Images courtesy of Penguin Random House

Masha Gessen, a journalist, was born to a Jewish family in Moscow. In the early 1980s, facing a potentially bleak future for their children in the USSR, her family emigrated to the US, though Gessen moved back to Moscow after college. Gessen is a lesbian, and after anti-gay rhetoric heated up in Russia in 2013, she decided she'd only feel safe if she, her partner, and her three kids returned to the US. That double emigration left Gessen fascinated with the idea of space, safety, and identity.

Gessen, known for her work covering Russia's homophobic politics and the machinations of Putin, began looking into Birobidzhan, a small region near the Chinese border in Russian that was established as the world's first autonomous Jewish region in the early 1930s. Birobidzhan was never much: the climate and surrounding land was too harsh to support sustainable agriculture. No more than 30,000 Jews ever actually inhabited the region.

Birobidzhan was always more a dream than an actual place. The idea for Birobidzhan was based on the philosophies of Simon Dubnow, a Jewish writer and activist, who saw Jewish cultural autonomy as crucial to maintaining identity in the face of increased calls for Jews to assimilate. He saw cultural autonomy as a more enlightened alternative to state and military autonomy, but even Dubnow was skeptical of the dream of Birobidzhan. Soon after the Jewish region was established, Soviet leaders decided that Yiddish and Jewish autonomy was antithetical to a united Soviet front, and many of the region's leaders were murdered. Birobidzhan was over before it started.

Gessen's new book, Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region, is out now from Schocken/Penguin Random House. It follows the creators of Birobidzhan as they attempt to create an idyllic Jewish enclave, traces Masha's family's history of emigration, and explores what it means to be a Jew and to have a safe space to live. VICE spoke with Masha Gessen to find out how Birobidzhan got started, and what we can learn from it today.

VICE: Why did you want to write this book?
Masha Gessen: I first wrote it in 2009. There was this draft that was lying around for years. I knew the draft needed to be reworked, but I couldn't get myself excited enough to rework it. Then when I emigrated for the second time, fleeing Russia again, as my parents had done 35 years earlier, that sort of gave me the motivation to rework the book and turn it into the draft that was finally published.

What drew you to Birobidzhan as a topic, in specific?
I was never particularly interested in Birobidzhan as an actual place, just because there isn't a whole lot to say about Birobidzhan as a place. Birobidzhan, in a way, never happened. It was an idea that was tied to a place. I was interested in the idea of autonomism, and I was also interested in this idea of a safe place for Jews, which is intimately tied to the idea of autonomism. I knew that the book ultimately had to be a rumination on safety, immigration, exile, and diaspora. I wasn't in that state of mind until I had to go into exile for the second time in my life.

In some ways, the book is a history of Birobidzhan, but it's not just a history because the idea of a separate place for Jews is still a very controversial, right?
I hope it's not purely historical. I think that the theme of exile, the theme of diaspora, the theme of are you ever really safe if you're not with your own people? are all universal. I'm also really interested in the idea of what it means to be Jewish. And that is why Simon Dubnow, the originator of the idea of autonomism is such a major character in the book. He is incredibly eloquent on what makes a Jew. He talks about the possibility of a secular Jewish identity, the possibility of a cultural Jewish identity, the possibility that you can be non-observant but Jewish, but you cannot be Jewish and observant in another religion. He was very clear about that. He focused very closely and brilliantly on the conflict between emancipation in the sense of being granted cultural rights and cultural identity.

I think most American Jews have an incredibly narrow idea of what being Jewish is, and it actually ties to my own life and my kids' lives as exiles. My 18-year-old son was telling me that just the other day, that he keeps getting into arguments with other teenagers who tell him he can't be Jewish if he's not religious. But he probably knows more about what it feels like to be a Jew in the world than many religious Jews here.

Was the dream behind Birobidzhan different from the reality?
In the early 20th century, there was an ongoing debate among different factions of Jewish thinkers. There was the assimilationist urge, and there were two kinds of reactions to the urge to assimilate. One was the Zionist argument: The Zionist argument was basically founded in the idea that as long as Jews live in diaspora, they will be followed by anti-Semitism, and that you could never get rid of anti-Semitism as long as Jews were a minority where they lived. The only way for Jews to live free of anti-Semitism was to have their own state. In the Zionist argument, the location of that state was not terribly important—although it was better if it was in Palestine—but it had to be a full state with its own army and with sovereignty.

And then there was Dubnow's argument. He basically said on one level that Jews had lived in diaspora for 2,000 years and there's no reason to move elsewhere, but at the same time there was every reason to resist the assimilation. And the way to do it, to maintain a cultural identity, was to strive for a kind of autonomy, but that autonomy should not include state sovereignty and should not include having a Jewish army. Jews could be protected by the state where they live, but they should have the right to self-government. He saw the Jews lacking military and lacking state sovereignty as a positive, as what allowed Jews to become the purest, the best kind of nation. And this really breaks my heart, but his argument was Jews would be unable to oppress another people with their military might, because they've never had military might. They're unable to fight over territory, because they've never had their own territory. Which is sad because today we see that's obviously not true.

What was Dubnow's take on Birobidzhan?
Dubnow was no advocate of Birobidzhan. His ideal of autonomism was already perverted by Birobidzhan because he didn't think that Jews had any way of benefiting from the Bolshevik state. He was very much a realist on that. But it was that idea that the founders of Birobidzhan ran with, and you have to admit it sounded pretty good on paper. But then, of course, when the first reconnaissance mission to Birobidzhan returned, they said that place is pretty much uninhabitable. It was either swampland or rocks and it was infested with, as they put it, these evil insects, which really make it impossible to survive the summer there for both man and cattle. And the Soviet State was never concerned with the human cost of whatever project they undertook, so they just sent Jews to this uninhabitable place, and when they arrived, it was a nightmare. They had no real shelter. The weather was awful. There were no roads. They couldn't work the land because they didn't know how and because the land was almost impossible to cultivate.

Birobidzhan is a like a monument to an idea that never came to fruition—Masha Gessen

What did you think this region was like before you went, and what did it turn out being like when you visited?
I'm not sure I was expecting anything. I just wanted to check it out. It's a weird little place. On one hand, it looks like any other Russian provincial town. It's close to the border with China, so it's very much oriented toward China economically, and at this point, even culturally. The border is fairly permeable so there are a lot of Chinese people in Birobidzhan, a lot of traders, Chinese restaurants, that sort of thing. In other ways, Birobidzhan is like a monument to an idea that never came to fruition. It was just populated by statues and monuments of something that was never really there.

Did you come away with any feelings one way or the other about the need for a separate space for Jews?
I think that for me, the very, very, very long process of trying to figure out what kind of Jew I am has settled into a fairly comfortable place of thinking many contradictory things at the same time, which I think is a very Jewish thing to do. I think I would like to live in an imaginary Birobidzhan or an imaginary Jewish autonomy. I don't think I would actually like to live in an actual Jewish autonomy. I think that I like living in New York City. In fact, that's probably as close as one comes to living in a kind of Jewish autonomy.

You dedicate the book to your parents. Specifically you say "To my parents, who had the courage to emigrate," and I was wondering why you decided on that dedication.
This book is largely a rumination on exile and on emigration, and the question that I keep circling back to is how do you know when it's time to go? And sort of implicit in that question is how do you get up the courage to jump into the unknown? To this day, I can't imagine what it was like for my parents. I was a young teenager then, but I didn't have responsibility for much. I know how scary it was for me to pick up my family, which includes my partner and our two kids, to move to New York City, where I had been to college. And I had a US passport and I had the money to buy a house. Still, it was really scary to uproot my whole family, to put my kids through losing everything that they had taken for granted, and enter the culture shock of emigration.

I can't imagine what it was like for my parents who didn't know where they were going, who didn't have papers, who had to go through a very mild form of refugeehood. We were in refugee camps in Austria and then Italy for a couple of months. What does it feel like to know that you had responsibilities for two young kids and you didn't even know how you were going to make a living? My mother has been dead for 24 years, but my father is still around and doing fine. And he has told me that he thinks of it as a great adventure and an incredible opportunity that they had. I think that's a really awesome way to think about it.

'Where the Jews Aren't' is out now on Penguin Random House. Order it here.

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Images courtesy of director Charles Siskel.

The Anarchist Cookbook is like a boy scout's survival guide if written by Ken Kesey, Alexander Shulgin, and Tyler Durden. The 1970 text features "recipes" or guides to making homemade bombs, illegal drugs, and phreaking devices in the form of a kitchen manual. It also features illustrated diagrams, ingredient lists, and prose calling for social change and armed revolution. In the mainstream, the book gained notoriety after being discovered in the homes of mass murderers, such as the Croatian radicals who bombed Grand Central Station in 1976, Thomas Spinks, who bombed abortion clinics in the 1980s, and Colorado school shooter Karl Pierson. It has reportedly sold over two million copies.

But what about William Powell, the author of the book? He wrote The Anarchist Cookbook at age 19 during the peak of the counterculture movement to protest the Vietnam War. Years later, he worked as a teacher in Africa and Asia, and Powell distanced himself from his own work, denouncing the book on its Amazon page. It was also dropped by multiple publishing houses, and the author recently penned an op-ed for The Guardian, asking for the book to "quickly and quietly go out of print."

The book's contested legacy comes back into focus this fall thanks to Finding Vivien Maier director Charlie Siskel, whose documentary on William Powell called American Anarchist premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival this week. The film is not so much a documentary as an interrogation. Most of it is in the form of a talking head interview where Siskel asks Powell to recount his side of the story. But then something odd happens. Siskel starts pushing his own agenda, trying to pin Powell as responsible for the acts of violence the book may or may not have enabled, and even asks Powell whether he feels a moral guilt about the incidents. It becomes readily clear that the director's intent is not about painting a portrait of an aging man who wrote something controversial when he was 19, but rather point a finger at him and make him reckon with the accusations. At one point, the line of pointed questioning is even contested by Powell and his wife.

It's riveting to watch, but also strange, as Powell seems erudite and genuinely remorseful, yet Siskel seems determined to get some revelation to make his documentary relevant. Eventually, he gets Powell to open up about the abuse he suffered as a child, leaving the viewer more sympathetic with the film's subject than the director clearly trying to play puppet-master. That said, the on-screen antagonism, the history of The Anarchist Cookbook, and how the internet prevented Powell from escaping his past makes for an incredible film experience, even if the approach is sometimes questionable.

Unfortunately we'll never get to find out what Powell thinks of Siskel and the documentary. He died in July of this year. We did, however, talk to the director, who defended his interview tactics as a means to an end of getting the story he wanted.

Before I watched your film, I never really thought about the author of The Anarchist Cookbook.
That's how I felt, exactly. I thought about Powell when I saw his statement renouncing the book on Amazon. We included a mention of The Anarchist Cookbook in Bowling for Columbine, which I worked on, and I just found myself thinking more and more about that period and about the book.

I had always been interested in that period—the Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society, and the New Left—when the 60s counterculture movement turned from nonviolent peaceful process to violence with the younger generation more and more disillusioned with the politics of the old left and angry about Vietnam, and how turned towards violence. Then I started wondering what would it be like to be the guy who wrote that book.

Watching the film, it seems that you came into the documentary with a set idea of the story that you wanted him to tell. At one point in the film, Powers even questions you about your own motives.
I had been thinking a lot about the Joseph Conrad book Lord Jim, and I quote that book in the film. I was very upfront with Powell about what I thought about his story and what I was interested in talking to him about. I also told him that I thought his story was a tragic one. I don't know if I used the word "haunted," but my sense was that he had written the book when he was young and that it was a youthful mistake and that he had paid a very high price for it. That was my instinct. Then we talked about the fact that I saw him as a flawed character. He was a real intellectual, so I don't think he was put off by that description.

In the film, both he and his wife tell you that you questioned him harshly.
Umm... I feel empathy for Bill and I felt that he would be willing to look at the uncomfortable truths about his past and confront some of the uncomfortable facts—that he continued to take money from the book, that he never took his name off the book, that he had opportunities to speak out more about the book. I sensed that he would be willing to do that, and I was empathetic to him, and I was on his side.

It is a difficult thing to do, and it is a human story. We all have things about our past that are uncomfortable, things that are easier to ignore than to confront, but I did know that it wouldn't come easily. I thought he would be a reluctant witness, so to speak, and that it would take some prodding and pushing to get him to talk about some of the stuff. I had to do that, to press him about his actions, his inactions, about the story that he had grown comfortable in telling, and to also try to point out some problems with his story.

Do you feel that you manipulated him?
It's such a loaded word. I don't think so because, again, he invited me to interview him. He knew the story what I was interested in telling. I was very upfront with him about that and it's clear in the film.

But at times it seems like you don't believe his testimony?
During one of the early moments in the interview process, I was genuinely surprised to hear that he had not read the book since he wrote it, and that he did not own a copy of it. I brought a copy with me, not because I thought that he hadn't read it, but because I wanted to film him reading part of the book as part of the storytelling. I didn't know that he was going to say that he hadn't read the book, and I still don't know if I believe if that's true. As I say, I was up front with Bill about the story that I wanted to tell. So no, I don't think I manipulated him, but I know that is a word that gets thrown about a lot in a documentary context.

So why do you repeat the same question about his moral guilt to him throughout the documentary?
He was trying to spin it as something that is different from what it is. He starts off by saying that the book does not advocate violence, and then when confronted with some of the words in the book, he says well, "OK, that's just over the top rhetoric." Then he reads some more and then finally admits that is a call to action, to violence. He had a long time to think about those things, and so I think that he was having a hard time admitting to me, or on camera, or to himself, that he had thought about these things and was ready to admit that the book had caused all these harms, or that the book did advocate violence.

In the 1970s, there were the Weather Underground bombings. For it to never have occurred to you that the book might have been used to commit crimes seems implausible. The book, in the early 1990s, was used to blackmail him, as he describes it. It is an infamous book, but what made the book infamous? The fact that it has been used in these other ways .

For more on 'The Anarchist Cookbook,' watch our doc on the controversial book:

Don't you think the internet would have made the information that was available in the book, available in any case?
Yes. If Powell didn't write the book, then this information would still have been out there in many ways. It was already out there in the public domain. Look at where he got it from... He got it in military manuals at the public library. The Weather Underground figured out how to make bombs without using Bill's book, presumably the same way that he did, with military manuals. I don't think that the movie, nor I, would not want to suggest that the book was somehow the cause of any of these acts of violence. There was something universal in his story that we can all relate to, and one thing in particular is that young people do stupid things. Today, a lot of people do stupid things on the internet, and they are publicly paying a price for things.

Why do you think Powell decided that you were the right person to tell the story? Do you think he knew he was about to die?
I don't think so. I do believe he was in reasonable health. I think his death was unexpected. He was reflecting back on his life and he was working on a memoir and so it was all about the right timing for him.. And in terms of choosing to work with me: I asked, and I don't know if any one else did.

But in the film, you say he had many requests to talk?
That's true. But I don't know if there was anyone asking to make a documentary film about him.

You reveal that Powell suffered abuse as a child quite late in the documentary. Why did you you not include those details when talking about his upbringing earlier in the film?
Why do you think? That's an editorial choice, obviously. I hate to say this, but I did a very similar thing in Finding Vivian Maier. I feel like mentioning it early is like loading the deck in some weird way. I feel like not earned on some level in the beginning, and that you don't know the person at the start. It will not mean something unless we've gotten to know the person of whom you are learning these sad things.

Do you think that the story of the abuse is true, or was he trying to get sympathy?
Oh, that's a good question. He doesn't identify who did it, but I do think that he's telling the truth. Yes, I do, because he doesn't have to lie about that. There is no shame in having been abused and it's obviously very important that survivors of abuse talk about it.

In the film, you show a lot of kids making the recipes into bombs. It's a pretty funny sequence.
It's terrifying. Sadly a good percentage of internet content is kids doing stupid things. I want people to be shocked by it and worried by it. There is also something funny about it and irresponsible. That is what young people do. Being young is the time to do stupid things.

Follow Kaleem on Twitter.

Visit the film's website to learn more about 'American Anarchist.'

On this week's edition of First-Person Shooter, we gave a disposable camera to a guy named Van who hates his summer job. Van's been cleaning ponds for cash. He found the gig on Craigslist while trying to save up for a trip to Mexico, but it's pretty shitty. He spends his days going to mansions in LA to pick out the green muck that's stuck in rich people's fountains, pools, and other things that contain a lot of bacteria-filled water. ("The bottom of a drained pond smells wretched," he says.)

Van told us that as soon as he finished shooting, he called his boss and quit. Good for you, Van! Enjoy your trip to Mexico. Summer's over, who wants to go in a pond anyway? Here's what else the former-pond cleaner told us about his tenure standing in muddy water this summer.

VICE: How long have you been cleaning ponds?
Only for a couple months. I got the job off Craigslist at the beginning of summer to make some extra cash for a trip to Mexico. I was initially drawn to the headline for the job posting because it read "Echo Park Lake Muck Removal." I called the number and was offered to start the next day.

Do you fix/clean/build other things as well?
Usually just building ponds and other types of water features, but if the bossman wanted to take a weird job and make us do it, he had no problem with that. For example, I got stuck laying tile for two weeks in this old man's backyard because he was a family friend of my boss.

What's the weirdest thing you've found in a pond?
You get used to finding nasty stuff like condoms, hypodermic needles, and beer bottles, but pulling a whole bike out of Echo Park Lake was definitely the coolest thing.

Are the ponds you clean normally at giant mansions?
Yes, the accounts are usually in Beverly Hills or South Pasadena, so I'm typically at massive homes. I saw the biggest house I've ever seen in Beverly Hills. It had four private ponds. I think the least fancy pond we worked on was at an elementary school.

I'm seeing a lot of algae in the photos, what do you with it?
We throw it in the trash. When we work in Echo Park, we usually remove about 150 milk crates of muck from the lake every day. The city doesn't want it for compost because it's so wet and messy.

What'd you do at the end of your day?
Well the day I finished these photos I called my boss and quit over the phone. It was the worst two months of my life and I really just wanted some extra cash to go to Mexico. I've gone back to freelance photo work since quitting. You can see my work on my website and Instagram.

Follow Julian on Instagram and visit his website to see his own photo work.

Check out Michael Hawkin's Instagram and Tumblr.

Over the past seven days, America witnessed seven mass shootings that left five dead and 32 wounded. These attacks bring the US mass shooting body count so far in 2016 to 291 dead and 1,037 injured.

Meanwhile, Europe suffered one mass shooting over the same period of time: On Saturday at about 5:00 PM, at least 15 men came to the home of a businessman in Yekaterinburg, Russia, to confront him over a dispute he'd had with guests at a local Roma wedding the previous night. The businessman responded by opening fire with a Kalashnikov-type weapon, killing two people and injuring seven before fleeing. He later turned himself in to local authorities, claiming the large group shot first and that he'd acted in self-defense. This incident brings the continent's body toll in such attacks so far this year to 43 dead and 136 injured.

Although America witnessed a couple of equally deadly and one much bloodier mass shooting than that in Yekaterinburg this week, none of them succeeded in drawing the same level of national attention. That's likely because all of this week's US attacks largely conformed to standard narratives of violence—and many lacked significant, eye-catching public details as well.

At about 3:30 AM on Saturday, a street shooting in Chicago, Illinois, left four people injured. Around 2:40 PM that day, a shooting at a housing project in Wilmington, North Carolina, wounded another four. The following morning, at about 3:00 AM, a shooting in a bar in Roanoke, Virginia, killed one man and left ten others injured. Then on Monday at about 2:00 AM a shooting in a parking lot outside of a packed event center in Clive, Iowa, left two dead and two injured. That evening, at about 5:30 PM, a street shooting in Reading, Pennsylvania, left four more injured. Later that night, another street shooting at about 10:45 PM in Chicago, Illinois, left two more individuals dead and three injured. And finally, at about 7:00 PM on Thursday, a shooting outside a home in Hot Springs, Arkansas, left five more individuals injured.

One recent attack in America has rivaled Yekaterinburg in terms of national and international media coverage—but it was not a mass shooting. On Thursday, a 14-year-old girl shot a fellow student (non-lethally) at an Alpine, Texas, high school before killing herself, triggering a huge response—in which one law enforcement officer accidentally shot another (non-lethally)—and a flurry of coverage. Despite its low body count, this incident likely attracted more attention than, say, the much bloodier Roanoke bar shooting earlier that week because, as Jaclyn Schildkraut, a specialist on media coverage of mass shootings at the State University of New York—Oswego recently explained to VICE, schools hold a special place in our national conscience. They're full of people we think of as especially tragic victims in a space that should be safe, but that also reminds us of numerous prior horrors. The power of these readings and memories allows even a limited shooting at a school to draw significantly more attention than larger incidents, even those involving kids or teens, in more routine, less sympathetic and tragically resonant locations.

Especially toward the start of a new school year, the pull to focus on the Alpine shooting makes sense. But ultimately the disparity in coverage over this past week just speaks to a disturbing tendency in America to write off lives and tragedies that lack narrative resonance. On a logical level, we know that a life lost is significant no matter where it occurs, and that the largest mass shootings perhaps ought to be those that draw the most attention, barring truly unusual and significant circumstances within others. However until we find a way to reconcile our logical brains with our sensationalist and story-hungry brains, America will continue to allow many mass shootings and lives lost therein to slip through the cracks. And with those attacks, deaths, and injuries largely unnoticed, we allow a major national epidemic of violence to fester on.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Before the sun is up, before I've even picked up my bags at the Anchorage airport terminal, I start to notice the curious looks. At first I don't mention it to my Muslim-American associate Shaian. To be fair, we both stand out like sore brown thumbs in a sea of jean shorts and woodland camo Crocs.

The last thing I want to do is assume that we're going to be racially profiled, or that we're the focus of some backwater bigotry, but it's difficult to remain pragmatic when you end up in a room behind an FBI building explaining your purpose in Alaska. I tell the officer that we're in the remote Northwest to visit congregants of the Islamic Community Center of Anchorage Alaska—the state's first-ever mosque—to examine how their small Muslim community is faring in a sociopolitical climate colder than its glaciers.

Historically, Alaska has been one of the most conservative states in the union, having only voted blue once in 1964 after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Over the past 25 years, Alaska has been quietly evolving. From 1980 to 2015, the the population of minorities has increased approximately 25 percent, with nonwhites now being listed as 40 percent of the state's demographics according to numbers provided by the Alaska Department of Labor.

Even with this political and cultural shift, Alaska, like many locations in the United States, can be a difficult place to exist for Muslim-Americans. In 2010, in a small town called King Salmon, the FBI foiled a terrorist plot that left many residents on edge and weary of their Muslim neighbours. More recently, Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, endorsed a Republican presidential nominee who has centered his campaign around anti-Islamic rhetoric, only adding to the uneasy tension here.

Beyond the quiet anti-Muslim undertones, Alaska has the highest rate of gun deaths in the country, the third highest violent crime rate, and a police presence that's also near the bottom of the list. When one factors in an arctic climate not synonymous with Muslim countries, you'd expect Alaska to be the last place that any practitioner of Islam would want to live. And you'd be dead wrong.

In late 2012, the Islamic Community Center of Anchorage Alaska broke ground on its multiyear construction project. This marks a historic event, because as it nears completion, the ICCAA will be the first-ever mosque to be erected in the state of Alaska. 6,000 miles away from Mecca and only a short flight from the Arctic Circle, the large white two-story complex is an isolated sanctuary for Muslim-Americans that call the The Last Frontier home.

I joked that this assignment could go the way of The Revenant, but as we drive down the Old Seward Highway towards our hotel, Anchorage looks like a lot of other American towns. I look out the window at a string of pro-Trump signs that line the road, and at first glance, I think nothing of it. After all, we're in a Republican state in an unprecedented election year.

It turns out we're staying in the same hotel that held a Trump rally just nights before. I read up on the rally and discover that the Trump campaign headquarters in Alaska is being set up right across the street. Shaian thinks this is fortunate news and decides that he wants to head over there after we grab breakfast to wrangle a quote from a campaign surrogate for a piece he's working on about climate change.

Down in the dining room, I help myself to a surprisingly decent continental breakfast, while flat screen TVs that line the walls echo a talking head with a bad haircut and cheap suit, vociferating about Hillary's emails. I'd never even heard of the One America News Network before coming to Alaska, but I now know that an hour of watching that garbage is akin to waterboarding.

I finish whipping up some Belgian waffles, stroll over to an open table in the crowded dining room, put my breakfast plate down, and head back to the drink line to pour myself a cup of coffee. Seconds later, I turn to see someone grabbing my plate and tossing it in the trash.

The server there apologizes for the "inconvenience" and asks what we're in town for. I'm reluctant to tell her at first because I don't want to cause a scene with all the camo clad fellas who are exercising their Second Amendment rights while enjoying their meals. Quietly, I tell her that I'm in town to write a piece on the new mosque that's being built around the corner. She looks at me and says, "What's a mosque?"

After finishing my coffee, we head down the road for an impromptu meet-and-greet with Trump campaign staff. Inside the massive structure is a confusing combination of hotel rooms, offices, retail locations, a gym, and an ice rink all stacked on top of each other.

Shaian going from office-to-office asking for the location of the Trump campaign office quickly proves to be a terrible idea, and garners a little too much negative attention. We are immediately shadowed by several police officers and rent-a-cops until we leave the building.

Later that night (or day, because the sun is still up around 8 PM) we travel to the ICCAA. As we drive around the neighbourhood trying to navigate the maze of construction, I notice several of the houses surrounding the masjid brazenly sporting Trump regalia—banners, bumper stickers, lawn signs—the works. I can't help but to feel like this is some sort of passive-aggressive stance at their new Muslim neighbours. The last time I'd been in a mosque was my deployment to Iraq almost a decade earlier, and that was under completely different circumstances. I know first-hand how groups of weaponized Americans can act around Muslims, and it isn't always pleasant.

While we stand outside waiting, the parking lot begins to fill with worshippers. One of the members walking in for the Isha, or evening prayer, seems happy to see us even though we are complete strangers. He introduces himself and his two young boys then graciously ushers us in.

Evening prayer. Photo by Dylan Park

Before the praying starts, we stand in the back of the carpeted room, and look on as an elder sits on the floor with a group of young boys gathered around him. He speaks to them about the importance of receiving an education to provide for their families and community. With attentive eyes, they ask him questions about college options and potential career fields. I think about myself at that same age, and I'm a bit ashamed of what a little shithead I was. These children were discussing callings in law, medicine, and engineering to contribute to humanity; at 11-years-old, I couldn't be bothered with anything more than Super Nintendo and Thrasher magazines.

When the members finish their mesmerizing prayer, we meet with one of the leaders of the community—an African man named Lameen, who has a reserved but noble presence about him. Initially, he's hesitant to open up to us, and declines an official interview.

He expresses reservation due to previous threats and vandalism directed towards the masjid. Each news report of a terrorist attack carried out around the globe by Islamic extremists seems to bring more and more media outlets to their growing community. Not all of them with good intentions, he explains.

After some informal conversation, he sees the sincerity of our approach. We are instructed to come back the next day, when we'll be able to speak with the mosque's community relations coordinator. Before we leave, he says that we are always welcome.

The following day, I park right across from one of the homes adorned in Trump banners and American flags. I notice a man working under the hood of a car eyeballing me as I exit my vehicle. We make eye contact, and as pleasantly as I can, I wave and say hello. He doesn't reciprocate my greeting and steps out from behind the muscle car gripping a mallet. Red flags immediately go up in my head, and I tell Shaian to stay his ass in the car.

Under watchful scrutiny, I approach him to explain that I'm a journalist writing a story about the new mosque that's being built just feet from his house. I ask if he has any commentary that he'd like to share.

He immediately dismisses me with, "I'm not interested." I say no problem, and as I walk away, he yells, "I want no part of your liberal agenda! This isn't a game to me!" I turn back to assure him that I'm not up to any funny business, and that I'm actually a decorated war veteran myself. I show him the worn black metal bracelet on my right wrist that displays the name of a dead friend. This seems to ease the tension just enough and he places the mallet on the engine block. He's visibly embarrassed to have treated me so rudely and thanks me for my service.

"Look, I'm a red-blooded American and I love my country," he explains. Me too, I say. Me too. "I have nothing against Muslims, but when they show up, innocent people start dying, and that's a fact." Wait, what? I ask him to clarify. "I don't have any problems with these folks as long as they keep to themselves and don't blow anything up." Yikes. I want to explain to him that, statistically, he has a much greater chance of being gored to death by an angry moose in Alaska, than he does of dying in a terrorist attack carried out by radical Islamists. I don't even waste my breath though. The only thing that's radical in his neighborhood is the cherry 1989 Chevrolet Camaro Iroc-Z that he's wrenching on, I quip. He chuckles, and I thank him for taking a brief moment to speak with me before I head back across the street.

Inside the mosque, I'm greeted by Youssef, a local physician who also acts as the communications director for the ICCAA. "Why Alaska?" I ask. He tells me that as a physician looking for an immigration visa, one of the requirements is that they work in an underserved community. "Anchorage isn't a bad community," he says. "It's just too far away from the Lower 48 and there aren't a lot of people here."

Alaska sports the lowest population per square mile in the United States. But that's slowly changing. "A lot of people don't know that Anchorage is the second most diverse place in the country behind New York," Youssef explains. He's slightly mistaken. According to data reported by the University of Alaska, three neighborhoods in Anchorage actually have the most diverse census tracts in the entire country.

He reminisces about a time when their congregation was so small that they worshipped in a rented out retail space in a strip mall down the road. But when an inundation of political refugees from the Middle East started moving to Anchorage, they soon outgrew that space, and had to rent out the space next door, too.

After pooling together some savings, they invested in building a center big enough to service their community that Youssef estimates is now over two thousand people. More importantly they wanted a site that promoted growth and a venue that would ultimately help them establish a positive rapport within Anchorage.

I try to ask him about any negative experiences that they've faced in recent years. He alludes to cases of vandalism, death threats, and briefly mentions a law enforcement plant that tried to infiltrate and entrap the mosque—but declines to provide details. Youssef isn't too interested in talking about hate crimes. He jokes about an incident where an individual emailed them to say that he hopes Trump is elected so all the Muslims are forced to leave America. He chuckles when he tells us that the bigot accidentally emailed them from his wife's work email, and they received an awkward apology the next day.

Youssef pivots to discuss the future, how Alaska is changing for the better, and about what the ICCAA brings to the community. "This is a hard time for Muslims everywhere; we're trying to build bridges."

We're given a tour of the 14,000-square-foot facility that's still under construction. Understandably, they don't allow us to take pictures because they want their investors and patrons to have the first preview. I suspect that they also may have some security concerns. Our guide tells us that they expect the community center to be completely finished early next year, but adds that they've continually missed deadlines and gone over budget. And it's easy to see why.

Within its walls, no expense is spared on the amenities. Modern tile flooring leads us down a hallway into a large two story prayer hall with gorgeous chandeliers that hang down from a vaulted ceiling. An elevator leads up to a balcony with a glass partition where the women will pray. There is space for classrooms, a childcare center, a game room, and a state-of-the-art kitchen. Towards the front of the building, overlooking the city through massive windows, is another large space that we're told is for non-denominational gatherings. Again, the guide wants to make it abundantly clear that folks of all faiths are always welcome.

The next morning, I sit down with Elvi Gray-Jackson and Dick Traini, the chair and vice chair of the Anchorage Assembly. Under new leadership, local government officials in Anchorage are making it a point to usher diversity into their city. I ask them what types of programs they have in place to promote an inclusive environment for the Muslims there.

"We invite everyone to volunteer for boards and commissions. We don't have a religious test. We'd like folks of all backgrounds to represent different functions—from parks and rec to animal control," Dick says. Dick tells us he's Mormon and Elvi, an African-American, formerly identified as a Jehovah's Witness. Elvi adds that under a recent change in the Anchorage Municipal Code, officials are required to recruit minorities to fill a percentage of the new positions within the municipality to increase representation.

Photo by Shaian Mohammadi

In 2014, Anchorage joined the White House's Welcoming Cities project, as one of the cities around the country that acknowledge the social and cultural contributions of their immigrant and refugee populations through employment opportunities, education, and civic engagement. Proof of this can be seen all over the downtown area, with slogans that say things like, "Welcoming Anchorage," "Stronger Together," or "Eliminate Racism."

Before leaving town, I speak with Staci Feger-Pellesier, the Public Affairs Specialist for the Anchorage Division of the FBI. But only after an awkward encounter in their visitor center in which Shaian is asked if he's carrying a gun or bomb and I'm asked what my purpose in Alaska is. When I say the word "mosque" we are quickly escorted off the premises by armed guards and shadowed all the way to our vehicle.

After returning to my hotel room, I receive a phone call from Staci. Thinking that we're now under investigation and on some government watch list, I'm ultra apologetic to her. I tell her about my meetings with the mosque and how the board cited their close relationship with the FBI. (I later found out that my statement was quickly vetted, because an official from the masjid let us know they were contacted by the feds questioning them to confirm my story.)

I ask her if there have been any prominent threats against the Muslim community in Alaska that she can speak on. She can't comment on any specifics, and states the FBI is not a "first responder" agency, but that they do have a "very active community outreach program." I'm tempted to inquire if this outreach program is the same one that imbeds spies into the mosque, but I don't because I have no intentions of ending up in Gitmo. She points us towards the Anchorage Police Department for additional information. Unsurprisingly, APD declines to comment.

We check out of our hotel room, and since Alaska still has yet to reach an agreement with rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft, I have the hotel hail us a taxi. Moments later, a yellow Dodge Caravan rolls up to the curb, and a tall blonde-hair blue-eyed dude in his mid-to-late-20s hops out to help me load my luggage into the trunk.

On the way to the airport, we make small talk to break the awkward silence. He has a pretty pronounced East Coast accent, so I guess New Jersey. I'm wrong. He tells me he moved to Alaska with his family from Connecticut. He wagers that 70 percent of the residents in Anchorage are from out of town.

"Folks come out here for the peace and quiet. They come here for a change of pace, for something different. But people from Alaska, they can't wait to leave." It's obvious, but I ask him why that is. "Because the winters are long and cold." Could've fooled me. The weather is gorgeous outside. He tells me that beyond the rough climate, Alaska gets a bad rap for its crime, "but the crime here is mostly DUIs and drug abuse." I respond by telling him about the astronomical gun death rate, but also clarify that 80 percent of the gun deaths in Alaska are suicides. The long dark winters take a toll on people, he says.

As we approach the airport, he asks me what I'm doing in his neck of the woods. I'm in town for work, I say. I mention that I'm writing a piece about the growing Muslim community in Alaska, and he gets really quiet. For a very brief moment, I fear that I've opened up a can of bigoted worms, and expect him to say something disparaging about the population.

He looks in the rearview mirror, and with a slightly different inflection says, "You were at the masjid this week? I go every Friday." I know I look confused because he quickly follows up by saying that he practices Islam. No shit, I say. "Yeah, I get that a lot. My family is from Albania, and we came out here to work in the taxi industry." My mind is completely blown.

"Life in Alaska is beautiful, man. It's a blessing everyday we wake up here." It's apparent that more and more Muslim families are feeling that way as they look north to the future.

Follow Dylan Park on Twitter.

Tonight on VICELAND, watch back-to-back episodes of Dead Set on Life from 4 to 9 PM ET/PT in Canada only. You can also catch more highlights from the first season scattered throughout Sunday.

Photo by Flickr User LaVladina via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Call it a delayed reality check. Over the past couple of years, the UK's publishing world has become increasingly aware of how much it can exclude the voices and contributions of people of color and those from marginalized backgrounds. Last week, Waterstones announced they'd hired a woman called Elizabeth Preston to re-launch their Gower Street shop events program, to mark it as a place of "literary, cultural, and intellectual activity." On Tuesday morning, I discovered that the first panel was all-white at the time (Nikesh Shukla was invited but unavailable; Sunny Singh has since been added, with others expected), and I tweeted about what I saw as a problem; here again, writers of color had been thus far excluded from the conversation.

Preston's response was defensive, which I hadn't anticipated; I hadn't accused her of being racist and I hoped to start a conversation about the dearth of diversity in publishing and how she felt trying to address it. The result? She said she felt attacked, though tweeted that she was "aware the panel is a problem right now; it's something I'm working hard on."

Preston later apologized to me in private, but reflecting on our odd exchange I wondered what it is that makes talking about race so volatile. I realized that this wasn't just about Preston's response to my observation, but a wider issue where some white people find it hard when they're called out on their blind spots around race. It makes them feel uncomfortable, and they often jump to victimhood as a defense, or resolve to gaslight people of color and without hearing out their perspectives.

It turns out there's a term for this: white fragility. You may have seen it bandied about online, but it was actually coined by academic Dr. Robin DiAngelo. "It became clear over time that white people have extremely low thresholds for enduring any discomfort associated with challenges to our racial worldviews," DiAngelo wrote in an article outlining just what she means by the term. "We can manage the first round of challenge by ending the discussion through platitudes—usually something that starts with 'People just need to,' or 'Race doesn't really have any meaning to me,' or 'Everybody's racist.' Scratch any further on that surface, however, and we fall apart."

In fairness, DiAngelo is American, so framed her argument around how race is seen as the "third rail" in the US. But that doesn't mean we in the UK don't have our own issues with race and ethnicity. In Britain, racism has always been more systemic, more quietly insidious, and, in many ways, hidden. What persists here is the dangerous notion that we don't have a problem with racism—and it means that when prejudice is pointed out, white people aren't often ready to acknowledge the ways it hurts the rest of us. It doesn't matter that ethnic minorities here make up a smaller slice of the population than in the US. We're still prone to what DiAngelo identified as some white people's reactions to someone trying to start a frank conversation about race or racism: white people often "withdraw, defend, cry, argue, minimize, ignore, and in other ways push back to regain racial position and equilibrium."

I put this idea to Daisy Buchanan, a white fellow journalist. "I find myself very frightened about any discussions involving race because of the 'calling out,'" she said. As an example, she goes back to a time when she wrote a piece about Beyoncé's "Pretty Hurts" video. "A Twitter user—incidentally, I think they were white—went for me, using quite abusive language, saying that as a white woman I could not have an opinion on or criticize Beyoncé—and I don't think that's OK either. The culture of 'calling out' in all its forms needs to incorporate civility. A small group of people use it to be unpleasant and unkind, ostensibly presenting themselves as being on the 'side of right' when they're not explaining or discussing, but are just being hurtful."

Filmmaker and friend Catrin Cooper also told me that "when white people are called out, a common response is defense and attack, something that is especially visible in online spaces. With us, we're more concerned about being seen as the 'good white person,' rather than facing accountability for our words and actions. In other spaces online like Black Twitter, it's not the same—there's a sense of accountability because they're part of the same community."

When I asked Preston to "do better" on diversity in her panel, the hostility I received turned into a classic "white fragility" case. It sounded familiar to DiAngelo. "For a long time, I was talking to white people about racism," she told me over Skype. "Consistent patterns appeared; they became predictable."

She continued: "Until white people understand that racism is embedded in everything, including our consciousness and socialization, then we cannot go forward. The current paradigm we have, with the focus on the individual rather than a system, functions beautifully to protect racism and white advantage." Basically, living in a world where we urge people to "be colorblind" works well if you're part of the ethnic majority—and seen as the default—but stifles conversation around how implicit racial bias affects our lives, from microagressions at the office to BME people opting for "white-sounding" names on CVs to increase their chances of getting hired.

I emailed Preston, to ask how she'd reflected on our exchange. Here's some of what she wrote, in a message that detailed how she felt we were probably both upset by it: "Your criticisms of our events programme were uninformed. My response was simply about the fact I was angry that you had made comments I felt were not justified, and that I already knew—simply by making them on a forum like Twitter (where people do not bother to fact-check)—irrevocable damage was already done. I do not believe our exchange was about race. I would respond to anyone who unjustly criticized my work in the exact same way."

So she didn't believe our exchange, framed around diversity, was about race. For many black people, there comes a point where our silence, rather than our visibility, seems to be safer. When we do speak up, it rocks the boat, and often our disruption comes at a cost. Until we can shift the paradigm, where instead of white fragility, white people are able to listen, learn, and work to destroy the hierarchies they all benefit from, then we won't be able to progress.

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Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale preaching "common sense" on CBC this week. Screencap via

If our own prime minister can publicly admit he's smoked weed, Canadians shouldn't be getting banned from entering America for doing the same.

That's the "common sense" message Canada's public safety minister has been delivering to media on both sides of the border this week, after VICE brought the strange practice to light last month.

Even when crossing into weed-friendly Washington, VICE found some travellers are being pressured into telling border guards about their smoking habits. In the case of music journalist Alan Ranta, he was cuffed, taken to an interrogation room, told he was under oath, and warned his car could be swabbed for traces of marijuana. Even though he didn't have any weed on him, Ranta's admission was deemed a violation of the Controlled Substances Act. Now he's barred from entering the country.

Read More: Why Are Canadians Being Banned from the US for Admitting They've Smoked Weed?

"It's pretty devastating," Ranta told VICE weeks after his detainment. Until the border run-in, Ranta says he'd never been arrested or charged with anything in his life. "My family's had a cottage in Point Roberts, Washington for about 50 years, which is a place I feel connected to my dad who passed away 10 years ago. I try to go several times a summer if I can."

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale called it a "ludicrous situation" on CBC's Power & Politics, and told international media he would push the US to stop it from happening. "We obviously need to intensify our discussions with our border authorities in the United States, including the Department of Homeland Security," he told CBC.

The Canadian government has plans to legalize and regulate weed as early as the coming spring, but that won't change anything for Ranta, who will be flagged a criminal at any US border entry. If he ever wants to visit the US again, he has to apply for a travel waiver—an expensive and discretionary exemption.

When I first called up immigration lawyer Len Saunders, he told VICE he's seen dozens of similar cases over the last few years. He stressed you don't need to admit anything at the border—and can always turn around and go back to Canada.

"Clients call me, they say they had to tell the truth, I couldn't lie," he told VICE. "What I'll say is, change the question: What if they asked about your sex life? Would you be so forthcoming?"

So far, American politicians and border protection have yet to offer any public comment on the controversy.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

You after you've realized you fucked it. Photo by Gerd Altman via Pixabay

When I was a kid in GCSE physics classes, I used to just repeatedly sketch out the floor plan of my future bakery, envisioning bright striped awning and a huge brassy cash register. A couple of years later, my dreams had changed: I was imagining a husband and a highly paid position in law by my mid-twenties.

But just look at me now: childless and alone, all of my dreams crippled by a repulsion towards the idea of actually ever opening a law book, as well as my utter refusal to wake up before 7 AM, especially to make some fucking bread.

To make myself feel better, I hit the streets to find out if anyone's lives turned out the way they thought they would, or if everyone is just a flimsy, misshapen shadow of their expected self.

Andrew, 25

Ostensibly, no it hasn't. I don't think I had a plan in the first place, so I can't really complain. I took six years to do my degree, I work in a bookshop, but I only work part time. I play around on my guitar and write my own music, and sometimes I think, 'Oh, I'll do that!' But I'm also 25, and soon I won't be 25 any more. Twenty-five is not young enough to be pissing about with guitars and stuff.

The general thing is to go to uni and have a career, but I'm totally against that. But even still, being completely against that normal thing, I still feel like I've failed because I'm judging myself against that standard. When you've got your friends and colleagues and family constantly judging you based on that, it's sort of hard to not feel like you've failed. I probably have the tools to change my life if I wanted, but I'm just not keen to.

Isobella, 24

I think it's pretty close. I'm travelling to London for the first time alone, which I never thought I would actually have the balls to do. I also knew when I was a kid that I wanted to be in branding and do graphic design, which I was fascinated by. So I ended up doing that, and in New York, which I thought I would.

But now it's like, what's next? What's going to happen later? I don't know if I want to know, though, because that would be boring, I would just be waiting for that thing to happen. It's kind of more exciting to be able to change around what you thought your life would be, rather than just say, "Great, I did it, I can check that box."

Tom, 36

No way. I thought I'd be married with kids and a house and a nice job. I grew up in a nice middle class family, so you go to school, you go to uni, you get a job. But I'm still living like I'm 16 years old. I work at a tattoo shop. I'm happier with where I'm at now, but there was a long time when I was unhappy, just thinking I should have my shit together by now.

I don't have any money, I don't own a place, I rent a room. I'm a recovering alcoholic and have been sober for almost two years. A couple of years before that my life was chaotic and I didn't think I would ever live a normal life again. So just to have money, a job and a place to stay is a fucking bonus.

Anna, 40

I've had lots of adventures, but I keep changing when I'm bored. I didn't really know how my life would turn out. It just happened, and I don't really think so far ahead. When I was a kid, my dad had all the ideas and told us what to do, basically, and after that I moved away to Australia and enjoyed myself for a while. Then I did some admin work and ended up studying geology. I was quite lucky with that, but it was a bit random.

I often say now, if I'd known then what I know now, I would have done something different – maybe tried for medical school. I think there's a few people, me included, who suffer from the grass is greener syndrome. There's a lot of choices in this day and age, so we're bound to end up a little disappointed that we can't do everything.

Ali, 31

No. I think I always thought I was going to end up being some sort of successful musician. So I did the band thing when I got out of school, and one got close and one didn't quite happen. I ended up turning my hand to writing and became a journalist. But I qualified the year that all of the major newspapers in Scotland were shedding their workforce, so it wasn't the best year to graduate. Then I got offered a job in London when I was drunk, and when I wound up in London and sobered up, I realised I was handcuffed to this job I didn't want.

I had quite a successful job writing after that, but it's not writing about cool things like music and books and art, it's writing about start-ups and corporations. I mean, I've got a six-month-old baby at home to look after. That wasn't on the cards, either, but it's all turned out great. It's still weird to think that three or four years ago I was kind of sexy and poor and walking down this exact street, with purpose but going nowhere, just wanting to be seen.

Sunny, 24

So far, so good! I think, growing up, I was a money-orientated little boy, to be honest with you. Six or seven years on, I left school after my GCSEs, started working and now I'm about to own my own construction company. So actually, 100 percent I'm still money-orientated. Money doesn't buy happiness, but it certainly helps happiness in life, and there's certain problems in life that can only be solved with money. I'm a charitable guy – there's this charity in India called Unique House that I give a lot of money to.

At 16, I knew that I wanted to be engaged by the time I was 24. I've got a missus, and we might get married two to three years from now. Kids? 27 or 28, maybe. Definitely something I look forward too – building a family is crucial, I think. Growing up, I had it in my mind that by this age I'd like to achieve this; by that age, that. Everyone has to have that kind of guideline in life. I think I'm quite strict with mine, but they've gone quite well for me so far, so I don't have anything to complain about.

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All photos by the author

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

As an atheist, I'm almost exclusively never at church. But it's a quiet Sunday afternoon in late August and I'm sat on a church pew next to Eileen Richards, an elderly lady with a story to share. God had told Eileen's mum to uproot from Essex and settle here in Norfolk's capital, via prayer, and Eileen says her mom conceded. Eileen was eight at the time. Did mom do the right thing? Eileen leans closer to me and nods. "God was here," she says, beaming.

Norwich's bond with God goes way back. In the middle ages, the city's booming wool trade funded several elaborate churches. At its peak, Norwich held 57 of them ("one for every week of the year!" locals will tell you). Those halcyon days reportedly came and went—the most recent census, from 2011, shows that Norwich has the highest proportion of respondents in England and Wales who identify with "no religion."

According to Eileen, Norwich churches are no longer good at deliverance. Her 45-year-old son, Matt Richards, agrees. For this reason, he founded the Radical Church—the one where I'm sitting in next to Eileen. Matt's movement joins an undercurrent of subversive churches running through the city. So how do you run a radical Christian campaign in a city with so few Christians?

Well, some would disagree that Norwich's Christian population has dwindled. Bishop of Norwich Graham James contested a census back in 2011, telling the BBC that Norwich is "a center of vibrant Christianity today." Richard George, of Norwich's Cornerstone Church, backs the Bishop. "Many churches, not necessarily the traditional churches, are growing rather than shrinking," he says. "I don't really know what happened with that survey... I don't think that's a true resemblance of reality." Richards' church rejects tradition; they have no set meeting day or time, choosing to move elusively throughout the city. Similarly, a representative from Burn 24-7 Norwich, a movement that meets for six, 12, or 24 hours for non-stop worship and prayer, shares Richard's skepticism.

But, according to church minister and professor of quantitative social geography Richard Harris, the census may have underestimated a lack of religion in England and Wales. "The 25 percent in the 2011 census is likely to be an under-estimate: the 2011 and 2014 British Social Attitudes Surveys suggest the figure is closer to 50 percent." An Ipsos Mori survey analysed by the Guardian in 2014 seems to land in a similar area, with 59 percent of the UK's overall population self-identifying as Christian.

Eileen's son, Matt agrees with the census outcome. While at the meeting, he tells me that churches in Norwich have become lukewarm, insular bubbles: "People have become disenfranchised. Norwich is full of apathetic people." An ex-mental health nurse, Matt says he built the Radical Church for the homeless people, sex workers, drug users, former inmates, and others who "don't fit into traditional church." Church meetings take place at various locations. Completely voluntarily run (bar a member stationed in India), the group can't afford their own building. "We had to baptize him in a recycling skip," Richards says, laughing and referring to 23-year-old ex-user Aiden Matthams.

Having no official church building is a recurrent theme with Norwich's unorthodox movements. Burn Norwich are also hosted by range of churches, allowing the movement to be "totally non-denominational" where "anyone can come," a representative tells me. Cornerstone Church changes location and meets on random weekdays because people "are less likely to enter a church building," leader Richard explains. Eschewing the 10 AM to 12 AM Sunday service seems to be a strategic move, which implies to me that the people behind these religious movements sense Christianity may be losing its dominant hold in Norwich. After all, with the increase of shift work and 24/7 services, Sunday is no longer a blanket "day of rest." To the city's disillusioned, churches that evolve from traditional structures might be more relatable.

Aiden explains that when churches are bound by conservatism, there's "no passion to go out and reach the people—it becomes like a country club." The Radical Church is anything but. I arrive in a sweater and shirt, and ended up being huddled by a Mackenzie-clad former drug user, a Roma woman in Superdry, and an elderly woman in her fuchsia Sunday best, all praying for my happiness.

"They're speaking in tongues," a former sex worker informs me, as the group move on to an elderly Filipino lady, attempting to heal her sight problems. Inches away from her face, Matt booms: "Cataracts, be gone!" On top of speaking in tongues and "healing" ceremonies, the Radical Church seems to want to challenge what it sees as apathy in "godless" Norwich in other ways.

"I just think, what a good opportunity!" Matt says. "If you're in a city where people say there's not many Christians, well fantastic! What a place to be. Christianity is for you. It's for the ravers, it's for the hippies, it's for the emos, and the people that don't fit in. It's for everybody. I believe a revolution is coming on the street."

During a modern, reggae-tinged hymn ("no thees, or thous!") Eileen jumps up, grabs a tambourine from under her chair and starts to bash it. The Filipino woman's daughter stops dancing, falls into her chair, and starts crying. Whether it's through day-long prayer sessions or rejecting church buildings, Norwich's subversive Christian scene is finding a way to affirm this immovable passion for Christ. Their message to the city? You may not think traditional Christianity is relevant to your lives, but don't give up on it. Find a new, radical way to express it. It's not quite worked for me, but that was probably too steep an uphill battle for the Radical Church anyway.

Follow Wedaeli on Twitter.

Photo via Victor Boyko / Getty

Now that Calvin Klein has appointed Raf Simons to the position of chief creative officer, the Belgian designer's name is on more lips than ever. For a company that makes plenty of money selling people underwear, this is an opportunity for Raf Simons to get Calvin Klein consumers to clothe the outside of their bodies, too. Despite Simons's relatively niche appeal, his work is the type that speaks for itself. He's built a universe with a strong visual gravity that pulls people into its orbit, and we should expect the same from Calvin Klein with the cult designer at its helm.

His last big job in the fashion world was as the creative director at Dior, the storied French fashion house that revolutionized post-WWII womenswear. He left the post after just three years, burnt out by the increasingly fast pace of the industry, and has mainly focused on his own collection since. He presented his most recent Spring/Summer 2017 line as a special guest at Pitti Uomo, the world's pre-eminent menswear trade show. It was notable for its use of images by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose estate actually approached Simons about working together.

To understand the significance of Simons's new position, one has to realize New York's current place in the fashion paradigm. Compared to the longstanding provenance of European fashion houses like Chanel and Louis Vuitton, NYC's luxury fashion scene is relatively young. Much of the European houses earned their cred by serving royalty and becoming beacons of upper-class aspiration. Many successful New York designers like Alexander Wang have gone on to steer the creative helm of venerated houses like Balenciaga. To have a foreign designer like Raf Simons come to America is unprecedented, because usually people leave the US to get legitimized on a global scale. Simons's flag planted at Calvin Klein could indicate that the company wants to compete at a much higher creative and cultural level.

"I think Raf is better suited at Calvin Klein than he was at Dior," says Eugene Rabkin, fashion journalist and founder of StyleZeitgeist, an online publication and forum where work from designers like Raf Simons are discussed fervently. One of the biggest challenges faced by Simons at the iconic fashion house was designing couture clothing—intricate dresses and outerwear that visually aligned with the label's long-established DNA. The road to his first couture collection for Dior is highlighted in the film Dior and I, and a small army of artisans that work at Dior's Paris atelier did most of the handwork.

While Dior is an established fashion heavyweight that makes plenty of its money from its apparel in addition to other categories like fragrance and accessories, Calvin Klein's soft power as a fashion house has waned in recent years. Under the creative direction of Italo Zuccheli, Calvin Klein's high-end menswear offerings saw some pop cultural success on the shoulders of guys like Harry Styles and even a collaborative tour collection with Drake. But it never quite caught on with the masses, though. What Simons's appointment does immediately is bring a new degree of cachet and international appeal to a classic, household American brand. He also has the possibility of reinvigorating its presence at New York Fashion Week.

"I definitely think that Raf has potential to bring a new level of excitement to New York Fashion Week," says Rabkin. "Not only as an avant-garde menswear designer, but also a designer who feels comfortable with the minimalist aesthetic that Calvin Klein is known for."

"Editors, buyers, and other influencers who leave New York early to get to London for its collections... will be inclined to stick it out until Calvin's traditional end-of-week show ," writes Vogue's Nicole Phelps, who also described it as "the hottest ticket in town."

Photo via FRANCOIS GUILLOT / Getty

What's interesting about Simons's appointment is that he's more of a "designer's designer" than a mainstream one. The Belgian-born 48-year-old has only seeped into the public consciousness very recently, despite running his eponymous line since 1995. High fashion is the realm of early adopters after all, where new ideas about style and dressing are incubated on the runway and eventually trickle down to the masses as they influence more commercial offerings by mass retailers. Simons has flirted with mainstream labels before. He still maintains capsule collections with adidas Originals and Freddy Perry—where his $400 rendition of the Stan Smith changes nothing about the silhouette other than adding a perforated "R" on the sides of shoes and incorporating more psychedelic colorways like school eraser pink and metallic silver. But his simple reinterpretation of the classic sneaker speaks to his penchant for minimalism and a design narrative characterized by tiny details, not broad strokes.

His rise to prominence is a testament to a blurring menswear market where street-informed labels and high fashion are embraced equally. And while mega European houses built their reputations through symbiotic patronage of the aristocracy over many decades, Simons's cult status comes, in part, from the respect other innovators have bestowed on the designer. Kanye West and Virgil Abloh have cited him as a key inspiration and reference for their own collections, the latter once describing him as his personal "Michael Jordan." A$AP Rocky's song "Pe$o" name drops him alongside designer Rick Owens, bragging that their clothes are usually what he's dressed in. And sites like Grailed afford younger heads a certain degree of education, functioning as a place where fashion kids (and future Kanyes) can purchase and discover pieces from earlier collections.

"His work has finally been discovered by a new generation of fashion fans," says Rabkin of StyleZeitgeist.

There's a definite parallel between the way Simons has traditionally infused youth culture into his work and Calvin Klein's controversial ads featuring racy imagery and underage models. Its current #MyCalvins campaign features everyone from Young Thug and Fetty Wap, to Justin Bieber and Kendall Jenner. The hashtag and use of finger-on-the-pulse celebrities is effective social media bait. But the difference comes down to Simons's approach, which is largely predicated on making the type of subculture-tinged uniform that youth in rebellion want to wear and aspire to create, not on-the-nose marketing that speaks their language.

"You can have Justin Bieber in as many pairs of boxer briefs as you want, and you can have a Kendall Jenner ad break the internet, but that's not going to do anything to influence the actual product," says Lawrence Schlossman, brand director at Grailed.

Raf Simons is one of the first fashion designers to authentically translate youth culture on to the runway. Originally inspired by the energy of Belgian club kids and the freewheeling spirit of young men in their sexual prime, he's continuously mined pop culture references and styles in a way that's always felt cerebral and real, not appropriative. In a way, he directs youth culture, rather than echoes it.

"If you look at Raf's early clothes, he absolutely predated the Instagram generation," says Rabkin. "He was one of the first designers to put cultural references like post-punk music graphics on fashion."

But Simons didn't simply screenprint Joy Division album art on the backs of fishtail parkas or on the chests of sweatshirts, notes Rabkin. Instead, he went the extra mile by utilizing fabrics like virgin wool or cashmere, taking luxurious materials and infusing them with a youthful, visceral visual appeal. And this was all years before the covers of Unknown Pleasures and Power, Corruption, and Lies ended up on a Supreme collaboration or anyone's Tumblr dashboard. An avid appreciator of art, Simons uses intricate methods to reinterpret the very works he's inspired by. In Dior and I, we see him commission a special, complicated woven fabric to craft a dress based off a painting by artist Sterling Ruby. If the best art is deceptively simple, Simons is a master.

"He is real. He's authentic, and the vision in his pieces feels tangible. That's what makes his stuff so covetable and collectible, even years after it's been on a retail floor," says Schlossman.

If Simons can manage to bring the kind of creative energy from his seasoned career to Calvin Klein, maybe New York Fashion Week can truly shed its reputation for boring, commercially-viable clothing. It could even become a place where creative fashion minds can not only jumpstart their careers, but build universes of their own.

Follow Jian on Twitter.

On this episode of Tea Time with T. Kid, I hung out with Doug Cohen, co-founder of 99th Floor, the best damn weed dinner series I've had the pleasure of experiencing in my edibles-heavy career. The company classes it up with underground multi-course marijuana meals that have some truly unexpected components—weed pea soup with lobster, anyone?

Doug talked about the formation of his business, and why people appreciate how the dining experience allows attendees to add more or less weed to the fancy meals. In other words, you can "curate" how ripped you get. We were also joined by our friend Spliff, a purveyor of great cannabis who brought along some extra special joints for us to try.

Lots of strains, lots of edibles, and, as always, a meaningful conversation that descends into blazed out giggles. Enjoy!

Follow T. Kid on Twitter and 99th Floor on Instagram.

Lead illustration by Heather Benjamin.

For more of Brian Blomerth's work, visit his website, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Logo by Kitron Neuschatz; photo via Shutterstock

Ah, friends. They're like family but cooler. Fully customizable. Fall and one of them will be right there to pick you back up. But as great as friends can be, they also do a lot of really stupid stuff. Stuff that blows your mind. Like, sometimes it seems crazy that you even hang out with people who make such crappy decisions. Stuff that, were it to get out, would be mortifying for anyone with even a shred of self-respect. Lucky for your friends, they've got you to ask their deepest, darkest questions for them. And lucky for you, we started this new column to answer those most embarrassing of queries.

The scenario: You rarely see your friend without a cup of coffee in her hand. And when you do, it's because she's holding an energy drink.

The hope: That when it comes to a compound found naturally in a drink brewed from beans—a magical fruit!—it really is the "more the merrier".

What to consider: "Caffeine is a powerful stimulant," says Alicia Romano, a registered dietitian with Tufts Medical Center. Accordingly, the buzzkill USDA, which issues (sometimes conservative) guidelines on the ingestion of pleasurable substances, recommends cutting yourself off at 400 milligrams per day.

The caffeine content of drip coffee varies by bean, roasting style, and brewing method, but it's usually between 95 and 200 milligrams per 8 ounces. That means you could have between three and five cups before it feels like there's a bouncy house inside your head. But you also have to factor in lattes and cappuccinos—those contain 75 milligrams per shot of espresso, at least at Starbucks—as well as chocolate, tea, diet soda, vodka–Red Bulls, and even caffeinated peanut butter and jerky. (Yes, they're a thing, and yes, they're gross.)

The worst that could happen: Washing down NoDoz with Monsters could lead to heart palpitations, tremors, and irregular heartbeat, says Romano. Last year, a Japanese man died of a caffeine overdose, but experts say you'd likely have to drink 140 cups of coffee in one day to meet the same fate.

What will probably happen: In the short run, overdoing it will take you from feeling perky and focused to being a nervous, nauseous, irritable insomniac. Long run? You'll likely be fine, especially if you get most of your caffeine from coffee (as opposed to energy drinks, which often contain sugar and other unhealthy ingredients). Three to five cups of caffeinated coffee a day has even been associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

What to do: Feel fine standing by while your friend caffeinates, unless her frayed nerves start showing. In that case, she can start by keeping tabs on her caffeine intake for a few days. (She won't typically find caffeine content listed on packaging, but she can dig it up in the USDA's database.) Going cold turkey will probably give you a headache, so start by making one of your coffees decaf or switching from black tea to herbal. And definitely cut out the herky-jerky.

Photo by Yasin Osman via

Today, America grieves for those lost on September 11. Tomorrow, on September 12, Muslims worldwide celebrate the holiest day of the Islamic calendar: Eid-ul-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice. It's a day of prayer, feasting, charity, and remembrance. Muslims honor Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son when called by God by sacrificing an animal and distributing the meat between friends, family, and the needy.

Because the Islamic calendar is lunar and Eid-ul-Adha shifts by about ten days each year, these two sacred days—one of religious celebration, the other of national mourning—almost coincided this year. The prospect troubled many, and American Muslims breathed easier when, after the new moon was sighted on September 1, the Fiqh Council of North America (the local body offering non-binding religious rulings) announced that Eid would be observed on September 12, a day later than initially projected.

"My 13-year old daughter told me, 'Thank God Eid didn't fall on 9/11. Otherwise, people would think that we're celebrating that day,'" says Rafi-uddin Shikoh, the founder of DinarStandard, the world's first research and advisory firms specializing in Muslim lifestyle markets.

Shikoh, an expert in the global Islamic economy with offices in Dubai and New York, tracks Islam's changing face across the modern world. Often, in the West, there is a stark contrast between the way Muslims experience their own values and faith, and how non-Muslims view them; a 9/11 Eid-ul-Adha might have brought that contrast into relief in an ugly way. Yet, Shikoh says there are signs that the gap is closing—that "authentic" Muslim values are being surfaced through hard economic forces, and the rise of a global group of young, affluent "Generation M" Muslims is reshaping Islam's relationship with the West.

DinarStandard's 2015/2016 State of the Global Islamic Economy Report found that Muslim consumers spent $1.8 trillion on food and lifestyle in 2014, and estimates that total will reach $2.6 trillion in 2020. The world's Muslim population currently stands at 1.6 billion, and is growing at twice the global rate. According to the Pew Research Center, it's projected to hit 2.8 billion by 2050. Economic power is shifting to emerging economies with Muslim majority populations such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan, or with significant Muslim minorities such as India and China.

"We're talking about a quarter of the world's population," Shikoh says. "Islamic countries represent 15 percent of the global GDP, and have the youngest, fastest growing population in the world. These emerging markets have unique Muslim lifestyle needs affected by Islamic values."

Islamic values affect products and services in five categories: Food, banking, travel and tourism, fashion, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics. The Qur'anic concepts of halal (Arabic for permissible, often defined as equivalent to kosher) and tayyab (wholesome or good) determine suitability for Muslim consumption. Across the board, strict ethical principles apply. Halal food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals must adhere to Islamic dietary guidelines. Islamic fashion is modest fashion. Islamic banking avoids interest, which the Qur'an forbids as enriching investors at the expense of entrepreneurs, thus widening inequality. Halal tourism replaces hard partying and drinking with family-friendly entertainment.

"For this generation of global Muslims, faith and modernity go hand in hand. Underscoring this is the desire to live a full life in society, to do what everyone else does." — Shelina Janmohamed

"These underlying values have a wider global appeal," Shikoh says. For example, he tells me that 80 percent of Islamic banking customers in Malaysia are non-Muslim because they find Islamic banking ethics appealing. Similarly, he says 80 percent of customers of Saffron Road, a halal food brand at Whole Foods, are non-Muslims looking for humane, vegetarian-fed, and antibiotic-free meat products.

"Islam has a lot to offer to modern business practices," Shikoh says. "There is no question that Muslims today don't reflect that vision, but we believe that there is a positive movement toward a global, ethical market in which Muslims will play a very strong role."

In Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World, Shelina Janmohamed similarly describes how young Muslims' aspiration to live modern lifestyles aligned with Islamic values translates into demand for products and services with evolving, more holistic understandings of halal and tayyab—i.e. humane, fair trade, sustainable, and eco-friendly, with emphasis on transparency in modes of production and disposal. Thus, Muslim lifestyle trends reflect broader consumer trends, particularly in the West.

"For this generation of global Muslims, faith and modernity go hand in hand," Janmohamed tells VICE. "Underscoring this is the desire to live a full life in society, to do what everyone else does, which people sometimes feel surprised about."

Janmohamed offers examples of contemporary culture's weaving together of faith and modernity such as: "Muslim boy bands with hijabi girls in the audience screaming their names and waving glow sticks," halal beer and wine, halal dating apps, Muslim superheroes such as Marvel's Kamala Khan, Ramadan clothing collections by Mango, DKNY, Dolce and Gabbana, and much more.

But as the halal market grows and awareness grows, backlash is inevitable. The French burkini brouhaha has become a lightning rod for debates about whether modernity and Islamic values can coexist. But, as the debate rages, the numbers tell their own story: burkini sales have increased by 200% percent, with many burkinis sold to non-Muslims.

Habib Ghanim, president of ISWA Halal Certification, a 25-year-old organization that certifies halal products, says that bans and protests can actually be good for business.

"The more they do it, the better it is for exposure," he says. "People hear about it, google it, learn more about what halal is."

He describes Pamela Geller's 2011 crusade against Butterball turkeys certified by ISWA Halal as a case in point: "She trucked in a lot of Southern Baptist Christians, and said that we were financing terrorism, and that anyone who would eat the turkeys would become Muslim. But when people found out the truth, they found that these people are bigots. Now more people are buying halal than ever before."

He adds that, if Eid-ul-Adha had fallen on 9/11 this year, he would have made it a kind of teachable moment, a positive opportunity to talk to non-Muslims about authentic Islamic values. Eid, after all, showcases the best Muslims have to offer: They pray, visit family and friends, and distribute money, clothes, and meat to the poor. (Last year, Honest Chops, the halal butcher co-founded by NYU's Chaplain Khalid Latif, distributed about 4,000 pounds of Eid meat to needy families and abuse survivors.) It's also a powerhouse of a day for the global Muslim economy. Over $3 billion in livestock is slaughtered, and millions more are spent on festive new attire.

Ghanim says, "A is nothing to fear. I would have taken it as a sign from God to tell people to wake up and remind them that we may have different issues, but we are one human race."

Photo via Flickr user gen gibler

Almost all young comedians have feet, and even more of them are desperate for a break. I may be generalizing here, but these are two facts you can pretty much count on, especially in the early days of a comedy career. That was certainly Patrick Coppolino's deal when he first met fellow stand-up comic Frankie "Trixx" Agyemang.

From one Canadian comedian to another, you'll hear the line, "Trixx got me." This isn't a punchline, really—it's a nod to an open mystery that's hung over the Canadian stand-up scene for several years involving dozens of comics, and yeah, their feet. What began as chatter between friends exploded into a now-infamous Facebook thread last year, sparking personal beefs, podcast apologies, and at least one crowdfunder aiming to animate the whole drama as a short film.

Exactly what happened is still under some dispute, but the hard-to-answer question is this: why did Trixx promise dozens of comics TV roles, prizes, and personal favours in exchange for what participants understood were videos of their feet? The short answer is exactly what you think it is, but underneath the obvious is a deeper set of questions about fetish, communication, and consent.

For Coppolino it started nearly five years ago with discussion of a TV role. Trixx told the Hamilton-based rookie comic he had a script nearly ready, and a Zach Galifianakis-type part with his name on it. "He asked me to do these auditions, he said it was going to be strange and awkward—to show you're OK in an uncomfortable situation," he told VICE.

Right away, Coppolino was taking off his socks in front of his own webcam. Over Skype, he was asked to lie on his stomach facing away from his laptop, with his feet aimed toward the camera. According to Coppolino, Trixx would also ask him to do "toe snaps"—flicking his big toe back and forth against the one beside it. This lasted a couple minutes. They went separate ways, and Coppolino waited for more info on the part.

Coppolino had thought Trixx got the "screen test" he needed, but the foot-centric auditions didn't end there. "I would do the audition thing, the foot thing, and then a day or two would go by, and he would tell me, 'Oh, I lost the footage, we need to do it again.' So I would do it again," he said. "He probably got me four times before I started to realize something was going on."

For years, Coppolino tried not to think about the role that never came. Somehow he suspended enough disbelief not to question why his audition didn't require lines delivered from his Galifianakis-bearded face. "I knew it was weird, and my buddies would joke that he's got a foot fetish, that it was a sexual thing. But I didn't think it was that strong of a possibility," said Coppolino. "I really got my hopes up for this gig."

He says career desperation kept him from confronting the situation head on. "I was new to comedy, just over a year into stand-up, a little naïve," he said. "My girlfriend was pregnant, so it was a big deal for me, and made me kind of see past any of the weirdness."

Coppolino didn't know dozens of other early-career comics were having the same set of conversations with Trixx, but with different variables. Sometimes Trixx said it was a scavenger hunt, and offered to split prizes if they won. Other times it was a guest spot on a show, or another professional favour. "I started to find out more and more of my friends also had it done to them," said Coppolino. "The same excuse—the video didn't work."

Jordan Foisy, a Toronto comedian and frequent VICE contributor who went to school with Trixx, remembers feeling jealous of his friends that were in on the weird project. "This is the kind of desperation he was playing on," he told VICE, "I was like 'How come I didn't get asked to record a foot video?'"

VICE reached out to Trixx to get his account, but he declined to answer questions about this whole thing. "It's a closed chapter for me," he wrote in an email. By Coppolino's account he lashed out at the people speaking up and making light of a strange situation. "He was like, 'What the hell? It was just a joke, I can't believe you would do that,'" he recalled.

It would take the better part of a year for Trixx himself to explain, at least in part, what was really going on. "The truth of it was, I had a foot fetish, and I came up with a weird way to appease that fetish," he told Julien Dionne on his Comedy Hour podcast last fall. "I was so defensive and so angry," he said, "because it's a bunch of people all at the same time coming at you."

"I'm not a bad dude, I'm just a guy who fucked up and was fucking up for a while, and I needed this to happen to not only stop, but to see you were kind of a shitty person."

The confession came with some strange caveats—Trixx claims he did nothing sexual beyond looking, and that he never actually pressed record across all those Skype "auditions" and "screen tests."

Because many of the people who were caught up in the controversy have been blocked out by Trixx, Coppolino only learned the details of the admission when I sent it to him last month.

"At the end of the day, I don't hate the guy. I think he made the whole thing worse by trying to hide behind the 'prank' excuse, instead of just apologizing," he said of the confession.

It was only a few weeks ago, when Trixx released a comedy album titled Undefeated and announced he was moving from Toronto to Edmonton, that the wider comedy community revisited the weird chapter. In his pitch to make an animated short called "Defeeted," comic Pat Burtscher says he's still asked about "the foot thing" constantly.

"I like to think there's a whole community of people on the internet who are into comedian feet," quips Foisy.

Coppolino has mostly put the foot mystery behind him, but sometimes he still thinks about what it was, and what it means. He says he doesn't feel "violated" by what happened—it was just his feet—but recognizes that others may feel differently. As some forms of deception are now being tested as a form of sexual assault in the United States, those questions probably won't get any easier to answer. Something about it still doesn't sit right.

"What bothered me the most, was he was taking advantage of naïve new comics, all of them younger, less experienced," Coppolino told VICE.

To his credit, Trixx has made moves to get out in front of all this in a more public way—posting an explanation for his album title choice on Facebook near the end of August. "Last year, right around this time, people learned about my fetish. That wasn't the horrible part, the horrible part was the many comics and people that once called me friend that I manipulated, lied to, and even tricked into appeasing the fetish," he wrote.

"The reason the album is called Undefeated is not to be cocky, it's because with the support of some very amazing friends, comics, and even a few comics that were manipulated, lied to and tricked by me horribly, I was able to own it."

From Trixx's perspective, the mystery is resolved, but others VICE spoke to still carry worries and doubts. Though the situation is equal parts absurd and fucked up, Trixx has made it clear there's at least consensus on one point: what happened was definitely not a joke.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Look, we're not saying this isn't a couple of Tories having a good time. Photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It's the news Trotskyites never wanted to hear. According to a recent YouGov poll of 19,000 Europeans, you're more likely to be have a happy sex life if you consider yourself "very right wing"—specifically, the data showed 72 percent of right-wingers rated themselves as sexually satisfied versus 62 percent of proportional left-wingers. At first, it's a surprising conclusion. When most of us think of classically right-wing (read: old-fashioned) people fucking, we imagine all the quiet, clinical joys of missionary sex.

But when conservatives—from the UK, Germany, Sweden, France, and Denmark—put down their 0 to 100 ranking next to a question asking how happy they'd say they were with their sex lives, what did they think it meant? Satisfaction is a slippery idea, and people could have been thinking of criteria as diffuse as number of orgasms, proportion of time spent on foreplay, the experimental lyricism of dirty talk, outlandish positions or how emotionally connected they felt to their partner.

Interestingly, in an earlier and similar survey conducted by the same researcher, people were asked for their political persuasions and their sexual fantasies. The results felt more like what you'd stereotypically expect: conservatives were, well, conservative, while liberals and socialists had a long list of fantasies in mind. So what is it? In an effort to understand the complexities of the concept of sexual satisfaction and how that sort of research can be basically used to pit people of different political persuasions against each other, I spoke to clinical psychologist and author Dr. Noam Shpancer.

VICE: Hi Dr. Shpancer, can you tell me what's actually meant by "sexual satisfaction" in these kinds of surveys?
Dr. Noam Shpancer: Most of the time sexual satisfaction is assessed by one survey item asking about it. So it just means whatever the participant thinks it means. Being sexually satisfied may represent very different things to different people. And since we don't know what participants think about when they think about sexual satisfaction, the results are ambiguous, and should be taken with caution.

How has the clinical understanding of what contributes to sexual satisfaction changed in the past few years?
I think we're beginning to appreciate that some of this is complex. Sexual satisfaction is usually a function of a person's relationship with others. We're gaining a better understanding of how both self and partner qualities operate within a sexual interaction to produce the experience of satisfying sex. For example, your personality matters for sexual satisfaction, but so does your partner's personality.

At the same time, sexual satisfaction has a lot to do with how the notions of sexual pleasure and gratification are integrated into someone's "self-concept." Do you see yourself as someone deserving of sexual pleasure? Do you see your sexual needs as worthy of asserting? These questions matter.

I also think we understand that sexual pleasure involves sexual knowledge and skill. In the past there was a tendency to assume that this is a natural function that will take care of itself. Well, it is and it isn't. You can compare this to hunger and eating. Hunger and eating are natural functions; you don't need to learn to be hungry, and you can probably figure out how to find and eat food for subsistence. But if you want the sublime pleasure of a gourmet meal, you need some effort and skill. It won't appear in nature on its own. The same goes for sexual pleasure. Most people can figure out basic "subsistence sex" easily. But if you want gourmet sex, you need to learn how to do it.

Are these surveys normally representative of heterosexual committed couples, or is there inclusion of singles and LGBTQ people?
Often these large surveys are not random but rather samples of convenience. To get a representative sample of anything, you need to do some work, which costs money. That being said there is research going on attempting to use representative samples (which include sexual minorities) or target sexual minorities specifically. Ultimately, relying on survey data is problematic in terms of advancing our knowledge. We need more experimental data, observational data, longitudinal data, and in-depth ethnographic data for that.

Are there areas of the world where the study of sexual satisfaction is absent or non-existent?
There are sex research findings coming in from all corners of the globe these days. But it's still a difficult line of work. Sex research is often ridiculed; government funding is often withheld; and scientists are often ridiculed and attacked for doing this kind of work. Quality control is another issue. Much of sex research is not very good.

How reliable can reports on sexual satisfaction ever be? I feel like there must sometimes be levels of self-deception involved in answering questions about your sex life, or potential divergent interpretations of wording that affect the outcome.
How valid are our findings? It's hard to say. Definitely people may interpret the same word differently. Definitely some people lie. And definitely we cannot measure directly what's in someone's true deep soul. But those are limitations of all psychological research, not just sex research. We often measure slippery concepts, indirectly, and we rely heavily on self-report. So there are issues. Clearly, to get deeper toward the truth, we have to do more than surveys. We have to invest in experimental studies, observational studies, studies that use physiological and brain measures, and longitudinal studies that follow people over time to get the full picture of how things really work.

What reasons can you imagine that might mean a correlation between political principles and increased sexual enjoyment? Is it potentially that right-wing voters could be older, married, and financially stable—and therefore more generally satisfied?
Those are good guesses, but I think the study you cite controlled for age and other demographics, so that may not be the answer. I also don't think this is a case where A causes B or B causes A. In other words, I don't think voting conservative makes you satisfied or vice versa. My hunch is that some temperamental tendency may be responsible for the link. (To the extent that it really exists. We need more converging evidence to gain trust in this finding.) Perhaps by genetic temperament, people who are less restless or thrill-seeking tend to vote conservative and also be more easily satisfied sexually.

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

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

US News

Clinton Cancels California Trip After Pneumonia Diagnosis
Hillary Clinton has canceled a two-day trip to California after the campaign announced Sunday that the Democratic presidential candidate has been diagnosed with pneumonia. Clinton has been advised by her doctor to rest. Her campaign team announced the diagnosis after initially claiming she had simply "overheated" when appearing to faint at a 9/11 event. —NBC News

NFL Players Protest During the National Anthem
Four Miami Dolphins players knelt during the national anthem on the anniversary of 9/11, following the lead of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who made headlines for refusing to stand during the national anthem during the preseason. Kansas City Chiefs cornerback Marcus Peters and several members of the Tennessee Titans raised a fist in the air before their games. —ABC News

One Killed, 18 Injured in Denver Bus Crash
One person was killed and 18 others were injured Sunday afternoon when a school bus carrying a high school football team crashed at Denver International Airport. The female driver was pronounced dead at the scene. Three adult coaches remain in hospital, and most of the 15 students who were injured have been released. —The Denver Post

Six People Shot After Peace Rally in Alabama
Six people were shot, one fatally, after a peace rally at a public housing complex in Birmingham on Sunday night. Police sergeant Bryan Shelton said all six victims were innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire when shooting broke out at the Gate City housing community. People had gathered at an event devoted to fighting violence. —CBS News

International News

Ceasefire in Syria Set to Begin
A ceasefire in Syria brokered by the US and Russia is set to begin at sundown Monday evening, but there are concerns about whether it will hold. Ahead of the ceasefire, more than 100 people were killed in a surge of violence during the weekend in a series of bombing raids in Aleppo Province and in Idlib.—Al Jazeera

French Teen Suspected of Planning Attack Arrested
A 15-year-old boy in Paris, suspected of preparing "violent action," has been arrested in the French capital. His arrest reportedly came as he was allegedly planning an attack in a public place, despite being kept under house arrest in Paris since April because the authorities suspected him of having ties to ISIS.—The Independent

Death Toll in Bangladeshi Factory Fire Rises to 31
A fire that hit Tampaco Foils food factory near Dhaka on Saturday killed 31 people, but officials said the death toll could rise further as close to half a dozen people are still missing. Police are still trying to locate the factory owner. —Reuters

North Korea Ready for Another Nuclear Test, Says South
South Korean officials have warned that North Korea could be ready to conduct another nuclear test at anytime. North Korea conducted its fifth test on Friday. A South Korean defense ministry spokesman said there was an unused tunnel at the Punggye-ri test site, which could be used for a sixth explosion. —BBC News

Everything Else

Trans Actor Alexis Arquette Dies at Age 47
Alexis Arquette, the transgender actor and activist known for her roles in The Wedding Singer and Pulp Fiction, has died of an unknown illness. She was surrounded by family who serenaded her with David Bowie's "Starman." —The Guardian

New History Museum Won't Feature MLK Artifacts
The National Museum of African American History and Culture will not feature any of Martin Luther King Jr.'s artifacts when it opens later this month. "It's outrageous," said Clarence Jones, King's former attorney. "I find it shameful and I'm sad." —The Washington Post

Felony Charges Against Desiigner Dropped
Felony weapon and drugs charges against Brooklyn rapper Desiigner have been dropped following a police investigation. The 19-year-old has been arraigned on misdemeanor drug possession and menacing charges instead. —Rolling Stone

Asteroid Grazes Earth's Upper-Atmosphere
Astronomers have revealed an asteroid came perilously close to Earth's atmosphere last week. Asteroid 2016 RB1 came within 24,000 miles of sea level on September 7 and within only 2,000 miles of communication satellites. —Motherboard

Politician Calls Bullshit on US Banning Weed Smokers
Canada's public safety minister said Canadians should not be prevented from entering America after admitting to smoking weed. Ralph Goodale called it a "ludicrous situation" and said he would push the US to stop it.—VICE

Instagram Choices Can Reflect Your Depression
A study by data scientists has shown a correlation between Instagram users' filter choices and how miserable they feel. People with symptoms of depression are more likely to post photos in tones of gray and blue, or opt for black-and-white filters. —Broadly

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"I am going to read about a three-way. Is that OK with everyone?" asked Asa Akira to a crowd of fans as she cracked open a copy of Dirty Thirty, her new memoir. She was standing in front of a microphone at Blue Stockings, a radical feminist bookstore tucked in New York City's Lower East Side, with her petite 5'2 frame hiked up by pair of tan Louboutin heels and her long black hair stick-straight despite the sweltering August heat. "It was either the or the time I thought I was a hermaphrodite."

At 31 years old, Asa isn't just a budding author, she's one of the biggest names in porn. In addition to penning two well-received books, she has starred in over 500 adult films and thousands of scenes that float around the internet on tube sites. Her work in front of the camera has earned her dozens of awards, including the Adult Video News' (AVN) coveted Female Performer of the Year in 2013 and Best Anal Scene in 2011 and 2012, not to mention she's often referred to as an "anal queen." After interviewing her two years ago about her first book, Insatiable, for VICE.com, I quickly realized how pervasive her fame was, even among people who don't watch porn. Any casual mention I made of her to a girl friend would be followed by, "I think my boyfriend masturbates to her..."

Despite all of her success, Asa's life has reached a crossroads. When she first started out, like most women who enter the adult industry, she only planned on doing porn for a couple of years. Instead, she's been in the business for more than eight. As she enters her thirties, she's been forced to think more seriously about her future and whether or not it will involve porn or having kids.

When she isn't dishing about masturbating on nightclub stages or cleansing her bowels before anal sex, it is this sense of uncertainty around the direction of her next chapter that fuels her writing in Dirty Thirty.

"I wrote a bunch and it all just seemed to have this underlying theme of turning 30, being a woman, and aging—but not knowing what the next step was," Asa said to me. "Whenever I quit porn, I'll be starting at square one again—I am going to be where all my friends were ten years ago. I don't know if I want to have kids, so that is a huge issue right now in my mind, too..."

Asa's inner turmoil is fueled by the stress of aging, which is a struggle for many women in a society that fetishizes youth. American ageism is only magnified in an industry like porn, where—despite niches like milf and mature—your overall value goes down as your years go up.

The quandaries of her quarter-life crises are also a reflection of the pressure society puts on women to be mothers. Even someone like Asa, who decided early on that she didn't want children and wanted to focus more on her career, is impacted by our culture's limited notions of womanhood.

In Dirty Thirty, she addresses this, saying, "The same way I knew if I had never done porn, I would've looked backed and regretted it forever; I knew that if I never had a child, I wouldn't feel fulfilled in life." But even if she ultimately has children, she worries how her choices up until this point will impact the lives of her kids, who will have an "anal queen" for a mom.

"It's kind of a hard thing to talk about because I know people who are in porn who have kids. I don't judge them at all for it, and I think they're actually doing a really good job. But at the same time, I remember when I was a kid that every time I'd fight with my parents I was always like, 'Well, I didn't ask to be born!' Which is the brattiest thing to say," she said. "I think ultimately that's what I'm afraid of. That once my kids learn that I've done porn and kids at school tease them about it, they're going to be like 'Why the fuck did she have me?'"

To Shira Tarrant, a Women and Gender Studies professor and author of New Views on Pornography, the internal conflict Asa is facing over how her sexual history might impact her ability to be a mother is a reaction to the societal "slut-shaming" that all women face. "It is a form of bullying," Tarrant said to me. "It starts very early and we internalize those ideas. It is a form of social control over women's bodies and sexuality."

In a time when pop stars like Beyoncé proudly throw around the word feminist, and Hillary Clinton could become our next president, it's hard to believe that women still feel the weight of these dated gender norms. But with Dirty Thirty, Asa bravely reveals that even empowered and liberated women who willfully defy patriarchal conventions are not immune to the baggage of entrenched sexism.

Dirty Thirty's mixture of the literary and the profane is nothing new for Asa. In her own way, she's always been a memoirist, chronicling her erotic exploits. Growing up, she documented all of her teenage sexcapades in her diary, up until the day her mortified mom discovered the secret text and read intimate details about the boys she had been fooling around with.

Asa was in tune with her sexuality at an early age. But like most young women, she grew up in an environment where she wasn't able to express it openly.

"Our culture tells girls growing up that they should be desirable, but not desirable on their own terms," said feminist educator Shira Tarrant. "If you dare to be desirable on your own terms, the cultural smackdown."

It was these relentless "cultural smackdowns" that filled Asa with guilt over her sexuality. "I definitely grew up with the shame of, 'Oh my God, I am not supposed to masturbate, but I can't stop doing it!'" said Asa. "I've done it for as long as I can remember, and I don't know why. I wasn't like fingering, but I would touch my clit and I knew it felt good."

Asa's curiosity about sex persisted, despite her family not being open to discussing the topic. Asa still doesn't talk about her porn career with her parents, even though she speaks with her mom every single day.

In Dirty Thirty, she touches on how this sexual repression can impact the psyche of young women and where it emanates from. "A young girl taught to suppress her sexuality learns that there are parts of herself that she cannot express, that she cannot enjoy," she writes. "Either way, we are both being taught that women are not equal to men, that women are not allowed the same luxuries as men when it comes to sex."

As a someone who finds immense joy in sex, her progression from a young girl who was in tune with her sexuality into a woman who could command and wield that sexual energy on camera happened fast. Interested in getting into the adult business, she started working as a dominatrix in a dungeon in Manhattan at the age of 19. From there, she became a stripper, dancing for dollars at Larry Flint's Hustler Club in Manhattan. Her next phase was doing cam-girl solo masturbation shows on the internet. She finally started shooting her first adult films in 2008 at the age of 23.

Asa's first ever boy-girl scene was directed by Gina Lynn, a porn star who's in the AVN hall of fame. The scene co-starred Lynn's then-husband Travis Knight. After taking a three-hour bus ride to Pennsylvania from New York City, Asa went through makeup, snapped a few promo shots, and finally mounted Knight cowgirl style in the couple's bedroom while Lynn operated the camera.

"It felt so natural, like it didn't feel like this big defining moment," she said. "It felt almost like when I am on set now. I was really happy like, This is definitely what I want to do." Four days after shooting that scene, she was on a plane flying out to LA to embark on her legendary porn career.

One thing that people often assume about actresses in porn is that they are victims being exploited by a misogynistic industry. But Asa has made it known throughout her career that pornography is something that she loves making, and it was that passion for her profession that gave her what she needed to reach the top.

For industry insiders like anal porn legend John Stagliano, her rise was undeniable and obvious from the very beginning. It came down to how much effort she put in. "She worked really hard," said the founder of the Evil Angel, a film studio that helped fund 2009's Pure, one of Asa's first AVN-nominated films. "She is a unique Asian girl who is really good at doing major lead roles. She is also unique because of her smarts."

Although her star was rising, Asa's big break came in 2010 when she entered into the world of anal sex. At the time, she had no intention of ever putting a penis in her butt on camera because it was the one thing that she wanted to save for a man that she loved. Her previous experience with anal sex was an uncomfortable, unfortunate situation where a sweaty dick accidentally penetrated the wrong hole. But Asa started to open up to anal sex after dating a guy who liked to be pegged. The ecstasy he felt as she fucked him piqued her curiosity.

"I did it with this guy and he was really good at it because he gets fucked in the ass. He knew all of these good tips and how slow to go," she said. "Most guys I don't think even know, they just think it is another hole. He was really good at it and I was like, Oh my god, I love this."

She went on to shoot her first anal scene as part of a showcase movie for Elegant Angel. The scene featured Asa in a three-way with two other men, one being her future husband Toni Ribas. It was meant to be her first vaginal double-penetration scene, but she felt so turned on during the taping that it quickly evolved into her first anal performance.

"I was like, 'Fuck it. I will just do it.' I was like, 'Just put it in my ass.' And they were like DPing me and it was the best feeling ever," she explained. "That changed me, it changed my whole outlook. It made me just go into things with a more open mind... It was really a life changing moment."

It wasn't long after that first scene that porn fans started to call her an "anal queen."

Asa's foray into anal couldn't have come at a more perfect time. Anal sex and ass play were becoming less taboo and more trendy. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 39 percent of women and 44 percent of men aged 15 to 44 experimented with anal sex in 2011. That's a significant increase from the 20 percent of women and 26 percent of men aged 18 to 59 whom the CDC reported on in 1992.

But it wasn't just the rise of anal sex that helped catapult Asa to the forefront of porn. As a performer, she brought something unique to the table.

", it is much easier to fake it and not be into the act," said John Stagliano, who's widely known as "Buttman," to me. "Anal sex is hard to do. Some people physiologically just can't do it comfortably. It is a genetic thing as much as a mental thing. But the mental thing is really interesting to watch, to see someone overcome that and go through the pleasure and the pain of anal sex is very powerful." Asa's performances clicked with fans because they could tell that the pleasure she exhibited on screen was real.

Today, Asa's brand is so synonymous with anal, she's asked to teach classes on it. She hosted one in August at the the House of Scorpio in Brooklyn, where a horde of eager fans purchased tickets to hear how she prepares for scenes. At the class, the star divulged her process, which included everything from cleansing her insides with an enema, rubbing coconut oil on her asshole, and drinking fiber-filled psyllium husk. It's instances like these with Asa that remind you that although what she does—whether it's with porn, books, or business—may look easy, there's a great deal of work and determination behind it.

"When I started doing anal porn, I was like, 'I want to be the best at this.' I really like things I am good at and I think as soon as I saw that I was good at porn—whatever that means—it made me say, 'OK, now I am really driven, now I want to win all of the awards.'"

As I sat in the crowd at the Bluestockings bookstore, during Asa's reading from Dirty Thirty, I saw the audience get entranced by her as she laid herself bare—this time, not through her flesh, but through her words. Following the reading, Asa answered questions from the audience. A man sitting in the back yelled, "You're not going to stop doing porn until you're 80 right?" Asa laughed and said, "Yeah, I am going to be like that," pointing to a cartoon of an elderly woman in a bikini hanging above a bookshelf. But the reality is that Asa doesn't know when she should or even if she could quit making porno films.

On the one hand, the industry has given her so much. Asa's net worth is estimated to be more than $1.5 million, making her one of the richest porn stars in America. But unfortunately there are struggles that come with her line of work in our society, especially as time goes by.

As Dirty Thirty outlines, now that she's in her thirties, Asa feels she is at a tipping point, where she has to reconcile the life she's led as a porn star with the life society would want her to lead as an older woman and a mother. It's unfortunate and unfair that this binary exists, even for sexually liberated business ladies like Asa. But what's so brave and bold about her is that she doesn't try to pretend that she's above or beyond this struggle. Her unguarded exploration of it in her writing and public life is powerful, real, and relatable.

"On one hand I am so proud of what I do. I am proud that I am in charge of my sexuality and I have done it despite what the majority of society thinks I should be doing," she told me. "But I am super aware that because of the way the world is right now, I have ruined a lot of things for myself. I have closed a lot of doors. It would be a lie to say that didn't sadden me."

Follow Erica Euse on Twitter.

See more photos by Heather Sten.

Asa Akira's Dirty Thirty was published by Cleis Press in August 2016. Purchase a copy.