Photo by Justin T Gellerson

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

In the years after 9/11, Thomas Drake, then a National Security Agency (NSA) executive, saw something he couldn't abide: an NSA-led program named Stellarwind. The dragnet-surveillance operation was spying on American citizens using a combination of wiretapping and mass-data collection through the internet.

Drake protested internally, feeling that Stellarwind violated the Fourth Amendment and was highly illegal—a warrantless surveillance of citizens on home soil. But Michael Hayden, then the head of the NSA who presided over the program, believed American spies had to do whatever it took to prevent another such tragedy.

According to Drake, when the September 11 attacks happened—15 years ago—the military-and-intelligence-industrial complex became so obsessed with hunting terrorists that the rights of American citizens were trumped. He complained through every legal channel and whistleblower-protection law to no avail. So in the winter of 2006, he contacted a reporter at the Baltimore Sun and helped her expose some of the NSA abuses he loathed.

For his actions, the FBI raided Drake's home, and he was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, narrowly avoiding 35 years in jail.

Now, Drake works at an Apple Store in relative peace and quiet. I talked to this modern American hero, or traitor, depending on how you look at him, in a bar in Washington, DC, about why he blew the whistle.

VICE: Tell me what the NSA's mission is on paper.
Thomas Drake: The NSA's focus is on foreign intelligence. It was formed in 1952. People don't realize it was not formed by an act of Congress. It was literally signed into existence by the stroke of a secret presidential pen. That was President Truman. It was the time of Communism, right? The big red threat. Super secret—the joke was it was No Such Agency or Never Say Anything.

The NSA is actually, I believe, culpable in making the infrastructure of modern society and all the things we enjoy far less secure.

What happened after 9/11?
Prime Directive was you have to have a warrant. Can't spy on an American without a warrant. It's got to be a legitimate reason, right? You gotta show probable cause. All that was pretty much tossed literally overnight after 9/11. What I was confronted by, within days of 9/11, was that the NSA had been granted verbal authority to turn its extraordinary power of foreign intelligence and now bring that to bear domestically. We don't know where the threat is. It could be anywhere. So the mantra became: We just need the data. Ends justify the means; we just need the data.

Now the NSA is unleashed on an extraordinary scale—a scale that we have never seen in US history. You had this obsessive-compulsive desire just to snag the data from wherever you could get it, and the problem was—it's like you are addicted to data. It becomes a drug, and you can't get enough of it, because there's always more. With the extraordinary amount of acceleration, it was continuing this wave. This digital technology wave was continuing to expand quite rapidly.

How has the NSA used back doors?
Back doors by hook or by crook, and if that means partnerships with certain corporations to build in technology that allows you to have access, if that means weakening encryption standards—which is clear that it has done—then so be it. Which means the NSA is actually, I believe, culpable in making the infrastructure of modern society and all the things we enjoy far less secure.

Do you think it actually has combated terrorism properly?
It's actually made it worse. It's part of the paradox of big data. The bigger the haystack, the more needles we can find. Here's the problem: In that mind-set, where all you're going to do is harvest data and you're going to pile it all up in a barn, then how are you going to find the needles? Because in essence, you're turning every straw into a needle, which means there are no needles. Or it becomes that much more difficult to even find the needles, because you can't recognize them as easily.

The irony is that the NSA had the data to stop 9/11 and did not focus and prioritize or share it properly with people who could have made the difference. And I know that because this is part of the Pandora's box that I was exposed to. And ultimately that's what I disclosed within channels as a whistleblower to multiple people.

Do you think it was worth it?
Yeah, history was at stake. I took an oath to support and defend an idea. Now you can imagine, post- 9/11, what I am confronted by when Pandora's box is opened up, and I'm staring into the abyss. I'm now realizing that I'm going to have to defend the Constitution against my own government. The government itself and the deepest of secrecy are sabotaging the Constitution. It was in essence a silent coup against the Constitution.

Can we go back to a state where the government is not spying on us?
I wouldn't have been willing to have this interview with you if I thought we were too far gone. So it's what they always say: It's always darkest before dawn.

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

Even in ordinary circumstances, having a roommate can be an awkward, stressful, and sometimes disastrous experience, but dorm living can feel like a sociological experiment. You're 18, all kinds of hormones crawling through your bloodstream, dropped headfirst into the heretofore mythical land of college, eager to prove you're an adult, simultaneously eager to drink a six pack of Smirnoff Ices on a Tuesday night, searching for some sort of identity but also terrified of embarrassment. Here is a tiny room with two or three beds barely ten feet apart; this is where you and another hormone-filled teen you've never met before will be living. You are about to spend more time with this stranger than anyone you know, and they will usually be close enough to you to watch you sleep. Have fun!

Everyone, without fail, has a weird freshman-year roommate. This is because everyone is weird as a freshman. Everyone drinks or smokes too much, or has weird habits, or is a control freak or a slob, or brings terrible people over. No one that age knows how to live, let alone live with someone else. If you doubt this, gaze upon the recent viral email sent by a UCLA freshman to her future roommates.

In celebration—or dread—of the beginning of college, here are a few stories of freshman-year roommate nightmares culled from VICE staff, contributors, and friends, some of whom have opted to remain anonymous so as not to humiliate their old roomies, who are probably very normal, productive people now.

It was freshman year of college, and I was living in an apartment with five girls. It was a crazy time. One of the girls in particular gave zero fucks about anything. She came from a lot of money, unlike the rest of us, and never had any responsibilities. There were many a night where I'd come home to her throwing up in a mug, or passed out on the couch with a cigarette burning in her hand, or with a large group of random people doing all kinds of drugs. We even had a drug dealer squatting on our couch for literally six months thanks to her! (His laugh was something from hell, it still haunts me today.) One thing she did that was just a serious WTF moment was when the DEA called one of our roommates' dads because they were inspecting a "suspicious package" with his name on it. Turns out our roommate was having drugs delivered to our apartment under our other roommate's dad's name. What!? Of course, her rich mom was able to clear things up for us, but it didn't stop us from throwing all her crap on the streets.

–Regina, 27

During freshman year of college, I lived in a triple on the west side of Boston University's campus. I had two roommates. One was Sam, who would become my best friend before having an existential crisis a year ago, breaking off contact with me, and riding his motorcycle across the country as he worked remotely as a programmer for a health insurance company. The other guy, Dan, who would never be my friend, hailed from western Massachusetts and became extremely interested in the college's kendo club, where they practiced this ancient art of Japanese sword-fighting with wooden sticks in the gym. When I was drunk and Dan was nowhere to be found, I would often pick up this bamboo pole and swing it in the direction of anyone who came near me. Between watching anime, pretending to study chemistry, and eating white cheddar Cheeze-Its, Dan practiced once or twice a week, and it was apparently a grueling activity, at least for him, because he would sweat more than I've ever witnessed a man sweat.

He always wore the traditional robe, which for some reason he was incapable of ever washing. He would keep it in the wardrobe next to his lofted bed, and by the end of my first semester, it was eliciting an odor I did not think could be produced by the human body. Initially, I thought the smell was from Sam—he showered infrequently and often bragged about not wearing deodorant—but he assured me it wasn't. One night, while Dan was absent and the stink had become unbearable (it is to this day the worst thing I've ever smelled), we went in search of the stench's origin. It didn't take us long to discover it. Not sure if it would be safe in the laundry, and not wanting to do laundry, and not having any desire to speak to him about cleaning it, we decided the next best thing would be to buy 15 cans of Febreze and spray the outfit until the fumes suffocated us. He mentioned nothing about his clothing—or the entire room—reeking of "Coastal Escape," but the next morning, I saw him put the robe in his laundry basket.

–Alex Norcia, VICE.com copy editor

My freshman-year college roommate was into weird, dramatic, long-distance online relationships. After talking to a random guy from a school across the country for a while, she invited him to visit her (technically "us" since we shared a room). For weeks, she tried to convince me to let this strange Midwestern possibly-serial-killer white dude she'd never met before chill six feet away from my head in her twin-XL bed. I wasn't having it. He came to visit (for a week!) anyway, and the RA had to physically restrain them from entering our room. She didn't speak to me for the rest of the school year.

–Jay, 24

He covered the microwave in tinfoil in order to protect himself from radiation and slept fully clothed on top of his covers with his arms crossed over his chest, sometimes in the middle of the day, like a vampire.

Even at art school, my freshman year roommate stood out. He was tall and thin and white and wore all black everywhere, which, fine—art school. But he also went barefoot around the campus, which was in New York and naturally had its share of broken glass and other hazards. He also had some odd habits. For instance, he covered the microwave in tinfoil in order to protect himself from radiation and slept fully clothed on top of his covers with his arms crossed over his chest, sometimes in the middle of the day, like a vampire.

He may have been somewhere on the Aspergers spectrum, and in any case either had trouble reading social cues or just ignored them. He'd mostly be quiet, but when he talked he could be breathtakingly rude and condescending. He didn't have many friends as a result (I definitely went out of my way to avoid him as much as I could), but he did talk to this one girl who was similarly socially underdeveloped. One day, weeks after they'd started hanging out, she came to drop off some books he had loaned her and they had a fairly involved conversation about a sci-fi series they both liked. Then, during a pause, he said, "I'm sorry, but what is your name?"

-Anonymous, 29

My roommate in college my freshman year seemed pretty great at first. She was nice, fairly quiet, and didn't snore really loud, smoke in our room, or bring boys back every night—things I'd half expected from horror stories I'd heard and movies I'd seen about college before getting to campus. She was normal. The only thing out of the ordinary that happened was our toilet overflowed a couple times that first month. Turns out, she'd tried to flush her pads when she was on her period. No big deal, lesson learned, just don't do that again. After she'd done it a few times that first month, things continued normally after that. We even started getting lunch together Tuesdays and Thursdays when we knew our schedules matched. Month two, more overflowing toilets. Same reason. Month three rolled around, more flushed pads, more overflowed toilet. I even started to know her schedule. I was becoming her own Period Tracker app. After a few dozen overflows in a matter of months, our RA finally demanded an explanation—deeply embarrassed, she'd lied up to this point, and I plead ignorance. Shortly after she moved off campus into her boyfriend's place. I remember thinking, on the date her period usually started, "I hope that guy has incredible plumbing!"

–Jaime, 38

My freshman year of college I was assigned to something called a "permanent triple," which meant that the housing department was going to cram me in a room designed for two people with a couple of girls who had been best friends since childhood. Clearly that was not happening, so I found some random girl who had also gotten fucked over, and we decided to get an apartment like a block away from the library. Flash-forward to my friend and I waking up covered in fleas because she'd adopted a cat and then neglected it.

My roommate, who majored in "event planning," also had a habit that I still think about from time to time of eating cold Oscar Meyer hot dogs filled with processed cheese out of the fridge as a snack. I honestly don't know why this still makes me so upset, but I started thinking of her as "female Joe Dirt" and still do. I worried that putting this on the internet under my name would be mean, but she also ended up keeping my deposit, so fuck her.

–Allie Conti, VICE.com staff writer

In the continuation of a time-honored tradition, another drug dealer has gotten in trouble after instagramming loads of photos of himself posing with cash, jewelry, and flashy cars.

Despite telling police he clearly wasn't involved in drug dealing because he didn't have any money, 29-year-old Levi Watson's social-media activity suggested he may actually have been completely lying. West Midlands police checked his Instagram and found photos of him posing in a literal bath of cash, as well as him and/or his hands positioned in or around/next to shiny champagne bottles, Lamborghinis, Rolexes, and a load of other shit only very rich people can afford.

One of the photo captions reads: "When your sitting on over quarter of a million but you tell them it's pennies."

West Midlands crime commissioner David Jamieson said that "hopefully the memory of his cash-filled bath and pink champagne will keep him warm at night while he spends the next seven years behind bars." But if his Instagram is anything to go by, Watson does not give a fuck. He posted the Tuesday after his sentencing: "They gave me Shmurda years, I smiled at the judge when he said 7."

The Wolverhampton drugs ring Watson was part of has collectively been sentenced to 130 years in prison for conspiracy to supply heroin and cocaine.

Read: Obama Just Created the First Marine National Monument in the Atlantic Ocean

Donald Trump in January 2015, back when he was just famous for being mean to people on TV. Photo by Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic

On Thursday, Donald Trump swaggered into the Economic Club of New York and, before going into some of the details in his constantly changing tax plan, couldn't resist some ad-libbed bragging to his audience about how well he was doing.

"We had some really incredible things happen today," he said. "The polls are coming out—we're leading in so many polls, I don't know where to begin. But that's a good feeling."

Trump congratulates himself as instinctively as fish shit in the ocean, but even the most contentious fact-checker would have to concur with the self-proclaimed billionaire's assessment of the polls. In the past week, a smorgasbord of surveys have found Trump leading in swing states from Ohio to Florida to Utah to North Carolina; many national polls gave Trump a slim lead as well. There's a lot of campaigning left to do, the polls as a whole show the race in a dead heat, and Trump needs to carry pretty much every swing state on the board to actually win. Still, he's undeniably surging.

This raises a question: What the fuck?

Trump's incompetence, habitual lying, and willingness to take advantage of the less fortunate are public knowledge to anyone who is paying even a little bit of attention. A Trump-branded real estate seminar is being sued for fraud, and Trump's personal foundation has been accused of using other people's money to bribe politicians and buy a giant painting of the candidate. His international business dealings could create massive conflicts of interest if he ever took office. He has a history of not paying contractors. He has spoken approvingly of torture. If he's not a racist himself, he at least makes appeals to nativism—building a massive wall, keeping Muslims out of the country—that white supremacists love. He engaged in an ugly public feud with the parents of a dead veteran. He's done racist impressions of Asians and condoned violence against protesters. As I was writing this, he lied about the origins of the racist birther conspiracy he advanced for years.

Everyone from his ghostwriter to Mitt Romney has called him completely unfit to be president. The New Hampshire Union Leader, normally a GOP-supporting paper, endorsed Libertarian Gary Johnson instead, calling Trump "a liar, a bully, a buffoon." The Richmond Times-Dispatch did likewise. The Dallas Morning News, another Republican stalwart, wrote that "Donald Trump is not qualified to serve as president and does not deserve your vote," then endorsed Clinton, the first Democrat the paper had backed in 75 years.

Despite all that, Trump could be the next president. What polls have recently made clear is that while a majority of Americans think he's unqualified for the job, some of those people will vote for him anyway. But why? How is it possible that Trump has remained so popular?

The easy thing to do would be to say that the people planning to vote for Trump are not paying attention, but that's a dodge, a way to dismiss Trumpites as ignorant. His supporters have heard all the attacks on him made by both the Clinton campaign and the media—back during the primary, a focus group of Trump backers found that many of these attacks made them like him more. Americans don't trust the media, and they don't trust Clinton.

The people who denounce Trump tend to be Establishment figures: big-city newspaper editors, longtime politicians, celebrities—in other words, the same people Trump says have been screwing up the country. Is it any wonder his voters don't give a shit what those people think? When 50 former GOP officials wrote a letter saying Trump is "not qualified to be president," it was simple for him to shrug them off as being irrelevant and incompetent, the people who had turned the Middle East into a mess in the first place.

The other thing Trump has going for him is that Clinton is, as everyone has noted, a weak candidate herself—not as inspiring as Obama, weighted down in voters' minds by her own habits of obfuscation and secrecy, hurt recently by an incident that saw her conceal her pneumonia from the public, then nearly collapsing while attending a 9/11 memorial. A longstanding mainstream theory of this election is that it's about voting against the candidate you hate, not voting for the one you love—hatred of Clinton has brought a lot of Republicans around to Trump.

But antipathy to Clinton just explains why people would vote Republican. It doesn't explain why Trump beat all those more polished politicians in the primary, and it doesn't quite explain the undead quality his campaign has, its ability to stagger on and even surge in the polls—after all, Trump was trending upward even before Clinton's pneumonia resulted in a wave of negative stories about her.

Scattered in with all the big and small lies Trump tells is a big truth: America has been screwed over by the people running the country. The war in Iraq was based on bad intelligence and promoted by the media, then horribly mismanaged; warnings of the financial crisis were ignored, no one responsible for it was punished in any significant way, and the recovery from it has been slow. People feel disenfranchised as a result, they feel angry, they feel that they've been abandoned.

"Imagine you are one of the millions of middle-aged unemployed white Americans with a high school degree," the conservative writer Ben Domenech said recently. "Your tomorrows look dark. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, look like gold. And when a golden-haired man comes on TV, a man who represents a version of what you might hope your life could be like... he tells you it's not your fault your life is the way it is. He tells you it's the fault of immigrants and bad trade deals and wasteful pointless wars based on lies. He tells you the problem with elites is not that they are too conservative or too liberal, but that they are stupid and don't care about you. He tells you, with confidence, that he alone can make everything great again. And you listen."

Campaigns are about telling stories to voters, and that's a powerful one. It's a story that makes a certain kind of person feel good and powerful again, and it doesn't matter too much if a lot of that story is BS, or if that golden-haired man is really a two-bit huckster. Trump gives people something to believe in, and they aren't going to give that belief up for a few inconvenient facts.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

With the election only a few months away and the race getting increasingly tighter, Bernie Sanders sat down with Seth Meyers Thursday night to once again plea with his supporters to bring people onboard with Clinton and keep Trump from the White House.

On Thursday's episode of Late Night, Meyers addressed Trump's recent surge in the polls, asking Sanders, "What do you say to your supporters now? What do you want them to do moving forward?"

"We've got to get beyond personality," the Vermont senator said. "What I would ask of those people who voted for me is, even if you have concerns about Clinton—I understand—but look at the hard issues that impact your lives and your neighbor's lives and then think whether or not you want Donald Trump to become president. I think if you frame it in that way, people will end up voting for Clinton.

"I don't think there's any reason for anyone to believe that Trump is going to stand with working people," he continued. "He's a billionaire; his proposals call for massive tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country. This is not a guy who, in my view, is going to stand up for working people."

Bernie was just one of a whole slew of personalities from the 2016 election to hit the late-night circuit this week—Trump palled around with Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show Thursday and Bill Clinton headed in for an interview on the Daily Show—but Sanders's guest appearance was the most focused discussion about the upcoming election stakes, with real, nuanced conversation and not a single hair tussle.

Read: Fuck This Election

Emily Beaver

Rob Rufus's life was on a real upswing. He was 17 years old, dating a cheerleader, and his band, the Blacklist Royals, which he founded with his twin brother, had just been invited to play a national tour. That's when he got cancer—and was told not to expect to survive beyond his teens. Die Young With Me, which comes out this month, is Rufus's evocative account of what it's like to go through everyone's worst nightmare, while his twin brother goes on living the life he'd envisioned for himself. Rufus's writing describes the medical rabbit hole we all dread falling into in a style so candid you can imagine yourself tumbling in along with him.—Kate Lowenstein

Dad had never taken me to the doctor before. Not once. To him, checkups fell under the same category as guidance counselors, shopping, and church—i.e., Shit Your Mother Deals With—so our ride to the hospital felt a bit strange for us both.

Dr. Hallbeck's office was in a part of the hospital that I'd never been to before. The move felt like progress. Her waiting room was filled with women wearing suspicious looks.

When the nurse called my turn, Dad looked over at me.

"Coming?" I asked.

"I guess your mother would kick my ass if I didn't, huh?"

"Definitely, dude."

He put down his magazine and followed me back.

I recognized Dr. Hallbeck once I saw her. Middle-aged, graying hair but still pretty-ish, if not for her glasses (they were even bigger than mine). She was the first doctor who showed any genuine concern—and not just for me. She was alarmed that other doctors in her hospital had been so flippant with my treatment.

"Your lungs sound horrible," she said, with her stethoscope pressed against me. "I am going to order that chest X-ray right now. If this is pneumonia, it is a severe case. If the X-ray shows what I think it will, we need to start treating it right away."

When we left the exam room, Dad and I both shook her hand.

"Finally, we're getting somewhere," Dad said.

"Yeah, and it only took them four months."

He patted my back and chuckled. We went looking for the X-ray lab.

* * *

X-ray was located in the basement of the hospital, with all the other radioactive machines. There were no magazines to read, just a waiting room made of the hard plastic chairs you'd expect to find at the DMV. Everything about it was utilitarian. It was clear that unless patients needed to be on this floor, they weren't.

Another nurse called me back. This time I asked Dad to wait.

The radiology lab was dark, and messier than I would have expected.

There was a long white table in the middle of the room, and a whiteboard in the corner. The tech told me to remove my shirt and glasses and stand against the board. I felt embarrassed to be shirtless in front of her. My chest and shoulders drooped like a melting vanilla ice cream cone. She told me to straighten my back, then to clasp my hands and raise them over my head.

I could hear the X-ray machine power up. A light shone on my pale stomach. I thought I might feel something, but I didn't.

"Breathe in," the tech said. "Good. Now hold your breath, holllddddd . . ."

The machine made a soft sound. She told me I could drop my hands and gave me a minute to catch my breath. Then she told me to turn to my right side and repeat. Then the left side—and that was it. I was done.

"That was fast," Dad said when I returned to the waiting room. "How'd it go?"

"Fine, I guess. They told me to come out here and wait."

"Well, big boy—let's wait."

* * *

We sat there for hours.

Other patients came down periodically, sitting near us until they were called back for this scan or that one. We never saw them afterward. I wondered if they'd forgotten about us. I wondered if we should just leave.

I stood up and headed down the hall to try to figure out what the holdup was. The entire floor seemed deserted. I held on to the wall and panted down to the corner of the hallway.

I saw an old man outside one of the rooms. He was lying flat in a hospital bed, covered in a thin white sheet. He wasn't moving. A nurse must have sat him there, the way you would an empty grocery cart. Behind the double doors, machines growled.

I left the man and walked slowly back.

"Any luck?" Dad asked. I sat down beside him and wheezed.

"Nope . . . you . . . ?"

"A few nurses walked by. I stopped them, but they wouldn't talk. All they said was we need to keep waiting."

"But we've been here all day."

"I know, I know," he said, leaning back into his chair. He'd removed his blazer, and the collar around his neck was now open.

Thirty minutes later, two nurses walked past us. Dad waved them down. Hesitantly, they stopped. He approached them. When he spoke, they didn't meet his eyes.

"The name is Rufus. We had an X-ray done hours ago. I just wanted to see if we can get out of here, or..."

I noticed one of the nurses, the younger one, staring at me.

Our eyes met—then all of a sudden, her lip trembled. She looked like she was crying. She took off down the hall. Dad looked at the other nurse.

"We are truly sorry for the wait," she said flatly, ignoring the other nurse's outburst. "The doctor will be with you in just a moment. Please do not leave until you have seen the doctor."

"Sure. Thanks," Dad mumbled, the color draining from his face.

He walked back over and sat down.

"Weird, man," I said.

He didn't answer me.

He just stared at the door of the X-ray lab.

A few moments later, the same nurse motioned us toward the lab.

We followed her into the X-ray lab, and then through a side door into a room with control panels and computer monitors. Then she ushered us into a room beyond the room.

It was clear that this room was not intended to receive guests. It was cluttered with papers, X-ray film, and coffee cups. A large desk ran along the far wall—a man sat behind it. The stacks of paper on the desk nearly hid him from view. He pushed a few folders out of his way.

He introduced himself as Dr. Houston, the hospital's chief radiologist. We sat across from him, anxious. Why were we back here? I waited for some kind of news. My leg was twitching.

"We reviewed your X-rays. Now, initially we were looking for signs of pneumonia. What we found was... different."

Dr. Houston clicked a button, and the far wall lit up like a bug zapper.

X-rays of what must have been my body were stuck to the lit-up wall. I looked inside myself—I saw a dark shadow in the middle of my body.

Dr. Houston was still talking. "What we seemed to have found is some sort of mass in the middle of the chest cavity. This explains the shortness of breath, and the coughing as well."

"Mass?" I said. "What does that even mean?"

Dr. Houston massaged his temples.

"Well, we won't know until we've done more tests. But from what I see here, and considering your age and speaking freely, my initial reaction would be that it may be a form of lymphoma."

Dad moved to the edge of his chair.

"Speak fucking English," he snapped.

Dr. Houston cleared his throat.

"I shouldn't make any assumptions until we run more tests."

"Lymphoma?" I said. "Is that, like, leukemia?"

"Sort of. The two diseases are often paired."

"Wait," Dad interrupted. "Are you saying this is cancer?"

Dr. Houston didn't answer. He just sighed and stared at his desk, as if he were searching for words in all that clutter.

Cancer?

"Is this—mass—inside of me like a tumor or something?"

The doctor rubbed his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. Then he looked me square in the eye.

"We don't know, Robert. But we will find out—fast. You are very lucky you got this X-ray. Your lungs look on the verge of collapsing."

"Does my son have cancer?" Dad said. His voice was on edge.

I'd never heard him sound that way. Nervous. Scared.

"Mr. Rufus . . ." Sigh. Pause. "I am sorry. Yes, Lymphoma is a type of cancer that is common in children and young adults. As you see from the X-rays this mass is localized to . . ."

His words drifted farther away from me.

They continued to talk, Dr. Houston pointing at X-rays. I felt weightless—I was sinking in on myself. I felt blank. I thought of all those machines outside, the white noise of their engines—blank and empty—calling to me. I sat there expressionless. I slipped into the hum.

2

They didn't want me to leave the hospital, but there was no real reason for me to stay—it was almost eight now, and most of the staff was already gone. So they finally told us to meet back at Dr. Hallbeck's office first thing in the morning, so she could take us to Oncology.

I didn't care, either way. I existed on a calm plain of shock. I had the night to "get things in order," as if that was an obvious process.

On the drive home, neither of us knew what to say.

"You hungry?" Dad finally asked.

"Sure."

"What'll it be, big boy? Anything you want."

What I wanted didn't seem to be something that came in a takeout container so I said pizza would be okay.

We got to the house around nine. The delivery guy from Gino's was standing like a clown in his yellow-red uniform. He held a stack of pizza boxes that reached over his head. Dad looked at the food like he'd forgotten he ordered it.

"Right. Hold on a second, buddy." He pulled out all the cash in his wallet and handed it to the delivery guy.

"For real?" the pizza guy asked. Dad nodded.

"Just help me carry this shit inside."

We had seven pizzas, three packs of garlic bread, and two two-liters—but neither of us knew what we should say to Nat. He stood before the stack of boxes, confused.

Dad tried to explain what the doctor had said, leaving out the words tumor and cancer. Dad called it "a thing with my lymph nodes," and told him that I was going back in the morning.

I couldn't listen anymore. My hands were getting shaky.

I threw five slices onto my plate and went down to the basement. I didn't know where else to go.

I sat down there alone, eating pizza on the stairs, trying to get my thoughts together. Through the door, I could still hear Dad and Nat talking. I didn't know anything about cancer—except that lots of people died from it. I knew that it was BAD.

People with cancer get chemo, lose their hair, puke—I had the base-level knowledge that any American TV viewer has, but that was it.

I didn't know what cancer really meant.

It was like some secret disease; people talk about cancer treatment, but they don't talk about the cancer. Does the cancer hurt? Will I feel it inside of me? How does it kill?

The basement door opened. My brother slowly came down the stairs.

"Hey," he said, sitting down beside me.

"Hey."

"Well, this is fucked up."

"Yeah. I know."

"You think they'll make you get chemo, or something?"

I shook my head. No one knew anything yet. Nat stood up and began pacing around the room, drumming on his thighs.

"Well, look, even if you do have to get chemo—fuck it. You know? I mean, you can't be that sick—we just played a fucking show, man!"

"Yeah. I guess so."

"See! So even if you get chemo, I bet it won't be that big of a deal. Ya know? Shit, you'll get to miss a ton of school and maybe you'll even lose weight. By the time Warped Tour rolls around, your hair will be grown back and you'll be fucking fine."

The TOUR—I hadn't even thought about that.

"Maybe. I hope so."

I stood up from the stairs. Nat walked closer to me.

"You're going to be fucking fine, dude. This is all going to be fucking fine."

I nodded. "Yeah. Okay. It'll be fine."

"Fuck it."

"Fuck it."

The basement door opened again. Dad stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at the two of us.

"Your mother is on the phone," he said, "she asked if she could talk to you."

I walked up the stairs and took the receiver. I was breathing heavily. Mom wasn't crying, which was good. If she had been crying, I think I would have finally lost it.

She said that she was coming home.

* * *

It was ten thirty. Ali was still at work. I knew I had to tell her, or at least tell her something.

I looked up the number for the Route 60 Frostop in the yellow pages. Some flunky answered, and I told him to put Ali on. I told him it was an emergency.

She took the receiver out into the parking lot. I imagined her there, in the glow of the streetlights, staring at the empty space where I should have been parked.

I surprised myself by saying it out loud—they think I have cancer.

Ali screamed and screamed. I tried to calm her down, I told her it would all be fine. I told her the same things Nat told me—but she kept crying, apologizing for nothing in slurred tones. I felt the tremor in her voice when she spoke.

Eventually, she ran out of tears. She grew silent. We just sat there on the line, me in my bedroom, and her in that lonely parking lot, stained with puddles of tears for me.

"I love you I love you I love you I love you," she swore.

"I know," I said, "I know. Everything is cool—I promise. Calm down. I'll call you after my appointment tomorrow. It might not be a big deal—okay? The appointment is way early, so I'll probably just see you back at school."

"Okay. It might not be a big deal. I'll see you at school."

I don't know if either of us really believed it.

3

I heard Mom's car pull in around three in the morning. I'd spent the last few hours on AOL, e-mailing Paul and the few other friends that I had. I told them as little as possible. After Ali, I just couldn't make another phone call.

Mom and Dad were at the computer now, in the little home office across the hall from my bedroom. Through the crack in my door I could hear them, Dad telling and retelling the events at the hospital. He was cussing a lot. I heard the office door slam shut.

I lay in my bed, shaking. I'd never seen Dad upset like that.

What did they just read on the computer? What did they just see?

There was no chance for sleep.

I got out of bed, put on my glasses, went to my desk, and switched on the lamp. I sat down and unzipped my backpack on the floor beside me. Whatever happened tomorrow, I knew I'd probably miss a few more weeks of school. I figured I should catch up on as much homework as I could—I needed to occupy my mind.

I decided to work on my English essay, the one about punk. I'd pretty much finished it, but I needed to proof it one last time. Miss Ray was the only cool teacher I had, anyway, so maybe she'd appreciate the effort and not load me with work while I was sick.

The title of my essay was "Punk Rock Elite." The first page touched on the history of punk—from the MC5 and the Stooges, then on to the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and the Clash. I talked about the second and third waves of punk (which is when I was introduced to it) and the way the music had changed.

But the second half of the essay—the part that I had been the most proud of—read differently to me now.

As punk rock became a successful music genre, corporations, record labels, advertising agencies, and various other sleazeballs attempted to re-create it—musically and visually—to be produced and marketed in a more profitable environment.

On many levels, this attempt was a success.

But no matter how authentic the watered-down, family-friendly version of corporate punk seems, there will always be an element lacking.

Because punk rock isn't about how fast you play, or how big your hair is; it's about attitude—a screw-you attitude that can not be manufactured, or thought up in a boardroom.

Punk is an attitude that goes beyond rebelling against disco or political parties—punk rock rebels against everything! And, oddly, I find this comforting.

Punk makes me feel like I can do anything, because the walls I see around me aren't real; religion, politics, standards, status quos—punk rock takes the power away from all those preordained establishments. It spits in the face of everything, even death.

Like the Dead Boys once sang:

Ain't it fun

When ya know that you're gonna die young?

It's such fun . . .

I mean, can you imagine Avril Lavigne singing that?

That's the difference between punk rock and everything else—punk rock is a way of life.

I stared at my own words. I felt disgusted.

What a bunch of bullshit, I thought. Dying young—from what? Self-destructive, self-obsessed crap? Fuck that—it doesn't count if you never see it coming.

Did any of these young punk rockers have cancer? Did any of them die slow, in a hospital gown, not a leather jacket? If they'd seen it coming, would they still have seen such romance in it? Would dying young still seem so cool?

I threw my pencil at the wall and heard it crack in the dark. I stood up and switched off the desk lamp. I was crying.

"Ain't it fun . . ." I said softly.

I cried alone, until sleep pitied me enough to show itself at last.

Copyright © 2016 by Robert H. Rufus. From the forthcoming book DIE YOUNG WITH ME to be published by Touchstone, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

For the last 17 years, 77-year-old Helga Schmidt has been working as a bathroom attendant at Hafenbar in Berlin's Mitte district. In 2002, she was actually voted bathroom attendant of the year, which she found puzzling. "How do you go about choosing the best bathroom attendant? Did they send someone to pee undercover?" she jokes when I approach her.

It's a Friday night, and I'm here to ask some of the questions that come to mind when we slip past one of her colleagues sheepishly, muttering that we have no change.

VICE: Do you get angry when someone pisses on the seat or leaves shit in the toilet?
Helga Schmidt: If someone pees on the seat, I'll complain under my breath, while cleaning it up as they're still washing their hands. I also do that when other people are occupying the rest of the stalls. I want them to hear it.

But very few people come to shit. When that happens, I spray the air with freshener—and if I'm out of that, I just use deodorant. Then I say to the next person who comes in, "Make sure to hold your breath!" Nobody shits roses—I can't get angry about that.

What have you learned about human digestion through this job?
If they throw up, then I see what they ate. Other than that, as I said, most people can hold in number two, when they are in a bar. I can even hold my pee in. I learned how to do that when I worked as an aid in a kindergarten. We'd go on trips frequently, and I couldn't leave the children alone, so I had to hold it in. In the 17 years I've been working in Hafenbar, I can count the number of times I've peed here on one hand. Even if I just cleaned the seat and I'm alone, I don't do it. I pee at home.

Who is messier when peeing and pooping—women or men?
Definitely women. They just don't seem to care. There's a trash bucket, but they often throw their used tampons on the floor and the same goes for toilet paper. And then they spend ten minutes in front of the mirror fixing their makeup and their hair, but they can't afford to spend a few seconds to clean up after themselves. There are hardly any problems with the boys, and 95 percent of them even wash their hands.

How thoroughly do you really wash the toilets?
I don't clean up after every person. I used to do that when I started working here, but I couldn't keep up. It gets particularly hard after midnight—that's when people start lining up. But I do go back again and again on any given night, with Lysol, a scrub, and lily of the valley air freshener.

Helga at her stall

Do a lot of people have sex in the stalls?
Nobody does if I can help it. Once, some guy offered me 20 euros to let him take a girl into a stall. I thought, "For 20 euros, you could have rented a room for an hour!" I didn't let them do it. But if I'm smoking or talking to someone, I can't always control what happens. It's happened, and then of course I realized that the stall was occupied for an unusual amount of time. And obviously the two of them had to listen to what I had to say on their way out.

What about drugs?
Obviously, I can't see it if someone takes a pill in there. But I do notice if someone is smoking weed in a stall. But by the time I smell it, the person is usually already done or everyone says, "It wasn't me." What am I supposed to do? But if I do catch someone smoking up, then they're out of the bar faster than they got in.

Do you get angry when people don't tip you?
I don't like it, but that's just my opinion. Regular guests know that I have a flat rate. If you pay one euro the first time you come in, then you can keep coming back all night, go to the bathroom, wash your hands—and I have hand lotion, deodorant, and a sewing kit if you need any of that.

I only said something once when someone didn't want to pay. There was nothing on my plate except for the coins I use to make change, three 50 cent coins. I heard some clatter and said, "Thanks." Then I looked at the plate, and there was only one cent there. A single cent! I whistled to the man to get him to look back. He turned around. I took the cent and said, "You forgot something."—"No that's for you," he said. But I made him take it back. I won't let anyone insult me.

What type of customer tips best?
Age doesn't play a role, but there is a difference between the sexes. Ladies give less than men. Girls don't seem to care about anything—in 17 years, I haven't been able to teach them to.

Do you put coins on the plate on purpose, so that people think they have to give you more money?
I always have three 50 cent coins there, but they're for making change. It's so if I'm not there and someone has a euro, they can leave it and take 50 cents back instead of leaving nothing.

Do bathroom attendants make good money?
No, or at least I don't. I don't get a salary here, I'm my own boss. For me, it's just a little bit extra, on top of my pension. I earn around 100 euros on a good Friday night. Saturdays are not good—the bar is full but with tourists, and they don't have any tipping ethics. I buy cleaning products, hand lotion, deodorant, and other supplies with the money I earn. I don't do this job for the money; I do it to be around young people. People my age tend to only talk about their illnesses. Here, I learned what a fist bump is. I think I will work as a bathroom attendant for another three years, and then retire at 80.

After spending half a decade calling Barack Obama's citizenship into question and claiming the president's birth certificate is a "fraud," Donald Trump finally admitted during a press conference in his new Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, that Obama was born in the US after all, the Associated Press reports.

But the press conference—during which Trump answered no questions—was a bizarre spectacle. Though the official purpose of the event was to honor veterans, Trump spent a chunk of time praising his hotel rather than talking about anything connected to the campaign.

Additionally, though Trump admitted for the first time that Obama was born in the US—always a ridiculous claim—he traded his old birther lie for a new and equally unfounded narrative: that it was Hillary Clinton who originally brought Obama's citizenship into question during the 2008 primaries, and Trump helped bring the question to a close. (Conspiracy theories about Obama's birth were circulating back then, but Clinton did not help spread them.)

"Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy," he told the crowd. "I finished it; I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again."

He then left the stage as reporters shouted questions at him, declining to elaborate on why it had taken him years to admit this basic fact. Shortly afterward, the stage collapsed on live TV.

Thumbnail of Trump speaking at a rally last February via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Read: Fuck This Election

On this episode of the VICE Guide to Comics, VICE's art editor Nick Gazin dives into the storied Japanese art form of manga to guide people past some common misconceptions and toward an irrefutable, completely objective list of the top five manga comics of all time.

Daddy Canada needs protection for all those selfies. Photo via Facebook

The Canadian government is on track to spend a record amount on security to protect Justin Trudeau and members of his family this year.

Cindy Blackstock, executive director of First Nations Child and Family Caring Society holds a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on September 15 regarding First Nations child welfare. Photo by CP/Sean Kilpatrick

As they have for the last three decades, First Nations advocates are again sharply criticizing the Canadian government for continuing to discriminate against First Nations children, and failing to fix its "broken" child welfare system—despite two court orders to do so, and despite the Liberal government's stated dedication to Indigenous issues.

Two men showering on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. Photo via Flickr user simpleinsomnia

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For many gay men who remember life before the internet, a nostalgia exists for the days of bars, backrooms, and voicemail, before the rise of internet dating platforms that dominate the way we meet now.

We remember it as a more visceral and genuine time, and complain about how no one cruises in real life anymore, because we're all constantly looking at our screens. After all, the illicit sexual tension that hangs in the air of a gay bar can't be replicated online and doesn't quite translate to its heterosexual counterpart.

That said, I sometimes feel grateful that gay dating has gone digital. There are things I don't miss about my analog love life: asking around to see if guys are single, for example, or spending untold hours in bars trying to divine through body language and eye contact whether attraction is mutual. Today, that information about other gay men (and their bodies, and whether they're in an open relationship or single or into something like "pit smell") is at my fingertips.

Take, for example, this July on Fire Island, when I went to one of the daily tea dances. It was the first I'd attended in 15 years, since a guy I was hitting on there told me he and his date, both in open relationships, were leaving without me because "single guys are too needy."

But I steeled myself and went back, and to my surprise, noticed a cute fellow making eyes at me. "I can't figure out if I know you or if I'm supposed to know you," I told him. He said we had chatted a while ago on Scruff. My bad. A man stood firmly beside him, glowering at me, and I couldn't figure out their deal. After a while, I saw them on the beach, naked, arm in arm. I walked along the shore and sighed. But later, I checked my smartphone—a luxury I hadn't had 15 years ago—and saw them both on Scruff, listed as single. I had a nice chat with the cute fellow, and we made plans to see each other in the city.

The next evening I saw an ex—who ghosted me after five weeks of dating last fall—2,000 feet away on Scruff. I surmised he was at the tea dance (he loved it there), so I went back, and there he was. I gave him a cold hello and walked away—I just wanted to see him, since he didn't give me the courtesy of saying goodbye. Later he texted an apology for disappearing, even apologizing for apologizing via text, and I finally felt a sense of closure.

Without the internet, I wouldn't have discovered the cute fellow was single, and I would have stewed for days. And with a little forecast that the Ghosting Ex was in proximity, I could prepare myself for the encounter. (Believe me, I would have handled it much more awkwardly if it had been a surprise.) But even with the ease and clairvoyance that digital dating provides, is dating "better" or "worse" today?

There was a lot of awkwardness about how we met and dated before smartphones. "I remember seeing ads for a free phone line in the back of the Village Voice," Tim Murphy, author of the recently released novel Christodora, told VICE. He was referring to an early version of today's sophisticated sexual technology: gay party lines. "You'd call, and everyone talked in that fake voice: 'Hey, what's up... what are you into... I'm masc.' People would just hang up on you and move on. It was the beginning of that slice and dice dehumanization of digital cruising, where you could hit pound and move on to the next person. But at least back then you had to leave the house to find out what they look like."

For his ongoing documentary project Conversations with Gay Elders, filmmaker David Weissman has been recording conversations with gay men over 70 to preserve their stories. One, an 86-year-old Chinese American man, grew up in San Francisco's Chinatown. "By the time he was in his mid teens, he was cruising," Weissman told VICE. "And this is absent of any external context for being gay. Gay men just found ways of locating each other. It's pretty fascinating to realize that." As dangerous as it may seem for a young person to be exploring his sexuality at such a young age, it's also pretty heroic. Especially when you realize it all happened before bars or bathhouses—or WiFi, for that matter. And today, the latter is supplanting the former.

It's staggering to think about how quickly times have changed, and today, it's easy to take digital access for granted. I sometimes find myself flipping through profiles on apps without realizing why, feeling numb. This doesn't just apply to gay men—I've watched as my straight lady friends swipe with the same glazed expression. We assume it isn't really affecting us, but it's possible the effects are too subtle for us to notice.

As painful as it was to hear that guy say "single guys are too needy," at least I felt it, in the moment. Getting ghosted or rejected online feels suspiciously manageable; maybe we should call it a micro-rejection. Every now and then, I'll hear "sorry, you aren't my type" from a guy on Scruff, and I always feel a bit stung. It's easier to brush off, but there's emotional residue—one paper cut is nothing, but 100 can leave a wound.

"I don't think we've grasped how new and different this all is," says Weissman. "In terms of emotional and community health and self esteem. Like: What does it really mean to be gay? What is a healthy sex life? Am I really happy with the hook up world? Those are the conversations not happening in our community."

If anything, the internet hasn't made dating or sex less complicated than it was. And it doesn't make guys any less complicated, either. Lately I've noticed that cute fellow from the tea dance posts photos with the glowering man on Instagram, on intimate vacations together, with hashtags like "#alwaysandforever" and "#daddy".

Whether or not he says he's single, they're in love. Time to move on, but also to check in. And checking in with how you're feeling—and realizing our emotional lives matter, both digitally and IRL—is a truth that prevails across all ages of gay men and eras of our culture.

Follow Mike Albo on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Mike Beauregard

For some inexplicable reason, Maclean's has published yet another reactionary column by Scott Gilmore on the subject of remote Indigenous communities. This happened despite near-universal opposition to his archaic opinions—which are, in short, that the problem is location and lack of "development," not ongoing colonialism—by Indigenous and Northern peoples.

Gilmore is a self-described "social entrepreneur" and spouse of Catherine McKenna, the federal environment and climate change minister. One would think this would grant this middle-aged white man with a disturbingly dead stare a degree of self-awareness or willingness to listen to other opinions. But nope, here we are again. (In classic form, Gilmore has accused critics of simply not reading his column).

In Gilmore's latest screed, he asserted that the North of Canada is "empty" and in desperate need of hyper-capitalist "development" in the form of resource extraction. He definitively states, referencing no sources, that "this lack of development has created serious social problems."

About the only thing that can be clearly extracted from his column is that he wants mining, and lots of it.

Given his relationship with a senior minister in a cabinet that's at least rhetorically committed to notions of "reconciliation" and establishing "nation-to-nation relationships," such attitudes matter. Especially given the environment and climate change is of critical concern to many Indigenous communities.

As with previous columns of this nature, Gilmore didn't bother to quote anyone who knows about the North. So, VICE Canada talked to people who live in and/or have spent a great deal of time there. It's remarkable what a difference that can make.

Photo via Flickr user Chris Fournier

Melissa Daniels, lawyer and member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN)

VICE: What was your immediate response to this latest piece in which Gilmore declares the North as "empty" and in need of development?
Daniels: Our experiences in the North are so completely different than down South that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission completed a report that focused solely on the Northern experience because that's how different it is.

This is a report that Scott Gilmore has clearly never meaningfully engaged with prior to his writing. Thomas Berger, with the Berger Inquiry, learned almost 40 years ago there is no way to really know the North and our issues without coming into our communities and engaging with us. And then, once you are invited to our communities you would be able to see that contrary to Gilmore's suggestions, the North is not empty: it is vibrant, it is full of life.

The North is arguably one of the most important ecologically vulnerable places on earth... It is inhabited by primarily Indigenous people, unlike the southern portions of the country. When Gilmore decides anything on the North and publishes it, it does have implications, especially when he's published unsustainable, unfounded, racist conclusions on Northern Indigenous issues, sustainability and the environment.

If anything, I think Gilmore's article just shows how much we need to conduct another Berger-like inquiry in the North in order to attain our views for environmental reform.

Do you think this ties back to Gilmore not being to conceptualize other ways of relating to society or economics?
I would believe so, considering this is a recurring event that's happened at least three times despite the overwhelming commentary from Indigenous people telling him it is not his place to be speaking on our issues. Especially in the manner that the does, so disrespectfully. The way he comes at Indigenous people and scholars on Twitter is not respectful. He's not receptive to critiques.

Are there communities or regions in the North that really defy what Gilmore's incorrect assessments are of that's happening?
Yes. Definitely. September 1, 2016: the Deline Got'ine Government became Canada's first combined Indigenous and public self-government. The official language is an Indigenous language, the focus is on Dene legal system. The idea of the whole self-government was born from one of our Dene prophecies on Waterheart and it centres on Great Bear Lake, which is one the last pristine sources of freshwater in the entire world. And that's where life ends and begins for the Dene is at Great Bear Lake. I think this is a great story of resilience, especially considering the uranium development that has occurred in Deline.

Erin Freeland Ballantyne, dean of Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning (located near Yellowknife, N.W.T.), first Rhodes Scholar from the Canadian North

VICE: What was your initial take on the Gilmore column?
Freeland Ballantyne: My initial response is what it typically is when we have people from the South trying to tell the rest of Canada what's wrong with the North. And it's that the North isn't underdeveloped, it's Gilmore's understanding of colonization and its impacts that's underdeveloped.

How does this relate to concepts of quality of life or development? It seems Gilmore really does promote the need for mining. Is that a political assumption about what the North needs?
Yeah, I think what we're challenged with all the time is people in the South thinking that what hasn't worked in the North for the last hundred years is suddenly going to start working and create a population that accepts that assimilation under Canadian values is the best thing for us. I think that what we know to be true is that the greatest resource in the North and the Arctic is not what's under the ground, it's what on the shoulders of all of the people that live here, and how incredibly resilient and innovative our communities are.

Is it fair to say that Gilmore's approach to these things is also indicative of the way the federal Liberals may be approaching them?
I think the challenge we have, no matter what government it is, is we're still operating under the auspices of the state that assumes sovereignty over nations that it doesn't have sovereignty over. The new government is saying "we want a nation-to-nation relationship." Well a "nation-to-nation relationship" is about recognizing who are the stewards, and if we want to use the language of the state, who are the owners of the land? And that's the Indigenous people that have been on them.

Until we start seeing those powers being taken back, or the Canadian state recognizing that if you want a "nation-to-nation relationship" that means things like Indigenous and Northern Affairs should be probably dissolved and that funding distributed across the North so that Indigenous Northern affairs can be part of the government that's governed by Indigenous and Northern people.

Canada desperately needs the North because the North has so much to give Canada to grow into the country that it says it is. Because we very much embody a lot of those values and those are really strong in our communities. There's a missed opportunity because it's really easy to look at the North and cite all of those statistics. But he does that without mentioning "how did we get here?" And how we got here was Canada dumping a bunch of money into destroying everything that was healthy and sustainable about the North.

Photo via Flickr user Pat O'Malley

Peter Kulchyski, professor in Department of Native Studies at University of Manitoba and author of Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut

What's your take on Gilmore's piece?
For Gilmore, paying attention to the North almost exclusively means industrial development. It's fully a colonial model. Absolutely. For him, it's all about putting in more infrastructure and more support for mining and energy companies and going down that path with maybe some training programs. That's kind of an extension of what the government does half-heartedly and largely supports.

I think part of the reason why we've seen less of it in the Canadian North than maybe other jurisdictions is because Canadian Indigenous people have successfully fought back. The turning point there is the Mackenzie Valley Gas Pipeline struggle in the 70s, which was the huge Northern industrial project that got turned back. But similarly the uranium mine in Baker Lake in the late 80s, and reappearing again more recently.

Does Gilmore have a point about the lack of investment in infrastructure?
I would say the investment we need to make is around land-based programming. That's the one thing that's not on anybody's agenda. I would say health problems, education problems, social issues can best be dealt with if we actually provided the resources for people to do much more land-based programming.

For me, the whole Northern policy trajectory is always about preparing people for jobs that aren't there, basically, and/or throwing in mines so they'll be there jobs where they can be at the bottom of a racially stratified workforce.

The whole presumption behind Gilmore's thing is that it's extraction that has to happen, and we have to prepare the preconditions for extraction. And it's definitely not a "let's look at the North for what it is: an Indigenous homeland" and think about how we can improve that.

On that point, is it fair to say that Gilmore and even the Canadian state at large simply can't imagine there are alternative ways of life?
It's about structural preconditions. Capitalism is based on accumulation. The Canadian state's job is to make sure that prior conditions are established so that accumulation can take place. And so it's in the very fibre of its organizational structure that what it wants to see is a workforce trained for capital development and infrastructure there for capital development, and therefore mining and energy companies moving in. That is what it does. That's it's purpose.

Photo via Flickr user Ian Mackenzie

Roger Epp, Director of UAlberta North, political science professor and author of We Are All Treaty People: Prairie Essays

VICE: What's wrong with how Gilmore approaches the North?
Epp: First, Gilmore's North is a slippery one. Sometimes it is strictly the territorial north, when he is counting people; and then, when he is counting ports, it slips down to Churchill. The question of where North begins is the subject of endless debate. Is Fort McMurray north? Labrador? Prince George? Sudbury? Chicoutimi? Or only those places where Indigenous peoples predominate?

Second, the "North" is judged entirely in terms of whether it is the site of effective sovereignty and economic development, especially of its "mineral wealth." Those are not necessarily the only criteria that Northerners would apply, though the assumption is that their perspectives are irrelevant. What matters is whether the North is genuinely "ours," meaning Southern Canadians'. As if it is up to people in Toronto and Ottawa to decide if "we" are a northern nation. People live there, and have been living there a long time.

Is this a symptom of Gilmore simply not being able to conceptualize that distinct cultural interpretations of lands/waters, economies, and societies exist? Or what's going on here?
Especially outside the territorial capitals, and in parts of the provincial norths as well, there is a complex relationship between what we might call traditional and wage economies. The latter presumably is a mark of "development." But it is not one or the other for people. Traditional land-based, water-based skills still compensate for the ridiculous price of food, for example, and the relationship between those skills and real self-determination and also the character traits required to live it out should not be discounted.

I was in the community of Deline on Great Bear Lake in late August, just before the effective date and the celebration of a self-government agreement that was almost two decades in the making. While Deline is not without its challenges, those negotiations were an incredible test of community leadership and cohesion, as well as a grounding in traditional stories and spirituality. Deline was rightly celebrated. Where was Gilmore?

At the same time, some of the biggest players in the conventional economy in the North, and increasingly southward, are Indigenous development corporations, usually the result of land claims settlements. With their own communities, they face the kind of questions that used to be asked of provincial crown corporations in places like Saskatchewan: are they to operate in profit mode to generate funds to be used for other collective purposes, or are they to fulfill social/employment goals in their operations?

Again, more complexity than you'd get from Gilmore's drive-by analysis.

Follow James Wilt on Twitter.

All stills via ''Blair Witch'

"Do you see her?"

York University student Mandi Gray was raped by fellow student Mustafa Ururyar. Photo Alyson Hardwick for VICE News

For the last 48 hours, women's advocates have been celebrating the outcome of York University student Mustafa Ururyar's rape trial.

Ururyar, 29, was sentenced to 18 months in jail Wednesday for raping fellow student Mandi Gray in January 2015. The sentencing, like the guilty verdict before it, was delivered with conviction (pun not intended) by Ontario Court Justice Marvin Zuker, who gave Ururyar the maximum jail time possible for a summary offence. In a week that's seen several Alberta judges scrutinized for their handling of sex assault cases—most notably Federal Court Justice Robin Camp, who may lose his job because he asked a complainant "why couldn't you just keep your knees together?"—the Ururyar sentence seemed like a victory.

But Gray doesn't feel that way.

Read more: 'Keep Your Knees Together' Judge Robin Camp Is Too Incompetent to Remain on the Bench

On Thursday, Ururyar was granted bail while he waits for his appeal of the verdict to be heard. Gray said the over-the-top statements Zuker made during both judgment and sentencing mean Ururyar's appeal likely has a better chance.

"I was really frustrated because it was just so much material and so unorthodox so it just provided the room for potentially a successful appeal," she told VICE.

While convicting Ururyar, Zuker quoted liberally from academic readings, including the Maya Angelou poem "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings." He dismissed Ururyar's version of events—that the former couple had had consensual sex—emphatically.

"To listen to Mr. Ururyar paint Ms. Gray as the seductive party animal is nothing short of incomprehensible. He went or tried to go to any length to discredit Ms. Gray if not invalidate her. Such twisted logic. It never happened this way. None of it," he said.

Taking on common rape myths, he declared, "No other crime is looked upon with the degree of blameworthiness, suspicion, and doubt as a rape victim. Victim blaming is unfortunately common and is one of the most significant barriers to justice and offender accountability."

He also noted that "for much of our history the 'good' rape victim, the 'credible' rape victim, has been a dead one."

Then, during Wednesday's sentencing, he delivered his decision pretty much as soon as court started, not bothering to consider the submission of Ururyar's defence team, who asked that he be given a conditional sentence (no jail time).

Read more: Judge in York University Rape Trial Slams Justice System While Delivering Guilty Verdict.

"Althought his lawyer made the most outrageous submission... the judge was like 'I already made up my mind.' It wasn't really a great thing to do in terms of taking her submission seriously," said Gray.

Lawyers she's spoken to have advised her to be ready for a new trial.

Michael Lacy, vice president of the Criminal Lawyers' Association, told VICE there are actually parallels between both Zuker and Camp.

"The judges were not acting judicially and not acting impartially in assessing the evidence that was before them," Lacy told VICE. "Any time a judge comes to a case with a preconceived view of the nature of allegations. .. it undermines the administration of justice, it undermines the appearance of fairness, it undermines the rule of the law."

Whereas Camp was presiding over sex assault trials without a proper knowledge of criminal law or rape myths, Zuker appears to have walked into the Ururyar trial with the presumption that Gray should be believed, Lacy said.

"She wasn't looking for a judge who was going to blindly accept her allegations. She wanted a verdict that would withstand scrutiny."

Gray said if Zuker were doing his job right, he would have intervened when Ururyar's lawyer Lisa Bristow was asking her questions about her sexual history on the stand, in contravention of Canada's rape shield laws. Instead, Gray told Bristow that the questions were inappropriate and Zuker agreed. Gray also had her lawyer David Butt write Bristow an email essentially telling her she was crossing the line.

"I shouldn't have to pay a lawyer to remind this woman of her responsibility," she said.

Gray said she doesn't know if she could handle going through another trial. "I got everything I wanted. I got back on campus. I'm feeling relatively OK about things. I don't really know what a new trial would prove," she said. "If he was acquitted, I couldn't even imagine the public scrutiny of it."

Ururyar is living in Vancouver with his partner—who is also his bail surety—while he waits for his appeal to be heard.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Over the past seven days, America witnessed ten mass shootings that left 12 dead and 38 wounded. These attacks bring the US mass shooting body count so far in 2016 to 304 dead and 1,074 injured. This means that 12 more people have been killed in American mass shootings so far this year than were killed by guns in general in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom combined in 2012, the last year for which data was available for all three countries.

Meanwhile, Europe suffered zero mass shootings over the same period of time, leaving the continent's body toll in such attacks so far this year steady at 43 dead and 136 injured.

This week was particularly nasty for America because it saw the single greatest number of mass shootings in one day so far this year: On the 15th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the nation suffered seven mass shootings. They accounted for seven of this week's US mass shooting deaths and 30 of its injuries. That's one more mass shooting—and a greater level of death and injury—than the nation suffered even on a high summer holiday like July 4, prime time for shooters to stalk crowded streets and open fire on targets out in the open.

To be sure, the clustering of shootings around such a grim date was entirely coincidental. All of these attacks adhered to routine patterns of mass gun violence in America—which is to say they appeared to stem from local disputes or sudden arguments. At about 1:50 AM that day, a shooting at a party in Saginaw, Michigan, injured five individuals. Less than half an hour later, a street shooting in Jersey City, New Jersey, killed one and injured three more people. A bit over an hour later, an argument between Atlanta rapper Rich Homie Quan's entourage and staff at a club in New Bern, North Carolina, escalated into a shooting that left five more injured. About an hour later, an apparent domestic dispute in Fort Wayne, Indiana, devolved into a shooting that left four dead and one injured. About half an hour after that, a man firing into a crowd in Kansas City, Missouri, injured six more people. Then later that night, at about 8:15 PM, a street shooting in New Orleans, Louisiana, and a shooting outside an apartment complex in Birmingham, Alabama, following a peace rally nearby almost simultaneously each left one dead and five injured.

Even though there was no connection between the date and this spate of violence, one might still have expected the overlap to trigger some special attention to the attacks and the wider phenomenon they represent. Yet for the most part, the day and each shooting that occurred on it received no more local or national attention than the other days that witnessed (similarly routine) mass shootings this week. On Saturday, at about 6 AM, a shooting outside a Miami, Florida, nightclub left one dead and three injured. On Tuesday, at about 2:30 AM, a second shooting in Fort Wayne, Indiana—this one at a bar—left three more dead and two more injured. And finally on Wednesday, at about 11:45 PM, a street shooting in Houston, Texas, left one dead and three injured. All of these incidents passed with moderate coverage at best.

One might argue it's a relief that media outlets declined to jump to conclusions about or make false connections between the dark day of remembrance and the mass shootings that came with it. But the fact that even this level of concentrated death and injury—no matter how seemingly typical the circumstances of each attack—barely stirred up more attention than the usual national nonchalance is devastating. If a rash of large-scale gun violence on a day like September 11 can't force America to confront this plague, it's hard to imagine what timing and concentration thereof ever realistically could.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Day for Night festival.

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Audience enjoying a runway show. Photo by Camilla via Wikimedia Commons

On Wednesday, Ralph Lauren's spring/summer 2017 runway show for New York Fashion Week tried something it had never done before in its more than 50 years as a brand. Immediately after the label presented it's latest runway show in a towering glass tent across the street from its flagship store on Madison Avenue, its new collection featuring Western-style fringe jackets and ponchos was made available for purchase. Although several designers have been experimenting with "see now, buy now" over the past few years, Ralph Lauren's the largest American brand to try out the runway-meets-retail tactic, which is one of many trends signifying a desire among designers to reform fashion week.

"Showing clothes, then delivering them six months later... it's over," Ralph told Vogue before the show. "With the internet, social media... you have to change."

Change is exactly what the doctor ordered. In March, the Council of Fashion Designers of America released results from a study about the current state of New York Fashion Week. It polled 50 industry insiders, including everyone from designers to bloggers. The consensus was that the system of showing clothes in a runway presentation and selling them in stores months later was outdated and ineffective. They also framed the breakneck pace of the fashion cycle as a problem that leaves designers burnt out and doesn't help gain new customers.

The reality is that fashion week hasn't evolved that much since it was started back in 1943. The semi-annual series of presentations and runway shows that showcases the latest designer collections to a crowd of international buyers, press, celebrities, and fans hasn't kept pace with our advances in technology, industry, or globalization.

Kelly Cutrone before a fashion week runway show. Photo by Flickr user Savanna Smiles

Ralph Lauren's move to offer its collection immediately after the models made their way down the runway, however, is one way to break out of the doldrums of NYFW. Tom Ford, Alexander Wang, and Burberry have also been experimenting with the "see now, buy now" model, and it makes sense.

In an age when the audience snaps pictures and posts them online before 15-minute runway presentations are even over, offering the new clothing to the public immediately after debuting it on the runway cuts down on the risk of fast-fashion knockoffs, and could even help designers capitalize on hype. After all, if you're going to drop anywhere from $40,000 and up to create a spectacle-like runway production, why wait to make that money back?

"All these young and emerging designers who are coming up with these great looks are spending all of their money clothes come out."

Putting together a fashion show involves conceptualizing a collection, creating samples, and finding a venue, in addition to the finer details like arranging lighting set-ups, music, and PR. According to Kerby Jean-Raymond, the designer behind Pyer Moss, designing the clothes for a fashion week show takes about four months, which means there's only two extra months between spring/summer and autumn/winter to work on everything else that comprises a fashion business.

This proposition is especially problematic when the shows can actually lose you business. In the past few seasons, Pyer Moss has put on some of the most hotly debated runway shows. For spring/summer 2016, Jean-Raymond turned his show into a platform promote the Black Lives Matter movement. Jean-Raymond's powerful message was lauded by critics, but it cost his company over $120,000 in business from buyers too chickenshit to take a stand up against oppression.

Kerby Jean-Raymond. Photo by Nick Sethi

Although some major designers are trying out new ways to make fashion shows more lucrative, for younger brands like Pyer Moss, who are on the rise but still lack the resources and revenue of storied brands like Ralph Lauren or Burberry, these new tactics can be tough to implement.

"It is really hard. I think it should be 'see now, buy soon,'" said Cutrone. "You can do 'see now, buy now' in limited quantities, but how do you do a production run if you are an emerging designer? For someone like Ralph Lauren, you know you are going to make 10,000 polo shirts so it is no big deal. For a smaller brand, how do you know how many to make? You don't because it has to be based on your orders."

Some brands like Public School, Gucci, and Vetements are combining their men's and women's collections, to help cut down the workload. "Designers are human beings who need to have some spare time to get rest and gather strength. Instead, designers are put under enormous pressure and insane schedules," Vetements CEO Guram Gvaslia told Vogue about showing men's and women's separately. "The industrial machine sucks out their creativity, chews them up, and spits them out. Once a genius, the designer is left behind incapable of being creative."

Other designers are balking at the system of fashion week by simply rejecting the official Council of Fashion Designers of America calendar and showing their presentations "everywhere from churches to clubs, and on everyone from agency-signed models to their own friends," writes W Magazine's Steph Eckardt.

For more on fashion, watch our VICELAND show States of Undress:

The influx of reality stars and social media personalities replacing editors and buyers at shows is another runway presentation risk that designers are learning to adjust to. The presence of famous faces in the front rows has turned the industry event into a social event that can ultimately overshadow the actual collections, especially in the media.

"The biggest con is that shows have become more beneficial for celebrities than they are for the designers," says Pyer Moss's Jean-Raymond. "It can suck after forking over $50,000 for a short event and then having your front row cannibalize your much-needed press."

He adds, "The return on investment on shows isn't there anymore, either. Most stores are finding brands on Instagram now, not on the runway like before."

Cutrone, however, has an idea for improving the return on investment of runway shows. "To me we should be selling tickets to fashion shows like a rock concert, where we comp 20 to 100 seats for people who are legitimate reviewers. Why? Because we are creating free content."

WATCH: Old at Fashion Week

The need for change has some people questioning whether the runway show is on the way out entirely. But the reality is that as annoying as fashion week can be for designers, the presentations offer a priceless opportunity for them to present their vision to the right people, which is something they can't do when the collection is simply shipped off to stores or worn by a celebrity without context.

It's this power of unfiltered expression that has kept and will undoubtedly keep attracting creative designers back to fashion week. And hopefully, with these new trends of change, they can catch the stodgy semi-annual event up with the 21st century.

Follow Erica on Twitter

Dalston Lane, Hackney. London 2014

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It all started with a hand-drawn map. Photographer Carlos Alba, now 31, had just moved to east London from Madrid in March of 2013, and his landlady handed him a rough sketch of the neighborhood to help him get around. "On it, she'd marked the usual places—bus and Tube stops, shops, the bank, a gym—so I used it to go out and get to know the area," he says. "During these walks I found a lot of objects on the street such as photographs, love letters, sketches. I started to collect them, at first randomly, then more methodically. When I had a good amount of interesting objects I researched the meaning of them and their owners. They were like a signal to follow for taking pictures."

And so he did, picking up his camera and documenting not only the found objects but the residents of the area to whose contours he was still tracing in his mind. In September, the project Carlos has called The Observation of Trifles started in earnest, and has since turned into a photo book that will be out this autumn. It's been quite the journey from working as a fashion and magazine photographer in Spain to starting afresh in a city Carlos deems "one of the most competitive in the world" but open-minded and multicultural.

As you'd expect, approaching strangers in the street required a bit of tact. "I used to bring the objects and a notebook with sketches and photographs with me," Carlos says. "They helped me to explain my project to the locals. I'd spend around 15 to 30 minutes talking with the people and if I found a particular person interesting, I'd finish the conversation by asking: 'Can I take your picture?' If so, I pulled the camera out from my backpack and I shot the photograph."

Three years later, there are still chats and objects that stick out in his mind. He remembers speaking to local man Robert Adams (pictured below), who was born "within earshot of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church, and worked as a switchboard operator connecting callers to Spanish-speaking countries. His interest in Spain began after his grandfather fought in the Spanish Civil War as part of the International Brigades." Most importantly, for Carlos, Robert said he was "very proud to be in a poetic photo book of his neighborhood. For me, that's the best review that I've received about this photographic work."

He won't soon forget the strip of negative film he found lying on the pavement—possibly his funniest little treasure—"in which you can see a naked dwarf," or the note that just reads "Please don't leave extra milk. We have too much stock. They all going out of date. Thank you." With everything from playing cards to single personal photos that may have slipped out of a jacket pocket or been intentionally cast aside, Carlos built a picture of his own understanding of the Hackney and Tower Hamlets areas.

Ultimately, the whole project came down to chance—there wasn't a master plan at any stage. "I researched about east London's local history, art galleries the kind of people living there, and I found it interesting and appealing. Also, it was the cheapest area in Zone 2."

Follow Tshepo on Twitter and Carlos on Instagram.

The Observation of Trifles is available now, via The Photographers' Gallery and La Fábrica. See more photos from the book below.