Some guys go to pretty insane lengths to propose marriage, and a lot of the time it doesn't end quite how they expected. But last week it was a few New York cops who got a surprise, after helping out with a guy's cute proposal made them the subject of full-on NYPD investigation, CBS New York reports.

In a video of the proposal—filmed from another car presumably by friends who were in on the surprise—three cops pull Yehuda Coriat and his unsuspecting soon-to-be-fiancée over. The officers ask the couple to step out of their car and start searching the vehicle. One cop opens the trunk, revealing a dozen balloons and a bouquet of flowers. That's when Coriat gets down on one knee.

The whole thing is pretty cute as far as stunt proposals go, but not everyone is pleased. The 101st precinct is pretty pissed that the three officers put on uniforms and borrowed department vehicles to help Coriat with the engagement when they were supposed to be out catching criminals or whatever.

The officers involved could be facing disciplinary action from the higher ups in the department, and the YouTube video above is being used as evidence against the cops in the case, according to CBS.

"This incident is being reviewed by the NYPD and based on preliminary findings, will be referred to the proper unit for possible disciplinary action," a New York sergeant said in a statement about the whole debacle.

Man, cops can't get away with anything these days.

Read: Three Horrendously Awkward Stories About Failed Marriage Proposals

Photo via Trading Academy Flickr page

Somewhere in Manhattan, there is a seven-year-old dachshund named Winnie Pooh with a $100,000 trust fund. The trust was set up six years ago by Winnie's late owner, Patricia Bowers, who wanted to ensure there was money to care for little Winnie. But last week, the pup's caregiver filed a lawsuit alleging she's received almost none of the money from the executor of the estate, forcing her to pay out-of-pocket for Winnie's expenses, including an emergency orthopedic surgery last year.

The ensuing legal battle over a dog's trust fund is a little eye-rolly, sure, even if Winnie's caregiver has the right to the money. And while most of us can't relate to having a six-figure trust fund, let alone leaving one to a dog, there is a takeaway in this whole mess: If you have money, you can set some of it aside to make sure your pet is taken care of after you die, which is a pretty nice thing to do for the only living being that ever truly loved you.

The most famous case of a dog trust is the one set up by real estate mogul Leona Helmsley, who died in 2007 and left $12 million for the care of her Maltese, Trouble. (Later, a judged ruled that the amount was excessive and gave $10 million to charity.)

Another socialite, Gail Posner—daughter of the guy who invented "hostile corporate takeovers"—left $3 million and a house worth $8.4 million to her three dogs after her death. Her son, who was left $1 million, disputed the will immediately, claiming conspiracy by Posner's staff, who received a total of $27 million to, among other things, take care of the dogs.

Apparently, leaving your riches to your pets—for their well-being, and maybe also to spite your family—is widely practiced among well-off pet owners. So I reached out to Gerry W. Beyer, a law professor at Texas Tech and pet trust attorney (yes, that's a real thing) to find out how it's done.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: OK, so how does this work? Do I like, go into a bank and ask them to open an account for my dog?
Gerry W. Beyer: In the United States, pets are deemed as property, so you don't actually leave money to the animal. Instead, you leave money in a trust, managed by a trustee, for the benefit of the animal. Normally you will have a human caregiver, who is the beneficiary, who receives money for the pet's care, and then you have a trustee to make sure that the animal is properly taken care of.

What if I don't get one? What happens to the pet?
They just pass through the will with everything else, or if you don't have a will, it'll pass by intestacy. In many cases, the pet just ends up at the pound, or the shelter, and they may not make it very long if they're there. Many people do not realize that there are simple techniques available to protect their pets.

So how is a pet trust different from just writing "everything goes to my snail, Rocket," in my will?
The deal with creating a pet trust is you want it to be legally enforceable, so you can make certain that that money is actually used to take care of a pet. In a "traditional pet trust," you tell the trustee to help the person who is providing care to your pet after you die by paying for the pet's expenses according to your directions . What you're describing is a "statutory pet trust," which is just a provision in a will. It doesn't require the pet owner to make as many decisions regarding the terms of the trust. Usually, the state will fill in the missing parts to a pet trust, making sure the money is spent on the pet.

That sounds easy enough.
It's a very primitive method and not one I would recommend, unless the estate is small. You'd sooner want a "traditional pet trust" where you actually name the caregiver of the animal, the person holding the money, how much to reimburse for expenses, plus an additional amount to "encourage" their help. The trustee would also make random inspections at the caregiver's home to make sure the animal is well treated. You're not relying on hope or trust; you're relying on a legally enforceable obligation.

What if the animal outlives the caregiver, or the money runs out?
The normal thing to do is to provide alternate caregivers in the trust. Even if you don't provide alternates, it would be wise to pick a method of picking an alternate. Obviously if the money runs out, you're basically out of luck. Hopefully someone would take care of the animal out of the goodness of their heart, but if you put too little in, then there's that risk of running out of money.

So what is a reasonable amount to put in? Some websites I looked at suggested between $15,000 to $20,000.
That's going to depend very much on the type of animal, the life expectancy of the animal, and the type of care you want the animal to have. If your dog is already 14 years old, or if you're setting up a trust for a hamster or gerbil, well, you're not gonna need that much unless you want to put aside a lot of money for extreme medical care.

One of the big types of animals that get a lot of pet trust activity are parrots, because parrots can live up to 100 years. You'd need to plan for caregivers who aren't even born yet. In that case, you can just put in money—say, $100,000—and that money is spent taking care of the pet. But some people put in enough money to generate interest and income, and the pet can live off that income. Plus, I've heard of people spending $5,000 and more for medical care if the animal becomes ill or gets hit by a car or something, and that can upset the funding quite a bit.

What are some of the larger pet trusts for?
I've read and worked on cases that range anywhere from the high hundreds of thousands to low millions, and that's obviously for animals that have intrinsic high value or live a long life, like parrots, racehorses, purebred dogs.

Is there a limit to how much money you can leave your pet? The $12 million Leona Helmsley tried to leave her dog was knocked down to just $2 million, and the rest went to charity.
Virtually every state that has authorized pet trusts has said that if the amount given to the pet trust is "unreasonably large"—although the definition of that is a matter of opinion—they can have an amount removed from the pet trust, and then it just passes as though the animal had already died. When that does happen, most of the money usually goes to a charity, and the rest goes to family. It is very rare of course. Helmsley yes, that got a lot of press, but that is exceedingly rare.

Follow Jules Suzdaltsev on Twitter.

All photos by the author

At this weekend's 31st annual Up Your Alley leather and BDSM festival, in San Francisco's historically kink-friendly South of Market neighborhood, more than 10,000 subs, doms, slaves, sirs, pups, handlers, leatherfolk, and onlookers gathered to celebrate the bonds of a community slowly moving from the sexual fringe toward something resembling the American mainstream.

It's no revelation that the leather and kink community has shed much of its outsider status in the wake of marriage equality and Fifty Shades of Grey. As the spectrum of North American kink broadens beyond its once predominantly leather-based roots, and a growing number of non-gay men come out as participants and players, a counter-retraction among the scene's demographic cornerstone is taking place. "Guy Baldwin, a fairly famous leatherman, gave a speech a few years ago to a room of mostly straight leatherfolk," Race Bannon, kink expert and columnist for the Bay Area Reporter, told VICE. "I'm paraphrasing, but he said that if gay men are retracting from your scene, it's because it doesn't feel like our scene anymore."

The contrast between Up Your Alley and its sister festival, next month's 32nd annual Folsom Street Fair, is sharp. Folsom, a traditionally tamer and straighter leather festival, hosts more than 400,000 attendees, and the BDSM on display there tends not to veer toward the sometimes graphic practice seen at Up Your Alley. "Frankly, the way that heterosexuals look at kink and BDSM is different than the way gay men do," said Bannon. "There's been a retraction into gay camps, and this is the appeal of Up Your Alley over Folsom."

Former Obama campaign official David Plouffe speaking on behalf of Uber at a panel in Philadelphia. Photos by Jason Bergman unless otherwise noted

Hamilton "Tony" James is president of the private equity giant Blackstone, and until very recently might have served as the perfect foil for a Bernie Sanders tirade about the evils of America's One Percent. At the Democratic National Convention last week, the financier was holding court in downtown Philadelphia at a caricature of the kind of shindig people imagine when someone bemoans money in politics: mini hamachi tacos, free-flowing wine, and small bottles of champagne to keep attendees entertained on the shuttles that took them to Wells Fargo Center to hear Hillary Clinton's acceptance speech.

Tony James really, really wants Hillary Clinton to be the next president.

"Every election, people say, '"Oh, this one really matters,'" he told his guests. "I think this one really matters."

The private reception was held in a lavish space adjacent to a Post-Impressionist art museum, but much of the influence peddling at the DNC went on in plain sight. Lobbyists and industry players imbibed generously at lush hotel bars and could be seen posted up in suites far above the convention floor. Spirits were high, and why not? Wall Street saw massive growth under the Obama administration, and corporate lobbyists were finally unleashed in Philly after the ban keeping them on the sidelines during the Democrats' last two conventions was lifted. Now they were free to help fund the proceedings, where select insiders enjoyed "Friends and Family" convention packages or "honored guest" badges that brought special status.

Onstage and in primetime, speaker after speaker celebrated America's diversity, pumped the crowd up with invocations to patriotism and social justice, and of course ripped Donald Trump's greed and narcissism. The convention also provided a preview of what Hillary Clinton's America might look like, and at first glance, that version of America looks a lot like the current one: a place where the rich have almost nothing to fear from the government.

Clinton is intimately linked to Wall Street—notoriously, she gave speeches at Goldman Sachs for hefty fees soon after leaving the State Department. The perception that she is deeply indebted to big finance caused her some trouble during her prolonged primary battle against Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, and while Trump is himself wealthy, he seems more comfortable bashing the globalism-loving elite and shady bankers than Clinton does. Her campaign and supportive super PACs have also raked in some $41 million from the financial services industry and its employees so far this election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, compared to just $109,000 for Trump.

Wall Street's passion for Clinton has obvious roots. She seems far more stable than Trump, has a track record of supporting free trade, and generally represents continuity—not the volatility that might come with her Republican opponent.

But how close is too close for comfort when it comes to Hillary Clinton and America's largest corporations?

The scene at the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Philly after a long convention night. Photo by Pete Voelker

The swanky party thrown by James—who has long been rumored to covet a job in the White House—was littered with veterans of the revolving door between Wall Street and the federal government. Star economist Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary under Bill Clinton who went to bat for Citigroup after leaving the Obama administration in 2010, was on hand. So was Steven Rattner, the Wall Street veteran who oversaw the auto-industry bailout during Obama's first term and then got charged in a pay-to-play scheme involving New York pension funds. (Rattner settled with the SEC and remains banned from the investment industry.)

There were also a few politicians who didn't exactly star onstage at the DNC but were in their element with this crowd. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, recently dogged by videotaped killings of black people at the hands of his city's troubled police force, got a special shout-out at the party. At one point, James jokingly called New York City mayor Bill de Blasio—whose administration is facing a bevy of corruption probes—"my boss," perhaps referring to his role in the mayor's campaign to curb income inequality.

The camaraderie reflected the close working relationship between the Democratic Party and wealthy businesspeople in the Obama era.

"For lobbyists who are coming to the DNC, they are working—this is business," Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, told me a couple days before James's party. "These are clients they're representing at the events they're hosting, and they're hoping to make it lavish enough and interesting enough to entice members of Congress—sitting public officials—to attend."

Though the final Democratic platform includes promises to rein in Wall Street excess by imposing tough regulations and a new financial transaction tax, you didn't get the sense these people were living in terror of a Clinton presidency. They were certainly more comfortable than the many delegates who crowdfunded their way to the convention—and more comfortable still than the Sanders holdouts who spent the week protesting in the brutal heat.

The love-in for corporate America wasn't confined to the financial sector, either. On Tuesday, Obama campaign wunderkind David Plouffe starred in a panel about how America—and millennials in particular—love the sharing economy. After leaving the White House, Plouffe was recruited by ride-share giant Uber to help it navigate a hostile climate of local regulation and national scrutiny. He's since stepped back from that role but still serves on the company's board and as a senior advisor, so of course he gushed about the massive startup, which operated an air-conditioned tent lounge at the DNC where passengers could wait for their rides.

During a question-and-answer period, I asked Plouffe and his cohorts if they had qualms about expanding the universe of non-employees who lack basic worker protections of the sort for which Democrats have traditionally advocated.

"Very important members of the Obama coalition and the Democratic coalition use these services, which make a great impact in their lives," Plouffe said, citing millennials, blacks, and Hispanics as key beneficiaries while acknowledging there was bound to be some "tension" with all the growth.

"From a progressive standpoint, when you look at who's benefiting from these platforms, I think it's the people that during my years in politics I was trying to fight for every single day," he added.

Plouffe's co-panelist, former Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter, seemed to bristle at the idea that the sharing economy represents a new source of lobbying power. "I'm quite sure that the horse and buggy industry hired the appropriate number of lobbyists and lawyers to fight Henry Ford and folks coming along with these newfangled things called cars," he said.

A Bernie backer who wasn't quite ready to get on board with Clinton in Philadelphia

If the primetime speeches at the DNC largely consisted of attacks on Trump over his views on race and immigration, the danger for Clinton heading into the final stretch this fall is that she's seen as too cozy with the rich people high on her candidacy. The GOP nominee's convention speech was comically dark, but it was also consistent in hammering home a message of economic decline caused by nefarious foreigners and elite deals struck behind closed doors. Unemployment numbers are low and the stock market is trading high, but many low-wage workers without college degrees feel left behind by the recovery and may be looking to buy what Trump is selling.

In public, of course, Clinton says all the right things about standing up for working people and reducing corporate power, but some doubt the candidate's sincerity given her proximity to its beneficiaries. Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, an old Clinton campaign hand, made what was perhaps the only gaffe of the Democrats' week-long party when he suggested Clinton was lying when she claimed to oppose the TransPacific Partnership trade deal with Pacific Rim countries. The TPP is a frequent punching bag for Trump, who promises to renegotiate deals that are screwing over Americans.

Of course, actually getting money out of politics is more of a pipe dream than a serious proposal at this point. Clinton has pledged to pass a constitutional amendment reversing the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision—but it's hard to imagine any amendment clearing a bitterly divided Congress, no matter who is president. That reality aside, Trump is happy to exploit Clinton's perceived coziness to Wall Street to cast himself as a candidate of change.

"Big business, elite media, and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place," he said during his own acceptance speech in Cleveland. "They are throwing money at her because they have total control over everything she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings."

More than anything else, the two major-party conventions drove home the absurd state of affairs when it comes to money in American politics today. Both nominees are basically rich New Yorkers who hang in some of the same social circles—Clinton attended Trump's wedding, and Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton were, at least until recently, quite friendly. As the two candidates jockey furiously to appease the economic angst that hangs over the country, the only question is if Trump's assurances that he cannot be bought (by virtue of his own alleged wealth) are more convincing than the steady diet of support Clinton enjoys from some of the biggest names in American business.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

Illustration by Sophie Castle

Most of us will be cheated on at one point or another in our sad and meaningless lives. A new piece of research out today finds that we are all too trusting of our partners and that they are inevitably more likely to cheat than we believe they are. Monogamy is a dying – if not already dead – way of life. Whether you believe the studies that show 60 percent of men and 45 percent of women have cheated in their marriages – or just remember your first teenage love getting fingered by a hotter, cooler version of you at Reading festival – it's almost guaranteed that at some point you will feel the burn of unfaithfulness.

But what if your partner cheats on you with someone you know? Your best friend? Your mortal enemy? Your mum? What does it feel like when you don't even have to do any self-flagellating Facebook stalking because you already know exactly what they look like? I spoke to some people who had not only been cruelly shunned for another person, but had the added misfortune of knowing the object of their lover's indiscretions.

SARAH

VICE: What happened?
Sarah: My boyfriend and I had been together for about three years when we decided to take a break. We were still living and sleeping together when I found out he had been having a love affair with my best friend.

Did you suspect anything?
I thought he had a really close relationship with my best friend, but like most first loves I trusted him blindly and without question, and always believed he was faithful. And she was my best friend; I trusted her with anything.

How did you find out?
A bunch of us were at the pancake parlour at 6AM after a night out on pills, when a mutual friend of ours blurted it out over waffles and syrup. We were all drunk as shit and coming down over breakfast when he looked at me and said, "Did you know Tory is sleeping with Damo?" The whole table went silent and I burst out laughing because I thought it was a joke. Then I looked at everyone else's faces at the table, and when I saw their reactions I could tell that they knew, and then the penny dropped. I felt like the wind was knocked out of my lungs. Ten years later I still remember the moment perfectly: what I was wearing, how stunned I felt, how cold it was outside on the way home.

So it had happened more than once?
Yeah, turned out the scumbags had been seeing each other for months. They had even slept together in my bed, in my house, while I was asleep in the same room. My "BFF" didn't even have the humility to keep it a secret – she had told pretty much all of my friends that she was desperately in love with him, so everyone knew what was going on except for me.

What happened when you confronted them?
He said he was sorry and that it was a mistake, that he was confused and didn't know what to do. She sent me a text which I never replied to – I can't even remember what it said.

What was the fallout?
I was totally devastated. I trusted both of them unconditionally and they were also the two people closest to me. Who do you turn to when everything goes to shit and it's the people who are supposed to be there for you who did it? It was also totally humiliating because all of our friends knew, and it was hard to accept that no one told me.

How do you feel about both of them now? Did you ever make up?
I have absolutely nothing to say to either of them. I know he is married with kids now; I actually saw him in a grocery store a few months ago and put my hood up and pretended to look at feta cheese until he was gone.

JAKE

VICE: Jake, talk to me. What's your sad tale?
Jake: So she was my first ever girlfriend and we'd been dating for almost a year. We were both 14 going on 15. I decided to have a small party for my 15th birthday and ended up erecting a tent in my garden to get drunk in. It got late; I went back inside my house while she stayed in the tent with another dude from our mutual friendship circle.

So did you walk in on them?
No, her best friend told me afterwards. Then she told me herself a few days later. I was so shocked – she was a cute, polite and slightly introverted person, and never really gave off that cheating vibe. I guess you can never really tell, eh?

So you never had any suspicions about that guy?
I was a naïve and nerdy 15-year-old who was lucky to even have a girlfriend, and the other dude wasn't that much of a looker. Plus, he was boring as fuck.

Did you ever confront her?
I don't think I even confronted her face to face – I think it took place on Myspace because we were both addicted to the new technology and also because I was super bummed out and didn't want to see her IRL. Sort of how I deal with my problems in 2016. I remember getting a long winded "I'm sorry" message, and I just dipped out after that. I felt pretty shitty, but there wasn't much of a fall out – I just ghosted her after that.

KIERAN

VICE: Who broke your heart?
Kieran: I was going out with this girl, Lucy, and her best friend was called Andy. She had slept with him in the past, and I think at one point he declared his love for her, but she didn't feel the same about him and wanted to get away from the drama. That was all before we started dating. There were always rumours about her and Andy during our relationship, and it transpired after we broke up that they were true. She'd also been with other guys. In fact, the last time I saw her when we were technically still together, I saw her making out with somebody else. Here's the kicker: the rebound relationship I had shortly after also ended when I saw my new girlfriend making out with this same Andy guy, in the same club that the drama with Lucy concluded. As you can imagine, I'm certainly not his biggest fan.

Fucking hell. What did you think of Andy before you found out he'd been boning your girlfriend?
While Lucy and I were getting together he would talk to me when he was drunk in a way that was quite angry, patronising and generally hostile towards Lucy for the way she had apparently "played with his emotions" and "didn't respect the emotions of anybody in her pursuit to get what she wants". We were from the same town but he was her friend, really. I never liked him, for obvious reasons.

So did Lucy and Andy stay together?
The time with Andy was a one-off, I believe, but I would find out after we broke up that there were a number of others, around four, that had been with Lucy during our year-and-a-half long relationship.

What happened when you confronted her?
She was aware of the rumour that they'd hooked up. Initially she tried to claim nothing had happened. She suggested we go out to dinner, where she blamed Andy's friends for trying to break us up, redirecting my anger towards them and away from her. I guess over this time I just felt really blank. I worked through every possible scenario in my mind as to how, where, what could have happened; it was mental torture.

So then what happened?
We actually stayed together until we were going away to university. We were going to separate parts of the country and I believe that my trust in her had begun to finally show cracks. The last night we were supposed to spend together I saw her making out with somebody new in a club.

What would you say to her if she called right now?
I understand she's married now. We're not in contact. I wouldn't want to see her again.

I haven't hate-read his tweets in months, so that's usually safe to say my heart has healed.

KELSI

VICE: Who cheated on you?
Kelsi: I was in my first year of university and hoping to have a "slutty" summer – my body count was very low and I'm terrible at casual dating. I think it's because I'm a Cancer. He was a 21-year-old medical student with two different coloured eyes who I started seeing at the same exact time he ended a three-year long relationship with... let's call her Girl Zero. We soon became "exclusive", but I always felt that if I ever called myself his girlfriend it would go to shit.

Were there any indications that he was a cheating scumbag from the get-go or was it a total surprise?
I had some suspicions about him, as his three-year relationship did not end on great terms and there was some infidelity. But university is weird, and monogamy can be as well, so whatever, right? Also, we were together 24/7 – it literally did not seem like he was ever not in my sight for long enough to have an opportunity to cheat.

What did you think of the "other woman" before you found out about the cheating?
I'd known her from on campus and in classes, let's call her Girl A. She's on my social media and we would head nod to one another in passing, small talk every now and again. She was one of those girls who is involved in every single extra-curricular activity – including student council, that he was in – but I generally thought she was OK, if a bit annoying.

How did you find out?
He'd been a bit distant for a few weeks. We were spending every single day together and sometimes I'd crash there. One night we were in the awkward deciding-without-words-if-I'm-sleeping-there-tonight hour when he tells me he's going to a concert. This guy only ever plays Xbox and drinks with the same med student asshole who was dating my roommate, so that was out of character. His phone kept ringing over and over again. He picked up and was increasingly vague, not saying names or locations. Then he told me he was going out with Girl A. His demeanour completely changed and I just felt it. Just in my stomach I felt it. I said, "Have you? her?" and he said yes. I sat there for a few seconds, staring at my hands. I absolutely hate crying in front of people so I was just silent for 30 seconds. I screamed some really hurtful shit at him, including calling him a narcissist, telling him that he loves wallowing in his own self-pity. I went home, smoked a few cigarettes and stalked Girl A on Twitter. Her most recent tweet was something along the lines of "wow I'm sleeping in my own bed and not after 3AM for the first time in days" and then some sad Maroon 5 lyrics – which I felt was both confirmation of the affair and that she is the absolute antithesis of myself. An hour later he showed up to my apartment and calling up Girl A to tell her he can't go to the concert with her, he does not want to be with her and it's never happening again.

How long had he been seeing her behind your back?
About two weeks – it was so humiliating.

What was the aftermath?
God, it was so messy – Girl A took a photo of me at a party flirting with another guy and sent it to him as some sort of, "Look at her happy without you, maybe you should see me still" type of bullshit. I cut him out for about a month, but when I started talking to him again he'd started going out with someone else (Girl B). But he broke up with her and told me he wanted to try again. Then he went on a cruise and began to date someone else from the other side of the country (Girl C). He's now back with Girl B and probably still dragging her life through the mud.

Are you still in contact with any of the parties involved?
Well, actually, I've since been able to kindle friendships with two of his exes, Girl Zero and Girl A, and hopefully Girl B will come to her senses and dump his ass soon. My ex has since followed and unfollowed me on Twitter a few times. I haven't hate-read his tweets in months, so that's usually safe to say my heart has healed.

More on VICE:

Sex Tips for Young People, from Older People Who've Been at It for Decades

The Worst Things People Have Said on a First Date

The Beauty and Splendor of Being a Slut

Warning: Spoilers from season one ahead.

We live in the golden age of hicksploitation. Poor southern whites are one of the last demographics that remain perfectly acceptable as caricature. Although it's long been second nature for Hollywood to imagine everything south of the Mason-Dixon as a netherworld of clapboard houses, laconic small-town sheriffs, and greasy spoons, a subgenre of post-antebellum pulp has cropped up all over television and movies in the past decade. Perhaps it's partially to compensate for a century of broad stereotypes, egregious and ongoing whitewashing, and tokenism, but this current variety of hicksploitation seems to say, "How do you like it, whitey," which is not to say that it's a totally new phenomenon. Night of the Hunter (1955) is arguably the origin of the species, with its Flannery O'Connor-esque showdown between a mad preacher and a gun-toting granny, followed in the 1970s by the banjos-of-doom-and-squeal-like-a-pig aesthetic of Deliverance.

But the mass appeal of red-state sensationalism feels like a contemporary outgrowth, in that half the country really does believe that the other half is crazy, and while that craziness might not be good for the republic, it does make for great B-movie entertainment. Remarkably supple—and frequently featuring its herald, Matthew McConaughey—recent hicksploitation includes the gothic, Eggleston-like bayou photography of True Detective, the "kiss my grits" supernaturalism of True Blood, The Paperboy's high camp, Django's black-comic lampoon of historical atrocity, the river rat nobility of Mud, the trailer-park mollusks of Squidbillies—and now the best of the bunch, AMC's Preacher, which aired its season finale Sunday, and in which Dixie mythology reaches lurid new heights of absurdity.

Photo courtesy of AMC

Developed by writer/producing team Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg with Breaking Bad veteran Sam Caitlin, Preacher can boast the grand-slam combination of blistering Texas wasteland, over-the-top violence, outlaw country swagger, and a joyously absurd plot that, in one scene, pits two angels in cowboy hats against a chainsaw-wielding vampire. In the first season, we see a mob of Civil War re-enactors, a fistfight between the mascot of local sports team the Red Savages and his more culturally-sensitive replacement Pedro the Prairie Dog, a hell-bound cowboy, a dude who gets his dick shot off then cradles it like a class pet, and an exploding Tom Cruise. What's not to like?

That said, the tone is initially hard to pin down. Preacher's first season is set in the fictional Annville, where Rev. Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper) becomes possessed by a mysterious deity called Genesis, whose superpower-of-suggestion he tries to harness to better to tend his flock, which includes an inspired ensemble of grotesques including a plucky teenager whose face resembles an anus thanks to a botched suicide attempt and Jackie Earle Haley as slaughterhouse mogul Odin Quinncannon, who has spurned the church for worship of "the god of meat." (There is also a laconic small-town sheriff.) Are we supposed to sympathize with these miscreants? Or are they there for us to laugh at? And the hard-drinking, ex-criminal Jesse Custer himself, with his incongruously tousled hipster hairdo, are we meant to see him as a conflicted man of God or a hypocrite?

In the first season, we see a mob of Civil War re-enactors, a fistfight between the mascot of local sports team the Red Savages and his more culturally-sensitive replacement Pedro the Prairie Dog, a hell-bound cowboy, a dude who gets his dick shot off then cradles it like a pet, and an exploding Tom Cruise. What's not to like?

The storyline is similarly all over the road. Subplots stutter and stall; episodes are frequently unfocused; the unrelenting extremity eradicates any trace of plausibility; and Custer's parishioners frequently act out of character, as when a hitherto meek organist casually feeds her nudnik boyfriend to a vampire. Weirdly, this looseness turns out to be Preacher's strength: There's more mayhem here than anything else on television, and the more it assures us that it doesn't give a shit about crutches like continuity, pacing, or exposition, the more enamored we become of its confident strangeness.

A big reason that we let Preacher get away with so much—and make no mistake, this is a world where the local brothel allows its clients to chase hooks through the woods with paintball guns and Quinncannon cradles a baby made out of ground chuck in the finale—are Custer's winning companions, the badass fugitive Tulip (Ruth Negga), with whom the Rev. Jesse used to rob banks, and smarmy Irish vampire Cassidy (Joe Gilgun). The pilot introduces Tulip fighting off an assailant in a car as it sails through a cornfield, after which she improvises a bazooka out of coffee cans and corn whiskey. We first meet Cassidy on an airplane, relaying an anecdote that begins, "You've had to have the kind of night that lands you in the hospital tryin' to figure out what the Spanish word is for 'ass hamster,' for goodness' sake." Negga and Gilgun's performances carry the show, which gets by on their mutual love/hate chemistry with Jesse, while it takes the season to find its voice.

Photo courtesy of AMC

Preacher is, of course, based on a seminal 1990s comic series with a wide following and the show sometimes feels like the first adaptation of a comic book to be aimed not at newcomers, but directly at the existing fan base. Its deviations in terms of content and writing are intriguing in terms of adaptation, as it manages to capture the wicked spirit of the books while making departures that expand on the canon.

The comic, more than the show at this point, was a deconstruction of southern masculinity, as conceived by the Northern Ireland-born writer Garth Ennis; the television show hits a little closer to home, making Jesse less of a John Wayne epitome and more of a John Wayne nerd. One thing that remains true is that neither the comic nor the show are shy about controversy: Preacher's season finale featured Jesse resolving a bet with Quinncannon about the existence of God by dialing him up on Skype and coming to doubt his divinity after he catches him picking his nose. Future seasons will probably incorporate the comic's Gestapo-like missionary Herr Starr (absent here save for a cameo in the third episode) and an inbred halfwit descended from Jesus Christ, among other heresies. For now though, Preacher is a joyous, mean, frustrating, outlandish show, whose bad taste and irreverence, in the best exploitation tradition, use the vernacular of trash to get to the deep heart of the country.

Recent work by J. W. McCormack appears in Conjunctions, BOMB, and the New Republic. Read his other writing on VICE here.

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

Photo by the CDC Global via Flickr

US News

Trump Claims Presidential Election Will Be Rigged
Donald Trump has suggested that the November election would be "rigged." He told a rally in Ohio that the contest was "going to be rigged" and also referred to Hillary Clinton as the "devil." He later repeated the claim on Fox News that the "election is going to be rigged," without offering any evidence for the claim.—CNN

US Launches Bombing Campaign on ISIS in Libya
US fighter jets have carried out air raids on ISIS targets in Libya for the first time. The Pentagon said the raids on the city of Sirte were launched in response to a request from the county's unity government, known as the Government of National Authority (GNA). Prime Minister Fayez Serraj said he had requested assistance.—The Washington Post

National Cookout Aims to Restore Relations with Police
Communities across the nation will host cookouts, block parties, and parades today to promote police-community relations during this year's national cookout. Organizers from the National Association of Town Watch say 16,500 community groups have registered, 500 more than last year.—USA Today

New Zika Cases in Miami Prompt Travel Warning
Federal health officials have urged pregnant women to stay away from a Miami neighborhood where additional cases of Zika infection have been reported. Florida officials said the number of Zika cases caused by local mosquitoes had risen from four to 14, and all cases have been found in the Wynwood neighborhood in north Miami.—The New York Times

Formula One racing boss Bernie Ecclestone. Photo via Wikimedia

International News

Zimbabwean War Veterans Arrested for Insulting Mugabe
Police in Zimbabwe have arrested senior war veterans who called for President Robert Mugabe to step down. Victor Matemadanda and Francis Nhando, leading figures in the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association, were arrested after the organization accused Mugabe of being "dictatorial."—Al Jazeera

Jamaica Pays Oil Debts to Venezuela with Food
Jamaica has announced it is paying off oil debts with Venezuela with food, medication, and fertilizers instead of cash. Venezuela is suffering from acute shortages of basic products amid a major economic crisis. The deal with Jamaica amounts to $4 million worth of products.—VICE News

Chinese Lawyer Found Guilty of Subversion
Chinese human rights activist Zhai Yanmin has been found guilty of subverting state power and was given a three-year suspended prison sentence. Dozens of human rights lawyers associated with the Beijing Fengrui law firm have been arrested and detained since last July, and more trials are expected.—Reuters

Brazilian Police Arrest Alleged Kidnapping Mastermind
Police in Brazil have arrested a helicopter pilot on suspicion of planning the kidnapping of Formula One racing boss Bernie Ecclestone's mother-in-law. Aparecida Schunck was abducted July 22 but was rescued Saturday. Ecclestone's pilot Jorge Eurico da Silva Faria is the alleged mastermind of the attack.—BBC News

Warren Buffett. Photo by Bloomberg / Contributor via Getty

Everything Else

Kesha Drops Lawsuit Against Dr. Luke
The singer has dropped a California lawsuit alleging that producer Dr. Luke sexually abused her, but she will pursue a similar set of claims in New York. Kesha's lawyer said she recently submitted 28 new songs to Dr. Luke's label.—Rolling Stone

Warren Buffett Challenges Trump to Tax Duel
The billionaire investor has challenged Donald Trump to a joint release of tax returns. "He can pick the place, anytime between now and the election," said Buffett. "I'll bring my return, he'll bring his return."—NBC News

New York to Stop Sex Offenders from Playing 'Pokémon Go'
New York State is set to ban 3,000 registered sex offenders from playing Pokémon Go while they are on parole. New York governor Andrew Cuomo said the game should not be allowed to offer "new avenues for dangerous predators."—TIME

Texas Students Protest Gun Laws with Dildos
Students in Texas are planning to protest against a new law that allows anyone to carry a concealed handgun on public college campuses by bringing dildos into classrooms. The "Campus Dildo Carry" will take place on August 24.—VICE News

Satanists Launch After-School Club for Kids
The Satanic Temple has announced plans for a kids' program called the After School Satan Club (ASSC). The temple is hoping to launch ASSC chapters in nine school districts this year, teaching "a rationalist, scientific, non-superstitious worldview."—VICE

Secondhand Weed Smoke Bad for Rats
A study published by the American Heart Association found that cannabis smoke had a more damaging impact on rats' blood vessels than tobacco smoke. But some scientists claim any comparisons between humans and rats are unreliable.—Motherboard

Photo by Denis Bocquet via

Last week, we asked women all over Europe what gets them to swipe right. You should obviously read the whole thing but here's the tl;dr version: Look decent, hold a puppy in your profile pics, don't hold a puppy in your profile pics and/or don't be an arsehole.

This week, we've asked a bunch of men from all over Europe to tell us how to make a good first Tinder impression on them.

WILL, 28, LONDON

VICE: What made you originally download Tinder?
Will: I wanted to meet girls! If I'm being perfectly honest, half of it is just to get quick dates and hook-ups and half of it to meet a potential girlfriend.

What's your biggest turn-off?
Girls who ask too many questions – when they're basically testing you, and it's almost like they're having you fill out a questionnaire. I prefer starting off with a fun, friendly chat.

What gets you to swipe right?
I like girls with dark, curly hair – and Mediterranean girls. I love pouty selfies. If a girl does a mirror selfie, she has to look in the camera and not in the mirror – that's a turn-off, actually. So I appreciate a sexy, seductive mirror selfie but it's nice if she also has one outdoorsy shot, so I can see her in her entirety.

That's pretty specific. What kind of photos would make you swipe left?
This will make me sound terrible but I really don't like goofy photos. I don't find it sexy at all when someone's looking silly. I remember this girl who had a picture of herself dressed up as a clown for Halloween, or something. She was doing this silly pose and I'm sure she was really nice and cool but I just don't think that's sexy. I'm a chilled out guy and I definitely have silly photos but I just wouldn't swipe right on Tinder.

What's the worst opening line?
"Hi" or "hey" are shit. And "ASL" . I mean – you already have all that information. I never know what to say to follow up on that.

AUDUN, 32, COPENHAGEN

VICE: Why do you use Tinder?
Audun: One of my mates told me about it and. Tinder feels like a natural way of dating for me. I'm not necessarily more serious on it but it's not just about the hook-ups, either.

What do you look for on Tinder?
Well, I'm looking for a potential boyfriend. I usually go for guys who look a bit more masculine – not the overly flamboyant types. But aesthetically what I like varies. I like funny people, especially if their humour is self-deprecating. In order to consider someone for something more long-term, I need to feel physical attraction and he shouldn't be too high on himself.

How do you communicate?
I'm usually very forward – endless chat conversations bore me to no end.

Do you go on dates with a lot of people you match with?
No, I actually rarely go out on a Tinder date. I get a lot of matches, but it hardly ever turns into a date. But it comes and goes – things are kind of slow during the winter but it heats up during the spring and summer.

ARISTIDE, 22, BARCELONA

VICE: What would you swipe right for?
Aristide: I don't have a type exactly, and I don't care about the pictures much because you can never really know what someone's like from them. So I swipe right a lot and then talk to whoever I match with.

When you talk to girls, what spikes your interest?
Well, I really like girls who are looking for something more than sex – nice, respectful girls with a strong personality.

Have you had any luck finding that kind of girl?
Not really, most of the girls I've found only wanted to have sex with me and that was it. That's fine with me if they're being honest about it, but some of them told me they were looking for more and then never texted me back after we hooked up. So I end up doing the same and using it to find something casual. It's great for that but I'm looking for something more.

So would you say that Tinder works for you?
Yes, but only for quick sex.

DAAN, 25, AMSTERDAM

VICE: Why do you have Tinder?
Daan: Mostly because it's pretty funny. I got it when it just came out in the Netherlands and there were only locals on it. You'd see all these people you knew. It's a bit more boring now but I did make a lot of friends on there.

Do you use it often?
No, not really. Mostly when I'm in the loo, shitting and swiping.

Do you swipe based on the first picture only?
No, I usually look at the other pics as well. A lot of girls do the "Tinder surprise" thing – they only have pictures from the neck up, so you have to look at a few more photos before you can make any kind of decision. If it's a match, you need to take a good hard look at her Facebook page as well.

What are the biggest turn-offs?
I really can't stand pictures of girls hanging out with tigers or monkeys in Thailand or some other exotic location. And you know what kind of girl you're dealing with if her first picture is a bikini shot. When it comes to group pics, you always have to watch out for the cheerleader effect – a group of mediocre looking girls together can look pretty great, until you look at them all individually.

EMANUELE, 23, MILAN

VICE: How long have you been on Tinder?
Emanuele: I've been on Tinder for almost a year. I'm quite addicted – when I wake up in the morning I open the app almost automatically and then I check it several times during the day.

What kind of pictures do you like?
I like genuine and clean guys – I hate posers. If you're all about showing your abs or making weird faces, I have no desire to get to know you better. But I'm also very picky when it comes to how people approach me.

So let's talk about the perfect approach.
The perfect approach is warm and friendly – but not overwhelmingly so. I also don't like guys who immediately get to the point. I need to have some kind of chemistry with a guy to want to meet him or have sex with him.

How many guys have met your standards so far?
I went out with six guys I met on Tinder, and those dates all went very well. I guess that's because when I agree to meet someone, I really see something in him.

MARVIN, 21, BERLIN

VICE: What are you looking for on Tinder?
Marvin: I'm usually looking for something casual, which has been working well so far. I just enjoy every moment, whatever happens. I chat with people a lot – sometimes that's interesting and sometimes not so much.

What will get you to swipe right?
It's Tinder and I'm not expecting to find my soulmate there. So if I like the way she looks, I'll swipe right. If she has a lame faux-inspiring quote from some poet or philosopher in her bio, I'll swipe left. That's so impersonal and boring.

What was your worst chat on Tinder like?
It was kind of funny, actually. I messaged her and she would only write back these very clipped, short replies – one or two words. That was so stupid – I have to be able to have a conversation with someone. So at some point I just let it go and didn't get back to her – and that's when she asked for my number.

PETRUŢ, 21, BUCHAREST

VICE: Why do you have Tinder?
Petruț: Because I'm bored. I like the concept – you just directly contact the girls you like, and that makes hooking up easier.

So what are you looking for on Tinder?
I'm looking for my future wife. Ha, kidding. I'm looking for sex. It would be pathetic to try to find the love of your life on Tinder.

What kind of girls do you usually hook up with?
I used to swipe right on girls with whom I shared no interests or friends. But I quickly realised that you have to have something in common. Like this one time, there was a girl who liked the same independent political leader I liked. So I made a joke about politics which broke the ice and gave us something to talk about.

JESSY, 21, PARIS

VICE: What convinced you to get on Tinder?
Jessy: I just wanted to give it a go – I figured it would be easier to hook up with girls. I never really had any trouble meeting girls, but when you don't have enough money to go out in bars and clubs, it can be really helpful.

Do you care about what girls write in their bio?
I'm always curious to see how someone would describe themselves but, to be honest, I don't care all that much. I mostly look at the pictures. The thing is, a girl can always lie about her character – a photo never lies.

DJORDJE, 22, BELGRADE

VICE: How long have you been using Tinder?
Djordje: It's been almost a year, but I don't use it all the time. I'll uninstall it, and then I'll get bored and install it again, and when I'm done with it, I'll uninstall it again.

What kind of people on Tinder are the most annoying?
Foreigners who are in Belgrade for just one night. I'm not interested in that at all.

More on VICE:

We Asked Women What They Find Attractive on Tinder

This Is What it's Like to Be a Mixed-Race Girl on Tinder

Paris Lees: My Transgender Tinder Adventure

Photo courtesy by Fred Norris/HBO

This post contains spoilers for the first three episodes of Vice Principals.

Vice Principals is an HBO show about high-school vice principals in a semi-generic town somewhere in the Carolinas. Until he was in his early 30s, my father was a high-school vice principal in a semi-generic town in the Carolinas. I had the idea of watching the show with him, to see if the show is to working in high schools what Silicon Valley was to navigating the byzantine and often illogical world of tech companies and VC's.

After watching the first episode of the show, my dad the former real-life vice principal said, "I've seen cartoons more accurate than this show." He said this because of its main character Neil Gamby, portrayed by Danny McBride. Gamby swears in front of kids, openly lusts after teachers, forces his driver's ed students to chauffeur him around on errand runs, and generally behaves like a gigantic baby with a mustache and a clip-on tie. Halfway through the second episode, my dad paused the show and said, "They would never let that man around children."

So, yeah. Vice Principals is not necessarily a show about working at a high school. Instead, it's something altogether more crass and potentially fascinating—a character study of the type of pathetic, power-hungry white man whose meager stature comes from his whiteness and maleness, who's slowly losing what little status he has. In other words, Neil Gamby might be a cartoon character, but that cartoon character is an assemblage of very real attitudes finding a voice in the current election.

Even if they never made another movie or TV show again, Danny McBride and Jody Hill–who created Vice Principals–will live forever in the hearts and minds of millions for having created Eastbound and Down, a gleefully profane, absurd, and weirdly poetic show about Kenny Powers, a washed up, John Rocker-esque pitcher who moves back to his suburban North Carolina home in disgrace and becomes a substitute teacher.

It's easy to draw parallels between that show and Vice Principals—between their basic story arcs, their main characters' delusions and foul mouths, and the relish with which McBride drapes both Kenny and Neil's tubby frames in the least flattering clothes possible, it's tempting to say that Vice Principals is just Eastbound and Down 2.0.

Photo by Fred Norris/HBO

There are certain commonalities that bind the shows together beyond the personnel involved. Each often invoke the abject tackiness of the modern Southeast through subtle in-jokes—in Eastbound and Down , one particularly dickish character is always wearing clothes reminding the viewer he went to Wake Forest, while in Vice Principals, the slogan of the regional fried chicken chain Bojangles—"It's Bo time!"—is used as a punchline. Both shows feature liberal use of slow-motion shots of unimpressive people doing unimpressive things soundtracked by edgy music, a gag that at this point has become something of a visual signature for Hill.

But there's a significant difference between the two shows, and that is this: Kenny Powers was a man of action. He lived life to the fullest, whether that meant taking steroids to get his arm back or becoming a semi-professional cockfight organizer. Even if he was a total psychopathic dickhead, you couldn't help but root for Kenny Powers, if only because of how sad it was to watch the guy act insane to make up for the fact that he wasn't a famous baseball player anymore.

You're supposed to laugh at Neil Gamby for being a white man who's too clueless to realize he can't blame others for his own inadequacies.

Neil Gamby is not Kenny Powers. He looks and talks like him, yes, but in reality he's like Kenny Powers' s older, pathetic cousin. He's divorced and going broke over paying the stabling fees on his daughter's horse. He has no friends, and the only person who seems to actively seek out his company is Ray, his ex-wife's new husband who rides dirt bikes and is sort of like what you'd get if you crossed a Florida Georgia Line song with a No Fear T-shirt. (Unfortunately, Neil's too insecure to ever actually want to hang out with Ray, so their interactions tend to consist of Ray saying something nice to Neil, then Neil telling him to fuck off.) He suffers from what appear to be PTSD-related flashbacks—in one scene, he hallucinates hearing gunshots and is set into a fury. The only thing he has going for him in his life is his position as vice principal of the nondescript North Jackson High School, where he takes his feelings of inadequacy out on teens as the school's head of discipline. No one likes him there, either—the teachers all think he's a ridiculous blow-hard, and the students are too young to know better than to fear him.

Throughout Vice Principals ' first three episodes, Gamby flails about with the impotent rage of a saber-toothed tiger trapped in a tar pit as his insignificant, brittle power and privilege slip through his sausage-like fingers. In the first episode, the North Jackson principal job that Gamby felt entitled to instead goes to Dr. Belinda Brown, an outsider with a bulletproof track record and a degree from Berkeley. In addition to being vastly more qualified for the job than Gamby is, she is also a black woman. By the end of the episode, Gamby's teamed up with his former rival, fellow vice principal Lee Russell, in an attempt to take Brown down. By the end of the second episode, the pair cruises on over to her house in a student driver car and end up burning the place down.

It should be fairly obvious that you are not supposed to root for Neil Gamby to succeed in defeating Brown, or even feel bad every time one of his pathetic schemes backfires right into his face. Instead, you're supposed to laugh at him for being a white man who's too clueless to realize he can't blame others for his own inadequacies. In this way, Danny McBride and Jody Hill's timing with Vice Principals couldn't have been any better: You can find Gamby's resentment of otherness, intense fear of change, single-minded devotion to law and order, and pointless brow-beating in Donald Trump and the type of white guys who will vote for him come November. And just like in real life, you're not supposed to root for that type of person. You hope they fail, and you hope they fail hard.

The Trump-Gamby parallels are particularly stark in the third episode, when he strong-arms joining several teachers as an additional chaperone on an overnight field trip to "Historic Charles Town," a made-up version of the extremely real, extremely goofy southern high-school field-trip institutions Colonial Williamsburg and Old Salem. On the bus ride over, Gamby engages in a power struggle with a hip, bike-riding history teacher over who gets to give a speech setting ground rules for the kids on the trip. Their argument, which involves Gamby's profanity-laced tough talk losing out to the history teacher's appeal for consideration and oneness, feels like the perfect allegory for the "political correctness" debate that America is currently embroiled in.

Things go smoothly enough in Charles Town—there is an unforgettable shot of McBride shooting two muskets into the camera while wearing khaki shorts, à la The Great Train Robbery—but it all goes to shit once everybody gets to the hotel, when Gamby catches the kids engaged in the time-honored field-trip tradition of surreptitiously drinking stolen booze and making out. Gamby screams, "What wine pairs with ten days ISS? A zinfandel? A fucking shiraz???" at the kids before realizing that two of the students are missing. Turns out the teachers were having a party of their own and hadn't been minding the kids, leading to the whole hullabaloo in the first place. As the teachers helplessly look to the racist, misogynist, mean-spirited bully to lead them out of the mess they've found themselves in, you can almost imagine Neil Gamby repeating Trump's mantra, "I alone can fix it."

Follow Drew Millard on Twitter.

Images by GreggMP via Flickr

"Dane Hansen, who operates a small steel business in Pleasant Grove, Utah, says that throughout his 11-year marriage, 15 pairs of cargo shorts have slowly disappeared from his closet. On the occasions when he has confronted his wife about the missing shorts, she will either admit to throwing them away or deflect confrontation by saying things like, 'Honey, you just need a little help.'"

OK, so this is in the Wall Street Journal. It is the best newspaper article of the year or possibly ever, and I am only on the first paragraph. There is so much to love about the passive-aggressiveness of 1) A husband buying 15 pairs (15 pairs!) of cargo shorts, 2) A wife throwing them out behind his back, and 3) This bizarre cycle continuing for more than a decade. So you knew that your wife was throwing your cargo shorts out because she hated them so much? And you kept buying them? Also what is a "small steel business" because I am a coastal elite and cannot really picture that?

"Relationships around the country are being tested by cargo shorts, loosely cut shorts with large pockets sewn onto the sides."

This is a good description of cargo shorts that nonetheless falls short of capturing the garment's soul. It's not just that they are baggy and sort of shapeless, it's not just that there's nothing less suave than digging your wallet/phone out of a pocket on your leg, it's that cargo shorts have been known for years to be empirically ugly, yet men—only men, these things are the most male clothing item since the codpiece—insist on wearing them. Normal pants have four pockets. When do you need more pockets than that? How many hybrid multitools are you dads carrying around at once?

"Fashion historians believe cargo pants were introduced around the 1940s for military use. In the U.S. Air Force, narrow cockpits meant pilots needed pockets in the front of their uniforms to access supplies during flight. British soldiers climbing or hiding in high places found pockets on cargo pants more effective than utility belts for storing ammunition."

Well, now I feel bad for insulting the shorts that helped beat Hitler. Sorry, everyone.

"They exploded into mass fashion in the mid-to-late 1990s... The pockets filled a utilitarian need as cellphones became ubiquitous."

What? This is insane. It can be annoying to carry a phone around when you're a woman whose clothing doesn't have pockets (thanks a lot patriarchy... not!) and have to put your phone in a bag you then have to dig through when it buzzes—but men? We have, as discussed, four pockets on your standard-issue, non-Hitler-defeating pants: one for your keys, one for your wallet, one for your phone, and one freestyle pocket for gum/a pen (really this can share a pocket with other stuff)/drugs/headphones (if you don't keep them wrapped around your phone)/loose change/condoms/a pad of paper/a gaming device/a Swiss Army knife/a small book (you can do this with your bigger back pockets). WHAT DO YOU NEED THOSE EXTRA POCKETS FOR?

"'Those teenagers are now married, and they don't get rid of their clothes. They don't evolve,' said Joseph Hancock, a design and merchandising professor at Drexel University's designer merchandising program, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis about cargo pants."

That is one hell of a thesis. When he says "teenagers," he means "male teenagers," of course, and probably "straight male teenagers." His thesis, by the way, is more than 300 pages long.

"Many upscale golf courses have banned cargo shorts in recent years."

That upscale golf courses—where dudes dress like this—are used as a barometer of fashion is a clue you are reading the Wall Street Journal.

"In 2012, Michael Jordan was playing golf in cargo shorts at a Miami country club when he was asked to change his pants, according to news reports at the time. He reportedly refused and left. His agent released a statement afterward saying Mr. Jordan had previously worn cargo pants at the club without incident."

I would watch an HBO series about the way the dynamics of race, class, celebrity, and Jordan's own personality played out during this incident.

"Jen Anderson, a 45-year-old freelance writer in Brooklyn... said she doesn't like the idea of being seen in public with her husband when he's wearing cargo shorts, which make him look like 'a misshapen lump.'"

"'It's a reflection on me, like, "How did she let him out the door like that?"' she said."

I feel like the trope of women telling their husbands how to dress is sort of tired and sexist? But I guess someone has to tell these dudes how to dress if they're wearing cargo shorts? I have no idea what the feminist perspective is here, please let me know.

"Despite persistent comments from his wife whenever he wears cargo shorts, said he's past the point of worrying about whether his clothes are fashionable, especially with his two young children who are always stuffing his cargo shorts pockets. The pockets function for men like purses do for women, he said."

OK, wait, yes, if you have young children who are constantly giving you... shells? Gerber jars? What do children stuff your pockets with? In that case, it makes sense. If you have young children, you can wear anything you like.

"Sales of cargo shorts have fallen over the past year for the first time in a decade, according to market-research firm NPD Group. Still, it says retailers sell more than $700 million worth of cargo shorts every year in the US."

Every time I read a figure like this, I am just boggled. What does $700 million worth of cargo shorts look like? What does $700 million of anything look like? How big and terrifying and wonderful is the world?

"At Wal-Mart, a pair can be bought for $8.50, while Neiman Marcus sells linen cargo shorts for $995 a pair."

This sentence is the most succinct description of America I have ever read.

" who often works from home, seizes opportunities when his wife is away at work to wear his cargo shorts. 'Every time I put them on, I am conscious of the fact that I am now being disobedient in my marriage,' he said."

Out of context, that quote is definitely about some kind of fairly involved kink roleplay. Even in context, well, look, if someone wants to be punished for wearing cargo pants that is his business as a consenting adult.

"There is some good news for cargo shorts advocates."

I am picturing rallies where thousands of dads assemble, their legs swaddled in piles of khaki and denim, demanding that their wives stop throwing their clothes out because they look like garbage.

"Style experts say the cyclical nature of mass fashion means cargo pants will almost certainly become trendy again. 'Everything will return,' said Dr. Hancock, the design and merchandising professor. 'I don't think cargo is ever going to go away.'"

In the Hindu cosmological tradition, the world goes through cycles called Maha Yugas, each of which lasts about 4.32 million human years. At the tail end of each Kali Yuga (the last stretch of the cycle), according to the Mahabharata, "Men with false reputation of learning will contract Truth and the old will betray the senselessness of the young, and the young will betray the dotage of the old. And cowards will have the reputation of bravery and the brave will be cheerless like cowards. And towards the end of the Yuga men will cease to trust one another. And full of avarice and folly the whole world will have but one kind of food. And sin will increase and prosper, while virtue will fade and cease to flourish."

So that is bad! But then the cycle we are in comes to an end, and at the beginning of the new cycle, everything is nice and everyone is extremely tall and lives an extremely long time. Over the next 4.32 million years people get shorter and die faster and everything basically goes to shit again, then is reborn. This happens 1,000 times—so 4.32 billion years—and that's just a single day in the life of the creator of the universe, Brahma. When that day ends, all life on the world is wiped out and the planet is made uninhabitable for another 4.32 billion years—that's Brahman's night. He lives for 100 years of 360 days and nights each, 311,040,000,000,000 human years if you're counting. After that, the universe is destroyed as the supreme being, Vishnu, exhales. Until then, no, I don't think cargo is going to go away.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

All photos courtesy Mike Pinkney and Michael Reich

As of this month, the last manufacturer producing VCRs will halt production on the players: The age of "be kind, rewind" is officially dead. While many of us have long abandoned the old format, there remains an active community of video artists who still use VHS for its portability and nostalgic imperfections. Among them is Michael Reich, a videographer who has long relied on the format for making music videos and for his project Videothing, which documents LA's underground punk scene. Along with his friend and frequent collaborator Mike Pinkney, the pair immortalized their love for the medium in their first film, She's Allergic to Cats.

All photos by Lauren Duca

The basement of James Donofrio's funeral home in Coney Island contains a veritable cemetery of paperwork. There's a heft of permits and certificates that come with the process of mourning, and Donofrio has about 15 feet of filing cabinets dedicated to the bureaucracy of death. The lives of tens of thousands of people are tucked away in his collection of now-discolored folders—though the poetic significance is perhaps lessened by the closet next door, which contains boxes of ashes dating back to the 60s—decades before he came to own the place in 1988.

It's strange how the remains of loved ones come to be left behind; in a recent case, a brother thought his sister had the ashes, and the sister thought the same. Donofrio is legally obligated to store the remains for only 180 days—but he holds onto them anyway, diligently sending certified letters to every contact twice a year.

"I could bury them—I could do a lot of things with them," he says. "But I keep them in case someone calls me and says, 'Hey, where's my mother?'" He says this with a shrug, the physical manifestation of the response, "What can you do?" There's an obvious intensity that comes with being the sole chaperone of the last remaining physical evidence of a person's existence, but Donofrio has managed it every day of the week since he was a young man. He has to.

He believes there is some sort of afterlife or existence—that you ought to treat people well in life, because "you're going to see them all in death." For this and other professional reasons, Donofrio " do right by everyone I work with. That's what I'd hope for myself, and what I want for my staff. I want everyone that I deal with to be treated as I would want to be treated."

At 57, Donofrio has an old-school-Italian way about him, in which he simultaneously is conversational and abrupt. He asks questions before cutting off the answer with another question; he calls people in his car and says, "Alright, goodbye" less than a minute later. He has a round face and a round belly, and when we meet at 7:30 in the morning on a sunny July day, he wears a loose white undershirt and a gold chain while finishing some permit work. Later, he'll change into a suit, and throughout the day—which includes two funerals before lunch—the suit comes to represent the many different types of jobs he takes on.

Many of his tasks are administrative, although a few weeks ago he had to help dig a grave; a few times a week, he retrieves and embalms bodies. "Mortician" is an outdated term—in part because "funeral director" has replaced it, a title that requires being intimately aware of the rules and regulations that dictate how the dead must be laid to rest.

James Donofrio, getting ready for a busy day burying the dead

Much of Donofrio's work includes doling out his encyclopedic knowledge of the process. Dying is the most obvious intersection of church and state, with a series of laws and beliefs jumbling together into an overwhelming venn diagram of to-do lists and requirements—like whether the details of a crime make the victim's family eligible for compensation, or how bodies are shipped to Mexico. If he's shipping overseas, as is often the case, things get more complicated; right now he's in the middle of dealing with the consulate of Khuzestan, who apparently has no idea how to handle foreign remains.

"That's Mrs. ," he says, nodding to the gray coffin in the back of his Chrysler. "She's getting a gypsy funeral later." In Donofrio's early days in the industry, "gypsy funeral" meant there was music, catering, even sometimes a bar at the viewing and cemetery. Sometimes the family would roast an entire pig in the parking lot of the funeral home. There won't be much of that today, though. "These are some broke gypsies," he explains.

Before that, we're headed to Hebrew Free Burial, a nonprofit association that provides funerals for indigent Jewish people. Donofrio is the funeral director for the Staten Island wing, and he has to clean the tahara room at the cemetery, where he ritually prepared the body of the 88-year-old woman named Vivienne who is about to be buried.

"Listen, I'm a Catholic, but I deal with every religion," he says. "I deal with Jewish people, Muslims, and Buddhists, and I have to know more than basic information about all these religions."

Driving up to the cemetery, he's greeted by the staff rabbi, who's wearing a straw hat and looks more prepared for a day of gardening than a somber religious ceremony—though the emphatically "green" nature of Jewish funerals makes that oddly apt attire. (Jewish bodies are not embalmed; they're clothed in linen with caskets made of wood to facilitate a return to the Earth uninterrupted by chemicals.)

Before the funeral, Donofrio has to wash down the mikveh, a bath used for immersion in many Jewish rituals, and here for cleansing the dead. Splashing bleach on the rectangular, sort of coffin-shaped marble tub, he turns to me and grimaces, "You see why I'm not wearing a suit?"

When Donofrio changes later for the actual funeral, the rabbi sees him all dressed up and giggles. "Superman," the rabbi says to me, as if making an introduction. "Clark Kent!"

Vivienne appears to have no family, but a friend named Sonia is there to eulogize her. The two met in the 90s through Vivienne's work with rare birds—she was a wildlife rehab expert, who often kept ailing fowl in her Midtown apartment. Sonia is calm and well-spoken, only tearing up once the coffin is lowered into the ground. Besides Donofrio, the rabbi, and a friend Sonia has brought along for support, there are a group of older Jewish men who volunteer at Hebrew Free simply by being present at the service. Together they are known as a minyan, or a group of at least 10 Jewish men over the age of 13, whose presence is required for public worship.

Sonia eulogizes her friend Vivienne at a Jewish burial.

"My mother is the only Spanish-speaking person in her area of Williamsburg," Sonia says to the makeshift congregation, toying with the Puerto Rican flag bracelet on her wrist. "She keeps busy helping orthodox Jews turn on lights or open doors ... I want to thank your religion and your culture for everything.

"This is exactly what Vivienne would have wanted," she continues. "She cared so much about the birds, about nature." With that, a flurry of chirping sounds from a nearby tree. The rabbi points and smiles.

Dying is the most obvious intersection of church and state, with a series of laws and beliefs jumbling together into an overwhelming venn diagram of to-do lists

Donofrio has been working in funeral homes since he was 12 years old, when he was mostly helping clean up the Galgano Funeral Home near his parents' house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. By 16, he was taking on more responsibilities; after he graduated from high school, it only made sense for him to go to Mcallister Institute of Funeral Services after two years studying liberal arts at Kingsborough Community College.

After graduating, Donofrio took the New York State test to be certified as a funeral director. He worked an internship after passing and was hired by Pyramid Trade Services, a company that removes and embalms bodies employed by funeral homes in need of extra help. Eventually, he co-bought the business he now independently owns, Blair-Mazzarella Funeral Home. He has a staff of three who help with the day-to-day tasks, as well as a series of per diem employees that includes a Russian interpreter, a Chinese interpreter, and a woman who does hair and makeup on the bodies. Still, there's a bulk of the business for which Donofrio can't quite delegate. After a lifetime in the industry, he has a level of expertise that just can't be taught.

On the way over to the second funeral of the morning, there are a lot more phone calls, including preparations for a woman living out her final days in hospice.

There's a level of desensitization you experience when you deal with death every day. Donofrio isn't callous, though—he's professional. Things can be hard, like the time he got a call from a family while their daughter's murder was airing on the nightly news, or a funeral from a few years ago when he had to hire security to keep out a woman's husband because he was suspected of killing her. He avoids the most painful elements of his day-to-day life by keeping busy; still, when speaking about death, there's an unmistakable sting in his voice that betrays a lack of numbness.

Ironically, Donofrio won't be having a funeral, and he doesn't think about it much. "I'd like to be cremated," he says without hesitation when asked. "But I haven't gotten around to buying one of the niches at Regina Pacis." That's a basilica with a columbarium in Bensonhurst, one that he is very proud to have helped plan, especially since he's been parishioner since he was a kid.

"I'm on the board there," he adds, his tone suddenly swatting away the severity again. "But I don't get a discount, you know. Not even one dollar."

Follow Lauren Duca on Twitter.

Photo by CP/Linda Givetash

First Nations in British Columbia are calling the approval of permits for a massive new dam that will flood their land "an absolute betrayal" by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Abu Qaswara in a Jabhat al-Nusra van filled with explosives

Today sees the release of a new documentary about men who want to blow themselves up. Journalist Paul Refsdal's Dugma: The Button shadows a group of fighters from the Syria-based, al Qaeda–affiliated group al-Nusra Front. These men have all added their names to the so-called martyr list and are waiting to be deployed with bomb-laden trucks in their battle against Assad's regime. Once they get to the front line, they'll press the button and hitch a ride to paradise.

Through Refsdal's camera, we get an unfettered insight into the mindset of these men as they teeter on the cusp of sweet immortality. Central among them are Abu Qaswara, a joker from Saudi Arabia with a love of fried chicken, and Abu Basir, a principled British jihadi who wants to fall in love and have a family.

Last Friday, al-Nusra Front leader Abu Mohammed announced that the group is cutting its ties with al Qaeda and changing its name to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham. Seemingly an attempt to legitimatize its operation in the eyes of the West, its battles continue on the ground regardless, and its ultimate aims—defeat of Assad, control of Syria—remain unchanged.

Ahead of its release, Refsdal—whose previous work includes the documentary Behind the Taliban Mask—Skyped me from his home in Norway to chat about martyrs, humanity, kidnapping, and gaining the trust of al Qaeda.

VICE: What made you want to make this film? Were you trying to humanize the martyrs-to-be?
Paul Refsdal: The subject of the bombers wasn't even my intention when I first got there. I just wanted to make a portrait of a group of low level al-Nusra fighters. I wanted to follow them for as long as possible and get some kind of grasp of their psychology. So in a way the answer to the question is yes, but I went in with an open mind. If they were to do, say, executions in front of me, I wouldn't have had any problems showing that. I didn't want it to be Sesame Street or something.

How did you go about gaining access?
It was like any job application, really. I had released a documentary about the Taliban in 2010, called Behind the Taliban Mask. In that I presented a more humane side to the Taliban, so of course I mentioned that. I gave references, like a CV. I was also helped by the fact that when the US special forces killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011 they found a lot of letters in his compound. One of those letters was from an al Qaeda media officer and listed some recommended journalists. I was on that.

Did al-Nusra ever put you under any pressure regarding the content of the film?
Not at all. They said, "Do what you want to do." They wanted it to be objective. For instance, there's a scene in the film where the coalition bombs the area near us, and an angry man is shouting, saying they are only bombing civilian houses. But there's a man correcting him, saying, "Please tell the truth," because it was also a military base. That man was a commander from al-Nusra. They could have had the chance to make some propaganda, but they didn't want to do it. I think they just wanted to be honest.

Abu Qaswara

What attracted you to your main subject, Abu Qaswara?
He was exactly the opposite of the stereotype of bomber you would expect. I thought they would be a young person with little idea of life outside his town, and maybe narrow-minded. But he's totally different. He's from Saudi Arabia, very generous and a nice guy.

One of the most moving parts of the film is when Abu Qaswara reveals that his father will be on the phone to him when he's in the truck.
The thing you might not understand is that his father is pushing a lot. I've heard that's quite common among the Saudis. As a martyr, you reach the highest level of paradise, but you can also ask to bring 70 members of your family. Sometimes the family designate a son to save the family in the afterlife. It's not said outright in the film, but indicated... his father wanted to be on the phone at the time of explosion. He sent him a message saying, "When are you going to die?" So I think his father is pushing him. I'm not so sure he really wanted to do it.

Not to give too much away, but things don't quite go to plan. Do you think Abu Qaswara is happy the way things worked out?
I got a WhatsApp message from him yesterday. I just told him to stay safe, and he said he would be safe as long as there were chickens in the world. He loves fried chicken.

Abu Basir al-Britani

What about the British guy, Abu Basir al-Britani? Did he lose the respect of his brothers by deciding to come off the list?
Well, it was hard for Abu Basir because he'd told me his highest dream was to complete a martyrdom operation, but I don't think there was a problem because it was normal to change your mind. And it's always part of a bigger operation anyway; they send in the truck with the bomber, he blows it up on the front line, makes a hole, and the main force attacks through that hole. But they always have backup in case the first bomber changes his mind. There are a lot of people on the list, so I don't think there's any stigma for him.

How would you compare your experience with al-Nusra to filming the Taliban for Behind the Taliban Mask?
Oh, it's much easier with al-Nusra—not just because of the language, but the cultural understanding. There are people there who have lived in Gulf states, with university degrees. It was very easy to communicate. In Afghanistan, most of them aren't literate. They didn't have any clue of the risk involved. They were men who may not have ever been out of their own valley—so it's quite different.

Plus, the Taliban kidnapped you while you were making that film.
It was the kind of thing that happens there. The commander wanted to re-marry, so he needed money, so he thought he could just capture this journalist. It was absurd in a way.

You were were kidnapped for a week. Where were you kept?
I was just in a family home with an old man and his sons. I could go out of the compound to the toilet at night, but the translator said if we escaped the kidnappers would punish the family. If I wrote it all as a script people wouldn't believe me. I was handed a loaded Kalashnikov because they were worried another jihadi group would take me. They didn't have enough credit on their mobile phones. In the end, I was the one who managed to call the Norwegian embassy. They tried but didn't get past the switchboard. So I called it and was speaking in Norwegian with the security officer in the embassy and was explaining where the place was, how many people there were and everything. It was like Monty Python's Flying Circus. But that's Afghanistan.

Follow David Hillier on Twitter.

DUGMA: THE BUTTON is available on iTunes worldwide August 2.

Alejandro Vivar, pictured on the left, was the victim of a shooting on Saturday morning (photo via Instagram). The suspect in the shooting (right) is pictured during the fitness class (photo via Toronto Police)

A man at an outdoor fitness class in Toronto's Christie Pits Park allegedly shot the instructor—a former gang member—in what the victim's lawyer is calling a targeted attack. Alejandro (Jose) Vivar, who, according to a witness, was shot four or five times, had been teaching a prison-themed boot camp Saturday morning that was part of the fitness business he'd created after being released from jail.

After offering the country peak Obama with a fiery speech at the Democratic National Convention last week, the outgoing president came out swinging again Tuesday, telling the press Donald Trump is "woefully unprepared" to be America's next commander in chief, as the New York Times reports.

"I think that the Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president. I said so last week, and he keeps on proving it," Obama said at a White House press conference, apparently in response to Trump's ugly, ongoing feud with Muslim parents of slain American soldier Humayun Khan.

Obama also dropped a pretty heavy dose of common sense on Republicans who have criticized Trump but continue to support him.

"If you are repeatedly having to say in very strong terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?" Obama asked reporters. "This isn't a situation where you have an episodic gaffe. This is daily. There has to be a point at which you say, this is not somebody I can support for president of the United States, even if he purports to be a member of my party. The fact that that has not yet happened makes some of these denunciations ring hollow."

Obama's words seemed to have rung true for at least one prominent Republican: Congressman Richard Hannah of New York announced Monday that he will not be supporting Trump in November and instead plans to vote for Hillary Clinton.

On Tuesday afternoon, perhaps by way of retaliation, Trump issued another broadside on Facebook that began, "Obama-Clinton have single-handedly destabilized the Middle East, handed Iraq, Libya and Syria to ISIS, and allowed our personnel to be slaughtered at Benghazi."

Read: How Barack Obama Stole the Democratic Convention from Hillary Clinton

Somebody's got to do it. All photos via the author.

Don Weir is in the bedroom sweating in a HazMat suit, metal scraper in hand, chiselling away at dried hunks of brain and skull plastered to the ceiling and walls.

Illustration by Sarah MacReading

John Doe was a student at George Mason University (GMU) when he met Jane Roe, a woman with whom he formed a BDSM-based sexual relationship that culminated in an assault on or around October 27, 2013. Roe, who played the submissive role, alleged in court documents (where both were assigned anonymous monikers) that on that day she pushed Doe away and did not want to continue. But he did—because, he alleges, she didn't use their safe word.

This March, the Virginia federal court in which Doe v. Rector & Visitors of George Mason University was heard made a historic leap in American case law as it relates to sex: They ruled that there is no constitutional right to engage in BDSM play in America. While no US laws currently criminalize BDSM, it's still a crime to harm others, regardless of whether they consent. It's a puzzle that places acts of BDSM in legal limbo—how do you legislate and define consensual, safe practices that are designed to sometimes look nonconsensual and dangerous?

It's not a completely unfamiliar problem for state legislatures, which have all had to legislate forms of consensual harm, such as tattoos, piercings, medical treatments, and organized sports. When the political will is there, laws can be made to allow for such liberties while keeping people protected by the state. The time has come, say BDSM experts, for our nation to explicitly legalize BDSM, rather than let it wither in the legal gray area where it currently sits.

The Virginia decision, it should be noted, merely concluded that states have the constitutional right to criminalize BDSM and didn't rule as to the morality of the practice or explicitly criminalize BDSM itself. Through the ruling, Virginia said that if a particular state or public entity (like GMU) believes it has an interest in preventing BDSM activity or passing laws that criminalize the practice, they can, and those prosecuted now have no legal recourse.

The idea that one cannot consent to harm is a basic principle of common law that has existed for centuries. Some believe we should abandon this principle in turn and enshrine consent as the guiding ideology of our legal framework instead. We let grown-ups do what they want—if a competent adult wants to be harmed, what business does the state have telling her otherwise?

It's not so simple. The consent to harm principle stands for good reason—because the law exists to preserve the public peace, not just to protect us from one another. We all have an interest in preventing people from settling their disputes by fighting and dueling. Equally important is that laws against consensual harm provide vital protection for domestic violence victims, who often tell police that they don't mind such abuse. Prosecutors need to be able to bring charges against abusers even when victims don't cooperate.

This might seem like a non-issue, because people are rarely prosecuted for engaging in BDSM, and police generally enjoy a strong relationship with the kink community. "The majority of run-ins and police have been minor and positive," Coreen Grace, a marriage and family therapy professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and 20-year BDSM scene veteran, told VICE. In general, she continued, the BDSM scene has taken it upon itself to educate law enforcement bodies as to the ins-and-outs of their subculture.

"Since 1997, we've really transformed the way the police department treats us," Susan Wright, spokesperson for the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF), told VICE.

But the legal right to engage in BDSM is still necessary for several reasons. First, BDSM players are frequent targets of discrimination. Because their behavior is not a recognized right, they have no legal recourse for the rare instances in which they are targeted for their lifestyle. Employers are free to fire people for being kinky, and BDSM activity can, and often does, become an issue in custody battles, where it can cause players to be deemed unfit to parent. A 2008 survey by the NCSF reported that a quarter of kinksters have suffered discrimination due to their proclivities. The NCSF offers legal assistance to BDSM players who face legal discrimination; Wright says that the number who have sought their help has dropped significantly over the past few years, but discrimination does continue.

Though statutes against gay sex were at one point rarely enforced, they legitimized homophobia and officially condemned homosexuality. By failing to recognize a public right to engage in BDSM, we condone the idea that kinksters are not normal.

As the law stands, if something non-consensual happens during BDSM play, victims may face trouble in getting prosecutors to press charges. And charges which manage to be successfully brought to court today are often tried under standard assault law rather than as sexual assault—and victims who seek justice under the former lack key protections offered to those who do so under the latter. Legal clarity on BDSM practice would also help in the prosecution of domestic abusers, who sometimes claim that their behavior was part of consensual play, by helping to legally distinguish genuine BDSM practice from sexual abuse.

It's worth noting that legal BDSM recognition could help reverse the social stigma against kinky sex as well. It's no secret that many try BDSM at some point in their lives; according to the 2005 Durex Global Sex Survey, 36 percent of US adults have experimented with some form of bondage, and that was before the 2011 release of Fifty Shades of Grey. Yet many still consider BDSM strange or embarrassing. "While awareness is increasing and acceptance is too, is still very taboo," said Ruth Neustifter, a relationship therapy professor at the University of Guelph and active BDSM player. "It frightens many people, and it's far from their conception of what's normal."

Our laws serve as a ledger of our shared social values. Though statutes against gay sex were at one point rarely enforced, they legitimized homophobia and officially condemned homosexuality. By failing to recognize a public right to engage in BDSM, we condone the idea that kinksters are not normal. Explicitly recognizing their legal rights would signal that our society accepts kinky sex and recognizes its practice as a legitimate sexual identity. It would serve to manifest the promise of Lawrence v. Texas, a ruling meant not only to grant adults true sexual freedom but to ennoble their personhood as sexual beings. Sex is an intimate, inextricable part of our identity. If American legislators are willing to grant gays and lesbians recognition for their identity, it only follows that they should do the same for kinksters and grant them the liberties they deserve.

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.

"Snitches get pickets" read one homemade sign in the drizzle. It was as good a three-word summary as you could hope for of the latest terrible chapter in the history of rainy fascism island.

Filling the pavement and most of a busy London arterial road in the middle of rush hour, several hundred people turned up outside Byron's Holborn restaurant on Monday to protest against the company's involvement in an immigration sting that led to the immediate arrest and deportation of a substantial number of their own employees—apparently on the instruction of the Home Office.

On July 4, immigration raids at numerous Byron premises led to scores of arrests, and 35 members of staff were deported back to countries including Brazil, Nepal, Egypt, and Albania, with the "full co-operation" of the gourmet burger chain, according to the Home Office. It was to be a fortnight before the Spanish-language newspaper El Ibérico broke the story, sparking a huge public outcry during the last week. According to the paper, another 150 members of staff are now in hiding.

After skirmishes over the weekend, the first substantial #BoycottByron protest achieved one picketing victory before it even began—the Holborn branch was shut down hours beforehand (a sign cited, with impressive vagueness, "technical reasons"). Holding signs reading "No human is illegal" and "Bun down Babyron," protesters braved the depressing summer weather to chant catchy slogans like "How do you like your burgers? Without deportations" and listen to (anonymous) testimonies from Byron employees and the numerous groups that had called the demonstration.

Alex from Dissidents wasted no time in addressing some of those who had defended the burger chain as an innocent party, with no choice but to follow Home Office rules: "I just want to speak to the people who have been saying, 'But it's the law.' It's quite simple, really: The law doesn't say, 'Rally your workers in the building, under the guise of fake training, lock the doors, and call immigration enforcement,'" she said, to the loudest cheers of the day.

"The other thing is when people say, 'But it's the law,' it's important to remember that some laws need to be changed—and the Immigration Act needs to be changed. The Immigration Act was put in place when Theresa May decided that they needed to create what she called a 'hostile environment' for so-called illegal migrants. That hostile environment means that it's almost impossible for people to work, it's almost impossible for people to rent, to go to the doctors, and just live a decent, dignified life—and that's something we need to talk about: It might be legal, what happened at Byron, but it doesn't make it right."

One Byron waiter who witnessed the raids on kitchen staff in her restaurant was left in tears. She arrived at work halfway through the sting, set up by bosses as a bogus morning meeting: "I realized what was actually happening after about ten minutes of being there and got really upset and was told by the area manager to start opening the restaurant. I tried but was having, I think, a mild panic attack," she said, emphasizing how hard her deported colleagues had worked, many of them doing over 50-hour weeks for the minimum wage, in some cases for several years.

"I was so appalled that the area manager, directors, and all those at head office would do this to these guys, all to avoid a fine because they didn't have the proper procedures in place to check their ID in the first place," she said. "They were fed to the lions."

Larry

For 22-year-old legal-aid caseworker Larry, the Byron raids were the tip of an iceberg we are just beginning to realize is, in fact, an iceberg. "I just feel it's totally outrageous—the whole 'hostile environment' project is just encouraging fear and aggression and racism," he said. "It's so clear in the results of the referendum and the aftermath of that. This is just one example, and we're all really angry about it, but given the direction Theresa May wants to go in—immigration raids in employment, through landlords—this kind of stuff is going to become more frequent, and it's terrifying to think it might become normalized."

A spokesperson for the organizers of the protest emphasized the "horrifying impact" of the raids on families left behind, adding: "There is no evidence whatsoever to prove that this government's 'hostile environment' is achieving its purpose (to limit migration to this country), but instead it's forcing already vulnerable migrant communities into further exploitation at the hands of employers, landlords, and so on."

Byron's apparent cynicism seems to have caught the public's attention, but what should Byron have done in the circumstances? According to the spokesperson: "They should support their workers with insecure immigration status, helping them to apply to regularize their status—they have a duty to do this as they reap so much profit from these vulnerable, exploited workers."

One week after the raids took place, a little-noticed story ran in the business press pointing to the current health and future expansion of the company: Byron has just secured an approximately $16 million fund, provided jointly by Santander and RBS, to expand from the 65 restaurants it currently has nationally to 100, over the next three years. In a sense, the immigration uproar has come at the worst possible time for the company.

Hosting a noisy, disruptive protest—not to mention the massed ranks of press, radio, and TV—in a prime central London location, outside a closed restaurant, is pretty terrible PR, perhaps especially so for a business that trades on an aesthetic of carefully modeled ruin-porn authento-hipsterism. And the scrutiny may intensify. Yesterday, CorporateWatch published research accusing Byron's owners of "siphoning millions of pounds offshore"; investment fund Hutton Collins bought the chain for about $130 million in 2013 and is taking advantage of a new scheme "helping the owners move their earnings from the burger chain into tax havens."

Defenders of Byron will continue to argue that the company was "just obeying the law," but they will struggle to convince everyone that the situation is as simple as all that.

Follow Dan Hancox on Twitter.

Follow Chris Bethell on Twitter.

Lia Kantrowitz

We all know what we're supposed to do about food. Eat more fruits and vegetables, less red meat, fewer sweets, drink less beer, yadda yadda. The advice, of course, sounds specifically designed to make life less pleasurable, if longer. And yet: Two recent studies suggest that going ultra virtuous in the diet department actually made people feel happier.

A study published this month in the American Journal of Public Health looked at the impact of fruit and vegetable consumption on happiness and found that with more produce, apparently, comes more joy. Researchers tracked more than 12,000 people over the course of several years, via food diaries and regular psychological check-ins. Lo and behold, people got incrementally happier with every serving of fruit and veg they ate, up to eight a day. This study didn't look at why the Prozac-like effect, but the lead author was willing to hazard a guess: "In the long run," study author Andrew Oswald, a behavioral economist at the University of Warwick in the UK, told VICE, "I reckon we will discover that it is all because of folate, carotene, and the micro-organisms that make up our gastrointestinal tract."

Indeed, at least one study has suggested that there's a connection between higher blood levels of carotenoids, a type of antioxidant that's plentiful in fruit and vegetables, and an increase in optimism. And recent research has established some interesting links between mental health and the bacteria residing in our guts, which secrete chemicals like serotonin and dopamine—the very same neurotransmitters that regulate mood in our brains. One small study out of Norway, for instance, found a link between certain bacteria in feces (which, of course, is directly linked to the foods we eat) and levels of depression.

The more advanced version of achieving happiness through food involves simply eating less of it: A recent study in JAMA Internal Medicine reports that when 100-odd men and women ate 25 percent fewer calories than normal for two years (with regular nutrition consultations to keep them on track), they reported getting better sleep after the first year compared to the people in a control group. After two years of dieting, the dieting group had improved moods, better sex drives, and better overall health. Which could be related to the fact that they also lost 17 pounds, while the non-dieters didn't lose much of anything.

Of course, there's not much that's worse than sustained caloric deprivation, so your commitment to happiness would have to be pretty high to eat 25 percent less food all the time. Oswald, of the fruit and vegetable study, has the right idea: "In the short run," he said, "my advice is simpler. Just eat up as many fruit and veg as you can and lie back and enjoy your life."