Photo via Flickr user Kelly Flanagan

Southern California geologists warn the LA area from time to time that there's real science to back up the local legend known as The Big One: a giant, overpass-snapping earthquake that's supposedly always on the horizon. But the warnings aren't usually as specific as the one they're giving this week: The Big One, they say, is unusually likely to become reality by next Tuesday.

According to a new press release from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the odds of a huge and potentially damaging earthquake in Southern California could be as high as one in 100 from now until October 4, following a series of small earthquakes on Tuesday along the San Andreas Fault line about 150 miles from Downtown Los Angeles. The odds could also be as low as one in 3,000.

This comes after a claim in May by Thomas Jordan, director of the the Southern California Earthquake Center, that an earthquake on the San Andreas Fault is just, kinda, way past due and likely to happen pretty soon. Or as Jordan put it: the fault is "locked, loaded, and ready to go."

The USGS cites an "earthquake swarm" near the lakeside town of Bombay Beach, California that started on September 26. That spot is "part of a fault network that connect the southernmost end of the San Andreas fault with the Imperial fault," meaning stress along multiple faults might be compounding the earthquake-causing effects.

As of September 26, that swarm had included 142 mini-quakes with richter-scale magnitudes of 1.4 to 4.3—hardly a tremble to the average California earthquake snob.

But, as the seismologist Egill Hauksson told the LA Times on Friday, "maybe one of those small earthquakes that's happening in the neighborhood of the fault is going to trigger it, and set off the big event." USGS says that could mean a magnitude 7.0 or greater earthquake—more powerful than the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, which killed 72 people, injured 9,000, and caused $25 billion in damage.

But that one percent chance doesn't necessarily mean Californians should pile into their earthquake bunkers for the next few days. "Swarm-like activity in this region has occurred in the past, so this week's activity, in and of itself, is not necessarily cause for alarm," the USGS release says.

One more bit of good news: The San Andreas fault is hundreds of miles from the ocean, which substantially reduces the risk of a tsunami, Dr. Lucy Jones, a USGS seismologist, told me last year.

But she also told me that a worst-case-scenario earthquake in Southern California could cause 1,500 buildings to collapse, and might seriously threaten LA's water supply. "If we lose a lot of water pipes, it could make it that much worse to control fires," she added.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

This week, the finale of GAYCATION's second season, "Deep South," aired on VICELAND. Throughout the season, viewers have reached out to co-host Ian Daniel to share their own stories of the struggles and personal triumphs. We've collected some of those powerful stories so highlight the variety of experience in the LGBTQ community worldwide.

Hello Ian, I'm Angel Santiago's mother. You and Ellen interviewed him for your special program about the Orlando shooting, and I was moved to tears as I watched. Listening to my son tell his story was so hard, because I didn't understand him when he was growing up. I guess I felt so much guilt for causing him emotional pain while he was dealing with his identity when he was younger. I'm grateful he's alive, to be with him, and to give him my love and support. I love my son so much. I want him to be happy. God bless. — Gloria Santiago

I know the chances of you seeing this are slim, but I felt an overwhelming need to send you a message to THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart. The fact that you and Ms. Page are bringing to light how hard it is for anyone who is gay, lesbian, transgender, etc. is amazing. I'm the mom to an amazing, beautiful, talented, giving, generous and kind transgender son. He came out to my husband and I a year ago as initially being a lesbian. I grew up with a gay uncle, so was fine with that—but my husband grew up in a Christian household in St. Thomas, USVI, and didn't understand. When our son told us about being transgender, again it didn't bother me—but my husband still has difficulty understanding his choice.

Our son changed his name to Xavier and started living as a male; I can say I honestly knew when he was in 7th or 8th grade that he was transgender. He struggles daily with body dysphoria, body dysmorphia, severe depression, and bipolar disorder, and he struggles everyday with people misgendering him. When making doctor's appointments we have to use his legal name, and even when I ask doctor's offices to refer to him as Xavier, the majority of them don't. We live in Alaska, and while there is a large LGBTQ community, no one really "sees" what all this does to him. I hurt for him, and I worry for his future and the way people will treat him. We're trying to build him and make him stronger, but I just wanted to thank you for bringing to light the lives of the LGBTQ community and the struggles they face daily. — Kelly

I just wanted to thank you so much for the amazing work you've done with GAYCATION. I'm a 27-year-old woman who's finally accepted myself as gay after 8 years of identifying as bisexual. Dating men was admittedly "easier," but what I never admitted to myself was that it was neither fulfilling nor truly made me happy. I'm currently married to a man, had a stint in the public eye from being on reality TV (which leaves me feeling terrified and overwhelmed about coming out), and have had some of those I've trusted most reply, "Maybe it's just a phase."

When I'm awake late at night like I am right now—sitting alone in my living room with only the company of my own thoughts, trying to figure out how to escape the eye of this storm—it's moments like these, sitting and watching your show, that help me know that's it's going to be ok. They allow me to smile, cry, and keep having the strength to follow my heart, be true to myself, and to fathom the idea that I, too, can find that happiness. I thank you for this, truly from the bottom of my heart. — "Arielle" (name has been changed to protect identity)

I am so touched by your kindness and your great professionalism. I came out when I was 50 after being married for many years; I'm now almost 58 and married to the real love of my life, a man, and your stories resonated very strongly. When the Supreme Court finally gave us the right to marry, I cried all day—like a child who could not believe that we were experiencing the beginning of our freedom to be. There's a lot of progress yet to be made, but people like you and Ellen are making a huge difference. Thank you. — Jean-Pierre Delabre

Ian, I truly appreciate the work you and Ellen are doing to bring light to LGBT issues. I am 67, retired, and pretty much still in the closet. I live in a intolerant suburb of Little Rock, AR and think often about what I could do the help my identity, but run into the reality of feeling too insecure and insignificant to step up. Keep up the good work. — Richard Tankersley

I just wanted to say thank you for being a part of GAYCATION. I'm a 20-year-old queer girl living in Southern Illinois—my dad is a pastor of a southern baptist church here and I am not out. It's painful each day to wake up and be so alone. We moved here when I was 12, and I have only since then come out to my younger sister who has been supportive but can't really talk to me about things. I stopped going to church months ago because I was getting panic attacks and hiding in the bathroom till the service was over. My "friends" stopped talking to me because I quit coming to church, but I can't sit through my dad preaching on the damnation of queers. I feel like he is speaking to me when he preaches and I feel shame and hurt.

After the first episode of GAYCATION, I Googled you and read that you grew up in Indiana—it comforted me to know someone from a smaller area has grown to be a light in the LGBTQ community, as well as a successful writer/artist. I just want to say thank you for giving me hope through this show. I I hope to date a girl one day and to be proud and not ashamed. Sending love to you both, a tiny queer girl in southern Illinois. — Scout

Want to know if you get VICELAND? Go here to find out how to tune in.

On an all new episode of ABANDONED, Rick McCrank explores, skates, and swims in an abandoned nuclear power plant and investigates nuclear paranoia in the Pacific Northwest.

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

William and Kate embark on a coastal voyage in a replica Haida war canoe. Photo by Tim Rooke/CP.

As they paddled Will and Kate in a replica Haida war canoe on Friday in the waters off Skidegate, Haida Gwaii, in Northern British Columbia, several members of the Haida Nation wore bright blue "No LNG" t-shirts in silent protest of a massive liquefied natural gas project near Prince Rupert, BC.

Protesters showed up in dress shirts, but then removed them to reveal the "No LNG" shirts underneath, a Haida member told VICE News. Another group of Haida community members continued their protest on land, wearing the tees and holding signs declaring "United Against Tankers."

Other protesters showed up wearing orange t-shirts for "Orange Shirt Day" to remember the children who were forced to attend residential schools in Canada.

With the highest rate of consumption in Europe—and a mortality rate three times higher than the European average—the UK is clearly keen on its drugs. In VICE's new documentary series High Society, we meet the users, dealers, and manufacturers behind these statistics, and look at the impact drugs have on British society as a whole.

Check out the trailer for the new series and watch the first episode on ecstasy Monday, October 3

Check out Penelope Gazin's Twitter, Etsy, and Instagram.

Actress Amandla Stenberg embraces poet Camonghne Felix in a still from a Teen Vogue video

This past January, 17-year-old Hunger Games star Amandla Stenberg chose a very public nexus of teen media platforms on which to come out as bisexual: Teen Vogue's Snapchat account.

A week later, 14-year-old Girl Meets World actress Rowan Blanchard announced she was queer via Twitter, with Teen Vogue, Seventeen, and other publications quickly reporting the announcement. And last October, Seventeen featured proudly queer YouTube celebrity Tyler Oakley as a cover star, in an issue that also prominently featured a story about dating a bisexual guy.

Teen magazines—canonized as packed with dating tips and eye candy for young, heterosexual, female readers—have gone queer. More specifically, mainstream teen titles are slowly shifting toward pages and websites full of LGBTQ voices and visibility, reflecting a broad consensus that in order to survive, broadening their editorial perspective beyond a traditionally heterosexual readership isn't just good business, it's imperative to reach teens today.

It's a shift that hasn't escaped Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD, an LGBTQ media monitoring group. "We've seen notable improvements in recent years in terms of LGBTQ representation in mainstream women's and teen magazines," said Ellis. "Writers and editors are now looking for diverse stories that haven't been told, and the LGBTQ community has plenty of them."

The rise in LGBTQ content can be attributed to a number of factors: the expanding digital reach of print media, which demands a greater volume of content and, consequently, room for more voices; the rising importance of identity politics to teen readers; the fact that old-line teen magazines, packed with beauty tips, heterosexual eye candy and images that reinforce traditional beauty standards, read as an anachronism in the age of Tumblr intersectionalism.

"For the past year or so, we've made a concerted effort to limit (and, eventually, banish) heteronormativity from all of our content, especially as it pertains to matters of sexual health and relationships," said Phil Picardi, Teen Vogue's digital editorial director. "Rather than assume our readers are hooking up with or dating men, we use gender neutral pronouns in almost all contexts. Our readers have appreciated the shift, and often help police our language to be more inclusive via social media and comments, which we welcome."

But meshing LGBTQ people into Teen Vogue's overall magazine without pigeonholing their identities is a larger challenge. "It's important for us to avoid the sandboxing effect of limiting queer people to just speak about their queer identities," Picardi said. "We have included LGBTQ people in stories that celebrate their accomplishments and lend them a platform beyond their sexual or gender identity, whether that's being more inclusive in our portfolios of young designers, say, or young feminists, or the cool new 'It' people you need to know."

The shift isn't limited to magazine websites: LGBTQ folks are visible throughout the pages of Seventeen. In 2014, the magazine dropped the "Guys" from its "Love & Guys" section, and has since made an effort to use general neutral terms when discussing relationships, subbing in "your crush" or "bae" for traditional, gendered terms.

"We want Seventeen to be a magazine where all girls feel represented and included, regardless of their sexual identities," said Joey Bartolomeo Seventeen's executive editor. "We always knew that not all of our readers were into guys, which was reaffirmed when a study came out earlier this year saying that only 48 percent of Gen Z-ers consider themselves exclusively heterosexual." Bartolomeo also noted that readers may have LGBTQ parents and friends or be dating queer teens, which Seventeen accounts for as editors continue weaving LGBTQ topics into the magazine in an organic, helpful way.

Though such shifts represent a step forward for LGBTQ diversity in print, Ellis spoke to ongoing challenges magazines face in trying to keep up with the shifting digital world, and the fact that LGBTQ representation must go beyond the content they produce into the staff of newsrooms who make it. "To improve LGBTQ representation, magazines can ensure that they're hiring a diverse staff, commit to raising the profile of important issues and notable LGBTQ people, and continue to educate themselves on how to report on LGBTQ issues," Ellis said. "Making sure that stories are inclusive of the rich diversity of the LGBTQ community is also key. While representation of LGBTQ people has increased significantly, coverage still largely focuses on gay and lesbian white people—leaving out a wide array of others in the LGBTQ community and its vast intersections."

While mainstream magazines still have many more improvements to make, progress is evident in pages dotted with LGBTQ faces and voices, inspiring momentum throughout the media for better and more comprehensive representation. "I hope for both our present and our future that somewhere there's a teenager who picks up a copy of Teen Vogue, opens it up, and can see themselves positively represented, and feel affirmation in that recognition," Picardi said. "And I hope that feeling gives them the courage to live their most authentic lives."

Follow Melissa Kravitz on Twitter.

On this week's edition of First-Person Shooter we gave a disposable camera to Leo Gutman, a Staten Island native and New York City street skateboarder. Leo's been skating for 15 years and is in a skate crew that makes some trippy skate vids. Skating in NYC in the summer is like "riding the Milky Way of tar" he says.

On the day he was photographing for us, he got up early and headed to the Chelsea skatepark, then met up with his girlfriend to go on a booze cruise where he crashed a quinceañera on the upper deck. (Unfortunately no skateboards were allowed on the boat.) He told us more about his day below.

VICE: What'd you get up to during your day?
Leo Gutman: First I got up and got some breakfast and coffee with my girlfriend before she went to work. I did some work on my laptop and then went down to the Chelsea skatepark and skated with some locals. After that my girlfriend had some relatives in town so we went on a three-hour boat cruise that went all around the Hudson. There was a quinceanera on the upper level of the boat, which consisted of the birthday girl getting dirty lap dances from all the party members, males and females. One guy was riding on top of her with his chest to her face while holding on to the back of her chair—and then he just suddenly drops her down to the floor while grinding and keeps giving her a lap dance while she's got her back to the floor and her dress fluttering in the air. After the party we headed home.

Who are your skating heroes?
Mike Carroll, John Cardiel, Josh Kalis, Marc Johnson, Dan Drehobl, and a grip of other people... How much time do we have?

Is skating in New York very different than skating other places?
Definitely. All the skate spots are really accessible but there's a lot of rough, hard-to-skate terrain. The rough terrain makes you think outside of the box, use makeshift obstacles and skate in the streets a lot. Pushing through the hot open pavement in the summer time is like being in another galaxy.

Are skaters "bad" kids?
I think most of us can be. If you can defy physics it can be pretty empowering. It's like when all the first astronauts who landed on the moon got back from space, the entitlement sweeps over you... You're on a plane of existence that others can't fathom, and this can make you act out as a bad kid.

However, skateboarders can be some of the best people I've ever met as well... Everyone is very respectful, it's all one big family.

You can buy Leo's video here.

Lady Gaga performs onstage during The 58th GRAMMY Awards. Photo by Kevin Winter/WireImage

In "Aftershocks," the coda to Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds tracks glam's echoes as they reverberate through 21st century pop. A slideshow of snapshot moments from her career as art-pop provocateur, this remixed excerpt assesses Lady Gaga's claim to be David Bowie's inheritor.

October, 2007

The flyer for New York Street Revival and Trash Dance promises "burlesque pop. rock n roll. glam. metal." A series of Thursday parties at the Slipper Room, they're conceived and hosted by performance artist Lady Starlight and an aspiring star who's only just started calling herself Lady Gaga. The party's name pays homage to October 1974's Hollywood Street Revival and Trash Dance Festival—a legendary night of performances by Iggy Pop, New York Dolls, and assorted LA glitterati at the Hollywood Palladium. But where that event was an ironically winking wake for the Death of Glitter, a phenomenon whose star was fading fast by late '74, Gaga and Starlight's New York Street Revival really is a revival—the self-conscious announcement of glam's rebirth on the Lower East Side.

August, 2008

The credits for Lady Gaga's 2008 debut, The Fame, make a point of thanking Andy Warhol and David Bowie. In interviews, she speaks of studying the work of Klaus Nomi, Grace Jones, and Leigh Bowery. Gaga gives as good quote as she gives good face. But as you'd expect with an artist whose whole career feels like postmodernism's death rattle, her patter often feels déjà vu. "I am not real. I am theater," Gaga declaims. She feels like she's "on a stage all the time... when I'm dancing, singing, making breakfast." Arriving at an airport, getting out of a limo outside a club—everything is performed, made into an Event. "I adore show business and don't ever want my fans to see me in any other way." Echoing Oscar Wilde and Alice Cooper, Gaga speaks of "lying profusely" and how "music is a lie... art is a lie." She flippantly flips the rockist attack lines—about style eclipsing substance—by wittily arguing that her music distracts and detracts from "the performance art" of the videos, the stage shows, and the public theater of her fame.

Truthfully, the music—"soulless electronic pop," Gaga calls it, with a wink to the Warhol disciples and the anti-humanists out there—is just an efficient base for the visual provocations. Arriving with perfect timing to harness YouTube's access to global audiences, Gaga rides a revival of the pop-video form. It had gone into decline from its late-90s, big-budget peak because MTV had phased out music programming in favor of non-stop reality TV. Now pop is audio-visual like it's never been before, and Gaga's right there at the forefront. A YouTube native, she's the first real digital-glam superstar, her promos dizzy with digi-FX and a frenzied turnover of costume/hair/make-up changes—the latter masterminded by an entourage of creative consigliere known as the Haus of Gaga.

Lady Gaga accepts the Best Pop Vocal Album award for 'The Fame Monster' onstage during The 53rd Annual GRAMMY Awards. Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images

November, 2009

The Fame Monster is the deluxe expanded version of The Fame, issued to capitalize on Gaga's success, with eight new tracks—including her best and bestest-selling song "Bad Romance"—tacked on. According to Gaga, "the runway" directly inspired these songs: "I wrote while watching muted fashion shows and I am compelled to say my music was scored for them." Gaga videos do often resemble runway shows, except that the background scenery changes as frenziedly as the clothes. The end result is like Cindy Sherman meets Alexander McQueen, scored by a soundtrack of eastern European club music.

There's an odd fatalism about Gaga's tryst with that femme fatale Fame: not only does she know, from the abundant literature on the subject, that celebrity is soul-eroding, she's made that the major theme of her work. Trailing the VMAs performance of "Paparazzi," Gaga proclaims her intent "to say something very grave about fame and the price of it." She starts the performance with an entreaty: "amidst all of these flashing lights I pray the fame won't take my life." And she ends it by enacting her own death, with fake blood gushing from her breast and a feigned hanging hoisting her into the air.

Gaga even puts out a fragrance called Fame, a black perfume designed "to smell slutty," like an "expensive hooker." Notes of belladonna evoke the toxic effects of stardom. "Vanity can create a very cruel space for you if you don't know how to manage it," Gaga warns. There's also "Fame Kills," a tour with Kanye West that gets cancelled after the rapper withdraws from the public eye after his VMAs intervention on behalf of Beyoncé. Gaga is wont to talk—melodramatically, but perhaps with genuine paranoia—of her fears that she might go the way of John Lennon or Princess Diana (the latter with whom she particularly identifies), either assassinated by a stalker or hounded to death by paparazzi.

Yet despite all its costs, all its damage, Fame seems to be all there is to believe in. No ideology or faith—nor even a real-world love—can rival its promise of self-completion. Fame, as Gaga conceives it, isn't really bestowed from outside; it's a sourceless inner conviction, what she calls "feeling the fame." It's just a matter of externalizing this internal ego-image, getting the world to ratify and recognize its innate existence. "I've always been famous, it's just no one knew it yet." The star's duty becomes to inculcate the fans with self-love—which for Gaga equates not just with mere self-esteem, but with the certainty of one's own extraordinariness. Her Monster Ball tours are "a pop cultural church," but rather than idolizing Gaga, "I'm teaching people to worship themselves."

This fierce 'n fabulous flame of self-belief is a magical defense against those who'd crush your ego—and perhaps your body. Gaga speaks for the misfits, the gender-confused, the bullied. In one interview, she recalls being thrown in a street-corner trashcan at the age of 14 by three boys, with girls looking on and laughing. She felt "worthless. Embarrassed. Mortified." Her only crime, she says, was being talkative and theatrical—too full of herself. In 2011, Gaga starts the Born This Way Foundation, an organization to combat bullying.

Placing a definite article in front of "Fame" in the album's title is jarring, an alienation effect. "The Fame" sounds like a disease. The further conjunction of monstrosity—the Fame Monster—is even more unsettling. Is Fame here a monster that's rampaging and ravaging across the world landscape? Or is Gaga herself a monster spawned by the mutagenic effects on the human psyche of celebrity culture? Little Monsters is what Gaga calls her fans; she is Mother Monster. "I used to pray every night that God would make me crazy," Gaga confesses. "That he would instill in me a creativity and a strangeness," of the kind that drove the artists she admired. But Gaga goes beyond the clichés of genius-as-madness. Fame-lust itself is a maddening virulence, a deranged will to omnipresence and overexposure that precedes any specific gift or talent, and can exist in their absence. "I want women—and men—to feel empowered by a deeper and more psychotic part of themselves. The part they're always trying desperately to hide," Gaga declares. "I operate from a place of delusion—that's what The Fame is all about. I used to walk down the street like I was a fucking star. I want people to walk around delusional about how great they can be and then to fight so hard for it every day that the lie becomes the truth."

April, 2010

"Alejandro," the third single off The Fame Monster, is perfunctory nothingness vaguely redolent of Madonna's "La Isla Bonita." But Steven Klein's promo is a tour de force of militaristic kitsch with a specialist-porn undertone. "It's all about where I'm from and love of theater.... love of the lie in art," gushes Gaga. The "where I'm from" probably refers to the Italian-American Catholic upbringing she shares with Madonna, figuring in the promo as compulsive blasphemy: Gaga as a nun in a red latex habit swallowing blood-red rosary beads. But Cabaret is in the mix too, and maybe Evita. The video oozes junta chic mingled with mood-tones from Tom of Finland. In yet another Madonna nod, Gaga wears a bra with machine-gun barrels jutting out as death nipples. Wrestlers from some between-the-wars military academy grapple homoerotically, clad in black shiny shorts and calf-length black boots. The whole "Alejandro" promo is a visual tone-poem translation of the famous last sentences of Susan Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism": "The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death."

January, 2011

Like her forefather Bowie, Gaga's acute self-consciousness and relentless self-curation don't discourage analysis by others, they incite it. Think pieces, blog essays, books (from bios to queer theory works like J. Jack Halberstam's Gaga Feminism) erupt around her videography and discography, interpreting and situating the densely encrusted references and allusions. Gaga practically pleads to be analyzed using prisms like Jean Baudrillard's hyper-reality, cyber-feminism, and queer performativity. Academia always used to lag behind pop culture (punk studies only went into overdrive during the eighties), but barely 18 months into her stardom, the Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame course is up and running at the University of South Carolina from spring 2011. Its creator, Professor Mathieu Deflem, becomes famous in his own right, leading him to write an academic paper on his experience of celebrity-by-association, "Professor Goes Gaga." In an interview, Deflem talks about the spiraling disorientation he felt: "You kind of undergo it. You experience it. You do not really have any control."

May, 2011

All this being-taken-so-seriously seems to affect Gaga: on Born This Way, the follow-up to The Fame Monster, she comes over like a pop stateswoman, addressing important issues, and in interviews talks about wanting to "be at rallies with the fans, being a part of their voice, helping to mobilize and enforce change." Conflating same-sex marriage rights and the plight of illegal immigrants to the US over a mariachi–HiNRG hybrid, "Americano" blends the didactic and the tacky. Elsewhere on Born This Way there's a new bulk to the sound matching the weightier themes: stadium rock and eighties schlock add ballast and bombast to the clubby sound, flavors of Springsteen, Pat Benatar, Jim Steinman. "The Edge of Glory" features E Street Band sax man Clarence Clemons; Brian May guests on "Yoü and I." The pomp-rock elements allow Gaga to flex her conventional musical prowess as pianist and singer. Advising "don't be a drag, just be a queen" and asserting "we are all born superstars," the album's lead single "Born This Way" is an all-purpose pride anthem for the LGBT community and anybody who feels weird, marginalized, or "culturally queer." Brassy and blaring, the song "not only plagiarizes Madonna, it super-sizes her," writes critic Pat Blashill, referring to the common perception that the song owes a lot to "Express Yourself."

August, 2011

At the 2011 Video Music Awards, Gaga does a full-blown drag-king turn as her male alter ego Jo Calderone. The persona is seemingly modeled on bad boy Johnny in The Outsiders—greased-back hair, cigarette tucked behind the ear, lip-curled sneer—although another possibility is Annie Lennox's turn as a side-burned 50s hood at the 1984 Grammys. Although her songs are mostly about hetero love-lust, Gaga plays the gender-confusion game as well as anybody since, well, Bowie. She propagates, or encourages, the rumor that she's a hermaphrodite, causing fans to scrutinize photos for suspicious bulges and rewind repeatedly the YouTube clip that seems to catch a penis slipping out when she mounts a motorcycle in a skimpy skirt.

Lady Gaga performs on stage during the 'artRave: The Artpop Ball' Tour at Perth Arena on August 20, 2014 in Perth, Australia. Photo by Paul Kane/WireImage

November, 2014

After Born This Way's bombast, Gaga takes the fatal step further into hubris with ARTPOP. The fanfare for the album (plus related transmedia activity) proclaims that Gaga will "bring art culture into pop in a reverse Warholian expedition"—only 40 years after Bowie and Roxy Music accomplished that mission. "I live for the applause applause applause," Gaga proclaims on the lead single "Applause"—only to be met with resounding silence from the global pop audience.

September, 2014

And then the strategic retreat: Gaga makes the classic hip-to-be-square switch. She partners with crooner Tony Bennett for the best-selling Cheek to Cheek album and tour. A deliberate echo of Bowie's "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy" duet with Bing Crosby for that 1977 TV special? Or just a shrewd career move?

February, 2015

Gaga burnishes further her showbiz credentials with a medley of songs from The Sound of Music, performed at the Academy Awards in celebration of the movie musical's 50th anniversary. Julie Andrews is gracious, gliding across the stage to hug Gaga warmly. But among the critics is the venerable Stephen Sondheim, who acidly informs the theater buff periodical Playbill that Gaga's rendition was "a travesty... She had no relationship to what she was singing."

January, 2016

Gaga wins a Golden Globe for her role in American Horror Story . Dressed in a black-velvet, bare-shouldered, cleavage-plunging Atelier Versace gown—"the pinnacle of retro glamor," the style blogs gush—she gives an overcome-by-emotion acceptance speech that is perfect down to the last lip-tremor. Gaga informs the audience of her new peers that "I wanted to be an actress before I wanted to be a singer, but music worked out first." The fame monster completes her metamorphosis into an all-American entertainer.

But later that same night, the news that David Bowie has died explodes across the internet—instantly knocking Gaga, and all the other Golden Globes winners, off the world's front pages. Talk about being upstaged...

Summer-Fall, 2016

Show business seems to have an inherently self-reflexive bent: its history teems with movies about the movie industry, with plays and musicals about the theater. Often these hark back nostalgically to an earlier phase of entertainment: the 1952 musical Singin' in the Rain , for instance, is set 20 years earlier during the transition between silent movies and talkies. This self-mythologizing trait also results in songs like "There's No Business like Show Business" (from Annie Get Your Gun) and "Life is A Cabaret" (from Cabaret). Whenever pop strays into the shlock zone, it too gets meta: Abba's "Thank You For the Music" and "Super Trouper" (named after a type of spotlight), Billy Joel's "I Write the Songs" and Robbie Williams's "Let Me Entertain You"....

There could be no more perfect sign of Gaga's total merger with American showbiz than the news that she's going to play the lead in A Star Is Born —the third remake of this Hollywood-about-Hollywood movie since the 1937 original. Gaga will be following in the footsteps of Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland, and Barbara Streisand.

Meanwhile, her pop career continues with her most perfunctory release yet, "Perfect Illusion." Talking about the song's message, Gaga frets about the delusion and deceit she once celebrated: "I believe many of us are wondering why there are so many fake things around us. How do we navigate through social media? How do we look through these images that we know are filtered and altered, and decipher what is reality and what is a perfect illusion? There are also a lot of things on the internet that are not reality. And I think people are pressured to keep that personal illusion going on in their real lives. So this song is about raging against it and letting it go. It's about wanting people to re-establish that human connection."

In this spirit, Gaga shuns AutoTune on her vocal, while the overall look of the video dials down the blatant motion-retouching and digital sheen that characterized her earlier celebrated promos. Instead of the 20 costume-changes-per-minute, Gaga opts for a relatively stable and dressed-down look: a grey crop T-shirt ideal for working out, cut-off jean shorts. The video's backdrops alternate between the singer rolling about in the desert dust and scenes of crowd frenzy midway between a rave and a mosh-pit, in the midst of which Gaga flails her body alongside a guitarist whose instrument is barely audible on the record. Is the hyper-real queen of digi-glam trying to start a... grunge revival? But how would that square with starring in A Star Is Born ? Does Gaga, like Courtney Love circa Celebrity Skin and The People Vs Larry Flynt , believe she can go Hollywood and keep it real at the same time?

We all know about those parts of town. The ones where some buildings haven't seen a new paint job in years, where the city council seems to perpetually never have enough resources to spend. As swathes of Britain's cities are knocked down, dragged away by diggers and replaced with those flats with little glass-fronted balconies, we're quietly losing some of those slightly decrepit-looking areas. Our cities are turning into more of an architectural hodgepodge, where skyscrapers gleam next to crumbling edifices.

Then, you have somewhere like Bristol's East Street, a pedestrianised stretch of shops and benches and the types of people your uncle dubs "eccentric". Photographer Ibolya Feher started documenting the area five years ago. "I often find streets in Bristol rather boring," she says, "all people rushing up and down without much happening. East Street is different, perhaps because it is pedestrianised – people move at a slower pace and tend to 'linger' more. In other parts of Bristol I often find that people are visibly disturbed by cameras, but here in Bedminster they often ask to have their picture taken. They come up to you and are happy to chat."

That's just as well, since the photos she shot may not have worked out otherwise. Ibolya, who started her East Street Tales series as a student project, ended up building relationships with the people who spend their days out on the street. It wasn't all lovey-dovey, community blog sweetness. "There can be shouting, upset people. Poverty is prevalent and is not always pretty. But that's not what should define the area, or be seen as its only facet, there is a lot more to it; I've witnessed kindness, a lot of humour and beauty."

In the ten years or so that she's lived in Bristol, Ibolya's come to know the stories behind the faces she recognised in Bedminster. "I remember when I first photographed Devonn with his chickens , an elderly man who'd peacock his way down the street. "He loves dressing up, particularly in military uniforms. Depending on the weather and his mood he's either a sailor, captain, sheriff or Russian soldier. He used to be a model and I think he loves the attention he gets from people." There was Iris, too, "an elderly lady who always wears a nice hat and is beautifully made up". She hasn't seen her for a while though. "I think she's now been re-housed and isn't in the area anymore – I miss her a lot."

Iris isn't the only one who may have moved on. East Street, and the general Bedminster area, are due to undergo a major regeneration effort over the next couple of years, in a multi-million pound effort announced in 2014. As ever with Britain's evolving cities, its landscape and character will start to transform.

Hundreds of luxury flats are planned to be built," Ibolya says, "which will bring a lot of new people and businesses into the area. How these changes will unfold and the impact of these changes on the local residents is something I will keep documenting."

@tnm___ / @eaststreettales

East Street Tales will be exhibited along East Street in Bristol, from the 8th to the 22nd of October, with an opening celebration on the 8th of October from 3PM to 5PM, next to Asda, East Street at the iron gate. Postcode: BS3 4JY

Please don't die, coffee. Photo via Flickr user CIAT

You probably don't want to think about a world without coffee. Even if you're not a three-cups-a-day pour-over fetishist, it's fairly easy to imagine this scenario could end with Mad Max-style road wars. Just the thought of losing it is enough to spark a hoarding instinct.

Apparently climate change could make this post-apocalyptic, caffeine-free wasteland a reality. A recent Climate Institute study found that a global temperature change by 2 to 5 degrees Celsius will create rainfall patterns and rising temperatures that could knock out half of the area suitable for coffee production by 2050. Wild coffee could be extinct by 2080. The bean could suffer the fate of the banana.

Of course there are also economic consequences. A plant that helped cultivate imperial trade routes could once again change the shape of the world economy. In Canada, over 170,000 jobs relate to coffee, from roaster to barista. In the US it's over 1.6 million. The National Coffee Association in the US estimates economic impact of coffee to be $225.2 billion. 7.75 million 60 kilo bags were exported globally in July alone.

Since it's impossible to unknow this extinction possibility, we reached out to some experts to figure out what might happen if coffee disappeared tomorrow.

Augustine Sedgewick, a historian in American Studies at Harvard University who has written extensively on the coffee trade. Mark Pendergrast, author of Beyond Fair Trade and Uncommon Grounds: The history of coffee and how it changed the world. Peter Giuliano, senior director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America.

VICE: What happens if coffee disappears tomorrow?
Augustine Sedgewick: I would buy stock in Monster energy drinks. Something would fill that space. If we can synthesize hamburger at this point I would assume we can synthesize coffee.

Mark Pendergrast: You would have a lot of people having withdrawal symptoms. A lot of people would have headaches and be grumpy. Some people have even been known to throw up. Thankfully it would only last a few days... People might turn to soft drinks, and then they'd be drinking a lot more sugar.

After we get over our raging coffee hangovers, a lot of us would be out of work. What happens to every writer, actor, and student employed at their local coffee shop?
Sedgewick: They start to work at the local coffee-flavoured Red Bull dispenser. But the number of people employed in the coffee industry can vary, from landowners, or those working on plantations. If there are 150 million people reliant for everyday livelihood, probably there will be about 149 million who will be really happy to not have to go to work tomorrow. Because a lot of the jobs that exist in that sector are really tough jobs and that includes producing and serving coffee.

Peter Giuliano: A coffee shop or a small coffee roaster is one of the really positive, and accessible small businesses people can start with not a huge amount of investment. I used to have a coffee roasting company. A lot of our customers were in small towns that had lost their industry, in North Carolina or Virginia. Someone would take their savings and open a coffee shop in the community and it provides a gathering place. It's part of the signs of a neighbourhood that is thriving is the existence of a coffee shop. And we tend to think of the big businesses, but there are over 2,000 roasters and 4,000 small coffee shops around the US.

North America is only one end of the global trade. What happens on the growing end?
Sedgewick: The problem with putting coffee at the centre of a national development strategy is that coffee is grown in many places around the world in the global tropical belt. The fact of its widespread cultivation very often means that in the coffee sector there is a race to the bottom in terms of price. When you're talking about plantation cultivation you're talking about people working on plantations because they have no other way to eat. And so when big cash crops go away or crash in price then you're talking immediately about hunger and starvation.

On the other hand ... despite some economic dislocation, I'm not sure that the economic connections and the livelihoods derived from coffee are more advantageous than disadvantageous. If coffee went away in places where it's now a dominant cash crop would it be a net loss or a net gain for that society? I don't think it's obvious it would be a net loss. There would be costs of that loss, but would there also be benefits I think yes.

But coffee is also the primary way that people think of doing good in the world economy. It was the first fair trade product. The first formal set of fair trade standards were centred on coffee. And coffee is by far the most common fair trade product. Coffee is the centre of those conversations such as they are at the moment. To lose them would be a loss.

Coffee shops are often a sign of a thriving or gentrifying neighbourhood. What happens to our urban social space after coffee?
Sedgewick: It's an interesting question because what are cities now? They're basically coffee shops and banks. Starbucks is the public washroom. It's become public space not just for people who live outdoors, but it's the place where people go to think in public. There's surely some emotional attachment that people have to those spaces that prepare this thing that is more or less the same everywhere you go. You have to think that if coffee went away that emotional attachment would take new form.

Giuliano: We've lost some of the opportunities to interact with people over time, but the coffee shop is a good location for that interaction. Coffee shops are spaces that different cultures can all go. There are restrictive spaces, a high end mall, or a punk club, but coffee shops include larger groups of people than most and so it becomes the default setting for community. If you go to Ethiopia where coffee was started the community comes together around coffee. We still do it, we share information over coffee. There are similar rituals rules around tea and mate in South America. It's no coincidence that all have some version of caffeine in them.

I asked an expert in neuroscience who studies the interaction of chemicals on the brain. He said caffeine gets the brain working faster by getting the different parts of the brain to connect more quickly. But another group of chemicals called flavonoids have been shown to reduce social anxiety. So potentially at the same time we're getting smarter, we're also more likely to interact with other people. It's like a one two punch of intelligence.

Could anything replace that function in society? There's not an obvious one because coffee behaves quite differently. Tea doesn't have that sense of energy that coffee does.

Like any crop, coffee has an effect on its environment. What happens if it disappears?
Pendergrast: Not much grows where good coffee grows—between 3,000 and 6,000 feet above sea level in semi-tropical areas where the temperature never freezes. They would probably start growing more cocoa leaf, which grows at about the same altitude as coffee. That may have a negative impact on people and the drug trade.

Giuliano: Almost every answer is ecologically worse than coffee. The easiest one is cattle raising. And cattle raising is terrible on erosion, it requires cutting down the forest, whereas coffee can be grown within indigenous forest.

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It's easy to understand why people aspire to make a living playing or composing music. All it takes is Justin Bieber and his mom realizing that he was just as good a singer as most American Idol contestants, and boom, there's the inspiration for a career as a pop star.

But what about the thousands of people who work in music-related jobs that don't involve performance? Did they see roadies lugging heavy drum kits or a music blogger writing listicles for minimum wage, and think, That's all I've ever wanted?

As David Herman's character once pointed out in Office Space, it's bullshit to assume that people invariably seek out the jobs they'd enjoy most because if that were true, "there would be no janitors." Jobs in the music industry definitely have their perks, but they often lack the glamor of those on stage. Even still, people aspire to be managers and engineers from a young age, and break their backs to get there.

For me, it was a case of discovering something that I both enjoyed and excelled at. While applying to New York University, my long-shot school, I found an essay prompt that asked me to write about a piece of art that inspired me. So I ran with it. I had never had the opportunity to write about such modern, historically irrelevant artifacts as the Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Unlike the rest of my college application process, it was fun. After reading it, I still remember my dad saying, "If you get in, it's not because of your grades. It's because of this." Today, I consider myself a music journalist, which was the end goal of my years at NYU.

Three years in, I'm just a sapling in this world of doing-music-related-jobs-but-not-playing-music. To better understand where this vast workforce comes from, as well as reinforce my own sanity, I reached out to five veterans whose resumés spread across various sectors of "the industry": an audio engineer, a tour manager, a producer, a roadie, and a music critic.

All of them are over 60 and have spent the majority of their adult lives recording, overseeing, organizing, or commenting upon popular music. Some started off as musicians, some were inspired by tour documentaries, some by sexist bosses. As told to me via phone and email, here are their music industry origin stories.

The following has been edited for clarity and legnth.

Susan Rogers, former audio engineer for Prince; Professor at Berklee College of Music

Like a lot of kids, I had parents who wanted me to take music lessons. I took a couple of years of piano lessons, but I was not good at it. It was nothing compared to the reward that came from listening to records. Like a lot of engineers, I was born to be a music-listener, not a music-maker.

I loved James Brown, Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, and Al Green, and I've pondered where these innate preferences come from. I worked for Prince for many years, and he used to refer to it as "the street that you live on," and that just means the music that calls to you. As a little kid, soul music made me go, Yeah, that's right. That works for me!

Whenever I had an album that had a picture of the studio on the back, I would just stare at that. I didn't imagine myself as a player. I would stare at the engineer, and not knowing anything about engineers, something inside me thought, That'd be good, I think I'd like that.

At 21, I moved to Hollywood with a friend and tried to get in the business, but there weren't that many women who were engineers. So I found a circuitous route. I became an audio maintenance tech, self-taught in audio processing and electronics. I learned to read schematics. I got a job as a trainee with a company. And I learned to repair consoles and tape machines. That led me to my big break.

In the Summer of 1983, I heard that Prince was seeking a technician. An ex-boyfriend found out about the job and called me up saying, "Your dream job is waiting for you. How would you like to be Prince's audio engineer?" It literally was the biggest dream of my life, I couldn't have asked for anything better. So I went to his management, and they interviewed me, and they hired me. I was well-qualified, I'd been in the business five years at this point, had been trained by highly respected people, and the most important factor: Prince and I listened to the same music growing up. I knew Sylvester, and I knew The Gap Band, and I knew all the members of Parliament-Funkadelic. I lived on his street.

David Libert, former tour manager for Alice Cooper; former manager for Parliament-Funkadelic, The Runaways, Living Colour

I used to hang out with some guys in my hometown of Patterson, New Jersey, and sing in the parking lot of a restaurant, basically because it seemed like a good way to meet girls. But we soon realized that we were pretty good at it, so we started to take it seriously and formed a band called The Happenings. That's when I realized, Let's give it a shot.

Patterson is very close to New York City, so I would go into New York to the Brill Building, and all of those places on Broadway looking for work. If it was a publisher, I was a writer; if it was in a production company, I was in a band; if it was a record company, I was in a band—you know, whatever it had to be. We were able to nail down a record contract, and so that's how I professionally got into the music business.

I became The Happenings' manager after we got rid of a manager who was a mess, and I realized that there was a far more retentive quality in being a manager than in being a Happening. I realized I could do this, and just learn as much as I could, and do as much as I could to get experience under my belt. It wasn't like a lightbulb went off in my mind, I just sort of morphed into that, and it happened to pay off.

When I left the band, I did some local stuff, booking bands in clubs on Long Island, then I became Rare Earth's tour manager, and then I became Alice Cooper's tour manager under the tutelage of Cooper's manager Shep Gordon, and I learned a lot. It gave me the education I would need to open up my own agency and represent Parliament-Funkadelic, Bootsy's Rubber Band, The Runaways, and several other acts, and then become a manager for George Clinton, Vanilla Fudge, Living Colour, and Sheila E. after that.

I don't know many other musicians who went on to manage, for some reason. I think most of them found their way to record companies, which was more closely related to the creative aspect of the industry. But I still got creative opportunities—I sang in the background of many Alice Cooper tracks and played piano or keyboards on some recordings. I never left music completely, but it didn't become my primary source of income, that's for sure.

Gail Davies, singer; songwriter; producer

I knew at an early age that I wanted to be a singer. I was born into a musical family and never had any other aspirations. It was always a given that I would make my living as a singer and later in my life as a songwriter.

After graduating high school, I moved to Los Angeles and eventually went to work at A&M Records as a session singer. Beyond that, A&M became my music school. Once I was invited to sit in on a John Lennon recording session, and sitting at the board between him and Phil Spector was one of the most exciting things that happened to me at that job. Inspired, I decided to get involved with music beyond just singing.

I was trained as a record producer by Henry Lewy at A&M, who just pulled me aside one day and said, "You know, Gail, you've got great ears. I think you could be a producer." I started writing songs, bought a guitar at a pawn shop, and eventually signed a publishing deal with EMI.

A few years later, I moved to Nashville and made my first solo record, but I had a very bad experience with the guy who produced it. During a recording session with my band, he told me, "I don't know that these guys want a woman telling them what to do." You know, it was Nashville, 1977. I decided I would never work with another producer, and I never have.

There weren't any female producers at the time I arrived in Nashville, and it was very discouraging. I was able to watch people like Carole King and Joni Mitchell producing their own music, so when I moved to Nashville, it was a bit daunting to see how few women were involved in the creative side of the business.

Jan Michael Alejandro, former road crew for David Bowie, Jackson Browne, Todd Rundgren, Blondie; owner of Jan-Al Road & Touring Cases

What really made me want to go on the road was seeing Mad Dogs & Englishmen in a Palm Springs drive-in when I was in high school. Joe Cocker, Leon Russell, and all of them were going from place to place in an old turbo prop tour plane, and I was like, OK... I think I want to do that. That would have to be the time that I first realized that I wanted to join the circus.

A year or two later I made my way to San Francisco and got a job as a night janitor at a rehearsal studio. Eventually, I was able to work as a driver. I ended up driving, then dispatching, then running the studios.

The clients were people I used to listen to— Tower of Power, The Doobie Brothers, Santana, Country Joe & The Fish— so of course I loved that. I just learned as much as I could, and I already played piano, so I knew a bunch about music. One day, the guy that hired me goes, "You know, you have a lot of skills. You should learn a whole bunch more and tell some of these people coming through that you'd like to go on the road."

I eventually moved back to LA, and was pretty much out of work when I got a call from David Bowie's people, these were guys who taught me a few things back in the studio before they started working for Bowie. They remembered me, and they asked if I wanted to meet them in Toronto and work for Iggy Pop, who was on tour with Bowie, playing piano for him. So went I went to Toronto, met them, and started from there. I worked for David for three years, did the Heroes tour, and I got all of these great gigs afterward—Todd Rundgren, Jackson Browne, Blondie.

After that, my wife and I started a touring case company, and it's still going 34 years later. Right now, we're doing work for the Stones, Lady Gaga, and Coldplay. I still get the calls, which is nice.

Joel Selvin, San Francisco Chronicle music columnist 1972-2009; author

I dropped out of Berkeley High School and went to work as a copy boy for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1967. Very shortly after starting work there, I discovered that I could get on the guest list at the Fillmore Auditorium by virtue of my employment at the newspaper. That's when I decided to go into the music business.

Music was all I knew about, all I wanted to write about. I had no interest in talking to cops, or people whose families were just murdered, or sports, or finance. No, I envisioned myself writing about rock bands for a daily newspaper.

Then there was the final nail in the coffin. I went to university and I started working for the college newspaper, and that's when the free records started arriving in the mail. Then I was done. At that young age, I had pretty much achieved all of my professional aspirations, and it was just a matter of playing out the cards to see what happened next. But free shows and free records—what more did I want? Those were like shots of morphine to the gut. A little dough, too? Hey.

It wasn't all perks, but there wasn't much work involved. The hard part was when you had to go to a show you knew you weren't going to like, and also staying reasonably un-hungover enough to perform some literary composition the following morning. That was what passed for hard work.

Did I ever think of being in a band or being in the industry? Oh good god, no. I was doing exactly what I wanted—going to the concerts, hanging around with a pad and pencil, and being the guy that wrote the smart-ass review in the paper the next day.

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Nova Scotia's Eskasoni Nation is delivering truckloads of water to Potlotek reserve. Still from 'Waterless Communities: Shoal Lake 40.'

A group of government officials and engineers will be in Potlotek First Nation on Tuesday to deal with an ongoing water crisis—thick, black liquid coming out of taps that residents in the tiny Cape Breton community suspect is making them sick.

"I showered with dirt or metal or rust or whatever it was this morning," Patricia Paul, who joined about 40 other people in protest at the reserve's community centre on Tuesday told CBC. She was in the middle of a shower when her water changed colour. "I still have shampoo in my hair."

"It's black," community member Bernadette Marie Marshall told VICE News, explaining that for about 20 years, tap water in Potlotek, with an on-reserve population of about 550 people, has been changing colours several times a year for two or three weeks at a time. "Some parts are real dark brown."

"We have had this problem for years, but it's continuously getting worse," she said, adding that she suspects the water is causing health issues among residents, like stomach problems and rashes.

According to Health Canada, the water, which contains high levels of manganese and iron, isn't unsafe, but the minerals do contribute to the discolouration and make it "aesthetically unsuitable for drinking." It can still be used for bathing, showering, and flushing toilets though.

While there's no boil water advisory on the reserve, residents like Paul say the discoloured, foul-smelling liquid is unfit for consumption. Paul has been sponge-bathing her children and using bottled water to brush their teeth.

On Wednesday, Potlotek's chief and council sent out a memo advising residents not to drink, cook, wash the dishes or ingest the water in any way.

At a meeting on Wednesday between federal officials, the Atlantic Policy Council of First Nations Chiefs, and Potlotek's council, it was decided INAC would work with the Nova Scotia Emergency Measures Organization to find places for community members to do their laundry and shower, increase the amount of drinking water, and arrange the delivery of bulk drinking water for bathing, dishes, and light laundry. Portable showers arrived Friday, allowing some residents to shower for the first time in several days.

Meanwhile, First Nations communities, like Eskasoni First Nation, from across the Maritimes have stepped up to help, delivering truckloads of water to the reserve.

Marshall demanded that the government do an environmental study of the water.

"We want it fixed now," she said.

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Check out Line Hoj Hostrup's Tumblr.

Seventeen-year-old Mohammed, who fled Syria alone, takes part in a swimming lesson organised by volunteers from Proem-Aid (All photos courtesy of Gordon Welters/UNHCR)

Three boys stand on the beach, the wind whipping around their heads, facing each other in stony silence. A Mexican standoff. One of them starts crying. The other two have rubber rings, and he doesn't. He's not happy.

About 20 other children are screaming, running in and out of the sea, laughing and singing. It's hard to believe that, just a few months ago, these kids would have been being hoisted out of the same water by aid workers, having made the dangerous journey from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesvos by boat. The children, and a handful of adults, are being taught to swim by volunteers. And, apart from the child without the rubber ring, they all look joyful.

But the reminders of the journey they've been through are constant. One young Pakistani guy flings a clear, A5-sized plastic wallet at me, asking if I will look after it for him. He had been wearing it on a string around his neck, but he can't take it into the water. I nod and he runs into the sea. Inside the wallet are his identity papers, a bank card and a few phone numbers written in biro on lined paper. I basically hold his entire official existence in my hands.

Panagiotis Koulakos, a 20-year-old fireman and lifeguard with volunteer group Lifeguard Hellas, travels from Athens to Lesvos every week to teach the kids to swim. It's a big commitment, "but we have to do it", he says. The swimming lessons have roughly one teacher for every two children, and they encourage the kids to get into the water by splashing and bobbing up and down in the waves. Most children are desperate to get in, and have been impatiently waiting in the refugee camp for up to an hour – swimming costumes and all – so they can go and play in the sea.

It wasn't like this when Panagiotis started teaching the lessons three months ago. "At first, they were afraid of the water and they didn't know who we were," he says. "The first day they were very suspicious of us and wouldn't get in the water. Many of them were sitting on the beach and crying. They didn't even want to step in the water. But now they see us and they start yelling. And there were many kids, who I can't really call kids, they were like 18 years old, who didn't even know how to swim. In the first few days they learned how to float, and then they learned to swim by themselves. It was amazing." Now when the volunteers pitch up at the refugee camps, they can barely get the flotation devices out of the van before the kids mob them.

Manuel Blanco, another lifeguard volunteer with Spanish organisation Proem Aid says the swimming lessons were also designed to take children out of the tedious refugee camp routine. "Keep in mind that most of them had never seen the sea until the day they made the crossing from Turkey to Lesvos. Many of them were scared, because they first saw the sea at night, in the cold darkness. With classes we've managed to stop them being so afraid. We are changing that darkness with fun, games and light."

Refugees have been coming to Lesvos from Asia Minor for generations, but by the time migrants that started arriving in bigger numbers in late 2014, the island was woefully unprepared. Lesvos had only two working ambulances to serve its 86,000 residents. Years of government cuts and shaky employment across Lesvos and Greece itself have meant that the local response got off on the wrong foot and then hopped along on the wrong foot until August 2015.

Local hospital workers and coastguards became hugely overstretched, meaning that volunteers – who started to stream in from across the world last summer – and a bolstered NGO presence were crucial. As awareness of the crisis rose, so did the international response. "More than 850,000 refugees arrived in Greece during the course of 2015," says Roland Schönbauer, UNHCR spokesperson in Greece. "With ordinary services overwhelmed, support from local communities and volunteers was vital."

Despite the volunteer effort, many refugees find themselves at a dead end. Lots of those who arrived last summer have reached their European destinations, but people who arrived more recently find themselves in asylum limbo. Borders are closed and many people who are waiting for their asylum applications to be processed are stuck in Moria camp, a repurposed prison that refugees describe not as limbo but as hell. In mid-September, Moria was set alight after protests by asylum seekers who were stuck in the camp and feared they were about to be deported to Turkey. Some 4,000 people were evacuated.

The kids I watch being taught to swim are residents of PIKPA, a camp for vulnerable refugees set up by a psychologist. PIKPA's set in a former holiday camp, and kids have access to a small playground, regular meals and a steady stream of volunteers. But the fact is that they are still stuck. Refugees I speak to at PIKPA speak openly about the psychological trauma they endure. One Syrian woman tells of how she found the body of a person killed in an airstrike – "it was like mincemeat". She sees it in her sleep.

Mainly, the negative connotations of water crossings are what make the lessons here so important. Epilepsy, intellectual and developmental disorders and severe emotional disorders are the most common among children, according to a 2015 report I was shown by the International Medical Corps. PIKPA is a great example of mental health being prioritised, but it is a small camp and far from the normal refugee experience.

Volunteer Sarah gets stuck in, helping a young girl ease into the water

"Previous trauma – or survival of incidents at sea – mean that high numbers of refugees, both adults and children, face mental health problems, such as post-traumatic stress disorder," UNHCR's Schönbauer says. "Although mental health and psychosocial support activities have been implemented in most camps, there are still sites where these services are not offered."

The international response to the refugee crisis has been somewhat lacking, but the volunteer enthusiasm has provided a contrast. "We have many teams - we have many people from all over the world who come, we had some from Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the USA," Panagiotis says. The groups of young volunteers also, crucially, know how to make it a bit of fun for the kids. "The easiest way to teach them how to swim is not with pure teaching. They're kids, they want to play."

@helennianias

More on VICE:

The Way We Talk About the 'Refugee Crisis' Robs People of Their Humanity

We Asked Some Refugees for the Stories Behind Their Phone Backgrounds

Tourists Are Avoiding Lesvos Because of the Refugee Crisis

All photos by Antonio Faccilongo

Our TV channel VICELAND recently explored the underground network of tunnels that connects the Gaza Strip to Israel and Egypt, allowing soldiers and goods to covertly pass into Palestinian territory. But the clandestine paths also promote the importation of illegal narcotics, including Tramadol, a synthetic opiate that's been wreaking havoc on the war-torn state for much of the last decade.

Following the December 2008 Gaza War, also known as Operation Cast Lead, a United Nations survey of Gaza residents found a surge in risky behavior throughout the area, including a significant bump in drug addiction. The primary substance associated with the addiction surge is Tramadol, an analgesic not entirely unlike codeine or morphine, with a high potential for abuse. Even before that conflict, roughly 30 percent of men aged 14 to 30 were estimated to be using the painkiller, with approximately 15,000 Palestinians demonstrating signs of dependence.

Over the past couple of years, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's forces have attempted to close the Rafah tunnels, but that'a simply driven Tramadol's price up. "...Even the high price doesn't stop hundreds of thousands of Gaza residents from using Tramadol," a local pharmacist told Al-Monitor in August."The fact is that Tramadol can still be obtained in Gaza. It is readily available to anyone who asks."

While Palestine's Anti-Drug Task Force has confiscated millions of pills over the past several years, substance abuse doesn't appear to be subsiding. According to Al-Monitor, there are even rumors that chemistry students at the Islamic University have been producing and distributing imitation Tramadol that sells at a lower rate.

Photographer Antonio Faccilongo visited Gaza in summer 2015 to document the repercussions and consequences of war. But he quickly became focused on the isolation and hardship that has many residents looking for a way out, honing in on Tramadol. His work imposes a socio-anthropological lens to explore escapism and suffering in the face of social malaise. See photos from Faccilongo's stay in Gaza below, and visit his website to view more of his photo work.

On the 29th of August, Arek Jozwik was eating a pizza in The Stow shopping arcade in Harlow, Essex, when he was set upon by a group of young locals. He died from a single punch, causing him to fall to the ground and bang his head. His attack is being investigated as a possible hate crime. In one way, this wasn't an isolated incident: last year, the Harlow district was reported as the site of a hate crime almost every two days from 2013 to 2014, with central Europeans as most victims. Hours after the vigil to commemorate Arek's death, two more Polish men were attacked. So is Harlow really such a hub for xenophobia? And if so, why?

You'd have to look back a bit to try and find out. In 1992, Harlow was the birthplace of Combat 18, Britain's best-known far-right terrorist group. Five years later, it was the site of a murder stemming from in-fighting within the group. According to Nick Ryan, who spent time with the group while working as a journalist and now runs communications for anti-racist charity Hope Not Hate, the incident related to an ideological split within the group, with one faction wanting to take the organisation in a more extreme direction.

The town continued to harbour some far-right roots in the years to come. In 2010, a Muslim Research Centre report from the University of Exeter described it as having a "strong extremist nationalist presence that adds to the sense of siege for the small Muslim community". The report noted that a mosque had all its windows smashed even though they'd been reinforced and were protected by a metal cage. Three years later, the mosque was set ablaze.

At a glance, there'd seem to be a combination of neo-Nazi sentiment and a sustained flow of racially motivated incidents at play in the town. But racism and xenophobia are two different things. Until recently, those with more melanin in their skin might have been more visible targets, but assaults on Polish people add another dimension to the story. I wanted to know what had changed, so headed to Harlow on the day of Arek's public funeral ceremony to see what I could glean.

When Harlow first came into being in the 1960s, it seemed destined for great things. It was a new town used to re-house London's urban poor, with exciting, experimental new building designs, and a myriad of green spaces. We were met with a "welcome to Harlow," shouted by a passersby who noticed our photographer taking pictures.

On the way to the crematorium, I asked our cab driver what he thought of the murder, and was surprised to hear he didn't think that it was motivated by prejudice. He told us that he lived in a block of flats overlooking the street where it happened, and that groups of youths would congregate there each night, starting fights because they had nothing better to do. "I don't think it was anything to do with racism. No way," he said. I was curious to see if the Polish community shared his views. Perhaps the racism in Harlow had died down, and the main problem was now one of general crime and disorder.

The service was well-attended, with both Polish and English people paying their respects. "Don't forget Arek," said his friend Eric Hind, in a speech. "He never wanted to make anyone cry, he wanted to make everyone happy." Prayers were said in Polish, and the clergyman assured Arek's friends and family that he was in a better place.

Afterwards, Eric said he felt the murder was definitely a hate crime. He believed that although there was anti-Polish sentiment in Harlow prior to the Brexit, after the results were announced, people felt emboldened to express it more. I also spoke to Mira Gustmajdzimski, who's been the victim of a hate crime herself. She successfully pressed charges against a former neighbour for racial harassment. "Brexit's opened everything up, and now there's more hate," she said.

Next, I spoke to a lady called Lorraine, pictured above, who told me she felt there was a big problem with xenophobia in Harlow. She didn't think it was anything to do with Brexit; she thought it was a long-standing issue. Others thought the Brexit had stirred up resentment. "Brexit's fired it all up, with people thinking they're taking their jobs, they're taking their houses," said James, sat on a bench in the town centre. He was disgusted by what had happened, and linked it both to xenophobia and uncontrollable kids.

A Nigerian immigrant who gave his name as "D" told me that the focus had shifted away from racism against black people, towards targeting Eastern Europeans. "When I first came to England, it was 'black cunt, fucking nigger', but now they've moved on to the Polish," he said.

There's no simple explanation for Arek's tragic death. One day in any town could never help you form a complete picture of it, and that's clear here. While Harlow was once home to far-right groups, that can't be connected in a direct line to what happened at the end of August. Instead, you find a town – like many others – that's grappling with underfunding and a shortage of jobs. Incidents explode from time to time, but once the national press has left again, there's no easy headline to write that sums Harlow up. Sadly, its become a place where a trip to the pizza place cost one man his life.

@nickchesterv / @SamTahmassebi

More on VICE:

When and Why the UK Gets Loud About Its Racism

What We Can Learn from the Lasting Rise in Post-Brexit Hate Crimes

The Quiet Beauty of Britain's New Towns

A campaign sign for Dennis Peron, a groundbreaking medical marijuana activist. Photo courtesy J. Tony Serra

From 1994 to 1998, Dennis Peron ran one of San Francisco's most successful marijuana businesses, openly flouting federal and state law by providing the drug to anyone who walked through the door of his Cannabis Buyer's Club (CBC), with one catch: you had to be sick or disabled to get in.

Modeled after buyer's clubs for AIDS patients, which gave those suffering from the disease access to non-FDA approved drugs that could help manage the illness, Peron created the CBC as a safe place for AIDS patients to buy and smoke marijuana. Over time, he expanded its clientele to people with disabilities, the terminally ill and the elderly.

Peron was inspired to open his CBC after a raid on his home in 1990. A known marijuana dealer and activist, police busted in with a warrant after receiving a tip that he was selling. They confiscated 4 ounces of marijuana and charged Peron with intent to distribute. But the bud wasn't Peron's—it was his lover's, Jonathan West.

"Now I've sold marijuana in my life- lots of it," Peron wrote in his self-published memoir, How A Gay Hippy Outlaw Legalized Marijuana in Response to the AIDS Crisis. "But I was not selling it that night."

West was in the late stages of AIDS, and marijuana helped him combat the nausea and loss of appetite he experienced as common side effects of the dozen-plus drugs prescribed to him. West passed away two weeks after the raid.

"In my pain, I decided to leave Jonathan a legacy of love," Peron told the LA Times in 1996. "I made it my moral pursuit to let everyone know about Jonathan's life, his death, and his use of marijuana and how it gave him dignity in his final days."

West wasn't the only AIDS patient using marijuana to ease pain and nausea. A 1990 Washington Post article reported on an "underground network of AIDS patients passing the word about the drug's medicinal benefits." And the story of how marijuana came to become the medically celebrated and largely decriminalized drug it is in America today is inextricably tied up in the struggle of early AIDS patients and those who fought for their right to use it.

The story of the medical marijuana movement begins with Bob C. Randall, who, years earlier, became the country's first legal medical marijuana patient. Busted for growing pot on his Washington, DC sun porch, a 1976 court case ruled in favor of his then-novel defense that smoking marijuana was a medical necessity, claiming it was the only drug that kept his degenerative glaucoma from rendering him completely blind.

In response, the federal government created the Compassionate IND (Investigational New Drug) program, permitting Randall and 14 other patients with debilitating diseases to smoke government-provided marijuana. In the process, Randall and his wife, Alice O'Leary, began advocating for marijuana legalization on medical grounds, essentially founding the medical marijuana movement as it's known today.

In 1990, after a Florida court ruled HIV positive couple Ken and Barbara Jenks' possession of marijuana was a medical necessity, the Jenks became the first AIDS patients admitted to the Compassionate IND program. The news brought the IND program and the medical potential of marijuana to national attention.

"Before the AIDS crisis, things had been very quiet for the medical marijuana movement, " said Drug Policy Alliance Director Ethan Nadelmann.

O'Leary and Randall began actively encouraging AIDS patients to apply for the IND Program. Randall founded the Marijuana AIDS Research Service, which helped people with the disease apply, and handed out AIDS-specific application forms at a National AIDS conference in 1991. As a result, the previously obscure IND program received hundreds of applications and accepted at least 28 new patients, according to the book Harm Reduction: National and International Perspectives. Directly after the increased demand, the program was quietly disbanded in March 1992, effectively shutting down the only legal route to medical marijuana.

Back in San Francisco, Peron had been recruiting marijuana, AIDS and gay activists in the fight for medical marijuana. In 1991, he ran a Vote Yes campaign for Proposition P—an ordinance allowing patients to use medical marijuana within city limits. It won in a landslide 4-to-1 vote.

"We were really shocked at how strong our support was," said Dale Gieringer, director of the California chapter of the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws, who worked with Peron on the Prop P campaign. "It was the middle of the drug wars. We thought we would slide by."

"I knew a lot of cancer patients who secretly used marijuana," said Chris Conrad, a cannabis and hemp lobbyist. "But the doctors, nurses, patients—they all kept it a secret. It wasn't until the HIV/AIDS community came along" that the drug's medical usefulness became well-known, he said. "They knew the government was out to get them anyway. The government wasn't helping them at all. So they told everyone."

In 1996, Conrad was asked to help the Proposition 215 campaign, a Peron-authored initiative which would allow patients throughout the state of California to use marijuana for medical purposes. He signed on without hesitation.

By the time the campaign was in full swing, Peron had been openly operating the CBC for two years. TV crews such as Univision and CBS had aired full news segments featuring the CBC's medical marijuana patients and their stories.

"It was really ingenious," Gieringer said. "He ran a little media center out of the place."

A menu from the CBC. Photo courtesy J. Tony Serra

But state narcotics agents had been building a case against Peron all the while, and on Sunday, August 5th 1996, the CBC was raided.

The move backfired. San Francisco city officials publicly criticized the raid, with then-Mayor Willie Brown likening it to "gestapo" tactics in the New York Times. Nationally-syndicated newspaper comic Doonesbury lampooned the raid for targeting the infirm. Despite California Attorney General Daniel Lungren's insistence that the CBC was a front to sell marijuana to the general public, the public only saw the state coming down hard on the sick and disabled.

While the raid gave Peron and medical marijuana much-needed national attention, the Prop 215 campaign received an influx of cash from left-leaning billionaire George Soros. National drug policy critic Nathan Edelmann was able to hire professional organizers, giving the campaign a last minute push to obtain the remaining signatures necessary to make Prop 215 a ballot referendum in California's 1996 election.

With the extra money, organization and publicity, Prop 215 passed with 56 percent of the vote. Carefully worded to not impose on federal law, California's Compassionate Use Act gave state residents an affirmative defense to possess and cultivate marijuana for medical use.

Today, twenty years later, 25 states have legal marijuana programs. Patients who enjoy the drug's medical benefits today have the work of Dennis Peron, Bob Randall, Alice O'Leary and the AIDS patients who fought to see a life-changing medicine be made legal to thank.

Follow Julia Alsop on Twitter.

Daigo Umehara. All photography by the author.

Somewhere at the back of the Birmingham NEC, a stage, a hundred chairs and a row of PS4s take up a comparatively modest amount of space on EGX 2016's show floor. A Street Fighter V tournament, part of Capcom's official Pro Tour, is nearing its conclusion and Daigo Umehara, arguably the world's most famous Street Fighter player, has just been eliminated.

I watch as he dutifully signs t-shirts and game boxes, posing for selfies and receiving compliments with a gentle, deferential demeanour. It makes me chuckle to think he's earned the moniker "The Beast" as I watch him potter bashfully around the stage area, tapping away at Hearthstone on his phone and drifting to and fro with no particular destination in mind. On a number of occasions I nearly send him flying when, as I talk to friends and gesture excitedly about the on-going competition, he scoots past me.

It suddenly hits me how strange this situation is. In the eyes of a fighting game fan like me, Street Fighter is huge. It's the most famous fighting game series in the world, the very definition of a household name, and gathered here are many of the world's top players all milling about in the same hundred square feet of space. But there's no security, no barriers, no PR reps – there's just the players, and the fans.

"Oh look, there's K-Brad," I whisper as he nudges past me to play a few casual games offstage with a fan. Pro Fluke cheers on his UK peers from his position in the middle of the audience, Problem X bounces around excitedly with his mates following a big win against Japanese legend Bonchan, and it's all happening three feet away from me. If a bomb went off in here, I reckon I could make the top eight at EVO next year.

The setup for the show is the nicest I've seen in the UK. London-based Unequalled Media are the hosts, a fighting game event company who have grown from the humble beginnings of plugging in some PS4s in a pub to being given the responsibility of hosting a spot on the Capcom Pro Tour. It's starting to dawn on me just how grassroots everything is about the scene. The players themselves, with the rare exception of players like the Red Bull-sponsored Darryl "Snake Eyez" Lewis, often have to pay their bills with a day job, only making money from Street Fighter if they achieve a winning place in a competition. When you compare this to the top League of Legends players, some of who earn six figures a year before prize money is even factored in, there's a huge gulf in terms of money spent and earned, despite both games being considered premier eSports.

Darryl "Snake Eyez" Lewis

Capcom themselves could be partially to blame. With the release of Street Fighter V, the studio's plan was to entice a swathe of new players in order to grow the series' popularity. There were tweaks to the gameplay to improve accessibility and a huge focus on online play. Unfortunately, the game was released feature incomplete, as well as suffering from a host of lasting online issues. This meant the opportunity to snag a more casual or fighting game curious audience alongside the faithful hardcore was missed and, as a result, the series became more of a niche interest.

Then again, maybe that's what makes Street Fighter so unique in the first place. There's a rawness and a realness to the scene. People play the game and get involved in it for the love of it, not for the money. Then there's the ever-seductive appeal of being in a clique, winking at each other when the in-jokes start rolling in, throwing clandestine terminology around and jumping up and down at a moment which, in the eyes of the uninitiated, looks like nothing. There's a real camaraderie and brotherhood amongst players – especially those from the same part of the world – as well as fierce rivalries between others.

Article continues after the video below

Watch VICE Gaming's short film on the competitive world of 'SMITE'

Let's not forget that the game itself is a masterpiece, a thing of beauty. Each character in the game is a musical instrument; you find the one that suits you best and you practise over and over until you become fluent. Some people play a character in one way, while another approaches them in a completely unrecognisable fashion. It's a concept solidified when you hear members of the audience, in hushed tones, whispering things like, "Did you see Ryan Hart's Guile? It was incredible!" I'm fascinated by different pro players' influences on the same character, and how uniquely they can make that character behave. They are the puppeteers who breathe life into these mannequins, creating mini-stories, playing out tense, 99-second dramas, one round at a time.

These are all quite selfish reasons to enjoy the scene as it is, though, as the truth of the matter is that many Street Fighter players are on the younger side, and are lone wolves who are taken advantage of. This tends to come in the form of half-baked sponsorship, often amounting to little more than a free t-shirt and the permission to associate their brand name with yours. They may have a passion for the scene, and that's great, but it would be beneficial both to the players and to the scene as a whole if they were smarter about getting proper sponsorship and being paid for their time and abilities. After all, they do consider themselves professional video game players.

Ryan Hart

For a photographer, journalist and fan, though, the Street Fighter scene couldn't be more exciting right now. Being able to stroll off the street straight into EGX and into the thick of the fighting game community, or the FGC as it's known, is like a dream. There's nothing like feeling the electricity and excitement first hand, devoid of interruptions, cooped up amongst a congregation of fighting game fanatics, roaring, cheering, reacting, applauding. It's a totally different feeling from sitting countless rows back, peering at a row of dots on a stage. It's more human, more relatable. You can feel the anguish of a semi-final knockout, you share the sting when someone makes an unforced error or drops a combo. You can sense the emotions of the players, feel the swing of momentum, know when someone is on the road to losing and buzz with excitement when there's no way of telling who will come out on top.

To see those same players whose skills you idolise unceremoniously stepping down from the stage, meeting with friends, sitting around eating the same slightly overcooked canteen pizza you just had is exciting and novel. When that blend of unprecedented hype meets the modest size of the community, nothing feels quite as special.

A gallery from the EGX Capcom Pro Tour event continues below.

@garydooton

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Maybe don't? Photo via Flickr user Rafael Castillo

Starting today, October 2, stoned drivers will face the same penalties as drunk drivers in Ontario. Rules now apply across all substances, according to a transportation ministry announcement this week.

On the low end, Ontarians caught driving while high are looking at a $180 ticket and immediate three-day licence suspension. More fines, mandatory education or treatment, criminal charges and jail time are also a possibility.

The trouble is, at least in the case of weed, cops don't yet have a reliable way to measure exactly how much drivers have smoked, or how much it impairs driving judgment. In a statement, OPP police chief Chuck Cox said his officers are "highly trained" in a bunch of acronyms that appear to stand for your classic touch-your-nose-and-say-the-alphabet-backwards roadside test. There's no equivalent to the breathalyzer for alcohol.

Read More: How High Is too High to Drive?

Canadian researchers are still studying what weed does to drivers' response times, attention spans, and ability to judge time and distances while driving. Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health is conducting the world's biggest-ever clinical study using a massive driving simulator VICE tested out earlier this year.

In the meantime, a bunch of weed breathalyzer prototypes seem to be popping up. Cops in California tested one company's model out in the streets, and released results in September. A researcher at UBC says she's developed a $15 option. Engineers at Stanford are testing out saliva swabs, but these have yet to make it onto the wider market.

With weed legalization on the way, cops are preparing for a spike in cannabis-impaired driving. Places like Washington and Colorado, where recreational weed is already legal, have seen increases in fatal crashes with cannabis detected. Whether Canada adopts a legal limit on weed, like Washington's five nanograms of THC per litre of blood, still remains to be seen.

Follow Sarah on Twitter.