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We Asked the Nicest People We Know About Their Sex Lives

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Just a couple of happy people who, scientifically speaking, should be having great sex

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Your nan was right all along. The notion that "nice guys and girls finish first" has now been borne out in two recent scientific studies on selflessness and sex. Basically, nice people have better sex lives.

Researchers at two Canadian universities uncovered that people who self-identify as altruistic, and those who unknowingly demonstrate their altruism through a willingness to donate to charity, also reported having more sexual partners in their lifetime, having more sex while in relationships, and having more casual sex than the rest of us selfish losers.

But why? It's hard to tell what's hot about someone just because they mentioned giving blood or sponsoring a goat at some point. "Previous studies have shown that humans prefer kind and altruistic mates—particularly for long-term mating," Dr. Steven Arnocky, a Nipissing University professor and lead researcher on this particular study, told VICE. "The reason seems to be rooted in the fact that humans have evolved to engage in long-term pair-bonding and bi-parental care of dependent offspring. Ancestors who happened to prefer qualities in a partner that signaled a willingness and ability to invest in their partners and offspring would have been at a distinct reproductive advantage."

You're thus theoretically more likely to get laid if you demonstrate that you're the sort of person who'll stick around and look after your partner and/or future children. Rather than just take science's word for it, we made some of our writers call up the nicest person they know for a chat about that person's sex life. You be the judge.

Ryan, 24

Ryan and Jack were friends in sixth grade, lost touch a bit during college, and reconnected later. Ryan's always doing stupidly nice things like running through mud to raise money for charity or helping to build schools in South Africa.

Doesn't everybody have a sexual bucket list of things they want to do? I've not done badly, but I've still got a little way to go on mine.

My personal number is four girls. I've done things other than sex with different people—second or third base and whatever—but four is the number of people I've gone "the whole way" with. Being like any guy, I'd be lying if I said I didn't want a higher number. Four is a lot lower than some of my friends, not that we sit around in a circle and talk about it, but it's something I'm aware of.

My sex life has definitely stepped up since I got into my twenties and moved to London. That's around the time I first started using Tinder more seriously, which isn't a coincidence. I used to think dating apps were a bit of a joke or just a way to boost my self-confidence, but they're a really easy way to meet girls. So far I've used it for a couple of one-night stands and a recurring thing, but I can't see that going any further. I've also had plenty of dates that led to nothing.

I'm kind of satisfied with how things are going at the moment, but I'd prefer to be in a proper relationship. With my last long-term girlfriend we'd have sex about twice a week and it was always good. Now that I'm single it doesn't happen as often! Right now I'd probably rate my sex life as a five or six out of ten.

Jess, 25

Salma met Jess on the first day of uni, where they bonded over a hatred of sexual double standards. Jess used to buy Salma's dinner when she was broke.

I wouldn't say I'm 100 percent satisfied with my sex life at the moment—I don't fancy my boyfriend as much as I did when we were first going out. I did consider finishing it but we do get on and think it would be hard to find someone that I connect with.

I definitely think I slept around more at university. I suppose my overall memory of uni was being at a social and realizing that I'd basically got with most of my flatmate's friends. Even now I can't quite believe I pulled solid nines—my friends said that I always get with the hot ones.

As I've got older, getting with random guys and waking up next to one no longer appeals as much. I wonder if that's because I got a lot of stick for it. And now that there's stuff like Snapchat, I don't want any photos of me floating around! That said, I always look back on those days and half-wish I had the confidence to be that girl again. It's funny because although I do a lot of charity work and volunteering, I'm probably the most selfish lover anyone's ever had. I'm really good at getting myself off so if a guy doesn't meet my standards, he doesn't make the cut. If I had to summarize my sex life, right now I'd probably say unsatisfied.

Tom, 26

Tom's an old school friend of Hussein's, and for as long as they've known each other, Tom's been involved in charity work for his church. While Tom trains to become a lawyer, he spends his free time tutoring kids and working in a food bank.

I don't really have a lot of sex, because of work, and because I live with my parents. They're strict Christians so obviously it would be awkward to bring someone home.

I've been sexually "active" since I was 12. That didn't translate into having lots of girlfriends or anything—I didn't lose my virginity until I was 19, so up to then my sex life was really just internet porn. There were opportunities to have drunken sex with girls at parties, but I didn't really want to do that. Something about casual sex at the time just made me uncomfortable, which might be why I waited for so long.

When I did finally have sex, it was a bit underwhelming, like I'd hyped it so much. It definitely did get more enjoyable over time. During good times we'd be having sex up to ten times a week—really passionate and exciting sex that would last hours. In the end though, we were having sex just for the sake of it.

Since uni I've maybe slept with two people? I met both on Tinder, during a time when I was pretty lonely and just horny. It was actually really fun and chilled out, though. I'm still not into casual sex much, but I'm less averse to it. I do hope I can meet someone really amazing and get into a long-term relationship again. Though sex itself is fun, I personally find it more enjoyable when you have a real personal connection with the person you're doing it with."

Photo by Marco Gomes via.

Sophia, 24

Sophia and Francisco met through mutual friends two years ago, and he was instantly drawn to her weirdly serene kindness. Francisco is also fairly certain that he wouldn't be with his current girlfriend without Sophia's wise counsel and reassurances.

I've had sex with eight people, and sexual encounters with two more people. The basic breakdown is: two relationships; two one-night stands with friends; one party encounter; one drunken mistake; three "things" where I fell too hard and broke my heart in different ways while we had on off sex for months; and one guy who I had casual friendly sex with on national holidays—Halloween, New Years, and Easter, don't ask why.

My first relationship lasted about six months. We had a lot of sex in the beginning and that was great. I kept getting cystitis though, which wasn't. It was less great at the end, obviously, and less nice when cystitis made me want to die.

I'm almost at the six-month mark with my current boyfriend and it's the best sex I've ever had. It's fun and it's hot and I'm into him like crazy. I probably see him about three times a week, and we'd generally have sex at least twice every time we see each other. He's a babe, utterly lovely, and incredibly "nice," which helps.

These experiences all made me more confident, but also more uncertain, particularly around the time I graduated. It meant wanting to be around people more and to have the thrill of getting drunk and making out. I fall hard and quick for people, as I've said, and that's a recipe for heartbreak.

Emily, 27

Tshepo met Emily when they were teenagers, and quickly realized that what seemed like a sort of incessant cheeriness was genuine kindness. Emily is the most generous person Tshepo has probably ever known, besides Tshepo's own mum (who obviously wouldn't talk to her about sex for this story).

I was about 13 when I first started doing sexual stuff, generally with older boys—guys who were 18, 19. I honestly feel like I've been sexually "active" for a very long time. Not as in having sex from a very young age, but in my head. I can remember, when I was about five, feeling... knowing how to feel turned on. I remember that vividly and understanding, before doing anything, that it was going to be great. That probably influenced how much enjoyment I got out of sexual stuff later.

I had a fair amount of sexual partners, from the age of about 17 to 21, and I think I found that quite fulfilling. I was drawn to so many people by a sense of excitement, at some level. I think I just get really turned on, and get attracted to a way that another person looks at me, first. Then, in a way I can't quite describe, I just get the feeling that we'd have great sex. In terms of what's satisfying about that, it's almost the idea of having it, during it. Especially if it's completely immediate—we say, "you, let's go, now," which is purely instinctive. I've never had the whole "I want to rip his clothes off right now" thing, but I can get sexual stimulation from anything on the spectrum of interacting with someone. I wouldn't say I necessarily cum with everything, but there's this connection.

Now, I'm in a long-distance relationship but normally my boyfriend and I would have sex at least once a day. At least. We definitely Skype and FaceTime, in all kinds of ways now—which is really fun.

Follow Jack, Salma, Hussein, Francisco, and Tshepo on Twitter.


'Ben-Hur' Couldn't Have Been Worse

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The movie entitled Ben-Hur, which is opening this weekend, has so little in common with the sumptuous 1959 Charlton Heston epic of the same name, it barely qualifies as a remake. It barely qualifies as a film.

Case in point: About 15 minutes in, as Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston), the Jewish prince of Jerusalem under Roman rule, strolls through the market with his love slave Esther, the camera suddenly goes wide to reveal that Jesus Christ is standing next to them. Putting aside his carpentry for a moment, he looks directly into the camera and intones, apropos of nothing, "Love your neighbor!" with the same studied nonchalance with which you might ask the CVS manager where the condoms are. (Prudish Ben-Hur, for his part, is put off and scoffs, "Well, that's rather progressive!")

I immediately asked myself: How many movies have I seen in which Jesus was actually standing just off-camera the whole time? Maybe all of them? If we panned over to the foosball table at Rick's in Casablanca, would the son of God look up and go, "Blessed are the meek?" Is there possibly a post-credits sequence in Citizen Kane where he guides Charles Foster through the eye of a needle?

Jesus's presence in the William Wyler film is minimal and generally considered a bit of a joke—the Coen Brothers parodied it in this year's Hail, Caesar!but this Jesus, played by Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro, vaguely familiar from Lost, will, before the movie is over, use the force on a Roman centurion and look out at the empty seats of the theater to implore God's forgiveness, for we know not what we do. This is because Ben-Hur is the latest—and at a $100 million budget, maybe the most expensive—instance of faith-based marketing, which puts it in the company of God's Not Dead, Heaven Is Real , and Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Ben Stein's 2008 expose of the theory of evolution.

These movies are screened for churches and conservative groups, run trailers during FOX News, and generally aim for a Christian audience with $5.1 trillion of purchasing power in the United States that might not otherwise attend an average mainstream, godless movie.

The goal here isn't to compete with other blockbusters any more than Christian rock competes with Guns & Roses or the Nintendo game Bible Adventures competes with Mario. The goal is to vaguely simulate non-secular pleasures for the Tim Tebowdemographic. But for a person to unironically enjoy the crime against celluloid that is the 2016 Ben-Hur—in which nothing, not the costumes, script, acting, or camerawork betrays that slightest competence—that person would have so little in common with other humans as to constitute some kind of atavistic mutation.

I cannot say this more plainly: This is not jaded cynicism at an indifferent Hollywood picture. This is a film so baffled by its own existence, it is almost The Room. We're talking The Garbage Pail Kids Movie . We're talking Hell Comes to Frogtown, people.

Heston's Ben-Hur traded gay-subtext barbs with rival Messala; This movie has a pained-looking, impassive Morgan Freeman as a Nubian sheik who looks out from under dreadlocks and says, "I had my 'All Romans must die' phase, just like you," as though recalling having owned a Sisters of Mercy CD in the 12th grade. And generally, the actors do look miserable, generally sticking to one facial expression and trying not to move too much, like they've confused filmgoers with the T-Rex in Jurassic Park and think you won't be able to see them if they stand in place. Ben-Hur features, as all period-costume flicks must, a wayward Game of Thrones actor and this time, it's Pilou Asbæk, TV's Euron Greyjoy, as Pontius Pilate. He spends most of the movie squinting, looking offscreen and mumbling under his breath.

The director who was conned into this folly is the Kazakh-born Timur Bekmambetov, best known for the Russian vampire movie Night Watch and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter; effulgent Christian hauteur, then, would not appear to be his métier, though he seems to be more at home in the scene where Ben-Hur confronts the lepers and they lurch toward him and yell, "We're lepers!"

Lew Wallace, the author of the 1880 novel of the same name, was a Union Civil War general who later became US minister to the Ottomon Empire. His version of the story is saturated with themes of displacement and divided loyalties. This movie, meanwhile, is so rife with treacle, even the galley slaves seem like they're about to break whimsically into song. And here I was, thinking this movie was going to be about chariots.

You know what was a good movie, at least by comparison? The Nativity Story starring Oscar Isaac as Joseph, the eldest Sand Snake as the Virgin Mary, and three wisecracking wise men to leaven the mood. Or how about Darren Aronofsky's Noah, where the prophet chilled with some Rock Biters out of The Neverending Story ? Or Gods of Egypt, in which Transformers seeded the Fertile Crescent? Basically, we need to go back to Clash of the Titans and apologize, because even the most saccharine exemplars of the sandal-genre are nowhere near as bad as Ben-Hur, which cost $60 million more to make than Passion of the Christ . It is, ironically, the only film in memory to be pitched to a Christian market whose very existence testifies there is surely no God, for He would not so forsake His children as to deliver them into a cinema showing Ben-Hur.

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

This Newspaper Is Written by Refugees, for Refugees

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Photo by Joshua Olley

In 2015 alone, over 1.1 million migrants entered Germany. Many of them were sequestered in refugee camps, where they still wait in purgatory to be granted asylum. International coverage of the crisis has subsided in recent months, and the media tends to only bring up the countless people stuck in between their past lives and their new residencies when it relates to something like a terrorist attack, or politicians seeking public office.

One Berlin-based newspaper, however, wants to change how the migrant crisis is covered in print, and it's doing so by giving the platform to the refugees themselves. In a letter from the editors, Daily Resistance explains it's a publication that's "fighting against a system of politicians, media, and capitalists that is based on dehumanizing laws that criminalize and instrumentalize people." Rooted in political activism, the newspaper upholds and reiterates the demands of the refugee movement: abolish all lagers (refugee camps), end the German policy of residenzpflicht (which requires refugees to stay within certain boundaries), stop all deportations, and allow refugees to work and study. Articles are written by refugees situated in the camps, as well as by members from activist groups around Europe. The paper is eventually printed in different languages that cater to its readership, including Farsi, Arabic, Turkish, German, French, and English.

"My personal aim," co-founder Klara told VICE, somewhat jokingly, "is to make Daily Resistance the most feared newspaper in Germany, then the most feared newspaper in Europe, and eventually the most feared newspaper in the world." The German citizen was inspired to start the publication after getting involved with a protest effort at the occupied school Gerhart-Hauptmann Schule that led to police attacking both her and others. After that, "I couldn't not get involved, it was right in front of me, it wasn't abstract anymore," she said.

I sat down with Klara and Turgay Ulu, a contributor and refugee activist, at Klara's office in Neukölln where the Daily Resistance team meets weekly. Because of the political nature of the paper, and the safety and privacy concerns that come with it, Klara asked that her real name and day job remain anonymous.

VICE: Can you give me some background on how Daily Resistance got started?

Klara: Daily Resistance came out of Oplatz.net, which started as an online representation of the three-year long occupation movement in Oplatz square. We wanted to have a printed newsletter that we could hand to people who don't have access to the internet, so the first issue was an edited version of online articles.

Turgay Ulu: People in lagers are in isolation and don't have technical means. A printed newspaper is a way to reach them. You can't expect them to already know about the movement if they just came here. Also, it was clear that we needed our own alternative media because the mainstream media was ignoring what was going on. Normally refugees' stories get instrumentalized by the media. So it was important to us that refugees could share their stories in their own words and on their own media platform.

What do you mean when you say that refugees' stories are instrumentalized by the media?
Klara: They pick and choose how they report on refugees, and use refugees to tell the story they are looking for. Sometimes they want to show that refugees are criminals, so they focus on the small amount of crimes enacted by refugees and generalize it as all of them. When we protested against the evacuation of the Gerhart-Hauptmann School, the media's reports always reflected the politicians' interests. They didn't report on what the refugees had to say, or their side of the story.

What is your goal for the newspaper?
The aim of Daily Resistance is to inform and inspire those who are isolated in the lagers. We want to mobilize and politicize them; we also simply want to show them that they are not alone. For instance, we have a pamphlet in the newspapers that includes practical information, like where to get medical or legal advice, addresses of institutions that we trust, locations of free German classes, and information on political groups.

How has the newspaper evolved since the first issue?
Our first issue was filled mostly with well known Berlin-based political refugee activists. The second issue completely changed because of the positive response. Individuals from Berlin and other parts of Germany shared their stories with us, and we received articles and statements from activist groups like Women in Exile, The Voice Refugee Forum, and Street Roots. The second issue is twice as many pages as the first one and twice as heavy. It's hard to carry; it's really a physical thing.

Can you elaborate on the content of the newspaper? What types of articles do you publish?
We have a pretty wide range of articles. In general, we try to publish articles that are about any kind of resistance against the system. Many are stories of personal experiences within the lagers or the refugee system. Some articles are about the actions that are being taken right now, others are about what needs to be changed. We have very simple rules for our articles: no sexism, no capitalism, no racism, and no homophobia.

Above, a photo of 'Daily Resistance' contributor Turgay Ulu

How have you been distributing it?
The distribution is mainly working because of one guy who is working with us. He was on a bus tour going from lager to lager in 2014, talking to and informing people who lived in them. He made a list of contacts, and they have been distributing the newspaper in the lagers. At first, we printed 2,000 issues and in a second they were gone. Then, we reprinted another 3,000 and shortly they were gone, too.

The lagers have loads of restrictions, is it difficult to get Daily Resistance into them?
Turgay: You are not allowed to be politically active in a lager, and they are closed off—you cannot enter a lager unless you have an official function. We find our ways, though. When the doors close, we climb in through the windows, or we throw the papers over the fucking fence. Also, there are meeting places outside of the lagers. It's not easy, but there are ways. Someone once brought Daily Resistance into a lager and got in a fist fight with security because of it. We have a lot of drama already.

So how are contributors inside of lagers contacting you?
Sometimes by email, or they hand us texts handwritten on paper. Sometimes they find someone to photograph what they wrote and send that to us. We also will sit down with refugees, record a conversation with them, and transcribe and translate that to be published in the newspaper.

Obviously, producing and distributing Daily Resistance is no easy task. Can you tell me about a moment or accomplishment that has motivated you to keep going?
One of these moments for me was when we saw photographs on Twitter of people throwing bundles of Daily Resistance over this super hardcore fence at a lager in Greece. It was unbelievable to see this, to see people who we don't know going through this effort to share the newspaper. The distribution by volunteers and individuals is quite amazing.

What It’s Like to Instantly Forget What Friends and Lovers Look Like

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Aphantasia means not remembering what your own spouse looks like.

I don't remember the best day of my life.

It was my wedding day, which was only two years ago. Admittedly I was drunk, but I'm often drunk and high functioning. This is a bit of an overstatement. I do remember aspects of it, like the date (June 8), and I know that the ceremony was in East Nashville, on the porch of an interior designer's Airbnb. I know that Blur's "The Universal" played as my wife approached an altar one might have described as quaint and crafty. And I know that my teenaged brother-in-law, despite being told to press play on the Dwight Twilley song before our first kiss, just straight stopped paying attention and I had to kick him to get him to do it. What I don't actually remember is what it looked like. I can't see it, I have to go through wedding photos just to revisit those moments.

I have a rare condition known as aphantasia, a neurological state that has generated some media attention, but very little of it seems to probe how it affects relationships—focusing far more on how the brain adapts and learns compared to the rest of the population. Put bluntly to me once by a colleague: I do not have "the ability to imagine." My inner thoughts are only those of vague sounds and facts. There are no pictures in my mind, along with no textures, no smells, and no tastes. Like the opposite of the kind of "super human" one might see on a low budget cable TV show, where he or she is shown a map of London and is able to draw it perfectly from memory.

If I were to ask the majority of you to conjure up the image of a car, some of you might imagine your own car. Some might think of their father's car remembered from being a child. Some might even be insufferably creative and conjure an original cartoon car in their mind. If I were to be asked a similar task, I would hear the word "car" in my head, and recall basic facts about it like how a car is what we generally use to get around. I would think of cars I like, and subsequently hear the words "Datsun" and "Bentley" swirling around my mind. Aphantasia is such an absurd concept to most people that when it comes up, the reaction is usually a combination of curiosity and skepticism, the latter of which does not aide in the punishing feelings of isolation I endure, or more specifically, staving off the idea that almost everyone on the planet has a superpower but me.

I actually keep a folder of not just wedding photos, but ongoing shots of my wife as a sidebar on every finder window on my computer so I can see her when she isn't around. I can tell you her height, and her measurements, and the fact that she is a brunette and an elegant dresser, but if I close my eyes, I can't see her. Strangely, I can recognize most anyone I meet from another time. There's the tired cliché of "I'm bad with names," that most trot out when nervous socially—somehow, I almost never forget a name.

The most significant international study (of which I am a part of) is done by professor Adam Zeman out of the University of Exeter, the major (or at least most sellable) purpose of it being to understand that children with the condition need to be taught most subjects with a completely different approach. Joining prof. Zeman's study and understanding why I've struggled with aspects of my life has brought a certain type of ease, by eliminating efforts I might have stubbornly attempted as a younger man. Carving out activities and interests that I will never succeed at felt defeatist at first, but over time I have accepted the following:

Despite attempting to play since I was five years old, I am terrible at chess because I don't posses the ability to see more than one move ahead.

I do not enjoy works of fiction. The descriptive texts of writers like Hemingway or Bret Easton Ellis mean absolutely nothing to me. I have never seen a film after reading a book and been disappointed by the visual accuracy. I am regularly, and depressingly, criticized for not having an impressive personal library of books, or not having any interest in art galleries. I am the one percent who is legitimately not trying to be insufferably contrarian when he says, "I genuinely get no enjoyment out of Steinbeck's oeuvre." Try defending your life to the literary cognoscenti regularly and you might feel isolated as well.

I pilot personal fashion by watching films and television and writing down the precise outfits of men who I think are dressed well. I've spent all summer dressed like the lead in Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some or in more fancy occasions, a photo I saw online of Harrison Ford in the late 70s. When it comes to style, my life is a series of cultural touchstones, which hasn't actually been all that unpleasant. It's my version of scrapbooking and it's almost completely private.

I get lost almost every day. I've lived in my city for a decade and a half, and still get lost in the streets both walking and driving. I even get lost in my neighbourhood grocery store. I have to walk up and down every aisle looking at every product because I cannot recall where they are stocked. I traverse my cityscape by attempting to remember which streets intersect with other streets and memorize how many streets in between intersections.

These are just some of what at this point I consider incidental issues. I don't care about chess or Hemingway. My phone has GPS. I like dressing like an extra from a late season of McMillan & Wife. The more complicated stuff comes from what most people want to know about: relationships.

As a young adult, I would hear about how men supposedly thought about sex every seven seconds, and immediately I turned inward with shame and questions. I don't and can't sexualize anyone with fantasy. I can't even remember what women of my past looked like nude. I can see some of my female friends as objectively beautiful and radiant, but they or any other women don't walk by me and turn me on to the extent I'm told most straight men are. "Is this why you get to be best friends with so many super hot ladies?" my barber crudely asked me recently while I was exiting his chair. "Yep," I self-assuredly quipped just as two sunny, young women picked me up for lunch.

"Talking to your ex, huh?" texted a friend in a speculative fashion after I tweeted a dumb interaction with a former girlfriend of five years. From an outside view, my ex and I should not be "fine" let alone communicating. There's so much baggage a person can carry forward from a past romance. However, I can't recall the moments of falling in love with her at 25 years old, nor can I remember her face when we would spew vitriol at one another. I can't daydream about our past encounters (I literally can't daydream). My past is sliced out. It's all gone. To half of those who get a kick out of analyzing my aphantasia, that's almost as close to hell as the idea of locked-in syndrome. To the other half, it's a blessing.

I suppose, like anything, being blind in my mind is about attitude. There are moments of complete emotional isolation, and there are instances where I feel like I'm experiencing the thrill of romance with my wife for the first time because of my goldfish brain. I'm sure there are millions of married people out there who would pay a healthy amount to have a pill that provides this experience.

I may not remember what my wedding looked like, but it's a lucky feeling for someone like me that my happiest day was also my most documented one.

Follow Trevor Risk on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: NASA Releases Latest Polar Ice Melt Images as Cruise Ship Heads for Northwest Passage

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Nearly ice-free Northwest Passage, August 2016. NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz

Polar ice loss picked up in the first two weeks of August, according to NASA's latest images released Friday, making extra room for a new luxury cruise line headed straight through Canada's Arctic.

Earlier this week, Motherboard reported that every month of 2016 has been the hottest in recorded history. Receding sea ice also broke records in January, February, April, May and June of this year.

According to NASA scientists, low atmospheric pressure, clouds and wind slowed polar ice melt in June and July, making it unlikely that sea ice will set a new annual low. However, a strong cyclone moving through the Arctic—similar to the one that devastated ice levels in August 2012—is now causing melting to accelerate again. The ice is expected to continue receding until mid-to-late September.

While an Arctic cyclone doesn't sound like good news for a 1,070-passenger cruise ship now on its way to the Northwest Passage, the new data suggests the area is unlikely to return to impassable ice levels seen even a few years ago.

"A decade ago, this year's sea ice would have set a new record low and by a fair amount," said Walt Meier, a NASA sea ice scientist. "Now we're kind of used to these low levels of sea ice—it's the new normal."

That "new normal" bodes well for the future of the Crystal Serenity, which is planning offer its month-long Arctic cruise next summer as well. The ship launched Tuesday and will also make stops in Cambridge Bay and Pond Inlet in Nunavut, charging anywhere from $22,000 to $120,000 for the trip.

In case you had any doubts about the intentions of people aboard this climate-happy voyage, the cruise includes some questionable "cultural" excursions, "featuring bannock, traditional dress displays and throat singing," according to the Globe and Mail.

Whatever Columbus complex makes "discovering" these newly-revealed waters seem like a good idea, science says it's only going to get easier.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.


How Scared Should I Be?: How Scared Should I Be of Getting Punched in the Face?

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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.

When I write something that pisses a lot of people off (usually something about video games), a handful of people will point out that I have a punchable face. They're right. In photos, including the one at the top of this post, I look smug, judgmental, professorial, weak, and just generally like I have what Germans call "Backpfeifengesicht" or "Ted Cruz Disease."

But despite my birth defect, my punchable face has avoided contact with fists for all of my 31 years of life. And as a fearful person, I don't let myself get complacent, despite my impressive un-punched streak. Instead, I back down easily when confronted, and I strenuously avoid people who look like they might be throwing fists around indiscriminately. I realize that's no way to live my life, and I've known for a few years that I should probably confront my fear.

But just this week, I happened upon a news story about a guy who had once killed a man with a single punch. Given that just one well-placed knuckle sandwich can end it all, does it make sense for me to keep doing everything I can to avoid fisticuffs completely?

Maybe I should, according to Dr. Darragh O'Carroll, an emergency room doctor in Los Angeles, and part-time ringside physician at MMA fights. If I got punched in the face, he said, "the odds are probably that nothing serious is going to happen, but it's still possible."

My likelihood of getting punched is a bit of a mystery. I couldn't find good data on face punching, and the only crime stats I could find were on aggravated assault.

Self-reporting on fights makes them seem much likelier. No one seems to ask adults, but in 2013, the Child Trends Data Bank asked high school students if they'd been in a fight in the past year. And 24.7 percent said they had. And in a very unscientific poll, I asked ten people at the VICE office if they'd been punched in the face, and 100 percent said they had at least once. The point, in O'Carroll's opinion, is that I can't hide from getting punched forever. "At some point, there's a high likelihood," he said, laughing.

But what are the health risks of a punch to the face?

Like people getting punched in the face? Watch this:

Broken Nose

When the inevitable happens, the most likely injury is a broken nose, in O'Carroll's opinion. Nose breaks can be simple fractures, or more complex breaks. Most, O'Carroll said, "will heal without any intervention." But he warned me about a potentially dangerous side effect of a broken nose called a septal hematoma. "If you stuck your finger in either nostril, you would feel—I would describe it as a big grape," he said, and that's something that would need emergency attention, or else my nasal septum could be destroyed due to lack of blood flow.

Jaw and Teeth Injuries

Obviously one concern should be my teeth, which O'Carroll said are more likely to be knocked clean out than broken. But when it comes to punching teeth, punchers should be more scared than punchees, according to O'Carroll. "There's more bacteria in a human mouth than a dog's mouth, so if those teeth got into your knuckle, you would need to get that washed out in an operating room, because the bacteria can proliferate and destroy the joint," he said.

I should be more concerned about getting punched in the jaw. "The mandible is half a ring, and rings like to break in two spots," O'Carroll explained. If my jaw only breaks in one spot, and it's non-displaced, he told me, I could get away with my jaw being wired shut, and drinking through a straw for 4 to 6 weeks. That's actually the better outcome when it comes to jaw fractures. O'Carroll said an open jaw fracture would be much worse. "That's when I look inside the mouth, and the fracture continues to where your gums and teeth have separated." Apart from the heavy-duty repairs involved, and the obvious risk of disfigurement (go ahead and google image search "open jaw fracture," I'll wait), there's also a risk of serious infection.

Brain Damage

Obviously the most likely form of brain damage is the most minor: a concussion. Intracranial hemorrhaging—that is: a bleeding brain—is less likely and much scarier. If I get an "epidural" bleed, it might seem like a concussion. "You get knocked out. You wake up. You're a little confused, but you're feeling better. In 20 or 30 minutes, you gradually get more stuporous," O'Carroll said. That would be an epidural bleed, and I need to go to the hospital or brain herniation could occur, which could be fatal. O'Carroll told me a hard punch to the temple could cause this kind of brain bleed, but that "if an intracranial hemorrhage was to happen, it's most commonly from the fall."

Eye Injuries

I gave O'Carroll a hypothetical: Assuming a fist was about to collide with his face, what would he be most worried about? "I don't want anybody messing with my eye," he said.

The "globe" of the eye itself and the orbit (the eye socket) are complicated, and they can be subject to countless different kinds of injuries. "Retinal detachment is possible," he said, but he added, "I don't see it as much as fractures."

Fascinatingly, orbital fractures don't happen the way I thought they did—from the knuckles crushing the eye socket. Instead, the eye and the other tissues, nerves, blood vessels, and muscles get compressed by the fist and explode unpredictably outward. "The pressure has to go somewhere," O'Carroll explained, and the result is often a broken bone somewhere inside the socket. And sometimes these internal orbital fractures are serious, because the muscle system that controls your eye doesn't like having splinters of skull bone mixing with it. "If a bone fragment is stuck in that muscle, and you can't turn your eye all the way inward or all the way outward, that's an indication that you need to go in for surgery," O'Carroll told me.

The Takeaway

Given the range of possible injuries, it seems like the actual danger of being punched in the face is a wild card. You can die, but no one I know has died from a face punching, or even needed surgery, and they all seem to laugh about it.

But some fears are easy to confront, so I had myself punched, Tyler Durden–style.

I work a few desks away from Mike Hresko, the editor in chief of Fightland, our sister site for fighting and MMA news. Mike, who knows Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai, knows how the pros punch. That's a little intimidating, but it also meant he wouldn't slip and hit me in the ear or throat or something. I asked Mike to hit me like he would a guy in a bar who was getting out of hand and needed someone to make him shut up. But I also told him I needed to finish writing this, so no concussions please.



It sucked.

It wasn't exactly painful at first, more like an overall shock to the system, kinda like a minor car crash or a firecracker going off near your head. My ears rang, and I got an instant headache. I felt myself reflexively lean away from it. In the next few seconds, my brain slowly started painting a picture of the specific injury. But I was alive and feeling fine to be honest. I was also able to go back to my desk and type about it, so my brain seems to be in working order.

Getting punched is no picnic, even when the assailant is your co-worker, and he's doing you a favor. Knowing what a relatively soft, message-delivery punch feels like, the thought of someone trying to seriously injure me actually sounds a little scarier than it did before I investigated this. And for the most part, seriously injuring you is exactly what people set out to do when they punch, at least according to O'Carroll. "If someone is really pissed off at another person, they're going for the knockout," he told me.

So I'll go back to being careful.


Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of Getting Punched in the Face?

3/5: Sweating it

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Comics: 'Moriyama's Dog,' Today's Comic by Berliac

Driving a Tank Is a Bizarre Power Trip

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A former German soldier turned tank instructor on top of a T-55 tank at Panzer-Fun-Fahrschule.

All photos by Alexander Coggin

If you want to get behind the wheel a 34-ton Soviet-era tank—and really, why wouldn't you?—just do what I did. Go to Berlin, drive two hours east to the municipality of Beerfelde, and find your way to Panzer-Fun-Fahrschule, a tank driving school that advertises itself as "Germany's biggest men's playground." There, you can pay 160 euro (about $180) to hop in one of 13 de-weaponized tanks and cruise around a dirt course for half an hour while an instructor tells you to stop stalling out every few minutes. For an extra 100 euro, you can crush a car.

Panzer-Fun-Fahrschule, which roughly translates to "Tank Fun Driving School," was founded in the early aughts after brothers Axel and Jörg Heyse bought and refurbished a Soviet T-55 tank they saw in a scrapyard in the Czech Republic. Axel had previously worked as a tank instructor in the East German army for a decade, and he and his brother drove their new toy around a neighbor's farm for kicks. "I just couldn't stop thinking about tanks," Axel told a German newspaper in 2009.

After the local government asked them to bring their tank to a local harvest festival, people started calling them nonstop with requests to drive the "iron pig," as they referred to it. In 2005, the brothers started the driving school on 20 acres of farmland in Beerfeld, and by 2009 they had purchased upwards of a dozen tanks that belonged to a variety of different armies, culled from sources "all over Europe." When I pressed him for details, Jörg told my translator, "You know, Eastern European countries like Slovenia. All over."

In the years since, Panzer-Fun-Fahrschule has hired more employees, including several former soldiers, to teach the driving lessons. The school has also been approached by the German and Austrian militaries to offer training courses for soldiers. But the majority of people who show up to drive aren't military types, but rather international tourists or local thrill-seekers. The day I was at the school, there were people of all ages waiting to hop in an iron pig, including a family or two. "You're the typical customer," Jörg said. "Our customers really come from all walks of life."

A Soviet T-55 tank

When you're driving a tank in Germany, it's hard not to think about the history of violence that surrounds you. The T-55 is one of the most popular tanks in the world, and has seen action in the Middle East, Vietnam, Angola, and elsewhere over the last few decades. And according to Jewish Gen, a site run by the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Beerfeld, where Panzer-Fun-Fahrschule is located, was home to a facility linked to the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg.

Maybe the strangest thing about the tank playground is that the founders relentlessly downplay any connection to the military or those who fetishize it. " that has anything to do with the military," Jörg said in the 2009 interview. "This here is just fun." The instructors I met, many of them former soldiers, echoed this sentiment, and wouldn't talk about the military history aspects of all this tank play.

Maybe they just didn't want to indulge a noisy American tourist. But a tank is not just a big car, it's a big car with a huge gun strapped to it. You don't drive a Soviet or German killing machine and imagine yourself going to the shop to pick up eggs—you probably imagine yourself roaming a battlefield, scorching some earth. Why else would the tanks at the driving school have fake missiles attached to them? And why did we wear outmoded leather helmets, earflaps and all? I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel inspired to make pew! pew! sounds while behind the wheel of my rented metal behemoth.

German thrill-seekers ride a Schützenpanzer BMP, once used by the German army

Dr. Thomas Kühne is a Professor of History, the Strassler Chair in the Study of Holocaust History, and the Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. When I told him about my experiences at Panzer-Fun-Fahrschule, and asked why the company seemed to be eager to ignore German military history, he said, " likely didn't want to talk about war history because they were actively ignoring it or just don't think about it. Germans these days are apathetic to war and the military."

According to Kühne, there are still some Germans who fetishize war history and military culture—notably the far-right groups that have recently been growing in size—"but it's a very small minority... and this group of people interested in the history and ephemera is much smaller than what's in America."

He continued, "Today, Germany is not entirely homogenous, but I would say 70 to 90 percent of Germans have no interested in the military at all."

A former German soldier who is now a driving instructor at Panzer-Fun-Fahrschule

Panzer-Fun-Fahrschule may brand itself as an entertainment experience—straight-up novelty tourism—but it's hard sometimes to separate the war from the war machines, the historical context. Or maybe I'm overly sensitive, and shouldn't have expected to learn about the past from a company whose website says crushing a bunch of cars with a tank will help customers "forget everyday worries and everyday stress."

After steering the T-55 up and down dirt mounds for a half hour, bouncing non-stop at the wheel, I didn't feel any more relaxed than before; I felt nauseous. I got out of the tank, took off my balaclava, and thanked the soldier-turned-driving-teacher. Then I politely excused myself, took a sip of a beer that my photographer had waiting for me, and promptly vomited.

See more photos below. Follow Zach and Alex on Instagram. Special thanks to our translator, Ruby Morrigan.


The wheels of a T-55 tank

The author before driving a tank

The fake missile on a T-55 tank

Germans riding in a BMP tank

The steering wheel of the Soviet T-55 tank

A bird's-eye view of the inside of a T-55 tank

Germans riding the BMP tank

A foreign tourist watches her family drive a tank at Panzer-Fun-Fahrschule


Weird, Brightly Lit Photos of London's Eastern European Construction Workers

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

You get to a point, generally somewhere past your teens, when you think you can't be surprised anymore. Agne Kucinskaite, 23, felt she'd reached that stage pretty recently, when she started trying to take photos of Eastern European construction workers in both the UK and Lithuania. Generally, she expected to uncover stories of discrimination, hardship, struggle.

That's not quite how things panned out. "I met a Polish man and started to ask him questions," she says about the early days of her Construction photography project. She braced herself for tales of isolation or mistreatment. "But he smiled at me and said that his was a good and easy job, and he felt as he was treated well. I spoke with another worker; he said that he sometimes feels stereotyped and overlooked. Yet, they both said that the construction business is one of the most open-minded towards immigrants."

And that was the end of her preconceptions. Agne is Lithuanian herself, living in London while studying photography here. She's interested in exploring identity, and figured the construction industry—one believed to be dominated by Romanian, Polish, and Lithuanian laborers—would be a good enough place to start.

In spring this year, after months of negotiating access with construction site manager and companies, she started shooting in both Lithuania and the UK. "In the six months I spent on the project, I was allowed fewer than ten visits that on average lasted less than an hour," she says. "It was trickier to persuade companies in England to let me visit the sites, as the health and safety restrictions here are stricter than they were in Lithuania."

She wriggled her way in, though, to shoot this series of stark and brightly lit photos from inside various construction sites. A lot of the photos are so close-up they're almost abstract, mostly due to the restrictions on what she could see and who'd be up for being photographed. Agne chatted Brexit with some of the guys and was "really surprised to see that most people weren't worried about it. Partly, I felt that people didn't believe it was going to happen. Others thought that it wouldn't change much. I got the impression that most people have built lives here that they like—some of them have lived here for more than a decade, their UK-born children go to schools here and from time to time they go for a pint in a local pub. The Brexit decision came to many of them as a shock."

Throughout, she learned to let the men there tell their own stories, unshackled from assumptions. "When I was shooting in a small town in Lithuania, almost all of the construction workers were older. One of them told me that he had two jobs in order to support his family. Though he was in his fifties or sixties, he'd go to do a shift as a security guard after a day of hard physical work."

Away from the roar of tabloid headlines and anti-immigrant hysteria, there was room to breathe. With her camera in hand, she felt she could let her photos tell their own story. An issue this complicated lands in a place where migration meets anxiety over national resources and collides with what looks to be the next stage of British multiculturalism. To try to make sense of it, she realised you have to strip back your own prejudices and let people speak.

"I met many people on the sites who had higher education diplomas, or were into in art or politics. We had very interesting conversations and a good laugh, and all of them were friendly. To conclude, I think that my chats with the men working made me realize that discussion of how eastern European construction workers go about their work isn't an easy one to answer—and if it was, the answers themselves wouldn't be simple."

Follow Agne on Instagram and Tshepo on Twitter.

Ex-Cons Remember Their Worst Jobs After Being Released from Prison

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Image via Flickr User Rusty Clark

Getting a job when you first get out of prison can be a nightmare. Most employers refuse to hire someone fresh out the feds or convicts who are still incarcerated but allowed to get a job through "work-release." Other prisoners are so shell-shocked from being back in a society that changed dramatically while they were locked up, that figuring out how to do basic things like use public transportation or a cell phone can feel like a Herculean task. According to the National Institute of Justice, over 60 percent of ex-cons are jobless up to a year after release.

That said, getting a job is a necessary step for prisoners to integrate back into society. Often times, it's a requirement by the criminal justice system, or else freshly-released inmates will risk being sent back to the feds. But even when ex-cons do manage to get hired, the work is underpaid, demoralizing, and their employers don't do much to encourage the re-entry process. There are organizers that help former prisoners assimilate into the workforce, but the support is generally few and far between.

After serving 23 years in the feds, the first job I got on the outside was as a sauté cook at an Italian restaurant, despite my earning two college degrees while in prison. The work sucked, and I was forced to do the grunt work no one else would do, like clean out the fryers every night. I wasn't in any position to argue and risk being canned, and my employers took advantage of this. I dreaded that job, but as I've talked with other ex-cons over the years about their first gigs on the outside, I now consider myself lucky. The fact that over 75 percent of ex-cons are rearrested within five years of release should be no surprise when the only jobs offered to people with criminal records are the gigs no one else applies for. VICE chatted with three ex-cons to get more perspective on what re-entering the workforce was like once they got out of prison.

Image of cattle ranchers via Wikimedia Creative Commons

Mendoor Smith, 43-Year-Old from Iowa
Served 12 Years for Marijuana Possession
Released from Custody in 2013

The worst job I had was working on a cattle ranch as a utility farmer, making $8.25 an hour. I had to be there from about 6 AM to 5 PM every day, and the commute was 45 minutes from the halfway house I was placed in. It wasn't really tough work, but the handling of manure and animals was rough, as was taking care of the calves and cows. Dealing with cows everyday is messy, and I'd have to clean out their living pens.

I remember calving one shift during the winter, and when I did my hourly inspection of the herd, I noticed a cow with an extremely bad vaginal prolapse. I called my boss and he called the vet who came out at four in the morning. I had to lift the cow's vaginal insides and hold them while the vet tried to stuff them back inside the cow. After about an hour and a half of lifting and stuffing this slimy, nasty thing, the vet finally got it all back inside and sewed up. When I did my final inspection of the morning at 10 AM, the cow had died. All that work was for nothing. Having to stick my entire arm in a cow to help pull out a calf was not fun either. You work super hard to pull one of the slimy things out, and then you have to scoop the little thing up and take off before the cow attacks you for holding its calf. Having a 1,200 pound animal chase you is a little intimidating.

I had two coworkers that knew about my situation. They asked a lot of questions, stuff about what was prison like and what I did to get all that time. My boss was a good boss. He helped me get my Class A driver's license so I could drive trucks for him. He was a big help and was instrumental in me getting the job I have now. The farm was a tight-knit family, so I was treated well, but the work was completely horrible. It prepared me for the struggle of rebuilding my life after prison, though. It didn't kill me and it made me stronger. That job sucked, but I was still glad to have it because I wouldn't be in the position I'm in today otherwise.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

David Hibdon, 55-Year-Old from Missouri
Served 10 Years for Drug Conspiracy
Released from Custody in 2014

My first job out of prison was the worst job available in Colombia, Missouri. I was picking up trash at the city dump in 100-plus degree weather for $8 an hour. I had to walk around 27 acres and pick up the trash that blew off the trucks, rain or shine. Some days I walked through raw sewage, or mud up to my ankles. The halfway house didn't provide transportation to the job, and I had to walk there every morning. It was a seven mile walk that took over two hours. I had to be there at seven in the morning and got off at 4 PM, with only a short lunch break in between. With my first paycheck, I bought a bike and then it only took me forty minutes to get to work. I was making about 50 bucks a day, but I was required to give 25 percent to the halfway house. If I bought a soda or cigarettes I was almost broke. It took me two months in the halfway house to save up and buy a $500 car.

I worked there because it was the only job available. Nobody wanted the job because of the stink and the dust blowing on you from the trash trucks. No one else would take these jobs besides ex-cons at the halfway house. And all the other ex-cons that worked there would sleep on a nearby hill or smoke K2 all day while I was working. I was alienated out there. It was one of the most degrading experiences I ever went through, but I got past it. It sure didn't help me become a better person cause I was still the same after.

I've had four jobs since I've been out, and I never told anyone I was on parole until after I was hired, or they wouldn't have hired me. I eventually started my own business, subcontracting myself out to do maintenance on rental properties. I could go back to the dump if I wanted, but that job sucked.

Image of a telemarketing call center via

Mike Vargas, 44-Year-Old from Washington DC
Served 14 Years for a Drug Conspiracy
Released from Custody in 2009

It wasn't hard getting a job when I came home, it just wasn't a good job. I started working the same week I was released at this telemarketing place that hired ex-cons at $7.25 an hour. You had to be there talking to people on the phone all day, cold calling, trying to collect donations for different organizations around the state and country. It was cool at first, but after a while I was starting to feel like a robot.

I worked with mostly young people, and there were also a bunch of ex-cons working there. Anybody could have got hired at this place, but the conditions were terrible. You had a total of 16 minutes of break time for a full eight hour shift. If you went to get a Coke, you had to clock out. If you went to the bathroom, you had to clock out. If you didn't kiss ass, you were an outsider. There was a lot of favoritism, and also a big turnover within staff, of course.

Dudes would curse out the boss. One dude even jumped up, picked up a computer, and slammed it down because he couldn't get anybody to donate. He walked out shortly after. But most ex-cons needed the job to get out of the halfway house, so they just kept working there until something better came along. I quit that job when I had something better lined up. It served its purpose because if you don't have a gig you have to stay at the halfway. I've had like seven or eight jobs since then. I've done a lot of different things, but that was the worst. I'm a machinist now, and I assemble parts all day at a machine. It's easier and the pay is better, but I am always looking for something better.

Follow Seth on Twitter.

I Went to a Female Blogger Conference to Learn More About the Career I Accidentally Fell Into

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All photos by the author

I guess I could technically be considered a blogger, though I do hate the term—to me, it suggests essays about the struggles and joys of motherhood, and the love of whatever sponsored foodstuffs and moisturizers have allegedly made said blogger's life easier. I say I could technically be considered a blogger because I'm writing this right now; but writing this right now, or anything for the internet, frankly, was never a life goal of mine. I've never felt a passionate desire to express my "truth" to a wide audience, or to monetize said truth. I just met a guy at an awful open mic years ago, he became an editor at this website, and the rest was herstory.

But since this is, for better or worse, my life now, I decided to go to the 12th annual BlogHer Conference to spend some time among my accidental peers and learn what, exactly, makes an intentional blogger. I had never heard of the BlogHer Conference, but, according to the website, it's "the world's largest celebration of women content creators across social media, video, photos, and the web." This year, it was held in a hotel ballroom in downtown LA, where the attendees hoped to learn from the best.

The keynote speakers at the 2016 conference included Sheryl Crow, Mayim Bialik, and Kim Kardashian; previous speakers have included Martha Stewart, Katie Couric, and a president by the name of Barack Obama. The BlogHer Conference, and the company that bears its name, is a hot commodity in the world of online content—its 2014 acquisition by SheKnows Media, the largest women's digital lifestyle company in the world, furthered its reach, including it in an umbrella of brands that reportedly generate more than 75 million page visitors per month.

The subtitle of this year's conference was "Experts Among Us," and at 9 AM on a Friday, I found myself watching one expert in action—a woman blogging during breakfast, penning an entry entitled "Lessons of a Solopreneur." I later learned, to my surprise, that "solopreneur" is a word that people actually use. I clearly had a lot to learn about the world of female content creators

"If you feel like blowing your own fucking mind over blogging this weekend, we encourage you to do so, and to hashtag it," SheKnows Media president Samantha Skey told the crowd during her speech.

The mind blowing, for me anyhow, began with the "What it Means to Be an Ally in 2016" panel. I had missed the panel preceding it, titled "Keeping Friends During a Heated Political Season," choosing instead to wander the conference's expo hall being marketed to... shout out to BlogHer sponsor Vagisil for the free internal vaginal moisturizing gel!

"What It Means to Be an Ally" was one in a series of panels centered on the concept of becoming woke online, though the whitest member of the panel spoke the most and had the least to say. Her specialization was animal rights—a movement dependent solely on allies, because, in her words, "animals can't talk." When the other panelists lamented the inherent racism that exists in the English language, the animal rights activist pointed out the lexicon was "species-ist" as well, in that it discriminates against animals. As she said this, the people around her sat in perturbed silence.

At noon, we gathered in the main ballroom to await the afternoon appearances of Crow and Kardashian. The ballroom was filled to capacity, no doubt due more to the forthcoming presence of Kardashian than Crow—those not lucky enough to find a seat at a table simply sat on the ground. These grounded women didn't seem particularly disturbed by the fact that they were sitting on the floor; rather, they seemed filled with the excitement of children on Christmas morning.

Crow, in conversation with the founder of the pregnancy site Mama Glow, told the crowd that they needed to fight to keep chemicals and hormones out of food, in order to protect our children from breast cancer, of which Crow was a survivor. She applauded Kraft for removing such toxins from their mac 'n' cheese, which was later handed out to attendees by the boxful. Crow also spoke profusely about a 3D breast cancer screening machine, whose expo booth she also conveniently made an appearance at following the speech. "She's body goals!" the girl sitting next to me said to no one in particular afterward. "Fifty four and in that shape? What the fuck?"

Upon Kardashian's entrance, a sea of women held cellphones aloft, capturing her flawless form in pic after pic. Kardashian estimated that she shares about 85 percent of her life with the world—15 percent of her existence, however, is hers and hers alone. In an effort to explain this ratio, she declared, "In this world, if you don't share something, it's like it doesn't exist." By way of example, she brought up the fact that people thought her infant son was a fabrication when she didn't post a stream images of him immediately post-birth.

While the conference, with its woke programming, had an unmistakably feminist vibe, Kardashian said she chose not to identify as such, as she "doesn't like labels." While she "loves to support other women," she doesn't like to push her views on people. "I'm a very nonjudgemental person," she told the audience. "My whole thing is nonjudgementalism."

When her spiel was over and the lights went up, women swarmed the stage in droves, calling her name and struggling to take selfies with her in the background. One began jumping, near tears, when she successfully achieved this goal.

The next afternoon, Philippe Guelton, CEO of SheKnows Media, presented a video about the "great value" of Herbalife, the multilevel marketing company that just reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission wherein the firm was told to "pay $200 million back to people who were taken in by what the FTC alleges were misleading moneymaking claims," and which had sponsored the BlogHer lunch.

Guelton then introduced Dr. John Agwunobi, Herbalife's chief health and nutrition officer, who informed an apathetic crowd that the thing he loved the most about his employer was the fact that it wasn't just focused on the products they sold, but "the entire life behind its customers," which he hoped the audience would become. I filled my complimentary Herbalife-branded water bottle after exiting the ballroom; it immediately began leaking.


Wandering the halls on the last day of the conference, I ran into a woman I knew, who was a speaker on one of the panels. When I asked what she was getting paid for her appearance, she told me that she was not getting compensated—in much the same fashion that most people who blog get paid very little for their efforts. According to a study conducted by iBlog—which is an actual publication, a copy of which I received in my conference gift bag—75 percent of all bloggers make less than $10,000 a year, and 51.5 percent make less than $2,500.

She did, however, get an all-access pass to the conference, and its accompanying opportunities to network, gain exposure, and build her personal brand. Because, in the end, isn't that more valuable than money? (To answer my own rhetorical question, no.)

I left feeling sorry for her, and for the rest conference's attendees; the entire event had felt a bit like a cash grab—full conference passes cost $399, and early bird passes were $250—designed to capitalize on the women's lack of knowledge about the "blogging business" and their dreams of somehow, someday, making money by sharing personal stories about Vagisil. And I left feeling grateful that I had simply fallen into the field they so desperately wanted to crack, especially an iteration of it wherein I earn more than $2,500 a year writing stories about them and not internal vaginal moisturizing gel.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

The Status of Racism in the UK After Brexit

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It was a couple of days before Shafiqul Islam even opened the envelope. Nothing important comes in the post these days, and what looked like a standard letter, perhaps a bank statement or a telephone bill, had been set aside to be dealt with along with the rest of the Bindi restaurant's correspondence on a quiet Sunday evening. In the office of the Indian restaurant he has owned and run in Newcastle upon Tyne for 15 years, Islam ripped open the envelope. Inside was a copy of the restaurant's own menu. Confused, he unfolded the leaflet and found the message scrawled inside. "MUSLIMS ARE FILTH!" it read.

Something changed in Britain after the referendum. Since the vote on our membership of the EU was held on June 23, the country has witnessed what has seemed at times like an outpouring of hate. There have been anonymous letters sent in Tunbridge Wells, inviting recipients to "Fuck off back to Poland." A German woman had dog shit thrown at her front door and was told by her neighbors she's no longer welcome here. A British Asian mother, walking her son to school in Greater Manchester, was physically assaulted by a man who asked her: "I voted for you to leave so what are you doing here?"

While it would be tempting to describe these as isolated incidents, the evidence is more than anecdotal. More than 3,000 hate crimes were reported to the police in the week before and after the referendum, a 42 percent increase on the same period a year before. Mark Hamilton, head of the National Police Chiefs' Council, described the rise as "probably the worst spike" on record. He was in little doubt that the referendum was the reason. "Some people took that as a license to behave in a racist or other discriminatory way," he told the Guardian. "We cannot divorce the country's reaction to the referendum and the increase in hate crime reporting."

It is tempting to think of Britain as a tolerant society. In January this year, the singer Sam Smith attracted ridicule after posting on Twitter about his shock at witnessing a friend being racially abused in London. His comments may have been naive, but they reflect a much more widely held view that, while of course racism exists, the days of openly expressed racist attitudes and xenophobic behavior have largely been left behind. However, in the wake of the hate now being expressed on our streets, that view looks startlingly naive. Once you scratch through the veneer of political correctness, have attitudes to race in the UK really changed at all?

In the days after the referendum, several campaigns emerged on social media to highlight the scale of the backlash being seen against immigrants. As awareness of these campaigns snowballed, the individuals behind them were inundated with reports of racist and xenophobic abuse taking place across the UK.

Priska Komaromi was one of the people behind the PostRefRacism Twitter account. She told me she believes the rhetoric used during the referendum campaign—and the subsequent victory for Leave—paved the way for the abuse. "People felt emboldened and felt their racist views were now what more than half of the country also felt," she said. Natasha Blank, who helped launch the Worrying Signs group, which collected reports of abuse on Facebook, agreed: "I don't think racism is a new concept by any means. However, people that are so inclined now think that half of the country agrees with them."

Analysis of the incidents gathered by these campaigns seems to back up this assertion. Komaromi worked with Worrying Signs, the iStreetWatch campaign and the Institute of Race Relations to produce a report examining the rise of racist and xenophobic behavior in the wake of the referendum. Her analysis of 636 individual reports of hate crime found that in 51 percent of cases the perpetrators referred specifically to the referendum in their abuse. In one typical incident, a middle-aged white man entered a bar the day after the vote was held and told a young British Asian woman: "We've voted to leave Europe today but we should have voted to kick all you lot out. You'll never be real British."

The incident was typical in another way. The report also looked at the ethnicity of those targeted. It found that people of non-European black, Asian, and minority ethnic backgrounds made up the largest group of victims. While there is no suggestion that anything but a small minority of those who voted to leave have gone on to perpetrate abuse, it also seemed that some voters believed the referendum result had sent a message—that it was a protest against any kind of immigration. It was a view characterized by the Brexit voter who was photographed in Essex wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan: "Yes! We won! Now send them back."

I contact Caroline Donnelly after searching Facebook for posts about Brexit and immigration. Her public feed is a mix of news articles about Brexit, immigration, and anti-Islamic memes. I send her a message asking if we can chat about her views on what should happen to immigrants after the referendum vote. She promptly sends me a polite reply. "I'd be happy to speak to you," she said. "It's an issue that I am very concerned about."

When we speak on the phone the next day, Donnelly tells me she is 50 years old and lives in Cumbernauld, near Glasgow, Scotland. Immigration, she says, is not a big issue in her area. But she is concerned about the impact of immigration on public services across Britain, on the NHS, schools and housing, and what she describes as "the Muslim problem."

"There are too many people in Britain now, and parts of England are like living in the Middle East," she says. I ask what she thinks about the recent attacks on immigrants. "I don't think it's right for people to go out and take matters into their own hands."

In Donnelly's view, the vote to leave was a verdict on immigration. "Straight away I want to see the borders shut," she says. "They are saying, 'If we can get a view on the single market...' I'm sorry, that's not what we voted for. We voted out, we want the borders completely shut. Once that's done, obviously mass deportations of people who are causing crime, people who have committed gang rapes. People who are decent, hard-working can stay. Fine. But I would like to see mass deportations and not just within the EU but outside the EU as well. We need to get a grip and listen to what people are saying."

I ask her who she thinks would be affected by mass deportations. "There is a massive problem with grooming gangs and—let's call a spade a spade—the majority of it is Muslims," she says. "There's hundreds of thousands of them involved in that." I interrupt to make sure I've understood correctly—hundreds of thousands? "I've read a lot about it," she says. "Obviously that's only my opinion, I'm not 100 percent sure. But what we're seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, I do believe the problem is a lot bigger than what they are making out."

We chat for a while longer before I thank her for her time. "I haven't got swastikas hanging on my wall," she reassures me, laughing, as I say goodbye. The next day, she posts an update on Facebook about our conversation: "I'm looking forward to seeing if he publishes my comments as concerns for the UK or if he will have me down as a 'far right nazi' lol. Time will tell." A few hours later, she posts another update: "NO SUCH THING AS A BRITISH MUSLIM. JUST MUSLIM FILTH."

Our views on race and immigration are not formed in a vacuum. In 2012, current prime minister and then home secretary Theresa May outlined her aim to create "a really hostile environment for illegal immigration." A year later, the Home Office deployed six advertising vans displaying a message aimed at illegal immigrants: "Go home or face arrest." Liz Feteke, director of the Institute of Race Relations, said recently: "If a 'hostile environment' is embedded politically, it can't be a surprise that it takes root culturally." In her report, Priska Komoromi found that around a quarter of the incidents reported to the three social media campaigns involved abuse using the words "go home" or "leave."

Carl Miller is research director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos and recently conducted an analysis of Twitter updates sent over the referendum period. He found that discussion of immigration on the platform peaked around the date of the vote. So did the number of xenophobic attitudes being expressed. Between June 19 and July 1, Miller found 16,151 tweets containing terms linked to xenophobia or anti-immigrant attitudes. The highest concentration of these updates occurred on the referendum date itself.

As highlighted by the PostRefRacism campaign, Twitter was also used by victims of abuse to share their experiences. Between June 25 and 29, Miller found 2,413 reports of hate crime on the platform. "In general, our research is suggesting that whether it's xenophobic or Islamophobic, are highly event specific," he said. "You see this huge explosion linked to specific events, whether it's Brexit or terrorist attacks. It explodes very sharply and quickly and usually declines in the days or weeks afterwards."

Police figures suggest the rise in reported hate crimes after the referendum is starting to decline. In practice, it's difficult to know what this means. It's widely assumed that the true number of incidents is much higher than those which are reported. It has been suggested that the rise seen in recent weeks may be partly attributed to more victims coming forward, a result of the spotlight now being shone on the issue. If the number of incidents is falling, who knows when it may rise again? The conditions which can spark an outpouring of hate emerge suddenly. Attitudes take much longer to change.

For Shafiqul Islam, owner of The Bindi restaurant in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the message scrawled on his menu was not the first time he had experienced racism. "This happened to me years ago once before, but since the EU referendum that's when it started again," he told me. It's more frequent this time. Staff at his restaurant have been receiving abusive and prank phone calls. Two weeks after the referendum, when visiting Newcastle city centre with his family, four men shouted racial abuse, calling them "pakis."

"I'm not even Pakistani, do you get me?" he said. "We're all born in this country. How can they say we don't belong?"

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Inside the Nasty Backlash Against 'No Man's Sky'

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Image courtesy of Hello Games

Where there is hype, there is inevitably a backlash. This has proven especially true for Hello Games, the developers behind one of 2016's most anticipated games, No Man's Sky. When the game shipped this month, it didn't include every single feature the developers had talked about, fermenting resentment among its most hardcore fans. This climaxed in an explosive reddit thread where a user compiled a list of publicly discussed features that didn't materialize.

The thread was upvoted thousands of times, becoming the most popular topic within the community and virally expanding outward, as the wider gaming populous latched on. It became ground zero for players looking for evidence that Hello Games had deceived them, a digital smoking gun that proved No Man's Sky designer Sean Murray was, in fact, full of shit.

"Sean Murray is a con ," wrote one user. The sentiment was echoed by others. (I reached out to that user to elaborate, but they only pointed me to the reddit thread in question so I "could understand exactly what ticked so many of us off.")

But in less than 24 hours, the thread vanished because the user deleted their reddit account. (It was later revived.) That user, MeetWayneKerr, is Alex, a No Man's Sky superfan who just wanted to help.

"I wanted to take part in an interesting discussion, not put the gavel down on it," said Alex, who asked his last name be kept out of this story to protect his identity. "The torrent of negative attention I was getting was just more than I could handle."

Few games captured the collective imagination of video game fans the way No Man's Sky did when it was announced in late 2013. The trailer struck a chord with the millions who'd always dreamed of exploring the stars. But few games have been forced to deal with that amount of hype, either. In the years since No Man's Sky was revealed, countless trailers, interviews, and idle speculation began to create a potentially toxic mix, if the game didn't meet expectations.


Alex described himself as "disappointed" with the features missing from No Man's Sky but was still captivated by the game. In culling a list of what had been quietly cut, in his eyes, he was trying to push back on a growing narrative that passionate fans had whipped themselves into a frenzy over nothing, "based solely in people having overhyped it for themselves."

"It wasn't until I started seeing a game that wasn't in my PlayStation that I started wondering what the fuck happened, you know?" he said, reading and watching tons of No Man's Sky interviews. "I didn't go in from a point of anger, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't come out the other side feeling like I'd been had."

The internet is prone to hyperbole. Either Sean Murray is a con artist who knowingly manipulated fans, or players are brain dead victims of marketing. The truth, like most things, isn't that simple. (No Man's Sky fans did themselves no favors in the court of public opinion after sending death threats to a Kotaku reporter and Sean Murray over the game's recent delay, however.)

Dozens of messages from people who congratulated me for really sticking it to these 'dirtbag' devs, when that wasn't my intention at all. People were taking the post and using it to fuel their own indignant anger. —Alex

That hyperbolic energy can be directed in different directions, and Alex had no control. It backfired.

" dozens of messages from people who congratulated me for really sticking it to these 'dirtbag' devs, when that wasn't my intention at all," he said. "People were taking the post and using it to fuel their own indignant anger. The final straw was when a YouTuber sent me a link to a video he'd made with the information in my post, and it was like 'Sean Murray Lies For X Minutes' or something... People were crediting me in their take-downs, and I stopped wanting any part in it."

Alex's thread, and what it seemed to represent, became a lightning rod in the developer community as well. It seemed to scare some developers off from wanting to speak honestly with fans. If this is the reaction you get from saying what's really going on, what's the point?

"It seemed to me that was the reason that a lot of big companies are very controlling of their PR messaging and what not," said The Flame in the Flood designer Forrest Dowling, "and are very careful about what they say publicly. I saw that as an object lesson for other developers as to why that is the case."

Dowling was a lead level designer on BioShock Infinite, a game that had its own expectation problems after promising too much in early public demonstrations.

"I think it's great to talk about and share what you're doing," he said, "but as a developer, when you're talking to the public, you really need to bend over backward." That means caveats and other ways of explaining how something that sounds interesting might ultimately get cut out.

Hello Games has painted itself into a particularly bad corner. It didn't, as Dowling suggested, provide caveats for features it was talking about. Making things worse, the developer hasn't provided any explanations for why the game they talked about isn't the game that shipped. If the studio had tempered expectations ahead of release, it might have lessened the backlash.

"The situation with Hello Games is certainly an argument in favor of both sides," said C. J. Kershner, a former writer at Ubisoft who worked on games like Far Cry 4. "We want, and we need, our games to be more transparent, a bit more personal when we talk about them. Everyone who does this loves what they do with their heart and soul."

To date, Kersher pointed out, there's no better look at the trials of game development than 2 Player Productions' exhaustive documentary on Double Fine's Broken Age. It's available free on YouTube.


"If there were more examples of that sort of transparency and people better understood what the development process was like," said Kershner, "they might be more understanding when certain features are discussed and then don't end up in the final game. There would be a bit more benefit of the doubt."

Without more insight into Hello Games's process, however, it's easy for fans to grow suspicious.

But even Double Fine went through its own public flogging over space simulator Spacebase DF-9, where Double Fine pointed to sluggish early access sales as justification for shutting down development. Though the source code was released to fans, official development was abandoned and employees like project lead JP LeBreton were laid off. Though the Spacebase DF-9 community wasn't as large the one driving No Man's Sky, fans were no less vocal.

"Some dev approaches are 'give our players as much context as possible,'" said LeBreton. "An open source game or something like Dwarf Fortress are good examples of that. But people still bring their expectations into it, that shining ideal of the game in their heads. So maybe it all comes down to managing that carefully. The dream you're conjuring in people's' heads should be compelling, but attainable. No pressure."

It's possible that Hello Games can still nail that with No Man's Sky. The game is a certifiable hit, and the developers have promised loads of free downloadable content and patches for it.

But the experience has left a mark on Alex, the guy behind the now-infamous reddit thread.

"Visiting the different No Man's Sky communities won't come without a twinge of shame," he said, "and I'd almost certainly let that paint my experience with the game. Nobody wants to have paid $60 for a game that makes them feel shitty. Honestly, it'll be nice playing the game without knowing about what everyone else has found for once. It's something I haven't done yet. I kinda look forward to it."

Follow Patrick Klepek on Twitter, and if you have a news tip you'd like to share, drop him an email.

What Indigenous Artists and Thinkers Are Saying About Gord Downie’s Message to Canada

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Gord Downie and Justin Trudeau photo via Twitter

With the help of a livestream from the Kingston theatre where the Tragically Hip played their final show last night, Gord Downie managed to break just about every heart in Canada, not only with a massive 30-song, three-encore set, but with a message about how Canada must address its fraught relationship with First Nations.

Just before launching into the band's buzzing new song "Machine," Downie name dropped the prime minister, who was in the audience, with some generous words: "We're in good hands, folks, real good hands," he said. "Prime Minister Trudeau's got me, his work with First Nations. He's got everybody. He's going to take us where we need to go."

Later in the set, Downie mentioned the struggles faced by Indigenous people in the far north. "He cares about the people way up north, that we were trained our entire lives to ignore, trained our entire lives to hear not a word of what's going on up there," he said. "And what's going on up there ain't good. It's not cool and everybody knows it. It may be worse than it's ever been ... we're going to get it fixed and we got the guy to do it, to start, to help.''

On Twitter, Indigenous leaders, artists and thinkers shared thanks for lending visibility, but also questioned Trudeau's ability to deliver. Observers said Downie could have used the platform to raise awareness about cancer, but choose something important to the country's future.

Jesse Wente, an Ojibwe columnist and film programmer in Toronto, tweeted that he hoped the prime minister would follow through on Downie's message:

Can You Tell from a Child's Behaviour If They'll Grow Up to Be a Prick?

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Near the beginning of new film The Childhood of a Leader, a young boy is learning to speak French. At the end of the exercise, his teacher, a prim but gentle Stacy Martin, tells him how well he is doing, and the boy, with eyes as hard as diamonds, purposefully places his hand on her breast. "My mother lets me do it all the time," he tells her.

We're in Versailles, France, in the aftermath of the First World War. The boy's American father, we learn, is helping negotiate the peace terms with Germany. His mother, in public, is distant and cold, leaving her son to the passing whims of nurses, maids, and tutors.

You end up watching a similar creepy-child trope as was shown in We Need To Talk About Kevin, The Omen, and The Bad Seed. This kid isn't just a troublemaker, yearning for attention and engagement from his distant parents. We're watching something else—the early years of someone capable of living without a conscience, and who may well, we're led to believe, become a notorious figure in European history. But, watching films like this where kids are cast as mini-villains, what actually makes children evil? Can you go back to someone's childhood and predict a dickhead demagogue on the way?

"If you look at the childhoods of Franco, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, one very obvious thing they all had in common was very complex relationships with their fathers," says history professor Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez, also author of Franco: The Biography of a Myth, on the former Spanish dictator. "Each of their fathers were frequently absent, and then, when present, were drunk and violent and threatening. That meant each child developed very close and emotionally intense relationships with their mothers. They went through their life resenting their fathers, while they always saw their mothers as a sanctuary of emotional refuge. But how might that work?

"It's easy to image the conversation. After a violent outbreak from their father, a mother vesting her hopes in the child could fuel a sense of that the child will be different. A belief in themselves as somehow greater than their environment."

There's an element of that idea reflected in Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism. It's a book published in 1933—the year Hitler took control of Germany—that served as an inspiration for this film, which was written and directed by Brady Corbet (best known for his role in Michael Haneke's 2007 Funny Gamesremake).

In chapter five, Reich wrote that the family is "the first cell" of a fascist society, its "first central reactionary germ cell, the most important place of reproduction of the reactionary and conservative individual." He went on: "Being itself caused by the authoritarian system, the family becomes the most important institution for its conservation."

"There was a widespread idea at the time that the only way to be a parent was to be an authoritarian," Corbet says, speaking to me over the phone. "Children were spoken to and not heard. I wanted to ask whether that might have been a contributing factor to the rise of some of the most notorious figures in history." Jean-Paul Sartre also looms large in the film—The Childhood of a Leader takes its title from a 1939 Sartre short story, a portrait of a young boy who endures a very Freudian form of therapy before embracing the ideology of fascism.

So, theories seem to point towards either a stifling authoritarianism setting children up for a fascist sensibility, or an exceptionalism borne from being molly-coddled. But not everyone who was a bit of a nightmare as a child grows up into an awful adult. And you start to walk into dangerous territory when you try to link distress in childhood with sadism later in life. Spend time with any normal child, from any stable, warm upbringing, and the chances are they're not always going to be good company. They're going to lose their temper, fail to control their impulses, maybe express their latent sexuality in strange and unruly ways.

"Many people of the time grew up with very cold relationships with their parents. That was the status quo, because we're talking about a very repressed period of history," Corbet says. "But, of course, the years between the first and second world wars were defined by famine, poverty and death. They were the dark ages. What made these people different?" The early twentieth century might have been Corbet's idea of the dark ages, but it was also an era that gave rise to figures who felt the need to remodel the world in their own image. People who felt compelled to not be a product of their environment, but to make their environment a product of them—whatever the cost, and however much death and destruction it might cause.

I put that idea, of nature and nurture both playing a role, to Dr. Christopher Clark, a consultant forensic psychiatrist and executive director at Rampton high security hospital in Nottinghamshire. Clark's responsibilities at Rampton have included deciding whether "Soham murderer" Ian Huntley was fit to stand trial for killing two children in a small Cambridgeshire village in 2002.

"When you look around secure institutions like Rampton, you will find that many, and probably most, of the people in them have had traumatic upbringings," Clark says. "They've often been the subject of neglect and abuse themselves. So there's a clear association between criminality and violence and fractured relationships—particularly with parents.

"But we're talking, of course, of people who were ambitious and are skilled enough to negotiate something like the Russian Revolution, or become totally revered by the populous, as Hitler was," Clark says. "You can't do that without being highly capable at getting people onside, and getting people to listen to you. "These are people who have managed to somehow use whatever happened in their background, whilst developing very unusual skill sets. They're rarefied examples."

But Clark is keen to press home a similar point. Institutions like Rampton make it easy for us to analyse people with violently criminal pasts; to link what they've done with what's happened to them. But what about all the people who went through traumatic childhoods, and didn't become dictators or criminals?

"In actual fact, a lot of people who go on to be very successful, and who we would regard as being forces of good, have also had unhappy and fractured childhoods," Clark says. "We know an awful lot about the people that are bad, because, as a society, we collect them all together and study them, but we know much less about the people who have the same backgrounds as them and live decent lives. Maybe that's as much of an important question to answer?"

'The Childhood of a Leader' is out in select UK cinemas as of the 19th of August

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Revisiting the Heyday of Slime on Canadian Television

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So. Much. Slime.

As a kid of the 90s, there was a not-insignificant portion of my psyche devoted to slime. Neon sludge falling from the sky somehow felt within the realm of possibility, and my childhood dreams reinforced this too-real threat.

This came back to me while watching Kristen Wiig get sprayed with sticky green ghost vomit in the Ghostbusters reboot, which got me wondering if slime is due for another cultural moment. For a solid decade, you couldn't turn on a kids channel without seeing a cast of goggled, baggy T-shirt wearing middle schoolers ready to be "slimed" at any moment. If I understand anything about the nostalgia industrial complex, there must be some TV execs out there figuring out a way to bring this back.

With this in mind, I decided to track down one TV personality I still associate with slime—Scott Yaphe, the host with a shiny hair-cliff on YTV's Uh Oh!. The Canadian game show, which launched at the tail end of slime popularity in 1997, was one of the network's longest-running programs, in which kids spun a wheel, answered dumb questions, competed in "mayhem" challenges, and generally tried to avoid being slimed by a dude in a bondage-y wrestling mask and hockey gear.

Even as a kid, it was pretty easy to tell that Uh Oh! was Canadian. I was too young for the cheap sets to give it away, but the Quebec geography trivia and the Canadian Tire-brand prizes were cues even I could catch. What I didn't know was that TV slime itself is a Canadian invention, started more than a decade earlier on Ottawa's local CTV channel.

"In our YTV bubble, we had thought that Canada started it first, as it kind of happens with the States sometimes: they will take a look at what we're doing here, and rip it off," Yaphe told VICE. "They made it bigger and bolder and more expensive... and never had to give credit."

Yaphe said this on a hunch. "I have no proof," he told me. But it was easy enough to fact check, and sure enough he was right. Canada served as a sleepy test market for goop-splattering kids before America mass produced the experience.I should note the story of slime has been told before—there's even a book on it—but these versions, shaped by Americans, gloss over Canada's contributions to the slime canon (and slime cannons) before Nickelodeon adopted it as an identity.

You Can't Do That On Television, which aired for the first time on Ottawa's CJOH-TV in 1979, is considered the definitive birthplace of slime. It was a sketch show written from a kid point of view, on which Alanis Morissette and other tween actors got dumped on for saying the words "I don't know." Like lots of Canadian-made TV of that era, creators were given a long leash, leaving plenty of room for mediocrity and weirdness. Slime could override any kid's stiff acting—and so the ultimate recyclable sight gag was born.

"If you want to get into the details, the original slime was oatmeal of a certain consistency with green food colouring," Josh Morris, a writer on the show for several years, told VICE. You can see this in YouTube clips of the early episodes—a chunky, paste-y slop that piled on the kids' heads and shoulders. "That stuff destroyed people's clothes. If you waited any time at all to wash it off, the clothes were finished."

Morris says the show also experimented with bulk cottage cheese, since it could easily wash out, but later abandoned the cheese-slime because (surprise) it smelled awful and appeared too watery on camera. "That early slime looked great, really gooey and viscous. Cottage cheese slime doesn't look as good," he said. Future incarnations would use combinations cream of wheat, vegetable oil, and baby shampoo. It helped that the kids were paid a $50 slime bonus.

Nickelodeon, a new network at the time, started buying You Can't Do That On Television episodes in in 1981, and from there the slime phenomenon caught on like wildfire. "Slime was this signal of irreverence," Morris said of its instant popularity. "It said we're just going to laugh and see cool things. We won't be learning lessons on how to be nice to other kids."

Read More: Everything I Learned From 'ReBoot,' the 90s Kids Show That Predicted the Future

Through the 80s, Nick added slime to a slew of new shows—Double Dare, Wild and Crazy Kids, and Figure It Out to name a few. Morris recalls something of a slime arms race, writing one You Can't Do That On Television episode with an unheard-of eight kids getting slimed. When You Can't Do That On Television folded in 1990, YTV carried on the gross-out tradition north of the border, buying old episodes and launching its own slime-friendly variety show It's Alive! in 1993.

Yaphe was a cast member, or "couch potato" on It's Alive!, which bookended shows like Power Rangers and Are You Afraid of the Dark? in its first season. Looking back, the show rode a wave of quite hilarious and shameless product placement, and billed itself as "the least educational show on television." On that show, says Yaphe, "the first sketch of Uh Oh! was born."

But Yaphe wouldn't score his glittery blazer and hosting gig until after It's Alive! went off-air. He even played the slime-dumping "Punisher" in a sketch version before breaking out into the game show format as "Wink Yahoo" on Uh Oh!. For over 200 episodes he would hang upside down with a hairnet, a blow drier and Ice Mist hairspray to make that cartoon head shape happen.

For Yaphe, his stand-out memories of slime also have a lot to do with smells. "They had to make so many vats of it, because they had to prepare for every kid who's spinning the Uh Oh! wheel to land on Uh Oh!," Yaphe recalled.

"We would shoot four episodes a day, and we would do it for two straight weeks... The goop would sit in a room for the next day, so the stench would pick up," he said. "At the end the kids would say, 'You reek, get away from me, you smell like vomit,' And they did, they stank."

Today, Yaphe still keeps in touch with Uh Oh! cast, and does some voice acting gigs. But mostly he focuses on an energy healing practice.

When I ask about a possible slime resurgence, Yaphe has some clues. "I've been approached by someone, I think even yesterday on my Facebook page, saying 'Hey, we've got a big event coming up, and we have to produce large amounts of slime—we were hoping you could help us."

That, and Uh Oh! gear Yaphe has hung onto absolutely kills on Bunz trading zone. "Those kids who watched are 25 to 35 now," he said of his fans. "When I was younger they didn't come up to me, but now they do." Based on Yaphe's experience, at least, I'd say the the forecast is clear, with a good chance of slime.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Narcomania: British Police Officers Reveal What They Really Think About the War on Drugs

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A Met Police officer with some confiscated drugs (Photo: Tom Johnson)

Good Cop, Bad War is the story of an undercover police officer, Neil Woods, who spent over a decade infiltrating Britain's biggest drug gangs. The book, released last week, provides a unique insight into a world of mind games and violence, where the drug trade acts as a production line for the creation of ruthless gangsters. Ultimately, his experiences led Woods to reject the way drugs are policed in the UK.

"The logic of the drugs war only leads one way: the police get smarter, so the criminals get nastier; things can only ever go from bad to worse, from savagery to savagery," says Woods. Now, after having left the force, he is chairman of LEAP UK (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition), a pro-drug legalisation activist group consisting of ex-law enforcement officials.

But to what extent are Woods and his colleagues at LEAP UK – and those currently employed in the police force – rare specimens? How thin on the ground are drug cops who think they are fighting the wrong fight? Expressing sympathy for anything other than hardline prohibition – even to their colleagues – is something of a risk in the black and white, "them and us" world of police culture.

Even so, every now and then drug cops open up about the realities of clearing the streets of dealers and drugs.

Neil Woods buying crack while undercover in 1995 (Photo courtesy of Neil Woods)

I spoke to Mike Fisher*, a senior drugs investigator for Britain's organised crime busting bureau, the National Crime Agency (NCA). He asked for his name to be changed to avoid disciplinary action, as his views will definitely not be found anywhere near the pages of the NCA's annual report.

"If the NCA stopped targeting drug gangs, it would change nothing," he explained. "You would see little change in the high street. Society would not collapse. As it is, drugs are freely available now. All that would happen is that dealing would be more open. But it may give us more of a chance to deal with crimes such as homicide."

On the surface, it's a counter-intuitive line to take for a senior officer working within an agency for which the drug trade is a key target.

"Law enforcement against drugs is completely ineffective and has been since the Misuse of Drugs Act came into force in 1971," says Fisher. "The idea of the state protecting you from yourself just doesn't work. We've spent billions of pounds trying to prohibit drugs, but there's less chance of it working than Canute stopping the waves.

(Photo: Andoni Lubaki)

Fisher tells me that arresting people on the streets for drugs is an endless cycle, and that it's the same with the larger fish. "Whenever we remove a big guy, someone else – usually a lieutenant – replaces him within days. The more we try, the harder it gets: increased enforcement keeps these people looking over their shoulder; they become more covert about their activity, and that makes our job harder."

Fisher's solution is to take the Portugal route: decriminalise personal use of all drugs, from cannabis to heroin, and look at legalising production and supply. "I believe consenting adults have a choice as to what they put in their bodies. It will also make it easier for heroin and crack users to get the help they need and free up police time to go out on patrol and deal with other crimes," he says. "Ideally, production should be wrested from organised criminals and managed by governments."

Surprisingly, he tells me around half of Britain's elite drug detectives at NCA have similar "liberal" attitudes to the drugs problem.

But what about those drug cops working below NCA level, in towns and cities across the UK? To gauge what they truly think about their daily task, you need to be a fly on the wall – so that's the exact position that University of Sheffield criminologist Dr Matthew Bacon took. He spent two years embedded with drug detectives in a town and a major city (the identities of which are secret) in the UK and wrote about his experiences in Taking Care of Business, published last month.

Most officers were anti-drugs and fully supported prohibition. Drugs were seen as being behind all that's bad in society. This gave them a "righteousness" in their actions, observed Bacon. But within this, recreational drug users, social dealers and nightclubs were far less of a crime problem than alcohol, a drug which few officers had a problem with.

It's perhaps not surprising, given the police's moral code, that most of the officers he hung around with viewed "junkies" as lazy, undeserving scumbags. In 2012, a former undercover officer who disguised himself as a heroin user-dealer, told me: "It made me realise how bad cops can be to drug addicts. I was abused, assaulted and threatened with being fitted up by having drugs planted on me on a regular basis."

To the anti-drug teams Bacon shadowed, heroin dealers were one of the most despised groups in society, so much so that they were seen as "police property" – objects that police could do with as they wished. "Almost without exception, dealers were depicted as deplorable and dangerous outlaws," says Bacon. "They were made the scapegoat of the drug problem."


(Photo: Marco Tulio Valencia)

Drug cops, who saw themselves as "elite crime fighters", had sufficient respect however for the the Mr Bigs of the drug world. They saw those who ran professional outfits and had families at home as worthy adversaries, and a "good collar" for which they would earn respect among their colleagues.

Despite all this, there was acceptance – often expressed by officers off-duty after a few pints – that they were not waging a "war on drugs", but managing an unbeatable problem in order to "keep the public happy".

One detective sergeant told Bacon: "Sometimes I think we're like those soldiers in World War Two – you know, those ones on the island who just kept fighting because they didn't know the war was over. Only difference is, we'd lost the war before we even started fighting." Another officer told him: "We've thrown everything at it, even the kitchen sink, but drug problems just keep getting worse. In the end, the drugs are still on the streets, no matter how many people we lock up."

READ: Inside the Secret World of a British Undercover Drugs Cop

There are rebellious notions even among the rank and file. When I went stop and searching in Soho with one of the Met Police's sniffer dog teams in 2013, I was surprised to hear from a regular beat officer and his colleague that they thought cannabis should be legalised entirely. "I say legalise the lot," one said. "Legalise it and tax it," said the other. "If someone wants to turn the sky green and the grass blue, then it's up to them. I can't see the difference between alcohol and cannabis. The official line is that drugs are under control, but they are not."

I call up Simon Kempton, a police sergeant from Dorset who has specialised in drug enforcement and sits on the National Board of the Police Federation, a body that represents rank and file officers. He agrees with Woods – that the drug trade houses the most violent people in the country – but believes prohibition is crucial to taking them out.

"I can't speak for everyone, but in my opinion drug policing is worthwhile, all day, every day," he says. "I get it: it can seem futile when we take out someone knocking out kilos of cocaine, replaced within two hours. But the reason it's worth doing is because the drug is not just about the drug trade: it's weapons, terrorism, people trafficking, money laundering; it straddles the spectrum of the most serious crimes, such as murder, kidnapping, serious assault – which all go hand in hand with the drug trade.

"We are taking out the worst people in our society. When they assault people it's not just a punch-up outside a pub; we are talking about sending a message through retribution and torture. These people have to protect their trade from others, so they use extreme levels of violence. You have to be the scariest, biggest person on the block, otherwise they will take your money from you.

"Undercover police officers would not take the huge risks infiltrating gangs if they did not think it was worthwhile. Undercover drug policing is not cheap, but it's very cost effective. It's rare to get a not guilty after undercover work because of all the evidence that's been gathered. Yes, people can feel demoralised that they've put themselves on the line, and then someone ends up getting just a coupe of years, but that's the way it is sometimes."

However, Sgt Kempton said that for rank and file officers, policing cannabis was another matter, and that many officers sympathised with the path taken by Durham Police in going easy on low-level cannabis offences: "With dwindling resources, forces are having to focus their limited numbers on areas which represent the greatest harms to wider society. While policing cannabis is still a legitimate action, I believe most officers and the public would support a focus on other areas of crime."

Over the years writing about the drug trade, I've met drug cops who have told me that their job is similar to that of the drug user or trafficker – a series of almost addictive drug bust "hits" that perpetuate the game. There are some who have crossed the line completely to become dependent drug users themselves, and others who are disgusted by the stigmatisation of drug users and even dealers.

One female drug cop I spoke to told me: "There are some pretty nasty pieces of work out there, but some of them are just ordinary people. Behind every user and runner, there's a story," she said. "A lot of people say drug addicts and drug dealers are scum of the earth, but they don't know anything about them."

Woods' book will open the public's eyes to the raw violence and canniness of the drug world, and the lengths police will go to in order to disrupt it. But after years fighting at the apex of the drug war, his conclusion – and that of other experienced officers who have chosen to speak out – must be heeded if we want to find a solution to a problem that has been trashing communities around the world for decades.

@Narcomania

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

What Happens if You're Caught Getting Drugs in the Mail?

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The VICE Guide to Right Now: This Guy Did Coke Outside a Police Station and Obviously Got Caught

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A man who was arrested after being caught allegedly snorting cocaine outside Lewisham Police Station (Photo: @MPSLewisham)

There are many places to snort cocaine. In toilet cubicles; off your phone screen in a tent; off a CD case at a house party that gradually but inescapably disintegrates into four people shouting at each other about the nationalisation of railways. So why, when you have all those places, would you choose to rack up outside a police station?

To find out, you'd have to ask the man who was arrested over the weekend after allegedly snorting coke outside Lewisham Police Station. Cops' attitude towards drugs might be changing in certain circles and among certain officers, but it's not like they can ignore someone brazenly doing class A drugs – a very illegal thing to do – directly outside their place of work.

Lewisham Police Station shamed the man on their Twitter: "A little tip...if you want to snort cocaine after a night out, try not to do it right outside the largest police station in the country." They then posted a photo of the man in handcuffs: "This male was detained by night duty C team officers and is now seeing the inside of the station!"

This, unsurprisingly, is not the first time someone's decided to get fucked up in a hugely stupid place. Last December, a pensioner tried to snort cocaine during a traffic stop, literally right in front of a police officer, and ended up getting arrested.

Or there were the two young men transporting 20lbs of weed who got high on the drive, freaked out, thought they were being tailed by police – when they 100 percent were not – and surrendered over the phone, telling a confused operator: "Hi, we're the two dumbasses that got caught trying to bring some stuff through your border and all your cops are just driving around us like a bunch of jack wagons, and I'd just like you guys to end it. If you could help me out with that, we would just like to get on with that."

@its_me_Salma

More on VICE:

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Is University Still Worth It?: University Students Let Us Inside Their Kitchens

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All photos by author

University students are infamously shit at feeding themselves. A 2014 study found that 30 percent of undergrads don't know how to boil an egg, and half couldn't rustle up a simple spaghetti bolognese.

Unfortunately, eating well is kind of a pre-requisite for living, which means the ability to cook is important. As filmmaker Robert Rodriguez once said: "I've got a lot of friends who don't know how to cook, which I could never understand because not knowing how to cook is like not knowing how to fuck."

With this in mind, I traipsed across a handful of student halls to see what student cupboards and fridges look like.

ARJUN, 19, SECOND YEAR



VICE: How often do you cook?
Arjun: I'd say I cook around four meals a week.

What do you do for the rest of them?
It's either, like, frozen food or take-out, or just something stupid, like noodles.

So how often do you do a big shop?
Like once every two weeks or something. I'm usually stoned when I shop, which is why I end up buying unhealthy things that attract me at the time but that you wouldn't be able to create a dish with. They're always really random and disconnected.



What's the worst thing you've eaten while at uni?
Ketchup and bread. It was toasted, but there was no butter.

What should every student know about cooking, shopping and food before going to uni?
Occasionally eat greens. You don't realise the importance of them until you end up getting sick because you haven't consumed anything healthy for a while.

Do you eat greens?
No, but I realise they're important.

FIFI, 21, THIRD YEAR



How often do you cook?
Fifi: Every day. Roast chicken if we have it, but pasta most of the time, or things like rice.

Do you ever have friends over for dinner parties and stuff?
No, never. If I have dinner with my friends I'll usually go over to their houses.

What's the worst thing you've ever eaten at uni?
Cheesy chips, I think. I had some which were really disgusting, but that's like a classic university food example.



What's the most expensive thing in your cupboard at the moment?
Probably some olive oil that I got from Greece, or some of our spices. My mum picks up spices from different places she travels because she goes overseas for work a lot, so it's probably something like that. We've got some really nice saffron at the moment, for example.

ANISHA AND CHLOE, BOTH 20, BOTH THIRD YEAR

How often do you shop for food?
Anisha: Oh my god, me and Chloe shop for food together because we share literally everything, and we only end up shopping once every, like, three months.

That sounds weird.
Anisha: Literally, and it only comes to around £90 at most. It's because we never have fresh food, though; absolutely everything is frozen. We'll get bread, milk and eggs – that's our snack food. The rest of the time we're either buying meals or defrosting shit.

What's the worst thing you've eaten while at uni?
Anisha: I once had chicken nuggets on top of Nutella on toast because I wanted the texture of the chicken nuggets, but the taste of chocolate. I was off my tits.
Chloe: We had round tortillas once. I ripped one in half, shoved both halves in the toaster, got butter, melted it and put garlic powder on. I thought it was the best thing ever.

Why don't you just eat, like, food?
Chloe: To be fair, we have like two tonnes of at least something healthy – pasta – but no sauce to cook it with. It just sits there in the cupboard because we don't know what to do with it because we just end up buying takeaway food because we can't be arsed.

What are your thoughts on two-minute noodles?
Anisha: Life. Life! The good ones give you diarrhoea but it's so worth it.

What should every prospective student know about cooking, food and shopping?
Chloe: Do everything together, because it will cost less and you'll be able to learn to cook together as well. We have a Mary Berry book that Anisha got me for my birthday. We've crossed the name out, because this is when Beyoncé's "Becky with the good hair" thing happened, and we decided was Mary Berry, so we crossed out Mary Berry and put Becky with the good hair.

Were you high when that happened too?
Chloe: 100 percent, yes.

ADAM, 30, MATURE STUDENT



How often do you cook?
Adam: Every night when I'm indoors I make food for myself.

What sort of stuff do you cook?
Leaves. Chicken and leaves, meat and leaves, steak and leaves. I like leaves; they're filling and they're good for you. I have the occasional pizza – and I love a fajita. I live in Brixton, so I like to cook a lot of jerk chicken as well.



What are your thoughts on Pot Noodles?
I ate a lot of them when I was at uni the first time, but now I've learnt. Also, the first time I was at uni I worked at Wetherspoons, so I used to get tonnes of cheap, free food. It was really quite bad, but it was cheap.

What do you wish you could afford to buy?
Saffron.

HOLLY, 21, THIRD YEAR



VICE: Are you much of a cook?
Holly: I love cooking, but I don't cook much because it's sad cooking for one person, and also I can't portion properly.

Do you buy much food then?
Not really. I'm probably in the shop every day, but just to get that day's food. I can't remember the last time I went into a supermarket and spent more than £7.

Where do you do most of your shopping?
Sainsbury's. I mostly buy salad-y things, or whatever's reduced, really. I'm quite a sucker for pastry things like quiche and tarts, but also crisps.



What's the worst thing you've eaten at uni?
Probably just like sheer quantities of things. In the first year at university I discovered lime-flavoured Doritos. I would sit and eat a family-sized bag of them. Sometimes, if I have a bit of money, I'll go and get cockles as well. I love smothering them with vinegar and eating them. I've consumed a lot of cockles in my time.

That is pretty disgusting. What's the most expensive thing in your cupboard and, or fridge?
Probably the whole-nut peanut butter that I've got, because it doesn't have palm oil in it. I read somewhere that palm oil is really super bad for orangutans, and I don't want to take their home away – they're too precious.

What do you wish you could afford?
Full-fat Philadelphia on fresh baked bread from the bakery, every single day. I just can't justify it, though.

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How Treating Students As Customers Turns the Idea of Meritocracy into a Joke

If You're Working Class, University Can Still Change Your Life

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Everyone Is Guilty on 'The Night Of'

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Riz Ahmed as Naz and Michael K. Williams as Freddy in a screenshot of 'The Night Of.' Courtesy of HBO

Spoiler for the latest episode of The Night Offollow.

The easiest way to describe The Night Of is that it's a miniseries about a murder. That's the void at the center of the plot, the reason everything happens. But the murder is also the show's most disposable, clichéd bit. An upper-class Manhattan party girl dead after a wild night of risk-taking turns into a stabfest? That's the sort of first-act fodder that shows from Castle to SVU have made use of.

What makes The Night Of special is the way it keeps getting sidetracked from the whodunnit logic of the case and lingers on the way characters navigate the lines separating legal and illegal, moral and immoral—lines that fail to line up with each other, lines that everyone ignores anyway.

We saw this over and over again in Sunday's long courtroom scenes, slow back-and-forth exchanges free of musical stings or embellishments. On the way to judging Naz (Riz Ahmed), the court judges each witness, weighing their morality, ethics, or simple common sense. Naz's dim-bulb friend/Adderall customer slouches his way through testimony, painting the defendant as a drug dealer, and gets admonished by the DA (Jeannie Berlin, who owns these scenes with her impish charm) for being a shitty business student. The prosecution's forensics expert gets raked over the coals by defense attorney Chandra (Amara Karan) for his past mistakes. And Detective Box (Bill Camp) gets targeted for giving Naz his inhaler instead of keeping it as evidence from the crime scene, a violation of police procedure. Chandra claims he had removed the inhaler from the scene because it didn't conform to the police's narrative—we don't think of asthmatics as being brutal killers. But Box has a simpler explanation: He gave the inhaler to Naz "because he was suffering."

Can we get a ruling on whether this act of compassion was in fact a subtle attempt, in anticipation of an eventual trial, to make Naz look slightly more guilty? Sorry. Like roughly 90 percent of the citizens of The Night Of, Box is inscrutable.

Naz has something dark in him, whatever the jury in his case decides.

Questions of motive swirl around pretty much every interaction this episode. Why did Naz throw that kid down the stairs as a teenager, then chuck the Coke can at the other? Why did that charming-like-a-snake defense crime scene expert Dr. Katz (Chip Zien, a musical-theater actor who knocks it out of the park here) praise the prosecutor's expert at a dinner years ago if he thinks the man's work is so lousy? Why is Naz freebasing coke?

Oh yeah, Naz is freebasing coke now. The series' main character becomes more inscrutable as time goes on. In this episode, he's almost entirely silent, growing harder and more taciturn thanks to his time in jail. In the most brutal scene of this episode, he barely speaks to another inmate's mother in the visiting room as she hands him baggies of drugs she had stuffed in her vagina. He tells her that her son is "fine," then expressionlessly swallows the baggies. Her son is not fine, of course—Naz comes across his body in the Riker's bathroom a few scenes later. That leads to him telling Freddy (Michael K. Williams) about how one guy in Freddy's crew was forcing the woman's son to have sex with him. That brings us to the episode's second most brutal scene, where Naz distracts a guard while Freddy cuts the sexual assaulter's throat.

Whether or not Naz killed Andrea, it's disturbing to watch him slip so easily across the barrier between citizen and criminal, and the way Ahmed plays him, a tightly wound ball of doubt and anger, you don't get the sense that the show is telling us that anyone would do the same—Naz has something dark in him, whatever the jury in his case decides.

In fact, there are a lot of plot threads that won't get resolved with the reading of the verdict, which will make next week's finale fascinating to watch. Naz's parents have pawned seemingly all their valuables; they are despised by their own community for raising an alleged killer whose actions have led to a wave of Islamophobic attacks. His father's business partners are dead set on buying him out at rock-bottom prices, to which he replies, "You're thieves. I don't do business with thieves."

"You are the father of a killer," is the response.

Most heartbreakingly, Naz's mother (an outstanding Poorna Jagannathan) seems convinced that her son is a murderer. "Did I raise a monster?" she asks Chandra after storming out of the courtroom. The answer doesn't seem to matter—how does a mother come back from thinking, if just for a second, that her son is a murderer? And does it make a particle of difference what a jury says? Even after a not guilty, Naz will still have to carry the weight of what he's done in jail with him; his father will have to recover the pieces of his livelihood; his family will have to repair relationships that might be irreparable.

Even the episode's only tender moment has a bunch of danger attached to it. During an attorney-client meeting, Chandra sees Naz's vulnerability, or the rawness of his desperation gets to her, or they're just two lonely people in a dark room. Anyway, they kiss—an act of compassion maybe, but also definitely an ethical violation for a lawyer. "Fuck," Chandra mutters, realizing that rather late. Seconds later we cut to security-camera footage of the cell, reminding us that mistakes, big and small, rarely go unrecorded.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

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