Spike Jonze, a longtime friend and collaborator of VICE, has created an intimate investigation into our ties to tech in his newest film, Her, which just received five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. The film focuses on love, loss, and how artificial intelligence alters our perceptions of those abstract ideas—as well as how our conceptualization of a "relationship" is always changing. 

Inspired by Her's themes of connection and meaningful communication in the internet age, The Creators Project asked filmmaker Lance Bangs (who also directed this profile of Spike) to interview a range of creative folks, including LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, actress Olivia Wilde (who appears in Her), and Marc Maron, about how technology has shaped their love lives.

Continue reading over at The Creators Project.

Map of clean up efforts, via CNRL.

It’s been eight months since the world first heard about a bitumen-oozing fiasco on a oil field owned by the Canadian Natural (CNRL) corporation near Cold Lake, Alberta. Four mysterious leaks have slowly spewed 1.878 million litres of heavy crude mixed with water, spurring several government investigations and orders—one of which called for two-thirds of a lake to be drained over the winter months.

According to the province’s energy regulator, all four spills are still oozing with no calculable end in sight. “The incident isn’t actually over,” says Darin Barter, senior PR advisor for the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), noting the cold weather has slowed the flow to “almost nothing.” “We don’t expect that’s going to last once the weather heats up,” he says.

All this is going down on an active air weapons range—which, no matter which way you slice it, is not a great look. The same Cold Lake oil field reported another incident just last week, spilling 27,000 bonus litres into an underground reservoir. Barter says that incident is unrelated, fixed and affected no wildlife or water bodies.

The spills have raised concern about the super-hot high-pressure injection methods CNRL and other energy companies use to get bitumen out of the ground. A coalition of 23 health, environment, and First Nations groups have called on the AER to conduct a public inquiry into the safety of so-called “in-situ” operations—a process similar to fracking.

Environment Canada, Alberta’s Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development (ESRD) and the AER have not, so far, taken up this broader cause. “I can only speak for the AER, but there are currently no plans for an inquiry into the matter,” Barter says. “Our investigation looks into the geological aspect,” he adds, “everything from pressures to caprock integrity.”

As The Tyee explained last October, caprock integrity isn’t often discussed in the media but it’s a crucial issue for the energy industry. “Approximately 80 per cent of Alberta's bitumen deposits lie deeper than 75 metres and cannot be mined. As a consequence, these deep deposits, all capped by rock, are currently being heated to as high as 300 degrees Celsius with highly pressurized steam.” This caprock acts as a protective seal, and operating with enough pressure as to not break the caprock is a very precarious process that has gone wrong in the past. There’s no indication, however, that such a mistake was made in Cold Lake.

“Our focus is on whether environmental laws were broken,” ESRD spokesperson Jessica Potter tells me. The ESRD also issued a second order, to test deep groundwater wells and find root causes for the spill. The drilling for those tests is underway.

CNRL has complied with the orders and has made greater efforts to reach out to the public about remediation efforts, earmarking $40 million for clean up. The affected area has been reduced and pressure underground appears to have decreased.

Why it happened and how it’s dragged on so long remains undetermined—though CNRL is advancing a “confident” hypothesis that bad cement jobs in retired wells are to blame. “Canadian Natural’s causation review will be extensive,” CNRL spokesperson Zoe Addington assured me via email. “All the evidence and data collected to date suggests the fluids can only make it through the shales at the base of the Colorado Group by a failed or partially-failed wellbore.”

Translation: there are these super-hard rock layers with names like "Viking" and "Colorado" around 180-360 metres deep in the ground. So far none of CNRL’s evidence show those rock layers have been penetrated by anything but the company’s old well structures. “A failed wellbore can be in the form of a poor or faulty cement job on abandoned legacy stratigraphic wells.”

Map of fissures and arrows via Dr. Timoney and Lee.

Aside from being written in robot, this is not a complete answer—nor is it endorsed by the AER. “We can’t confirm what they’re saying,” says Barter. It doesn’t begin to explain why the bitumen arrives at the surface in long, oily gashes in the surrounding soil and wetlands.

“Until independent scientists can examine the geologic findings, I would not place much stock in the opinion of CNRL,” says Dr. Kevin Timoney, a scientist who released his own research on the spill back in September. Dr. Timoney says he does not know of any independent scientists that have been granted access to the site, which includes experts hired by local First Nations to collect evidence for constitutional challenges.

Crystal Lameman of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation is still waiting for access. She says her right to hunt, trap, fish, and forage on the land has been violated by the spill and the cumulative affects of industry. “In order for those rights to be abided by, you obviously need a healthy ecosystem—being damaged and affected, that's a direct violation of our treaty rights, which are enshrined in the Canadian constitution.” 

The Beaver Lake Cree case is one of several legal battles between provincial and federal governments and First Nations, most recently sparking controversy as Neil Young weighed in, asking Canadians to honour the treaties of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nations, a people and territory located further north amid Alberta's oil deposits.

“They [the government] don’t get to pick and choose which parts of the constitution they like and which they don’t,” Lameman says, adding the Beaver Lake Cree have documented 20,000 treaty violations based on leases and permits granted without First Nations consultation. Lameman's nation recently succeeded in raising over $30,000 to begin researching cumulative impacts of developments like the CNRL spill site near Cold Lake.

The spill officially enters its ninth month next week.    

In less than a month, the world will turn its attention to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. As the Russian government gets ready for the event, the gay community is preparing in a slightly different way.

Putin’s ultimate fuck-you move to the Russian gay community was the recent ban on gay “propaganda,” and in the fight back, the publishing company, OR Books, will release a collection of testimonials, interviews, and stories about being gay and in love in Russia on the eve of the Olympics. Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories provides a glimpse into the ongoing abuse and intolerance, and will bring much needed hope and reassurance to young LGBT people of Russia.

I wanted to know a little more about the book and its timely release, so I spoke with one of the book’s editors, Joseph Huff-Hannon. Joseph is a journalist and an activist who has strong ties to the global LGBT right group, All Out.

VICE: Hi Joseph, thanks for speaking with us. Are you excited for the launch of Gay Propaganda? How long of a process has it been?
Joseph Huff-Hannon: Very excited. Our timeline has been kind of insane. We started the book in October, and we’re publishing it in February just in time for the Sochi Olympics, in both languages, English and Russian. We’ve pulled together some incredibly moving stories, and also some really fun, eclectic, unexpected material—a really nice range.

How did the idea for this book first develop?
I just kind of tripped over it. It started with a casual conversation with a Russian woman I met in New York last fall. We were hanging out at a picnic, and she told me about how she met her wife, a decade ago online. It was this very modern long-distance love story, with online dating, language barriers, a happy ending with the two of them in New York, a young daughter, and a wedding right after the Defense of Marriage Act was overturned.

I found it incredibly romantic, and thought, there are hundreds of thousands of great stories like this from Russian LGBT people in love, or looking for love, in Russia, or from Russians who've been pushed out or left their country because of their sexuality. And the Russian government had just declared this all illegal “propaganda.” So I thought, let’s find some of the best ones and put them in a book.

Things moved pretty quickly from there. I pitched OR Books, which is really good at fast turnaround publishing, then reached out to Russian journalist Masha Gessen, my fantastic co-editor on the project. She’s also gay, and had written a piece for The Guardian in June about the choice to move her entire family, partner, and three kids, to the US to escape the anti-gay laws. Despite her very crazy schedule, she heroically agreed to take it on with me, and we didn’t waste much time. Masha organized interviews with gay and lesbian Russians in Russia, and I chased after LGBT Russians abroad, a fast-growing category thanks to the deteriorating situation back home.   

While gathering stories and material, what sort of obstacles did you and the book’s storytellers have to overcome?
Time was a major obstacle; we had very little of it. Also Masha and some of the journalists she was working with had a hard time convincing people or couples living in smaller cities, outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, to open themselves up and share these stories publicly; because of very legitimate fears of being ostracized, fired, attacked or otherwise penalized by the government or the police. I didn’t find it as difficult to convince gay and lesbian Russians living abroad to speak with me, as many these folks don’t feel like they have much left to lose. Many of them are seeking asylum and hope not to return.

How do you hope to distribute the book, both throughout Russia and abroad?
Outside of Russia people can find the book through the normal channels, the publisher will sell it, you can buy it on Amazon etc. In Russia we’re not under any illusion that it will be sold in bookstores. It is a deliberate provocation after all, and by definition likely considered illegal under Russian law if it’s read, seen, or discussed within earshot or in the vicinity of a minor.

But the intention is definitely to get the book into the hands of a Russian audience who it’s primarily intended for—a huge community of LGBT people (Russia is a country of 140 million), along with friends and allies and thinking people in Russia who don’t want their government telling them what to read or not to read, and who may appreciate these very lovely, very human, and often very hilarious, true love stories. In a society where the government has made positive or sympathetic portrayals of LGBT life illegal, I think voices like this could be a lifeline for some queer Russians, and a culture jam to at least begin to combat all the anti-gay venom being spewed by the major media in Russia.

As to how we’ll do that, by the end of this month the Russian e-book will be available for anybody as a free download, and we’ll be publicizing that in the Russian blogosphere and in the media. Right now we’re also trying to fund raise for a special Russian printing of the book, so we can send them to Russian LGBT groups for free, and they can circulate them “samizdat” style, amongst friends and acquaintances. And we’ll be looking for people traveling to Sochi—spectators, athletes, journalists, to take copies with them and help get them circulating.

Using literature to combat oppression isn't new, but how do you think e-books will fare for this purpose? People aren’t exactly advertising what they’re reading when using e-readers...
I think the subject matter lends itself well to reading this on an e-book or a tablet, for readers in Russia. The situation right now really is pretty scary. I just heard about a friend of a friend, a straight guy, who was beat up by thugs in Moscow who shouted anti-gay epithets at him. Apparently he was dressed too stylish. So reading the book in a way that doesn’t advertise the content could make it easier and more accessible for some people, young people in particular. That said printed books are still the easiest to share and pass around, so we’re also talking now about a special Russian edition with a more innocuous title and cover image that doesn’t immediately broadcast that this is a book of gay and lesbian love stories. In that way I do think this project lives in a very cool dissident Russian tradition of samizdat, of printing and circulating banned books.

For a movement such as this to prompt change, what do you think needs to happen in Russia and elsewhere?
That’s a big question. I think one of the reasons this law came about in the first place was in reaction to the powerful role that culture has played in the west in softening attitudes toward gays and lesbians. I think reactionaries around the world, in the US as well, have taken note of how literature, TV, theater and film have helped normalize the idea for the mainstream that yes, LGBT people exist, they’re mostly just like you and me, and you probably have at least one in the family. These cultural shifts have gone hand in hand with political and legal campaigning to win equal rights.

So I do think it’s a shrewd move on the part of conservatives to try to shut down that cultural space where stories and portrayals and reporting can change hearts and minds. And in a place like Russia where the major media are so thoroughly in bed with the government, it’s much easier to do that. But I also think it can create a backlash, and who knows, we may see that happen in Russia, though it may not happen until Putin’s rule has run its course.

Is the Olympic committee going against its own policies by allowing Russia to host the winter games?
I think there’s been some really creative organizing and campaigning by groups like All Out and Athlete Ally around the Olympic committee in particular. They teamed up with American Apparel on a whole new clothing line called P6, which stands for Principle 6 of the Olympic charter, the clause that calls out discrimination. They have athletes and others who are going to wear that all over the place in Sochi, which I think is pretty cool. At this point I think there’s been so much drama kicked up around this issue and the Olympics that it will undoubtedly figure into how the IOC chooses to select host cities in the future, and that’s a win. I also think one of the hilariously unintended consequences of it all is that Sochi will likely be seen as the gayest Olympics ever, that LGBT rights and representation has become such a central part of the story, and is going to be a major part of the coverage. It’s probably not what Putin intended when he vied for the Games.

It was recently reported that Nigeria passed a law banning same-sex activity, punishable by imprisonment. With Russia setting an example of intolerance, are more countries likely to follow suit?
There is definitely something happening right now, a backlash. Dozens of gay men were actually just arrested in Nigeria following the passage of that law. The Ugandan parliament just passed their draconian anti-gay law (though the president has yet to sign it). The Indian Supreme Court recently overruled a lower court ruling, and re-criminalized gay sex, in the biggest democracy on the planet. So there is definitely a sense somehow that the pendulum is swinging backward in some places. I think there are a lot of forces at play, but international LGBT rights have also never had the profile they do today, so clearly the battle is ongoing.

@willscarlett

image via Flickr User T3I Eric

There's an ugly schism happening in the animal shelter business over whether or not we should kill animals when a shelter gets too crowded. The reality used to be that the animals in the pound were all on death row, and adoption rescued them. The recent trend toward no-kill shelters created a much more comforting mental image if taken at face value: a shelter isn't a pound; it's a place where animals can stay forever, right?

Even PeTA has taken a somewhat pro-euthanasia stance, and it has resulted in counterintuitive news stories where the noted anti-cruelty crusaders are suddenly showing up as the puppy slaughtering bad guys. As if on schedule, a new story presents the other side of that coin: Maybe PeTA is exhibiting forward-thinking pragmatism instead of just being headline-grubbing trolls. 

A recent lawsuit in Maryland is the latest event bucking the trend by painting a picture of a shelter manager's no-kill obsession that led to alleged acts of unthinkable cruelty to animals. Former employees of the Humane Society of Washington County in Hagerstown, Maryland, are coming forward with accusations, as well as a lawsuit. The plaintiff in the suit, Amanda Surber is publicly naming names, and telling horror stories that, if false, would easily get her slapped with a defamation suit. 

Over at the Humane Society, non-disclosure agreements come pretty standard with employment. I admit that my evidence for this is anecdotal; acqaintences of mine who have worked there won't tell me what it was like. However, in Surber's case, one of the litany of complaints against her employer is that retaliation after she refused to sign her NDA was part of the reason she was fired. The complaints in her 20-page suit include everything under the sun, from not paying overtime to seemingly wholesale disregard for animal welfare.

Surber calls out her former boss, Michael Lausen, as the primary villain. She says Lausen was determined to win the label "No-Kill" for the shelter, at any cost, including crowding cats together like sardines. She and another former employee, Andrea Carroll, are going full whistleblower, with photo printouts, and testimony about horrible animal abuse being carried out in the name of not killing. She told ABC News, "Forty cats would be coming in every day. We had nowhere to put them. They’re sick, diseases were spreading that we can’t treat.” 

Amanda Surber. Screencap via

Lausen had previously been on a high-profile crusade to get pets out of shelters and into homes in Washington County. Last year shortly after transferring from El Paso, Texas, and shaking things up in his new place of employment, he told the Herald-Mail, “We’re not the housing police. We’re not checking the income,” and that the previous adoption process at the shelter had been “extremely tedious, to be polite.”

But on the other hand, Surber claims Lausen also ordered the slaughter of animals en masse for unclear reasons in pursuit of his "no-kill" aspirations. Perhaps he needed a clean slate in order to achieve a no-kill 2014? But slaughter animals he did, she alleges, and the specifics will turn your hair white.

You may want to prepare a browser tab with some cute pictures before reading this next part.

• She says in July of last year, someone wanted their dead dog cremated, but that there was a grim switcheroo, and the dog's ashes were mixed into a pet ash salad. So Lausen euthanized a similar dog, and gave the customer the ashes in order to cover his mistake.
• She also says a bunch of cats were given a slapdash mass execution, and that they "had violent seizures instead of a peaceful death.” She told ABC that she "had to go room to room to put these animals down. You can’t kill 130 animals in an hour and expect it to be humane."
• Finally, one of her 86 complaints is that sick animals were housed with healthy ones. I assume this was just carelessness, not an attempt to weed out animals with illness instead of euthanizing them, but it's still pretty horrible.  

Text of the legal filing. Screencap via

I don't claim to know what Michael Lausen was really up to. I can picture a head-cracking take-no-prisoners manager fomenting bad blood in his former employees, but I can also envision one of those seemingly normal people on This American Life who turn out to be dangerous psychopaths.

If "no-kill" is bad for animals, and "yes-kill" is also bad for animals, what do we do? Let all the strays run wild and free? No. Turns out that's even worse for animals, because, left to their own devices, many of the animals we love turn into killing machines. As Jonathan Franzen is fond of pointing out, every year outdoor cats kill about 2 billion birds  and somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 billion mammals, meaning for sheer number of organisms killed, they're out-killing humans. Far from being just a part of nature, cats are invasive, and are driving species like the piping plover, the Florida scrub-jay, and the California least tern to the brink of extinction.

At any rate, the whole thing is about to play out in court, and if cases like these are widespread, it might give way to more whistleblowers. One way or another it's going to have a very real impact on the lives of a lot of animals.

@MikeLeePearl

This week, Lower East Side legend Clayton Patterson invited me to the screening of Simon J. Heath's new film Ten Men Talk New York. A tale about what New York means to ten of its natives, the film doesn't fall short of its title.

Clayton is one on the men in the film. He met Simon at the closing party for Motor City, a now-closed dive bar known for its grungy clientale, where Simon asked him to participate in his movie. “The questions [he asked] were more just words,” Clayton said. “Words that generations of brilliant poets, philosophers, writers, and artists have been struggling to define the meaning of.”

As a lover of art and the Lower East Side, I was dying to see Simon's movie and speak to the filmmaker himself. Luckily, I was able to catch up with Simon at a screening and interview him about his new movie, love for Manhattan, and the magical, poetic words that inspired the film. 

Photo of Simon by the author. 

VICE: Hi Simon, why did you decide to make a film about New York?
Simon J. Heath: I have loved New York since I was a kid. All my heroes, from Kerouac to Hendrix, Pollack to Gallo, lived and relished the culture that New York throws at you with everything she has. After watching a recent film about New York that painted the whole city like a giant Upper West Side yuppie paradise, I got pissed off. The Hollywood film showed a world far from the New York I skate through. So I decided to make my own film.

What was the thinking behind the film?
I wanted to keep Ten Men Talk New York bullshit-free and true to the men who I feature in it. I shot it clean in black and white, with the ten men simply speaking what they want on camera. There is no flashy host or cheesy voiceover in Ten Men Talk New York, because I did not want anyone telling the audience what to think. This movie allows ten real New Yorkers to speak. Its up to the audience to make their own decisions on what is said. 

How did you choose ten New Yorkers out of million of men?
The ten men are all long-time New Yorkers—guys I already knew from bars, skating, parties, and just hanging out in New York. They gave me their trust, they spoke openly, without fear, favor, or trying to kiss ass. 

How did you choose the topics?
The topics the ten men talk about are love, sex, death, race, the best, the worst, new, and old. These topics were chosen because we all have views on them—they’re universal. But here in New York—like everything—these things are amplified out of all proportion. That’s why we live here.

Why are there no women in the film?
There will be a Ten Women Talk New York once I get the cash to make it! So contact me and throw a fucking ATM at me and let the creativity roll on.

@RedAlurk

When Russian President Vladimir Putin banned gay "propaganda" in June last year, Russia's LGBT community went from being a stigmatized fringe group to full-blown enemies of the state. Homophobia becoming legislation means it’s now not only accepted in Russia but actively encouraged, which has led to a depressing rise in homophobic attacks and murders.

The main aim of the law, which essentially bans any public display of homosexuality, is to prevent minors from getting the impression that being gay is normal. Which means that, if you’re young and gay in Putin’s Russia, you’re ostracized and cut off from any kind of legal support network.

We traveled to Russia ahead of February's Sochi Winter Olympics to investigate the effects of the country's state-sanctioned homophobia. We take a ride in Moscow's gay taxi service, hear about the rise of homophobic vigilante groups, and meet Yulia, who runs LGBT self-defense classes. 

For further information on some of the issues raised, please visit www.stonewall.org.uk/international.

A still from Noah. 

If you have been near the internet in the last few months, you have probably heard about Noah, a 17-minute short film that takes place entirely on a teenager's laptop screen. In more conservative hands, a concept like this would consist of annoying moments that would make you want to rip your laptop screen off its hinges. Thankfully Patrick Cederberg, Matt Hornick, and Walter Woodman—the movie’s three Toronto-based student filmmakers—got into the nitty-gritty of our contemporary digital landscape, creating scenes that feature Facebook profile hacks and a barrage of cocks on Chatroulette.

Although the filmmakers removed the short from the internet because they’re entering it into 2014 film festivals, Noah remains cinema’s most accurate portrayal of communication in the internet age. Last week, I skyped with the three directors to chat about the creation of the movie, growing up online, and the internet's endless suppy of penises. 

From left: Patrick Cederberg, Matt Hornick, and Walter Woodman. 

VICE: Where did the idea for the movie come from?
Patrick Cederberg: Walter had written a draft that started out on a computer screen—basically the whole Chatroulette sequence—and in the second half left the computer as our hero went and found a girl he fell in love with on Chatroulette. But after a lot of discussion, we figured the real life part wasn't working, and we thought it'd be a cool challenge to do an entire short film in that box and see if it was possible to convey emotion and language using only what you see on the computer screen.

How long did it take to film the movie?
Walter Woodman: The longest part was making the profiles, which took a couple of months. We made these fake Facebooks, and we sent messages to one another and also tried to add kids from that school—the characters go to real schools that exist in Toronto, so we started adding kids from those schools. They'd be like, “Do I know you?” and we'd be like, “Yeah, from that party,” and they'd be like, “Oh, cool.” But the actual filming and screen capture only took a week. We sat in the room with our actors and ran over our Skype and Chatroulette scenes with a ton of takes, and then comped those in. We did the actual screen capture live. It was the three of us sitting around a bunch of computers, and each of us was assigned a different character.
Matt Hornick: We got the first half of the film in one night, and the second half in another night. It was just two nights for the screen capture.

Was the Chatroulette scene real or did you create that? 
Walter: You could never get that if you just go on Chatroulette randomly, so what we did was take our computer to our friend's house and just tell our friends to entertain us. Then we made a montage of our friends and showed it to the actor on Chatroulette. He didn't know what was coming next, so he just had to react to our friends. I can't really say legally whose cocks those were, but we do have a lot of friends who [showed their] dicks.

Throughout the movie, you zoom into different areas of the screen, which is how I always read on the computer. Right now, for instance, I’m looking at three different things as I talk to you. Did you zoom into different areas to recreate that reading style?
Patrick: In the initial cut, we wanted to see what it would be like to have a full screen capture that you could watch, but after about five minutes, it was incredibly boring. We found that unless we are in control you don't really know where to put your focus, so we decided that if we added in the focus moving around, it not only would give us a character we wanted but also would be a nice narrative tool to tell jokes.

You guys are in your early 20s, so you were brought up with this technology. Has the internet been there throughout all your formative years?
Patrick: It was around in elementary school when kids started to communicate this way, so we saw [the world] with and without the internet in a sense.
Matt: I think our age group is the last one to remember what it was like before the whole change to the internet.
Walter: We were less concerned about the exact technology. I didn't even have a Facebook when we started the whole thing. We wanted to make it so that it wasn't about those particulars. It wasn't about Facebook or ChatRoulette because those come and go—it was more about the style of communication and the body language. We were discussing, “Is there body language when you're watching someone else type?” There was a comment on YouTube saying, “Who the hell highlights their text when they're writing?” The reason that's in there is because I do that. 

You also deal with having porn on in the background of the computer screen while using the computer for other reasons. Why did you choose to have porn in the background of scenes?
Patrick: Being teenage boys in the era of the internet, that's so fresh in our habits. And we never wanted to approach something like this without being honest. This would've sucked really hard without it being brutally honest, which is why we wanted to put in the porn and the dicks.
Walter: There's also the cheeky nature of us doing a school project and wanting to put “Scene 1: He Goes To YouPorn.” We thought that was funny, but then it became less and less of “Look how clever we are.”  It was more like, “Fuck, this is what we do. This is the sad truth of who we are.” 

@RickPaulas

Cutter Hodierne’s short film about Somali pirates, Fishing Without Nets, was a 2012 Sundance grand jury prize-winning short. We were so blown away by the film that we decided to team up with Cutter to produce a feature film. Cutter and his crew returned to East Africa to shoot a full-length Fishing Without Nets. They came back with an entrancing and humanizing look at Somali pirates through the eyes of the pirates themselves.

Fishing premiered at Sundance yesterday to glowing praise. After a night of much-deserved celebration and revelry, we woke up this morning to rave reviews from Variety, Associated Press, the Wrap, the Hollywood Reporter, and lots and lots more.

The film follows Abdi, played by Abdikani Muktar, a fisherman who—after pollution spoils the waters generations of his family have counted on for fish—uses the last money he has to smuggle his wife and son out of the country, towards a better life. Desperate to join them, Abdi succumbs to the allure of the quick money to be made as a pirate. His experience as a fisherman gives him the knowledge about shipping lanes that the hijacking party needs. Reluctant, but determined to rejoin his family, Abdi sets off to capture an oil tanker and take its crew hostage.

Cutter's film is deeper than the standard blockbuster: it brings a complex, temporal beauty to the action-thriller genre. To get a taste, check out Cutter's original short below.

Photo via

Here begins a mysterious tale, a remarkable turn of events filled with superstition and dark discoveries, quirks and confusion, lies and past lives. Yeah, that’s the X-Files theme tune you can hear. At the center of the plot lives a mysterious character, the mad scientist known only as Dr. V, owner of a magical putter, genius-yet-difficult mind and decidedly questionable past. As we delve deeper into this exotic tale, we shall discover, well… how can I put it? Discrepancies. Things that cannot be explained. Revelations. This story, you see, is very, very strange. And then it becomes stranger still. And then, the deeper we delve, the stranger it becomes…

If you would like to read that story you could head over to Grantland.com and check out Caleb Hannan’s 8,000-or-so word essay on his oh-so fascinating investigations into the mysterious Dr V. Or if, like me, you’d rather spend that time getting drunk, or fucking, or watching Breaking Bad. You could get all the facts simply by reading my next three sentences. A transgender woman known as Dr. V invented a new type of golf club and lied about her academic qualifications. A journalist called Caleb Hannan threated to publish details about these professional lies and also out her as transgender against her will. A few days later she killed herself.

Don’t hate Caleb. He has, up until now, been totally outdone by his older brother, Freddie Jones. Freddie and his pals Daphne, Velma, and Scooby have solved various mysterious over the years—while Caleb remained in the background, silently pining for glory. You can totally see why he would jump at the chance to make a name for himself with the "Mysterious Case of Dr. V’s Magical Putter." Sadly, subtlety is not Caleb’s strong point (nor mine, truth told) and he insists on telling his readers, at every opportunity, how very strange his story is. He kinda reminds me of that time my grandma tried a spliff. “Everything is so strange!” Whatever his literary pretentions, the effect is less Sherlock Holmes and more Tales from the Crypt. We need to cut out a great deal of bullshit to get to the bottom of it all. Let’s start at the beginning. 

Caleb, for unexplained and mysterious reasons, simply can’t sleep, and is up watching videos on YouTube. The clock has struck midnight; the witching hour, you might say. Who knows what might happen? He finds out that someone has invented a new type of golf club. As a journalist, curious Caleb wants to know more. It turns out the woman behind this new putter, Dr V, hates media attention. She replies to his email using fancy language and a few words he doesn’t know. "No harm in that," says Caleb. She’s clearly just one of those mad scientists. If anything, it’s to be expected. Dr. V makes clear from the start that she will only talk to Caleb if the focus is “on the science and not the scientist." "That’s reasonable," says Caleb. Still, this Dr. V does strange shit like signing off emails with ‘ciao’ and using acronyms Caleb has never heard. So he decides to dig deeper and discover the secrets that have, up until now, remained shrouded in mystery. Cue spooky Scooby Doo music.

Caleb speaks to one of Dr. V’s colleagues, McCord. He agrees to introduce Caleb to Dr. V, but reminds him that the focus must be on the science and not the scientist. Even though McCord himself is irresistibly intrigued by her.

“It wasn’t just the science behind Dr. V’s putter that intrigued McCord. It was the scientist, too. For starters, she was a woman in the male-dominated golf industry. She also cut a striking figure, standing 6-foot-3 with a shock of red hair. What’s more, she was a Vanderbilt, some link in the long line descending from Cornelius, the original Commodore.”

I know, right? It’s like an episode of Eerie, Indiana. She’s tall! And that hair! Red! When have you ever met someone like that?!

Caleb then writes some mildly interesting stuff—nothing as exhilarating as meeting a tall woman with red hair, mind—about how if you tell people they are playing with superior equipment they actually play better. Regardless of the actual equipment. He also tries the putter and thinks it’s kinda groovy. It all seems like valid stuff to be thinking about if you’re writing an article on golf putters. But then Caleb finds some of Dr. V’s business decisions confusing and decides to ask her about her personal life. Because that’s logical. And has everything to do with golf putters. Dr. V reacts badly and reminds him to focus “on the benefits of the science for the golfer, not the scientist." What a weirdo!

Caleb keeps digging. Just what is Dr. V hiding? What mystery does she hold? It certainly looks like she’s lied about her resume. She’s clearly the first person in America to do this so Caleb decides to make it the main focus of his investigation. He also finds someone else who’s been digging up information on her.

“He was clearly trying to tell me something, which is why he began emphasizing certain words. Every time he said 'she' or 'her," I could practically see him making air quotes. Finally it hit me. Cliché or not, a chill actually ran up my spine."

“Are you trying to tell me that Essay Anne Vanderbilt was once a man?”

A-ha, the Scooby Doo moment! Take off that mask “Dr. V”! The spine-tingling truth is revealed!

What I find most interesting is his informer’s refusal to confirm that Dr. V is trans. “I cannot confirm or deny anything on that… But let me ask you a question. How far have you looked into her background?” I didn’t realize people spoke like that outside of Hitchcock movies, but then I’m only just discovering what an incredibly strange world we live in. There’s something more than a little absurd about this asshole telling Caleb, “There’s something you should know” before adding “but it’s too terrible for me to confirm,” like it’s some unspeakable truth. You know, that transgender people exist. He could have just said, “It’s not really my place to say, but I think Dr. V could be trans. That might explain why you’re having trouble finding her records." But why put it like that when you could be make a big fucking deal out of it instead?

But back to our magical tale. Strangely, Caleb’s other interviewees don’t seem to care that Dr. V is trans. As he puts it, “the more I talked to people in the world of club design, the more I came to understand that many believed the physics behind the Oracle putter were solid, even if the ‘scientist’ was not.” Maybe they were, um, focusing on the science and not the scientist? Maybe they saw she had value beyond her gender? As Caleb also writes, “Champions Tour player David Frost had once received an hour-long putting lesson from Dr. V… the information Dr. V had imparted to him was so valuable, Frost told me, that he wasn’t even willing to share it."

That’s what really pisses me off about his shitty Grantland article, and the editors and journalists who defend it. There are so many talented people out there, with so much to contribute to society—be they musical or medical skills, or some boring old shit about golf clubs—who are terrified of succeeding, for fear the media will harass them simply for being transgender. More and more young trans people are living their lives openly, but Dr Z grew up in an era when there simply wasn’t a positive way for a transgender person to appear in the news. It was always shit. And, as Caleb has quite spectacularly demonstrated, things haven’t moved on that much. Look at schoolteacher Lucy Meadows, who killed herself following months of unwanted press intrusion in the UK. Or Dr. Kate Stone, who was outed by British newspapers after she nearly died in a stag attack. A stag attack! What the fuck has that got to do with being transgender? Sorry for all the British references, I’m an English rose you see. And we actually have laws in the UK that make it illegal to out a trans person without their consent or reference someone’s transgender status unless it is genuinely relevant to the news story. It rarely is, but British newspapers still regularly invade people’s freedom to privacy.

American journalists have their own code of conduct, but Caleb doesn’t waste too much time worrying about that. He’s got more important matters to deal with. As everyone knows, when you find out that someone is transgender and wishes to keep that information private, you go tell everyone. He doesn’t quite get the response he wants though. “Maybe the most surprising thing about my conversation with Kinney was how calmly he took the news that the woman he thought was an aerospace engineer had once been a man, and a mechanic.” I can just see the confusion on Caleb’s face, the disappointment when he realizes that Kinney just isn’t that bothered. I picture him running around shouting, “Kinney look, it’s a transgender person! She exists! Be shocked with me!” He seems to totally miss the irony when he writes, “Kinney said he was worried that the putter’s excellence would be lost in the strange tale of Dr. V.”

After this, Caleb contacts Dr. V and tells her he’s going to publish his discoveries. She reacts badly. She shouts. She threatens legal action. It seems, as she’s been saying all along, that she’d rather her private life remained private. Caleb can’t accept that though! Things have changed. He didn’t know she “used to be a man” when he first agreed to respect her privacy, did he? A few days later Dr. V emails Caleb warning him he’s about to commit a hate crime. And, a few days after that, she kills herself.

Caleb goes ahead and publishes his story on Grantland. He tells us “everything he knows," which is definitely not the same thing as “everything that’s relevant." He refers to Dr V as “he” and publishes her old name. He discusses her life before she transitioned to female. He tells us she was married. And that she’d tried to kill herself once before, a few years previously. Never mind that she was clearly vulnerable, it was all just another fantastic twist in the plot for Caleb. “What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention had turned into the tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself.” And never mind that faking her scientific credentials had nothing to do with being transgender. Caleb, who has been found guilty of sloppy journalism before, was simply recycling a media narrative that casts trans people as liars and fakes. Many trans people have been killed because of this idea and it’s also the reason their killers expect to be let off the hook. Look up "trans panic defense." That’s when you kill someone because you happened to find them attractive and felt tricked when they told you they were trans. Yeah, it’s a thing.

I tried to contact Caleb last night but he didn’t respond to my tweets or my emails. He chatted to a journalist buddy of mine yesterday, but it was strictly off the record. On Twitter he says he is “overwhelmed” by the negative responses he’s had—just check out the thousands of angry tweets using the hashtag #JusticeForDrV. Many people are calling him a murderer. I don’t think we can simplify suicide like that though. There could be any number of reasons Dr. V killed herself and there are lots of unanswered questions. What the hell, for example, has someone’s genital status got to do with their ability to design a golf club? But that doesn’t change the fact that, like many transgender people, Dr. V was clearly vulnerable, and she didn’t deserve to be outed against her will. I could give you some stats that show transgender people are way more likely to experience discrimination, mental health issues, and a desire to kill themselves, or you can just take my word for it. Maybe Caleb will write about these issues one day. For now though he doesn’t want to talk to reporters. He values his privacy. Mysteriously, strangely, oddly, he just wants to be left alone.

@ParisLees

I discovered dabbing about a year ago, and since then I’ve seen the curiosity about it thrive. Apparently Google doesn’t turn up very informative results on the topic because lots of people have come to me with very basic questions about it. I am by no means an authority on the science of extracts, but I’ve had enough experience with them to mildly enlighten the complete novice.

Most people come to me with snippets of information they’ve gathered and ask me to connect the dots, often wanting to know the distinction between vaping flowers, vaping oil, and good old-fashioned smoking. Others have seen someone dabbing and want to know what they were looking at. My favorite category is people who have bought a pen or some oil without completely understanding how to use them. I was recently at the home of a family friend whose son slyly told me that he had some oil. He pulled it out of his contraband cigar box and handed it to me. I took a look at the little amber wad on a square of parchment paper and said, “Looks real nice.” He agreed enthusiastically and then paused for a moment before asking, “So, what the fuck do I do with it?”

I’ve come across lots of people like him, who bought a little bit of oil on a whim and don’t know what to do with it. Then there are the people who have come upon a vaporizer pen and asked me where they’re supposed to get the stuff to put in it. It’s happened enough times that I have a little crash course prepared. I always preface it with a little disclaimer, asking, “Are you sure you want to deal with all this?”

While the high from oil is great, and markedly stronger than any high achieved from vaping or smoking flowers, no one can deny that it is a righteous pain in the ass to deal with. It’s expensive, it sticks to almost anything you store it in, and of course there’s the conundrum of consuming it correctly. If you have some flowers and want to blaze, you can easily whip up a device from the contents of your kitchen, but if you’ve got oil and want to experience the premium high that comes from vaping it, you’re limited to dabbing it with a rig or putting it in a pen--both of which are far more costly than that apple in the crisper. On top of running you 50 bucks or more, vape pens haven’t been around for long enough for all the kinks to be worked out. Every single brand I’ve used has had functionality problems at one point or another. After spending money on both the pen and the oil, there’s nothing more frustrating than having it clog or worse yet seeing it flash a bunch of times to indicate a mystery problem.

If you’re a fully dedicated, long-time dabber, now is the part where you roll your eyes. In pockets all over the US, particularly on the West Coast, dabbing has become widespread enough to develop its own cultural following. In these circles, it’s worth all the trouble, and some even believe that it’s overall a more sophisticated method of consuming cannabis. When we were producing the first episode of Weediquette, which covers solvent extracts, I met some awesome dabbing enthusiasts who took great joy in educating me on this, and others whose enthusiasm bordered on pure elitism. These folks have taken it to the extreme, refusing to smoke flowers and vehemently declaring that smoking plant matter is disgusting and that buds are meaningless.

This mentality can be pretty confounding to typical potheads who have a more “live and let live” attitude when it comes to smoking weed. My preferred method is spliffs, (joints mixed with tobacco) which many people find disgusting. Frankly, I don’t enjoy a pure weed joint as much, but I don’t discriminate. I’ll smoke in any manner the situation dictates. If someone who is smoking with me in my space prefers not to have tobacco, I won’t throw any in. Half the time, I just acquiesce because I don’t want to make a big discussion out of it. But the obsessive dabbers I have met are quite the opposite, taking any opportunity to launch into a spirited soliloquy on the merits of their preferred method over any other.

With extracts, everything is more intense. The high is more intense, the fandom is more intense, and the way you make it is straight up explosive. People who try to derive extracts at home using flammable solvents like butane will sometimes botch the process, blow their faces off, and wind up on the evening news. This irks advocate groups who are pushing to get weed legalized. It’s hard to justify legalizing a drug when all of its medicinal and social benefits are overshadowed by an insular trend that appears far more elicit than any component of the plant itself. And it may even have been a palpable threat at one point, but now legalization is unfolding so fast that it’s unlikely that a few instances of botched home extractions will slow it down.

Many who fear the dabbing trend overlook the practical benefit that it can provide. For medical cannabis patients, sometimes a dab is the only way to get the amount of medicine needed to alleviate pain. Smoking an equivalent amount of weed would tear up one’s throat, and dabbing is faster-acting than eating an edible. Arguments against dabbing for medical use usually center around a lack of testing of extract products. In a lot of cases, medical dispensaries are still selling home-blasted extracts that could have remnants of butane, propane, or whatever solvent was used to conduct the process. Some more advanced operations are using carbon dioxide, which is much cleaner, and others are actually going back and perfecting water/ice processes and coming out with hash so pure you can dab it.

In itself, dabbing is a pretty innovative way of ingesting cannabis, and it gets you high as absolute fuck. I’m glad that it exists as an option. But its delivery systems are still a little half-baked, and the way it’s characterized by both opponents and aficionados reflects a nature of excess that makes me think twice about making it a habit. There will come a time when getting wax and vaping it will be streamlined and easy as pie, but right now it may be more of a hassle than it’s worth. That’s my two cents for anyone who asks me about dabbing. If it’s something you’re into, by all means, do it. Just don’t give me shit about smoking spliffs.

Special thanks to JJ Chamberlain

@ImYourKid

In the first part of Fresh Off the Boat - Shanghai, Eddie ventures into the heart of the city where he meets with Qiuxiang Wang, a humble street food vendor working to live in the city on her own terms. He spends time in her home, where she's constantly making grilled skewers, grabs a midnight snack at a popular nighttime market, and gets a glimpse into what life is like for those trying to keep homegrown markets alive.

Here are some pictures of London that we've gathered together to remind you what a spiritually disorientating, morally depleted, and fun fucking paradise it can be.

Does your town or city qualify for paradise status? Feel free to send your pitches to ukphotoblog@vice.com. We won't bite.

Photos by Konstantin Chernichkin

Just when it seemed that Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests were entering a quieter phase, noise and violence returned to the streets of Kiev during an antigovernment rally yesterday. Anger at a new law that effectively seeks to criminalize antigovernment demonstrations erupted into clashes with riot police. The fighting between the two sides was the most intense the Ukrainian capital has seen since the protests began.

As the Euromaidan campaign continued through New Year and over Orthodox Christmas (January 7), turnout understandably dropped. The initial outpouring of dissent at president Viktor Yanukovych's refusal to sign a major trade deal with the EU back in November had started to wane. It was unclear for how long the protesters could continue, or what strategy the opposition had other than repeating calls for Yanukovych to resign. But the new law—and farcical TV footage of Ukrainian politicians exchanging blows in parliament—provided the president's opponents with new fire for the fight.

Recent weeks have been punctuated with attacks on antigovernment activists in Kiev and other cities. Among them was Tetyana Chornovol, an investigative journalist, known for her reports on the shady business deals of Ukraine’s top officials. In the early hours of December 25, she was driving home alone after publishing a blog post titled, "A Hangman Lives Here," with pictures of an out-of-town residence, which she claimed belongs to Ukraine’s interior minister. In a terrifying ordeal that was caught on dashcam video, she was chased down by another car, and then brutally beaten and left for dead.

Chornovol has since accused Yanukovych of ordering the beating. Speaking yesterday at her first press conference since the incident, she held up a picture of a vast new mansion that is being built, which she says probably belongs to Yanukovych.

As the protests have continued on Independence Square, another form of demonstration has emerged. Known as “avtomaidan” (hashtag #автомайдан), it involves many cars driving together to Mezhyhyria, Yanukovych’s personal residence outside Kiev, or to block government buildings.

The relatively quiet spell was broken last Thursday, when the Ukrainian parliament passed a series of new laws that seriously limit the scope for protests. The laws were rushed through by President Yanukovych’s supporters, with a show of hands and no time for discussion. Not for the first time, a brawl broke out in parliament. But the voting procedure was clearly fine with Yanukovych, and the next day he signed the laws.

The laws, summarized in English on this infographic, clearly limit Ukrainians’ freedom of assembly. They introduce penalties for wearing helmets at demos, setting up tents and public stages and distributing “extremist” materials, among other activities. People driving cars in columns of more than five could have their licenses and vehicles confiscated (presumably a response to the increasingly popular “automaidan” initiatives). Foreign observers are particularly dismayed at the law—which could have been copy and pasted from Vladimir Putin’s Russia—that labels NGOs receiving money from abroad “foreign agents.”

“On paper, Ukraine is now a dictatorship,” commented Timothy Snyder, a well-known American historian of Eastern Europe in the New York Review of Books. Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister, has called Ukraine’s new laws the most repressive to go through a European parliament in decades. They “promise a grim future for the entire nation,” added Amnesty International.

The laws came as a shock to protesters and were condemned by the opposition. "They do not have any legal basis,” said Vitali Klitschko, the heavyweight boxing champion who now leads UDAR (literally: punch), one of the three main opposition parties. It seemed that the authorities would finally be clearing the Maidan, a maze of tents and barricades that have been built up around a central stage in the city's Independence Square. For many commentators, the new laws were a sign that Yanukovych is preparing for the next presidential election, scheduled for 2015, which he is desperate to win—at any cost, it now seems.

Angry at the new laws, a crowd of about 100,000 gathered at the Maidan on Sunday. Some protesters had chosen to respond to the law banning helmets by posing for photos wearing metal colanders and other cookware on their heads instead. Another law, referring to masked extremists, prompted people to come to the Maidan wearing colorful animal masks.

What began as another Sunday of peaceful protests was soon consumed by violence, as radicals clashed with cops near the Dynamo football stadium, about 300 yards from Independence Square. Some of them attacked a police bus, setting it alight with Molotov cocktails. The police responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and water cannons. Channel 5, a Ukrainian TV channel, reported that riot police stripped two protesters, beat them, and fired water at them from a cannon in the freezing cold. One video (above) from yesterday’s events shows riot police charging protesters, then immediately retreating, leaving two to be beaten with sticks and poles, to the sound of the Ukrainian national anthem. Another video, published by Radio Svoboda, shows police taking aim at one of its reporters.

The fighting continued into the night, leaving dozens of citizens wounded. There were many injuries among the police, too: about 100 officers sought medical aid and over 60 were hospitalized, according to an Interior Ministry report the following morning. In addition, over 20 people were detained.

Speaking on Sunday night on hromadske.tv, a civic news channel, Klitschko repeated his call for an early presidential election. In response to one question about the day’s events, he replied: “What was I supposed to do? Use my sportsman’s abilities?” More than once during his TV appearance, the possibility of a “civil war” was mentioned.

A White House statement called the rising tension in Ukraine a “direct consequence” of the Ukrainian government refusing to listen to the people’s demands. “From its first days, the Maidan movement has been defined by a spirit of non-violence and we support today's call by opposition political leaders to re-establish that principle,” it wrote, adding that the US is considering further measures in response to the violence, including sanctions.

On Monday morning, there were many people milling around Hrushevskoho street, where the worst clashes had taken place. Part of the ground was wrecked where heavy paving slabs had been pulled up to use as missiles against riot police. A police bus that had been consumed by flames the previous night was now eerily adorned with icicles.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government showed that it was well on top of the weekend’s news, starting the day with the following tweet: “PM Mykola Azarov: There is a perspective for developing [Ukraine’s] sugar industry.”

Follow Annabelle on Twitter: @AB_Chapman

Driving a Lyft shift can make you do things you never thought you could say no to. After I strapped on the hot pink mustache to my car's grill, I get summoned to pick up my first fare on a Saturday night. It’s from a girl named Amanda. I pulled up to her apartment in LA's Miracle Mile neighborhood and saw her and three other girls waiting in front of a Spanish-style building. They tell me they are headed downtown to a rave and begin talking amongst themselves.  As we’re about to hit the I-10 freeway, the girl in the passenger seat up front, Kim (not her real name), made me an offer I usually can’t refuse: a pot brownie and some Molly.

I thought about it for a second or two, and then politely declined. Kim was a bit surprised. “Who turns down a pot brownie?” she asks incredulously. I laughed and said I had a long night ahead of me. Since I appear to be a normal driver, she kept insisting that I join them for the party. Kim finally gave up and we continued chatting about random things like soccer, their post-college jobs and their plans for the night, which include wooing a lucky dude.

Once we finally arrived downtown, I was asked one more time if I wanted to partake in any of their activities. I declined once again, which sent them on their way. By the time I got home a few hours later and finally parked my car, I noticed something in my cup holder: a hit of Molly. I shook my head, opened my apartment door and chalked it all up to another night of Lyfting.

I first heard about the company in April when my sister told me she was shuttled home by a driver who had a mustache on the front of his car. The best part, she said, was that the ride was donation based. For those of you who don’t know, there’s a suggested amount that Lyft asks "Pax" (the slang term Lyft drivers use for passengers) to pay the drivers based on their experience. You can pay more, you can pay less, but that choice is arbitrary. Soon thereafter, I noticed more cars zipping across town with the company’s trademark pink mustache.

Sometimes your preconceptions about Pax can be entirely wrong. One night, I swooped up a group of what appeared to be rowdy bros who I assumed who were on their way to a bar to continue the party. Instead, they were headed to a concert in Hollywood and in a spacey state of mind. After a few minutes, they told me why: they dropped acid just before I arrived. I thought the group could be one of the typical nightmare rides I’ve heard about on the Lyft driver message board. The four bearded bros are on their way to a concert and hey, who am I to get in the way of a good trip? It turns out the dudes also brought some booze in red Solo cups. Usually, if these fellas were my friends, I’d tell them to spill it out. But I want my 5-star rating and hopefully a tip, which was an unspoken understanding when I let them be. As we cruised down Santa Monica Blvd., I hoped I didn’t get pulled over.

Of course, as we move through West Hollywood on our way to the Fonda Theater, I notice a DUI check point but it’s too late. I can’t move because there’s traffic on both sides of me. I nervously and slowly continue until I see a slew of cops. The guys put their cups down just to be safe, but thankfully, the checkpoint is on the other side of the street so we’re home free.  After we’re in the clear, everyone high-fives and they pounded my roof to the soundings of some EDM courtesy of KCRW that I blasted in the background, all seemed well. When we got to the venue, we fist bump and I’m on my way.

So why did I become a Lyft driver? To help pay off my astronomical student loans. I attended an elite graduate program to get a degree in a shrinking industry. Thanks to the government’s strict policy on student loan default, there’s not a lot someone with a Master’s degree can do in order to pay back those daunting loans unless you’re making serious, banker money. Lyft is an added source of income that doesn’t require too much work and can be fun.

After I kicked around the idea for a couple of months, I applied to be a driver. At first, the thought seemed ridiculous. My buddy and I joked about becoming Lyft drivers due to the easy money. While he never went through with this, I did. My decision was mostly due to my father’s past experience. When my dad was in law school in the late 1970s, he drove a NYC cab for extra money and to put some of that cash towards paying down his student loans.

With Lyft’s growing presence, many cab drivers feel threatened, and rightfully so. They work in an antiquated system that routinely overcharges passengers, are rude to their customers, and their driving skills/knowledge of the city’s roads leave much to be desired. But they have on more than one occasion gone after a Lyft driver, and this is one of the primary reasons why I always keep a baseball bat in my trunk, just because you never know when a cabbie is going to fuck with you.

So far, I haven’t had too many awkward rides. I’ve learned how to steer the conversation towards whatever interests the Pax, and even if this means fibbing about my background. I've assumed the types of professions that on are typical for an Angeleno, which makes my story more believable. I’ve been a comedian, an actor, a student, and even a painter. No one has ever questioned it It’s just another layer to their experience.

On a busy Friday night that saw me start in West Hollywood, I ended up in Santa Monica where I picked up a young lady and her boyfriend. As we sat beside the Santa Monica Place mall, the girl (we’ll call her Deborah) told me that her inebriated boyfriend (we’ll call him Bobby) may be take a few minutes to which I respond, “he better not barf in my car.” She seemed stressed about the situation. I thought, if only I had the pot brownie that girl offered me.

Bobby sat slumped over by the fountain on the corner of 3rd and Broadway. I couldn't see much, but what I did see was the all-too-common sight of a man too drunk to stand. Maybe he is going to yak in my car. Several minutes later, he finally composed himself, so we hit the road.

Bobby tried to make light of the situation, in a way only a drunk bro can. It pissed Deborah off to no end. She smacked him a few times, before landing a forceful slap in his face. I was worried that a domestic dispute would break out in my backseat. Thankfully, nothing happened and Bobby eventually passed out. I weaved in and out of traffic on our way back to her Mid-City apartment. As we slogged through the Friday night traffic, I noticed something strange. I thought Deborah had her hand on my shoulder. I glanced back and it turned out I was wrong.

By the time we got back to her West Hollywood apartment, Deborah, who hadn’t seen my face since our quick fist bump (something that begins and ends every ride) out of concern for Bobby, woke him up and thanked me for the ride. Bobby gives me a haphazard slap on my back. Deborah gestured like she was going to try to chase him down, but he had disappeared into the building. Suddenly, she stopped.

“Has anyone ever told you that you look like Zac Brown?” she said.

I responded no, and asked if that’s a good thing.

“Yes,” she said with a wry, flirtatious smile with her hand on my right shoulder. After an awkward pause, she jumped out of my car, glanced back at me and went on her way.

Before my first ride, I had no idea what to expect from Lyft. I knew I’d be driving strangers around in my own car in the hope that they’d compensate me well, but was it worth compromising my free time? So far, the answer is, "I guess?" I’ve pulled in some decent money, and I’ve gotten a taste of some of the interesting people the melting pot of Los Angeles has to offer. Lyfting has been a journey where your night can yo-yo between the absurd and ridiculous. The last time I checked, that wasn’t a bad thing.

@danielkohn

The signature Stoya Fleshlight at the company's warehouse

Steve Shubin wants us to talk more about touching ourselves. The inventor of the world’s most successful sex toy, the Fleshlight, a polymer vagina housed inside something that looks a bit like a fat torch, said that it's a man's duty to masturbate frequently. As such, he's baffled as to why dildos have become an acceptable brunch conversation topic while male sex toys remain taboo.  

But Steve hasn't always been so concerned with the ins and outs of sensual self-flagellation. One of jerking-off's wealthiest advocates was raised in a blue-collar house with 13 siblings. Football took him to college, which he followed with a brief stint in the Army before seven years with the Los Angeles SWAT team.

"Police work’s a great career, but it doesn’t pay much; you can’t look forward to buying anything significant, and I’ve always wanted to do that," he told me. "I’m one of 14 kids and I grew up having nothing. I was obsessed with having everything." So, aged 32, Steve left the force to open his own small business.

It wasn't until he was in his 40s that his tennis-pro wife's pregnancy pushed him toward the industry he now dominates.

"The doctor said that, because we were 40 years old, we had to be very careful and should probably not have intercourse for the duration of the pregnancy," he explained. "And we were at the beginning of the pregnancy. So, for me, that was a problem. Tell me I can’t get laid for nine months; that’s a problem for me."

While out to dinner to celebrate the pregnancy, Steve turned to his wife Kathy and asked, "Tell me, would you think I was a total pervert if I told you that, in your sexual absence, I would use something to replace you sexually? Would you think I’d be a total creep?"

Steve Shubin, founder of Fleshlight

Initially, they both laughed at the image of a six-foot-three, 14-stone tree trunk of a man getting intimate with a blow-up doll. But, on the drive home, they expanded on the idea. "We kind of thought, 'Well, wait a minute. What if we had a problem that doesn’t go away? Whether it’s a physical handicap or a psychological handicap—things that would never afford me a normal sex life,'" Steve recounted. "And we started thinking this way because there was a much bigger opportunity than my current, very narrow, issue."

With a primary investment of $50,000, they quickly founded the company that would eventually become Fleshlight. Kathy’s one requirement was that whatever they produced had to be tasteful ("Something artistic that wasn’t some disgusting-looking, adultish garbage product"). A little research showed that there was nothing on the market resembling competition.

By 1995, they had come up with something worth patenting. The first patent application was for sexually useable body portions, referred to, romantically, as "mannequins with sexual application." The original patented mannequins, according to Steve, were "perfectly anatomically sculpted, with probably a better body than you could get if you lived in a gym".

Fleshlight is a family business, and Steve's teenage sons were drafted in for the initial brainstorming session. The Shubins gathered around the dinner table for a week, cutting out their favorite body parts from skin mags, until they came up with the prototype.

Bent over doggy style—cutting out extraneous filler, like torsos and faces—the mannequins covered everything between the knees and ribs. The "orifice" was removable for easy cleaning and was manufactured out of a patented mix of thermo-plastics and oils designed to recreate the sensation of human skin.

A cross-section of the Fleshlight Vstroker

In his own words, Shubin was a "mad scientist" in his pursuit of the ultimate synthetic fuck buddy, "Because – as a man, you know this: if something doesn’t feel real, we’re not going to be excited about the physical contact with it. So that was a first priority."

Two years and more than a quarter of a million dollars into the project, not a single mannequin had been sold. It was around this time that an old friend and successful businessman, Bob, came to visit Steve and Kathy’s office in California. He was impressed with what he saw. As Steve dropped him off at the airport, Bob asked if Steve could send one of the vagina inserts to his house. Shubin offered to ship him an entire body, but Bob was reluctant: "Oh, no, no, no. Please don’t do that. I’ve got children," he said. "I could never bring something like that into my house."

"Driving back from the airport, I thought, My gosh, if I can’t give a product away to a friend, how can I ever expect to sell one of these?" Steve recalled. It was then he realized that perhaps size was a much larger issue than he'd first assumed.

Between the airport and his office, he began to redesign the product in his mind. "I knew that it would have to be portable; it had to be small; it had to be able to fit easily into the hand so that it could facilitate the use of the product. I thought, Guys are into tools. And what I had settled on was a flashlight, so I decided to call it Fleshlight.

"As soon as I got back to my office I had my guys working on that different concept," Steve told me. "I immediately contacted my attorney and began working on the copyright stuff and the protections on the name. I bought the URL immediately and started the business end of it right away as we were developing the product."

Now that he had a viable product, the next challenge was figuring out how to get it into consumers’ homes. It was 1997 and the internet was still in its relative infancy. "It wasn’t secure; nobody trusted it. We were intrigued by it, but never would anybody use their credit card to make a purchase on it," Steve said.

The Fleshlight warehouse

Regardless of the challenges, Steve was sure that the Fleshlight would be "a rockstar instant success", and the production line was knocking out 1,200 units a day to cope with the expected demand. The Shubins were $2 million into the Fleshlight before a single unit had been shipped.

Four years later and lot of lessons learned, their original investment had been recouped. Fleshlight went on to become a multi-million dollar company and the best-selling sex toy on the market.

However, there are still obstacles to overcome: society isn't willing to normalize the Fleshlight in the same way it has the dildo. Steve said that, 15 years ago, shows like Sex and the City and Oprah opened a conversation about vibrators that has failed to materialize around male masturbation.

Perhaps the problem is that, for all our liberal pretences, talking about touching yourself is still taboo. We may have moved on from the 1940s, when sexologist Alfred Kinsey discovered that 40 percent of young Americans believed that masturbation caused insanity, but you're not gonna see Phillip Schofield and Richard Bacon discussing the relative merits of various fake vaginas on This Morning any time soon.

When Fleshlight approached Maxim in search of a mainstream publication to carry their ads, they were told their money was no good: no one wants their brand to be associated with jerking off. However, Shubin reckons this was a gender-based issue; that women are never too thrilled to hear that, partnered or otherwise, men enjoy and need to masturbate. Meaning one of the reasons Maxim refused to carry Fleshlight's ads, according to Steve, was out of the fear that any hint of male masturbation may upset female readers.

He continued, reasoning that men just need more orgasms than women, and suggested women can sometimes view a man's right hand as competition. "If you tell your wife, 'Oh, by the way, sweetheart, we were together eight times last month, but I actually had 30 orgasms,' women feel cheated," he said. "They feel like you don’t love them. They feel like they’re losing you."

The first time Steve brought a Fleshlight prototype home, he said that his sex life improved vastly. "What’s going on?" he asked Kathy. "You’re just hitting this new wave of sexuality. I mean, you’re killing me." To which she replied, "I just don’t want you to have enough energy to use that Fleshlight."

A Fleshlight shower mount, so you can use your vagina-in-a-can in the shower

Shubin’s solution is education of both sexes. Men need to be taught to be unashamed of their need to "maintain their biology, their civility" through masturbation. Women need to understand that "sexual gratification for men is not an emotional thing; it has nothing to do with love and it has nothing to do with the wife. It is immediate and spontaneous, and once I’m done with whatever I’m doing, I don’t think about it any more, because I’m gone that quickly."

However, education isn't just important to boost sales; Shubin’s on a mission to help men behave better in a society that he says is incompatible with their biology, "The domestication of man, while it’s been great for civility, has not been kind to the biological need to function as a man," he said. "Society doesn’t allow us to do what we might have done a million years ago. We cannot chase and take the sexual things that we may have done hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that’s an awesome thing. But we still need to function as biological men."

He continued: "But the responsibility to do that is not on women. They’re not on this planet to satisfy our sexual needs; responsible men do this themselves. And I know that if I don’t manage my sexuality, I would find myself becoming angry with my wife because she wasn’t as sexually active as I needed her to be. And I had to grow up and learn to function. She is not my escort; she is not my sexual tool. My sexual relation with my wife is based on two people being intimate and developing a life together. Any sexual needs I have beyond that are my responsibility to maintain."

And this re-education isn't only targeting personal relationships; Shubin has much grander plans, hoping to introduce Fleshlight to the Indian market. "In India right now, we know they have a big problem with sexuality and male performance and the abuse of women," he said. "And I certainly hope it’s a very small percentage of people, but there is an education process that needs to happen there, and they have a desperate need for an alternative product and the psychology that would allow them to use a sexual product."

The Asian market has proven particularly hard for Fleshlight to crack. "They don't like you to ship anything into their countries with the likeness of a human orifice," Steve explained. So, to get around that minor hiccup, the company has started creating products that don't have a likeness to any piece of human anatomy. They’re marketed as marital aids and shipped as "biological maintenance," which is the other half of Steve’s crusade.

The trouble with penises, Steve explained, is that, unlike most muscles, they’re not attached to a bone, meaning they receive little casual exercise. As a result, "If you’re not filling it up with blood and stretching it out and using it, it will atrophy," he cautioned. "They do shrink." Of course, a clogged prostate—and the risk of cancer that comes with it—is the other danger for men who refuse to regularly clean their pipes.

Asia may not have been kind to Fleshlight financially—on top of the import restrictions, there is the Japanese patenting process that pushed their vagina-in-a-can design into the public domain—but that hasn't deterred them. Somewhat surprisingly, they're using the vast financial and technical resources at their disposal to help the continent’s elephant population, which is plagued by land mines left over from decades of tension and conflict in countries like Thailand and Burma.

The front entrance to the Fleshlight offices

"It’s very common to find elephants that have a portion of their leg blown off," Steve told me. "And the need for prosthetics is what we’re working on right now. We have an R&D lab in New Mexico that’s managed by one of my sons, and professional sculptors are working on the mechanics of giving the elephants new legs as we speak."

Other philanthropic ventures have included providing prosthetic breasts for mastectomy patients and modernizing the antiquated methods currently used for extracting semen from stud racehorses.

While this is all highly commendable, it doesn't mean the company hasn't come in for criticism in the past. And Shubin understands that you don’t get to be a multi-million dollar sex-toy manufacturer without making a few enemies along the way.

For example, it doesn’t take much googling before you start coming across disgruntled ex-employees complaining of capricious or flat-out incompetent management. "Utter and total lack of management with more between their ears than pocket lint" is one example I put to Steve. His response, "If anyone was let go, I can promise you this: they were not good at their jobs—they sucked."

Some criticism has been less vicious. Professionally, Shubin has always been careful not to court conversations with religion, and the only one he’s consciously been party to resembled a piece of performance art more than a legitimate dispute. In the company’s early days, an employee noticed someone burying something in the ground in front of the office. As he got closer he realized the stranger was planting a row of tiny crosses. When he asked the stranger what he was doing, the reply was simply, "We’re bringing Christ to you." With that, the stranger fled.

The company knew exactly which church the man had come from, but chose not to make a big deal of it. Shubin explained, "We weren’t offended. We didn’t argue with them, and it’s really never been a problem because I never broach the subjects of sexuality and religion." He may be on a crusade to bring masturbation to the mainstream, but he’s not interested in getting into a knife fight with the church.

For now, Steve and his family are going to keep encouraging us all to talk about our physical relationships with ourselves. They’ve already invested in a web TV sitcom, The Fleshlife, and the heart of the company's manifesto now revolves around the duty to normalize male masturbation. But they're aware it will take more than just a sex toy manufacturer talking about it to change the public’s attitude. "It’s something that we don’t talk about," Steve started, "but it’s a needed discussion, because people need to understand that, in order for us to be civil, we need to maintain our bodies."

@jackoozell