This story was published in collaboration with the Marshall Project.

The first thing I noticed was the silence.

I had spent the previous 12 months incarcerated at the Federal Prison Camp at Florence, Colorado. Living with 400 other minimum-security inmates, I'd grown acclimated to a certain level of background noise: radios playing, loud conversations, card games. The place buzzed with the sound of life—not much of a life, but life nonetheless.

Now I was walking into our neighboring facility, the infamous "supermax," and it was as silent as a tomb.

I'd recently had my prison job transferred from the recreation department at the camp to the same department at the supermax. Three days a week, I would be an inmate worker inside the most imposing building I had ever seen.

If someone asked me to describe the word "doom" using just a picture, I would hand them a photo of that maximum security prison.

On my first day, we boarded a bus and drove the two miles over. As we got off, I realized the place had two levels: the upper levels held administrative offices, medical stations, and guard rooms, and the lower levels housed the prisoners in a maze of electronically locking doors and steep ramps.

We went through an ID check, two pat-downs (one on each side of a razor wire-topped fence), and a metal detector.

"I have six campers moving from back bay to recreation," the guard next to me squawked into his radio.

"You're free to make that move," responded the voice of an unseen officer, whose job it was to watch the monitors and help coordinate the movement of the inmate workers bused in from the camp.

The door opened and we proceeded down a large hallway. Overhead, halogen lights glared every few feet. The walls were bare, painted a white that was almost reflective. Nothing could hide here, not even shadows.

As we walked, an administrator turned the corner and came toward us. Because I was near the front, I didn't notice that every other Camp inmate had stopped and pressed themselves flat against the wall.

"Williams, stop!" the guard yelled.

I froze, unsure what I had done but realizing that he'd used his "show" voice, reserved for situations when higher-ups are observing, when the CO is trying to impress other inmates with his harshness, or when you have royally fucked up.

"This ain't the fucking camp. In this building, when anyone is walking towards you that's not wearing green, you stop and press yourself against the wall. And you stay there until they are a dozen feet past us."

"Got it, boss."

After several more electronic doors, we arrived. An officer we knew from camp greeted us, and was soon explaining what our job would be. On Tuesdays, he said, our six-inmate crew would shelve books returned by the supermax inmates; we would also type up a ten-question quiz about one of the novels, make copies for every inmate, and place them on the appropriate cart. On Wednesdays, we would fill requests for new books, grade the returned quizzes, and place candy bars on the winners' carts. Wednesdays we would also prepare a math, logic, or visual puzzle for the inmates, which we would then grade on Thursday.

An inmate who had already been working at the supermax for years told me that the quizzes almost always had a large number of winners, because the inmates whisper the answers to each other. That way, everyone on the tier gets the highest score and a candy bar.

Soon, I was sitting down before an ancient typewriter, trying to think of some good quiz questions. The inmates had apparently been watching all eight Harry Potter movies recently, so I typed up a quiz on Harry Potter from memory.

Among the questions I posed to the most dangerous inmates in the world: How does one free a house elf from servitude?

The next day, when I sat down to grade the returned quizzes, I noticed that most of the inmates had gotten 5 out of ten. Just as I'd been told, there were over a dozen inmates with this score on each tier, making them all "winners." I had already started doling out the candy bars when I came across another quiz—with a score of 8 out of ten.

At the top of the page, in perfect all-caps, the inmate had written: THEODORE JOHN KACZYNSKI.

I circled the score and put his sheet and candy bar on D wing's cart, alone.

After lunch, the guards came to collect the carts. One of them beckoned me over.

"What's going on? There's only one candy bar," he asked.

"Kaczynski dropped an eight on them. Everyone else got fives."

"Fuck! They are gonna be pissed about that. Grab me a box of PowerBars, I'm not listening to a bunch of whining today. It's bad enough you sent them a Harry Potter quiz."

"I thought they would like it! They just watched the movies..."

"Well they didn't like it. I've been listening to them complain about it all morning."

Check out our interview with Barry Jenkins, director of 'Moonlight.'

My exchanges with the supermax inmates eventually became more cordial. I continued to write themed quizzes (the astronomy one was surprisingly popular, producing a handful of perfect answers), mixed in with some pulled directly from a 12-year-old Trivial Pursuit game.

I even opened a letter from the Unabomber. Like everything else Kaczynski sent in, it was written in all caps and he referred to himself as THEODORE JOHN KACZYNSKI. But rather than a diatribe, he was simply making a polite request for books.

I recognized one of the titles: "The Name of the Wind," by Patrick Rothfuss.

I like to think that fantasy books are popular in prison because they allow the inmate to escape his surroundings. But there's a simpler reason: prisoners are only allowed a certain number of books, and fantasy books tend to be much longer than general fiction.

If you can only have three books, might as well make one of them a 1,000-pager.

Blake Williams, 34, was incarcerated at a satellite camp of the Federal Correctional Institution in Florence, Colorado, for securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud.

A few years back, I was asked to style As You Are, Miles Joris-Peyrafitte's new film about young people exploring their sexuality and finding themselves. Set in the early 90s, it stars Owen Campbell, Charlie Heaton, and Amandla Stenberg. The teenage love story was shot in the autumn months on the Hudson River in Upstate New York.

I've spent much of my career working in and around New York City, so getting the chance to retreat to a small town during one of the most beautiful parts of the year to work on my first big film was an incredible opportunity. We set up shop in this beautiful Victorian house, that served as the sleeping quarters for the crew and also housed the film's art and wardrobe departments. Working, living, eating, and sleeping together in the middle of nowhere really helped us bond. We cooked meals together, helped one another solidify ideas about characteristics of the cast, and had fun when it was time to wind down. We were all in it together, and thats what made it so magical.

It was only natural for me to capture the experience in photographs, which you can see below. I tried to take as many pictures as I could so that I could remember every step of the journey. Looking back at these photos, I know shooting As You Are will always hold a special place in my heart, because of the magical moments shared I with the crew and cast.

As You Are is in theaters now. For details, visit AsYouAre.movie.

Follow Miyako on Instagram.

Passengers on a domestic flight from San Francisco to New York received an unusual greeting when they landed at JFK airport Wednesday night: two Customs and Border Protection agents waiting on the jet bridge to check IDs as people exited the aircraft.

VICE News staffer Anne Garrett was on the flight and documented the incident. It triggered outrage and concern on Twitter, with Edward Snowden and other prominent civil liberties advocates speculating that it could be linked to President Trump's new hard-line policies on immigration.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) later confirmed the details of the incident. In a statement to VICE News, a spokesperson for the agency said the agents were present because Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE) had asked for help locating an individual "ordered removed by an immigration judge."

Continue reading on VICE News

This morning, a video of Siberian tigers playfully hunting (and disemboweling) a drone was everywhere on the internet. A tweet from ITV News, a British television network, quickly made an appearance in dozens of stories.

"Wow, it's such a good video. All the beautiful tigers look up at the sky and run around. Eventually they get the drone, and get their heart rates up in the process. Good for them. Good for me," wrote The Verge.

But like so many good things online, this viral video is actually… bad.

Watch and read about it on Motherboard.

(Top image courtesy of University of the Underground)

It would be an understatement to call Nelly Ben Hayoun's CV intimidating. The award-winning French director and designer holds diverse credits that include Designer of Experiences at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute; member of the Space Outreach and Education committee at the International Astronautical Foundation; WeTransfer Chief of Experiences; United Nations Advisor to the UN VR labs; and consultant for NASA. She even assembled and directs the International Space Orchestra (ISO) – the world's first orchestra of NASA space scientists and astronauts. Put simply: she puts me and you and everyone you've ever met to shame.

For her latest project, Ben Hayoun is setting up The University of the Underground (UoU), the world's first postgraduate course based in subterranean urban spaces – the London arm of which will be based in Shoreditch's Village Underground, which has committed to a 100-year partnership with UoU, hosting the programme for a maximum of three months a year. The whole thing is a postgraduate programme run in collaboration with Amsterdam's Sandberg Instituut, and will provide students with scholarships to cover tuition. WeTransfer has committed to "100 years of education" with UoU, so the programme is set for at least the next century. Once on the course, students will be taught "how to engineer situations, to design experiences and events to best support social dreaming, social actions and power shifts within institutions, companies and governments".

I spoke to Nelly Ben Hayoun to find out more.

(This interview has been edited for length)

Nelly Ben Hayoun

VICE: When are you starting the programme?
Nelly Ben Hayoun: We just released the news that we're open for application until the 1st of April. It's kind of like, if you miss your window you have to wait until 2019. We do it as a biannual, and it's an MA programme, full time. We support your tuition fees – that's a part of the discussions. We start the classes at the end of September and then you're on for two years. The plan is to grow, to go to New York and San Francisco and then to open what we call the Unconventional Practices Research Department, where we can actually host PHDs.

We're really specific to postgraduates – that's the outlet that we decided to focus on. We found that, with postgraduate studies, there is a need for scholarships and support and getting students interested. The topics we're interested in need... not more maturity, but they need to have done their BA first. They need to have an awareness of what their practice is about to come into an MA like this, where we are talking about social dreaming, social action, institution, design of experiences. They are all concepts that you will have more of an understanding of once you've done your BA and know where you sit a bit – where you've engaged with social action and social dreaming in your own practice and experience.

So what is design of experiences? What does that cover?
The way we define it is just encompassing all of these disciplines that we wanted to offer the students, basically. It encompasses music practices, political practice, power structure, how you can modify power structure from inside institutions. There is design practice as well; film practice; we also speak about literature. The design experience encompasses all of that, so to say a designer is not just a person making a product like chair or tables, but someone who is able to become a producer or director. Someone who is going to be nurturing their own job or own outlet inside an institution. It's very much about the experience, about the event, so putting up events that will modify the way an institution thinks about themselves or communicates with the public. The way we have designed the curriculum is to make sure that the students touch on all of these different aspects.

Why did you create the University of the Underground?
We created it to respond to three things, really. The first one being the fact that, mainly in postgraduate studies, there is a trend to increase student fees, so we wanted to figure out a way we could design a new financial structure that supported education and students. What we've done is looked at a business model which is being used in most cultural institutions, like museums, where you have 80 percent coming from philanthropy and 20 percent coming from government. So we replicated this model – we created a foundation which is separate from the place where we're going to get the degrees from. The foundation has its own advisory board, like any foundation which is non-profit. We recruited, we get donations from philanthropy and from tech companies. People like WeTransfer or Airbnb. Those supporters come in and they are inside the foundation – but are separate from the students – and we have a collaboration with the Sandberg Instituut, who are providing us with the degrees, so we can give proper MA degrees in design.

The second reason is of course we wanted to define a new programme in which we say that design is not about chair and table; it's about encompassing the broad new figure of things, where a designer is now a director or a producer, and actually supporting cultural entrepreneurship. We tell them they can become whatever they want within institutions and we need to support that. We tell them the programme is about multidisciplinarity and supporting all these elements.

Finally, we wanted to create a network of creative soldiers. So students and designers that are there to make positive change in institutions and do that through design of experiences and experiential practices. It is to say that creatives have got a role in politics, and is to say that they should be at the table of decision making. The ultimate goal would be that one of our students becomes president or becomes the director of the United Nations.

Image courtesy of The University of the Underground

Do you hope other people will take on your model?
Yes. We're going to make all our finances available to the public after two years. All of our reports – the way we have used our finances, what we found – will be available online. I think it's important that we want to encourage other places and institutions to be bolder in the way that they think about education and the future of it. We can't just keep on living in a scheme in which students have to pay £16,000 to pay a Master's unless you have really rich parents. It removes that nepotism that is inherent to all disciplines, and specifically in the creative realm right now.

How did you find the right teachers for this project?
We call them "dreamers of the day", which is from Lawrence of Arabia. There are two types of people: the people that sleep at night and don't remember that dream because it's in the recesses of the night, then the dreamer of the day, who are adventurous people who make the impossible happen. We have recruited a teaching team which is like that – people who are positive and supporting the students. We have disciplines that we are passionate about: music, politics, design. In the second year students are finding the institution of their choice that they want to work with. We impose the institution to work with during first year – total bombardment that gets you all of these different places in a short time – but second year is when you get a chance to say, "Okay, I want to work with the jail system," for example; "I want to work with that specific jail and think about how I can modify some of the ways that the community is thinking about this." It can extend from a company to an institution, but it's important that the student showcases the system he's trying to challenge. The only way you can challenge a system is by fully understanding what it is made of.

What would you say to someone who wanted to apply?
Potential students should keep on looking at our website, because we will keep announcing new board members and new teachers. We'll be revealing our site in Amsterdam pretty soon, too. These things will be developed and revealed in the coming weeks. We invite all our students to apply, and they have to define social dreaming and action for themselves. What does it mean to be doing experiences, designing experiences? They can have their own understanding of it. For your generation, designing experiences may not be theatrical – it may be VR. I want to know how we can tailor or make a programme that is responding to the needs of our students, but not forcing them into a realm they don't want to go.

How many students are you taking?
Fifteen. Every city we will go to, we will always have 15 students. From now we only take 15 students in 2017-2019, and then again. We will open up fully the part in the US next year and that will be 15 and so on. You grow, it's a nebula. We are creating a nebula of potential chaos.

And that's ultimately what you want, for your students to create real change?
Yes. We go from the bottom, and you keep on climbing all the way through the entire scale of each of the disciplines and each of the social systems and all of the barriers that are inherent to any jobs to actually make it to the top. Our mantra is "nothing is impossible". Get your creativity out there and actually impose yourself. The other thing we talk about quite a lot is the Theatre of Cruelty, which is a theatrical practice from the 19th century which says that it's a violent collaboration between the stage and audience. It was created by Antonin Artaud and he would throw blood in the face of the audience to create some very strong reactions from them. He believed that the only way to get a member of the public physically engaged with any research or any topic was to be violent with them, either with music or with light. If you take that model and apply it to innovation then we also believe that we need to force our way into things. We don't wait for the door to be open, and I think that's the kind of can-do attitude that we are supporting.

Thanks, Nelly.

@marianne_eloise

Do you remember what weekends were like as a student? They lasted anywhere between three and six days, and became this sort of smeared haze, of weed smoke and vodka bottles and and pizza and sleeping and wearing the same socks three days in a row – the socks orange, at the bottom of them, somehow stained that colour with a rigorous cycle of damp bathroom floors and sticky kitchen surfaces and the weird matted carpet in your sharehouse lounge – the kind of weekends that go on forever, go on so long you forget what day it is, a weekend that blurs into the vague shape of a week – it squidges, right up to the edges – but never quite fills it.

Then, in that kind of lost summer after uni or college or wherever where you were sort of looking for a job but not really but you sort of were – if your mum asked, you definitely were, but also you very much weren't – you were sort of just going over to your mates' houses a lot and waking up at 2pm and filling in job applications online very, very slowly, in many fragmented parts over a series of days, so that when you did ever finally click "apply" the form came back to say: "Sorry, this application is no longer available. Please refresh the page." And the weekends, then, were more like a sort of endless, six-to-seven week weekend, a weekend so long and tedious it kind of just became this thing, this other, a monster bust out of the form of the week and the weekend, there was no end because there was no beginning, like how can you have breakfast if you never slept? That sort of thing.

And then you actually got a job and, hey, it's not so bad, is it? You're making friends. You have an email address. They pay you, automated, at the end of every month. You're making far more than you ever did on bar shifts. You don't hate wearing an actual pair of trousers, something on your feet that isn't a scuffed and extraordinarily fucked up pair of trainers. This is… actually good? This is… sort of okay?

But being occupied Monday through Friday does something, to you, it imperceptibly alters the DNA of your weekend. What once was this sort of road of possibilities that stretched endlessly into the horizon, now it's compacted into 48 small hours. And where once you were like "Sunday night! Let's! Go! To! The! Pub!", now you're like "but only for a small one, guys, I really have to be up and out early tomorrow morning."

So now we are in the horrible situation where we are living in a world where Hard-Fi have been proven right. We are, truly, living for the weekend. The weekend is the only time, away from the strait laces of the office, where we can now truly be ourselves. Only: god, it's quite knackering, isn't it, working all the time. And you have that laundry to do. And actually there are quite a few emails you didn't get to during the week. But also it's Simon's birthday and Simon always makes a big deal out of his birthdays and look, he's text you a photo of three 24-packs of Becks and two bottles of Smirnoff stacked up on the lino in his kitchen with the caption "pre-drinks?".

Your soul is being squabbled over by two opposing weekend-shaped demons: on one hand, Virtuous You, the person who planned a weekend of brunch and shopping and vigorous exercise. On the other shoulder, Punished You, the version that wants to squeeze every dirty little drop of fun out of the weekend and lick it up like exquisite liquor.

And so here is how you have planned for your weekend to go.

And here is how your weekend actually will go.

(All photos via Bruno Bayley. Usual disclaimer – none of the people in these photos are actually taking gak or doing a lot of alcohol with their bodies, illustrative purposes only, &c. – apply.)

FRIDAY NIGHT

EXPECTATION: Heh, 5pm can't roll around soon enough, can it? Listen, take it slow because you've got a big weekend planned: desk beer at 4.30pm, one pint maximum at the pub on the corner with the work crew and then one more at your mate's girlfriend's birthday at that bowling alley nearby (it's ironic, okay!), then get home to make stir fry, catch up on all the week's TV and get a decent night's sleep. Just a chill one. Eat your vegetables and get your sleep. Nothing major. Just a quiet one .Just a little chi—

REALITY: WAY–HEY HEY HEY! WAY–HEY HEY NA NA! Jägerbomb? Jägerbomb? Hey? Jägerbomb? I'm getting you a Jägerbomb! Nah fuck off prick, I'm getting you a Jägerbomb! And so predictably, here you are: it's 8pm and you're still getting pissed with the work lot, texting your mate to tell his girlfriend sorry you missed the candles but you'll be there for later, and two £30 bar receipts are already growing warm and wet in your ass pocket, and then you get an Uber across town then stop off for a can and a walk to the bowling alley, where half the people have left and the vibe is already dropping but you're convinced you can save it – you can salvage this, you can bring this round, you and you alone are the hero of the night! – if all you do is pony up £80 to book two karaoke booths for an hour, but by the time you get back from the karaoke booth then the bar a few more people have fucked off, and you can't get a refund so you just put three people in each booth, and you said MAYBE

I DON'T REALLY WANNA KNOW

HOW YOUR GARDEN GROWS

'COS I JUST WANNA FLYYYYYYYYYYYYY

LATELY

And you point to someone you half-fancy but not really but they'll do, won't they, they'll do

DO YOU EVER FEEL THE PAIN

BLUH BADDUBA DEE BEE

'COS I JUST WANNA FLYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

SATURDAY MORNING

EXPECTATION: There's a Farmer's Market near you that you always see in the afternoon when they're just packing up, and you keep missing out on it, don't you, so you've been meaning to get up early and go one weekend soon, sample the wares, there's a stall that's always sold out of it's sugar-dusted almond croissants and you imagine yourself, don't you, as the sugar-coated almond croissant type, walking around the market with your baked treat and your frothy coffee, and maybe you will buy some of the fresh vegetables there – leafy greens, carrots so ripe and orange it looks like you can polish them – then check out that brunch place that just opened up nearby, where the coconut and hemp acai bowl has got rave reviews. Maybe afterwards you can finally crack open that Hygge book mum got you for Christmas!

REALITY: First message you read when you wake up face down on your pillow, harrowingly alone and at midday, is an Uber receipt saying somehow you spent £28 getting home last night, and three furious missed calls and a "fuck it, fine mate, we're in [pub at least an hour's travel from where you currently are] if you're about" message from the friend you forgot you were supposed to meet this morning, and now you must go about making yourself strong again, and tough.

The first thing you need to do is address this hangover, but it's a Saturday hangover, so it doesn't count. It's not a big hangover – not painkillers and sunglasses and order-in a pizza – but still your insides are feeling quite furry and basically as if someone took your lungs, heart, kidneys and red bits out and put them in a washing machine briefly on spin, and then put them back haphazardly, and so what you need now is food. You have one of two food cravings: an egg sandwich, or a bacon sandwich. These are the only foods you want.

Check the fridge. You do not have any of the ingredients for the above. And so now you have to put on joggers, and trainers, and a top, and count out a load of money from your change mug – you could put this purchase on a card, but you know the corner shop you're going to charges 50p for card transactions and you're not made of money, are you? – and you go and buy one loaf of fat fluffy white bread, an extremely suspect-looking package of bacon ('What is "Dalloway Farm"? you think, idly, in the queue. 'That is a farm that definitely does not actually exist.') and a pint of milk and go back to the flat and do strong tea and two bacon sandwiches (you realise you have neither oil or butter to cook the bacon in so you just sort of roughly fry it in the pan anyway and hope for the best but the smoke alarm goes off regardless) and eat it on the sofa in front of an episode of a Netflix serial drama you are watching but you are not really paying attention and a lot of crucial shit seems to be happening so you know at some point you're going to have to watch this episode again. And lo, life is restored to you.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

EXPECTATION: Well sure is a glorious day! There's a sharp pinch in the air but it's bright and dry, so you take the bike you've been meaning to take out for ages out, and run it down the canal, through the parks, round the marshes, see young fresh butterflies and little woodland creatures, pelt it back at a nice little tick and work a sweat up. Maybe, on the way, you dink into a little pub that does artisan pizzas and have a fresh slice and a bottle of Corona, because hey: you've earnt it, right? A beer so cold and crispy you can bite it like an apple and a quick little dip of your hot feet in the cool cool water of the canal. What could be better than that?

REALITY: There is a beer in the fridge so on the stroke of midday you drink it. The afternoon is a write off – shitty film, shower, brief trip to the supermarket for an array of snacks, whole tub of mini muffins to yourself followed by three brisk wanks – so you spend it mostly WhatsApping around to see what's happening tonight. Your three different friendship groups are somehow having four separate parties each in a differently directioned hour-long commute away from your house, so you pick the one that requires the fewer public transport changes to get there, iron something vaguely passable, spritz yourself in cologne or perfume and get out of there, twirling your keys on your finger as you go.

SATURDAY NIGHT, DE-DA-DE-DA-DE-DA-DE-DA

EXPECTATION: Someone you know is "having drinkies" in a pub about 20 minutes from your house, and when you get there all of your friendship groups have converged in the same place and— Tom! How do you know…? I can't believe you know Tom! We used to go to uni together! – and all in all it's just a lovely, wholesome night, where everyone sort of starts sat down on some leathery old pub sofas but slowly rises to their feet, huddled in little groups that you flit happily between, and the sofa is just drowned in coats and scarves and such, and the place starts to rise and bubble with the euphoria of you and your friends, and everyone sticks rigidly to the rounds system – people are buying you drinks! You're three-deep at this table, here! No more gin for me, honestly! – and then the place starts to clear a little but the DJ comes on and puts on floorfiller after floorfiller – some of it cheesy, some of it from the good old days, and then he drops "One Dance" at the exact moment you needed some Drake, and there you are: eyes closed, the sweat of the night wicking your clothes close to your skin, fingers in the air and bouncing from one foot slowly to another, just totally in the moment, "strength and guid–enss", what a night, O what a night, walk home in the warm dry embrace of the night, suddenly calm sobriety overtaking you, walk past the kebab shop and give it a steer, maybe some toast when you get in, glass of water next to the bed after properly adhering to your facewashing routine. Absolute. Fucking. Bliss.

REALITY: The excitement of the night to come. You take the long bus so you can sit on the top deck with a couple of tins, and text people as you make your way there, everyone's meeting in central, for some reason, the bars are shit but the vibe is – I mean you cannot quarrel with that, vibe, can you? And you're sort of texting all your mates and slowly drinking a Heineken and occasionally just leaning your arm against the window and watching as the sky fades from blue thru pink to grey, and the night approaches, and you can feel your heart skip in your chest a bit – wuh-whump, wuh-whump, wuh-whump – and you know this is going to be a good one.

When you get there – it's a bar in central where they pat you down before you're allowed in – there's a few people there already, so you get to the bar to get the drinks in. Quite a heavy queue, though. Three rows of people and you're not really given enough space to look at your phone while you wait, so you're just stood there, crammed in, waiting. It's 15 minutes before you get to the bar – you try leaning on it but there's a slick of beer right where you put your arm, and now your arm is both wet and sticky and cold too – and it's another ten minutes before you actually get the barmaid's attention, and you decide This Isn't Fucking Worth The Wait Again so you get six drinks in when you only really needed three, and some shots too because you're losing your buzz, and by the time you get back to the table more people have arrived and ask you if you need a drink and you say 'yes' because it's gonna be 40 minutes until you see them again anyway, but miraculously they get served in, like, 120 seconds flat, so now you've got three beers and a shot and no self control, and long story short...

So now you've got three mates together in a huddle because you're excitable pissed and you need some gear and you know it's Saturday night so it's going to take a while for anyone to turn up, and you have to do that ritual – who's got a guy? Have you got a guy? I've got a number have you got a number? Okay how much for a gram, where's the nearest cashpoint – and you put in your order for two and let's see how it goes, and long story short...

So now you're crammed in the cubicle for the third time in 20 minutes tapping a line out on the back of your phone, and the blood is pumping and this is good, this is good, tap your teeth with your tongue because this feels euphoric, god this is, this is what they mean, isn't it, when they say "living for the weekend", because god. God. This is the shit. Your night is just starting but the venue is closing so you get an Uber to someone's house, anyone's house, someone has a house don't they, can you get YouTube on your TV mate? I really need to hear eight very specific songs from 2008 like, right now

SUNDAY MORNING (EARLY A.M.)

EXPECTATION: You are soundly asleep

REALITY: You are doing cocaine in someone's bedroom and saying one of the three following phrases a lot:

— "Yeah! Cocaine!"
— "Let's get some more cocaine!"
— "Who's got a number who's got a number have you made the call? Have you made the call? Mate do I need to go to a cashpoint now or shall I PayPal it to you?"
— "No because here's the thing like because: no because what it is is what people think about me, yeah, isn't who I am. And no no no no I mean: it's unfair, isn't it? Because I know people talk and I know what they are saying and I know people see me and think like: yeah. You know? But actually I'm very not like that, at all. Did you know for instance I like French literature?"

Uber home at 5am: £36.08

SUNDAY MORNING (LATE AM)

EXPECTATION: Cheeky jog in the morning, kale smoothie on the way home, long bath, read of a book, check your online banking without fear in your heart and put £20 aside for an ISA. You somehow get three loads of laundry done?

REALITY: You are asleep but not asleep because you took so much cocaine (at one point in the night you started calling it "cock–aye–ee–nah!" in a muy Española accento) that your heart won't stop racing, so instead you are lying in bed and fidgeting a lot and your eyes are closed but you are not actually asleep. Hell. You're in hell.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

EXPECTATION: Hey: maybe you'll take yourself to the movies! Nothing quite so liberating as going to the pictures on your own. Just you, La La Land and a whole bag of Minstrels: the dream. And it's still light outside when you get out of there, so you go to the pub and have a big, lovely £14 plate of roast dinner with some of your friends you haven't seen for a while. Someone brings a dog!

REALITY You wake up next to a blue plastic bag of assorted food items you do not remember buying on the way home – two bottles of Yazoo? A Pepperami? Why did you buy a whole bag of Babybel? Did… did you eat six Babybel before bed? – but you're hungry anyway so you try and order pizza but the pizza place isn't open yet so you make the order anyway so your order is first and waiting when they do open the guy calls you to say they don't have any chicken wings and long story short it takes two-and-a-half hours for a large pepperoni pie with a full two litre thing of Coke and a whole ice cream tub to arrive, which you consume entirely in bed while chain-watching Real Detective. By the time you're ready to move in any significant way it is 6pm and you can't actually be arsed with it so you have a shower, order Chinese food in, settle down with some wind down Sunday night TV and wait for the weekend to come to an end. Then you end up staying up until 1am just looking at Instagram a lot, like you always do.

MONDAY MORNING

EXPECTATION: You feel great! Supple, relaxed, refreshed. You woke up this morning and had chia pudding you prepared last night. You take a lunch tub of leftovers in to work. I mean you basically have absolutely fuck all to say to your workmates, with their "how was your weekend, then? Good?" basic-ass Monday morning chat, but hey, who cares? You clocked up 24 hours of sleep this weekend. You got up early and made a green smoothie. You ran into the office, and you'll run home, too. All your clothes are ironed. Monday night? Probably fold your legs under your body on the sofa (in your clean front room!), try a new recipe out, and watch a bit of TV. Life's not… life's not actually bad, you know. Everything isn't so bad.

REALITY: You feel like shit, you look like shit, and you are shit. You live your life like shit. See you again on Friday though, yeah?

@joelgolby

The FBI is investigating a Kansas bar shooting that left one Indian man dead and two others injured on Wednesday to determine if it was a possible hate crime, CNN reports.

Adam Purinton, 51, was charged with murder after open firing on Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani—two Garmin employees originally from India—at a bar outside of Kansas City. Ian Grillot, a bar patron, reportedly tried to intervene, but was shot and later hospitalized along with Madasani. Kuchibhotla was shot and died in the hospital.

"I was just doing what anyone should have done for another human being," Grillot told KMBC. "It's not about where he's from or his ethnicity. We're all humans. So I just felt I did what was naturally right to do."

According to the Kansas City Star, at least one witness heard Purinton yell "get out of my country," before fleeing the scene on foot and trying to hide in a nearby Applebee's. Before the Applebee's employees called the police, he reportedly told a bartender he had killed two Middle Eastern men.

At a news conference on Thursday, local law enforcement declined to comment on whether or not they believed the shooting was a hate crime. FBI special agent Eric Jackson said the bureau had joined on to try to figure out if Purinton was racially motivated or violated the victims' civil rights.

"This was a violent crime and we want the best prosecution that relates to this because there are victims of this crime and we want the community to know that," Jackson said. "We're looking to make sure that the individual involved in this is held accountable for his actions."

According to NPR, Purinton has been charged with first-degree murder and attempted premeditated murder. He's currently being held at the Henry County Jail on $2 million bail.

This is part four of a six-part series. Read the other installments here.

"I hope you are all in comfortable shoes for Auschwitz. We've got a lot of walking. And we're behind schedule."

So says our tour guide, Margaret, concerned about our bunions on the way to one of the sites of history's worst genocide. This practical worry catches me off guard, but I shouldn't be surprised. After all, even death camps become normalized when you visit them enough. In the end it's always a battle between personal comfort and psycho-historical horror. And even if your feet hurt, as I'm soon to learn, horror wins.

I'm thinking about this as we pass the gingerbread houses in the quaint little town of Oświęcim, along the lane to the camp. The town folk, apparently, had no idea what was going on over there. Except, you know, when the camp was going full tilt, the housewives weren't happy with all that nasty ash that kept settling on their laundry when they hung it out to dry.

And yes. There are so many deep, meaningful things to say about Auschwitz. About any camp. And I plan on saying them. But not now. I need to postpone my long-imagined Auschwitz moment. Because, being a man of a certain age, the second the bus squeals to a halt I fly out of it, gripped by an urgent need that makes it hard to be profound about anything.

As I crane my neck for the facilities, I see a half dozen other guys, sprung-shot from their motor coaches, faces locked in that same grim, single-minded focus that makes the fact that you're about to enter the site of one of the worst crimes against humanity ever secondary to hoping you don't wet yourself before you get in.

And then…

For a few bad beats my fellow not-young, boggy prostate owners and I are stuck in that crowded line outside the gates. Hopping from leg to leg. Around me are people in short-shorts, people in Metallica t-shirts. People laughing, texting, talking, staring off, doing what people do. All of it seems wrong. Where is the impact of the moment? This must be some mutant spinoff of the Heisenberg Principle: does the act of visiting a genocide site in a horde of crowded, braying tourists impact the gravitas of genocide? Is any venue packed with large Americans sucking the nipples on their water bottles inherently de-gravitased?

Before I can answer, the line moves and I'm through the iconic gates—ALBRECHT MACH FREI—but need relief before I can surrender to emotion. The vista is gripping: the barracks, the chimney, the counting ground where prisoners stood for morning count each day, sometimes for hours, in the freezing cold until they began to drop. Now weeds and grass and gravel, nothing but leaden, shoe-swallowing mud and shit when it was operating.

But finally, I see the men's room, off to the right. I bolt in and nearly kneecap myself on the edge of a low wooden card table, behind which slouches the hard-eyed bathroom attendant in a ratty blue sweater, reading a newspaper. He stares up at me like I've interrupted a state dinner.

As far as I can tell, the bathroom sector is the one booming industry in Poland. From my informal research, there isn't a single unmanned toilet in the country. But it takes me a minute to figure out the protocol. Am I paying admission? Or is peeing free, and I'm supposed to tip on the way out? Either way, from what I can tell it's the same business model as a bridge troll's. I'm paying for the right to pass.

After a moment, I realize I'm staring at the young Toilet Kommandant. And he's staring back. Like, Just fucking ask me. How did I end up working at a death camp crapper? What's it like to sell piss tickets to Holocaust tourists all day? What happens to people who don't pay?

Sixty-thousand out of 1.5 million survived this place. What does he think about, staring from his toilet station at the biggest crime scene in history?

I have so many questions! Is he, I wonder, a third generation death camp crapper attendant? Did his great grandfather once sit where he's sitting now, taking tips from Himmler when he came to visit Kommandant Hoess, whose wife and children kept a lovely garden on the other side of the wall?

I open my mouth, but just then a guy comes in behind me, tosses a coin in the bowl and edges by me without a backward glance. Finally I go in, too, but I want to interview the guy so bad I pay him again on the way out. I try to strike up a conversation, but of course he doesn't even answer. Just scowls. Then a man in a suede jacket strides in, sizes up the situation, and says something in Polish as he squeezes by me. The two men snicker like I'm not there. Defeated, I leave. This was not the experience I had envisioned.

There is no way to comprehend the horror, and to assume you can dishonors those who endured it.

But then, walking outside, I feel something in my consciousness shift. I realize that what they say about being here is true—until you feel your feet on the ground, and consider the dead beneath them, until you inhale, and a voice in your head asks the question only visitors to death camps ask: Am I breathing air in which the ghost of human ash still floats? Only then will you realize that there exists but one certainty: There is no way to comprehend the horror, and to assume you can dishonors those who endured it.

Anyway, I'd lost my tour group and decided to head for the crematorium. The only one left intact out of the five originals. It's a little crowded. In the dressing rooms outside the gas chamber, there were hooks for inmates' clothes, with numbers, so they could find them after their showers. The SS, famously, would subject all new arrivals to a selection: by and large, the able-bodied were chosen to head to the camp, and the slow death of starvation, disease, overwork, and violence. The rest—the sick, the old, the feeble—were directed to the showers. Where, of course, the showerheads were fake and the pipes sprayed Zyklon B instead of water and the doors locked behind them as the gas was released. It is one thing to know, abstractly, how victims were told to leave their clothes and belongings before marching naked to their own deaths. But to see the actual changing room—to see those numbers—is to confront the perverse theater of it on a whole new level. Those numbers, to me, were more chilling than the guard towers.

Inside, the gas chamber is as hellish as you'd think. The stains, the airlessness, the scratch marks on the walls... I obsess over those scratches. They give a hideous specificity to the horror.

Suddenly, I hear a man's voice. "They're not real."

What are you talking about?" a woman replies.

I turn around, and behind me an American hipster couple is bickering.

"They rebuilt the room in 1947." His girlfriend is horrified. In a second their sniping gets louder. "The chimney's a replica, too," the boy says, like he's got one over on the Six Million.

It's too much. While not usually one to meddle, I can't help myself and chime in. "Are you fucking kidding me? You're having a gas chamber fight? What the fuck is wrong with you?"

It occurs to me they should just fence the place off and make people stare from a distance. Declare the space too toxic, like Chernobyl. Give the ghosts some fucking peace.

I have to flee. That or risk being the first man to commit homicide at a death camp. (I mean, since they closed.) But outside it's worse. Heat, crowds, the trio of Filipina girls who mistake me for Kramer and want a selfie. I flew nearly halfway around the world and signed on with a bus tour because I craved the up-close experience of the darkest of dark stains on humanity, and instead I'm experiencing… humanity. Being human. At Auschwitz. Why isn't everybody ripping the skin off their faces and weeping in the dirt? It occurs to me they should just fence the place off and make people stare from a distance. Declare the space too toxic, like Chernobyl. Give the ghosts some fucking peace.

Running on nothing but genetic instinct, I wander out to the counting ground, hyper-aware of the crunch of gravel under my boot. The awareness of treading on a mass grave.

My first death camp, and I feel like I'm doing it wrong.

Illustration by Koren Shadmi

I have bad news for anyone planning to watch this Sunday's Oscars expecting a night of surprises: Damien Chazelle's fantastical, heartbreaking, and absurdly divisive La La Land is probably going to win pretty much every award it's nominated for. Sure, Ryan Gosling has close to zero chance in nabbing Best Actor—smart betting is split on Denzel Washington's complex performance in his adaptation of August Wilson's Fences and Casey Affleck's quietly towering turn in Manchester by the Sea—and there's a chance that Barry Jenkins's immersive Moonlight will take either Best Director or (more unlikely) Best Picture by way of categorial vote-splitting. Otherwise, start steeling yourself for hearing people say "And the winner is... La La Land" for five hours on Sunday night.

To say the least, such mass inevitability takes the guesswork out of this year's Oscar season. So, instead of making predictions, we've thrown together our own wildest-dreams picks for taking home the night's top prizes. Think of this as an Alternate Universe Oscars, designed to highlight those who didn't even get nominated but deserve recognition. One caveat: We've stuck to the Big Six awards—all four acting categories, Best Director, and Best Picture—for the sake of brevity. So, if you're looking for a deep dive on costume designers, you might want to go elsewhere. Otherwise, read on for a highly subjective take on who we'd want to win, in a perfect world.

Best Supporting Actor

Jason Bateman, Zootopia

Let's be real: Moonlight's Mahershala Ali not only has this award in the bag, but it's highly deserved, as his performance is arguably a crown jewel in a film filled with stunning turns. One of the film's most devastating scenes takes place when his character, the compassionate drug dealer Juan, breaks down shortly after talking with "Little" (Alex Hibbert)—you can see the pain on his face, which is why I chose Bateman's performance as con-artist fox Nicholas P. Wilde in Disney's sneakily subversive Zootopia here.

I'm not going to lie: I don't typically like Bateman in anything and have found his smugness (not easily washed off from his Arrested Development days) to be a major turn-off. But maybe all I needed was to not see his face, since his "thing" finally seems to work in Zootopia. The absence of physicality gives a new and slightly more adorable shape to his typically sarcastic persona. Bateman's had a string of duds when it comes to live-action fare (Horrible Bosses 2, anyone?), but his contributions to Zootopia suggest a better, more animated future for his career.

Best Supporting Actress

Rachel Weisz, The Light Between Oceans

Derek Cianfrance's latest film—a simultaneously scandalous and weepy adaptation of M.L. Stedman's 2012 novel of the same name—was, to put it lightly, fucking ridiculous. But look beyond the movie-of-the-week premise (of which I refuse to spoil here, just find it out for yourself), and you'll find a film with gorgeous cinematography, breathtaking location shooting, and astounding performances (including a real-life romance between leads Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender).

One of those performances was turned in by the always reliable Rachel Weisz, who captures grieving mother Hannah Roennfeldt with a complexity that elevates the source material beyond mere camp, if only fleetingly. Weisz had a solid 2016—she provided a perfect foil to a frumpy, disheveled, and near-unrecognizable Colin Farrell in The Lobster—and her turn in The Light Between Oceans was the latest reminder of the potency of her talent, regardless of what it's lent to.

Best Director

Karyn Kusama, The Invitation

She had a strong debut with 2000's Girlfight, but Karyn Kusama has spent the past decade largely languishing in what Amy Heckerling recently referred to as "director jail" after the high-profile flop of 2005's antiseptic adaptation of the seminal MTV cartoon Aeon Flux. Kusama took a shot at the horror genre in 2009 with the Diablo Cody–written (remember her?) Jennifer's Body, but it was last year's The Invitation that truly cemented her mastery of the genre.

A ticking time bomb of a movie that starts out simmering and ends with gory, tense (and literal) explosions, The Invitation was an undoubted comeback for Kusama—and she's capitalized on it since with My Only Living Son, her excellent contribution to this year's otherwise so-so horror anthology XX. At the very least, her just-short-of-satirical depictions of selfish, vainglorious West Coasters might make you think twice before hopping on that JetBlue to LAX.

Best Actor

Andrew Garfield, Silence

This one's cheating, kind of: Garfield is already nominated in this category for Mel Gibson's World War II epic Hacksaw Ridge. Despite Gibson's obvious awfulness, Hacksaw Ridge is a very fine film, largely due to Garfield's pure-hearted portrayal of conscientious objector and lifesaving WWII medic Desmond T. Doss. But the definitive Garfield performance of 2016 is smack dab at the heart of Martin Scorcese's astounding and challenging meditation on faith, Silence.

Save for a nod for its lovely cinematography, Silence—a film that, with time, will surely be recognized as one of Scorcese's best—was largely shut out of the Oscars. And that's understandable: It's a three-hour epic about Christianity, with long stretches of dialogue in Japanese, and even longer stretches with very little dialogue at all. (It's also brutally and unforgivingly violent in its scenes of torture.) Garfield's turn as a 17th-century Jesuit priest is just one of Silence's marvelous slow-moving parts, but his radiant humanity in the role is impossible to ignore.

Best Actress

Hailee Steinfeld, The Edge of Seventeen

I know, snubbing Amy Adams's Arrival performance—a fine turn in a career that's been nothing but peaks so far—can, even in this imaginary exercise, seem a little cruel. But I found myself utterly overwhelmed by Steinfeld's real, hilarious, and touching role as an angsty and emotionally well-rounded teenager in Kelly Fremon Craig's directorial debut, and there was a touch of relief felt, too.

Steinfeld's career since breaking out in the Coen Brothers remake of True Grit (which earned her first Oscar nod) has taken a few interesting turns: She's tried her hand at pop music, and after the massive success of 2015's Pitch Perfect 2, she's tied to one of the most successful non-comic-book franchises going. So watching her flex her chops in The Edge of Seventeen is a joy even when it's heartbreaking—and it's reminiscent of an unlikely parallel: the 2003 Mandy Moore teen drama How to Deal, which similarly mines teenage emotional chaos. How to Deal, granted, is a cinematic dish best enjoyed with a sprinkling of irony—but Steinfeld's turn here is pure sincerity, straight from the tap.

Best Picture

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

I'm being serious! Speaking of seriousness, just take a look at these Best Picture nominees. They are, quite literally, no laughing matter. The closest thing to anything funny in any of these movies is when Kevin Costner says "Here at NASA, we all pee the same color" in Hidden Figures. Most of these movies are good! (I haven't seen Lion yet.) But they're also impossibly stuffy, as if there wasn't anything at the multiplexes in 2016 that didn't bring any sort of straight-up, stupid-as-shit hilarity that was also genius in its execution.

Which brings me to Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, the Lonely Island's cinematic mockumentary opus lampooning the music industry (and, more specifically, Justin Bieber's own tour doc Never Say Never). In addition to not receiving a single Oscar nomination (not even for the brilliant Michael Bolton–featuring "Incredible Thoughts"), Popstar also ate shit at the box office, which is a shame because it deserves to be seen by everyone at least once. If you've found yourself crying with laughter over a late-night viewing of Step Brothers—or, if you just need a brief escape from the crushing mundanity of daily life and want to find solace in the image of a penis-less Andy Samberg—then Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is the only film you need. Best Picture? Try Best Picture Ever.

Follow Larry Fitzmaurice on Twitter.

It's obvious Hollywood saw women as little more than objects of desire in 1943. In one of the year's most iconic films, Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, a young woman pines weirdly for her visiting uncle, her primary purpose to please the men of her household. Yet little-known horror noir The Seventh Victim (directed by Mark Robson but helmed by producer Val Lewton), a film released the same year as the Hitchcock classic, has a radically different portrayal of women. Its female characters control their own destinies, share intimate sexual relationships with one another, and aren't afraid to answer back to men.

The film focuses on Mary (played by the striking Kim Hunter), a young woman who learns that her older sister and only guardian Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) has gone missing in New York. When told by her boarding school that her sister has stopped paying for her tuition, Mary is forced to go to the city to search for answers. As she departs, one of her female teachers advises, "Don't come back here, no matter what. A woman must have courage to really live in this world." It's the first of several overtly feminist statements in the film that serve to amplify the strength of femininity.

When Mary is ordered to drink her milk in a café by a man who claims to know of Jacqueline's whereabouts, she shouts back, "I don't like to be ordered to do anything. Don't you dare treat me like a child!" He politely replies, "I promise I'll never order you around again." While this exchange might not seem too radical in 2017, it is uncharacteristically bold for the sexist 1940s.

Read more on Broadly

Well, it seems the ubiquitous sight of teens crushing darts outside of their high school may become an increasingly rare one in the coming years.

The federal government is mulling over the idea of upping the minimum age you can buy cigarettes across Canada from 18 to 21.

The idea is being floated in a Health Canada paper called Seizing the opportunity: the future of tobacco control in Canada. The National Post has reported that the paper has been "quietly distributed" throughout the department as it considers a new national tobacco-control strategy—the current strategy is set to expire in 2018.

A majority of the changes proposed in the paper focus on curtailing youths from starting the cruel and expensive habit of smoking.

"Preventing young people and others from starting tobacco use has been a key pillar of federal, provincial and territorial approaches to tobacco control," reads the paper. "Enforcement of the federal Tobacco Act and its regulations is a key measure to protect youth."

Other ideas raised in the report include developing regulations that would reduce the addictiveness of tobacco, the creation of smoke and vape-free spaces (post-secondary campuses, in public parks, or in multi-unit dwellings,) and cracking down on illicit tobacco contraband.

Like, smoking is bad and all, but vaping is just so goddamn lame. Photo via Flikr User Vaping360

The government is also questioning whether or not they "should take a more active role in encouraging adult smokers to switch to vaping products." Yeah, you read that right, Canada might become a pro-vape country—get ready to lose any sort of street cred this country ever had if that happens, Canada.

The end goal of the new strategy is to "radically reduce the unacceptable burden inflicted on our society by tobacco use." The reduction would follow in line with the declining trend of cigarette consumption in Canada. Since 2001, the rate of smokers in the country has fallen from 22 percent to 13 and it is aiming to hit five percent by 2035.

Upon first glance, it's pretty easy to see that upping the smoking age could actually significantly decrease the number of smokers in Canada over time. It will, like it or not, make it harder for teenagers to get their hands on darts, which is the age most people start their addiction.

Keeping darts out of the hands of the youngins is a good thing, because, and I say this as a smoker, if you're over 18 and you start smoking for the first time, you're an idiot.  

Lead photo via Flickr user Roman Pavlyuk.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter .

Canadian-born photographer Chris Buck has shot everyone from Barack Obama and Donald Trump to Leonard Cohen, Kendrick Lamar and Maragret Atwood. His portraits are compelling in their simplicity, a peeled-back look at the often unseen side of their subjects. HIs new book UNEASY: Chris Buck Portraits 1986-2016 just launched this week. I spoke with him over the phone and asked him to take me behind the scenes of a few of his most memorable shoots.

VICE: Why don't we start with this amazing Donald Trump portrait?
Chris Buck: So this was shot 10 years ago. He was not the President of the United States or anywhere close to it. He was just a TV personality and well-known real estate business guy. We initially had this conceptual shot where a bunch of my friends and my wife's friends dressed up in suits and held Donald Trump masks in front of their faces. The idea was Donald Trump is everywhere. At the end of the shoot I gave him a print of another photo I'd taken of him. It was actually a pretty strange picture I gave him but I gave him this 11 x 14 print, he took it out of the envelope and said, "what's this?" I said, "I want to buy more time with you and I'm giving you a gift in exchange." He kind of shrugged and said, okay. So, he posed for this last shot for a couple of minutes and now it's the shot you see that's in the book.

It's an incredible shot. So much of what we see of him now is the stereotype, the temperamental person, what was the mood like on set?
I've photographed him three times now and I was surprised the first time, I was genuinely surprised how kind of like low-key he was. When I first photographed him, The Apprentice had become a big hit, it was the beginning of the first season and I had known who he was already. I found him kind of an obnoxious presence and didn't really find him of interest but in person, he is much more low-key and kind of reasonable. I photographed his daughter a year before. I mentioned how I met his daughter and she was very sweet and very polite. She was just in her early 20s at that time. I said to him, when a child is really well-put together like that, it's quite an accomplishment to the parent. I think he took note of that and kind of relaxed a bit, and was more easy to work with after that. I think he appreciated the compliment.

In the second shoot, we had this little crowd and he actually really came alive and really like loved having the audience and he was quite funny. One thing I have noticed, during the election campaign when he have these private meetings with people who he really should have like no connection to or there's no reason why they should endorse him, like American Evangelicals or Bill Gates, people like this, they come out singing his praises. Having met him and spent time with him, I totally get it because he is an amazing, warm, great, sales personality. He really is very likable and very charming in person. He's one of those rare people who is so different in person than he comes off in the media. I recognized that the first time I met with him but it became much more pronounced the second time.

Did he see this photo?
Yes. Actually, I met with him again, about a year and a half ago for my third shoot with him. I had the mock up for this book together. I showed him the book and I showed him this picture and he really liked it. I mean, I think he liked it because it's a picture of him. I asked him for an endorsement, he said he'd give me one, I haven't got it yet. He was very cordial. What can I tell you? I tried showing him more of the book but he really was only interested in the picture of him. He was just kind of funny. He was very decent about it. I've got these amazing pictures of him looking at my mock up, it's very bizarre. What can I say? I was surprised when he became President.

I think we all were. Moving on to this image of Barack Obama, I don't want to compare the two but there seems to already be a different energy to this photo.
This was in 2013, basically right before his second inauguration. Yes, he's obviously a very different personality than Trump but they do have things in common too. I think they're both pretty self-involved. I think they both are kind of all about themselves, so in that way they're kind of similar. I think in a way, their little competitiveness with each other make sense because they both love their internal narratives. Obviously, Obama is more a detailed person and more of a traditional intellectual. Anyone who runs for president kind of aren't that different from each other. Occasionally, some presidents genuinely fall into it kind of by accident, like Gerald Ford, I think he never really intended on being president. But most of them have this intense ego that brings them to run for president. In that way, I actually think they're more alike than dissimilar, at least they have things that are alike.

Do you think that's true of  politicians in general, that narcissism?
I think when you get to the point of prime minister or president, you're in a different level of ego than ministers in Parliament or whatever. I think a lot of them genuinely get into it out of the sense of service. I think when you become party leader or prime minister, I think it moves into a whole other level. Like with our current prime minister, I really like Justin and I've met him a couple of times. He's a very sweet guy but really, he loves being prime minister. He's gone feet first. He's in. He loves it.

Have you done his portrait?
I haven't but I did a talk in Toronto, I guess 15 years ago and he was at the talk and he approached me afterwards and said, hello. Actually, I've got a great story with him, do you want to hear it?

Oh yeah. For sure.
We stayed in touch a little bit after we met. I never became close to him or anything, but I ended up being in Ottawa one time for a social thing with friends. He was hosting an event in the same building that I was in. I went by to say hello to him, I guess he was a guest of honor or something. This would be eight years ago or something, and so I went over and said, hello. Of course, he remembered me and I invited him to go drinking with my friends and I. He very politely declined and said, he was invited by this group and he really should stay for the duration. He appreciated the invitation but he really couldn't take me up on it. I ended up talking with a friend about it who was on that trip with me. When he became prime minister, we were kind of recounting the story and he said, 'yeah, but there's more to it.' I'm like, what do you mean? He said, 'you don't remember?' I said, no. He said, 'you invited the prime minister to come to the strip club with us.' I said, I did not. He said, 'you may not have asked explicitly but you certainly implied that this is something we were going to do and that he was welcome to come join us.' I was like, okay I don't remember that but if you say it, I'm sure it's true.

I like it that he very politely replied like, 'oh, I'd love to but I have to fulfill these obligations.'
He was already planning his ascent then. It's not like he made it a secret. He's been on that track for a long long time.

Moving to another seminal Canadian figure, tell me about this portrait of Leonard Cohen, when was this one taken?
It was taken 2001, in Los Angeles where his home was. That was a big deal for me. I was a big fan. I mean I'm really like—of all the people I've shot, there's really maybe just a dozen who were genuinely like heroes to me. He was one of them. It was quite daunting. I was well into my career at that point, so I managed the anxiety or whatever and it worked out fine. We had two hours with him. One of these things that's interesting about him that I think you might appreciate, was that when we walked to him, he was huddled over the stove wearing like a suit and a hat and he had a cigarette hanging over his mouth. He was frying up some eggs for his breakfast. He was all hunched over, he literally had a hunched-back. He looked like Humphrey Bogart or something, kind of short and kinda aged. He looked amazing in his suit and everything. But then, when I started taking pictures, he straightened out and became very proper. He always looked so elegant, every picture of him. My whole thing is getting to the more vulnerable side of people. The book is called, Uneasy, that's where I really connect. I was trying to get him to let down that guard but he clearly has this...he wants to look his best which I respect, but it's my thing to get beyond that kind of presentation.

How do you do that?
Part of it is, sometimes they will let their guard down when I'm not actually shooting. At one point, we were just talking, he was sitting, he was sitting this way where he had his hands sort of draped down. They look like dolphin fins...it looked like a fin or something. The way his hands were sort of set, I was like, hold it, don't move! I dragged the camera over on a tripod and I just insisted, do not move. I just gently set the focus and I executed these frames and that's how I got that shot. He's pretty proper but there was something about his hands, it was sort of strange and fish-like. I thought it was just so beautiful and strange, and that's how I got that shot. For whatever reason, he trusted me enough to let me get that moment.

How often do you have to break that barrier by making yourself uneasy to get that shot?
In some ways, I get the vulnerability from people in ways that are relatively artificial. I just make them go into a place in a room that just forces them to be like physically constrained and I guess I do kind of expose my own vulnerability. I don't know, it's not that conscious, it's funny. As a photographer and as a journalist, I'm sure you know, you have your whole little bag of tricks that you kinda roll out to get people to open up. You do what you have to, to get people to reveal themselves and to kind of let that barrier down. You try different things with different people and you kind of see what works. As a journalist, people have done it with me where they'll kind of tell an kinda awkward or a vulnerable story, hoping I'll go there too, knowing perfectly well that their vulnerable story is not going to end up in the piece, which is fine, like I get it because I do it too. But it's a thing one does to get people to open up. That's our job, is to get people to show something of themselves.

What are some of your other tricks? Obviously, you've talked about kinda showing your own vulnerability, what else do you use to get people out of their own heads?
I don't really spend a lot of time trying to make people super comfortable. In a weird way, I don't want people to feel comfortable enough to say no to me. So when I ask them to do the thing that's kind of strange or vulnerable, they just do it and they don't question me. When I say, go on your hands and knees, or go in that corner or whatever, they kind of obey. I don't want them comfortable enough with me to say, you're really cool, I just don't want to do that. I want them to say, yes, and just do it. I want them to be a little intimidated by me. I kind of will be friendly enough but I do like to convey a sense of 'I'm in charge and it's best you just obey.'

One other thing I'll do is I'll bring a gift for people, like with that Donald Trump shoot where I brought him a print. I would give people a print. If I know they're a fan of someone and I photographed them, I'll bring them a print. It's amazing how that will create this sense of indebtedness that becomes implied in the shoot. They will give me more because I've given them something. Even though I'm just a photographer, I'll study people I'll read interviews with them, I'll learn their history and I'll have conversations with them that show that I know their story and I think that helps, too. People will tell me, you know more about us than the people at our own record label. I think that  endears me to them and they'll more likely say yes.

How did you choose the people that made it into the book? What is it about these portraits that connected them for you?
I think it's a mix of who they are and also the images themselves. I think it's also a balance of different people or different vocations, I think that was important to me. I didn't want to have just actors and musicians. I want to have lots of photographers and writers and politicians. I love super niche celebrities, people who, in their field are super well respected, but outside their field, they're barely known. Like Vince Cerf who is one of the inventors and innovators of the internet back in the 70s and 80s. I photographed him in the mid-90s and he's still like an important person. That was super cool to put him in the book and people who know who he is are like, 'Whoa, Vince Cerf, that's so cool.' Obviously, it's well and good to have people like Barack Obama or Kendrick Lamar but to have people who only very specific people are going to know, it's a way of me curating who I think is important.

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At least twice a year, Twitter and the internet at large become embroiled in some kind of controversy. Do dogs wear pants like this or like that? Do you wash your legs in the shower? For what feels like the last three weeks, the latest of difference of opinion has been: pineapples on pizza.

The president of Iceland even chimed in, saying he'd "ban" pineapple on pizza. Which led to him having to clarify that he doesn't actually have the power to do that. In an embarrassing attempt at relevancy, Canada's official Twitter account went so far as to claim we invented pineapple on pizza back in 1962 which is not a statement without controversy. According to Wikipedia, the Germans had their own variation back in 1955, but whatever. Canada still owns the "bragging" rights to California rolls.

To be fair, if you've ever ordered pizza for more than a few people at once, having fruit on pizza is controversial—and it should be. Pineapples on their own are generally hit or miss, especially if they're from a pizza chain. Having the wrong ripeness of pineapple on pizza can taste like how someone else's vomit smells. Personally, I don't really care about pineapple on pizza, it's usually not good but whatever. Either way, this is nothing more than a huge distraction from the real pizza problems. Are you ready for a pipin' hot take: corn on pizza is the true enemy.

"That's not a thing, you contrarian bitch" is what you are likely thinking if you're from Canada or the United States. But, yes it is! It's a real thing all over the world, basically anywhere that isn't North America you will find corn on pizza or at least it wouldn't be a ridiculous suggestion. On the Domino's Japan website, at least four pizzas have corn as a topping (one has corn and pineapple, kill me now.)

Sweet corn on its own is shitty. It tastes bad and it gets stuck in your teeth. That's why it was the only thing people could eat in Interstellar towards the end . Also, wake up sheeple it's in EVERYTHING. We're being pumped with corn all the time, you don't even know it but at any given moment you're at least 40 percent corn. According to anti-corn blog (I swear this is real) Live Corn Free, corn is in goddamn toothpaste. You know what else? You can pick pineapple quite easily off pizza (which is why everyone is being way too dramatic) BUT YOU CAN'T PICK CORN OFF PIZZA. It just blends in with the cheese and every bite you taste that bland Green Giant sweetness.

Basically, everyone needs to calm the hell down. As far as pizza goes, North America is doing a great job (just look at the regional diversity of pizza). It's the only thing we really have under control in these crazy times. Just pick off your pineapples and say a prayer your friends aren't trying to get you to eat corn 'za.

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Lead image via Pexels.

Chinese photographer Ren Hang has died, a representative of Klein Sun Gallery confirmed to Creators earlier this morning. Hang's unique arrangements of nude models, usually his friends, conveyed a casual eroticism that often earned him censure from the Chinese government, including his arrest.

"Ren is a poet and photographer," Klein Sun described the artist in a release for his May, 2016 solo show at their Chelsea location. "Splicing imagery of urban and rural environments as a metaphor for the increasingly citified millennials of today, he arranges the naked limbs of his friends in his hide-and-seek photographs. In these images, the subjects' expressions are casual yet provocative, hinting at the erotic and playful energies between Ren Hang and his intimate circle of companions."

"Today we mourn the loss of Ren Hang, a talented and rising young photographer who passed away well before his time," Eli Klein wrote on Instagram this morning. "@kleinsungallery was honored to host his solo exhibition last year and send our heartfelt condolences to all of his loved ones."

Continue reading on Creators

A version of this article originally appeared on the Trace.

Are AR-15s military weapons, designed for inflicting maximum damage to enemy troops? Or are they part of the American civilian gun owner's heritage, essential for both recreational shooting and self-defense?

Most of the time, the distinction is of little practical importance: These semiautomatic rifles are ubiquitous, widely available for sale in gun shops across much of America. But on Tuesday, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, came down squarely on one side of this debate, with big implications for how states regulate assault weapons. In a 10–4 decision, the federal court upheld Maryland's 2013 assault weapons ban, finding that guns like the AR-15 are weapons of war, and thus American civilians don't have an unfettered right to buy and own them under the Second Amendment.

The court's decision is uniquely forceful. While every other appeals courts to consider other states' assault weapon bans has upheld those state laws, only the Fourth Circuit has weighed in on whether there is a constitutional right to own these kinds of weapons.

"It sends a very clear message that states are free to regulate assault weapons," said Brian Frosh, the Maryland attorney general whose office defended the law. "The Fourth Circuit is the only one to address that question head-on." The upshot of the decision, Frosh predicted, would be that "other states can be comfortable that if they adopt similar laws they'll be upheld by the courts."

There's no question that the AR-15 was created for the military. Famed engineer Eugene Stoner first designed the gun in the late 1950s as a replacement for rifles developed during and soon after World War II. Stoner designed a "select fire" weapon that could either shoot one bullet at a time or many rounds with one sustained squeeze of the trigger. In 1959, Colt, a much larger firearms company, bought the design from Stoner's struggling Armalite, and produced it for the military under the designation M-16. Many gun companies now make their own versions of that weapon, along with other military-style semiautomatic rifles like the AK-47 or Sig Sauer's recent MCX. These rifles are virtually identical in functionality to the M-16, with one difference: They lack the automatic-fire feature. Meaning, its owner must squeeze the trigger each time he or she fires a shot.

After a series of mass shootings committed with commercially sold assault weapons and fears grew that gangs were using such firearms to out-gun police, President Clinton restricted their manufacture and sale. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, a sweeping omnibus crime bill, included a ban on assault weapons. When that ban expired in 2004, the market for such guns opened up. Demand skyrocketed during the Obama administration, especially after Democrats introduced new gun control legislation following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, which was carried out with an AR-style rifle made by Bushmaster.

The case decided Tuesday by the Fourth Circuit can be traced back to Sandy Hook. In 2013, Maryland and several other states passed their own laws banning the sale, transfer, or transportation of guns like the AR-15. A group of Maryland residents, who wished to buy such weapons but were prevented from doing so under the new law, sued the state and were joined by gun dealers and trade groups like the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Pro-gun groups like the NRA and more gun-friendly state governments, including Alabama and Kansas, filed briefs backing the suit. Maryland defended the law and was supported by gun-violence-prevention groups like the Brady Campaign and states like Illinois and New York.

The two sides argued over the development history, technical features, and place in American life of these assault weapons. The plaintiffs disputed the defense's assertion that certain features, like a coiling shroud that protect a user's hands from the heat created by shooting multiple rounds, are unique to military-style guns. In one filing, they sounded nearly contemptuous of the defense's fixation on these design details: "Plaintiffs dispute this 'fact' because Defendants' statements inaccurately imply that this is a feature unique to 'assault weapons.' In fact, most firearms have either an extended stock or a barrel shroud to prevent the shooter's hand from being burned, which can occur when even a few shots are fired."

In contrast, the defendants pointed to the AR-15 and similar weapons' clear origins and continued marketing as guns developed for the military. The government's lawyers pointed to gun companies' own marketing materials. As they wrote in one filing, "Colt relies heavily on the AR-15's military origins, features, and specifications when marketing to civilians, boasting that its rifles are 'based on the same military standards and specifications as the United States issue Colt M16 rifle and M4 carbine.'"

The plaintiffs pointed out that there is a crucial functional difference between the guns that the military uses and those sold to civilians. In their complaint, they wrote that "the critical difference is that the banned firearms are semi-automatic, rather than the fully automatic versions used by the militaries. These two distinct classes of firearms cannot be 'essentially identical' and yet differ completely in their most material respect."

The court sided with the defendants, ruling that the difference between the semiautomatic and automatic versions of the weapons is "slight" and that law enforcement officers and soldiers are often advised to use the semiautomatic feature because "it is more accurate and lethal" in many situations.

In an article on how the military considers which guns to give its service members, the magazine Task and Purpose noted that "current training emphasizes semi-automatic fire in most situations." Carefully aimed bullets are more likely to hit their designated target, which experts agree makes one shot more deadly than another.

Civilian ownership of fully automatic weapons has been strictly regulated since the passage of the National Firearms Act in 1934, and no new automatic weapons have been produced for the civilian market since 1986.

Check out our helpful video on how to fix an impaled object wound.

For those outside the gun world, however, that may be a distinction without much of a real-world difference. As the judges wrote in their decision, "the automatic firing of all the ammunition in a large-capacity thirty-round magazine takes about two seconds, whereas a semiautomatic rifle can empty the same magazine in as little as five seconds." Expert shooters can discharge as many as six rounds from an AR-15 in a single second.

Another key friction point was whether the assault-style rifles subject to the Maryland ban are "commonly owned." The landmark Heller v. District of Columbia establishing an individual right to own firearms affirmed the specific right to keep handguns—explicitly because that style of weapon is so popular. The Heller decision left open the possibility that legislatures could ban other types of guns that are not commonly owned. In its opinion, the Fourth Circuit said that while AR-15s and other similar rifles are owned by a small minority of all gun owners, the large number of sales can be explained, in part, because those who buy the weapons often purchase several.

The Fourth Circuit's decision goes farther than other decisions upholding assault weapons bans. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, for example, upheld New York State's SAFE Act—but also ruled there is some civilian right to own an AR-15, even if the government has a compelling interest in regulating these guns. The ruling by the Fourth Circuit attempted no such balancing act.

But, right now, that distinction may not matter much outside the courtroom.

"As a practical matter, there's not very much in the way of implications for the difference in opinions," said Frosh, the Maryland attorney general.

The immediate result of the Fourth Circuit's decision is basically the same as the result of the Second Circuit's earlier decision: The state laws stay the same.

But the unequivocal language in Tuesday's opinion could provide legal cover for other states that want to follow Maryland's example.

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

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"Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. If you kick 'em all out, you'll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts."

Meryl Streep's Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award speech at this year's Golden Globes ceremony touched on a variety of topics—politics, one's own sense of home and belonging, public cruelty, the passing of Carrie Fisher—but it was those two sentences, addressing the encroaching xenophobia and bigotry brought on by then–president elect Donald J. Trump's ascendancy, that stuck strongest with the public afterward. Is it accurate to refer to Hollywood as a whole—a tremendously moneyed industry that often faces derision and charges of elitism, cronyism, and nepotism—as a place where outsiders truly thrive? By drawing a line in the sand between the arts and other forms of mass entertainment, does Hollywood risk further alienating the populace that brought Trump to power? And in the end, does it matter?

The strength and swiftness of the reaction to Streep's speech—both positive and negative—demonstrated that regardless of its intentions or desires, the world pays attention when Hollywood takes a stand. People—regardless of color, faith, sexual orientation, or immigration status—like to watch stories, and that gives Hollywood an incredibly powerful opportunity. More so than any other industry, it has a direct line into the living rooms of Americans across the political spectrum.

But in this new, truly uncharted American landscape, what is Hollywood's role? Should Sunday night's Oscar ceremony devote itself to civil rights and humanitarian causes? Is it time for the industry to refocus on the messages it delivers and the politics it collectively aligns itself with? And, importantly, is Hollywood inherently liberal because of the ideology at play in its most popular themes and story arcs, or is it a conservative enterprise driven by a strong bottom line like Wall Street or any other classically capitalist entity? If the industry is indeed as progressive and all-inclusive as it portrays itself, why do some still believe coming out might negatively affect their careers? Are new distribution systems like streaming services opening up new opportunities for more diverse voices and programming, or will the major studio cabal continue to control the industry's output? Is it up to Hollywood as society's storytellers to help make sure ALL people continue to be heard?

As we move into an era where Washington is threatening to stifle the voices and roll back the rights of women, people of color, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community, among others, these questions are more important than ever.Through this package of articles, titledHollywood: The Next Chapter, VICE tries to answer those questions by investigating Hollywood's past, taking the pulse of its present, and looking toward what its future may hold. The entertainment we consume and the political climate that surrounds us are poised to overlap; with this series, we're looking at how and why, as well as what may come as a result.

Doug Brown has been an acoustic specialist in the Canadian military for 33 years. Normally, his gig involves sailing aboard navy frigates, but recently the brass sent him on a more unusual mission.

For nine days in late January, Brown visited the small northern hamlet of Igloolik in Nunavut. His assignment was to meet with the predominantly Inuit locals and gather first-hand reports of a mysterious "ping," allegedly emanating from the seafloor, which some believe may be to blame for a lack of wildlife in the area previously noticed by hunters. The ping was first reported by a sailboat that had recorded a sound with its onboard sonar.

The army initially planned to send two specialists, but the other couldn't make it due to conflicting duties, meaning Brown had to go alone. He'd never been to the Arctic before.

Though he's an acoustic specialist, Brown wasn't in Igloolik to conduct any readings or record sounds. That had already been done, with no results. In November, the military sent a CP-140 aircraft over the Fury and Hecla Strait—the location of the strange sound—to conduct an acoustic analysis. They found nothing.

For nine days, Brown stayed at the local Igloolik Inn and met with hunters and politicians, taking notes. He went out on the land with the Canadian Rangers (a reserve force that patrols the sparsely populated North), and dined on Arctic char.

Now that Brown has returned to Halifax from Igloolik, his findings will be put into an internal report for the military. When I called Brown to find out more about his experience, and what he discovered about the ping in Igloolik, he said it was "case closed," as far as the Canadian Army's concerned.

Read more on Motherboard

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released new data Friday that sheds more light on the nation's growing opioid crisis, revealing that 25 percent of all overdose deaths in 2015 were attributed to heroin, a sharp rise from just 8 percent in 1999, CNN reports.

Opioids—heroin, prescription painkillers like oxycodone, or illegal heroin synthetics like fentanyl—were also responsible for the majority of overdose deaths in 2015. The study found that opioids caused 73 percent of all overdose deaths last year, which is up from 57 percent five years ago.

Last year, more people died from heroin and fentanyl overdoses, whereas deaths from prescription opioids decreased from 29 percent in 2010 to 24 percent in 2015. This might be a result of those addicted to prescription drugs switching to more illegal alternatives because they're cheaper or easier to get.

The CDC's numbers echo a sweeping study from the US surgeon general released last November that found that 21 million Americans struggle with substance abuse. It revealed that 50,000 people died of overdoses in 2014 alone, while only 32,744 died in car crashes. In 2015, that number jumped to 52,404, which is the first time US overdose deaths exceeded 50,000, according to Holly Hedegard, co-author of the CDC study.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer acknowledged the country's growing opioid epidemic Thursday by likening it to recreational marijuana use.

"When you see something like the opioid-addiction crisis blossoming in so many states around this country, the last thing we should be doing is encouraging people," Spicer said. "There's a federal law that we need to abide by when it comes to recreational marijuana and other drugs of that nature."

However, evidence actually points to the fact that legal marijuana leads to reduced opioid use. A recent Columbia University study surveyed 18 states and found that the places where medical marijuana is legal, there was an decrease in opioid involvement in fatal car crashes. Additionally, a 2014 study published by JAMA Internal Medicine reviewed ten years' worth of death data and found that overdose deaths were 25 percent lower in states with medical marijuana laws than in those without them.

Ari Yarwood's sex education amounted to a brief anatomy lesson, scary words about STIs, and a video about abstinence hosted by Kirk Cameron at—for some reason—a scary haunted carnival.

"I grew up in a rural, conservative area," Yarwood said. "There were still big gaps in my knowledge base that I needed to fill in as an adult, especially as a queer woman."

If only Cameron and his clowns could see her now. Today, Ari is editorial director of Oni Press's new Limerence Press, an imprint dedicated to comics focusing on erotica and sex education. Under her leadership, the company is hard at work on books like Oh Joy Sex Toy, an erotic coloring book by artists Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan, and an erotic story entitled Small Favors by Colleen Coover.

American sex education has always drifted far from the reality of sexual practices, from absurd "abstinence only" advice to lessons that omit queer people altogether. Only 13 states require that sex ed be medically accurate, and most don't require lessons at all. Increasingly, those filling that gap are the only people unafraid to bare it all in the first place: explicit artists, porn companies, and sex workers.

Global research has shown that porn is already stepping up to fill sex ed's role. According to a 2015 British study, 60 percent of school and university students there watch porn to learn about sex. "Porn has become a cultural mediator in how young people are understanding and experience sex," Australian researchers Maree Crabbe and David Corlett wrote in another study. "Porn is our most prominent sex educator."

The role of educator is at times unfamiliar for companies that usually focus on fantasy, but x-rated creators are increasingly providing lessons that viewers may be unable to find elsewhere. Among those resources is PornHub's new Sexual Wellness Center, launched earlier this month and overseen by Dr. Laurie Betito, a distinguished sex therapist.

"I'd never been involved in the adult industry at all," she said. But "as a sex therapist and educator, I've been in the media for 30 years, and it's a dream to be able to reach 70 million people a day with quality information." The site features informative articles and videos on everything from the most basic questions about conception to queer sexuality and more.

Pornhub isn't the only company capitalizing on the need for competent sex ed; earlier this month, after Utah legislators rejected a bill that would require schools there to offer optional, comprehensive sex ed classes, the porn site xHamster redirected all its traffic from the state to the Box, its series of sexual-wellness videos.

Some adult performers are launching educational campaigns on their own, like British performer Jason Domino, who is spearheading a project called Porn4PrEP that originated after he was exposed to HIV on set.

"I wasn't really prepared," Domino recalls. After the incident, he started PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis), which was able to prevent him from becoming positive, and started learning about proactively protecting himself from HIV with PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis). "I needed to talk about it so new infections could be reduced," he said. "Currently, sexual education seems to be quite focused on reproduction. It seems like all queer aspects, no matter the gender, aren't tied in. The excuse is that sex education is about producing babies."

Jason's currently working on a series of videos that feature safe-sex lessons that incorporate live intercourse; he estimates they'll be coming out sometime early this summer.

Other performers and outlets are focusing on aspects of sex ed that are rarely, if ever, covered in schools—those having to do with the safe, affirmative practice of kinks and fetishes. Professional dominatrix Princess Kali started Kink Academy in 2007 to address knowledge gaps she saw in her clients. "Heteronormativity is still the baseline," she said. "I think sex education does tend to take a heteronormative, cisgender, skinny white people approach."

Porn-industry heavyweight Kink.com has also gotten into the education game, offering frequent classes in BDSM and related subjects at its San Francisco headquarters. The company's goal is "to demystify BDSM and alternative sexuality through transparency," said Dusty J, who manages the workshops.

"I've got a squirting workshop that's great," she said. "We call it hands-in instead of hands-on."

Delivering realistic, factual messages about sex can be challenging in the realm of erotica. Although faulty sex ed is responsible for a wide variety of misconceptions, pornography itself presents an imaginary form of sex. Beautiful bodies, infallible boners, and performers' impossible flexibility can create all manner of unrealistic expectations.

"Something like PornHub responds to the needs of people with fantasies," said Dr. Betito. "I'd like to see more porn where performers use condoms, so it can show a responsible sexuality side, but that's just maybe wishful thinking. I don't know. At least there's a balance, there's something. It's better than nothing."

Artists working in adult media tend to argue that if audiences think porn is real, they've been failed by the educational system, not by the adult industry.

"I fully blame the public sex-education system," said Erika Moen, co-creator of Oh Joy Sex Toy. "Is it Star Wars' responsibility to teach kids how to fly a spaceship realistically? No, it's up to the grown ups and education system."

From major companies to individual models to indie creators, those who use adult media to educate cite an urgent need for information that is more accurate and more inclusive.

"I've seen a lot of suffering over the years, a lot of people who think they're not normal for something they're feeling," said Dr. Betito. "I'd like people to avoid that kind of suffering."

"Understanding your sexual desires and how to express them is worthwhile," said Princess Kali. "Your sex life is worth an investment."

Follow Matt Baume on Twitter.

In the ongoing and necessary conservation about diversity on television, Netflix is often presented as an example of a network that's getting it right. Last year, numerous articles championed the streaming service for its diverse programming—from Master of None and Orange is the New Black to Narcos, and so on. But is Netflix's commitment a lasting one, or just a fad?

Granted, writing off diverse television as a mere "fad" can come across as callous—but it's not completely off-base, either. While analyzing TV's landscape in 2015, author Robin R. Means Coleman explained to me that the prominence of minority narratives on television follows a cyclical pattern, popping up "about every 20 years." During the 2014-15 season, we saw the broadcast debuts of Black-ish, Fresh Off the Boat, Jane the Virgin, The Carmichael Show, among others—all which indicate that, right now, we're in a positive cyclical pattern. Still, there's the oft-unspoken worry—especially from diverse viewers and critics—that the industry will eventually return to its old ways.

So maybe that's why it's important that Netflix has continued to greenlight more diverse shows—not just as a token gesture, but as a commitment to real representation across genres and behind the scenes. Rather than just throw in a few non-white characters to balance out the cast, Netflix's programming slate actively explores the specificities, cultures, and lived experiences of marginalized groups that don't often get to tell their stories—or have them told at all.

And April 28 marks the premiere of Netflix's Dear White People, a television adaptation of Justin Simien's 2014 film of the same name. Like the movie, the series doesn't just feature people of color, it's about people of color. "It's not just: Hey white people, these are things you need to know," Simien told the crowd during a recent Netflix press event. "It also allows people of color to see themselves and to see, you know, their humanity." Dear White People follows a diverse group of students on campus—Logan Browning plays biracial protagonist and controversial radio host Sam, stepping in for Tessa Thompson who originated the film's role—as they navigate their mostly-white Ivy League world and speak truth to the microaggressions and racism they encounter.

The trailer is blunt: Sam explains to her peers that her culture isn't an appropriate Halloween costume, as images of white students in blackface appear on the screen. The reaction to the trailer was both frustrating and unsurprising: former BuzzFeed writer and current "outspoken member of the so-called alt-right" Tim Treadstone tweeted that the "anti-white" series "promotes white genocide," along with a screenshot showing he canceled his Netflix account. Others took aim at the show's perceived content—this, based on a 34-second long trailer—and Simien fought back at some of the hate on social media.

It's clear that detractors will become more vocal once the series is actually released, and their reaction also emphasizes why a series like Dear White People is so necessary. It depicts the daily struggles and frustrations of simple existing as a brown person in a white world; the reaction proved exactly the series' point.

The reaction also suggested that, somehow, producing more diverse content still could be considered a risk—especially when it comes to a series that explores and picks apart race issues instead of tiptoeing around them. Earlier this year, Netflix released a Cuban-American remake of Norman Lear's One Day at a Time that places Cuban culture as a driving thematic force of the series itself. It garnered positive reviews—but executive producer Gloria Calderon Kellett tells me that they "were worried in every step of the way" when it came to pushback from audiences who may not have wanted to see a beloved sitcom rebooted with diverse characters.

One Day at a Time co-executive producer Mike Royce explains that the remake's origins were "literally as simple as 'Let's look at Norman Lear's properties and see what good projects we could do'." He believes that there was "a goal to do something with a Latino family, probably because Norman had a show back in the 80s that wasn't really a success and he always felt like he didn't do it right." (That 1984 series, a.k.a. Pablo, focused on a Mexican-American stand-up comic and his family; it was canceled after six episodes.) The decision to make this new version of an old family specifically Cuban-American was owed to Kellett's involvement; once she was brought on board, she realized there was "so much to mine from" her own Cuban background.

One Day at a Time is perhaps the strongest example yet of Netflix's commitment to real representation over superficial diversity; the show gives equal attention to military veterans and queer youth in the form of well-rounded characters with narrative arcs that transcend mere label box-ticking, while also touching on subjects from PTSD to religion.

Much of the show's thematic scope is owed to the diversity of the writers room itself: "We made it a priority to make sure our writers room had a lot of voices, a lot of points of view, and is very diverse," Royce said, citing the multiple Latino and LGBTQ voices. "I think we try to get it right [by] coming from people who have had these experiences. Every writers room, every show I've ever been on, comes from people telling personal stories." (It's also worth mentioning that, according to Kellett, about 90% of the first season's directors were diverse and women.)

The end result is a show that has universal family appeal—who hasn't gotten annoyed by a younger sibling, or fumbled with online dating?—but one that also remains hyper-personal and specific, as we see Penelope (Justina Machado) deal with the hell of the VA while her daughter Elena (Isabella Gomez) tries to help a friend whose parents have been deported. By depicting these diverse families and their daily lives, shows like One Day at a Time are normalizing the "other."

And Netflix is extending this approach to its kids and family programming, too: This Friday, they'll debut Las Leyendas (Legend Quest), the network's first animated foreign-language show produced in Latin America. The decision makes sense, according to Netflix's Director of Global Kids Content Andy Yeatman: "We're rapidly coming to the place where more of our members are outside the United States than are inside, so we want content that reflects our membership base." With the exception of Canada, Netflix has been in Latin America longer than any other international country, and as he explains, "our membership in Mexico watches a ton of Netflix—particularly kids and family content, so it was a logical place to start."

Based on a trilogy of popular Mexican animated films, Las Leyendas is a spooky, supernatural, and funny children's series that combines an adventurous and mythical story with what Yeatman describes as "What has traditionally been Mexican legends." The show's characters traipse around other parts of the globe too, an approach emphasized by Las Leyendas executive producer Fernando de Fuentes, who spoke to me from Mexico: "We specifically targeted most continents and most cultures. Why not show to the audience, not only fun and scary, but also other cultures?" De Fuentes also talks up the diversity of the behind-the-scenes crew—"Our director is from Mexico, we have Cuban animators, Spanish line producers, English writers. We're from all over"—and notes that involving so many different, diverse people in the production process "gives this show a global appeal that we wanted to achieve."

Even outside of Las Leyendas, Netflix has been thinking globally: last year's dystopian thriller 3% was Netflix's first original Brazilian production, and the upcoming Ingobernable is a Spanish-language political thriller that stars Kate del Castillo as the First Lady of Mexico (it was originally slated to shoot in Mexico, but now has to shoot in the U.S. because of Del Castillo's ties to El Chapo).

Of course, Netflix is far from perfect: There are still loads of ultra white shows—Santa Clarita Diet, The Ranch, Girlboss, Haters Back Off, the list goes on—and it will never quite get rid of the bad taste that Adam Sandler's notoriously racist The Ridiculous 6 left behind. Speaking specifically to Netflix's children's programming, Yeatman says that "I think we're doing quite well on screen but I think we can improve, and I think we can certainly improve behind the camera as well, but that is something that we're working on." The upcoming Magic School Bus reboot, for example, will have a "cast that is a lot more diverse than the original version was," and even Julie's Greenroom, the Julie Andrews-hosted children's show in conjunction with the Jim Henson Workshop, makes it a point to include diverse puppets, even including a young boy puppet in a wheelchair. "It was our shared goal to create characters that were reflective of all kinds of families," said Lisa Henson, CEO of The Jim Henson Company in an email to me. "We want kids to watch this show with their parents, and see themselves in the puppets we've crafted, which is why this cast is so diverse."

Netflix does have an advantage in that it produces so much original content and isn't tied to traditional primetime television schedules. As Yeatman said, "One of the things about being an on demand platform is that people can choose what they want to watch ... part of what we offer to consumers is such a variety of choice." Royce echoed this sentiment, likening Netflix to a supermarket: "You can go in and get whatever you want whenever you want as opposed to just one thing on at one time, so [Netflix is] happy to try things out." This "trying out" method is perhaps one that more networks should employ, especially since numbers keep proving what we already know: a recent Nielsen study reiterated that programs "with a predominantly black cast, or a main storyline focusing on a black character, are drawing a substantial non-black viewership, too."

But this process has to be an ongoing commitment—and not just for Netflix, but for all networks. In June, Variety's Maureen Ryan analyzed the showrunners of the 2016-17 broadcast TV season and found that "90% of showrunners are white, and almost 80% are male." And during our interview, Kallet spoke passionately about the frustration of pick-up season, the need for continued representation, and the importance of first generation kids creating art that speaks to their experiences. She explainedthat she still thinks we have a long way to go. "Not one [show] got picked up that has a Latinx creator this year thus far. That's discouraging to me because I was hoping that after One Day at a Time came out, that people would go 'Oh! We should make more of these Latino shows!' But there's no network or studio that I know of at this point. I think the fight is continuous. We can't just rest on our laurels. We have to continue to create content, we have to keep trying, and hopefully by continuing to try and getting better and better, the landscape will continue to change."

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