This article originally appeared on VICE UK

There's a lot you don't realize about your hometown until you leave it. Anyone who reinvented themselves at college could tell you that for free. For 23-year-old Chris Luu, the lesson came when he flew from Perth to England last summer, after befriending a Brit who was traveling through Australia in January. As a skater and photographer, he hadn't quite counted on the culture shock.

"Skating has the same melody worldwide, but it's the environment that makes it interesting," he says. Skating felt distinctly different in London and Bristol: "With London being a lot rougher, I would skate at a snail's pace, worried about hitting a crack and flying into dusting my front teeth on the tarmac. Then I'd see 'little local Billy' from down the road just blast through."

After an initial four-month trip to the UK last year, where he crashed with two friends, "lowering their tea and cereal supply," Chris returned this year. His month-long trip felt as though it bent time. "This was a close group of friends of mine who were on a seemingly endless British summer holiday. They were all so hyped on skateboarding: it reminded me of being a kid, and wanting to go session the curb outside my friend's house for ten hours a day. Seeing the world through their eyes, bombing hills, bleeding, traveling, and sleeping in seven-man 'stink-pits.'"

Chris kept his camera on him throughout. He documented the aftermath of his friend Gabs taking a spill in Bristol—"he choked up his wheel, went flying, and just butchered himself on the pavement; his hands were toast"—and the days that turned into mass sleepovers. "There were dudes everywhere, limbs just scattered in all directions, we were shoulder to shoulder. Some of my best memories were on that trip. None of us cared—we'd barely showered but we just wanted to go skate."

While he notes that, due to its size, Perth "naturally has a smaller community of skaters," Chris says he twigged how skate culture has become a commodity. "I think skateboards themselves have become a bit of an 'accessory' for some," he says. He mentions the interplay between gentrification in London and the way skating has been used to sell a certain "look," which felt worlds away from what he saw and the people he met. "These are guys whose personalities are far from what's 'trending' today inside the wider skate world. It's a bare insight into what skateboarding should be with mates: concrete, beers, and seeing cool shit."

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'Nicholas Schimmelpenninck' didn't have the same ring. Still via

Ten years on from the rise of YouTube, the passive game-watching experience has become almost as ubiquitous as the act of playing itself. For those just looking to zone out on the couch, it might even be the norm. Just try doing a quick search on vintage Super Mario Bros. games or updates for Gears of War and you'll find hours' worth of footage from self-appointed specialists offering anything from tutorials and tips, to speed runs and overly in-depth reviews. Scrolling through the volumes of content can be overwhelming, not to mention boring. Back in the 90s, though, there weren't too many options to see the newest, hottest games, unless you tuned into Video & Arcade Top 10.

The Toronto-made weekly show on YTV was a televised godsend for young Nintendo Entertainment Systems obsessives, where a group of acid wash-and-flannel-clad pre-teens got to test out punch-em-ups and flight sims in front of a studio audience, often before they hit the market. Hosting it all from a seemingly subterranean, chain link-lined clubhouse full of consoles was Nicholas Picholas (born Schimmelpenninck), a curly-haired, cherub-faced guy in a Public Enemy baseball jersey. When it premiered in 1991, the idea of kids wanting to watch kids playing video games seemed weird, but from a marketing standpoint, it was a major breakthrough for the industry.

"I didn't think about it as watching people play, I thought about it as you're seeing a game that you haven't seen before," Picholas told VICE from his home in Buffalo, where he currently works as a morning radio host. "I think at the time, you'd go into a store, a video retailer, and you'd see the cover of the game and either it looked good or it didn't. That's how you made that judgment. This was an opportunity to see someone play the game and see what the next levels were... I guess that was fun."

While Picholas ultimately became the face of the show, he wasn't the first. The debut season was hosted by Gordon Woolvett, a Hamilton-born actor who'd later be cast as a regular on sci-fi show Andromeda. Picholas, then a DJ for Toronto's CFNY, was first picked up to talk about new music in between game segments. He'd take over in season two, a position held until the show went off the air in 2006.

Read More: Revisiting the Heyday of Slime on Canadian Television

Retaining the anything-goes quality of other YTV shows, Video & Arcade Top 10 was filmed live with a studio audience on a shoestring budget. Filming days were intense and played loose, with up to six episodes banked at a time. There could be up to 12 games played in a single day. Filming in excess of 700 episodes, Picholas admits to having learned a lot of the game-specific jargon on the fly. Though he says that some players weren't as successful at picking up the basics for their first-time experiences.

"The games were so new that our players didn't know how to get past the first level," the host recalls. "They're sitting on it for the first time, maybe they get a half hour to play it in a practice room setting. You know, you're playing the game for the first time: you don't know what to do, where to go, how to move on."

In order to push the tapings along, he explains: "We would sometimes help them. We'd have someone, an assistant, help them move on to the next level so they wouldn't get stuck." But while there was a serious learning curve on certain episodes, Video & Arcade Top 10 wasn't afraid to bust out the favourites multiple times, from Mario Kart racers to Zelda games across the various consoles.

"When N64 came out, they treated this thing like it was gold. The people from Nintendo would come with security. I imagine they were just very afraid of anybody taking the system, or copying it, or getting into it before it's allowed to be released."

While the show started in a simpler time of space shooters and side-scrolling adventures from world famous plumber Mario, times got tougher as trends skewed towards violent head-to-head combat games, or more adult-themed narratives. Being on a youth-geared network, Picholas says that the show's later years compensated by trotting out E-rated pablum.

"Once the games got more violent and the internet came alive, which happened during the span of the show, it became more and more difficult to do the show. We'd have to tell the kids, 'Hey, don't pick up the knife, we don't want you stabbing the guy.' We were on YTV, a youth network that's trying to keep less stabby—you wanted to stay away from any of that stuff. I remember at the end it became difficult, we were playing children's games—toddler, single digit kids game—because you couldn't play anything else. Everything else had this intense violence."

After the show wrapped in 2006, Picholas put the focus back on his radio career. He currently co-hosts a morning show for Buffalo's Kiss 98.5, does a series of local club gigs as a DJ, and spins songs at Buffalo Sabres and Bills games. A busy father of three, he's not gripping a joystick the way he once was, but he admits he's been keeping an eye on the gaming world. He was blown away by the summer explosion of Pokémon Go, noting that he saw waves of "very zombie-esque" players flocking to Buffalo's Canalside district to catch 'em all. He's also been keeping an eye on the ongoing development of the still under-wraps Nintendo NX console, but admits he's a bit more excited about the about-to-be-released NES Classic Edition, a miniature system pre-loaded with vintage games like Metroid, Mega Man, and, of course, the Mario series.

"I'm curious to know if they have any appeal to someone that doesn't know it," he wonders about the nostalgic, antiquated graphics of the retro Nintendo system. "If I give it to my kid, is she just going to look at it and say, 'Dad, are you kidding me?' and hand it back to me?"

Read More: Nintendo's NES Mini Is the Same as the Old NES, So It's Great

While his kids may or may not be getting some insider tips on the classics any time soon, Picholas does encounter the odd fan over Twitter.A few years back, cable channel GameTV picked up a block of Video & Arcade Top 10 reruns, which led to a handful of gamers tracking the old host down on social media to get some choice advice.

"I started getting these Twitter messages like 'Hey, I need help with whatever game' and I'm like 'hold on...' I can't tell if this is someone being funny, or a legitimate gamer watching the show, thinking it's fresh and wanting codes. You know how you can profile someone's social and see if they're for real or if they're messing with you. I didn't know what to do with that. I'll tell you what I can remember?"

With Picholas having had plenty of experience working the original NES, it may be worth tracking him down online this winter once the NES Classic Edition hits. For anyone who was there back in 1986, figuring out how to put together the Legend of Zelda's original Tri-Force can be pretty tricky.

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Photo by Heath Alseike via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

First, they came for your mouths. A couple of months ago, we wrote about a study that found that, along with possible IQ issues and and psychotic illnesses, long-term regular cannabis use could also leave you with two gammy pairs of gums. The research in question followed more than 1,000 New Zealanders over 20 years—from when they were 18 to 38—and logged their self-reported cannabis use.

When comparing how the weed fans fared in relation to people who just smoked tobacco, "normal" cigarettes were found to be linked to more problems with people's lungs and metabolic health. But more than half of the people surveyed, who smoked cannabis heavily for at least 15 years, ended up living with periodontal diseases—or infections, swelling, and bleeding in the general gums area.

Now, another group of researchers are putting a real downer on weed in relation to ... your bones. Well, it's only a downer depending on your perspective. A study published last month surveyed 170 self-identifying heavy weed smoking Brits and looked at their bone health. In this case, "heavy use" amounted to smoking at least 5,000 times in your lifetime, though the researchers made note of the fact that average heavy user had actually lit up more than 45,000 times in their lifetime.

The study found that the stoners had a lower bone density, of about 5 percent, compared with tobacco smokers. Cannabis users tended to have bones more susceptible to fractures, which indicated the sort of low bone health that could lead to osteoporosis later in life.

The bone density x-ray was just one part of the study, though. The research team also discovered that stoners tended to have a lower body mass index (BMI) than non-weed smokers. "We have known for a while that the components of cannabis can affect bone cell function but we had no idea up until now of what this might mean to people who use cannabis on a regular basis," said lead researcher, professor Stuart Ralston. "Our research has shown that heavy users of cannabis have quite a large reduction in bone density compared with non-users and there is a real concern that this may put them at increased risk of developing osteoporosis and fractures later in life."

While that doesn't sound great, it's important to pull apart the findings on bone health a bit. As we've already reported, CBD—the cannabinoid in marijuana that doesn't actually make you high—may actually be able to improve bone health over time. And in the UK, CBD's been approved as a medicine by the government arm that regulates medication and healthcare products, so the market for hemp-derived CBD oils may be about to undergo some major changes. But when smoking weed, you obviously can't just extract CBD on your own for the sake of your bones.

This September study found correlation between lower bone density, and the sort of lower BMI that you wouldn't expect from a drug that, in the short term, makes people reach for the snacks. For the researchers, the conclusion was simple: "Heavy cannabis use negatively impacts on bone health both directly and indirectly through an effect on BMI." You'll have to see what body part comes under scrutiny for stoners next.

All photos by Zoë Ligon

There are a bunch of NSFW photos ahead.

For this edition of First-Person Shooter we handed off two cameras to Zoë Ligon, the owner of a sex toy shop based in Detroit called Spectrum Boutique who is also a contributor to VICE. Starting her career in 2013 at a Manhattan sex shop, Zoë learned about "work ethic, society, and business" while also doing the whole college thing. She now uses the skills she learned in NYC to promote positivity in sex education, on top of "slingin' dills in Detroit."

Recently, Zoë attended the Sexual Health Expo (SHE) in Brooklyn, where she snapped some pics of futuristic dildos made out of pure crystal chakra stones and an incredibly large display of candles shaped like penises. After the expo she made her commute back to Detroit and gave us a photo tour of her sex toy show room. Here's what else she told us about her day.

VICE: Why brought you to this convention?
Zoë Ligon: I try to attend as many conventions as possible. I see them as "continuing education," in a sense. I'm currently en route to yet another conference, as a matter of fact! Besides the fact that I get to learn more about the world of human sexuality, I also really appreciate the networking component of these events. The sex ed community is fairly small, and also quite vulnerable due to society's sex negativity. Knowing other people in the industry helps us all have each other's backs, and also gives us the opportunity to collaborate.

What was your day like on the day you went to the sex convention in Brooklyn?
I woke up around 10 AM and got dressed immediately. The Sexual Health Expo started at noon in Greenpoint, and since I was in Bushwick and had my car with me, I drove there to save extra time. Even though I was one of the first people there, I waited in an extremely long line where I befriended two women who were very chatty and very amped up for this event. As soon as we got inside, it was a bit of a frenzy because they were giving away swag bags to the first attendees. I made a beeline to visit my friends Bunny from Sybian, and Vanessa from Chakrubs—both of whom were tabling at the expo. I was already overwhelmed by the amount of humans and vibrators, so I sought refuge at their booths.

I cautiously explored the other tables, and found many frighteningly shitty sex toys for sale but also a few unexpected new products that got me really excited, like the Eva, a hands-free vibrator that can be worn during penetrative sex, as well as a device that can disinfect ALL hard materials—even porous materials (a DREAM for a sexual health nerd like me!). I promptly ordered both of these products to stock in my shop.

What else impressed you at the event?
As the day went on I listened to several different speakers, but I had my own personal fan-girl moment when I saw Tristan Taormino, a sex-positive author, porn director, and general sex ed superstar.

What was the weirdest thing you saw at the convention?
There was a very obnoxious man operating a gigantic vibrator outfitted like a horse that you could sit on as he operated it. I think that shit is pretty tacky in a convention setting, but it was pretty amusing to hear it periodically turn on as shrieks echoed throughout the space.

I see some stones in some of your convention pictures. What are they?
Yes! Aren't they fucking gorgeous? They are Chakrubs—dildos carved out of various gemstones. A lot of folks like to buy them for their healing properties, but aside from that they're also fantastic sex toys. Hard materials are ideal for stimulating the G-spot and prostate, and materials like stone also retain warm and cold temperatures quite well, which some people like to incorporate into play. I still can't get over how beautiful they are, and I've been selling them for almost a year now!

What's the weirdest dildo you've ever seen?
It's really hard for me to find something "weird," especially in the realm of sex toys, but I saw a dildo over the summer that was sculpted to look like an amputee's leg. Hey, everyone likes different stuff.

Visit Spectrum's website to learn more about the sex toy company. See more photos Zoë took below.

Photo courtesy of Cai Guo-Qiang's studio

Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang makes ebullient art, awesome in the traditional meaning of the word. In the past, he's "extended" the Great Wall of China to the Gobi desert with a six-mile-long gunpowder fuse he ignited, created paintings through explosions, and orchestrated the spectacular fireworks display during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He also won the Golden Lion Prize at the 48th Venice Biennale, arguably the top honor in the art world. In a new documentary, out now on Netflix, viewers are offered vantage into the life of the man behind the match.

Director Kevin Macdonald's Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang takes an engrossing and informative look at the work of Guo-Qiang over the last few years. The film starts with the display the artist conducted at the economic conference APEC China in 2014, before following him as he attempts to complete Sky Ladder, a site-specific project he'd failed to realize three times in the past, which involves the construction of a 1,650-foot ladder that reaches into the sky before it's ignited, leaving a glowing image of a path to the heavens.

Macdonald puts the artist's work in context, making the argument that his practice with gunpowder is analogous to cultural revolution because his art is born from an explosion that destroys what has come before. He also hints at the battle between the funding of Guo-Qiang's work and maintaining artistic integrity, but ultimately his film is a touching and affectionate portrait of one of the world's great pyrotechnics. VICE met with Guo-Qiang just before he gave a talk at London's Frieze Art Fair to discuss his life, work, and the movie about it all.

VICE: Why did you agree to do this documentary?
Cai Guo-Qiang: Many people are interested in my exhibitions at museums, or the explosion events, but they are also equally curious about how I create these works. The documentary film manages to do something that cannot be done by an exhibition, which is that you get to see my complicated feelings for my hometown, my family, and my country. I hope that you see the real me, because oftentimes when people talk about me and what they say about me, I don't think it's the real me. I feel that the film manages to capture the real vulnerability that I feel. The difficulty and vulnerability on the screen is very real. Everyone has their moments of solitude, difficulties, and vulnerability. Film can make not just the work accessible to people, but also the artists.

Was it a new experience being followed by a film crew?
Not really. When I do an exhibition, oftentimes there is a film crew that is filming me, so I'm used to it. This time it was different in that it was done for a feature-length movie. And they didn't want to just see my art, but also my personal life.

Was it hard to talk about more personal subjects like your father, who's also an artist but also very sick?
In the beginning, yes, but now I'm more used to it. Being able to talk about him makes it easier. Recently, I featured his paintings in my solo exhibition in the Netherlands, putting his work next to my own work.

In this episode of VICE Talks Film, host Hannah Ewens meets Sasha Lane, first-time actor and breakout star of Andrea Arnold's new film, American Honey.

Lane was partying on a beach in Florida over spring break when she was plucked from obscurity and cast as a lead in the movie, which explores American youth culture. Lane plays Star, a southern girl who leaves home to join a magazine-sales crew, before falling in love with wildcard Jake, played by Shia LaBeouf. Trekking across the States in a van, drinking, smoking weed, and scamming the rich, Star and the crew learn about themselves outside of the confines of the poverty and unhappiness they're running from.

We caught up with the 21-year-old Texan, and she shared her unusual fairytale origin story, what it was like working instinctively with the Fishtank director, and how you can find light in the darkest places.

Image by Sarah MacReading

To millennials entering the workforce, the idea of an unlimited vacation policy probably sounds amazing. And it's meant to: Unlimited vacation days—or "open paid time off"—are a way to attract young talent. And with a name like that how could there possibly be a catch?

"Kind of ironic," Cameron Vass, an environmental organizer, told me, "the guy with unlimited vacation physically has no time to talk about it."

I would tell you more about Vass, but I didn't get the chance to fully interview him. Vass was working an 80 to 90 hour week and doesn't have much time to chat. Unlike many millennials, he happens to work at one of the 2 percent of companies that has an unlimited number of vacation days offered to their employees. But like millennials across the nation, Vass didn't like feel he can take time off.

"There's so much work to do in environmental organizing, and I don't see myself taking any time off soon," he told me. "Kind of psychologically nice, though, to know it's there."

Turns out the only thing millennials are better at than be underemployed is being overemployed. Baby boomers might call us the "laziest generation," but millennials are working the longest hours of any generation. Even the lucky few working under an unlimited-vacation policy are rarely taking more than three weeks off.

"I think maybe I don't take that many vacations?" said Mattias Lehman, who works at Riot Games, a studio boasting an unlimited-vacation policy. "I'm doing something I love so it has never really occurred to me to take time off from work."

In 2009, the idea of unlimited vacation was cutting edge. Netflix released its "Netflix culture deck," which became incredibly influential in Silicon Valley. It might read something like a cult handbook ("You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than what is best for yourself or the group"), but it also had some good ideas about de-bureaucratizing the workplace in a world of changing technology where no one is really ever on or off the clock.

So other companies followed suit: Rather than abandon a vacation policy, which is what Netflix did, some created policies of limitless vacation.

"Netflix sort of pioneered the space," said Katie Denis, the senior program director of Project: Time Off, an advocacy organization for vacation time. "They do it very well because they have an entire culture built on freedom and responsibility. But if you introduce it to somewhere that doesn't fit the culture, people are going to be more fearful and err on the side of caution."

So, for instance, if you introduce it to a culture of, I don't know, perennially underemployed overeducated overly eager millennials saddled with a trillion dollars in student loans and a desperate fear of being laid off?

"One of recommended we take a week off after that just to decompress," he said.

"I think that if you have an experience where an unlimited vacation really works for you, you've got a manager behind that policy who was being thoughtful about how it's applied," said Nightingale. "Make sure your team is rested and productive. I mean, that's what it's really about. It's not a setting you can dial so that your company is suddenly progressive and positive."

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Dash Shaw, who helped to usher in the contemporary era of alt-comics with books like Bottomless Belly Button and New School, rarely sticks to a single style. His work is often an analysis of the art that precedes it, filtered through personal experience and his current circumstance—and My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, Shaw's first feature film, is no different. In the film, Shaw explores the melodrama of teenage life, from the protagonist's tribulations writing for the school newspaper to the catastrophic destruction of his high school, which was irresponsibly built atop a fault line.

After abandoning his first attempt at making a feature film, Shaw put together My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea with partner Jane Samborski in the kitchen of their one-bedroom apartment, and the finished product is a collage in every respect. Utilizing various analog materials and digital animation techniques, and incorporating references to Peanuts and Japanese manga, the film enlists an all-star cast including Jason Schwartzman, Lena Dunham, Reggie Watts, and Maya Rudolph for an experience that's sure to satisfy anyone looking to pick apart the puzzle it presents. With My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, Shaw and Samborski create a sense of creative exuberance that you'd typically only find in someone's homemade zine.

VICE: The film was based on a comic that appeared in your story collection The Unclothed Man. How did that story turn into the film?
Dash Shaw: In the 90s, when I was a teenager, alternative comics were mostly autobiographical. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea was kind of a parody of that idea—an autobiographical comic where the author is altering reality and making himself the hero. It seemed like it could work as well as a movie as it does as a comic.

"Can putting a Q-tip on screen be awesome? Can just looking at a dot be exciting?"

The film reminded me of The Drifting Classroom, and it's also filled with visual references to old video games and Peanuts. What informed the story you were telling, and how you told it?
Definitely A Charlie Brown Christmas. It's a perfect example of limited animation—just by using a few lines and facial expressions, the characters are really empathetic and moving. I always thought that that limited animation language was the coolest. There's something really beautiful in it that I wanted to celebrate and see how it connects different things. Can putting a Q-tip on screen be awesome? Can just looking at a dot be exciting?

When I was a kid, a huge amount of Japanese manga were about schools in danger—and in The Drifting Classroom, the school drifts through a portal into another dimension where it's attacked by monsters. When I was younger, something about that made sense in that it mirrored the anxiety of that time. Titanic was a reference point, too, as well as the Go Nagai Devilman cartoons from the 70s that were drawn in a really rough way to the point where you're amazed that a kid would watch them.

Portrait by Matthew James-Wilson

What made you abandon your previous attempt at making a feature film?
The producers were trying to make it the normal way where you would get a cast and raise financing. It was a waiting process, and I didn't understand why I wasn't just drawing the movie, so I just decided to go home and start drawing this one. This story felt more doable because it just happens in a school, so I could imaginably paint all of the backgrounds. Other cartoonists came aboard to execute a lot of the movie's beautiful paintings, but it was important to make something where I could feasibly make it by myself—even if it didn't turn out that way. In my experience, if you're asking for permission to make things, it never happens.

What aspects of the film are autobiographical?
Like the characters in this movie, I was obsessed with books and I wanted to be a writer. A lot of the anecdotes in the movie come from real experiences that have happened to friends, but a huge part of the movie is supposed to be a joke. It's funny that a director would make a movie where the character that's supposed to be him is the one that's trying to warn everyone else—he's the only one who knows that disaster will strike. It also points to the transparency in a lot of these movies—we know that Indiana Jones is like George Lucas's fantasy, but it would be sad and pathetic if he just named the character "George Lucas."

"In my experience, if you're asking for permission to make things, it never happens."

How did you pull together the cast of the film?
I met Jason Schwartzman eight years ago through comic books, so we kept in touch. He really understood the film's sensibility completely. Lena Dunham and I had years before as well—she'd read my comics, so she was on board too. As we added more people, they could see what the personality of the movie was because I already had a majority of it drawn.

What was it like working with Samborski to create the different animation techniques used in the film?
She knew how to do all of this stuff that I didn't know how to do and was very good at figuring out how to do traditional animation compiled in After Effects. There's a million ways to make animated movies—you can have a style guide and hire a bunch of people to draw according to it, or you can hire people overseas and have a studio executing things so that it looks uniformly drawn. I always thought that approach seemed dehumanizing in respect of the fact that all of those people are artists with unique sensibilities. In Ralph Bakshi's movies, you could always tell that he knew Mike Ploog drew in a certain way, so he'd employ his help the way you'd cast an actor for a movie. It's a more respectful way to work with artists.

"The movie becomes made up of all of these different artists just like how it's made up of different actors, and they're contributing to the overall movie."

The art of making comics can be low stakes—they're often cheap to produce, and even if they're successful no one makes a lot of money off of them. With film, the stakes can often be higher. How did you reconcile the mindset of making comics while making this film?
The stakes never felt very high. I didn't really think anyone would see it—I just wanted to see if I could make an animated movie. I tried to do it the normal way and I failed, so I asked myself, "Can I still do it?" It felt like I'd spent half the day drawing comics and the the other half working on the film. When we casted it, then we were like, "Oh, shit! Other people might see this." It's incredible that it played at TIFF, and now it's on the Main Slate for the New York Film Festival. I almost feel like I should warn people that it wasn't meant to be screened at Alice Tully Hall, but it's awesome that it was selected anyway.

Follow Matthew James-Wilson on Instagram.

Check out Ed's website, Twitter, Instagram, and buy his new book, Wuvable Oaf: Blood and Metal!

All photos by Masatoshi Naito, courtesy of Super Labo

Masatoshi Naito is an acclaimed Japanese photographer whose work has been exhibited internationally since the 60s at places like the MoMA and the Barbican. While he's often known for Ba Ba Bakuhatsu (Grandma Explosion) , a project documenting Japanese asceticism, rites, and folklore practiced in the mountain region Tohoku, his documentation of Japanese street scenes from 1970 through 1985 reveal another subculture, of sorts, in Japan.

Published in 1985 and reissued this year by Super Labo, Tokyo: A Vision of Its Other Side imagines the metropolis as a "huge life form," and the images within unearth a less common side of the organism, so to speak. Naito documented the disenfranchised population of Tokyo, such as the homeless, sex workers, and alcoholics—"those who dwell in the darkest and innermost areas of the city."

Masatoshi Naito wrote the following about the photo book:

It was from 1970 to 1985 when I intensively photographed Tokyo. Japan was radically changing as rapid economical growth was underway. Old houses and buildings were being destroyed and replaced by new ones including modern skyscrapers. Even today, Tokyo is still expanding.

Nowadays, I see crowds of people flooding all over the Tokyo city area from morning to night. The crowds are always there, from the first train to the last train of the Yamanote Line, the Chuo Line, subways and various private railways. However, when the last trains are gone, along with the businessmen and women, students, and the workers of restaurants and bars, Tokyo is deserted, and the 'other face of Tokyo' emerges.

Somebody gathers food dumped by bars and restaurants. Another one picks up cardboard boxes and cans that may sell. There are people sleeping on the street. Some of them are drinking alcohol. Homeless people begin to act lively. Exactly, Tokyo as a 'huge life form' reveals itself.

Tokyo: A Vision of Its Other Side is out now through Super Labo. It can also be purchased at Printed Matter. See more photos from the book below.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

I always thought I wrote best when I was depressed. A lot of writers say the same thing. There's just something about feeling sad, anxious, angry. It makes sense. You're not sitting in a dingy room, listening to some droning song by The National, writing gloomy poetry when you're loving life. Happiness isn't something you question.

Depression forces us to reflect on every bad moment and find reason in it. Or at least find somebody to blame, usually ourselves.

Four years after being diagnosed with clinical depression, I just got sick of constantly fighting it. At 22, I'd tried every natural remedy available—meditation, yoga, adult coloring books—and felt out of options. I needed a quick fix. Each day meant increasingly intense panic attacks and it was slowly killing me.

So I went on Lexapro. I took 20mg every day for 11 months without missing a single dose—unless you count that time I accidentally double dropped on NYE last year. As it turns out, Lexapro is also Kanye West's drug of choice—he mentions it on "FML" when he says, "You ain't never seen nothing crazier than this n***a when he off his Lexapro."

I never considered the side effects of antidepressants before taking them, I thought it was simple, take a pill, everyday, and be alright again. I didn't think it was going to kill the one thing I loved to do, which was writing.

At first, I was certain my regular habit for procrastination had just dialed up a notch. But I started to notice a trend. I stopped crying. I had to go to my grandpa's funeral and, even though I was shattered, I was the only person there who wasn't tearing up. I got so paranoid people were judging me that I ducked away to the bathroom, frantically dabbing water under my eyes to give the impression I was crying.

Lexapro turned me into a zombie, riding through the motions of life without feeling. Things that made me angry became irrelevant. There was no twinge of sadness watching Tom Hanks in Philadelphia. If you're wondering whether something is off, that's a sure sign. Whenever I picked up a pen to write, I had nothing. I couldn't even write about the damn rain. If you're a creative writer who can't poetically describe the rain, you're in trouble.

The dulling of emotions by Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) is known as emotional blunting. For most people this means antidepressants will stop them feeling depressed, which is great. But for others, SSRIs can kill all emotions, whether you like it or not.

It's a catch-22. You take SSRIs to stop being depressed, and that works, but then you're depressed because you can't feel anymore. Lose-lose. But I wasn't crying myself to sleep or getting anxious every time I entered a room. Wasn't that what I wanted? I should have been happy, but I wasn't.

I wish someone would've warned me before I started antidepressants. Of course, doctors tell you how much your life will change when you start taking SSRIs. There was no mention though of the emotional toll that not feeling would take. I could handle the brain zaps, constant dizziness, and sleep problems. But losing your emotions feels like dying.

Creativity is subjective, which makes it difficult to measure with any accuracy. But googling around I found researchers have tried to understand the link between feeling bad and feeling creative. And Columbia University social psychologist Modupe Akinola found a correlation between the two.

Working with Harvard University's Wendy Berry Mendes, Akinola asked students to write down their career aspirations. Then they were given feedback that was either positive or dream crushing. After this, the students had to create an artistic collage. As it happens, participants who got negative feedback—and felt shitty because of what the researchers termed "social rejection"—made collages that were more creative than those who were unaffected.

I decided to stop Lexapro around six weeks ago. It wasn't really a case of "going off your meds." After weighing up the pros and cons, I just decided it was time for me to let go. The drugs worked too well. Some people definitely want to feel emotionally numbed, but I wasn't cut out for that life. I missed being creative.

Within two days, the emotions I craved raced back. But I spent a month going through intense withdrawals. There was the extreme fatigue, random electric shocks, and mood swings. It was challenging, but I don't regret stopping.

I haven't recovered from depression, I'm not sure I ever will. But I do feel like I'm in a much better place than I was a year ago. All of those negative emotions that used to overwhelm me, I've gotten better at channelling them creatively. I guess I learned my artist self and human self aren't two separate things—you can't ignore one for fear of losing the other. There has to be balance.

If you are struggling with depression or suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

Follow Amy on Twitter

Loving this, oh yes. Photo by Ian Keating via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Just like most people, most dates are unremarkable. 95 percent of those $15 cocktails and kisses under restaurants awnings will float from our consciousnesses in the inevitable flotsam and jetsam of our escaping youth, as we march on towards long-term partnerships, marriage, children, and death.

But there are some dates that will stick with you. Those dates where the person did something so inexplicably strange or horrible or surprising that instantly, in one crystallized moment of divine illumination, you knew that you were never going to see that person again. We asked people about those moments, in honor of the official end of summer romance season.

"Maybe he had diarrhea?"

The night before one date this guy sent me a reaaaally long, sexually explicit poem. Like, 13 stanzas worth of kinda hot, but also super weird stuff about "suckling my sweet pearl."

What I was met with was a guy sitting with his hood up in a dingy corner of a bar in the middle of a beautiful day, looking miserable with his earphones in. He didn't come over to say hi and basically gave me the vibe that he really didn't want to be there.

What decided it, though, were the ten phone-calls and trips to the toilet that he seemed to make in one hour. It was surreal, and an old man watching the entire scenario from another table was just pissing himself laughing. It felt like he was feeding some kind of intense coke habit. Or maybe he had diarrhea? Either way, the last time he got up, I just ran off into the sunshine and cried to my ma on the phone down the road.

— Caroline, 23

"All that expectation, slashed in an instant"

It wasn't like there was a specific moment where I decided I never wanted to see her again, more like the other way around. We decided to meet up in a no-pressure environment, so she invited me to a house party she was having and I brought along a friend for moral support. We spent ages walking around trying to find this house, but when we finally got there her friend opened the door, looked at us, and said witheringly, 'Stephanie's all partied out I'm afraid.'

I could see through the window that the party definitely wasn't over, so I was like 'are you sure?...' But she just shook her head and closed the door on us. All that expectation slashed in an instant. We ended up going back to mine and playing Fifa and I never even got to meet her.

— Rob, 25

"He saw the people in drag and was like, 'what?'"

I found him on Tinder. He was unusual—hot but had a mystery about him. We bonded over a shared love of food. Initially, he seemed overly keen to meet me and for me to show him around London, because he was from Lincoln and hadn't been down much. I decided to take him to Pride as it was happening in Trafalgar Square. Little did I know, he was a raging homophobe!

He was initially confused and thought it was just some festival, then he saw the rainbow flags and people in drag and was like, "What's going on?" I explained what Pride is, and he was just looking around like, What the fuck has this girl taken me to? When he saw my brother, not knowing who he actually was, he turned round to me and said "Who's that batty boy?" I'm also bisexual, so it was an all round deal-breaker moment, because he just made me feel like I was wrong to celebrate something so amazing.

After that I said I had to go, I never messaged him again, and he deleted me from all social media.

— Katie, 23

"Oh, you ... brought your guitar? No, that's cool. Yeah, good stuff" Photo by Neil Odhia via

"She pushed her hand down my trousers in the middle of the pub"

Alarm bells went off pretty early when, at 7 PM, my date turned up at the pub already completely smashed and ordered us two tequilas each. After five minutes, she asked if I wanted to score some coke and go on an 'adventure.' I was like "No, It's a Tuesday." She shrugged, called me boring, then pushed her hand down my trousers in the middle of the heaving pub. I pulled her hand off my limp dick and made the wild suggestion of maybe getting to know each other a bit first.

While all that wasn't the best start, the epiphany moment for me was just after that, when she stepped backwards onto a guy's foot and then shouted at him being in her way. I hate rudeness far more than I do potential substance abuse problems, so I told her that it was kind of her fault. She just looked at me, said "I like your vibe," and bit my lip so hard it bled.

After ten more minutes, I made up an excuse. On the way to the tube she shouted, "I'm hungry! BRB!" and rushed into a corner shop. When she emerged she was holding a huge sausage roll, which she immediately dropped into the road.

"Oh man, that's a shame," I said to her.

"What's a shame?" She replied, as she picked up the visibly gritty pastry off the road and finished it in two huge bites. I literally ran to the tube.

— Cooper, 25

"The topic moved to deeper stuff like race and religion"

I was on the second date with a girl who was hot but lived alone with an indoor bunny. We were just shooting the shit for a while when the topic moved to deeper stuff like race and religion. She said, "I don't think I could ever date a black guy because of a clash of cultures and all. It would just be difficult for both of our families."

I thought it was just a hilariously stupid thing to say, and I decided it was done at that point. But because we were in the middle of eating, we finished the night and left with a weird kiss. Basically I just got candle-lit with a closet racist for a couple of hours.

— Michael, 21

"He kept making numerous abrupt toilet visits"

We met at a bar, and he asked to take me out. He was cute. On our first and only date we went to a Michelin-starred restaurant, which was nice. But when we sat down he ordered my drinks and food for me, without asking what I wanted.

I tried to enjoy myself anyway, but found that he was rarely there to talk to—he kept making numerous abrupt toilet visits. Following the 1 millionth bathroom visit, I clocked on. My date had been snorting cocaine, not weeing. Every time he'd return, he'd sniff and talk at me a million miles an hour. It was bizarre. Also, he never fucking offered me any, did he? After the longest dinner of my life, we left the restaurant.

Now, filled to the brim with crab and charlie, my date excitedly hailed us a tuk tuk. I pretended to look impressed and got in, as a jazz club and more toilet visits awaited! At the jazz club, the absolute worst moment was when my date angrily growled that that the sax player knew nothing. Then he leaned in for a horrible, shellfish-y kiss. I recoiled, felt a bit sick, and decided that it wasn't going to work. Later, when he protested that we should go find a lock-in, I made my excuses, broke his cokey heart, and went home.

— Daisy, 25

You won't need a license to do the tripping part, at least. Photo via Flickr user Alyssa Russo

Anyone who's ever been walked back from an acid-induced existential cliff can appreciate the benefit of someone who knows what to do when you're having a bad trip. What if this person, perhaps knowledgeable about soft lighting and gentle music, was trained by a special branch of the government? What if they had a legal mandate to spritz pleasant scents, offer you smooth rocks, and hold your hand while you talk about your family of origin?

While this might not sound like everyone's best case scenario, it's a starting point in a conversation about the regulation of psychedelics and their uses, and what several researchers in BC see down the road as we hurtle towards a culture with increasingly lax attitudes about altered states.

Mark Haden, chair of Canada's leading psychedelic research organization, has a bold plan not only for licensed trip sitters and shamans, but goes so far as to imagine tax collection from the sale of mushrooms and MDMA, sold in plain packaging. In a paper published in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs last week, Haden and coauthors found there is no reliable way to know who is a good or bad spiritual guide, and suggest a government commission could help us separate sham healers from the real deal.

VICE caught up with Haden to talk about the growing body of research into psychedelic therapies, and his vision for how they'll be used in a post-prohibition world.

VICE: Psychotherapists and shamans have been using psychedelics with clients, under the radar, for a long time. There's a lot of anecdotal research out there that these therapies are successful. But your paper is suggesting a Psychoactive Substance Commission. What does that look like?
Mark Haden: The four options really are: a for-profit running it, a not-for-profit running it or the government running it, and so we looked at all of those and thought no: it needs to have some kind of government level of authority but it needs to be hands-off, at arm's length from government so that it can have a stable mandate and vision. The idea that we proposed was to have a commission responsible for all currently illegal drugs. There would be essentially public health folks at the top—people who really understood that that was the vision that needed to be implemented—but then there's different streams.

There would a cocaine stream, a smokeable/injectable stimulant stream, a heroin stream, a cannabis stream, and then a psychedelic stream. So within the psychedelic stream you would have some content subject matter experts. Some people who have experience with psychedelic psychotherapy. You would have some Aboriginal groups to acknowledge that psychedelics have been used by Aboriginal groups for centuries. So maybe the peyote folks would be in there. You'd have an ayahuasca person. So you'd have the cross-cultural wisdom sitting at the table.

From a public health perspective, what are psychedelics effective at treating and what are they less effective at treating?
With the psychedelic renaissance, researchers are grabbing the low-hanging fruit and trying to understand what they are useful for. The ones that are of interest now, because that's how the research is unfolding, is psilocybin for end-of-life anxiety, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, depression—high dosages for significant depression, microdosages for lower levels of depression. Addictions of all sorts. Psilocybin for tobacco dependency, ibogaine for heroin dependency. Spirituality from a number of different perspectives.

There's another person who looked at recidivism. What prevents people from going back to jail? Now, normally in our society we see things like stable family, housing and employment. If you have that when you come out of jail you don't go back to jail. But then he looked at drug use and he found much to nobody's surprise that if you smoke crack cocaine, you go back to jail more frequently. But then he looked at psychedelic use, and it was an outlier in its protective effect. People were more protected against recidivism if they use psychedelics than if they had stable family, employment and housing.

Shamans, for instance, who might be Indigenous, or not, but are experienced in these kinds of states, it seems hard to accredit them. How do you judge the quality of a shaman?
We dealt with that explicitly. We had a long discussion around that, as to what to write, and we basically said we wanted to acknowledge that history. These people have been doing it for a long, long time and they need to be at the table, and the language that we used is that we would grandfather them into the process. Yes, they would be sitting at the table with us in this process, it wouldn't just be all old guys with suits who are old psychologists. No, it would be mixture of people who represent the diversity of people who are involved today and bring their wisdom to this process.

The paper also specifically mentions festivals, can you tell me how that ended up in your paper? Festivals and recreational use? It seems like shamans and psychotherapists and trip sitters can be lumped together because they all deal with psychedelics, but they seem very different to me.
Our intention was to demonstrate the range of skills that people would need to work in this world. And certainly I know people who go into festivals and provide essentially emergency psychiatric services. There's a real talent to it because people come in really messed up. And so the skill of providing a zendo tent is not insignificant. Those people would be brought under this umbrella as well.

And you mention that there is also the potential for abuse with this because people are vulnerable when they do drugs. They're out of their normal minds. They are not necessarily being vigilant themselves.
Oh absolutely. I mean having worked in the addiction services I'm aware that predators get attracted to vulnerable people, and part of my job as a supervisor in the addictions services was managing folks who came and were attracted to the fact that that's our population and we have an enormously vulnerable population.

Mostly the people who show up are compassionate, caring, wise, skilled people but occasionally the predators come in the door. And certainly if you look at the world of ayahuasca, some shamans are fabulous and some shamans are completely predatory. And they are predatory because they can be. That's one of the reasons that you need to set up a system that is accountable and managed professionally and people would be allowed to complain.

I've certainly met a lot of weirdos in the world of psychedelics in general.
Weirdos are different from predators. I mean there's a lot of colourful people who aren't predators, but there's also predators. People can be allowed to have a certain amount of colour and that's not a problem. But the predatory aspect of doing harm to others is certainly a concern.

So that's where the College of Psychedelic Supervisors would come in?
Yes. It would be accountable. It would be managed by best practice and the people in it would be accountable, and people who experienced it could complain. If you don't like what your doctor did to you, there is a way of getting your doctor fired. The College of Physicians and Surgeons has taken great care to manage that quite skillfully. So there are models out there of how to manage it that would reduce the risk.

So because these substances are illegal, you're saying there is probably a lot of abuse going on because people who have had negative experiences don't have anywhere to go for help?
Absolutely. There's a greater potential for abuse. It's an unaccountable system happening out there. How do you complain about a psychedelic psychotherapist who is doing it under the radar? Well, you can't.

Read More: I Have a Rare Visual Disorder That's Like Being on Psychedelics All the Time

What's the timeline for something like this and how feasible is it?
The timeline, if you think about what we are doing with the MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. We're doing that within the context of Health Canada and we are about four or five years away. So we will have MDMA as a legal prescription drug in five years. The Heffter group will have psilocybin in about the same time frame. We are about to start our stage three clinical trial. When we finish our stage three clinical trial, it is agreed by both the FDA/DEA, the IRB and Health Canada that this will become a prescription drug. So we're about four to five years away.

So this proposal is about getting a jump on the regulation part?
What's going to happen... I'm gazing into my crystal ball when I say this... is we will succeed, so our phase-three clinical trial will come to an end, and we will submit all our data to Health Canada and they will say, "Yes, this is now a legal prescription drug." Then the question is what do we do? What do we do with it? Do we say that now it's available to anyone who's a psychiatrist? How do we manage that?

And psychotherapists can't prescribe, so how does that help them?
We don't know yet. That's what we're proposing. It could go wrong, it could be commercialized. There are all kinds of models that would be unfortunate. Because we need a long discussion about how that profession gets managed and regulated and structured. Let's start the discussion now, because we can see it coming down the pipe.

You mentioned youth access, and it's mentioned because of the Indigenous histories of including youth in ceremonies, but we don't have a culture that includes youth in these kinds of things, at least not explicitly. That seems like a thorny issue.
We had a lot of debate as to whether or not to put that paragraph in there or not. And decided eventually we want this to stand. We want this to be a statement, that is a statement, quite frankly, of truth. And just because it's thorny and controversial doesn't mean we can't actually see the way through this.

Because youth have always accessed psychedelics, they are available to the youth community if they want to use them. And so if we created a system that was 21 and above, what we are still going to have is prohibition for youth beneath the age of whatever the cutoff is. And they will still use them in uncontrolled, unregulated and unstructured ways and they will have all the problems they've always had.

Really, youth need to be included in some way. What we said is youth need to be allowed to access these experiences but they need to access them from trained adults who have this knowledge.

They seem especially vulnerable to the kinds of abuses that we've talked about?
Well that's why it would be guided by professionalism and best practice. And again, there's huge history with this. I dug through literature trying to find how youth were included in the different traditions, and peyote folks sort of get included in specific times through rites of passage (puberty, etc.), but the ayahuasca folks, women show up when they're pregnant, they show up with their newborns, they show up with their toddlers. So youth have always been a part of psychedelic communities in Aboriginal groups but in very different ways. Looking at that and making wise decisions about that would be logical and reasonable. As opposed to doing prohibition for youth and this other thing for adults.

But having a legal age is the way our society does deal with these things. This is something of a radical departure.
Yes, and we need to allow wisdom to apply here.

Is there anything like this proposal anywhere else in the world?
We've taken elements that exist already and we've pulled them all together into one package. The elements of Aboriginal use of psychedelics is in there. We went and dug and found that 21 states have legislation on the books that allows alcohol to be served to minors at the dining room table as long as parents have a guiding hand at this. So with parental approval and supervision, youth can access alcohol. Which is interesting. So you have a young person accessing a drug that would be illegal unless the parent is there. We have the health care system which in BC distinguishes between mature and immature minors. There is a point at which youth become mature and accessing health care at that point, when they are able to make that decision, they show up at the doctor's office and say I want to be on the birth control pill and I don't want you to tell my mother. That's an existing access to healthcare model. So we kind of put all of those together and came up with the statement we came up with.

It seems unique. You're in uncharted territory with this.
Well, we're not doing it very well and we need new models.

Follow Kate Richardson on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

On Saturday afternoon, hundreds of people headed into central London with a common goal: celebrating loosely pan-African culture as part of this year's Africa on the Square event. Since Black History Month was founded in 1987 by Greater London Council's Akyaaba Addai Sebbo, October has become a time when city councils around the country make a concerted effort to honor cultural contributions made by the black diaspora.

The usual tourist hum of Trafalgar Square turned into a street party, market, and stage that saw the likes of street performers and London mayor Sadiq Khan mingle with a happy crowd. We sent photographer Angela Dennis down to take in the sights, and here's what she made of the day.

Follow Angela on Instagram

Photo of Sonny Liston fighting Muhammad Ali via Central Press/Stringer/Getty

In a bygone era of great fighters when heavyweights like Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman were king, Sonny Liston was viewed as the ultimate WWE-type heel, a villainous character of epic proportions who people considered the biggest thug on boxing's biggest stage. Liston was like Mike Tyson before there was a Mike Tyson—a scowling, menacing fighter with lights-out power, an intimidating ring presence, and a lengthy criminal background. Big, bold, and brash, he gravitated toward the sport of boxing in a Missouri penitentiary while serving time for a first degree robbery charge. After his release from prison, Liston turned pro in 1953 and won the heavyweight championship in 1962 by knocking out pugilist legend Floyd Patterson.

Amassing a career record of 50 wins and 4 losses with 39 knockouts, Liston was the quintessential anti-hero America loved to hate. The fighter, who some called the "Bad Negro," was also a barroom brawler with ties to the Lucchese crime family and over 20 arrests. After consecutive losses to Muhammad Ali in the mid-60s, his reign as a top heavyweight was effectively over. But Liston subsequently capitalized on his notoriety in Las Vegas, spending his days at the casinos shaking hands and doing public appearances. At night, however, Liston reverted to form. The one-time boxing talent would drive around the strip in his pink Cadillac, dealing drugs, womanizing, and working for the crime syndicates he'd known since his youth as a leg breaker. In 1971, he was found dead from an apparent heroin overdose, but no one believed his death was accidental.

In his new book, The Murder of Sonny Liston: Las Vegas, Heroin, and Heavyweights, out October 18, ESPN journalist Shaun Assael treats the boxer's death as a cold case and investigates the circumstances that led to Liston's early exit from life. As the story unfolds, readers get a light into not just the seedy underworld of professional boxing, but also 1970s Las Vegas—a world of glitz and glamor, grit and crime. Assael found that Liston straddled the line between two worlds, walking in the limelight with celebrities like Elvis, but at the same time consorting with criminals, big players in the mob, and dirty cops. VICE chatted with Assael to find out what happened to Sonny Liston, a man who many wanted to silence.

VICE: What was Sonny Liston's stature in boxing and the sports world when he died?
Shaun Assael: By the time Sonny died, he was a forgotten champion, in some respects. In the late 50s early and early 60s he was considered the meanest man on the planet, and during the middle 60s when the Civil Rights movement was tearing at America he was known as the baddest black man around. Lots of fighters were scared to fight him. But after two notorious losses to Muhammad Ali in 1964 and 1965, he was kind of a diminished figure. The book picks up when he moves to Las Vegas as that diminished figure after reaching such great heights.

Sonny was a country boy who came out of very, very poor circumstances in Arkansas, and he followed his mother to St. Louis where he really grew up on the streets, despite his mother's best intentions. He had a famous criminal record that followed him all the way up to his early fights, and by the time he was fighting Floyd Patterson for the title in 1962, President John F. Kennedy told Patterson he should find somebody of a higher moral fibers to fight. Sonny was just seen as a thug and a tool of the mob, and that reputation never quite left him. He was always seen as somebody who had organized crime lurking in his corner.

What led to your interest in Liston's story and why did you decide to investigate his death as a cold case murder?
I was actually writing a novel that was about a suspicious death, and the novel made me think, Man, I wish I could go back in time and reinvestigate this. It gave me the idea of going back and finding a cold case to write about and investigate within the sports world. Working for ESPN and having written about boxing in the past, it didn't take me long to reach Sonny . The idea of spending time in Las Vegas and recreating that era and then recreating the world that Sonny lived in was really appealing to me. It turned out to be fascinating because it was a trip into the past with Elvis Presley and Howard Hughes and all these larger-than-life mobsters and all these larger-than-life sports figures. Everybody in the book is larger-than-life... until they're dead.

Among the vast universe of people I talked to, nobody doubted that Sonny was killed. It was just a matter of who they were pointing the fingers at. It was ruled natural causes, although there were heroin metabolites in Sonny's blood that made the police speculate a heroin overdose. His body was so badly decomposed when the cops found it that there was really no way to rule out blunt force trauma or anything else. I firmly believe it was not an accident.

Sonny Liston fights Floyd Patterson for the heavyweight championship title in 1962. Photo via Getty/George Silk

What was the extent of Liston's mob connections and why was the former heavyweight champion selling drugs in Las Vegas?
In the 1950s and certainly well into the 60s, the mob ran boxing and one of the seminal figures in this was Frank Palermo who was a key crime figure in Philadelphia. His partner was a member of Murder, Inc. You couldn't get a big fight back then without the mob being involved. It was not so much that the fights were fixed, but you couldn't make a match without the mob blessing the match. By 1970 that was beginning to change. You had huge businessmen like Jack Kent Cooke, the owner of the Washington Redskins, and a Hollywood agent named Jerry Perenchio, who were making the Ali-Frazier fights. You were beginning to see the loosening of the mob's hold over boxing—not the elimination, but the loosening.

Sonny never really got paid 100 percent of his contracts—not that any fighter does, but he especially didn't. As one friend once remarked, he was carved up pretty well. And so by the time he's in Vegas and we see him in 1970, having lost a fight that would have given him that one last payday, he was left hustling money. He was paid $13,000 for his last fight and he had to fly to the Jersey City Armory in New Jersey to do it. Sonny needed money and hustling drugs was the way he knew how to get it.

When you were researching the story, what did you find out about 1970s Las Vegas that surprised you the most?
One of the most surprising things for me was just knowing about the glittering strip, how racially segregated Las Vegas was, how mean the police force was, and how little opportunity black people had in Las Vegas. The closer I was able to look at that the more I was stunned about how Sonny may have actually been the only celebrity who was able to transcend those two worlds. He lived in a largely-white suburb filled with actors and casino executives. He spent his nights driving this pink Cadillac all the way to the heart of the ghetto. It's that duality that fascinated me about Sonny. He had this public personality that made people want to come up to him in casinos and shake his hand, and he had this soul that kept him dealing drugs, working for crime syndicates, and doing a little bit of muscle enforcement even after he had been in four title fights.

The following excerpt from Taschen's monograph on the late H.R. Giger is by Andreas J. Hirsch, a photographer and writer who's curated multiple exhibitions on H.R. Giger's work. All images courtesy of Taschen.

In the spring of 1978, having just turned 38 years old, the Swiss artist H.R. Giger jotted these lines in his diary:

May 18, 1978. Work on the film is in full swing. The construction of the spaceship is almost finished. It looks good. Small models of the landscape and the entrance area of the spacecraft were made. The people who built these have no clue about my architecture. I said that they should get bones and build a model with plasticine...

At that time, H.R. Giger was already a successful painter whose bleak visions in a style that he termed biomechanics were widely distributed: in the form of popular poster editions that appeared in the late 1960s; in the large-format illustrated book Necronomicon, which he designed himself; and on album covers such as Emerson, Lake & Palmer's 1973 release Brain Salad Surgery. But the project he was now working on would make him both a worldwide cult figure and an Oscar winner. Director Ridley Scott had hired Giger to create the monster in the movie Alien. So the artist went to the Shepperton Film Studios near London to realize his designs for the world of the Alien with his own hand.

Necronom IV (1976)

It was a painting in Giger's Necronomicon that had immediately convinced Scott to get him involved in shaping the alien creature: Necronom IV (1976), one of the key works in the artist's oeuvre. It shows in profile the upper body of a being with only remotely humanoid traits. Its skull is extremely elongated, and its face is almost exclusively reduced to bared teeth and huge insect-like eyes. Hoses extend from its neck, and its back is dominated by tubular extensions and reptilian tails. The male sexual organ is significantly extended and curved upwards over the head. It opens out into a transparent bulge in which a skeletonized being is visible like a little saint resting in a glass coffin.

The entire body appears to be under a tension that is maintained with ease. Only the powerful arms are still close to the human form, although wires and mechanical tracks are visible under their translucent skin and their material is less reminiscent of tissue than of the grain of medieval woodcarvings. The position of the hands in the top right corner of the image is also noteworthy: they appear to have been taken from the iconography of medieval altarpieces. The elegantly slender fingers contrast sharply with the creature's merciless mien. The hands seem in the process of taking something that is out of sight, as if trying out a grip or magically manipulating something far off.

As a matter of course, the figure takes up the entire picture plane and allows but a little glimpse at the organic background, which is dominated by slimy forms and without any spatial depth. Although there is no indication as to where the creature may be in space and time, it is still obvious that it cannot come from the world as we know it.

Erotomechanics VII (Mia und Judith, first state), 1979

In order to turn this painted creature into a monster for a movie, the artist had to submit it to a complex transformation. The original painting fascinated Ridley Scott so much that he had Giger develop a complete "natural history" based on Dan O'Bannon's screenplay, which ultimately produced the final monster of the film. The creature's latent deadliness, which was already perceptible in the painting, turns into a sort of applied lethality that it acts out through dynamic motion in the film. Between these two stages stood the creative and artistic process of designing and producing the necessary figures, which Giger did primarily by himself. The process results in that mixture of fascination and disgust with which we encounter the Necronom and—with an even greater sense of dread—the Alien. Giger's monster represents a turning point in science fiction and horror movies, to which Alien brought a deadly life form from space that had never been seen before.

NY CITY II (1980)

The myriad traces that Giger's work has left in so many different areas—painting and film, album covers, and tattoo culture, as well as in the genres of science fiction and fantasy—make it like a "Rosetta Stone," combining several "languages" that still have to be decrypted. Giger's work today appears like a code that has been far from fully broken.

Seen in art-historical terms, we have an artist whose work, although inspired by Surrealism and Symbolism, was highly autonomous and ultimately difficult to classify. He had already made a distinctive contribution to the fantastic art of the 20th century with his work before Alien. His biomechanical ideas are still developed independently in disciplines like media art and bio art, less as an aesthetic influence than as ideas influencing a conceptual approach.

Cthulhu (Genius) III (1967)

Then there is the reading of Giger's work focusing on mythology and psychology, examining the role of individual and collective fears in his approach, which is not merely figurative and narrative but can also be understood in a modern way as the creation of a mythology. A work so densely populated with archetypes and beings from a post-human future, which is well beyond accepted notions of reality and which is so rich in symbols, shapes, and themes from occult traditions, also calls for a reading that includes interpretations from the fields of alchemy, astrology, and magic.

The diversity of the readings of these archetypal themes sketched out above, of dream and trauma, birth and death, means that one could easily fill a whole library— a "bibliotheca gigeriana," albeit fictitious for the time being—on the draftsman, painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and designer H.R. Giger.

The Spell II (1974)

Andreas J. Hirsch is a photographer, writer, and curator based in Vienna, Austria, where he has curated exhibits on H.R. Giger's work, as well as Pablo Picasso and Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

Taschen's publishing history with H.R. Giger goes back to the mid-1980s and includes the limited editions of 'Hologramm' and www.hrgiger.com. Project work for this SUMO-sized monograph dates back ten years and included close curatorial and design collaboration with Giger, as well as new photography of leading artworks held in private collections all over the globe. Due to his untimely death in 2014, Giger was unable to witness the final printing and binding of his opus magnum, but it stands in his memory as testimony to his prolific output and extraordinary vision.

The limited-edition monograph of H.R. Giger is available to pre-order on Taschen's website now.

See more images from the text below.

Biomechanoid 75 (1975)

Gebärmaschine (1967)

Alien III (Front view II), 1978

Hommage à Böcklin, 1977

People at Bristol's recently auctioned Mapgie squat (Photo courtesy of Jamie Gillman)

Bristol's Stokes Croft road cuts a gnarled, paint-splattered route north from the city centre. To the east runs St Paul's, home to the city's historically Jamaican and Somali communities and the location of notorious riots in the 80s, and to the west sits affluent Kingsdown. In the empty spaces left derelict long after World War Two, a thriving counter-cultural scene blossomed, starting with the punks in the 70s and evolving into the festival and alternative art communities of the late 90s and beyond.

The squats created a space for parties, performances and exhibitions – and one where artists could live and work without worrying about making rent. The graffiti-sprayed buildings changed the aesthetic of the area and, inevitably, the neighbourhood became fashionable, creeping up in price.

The summer of 2011 marked a turning point. The eviction of long-running squat Telepathic Height sparked riots, and anti-squatting laws were soon passed by the coalition government, making it harder to open new spaces. One by one, many of the squats were emptied, with coffee shops and craft beer bars popping up in their place. This year, the last standing squat in the area – the Magpie – was sold for £300,000 at auction so we spoke to people from different squats over the years about their memories.

(Photo courtesy of Jamie Gillman)

Dav Khay, 37
Opened the recently auctioned Magpie squat

It was about 2006 and a group involved with festivals and events were looking for a space to live and work. We got wind of this empty building – just a shed, really – and found a sliding door at the front that was unsecured. We just opened it and went in.

It bloomed into this amazing creative community. We got funding for a workshop and tools, and opened it up to people who wouldn't normally have access. Someone made a solar-powered milk truck to take round festivals, another built a transportable yurt that packed down onto a bike. Once, we turned the upstairs into a stage and opened up the yard to the public, which ended up turning into a full-on street party.

When the building was put up for auction, one of us actually had enough funds to bid for it but the security refused to let us in. Now I'm trying to do similar things elsewhere – I'm about to go to Greece to set up a project with refugees. It's made me realise how important it is to fight for these spaces and the positivity that can come out of them.

Bear Hackenbush, 53
Opened 80s squat venue the Demolition Diner

In the early 80s the area was desolate. There wasn't anything going on apart from the punk and squat scenes because, to be honest, no one else wanted to go there. When I was about 21, a group of us decided to squat an abandoned shop and adjacent VW showroom.

We turned the shop into a cafe called The Demolition Diner, then got the electricity working in the showroom – a bit dodgy because it used to flood – and called it The Demolition Ballroom, for gigs. We took it in turns to work in the cafe, serving vegetarian and vegan food. Locals came in all the time too, not just the anarchists and the lefties, as it was only about 50p a meal. The Ballroom became an established venue on the touring circuit, and we also started a market during the day. It was great.

There were a couple of dodgy instances – a riot broke out once after an altercation with local kids – but generally the police left us alone. I started getting involved with events at different venues and drifted away from it, and eventually the place got evicted. These things tend to fade out over time, but it was amazing while it lasted.

(Photo courtesy of Doug Francisco)

Doug Francisco, 48
Used an Audi garage as a performance space

I'd spent years travelling round the world with my performance group before coming to Bristol via London in 2005. We started putting on performances in a squatted house at the top of Stokes Croft but it wasn't big enough – we'd have 100 people at the door queuing to get in. We noticed an old Audi garage – a huge, multi-level space – but it was in such a state we weren't sure if we wanted to take it on. It had been used as a shooting gallery by local addicts and was pretty destroyed. But then we just decided to do it anyway.

We started putting on exhibitions and weekly cabaret nights in the front space while we did the rest up. It all culminated in our event The Road to Nowhere – we opened up the space, using all the multi-storey parts of the building from when it had been a showroom and workshop, with different artists and performers everywhere. After we were evicted we started working with the council to take over empty spaces and give them to artists but, as in London, there's less available now prices are going up. The pop-up culture that's been fashionable recently draws from squatting culture but commercialises it. It used to be people with no resources making something out of nothing, and now it's people with a lot more resources competing for much less space.

Life in Telepathic Heights (Photo courtesy of the Silly Tang)

Philip Pezard, 31
Telepathic Heights resident during the 2011 riots

I was 24 and had just finished uni when I moved into the squat. The building itself had been open for years but the last occupants had been sent to jail, so me and three mates – Salim, Dave and Max – came in and did it up. We made it a nice place to live.

When you're living in alternative spaces – whether you're an artist, an anarchist, a drug addict or whatever – you become one community together. We were friends with the homeless people in the area, they'd come round and get pissed in our yard. We had some mad parties, but the craziest of all was the eviction one. We'd received notice from the council, so we moved all our stuff out and put the word out. Every type of person you could imagine turned up and it got a bit out of hand: people were tagging the walls and pissing everywhere. But the bailiffs never arrived and the party ended up going on for three days.

We tried to find out what was happening and were told the police thought we were making a molotov cocktail to chuck at the newly-opened Tesco opposite, which we found hilarious. Then a week later, 325 riot police turned up without notice and tried to arrest us. We came out without a fight, but a bunch of local anarchists got wind of what was going on and came to protest. Everything just kicked off. The police were so distracted by the riots that we managed to sneak back inside. We saw one officer get hit in the head with a rock, it was horrible. We put the decks on and just tried to block out everything that was happening.

The final Telepathic Heights party before the police evicted everyone (Photo courtesy of The Silly Tang and Phil Pezard)

When they finally came for us the next morning I'd only had about half an hour's sleep. They made us sit outside in the boiling sun for three hours. I had half a gram of ketamine stashed in my sock and did the whole thing in the back of the police van – it was actually the best way to deal with being in custody for 48 hours, because I just slept through most of it.

They tried to charge us with terrorism and pin the riots on us, but they had to drop it because obviously there was no evidence. We eventually got an apology from the chief inspector but it'd already messed us up. One guy had mental health problems already and it affected him really badly. It hasn't put me off squatting though. I'd do it again if it was the right time and place.

@jessicabateman

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Chief Tammy Cook-Searson said there is a "crisis" with the the community's youth and families. File photo by Liam Richards/THE CANADIAN PRESS

Four fires were lit around a northern Saskatchewan community to guard its people and protect its youth, after a week where three young girls died and rumours of a suicide pact circulated online.

The small cemetery in La Ronge struggled to hold the stream of people who came together to mourn on Saturday. The gathering to celebrate the life of a 14-year-old girl—sharing stories and moose meat—was too familiar for the Indigenous community, who were already mourning two other young girls, between the ages of 12 and 14. They all committed suicide within four days.

"There's always visiting and going to the the person's house and bringing moose meat and just being there," Jody Ratt, a relative of the young girl, told VICE. Ratt lit her woodstove following the funeral and thought about her own four children. "We are not a big town so we all support each other and come together in a time of need like this, especially at a time like this."

"Everyone is still in disbelief and shock. It's tragic everytime you lose one youth, we've lost three," Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) Chief Bobby Cameron told VICE.

There were also nine suicide attempts in the community and more than 20 youth were considered at risk in the days following the young girls' deaths, with some sent south to Prince Albert to see a psychiatrist. Chief Tammy Cook-Searson said there is a "crisis" with the the community's youth and families.

While rumours circulated online about the suicide pact between some of the youth and a group calling themselves the "suicide squad," the community quickly responded. Local health centres and the band office began staying open all day and night and extra mental health workers were made available. There was also additional support from the Mental Wellness Team from the Prince Albert Grand Council.

"It's a huge concern," Cameron said. "Everyone is doing their part to address and stop it. That's one of our priorities right now to put a stop to it and address it."

Read More: Canada Had All the Information It Needed to Predict the Attawapiskat Suicide Crisis

Two of the girls were from Stanley Mission, a First Nation located in the heart of the boreal forest on the banks of the Churchill River. The other girl was from La Ronge, a larger town located about 80 kilometres southwest. All of the girls were members of the Lac La Ronge Indian Band (LLRIB), the largest First Nation in Saskatchewan.

Health Canada told VICE in a statement that the department will help fund therapy and travel costs for three mental health therapists to travel weekly to the community to provide counselling to at-risk youth on Fridays and Saturdays until the end of December.

Suicides make up 25 per cent of injury deaths in northern Saskatchewan with rates three times as high as in the rest of the province, according to a 2011 health indicators report by the northern Saskatchewan Population Health Unit. From 1998 to 2007, suicide was the leading cause of injury deaths in northern Saskatchewan, surpassing traffic collisions by nearly 10 per cent.

Suicide clusters and specifically pacts among youth are becoming an increasing concern for Indigenous communities. Eleven people attempted suicide in one night on the isolated Attawapiskat First Nation in northern Ontario in April and a group of children were overheard making a pact and brought to hospital for assessment. In Manitoba, the Pimicikamak Cree Nation declared a crisis after six people committed suicide in March—once again the band was concerned there was a suicide pact.

"Many people will struggle to understand why a young person takes their life far too soon, some of us though have a bit of understanding as we may have been there before," Kevin Roberts, the head of sports, culture and recreation with LLRIB, wrote on Facebook.

"We don't like the poverty, having to go to bed hungry, wondering what's for tomorrow's supper, wishing you had certain foods, decent clothes, money for lunch or school pictures. We hate the fact we might live on welfare, it's humiliating, embarrassing and there's no pride in it."

Roberts went on to say that there are many things that can contribute to kids feeling sad, especially the stigma associated with mental health. "There are some pretty tough life realities many kids are going through right now. It's hard to grasp or understand if you haven't been there or experienced it," he wrote.

Although a First Nations Youth suicide prevention strategy was developed in 2001-02, experts say it's implementation has been slow if not absent, and many are calling for a national suicide strategy. Canada is the only developed country without a national funded program dedicated to reducing the suicide rate, according to the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention.

In June, the Liberal government announced an investment of around $70 million over three years to address the health and suicide crisis involving Indigenous people. Communities and Indigenous organizations, including Native Women's Association of Canada, say it's a step but not enough.

Aboriginal young adults are twice as likely as non-Aboriginal young adults to report having had suicidal thoughts, according to a study on suicidal thoughts among off-reserve First Nations youth released from Statistics Canada and NWAC on Thursday.

"The suicide epidemic in our Indigenous communities requires immediate action," said NWAC President Francyne Joe in a statement, adding that long-term solutions, improved resources and culturally-aware mental health services are urgently needed.

In northern Saskatchewan under the sprawling sky within the beautiful boreal forest, Indigenous leadership is calling for people to listen to the youth about what they need right now.

"The bottom line is we need resources to support these communities in implementing their own solutions," FSIN Vice-Chief Robert Merasty told MBC Radio.

"We need to respond now, the call to action is now. The La Loche happened months ago and nothing has happened, we need to reach out to these young people now."

Follow Geraldine Malone on Twitter.

Photos via Flickr user PhotoAtelier

Drugs feel like they've have become a near-constant news item recently. With opioid epidemics raging in many states, conversations about drug overdoses and prescription pills have become a regular feature of nightly newscasts. At the same time, conversations about the drug and medical industry itself have entered the mainstream. Between pharma executive loudmouth (and alleged crook) Martin Shkreli, the high-profile implosion of Theranos, and controversy over the pricing of EpiPen, Americans seem to be talking about drugs more than ever.

But what are we talking about when we talk about drugs? Are opioids good or bad, or both? When people talk about prescription drug pricing, are they entering uncharted territory for public discourse? Danya Glabau is a New York-based medical anthropologist who is teaching a class in those very topics. Called Drugs and Society, the class will be at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research starting October 19 and will attempt to get at some fundamental questions about drugs, including defining what a "drug" is and how we conceive of "good drugs" versus "bad drugs." Glabau spoke with VICE about her course.

VICE: How'd the idea of this class came about?
Danya Glabau: My dissertation looked at allergy activism in the US, trying to understand the the culture of food allergies. A big part of looking at any medical condition, or community united by medical condition, is thinking about the different kinds of pharmaceutical interventions that they use. I've been studying the different interactions among communities and drugs for six years, since I started graduate school. This class comes out of that work, in large part.

Can we define what we talk about when we talk about drugs? What even are drugs?
That's a really good question. In this class, in particular, I am trying to look at both the pharmaceutical side, what we think of as "good drugs" in our society, as well as the illicit side. In the tradition of Western medicine, there is this play on how we think of the pharmacon—that's a Greek word that describes substances that can both heal and harm you. That's deeply embedded in Western thinking—that medicine and drugs are both healing and harming. You can see this with, again, drugs like prescription opioids, where they can be really essential to helping people with injuries and they also have this dark side of addiction. You can see that in other classes of drugs, too. For example, chemotherapy drugs: They're very powerful drugs. Some of them have done a lot in extending the lives of people with cancer, but they really come with very serious side effects. What we view as helpful, versus harmful.

I think often, when we talk about drugs, especially outside of scholarly conversations, there is this split between, are we talking about prescription drugs, prescription medications, and the political economy of healthcare in our country, or in our society? Are we talking about bad, dirty drug users, who belong in jail? There is often a much harder split, I think, in public conversation about drugs.

Do you think that Americans have a hard time talking about drugs, or conceptualizing a framework for how to even talk about drugs? It seems to me that there are so many people on various drugs—whether it is antidepressants, or anti-anxiety pills, smoking weed, or whatever it might be—but it's still a not polite conversation to have, though.
I think because pharmaceutical drugs, in particular, are used to treat bodily dysfunction, bodily ills, illness, disease, whatever you want to call it, there is a big taboo about talking about that, in American society in particular. In my research, I was struck after reading about how in Europe there is much less of a taboo around talking about illness. I think the taboo around that in the US is is a big part of it. I mean, I also think it is difficult to think about drugs as a monolithic class.

But there's a real shift in how we are thinking about drugs and disease. It feels like we are making progress, having conversations about what we need to do to care for people with mental illness, or with food allergies, or whatever. There is more conversation to be had. With food allergies, the example recently is the conversation about the pricing of Epinephrine auto-injector, where the community was really united around helping companies expand access to them. Many activists got involved in lobbying their local, or state, governments to loosen restrictions on who could use them, in order to provide Epinephrine in places like schools. Then, all of a sudden, there is this pricing debate, which dovetails with some concerns of people who are already working on the activist side, about the rising cost of the drug. Now, there is skepticism about, Well, was it really, actually, a good idea to work so hard to expand access to this, potentially life-saving drug? I think most the activists say yes, but we should think more carefully about who our allies are, moving forward.

There was that controversy, and then the controversy about Martin Shkreli. Why do drugs seem so controversial this year?

Muhammad and Qadirah Roach

In February of 2015, three east London schoolgirls absconded to Syria and vanished into the block caps of international headline news. Less than three months earlier, in November 2014, Qadirah and Muhammad Roach just vanished. The three east London schoolgirls prompted a global outcry, and not a little hysteria about the power and potency of Islamic State propaganda. But Qadirah and Muhammad—whose journey to Syria began from the Caribbean Island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T)—didn't even make it onto the front page.

There are reportedly 400 Trinidadians in Syria, living under the so-called caliphate. The official number given by the government of T&T is 120. This is well below the 1,800 from France and the 760 from Britain. Yet T&T, with a population of 1.3 million, including 104,000 Muslims, is top of the list of Western countries with the highest rates of foreign-fighter radicalization. This is one of the big untold stories of the war in Syria, and it's why I had come to Trinidad in February and June this year.

It is remarkable just how many lives the war in Syria has touched. It is also remarkable just how far its deadly embrace has reached. In late November 2014, it came for Marvin Roach in Trinidad, and his only two children, 15-year-old Qadirah and 11-year-old Muhammad.

In 2011, Roach divorced his wife and was awarded full custody of the children. As part of the custody agreement, his ex-wife was allowed to have the children one weekend a fortnight. When she took Qadirah and Muhammad on Friday, November 21, she told Roach they were going to Tobago for a short break. But she was lying, and instead took them to Guyana, and from there to Syria, joining her new husband, who had left Trinidad just weeks before.

The day I returned to England from my second trip to Trinidad, Roach sent me a photograph of the two children together, sitting in the back of his car. Qadirah is wearing a white hijab, with a large daisy attached to it, and two more on her top. Muhammad is in a blue shirt, with the beginnings of a smile on his face. They look confident, with strong features, and full of promise.

Mark Bassant, an investigative TV reporter in Trinidad, put me in touch with Roach, who agreed to speak to me about his ex-wife and her abduction of Qadirah and Muhammad. We met in a food court above Frederick Street in Port of Spain, T&T's capital, near where Roach works in a cellphone store. It was June, and still Ramadan, and hot as hell. Carelessly, I asked Roach if he wanted a drink. He politely declined; he was fasting. Roach, like so many black African Muslims in Trinidad, is a convert. Born in 1974 in San Juan, just outside Port of Spain, he was 19 when he converted from Christianity to Islam. His teenage years, he told me, were "a little wild: liming, partying, having fun, carnival." It wasn't a straight conversion because his first introduction to Islam was via the Nation of Islam, the controversial African American religious group led by Louis Farrakhan. But after visiting a "real mosque" in Trinidad and "seeing what it's really like," he soon discovered that "they were preaching stuff that contradicts the true Islam, which is the racism stuff." This was the Nur-E-Islam mosque, in El Socorro, San Juan, one of the largest in the country, and the same mosque attended by Shazam Mohammed, who was among the first cohort of Trinidadians to join ISIS, in July 2014.

The reason I offered Roach a drink is because when he approached me his eyes were crimson and wet, and I didn't know what else to say. At Kent University, where I teach criminology, I urge my students to try to develop rapport with interviewees before asking questions: joke, mess around, loosen it up. But how are you supposed to do that with a man who has lost his two children—his only children—to a war zone and a group that rapes girls and turns boys into human bombs, all as a matter of deliberate policy?

To say that Roach finds this a difficult subject is an understatement. So the first thing I asked him was about his ex-wife, to whom he had been married for just over ten years. This was safer ground, because it wasn't Qadirah and Muhammad, and because it allowed Roach to feel his way toward a different order of emotion. Tricia Ramirez, his ex-wife, he said, was "a very pig-headed, very arrogant person... not someone who could be easily advised." Like Roach, she too was a convert, becoming a Muslim when she was around 13, after moving in with her aunt, who was also a Muslim. But unlike Roach, who is devout, Ramirez, he said, "would dress the part and everything, but I wouldn't really call her religious." She was also, in Roach's telling, an unreliable and chaotic mother, and would often turn up at the children's school and take them as classes were in progress. The man she left Roach for and remarried—Sean Bartholomew—was also hardly a role model: He was an ex-con, and he was violent. Roach recalled that just after he had won custody of the children, Bartholomew came to his store and attacked him with a metal bar. Bartholomew was arrested and charged for this, but the case was dropped because of a procedural error.

When Ramirez collected the children on the Friday, she told Roach that she would return them to school on the Monday. But when Monday came, Qadirah and Muhammad were nowhere to be seen. Around lunchtime, Ramirez sent Roach a text, explaining that she was extending their stay in Tobago and would return on the Thursday. Straight away, Roach felt that "something's not adding up." And he was right: Thursday came, and Ramirez and the children were still gone, and now she wasn't responding to his calls and texts. He then contacted child services and the police, who on searching Ramirez's home found her two older sons, both in their early 20s, from a previous relationship, but not Ramirez or Qadirah and Muhammad. It transpired that Ramirez, on the day before she was due to return the children, had taken them on a flight bound for Guyana and, eventually, to Syria. This was despite Roach having the children's passports, which they would have needed to fly. Roach believes that Ramirez, in planning the abduction, had bribed an official to acquire passports for the children.

According to Roach, when the police arrived at Ramirez's house, they seized the cellphone of one of the sons, but it had just been wiped and revealed nothing. They also questioned the sons about the whereabouts of their mother, but to no avail: "Police didn't get anything out of them." Around the same time, the police paid Roach a visit: "A couple of investigators came by, they took statements, and that was it. No follow-up. No nothing." And it has been like that ever since, Roach said. "No updates. Nothing. I honestly don't know what they doing, what information they have, what they gathered, I don't know."

Sean Bartholomew and Tricia Ramirez in Syria

It was through his own investigations that Roach was able to piece together what had happened. Ramirez's new husband, Sean Bartholomew (a.k.a. Shabazz), Roach told me, had taken a flight from Trinidad on October 8, 2014, to Suriname, and from there onto Syria, to join ISIS. This is confirmed in a 50-page leaked document from a T&T police agency, reported on in the Trinidad Guardian in April this year. Roach was also able to locate Bartholomew's Facebook page, where he found photos of Bartholomew posing with Ramirez in Syria. He also found out about Bartholomew's death, subsequently confirmed in the Guardian, coming across his "martyrdom" picture on social media before this was public knowledge.

Bartholomew, as Roach describes him, was a troubled soul. The two knew each other well and used to be friends. Born in Trinidad, Bartholomew moved to the US when he was four, returning in his early 40s after being deported for drug offenses.

"First impression was jail-bird, his whole demeanor," said Roach, recalling the first time they met, having been introduced by a mutual friend who asked Roach to take him to a mosque. "He told me, 'I really don't have no friends in Trinidad, I've been away, I'm really lonely, could you befriend me?' Just like that." And just like that, Roach befriended him. "I got his first job for him," Roach said. "I remember even giving him clothes." Roach also tried advising him on matters of faith: "I started teaching him stuff, because I realized his knowledge was very limited Islamically." But little of what Roach told him seemed to get through. "He was very arrogant, hasty, short fuse," Roach recalled, adding that "it wasn't far-fetched to see a person like him becoming involved in stuff like this," referring to his involvement with radical Islam and ISIS. It was through Roach that Bartholomew met Roach's then-wife. I didn't want to press him on whether Ramirez left him for Bartholomew, but Roach made it clear that "you don't just break up with one person and go to the next person just like that."

He also made it luminously clear just how he feels about ISIS: "Only stupid people get involved in ISIS. The majority of people being killed at the hand of ISIS are Muslim! You leavin' Trinidad, a beautiful country, sun 24/7, beaches nice, coconut water, doubles, we live good here, nobody stop us from practicing our religion. You free... You would give up all of this to go in a so-called holy war, where the majority of the people you're killing are Muslim."

A lot of Trinidadians in Syria, Roach claims, are gang members with pending court cases back in Trinidad. Some of them he personally knew. "One guy that I know very well, he's a drug addict. I know him from being strung out on crack cocaine to being a soldier for ISIS." Many other brothers he knew would just disappear, turning up months later in news coverage of foreign fighters in Syria. "They in the gym, you're working out, there's brother so-and-so—'Hey, how are you?' Next thing you missed the brother for a couple of weeks, and then later you're watching the same person on the news. These guys just buying tickets and walking out of Trinidad. No one stops them."

I asked Roach if he had contemplated going to Turkey or Syria to try to find Qadirah and Muhammad. He has, but he doesn't think it's a good idea, and in any case, he doesn't have the money for the trip. Yet not a single day goes by when he doesn't think about Qadirah and Muhammad. Only in his dreams does he get to see them and hear their voices: "It's always, like, they return, always them coming back."

According to a leaked security document containing the names of 102 Trinidadians in Syria, 40 are children. The youngest is just two years old. In Trinidad, the national conversation is focused on how to respond to the potential security threat of the adult returnees from Syria. But no one is talking about the return of the missing children.

Qadirah and Muhammad Roach were taken exactly two years ago next month. They are still missing. But with ISIS now on the back foot, there is a hope, however faint, that they will return, and re-join the loving father they were so cruelly snatched from.

Follow Simon Cottee on Twitter.