Carin in a selfie she sent over. All images supplied

I've got a love-hate relationship with dating. Sometimes it's magic. Other times I spend too much money and too many hours to achieve only boredom and hangovers. And in these moments I wonder if there's a way to take the inefficiency and general haphazardness out of dating. If I stopped relying on vibes and turned to a more scientific approach, maybe I could—you know—win?

But like all ideas, someone else was way ahead of me. Starting in May 2014 a Seattle-based woman named Carin Fishel started logging every single detail from every date she went on. She wrapped up the experiment in June, with a total of 90 dates with 52 guys in two years. Carin then did the only logical thing someone could do with all that data—she put it together in a PowerPoint presentation, illustrating what she'd learned.

I was curious about those learnings, so I called her up to ask some questions.

VICE: Hey Carin, let's start with your background. What led you to do this?
Carin Fishel: I've always been a numbers person. I work as a UX designer for a data imaging company. With this particular project I wanted to take the seriousness out of dating. And as I was also spending so much time on dates, I wanted to create something out of it. That way if the dates didn't work, at least it wouldn't be time wasted.

Did you tell the guys you were doing this?
No, I learned not to pretty quickly. A lot of guys were super freaked out about it. Especially the non-tech guys—the musicians and the artists, they got paranoid.

Yeah, I can imagine. How were you collecting the data?
In a huge Excel spread sheet. I collected everything from age, where they were from, their height, how we met, total dates, did we have sex, did we kiss, does he want kids, how many messages were sent before we met. Then everyone got a rating out of one to five. One was, "I don't care about this person" and five was, "I can't get them out of my head." Then, after two years, I turned the data into a PowerPoint presentation.

So what was your first realisation?
That I've spent 334.5 hours on dates.

That seems like a lot. Would you say you're pretty dedicated to dating?
Well, some people would say dating is a numbers game, so the more people you meet the more likely you are to meet somebody. I mean I'm 35, so sometimes I'm like, "I've got to go on dates, I just have to keep trying." Then sometimes I'm like, "I can't do this anymore." I just kind of go up and down.

This is a slide from Carin's powerpoint. It refers to where she met the people she dated and how much she liked them. "Too much info" means that dating sites that provide large biographies with their profiles were less likely to introduce her to likeable people

What was the next thing you realised, looking back on these two years?
That how I meet people has an impact on how much I like them. This slide here (see above) shows how I met everyone and it's coloured by the likeability rating. So I went on the most OKCupid dates, but they were the most grey, so they had the lowest likeability ratings. But the people I actually met in person had the most pink so they had the highest ratings.

I think the issue there was that with Match.com and OKCupid they have a lot of fields to fill out, so you know a lot about the person before you meet them. But they've painted a picture of who you are to them. So you think these people seem so cool, until you meet them. I think a lot of those sites create unhelpful expectations.

Another slide. Carin broke down the desirable attributes among the people she rated as fours and fives.

What did you learn about who you are attracted to?
Well, an interesting thing is that the people who start out at fives, you'd assume would be the people that you want to meet. But what I found was that the people who start out as three are much better. Those people can grow in numbers, whereas all the fives were just short-term obsessions. It was good to realise this because it showed me I can let go of the fives faster.

Was it weird to meticulously tally up how many people you'd slept with?
No. When you've been single for so long sex doesn't seem like a big deal, because you've got to get it somehow. Maybe the only surprise was that I once thought that if I slept with someone I'd become more attached to them. But if I look at the data I realise that isn't true. I was disappointed with that.

A tally of who ended the relationship. In most cases (51 percent) neither party cared enough to actually end it

Have you found any other aspects of this project disappointing?
Actually quite the opposite. I think it gave me a better perspective on it all. Like, I used to think I was always getting dumped, but when I look at that pie chart I'm not. Getting dumped 19 percent of the time isn't so bad. So I think this kind of helps me understand the situation better. It helps me to chill out.

How are you feeling about dating now this project is over?
I know I don't want to go on these stupid online dates any more. They're the dumbest thing in the world. They're just staged and it's not how love works.

How do you think love works?
Love? Sometimes I feel like I don't know what that means. Like I haven't watched a romantic comedy in 10 years because I think that gives you an unrealistic view of what love is. When I look at the people whose relationships I really admire, maybe they were friends first or they just met and really liked one another. So I'm kind of at a loss.

Have you ever wondered if it's you?
Of course, I've wondered if I'm too picky but I don't think I can change that. I had other times when I thought, "I can't meet somebody, there's something wrong with me." But that has nothing to do with this project. It's just how everyone feels sometimes.

Ok, last question. After all of this, what advice can you offer me? Have you cracked the code to dating?
No, this project made me feel like I don't know anything about dating. I don't think there is a code.

So you think it's just pure chaos out there?
Pretty much, but there were other upsides. The whole goal behind this project was never to get a man, but to not care so much about getting a man. I definitely achieved that.

Follow Julian on Twitter

Also, follow Carin on Twitter

The Ingrams. Credit: Wikimedia

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's September 9, 2001. Major Charles Ingram—soon to be known forever, eternally, as the Coughing Major—is sitting on the edge of a stainless steel high-chair. He is in the middle of filming an episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He is also in the middle of committing one of the clumsiest, most ineffectual, but brilliant crimes of the 21st century.

Question by question, guided along by an oblivious Chris Tarrant and a duo of shadowy accomplices hidden in the surrounding audience, the Coughing Major is stealing a million pounds.

The story of the Coughing Major is a tale as timeless in morality as it is peculiarly rooted to the moment in space and time within which it occurred. The army man's attempt to steal a million pounds on television, with little more for help than sheer dumb luck and a terrible fake cough, is a fascinating incident even today. Grotesque in its stupidity, tragic in its context, hilarious in its execution.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, which first aired in 1998, was a phenomenon when it hit British screens. At its peak in 1999, one edition of the show was watched by 19 million viewers, one-third of the British population. A combination of the then-futurist set, the affable Tarrant, and the astronomical promise of a million pounds—a prize never before imagined on a television show—made it the perfect premise for the precipice of the millennium. It was a show that promised big thrills and even bigger rewards. Perhaps it was always going to attract some dubious attention at some stage.

Major Charles Ingram's appearance on the show was in 2001, but his wife, Diana, had also been on earlier that year and won £32,000 worth of debt. Despite the blustery veneer, the clipped accent, and the military façade, the Major was masking a thinly veiled desperation.

Charles Ingram's appearance on the show started pretty badly. By the time he had stumbled his way to the £4,000 mark, he'd already used up two of his lifelines and was struggling to land on the name of Audrey's daughter in Coronation Street. By the time he finally sputtered "Gail," it was time for the recording to end for that day, meaning Ingram's run would continue onto the next episode. The production team at the time all doubted that he'd make it any further.

Then a miraculous thing happened. During the next day's filming, wearing the same strangely childlike patchwork polo shirt, Major Charles Ingram stomped his way ungracefully to a million.

We now know what had really happened: a plan had been devised to get him there. Diana Ingram had found a plant: Tecwen Whittock, a college lecturer from Cardiff who Diana knew from the gameshow circuit. They colluded as a three, creating a system to carry Ingram to the higher reaches of the game. The Major would read the four possible answers, and Whittock would cough after the correct one. On hearing the cough, the Major would know he had said the right one and proceed to offer this answer.

In some respects, it's not a totally terrible plan, but what's amazing watching it back is just how terribly they pulled it off. Take, for example, the Major's process when answering the question, "Who had a hit UK album with Born to Do It, released in 2000?" Ingram, for some unknown, baffling reason, decided to say, "I've never heard of Craig David," before he'd given Whittock or his wife a chance to cough. More than that, the Major even states he "thinks it's A1." When, finally, he gets the message that the correct answer is Craig David, he is forced to pull a completely unnatural U-turn. Despite having previously given A1 as his final answer, he suddenly says, "No, I'm going to go Craig David." When Tarrant asks him about his sudden turnaround, he says he's changed his mind because "most of my guesses are wrong."

This pattern continues. The Major admits to not knowing any answers, making the process even harder for himself. Bafflingly he continues to say, "I don't know what that is," "I'm sure it's not that," or "I've never heard of that" about answers that he is eventually forced to settle on. As he climbs higher and higher up the board, his behavior becomes more and more erratic. By the time he reaches the million pound question, he is clearly not feeling anywhere near the sort of pressure he should be. He flips between final answers, taking the money, A, B, C, and D, as though he can't decide what he wants for his tea. You can't help but feel that had anyone else been sitting in the hot seat—anyone but the Major—they'd have gotten away with it.

Credit: ITV

In a documentary made about the incident—A Major Fraud—it's revealed that after winning the million, the Ingrams were heard to have a screaming argument. Speculation is that the Major was supposed to stop earlier. He wasn't supposed to go all the way to a million. Had he stopped at £64,000 , and many have observed this about the case, he would have cleared the Ingram family debt and most likely have gotten away with it all. So why didn't he?

It's impossible to say for sure, but it's as if a switch flipped inside of him. He got so far and thought, Fuck it—let's push this further. There's a mania that develops in his eyes, gradually, question by question. It's as though this hapless, mild-mannered man, who had spent his life pushed to and fro by his domineering military friends, had had enough of constantly being at the beck and call of others. He finally cracked, taking the descent into madness into his own hands.

Eventually, it comes down to the million pound question and one final answer. Five words win him the million: "I'm going to play Googol." When you look at the footage now, you see a man coming to terms with what he's just pulled off. He knew he had the right answer, but he also knew he'd just cheated his way there in front of an arsenal of television cameras and an audience of millions. He was in the throws of ecstasy and terror all at once. He wanted to throw up all over Chris Tarrant—cover his polyester suit in sticky vomit, let the acidic stench of the vomit heat and rise under the studio lights. The Major was ready to cry, laugh, and punch a wall. No lifelines now, just him—and he'd never felt more alive.

Without Major Charles Ingram, the scandal would likely have been forgotten by now. It's his character that makes the story eternally fascinating. Look at his face throughout the entire episode. It's impossible to call what he is smothered by more: panic or excitement. He seems to be a man enraptured by just how out of his depth he is getting. The further he goes, the more out of hand the con gets, and the more he weirdly loves it. Toward the end, it's hard to tell what's powering him more—getting away with it or getting caught.

Of course, he did get caught. The £1,000,000 (including legal fees). Following this, the Major was stripped of his title by the Army Board, after 17 years of service.

To this day, the Ingrams maintain their innocence. Two journalists interested in miscarriages of justices, James Plaskett and Bob Woffinden, have since published a book protesting their innocence based on newly unearthed evidence, and writers such as Jon Ronson have also questioned the evidence in the case—but it all seems too little too late. Even if he was proved innocent now, he will forever be the Coughing Major in the hearts and minds of the public.

The years following Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? saw life for the Ingrams continue on its bizarre trajectory. Their appearance on shows like Wife Swap and Hell's Kitchen (Gordon Ramsey served them a cough sweet) suggest the Ingrams' taste for celebrity was only fueled by their infamy. For a particularly surreal watch, you can even see Charles Ingram's appearance on This Morning in 2003, during which he undergoes past life regression therapy—a process that reveals Ingram's belief that, in a past life, he was called David Huggott, an officer instrumental in Britain's victory during WWI.

Real life, however, was less fantastical. Ingram has been on record many times describing his life since as a "living hell."

The Coughing Major happened in the moment that reality television was about to enter its zenith. The world was increasingly being told that anyone could get on television if they were prepared to push themselves hard enough. Equally, the gargantuan scale of prizes that the likes of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? had begun to inspire were similarly sending the message that anyone was entitled to riches—if they were prepared to play the game. The Major was the most maniacal spawn of this culture. An aristocrat, an upstanding military man, debased to cheating on a chintzy gameshow by the weight of the world. A man who looked into the eyes of Chris Tarrant and saw his own soul staring back.

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Still from 'Jeff Ross Roasts Cops.' All photos courtesy of Comedy Central

Comedy is hard. Every comic has tricks to make it easier, whether memorizing recycled crowd-work that you can make "seem fresh" on a moment's notice, or just getting shitfaced. Not Jeff Ross, who seems to be trying to make comedy as hard as possible. Why else would he choose to do a comedy special for the Boston Police Department, about the Boston Police Department?

Ross, sometimes known as the "Roastmaster General" for his numerous appearances in Comedy Central's Roasts, usually targets media ghouls like Ann Coulter and Flavor Flav. Now he's setting his sights on a slightly different group—cops. We spoke to Ross about his latest special and why now is the perfect time to roast the police.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: I really enjoyed the special—but on paper, it sounds insane. How did you turn this "roast of cops" into a reality?
Jeff Ross: Well, my last special was at a jail. I thought it'd be funny to roast prisoners, humanize the prisoners. And then I thought, who needs that right now? And my friend Jonas at Comedy Central said, "How 'bout cops?" And I took a beat, and I was like, you know, you have to follow that discomfort. One of my producers, Stu Miller, told me that, and he got that from Jon Stewart. I started writing acts about cops, and jokes that not just cops might laugh at, but we would laugh at as the general audience.

On your first ride along, you said something to the effect of, "You gotta laugh at this shit or else you'll cry." That seems to be sort of the thesis of the special.
That statement—"If you don't laugh at this, you'll cry"—that was something that just happened organically in the middle of the night after I found myself laughing both at and with the cops when they were dealing with a homeless, potentially mentally ill, drunk person. My only alternative was to stop filming and sulk and wonder where mankind went wrong, so I just kept trying to ask more questions and build material.

Do you think comedy has helped you—and America in general—deal with the horrible bullshit we're constantly bombarded by in the news?
We've heard this, "laughter's the best medicine," our whole lives, but once something finally gets close to you, or something sad happens, or you're in the middle of a national tragedy, or you're looking at footage of boys being murdered by law enforcement... You have to escape. And I think that's why roasting's become so popular, because it's hard. It's authentic. Everyone's crying about what's happening between cops and the communities that they police right now, but I don't hear a lot of conversation between the two, and I think that's kind of what my special's about.

One of the funniest moments to me was your first appearance at the Boston Police Department, because someone circulated a memo about you being a cop hater. You were telling really funny jokes, but you were bombing. What was going through your head at that moment?
It's funny... I had such a hard time editing that scene. I felt like I was watching my own nightmare. I remember right afterward, sitting down in that empty room. Everyone was gone, and I sat that with my manager and my producers, and we just all had different ridiculous theories of what had happened. Turns out none of us were right. The cops were just mad at me.

To me, it says a lot about the real problem that police in general are unable to take any criticism from civilians. But then you sat with them, and they did warm up to you, even though you were criticizing them. How did you get them to ease up on you?
Did they ease up on me? I got funnier, and I brought them to an environment more conducive to having fun—a charity event for kids with cancer. I think they were inclined to have a little more fun, even though they weren't drinking, they were still off the beat, off the street. I think by doing that, sticking with it after that first colossal bomb, I earned some respect.

In your special, you mentioned that the Boston Police Department hasn't killed an unarmed person in 25 years. What do you think makes them better than other departments?
They have terrible aim.

God, I wish I had that joke a couple weeks ago when I was doing the show. That would've been a showstopper. Damn you, VICE! Honestly, I think that's probably a better question for the commissioner. Part of it is community policing, part of it's training, and the guys and gals that I met were not aggressive people.

Right, and the cops you met were very diverse.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the Boston Police department was like that—22 percent African American. That makes it easier for me as a comic. They got a little bit of everything, so I got something to work with here. It's kinda fascinating how the job still appeals to so many people of different ethnicities. I got hassled for cutting through Washington Square Park a few weeks ago by a Chinese cop and an African American cop. Even though they were total assholes, I was kinda glad they weren't just other white guys hassling me.

You had a TV crew with a bunch of cameras, and people definitely do act differently in front of the cameras. So how do you think normal people, without a TV crew, can get cops to listen to them?
Be white.

Try to remember that cops are almost only exclusively dealing with shitty people, so if you're a good person, come at them extra kind and extra polite. Especially right now. There was a cop shot in the calf when I was in Boston, so everyone was on edge. They never know who's armed. As I'm saying this, I'm in traffic and I'm watching a motorcycle cop talk to a black dude, and they're just laughing and having a good time. God knows what they're talking about, but more of that. People are just screaming at the cops right now, and I'm not saying they're wrong, but getting louder isn't really helping with anything. Sometimes it's getting more thoughtful. I'm talking about everyday interactions with cops. You talk about arrests and brutality, what's going on with African Americans, that's another story. I'm not black, I'm never gonna understand that part of it. But I'm doing everything I can as a US citizen to try to understand.

You ended the special by saying, "The real cops need to step up and leave the fake ones behind." How can we help them do that?
I think we need to press for transparency and reform, and we need to really take a good look at who's getting hired. I think body cams are a good idea, even though a lot of cops resist. People are really scared, and people are dying, so I feel like the cops are gonna have to bend over backward to earn everyone's trust right now.

I remember years ago, the president had a "beer summit" after a police incident with , a black college professor. I'd love to see the president, or the most open minds on both sides of this issue, get together and start talking instead of preaching to the choir. It can't go on like this. This is not a sustainable situation right now. Everyone seems to be suffering.

Do you think people can help more with their local police departments?
Yes. As a matter of fact, once a month in my neighborhood of New York, there's a meeting in a church basement with the head of a local precinct, and whoever wants to come. They give you a little update on the neighborhood, and then people ask questions. Sometimes it goes a half hour; sometimes it goes a couple hours. But it's great theater, it's normally very friendly, and it's a great time to be heard. Maybe it starts there. A lot of communities do these sorts of meetings, but average citizens aren't interested. They're not going to that; they don't even know about it. I was trying to dig in , so I started going, and I kind of got hooked on it. There are citizens who also help with organizing it all, and they put up signs around the neighborhood. But I'd like to see something more formal. I'd like to see a summit or a convention. You know, "Cop Con."

Where you get to cosplay as Rodney King?
You're in. I'll moderate.

Follow Josh Androsky on Twitter.

Watch Ross's special, Jeff Ross Roasts Cops, airs on September 10 at 10 PM on Comedy Central.

It was an afternoon in early July, just before the Republican National Convention, and Ann Coulter was sitting in the back of a baby-blue Mercedes SUV, speeding through Thai Town in Los Angeles. Ray Bans covered her eyes, a Louis Vuitton belt wrapped around her waist, and the sun lit her blond hair like a spotlight. As ABBA's "Fernando" played over the car stereo, she sipped coffee out of a green straw and pointed at a group of Latino people on the sidewalk. "Look, there's a Thai!" she remarked wryly. "More Thais!"

She's taking me on what she calls the "Ann Coulter Tour of Los Angeles Immigrant Hot Spots." In addition to Thai Town, these "hot spots" include Koreatown and Little Ethiopia—three historic ethnic enclaves that Coulter claims have been flooded by Hispanic immigrants. "We don't have time for Compton," she told me, "but you'll have to take my word for it."

The goal of the expedition, Coulter said, is to show me the overwhelming effects that immigration—and specifically, immigration from Mexico—has had on Southern California neighborhoods. "They're all Mexican. This is diversity," she said. "Welcome to Thai Town! We're gonna get a Thai taco. With any luck, we'll get some Thai graffiti."

If this were any other year, Coulter's comments—indeed, the very idea of an "Ann Coulter Immigration Tour" in the first place—would have seemed ludicrous. But new rules apply in 2016: Coulter's anti-immigration positions, outlined in her 2015 manifesto Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn America into a Third-World Hellhole, have been adopted wholesale by Donald Trump, providing the intellectual foundation for the Republican candidate's signature policy.

For better or for worse, that's made Coulter one of the country's most influential policy minds. "Perhaps no single writer has had such an immediate impact on a presidential election since Harriet Beecher Stowe," the Atlantic's David Frum wrote about Coulter last December.

That influence was confirmed again last week, when Trump gave an immigration speech detailing a ten-step plan very similar to the ones Coulter outlined in Adios, America. The proposal included building a wall—which Mexico, of course, would pay for—ending the "catch-and-release" strategy to rid America of "criminal aliens" and banning immigrants from countries where the US is not able to complete thorough background checks, as determined by Trump.

Like Coulter, Trump described new immigration laws as vital to protecting the livelihood and culture of working-class Americans. "Immigration law doesn't exist just for the purpose of keeping out criminals," Trump told an audience in Phoenix, Arizona.

"It exists to protect all aspects of American life—the worksite, the welfare office, the education system, and much else. That is why immigration limits are established in the first place. If we only enforce the laws against crime, then we have an open border to the entire world."

As Trump continues to embrace her anti-immigrant positions, Coulter has in turn become an ardent evangelizer for the Republican presidential candidate. "I have been in heaven since June 16— Mexican rapist speech," she told me.

She spent most of this past winter and spring telling anyone who would listen to vote for Trump, running what she calls her "shadow campaign" to get the real estate mogul elected. For months, she's been making bets with Trump doubters she encounters at bars and parties—she claimed she won $5,000 from an assistant for one of the Koch brothers who bet Trump would lose the primary—but conceded it's not a particularly effective way to elect a candidate.

"I can't keep cornering the anti-Trump people individually at parties and bars and forcing them to make a bet," she said.

On August 23, she published a new screed, subtly titled In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! The book defends Trump as the "Great Orange hope," making an impassioned case for the white populist nostalgia he's brought back into the conservative movement. It has become her 12th New York Timesbestseller.

"People are saying it's terrific," Trump tweeted the day the book was released, "knowing Ann I am sure it is!"

A little more than a year ago, before Trump announced his candidacy, Coulter thought her anti-immigration rhetoric would ruin her career. She worried Adios, America would flop and predicted television networks would ban her from the air for life. "I thought I would live under the Brooklyn Bridge," she said, looking back. "I knew it would be the end of my career."

Coulter had started writing about immigration a few years earlier, around the time that then president George W Bush was trying to pass an immigration-reform bill that included a conservative plant to provide undocumented workers with a pathway to citizenship. In May 2007, Coulter wrote a series of attacks on the bill, under headlines like "Importing a Slave Class" and "A Green Card in Every Pot."

"Americans—at least really stupid Americans like George Bush—believe the natural state of the world is to have individual self-determination, human rights, the rule of law, and a robust democratic economy," she wrote at the time. "In fact, the natural state of the world is Darfur. The freakish aberration is America and the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world."

After that, at the end of her speeches—about Scooter Libby, gun rights, Obamacare, whatever the conservative topic of the day—she started mentioning immigration. And the crowds would go wild.

All photos by Jason Altaan, unless otherwise noted

Adios, America started as a chapter, not a book. Regnery, the conservative imprint that publishes Sarah Palin, had given Coulter a deal to write a different book, but while doing research, she says she stumbled across what she believed was a conspiracy to mask the true number of immigrants committing crime in the country. Convinced that the media, politicians, and government statisticians had pulled the wool over the country's eyes when it came to the real state of immigration in America, Coulter persuaded her publisher to let her devote an entire book to the topic.

The resulting work laid out her immigration views in detail, including alleged crime and public-safety problems Coulter attributed to new immigrants. It also outlined a series of solutions that she proposed would fix America's broken immigration system: building a wall, deporting undocumented immigrants, and placing a ten-year moratorium on immigration—all immigration—before implementing a new entry process based on labor skills, rather than family preference or per-country visa caps.

In short, it was a set of ideas remarkably similar to what Trump is proposing in his presidential campaign.

When the book was done, Coulter started sending out hardcover copies annotated with Post-It notes to Republicans that seemed likely to run for president. Then, shortly before the book was published, her good friend Matt Drudge encouraged Coulter to debate her ideas with Jorge Ramos, one of the country's most respected Hispanic journalists. So in May 2015, several days before Adios, America hit the shelves, Coulter appeared with Ramos in a Fusion television special called "Ann's America."

"If you don't want to be killed by ISIS, don't go to Syria," Coulter told Ramos as they argued the points in her book. "If you don't want to get killed by a Mexican, there's nothing I can tell you."

One viewer was apparently Donald Trump. Shortly after the special aired, Coulter says, one of his employees emailed her asking for an advance copy of the book. About a month later, on June 16, 2015, Coulter woke up to see that her ideas had made an impact: Trump was running for president, using an anti-immigration platform ripped straight from the pages of her book.

"," Trump declared in his now-infamous announcement speech. "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime."

In the weeks following, Coulter kept hearing Trump mention talking points she'd outlined in her book, listening proudly as he blamed the heroin epidemic on Mexico and attacked corporations for replacing American workers with foreigners on H-1B visas.

"TRUMP READ IT!" Coulter crowed in an email to me this past March as I was working on another story for Broadly. "Anchor babies, building a wall, how many illegals are here (minimum: 30 to 50 million), Mexican rapists, immigrant crime, the heroin epidemic brought to us by Mexico, H-1B workers—all this is from Adios, America! You might have found some of that elsewhere (if you looked really hard), but the immigrant crime wave, and specifically the Latin American rape culture, has never been written about until ADIOS, AMERICA!"

Coulter has described her opposition to immigration as being driven by "cultural" rather than "racial" reasons; in short, she believes Latino and Muslim immigrants come from countries with cultures that advocate rape, murder, homophobia, and drug use, and therefore pose a threat to both US security and America's cultural identity. In practice, of course, her ideas are vaguely racial—and sometimes outwardly racist—calling for the preservation of American culture as defined by decidedly white British and Dutch settlers.

Like Trump, she sees immigration as a threat to both the country's safety and its national identity, striking a defiantly populist tone as she accuses immigrants of taking jobs from working-class people, primarily African Americans and the lower-income white voters who make up Trump's base of support.

"Immigration is never going to affect George Soros or Rupert Murdoch or Megyn Kelly or Rachel Maddow—it's not coming to their neighborhoods," said Coulter, who graduated from Cornell University and splits time between her residences in Beverly Hills, Manhattan, and Florida. "They don't know anybody who lost a job because of a bad trade deal. They don't know any steelworkers, coal miners, and they don't particularly care."

This type of anti-immigration populism isn't exactly new. The ideas Coulter outlined in Adios, America had been bouncing around the right-wing blogosphere and talk-radio circuit since at least the 1980s, espoused by conservative pitchfork-wielders like Pat Buchanan and more recently by the white nationalists and "identarians" who post on websites like VDARE.

"In terms of writers and pundits, that was about it," Coulter said in an email. "There were specifically immigration-concerned groups like NumbersUSA and fabulous members of Congress, like the sainted Jeff Sessions, but those you could count on one hand."

It was the self-described "neoliberal" blogger Mickey Kaus, a prominent anti-immigration writer from California and close friend of Coulter's, who first talked to her about the overwhelming presence of Latino immigrants in California. "No one needed to point it out to me—just visit Californians, noticed it and didn't like it."

As we drove around LA in July, Coulter said the influx of immigrants to California—particularly those from Mexico—had led to a cultural shift in one of her favorite states. Looking around the city, noting the Spanish billboards, graffiti, and street corners crowded with Latino workers, she agreed. On our tour, she pointed out things like Mexican restaurants in Asian neighborhoods and the aforementioned graffiti, ordering VICE's photographer to only take photos of her in front of signs in Spanish.

"This is the heart of Koreatown," she said at our first stop, a Mexican restaurant called Mexican Village on Third Street. "I just looked up a random address in Koreatown." We drove past the restaurant and toward a parking lot where a Latino woman in a pink shirt stood with her family.

"We are going to drive through, and you'll see a lot of Koreans named Pepe," Coulter added sarcastically. "We are just going to drive around to look at all the Koreans here in Koreatown."

For the first two weeks of Trump's campaign, Coulter said she tried not to get too excited; she expected him to backtrack and ease up on his anti-immigration rhetoric as so many Republican politicians had done before. When he didn't—and even doubled down on his hardline proposals, most notably the border wall—Coulter and Trump's then campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, began corresponding with each other.

The pair stayed in touch via email for the first several months of the GOP primary, with Coulter berating Lewandowski about the need for Trump to stand firmly behind his immigration platform. According to Coulter, Lewandowski, who was fired from the campaign this past May, promised that the candidate wouldn't back down.

Trump fans go wild for the Republican candidate at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo by Ralph Freso/Getty Images

Even after Lewandowski's departure, as the campaign moved past the Republican primaries, Trump seemed committed to his anti-immigration stance. Though he studiously avoided giving specifics on any other policy plans, Trump continued to spout out details about what he would do to curb illegal immigration and protect American borders. And it worked: Conservative audiences ate up Trump's message, handing him the GOP nomination because of, rather than despite, his controversial immigration positions.

The nods to Coulter also continued apace. Over the summer, Trump announced an "expansion" of his ban on Muslim immigrants, echoing ideas laid out in Adios, America. And he got into a high-profile sparring match with Khzir Khan, the father of a slain Muslim soldier, who had criticized Trump at the Democratic National Convention, insinuating that Khan's wife stayed silent because of Muslim opposition to women's rights. The controversy, which dragged on for weeks, had Coulter written all over it.

The result has been to fundamentally change the way that the Republican Party talks about immigration, moving Coulter's ideas from the fringes of the conservative intellectual sphere to the center of the party's policy platforms. And though Coulter herself has remained somewhat of a political outsider, she has appeared with growing frequency on cable news shows and in radio interviews and asked to translate Trump's positions on the issue that has brought them together.

"Ann's influence has been huge and transformative," Kaus wrote in an email. "Basically Trump read it, and it prompted his epic rant, which propelled his candidacy from out of nowhere. Tinder, spark. She understood that the MSM-suppressed crime news was an emotional and political point of outrage."

In In Trump We Trust—a book Coulter wrote at breakneck speed this spring, in order to get it published before Labor Day—she lays out a similar set of policy ideas to the ones developed in Adios, America, positioning Trump as the anti-immigration cultural savior that Coulter had called for. "None of the other candidates could approach Trump on immigration because they were dependent on wealthy contributors," she writes.

The book continues: "The problem with trying to find an old-school WASPy, understated, less-is-more, antique leather, sturdy wood-and-brass type to take on Trump's positions is that all those people agree with NPR on everything. Their good taste is their undoing. Only someone who brags about his airline's seatbelt buckles being made of solid gold would have the balls to do what Trump is doing."

Throughout the book, Coulter acknowledges the absurdity of a billionaire reality star transforming into the working-class hero she longed for, but when we talked in July, she said she had begun to understand how Trump fell into that role.

"Trump grew up working construction sites. That is also why he talks like that—which is so great," she told me. "It is like a Shakespearian play: There is high comedy and low comedy. Trump is hitting it exactly right. That is, both his grammar is his simpatico with them, and he has always been like that. I mean, I never really cared about him until the Mexican rapist speech, but then when I looked up old articles with him—and interviews with him—he has always said, 'I don't really get along with rich people. They don't like me. I like the cab drivers and the workers.'"

Then, a few weeks ago, just as Coulter was preparing to launch a publicity tour for In Trump We Trust, Trump's campaign began to suggest that his positions on immigration might be softening. For more than a week, Trump's new campaign manager, the Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, and even Trump himself, hinted that he may have eased up on some of his more hardline immigration stances.

"Now, everybody agrees that we get the bad ones out," Trump told Sean Hannity in a televised immigration town hall on August 24. "But when I go through and I meet thousands and thousands of people on this subject, and I've had very strong people come up to me, really great, great people come up to me, and they've said, 'Mr. Trump, I love you, but to take a person who's been here for 15 or 20 years and throw them and their family out, it's so tough, Mr. Trump.' I have it all the time! It's a very, very hard thing."

When I spoke to her that same week, Coulter blamed Trump's possible change on his new campaign advisors. This new reliance on the GOP consultant class that Coulter—and until recently, Trump—had railed against for years incensed her.

"I think he said something stupid," she wrote in an email. "He's done it before, and he'll do it again. At least his entire platform isn't stupid, unlike every other person who ran or is running for president this year. What the f— did the moron who told Trump to say this think he was getting out of it? He demoralized his base, and people who already hated him don't like him any more, but now they can accuse him of being a flip-flopper."

But just when it looked like Trump had finally gone soft, the Republican candidate redeemed himself, at least in Coulter's eyes. Last week, in his immigration speech, he doubled down on the campaign promises that he made in the "Mexican rapist speech" that converted Coulter to his campaign in the first place. When asked about her thoughts on the speech via email, Coulter said, "Better than Lincoln's Gettysburg address."

As hyperbolic as that might sound, it's clear that Coulter believes the stakes are that high. "Unless Trump wins, there will be no Republican Party—which is now, the all-new Trumpian Republican Party!" she wrote me. "(He's already blown up the old Republican Party.)"

So what will she do if Trump loses? "First a cookbook, and then mysteries," she told me.

And if he wins?

"Oh my God, I won't stop smiling! I'll be so happy. I'll dance a jig," she said. "And the only job I want: FCC chairman."

Correction: An earlier version of this piece stated that Coulter was prompted to write Adios America after uncovering statistics about the number of immigrants in the US. In fact, she says she was prompted to write the book after uncovering statistics about the number of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants living in the US.

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Irvin Rosenfeld smoking a joint. Image courtesy of Irvin Rosenfeld

If Irvin Rosenfeld had to guess, he'd say he's smoked about 135,000 joints since 1982—roughly ten a day, every day, for 34 years.

Despite a cannabis habit that would probably kill Snoop Dogg, the 63-year-old Floridian leads a fairly normal life: He's a senior stockbroker at a large securities firm, who spends every Saturday volunteering with disabled adults and children, while grappling with a rare bone disease called multiple congenital cartilaginous exotosis.

When I called Rosenfeld at his office, he had just smoked one of the 300 pre-rolled joints the US government sends him every month as a patient in the FDA's compassionate Investigational New Drug (IND) program.

Rosenfeld's government-supplied stash is low potency—about 4 percent THC—and it doesn't get him stoned. The choice, he told me, is not his. Ever since he first tried pot in the early 70s, he's been unable to get high due to an anomaly with the cannabinoid receptors in his brain. Still, the cannabis takes the edge off of his chronic pain and, if you ask him, it's the only reason he's still alive.

When Rosenfeld was diagnosed with his disorder at age ten, the doctors found more than 200 tumors covering his bones. These tumors were expected to multiply and grow, and in the meantime, Rosenfeld had to deal with the painful bone splinters the disorder causes.

In the best case scenario, Rosenfeld would have to deal with a lifetime of incessant pain and heavy doses of painkillers. In the worst case scenario, the tumors would proliferate, become malignant, and kill him.

With these less-than-rosy life prospects, Rosenfeld left for college in 1971. At this point, he'd never tried marijuana—with all the top-shelf prescription narcotics at his disposal, he saw no reason to add an illegal drug to the mix. But eventually, he gave into peer pressure and started smoking socially.

Around his tenth time smoking a joint, Rosenfeld noticed something remarkable: He'd been sitting and playing chess with a friend for nearly a half an hour, completely pain-free. Previously, Rosenfeld was unable to sit in one position for longer than ten minutes due to the pain from his condition. He hadn't taken any painkillers.

"That's when I realized this illegal drug called marijuana was the only medicine that was doing this for me," Rosenfeld told me.

Rosenfeld showing off his stash to the US Congress in 2005. Image courtesy of Irvin Rosenfeld

Rosenfeld dropped out of college in 1972 and petitioned the federal government for his right to use marijuana medicinally, but his pleas fell on deaf ears.

Then, in 1977, Rosenfeld met Robert Randall, who had been granted government permission to use marijuana medicinally the year prior. Randall was diagnosed with glaucoma in his 20s, and doctors warned that he'd likely be blind by 30. But one day, after smoking a joint, he realized that marijuana eased the spots in his eyesight.

"He immediately put it together," Alice O'Leary, Randall's widow and lifelong partner in his marijuana activism, told me. "He thought it was too incredible to be true, but through trial and error, he proved it to himself. So it became a regular part of our lives to try to procure marijuana."

Of course, this was illegal. In 1975, Randall and O'Leary were arrested for growing five marijuana plants on their sundeck in Washington, DC, just eight blocks from the Capitol. They could've easily paid the fine and been done with it, but instead, they decided to take on the federal government in court on the grounds of medical necessity.

Serendipitously, a UCLA study on marijuana's effect on inter-ocular pressure was just wrapping up. Randall became one of the final participants in the study and was able to show that marijuana did indeed help his glaucoma and could potentially stave off his blindness, if only for a few years. With this data, the judge presiding over Randall's case dropped the charges against him and O'Leary.

Randall approached the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Institute for Drug Addiction (NIDA), the two agencies responsible for overseeing the federal marijuana produced for research, and petitioned them for access to their cannabis crops to treat his glaucoma.

"That petition was a real surprise to the federal agencies," said O'Leary. "Medical marijuana was nowhere on the radar at this point, and here's this lone individual coming into a federal office and asking for access to their supplies. Their first reaction was one of great compassion—they granted him the petition."

Randall became the first patient to use marijuana medicinally in the US since the government effectively banned marijuana in 1937. And with that, the compassionate Investigational New Drug program was born.

Robert Randall after receiving his first shipment of federal pot in November of 1976. Image courtesy of Alice O'Leary

When Rosenfeld met Randall in Virginia a few months later, he explained how the FDA had been stonewalling his request for access to medicinal marijuana. Randall and O'Leary offered their help. Together, they established a compassionate IND protocol for Rosenfeld, and in 1982, Rosenfeld became the second patient in the program.

Throughout the 1980s, the IND program continued to grow, expanding access to AIDS patients and those afflicted with rare types of cancer. But in 1992, the Bush administration shut it down, and only 13 patients were grandfathered in.

Rosenfeld was one of those 13. Every five months, he receives six tins, each filled with 300 pre-rolled joints. All of the marijuana is grown at the University of Mississippi, which is the sole grower for all federal marijuana.

After harvest at Ole Miss, entire marijuana plants are sent to Raleigh, North Carolina, where the buds are fed into a cigarette machine. These cigarettes are then freeze-dried, placed in a tin can, and stored in a freezer for an indefinite amount of time. Rosenfeld says the joints he's smoking this year were packaged and frozen back in 2009, although he's had buds up to 13 years old.

"If you're talking about a connoisseur who wants to get high, they would be disappointed in the quality of the cannabis," Rosenfeld told me. "But I'm looking for the medicinal aspect and what I get sent to me is enough."

IND patients Elvy Musikka, Irvin Rosenfeld, and Robert Randall, and Mae Nutt, a longtime marijuana activist. Image courtesy of Irvin Rosenfeld

Rosenfeld and the other patients completed biannual progress reports with their doctor as a stipulation for their participation in the program, but oddly, these reports were never used to assess the impact of long-term marijuana. However, an independent study of IND patients from a physician named Ethan Russo found that the patients were as healthy as could be expected given their respective disorders. In other words, smoking hundreds of marijuana cigarettes a month had no discernible negative effects on the patients' health.

In fact, in some cases, marijuana actually drastically improved patients' quality of life. Randall, for example, kept his eyesight until he passed away at age 53, despite the fact that doctors told him he would be blind by 30. Similarly, doctors told Rosenfeld that his bone tumors would grow larger and multiply—yet since he began using marijuana, his tumors haven't grown or multiplied at all.

As for those who didn't make it into the IND program, many have worked to legalize medical marijuana on the state level, including the passage of Proposition 215 in California, which in 1996 became the first state to legalize cannabis for medicinal use. Today, 25 states and Washington, DC, have similar laws in place, and this November, at least nine other states will vote on legalizing weed for recreational and/or medicinal use.

Still, Rosenfeld and O'Leary are the first to acknowledge that the battle is far from over.

"In 1982, Bob Randall and I made a pact," said Rosenfeld. "We were going to teach the entire world about the benefits of medical cannabis. That's what we set out to do, but we haven't won yet for everybody. It's frustrating when the feds keep saying there is no medicinal benefit to cannabis because we know there is. We're living proof that this works."

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Matt Baume talks with trans gamers on how their favorite games, characters, and the gaming community helped them make peace with family, friends, and gender.

James Prost had just moved to Seattle, was newly out as trans, and hardly knew anyone. Feeling lonely, he reached out to a fellow member of the gaming community he'd met on Instagram: "I hate doing my own testosterone shots," Prost wrote.

"You could come over and meet my partner and me," his friend offered, "because my partner does my shots."

Thus began biweekly group T shots, followed by tabletop gaming. "It was at a time when I wasn't sure if I could continue to pursue surgery," Prost told VICE. "Monday through Friday I tried to figure out the song and dance to make it all work, but on Saturday nights, I let the dice work it out. It helps unwind the stress when you're a werewolf barbarian plowing through dragon cultists."

Over time, Prost became a part of the household, and with the encouragement of his fellow players, he underwent surgery just a few weeks ago.

Transgender people don't always feel at home within their biological families, or even in their own bodies. But for many, games—and the communities that play them—have proven to be an unexpected wellspring of social support. Whether through online play, real-life meetups, or livestreaming, trans people who game are connecting in greater numbers than ever before—and as they connect with one another, they come to better understand themselves.

"A lot of your ability to be recognized comes from other people," Dr. Adrienne Shaw, an assistant professor in Temple University's Department of Media Studies and Production, told VICE. "We form our identities in social situations. What it means to be a woman, what it means to be gay, what it means to be a gamer."

While games themselves can be a space for experimenting with gender and gender roles, many trans gamers have found that the larger gaming community has helped them in their transition, to cope with family reactions, and in finding self-acceptance—whether they find that community through playing games or through game-adjacent activities, like conventions or livestreaming.

But finding that community can be a challenge. Recently, game developer Beamdog faced criticism after including a trans character in a Baldur's Gate expansion. That negative reaction reinforced the feeling that if trans characters are unwelcome in games, trans players are unwelcome, too.

"When I play online, I don't feel totally comfortable stating my gender identity, because I still feel that there's so much toxicity and harassment," Jude Jackson, a gamer based in Bakersfield, California, told VICE.

When he presented as female, other gamers sexually harassed and derided his gender. After he transitioned, that misogyny turned into transphobia. It was an isolating experience. "I have a lot of body issues, being overweight and being trans," he said, "and that leads to social anxiety."

But that isolation began to change as he found himself drawn to non-gendered characters, such as the robots in Portal 2. Identifying with characters unburdened by male and female gender roles helped Jackson feel more comfortable expressing himself; eventually, it helped him connect with his fellow queer players. At the first GaymerX, a Southern California–based game conference with an LGBTQ focus, he organized a large cosplay group with other Portal fans. In the company of friends dressed as various agender robots, he found his anxiety lift, and by the end of the night, he'd worked up the courage to join a cosplay masquerade.

As the visibility of the trans community within gaming improves, new role models emerge to encourage younger generations to embrace themselves.

Game journalist Sabriel Mastin was recently speaking on a panel at the gaming conference PAX East when she experienced a sudden bout of imposter syndrome—the anxiety that your accomplishments are comparatively unimportant. Oh, what am I doing here, she thought as her fellow panelists listed their impressive qualifications. She felt completely unimportant as she leaned to the microphone to say, "I write about video games."

But midway through the panel, Mastin decided to open up about something she didn't always discuss and began to describe her experience as a trans woman in the game industry. "I didn't realize how much I had bottled up inside," she told VICE. "I had to take a moment, catch myself—I was starting to have tears well up."

A panelist hugged her, and the crowd of hundreds of gamers burst into applause. "It felt amazing," she said. "That was my contribution, re-outing myself."

After the panel, Mastin was mobbed. "Thank you so much for being open," said one spiky-haired attendee in a flannel shirt.

"Growing up, I always liked seeing someone who represented me," she said, recalling how meaningful it was to play as powerful women like Samus. "And suddenly I was put in that position where I was that representation for someone else."

Maintaining a public profile has lent many trans gamers a feeling of connection and empowerment. Cetine (who goes by one name) broadcasts her game sessions live on Twitch.tv. "It's a chance to enter a space that's mostly straight, white, male dominated," she told VICE.

As she plays, Cetine responds to messages from queer viewers. Recently, a self-identified gay boy expressed worry that if he transitioned, his boyfriend would stop loving him. Cetine identified with his fear and guided him to consider his own needs: "If he doesn't love you, somebody else will," she said.

Growing up in a small California farming town, that was a message that Cetine never heard until much later in life. She now feels a duty to use the channels at her disposal to reach out to young gamers like herself.

Because they provide a chance to experiment with gender in a relatively low-stakes setting, games can be an ideal venue for trans people to learn about themselves and practice their identity. But the benefits of gaming go beyond single-player exploration—in the company of other gamers, trans people can proclaim their identity and find others ready to celebrate with them.

Now a professional model in LA, Cetine loves playing shooters and strategy games with other women. "My group is always female characters," she said, referring to a favorite game named Dragon Age. "It's fun to go in and take control of castles with a group of women."

But there's one play style she tends to avoid: stealth missions, like those in Uncharted or Metal Gear Solid, where the player's main goal is to avoid detection.

"I don't want to creep around," she said. "I want to overcome."

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Helaina Hovitz had just started seventh grade in Lower Manhattan when the planes struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Like thousands of others who survived the events of that day, Hovitz has experienced lasting effects on her mental health. This week, just before the 15th anniversary of the attack, Hovitz published a book about her life since that day. After 9/11tells her story, and the circuitous path she followed to recovery. —Kate Lowenstein

When the bomb squad burst through the doors, along with droves of hysterical parents crying and screaming, I knew my parents wouldn't be among them—they were still at their far-away jobs. I did see Ann and her son Charles, who I walked to school with every day, who I instinctively hustled over to, knowing they could get me home so I wouldn't have to evacuate to wherever the other kids were going. Outside the school building, the burning smell instantly stung our eyes, our nostrils, as the buildings vomited paper and people. The crowds were almost impossible to move through, but we had one objective: Get home to the east side, to our neighborhood, which was also just three blocks away from the World Trade Center, on the other side of town. But police on the west side kept refusing to let us through, directing us uptown only.

Soon, we were running from a giant cloud of smoke and debris that Ann told us not to look at. "Just cover your faces, don't look back, and run!" The scene for the next hour, as we tried every possible way into our own neighborhood, was the stuff that nightmares are made of: bleeding bodies. People covered in debris, piercing, blood-curdling screams and cries. I was covered in debris and kept forgetting to pull my shirt over my face to protect it. We spent an hour navigating the horror, trying to get home, normally a ten-minute walk from school, but police blocked every possible way. Once we finally made it back to our apartment, we found our neighborhood had become a war zone.

The lobby was dark. People hid inside, covered in ash.

When I pushed open the staircase door, I saw Grandma at the end of the hall, standing in the doorway of her apartment, holding the white-chorded phone to her ear.

"She's here, Paul!" Grandma cried into the phone. "She's here! Oh my God!"

My grandmother gently thrust the phone to my ear, smoothing my hair and kissing my head as I assured my dad that I was OK. There was this sense that time was limited—the dark lobby, the elevators out, Devin's cellphone that had stopped working. We quickly called my mother next. She was still at work. Out the window, I could see nothing but black. On TV, which was still working for the time being, I saw what we had been running from the whole time—the collapses—and saw the Pentagon had also been hit, and yet another plane had been hijacked. I thought planes and bombs were destroying the entire country.

Soon the power would go out, the phones, the water. When we wrapped towels around our heads to use the payphone across the street, we were entirely alone in that dust storm that came from the towers, which were still on fire. The payphone worked for long enough for my dad to tell me that the police told him everyone had been evacuated.

But we hadn't been.

I saw my dad the next morning, covered in a thick film of debris, dust, and sweat.
As days turned into weeks, we only had the food and medication my father helped coordinate from New York Downtown Hospital across the street. We also had more threats of collapsing buildings, bomb scares on nearby landmarks, and instructions to pack an emergency bag and have the whole family ready to leave on a split-second's notice—without having any idea where we would go.

The National Guard showed up, the sound of a plane sent me into a hysterical panic, I wasn't sleeping, I was always worried, paranoid, ready to take off at the next attack, having nightmares and flashbacks, feeling like a sitting duck waiting to die. While the rest of New York City above Canal Street and the rest of the world resumed "life as normal," it became very clear to me that because of what was happening in my brain and my body, and what continued to happen outside of my front door, nothing would ever be normal again.

***

"Do you feel that your moods are very up and down?" Dr. C, my new psychiatrist, asked me. Her office was on the ground floor of a residential building on Park Avenue, and I sat on the couch, looking at her in her big chair as she took notes on a legal pad.

"Yes," I said, because it was true.

"When you're up, when you're high, do you feel so happy it's like you're on top of the world? And when you're low, do you feel like you're at the lowest point ever?"

"Yes," I said, because that was also true, and because I was desperate to put a name on this thing and have her fix it.

"Tell me what else is going on," she said.

I launched into it with no problem, so used to having to explain the same thing over and over again. "I'm afraid that people are looking at me like they want to hurt me. In school, on the subway, everywhere," I said. "I'm nervous all the time, and when I get upset, I feel like I'm out of control. I'm scared of things other people my age aren't scared of. I feel like I'm suffocating half the time. I'm having head­aches so often that I've stopped identifying them as headaches. It's like a permanent background feature of my life, changing only in severity. And I'm always fighting with my boyfriend over things that he thinks aren't a big deal."

"Your mother said that you're throwing a lot of tantrums, hitting and kicking and screaming, in these highly emotional states," she said.

"Yeah," I said, looking down and shrugging. "I guess so."

"Do you feel like you're hyper-talkative?"

I didn't even know what that meant, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to say anything that would cause her to not fix me. So I said, "Maybe."

What she didn't account for in her line of questioning was cause and effect, triggers, and reactivity—it all came from somewhere. Yes, I had periods of depression, and yes, I couldn't sleep. I made bad choices, but I did not have inexplicable, manic episodes, and I never had grandiose or delusional ideas. I did not think I was "chosen" for anything, and I did not go on spending sprees, or disappear for days and then remain unable to account for what had driven that decision or what I had even done.

What she didn't account for was that sometimes, "fight or flight" is as simple as a reaction. If someone made me feel threatened, whether it was my parents, or my boyfriend, or someone at school, or someone on the street, I reacted, impulsively, quickly, aggressively. I would later learn that she had added something called "potential secondary trauma due to 9/11" to my chart when we first met, just one sentence long. But Dr. C seemed to think that the reason for all of this behavior was because I was bipolar, so she started writing me prescriptions for that.

By late spring of 2005, my life was overflowing with orange pill bottles, medication my body rejected along with the last meal that I ate. After I got sick the first time I tried a drug, she lowered the dose, unless I got so sick that I was too scared to try again. We tried Seroquel, then Lamictal, then Lexapro, then Prozac, then Depakote, to try to tackle some of these symptoms, which, no matter what, continued to get worse. I sat there like a test subject, being analyzed instead of taught how to do anything differently. She was just a psychiatrist, so I was still ushered in and out of therapists' offices, always going in hopeful, unlike most reluctant, brooding teenagers who sat there and grimaced because their parents "made them go." I tried to explain to therapists what was wrong with me over and over and over again, only to find they couldn't help me, either. I did begin to feel more foolish for getting my hopes up, then resentful of the therapist I was talking to. Nothing seemed to be working.

I was always going for blood tests, and I was no longer the "brave" girl that the nurses marveled at. I had become squeamish. I was already charged up from the trip, from trying to find an address I couldn't find, another crisis. "I'm not good at this," I would warn the technician as she wrapped a rubber strap around my arm. I'd look the other way, squeezing my eyes shut, trying to sing a song in my head. But no matter how many blood tests I got, the answer never seemed to be swimming around in those vials.

***

Years later, as I begin to answer people's questions—How did they miss it? and What took so long? and How could it not have been obvious that the diagnosis was post-traumatic stress disorder?—I learn that the proper treatment for my condition is cognitive behavioral therapy, then dialectical behavioral therapy, then, to get sober and start learning how to actually deal with life in a healthy and effective way without reaching for something that would temporarily put a band-aid over things but actually make them much worse.

Kids don't really have the words to describe most accurately what's happening to them, or what their symptoms are really like, or trace them back to where it began. They don't "connect" the dots that far back, and frankly, adults typically don't either, everyone collectively rolling their eyes when asked about their childhood. But it's not the patient's job to connect the dots, or the parents, or the teacher's: It's the doctor's.

But since symptoms can take years after the trauma to surface, and existing issues can present themselves as similar to those that partially fit another diagnosis, some doctors feel there is often no time to dig that deeply; the symptoms as they present themselves feel like the most urgent thing to treat. Sometimes, the clinician just doesn't have the training to diagnose and treat trauma. Other times, they don't want to walk down that road with the patient, having to relive some painful and disturbing memories of their own. So, in addition to bipolar and ADHD, other misdiagnoses that continue to flood the medical records of young people everywhere include acute stress disorder, adjustment disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and panic disorder, to name a few. Some will give up, not wanting to start from the beginning over and over again with this doctor and that one, feeling hopeless and unable to live the kind of life where the world, both inside and outside of their own skin, feels too dangerous, sad, unbearable.

There was no magic pill that was going to get me there. It took years of work, but I was able to put myself back together again from these fragmented pieces of a girl living in a world full of continued crime and terror and violence, and, through a lot of hard work and determination, I was able to rebuild my own life and keep it from collapsing during the most stressful of times. But one out of every two children in this country will live through a trauma, whether that's living in an unstable or abusive home or in an "unsafe" neighborhood, an accident, a natural disaster, sexual assault, a shooting, terrorism, medical trauma, and the list goes on. Children may be naturally resilient in the sense that they "keep going," but true resilience has to be learned and taught over time. Otherwise, the invisible scars of trauma can lead to worse damage in the present.

Excerpted and edited with permission from After 9/11: One Girl's Journey through Darkness to a New Beginning by Helaina Hovitz. Copyright 2016, Carrel Books, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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Paul Rust in the Judd Apatow-produced Netflix series 'Love,' which he co-created. Photo via Wiki Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE Greece.

Last Saturday, modern-day Spartans honored warrior king Leonidas and his legendary fight at the Battle of Thermopylae. During that battle, which took place in August or September 480 BC, Leonidas and his tiny army (including 300 Spartans) fought the enormous Persian army and held it off for days—after which the Spartans allegedly dined in hell.

So to commemorate that battle, Spartans held a festival in Georgitsi—a village about 17 miles from the city of Sparta. The festivities included a Spartan phalanx, duels, dancers performing the traditional Pyrrhic war dance, and wrestling demonstrations. The whole festival was a perfectly kitsch celebration of the Battle of Thermopylae, but that didn't make the nu-Spartans there less proud of their ballsy forefathers.

In 2006, the New York Times dropped a bomb on the world of letters when it discovered that JT LeRoy—the literary prodigy known for harrowing tales of troubled youth—was actually a woman named Laura Albert who previously worked as a phone sex operator. The new film Author: The JT LeRoy Story takes us through the decade Albert spent breathing not only words, but life, into her LeRoy avatar.

In this episode of VICE Talks Film, VICE sits down with filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig, who unravels the complex and incredibly layered saga of JT LeRoy in his new documentary.

Author: The JT LeRoy Story, directed by Jeff Feuerzeig and produced by VICE Films, opens this week in theaters across the US. Buy tickets here.

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Weeks after touring Canada with The Tragically Hip one final time, Gord Downie announced that he'll be releasing a new album and a graphic novel. The surprise project is about a 12-year-old Indigenous boy named Chanie Wenjack who died running away from a residential school 50 years ago.

On October 22, 1966, Wenjack died of exposure and hunger while trying to reach his family that was 400 miles away from the school near Kenora, Ontario. He was determined to get away even though he didn't know how to find them.

"Chanie haunts me. His story is Canada's story. This is about Canada," Downie wrote in a statement. "We are not the country we thought we were."

The novel Secret Path is illustrated by Jeff Lemire, and consists of 10 poems, which were then recorded as songs for the album of the same name.

Downie explained that his brother Mike introduced him to Wenjack's story, which is one that he wanted to tell again to highlight how Canadian governments and churches destroyed generations of Indigenous families.

"History will be re-written," Downie wrote. "We are all accountable, but this begins in the late 1800s and goes to 1996. 'White' Canada knew—on somebody's purpose—nothing about this. We weren't taught it in school; it was hardly ever mentioned."

READ MORE: What Indigenous Artists and Thinkers Are Saying About Gord Downie's Message to Canada

Downie also highlighted Canada's relationship with First Nations during the Hip's final concert, on August 20 in Kingston. Late in the show, which was broadcast on CBC and watched by over 11 million Canadians, Downie called out Prime Minister Trudeau, who was in attendance, for the second time of the evening: "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.''

Secret Path will be released on October 18 and has also inspired an animated movie that will air on CBC on the 50th anniversary of Wenjack's death.

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AP Photo/Hassan Ammar, File

On Friday, the US House of Representatives passed a bill that allows victims of the 9/11 terror attacks to sue Saudi Arabia. The bill was already passed in the Senate back in May, but it still has to be signed into law by President Barack Obama, what already threatened to veto it back in April.

The bill itself is a bipartisan effort, spearheaded by Senators Chuck Schumer of New York, the number two ranking Democrat in the upper chamber, and John Cornyn of Texas, the third ranking Republican. The bill would deny Saudi Arabia the ability to invoke sovereign immunity against lawsuits in US courts.

Saudi Arabia has been accused of being too tolerant of extremist clerics in the lead-up to 9/11, and there has long been innuendo about high-ranking Saudi officials being involved in the funding of al Qaeda.

In an interview on CNN Friday, Schumer said,"There are always diplomatic considerations that get in the way of justice, but if a court proves the Saudis were complicit in 9/11, they should be held accountable." Schumer added that, "if they've done nothing wrong, they have nothing to worry about."

In July, 28 previously classified pages of the 9/11 Commission Report on the topic of Saudi involvement were finally made public. While the pages didn't conclusively link Saudi Arabia to the attacks, they did spotlight a few tantalizing mysteries.

While on a trip to Washington, DC, in April, Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, went around telling lawmakers that if the lawsuit bill passed, the King of Saudi Arabia may have to unload $750 billion in US assets and treasury securities. This sudden and potentially destabilizing transfer of US assets could ostensibly be necessary to the Saudi economy given that if a 9/11 won a lawsuit, Saudi assets might be frozen in an effort to collect the damages.

According to the New York Times, an anonymous source at the White House confirmed this week that the President's veto threat still stands.

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Sometimes it seems like everyone is a club photographer—or at least says they are in order to skip the line like a celebrity or a drug dealer. But those of us who actually do the gig occupy a unique role of privilege (and probably come off super douchey) by providing a vital service in our FOMO-fuelled world: pretty pictures. After all, what's more universally important in 2016 than how busy you look on your Instagram?

Not a good way to cross a border. Photo via Flickr user Mark O'Sullivan

An American man has been sentenced to two months in jail for using an air mattress to float into New Brunswick illegally.

John Bennett, 25, made the journey along the St. Croix river last week, floating from southern Maine into St. Stephen, New Brunswick. He reportedly bought the air mattress at a Walmart and then used a wooden paddle to help steer himself. (It's possible he was inspired by 1,500 of his fellow Americans, who accidentally floated into Sarnia while raging in the St. Clair River.)

According to Global, a local saw Bennett and presumably wondered what the hell he was doing.

Read more: 1,500 Americans Partying on a Michigan River Accidentally Ended Up in Canada

"He was wet and carrying his boots ... (and) walking towards the town," said Crown prosecutor Peter Thorn in a Saint John courtroom Thursday.

Soon after, Bennett was arrested for failing to appear at the border crossing.

Bennett told the cops that he was rejected from the border earlier because he's been charged with mischief in the US.

Thorn said Bennett was desperate to see his pregnant girlfriend.

"He said she had an ex-boyfriend who was threatening her, but that hasn't been confirmed by the other party," Thorn said.

Despite the jail sentence, both Thorn and the judge presiding over the case seemed to lowkey appreciate Bennett's tactics. Thorn called the air mattress "novel" while the judge said "Pardon the pun, but it seems to me you wanted to get there, come hell or high water."

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On an all new episode of ABANDONED, host Rick McCrank travels to Canada's east coast where much of the land is scattered with dead and dying fishing towns to discover what life is left in these deserted villages.

ABANDONED airs Fridays at 9 PM ET/PT on VICELAND.

Image via 'Free Fire'

The Toronto International Film Festival unofficially closes out the year's big movie fests. It's free of the uptight air of Cannes, and lacking the insular, indie bubble of Sundance. It's the most widely accessible, the fan festival and generally points to what major releases will draw box office numbers and Academy Awards. This year's slate is mercifully short on glitzy blockbusters and instead has a solid lineup of gritty, weird, intense movies that we'll all be talking about well into next year. Here's my pick of the 20 to watch for this fall.

Photo via Flickr user Dolapo Falola

It's a critical first-step in addressing a male-dominated industry that's come under fire for sexism and harassment in the last couple years—but one of the industry's best-known critics says the training won't do shit unless the people within the business want to change.

Surrey Creep Catchers allegedly busted an RCMP officer this week. Photo via Facebook

An RCMP officer in Surrey, BC, has been arrested and suspended after being confronted by Surrey Creep Catchers, a group of vigilante child predator hunters, live on Facebook Wednesday night.

A video posted to Facebook shows Ryan Laforge, president of the Surrey Creep Catchers chapter, walking up to another man just outside of a Boston Pizza.

"Officer Dan, how are you? Creep Catchers," Laforge says to the man, who responds by saying "Fuck!" and running. Laforge follows him, screaming "Surrey Creep Catcher, bitch! That guy's a cop pedo." Other members of Creep Catchers also pursued Laforge on foot.

Read more: Toronto's Vigilante 'Pedophile Hunters' Look to Turn Legit, Say They're Working with the FBI

Police later showed up and eventually arrested the officer, who is also being investigated criminally for child luring and sexual exploitation, and internally for code of conduct, according to information released at a press conference Friday. Specific charges have not yet been laid.

Assistant Commissioner Brenda Butterworth-Carr told reporters that if the allegations are true, "There is no room in the RCMP for this kind of behaviour, or this kind of individual." But Insp. Tyler Svendson told The Province newspaper the police "don't condone" creep catching.

Creep Catchers branches have been popping up across the country, including locations like Edmonton, Calgary, Saint John, and Thunder Bay.

In Toronto, vigilante Justin Payne has been confronting people he believes are pedophiles or child sex offenders for the last two years.

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Incredible, incredible thumbnail (Photo: YouTube)

Listen here is the way you shit in a supermarket: you drop trou and you shit on the tiles. The trousers need to drop to about the three-quarter-the-length-of-your-thigh area, not all the way. If you're dropping your trousers all the way to your ankles to shit in a supermarket then you are doing it wrong. It is like an unwritten rule of shitting in a supermarket. How do I know so much about how to shit in supermarkets? Because people shit in supermarkets all the time, dumb-dumb, and CCTV exists, and the videos always see them dropping trou and shitting on the tiles. Skirts complicate the issue and that is a separate article. But for now, for a base waterline of how to shit in supermarkets, take this: drop trou, shit on the tiling. That is the accepted way of doing it.

However:

And so we have a maverick. Consider this man, shitting in a supermarket in Russia the other week, a moment captured and made crystalline forever by CCTV – yes we all think CCTV on the whole is bad, listen we've all read Nineteen Eighty-Four, yes yes, but sometimes, like moments like this, when a man shits down the sides of his shorts on the floor of a supermarket in Russia, sometimes it justifies itself – and know that you are looking at an artist. This dude sees your norms, your laws, your accepted ways of shitting on the floor of a supermarket, and he laughs at them. He flips them all up on their head.

This dude just shat down the side of his shorts and plopped those little things out onto the floor of the supermarket like they were warm unwanted pears.

Suppose shitting in a supermarket can roughly be split into three distinct acts – sort of like a play! – all of which are demonstrated near-perfectly above video. Let's start with the opening act:

1. SHITTING IN A SUPERMARKET

First you have to actually have to do the shit. We have discussed this. You have to open the shitting in a supermarket process by doing the shit. The motives differ but the result is always the same: shit, on the floor, at a supermarket.

2. TRY AND BE DISCREET ABOUT IT

The thing about shitting in a supermarket is society still, for all its progress, frowns upon it, so you have to find a place in secret to do it. This is possible in many large supermarkets – of his time before Seinfeld got big, Larry David once said, "When I was living in New York and didn't have a penny to my name, I would walk around the streets and occasionally I would see an alcove or something. And I'd think, 'that'll be good, that'll be a good spot for me when I'm homeless'," and I feel much the same about shitting in supermarkets: I don't want to do it, but should I have to, I am prepared, especially in the Sainsbury's in Forest Hill – and you can see our Russian hero doing much the same. He is crouched in position of dropping his turds, in case someone peeks over the bread aisle and sees him do it; he is alone in a low foot-traffic aisle (the squash aisle, for example, would be a great place to shit in a supermarket, right by a pallet of Capri-Suns); at one point he kicks a turd under some skirting, which you would definitely do if you just shat in a supermarket. Nothing more embarrassing than being marched out of an ASDA by a disinterested security guard for shitting. Hide the evidence.

3. WIPIN' ON UP!

Hey: you got to wipe your butt when you shit! And what better way to do it than by stealing tissues and liquid soap from the very supermarket you just shat in. In many ways, this is rubbing salt in the wound – you just shat in a supermarket, and now you are thieving from it, a perfect double whammy – but also I think it displays a lot of what the overwhelming groupthink towards supermarkets is: that they are faceless, that stealing from them is a victimless crime, that they are large networks of tendrils and veins of a bigger megacorporation, the oppressor, and they need to be shat in to be taught a small lesson. Listen, we all think supermarkets are bad, but also we need somewhere to buy a Meal Deal every lunchtime, so we still shop in them. But maybe – just maybe – if once in a while we can drop a discreet turd in them, we can still stick it to The Man while still having a place we can buy laundry capsules on offer for £5 down from £5.99.

Suppose we'll never know the true motive for the anonymous Russian supermarket shitter – a lactose thing, a car boot sale burger, three cups of coffee followed by two bananas, that weird thing that happens sometimes where you really need to shit after you run – but we do know that... err... hmm. No there's... there's not really anything to learn from this one. No moral. The End.

@joelgolby

More stuff from VICE about exactly this thing:

Exploring The Philosophy Behind Women Shitting In Supermarkets

Exploring The Philosophy Behind Women Shitting In Supermarkets

Exploring The Philosophy Behind Women Shitting In Supermarkets

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

LGBT rights have come a long way in recent years, but to say that non-hetero people still don't have it easy would be an understatement. On September 3, a man said he and his partner were aggressively kicked off a London bus after boarding through the wrong set of doors; last weekend, homophobes attacked Pride committee members in Northern Ireland; on Monday, a Burnley footballer had to revisit tweets he popped off in 2012—calling for gay people to "burn"—after the FA charged him with misconduct over them.

In short, things can be rough. Some people think that the solution is to keep fighting tirelessly for equality. Gay separatist organization the Gay Homeland Foundation has proposed a different strategy: its members believe that the marginalization of gay culture is an inevitable consequence of societies where the majority of people are straight. They advocate the creation of an all-gay state. This might seem a little radical, but as far as they're concerned, it's the only feasible solution. I got in touch with the group's executive officer Viktor Zimmerman to find out why he believes that such a drastic move is required.

VICE: Hi Viktor, why do you think that gay people require their own homeland?
Viktor Zimmerman: We need a cultural and political center, where we can develop new, better ways of gay living that are more suited to our nature. Bringing gay people together in a creative and affirmative environment will release a tremendous energy. Thousands of gay artists, writers, sculptors, filmmakers, and songwriters will be brought together in one spot. There would be no more cultural oppression from the hetero; all the public spaces would be decorated with gay artwork.

A gay city-state would also become a safe haven for millions of gay people. Many gay people on this planet live in dangerous circumstances; their physical security is threatened on a daily basis, their jobs are insecure, and their families threaten them or try to force-marry them. Due to strict immigration restrictions, these people simply cannot relocate to another country. A gay country would be a very good option for these gay folks.

So the purpose of your organization is to secure a safe space for gay people, where gay cultural norms apply?
Yes, our purpose is to establish a free, independent, and democratic gay state. We strive to initiate one or more self-administrated settlements for gay people, and look to promote their economic, cultural, and political development.

Why focus on a gay homeland rather than improving LGBT rights in the nations that already exist?
There's no contradiction between the existence of a gay state and the improvement of gay rights in various existing nations; we can have both. Gay people need to come together, socialize, and exchange ideas. If there is to be genuine gay high culture, we will need more than just local gay bars, two to three gay bookstores, and a gay pride march once a year. This is not a question of human rights; it's is an issue of a six percent-minority population being dispersed in an unaccommodating cultural environment.

We also need to remember that human rights can be taken away as easily as they were granted. All the progress in gay rights that has been achieved has only taken place in the context of liberal democracies, and it has been a very difficult process that is still unfinished. We need a place where gay people can move to from hostile countries. The few refugees accepted by the US, Canada, and the EU are but a lucky few; the vast majority are refused admittance.

Where are you planning to set up the homeland?
Ideally, it should be somewhere where there is sufficiently cheap and habitable land available in a warm climate by the seaside. There is plenty of suitable land in South America, and its political circumstances seem favorable. A friendly Buddhist country in southeast Asia might be a strategically good choice, too.

Realistically, we will take whatever comes and try to make the best of it. Even artificial seagoing constructions are not out of the question. They are currently being developed by an organization called the Seasteading Institute, which is heavily funded by Peter Thiel, the gay guy who made a fortune by co-founding Paypal.

What's your long-term plan of action for establishing the state?
The first step is the formation of a non-territorial sovereign entity—a state without a territory. The entity would resettle gay refugees and help them with housing and jobs. Economic activities will be essential at this stage in order to give people employment and gain revenues for the security-related expenses. A gay development bank would help to establish small- and medium-size businesses to empower our people economically.

We will then strive to obtain political recognition from as many other states as possible. Such recognition would be very helpful in many kinds of activities: transit of refugees, international financial transactions, purchase of security-related equipment. To facilitate international recognition, we will use the legal precedence of the Order of Malta.

Isn't that a state that continued to exist after it lost its territory?
Yes, its sovereignty is still recognized by over 100 foreign governments. The next step would be taking a long-term lease on a moderate-sized territory from an existing country. The territory will be used to establish a settlement on conditions of extraterritoriality. Legally, it would still remain the territory of the host country, but we could administrate it according to our own laws.

Here's Zimmermann (left) with another Gay Homeland Foundation member at a group gathering in New York

Would any straight people be allowed to live there?
There will be straight people living in the gay territories, but their numbers will be limited and they will be not in charge. Dependents of citizens—underage children or helpless parents—will of course be admitted.

How would you ensure that the population wouldn't dwindle?
Immigration. We all know how gay babies are made—there are millions of them being born into this world year by year, without any effort on our side. All we need is for a fraction of them to pack their stuff together and move to the gay state.

Finally, how realistic do you think it is that you'll achieve your goal?
Legally, the foundation of the gay state is viable. There have been precedents for the establishment of new states via treaties, such as the creation of the Vatican state, and there have been multiple legal precedents for the peaceful acquisition of land. There have also been precedents for international recognition of non-territorial sovereign entities, such as the Order of Malta. We are confident that one day gay people will have territorial control over a sovereign territory.

Thanks, Viktor.

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