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

Gary Johnson. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

US News

Clinton Spending Twice as Much as Trump
Donald Trump doubled his campaign spending last month, but he is still spending less than half as much as Hillary Clinton, according to Federal Election Commission documents. Trump spent about $18.5 million in July, compared to about $38 million spent by Clinton. The Democratic nominee also fundraised $15 million more than her rival last month. —VICE News

Lochte Admits He 'Over-Exaggerated' Gunpoint Story
Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte said he "over-exaggerated" his story about getting robbed at gunpoint in Rio and admitted to "immature behavior." He also confessed that he was still drunk when he gave the initial interview. But he maintained "there was a gun pointed in our direction and we were demanded to give money." Lochte said he hoped to continue his Olympic swimming career. —NBC News

One in Three Considering Third-Party Candidate
The latest ABC News/SSRS poll reveals 35 percent of people are considering voting for a third-party candidate, showing widespread dissatisfaction with the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But 59 percent of respondents are worried voting for a third-party candidate could cause their least preferred candidate to win. —ABC News

Zika Could Spread Across Gulf, Warns Official
A top health official has warned that Zika could soon spread to states like Louisiana and Texas after cases of the virus were recorded in Miami Beach. Dr. Anthony Fauci, of the National Institutes of Health, said it "would not be surprising" to see cases in other Gulf Coast states. Flooding in Louisiana has made it a prime target. —Reuters

International News

Suicide Bombing in Turkey Blamed on Child
A suicide bombing that killed 51 people at a Kurdish wedding in the Turkish province of Gaziantep was carried out by a boy between the ages of 12 and 14, said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Turkish leader said ISIS was responsible for planning the attack. —Al Jazeera

Rio Hands Olympic Flag to Tokyo
The Rio Olympics ended with a carnival-inspired closing ceremony, as the Olympic flag was handed to 2020 host Tokyo. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe got one of the night's biggest cheers when he appeared dressed as Nintendo character Super Mario, rising out of a huge green pipe.—CNN

Malian Extremist Pleads Guilty at ICC
An Islamist rebel will plead guilty to destroying religious sites in the Malian city of Timbuktu, according to prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, a former member of Ansar Dine, a group with links to al Qaeda, is accused of the destruction of nine mausoleums and a mosque.—BBC News

South Korea and US Start Joint Drills
South Korea and the United States have launched annual joint military exercises today, prompting warnings of retaliation from North Korea. The North calls the exercises invasion preparations, but the UN Command Military Armistice Commission said it notified the North Korean army the drills were "non-provocative." —Reuters

Everything Else

Pills at Prince's Estate Contained Fentanyl
Pills recovered at Prince's estate after his death were counterfeit drugs that contained fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid. Authorities are still investigating how Prince obtained the drugs, which were found in an Aleve bottle labeled "Watson 385." —AP

Millions Watch Last-Ever Tragically Hip Show
A staggering 11.7 million Canadians watched the last-ever show by the Tragically Hip, whose lead singer Gord Downie has terminal brain cancer. The emotional gig in Ontario was broadcast live across Canada. —CBC News

Sean Hannity Admits to Advising Trump
The Fox News host said he has been acting as an unofficial strategic advisor to Donald Trump for some time. "I never claimed to be a journalist," said Hannity, who referred to Trump as "my friend."—The New York Times

Frank Ocean Reveals Album Inspiration
The artist took to Tumblr to explain the inspiration behind his new album Blonde: car journeys. Ocean, who released the 17-track LP at the weekend, revealed "the first time I did shrooms" was in his manager's Porche.—Noisey

Gay Police Chief Aims to Make History
Crystal Moore, police chief in Latta, South Carolina, is aiming to become the state's first female sheriff, and the first openly gay one as well. Moore was reinstated two years ago after she was fired by the town's mayor for leading a "questionable" lifestyle, and is now running for sheriff of Dillon County. —VICE News

Newspaper for Refugees Launched in Germany
Activists in Germany have launched a newspaper called Daily Resistance which gives refugees a platform to write. Co-founder Klara said her aim was to make Daily Resistance "the most feared newspaper in the world." —VICE

This story appeared in the August issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

"I've always liked playing with boys, from softball to hardball, and I love watching them, the way some like to watch us," Jill Freedman said. "I realize now I've been watching them for years, only I never thought about it that way. I thought in terms of adventure, excitement, curiosity, action..."

Freedman, whose prolific, award-winning street photography has recorded more than five decades of life in New York City, picked up a camera in the 60s and used it as a ticket into all the boys clubs she could find: the bars, the games, the firehouses, the police stations. She hung around long enough that the men stopped trying to impress her, so she could observe them in their natural states: comfortable around their own, telling jokes and lies, playing or fighting, and sometimes just being quiet.

In the 70s and 80s, she released books that portray the lives of those she thought of as "the good guys." Firehouse is a record of the men who fought fires in the Bronx and Harlem, whom she views as heroes. Street Cops examines New York City's police, and Freedman saw a distinction between the men she profiled, who she believed didn't fit the popular perception of a force rife with corruption, and the officers she called "bad guys," who liked to hurt people. But this unpublished portfolio goes outside those exclusive boys clubs and examines the more expansive identity of manhood. It's a culmination of her decades-long study of all types of men, seen through one woman's eyes. She photographed them with women, with children, with other men, and alone to understand what they're really like—funny, disgusting, adorable, crude.

"One minute you love them, the next you want to kill them," she said. "Just ask any woman."

A 1989 photo by Birney Imes of the Riverside Lounge in Shaw, Mississippi

If you asked me about my favorite place in the entire world, I'd probably take you to Churchill's, an anarchic mess of a bar looming in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood. For decades, owner Dave Daniels lived on the property and was a fixture there. But even after he sold the place the bar kept its traditions: It's supposedly had live music every single day since it opened in the 70s, and it remains incredibly, gloriously, shitty. There's a laundry room there that I've seen people both wash clothes and have sex in. Its bathrooms are legendary for their filth, and people would stand ankle-deep in dirty water in order to do key bumps.

It's the kind of place where anything can happen. Local crackheads don reflective vests in order to convince motorists they're parking attendants and trick them out of a buck or a cigarette. One time, someone stole my car and drove it into Churchill's—as in, crashed it against the back of the bar. They left a shank broken off in the ignition and a Stephen King book in the backseat. When I showed up to deal with all that, the locals demanded payment for "protecting my car" all night. I ignored them, went inside the bar, and grabbed a set of pliers so I could work on getting that shank removed.

Churchill's sometimes had better music than most dives, but it was unquestionably a dive. You know what a dive is—maybe you have your own dive memories, your own recollections of scuffed counters and spilled beers. Growing up in central Florida, I remember dives as spots where you could get dollar drafts, play pool, and smoke inside––a crucial lure, because there was no smoking in my parents' house. You could talk to people about catching catfish with their bare hands, sit quietly in the corner and play the naked version of Photo Hunt without anyone bothering you, or show up to eat a buffet-style meal prepared by the bartender on Thanksgiving if you didn't have anywhere else to go.

But when you try to turn those recollections into a definition, separate the dives from the ordinary bars, words fail. What makes a dive a dive? I kind of felt the same way that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously felt about the concept of obscenity––I knew it when I saw it.

"It's cheap and there's no question when you walk in about whether you're dressed well enough. If you're wearing pants, you're good," is how Kathy Giuffre describes dives, and she would know. Giuffre is now a sociologist at Colorado College, but in a past life she was a denizen of a bar in Raleigh, North Carolina, called the Cave. At the time she was in her 20s, a transplant who didn't know anyone, so she started chatting up the regulars there, and eventually started working for the bar since she was there all the time anyway. She wrote a novel fictionalizing the watering hole, and today studies "third places" like the Cave.

A third place is a term coined by a sociologist named Ray Oldenberg. His idea was that home is the first place, work is the second, and any place where you can build community counts as a third. Think the Agora in ancient Athens, coffee houses in pre-Revolutionary Paris, and whatever parking lot goth teens congregate in after school. They're hubs where people from different backgrounds can freely exchange ideas, a fact that perhaps explains why many of the people accused of witchcraft in Salem were either tavern owners or related to them, according to Giuffre.

She tells me that the concept of a third place is possibly even more important than ever as people migrate away from their hometowns. There are few places you can go to meet new people when you've just blown into a new city: Your choices are basically just church or a bar, and I know which one I'd pick.

Photo by Christian Patterson, from his 'Sound Affects' series

The term dive bar entered the lexicon in the 19th century as a way to describe a bar or opium den that was literally subterranean. There's a folk etymology as well––going in meant you were headed out of sight and into a zone of ill repute.

"To me, a dive bar is a place you don't want people to know that you are going to," John Cline tells me. "A real dive wouldn't call itself a dive, the same way you wouldn't say, 'I'm a degenerate alcoholic.'"

Cline has a PhD in American studies, but his real qualification comes from the hours he's logged in those kinds of places. He's hulking and bearded, and was big and hairy enough in high school that he could get into biker bars, no questions asked. His fascination with dives began at these places in rural Illinois, where he giddily remembers ordering Old Milwaukees with impunity while rubbing elbows with roughnecks. The core clientele of a dive bar, according to Cline, is always the lowest rung of society—they may be open to everyone, but traditionally these spaces are reserved for the working classes.

"It's going to be really sad when there aren't places where a 20-year-old and a 70-year-old can just sit around a table and shoot the breeze."
–Kathy Giuffre

Dives don't generally make an effort to appeal to cleanliness. Giuffre still has a recurring nightmare about the Cave where she's being forced to put her bare feet on the bar's dirty floor. You can love a dive bar, even think of it as home, but still be disgusted by it—and maybe that's why you love it in the first place.

"Maybe as human beings we need a little danger," Giuffre says. "People have been helicopter parenting for a long time now and we grow up in these places that are so controlled that we need risk. For a lot of people who live in little suburbs and places that are very safe, it can be soul-killing."

The flip side of that attraction to dive bars is that we sometimes fetishize them. It's not just working-class people who seek out dives, it's everyone who wants to burrow into someplace dark and beery for a few hours. Cline compares the phenomenon of the upper-middle class going to dives to the way white musicians of a certain era would have formative, life-changing experiences at black clubs.

"It's like transgressing the boundaries of class," he says. "And how many white people going to these places have any direct connection to the working class anymore?"

In the country's most obnoxiously cultured cities, there aren't many dives left—some have been pushed out by gentrification, others have closed when aging owners die or retire. What takes their place are often hip cocktail bars or "small-plate" restaurants catering to the young and overmoneyed. Nice places to visit, maybe, but you wouldn't want to live there the way you do with a good dive.

The Cave is still open in Raleigh, but Giuffre knows its only a matter of time before it too shuts its doors. "It's going to be really sad when there aren't places where a 20-year-old and a 70-year-old can just sit around a table and shoot the breeze," she says. "That's a really wonderful way to be in the world."

One thing we have more than enough of is nouveau dives, like the one that just opened in my neighborhood of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. There are antique Budweiser signage, distressed wood, big containers of cheap beer—the signifiers are there, but something in my gut tells me that it's not a "real" dive. It's like what Disney's Fort Wilderness is to camping, or what Grand Theft Auto is to actually stealing a car.

When Giuffre and I try to put together a theory of what was wrong with places like that, she says the problem is that the wear and tear wasn't earned the way it would be in an actual dive.

"The people who distress wood in an actual dive bar distress it by putting their cigarettes out on it by accident or spilling their beer on it by accident or running into it with a pool cue," she says.

Cline doesn't have kind words for these faux dives either. When I describe the new bar to him he likens it to a place in Austin, where he lives, that uses truck beds as benches. It's the sort of place that a free weekly paper might give the honorific of "best dive bar." He says that what those tastemakers consider a good divey spot is actually a highly selective, very curated take on what "low culture" is. That is to say, going to one of these nouveau dives constitutes a sort of class tourism––the illusion of authenticity without the inconvenience of having to hang out with any working-class people.

So what makes a dive a real dive? For one, the main activity that takes place there has to be drinking. No karaoke, definitely no bar trivia. A TV can be there, but it should be old, unremarkable, and probably tuned to the local news. There's no such thing as a new dive—they need to be there long enough to attract a regular clientele. The best dives still do buy-backs, a practice entirely forgotten in faux dives in which the bartender gives loyal customers drinks on the house. Mostly what makes a dive a dive is the people inside.

"I like the people here... I've never met a bad person here."
–Dave Lennard

The other week, I wandered into a dive I had never been to— Gottscheer Hall in Ridgewood, Queens—on one of those sweltering New York days when any bar seems like an oasis. It was so hot the mosquitos were flying and a white-haired man stood just outside the door, swatting at them.

He told me his name was Dave Lennard. The 67-year-old had cascading eyebrows that hung about an half-inch off his face and two visible teeth on the bottom row. Carcasses of his past kills littered the ground along with the butts of the Half-and-Half cigarettes he'd rolled at home. Lennard, who punctuates about every fifth sentence with "boom," told me that he had done three tours in Vietnam, and had lived in the neighborhood for 20 years before moving to Glendale, still in Queens but not exactly close.

"There's always steadies here, but then always new people you want to meet," he said by way of explanation why he still treks back to Gottscheer.

Inside the bar were pictures of past and present winners of a pageant that caters to women descended from a part of Germany that's currently in Slovenia. A couple small televisions played the Olympics, but no one really was watching. You could get a big mug of beer for $5, and there was a stack of business cards for a local car service at the door. A free jukebox played Private Dancer in the background.

"Now, who doesn't like Tina Turner?" Lennard asked rhetorically. "Boom."

Lennard told me about his love for Citizen Kane and Lawrence of Arabia. He was still upset about the American League's designated hitter rule, which took effect back in 1973. The best Led Zeppelin album, we agreed, was the first.

"I like the people here," he said just before I left. "I've never met a bad person here. You can come out here and deal with young people and old people and everyone gets along. We all come in here and communicate, and what's better than that?"

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

All images courtesy of Dmitrij Panov

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

On the first day of February 2016, 25-year-old Dmitrij Panov published a post on his blog:

"Hello, my name is Dmitrij Panov and I'm going to die soon. It may sound strange, but that's how it is."

One day, about four years earlier—in December of 2011—Dmitrij was waiting alone in an examination room, exhausted from the MRI scan he had just had. After seeing the scan, the doctor only needed a few seconds to diagnose him. Malignant cell growth in his brain—a tumor. Relieved, Dmitrij immediately rang his mom to tell her that he finally knew what was wrong with him.

Dmitrij studied psychology in Marburg, where he went to the doctor when he couldn't take the daily pain in his back and the constant urge to vomit anymore. The orthopedist assumed it was some kind of tension—the physical therapist sent him to an internist. One day, about a month later, Dmitrij was playing Tetris when he suddenly fell to the floor. He woke up in the university clinic in Marburg, and finally saw a neurologist. When it was confirmed he had a brain tumor, surgery was planned for the following morning. He looked forward to surgery and the following radiation. The pain, vomiting, fainting—it would all be gone. Dmitrij took a semester off from college to recover. At first, he had radiation treatment every six weeks, later every few months.

The doctors didn't have a lot of time for him—sometimes one of them asked him how he was feeling. But Dmitrij's felt his answers always took too long—he needed more words to describe what he was going through than the doctor had patience for. One time, after a nurse drew blood from him, Dmitrij's trousers were covered with blood. He didn't get an apology.

"In days following the surgery, I learned about the advantages of strong anaesthetics (the visions!) and a catheter (going to the loo is for commoners). After ten days, I crawled back out into the world. Then I had radiation and chemo—and all was well for the next few years. It would have been nice if that was where this story ended."

The treatment was successful, and after two years of being cancer-free, Dmitrij's worries subsided. But it only counts as "cancer-free" after five years—not two.

He resumed his psychology studies and got back to his life of playing video games and watching films with friends. He joined the school's theater troupe, discussed films on an online movie forum, and met up with people from that forum in real life. He loved that community: When he first fell sick the news spread quickly on Facebook—people who only knew him online rang him to support him. Over the years, Dmitrij had collected 680 DVDs—his favorites being Kill Bill, Moonrise Kingdom, and the South Korean original version of Oldboy.

In April 2015, one year before he officially would have been considered cancer-free, he found himself back in the doctor's office. He was diagnosed with a recurrence—the same kind of tumor in the same place. He underwent another surgery, followed by radiation and chemo. He had to start over counting the cancer-free years.

Dmitrij with markings for his radiation therapy

Near the end of 2015 his spinal fluid was tested, which resulted in a new diagnosis: brain metastases. A new round of chemotherapy followed—the doctors wouldn't be able to really get rid of the metastases, but wanted to "optimize the quality of his life as much as possible." He had a stage 4 medulloblastoma on the part of his brain influencing his motor control. If it got bigger, it could affect his balance too, or press against the visual cortex. Medulloblastomas are sometimes called "child tumors" because they mostly appear in young people. There has hardly been any research on what they do to adults and young adults like Dmitrij, so the doctors had to experiment.

The news that there wasn't really anything to be done didn't surprise Dmitrij—the fact that it wasn't operable meant he could spend Christmas with his grandmother instead of in hospital. He had already missed her birthday while undergoing chemotherapy.

The news brought him to writing that first blog post, at 2 AM on February 1:

"Hello, my name is Dmitrij Panov and I'm going to die soon. It may sound strange, but that's how it is."

He called his online diary "Dying With Swag" and published something new every four days—to show that the incurable and inescapable isn't all that bad. He wanted to leave something behind.

Dmitrij was born in the Soviet Union, 25 years ago. The umbilical cord had been wrapped around his neck and he wasn't breathing. According to his mother, it took four hours to revive him. She lives 30 miles away from Dmitrij, in Herborn. Now, she would lose her only child anyway.

After his visits to the clinic, he would go home to the apartment he shares with his best friend Sabine. Dmitrij talks to his mother on the phone every now and then, but he never wanted to move back to her—he's easily annoyed and, according to Dmitrij, there's no proper wifi at his mother's. He didn't go back to his studies, but filled his days watching movies and playing video games. His theater troupe performed Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and on opening night he stumbled, wobbly, onto the stage. After the final applause, his classmates brought him straight to the university clinic.

"Slowly, the feeling that I'll never get out of this clinic is getting stronger. It's likely that it'll get worse. Do I accept that? Not yet. It's so annoying that the doctors always make you wait for them. I have pain in my back, my legs, the pain in my arse keeps coming back; the IV keeps dripping. It could be worse. I don't want to think about what I'll do when it is."
(April 29, 2016)

Dmitrij had another operation and another six weeks of radiation. He heard he might be paralyzed from the waste down, he started writing his will—his DVDs would need a new owner. When the white walls of the clinic seemed to close in on him, it helped him to read the comments from his readers.

"What used to matter to me and doesn't anymore:
College.
Sex."
(July 2016, "Ask Me Anything" on Reddit)

He was admitted to a recovery center—not a hospice, because he wasn't set to die that soon. He didn't want to know how much time he had left, exactly. He's not scared of death—some people die unhappily at 100, he'll die fulfilled before he's 30. He wrote that he's not interested in touring the world, but he's sad about missing out on a few things: that he never went to the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet around the corner from a Penny supermarket in Bonn. And not being able to play all the video games that haven't been released yet.

"Last time, I wrote that I'm not really afraid of dying. Maybe I should have said that I'm not really afraid of being dead. When you're dying, there's still some life in you and sometimes I think that I'm afraid of life."
(May 11, 2016)

On a sunny day in May of this year, Dmitrij was in the neurology ward of the clinic in Hesse—stuck in his room and hardly able to move. That's where I met him. The other patients went for walks outside, or lay in the grass in the adjacent park. The clinic has one wing for people with mental issues and another for people regaining their physical strength. Sometimes, Dmitrij wasn't sure which wing he was in.

He watched movies, played games, and looked out the window, overlooking a forest. The view didn't interest him much. His back hurt, he wasn't able to find a comfortable position for days. His last diagnosis was another metastasis, grown on one of his vertebrae. He couldn't see properly sometimes, which would last for about half an hour.

"Morning/midday probably the most intense pain of my life. It's been okay for about an hour (thanks to the paracetamol I had for a fever). It's far from being ideal, but I'm able to sit and I'm not constantly screaming out in pain. Hopefully it'll stay that way—firstly because I'd love to get out of here, and secondly because I'm not sure I can take it again."
(June 4, 2016)

Dmitrij was sent home on June 9 of this year.

After his death, Sabine will post his final blog entry for him.

This story was co-published with the Marshall Project.

Starting this week, about 20 million students will be arriving on college campuses for the fall semester, and while classrooms fill up, fraternities, sports teams and clubs of all kinds will open their rolls to new students and, inevitably, to initiation rites that can include hazing. Not just embarrassing or humiliating pranks, but physical abuse and serious physical peril, even death.

According to a 2008 study by two professors at the University of Maine, more than half of college students involved with student organizations experience hazing, which often involves "alcohol consumption, humiliation, isolation, sleep- deprivation, and sex acts."

Forty-four states have laws against hazing. Some are as tough as statutes on assault or manslaughter, whose language and penalties they resemble. But many others amount to low-level charges that experts say fail to rise above the level of disorderly conduct. Some are merely admonitions that result only in fines, others leave it to the discretion of the school.

"They are basically a symbolic gesture," said Hank Nuwer, a professor of journalism at Franklin College in Indiana who has been tracking hazing deaths in the United States for over 30 years.

For example, Arizona's anti-hazing laws, adopted in 2001, require all public education institutions to enforce a hazing-prevention policy that includes a statement prohibiting hazing. The policy states that every institution must print the prevention policy in all student handbooks to be distributed to students and parents.

However, there are no penalties defined for those who initiate hazing.

Florida, on the other hand, enacted much tougher anti-hazing laws in 2005. A person charged under the hazing statutes could face a third-degree felony if the crime ends in serious injury or death. A third degree felony in Florida carries a prison sentence of up to five years.

A person could also face a first degree misdemeanor in Florida for an act of hazing that creates risk of serious injury or death. This carries a maximum of one year in prison.

The first anti-hazing law in the United States was passed in New York, in 1894. This was a response to an incident at Cornell University in which students released chlorine gas into the kitchen and dining room at the freshman annual banquet. A staff member died, while others were injured. In the half century after 1894, 25 states passed anti-hazing laws.

Since 2008, high-profile incidents have raised the attention of hazing across the country.

In 2013 Chun Deng, a freshman at Baruch College in Manhattan, died at a retreat in Pennsylvania during what authorities said was a hazing ritual of Phi Delta Psi fraternity.

Deng died after running across a frozen yard blindfolded and wearing a backpack laden with pounds of sand, all while being beaten repeatedly by members of the fraternity, according to prosecutors.

Five members of the fraternity were charged with murder and are awaiting trial, according to the district attorney's office. All five pleaded not guilty.

In 2014, Brandon Chamberlin, then a law student at Emory University in Atlanta, researched national hazing laws for an article in the school's law review and concluded that they were often weak and ineffectual, as well as misguided.

Chamberlin acknowledged that hazing was widespread and has been so for centuries, citing cases in Europe and the United States. He also acknowledged that hazing was unlikely to disappear, because it is perpetually attractive as a secret ritual ordeal intended to bind initiates to the common values of an organization in which membership, as they see it, enhances their self-worth.

But because many hazing laws did little more than duplicate existing misdemeanor or felony statutes, Chamberlin called for a new approach, one that would establish criminal liability for members of a group who did nothing to help assure the welfare of an initiate who might be seriously hurt or put in danger by hazing rites.

"Legislatures feel that they have to do something about it, so a lot of it is just expressing condemnation of the actions," said Chamberlin, who is now a law clerk for a federal judge in Manhattan. "When people are seriously injured or killed there's a rush to do something, but outside of that not much happens."

This article was originally published by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US criminal justice system. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Gord Downie at Saturday night's show. Photo via Live Nation

August 20th was a national holiday in Canada. Huddled together in a hundred thousand living rooms, bars, backyards, sheds, and stadiums, more than 11 million people tuned into the CBC for the final Tragically Hip show. We said goodbye to a national icon.

It was a beautiful concert. Poet and frontman Gord Downie delivered an astonishing performance—impressive enough on a regular day, devastatingly powerful for a man with terminal cancer. They played the hits and gems of a 30-year career and everyone's heart shattered into a million pieces as Gord sobbed his way through "Grace, Too" in one of their three encores.

The occasion was tremendously sad, but also genuinely sublime. Cancer is robbing the man far too young, but we should all be so blessed as to give our own eulogy to millions of adoring fans.

I love The Tragically Hip. Their music got me through a really rough patch in my life, alone and depressed on the other side of the country from everyone I knew and loved. Gord's voice has been a pretty constant companion throughout most of my adulthood. The Hip is an indispensable soundtrack for anyone thinking and writing about Canada for a living.

The moment a country's heart broke. Screenshot

So I tuned into CBC on Saturday night and I was caught up in the magic. It was the magic of great art and the hard beauty of a man gracefully handling a human tragedy.

It was also the magic of Canadian nationalism.

The Hip's final show was a celebration of Canada, of a certain idea of liberal English Canada, as much as it was a celebration of Gord and his music—although now, certainly, they are inseparable. The CBC's relentless coverage of the Olympics segued smoothly into its celebration of "the most Canadian band in the world."

That the public broadcaster aired the concert, unfiltered and uninterrupted, for three hours justified its existence. It also fed into a tidal swell of sentiment across all media platforms (traditional, digital, social) urging us to give a fuck about this concert, the same way we are subtly and regularly urged to "give a fuck about hockey" and Tim Hortons and Molson Canadian and liberal multiculturalism. The country was united for the band—"Canada is closed," as one meme making the rounds put it. A band who spent 30 years playing with the building blocks of national imagery—building it up, knocking it over, scattering it around—was now the centre of the biggest anglo-nationalist spectacle this side of the 1995 referendum. Canada's 150 next year will not even come close to generating this kind of attention or affection.

Read More: How I Grew Up and Learned to Love the Hip

The show was Peak Canada. The subtext to all this is that if you didn't give sufficient fucks about the Hip, you were a bad Canadian. (And according to my Twitter mentions, I am a bad Canadian for pointing this out.)

All of this culminated near the end of the night when Gord called out to Justin Trudeau and gave him a ringing endorsement as the right man for the job of righting Canada's relationship with Indigenous peoples and the North. Anyone who has followed Downie's career knows that he really, passionately cares about addressing the ongoing injustices of colonialism and holding Canada to account. That he would use his final public appearance to tell the millions of people watching to care about people and issues that "we have been trained our entire lives to ignore" is touching.

It was beautiful. Here was Gord Downie, voice of a nation in his last days, calling across the arena, calling across the space and history of Canada to Justin Trudeau. It echoes the call from Flanders' Fields: "to you from failing hands we throw/the torch." In a Canadian cathedral this would be a gleaming stained-glass window, a sacred mythological moment. I was profoundly moved to see it.

But this is precisely where we need to stop for a second. What are we witnessing? Canada's most beloved musician called out to the prime minister on live television, in front of more than one-third of the country, and charged him to reconcile settlers with Indigenous peoples.

This is a big deal. The concert represents a powerful chance to publicly hold Trudeau to account for what his government does—or does not do—to address colonialism in Canada. But given how charged it is with symbolism and emotion, we need to tread carefully, because it could just as easily become something else: Trudeau's ascension into pure symbol, a living conduit for all our warm feelings about liberal nationalism, the moment he became the Chosen One anointed by Gord as saviour of Canada.

That the prime minister was singled out for reconciliation is an especially great example of the disconnect between Trudeau the idea and Justin the man. Trudeau and Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett have both enthused that Canada would fully embrace the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), but in July, Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould told the Assembly of First Nations that "simplistic approaches such as adopting the United Nations declaration as being Canadian law are unworkable and, respectfully, a political distraction to undertaking the hard work actually required to implement it back home in communities." Within the first six days of taking office, the Liberal government also killed an appeal that would have sought to make the Catholic Church pay restitutions for its role in residential schooling. And by granting permits for the controversial Site C dam in British Columbia, the federal government has signalled that, in the last analysis, reconciliation will take place on the terms of the Canadian nation-state, not those of First Nations.

Whether Gord's endorsement holds Trudeau to account or serves to mythologize the man further—to take him further away from our democratic reach—depends largely on how much we focus on the prime minister's government over his carefully curated image. (Such as this photo, with its 200K plus likes.)

Gord and Trudeau before the show Saturday. Photo via Facebook/Justin Trudeau

In 2012, Gord Downie told CBC that "I love this country. I love my idea of this country." This is the magic of nationalism—to wrap you up in a warm, glowing blanket. It makes you love an idea. It's a well of energy that The Tragically Hip challenged, diverted, played with, and ultimately channeled so expertly over the span of their career. And while it's not the only factor in why Saturday night felt so transcendent, it is a leading one. It's not bad or wrong to feel that Canadian glow so intensely, or to enjoy it. I felt it and reveled in it as much as anyone else. But I think we should acknowledge that it comes with baggage.

Read More: What Indigenous Thinkers Are Saying About Gord's Message

I feel about Canada the way Gord does. I think anyone who listened to his music and watched his last performance feels that way. The idea of Canada—the vision of a democratic, decolonial, egalitarian and truly federal community stretching across the rugged Northern wilderness—is one of great and profound beauty. Tapping into it as thoughtfully as they did is what made The Tragically Hip such an incredible band. But there is always a danger in losing sight of the real Canada for the idea of it we are being sold; doubly so when politicians become involved. It's easy to trip and fall in the dark if you're blinded by the stars.

As always, the last word belongs to the poet himself: "Isn't it amazing what you can accomplish / when you don't let the nation get in your way?"

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.

If Donald Trump's presidential campaign were a sports team, it would be hard to stay a fan, simply because the stars on the roster keep changing. Did you like brusque former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski? Political die hards had to watch Lewandowski slowly decline in power before finally being booted from the campaign in June, and joining CNN. Now, with less than 80 days left in the campaign, Trump's Russia-loving campaign chairman Paul Manafort is gone too.

With the latest polls continuing to give a healthy, if not totally comfortable, lead to Hillary Clinton, experts told VICE this latest shake-up may not spell certain doom, but it's a disaster nonetheless.

"It's not that uncommon for candidates to fire their campaign managers, often as a way to divert attention away from some bad news or bad polls," said Melissa Michelson, an author and politics professor at Menlo College whose work focuses on elections. She pointed to similar firings of campaign staffers, like John McCain's early in the 2008 campaign, and Al Gore's early in the summer of 2000. They were fired, she said to "signal to the public that the candidate is changing."

But she added that the Trump campaign dismissals aren't just symbolic scapegoating meant to calm the nerves of donors. Trump is hiring people, and those people are "screwing up," as Michelson put it. Compared to Gore or McCain's campaign jitters, this staff change "reflects differently on campaign," because "his attempts so far to hire people seem to be ending badly," according to Michelson.

Manafort left amid reports that he had illegally dodged some disclosures about operating as a Russian agent in Ukraine—a fact that had drawn criticism on its own. Before Manafort, Lewandowski had battled allegations of battery on the campaign trail. It makes Trump's promise to "hire the best people" look pretty ridiculous.

"The question is can you do this with two-and-a-half months until the general election? That's why this is rather unprecedented," said Richard E. Berg-Andersson, creator of TheGreenPapers.com, one of the first online election trackers. Berg-Andersson likened the change to "when McGovern had to dump Thomas Eagleton as his running mate." McGovern, who got his ass kicked by Richard Nixon, called the decision to fire Eagleton "the saddest part" of his campaign.

"I don't think it's quite on that level," Berg-Andersson hastened to add.

However, it's worth noting that Manafort was initially hired for a specific task: to shepherd Trump through the primary. "One thing to keep in mind is that Paul Manafort's role in the campaign was to bring a polished political machine to the conventions," said Sarah Rosier, the federal editor of the election-tracking site Ballotpedia. "Manafort did what he was hired to do."

"The hires of Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway represent, in a way, a return to the style that made Trump successful in the primaries: less political polish, more populist fire," Rosier said, referring to Trump's two new campaign heads. Bannon, the new chief executive, is a former spokesman for the conservative news site Breitbart.com, and Conway, Trump's new manager, is a former pollster. Long story short, Bannon is expected to Make Trump Great Again by once again unleashing the candidate's meannness and populism—as if they were ever leashed.

Before Manafort officially left the Trump campaign, analysts like Nate Silver derided the back-to-primary-mode general election strategy as a way to further alienate undecided voters. But according to Brian Balogh, a historian at the University of Virginia and one of the hosts of the radio show Backstory with the American History Guys, there is a fleeting possibility that Conway could work wonders in Manafort's absence for all anyone knows.

"Maybe the new campaign director has a kind of relationship that will make her effective in convincing Trump to stay on message," Balogh said, "but so far nobody has been able to get him to stay on message when the message is something other than Trump."

According to Rosier, if the move really is going to pay off, we'll know soon. "The next few weeks will tell us whether or not the Trump Train can regain some steam," she said.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Cash seized from the home of a hydroponics gardening store owner in Miami Gardens, Florida. Photos courtesy Miami-Dade Police Department

To learn more about alternative economies functioning outside or on the border of the law, catch our show Black Market Dispatches on VICELAND. Find out how to watch here.

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon on April 26, Luis Hernandez-Gonzalez, the 44-year-old owner of a hydroponics gardening store in Miami, Florida, received a call from a customer who had recently moved to Tennessee.

Luis Rego, a 32-year-old alleged pot farmer, was having trouble with his current crop and wanted some advice. Unbeknownst to both men, special agents from the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) were eavesdropping on their conversation as part of an investigation into a ring they believed had set up an illegal grow house network in eight Tennessee counties. According to an excerpt from transcripts of the phone call, Rego said of his crop, "Man, this does not want to even out... In the morning, it's fine, and in the afternoon, it gets sad."

"At what temperature, what percentage do you have it on?" Hernandez-Gonzalez asked.

"Ever since I got here, I put it at 500, 400," Rego replied.

"Take a little picture for me later and send it to me here, so I can see it," the owner instructed.

The following afternoon, after receiving three photos of the plants from Rego, Hernandez-Gonzalez offered instructions via another recorded phone call. "Turn it completely around," he told the aspiring farmer. "After a week of turning it, all that wilting will go away."

Three months later, in a bust that generated international headlines, Hernandez-Gonzalez was arrested on marijuana trafficking, money laundering, and firearm charges. After finding small amounts of weed and $180,000 in cash at his place of business, narcotics investigators wheeled out 24 paint buckets containing shrink-wrapped bundles of cash totaling more than $20 million from a secret attic in Hernandez-Gonzalez's house in the suburb of Miami Lakes, according to an arrest report. Meanwhile, Rego and 11 others were criminally charged in a large-scale marijuana distribution conspiracy in Tennessee in mid June.

The case against Hernandez-Gonzalez put a spotlight on a cottage industry that straddles the letter of the law by selling tools needed to cultivate high-grade weed indoors. In states that have legalized pot for medical and recreational use, hydroponic supply companies are poised for record growth, leading one publicly-traded gardening conglomerate and mainstream brand, Scotts Miracle-Gro, to get in on the action. But in states like Florida where pot farming remains a felonious offense, stores selling hydroponic equipment are battlefronts in the ongoing war against weed.

According to market research firm IBISWorld, the hydroponic gardening retail industry has experienced annual growth of 8.2 percent since 2011, generates $654 million in annual revenue, and employs 11,721 people across the country. "Industry revenue is forecast to continue rising over the five years to 2021, as a result of rising popularity of quality organic produce along with increases in the market for both medical and recreational marijuana," their analysis states.

Michelle Goldman, vice-president of BetterGrow Hydro, a California gardening store chain founded in the 1990s, told VICE that perhaps 25 percent of her customer base grows fruit and vegetables. The majority, though, grow weed under the auspices of the state's robust medical marijuana program, she said. (Voters will get to decide if weed should be legal for recreational use in California this November.)

But in Florida, where the DEA eradicated 242 indoor marijuana grow sites in 2015—second only to California—indoor gardening retailers are catering to a mostly black market clientele with a wink and a nod, according to experts, cops, and local businesspeople. The Sunshine State currently allows only a non-psychoactive form of cannabis for medical use, and while a proposed constitutional amendment to legalize stronger strains of marijuana for very sick people is on the November ballot, pot cultivation over 25 pounds is still a felony punishable by a minimum of three years in prison.

"It's like going into a head shop," Arturo, a manager at Advanced Hydroponics in Miami who asked his last name not be published, said of his industry. "You use a "don't ask, don't tell' policy. If someone references illegal substances, I show them the door. But the truth is that a majority of the growth in our business is due to people getting into growing marijuana."

Miami-Dade Police Detective Jonathan Santana is leading the ongoing case against Hernandez-Gonzalez and has been a narcotics investigator for five years. He told VICE that a standard investigative technique for cops in the area is to just post up at hydroponics stores and follow customers when they leave.

"I have made numerous arrests that originate from these grow stores," he said. "I have never seen anyone who shop at these stores growing fruits and vegetables. It has always been marijuana."

Finn Selander, a former DEA special agent who helped organize the petition drive that placed recreational marijuana on the November ballot in Arizona, agrees there's no question a fair number of hydroponics supply store customers are involved in the marijuana business.

"The stores themselves operate in a legal element," Selander told me. "They may get customers that just want to grow daisies, but the real money is from people buying supplies to start grows."

One of the red buckets recovered at Hernandez-Gonzales's home

For a majority of his 18 years with the DEA, Selander worked as the coordinator or the assistant coordinator for marijuana cases in Orlando, Florida and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Over time, he said, agents stopped monitoring hydroponic stores because it resembled profiling people leaving a bar for driving under the influence.

"I'm sure there are still doing that," he said. "But today, a lot of these stores sell a ton of stuff online. No one is going to get a list of all those people."

While Santana could not comment on Hernandez-Gonzalez's ongoing case specifically, recently filed court documents suggest investigators are still gathering evidence in an attempt to prove the Cuban expat has been using his store, The Blossoms Experience, as a conduit for illicit marijuana trafficking for more than a decade. Hernandez-Gonzalez is in jail—at least until he posts bail money that he can show comes from legitimate sources. (His defense attorney, Philip Reizenstein, declined comment for this story.)

According to an August 12 civil forfeiture lawsuit by the Miami-Dade Police Department against Hernandez-Gonzalez, investigators recently spoke to Efren Ruiz, an ex-con who in 2012 was charged in a Medicaid scam that diverted prescription drugs to treat HIV, schizophrenia and asthma for resale in the black market. During an interview conducted by Santana early this month, Ruiz allegedly claimed that he and Hernandez owned two houses, one in Davie and the other in Big Pine Key, where they grew marijuana between 2003 and 2006, harvesting hundreds of pounds. (In 2005, Hernandez-Gonzalez received probation for intent to sell cannabis.) During the same time period, Ruiz and Hernandez-Gonzalez each invested $60,000 to open The Blossoms Experience, Ruiz apparently admitted.

"Mr. Ruiz stated that he has knowledge that throughout Hernandez's business transactions at The Blossoms Experience, Hernandez would inform his customers that if they growing marijuana, he would purchase marijuana for resale," the forfeiture suit states. When VICE contacted Ruiz at his home in Miami Lakes, he declined to comment.

In a recent motion to reduce Hernandez-Gonzalez's $4 million bond, Reizenstein, his attorney lawyer, argued that investigators still haven't shown a nexus between his client's seized cash and actual marijuana trafficking. "There was no controlled sale of marijuana involving Mr. Hernandez-Gonzalez," the attorney wrote. "And no law enforcement officer saw him in possession of any marijuana or ever discovered Mr. Hernandez-Gonzalez growing any marijuana."

Still, according to BetterGrow's Goldman, the suspect's legal troubles offer a case study of what not to do when operating a hydroponics store in a state where the War on Drugs is still in full effect.

"If you are in a state where marijuana is not legal, getting involved with your customer is a big no no," she told me. "That essentially makes you their partner."

Follow Francisco Alvarado on Twitter.

Screenshot from the trailer of We Live In Public via

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

The first series of Big Brother aired in the UK in July 2000, but six months earlier, a bunker in New York was already acting as an extreme prototype. Internet millionaire Josh Harris put 150 people underground and surrounded them with food, drink, guns, and, most importantly, webcams, as an artistic experiment about the loss of privacy in the digital age. In the film We Live In Public, which came out in 2009, acclaimed documentarian Ondi Timoner charts Harris' fall from grace, which culminated in him livestreaming himself and his partner's 24/7 arguments and falling-outs, awaiting the reaction of the viewers to see who they thought had the upper hand in the fight.

Seven years on, I wanted to catch up with Ondi to discuss Josh's now clearly prophetic predictions about modern culture's willingness to relieve itself of its privacy, and what she does herself to stay away from its trappings.

VICE: How much have you heard from Josh Harris since the film came out?
Ondi Timoner: I'm in regular touch with Josh. We're both working on something right now, so I just saw him and had a wonderful time in Montreal.

So it's a continuous working relationship?
Yeah. We co-own the rights to We Live In Public, he has a good deal of interest in the film and what's going on and so on and so forth.

Is it usual for filmmaker and subject to have such a relationship in the documentary world?
No, I don't think so . But this is a prophecy for the time we're living in now. It's a prophecy for everything from reality TV to social media, oversharing, and lack of privacy and intimacy, new ways of forming intimacy—you know, it was all kind of set forth in the bunker in a way, and very hard to really decipher until Facebook. That's when I decided to finish the film—when I saw the first public posting on Facebook saying, "'I'm driving west on the freeway,' posted two hours ago," and I thought, "Who cares?" And then all of a sudden people were like "Wow! You're on the west side?!" and I was like, 'What?' I just had this feeling in my gut like, oh my god the bunker's coming true, I've got to finish this movie right now.

What's the most striking parallel between what we see in the film and in real life?
It seemed quite over-the-top when Josh first said that we were all going to be trapped in virtual reality. The first line of the movie is Josh saying, "Lions and tigers were kings of the jungle then they wound up in cages. I believe the same will happen to us." That seemed kind of implausible, but now it seems we're trading our privacy. We're accepting terms and conditions that can be changed at any time that are 48 pages long that we can't read, and we are allowing our data and our wishes and privacy online because it's so convenient. The value proposition is beneficial to us, we like it, we want to have that stuff instantly. We're losing our ability to focus on the physical world. You walk through a space and everybody's faces are in their phones. We are putting ourselves in these virtual boxes as he predicted we were going to.

Of course, reality TV is coming to be this incredible platform for people voluntarily demeaning themselves for some kind of fame. Josh said everybody wants their 15 minutes of fame every day, and will trade anything for that. I said I think it's more about us feeling a connection; I think that's what motivates us more. It's more about not feeling alone and feeling like if we do something that gets some traffic, some hits, along with the shot of dopamine that's released in our brains we also receive a feeling of—not immortality, but significance. But the ultimate goal is immortality. The idea of rising above the fray and the noise in this era is next to impossible. Josh was right about that too—it's gonna be faster and faster that it gets thrown away. There's so much because everybody's uploading their lives for that moment, for that significance.

It sounds like you have a more positive view on it than Josh. His work is based on criticizing people's mass narcissism, and yours is more about connection and togetherness.
I think Josh felt like he wanted that a lot. It was very thrilling to him, as it's thrilling to most people, to end up in a magazine or newspaper or something. Then it becomes at a certain point taken for granted if you're a celebrity, and then it becomes totally annoying. My last film was about Russell Brand. It's another look at the desire . As he says, "escape the penitentiary of anonymity," and the only way to get out of that prison of being a common person was getting famous. Again, it was a look at that drive filtered through the someone who actually did accomplish that and kind of came up empty. I don't think everybody's after that though. I do think we all want to feel like our lives matter and will give up almost anything for that. However that plays out.

Ondi Timoner in conversation with the Young Turks from their YouTube channel via

Do you think there will be some sort of Luddite-esque movement in the future, where people shirk technology?
It's funny you mention it. I have a new series in pre-production set in the jungle. It's a bunch of kids, a bunch of young people, who are facing climate disaster and feeling overwhelmed and trapped in their cushy wired world and are looking for another way to live, moving down there to build the world's most sustainable modern town.

But on a wider scale?
I think that's a bellwether sign right there. I see the project as We Live In Public in reverse. I actually think it's very significant. There were around 150 people in the bunker, and there'll be that many in the jungle. It's very hard for them to make that transition, but they come out the other side wanting to throw their phones against the wall.

Did making the film ever put you off the internet?
I've been asked that question a lot over the years, and I always say, "We'll organize going offline, online." We'll use the internet to go offline but we won't stay offline. It's too compelling. It's the greatest invention; it's bigger than all of us, one of the most major, along with airplane and penicillin. There are ways to use the internet to collectively make our lives better than it would be without it. There are so many positives and it's not all dark. I have a much less dark view. It was a film I made about Josh's prophecy more than my own.

There is definitely a dark side, we're seeing that. Alex Gibney made a new film about Stuxnet (an alleged American-Israeli cyber weapon) and that's just the beginning of cyber warfare on a massive scale. And, you know, people taking over your car and hacking into your car and driving it, disabling your breaks—whatever. Anything that's powerful for good can be used just as powerfully for evil. And if you ask Josh Harris, he'll tell you that within the next 20 years, we'll be completely trapped inside the borg. That's his latest thing. He's pretty sure of it. He just said it in front of an audience in Montreal.

How did they react to that?
Nobody was pleased! Some people fought him on it, some people stood up and acknowledged it.

Could this modern level of ultra-intimacy be good for us?
I think we just have to stay sober with it. The reason I made the movie when I made the movie is to fire a warning shot and to say 'be cautious.' People cried and started to tear down their Facebook pages at We Live In Public screenings, and I said, it's not about that. Enjoy it, use it to connect with people that you haven't spoken to in forever—there's a lot of really positive attributes to it but, put the phone down and have dinner. Once you put something online, it's never yours to make private again. Remain conscious. Let it work for you and not against you.

There's some distortion of vocabulary—something like 'friends' on Facebook. I never liked that term. It might be somebody you're a fan of or somebody you appreciate or somebody that you're connecting with for something else. It's a network. I don't like LinkedIn very much, but that's a more accurate description of the relationship. It's just a matter of staying sober. It's something you could literally dive into and never come out. And don't raise your children on screens all the time.

I have a child, he's 12, and I have to fight him every day to get him off the internet and get him off games and make him go outside. I got him a puppy and I make him play with the puppy and he loves the puppy, but his draw is to go to the screen and that's where he is forming his friendships. And there is something to be said for sharing while you're playing a game with somebody, being more able to be honest and less self-conscious than if they were meeting a church somewhere, or something. It's not that it's less real because they're talking on the internet—it's just that they can't see that other person and it can be dangerous and you need to educate your children. The danger is the desensitization that happens when living online or on a screen.

That's a big message from the film that remains true today, and even more true as we tumble on this ride together across time and space and this fantastic internet.

Follow Joe Bish on Twitter.

Imagine the kind of person who'd name their book after themselves. Either an egomaniac or someone lacking in imagination—or the person you wish you could be. Hera Lindsay Bird's collection of poetry reads her name twice. Once so you know it's by her, a second time because she can.

"It was kind of my homage to one of my fave pop stars from the 90s. Janet Jackson named three albums after herself," says Bird on a late-night call from her New Zealand home. "I actually wanted to perfectly re-create Janet Jackson's first album cover for my book cover, where she's coming out of the swimming pool with flowers on her head, but it ended up being too time-intensive." It was also a decision that allows her readers to immerse themselves in her life. "I wanted to give people permission to read it as my personal book. With anything autobiographical and confessional, it's assumed the writer's talking about themselves, but it's not always said explicitly. I wanted to put it straight out there."

The 28-year-old's poems are painfully naked. In July, her poem "Keats is Dead so Fuck me From Behind" went viral. Women in particular connected with its vague loneliness, stark depiction of sex ("Bend me over like a substitute teacher & pump me full of shivering arrows"), beautiful imagery ("the days burn off like leopard print"), and mention of pussy. Lots of angry men didn't like it. When the poem was mentioned in a piece on the Guardian, she was pelted with messages. "Some of them were in Latin and others wrote back in poetry," she says. "Old men think I'm personally responsible for the death of T.S. Eliot or something. It's bizarre, because usually people don't care enough about poetry to negatively comment on it."

Writing poetry about sex as a 20-something-year-old woman is still enough to rattle the old guard. "In my writing class in New Zealand, there was a real feeling that it was tacky or juvenile to be writing about love and sex. You had to earn your right as a poet to write about it. Feeling like it was in bad taste or off-limits spurred me on to see how far I could push that and still get people to like my work. And what else is there to write about?"

When Bird grew up in a small New Zealand town, Thames in the Coromandel, her parents didn't have much money. But they were interesting. "My dad won a gameshow when I was a child. The prizes were bizarre furniture and stuff like that. So we were quite poor, but had these expensive leather lounges," she remembers. Her parents split up when she was about six and like most millennials, she has a host of step-parents. Creative endeavors run in her family; her younger brother is an artist who makes body-builders out of bubble wrap; her mom went to art school when she was in her 50s, and her dad is a drug and alcohol counselor but wrote Bird poems every year for Christmas. "I remember my dad used to read us Lord of the Rings. He would do any accents he wanted to. Boromir was always Jamaican."

When she was a teen she moved to Wellington, one of the country's two big cities. All the material was there, but it was only as an adult that she started writing poetry. "I hated university so I was basically trying to pass it by getting credits for as many creative writing classes as I could. There was this woman called Lauren Gould, a contemporary poet, who showed us poems of her friends and I was like, "Fuck? I didn't realize poetry can be like this?"

Old men think I'm personally responsible for the death of T.S. Eliot or something.

As it can be in Britain, poetry in New Zealand is either archaic and stuffy or done at slam shows, and it's a turn-off for most young people. "I wish I didn't love poetry," Bird explains. "The only times anyone wants to hear it is when someone dies or gets married. Here we get poets brought out to read at big vineyard openings. It's similar to you guys with Carol Ann Duffy, who writes some horrible poem about the Olympics. Every couple of years someone decides to have a big state of the nation about how we're going to rescue poetry and bring it to a new generation. Actually, the most effective thing to do is for all the people to leave it the fuck alone." That's what happens when you get thousands of girls sharing a poem on the internet.

Some of the most astute observations are on bisexuality, based on Bird's own relationships. In "Bisexuality" she writes, "To be bisexual is to be out of office, even to yourself / Like a rare sexual Narnia and no spring in sight." Later she adds: "Everyone assumes you want to fuck them...and they're right." There are many contradictions to sleeping with men and women, and she pins down a lot of them in a way that feels both foreign and uncomfortably familiar.

"If you're a bisexual woman you're a unicorn," she says on the phone. "People are always looking for someone to fill their threesome. It still feels embarrassing to tell people that you're bisexual. Lesbians don't like it and men just get turned on by it. Plus the only bisexual character on The L Word was horrible." It's true. "My favorite authors are women from the 20s who gambled heaps, had affairs with both men and women. The kind you wouldn't want your daughters to invite to dinner parties. Instead of my poems saying 'not all women are like that,' I enjoy that histrionic, trouble-making stereotype."

Most of the poems are very funny. She says she feels more in common with stand-up comics than with poets, which you can believe. In "The Ex-Girlfriends Are Back From The Wilderness," she imagines old partners sloping back the past to sniff around—as they so often do, at the same time—and she is the museum director, "walking talent on a gold leash." Here and elsewhere, she's worried she's been mean and "pissy" in them, but those digressions only makes her work funnier and more true to human emotions.

In her opening poem, "Write a Book," you'll see her modus operandi clearly stated. "You might think this book is ironic / But to me, it is deeply sentimental / like... if you slit your wrists while winking–does that make it a joke? / To be alive / Is the greatest sentimentality there is." There are winks littered through its pages, but thankfully, refreshingly, you don't need to dig through the lines to find layers of wry meaning. Death to irony and insincerity, the twin plagues of our generation.

It took her three years to write this book. With her partner at the time, she moved from Wellington to Port Chalmers, a small town with a tiny population, built for cruise ships to dock. "It had a store with rocking horses and antiques. I spent all that time in that weird, small town just trying to finish the book and not working very much and occasionally get high and go on a big trip to your equivalent of an ASDA. I'm a very slow writer and I really don't have much work. I'll work on one poem a month so everything I wrote during that time is in that book."

Now she's back in Wellington, the town she spent most of her teenage years. She works as a children's book specialist in a book shop and is writing a children's crime book. But she's on a break from poetry. "The reason my book took so long is because I write autobiographically. Sometimes it takes a while to have enough happen to you in your life. If you've been in a solid relationship, living in a small town, going to the store once a week, and watching heaps of Judge Judy on YouTube for three years you don't have a lot of emotional material. I guess I'll just have to wait."

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

At some point, we've all fantasized about quitting our jobs to do whatever we want until we die. I've asked myself a lot, "How much money would I have to save to do thatright now?" The answer is actually kind of boring, either "a million-ish dollars (assuming you're debt-free and and don't mind living somewhere weird)," or "significantly less than a million-ish dollars (assuming you're debt-free, really good at investing, and don't mind living like a monk)."

A number of internet personalities preach the virtues of a frugality-first lifestyle meant to help you save and invest to a point where you can live off your meager budget forever; philosophically, they fall somewhere between the Four-Hour Workweek guy and those who think you can "opt out" of paying your taxes because they're secretly voluntary.

There's the Early Retirement Extreme guy that claims to live off $5,000-$7,000 per year and espouses vaguely anarcho-capitalist ideals; there's Mr. Money Mustache, whose New Yorker profile portrayed him as a goofy, stoner-ish version of the Early Retirement Extreme guy. There's the Retire By 40 guy and a couple who call themselves Millennial Revolution and implore you to "Stop working. Start living."

These people make achieving early retirement seem like more work than, well, work itself—not to mention that the idea of retired young-ish people making a living selling others on the dream of early retirement seems like a pyramid scheme. "Those are outliers," says Mike Dang, a co-founding editor of the financial site The Billfold who also serves as the Editor-In-Chief of Longreads. "It's not a story you can learn from. They're nice to read, and then you move on with your day because you have a whole different set of problems than what those people have."

The first of those problems is that saving is generally a complicated business, especially if you came of age during the Great Recession, says Dang: "Wages were stagnant, but the amount of debt we were accruing after college was skyrocketing." Housing costs, healthcare, and student loans have risen since, so many young people are financially stretched as it is: "There are all these expenses you need to think about, then your savings, then retirement."

Let's say you could clear all your outstanding debts, cut down on housing costs through living at your parents' house, and taking a second job freelancing part-time (or selling weed). In that case you could stop working once you had around a million dollars.

As certified financial planner Sofia Bera explains to me, "People who have a ton of money don't need to invest for growth—they just need a big enough sum to generate enough income on a yearly basis," through payouts on investments. For retirees of any age, the idea is to have enough of a nest egg built up to the point that you can expect to draw a "salary" from your investments while still adding enough to weather inflation rates. "That can work out really well if you only need two or three percent a year in dividends in order to withdraw from your portfolio," Bera says.

Once you hit that million-dollar figure, you're able to turn your money into a perpetual money-making machine that you can theoretically live off of—that is, if you make some life adjustments. Judging off the yields Bera suggests, you'd be able to take $20,000 to $30,000 per year from your fund—enough to live sustainably in any of the lowest-income places in the United States.

Regardless, you really should start saving some money for retirement. Even a small amount can make a big difference over a number of years. (Here's a primer to get you started.) As for how much you'll need: Dang says that when people ask him this question, "I always tell them to think about how they want to live their lives." Some might decide to work well into advanced age as a way to keep themselves occupied while providing themselves with a bit of income; others might want to spend their twilight years having fun or using their decades of sexual experience to do weird sex stuff (and potentially get a couple STI's).

The point is, even if the world suffers some sort of cataclysmic event that turns society into The Road Warrior, you'll still need some savings to get by—if only to buy up all the weapons and gasoline you'll need to become a post-apocalyptic pirate ruler. So get started, because the magic of compounding is real.

Follow Drew Millard on Twitter.

Thumbnail via Houston Chronicle newscast screenshot

On Sunday, about 20 "White Lives Matter" activists—some armed with assault rifles and confederate flags—protested outside Houston's National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) headquarters, as the Washington Post reports.

The group, led by a man named Ken Reed, called for the civil rights organization to "hold their people accountable" following the attacks on the Dallas Police Department last month, even though the NAACP condemned the tragedy in July.

"We came out here to protest against the NAACP and their failure in speaking out against the atrocities that organizations like Black Lives Matter and other pro-black organizations have caused the attack and killing of white police officers, the burning down of cities and things of that nature. If they're going to be a civil rights organization and defend their people, they also need to hold their people accountable," Reed, who sported a Donald Trump hat, told the Houston Chronicle.

Reed defended the use of the Confederate flag, saying, "It has all to do about heritage, nothing to do with hate." He also claimed that the group felt the need to carry guns and wear body armor as protection.

"Obviously we are exercising our Second Amendment rights but that's because we have to defend ourselves," he added. "Their organizations and their people are shooting people based on the color of their skin. We're not."

The assembly a predominantly black neighborhood quickly attracted community members who started a counter-protest and named the many fatalities that have resulted from officer-involved shootings. Police started to clear up the gathering at around 3:30 PM.

Sunday happened to be Houston NAACP executive director Yolanda Smith's birthday, and her son Andre took to Instagram to share his take on the protest.

"We spent the day celebrating a black life that did matter and will continue to do great work at this place you protest! Thank you and try again!" Smith wrote under a photo of the protest.

Read: How I Became a White Supremacist

Prince performing during the halftime show at the Super Bowl XLI football game at Dolphin Stadium in Miami. Photo by AP/Chris O'Meara

When Prince was found dead in his home in Minnesota in April of this year, rumours swarmed around the cause of his death being a drug overdose. In June, reports confirmed that the potent opioid fentanyl, which is typically 100 times more potent than morphine and many times more powerful than heroin, was the substance that caused the pop icon's overdose death. But on August 21, an anonymous official source involved with the investigation into Prince's death told the Associated Press that it might not have been prescription fentanyl that killed the musician—counterfeit pills containing bootleg fentanyl had been found on his estate.

Students at St. Anne's Indian Residential School in Fort Albany, Ontario in 1945 (photo via Wikimedia)

A Manitoba judge has ruled that a residential school survivor shouldn't have had to prove that a nun who grabbed his penis was acting with a "sexual intent" in order to be compensated—a decision that could help at least dozens of others whose claims were rejected on the same basis.

It's all downhill from here. Photo via Flickr user tup wanders

Bad news for everyone working in retail, the restaurant industry, delivering pizza, interning, and basically doing any other low-paid, shit job people have in their 20s—in just a couple of decades, this kind of work will begin to wreak havoc on your body and mind.

According to a study out of Ohio State University, hating your job in your 20s and 30s—which is pretty much par for the course these days—means by the time you hit your 40s, you'll start to experience symptoms like depression, anxiety, insomnia, back pain, and more frequent colds.

"We found that there is a cumulative effect of job satisfaction on health that appears as early as your 40s," said lead study author Jonathan Dirlam, a doctoral student in sociology at the university.

The study tracked job satisfaction amongst 6,432 Americans aged 25-39; 45 percent characterized their job satisfaction as consistently low and 23 percent ranked it low near the beginning of their careers.

Those who hated their jobs reported worse mental health issues, including excessive worry, than their happy counterparts (about 15 percent of participants.)

The likelihood of getting a disease like cancer or diabetes remained the same regardless of workplace satisfaction. So at least a crappy job isn't more likely to kill you.

But Dirlam cautioned the oldest participants in the study were only in their 40s, so physical health problems, including cardiovascular issues, that come as a result of having a miserable job aren't out of the question later down the line.

According to a survey by human resources firm ADP released in February, 55 percent of Canadians aged 18-34 wanted to change their careers this year. Meanwhile, the youth unemployment rate is sitting at about 13 percent.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

What were they thinking? Photo via Flickr user Mark O'Sullivan

After 60 years, the northeastern town of Tisdale, Saskatchewan has decided it no longer wants to be known as the "land of rape and honey."

The agricultural community, located about 200 km northeast of Saskatoon, first employed the slogan as a nod to its abundance of rapeseed crops and a giant 16-foot honey bee statue. But over the years the town has been given grief over the phrase because its inspiration isn't readily obvious—and instead comes off as some sort of a disgusting homage to sexual assault.

Last year, Tisdale council voted to change to slogan and today officials unveiled the new one: "Opportunity grows here."

In a statement, Sean Wallace, the town's director of economic development, said "our survey, our focus groups and the advice that we received from industry experts indicated it was time for an update."

It is somewhat concerning that so many layers of consultation were needed to determine "land of rape and honey" is a problematic motto.

Officials have said the new slogan also recognizes Tisdale's "agricultural tradition." It's unlikely that that many people will remember it, but that's still a big improvement.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Colten Boushie's brother William Boushie speaks at a rally outside of Saskatchewan Provincial Court. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Liam Richards

Ben Kautz, a councillor for the rural community of Browning, Saskatchewan, should probably be out of a job right now.

Kautz has made headlines for his racist public reaction to the murder of Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Indigenous man who was allegedly shot to death by white farmer Gerald Stanley, 54.

When he was killed, Boushie, who is from the Red Pheasant First Nation, and four other people had driven onto Stanley's property in Glenside, Saskatchewan because, according to Boushie's cousin who was in the car at the time, they were seeking help with a flat tire.

Boushie's death has sparked a heated dialogue about racism in the community, with First Nations leaders denouncing the prejudice wording of the RCMP press release about the incident, which implied that Boushie and his friends were suspected of theft. While many people are weighing in, Kautz wrote this particularly disturbing message on a Facebook page for farmers:

"In my mind, his only mistake was leaving witnesses."

The implication is that Stanley should have killed those who were with Boushie at the time he was shot. Let that sink in. A white politician, weighing in on a racially-charged murder investigation in which a white man allegedly shot an Indigenous man to death, lamented the fact that there weren't more victims.

Read more: Tensions Run High at Court Appearance of Suspect Charged with Killing an Indigenous Man on Saskatchewan Farm

Kautz has deleted his remarks but has yet to explain himself publicly. (He did not respond to VICE's interview request.)

While his comments are horrific, the fact that people are actually jumping in to defend him is almost as bad. Speaking to the Canadian Press, his wife Dawn said her husband regrets the post and has offered his resignation.

"My husband removed his comment.... I wish we could just leave it at that," she said.

But she also attempted to justify his words by saying the family farm has been robbed of tools and gas. What the hell does that have to do with anything?

There is no evidence that Boushie or those who were with him the day he was killed had stolen anything. The RCMP arrested and released three people in the car with Boushie in relation to their theft investigation. But even so, since when does being a burglary victim make it OK to cosign murder?

Meanwhile, fellow councillor Brian Forwald has said Kautz should keep his council seat and also alluded that farmers who've been stolen from get their "dander up."

"I think everybody says something sometimes that they regret 10 seconds after... I don't think you're human if you haven't," he said.

Pius Loustel, the area's reeve (or leader) said Kautz's comments will be subject to an upcoming meeting, but he refused to condemn the statement or suggest that Kautz should lose his position.

Compare this to the backlash Black Lives Matter Toronto co-founder Yusra Khogali faced over a tweet of hers that said "Plz Allah give me strength to not cuss/kill these men and white folks out here today. Plz plz plz." Khogali was called out by virtually every major news outlet.

Speaking to CP24, Toronto Mayor John Tory said, "We do not make these kinds of implied threats of violence and things like that. It's not a part of how we do business and never should be."

Khogali's tweet was old—it was posted in February and dug up by Conservative Toronto Sun columnist Jerry Agar in April, following BLMTO's two-week protest outside police quarters. According to an op-ed in the Toronto Star, Khogali said she'd been frustrated after being "bombarded by tweets from white men asking me to prove that racism, Islamophobia and misogyny exist." She said her words were used against her to delegitimize BLMTO's concerns about systemic racism in policing.

Kautz's views are far more difficult to comprehend. He's referring to an open murder investigation, with which he has no involvement, and is inciting more violence. His position as a publicly elected official makes it all that much worse. And yet, so far at least, the blowback doesn't seem to be even a fraction of what Khogali and BLMTO experienced.

We'll have to wait to find out what Kautz's fate will be. But those making excuses for him, enforcing a culture where blatant racism goes unchallenged, are as much a part of the problem as he is.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Donald Trump looking hella presidential. Photo via Trump's Facebook.

Watching the ascension of Donald Trump from side-show jester to political front-runner to, eventually and astonishingly, could-be president has been jaw-dropping. Most of us in the media dismissed his "campaign" if you can call it that, from the beginning, assuming that at the first real road block he'd bow out disgracefully like he's done many times before. Or that the finely-tuned machinery of the Republican party juggernaut would grind him down and push him out, choosing a lesser evil to represent them at the polls in November. But here we are and there he is, waving his tiny hands around and squawking mercilessly about walls and tacos and America and whatever else happens to pop into his yellow wig when he's standing on a stage. His words and more importantly, his actions (dramatic under-spending in key states ahead of the election, alienating large swaths of the voting population, his wife's bonkers plagiarism) are so out-of-this-world that it's still hard to believe any of this is real. In fact, one of the greatest off-shoots of Trump's rise to the top are all the ways in which people postulate that it really isn't real.

A bunch of Americans quite possibly having the worst sobering-up of their lives. Photo via Sarnia Police

Canadian police had to deal with a strange, accidental US invasion on Sunday when approximately 1,500 Americans on rafts and pool floats in the St. Clair River accidentally crossed into Canada due to high winds. The Americans, who had been participating in an annual unsanctioned booze-fuelled party called "Float Down" that started in Port Huron, Michigan, were then subsequently wet and stranded in Sarnia, Ontario for hours until 19 buses could pick them up to bring them back to their homeland.