There's something wholesome about a high school crush. The simplicity of a time before the abyss of meaningless swipes on Tinder; before you had any shame about changing your entire wardrobe and personality in the hope of gaining attention; before you'd ever been dumped.

If you had a crush on someone, there was absolutely no way you would tell them. Nobody did that. Instead, you'd blush furiously and avoid looking anywhere near their general direction. You'd privately speculate whether it meant something that they might have glanced at you at the bus stop, or that they'd sat behind you in a class, or – crucially – that they'd been the first to ask "How's u?" on MSN the night before.

Years – and probably a few miserable relationships – later, you might think about your school crush. Is Jamie still as fit as he was in year nine? Would you still be down if you saw Hannah now?

In the spirit of this past week – of Valentine's Day and love and not being alone forever – we looked up our school crushes to see if we still fancied them.

"I can look back now and see the repressed closeted teenager I was"

I wonder if any of my friends believe me when I say that I only had crushes on girls at school. I can look back now and see the repressed closeted teenager I was. But back then, through heterosexual willpower, I (unsuccessfully) pined after beautiful women.

Being at an all-boys school probably didn't speed my journey to the eventual happy realisation and acceptance of my sexuality. It also meant the majority of interactions with girls that I fancied were online.

This was via Facebook, but back in the days when you wrote on people's walls, posted cringey statuses and no one got 10 likes on their photos, let alone hundreds.

I've just deleted this high school crush on Facebook in case she reads this article. I also destroyed all evidence of the messages we wrote on each other's walls because...

Screengrab via Facebook

It's hard to believe it was only eight years ago.

She was seriously cool, I was steadily average.

Looking through her pictures now, the life she displays to the world is sun-drenched and successful. There are dinner parties. There are requests for lawyers to help on a tech startup. There are wholesome countryside walks.

I'm happy she appears to be doing great. I'm also happy our lives diverged when they did.

– @maxramsay

"To this day, Foo Fighters' 'Best of You' brings back the feelings of painful inadequacy"

My high school crush was perfect. He was the lead singer in a band, he liked Lord of the Rings, he looked a bit like Zac Efron. He was also a big fan of Muse, and so suddenly I was in love with Matt Bellamy and knew all the words to "Time Is Running Out".

When he got a hot girlfriend from the year above I was devastated – as were the many other girls in my class who also coincidentally loved Muse too. That year, a group of us went to Isle of Wight festival. We were all watching Foo Fighters when the two of us and his girlfriend got separated in the moshpit. To this day, "Best of You" brings back the feelings of painful inadequacy brought about as they enthusiastically sucked face.

I got over him soon after that, and we were friends for the rest of our time at school.

Looking him up now, I don't think it was meant to be: he runs an "outdoor centre" and does triathlons – I still don't know how to ride a bike. He lives with his long-term girlfriend and seems settled and content – the prospect of domesticity terrifies me. He also still looks like Zac Efron, but these days I'd rather an Adam Driver. Although, full disclosure: I still like Muse. I guess some things do last a long time.

– @tara_dwmd

"He was super emo, I wore Jack Wills"

At the start of GCSEs, a guy I had never really noticed before was suddenly in all my classes. He was funny and flirty and I had a massive crush on him.

He was super emo, I was the type to wear a Jack Wills top under my school shirt. So I attempted to be a more successful version of the girl from "Sk8er Boi": I dyed my hair black, cut myself a fringe and started listening to Bring Me the Horizon. It didn't work out, but I did briefly date his friend – another Olly Sykes wannabe – so it wasn't all in vain.

A few months later I got my first real boyfriend and reverted back to an Abercrombie-clad prep. I kept buying Kerrang! for a while, though, and still listen to My Chemical Romance from time to time.

Nine years later, he lives at home and is working in a shop in my hometown (with the same haircut). I can't see myself heading back to rural Berkshire anytime soon, and I doubt I'd fancy him if I met him now – but we'd probably still have a laugh. He's in a long-term relationship, so I think the feeling would be mutual.

– @bridiepjones

"She was head girl, I got kicked out of school for smoking weed"

She was hot, smart, a hard-working beacon of virtuosity. She was one of the popular girls, I was not one of the popular guys. And still, I was hopelessly enamoured.

We were in competition for Head of Year. When visitors came to look around the school, we used to be sent by the headmaster, as a pair, to give them the grand tour. I was painfully aware I fancied her, but never mentioned it. To be honest, I had no chance: I was barely visible on the school social spectrum that revolved around her. The conversations we had on those rare occasions amounted to me awkwardly fumbling my words.

Suffice to say, it wasn't to be. On top of my inability to hold a conversation, a year later I got kicked out of school for smoking weed. I moved to London, never to return, and she was left to take the spot of Head Girl unopposed, like a cruel despot of my heart. I haven't seen her since.

Looking her up now, she has a long-term boyfriend and has graduated from a reputable university into a serious job in business. She still hangs out with the same friends. But as with most girls I fancied in my wanton youth, I doubt I'd like her if we met today. Somehow virtuous isn't really my type any more.

– @alexjohngreen

"If he asked me out tomorrow, I'd probably still say yes"

I met my crush at a school rock concert. We dated and, after pressure from his friends, he asked me to be Facebook official, but then he ghosted me for a month. I'd text him almost daily asking what he was up to, but got no response, so I lied and told him that I'd shaved my head in rebellion. That got his attention pretty quickly.

After a two month relationship he dumped me the night before my English A Level exam on a park bench in front of all of my friends, claiming that he just "didn't want a girlfriend, but I shouldn't be upset because we hadn't slept together".

A year later I discovered a video on YouTube of a song that he'd written with a line saying that he'd "fucked" me, which is pretty tragic considering we never even got close.

Then, a couple of years down the line, I bumped into him at a festival and we hit it off again. Afterwards I used any excuse to strike up a conversation. Needless to say, he ghosted me.

If he asked me out tomorrow, I'd probably still say yes.

– @fayecwhite

Like many of the over 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, 27-year-old developer Celso Mireles spent much of his life haunted by the specter of surprise deportations of the kind that we saw across the country this week. Although he's recently documented, Mireles came to the country as a child with two undocumented parents and then spent over 25 years undocumented while seeing friends and community members deported.

Now Mireles is building a new app aiming to provide crowdsourced and verified warnings about immigration raids so undocumented individuals can be alerted and avoid them. News of the app comes in the wake of new Homeland Security immigration raids totalling more than 680 arrests. The app has been in the works since the Obama administration was busy deporting more people than any president in history, but the recent raids motivated its developer to pick it up again.

Read more on Motherboard.

After a brutal year where more than 900 people died of drug overdoses in British Columbia, doctors are pointing to one morbid upside.

It might sound like something out of a dystopian horror comic, where drug users are wiped out and harvested for organs. But new stats released by the health agency responsible for organ transplants show that's not exactly a far-off nightmare anymore. Health officials have noticed a significant uptick in organ donor deaths, and say that fentanyl is likely playing a role.

According to BC Transplant, the number of organ donors in the first weeks of 2017 has doubled over this time last year, from 10 to 20. That's resulted in 59 transplants, up from 37 organs over the same period in 2016.

"It's heartbreaking anytime someone dies suddenly in a way that makes them a candidate to be an organ donor," reads an emailed statement from Tina Robinson, communications manager for the health agency. "It's remarkable that the legacy of some of these people is giving the gift of life to someone waiting for a transplant."

"We started tracking the connection between fentanyl and organ donation more closely at the start of 2017, and fentanyl has been a contributing factor in about a quarter of our donors so far this year."

Read More: How North America Found Itself in the Grips of an Opioid Crisis

BC Transplant's statement cautions against drawing conclusions based on a small amount of recent data. But long term trends show the proportion of organ donors dying from overdose has gone up steadily over many years. Back in 2013, 7.5 percent of organ donors tested positive for drugs. In 2016, that number rose to 22.7 percent.

Robinson challenged the notion that lungs or kidneys from drug users would harm the patients that receive them. "Drug overdose does not stop someone from becoming an organ donor," she told VICE. "Physicians will only offer organs that they believe to be safe to recipients, and where the benefits of transplants would outweigh the risk."

This news comes as the federal government just announced new funding to battle the country's overdose epidemic. That included $10 million in urgent support for BC, which has been hardest hit.

Though the exact use of that funding has not yet been announced, Canada's health minister suggested more opioid substitution treatment, expanded police enforcement, new safe injection sites and more lab testing will be "priority areas" during a Friday press conference in Victoria.

On the same day, Surrey became the latest BC municipality to submit an application for a supervised injection site. The suburb has seen the second-highest amount of ODs behind Vancouver, with 110 deaths last year.

The crisis continues to stretch far beyond urban centres. The whole province saw 116 overdose deaths in January, down from a record-breaking 142 the month before.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Increasingly, I feel like the empty spaces in my life are filled with cats—and I don't even have one. Whether they're fitting themselves into unlikely containers or inexplicably leaping into the air, cats have proven excellent mascots for the internet, equal parts beguiling and cute and serving as stress relief even if there's not one purring on your lap. But Ceyda Torun's new documentary, Kedi, about Istanbul's huge and adorable population of street cats, argues that they're much more than fluffy companions: They're entities with characters and personalities, intermediaries between us and God.

From ancient Egyptian sculptures, to T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, to Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, felines have inspired works of art for thousands of years—and Torun's film is a delightful addition to the chronicle of cats' alluring nature. Like many Muslim-majority nations, Turkey has a particularly robust cat population; in Islam, cats are ritually clean animals, and one account in the hadith tells the story of the Prophet Muhammad cutting off his sleeve so as not to disturb the cat sleeping on his robe. Today, residents and businesses leave out food and water for these recurring visitors in their lives, allowing the cats to come and go as they please. In a particularly funny scene from Kedi, a baker describes how everyone in the neighborhood has a "running tab" at the vet for their scrappy friend Gamsiz (the "Player"). In another, employees at a restaurant laugh as they describe how Duman (the "Gentleman") will show up outside the establishment and paw on the window for food, even when the door is wide open.

"The Istanbul cat movie," as I've taken to calling it, is certainly compelling at face value—many of the documentary's New York showings last weekend were sold out. But while the film is sure to induce coos, Kedi isn't just pure escapism. There are subtle inferences regarding the cats' world around them—whether political (deliberate shots of "Erdo-GONE" graffiti) or emotional (a cat caretaker's admission that their feline friend helped deal with a nervous breakdown)—that quietly paint a rich portrait of a rapidly changing culture. By the end, you might find yourself in love with Istanbul's cats, while also worrying about threats to their livelihood. I spoke with Torun over the phone as she prepared for the film's LA debut this weekend.

VICE: Why did you want to make this film?
Ceyda Torun: I grew up with cats in Istanbul, so for me there's a love there already. But non-Turks also noticed there was something special about the relationship between cats and people in Istanbul. We also wanted to explore a city and a culture through the eyes of a non-human—to portray the city in a way that news reports and tour guides really can't.

What were some of the logistical challenges in creating that cat's-eye-view perspective? Did you just have cameras rolling in certain locations all the time?
We didn't have cameras set up in [specific] places because it would've been too difficult—the city is too big, there are too many people, and the cats are too mobile within their territories. The biggest challenge was that they move on a vertical axis as well as a horizontal one. They explore the city in a three-dimensional way that would've been very difficult for us to prep for with cameras.

The best way for us to get the footage was to have a small, mobile crew based out of a van that just ran around the city. We got the people to be our informants—to call us and say, "Psycho's back, you gotta come back!" Cats are so attached to their human counterparts that tracking the humans helped us track the cats.

Still from Kedi. Photo courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories

Do you think kittens were overrepresented? They are precious and I love them, but I wondered if you would really see that many.
We didn't go out of our way to add more kittens, but we didn't go out of our way to eliminate kittens. In parts of the city where people are more directly involved in the lives of the cats, the trap-neuter-return operation functions better, so you have a lot of middle-aged and older cats in those neighborhoods. A lot of the kittens in the film are where the fish hole had been—where big ships would come in with their catches from the night before. That's a place where people don't live, and those are areas where you see more uncontrolled populations of cats, and therefore a lot more kittens.

We filmed during April and May, though, so it was prime kitten delivery time. We had a lot of heavily pregnant cats try to take over wherever we were to try and set up a place where they could give birth. They're so human dependent; a pregnant cat might show up on your balcony one morning and find her way into your house so she can give birth to her kittens. And you can't really kick them out.

"Cats are so attached to their human counterparts that tracking the humans helped us track the cats."

There's some discussion toward the end of the film about how the city is changing, and you suggest the cat population could be under threat. Can you explain that threat a little more?
I wouldn't call it "gentrification," because it's not the case of a community or neighborhood naturally evolving into a more livable space. This is more a case of real estate becoming more and more valuable because the population of humans is growing exponentially. When I was a child in Istanbul, we were about 4 million people—now it's about 20 million. The threat to cats and their habitat is our [city's] placing priority on our immediate needs, our having to accommodate housing for people instead of thinking in a more strategic way. The city grew really rapidly in the 80s, but it was not really managed in the most organized way. The cats run out of spaces to live, which is us running out of spaces to exist outside of an apartment unit.

Occasionally the government will say, "Let's round them all up and put them in shelters because [having a huge stray cat population] is not what the EU would like," so they declare that they're going to come take all the cats and dogs. Then tens of thousands of people protest. It's sort of an every-five-years type of thing. So there is always a threat that the cats may disappear, or may not exist in the way they are right now, and that was one of the reasons I was so motivated to document them.

Still from Kedi. Photo courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories

I've seen a couple of reviews that say the movie isn't political. Do you agree with that?
I think that people can see what they want to see, which is fine—it's not meant to be an activist film. The cats in Istanbul, and the relationship they have with people, are bigger than any government or any political issue. [But politics] was always influencing my choices. I think there's a way to talk about politics or political environments without pushing an agenda or making it the forefront of a film. This movie needed to be more of an experience, much like a sort of thought process. I was motivated to create a film that felt the same way a street cat in Istanbul makes you feel when they come in and sit on your lap for an hour and you can't move. It's so nice. They're warm, they purr on you, they let you pet them without making you feel nervous about anything. Suddenly, you're not checking your phone, you stop having the conversation that you're having with your friend. You become focused on that experience, all while being sort of guided by this animal that is just sitting and purring on your lap.

Do you have any cats?
No, I don't have a cat that I say is my own because we travel too much to be fair to an animal. We just take care of other people's cats and dogs.

Follow Lauren Oyler on Twitter.

Kedi is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with a larger rollout to follow.

HIV has reached epidemic proportions in Russia. Over 1 million people are HIV+ in the country, with 100,000 new infections in 2016 alone, and rising at a rate of 15 percent annually, according to a report by the European Center for Disease Control (ECDC). Even still, there are few signs that the government will commit resources to stem the acceleration of the virus.

Now, in a new tactic to quell the disease, the Russian Health Ministry has announced a new policy: a national registry of HIV patients.

While the government claims that the registry is not mandatory, it's the only way that patients could receive life-saving medication. All doctors and treatment centers would only receive medication based on the names of the patients listed. "Any individual diagnosed with HIV should be interested in being included in this register since he or she will receive medicine on this basis," the Russian Health Ministry Spokesman Oleg Salagai told TASS, a Russian News Agency.

While the idea of an HIV registry might seem autocratic, most countries already have some version of one, including the US, which has kept track of HIV+ people since 1981. Many Western European countries use an encoded process, such as a string of numbers or letters, rather than patients' names for privacy concerns, but the US uses a name-based register for accuracy. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has pressed states to drop name-based registers, but a few states, such as Maryland and California, have rejected their policy. Most research on name-based registers show that they can lead to a 22 to 63 percent decline in HIV testing due to a patient's concern for privacy. The only reason that this decline hasn't been shown in America is because most Americans are unaware that these registers exist.

Russians, on the other hand, are very aware that this registry exists and are growing increasingly concerned. Mandatory lists of stigmatized vulnerable populations are concerning if the list falls into the wrong hands. Activists worry that the registry will be used to further discriminate and crack down on LGBTQ communities, drug users, and prostitutes.

"At hospitals or even with close friends, you never disclose your status because your whole life can be ruined," said Maxim Malyshev, who is HIV+ and works for one of the few NGOs that distributes clean needles. "There is too much stigma and discrimination not just on the personal level, but also in the legal sphere, such as the ban that prevents HIV+ parents from adopting children."

In other countries where there's severe discrimination against HIV+ people and individual privacy is not valued, name-based registers can be used for coercion. Last year, a man hacked into one Chinese register and then blackmailed over 500 HIV+ people, threatening to disclose their status to the public and employers unless he was paid sums upwards of $10,000. In China, an HIV+ diagnosis can lead to the loss of your job, refusal of medical treatment, or even exile from your town. This past year, Chinese authorities announced they intended to release the names of all the HIV+ college students, purportedly for the purpose of warning the rest of the student body.

HIV, a chronic but manageable disease, requires a constant life-long supply of antiretroviral therapy drugs, which work to allow the immune system to function. Anya Sarang, the president of the Andrey Rylkov Foundation, a Russian NGO that relies on foreign donations, told me she hopes Russia's HIV registry will help patients receive these medications. "This measure will hopefully improve the situation," she said. "Due to inadequate planning, we have interruptions of treatment every year and people suffer."

But others—like Natalia Sukhova, a project coordinator at EVA, one of the only non-profits in Russia that connects HIV+ women with medical support—are more ambivalent.

"It's a positive thing that there will be a general register of those who need treatment, but the control and protection of access to this register causes great doubts among all the people directly affected by HIV," Sukhova told me.

As of now, it's uncertain if those on the registry will even receive the medication they need, since the Russian Health Ministry announced last month that the country cannot afford to spend $1.2 billion that was allotted for HIV/AIDS relief. The money was intended to subsidize medication for those on the registry, as well as fund free HIV testing. With the refusal of political conservatives to support safe sex campaigns or needle exchange programs, and the disbandment of foreign funded NGOS, the situation looks dire.

The figures that the Health Ministry has released, which show that 824,000 HIV-positive people, likely vastly underestimates the real numbers of people living with HIV and are too afraid to get tested or to announce their status. Other reports suggest a million people have registered.

"The women that come into the clinic cannot even imagine that they may be at risk for HIV," said Sukhova. "Most women do not belong to any risk group, and don't know that the HIV epidemic in Russia has been spreading among the general population for a long time and that any woman of any age and social status could be at risk. Discrimination [against women] in Russia is a permanent phenomenon that affects everyone, but HIV-positive women even more."

Now many HIV+ women must face an ultimatum—either register and face potential discrimination or sacrifice potential aid and medications.

"I won't register," one woman who receives care through EVA told me. "If it wasn't for EVA, I don't know what I would do."

For years, the Russian Health Industry has warned that the HIV epidemic could escalate out of control by 2020 if treatment is not expanded, but the government has been slow to respond. Many government officials have claimed that evidence of an HIV epidemic is propaganda and part of a foreign "information war." At a meeting last year, the Russian Institute for Strategic Research (RISR) released a study showing that condoms were to blame for the rise of the disease.

"The contraceptive industry is interested in selling their products and encouraging under-aged people to engage in sex," said Igor Beloborodov, the co-author of the study. "The best form of protection is to be in a heterosexual family where both partners are loyal to each other."

Beloborodovs' comments echo the increasing influence of the Orthodox Church. Russian conservative politicians and executives are seeking to minimize safe sex education in schools.

"The safe sex campaigns are not allowed anymore," Sarang told me. "The conservative agenda in Russia focuses on promoting Russian Orthodox Church values, such as abstinence and monogamy, no sex before marriage, and other idealistic bullshit."

According to Sarang, much of the sparse government funding that has been allotted for HIV relief has been spent on counterproductive campaigns, such as a one $1 million initiative last year, which promoted the message that condoms don't protect against HIV.

"If the register leads to more money spent on treatment medication, rather than these useless campaigns, then it's a good thing," Sarang said.

However, some young women, such as sex workers, are unlikely to enroll in any type of register that will associate them with the highly stigmatized disease, even if it's the only way that they could receive life-saving medications. Currently, one-third of sex workers don't have the necessary paperwork to receive government aid and experience too much stigma and financial limitations prevent them from seeing private doctors. It's unclear how much a register will even help these women.

"I'm without much hope because every year more and more medication shortages occur and there are huge concerns related to the quality of the drugs that do exist," Malyshev told me. "There needs to be more assistance for those who have HIV, but many people will be afraid to enroll in a register that could help them. Those who will the most afraid of enrolling in a register, such as drug users and prostitutes, are also the least likely to engage in private alternative treatment options due to discrimination."

Follow Alex Kopel on Twitter.

On the morning of April the 26th, 1986, a power surge caused a reactor explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in what was then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union. The resulting blast released 100 times the level of radiation found at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, springing forth a putrid cloud of contamination so large that traces were discovered as far away as Ireland.

Radioactive miasma infected the air, the soil and residents, causing birth defects and thyroid cancer in infants, and inflicting future generations of livestock with grotesque mutations. Thirty years later, Chernobyl has become a morbid tourist attraction, a lesson on the extreme human cost of government hubris – and, to a group of around 140 people, home.

Photographer Esther Hessing and writer Sophieke Thurmer travelled to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (the area worst affected by radiation) to visit the "Samosely" – the last generation of a formerly thriving community. Many of the settlers are elderly, and covertly returned to their former homes against the advice of the Ukrainian government. Others settled out of desperation, squatting illegally in the thousands of abandoned structures, surviving on crops cultivated in contaminated soil.

(Photo: Esther Hessing)

In their new publication, Bound to the Ground, the pair document the day-to-day lives of the residents, collecting firsthand accounts of life in the Exclusion Zone, as well as the stories of the current employees at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (CNPP). I spoke to Esther about the project, and she explained the reason so many people have returned to this dangerous region: "First of all, this area has a long tradition of misery," she said. "In the 1930s there was hunger due to the regime of Stalin, and after that because of WWII. People were used to a tough life."

"People had little money and were depending on the harvest from their own land. The government moved most of these farmers to apartment blocks specially prepared for them in Kyiv. They decided they were better off living in a nuclear zone for only a short period of time, [rather] than growing old and miserable in Kyiv. They also believed that you are only able to be reunited with deceased loved ones if you are buried in the same place."

Chernobyl victims suffered terrible discrimination from the general populace in the years following the disaster. Self-settlers returning to the Exclusion Zone were often on foot, faced with a 130km trek from Kyiv. Understandably, they needed rest during their journey, but were often refused a place to sleep from residents who were afraid of becoming infected by radiation.

(Photo: Esther Hessing)

Esther described how even the children of the area were stigmatized: "The children of Pripyat were called 'Chernobyl-hogs'. This was an abusive word used in the years after the disaster to the children who were infected by radiation. These children were not allowed to play with other children. It only stopped when the city of Slavutych was finished in 1988, as many of these children were moved to this new town because their parents were working in the CNPP."

Upon arrival, Esther and Sophieke were surprised to discover that over 2,000 people were actively working at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Unlike the Samosely, who live off the land in abandoned villages outside Pripyat, the plant employees live in a specially built town called Slavutych.

"Many of the current employees are children of the employees who worked in the CNPP during the disaster," Esther explained. "They grew up in Pripyat, and now their children, who have grown up in Slavutych, are working in the power plant."

Esther Hessing

Lack of opportunities emerged as the driving force behind their employment: "There's not enough work in Ukraine, the unemployment rate is huge and the facilities for healthcare and children are generally poor," said Esther. "The CNPP still offers well-paid jobs, and Slavutych has good schools and nurseries. It's a safe town for raising children. It provides extra care facilities and attention for the consequences of exposure to radioactivity for first, second and third generation victims."

As well speaking to the Samosely and plant workers, the pair explored the abandoned town of Pripyat – a municipality that was originally constructed for the employees of the CNPP. Pripyat now stands a desolate ghost town, but was once devised as a "city of hope" by the government of Ukraine – hope pinned on a future powered by nuclear technology.

Without the detrimental impact of human intervention, nature has fought back for control of large sections of Pripyat, enveloping the grey structures and suburban streets with greenery and wildlife: "Instead of fear, horror, death and a lost country, we found a beautiful area with lots of flowers and trees, fertile soil and loving, hospitable people who gave us a warm welcome every time we dropped by unannounced," said Esther.

(Photo: Esther Hessing)

"We found a community who still works on a decommissioned power plant with a strong belief in the future. We found people brave enough to work in this dangerous place just to make the world a bit safer. They showed us the remarkable strength of mankind and how strong nature really is."

Any future Samolesly have now effectively been banned by government policy, with an order introduced that prevents any new settlers to the area for 1,000 years – once the current residents have all died.

Preserving this secretive and temporary community was the underlying inspiration behind Esthers's work: "It's important to tell this story, because the self-setters are all very old," she said. "As the babushkas in the [Exclusion] Zone continue to age and no new residents are allowed to move into the area, we expect that, in ten years from now, their stories and memories will be forgotten. We wanted to tell their stories and show the faces of the villagers before they fall silent."

Esther Hessing

'Bound to the Ground' is available now from The Eriskay Connection .

Check out Marlene Krause's website, webstore, and Tumblr.

Mental illness is a pervasive part of our culture and conversation, and yet finding a photo that accurately represents a concept as complicated as depression is about as easy as, I don't know, finding a magical cure for it.

We've all seen photos of tear-streaked eyeliner and handfuls of pills used to signal crisis situations, but these images totally miss the everyday internal battles that lead us to those dark places.

Vancouver photographer Jackie Dives—who, full disclosure, has taken photos for VICE—is putting on a photo show next month that looks back on her own teenage struggle with anxiety and depression and the curious way those conditions tend to hide from the view of a camera lens. She recently dusted off a closet full of never-developed film rolls, and despite a thousand internal voices telling her the shots probably weren't any good (hiii inner demons), got the entire set developed all at once.

Dives says it's taken her decades just to muster the courage to confront the photos and the period of her life they represent. "I always felt this deep, deep wonder about them. And also this very deep feeling of a gap in my artistic profile," she told VICE. 'I had no idea what was in there, but it felt like pieces missing from my career, or my photography journey."

The resulting show could be taken as a metaphor for mental illness itself—something that by nature remains unseen and difficult to share. Even when the outward appearances look like road trips and bush parties, Dives' memory suggests it's unwise to try to forget depression is there.

"There's no individual photo that depicts anxiety or depression, but as the person who took them, I know what's going on," she said. "So much of my experience has been pretending not to be depressed, instead of figuring out how to live with it."

"I know there's one picture of my car in a motel parking lot. It's taken at night. I know that night I showed my friend Claire I had tried to cut my wrists the day before," Dives told VICE. "When I look at it, I know that, but it has to be explained."

Dives likens sharing those images and their backstory to therapy. "I feel a huge sense of release, like I'm finally processing them in a way, and now I'm letting them go into the public. I could have just developed them and kept them in the closet, but I feel for me, part of it is to now show them to the world."

For event details go here.

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Clyde Stubblefield, the creator of the most sampled beat in hip-hop history and long-time drummer for the James Brown Band, has died at the age of 73. Rolling Stone reports that Stubblefield died Saturday and that the cause of death was kidney failure.

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1943, Stubblefield played professionally as a teenager before working with Eddie Kirkland and Otis Redding in the early 1960s. His career took off in 1965 when he joined John "Jabo" Starks as one of a handful of drummers in the James Brown Band. Brown quickly settled on Starks and Stubblefield as the band's percussive backbone and the two would go on to lay down the beats in many of the Godfather of Soul's most memorable tracks.

One track in particular, however, has cemented Stubblefield's legacy. The 1970 single "Funky Drummer," with its syncopated break, went on to become the most sampled track in hip-hop, serving as the beat for Public Enemy's "Fight the Power," N.W.A's "Fuck tha Police," De la Soul's "The Magic Number" and Run-D.M.C.'s "Run's House." On top of the beat's near ever-presence in hip-hop, the "Funky Drummer" beat also found its way onto the Powerpuff Girls theme and Kenny G's "G-Bop." According to WhoSampled.com, it's been lifted into over 1000 tracks.

Read more on Noisey.

Each year, Phoenix, Arizona hosts the International UFO Congress, the largest annual gathering dedicated to the study of this phenomenon, otherwise known as ufology. One of the most striking things I noticed while speaking with attendees at this year's congress was their insistence on the reality of UFOs, even before I had expressed any doubt. Ufologists always seem to be on the defensive, a conversational tic that is undoubtedly learned from years of speaking with skeptics.

In other words, ufologists will always be the first ones to let you know that they don't believe in UFOs, they know they are real. But the gap between belief and knowledge is a large one, a chasm that separates the scientific and the pseudoscientific. Since ufology became something of an organized field of study, albeit a fringe one, in the 1950s, the overwhelming majority of the scientific community hasn't hesitated to label the field as pseudoscientific, much to the ire of ufologists.

Although the US government has launched formal inquiries into the UFO phenomenon, little has changed in the last six decades to indicate that ufology will ever be anything more than pseudoscientific. But Bob Davis, a retired neuroscientist and self-described "UFO agnostic," wants to change that. I caught up with him at the International UFO Congress to find out why he thinks ufology can become a serious scientific discipline.

See the conversation on MOTHERBOARD.

Swedish people have taken to social media to express their confusion over President Donald Trump's allusion to a terror attack in their country that didn't actually happen.

"You look at what's happening," Trump told the crowd at a campaign-like rally in Melbourne, Florida on Saturday night. "We've got to keep our country safe. You look at what's happening in Germany, you look at what's happening last night in Sweden."

"Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden," the president continued. "They took in large numbers. They're having problems like the never thought possible. You look what's happening in Brussels. You look at what's happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris."

Except, as Swedes pointed out on social media, nothing bad had happened the previous night in Sweden. "Sweden? Terror attack?" wrote former Prime Minister Carl Bildt on Twitter. "What has he been smoking? Questions abound."

Read the rest of this article on VICE NEWS.

Just like Kylie Jenner's ass and Salt Bae memes, I can't get away from slime videos on Instagram.

Everytime I open my Explore page I'm met with videos of teens unwrapping, poking, squishing, pulling and prodding homemade slime. It took only one look at blue cotton candy goo to get me hooked and the next thing I knew I was following every account I could find, feeling the tension exit my body as I watched people pull apart foam-filled crackling slime.

The trend started over the summer in Thailand, when teens began posting video tutorials on how to make the stuff by mixing water, food colouring, glue and borax powder (a chemical used to kill cockroaches). The result, reminiscent of 90s toys like Creepy Crawlers and Nickelodeon Gak was then played with on camera, often adding extra ingredients like foam and glitter to give it a satisfying crunch. The results are strangely euphoric to watch, and the best slime videos feature sounds and visuals that can trigger Autonomous Sensory Meridian Responses (ASMR), a tingling sensation that starts on the scalp and moves down the spine.

Today, some of the more "slime famous" accounts have followers in the hundreds of thousands. Kids as young as 13 sell their products through e-commerce websites like Etsy and Mercari, receiving dozens of daily orders and raking in hundreds of dollars a week. People's love of goo is helping young entrepreneurs across the world pay for gas, contact lenses and college tuition. I love social media.

Thankfully, for the sake of our entertainment, the slime community isn't without it's weirdos and overzealous fans. The average comment on a slime or foam video ranges from "living for the crunch" and "imma fkn BUST A NUT." Nice nails and hands are one of the most important features of a good slime video and can cause fans to beg for "face reveals." Accounts dedicated to calling out drama and flaws within the slime community recently sprung up, and users have been known to beef over the names and credits of certain slimes. There's still a debate as to whether or not slime has a sexual connotation—some people I showed videos to expressed arousal, not relaxation.  

I wanted to find out why we love to watch people touch goo, so I reached out to some of Instagram's most popular slime accounts.

Alyssa J., @craftyslimecreator, 157K followers

VICE: Where are you from and how old are you?
Alyssa: I am from Ontario, Canada and I am in high school.  

What is it about these accounts that people find so satisfying?
There are many reasons why I believe that people find these videos satisfying, one of them being "autonomous sensory meridian response" or ASMR. I am not an expert, but these videos help to calm people and help with anxiety. Crunchy floam, bubbly slime, glossy slime, all different slimes have different sounds that people enjoy. Also, a lot of videos can be visually appealing, for me nothing is more satisfying than mixing colouring or pigments into slime. I love seeing the final product and I think other people do as well.  

What's the weirdest comment you can remember receiving on one of your videos?
One thing I find strange is when people comment on my breathing because I have to breathe. Another thing that I find strange is when people make inappropriate, sexual, non-PG rated comments about the sound of slime.

Prim, @sparklygoo, 75.7K followers

VICE: Where are you from and how old are you?
Prim: I'm from Vancouver, Canada. I'm 22.

When did you notice the trend beginning?
I came across a slime video that's owned by a Thai slime account. I was fascinated by the way they look, I wanted to make purchases but I couldn't find them in the store anywhere not even online so I decided to try to make them as an art project over the summer. Thailand started this trend long before people of North America, they're the true trendsetter there's no doubt about that. I started to see the trend in North America since an art account @lovewatts started reposting these thai slime videos.

Where do you see your slime account going?
I am a huge supporter of any form of creativity, I have little kids messaging me they started making slime because they were inspired by my videos, knowing this is absolutely makes me happy. For this reason, I'm in the process of setting up a website dedicated to slime related things and my products along with tutorial videos to provide a platform for those who eager to make their own.

Theresa Nguyen, @rad.slime, 144K followers

VICE: How old are you?
Theresa: I'm 13.

How much slime do you have at your house right now?
I have about 50 different kinds.

What is the average price of your slime and how many orders do you receive?
A 4 oz is roughly $6.50 and an 8 oz is roughly $13. I normally restock on Saturdays with about 30-50 slimes and I make about $300-400 each time.

Are your parents aware of your account and what do they think of it?
Yes, my parents are highly aware of it. They think is a good thing that I sell slime. This money is going to help me pay for college.

Have you ever been in an argument with another slime creator?
Yes, but it was private and lowkey. There is an account called @slimeconfessions or something like that, that disrupts the community and creates lots of drama.

Desire Colio, @slimeclouds, 48.2K followers

VICE: Where are you from and how old are you?
Desire: I am from San Diego, California and I'm 23 years old.

What is it about slime accounts that people find so satisfying?
For me, at least, it is the sounds and the softness of the material that makes it so satisfying. It is like a much better version of a stress ball. It helps you with nerves, anxiety, stress, etc., and it is so calming and relaxing as well.

Do you think there's real money in slime?
I wouldn't call this a stable job, it's just a way to bring more money in especially
for me since I am a broke college student and this really does help me out with bills and
necessities at the moment.

What exactly do your slime sales cover in your budget?
Mainly my car insurance, gas, and car repairs. Basically I mostly use it for my car. But I also use it to pay off my contact lenses and then of course little things like food, entertainment, etc. But very little at a time, I don't make that much a week so I have to keep track of it.

Casey Duke, @fruityslimefactory, 18.3K followers

VICE: Where are you from and how old are you?
Casey: I'm from Florida and I'm 14-years-old.

You call yourself the "creator of pop rocks slime", what is that?
Pop rocks slime is clear slime with little blue fish pebbles inside to make a pop rocks sort of crunch.

Do you get any sort of extra recognition for inventing a slime?
If you start a trend in slime, such as 'fishbowl' created by @anathemaslime, you will get a lot more followers. She became slime famous over that.

Is it weird to be known for making slime?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Some people think it's really cool, but other times when I say I have a slime account, it's kind of embarrassing. I mean I am playing with glue and borax hahah.

Aristotle K, @spiffyslimes, 74.4K followers

VICE: Where are you from and how old are you?
Aristotle: I'm from a small town in Wisconsin and I'm 18 years old.

Why did you start making slime?
I began making slime as a way to relieve stress. I was in a really rough place with school, money, housing situations, family stuff, and for some reason out of all the things to latch onto for coping, I chose slime.

I noticed "slime review" and "slime fan pages", do you have any crazy fans?
No crazy fans. Although, I do get a ton of compliments about my hands and there is an overwhelming amount of people pressuring me to do a face reveal.

Will you do it?
I do have a private personal account where I post very few pictures of my face. I let people know what that username is and moderate who I let follow me. As of now I'm a bit uncomfortable with sharing my face directly to 85,000+ followers. Perhaps someday in the future I will do a more proper face reveal, but for the months ahead of me, I don't see myself doing that.

Do you think there's a sexual element or one of physical attraction in slime?
I think the vast majority of the compliments I receive don't come from a place of sexual attraction. Although, I have received blatantly sexual direct messages from one anonymous user recently. But I'm pretty certain they were just a troll. Either way, I take them as compliments and don't mind too much.

Conor McKeirnan, @theslimeyshop, 158K follower

VICE: Where are you from and how old are you?
Conor: I am from Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania and I just turned 15 years old.

Describe the slime community.
The slime community is a pretty chill and low key super popular trend that is constantly growing. It's such a big community in fact, there are "slime drama" accounts or "slime confession" accounts that post drama about slime accounts. Most of the slime community is chill though.

What's the weirdest thing you've seen go down within the community?
I think the weirdest thing that I've ever seen go down with the slime community is when there are arguments over who made up this type of slime first or if the person should give credits to the "creator" or not. I personally don't really care because it's slime but it happens all the time.

Ryan Joseph, @SlimeCaptain, 75K followers

VICE: Where are you from and how old are you?
Ryan: I am from a small town in New Jersey and I'm 16.

Why did you start making slime?
I started making slime because I wanted to provide people with the same excitement and interest that I felt when I first fell in love with slime videos. As you watch slime videos, you become more relaxed and a lot of stress is released through the satisfying auditory sounds. Slime serves as a calming method that aids many in coping with the stresses of life, even if you only get to see a 60 second video.

Do you think there's real money in slime?
Absolutely. I've made a large amount of profit in a short period of time that sprouted from selling my slime. Each month I donate half of my profits to St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, as Cancer has been present in my family. With an abundance of money, it is my responsibility to spread some good in the world and set an example for many.

Kaitlinh Nguyen, @SlimeSherbet, 69.2K followers

VICE: Where are you from and how old are you?
Kaitlinh: I'm originally from Texas, but now live in the East Coast. I am 13.

How much money have you made so far?
I'm not sure the exact amount but it's somewhere over $1,000.

Do you have any crazy fans?
Yep. There are definitely some out there that beg me for my phone number and ask for my address.

Bella, @theslimenation, 92.6K followers

VICE: Where are you from and how old are you?
Bella: I'm 14 and I'm from the US.

How much slime do you have right now?
I currently have around 600 ounces of slime made that I'm getting ready to sell.

What is the average price of your slime and how many orders do you receive?
My average prices for slime depend on the number of ounces. The biggest size of slime I offer is eight ounce which I would normally sell for around $10. The number of orders I receive would depend on how many and how often I Restock my slime, but if i were to guess I'd say anywhere from 100-300 orders monthly.

What's the weirdest thing you've seen go down in the slime community?
There are a lot of weird things that go down in the slime community. A few examples would be people poking slime with their toes, adding food or grass to slime, or making drama pages "exposing" slime creators.

(Top photo: The shipping container cranes at Felixstowe Port in Suffolk. Photo: Chris Radburn PA Archive/PA Images)

The simplest way to distinguish between the "weird" and the "eerie", the late Mark Fisher writes, is to think about the difference between presence and absence. Weirdness is produced by the presence of "that which does not belong". It shouldn't, or couldn't, exist – and yet there it is. Think of the montage techniques of Surrealist art or the fact of Donald Trump's Presidency.

Eeriness, however, is produced when something is absent: "We find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human." Think of an empty housing estate, its residents "decanted" by the council to make way for luxury flats, cranes rotating silently above. Weirdness abounds at the edge between worlds; eeriness radiates from the ruins of lost ones.

Fisher's short book of essays, The Weird and The Eerie, is developed from arguments he made on his iconic K-Punk blog, and looks at how the weird and the eerie work their way through popular culture. Like so much of his writing, it is lucid and revelatory, taking literature, music and cinema we're familiar with and effortlessly disclosing its inner secrets.

The first chapter displays his profound sensitivity to the architecture that structures the sci-fi/horror world. Weirdness makes itself known through an Escheresque array of doors, portals, entrances and exits, because it has to do with "that which lies beyond standard perception". Fisher leads us through H.G. Wells' short story "The Door in The Wall", which is about a politician who becomes fatally obsessed with a green door in West Kensington, discovering a surrealist paradise of panthers and magic technology on the other side. This idea of weirdness-as-transition is developed in a discussion of David Lynch's rabbit-warren set design in Inland Empire and the simulated small-town America of Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint. Even if you're not familiar with the texts he references, he evokes their moods so well that you don't feel lost.

One of the best essays is on post-punk band The Fall, whose music is "grotesque" in the proper sense, synthesising human and non-human forms into a gruesome whole. The Fall create a "tissue of allusions", singing about "men with butterflies on their faces" and making a thick montage of literary references and self-referential sounds, like the hiss of recording cassettes. In a memorable interpretation, he describes their 1980 album Grotesque (After the Gramme) as an act of counterfactual history. Fisher asks:

"What if rock 'n' roll had emerged from the industrial heartlands of England rather than the Mississippi Delta? The rockabilly on 'Container Drivers' and 'Fiery Jack' is slowed down by meat pies and gravy, its dreams of escape fatally poisoned by pints of bitter and cups of greasy-spoon tea."

What's fundamentally weird about The Fall – what doesn't belong about them – isn't just the form and content of their music, but their very existence: according to "official bourgeois culture and its categories, a group like The Fall – working class and experimental, popular and modernist – could not and should not exist". Here, weirdness is an act of existential defiance against the idea that sophisticated art is only for elites.

The second chapter is on the eerie, which, for Fisher, is fundamentally about "the problem of agency". A bird's cry is eerie "if there is a feeling that there is something more in the cry than a mere animal reflex or biological mechanism". Stonehenge and the statues at Easter Island are eerie because we're not quite sure who made them and what set of beliefs made them meaningful at the time. This leads to the following thought: "Confronted with Easter Island or Stonehenge, it is hard not to speculate what the relics of our culture will look like when the semiotic systems in which they are embedded have fallen away". The archetypical image of this is when Charlton Heston discovers the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes – it was Earth all along! Eeriness estranges us from the political settlement we call reality; it allows us to see it as temporary and changeable.

One purpose of radical politics and writing is to de-naturalise society, to show that it is governed by artificial forces. Fisher implies that the weird and the eerie can play a role in this. He writes that "capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, [it] exerts more influence that any allegedly substantial entity".

As capital migrates across the world it leaves traces of the eerie, both in its abandoned factories and the new, postmodern forms it takes. This becomes clear in Fisher's haunting description of the Felixstowe shipping container port in Suffolk: a vast automated system of "inorganic clangs and clanks". Observing it from the surrounding countryside, he notices an "eerie sense of silence" despite the noise, since "what's missing [is] any trace of language or sociability".

As for the weird, in traditional fantasy novels magical worlds like Middle Earth or Narnia operate according to a relatable realism. In contrast, the weird fiction of David Lynch or H P Lovecraft makes all worlds seem unrealistic by "exposing their instability, their openness to the outside". To be confronted by the weird is to realise that "the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete" when it comes to understanding the world. It is an exhilarating feeling of newness, not unlike revolution.

Fisher – who passed away last month – is best known for his hugely influential book Capitalist Realism, which is about how capitalism, and especially neoliberalism, tries to exhaust the ability to imagine coherent alternatives to it. As such, he often returned to the question of the future in his work. What are the conditions for thinking beyond the "eroded present" that capitalism gives us? How might we know when something different is around the corner?

These questions hang over the final essay in The Weird and The Eerie, which looks at Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock. In the book, a group of girls at a repressive private school in Australia go on a day-trip to the desert. During a picnic, four of the students – Miranda, Edith, Marion and Irma – decide to climb Hanging Rock, "a geological relic from deep time, a time that preceded the arrival of human beings by many millennia". On top of the rock they realise they have crossed some sort of metaphysical boundary and fall into a deep sleep. When they wake, Marion is overcome by the desire to get rid of all her "absurd garments", and some of them cast their restrictive corsets aside. The clothes don't fall to the ground, however, "but float in mid-air at the side of the Rock". Marion and Miranda later pass through a "hole in space", which leads to an otherworldly terrain, and never return.

The mystery is unexplained, but what really interests Fisher is their act of crossing the threshold. The girls have to disavow worldly attachments, their restrictive clothes, to pass through, but not all of them muster the courage to do so. The "delirious allure" of Hanging Rock is precisely this enchanting, yet threatening, promise of something radically different to the way things are.

The future will be weird; the future will be eerie; and embracing it will involve a transcendental shock with something extraordinary.

@yohannk

Mark Fisher's 'The Weird and The Eerie' is out now on Repeater Books. There is a memorial fund for his family here.

(All photos: Chris Bethell)

The good thing about tattoos is that you get to keep them forever. They're not like gloves – you're never going to lose one and have to buy a whole new set. Once they're there, they're there to stay. Of course, this also means that you have decades for what seemed like a good idea at the time to morph into what now seems like an absolutely terrible idea. Like getting "SIT HERE" tattooed on your upper lip, or a tribal tattoo literally anywhere on your body.

Because Needles & Pins – a new Grace Neutral-hosted show about body modification – comes out on VICELAND this week, we thought we'd go along to the Tattoo Collective convention at the Truman Brewery, east London this weekend to ask people about their most ridiculous tattoos.

Mark, 39

VICE: What's your tattoo?
Mark: The tattoo is a Friday the 13th owl, which I got for £50. The guy stuck it on me the wrong way around and tattooed it back to front. I didn't realise until I looked into the mirror six months later.

When did you get it?
About five or six years ago.

Is there any meaning behind the owl?
It's just off one of those Friday the 13th flash sheets. So it's got the number 13 written in the owl, but it's the wrong way around.

Max, 28

What's the tattoo?
Max: I've got "FUCK LIFE" tattooed on my arm.

Okay, and why did you get that?
I don't know, I just kind of hated life at the time. I was pretty heavily into drugs, kind of miserable, kind of on a downer, got "FUCK LIFE" tattooed on me. And then a little while later I met my lovely girlfriend, sorted myself out, and now I don't really hate life any more. Life's pretty good.

Any regrets about it?
I don't know. I don't really regret getting it, because at the time I did hate life. I maybe regret getting it on my arm because it's so visible there, but it's black on black so you can't really see it.
Max's girlfriend, Penelope: I guess it's a reminder of how times have changed. Things are better now.
Max: Yeah, so it's still got a certain charm to it.

Collette, 21

What's the tattoo?
Colette: 30 Seconds to Mars – the band with Jared Leto in. They have these four symbols. The first is meant to be a three and a zero put together. The second symbol is meant to be a clock going backwards. The third symbol – the gaps in it mean two. The last one is Mars with its moons. I've been a fan of them since I was 12, and I saw a girl on Facebook put up that she had a tattoo gun and asked if anyone wanted tattoos doing. I thought 'fuck it' and went to get a tattoo from her. Unfortunately it's done really badly. I hate Jared Leto, but I still like the band. If the placement was fine I'd get it done over, but the placement is terrible, so I'll probably get it covered up.

Hannah, 25

What's the tattoo?
Hannah: Peanut butter and jelly on my leg. I have no idea why I got it.

What was going through your mind at the time?
You know what? It was just a really random, spur of the moment kind of thing. I don't even like toast. That's the best thing about it. I don't even like peanut butter and I don't like jelly. I just thought it was funny.

Any regrets?
No. The sillier the better.

Sophie, 27

What's your most ridiculous tattoo?
Sophie: It's my Randy Marsh tattoo. My friend and I both have his face from the South Park episode "Crème Fraîche".

Why?
We love Randy Marsh. We just love him.

How long ago did you get it?
About three years ago.

Any regrets?
Absolutely not. He's my favourite tattoo.

Natalie, 25

What's the tattoo?
Natalie: It's the signature of the Cigarette Smoking Man from the X Files.

How did this come about?
I met him at Comic Con. He was quite frightened because he's quite old. He had a lovely young 20-year-old Polish wife. He signed my ankle and I ran straight to a tattooist to get it permanently on me.

What do your friends think of it?
Everyone thinks it's silly, but I love the Cigarette Smoking Man so much. I have a doll of him, I have a signed autograph, I have lots of X Files memorabilia and I think it's great! No regrets.

Sam, 27

So what's your tattoo?
Sam: It's Drake crying. Yeah.

And why did you get Drake crying permanently etched into your skin?
Because it was drawn up in the tattoo shop and I thought it was pretty funny.

How long ago did you get it?
Last year, at the Brighton tattoo convention. I just saw it in the flash book and thought I needed it.

Do you reckon Drake would like it?
Yeah, I reckon so. Why not?

Luke, 28

What's the tattoo?
Luke: It's a chicken soup. Noodle flavour, I think. I don't know.

And does it mean anything?
No, not really – it was just a spur of the moment convention tattoo.

How long have you had it?
Two to three years now.

Any regrets?
Yeah, I hate it. I want it blacked out.

Thanks, Luke.

'Needles & Pins' airs on VICELAND, Sky channel 153, every Wednesday at 10PM, from the 22nd of February. Watch the trailer here.

@CBethell_photo

More on VICE:

We Spoke to the Teenager Who Got Mia Khalifa's Face Tattooed On His Body

10 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask a Person With a Face Tattoo

This Canadian Model Has More Face Tattoos Than You

When model Bella Hadid made her way down the runway for the finale of Prabal Gurung's fall/winter 2017 show, she wasn't wearing one of the designer's delicate sheer tops or draped in a luxe intarsia fur coat from the collection. Instead, Hadid sported a white T-shirt with the words "The Future Is Female" emblazoned across the front in black block letters. She was followed by a chorus of other models who wore similar politically-driven tees with slogans like "Nevertheless, She Persisted" (an ode to Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren) and "Our Minds, Our Bodies, Our Power," while John Lennon's "Imagine" played in the background.

"Today, I bring to you the women who inspire me―those made of strength, inner beauty, graceful femininity, and vigilance," Gurung wrote in his notes for the NYFW show, which took place on February 11. "We are awake, alive, and inspired to celebrate women from all walks of life. This is the time to speak our conviction and use our voices to invoke change. This is the upside of the downside."

Gurung was just one of many who used the runway to get political during Fashion Week. From designers like Becca McCharen of Chromat who closed her show with a performance that featured UNIIQU3 rapping "Fuck Donald Trump" to LRS Studio who printed phrases like "No Ban, No Wall" on their underwear, it was hard to find a fashion show that didn't offer some commentary on the current political climate. But this season many designers seemed especially eager to speak out for women's rights.

Designer Mara Hoffman, who was one of the more than two million people who took part in the worldwide Women's March last month, invited the protest's four co-chairs to open her fall/winter 2017 presentation. Dressed in head-to-toe black, Brooklyn-based fashion designer Bob Bland, social justice activist Tamika Mallory, social justice advocate Carmen Perez, and civil rights activist Linda Sarsour recited parts of the Women's March mission statement along with empowering quotes from activist and author Maya Angelou, before models and contemporary dancers showcased Hoffman's colorful printed dresses and geometric monochrome outerwear.

"In a time when so many people and so many creatives like myself felt a little lost and unsure of what to do, these women came together and turned to action, leading the largest human rights protest in history. I am deeply inspired by them, and the myriad of fearless activists in the world, and all the women that they stand for," Hoffman told me over email when I asked her about including activists in her show.

Ahead of New York Fashion Week, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) announced that it would be teaming up with Planned Parenthood, an organization that has been directly threatened under the Trump administration, despite the fact that it provides critical health care to millions of Americans each year. Trump's administration has already taken action to defund the organization because in addition to cancer screenings and HIV testing, it offers abortions.

The CFDA, the trade association behind the bi-annual NYFW, passed out large pink pins to attendees that said "Fashion Stands with Planned Parenthood," which were seen sprinkled throughout the crowds at each show. It also pledged to donate $5.00 (with an aggregate maximum of $5,000) to Planned Parenthood for each image of the "pin that is shared on Instagram with the hashtag "#IStandWithPP."

The group urged the more than 40 designers who were participating in NYFW to wear the pin on their final walk or place it on one or more models in their show, but many took their support for Planned Parenthood much further.

Jonathan Simkhai lined the front row benches at his show with white T-shirts emblazoned with the words "Feminist AF" and a note that explained that $5 for each seat in the house would be donated to Planned Parenthood.

"I am fortunate to be surrounded by many strong and powerful women in my work and personal life. I was very moved by the energy and emotion I felt when I went to the Women's March in DC and I wanted to show my support and solidarity," said Simkhai to me over email. He is also selling the $95 tees online with all profits going to the organization.

Designer Adam Lippes showed his support for women ahead of his presentation. He had models dressed in his silk floral skirts and pantsuits pose near Washington Square Park holding colorful protest signs that read "My Body, My Choice," "Girl Power," and "Adam Lippes Stands with Planned Parenthood."

The brand MILLY, known for its contemporary womenswear designs worn by stars like Beyoncé and Solange Knowles, also gave out T-shirts to attendees that said things like "Steinem AF," a nod to author and feminist icon Gloria Steinem.

"During the time I was designing this collection, the world changed dramatically. The elections left me feeling defeated, especially as a woman. I now feel like I have to fight hard for all sorts of rights I once took for granted…" wrote Michelle Smith, the creative director of MILLY on Instagram.

Hoffman shared similar feelings urgency to me when we talked on the phone, especially the desire to use her fashion as a platform to make a difference.

"We can see that making noise, that protesting, that coming together, can create real change, so it felt right to somehow speak to women's rights, and to lend my platform to these powerful leaders," Hoffman explained to me. "Under this administration, humans are not being treated humanely. Women's rights are at risk and at the hands of people who have treated women more like political currency than people. There are so many that have put themselves on the line for my rights, how can I not use my voice to do the same?"

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Lead Photo: A model walks the runway at the Prabal Gurung show during New York Fashion Week at Skylight Clarkson Sq. (Photo by Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

Nobody in their right mind can deny that the gay community has a problem with racism, or that queer men of color are often subject to prejudice stemming from the intersection of their racial, sexual and/or gender identity. That racism takes many forms—from the insidiousness of Grindr rapport like "no Asians, no Blacks" to softer forms of bigotry—but it exists, it's prevalent, and it's not something that can be dismantled overnight.

One way to combat it, though, is to spread insight and awareness into the experiences of queer men of color. And being queer filmmakers in New York City, Abdool Corlette and Adam Vazquez decided to use their skills to produce a web series that simply puts the stories of other queer men of color on screen. The result—Other Boys NYC—which premieres today on the queer media network SLAY TV—is a potent antidote to mainstream gay media, which often fails to adequately include and represent the experiences of LGBTQ minorities.

Shot against bright-colored backgrounds—the better to show off the skin tones of subjects and celebrate their beauty—Other Boys NYC is a documentary series consisting of 50 interviews with queer and trans men of color. With the intimacy of a direct address to the camera, Corlette and Vazquez hope to encourage audiences to listen to these stories with an open mind. They spoke with VICE about the renewed relevance of truly diverse onscreen representation, the earnestness at the heart of their project, and why you can never be woke enough.

VICE: This project has been in the works for a while. Did you ever think it would feel as timely as it does being released in 2017?
Adam Vazquez: We started filming last February, and we've been filming all the way until now. Trump was still making his way through the primaries then. We didn't realize that throughout the year, somehow the events of the world—like the Orlando shooting, and even when we filmed after the election—had made their way into the documentary. It did become a subject. Not at all times, but it definitely influenced some of our interviews. Which was interesting, because Other Boys almost became documentation of what 2016 was for our community.

And you can see that. For example, in Hari's interview, with him talking about how Trump's rise merely exposed something many (be they black, Muslim, women) already knew about this country.
Abdool Corlette: And I think that, also, the LGBTQ community needs to do a lot of soul searching. Many times, gay men feel exempt from certain things, and treat their Otherness as permission to get away with bad behavior, whether it be racism, sexism, or xenophobia. And the fact is that the LGBTQ community folds into the larger community. You know, many people in New York like to point their fingers down at North Carolina, like "You're terrible!" but we could literally turn on a dating app in any neighborhood and see racism. I hope as a community we take the time to chat amongst ourselves about the places we grew up, the things we learned from our communities and our families, how that's negatively contributed to the situation that we're in right now. It didn't just come out of thin air.

Vazquez: I'll tell you: everyone comes into this studio with a specific thing in their mind and heart that they want to put out there. I can't tell you how many people finally, after an hour and a half of talking, said, "Well, there's one thing I want to talk about." And that one thing becomes the final five minute interview that we edit down. I think the craziest thing was when we started interviewing strangers, people who we didn't know at all, who came to us on a leap of faith and courage, to just put it all out there. That profoundly changed both of us.

I can imagine, especially as so many of these stories really do run the gamut and offer insights into so many different family units, cultures, religions.
Corlette: There's this idea that certain cultures are very extreme or homophobic, and that Americans are somehow better than the world when it comes to acceptance—or, no, I'll use the world tolerance. And that's just not true. That's another reason why it's important to show more than just one person from one culture. It was very important to show that a person's story isn't defined by just rejection or by trauma. Like everything in life, people's stories transform and evolve. That was important too. Painting a person's story not just for the purpose of a sound bite.

Vazquez: What makes this project so meaningful is that we're really exploring identity, which is the most basic truth about ourselves. We see ourselves in this vessel that we are, and this is our body, this is where I was born, who I am. We're exploring those things. And their growth. It's really important to hear those stories because you really want to understand who people are today. And that's what we really wanted to explore with this documentary. Also to show that the sheer fact is that queer men of color are underrepresented. We're simply not there. We're just putting them out there for people to see.

And in that sense, the issue of representation which was clearly at the core of Other Boys NYC feels even more pressing. Could you talk a bit about what it means to put the spotlight, as it were, on these "other boys"?
Corlette: A lot of people can watch the Stonewall movie, or turn on Queer as Folk, or watch Looking, and I could be in a room with two white guys who see something completely different from what I'm seeing. I don't know how to show people that. How do you tell a person how it feels to never see yourself on TV? How do you make someone feel the way we feel when we go see Moonlight? I get chills just thinking about it. Because the validation and power in seeing your story, that's incredible. What's tragic is that people of color still have to experience what I experienced when I watched Moonlight. And that a lot of our white peers take for granted representation and seeing themselves on screen.

Vazquez: So what we're saying is "Stand up! Rise up!" Really. We're going to tell the world who we are. Because we have to take action.

Corlette: But we also want to tell people that sometimes they need to just listen. Somehow, a lot of times when we engage in sensitive conversations, it becomes about "Why I'm a good white person." I feel like a lot of people have a hard time, or get defensive when talking about how systems in place are inherently racist or what privilege looks like. Because of that defensiveness, it's sometimes hard to break through and make serious connection and change. At least I hope that if people have a hard time listening in person, they can at least watch these videos and listen by themselves. It's not about having a conversation about how "Oh, I'm a good ally." All of us, we all have to do that, we have to listen and learn. No one is woke enough, you know? You'll never be totally woke. There's always room to learn something new.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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Three years ago, after sustaining multiple facial injuries during a bad car accident, Emily Ashcroft, went to see an ear, nose, and throat specialist about a broken nose that had healed wrong.

After an awkward interaction with clinic staff bewildered by the male name on her insurance card—she had yet to legally change her name after transitioning to female—Ashcroft says she was seen by the doctor for an endoscopy. "You could just see he was very standoffish, and... didn't want to approach me," she said. The doctor put on a face mask, glasses, and gloves to prepare for the procedure, but just as he was about to begin, he abruptly stopped and walked across the room for another pair of gloves. Ashcroft asked why.

"'It's purely a precaution,'" she said he told her, "'in a situation where I don't understand what the potential repercussions might be for me.'"

"That was upsetting," she said, still incredulous. Afterward, she explained to the doctor how marginalized and upset his actions made her feel. He apologized, but she never saw that doctor again.

Experiences like Ashcroft's are strikingly common among transgender people. In a 2015 survey conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), 33 percent of transgender people who saw a physician in the past year reported a negative health care interaction related to their gender, which could include harassment, being denied treatment, and encountering unknowledgeable practitioners. Twenty-three percent of those surveyed reported having avoided seeing a doctor due to fear of mistreatment. And according to another NCTE report, issued in 2011 in collaboration with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, those bad experiences lead to avoidance of care and, ultimately, poorer health among transgender people.

Advocates for transgender health agree that the solution lies in producing more doctors who are "trans-competent," which translates at a minimum to treating transgender patients with the same compassion and curiosity brought to all patient encounters. And while medical educators have developed formal benchmarks for trans-competence in practice, the reality is that the way medical students are educated is taking time to catch up to those guidelines.

According to a 2011 survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, only 40 of 132 surveyed medical school deans reported that their curricula included content relating to gender transition. Hospitals and health care systems began to recognize that "you can't deliver [equitable care to transgender people] if you don't teach on these issues," said Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, who directs the Program for LGBTQ Health at Vanderbilt University.

Leaders in medical education noticed the void in resources to guide medical schools in providing that training, said Dr. Laura Castillo-Page, who directs diversity and inclusion initiatives at the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC). In response, the AAMC released a publication in 2014 aimed at its constituency of 147 American and Canadian medical schools and 400 teaching hospitals. It was intended to serve as a resource for medical educators seeking to change the way students learn to care for patients who are LGBTQ, gender nonconforming and born with differences of sex development.

An AAMC spokesperson said in December 2016 that in a review of 2015-2016 medical school curricula, only 30 of 144 schools included transgender-related material in their curricula. The number isn't entirely comparable to the figure from the 2011 study, in part due to the inclusion of different schools in the earlier study and its reliance on self-report by medical school deans.

And while the numbers do not seem to indicate a positive trend toward curricular inclusion of educational content related to transgender health, Ehrenfeld said there are other indicators of growing interest in and demand for the material among medical students and medical educators.

At the University of Connecticut's medical school, for example, the inclusion of an entire unit on sexual minorities and health care disparities—which revolves around a case study of a trans man with breast cancer—grew out of a faculty member's realization that the medical community at large was broadly unaware of many LGBTQ health issues.

The AAMC publication took an important first step toward helping medical schools provide transgender-related content, said co-author Dr. Kristen Eckstrand, by defining "the meaning of competence" when it comes to caring for transgender individuals.

Among those competencies are what some doctors say are universal principles of primary care: asking sensitively yet effectively about sexual anatomy, development, behavior, history, and identity; developing rapport with patients; and recognizing the historical and systemic factors underlying health care disparities. They also include an understanding of terminology used to talk about gender identity, and the basics of the medical and surgical options available to transgender people, among other skills.

Watch VICE Canada correspondent AJ Ripley explore the state of their country's transgender healthcare access:

Dr. Harvey Makadon, a clinical instructor focusing on LGBTQ health education at the Fenway Institute in Boston, said getting comfortable with the medical specifics of transgender care is much less important than simply getting comfortable with talking to transgender patients. "If someone's interested in doing it, there's not so much to learn that it's too complicated," he said. "It's really just an issue of feeling comfortable with the conversation."

Medical schools all over the country—and not necessarily in the most predictable places—have begun including transgender-related content in innovative ways. While schools in large, coastal urban centers such as San Francisco, New York City, and Boston led the way, said Ehrenfeld, schools in places like Texas and Alabama are also innovating. "The curricula all look surprisingly different," he said.

Teaching, said Eckstrand, isn't straightforward when the subject is a population that has historically been mistreated by the medical establishment. "We always have to strike a fine balance between training opportunities and being respectful of people who typically experience difficulty when receiving care," she said. Bedside instruction should be "done in a way that doesn't continue to marginalize transgender people when they interface with the health care system."

Fundamentally, medical education is a long way from sensitizing young physicians to the needs of transgender patients. While many schools are struggling to include transgender-related content at all, some schools that have incorporated content now struggle with how to test students on the material. And integrating trans-competency into the education of resident physicians—trainees at a later stage in their training—is still a distant goal.

Eckstrand admits the bar set by the AAMC is high, but also feels that any inclusion of transgender related material in medical school curricula likely addresses at least some of the AAMC competencies.

Regardless, she wrote in an email, "until we reach a point where we have standardized assessments that measure curricular outcomes, I don't think we can (or should) say that any school sets the gold standard."

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I first heard the word "socialist" in the movie Clue. It's an early laugh line delivered by Tim Curry as he discusses his deceased wife's previous indiscretions that led him into this murder mansion mess. You see, she used to hang out with *dramatic pause* socialists. "We all make mistakes," he confides to the room of murderous Washingtonian shit-heels and the dead body among them.

As the product of the American public education system, that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge of this concept of "socialism." Sure, there were the tales of "communist" Hollywood types being blacklisted during the red scare, and sure, I had read enough Howard Zinn to know that "trickle-down theory" just meant "rich people pissing on the poor," but that was it. Most people don't acquire much more than a back-of-the-napkin understanding of politics, and mine was: There are two options available, and one is full of the most hateful, bigoted, dumbest, racist people imaginable, so the other one is good enough.

Like so many others, I was heartened by Bernie Sanders's campaign—particularly his desire to work on developing free or cheap higher education options, his dedication to "Medicaid for all," and his continual highlighting of income inequality—but when Sanders inevitably lost to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, there was a sense of air being let out of the balloon. The specter of a potential Trump presidency loomed on the horizon, forcing most Sanders supporters to back away from their hopes of an actually progressive candidate in favor of yet another lesser of the two evils ticket. Sure, maybe Clinton won't prosecute corrupt bankers or give us the government-backed healthcare system we need, but the alternative would be worse in so many ways.

That all changed on Election Day.

The Democratic Party, however reasonable and adult, clearly was not going to save us.

If elections are like Thanksgiving dinners, where extended families with long-simmering gripes and resentments play nice for a few hours before shit-talking on the ride home, the election of Donald Trump was like your dickhead uncle getting hammered and causing ruckus enough to shift the family dynamic for good. It's a horrific scene, and maybe some relationships are fractured without repair, but the positive side of having dirty laundry forcibly aired amongst mixed company is that it can no longer be ignored. And guys, America's been floundering about in some soiled diapers for awhile now.

For me, the day after the election was a Highlander-like flood of previous misconceptions being flushed away, of half-considered possibilities being throw open. The Democratic Party, however reasonable and adult, clearly was not going to save us. Trump was the orange brick that broke the camel's back, but in the wake of the sweeping national GOP victory, if you looked around you realized that Republicans had taken over state governments across the country. For someone like me, the only point of the Democratic Party was to beat back the Republicans, and it had failed at even doing that.

So I looked for another way.

I didn't want to fret about Russian influence or FBI Director James Comey—replaying 2016 seemed like a dead end—so I forked some money over to the ACLU before realizing that a freelance writer's income won't likely make much of a difference. Like everyone else, I went to protests, mass gatherings that gave a much-needed voice to opposition but have all-too-obvious limitations. Rallies don't lead to actual change as long as the people with guns aren't listening. At my wit's end, I did what any reasonable and sane person would do in this political climate: I became a card-carrying member of a socialist party. I chose the Democratic Socialists of America.

This isn't an uncommon story, I've found. Whenever there's a show of hands at any of the recent DSA East Bay meetings for how long everyone's been members, a huge majority goes for the "after the election" option. The DSA, subject of several media profiles, now has more than 15,000 members, a drop in the ocean compared to the major parties but a huge number for a previously unknown group of lefties. Why the DSA? As a fellow member summed up nicely the other day over beers, after the mind-rattling we all got Election Night, he wanted to figure out who "got it right and follow them." The "ones that got it right"—that is, who predicted the failures of the Clinton campaign, but also rejected Trumpism—are all over the internet, if you know where to look.

The "dirtbag left" podcast Chapo Trap House has become the central reference point for whatever you want to call this new American socialist movement, which makes sense, as they're working in a medium that's immediately accessible. (Doesn't hurt that the hosts are bright and funny as all hell.) There's also left-leaning publications like Current Affairs, the Baffler, and Jacobin, each of which examines the world through the failures of capital in a slightly different way. And of course, there's the cavalcade of "leftist" Twitter accounts, many of which are now adorned with roses, long a symbol of socialist movements throughout history, next to their handles. Among these are @LarryWebsite, a DSA organizer based in Philadelphia and huge 76ers fan, and the brilliant @crushingbort, the pseudonymous media critic who wrote a single tweet that completely changed how I view the world:

It's worth pointing out that, while Twitter is a horrific cesspool the world would be better without, accounts like these "work" because of the constraints and chaos of the medium, which forces you to adopt a concise rawness to get your point across. That many do so anonymously, removed from the brand-building punch-pulling of mainstream political analysis, makes their 140 characters more potent.

It's not like socialist tendencies, or general leftism, is a new concept at all. It's been lingering on the edges of the culture for as long as America's been a country. But the potential for these humanistic ideals—that societies should lift up their most vulnerable, that quality of life for all is more important than the material advancement of some—to actually elbow their way into the system seemed to die right around 1980. That was when, you'll recall, the American populace elected a saber-rattling former actor who preached "small government" as the answer to everything, and threw a peanut farmer who actually gave a shit out of office. I'm in my mid-30s; for my cohort, actual, unapologetic liberalism simply didn't exist on a mass scale until Sanders's rise. (Bill Clinon's aggressive centrism and Barack Obama's technocratic administration never made the hearts of leftists swell.) And it was Hillary Clinton's horrific choke job that made socialism look even more attractive. If an established political party, with all the think tanks and algorithms and celebrity endorsements, can't succeed when facing the least popular, most extreme candidate of all time, well, maybe it's time for new ideas?

For me, membership in the DSA has mostly offered an oasis of sanity.

Where this movement goes is anyone's guess. I don't know whether the DSA proper will break through, or if the flag will be carried by some other organization, or if a conglomeration of a bunch of them together will shift Democratic policies left, as conservatives once upon a time took over the Republican Party. It's growing, there's no doubt about that, at the same time more and more people realize how powerless the Democratic leadership truly is. And as it's growing, it's not being dragged down by political lifers or opportunists, but being borne aloft by passionate people who are working to find realistic and legitimate paths ahead. (In the East Bay chapter, we're focused on trying to get a single-payer healthcare system established in California; other chapters have their own goals.)

But for me, membership in the DSA has mostly offered an oasis of sanity. Protests and calls to congresspeople are nice, and no doubt have made some kind of difference, but Rex Tillerson is still secretary of state, Betsy DeVos is still secretary of education. Trump is still president. Protests at airports are symbolically important, but an aggressive campaign against undocumented immigrants still seems to be brewing. Actually finding a group that's not only passionately opposed to this new moronic White House, but offers a promising vision of how to win future elections and what to do beyond? For me, that's been a stabilizing force in our new reality of chaos.

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