When writer Steve Englehart and artist Frank Brunner took over the run of Marvel Comics' Doctor Strange in the early 1970s, they would get together every couple of months to have dinner and then get high, brainstorming wild, new directions in which to take the character.

Based on the latest marketing efforts for Scott Derickson's Doctor Strange—the newest superhero to join Marvel's Cinematic Universe—it appears they weren't the only ones to get high and discuss the Sorcerer Supreme. The trailers and movie posters give off a mystical, psychedelic vibe unlike any Marvel movie we've seen so far, with scenes so far-out, they appear to have been ripped from the very early issues of the classic Steve Ditko and Stan Lee comics of the 1960s. It was these same comics that helped inspire students in higher education to take drugs and discuss philosophy, religion, and Eastern mysticism, all in an effort to expand their minds—just like the good doctor himself. In other words, Doctor Strange, in part, inspired the hippie movement of the 1960s.

In Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, Bradford W. Wright wrote, "Dr. Strange remarkably predicted the youth counterculture's fascination with Eastern mysticism and psychedelia. Never among Marvel's more popular or accessible characters, Dr. Strange still found a niche among an audience seeking a challenging alternative to more conventional superhero fare."

Doctor Strange was created by Ditko and Lee and premiered in Strange Tales No. 110 in July 1963. Inspired by Chandu the Magician and other radio serials and pulp stories of the 1930s, the character transformation of Dr. Stephen Strange is much like Tony Stark's of Iron Man fame; an egotistical, selfish, and highly successful surgeon, Strange destroys the use of his hands in a car accident, promptly ending his neurosurgical career. He embarks on a quest to Tibet to find a way to repair them, but this quest becomes more spiritual when he encounters the Ancient One, a master of the mystical arts, who becomes his mentor and introduces Strange to the more mystical side of life. Strange, like Stark, learns to shed his old way of thought and embraces a higher calling: to use his newfound powers in the fight against evil.

In the 1960s, Marvel Comics became known as the reading material of choice in academic crowds, with more emotionally in-depth characters like Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four—heroes who were more relatable than say, DC's Superman. But the world of Doctor Strange was unlike anything comic book readers had ever seen, with much of the credit going to Ditko for his psychedelic, mind-bending illustrations that veered toward something you'd see while high on hallucinogens, undoubtedly inspired by the likes of Salvador Dali, M.C. Escher, and other surrealist artists. Throw in mysticism, black magic, the occult, astral travel, alternate realities and dimensions, and the study of dreams, and you've got plenty to analyze.

Comic book historian Mike Benton explains in his 1991 book, Superhero Comics of the Silver Age: The Illustrated History: "The Dr. Strange stories of the 1960s constructed a cohesive cosmology that would have thrilled any self-respecting theosophist. College students, minds freshly opened by psychedelic experiences and Eastern mysticism, read Ditko and Lee's Dr. Strange stories with the belief of a recent Hare Krishna convert. Meaning was everywhere, and readers analyzed the Dr. Strange stories for their relationship to Egyptian myths, Sumerian gods, and Jungian archetypes."

'Doctor Strange' movie still, courtesy of MARVEL STUDIOS

Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and a member of the Merry Pranksters—a group who are best known to have traveled across the United States in a painted school bus in the early 60s, throwing parties and giving out LSD— is mentioned, on several occasions, in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as being a big fan of the Doctor Strange comics, tripping on drugs while reading them. Kesey eventually was introduced to Timothy Leary, who worked with Dr. Richard Alpert in the controversial Harvard Psilocybin Project, which measured the effects of psychedelic drugs on test subjects. Alpert, who eventually changed his name to Ram Dass after becoming spiritually enlightened after his own Doctor Strange-kind-of-quest, admitted his love for the old Ditko and Lee comics to a large gathering of health professionals in the 70s. He also mentions Doctor Strange in a 2012 blog post on his website, comparing people's thoughts to the thought and word balloons in those comics.

The new Marvel movie promises to evoke visuals hearkening back to Ditko's early psychedelic Doctor Strange artwork, with glimpses of the artist's technicolor weirdness in trailers, and taglines such as "Have a good trip" and "Open Your Mind" used in other promotional materials. There are even updated Doctor Strange blacklight posters for sale now, similar to those that Marvel produced in 1971.

'Doctor Strange' movie still, courtesy of MARVEL STUDIOS

Though Ditko's artwork in the original Doctor Strange comics is heralded as the pinnacle of just how strange Doctor Strange could get, Englehart and Brunner would eventually take the world of Doctor Strange to even greater heights—and dimensions.

In an email interview with Englehart, he mentions his favorite Doctor Strange comics during his run on the series: First is Marvel Premiere No. 12–14, where Strange essentially meets God; second is Doctor Strange No. 10–13, where the Earth is destroyed but Strange convinces a character named Eternity to recreate it exactly as it was before, leaving Strange the only person who knows that everyone on Earth, at one point, died.

But Doctor Strange didn't just influence college students and hippies, the trippy superhero also had an effect on the 1960s music scene. Pink Floyd included an image taken from Strange Tales No. 158 on their 1968 album A Saucerful of Secrets. In 1965, Jefferson Airplane put on one of three dance concerts in San Francisco that featured bands such as the Charlatans, the Great Society, and others—collectively called A Tribute to Dr. Strange.

When Doctor Strange hits theaters November 4, you don't necessarily have to be baked to enjoy the film. But, as history points out, it might just help expand your mind while watching, as Marvel takes its cinematic universe to a whole new cosmic level.

Follow Charles Moss on Twitter.

In mid-October, Manhattan US attorney Preet Bharara announced the arrest of 20-year-old Anthony "Taco" Delosangeles for allegedly selling a fatal dose of heroin to a 25-year-old man. Delosangeles has been charged with conspiracy to distribute heroin, for which the federal mandatory minimum remains 20 years behind bars.

This was just one salvo in an aggressive new campaign to fight America's burgeoning opioid crisis by using longer, federal sentences for drug dealers. "We are going after those callous dealers who play Russian Roulette with other people's lives," Bharara wrote in an op-ed published in the Daily News. "Every overdose is a potential crime scene and should be treated as such."

On Monday, Bharara announced victory in a similar case: A judge sentenced 23-year-old Terrence Johnson to prison for 21 years for another 2015 overdose death. Meanwhile, prosecutors in at least 20 states—including California, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio—have the power to enhance sentences for people who sell drugs to those who end up dead and many are doing so. But this approach is in direct conflict with laws aimed at saving overdose victims, and could actually make things worse as America continues to grapple with what amounts to a public health crisis.

The phrase "drug dealers" calls to mind villainous kingpins cackling while ordering murders and surrounded by luxury, stacks of hundred dollar bills, and beautiful women. In real life, many dealers earn McDonald's-level wages and often suffer from addictions themselves: Around two thirds of those in state prison for drug trafficking meet criteria for a substance use disorder, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. In other words, many of those prosecuted for drug delivery deaths could easily have been overdose victim themselves.

In a nod to this dire reality, at least 32 states have enacted "Good Samaritan" laws aimed at getting more people to seek medical help during an overdose by protecting them from prosecution for at least some drug crimes. Studies show that most heroin users have witnessed at least one overdose themselves—and less than a quarter reported calling for help in one study, mainly because they feared arrest.

These are some of the same people who will be targeted as dealers by prosecutors like Preet Bharara.

Unfortunately, the state he serves—New York—provides a prime example of why such an approach is doomed to failure. In 1973, then-governor Nelson Rockefeller pushed through a set of laws requiring dealers of coke and heroin be slapped with minimum sentences of 15 to life—or more. This meant that thousands of nonviolent criminals served longer terms than rapists, armed robbers, and even killers.

The laws did not end New York's drug problem, obviously. Less than a decade into their enforcement, in fact, NYC began experiencing one of America's top three crack epidemics (Los Angeles and Miami had the others), along with what became ground zero for the plague of HIV spread by intravenous coke and heroin use. New York also continues to have one of the largest concentrations of heroin users in the country, as it has pretty much since the drug was first introduced to the public en masse in 1898.

Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Laws were a catastrophe for the black and Latino communities. By 1992, the number of people incarcerated in New York state prisons had more than tripled, with the proportion of prisoners serving time for drug crimes rising from 11 percent to 35 percent by 1994. Despite minorities making up only about a third of the state's population, nearly 90 percent of those who served time under the laws during a period of peak enforcement were people of color.

It took more than three decades for lawmakers to admit their failure and repeal the statutes, starting in 2004. And there's no reason to believe that returning to lengthier sentences for dealing—whether it is labeled as such or as drug delivery leading to death—will be more helpful this time around.

In fact, the current epidemic presents deadlier challenges. As Bharara himself laments, heroin today is often mixed with substances like fentanyl that are far more dangerous in lower doses, making the risk of OD that much higher. By making those closest to an overdose less likely to seek help, these prosecutions could increase harm—not reduce it.

What this also means is that Bharara and prosecutors like him have set their nets to trawl for minnows, not sharks. After all, it's (usually) not kingpins who get high on their own supply or make the penny ante transactions in which drugs reach their final destination. And, by targeting retailers like "Taco" Delosangeles, who is Latino, and Terrence Johnson, who is black, they will continue racist disparities in enforcement, while failing to touch high-level sellers.

Moreover, while locking up a robber or rapist is virtually guaranteed to reduce the number of people on the street committing said crimes, locking up a drug dealer often just creates a job opportunity. A century of experience with prohibition tells us that law enforcement can't put a dent in these black markets.

If he's convicted, it will cost $1.2 million simply to keep Delosangeles in state prison for 20 years. And if history and science are any guide, it won't prevent a single overdose. If, however, that money were to be spent on effective, evidence-based maintenance treatment, it could treat Delosangeles and two dozen other people dealing with drug problems for at least a decade, cutting their risk for death and for relapse at least in half and thereby actually shrinking demand.

Bharara's approach simply revives a proven failure. It's time for prosecutors in America to stop embracing drug strategies that have negative consequences and instead do what we know will save lives and reduce suffering.

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

Fractus V by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Have you ever seen a balding 40-something man doing a flamenco dance-off against another balding midlife guy, both in high-heeled flamenco shoes and double denim? Dave's Epic Strut has nothing on it. It's so pregnant with awkward poignancy it's dilating.

One of the two men I'm referring to is Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui—a highly esteemed Belgian dancer-come-choreographer, who, according to the Guardian, can twist himself "like a pipecleaner," and is now attempting to turn the works of political philosopher Noam Chomsky into a ballet, which he's titled Fractus V.

He's a dance auteur. And, in 2016, he's now also a 44-year-old man employing a company of five dancers, who are all as balding as he is. They look like they should be in a 1980s Aaron Spelling comedy-drama about men coming to terms with the loss of their virility.

Alongside the dancing, Chomsky was being broadcast in quotation throughout, mainly delivering a spiel about corporate mind control. Cherkaoui then tugged at the ideas in the quotes in ways both subtle and crashingly obvious. Take the show's best bit: On one side of the stage, he is sitting in a chair, watching his TV, in a mask, giving the finger, and laughing and gurgling like the consumerist moron he is and we all are. Meanwhile, on the other side of the stage, some guy is having seven bells beaten out of him in dance form. After a solid dance beating, the man finally collapses onto an array of big white plastic triangles, which domino right round the stage, knocking Cherkaoui into the audience—imagine an OK Go video about the war in Yemen.

There are lots of these white triangular structures on the stage, and the dancers kept re-arranging them, like they were laying some of that IKEA fake-wood flooring, but they can't quite get it to align. Again and again, they pick up these big white triangle pieces and attempt to put them in a more pleasing shape for a buy-to-let new build. They do the Shiva thing with their hands to illustrate the complexity of information overload. In another section, a man is shot again and again and again in a vicious gunfire ballet, a bit like the slo-mo scenes in The Matrix.

If you want hardcore politics about class war, it's 'Les Miserables' every time.

Remember how revolutionary that slo-mo sequence seemed back in the day? Just like Chomsky. They both peaked at the roughly same time—back in a golden age of Ralph Nader and No Logo, when Michael Moore seemed more like a Twinkie-addicted puckish prophet than a crabby, fibby annoyer-in-chief.

In fact, the sense of "why now?" runs right through the evening. It isn't hard to work out why you would put on a Chomsky dance sesh; everybody loves to access their radical political economy via expressive dance. It's just a lot harder to work out why you'd do it specifically in 2016.

Chomsky's big idea was that the world is controlled by informational channels that spoon-feed us nutritionally void info-bytes, that the truth—or, more often, the context—of what we're told isn't verifiable. So unless we come home from our slob-jobs, open our almanacs, and start researching, there's no way the individual citizen can outpace the media-machine, which, he asserts, is constructed so as to reinforce our present oligarchy, a.k.a. the Man.

Fractus V by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

His solution, as described in 1988's Manufacturing Consent and recounted onstage, is that citizens should associate—they should consume alternative media and band together, syndicate, meet, discuss. Individuals, Chomsky suggests, are fed the lie that they are powerless and alone. And, alone in their houses, watching their TVs, being drip-fed by corporate media, they certainly are.

Chomsky's thesis, in other words, is that TV in the late 80s was rubbish. And I would entirely agree. However, this is 2016. TV's brilliant. Hasn't he heard about The Crown? Black Cocking Mirror? That Foxy Knoxy documentary? But like a really great Black Mirror episode, we're also already living in the future that Chomsky was casting his eyes toward. One in which the citizen can band together with others and get alternative info: Indymedia, Wikileaks, Medium, whoever your YouTube pulpit vlogger of preference is.

The fact that he's alive to see that future is unusual—it's like if Marx had turned up in Moscow in 1928. And the truth is that he was totally right and hopelessly wrong. Our new channels have pulled down icons; we've had Tahrir Square and the Trafigura scandal. But at the same time, they've centrifuged us into Trumpists vs. Black Lives Matter-ists, taken everything to the margins of the Canary or Breitbart. If anything's lacking, it's the center he decries: It's newspaper-funded investigative journalism that's declined as "the power" (a.k.a. "the money") has been stripped out.

Tellingly, whenever Chomsky has been wheeled out to comment on the foment in America and the world this year, he's sounded little different to most of the commentariat—like everyone else, he points out that there is unease over globalization, an anomie in the citizenry, we're more isolated, oppressed, and grumpy than ever before. Does this mean that he was right all along, and we've merely caught up? Or that, as the world has moved on, his ideas have been absorbed, run out of steam, or fused into banality?

At least the dance side of Chomsky's oeuvre remains super fresh—Fractus V was given a lengthy standing ovation. If you want a man-dance extravaganza, it's here. If you want hardcore politics about class war, it's Les Miserables every time.

Follow Gavin Haynes on Twitter.

From costly foreclosures to high-interest payday loans, it's expensive to be poor in modern America. But nearly two years after the feds decried a system of preying on the desperate to fund the local government in Ferguson, Missouri, being poor can still get you locked up in the state—or so says a new lawsuit filed in federal court Tuesday. The plaintiffs allege the St. Louis County city of Maplewood uses jail time to squeeze poor people for money, and that in a more extreme move, the local government effectively denies people access to court if they're in debt.

Cecelia Webb, 26, black, and a mother to a six-year old girl, recounted getting caught up in Maplewood's snare on her way to a night shift at Walmart this June. After parking her car, blue vest and name tag in place, Webb said, she discovered the path to work was blocked by a city police officer. Webb was arrested after a brief dispute, and sprung from jail only after her husband and pastor managed to find $550 to pay Maplewood for one outstanding arrest warrant, and $300 to pay the nearby city of Webster Groves for another, according to the suit.

"It was never really clear why I was arrested," Webb told VICE. "They never told me. They just said, 'Hey, you have to pay this amount of money."

The same officer that arrested Webb that night had stopped her on her way to work in April, she claimed, slapping her with low-level traffic citations. Webb said she pleaded guilty and set up a payment plan with Maplewood, but the cop in question wanted more.

"He was just not really paying attention to me," Webb recalled of the second encounter. "And I tried to let him know, 'Hey, I need to get into work. I have a point system, and I have to be there on time.'"

It is unclear why Webb was stopped that second time, but she said that it was only after informing the officer, "I know my rights," that she was handcuffed, charged with disorderly conduct and failure to comply, among other offenses. (The Maplewood Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.)

Perhaps even more alarming than how local cops carry out arrests is what the plaintiffs say comes next. The class-action suit filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri on behalf of Webb and five others from the area accuses Maplewood of erecting a "pay wall" before the justice system—an "unlawful pay-to-play" arrangement motivated by "a desire to profit off of individuals subject to arrest solely for failing to pay minor municipal fines or failing to appear in its municipal court."

"This is only a problem for people who can't afford that payment," Blake Strode, an attorney at Arch City Defenders, the group that filed the suit, told me of the local system. "The only people who have warrants outstanding for months, sometimes years," or have been arrested and sat in jail because they didn't pay, "are people who can't afford to pay."

At the time of her second encounter with police, Webb said, she was unaware of the warrant stemming from the first one. Arrest warrants for failure to appear or to pay are, the lawsuit contends, automatically generated by a computer program without ever being reviewed by a judge.

What's peculiar about Maplewood's "extortionate scheme," the lawsuit alleges, is that the poor people accused of failing to appear in court are forced to pay a fee of between $300 and 500, or serve jail time, to have their warrant recalled or even just to access the court system. People facing such "warrant bond fees" are allegedly denied basic information about their case or an opportunity to appear before a judge until they have paid up or spent 48 hours in jail.

The Maplewood city manager did not respond to a request to comment for this story.

Metropolitan St. Louis is profoundly segregated, a divide that is enforced by the county's jurisdictional crazy quilt of 90 municipalities that keeps white and black, rich and poor—and the city of St. Louis—apart. Maplewood, mostly white, lies just west of the city and his home to big-box stores, chain restaurants, and roads used by many to commute from one town to another.

The region has been in the spotlight since August 2014, when an officer in nearby Ferguson shot and killed Michael Brown, setting off widespread protests against police brutality that continue to reverberate across the country. Brown's death focused unprecedented attention on the harsh inequalities and broad sweep of the region's criminal justice system. The summer that he was killed, there were roughly 750,000 outstanding warrants in the city and county.

"Policing just becomes, which of these people with a warrant am I going to stop?" Thomas Harvey, Arch City Defenders' executive director, told me.

The system allegedly maintained by Maplewood is extreme, but the basic set-up is far from unique, according to the Defenders, who say they've filed lawsuits against 17 St. Louis County municipalities.

"Despite being under intense scrutiny since Michael Brown was killed, the police and courts in the St. Louis region are still trying to squeeze money out of the very residents who are least able to pay," Karin Martin, a professor of public management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said via email.

Though the Supreme Court has ruled that it is unconstitutional to jail someone for a debt he or she cannot pay, doing so remains commonplace in America, experts say.

"The practices in Maplewood are not an anomaly," Alexes Harris, a sociologist at the University of Washington, said in an email. "Courts across the nation are using warrants to bring non-paying indigent defendants into courts and either forcing them to pay what little money they have or are jailing them. These practices lead to a two-tiered system of justice where the poor experience a very different and long term type of punishment compared to people with wealth."

After her release, Webb said, she had to pay more than $200 to recover her towed car, and was informed that she no longer had a job because she had missed her shift the night she was in jail. Webb is now working part-time for $8 per hour and unable to afford health insurance.

"I knew how much it was going to help my family and how much I needed it and how hard I worked to get it," Webb, beginning to choke up over the phone, told me. "I was treated so badly. And when he put his hands on me, I was scared for my life."

Sometimes, the charges handed out to poor people in places like Maplewood are unjust. Other times, poor people, like everyone else, make mistakes. But because poor people operate with an incredibly small margin for error, what would be a forgettable lapse for a middle-class person can tip them into an economic "vortex they can't get out of," as Martin put it.

Check out our documentary about debtors' prisons in America

Darron Yates, a 48-year old black man unemployed save for the occasional odd job, recalled a court-ordered shakedown that began one evening this past January. He'd borrowed his neighbor's car, which ran out of gas, so he walked to a nearby station to fill up a gallon can. Driving away, he was pulled over by police he had noticed tailing him on his walk, he said. The cops, who apparently believed he may have been stealing from vehicles, allegedly searched his car and cited him for driving with a suspended license and lacking proof of insurance.

"It was just a great deal of harassment," Yates, a named plaintiff in the lawsuit, told me. He added that police asked him what he was doing in the town. "I felt like I was targeted."

Yates said that he wasn't sure when he was supposed to appear in court. It was a "clear misprint on the ticket. I couldn't make out the court date," he said. When he called the courthouse, he said they told him it was too late and that a warrant had been issued for his arrest. He was told he could either pay $500 to get the warrant recalled or turn himself in and go to jail, according to the complaint. He did not have the money and feared arrest if he came in to explain himself.

A few months later, Yates was collecting bulk items on the street in University City, the St. Louis County city where he lives, when he was stopped by police and accused of stealing and trespassing, he recalled.

After Yates was jailed and charged with trespassing, cops discovered the warrant from Maplewood and said he could not be released until he paid the city $500. Eventually, he said, a judge visited the jail and lowered the fee to $200, which Yates's mother gave him out of funds she had saved for utilities and groceries.

"He gave me a down South type grilling," said Yates, citing questions like, "What were you doing riding in my city?"

Yates is now afraid of visiting Maplewood or even leaving his home.

"I don't want to be a Michael Brown. I don't want to be a Trayvon Martin," he told me. "I just don't want that grief."

Maplewood has taken advantage of its location to shake down poor black people passing through on their commute and thus putting them "a constant state of terror," according to Harvey of Arch City Defenders. Black people stopped in Maplewood during 2015 were more than twice as likely to be searched, and nearly three times more likely to be arrested as whites, according to the lawsuit, which cited data reported to the state attorney general.

"I feel almost like I don't belong over there, or afraid to go, because I'm a minority," Webb said. The arrest and resulting economic crisis, she added, "made me feel very depressed that I can't get ahead in life. I'm just trying to go to work."

Follow Daniel Denvir on Twitter.

Door knockers in Woodbridge, Virginia, many of them undocumented themselves, prepare to go out to mobilize the immigrant vote for Hillary Clinton. Photo by Allison Shelley for the Washington Post via Getty Images

Last month, Donald Trump nodded along as Art Del Cueto, a representative of a Border Patrol officer union that had endorsed the candidate, described undocumented immigrants flooding across the border to vote illegally. This was a continuation of the general Trumpian anxiety about brown people coming from afar to damage America, but it also reflected a specific fear: Almost 60 percent of Republicans believe that illegal immigrants vote en masse, though there's no evidence of that.

Undocumented immigrants have been engaging in the election in another way, though: They are registering and encouraging citizens to vote, even though they can't do so themselves. Given the stakes—with Trump promising to deport millions of them by force—it's not surprising that they're as engaged as they possibly can be.

The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) utilized the collective power of undocumented immigrants to register voters through a program called the New Americans Democracy Project. About 23 young fellows, several of whom are undocumented but have DACA permits allowing them to stay and work in the country, worked in and around Chicago in high-density immigrant neighborhood that typically don't vote in large numbers. (These permits are the result of executive action taken by the Obama administration allowing undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children to remain.) They registered those who could vote, and educated the community in an attempt to get them more engaged.

Celina Villanueva oversees this program as the ICIRR's civic engagement manager. We spoke in a sunlit corner outside the cafeteria at Chicago's Little Village Lawndale High School, where the organization was throwing a Halloween-themed early voting festival. She explained that ICIRR is firmly invested in the power of the immigrant community because "in order for us to see legislation like immigration reform—which we desperately need—we really need our people to be registered, to get out to vote, but also to advocate for themselves." The fellows' immigration status and background give them "a really profound understanding of the communities that they're working in, but also a huge desire to really see some action."

One undocumented ICIRR fellow, Hector Farias, registered people to vote in Chicago for two months (the last day to register in Illinois was October 23). Through the process, he's learned that "a lot of people that could vote aren't going out to vote." He hoped to change that, and to convey to voters that they have a responsibility for those who can't vote. Another fellow, Cristina (she didn't give her last name, citing the immigration status of family members), decided to help register voters because like Farias, she didn't want to sit back and do nothing.

That urge is common to undocumented immigrants across the country. Born in Mexico, Cesar Mata moved to America after his father lost his small factory and now lives in Birmingham, Alabama. The 38-year-old works with Alabama Vota, part of the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice. In a statement, he explained that when speaking to potential voters, he asks them to "make sure to vote, and to do it for me as well as for many others that like me do not have that privilege." He said this encourages others, because "for many new voters, just knowing that an undocumented immigrant is doing work to get them to vote is a motivation to use their privilege."

Unsurprisingly given their status in the country, undocumented immigrants tend not to be politically active. A 2012 Pew Research Center survey showed that 27 percent of unauthorized Latino immigrants don't identify with either party. But the longer people live in America, the more its politics seeps into them. Pew found that while only 38 percent of Hispanic immigrants who have been in the country for less than 15 years identify with a major party, that goes up to 63 percent for Hispanic immigrants who have been in the country for 15 years or more. (Far more Hispanic immigrants, both documented and undocumented, identify as Democrats than as Republicans.)

Geraldo Cadava, a professor at Northwestern University who studies history and Latinos in the US, predicts that this election could be different, though. He said over email that we could see increased voter turnout from Hispanics, "both because Hillary Clinton has done well with Hispanics her whole career, and because they'll do anything they can to keep Donald Trump from becoming president." As a result, he said, Hispanics are registering in record numbers, "and they report being more enthusiastic about—and, therefore, more likely to vote in—this election than they were in 2008 and 2012."

As the national civic engagement Coordinator for Mi Familia Vota, Cristian Avila has led programs around the country helping people, particularly Latinos, get to the polls. He told me over email that he's afraid for his undocumented family members constantly, because "deportations for my family aren't just a headline but a reality we live day to day." And while Avila can live and work in the US under DACA, there is little hope he'll become a citizen—meaning he has no chance to vote. "The way the laws are written I don't have a pathway to citizenship as of right now," he explained. "I'm hoping this changes the day we pass immigration reform."

One of the few ways he can take part is by encouraging others to vote with his needs in mind. He believes that "building political power among Latinos will be the only way to get an immigration reform passed, and free millions of families like mine of the fear of deportation."

This underscores the stakes of the debate for immigrants like Avila and Farias—without some sort of reform, people they love could be forced to leave the country, their lives uprooted. For that reason, their efforts will continue after the last ballot is cast.

"Our work doesn't just end with people getting out to vote," Villanueva explained. It will continue because "the truth of the matter is, immigration reform has a chance to happen depending on who the winner of the presidential election is."

Nandita Raghuram is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer.

Illustration by Taylor Lewis

Get the VICE App on iOS and Android

It's 2016, and white celebrities like Kylie Jenner, Justin Bieber, and Vanessa Hudgens still think nothing of fashioning their hair into dreads and cornrows. This weekend, Hilary Duff and boyfriend Jason Walsh thought nothing of dressing as a pilgrim and Native American for Halloween. Last week, Amy Schumer thought nothing of releasing a lip-sync video remake of Beyoncé's "Formation," a Black Power anthem. Schumer was vocally accused of cultural appropriation for her parody. That seems to be the problem—they think nothing of it.

In a public response, Schumer said the video was Beyoncé-approved, and that her intentions were good. It's a common refrain—that these stars' intentions are good, that these were not racialized acts—and one that continues to ring forth when offensive acts spark outrage online. Often, where others see appropriation, these stars see themselves as celebrating and honoring diverse cultures.

This spring, Beyoncé herself was criticized for an appearance in Coldplay's "Hymn for the Weekend" music video, in which she wore an outfit reminiscent of an Indian bride, complete with a sari, henna, and a bindi. Some called the video exoticizing; others praised her for celebrating Indian culture and spreading awareness of its history. She follows in a long tradition of pop stars incorporating Indian culture into their looks and acts, for both better and worse. She, like those stars before her, chose to walk the fine line between celebration and appropriation, to predictably mixed results.

As an Indian immigrant, seeing these and other examples of Hindu exploitation now makes me cringe. It didn't always. Odd as it may sound, I once loved cultural appropriation—and I wasn't alone.

I grew up in India in the 1990s, where I looked to entertainment to distract me from my teen angst; that meant turning to Western media. And while I cannot speak for the entire country and generation, other Indian kids of my age and background—English-speaking and upper-middle class—seemed to agree that listening to Hindi music or seeing Bollywood films was social suicide. (Everyone still did, but as a somewhat shameful, hidden secret.)

We spent our school days discussing the latest Hollywood action films and singing lyrics from the Billboard charts. We wore Nike, Lacoste, and Levi. Our bedroom walls were not unlike those of my American cousins, plastered over with the same heartthrobs, hot rods, and pop stars. If Westerners pegged us as exotic, we returned the sentiment. Nothing was cooler, louder, and more exciting to us than anything we deemed "foreign." We drank the proverbial Kool-Aid (also unavailable in India).

You may know where I'm going with this: Gwen Stefani, right? Yes, the epitome of 90s cool girl rebel. She wore bindis—on red carpets, in concerts and music videos. While dating No Doubt band member Tony Kanal, an Indian American, she noticed his mother wearing one and adopted it into her look, simple as that. She thought it was pretty. Many thought it was appropriative—as was her most notorious cultural stunt later on, her Harajuku girls.

I remember watching her on TV in 1997, when the band visited India for the Channel V Awards (South Asia's MTV). Gwen took to the stage in a full sari, hands covered in mehndi, forehead adorned with jewels and flowers in her hair, looking like a Hindu bride. (Not unlike Beyoncé this spring.) The first words out of her mouth were a heavily American accented "namaste." The crowd went wild. So did I.

A slew of celebrities would go on to take cues from our culture throughout the 90s and early 2000s. And we noticed.

British artists like Sting and Kula Shaker used sitars and tablas on their albums. Bollywood samples were prevalent in hip-hop. Fashion designers like John Galliano and Jean Paul Gaultier gave our culture a nod in their collections. Saris were seen on visiting celebrities like Oprah, Naomi Campbell, Elizabeth Hurley, and the Spice Girls.

Of all of them, Madonna, the mother of reinvention herself, may have been the queen of borrowing from South Asian culture. After all, she sang a song entirely in Sanskrit, "Shanti-Ashtangi," on 1998's Ray of Light. She performed a sample of it at that year's MTV Video Music Awards, complete with traditional dancers, religious imagery and, of course, a bindi. When a Hindu organization condemned her performance, the tone-deafness of her reply was telling.

But in India, her albums were not burned in the streets—we thought it was awesome. My friends and I were ecstatic at these brief moments of cultural "appropriation." It wasn't like these stars had stolen anything; we felt they were promoting and celebrating India by bringing our culture and tradition to the masses. Making it cool, in fact. We were proud. It was the only form of mainstream representation we could hope for. We honestly didn't know any better.

My parents likened this to their own youth, when the hippie movement borrowed mantras and fashions from the East throughout the 60s and 70s. No one protested when the Beatles came to our ashrams, wore kurtas, and played the sitar with Ravi Shankar. It's an important moment in music history and influenced their, and others', work profoundly. "Jai Guru Deva Om" indeed.

Looking back now, I can see the forest for the trees. I realize that in the 90s, India was seen as a rising global economic powerhouse. These entertainers were celebrating our culture, to be sure, but so much of that had to do with making money, a sad realization that taints some of my favorite childhood memories. I can forgive ignorance, but not greed.

When I moved to America in the early 2000s, I saw the other side of the fence. This place I had worshipped from afar was indeed a dream come true, partnered with a few harsh realities.

Many people I met had a concept of India that was archaic. They saw us as exotic, true, but also backward. Some marveled that my family and I spoke English "so well" and were up to date on the latest news, music, and trends. The fact that we didn't sleep in huts and have pet monkeys seemed to disappoint them. Their ignorance disappointed me back.

I was no longer enamored by the "glamour" of the West. Many immigrants I know and have met felt the same way. This shiny star of a country is a great goal to aim for, but you shouldn't have to dismiss your own background for its own sake.

Fortunately, Indian youth today are far more politicized and well-informed than those of my generation; unlike the undying adoration of Western culture I saw from my generation, today's youth have achieved a remarkable balance between embracing their heritage while drawing inspiration from the West. And according to my relatives still there, Bollywood is just as cool as Hollywood now, as it has been for some time. I just didn't see it when I was growing up.

We still very much want mainstream media representation, and we want it in a way that celebrates, rather than appropriates. And it's high time that such celebration comes from actual South Asians, not from white people playing dress up. Today's Western cultural terrain is far from perfect, but when South Asian stars like Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling, and Priyanka Chopra have broken into the mainstream, that's cause for true celebration—and, one would hope, only the beginning.

The fact that cultural appropriation no longer gets a pass, that such acts are now vehemently condemned when they happen (even if they happen all too frequently) is important and telling. If you want to pay respect to our traditions, learn about them first. Educate yourself. In 2016, we no longer seek your approval—you need ours.

Follow Reneysh Vittal on Twitter.

USA. Wisconsin. 2007. Raymond plays with Star Wars lightsabers with his sons Brady and Riley. © Peter van Agtmael/ Magnum Photos

Magnum Photos is the most prestigious photo agency in the world. It's now almost 70 years old, an upcoming birthday it celebrated by giving us a bunch of photos their photographers had taken at "the perfect moment."

For its Square Print Sale this week, "Conditions of the Heart: On Empathy and Connection in Photography"—where you can buy signed and stamped prints from Magnum photographers at $100 a pop—their artists were asked to pick a photo from their own body of work that exemplifies empathy and connection.

From Bruce Davidson's picture of Coney Island's fireworks to David Alan Harvey's French teenagers smoking and kissing, each tells a story of the empathetic moment they captured. Below are a few of the photos in the series.

JONAS BENDIKSEN

Qikiqtarjuaq, Canada. 2004 © Jonas Bendiksen / Magnum Photos

"I took this picture in Qikiqtarjuaq, Nunavut, a small village in N]northern Canada. At the time, in 2004, I was on a photography assignment for a German magazine. While the location itself was magnificent, a surreal piece of urbanity dropped into vast white wilderness, the story the magazine was running was quite dark. Along with a journalist, I had been sent to try to understand the community's many social issues. Different generations were struggling to understand one another, as the emergence of the internet, TV, substance abuse, and general feelings of isolation challenged traditional practices such as hunting and fishing.

"During the two weeks I was there, I struggled with my role as a complete outsider, as I had been sent to observe what felt like very private matters. At the same time, I was enamored as I watched the rituals of daily life unfold amidst all the stark and awesome beauty around us."

– Jonas Bendiksen

BRUCE DAVIDSON

Coney Island July Fourth Fireworks. New York City, U.S.A. 1962 © Bruce Davidson / Magnum Photos

"Sometimes they don't tell stories, they simply speak as images. They express feeling, increase knowledge. Photographs can draw passion, beauty, and understanding. And then there is love."

– Bruce Davidson

PAUL FUSCO

USA. 1968. Robert Kennedy funeral train. © Paul Fusco / Magnum Photos

"I took this photograph from the train that brought Robert F. Kennedy's remains from New York to Washington, DC. The train tracks were lined with up to 2 million people who came to witness the passage. The crowd represented all kinds of Americans; Bobby Kennedy's fight for racial reconciliation made him, to many, 'the most trusted white man in black America.' The people in this photograph had a meaningful connection with Kennedy and an appreciable reason to build a sign, stand in the heat, and say goodbye to the man who had once offered them hope."

– Paul Fusco

HARRY GRUYAERT

Marieke in Venice. © Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos

"We were spending the Christmas holidays in Venice, staying in an old palazzo. That particular morning my daughter, Marieke, who was ten at the time, had trouble getting out of bed: She was in a sulky mood. I have been taking pictures of my two daughters since they were born, always shooting in black-and-white because I felt it was more direct and would enable me to focus on them more than on their surroundings. But on that day, the general atmosphere, the mood of the moment, and the light made me choose color."

– Harry Gruyaert

PETER VAN AGTMAEL

USA. Wisconsin. 2007. Raymond plays with Star Wars lightsabers with his sons Brady and Riley. © Peter van Agtmael/ Magnum Photos

"I met Raymond Hubbard in the fall of 2007, in Washington, DC. At the time, he was recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, after having lost his left leg in Iraq the previous summer. I had been covering Iraq and Afghanistan intensely for nearly two years and needed a break. I was attracted to Raymond's intelligence and charisma, and we began hanging out. I was a bit shy of photographing him at first. After a while, he snorted, rolled his eyes at my transparent hesitation, and invited me to photograph what I wanted, how I wanted.

"We began spending a lot of time together. A few months after we met, he was discharged from the hospital and moved back to his small hometown of Darien, Wisconsin. I joined him out there a few weeks later. We partied together, smoked too many cigarettes, and talked intimately. One day he asked for a family portrait. He loved Star Wars and wanted to pose with his sons and lightsabers. We went to a nearby cornfield at dusk and took a few photos. I wish I had taken more. Sometimes I mark time through this photograph."

– Peter van Agtmael

DAVID ALAN HARVEY

French teenagers on a boat in the River Seine. Paris, France. 1988 © David Alan Harvey / Magnum Photos

"I was commissioned by National Geographic for a piece for their special issue on France. I decided I did not want to present historic France, but rather modern, young France. French teenagers. So I did what I always do: reduce the scope. I chose one group of Parisian teenagers who formed a sort of gang. A nice gang. Friends. I became part of their group for several weeks. I went to school with them, hung out everywhere with them, saw them succeed, saw them fail.

"Judith, pictured here with the cigarette, was the leader. There is always a leader. I was especially happy with this shot. It was taken on their graduation day on the Seine in front of Henri Cartier-Bresson's house. I was always referential to Cartier-Bresson, even when I shot in color during this era. Clearly I bonded with these young French people. We were like family when I had to hug them goodbye, which for them was goodbye to their childhood."

– David Alan Harvey

SUSAN MEISELAS

USA. New York City. 1976. Little Italy. Dee and Lisa on Mott Street © Susan Meiselas/ Magnum Photos

"I remember the day I met the Prince Street Girls, the name I gave a group of young Italian girls who hung out on the nearby corner almost every day. This is Dee and Lisa posing for me—or maybe for themselves. They were great friends, born the same month; they just clicked. Growing up in Little Italy, they were always together, at school and on the street—and onward. A friendship that's now spanned 50 years.

"Back then, I was the stranger who did not belong, but these girls would see me coming and yell, 'Take a picture! Take a picture!' For years, I was their secret friend, and my loft became a kind of hideaway when they dared to leave that corner, which their parents had forbidden. It was important for me to keep on photographing them as they grew up, especially when I came back from abroad where I had been photographing wars. Looking at these pictures now reminds me of how difficult it was to integrate my two lives—family and friends at home, and my life as a photographer on the road. It was often a painful separation, though not one I regret having chosen."

– Susan Meiselas

JEROME SESSINI

Child with mask. Ciudad Juarez. Colonia Zaragoza. 2009. © Jerome Sessini / Magnum Photos

"In many ways, I have a close connection with Mexico, which has drawn me there recurrently over the past ten years. As I wrote in my book, The Wrong Side: Living on the Mexican Border (Contrasto, 2012), in which this image was included: 'Disturbing landscape, grey world of the workers in the maquilas. Concrete blocks. Seaside without the sea... Silent children, strangled by the hoods of their anoraks, heads down. They drag themselves like old men along the path home.'"

– Jérôme Sessini

DENNIS STOCK

USA. Indiana. Fairmount. In 1955, James Dean visited the town where he had spent his youth. It was just after he'd made 'East of Eden,' but the film was not yet released. He stayed on a farm belonging to his uncle Marcus Winslow with his relatives. © Dennis Stock / Magnum Photos

"In a way, this image of James Dean is a story about not belonging. This portrait of Dean shows the future icon at a transitional moment: The glamorous profile in the photo seems incongruous against the background of his boyhood Indiana farm. There is a moment when we are not quite sure where our place in the world is, though we all must undertake the search to find it. Dennis has captured this moment. Perhaps this is why this photograph was one of his favorite images of James Dean; in fact, he often said it was his best-composed photo."

– Susan Richards, wife of Dennis Stock

CONSTANTINE MANOS

"This picture was made in an ice cream parlor in Miami Beach in 2003. I went in to buy an ice cream cone and found this man taking a nap in a quiet corner of the shop. It struck me as a beautiful and quiet situation."

– Constantine Manos

Magnum's Conditions of the Heart: On Empathy and Connection in Photography square print sale runs until Friday, November 4, 2016, at 6 PM EST. Signed and estate stamped, museum quality, 6x6" prints from more than70 artists for $100 for five days only, available on its webstore.

The Canadian government is being sued for $600-million for its past treatment of the LGBTQ community. Photo via CP.

In a Canadian military interrogation room in 1990, strapped to a polygraph machine and sensing unseen observers behind a two-way mirror, 21-year-old Canadian sailor Todd Ross finally broke down in tears and said out loud what he'd been unable to say even to himself: He was gay.

Professor Jordan Peterson. Screenshot via YouTube

University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson claims he's made far more friends than enemies in the weeks since he waged a war on political correctness, but that didn't stop someone from allegedly gluing his office door shut.

On Saturday, Peterson, a psychology prof who refuses to recognize non-binary gender pronouns, tweeted "Some SJW filled my U Toronto office door lock with glue. Made it difficult to see clinical clients. Another step towards a better world."

He told VICE he had to cancel his weekend appointments because of the "incident."

"That's exactly the kind of tactic I would expect of the people trying to deprive me of my job and reputation," he said, slamming "social justice warriors" as people who will do whatever is necessary to "enforce their view of the world."

Peterson sparked a debate over gender pronouns when he posted a YouTube video in September called "Professor against political correctness: Part 1," in which he said there isn't "any evidence" that non-binary gender identities exist.

"I don't know what the options are if you're not a man or a woman," he said.

Read more: U of T Prof Ignores University's Demand He Use Students' Preferred Pronouns

As such, he refuses to use pronouns like "ze" or "zer" sometimes used in place of traditional pronouns like "he" and "she." He's also opposed to Bill C-16, which would protect trans Canadians from harassment and discrimination.

Since the media caught wind of the video, Peterson has received considerable support and backlash. A letter signed by U of T admin, including the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science advised Peterson that he was trampling on the human rights of trans and genderqueer students by refusing to acknowledge their preferred pronouns.

But, despite being concerned about his job, Peterson said he sees the "made up words" as the "consciously articulated expression of this radical politically correct philosophy that I have nothing but contempt for."

"I don't like those people so I'm not going to say their words," he told VICE, adding he's received a flood of positive letters from transgender individuals.

He also said he thinks the pronoun talk is just a "side show" and that the real issue is that progressives want systems of power to be restructured based on equity (i.e. 50 per cent women in positions of authority.)

"Discussions of those sorts that are predicated on group identity have gone so far they pose a far greater threat than any possible good they can do."

Asked how he responded to charges that his words have resulted in threats of violence against LGBTQ and black students, Peterson said it's "absurd" to hold him responsible. He also chalked up the talk of threats to "part of the politically correct game."

"Two things social justice warriors always do is claim anybody opposed to them is a bigoted tyrant and that any active opposition is inappropriate because it decreases safety and produces fear."

But Cassandra Williams, vice president of student affairs at the University of Toronto Students' Union, previously told VICE some of Peterson's supporters have contacted family members of trans students, making them feel unsafe.

"Students are worried for their safety when going to class or just when walking around campus. Many students will not do this alone," she said.

Fellow U of T prof A.W. Peet, who is trans and goes by "they/their," sent out a series of tweets condemning Peterson.

"Suffice it to say if you're a professor and you're causing NEW traumas in your students, you're a shitty person." Peet also said Peterson's views are soaked in "toxic masculinity and toxic whiteness."

Peterson said he's still receiving several media requests a day and that he is in discussions with the university about hosting a debate. If it falls through, he said he will organize it himself.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Madeleine Thien defended her friend Steven Galloway last month. Photo via Simon Fraser University

Students are closely watching the University of British Columbia's handling of sex assault allegations, and an open letter circulating on social media today suggests many are not happy with what they see.

In public debate so far, virtually nobody seems to support the results of an investigation into fired creative writing department chair Steven Galloway—not the complainants, not the accused, not the Canadian literary community, and increasingly, not the wider public.

A retired Supreme Court judge ultimately found the primary allegation of the main complainant could not be substantiated. Those details are redacted in a 44-page report. But since Galloway was fired, and details that led to that firing are protected by non-disclosure, rumour and speculation continues to cloud the conversation—in some cases violating complainants' privacy.

Governor General's Literary Award winner Madeleine Thien made her frustrations known last month in a letter asking the university to remove any mention of her from school publications, citing the damage done to her friend Galloway's reputation. She wrote that the case should have been handed over to police, not handled in house behind closed doors, and that the university failed everyone involved.

"Unsubstantiated allegations, slander, whisper campaigns, and misrepresentations of allegations are not the domain of the law or of justice," it reads. "As a survivor of sexual assault, I do not take the law lightly... We cannot rely on institutions, including UBC, whose primary interests are self-serving, and who have never been invested with the obligation to uphold justice."

That letter, which also publishes snippets of unredacted complainant details, became the centre of a Globe and Mail story that laid out all the controversy and damage done to the people and creative writing program so far. Now one student's response to Thien looks at the case from a new lens, directing attention to the failings of both police and academic institutions on sex assault.

Identifying herself as "a fellow Chinese Canadian woman writer" and "current student at UBC," the anonymous student addresses the Canlit star's concerns point-by-point. On social media, former students commended the student for attempting to bridge a conflict that has caused a considerable amount of pain and confusion.

"To be clear I completely support you in having your name removed from all things related to UBC," reads the letter. "I would want to remove my name too. I also want to honour your vulnerability in sharing your experience of sexual assault in your letter."

The student agrees the university failed miserably, but questions why Thien jumped to the accused's defence, when systemic inequality already favours people like Galloway.

"To be completely honest, I find it difficult to honour how you deploy survivorship on your letter to bolster your defence and thus invalidate the testimony of the complainants of this situation," she wrote. "Let's be clear that, while Galloway's mental health is not negligible, centring his at the expense of those he has harmed favours patriarchy."

The student then writes police investigation into sexual assault also tends to fail women, and could result in similar pain and controversy. "Going to the police, as you advise, is usually not an option," it reads. "Sexual violence exists on a spectrum and the Canadian legal system has not been reliable in holding perpetrators (of all kinds of violence) accountable."

Though the open letter comes from an outsider's perspective—she states she was not part of the creative writing program or investigation—it suggests that students across campus are listening and well versed in the case, and want to discuss assault on campus. With consultations for a new sex assault policy still ongoing, there is at least a forum for perspectives outside the media.

Finally, the student asks the Canadian literary community to do better to speak up for victims, and address inequality. "As a reader of your work I hope that you will consider the enormous power you hold as an internationally-recognized author when making such statements."

Follow Sarah on Twitter.

On an all new episode of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, Hamilton travels across the US to meet with addicts, dealers, and chemists to trace the history of PCP from its pharmaceutical origins to its escape onto the streets.

Hamilton's Pharmacopeia airs Wednesdays at 10 PM on VICELAND.

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

This article originally appeared on VICE Sweden

In a recent interview with Fox Business, American filmmaker Ami Horowitz said he had visited one of Sweden's "30 to 40 no-go zones" – areas in the country where he claims even the police doesn't dare to go. "Everyday, there's gun violence going on," Horowitz said. He also claimed that "Swedish law doesn't apply in these places" and that Stockholm or Sweden (that remains unclear) "has become the rape capital of Europe." That last comment can easily be disproven – according to the Swedish Crime Survey, 5,920 rapes were reported in 2015 in Sweden, which is 0.06 percent of the population. In comparison – in England and Wales, for example, that number reflects 0.17 percent of the population. But what about the rest of his claims?

Fox Business isn't the only medium to report on Sweden's apparent no-go zones. Right-wing websiteBreitbart Newswrote in September that Sweden has become so violent that migrants are considering moving back to the war-torn places they fled. The Daily Express wrote the gripping headline: "SWEDEN IN CHAOS: Number of 'no-go zones' INCREASED as police lose control over violence". And in 2014, Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported on areas, where "12-year-olds are carrying guns and drugs are sold openly."

These reports likely refer to the 53 geographical areas in Sweden that are listed in an official police report as "vulnerable areas". In these areas, crime and unemployment rates are generally higher than in the rest of the country.

I called the police station in Rinkeby in Stockholm (a "particularly vulnerable area" according to the police report and a "no-go zone" according to Breitbart) and spoke to officer Niclas Andersson. He said there aren't any no-go zones in Sweden. "There are areas with major challenges, like a high crime rate, poverty and little faith in the police or society in general. But calling them "no-go zones" paints an unfair image," he added. "And police do visit these neighbourhoods whenever necessary."

Whether it's the media or the police talking about these neighbourhoods, there's one group we hardly ever hear from – the actual people living there. I went to the Tensta suburb of Stockhol, which has also been labeled a "no-go zone" by Sputnik, Breitbart and Swedish newspaper SvD, to speak with locals about how they feel about the negative headlines circling their homes.

Ailin, 23

"Who are the people writing these stories? The only thing the media report on when it comes to our neighbourhoods is how bleak it is here. It's frustrating. If you google Tensta, you'll only find pictures of riots. I'm from here and I know that there's so much more to these areas than riots. Of course you'll feel more unsafe when visiting an area you're unfamiliar with – that's what the media do and then they report on it. I don't feel unsafe here – this is my home and these are my neighbours.

Instead of focusing on one or two crimes in the area, the media should be reporting on why it's unsafe to go places at night, why there's more crime in certain areas – and if the reports are true in the first place. I guess I don't always understand what's going on with the police over here – the place is segregated and a lot of people don't trust the police. But it goes without saying that no one can speak for everyone who lives here."

Agata, 23

"I've talked to people who are afraid to come here because they think Tensta's brimming with criminals – that's what they read in the papers. They shouldn't be afraid. The media talk about Tensta in a way that's not always accurate, but a lot of things are true. When you see a video of a reporter being assaulted, you can't deny it ever happened. But you have to also ask yourself what happened before that assault.

There's violence anywhere in the world and you can get yourself into trouble anywhere. I feel as safe here as I do in Stockholm's city centre and other areas with a better reputation. I find that people are friendlier here, because it's a tight community that looks after each other. We need to ask ourselves how and why segregation, alienation and poverty emerge in some areas and what can be done to prevent it. People here don't trust the government and police, because they feel they're being treated unfairly. How can we change that? That's what the media should be worrying about."

Suhul, 26

"Even our local newspaper usually reports on Tensta in a negative way. There are a lot of immigrants here and the news reflects that segregation. It's difficult to communicate with the police, because they think of us as criminals before they've even met us. But I mean, I love it here. I feel safer here than anywhere else in Stockholm. Tensta isn't some kind of war zone or battlefield. Some young people do hang out on the street and if you're not from here, I can imagine you might think it's unsafe. But I don't think it's worse than anywhere else.

The media should look at these areas from a wider point of view. A couple of years ago, for example, the Turebergs school in Sollentuna was demolished and now there's a jail in its place. What kind of message does that send?"

Amanuel, 28

"A while ago, I saw a television crew setting up in the middle of our town square. They turned a huge spotlight on the people walking by. They were reporting about the neighbourhood and just filming the people living here instead of talking to them. That's so symbolic of the way the media interact with people in this area – they think of us more as a spectacle than as actual thinking human beings. I think this way of thinking and the "us versus them" rhetoric is very dangerous.

I help to organise cultural events for young people in the neighbourhood – there are so many wonderful people living here. It's a very close-knit community, people look after each other. Everyone is someone's brother or sister."

Asrin, 27

"I don't think it's dangerous here – I never feel unsafe. Stockholm is very segregated. It's difficult and expensive to move around in this city so if you live in one place, that's where you'll hang out. The media just focus on crime here and the people reading these news stories never come over to see for themselves. So they believe what they read, but it's very one-sided.

People who live and work here don't think of Tensta as a place filled with burning cars and people throwing rocks at each other. Tensta is wonderful. There's an exhibition by artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian called Fuel to the Firegoing on right now at Tensta Konsthall, which explores other perspectives on these areas than just those of the media and police.

I've never been in a situation where I've had to deal with the police, so I can't say how other people feel. There's some violence here and we've had clashes between the police and locals. But I think we need to deal with that in a wider context – that's what we're trying to do with the exhibition. It would be nice if journalists did the same."

Additional reporting by Aretha Bergdahl.

More from VICE:

Swedish Muslim Women Talk About How It Feels to Be Constantly Spoken For

How do Swedish Teenagers Feel About Mandatory Military Service?

The Uppsala Pride Parade for Asylum Seekers

(Photos: Eamonn Freel)

Do you remember the Vengaboys? In my mind they were always vaguely plastic and almost not human, and released a stream of incredibly annoying songs that you desperately tried to avoid getting stuck in your head.

But I feel a little different now.

A few weeks ago, a friend from Southend discovered that the Vengaboys were playing a show at Mecca Bingo in his hometown over his birthday weekend. Problem was, his sister and their friends had already decided to throw him a surprise party the night before in their favourite old nightclub – a night that turned out to be a lovely affair that ended in a casino I think might have been made completely out of gold.

The next day, I dragged myself and my boyfriend from my friends' parents' living room carpet to go and watch a Disco Turtle parade dance its way down Southend high street. The Disco Turtle dragged us and our comedowns all over town, and by the end of that saga the thought of facing a night at the bingo followed by a Vengaboys set was almost too much to bear. What are the Vengaboys, anyway?

I texted my sister to see where she was; all I got back was:

"Venga."

"Venga."

"Venga"

"Venga"

"Venga."

So we sucked it up and made our way over.

READ: We Talked to the Frosties Advert Kid Everyone Thought Was Dead

The thing about bingo is – and I didn't know this until this weekend – it's fucking brilliant. Because you've got a job to do – something to focus on, something that doesn't involve the mindless drink-smoke-piss circuit – it adds a sense of purpose to your getting drunk. Which can only be a good thing. Plus, there's money to be had.

One of our friends grows her own magic truffles, and that night she bought some along. About an hour into the bingo, half our group had a nibble, just in time to feel a little sparkle for the show.

And then there they were, in all their glittering glory. They weren't plastic and they weren't vague; they were solid and so close, only about a metre away on that tiny Mecca platform, with the bingo alerts rolling over the top of their heads.

"Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!"

"We have four 50p cashline links..."

"I want you in my room!"

"You could win a few hundred £££s!"

It was fascinating. The strangest blend of sadness and delight I've ever felt. Think of the stages they must have played 20 years ago, the crowds. There was something very "disgraced actor turns to panto" about it.

That said, the crowd they were playing to that night was wild. We knew every word. We were jumping up and down and singing along. I was entranced by their choreography; it was perfect.

Suddenly I wanted to know everything about them. Who are they? Where have they been? Is this the start of a comeback, or have they been happily touring the UK's bingo halls for years? Is that sad or is it brilliant? I don't feel sad for them, or do I a little bit? Either way, look at that cowboy hat! Look at those dance moves! Listen to the songs, and their sweet, beautiful lyrics.

Let's spend the night together, from now until forever.

More photos below:

This year, literature's biggest prizes for fiction, the Pulitzer and the Booker, went to novels by American writers of colour: Viet Nguyen's The Sympathizer and Paul Beatty's The Sellout, respectively. Both books owe a debt to Ralph Ellison's 1952 classic, Invisible Man, in that they depict protagonists struggling to reconcile their self-perception with the false images society projects on to them. W.E.B. Du Bois termed this "double consciousness," the "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others." "I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces," begins The Sympathizer; while the The Sellout opens with, "This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything." The difference is that The Sympathizer, like Invisible Man, is primarily a tragic text with elements of dark humor, but The Sellout is pure comic absurdism from start to finish, about an African American man named Bonbon Me on trial before the Supreme Court for attempting to reinstate slavery and segregation. While we've become accustomed to stand-up comedians—from Dick Gregory and Richard Pryor to Dave Chappelle and Hari Kondabolu—tackling the issue of race in America, the comic novel feels undervalued, if not ignored by the Literary Establishment.

In part, this is a problem facing all comic novelists, as Howard Jacobson, author of The Finkler Question, the last comic novel to win the Booker in 2010, argued in the Guardian: "There is a fear of comedy in the novel today—when did you last see the word 'funny' on the jacket of a serious novel?" Although he says that "stand-up comedy is riding higher than ever," he also cautions that "we have created a false division between laughter and thought, between comedy and seriousness, between the exhilaration that the great novels offer when they are at their funniest, and whatever else it is we now think we want from literature."

For writers of colour, there is also the question of subject matter. Jacobson, a Jewish Londoner, is surely aware of the difficulties of taking a comic approach to the historical oppression of Jews, which is why Mel Brooks's films Blazing Saddles and The Producers remain controversial to this day. The same is true for black writers. In 1935, Richard Wright wrote in the New Masses about Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, that she was maintaining "the minstrel technique that makes the 'white folks laugh' and showed 'no desire whatsoever to move in the direction of serious fiction.'"

The comic novel feels undervalued if not ignored by the Literary Establishment.

Similar criticisms have been leveled at Ishmael Reed, who wrote, amongst others, a comic novel about slavery called Flight to Canada. But his influence can still be seen on the next generation, writers like Junot Díaz, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Paul Beatty himself. Nonetheless, Wright's comments about Hurston have not been lost to history; the fear of being misunderstood by white audiences remains, that they might miss the irony and revert to laughing at black characters. As Richard Pryor said, "There's a thin line between to laugh with and to laugh at."

We see this fear come to life in Percival Everett's darkly funny novel, Erasure (2001), where the narrator, an author whose surname happens to be Ellison, writes difficult, theoretical novels while being dismayed by the success of books that rely on grotesque stereotypes of black people. Ultimately, he pens his own parodic version called Fuck, which becomes a bestseller. Fuck ends with the narrator saying, "Look at me. I on TV," while Erasure itself ends with "'Egads, I'm on television." High culture or low, Everett seems to be saying, "our version" only enters the mainstream when it mutilates itself into congruence with "their version," and this is the root of Paul Beatty's fear of being misread. "I get nervous when things don't make people nervous," he said in an interview with Playboy, before telling told the Wall Street Journal, "The part that scares me with the satire label is that there's an implication of being entertaining."

These dangers notwithstanding, by refusing to abandon the comic "race novel," Beatty and his peers have gone on to influence a new generation of writers working in this genre. This year we have seen two highly acclaimed debuts by writers of colour in Kaitlyn Greenidge's We Love You, Charlie Freeman, about a black family who move to the all-white Berkshires to try to help a chimpanzee learn to speak, and Jade Chang's The Wangs vs. the World, about a Chinese American family of millionaires who lose everything after the 2008 financial crisis.

When I spoke to Jade Chang she confirmed Beatty's influence, referring to his first novel, The White Boy Shuffle (1996). "It was maybe the first book I'd ever read that talked about race with humor," she said over email. "I think humor is useful for anyone trying to speak an uncomfortable truth. A recognition of the absurd often goes hand-in-hand with a recognition of injustice."

The Wangs vs. the World features a character called Andrew, whose difficulties in attempting to be a stand-up comedian mirror those facing the comic novelist of color. "The word 'microaggression' wasn't widely used when I first started writing this book," Chang explained. "But Andrew starts out doing comedy that comments on the daily indignities of being a person of color in America. The stand-up sets in the book were an interesting balancing act because Andrew is aware that he's speaking to mostly white audiences, yet he is still determined to center his own voice and experiences."

In other words, it's the same problem of "double consciousness" addressed, more than 60 years ago, in Invisible Man, a term that's a near-perfect synonym for irony. Andrew is attempting to turn an in-joke into an "out-joke," revealing the inadequacy of "their version" as well as his own. But lowering your defenses in this way requires confidence not only in yourself but in the humanity of one's audience—particularly one's white audience.

Rajeev Balasubramanyam's latest novel is called Starstruck. Follow him on Twitter.

(Illustration: Sam Taylor)

Transgender feminazis have joined forces with BBC communists to force innocent kids into sex change operations. Or so said last week's Mail on Sunday. "FURY AT BBC SEX CHANGE SHOW FOR 6-YEAR-OLDS" screamed the headline. The Sun and The Mirror repeated the story almost word for furious word.

The big deal? A CBBC film called Just a Girl, about an 11-year-old trans girl who takes puberty blockers. It's not an advert for gender transition; it just describes what her life is like. It's educational.

But we can't be having that, can we? Not when there are papers to sell, misinformation to be spread and a public broadcaster to bash. The Mail quotes Tory MP Peter Bone, who says: "It beggars belief that the BBC is making this programme freely available to children as young as six... It is completely inappropriate for such material to be on the CBBC website and I shall be writing to BBC bosses to demand they take it down as soon as possible."

What the fuck does Peter Bone know about kids who are questioning their gender? I was one of those kids once. I was bullied violently at school and at home by my father for "acting like a girl". Do you really think Bonehead gives a shit about kids like me? I'd have loved to have had a supportive family and school as a kid, and being able to access information about trans people would have really helped me through a tough time in my life.

Yet this fabricated row marks a weird sort of victory for the trans community. Ten years ago, the press was obsessed with the myth of transition regret: people who regret changing gender. They are vanishingly rare. For a time in the 2000s, though, Guardian journalist David Batty bent over backwards trying to find transgender regretters. He turned up a few inconclusive cases, but even then their regret was largely down to stigma and discrimination. Julie Bindel, meanwhile, warned against the "operation that can ruin your life". Fast-forward to 2016 and referrals to gender identity clinics are through the roof, and study after study shows that genital reconstruction surgery leaves patients overwhelmingly happier. In terms of patient satisfaction, it has one of the highest success rates of almost any operation on the NHS. God knows why anyone wanted to question us in the first place – it's a private decision and no one else's business, frankly – but trans people won the argument.

So now the "debate" has moved on to kids.

We've been here before. In the 1980s, homophobes had essentially given up their efforts to stop adult gay people fucking and falling in love. So haters found a new way to hate gay people: by dressing up homophobia as a child protection issue. Tabloids routinely linked gay rights with paedophilia and the spreading of HIV – and they were all at it. In 1984 The Sun called gay rights "sick nonsense" and, two year later, The News of the World said Labour councils were encouraging AIDS by "telling children that homosexuals living together are as stable as married couples". In 1986, Tories handed out leaflets in Haringey that said: "You do not want your child to be educated to be a homosexual or lesbian" and "We do not believe in prejudicing young minds. AIDS is a killer." The Telegraph warned readers about "a deliberate attempt to molest the sexual education of children" (note the loaded use of "molest"), while The Times condemned the "malignant cause" of "extremists" promoting "sexual propaganda".

The message was clear: gay people were a threat to children.

Soon after, Section 28 was passed – which effectively banned the "promotion of homosexuality" in schools. The law was intentionally vague and frightened teachers out of even discussing homophobia, meaning that many failed to act when pupils – like me – suffered homophobic bullying. I spent ten years of my childhood being called a poofter every day. Section 28 became a symbol of homophobia and galvanised the gay rights movement until it was finally repealed in 2003. A couple of years ago, David Cameron even apologised for it, telling a gay pride rally, "We got it wrong." They really did. They all did.

But what, exactly, started all the media fear-mongering that lead to Section 28? Well, in 1983 The Mail got its knickers in a twist over "Jenny lives with Eric and Martin", a storybook about a girl who lives with her father and his boyfriend. Just like Peter Bone, bigots like Jill Knight were concerned that these educational materials could be accessed by "children as young as five or six". Because we can't possibly inform children about the existence of people we don't like...

Sadly, this is not the only way in which hateful history is repeating itself. On Saturday, The Mail launched a vicious attack on Mermaids, the UK's only charity for families with kids who are trans or questioning their gender. They do fantastic work and I wish my family had known about them back in the day. Gay charities were similarly targeted in the 80s and accused of corrupting impressionable young minds – right when gay kids needed support most. Matthew Todd describes growing up surrounded by media homophobia in his brilliant book Straight Jacket: How to be Gay and Happy: "On a sunny spring day in 1983, standing outside the school hall next to a peeling climbing frame, the biggest realisation of my life hit me like the sky crashing down: the way that I was different and these bad words I kept hearing were linked. Gay. Queer. Poof. Pansy. I suddenly understood: that was me. That was what I was." He was ten.

I'm deeply concerned that the press, emboldened by this post-Brexit atmosphere of normalised xenophobia, seems to be ramping up its attacks against trans people. So let's clear up some of their bullshit:

1. You can't force kids to change gender any more than you can force a child to be gay. Just like the imagined fears of "sick" homosexuals "recruiting" impressionable kids in the 80s, it's bullshit. From the age of four until I was 18, every single person I knew told me I couldn't be a girl. I'm a girl now. You simply cannot force people to be something they're not.

2. There is no such thing as a "child sex change" or "child sex change drugs". Genital reconstruction surgery isn't offered to trans people below the age of 16. In reality, people are generally forced to wait until they're much older for surgery. Puberty blockers delay puberty so that kids have time to think about what they want. Hormone blockers aren't sex change drugs at all. They are "Don't rush into anything, darling" drugs.

3. Why don't newspapers run headlines on the thousands of people who took hormone blockers as teens and are now doing just fine as adults? If The Mail really cares about kids, they should write about the bullying, family rejection and mental health issues many gay and trans kids suffer. Study after study reveals that young trans people are highly vulnerable – 48 percent have attempted suicide in Britain. Not "thought about". Attempted. Why? Well, there is growing evidence that stigma is a major cause of poor mental health and morbidity. Stigma isn't just a bitch; it's a killer. I guess that song about sticks and stones got it wrong.

4. And could that, I wonder, be the very same sort of stigma whipped up by prejudicial media coverage??? The day after it reported the "fury" over Just a Girl, The Mirror ran a story about a 25-year-old trans woman who was hacked to death in Russia. Hacked. To. Fucking. Death. As The Mirror wrote: "The killing took place after the 25-year-old's father Alimshaikh Aliev had told a TV station: 'Let him be killed, I don't want to see him. Bring him here and kill him in front of my eyes.'" Do the journalists at The Mirror realise that the violence and family rejection many trans people still face is PRECISELY why educating people is so important?

5. Radical feminists who exclude trans people don't like being called Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, so I'll refer to them here as "wankers". Wankers keep lying on the news and saying that 80 percent of trans kids grow out of it at puberty. That statistic is false and based on bad science, as Brynn Tannehill explains here. It's one of many ways in which wankers exploit fabricated "debates" to spread dangerous misinformation that your average member of the public wouldn't even think to question. Much like their wild, paranoid claims that trans women are potential rapists, based on pure stereotype and zero evidence – but I digress.

READ: Why I Won't Shut Up About Sex Just Because I'm Trans

I'm going to end by throwing down a gauntlet to every journalist in Britain: find me one young adult who completed the blockers programme and then went on to transition who has a single regret about it. It's precisely the same way I ended a similar article for VICE two years ago. Blockers have been trialled in the Netherlands since the 1970s and are completely reversible. If there were really any cases of young people who regretted it, the tabloids would have splashed them across every front page by now. Still, don't be shy if you've got evidence!

Schoolteacher Lucy Meadows took her own life in 2013. In the months before her suicide, The Mail's Richard Littlejohn bullied her and suggested she was not "suitable" as a teacher – because she was trans. Journalists hounded her for weeks. She was an innocent member of the public and much loved by her pupils. At her inquest, the coroner told the press, "Shame on you." Lawyer David Allen Green truly nailed it, though, when he tweeted that: "The way the tabloids treated Lucy Meadows is how they would treat anyone, if they could get away with it."

It is. They demonised gay people in the 80s and now they're doing it to trans folk. I invite gay people, Muslims, refugees – anyone who's been lied about and treated like shit by the press – and, indeed, all decent people to stand up for trans people, stand up to press bullies and take a stand for justice. Now more than ever we all need to pull together in solidarity. It may sound corny, but it's better than living in the right-wing mob rule nightmare we're currently headed towards.

We must not let them get away with it – again.

@ParisLees / @SptSam

More on VICE:

A Few Questions for 'The Sun' About Their 'Child Refugee Turns Out to Be an Adult Jihadi' Story

Why the Press Want to Stop Celebrities Like Me Talking About the Migrant Crisis

The Media's Reporting of Murdered Mother and Sex Worker Jessica McGraa Is a Disgrace

Image by Aeriform via Getty

It's now less than a week until Election Day, and if you're like most American news junkies, you're watching your news feed, feeling like an impatient kid on December 21, shaking Christmas presents that might actually have coal in them. To make matters worse, the candidates don't have much left to do or say at this point, so our unblinking eyes are mostly inundated with polling data. In the absence of candidate debates or hard news, all we can learn is who has an unexpected lead in a new poll, who just surged ahead in which swing state, and exactly how each new result can be projected prematurely on a speculative blue and red electoral map.

Polls are supposed to give us the answer to a simple question—is Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump more likely to win?—but when different polls answer that question differently, and when even different aggregation models are spitting out wildly different numbers (Thursday morning, FiveThirtyEight gave Clinton a 67 percent chance of victory, while the New York Times had her at 86 percent), scrutinizing the polls can make us feel like we know less than when we started.

Depending on which polls you read in the past few days, Trump is ahead nationally, just behind Clinton, or being trounced by Clinton. Trump is leading by seven points in North Carolina, and also tied in North Carolina.

So what gives? To walk me through this poll confusion, I got in touch with Princeton professor Sam Wang, who is a data scientist, a neuroscientist, and the operator of the Princeton Election Consortium blog. He told me how to crunch numbers if I want to do my own poll aggregation, and how to find an escape hatch from poll mania when things get too crazy.

VICE: I'm trying to understand what's going to happen in this election, but FiveThirtyEight, the Upshot, the Huffington Post, and others all give me wildly different numbers. What's going on?
Sam Wang: Different aggregators make different assumptions about how much the polls may be off in either direction, or how much opinion may swing in the next six days. Obviously Clinton is favored, but by how much?

At this moment, Huffington Post's model says Clinton is leading with 47.8 percent to Trump's 41.9 percent in the polls, which allows them to project a very probable victory for Clinton. Is FiveThirtyEight's 68.9 percent probability of a Clinton victory a similar measure of the outcome?
No, that's totally wrong. People are terrible at gauging probabilities. Anything in the 20–80 percent is up in the air. A chance of one in five of the "surprising" outcome is like a game of Russian roulette. I think people get vote share and probability mixed up.

OK, so what's the difference between vote share and probability?
If a candidate is polling at 60 percent to 40 percent, his win probability is basically 100 percent. As margins get larger, probability gets way larger. Even a 5 percent margin is pretty definitive if the aggregation is done well.

Aggregators forecast outcomes multiple times a day. Are the actual probabilities really changing all the time?
Ideally, a forecast shouldn't change that much over time. Effectively, their forecast acts a lot like a snapshot of current conditions, even though they call it something else. Because they also have what they call a "Now-cast," they basically have two snapshots, one blurrier than the other

Sometimes a poll—like the ABC/Washington Post one from Tuesday—shows a sudden drastic shift in public opinion. What can I make of that?
Basically, single polls can always be off for two reasons: Taking a sample of voters can be a little off in one direction or another, simply by chance; also, each pollster has to apply judgement when getting the sample composition to match the pattern of people who will vote.

But when I dig into the details of how a poll got made, sometimes I feel less certain, like polls don't mean anything at all. Should I be digging through all those details to get more or better information?
I didn't say consumers should do it. The point is that pollsters apply their expertise. Individuals can just calculate the median, or rely on aggregators such as HuffPollster or whoever.

How do I calculate the median?
Arrange the polls in order of margin, and then take the middle value. For example, if results are Trump at plus 1 percent, Clinton at plus 2 percent, Clinton at plus 5 percent, then Clinton at plus 2 percent is likely to be closer to the truth than the other two values. Anybody can do this.

What if I need to do the opposite—get just the minimum information I need to stay on top of the news?
For those who are anxious, they should go find a place where their efforts make the most difference. For example, at the Princeton Election Consortium I list which states have races where a few votes have the most power to shape the overall outcome. That's not the presidential race—that is essentially settled unless there's a double coastal tsunami. But the Senate is very much in play. People can go get out the vote in key races like New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Indiana, or Missouri. Or they can get out the vote in key House districts—I have an app for that on my website. The other way to get rid of stress is to ration your news intake to once a day. Maybe at the end of the day with a beer. And whatever you do, turn off the TV. That's an unusually frustrating way to get information, repetitive and not thoughtful.

So just look at an aggregator, and only do it once a day?
Words to live by!

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Illustration by Tallulah Fontaine for VICE

A few weeks ago, I wrote about meditation's power to transform, and its ability to help us realize that our inner and outer lives are the same thing. The forces that push down on us daily are meant to shape us, help us master our inner life, and the other way around. Through deep concentration or any activity where a larger perspective is gained, we are better able to relate to the parts of the outer world we've neglected while looking inward.

A good example of this can be found, oddly enough, in Ebenezer Scrooge's visits to Christmases past, present, and future in A Christmas Carol. It's not hard to imagine that the visions Scrooge had were the result of a desperately needed psychedelic experience, and that the ghosts shepherding him on his journey were actually his own guardian angels, emanating from within himself.

Those angels peeled back his own life and revealed to him the reality he'd missed while blinded by material ambition. In doing so, they changed his entire conception of what being alive was truly about, and immediately established within him a new clarity he'd previously lacked. Basically, his own deeper intellectual and emotional powers showed him how different his years on earth would've been had he made the many decisions he'd come to over his lifetime armed with compassion and empathy. If he could've just seen what his actions and decisions were doing to those around him, he could've given more consideration to their weight and taken a different path.

Some of the biggest decisions we make in our lives are rooted firmly in pure emotion, which, if we're not careful, can be dangerous.

Most of the choices we make—whether or not to hit snooze on the alarm, chocolate or vanilla—don't require much in the way of reflection or deep thought. This makes sense. If we gave equal consideration to all the choices heaped upon us on a daily basis, we'd never get anything done. But when it comes to the big, life-changing decisions, we tap into different parts of the self to help guide us, often for better, but sometimes for worse.

Some of the biggest decisions we make in our lives are rooted firmly in pure emotion, which, if we're not careful, can be dangerous. When giving in to these emotional instincts, we can make decisions based on extreme anger and hate. We can form beliefs based on jealousy, prejudice, and our lowest and most irrational impulses—situations that in calmer moments we would see more clearly, seem threatening and menacing.

On the flip side are big decisions made from a place of reasoned intellect. When the mind is able to quiet our compulsions and moods enough to access a richer intelligence, we can make better decisions. Playing a central role in those choices we make thoughtfully is our conscience.

Greater than pure intellect alone, the conscience speaks directly to us, rather than searching for an answer. This is the most advanced or deepest level from which to make decisions, and also the most elusive. Our conscience does not yell out to us—instead, it is the gentle yet persistent voice urging us to rise to our best selves.

With a bit of effort, we can connect to this deepest and highest insight more frequently and shorten the gap between hearing its directives and summoning the strength to carry them out. This is the voice that's pleading with us to be more patient, considerate, thoughtful, and empathetic—real human beings. The conscience is the instinct that compels us to strive to be better, and the small but powerful inner voice that's most disappointed when we make a decision based in greed or selfishness.

Ultimately, when making big decisions, we must tap into our conscience, and profoundly consider how our choices affect others. This is often the easiest thing to overlook. We are all bound up in this life together, and that thought can be quite overwhelming. It's why some choose to live as though it's not true, or create a version of life, like Scrooge before his awakening, where that fact can be conveniently ignored.

Just because you close your eyes doesn't mean the world ceases to exist.

Next week many of us will make what is perhaps the biggest decision of our lifetime, one that is the culmination of more than a year of chaos, noise, distraction, arguing, and anger. It would serve us well to listen to our conscience, and think of those who will be most affected before we do.

Follow Andrew W.K. on Twitter.

Over the past two years, stories from Black Mirror have been eerily echoed in real life. First, there were claims that British prime minister David Cameron inserted his penis into the mouth of a dead pig as part of a university club hazing ritual—eerily similar to the first Black Mirror episode, 2011's "The National Anthem." Then this past May, a Russian-born San Francisco-based journalist and entrepreneur Eugenia Kuyda designed a chatbot imitating the conversational style of her recently deceased best friend, inspired by the 2013 episode "Be Right Back." While some high-tech futures of other episodes are still impossible, their questions about the social consequences of technology have proven themselves germane provocations.

With Black Mirror's latest six-episode season season, the satirical show follows the format of past seasons: Each episode has an entirely new cast of characters and totally different near-future reality, from soldiers aided by an augmented-reality implant to a single white female determined to improve her social media rating in an effort to qualify for a private real estate community. Some episodes tell stories possible with our current webcams and smartphones, while others look further into the future, speculating what might be possible with new technologies.

There's also a theme of reality being gamified in every story, for better or worse, which makes sense considering Black Mirror creator and showrunner Charlie Brooker started his career writing about video games. In addition to penning reviews in the mid 90s, he also wrote a comic strip for PC Zone called Cybertwats, which suggested an early penchant for societal critique. Working in both print journalism and broadcast TV over the past decades, Brooker's career has been extremely varied, from writing TV reviews and a what-if style column called "Supposing" for the Guardian to broadcast writing for the brilliant satireNathan Barley, the faux-news comedy series The Brass Eye, and the zombie-thriller Big Brother–parody Dead Set. All these endeavors showcase a cynical intelligence that's on full view in Black Mirror.

We talked to Brooker about reimagining what the show could be this season, his influences from The Twilight Zone to Monty Python, and how technology doesn't frighten him at all.

VICE: How did you feel that some of the episodes have come true to some degree? There was Piggate, of course, but did you also read about that Russian woman who used a Black Mirror episode as inspiration to create a chatbot based on her dead friend's messaging history?
Charlie Brooker: That was pretty mind-blowing. I kind of feel like if we predicted things that then come true, we kind of got lucky. Basically, we are trying to extrapolate from things that exist now, so in a way that's bound to happen. Some of the ideas strike me as inevitable. We probably get more credit from that than we deserve, but I'm happy to take it. Obviously, Piggate was just bizarre. That was the weirdest one of all by far. But when you're trying to predict the future, sometimes you're going to get lucky. Luckily, people don't notice all the stuff we got wrong.

When you're writing these episodes, is it a challenge to balance the emotional arc or storyline with the more conceptual societal critique?
It's kind of just using different muscles. This season, we sort of approached each episode like a different genre. Even within the season, "Hated in the Nation" is a police procedural and then "San Junipero" is a romance, coming-of-age story. I've got a short attention span, so I like a lot of variety. When we were shooting the first-ever season of Black Mirror, at the same time, I was working on a show that was effectively a Naked Gun–spoof , it's going to be technology.

Follow Whitney Mallett on Twitter.