It seems slightly redundant for Modern Round to have to identify its cuisine as 'American.' When a restaurant allows its customers to shoot guns while they wait for their Bud Light and order of deep fried macaroni and cheese puffs, we're pretty sure the 'American' part is implied. That's the concept behind Modern Round, an Arizona bar and restaurant that serves its appetizers and entrees with a side of all-you-can-shoot sidearms.

No, the guns aren't real, but the experience is as close as you should ever get while you're simultaneously chewing a hot dog. According to Modern Round's extensive FAQ, its guests shoot "replica firearms molded into the size, shape and weight of actual firearms." Amateur action heroes will shoot at 16-foot screens while zombies, flying pigs, or even real-life police "shoot or don't shoot" scenarios play in front of them. In addition to the top-shelf laser-enhanced technology, some of the weapons even have a CO2 system that "provides realistic recoil and blowback."

According to Forbes, the company was founded by Mitchell Saltz, who was once the chairman and CEO of—wait for it—Smith & Wesson. The Peoria, Arizona location is just the first in what he hopes will be a series of Modern Round restaurants that will dot the U.S. like a pile of spent CO2 cartridges at a patron's feet. The company pitched its idea to potential investors at this week's ICR Conference in Orlando, where it received what Forbes described as a "mixed response." Some of the concept's critics thought that guns were just too divisive an issue to warrant an investment.

Read more on MUNCHIES.

Is there any better way to see the true soul of a person than a glimpse into their internet history?

Well, probably what they search in the incognito window, but their viewable history is a close second. Internet search engines are a valuable tool and taking a peek into them can provide us a glimpse into what a person might care about.

So following along that thought process, we decided to try and see what the goods that the ids of Canadian provinces care about.

In true and scientific fashion we took to Google autocomplete to help us answer. By utilizing the process outlined by fixr Googling "What does (blank) cost in (provinces) name" and looking at what came up in the blank. We're nothing but thorough here.

Some of the results were to be expected, Ontario was boring, Quebec was drunk and PEI really likes lobsters. As a side note, Nunavut's results were almost uniformly about food because the food insecurity up there is a real problem. That said, some were a tad surprising.

Why circumcision New Brunswick? No seriously, please email and let me know.

Sadly, one of the territories, NWT, didn't have enough results to autocomplete so it remains an enigma (for now.) And, because we like you dear reader and got more than one result in this experiment, we grabbed a weird term the provinces searched for and tabulated them into a map of their own.

Look it's right here.

Results:

Ontario

Most searched term: Sod
Unique search term: Slimband

Alberta

Top searched term: In Vitro Fertilization
Unique search term: Divorce

Manitoba:

Top searched term: Daycare
Strangest search term: Twinrix (Hepatitis Vaccine)

Quebec

Top search term: Beer
Unique term: College

New Brunswick:

Top Search term: Circumcision
Unique term: Braces

Saskatchewan:

Top Search term: Electricity
Unique term: Botox

Nova Scotia

Top searched term: In Vitro Fertilization
Unique term: Cremation

Newfoundland

Top search term: Electricity
Unique term: Cigarettes

PEI

Most searched term: Lobster
Unique search term: Weed

British Columbia:

Top search term: Gas
Unique search term: Liposuction

Yukon

Top search term: Diesel
Unique: Land… I guess

Look, there weren't very many options to go off here.

Nunavut:

Top search item: Food
Unique item: Milk

Follow Mack Lamoureux on  Twitter  .

The first handgun I ever shot was a Desert Eagle. It was handed to me by a guy named Buck who lived out in the emptiness of eastern Nevada, where he spent his time taming wild horses, making exploding shotgun shells, and shooting at RC Cola cans from his living room window. The kickback from the Eagle made my arm feel like it was going to snap, but I swore that when I got back to Florida I would buy a firearm for myself. I felt that I had been let in on some sort of secret and was hooked.

I snapped back to reality quickly upon my return. Owning a gun didn't seem that fun in civilization, where I couldn't shoot out of a window without killing someone. My current desire to shoot a gun is basically nil. But I get it: Guns are awesome, at least in one sense of that word, and the US loves them. According to the latest data, 36 percent of Americans own firearms or live with someone who does. And one gun isn't enough for lots of people—about 3 percent of people in the United States own half the nation's guns.

Last year the nation's gun folks got their own cable network, aptly named Gun TV. Boasting the tagline "Home Shopping: Fully Loaded," the channel was home to an unending series of infomercials in which men with small faces and giant belt buckles are constantly fondling artillery. That artillery, the men would tell you, can be yours if you call the number on screen, plunk down a 20 percent downpayment, and tell the sales rep the name of a store where you can pick up your purchase.

It was an odd variation of the usual selling-products-through-a-screen formula, but it was also a vision of America, the same America I glimpsed when I was firing a weapon in the high desert—a place where guns aren't just tools for killing, but symbols of power and even freedom. Gun TV is off the air as of last week (its founders insist it's a temporary hiatus), but that vision of America is still alive and kicking, and I feel like I learned something about my country just by watching the channel.

Someone once told me that they understood Trump's popularity when they caught themselves eating a kale salad in bed on the Fourth of July. I had a similar epiphany when I turned on Gun TV while eating a meal assembled from Whole Foods produce and saw someone playing a game called "fruit salad," a.k.a. blowing up avocados with a Magnum Research Desert Eagle. I felt like a cultural anthropologist who was suddenly privy to a world I shouldn't have access to. It wasn't long, though, until a host named Billy Birdzell attempted to relate to people like me.

As he decimated the produce, Birdzell, who sort of but not really looks likeChanning Tatum, spun a tale about an upbringing in New York that didn't exactly breed an appreciation for guns.

"I didn't know anyone who knew anyone who owned guns," he explained. "But there was something about guns that intrigued me."

Birdzell's indoctrination into gun culture apparently came when he joined the armed forces, where he was "given a funny uniform." After two tours in Iraq, he traded that outfit in for an ill-fitting blazer and polo combo that looked like it came from the sale aisle at Kohl's, and got a gig that he considers a dream come true since it allows him to exercise his constitutional rights on live TV. While shilling for the $1,530 weapon (Gun TV price: $1,299), Birdzell explained that the people he grew up looked down on hunters, which is something that his co-host, Bree Warner, related to. She also grew up where there were no guns, but learned to love how they made her feel like "an action hero in her own life."

Gun TV was full of sales pitches like that, testimonials that almost sound like conversion stories. On another occasion when I was watching Gun TV, a large man in a cowboy hat selling a Savage Arms A-17 rifle explained to the audience that there's nothing like going to the gun store and seeing the smiling faces of like-minded individuals. This wasn't a counter to all those "guns are bad because they kill people in large numbers" arguments I've internalized, but a notion that runs parallel to them. Like any hobby, being really into guns makes you feel connected with people who share that passion. Guns can be an identity, even a community in a world that's maybe short on supportive communities right now.

Other sales pitches deployed during an hour dedicated to ammo were less convincing. A female host suggested turning empty bullet cases into jewelry for wives and girlfriends. Someone said it made more sense to shoot a ton of bullets rather than just a few. In the middle of one infomercial, I was forced to confront the sheer enormity of bullets through a half-hour of close-ups. Previously I thought of bullets as being little specks, but the borderline pornographic images of hollow-points revealed they were actually as long as my middle finger, except unlike my middle finger they are designed to go very fast into someone's body, then explode.

In case viewers were wondering why you'd want to own bullets meant to go shred body armor and play "fruit salad" with someone's organs, the hosts explained that they are actually a responsible decision, because they allow you to take out a target while firing a minimal amount of shots. This would reduce the amount of violence because—actually, sorry, I didn't follow this bit.

Not surprisingly, given that a lot of Gun TV's products were being sold to people who would absolutely, 100 percent be down to get into a shootout if called upon, there was a wee bit of paranoia. Nowhere was that more evident than in the commercials breaking up the longer infomercials. In constant rotation are ads for a law firm that specializes in winning settlements for mesothelioma victims and another one for a dashcam that features a testimonial from someone who had a border patrol agent crash into their car. In the Gun TV universe, something bad and completely random is always about to happen to you. I can't tell if the ads are designed to prime the viewer with fear so they're desperate for a solution by the time a host comes back on TV with a Taurus 85 and appeals specifically to fathers who should buy the gun for their daughters, or if that was a happy accident.

"The point of guns is not to operate a machine," a host said during one of the few bits of GunTV that stood out to me. "The point of shooting guns is who we become in the process."

During the process of watching this interminable infomercial for America, I came around to a better understanding of why I liked the idea of guns at one point. Owning one was considered socially unacceptable by the majority of my friends and family. They were forbidden, dangerous, wrapped up in mystery or romance. Even though Gun TV failed, the mixture of power and danger that gives firearms their appeal isn't going anyway.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

After Donald Trump's narrative-shattering, world-upending election victory in November, Traci Feit Love, like a lot of people upset or unmoored at the results, spent some time scrolling through Facebook, reading personal narratives of dread and notes about how to oppose the next president. Love, a Harvard Law grad who was then vice president of 180 Legal, a company that helps smaller law firms with marketing, noticed that a lot of lawyers were saying important things that were being ignored in the flood of rage and fear.

"They had concrete suggestions, they had immediate steps they believed people should take, but their thoughts, suggestions, and feedback was getting lost," she told me.

Her solution was to create a private Facebook group where these anti-Trump lawyers could trade advice, inviting a few friends and posting about the group, christened Lawyers of the Left, in public Facebook forums. She figured she'd get maybe 150 or 200 members. Instead, she said, the group attracted 60,000 in its first 72 hours of existence and had 100,000 after a week before leveling off at around 120,000 members.

"It was immediately clear it was going to be more than a Facebook group," Love told me. "This was, basically, a legal army in the making." Since then, Love has thrown herself in into trying to marshall that army, scaling back her duties at 180 Legal so she could focus on bringing her Facebook group into the real world. She surveyed 15,000 of the group's members to see what their skills and interests were, started the process of becoming an official nonprofit, and recruited a three-person board. She also divided the group into geographically-based chapters and committees to address individual subjects like immigration, civil rights, and conflicts of interest. Finally, she changed the name to Lawyers for Good Government in order to be a bit less nakedly partisan and to clarify the group's mission as targeting corruption in particular. (She told me that this tweak angered some members who wanted the organization to self-identify as progressive.)

The flurry of online activism in the immediate post-election aftermath makes it easy to be skeptical of brand-new groups making vows of resistance. But Lawyers for Good Government seems serious—for instance, it has partnered with another fledgling opposition organization, RISE When We Fall, to put on a conference in Washington, DC during inauguration weekend. Love also emphasized that she didn't want to duplicate the work of other legal groups, and that Lawyers for Good Government wanted to cooperate and coordinate with all the other nonprofits preparing to deal with the right-wing policies of the Trump administration.

In advance of the conference and Trump's official ascension to power, I talked to Love about the challenges of building an organization from scratch, what lawyers are good at, and the rising threat of government corruption.

VICE: What do you think that the broader anti-Trump movement could gain from having more lawyers involved?
Traci Feit Love: I think it's the same kind of thing any movement or individual can gain by working with a lawyer. Lawyers are educated in a very specific area; they tend to be good at focusing on key issues, understanding what the key issues are in a given instance, and figuring out what kind of things have remedies in court and what kind of things don't.

But I should also say I don't think it goes one way. It's also important for lawyers to work with people who are not lawyers. For that reason it's important to us to establish partnerships—we're partnered with a watchdog group called RISE When We Fall to put on our conference in DC, and their group is not for lawyers, though there are many lawyers who are part of it. There are meaningful perspectives to be brought to the table from a number of different areas, and lawyers are just one of those.

Which topics do you plan to tackle immediately, either in court or just in general?
We're not on the verge of filing a lawsuits on anything right now. But we are in very serious conversations, particularly around the issue of conflicts of interest. That's one of the things that I think is very important not just to us but to the American people as a whole—and it doesn't just cut down party lines, it's a bipartisan issue. The government should be run by people who have the best interest of the country at heart, not the best interest of themselves, or a private corporation, or other kinds of special interests. It's bad enough when elected officials are being influenced by special interests, but it's an entirely different level when you've got officials whose personal interests are directly affected by the decisions they make as elected officials. That's a very serious problem that has be fought in as many ways and on as many fronts as possible.

I assume you're mainly talking about Trump himself here. Is there anything that your group can do to push back against any conflicts he has? From what I've read, it seems very difficult to hold the president accountable since many conflict of interest rules don't apply to that office.
That is part of the challenge, and part of what we're trying to figure out right now. Unfortunately, a public awareness campaign, or letter-writing, has as of yet not proved sufficient. For now, I think the most important thing for all of us to do is to proactively educate ourselves about what these conflicts actually are. There's new information coming out every day, and it can be overwhelming to try to keep on top of it, but it's something we all have to keep an eye on, just as citizens. Just keeping up the pressure on the president and also on those in Congress who may have the ability to at least voice this issues, not to let this slip through the cracks—we should make sure that when we view the decisions being made, that we're asking ourselves, What was the personal interest of the individual who made that decision or cast that vote?

I don't know if you heard about Pantsuit Nation, a large pro-Hillary Clinton Facebook group that has become famous for splintering in the weeks after the election. It's easy to imagine your Facebook group's 120,000 members becoming divided over time—is that a concern for you going forward? Do you have plans to combat that kind of division?
I don't know enough about the inner workings of Pantsuit Nation to comment on their group. With our group, we've taken a number of steps to create a coalition that is strong and can withstand pressure both from the inside and the outside. That includes things like having members in different regions select chapter leaders that they believe are suited to work with them locally. It also involves getting feedback from members on as many issues as we can.

It would be naive to suggest that all 120,000 of us are going to be able to remain united around all things for any significant period of time. There will be disagreements and divisions. The question is, can we put those things aside when it comes to the issues on which we do agree? Can we learn to fight for things on which we disagree in other forums, so that this group can be a place where we look for points of commonality? I certainly hope that's the case and will do everything in my power to make that a reality—but I think a certain amount of disagreement and divisiveness is to be expected with a group of this size.

Do you see this group continuing on after Trump leaves office?
I do. I don't see us as purely an anti-Trump group. Of course, Trump's election was the catalyst for us coming together. But it's not because of him individually—many of the things he stands for, it's not just him; there are elected officials in Congress who support many of the things he proposed. It's not really about any one person, it's about knowing that fundamentally, we have a system and structure and checks and balances in place that are real and can ensure us that we have a free, democratic society, and a government run by people who have the best interests of Americans at heart.

Does that mean you're concerned that the norms around corruption and democratic government in the US are being eroded?
We are absolutely concerned about the potential for corruption. Just the other week, House Republicans put it to a vote to gut the independent office responsible for oversight of ethics issues in Congress. Thankfully, the following day they realized it was a terrible idea after millions of people made phone calls and protested—and of course there was the tweet from Trump. But if no one had said anything, that would have gone forward. It's troubling that the first thing members of Congress want to do when they start of the year is get rid of or limit the ability of an independent office to oversee what's going on from an ethics standpoint.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Let's say someone is following you on social media, sending you death threats, then rape threats—and seems capable of seeing them through. You turn to the police for help, but you're told that maybe you should delete your Twitter account or change your hair color.

That's how the past five years have gone for Lenora Claire, a former art-curator and current casting agent in Los Angeles, who has been stalked since 2011 by the same man who has made headlines in the past for stalking Ivanka Trump. Unlike Ivanka Trump, Claire doesn't have the luxury of bodyguards and private security, and when she turned to law enforcement for help, it became clear she would need to take matters into her own hands. The ongoing saga, which resulted in her stalker being captured by the Secret Service this year, has sparked a discourse on stalking laws, including proposing new stalking legislation that would emphasize the greater threat of cyber stalking and internet threats.

Claire and I have been online acquaintances for years, and during our interview, it surprised me how much we knew about each other despite having never met in real life. I saw that you were at this show last week, how was it? Are you still getting rid of your old clothing? Is that guy still ghosting you? That's the power of social media: We can know people without knowing them. And for all the fame, recognition, and attention that comes with having an internet presence, women like Claire and I rarely consider the potential danger it can bring.

Back in 2011, Claire was profiled as one of LA Weekly's "Best of LA" for the formation of her now-defunct art gallery, pop tART. Shortly after the article came out, a man wearing a spacesuit showed up to the gallery, which Claire brushed off. "When you're a curator, you have a high tolerance for artistic shenanigans so I was just like, Whatever. He seemed off, but harmless," she told me.

But as they continued talking inside the gallery, Claire realized she had misjudged him. "He tells me that I remind him of Jessica Rabbit and that he thinks I'm a supreme being," she remembers. "Then he tells me that he intends to stalk me. He tells me that right to my face."

The man, born Justin Massler, had legally changed his name to Cloud Starchaser several years prior. He was a Harvard-bound star athlete until he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, the manifestation of which changed the course of his life. He convinced himself that he was Superman, and expressed beliefs that women like Ivanka Trump and Lenora Claire needed to be kidnapped and raped in order to harness their powers.

His fascination with Ivanka had been ongoing since at least 2010. He had threatened to commit suicide if she and her husband would not speak to him, and harassed the employees of her jewelry store for not delivering earrings that he bought for her. Following this last incident, he was eventually caught by Secret Service agents only a few blocks away from Trump Tower. According to Claire, he is currently being held at the Bellevue Psychiatric Center in New York, with no current set plan on what his future will be.

Over 7.5 million Americans are victims of stalking, according to the Stalking Resource Center, but most of them don't have the resources of a woman like Ivanka Trump. Claire was lucky, in a sense, that she shared the same stalker as Ivanka, and that Cloud Starchaser frequently posted his intentions to stalk and his whereabouts on his website. But when Claire tried to bring this evidence to the Los Angeles Police Department, she says she wasn't taken seriously. The first time she turned to the police—after receiving several handwritten letters and emails from Starchaser, telling her they were in love and meant to be together—she says the LAPD's reaction was to blame her. "They told me that I should change my hair so I'll be less of a target," she remembers. "They also told me to remove myself from social media. They mocked me and shamed me. I walked out of there so angry." (The LAPD declined to comment for this story.)

To tell someone to remove themselves from social media in this day and age is akin to telling someone to stop existing. "We have a climate now where people are getting more attention through self-promotion on social media, but are completely unprepared for the fact that it does bring to them false attachments," Claire told me. "You post about what you're doing and who you're with, and it does get easy to stalk you."

Even if the LAPD had been more sympathetic to Claire's case, there's only so much they could've done. Stalking laws are slowly adapting to modern times—harassment through email or social media is, for example, now a crime in states like California—but the act of stalking itself is still a low-level crime, and one that's hard to punish. Stalking crimes are generally labeled as misdemeanors that occur in conjunction with the act of stalking, such as vandalism or in-person verbal threats. The most a victim of stalking can currently do, legally, is serve a restraining order against their stalker. But even that can be difficult to accomplish. When attempting to file a restraining order against her stalker, Claire says she was told that because he had no physical address he could not officially be "served" the paperwork, making the restraining order only pending as opposed to permanent. It wasn't, she says, until he was caught in San Francisco, after showing up to the workplace of a woman he went to high school with, that authorities could officially serve him. "Even after all this, they still let him go," Claire told me. "Immediately [after] getting my restraining order, he contacted me."

So Claire took her protection into her own hands. She taught herself to check IP addresses every time he sent an email, to find out whether or not he was contacting her in California or another state. "If he was in California, I was in high alert because I felt like he could find me. If he was in a different state, I could breathe a little easier that day," she told me. "This became my normalized routine."

Now, after five years of constant anxiety, Claire says it's time we reexamined the way we deal with stalking in the United States. She's made appearances on Crime Watch Daily to talk about her experience and is being featured in an upcoming episode of 48 Hours. And then there's her work with California Congressman Adam Schiff, who collaborated on legislation that would emphasize the greater threat of cyber stalking and internet threats. Part of this new proposed legislation, which has been presented to the Department of Justice, includes creating a national stalker registry that would list the name of a convicted stalker regardless of what state they were convicted in.

On top of that, Claire and Schiff want to change the law so that it's possible for restraining orders to be served via email, as well as ankle monitors to be worn by convicted stalkers once they're set free. Outside of taking government action, she is also forming a non-profit organization along with California-based lawyer Peggy Farrell that will help protect stalking victims and provide them with proper legal help.

Claire is the first to point out that it's not glamorous work, but if it saves someone else five years of constant anxiety, it's worth it.

"No one wants to be the face of stalking," Claire said. "[but] we have seven million Americans being stalked and we haven't done shit for them. I want to change that."

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

The killer heroin was sometimes sold under the brand "Scumbag."

Heroin brand names are often devised with a morbid sense of humor. A few recent examples I've come across include "Obamacare," "Jim Jones " and "Walking Dead." In the case of Scumbag, however, the name should have been taken as a warning about the kind of person who manufactured it: The drug may have been responsible for as many as 35 deaths over the course of five days in Philadelphia last month.

In the past, that fact might have been a marketing bonanza for Scumbag dealers—a signal that their stuff was potent, or at least definitely not a placebo. Experienced users with a high tolerance might have been drawn to it because powerful heroin that will easily kill a newbie is, for some addicts, the only thing strong enough to do more than stave off the next withdrawal.

But the proliferation in recent years of street fentanyl and related derivatives—which can be hundreds of times stronger than morphine and are generally sold either as heroin or in counterfeit prescription pills—may be starting to change that calculus. And that has important implications for how America combats drug overdose in the years to come.

According to the DEA's 2016 National Heroin Threat Assessment, between 2013 and 2014 alone, overdose deaths linked to synthetic opioids (predominantly fentanyl and derivatives) rose by 79 percent. before 2013, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene had found that less than 3 percent of overdose deaths in America's largest city involved fentanyl and similar synthetics. But in 2016, they were implicated in nearly half of all cases. In Philadelphia, fentanyl deaths have risen an incredible 636 percent in just two years.

Jeff Deeney, a social worker in Philadelphia who is himself in recovery from heroin addiction, has seen the spread of fentanyl harm his clients. "The biggest challenge for me was to really punch through this idea that the game has changed," he says. "This is the 'crying wolf' thing. Everybody had heard in past, with crack, you smoke it once and you're addicted for life and all that bullshit. Everyone thinks they've seen it all before."

This cynicism doesn't come from nowhere: Every time the media discovers a new "drug epidemic," journalists get quotes from experts saying that this time, it's really different and the new stuff truly is more potent, more addictive, and deadly than anything that has come before.

Here's neuroscientist Roy Wise of Concordia University in Montreal, quoted in the New York Times in 1988, near the height of hysteria about crack: "If I knew that my daughter was going to try either heroin or crack, I'd prefer that she try heroin,'' he said. "In the case of crack, the only solution I've got a lot of faith in is not starting to use it in the first place."

Now here's NPR two years ago, quoting a police chief who's actually nostalgic for crack:

[Marion, Ohio Police Chief Bill] Collins remembers several years ago when all he had to worry about in Marion was crack cocaine. And at least crack addicts, he says, could somehow hold a life together. It's a different story with heroin users, he says. "These people are not able to hold a job," he says. "They steal their family blind to the point where the family just pretty much disowns them. "It doesn't take long for you to end up seeing a heroin addict that has burnt every bridge they've ever had."

When every fashionable new drug is always presented to the public as unbelievably awful, if a truly nightmarish substance does come along, users might not believe it—at least, not until many people around them are dead. But fentanyl really is that bad: Crack didn't actually account for that many overdose deaths, and even during the times in the past when heroin was especially popular, it never reached fentanyl's level of mortality.

"The medical system hasn't applied the same rigor and standards to talking about drug addiction as it has for everything else," says Sarah Wakeman, medical director of the Substance Use Disorder Initiative at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. "We haven't informed the public in an accurate way."

Wakeman notes that teens who are told that weed will inevitably lead to disaster can simply stop believing official information when they see the real world falsify these claims—which makes it harder to stop them from doing dangerous drugs. "People are inured to fear tactics because they think you're trying to scare them straight," adds Deeney.

Another way using fear to try to reduce addiction can backfire is through policing. As Deeney told Philadelphia magazine at the time, many of the Scumbag overdose deaths took place in the wake of a crackdown on street markets. Users had actually been trying to avoid Scumbag, according to him.

"The cops had shut literally every other corner down," Deeney tells me. "It created a huge funnel and shunted all these people to the one corner where they were selling it."

So what can make people with opioid addiction reject brands that boast super high potency rather than chase them? Simple experience, for one. "Everyone is being touched by this and death is a bit less hypothetical when your friend or partner just died," says Wakeman.

But there's also another critical factor, which is the pharmacology of fentanyl-like drugs. Fentanyl is legitimately used for surgical anesthesia, with good reason: it knocks you out cold, almost instantaneously. If you want complete oblivion, that's one thing. But in my experience of covering addiction for nearly three decades—and having struggled with addiction myself—most users want to feel better, not feel nothing. What's the point of taking drugs if you don't consciously get high or feel relief? And if you are lying unconscious on the street, you're highly vulnerable.

"The fentanyl high is sloppy," Deeney says. "They call it 'sleep cut.' It puts you right out." It also lasts for a much shorter time than heroin does, with users reporting that at most, they get a few seconds of high, lose consciousness—and then, if lucky, wake up with withdrawal sickness an hour later. It doesn't have what users call the "legs" or long-lasting four to six hour high of heroin.

Daniel Raymond, policy director of the Harm Reduction Coalition, observes that a shift away from seeking the strongest heroin possible towards actively avoiding fentanyl may come with experience. "It's almost like a community level adaptation," he says, "At first fentanyl might seem like it makes more sense—if you can stretch it out longer by dividing it into smaller doses, there's [perceived] benefit from that. But then when you see that it's hard to calibrate the dose and people are OD'ing and people close to you are dying, that shifts it from adaptation to avoidance."

Check out our documentary about pedophilia in Canada.

This month, in order to try to help drug users reduce risk related to fentanyl, the Harm Reduction Coalition will launch a pilot research program offering test strips that can determine the presence of fentanyl and survey those who decide to try them about how they use such information. The group doesn't yet know whether this will be helpful, of course. Will people just discard bags that test positive for fentanyl—or will they try to avoid overdosing by using smaller doses? Will the test provide accurate information, or will it miss too many potentially harmful but new synthetics and fail to reduce harm?

"That's why we're doing the survey," says Raymond, who adds that the test strips seem to be able to pick up not just fentanyl, but at least some derivatives. Still, this doesn't clarify the dose present, which obviously makes a huge difference. "Is that useful or actionable information?" he wonders. "Are there risks of false positives or negatives or of a false sense of security?

"We don't know that yet, so we're hoping to at least learn something," Raymond says.

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

The theater has always been a sanctuary for those who need it most. Which makes Donald Trump's tweet on the heels of Mike Pence's booing at the musical Hamilton last November especially ironic:

For once, he got it exactly right. The theater is a safe and special place—for anyone but someone whose political aims portend havoc for our society's most marginalized.

On January 19th—the night before Trump's inauguration, and two months after Pence's booing—the theater community will band together for a show of solidarity in the form of The Ghostlight Project. Named after the light left on on a theater's stage when the auditorium is unoccupied, the protest will gather hundreds of groups outside theaters across the country, from Broadway to community stages, in free-form events designed to express support for vulnerable communities targeted by the Trump administration.

Costume and set designer David Zinn (whose recent shows include the Tony-award winners The Humans and Fun Home) is a co-founder of the protest. It stands as a marriage between his theater work and his long history as an activist, stretching back to his days as a member of ACT UP, where he brought his theatrical bent to the work of direct action politics. He spoke with VICE to reveal the origins and future of his burgeoning movement.

VICE: How did The Ghostlight Project start?
David Zinn: The day after the election was reserved for horror and mourning, but shortly thereafter, I had a little vision. I was so horrified by what had happened, and I knew that once he's elected, I was going to spend the next four years screaming my brains out—which is my usual political response to things. But I had this weird sense that we needed to really come together in some way.

I wrote an email to nine friends of mine, who I thought might be a place to step off from, people with a history of activist work. As I'm sure you've discovered in the world of emailing friends, there was like, zero response. And I was like "Alright, well, dumb idea. I'm happy at least I said it."

Then they started to respond, all at once. We decided we wanted to do something on the 19th, and we wanted to show that we stand together. We wanted to offer ourselves and our spaces as harbors, and reach out to other communities, to break down borders.

I always get worried when people start talking about "sanctuaries" or "safe spaces," because I think we all define what safety is relative to our own needs and experiences. But I like that this project is focusing on concrete actions. How do you plan to help folks keep this energy going and make change?
After the 19th, we're making the website a place where people can go if they have questions. For example, if you want to write a check to someone, here's a bunch of organizations we love. If you want to get more involved with a group of theater people that are doing very specific local actions, here's so-and-so's action network. Do you want to learn how to try to get your management to be a little more open to the idea of different hiring practices? Here's this theater's story. We want to make the bar for failure almost zero, know what I mean? If what you're doing is just picking an organization that seems great and sending $100 to them, Mazel. That is so much better than nothing.

My ultimate goal is to make social action just be a part of what we do in the theater. It's not mandatory—we're all busy, we all have a million things to do—but to make that opportunity exist for people seems really important.

My hope is this. There's always a first rehearsal where everybody gets together, it's like the first day of school, and a lot of information is distributed. My dream is that in the future, at theaters taking part in the Ghostlight Project, they'll be like "Oh hey, you just heard from the company manager, now this is Cynthia, who's in charge of our Ghostlight project, and this is the group we work with, and on Mondays, from 4-6, we're going to go volunteer at this thing. If you want to volunteer, or find other ways they can help, come see me."

So this will continue past the 19th?
Yes. People who have signed up to do it are also committing to some sort of social action, whether that's within the walls of the theater, opening your theater up to voices that haven't been well-represented, or literally opening your theater to a community group to let them use your space for a meeting. It could be a cast coming together and collectively supporting Planned Parenthood or the Leadership Council or WhiteHelmets.org. We want people to define the terms of the thing on their own, but we want them to do something.

With the dawn of this new administration, there are a lot of traditionally vulnerable communities that will become more vulnerable. We want to protect them. We don't have political power, but we have some power. Theater people are connectors. We spend our lives hopping around and meeting all these other communities and that's great. We are this community of people who in some ways model the world that we want to create. Not in every way, and not perfectly, certainly, but we're an interesting, smart, diverse group of people who value those things. And we come together to make communities everywhere, and that seemed like worth invoking and standing together.

What will you be doing yourself?
I just gave a chunk of money to the Sylvia Rivera Law Project [a legal organization that fights for the rights of transgender people]. I've been a queer activist for a long time and trans issues are important to me, and important to the world.

I think as long as their financial portfolios are OK and Trump doesn't touch marriage, there are a lot of gay people who feel we're fine. So I have become less excited about fighting for "traditional" gay rights issues and really excited for trying to amplify the voices on the margins—there's probably a nicer way to say that —of the community, the people who just haven't had as much of a voice.

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.

Have you ever stressed over whether to buy the no-name brand of frozen burritos from the supermarket? Is the $4 more for the logo and fancy package really worth it? If so, you'll probably be pretty upset to know that eight of the world's billionaires own as much wealth as half of the entire population of Earth, according to a new report published by Oxfam

The data (which came from Credit Suisse's economic research on wealth distribution in 2016) shows that eight billionaires—totaling a net worth of $426 billion—have as much wealth as 3.6 billion people, who make up the bottom half of the world's economy. Last year, it took 62 of the world's richest to reach that same conclusion.

The eight billionaires, in order of networth, are as follows: Microsoft founder Bill Gates ($75 billion); Fashion business magnate (aka Zara owner) Amancio Ortega ($67 billion); American investor Warren Buffett ($60.8 billion); Mexican businessman Carlos Slim ($50 billion); Amazon head Jeff Bezos ($45.2 billion); Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ($44.6 billion); Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison ($43.6 billion); and former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg ($40 billion).

The report notes that the transfer of wealth from the bottom half to a very select few is a hard and complex relationship to understand, but offers a few explanations for the ever-widening wealth gap—pointing to an increasingly-stressed global economy, as well as factors such as climate change and war.

"Unlike extreme wealth at the top, which can be observed and documented through various rich lists, we have much less information about the wealth of those at the bottom of the distribution. We do know however, that many people experiencing poverty around the world are seeing an erosion of their main source of wealth—namely land, natural resources and homes – as a consequence of insecure land rights, land grabbing, land fragmentation and erosion, climate change, urban eviction and forced displacement."

Read More: Who's to Blame For Income Inequality in the US?

According to the report, most of the world's poorest half resides in live in south-eastern portions of the globe, such as India, Africa, and some parts of Asia. Only one percent of that population resides in North America, and almost half of all billionaires are from the continent.

The data also shows that the growing rift between the world's poorest and richest has no borders: in Canada, David Thomson and Galen Weston—two Canadian billionaires with a net worth of $33.1 billion—own as much wealth as one third of the entire country,

Across the globe, women also take the brunt of the blow when it comes to wealth distribution. In countries like Canada, New Zealand, UK and Australia, women make up over 60 percent of the unpaid work force. Women are 90 percent less likely to earn an equal wage as their male counterparts, and compromise a mere 15 to 20 percent of the top income bracket in western countries.

For what it's worth, the richest woman on earth last year—Liliane Bettencourt, the principal owner of L'Oreal—is worth a rock solid $36.1 billion.

"Worldwide, the chances for women to participate in the labour market remain almost 27 percentage points lower than those for men," the report reads. "Once in the labour market, women are more likely than men to be in jobs not protected by labour legislation. In formal jobs, women consistently earn less than men."

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Lead photo via Wikimedia.

When it was time to choose a pediatrician for his then two-year-old son, Brooklyn-based photographer Ruddy Roye was determined to find one who shared his black and Jamaican roots. He scoured catalogs and listings, but when he tracked the right one down, the doctor was mystified. He couldn't quite grasp why Roye, who travels the world shooting for major magazines and newspapers, would spend so much time searching for a doctor with his own background. But as the photographer told me, "There was no other way to explain to this educated man why I chose him other than what happened the first day my son was inoculated."

As the black and Jamaican doctor tried to keep Roye's child's attention away from the needle that day, he asked the boy what he wanted to be when he grew up. Mosijah, Roye's son who is now 11 years old, looked up at the pediatrician and replied softly, "You."

For Roye, this moment was a powerful affirmation of his belief that seeing people who look like you do positive things can have a profound impact on how you see yourself. "The visual allows boys to see that it's attainable, that it's not as farfetched as a guidance counselor saying, 'You know, you could be a doctor'" he said.

This sensibility serves as the bedrock of Black Male Re-Imagined, a narrative photo project backed by the Campaign for Black Male Achievement and shot by Ruddy Roye. The organization, which was launched in 2008 and has helped invest tens of millions of dollars into initiatives for black men and boys, tasked Roye with traveling to cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Chicago to photograph and share the perspectives of everyday people who are uplifting the lives of black men. Along the way, he took portraits of leaders like Tracy Martin, father of Trayvon Martin, Reverend Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, high school principal Yetunde Reeves, and contemporary artist Knowledge Bennett.

"When I first came to this country, I met all of these stereotypes: That black men were never fathers, we were never teachers or educators," Roye said. "By showing these images, I inspire other other black men to say, 'I can be that person' or 'I can be in those positions.'"

The Campaign for Black Male Achievement helped lay the groundwork for President Barack Obama's popular My Brother's Keeper initiative and is involved in organizing the annual MLK Now event, which is taking place Monday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Like those well-known efforts, Black Male Re-Imagined furthers the group's mission of "narrative change," which Rashid Shabazz, the Vice President of Communications of the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, defined to me as creating "more accurate, elevated depictions of black men and boys."

Although the project's idea of the "Re-Imagined" is flexible, Shabazz made it clear to me that the goal was not to push tired respectability politics. In addition to showing black boys the men that they could be, this project also seeks to show America who black men really are.

"The idea really was to be provocative. A lot of times we don't have to reimagine black males—we just need to put a light on the diversity, that black males are not a monolith," he said.

This mission seems especially important today. Although it's Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a holiday dedicated to an activist who epitomized the strength and grace of black men—and we've just seen a black man serve for eight years in the highest office in the land—the triumphs of these leaders and others like them have not been sufficient to negate the pernicious negative perceptions many Americans hold about men of color.

At a time when black college enrollment surges and the absent black father myth has been debunked, it's disheartening to see that old stereotypes and one-dimensional portrayal of blacks males still color the way many individuals see the world. Even our next president, Donald Trump, perpetuates mangled concepts about black people—that we all "live in hell," violent communities filled with "gangs roaming the streets."

Ruddy's work depicts a more nuanced black America, one with beauty and hope and power in spite of the pain of enduring in a country plagued with institutional racism. As Shabazz noted to me, regardless of their surroundings, Ruddy manages to capture his black subjects with "a sense of dignity" that they are usually denied. "He's telling these amazing stories through images. That's why we chose him. That's why we want to engage with him. He captures us in a way that shows not our brokenness, but our wholeness."

"If we come together, we can strengthen the platform that we stand on. I think these images do that." —Ruddy Roye

Of course, this is nothing new for Roye, who's used the same approach since his first major photo project in 2000. In that early work, he documented the squatters along an abandoned train line in Jamaica. And to get the story and really engage with the people, he walked 121 miles from Montego Bay to Kingston.

After moving to the US in 2001, Roye found himself a bit disillusioned with photojournalism because of the stories he was asked to cover by white editors—and his dwindling professional prospects.

"I began to feel as disenfranchised as the people I saw in my Brooklyn neighborhood," he said. "In the past, it was so hard for me to walk up to them and say, 'I'd like to photograph you.' But I found it easier if we talked about the fact that we weren't working together. 'I'm not working. You're not working. I'm a father. You're a father...'"

And so he began photographing people in and around his community in ways that expressed compassion and understanding for their mutual struggle as blacks in America. Instead of going to traditional media companies with this work, Roye published these powerful photos on social media. "Instagram gave me the vehicle to do it," he said. "There were no editors at the gate telling me that this story was not important."

Today, Roye's vision has earned him more than 250,000 instagram followers and he was just named Time's "Instagram Photographer of 2016." Although his work has appeared practically everywhere, from the New York Times to Vogue, he told me that this Black Male Re-Imagined project with the Campaign for Black Male Achievement is what really satisfies his soul.

One of the most impactful experiences he had shooting this project was in Milwaukee, where he photographed Mike McGee, an older gentleman who had been a member of the Black Panther Party.

"As we sat down, he was very belligerent about talking about where we were going to be in the future as a race," Roye recalled. "He believed that without a physical revolution, we would never achieve anything. It was important for me to understand that during his time, that was his belief. And where we are now, I have my own beliefs. And as I look to my sons, they approach race in a different way than even I do. We're three generations of black men, coming from three different spaces. My goal is to photograph in a way that will link us together."

Capturing that sense of unity is crucial to Roye's mission in these photographs, because it is something he hopes will have a tangible impact on those fighting institutional racism across the nation.

"One of my responsibilities was to go out and photograph what we are all doing because we really don't know," he told me. "Remember, the fist is not just a symbol of power and strength, it has a story of connectivity. What's going on in Oakland, Atlanta, Birmingham, Baltimore, in Ferguson—if we come together, we can strengthen the platform that we stand on. I think these images do that."

Below is an exclusive selection of photos from the Campaign for Black Male Achievement's Black Male Re-Imagined project by Ruddy Roye. Each photo features a caption by Roye about the subject's point of view on the representation of black men today and the legacy of Barack Obama. You can learn more about the Campaign for Black Male Achievement on their website and you can see Ruddy Roye latest photos on his Instagram.

I photographed Tracey Martin, father of Trayvon Martin, after his "Father to Son" talk at the Kennedy Center. His social justice organization, the Trayvon Martin Foundation, supports families who have lost their loved ones to gun violence. His response to what "Black Male Re-Imagined" means to him was, "I envision the black male being in a position of power, being entrepreneurial, being more than just iconic sports figures, being innovators. There's a perception that we're in a dark place as African-American men. It's not that we need to change the things that we are doing, America needs to change the things that they're doing to us. We have to shift that paradigm, and it's important to show young black men love and respect."

I've never met a person who carried so much of the struggle of African-American people. Mike McGee, Sr. was quiet for most of the time we met. He sat at an event in Milwaukee celebrating the lives of former basketball stars from his neighborhood basketball club, of which he was a coach and community leader. When I asked him about how the narrative around black men in America has evolved since Obama's presidency, he said, "Nothing has changed. I feel completely disenfranchised since his eight years. I would have at least apologized for slavery. It would have been a token gesture and he didn't even do that. I'm disappointed in our black elected officials in general. They have let the black people down. I was ahead of my time. Until the black men are ready to fight, not protest, actually fight, nothing will change for us. Begging will not get you anything. I don't think anything has changed. It's a flash in the pan."

Gaulien "Gee" Smith has owned Gee's Clippers for 21 years. It is the first African-American barber shop in the country to charter a Boy Scouts troop and is a staple in the Milwaukee community. He told me, "In 20 more years, I hope that people remember me as a brother who truly cared about his community. A brother who showed selflessness and went beyond the call of duty to bring change to his community. That I brought awareness to the incarceration rate, filled the void of missing fathers, and encouraged inner city kids to vote." Smith does believe that Obama's presidency changed the black male experience. He said, "It gave our kids hope and allowed them to see that the sky is the limit."

I saw Reverend Sikou walk off the stage to the chants of "more" at a festival of music, art and social justice, dubbed "Many Rivers to Cross." The two-day music festival was held at the 8,000-acre Bouckaert Horse Farm in Fairburn, Georgia. His set was spellbinding and seemed to hold his audience in a trance. "Part of the way black music in general is a savior to the wounds of racism, is that it creates a space whereby we can be free but for a few minutes. Blues music in particular does it with a bit of style and style is a form of resistance."

Knowledge Bennett is a contemporary artist who believes that being a black artist with a pop art viewpoint gives him a unique perspective. "Often times, 'black art' from a traditional sense appears to miss the mark when attracting the attention of black men and boys who haven't necessarily been introduced to the world of fine art," he said. "My work serves as a perfect introduction because I'm presenting elements of pop culture, things that these individuals have an immediate connection with."

I could not take my eyes off of Storyboard P. as the Brooklyn dancer practiced his moves before going on stage. His tight, intricate, syncopated movements seemed to connect his eyelashes to his toe nail and his body rippled like the Caribbean Sea. "I move because the whole world is movement. There is no such thing called stop. The way I feel is movement. It allows males to navigate their male qualities and connect with their female qualities. It allows black boys to express themselves and it gives them balance. I believe my art allows aggression to have more articulation. It shows confidence—your posture alone tells you about yourself."

Yetunde Reeves is the principal at Ballou, a predominantly African American high school in Washington, DC, where she's working to change the narrative about black youth. The area is known for its high crime rate, homelessness, and issues with addiction. "I think the narrative around some black men has evolved since the election of Obama, but I'm not sure how many students relate to his story. Seeing a black man achieve an accomplishment is certainly important. I just don't know if my students have felt personally impacted by his administration. The narrative for me is about the possibility and the resiliency I see in my students."

Ray Nitti spends a lot of time composing art that will reach his audience of black men and boys in Milwaukee. "We are using the music to give black boys an alternative form of expressing their emotions instead of lashing out in anger. It is their therapy. We connect them with opportunities and various platforms that will allow them to strengthen their talents and hopefully find some form of value that might transform into some form of employment or payment. I think the narrative is being deliberately perpetuated. Yes, it has evolved. There was always a focus but now I think there has been a concerted effort to attack not just the black man, but also his community. In the next 20 years, I envision that we will be organized. Since slavery, we have never truly been organized or had control of our culture. We need to be a people who see about our business and culture."

Bradley Thurman is 67 and the proprietor of Milwaukee's Coffee Makes You Black, which provides a spot in the community where people feel comfortable to network and communicate. "I think society has regressed to Jim Crow. [Obama came in eight years ago, but we still] haven't gained any ground. In a way, we have lost ground. When I graduated from high school, there was riots in the streets. I'm 67 years old, and there are still riots in the streets. The institutions are still preventing us from [owning the system]. So I am not surprised to see the young people rebel.

Andrew Joseph Jr. lost his son Andrew Joseph lll on February 7, 2014. The 14-year-old was killed crossing Interstate 4 after the Sheriff Department ejected him from the Florida State fair. "In Tampa, I think when Obama was elected, we had certain expectations. We were proud. We celebrated. But he told us in the beginning that he didn't want to be a black president, he wanted to be a president. We have been waiting through both terms. We have not seen that change we thought we were getting—a president who would stand up for us. We got fringe benefits, museums, and street names. We have not gotten that real change. We are demanding change now. The black men are being executed in our homes."

I met up with Rashid Shabazz on Bedford Street to photograph him for this project. He was with his five-year-old daughter Zahara. Rashid has dedicated his life to fighting injustice, a struggle he hopes is not lost on his daughter when she comes of age. Activism is in his blood: Shabazz's father was a captain in the Nation of Islam, an organization that transformed the lives of many black men to be more self-determining and to stand up for the rights of their people. "I grew up in a home unapologetic about black excellence, black achievement and the black contributions to the world. I saw my father use his weekends going to minister to brothers who were locked up and knowing that he was doing that to help them. But I am sure in my subconscious there was a sense that I knew there was some injustice in that, given my lessons in the Nation. I made early connections that black women and men faced injustices that needed to end and still do need to end."

Follow Wilbert L. Cooper on Twitter.

(Top photo: Some faux-lesbianism at the UK Porn Awards. Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete)

Earlier this month PornHub released its stats for 2016, and for a second year running "lesbian porn" came out on top as the site's most searched-for term, just behind "step-mom". This is likely because lesbian porn is popular with both guys and girls – women in North America were 86 percent more likely to search for "lesbian" than North American men, for instance – while "step-mom" porn is presumably a pretty male interest.

What is it about the idea of four pert breasts rubbing up against each other that turns people on so much? Maybe the answer is obvious. But it seemed to make sense to ask actual, real life lesbians if they had any insight, and more to the point, how they feel about it. Is it gross or flattering to think about men whacking one out to the very special and private act of two women making love? Or does lesbian porn bear so little resemblance to actual lesbian sex that it's neither here nor there?

PENNY, 27, YORKSHIRE

Well, firstly, I think "step-mom" seems a lot more exciting than "lesbian". It's a bit more divergent. Socially, lesbianism has become a bit more "normal", so it's not really got that aura of, "What do you girls do?" any more.

I'm mildly disappointed that it topped the list. It does reflect objectification; it's reinforcing the idea that it's "different". When I think of just how many people are watching lesbian porn I think, 'You can't have your cake and eat it: you can't say lesbian sex is not OK or that it's subnormal and then utilise our sex to whack one out.' Maybe that's why lesbian sex is subordinated – if you make something lower than you, you can exploit it, which is what's happened to women in the history of all time. Now it's happening when we have sex with each other.

As for whether it's helping educate men about what lesbian sex involves, and the idea that sex goes on without them, the question there is: is porn real lesbian sex? I think a lesbian might be a bit more discerning in the lesbian porn they would watch because they're looking for more authenticity, so they might go for something more amateur but realistic. Ultimately, lesbian porn can't show men what lesbian sex is really like, because lesbian sex isn't for men, and the minute it is – i.e. in porn – it's just not the same. Sorry guys!

SOPHIE, 30, LONDON

Of course "lesbian" porn is the most popular! Men like lesbian porn because they can get a boner without feeling compromised by the visuals of another man's boner. Not only does it make them feel like their heterosexuality is compromised, but look at slut-shaming: what makes a woman impure? It's all these dirty willies going inside her. Guys love their own willies but they see others' willies as disgusting; they'd rather not see one. And when that's not the case, narratives of lesbian porn just uphold heteronormativity in that the women paw at each other and moan and fuss about, and then the man comes along right at the end and fixes everything with his penis.

Personally, I don't watch porn because I want to know that no women have been hurt in the making of porn and it's so hard to verify that. Secondly, I don't want to get off to the same things gross men I'd never talk to or engage with are watching. Thirdly, lesbian porn online is never for lesbians, is it? I've not met an actual lesbian who enjoys it. The girls have long fingernails! I think the most attractive thing about lesbians, all lesbians, is that to come out, to go against the grain – and it still is really against the grain – and fancy a woman is to take an active control of your sexuality. And that doesn't translate when two women – who are doing gay-for-pay – get it on to-camera. I look forward to a world where lesbians are as respected as they are fetishised – and porn actresses are required to remove fingernails before insertion.

EMMA, 26, LONDON

I'm definitely one of those women who have been searching "lesbian porn", and I wouldn't say it's any better to watch lesbian porn myself just because I have sex with women. I guess my intentions are the same: I just want to wank, right? But I do like to think I watch lesbian women having sex in an authentic way. A lot of porn out there is what men imagine lesbian sex to be like, and I don't find that arousing, so it's a very specific genre I look for.

The difference is to do with the male gaze. In some lesbian porn it's for men, either implicitly or explicitly; implicitly, a man holding the camera might talk to the two women and is part of the story or dialogue; more explicitly, two women might be making out, then a man enters and joins. In mainstream lesbian porn the way the girls have sex is different: head looks kind of the same, but quite often the girls have no clue what they're doing and orgasms seem fake. Whereas the kind of things I watch might be performing or acting, but it's usually made by women, the girls seem more into it, they stereotypically look more lesbian and there's not a man lingering in the background waiting to jump in and fuck them both.

I think men could benefit from watching this kind of porn – they might respect lesbian sex more, it might stop them thinking their girlfriends are abnormal for having real bodies and it might just generally be informative rather than oppressive.

BRYONY, 27, DORSET

I'm not surprised about the popularity of "lesbian" porn, to be honest. People are perpetually fascinated by that which they perceive as defying "normative" conventions. They love to subsume what they perceive as "other" by getting really really close to it and cracking one out to it twice a day. For some, I imagine watching it fulfils a need to substitute what is perceived of as a "lack"; it's the desire to intervene, to meddle and project your desires into a scene where you are not necessarily needed nor wanted. Two women having sex refuses men a place. And what's more thrilling than trying to muscle your way into the conversation?

For heterosexual women searching it – and I reckon there are a lot – I think there's an element of intrigue. The narrative goes that it is naive young men who are desperate to understand what it is that lesbians get up to. However, I think we forget that this forecloses the fact that this is a question many people have, not just young, perplexed straight men. While it's a frustrating question, I think it comes down to the sex education that many receive, and the heteronormative model this is founded on, which often precludes a substantive, well-rounded knowledge of other sexual practices. Fewer people would watch lesbian sex if we were all better educated about it.

I guess I don't think of it as objectifying, because it's not me, or any of my sexual partners, who are being watched. And I think we have the right to watch that which is made consensually and ethically. When we start policing and censuring what strangers watch in their own homes, there are both pros and cons – some things are obviously not OK, like porn featuring people who are underage. However, with the imminence of the [Digital Economy Bill], which is set to target "non-conventional sex acts", I think it's crucial to understand how quickly this policing can flip on its own head, legislating the bodies and acts of those it deems as "non-normative" – and that's usually involving women's pleasure.

LANA, 23, LONDON

In all honesty I don't really frequent "mainstream" porn websites, because most of them just make me very uncomfortable – consent lines are pretty dodgy, there's no way of knowing about the actual safety of the actors and actresses when it's just a massive cluster of videos from a million places with names like "teen student gets pounded". But it does surprise me that "lesbian porn" is number one.

I do know there are a lot of straight-identifying girls who watch lesbian porn purely for the fact it seems more focused on women and their pleasure than mainstream straight porn – but that's not saying much because the bar is set so low. I'm willing to wager that the rise of the popularity of this term is partly to do with the fact that more women might be watching porn or frequenting porn websites as female sexuality becomes more openly discussed and encouraged, and these women might be drawn to that search word – because of the reason I mentioned before, or because of curiosity about their own pleasure, or because our generation is the most sexually fluid. Their views probably add to the men who want to watch it to fetishise queer relationships featuring women.

Of all my queer women friends, I know very few who watch "lesbian porn" as it's marketed on these websites. Most of them just find it funny because of how wrong it is. Another reason is that a lot of porn that includes queer relationships doesn't feature clear consent and has a lot of dubious power dynamics going on – "tricking people into doing gay stuff", etc, and that's really not what it should be about. I don't think a lot of queer women looking for porn would be satisfied or extremely comfortable with the amount of non-consensual undertones and overtones. We need more healthy portrayals of sexual relationships in porn. Again, that comes from the producers, and it really, really isn't that difficult.

Finally, I think lesbian sex, as it has been sold in porn, has probably contributed to the male imagination of it being OK to stop two girls in the street and say, "Whoah I'd love to watch," or badgering girls who are together in a bar for a threesome. Or, as has happened to me a million times, taking photos of them if they kiss because "it's hot". It adds to that entitlement because it makes men believe that queer women are for them and for their consumption, rather than individuals. For it to be revolutionary that "lesbian porn" is the most searched term, we'd need actual LGBTQ women making and participating in these films and putting their gaze in the story, rather than leaving it to a horny, entitled straight dude who wants to see straight girls who fit his ideals of beauty half-heartedly touching one another's boobs.

@MillyAbraham

This is the VICE Interview. Each week we ask a different famous and/or interesting person the same set of questions in a bid to peek deep into their psyche.

Jamelia – Birmingham-born singer and, more recently, social media star – is known for her string of 2000s hits, including "Superstar" and "Thank You", and for going on panel shows and always being the nicest person there. After leaving daytime chat show Loose Women in 2016, her latest venture is a YouTube lifestyle channel centring on black hair and beauty.

I spoke to her over the phone about conspiracy theories, Mary J Blige and Rastafarianism.

VICE: When was the last time you said no to something relating to your career?
Jamelia: Recently I ended a business relationship because it wasn't serving me or my intentions for myself in my future career. This year, for me, I think it's very important to become a person that empowers other people. This business relationship just didn't support that idea, in a variety of ways. Over the past year I feel I've seen the media representation of black women completely differently. I feel like I've found a whole new section of media that motivates and empowers, which is exactly what I want to do. We have to intentionally occupy spaces that serve us in all of our facets.

What is the nicest thing you own?
The nicest thing I own is my house. When I was younger I lived near not a national park, but that kind of thing. We'd go there in the summer to fly kites, or go and find tadpoles, and I remember seeing this area and absolutely not seeing myself in that type of place. And for me, living where I live is a representation of how far I've come and the fact that I've successfully socially migrated. I don't believe that social migration is the only way of displaying success, but I think it is a very clear way to do so. In comparison to where I grew up, which was inner-city Birmingham, in a council house, I can do little things like being able to dance around my kitchen – we didn't have space to dance in the kitchen when I was young.

Would you rather change one day from your past or see one day from your future?
I think maybe see one day from my future. I think, for me, I've had a multitude of experiences, good, bad and extremely ugly. But what I will say about them is that they have absolutely served me in becoming the woman that I am today. I think seeing a day in my future would just be a way of being reassured that I'm doing the right thing and that the choices I'm making today are going to continue to serve me well.

What would your specialist subject on Mastermind be?
Mary J Blige, because I'm obsessed with her.

Would you like to experience death if it could be guaranteed you could be brought back to life?
Absolutely. I know that seems like a strange answer, but I'm curious [about it]. If you can be so intuitive and so connected to other people, can that just switch off? I just don't believe that that's possible. But being someone who's non-religious I don't have any explanations or reasons. I'm definitely scientifically and technically minded. And, for me, it kind of borders on the spiritual or the religious. So I feel like I need that proof, but only if it's guaranteed that I'm going to wake back up.

Are you religious?
I was born into Rastafarianism, and so the first 10 years of my life I spent as a Rasta. I'm curious and interested in religion but I have come to the conclusion that I don't require religion. I do appreciate and accept the necessity of religion for other people.

If you could live in any time, which one would you pick?
I enjoy overcoming struggles, so I would have loved to have been around in the 60s. I don't feel like that era of black women are acknowledged enough. I don't have access to the history around them. We only know what we're taught in Black History Month or what's available in the libraries. I just feel like there has to have been more to it than that. I feel the only way that I can gain that history is to have actually been there. The elders of that generation are kind of cagey. They want to let it go.

What was your first email address?
I actually still have it, but it's not functioning, so I can tell you what it is! It's mydamnbusiness@aol.com. You know when you're signing up to things and you don't want to give away your email address? I still use it for that. I did it when I was 15, the same year I signed my record deal. I didn't want it to be my name because I didn't want people to figure it out. And I just thought it was like me – cheeky. It's so embarrassing, but I was only 15, so allow it.

What would your parents prefer you to have chosen as a career?
I believe that I've surpassed any aspirations that my parents had for me. Because they were the first generation after Windrush I feel like they were a bit of a lost generation. My mum didn't leave school with any GCSEs. Neither did my dad, actually. My mum did go on to do amazing things with her life – she started off volunteering at the local play centre and ended up managing it. Which was a big deal, especially for me, having a front row seat to that ascension.

What conspiracy theory do you believe?
I don't know if you'd call it a conspiracy theory, but I think the mainstream media has an agenda to present ethnic minorities' narratives in a certain way. In a skewed way. I don't even think it's a conspiracy theory, actually; I think it's a fact. I think that us taking advantage of social media and the internet was something that they didn't bargain on happening.

Do drugs make you happy?
I genuinely have no idea. I've never taken them. I don't even think I've seen a [hard] drug before in my life. I'm 36 tomorrow and I'm very green when it comes to that. Growing up Rastafarian I've seen a lot of weed in my time. But it's funny, because I don't see weed as a drug. That might be controversial to the British media, but I really don't. So, to me, with my idea of what a drug is, to me taking them doesn't look like happiness.

If you were a wrestler, what song would you come into the ring to?
I think I'd come in to "Return of the Mack". People have definitely done that. I feel I am someone who has been knocked down so many times, but I always get back up and I always come back.

What's the latest you've stayed up?
Oh my gosh, I'm a proper night owl. I'm also a parent, so last night I was up to, like, 3AM, and I had to be up to get my girls ready for school at half six. Frequently I'm up all night and then I'll function normally in the day, which actually is not something to be proud of, because then I'll have days like yesterday, where I slept literally all day. But I do work in an industry where I'm able to sleep in the day if I want to.

What would your last meal be?
It would just be a bowl, or plate, as big as possible, of fried plantain. I'm obsessed

What memory from school stands out to you stronger than any other?
I had two fantastic teachers in primary school, one called Mrs Smith, who unfortunately died a few years ago, and my other teacher Mr Lamb. As a young black girl sometimes you can be written off in a school environment. But if they saw me starting to go off the rails they were like: "Nope. Not you, not today!"

@CharlieBCuff

More VICE Interviews:

Mike Skinner

Mr Motivator

RuPaul

Almost every episode of Malcolm in the Middle ends with the sound of a door being slammed shut. It returns Malcolm's family – a combustive medley of troublemakers and misfits – back to the status quo. This is standard in sitcoms; everything returns to how it was. The difference is, in Malcolm in the Middle, the status quo is bleak. Unlike the characters in, say, Friends, who live comfortably in midtown apartments with lives seemingly unbothered by work, Malcolm's family is poor. Every joke, plot and resolution revolves around this material fact.

I grew up thinking Malcolm in the Middle was a zany show about four quarrelsome brothers and their parents. Re-watching it now it's clear what the show is actually about: the idea that meritocracy is a sham, social institutions are corrupt and wage-labour is cruel. The parents, Hal and Lois, have a comically carnal relationship, which I didn't really understand when I was young. It's a way of protecting themselves from the vicissitudes of capitalism. All the characters are condemned, in one way or another, by the world that surrounds them.

While this might sound like heavy stuff for a primetime show on FOX, sitcoms have smuggled in radical ideas before. In fact, there's a reference to this on Malcolm, Dewey and Reece's bedroom wall: a poster of the sitcom Dinosaurs, which ran in the early 1990s on ABC. Dinosaurs is unlike any sitcom America has produced: an anti-capitalist, moralistic puppet show about a family of dinosaurs living on a swampland owned by the FruitCO corporation (a division of WeSaySo enterprises), run by a Trump-esque CEO. It offers a critique of exploitation, sexual harassment and political corruption, and concludes with the family becoming extinct due to a climate change-induced ice age. Dinosaurs was Malcolm's guiding spirit.

In the beginning Malcolm's family are in debt, perpetually stressed, living in a house that's falling apart. A typical image is Hal and Lois sitting at a kitchen table littered with bills. Lois doesn't have time to go beyond the basic demands of the roles expected of mothers – cleaning clothes, scrabbling together lunch – since she's keeping up a low-level service job in a drugstore. Hal works a white-collar clerical job in an office. It's the kind of unproductive, pointless job capitalism makes up just to keep people miserable. He does so little work it's at one point discovered he's never turned up on Fridays, going on day trips by himself to places like Seaworld – a radical refusal to work if there ever was one.

"'Malcolm in the Middle' showed that the promises of neoliberalism had always been false."

In the first episode, Malcolm is recognised to be a genius with an IQ of 165. His underfunded public school puts him in the gifted class, "the Krelboynes", where they keep "all the sort of good things they don't waste on the normal kids". In a conservative sitcom this would be a rags-to-riches story, his intelligence elevating the family to a prosperous future. But what happens instead is ruthlessly honest. Malcolm's gift doesn't bring him out of his class position; it entrenches it: in the show's finale he gets accepted into Harvard but can only afford the tuition fees by working as the university's janitor at the same time.

This was all years before the 2008 economic crisis, after which publications started writing about the "collapsing middle class" across Western economies, as if everything had been fine before that. Malcolm in the Middle showed that the promises of neoliberalism had always been false: real wages for middle and low wage workers had stagnated since the 1980s, personal debt had mushroomed. When the family has to cancel a summer holiday to pay for Malcolm's hospital bills they make a cost-benefit analysis that's rarely seen on TV, but happens every day across America.

The show doesn't just depict the struggle of surviving under capitalism, it undermines its ruling ideas. One of the recurring jokes is that the family's poverty is the result of the parents' individual character flaws rather than structural forces. When Lois and Hal are forced to stop having so much sex because of a yeast infection they start obsessively tending to the house and transform it into an idyll of bourgeois living – the grass grows and the flowers bloom. When Dewey discovers Hal has been secretly smoking, he works out that with the amount he's spent on cigarettes he could have sent Dewey, who's also intellectually gifted, to private school. The jokes parody the Thatcher / Reagan rhetoric that poor people are poor because they don't work hard enough.

Re-watching it now it's clear what the show is actually about: meritocracy is a sham, social institutions are corrupt and wage-labour is cruel.

TV critics have lauded Malcolm's pioneering use of a single-camera and no laughter track, which led the way for the postmodern comedies of the 2000s. But few commented upon the cast's diversity. Malcolm's best friend, Stevie, isn't just African-American; he's physically disabled and upper middle-class. This isn't some cruel, intersectional joke, like when Lena Dunham responded to a lack of diversity in Girls by writing in a black Republican for two episodes, but a sensitive relationship through which both characters develop. Also, Stevie's conservative family values satirise the "respectability politics" – the idea of "acting right" to get ahead in a world of white dominance – which was seen in programmes like The Cosby Show. (Stevie's jumpers are straight out of The Cosby Show's wardrobe.)

The same goes for the eldest brother Francis's wife, Piama, who is of Inuit descent. Although there's a pitiful absence of Native American characters in American culture, Piama isn't a token of diversity – her character is complex. Lois is initially distrustful of her for taking away her son, but they form a sense of solidarity over a shared enjoyment of punishing their useless partners – smashing up Francis and Hal's stuff when they go on a selfish motorbike trip by themselves.

It's become obligatory recently for critics to end reviews by attempting to integrate pop culture into the contemporary political climate – an impulse that has, at times, felt over-laboured. But as politics becomes increasingly senseless, it's harder to detach it from culture at large. Completely immersing myself in Malcolm's world, I have such sympathy for their lives that I can't help but wonder how they would fare in Trump's America. Probably not well.

Then I had a scarier thought: what if they voted for him? Although Trump's success depended on multiple demographics – college-educated, wealthy whites were crucial – as a white family in a low income-bracket somewhere in an undefined midwestern state, Malcolm's family would have been a key demographic to mobilise; possibly part of the considerable swing from poorer Democrats to Republicans that helped Trump clinch it. Could Lois and Hal have been convinced by Trump's promises to bring back high wages and an export-based economy? Would they have been fooled by his anti-establishment disguise and found catharsis in a protest vote?

I soothed this admittedly strange worry – that my favourite sitcom family could have been Trump supporters – by considering a more plausible outcome. When Election Day came round, amid the stress of poorly remunerated work, the anxiety of debt repayments and the chaos of putting out their children's fires, Lois and Hal would have, like millions of others, been too busy – or perhaps cynical – to care. If Malcolm in the Middle articulates the experience of any particular demographic, it's those who simply didn't vote.

@yohannk

(Top photo via publicdomainphotos.net)

You couldn't make it up. Actually – you could. That's exactly what they're doing. Brexit has become a creative writing assignment for politicians, and they're letting their imagination run free. "Forget beginning, middle and end; forget all sense of structure!" their beleaguered English teacher tells them. "Just write whatever you want."

Philip Hammond sits with a blank piece of a paper and a crayon, looking at the playing fields through the windows, daydreaming. When he finally hands his assignment in, it's only five words long, scrawled in big letters so it takes up the whole page: Make Britain a Tax Haven.

This was what was widely understood from an interview with the Chancellor published yesterday in the German Sunday newspaper Welt am Sonntag. To be fair, Hammond didn't use the term "tax haven" himself; it was used by the interviewers, who told him that the impression on the European continent was that Britain sees its future business model after Brexit "as being the tax haven of Europe".

Rather than dismissing the ill-formed idea of turning Britain into a floating Luxembourg, Hammond flirted with it. The implicit threat of doing so could be used as a bargaining chip during Brexit negotiations, he hinted. He said that although he wanted Britain to remain a "European-style economy... on the US end of the European-spectrum" – i.e. the reason your life is worse than a continental European's but better than an American's – his government would consider "[being] something different" if they were forced to.

When pressed on what he meant – "We don't understand; who or what would force you?" – he said:

"If we have no access to the European market, if we are closed off, if Britain were to leave the European Union without an agreement on market access, then we could suffer from economic damage at least in the short-term. In this case, we could be forced to change our economic model and we will have to change our model to regain competitiveness. And you can be sure we will do whatever we have to do. The British people are not going to lie down and say, 'Too bad, we've been wounded.' We will change our model, and we will come back, and we will be competitively engaged."

Yes: that's right. The grit and determination of hard-working, alarm-clock, rule Britannia Britons is so great that the government is willing to shred the few remaining fibres of the social safety net and further deregulate the City of London just to teach the Europeans a lesson.

We're already bending over backwards for big business. Theresa May's pledge to cut corporation tax – which was already massively reduced by the coalition government – to below 15 percent, making it the lowest level of any country in the G20. By way of comparison, the equivalent rate in Germany is 30 to 33 percent, and in the US it's technically 40 percent, although in practice is often lower.

Could we really go any lower? And what would that do to the economy? Tony Norfield, a former City trader and author of The City: London and the Global Power of Finance, told VICE that although he agrees "the prospect is being used as a threat by the UK in the current pre-negotiations", it's hard to see Hammond's "tax haven" plans being much of a go-er.

"Although it could lead to the relocation of some corporate HQs to the UK and the headlines might look good for [the government], the economic impact would be minimal," he explained. "Even in terms of tax revenues from corporation tax, if the general tax rate is reduced there would have to be a large number of extra companies paying it to bring about higher total revenues."

He also pointed out that it's unlikely "tax haven" is being used in its technical sense, since it "wouldn't be feasible for the UK to adopt a Cayman Islands approach to taxation".

"Given the costs of running the UK state and the magnitude of its expenditure – the Caymans does not have its own nuclear submarine! – [Britain] would have to attract every company on the planet to make up for the lost tax revenue," he said.

So the chancellor is squaring up to the EU, threatening that if it plays hardball in Brexit negotiations Britain will fight back by implementing a plan that… doesn't actually work.

If Hammond's plans for a tax-cutting, deregulating Brexit is causing worry this side of the Atlantic, it certainly isn't in the White House – or, at least, in Trump Tower. Brexit was getting all the praise it could from Donald Trump, who appeared in his first interview as President-Elect with a British publication today. Speaking to Victorian hand puppet Michael Gove in The Times, Trump claimed it was smart to leave because the EU is "basically a vehicle for Germany". He also said that his administration would secure a new trade deal for a post-Brexit Britain. Although he didn't add any details, he said it would be "done quickly and done properly", since he's a "big fan of the UK".

Days away from the Presidency and months away from triggering Article 50, both Trump and Hammond spent their weekends speaking in generalisations, grounded by generic appeals to capitalist interests. British business "is unbelievable" (Trump) and free trade will flourish with "countries around the world" (Hammond). Both Brexiteers and Trumpists say they speak for the working-class and the left behind, but as their speculative plans start to congeal, they're looking more and more like the failed economic models they claimed to do away with.

@YohannK

More from VICE:

Did Theresa May Actually Say Anything in Her Big Brexit Interview?

Saying 'Hard' and 'Soft' Brexit Stops Us Talking About a Better Future

How Liberals Fucked It and Paved the Way for the Right

The internet is a magical and disgusting place. I have met a lot of people from the internet for a lot of different reasons. Some people I have no intention of ever meeting, but still like to know exactly what they're up to at every moment of the day or night. Most of these people are drag queens.

Instagram is how I ended up meeting two of Florida's most impressive and trashiest drag queens. In 2015, I had an art show called Pink Elephants, which featured drawings of homoerotic, anthropomorphic elephants. I had posted some of the drawings on my Instagram, and one day got a DM out of nowhere that said "I am getting one of your drawings tattooed on me tomorrow."

It didn't say which drawing, and wasn't even exactly asking permission (which is what people sometimes do). It just stated it as a fact. It turned out it was one of my naked elephants, and it was tattooed right above the ass of drag queen Lisa Limbaugh. She and her drag sister, Rubber Child, really helped snowball my fixation on the internet drag scene.

If you want a tattoo of that I'll probably get obsessed with you.

I've always been a big fan of drag, but now I basically only follow drag queens (and pigeons) on Instagram. Honestly, I think drag performers are the most talented and innovative contemporary artists working. They consistently inspire me and push both visual and performative boundaries in so many unique ways. My feed is just continuous chain of insane makeup and wigs and costumes. When people complain about their friends posting pictures of their food I sincerely can't relate. Why would you put yourself through that?

RuPaul's Drag Race has inspired an entire generation of queer youth to try their hand at drag. This is great because drag functions as a conduit of self-discovery for a lot of queer people. Becoming someone else in order to find out who you really are is a really powerful thing. Watching someone's growth through online platforms like Instagram is a weirdly voyeuristic journey that can make you feel more personally connected to someone than you actually are (READ: stalker).

The internet is how a lot of queens get recognition and attention. Like I said earlier, I follow like a million queens on Instagram, and it's honestly a really deep wormhole to fall into that you'll never ever escape from (but do it). Both Rubber and Lisa have built a big online fanbase. The exposure you can get yourself online obviously doesn't compare with being a contestant on a popular TV show, but it works.

Drag is a competitive. In a lot of ways, I am happy I observe it from the outside, rather than as a participant. Queens can be cutthroat. Of course there's a sense of community behind it, and its positive qualities will always outweigh its flaws. Being a full-time drag queen takes a fuck of a lot of dedication and perseverance. Watching their hustle is inspiring in itself.

Anyway, since that tattoo a couple years ago, I've gotten close with Lisa and her drag sister, best friend, roommate, and cancerous mole, Rubber Child. Is there a description of when you're friends with someone but you also stan them hard online? I'm whatever that is.

Rubber Child

Rubber and Lisa live in Florida, but get booked to perform in other cities. I went over to Portland last week to watch their show, catch up, and ask them about their thoughts on drag and the internet.

Lisa Limbaugh

VICE: Do politics impact your drag lives? Do you feel the need to be louder in Trump's America? Do you think drag is still a form of subversion and protest of heteronormative society?
Lisa Limbaugh: I feel like politics aren't directly involved in my drag life, but they affect my overall life as a drag queen. Politics lately have been setting a different mood in the air in gay clubs and bars. A lot of progress has been made in the past four years that has allowed drag to flourish, and now there's this new fear that all of that could end. I definitely feel like I could, and sometimes should, be louder, given the platform that I have. But it's not something I talk about much on social media. Yes, I think drag is a form of subversion, although it doesn't have to be if that's not what you want to make your drag about. But yes, I think it's in protest, or at least poking fun at heteronormative society.

Rubber Child: Politics totally impact drag, as well as anyone's life, whether they are part of the LGBT community or not. Every single person in America is affected and everyone is kind of going to get fucked over in one way or another. I don't really feel the need to be louder in Trump's America, though, because getting into a screaming match really doesn't accomplish anything with anyone ever, it just makes you look like a toddler, which he does a good enough job doing himself. I feel like drag queens have always kind of been in the forefront of politics regarding issues that are affecting us in our community, so I definitely still think we need to use our voices, we just need to use them in the right way. Drag has become so mainstream now, more than it's ever been before, so we really need to take the opportunities to really educate younger people and even older people that may be confused or misunderstood about their political stance, or what people in political power actually stand for.

I remember you two were booked to perform at Pulse two days after the shooting happened. Did having something so horrific happen so close to your lives affect you?
LL: Yeah, it was wild! It left this weird sense of emptiness knowing that we very well could have been there that night. Like you're faced with your own mortality in a way. Also, I'm friends with a bunch of people in Orlando, and it was terrifying not knowing who was safe when I woke up that morning and heard about everything. My mom called me crying because she didn't know if Rubber and I were already there. The whole situation is still terrifying.

RC: That totally affected our lives. It was one of the largest shootings ever, and for it to happen in our community and so close to home really shook everyone. A lot of us were scared to even go out to the club for the next few weeks, because how the fuck are we supposed to feel comfortable standing on stage after something like that? I mean, obviously as time passes, you can't let it ruin your life, but whether you knew someone or not, you were so, so deeply affected, because it really could have happened anywhere, at anytime, to any of us.

What's really fucked up is I think a lot of celebrities didn't give it the attention that it needed, because it didn't directly affect them. They were just an "ally" which sounds fucked up to put in quotes, but I mean a lot of people kept their mouth shut. Like Nicki Minaj, who's got a huge gay fan base. Don't get me wrong, I fucking love Nicki, but bitch should have said something.

I know you have a lot of underage fans.  Do you consider yourselves role models, and do you ever censor yourselves because of it?
LL: I love my fans so much. I totally consider myself a role model! People are always sending fan art and makeup they did that was inspired by mine, which is so bomb and makes me feel so proud. I don't really censor myself at all, but I don't feel like I need to. If I were to censor myself online I don't think anybody would really be able to get to know me through social media.

RC: Fuck no, I don't consider myself a role model, period. I understand that a lot of kids do look up to me, but if I was to censor myself and change parts of my drive or my personality, then they really wouldn't be looking up to a real person, they would be looking up to a character, and they can fucking watch TV for that. I feel like a lot of people like us because we are real… in drag and out of drag, we are the same in people who we are on the internet. Plus, if I was to censor myself I pretty much be stripped down to nothing. No pun intended because I'm usually naked anyway.

Drag is as much a community as it is a bloodsport. Why do you think drag is so competitive?
LL: Drag is so competitive because it's performance art. Like it's entertainment happening in real time (in the clerb and on social media) and there is just so much passion there that it naturally makes it competitive.

RC: I think drag so competitive is because people take it so fucking seriously, and don't give me wrong, it's totally serious, and I take it seriously, but you have to kind of step back every now and then and realize you're not really fucking curing a disease. You're making people laugh, having the time, and you're there to party. I am at least. And a lot of times people see it as some sort of success… whether it be a pageant title, or a TV show, or getting to travel… anything. And if it's not happening to them, they think, "what does that bitch have that makes that happen for her and not me?" Like I don't know, just fucking lucky I guess. Not really, I work hard for things that I have, and I work hard to get places and do certain things, and I'm not gonna let somebody make me feel bad for working hard.

What are your ideal end goals for what you do?
LL: I'd like to be able to have drag be my full-time job. Like it would be so much fun to travel around everywhere doing shows and meeting people! And to sound deep, I don't want there to be an end goal! I want the progress to keep on flowing.

RC: Ideally, I would live in a tiny house community full of drag queens with underground tunnels that connect, and we have a giant warehouse of clothes at our disposal that only I'm granted access to. But really, I think it would be cool, and I've been talking with a bunch of my friends and saying this forever, that it would be awesome to do a mini drag tour of girls that haven't had the opportunity to be on the show. Like there's still so many unrecognized girls that are fucking amazing performers and have amazing looks that don't have the platform that some girls have, and don't do anything with it. So I think it would be cool just got a bunch of us together and get to travel to different cities on like a bus, and just show a bunch of people around the country that we're cool.

The girls' Portland show was great. A couple of highlights were Lisa singing Kiss Me , while also opening a can of tuna and spewing it all over herself. Rubber glided around the stage in one of her numbers, handing out straws and little baggies of glitter off of a silver serving platter. Back in their hotel that night, I ask if they do as many drugs as they [post] about online. Laughing, Rubber shouts, "We've never done meth on purpose! Make sure you put that in the article!"

Stalk them here: Lisa Limbaugh and Rubber Child

Follow Jake Puppyteeth on Twitter.

Photos by RAKEEM

Imagine getting out of prison after years inside. You collect your things, take off your prison-issued clothes one last time, and then a door opens and you're out. There must be joy in that moment, although joy tinged by fear and weighted in expectations. What happens next? You're free. Who do you first visit and where do you go? To find out what those first few hours out of prison are really like, VICE spoke with three men who've lived it. All are from the Australian state of Victoria, and all are involved in ReConnect, a program run by the Jesuit Social Services.

Image via Flickr user Alexander C. Kafka

Shaun, 34. Spent five years in jail

On the day I was released from jail I went straight home to my dad's place. He had something planned for me, kind of like a little party, but I said, "Nah that's not happening." I didn't feel comfortable. I know you're surrounded by a lot of people in jail, but being surrounded by people outside, that's a whole different atmosphere. Outside of jail I found it hard to talk to people. Like, what did we have to talk about?

It'd been years since I'd heard birds in the morning, or seen the night sky. This was because I did the last three-and-a-half in a maximum security prison, where it was lock in at 4 PM every day. But back at Dad's, at 5 AM, I heard a rooster. I thought I was imagining things but Dad was like, "Yeah the neighbour's got a rooster."

Do you know what I was really hanging for after jail? Vegemite toast. You can't have Vegemite in jail because of the yeast. Prisoners have extracted the yeast in the past to make alcohol.

After I woke up, got over the rooster, and had some Vegemite toast, I had to visit the doctor. I was on the train for probably 10 minutes—first thing in the morning, peak hour, the whole train packed—I started having a panic attack and had to get off. I couldn't handle all those people in my face, I felt like the walls were caving in. It was tripping me out. I ended up waiting until 11 AM and getting a train when it was less packed.

I'll admit, at first it scared me a bit, being away for five years. I felt like I couldn't handle it out here. I cried to Dad and told him, "I can't do this, I'll have to go back to jail." The first few days were all like this but slowly it got easier.

Image via Flickr user 826 PARANORMAL

Ziggy, 39. Has served several sentences, his most recent was for two years

In the weeks before being released I probably experienced anxiety more than anything else. But once I got released it was more excitement than anxiety. I think it took a while, a few days for it all to completely sink in. Just that moment when I signed the papers, knowing that I was leaving prison behind me… it was such a unique feeling.

The day I got released was cold. I remember that because I didn't have a jumper. My parole address was with my parents, initially, as they'd agreed to have me there while I got to my feet. After I dropped my stuff off at my parents' place I went to visit my kids and their mum. They knew I was coming home and it was a great feeling. That week they kept telling me over the phone how excited they were, how much they were looking forward to seeing Dad. Unfortunately, my kids aren't strangers to me being away for long periods. It wasn't my first time in prison. For the majority of their lives I've been in prison. It's not something that I'm proud of, but at least I'm fortunate enough that we still have a strong connection with each other.

I have to say, getting out this time has felt different. When I've got out before I've felt like there were too many people around me, too much noise. But when I came back out this time, it felt natural. This time I've been much more prepared with my support network, and I'm using my parole officer as part of my support network. Parole used to be the enemy for me but I realised I had to change something. Also this time I've got a good parole officer—so that's half the battle won.

I'm feeling really positive about life at the moment. My future looks brighter than it's ever been in my entire life. I just put it down to my support networks—the people who I can rely on... my family and my friends. I'm on track at the moment but I'm not complacent. I've been in this position before and it's gone downhill rather quickly. But I've been in jail enough, and it's just a waste of life.

Image via Flickr user mike demers

Vu, 36. Spent three years in prison on a drug charge

I was released from jail in the afternoon. My social worker came to pick me up. He took me home to my mum's place. Everyone made me feel welcome. We made food, had something to eat—mostly Vietnamese cuisine, the kind my mum makes that I missed the most. We had plenty to talk about because a few years had gone by. At the start you don't know how people feel to have you back in their life. But when you sit down, you talk to them, and they're fine and happy for you to stay there.

After jail I was totally unaware of what was going to happen next. I had no control over anything. But at the same time I wanted work and to get on my own two feet. I didn't want to be a burden on someone else, you know?

My other priority was to see my son. It was difficult because he's under the care of his grandparents. Ever since the drugs charge they've treated me weirdly. So my first opportunity to see him wasn't a full day, just a few hours at the shopping centre, fully guarded by the grandparents. It was annoying but, after surviving jail, most issues feel very small. I didn't take it personally.

You've just got to be focusing on where you want to be, what you want to do. That's it. Trying to be as normal as possible. Before jail, everything was moving fast. I was making good money, heaps of money, but I was stressing out. Now I really enjoy my life even though I'm not going to have a nice house or car, or have heaps of money in my pocket. But hey, you know, I'm happy. That's what's important to me at the moment.

Follow Chelsea on Twitter

In his central Beijing office, Zhu Qiming flicked at his smartphone screen. A small pair of yellow boxer shorts suddenly appeared on the digital hunk staring back at him from his device.

The briefs were designed to resemble Spongebob Squarepants' head, complete with a scowling face over the bulge they were concealing. A few more finger flicks from Zhu caused the guy in the Spongebob boxers to be joined by a friend who was equally as buff, but sported an even skimpier pair of briefs over his considerable virtual package.

Zhu was giving me a demo of a forthcoming smartphone game with the working title Rainbow Town. As both its title and heavy use of near-naked men suggested, it looks set to be the gayest game ever released in China.

This is wholly intentional: Rainbow Town is the result of Zhu's gaming company Star-G Technologies spotting a gap in the enormous Chinese mobile gaming market. Right now China is having its own 'pink dollar' moment, with an increasing amount of companies realising there's money to be made marketing to LGBT customers. Small tech firms such as Star-G are leading the way.

Read the rest of this piece on Motherboard.

Broke Canadian university students are turning to sugar daddies to offset their costs, according to SeekingArrangement, a dating site that facilitates relationships between sugar babies and sugar daddies.

By the time the average Canadian university student graduates, he or she is saddled with an average of $26,819 in debt—often going on to become jobless or underemployed, i.e. the new economic reality.  

But 2016 data from SeekingArrangement shows the number of Canadian university students signing up for a sugar daddy has risen to 206,800, up from 150,000 in 2015, a 37% increase. All but 11, 238 are women. (There are 631,678 Canadian users overall, 65 percent of whom are female.)

The website operates by pairing up young people with sugar daddies or mommies—"successful men and women who know what they want." The couples then set out their expectations, which often include an allowance given to the sugar baby. For Canadian students, 39 percent of the average $2,700 monthly allowance goes toward tuition, while 30 percent goes to rent, and 21 percent to books.

Read more: Here Are the Best Degrees in Canada If You Want to be Rich

"Some see this as a controversial solution. But, instead of waiting for the government to take action, these students are taking matters into their own hands," SeekingArrangement founder Brandon Wade said in a press release.

In terms of new sign-ups, the fastest growing Canadian schools of 2016 were the University of Alberta (138), Ryerson (135), and University of Ottawa (132), while enrollment is highest at University of Toronto (683), Ryerson (577), and University of Guelph (554). The top three sugar baby majors are nursing, business, and performing arts.

Students who join with their school email are considered part of "Sugar Baby University" and are given a "free premium membership."

According to Statistics Canada, undergraduate students paid an average of $5,959 in tuition in 2014/2015, up from $5,767 the year prior. Those numbers are highest in Ontario, where undergrad students pay about $7,539 annually. Women account for 60 percent of Canadian undergrad degree holders.

While it's easy to see the appeal of having a sugar daddy, the relationships don't always go as planned.

Jenna (not her real name), 29, told VICE she became a sugar baby in 2015 to help pay her bills. At the time, she was working as a production assistant for a fashion designer in New York City—her rent in a shared house was $1052.88 CAD a month while her cellphone bill was about $150.

"I could cover my rent and maybe phone bill but couldn't really pay for anything else," she said.

The first daddy she came across, who said he'd previously paid for a woman's college tuition, offered her a weekly salary.

"I was into that kind of arrangement," she said, "but I just couldn't do it… He was in his 50s and did not work out or anything nor was he attractive."

Soon after though, she settled on a 48-year-old real estate developer, who paid her rent, meals, and took her on a trip to Vieques, Puerto Rico where they stayed at Hix Island House, the same luxury retreat Lady Gaga reportedly visited. He also spent more than $1,000 in sex toys for the two of them and lingerie. In the six months they were together, Jenna estimates her sugar daddy spent around $25,000 on her. In exchange, she said she would have sex with him four to five times a week—usually dominating him.

"You are getting money in exchange for sex," she said. "That's the definition of prostitution."

Universities with the most new sugar babies. Screenshot via SeekingArrangement

But things went south because Jenna said her sugar daddy was in denial about the nature of their relationship, and wanted her to act like a "real girlfriend."

"He'd get jealous and he was controlling," she said. "Whenever I wasn't with him he'd constantly blow up my phone calling and texting me asking me so many questions about what I was doing at that moment. I felt interrogated."

However, she noted that she doesn't believe all sugar daddies are like that, and even said she almost went with a friend to meet a different client, who was offering them "$1,000 to do coke and suck his dick."

"You can make a lot of money and some girls just love the attention and lifestyle," she said.

SeekingArrangement spokeswoman Alexis Germany said prostitution is strictly against the site's rules.

"Prostitution is strictly transactional where someone is paid for sexual services, whereas a Sugar Baby is in a relationship with their Sugar Daddy. Oftentimes, arrangements evolve into romantic relationships, and even marriage," she said.

Doug Hoyes, co-founder of Hoyes Michalos personal insolvency firm, told VICE 60 percent of people who go bankrupt due to student loans are women, and that women tend to owe more money than men.

Read more: The Often Lucrative But Sometimes Oppressive Lifestyle of Being a Male Sugar Baby

He recommended students entering university think carefully about whether or not they're going to have a job by the time they graduate.

"If there isn't going to be a job or it's going to be a job that won't allow you to pay back your loan, maybe you're better off going to school part time," he said.

So, maybe avoid these degrees.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Jay spots his own penis on the side of a building in the trailer for NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW, VICELAND's new series premiering February 2. Matt and Jay pick up where they left off in their cult hit web series—still trying to score a show at the Rivoli without actually making any music. This is VICELAND's first scripted series, from writer/musician Jay McCarrol and filmmaker Matt Johnson. Johnson's moon landing conspiracy film Operation Avalanche premiered at Sundance last year.

Here is how to tune in to VICELAND.