Clearly not a serious Zamboni driver. Photos of Deaner courtesy of Daily VICE

Watching a Zamboni whirl around a rink leaving behind a pristine sheet of ice is a meditative, almost Zen-like experience. Since 1949, the ice resurfacer has been an indispensible part of rinks across the country; offering a slice of calm amidst the frenzy of a hockey game. Anyone who has laced up a pair of skates knows that when the ice resurfacer comes out, you can't help but stop and watch.

Photo via Flickr user Ioan Sameli

The long history of drug scare journalism sank to a new low recently with a photo from Ohio posted to social media. Chances are, you've seen it: a couple, both of whom have allegedly overdosed, lying comatose in the front seats of a car while a toddler strapped into a car seat can be seen in the back. The East Liverpool Police Department in Ohio explained their decision to share the shocking image in a Facebook post: "It is time that the non drug using public sees what we are now dealing with on a daily basis... This child can't speak for himself but we are hopeful his story can convince another user to think twice about injecting this poison while having a child in their custody." Predictably, the photo appeared in hundreds of news stories from across North America and around the world, and has been shared tens of thousands of times. And just a week ago, CNBC published an article with the catchy headline "An elephant sedative is causing a drug overdose epidemic," explaining that this is "a sign of a shift from heroin to synthetic opioids, which can be far more potent and dangerous."

Violet Palmer in a still from a recent documentary about her career, 'Queen Vee'

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On October 31, 1997, with her heart pumping, hands sweating, and the eyes of the entire world upon her, Violet Palmer stepped onto the basketball court at a game between the Vancouver Grizzlies and the Dallas Mavericks.

Nine minutes in, she blew her whistle when a ball was deflected out of bounds. In that moment, history was made: Palmer became the first woman ever to referee a game in a major American men's professional sports league.

These days, Palmer admits she's not as nimble as she was then. In the near two decades she's spent refereeing with the NBA, she has seen her body break down and her ability to keep up with the job's rigorous travel schedule diminish substantially. That's why, a few weeks ago, she made the difficult decision to retire.

"People don't realize how much work it takes," she said. "I had to have a personal trainer, eat right, and go to physical therapy to continue to be a referee over the course of my career. They just see you put on a shirt, referee, and that's it. But age is age. Eventually, it's going to catch up with you."

"But I think I've proven that a woman can do this job and do it well," she continued. "And knowing that the NBA has since hired another female ref solidifies everything for me."

Palmer was hired alongside another female ref, Dee Kantner. Rod Thorn, the NBA's senior vice president of basketball operations at the time, told the Washington Post in 1997 that Palmer's being chosen to officiate first was the "luck of the draw." Palmer officiated 919 NBA games before retiring at the age of 52 and became the first woman to helm an NBA playoff game in 2006. And to say she's a trailblazer would be an understatement: She crossed over into the overtly masculine world of NBA basketball not only as an African American female, but also as a lesbian.

In the late 90s, LGBTQ issues were seldom discussed, and being a woman in the NBA, she said—and all of the expectations that came with it—was punishingly hard. She wanted the public to focus on her performance on the court over anything else. With so many other factors weighing against her career, Palmer knew that making an issue of her sexuality would only add another bullseye to the back of her shirt.

She said it wasn't until 2007 that she finally shared her "secret" with her fellow referees. But her big "coming out" moment didn't happen until 2014, when gay marriage became legalized in California. It was then that she married her longtime girlfriend, Tanya Stine, in front of 130 guests, including some NBA co-workers.

"To be honest, I was always out," Palmer told me. "I just never mentioned it publicly because no one ever publicly asked me. And once I had established myself and gained a foothold within the league, I felt I could say it freely and that no one would care."

Throughout Palmer's career as an NBA referee, she said she never had any player use discriminatory language toward her or make homophobic comments in her presence, despite it being common knowledge within the league that she is gay. Palmer believes it's because the NBA is a diverse organization that pushes for equality on a variety of levels. "If they weren't for diversity, they would have never given me a chance in the first place," Palmer added. "And from the beginning, they have always been supportive of me and my success. I've never gotten any negative vibes regarding my sexuality from the league or the players."

This doesn't mean she hasn't faced intense scrutiny for her gender over the years. "This is a man's game, and it should stay that way," NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley once quipped. "Can't pat them on the butt anymore," Michael Jordan told the Chicago Tribune upon learning of her hiring. Dennis Rodman chimed in with a stab of his own, as recounted in footage from a recent documentary short about Palmer, titled Queen Vee: "Well, if you take her hair off, I think she's a man."

"The NBA has long been a good old boys' organization and a man's world," she said. "My being hired was a bit of shock to the system. And there was definitely some uncertainty amongst coaches and players about how to treat me on the court. They wondered, Can we cuss at her, can we yell at her, can we argue with her?"

The NBA wasn't the first place Palmer had seen resistance to her refereeing men. In 1996, Palmer says her name was being considered alongside other referees for the Men's Division I NCAA Tournament. But the offer was rescinded shortly thereafter. According to Palmer, rumors indicated it was because some men on the NCAA Committee disapproved.

"I'm not sure what the reason really was, but that was the rumor," she said. "That summer, I attended an NCAA camp, and the men there were a bit taken aback by my presence. I can honestly say that after being around them and getting comments like "why are you here?" or "you have plenty of games on the women's side," I wasn't surprised when they didn't give me a shot at it.

And really, that's all Palmer ever wanted—a shot, a chance to prove that she was just as good as her male counterparts, if not better, regardless of gender. "I knew I had a job to do, and I was going to do it," she said. "For me it was more about proving that I belonged on the court, that I knew what I was doing, and that I could do it well."

Follow Lyndsey D'Arcangelo on Twitter.

Ontario's police watchdog announced on Tuesday that it has charged three Toronto cops with assault causing bodily harm, but released virtually no information about what is alleged to have occurred.

The Special Investigations Unit has known for over a year about the alleged 2013 incident involving constables John Darnell, Piara Dhaliwal, and Adam Morris, but only disclosed it on Tuesday.

It blamed "limited resources" for its silence on the allegations until now.

"In the evening hours of February 13, 2013, officers arrested a 46-year-old man at his home and placed him in the back of a police cruiser," according to the SIU, which has been investigating since August 2015. "While transporting the man to the police station, there was an interaction between the man and three officers.

"The man was taken to the Humber River Regional Hospital for examination, and it was later determined that he suffered a serious injury."

Darnell, Dhaliwal, Morris are set to appear in court on November 3.

The Toronto police deferred questions to the SIU, but confirmed that all three officers have been suspended with pay.

In the past, the agency has publicly announced the launch of an investigation, but no such press release was put out last summer, when it began looking into the matter.

Spokesperson Monica Hudon said the SIU hears about hundreds of incidents every year, and given its "limited resources," it's not feasible in all cases to issue an initial news release — a matter the agency is trying to address as part of the province's independent police oversight review being done by Justice Michael Tulloch.

"At a minimum, the SIU is committed to issuing initial news releases in all death cases, whenever a firearm is used and for major vehicle collisions," Hudon said.

The SIU has been heavily criticized over the past two years for a lack of transparency. Few details about their investigations are ever released unless charges are laid, and even then, only a summary of an internal report is made public.

In 2014-2015, the agency cleared 94.5 percent of officers of any wrongdoing.

Follow Tamara Khandaker on Twitter.

All photos by the author

At 6:00 PM on a rainy Tuesday, I walked into Ground Kontrol, Portland's legendary arcade. Up the stairs, in the back room where all the pinball machines live, players were already shoulder to shoulder, practicing before the tournament would start.

The heat steaming off the machines, combined with Portland's dampness, made the place feel cramped and hive-like. Ear-piercing bells and clangs and chirps, the jukebox on full blast, players laughing, cursing, a million strobing and multicolored lights.

Portland has arguably the greatest pinball scene in the world, and tournaments like the one at Ground Kontrol host some of the best players in the game. People like Andy Cobb, current reigning Oregon State Pinball Champion; Derek "DMX" Miazga, ranked first in the state by points; Noah "Opto" Davis, ranked 162nd in the world and gaining; Greg Dunlap, who has nearly two-and-a-half decades of experience as a dedicated pinball player and volunteer with the Pinball Outreach Project, a charitable group that gets kids into the sport. There's Colin Urban, the unofficial mascot of Portland pinball, who, at the age of 11 beat the world's greatest player, Keith Elwin, at a local tournament. Now, at 14, Urban is officially the World's Best Youth Player, and 111th overall. And then there's Zoë Vrabel, the World's Women's Pinball Champion.

The Portland pinball scene began in a garage, Vrabel told me. "Seven or eight people would get together and have these teeny tiny little informal tournaments," she told me. "But I think the real reason that there's such a huge scene in Portland is because of CFF."

Crazy Flipper Fingers, or CFF for short, is Portland's largest pinball gang. It started off in 2005 as a loose group of 20 or so hard-drinking types, united by a pure, obsessive love of pinball.

"They'd buy a lot of drinks, but they'd only go to bars with machines," Vrabel told me. Bars started to realize they could capitalize on a group of heavy drinkers who liked to play pinball, and Portland started to get a lot more pinball machines.

An official Tuesday Night Tournament soon followed, registered with the International Flipper Player Association, the global governing body of all things pinball. The scene flourished from there, and today you can find tournaments every week, sometimes three or four, in dimly lit bars or private back rooms all over the city. And then there's the unranked bar leagues, pinball pub crawls, and charity events. Portland even has a women-only league, Belles and Chimes, where women can get together to talk strategy and practice on machines in a less competitive environment.

Watch: VICE traces the history of pinball, from illegal gambling game to American obsession

At Ground Kontrol, during one of the weekly Tuesday tournaments, the place was so packed by 7 PM that you'd have to yell to the person next to you to be heard over the wall of noise.

It goes like this: 40 or so players; every round, two randomly selected players would battle on each machine. Every game you lose is a strike, two strikes and you're out. Survive to the bitter end, and you win.

Related: Competitive Pinball Is the Best Thing on Twitch Right Now

The announcer barked out the matches, and Cobb, the state champ, ponied up to his first machine. Cobb looks like a second grade teacher, but stoned. Behind the machine, however, he's a fucking nightmare.

As a kid, Cobb spent most of his nights at the nickel arcades of Portland, where he first discovered pinball. Now, at 30, he's a staple of the Portland scene and a serious player. By his own estimates, he's logged around 10,000 hours on pinball. To put it another way, that's about ten hours a week, for 20 years.

Cobb's first match of the night was on Bram Stoker's Dracula, a machine so perfect and shiny, recently doted upon by one of Portland's priestly pinball techs. Amidst all the chaos and noise and heat, his opponent watching from behind his shoulder with darting, unblinking eyes, Cobb was only focused on one thing: the machine.

They battled back-and-forth for 20 minutes. His opponent played with zen-like calm, barely moving save for his index fingers, which were twitching like insects. Cobb, on the other hand, played with the spring-loaded tension of a cobra on meth.

A few machines over, Vrabel was playing with the flailing style of a Southern Baptist preacher—legs kicking out, hands flying. Between matches, I asked her what it was like to be one of the few women here.

"It's pressure," she told me. "I feel like I'm letting women down every game I lose, you know? Like there's always someone waiting there to judge me."

By 9 PM, the room smelled like sweat and beer. It was down to a handful—Cobb, Vrabel, Urban, and Dunlap among them. Everyone else had left, defeated.

Watching some of the greatest pinball players on the planet is like watching any competition between the world's best of any activity. At its heart, it's a form of art, with subtlety that could be easily lost on the average observer. But if you know what you're looking for, if you know how skillfully each player is playing, it's a mesmerizing thing.

In the end, after five hours of battling, Cobb won the tournament. His prize: $120.

No one gets rich playing pinball. Not yet, at least. And anyway, that's not what it's really about.

For the novices, it's about hope, that maybe, if the winds are blowing just right, you can beat the greats and get your name written in some small piece of history. For players like Vrabel, it's about camaraderie. For Dunlap, it's about preserving something, passing accrued knowledge on to future generations.

For Cobb, it's just about not losing. "I hate losing more than I like winning," he told me, smiling. "Although winning feels pretty fucking good, too."

As the last of the players stroll out in to the night air, I asked him if he had any advice for a new player.

"Don't let the ball go down the hole," he said, laughing. "If you can do that, you'll beat everyone."

Hangin' out with some clowns at French clown school. Photo courtesy of Robert Silverman

Almost two months ago, people down in the Carolinas began reporting sightings of creepy clowns in the woods. This made-for-the-viral-internet story went viral, of course, and it also spawned more IRL clown sightings—the vast majority of them appear to be fake or pranks, but if there was ever a year with a shakier grasp on reality than 2016, I haven't lived through it. On Monday alone, reports trickled in from all over the country of people in clown masks getting arrested for threatening behavior and trespassing, and of yet more (probably fake) threats of clown attacks.

All of this is stressing out regular, non-killer clowns, but it also highlights how little most people think about clowns and the art of clowning. The killer clown trope is overused to the point where it's turned generic, but what the general public doesn't know about actual, flesh-and-blood-and-rubber-nose clowns could fill one of those secretly massive tiny cars. Why do people like clowns in the first place? Why do clowns clown?

To get these questions answered, I called up Robert Silverman, a writer at Vocativ and a VICE Sports contributor. In a former life, he was trained at Ecole internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, a Parisian "school for physical theater and theater creation," as Silverman describes it, that includes a dose of clowning in its second year. That sort of artsy European clowning is different from what most American clowns do—think Baskets, not Bozo—but who better to ask what people don't know about clowning than someone with a degree in it?

VICE: So tell me about clowning.
Robert Silverman: Avner Eisenberg, who is a very well-known clown, is known in clowning as Avner the Eccentric. The only time I ever think he got famous beyond that specific world is he was the Jewel in the movie The Jewel of the Nile, the sequel to Romancing the Stone. He tells this story that the history of clowning is this: There's a bit where the ringmaster says, "We are going to have someone walk a tightrope," and they set up a tightrope—but the tightrope-walker isn't there. And suddenly a drunk stumbles out from the audience and sloshily says, "I can do it, I can walk the tightrope," and he's clearly soused and is falling all over himself and practically killing himself walking up the ladder, and then he tries to walk across the tightrope. There are a number of ways that you can make this funny: He can fall repeatedly and in funny ways, or he can get up on the ladder and just do a perfect tightrope walk—there's a whole range of options. According to Avner, that's the origin of the red nose: It's the drunk's red nose.

It's not just, Ha, look at this funny stumble-bum drunk, it's about failure. The red nose is a mask that becomes revelatory—you hide behind this thing where you're like, "I am going to fail for you, audience." The thing that distinguishes clowning from any other comedy is that it's a direct engagement with the audience—everything that's being done onstage is for the audience. When you fail, you fail for the audience, and when you succeed, it's like, look you succeeded, and you give it back to the audience. When the clown fails, the wonderful paradox is it's not about the agony of failure, it's about the joy in revealing one's own personal specific kind of failure. No one fails in the same way.

That's what you learned at French clown school?
Here's an exercise that I think breaks it down kind of nicely, it's one of the first ones you do: All the students sit in a room, and you leave the room, then enter the room, walk to the center of the stage, then you have to make the entire room burst out in gut-busting, tear-soaked laughter. The trick is, you are not allowed to do anything: You can't talk, you can't tell a joke, you can't do a pratfall. If you try and you start to do something, the teacher says "STOP" and sends you out and makes you start again.

So what happens is everyone comes in and you stand there and you're staring at 30 people with these stone-cold not-laughing faces and it's awful because you're failing and you want to make them laugh and you can't do anything and in that moment of paralysis—feeling awful and wishing the earth would open up under your feet and you could be anywhere else in the world maybe even law school—if you actually suffer and fail, everybody laughs. And it's not cruel or sadistic in any way. Getting to the place of nothing, where you're not actually doing anything, you're just experiencing real actual failure—it's difficult and you screw up time and time again and you keep coming back and back and back and back and trying again and again and again and you fail and you fail and you fail until you get to that real place and then everybody laughs. That's because nobody fails in the exact same way, or that feeling of desperately wanting to do something and being totally unable to do it and having no idea of what to do in order to get there is very human and recognizable. The moment where everyone laughs is so thrilling to the person onstage—and of course for the next two people to do the exercise, it's like, "Ahaha, I have the answer, I'll do what they did, I'll fail." But you can't, you can't fake failure, you can't imitate anyone else's failure.

This school sounds brutal.
At the end of the first year, you go meet Mr. LeCoq—he actually passed away a year before I got there, but you get to meet the head of the program. Everyone goes in one by one and has a 30-second meeting where he'd tell you one of three things. He will say either, "We would like to keep working with you, if you are interested please stay for another year," or, "What you need now is to actually go work and make theater, you don't need more training, you need to go work, thank you, we've enjoyed working with you," or three, "You need more training, but this is not the right training for you, find one that better suits your needs," or he'd say, "You are not an actor, go find another path in life."

And it was brutal to the people he said it to—there were about ten people in my year who got that. They were devastated, they were destroyed, but it was absolutely what they needed to hear. Those were ten people who really, really weren't actors, and that's a brutal gut punch.

Is this all separate from American clowning?
Whether you are doing a circus bit that would be recognizable at Ringling Bros. or something that's more refined, or snooty, like the kind of stuff that I am talking about—I think they are both the same. The Ringling program doesn't get as philosophical about the meaning behind it. I haven't gone through it myself, so I can't say for sure, but it's more about creating really funny bits and slapstick and that kind of thing. But at the core I definitely think they are both pointing at the same thing, in the kind of sharing-failing way.

Does anything you're talking about have to do with why people are afraid of clowns?
I could be totally talking out of my ass here, but I think that that kind of raw failure freaks some people out. That's not a criticism, that's just not their brand of entertainment.

What are the top misconceptions about clowns you think people have?
One: Not all clowns are secretly serial killers like John Wayne Gacy. Two: It's really easy to get the makeup off, you just use like a little makeup remover and a light moisturizer, and it's not going to cause skin trouble. Three: You have to be like a really good athlete to be a good clown—the truly brilliant clowns are physical geniuses. Falling down is hard, it hurts.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Photo of Emily Witt by Noah Kalina/courtesy of the author

When I met Emily Witt six years ago, I felt that touch of vertigo that comes when you realize you're in the presence of a highly sophisticated and committed mind. Witt is an alumnus of Brown, the Columbia School of Journalism, and Cambridge. So she did not strike me as the sort of person who would get high and have sex in the "orgy dome" of Burning Man with a person she'd just met. I'd made this assumption because I am, like most people, susceptible to normative narratives of what a hyper-educated, somewhat reserved young woman does and does not do. Nowhere are those narratives more fraught than in the realm of sex and dating.

In Future Sex, published this month by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, Witt interrogates both our cultural myths around feminine sexuality and the vanguards of sexual experimentation seeking to dismantle them. Her serious, radical book places her in a lineage that started with writers like the late feminist critic Ellen Willis, and, yes, Joan Didion herself. Didion didn't do acid in Haight-Ashbury, but Witt, who, for example, details attending the live filming of a hardcore pornography series, is participant as well as observer. Her progressiveness is not just of politics, but of practice. The result is this wise, honest, and necessary book. We met for coffee last week in Brooklyn to talk about Future Sex and how to approach writing about female sexuality.

VICE: Writing by women about sex is so often belittled, or at least marketed in a circumscribed way—as purely confessional or funny. Were you aware of that when you began working on the book?
Emily Witt: I felt that there was this register in which a lot of writing about women's sex happens that wasn't satisfying to me. It had this false enthusiasm. For example, the way porn is written about. Either it's like, "No one's ever watched this thing!" or it's, "We all watch porn all the time and nobody's ever anxious about it, we're just so cool and down with it!" I saw Thy Neighbor's Wife by Gay Talese as an example of how to write about sex in a more journalistic, thorough, reported way—as cultural history. So no, I never worried about seeming like I was writing something frivolous, or that I would be treated as frivolous.

But in the chapter on live webcams, you've cut a line from the original essay on Medium in which you mention worrying about the "married, middle-aged male editors who are in charge at most of the magazines I want to write for" and what they might think if you were to perform. You wrote: "Joan Didion would never have sex-cammed; she went to San Francisco in 1968 and didn't even do acid."
Yeah, I think she could have gone there if she wanted to. It would have been transgressive and she wouldn't have been put in jail, and people would have still read her because she's just a better writer than everyone else.

Right. Do you know supposedly she considered "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" a failure? She felt like she hadn't got the story. Maybe she would have felt differently had she done acid!
That's insane—it's not a failure. I think there's an idea of what constitutes an authoritative person or leader, and it's not the voice of a polyamorous-sex-party attendee. But we're questioning that neutral voice at a lot of different levels right now—at the level of race, and at the level of sexuality and gender. Nobody has to give me permission to write about stuff, though, and I get to define what "a serious person" is. I had more trepidation about writing in the first person than I did about writing about sex.

"I think there's an idea of what constitutes an authoritative person or leader and it's not the voice of a polyamorous sex party attendee."

The first person is so interesting in this book. When dealing with something like Public Disgrace, an online porn series in which women willingly submit to extreme sex in front of a crowd, how did you negotiate between you as dispassionate observer and you as an emotional, sexual being?
My editor and I talked about that 70s New Journalism, "on-a-mission" voice, which she thought was dated. I don't know if I agree with that, but I know when I tried to write that way it didn't work. When I wrote about people and didn't put myself in there, it was sterile and felt artificial. The other thing was that I was just embarrassed to talk about myself. I thought of myself as a very conventional person with conventional desires about relationships, and so journalism for me was just an alibi, a way I could look at this stuff while telling myself, Oh, I'm not that kind of person. Until suddenly it was clear that I was scared to let go some idea of myself—and scared of judgment. It was really easy for me as a straight white person to not see the mythologies by which I was living and recognize that they weren't rooted in any empirical reality. So a big part of the book was figuring out what those stories were and then what to cling to and what to discard. It took me successive drafts to talk about certain things in my life. I describe watching porn, and that was a very late addition. Once I wrote it, it wasn't hard, but I'd had this idea of someone in a bar quoting a line from the book and everybody laughing.

Speaking of laughing: I read Future Sex described somewhere as "hilarious," and I'm going to sound like I'm insulting you when I say I couldn't disagree with that adjective more. Humane and humorous yes, but no way is this book "hilarious."
A friend once said a foundational part of my writing is I just take everything a little too seriously. So if somebody says "hilarious," I think, Wait, what? My whole problem in life is being way too earnest and serious about things that maybe don't require that level of seriousness. When I read something that is actually hilarious about sex, I'm like, "Oh God, I'm doing this all wrong—I'm trying to be so professorial or philosophical about this thing that actually is just funny and animalistic and whatever."

"Having a lot of respect for it, and having learned a lot about does not make it less scary or easier to undertake. You're always navigating between your ideals that you're trying to live by and what life offers up to you."

You've talked about the frustrations of trying to find satisfying representations of female sexuality in fiction. Why were you looking primarily in fiction?
Like you, I'm someone for whom novels are the instruction manual for how to live and process our emotions—it's where we find resonance with something greater than ourselves. I was always looking for that and found it in Doris Lessing, but the canon of women writing openly about sex is small. It just is. I was looking in nonfiction, too—Simone de Beauvoir was so important to me in writing this book. She was interested in trying to live this original life in which she decided the rules she was going to live by based on experience and testing things. But yeah: You write the book that you can't find for yourself.

You're coming to these radical sexual practices and ideologies with hopeful credulousness, while simultaneously interrogating them rigorously. Is that an exhausting mode to commit to?
Everybody has been asking me about the extent to which I've tried to now pursue an original life and be a practitioner of free love. I want to pursue those ideals, but sometimes I'm not sure I have the stamina or self-confidence; I'm scared of everything. The part of me that wants to be obedient is still very active in me. Having a lot of respect for it, and having learned a lot about does not make it less scary or easier to undertake. You're always navigating between your ideals that you're trying to live by and what life offers up to you.

Right, and as you say in the book, declaring yourself something doesn't translate to it becoming real.
Yeah, whether it's wanting to get married or wanting to live in a sex commune. The thing about trying new things and creating new language is that most of it is not going to work out. But some of it is going to work and be repeated and catch on in a wider way. We had this idea about 60s idealism in the 70s and 80s that it had just been a disaster, and we weren't going to mess with the family.

things could be attempted is really incredible. When I first started going to , I would talk to my friends about it in a certain tone of voice—"Oh, they're so crazy, they're so weird." And then I started to feel kind of disgusted with myself because what they were doing was an earnest experiment about how to live better. I started to see these things as genuine possibilities of how to live your life.

I imagine that in previous decades, pre-1990s say, it was easier to have a sense of where our models of sexuality came from and what they were because life was more institutionalized, less heterodox. So how did you ascertain where our sexual narratives might be coming from?
Well, for me, it was an embarrassing realization that they were probably coming from the New York Times. I mean, I don't watch a lot of TV, but I knew I didn't like Girls for really specific reasons.

What were they?
I just found it really conservative. It didn't feel liberating to me, being told that the only way to feel sexually safe and adjusted or happy is to find the right boyfriend. Or this Amy Schumer–type idea that we have no agency, that any form of sexual expression is an expression of false consciousness and that there's no way for you to be a sexual being because you're just trying to please this sovereign subject. So I really wanted to write my way out of that.

VICE Meets Norwegian literary superstar Karl Ove Knausgaard:

In the book, you describe being on drugs in vivid detail, but you don't describe actually having sex. Why one bodily experience and not the other?
Yeah, there was nothing scary about writing about drugs except for my parents were going to read it. In the Burning Man chapter, I go to the orgy dome, and I did have sex with that man, but we just did the kind of movie cut, to the train arriving in the station, or like, camera pan away to the fireplace. It was just my own embarrassment that was the obstacle.

Do you suspect men will be reluctant to write about the book?
No. Are men reluctant to write about anything, ever? I mean, first of all, I wish that there was a similar book about men. There's much more consensus about what being a sexually accomplished man is, but I feel like most of the men in my life are just as confused as the women.

A 30-year-old friend of mine was talking recently about having sex with guys in their early 20s and how they were all very sexually skilled but simultaneously terrified of intimacy.
The intimacy thing is real—many people have experienced the disappointment of sex without kindness or affection or maybe even just breakfast—but I think it's coming out of a moment of confusion as we're changing from one paradigm to another: The manners and the ethics and the standardized rituals haven't been worked out. You can have a really intimate time with casual sex and actually get to know somebody. When you're 21, you don't know how to act. So your friend's partners were probably acting out a part they thought they needed to be playing. They'll figure it out at some point, because they'll fall in love. There's nothing new, all that changes is the language and the story.

Follow Hermione Hoby on Twitter.

Future Sex by Emily Witt is available in bookstores and online from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

If Solange Knowles wears a brand, you know she is genuinely a fan of the work. The artist has long been a champion of forward-thinking, but perhaps lesser-known, designers. And that aesthetic is on full display in the first visuals for her new album, A Seat at the Table.

With help from her stylist, Shiona Turini, the singer-songwriter corralled a band of her favorite emerging designers to outfit some of the scenes in the "Cranes in the Sky" and "Don't Touch My Hair" music videos (that is, when she or her mother, Tina Knowles, weren't creating their own looks). But these weren't just garments she thought would look great on film—these were designers she's had a history of repping, of shouting out on social media, and of coveting, waiting for the perfect moment to unveil a standout piece like Nadine Goepfert's crumpled pink coat.

A Seat at the Table is a deeply personal album. You can feel Solange's fingerprints in every note and lyric. Similarly, every fashion piece was also an intentional choice that reflects the meditative mood of black pride and the celebration of melanins popping. Solange directed the videos for "Cranes in the Sky" and "Don't Touch My Hair" with her husband, music-video director Alan Ferguson, to reveal images of black royalty. With A Seat at the Table, Solange has created an artistic reference point that will forever reflect what it meant to be black in 2016—the pains and the joys.

I spoke to artistic director Carlota Guerrero, who worked closely with Solange and tapped into her own design background to create unique fashion looks on location, as well as a few of the designers, from an eco-friendly upstart to a recent Central Saint Martins grad, to learn how it feels to take a seat at this table.

Carlota Guerrero, Artistic Director (Barcelona)

Carlota Guerrero (left), image courtesy of the artist. Screenshot (right) via YouTube

I've always admired Solange's work, but she discovered mine on Instagram. Her manager asked me to join her last June to art direct a performance at the Tate Modern. We had a beautiful creative connection and kept working together.

Solange and her amazing stylist had a very strong view for both videos. We worked together on every scene. We talked a lot about color, and we were very aware of having coherence everywhere. I was more involved in all of the experimental looks. Solange and I created together. The plant earrings Solange wears are from an amazing project on ephemeral Mediterranean jewelry called Keef Palas.

We also created the pink paper dress, the silver foil one, and the one with pink plastic bags, which was inspired by Blanca Miró Skoudy and Claire O'Keefe. Solange and I wanted to reinterpret Issey Miyake's connected dress , so we asked Miss Tina Knowles and Tim White (her amazing tailor) to help us, and they created this purple one in literally two days—we couldn't believe it! Same story for the fringed golden jacket. And Solange did the purple yarn one herself the day after I left.

We spent the whole month of August working together, traveling from New Orleans to New Mexico in a van, shooting every day with very little rest and the funniest situations. My favorite location was White Sands in New Mexico.

I admired Shiona and Solange's work with styling a lot. They had chosen the most amazing pieces from so many different designers. Some of them were so experimental, they just looked like sculptures. I'm a bit more hippie in this area, and I always wanted to have Solange barefoot and almost naked with a random piece of fabric or a plant or a paper or glitter. But I think we managed to balance the three visions very well. They would let me do a look with paper, but then add some beautiful Maryam Nassir Zadeh shoes, so everybody was happy.

Nadine Goepfert, Designer (Berlin)

Nadine Goepfert (left), image courtesy of the designer. Solange (right) in Goepfert's design. Image courtesy of Carlota Guerrero

Shiona contacted me in April, telling me that Solange would love to wear the memory foam pullover for the Met Museum Ball. Usually my work is shown in the context of exhibitions or galleries. That sweater weighs around five kilos . So it looks very amazing when it's worn, but it's not very comfortable to wear. It's more a conceptual piece. But Shiona said that's probably the reason why Solange fell in love with it.

I couldn't really see Solange wearing this heavy piece on the red carpet. contacted me again in August and asked if I could lend her the sweater—but she didn't talk about any music video. She was only talking about shooting for her new album, so I was also quite surprised when I saw it in "Cranes in the Sky."

I have the feeling she really understood what it is about. For her, it's also an art piece and a special piece, and not just a costume. And she also did some of the costuming herself, and I really like that. She's not too shy to create something in that way.

The pullover is part of my collection, called The Garments May Vary. It's a collection of garments and textiles that change their form, structure, or volume. This project I made to investigate the daily usage of apparel and the movements of the person wearing it. Each of the materials that I used for the collection is to highlight a different form of change. For example, the memory foam, if you squeeze it, it will change its form, and it will slowly get back into its original state.

If you give your garments to stylists, you're often worried if it will be used in a nice way, or maybe you're disappointed at the end, because it's really not the way you want to see your work displayed or shown. But when I saw Solange, I was like, Nobody else could have worn this piece like that.

Jaimee McKenna, Designer (London)

Jaimee McKenna (left), image courtesy of the designer. Solange (right) in McKenna's designs. Screenshot via YouTube

Shiona her stylist got in contact with me about shooting for a video. I was in the dark made from lamb's wool. They're all knitted, ribbed jumpers with that knitted, felted lamb's wool that's been pleated. They are really heavy. They kind of bounce just by holding them. They were from my M.A. collection from Central Saint Martins, so they were kind of hanging out in my studio.

When I first saw "Don't Touch My Hair," I thought it was incredible, the visuals. Both of the videos are so sick. I was just like, This is everything. It was nice to see my blue outfits there, too, even though the other looks are incredible.

I've just had A Seat at the Table on while I've been knitting to my new collection. It's a good one to jam to, a good one to work to.

Jaclyn Hodes, Designer of AwaveAwake (Los Angeles)

I was told Solange discovered AwaveAwake herself. I don't know how. I did sell my first two collections at Opening Ceremony. I know that she's connected to Carol Lim and Humberto Leon at Opening Ceremony, through Kenzo. Solange asked us for a bunch of dresses in certain shades of color for her 30th birthday celebration. She and all her friends were wearing the pieces. And then she reached out again when they were doing the video. It was really of no surprise to me, because I was already noticing Solange is really into monochromatism. She really likes color blocking, and that's part of our collection. We only use 100 percent natural-color plant dyes, so we don't do patterns. We just stick with this changing color palette every season.

I was so psyched . In a way, I've always envisioned Solange wearing AwaveAwake. She's the ideal customer. She's an AwaveAwake woman: super smart, fashion-aware, but in a way where she's referencing things very deeply and very subtly. The aesthetic is informing her message and vice versa. I got asked the question, "Does Solange know AwaveAwake is eco-conscious and sustainable?" And it's like further proving the point that it probably resonates with her because it is, but she's not trying to scream anything. She's just really smooth about it in all that she does.

Also, movement's really important to me. I have a dance background. The clothes are silk, and they're long dresses, so there could be, like, a preciousness, but for me there's not. They're really pieces that you can move and dance with, and that was always something I keep in mind. And her moves were so good throughout the whole thing, from when she was choreographed to when she was freestyling, just moving naturally.

For her to not just have gone to the big designers, but for her to just like what she likes, to be authentic—that's what's so amazing. As a young designer, you're competing, with, in a way, Chanel and name brands, in terms of getting attention or getting picked up. So when someone picks you up and notices you and chooses you to create such a powerful image, then you know you're doing something right.

James Flemons, Designer of PHLEMUNS (Los Angeles)

James Flemons (left), image courtesy of the designer. Solange (right) in Flemons's design. Screenshot via YouTube

Solange has worn some of my stuff a few times ,and I did a collaboration with Saint Heron for their store. Our history kind of goes back a few years. I styled the shoot for one of her artists, Moses Sumney, in 2014. The first time she wore one of my pieces was close to a year ago. There's a dress from my spring collection, that every time I posted a photo on my Instagram—we weren't as close as we've become now, she wasn't really following me then—but she kept coming across this one dress, and every time, she would be like, "Oh my gosh, I love this dress, I need it now." I'm like, "You know if you want something, I'll give it to you? I love you, you're amazing." I did the red bralettes and red shorts. I made 30 pieces total. I made them custom. Shiona sent me three photos of pieces that Solange was really interested in, and they kind of left it up to me to decide what the final pieces would be. I made the same bralette in the video, but out of iridescent silk that turns blue or purple depending on how it is in the sun, for my spring collection. So I did that in the red they requested, without the grommets on the bottom. The shorts that are in the video, in my collection they have big cargo pockets, so they just requested those without the pockets.

The sets are gabardine. The pieces they initially sent photos of, one of them was in denim and one was in silk, but they more specifically were looking for it in a red. So I kind of got to choose what fabric it was for the video. I was looking for denim because that's usually what I work with, but it was easier to find a red gabardine, which kind of mimics the weight and weave of denim.

When they reached out to me in August, that was the first bit of information that I had known about it. And they just said they were working on videos for the upcoming album and that was it. I had no idea the impact of how amazing and impactful was and how beautiful the videos were going to come out.

I was really blown away by everything. It's nothing like anything that's been out in a really long time. It's so personal and so in tune with what's happening in the world and in the black community. I think it's something that'll be marked down in history.

Follow Amirah Mercer on Twitter.

Some spy agency. We were able to find where they live. Photo via CP

The Canadian spy agency's first-ever tweet in mid-July—a resounding success with over a thousand retweets and 1,400 likes—was one of many ideas thrown around by staff before they landed on, "Yes, we're on Twitter. Now it's your turn to follow us."

On an all new episode of Black Market: Dispatches, we talk to members of Vietnam's transgender community about turning to illegal hormones and cosmetic surgery while being shunned and discriminated against.

Black Market: Dispatches airs Tuesdays at 10 PM ET/PT on VICELAND.

Uli Horner spreads the cream and jam onto his scone, sliced almost too perfectly in half, with the utmost precision. The layers are even, with nary the smallest square millimeter of the scone left untouched by the accompaniments. He takes a sip from a glass of classic Coke, a bite, and lets his modesty unfurl with an endearing sincerity.

"I know that there are people out there who have maxed the game out at 999,999. People claim they've done it—and I believe them. But perhaps they paused, and they've just not bothered to film themselves. You have to film your effort for any record to stand. So I don't actually feel like I'm the best out there, and there are definitely at least two people who could beat my record. They can tap things very quickly."

Horner's game of choice, the game that he is the official world record holder in, is Tetris—specifically 1989's Tetris for the Game Boy, a.k.a. the Tetris, the one version of the game that ever really meant anything to Europeans. The German-born Horner's 441 lines and points tally of 748,757 puts him at the top of the global Twin Galaxies standings. (Twin Galaxies, founded in 1981, being the organization that tracks such achievements.) In 6th place, with 507,110 points, is Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The guy in second, New York artist Rutherford Chang, is more than 130,000 points behind Horner. And yet, sitting in a small London cafe, just a short walk from both his place of work and the VICE office, the official number one in the world maintains that he's absolutely not the best out there.

"In America, it's the NES version that's really big, and they rather run the whole Tetris scene. Nobody really plays the Game Boy one, so I'm benefitting from not having so much competition. And I'd never tell anyone playing another version of Tetris that I'm better than them. Online, there's Tetris Friends, and I play that with a nice mechanical keyboard. I'm quite OK at that. But if you want to see something amazing, watch some of the Japanese people who play the arcade version of Tetris. That's the proper arcade stuff, made by Arika. Look on YouTube for TGM, Tetris: The Grand Master, and that is incredible. That is beyond what a human being should be able to do. That skill is beyond anything I'm close to."

An advertisement for the Game Boy, and 'Tetris,' from 1989

As amazing as some players' dexterity is, fingers flicking at hyper-speed in comparison to the slower Game Boy version of the world's biggest-selling multi-format game of all time, there's a unique trait to the portable favorite that makes it the hardest to perfect.

"Game Boy Tetris is horrible in a way," Uli says, "because you get genuinely random pieces. It's truly random—it's always a one in seven chance, so you can always end up with horrible combinations that just kill you. All the other versions of Tetris have something readable in there—allegedly, it's easier to consistently play well on other versions. So even I will mess up games on the Game Boy version, which is really frustrating, because you're beating the bell curve—you have to play a thousand times to get a few nice games. Some of the other versions, you can approach them with tactics that will always work."

"I read about someone getting 400,000 points, and that was the European record. I could do 500,000 at that point—so that's how I knew I was good."

Like many of us who were into video games in the early 1990s, Uli coveted a Game Boy—but as someone who was in his later teenage years, he actually felt a little embarrassed to be seen with Nintendo's multi-million-selling handheld. "It could be seen as a child's toy," he says. "But I bought one, and didn't tell anyone, when I was just finishing school, during my final year. I spent that year just playing on the Game Boy. For the whole of 1993, I just played Tetris. I bought, probably, almost a hundred other games for it, over the years, but I'm sure that I didn't touch 80 percent of those, even once. Because Tetris is just nicer—I do really, really like it.

"I'd been playing a lot, and it felt like I'd got quite good," he continues. "And for some reason our local newspaper, in a place a bit south of Stuttgart, in Reutlingen, they had an article on a day when there was no news about a guy who'd broken one of the records for Tetris, because he'd gone into the newspaper's offices when his battery was running out. He eventually got 400,000 points, and that was the European record. And I could do 500,000 at that point—so that's how I knew I was good."

Article continues after the video below

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

Today, elite gamers can earn amazing rewards for their prowess with a mouse and keys—the rise of eSports shows no signs of stalling just yet. Uli's dabbled with competitive gaming from a spectator's perspective before—he used to watch StarCraft, adding, "That was very entertaining with the right guys playing—a lot of the time it's more about them, and their personalities, than the games themselves." He's totally onboard with young players taking advantage of their skills while they can—"if someone is good enough to play video games for five years and then maybe not have to work too much for the rest of their life, why not?"—but there are no comparable perks to being an amazing Tetris player.

"There were always rumors in the 1990s, that there was this magical tournament in Japan, and you get a Game Boy and every single game that's ever been released. But of course it wasn't true.

"I've bought a GoPro now—I previously taped an iPhone to a vase to record myself."

"When you tell people that you're the best at a game like this, they assume that must benefit you in some way. But there's no money in this—and you have to buy these things (the Game Boy), although they're quite cheap. There must still be unused ones in cupboards—I have to wait for a mother to clean out her son's old room." He pulls out an original model from his bag: "This one is from a specialist German trader, who rates them according to how good they are, and this is the highest grade. It cost me £80 . I still have the Game Boy I first broke a record with, but I can't use it anymore.

"The big challenge nowadays," he continues, "is to find a Game Boy with good enough buttons to go for a record. This one is refurbished, I think, and the buttons are quite stiff, but to be honest, I've never found an original Game Boy that's really good enough—I set my record on a Pocket model. The buttons on the first Game Boy are by far the nicest, but they're usually so worn out these days."

Uli Horner, photographed by Giulio Antonutto

Uli might be the world record holder, 100 percent verified, at Tetris where it—let's be honest now—really matters. But his recorded best is far from the most he's ever scored.

"I got 889,000 points at one point, which is the best I've ever been," he tells me. "That was before I knew anything about recording my attempts, to send away to Twin Galaxies. So the Twin Galaxies score, which I set in 2011, is the official record, but it's lower than the best I've got. Filming yourself as you set the score means that you can't cheat. You're not allowed to pause, to take a break—you have to set your score in a single run.

"So, you turn the game up to level nine at the beginning, because points are awarded proportionally to the difficulty—the higher, the more you get. It goes up to level 20, and that's the ceiling, that's from 200 lines. So as soon as you've made 200 lines, you're playing the game at its toughest. And at that stage, any mistake just kills you. At that point, my brain is constantly putting the preview in the field, so I'm not even consciously aware of what's happening on the field. It sounds sophisticated, but if you play 10,000 games of Tetris, you'd be able to do it, too. I had a friend who I quite quickly taught to reach 400,000 points. It's not that hard—it's just seven pieces, to arrange in a field. I could probably sit here and get 500,000 while talking to you. That's about my average."

He doesn't start a game as we chat—although he does constantly fiddle with the Game Boy, prying off the battery cover and replacing it. "They're always so loose," he rightly observes. "I've never lost one, though." The desire to do better, to beat his own high score, still surfaces from time to time—but when Uli decides to go for it, he has a system that he sticks to.

"It's usually when I'm between jobs that I get the urge to go for it. I'll take a week off, and I'll devote some of each day to the record. That's just an hour or two every day—I can't do it any longer. I think the first time I broke the record, I started playing on a Saturday and broke it on the Sunday—but after that it was Tuesday, and the next time it was Wednesday. So it can take a while to get going. I don't actively play every day anymore—I've stopped playing on the bus, because what if I broke the record there? Although, the last time my wife and I took a holiday, to Scotland for a week, I took a Game Boy and didn't play it once—it was just nicer to look out of the window.

"I really love that you always lose. The game will only end when you lose. Your best is only ever good enough to lose. How great is that?"

"But I will keep trying. I've bought a GoPro now—I previously taped an iPhone to a vase to record myself. My records have always been set in a way that's not comfortable. Not having that 999,999 score does bug me, and I will keep trying for that. But then I sometimes also think, I have the record, I have my name in the gamer's edition of the Guinness World Records, and maybe that's enough.

"I'll tell you what I really love about the game, though—that you always lose. The game will only end when you lose. Your best is only ever good enough to lose. How great is that? In other games, you shoot everyone and you win. Nobody really wins at Tetris, ever."

We leave the cafe and go our separate ways. Nobody will stop Uli on the street to ask for an autograph, a photo, or even a little advice on how to be the best at the most popular version of what is among the most famous video games in the world. But he walks away as an undisputed champion, a button-bashing king of a monochromatic kingdom. And it's likely he'll reign for no little while yet.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Illustration by Gavin Spence

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Photo by Michael Kovac/WireImage

If we wanted to know about Donald Trump's propensity for lying about money, all we had to do was take a look at the edits he made to his Comedy Central Roast jokes.

According to the Huffington Post, the former business mogul made edits to the drafts of the show's proposed jokes in order to exaggerate his wealth. He reportedly edited one joke about his fake "25,000 square-foot penthouse atop solid-gold space station" to 50,000 square feet. He also wanted to change the dollar amount to "billion" in his line: "I'm sorry, I must go now and make a million dollars somewhere else."

Trump also wrote a few jokes of his own and made edits in the margins of the drafts. "Their all losers and I like associating with loser because it makes me feel even better about myself," one edit reads, showing off both a first grader's sense of humor and grammar ability.

The released edits follow a list of Trump's suggested joke topics that longtime Roast writer Aaron Lee released back in August. While Trump's kids, hair, and "having sex with models" were all fair game for the roast, he was reportedly not cool with jabs about his finances or multiple bankruptcies.

"It's always interesting to learn what is 'sacred' for a celebrity," Lee wrote.

Read: Angry Old Men: A Brief History of Demagogues

Scott Campbell (Photo: Hennessy)

At this year's Frieze art fair, renowned tattooist Scott Campbell decided to tattoo people for free. The only catch: the tattoo had to be a surprise. For his "Whole Glory" project, six lucky people a day got to put their arm through a hole and let Scott go wild on their skin.

The project picked up a load of media attention here, but Scott's better known elsewhere for tattooing everyone from A-list celebrities to Mexican prisoners; from when he took his "Whole Glory" project to other cities; and, among cognac fans, for designing the label art for a limited run of Hennessy bottles.

I met up with him at East London's Sang Bleu tattoo studio to talk about what it was like to tattoo in a prison, how you go about giving people surprise tattoos and the importance of shitty tats.

People in London taking part in the "Whole Glory" project

VICE: Here's something I've always wanted to ask a tattoo artist: what do you think about non-permanent tattoo ink?
Scott Campbell: I'll believe it when I see it. I feel like every few years you see some article about something coming out related to temporary tattooing, and I've never seen a product that was actually anywhere near viable.

There's part of me that wants to be bitter and say, like, "Well, that doesn't count because the commitment is the thing," but it's just a different thing. Permanent tattoos are powerful because of their permanence, and I think it's healthy to have old outdated tattoos. We all make mistakes in life, and none of us can go back and change the past, but when you have the past tattooed on you it kind of takes away the luxury of denial. I can't pretend I was anybody but who I have been, because I have it written all over me.

Is there a difference between tattooing prisoners in a Mexican jail and celebrities in New York?
I've tattooed bikers who murder for a living and Jennifer Aniston, but I definitely see a common thread through all of them – they're just people, trying to do the best they can. You definitely see more similarities than differences.

How did the prison tattoo project start?
It was a time where all these reality TV shows were cropping up about tattooing, and it was becoming a part of pop culture. I was trying to deal with that, because tattooing is something that I have loved my whole life and all of a sudden the whole world was running away with it. I wanted to reconnect and get back in touch with it.

In prisons, tattoos have a powerful and visceral purpose. Prisons are a place where everyone's been given a uniform and a number, and it's just homogenised. Tattooing is the only medium they have to distinguish themselves from the people around them. So it felt really good to be part of a tattooing process that had a genuine purpose, outside of just aesthetics.

There's clearly a resourcefulness when it comes to the materials in prison, as you weren't allowed machines – did you feel that in regards to the designs you were tattooing as well?
A lot of the subject matter had to do with Santa Muerte, the patron saint of criminals. A lot of them were also for the families on the outside. I feel like there was a real attempt from people to have reminders that the world inside those walls wasn't the whole world – that there was warmth outside of there that they were quite desperate not to forget about. It's easy to get lost in a place like that.

You tattooed a bunch of soldiers on the frontline in Afghanistan too. How was that?
It was really interesting. I'm the son of a draft dodger – my parents did not believe in war, and I realised when I was on the plane over there that I didn't even know why any of these people were even in Afghanistan. I don't know why they're fighting. I went there interested in the emotional environment and what people were going through. It was similar to prisons in the sense that a lot of the tattoos I did were either camaraderie tattoos – tattoos they got with other soldiers to reinforce solidarity – or tattoos that connected them with home.

Both going to prison and to the army, were there any expectations you had? Did they correspond with the reality?
If there's anything I've learned in tattooing it's not to judge. Don't even bother having expectations because they're going to be wrong. I think I was surprised in Afghanistan at how much I connected with people, because that culture was so different from my world. I am less often surprised by other people and more often surprised by myself.

I think the prisoners were very happy for an outsider to take an interest in them, because they're basically treated like animals most of the time, so for someone to come in and look at them as a person is really refreshing. Every prison has their resident tattoo artist, and that was the first place they took me – saying, "This is our tattoo artist; he does all of our work in this area of the prison." So we swapped notes.

Did you keep in touch with them?
A bit; we've become pen-pals. There were two main guys who took me around there; about two years later one of them was stabbed and killed in the prison and the other one ended up killing a couple of people and being transferred to a different prison, and I lost touch. Prison is not a very stable life.

At Frieze you were giving people surprise tattoos through a hole in the wall. What attracts you to working with limitations?
The "Whole Glory" project came about because I do a lot of painting and sculpture. Obviously working on a canvas I have freedom – in tattooing, your canvas has an opinion, and you need your canvas's permission to do stuff. So this was a way of realising my fantasy: 'What if I could tattoo with the same freedom that I can paint on a canvas?'

It's been such a cool experiment. It started off just out of curiosity, but I feel like I've learnt so much from it about human nature in general. At first I thought the wall would take pressure off of me, but it actually put a lot more pressure on me – to make it sincere.

In New York I tattooed about 20 to 25 people, and at the end of it I threw a dinner and invited everyone to have dinner so I could meet them. It was so funny because almost every single one of them pulled me to the side and said, "Hey man – I just wanna say thanks, because obviously I got the best one." Everyone was saying, "Man, this is so me!" So it felt like that thing when people read a horoscope and think, 'This is me!' It's like... were you that before you read it or are you that now because you read it?

Is there such a thing as bad tattoos?
I love stick 'n' poke tattoos and the fact that they're relevant now and are becoming a way for people to communicate. A lot of tattoo artists frown upon it because whatever, but I think it's awesome. It really captures the spontaneity and sincerity that I think makes tattoos powerful. It gives anyone the ability to tattoo – you don't need equipment.

Get shitty tattoos – sincere tattoos. The aesthetic doesn't matter. People who are getting their first tattoo, their biggest mistake is that they put too much pressure on it. They feel like they need to summarise their whole identity in one symbol. The tattoos that people like are the ones that are sincere. If you look down and you regret a tattoo you got ten years ago, it's likely you just regret being the person you were ten years ago. Don't blame the tattoo.

Thanks, Scott.

@bijubelinky

More on VICE:

People with Face Tattoos Explain Their Ink

Photographing People While They Get a Tattoo

I Had a Face Tattoo for a Week

A still from "Keep It Halal," an animated short about acceptance in the Muslim community. Photo via Muslims for Progressive Values

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This past June, after Omar Mateen, a Muslim man, gunned down 49 patrons of Orlando's Pulse gay nightclub, leaders of prominent American Muslim organizations issued a statement unequivocally condemning the attack. They declared their commitment to "our shared humanity," despite "differences in faith or lifestyle," and the "cherished political right" of Americans to "pursue happiness as each one sees fit."

Others went beyond such qualified language: "For many years, members of LBGTQI community have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Muslim community against any acts of hate crimes, Islamophobia, marginalization and discrimination," wrote Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations. "Today we stand with them shoulder-to-shoulder Homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia are interconnected systems of oppression, and we cannot dismantle one without dismantling the other."

Homophobia is widespread within many Muslim communities; Muslim LGBTQ activists, who have struggled for years to bring attention to the issue, were encouraged by the support expressed after Pulse, hoping the tragedy might spark an increased commitment to addressing the struggles of queer Muslims. Ani Zonneveld, founder of Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV), a pioneering human rights organization in the fight for LGBTQ Muslim rights, called the shooting "a moment for the traditional Muslim communities to put their money where their mouth is." With American Muslims supporting LGBTQ rights in increasing numbers—a 2014 Pew Research poll found that 45 percent of American Muslims accept homosexuality, up 7 percent since 2007, and 42 percent support gay marriage—the time seemed ripe for change.

This July, MPV launched the No to Homophobia campaign, calling on prominent imams and other representatives of faith-based institutions, such as schools, mosques, and universities, to "pledge to eradicate all homophobic teachings in my community and in the religious institutions I am affiliated with, and affirm the dignity of LGBT individuals."

But the outcome was underwhelming. Zonneveld told me, "We wrote to Hamza Yusuf"—a co-founder of the prominent Muslim liberal arts college Zaytuna College—"and several prominent imams directly and didn't get a response. We know that they opened it; one or two opened it several times. The only ones who have responded to our emails have been chaplains and policy makers."

I also reached out to a cross-section of American Muslim leaders, including Yusuf and leaders of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), to learn about efforts to eradicate homophobia and actively address the struggles of queer Muslims in Pulse's wake.

A rep for Yusuf said he was unavailable to comment. Safir Ahmed, Zaytuna College's director of publications and media relations, referred me to Yusuf's June 15 CNN interview, in which he stated that "an active homosexual lifestyle" would never be compatible with the traditions or scriptures of Islam, though he himself was sympathetic to the struggles of individual queer Muslims and didn't judge their choices.

Wilfredo Ruiz, CAIR-Florida's media facilitator, assured me that CAIR has been "engaging with LGBT civil rights leaders for years, before Orlando." Neither Ahmed nor Ruiz could comment on specific efforts to actively dispel homophobia, but Ruiz reiterated CAIR's commitment as a civil rights organization to supporting human rights writ large. ISNA did not respond to requests for comment.

It's a parade of responses Zonneveld is all too familiar with. "I think it's really up to the people themselves to insist on change and to keep calling these religious leaders out," she said with some frustration.

But writer and religious scholar Reza Aslan said that it's a mistake to look to theology and religious authorities to lead on LGBTQ rights.

"The problem is that this kind of discrimination is baked into the scripture," he said, citing scriptural condemnations of homosexuality in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. "Muslims aren't different than other religious communities who condemn and then unfortunately have to deal with the consequences of their rhetoric."

Though there are verses in the Qur'an that acknowledge sexualities other than heterosexuality—MPV employs them in its work—Aslan said such arguments require the belief that scripture is "living and breathing, reinterpreted every generation" and not an ahistorical document "without context, fixed in place for all time." Most Muslims see it as the latter and look askance at modern interpretations that reverse centuries of established tradition. The Qur'an, after all, is by definition is the holy word of God, directly transmitted to the Prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, untouched by human corruption.

Aslan said, "If we want to transform the way our religious leaders and houses of worship think and talk about , it requires that gays and lesbians express themselves spiritually. An individual who manages to express a deep-seated Muslim spirituality at one with his queer nature is much more effective at transforming the way that people of faith think about gender and sexuality than any theological or scriptural argument could be."

Such reconciliation can be a tall order for queer Muslims, many of whom have internalized feelings of self-hatred from Islamic teachings that homophobia is a grave sin. Aslan holds up Imam Daayiee Abdullah, the first openly gay American imam, as an example—but he is the rare exception to the rule.

Imam Daayiee shrugs off the lack of follow-up from CAIR and other organizations in the months following Orlando—"it's been crickets," he said—and told me that his attention is focused on the MECCA Institute, a progressive online Islamic seminary he has founded, scheduled to open fall of 2017.

"I'm committed to a different framework, a different way of doing things, with different components," Daayiee said. "If you're looking for leadership in the past, you're not going to find it. It has to be alive today."

That vision is being brought to life by the MECCA Institute, Muslims for Progressive Values, the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity, and others among a new generation of organizations and activists building a more inclusive Islamic community, one with its own institutions, power structures, and places of worship.

Jerin Arifa, a feminist activist and community organizer, has worked to bring together progressive members of the Islamic community who have been "stonewalled" on many occasions by the "Muslim mosque patriarchy.

"It's our responsibility to make sure that there are more organizations with more viewpoints," she said. "I refuse to go to any mosque or organization that espouses hate. Let's support organizations that are not scared to talk about these things publicly—we need to call out people for their homophobia, but in a nonviolent, teachable-moment kind of way."

Shahirah Majumdar is a writer living in Chicago.

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

John Podesta, chair of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, delivers a speech on the first day of the Democratic National Convention. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

US News

Clinton Advisor Links Trump Campaign to Russian Hacks
Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta, says the FBI is investigating Russia's possible role in hacking thousands of his own personal emails, and claims Donald Trump's campaign may have been aware of the hack ahead of time. Podesta concedes the evidence is "circumstantia," and those close to Trump denied it. US intelligence officials said last week they believe the hackers of Democratic Party data are working for Russian intelligence.—AP

Hurricane Matthew US Death Toll Rises to 35
Hurricane Matthew has been blamed for 35 deaths in the US, after North Carolina officials reported 17 casualties in the flood-hit state. A state trooper fatally shot a man during a high-water rescue; North Carolina governor Pat McCrory said the incident was under investigation. "Too many people have died, and we don't want any more to die," he said.—ABC News

Pentagon Vows Retaliation for Attack on 'USS Mason'
The Pentagon has vowed to "take action" against whoever fired two missiles at a US Navy destroyer off the coast of Yemen. "We are going to find out who did it and take action accordingly," said Captain Jeff Davis, a Defense Department spokesman. Davis added the missiles were fired from territory in the hands of Iran-backed Houthi militants in southern Yemen.—NBC News

Unarmed Man Shot by Tulsa Cup Was Reportedly on PCP
Terence Crutcher, the man shot and killed by Tulsa police officer Betty Shelby last month, was on PCP at the time of his death, according to a toxicology report released Tuesday. He was unarmed and did not have a weapon in his vehicle, officials have conceded. Shelby, who is charged with first-degree manslaughter, has said he was behaving erratically.—CBS News

International News

Fourteen Worshippers Killed at Kabul Shrine
At least 14 Shia Muslims were killed and more than two dozen others wounded at a shrine in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, on Tuesday. A witness said the assailant shot and killed a policeman on guard before unloading on worshippers with an AK-47 assault rifle. Another attacker was killed after attempting to enter with a vest loaded with explosives, according to an Interior Ministry spokesman.—Al Jazeera

Putin Cancels French Trip Amid Syria Beef
Russian president Vladimir Putin has canceled a scheduled trip to Paris after his French counterpart François Hollande indicated he might only be willing to see Putin for talks on achieving peace in Syria. Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, addressed the snub by suggesting the Russian leader was ready to visit Paris "whenever it is comfortable for President Hollande."—The Guardian

Lawyers Will Not Defend Paris Attack Suspect
Attorneys for the chief captured suspect in the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks are done defending him. Salah Abdeslam, accused of playing a significant role—possibly including transportation and planning—in the attacks that killed 130 people is invoking his right to remain silent amid his own frustration at being under surveillance. "We said from the beginning... that if our client remained silent, we would quit his defense," said one of the lawyers, Frank Berton.—BBC News

Everything Else

Kim Kardashian Sues After Website Claims Robbery Staged
Kim Kardashian has filed a lawsuit against the gossip site MediaTakeOut.com for claiming she lied about the recent robbery in France. The article alleging a "staging" of the theft has been taken down.—BuzzFeed News

Jay Z, Frank Ocean, and Kanye West Win Lawsuit
The three artists have won an appeals court ruling on the copyright infringement case over their track "Made in America." Joel McDonald, also known as Joel Mac, claimed the song stole its concept from his own 2009 track of the same name.—Rolling Stone

Actress Breaks Silence Over Dakota Pipeline Protest
Shailene Woodley, star of the Divergent series, has spoken out for the first time since her arrest at a Dakota Access pipeline protest. She wrote on Instagram: "One day, baby, we'll sing our poetry. The words dripping from our tongues wet with ripened patience."—TIME

Scientists Discover New Dwarf Planet
Scientists in Chile have discovered a new dwarf planet at the edge of our solar system. Known for now as 2014 UZ224, the planet is 8.5 billion miles from the sun and has a year equivalent to 1,100 Earth years.—Motherboard

WikiLeaks Reveal UFO Emails from Tom DeLonge to Clinton Advisor
WikiLeaks has released emails from former Blink-182 singer and guitarist Tom DeLonge to Hillary Clinton's advisor John Podesta about UFOs. "I just need 2 hours from you," wrote DeLonge. "Just looking to have a casual, and private conversation in person."—Noisey

A still from a video by World of Wonder, the production company behind RuPaul's Drag Race, in which top-notch queens deliver presidential realness

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Last year, a Gallup survey reported a dramatic shift in American voters' acceptance of non-traditional presidential candidates (a.k.a. candidates who aren't male WASPs). More than 90 percent of respondents would vote for a qualified woman and 74 percent would back a gay or lesbian candidate—at least in theory.

In the year since, headlines touted those encouraging results, and the United States got closer to electing its first female president, who, of course, would be following the first African American president. The prospect of the first openly gay president? Opinion polls aside, chances seem slim.

Even as LGBTQ issues gain support nationally, the field of viable gay candidates remains insignificant: Only seven members of Congress are openly LGBTQ out of 435, and only one state senator has ever taken office while openly gay.

And in a year where gender has become so central to the political conversation, the state of gay politics in America raises interesting questions about the role masculinity plays in US elections—especially when you consider that virtually no gay politician on the national stage seems obviously gay.

This seems particularly relevant in the case of gay male politicians, whose public personas appear to clearly align with gender expectations. That doesn't come as a surprise in our patriarchal society: Femininity has long been associated with the domestic realm; masculine behavior, on the other hand, has dominated public life. It follows that men (and even many women) who seek power dare not display conventionally feminine characteristics—a sign of weakness, not strength.

When you watch interviews with and speeches by the five openly gay representatives currently in the House—Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, Jared Polis of Colorado, David Cicilline of Rhode Island, Mark Takano of California, and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin—you probably wouldn't guess their sexual orientation right off. It's a good bet these candidates could pass as straight, in the sense that their professional behavior or mannerisms don't seem markedly different from their congressional peers. And that's not to say it should—typecasting gay men and expecting they conform to certain stereotypes is itself a form of homophobia.

How gay a politician reads should have no bearing on their day jobs as lawmakers. Cicilline has even said his sexuality has been irrelevant to his work as a congressman.

But it's fair to wonder whether Americans would even consider a male presidential candidate whose behavior significantly deviated from the norms of conventional masculinity. In other words, would voters—who overwhelmingly claim they'd consider a gay candidate—elect an effeminate president?

One answer relates to the persistent stigma associated with reading as gay—it's a deep-seated homophobic reality where it's OK for gay people to be gay, just as long as they don't act or sound too gay or effeminate. You even see this stigma present in the gay community, where internalized homophobia often manifests in "masc only" guys on dating apps like Grindr.

To be clear, a variety of characteristics feed into the complex notion of effeminacy—style, mannerism, and gender roles, just to name a few. But one of the more obvious examples—and perhaps the most persistent gay stereotype—is effeminate speech.

It's what you might term the "gay voice," which typically means a man who speaks with a singsong lilt, an affected lisp, greater pitch variation, and a flamboyant flair. But as the Washington Post reported, several studies have also determined that what most people think of as a gay voice is any man—regardless of sexuality—who simply sounds more stereotypically feminine, i.e., a higher-pitched, more melodic voice.

While an effeminate vocal register may seem an insignificant quirk, it can be a very disruptive trait. That's because many people who hear it immediately associate the speaker with femininity and homosexuality. Misogyny and homophobia often follow.

David Thorpe, director of the documentary Do I Sound Gay?, likens the gay voice to public intimacy among same-sex couples, in that both can easily provoke a homophobic response. "It's a very small act, but if you kiss someone of the same sex in a room like this , you know people are watching you and the temperature of the room changes," he told Fast Company in 2014. "So a small act like speaking has enormous consequences."

It's easy to envision a scenario where this style of speech could come to define an effeminate presidential candidate. Yes, atypical fashion choices and physical mannerisms would certainly raise eyebrows, but it's a good bet that the majority of voters would form opinions of a hypothetical candidate through what they'd hear him say. In a news cycle dominated by sound bites, voices resonate.

Research suggests a "gay voice"—like the cartoonish one the comedian Peter Serafinowicz dubs over Trump speeches—could make a potential candidate less likely to win.

Casey Klofstad is a professor of political science at the University of Miami, where he's conducted numerous studies on the way voters react to the voices of political candidates. In particular, he's examined the role of pitch—the perceived "highness" or "lowness" of a voice—and how that influences the choices voters make in electing a candidate. For example, in a paper published last year in the journal PLOS ONE, he digitally manipulated the voices of men and women speaking the sentence, "I urge you to vote for me this November." Then he had 400 participants vote in a number of mock elections, asking them which voice sounded stronger and more competent. The deeper pitch won.

"What we find is that both men and women prefer candidates with lower-pitched voices," Klofstad said. "Conversely, they are less likely to vote for the male candidate with the higher-pitched voice."

His research has consistently shown how pitch influences the perception of leadership capacity. And unsurprisingly, strength and competency are qualities we value in presidents. With these findings in mind, the deck looks stacked against a hypothetical effeminate candidate.

What, then, would Klofstad suggest such a candidate do based on these findings? "Well, I'm of the mind that a person should be who they are—they should be authentic," he said. "But if I'm going to put the hat on of political consultant, the advice I would give is that vocal training would increase the odds of success—and we can show that empirically with our experiments."

Margaret Thatcher, prior to her ascent to power as prime minister of the UK, might seem an odd role model for an effeminate American candidate. But that's exactly what she did: The Iron Lady famously took lessons from a speech coach to help her voice sound more powerful, more persuasive and, you might say, less feminine.

So with ingrained homophobia, persistent sexism, and voters' preference for "masculine" sounding voices, what's the best strategy for an effeminate candidate in America? At least for now, become less effeminate—that is, if you hope to win.

Follow Jon Shadel on Twitter.

This article appeared in the October issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Luis Gispert and Jeff Reed first began collaborating on films and photographs around 2002. Their Stereomongrel project premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art and has been exhibited or screened Internationally. Both work as artists and filmmakers on their respective coasts: Gispert in Brooklyn, New York, and Reed in Venice, California.

What's the backstory of your cover image?
Luis Gispert: The cover image "BB Matrix" was part of a larger project called Stereomongrel that debuted at the Whitney Museum. It was basically a ten-minute film and a suite of large-format photographs that captured scenes and characters that were not seen in the film. These weren't outtakes, but actual set pieces designed to be their own photographs. We imagined them to be moments within the narrative orbit of the film that took place elsewhere and simultaneously.

How did music influence or inspire this project?
Jeff Reed: Luis and I had been talking about this thing "portamento," which is a musical term. It comes from classical music and fretless string instruments, but then became the basis of a lot of synth music in the 60s and 70s as analog synthesis flourished and subsequently found its way onto a lot of rap records in the 80s and beyond. Think Dr. Dre, NWA, Snoop... It's that effect of gliding smoothly and seamlessly up or down a musical interval without stopping on any of the discrete notes.
Gispert: We thought of the film and photographs as separate tones that are bound together within the same aesthetic world but that can be experienced seamlessly as a whole.
Reed: I had a studio in LA at the time, and we would spend days just playing music against our film, working with producers, writing, scoring.... It was a great time to create, and everything we were doing can be seen in the final product. It's a testament to the music we were consuming and creating, the huge influence it had on the film's soundtrack and the photos.

What were you guys listening to?
Gispert: The project took two years to complete, so we're talking 2003 to 2005. Mashups had just started getting big. There was plenty of hip-hop playing in the background. Mobb Deep. Ghostface Killah's "Supreme Cliental," was pretty much on endless loop. We got really into this amazing Italian prog rock band called Goblin.

Where did the shoot take place?
Reed: At the time, we were really focused on fabricated subcultures or gangs. We were looking around Miami's Overtown neighborhood, near North Miami Avenue, which was then one of the most dangerous areas in the city. The crack epidemic had really destroyed everything. This was long before Art Basel had ushered in the gentrification. Having grown up in Miami, Luis was familiar with the area—his father's shop was in the neighborhood, and he knew many of the local residents.
Gispert: We came across a guy wandering around in full construction garb—even a dust mask—but we knew there was no construction site for miles. He was holding a machete. After striking up a conversation, he told us that everyone had to have a "look." His "look" helped him: It was camouflage, so the cops wouldn't harass him.
Reed: He said he had a crew in the area that might want to be in our photos for a few bucks. He guided us around to a really sketchy and grimy back alley, which seemed like a super logical place to hang out with a guy holding a machete, especially when you're two skinny guys walking around with expensive cameras and cash. He introduced us to his cohorts: a pimp, a few prostitutes, lots of crackheads. All-around hustlers. They were all game to join in on the photo. We had a flatbed truck, a Toshiba boombox, and a toolbox full of costume gold. After huffing crack out of a paper bags, they wandered the yard like zombies with boomboxes in tow. A pied-piper archetype showed up with a flatbed truck and collected all the boom boxes to be transported and passed on to other gangs inhabiting this Stereomongrelized world.

Can you let us in on the connection between the cover photo and the inset photos?
Gispert: Well, we've talked about the cover story. Every photo had a unique backstory but was also rooted in the Stereomongrel universe. The photograph of the gang of bruised-up red-headed, heavily flossing urban cheerleaders strolling down Great Jones Street in Manhattan ties directly to the cover image. The Ghettoblasters were like torches being passed from the inhabitants of the flatbed truck world to the cheerleader squad in another urban fantasy space.
Reed: "Cold Storage" was shot in Los Angeles and was based on a pair of black market speaker salesman we encountered. We transformed their story into a duo of college-aged girls hustling speakers out of their middle-class Mar Vista kitchen. We realized that you can use completely factual aspects of a story—and we really got to know the guys and their whole operation, from sourcing to theft to fencing to evasion of authority—but by changing the faces, locations, and their attendant class connotations, you're left with an image that feelssurreal and imagined but is essentially a documentary.

What projects are you working on now?
Apart from our own directing and art projects, we are excited to be in talks to collaborate once again.

Since a lot of our recent covers have been still lifes, we wanted to do something a little different this time. We don't typically put artists or celebrities on our cover, so we chose an image with a lot of movement and an immersive backstory that we felt encapsulated music in an unlikely way. The images above were alternate cover options.

This photo comes from 'Stereomongrel,' a series of large-format images Luis Gispert made with Jeff Reed to accompany their film.

This article appeared in the October issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Danny Shedd with his wife and child in front of their Oklahoma house. Photo courtesy of Mark Isaac

Danny Shedd's nightmare began with some cows.

When Shedd, a 12-year veteran with combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, finished up his military service at Fort Benning, Georgia, he and his wife, Jacinda, wanted to move to the prairie. The house they settled on in Big Cabin, Oklahoma, was perfect: a 5,400 square-foot, four-bedroom spot built in 2006, which mortgage giant Fannie Mae purchased in a foreclosure auction and was selling for one-third of its appraised value.

After inspections and appraisals, the Shedds closed on the house in June 2015, paying $172,425 cash—the product of years of saving. "They said congratulations on your new home," Shedd told me.

The vet's honorable Army discharge didn't come through until that August, so Shedd settled his wife and kids in the new digs before returning to Fort Benning. But Jacinda soon began complaining about the neighbors' cows lurking around the place at all hours. They would pass through a broken fence and eat the backyard grass, according to Shedd, with cow shit littering the space where his kids wanted to play. Shedd decided to rebuild the fence himself, enlisting a surveyor so he knew exactly where to place it.

The surveyor came back with bad news: According to the deed, the property Shedd paid for was actually ten wooded acres to the north, in a flood plain. The house his family was living in wasn't even on the property they had the rights to.

Worst of all, the neighbors are now saying the house belongs to them and are trying to get the Shedds evicted.

The bizarre situation speaks to a potential time bomb lurking behind an untold number of US residential mortgages. During the housing bubble that went bust in 2007 and 2008, mortgage companies routinely ignored longstanding property records laws. So defects—whether due to inaccurate deeds or fraudulent transfer documents—have sown chaos in county recording offices and foreclosure courts. These defects create ruptures in the "chain of title," confusing who holds true ownership over properties.

Shedd's plight shows the potential consequences for unsuspecting homeowners, who can become innocent victims of a housing market assembled on a mountain of fraud. The only question is how far the ruptures have spread.

In Shedd's case, the defect dates back to the original construction: The Careys, his neighbors, deeded the land to their daughter and her husband, James Stampes, to build a home, and Stampes took out a mortgage to pay for construction. But the legal description in the deed always reflected the wrong parcel—not the land the house was actually built on.

Stampes and his wife slipped into foreclosure in 2008, a protracted process eventually finalized six years later. Fannie Mae picked up the house at auction and sold it to Shedd. But for years, no one seemed to notice that the deed was inaccurate, and the wrong legal description of the property carried through. "Nobody put boots on the ground and figured out where the home is," Shedd told me.

When he got the bad news, and on advice from a real estate attorney, Shedd asked the Careys for a swap. The Careys would get the ten wooded acres, and Shedd would get the acreage under and around his new home. And initially, according to Shedd, the Careys agreed, only to change their minds a few days later. "The wife says we're not deeding you this land," Shedd told me. "This is a windfall for us."

The vet figured his title insurance company would resolve the matter, because title insurers are supposed to protect policyholders from defects in their titles. But when he appealed to American Eagle Title Insurance Company, the insurer retained an outside lawyer, Mark Kuehling, to review the claim. "The mistaken possession of the wrong parcel does not constitute a defect to the insured land," Kuehling wrote to the Shedds.

In other words, Shedd buying ten wooded acres instead of the house he thought he was getting wasn't the title insurer's problem.

Kuehling also pointed to an exception in the title-insurance policy, which said that the insurer does not have to pay claims if there are "any encroachments, overlaps, discrepancies, or conflicts in boundary lines, shortages in area, or other matters which would be disclosed by an accurate and complete survey or inspection of the premises."

In Shedd's closing documents, he did sign a "hold harmless" form certifying that he did not conduct a survey on the property, and that the title insurer would not be liable for "any damages due to any such discrepancies." But he appealed anyway, arguing he did have an inspection done, as per the title-insurance policy. In addition, all the marketing materials referred to an actual home, and the purchase contract was a residential contract—not a vacant lot contract with no residence. The improper contract constituted a title defect, Shedd argued.

But Kuehling insisted there was no title defect to the property described in the policy—a.k.a. the ten wooded acres. "I am sorry that this problem has affected your use and enjoyment of your home," he wrote. (Kuehling did not return a request for comment. Eric Offen, president of American Eagle Title Insurance Company, declined to comment.)

James Surane, a foreclosure defense attorney in North Carolina, is bewildered by the title-insurance company's decision. "The closing attorney and the title company are supposed to ensure the legal description is accurate, not the surveyor," he told me. "A survey would have disclosed the problem, but that doesn't shift responsibility to the homeowner."

Meanwhile, the Careys hired attorney Mark Reents and posted a notice to vacate on Shedd's door on January 6 of this year. "Be advised that you are a trespasser upon the Property," the notice read. The Careys gave the Shedds until February 15 to leave. When the Shedds refused, the Careys filed suit in May, seeking $20,000 in punitive damages in addition to the home. (Reents, the Carey family lawyer, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Through a caseworker in his local congressman's office, Shedd reached out to Fannie Mae, the quasi-governmental company that sold him the home. Fannie offered to intervene in the case against Shedd, and rescind the purchase contract: Shedd would get back his $174,425, plus additional expenses and up to $2,500 in legal fees, and Fannie Mae would get back the home. The intervention officially took place on May 31.

But when Fannie Mae sent out the settlement agreement to the Shedds in July, the company had changed the terms. The Shedds would have to continue to fight the case against the Careys and pay their own legal fees. Other parties involved in the case—the title insurer and the closing agent—would also be released from liability under the settlement. Plus, the agreement would be confidential, with a non-disparagement clause that would block the Shedds from saying anything negative about Fannie Mae in public.

"I said I will not sign that," Shedd told me. "Other people need my story." The veteran's then-lawyer subsequently tried to get all parties to go to mediation, but Fannie Mae refused, saying they would only take back the house and give Shedd his money.

Brent Rodine, current counsel for Fannie Mae, did not return a request for comment. Rosemary Clinton, an attorney with the closing company, known as Buffalo Land & Title, told me, "I can't answer any questions," citing pending litigation.

Shedd says he can no longer afford an attorney, and the family officially owns only an empty lot, with nowhere to live if and when they are evicted. Increasingly desperate, Shedd released a video on YouTube describing the entire story in detail, asking viewers to share his ordeal. "How many people are living in a home that they don't own?" he asked.

It's impossible to determine how many other residential properties have significant defects like this—but it would be a mistake to assume Shedd is the last homebuyer who's going to experience this kind of disaster. "From doing foreclosure defense work, 50 percent of the time I'll find defects in title, maybe more," said Surane, the foreclosure lawyer. "Lenders and underwriters were overburdened and made mistakes."

Central to Shedd's dilemma, it seems, was the cash purchase. "If this were financed, the bank would have done a minimal survey to draw the lot lines," according to Tara Twomey, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center. "The fact that he paid in cash meant that he didn't have a second person doing due diligence."

American Eagle's insistence that they exclude a bad property description from claims raises the question of how bad this could get the further we get from the foreclosure crisis. While the survey exclusion is standard, could title insurers similarly refuse to pay out for all the mistakes that clouded properties throughout the 2000s? "Insurance agencies only make money if they don't have to pay out," Twomey said. "My guess is most people have no idea that this is excluded in their policy."

Shedd says he's working with state legislators in Oklahoma to require mortgage holders to conduct a survey prior to foreclosure, and to file that survey with the county land records office. That would have prevented his own nightmare.

"This consumes our conversation," Shedd said of his current life in the place he calls home. "Every time I mow the yard, I feel like I'm mowing the neighbor's yard."

Follow David Dayen on Twitter.

Via Appia in Perugia. Image via Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE Italy.

I was born and still live in Perugia, the city, dominated by students, where Meredith Kercher was murdered in 2007. Our town was shocked and heartbroken that such a gruesome murder could have taken place here—and in the weeks, months, and years after her murder, everyone in Perugia closely followed the reporting on the case in international media. But Perugians soon noticed that almost every report characterized our city as a place where hedonistic students partied, boned, and were murdered.

Now, almost nine years later, the latest addition to the story around Meredith Kercher's death is the new Netflix documentary Amanda Knox. The documentary sparked a lot of debate in Perugia, inspiring comments like "for the umpteenth time, Perugia is on trial, slandered, defamed without a chance of redemption," or something to that dramatic Italian effect.

So I decided to talk to some Perugians about what effect they think the documentary and the tragic events of 2007 have had on our city.

Michela, 30, Art History Graduate

VICE: Have you seen the latest documentary on Amanda Knox?
Michela: Yes, I saw it a few days ago. I had the impression that, in trying to tell this story, the writers made these ridiculous caricatures of the people featured in the film. Like Raffaele Sollecito, who smokes joints but is a good boy in the end. Or Amanda—the strange, pretty girl who breaks into a smile when she remembers that Sollecito said he wanted to get her some perfume.

How close do you think they kept to the facts?
I don't think they went deep enough. The fact the Rudy Guede appears for ten minutes out of an hour and half—while he is one of the main players in the case and was convicted—shows how Netflix was mostly focused on getting the ingredients of the story they wanted to tell: youth, the "bella Italia" stereotype, sex, drugs, and murder.

How much do you think this case has affected the town?
So much. It used to be like any other university town. I swear that Perugia changed overnight—this story changed how we all saw our own city. Only now it's starting to get itself back together, but for years, the town was reduced to being the backdrop to this trial.

Do you think the press had a large role in this?
Of course, and they were manipulating how people viewed our city. I remember one time, for example, a friend of mine started talking to a girl who was having a glass of wine somewhere. The girl offered him some of her drink, so he took a sip. At exactly that moment someone with a camera popped up and took a picture that was supposed to show that young people in Perugia were drinkers. The girl turned out to be a journalist.

Luigi, 70, Newsagent

Have you heard about the documentary on Amanda Knox?
Luigi: No, I haven't heard about it, or I would have seen it. I'll watch it tonight. But I don't think it will change how I see the whole thing.

Why is that?
Let's say I followed the case from up close: Because of my job, I followed practically every step of the investigation and trial every day. This story has always upset me. The trial was unfair, but I also remember how the journalists and the media described Perugia in those years—like a drugs capital, like a city filled with assassins. I mean, you'll find drugs and murders in any city, right?

Do you think people's view on Perugia is distorted?
Well, American students have stopped coming here. For years, we had a wonderful exchange between cultures and generations—that all disappeared.

Giorgia and Irene, 20, Students

Have you heard about the documentary on Amanda Knox?
Giorgia: Yes, but I don't have Netflix, so I haven't seen it.
Irene: I haven't seen it because I don't really like those stories—I don't think we need more media attention.

Do you think the story influenced the perception people have of Perugia?
Giorgia: I really think so.
Irene: Absolutely. I remember, for example, that when I moved to the center , people warned me to not go out alone because they said it would be dangerous. I heard people talk about about nightly fights, shootings, drugs—and I think that a lot of that kind of talk is linked to the Kercher case.

Marco, 30, Social Media Marketing Manager

In 2007, you were studying at the University of Perugia. Do you have any personal memories of Kercher's murder?
Marco: I do—Meredith was in a class with me. I didn't know her, and we never spoke, but the morning after the murder the professor asked where the "Erasmus group" was, and I replied that they weren't there because one of them had died. That's what I had heard. The class then just went on as normal.

What did you think of the documentary?
I read some time ago about a meeting between Netflix Italy, the documentary makers, and someone from RAI. Netflix said the documentary would concentrate on the role of the media in the story, and I would have found that interesting. But then I saw the documentary, and the only focus on the role of the media is when they talk to a journalist, Nick Pisa, from the Daily Mail who—in his own words—was someone who'd do anything to get his story on the front page.

Antonio, 55, Manager/Chef at a Cigarette Shop and Bistro

Have you heard about the American documentary on Meredith Kercher's case that came out?
Antonio: No. I haven't heard anything about it.

Your bistro is close to the court where the trial for Kercher's murder took place. What do you remember of that time?
I remember that everyone was talking about it. In the morning, people would come into the shop just to talk about it. During the days of the trial, there were hundreds of journalists from all over the world. The entire square was filled with television crews and cameras.

Do you think that the media attention gave people a certain impression of the town?
I'd say so. If only for the fact that sometimes tourists come and ask where Meredith's house was and not, for example, where they can find the National Gallery of Umbria.

Andrea, 22, Cook

What did you think about Amanda Knox?
Andrea: They wanted to tell a particular story, and they've done everything they can to have it appeal to a wide audience.

How do you think the documentary related the facts?
I think that the reconstruction wasn't bad—it was based on real documents and facts. But, of course, there are also things they didn't report because it didn't fit into their narrative—like the fact that the police force that took over the second part of the investigation wasn't from Perugia but from the south of Italy.

Do you have any specific memories of the time of the case?
I remember the incredible chaos the night of the murder—the police were everywhere, and we were all trying to find out what had happened. Perugia was on television all over the world.

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia.

It's Mental Health Week in Australia. To draw attention to this important event, we asked writers to contribute some of their own thoughts and stories. This article comes in reply to another Patrick wrote on Monday: How It Feels to Live with Borderline Personality Disorder.

I usually don't talk to strangers on Facebook, but the last few days have been different. I've spent the week talking to people the world over about mental illness, and what my recent piece on the topic meant to them.

It's amazing how kind people are outside of the comment section. Strangers are telling me intimate secrets, describing their struggles, railing against stigma, and asking me for advice. It's weird for me. In my ten years as a writer, I've mainly worked as a piss-taker or a piss-poor poet—no one has asked me for tips regarding my Media Watch spec-fic. For a manic egotist, it's an oddly humbling experience. All I can say to these people is "hang in there" and "you are not alone" and—most important—"you're right, it is shit."

The message I get most frequently saddens me and encourages me in equal measure: "How can you be so open about this? How can you share this? I am afraid to tell my loved ones, let alone the internet."

I don't have a good answer.

As a kid, my nanna had a sign on her front door that read "DO NOT DISTURB! THE PERSON INSIDE IS DISTURBED ENOUGH ALREADY!"

That was my jumping off point.

When I was 20, I was the editor of my college's student newspaper. A younger writer submitted a very honest and empathic article about their struggle with depression. I'd been diagnosed with bipolar, BPD, depression, and anxiety when I was 14, yet I'd never talked about it with anyone. The diagnosis was emasculating. It was shameful. It was isolating. Most frighteningly for me, it undercut my fast talking Bugs Bunny persona: "Oh, you're like that because you're manic." I wanted to believe I was like that because I was brilliant.

But reading this young writer's piece on depression changed me. My shame eroded. Suddenly, the other writers at the paper were talking about similar diagnoses, similar battles. By naming it, the ghost lost its power—the horror show became more a haunted house once it was shared among friends.

Still, the idea of treatment and medication terrified me. I was a compulsive writer and performer—I was scared pills would zombify me. It took my girlfriend and her seemingly infinite pools of empathy to get me to ask for help. So much progress hinges on the kindness of very rare souls.

One of the great horrors of mental illness is seeing it swallow up your identity. I am uneasy writing about it for that very reason: I don't want to be the guy that writes mental-illness articles. Outside of the cascade of bullshit that is battling the black dog and his scraggly mates: I'm no expert. I cannot reel off harrowing statistics nor can I provide answers to everyone's how and why. I just know what it's like to have your hand on a hot stove, and I'm able to put words to it.

I wanted to wrestle—I don't say defeat because I can't win—my mental illness by outing it. I started to recognize it as a part of my makeup, but one I could cordon off with safety tape reading: "work in progress." It's me, but it's not all of me. The genius of the phrase "the black dog" is that it allows you to imagine an other, and that allows you to develop a relationship. If you can project it, you can negotiate with it—but the ability to do so can only come from frank and caring talk.

I now approach my mental illness with a casualness. I discuss it at dinner parties, with workmates, with friends, in my stand-up, here. I want to make it a banal conversation. If someone rolls his or her eyes and thinks, Not this dull shit again, then great. I want to repeat it ad nauseam, so that people who feel uncomfortable with themselves and their diagnoses will one day be at a point where they can discuss it like they discuss asthma or arthritis.

Silence is the killer. In Australia, our toxic notions of masculinity, strength, and ANZACery make the mentally ill feel unwelcome. We tend to comfort those who have to tolerate the mentally ill more than we do actual sufferers. The "she'll be right" attitude is shit and will remain shit.

I want to tell people that it's OK to feel angry, and you shouldn't feel guilt for feeling slightly screwed over. Things are out of your control. The embarrassment you feel is a false construct. Those who turn it back on you are, quite frankly, pricks. Hold your head high and be proud for surviving, but don't be ashamed if that survival is hard.

The people who reach out to me all have one thing in common: isolation. They feel alone. Even those in loving relationships or those surrounded by friends and family feel abandoned. The experience is cruel like that. By writing about this stuff so openly I hope to create a small sense of community. I don't hate the phrase "nutters" because it makes us sound like a roving schoolyard gang.

I don't like readers' messages because I like praise: I like them because the gentle comfort of connecting with someone across the world who understands feels good. These are toxic times, and gentle words and gentle knowings are a scant resource. Take them when you can. They'll get you a little further down the road.

Hi, how are you? I'm Patrick Marlborough and tasks like doing the dishes make me hyperventilate. Making eye contact is like being stabbed by a Phillips-head. Day time TV literally makes me nauseous. I compulsively imagine eating my dog's shit. I can't filter my conversation: I may call your mother a cunt and mean it.

Do you ever feel the same? Let's talk about it.

Follow Patrick Marlborough on Twitter.