(Photos: Eamonn Freel)

Do you remember the Vengaboys? In my mind they were always vaguely plastic and almost not human, and released a stream of incredibly annoying songs that you desperately tried to avoid getting stuck in your head.

But I feel a little different now.

A few weeks ago, a friend from Southend discovered that the Vengaboys were playing a show at Mecca Bingo in his hometown over his birthday weekend. Problem was, his sister and their friends had already decided to throw him a surprise party the night before in their favourite old nightclub – a night that turned out to be a lovely affair that ended in a casino I think might have been made completely out of gold.

The next day, I dragged myself and my boyfriend from my friends' parents' living room carpet to go and watch a Disco Turtle parade dance its way down Southend high street. The Disco Turtle dragged us and our comedowns all over town, and by the end of that saga the thought of facing a night at the bingo followed by a Vengaboys set was almost too much to bear. What are the Vengaboys, anyway?

I texted my sister to see where she was; all I got back was:

"Venga."

"Venga."

"Venga"

"Venga"

"Venga."

So we sucked it up and made our way over.

READ: We Talked to the Frosties Advert Kid Everyone Thought Was Dead

The thing about bingo is – and I didn't know this until this weekend – it's fucking brilliant. Because you've got a job to do – something to focus on, something that doesn't involve the mindless drink-smoke-piss circuit – it adds a sense of purpose to your getting drunk. Which can only be a good thing. Plus, there's money to be had.

One of our friends grows her own magic truffles, and that night she bought some along. About an hour into the bingo, half our group had a nibble, just in time to feel a little sparkle for the show.

And then there they were, in all their glittering glory. They weren't plastic and they weren't vague; they were solid and so close, only about a metre away on that tiny Mecca platform, with the bingo alerts rolling over the top of their heads.

"Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!"

"We have four 50p cashline links..."

"I want you in my room!"

"You could win a few hundred £££s!"

It was fascinating. The strangest blend of sadness and delight I've ever felt. Think of the stages they must have played 20 years ago, the crowds. There was something very "disgraced actor turns to panto" about it.

That said, the crowd they were playing to that night was wild. We knew every word. We were jumping up and down and singing along. I was entranced by their choreography; it was perfect.

Suddenly I wanted to know everything about them. Who are they? Where have they been? Is this the start of a comeback, or have they been happily touring the UK's bingo halls for years? Is that sad or is it brilliant? I don't feel sad for them, or do I a little bit? Either way, look at that cowboy hat! Look at those dance moves! Listen to the songs, and their sweet, beautiful lyrics.

Let's spend the night together, from now until forever.

More photos below:

Illustration by Taylor Lewis

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This piece was originally featured on VICE US.

It's 2016, and white celebrities like Kylie Jenner, Justin Bieber, and Vanessa Hudgens still think nothing of fashioning their hair into dreads and cornrows. This weekend, Hilary Duff and boyfriend Jason Walsh thought nothing of dressing as a pilgrim and Native American for Halloween. Last week, Amy Schumer thought nothing of releasing a lip-sync video remake of Beyoncé's "Formation," a Black Power anthem. Schumer was vocally accused of cultural appropriation for her parody. That seems to be the problem—they think nothing of it.

In a public response, Schumer said the video was Beyoncé-approved, and that her intentions were good. It's a common refrain—that these stars' intentions are good, that these were not racialized acts—and one that continues to ring forth when offensive acts spark outrage online. Often, where others see appropriation, these stars see themselves as celebrating and honoring diverse cultures.

This spring, Beyoncé herself was criticized for an appearance in Coldplay's "Hymn for the Weekend" music video, in which she wore an outfit reminiscent of an Indian bride, complete with a sari, henna, and a bindi. Some called the video exoticizing; others praised her for celebrating Indian culture and spreading awareness of its history. She follows in a long tradition of pop stars incorporating Indian culture into their looks and acts, for both better and worse. She, like those stars before her, chose to walk the fine line between celebration and appropriation, to predictably mixed results.

As an Indian immigrant, seeing these and other examples of Hindu exploitation now makes me cringe. It didn't always. Odd as it may sound, I once loved cultural appropriation—and I wasn't alone.

I grew up in India in the 1990s, where I looked to entertainment to distract me from my teen angst; that meant turning to Western media. And while I cannot speak for the entire country and generation, other Indian kids of my age and background—English-speaking and upper-middle class—seemed to agree that listening to Hindi music or seeing Bollywood films was social suicide. (Everyone still did, but as a somewhat shameful, hidden secret.)

We spent our school days discussing the latest Hollywood action films and singing lyrics from the Billboard charts. We wore Nike, Lacoste, and Levi. Our bedroom walls were not unlike those of my American cousins, plastered over with the same heartthrobs, hot rods, and pop stars. If Westerners pegged us as exotic, we returned the sentiment. Nothing was cooler, louder, and more exciting to us than anything we deemed "foreign." We drank the proverbial Kool-Aid (also unavailable in India).

You may know where I'm going with this: Gwen Stefani, right? Yes, the epitome of 90s cool girl rebel. She wore bindis—on red carpets, in concerts and music videos. While dating No Doubt band member Tony Kanal, an Indian American, she noticed his mother wearing one and adopted it into her look, simple as that. She thought it was pretty. Many thought it was appropriative—as was her most notorious cultural stunt later on, her Harajuku girls.

I remember watching her on TV in 1997, when the band visited India for the Channel V Awards (South Asia's MTV). Gwen took to the stage in a full sari, hands covered in mehndi, forehead adorned with jewels and flowers in her hair, looking like a Hindu bride. (Not unlike Beyoncé this spring.) The first words out of her mouth were a heavily American accented "namaste." The crowd went wild. So did I.

A slew of celebrities would go on to take cues from our culture throughout the 90s and early 2000s. And we noticed.

British artists like Sting and Kula Shaker used sitars and tablas on their albums. Bollywood samples were prevalent in hip-hop. Fashion designers like John Galliano and Jean Paul Gaultier gave our culture a nod in their collections. Saris were seen on visiting celebrities like Oprah, Naomi Campbell, Elizabeth Hurley, and the Spice Girls.

Of all of them, Madonna, the mother of reinvention herself, may have been the queen of borrowing from South Asian culture. After all, she sang a song entirely in Sanskrit, "Shanti-Ashtangi," on 1998's Ray of Light. She performed a sample of it at that year's MTV Video Music Awards, complete with traditional dancers, religious imagery and, of course, a bindi. When a Hindu organization condemned her performance, the tone-deafness of her reply was telling.

But in India, her albums were not burned in the streets—we thought it was awesome. My friends and I were ecstatic at these brief moments of cultural "appropriation." It wasn't like these stars had stolen anything; we felt they were promoting and celebrating India by bringing our culture and tradition to the masses. Making it cool, in fact. We were proud. It was the only form of mainstream representation we could hope for. We honestly didn't know any better.

My parents likened this to their own youth, when the hippie movement borrowed mantras and fashions from the East throughout the 60s and 70s. No one protested when the Beatles came to our ashrams, wore kurtas, and played the sitar with Ravi Shankar. It's an important moment in music history and influenced their, and others', work profoundly. "Jai Guru Deva Om" indeed.

Looking back now, I can see the forest for the trees. I realize that in the 90s, India was seen as a rising global economic powerhouse. These entertainers were celebrating our culture, to be sure, but so much of that had to do with making money, a sad realization that taints some of my favorite childhood memories. I can forgive ignorance, but not greed.

When I moved to America in the early 2000s, I saw the other side of the fence. This place I had worshipped from afar was indeed a dream come true, partnered with a few harsh realities.

Many people I met had a concept of India that was archaic. They saw us as exotic, true, but also backward. Some marveled that my family and I spoke English "so well" and were up to date on the latest news, music, and trends. The fact that we didn't sleep in huts and have pet monkeys seemed to disappoint them. Their ignorance disappointed me back.

I was no longer enamored by the "glamour" of the West. Many immigrants I know and have met felt the same way. This shiny star of a country is a great goal to aim for, but you shouldn't have to dismiss your own background for its own sake.

Fortunately, Indian youth today are far more politicized and well-informed than those of my generation; unlike the undying adoration of Western culture I saw from my generation, today's youth have achieved a remarkable balance between embracing their heritage while drawing inspiration from the West. And according to my relatives still there, Bollywood is just as cool as Hollywood now, as it has been for some time. I just didn't see it when I was growing up.

We still very much want mainstream media representation, and we want it in a way that celebrates, rather than appropriates. And it's high time that such celebration comes from actual South Asians, not from white people playing dress up. Today's Western cultural terrain is far from perfect, but when South Asian stars like Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling, and Priyanka Chopra have broken into the mainstream, that's cause for true celebration—and, one would hope, only the beginning.

The fact that cultural appropriation no longer gets a pass, that such acts are now vehemently condemned when they happen (even if they happen all too frequently) is important and telling. If you want to pay respect to our traditions, learn about them first. Educate yourself. In 2016, we no longer seek your approval—you need ours.

Follow Reneysh Vittal on Twitter.

A protester outside the High Court (Picture by Yui Mok PA Wire/PA Images)

The High Court has just ruled that only Parliament can trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty – the article that will see Britain shuffling out the door of the EU party, having just smashed a pint all over the kitchen floor. This is a victory for a legal case brought by a group called "People's Challenge" – part-funded by the eccentric CEO of Pimlico Plumbers, who turned up to court in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. The judgment will delay Brexit, as Parliament will get a chance to argue over it, rather than the government just pushing everything through without a debate.

If you're a Remainer, this is one in the eye for that idiotic 52 percent of the population who got it wrong on the 23rd of June. The country's destiny is safely back in the hands of our elected representatives in Parliament, who we all totally love and trust.

For the Brexiteers, this is a smack-down against democracy from some fusty old judges, totally at odds with public opinion. How dare they derail the plan, which was that Theresa May and her cabinet were going to sort it all out without consulting Parliament. Heaven forbid someone unelected would make any decisions. It's weird: when Vote Leave was steering us off a big cliff, it was exactly because they wanted Parliamentary sovereignty. Now they're getting all pissy that Parliament will get to vote on the speed of take off.

People from both sides are making appeals to the democratic right of people to agree with them. Lib Dem leader Tim Farron welcomed the ruling, saying that "the British people voted for a departure but not for a destination, which is why what really matters is allowing them to vote again on the final deal, giving them the chance to say no to an irresponsible hard Brexit." At last people have a chance to agree with Tim Farron.

Nigel Farage, on the other hand, has warned that the "political class" that he is definitely not part of has "no idea of the level of public anger they will provoke" if they delay the driving of this bus into a large chasm. Dunno about you, but I'm kind of looking forward to riots on the streets of Frinton. Seriously, though, wouldn't it be a shame if somebody provoked some sort of mass public anger, like by running a xenophobic campaign that sent the level of racist attacks and hate speech soaring?

The context is that the referendum was just a big piece of politicking by David Cameron – an attempt to use popular sovereignty to fuck UKIP over and silence the Eurosceptic boo-boys in his own party that all went horribly wrong. And the victorious Leave campaign itself was a huge smirk at people's intelligence, telling everyone to look forward to £350 million a week more for the NHS, and then dropping that promise almost instantly after they won.

As the pernickety business of actually enacting Brexit spins out, we can expect many more politicians telling us what the people want, which will conveniently chime with whatever they believe. The whole process has so far been marked by the use of democracy to legitimise the views of two sets of politicos who have differing views on whether to treat migrants as economic units to exploit or vermin to exterminate, and how best the country can serve business and ignore its post-imperial decline.

It's all bollocks, obviously. These calls for democracy should largely be interpreted as calls for "me, me, me; do what I want to happen now please". It's all about power. The good thing is, Parliament having a say over Article 50 gives us the chance use their massive concern for what everyone thinks to try and avert catastrophe.

@SimonChilds13

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This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands

Since 2012, Amsterdam's Club Church has been hosting an event called Hello Pozzums, targeted specifically at gay men who are seropositive for HIV. Recently, they also started welcoming "negative" men, who take the HIV prevention drug PrEP (or Truvada) to these parties.

Club Church is a bastion of free sex; the only real sex club in Amsterdam, where the parties are all about getting some no-strings-attached action. The club is full of cruise spots where people can fuck, and for those who prefer to do that in the dark, there's a dark room as well.

The club was founded in 2008 by Australian Richard Keldoulis and his business partner Wim Peeks. While the Dutch capital is undergoing intense gentrification, with a number of its gay bars and saunas closing down over the last few years, Keldoulis and Peeks remain intent on keeping the scene alive. Besides Club Church, they also run the city's last gay sauna, Sauna Nieuwezijds. I spoke to Keldoulis about PrEP, sex parties and Amsterdam's changing gay scene.

VICE: How did you become a club owner?
Richard Keldoulis: Before I started Church, I had a kiosk near the Homomonument, which I opened in 1998. We sold souvenirs and organised events on Queen's Day, Gay Pride, etc. We did that for about 10 years. During those years we occasionally threw parties in Club LA, which used to be located right here in this building. Eventually we got the opportunity to buy the club, and that's how it all started.

How has the city changed since you arrived, 18 years ago?
Things are awful now. With every year, the number of gay spots that are closing grows. It feels like there isn't anyone doing anything new at the moment. When I arrived here, in 1990, there were 34 dark rooms in Amsterdam. Nowadays, the only dark rooms are situated in gay bars. And there are no other clubs like ours. Some people think that's a sign of growing equality, because gay people have started to go to mixed bars. I think it's a shame.

Why?
I think a lively gay scene fuels creativity in urban environments, as Richard Florida once wrote. I think there's always going to be a clash between cultures, where one side goes: "Just act normal" and the other side goes: "Normal makes life dull." But a big gay scene fuels the creative class and questions what "normal" is. You shouldn't strive for uniformity – that's bad for the city.

"After the discovery of penicillin, there was a sweet period when people were not afraid of deadly STDs and sex was free. Then AIDS came along in 1981, and fucked it up for everyone. Hopefully now with PrEP we can pick up where we left off with the sexual revolution."

Was the lively gay scene at the time the reason that you came to Amsterdam?
Absolutely. I lived in Japan for a while until my visa ran out. So, I thought about where I wanted to go next. In Amsterdam, I found freedom – I could smoke weed and just be myself. The Netherlands was very progressive at the time. When I got here, I saw dicks on the local TV-channel! You'd never see that in Australia. The Dutch are much more open about sex. And a club like Club Church wouldn't be able to survive, where I come from.

Don't you think that gay clubs are disappearing because of apps that help you find a fuck buddy with the touch of a button?
That may be a factor, but they also have the internet in Madrid and Berlin, and those cities still have a huge gay scene.

What's the best part of owning a sex club?
The dark room is sort of my natural habitat, my playground. I started working in this business out of personal interest. And sex sells, right? Now I can combine a successful business with my battle for sexual freedom.

When you started throwing parties for seropositive men in 2012, you wrote: "'People with HIV are still being discriminated in the cruising scene. HIV-positive men want to be able to enjoy an event, where having HIV is the norm, where there's no stigma. Club Church wants to create a space where HIV-positive men can feel physically uninhibited, where one's HIV status is not an obstacle." Now you also welcome seronegative men that take PrEP. Why?
We want to do away with the taboo around HIV, also within the gay scene. We wanted to create a space for men that are seropositive, so they too can have unprotected sex. But we've also known for a number of years now, that when you're positive and you're taking your meds, you're not at risk of infecting others. Moreover, people that take PrEP cannot get HIV. So gay sex keeps getting safer. In the end, the most dangerous men are the young guys, who don't know their status.

Do you feel responsible for the wellbeing of your guests?
I've always felt responsible for their safety. We have free condoms lying around everywhere in the club and we actually used to go around checking if people were using them, but we don't do that anymore because, as I said, PrEP makes things less risky. But at the end of the day, it's not for me to tell you how to have sex.

How do you feel about HIV becoming less and less of a threat thanks to those new drugs?
It's fantastic news, obviously. You know, when penicillin became available during the Second World War, syphilis suddenly became much less of a problem. That's why until the 1980s there was a sweet period, when people were not that afraid of deadly STDs and sex was pretty free. Then AIDS came along in 1981, and fucked it up for everyone.

Hopefully now we can pick up where we left off with the sexual revolution. I'm already enjoying more freedom now. I use to religiously use condoms but ever since I got on PrEP, I got rid of the condoms and, most importantly, the fear.

(Illustration: Sam Taylor)

Transgender feminazis have joined forces with BBC communists to force innocent kids into sex change operations. Or so said last week's Mail on Sunday. "FURY AT BBC SEX CHANGE SHOW FOR 6-YEAR-OLDS" screamed the headline. The Sun and The Mirror repeated the story almost word for furious word.

The big deal? A CBBC film called Just a Girl, about an 11-year-old trans girl who takes puberty blockers. It's not an advert for gender transition; it just describes what her life is like. It's educational.

But we can't be having that, can we? Not when there are papers to sell, misinformation to be spread and a public broadcaster to bash. The Mail quotes Tory MP Peter Bone, who says: "It beggars belief that the BBC is making this programme freely available to children as young as six... It is completely inappropriate for such material to be on the CBBC website and I shall be writing to BBC bosses to demand they take it down as soon as possible."

What the fuck does Peter Bone know about kids who are questioning their gender? I was one of those kids once. I was bullied violently at school and at home by my father for "acting like a girl". Do you really think Bonehead gives a shit about kids like me? I'd have loved to have had a supportive family and school as a kid, and being able to access information about trans people would have really helped me through a tough time in my life.

Yet this fabricated row marks a weird sort of victory for the trans community. Ten years ago, the press was obsessed with the myth of transition regret: people who regret changing gender. They are vanishingly rare. For a time in the 2000s, though, Guardian journalist David Batty bent over backwards trying to find transgender regretters. He turned up a few inconclusive cases, but even then their regret was largely down to stigma and discrimination. Julie Bindel, meanwhile, warned against the "operation that can ruin your life". Fast-forward to 2016 and referrals to gender identity clinics are through the roof, and study after study shows that genital reconstruction surgery leaves patients overwhelmingly happier. In terms of patient satisfaction, it has one of the highest success rates of almost any operation on the NHS. God knows why anyone wanted to question us in the first place – it's a private decision and no one else's business, frankly – but trans people won the argument.

So now the "debate" has moved on to kids.

We've been here before. In the 1980s, homophobes had essentially given up their efforts to stop adult gay people fucking and falling in love. So haters found a new way to hate gay people: by dressing up homophobia as a child protection issue. Tabloids routinely linked gay rights with paedophilia and the spreading of HIV – and they were all at it. In 1984 The Sun called gay rights "sick nonsense" and, two year later, The News of the World said Labour councils were encouraging AIDS by "telling children that homosexuals living together are as stable as married couples". In 1986, Tories handed out leaflets in Haringey that said: "You do not want your child to be educated to be a homosexual or lesbian" and "We do not believe in prejudicing young minds. AIDS is a killer." The Telegraph warned readers about "a deliberate attempt to molest the sexual education of children" (note the loaded use of "molest"), while The Times condemned the "malignant cause" of "extremists" promoting "sexual propaganda".

The message was clear: gay people were a threat to children.

Soon after, Section 28 was passed – which effectively banned the "promotion of homosexuality" in schools. The law was intentionally vague and frightened teachers out of even discussing homophobia, meaning that many failed to act when pupils – like me – suffered homophobic bullying. I spent ten years of my childhood being called a poofter every day. Section 28 became a symbol of homophobia and galvanised the gay rights movement until it was finally repealed in 2003. A couple of years ago, David Cameron even apologised for it, telling a gay pride rally, "We got it wrong." They really did. They all did.

But what, exactly, started all the media fear-mongering that lead to Section 28? Well, in 1983 The Mail got its knickers in a twist over "Jenny lives with Eric and Martin", a storybook about a girl who lives with her father and his boyfriend. Just like Peter Bone, bigots like Jill Knight were concerned that these educational materials could be accessed by "children as young as five or six". Because we can't possibly inform children about the existence of people we don't like...

Sadly, this is not the only way in which hateful history is repeating itself. On Saturday, The Mail launched a vicious attack on Mermaids, the UK's only charity for families with kids who are trans or questioning their gender. They do fantastic work and I wish my family had known about them back in the day. Gay charities were similarly targeted in the 80s and accused of corrupting impressionable young minds – right when gay kids needed support most. Matthew Todd describes growing up surrounded by media homophobia in his brilliant book Straight Jacket: How to be Gay and Happy: "On a sunny spring day in 1983, standing outside the school hall next to a peeling climbing frame, the biggest realisation of my life hit me like the sky crashing down: the way that I was different and these bad words I kept hearing were linked. Gay. Queer. Poof. Pansy. I suddenly understood: that was me. That was what I was." He was ten.

I'm deeply concerned that the press, emboldened by this post-Brexit atmosphere of normalised xenophobia, seems to be ramping up its attacks against trans people. So let's clear up some of their bullshit:

1. You can't force kids to change gender any more than you can force a child to be gay. Just like the imagined fears of "sick" homosexuals "recruiting" impressionable kids in the 80s, it's bullshit. From the age of four until I was 18, every single person I knew told me I couldn't be a girl. I'm a girl now. You simply cannot force people to be something they're not.

2. There is no such thing as a "child sex change" or "child sex change drugs". Genital reconstruction surgery isn't offered to trans people below the age of 16. In reality, people are generally forced to wait until they're much older for surgery. Puberty blockers delay puberty so that kids have time to think about what they want. Hormone blockers aren't sex change drugs at all. They are "Don't rush into anything, darling" drugs.

3. Why don't newspapers run headlines on the thousands of people who took hormone blockers as teens and are now doing just fine as adults? If The Mail really cares about kids, they should write about the bullying, family rejection and mental health issues many gay and trans kids suffer. Study after study reveals that young trans people are highly vulnerable – 48 percent have attempted suicide in Britain. Not "thought about". Attempted. Why? Well, there is growing evidence that stigma is a major cause of poor mental health and morbidity. Stigma isn't just a bitch; it's a killer. I guess that song about sticks and stones got it wrong.

4. And could that, I wonder, be the very same sort of stigma whipped up by prejudicial media coverage??? The day after it reported the "fury" over Just a Girl, The Mirror ran a story about a 25-year-old trans woman who was hacked to death in Russia. Hacked. To. Fucking. Death. As The Mirror wrote: "The killing took place after the 25-year-old's father Alimshaikh Aliev had told a TV station: 'Let him be killed, I don't want to see him. Bring him here and kill him in front of my eyes.'" Do the journalists at The Mirror realise that the violence and family rejection many trans people still face is PRECISELY why educating people is so important?

5. Radical feminists who exclude trans people don't like being called Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, so I'll refer to them here as "wankers". Wankers keep lying on the news and saying that 80 percent of trans kids grow out of it at puberty. That statistic is false and based on bad science, as Brynn Tannehill explains here. It's one of many ways in which wankers exploit fabricated "debates" to spread dangerous misinformation that your average member of the public wouldn't even think to question. Much like their wild, paranoid claims that trans women are potential rapists, based on pure stereotype and zero evidence – but I digress.

READ: Why I Won't Shut Up About Sex Just Because I'm Trans

I'm going to end by throwing down a gauntlet to every journalist in Britain: find me one young adult who completed the blockers programme and then went on to transition who has a single regret about it. It's precisely the same way I ended a similar article for VICE two years ago. Blockers have been trialled in the Netherlands since the 1970s and are completely reversible. If there were really any cases of young people who regretted it, the tabloids would have splashed them across every front page by now. Still, don't be shy if you've got evidence!

Schoolteacher Lucy Meadows took her own life in 2013. In the months before her suicide, The Mail's Richard Littlejohn bullied her and suggested she was not "suitable" as a teacher – because she was trans. Journalists hounded her for weeks. She was an innocent member of the public and much loved by her pupils. At her inquest, the coroner told the press, "Shame on you." Lawyer David Allen Green truly nailed it, though, when he tweeted that: "The way the tabloids treated Lucy Meadows is how they would treat anyone, if they could get away with it."

It is. They demonised gay people in the 80s and now they're doing it to trans folk. I invite gay people, Muslims, refugees – anyone who's been lied about and treated like shit by the press – and, indeed, all decent people to stand up for trans people, stand up to press bullies and take a stand for justice. Now more than ever we all need to pull together in solidarity. It may sound corny, but it's better than living in the right-wing mob rule nightmare we're currently headed towards.

We must not let them get away with it – again.

@ParisLees / @SptSam

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A sex worker in Holbeck (Photo by Jack Wright)

Until recently, Holbeck in Leeds was unlikely to see a news reporter from one end of the year to another. Lying on the southern edge of the city, Holbeck is partly residential, partly industrial, with a scattering of businesses: a tile shop, piano shop, printers, a tanning salon. Sex workers have hustled on these streets for years, but at the end of 2014 Holbeck was thrust into the limelight by a trial scheme: the UK's first "managed prostitution zone".

The managed area meant that sex work in Holbeck was now contained mainly in the business area, away from people's homes. Elsewhere in the UK, while selling sex is legal, soliciting is not. In the managed area, however, this law no longer applies between 7PM and 7AM. The basic premise is that, as long as you're over 18 – police may ask to see ID – you can work as a sex worker without fear of arrest.

On Friday the 21st of October, however, the truce appears to have broken. Women working in the area were shocked as police and UK Border Agency (UKBA) officials poured out of vans and cars and began to round up whoever they could find.

Anyone from outside the UK – and sex workers in the managed zone are frequently migrants – found themselves detained and questioned. After being interviewed on the street, six women, all from EU countries, were taken straight to Yarl's Wood and are now waiting to be deported. Others have been given 30 days to provide paperwork proving their legitimacy to stay in the UK.

Tanya, 23, is from Romania. She arrived at Yarl's Wood in the clothes she'd been working in and is now dressed in a regulation tracksuit.

"The night of the operation was awful," she says. "I didn't know what was happening. I had a good relationship with the police before. They asked if I was OK. It was normal; I'd joke with them. I knew the police were around, and I'd call them if I needed them."

Tanya says that, the same night she was detained by the UKBA, she'd called the police after a client refused to take her back to the managed area. "I was scared," she says. "So I rang the police and they spoke to the punter and stayed on the phone to me while the punter finally agreed to drop me back."

Like the other women detained that night, Tanya says she isn't sure why she's being deported. "I'm not a criminal," she says. "I don't take any benefits. I keep myself to myself. It's like prison here. No one tells you anything. You just wait and wait and wait. I don't know when I'll go home. I could be here one month, two months, six months."

The Home Office declined to comment on the cases, but it's likely the women are being deported for failing to observe their EU treaty rights. EEA nationals who've been in the UK for longer than three months need evidence either that they're working, studying or that they're financially self-sufficient. Without payslips, a contract, proof of National Insurance contributions or bank statements, for example, you can be kicked out.

Sex workers are easy targets for immigration stings. It's cash-in-hand work that requires no papers and can be done with little English. Despite being legal, it's regarded as shady and illegitimate. Who's going to complain if a few hookers get sent home? No coincidence, perhaps, that the same week women in Leeds were detained, similar raids took place in London and Bolton.

Basis Yorkshire works with Safer Leeds (a West Yorkshire Police and Leeds City Council partnership) in the managed area. The charity is horrified by what took place on the 21st of October.

"Since working under a managed approach, the relationship with the police has been substantially improved," Basis said in a statement. "Amongst other things, this has led to the identification and prosecution of criminals, including those guilty of sexual and other violent forms of assault on sex workers and other citizens in Leeds. We believe strongly that has been detrimental to the relationship between street sex working women and the police."

No one is pretending the managed zone is an idyll. Last year, Daria Pionko, a Polish woman, was murdered while working here. Her killer is now serving life in jail. Other attacks have taken place. But what's different from other areas is that women have been willing to speak to the police and prosecutions have been made. Some local residents and business owners say they feel unsafe and that, although having sex in public and littering is illegal in the managed area, it still takes place.

Media reports of the managed area are frequently lurid and offer conflicting views, but a report by researchers at the University of Leeds suggests that, since the scheme was introduced, crimes are more likely to be reported and prosecutions made, and that locals business owners and residents were largely supportive of the scheme.

For the police, this is a balancing act. Lots of the women working in Holbeck are already vulnerable and would remain so were the managed zone to disappear. Their safety must be weighed up alongside the feelings of non-sex working locals.

A spokesperson for Safer Leeds told me: "Attention is now focused on providing increased support to vulnerable sex workers with complex needs, particularly addictions, to exit this work. Adjustments are also being made to the rules and operation of the Managed Approach, which sit aside targeted enforcement tactics with partner agencies."

It's not known what these adjustments will be, but the targeting of migrant women seems incompatible with an approach that prioritises sex workers' safety.

Monika, from Hungary, is also in Yarl's Wood. She's confused at the conflicting messages; the fact that, just two weeks ago, police in Holbeck were chatting to her and asking if she was OK. Now she's here.

"I was told I wasn't being taken to a prison, but it feels like I'm in prison," she says. "The doors are locked. I never realised I wasn't allowed to be working . Now I don't know what's going on. I feel like I'm going crazy."

@frankiemullin

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Members of Chinese Americans for Trump pose with their man. Photo courtesy of Chinese Americans for Trump

This piece was originally featured on VICE US.

One of my most recent experiences with Chinese Americans for Trump (CAFT) came about because of "Meet the Flockers." The 2014 track, for those unfamiliar with the rapper YG's work, is about robbing people and opens with the lines, "First, you find a house and scope it out / Find a Chinese neighborhood, cause they don't believe in bank accounts." The members of CAFT, perhaps understandably, were ticked off, and I was invited to a WeChat group dedicated to protesting it. In the group chat, posters organized protests and discussed strategies to shut the video down.

The conversation at one point turned to ways to protect oneself against the threat of violence, and that's where things took a turn, as people posted photos of their firearms—handguns, semiautomatics. One photo featured someone's arsenal laid out neatly atop an oriental rug in a living room.

Asian Americans as a whole have moved leftward in recent decades, making CAFT an outlier, and something of a head-scratcher given that Trump impersonated a Chinese man onstage last year. But though small, the group's existence shows an emerging schism in Asian American politics: On one side are those who believe in progressive causes, and on the other are new Chinese American immigrants who are wealthier than earlier generations of immigrants, and maybe more willing to embrace right-wing rhetoric.

"Members of CAFT and other members of Chinese American society, we are pretty much 99 percent with what Trump said. Not 100 percent. What's the 1 percent? The recent news of what he said something about women," said David Tian Wang, the group's 32-year-old founder, who calls himself an independent investor. (When we spoke, news about Trump's 2005 boasts of grabbing women "by the pussy" had just broken.) "I don't think anyone would agree with that, but you got to look at the big picture, it's either that or having Hillary as president. Jesus, plus when he said it, it was ten years ago."

Chinese Americans for Trump was born from a WeChat group started by Wang in June 2015. It took a while to build momentum—the group had about 100 members by the end of that year, then swelled to 1,000 after Jeb Bush dropped out from the race in February. I first met Wang in May of this year, when I attended a CAFT press conference held at a Shanghai restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley—a cluster of cities east of Downtown Los Angeles known for their sizable Chinese and Taiwanese American populations. Amid a roomful of journalists from the local Chinese press, I was the only representative of the English-language media. And I've been following this group since, hanging out in the invitation-only Chinese-language WeChat groups where they largely exist.

Wang estimates there are now around 6,000 CAFT members, 95 percent of whom are first-generation immigrants from mainland China. Some of these are US citizens, while others, like Wang himself, are green card holders. (Wang said he put in his papers to become a citizen earlier this year, but won't likely get that status in time to vote this November.) Many of them are professionals: doctors, lawyers, small business owners, a far cry from the first-generation mainland Chinese immigrants of the 1980s and 1990s, who largely came from the working and lower-middle class. One professor from Maryland, Wang says, quit her job to canvass full-time for the GOP candidate in Florida.

I've talked to several members of CAFT online and off. Some are pro-gun, others are anti-LGBTQ rights, and many are against high taxes and Obamacare. They are anti-illegal immigration, precisely because they are immigrants themselves.

"I am a big gun supporter, I want to tell everyone that if you want to stop crime, you have to get guns," said Jay Hu, a 34-year-old CAFT member in Los Angeles who also works as a National Rifle Association instructor.

"I think illegal immigrants are criminals. They knowingly come here, walking across the border and take our tax money. That is not fair for us, we are legal immigrants, we fought our way here, we spent a decade trying to get a green card. We did everything the right way," said Wang, who also serves on Trump's Asian American outreach committee.

But the real rallying issue for the group is higher education. An important embryonic moment came in 2014, in the fight against a legislative proposal in California called SCA-5, which would essentially reintroduce race-based affirmative action in higher education in the state. Many Asian American groups supported the amendment, but it eventually died in the California Legislature, due to protests organized by Wang and others.

"Our number-one priority is on education. We understand the universities here are the top in the world," said Wang, a father of three. "And right now, an average kid, to go to UCLA, an average Chinese American kid has to score an average of 4.3 or more. We have to score 200 or 300 points over on the SAT. How is that fair?"

A similar battle was fought recently in California over the bill AB1726, which would have broken up the umbrella term "Asian American" to include a range of Asian ethnicities—like Taiwanese, Laotian, and Filipino—for data-gathering purposes. The original proposal called for data disaggregation in both healthcare and education. Again, Asian American groups overwhelmingly supported the proposal. But the version that ended up passing in the legislature applies only to healthcare, because of opposition from Chinese Americans, Wang among them, who said they felt that those policies are ultimately discriminatory because they pit Asian Americans against each other.

"Asian American is a minority group in the US. Why do we have to further divide them: You are from China, you are from Taiwan, you are from India," said Wei Zhang, a 42-year-old professor of computer engineering in Virginia who serves as the organizer of the CAFT chapter in that state. "Why do we have to single out the Asian Americans, which is only 5 to 6 percent of the US population, and further divide them? That is not equal. I don't want our politicians to further divide us into black Americans, White Americans, and Asian Americans."

The part of Trump's message that speaks to Chinese Americans—and some other minority GOP supporters, seems to be the idea of America as a colorblind meritocracy. CAFT members think laws put in place by Democrats—particularly policies like affirmative action—are not giving Asian Americans a fair shake.

"Donald Trump to me, he is going to develop policies based on merit, not just race," said Zhang, who identifies as a moderate conservative.

I asked both Zhang and Wang what they think about the use of "alt-right" to describe the network of Trump supporters. Neither was familiar with the term, and when I told them about its white nationalist connections they both rejected the connection immediately.

"I don't agree with that view. Probably some of the white Americans, their voices were not heard for a long time. They become very passionate about Trump's policies," said Zhang. "I don't think we should define Trump's movement as just for white people. I think his policies benefit every American. We want to have a better economy, more jobs, better security. We want to have law and order, we want the rule of law. I am Asian American, I want that, too."

Fiona Ng is the cohost of Shoes Off, an upcoming podcast about Asian Americans.

Page and her longtime friend Ian Daniel in Gaycation

This piece was originally featured on VICE Australia.

When Ellen Page first began leaking into the household consciousness as the title character in indie triumph Juno, she was almost unanimously and instantly beloved. Was it her, dare I say, quirky nature? Her smile? Her monotone voice and deft delivery? Or the way that she was beautiful like a girl who could've lived on your street? Who knows.

Her performance in Juno earned her an Oscar nomination, and lead to roles in similar indie comedies like Smart People and Whip It, and to blockbusters like Inception and X-Men. And all this time she was omitting a crucial piece of her identity from the one the world was crafting for her.

Gaycation, along with a bunch of great shows from VICE will be free to watch on SBS VICELAND, launching November 15.

In 2014, at the Human Rights Campaign's "Time to Thrive" conference, six years after the release of Juno, Page told the world that she was "tired of lying by omission"—that she was gay. The Canadian actress, 27 at the time, spoke about having suffered for years; "my spirit suffered, my mental health suffered, and my relationships suffered." She said. "I am here today, with all of you, on the other side of that pain."

In an interview with Elle back in January, Page said that her choice to come out publicly had affected the breadth of her acting roles, and that she was experiencing being pigeonholed as a "gay actor." She felt as though she was no longer being considered for straight roles.

"There's still this double standard," she said. "I look at all the things I've done in movies: I've drugged a guy, tortured someone, become a roller-derby star overnight. But now I'm gay, I can't play a straight person?"

She's not the only person in Hollywood to have discovered this. In IMDB's list of the most successful openly gay actors and actresses, out of 66 people profiled, only nine of them are listed as lesbian. How many times has the world met an open and out lesbian actress with open arms? How many have we seen whose sexuality has not been used as a constant point of difference? How many actresses and Hollywood personalities are there that are deeply successful and openly gay in the way the Neil Patrick Harris or Zachary Quinto or Ian McKellen are?

Ellen Degeneres? Jodie Foster? You can count the examples on two hands—which is understandable when you remember that Degeneres's sitcom was subsequently cancelled after she announced "Yep, I'm gay" on the cover of Time Magazine. And there aren't many who've done it as young as Page. Degeneres came out to the public at 39, and Foster—technically—at 50.

Maybe this is why Page has since been on a projected path toward Gay Icon status. It started with 2015's Freeheld, the mostly-fictional drama about a lesbian couple who fight the legal system, Erin Brockovich-style, for their right to spousal pension payments when one of them (Julianne Moore) is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

" is a reflection of things that I always thought about and cared about" - Page on the set of Gaycation

It was around the same time that she showed up on VICE's radar, and pitched the queer-perspective travel series Gaycation to Creative Director Spike Jonze. The first season of the VICELAND show saw her and her longtime friend, Ian Daniel, travelling the world to investigate its many and complex gay cultures.

"The show is about the triumphs, the joys, the nightlife." Page told Vulture back in March. "Sadly, a part of the show is about the discrimination people face and how oppression affects people's lives."

Gaycation seemed like the perfect way to marry Page's film experience with her desire to explore and connect with the global LGBTQ community. "We wanted to give a voice to those who don't always get to share their perspective or what they're going through," Page said earlier this year. "I think a lot of people just don't understand the difficulties a lot of people face in the community—including in America still, despite all the incredible progress."

The premiere episode followed Page and Daniel into Japan's gay and queer scenes, looking into how the country's often strained and archaic views of sex and sexuality impact the LGBTQ community. From there they visit Brazil and Jamaica, and beeline from Iowa to New York as they attempt to piece together how the queer scenes on each continent, to each city, are affected by legislation, violence and pride.

" is a reflection of things that I always thought about and cared about and now I'm able to align my work and creative life with who I am," Page told Indiewire.

Gaycation will premiere on Australian television on Tuesday November 15 at 8:30 PM, kicking off the launch of SBS VICELAND.

Follow Issy on Twitter

In a recent interview with Fox Business, American filmmaker Ami Horowitz said he had visited one of Sweden's "30 to 40 no-go zones" – areas in the country where he claims even the police doesn't dare to go. "Everyday, there's gun violence going on," Horowitz said. He also claimed that "Swedish law doesn't apply in these places" and that Stockholm or Sweden (that remains unclear) "has become the rape capital of Europe." That last comment can easily be disproven – according to the Swedish Crime Survey, 5,920 rapes were reported in 2015 in Sweden, which is 0.06 percent of the population. In comparison – in England and Wales, for example, that number reflects 0.17 percent of the population. But what about the rest of his claims?

Fox Business isn't the only medium to report on Sweden's apparent no-go zones. Right-wing websiteBreitbart Newswrote in September that Sweden has become so violent that migrants are considering moving back to the war-torn places they fled. The Daily Express wrote the gripping headline: "SWEDEN IN CHAOS: Number of 'no-go zones' INCREASED as police lose control over violence". And in 2014, Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported on areas, where "12-year-olds are carrying guns and drugs are sold openly."

These reports likely refer to the 53 geographical areas in Sweden that are listed in an official police report as "vulnerable areas". In these areas, crime and unemployment rates are generally higher than in the rest of the country.

I called the police station in Rinkeby in Stockholm (a "particularly vulnerable area" according to the police report and a "no-go zone" according to Breitbart) and spoke to officer Niclas Andersson. He said there aren't any no-go zones in Sweden. "There are areas with major challenges, like a high crime rate, poverty and little faith in the police or society in general. But calling them "no-go zones" paints an unfair image," he added. "And police do visit these neighbourhoods whenever necessary."

Whether it's the media or the police talking about these neighbourhoods, there's one group we hardly ever hear from – the actual people living there. I went to the Tensta suburb of Stockhol, which has also been labeled a "no-go zone" by Sputnik, Breitbart and Swedish newspaper SvD, to speak with locals about how they feel about the negative headlines circling their homes.

Ailin, 23

"Who are the people writing these stories? The only thing the media report on when it comes to our neighbourhoods is how bleak it is here. It's frustrating. If you google Tensta, you'll only find pictures of riots. I'm from here and I know that there's so much more to these areas than riots. Of course you'll feel more unsafe when visiting an area you're unfamiliar with – that's what the media do and then they report on it. I don't feel unsafe here – this is my home and these are my neighbours.

Instead of focusing on one or two crimes in the area, the media should be reporting on why it's unsafe to go places at night, why there's more crime in certain areas – and if the reports are true in the first place. I guess I don't always understand what's going on with the police over here – the place is segregated and a lot of people don't trust the police. But it goes without saying that no one can speak for everyone who lives here."

Agata, 23

"I've talked to people who are afraid to come here because they think Tensta's brimming with criminals – that's what they read in the papers. They shouldn't be afraid. The media talk about Tensta in a way that's not always accurate, but a lot of things are true. When you see a video of a reporter being assaulted, you can't deny it ever happened. But you have to also ask yourself what happened before that assault.

There's violence anywhere in the world and you can get yourself into trouble anywhere. I feel as safe here as I do in Stockholm's city centre and other areas with a better reputation. I find that people are friendlier here, because it's a tight community that looks after each other. We need to ask ourselves how and why segregation, alienation and poverty emerge in some areas and what can be done to prevent it. People here don't trust the government and police, because they feel they're being treated unfairly. How can we change that? That's what the media should be worrying about."

Suhul, 26

"Even our local newspaper usually reports on Tensta in a negative way. There are a lot of immigrants here and the news reflects that segregation. It's difficult to communicate with the police, because they think of us as criminals before they've even met us. But I mean, I love it here. I feel safer here than anywhere else in Stockholm. Tensta isn't some kind of war zone or battlefield. Some young people do hang out on the street and if you're not from here, I can imagine you might think it's unsafe. But I don't think it's worse than anywhere else.

The media should look at these areas from a wider point of view. A couple of years ago, for example, the Turebergs school in Sollentuna was demolished and now there's a jail in its place. What kind of message does that send?"

Amanuel, 28

"A while ago, I saw a television crew setting up in the middle of our town square. They turned a huge spotlight on the people walking by. They were reporting about the neighbourhood and just filming the people living here instead of talking to them. That's so symbolic of the way the media interact with people in this area – they think of us more as a spectacle than as actual thinking human beings. I think this way of thinking and the "us versus them" rhetoric is very dangerous.

I help to organise cultural events for young people in the neighbourhood – there are so many wonderful people living here. It's a very close-knit community, people look after each other. Everyone is someone's brother or sister."

Asrin, 27

"I don't think it's dangerous here – I never feel unsafe. Stockholm is very segregated. It's difficult and expensive to move around in this city so if you live in one place, that's where you'll hang out. The media just focus on crime here and the people reading these news stories never come over to see for themselves. So they believe what they read, but it's very one-sided.

People who live and work here don't think of Tensta as a place filled with burning cars and people throwing rocks at each other. Tensta is wonderful. There's an exhibition by artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian called Fuel to the Firegoing on right now at Tensta Konsthall, which explores other perspectives on these areas than just those of the media and police.

I've never been in a situation where I've had to deal with the police, so I can't say how other people feel. There's some violence here and we've had clashes between the police and locals. But I think we need to deal with that in a wider context – that's what we're trying to do with the exhibition. It would be nice if journalists did the same."

Additional reporting by Aretha Bergdahl.

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The Canadian government is being sued for $600-million for its past treatment of the LGBTQ community. Photo via CP.

This piece was originally featured on VICE Canada.

In a Canadian military interrogation room in 1990, strapped to a polygraph machine and sensing unseen observers behind a two-way mirror, 21-year-old Canadian sailor Todd Ross finally broke down in tears and said out loud what he'd been unable to say even to himself: He was gay.

Sven Ruygrok in the Frosties advert

He got bullied so badly he moved to Australia. He killed himself by cramming a pencil into and up his nose. He only got the job because he was terminally ill and his dying wish was to be in a Frosties advert.

Everybody had their own theory about the Frosties kid, the urban myth that spread across British playgrounds a decade ago. So much so that history has consigned the pre-teen boy with spiky blond hair and a grating nasal voice to schoolyard legend, alongside the "brown noise" and "Reading Festival poo girl". But there's more to his story.

The kid in the Frosties advert was a 14-year-old named Sven Ruygrok from South Africa. He didn't die, and after emerging intact from the aftermath of the commercial and pursuing a career as a gymnast, he is now an actor, finding relative fame in his home country. In a remarkable twist of fate, Sven now runs his own anti-bullying workshops.

Now aged 24, in his first time opening up about the Frosties advert, I spoke to Sven about cereal, looking past the online abuse and what it's like to be part of the biggest playground conspiracy of all time.

The infamous advert

VICE: Hey Sven, let's go back to the beginning. What do you remember about being in the advert?
Sven Ruygrok: Unfortunately the truth is a lot less exciting than some of the urban legends. I was 14 years old and auditioned for the advert with loads of other boys. I remember the casting being really weird. They asked me to imagine all sorts of things and be all sorts of things, like pretending to be a dragon, a ballerina and acting like an imaginary crate was exploding in front of me.

So that annoying voice in the video – I'm assuming that wasn't you?
Yeah, that's not my voice at all. They recorded the jingle months before we shot the commercial and I just had to learn the words so I could mime along.

Let's talk about the rumours. How did they affect you?
Not much at the time, to be honest – I was 14. I wanted to be outside and play. I was more concerned about pimples and hormones ruining my life than a commercial, but I do vividly remember my parents being affected by it. I mean, what would you do as a parent if your child's name was being thrown around the internet like a rag doll under a truck by people who have never met them?

What was the worst rumour you heard about yourself?
I think the ones about the manner in which I died were quite disturbing. People said I stuck two pencils up my nose and slammed my head on the desk, nose-first. Others said I got the job because my mother was dying of cancer and it was her last dying wish to have her child in a Frosties commercial. Also, there's a great video on YouTube of me getting hit by a train – twice, and then just for safety I'm then blown up with a bomb.

This is all online abuse, but did it go any further?
Absolutely. We had a reporter track me down and jump our gate to get an interview. That was just over and above the general harsh comments and cyber bullying online.

Just to set the record straight, you are very much still alive. What do you want people to know about you?
It's not a rags to riches story. Like many young kids I went to a casting, booked it, shot it and used the money to fund my trip overseas for one of my passions – gymnastics. Simple, lame and far less cool than the urban legends.

Sven now

And now you run anti-bullying workshops. How did you get into that?
I started out giving talks to underprivileged kids about the value of life. Kids are so dependent on external things to validate them and to tell them they are good enough, constantly telling themselves, 'If I get the next best thing, then I'll be happy.' But it's short-lived – a sugar rush with a devastating crash. And we're seeing the effects of it today with anxiety issues, body issues and suicide. So this is where my life experience comes into play and I share with them my story and remind them to focus on bigger things. Because when we all die, what they will remember is the qualities that you possessed and the kind of person that you were.

If you could give any advice to yourself 10 years ago, what would you say?
Find your identity. An identity that is not ever-changing. One that doesn't depend on how you're feeling, what group of friends you are with, how much money you have or what you look like. You will never know what you are, and you will forever be trying to please people by constantly chasing things.

I have to ask: do you even eat Frosties any more?
Nope, never did. Not because I have anything against the brand due to the commercial, but because they are just not my cup of tea.

Sven with Orlando Bloom

People outside of South Africa might not be familiar with your acting career, but that's what you're known for over there. What can you tell me about it?
I've worked with some really amazing people, like John Cleese in the Spud trilogy, Orlando Bloom in Zulu and Matthew Lewis in Blue Stone 42. I've been lucky enough to play many different characters, from a jock to a nerd, a soldier, a cheerleader and everything in between. I just finished up a feature film called The Empty Man and I'm hopping onto a TV series pilot called Of the Dragon.

And do you think being in that infamous Frosties advert helped or hindered your career?
If anything, it gave me life experience and taught me humility. You never just wake up and become the top dog in your field. There are always people along the way to help you, guide you and cheer you on. If I listened to all those rumours about myself, I would never be in an industry where I am constantly criticised.

How do you look back at it 10 years on?
I wouldn't change a single thing. I'm lying – perhaps that annoying jingle.

Thanks, Sven.

@jackcummings92

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Have you ever seen a balding 40-something man doing a flamenco dance-off against another balding midlife guy, both in high-heeled flamenco shoes and double denim? Dave's Epic Strut has nothing on it. It's so pregnant with awkward poignancy it's dilating.

One of the two strutty men I'm referring to is Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui – a highly esteemed Belgian dancer-come-choreographer, who, according to the Guardian, can twist himself "like a pipecleaner", and is now attempting to turn the works of political philosopher Noam Chomsky into a ballet, which he's titled Fractus V.

He's a dance auteur. And, in 2016, he's now also a 44-year-old man employing a company of five dancers, who are all as balding as he is and wearing double-denim. They look like they should be in a 1980s Aaron Spelling comedy-drama about men coming to terms with the loss of their virility.

Alongside the dancing, Chomsky was being broadcast in quotation throughout, mainly delivering a spiel about corporate mind control. Cherkaoui then tugged at the ideas in the quotes in ways both subtle and crashingly obvious. Take the show's best bit: on one side of the stage, he is sat in a chair, watching his TV, in a mask, giving the finger and laughing and gurgling like the consumerist MORON he is and we all are. Meanwhile, on the other side of the stage, some guy is having seven bells beaten out of him in dance form. After a solid dance beating, the man finally collapses onto an array of big white plastic triangles, which domino right round the stage, knocking Cherkaoui into the audience – imagine an OK Go video about the war in Yemen.

There are lots of these white triangular structures on the stage, and the dancers kept re-arranging them, like they were laying some of that IKEA fake-wood flooring, but they can't quite get it to align. Again and again, they pick up these big white triangle pieces and attempt to put them in a more pleasing shape for a buy-to-let new build. They do the Shiva thing with their hands to illustrate the complexity of information overload. In another section, a man is shot again and again and again in a vicious gunfire ballet, a bit like the slo-mo scenes in The Matrix.

If you want hardcore politics about class war, it's 'Les Miserables' every time.

Remember how revolutionary that slo-mo sequence seemed back in the day? Just like Chomsky. They both peaked at the roughly same time – back in a golden age of Ralph Nader and No Logo, when Michael Moore seemed more like a Twinkie-addicted puckish prophet than a crabby, fibby annoyer-in-chief.

In fact, the sense of "why now?" runs right through the evening. It isn't hard to work out why you would put on a Chomsky dance sesh; everybody loves to access their radical political economy via expressive dance. It's just a lot harder to work out why you'd do it specifically in 2016.

Chomsky's big idea was that the world is controlled by informational channels which spoon-feed us nutritionally-void info-bytes, that the truth – or, more often, the context – of what we're told isn't verifiable. So unless we come home from our slob-jobs, open our almanacs and start researching, there's no way the individual citizen can outpace the media-machine, which, he asserts, is constructed so as to reinforce our present oligarchy, AKA The Man.

Fractus V by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

His solution, as described in 1988's Manufacturing Consent and recounted onstage, is that citizens should associate – they should consume alternative media and band together, syndicate, meet, discuss. Individuals, Chomsky suggests, are fed the lie that they are powerless and alone. And, alone in their houses, watching their TVs, being drip-fed by corporate media, they certainly are.

Chomsky's thesis, in other words, is that TV in the late 80s was rubbish. And I would entirely agree. However, this is 2016. TV's brilliant. Hasn't he heard about The Crown? Black Cocking Mirror? That Foxy Knoxy documentary? But like a really top Black Mirror episode, we're also already living in the future that Chomsky was casting his eyes towards. One in which the citizen can band together with others and get alternative info: Indymedia, Wikileaks, Medium, whoever your YouTube pulpit vlogger of preference is.

The fact that he's alive to see that future is unusual – it's like if Marx had turned up in Moscow in 1928. And the truth is that he was totally right and hopelessly wrong. Our new channels have pulled down icons; we've had Tahrir Square and the Trafigura scandal. But at the same time, they've centrifuged us into Trumpists vs Black Lives Matter-ists, taken everything to the margins of The Canary or Breitbart. If anything's lacking, it's the centre he decries: it's newspaper-funded investigative journalism that's declined as "the power" (AKA "the money") has been stripped out.

Tellingly, whenever Chomsky has been wheeled out to comment on the foment in America and the world this year, he's sounded little different to most of the commentariat – like everyone else, he points out that there is unease over globalisation, an anomie in the citizenry, we're more isolated, oppressed and grumpy than ever before. Does this mean that he was right all along and we've merely caught up? Or that, as the world has moved on, his ideas have been absorbed, run out of steam or fused into banality?

At least the dance side of Chomsky's oeuvre remains super fresh – Fractus V was given a lengthy standing ovation. If you want a mandance extravaganza, it's here. If you want hardcore politics about class war, it's Les Miserables every time.

Follow Gavin on Twitter @gavhaynes

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As the World Series of Poker (WSOP) closes for another year, and millions of dollars are fed to men who have spent a fortnight of their lives playing cards, we were left with another final table about as diverse as a Father John Misty concert. In the end, Qui Nguyen, a Vietnamese man, won the coveted bracelet and over $8 million. And yet again, there was one demographic missing from the final table of the biggest poker tournament in the world: women.

The only woman to have ever made it to the final table – or the "November Nine" – at the $10,000-entry Main Event was Barbara Enright in 1995. French player Gaelle Baumann came close in 2012, but finished in 10th place, narrowly missing a shot at glory. Thing is, it's a sport, if you can call it that, that really shouldn't be dominated by one gender – it's just a bunch of people, seated, being strategic with cards.

Kara Scott is a poker player, but primarily a broadcaster who hosts interviews with the winners and losers at the WSOP. I spoke to her to try to figure out why this card game doesn't seem to attract as many women as men, and what can be done to encourage greater inclusivity.

VICE: One thing that puts me off the game is when you go to the casinos there'll be guys who try to bully other guys at the table, and kind of act like they're the big dogs, and it'll piss you off and make you want to leave. Do you see that as a problem?
Kara Scott: People definitely have different styles, and you can't police their styles, and I know that, but I find it off-putting sometimes when I'm playing against players who use a lot of body language or verbal cues to show you they don't think much of you. And I think that makes them not just bad for poker, but not great for them either. If they're sitting at those games and they're making money but they're chasing away the players who are coming to have fun – who they're taking the money from – then they're actually doing themselves a disservice as well as, you know, not being very nice about it.

Poker does not need to chase away new players, or players who are recreational. I have been an advocate for recreational players for a really long time, because I don't play professionally. I play with the professionals but I make my living as a broadcaster, and I'm very clear about the difference. So, sometimes, I'm very much the fish in the game, and I get that, and when I'm playing against really great players they do not make me feel like the fish in the game, because they know better. Like, I've put my money in and I might as well enjoy myself, even if I'm going to lose it to them.

It's my entertainment money, let's say. If I'm playing with a certain amount of money that I might put into certain other kinds of entertainment, like expensive meals, they're not gonna make me feel like I've wasted my money because they know better. Maybe they just have better manners, too.

Do you feel like when you sit down at a table there's a certain level of presumption about you and your ability to play?
Oh yeah, of course. Poker is a part of the world, and the world is the way the world is, so absolutely. I'm protected in a big way by my position in the industry because I've been here for so long. We're a very young industry and I've been in it for over a decade, so I'm now kind of one of the old timers. I also have a great position at the World Series of Poker (WSOP), and that protects me from a lot of things. But yeah, for sure, it does happen. It's not a great feeling when it's happened, and you do learn how to deal with that because it happens in the wider world, like I said, but it's a more targeted thing when you're sitting at a table and you don't want to stand up and walk away from a cash game if it's going well, and you're not going to throw away your buy-in because someone's being off with you – so you just have to sit there and take it, or figure out a way to deal with it.

One thing I like about football is how, when it comes down to it, it's a pretty ridiculous spectacle. Do you ever think that about poker, a game that takes itself very seriously?
I think the cameras do that to people. We're all very media savvy now. We know what it means to do certain things on camera – we know what it means to have camera time – so it does make people a bit more serious, or it makes some of them louder, you know? They know that they're going to be seen on television – it's gonna be on YouTube – and it makes it more important not to screw up. It's going to be there forever. I played a hand badly in the Irish Open seven years ago and people still bring it up to me, and are like, "You totally can't play." And I'm like, "Dude, it was seven years ago – come on!" Sometimes the money is very serious, too. I'm not surprised that people are quiet.

READ: We Talked to the Frosties Advert Kid Everyone Thought Was Dead

Do you think there are any advantages to being a woman playing poker?
Women in poker are in the minority, so we're more visible, which is good and bad. I'd prefer if it was more evenly split gender-wise, but being a woman in poker means that you're more likely to get PR offers because you are more visible – same as being a sportsperson, or an actor.

What do you think turns women off the game?
It's a good question. Man, it's such a great game – it really is. I wish someone would do real research into it so we could stop speculating. We need to find why women are turned off it. It's important. Partly it's a marketing issue. When you market something so hard towards one gender, or one demographic, it can feel kind of exclusionary. When you look at poker marketing and the only images of women are not of players, then all you really see are models working at the games rather than playing the games. When people talk about women in poker they're imagining all the 20-something attractive pros whose faces they've seen, and they're not imagining the vast amounts of middle-aged and retirement-aged women who play. These are the women who are playing, and we don't see them in the marketing and we don't see them in the media as much, and I think we should. There's something very cool about it.

Is that maybe also something to do with the stereotypical delineation between men and women playing cards informally, i.e. men have their "boys nights" and play poker, whereas women get together and play bridge?
Well, some of those are ridiculously cutthroat! They might just be doing it in different settings because traditionally that's what was allowable. There's a lot of things about the world that put things in different categories and make it seem like it's there for a reason – gender separates things because that's what gender does – whereas, really, maybe it's history; maybe it's the way we look at the world, look at gender. There's nothing innately masculine or feminine about poker, it's a great game.

Thanks, Kara!

@joe_bish

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Eugh, I really don't want to be that guy – that "woah Black Mirror is already here guy", because that guy uses Linux and has a bit of tape over his Macbook camera and has recently re-ordered his top 10 Radiohead albums playlist. But sorry,Black Mirror is already here.

In the first episode of this season, "Nosedive", everyone rates everyone, like Uber ratings but for human beings. There's a bit where the main character tries to rent a car but she can't get a good one because her social media "score" is too low. Well, this morning, Admiral car insurance said they will analyse first-time drivers' Facebook posts in order to judge their premiums. They set up a new company "First Car Quote" to do it, just for drivers aged 21 and under.

You can only log into the First Car Quote app using Facebook, at which point they can start scanning your data. Admiral explains:

"We already know social media posts can tell us whether a person is a good or a bad credit risk and this is true for cars too. It's scientifically proven that some personalities are more likely to have an accident than others. But standard insurance questions don't tend to measure personality. At firstcarquote, we look at a driver's personality by analysing some of their Facebook data and if we see indicators that you will be a careful driver..."

According to the Guardian, the things they're looking for are subtle and bizarre. They include "writing in short concrete sentences, using lists and arranging to meet friends at a set time and place, rather than just 'tonight'".

They also say "the use of exclamation marks and the frequent use of 'always' or 'never' rather than 'maybe' will count against them".

Facebook has already released a statement saying that doing this would violate its terms of service, and immediately disabled the app. Admiral has said it's "delaying" the launch and is working with Facebook to get it back and up running.

All of which has a big whiff of bullshit to it. For a start, there's no way Admiral, an insurance company, would have launched this scheme without lawyering the fuck out of it, as well as considering the potential PR issues. The disagreement with Facebook's user agreement would certainly have come up.

Also, who makes specific plans with friends on publicly available Facebook comments? That would be a dangerous and stupid use of Facebook, which allows for private messages. Anyone who leaves a comment on someone's wall that says "meet at 9PM down the dark alley behind the graveyard", I would imagine, is far more likely to be a dangerous driver, because they are an idiot.

The larger point is that social media is unlikely to be a good reflection of someone's personality, never mind how they drive: I can start emails "Dear sir" and start status updates "Looooool"; it doesn't say much about me as a person. Admiral claims it has plenty of research that driving ability can be linked to social media language, but it must all be secret research because I've just done a fairly thorough search of Google Scholar and can't find a single scholarly article with even a whiff of that kind of research (although there are plenty about using social media whiledriving). There are separately, papers that link personality to driving ability and papers that link social media language to personality. But it's a huge leap to go from that, to people that overuse the word "always"are worse drivers.

A lot of the quotes about driver behaviour that Admiral sent out come from "independent advisor Yossi Borenstein". He says stuff like: "An overconfident person will use phrases such as 'always', 'never' and exclamation marks ... An overconfident person might be a risky driver." As far as I can tell, though, Yossi has no background in driving safety. His other endeavours seem to be working on an app for art galleries and a book about the computer science field of metaheuristics. All he is saying is that overconfident people use more certain language (quite possible) and that this may be linked to driving (completely unproven).

We emailed Yossi, who would only pass us on to a press officer for Admiral, who wouldn't answer questions about where the research came from. She only provided a prepared statement which said:

"Firstcarquote, which will allow first time drivers to voluntarily share some social data with insurers for a simple and discounted quote, is currently a beta product...following discussions with Facebook the product is launching with reduced functionality, allowing first time drivers to login using Facebook and share some information to secure a faster, simpler and discounted quote."

I'm not normally a fan of people who think everything is a publicity stunt, but I think we should entertain the possibility that Admiral was planning to launch a fairly standard new app for first time drivers and was looking for a way to cause a bit of a media splash about it, knowing full well that element of it would be shut down. Is it even out of the question that someone at the company's marketing department watched Black Mirror and thought, 'I know what we can do'? They've certainly tapped into a lot of public fears about social media, and the story has had wide coverage today – much more than the launch of an insurance app ever would.

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At the end of 2015, Yvonne Eisenring decided to quit her job, leave her apartment and travel the world looking for love. Tel Aviv, Havana, New York, Hamburg, Rome – in one year she visited 12 countries, had over 50 dates and then, when she got back, wrote a book about her experiences. I got in touch with her to find out if it's really easier to fall in love when dating is your full-time job.

VICE: Was your job so stressful that you had to take tim off to find a date?
Yvonne Eisenring: I started working when I was 20. I was one of the youngest TV reporters in Switzerland. When I turned 27, I realised that I hadn't been in love for a while and asked myself why. I wanted to see if falling in love is more likely to happen, when you have free time and no responsibilities. Some friends thought it was a brave thing to do, others worried that I was gambling with my career.

If I had taken that year off to do some postgraduate training, then nobody would have thought twice about it, since it would have been a good thing for my career. But with falling in love, you never know if it's worth it.

So, we're capitalists when it comes to love?
We're very performance-oriented. Everything we do has to result in something. And since being in love doesn't yield immediate results, we choose to spend our time on our bodies, our careers or our social media profiles instead. You only have time to meet someone between leaving the office and going to the gym.

Yvonne in Tel Aviv | Photo courtesy of Yvonne Eisenrig

Isn't it performance-oriented to treat falling in love like a project?
That's not what I did. It's not like I signed up for all the dating platforms like Parship and OkCupid and sought out my one true love. I just started traveling to see what happens when you have more time and more headspace. Friends would set me up with men – or guys would just talk to me on the street and I had the time to respond. I only actually used Tinder in New York and Hamburg. I wouldn't have met anyone in Hamburg if I hadn't used Tinder.

Did any of the men you dated live up to any national stereotypes?
In order to say, "Cubans are like this," and "Germans are like that," I would have had to have dated 5,000 men, not 50. But certain clichés were confirmed. In Cuba, I actually did go salsa dancing a lot, and my date told me I was the most beautiful woman he'd ever met within five minutes. New Yorkers never wanted to commit – they were always waiting to see if there was someone better around the corner. Dating seemed to be a hobby for them.

The Italians that I met were easygoing and paid me a lot of compliments. And they actually did talk about their mothers a lot. For example they'd say, "The carbonara in this restaurant is good, but my mother's is better." I also noticed that in Italy the differences between genders were more emphasised: men and women seem to be a mystery to each other in the South of Europe, but they all seem to like it that way.

With Germans, the cliches weren't true. A lot of my German dates were funny and sarcastic. They were able to laugh at themselves and they all looked good. I think people in Central Europe have an unjustly bad reputation when it comes to romance.

What did you think about the British?
I only met Londoners. One of them actually visited me for a weekend in Vienna afterwards. He was very polite and funny, and a true gentleman. After we had been out all day together, he changed into a white, button-down shirt for dinner in a restaurant. I thought that was cute, but a bit much. But London was like any of the other big cities for me – people have very little time and too many choices.

In general, I was surprised to find that men all over the world are hustling to find love. There is that cliché that men don't care about finding love. But I don't think that's true at all. Some even booked flights to see me again and really put themselves out there.

Yvonne in London | Photo courtesy of Yvonne Eisenrig

What was the worst date you've had in the last year?
One time, I was talking to my date about how we both like to sing. He started belting an Italian aria in the middle of a café. His voice was actually good but it was at four in the afternoon and we hadn't had anything to drink.

What did you learn from your time off?
The most important thing I learned was that it's worth to take the risk, and focus on your private life. Some people are afraid of losing control, or of getting hurt. Falling in love shakes you up. It's strange that people will put so much effort into their careers but don't want to invest anything in love.

Did you find love, then?
I don't want to say because that would be giving away the end of my book. All I'll say is that I'm very happy at the moment.

So many rom-coms are based on the idea that you only fall in love when you least expect it. Is that an illusion?
You can't hunt for love, but it does help to get around and keep your eyes open. Of course you can bump into the love of your life in the supermarket. But if your head is filled with other stuff, you'll just keep walking on. You have to take the time to allow for accidents to happen. You have to set the stage so that love can make its entrance.

Illustration by Dan Evans

Culturally, the United Kingdom is a confusing place. It's like America, but with less shouting and more antique shows; like mainland Europe, but with slightly better clothes and worse crisps. Dotted around our lumpen grey rock are an assortment of weird and wonderful celebrities – the flag bearers of our Isles. To foreign eyes they might appear confusing – inexplicable, even – so with that in mind, these seminars intend to elucidate who they are, and why. Welcome to British Studies. Lesson 1: Noel Edmonds.

For British people, Noel Edmonds has always been present – a cultural figure for all our adult lives. Yet to compare him to a benevolent father figure, or even a funny uncle, would be mis-selling him somehow. Despite often wearing the wooly jumpers of an off-duty vicar, or the snazzy shirts of a cuddly bank manager at a Christmas party, there is in fact something alien, non-corporeal about Edmonds – a television presenter who contains within his head the weight of the universe. Light entertainment, heavy heart.

First, to understand Noel Edmonds, it's best to do a quick visual breakdown. It's important to recognise that Noel Edmonds has never aged. He looked exactly the same on the front of the Radio Times in 1987 as he does appearing on This Morning in 2016. His look – a sort of coiffured, cherubic Richard Branson vibe – has remained unweathered, untarnished by the sands of time. He has a perfectly shaped gauze of stubble wrapped around his chin, as though comprised of iron filings held to his face by the constant electromagnetic pulse that courses through his veins. He speaks with sincerity and a deep, unshakable conviction, awarding cash prizes in the same hushed tones you'd expect a terminal diagnosis.

He speaks, some might say, as God might.

Noel Edmonds began his career as a pop radio DJ in the 1960s. It was here that the little lion man honed his affable – yet weirdly intense – patter, forging a relationship with a public he would come to adore and rely upon like family.

Rising through the ranks of radio, Noel ultimately became the king of prime-time British television. He was our Ryan Seacrest – if Ryan Seacrest looked like a carpet salesman from Barking. Between 1970 and 1999 he presented Top of the Pops, live televised jumble-sale Swap Shop, meta-gameshow Telly Addicts and a seemingly infinite list of shows called things like Noel's Big Breakfast Roadshow... On Tour!

Then, in 1991, his ascension to the top peaked with Noel's House Party – a Saturday evening vehicle, best described as a peak-time, cottage-based, pastoral variety show. Each episode, set in the fictional village of Crinkley Bottom, was a mixture of live performance, special guests and elaborate pranks called "Gotchas", during which Noel played practical jokes on celebrities, e.g. tricking Barbara Windsor into driving around Basingstoke really slowly on a double-decker bus.

Noel's House Party was also the first platform for perforated, phallic demon Mr Blobby – Noel's sidekick throughout the series. We don't have time to explain Mr Blobby, but maybe just watch this and we'll do Mr Blobby another week.

These were Noel's salad days. Weekend after weekend, the roars and screams of his beloved fans rising to the rafters of his branch-of-Harvester themed studio. Then, in 1999, on the eve of a new millennia, the temperature changed. The water grew cold, the laughter stopped and Mr Blobby was packed away into a BBC store-cupboard, left to rot in the furthest, most-nightmarish recesses of the minds of children born circa 1990. Noel's House Party was axed.

I bet you think you know this story, don't you? Light entertainment presenter, huge in the 1980s and 1990s, whose popularity waned, causing him to disappear. I bet you're expecting to hear how he went off the rails, how he ended up dancing the macarena dressed as Muammar Gaddafi on Celebrity Big Brother. Think again. Noel Edmonds would not disappear silently into the night, for he had the stars on his side.

In 2005, Noel began presenting Deal Or No Deal – a sort of massive 3-D scratch card turned social experiment, during which he conversed with mortals and assisted their emotional journey towards a modest cash prize. There is an American version of the same show, but in the UK it was more like a weird cult meeting in a community centre than a shiny-floor extravaganza, with Noel encouraging the most bizarre theories about the game being a pre-determined spiritual exercise in positive thinking.

The show was, for some reason, an unprecedented success. Noel enjoyed a rumoured £3 million fee to stay with the project in 2007, making him one of the highest-paid personalities on UK television, nearly a decade after his house party went up in flames.

What was the secret of Noel's big comeback? Well, in Noel's words: "You are allowed, whatever your faith, to say to the cosmos, 'This is what I'd like.' You place an order. Some people talk to the moon, some people go and stand on a cliff and stare at the breakers, or you do what I do, which is write it on a piece of paper. One of the wonderful things about Deal Or No Deal is that it reflects life."

So, to be clear, Noel Edmonds believes his comeback came about as a result of asking the universe for it on a piece of paper. Now, who are we earthly-beings to question the methods of celestial creatures? Perhaps, in the order of all things heavenly, it was imperative that Noel Edmonds returned with a 60-minute studio-based gameshow. Perhaps.

But more likely, Noel's belief that his career in daytime television lies written in the stars reveals the core truth that burns within him. We might think Noel Edmonds is a telly presenter, but he believes himself to be something more; much, much more.

Noel's renewed celebrity allowed him to spend more time on his hobbies: like hosting a pre-Brexit anti-PC carnival called Noel's HQ, which he put on for absolutely free, and was the closest Britain has ever come to a Fox News-type extravaganza: railing against yobs, hoodies, drugs and licensing laws.

Noel's HQ was just the beginning. Consider the following statements, all true, about Noel Edmonds.

– He, at one time, planned to launch "Project Reith" – a clandestine board of investors intent on taking over the BBC.

– He runs a service calling people's pets to offer them emotional support.

– He has also just launched the world's first radio station for animals, along with a slew of other stations all aimed at providing spiritually-enriching positive energy.

– He believes he knows the cure to cancer.

Technically, Noel Edmonds has gone off the rails, yet it's hard to describe it as a breakdown because he seems so in control, so confident (it's safe to say, were he an American, he would definitely be a Scientologist by now; instead, he occasionally mumbles stuff about reading The Secret). Far from going fully off-piste he has become a sort of new-age raconteur. He might have started out a telly presenter, but he has discovered so much more in himself since those days. He is a soothsayer, a doctor, a cat-whisperer, a socio-cultural healer. He is also surely the only multi-millionaire to drive a black cab with a mannequin stuffed in the back seat in order to use bus lanes.

In explaining Noel Edmonds, we are explaining a man who – whether as a result of his own hubris, or a genuine belief in the cosmic power of positive energy – has chosen to transcend his earthly state and become an angel. We could mock, but he somehow managed to continue regularly appearing on television, managing to balance his otherworldly outlook with a healthy career in showbiz. He is a bearded star-child, a disciple of the light, a soul not meant for the vulgarity of this realm. He also thinks there are too many immigrants cos the traffic is really bad.

The question now is, what next? Channel 4 have just announced that Deal Or No Deal's hugely successful run is coming to an end. Noel has found himself axed once again. But this time he knows better. He knows now that glowing orbs flank his every move. That he flies on gossamer wings. Prince of Light, Son of God, the First Noel.

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I've lived most of my life in Creteil, a suburban area of Paris by the Marne river. It's where I spent my formative years, my best days and my worst days. These Parisian suburbs – or "banlieues" – are usually working class and renowned for their decaying tower blocks. They're demonised in the media for being havens for violent crime and terrorism.

I don't think the banlieues are like that, so I shot my own version of Creteil. My work tends to lean towards reminiscing on and revisiting old memories, so when I went back home this summer and saw old friends, I took them back to our old haunts from high school.

My friend Marie looks back on her middle school and the places she would go to flirt with the boy she had a crush on. Groover has lived here his whole life, 25 years in the same harbour town, and a decade playing in local basketball courts. A lot of us would spend our summers hanging out in town, at the car park of the shopping mall, partying by the water on Bords de Marne.

Over time, lots of us left – to go to university or for work, or just leaving to get out and go somewhere better. But you never really leave anywhere in the past; most of our families still live here, and that's what draws us back.

reginalc.com

Call centre cadres unite against the oppressor! A generic stock image of an office worker using a hands free headset (Picture by Lauren Hurley PA Archive/PA Images)

In the UK, 1 million people work in call centres. That's over 4 percent of the working population. In some parts of the UK it's the only big employer in town. Some in the north are, symbolically, built on top of closed coal mines. The call centre is an integral part of our lumbering and lurching post-industrial economy. In a country that doesn't even own its famous cultural products, like Marmite, pretty soon this work could be all we have left.

You will receive, on average, 468 cold calls a year. At cold call centres, entry level workers are paid on average £13,200 a year, work by commission and are under immense pressure from supervisors; monthly staff turnover can exceed 50 percent in some places. Somehow, in an age of internet shopping and comparison sites, these phone calls still work, otherwise companies wouldn't bother. No one likes being cold called, but have you ever considered the condition of the workers who make them? Why do we fail to feel sympathy for the caller when we know they are just trying to make money and get by like the rest of us?

Jamie Woodcock, an LSE academic, went undercover for a year working in cold call centres around the UK to investigate these questions for his new book Working the Phones; Control and Resistance in Call Centres . He told me the internet won't replace the cold call just yet. "Calling exploits and uses people's emotions in a much stronger way than email or instant message," he said. "It takes what's positive about social interaction and warps it into a sales situation." He is careful not to blame the workers, but the system itself.

Jamie sold "bad financial products, a kind of sub-prime insurance" over the phone, working from a pre-written script. At his call centre, workers were expected to make between 300 and 400 calls a day. There is a five-second gap between one call ending and the next beginning, like a telecommunications conveyor belt. This type of work produces something like "an assembly line in the head" – a form of "chain work" rather than "brain work", where you are constantly performing the same cognitive routine for hours on end. Breaks are timed by the second. You have to click "log off" on your workstation and then a big counter appears on your screen. Counting up, once it hits 15 minutes it goes red, like an alarm. You can be fired on the spot; your contract often stipulates that you agree to not involve a trade union to bargain on your behalf and there is constant surveillance of your performance.

Jamie writes of a time he was pressured by his supervisor into making an insurance sale with someone about to go to hospital for kidney dialysis. "The supervisor started to mouth, 'This person is sick! We offer guaranteed acceptance! This is your next sale!'" The customer said his illness was too serious for new insurance, yet Jamie, "under pressure from the supervisor, continued to pitch the product, despite the customer becoming upset". The sale wasn't made, but he was "verbally reprimanded for not being persistent enough to close the deal". There are stories like this from all over the industry, such as charity call centre bosses asking workers to make "ferocious and brutal" calls to pensioners.

Meeting Jamie, he seems like a sound guy; intelligent and compassionate, not a bastard. But he still managed to become "averagely good" at these sales calls. "It's all the little bits about speaking to somebody, that happen in between the script that make the sale," he says. How is someone like Jamie, who says cold call centres demonstrate "how decrepit capitalism has become", able to do this? What happens to you? He says the concepts of "emotional dissonance" and "affective labour" are key.

Affective labour, Jamie says, "is the way in which you use your emotions at work. It's more than just emotional labour. I think of it as an emotional package; the way you influence other people, interact with them, the social and psychological aspects. This makes it very different to other types of work. You use your social abilities in order to make profit. You are not only disciplining your body but also your mind and your emotions and how you interact with the world. It's exhausting, emotionally draining and alienating." Affective labour is "historically associated with female qualities and is therefore usually expected of women". It is no surprise that 80 percent of call centre staff are female and many experience sexism and misogyny from a mostly male management strata.

"Emotional dissonance" is the negative feeling you get when your emotions are in contradiction. You can hate your job passionately, yet when you make a call and "smile down the phone" you have to sound upbeat and positive. Most people in any service sector workplace will have experience of this, but it is the relentless calling at the call centre that makes it so intense for staff there. It is a demand not only to be at work but to genuinely enjoy it.

The maximum Jamie stayed at any one centre for was six months before the mental toll was too much. However, of the training cohort he started with, he was the last one to quit.

I ask if there is any hope in changing the culture at a workplace when no one sticks around long enough to demand it. Jamie found that chatting about making work less terrible actually made work less terrible. "It gave us something to chat about at the breaks. But even though people will leave, and demands such as the right to refuse to pressurise someone into buying will never be met, at least the worker has experienced organising. Hopefully they'll discuss conditions at their next job. The call centre may not be the terrain of struggle, but they will take their experiences elsewhere."

Since the deregulation of finance and telecommunications in the 1980s a cold call monster has been born. Before we part ways I ask Jamie what future call centre work might look like.

"There was an inbound university call centre for students, but it shut down because no one wanted to call them," he says. "They would tweet them or email. But sales calls, that will continue. You can definitely imagine a future where there is a piece of software on a worker's phone and you call from home so you don't have to be in the office. Call centres already call via the internet, so you could easily do that from home. There might well be a horrible cottage industry of a million people working in their living room bothering other people in their living rooms while some supervisor sends some abusive text messages from their house telling you to work harder."

Maybe next time you hang up on the person calling you, just take a moment to wish them luck with their next job.

@KitCaless

Working The Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres is out on the 20th November from Pluto Press

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"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"

This article originally appeared on VICE Poland

A tattooed young man with a trimmed beard poses for a picture, in front of a slightly campy painting of Jesus. He's holding a black shotgun with a couple of slugs attached to it, while standing next to him is a little girl in red glasses, holding a figurine of the White Eagle – a national symbol for Poland. The picture was recently posted on the Facebook page for #jestemchrześcijaninem , and went viral – at the time of publication it has been shared 3434 times. On this Facebook page, you'll find tons of similar pictures – Polish people declaring their faith by posing with A) a home-made sign saying they're Christians and B) a pistol, shotgun or assault rifle.

#jestemchrześcijaninem was initiated by Father Chojecki, a parish priest at the New Covenant Church in Lublin. The church is an independent community established by what Chojecki calls "former Catholics". Chojecki is famous for demanding the death penalty for president of the European Council Donald Tusk, for calling the pope "one of the worst threats to civilisation" and for working with Marian Kowalski – the presidential candidate of the far-right nationalist Polish National Movement.

The brains behind the operation, Paweł Chojecki

Chojecki launched the #jestemchrześcijaninem initiative after the Umpqua Community College shooting last year, where a student killed eight people – reportedly asking his victims whether they were Christians or not. After that tragedy, then US presidential hopeful Ben Carson shared a picture of himself holding a piece of paper that said "I am a Christian". "In Poland we slightly changed the idea," Chojecki told me, "combining the statement of faith with firearms displayed in a non-threatening way."

Since I can't see how a gun held alongside a religious message can ever be interpreted in a non-threatening way, I asked Chojecki to explain to me how he unites his love for guns with his love for Jesus.

VICE: Father Chojecki, why does a Christian need a firearm?
Paweł Chojecki: Christians, like all honest people, need weapons to defend themselves, their loved ones and their territory. We aren't in heaven yet, we live in a world full of sin and evil. It would be very naive to think we don't need weapons.

But Christianity is the religion of mercy – growing up in a Christian household, I was always taught I should follow Jesus' example and turn the other cheek.
You can turn the other cheek when someone offends you, not when someone wants to kill you. Mercy is an act of grace. You give mercy to defeated enemies – but you still need to defeat those enemies first. How can you show mercy if somebody is trying to slit your throat? Many Christians forget that Jesus taught us to be sensible and buy a sword: "But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one." (Luke 22:36).

What about pacifism?
Pacifism is a deceptive ideology made up by wolves in sheep's clothing. The lie of pacifism makes Christians vulnerable to attacks of terrorists and killers that go unpunished. And this idea of pacifism makes a caricature of Christianity – like we're a bunch of hippies. It turns reasonable people away from Christianity.

Thank you! First woman on board :)

So how do you figure universal access to firearms would stop people from shooting innocent victims?
Universal access to guns wouldn't mean that there's no control on who can buy firearms. Only law-abiding adult citizens would be able to buy them, not children or people with mental health issues. Plus: we should have the right to self-defence. If we could have both those things in Poland, I think we'd see the same kinds of things happening as in Texas recently, when clerks at a jewellery shop defended the shop from armed robbers – even killing one of them. You won't need the police.

The US, a Christian nation with pretty easy access to firearms, has one of the highest homicide rates in the West. Why are you so convinced that freer access to guns would have a positive effect on safety in a country?
The United States are a huge country and the accessibility to firearms is different in every state. So the combined results may be misleading. As Christians, we put morality and spirituality first – only Jesus Christ can transform an evil man into a good one. But once an evil man decides to use weapons, he can be only stopped by a good man carrying a weapon. We started #jestemchrzescijaninem in order to stop the spread of pacifist lies in churches.

There are Christian websites calling your statements "anti-Christian" and your church a "sect".
Jesus warned us: "Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets." (Luke 6:26). In fact, Jesus himself was accused of contacts with demons. The attacks from Catholic websites only confirm what we do is necessary and that the lie has spread among Christians.

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A commendable attitude! Thank you!
#IamAChristian #NotAPacifist
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Join #IamAChristian ‒ send a picture, share, like!
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"

A commendable attitude! A hearty thank you for joining us!
Join #IamAChristian ‒ send a picture, share, like!

Marian Kowalski is with us! #share (y) Want a t-shirt like this? Write to us!
Join the #IamAChristian initiative – send a picture, share, like!
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"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"
In honour of the Roseburg victims and all the people killed for their faith in Jesus.

Gaskell and his rescuers. Image via RTM Sarawak

This piece was originally featured on VICE Australia.

One day, you're just another millennial with a travel blog on a journey to discover yourself in the Malaysian wilderness. The next, you're hopelessly lost in the jungle with only leeches for company. So was the story for 25-year-old Tasmanian backpacker Andrew Gaskell, who went missing two weeks ago in a remote part of Mulu national park in Borneo. Happily, the lost hiker was rescued by local authorities on Tuesday.

Gaskell, who was trekking by himself through a terrain full of limestone caves and gorges, was found alive and well—albeit covered in leeches and maggots, and close to starvation. He reportedly survived by eating wild ferns for sustenance. The traveller had been declared missing in mid-October after failing to make contact with family and friends , who then travelled to Malaysia to help take part in the rescue mission.

As his extensive blog details, Gaskell is an engineering graduate who decided to leave it all behind and travel indefinitely in Asia, hoping to "come to some sort of conclusion as to who I am."

He explains how he has become disillusioned with the world of civil engineering and society at large. "Many people talk a lot, yet say very little," he sagely observes. "Everybody is crazy. It's just that many people are too afraid to flaunt their true character. For far too long I have supressed my insanity in order to conform to social expectations and futile self-consciousness."

Gaskell's first post before embarking on the Malaysian trip—titled "Confessions of an Imminent Traveller—will be familiar to just about any young, white person who believes their backpacking stint will be different to that of the millions of others who have preceded them.

"My main travel goals are to have genuine cultural experiences with local people outside of the mainstream tourist attractions; and to climb a lot of mountains. And maybe, just maybe, in the course of my travels I'll come to some sort of conclusion as to who I am and what I want to do with my life. And so begins my journey beyond the horizon," Gaskell wrote in early August.

"I have a nagging curiosity of the different cultures around the world. Are people who live in less wealthy countries any worse off internally? Perhaps people from poorer communities are happier than materialistically abundant western societies? I look forward to observing how communities and families interact in a variety of cultures across the globe."

Not all those who wander are lost, until they are in fact actually lost, and have to rely on an international rescue mission to save them. For better or worse though, Gaskell's close call hasn't dissuaded him from continuing his spirit quest—the backpacker is reportedly keen to continue his intrepid travels upon recovering in a local hospital.

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USA. Wisconsin. 2007. Raymond plays with Star Wars lightsabers with his sons Brady and Riley. © Peter van Agtmael/ Magnum Photos

Magnum Photos is the most prestigious photo agency in the world. It's now almost a grand 70 years old, an upcoming birthday it celebrated by giving us a load of photos their photographers had taken at "the perfect moment".

For their Square Print Sale this week, "Conditions of the Heart: on Empathy and Connection In Photography" – where you can buy signed and stamped prints from Magnum photographers at £80 ($100) a pop – their artists were asked to pick a photo from their own body of work that exemplifies empathy and connection.

From Bruce Davidson's picture of Coney Island's fireworks to David Alan Harvey's French teenagers smoking and kissing, each tells a story of the empathetic moment they captured. Below are a few of the photos in the series.

JONAS BENDIKSEN

Qikiqtarjuaq, Canada. 2004 © Jonas Bendiksen / Magnum Photos

"I took this picture in Qikiqtarjuaq, Nunavut, a small village in Northern Canada. At the time, in 2004, I was on a photography assignment for a German magazine. While the location itself was magnificent, a surreal piece of urbanity dropped into vast white wilderness, the story the magazine was running was quite dark. Along with a journalist, I had been sent to try to understand the community's many social issues. Different generations were struggling to understand one another, as the emergence of the internet, TV, substance abuse and general feelings of isolation challenged traditional practices such as hunting and fishing.

"During the two weeks I was there I struggled with my role as a complete outsider, as I had been sent to observe what felt like very private matters. At the same time, I was enamoured as I watched the rituals of daily life unfold amidst all the stark and awesome beauty around us."

– Jonas Bendiksen

BRUCE DAVIDSON

Coney Island July Fourth Fireworks. New York City, U.S.A. 1962 © Bruce Davidson / Magnum Photos

"Sometimes they don't tell stories, they simply speak as images. They express feeling, increase knowledge. Photographs can draw passion, beauty and understanding. And then there is love."

– Bruce Davidson

PAUL FUSCO

USA. 1968. Robert Kennedy funeral train. © Paul Fusco / Magnum Photos

"I took this photograph from the train that brought Robert F. Kennedy's remains from New York to Washington, D.C. The train tracks were lined with up to 2 million people who came to witness the passage. The crowd represented all kinds of Americans; Bobby Kennedy's fight for racial reconciliation made him, to many, 'the most trusted white man in black America'. The people in this photograph had a meaningful connection with Kennedy and an appreciable reason to build a sign, stand in the heat and say goodbye to the man who had once offered them hope."

– Paul Fusco

HARRY GRUYAERT

Marieke in Venice. © Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos

"We were spending the Christmas holidays in Venice, staying in an old palazzo. That particular morning my daughter Marieke, who was ten at the time, had trouble getting out of bed: she was in a sulky mood. I have been taking pictures of my two daughters since they were born, always shooting in black and white because I felt it was more direct and would enable me to focus on them more than on their surroundings. But on that day, the general atmosphere, the mood of the moment and the light made me choose colour."

– Harry Gruyaert

PETER VAN AGTMAEL

USA. Wisconsin. 2007. Raymond plays with Star Wars lightsabers with his sons Brady and Riley. © Peter van Agtmael/ Magnum Photos

"I met Raymond Hubbard in the fall of 2007, in Washington D.C. At the time, he was recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, after having lost his left leg in Iraq the previous summer. I had been covering Iraq and Afghanistan intensely for nearly two years and needed a break. I was attracted to Raymond's intelligence and charisma, and we began hanging out. I was a bit shy of photographing him at first. After a while, he snorted, rolled his eyes at my transparent hesitation and invited me to photograph what I wanted, how I wanted.

"We began spending a lot of time together. A few months after we met, he was discharged from the hospital and moved back to his small hometown of Darien, Wisconsin. I joined him out there a few weeks later. We partied together, smoked too many cigarettes and talked intimately. One day he asked for a family portrait. He loved Star Wars and wanted to pose with his sons and lightsabers. We went to a nearby cornfield at dusk and took a few photos. I wish I had taken more. Sometimes I mark time through this photograph."

– Peter van Agtmael

DAVID ALAN HARVEY

French teenagers on a boat in the River Seine. Paris, France. 1988 © David Alan Harvey / Magnum Photos

"I was commissioned by National Geographic for a piece for their special issue on France. I decided I did not want to present historic France, but rather modern, young France. French teenagers. So I did what I always do: reduce the scope. I chose one group of Parisian teenagers who formed a sort of gang. A nice gang. Friends. I became part of their group for several weeks. I went to school with them, hung out everywhere with them, saw them succeed, saw them fail.

"Judith, pictured here with the cigarette, was the leader. There is always a leader. I was especially happy with this shot. It was taken on their graduation day on the Seine in front of Henri Cartier-Bresson's house. I was always referential to Cartier-Bresson, even when I shot in colour during this era. Clearly I bonded with these young French people. We were like family when I had to hug them goodbye, which for them was goodbye to their childhood."

– David Alan Harvey

SUSAN MEISELAS

USA. New York City. 1976. Little Italy. Dee and Lisa on Mott Street © Susan Meiselas/ Magnum Photos

"I remember the day I met the Prince Street Girls, the name I gave a group of young Italian girls who hung out on the nearby corner almost every day. This is Dee and Lisa posing for me – or maybe for themselves. They were great friends, born the same month; they just clicked. Growing up in Little Italy, they were always together, at school and on the street – and onwards. A friendship that's now spanned 50 years.

"Back then, I was the stranger who did not belong, but these girls would see me coming and yell, 'Take a picture! Take a picture!' For years I was their secret friend, and my loft became a kind of hideaway when they dared to leave that corner, which their parents had forbidden. It was important for me to keep on photographing them as they grew up, especially when I came back from abroad where I had been photographing wars. Looking at these pictures now reminds me of how difficult it was to integrate my two lives – family and friends at home, and my life as a photographer on the road. It was often a painful separation, though not one I regret having chosen."

– Susan Meiselas

JEROME SESSINI

Child with mask. Ciudad Juarez. Colonia Zaragoza. 2009. © Jerome Sessini / Magnum Photos

"In many ways I have a close connection with Mexico, which has drawn me there recurrently over the past ten years. As I wrote in my book, The Wrong Side: Living on the Mexican Border (Contrasto, 2012), in which this image was included: 'Disturbing landscape, grey world of the workers in the maquilas. Concrete blocks. Seaside without the sea... Silent children, strangled by the hoods of their anoraks, heads down. They drag themselves like old men along the path home.'"

– Jérôme Sessini

DENNIS STOCK

USA. Indiana. Fairmount. In 1955, James Dean visited the town where he had spent his youth. It was just after he'd made 'East of Eden', but the film was not yet released. He stayed on a farm belonging to his uncle Marcus Winslow with his relatives. © Dennis Stock / Magnum Photos

"In a way, this image of James Dean is a story about not belonging. This portrait of Dean shows the future icon at a transitional moment: the glamorous profile in the photo seems incongruous against the background of his boyhood Indiana farm. There is a moment when we are not quite sure where our place in the world is, though we all must undertake the search to find it. Dennis has captured this moment. Perhaps this is why this photograph was one of his favourite images of James Dean; in fact, he often said it was his best-composed photo."

– Susan Richards, wife of Dennis Stock

CONSTANTINE MANOS

"This picture was made in an ice cream parlour in Miami Beach in 2003. I went in to buy an ice cream cone and found this man taking a nap in a quiet corner of the shop. It struck me as a beautiful and quiet situation."

– Constantine Manos

Magnum's "Conditions of the Heart: on empathy and connection in photography" square print sale runs until Friday the 4th of November, 2016, at 6PM EST. Signed and estate stamped, museum quality, 6x6" prints from over 70 artists for $100 for fibe days only, available at shop.magnumphotos.com

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The author at work

Loads of people don't reach their full potential. It's a fact of life. For the most part, by and large, people are just too lazy. They can't be arsed to get up and go. Go getter? You go get it! I want to sit here and see if Wotsits dust will hurt my penis if enough of it goes in my urethra while I masturbate with Wotsits-dust hands!

Take me as an example: I feel like if I didn't fart around and take my school's average grade down a notch just by existing, I could have been doing pretty well by now. I was always told I was "bright", but I kind of took that to mean "you can just do what you like and you'll be fine because you're not thick". Little did I know it wasn't quite enough to give me instant success and, two sackings and a redundancy into my short life, I realise I probably could have done with working a bit harder.

Had I worked harder I think I'd probably be writing books. Big old history books. Well researched books. I'd be presenting a cool BBC documentary about various wars, simplifying it for the plebs out there so that they too could be clever clogs like me. I'd be loved and respected and wealthy, and the housing crisis would just be a headline that I'd read in my conservatory while calmly eating my boiled eggs and soldiers, not in a rush to go anywhere at all. Instead, I wake up every day in a panic and end every day in disappointment.

Here are some other people talking about how things are going for them.

LEALA, 27, EVENTS

If I'd applied myself in earnest throughout my life I'd probably have reached all that unspecified potential my school teachers kept talking about. I'd have retrained and fixed the knee I fucked up during my physical theatre stint at uni and would most likely be an amazing contemporary dancer and less of drug addict.

Or I'd be an amazing contemporary dancer who could afford better drugs.

SAM, 26, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, VICE UK

I'm quite happy at my job at VICE, but I got a first in Politics from Cambridge so I probably should be doing something better with my time. I just googled people who graduated from my course and they include: the Hollywood actress Tilda Swinton, Pointless host Richard Osman and disgraced journalist Johann Hari. I suppose that latter option is still very much on the table.

I think there is probably a version of my life where I did a Masters in Political Economy at an American university, married a thoughtful but beautiful liberal from Indiana or somewhere and then the two of us go to work in Washington at an NGO or something. Actually, I think I'm just describing the plot of Parks and Recreation.

RICHARD, 34, FOOTBALL ADMIN

I work in the office of a football club, which I enjoy a lot because of the variety of tasks I'm charged with and the sense of camaraderie with my colleagues. While it's a job I'm quite happy to do, there is the feeling I have reached something of a professional ceiling and, despite trying, I'm finding it hard to get promoted. To a point I'm happy to get my head down and carry on, because prior to this job I spent time on the dole or working terrible temp jobs.

If I could have changed the way I lived my life I would have chosen and focused on a more specialised role – for example, dealing with the media or legal aspects of football, rather than the more administrative work I currently do. If I had been more aware of my educational and professional decisions when I was younger I might have reached my full potential.

That said, hindsight is 20/20 and it's impossible to know what will happen to you, especially since the working world changes so quickly. Many people I know change jobs practically on a yearly basis, but I've been here seven years doing my job, which I am good at, and I'm happy enough to carry on for now. In short, if I had reached my full potential I might have a better paid, more specialised job – but I'm not complaining, really.

READ: 'British Values' Is a New Way of Dealing with British Racism

JACK, 27, A&R

What would I be doing now if everything had gone the way it was supposed to? Well, personally, I do not see the fact that I spend my days trying to track down the publishing info for a saxophone sample from 1974 or agonising over 0.5 seconds of crackle on a test pressing as widely symptomatic of some sort of degenerative idleness or spiritual torpor, but admittedly I am not a doctor or lawyer. I'm not even a tinker, tailor or candlestick maker. I am, however, a relatively poor man, so let's roll with this for the sake of argument.

A better question would possibly be to ask, "What does my mother wish I was doing?" She actually touched upon this in an email recently where she berated me for yet another in a series of minor life disasters. After one or two paragraphs of seething invective I think she probably realised that she could potentially be authoring a text that would end up in the tragedy porn pages of the Evening Standard (although I'm not liked by everyone who knows me and certainly not a talented footballer, so it may not have made it regardless) and so reined it in a bit in concluding: "I love you so much, but I do wish you'd made better choices with that great brain of yours."

Well, if only I'd not heard the clarion call of indie calling in 2007 and continued my stellar start to academic life (catapulted from a special measures school that was run by a psychopathic pseud who was eventually caught siphoning off the PE budget to fund his expensive plonk collection into the dizzy flashbulbs of the local paper as star pupil) into university, then I think by now I could probably be just about finishing a law degree, possibly with some sort of placement in a practice on the Strand.

If only I'd never gone on that tour with Late of the Pier (I was only meant to go for one day and ended up on the bus for two weeks; the tour manager was an ex-addict who relapsed and went berserk in Brighton over a game of Fifa, took off both his shoes and threw them at the band's manager before running off bare-foot into the night – it is to this day one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen) and missed my first year exams then things could be rather different indeed.

I'd probably have at least five identical clean white shirts hanging in my wardrobe at all times. I'd have Wasabi or Itsu for lunch every day instead of beans on toast and beers in the office at five o'clock on a Friday. I'd have a driving license but no car (little point in the city, but nice when you're on holiday), a Netflix account, a steady girlfriend I'd see two or three times a week and a lot more money for cocaine at the weekends. I'm so sorry mum, I never meant to let you down.

P.S. the tour manager was not seen or heard from for two years after his disappearance, eventually being traced to Australia after someone came across his avatar on World of Warcraft.

ALFIE, 22, IT SUPPORT

I'm a classic underachiever in the sense that when I was young I was told I was incredibly smart and would be able to do anything if I put my mind to it. This lead to an inevitable belief that everything I want in life would come easily to me. If I did life "right" (did my homework at school, did my coursework in college, did ANYTHING other than getting stoned all the time) I imagine I could have actually come out of education as a much more qualified individual who would have been a more valued member of the workforce.

I'd probably be in the same line of work, just with a lot more money.

WATCH: High Society – Weed

RFN TAYLOR, 24, PLATOON MACHINE GUNNER

I never started to think of things as a sad "if only" scenario. Being a soldier in my Regiment means every day you have to better yourself if you don't you fall by the wayside. Serving in the British Army has been something I've wanted to do since I was young. It has given me a remarkable sense of accomplishment and the ability to reach my goals, despite how many times you fail. Failure is inevitable – it's how you re-organise yourself mentally and physically, and it's how you overcome it that defines you. The army is like any employer, full of good bosses and bad bosses, good people and bad people, and you don't get to pick who you are thrown to hell and back with. Learning how to carry on and overcome is a gift. It has been a wild, amazing ride.

LISA, 24, FLORIST

I'm not quite sure how to answer this question, to be honest, as I'm not sure what you mean by "potential". Thinking about where / when I could have worked harder would probably have been most effective when I was in school, doing A-levels or various exams. I remember teachers telling me I hadn't reached my "full potential and needed to pull your socks up", but I never really knew how much further I needed to push myself. What are you pushing yourself for? Do we value ourselves only by our economic output?

I still managed to go to university and finish with good grades. You're always taught, from a young age, that these grades will make a difference in your future, in terms of employment, but I don't think they really do. I think the precariousness of the world we live in today has definitely defined what I can and cannot do in terms of employment. Ideally I wouldn't have to be working three demanding jobs to survive. It's difficult when you compare yourself to others who are more successful and you internalise the fear or worry that you're not good enough, or not where you're supposed to be. I guess reaching my full potential would mean I was happy working one job in a field that I care about – the arts education sector, which I hope to go into after finishing my MA. Not having to work other low-paid jobs to support that career path would make me happy and it would be so nice not to constantly worry about money, to be comfortable and free to do the things that I want without hesitation.

@joe_bish

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A participant at the Ecosexual Bathhouse by the art group Pony Express. Photo by Matt Sav

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This piece was originally featured on VICE US.

If you happen to find yourself in Sydney this week, you have the unique opportunity to have sex with the earth. You just need to stop by the "ecosexual bathhouse," which is currently part of the Syndey LiveWorks Festival of experimental art. The bathhouse is an interactive installation created by artists Loren Kronemyer and Ian Sinclair of Pony Express, who described the work to me as a "no-holds-barred extravaganza meant to dissolve the barriers between species as we descend into oblivion" as the result of our global environmental crisis. But they also see their piece as a part of a much larger ecosexual movement, which they say is gathering momentum around the world.

And they may be right. Jennifer Reed, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is writing a dissertation on ecosexuality, and says that the number of people who identify as ecosexuals has increased markedly in the past two years. And Google search data confirms that interest in the term has spiked dramatically over the past year. We may look back on 2016 as the year ecosexuality hit the mainstream.

Ecosexuality is a term with wide-ranging definitions, which vary depending on who you ask. Amanda Morgan, a faculty member at the UNLV School of Community Health Sciences who is involved in the ecosexual movement, says that ecosexuality could be measured in a sense not unlike the Kinsey Scale: On one end, it encompasses people who try to use sustainable sex products, or who enjoy skinny dipping and naked hiking. On the other are "people who roll around in the dirt having an orgasm covered in potting soil," she said. "There are people who fuck trees, or masturbate under a waterfall."

A participant at the Ecosexual Bathhouse by the art group Pony Express. Photo by Matt Sav

The movement's growing prominence owes much to the efforts of Bay Area performance artists, activists and couple Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens, who have made ecosexuality a personal crusade. They have published an "ecosex manifesto" on their website SexEcology and produced several films on the theme, including a documentary, Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story, which depicts the "pollen-amorous" relationship between them and the Appalachian Mountains. And while touring a theatre piece across the country, Dirty Sexecology: 25 Ways to Make Love to the Earth, they've officiated wedding ceremonies where they and fellow ecosexuals marry the earth, the moon, and other natural entities.

Sprinkle and Stephens talk openly about ecosexuality as a new form of sexual identity. At last year's San Francisco Pride Parade, they led a contingent of over a hundred ecosexuals in a ribbon-cutting ceremony to "officially" add an E to the LGBTQI acronym; Stephens told Outside that they believe there are now at least 100,000 people around the world who openly identify as ecosexuals.

A trailer for Pony Express' "Ecosexual Bathhouse"

According to Reed's research, the term "ecosexuality" has existed since the early 2000s, when it started appearing as a self-description on online dating profiles. It wasn't until 2008 that it began its evolution towards a fully-fledged social movement, when Sprinkle and Stephens began officiating ecosexual weddings. The two artists had been active in the marriage equality movement, and they wanted to harness that energy for environmental causes. Stephens has said that their aim was to reconceptualize the way we look at the earth, from seeing the planet as a mother to seeing it as a lover.

Also in 2008, Stefanie Iris Weiss, a writer and activist based in New York, began researching her book Eco-sex: Go Green Between the Sheets and Make Your Love Life Sustainable, published in 2010. Weiss, who was at that time unaware of Sprinkle and Stephens' work, initially lent the idea a more practical, literal focus, with research revealing the harmful environmental impact of materials used in condoms, lubes and other sex products upon both our bodies and the planet. She said that she wrote the book to help people make their sex lives "more carbon neutral and sustainable," and to help us avoid polluting our bodies when we have sex.

The desire for safer and more sustainable sex products remains an important part of the ecosexual movement, and Weiss said that green options for consumers when it comes to sex products have increased dramatically since she wrote her book. But she has also happily embraced Sprinkle and Stephens' more holistic take on ecosexuality, immediately recognizing in their efforts a shared goal: to help people reconnect with nature, and with their own bodies.

Reed said that ecosexuality is different from other social movements in that it focuses on personal behavior and pleasure rather than protests or politics. She said that some people within the environmental movement have kept their distance from it for this reason. But ecosexual activists interviewed for this story all insist they have a serious goal at heart. As Morgan said, thinking about the earth as a lover is the first step towards taking the environmental crisis seriously. "If you piss off your mother she's probably going to forgive you. If you treat your lover badly, she's going to break up with you."

At the same time, the sense of levity that characterizes works such as the bathhouse or Sprinkle and Stephens' performances is an integral part of the movement. Morgan describes ecosexuality as a means of moving beyond the "depressing Al Gore stuff" that people often associate with environmentalism. Her hope, and that of other ecosexuals such as Weiss and Kronemyer, is that it can gives the average person a way of engaging with the issue that is accessible and fun, and that creates a sense of hopefulness.

Morgan and Weiss both say that they also see sex as a potentially powerful tool for motivating people to make the environment a priority. As Weiss put it: "If you're running from floods, you won't have any time for sex."

Neil McArthur is the director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at University of Manitoba, where his work focuses on sexual ethics and the philosophy of sexuality. Follow him on Twitter.

This was just one salvo in an aggressive new campaign to fight America's burgeoning opioid crisis by using longer, federal sentences for drug dealers. "We are going after those callous dealers who play Russian Roulette with other people's lives," Bharara wrote in an op-ed published in the Daily News. "Every overdose is a potential crime scene and should be treated as such."

On Monday, Bharara announced victory in a similar case: a judge sentenced 23-year-old Terrence Johnson to prison for 21 years for another 2015 overdose death. Meanwhile, prosecutors in at least 20 states—including California, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Ohio—have the power to enhance sentences for people who sell drugs to those who end up dead and many are doing so. But this approach is in direct conflict with laws aimed at saving overdose victims, and could actually make things worse as America continues to grapple with what amounts to a public health crisis.

The phrase "drug dealers" calls to mind villainous kingpins cackling while ordering murders and surrounded by luxury, stacks of hundred dollar bills, and beautiful women. In real life, many dealers earn McDonald's-level wages and often suffer from addictions themselves: around two thirds of those in state prison for drug trafficking meet criteria for a substance use disorder, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. In other words, many of those prosecuted for drug delivery deaths could easily have been overdose victim themselves.

In a nod to this dire reality, at least 32 states have enacted "Good Samaritan" laws aimed at getting more people to seek medical help during an overdose by protecting them from prosecution for at least some drug crimes. Studies show that most heroin users have witnessed at least one overdose themselves—and less than a quarter reported calling for help in one study, mainly because they feared arrest.

These are some of the same people who will be targeted as dealers by prosecutors like Preet Bharara.

Unfortunately, the state he serves—New York—provides a prime example of why such an approach is doomed to failure. In 1973, then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller pushed through a set of laws requiring dealers of coke and heroin be slapped with minimum sentences of 15 to life—or more. This meant that thousands of nonviolent criminals served longer terms than rapists, armed robbers, and even killers.

The laws did not end New York's drug problem, obviously. Less than a decade into their enforcement, in fact, NYC began experiencing one of America's top three crack epidemics (Los Angeles and Miami had the others), along with what became ground zero for the plague of HIV spread by intravenous coke and heroin use. New York also continues to have one of the largest concentrations of heroin users in the country, as it has pretty much since the drug was first introduced to the public en masse in 1898.

Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Laws were a catastrophe for the black and Latino communities. By 1992, the number of people incarcerated in New York state prisons had more than tripled, with the proportion of prisoners serving time for drug crimes rising from 11 percent to 35 percent by 1994. Despite minorities making up only about a third of the state's population, nearly 90 percent of those who served time under the laws during a period of peak enforcement were people of color.

It took more than three decades for lawmakers to admit their failure and repeal the statutes, starting in 2004. And there's no reason to believe that returning to lengthier sentences for dealing—whether it is labeled as such or as drug delivery leading to death—will be more helpful this time around.

In fact, the current epidemic presents deadlier challenges. As Bharara himself laments, heroin today is often mixed with substances like fentanyl that are far more dangerous in lower doses, making the risk of OD that much higher. By making those closest to an overdose less likely to seek help, these prosecutions could increase harm—not reduce it.

What this also means is that Bharara and prosecutors like him have set their nets to trawl for minnows, not sharks. After all, it's (usually) not kingpins who get high on their own supply or make the penny ante transactions in which drugs reach their final destination. And, by targeting retailers like "Taco" Delosangeles, who is Latino, and Terrence Johnson, who is black, they will continue racist disparities in enforcement, while failing to touch high-level sellers.

Moreover, while locking up a robber or rapist is virtually guaranteed to reduce the number of people on the street committing said crimes, locking up a drug dealer often just creates a job opportunity. A century of experience with prohibition tells us that law enforcement can't put a dent in these black markets.

If he's convicted, it will cost $1.2 million simply to keep Delosangeles in state prison for 20 years. And if history and science are any guide, it won't prevent a single overdose. If, however, that money were to be spent on effective, evidence-based maintenance treatment, it could treat Delosangeles and two-dozen other people dealing with drug problems for at least a decade, cutting their risk for death and for relapse at least in half and thereby actually shrinking demand.

Bharara's approach simply revives a proven failure. It's time for prosecutors in America to stop embracing drug strategies that have negative consequences and instead do what we know will save lives and reduce suffering.

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

Image by Hana Song

This article was originally featured on VICE US.

There's been a lot of talk of voter fraud this election cycle, mostly stemming from a certain orange-skinned, fear-mongering presidential candidate. In reality, those concerns are mostly unfounded. The myth of millions of living people impersonating dead voters to cast fraudulent ballots—including Donald Trump's insistence that millions of "people that have died ten years ago are still voting"—have by and large been debunked.

There is, however, another way the dead can cast ballots: What happens if you vote, by absentee ballot or early voting, but don't live to see Election Day?

The answer depends mostly on where the voter is registered, because American election laws and procedures are for the most part determined by the individual states, even in elections for federal office. In New York, for example, an absentee ballot can be challenged on the grounds that the voter died before Election Day (in-person early voting is not available in New York). Minnesota, which has both early voting and absentee voting, allows for a challenge in both cases if proof is presented to an election judge that a voter died before 7 AM on Election Day.

But most states do count the votes of the recently deceased, according to the bi-partisan National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), an NGO that tracks US state election laws. In the case of Florida, state law spells it out clearly: "The ballot of an elector who casts an absentee ballot shall be counted even if the elector dies on or before Election Day."

Of course, laws are one thing and implementation is another. According to the NCSL, it can be "virtually impossible" to separate the early or absentee ballots of the living from those of the deceased. For example, it might seem obvious to question why thousands of New Jersey residents listed by the Social Security Administration as dead prior to 2011 are still listed as "active" voters five years later—but there's no easy way to alert election authorities processing millions of ballots about the handful of absentee voter deaths that occur within days of the election. There's also the fact that many places with in-person early voting open the ballot when it is provided, and once that happens, there's really no way to tie each ballot back to an individual. Only if ballots remain unopened until Election Day can they be challenged.

You might be thinking, So what? But for many voters—including the elderly and the terminally ill—casting a ballot may be their dying wish.

"Being engaged in the political process and fulfilling one's civic duty may be important roles to be fulfilled for dying patients," Christian Sinclair, a palliative care physician, wrote in a blog post. The numbers are small but not insignificant, particularly in battleground states. In 2004,USA Today calculated that around 455 voting-age people die in Florida each day. Recall that the presidential election in 2000 came down to a difference of 537 votes in Florida.

In 2008, 88-year-old Florence Steen, who was born before women had the right to vote, cast her absentee ballot for Hillary Clinton on the South Dakota primary. But she died before Election Day, and because of state law, her vote was discounted. President Barack Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, also voted by absentee ballot for the 2008 general election. She also died before Election Day, but her vote was counted—not because of state law in Hawaii, which is actually similar to South Dakota's, but because Hawaii required official confirmation by the state's Department of Health that she was dead, and such confirmation could not be produced in the two days between her death and Election Day.

For the most part, the disagreement between opponents and proponents of "alive on Election Day" voting boils down to whether voter eligibility should be based strictly on the official date of the election. "In my mind, it's clear," South Dakota Secretary of State Chris Nelson told the Associated Press in 2008. "You have to be a qualified voter on Election Day. I don't know how someone can say you're a qualified voter if you're deceased."

Regardless of which side of this legal conundrum you fall on, it's not hard to be see the problem with having different rules in different states. Crafting policy at the federal level to remedy the situation would be tricky, given that elections will still need to be controlled at the state level, but some kind of national policy could help ensure that all ballots are treated the same way. In an article for the William & Mary Law Review called "The Vote from Beyond the Grave," Krysta Edwards argued that Congress should adopt a resolution whereby states would be directed to either disqualify or count all such ballots. Edwards, for her part, favored all ballots being counted.

If every dead person's ballot was counted, would it swing the election? Probably not. A search of recent obituaries shows a level of dissatisfaction with both of the current candidates. One recent obituary memorialized Vivian Ziegler of Arcata, California, who died on October 18—but not before casting her ballot for Hillary Clinton. According to the official I spoke to at the election office for Arcata in Humboldt County, "as long as it's in our office , it counts."

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A model rocks a Sharpe Suiting blazer. Photo courtesy Sharpe Suiting

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Leon Wu entered UCLA with a sorority girl's wardrobe, left wearing a military uniform, and found his male gender while dressed in drag.

"I tried really hard in college to fit in with what was expected as an Asian young lady," said Wu. After graduating in 2000, he became an officer candidate training to join the Marines, but something pulled him away from that career path: a Los Angeles drag king troupe called the Beauty Kings.

"I did a lot of the choreography," said Wu, "and mainly I designed a lot of the costuming." He'd spent his entire life fashioning a feminine appearance to fit in, but the Beauty Kings presented an opportunity for him to design masculine outfits—and a masculine identity to go with them. Eventually, while in the troupe, he began to transition from female to male. And in 2013, he founded his own custom ready-to-wear clothing company called Sharpe Suiting.

For many queer people, clothes are more than just external adornments. They can express an identity waiting to emerge, signal a community where acceptance can be found, and serve as an extension of the bodies upon which they are draped. That's why a growing number of designers, from DIY home crafters to artists to ambitious entrepreneurs, are creating fashions designed to help LGBTQ people feel excited about their appearance in ways they never thought possible.

Designer Sky Cubacub found comfort in their clothing in a more literal sense—starting at age 13, they began making their own chain mail. "It involves opening and closing thousands of little rings," they said. "I had panic attacks and lots of anxiety, so the medium really calmed me and helped me organize my brain. I think of it as emotional armor, but it's also actual armor. It protects me physically, but it also makes me feel emotionally safe, like I can talk to folks. I think that all queer folks need some sort of armor for themselves to live in the world as gender warriors."

After designing chain mail for years, Cubacub is now working on a line of lingerie for non-binary folks, as well as clothing for queer people with disabilities.

Models display Sky Cubacub's designs. Photo by Grace DuVal

"I'll make a chest binder, but I'll make it with seams on the outside for folks with skin sensitivity," they said. "Or I'll make it slightly less tight of a bind for folks whose ribs dislocate. Or I'll have it have clasps in the front, so a person who can't raise their arms can get it on without having to go over their head."

In the past, queer-focused apparel has been largely DIY. If you wanted to dress at the boundaries of the gender binary, the best you could hope for was to browse the "wrong" section of the store for a close-enough fit.

Wu, for his part, had been thinking about starting a company for a while before he did, but the last straw came when a salesman at a suit store told him that none of their clothing could be made to fit women. As he left the store, Leon's mind was made up. "I gotta do this," he said.

"A lot of tomboys gravitate toward menswear clothes, but menswear isn't fit for people who have a bust or hips," said Laura Moffatt. She and her wife, Kelly, started a company called Kirrin Finch for clothes that look traditionally male, but are cut for women's bodies. It's a labor of love for the couple—and it would have to be, given that their backgrounds have little to do with fashion. Laura, who holds a PhD in neuroscience from NYU, worked in the pharmaceutical industry for ten years before starting the company, and Kelly was a teacher and elementary school librarian.

Models wearing shirts and bowties by Kirrin Finch. Photo courtesy Evan Robinson Photography

"I think for us the frustration was so high that we felt we had to do something about it," said Laura. That frustration reached a breaking point three years ago when they were shopping for their wedding. "You can find a million dresses, but there's not a lot of options if you're looking for men's style," said Laura. "Not having the ability to portray yourself in a way that gives you internal confidence that you can exude externally is a problem."

"What our customers do today is cobble together outfits from various places," said Kelly Moffatt. "We want to offer the one-stop shop for somebody on the tomboy side."

Designing clothes that break gender barriers involves a blend of science and art. "If someone wants to accentuate their hips, for instance," said Wu, "you want a garment that is hugging your curves. If you're talking about something that's more masculine, then you want drape straighter, so it looks more like a line than a curve."

Sharpe Suiting uses a technique they call Andropometrics (adapted from the tailoring technique known as anthropometrics) to tailor their designs, based on hundreds of body measurements and millions of data points. That allows them to ask customers just a few questions about age, weight, and whether they want to present as femme, masc, or androgynous; an algorithm then predicts the correct fit. Wu currently works with several high-profile LGBTQ celebrities (we had to reschedule our interview so he could deliver a suit to Laverne Cox); his apparel can be seen on various red carpets and recently in a Revlon commercial.

Bridesmen carry a bride in a Sharpe Suiting suit. Photo courtesy Sharpe Suiting

There is, of course, a risk to designing clothes for queer people. "You can create a lot of customer loyalty, but you do that at the expense of a broader marketplace," said Laura Moffatt. "How focused do you go before it's too small? We want to serve our community, but how do we go about it in a way that we make our business viable in the long term?"

Wu has similar concerns. "We've done a good job of being all inclusive, but how is that going to potentially derail our heteronormative customers?" he wondered. "If somebody does not want to wear clothing inspired by the LGBTQ community, I have no control over that."

Ultimately, the feedback from devoted clients has been a strong motivator for queer designers.

"We've had a lot of repeat customers," said Kelly Moffatt. She helped a customer find a gingham dress shirt for a wedding, "and they wrote back a lovely email about how powerful it was to be able to express themselves at that kind of occasion," she said. "It's really exciting to be part of a movement. Queer fashion right now is a movement and people are pushing the boundaries of what society feels like everyone has to dress and look like. And people are saying, 'No, we're going to dress how we feel.'"

"Clothing is not just the fabric you wear on your back, it's not just an item you use to cover yourself up," said Laura. "It tells people who you are."

"It's not just the clothes. It's what our clothing stands for," Wu agreed. "My clothing stands for equality. Gender equality. Being empowered as an individual, no matter how you identify."

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Some calling cards – although the vast majority of student sex workers advertise online, not in phone boxes (Photo: Per Gosche, via)

Sex work, it turns out, is still just as popular a way to finance your university studies this year as it was last year. A poll of British students at the beginning of this academic term found that one in 20 people know somebody paying for their course by escorting, while one in 25 students said they would consider finding sugar daddies to finance their lives as they completed their degrees.

British students can expect to be saddled with over £45,000 worth of debt on leaving university, so it's no surprise that young people want to find ways to avoid getting maintenance loans, or – if things are really working out for them – even loans to pay their fees.

The Student Sex Work Project, carried out last year by researchers at Swansea University, found that many students largely enjoyed the work – citing the flexible hours, decent money and the fact they just enjoyed having sex – but that it came with a few unsurprising downsides, such as facing stigma and having to hide what they did from their peers and parents.

The same study found that there are more male than female students using sex work to help them pay their way through uni, but in writing this piece I was only able to speak to three young women – so here are accounts from them about supplementing, or even wiping out, your loan with sex work.

Tiffany, 25, studying in Essex

There are two ends of the scale: you get the ballers who know the game and the losers trying their luck. One guy I met made me order off the happy hour menu at a Mexican. For most of the date he had guacamole around his mouth and then told me at the end that he was "between jobs" but would love to take me to La Senza. Yeah, I mean: bye.

This other guy handed me £4,000 in £50 notes in the corner of a pub and sent me a prepaid credit card while he was away on business a few weeks later. We hadn't even fucked yet.

The perks are great: I buy myself a new wardrobe every other month and I always spend my first allowance with a new guy on a new handbag or Louboutins, and half the time they buy you everything you want anyway.

Travel wise, I've been all over the place – London, Barcelona, Dubai, but never for that long, or else they get bored with you. It can be quite tiring. You've got to dress sexy during the day, make sure your makeup is always flawless and be in a good mood 24/7. You can never burp, fart, yawn or not laugh at their shit jokes. You've got to be willing to try sex stuff you'd refuse your boyfriend. I mean, one minute you're lying on your back; next minute you've got a dildo up your ass, pretending to love every minute of it. I've made about £42,000 this year, so if you're good looking and can fake-moan you're sorted.

READ – Sex Shops and Swingers Clubs: How the A1 Became Britain's Sexiest Road

Adrianne, 24, studying in Manchester

I study in Manchester, but, coming from the US, I had no expectations as far as how expensive Europe was going to be. I was finding the financial situation quite hard; I was basically counting coins in a three-bedroom flat with six people – so I decided to give escorting a try after I was introduced to this site by my classmate.

I created my profile and got 25 messages within the first 24 hours on the site. The requests were everything from a sensual massage to a plain and simple coffee. I decided I wanted to go out with this gentleman who seemed really nice and well spoken over text. He wasn't too old, about mid-thirties; I didn't want my first time to be with someone close to my grandfather's age. We met at a local bar for drinks. I felt very uncomfortable sitting there waiting – it wasn't like waiting for a date at all. I felt like everyone around me knew what I was up to.

When my date finally arrived I immediately got paranoid. He didn't look like the charming man in the photos. It was definitely him, but he looked far from his profile picture. We started talking and my voice wouldn't stop shivering. He sat too close to me and seemed to always have the need to have his hands on me, whether on my hand, thigh or shoulder. It freaked me out. He wouldn't take his eyes off me and spoke in riddles, which made me incredibly uncomfortable. The simplest questions was answered in riddles all leading to me, my body or what I was wearing.

Later on, the guy had to use the bathroom. I went to the bar and asked if there was a way out of other than the main entrance. The bartender asked if I was having a bad date, and I laughed in fear and said yes. He kindly pointed towards the other end of the room and I ran out of there with my coat in my hand. I started walking towards my bus and, as I approached the bus station, I heard my escort name being called out loud. I turned around and saw the man running from the bar towards the bus stop, telling me I wasn't supposed to leave yet and that he wasn't done.

I jumped on the first bus at the bus station, not even looking at what route it was. The bus drove away – in the opposite direction I wanted to go – and I never saw him again.

WATCH: 'Inside the UK's Ecstasy Underworld', an episode of 'High Society', our documentary series about drugs in the UK

Annabelle, 22, studying in South Wales

I was first introduced to escorting through a friend of mine who'd heard about students selling "company" as a way to make the financial status easier as a student. I decided to give it a go.

I'm still dating the first sugar daddy I met. We met for coffee and hit it off instantly. We had a few non-sexual dates, like dinners, cocktails and a trip to the opera. The first night we slept together I made £1,200. I had regular vaginal intercourse, gave head and he went down on me, too. It didn't feel different from any of the other guys I would usually date, apart from the fact that he was almost twice my age, married and had kids.

So far I've made close to £30,000, I travel with my sugar daddy when he's on business trips. I usually just sit around and wait at cafés and hotel restaurants – but sometimes he lets me go out and shop with his credit card. I never splurge on super expensive things, just because he's already paying me a monthly allowance of £3,200.

I've done some pretty nasty things in bed, simply because that's what he's into. He's submissive, so I'll hit him, choke him and even sometimes spit on him – he really likes that.

I'm not planning to stop escorting, but it sometimes gets a bit hard if I find myself being interested in other guys. I have to support myself and I desire the lavish lifestyle more than a solid relationship at this point in time.

More on VICE:

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The VICE Guide to Student Life

There are generally two experiences everyone remembers vividly: their first sexual experience and their first encounter with the internet. For anyone who discovered Newgrounds.com as a kid, they often occurred simultaneously.

In its heyday, during the internet boom of the late 90s and early 2000s, Newgrounds hosted thousands of active users and served as a platform for user-submitted, original creative content. A year before YouTube launched in 2004, Gary Brolsma uploaded the now-famous "Numa Numa" to Newgrounds, signifying the first shift towards internet-generated, shareable content that has become a part of our everyday lives.

Shortly before Y2K, Netscape 5.0 was installed in my home. My internet exposure had previously been limited to the classroom or a neighbor's computer. Knowledge of the website known as "Newgrounds" had swept through my school yard, and I wasted no time accessing it.

Due to games like "Dad n' Me," a poorly animated game that involves massacring characters with a chainsaw, and "Britney Spears dress up doll," where users undressed a photoshopped figure with Britney Spears's head attached (there were many games dedicated to degrading the reigning pop princess), we were swiftly prohibited by parents and teachers from visiting the forbidden the site.

Naturally this made the site all the more exciting. We were confused and hormonal—a volatile mix—drawn to its controversial allure. There we found violence, nudity, and community. It served as a welcome to the wonderful world of the web. We found a place to experience new and innovative content that was as warped as our prepubescent minds. It was this uncensored, unadulterated content that would make Newgrounds so successful. For the kids, it represented an escape from the ordinary reality of our daily lives. As we grew into adolescence, it reaffirmed a shared view that was, predictably, in opposition to our parent's standards of decency.

"A lot of the motivation behind Newgrounds came from growing up in a pre-web world, in particular, a world where no one saw what you made if you grew up in a small town and weren't part of 'the industry,'" he said.

He recounts an experience in grade school school creating a book report video, only to have the teacher deem it obscene. "The video was laced with skits containing violence and drug humor. My teacher regretted showing it and gave me a C."

" jokes. so i wouldn't pay too much attention to those who get offended. who cares if he did it anyway? drugs should be legal."

But Newgrounds was more than provocative content. It mirrored cultural shifts and was a window into the future. Like the meme culture of today, the games often parodied what was popular or culturally significant. After September 11, the site was flooded with games like "OSAMAGOTCHI" that took aim at Osama bin Laden. Alternatively, "CELEB TERROR ALERT" allowed players to play as bin Laden whose mission is to kill various political figures also proved popular. In hindsight, I can see that Newgrounds served an unusual function. Through its emphasis on satire, it shaped my critical thinking skills and willingness to question conventional logic. At a time when "terror"—and the propaganda that surrounded it—seemed an omniscient force and resulted in shared, suffocating anxiety and fear, Newgrounds took aim and made it funny.

Games like these highlight the creative liberties creators were allowed to take and the humorous spin they placed on disturbing subjects. The different takes on the same issue spoke to a larger paradigm underlying the content: irreverence toward everything conventional. Creators used clever and innovative methods to address larger global issues and trends, and while it often seemed juvenile, it was bold and refreshing.

Newgrounds marked the end for parental oversight and the beginning of a rogue internet culture that continues to embody many of the values originally envisioned by Fulp. The refusal to be censored remains strong, while threats to net neutrality continuously loom. More than ever, sites like Newgrounds are necessary to counter the conventions of the day. Breaking down narratives is an essential function of the internet where so much information is readily available. Being able to think critically about what is happening is both a skill and art, and Newgrounds had the capacity to foster both.

The argument that millennials are desensitized may be misattributed to their ability to question or completely dismiss what's in front of them. It's hard to bullshit a generation of people raised by sites like Newgrounds, a place devoted to recognizing bullshit and turning it into content.

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"He knew the US had respect for gay rights, which isn't true in a lot of places in the world," Keren Zwick, Ibrahim's attorney, told me. "A family member helped him get out of the country, and he came to the Western Hemisphere as a stowaway on a boat."

But when Ibrahim (whose name has been changed to protect his identity) arrived in the US and asked for refugee status, he wasn't expecting to be thrown into county jail. He would remain there for seven months, in constant fear of abuse by fellow inmates, until he finally won his asylum case.

The United States has long been a destination for immigrants seeking refuge from anti-LGBTQ laws and customs in their home countries. But a growing number, like Ibrahim, are now being placed into detention centers after entering the United States, despite being at high risk for abuse in detention.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) increased its detention of asylum seekers like Ibrahim threefold between 2010 and 2014, placing many in mandatory detention, according to a report published this summer by Human Rights Watch. In the past year, ICE detained 20 percent more of LGBTQ immigrants who did not require mandatory detention last year than it did the year prior, according to a new report by the Center for American Progress (CAP).

This is perfectly legal per the Immigration and Nationality Act, which states that people without legal immigration paperwork caught within 120 miles of the border can be placed into expedited removal proceedings, which includes detention. Even asylum seekers who have passed a credible fear interview can be "detained for further consideration of the application for asylum."

But ICE's own guidelines acknowledge that LGBTQ immigrants—those who "fear any harm in detention based on his/her sexual orientation or gender identity"—are an especially vulnerable population who should not be detained unless necessary.

"This is a small group of people who are extremely vulnerable to abuse in detention," Sharita Gruberg, author of the CAP report, told me of LGBTQ immigrants. "If ever a population should be released detention this should be them, yet ICE detains them as the rule not the exception."

She and other immigration advocates said ICE should instead use alternatives to detention, such as periodic check-ins and reminders of immigrants' court dates.

Gruberg's report found that in fiscal year 2015, officials locked up 88 percent of immigrants who self-identified as LGBTQ and specifically expressed fear of abuse in detention in their initial intake interviews with ICE. The prior year, officials had detained 68 percent of those individuals.

"LGBT immigrants were detained with startling regularity regardless of legal requirements, vulnerability to abuse, or even the absence of flight risk or risk to public safety," the CAP report found. "The rate of LGBT immigrant detention has continued to climb."

The growth of LGBTQ incarceration follows a larger trend of immigrant detentions, according to Michael Tan, a staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrant Rights Project.

"We've never seen this many people detained ever," Tan told me. In the past 20 years, the number of immigrants detained has jumped from an average of 8,500 to 45,000 per night. Both Tan and Gruberg said there was inadequate data to tell whether the increase in LGBTQ detainees was proportionate to that of the overall immigrant population.

Most recently, the increase in detention has been due to an uptick in incarcerating asylum seekers: In fiscal year 2010, 15,683 asylum seekers (45 percent of all asylum seekers in court proceedings) were detained, which jumped to 44,228 (77 percent of asylum seekers in court proceedings) in fiscal year 2014, according to the Human Rights First report.

For LGBTQ immigrants and asylum seekers, that presents a major problem. A 2013 study by CAP found that LGBTQ detainees were 15 times more likely to be sexually assaulted in detention than non-LGBTQ detainees, and it revealed a "systemic nature of abuse" against LGBTQ people in immigration detention, including sexual assault, withholding of medical treatment, solitary confinement, inappropriate use of restraints, and verbal and physical abuse by guards. That report found that between 2008 and 2013, at least 200 LGBT detainees made formal complaints to ICE about such abuses.

The increased incarceration, said Gruberg, blatantly contradicts ICE's stated guidelines in its Risk Classification Assessment (RCA), which recommends not to detain anyone with a "special vulnerability," including disabilities, serious illnesses, or risk based on sexual orientation.

"RCA will never recommend detention to an individual with a special vulnerability unless subject to mandatory detention," ICE stated in a 2013 presentation to the National Disability Rights Network.

Not only does the detention of LGBTQ individuals flout RCA recommendations, but Gutenberg said it also contradicts a 2014 memo from the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, which stated that the DHS should not detain vulnerable individuals whose detention is "not in the public interest." (Johnson did not specifically mention LGBTQ individuals in the memo, but Gutenberg said they clearly fell into the category not recommended for detention.)

"When the memo came out advocates from the LGBT community assumed LGBT individuals were included in the protected category, because gender and sexuality are included in the special vulnerabilities in the intake form," Gruberg told me.

Now, ICE continues to incarcerate even more asylum seekers. Zwick explained that per the 2014 memo from DHS, the government's top detention and deportation priority is "aliens apprehended at the border or ports of entry while attempting to unlawfully enter the United States," which includes all recent border crossers, even those seeking asylum.

"The really messed up thing about immigration right now is that the November 2014 memo set up priorities and the number one priority is anyone who's arrived recently," Zwick said. "So all asylum seekers are a number one priority."

Even as the US government has grown harsher on asylum seekers, more and more people have flocked to the country for refuge, especially LGBTQ individuals.

"In the last five years, we've seen an increase in people seeking asylum because of sexual and gender orientation," Zwick told me. "The US has become pretty well known with respect to its freedom, ever since nationwide gay marriage"—and that reputation holds, even if those seeking its freedoms end up behind bars.

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Lady Cynthia Asquith. Photo by ullstein bild via Getty Images

Unless you're a long-standing reader of ghost stories, it's easy to fall victim to various untruths that line readerly expectations like bogeyman on some dimly moonlit path. For instance, one might think of masters of the medium like M.R. James, E.F. Benson, Ambrose Bierce, and Oliver Onions and conclude that most horror fiction was written by men. But picture the Reaper extending a long bony finger in your direction as a means of caution, for you, dear reader, would be gravely mistaken.

The classic era of the ghost story—ranging from Victorian times through World War I—was dominated by female authors with a knack for scaring everyone out of their minds. Ghost stories were written for publication, for amusement among friends on bridge night, in informal neighborhood contests, and just as something to do, an avocation that bore spectral fruit, with Marjorie Bowen, Charlotte Riddell, and Margaret Oliphant numbering among the master harvesters, you might say.

But if we're talking canonical masters of the ghost story form, we have to talk about the veritable first lady of horror, Cynthia Asquith, a writer little read today who deserves her bow as one of the finest propitiators of the dark muses.

Born in autumn 1887 to the 11th Earl of Wemyss, Lady Cynthia had one of those varied careers that today would be problematic for lacking a clear-cut brand, as she was just incredibly versatile (she's also maddeningly out of print; a little help here, present-day publishers?). She composed children's books, memoirs, a diary to rival anything by Pepys, a range of short fiction, works on royalty, while also cultivating a raft of literary friendships. (J.M. Barrie was a close friend and left her huge chunks of his estate, minus Peter Pan, as was D.H. Lawrence, plus horror fiction masters like Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and Hugh Walpole.)

What she was really best at, though, was scaring the motherfuck out of you through her writing. She had a number of ghost story collections, but the acme of that output came later in her career, with 1947's This Mortal Coil. It contained "The Follower," a proto– Twilight Zone offering on the very short side that is typical of Asquith's writing: We have an everyday scene of a woman, Mrs. Meade, in a nursing home. She's had some heart problems. We like her. The story feels companionly, like we're hanging out by her bedside, and may even be asked to play a game of checkers.

Mrs. Meade has been having hallucinations of a man she used to see—or thought she saw—following her in a black slouch hat. Her therapist arrives for his normal consultation, a touch on the early side, having come from a costume ball, still attired in his get-up and mask, which he starts taking off as their session begins.

Our elderly friend describes coming home one day and seeing a crowd gathered where a young girl had been run over, and there the man with the hat was again. Later, Mrs. Meade needs an operation and drives to a hospital, where the man is on the other side of the door, causing her to flee. The therapist is sympathetic and takes off his mask, revealing himself to be the man the woman fears. She dies of heart failure.

There is no monster in the human imagination to touch upon the horrors of the perpetuation of the past, and Asquith knew this as well as any ghost-story writer.

Alongside writing stories, Lady Asquith gathered them too, putting the call out to her writer friends to send along their best ghost stories, which she collated into 1927's awesomely named The Ghost Book.

It's a towering anthology, a literary abattoir where the dead dance eternally and fairly rock the joint with their ministrations. Blackwood, Machen, Lawrence, and Onions are all here, and if you wanted to shortlist a single anthology as the best horror has ever produced, you'd have to start here.

A second volume followed in 1952, with a third helmed by Asquith in 1956. For those, she wrote the concluding stories. "One Grave Too Few" concerns a newly married couple in the full blush of happiness expecting a child and buying a house where two young pregnant women have had some setbacks in the form of horrible early deaths.

A passing character describes the situation as "a perpetuation of the past"—and really, what haunts all of us more than the idea of one's former painful experiences always charging ahead into an increasingly bleak future? Other writers had the obvious bogey monsters, gross-out techniques, and demons. Asquith manages to be just as chillingly entertaining while also giving you horror in capsule form—she is a master, for instance, at pointing out how that seemingly commonplace detail of your everyday life might be the horror waiting to destroy you, if only you'd stop and notice it properly—such that her terrors continue to dissolve into your bloodstream long after you've read a given story.

Her anthologies work the same way, which is a feat, as though the writers she knew had invariably picked up some of the qualities that defined her own fiction (or else were edited so that they did). We're talking about some truly potent, terrifying stuff here: Asquith helped make something like the doubting of one's own senses or motives every bit as powerful as the demons one encounters in, say, M.R. James or Lovecraft. Sadly, she wouldn't have their influence, but it's not too late to discover and read her for ourselves (albeit secondhand). Still, if people in fiction can come back as ghosts, why can't great, forgotten writers come back as presences in our lives, too?

On VICE: A Conclusive List of the Top Five Scariest Horror Comics:

Better still is the tale "Who Is Sylvia?" If you think about your favorite ghost stories, they almost always have two things going for them: One, you can reach out and practically run your finger over the atmosphere. Two, there's a framing gambit that is one of those "Why the hell didn't I think of that?" types of ideas.

In "Who Is Sylvia?" that involves a woman in love with a man, who dumps her for the title character. The spurned woman, Susan Small, is frumpy; her rival is effortlessly attractive. After an evening of cards, an odd, scary guy relates a disturbing tale of once murdering two people by writing their names on a piece of paper and sticking them in a drawer.

Partly as a joke to herself, Susan does this with her rival Sylvia's name. Then Sylvia dies. The next time Susan opens the drawer, she finds a piece of paper with Sylvia's name on it, written in Sylvia's hand, and it goes on like this for a while. Which is scary enough. But then she starts to fall in love with Sylvia, there's this lesbianic, beyond-the-grave kind of affair transpiring, followed by suicide, which doubles as what we might think of as a ghost's version of simultaneous orgasm.

"Could I live through all the long littleness of life?" Sylvia asks a friend in what is tantamount to her suicide note, but also a reminder of the real powers that be, terror-wise: the banal, the life marked not by how deeply one lives, but how passively one exists. In the hands of the great Lady Asquith, sometimes doing nothing can be the scariest fate of all.

Colin Fleming is the author of The Anglerfish Comedy Troupe: Stories from the Abyss, a regular guest on NPR's Weekend Edition, and is writing a memoir, Many Moments More: A Story About the Art of Endurance.

Justin Duckett works on the front lines of Memphis's gun violence epidemic. He is a firefighter and a paramedic in Orange Mound, one of the most violent neighborhoods in the city.

Increasingly, when he responds to a medical call, it is to treat a gunshot wound victim. There have been 189 homicides in Memphis so far this year, an uptick of 17 percent over the same period last year. The Memphis Fire Department has responded to more than 480 gunshot calls.

In his nine years on the job, the 31-year-old Memphis native estimates he's attended to hundreds of shooting victims.

Duckett practices a kind of battlefield medicine: After racing to the scene, either in a fire truck or ambulance, his priority is to keep gunshot patients from bleeding to death until he can get them to a hospital. The work is high-stress, fast-paced, and disturbing. He sees things that he can't forget. Some days, he gets home and finds specks of blood from victims still on his wristwatch, or on a pen he'd been writing with earlier.

Duckett spoke with the Trace about trying to save people struck by gunfire, and how he copes with the emotional strain of his job.

Describe what happens when you get a call for a shooting.
Justin Duckett: The first thing we think about with any call is our own safety. We ask dispatch, "Hey, are police there?" If we pull up and one of us gets shot, now you have two patients and still nobody to help. We use judgment, though. If a six-year-old kid just got shot, and I feel like I can get that kid outta there, I'm going to.

Once I get to the patient, my first question is always, "What happened?" Just from the first few words I can get a good idea of their breathing and mental state. While I'm getting their story, I'm getting their clothes off, I'm looking to see where the holes are. I'm also looking for bleeding. If the patient is losing blood at a high rate, I need to jump straight to controlling this blood loss. As a paramedic, I can always intubate you and breathe for you. But I can't give you blood.

If the bullet hit an extremity, we'll apply pressure. We might have to apply a tourniquet, or an iTClamp, which looks like something out of a horror movie. It's like a hair clip with the teeth, except it's all needles. If a gunshot has blown open a hole in your leg, now you are missing tissue, and it's hard to pinpoint exactly what's bleeding. The iTClamp will pull all that tissue together. At that point, we're down to a last-ditch effort.

Trauma calls, or gunshot calls, are the quickest kinds of medical calls. Gunshots are really just the most barbaric form of pre-hospital medicine that we do.

Where is the deadliest place on the body to be shot?
With gunshots, a little bitty hole the size of a dime can create the damage the size of a cantaloupe on the inside. You can't even begin to understand what's bleeding—or what's seconds away from bleeding. A person may have been lying there long enough that they obstructed something that was bleeding, and as soon as you start moving them around, boom, that little nicked artery opens up.

The number one thing there's no coming back from is getting shot in the center of the chest, especially in the heart. And if you're hit in the lungs and they can't hold air, you suffocate to death. Or if they fill up with blood, you drown to death. The head's tricky because the body is so resilient, it'll still try to force you to breathe and try to keep the heart pumping.

Is there a kind of shooting you dread responding to?
A child. Before we even get out of that station, you can tell everybody's thinking, I hope when we pull up, it's not what they said it is.

Most of our training is based off an adult. With a child, everything you do is magnified. A child only has so much blood circulating compared to a full-size adult. The difference between that child bleeding to death and possibly having a chance to live is seconds.

Whereas a doctor can say, "This person weighs 55 kilos, we estimate he's lost this much blood," we're on the street. I don't get the luxury of knowing exactly how much a person weighs or how much fluid they need to replace the volume of blood loss, because the heart needs something to pump. I get one quick guesstimation.

Is there a particular call that sticks with you?
Every fireman has a couple they never forget. One of mine came four or five years ago, on my first day at Station 16. There were three children, and the oldest called their grandmother and told her, "My parents are lying here in the living room, and they're not talking. They won't wake up." Then grandma called 911.

When we walked in, the back door was kicked in. There were bullet holes everywhere. Blood everywhere. The shooting happened at some point during the night, and nothing more could be done for the parents. But you got three little ones that don't understand what's going on—a seven-year-old and a four-year-old and a two-year-old asking when their mommy's going to wake up.

The Trace has reported on how mistrust between law enforcement and residents can perpetuate the cycle of violence. Do you notice this dynamic in your work, and does it ever affect your ability to reach gunshot victims in time to save them?
As a fireman or paramedic, you're generally accepted better than police. When somebody sees the big fire truck, or the ambulance with all the lights, they automatically associate it with help.

But if the ambulance comes, the police are going to come as well. And so people will avoid calling if they can. They don't want to tell you who did this to them, because they're scared that they might do it to them again or might do it to their family.

The one that completely messes your night up is when you've been running all night on the unit, you finally get back to the station, and you think, Whew, I'm going to sit down for a second. Then you hear boom, boom, boom on the door. You look outside, you see a car pulling off, and a body lying right there in front of your station.

As a paramedic, you see a lot of horrific things on a regular basis. How do you cope with the stress and sadness of the work?
After any bad call we go through a mandatory debriefing, where we talk about what happened and get it off our chests. But very rarely will a fireman just come to you and say, "Hey man, that last call really bothered me." It ain't gonna happen. You're better off looking for the tooth fairy. It's that alpha-male, we're the strongest, best, baddest-in-the-land mentality.

Paramedics are said to have higher rates of divorce, suicide, and alcohol abuse. Is it the stuff that we see? Or is it because we all share the same personality, we all share the same faults?

Honestly, though, the thing that truly makes you move on, is the other guys. We wake up together, eat together, go to calls together. We're around each other so much that we can tell, "Hey man, something's not right." Like, I love sweet tea. If we come off a jacked-up call, my lieutenant might go in and put on a pot of tea. That's what I feel helps better than any formal program.

What's the one thing from your years as a paramedic you wish you could forget?
I wish I could erase the smell of iron. That weird metallic-y smell. You can almost taste it.

Sometimes I'll be working on my bikes, or bite down on one of those old forks, and it automatically triggers: bad. It's the smell you get when you walk into a room covered in blood.

A version of this article was originally published by the Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Trace on Facebook or Twitter.

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The "Snog, Marry, Deport" feature from 'British Values'

Racism in the UK has gone mainstream. Where, before, big public displays of xenophobia were largely restricted to fringe far-right groups and similar breeds of dickhead, it's now part of the official Conservative Party identity. You need only look at the speeches at the party's recent conference for confirmation of that the Tories have adopted the anti-immigrant rhetoric that worked so well for UKIP and are trying to use it for their own gain.

It's in response to this political climate that journalist Kieran Yates – who was behind last year's Muslim Drag Queens documentary on Channel 4 – started her zine British Values. The idea was to provide a platform to Brits and people living in the UK who aren't white British men to speak about their experiences, with contributors so far ranging from respected journalists to actors and grime MCs.

The first issue was released last year, and the second – which features Riz Ahmed, Rude Kid and Speech Debelle, among others – is available to preorder now. I spoke to Kieran about her zine, and asked her for her thoughts on the recent shift in political rhetoric in the UK.

The front cover of issue two of 'British Values'

VICE: Hi Kieran. Please sum up the magazine in one sentence for people who may not know about it.
Kieran Yates: It's basically a celebration of the best of immigrant communities in the UK, telling firsthand stories and jokes all written by people of colour or those from immigrant communities, and one token white British man per issue, for a joke.

Why did you want to make the magazine?
It was a response to the increasingly aggressive rhetoric of "British values" that was being used in politics last year by David Cameron and Theresa May – quotes like, "We need to be more muscular in promoting British values." I felt like the political rhetoric was encouraging non-white Britons to show and prove their allegiance to the country.

So who is British Values for?
It's for everyone, but some jokes might go over your head. Obviously there are certain jokes the white community can't ever really find funny because the punchline means wading through lengthy explanations whenever you make a quip about Fair & Lovely cream, or whatever, and learning the comedic levels of rooms is part of the immigrant experience. But saying that, satire is satire, so if you get culture and have a superficial understanding of politics you'll get it. Like, Sadiq Khan as a page three stunner isn't just a brown joke.

Why do you focus on Theresa May visually so much? In the first issue and this one.
I mean, I truly believe that Theresa May and the current cabinet do not have "minority" women's best interests at heart. Changes to the Immigration Act alone will inevitably hit vulnerable women hardest. But I also think we need to be careful not to call her a she-devil straight off the back.

Why?
Because there are still systems in place that have got her here. She's awful and dangerous and has been put in a position of power at a time when the Tory government had already fucked up so badly that she's on what a lot of feminists would call a "glass cliff", which is when women are put in positions of power just as the company or government and so on is about to fail. But that's not to say she hasn't been awful and disappointing. Yarl's Wood Detention Centre, Prevent and the Immigration Act are all evidence of that.

That's a good point. So what do you expect from her?
I don't expect much more from her, to be honest. It's just mad that when she was Home Secretary she was fucking awful, and then here she is as Prime Minister. It's beyond parody, really.

So what do you want to happen with your magazine? What's the ultimate aim?
I mean, it's about platforming contributions and rewriting historical narratives – so three things, really. Maybe someone sees the feature on the Grunwick Dispute and sees how South Asian women were instrumental in pushing trade union rights in this country forward, and is like, "Oh, right." Maybe overwhelmingly white media offices will commission writers and illustrators off the back of it. Maybe a lone Priya growing up in Sunderland will see it and lol about the "Snog, Marry Deport" stuff. I dunno. The last issue was good, though, because people ordered it internationally, but also all over the UK, in places like Hull and Sunderland and Barnsley, and I thought that was very interesting.

I went to Grimsby recently and saw a fishing industry that had been gutted by EU legislation, and without making me want to vote for Brexit, it definitely made me understand some of the frustrations with the EU.
This is the thing – a lot has been written about the thicko white working classes who voted to leave, but there is lived experience of economic trauma, which I get, and a real frustration about immigration. I don't agree with the condescending tone people use for working class voters, and the left has been unbelievably bad at speaking to those communities, and Nigel Farage has been good.

What do you think about how politicians have been speaking since Brexit? The overwhelming emotional rhetoric.
Well, this notion of finally reclaiming lost sovereignty cracks me up.

Why?
Because the reason Britain is great, in my opinion, is thanks to years of shifting demographics and immigration and Punjabi corner shops. So yes, the idea that Britain has now been "claimed back" and that we'll make the best of this tough time together is really interesting. I guess people just want to feel ownership of something when they've lost so much after two recessions – and identity is what they're hanging on to.

READ: How the Conservative Party Is Sucking Up to Bigots and Stoking Racism

Do you feel the need to hang on to any kind of identity?
I mean, I don't need to cling on to an identity because mine feels very distinct – obviously I'm aggressively Punjabi in a lot of spaces, but I also grew up ingesting cold, rain-soaked British misanthropy and listening to Oasis and eating Victoria sponge. So this isn't an attack on "Britishness"; it's just a lament that the kind of Britishness that I thought was cool growing up is now aggressive and tolerates me rather than celebrating me. It's like having a mate you thought was cool growing up, but then you get older and realise they had a burn book about you all along and now tells everyone you're a shithead.

That's a very sad thing.
You know what I mean? Like, Jesus, Britain, who hurt you? I swear immigrants had made a net contribution of £20 billion to the UK over the last ten years, you prick. So yeah, it's emotional, really – it's a feeling, but then you just write it out and make jokes and hope things will be better for your kids.

Thanks, Kieran.

British Values is now available to preorder here.

@williamwasteman

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Happy #LivingWageWeek, everyone! Hope you've all got your discounted booze at the ready and will be performing the rites sacred to this week: paying your bills on time, having a fridge adequately stocked with economy range products, not developing severe anxiety due to poverty – that kind of thing. Living Wage Week? Scuse me, poseurs, while I give a shit about the living wage all year round.

That said, this #LivingWageWeek is particularly special, because on Monday it was announced that the living wage – as defined by the National Living Wage Foundation – has increased from £8.25 to £8.45. In London, Mayor Sadiq Kahn announced that the London Living Wage (which is higher to keep the capital's low paid workers in travel cards) has gone up from £9.40 to £9.75. This is not to be confused with the government's "National Living Wage", a savvy rebranding of the minimum wage that was launched in April this year. Confusingly, earning the National Living Wage of £7.20 still means you're technically living in poverty.

Nearly 1,000 employers in London, and 3,000 elsewhere, have been magnanimous enough to sign up to the Foundation's recommendation and agree to pay their employees enough to not be living in poverty.

But where does that leave employees for companies that haven't signed up? Outside the Ritzy Picturehouse cinema in Brixton on Monday night, workers were holding a Halloween-themed picket to protest the fact that they still don't get paid the living wage.

To get the inevitable filmic analogies out of the way early on, the Ritzy workers' strike was one of the feel-good stories of summer, 2014. The heroes were the badly paid workers who walked out 13 times over the course of the summer, demanding their bosses, independent cinema chain Picturehouse – owned by not-actually-very-independent mega-chain Cineworld (2015 post-tax profit, £83 million) – cough up. Eventually, and after a heart-in-your-mouth twist that saw them try to make 20 of their 93 stuff redundant, the bad guys had to give in. They agreed to three incremental increases, reaching £9.10 in 2016.

The victorious workers rode off into the sunset with a 26 percent pay rise that meant they were paid only marginally less than the living wage – a true Hollywood ending.

Fast-forward to now and its time for a sequel. Further progress towards a living wage has stalled. Strikes in recent weeks have caused the closure of two BFI screenings. Last night, the workers were standing around with placards and pumpkins outside the cinema – which they had managed to shut down – wearing Halloween face paint, which was kind of distracting, like trying to interview some out-of-work actor at the London Dungeon.

As Kelly Rogers, a BECTU union rep working at the cinema, told me, "We came back into negotiations in June and they said they have no intention of paying the living wage, so we came back out on strike. [The 2014 pay increase] was a massive victory at the time and everyone here is incredibly proud. But we're still not on the living wage, we still need it, we still deserve it."

To those on the picket, the rise in the living wage was welcome, but served as a reminder of just how underpaid they are at the moment. As Kelly put it, "Things like going to the doctors and getting prescriptions is stressful. You literally can't call in sick sometimes because two or three days' pay is the difference between making rent or not making rent sometimes."

It's not just a living wage they're after; they're also looking to negotiate for sick pay and maternity / paternity pay. Another striker, Kostas Georgakakis, did a decent job of explaining why this stuff matters. "Last year I got seriously ill for eight days," he said. "If you're ill for more than a week that can be very stressful. I'm expecting my first baby. We are due – three days late. I'm going to get paternity and they don't pay anything – just whatever you get from the government, which is very little money. When my wife's on maternity, we're going to be very, very tight."

A spokesperson for Picturehouse told me, "Our staff are hugely important to us, we pay fair wages and have a wide range of benefits within a good working environment. Increases in pay for front of house people in Picturehouse Cinemas have far outstripped inflation over the last three years."

The obvious question, then, is how badly paid were Picturehouse workers before those three years of far-above inflation increases if they're still paid less than the living wage?

"I think what we've shown is that people in low paid, precarious jobs can get organised, and should," said Kelly. "When we were in our negotiation meetings a few months ago they said, at times, they've wanted to put our hours down and they haven't because, in their words, 'You won't let us.'"

With the strike spreading to Hackney Picturehouse – where staff are paid even less, at £8.77 per hour – the idea seems to be catching on.

"If we get it, other cinemas can get it. If cinemas get it, maybe theatres can get it, et cetera, et cetera, and suddenly living in London is not so bitter," said Kostas.

The government's "National Living Wage" is nothing of the sort, and the real living wage remains an opt-in for employers on the nicer end of the spectrum. If we're being honest, Living Wage Week shouldn't be a thing, any more than you'd have a week celebrating our ability to breath air and drink water. For now, it remains a bitter reminder that many workers don't have something that seems like a completely basic requirement: a wage that doesn't force you to live poor.

@SimonChilds13

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What, exactly, is good taste? And when does a shit film become "art"? These are questions that Tamara Anderson, a curator at the Barbican cinema in London, has been trying to answer. For the last few months she's been watching Nazi exploitation films, gory slasher movies and porny art house cinema from the comfort of her living room, to pick films for the cinema's latest themed season, Cheap Thrills.

The idea is to showcase the beauty of "trash cinema" – the kind of films that either intentionally set out to push the boundaries between good and bad taste, or those that accidentally became cult classics for their dodgy screenplays, bad acting and schlocky execution.

John Waters once said that "to understand bad taste one must have very good taste". It's true, undoubtedly, but while trash is obviously in the eye of the beholder, some films – it's fairly easy to see – are just plain offensive. And in an age of trigger warnings and no-platforming, you have to ask: how offensive is too offensive?

I called up Tamara to find out.

VICE: Hi Tamara. What inspired you to put on a programme full of trash?
Tamara Anderson: We came up with Cheap Thrills to run alongside an exhibition at the Barbican about vulgar fashion. Before the 1960s no one considered films as a high art form – they were shown as fairground attractions or at peep shows. It wasn't until French film critics tried to legitimise it as a form that film was considered to be an elite taste. Then, of course, there was a backlash; people began to argue that no work is too humble for aesthetic complications. Even the lowest forms of art could be seen to have taste.

Who made that argument?
We've leaned on the work of one film critic from the New Yorker called Pauline Kael. She wrote a famous essay called "Trash, Art and The Movies". The argument is that the greatest pleasure of movie-going is freedom from respectability and what people say is good taste – like books, art or theatre. She writes that great movies are the crude ones; the ones that don't look like art.

But if shit films are interpreted differently by everybody, how do you decide what to show?
It's been quite difficult. We didn't want to be toothless, but we also didn't want to show anything too offensive. Ultimately, I suppose we chose ones that reflect our team here. There are art house shockers, exploitation films and cult classics, which were made as serious art house films but missed the mark.

The trailer for 'Fat Girl'

What's an "art house shocker"?
Something like Fat Girl by Catherine Breillat, which was a film belonging to a movement at the end of 20th century of quite extreme French art house cinema, full of sex and shocking violence. This is the most notorious. It's a very frank depiction of teenage sexuality, but its ending is horribly violent and really quite ambiguous.

I once read that she made a film where someone puts a bloody tampon in a glass of water and drinks it.
Oh God. I've not seen that one. But it sounds about right.

What exploitation films have you got?
We've got examples from around the world. Fuego is an Argentinian sexploitation film from the 1960s. The Boxer's Omen, made in Hong Kong, is a horror film from the 1980s. There's lots of gloopy, gory makeup and special effects. Then we've got Dolemite, which is a kung-fu Blaxploitation film. What these films have in common is that they're all designed to turn a quick buck, and they do that by exploiting contemporary cultural anxieties, like rebellious teenagers, sexual deviance or race issues.

What's the difference between an art house film and an exploitation film?
I like to think it's to do with the intentions of filmmaker; art house, auteur filmmakers are trying to make intellectual work based on personal expression, whereas grindhouse or exploitation films are a cheap thrill designed to titillate.

The problem is, because films are so expensive to make, you're never really far from commercial considerations, even in the art house sphere. How would you describe Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac or Antichrist, for example? He puts it about that they're films about addiction or a couple working through grief, but all the publicity around the sex and violence doesn't hurt at the box office. Same goes for people like Tarantino and Edgar Wright – they're art house filmmakers but they've been actively calling for a reappraisal of exploitation cinema since the 1990s.

Obviously Tarantino and Edgar Wright are are quite mainstream. Would you say that we've got a better threshold for bad taste today?
On one hand it's true that we see more bad taste than ever, but on the other hand, yes – I've shown some of these films before and this was the first time I considered putting trigger warnings on them. I think that's indicative... shocking movies are released every year, but I don't think they've been causing as much controversy as the scandal of so few women directors, or #OscarsSoWhite. Today we're more likely to focus on conversations around diversity or who is in control of storytelling.

Which films on the programme do you think are in the worst taste?
What's interesting is that some films have got less shocking with time – like John Waters' films are almost mainstream now. Others have got more shocking with time. Todd Solondz' Happiness, for example, is a black comedy about paedophilia from 1998. It feels unthinkable for that to be made today. And also The Night Porter from 1974 – I've never seen it on telly, only on DVD, because it's so problematic even today. It's about an S&M relationship against the backdrop of the Holocaust, between a camp commander and an inmate. It just makes you feel really, really uncomfortable.

Were there any films that were just too gross or offensive to show?
Sweet Movie by a Serbian director called Dušan Makavejev. It was never classed for exhibition in the UK because of a strange scene where a woman stripteases in front of children. That earned it a certain reputation. I just thought, 'I wouldn't want to put my name to this.'

Thanks, Tamara.

Check out the full Cheap Thrills programme here.

@MillyAbraham

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An Alcosynth cocktail (Photo: Suzannah Nutt)

Fun fact: alcohol abuse leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. It can be a lot of fun to drink, of course, but it is – as someone condescending will definitely have told you at some point in your life – a poison. A toxic liquid that single-handedly keeps Berocca afloat via the hangovers of millions of people, and can also lead to much more serious afflictions than a sore head and an intolerance of loud noises, such as liver cirrhosis, cancer and heart disease.

Lucky, then, that hero of psychonauts and former advisor to the British government, Professor David Nutt, has spent the last decade working on a synthetic booze that promises to do away with all that bad stuff. Nutt is confident that Alcosynth – which admittedly sounds a bit like a new romantic covers band – will have replaced alcohol entirely by 2050, but there are some tough obstacles in its way, from powerful alcohol companies to the absurd Psychoactive Substances Act introduced in the UK earlier this year.

I gave Professor Nutt a call to talk about how Alcosynth will work, and to find out when it might be available to people like you and me.

Professor David Nutt (Photo: Matt Shea)

VICE: When did you start working on alcosynth?
Professor David Nutt: Back in 2005, when it was part of the government's Foresight Programme. Twice a year it picks a topic, and the topic that year was brain science and drugs. All of my professional life I have worked to reduce the problems of alcohol. Medicine is awash with alcohol problems, like seizures and withdrawal, so from the first day I was a doctor I've been dealing with alcohol problems in casualty. I've been trying to think of ways to reduce alcohol harm and withdrawal.

This foresight programme was very clever, because you do a lot of abstract brainstorming. We suddenly thought, 'Well, you can never get rid of the harms of alcohol as it's a toxic substance and poisonous – maybe we can replace it.' So for the last ten years we've looked for replacements. The science has moved on a lot; we can mimic the good effects with other pharmacological agents.

And you've found your final version?
We've got two used on human studies and more patented as back-ups. I mean, alcohol has a horrible taste – no one drinks raw alcohol. We're going to mask the same way you mask the taste of alcohol; some will go into non-alcoholic beers and tonics easily, others into sophisticated cocktails. We know they will work in drinks people like to drink. Cocktails will be the route to market.

Many cocktails were invented during Prohibition because, in the speakeasies, the alcohol was hooch, which was horrible. So they had to do intensive taste-masking, so cocktails got interesting and exotic to hide the taste. It's the same idea; you have to mask the taste of alcosynth.

And it'll get rid of the hangover?
Well, hangovers aren't the big issues, but they are the obvious manifestation of alcohol toxicity. Some people get indigestion as well, but getting rid of the hangover is not something we targeted. We could find an anti-hangover drug, but it encourages people to drink more. Hangovers are a deterrent and a model of toxicity. It's not the purpose of alcosynth, but it is proof of its non-toxicity.

And there's a max-out on the effects?
It's based on a dose response curve. The more of a drug you take, the more effect you get. With alcohol, if you keep taking more and more you eventually die, due to the effect on the brain's receptors being maximal and toxic – and alcohol works on many receptors. So to reduce harm you focus on one or two receptors and minimise interactions with other receptors. You also design molecules that'll never produce a maximal effect.

You can even design molecules that'll have no effect. For example, heroin: too much and you die. But we have an antagonist called Naloxone that we give to people so if they are dying it'll wake them up. You can find drugs in between called partial-agonists. There is a widely-used one called Buprenorphine, which is designed to be a safer heroin. So that's an established pharmacological principle. We're doing the same with alcosynth; a partial agonist that can never produce a maximal effect and could never kill you.

Why hasn't this been done before?
It's too radical. To a scientist, it's obvious. The drinks industry actually employs lots of sciences; the field of biochemistry was started in the 1850s by the drinks companies understanding why different yeast produces different beer. Every drinks company has thousands of scientists. They say to me, "We want in on this. You're right – by 2050 no one will drink alcohol." But the bosses are happy to retire in five years and leave it as someone else's problem. The scientists know it must happen.

In the tobacco industry, Marlboro has said they'd move as far as they can from burning tobacco to safer alternatives. The drinks industry knows they'll be forced absolutely to go down the same route by scientific pressure and public demand. But they'll be as slow as possible, as selling alcohol is the easiest way of making money.

READ: Can You Reverse the Horrible Long-Term Effects of Drugs with Exercise, Food and Vitamins?

Would alcosynth come into conflict with the Psychoactive Substances Act, as it'll presumably have some sort of effect on the brain?
That's a very interesting question. The Home Office has been asked that question and said if it breaches the act then it will. They don't know. There's never been a prosecution under the act as no one knows what it means. What it does is puts off investors, as it creates uncertainty.

It's an absurd piece of legislation. I hope it'll disappear. What's the point of a law never enforced? It was just a political gesture for the last election. Legal highs kill five people a year; it's not worth a law to save five when alcohol kills 25,000. The law was brought in to make it easier for the police to close down head shops. People hate them as they don't like the people that go in them. But those head shops are still open as they actually weren't making their money from selling drugs.

It was also designed to make stuff like nitrous harder to sell at festivals. The drinks industry were of course behind it, as it was cutting down alcohol sales. It's harder to sell nitrous on the streets now, but it's just to make policing easier. It's shaken-up investors as no one knows. The Daily Mail could make people panic about alcosynth.

Britain is a waste of space. We're going to go over to proper countries that have a rational approach.

And in terms of long-term effects it could be revolutionary.
Of course. It's non-toxic and of pharmaceutical safety. This is a hundred times safer than alcohol.

When could it become reality?
Give me £5 million and I'll sell it by next Christmas. We're going to have a launch for investors in Germany. It's just another example of a British invention going overseas due to ridiculous laws.

Thanks, Professor.

@kylemmusic

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Screengrab from YouTube. Clip via HOTCARSTV

This piece was originally featured on VICE US.

It's a brave new world for cannabis laws, which will almost certainly shift yet again in the coming weeks as five new states vote on recreational initiatives. Among them is California, the seventh largest economy in the world and home to about 80 percent of all pot grown in the US. If the polls are any indication, it will be a huge domino to fall in the path toward legalization. The times are inarguably a changin', but driving with weed in your car will likely be a serious offense long after the last state makes the seemingly inevitable conversion.

A 6.6-magnitude earthquake struck Italy on Sunday, leaving more than 18,000 people homeless and 20 injured – but luckily not resulting in any deaths. The quake, which was centred near the Umbrian town of Norcia, comes after two more earthquakes took place near Umbria's capital of Perugia on Wednesday. All recent earthquakes happened along the same fault lines as an earlier earthquake that killed nearly 300 people in August 2016.

According to experts, violent earthquakes such as the one that occurred in August create stresses, which are then redistributed across adjacent faults causing them to rupture in a domino effect. Italy is one of the most seismically active regions in Europe and the Mediterranean – in the last century, more than 30 earthquakes have shaken the country, with the last one being the strongest since 1980.

We asked three people who survived some of the worst earthquakes in recent Italian history to recall what it was like to be at the mercy of Mother Earth.

FRIULI, 1976

The Friuli earthquake (in the North-East of Italy) took place in May 1976, with a moment magnitude of 6.5. Up to 978 people were killed, 2,400 were injured, and 157,000 were left homeless. The main event was followed by some aftershocks in September of the same year.

On the 6th of May, at around 9PM, I was in my pyjamas having dinner with my family in our flat in Udine. I was studying for my final high school exams back then so, every night after dinner, I would spend three hours studying in my room.

That's what I had just sat at my desk to do, when the tremors started. I remember running in the living room, where my little brother was playing in the shadow of a huge library from which books were starting to fall. I came in just in time to prevent the heavy books from falling on him. We spent that night and the next one sleeping in the family car with our mum. My father, who had spent years in an Indian prison and survived an Himalayan earthquake, refused to leave our house so that's where he slept.

When the second tremor hit, I was in Udine's city center, stuck in traffic in my FIAT 500 cabrio. It was hot and the city was crowded. I felt the car shaking, so I looked up and saw the buildings trembling too. A woman standing right next to my car lost her shit and started screaming. Parts of the town that were destroyed in that earthquake were rebuilt in the following years due to the superhuman efforts of the citizens – no thanks to the Italian government.

- Fabio, 58

L'AQUILA, 2009

On the 6th of April, 2009, an earthquake of about 5.8 Richter destroyed the city of L'Acquila. It had been announced by a long series of tremors, and it was felt throughout central Italy. For the destruction and number of casualties (309) it caused, it has been rated the fifth most violent earthquake in recent Italian history.

Italians won't remember my name, but they may remember footage of my rescue, which was broadcasted on the 6th of April, 2009. Everyone on TV talked about a girl, who was still alive but trapped under the debris. I am that girl. It was only months after my rescue that I realised I'd become a symbol of hope for my city.

These days, I am a normal girl. I have a degree, a job, dreams and anxieties. But when I was 24, I spent 23 hours under the pieces of my own flat. I owe my life to the firefighters, who worked 15 hours without break to free me. I lost a lot in that earthquake: clothes, shoes, books, my computer – but most importantly quite a few friends.

I have often thought about what happened, in an attempt to figure out whether there was a deeper meaning to my experience. I've concluded that I was given a second chance, which means I have to live life at the best of my abilities. That's what kept me from giving up despite the many gruelling months of rehabilitation that I had to go through in order to be able to walk again. I lost my balance for a handful of seconds and it took a lot of time, determination and faith to find it again.

- Marta, 31

EMILIA, 2012

An earthquake of a magnitute of 6.1 struck the Emilia-Romagna region, on the 20th of May 2012. It was followed by a tremor that shook the entire North of the country, on the 29th of May. Twenty seven people lost their lives in these earthquakes.

I was asleep in my house in San Martino Spinto, not far from the city of Modena. I was lying on a mattress laid on the wooden floor, and I'd left the light on. All of a sudden, the light went out and the room started moving up and down, and side to side.

I stood up with my legs well spread in an attempt not to lose my balance. Everything I owned was falling from the shelves or their place on the wall. I thought, "Fuck, I am going to die." Then I thought of opening the window, jumping on the platform roof, from there on a car and finally on the ground. As I was about to open the window, it all stopped. So I ran down the stairs and out on the road, barefoot and in my underwear.

I ran to my parents' place – I have never run that fast in my whole life – and I found them out on the street, surrounded by a small crowd of neighbours. The first thing they asked me was, "Why are you only wearing your underwear? Aren't you cold?" In that tragic situation, they still remained my parents. Soon after, the sun rose and we saw the consequences of the earthquake, which so far we had only felt.

It rained the following day, but thankfully it didn't rain anymore in the months that followed. For that time, I lived in a tent, while my parents lived in their car. My dad did not really sleep for the next 40 nights. He would lie down for a couple of hours every night but spent the rest of his time standing guard, in case of an aftershock. We would eat on the street under a beach umbrella and once my mother said, "Can you believe there are people that go to the seaside just to do exactly what we're doing now?"

- Tiziano, 48

Regardless of who wins, Donald Trump's US presidential candidacy will change the world: emboldening far-right parties in the UK, changing people's approach to dealing with "the truth", and encouraging strong man leaders around the world.

With eight days to go until we find out who's going to be the next President of the United States, we talk about what Trump means for global attitudes to torture, immigration and the media, and we're joined by far-right politics expert Matthew Goodwin, who explains why Trump is "just the trailer" for the rise of anti-immigration parties.

Please subscribe on iTunes to get the VICE UK podcast every Tuesday.

This, right now, is one of those moments where I can't hide the disappointment I have in my own existence. Millennial life is so fucking bleak and unfair - I wasn't prepared for this growing up. Childhood was a Recess-watching, Babybel-eating, Digimon-caring dawdle on easy street: the dream.

Living in the vicinity of East Dulwich; the epicentre of mums, milk bottles and playgrounds, I'm constantly reminded of it. These little bastards have the life. Every holiday is built around giving them free shit: Christmas, Easter and, my former favourite, Halloween. I used to adore spending nights knocking on doors, shouting at people, then having Chomps and Dib Dabs thrown at me. If you did that as an adult, you'd probably have the police called on you.

But maybe the world is waiting for a messiah to break the trend; a Peter Pan to refuse the mundanity of older life and say, "This is enough – trick or fucking treat." Nobody was going to know until somebody tried, so I thought it was time that I, Oobah, a 25-year-old man who needs ingredients and party paraphernalia, donned a costume and took to the streets. I would be armed only with a shopping list for my dinner party, which I would try to complete by trick or treating.

All photos by Peter Butler

First, I would need a costume. To conquer fear, you must become fear. So what do I fear in my life today? Caffeine-induced palpitations inspiring a heart attack? Cancer of the testes? Male pattern baldness?

No, THIS fucker:

This is the absolute bastard that keeps me awake at night, that manages to make every shower, early hours toilet visit and shave feel like a terrifying Jans Svankmajer animation. He is the thing I fear most in this cruel world, and so:

I become the shower spider! I am ready. With just a few hours to save my party and complete this shopping list, it's time for me to go trick or treating. After a 12-year hiatus, the old dog is back.

I open the door, stroll out onto the streets and – within seconds – I'm right in the thick of it.

Draculas to my left, witches to my right; I didn't even realise there were this many children in London. I hear them murmuring to parents as I stroll past purposefully: yes, I am a man, and YES, I am getting a slice of your action. And dare I say it, you little punks, there is nothing you can do about it.

All these kids are going to flock to the patsy houses with the pumpkins, but I've been in this game much longer than them. I know from experience that you should ask people for free stuff if they already have loads of stuff, i.e. I need to knock on the doors of the richest people in south London. And not just the big houses – the ones without decorations. You don't want to hit the same spots as everybody else.

I pick my first target – one of Dulwich Village's finest, largest homes – and push the bell.

The door slowly opens. An older man positions his face in the crack of the door: "Can I help you?" he says in a deep, gentile Empire accent.

"Sure you can, pal. Do you have a minute or have you got any sweets? I'm local."

"Are you looking for money? I don't have any."

"No, Halloween request, sir."

"It's Halloween?"

He furrows his brow and shouts back into the house. "Is it the 31st, Judy?" From the top of the stairs, a lady shouts down. "It is, Paul. What does he want? Money? Isn't he a bit old to be messing around like this?"

"Well, I can explain," I interject.

"What are you dressed up as?"

"I'm the terrifying spider that's been living in my toilet for a few weeks."

Judy scoffs at this point, asking, "Are there no children with him? That's a bit sad." Paul nods in agreement.

"Look, I'm just trying to get a few things. Do you guys by any chance have a Phillips Head Screwdriver that I can-" Judy sneezes aggressively, before Paul cuts in.

"Can you believe the cheek? I'm sorry, but goodnight."

Before I can protest, the door is shut. Surely an anomaly? I catapult into another big old fucking house, licking my lips.

"Hi there," I say.

"Oh good evening, I like your outfit," the nice lady replies.

"Well splendid!"

"Do you prefer chocolates or sweets?"

"Neither, really. I'm trying to complete my shopping list for a party tonight."

The nice lady's face switches immediately.

"So if you have any toilet paper, paper plates or potato salad, that would be fantastic." As I'm talking, a burly Scottish accent starts bellowing from the kitchen. The man's head explodes from around the corner and he begins yelling at me. "This is a night for the children! For the bloody children! And you're trying this on tonight! Seriously, piss off!" The lady starts giggling awkwardly as he continues to shout, and though I cup my hands, making praying gestures, mouthing "please", she closes the door on me.

I decide to get my head out of the firing line for a moment with a tinnie on the pavement. That experience seriously couldn't have been more debilitating. What have I done wrong?

I sit, nervously shaking and swigging away at my can, as the groups of ghouls bound past clutching bags of sweets. And I don't know whether it's the 12 percent Polish lager talking, but I have a brain wave I never expected. In a moment of utter desperation and weakness, I turn to the unlikeliest of places.

"Hey, punk," I say, stopping her in her tracks. "Now, I know we've had our differences in the past, but I need to know: how do you do it?"

She stares back at me blankly.

"This is not an interrogation. I know you're looking to feed your sweet habits, and I respect that. But I have habits, too. I'm really low on self-esteem and I can't stand what I've become. This is an appeal to your humanity: what is the key here? How do I persuade the people to give me what I want?"

She looks up at her mother – who is giggling – and slowly says it:

"I'm a witch. What are you?"

And by jove, I get it. I haven't been believing what I am! I need to really embody that fear I have for the spider, to conquer it, to get to the true spirit of Halloween. Of course! I thank little April and skip off down the street.

I seek more help from the children. They show me how to embody my character – to really frighten the people behind the door. And before I know it I've learned more in 30 minutes than I have in the past decade. Perhaps there's time to complete my shopping list and save my party yet? It's just a matter of believing. Let's give this another shot.

You are the spider, Oobah. You are the fucking spider. These people are the flies. They are simply you, going to the toilet or jumping in the shower, and you are going to make them quake in their very boots. You can do this – you've got this. I take a deep breath.

"Trick or treat!" I yell.

"Woah. How old are you, man?" My heart sinks.

"I'm 25. I'm really sorry for this."

He pauses. "Cool, bro, I have no problem with that: being American, I love Halloween and think it should be for everybody. So you don't have any medical conditions like diabetes or anything do you?"

I shake my head.

"I actually have a list." I unveil it, and the man takes it out of my hand, frowning curiously. He shouts back into the house, "Guys, come take a look at this!" It gets passed around and, before I know it, I have a present.

"Here you go, dude," his friend says. "Cider. Cross that off your list, if you count Strongbow as scrumpy."

"Thank you! You guys have done your country PR wonders!" I scream. "God bless America!"

Yippee! Finally, I have an in. Time is ticking and now it's time for me to give it my all.

After a warm "Trick or treat!" I unravel the crumpled list again, and the lady takes a long and confused look at it. She disappears into the house and, within seconds, emerges with a present of her own.

Toilet paper! I'll never spend a penny on the stuff again! This is the life people; this is the life.

With another few visits comes potatoes, cinnamon, tonnes more sweets. People truly are perplexed but helpful – although most of them are much happier to hand over their groceries than have their picture taken.

I'm taking stock and, with my head in the clouds, I notice a group of kids screaming past me like a horde of water buffalo. It's then that I hear a smash on the ground.

Ghostbusters. Fuck. I'd totally forgotten about them, but now I remember these big kids haunting my every Halloween, pelting me with eggs and stealing my sweets. They're the little bastards who grow up and go into sales jobs and disappoint their families. With their approaching-breaking voices, hoodies and hormone imbalance, I'm spooked.

But they don't take notice of me. Bless the skies! My costume is scary enough after all.

With around half an hour to go until my party, I take one last look at the list and what's left. I only really have time for one more house, and it needs to be a big haul. I pace the streets of Dulwich eyeing up houses; too many decorations, too many competitors, too quiet.

Then I see it: a severed head in the bush. This is it. Remember your training, Oobah. Remember what the witches and the undead told you: be the spider.

"Trick or treat!"

I give them the best I have all night – spider eyes and everything – and the lady giggles with her two children. The little boy, dressed as Spiderman villain Venom, shouts: "Are you Doctor Octopus?"

"No, no, I'm not. I'm the spider from my toilet."

"Well, that is scary," the mum says. "What can we do for you?"

I nervously get the list out and they all crowd around it. Within seconds the mum disappears into the house. Is she angry? Is she going to get somebody who is finally going to beat the crap out of me for being such a desperate, impulsive and depressing wanker?

Soon, she emerges.

"Party hat. Number one – put a line through that!"

They all cheer.

She looks again, screaming "paper plates!", and disappears back into the house. Kit-kats, more sweets and more potatoes – this happens again and again. I can't believe how helpful they are. I've been at their door shouting "Hurrah!" for a full-on ten minutes. Then it looks as if we're done. The lady scratches her head. "Now, we don't have Corona, sorry."

"Oh go on, mum." The boy pushes her into the house, wriggling in excitement. Several seconds later she returns, arms full with four cans of Stella! £5 street value. Can you fucking believe this stuff? She goes to hand me the beers and the boy stops, taking them out of her hands, and handing them to his sister.

"No, mum. No. We have to have me and her giving the cans to him. We just have to."

"Why?" the mum replies. "What are people going to think if my young kids are holding beers!"

"Yeah, why?" I add.

He stops, flashes a look into camera and smiles: "Because that'll be banter."

And with that, I'm done. This is wokeness defined; a generation that – with parents like this fella, guardians like this fella – is going to be fine. Walking away, I realise that the flame of community burns bright in London; that the England Orwell claimed was dead in Coming Up for Air exists well and truly on our doorsteps. You just need to look beyond a Tube carriage for it.

So learn this from me: in this world, you never need go hungry again – just lobby thy neighbour. I could do without the last three items on my list – potato salad, Phillips Head Screwdriver and Lucozade. I had a party to go to, and a world worth living for. I don't want to waste another moment in this, beautiful 2016; I'm ready to make the most of it. Look out, world, here I come!

Three episodes of The Wright Stuff, a litre-and-a-half of cider, two lines of cinnamon and a baked potato: a night of triumph; a dinner party to remember. Happy Halloween.

@oobahs

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The broadcast of Coletti's romantic stunt, along with those staged by his friends, helped launch the growing prom proposal trend among American teens. In the past, elaborate proposals such as these were reserved for major life events like marriage, but today teens are expected to create extraordinary invites for school dances—not just prom, but homecoming and Sadie Hawkins, too. The "promposal," as it's called, has become just as necessary as renting a suit or buying a corsage.

"Although it took some time to catch on nationally, teen's fervent use of Facebook in 2006 to 2007, and their increasing willingness to share their lives publicly, helped propel promposals as a mainstay among American youth," said Andrea Richeson, the founder of Youth Tribes, an organization that studies youth culture.

Over a decade after the affluent California high schoolers introduced the world to promposal, the invites have taken many forms from thoughtful surprises like Coletti's to elaborate stunts like jumping out of a plane, all in the name of a school dance.

It was only two weeks into my little brother's freshman year of high school when my mom called me up to see if I had any cool ideas for a homecoming proposal, even though the event was still six weeks away.

When I attended my first homecoming 12 years ago, my date asked me to the dance in the cafeteria of our Catholic high school. It was only a couple days before the big night and the awkward face-to-face encounter lasted about five seconds. When I suggested my little brother just do something similar—like, just ask the girl face-to-face—he scoffed. The promposal was a tradition he told me, and if he wanted a date to the dance, he had to do one and it had to be clever.

My mom had already purchased him a large white poster board, which appears to be the format of choice for many promposals. He planned to write some kind of corny poem on it. For example, his friend had wrote, "I couldn't bear to go to homecoming without you" on a sign and handed the girl a stuffed teddy bear.

Since my date could hardly muster the words to ask me to the dance, it was hard to believe that so many teens would want to put themselves out there like that. A promposal video that went viral last spring captured just how a proposal can go wrong. Daniel Pena had hoped to create a memorable promposal for his girlfriend Alex. He set up signs along the road that read "Alex. Will. You. Marry. LOL JK. Go To. Prom. With Me" before picking her up in his car.

Pena filmed the couples' ride, in which you can see Alex read the first couple signs aloud. Alex calls the promposal "shitty" before realizing that it was actually for her. While the invite didn't go as planned (she still said yes), the video has been viewed over 13 million times.

The rising popularity of promposals has been fueled in recent years by the obsession with social media. For a successful promposal, it is not just about the date saying yes, teens have to produce something that is worthy of YouTube views and Instagram likes. As Richeson shared with me this "continuously ups the ante and the pressure to have a share worthy moment that is liked among friends, family, and the world."

As I searched the internet for inspiration for my little brother, I quickly learned how big the promposal trend really was. There were Tumblr and Instagram accounts with thousands of followers that were dedicated to the extravagant invitations. The propositions ranged from a bouquet of suckers that says "prom would suck without you" to a teen enlisting Senator Ted Cruz to read a promposal script on camera.

"I think promposals have become such a big trend because they garner such positive reactions, not just from the lucky recipient of the promposal, but the social community as well. Just like teens refuse to be photographed wearing the same outfit because they want to get fresh responses from their followers, grand gestures like promposals are valued for their inherent originality," said Richeson.

Thomas Maher, a teen from Arizona, gained media attention earlier this year when he offered his long-term girlfriend a trip to Hawaii in exchange for being his date to prom.

Mathieu Sonnemans and his son Rolf in front of their bakery.

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands

'Sonnemans' is a small, picturesque Dutch bakery, where you can buy a fresh loaf of bread and also look at some original Second World War helmets that are on display. That combination is not that surprising when you consider that the bakery's owner Mathieu Sonnemans is a baker and an avid collector of Nazi-related items from WWII.

The stuff Mathieu collects and displays in his bakery mostly has to do with the Atlantic Wall – a coastal defence structure built by the Nazis. The Atlantic Wall ran along the coast of continental Europe and Scandinavia, and part of it was located in Burgh-Haamstede – the village, where you'll find Mathieu's bakery. Some of the items in his collection Mathieu dug up himself, in and around the bunkers in the woods and dunes of Burgh-Haamstede. The rest of his pieces found their way to him through word of mouth.

By the way, Mathieu isn't a Nazi sympathiser – he's just fascinated with World War II: "When I was 13, my family moved to Zeeland and shortly after that, I discovered the first bunker in the woods. That war has always intrigued me," he explained when I visited him. "The Atlantic Wall has had such a profound impact on Zeeland, as a local you simply can't escape it."

Update 1 November 2016, 4 PM: The title of article was edited to reflect that Sonnemans' bakery doesn't just display Nazi paraphernalia, but items from WWII.

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A teacher doing some teaching (Photo via)

Being a teacher is stressful. You've got a giant workload to manage and hordes of rowdy, hormonal teenagers to deal with, all while trying to keep it together in the face of regular assessments and attempting to retain some semblance of an out-of-school life. It's no wonder that almost a third of teachers quit within five years of qualifying.

But it's not all bad: despite the above, it can be a very rewarding job. Pawel Blanda, 25, has been teaching English for nearly a year-and-a-half. Starting out as a teaching assistant, he graduated to teaching after two years, partly so he could afford to live in London. He's now working with students from years 7 to 11, and is passionate about his profession.

I sat down with him to ask ten questions you've always wanted to ask a teacher, about everything from shouty parents to drug use.

Pawel Blanda

VICE: First – do teachers take drugs?
Pawel Blanda: Teachers are expected to follow the law – we get barred from the profession if we don't. So even though, statistically, one would suppose that some must, I have no evidence to say which do. That said, most teachers are dependent on caffeine.

Have you ever wanted to hit a student?
Honestly, yeah. It's rare and it's only when I'm at my worst and most undernourished. I suppose everyone has intrusive thoughts – but hitting solves nothing. Also, it's always the kid who will later make all the frustration worthwhile. The most frustrating type of behaviour is interrupting. Boys do this the most – just calling out a question or starting to answer it, despite me explicitly asking for someone else's ideas. Or just starting a conversation while another student is explaining how to do something.

Have you ever fantasised about a student?
Oh god, no. There's too much trust to abuse. Kids are fragile, weird little things. I think our society infantilises the same bodies it sexualises, so there's definitely a narrative that fetishises these types of relationships between teacher and student. Honestly, Anne Summers' "sexy teacher" and "school girl" outfits make me feel really uncomfortable.

What is the worst thing about the school system today?
Since the 1990s the school system has been treated as a semi-market, where schools compete between themselves for better results. This is happening while funding is being syphoned off and contracts are continuously being given to private sponsors. I think there should be less emphasis on competition and more on cooperation. That, and there should be more public scrutiny into how schools are funded.

Is there anything you wish you taught but can't?
No – my department's very good with giving me room to teach how I want. I mean, there is an abundance of dead white men on the syllabus, but my department doesn't require me to only teach them. For instance, I taught a Year 7 group about persuasive language in speeches exclusively by looking at black female speakers. In terms of that, I guess it comes down to the texts we get to select as teaching material.

There's also a big debate about how grammar and literacy is taught, coming from the change in KS2 SATs tests. That revolves around a more explicit use of metalanguage. So, for example, our generation – if they were taught in England – are likely to be able to use grammar correctly but not be able to explain why, while this generation is expected to be proficient in the terminology around grammar.

You might have heard of a lot of resistance to those, but I'm a bit of a grammar nerd, so I think I have a biased view on it. I think the old system unfairly favoured speakers whose first language is English.

Is being book smart the only way to succeed in life?
I really hope not. That would be so dull. But unfortunately, the statistics are even duller: kids with rich parents end up doing best in terms of success. In terms of asking if kids who prefer certain subjects do better in school, I would say there is a hierarchy, which is hinted at through governmental policy, about which subjects are "important". As an English teacher, I find my students really respect my subject. I can imagine that isn't the case in all subjects. Also, generally, students don't excel in one subject exclusively – if they make progress they tend to do so across the board, in my experience.

Also, I would say grades matter less than most kids think – for the students, at least. They're useful as a guide to determine what should be learnt next and how. Grades are used to hold teachers to account – which is odd, if you think about it. I'm not sure how many people know, but our pay is strongly related to how well the children perform.

What's the most embarrassing thing that's happened to you in class?
Getting kids names muddled up generates a big response – the level of outrage tends to be almost operatic.

Do you think being a teacher will affect your parenting?
I'd love to adopt one day, but teaching has made me very aware of the amount of emotional work that comes with having a kid. Unfortunately, it's also not easy to look after a child in a material sense, so often emotional stuff gets neglected. I think I need to become more financially stable before I have the emotional energy to do a decent job as a parent. I have so much admiration for anyone who does it, though.

What is the hardest thing about being a teacher?
Just the sheer amount of work. It's endless. Some of it is really hard, but even the easy stuff – there's so much of it. On an average day, my schedule comprises of:

- Arrive
- Make a coffee
- Check emails
- Mark books
- Prepare resources for the day
- Teach a 30 minute pastoral lesson to my tutor group
- Teach two 50-minute lessons
- Depending on the day, either prepare resources for the lessons I have after break is over, or teach another lesson
- Have lunch while preparing the classroom for the rest of the day
- Then either have staff meetings until 4:30PM, or run extra-curricular clubs
- You meet or call parents to let them know if their child has misbehaved or done well
- Now more admin stuff to be done
- Then you can plan lessons for the next day
- Now there's probably more marking to do
- Then you can go home and sleep

Often we have a meeting in the morning, too. Many teachers forget to eat, go to the toilet or drink for the whole day. It's really easy to let that happen because there's just so much to do.

Who's the worst parent you've encountered?
A parent made a formal complaint against me, but my school has a really clear behaviour policy, so as long as you follow it, you're fine. That was a difficult conversation, though.

I also was roasted by a bunch of parents because they thought I was being uncommunicative. Fortunately, another group of parents stuck up for me. I think they were expecting a similar level of communication as you get in primary school, where a child is with one teacher all day and you get to see them face-to-face every day when you pick your child up. Obviously secondary school doesn't work that way, so there's a bit of a gap in expectations of levels of communication.

Parents can get shouty, but it's very rare. Generally, everybody wants what's best for the child, so any disagreements are dealt with quickly and it's never personal.

Thanks, Pawel.

@bijubelinky

More on VICE:

I Went to a Feminism Class for Private School Boys

What It's Like to Teach Teenagers When You're in Your Twenties

Shed a Tear for Britain's Messed Up Boarding School Kids

This post originally appeared on VICE Canada.

The story of today's prescription opioid overdose crisis didn't start this year, or ten years ago, or even 100 years ago. It starts with a plant—the opium poppy—that has been a part of human civilization for thousands of years.

Papaver somniforum, literally, "sleep-bringing poppy," is the scientific name for the type of poppy that produces opium, which humanity has relied on since before history was even a concept. Along with wheat, the opium poppy is one of the world's oldest cultivated plants, with some estimates suggesting that humans have been growing it for 10,000 years or more. It's been cultivated so widely we don't even know where it originates. Some think it's indigenous to the Eastern Mediterranean or the Swiss Alps, but frankly nobody really knows. What's clear, though, is that the relationship between humans and this strange and hardy plant (it can grow basically anywhere) goes beyond curiosity and into the realm of symbiosis.

There's a line from Lars Von Trier's Antichrist: "Nature is Satan's church," and perhaps there's no better example of the curious and uncanny relationships that form across species and time than the one between humans and the poppy. Opioids, the chemicals produced by Papaver Somniforum, somehow fit perfectly into the human body's opioid receptors, which are scattered throughout the brain, spinal cord, and digestive system, and this precise fit makes them exceptionally effective at suppressing pain. The geometry is so exact that some experts theorize that the opium plant and our neural architecture is the result of symbiotic co-evolution (some even think opium poppies shaped the development of human consciousness). The mystical pain-dampening plant on the one hand, the upright ape on the other.

So when we talk about today's opioid crisis, we're really talking about just the latest chapter in an inter-species relationship that spans millennia. That's important to remember because for all their potential harms, opioids are a critical part of human civilization given their unique capacity to numb our pain. The issue, then, isn't so much how we stop people from using opioids, but instead how we make sure that these drugs bring us the most benefits with the fewest harms.

Unfortunately, over the past few decades, it seems that the harms of opioids are increasingly outweighing their benefits in North America, to the point where governments are declaring public health emergencies in response to epidemics of opioid overdose deaths. In Ontario, one in eight deaths among young adults are the result of opioid overdoses, while drug overdose—driven primarily by opioids—is the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. But how did we get here? The answer is a cautionary tale about the power of Big Pharma, the unintended consequences of government intervention, and the tenacity of drug markets.

Purdue Pharmaceuticals. Photo via Doug Healey/Associated Press

OxyContin has been widely hailed as a wonder drug, and in many ways, it is. A prescription drug with billions in R&D behind it, OxyContin was put on the market in 1996 as a fast-acting, controlled release formulation of oxycodone, which is an opioid used to treat moderate to severe pain, and which was originally designed to treat cancer patients. In its first year on the market, OxyContin sales reached $48 million; in 2000—just four years later—annual sales had reached almost $1.1 billion, representing an increase of roughly 2,200 percent. It remained among the top 20 best-selling drugs in the US until 2013, when it was taken off the market. By the conventional metrics of the pharmaceutical industry, then, OxyContin was a massive and highly profitable success.

Part of that success, though, wasn't just a natural result of OxyContin's effectiveness as an opioid painkiller. Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical giant that developed the drug, also threw millions behind marketing the drug to its key customer base: medical doctors. This meant, for instance, holding more than 40 all-expense-paid conferences for more than 5,000 attendees and paying out $40 million in bonuses to Purdue sales reps in the first five years OxyContin was on the market. In some cases, the marketing strategies verged into the ridiculous, as with Purdue Pharma's creation of a promotional song—"Get in the Swing with OxyContin"—to try to entice doctors to prescribe the drug.

Other strategies went further. One of the major breakthroughs in expanding the number of OxyContin prescriptions came with Purdue Pharma's decision to switch focus from marketing OxyContin as a drug to manage cancer-related pain—a relatively stable market—and instead promote it as an effective and safe treatment for the more nebulous class of "chronic non-malignant pain" (a.k.a., non-cancer pain), a market that was exploding in the late 1990s. It was a masterstroke, and it paid off: Between 1997 and 2002, there was a near tenfold increase in OxyContin prescriptions in the US for chronic non-malignant pain, from 670,000 to 6.2 million annually. It was the opening up of a massive new market for opioids that would prove incredibly profitable: Purdue Pharma made nearly $3 billion in revenues from OxyContin in the first five years it was on the market.

The true genius, though, was Purdue Pharma's use of granular geographic data to identify doctors with the highest OxyContin prescribing patterns in specific area codes, and then targeting those clinicians with marketing materials that included patient coupons for free 30-day trials of OxyContin prescriptions (as laid out in a American Journal of Public Health review.) The idea was that these techniques would help identify doctors with the highest number of chronic pain patients. Of course, it also opened up the possibility, if not the probability, that Purdue Pharma was pushing doctors who were already over-prescribing OxyContin to ramp their prescriptions up even further.

Photo via Toby Talbot/Associated Press

In some cases, Purdue Pharma's marketing verged on the sinister and even crossed into the illegal. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the pharmaceutical giant's downplaying of the addictive potential of OxyContin, which it did in a multitude of ways. In 2010, two doctors at St. Michael's Hospital, a teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto's medical school (and where I hold a position), started voicing concerns about pharmaceutical industry involvement in a pain-management course that was part of U of T's med school curriculum. It turned out that the lecturer for the course, Dr. Roman Jovey, was a member of Purdue Pharma's speakers' bureau and was paid by the company to lecture. Worse, a book on pain management that was co-authored by Dr. Jovey and funded by Purdue had been used as a textbook within the class. In the book, free copies of which were given to U of T medical students, oxycodone (the active agent in OxyContin) was described as a moderate-intensity opioid despite the fact that it is twice as potent as morphine. It was also characterized as having a low risk for addiction among non-malignant pain patients, despite the fact that at the time, rates of opioid dependence among patients prescribed OxyContin were soaring.

In 2007, during a time when the dangers of OxyContin over-prescribing were starting to become clear to public health experts, three top executives at a subsidiary of Purdue Pharma pled guilty to fraud and paid $600 million for "misbranding" OxyContin as a result of the company's claims that the drug was less addictive than other comparable opioid-based drugs like Percocet or Vicodin. In internal Purdue Pharma documents dating to before OxyContin was marketed, company officials expressed concerns that they would face resistance from medical doctors concerned about the potential for patients to become addicted. Despite these doubts, Purdue Pharma went full steam ahead in marketing the drug as having a "reduced-risk" for addiction; in the court case, it was found that this constituted fraudulent and deceptive marketing, and in a guilty plea, Purdue Pharma agreed, with the company stating that "e accept responsibility for those past misstatements and regret they were made."

By the time public health experts started sounding the alarm about the addictive potential of OxyContin, the damage was done. Beginning in the early 2000s, the infusion of billions of OxyContin pills into the drug market had caused a seismic shift in drug use patterns, with increases in heroin use and injection-drug use among working-class white people in suburban and rural communities across North America for the first time in decades. Purdue Pharma had wedged open a massive new market of people seeking to numb their pain, aided and abetted by a legion of clinicians without the requisite knowledge about the drug's dangers and a lack of expertise in managing the associated risks. But now, the market was out of control. The alarm had been sounded. It was time to act.

There's a phenomenon to describe the ways that trying to intervene in one part of a drug market can make things worse elsewhere. It's called the Balloon Effect, for the way that squeezing one part of a balloon causes other parts to expand, and it's surprisingly common in the history of the drug war. When the US tried to stop cocaine production by eradicating coca leaf cultivation in Colombia, for instance, all that the aerial spraying and destruction of millions of hectares of farmland did was spread production to Colombia's neighbors, Bolivia and Peru. When a sudden drop in the availability of heroin in Australia occurred in 2001, the number of heroin users plummeted, but was offset by a similar increase in the number of people using cocaine and amphetamines. The problem is, basically, that if you don't first reduce demand for a drug, trying to control supply in a global economy only incentivizes drug traffickers to find new supply routes or new drugs to bring to the market.

So it has gone with efforts to control North America's opioid problem, and why it is that we are now facing an even graver crisis than in the era when OxyContin prescriptions were at their peak. Instead of meaningfully scaling up effective treatment for people who became addicted to OxyContin, the major policy change was the removal of OxyContin by Purdue Pharma from the North American market in 2012 and its replacement with OxyNEO, which the company claims is tamper-resistant (i.e., harder to crush up, snort, or inject). The timing of this swap out, though, caused some experts to grow suspicious: In Canada, OxyNEO was introduced just a few months before the patent on OxyContin was set to expire, meaning that it was also an effective way for Purdue Pharma to protect its market share.

Worse, efforts by government agencies and medical associations to reduce opioid prescribing failed to make a meaningful dent. How could it, given that doctors had been acculturated into believing that drugs like OxyContin weren't actually that dangerous, and chronic pain patients had grown accustomed—and in many cases, dependent on—a steady supply of opioids? Instead, with OxyContin's removal, fentanyl, an opioid painkiller 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine and which carries an even higher risk of overdose, became the opioid of choice to fill the prescription void.

And this is where the Balloon Effect comes into play: Without expanded access to treatment, the demand for opioids hasn't gotten smaller. Reducing the supply of opioids like OxyContin has only served to shift the market to more dangerous ones like fentanyl. As a second wave of alarm has spread about fentanyl, some doctors have become unwilling to treat chronic pain patients at all. The result? The market—this time, contraband fentanyl and lesser known carfentanil (developed as an elephant tranquilizer and 10,000 times more powerful than morphine)—have been filling the void, with deadly but predictable results. The question is, of course, where continuing along this path will get us. If beer was taken off the market, people would drink wine. If wine was taken off, people would drink hard liquor. If hard liquor was taken off, people would drink industrial alcohol. So it goes with opioids, and why we've moved from OxyContin (1.5 times as strong as morphine) to fentanyl (50–80 times more powerful) to carfentanil (10,000 times more powerful).

So how does this cycle stop? Sadly, there is no quick fix when it comes to opioids. Simply banning painkillers would doom hundreds of thousands of people who are legitimately suffering with pain to a barbaric and excruciating existence. And when the problem was caused by a billion-dollar fraud perpetrated on an unsuspecting public via one of the most trusted pillars—medical doctors—the solution is just too damn big to be easily dealt with. What's clear, though, is that the cycle of squeezing the supply without addressing the demand for opioids will only get us into increasingly more dangerous territory. Instead, we need a broad recognition that the pharmaceutical market is just one part of a larger drug market that includes illegal drugs and regulated substances like alcohol, and that intervening on supply in one part of this larger market will have ripple effects across the whole enterprise. If we fail to come to this realization, we'll be dooming ourselves to the opioid overdose epidemic becoming a permanent fixture of our society. Do we really want to live in a world where we have to worry about one tiny grain of carfentanil killing kids who are experimenting with drugs? In the long history of our symbiotic relationship with opioids, that would be the saddest ending of all.

Dr. Daniel Werb is an epidemiologist and policy analyst with expertise in the fields of HIV, addictions, and drug policy.

Follow Daniel Werb on Twitter.

Eric Garner's body lies in a coffin for viewing before his funeral at a church in Brooklyn. Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

This article was originally featured on VICE US.

The internal machinations of federal law enforcement have been the biggest news story in America since Friday, when FBI director James Comey told Congress agents are looking into a new cache of emails possibly relevant to their investigation of Hillary Clinton. Since then, the Wall Street Journal reported officials at the Justice Department and FBI have been squabbling over how and whether to press ahead with the probe. But there's another weird Department of Justice/FBI dispute that has been hovering in the background of American life for a while now, and this one isn't about classified documents, insecure emails, or the future of a prominent politician.

Instead, this fight is about a man's life and why he lost it.

Last week, the New York Times reported the feds have swapped out the New York investigators and lawyers on the Eric Garner case, signaling NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo might still face charges for violating the black man's civil rights by placing him in a lethal chokehold in 2014. To back up a bit, after a local grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo on charges of manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide that December—igniting protests across the city and country—the feds in Washington announced they were opening their own civil rights probe. "Our prosecutors will conduct an independent, thorough, fair and expeditious investigation," then-US attorney general Eric Holder promised.

Expeditious probably wasn't the right word, because despite video of Garner begging 11 times—"I can't breathe!"—for air after being wrestled to the sidewalk, Holder's vow came nearly two years ago. Meanwhile, Pantaleo remains with the force (albeit on modified duty) and has even seen his pay go up.

But word of a staffing change has injected new life into the case, even as it raises fresh questions about the federal government's role in probing some of the most outrageous police-brutality cases in America. For a sense of how to read the tea leaves—and what, exactly, it takes to charge a cop with violating someone's civil rights in this country—we spoke with Jonathan Smith, executive director of the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. Before taking that gig, Smith completed 18 investigations as the head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division's Special Litigation Section, including, most notably, the case centering on the death of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri.

VICE: Before we go into the latest developments in the Garner case, can you break down how the feds get involved in these types of cases generally?
Jonathan Smith: So the federal government has one criminal civil rights statute, the 18 U.S.C. 242, which permits the US to prosecute people for willful violations of someone's civil rights. It's a fairly high standard, and different than most state standards, where you may have various different crimes that a police officer can commit, including negligence or recklessness. Willfulness is the same standard as you'd have to prove someone engaged in deliberate murder, or first-degree murder, essentially for the purpose of depriving a person of their civil rights. It's a very difficult standard to meet, and so that's why, just as a general matter, you see many more state prosecutions of police officers than you see federal prosecutions.

Nevertheless, during the Obama administration, the feds have brought about 600 successful "color of law" prosecutions—they are called "color of law" because it's violation of someone's civil rights under the "color of law." A lot of them changes that dynamic.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Sarah_Ackerman

This piece was originally featured on VICE Canada.

Last Saturday in the midst of Halloween craziness, one of the ubiquitous Times Square Cookie Monsters was stabbed in the back when he tried to break up a fight between a guy dressed up as a Tuskegee Airman and another man dressed as a Native American, the New York Post reports.

The trio reportedly collided on West 50th around 6 PM on Saturday night after the man in the pilot costume confronted the man wearing the Native American costume, deeming it offensive, and a fight between the two men broke out. When Christopher Ramos, the man in the Cookie Monster suit, stepped in to try and diffuse the brawl, the aviator allegedly pulled a knife from his shoe and plunged it through the Cookie Monster costume and into Ramos's back.

Ramos then went straight to the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital after the tussle, but none of his injuries were life-threatening, according to an NYPD representative who spoke with Gothamist.

The NYPD—who are no strangers to witnessing meltdowns at the city's tourist hotspot—are still looking for the short-tempered costumed pilot and the man dressed as a Native American.

Read: Redface Is Just as Offensive as Blackface

Photo via flickr/Popwerks

This piece was originally featured on VICE Canada.

Montreal police, investigating the possibility of crooked cops on the force, obtained warrants to surveil a journalist's iPhone, and even obtained permission to use his GPS chip to track his whereabouts at all time.

But the federal minister of public safety, Ralph Goodale, stopped short of discouraging police forces from going to the courts to obtain judicial orders against journalists.

Asked directly by NDP Member of Parliament Matthew Dubé on Monday about whether he'll issue a directive to create more formal rules around how police deal with journalists, Goodale would only say that "we take the freedom of the press in this country very, very seriously."

Dubé raised the question after on Monday after Montreal newspaper La Presse published details on surveillances warrants, at least 24 in total, obtained to surveil journalist Patrick Lagacé. The MP also referenced another case, where federal police are working to obtain chat records from a VICE journalist's cell phone, as evidence that action needs to be taken.

Lagacé, who works at La Presse, had been in contact with Faycal Djelidi, a Montreal police officer under investigation for a number of crimes, including perjury and obstruction of justice. When Lagacé's number popped up on Djelidi's phone, the Montreal police obtained the initial surveillance warrants for the journalist's device.

The Montreal police contend that, while their judicial authorization allowed them to access the GPS chip in Lagacé's phone, they used that power "never," or "nearly never," according to La Presse. The surveillance order would allow police to see the numbers for his incoming and outgoing calls and texts.

Costa Labos, head of internal affairs for the police service, confirmed that he green lit the practise, but defended the investigation.

"I understand that certain people could have been offended or disturbed by the fact that their telephone was , but we have to do our work," he told the newspaper.

Labos was, himself, subject to an internal affairs investigation after he was accused of lying to a judge to obtain a search warrant. Djieldi, for his part, is still facing trial on nine charges.

The case, just one of many instances of Canadian cops investigating journalists in recent years, shows how willing police are to compromise journalist's protection of their sources, La Presse said in a statement.

"In Canada, police bodies just seem to ignore the fundamental rules," said Éric Trottier, a vice president at the media company. "We have to put an end to what seems like a total witch hunt against journalistic sources."

Aside from the investigation into Lagacé, national and local police have been criticized repeatedly in recent years for expanding their investigations to include journalists.

VICE Canada is currently appealing a 2015 production order, upheld by an Ontario court, that would force national security reporter Ben Makuch to hand over transcripts of his conversation with suspected Islamic State fighter Farah Shirdon to the RCMP.

READ MORE: 'A Detrimental Chilling Effect': VICE Pushes Back in Legal Fight With Canadian Police

More recently, it emerged that Joel-Denis Bellavance and Gilles Toupin, also at La Presse, were followed by RCMP officers operating under their own authority, as the investigators tried to find the source of an intelligence whistleblower. In another case, from September, a Montreal court order authorized police to seize the computer of Journal de Montreal reporter Michael Nguyen, after he published surveillance video of a judge behaving erratically.

Canada has laws that protect journalists' relationship with their sources, like many American states have.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Brazilian military police escorting protesters holding signs comparing Hillary Clinton to Brazil's former president Dilma Roussef. All photos by Jardiel Carvalho/ R.U.A. Foto Coletivo

This article originally appeared on VICE Brazil.

Last Saturday, about 20 supporters of Donald Trump took to the streets of São Paulo to show their support for the Republican presidential nominee. These were Brazilians who presumably couldn't vote for Trump, but they were American patriots nonetheless—when they gathered in Paulista Avenue, they kicked the day off with a rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Some demonstrators held Trump signs and placards accusing Hillary Clinton of being the North American version of Dilma Roussef (the former Brazilian president who was impeached last August); others wore shirts printed with the face of Brazilian far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro.

These Trumpistas were outnumbered by journalists, and the made-for-the-cameras action continued peacefully until about 3 PM, when an anti-fascist group arrived. The two opposing demonstrations started yelling at each other, and that was the prelude to some physical confrontations. After things got heated, police officers arrested four anti-Trump protesters, who were released right after being taken to the station.

See more photos of the rally below.

I've always loved anything that puts an original twist on a well-known story. As an adolescent, I devoured the feminist, sometimes queer, fairy tales of Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch and wished there were more books like it. In the last few years, interest in queering the classics seems to be gathering momentum with books like Malinda Lo's Ash, in which a Cinderella-esque character chooses a huntress over a prince; former VICE contributor Sara Benincasa's Great, an updated version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, where both Gatsby and the object of her affection are girls; and Sassafras Lowrey's Lost Boi, a Peter Pan story about queer and trans street kids.

Queer retellings aren't limited to the written word, either. In June, Lifetime remade its own original movie Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?, this time featuring lesbian vampires. Even more recently, the band It Was Romance debuted the video for "Hooking Up with Girls," which visually echoes every shot in Fiona Apple's iconic "Criminal" video. At this point, it's safe to say that queer retellings are mainstream, and more will certainly be forthcoming. (Next month, Manifold Press will release A Certain Persuasion: Modern LGBTQ+ Fiction Inspired by Jane Austen's Novels.) Any story about forbidden love is especially easy to queer, but just about any plot can be reworked to suit LGBTQ characters and audiences.

Of course, queer retellings are only a small facet of a larger movement toward LGBTQ representation and visibility in every corner of art and culture, but they're a crucial one. We'll never stop telling new stories and exploring underrepresented aspects of the human experience, but retelling old stories from a queer point of view adds something unique: the recognition that the stories that connect us across cultures and generations belong to all of us, LGBTQ people included. Lane Moore, the singer/songwriter behind It Was Romance and director of their video paying homage to "Criminal," says her goal was to "normalize queer culture because to me, it's all the same. I just love the idea of people all starting to see that we're more alike than we think, because that helps people become more compassionate with each other, and oftentimes feel less alone." By elaborating on the canon in this way, LGBTQ writers carve out a space for themselves—and for queer readers.

We'll never stop telling new stories and exploring underrepresented aspects of the human experience, but retelling old stories from a queer point of view adds something unique.

Robin Talley's novel As I Descended, released in September, tells an all-too-familiar story of potential outmatched by destructive ambition. It's recognizable as Macbeth, but the antihero this time is a bisexual teenager named Maria, nudged along the path toward success and then disaster by her closeted girlfriend Lily. Just as her Scottish predecessor struggles to navigate between his goals and his morals, Maria is torn between her desperation for a coveted scholarship and what she knows is right. Lily has her own agenda, which is intimately connected to her fear of the consequences should anyone find out that she's gay.

The plot of As I Descended both hinges on the characters' queerness and transcends it—there's nothing about the book that would be inaccessible to a straight reader, but same-sex romance is an inextricable part of its plot. In a literary environment where LGBTQ representation is still catching up from centuries of erasure, it's refreshing to see a queer protagonist like Maria, not a stereotype nor a trope but a deeply flawed, complicated person battling conflicting desires. When Maria gives in to her worst impulses, it's not a validation of homophobic stereotypes but an illustration of what could happen to any desperate person in a moment of weakness. Worth noting, too, is the fact that the Macduff stand-in who threatens to foil Maria's plans is also gay; no single character in As I Descended must bear the burden of representing all LGBTQ people.

Talley says that writing classics from a queer perspective shows readers "that there's nothing inherently 'straight' (and for that matter, nothing inherently male, white, or Christian, etc.) about the stories that we think of as defining our culture." While straight, white, and male is overwhelmingly the profile of literary characters typically deemed "universal," As I Descended proves that a bisexual Latina student makes an equally compelling and relatable lead.

For Sara Benincasa, author of Great, turning Jay Gatsby into a teenage girl with a borderline obsessive crush on her childhood best friend was not just a question of offering a relatable character to queer readers, but of making the story more real. She says, "For stories to be authentic, they must include LGBTQ folks, because we're everywhere. We're in every town, every school, every gym, every grocery store, every club... So why shouldn't we be in stories?"

As a queer writer and reader, and as someone endlessly fascinated by the ways stories evolve across time and distance, the growing popularity of queer retellings inspires and delights me. Writers and artists like Talley, Moore, and Benincasa help readers to understand that not only are LGBTQ people part of the story now, but that in fact, we always have been.

Follow Lindsay King-Miller on Twitter.

Somehow at the turn of the millennium, the tech-paranoia of Canadian horror master David Cronenberg, and the testosterone-fueled action of Aliens, gave rise to what I call nu-horror: a mix of monster horror with sci-fi action, enhanced with computer animation. The movies were plot heavy, often adapted from video games, filmed in bright colors, and they were full of un-spooky subject matter like space travel and the internet. It was an exciting new high-tech millennium, and these were apparently our high-tech new fears.

Movies that set the stage for nu-horror included The Faculty, Event Horizon, and Blade. Examples of the subgenre at its height include Thir13en Ghosts, Resident Evil, Jason X, The House of the Dead, Dracula 2000, Ghosts of Mars, and How to Make a Monster.

In the Y2K days, horror's sister musical genre, metal, was going through a similar rough patch. Bands like Korn, Mudvayne, P.O.D., and Linkin Park were stretching the term "metal" to its breaking point by making what we now derisively call "nu-metal"—the term I'm obviously co-opting here.

NME called nu-metal "the worst genre of all time." The nu-horror era in movies is not fondly remembered either.

According to film scholar Steffen Hantke, horror fans in the Y2K days were in a panic about their precious genre coming apart at the seams. In Hantke's 2010 book American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium Hantke wrote that "from a pessimist's point of view, the last ten years have seen American horror film at its worst." He also noted that the movie blog Bloody-Disgusting.com hosted a discussion in 2005 called, "'Do you think horror movies are done for?'"

A lot of this geek anger was in opposition to teen slasher movies like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and a glut of American horror movies that were just inferior remakes of Japanese movies. Still, much of the blame also lands at the feet of the cheesy, sci-fi-tinged horror I'm labeling nu-horror.

Here's a very brief history:

In the late 90s, Robert Rodriguez's aliens-ate-my-teachers movie The Faculty, and the blue-tinted gorefest in space Event Horizon, helped set nu-horror in motion.

The Faculty starts out as a garden-variety Invasion of the Body Snatchers–style paranoia thriller, but set in a high school so it can be marketed to teens. But then at the end, the monster is revealed as sort of a mix between the alien from Alien and the plant from Little Shop of Horrors, and computer animation takes over. Event Horizon is sorta the opposite, starting as a space opera on a grand scale, and then making a left turn into horror movie territory, with demons, torture, and glimpses of hell.

In the ensuing few years, things like space travel, computer read-outs, and shootouts with aliens became commonplace in ostensibly scary movies. Also, in 1999, The Matrix came along, and as a cultural juggernaut, its influence can definitely be felt in the horror movies of the time. For instance, Uwe Bol's 2003 House of the Dead includes several shots that mimic "bullet time," The Matrix's time-stopping camera technique (link is NSFW).

The Matrix is no more or less scary than one of the high water marks of the nu-horror subgenre: 2001's Jason X, in which Jason Voorhees wakes up on a space ship, having been frozen for 445 years, and starts killing the sexy astronauts he encounters. The sexy astronauts fight back with killer robots and super guns. It is not a scary movie, but it is an immensely entertaining movie.

The year 2001 was the biggest for nu-horror. Thir13en Ghosts (which I think is pronounced "Thir-one-three-en Ghosts") is the most useful all-around snapshot of the subgenre I can find. It offers the viewer the kind of bright, colorful sets and lighting design they might typically expect from a movie adaptation of a Broadway musical, costumes reminiscent of the Joel Schumacher Batman movies, the visuals of a Slipknot video, and a Ghostbusters-style mix of science fiction and horror.

There's also a needlessly convoluted story, in which (deep breath) a giant steampunk house is murdering people, but ghosts also live in the house, and a cursed document written by the devil is all over the walls, which can be used to trap the ghosts, and the characters who are still alive can only see the ghosts if they wear hi-tech glasses that work like the glasses from They Live , and in addition to the house being able to kill people, the ghosts can also kill people.

The plot doesn't stay with you, and neither do the attempted scares. Instead, after watching Thir13en Ghosts, like so much Y2K-era culture, you just remember a kind of strobing, screaming, technicolor mess.

Because of their low budgets, horror movies will always be laboratories for cheap special effects that look dated a few weeks after the movies leave theaters. And because they're for teens, horror movies will always try to riff on the cultural fads of the moment, and the results will be ridiculous. So nu-horror may not be some uniquely crappy era in movies, but just possess a unique lack of aesthetic limits, as if the filmmakers were hitting you with every sight, color, and noise they possibly could.

The time period itself had its high points as well, with non-nu-horror horror movies like The Blair Witch Project and Gore Verbinski's Ring remake. In that vein, over the next few years, non-Hollywood horror movies like High Tension, Wolf Creek, and The Descent came along and injected some new ideas—restraint mostly—into Hollywood's horror vocabulary. Say what you will about the flash-in-the-pan that was torture porn, movies like Saw and Hostel helped usher in a new era of gritty, pared-down movies.

These days, instead of throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the audience and hoping some of it scares them, filmmakers are working on a relatively microscopic scale, making horror movies like The Witch and Green Room, and audiences seem to dig them.

But then again, another Resident Evil movie will hit theaters next January. So maybe nu-horror isn't dead.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Twenty-five years after it was first released, Boyz N the Hood is coming back to UK cinemas as part of the British Film Institute's Black Star season, which celebrates black actors in film and TV. And it deserves its spot on the schedule; the film's influence can still be felt everywhere, from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, M.A.A.D City.

Director John Singleton was just 23 when he made Boyz N the Hood. Part of the early 1990s wave of African-American cinema that started with Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and included the likes of Juice, Menace II Society, Friday and New Jack City, it was based directly on Singleton's own life and shot on the streets he grew up on.

The film represented a major breakthrough moment for all three of its main leads – Cuba Gooding Jr as the hardworking, conflicted Tre; Morris Chestnut as teenage father Ricky, college-bound on a football scholarship; and Ice Cube in his first acting role as Ricky's brother, small-time dealer Doughboy. Despite being a quarter of a century old, it's still a powerful, affecting tale of lost youth, and sadly the issues of police brutality and gentrification it covers remain relevant today. After its release, Singleton became both the youngest person ever and the first African-American to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar.

I met with Singleton while he was in London for a Q&A session at the BFI, and he wolfed down jam scones throughout the entirety of our interview. He's gone on to direct films like Baby Boy, 2Fast 2Furious and the remake of Shaft, but Boyz N the Hood remains his most famous work, and we went deep into the making of it.

VICE: So let's start at the beginning. Prior to even writing the script or anything, when did you first have the idea of making Boyz N the Hood?
John Singleton: I think I was living this film before I ever thought about making it. Growing up in my early teens, I batted around with three friends, Jimmy and Michael, and our other friend who was also named Michael; his nickname was Fatback – he was heavy-set – and in the movie we called him Doughboy. As I started to think about what I wanted to do with my life, and cinema became an option, it was just natural that this was probably gonna be my first film. In fact, when I applied to USC Film School they had a thing that asked you to write three ideas for films. And one of them was called Summer of '84, which was about growing up in South Central LA.

So obviously your experience influenced the film's setting, but how much of it is closely based on your life?
A lot of it. At 11 years old I went to live with my father. There are things that happened to me and my family, like the guy breaking in and my father getting the drop on him, and the black policeman, saying "You should have got him – that would have been one less nigger." Then there's other events in the picture that happened, but not necessarily to me.

Was your dad like Furious?
Yeah, he was very politically-minded, very black conscious. He was the only single dad on the block, so a lot of the kids looked up to him. I have to thank my father; I never had to grow up with a lot of the insecurities a lot of young black men have. He gave me a foundation that I needed.

Both Cuba Gooding Jr and Morris Chestnut were basically unknowns at the time – how did you find them?
It's funny, because when we were making it I knew nothing about the process of casting. So the first two people who came in to read for Tre were Morris Chestnut and then Cuba Gooding Jr. And then after those two came in, I said I was going to lunch. We had seven more people to see! But I just said, "This guy's gonna be Tre, and the chocolate guy's gonna be Ricky. I'm gonna go eat. Goodbye!"

How did Ice Cube come on board?
He came on board because I wrote the part for him. I couldn't see anyone else playing that part but Ice Cube. I knew him while I was in college and working on The Arsenio Hall Show, where I was a directing intern. He was trying to get backstage to the green room and they wouldn't let him back. I said, "Hey man, this is Ice Cube from NWA! Come on, man, I'll take care of you." I took him back there and I told him I had a script I'd been writing for him, and he gave me his phone number. I'd see him around town. He gave me a ride home one night when I was stranded in Hollywood. It was January of 1990. He plays the beats to this record, and he says it's his new solo record, going to be called AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted. And then I said: "Remember that script I told you about? I wrote it." Seven months after that we were working on the movie. And we always tell that story, because we were just two dudes with dreams and a small jeep riding on the freeway in South Central, talking about what we wanted to do.

Did it help having a recording star like him in the cast?
The studio didn't have a clue who NWA were. If anything, it was the success of Do the Right Thing two years previous that helped more. Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle had also come out. Those were small measures of success – new black voices coming through. So the studio thought they had to make their own star. So I was sort of made as a filmmaker as a counterpoint to what Spike Lee was doing.

Is it true you wanted the rest of NWA to be in the film as well?
They were supposed to be in it – that was my plan. The first time I met Eazy-E I said that I had this movie, but he wasn't concerned about it.

Is that why you had the guy wearing the "We Want Eazy" shirt getting beat up in the film?
Yeah. That was Ice Cube's first day of production. I called him up and told him to bring all his NWA paraphernalia to the set. And then all of a sudden the crackhead walks out and his shirt says says, "We Want Eazy." Cube laughs, and I say, "Y'all gonna whoop his ass!" I did that – that was me!

Producer Steve Nicolaides said that you got some Bloods coming up to you during the shoot and you had to change some locations?
They didn't come up to me. Steve had a meeting with a dude who called himself the leader of all the Bloods in LA. First of all, there's no leader of all the Bloods in LA – it's not West Side Story! We were intending to end a shoot-out scene in a certain area that was a known Blood hood. So he has a meeting out of courtesy. And they said we can't do it. I'm like, "Fuck them! They don't own that shit!" In the end we just did it somewhere else that was actually more spacious, with more room to do the stunts, but it was still their hood.

Was this "Blood leader" just a bit of a chancer then?
In LA there's always these dudes who present themselves as being very street to Hollywood. Whenever he shows up to a meeting he has all these young acolytes with him. Like anything in Los Angeles it's a facade. And I'm from the streets, so it's like, "Fuck you – we don't have to do what you want to do." So then he's there like, "Okay, just slide me something." That's their thing. Plus, this dude was in that movie Colors, so I definitely wasn't going to listen to him!

The costumes in the film are so great, especially looking back from 2016.
My costume designer was Darryle Johnson. He's still working today. He actually sold T-shirts at the local summer fair. The "Crenshaw" shirt in the film, he used to sell those shirts.

Were any of the cast wearing their own clothes?
No. Well, the shirt that Cuba wears when he comes into the barbecue, that's what he wore to the audition. Plus, Cube could pick out what he wanted to wear in a scene – he was specific about what he wanted to wear.

Where did Dooky's pacifier come from?
That kid walked in looking just like that! He had it in his mouth when he was talking, and I was like, "This guy's gotta be in the movie!"

I also wanted to ask you about Little Chris, who's in a wheelchair, but you never explain why.
It's never mentioned, but it's there. It's like you don't have to . The guy who played was from Oakland. He got the role because he came up to the production office and said, "You got a role for a guy who was shot and is now in a wheelchair? I was really shot and I'm in a wheelchair! I gotta be in your movie!" I told him to audition, he was good, and he's in the movie.

You also have several reference's to Rob Reiner's Stand By Me in the film.
It was the last film I saw before I started college, and I loved everything Stephen King wrote. It's a very emotional coming of age, young male story. And I love it on the merits of that.

By referencing it, were you comparing that idyllic 50s white childhood you see in the movies to your own experiences?
No, it wasn't that at all. I just like that film, and it was something that affected me emotionally. The other films that affected me like that were Hector Babenco's Pixote and François Truffaut's The 400 Blows – films about young men going through different things in various cultures.

Finally, there have been several 90s directors returning to their iconic early works in recent years, like Richard Linklater's Before Sunset and Before Midnight, and Kevin Smith's Clerks 2. Have you ever though about going back to see what Tre is doing now?
No. I'd rather make films that were in the same milieu, but with different characters. Like Baby Boy, which is a counterpoint to Boyz N the Hood. Baby Boy is one of my favourite films that I've made, because it's the same world. I am planning another urban film. I won't say what it is, but I'm interested in doing a film about post-Obama America. The psychological implications of the aftermath of that. And to deal with race and class in a different way.

Boyz N the Hood is on limited release in UK cinemas

@achinglychic

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