Photo via Flickr user Matt Mangum

"I'm not a prostitute," my friend Cara told me from across the table. "But I did go on a date. For money."

Two strong drinks into happy hour, Cara explained that a mixture of sexual frustration, boredom, and earning potential led her to create a profile for herself on a prominent sugar daddy website she'd read about in the New York Times. Cara was considering offers from all over the country, but she had her first date the week before with a Los Angeles–based real estate developer who slipped her a crisp envelope of hundreds after they kissed goodbye.

"I'm not a prostitute, right?" she later asked nervously sipping her whiskey sour. "We didn't have sex or anything. I mean, I wouldn't." She looked into my eyes, pleading for assurance that she wasn't disgusting—or worse, a prostitute.

What Cara didn't know was that almost ten years ago, I had been a sex worker myself.

In the early 2000s, I worked a phone sex line for pretty much the same reasons Cara joined the sugar daddy website: I needed money, I was bored, and I was curious. After installing a cheap landline and completing a 25-minute "orientation" with my supervisor, I went into field to make some money. And I did. I continued working the phone sex line until I got my first teaching assistant job (which, depressingly, paid about half what phone sex did).

I don't regret it, and I doubt I ever will. I used to brag that I got people off all over the world, but it was much more than that: I talked to them, became their friend, lifted their spirits, and helped them unpack complex personal situations. I learned how to simulate the sound of a wet pussy (lotion in a fist) and how to convincingly describe my role in a courtly Elizabeth gangbang to the guy who yelled over the phone that he was going to murder me before he fucked me. Being a sex worker put me in touch with such a wide range of human circumstance than anything else had up until that point.

Sitting in front of Cara, I wondered what my 22-year-old self, still working as a phone sex operator, would say to her. I wondered what a prostitute, a porn star, a cam girl, or a stripper would say to the woman who had, for all intents and purposes, joined their ranks. Was her version of sex work "better" or "worse" than theirs? Was it sex work at all?

Related: What It's Like to Date as a Sex Worker

Throughout the next couple of months, I interviewed more than 30 friends, acquaintances, and researchers involved in the sex industry about their perspective on a "hierarchy of sex work," if one even existed. The more people I talked to, the more I realized that there wasn't one consistent metric to decide which jobs in the industry were "better" than others. But there was a pervasive sense that some jobs were "worse," and many sex workers looked down on others with "lesser" jobs.

This hierarchy wasn't based on money. If anything, the highest earners were often looked down upon as the least valued part of the community. It wasn't fame, either, now that anyone can film their own porn on their iPhone. Instead, industry professionals told me they thought about their jobs as existing on two hierarchies—one organized by the degree of physical contact with clients, and the other by how enjoyable they were.

Watch: Broadly travels to Spain to see what happens when sex work goes unregulated.

Melinda Chateauvert, author of Sex Workers Unite!and self-described "whorestorian," told me that many individuals choose to work as pro-dominatrixes or dancers "because they don't have sex, give blowjobs, or exchange body fluids. They feel superior to those who do. They use contact as a meter."

Many sex workers agreed that they were often judged by this metric. A few strippers told me they didn't think stripping was sex work at all, since they didn't have to touch any of their clients. Escort and porn actress Gina DePalma recounts seeing this hierarchy in action at a strip club in Las Vegas: "Dancers thought of prostitutes as lower than them and would look down their nose at dancers who left the club for money with clients," she told me. "I always was amused: They walked around naked for dollars and grinded on guys crotches for 20s; let guys finger them in the club, gave BJs and hand jobs. Yet some thought they were better than the call girl or stripper who goes to the guy's room."

This is underscored by the legal boundaries, which are more permissive toward no-contact activities (like stripping) than high-contact activities (like prostitution).

A cam girl, who asked that I not use her name, told me these views made their way into her romantic life. "I've had a lot of men tell me that they wouldn't be OK with me being in porn but that it's fine for me to work as a cam girl or stripper," she said. "Similarly, men frequently believe that prostitutes are filthy and desperate—but they praise porn stars. It's as though the computer screen shields them from the reality that they are both women who sell sex."

Related: Sex Workers Talk About the Lies They Tell Their Loved Ones

Other sex workers were less judgmental about physical contact and instead prioritized enjoyment of their work. Due to the incredible availability of free porn and a market flooded by a cheaper and cheaper product, few people are getting rich by getting people off. A porn producer, cam girl, and stripper (who asked to remain anonymous because they have day jobs outside the sex work industry) each told me that the people they admire most in their industry are those who "really love what they do" or are sex workers because "it's something they've always wanted to do."

"I love what I do," Hilary Holiday, a Minneapolis-based escort, told me. "I'm very choosy as to who I will spend time with and require copious amounts of respect. I turn most away. I make a good six-figure income and trade options with the savings I've built."

On the flip side, those who feel bound to sex work for financial reasons are often looked down upon. They're also less free to pursue other forms of work, and as a result, feel resentment toward their jobs.

Melissa Gira Grant, a former cam girl, has written at length about getting into sex work solely for the money, after struggling for years trying to become a writer, and then feeling trapped in the industry. I myself was conflicted about quitting my phone sex job to take a more "respectable" but much lower paying TA position.

Antonia Crane, who spent years working as a stripper and escort, emphasized that reducing stigma, shame, and industry divisiveness requires "working together instead of against one another, working against the very fabric of the system designed to pit us against each other. Which is to say: team up, bitches."

Back at the bar with Cara, my first instinct was to feel distance and shame from her judgmental rhetoric. Who was she to look down on other sex workers? But I knew I wouldn't get anywhere by recoiling. So instead, I bought us another round and started telling her my story.

Follow Rebecca Leib on Twitter.

In the column "How Scared Should I Be?" VICE staff writer and generalized anxiety disorder sufferer Mike Pearl seeks to quantify the scariness of everything under the sun. We hope it'll help you to more wisely allocate that most precious of natural resources: your fear.

If you look up at the night sky in the next couple of weeks, your odds are much better than usual of seeing a shooting star or two or seven. That's because we Earthlings are at a point in our annual trip around the sun that takes us through the debris field left by a comet called Swift-Tuttle, which was last seen in 1992. When chunks of that debris hit our atmosphere, they turn into a multi-week light show we call the Perseid Meteor Shower. This is going to be one of the most active Perseid showers in recent memory, making this the most wonderful time of year for your nerdy uncle who spent all that money on time-lapse photography gear.

But like many of the known objects whizzing around our solar system, Swift-Tuttle has a tiny, tiny chance of hitting Earth at some point. That makes the Perseid Meteor Shower a beautiful but horrifying reminder that a high-velocity space rock could take out our little Horton Hears a Who speck. And since its an inanimate object, it wouldn't even give a fuck.

Human extinction wouldn't even require a "Texas-sized" chunk, like the one that probably K.O.-ed the dinosaurs. In fact it's thought that something 60 miles across would probably be enough to extinct humanity, so an object about the size of Jamaica should more than do the trick. But even smaller meteors injure people, and might even kill them. So are collisions with objects from space such a serious danger that building Ned Flanders-style backyard shelters might actually be a rational move?

I took my anxieties to Paul Chodas, who manages NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Just like C-3PO, he told me the odds of a dangerous encounter with an asteroid, but unlike Han Solo, my spaceship (Earth) probably isn't at any real risk at all. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: I'm scared of meteors. Should I be?
Paul Chodas: The average person should not be concerned about being injured by asteroids and stuff from space in general because it's extremely unlikely and extremely rare that that sort of thing happened.

I read that a small meteorite killed someone earlier this year. Could that happen to me?
There was a lot of skepticism at the time because the crater that we had seen pictures of is more consistent with something exploding from the ground rather than something meteor impacting. That fatality is not confirmed to be from a meteorite.

Should I be more worried about something like the Chelyabinsk meteor that hit Russia in 2013?
That certainly was a meteor, and it certainly caused injuries; most of those injuries were from the shockwave and the broken glass, because many windows shattered from that impact. It was the shockwave that produced the hazard.

That meteor had the mass of the Eiffel Tower until it hit the atmosphere and started breaking up. Why was no one killed?
think we could divert them, given sufficient warning.

By sending an oil drilling crew, like in Armageddon?
No, we would send a smaller space craft to hit the asteroid as JPL (NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and NASA did for Deep Impact, the mission that hit the comet nucleus 10 years ago. So we have the technology to hit a small body in space and we could do that to a hazardous asteroid, given sufficient warning.

Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of Meteors?

1/5: IDGAF

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

(Image via Olympics.org)

Not sure how the whole drug testing thing is going to work out, but hey, anyway, good news for those who wanted it: skateboarding is now an Olympic sport!

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) voted unanimously on Thursday to include skateboarding in the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo. The Olympics will include both men's and women's park and street events, with a total of 80 skaters – 40 men and 40 women – competing in them.

The thinking was that skating would draw a young audience in. "We want to take sport to the youth," said IOC president Thomas Bach. "With the many options that young people have, we cannot expect any more that they will come automatically to us. We have to go to them."

(Image via Olympics.org)

Skateboarding is just one of five sports that have been added to the Olympic programme, alongside sport climbing, karate, baseball/softball and surfing.

While it's good news for the Olympic Committee, others – namely lots of skaters – aren't so happy about skateboarding's inclusion in the Games, citing the fact competitive skating is always kind of lame and not really keeping in the spirit of what the sport's "supposed" to be about.

"Skateboarding was cool because it was something different," said one commenter on an article on The Ride Channel. "Skateboarding just took one more step towards being a lot like gymnastics or figure skating. Damn it," said another.

But the decision still has its champions: International Skateboarding Federation president Gary Ream said: "I've always believed that if skateboarding was properly protected and supported, its appearance on the Olympic stage could change the world."

So there you go; the 2020 Summer Olympics will take place in Tokyo from the 24th of July to the 9th of August, so make sure to tune in to see exactly how the world is affected.

More on skating:

Montreal's Dime Crew

A Look at Alasdair McClellan's Book About Palace Skateboards

Photos of Nepal's Post-Earthquake Skateboarding Scene

Empty deckchairs at a Tunisian hotel (All photos by the author)

More than a year has passed since Seifeddine Rezgui, a student and wannabe break-dancer, smuggled a Kalashnikov onto Sousse's Boujaafar Beach and started firing. But the massacre he perpetrated in the name of the Islamic State, which left 38 tourists dead, has cut visitor numbers in half and left Tunisia's reputation as the Mediterranean's most affordable package destination in tatters.

The British market has made the most impact so far. Home to 30 of the Sousse victims, the UK accounted for over 420,000 visitors to Tunisia in 2014. But last year's atrocity prompted the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to issue an advisory warning its nationals against travel to the country. No longer able to insure their customers, the major tour companies immediately pulled the plug on their Tunisian operations. Charter flights from the UK abruptly ceased.

I've come here against the advice of my government to see firsthand how one man with a gun can bring an entire industry to its knees.

Police on Boujaafar Beach

Step onto Boujaafar Beach today, down the lane where a policeman's bullet finally put an end to Rezgui's rampage on the 25th of June, 2015, and you might not immediately appreciate the extent of Sousse's troubles.

There are a few tourists here, mostly Russians lured by cut-price deals. But walk a hundred yards further and you'll encounter a no-man's land – a stretch of empty sand where the only presence is a pair of police patrolling on a quad-bike, the one riding pillion holding a shotgun across his knees.

At the rear, behind a bank strewn with thatched parasols, the tan walls of a sprawling resort complex have been cut off from the beach by a chain-link fence and coils of barbed wire. This is the Imperial Merhaba Hotel, where Rezgui continued the spree he'd started on the beach. Now it sits abandoned, one of almost 200 major Tunisian hotels to have shuttered in the last year.

Jihed and Mo'jgow

Off to one side, I find Mo'jgow Sahbi and Jihed Hassen sitting under a timber awning. Down at the shoreline, the tools of their 20-year-old watersports company are lined up in the hope of custom: a folded parasail and two jet-skis sit beside a banana boat with killer-whale markings. But their speed-boats are beached, the foot-wells accumulating sand. They tell me business is non-existent.

"We are all suffering, my friend," says Hassen, the younger of the two. "The shops, the hotels, the taxis, you can't imagine."

Both claim to have saved lives last June, corralling 100 terrified tourists into the neighbouring hotel compound, imploring the shooter to stop his rampage.

"It's not fair – we did what we could," says Hassen when I ask about the UK's travel ban. "Since the revolution most of our guests have been British. Now we just come to sit."

Theirs is a grudge shared by many in Tunisia. Speaking to the people here, in the medinas and the cafes, on the beaches and the promenades, some common opinions emerge. The abrupt decline of Tunisia's tourist industry, many say, feels like a betrayal of the optimism that accompanied the Arab Spring in 2011, which saw the overthrow of the autocratic President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and a democratic government rise in his stead.

A new constitution was adopted in 2014, and free elections took place peacefully at the end of the year. But Tunisia's new-found pluralism has also turned it into a target for extremists, hell-bent on creating an Islamic world under the boot-heel of Sharia law.

Despite the brutal terror attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis last March, which left 24 dead, 2015 was set to be a bumper year for Tunisian tourism. Then came Sousse, and foreign arrivals – whose spending accounts for 15 percent of Tunisia's GDP – slowed to a trickle. Now there is frustration that the tourists' abandonment of Tunisia, as symbolised by Britain's travel ban, has exacted a cruel and disproportionate economic penalty on a whole country for the crimes of a few extremists. Look at Brussels, they say. Look at Paris, where brutal attacks have been carried out more recently, and with greater casualties. Why has the international community turned its back on Tunisia? One conclusion – that Tunisia has been harshly treated because it is a Muslim country – is a common topic of conjecture.

But this sense of grievance is tempered, too, by a recognition that Sousse was different, that the image the reports painted – of sunbathers murdered where they lay, of families pursued through hotel corridors, of Rezgui laughing as he pulled the trigger – will take time to expunge.

In the meantime, people are left to pray that there is no repeat. For IS, whose propagandists have described Sousse and the Bardo Museum as "dens of vice", tourists are a vulnerable embodiment of western decadence – legitimate targets for righteous extirpation. With neighbouring Libya in turmoil, and the border notoriously porous, only the most blinkered optimist would guarantee that there may not be more to come.

If Sousse still moulders under the memories of last June, Hammamet, an hour's drive up-coast, at the northern tip of its eponymous bay, feels like a place in the aftermath of apocalypse. In this former fishing village, the place where the Tunisian tourist industry began in the early 1960s, tourism is the only game in town, and the sense of ennui – of thwarted hospitality – is hard to bear.

The main road is so devoid of traffic that I can walk up the middle of the carriageway, and inside the sprawling whitewashed resort hotels that line it my footsteps echo across empty marbled lobbies. Down at the harbour, huge mock-galleons, capable of carrying over 100 tourists on day-cruises, are moored in a row, looking all the more preposterous for their pointlessness.

Down on Hammamet's beach, a young man selling camel rides responds to my question about how his business is faring by opening his arms towards an empty beach. He tells me that the only people coming here now are Russian (though Russians were among the victims of Sousse, I'd find out later that numbers are up 650 percent on last year). But where the absent British paid £6 for a ride down the sand on Fatima, Abdul's undernourished camel, the Russians offer 30p. He has no choice but to accept.

By now, any residual anxiety I might have felt about visiting Tunisia has long since evaporated. Looking left and right down Hammamet's vacant coastline, there's perverse reassurance in the reality that there is hardly anyone here to target.

How do you get rid of a black mark like Sousse? This is the question currently faced by Tarek Aiouadi, Tunisia's UK Director of Tourism, who I meet in another cavernous hotel atrium in Gammarth, just outside of Tunis.

On the knee-high table in front of him is a stack of paper detailing the latest quantification of the challenge he faces. Latest UK tourism numbers, he says, are down 93.2 percent. Like everyone I speak to in Tunisia, Aiouadi is anxious not to downplay the horror of Sousse. But he too believes the FCO response has been disproportionate.

"Indirectly you are telling that they are winning," he says. "You can see their victory in what has happened in this country."

He points to the increased security I've seen during my trip up the coast as evidence of the country's efforts to reassure and recover: the metal detectors and under-car mirrors that now punctuate the hotel entrances. Only this morning, at Carthage, a ring of armed sentries stood at 50-metre intervals around the crumbling walls and columns of long-dead Empire, there to safeguard the tourists who, for the hour I was there, numbered half a dozen.

Out of the ruins, Aiouadi clings to hope. For too long, he says, Tunisia has focused on the mass-market. But the country has more to offer. He enthuses about the interior, an area the size of England, a place of mountains, oases and desert where tourists rarely venture. Perhaps the events of last year will catapult Tunisia towards a long overdue diversification, from the unreconstructed beach-side tourism of the past to something more sustainable.

"We are going to bounce back," says Aiouadi. "But it's going to take time."

@HenryWismayer

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The Economics of the Islamic State: Terror as a Global Start-Up

Why Do So Many Jihadi Terrorists Come From High Wycombe?

WATCH: Eagles of Death Metal Discuss Paris Terror Attacks

Eric Andre at the 'Legalize Ranch' pop-up dispensary in New York. All photos by the author

The Eric Andre Show marks new territory for comedy and television as a whole, narrowing the gap between the silly and the avant garde. The late-night talk show that began four years ago on Adult Swim matches high-stakes pranksterism with manic editing, using the absurdity of the show to throw a light on the absurdity of the rest of the world.

Part of what makes The Eric Andre Show so fascinating is his complete lack of responsibility to the audience, the network, and himself, but his total respect for everyone else involved. Andre's show serves as a level of progress for black performers, employing tons of black guests, writers, musicians, and co-host, Hannibal Buress, but the show still rejects the idea that a show with a black host and black collaborators has to be about race, or really anything.

The Eric Andre Show isn't an Aaron Sorkin–type show that presents politics as people talking quickly in suits within made-up, pseudo-intellectual scenarios. Rather, Andre's political power lies in his desire to elicit genuine reactions from real people on the street and the audience through antagonization and frequent acts of self-debasement. Andre transforms the camera into a kind of cultural microscope, recording the gleefully stupid experiment he and writing staff have concocted, whether it's dressing up like a cop and handcuffing himself to a pole in Harlem, forcing famous rappers to endure an American Gladiator–style gauntlet, or licking strangers while wearing a green-screen spandex bodysuit.

What Andre is calling his "dystopian Eraserhead season" of the talk show starts this week on Adult Swim. To launch the fourth season, he shot promos at the DNC and the RNC and opened up a "Legalize Ranch" pop-up dispensary at a bar on the Lower East Side of New York, further establishing the brilliantly dumb tone of the show. It was stunning to see the unique range of fans forming a multiple-block line outside of the dispensary, to say hi to Andre, and then chug a bottle of ranch. A few days later, we met up at a hotel bar to talk about his intentions behind the new season of the show.

VICE: So before you started doing stand-up, you studied upright bass at Berklee College of Music. What was that experience like?
Eric Andre: It's a waste of a lot of money. I don't regret going because I met cool people, and I got into comedy because I was in Boston. But it's a good way to waste $120,000, for sure.

Did that experience inform your attitude when you went into comedy?
I think so, because I didn't want to take any comedy classes. Music classes sucked the joy out of music for me, and it made it so academic and left-brained that I didn't want to take UCB classes. I eventually took a UCB class and I took a Groundlings class later on, and I'm glad I did. But I just wanted something to feel kind of pure.

Let's talk about your most recent season. You filmed some promos for your new season at the RNC and "near" the DNC. What made you decide to film there?
I just felt like it was a unique opportunity that only comes along every four years. It seemed like such a great breeding ground for high-stakes pranks, and it was. It was actually my writing partner Dan Curry's idea. He didn't even want to do the DNC, and we figured the RNC would be easier. But the network was like, "Let's try to make it balanced and do both conventions."

Dan is, like, the funniest guy I've ever met in my life. He plays Kraft Punk on the show. The phrase "bird up" he came up with. All of the ranch stuff came out of us bullshitting together in my office.

Did you feel any responsibility to talk about things happening within this election year?
I didn't feel a burden to expose anything politically or have a hard and fast political agenda. It would just be out of tone for the show. I'm playing this inept, incompetent talk-show host. To then suddenly be informed about politics or try to make a statement I think would have been a little bit out of place for the show. The statement made, if there is a statement, speaks for itself, based on the reaction from the people at the RNC, kind of digging their own graves. Like when the guy was shouting at me saying that I'm not Martin Luther King Jr. He's exposing his own idiocy. Why me asking Alex Jones to have sex with my wife would make me Martin Luther King Jr., I've never really understood.

It's kind of like Borat. Borat in character isn't like,"I'm going to expose people' s racism!" But the genius of Sacha Baron Cohen got people to kind of expose their own racism and bigotry and homophobia and stuff like that. The camera acts like a microscope.

"When the guy was shouting at me saying that I'm not Martin Luther King Jr., he exposing his own idiocy. The camera acts like a microscope." —Eric Andre

I think your show is really representative of the progress of black performers. It doesn't seem like you have the same pressure to just talk about "the black experience" the way that Chris Rock or Richard Pryor did. Do you feel any responsibility to talk about your blackness on your show?
Yeah. I think that kind of comedy should happen organically, and I just wasn't as obsessed with race as most Americans are. I think because I grew up in a multiracial family, and had not only diversity in my family, but my friends and my family's friends. Americans make race a bigger issue than I think most other countries do. So it's just not where my mind goes. Sometimes Hannibal and I get into some race comedy. But it's not all there is to talk about as a black comedian, and that's how we felt.

When you started out doing stand-up, did you feel any pressure to talk about being black?
I think Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle and In Living Color and especially Richard Pryor and even Freddie Prince did that kind of comedy so well that it's like,"What else could I say that those guys haven't come up with yet?" Those guys are geniuses. I just felt I wanted to have my own perspective and do something kind of post-racial. But it wasn't like a big, heavy-handed agenda. It's kind of just organically where the show ended up.

Yeah, I think growing up in a multiracial home, you don't really see race until someone from the outside starts pointing it out and placing it on you.
Right! People want to pigeonhole you or put you into a box. I had a similar experience, for sure.

Growing up in a biracial household, did you ever have a difficult time seeing yourself in the stuff you watched as a kid? Were there things that you actually really identified with?
Actually, no. I didn't really make race an issue growing up. It was outside forces later in life that made race such a big issue that made me start to feel hyperconscious about it. I loved Hulk Hogan and Junkyard Dog.

"We just go in the writers' room and try to come up with the stupidest ideas first as a warm-up. Those usually end up being the ideas we fall in love with the most, because they're so stupid." —Eric Andre

Do you try to build segments around revealing some sort of truth about people?
I think it's case by case. We just go in the writers' room and try to come up with the stupidest ideas first as a warm-up. Those usually end up being the ideas we fall in love with the most, because they're so stupid. It's like a bunch of smart people trying to come up with the stupidest idea ever.

Do you think your show could exist the same way on a different network, or at a different point in time?
I don't know if it's the era. It definitely plays a role—I mean, I couldn't do my show in the 1930s. But I think Adult Swim is the best network for it. I don't think we would have had this much flexibility and creative freedom on any other network. They gave us carte blanche to do whatever we want, and they're just very nurturing. Mike Lazzo, the guy who runs the network, is kind of my Obi-Wan Kenobi. I owe my career to the guy. He's the guy who created Space Ghost Coast to Coast .

VICE Meets Eric Andre:

Are there certain points that you try to get across in the show?
Sometimes we have overarching thematic things I want to get out. This season was kind of like our dystopian Eraserhead season. I grew out my fingernails super long and lost weight. I made sure I didn't go into the sun at all the whole year. I didn't wear deodorant the whole time. I didn't wash my suit the entire time, so it reeked. I didn't brush my hair the whole time. I would, like, smoke cigars and shit in the morning, so my breath stunk. I would eat onions. I wanted to look like a hostage. Next season, I want to pick my head bald, shave my entire body, gain 50 pounds, get really tan, and then put veneers on my teeth and wear colored contacts.

Most of the show comes in the conflict between you and everything else. What do you think is unique about the humor that comes out of that situation?
I like that I play this low-status character in a high-status position as a late-night talk-show host. I'm kind of just forced, by this organism that is the show, to do a talk show. I'm completely the worst person for the job.

"We kind of prey on celebs that don't even know what Adult Swim is." —Eric Andre

What's in the email you send someone you want to be a guest on your show?
We send them a very innocuous, lighthearted celebrity reel that shows snippets of interviews that don't seem that insane. Then when they get there, they're like,"Oh, shit! This is nuts!" We don't even try to send them that. We kind of prey on celebs who don't even know what Adult Swim is.

The musical guests have to be in on it somewhat so that they commit to whatever torture device we're putting them through. With that said, they're still being tortured. When we had Action Bronson [who is the host of the VICELAND show, Fuck, That's Delicious ] trying to run on a treadmill—the dude has a weight problem. He's a friend, I love him, I love his music, no disrespect. But he's a little bit big; he's a little heavy-set. So when you put him on a treadmill you know, it's not easy.

Was there anything you wanted to do this season that was outside of the budget?
We wanted to do an underwater intro. The intro to the show we call set destruction, and we wanted to do an underwater set destruction. It is just not going to happen. We were going to drive out to a tank in San Diego, hire all of these scuba-diving camera operators, build the set underwater, and teach the band how to hold their breath and make it look like they're not holding their breath. It would have been insane. It would have taken a week to film 30 seconds of footage.

Are there any dream guests you would like to have on the show?
I want Bill Cosby on.

What would you want to have happen with Bill Cosby as a guest—get him and Hannibal on camera together?
I think it would be a very tense interview. I would try to citizen's arrest him.

Can you imagine a bit you would write Bill Cosby into?
I would write him his final pudding commercial.

Season four of The Eric Andre Show premieres on Adult Swim this Friday, August 5.

Follow Matthew James-Wilson on Instagram.

What goes up... Photo via Flickr user Colin Knowles

We've been hearing a lot about Canadian real estate in 2016, often alongside the word "bubble." While this may be a source of anxiety for a lot of us, a recent Financial Post breakdown of Canada's economic performance says the overheated housing market is actually the one good thing we've had going for the last two years.

According to a recent Statistics Canada report on GDP, Canada's current economic growth is the slowest it's been in more than half a century. Real estate has been the biggest area of growth since oil prices dropped off in 2014, while Alberta's oil and gas industry continues to bleed red ink.

Jeff Rubin, former CIBC World Markets chief economist and author of The Carbon Bubble, says it makes sense that capital is moving out of oil and into things like real estate, but dependence on housing fueled by low interest rates also comes with some risks. "That's a double-edged sword," he told VICE, "because the rise in housing prices, particularly in places like Toronto and Vancouver, raises affordability issues."

Depending who you ask, Canadian markets are either starting to rebound after ten months of stagnation, or just waiting for another shoe to drop. In the meantime, young people in urban centres have pretty much given up on buying houses, consumer debt continues to rise, and West Coast homeless shelters are overcrowding with out-of-work Albertans.

Back in June, governor for the Bank of Canada Stephen Poloz said "we have the right to be optimistic" as oil producers returned to work after the Alberta wildfires. But if you ask Rubin, who's also a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, he thinks Canada's oil sector still has further to fall, and it won't be easy for other industries to pick up the slack.

Rubin explained that the world is headed for a period of slower growth and low oil costs, and that Canada's high-cost, low-payoff oil sands have yet to scale back to match market conditions. While high-cost producers in the US have cut down on production, he said Canada apparently didn't get the memo: "The global oil market is no longer growing at a rate that will accommodate an expansion of high-cost oil, or even current production of high-cost oil," Rubin told VICE. "There hasn't yet been a cutback in the oil sands. They're still increasing production, even though it's hemorrhaging red ink."

As for the housing market, Canada's major banking regulator recently made some banks beef up stress testing in case of a major crash in the market. Last month, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions told private banks to see if they can handle a 50 percent price drop in Vancouver and a 40 percent drop in Toronto—up from the 30 percent stress testing required after the 2008 financial meltdown. Then there's the $13.7 billion in short bets against Canada's major banks, according to a new Toronto-based real estate blog. (To say nothing of the chief officers at those banks who happen to be selling their multi-million dollar homes.)

To recap: unless you're the head of a bank or a homeowner who got into the market early, it might take some serious self-delusion to find good news in Canada's economic outlook.

Follow Sarah on Twitter.

Between the Olympics and the presidential election, this year's most anticipated competitions have been reduced to rivers of shit, both literally and figuratively.

But today, luckily, you can forget about all that and just immerse yourself in something that feels all too wholesome for 2016: the 2016 World Yo-Yo Contest. All week long, yo-yo enthusiasts will storm what looks like an elementary school auditorium stage in Cleveland to Walk the Dog or whatever until one champion will emerge victorious and be crowned the global yo-yo champ.

Sure, things are looking pretty bleak out there right now, but there's nothing like adults competing to see who is better at playing with toys to make you forget that the world is hurtling toward impending doom.

Read: Inmates Broke Out of Their Cell to Save a Guard After He Had a Heart Attack

Since the Democratic National Convention ended, Donald Trump has been acting like a man who wants to lose an election. Describing his last week is like describing Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights; there's so much going on, so many unnatural or incomprehensible bits, that you can get muddled just trying to sum it up. But let's try:

After Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a Muslim American soldier who died heroically in combat in Iraq, criticized Trump in one of the DNC's most emotional moments, Trump didn't simply ignore it and move on. Instead, he fired back at the couple, implying Ghazala wasn't allowed to speak because she was a Muslim. Responding to Khizr's assertion that Trump hadn't sacrificed for his country, he said that he had "scarified" for America by creating thousands of jobs. The impolitic statements let the media run with the story days after the Khans' speech.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump refused to endorse Arizona senator John McCain or House Speaker Paul Ryan in his primary race, reportedly enraging Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus. A confidant of top Trump advisor Paul Manafort told CNBC Manafort was "mailing it in" and the staff was "suicidal." GOP officials are reportedly thinking about (read: fantasizing about) what would happen if Trump quit the campaign entirely before November. Former HP CEO Meg Whitman, who once ran for California governor as a Republican, is openly raising money for Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, at his events, Trump has spent a lot of time railing against fire marshals for keeping people out of the venues for "political reasons," even though the marshals say that his staff agreed on the number of people who would be allowed inside beforehand.

What else? Oh yeah, Trump said that women facing sexual harassment at work should stay in the job "if there's not a better alternative." Trump also called Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—the capital city of a vital swing state—a "war zone," offending that city's officials. And apparently, during one meeting with a national security advisor months ago, Trump repeatedly asked why the US couldn't use nuclear weapons. "Mass Defections Expected as Donald Trump's Campaign Implodes," read a Vanity Fair headline; New York magazine, slightly more cautious, went with "Donald Trump's Campaign Might Actually Implode."

Meanwhile, on Trump's Twitter:

My analysis: Things look bad for Trump! But I also pay an abnormal amount of attention to this stuff; it is literally part of my job. I work for a media company that gives me health insurance and free snacks, I pay a shitload of money for fancy coffee beans, I watch more premium-cable shows than reality TV, I don't own a gun, I made an art-history reference like three paragraphs ago, and I am not by any measure poor. I'm not Trump's target audience, in other words. I imagine that a lot of DC and New York people are basically in that same narrow demographic, and to us, Trump's campaign has looked like a dumpster fire for a long time, and it is now imploding, mixed metaphors be damned.

The question is, do normal people—the folks who don't follow the same 200 Twitter accounts, who don't pay attention to the "narrative" of the campaign—care?

Trump's core supporters certainly don't. The alleged billionaire could, as he once said, shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and wouldn't lose his fan base. The Guardian interviewed people at Trump rallies and found that they either hadn't heard of the Khan controversy—a story that the press has been fixated on—or weren't bothered by it. "Everybody's said terrible things," one told the publication.

Anyone who has covered Trump for any amount of time knows that he lies constantly, or at least doesn't care whether the shit he says is true. This is different from other politicians using weasel words or vague statements or recontextualizing something—Trump lies about everything from giving to charity to the size of the crowds he draws to whether American Muslims cheered on 9/11. Yet if you aren't paying close attention to the ways Trump's dishonesty is different from ordinary political shadiness, you might dismiss all of this.

A CNN/ORC poll found that Clinton was leading Trump by nine points, but found that voters found them equally dishonest (34 percent of respondents thought Clinton was trustworthy, versus 35 percent for Trump). Maybe if he was facing a candidate not named Hillary Clinton Trump would be vulnerable to attacks on his compulsive lying, but so far it doesn't seem like such assaults are sticking.

Remember, too, that all of the anti-Trump rhetoric is coming from the media, an institution Americans trust less and less. I can tell you that Trump is a liar, that his attacks on Muslims and Mexican immigrants are either racist or a naked appeal to racists, same difference, but will you believe me, a 20-something Brooklynite with an admitted anti-Trump bias? The press is also often seen as pushing political correctness—which Trump supporters and many others on the right despise—and the notion that the economy has recovered. The numbers may say that the country's fortunes have improved, but wages have remained stagnant for decades, inequality is still rising, and homeowners are still struggling with unaffordable mortgages or choosing not to buy homes altogether.

This is what Trump means when he says that the system is rigged, which may be his most persuasive argument. The people telling you that the world is getting better when your livelihood is precarious are also the people telling you that the things you say are offensive or even racist, and the same people saying that Trump is super duper awful. To many primed to back an Anti-Establishment candidate, he might tell little lies that his opponents jump on, but his truths are big truths. Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention, full of stories of homicide and poverty and a world on fire, seemed insanely apocalyptic to people like me—not to mention full of falsehoods—but it also may have rang true to many people in a way that Clinton's "stronger together" optimism does not.

Clinton is currently leading in pretty much every poll and has done better since the DNC ended. But her lead is still in the single digits, which is to say that Trump still has a puncher's chance, no matter how many strange statements he makes, no matter how many times the media crows about his amateur-hour mistakes on the trail. The correct metaphor for Trump's candidacy is not an implosion but Springfield's perpetual tire fire from The Simpsons—an ugly, smelly blaze that nonetheless refuses to go out.

Images courtesy of Hello Games

This is it. Following three years of waiting and a last-minute delay, one of the most anticipated video games ever, No Man's Sky, is out in just a few days. It's no exaggeration to place it up there with gaming's most wanted of all time—just peruse the relevant subreddits and message boards for all the necessary evidence.

But it's not just hardcore gamers who are slavering over the prospect of finally blasting off into the game's procedurally generated space, in search of discovery and adventure on a scale that this medium has rarely delivered. The scientific community has its fans, too, as I found out by speaking to former NASA consultant and aviation specialist, Justin Julian. (Disclosure, at this point, as Julian is someone I've known for a while, but that doesn't make him any the less a dude who worked at NASA.)

As Julian sees it, No Man's Sky could do more than simply entertain—if it proves as popular as its developers/publishers, Hello Games, are hoping for, it could be a crucial next step for progressing our very real reaching out toward the stars.

"It doesn't matter what the medium is, all it takes is one person seeing it and getting interested enough to ignite that spark, and then we've got our next big breakthrough," he tells me. "This game could push someone where we need them, to advance our species."

These days, Julian is an airport manager for Anderson County Airport in South Carolina, but his time with NASA taught him that the future is always in the hands of those we teach. "Every day I passed these words on the way to my desk, 'To Inspire the Next Generation.' I really think this game has the potential to do that."

NASA has been struggling over the last few decades with funding cuts and a public shift from seeing space travel as something exciting, if not absolutely necessary. But that hasn't killed the spirits of those who firmly believe in humankind having a future somewhere other than Earth. For Julian, a game like this could be both fun and just what school-level sciences need to educate and spread interest in a way that could be conducive to NASA's goals.

"As a gamer myself, investment values are high. It looks like you get out of No Man's Sky what you put into it. And as a specialist, we're teaching people how to problem solve and how to manage resources, so it's the best of both worlds."

No Man's Sky has touted its procedurally generated universe as the largest and most expansive in gaming history, beyond Elite Dangerous and other space sims. It's so large that they had to build in-game bots to explore the whole thing. This scaled representation of our unknown universe is key to what Julian believes is important for teaching players about the real thing.

"A great part of this game is sharing resources with other players. Getting things to other people that they don't have in their native systems is so important to understanding the vastness of the universe, the scale of it. When we start looking at other places in real life, we may find new resources that can substitute and be better than our own, and that's essential for our survival and growth."

"Having the ability to think outside the box is the most important thing we can teach anyone."

He has praise for the game's willingness to be a different kind of fun, one that's not all guns and action. "It's not just all about storyline, or really a scripted game at all, from what's been shown. It's an experience, and it evolves just like the real thing. You have to use critical thinking, and there are no obvious big bosses or documented strategies to guarantee 'winning.' And having the ability to think outside the box is the most important thing we can teach anyone."

In No Man's Sky , the player assumes the role of an explorer and embarks on a mission of discovery in their very own spaceship, initially alone in the bleakness of the vacuum. In the game, you may be safe as a solo pilot, but Julian has concerns when it comes to astronauts really heading beyond our atmosphere alone.

'No Man's Sky,' 'EXPLORE' trailer

"My biggest concern there is that people are human. People make mistakes. That could be the pilot, the mechanic, even the manufacturer of the aircraft. You like to think that there's control and foresight there to mitigate hazards, but sometimes things happen. In aviation, we see bird strikes, foreign objects interfering with planes, weather concerns, you name it." When asked how difficult it would be to coordinate with millions of ships in space, like the stations will do in No Man's Sky, Julian laughs and sarcastically replies: "Oh, fun.

"Space is a dangerous environment," he continues, "so you're going to be dealing with problems every second of every day. Keeping everything running is going to be tough, too. Go to flightaware.com and type in Atlanta, and you'll see all the aircraft going in and out of Georgia. What we're looking at in No Man's Sky is way more complex than that, and that's crazy to think about in handling terms. We'll have satellites, debris, and who knows what else floating around up there that could cause problems, too."

New, on Motherboard: How the World Falls Apart

He goes on to explain where our current technological capabilities are in comparison to what we're seeing in the game. "Y'know, we're actually so close to it. There are way too many variables to know fully what deep space travel will be like, but NASA currently plans to put people on Mars. That's the next step, and there is an honest strive for it, with the same passion that was there when we put a man on the moon."

Like Julian, many players are captivated by the wonder and scope of No Man's Sky's possibilities, but ultimately its success will come down to its reception among an already substantial fan base. "I hope it engages the players' imaginations, and I hope it engages mine as well," says Julian. "I want people to play this game and then think about flight school or taking astronomy classes. Then maybe they'll go even further than we can think of going now. This game really could give us the next big innovator."

No Man's Sky is released for PC and PlayStation 4 on August 9 in the US and the next day in Europe. Find more information at the game's official website.

Follow Alex Tisdale on Twitter.

Read more video game articles on VICE here, and follow VICE Gaming on Twitter at @VICEGaming.

Image via Enzo Figueres/Getty

In 2014, UPenn freshman Madison Holleran leapt to her death from a parking structure on her college campus. Her suicide made national news, and the New York Times decried the "pressure for perfection" causing college students to take their own lives. The article joined a chorus warning of a mental-health crisis at US colleges, pointing to everything from trigger warnings in lectures to long wait times at counseling centers as proof that today's undergrads are vulnerable and easily broken.

But a large body of evidence, including a study published last month in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, casts doubt on this narrative. Historical data suggests that college students might actually be better off than ever before—and that those who don't go to college are at a higher risk of suicide.

The study, led by researchers from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration (SAMHSA), found that people aged 18–25 who don't go to college are more likely to attempt suicide with a plan than their college-attending peers. (Attempting suicide with a plan is usually considered more dangerous than attempting it without one, as planned suicides are more likely to end in death or serious injury.)

"We don't want to ignore the problems of college students," study co-author Richard McKeon, branch chief for suicide prevention at SAMHSA, told VICE. "The important thing is that people don't think that college students are actually at greater risk when the opposite is true."

The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry paper follows decades of research showing that full-time college attendance is associated with lower rates of suicide—specifically, deaths, rather than just attempts or ideation. The Big Ten Student Suicide Study, published in 1997 and based on data collected in 1980–1990, found that suicide rates for current college students were about one-half those of non-college students of the same age range. That same finding has been corroborated by multiple studies since, most notably in those led by University of Rochester psychiatry professor Allan Schwartz.

Researchers aren't sure why college students are less likely to die by suicide or attempt suicide with a plan. Schwartz has argued that a lack of access to firearms is key; others point to the protective nature of the campus community. Another possibility that remains unconfirmed by research is that the kids who end up going to college have lower rates of mental-health problems to begin with. One thing is certain: Suicides like Madison Holleran's are the exception, not the rule.

Psychiatrist Victor Schwartz (no relation to Allan) is the medical director of the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing suicide on college campuses. He argues that college students' mental-health issues might get more media attention simply because it makes for a good story. "It feels like such a high-stakes issue, because college is associated with the path to success," he said. "When kids this age have issues, it feels like a very big deal."

Victor Schwartz is skeptical of the narrative of a mental-health crisis on campus, pointing out that much of the data is more positive than it seems at first glance. For instance, the 2015 American College Health Association National College Health Assessment (ACHA-NCHA) found that 9.6 percent of students had seriously considered suicide in the past year, and 1.6 percent had actually attempted it. Those numbers may be upsettingly high, but they've also barely changed since the survey's first edition in 2000. "You'd think that if, in some generic way, college students were sicker than they were 20 years ago, these numbers would reflect that," Schwartz said. In other words, there is no current crisis.

The ACHA-NCHA survey also said that more than 30 percent of college students have felt so depressed in the past year they found it difficult to function. Not an encouraging statistic—but previous results suggest that it's down from 40 percent in the year 2000.

What is different is more students are getting help for their depression. A lot of articles about the "college health crisis" refer to long wait times for counseling centers as a sign that more students have mental-health issues—but it might simply be a sign that more students are seeking treatment.

The uptick in college students seeking on-campus counseling can be explained, Schwartz said, by the drastic cuts in community mental healthcare in the past few decades. Students who would've been referred to outside providers for care are now flooding college counseling centers because those outside providers are no longer there. "We work with schools out in the Southwest where there just isn't anyone in the community to refer students to," he added.

Both McKeon and co-author Beth Han emphasized that their research shouldn't be taken as downplaying the importance of suicide prevention on campuses. But they also pointed out that non-college-attending 18- to 25-year-olds may be comparatively underserved, even though they represent 59 percent of their peer group.

Much of the problem is access. Campus suicide prevention efforts can loop in counselors, faculty members, administrators, and resident assistants to ensure multiple touchpoints for every at-risk student. "The challenge for the other groups is: How do you reach them?" McKeon pointed out. "It's not as straightforward."

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255) at any time of day or night to talk to a trained counselor in your area.

Secretary of State John Kerry meets with Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad, Zarif on April 22, 2016. Image via Getty

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

US News

DOJ Objected to Cash Payment for Iran
Senior officials at the Department of Justice objected to a plan to fly a jet with cash to Iran at the same time that four American hostages were released in January, fearing it would create a bad impression. They were overruled by the State Department.—The Wall Street Journal

Phoenix Serial Killer Still a Threat
Police hunting a serial killer in Phoenix, Arizona, have now added a ninth attack to his suspected crimes: a July 11 incident in which the wanted gunman fired at a man and a 4-year-old boy sitting in a car. Investigators previously thought his string of crimes had ended in June. "The threat is still alive," said Police Sgt. Jonathan Howard.—NBC News

Clint Eastwood Backs Trump for President
Clint Eastwood said he supports Donald Trump's bid for the presidency and defended the Republican's offensive remarks. "He's said a lot of dumb things... Just fucking get over it," he said. The actor-director also attacked a "pussy generation" obsessed with political correctness. "Everybody's walking on eggshells."—Esquire

SCOTUS Allows School to Impose Trans Bathroom Ban
The Supreme Court says a Virginia school board can block a transgender teenager from using the boys' bathroom at his school until it decides whether to take up the case. The court order allows Gloucester County school board to bar 17-year-old Gavin Grimm from the bathroom matching his current gender identity.—CBS News

International News

Syrian Government Forces Strike Back in Aleppo
Syrian government forces, backed by Russian airstrikes, have recaptured hills and villages from rebel fighters on the outskirts of Aleppo. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 40 civilians have now been killed since the rebel offensive began on Sunday.—Al Jazeera

Knife Attack in London Leaves One Dead, Five Injured
One woman has been killed and five others injured by a man who attacked them with a knife in London. Police say the attack in Russell Square could be linked to terrorism, but mental illness is also being investigated. Officers used an electric-shock gun to arrest the 19-year-old suspect.—The Guardian

Australia Accused of Allowing Asylum Seeker Abuse
The Australian government has "strongly" denied claims it deliberately ignores abuse of asylum seekers. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International released a report criticizing conditions at the detention center on the island of Nauru and concluded the government intentionally allows abuse to deter asylum seekers.—BBC News

Campaigners Urge Thais to Vote in Crucial Referendum
Around 3,000 students and civil servants have gathered on the streets of Bangkok to encourage Thai peoople to vote in a crucial constitutional referendum this weekend. Thailand will decide on Sunday whether to accept a military-backed constitution, one that could give the generals a permanent role overseeing the country's development.—Reuters

Everything Else

Private Moon Mission Approved for 2017
A California-based company called Moon Express is set to launch the first private mission to the moon after various branches of the federal government, including NASA, gave their approval. Its first lunar landing is scheduled for late 2017.—VICE News

'Suicide Squad' Fans Want to Shut Down Rotten Tomatoes
Fans of Suicide Squad have launched a petition on change.org to close movie-review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes after the blockbuster received a series of bad reviews. The petition has gained more than 17,500 signatures.—Variety

Bitcoin Value Falls After Hackers Steal $65 Million
The value of Bitcoin plunged after one of the world's largest Bitcoin exchanges confirmed it had been hacked. Bitfinex in Hong Kong said 119,756 Bitcoins, worth $65 million, had been stolen.—Bloomberg

Daisy Ridley Quits Instagram
Star Wars actress Daisy Ridley has deleted her Instagram account, reportedly due to online abuse. She attracted negative comments for posting about meeting young people affected by gun violence and using the hashtag #stoptheviolence.—Vanity Fair

Massachusetts Passes Equal Pay Law
It will be illegal for companies in Massachusetts to ask prospective employees about their current or former salaries, due to new legislation signed into law this week. It is seen as a major step toward equal pay for women.—VICE News

Internet Guy Covers Pokémon Song in 20 Different Styles
A guy named Anthony Vincent has covered the Pokémon anime theme song in the style of 20 different musical acts of the late 1990s, including Destiny's Child, Blink-182, Radiohead, and Ricky Martin.—Noisey

In a tale that could only come from America's dystopian justice system, investment banking giant Goldman Sachs funded a failed attempt to reduce recidivism among inmates at New York City's Rikers Island jail by teaching teenagers that their own moral weakness is the source of their problems.

The project's disappointing results were published last year, but the bank's investors weren't exactly going out on a limb with the experiment. The treatment used in the study is known as Moral Reconation Therapy (MRT), and it's listed in a US government database ostensibly designed to spotlight programs backed by scientific data. About a million inmates across America have been exposed to it, according to proponents. Yet the story of MRT at Rikers shows how little thought is typically given to programs intended to help people with addiction and other problems behind bars, and how miserable the evidence base for such treatment really is.

The saga also suggests that even when corporations want to do good, the expert advice they receive is often problematic at best.

Sarah Beller at the Influence (a partner of VICE and an outlet for which I also write) first exposed the extent of MRT's problems in a stunning feature this June, revealing it to be popular with drug courts and widely used in lock-ups in dozens of states. (She also found weird overlap between the program's moral grid and that of Scientology—more on that later.) But despite being introduced decades ago, this supposedly science-based treatment contradicts the modern, medicine-based approach to addiction.

As a 2007 review by the Justice Department explained, "The underlying theory of MRT is that offenders and drug abusers have low moral reasoning." Academics Greg Little and Ken Robinson introduced it in the 1980s and say they based it on theories of moral development devised by psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, who studied how children develop a sense of right and wrong.

The term "reconation" was coined by MRT's developers to describe the change in moral thinking they seek to inspire. Supporters might say the word "moral" is simply a reference to Kohlberg's work, but it's hard not to see the idea that someone has "low" moral development as at least a bit judgmental. Indeed, much of MRT is about getting prisoners to take complete responsibility for their situation—rather than exploring the role of factors like poverty, unemployment, poor schooling, mental illness, and past trauma.

"In many forms of pop psychology, you are told to blame yourself because you could have everything, you could be on top of the world and you just haven't focused, you haven't worked hard enough," says Barbara Ehrenreich, bestselling author of Bright Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. This, obviously, is in the interest of those who want to keep America's political and financial systems the way they are—if people start to suspect the system is rigged, they might stop beating themselves up and look around for other villains.

MRT, however, doesn't even take the optimistic tone self help usually does. One piece of material, for example, tells readers, "You have probably become aware of the sorry state of your life and the fact that you, alone, are responsible for where you are," and calls those who refuse to start the program "dishonest."

As Ehrenreich explains, this isn't exactly inspirational stuff. "It's not enough to be in prison, which means constant humiliation—and if you are in, it's probably because you're really poor," she says. "On top of that, you have to participate in trashing yourself and that seems to me to be a whole new level." Indeed, research on other programs that confront and shame addicted participants has shown repeatedly that this is counterproductive.

MRT veers even further away from science by apparently borrowing concepts from Scientology. The language it uses to describe its successive phases of moral development are awfully similar to those contained in Scientology's "Life Conditions." According to MRT materials obtained by VICE, we all begin childhood in the moral stage of "disloyalty," which involves dishonesty, "pretense," and "victimizing." Scientology labels a similar, early stage in its moral hierarchy "treason." The idea is that children cry not primarily because they are in need, but because they want to manipulate and control their parents. Under either name, it's a strange way to see babies and toddlers—and is contradicted by research showing children as young as 18 months old will typically try to help others without even being asked, if they know how to do so.

Also, four of MRT's phases have the same name as the comparable Scientology stage. Beller, of the Influence, notes that MRT credits a man named Ron Smothermon with developing and naming the steps of what it calls the "freedom ladder." Smothermon is a self-help author connected to the "human potential movement" of the 1970s and may have been influenced by Scientology.

(Little insisted in an email to VICE, "I know nothing at all about Scientology, except what I saw on a single episode of South Park.")

But let's leave the program's apparent debt to Scientology's rhetoric aside. At least six published evaluation studies of MRT are listed in PubMed—the official US database of scientific studies—as well as dozens of papers that are unpublished or remain outside the peer-reviewed literature. A 2013 meta-analysis of data from 33 studies, which included more than 30,000 participants, found an average recidivism reduction of around one third. That sounds impressive, but 50 percent of the studies showed no effect at all, and the overall "effect size" was calculated to be 0.16

Effect size is a measure of how much of a difference something makes— researchers typically rate them as "small," "medium," or "large," and obviously for something like reducing recidivism, the bigger the effect, the better. The typical cut-off for being seen as having a enough of an effect to make a real world difference is .20, though the authors of the MRT meta-analysis note that many widely used prison programs have similarly small effects.

That's another reason it seems especially odd a program with such small and often null results would be listed on an official US website highlighting treatments that are evidence-based and effective. Nonetheless, MRT can be found in the National Registry of Evidence Based Programs and Practices (NREPP), run by the federal government's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). (It is listed as a "legacy" program.)

I reached out to the feds to ask why MRT is included and what that designation means. In an email statement, a SAMHSA spokesperson explained that the registry is undergoing a major transition: In July 2015, it changed its mission from being a database of programs that work to one that lists any program about which there is any evidence, positive or negative.

"Now evaluations are published whether a program is harmful or ineffective, as well as if it is promising or effective," the spokesman said. "This changes the entire nature of the registry from a list of evidence-based programs to a list of all programs that demonstrates not only what is effective, but also what is harmful or ineffective so communities can better invest scarce resources."

That sounds like an excellent idea. But it should probably be accompanied by a change in the name of the database, which as of now implies that it includes only programs backed by evidence. SAMHSA is aware of the contradiction, its spokesperson adding, "As NREPP transitions into its more mature phase as a registry, the appropriateness of the name will be considered."

In the meantime, a disclaimer on the website would help. After all, programs like MRT use NREPP as something like a Good Housekeeping seal of approval; on the treatment's website, its inclusion in NREPP is cited as "recognition" that it is "an evidence based program." In the statement, SAMHSA's spokesperson added they are currently reviewing the data on MRT and other "legacy" programs that were reviewed before 2015, but this will not be completed for several years.

For his part, Little thinks his program was implemented on Rikers in a way that made it unlikely to work. "MRT is generally designed for implementation in more than 30 sessions," he wrote VICE. "As I understand it, the 'clients' at Rikers came to an average of less than 7 sessions, the median number was three meetings as I heard it. To me, it was designed to fail at some level."

If there's any good news here, it is that the poor outcome cost a rich bank $1.2 million, rather than taxpayers. That's because the research was conducted as one of the first US experiments in what are known as "social impact bonds." The idea is to get companies to invest in programs that might cut government costs by improving outcomes. If it works, the investors make money and the government wins, too, by gaining data and early implementation of an effective program. If the program fails, however, only the investors lose money. (Through a spokesperson, the bank declined to comment other than to say, "Goldman Sachs funded a social impact bond to help reduce recidivism on Rikers—the funding was not for research on the therapy.")

The issues run deeper, though. Study participants experienced an outdated and humiliating treatment that basically taught them that their problems lie only in themselves—not in a society that locks up kids even when data shows that this, in and of itself, increases recidivism compared to noncustodial placements. No one involved even seemed to consider what it would be like to get beaten by guards at night—as has been widely documented at Rikers—while getting told each day that their own disobedience is the real problem.

If we want a more just society, maybe it's not prisoners who need to take a moral inventory, but leaders and corporations who accept this corrupt, unequal, and biased justice system as it is. Politicians across the spectrum keep claiming to believe that addiction is a disease. But our courts and jails and prisons—and the programs we choose to study in them—keep saying otherwise.

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

As cannabis transitions from the black market to a legal industry, big shot marijuana investors with their eyes on the "green rush" want to make pot seem "mainstream" enough that white soccer moms will forget it was ever a crime. Their hope is that the industry will continue to expand as the stigma fades, and one of the most important ways to make that happen is to eradicate the racially charged "criminal" association with weed.

The problem is that most of today's stoners were participating in the black market for years before legalization hit the United States. They just didn't perceive themselves or their dealers as dangerous people who fit the description of a "criminal." Instead, the counterculture associated with the black market was a community of dissenters who rejected government propaganda and relied on trust to create an underground industry.

Now, hip-hop artists, who helped usher underground pot culture into popular culture, are trying to trying to employ the same entrepreneurial spirit they used to launch clothing lines and liquor brands to take the reins of the legal-weed industry.

Early this year, Wu-Tang's Ghostface Killah and Killah Priest busted into the California weed industry with Wu Goo, a 70 percent THC oil made to be smoked out of their Dynamite Stix vaporizer. The product comes after the success of West Coast rapper Kurupt's line of marijuana products. Kurupt's Moonrocks are girl-scout cookie buds rolled in CO2 oil and dipped in kief. Kurupt also sells THC-infused "lean" called "Moonwalk." Flavored and bottled like grape cough syrup, the purple drink is a not-so-subtle homage to sizzurp.

Both products are produced in a partnership with Dr. Zodiak, an entrepreneur and hip-hop artist who credits their success to their approach. "We just do things the way they should be done organically. We're not going to take Wu-Tang and try to turn it into Betty Crocker or something like that. We're gonna keep it original and authentic and keep the fans happy. We're not going to change for anybody."

The initial success of Moonrocks, which included a social-media campaign and natural endorsements from the hip-hop community, including Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne, and 2Chainz, encouraged Kurupt's partners, Zodiak and Michael Solo, to reach out to Ghostface and Killah Priest in hopes of developing Wu Goo. Although Ghostface famously dreamed of having "enough land to plant to go and plant own sess crops" in the classic Wu-Tang track "Can It Be All So Simple," it never occurred to him that there'd be a legal-weed business and he might be a part of it. "No, never. Never. Nope. Nope," Ghost tells VICE. But looking back, it makes sense to him how we got to this point. "At the end of the day, it's all about money. The government says you were a criminal if you were getting money off of this weed. Then they saw the demand. They saw it was a growing business. Now they wanna take it and put a dollar on it, so they can get a dollar. They do this with whatever is blowing up. They'd do crack and heroin, too, if it wasn't for people dying over that shit."

Though Ghostface and Killah Priest are joining other rappers who are known to love pot by breaking into the legal-weed industry, they aren't exactly weed heads like Wu-Tang Clan member Method Man, who's about to release a sequel to his stoner comedy classic How High next year. But the respect and renown Ghost has garnered for his art is what Solo believes will help propel their business forward.

"I just think hip-hop is the number one way to brand weed. I think hip-hop and weed go hand in hand together, and they alway have," he says. "The fact that we were the first ones really to combine weed with the hip-hop element with Kurupt and with Wu-Tang, you can see from the results. It just took off and blew up bigger than we ever thought it would, and now we're just coming out with new flavors and new products under our umbrella. It's a beautiful thing."

To stand out from the pack, Wu Goo must keep it real while staying in the lines. "We're a social-media-driven company, and we drive sales through our ability to reach millions of people through social media," Solo says, "Our company makes noise because of all of our friends. The entertainment industry is wrapped around our company, and they're supporting us—but not because we're throwing money at them like big corporations are."

The company has hired Brian O'Dea, a major pot smuggler in the 1970s and 1980s, to expand the company in legal states and internationally, with their eyes set on his home country of Canada. The illicit-turned-licit entrepreneur helps the company expand and keeps the product in line with regulations. That's no easy task given the variety of regulations from state to state, especially as they prepare to potentially convert from medical to recreational in California. I couldn't help but ask Ghostface if he could have ever imagined selling drugs with a white senior citizen from Canada. "Hell no," he says, albeit not dismissively. ""You know, things just happen in life."

"I'm glad he understands it," Ghost adds on O'Dea. "He sees everything, so that just makes you more confident."

"My history actually works to my benefit," O'Dea argues. "It's one of those few instances in your life when your criminal past is actually a qualifier for your legitimate presence."

Solo's call to O'Dea to help expand into Canada turned into a plan to tackle more US states. Now, he is legally selling the drug he smuggled decades ago. "The last thing that I did was 75 tons and $250 million, and we did that with the DEA watching us and somehow we pulled it off. To be able to do this in the legitimate world, to know that everything that we're doing is actually benefitting people, it's just an extraordinary opportunity for me," he says.

That criminals who sparked the cannabis culture in this country are in jail while investors are getting rich is not lost on O'Dea. He says that while speaking to stockbrokers in Canada about the cannabis industry a couple of years ago, he noticed the room was full of men in Tom Ford suits and Prada shoes. To them, he says from the stage, "You owe the seats you're sitting in to people in prisons in orange jumpsuits. You have to stand on those chairs and say let those people out." But, he adds, "Of course no one did."

Now Wu Go looks to expand to other states and convert to a recreational license in the Golden State if marijuana legalization passes the California ballot in November. O'Dea spends his time comparing these regulations. "The compliance in every state has to be dealt with very carefully and a lot of the compliance is around packaging and content. So our labels are different in every state because every state requires different info on the label. We have to put certain symbols on the label in Colorado that we don't have to use in Washington. As we get along, we will have our own person who does nothing but compliance in the markets that we go into," O'Dea says.

O'Dea thinks marijuana will "definitely" be legalized for recreational use in California, and that when that happens, "a lot of smaller companies, a whole lot of companies in general, they're going to get wiped out by big corporations. It's unfortunate that that's going to happen. But I feel very confident with the number of stores that carry our product, we're not going anywhere."

Ghostface is a bit more enthusiastic about the prospects of average people getting into the weed game and turning it into something positive. He simply tells me, "Go in your backyard and grow that shit."

Follow Kristen Gwynne on Twitter.

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Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson announced yesterday he'll be making steps to improve the city's housing crisis by building "100 percent social housing" over tent city, the lot currently occupied by unaffordable housing protesters.

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According to University of Leicester criminologists – who I am sad to announce are grasses, bad grasses, the worst of all the grasses – day-to-day theft is on the rise thanks to that most brilliant of inventions, self-service checkout machines. Unexpected item in the bagging area? Not if you straight up steal it by scanning it through as an especially heavy onion. The overwhelming feeling of the report is 'theft is bad', with supermarket losses supposedly doubling since the introduction of self-service and the advent of lowkey, easy-to-do, palm-it-off grocery theft. But we all do it. Even people who have never stolen in their life know to scan anything from the bakery as a humble bread roll. Even people who are nailed-on going to heaven have, in a moment of poverty-induced weakness, Scanned The Onion. Here some people share their #hot #tips on how to scam Tesco out of small quantities of money.

JACK, 27

I'd had maybe three pints – the magic number – before going to Sainsbury's to pick up some dinner. I was feeling confident, fearless, because of the magic pints, and when I got to the till decided to try the onion scam on a £4 pack of cod. I hit the onion button, punched "1" into the quantity bit and put my cod in the bagging area.

The red light immediately started flashing. I began to sweat. A man in a Sainsbury's polo shirt asked me why I had tried to pass off two cod fillets as a solitary onion.

"What? No I didn't – I scanned the cod," I said to the man, lying fairly obviously.

"No you didn't," he said, accurately. "You scanned an onion and then put that cod in your bag – I watched you."

"Uh sorry, did I?" I asked, for some reason. I was so hot and red. So so hot.

"Yes," he said. "Don't do it again."

"Okay," I said, and left, without any dinner.

VIVIENNE, 25

I always end up paying more at self-service checkouts because I pick up the reduced stuff and it always scans the full-price label.

EMILY, 26

My friend got banned from a Tesco in Brighton because he kept scanning whole chickens through as one banana. Personally I just run fancy pastries through as an onion so they're not as expensive.

JIM, 28

My soul is largely pure and sin-free although, father, I have to admit that I once put a 12-pack of assorted Krispy Kremes through as a plain 12-pack of Krispy Kremes. I wanted jam and icing Krispy Kremes but I didn't want to pay for them, but I still wanted to be honest about the fact that I was buying Krispy Kremes. This saved me somewhere between £1.50 and £2. I was sweating throughout this endeavour. I am not cut out for high crime.

RICHARD, 24

Krispy Kremes are the best doughnuts to emerge from the realm of baked goods. They're smooth; they're soft; they come in a range of flavours to suit every palette. They're also freaking expensive. So in my heady and golden and dry-mouthed days of getting stoned and ascending to a perpetually confused state of being every single day, my friends and I devised a procedure in which we could eat our weight in Krispy Kremes for a fifth of the price. It's simple, really. Just scan that glob of royal dough in as a normal Tesco doughnut. Way less risky than scanning a pack of mince in as a load of onions, because the weight will always be the same, and the rewards are greater. Sugar is a triumph over the blood-soaked remains of a bovine animal. It is the antidote for cotton-mouthed teenagers the world over. Plus: bonus round! Put that shit in the microwave when you get home and cooly attain the god-level of heaven.

ALED, 32

When I was at uni and had just started writing for magazines I was broke so I'd go in to get my sandwich for lunch and then roll the magazine up and put it under my arm like you do when you're walking around with a copy of the Standard. If someone asked at the checkout I could say, 'Oh shit, I forgot' and laugh it off. But no-one ever asked so I just got free music magazines.

OLIVER, 27

I've always been obsessed with scamming supermarket checkouts, and it's not even a money thing. As an 11-year-old, I once sneaked a discoloured and out-of-date Boost bar into a local shop, placed it on the shelf and – an hour or so later – returned to buy it. As I handed the bar to the lady at the till she paused. Rotating its mangy packaging in the light and squeezing its spongy body, she frowned confusedly. Sniffles were chugging from my nose and I was going bright red, but the lady didn't notice. And eventually she put it through the till and I walked out beside myself with happiness. So for the next fortnight, I repeated the same thing every single day, and it just got funnier each time. Afterwards I'd be curled up on the pavement around the corner, staring at the bar and crying with laughter at the very idea that they were charging me for this hunk of debris. 13 times I bought that Boost – and it's making me laugh now.

But on to present day stuff. Every so often at lunchtime, I'll want something fancy. When that occurs, I head to my nearest Tesco, pick whatever £6 Heston Blumenthal wanker Tory snack I desire and carry it over to the reduced section. There I hold the snack flat in one hand and pick up the yellow stickered items with the other, making my arms into a set of scales. When I find something of equal weight, I do the old switcheroo: peeling the sticker off the reduced item and placing it over the bar code on the one I actually want. Scan it through at the self-service, remembering not to panic when your halloumi & rocket wrap comes up as a salsa/sour cream combo dip, and the robot doesn't know the difference. This is a classic grift sure to provide you with both thrills for when you're bored and more money for scratch cards.

VICE in no way encourages or endorses these terrible acts.

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Screenshots captured in-game by the author

I've been playing Rainbow Six Siege nearly every day since its release in December 2015. I've seen overpowered operators rise and fall, a series of usability fixes and map tweaks to keep the community happy, and countless free additions to the game.

So, I can tell you with all the authority I need that it's the best multiplayer shooter of this generation. Perhaps of all time. And you need to be okay with this.

The core concept of Rainbow Six Siege is simple, immediately familiar to anyone who's ever held a digital gun. A team of five attackers tries to penetrate a fortified location where an evenly matched team of five defenders holds and protects an objective. This objective could be a bomb you defuse, a hostage you rescue, or a biohazard container you'll need to stand near to "secure". You get one life per round, a single headshot from most weapons instantly kills, and each player has a unique character with their own weapons and gadgets to help get the job done.

What makes Siege so satisfying though is the wealth of systems laid over the top. Its four-minute rounds have a complexity similar to a fully featured multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, like DotA 2 or League of Legends. And just like a MOBA, the game is at its most fascinating when these systems start to smash into each other.

Lots of noise was made about its destruction system when the game launched, but few people talk about how complex the procedural destruction really is. It's not a matter of tossing a grenade to blow a hole in any random wall, although that's a valid approach. It's what the ability to blast through the terrain in a map does to your strategies. You're no longer thinking of open sight lines and doorways, but of the ever-so-delicate walls and ceilings surrounding you. Reinforcements and bulletproof barricades can help defenders create chokepoints, but they're in short supply. If the attackers want to find a way in, they'll eventually find one.

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Each round starts with one of the best-designed parts of a video game I've seen in years, too: the drone stage. How do you get past the design problem that defenders need a 45-second head start to build their castle before the attackers try to kick it over? The answer is these drones. In the time before the round begins, the defenders are grabbing armour, putting cameras in place and setting up traps; while on the other side, the attackers have drone parkour. These little machines are piloted around the map in an attempt to find the objective and to scout out the opposition, and its strengths and weaknesses, in advance.

From there it's carnage, and despite the ever-dwindling supply of both allies and ammunition, the most important resource is time. As a defender you're mostly just trying to buy yourself as much of it as possible, and attackers are pressed into moving quickly and efficiently, to reach the objective before the time runs out. Given long enough, any defence can be unpicked – but the ceiling on how long a round can last means that players aren't often able to find the perfect way to mount an assault, and instead have to make a snap decision between one of two shitty options, based solely on what they might have seen during the drone stage.

Having the reflexes of a 15 year old will help you to get ahead here, but winning at Rainbow Six Siege requires not just player skill – communication, intuition and straight up being smarter than your opponents are essential factors. Take my favourite defender, Pulse. Pulse has a handheld heartbeat scanner that can see people's hearts thumping in their chest through walls. If an enemy gets within 12 metres while you've got the scanner out, you'll see a circle. You could kill them with a shotgun blast through the wall, or letting off an explosive, but you need to be proficient in how the scanner works to really make the most of it. Despite how it might sound, it's not a win condition – especially when you consider that the attacking operator called IQ can detect electronics through walls, electronics just like the scanner you're holding in your hands.

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If all this sounds like a lot to take in, it is. Six is a first person shooter for the MOBA generation – highly complex, super adaptable and incredibly fast. In return for my investment over the course of eight months, I've rarely played a round that was anywhere similar to one that's come before. I've seen strategies reworked to account for every new trick we've found, and each week a handful of new ideas are spread on the subreddit that functions as the game's official community, plans that most people haven't thought of before.

With voice comms active and four friends ready to fill in as eager teammates, Rainbow Six Siege is the finest multiplayer game I've ever played. Almost everyone I have encouraged to get into it has, and continues to love it. It's not the newest shooter on the market, or the prettiest, or the most popular, but it's the one that I can't quit going back to. It's just that good. You should probably get it, too.

@_JakeTucker

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It was a bit ironic that Melania Trump's naked photoshoot surfaced around the same time Donald Trump's plan to crack down on porn made headlines, but that same spread is now raising potentially explosive questions given a bedrock issue powering her husband's presidential campaign: his tough stance on immigration.

According to a new report from Politico, there are a few gaps in Melania Trump's immigration story from her native Slovenia that may call her citizenship into question. The wannabe first lady was quick to deny she broke the law Thursday, but the photoshoot seems to place her working in the US in 1995—despite her having previously suggested she arrived a year later.

Melania Trump has told the press on at least two occasions—in practically the same words—that she followed the rules by returning to get her visa stamped in Europe every couple of months. But the type of visa that requires a stamp every few months is usually a temporary visitor or business type of visa, rather than a longer-term work visa she said she had (and that would have allowed her to legally work in the US).

If the model did in fact have a B-1 Temporary Business Visitor or B-2 Tourist Visa at the time she was working as a model in the US, it would constitute visa fraud. Experts told Politico if this were the case, Melania Trump's now-official citizenship could be called into question—even though she's married to a US citizen hellbent on keeping illegal immigrants out of the country.

In her defense, Lady Trump tweeted Thursday, "Let me set the record straight: I have at all times been in full compliance with the immigration laws of this country. Period." But given the recent kerfuffle over the nature of her college education—and the general tendency to massage the truth by the Trump clan—one might be forgiven for a healthy dose of skepticism here.

Read: Trump Campaign Admitted Yeah, OK, Maybe It Did Plagiarize Michelle Obama's Speech

The blood is still drying on Clay McCann's hands when he walks into a remote ranger station, slides a warm gun across the desk, and informs the ranger that he's just killed four campers.

"Do you want me to call a lawyer?" the alarmed ranger asks.

"I am a lawyer," McCann says.

So begins C. J. Box's 2007 thriller Free Fire, the seventh in a book series about a Wyoming game warden. The novel's plot spins on the premise that in an uninhabited, 50-square-mile portion of Yellowstone National Park, you can legally get away with murder.

The book's premise originates from a 14-page article called "The Perfect Crime" by Michigan State University law professor Brian Kalt. The article describes a judicial no-man's land in the Idaho part of Yellowstone, where a person can commit a crime and get off scot-free due to sloppy jurisdictional boundaries.

In 2004, Kalt was weeks away from becoming a father. Before the baby arrived, he wanted to churn out one last article to stay on track for tenure. He was researching obscure jurisdictional gray areas when he found a reference to the unusual jurisdiction of Yellowstone National Park. Like all national parks, Yellowstone is federal land. Portions of it fall in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, but Congress placed the entire park in Wyoming's federal district. It's the only federal court district in the country that crosses state lines.

Such trivia would scarcely summon a yawn from a layperson, but to a constitutional lawyer like Kalt, it was a flapping red flag. Kalt knew that Article III of the Constitution requires federal criminal trials to be held in the state in which the crime was committed. And the Sixth Amendment entitles a federal criminal defendant to a trial by jurors living in the state and district where the crime was committed. But if someone committed a crime in the uninhabited Idaho portion of Yellowstone, Kalt surmised, it would be impossible to form a jury. And being federal land, the state would have no jurisdiction. Here was a clear constitutional provision enabling criminal immunity in 50 square miles of America's oldest national park.

"The more I dug into it, the more interested I got," Kalt told me recently when I called him at his office in East Lansing. "People have this fascination with uncovering a loophole for the perfect crime. There are a lot of different approaches to it. But in terms of geography, there's just this one spot."

Kalt cranked out the paper in two weeks—before his wife gave birth—and the Georgetown Law Journal agreed to publish it in 2005. But Kalt worried his paper might inspire someone to schedule a trip to Yellowstone with the person they liked least. So before it came out, he sent copies to the Department of Justice, the US attorney in Wyoming, and the House and Senate judiciary committees. He hoped they would close the loophole before he broadcasted it to the world. It would be a simple fix, Kalt wrote, for Congress to divide Yellowstone into three federal districts—the Idaho portion going to Idaho, the Montana portion to Montana, and the Wyoming portion to Wyoming. He even drafted the legislation language. It was three lines long.

But Kalt barely got a response. From what he did hear, it seemed no one intended to do a thing. "I naïvely thought that once Congress found out about this, they'd think it was a problem worth fixing and they'd fix it," he told me. "But nothing happens in Washington just because it's a good idea."

"People have this fascination with uncovering a loophole for the perfect crime. In terms of geography, there's just this one spot." — Brian Kalt

When the paper was published, the media went nuts. Stories appeared in the Washington Post, the BBC, NPR, and even a Japanese newspaper. Wyoming-based crime writer C. J. Box read about it and thought it would make a great plot for a novel.

"I write about mystery, suspense, and crime, so the idea of a perfect crime anywhere, and especially in my neighborhood, was just really intriguing," Box told me over the phone.

His novel, Free Fire, made the New York Times extended best-seller list and continues to be popular. "Every time I go on tour, someone asks me about it," Box said. "The book is sold all over Yellowstone, which I find really interesting. People are still buying it like crazy."

Kalt notes in his article that even in the Zone of Death it would be difficult to get away with a crime completely. First, the crime would have to be serious enough to entitle the defendant to a jury trial, since lesser offenses could lead to fines or even short prison sentences. The crime would need to happen entirely within the park. (If it were orchestrated elsewhere, the defendant could be charged with something like "conspiracy to commit murder" in another district.) And even then, the defendant could still face civil lawsuits, like getting sued by a victim's next of kin. Finally, there aren't many opportunities for crime in an area that is uninhabited, and remote—there's not even a road connecting it to the rest of Yellowstone.

"All of these things reduce the incentive," Kalt admits. "It becomes harder to imagine someone relying on my theory and getting away with it."

Even still, Kalt is worried about the wait-and-see approach that Congress is taking to this loophole. "I'm less concerned about the odds than the stakes," he told me. "I don't think something is likely to happen, but it would be really bad if it did. If Congress really wanted to fix this, it wouldn't take long at all. The problem isn't that it's complicated; it's that they're not interested in it."

Congress doesn't seem to agree. Wyoming senator Michael Enzi's press secretary told me in an emailed statement that "Senator Enzi has studied the 'zone of death' issue in Yellowstone National Park, and there does not seem to be a simple legislative fix." Idaho senator Jim Risch told me the argument is "science fiction" and insists the state of Idaho would have jurisdiction over a crime there. "This is all very romantic and a great fictional thing," he said, "but I'm telling you, the states have jurisdiction." (This statute, however, clearly places Yellowstone under the "sole and exclusive jurisdiction of the United States.")

Kalt, for his part, isn't surprised that lawmakers are sitting on their hands. "They don't deal with hypothetical threats," he said. "They deal with concerns that are currently affecting influential constituents."

Still, the inaction has caused him some existential handwringing. "The question I usually get is, 'Why write the article?'" he told me. "If you know they're not going to fix it, why bring it up?' I don't really have a good answer, other than to say I'm optimistic and that maybe, every once in awhile, something happens."

Until then, Kalt's theory of the perfect crime needs only the perfect criminal to walk into the woods and test it. Then the answer will be settled once and for all. Unfortunately, someone may have to die first. And that's not an outlandish notion in America's national parks—in 2015 a man was stabbed to death in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and in 2013, a woman pushed her newlywed husband over a cliff in Glacier National Park.

When Free Fire came out, the publisher brought Kalt to Wyoming to speak at some publicity events. After one talk, someone suggested they drive out to the Idaho portion of the park to take some pictures. It's a beautiful area, by all accounts—an untrampled wilderness of lodgepole pines, grizzly bears, and waterfalls. But Kalt had no interest in tempting fate.

"I'm not going there for a million dollars," he said. "Not until this is fixed and probably not even then. The irony gods would have a field day with that one."

Follow Jacob Baynham on Twitter.

Japanese reporters outside the home of Satoshi Uematsu, who allegedly killed 19 in a mass stabbing last month. (Photo by Richard Atrero de Guzman/NurPhoto)

Late last month, authorities say a man named Satoshi Uematsu used a hammer to shatter a first-floor window at his old workplace, a residential center for the disabled about an hour outside of Tokyo. Once inside, he proceeded to carry out a horrific stabbing spree that left 19 people dead and at least 20 more injured in the deadliest attack in Japan since World War II.

The assault was shocking on a variety of levels. For starters, Japan has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world; in 2012, there were just three gun deaths in the entire country. There's also the fact that, prior to carrying out this plan, Uematsu wrote a letter detailing his bizarre fixation on killing people with disabilities, offering to eradicate mass numbers of them so long as the government changed his name and ponied up some serious cash to help him start over. He was fired from his job and later sent to a mental hospital, but somehow got released after being deemed less than dangerous. Finally, it's curious that the story didn't make more of a splash in the United States given the sheer volume of death.

For some perspective on Uematsu's crime, I called up Anne McKnight, an English professor at Shirayuri College in Tokyo. We talked about how people there view the crime and what's been missing from Western accounts. She explained some of the broader social currents percolating before the attack, like a massive elderly population enjoying a robust welfare state and a trend away from national pacifism. "As you may have read, Japan is increasing as a security state with the government wanting to remilitarize the country," she told me. "A lot of things are open in terms of what direction the country will go in."

Here's what she had to say about the worst mass killing in recent Japanese history.

VICE: What's the reaction been like to this story domestically, in Japan?
Anne McKnight: A lot of kind of stunned silence, because this guy is a loner, and it sounds like he was unfriended by a lot of people when he did start to go off the rails.

One narrative that's coming out is that this guy wanted to be a caretaker. He was in a teacher-training course, and then he worked in a nursing home. So people are kind of wondering at what point he made that turn––from wanting to care for people to then taking on the role of cleanser of the weak. Everyone agrees it's a senseless crime––he claims no allegiance to any organized group. So in that sense it's very different from a lot of the large-scale political crimes of the 60s, like the governor of Tokyo is pretty right-wing. There is a tendency toward militarization and security, and the Olympics are coming here. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out. People in the West have a knee-jerk tendency to celebrate anyone for being a woman. Well, Margaret Thatcher was a woman, so there you go.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Images via the author

I started working as a camgirl around the time I graduated university and was desperately looking for a job. I was really wary about the gig at first because I'm a bigger girl, and I'm not used to being bigger. At that point I think I had hit around 260 pounds—100 pounds above my usual, comfortable weight. The stress of gaining so much weight caused a vicious cycle where I would eat to make myself feel better and in turn gain more weight and feel bad. It was hard to imagine feeling good about my body and making money from it, but I was desperate.

I'd recently started watching documentaries on girls who did financial domination, also known as findoms. Basically they yell at businessmen to give them money and they comply. I tried to get into this but it took a lot of effort to get approved, and these were trying times, so I signed up for a camgirl site called Chaturbate. Their hiring process was a lot less rigorous, though they did require a photo of me holding up my ID to my face to prove I was at least 18.

As I was preparing for my first show, I ran through all the terrible things that could happen to me while I did this. I imagined viewers telling me how fat and disgusting I was. I assumed they'd tell me I wasn't cut out to be a camgirl and that I shouldn't even be TRYING to do this type of work because fat girls aren't attractive. I thought I'd do this first show and then get so bullied that I would never, ever try it again.

I was completely wrong. I was really nervous and uncomfortable as I started, and I didn't even bother taking off my clothes at first. I just wanted to do a test run to see how people would respond to me as a human being. A lot of the people watching camgirls are honestly just lonely. If they weren't, they would watch porn that has been pre-filmed and doesn't involve direct interaction with the actors. The people watching me on my first day were genuinely nice to me and we all had a good chat. Of course there were a select few who immediately typed, "show titz now," but it was fairly easy to figure out that those people aren't paying customers.

READ MORE: Meet the Bouncers of Camgirl Chatrooms

All in all, that first camming experience went pretty well. A lot of the people were friendly and helpful, they explained to me a bit more about how the site worked. There were a lot of people directly saying "I love your body"—sometimes it was that my curves were amazing, and that I was "the absolute perfect amount of curves." And because I have tremendously bad self esteem, these compliments, regardless of their intentions, made me feel better about myself. I continued doing shows for a while and it actually made me a lot more confident. I changed my photos on Tinder to full body shots because I wasn't as embarrassed anymore—my body was good enough for the people I did shows for, so it was good enough for the strangers on Tinder. This confidence transferred to my professional life as well; I got a lot less nervous during interviews and didn't feel as judged. However, I did everything under an alias, and I do not mention my experience on my resume or to people I do not directly trust.

As I got more confident in myself and my body, I also became more comfortable with the different types of requests I'd get from guys (it was usually guys) viewing my shows. A lot of the requests were pretty tame, starting with, "Can you watch my camera as I watch yours?" which was the easiest type because I would interact a little with them on their channel but mostly respond to my own. But the more popular and comfortable I got, the weirder the requests became.

It started with foot fetishes, just requests to see my feet in general and then moved on to, "Please suck on your big toe for two minutes," which was weird and gross but still kind of funny. The foot trolls were pretty boring and tame, so I moved on quickly from that to men who really wanted to be dominated; as in they wanted me to talk them down to dirt until it got them off. I had one man who wanted to be ordered to wear women's lingerie, which was fun to watch. The weirdest request I've received, though, was from someone who eagerly requested a private room to see me poo. He required that the camera be positioned directly by the butthole so the poop could be seen coming out. I'm not entirely sure why that turned him on; but no harm no foul, so to speak.

Camming is not all fun and games and positivity and confidence. It's not "easy money" by any means. I'm always afraid that young girls will do this when they aren't comfortable with themselves and get exploited. I often second guessed whether it could one day come back to bite me, because I knew a girl who did it and someone emailed a bunch of her photos to her family to "expose" her. She did use her real name, which is something I do not. There were some people that I do regret talking to who tried to pressure me into private shows with them off the website. This required Skype, and the person saying they had no credit card and that was why they couldn't use the website's token aspect - looked really young, but reassured me he was over legal age - was something I was pretty uncomfortable with. It was more murky territory because he was insistent that I watch his cam.

I was 21 at the time that I began camming, and I did it for about four months. My professional life was most unaffected at the time because I eventually was working a 9-5 job, and my hours of camming were later at night. Outside of that, I didn't have a whole lot of time for friends and socialization—or dating, but it did help improve my sex life! It takes a LOT of time to actually make very much money via these websites. You have to be pretty consistent with a schedule, and people are mostly on later at night. Even though nothing about it was illegal, the social stigma that stays with it still haunts me. I don't tell people about it because I'm not very proud of it. I honestly didn't do anything on camera I regret besides that one outside viewing, because mostly you are the one in control of your own show. If I had my time back, I would still do the exact same thing because it was such an experience.

It's hard to imagine that taking off your clothes for strangers and sucking on your own toes can be affirming and improve your confidence, but it really did change the way I view myself. Seeing my body as something beautiful and sexy through the chat room comments allowed me to find a new perspective on who I am and how I look to the world.