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Women protesting Bill Cosby after a series of rape allegations in 2015. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Last week, California governor Jerry Brown signed into law the Justice for Victims Act, which will remove the statue of limitations for sex crimes in the state. The law has been referenced as the "Cosby Bill" by media and lawmakers alike, since only one of more than 50 alleged victims of Cosby's can prosecute in criminal court due to statute of limitations on sex crimes in states like California. (The singular criminal case, brought by Andrea Constand, will take place in Pennsylvania.)

California's new law, which follows in the footsteps of 17 other states, allows for the indefinite prosecution of rape, sodomy, and lewd or lascivious acts by anyone, at any age, at anytime. Previously, California imposed a ten-year statute of limitations on rape and other sex crimes. Senator Connie Leyva, who introduced the bill into the state legislature, said in a statement that it will "offer victims more time to come to terms with the horrible crime committed against them and then build up the courage to possible to find balance in providing justice to victims while also protecting the civil rights of the accused, particularly if there's evidence, corroboration, and claims can substantiated," Barbara Matthews, a New York–based attorney, said. "The removing of these statutes will act as huge deterrents to people like Bill Cosby and others in power who instill fear in order to exploit and silence their victims."

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Omar and Johnny from 'My Beautiful Laundrette'

Growing up in India, homosexuality was treated like a mysterious foreign disease. Even in the mid 90s, it was not something to be discussed among polite company. When it was, it was whispered about as a shameful, isolating thing.

Like many closeted teenage boys, I sought out anything I could to better understand the life that was possible for a gay person like me. Before widespread internet access, that meant searching for subtext in the limited selection of movies available at our local library in Madras (now Chennai). Suffice to say, the pickings were slim. Or grim.

The Birdcage and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert were too campy and far-fetched to feel realistic. Gay characters that popped up in teen flicks like Clueless and Cruel Intentions were throwaway roles at best. Those in critically acclaimed films—like In & Out (forced out of the closet), As Good As It Gets (a victim of a gay bashing), and The Talented Mr. Ripley (a psycho killer)—hardly painted modern homosexuality in the best light.

For the most part, the gay men I saw in the Western films available to me were white and either American or British. Generally, they were very good-looking, and served as eye-candy. Some were exaggeratedly promiscuous, others nearly virginal. Some found love; more often, they lost it.

As a South Asian, I never felt included in the conversation. We didn't have out gay celebrities or gay characters in Indian media, so I kept searching these foreign films for some sense of representation, of belonging. It seemed impossible to find a character or plot line to which I could really relate.

That all changed the day I stumbled upon a VHS tape of My Beautiful Laundrette in the library's drama section. I remember how the cover set my gaydar on fire: a simple shot of two men in front of a laundromat, one white, the other brown. They stared out at me, and I knew that this movie would be different. I smuggled it home in my backpack.

Set in Thatcher-era England, the 1985 film follows Omar, a young man of Pakistani descent, navigating the expected duties of his family and their launderette business while dealing with constant harassment from a gang of racist white thugs.

Through the first half of the film, while the plot developed (slowly), I felt a sense of disappointment—a sad realization that this might not be about what I had hoped it might. But hey, I thought, that Daniel Day Lewis guy is really cute! He played Johnny, the sympathetic leader of the gang and Omar's childhood friend.

In a scene in an alley, after putting aside their differences, they discuss the possibility of teaming up to make the launderette more successful. Then, suddenly, Johnny pulls Omar toward him and delivers a deep kiss. Omar returns the kiss with both passion and familiarity. They fade back into the darkness, wrapped in each other.

I was dumbstruck, then teary-eyed. My teenage heart raced as I rewound that moment over and over—it was the first time I had seen anyone who looked like me be with another man. It showed me that I could be happy, that there was hope that I too could find love. It wasn't just for one kind of people in this world.

The film itself was no box-office smash. Despite near-universal critical praise and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, to this day, many of my friends have never heard of it. But even a supposedly dismissible piece of cinema can have a huge impact on the world beyond the audiences it was made for.

Think of Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet, in which a gay Chinese man struggles to choose between the male partner he loves and the family he must honor. Or Yossi and Jagger, where an unexpected romance blooms between two male soldiers amid the bloodshed on the Israel-Lebanon border.

India ultimately joined the fray with the 1996 Indo-Canadian English-language film Fire, in which two women in unhappy marriages find solace in a forbidden love. It was lauded internationally and banned locally; I still remember watching news clips of riots outside movie theaters that dared to screen such a blasphemous film. There's no doubt that for all the controversy it caused, the film must have stirred within a generation of young, queer Indian women the same things I felt when I first saw Omar and Johnny embrace.

The West certainly has a long way to go until LGBTQ persons achieve a full measure of equality, but its reached a level that the rest of the world has yet to reach. That progress is reflected in Hollywood today, where queer films are far from taboo—they're celebrated, with Carol, Milk, and Dallas Buyers Club as just a few recent examples.

But now that LGBTQ stories are being told, Hollywood's focus must shift toward showing the world the many faces of our community.

On television, diverse queer storylines abound. Orange Is the New Black and Transparent feature positive portrayals of transgender and queer women of color. How To Get Away With Murder features a gay Asian man in a loving relationship who gets diagnosed with HIV. A slew of LGBTQ characters of color feature on a number of popular shows today, from silly (Broad City, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) to serious (American Odyssey, The Good Wife, Empire).

For every Tangerine or Viva that dominates the indie and foreign film circuit comes another whitewashed rehash of queer history, like Stonewall, or pandering attempt at inclusiveness with a mostly straight, white cast, like Jenny's Wedding.

The thumbnails in Netflix's LGBT section primarily show pretty white boys and girls in various states of undress and embrace. It reminds me of when I went to my first Virgin Records in Times Square, not far into the new millennium, and gleefully beelined to the Gay and Lesbian DVD shelf.

Before me laid a sea of creamy-skinned perfection. Beautiful Thing, Come Undone, Edge of Seventeen, Get Real, Trick—I've seen all those movies at some point. They rightfully deserve their place in the history of queer cinema. But it would be nice if they felt a bit more universal. There are millions of people of color who could have been a part of those stories.

That day, I actually ended up buying a copy of My Beautiful Laundrette. I still have it. And even now, years after coming out and after having fallen in love several times over, when that scene in the alley comes up, I hold my breath and feel once again like I'm part of the story.

Follow Reneysh Vittal on Twitter.

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This article was published in collaboration with the Marshall Project.

Q: Did it hurt when she inserted it?

A: Oh, yeah. Bad.

Q: Describe that for me.

A: Just as if somebody would take a burning hot coal and stick it up your penis.

– Deposition of Jamie Lockard, in a lawsuit against police in southeastern Indiana

In the United States there is a wealth of case law pertaining to the Fourth Amendment, with the US Supreme Court and the rest of the judiciary fashioning jurisprudence on what constitutes an unreasonable search or seizure. But the courts have yet to reach any kind of consensus about one particularly cringe-worthy practice, as exemplified by what happened to Jamie Lockard in a small town in southeast Indiana, close to the Ohio border.

In March of 2009, police in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, pulled Lockard over for not stopping at a stop sign. Suspecting he was drunk, the police had him take a breathalyzer test. He blew a .07 percent, just under the legal limit. The police then obtained a search warrant for blood and urine samples and took Lockard to a local hospital. The blood draw—nurse and needle, with no resistance from Lockard—was no problem. The urine was another matter. Unable to get a sample from Lockard the conventional way—hospital personnel said he wouldn't go, Lockard said he couldn't go—the police took Lockard to the emergency room and handcuffed him to a bed. A police sergeant held one of Lockard's ankles while an officer held the other. A nurse inserted a catheter tube, typically 16 inches long—up the urethra, through the prostate and into the bladder.

Ultimately, Lockard pleaded guilty to reckless driving and got a suspended sentence. (His blood sample produced a blood-alcohol content of .05 percent.) But he sued the police officers and the city of Lawrenceburg, alleging the forced catheterization had violated his civil rights. In a deposition, Lockard described pain both physical—"felt like something twisting where it ain't supposed to be twisting"—and emotional: "Like it could happen again. Just makes you think, what's this world coming to. It was bad, bad."

In 2011, a federal judge in Indiana threw out the lawsuit, ruling that the police were entitled to qualified immunity. Under the law, police cannot be held liable for "bad guesses in gray areas," according to the courts. And this case, the federal judge wrote, fell into "nebulous territory." While the US Supreme Court has drawn lines on extracting blood and even bullets from involuntary suspects for purposes of gathering evidence, the forcible extraction of urine remains an unsettled area of the law. One lower court wrote that forced catheterization is "more intrusive than a needle but less intrusive than a scalpel, making it hard to classify."

In an interview, Lockard's attorney, Douglas Garner of Lawrenceburg, called it shocking that some police use such force—and shocking that courts have generally allowed it. "It's barbaric. It's unbelievable. But that's where we are."

Barry Friedman, a law professor at New York University and founding director of its Policing Project, co-authored a law review article published last December saying forced catheterization has slipped "entirely below the public radar." In an interview with The Marshall Project, Friedman said: "Hopefully, it isn't happening very often. The thing that I think we all should be shocked at is that it happens at all."

Three months ago, the Argus Leader, a newspaper in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, wrote about police in the state using forced catheterization on uncooperative suspects. "They don't anesthetize them," one attorney who has had two clients catheterized without consent told the paper. "There's a lot of screaming and hollering." A search of case law and media clips also turned up instances in Utah ("They made me feel like an animal," a catheterized man told Fox 13 in Salt Lake City), Washington and Idaho, among other states.

It's unclear in some of these cases precisely what catheterization procedures were used—for example, the kind of numbing agent applied, if any. (For anyone seeking a description of urethral catheterization in general, this Medscape entry should suffice. The queasy might prefer to skip the part about topical anesthesia.)

In the Idaho case, decided in 2011, the state's Supreme Court expressed puzzlement as to why police in a DUI case would resort to forcible catheterization to get a urine sample instead of simply drawing blood to test for alcohol. "atheters impinge on a person's dignity much more severely than a blood draw," the court held, noting the required exposure of genitalia and a stranger handling "very private parts." A blood draw—"a small needle into the arm"—is relatively painless compared to a long tube into a body cavity, the judge noted. Plus, catheterization carries a greater risk of infection by pushing bacteria into a normally sterile area. Still, the court granted qualified immunity to an Idaho state trooper who opted for catheterization without a warrant, saying American law on the subject is undeveloped.

While South Dakota is the state where forced catheterization has drawn the most attention recently, the state where the issue has arisen most often could be Indiana. In addition to the Jamie Lockard case in Lawrenceburg, police in Schererville, in northwest Indiana, and in Rush County, east of Indianapolis, have been sued in federal court for obtaining urine samples through force. The Schererville lawsuit is still pending, while the litigation out of Rush County reached an unusual conclusion for these cases.

In 2006, when a Rush County sheriff's deputy pulled Larz Elliott over for speeding, the deputy, suspecting intoxication, secured a warrant allowing him to seize blood or urine. The deputy took Elliott to the hospital and got blood and urine samples, the latter with the assistance of a local police officer and a nurse with a 15-inch catheter. "They were pinning my legs down, yelling at me, telling me to quit screaming, telling me not to cuss at the lady," Elliott said in his lawsuit.

Elliott had tried providing a sample the usual way, but was unable to urinate even after drinking five cups of water in 45 minutes. "He had shy bladder syndrome," says Stephen Gray, an Indianapolis attorney who represented Elliott in the civil suit. Asked during the lawsuit why he opted for catheterization, the deputy said: "That's the only other way I know that you can urinate." He had used forced catheterization "four or five" other times in the previous 2½ years, the deputy said.

When Elliott sued the sheriff's office and the individual deputy, the case went before U.S. District Court Judge Richard Young. In 2010, the judge refused to throw out the lawsuit, ruling that the deputy was not entitled to qualified immunity. The deputy exceeded the warrant's scope by obtaining both blood and urine, the judge wrote. And while Judge Young could not find any other cases closely analogous to this one, he concluded that the deputy's conduct amounted to so "obvious" a violation of the constitution that the deputy should have known it was wrong.

The lawsuit was subsequently settled for $250,000, according to Elliott's attorney.

The suit also helped lead to a change in practice. "In short, no, we do not do forced catheterizations any more," David Sliger, chief deputy of the Rush County Sheriff's Office, told The Marshall Project. "The prosecutor's office is issuing search warrants for blood, so we'll get a blood draw now."

Asked whether it was fair to describe forced catheterization as "barbaric"—the label applied by an attorney in another Indiana case—Sliger said: "Honestly, I've never had a catheter, so I couldn't tell you. But the medical field uses catheters every day."

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Illustration by Tyler Boss

A photo of someone looking surprised, because unfortunately none of the people we spoke to had pictures of themselves being caught in the act (Photo: Orin Zebest, via)

Your poor parents. Think: they literally create you, they raise you, they keep you alive with food. And then you turn 13 and start screaming at them for being unfair because they won't let you to travel to France unaccompanied to meet an internet friend. Then you turn 14 and start disappointing them with the majority of your life decisions. Then you turn 15 and everything just goes to hell, until whatever age you start to understand that, actually, your parents just don't want you to die and are mostly looking out for your best interests. And then everything starts to be fine again

But the years before that turning point can often be a struggle.

We spoke to some of our friends about moments from these years – moments when their parents have caught them in the act and ended up extremely disappointed.

DO NOT EAT THE PINK VALIUM

Just some normal valium (Photo: Flickr user Dean812, via)

There have been times when I've called my dad on acid, or have done gardening with him on 2cb, but the worst time for me really sticks out in my head – or rather doesn't, because I blacked out and had to be told later what happened. It was quite a heavy night – I think MDMA, coke, weed and booze was the hit list; one of them nights, y'know – and by the time we'd left the party it was like 9AM or 10AM the next day. I was feeling ghastly and my friends had ordered these strange pink "super valiums" from the internet on a "legal highs" site, and warned me that they were very strong, so obviously I decided to pop a handful. And then I had about three more. Still extremely wired and on no sleep at all, we went back into the house where my parents were farting around drinking coffee and gardening, what with it being a sunny Sunday morning. Then I woke up fully clothed at 6PM on my bed and didn't get the full story until a couple of days later.

Apparently I'd taken it upon myself to show my friends the entire contents of my garage, and I spent a couple of hours taking everything out and showing it to them – and my mum – in painstaking detail. I found a box of 1950s erotica and decided to loudly read some of it out. At some point I poured a cup of tea over my laptop while trying to jump over a table. Basically I behaved like someone you'd meet at the Boomtown toilets at 5AM, rambling incomprehensibly, making weird noises, hooting and hollering, rolling around, while my parents were trying to read the Observer and have a sandwich. There's probably so much that I can't tell because it hasn't been told to me, probably to preserve my own sanity, but everyone was very weird with me for a little while after.

I got most of the story from my friends. My mum was wryly amused about it all and my dad was silent, except for the classic, "So... ahh... feeling better this morning?" I'm sure there's some stuff from that night I've forgotten, but god knows I'm not fucking asking them about it. Do not eat the pink valium.

- Jan

PARENTAL UBER

Sat-nav in an Uber (Photo: Tom Usher)

I was 18 and it was New Year's Eve. I was going to a squat rave somewhere in Shoreditch, but it was 11.45PM when I got there and I still hadn't had a single drink, so I was panicking. I had a lot of Russian friends at the time, and when I got there one of them had brought back a bottle of 80 percent vodka from a recent trip to Russia. At that percentage you can't actually taste anything, and I was 18 and dumb, so I just started necking it. I don't know how much I drank, but by the countdown I was fucked and pulling some 30-year-old dude. Shortly after that the room started spinning and I started throwing up uncontrollably. I tried to go outside for some fresh air but puked on the stairwell. I don't remember much after that until one of my friends told me they'd called my dad to come pick me up.

This would have been great, except for the fact my parents are super strict Muslims who don't know I drink. My dad arrived, bless him, and my friends pretty much carried me into the car, where I spent the long journey home back to west London intermittently puking out of the car window and mumbling some bullshit excuse about food poisoning while loads of people who were out celebrating shouted, "GO ON LOVE! GET IT OUT!" at me. It was a quiet ride – my dad mainly just seemed disappointed more than anything else, as both of parents are in denial about this side of my life. I was in such a sorry state I didn't even get into trouble; my dad never brought it up again and I spent two more days in bed throwing up and barely able to eat, with low-level alcohol poisoning. I've never touched vodka since, and the heavy drinking part of my life is still hidden from my parents.

- Zania

BIG STONED ELEPHANT

(Photo: Jake Lewis)

I think this happened to me the year before I left home for uni. I went to a party with my boyfriend and friends, and got so wasted that I went to kiss my boyfriend and ended up smashing my front tooth on his. My tooth chipped off and I was hysterical. All the booze, tears and weed conspired to make my eyes sore and puffy, so I was like, "Time to take my contacts out." Problem was I was so mashed I didn't know what I was doing, and basically kept scratching at my corneas and getting more upset.

So my boyfriend called my dad, who came to get me at 4AM to take me to hospital. Not best pleased, obviously. He'd seen me a bit drunk before but I was totally fucked up. In the car he asked if I'd had a good time on the "happy hay" and I was INDIGNANT that he could think I was capable of such behaviour. So I made a really piss poor attempt at convincing him I was stone cold sober and had just had a lenses mishap. Anyway, we were in hospital for fucking hours. I had to wear bandages on my eyes for three days and my dad "wasn't angry, just disappointed". The worst. He said nothing about it afterwards, which was the hardest part – typical of my dad. It was the big stoned elephant in the room for a long time.

- Rachel

FULL OF MDMA

Me and my siblings came over to Manchester for a gig and were supposed to be staying at my older cousin's. We all shared a few grams of mandy before going in, and I'd never had any before. My cousin was so drunk and fucked that we lost her and had nowhere to go, so we had to get my dad to drive over an hour to pick us up and take us the whole way home absolutely off our faces. I was only about 17. It was very embarrassing and anxiety-inducing because we had no idea if my cousin was even alive. I couldn't stop talking. I explained to my dad that my jaw was moving on its own. I just kept saying how amazing the gig had been on repeat.

At first we didn't tell him, but he really babies me and kept asking, "You OK, pet lamb?" Eventually my brother was like, "Dad, she's full of MDMA", to which he was like "Oh, Rosie." and laughed quite a lot. I must've looked really funny to him, my eyes were like saucers, it was grim. He was very cool about it but my mum went ape when we got home. She kicked off big time, not really at me because I was the kid but at my brother and sister. She kept saying I could've got lost like my cousin or hurt, like crying and stuff. We eventually found my cousin the next day, she'd passed out in the paramedics tent all night.

- Rosie

A FAILURE TO RESPECT WOOD

(Photo: Pixabay, via)

I was having an outdoor party at my parents' house while I still lived at home, and we had this outdoor chimney in the garden, so I was burning all this scrap wood we had. I'd been drinking since early afternoon and my parents arrived home at about 3:30AM, so I was annihilated and struggling to stand. I said goodnight and went upstairs, but was called down soon after. My dad took me outside to the chimney and asked me where I'd been getting the wood from. I took him to the garage and showed him the pile. He went red and just didn't speak for a bit. I can't totally remember what he said, but it was the most angry I'd ever seen him at the time.

It turns out for the last few hours I'd be accidentally burning my sister's deconstructed wooden four poster bed, which was worth about £500, in this chimney. I'd been jumping on the beams to snap them in two and burning them. Needless to say, they weren't happy. This is where the alcohol comes into the equation, I feel; fuck knows why I just assumed these boards I'd found were fair game for burning, but I did. My mum had gone to bed and was more forgiving afterwards, but I genuinely didn't speak to my dad for like two days. At the end of the day, my real crime was failing to respect wood.

- Joe

@williamwasteman

This article originally appeared on VICE France

People become solicitors for many different reasons – some do it for the fancy robes, others to seek justice for the unfortunate and downtrodden. Whatever their underlying motivation, most members of the bar will face a complex or gruesome case at some point in their career. Wanting to know more about those kinds of cases, I got in touch with five French lawyers and asked about the human horror stories that affected them the most.

Nicolas Pasina, who practices law in Nancy and Saint-Dié des Vosges, remembers defending a 35-year-old woman, accused of stabbing a judge in a juvenile court. On the 5th of June 2007, after the judge announced that he was extending the foster placement of Fatiha Benzioua's three-year-old son, she pulled a 20cm long kitchen knife out of her bag and attacked him. The judge, Jacques Noris, was rushed to the hospital with several wounds in his abdomen. Luckily, he survived. "This woman is very petite – she's not even five feet tall – but when she attacked the judge no one could contain her. Not even her partner, who is a 6'6" butcher," Pasina told me.

He seemed convinced that his client wasn't in full possession of her faculties: "Social workers say that in the weeks preceding the hearing, she became convinced she could speak to Michael Jackson," he said. In April 2010, Fatiha Benzioua appeared before the court once again, this time accused of attempting to murder a magistrate.

It was a challenging lawsuit for Pasina because, as he maintains, "during the trial she was under medication and in no condition to defend herself." Having been seen by four psychiatric experts, only one of them reckoned that she had taken leave of her senses during the attack. "We had to fight the other three psychiatrists who insisted she was fine. She wasn't fine. She spent the trial staring at a wall, rocking her body back and forth. At the end, the Attorney General requested a sentence of 13 to 15 years in prison, and the court sentenced her to 13. Later, that sentence was upheld on appeal. This was an unfair punishment for Pasina, who also believes that "real justice doesn't exist. Mental illness scares us. Evil, you can explain. But you can't always explain insanity."

For me it's inconceivable. It's a crime that I can't intellectually understand. How can someone remember to give water to their dog but forget about their child?

On June 19th, 2013, a 9-month-old girl died at her home near Toul, due to severe dehydration. According to forensic experts, the child had slept in an unventilated room with a temperature close to 30 °C and appeared to not have had a drink for 12 to 15 hours. The day before, her father – who was 25 at the time – had taken her for a stroll in direct sunlight. "The first question I asked was how could the parents have allowed for that to happen?" says Gregoire Niango, who served as the legal counsel for the elder brother of the deceased girl. "For me it's inconceivable. It's a crime that I can't intellectually understand. How can someone remember to give water to their dog but forget about their child?"

The trial was held in Nancy, in October 2015. "Every single night during the trial, I would dream about this case. They let their baby die of thirst because of laziness. It's just incomprehensible," Niango despaired. He went on to admit to indulging in a "temper tantrum" in court, when he asked the father: "Has your dog died? Has your fish died? Has your baby died?" The defendant – who up to that point seemed unfazed – broke down in tears. "I was relieved to see him cry, because that reinstated his humanity," he said. The couple were sentenced to five years in prison.

In April 2015, Frédéric Berna defended a 40-year-old accused of, on the same night, killing his baby, sexually assaulting his daughter and fatally hitting his girlfriend with a flashlight before raping her corpse. A terrible trial, after which the defendant was sentenced to lifelong imprisonment. However, this was not the case that Berna found most difficult to defend. "Defending an absolute bastard, who the common man considers a monster, is not that difficult. This is when your practical self takes over and you think, 'It's only business'. What is more complicated is defending a client, for whom you feel sympathy," Berna told me.

He recalled his encounter with a young prisoner, who had been accused of torturing a fellow prisoner to death, together with his cellmate: "He was a young lad. He had just been transferred to the adults' prison, and I immediately took a liking to him." Sébastien Schwartz was sharing a cell of the Charles III prison with Johnny Agasucci (a 26-year-old construction painter, who had been implicated in a drugs case) and Sébastien Simonet, who awaited his trial for acts of torture committed on another cellmate. The latter had a habit of marking his roommates with an iron rod and was clearly reigning terror in the prison.

I felt tremendous pressure. I had come to think of Schwartz as a son. I'd lost all sense of perspective. As the trial approached, I couldn't sleep or eat properly.

On the night of the 25th August, 2004, Agasucci was found dead in his cell. He had been repeatedly punched in the stomach and the genitals, and also carried stab wounds from a fork. He was found with his arms shackled behind his back and a rope tied around his neck. His cellmates were immediately held responsible.

Schwartz described the scenes of violence to the police and insisted that he had not participated in the torture. His story seemed to agree with the results of the autopsy: "Schwartz was a small guy of around 5'2''ft and 8.5 stone – and he seemed completely traumatised by what he had witnessed. He had beaten up the victim on Simonet's orders," explained Berna. "I was convinced that he was more of a victim than a suspect. He found himself in a situation that he couldn't change for fear of his own life." Freed while awaiting trial, the young man found a job, went to live with his girlfriend and started a family.

The demanding trial took place in January 2009, at the Meurthe-et-Moselle court, where Simonet's defence tried to put the blame on Schwarz. "I felt tremendous pressure. I had come to think of Schwartz as a son. I'd lost all sense of perspective. As the trial approached, I couldn't sleep or eat properly," Berna recalled. "When my time came to take the stand, I was almost paralysed by the fear of getting it wrong. Addressing the jury, I started by talking about myself and how working on this case had affected me. Once I was done, I sat down and pretty much blacked out. I felt a black veil cover me," he recalls.

In the end, Simonet was sentenced to life imprisonment, while Schwartz was given one year in prison for battery. The Attorney General had requested 10 years for murder for Schwartz. "It was the best result of my career," smiled Berna.

She spoke of all the horrible things she had done, as if reciting a grocery list. It made me really uncomfortable.

It's an even more sordid story that Épinal-based attorney Pierre-André Babel was confronted with, back in 2009. A man from Saint-Dié des Vosges had started a relationship with a woman, who would eventually become Babel's client. According to the lawyer, the man was "a real pervert with an insatiable sexual appetite." He also maintained a relationship with his neighbour and kept a photo album of orgies that he had partaken in together with her and her young daughter. "He managed to manipulate these two women, who were both modest people, with serious deficiencies," Berna told me. Accused of sexual assault on a minor, the man, his partner and the neighbour were taken to the Court of Vosges, in June 2009. "Simply going through that photo album was a test of character," the lawyer remembers. "It was the first time in my career that what I saw gave me nightmares."

What reassured the lawyer about the intentions of his client were the pre-trial interviews. Apparently, these made it obvious that the woman he had to defend had been manipulated. However, a few months before the trial, the male defendant stopped eating and taking his heart medication, which caused him to die in prison. "That was the first obstacle I had to overcome, because if the defendant was present at his trial, the jurors would have been made aware of his character and realised that he was the mastermind," said Babel. "The second difficulty, was that my own client had 'frozen' emotionally, and become unable to express compassion. She spoke of all the horrible things she had done, as if reciting a grocery list. It made me really uncomfortable. More importantly, if the jurors can't see a bit of humanity they cannot sympathise. I was afraid that her psychiatric pathology would lead to a sentence that was heavier than what she deserved."

Indeed, at the trial, his client was sentenced to seven years in prison, while the accomplice – the mother of the victim – was sentenced to 15 years. This trial was followed by an appeal trial before the Court of Meuse. Meanwhile, the defendant started working with a psychiatrist. She started that trial with the same frosty attitude until the second day, when she burst in uncontrollable tears while on the stand. "It was a moment of honesty that may have added to the fact that her sentence was reduced," concluded Babel.

That morning she had found the cold body of her baby in the crib. The autopsy revealed that his ribs had been fractured, and that he had also received violent blows to the head.

"One morning in 1998, a 17-year-old woman walked into my office. She was pushing a pram, with a little blonde girl inside, and she was also heavily pregnant," recalled Hélène Strohmann – another lawyer from Nancy. The woman's boyfriend, whom Strohmann had defended a few years earlier, had been murdered before her eyes because of a drug deal that had gone awry. "The woman was a drug addict too and social services were threatening to take her children and place them under state custody. While we fought for that, she fell in love with another man. She was seven months into her pregnancy at the time."

A few weeks after the birth of the child, Strohman was called to the Nancy police station to find out that the young woman had been arrested under the suspicion of infanticide. Apparently, that morning she had found the cold body of her baby in the crib. The autopsy revealed that his ribs had been fractured, and that he had also received violent blows to the head.

"I had known her for several years by that time and could not imagine she was capable of that kind of thing. Neither her or her partner ever sought to blame the other and they both maintained they had no idea how this had happened. Of course, everyone in her neighbourhood put the blame on her. At the end, the court of Meurthe-et-Moselle sentenced her to 14 years in prison, but acquitted her boyfriend. I will always remember her putting on her coat after the verdict was announced," Strohmann recalled.

An appeal trial was later held in Saint-Dié des Vosges, the deliberations for which went on till 2AM. In the end, the young mother was acquitted. "It's a fair decision from a legal point of view, but unjust in human terms because we still don't know how that child died," said Strohmann. "The story of this young woman really had an effect on me because she had such a hard life. It's as if she was never given a choice. I was her lawyer twice: Once, she was the victim – she saw the father of her children get killed before her eyes. Then she was the defendant, suspected of having killed her baby," she resumed. "It's the kind of case you can't leave unscathed."

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1,149 hours.

That's how long I've played Dota 2 for. It adds up to nearly 48 days. I'm not sure why I didn't make it to 1150 to round out the count. Presumably I slunk off after a tight game in disgust, fuming at either my own performance, or at the player on my team (there's always one) who suggested I'm an idiot, or that I should have been aborted. That guy.

So I think I should play other games. We should see other people.

I'm giving up on you, in part, for the games I've never played. Resident Evil's HD remaster, Valkyria Chronicles, Virginia. There's a digitized mountain of games I've bought and dutifully installed on launch day, only to never play. Instead, I spent another night chasing the dragon—otherwise known as Roshan—with another round of wizard fight club.

We had our good times. Those old Troll Warlord games, back when he was good, that often saw me murder the entire enemy team within 15 minutes. The five-man black hole that had us storming the high ground and taking a tense game. In those early days I made a lot of friends, and there would be screams of elation as my rookie fingers managed to pull off something that felt genuinely magical.

But there's a problem. There are problems. As I've progressed in skill, you haven't been treating me well. While playing Dota 2 today, I become the worst version of myself. I'm paranoid, twitchy, and too fast to call out the mistakes of others—and too happy to dwell on those of my own. I get sullen and frustrated. I think that, towards the end, 75 percent of the time I spent playing, I did so while miserable. I've been finding myself frustrated, bent out of shape by teammates or my own declining ability, stuck with the realization I'm doomed to a bad game 20 minutes in. Sometimes I'll be locked into this cycle of death and rebirth against nigh-impossible odds until the bitter end, often 30 minutes later.

That's the thing about Dota 2. Leaving games while they're in progress is heavily penalized, so if you're having a bad time you've just got to stick it out. Leave early and you go into "low priority", a punishment pool that bundles all of the quitters, griefers and abusive players together, and that seems like a really good idea until you're stuck there. Games in low priority were miserable affairs, where I'd try to serve out my time while a friendly Pudge attempted to trap me on scenery, and people would shout abuse at each other over voice and text chat, in a variety of languages.

I've actually worked out three reasons we're not a good fit anymore.

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

Firstly, I'm just not a very good Dota player. Many of the friends I made in the early days slowly became annoyed at my lack of skill. As they got better and better, I remained at the same level (2000 MMR, for those of you clamoring to ask in the comments) and couldn't seem to improve. They started to attribute my inadequacy to malice or idiocy, and I found the atmosphere while I played could get decidedly chilly. After a while, I wasn't invited to play Dota anymore.

The second reason is that I don't have that much time to put into the game. Dota 2 requires your patience and commitment. It isn't like loading up Call of Duty or fitting in a few matches of FIFA. Dota games run for anywhere between 20 and 90 minutes, averaging out around 45. You'll need to play five or six games a week to maintain any level of skill. I found that when I slipped away to play something else for review, or perhaps even for fun, I'd come back and be markedly worse at the game.

Thirdly, and this is perhaps the most important thing: I'm a delicate snowflake. I don't want an angry man with a thick accent loudly screaming in my ear because I accidentally used my Blink Dagger—a short-range teleportation item—at the wrong time.

Of course, I try to say what I mean, and these aren't the real reasons it's over between us, Dota. You deserve better than a whimsical dismissal. It's actually because I recognized, too late, that you turn me into a toxic monster.

A couple of years ago, worn down by my mid-20s neurosis and trying to work out what sort of person I'd like to be, I adopted a mantra: "Try to write good words for the internet and be nice to everyone." Unfortunately, Dota 2 makes this impossible, because in play I become a shithead. My first warning came late last year, when I got a ban from chat because my behavior had received a certain number of complaints. I served the punishment and made a conscious effort to try and be more constructive in my criticism. Instead of an angry, "Why do this?", I tried to go for a polite, "Have you tried doing this?"

But whenever I started to lose, I found that I was filled with resentment again. Beyond that indignation at myself for failing, I was annoyed that I was spending my leisure time getting angry at a bunch of video game characters smashing each other around in some virtual woods. Why was I trying to psych myself up for my fourth successive loss of the day when I could have been playing Mad Max instead? These hour-long wars of attrition could have been used to prevent a nuclear apocalypse, or execute a nigh-perfect (but never quite there) heist. In another video game, you understand.

Playing Dota 2 had become as compulsive for me as breathing, but I'd grown to hate what it did to me as a person, and I despised the amount of my time the game was taking up.

So, now I've uninstalled you, Dota 2. I told myself it was a trial, and started the long process of selling off all of my cosmetic items (I could write an entire follow-up piece about how pointlessly arduous that was). I'll come back eventually, I said, secretly hoping that'll never be the case.

It's been a couple of months since my last game of Dota 2, and I feel much better. I've finished Wolfenstein: The New Order and I'm nearly there with Mad Max. I'll always have fond memories of our time together, Dota, but if you've brought me anything, it's the lesson that sometimes I care about games too much. And when that happens, I can turn into a bit of a dick.

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Dr Paddy Neumann. Image via Neumann Space

Paddy Neumann kind of looks like someone who's really into brewing beer. But back when he was a third year student at the University of Sydney, the now Dr Neumann started on a course of experimentation that would see him beat innovations by NASA's top scientists.

For his final research project, Paddy was working with the university's plasma discharge, mapping the electric and magnetic charges around it. He noticed the particles moving through the machine were going really fast. In fact, they were clocking in at around 23 kilometres per second.

"I looked at my numbers from that final year project and thought, you could probably make a rocket out of this," he says. Particularly when you consider that conventional hydrogen-oxygen rockets only get around 4.5 kilometres per second.

Through his Honours, Masters, and PhD, Paddy refined his idea, eventually arriving at the Neumann Drive, which is a world record-breaking ion engine. Right now, the drive can achieve more than 11,000 seconds of specific impulse—which is one measure of how efficient a rocket engine is. The higher the number, the better. Paddy says that by comparison, NASA's best experimental efforts max out at 9,600 seconds of specific impulse.

To move through space, vessels need a push, which comes from the propellant that spurts out the back of a rocket. With a high specific impulse, the Neumann Drive can push through space using less fuel, allowing rocket ships to be lighter, and hold more room for cargo.

"This was just one of the cool things that happen when you putter around in a lab for long enough," Paddy says. "It's me having a go with something that lots of people have used in the industry for a long time but putting it under conditions that nobody has really tested... no one was crazy enough to put this much current through it."

So how does the Neumann Drive work exactly? Well, that's where things get a little technical. "It works using physics kind of similar to how an arc welder works," Paddy explains. "You strike an arc between the cathode and the anode, and that erodes cathode material... ionises it, and accelerates it away from the cathode. It moves really, really fast."

In the most simple terms, the idea is that electricity will be used to heat up solid metal, turning it into plasma, which is then shot out the back of the rocket. Neumann Space's tests show magnesium is the most efficient fuel.

Another unique aspect of Paddy's ion engine is that—unlike other rockets that need to carry their entire fuel load from Earth—the Neumann Drive can be powered by a fuel that's plentiful in space: space junk.

"Much as how whenever humanity has gone to explore some place new, such as Mount Everest where we leave oxygen bottles behind, whenever we've gone to space, we've left rubbish behind," Paddy says. "Somebody should clean it up."

Old satellites that are on the way out would make great fuel. As could spent stages from rockets, which are what propel ships up through the Earth's atmosphere—before being ejected away into space. Both are rich in "aerospace metals" and could be captured, melted down, and repurposed into solid fuel for the Neumann Drive.

Paddy found magnesium, an aerospace metal often found in satellites, is the most efficient fuel for the Neumann Drive. Image via Pixabay

Obviously there's a lot of technology that needs to be developed for this to work—smelting metal into fuel in outer space isn't something we're great at just yet. But Paddy already envisions an entire space economy. He speculates people will become "junk hunters," heading out into space in search for fuel that they can sell on. Neumann Drives will be everywhere, keeping satellites in orbit, even directing asteroids close to Earth to be mined for precious metals.

And then there's the drive's capacity to power long distance space travel. While it doesn't generate enough thrust to get a rocketship off the ground, once you're in space, those high specific impulse numbers mean the Neumann Drive can move a vessel very efficiently.

Paddy speculates the Neumann Drive could make the 100 million kilometre round trip to Mars and back on one fuel rod. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Right now, the Neumann Drive is very much still a laboratory prototype. To get to the next stage, Paddy and his team need money—something that can be hard to come by in Australia. Investors aren't exactly used to betting on inventions that are as complex or forward-focused as the Neumann Drive.

Australia is spending more than $1 billion dollars a year on space but very little goes to private enterprise. Most is spent on paying other countries to send satellites into orbit for us and "classified military" projects.

So to fund the next stage of development, Paddy and his team are getting creative. They're going to sell off excess room on a platform they've been given on International Space Station, which is scheduled to set off in 2018. If all goes to plan, the Neumann Drive will spend a year in space, getting tested out, in real conditions.

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When Mark Hainds set off to walk the length of the Texas-Mexico border two years ago, it wasn't to make a political statement. Mainly, he just wanted an escape.

Hainds, a forestry expert in his mid-40s, was feeling overwhelmed by dual positions as a researcher at Auburn University and the Longleaf Alliance, an Alabama-based nonprofit organization dedicated to studying and preserving the longleaf pine ecosystem. So he left, to "get away from the modern world" for a while.

He began the trip in El Paso on October 27, 2014, and hiked 1,010 miles of Texas borderlands over a seven-week period (including a one-week hiatus to return to Alabama, where he wrapped up some teaching duties). During his trek, he encountered a group of recent border-crossers, drug smugglers, cowboys, a few other hikers, and a daily dose of Border Patrol and law enforcement agents.

The journey, chronicled by documentary filmmaker Rex Jones, will appear in an hour-long documentary La Frontera, which will be available online beginning October 7. But Hainds's journey doesn't end there: On December 21, he intends to walk the remaining length of the border from New Mexico to California. Hainds believes he'll be the first person to walk the entire length of the southern border.

We connected with Hainds ahead of the release of La Frontera to hear about the first border walk and what he expects when he hits the trail again at the end of the year.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mark Hainds and two of his "Compadres" on Old Mines Road. All photos courtesy of Mark Hainds

VICE: Where did you start the first border walk?
Mark Hainds: I started at International Boundary Marker Number One in El Paso, Texas. That's where they laid in the border between us and Mexico, and they've got a big marker there. And then I followed the trail or the road that was closest to the Rio Grande all the way to Boca Chica beach in the Gulf of Mexico. I followed the Rio Grande, but I cut off horseshoes and stuff. If you followed every twist and turn, it's like 1,200 miles. I walked 1,010.

To help me out, I had what I called my "Tex-Mex Compadres," who were volunteers, friends of mine, who came out for a week to two weeks at a time, to bring me food and water and to pick me up when I needed to be picked up. So there were about a dozen different people who visited me over the course of the walk.

We've heard a lot about the possibility of a border wall lately. How do people feel about it down there?
Rex Jones, the documentary filmmaker who traveled with me, interviewed right-wing libertarian ranchers to Spanish families that have been there for multiple generations. Almost everyone said that further construction of the wall is the dumbest thing we could possibly do with our funds. From right-wing to left-wing, they were all against further construction of the wall.

A lot of people don't realize it's already there. I walked along large portions of the wall. You cross hundreds of miles. And there are urban areas where it probably makes a lot of sense, but then you hit the center portion of my walk, you start getting in what's called the Big Bend area, and everything to the south of that is called the despoblado, which in Spanish basically means "abandoned zone." The locals there, they don't call the agents the Border Patrol, they call them the "Boredom Patrol" because there's nothing for them to do in the center of that range—there's nobody coming across. So why in the world would you spend billions of dollars putting up a wall there?

Did you run into any trouble along the way?
Yes. I mean, it's the border. It's 1,010 miles. There is no path; this is not something like the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail. I had to make my own way, which meant I had to take the trail or the road that was closest to the border. In many cases, they're called public roads, but they might be blown out or impassable using vehicles, so I would walk 60 or 100 miles between human habitation. In many cases, it was remote and so rugged that the Border Patrol doesn't go very far down those roads. They patrol the edges because if you head in there, you're by yourself, and there's no way for any backup to get there. I walked through smuggler zones and stuff.

How did you know they were smugglers?
There was one encounter that I know for sure. I had been dropped off in the early morning by a friend, one of my Tex-Mex Compadres. He drove off, and I was standing in the road basically adjusting my backpack and getting ready. I was a few yards away from an intersection, and when I looked up, there was a car parked in front of me.

I thought, That's weird. And then the trunk popped open, and I thought, This is not good at all. A bunch of guys ran out with boxes and, really fast, they jumped out of the brush and were stuffing this car full of dope. I was just standing there in the middle of the road. In the process, one of them looked up, saw me, and pointed in my direction, and they all looked at me. So that was pretty scary. That was on Old Military Road. It's a major smuggling area. The governor, I think it was Perry at the time, had put hundreds of state patrol down in that area, so they were all over the place. Every five or ten minutes, I was coming across a state patrol, but the smugglers were still bringing it through, right in the middle of all that.

What is that area like?
That was on Old Mines Road, an incredibly remote section between Eagle Pass and Laredo. It's a 100-mile stretch that's paved on the ends, but most of it is just a washboarded dirt road. So you're walking Old Mines and the only traffic that we came across, the only people that you see are the oil and gas workers. That was at the peak of the oil and gas boom. They were working kind of on the ends of Old Mines Road putting in wells. And the Border Patrol. But in the center—about 50 miles of that stretch—there was nobody, except for basically undocumented people coming through there.

The Border Patrol said there's no signal in that area, and it's just too dangerous—they couldn't communicate well—so they didn't even work the center of it. The road is lined with high fences. Much of Texas out there, the main use now is hunting, so they have high fences along the road. And you can see where the fences have been almost demolished by all the people coming and climbing over, all the way up and down the road. It's just every post, someone's been over it. And when you get out on the ends, you see even articles of clothing tied up on the tops of the fences.

Mark Hainds at the marker for Pecos, Texas, about 200 miles east of El Paso

You mentioned Border Patrol. What was your experience with them and other law enforcement agencies along the way?
Once I was in a populated area, it averaged about one interaction a day with law enforcement. That was all branches—from the Border Patrol, sheriffs' deputies, the Texas state patrol, multiple interactions with all of them. What was interesting to me was how little communication there was between the branches of law enforcement. And then the Border Patrol divides everything into sectors, and it might be 100 or more miles between sectors. I would hit a new sector and ten minutes later, the Border Patrol would be there. "Who are you, and where are you going?" And I'd tell the story. Another ten minutes later, I'd have to tell it to another agent, and sometimes this would happen two or three or four times over a fairly short period of time, and then they would put it out—however they shared it, on the radio or at their briefings. Then for the next 80 to 100 miles, I'd see dozens of them, and they would just wave, because they knew who I was. But I hit the next sector, and it started all over because there wasn't communication between sectors. Overall, I was really impressed with my interactions with law enforcement along the way.

What are you expecting with the second half of the walk? Will it be harder?
It's so much more remote, and it's going into more mountainous territory. I had some time in the mountains in Quitman Pass, but this is going to be a lot more remote, a lot more mountainous. And I'll be going at higher elevation in the winter months. On virtually every level, it's going to be more difficult.

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Grover Norquist in New York City in July. Photo by Brad Barket/Getty Images for Ozy Fusion Fest

Grover Norquist is America's most famous—or infamous—anti-tax crusader. Americans for Tax Reform, the nonprofit group he's run since 1985, is responsible for the "Taxpayer Protection Pledge," a promise signed by the vast majority of elected Republicans in DC that essentially commits them to oppose any tax increase. During the contentious congressional budget battles of the past decade, Norquist was blamed for gridlock by leading Senate Democrat Harry Reid and called "the most powerful man in Washington" by Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes.

In the last few years, though, Norquist's public profile has gotten a bit groovier. He hasn't abandoned the hardline opposition to taxes, but his profile and influence has declined, especially as Trumpism has become a more potent force than mere anti-tax conservatism. In the meantime, he's gone to Burning Man (his Playa name is "Grover") and gotten really into vaping. Not just vaping himself occasionally, but promoting the idea that vaping and vapers will decide the future of America.

"Trump failed to speak to the Vaping community tonight," he tweeted the night of the first presidential debate. "Missed opportunity." This is on-brand for him; in February, he told the Washington Examiner that "the next election, at the presidential level, and a lot of other levels, is going to be determined by the vaping community."

Like cigarette smokers before them, some vapers view their right to inhale as something that should be protected from nanny state interference: Earlier this year, a Republican congressman from California named Duncan Hunter vaped in protest during a debate over whether to ban vaping on planes, saying, "This is the future." Is Norquist one of these cloud-blowing mavericks? Is his pro-vaping stance related to the money his group has received from tobacco companies? What does any of this have to do with taxes?

I called him up to talk vaping and hopefully answer some of those questions. A condensed version of our conversation appears below.

VICE: You've tweeted that a Clinton presidency will result in a vaping "prohibition." Why do you think that?
Grover Norquist: Because the FDA has ruled that 98 percent of vaping products will be illegal shortly. As soon as this goes through the courts, there's a death sentence. They've set up prohibition. This is not a maybe. This is not, "If Hillary gets elected, she might do something." All she has to do is not sign the legislation the Republicans have been pushing.

What the FDA did was, they said any product built before 2007 is going to have to go through some new multimillion-dollar approval process. They set the date to cut off everything except the stuff that was at the very beginning. I mean, some people have a conspiracy theory—maybe true or not—that the big boys got in early, and they're cutting off everyone else. It would cut off 98 percent of the products, and then you get, "Oh, sure, you can have your little strawberry-flavored vaping juice, you just have to spend $3 million going through the FDA process." These products have been used for years, and you know what's in this stuff. There's no secret sauce. This is not weird chemicals or anything. And this is infinitely better than cigarettes.

How did you come to think of vaping as such a politicized issue?
When people try to tax something, we get calls from the states or Washington, saying, "Hey, in South Carolina, they're trying to tax vaping." Then we discovered that in Washington State there was a rally with 500 people. In New Mexico, there was an state legislator who lost an election on the subject. I've been to a couple of the vaping conventions, and it's like a political movement. These people understand that their life is on the line. I went up to a guy who's running as a write-in against the Republican in Pennsylvania. The Republican voted for the tax increase, and the guy doing the write-in campaign runs a little vaping store. They passed a law that's a 10 percent tax on all your inventory. So this guy is getting hit with a $40,000 or $60,000 bill, and he doesn't have the money, because he hasn't sold the product. I talked to the guy and to other vapers who said they go out of business if we don't get this fixed.

Is there any indication that Donald Trump would sign legislation that would prevent the FDA from enacting these new vaping regulations?
Yes, because the Republican Congress would make him. There's no reason to think he wouldn't. I've talked to guys around there, and we haven't yet gotten them to focus on speaking to this issue as loudly as I think they should. We've started the ball rolling in terms of raising it, and that's the point of the tweets, that's the point of the travel I've done to some of the conventions.

Why do you think vapers are so passionate about vaping?
Vapers spend more time vaping than people in monasteries spend praying. It's hours in the day. You're telling all your friends, and some jerk politician is going to come screw with you? It's a very powerful issue, it can be focused in this election, and it can be focused in the next election. What you have to have is people who see a problem, recognize it, and feel energized to do something about it. And when it's a lifestyle issue—gay marriage, home-schooling, vaping—it's who you are. It's a definition of what you do.

You've got 9 or 10 million who don't like to be taxed, but the threat is not just raised taxes, the threat is the FDA bans most of the products that you've been selling or using. It would signal that vaping would be regulated the way that cigarettes are, which is fascinating because the old line from politicians was that we're going to raise taxes on cigarettes because we want everyone to stop smoking.

They're being rougher on vapers than they are on cigarettes. The whole thing about how the reason they were taxing cigarettes is they're trying to get kids to stop is just a lie. They want the money. First they tried to tax you. If you shifted to vaping, now they're trying to ban vaping and keep you smoking. And vapers, unlike cigarette smokers, they are very proud that they've made this switch in their lifestyle. They're healthier now, and some jerk has decided to interfere with that.

I'm curious: What kind of regulation of vaping do you think would be appropriate, if any?
It's nicotine. People know what nicotine is. Nicotine's not some new thing, it's been around since forever. The alternative , by the way, is not not having nicotine. It's smoking cigarettes and having smoke in your lungs, and nicotine.

If you wanted to say you have to be 18 or something , I suppose so. But all those regulations are in now, so I don't see any legitimate need for anything new. This has been going on for years, there are no problems, and all of a sudden people are trying to shut it down.

There was a similar effort against another product that helped, which is chewing tobacco. In Sweden, they had this big thing, 25 percent of Swedish smokers had quit, and they used chewing tobacco. They use the chewing tobacco that comes in packets, so you can chew tobacco without needing a spittoon. It gives you the nicotine but without the smoke in your lungs. Evidently, because it hangs around your mouth, that could raise problems with mouth cancer. I don't know how accurate that is, but maybe. The harm reduction is still significant. In Europe, they were promoting that and not trying to tax it and kill it; in the US, they were trying to tax it and kill it. It's a separate issue, but it's in the same zone. Something is less harmful than another thing that's perfectly legal and they say, "No, don't do the less harmful thing, go back and do the one we taxed."

It seems like the FDA doesn't think of vaping as harm reduction so much as an additional dangerous thing that's entering that public sphere.
I think that as people get more used to it, as 10 million vapers become 20 million vapers. I think the politicians that are screwing with them are making a big mistake. I think that it's perfectly in tune with my vision of the center-right "leave-us-alone coalition," where people simply wish to be left alone. Each one has a different reason.

Have you ever vaped yourself?
I have, yeah. I don't vape on any sort of regular basis, other than when I sort of hang around with other vapers. This is not personal for me—I'm also in favor of people's homeschooling rights, and I don't homeschool.

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Kim Kardashian West. Image via Instagram/Kim Kardashian

So news breaks that Kim Kardashian was bound, gagged, threatened at gunpoint, and robbed in the Paris residence she was staying in for fashion week. We're told "she begged for her life." That she pleaded with her attackers, who were masquerading as police, to spare her because "she has babies at home." Reports surface she was terrified they were going to rape her.

And the public response is sickening.

Of course there's the intrigue. Minute-by-minute updates in the tabloids, entertainment news programs offering up the most horrifying experience in this woman's life as some sort of salacious drama.

It feels kind of gross, but it's also par for the course. Kim has built an empire on commodifying her life. She is a public figure whose currency is human drama.

What truly makes the stomach turn is something else, something darker that's largely playing out in the comments section of news articles and Twitter. Drips of vitriolic bile follow Kim around the internet. But in the wake of this robbery, it seems the flood gates are well and truly open.

We're to believe Kim either paid people to rob her for publicity, or she deserved it. And there are already enough think pieces out there about why both of these responses are fucked up—how they reflect some dangerous attitudes about women and fame.

What isn't being said is just how dull and expected these responses are. Of course if we listen to the mutterings of a dumb planet, we'll hear Kim Kardashian had it coming. The internet rages at everything that isn't them. It formalises, intellectualises, and amplifies all the bullshit humans have rattling around in our silly, proto-neanderthal brains. All that unfocused rage and twisted obsession with status, apprehension of women, and weird sexual tension that underpins so much anti-Kim sentiment. Of course that's what came out.

Some sweet condolences for Kim Kardashian about being robbed

Why you hate Kim Kardashian isn't interesting. You're angry that she's rich. Sure, it sucks that some people in the world are obscenely wealthy while others are really poor. Unfortunately, Kim played no role in designing the modern global economy that led to these vast disparities. She was not present at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, nor did she repeal the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.

Kim Kardashian is not a political figure, she's just a celebrity who made millions marketing things that you're buying. Or your daughter is buying, or your friends, or Sharon from accounting who plays that Kim Kardashian: Hollywood app obsessively.

To argue that Kim didn't earn her fortune—the money that bought her all the jewellery that got stolen—is boring too. What do you mean she didn't earn it? Who do you think earned it?

Kanye and Kim. Image via Instagram/Kim Kardashian

You could say genius marketers, but she's the one paying their salaries. And without the Kim Kardashian brand they could never hock all those cheap handbags, skinny tea, and boring iPhone games. People want to buy what she's selling. There is no trick.

Maybe your boring hatred of Kim Kardashian is more of a moral abhorrence. You hate that she rose to fame off the back of a sex tape. Of course you do. Raking people over the coals for things they did in their early 20s is fresh. Holding a grudge against a someone for a sex tape, leaked without their permission nearly a decade ago, makes total sense.

And I can't think of anything more exciting than reading another comment about how Kim Kardashian is "disgusting." Does anyone else want to offer up an opinion about how her posing for magazines naked, or semi-naked—or even if she's fully clothed but you can just make out the edges of the female form if you squint—is "actually destroying society"?

Kim and North West. Image via Instagram/Kim Kardashian

This sect of hardcore Kim haters has always been kind of surprising. Have guys with seven likes or less on their Facebook profile photos always been the exclusive arbiters of morality in society?

But what's just as boring is another "In Defence of Kim Kardashian." She really doesn't need it. She has a massive fortune, two kids, a loving husband, a strong family, and a massive fanbase. What's needed is a bit of self-awareness. Can you hear yourselves?

There's so much energy being poured into screaming at this woman in 140 characters or less because... I'm not sure why. Because she's succeeded where you failed? Because she has money and you want more money?

Maybe you need a new hobby.

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Richard Hong was found dead September 23. Photo via Instagram

An arrest has been made in the killing of Richard Hong, the Canadian actor found dead in the Los Angeles home of TV host George Stroumboulopoulos last week, according to the Associated Press.

'BioShock Infinite' screenshot courtesy of 2K

It originally launched just three years ago, but BioShock Infinite, even compared to the other, older BioShock games, feels dated. Its obiter dictum on politics—whether far right or far left, everyone is equally questionable—in this US election year rings particularly false. Only a writer unaware of politics could suggest a Donald Trump is as promising a presidential candidate as a Hillary Clinton. Similarly, the game's examination of religion, and its symbiotic relationship to patriotism, is too open to interpretation. In light of games like Actual Sunlight, Life is Strange, and The Magic Circle, all of which have launched since 2013, all of which approach their respective subject matters with conviction and determination, Infinite's insistence on giving every side of an argument an equal share of the floor makes it feel weightless.

Imbued with what they perceive as a God-given right to rule all peoples, Infinite's ultra-American residents of the floating city of Columbia are racist, exceptionalist, and vehemently capitalist. But also, they live in utopia. The reveal of the city, when players emerge through the clouds and gaze at it framed perfectly through a window, while serenaded by tender religious music, is undoubtedly ingratiating—BioShock Infinite wants us to think this place is beautiful.

"Instead of expanding on what they can or can't talk about, BioShock Infinite does what video games have always done: Try not to piss off any customers."

Of course, the façade is gradually removed. As well as its picturesque welcoming center, you are taken to Columbia's slums. But this supposed balancing of perspectives betrays not BioShock Infinite's impartiality, or its writers' integral journalism, but an absence of conviction. Instead of expanding on what they can or can't, should or shouldn't talk about, BioShock Infinite does what video games have always done: try not to piss off any customers.

Documentary maker Adam Curtis describes how politicians today, rather than leaders are perceived as "managers of public life." His film The Trap scrutinizes a style of government, practiced by both the American neo-conversatives and British New Labour, which relies heavily on focus testing, statistical analysis, and constant canvassing of opinion. Such a managerial style is echoed by Infinite's refusal to take a side or make, concretely, any point—its politicizing may be visible, but it's always safe. And in this election year, such a quotidian approach to real-world issues may prove costly. If Clinton is struggling to ignite both young and floating voters, it's because, unlike the unpredictable, entertaining Trump, she's perceived like one of Curtis's managers, a president as usual. When the Republican candidate is as perilous as this year's, one is glad for a steadier, saner Democrat. On the other hand, when you replay BioShock Infinite and imbibe its evasive, watery politics, you cannot help but envy the right wing and its privilege of fierce, definite rhetoric.

BioShock Infinite poses questions, and to that Alamo of self-justification the game can always fall back—like it or not, Infinite dared to ask. But surely we're capable of asking questions ourselves. Particularly in 2016, when the internet provides such a cavalcade of information and opinion, we look to entertainment and art if not for answers then at least for qualified perspective. We trust authors, and film, music and game-makers to be atop their platforms because they have something to say, not something to ask. If BioShock Infinite is merely repeating back to us broad political questions—who can I trust? With what should I identify? Is my country all that great?—then rather than urgent or acerbic satire, its achievement is in capturing uncertainty and insecurity. These are feelings that people, when they turn to proclaimed political observers and commentators, want to be rid of—Infinite only makes them stronger.

More than people, the game is interested in cold, aloof essayism. Two games that came after Infinite, The Talos Principle and The Stanley Parable, address more artistic form and gaseous, theoretical questions, and can almost get away with their absence of heart and humanity. But when Infinite is talking about politics, religion, and race, and treats all three subjects like thought experiments, to be kicked around and intellectually masturbated over, it rapidly drains the game of credibility.

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Perhaps, if you squint your brain, there is some truth to its central, cynical assertion. But in modern America, juxtaposing a rich white character and a poor black one, in order to make a point about equality—equality of power, responsibility, and culpability—ignores an overwhelming amount of real-world context. Father Comstock, Infinite's white villain, does many bad things. Daisy Fitzroy, his impoverished, black opponent, does bad things also. Implying that makes them equally immoral however fails to account for either the characters' respective backgrounds or the real-life social circumstances by which they are inspired in the first place. When in 2016 almost five out of every million black people are killed by US police, as opposed to two out of every million whites, and when black American women are paid on average 19 percent less than white American women, it's hard to simply agree—for example—with Infinite's tacit implication that Comstock and Fitzroy can have their actions or characters compared on the same moral grounds.

BioShock Infinite implies punching up is as bad as punching down; stealing bread to feed a family is as criminal as stealing it just because you can. These are moral absolutes and in dispassionate, purely academic discussion they may serve fine. But they make no accommodation either for people. At best, Infinite is the equivalent of book learning. It purports to be taking the pulse of a nation, and capturing the voice of the population, but in favor of its own middlebrow posturing ignores the contexts governing that population's wildly varying experiences. The opposite of good journalism—the opposite of rending the zeitgeist—the game cares primarily about what and who without really asking, let alone trying to understand, why.

Infinite's other main thematic concern, the relationship between the game's maker(s) and its player(s), is handled with greater nuance. Whereas BioShock suggested the player could be either an unaware supplicant of the developer or a mischievous, destructive singularity, and BioShock 2 implied developer and player could work together, so long as they accepted their mutual creation would be chaos, Infinite, more optimistic, envisions genuine, beneficial cooperation.

The Handyman, one of Infinite's most powerful enemies, is a human head on a robotic body—a mix of man and machine. The gun turrets are all modeled on people and resemble a soldier carrying a rifle. Vending machines take the form of a speaking mannequin called Dollar Bill. Columbia's July 6 parade, marking its secession from the United States, features several mechanical horses. Characters like these—combinations of routine, robotic mechanisms and lifelike, even organic parts—resemble a symbiosis between the predictable and unpredictable, the video game as intended and the video game as played. The Handyman is a tortured figure, but at least he works. The clinking, clanging metal horses won't fool anybody for long, but more than in previous BioShock games, they suggest an element of wildness can survive filtering through such a tame form.

Even the player's death, which games routinely ignore and retcon by simply restarting, as if nothing had happened, becomes canon in Infinite. Appropriate to the game's dimension-hopping narrative, every game over represents the forging of a new timeline. Each time you revive, by walking through the door of Booker DeWitt's office, you are stepping out into a fresh reality—you are not dead, but the fact this new dimension has been forged means you did die, and the game acknowledges it.

Infinite's examination of game-maker/-player relations is much more expert than its predecessors'. Nevertheless, when playing it now, as part of 2016's BioShock: The Collection, it's difficult to care. How many times do we need it pointed out? Of course games are artificial. Of course the player's freedom is limited. Of course our actions and decisions are, in big and small ways, influenced or even made for us by the game-maker. Like its removed political oversights, Infinite's deliberations over the nature of games and the passivity or impassivity of writer and player feel largely self-interested—its two central preoccupations, simplistic moralizing and prodding at narrative form, leave you convinced that rather than moral, social, or human issues, Infinite is interested in sophomoric debates about video games.

It asks redundant questions; it gives few or slight answers. In such a heated political climate and with games, surely by now, grown out of idle self-inspection, BioShock Infinite, for all its at-the-time acclaim, feels very limited.

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On this episode of VICE's Autobiographies series, we sit down with Nigel Sylvester, a kid from Jamaica, Queens, who captured Dave Mirra's attention and took the BMX world by storm. Sylvester talks about how his upbringing influenced his passion for BMX riding, the racial stereotypes he's challenged throughout his career, and how he's developed an unconventional take on the competitive sport.

Photo via Flickr user Governor Tom Wolf

Dr. Del Dorscheid recently had what he calls a "tragic" week in the intensive care unit at St. Paul's Hospital. Situated in the epicentre of Vancouver's fentanyl crisis, the unit is often overflowing with patients who stopped breathing after overdosing—sometimes without even knowing they'd taken fentanyl, cut into other drugs such as cocaine or heroin.

It's hard to write anything about screenwriting sage Robert McKee without mentioning Adaptation. The Spike Jonze–directed, Charlie Kaufman–penned movie may have come out 14 years ago, but it's still the go-to reference to teach the uninitiated about the influence McKee wields in Hollywood. Robert McKee's writing seminars, and his book Story have been staples of Hollywood screenwriters for decades. Everyone from Peter Jackson to Paul Haggis to the Pixar team sing his praises.

In Adaptation, Nic Cage plays a fictionalized version of Charlie Kaufman who, struggling to write his new script, winds up at a McKee seminar in search of something that'll get him through his third act. Cage-as-Kaufman bristles at the lessons, worried that McKee is ushering in a homogenization of screenwriting, a kind of formulaic "chicken in every pot, point of no return at every midpoint"–style of writing that will turn all movies into paint-by-numbers.

It's a complaint about McKee that isn't unique to Adaptation, or even to McKee himself. Each book promising to teach movie writing from Syd Field's Screenplay to Save the Cat has been met with doomsdayers who say the art form is going to be spoiled by screenwriting teachers forever.

But Robert McKee isn't a screenwriting teacher. Sure, his seminars primarily focus on narrative in film and Story's subtitle promises the "principles of screenwriting," but there's a reason it is simply called Story. The book isn't interested in teaching readers how to write a successful screenplay. McKee's main focus is dissecting well-told stories, unpacking them piece by piece, and figuring out how they do what they do. He may be best known in Hollywood, but his close study of narrative should be required reading for storytellers of any kind.

Robert McKee released Story's long-awaited follow-up, Dialogue, last summer. The similarly bluntly titled book is an exhaustive breakdown of the different ways speech can be used in novels, theater, and cinema; it's one that trains you to look at dialogue in different ways as you read. It's the book that will solidify McKee's place as more than just a screenwriting guru—he's an anthropologist of narrative, more Aristotle than Syd Field.

I sat down with McKee for lunch on Manhattan's Upper East Side to talk to him about Dialogue, the future of storytelling, and why his Hollywood script guru reputation needs to change.

Photos by Julian Master

VICE: Although you're best known in the screenwriting world, Dialogue isn't really a book fits on a shelf next to Save the Cat or How to Write a Movie in 21 Days. It's a different animal.
Robert McKee: When I wrote Story, my publisher and I had a bit of an argument about the title. She wanted it to be called Screenwriting, but I said, "No. We can put that in a subtitle, but I'm going to call it Story to encourage playwrights and novelists to read it. Everything I say about stories and say about film in fact is true for them." She agreed. Writing is writing.

When I got to write Dialogue—along with the books I'll write in the future, like the next one I'll write will be on character—I wrote about page, stage, and screen. One of the reasons why people have trouble with Dialogue is that they assume it's for screenwriting, but when they pick it up, they realize they've got to think like novelists and playwrights.

"First-person novels are 50,000 words of nonstop dialogue."

Yeah, I think that's what is really exceptional about the book. It teaches me how to think critically about modes of dialogue. I've been listening to the audiobook, as well...
What do you think of it?

The Story audiobook feels like an abridged version of your seminars. It goes down easy. The Dialogue audiobook requires more of my attention because it's advanced content. You have me thinking about dialogue in a way I've never considered it before.
You're absolutely right. The book is radical because I redefine dialogue. The conventional definition of dialogue is two characters talking to one another. I define dialogue as anything said by any character to anyone. If that's the definition, then first-person novels are 50,000 words of nonstop dialogue. The writer of the first-person novel has all the typical problems that writers have when writing a particular scene, but 50,000 words of it.

I've been waiting for the professors of English literature to start throwing stones at me, because this is not how literature is normally taught.

How do you even start looking at dialogue in this granular way? I have a mental image of you sitting in a leather chair, staring out a window, solemnly contemplating narration.
Well, I don't think critically about everything. It has to get my attention and satisfaction first. If it's something that catches my eye and attention and makes me wonder how they did it, then I sit back and think. I'm always learning.

When I was talking to HBO recently, I told them about a big learning experience I had thanks to the finale of The Sopranos. A lot of people didn't like the ending, but I thought it worked. It's not just that it was anti-climactic. It was anti-conventional. It played against expectations, but it worked in a sense that was satisfying.

There are four classic endings to a story: purely positive, purely tragic, positive with irony where the character gets what he wants but pays a big price, and tragic with irony where he loses everything but he learns something. Those are the classic tonalities of endings.

But The Sopranos ending isn't really any of those, and it's still satisfying.
Right. I thought about the ending with them sitting in this restaurant, and I realized there was a fifth possible ending, which is what I came to call "exhaustion." That means that the characters have been emptied out completely, and the writer has exhausted their humanity. There's nothing you don't know about them. Everything is known, including their dreams. That was it.

All those characters in The Sopranos were exhausted, and it was satisfying. You realize you know everything. You got to know these characters like you never have with somebody in your own life. That's exhaustion in the strict sense of the word.

The Sopranos taught me the fifth ending, which is only possible in the long form—long novels or a hundred-episode series. Exhausting characters takes a lot of storytelling. If a film exhausts somebody, then the character wasn't that complex to begin with.

What about The Wire, which didn't try to do that so much with characters, but with Baltimore?
That would be another way of looking at exhaustion, which is that you emptied out the potential of the setting. I think those characters from The Wire still have lives to live after that and have potential for change, but you've come to know that world so much that Baltimore is exhausted.

A classic example of writers not knowing that they reached the level of exhaustion is Dexter, because he was emptied out and wasn't going to change by the end of season four or so. But it was making money, so they made new serial killers and put the emphasis on the antagonists, but Dexter was an exhausted character, and it got stupid.

Right. You mentioned your next book, Character, a little bit ago. Have you started on that?
Yes, I have.

Were you working on that in parallel with Dialogue?
No, what happened was I was working on Character first and we developed while I was doing that. The research for Character was enormous—you could also call the book Human Nature. It's a rather generous subject, for obvious reasons.

I was working on it while creating lessons for my website, McKee Story. One lesson was about dialogue, and I reached the point where I realized that I was actually ready to write a book on dialogue right then, while I still had much more to learn and study to finish the book on character. I just shifted gears to do that.

You said the literature professors might come knocking soon. That might be right. The trilogy of Story, Dialogue, and Character could probably be adopted as something like Elements of Style for storytelling. How would you like people to think of you and your work, since it's larger than screenwriting?
I would like just to be thought of as someone who did their best to keep the storytelling art forms alive. I want to keep theater alive. And keep the novel, of course, but I don't think the novel is in danger. Theater is. Cinema, as well.

Certainly by 2050, all the movie houses will be closed. There will be no television; no broadcasting or cable. What we'll have is great stories for the screen, but the screen will be in your pocket or on the wall at the foot of your bed or your computer. There will always be the screen and the stage, but the traditional methods of distribution are changing.

Right.
In the 90s, I was living in England, and I was looking toward the 21st century and wondering if story itself was exhausted. By the 1990s, we'd had a hundred years of mass media.

In the 19th century, you maybe spent an hour a day reading a novel, two hours a month watching a play. That was all the storytelling done by professionals for you. People now see that much storytelling every day. Theater became Broadway, then radio, movies, and TV. It all happened in the 20th century.

All the arts in the 20th century exhausted themselves technically. By the time Ad Reinhardt painted a canvas black from edge to edge and said it's a painting, the form was over. Music had been explored down to noise. Every technical possibility had been explored. All possible techniques.

So I was thinking, Since all the arts have reached the black canvas, what was going to become of story? Where would writers go in the 21st century?

I realized there is one aspect of human nature that really hasn't been exploited and explored: evil. You have dark characters like Iago, great villains who are diabolical and evil, but it's a pure evil. Human beings are very rarely pure evil, and storytelling hadn't truly explored the complexity of realistic evil.

And then, a few years later, came all these great long-form series, which opened an exploration of evil. There was The Wire and The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, even Mad Men. With all these great series, you get complex, good/evil characters.

It's interesting because it's always a chicken and egg question: Does content create form, or does form generate content? They're always going on side-by-side, simultaneously.

In order to keep a show interesting for 100 hours, you need dense and complex characters. That means exploring the good and evil inside them.
Yes, you have to have complexity and multidimensional characters. I don't know whatever part I played in that, but I know that many people who are writing these great long forms are my former students.

So, that's the answer to your question: I would like to be thought of as a person who did his best to take story to the next level.

Follow River Donaghey on Twitter.

No. Photo via Instagram

You expect a certain amount of bad decision making during a homecoming weekend. The University of Western Ontario has an especially fratty reputation: People are blackout drunk. They're wearing purple paint on their faces. They're standing on roofs, playing beer pong, and leaving a shit ton of garbage in the street for some reason.

But let's just imagine for a second the many levels of bad, ignorant decisions that must have taken place for this Instagram photo to exist. Here we have four young bros in Western gear, posing in front of someone's homemade "Western Lives Matter" sign in an Instagram photo that is tagged "We matter." There are over 100 likes on the public photo as of Tuesday morning. (I reached out to Jana Luker, VP student experience at Western, and she said the school is aware there are photos of the sign and is discussing how to meaningfully respond.)

Being from London, I have a pretty good idea about what the fuck anyone in this general vicinity was thinking. They're not thinking "woo, racism!" despite what appearances suggest. They're probably saying to themselves, repeatedly, at this moment: "It's not racist, it's a joke." (See: why London is a racist asshole).

READ MORE: Another Frosh Week, Another Terrible 'No Means Yes' Controversy

Here's how I imagine this going down. At least one person was armed with a white sheet, purple spray paint, and an unforgivably poor understanding of the real-life threat of violence, incarceration, and death faced by black people. They wrote this "joke" out of school spirit, and likely got someone to help them hang it up in a very public place—a two-person job at least. Who made the sign and what they were thinking is unclear, but we know that at least six people (there are multiple photos of the sign online) decided to pose in front of it, and then several people posted those photos to Instagram. Hundreds of people have liked the images since then.

At this point there are already witnesses—already opportunities for a roommate or classmate or party attendee to advise strongly against co-opting an expression meant to spotlight widespread racial injustice. Someone—anyone—could have told them that doing so belittles the all-too-real experience of oppression faced by people of colour in America, Canada, and yes, even London, Ontario.

For me, this raises some serious questions. Namely: What the actual fuck? Was everyone at this party white? Was someone told to lighten up just for mentioning this is offensive? Did nobody learn from whichever asshole wrote "No means yes, and yes means ANAL" on a window just down the block last month? Did anyone get a "I'm not racist, but..." count at this party?

And finally, a question for the jokester, who was clearly only making a joke: would it be funny if that white sheet was used as a hood, too?

Be honest, Western.

Follow Sarah on Twitter.

All images courtesy VICE News.

Midnight on the edge of Eastern Ukraine's bloody conflict is marked by red fireworks and dogs barking at the crackling of gunfire.

Avdiivka is a small city in the Donbass region, littered with bullet holes and drones that are visible at night amidst the constant tracer fire trying to blast them away.

The pro Russian separatist and Ukrainian lines haven't changed much in the last year here. It's a complete stalemate with some of the wooded fighting positions resembling World War One trench lines. And into that intractable position, a covert war has taken root.

Since the start of the conflict over Crimea in 2014, Vladimir Putin deployed his unidentified "Little Green Men," the term given to the armed soldiers without official insignia who showed up in the now Kremlin-controlled peninsula. And it's widely believed that those kind of Russian soldiers are among the separatists in the Donbass region.

But the clandestine activity cuts both ways. On a recent trip to Avdiivka, VICE News was given rare access to Ukrainian commandos fighting on the frontlines of the now two-year-old conflict. Bumping along Eastern Ukrainian roads in an old Brinks-styled armoured vehicle retrofitted into a bulletproof iron cage with no seat belts, I interviewed these elite soldiers earlier this summer.

We were there for an investigative documentary on the effects of Canada's training mission in Ukraine—but conversation quickly turned to their own missions, covert or otherwise.

Wearing balaclavas and carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles, they spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear Russian intelligence agents could identify them.

These guys reminded me of other western special operators I've spoken to in the past. Much more existential with their thinking on war and killing than the average enlisted soldier, but with the added value of feeling like they've also done some seriously secretive, brutal operations before. The Ukrainian commandos constantly asked me what I thought of them and my answer was always the same: "You all look really tired of fighting."

They nodded to that answer every time. They were all too familiar with the terrible soldier food we ate, made up most mostly of imitation kolbasa, and the shell craters we'd periodically drive over, sending everybody's head into the rusty iron roof of the armoured vehicle.

In a subsequent interview, one member of the Ukrainian special ops says commandos execute targeted killings behind enemy lines in the Donbass region, which entails identifying and eliminating specific members of separatist forces.

"Targeted killings" is special forces parlance for surgical operations to kill enemy senior ranking officers or other targets like snipers and bomb makers.

According to the same soldier, Ukrainian special operators also sabotage or destroy separatist-controlled infrastructure to disable the performance of their enemy on the battlefield.

"Ukrainian Special Operation Forces are used to making some diversions deep inside the enemy's territory," said the source, adding that this includes sabotaging gas stations or destroying "supplies or expensive military liberation of Donbass cities," he said, adding that through Western-assisted training and combat experience, regular troops can now take on more offensive missions on special separatist targets.

By the same token, it would seem almost unthinkable that any of these potential covert targets for the Ukrainian military would be in Crimea. That would almost certainly provoke an all out war with Russia. Yet members of the Ukrainian special forces said to me they see Donetsk as territorial Ukraine and thus, fair game for operations.

Ultimately, any total war with Russia would likely end one way.

"If we declare official war with Russia, this war will last maybe one week," said the Ukrainian commando. "Because we can say truly Russia has more powerful forces."

With files from Sofi Langis

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Time for "How Scared Should I Be?" the column that quantifies the scariness of everything under the sun and teaches you how to allocate that most precious of natural resources: your fear.

The singularity is a hypothesis from computer scientist and novelist Vernor Vinge, who said in 1993 that technology is about to cause a shift as dramatic as the emergence of life on Earth, and that afterward "the human era will be ended." By this he meant that, for better or worse, computers will be running shit.

Some futurists, like Ray Kurzweil, think that when the singularity hits, it's going to be fucking awesome. Ever-improving machines will start repairing our cells from the inside, thinking for us whenever we don't want to think, and generally making everything better.

But for paranoid sci-fi fans like me, the singularity is the mythical moment when humans will pay for our promethean technological hubris—probably in the form of a war against evil computers, like in the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which, for the sake of this article, I used as the model for an evil singularity.

I ran this evil singularity concept past some scientists. For the most part, they said a rational person shouldn't be stressed out about it all the time (like I am). "My opinion is that there is no ground for fear, whatsoever," Danko Nikolic, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, and an artificial intelligence commentator, told me. But artificial intelligence sounds like it might still bring some scary surprises with it.

Phase one: Computers Control Everything

Good Terminator: "Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterward, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense."

Thanks to Predator and Reaper drones, it seems like a fair amount of the stuff that led to Judgment Day in Terminator 2 has already come true. But drones hardly have a "perfect operational record," since they have a reputation for killing more civilians than enemy combatants. Granted, that doesn't exactly make them less scary, but for the moment, this aspect of Judgment Day seems very far away.

And while it is a scary thought that—singularity or not—autonomous robots might be on the battlefield soon, it's also worth noting that robot soldiers will most likely suck for a long time according to Peter Asaro, philosopher of science and technology at the New School, and a spokesperson for the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.

"Systems are not good at coming up with their own goals," he told me. Yes, we can point to creepy examples of software beating the best human brains at chess, or recognizing our friend's faces on Facebook. But those abilities are the results of mountains of data, supplied by very patient humans. For a computer to find and solve problems autonomously, Asaro said, "we would need pretty much a scientific revolution in computer science on the order of Einstein replacing Newton."

So in short, autonomous, armed robots probably aren't going to replace—say—the police anytime soon, which is comforting since those would be more or less a prerequisite for phase two.

Phase Two: Computers Become Self-Aware and Run Amok

Good Terminator: "Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware 2:14 AM, Eastern time, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug."

Sarah Connor: "Skynet fights back."

Can computers develop human-like consciousness and "wake up"? For the purposes of this column, I really don't care about that for two reasons: 1) There's some question as to whether it even makes sense, and 2) a machine without consciousness that plans to kill me is still scary as hell.

But regardless of whether robots are conscious per se, the singularity requires artificially intelligent systems to exhibit what Ray Kurzweil calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, or what Asaro calls the "accelerationist model." This imagines a state at which "things will start developing so quickly that will take over and start innovating itself."

Will that really happen? Maybe, but according to Nikolic, probably not.

It's folly to assume that increases in computer power are the same as increases in sophistication, he explained. "This is like saying that if we get enough paper and pencils, everyone could write Dostoevsky-type masterpieces." Nikolic hinted that a huge improvement in neural networks—linked computer systems that mimic the way neurons in our brains work—might maybe bring about some kind of rapid acceleration, but he still doubted that self-driven exponential increases in artificial intelligence would ever be possible. By way of an explanation, he pointed to some of the limitations of human brains.

We humans can learn stuff, but we can't, after all, rejigger our own brains in order to make ourselves smarter. This would be true of an intelligent neural network as well. "You can make changes to computer software, but you would not know what to change in order to make yourself more intelligent," he told me. In other words, a super intelligent computer could upgrade itself, and that would probably be handy, but it wouldn't necessarily be getting exponentially more intelligent just because it was snapping more and better Pentiums onto its motherboard.

The Takeaway

So a singularity in which sentient robots with guns march down the post-apocalyptic highways repeating "kill all humans" is probably Hollywood bullshit. But the dawn of any form of what Vinge called "superhuman intelligence" is still scary for other reasons, Asaro told me. "Like any other technology that's in widespread use, we should be concerned about how AI is developing, and the impact it's going to have on our lives."

Even if the intelligent robots that take over our lives are friendly and only ever want to protect us, they might put us in peril—economic and social peril. Sure, Silicon Valley fetishizes so-called disruptive technologies that show up and slap the corded phones out of our hands, toss our CD collections out the window, and annihilate the taxi business. But disruptions have downsides. For instance, the rise of Uber, he pointed out, "economically benefitted one company at the expense of many hundreds or thousands of companies."

So when AI comes, Asoro worries, it could just be one more in a long line of technologies that show up in society and toss aspects of our lives that we value into the dumpster of obsolescence. And after some form of a singularity, if AI itself is guiding innovation and adoption of new technologies, the rapid march of progress that brings about those innovations will become less of a rapid march, and more of a tornado, with "no individual and no group of people really guide it anymore."

The thought is half-scary and half-exhilarating.

Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of the Singularity?

3/5: Sweating It

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

All photos by the author

It's been two months since Abdirahman Abdi died following a violent interaction with police in Ottawa, and the community is still awaiting answers.