The latest in Netflix's Marvel series ( Jessica Jones, Daredevil, Luke Cage) is Iron Fist. 

After surviving a plane crash that killed both his parents, Danny Rand aka Iron Fist, masters kung-fu in isolation with some monks. Because of course he does. He eventually returns to New York City to reclaim his fortune and fight the corruption that's taken over Manhattan and is possibly responsible for the death of his family. Because of course it is.

Iron Fist joins Luke Cage as the "last defender" in what is sure to be a mega comic crossover, as evidenced by the appearance of Rosario Dawson in the new trailer. The binding thread between Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Daredevil and now Iron Fist, Dawson is a sign that all four anti-heroes will be sharing a collective destiny fairly soon. 

The show starring Finn Jones as billionaire Danny Rand launches on the site March 17.

This story appeared in the February Issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Motherboard

Motherboard is VICE's guide to the future. It's never been able to decide whether the future is wonderful or terrifying, but that indecision has at least given it a reason to produce editorial and video from sketchy locations around the globe. For this issue, Motherboard spoke to people exploring the behind-the-scenes implications of tech, from a hustler who broke Ticketmaster to the founder of 18F, the government's digital-services agency.

See THROUGHOUT THE ISSUE

Paul Soulellis

Paul Soulellis is a graphic designer, artist, publisher, and teacher whose work has been called "a 'transduction' between media in printed web works." We don't know what that means, but it sounds impressive, and we love what he does at Library of the Printed Web—where he archives, curates, designs, and publishes print-on-demand publications that have included the work of more than 180 contemporary artists—so much that we've featured some of it in this issue. Soulellis is a faculty member at the famed Rhode Island School of Design and a contributing editor at Rhizome.

See LIBRARY OF THE PRINTED WEB

The Creators Project

The Creators Project is VICE's arts and culture online publication, covering every aspect of the creative process, including at least one aspect that you've probably never heard of. Its mission is to make art coverage more accessible to a wider audience, with diverse voices reporting on new artists working in everything from sculpture and light projections to street art and dance. In this issue, its team curates the best and brightest multimedia artists in a gallery feature as well interviews one of the founders of DiMoDA, a museum of virtual art.

See THROUGHOUT THE ISSUE

Waypoint

Wondering which VR system will best enable you to simulate shooting a hotdog from a crossbow into a skeleton's mouth, or why augmented reality may be more your speed? Look no further than this month's contributions from Waypoint, VICE's home for gaming culture, built to explore how and why we play. Waypoint looks beyond the press and product cycles, with a focus on the people and community. Whether a game was a commercial success or lost relic, Waypoint covers the culture, passion, and politics of gaming.

See THROUGHOUT THE ISSUE

Emily Witt

Emily Witt is the author of Future Sex, a nonfiction exploration of contemporary sexuality that one reviewer described as "Joan Didion meets fetish porn." In this month's issue, she wrote about VR porn, which she first tried to write about back in 2014, when a public-relations man for Oculus Rift assured her that "there are lots of great things that fall within 'sexuality' that VR could enhance." Unfortunately, he continued, "We just do not want to participate in this discussion." This exchange happened exactly 19 days before Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion.

See THE VR PORN DIARIES

Before Twitter, news of celebrity feuds spread like wildfire the old fashioned way—through the rumor mill like an elaborate game of telephone. One of these pre-internet beefs was between rappers Fat Joe and Jay Z. But the story at the time wasn't quite in line with reality. When Fat Joe visited VICELAND's Desus & Mero, he gave the lowdown on what actually happened between him and Jay, including one awkward elevator encounter.

Along with discussing his complicated relationship with Jay Z, the hip-hop icon talked all about his various living situations—including growing up in the Bronx projects, moving to New Jersey, staying in his bird-infested Florida "dream home," and what happened when he became neighbors with Kelly Rowland in Miami.

Be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM ET/PT on VICELAND.

On 17 July 1897, the headline of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer read, "GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!" and announced the return of "sixty-eight rich men on the steamer Portland." These men had struck gold on the Klondike River, a tributary of the Yukon in the far, far north. They weren't Astors or Rockefellers. They were ordinary working people who'd travelled far, suffered greatly, and hit the jackpot. When the news hit Seattle, it was a sensation. That headline launched a gold rush as a generation of dreamers headed north in search of great riches—and a group of savvier dreamers worked to make money off of them.

That rush jump-started the fortunes of the Trump family and set in motion a story reminiscent of The Godfather or a great American novel: Immigrant grit and hustle begets a thriving family business run by a succession of ruthless, cunning, single-minded men. That the last in that line of men is now the president of the United States makes this story a suddenly vital one to understand.

Having just finished working on a documentary about the Trump family—broadcast in the UK on Channel 4—one that tells the story from grandfather Friedrich Trump, Donald's grandfather, to the present day, I've been thinking a lot about that story, and how the Trumps have embodied the American dream and its hard realities.

On that July day in Seattle, Friedrich read the headlines screaming of gold and saw clearly his next move. He'd come to the United States from his native Germany in 1885, just 16 years old, and got a job as a barber, making a living wage in New York for five years. But a living wage was not what the young Trump wanted and so he headed west, winding up in Seattle, then a rough-hewn logging town.

In the end, the gold rush made Friedrich rich. Not because he went after the gold—that was for suckers—but because, in the words of Trump familybiographer Gwenda Blair, he "mined the miners." The prospectors traveling north needed food, drink and companionship. On the Dead Horse Trail, with horses dying in their droves (hence the name) as men toiled onward, Friedrich Trump set up a tent restaurant and sold the horses back to the men in burger form. In Bennett and then Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon, he ran hotels that served food and acted as brothels, with the men paying in gold dust if they needed to. The menus had an air of Trumpian grandeur—goose, moose, and swan were all on the menu, as well as fresh fruit, which was hard to come by.

This ability to thrive on the edge of the law in hard times is something Friedrich's son Fred also had. Life for these two men was red in tooth and claw, a Darwinian struggle to get on and get ahead. The American dream was something you realized by fighting and fighting hard, pushing the limits and testing the boundaries. "Desperation is the land they inherit and inhabit", the late, great reporter Wayne Barrett said of the family, from grandfather to son. "Dark times are times of great opportunity for people of great stealth."

During the Great Depression and then after World War II, when there was a desperate need to house returning servicemen, Fred Trump built a mighty property empire off the back of government funding and government connections. Just as Friedrich wasn't some sucker miner dreaming of finding gold in the river, so his son wasn't some sucker public official clocking in and clocking out in the great age of American governance. "It's a great irony", said Barrett, "that the Trump Empire as it was built in the 1930s was a consequence of great liberal policies. He's the original state capitalist, milking every dollar that he can, all of it through political connections."

Donald Trump took over the family business at the tender age of 25. He had learned at Fred's knee, and although his move across the bridge from Brooklyn and Queens to the old-money world of Manhattan real estate was not one his father would have made, Donald used Fred's money and political connections to do his landmark early deals.

He saw, like his father and grandfather, opportunity amidst the weeds. The Manhattan of the 1970s was not so different from the Wild Wests Friedrich and Fred had taken on—"cities were not considered too hot," as Donald put it in a 1980 interview. While the hip-hop and punk scenes were bursting into life, well-heeled residents were leaving. Trump saw the opportunity to pick up bargains with government help.

"I see the inner cities as being the wave of the future," he said, and so it proved, with artists and working-class residents pushed out by skyrocketing rents. In an unpublished memoir passed to me by an associate, the late real estate developer Ned Eichler wrote that at this time, the young Donald reminded him of a character in a 19th-century French novel who comes from the provinces to conquer Paris. His ambition knew no limits.

Trump took on Manhattan with the help of another ruthless outsider turned ultimate insider, Roy Cohn. The lawyer—whose mentor had been Joe McCarthy, the communist hunter, and who was the attorney for all five of New York's organized crime families—defended the Trumps against a racial discrimination suit brought against them by the Justice Department in 1973.

The Trumps settled after two years of fighting and Cohn stayed on, becoming Donald's mentor. "I would sit at lunch with Roy Cohn and feel as though I were in the presence of Satan," remembered Wayne Barrett, who categorized Cohn as the most important influence in Trump's life, bar his father Fred. "He ate with his hands, he was gay but you couldn't find a more anti-gay person in New York… he had frogs all over his house in Greenwich Village!"

While Donald was on the rise, his older brother Freddy was struggling. Having failed to show an aptitude for the family business, Freddy became an accomplished pilot. But, as his friend Annamaria Forcier told me, "For Fred Senior, and Donald, he was just a glorified bus driver." Forcier spoke with incredible warmth of her lost friend, whose story she said was "beyond tragic" and who she believes struggled a great deal with the pressure he felt from his family.

Alcohol took a hold of Freddy Trump and he died in 1981. Donald, who loved his brother, called him a "terrific personality," a kind, open, and caring man who had been undone by these characteristics, who could not hack it in the New York real estate business, with "some of the great sharks of the world."

Like many Americans, Trump clearly believes in winners and losers, but it's an ethos that runs especially deep with him. Reportedly he believes he can continue, at 70, to not exercise and eat more or less whatever he likes because of his strong genes. He's said that he thinks some people are born to succeed. You are either marked a winner or not. You're either an American or an outsider, either for us or against us. Is it any wonder that that belief has led, in his first month in office, to policies that have been blasted for their cruelty?

At a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, near the end of 2015, Trump told his audience that the American dream was dead. He has told his followers that he will bring it back, but there are some awkward truths he doesn't usually acknowledge. First, many of the jobs his supporters once had won't be coming back , no matter what he does. Second, the American dream of the sort that lifted up the Trump family is based on a kind of social Darwinism. Those prospectors Friedrich Trump sold swan dinners to mostly didn't strike it rich—they ended up broke or dead. The question is, will Donald Trump help those sorts of "losers" as president, or govern for the winners alone?

Follow Oscar Rickett on Twitter.

(Top photo: A heroin user in the US preparing to inject. Image used for illustrative purposes. Photo: Jae C Hong AP/Press Association Images)

When the synthetic cannabinoid Spice first gained a following among internet drug geeks as a cheap, mellow, legal marijuana substitute in 2009, no one predicted what would happen next.

Under myriad brand names and legal bans, synthetic cannabinoid products – now generally known as Spice, after the original – became increasingly unpredictable, potent and toxic. Instead of making people feel slightly stoned, demand for a stronger hit led to a drug with side effects more reminiscent of crystal meth than weed. It left users agitated, incapable of sleep, aggressive and addicted, and caused havoc among young offenders, the homeless and in the prison system.

Now, nine months after the Psychoactive Substances Act banned all "legal highs" such as Spice, research into the latest UK drug trends has revealed that the continued use of the substance may be breeding an as yet unreported side-effect: an increase in heroin use among young people.

Published today by DrugWise, a study I co-authored – "Highways and Buyways: a snapshot of UK drug scenes" – includes interviews with drug treatment workers, police officers, researchers and other experts representing 32 organisations and 13 police constabularies. The survey revealed that in several parts of the country, young people – a demographic not associated with heroin these days – have been reported as using the opiate to self-medicate the side effects of Spice use.

"We've seen [Spice users] using valium for withdrawal, then the valium sellers are selling heroin, and so they will try that."

Sam, in his early twenties, is one of a growing group of young homeless hostel residents in Newcastle who have started using heroin on the back of Spice. "One day in November I'd been on the rattle [withdrawing] from Spice for two days," he tells me. "I was sweating, I had the shakes, felt sick and couldn't get to sleep. One of the older residents suggested I try heroin to calm me down. It didn't knock me out like Spice did – it made me tired – but it helped take the rattle off. Now I smoke a £10 bag of heroin a day at night after Spice. Since then I've also started using crack. So now, after starting on Spice, I'm chasing three habits instead of one."

Many of these young people are unfamiliar with the risks of taking heroin. Two weeks ago, a 19-year-old who was known to drug and homeless services in Newcastle died. A source confirmed that he had been addicted to Spice and that he had recently started using heroin. However, the results of the autopsy have not yet been released and therefore the cause of death has not been confirmed.

Kevin, 26, almost died during his first heroin hit, taken intravenously last summer. "I was cutting down on Spice because I was sick of the scene and needed something to make me sleep for the night," he says. "Someone gave me some heroin and I injected it. It felt better than valium and [I] just went onto my back. I overdosed and an ambulance came to save me." Despite this, he now regularly uses heroin as a comedown for Spice. Like others fresh to heroin from Spice, he has also started using crack.

"Spice can be a gateway to heroin and crack. Since last year I've seen a rise in young people moving from Spice to heroin," says Mick Portis, a harm reduction worker at the city's Lifeline project. Portis tells me that heroin has crept onto young people's drug menus because the Spice withdrawal is so severe.

Packets of Spice on sale before the Psychoactive Substances Act was introduced. (Photo: Markus Schreiber AP/Press Association Images)

As we walk down one of the city's smartest Georgian streets, Portis tells me of two teenage boys he knows – who've begged on this street for money to pay for Spice – who have started sex work and moved onto heroin. "We've seen people using valium for withdrawal, then the valium sellers are selling heroin, and so they will try that," he says, adding that crack – never a big drug in Newcastle, unlike 30 miles down the road in Middlesbrough – has entered the city "in a big way in the last two months".

Alongside Newcastle, Scarborough, Southampton, Stoke, east London and Manchester, Belfast has seen a similar picture develop. One drug expert explained: "There is a new phenomenon of young people as young as 17 starting to use heroin in Belfast, mainly on the back of using Spice. Most of the hostels said these young people who were on Spice are all on heroin now."

The DrugWise research into Britain's drug market reveals a patchwork of hidden scenes – a narcotic landscape that is becoming increasingly varied and mutable, from codeine-addicted housewives in Hartlepool and West Country fishermen on speed, to Lithuanian dealers in Belfast and homeless powder cocaine injectors in Glasgow.

The survey provides the first litmus test into the impact of last year's Psychoactive Substances Act – which banned the sale of new psychoactive substances (NPS) from head shops – on the supply and use of Spice. And it reveals a divided picture: in around half of the areas surveyed, the Act has barely affected the market, with many users buying drugs under the counter from head shops, from street dealers and the internet. By contrast, in the rest of the areas surveyed the law has done what it set out to do, resulting in reduced availability and use, even in prisons. Drug services are finding, however, that some people are replacing NPS with old school drugs such as cannabis, alcohol and opiates.

The move away from NPS use in some areas comes at a time, the report found, of "unprecedented" street purity levels in traditional substances, namely heroin, crack and powder cocaine and ecstasy, alongside the continued rise of the black market in prescription and over-the-counter drugs. Heroin, powder cocaine and rock cocaine have risen from sub-20 percent purities in 2010 to more common purities in 2016 of between 43 and 74 percent. The rise in purity of ecstasy pills has been well documented, with some pills containing quadruple doses: 300mg of MDMA.

WATCH: 'High Society – The Truth About Ecstasy'

One drug expert quoted in the report says that in the face of highly pure traditional drugs and the ban on legal highs, he believes Spice and other NPS are living on borrowed time in Britain. "The USP of Spice was legal, accessible, did not come up in drug tests, cheap. But it is starting to lose all these selling points. I'm not convinced there will be a big enough market, as its users need continuity of supply, otherwise they will go onto something else. So unless it's being imported into the UK in large amounts, supply may not be maintained."

Official statistics show amphetamine use is increasingly uncommon in the UK. However, the report found it's a drug still being used, albeit under the radar. For example, as well as speed being popular among a large group of middle-age injectors in Lincolnshire and domestic abuse victims in east London, the drug is also being used by fishermen in coastal areas in the south west of England as an alertness aid in an increasingly competitive industry.

As one drug worker explained: "There is a no drinking rule at sea, but that does not stretch to taking illegal drugs, as long as it's kept under control. The need for drugs seems to be accepted within the community, but is kept behind closed doors."

At the other end of the country, in Glasgow, exists another counter-intuitive drug scene. Over the last two years, health workers have been dealing with an HIV epidemic among homeless drug injectors. One of the causes of this spike is an escalating number of city centre rough sleepers opting to inject powder cocaine, a rarity in Britain. As with the injection of crack, a form of cocaine that is rarely sold in Glasgow, cocaine injecting often entails more frequent and risky use of needles.

Prescription and over-the-counter medications diverted onto the black market are a rising presence on the UK drug scene, according to the report. Alongside valium and tramadol, the anti-epilepsy drugs pregabalin and gabapentin have become a mainstay of diverted medications taken by heroin users.

A spoonful of Promethazine-codeine cough syrup. (Photo Stickpen, via)

Meanwhile, in places such as Hartlepool, Northern Ireland and Tyneside, codeine is increasingly being used, the report says, by adults as a way of getting through the day. Some are taking up to 40 codeine-containing pills – such as Nurofen Plus and co-codamol – a day. In Hartlepool, codeine is particularly popular with housewives, as one drug service told the survey: "These housewives use codeine regularly throughout the day, to take the edge off, make them more relaxed, less stress, so they can cope. But it's creating long-term health problems."

Codeine is also on the rise with young people as a recreational drug. In Southwark and Kent, drug workers say they are seeing more teenagers, inspired by US hip-hop culture, drinking Lean (also known as Dirty Sprites, Sizzurp and Drank), which is codeine, in the form of cough syrup, mixed with a soft drink. Similarly, one source told the survey that the benzodiazepine Xanax, another drug linked to American celebrity culture, is becoming more popular with young adults.

Despite falls in the number of cannabis users, drug services have reported a rise in people coming in for treatment for problems with the drug. But according to a separate report published today by drug policy group Volteface, "Black Sheep: An investigation into existing support for problematic cannabis use", the help out there is largely inadequate. It says if cannabis was a regulated drug then treatment for problem users would not be so badly neglected.

In conclusion, the DrugWise report says the British drug market is slowly reconfiguring itself since being shaken up by a dive in purity levels and the arrival of NPS eight years ago.

"The history of drug use in the UK since the Second World War," says the report, "has been propelled by a series of 'tipping points' such as smokeable heroin, HIV/AIDS, rave culture and the internet. None of the previous tipping points could have been predicted, so what comes next remains to be seen."

Some names have been changed.

@Narcomania

UPDATE 07/02/17: An earlier version of this article did not make it clear that the results of the autopsy of the 19-year-old in Newcastle had not been released, and so a cause of death had not yet been confirmed.

More on VICE:

The Story of Mephedrone, the Party Drug That Boomed and Went Bust

Gen Z Is Too Busy for Drink and Drugs

Why Do People Use Drugs at Work?

Everybody's been watching that clip of Saturday Night Live's latest Sean Spicer send-up, where Melissa McCarthy does a pitch-perfect parody of the press secretary—everybody including President Trump, and he's allegedly not so pleased about it.

While Spicer himself said the sketch was "cute" and "funny" during a Sunday interview with Fox and Friends, Politico reports that the vibe is a little different behind closed doors at the White House.

"Trump doesn't like his people to look weak," a Trump donor told Politico, and apparently that's what McCarthy's gum-smacking Spicer did in the president's opinion. What really grinds Trump's gears, reportedly, isn't the content of the skit or the jokes themselves—it's that Spicer was played by a woman.

Sources close to the president told Politico that Trump found it troubling that the press secretary wound up being played by a female comedian dressed in drag. And the fact that Trump hasn't even launched his usual Twitter tirade about the sketch show, opting instead to avoid mentioning it publicly at all, might be a sign that his easily-ruffled feathers got more ruffled than usual.

If Trump can't stand to see McCarthy play a member of his staff, he's going to have a hell of a time if his nemesis Rosie O'Donnell shows up to Studio H8 to play Steve Bannon some Saturday in the near future, as she seems pretty game to do.

US News

US Raid in Yemen Failed to Take Out al Qaeda Target
Military and intelligence officials have revealed that a US Navy SEAL raid in Yemen last week failed to capture or kill al Qaeda's chief in the Arabian Peninsula. Qassim al Rimi has reportedly been heard gloating in an audio recording, believed to be genuine by military officials, that "the fool in the White House got slapped."—NBC News

Democrats Hold All-Night Session to Stop Betsy DeVos
Democrats in the Senate spoke through the night in a bid to block Betsy DeVos's confirmation as the Trump administration's education secretary. Defections by two Republican senators are expected to leave the vote in a 50-50 split, and could force Vice President Mike Pence to break the deadlock and vote through DeVos's confirmation late Tuesday.—VICE

San Francisco to Provide Free Local College Tuition
San Francisco will provide free community college tuition to all students who have lived in the city for more than one year and one day, regardless of income. Mayor Ed Lee said the money to cover around 30,000 local students would come from a hike in real estate transfer tax on properties valued at more than $5 million.—ABC News

US Strikes Went Unreported by Pentagon
Pentagon officials declined to report as many as thousands of deadly airstrikes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria over several years, according to a new report. At least 456 airstrikes carried out in Afghanistan in 2016 were not reported on the US Air Force's public database. One US military official described the reporting regime as "really weird."—Military Times

International News

Israeli Bill Legalizes 3,800 Settler Homes
Israeli Knesset has voted 60–52 to pass a bill to retroactively legalize 3,800 homes built in the occupied territory of the West Bank. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) condemned the bill, describing it as a way to "legalize theft" of privately owned Palestinian land. The Israeli government's attorney general has called it "unconstitutional."—Al Jazeera

Sarkozy Faces Trial Over Fraud Accusations
A French judge has ordered former President Nicolas Sarkozy to face trial over alleged campaign finance crimes in 2012. Sarkozy, who denies the allegations, is accused of conspiring with his Republican Party, known then as the UMP, to falsify campaign finance records to avoid exceeding a $24 million spending limit.—Sky News

Thousands Hanged in Syrian Prison, Report Says
A new report by human rights group Amnesty International claims that between 5,000 and 13,000 people, mostly opposition supporters, were executed at Saydnaya prison in Syria. Amnesty is basing its estimate on the testimonies of former detainees, guards, and officials. The report claims groups of between 20 and 50 were hanged at least once a week.—BBC News

Australian Senator Forms New Right-Wing Party
Cory Bernardi has defected from Australia's Liberals to form a brand new right-wing party, the Australian Conservatives. The move leaves Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's ruling Liberal-National coalition, which just won power seven months ago, on thin ice.—Reuters

Everything Else

Kanye Deletes Tweets Defending Trump Meeting
Kanye West has axed tweets explaining why he met with President Trump in December. The artist has also deleted a tweet that showed a picture of a signed copy of TIME magazine on which Trump has described Kanye as a "great friend."—CNN

Drake Appears to Jab at Trump on Tour
Drake seemed to speak out against President Trump at a recent show, warning against those "trying to tear us apart," intoning, "If you think one man can tear this world apart, you're out of your motherfucking mind."—Noisey

Labor Nominee Hired and Fired Undocumented Housekeeper
Andrew Puzder, the Trump administration's choice as labor secretary, has admitted he and his wife hired an undocumented immigrant as a housekeeper for a few years. Puzder said he ended the woman's employment when he learned of her status.—USA Today

Vaping Cuts Down Health Risks if Tobacco Dropped, Say Researchers
A study funded by Cancer Research UK found e-cigarette users who stop smoking tobacco reduce exposure to carcinogens and toxicants by between 57 and 97 percent. The American Vaping Association called it a "wake-up call" for anyone who has dismissed vaping as unhealthy.—CBS News

Italian Priest Admits to Orgies in Church Rectory
Andrea Contin, a priest at the Church of St. Lazarus in Padua, Italy, has reportedly admitted organizing sex parties in the church rectory. Police apparently found video evidence of the orgies, and one woman claims Contin both encouraged her to have sex with a horse and fathered her child.—VICE

Classic Shooter Modded to Ask if Anti-Nazi Violence Is OK
Game designer Ramsey Nasser has added dialogue boxes asking questions about violence against Nazis to an online version of classic 1992 shooter Wolfenstein 3D. Sarcastic questions include: "Have you tried talking to them?"—Motherboard

Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

Empathy is bad and it's ruining the world we live in, so says Yale psychologist Professor Paul Bloom in his new book, Against Empathy. In it, he argues that empathy's association with kindness, caring and compassion is wrong – and in fact it is damaging us and the world we live in. On a sliding scale from day-to-day personal relationships to international relations and policy making, it is, Bloom argues, a force driving bad decision-making, and one that leaves us open to manipulation.

I called Professor Bloom to talk about how something so many people think of as a good thing is actually the exact opposite.

VICE: It must be fun putting a book out with a title like yours that takes people aback. Against Empathy seems confrontational to many because they think of empathy as being the same as kindness or compassion.
Paul Bloom: Exactly. I have been getting hate mail and weird tweets from people thinking I am arguing for psychopathy or for cruelty, or that I am against kindness. I try in the book's subtitle, "The Case for Rational Compassion", to make it clearer. People mean different things when they say empathy. Sometimes people use it as a synonym for kindness and goodness, and I am not against those things. The sense of empathy I am against is feeling other people's pain, putting oneself in their shoes. Empathy in this sense is biased; it's innumerate; it can be weaponised. It makes us worse people. So I think we should make our moral decisions without empathy, through rational deliberation.

You mention personal relationships as a sphere in which empathy is perhaps most useful, or at least less damaging.
The distinction that needs to be made is between empathy: feeling what other people feel, which I argue is often very bad; and compassion, which is caring about people, and which is almost always good. I think empathy is plainly wrong for foreign policy decision-making – decisions such as when to go to war – and also for domains like criminal justice or healthcare. For these sorts of things it almost always leads us to make stupid decisions. But I do go down to the micro level. If I go to my wife and I'm depressed, I don't want her to get depressed; I want her to cheer me up.

"Empathy is myopic; it focuses on the immediate suffering of people and makes us blind to long term consequences."

How can empathy negatively affect things on a larger scale – in politics and international relations?
The worst political decision-making is often motivated by empathic concerns. You get really drawn into the plight of one person, often a child, or someone attractive, likely someone who looks like you. That is then used as a catalyst for some decision that ultimately makes the world much worse.

In the Iraq War of 2003, the newspapers here were filled with grotesque details of atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein. If we go to war against IS it will be after seeing more and more stories about beheadings and other terrible things. Now, the suffering of innocent people is actually a pretty good reason to enter into a conflict, but empathy is myopic; it focuses on the immediate suffering of people and makes us blind to long-term consequences.

Donald Trump's rhetoric against immigrants has often employed an empathic appeal. He told people about the suffering of victims, rape victims, assault victims, people who lost their jobs to immigrants. He used people's empathy for these victims to energise hatred against these groups.

Trump weaponised his voter base's empathy, essentially blowing statistics and concrete information out of the water. Does this mean empathy has a double action – not only does it have its own proactive effects, it neutralises statistics and hard information?
Yes – and you know this better than everyone; you are a journalist. A story – whatever it's about – doesn't tend to lead with long-winded statistical analysis, it tends to start with a specific person and their story. Now, you [journalists] are never going to stop doing that – that's what people want: stories. When done responsibly, you can lay out an argument statistically and then use your story to support it, to bolster it. The problem is that often people don't do that. Demagogues just use the story.

Take the famous photo of Aylan Kurdi. Would this, in your opinion, be a rare example of people's empathic reaction being useful, in that it motivated changes about policing those migrant routes? Or is this still problematic in your view as it's an empathy-based reaction of the masses which is not based on full understanding of the situation?
I don't doubt that empathy can sometimes get it right, particularly when our empathy is prompted by wise and moral individuals. As for the specific case of Aylan Kurdi, I don't know. It led to a temporary spike in donations to various causes that I support, which is a good thing. On the other hand, if our empathy for the suffering of Syrian children leads us to get into a terrible and irrational war, it will be yet another case where our empathic reaction made the world much worse.

Another big part of the book is the bias in empathy. It is an emotion that is very open to bias – be it in terms of racism, xenophobia or attraction. I think most people – and I'm not talking about demagogues; just nice "normal" people – would rather not think of their empathy that ugly way.
Empathy works like a spotlight and zooms us in on people, so it is really vulnerable to biases. Laboratory studies have been done showing we feel more empathy for people who are attractive, those who we consider safe over those we see as dangerous, those we affiliate with – a lot of that's common sense, really. One example I use in the book is the case of child beggars in India and Africa. There are a lot of studies suggesting that by giving to these kids you make the situation worse: these kids are sometimes effectively enslaved by criminal organisations who take a cut, and by giving money you are supporting that.

I was once on a radio programme talking about charitable giving. On the programme with me was a minister who was shocked by my recounting this example. She said, "No! This is terrible! I love giving to beggars, and to children in particular, because I feel human contact and intimacy." To that I said, "You should give that money to, say, Oxfam," and she said, "I don't want to go on my computer and type things in – I want more." So it depends what you want. If you want to feel good, give to the street kids. If you want to make the world a better place, give that money in a better way.

So there's even maybe a selfish aspect tied into typical empathic reactions? People like to feel good, and that's a common result of acting empathically rather than rationally?
Philosopher Peter Singer describes some people as "warm glow givers" – they give to a multitude of causes and charities, a little to each one, getting a little buzz each time. Singer says it would be better if you looked into which charity worked the best and gave to that. This is the argument for effective altruism. We see the same issue in our everyday life as parents or with friends, where what I can do for my sons that makes them happy in the short-term and gives me a buzz too isn't necessarily what's best for them in the long run.

So how would you like to see your book used, applied for a better functioning world?
I wrote the book because I think we should change a lot of the ways in which we act. One example specific to America is the use of "victim impact statements" during sentencing for crimes. I think it's understandable – it gives victims a voice. But I think it's also incredibly unjust. What then happens is that the sentencing of the criminal is largely decided by how a judge or jury empathises with the victim. What that means in the long run in America is you are going to get a longer sentence if you rape a white woman than a black woman, or a bigger punishment if your victim is attractive or if the relatives of your murder victim are articulate. More generally I would like a cultural change. I want to see a change where when a politician says, "We have to change our healthcare policy because, well, let me tell you this story about a little girl…" people will object. I would like to see people say, "Screw that, it's a dumb way of doing things – let's hear the actual arguments."

More on VICE:

What Happened to Empathy in Politics in 2016?

Magnum Photographers Chose Images from Their Archives That Show 'Empathy and Connection'

Is It Possible to Cure Prejudice and Racism?

This article originally appeared on VICE Alps

Image: Dora Schimanko at a 2012 protest in Vienna against the Academics' Ball, a prom organised by Austria's right-wing party FPÖ.

Dora Schimanko is an 84-year-old Austrian former refugee. After the Anschluss in 1938, when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, she and her Jewish family fled to the UK to escape persecution by the Nazis. "They could have persecuted us for being lefties or being Jewish – either case, we'd be damned," she writes in her 2011 book Warum So Und Nicht Anders (Why it's Like This and Not Any Other Way).

After returning to Vienna in 1946, Schimanko got involved with Austria's communist party and started speaking at public events against fascism and far-right extremism. She also speaks as a witness of WWII in Austrian schools.

The rise of far-right parties in Europe, Donald Trump's presidential win and his actions during his first few weeks in office have given way to a lot of talk about the return of fascism to mainstream politics. Comparisons with Adolf Hitler are never far away when we talk about authoritarian world leaders – or any world leaders, in fact: Republicans often compared Obama to the head of the Nazi party – but the analogy has been made often since Trump came to power.

We spoke to Schimanko to get her take.

(Hitler photo: German Federal Archive, via; Trump photo: The White House, via)

VICE: Hello Dora. What do you make of Donald Trump?
Dora Schimanko: Well, Donald Trump is quite an actor and entertainer. I think that makes him a populist icon – the perfect candidate to represent the ruling class in the United States: profit-driven multinational corporations.

So you're saying he's basically some kind of capitalist saviour?
Yes.

How did you find out that Trump had won the election?
A friend of mine told me about it after she heard it on the morning news. I couldn't believe it at first; it just didn't seem possible to me. But soon after finding out I started reading up on the American electoral system. I think Trump's victory was only made possible because of that system. Clinton actually had the majority of votes.

After Trump got elected, many urged the public not to panic and just wait to see what he would be like as president. Within his first week of office he scaled back the Affordable Care Act and tried to keep people from seven Muslim countries from entering the US, among other things. Did you see that coming?
God, yes. Trump is a profit-hungry representative of the ruling class – I didn't expect anything less, to be honest.

Those seven countries included Syria, where so many refugees are fleeing from. You yourself fled Nazi Austria in 1938. What do you think would have happened to you if England had closed its borders for refugees at the time, like what happened in the US last week?
Oh, I would most certainly not be alive right now. I would be long dead. But the policies in England back then were so different from the current policies in the US. In those days in England there were international conventions regarding taking in refugees, but the country also had another system for immigration, where English people who were willing to support you and cover your costs for coming over could invite you. Some aristocrats and Quakers, for example, financed many refugee children's passage to the UK.

There's a lot of talk about Trump and his team having fascist tendencies. Do you see parallels between Germany in 1933 and the United States in 2017?
No. We really do live in a different millennium. I don't think that a system of forced labour would work in America as it did in Nazi-Germany, for example. And I think that democracy in the US today is in a much better shape than it was in Germany back then.

So you're not worried that fascism will make a comeback and settle in the US, then?
Oh yes, I'm very worried about that. I think that if Trump saw a chance for profit in the concept he would turn the United States into a fascist state the first chance he got. But I really do hope that the American democracy is stronger than anything Trump can do to the country in four years.

So you'd say that people are way off when they compare Trump to Hitler?
Sure. Trump is rich – Hitler definitely wasn't that rich. Trump is dangerous in a different way – he stands for very dangerous interests. He doesn't have to actively persecute minorities in his country, but he's a representative for large, greedy corporations that endanger the whole planet in their search for profit.

More on VICE:

I Asked My Tinder Matches If They're Excited About President Trump

Psychologists Explain Why People Keep Having Trump Nightmares

My 12 Hours Among the Hustlers at Trump Tower

Accused mass murderer Alexandre Bissonnette, the only suspect in the Quebec City mosque shooting, is reportedly a legal firearms owner.

According to Le Journal de Quebec, Bissonnette, 27, who allegedly shot six worshippers to death on January 29, had two guns on him the night of the shooting—a CZ 858 rifle and a 9mm pistol.

Owning a pistol requires a restricted license in Canada, which means that police—in Bissonnette's case the Sûreté du Québec—would screen a person for mental health issues, violence, a criminal record, and would check in with at least two character references. But the system relies partially on self-reporting and on the applicant's references to be truthful.

Read more: Alleged Quebec Mosque Shooter a Pro-Trump Troll, Says Classmate

Bissonnette is believed to have received his license two years ago, but Le Journal de Quebec report says he was more recently taking medication for anxiety and had issues with alcohol. The article also said people in Bissonnette's gun club found his behaviour "bizarre" but never spoke out about it.

Though limited, this information suggests that there are holes in Canada's licensing system.

A.J Somerset, the London, Ontario-based author of Arms: the Culture & Credo of the Gun, a book about North American gun culture, told VICE there are a couple of issues with the self-reporting aspect of licensing here. First off—a person can just lie about their mental health status.

"All that's really hanging over your head is if you lie on an application and you get caught, you're probably never going to get a licenses after that." 

And while a person's name can be run through Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) to look for any incidents involving police, authorities don't have that option to detect a history of mental illness, Somerset said.

"That's a confidential health record, it's not something police can easily search. It's not something where they can go to very psychiatrist in Quebec City and ask 'Is this guy being treated for anxiety?'" And allowing cops access to that information would be an infringement of civil liberties.

Read more: It Shouldn't Take a Massacre to Humanize Muslims

Somerset pointed out that while you would hope a gun owner's references would mention concerns, "your references are your buddies."

He told VICE due to the correlation between drinking and violence, things like a history of drunk driving offences, should be a red flag when someone is applying for a license. He also suggested that a person's interests in extreme ideology should be flagged.

Bissonnette's acquaintances described being a right-wing troll—one even called him an "ultra nationalist white supremacist." He allegedly admired far right French politician Marine Le Pen.

Somerset said these interests should catch the attention of the cops overseeing Canada's licensing regime.

"Someone who reads Infowars and believes right wing conspiracy theories or is a member of the Soldiers of Odin, I wouldn't suggest that you automatically report those people," he said. "But when you see somebody who is just off, I think we need to be more willing to say 'Maybe this guy shouldn't have a gun'."

To that end, he said there can be an us-versus-them attitude between gun owners and cops, which is perhaps why fellow gun owners who saw Bissonnette acting "bizarre" on the range may have been reluctant to speak out.

Somerset is a former Canadian soldier and hunter, who is pro gun control. His book has been highly criticized by the Canadian firearms community. 

Rod Giltaca, President of the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights, told VICE no us-versus-them attitude exists. He gun owners want nothing to do with alleged murderers like Bissonnette.

"I would think if someone had a legitimate concern they would have brought it to the attention of the police. We have seen countless examples of  mildly concerning or even benign behavior from many infamous murderers in recorded history and we still haven't figured out how to pick them out of the crowd," he said.

When asked about the larger flaws surrounding Canada's licensing laws, however, Giltaca said there are no easy solutions.

"The truth is that there is no regulatory system on guns, knives, hands or cars that can eliminate violent behavior," he said, noting that most of Canada's 2.1 million legal gun owners are law abiding citizens.

"Politically it's far easier to create more regulations that mass murderers and criminal will continue to ignore. This tactic fits neatly in a single election cycle and leaves the root cause untouched."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

It's the look in someone's eye when they find out you've done drugs. It's the judgment in their voice that gives away the belief that they're better than you. The othering, the jumping to conclusions of moral deficiency due to personal choices you've made about the substances that have gone down your throat, up your nose, into your veins. It's hiding what you're going through for fear of these responses from loved ones, doctors, employers. And yet, for all the shame the stigma of drug use has caused, it's done little to help.

Constant news about the opioid crisis has flooded our social media feeds daily with stories about death and destruction. Thousands have died in Canada, and people continue to die with each passing day. Amongst the reporting that breaks down stereotypes of drug use by showing the range of people who've been affected by it, we continue to see the shaming of those who use drugs. It's not always obvious. But if you're someone who has used drugs or has a loved one who has, you see it.

This is the real moral deficiency related to drug use: It's not necessarily those doing drugs; it's those who judge someone's use of substances without knowing what they've gone through in life.

I was reminded of this over the holiday season when a coworker messaged me a conversation she overheard on a Megabus trip. A young couple were reading about the opioid crisis, and one of them suggested to his partner, "We should just let it weed people out."

Similar vitriol is commonly spewed in comments sections, the hellholes that they are, in stories related to illicit drugs, judging those who use or sell—erasing their humanity in the process. This is the real moral deficiency related to drug use: It's not necessarily those using; it's those who judge someone's use of substances without knowing what they've gone through in life.

And what are the roots of this type of thinking? Undoubtedly, the War on Drugs is a major reason—a propaganda-laden political campaign with admitted racist intentions that has led to mass incarceration of drug users and is largely considered a failure. Yet, we allow the sentiments of a failed drug war to pollute our society's progression, even in a time where drug users are feeling targeted as the opioid crisis continues to kill off their friends.

It's also in the terms we see journalists use. Though it is exceptionally rare to see "junkie" used in articles anymore, some who use drugs have said that the term "addict" is just as harmful. And before you accuse me of being a social justice warrior, consider what this BC doctor has said about its use in the clinic he works at: "I won't even say it, the A word is not even in the professional language anymore," Dr. Scott MacDonald at the Crosstown Clinic in Vancouver told the Times Colonist. MacDonald said that the term "addict" no longer is listed in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and that using the term sets up a "dynamic" with patients.

Yet, journalism has yet to subtract the term from its vernacular. Look at some headlines from the past few months on the opioid crisis: The horrifying way some drug addicts are now getting their fix ( the Washington Post); Editorial: The goal should be to get addicts off drugs (the Vancouver Sun); Fear of deadly fentanyl doesn't stop addicts at pop-up injection sites ( CBC News).

But I digress, as there is far more at play here than reducing the reality of drug use to a stigmatized word. As it stands, equating drug use to addiction is quite reductive anyway. Addiction is a medical condition, and someone's drug use can get to a dark place without them being technically "addicted" to a substance. And in contrast, it's possible for some to use certain drugs without developing addiction or their drug use getting out of control.

But when it comes to addiction, society often forgets (or is uninformed) about the strong, well-documented connection between childhood trauma and drug addiction. I was diagnosed at age 13 with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of childhood trauma; by the time I was 20, my drug use had gotten to a scary place. I was able to rein myself in after hitting some low points, but I witnessed drug use progress to points of no return for others in my life—often those who were suffering from mental health issues or previous trauma.

Experts agree. In a recent piece for CBC News, physician Gabor Maté, who has worked for 12 years in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, wrote: "All my female patients reported sexual abuse in childhood, all the male patients abuse or neglect of one kind or another. As large-scale international epidemiological studies have repeatedly demonstrated, childhood adversity is at the core of the emotional patterns and psychological dynamics that drive addiction."

"Further, childhood trauma shapes the physiology of the developing brain in ways that induce a susceptibility to addiction." In sum, Maté wrote, that we must deal with that trauma people have experienced if we want to address opioid addiction.

And yet, though this connection to victimhood has been established, society continues to see drug users as immoral, unproductive members of society. Stigma continues to hold back opioid crisis policy in Canada. As Michael Parkinson of the Waterloo Crime Prevention Council said, "The issues of stereotypes, stigmatization, and outright discrimination [of those who use drugs] are rife throughout Canadian society. The folks who are policy makers, they're humans like the rest of us... If the language [in the media] is deplorable, discriminatory, and focused on individual moral failure, that's the message that Canadians hear."

READ MORE: We Asked Experts How to Solve the Opioid Crisis

The next time you automatically scoff at someone who uses drugs, consider this: Do you know what this person has experienced over the course of their life?

If you don't know the answer to the above question, chances are you don't know this person, why they made the initial choice to use drugs, or why they're at this point in their life now. If your mind went to immorality, jumped to conclusions, if you thought for a second you were better than this person—please, reconsider.

Follow Allison Tierney on Twitter .

A version of this article originally appeared on the Trace.

The second-highest ranking official at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is proposing that the agency roll back restrictions on silencers, armor-piercing bullets, and the import of some foreign-made rifles, as well as reconsider efforts to force gun sellers to keep old sales records.

The recommendations, put forth in an internal agency white paper written by Ronald Turk, the associate deputy director and chief operating officer of the ATF, and first obtained by the Washington Post, broadly align with the wishes of the gun industry. The memo is dated January 20, the day President Donald Trump was inaugurated, and is addressed to the new administration. The text of the Second Amendment is at the top of the first page.

"These general thoughts provide potential ways to reduce or modify regulations, or suggest changes that promote commerce and defend the Second Amendment without significant negative impact on ATF's mission to fight violent firearms crime and regulate the firearms industry," the memo reads.

Turk argued that the proposals would ease the burden on the ATF to enforce restrictions that have little public-safety benefit, and free up resources to fight crime.

Enforcing the current tight restrictions on the sale of silencers, for example, costs the agency more than $1 million a year in overtime pay each year, and occupies the time of more than 30 full-time staff—and even with that effort, there is an eight-month backlog on processing requests.

"Given the lack of criminality associated with silencers, it is reasonable to conclude they should not be viewed as a threat to public safety," he wrote.

Two former ATF officials said it is unheard of for someone at Turk's level to write a general memo espousing his personal opinions about gun regulations. They said it reads like a pitch to the Trump administration for the agency director's job.

The ATF has been without a permanent director since 2015, when B. Todd Jones resigned following a controversial proposal by the agency to ban bullets that could pierce bullet-proof vests. The agency abandoned that effort in response to pressure from Congress.

Experts say the gun lobby has long played a powerful role behind the scenes in blocking candidates for the director's job. Turk's proposals align with lobbying positions taken by the two most powerful gun lobbying groups: the National Shooting Sports Foundation—the gun industry's trade group—and the National Rifle Association.

Chelsea Parsons, vice president of guns and crime policy at the liberal think tank The Center for American Progress, said the memo sets a dangerous tone.

"It does seems to be a wish list of the gun lobby," Parsons said. "It seems to prioritize relieving these perceived burdens on the gun industry without a full consideration of any impact on public safety."

In an email, a spokesperson for the ATF said that the recommendations put forth in the white paper "are merely the ideas and opinions of the writer (Mr Turk)" and were "created to promote dialogue within the agency and not intended to be public."

Here are Turk's most consequential recommendations.

Commissioning a new study on whether military-style semiautomatic rifles have "sporting purposes"

In 1989, following public outrage after a schoolyard shooting in Stockton, California, the federal government clamped down on importation of military-style semiautomatic rifles like the AK-47. A 1998 ATF study reaffirmed the basis for that ban, concluding that such weapons had no "sporting purposes" and maintaining the ban. Turk's memo proposes revisiting this decision.

While the 1998 study used a "narrow interpretation" that limited sporting purposes solely to hunting and organized, competitive target shooting, Turk suggests this should be changed in light of the surge of interest in such of weapons since the federal assault-weapon ban expired in 2004 and given the growing popularity of competitions testing tactical abilities.

If the ATF determined these rifles to have sporting purposes, that would allow foreign companies like Sig Sauer or Heckler & Koch to directly import their rifles. Currently, overseas gun makers must open American subsidiaries and manufacture military-style rifles within the United States.

Reclassifying silencers under the National Firearms Act of 1934

A silencer, or suppressor, is a device that can be affixed to the barrel of a firearm that reduces noise and muzzle flash. It is among the most heavily regulated firearms accessory. Right now, obtaining one requires a $200 tax, a background check, and a lengthy application process that can last up to 12 months.

That hasn't stopped American consumers: As of August 2016, more than 900,000 suppressors were registered in the United States.

Such demand has put a strain on the ATF, Turk wrote.

"NFA processing times are widely viewed by applicants and the industry as far too long, resulting in numerous complaints to Congress," he said. "Since silencers account for the vast majority of NFA applications, the most direct way to reduce processing times is to reduce the number of silencer applications."

A federal bill called the Hearing Protection Act, sponsored by Republicans in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, would remove silencers from the list of items heavily regulated by the National Firearms Act. The gun industry's trade group and the NRA have both lobbied in support of the bill.

"Given the lack of criminality associated with silencers, it is reasonable to conclude that they should not be viewed as a threat to public safety necessitating NFA classification," Turk wrote.

Critics assert that the noise guns make provide a valuable warning to bystanders and law enforcement that a shooting is underway.

Allowing the sale of some armor-piercing bullets

Federal law bans the sale of ammunition that can pierce body armor when fired from a pistol (many types of rifle ammunition can pierce armor). The restriction became law in 1986, when President Ronald Reagan signed a law aimed at combatting "cop-killer" bullets amid fears of rising gang crime.

In 2014, the Obama administration set off a firestorm after it published new guidelines on armor-piercing bullets that would have eliminated a long-standing exemption for so-called green-tip bullets, popular with users of the AR-15 rifle. While the ATF said that guideline was the result of a "publishing error," many gun advocates suspected it was a sneaky attempt to ban one of the most common rounds in the country.

Turk suggested eliminating this uncertainty about the popular bullet by making the green-tip exemption permanent by releasing new guidelines for determining what rounds qualify as armor piercing.

Watch 'Armed and Reasonable,' our documentary about buying guns in Canada.

Reconsidering a proposed rule to require gun dealers to keep records indefinitely.

According to the white paper, the ATF has a regulation pending with the Department of Justice to require Federal Firearms License holders (FFLs) to retain records indefinitely. Current law allows FFLs to destroy records that are more than 20 years old.

Records of gun sales are valuable to the ATF and other law enforcement agencies because they are required to trace a firearms purchase.

According to Turk, 1,200 traces a year over the last five years have been unsuccessful because of destroyed records. However, he recommends revisiting the proposed rule change.

"While such an extension is arguably a viable law enforcement intelligence tool, much of the firearms industry is opposed to such a change and a closer review of this proposal could be beneficial," Turk wrote.

Making it easier for gun dealers to sell firearms across state lines, and do business at gun shows and on the Internet

Under current law, a firearms dealer can travel to a gun show in another state and display firearms—but it can't sell them. The dealer can only take a customer's order, and ship the purchased firearm to another dealer in the buyer's state, where a background check is completed and the weapon retrieved.

In the memo, Turk proposed allowing dealers to travel out of state and sell directly to consumers, as long as they respect all local gun laws, such as assault weapons bans. That would mean a gun dealer would be able to conduct a background check in another state, which is not currently allowed.

Such a change "would have no detrimental effect on public safety and still provide ATF a means to trace firearms," Turk wrote. "It would also be viewed favorably by the broader firearms community."

Turk also suggested issuing guidance on how dealers who sell exclusively at gun shows and on the Internet could obtain a license.

"The marketplace has changed significantly in recent years, and ATF's guidance to FFLs on these issues has not kept pace with developments in commerce," he wrote.

A version of this article was originally published by the Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Trace on Facebook or Twitter.

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Although Donald Trump has never had a drink, he eats like a person coming out of a bender. On the campaign trail he subsisted on greasy, carb-filled fast food from places like KFC, Dominos, and McDonalds; now that's he's president (and can presumably get the White House chefs to cook anything he likes) he reportedly favors rock-hard steaks, chips and cookies, or piles of seafood and potatoes. He's also 70 years old, sleeps as little as four hours a night, and rarely exercises beyond the occasional cart-aided round of golf.

Given that when the VICE health editor ate like Trump for a week it made her feel irritable and insane, I thought it would be fair to ask what kind of effect these eating habits would have on a senior citizen with the most important job in the world. So I called up a registered dietician who works a lot with seniors who later requested anonymity because they work with the government, and asked what kind of effect diet has on famously very good temperament.

VICE: Donald Trump is an old man who only eats steak, potatoes, and fast food. Is this diet sustainable? What advice do you have for him?
Anonymous Registered Dietician: I would encourage him to increase his fruit and vegetable intake and also his whole-grain consumption because of all of those nutrients that would come into his diet, especially if he's up in age. I mean, we're talking about a 70-year-old. We want to make sure he's eating well throughout the day, and if he's just eating these large steaks than clearly he's deficient in the diet aspect.

How would only eating giant slabs of meat affect someone's mental acuity or energy? And what about his habit of liking steaks cooked really well done? Does that make it better?
It's pretty interesting because the diet that he's doing is one that many people do in this country. We have a lot of people who are deficient in fruit, vegetable, and whole grain consumption but are high in sodium and sugar and fat. They're not getting the nutrients that are nourishing to the body. From a physiological perspective, he's a little older, and he might be in for a little constipation. [Overcooking the meat] has an effect on the digestion, but it also has an affect on the extra carcinogens that come in when you cook your meat well-done.

What should a 70-year-old be eating? Obviously not the same thing as a 20-year-old college student, right?
Definitely having an occasional salad in there would be a great way to improve his health profile. And it doesn't look like he enjoys eating fruit or nuts, and I think one of the issue that people get perplexed by in general is having [the recommended] five or six servings of fruit and vegetables a day—it can feel overwhelming. So for him, he might gradually introduce something like citrus, since he's in Florida when he's not at the White House, and then build up from there.

I'm really interested in what that feels like. What happens to your body when you have no vitamins?
Some of the symptoms that come up in people who are deficient is that their nerves start firing inefficiently, you could be cold, you could have fatigue, shortness of breath, you could be dizzy, your heartbeat could be irregular. You could have muscle weakness, personality changes. So there's a lot of different things that can come with vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Poor sleep, too.

Trump also guzzles Diet Coke. Have there been any reputable studies about the long-term of effect of that habit?
All the studies that are currently out show that things like Diet Coke that contain aspartame are safe to consume. I think the only time people become leery is when you're dealing with a pregnant or expecting woman. The amount that's considered carcinogenic is obscene. You'd have to consume a good amount of Diet Coke to reach what is considered potentially toxic. So his vice is Diet Coke. Fair enough. I think there's lot of options he could do like some fruit-induced water or seltzer water that would be better, but oh well.

Well, he also doesn't drink alcohol. What's worse: chronic alcohol abuse or only eating Big Macs?
I think both of them can end up being unhealthy. I think one of the things with fast food is that society gives it a bad rap. I'm not sure what he's ordering when he goes there. If we wants to have fried chicken as his entree at KFC, he could have vegetables instead of potato wedges as a side. The issue with alcohol consumption is that diet quality tends to decrease if they overdo it on alcohol consumption. It's good that he's not drinking.

But he already eats like a perpetually hungover person. Also, is getting enough exercise for an old man?
What we encourage is all of our citizens to get 30 minutes of moderate or intense physical activity a day. I know he likes to go play golf, but if he's riding around in a cart and getting out to hit the ball and then getting back in, that's not considered physical activity. If he was carrying his clubs around, that would be.

What about sleep? Can the body train itself to become acclimated to only getting about four hours or rest? Or is Trump perpetually half-asleep?
As people get older, the number of hours that they need to sleep decreases. Most elderly people need to try and get six hours of sleep per day, so getting four is not enough. He should take a cat nap or something in the middle of the day or get some extra sleep. He's gonna be tired, he's gonna be irritable, his decision-making is gonna be impacted. I think he'd have reduced endurance, increased heart rate, more moodiness, an increased amount of stress hormones, which can affect your glucose tolerance. So it will affect your mood and your lean body mass, too.

Would it be a disaster to chance your life drastically at age 70? Or are you better off just maintaining your habits, even if they aren't the healthiest?
There are two kinds of people in the world—those who can change cold turkey and those who need to gradually move the barometer over. And that's what I feel like would be best for this situation. There's a lot of things he can change, but perhaps trying to incorporate a couple of goals over a two- to four-week period whether that's increasing vegetable intake, or increasing sleep, or doing more physical activity. He's going to be so busy with the things that he's doing, that he's not going to think it's a worthwhile investment, and he's been living for 70 years. So if it ain't broke, don't fix it, but working with the elderly, it's about improving quality of life.

So the overall effect of this diet is it'd make you constipated, vitamin deficient, irritable, and without much lean body mass. Is that just what it feels like to be an old man, though?
A majority of the old men I work with have a difficult time making behavioral changes, because you might look like a fruit bowl or a salad, and you might not perceive that as feminine, right? But a majority of these older men will look at that and feel like it's feminine so they won't eat it. So Trump's part of that red-meat-and-potatoes generation. It's not gonna be a full swing in the other direction, but he can gradually move it over, start to feel a little better, and maybe if he loses a little bit of weight, he'll be more effective in the office.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

After the inauguration, Barack and Michelle Obama took a much-needed vacation, first to Palm Springs and then over to the British Virgin Islands, where they kicked back for ten days on Necker, the private island belonging to billionaire Richard Branson.

The Obamas are at their new home in DC now, but on Tuesday, Branson released a video of their time together. Apparently, a backward-hat-sporting Obama spent the first few days after handing the keys to America off to Trump by learning to kiteboard, which seems infinitely better than frantically stressing over the state of our country (though he did have to pause his vacation for a minute to speak out against Trump's travel ban).

In Branson's video, he and Obama go head-to-head to see who can master their respective new watersports faster—kiteboarding for Obama, and foilboarding for Branson. Watch the former president enjoy not being president any longer, and almost definitely not worry about who's playing him on Saturday Night Live.

As expected, the Senate reached a 50-50 tied vote on confirming Betsy DeVos, a billionaire conservative donor and charter school advocate, to become the Trump administration's education secretary. Vice President Mike Pence had to cast a tie-breaking vote, bringing it to 51-50 in favor of approving DeVos, signaling the end to one of the more contentious fights over one of Trump's Cabinet appointees, Politico reports.

Democrats pulled an all-nighter Monday to filibuster for a full 24 hours on the Senate floor in an attempt to pressure Republicans to vote against DeVos. Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkoswki of Alaska had already agreed to vote against her, bringing the vote to tie. The Democrats proved unable to secure one more member from across the aisle to vote against DeVos, and Pence had to vote to break the tie—a historic first for a Cabinet secretary confirmation.

As a conservative donor, DeVos and her family have given millions to Senate Republicans, though she's raised questions on both sides of the aisle as to her competency for the nation's top education job. DeVos has been outspoken about allocating taxpayer dollars to private schools, as opposed to public schools. She also has relatively little experience working on matters regarding higher education or in handling LGBTQ issues at schools.

After her sloppy confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions—in which DeVos said guns belong in schools so people can protect themselves from "grizzlies"—senators received thousands of calls from concerned constituents and teachers' groups urging them to vote against her. So much so, the phone lines were reportedly jammed.

(Illustration: Dan Evans)

Over 30 years ago, an experiment took place. A group of 146 university students watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, in which Jack Nicholson's character ends up in an asylum after faking insanity. "Considerable negative changes in attitude" towards people with mental health problems occurred among those who saw the film.

Considering the majority of the population report that their information about psychotherapy and mental illness comes mostly from what they see on screen, when the media gets mental health wrong it's a concern. There's even evidence to show that people who draw their knowledge from the media are generally more intolerant towards people with mental illnesses, advocating more socially restrictive attitudes and policies, and being less supportive of community treatment.

If you have personal experience with – or decent knowledge of – particular mental illnesses, you'll probably find yourself unable to fully let go and indulge in fiction, instead picking apart performances or plot lines. Plenty of shows do mental health well, such as Netflix's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend with Rebecca Bloom, the tenacious, funny lawyer living with anxiety and mental illness; or Hannah Ashworth from Hollyoaks, whose eating disorder showed the illness as both tedious and dangerous; or the disordered binge eating of C4's My Mad Fat Diary. However, far more have done it badly in the past. Pretty Little Liars, where Hanna got over bulimia "all on her own", the episode of Will and Grace where Grace tries to convince everyone she has Borderline Personality Disorder (bit off), Cassie from Skins and the glamourisation of her eating disorder.

'My Mad Fat Diary' (Photo: Channel 4, via)

Showing mental health on screen accurately is increasingly seen as something that matters. A 2015 report commissioned by the anti-stigma campaign Time to Change confirmed that TV producers are moving away from dated stereotypes, and last year a significant poll by mental health charity Mind found that a quarter of TV viewers suffering from mental health problems have been prompted to seek help after following mental health storylines. This progress has a lot to do with a select few people – those whose job it is to mitigate against harmful representations on screen.

Senior Media Advisor at Mind, Jenni Regan, watches all the soaps and keeps on top of the TV guide magazines, because they often talk about storylines ahead of time. Part of her job involves watching out for the damaging storylines to prevent them happening again.

"I noticed there were quite a few British dramas last year which had characters with schizophrenia, or something similar, who turned up and killed people," she explains. "In one, a character with schizophrenia was taken into questioning, even though there was no evidence he'd done anything – purely [because] he had this illness and lived in the area. That's appalling, really. We're not there to tell people off; in this case I spoke to the production company and said we should work together in the future to explore this condition."

So what is a good representation of mental health? Jenni says shows should present how and why people became unwell, and how, hopefully, they can get better. Importantly, they should demonstrate that people don't just get ill or better one day; that it's a gradual and fluctuating process both ways.

"Depression is so boring to show. If someone is depressed they don't want to do very much – they want to stay under a duvet, and that's not very dramatic. There is dramatic without the stigmatising knock-on effect, and that's what we're trying to find." – Jenni Regan, Mind

Day to day, Jenni works directly with soaps and dramas. According to her, a lot more research goes into one-off BBC dramas – especially as they usually only have an hour to get an illness right – but soaps are her bread and butter. She talks me through the storyline of Stacey from Eastenders, who suffered from postpartum psychosis, which she says was one of the biggest projects Mind had ever worked on because it was a mental illness depicted onscreen over six months – "practically unheard of in soap history".

"We got together to meet and decide, first of all, what that might look like on screen," says Jenni. "We've worked on storylines involving Stacy for a few years, so we know the character quite well. We threw around ideas and then recruited case studies who came in and spoke to the actress, as well as the script writers, and actually some of the stories you saw on screen in the end were heavily based on people's experiences."

Ideally Jenni will get to see three or four versions of the script, going back and forth with comments between her and the writers, hammering out problematic scenes or dialogue. It's very common to have issues. "In particular, there was a scene where we thought it looked like Stacey was trying to put her child in harm's way. [Postpartum psychosis is] an illness where a lot of people think women must be very dangerous and kill their babies, which is very far from the truth," Jenni explains. "Generally, women might do things that endanger their children, but it wouldn't be something that was intentional damage. Perhaps they're so unwell they neglect their child, but it's very rarely something they're conscious of or trying to do. We managed to get that scene changed completely and ended up with Stacey in danger, but not her child."

Stacey and her child, 'Eastenders' (Photo courtesy of BBC Pictures)

It's obvious where the tension lies between advisors like Jenni and production companies – drama is about action, and mental illness doesn't always provide enough of that. "Depression is so boring to show," Jenni offers as an example. "If someone is depressed they don't want to do very much – they want to stay under a duvet, and that's not very dramatic. There is dramatic without the stigmatising knock-on effect. And that's what we're trying to find."

But what could be more sensational, more riveting, than the action before the Eastenders drum roll, the ending of a long-running storyline climax? "Sadly, people always think the only way to finish a mental health storyline is to have them killed or be sectioned," says Jenni. "With sectioning, they'll get dragged away and you don't see them for six months and then they're back, which isn't that realistic and gives the impression that people with mental health problems should just be locked away, which again isn't the case."

With Stacey's storyline, the character was sectioned, but it was positioned as something that would allow her to get the care and support she needed, rather than being a punishment. A successful ending for Jenni was when she worked on the Ian Beale depression storyline a few years ago. "He ended up leaving his life without trying to kill himself or harm others," she says. "What's most realistic for a middle-aged man is to walk away. It happens a lot."

"What historically tended to happen in soaps was there'd be a character who wasn't very well known who'd come in with mental health problems and do something very strange. It was an excuse for someone to behave badly." – Jenni Regan, Mind.

Yet, sometimes suicide is – and should be – talked about, and the events leading up to it shown. Lorna Fraser at Samaritans does the same job as Jenni at Mind. Although she can't name or shame good or bad storylines or scenes, as this would involve talking explicitly about suicide in a triggering way, as well as inadvertently doing the exact same thing in print as she's trying to prevent happening on the screen, she says that if companies come to her there's a very strong willingness to compromise to make the scene work. "There's a significant body of research which shows links between certain types of coverage of suicide and increase in suicide rates, so our work is focused on helping programme makers cover this topic safely to reduce that risk," says Lorna.

Lorna worked on the recent Lee Carter suicidal storyline on Eastenders, which was praised for its sensitivity. "The character had suffered with depression for a long time, and [the producers] got in touch with me and said they wanted to develop a suicide contemplation storyline," she says, highlighting how ideal it was that they brought her in at the very beginning. "It's not good when you're brought in at development stage and have to ask for loads of cuts. We gave a steer from the outset. They continued to work with us over the course of a few months and that involved sharing scripts, giving advice, working with the two main actors involved in the scenes, as well as the writers and researchers."

Lee Carter, 'Eastenders' (Photo courtesy of BBC Pictures)

In the months leading up to this contemplation, viewers had seen Lee struggle with significant life events, like bullying at work and the impact of this on his relationship with his new wife. "What has made this all the more difficult for Lee is that he suffered in silence, pretending things were OK," says Lorna. "The storyline has managed to show the dangers of isolating yourself to any viewers who might be having issues. He reached that lowest point of feeling like he couldn't cope with it. The car park attendant who stops and speaks to Lee also hands him a Samaritans helpline contact card before he leaves and says he should call them if he's struggling again."

Both Jenni and Lorna agree that soaps are now brilliant at depicting mental health issues. "What historically tended to happen in soaps is there'd be a character who wasn't very well known who'd come in with mental health problems and do something very strange. It was an excuse for someone to behave badly," Jenni explains. "Over the years it's become much more about main characters developing mental health problems, which is a lot better way of doing it. It's cutting down the idea of it being us and them."

Now, you're seeing more key characters dealing with their mental health. Coronation Street's grumpy, dopey, sarcastic Steve McDonald, for example. Jenni worked on his long-running depression storyline. "He was a character who was quite funny and likeable, so to have him have depression rather than someone who was a wallflower is a great move for them. In terms of the response, our website crashed after the main episode because people were looking for information on depression. It shows that people do see a character like Steve and think, 'If he can get it, I can get it, and maybe that's what's wrong with me?'"

So where is there room for improvement?

So far, no British soaps or long-running drama excel in showing that, for many people, mental illness doesn't just "get better" – that it's a long-term or recurring factor in their lives. "The fact that Steve McDonald has just lost a child [in Coronation Street]... in real life, that could trigger another depressive episode," says Jenni. "I don't know if they will do that, but that'd be something we'd recommend. Depression doesn't necessarily happen for a month and go away."

Generally, the consensus is that soaps are doing a good job when it comes to reaching and educating people. "Our relationship with the soaps is very well established now," says Lorna. "We'd like to encourage more filmmakers to work with us."

And you can see why: it's difficult to name many big films that manage to depict a mental illness even somewhat accurately. Lars Von Trier's Melancholia is one; Martha Marcy May Marlene is another. But with film and mental health, it's almost as if the bigger the budget, the more offensive the result. That said, consumer sentiment is changing, even if film isn't. For example, mental health advocates hated M. Night Shyamalan's new film Split – in which James McAvoy's character's split personality disorder spawns one persona who becomes something of an evil superpower – and have organised boycotts and protests against it.

Jenni knows people don't want dangerous representations of mental health on screen, because Mind hear the complaints after something comes out in the cinema or is shown on TV – and they get a lot of them. Ultimately, when it comes to mental health and identity, people want to see themselves and the people they care for on screen; more depressed Steve McDonald, less demonic topless James McAvoy.

Read more about Mind here and Samaritans here.

@hannahrosewens / idrawforfood.co.uk

More on mental health, film and tv:

'You're the Worst' Keeps Getting Mental Illness Right

How Good Is Hollywood at Portraying Mental Illness?

Could We Use Films to Teach the Ignorant About Mental Health?

It's not hard to see Sam Richardson's mannerisms in his characters—and vice versa. On Veep, Richardson plays Richard Splett, an eternally optimistic White House staffer who doesn't seem to mind—or even know—that he's an idiot about most things. At one point, he introduces himself as "Richard T. Splett," and then cheerfully corrects himself: "I don't know why I said 'T'—my middle name is John." Richardson is more worldly than his fictional counterpart, but with a penchant for mid-sentence giggles, he's just as upbeat.

Richardson's latest character, Sam Duvet, is basically a less professionally successful and politically ambitious Splett: bug-eyed, socially confident, sometimes grating, and blissfully and/or willfully ignorant of the frustrations he causes others to experience. He's one of two leads on the new Comedy Central sitcom Detroiters, a show about a pair of bumbling commercial writers who see the world through rose-colored glasses and rarely, if ever, get work done.

The threads connecting these characters aren't an accident. Richardson, 33, created Detroiters along with his friends Tim Robinson, Zach Kanin, and Joe Kelly. The bubbly rising star says his sense of humor has been pretty consistent since his childhood, when he could be found quoting Jim Carrey movies like The Mask and obsessing over Saturday Night Live stars like Phil Hartman. "My cousin Dwayne was really the first person who was like, 'You're funny, man!'" Richardson told me over the phone. "I was like, OK, sure.'"

At 16, Richardson started taking classes at The Second City Detroit, an improv comedy talent factory that counts Keegan-Michael Key and sitcom veteran Suzy Nakamura among its alumni. Richardson began working there four years later, in 2004. After a few years, he moved on to a memorable stint performing comedy with Second City on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.

Working on the cruise ship strained his bank account when he got a little too comfortable with relaxation in Barbados and Saint Lucia. But his takeaway was more positive: Performing for an audience of vacationers trained him to be "efficiently funny. It happened right when it needed to in my life," Richardson said.

Richardson briefly returned to Detroit before moving to Chicago and eventually clawing onto the TV guest-star circuit. His breakout turn in Veep raised his profile enough to land him some small parts in blockbuster movies (Neighbors 2, Ghostbusters, Office Christmas Party) and a chance to co-create and star in his own series.

Richardson met Tim Robinson, a former Saturday Night Live cast member and staff writer, in passing a few times and eventually bonded with him as his Second City underling in Detroit. The two soon imagined creating a show together, set in their beloved hometown and capitalizing on their strong bond. The original concept was for the two to play parking lot booth attendants going on adventures and getting into mischief. But the prospect of paying homage to the iconic local commercials they grew up watching dovetailed nicely with their own experience as comedy writers. Detroiters was born.

Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson in Detroiters. Courtesy of Comedy Central

"I think everybody from whatever town they're from knows their hometown commercials," Richardson said. "What if the guys who came up with these things were so impassioned about it that they thought they were making high art?"

Sam Duvet and his friend Tim (played by Robinson) have inherited Tim's father's local advertising business, despite no formal training. They're prone to distractions, like smashing a glass window in their unnecessarily spacious office or renting a motorcycle for use during workdays. Sometimes, they fight—in an early episode, Sam thinks Tim holds him back from finding love, while Tim thinks the women Sam likes don't deserve him—but mostly, they frolic.

"That friendship on the show is pretty much how we are in real life. We say we love each other all the time," Richardson said. "Of course, the characters are extreme. We always say that Tim and Sam Duvet are Tim and Sam Richardson if we were half as lucky and twice as dumb."

Richardson recalls warning Robinson just before filming began that they would probably "have a blow-up fight" before wrapping production. Richardson told his friend to remember, "I love ya and we're just coming from two different creative places." On the last day of filming, though, Richardson realized his prediction hadn't come to pass. "Incredible," he recalls wistfully. The admiration and adoration are mutual, Robinson confirms. "We have gone through many stages of our careers together, and even when we went through stages without each other, we always checked in regularly and helped each other through ups and downs," he wrote in an email. "So to have my best friend by my side every day is [a] dream come true."

Their playful rapport caught the attention of Comedy Central president Kent Alterman instantly, he said. "They are not only funny, but have a genuine sweetness that is irresistible," Alterman wrote me in an email.

Detroiters is a monument to their friendship, but also to the city where it began. The jubilant theme song, a brief but catchy blast of tuneful crooning about hometown pride, sets the tone; Richardson and his team took pains to subvert persistent pop culture depictions of Michigan's largest city as "full of parolees and cons walking the streets looking to steal stuff." In his eyes, Detroit is full of "sweet, kind, Midwestern people" bursting with hometown pride.

The creators also sought to honestly reflect the demographics of Detroit's population—more than 80 percent of which is black, according to U.S. Census data. For heightened verisimilitude, the show was shot on location, breaking from Comedy Central's typical New York and L.A. locales. Richardson, who spent parts of his childhood living with his mom in Ghana, saw to it that the casting department stayed accurate, right down to the bit players.

"I wasn't going to let the show get whitewashed," Richardson said. "Ninety percent white people walking down the street, and the black people are there parking cars and shit. That's just not Detroit."

The characters in Detroiters don't talk about race much, and Richardson says that's by design, to keep the focus on their misadventures, instead. Still, he hopes someday to translate the experience of being surrounded by black people in two different cultures into a story of its own. For now, he wants viewers to appreciate the Detroit he knows, not the one they think they know.

With Detroiters, Richardson is kept busy running his own show. Having to answer every question down to specific choices about what's in the frame or how an episode should end has been taxing, he admits. Yet, on the other hand, Richardson and his collaborators relish their freedoms. "You're accountable for so much but that's also a positive because if you're detail-oriented, you have it reflect the details you want so much," Richardson said. "Being on Veep, it's so much fun, and I get to put so much creative input in there, but at the end of the day, what they say, I do." On Detroiters, however, he and his friends call the shots. He credits his success in that transition to Detroit's discerning comedy fans, who kept him humble during his Second City days.

"Those audiences, once you get 'em on board, they would fiercely love those shows," Richardson said. "It's what made me want to keep doing what I do."

Follow Mark Lieberman on Twitter.

The first time I watched anything from John Early and Kate Berlant I was legitimately in tears. Their "Paris" video was so instantly recognizable and relatable, so searingly accurate and overwhelmingly funny, that I played it over and over and over again. It became the thing I forced friends to watch at parties or over dinner, or really any time there was a lull in conversation. For a certain type of person, whether you've been to Paris or not, it became a kind of cultural calling card.

Paris inevitably led me down an Early/Berlant YouTube wormhole, where I stumbled from "John and Kate plan a dinner party" to the Santa Monica series. What's immediately evident in every video the pair does is their ability to expertly blend parody with homage. Their dynamic drives the comedy and even when the outlandish is at play (two strangers with face tattoos meeting at the farmer's market) it always feels intimate and real.

This ability to embody other lives was especially highlighted in their individual episodes on Netflix's sketch anthology, Characters. Early and Berlant had two of the strongest episodes in the series, creating near-iconic characters, from Early's denim-wearing suburban stand-up comic, to Berlant's pitch perfect riff on artist Marina Abramovic. In many ways, they are the future of American comedy, though through catching their sold-out/standing room only Toronto show promoting their new Vimeo series, it's clear their appeal is universal.

555, directed by long-time collaborator Andrew DeYoung, is a dark, prodding look at the desperate, driving search for fame. Co-produced by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, the series has a beautiful, dreamy design and at times feels almost surreal in its production. But you're quickly shot back to reality by Early and Berlant's ability to skewer everyone from stage moms to talent agents.

I sat down with Early and Berlant just before that sold-out show in January to talk about how they became collaborators, their own frustrations with fame and why they insist on resisting Trump.

VICE: So tell me how you guys met.

Kate Berlant: Camp!

John Early: Yeah, in a Christian camp. And the relationship was frowned upon. It wasn't sexual, but it was just the age difference.

Berlant: It wasn't sexual, but it was physical. No, we met doing stand up.

Early : We met doing stand up but we really met doing a mutual friend's short film where Kate played a professor who runs the SAT and I played her androgynous assistant. It was beautifully cast and we were screaming, laughing, instant just (whoosh!) didn't wanna part. And that night texting until like 4 AM and we made plans for the next day which turned into two weeks of sleeping over at her apartment. It would always just be a cycle of, if I would run out of underwear, I would go home.

Berlant: Or, we'd buy new underwear.

Early: Yeah, we'd walk to Duane Reade in the cold and buy a pack of underwear.

Berlant: But it was a long process of waking up together, splitting up to do errands and then meeting up again.

Early: With like one errand.

Berlant: It was like, "I'll see you at five?"

Still from '555'

Early: There was also not even "I'll see you at five," there was just like a complete assumption that we'd be hanging out later that day.

Berlant: We never made plans.

Early: We'd be like, "Where are you?"

And were you working together right away?

Early: Yeah, both from the first day of meeting, we were like, we literally said we were going to have a pilot by the end of the year. We still don't have a pilot!

Berlant: It's so hard.

Early: But we were positive. I really believed that that was going to happen.

Berlant: We were both convinced that we were going to be on SNL. We were like "DO WE EVEN WANT THAT."

Early: We were also thought we were going to be on GIRLS. We just assumed—

I'm surprised actually that you haven't been.

Early: That's what I've been saying!

Berlant: Well, John was actually cut out.

Early: I had three lines and it was cut. But we actually both were like, after season one, we'll see you on season two.

Berlant: I was sure we'd be on GIRLS. I was pretty sure we'd be on GIRLS. I thought we'd definitely have to turn down SNL.

Early: Oh yeah, none of that ever happened. Oh yeah, no we started making videos a month into our friendship.

The Paris video is so iconic.

Early: Yeah it is our most popular video.

How much of you was in that video?

Berlant: So much.

Early: So much.

Berlant: Like when we're on a roll about something, it is improvised but it really is us just spiralling out of control.

Early: We are absolutely using our kind of natural rhythms as friends and just turning it up a notch. We really do tend to build each other up and even now that we're hyper aware of those qualities in ourselves, we still fall into it and we'll realize, 'Wow, we are fully doing that thing.'

And what is it about character work that is so appealing?

Berlant: I don't know any alternative. But I think—

Early: I don't know, I think we just always, I've always just loved characters and actresses in wigs. From a very early age, just like this worship of the women of SNL, so it was always very natural to me. When we first became friends, our goal for a really long time was just to have a sketch show. Like a beautiful sketch show and that's kind of what this Vimeo series is.

This show is almost like a full circle of what you've done so far. Like the Characters episodes, the videos, the amazing lamp stuff.

Early: That was the first video of Kate's that I ever saw. Like, before we were friends, I couldn't believe it.

I've watched it multiple times.

Early: It's so ingenious.

Berlant: I never made another video, I was like, "my fatigue." I was like, "never again."

It was so complete you don't even need another one.

Berlant: Thank you.

How did 555 come to be?

Berlant: We just kind of got lucky, we pitched to Vimeo and we said, "Here are these videos we want to do" and with all of these crazy concepts and they were like, "yeah." So it was pure luck.

Early: They seem to be very indie film driven. I think it was so nice to have a meeting with someone who was naming our references before we did. They were like, "Oh yeah, we know Robert Altman" and we were like *gasp*. It was very cool, very cool. I was very thrilled that they had like, good taste.

It's definitely an industry skewering or at least like a window into the industry that most people don't get. It's not La La Land . What connects all of those stories?

Early: Kate does.

Berlant: John does. I mean, I think this may sound obvious but that desperation slash desire to do something.

Early: I think of the child actor short with the image at the end with the fog machine. I feel like that's a perfect metaphor for the whole series—like people who are like almost there, but kind of consumed by their own desires and dysfunction and don't ever quite make it.

What's your worst experience dealing with that side of the industry?

Berlant: Well, I don't wanna toot my own horn but I had one and a half lines on Lizzie McGuire, it was a Disney show and I was student #2 and from that was my big break and I got like a child manager who was disgusting.

Early: Was it a man or a woman?

Berlant: It was a duo like, "Here's the thing with you!" and the guy was like, "you're skinny, show your tummy a little bit."

Early: Disgusting.

Berlant: I was like "OK." And then they sent me out a couple times. I wish they… I can't remember their names. I wish I could find them and terrorize them online. I'm sure they have like a Twitter account with two followers. So yeah, then I headed over to a That's So Raven audition and I bombed it really hard and I remember there was a spatula prop and I took the prop back with me. And I had it and then I got a call and I knew that it didn't go well and then they dropped me.

Early: The child agents dropped you? Wow. Do they have any successful clients?

Berlant: No.

Early: Chloe Grace Morello…?

Berlant: No, they had one. I can't remember who it was.

Still from '555'

But do you still have the spatula?

Berlant: Probably

Early: I had one line on 30 Rock. It was five lines originally and it was like my biggest dream come true and then it was cut down to one and on one of the TV's with the TV-14 logo, it covered my head when it was a full-body shot of me. And because it was 30 Rock, I was so determined to kill so the whole time I was on set, I was trying to make the crew laugh. I was being INSANE. I improvised like such a small part like little lines and I went home thinking I just slaughtered. I didn't hold back. It was my first shot and I could've held back but I didn't hold back. And then I spent months telling people, like I went back to Nashville for Christmas and I would have people over and I would tell them my 30 Rock story and I was telling everyone about how it was coming out in the Spring and it came out and it was like one three-word line and I was in the background of the shot like stealing focus and they were literally trying to edit where I was around because I was literally so hammy.

Berlant: It's so hard. It really is. You're like "ugh" cause you are so hungry and you try to do so much but the scene just doesn't call for it.

Shifting gears just a little bit and talking about what is happening in the world and how much, I know obviously both of you are very outspoken but do you feel pressure to not talk about those things?

Early: Luckily no.

Berlant: No.

Early: That's the beauty of being like in comedy where we're in an artform that lets us and encourages us to speak up so no one's been like, "uh uh uh!"

What do you hope kind of happens from the industry in the next four years to push some of this resistance forward?

Berlant: I hope more just entertainers choose to engage in activism and probably what we need is less people just focused on making art and more people who are simultaneously focused on activism.

Early: One of the only things you can do right now artistically is make people who are more marginalized more visible on screen and make their lives seem important and seductive and interesting so that people who are not exposed to that can see a more inclusive world and hopefully that can affect the culture. That's probably all you can do.

Berlant: And that's a huge thing you can do. Which hopefully is starting to happen more from people who historically are just silent or have been silenced.

555 is available on Vimeo now.

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Workers at Legoland Windsor in England were doing a routine asbestos check when they stumbled across a huge marijuana grow house on the property, full of 50 chest-high plants, electric lights, and an irrigation system.

According to the Scotsman, the grow house operated out of what was believed to be a derelict building formerly used by park staff, located on Legoland's 215 acres. The building isn't in the actual park, though, so it wasn't like kids were at risk of stumbling across a giant weed forest stashed behind the rides at Viking Land or whatever.

The secret grow house was situated by the front entrance to the park, near the kennels where visitors can leave their dogs while they're enjoying a day of fun. Because it's not accessible to the public, authorities believe that the industrious farmers were getting to the site through the neighboring Crown Estate, land belonging to the Queen of England.

"Officers are currently at the site where cannabis plants and equipment used in the production of cannabis has been located," Windsor's police said in a statement. "No arrests have been made and an investigation is being carried out."

It's a shock that pot growers got away with using the site long enough for the plants to grow so tall, since Legoland had 2.3 million visitors and is the most visited theme park in the UK. The theme park is currently closed for the month of February, and the weed will probably be long gone by the time it opens up again.

Update 2/7/17: This post has been updated to correct an earlier version stating that the Legoland park was in Scotland. It's in England.