With growing paths for distribution and technology making way for more ways to realize one's creative vision than ever, independent film has never been more exciting or diverse. A new generation of filmmakers are bringing stories and visions that, to this point, have been rarely seen on film, instilling hope for the future of the medium. We spoke with and photographed several rising talents about how they're upending the system, and what they believe the future of independent film looks like.

Nathanael Turner

Andrew Ahn, Director of 'Spa Night'

VICE: What do you see in the future of independent filmmaking?
Andrew Ahn: I see innovation on the horizon. There's an attitude in the air, a refusal to settle. Filmmakers are taking on more challenging subject matter, experimenting with techniques and form, and finding new ways to connect with audiences.

What types of stories would you like to see coming more from young filmmakers?
I've met a lot of young filmmakers who are trying to make something flashy in an attempt to stand out. Unfortunately, these films often end up gimmicky or derivative. I am more interested in personal stories—stories that can be told with insight, nuance, and passion. It allows filmmakers to focus on their personal artistic voice, instead of being distracted by budgets or special effects.

What responsibilities does independent filmmaking have in America right now?
Now more than ever, the independent film community has the responsibility to make films that promote progress and equality. We need more films about and made by women, people of color, and queer and trans folks.

Nathanael Turner

Elizabeth Wood, Director of 'White Girl'

VICE: What do you see in the future of independent filmmaking?
Elizabeth Wood: In theory, anyone can make a movie now. We all have video cameras on our cellphones and a way to share our stories with the world at our fingertips. I always swore I was going to make White Girl on my cellphone if no one would help me; luckily it didn't come to that. But, hey, look at Tangerine, it worked out great for them.

Anyone anywhere can watch virtually any film ever made. Independent cinema is primarily experienced the same way studio films are: not in theaters, but at home—by people in their underwear on their couch while they stare at Instagram, on cellphones and iPads in cars and on buses, trains, and planes. It's gross and exciting.

However, because of all this noise, because of all of our voices echoing into the digital infinite, it is more important than ever to tell a good fucking story. To have a viewpoint. To make something that matters. Because otherwise you are gonna get lost at sea.

What types of stories would you like to see coming more from young filmmakers?
Despite the wealth of storytelling tools at our disposal, films still are incredibly hard to make and many complicated stories still require a lot of financial and logistical support.

So when someone does get the amazing opportunity to make a film, I urge them to be as honest as possible—so honest that it hurts, that it's embarrassing, that it feels wrong. I believe it is in that painful arena where you start to resonate with other people.

What responsibilities does independent filmmaking have in America right now?
I would not limit responsibility to independent film. A film is powerful tool. If it does not have a purpose, then it is merely another piece of plastic gathering in the center of the Pacific Ocean, yet another dollar in the insipid entertainment stock market. I'm not saying this means you have to make important boring movies. I hate boring movies. Movies can be full of drugs and sex and violence and be entertaining as hell, but they have to have some greater purpose. They have to be about something.

Nathanael Turner

Sophia Takal, Director of 'Always Shine'

VICE: What responsibilities does independent filmmaking have in America right now?
Sophia Takal: I think the responsibility of filmmakers is different than the responsibility of independent-film distributors and curators. For filmmakers, I think making films that expand an audience's sphere of empathy is important—making films that are personal is important, and thinking about how to use film to challenge dehumanizing rhetoric and actions is important. For curators, I think now more than ever it is essential to seek out and support work by and about people of color, women, and other minority voices and to expose audiences to work that challenges the imperialist white supremacist patriarchal values that our society is built on.

Anna Rose Holmer, Director of The Fits

VICE:What do you see in the future of independent film-making?
Anna Rose Holmer: New voices. New rules. Endless possibilities.

What types of stories would you like to see coming more from young filmmakers?
We are already seeing young filmmakers who fall outside of the very narrow, industry-supported gaze find new paths to their audiences. We need greater access to opportunities for these under-represented perspectives. As a film-goer, I want to see characters I've never seen on screen before, as told by varied voices, in forms I never imagined. I want to be challenged and surprised.

What responsibilities does independent filmmaking have in America right now?
I think independent filmmaking has the same responsibilities it has always had—to provoke, to inspire, to question, to illuminate, to instigate, to validate, to examine, to empathize, to document, to champion, to empower. However, crafting cultural narratives is a political tool we cannot underestimate. As the world around us closes its doors, we must make sure we are opening ours. We must invite more voices to the table, more perspectives to the screen, and make sure we engage as human beings, not just as filmmakers

All photographs by Nathanael Turner and Nathan Bajar

"I don't think you can think of another gay man who went undercover and put away the head of a major crime family," Michael Blutrich said when I reached him by phone, and he's right—I can't.

Scores is the title of his new memoir, but it's the subtitle that manages to sum up Blutrich's wild career: "How I Opened the Hottest Strip Club in New York City, Was Extorted out of Millions by the Gambino Family, and Became One of the Most Successful Mafia Informants in FBI History."

Recently released from prison, Blutrich has lived an incredible life of secrets and contradictions. At the height of his career, he was a gay man working in the straightest world imaginable—but running Scores, a multi-million-dollar Manhattan strip club, meant dealing with the mob, which attracted FBI attention. Blutrich found himself torn between his business, the mafia, and law enforcement agents who had detected one of his other closely-guarded secrets: He was embroiled in an extensive insurance fraud scheme. Using the threat of prosecution as bait, investigators pressured Blutrich into secretly recording his criminal associates; after they were convicted, Blutrich himself was locked away in a witness protection unit in prison for thirteen years.

Blutrich's tell-all book is part confession, part cautionary tale, and strangely funny (like the time he says he extracted confessions from unwitting mobsters during a proctological exam). But it reads most of all like a long sigh of relief from a man who carried more secrets than anyone should, now free to reveal just about everything.

It all began in a law office. In the 80s, Blutrich was a successful Manhattan attorney, working in a Park Avenue office alongside future Governor Andrew Cuomo. One day, a client approached him with a proposal that was, at the time, a radical proposition: help open a topless bar in Manhattan. His client envisioned an upscale, expensive alternative to the Time Square dives that were then the industry standard. He asked Blutrich if he would be a co-owner.

"The last thing I want in my life is to own a club filled with naked women, catering to a homophobic straight crowd," he told me he remembers thinking.But they forged ahead, opening Scores in the early 90s. Even the New York Times reported that topless bars had emerged from their grimy reputation to offer something approaching, well, class.

It soon became an unbelievably lucrative business, but Blutrich felt like an alien within it. His sexuality had always been a source of stress: "For most of my life I couldn't be myself," he said. "I thought, as a teenager, I was the only person who had these feelings. I suppressed it and got married."

That didn't last. "She got bored with me," he said. His marriage crumbled just as the AIDS epidemic hit, and though he talked to a few friends about coming out of the closet, "I went running back in. It was so frightening," he continued. "Nobody knew how the disease was transmitted, it was just pinned as a gay disease."

Though he was having flings with men, he never allowed them to become romantic, and even avoided gay neighborhoods. And tohis surprise, his sexuality became an advantage in his aggressively heterosexual industry. Dancers at Scores would offer sexual favors in exchange for lucrative shift assignments—they could expect to make $5,000 on a Thursday night, compared to $1,500 on a Monday—which he refused. He avoided physical temptation and focused on the business instead, buying beers for fifteen cents a bottle and selling them for $17.

But it was his dancers—many of whom were queer women themselves—who would ultimately figure out that he was gay. Rumors spread. "I finally said, 'Fuck this, what am I doing? I'll be dead one day. The girls know, the people at the club know. Nobody gives me a hassle. I'm done.'" He decided to come out in 1998, seven years after Scores first opened.

To his relief, coming out wasn't as difficult as he feared, and it didn't hurt that he had money and power. He made a circle of gay friends, and even recalls growing so comfortable with his sexuality that he was able to visit a gay strip club in Montreal, an eye-opening experience—the first time he came to understand what attracted the straight clientele to the club he helped found.

But pressures were building back in New York. As the mafia became inextricably entwined in his business, Blutrich's insurance fraud scheme grew. After helping three of his clients purchase an insurance company in Florida with a fake check, they then became close investors in Scores, using the company to embezzle funds and defraud investors and the government. The FBI had a strong case against Blutrich for those crimes, and approached him about wearing a wire to inform on the mafia. Fearing jail time, Blutrich agreed, risking extreme physical danger in the process.

"I'm not brave! I'm not a brave guy," he said. "I just did what was asked." On more than one occasion, he was strip-searched before mafia meetings, and barely managed to conceal recording devices in the folds of his clothes. "The first time I almost got caught was on the second mission," he said. His mark insisted on searching him, taking him to a bathroom to strip. Blutrich carefully shifted the recording device into a pant leg as he undressed, then "sauntered over to him and started giving him a lap dance. He's screaming, 'put on your fucking clothes!' I was like 'no, you embarrass me like this? You're gonna give me a hard on.'" He knew he'd never search him again.

On another occasion, when a pat-down by a mafia lawyer came close to a recorder concealed by Blutrich's crotch, he says he grabbed the lawyer's crotch in return, shocking the man and instantly ending the search.

Blutrich lived in constant fear for over a year as he accrued conversations for the FBI. In the end, the recordings helped put 35 mafia defendants away for various charges related to organized crime schemes. Blutrich was then sentenced to 16 years in prison for his role in the insurance scheme, reduced from 25 years, longer than the sentence of many of those he'd helped put away.

"I went from coming out of the closet, feeling better about it, having friends who were gay, to an environment where I had to be closeted again," he said. "When you're high-profile like me, you really can't get involved and have a boyfriend [in prison] and be sleeping with somebody."

Upon his release, Blutrich found himself in a world transformed. "The openness that gay people had achieved was spellbinding," he said. "The gay thing was a nightmare, in some ways, in jail, but glorious when I came out. For the first time in my life, I didn't have to gauge what people would say when I came out."

These days, Scores is still around, under new management.It hasn't even lost its reputation. In 2004, it was revealed as the site of a highly-coordinated credit card fraud ring by its dancers. Meanwhile, Blutrich is still piecing his life back together, and suffering under the weight of having kept so many secrets for so long. He's adopted an assumed name in his day-to-day life and keeps only a small band of friends to evade retribution.

But of all the subterfuge he's perpetuated, it's the closet that seems to pain Blutrich the most. There was only one point during our hour-long conversation when his voice slowed, and it was upon reflecting on how long it took him to come out. "I wish I'd been born in a time like now," he said, "when I could have had a whole life for myself."

Follow Matt Baume on Twitter.

It's Wednesday evening and the Turtle Bay opposite Blackburn railway station is so busy that it takes half an hour to get a drink. Having visited branches of the Caribbean restaurant chain in nearby Manchester and Preston, I'm not surprised by its popularity, but taken aback by the demographic—the patrons here are all white.

According to a recent Guardian article, the Lancashire town of Blackburn is one of the most racially segregated places in Britain. Whalley Range (a neighbourhood just ten-minute's walk from Turtle Bay) has reportedly 95 percent Pakistani and Indian residents; and is home to a number of halal butchers, curry houses, South Asian confectioners, and shops. Blackburn Council describes this "Asian quarter" as as a rival to Manchester's Curry Mile—the popular strip of eateries that runs through the city's Rusholme neighbourhood.

Blackburn, Lancashire. All photos by Akash Khadka.

Ten years ago, Whalley Range was the subject of a major council regeneration project. As well as boosting the local economy, the scheme was hoped to foster relations between Blackburn's Asian community and prevent the "white flight" evident in some of the town's neighbourhoods. Blackburn and Darwen Council senior communications officer Kate tells me: "It was about improving physical links between town centre core and Whalley Range area through highways improvements, pedestrian links, signage, visibility, and marketing."

Read more on MUNCHIES.

Eddie Huang was never one to shy away from his distain for Fresh Off the Boat—a televised adaptation of his memoir by the same name. Now after two seasons on-air, Huang, a renowned chef and host of VICELAND's Huang's World, still has opinions that have only grown more nuanced with time.

During last night's Desus & Mero, Eddie Huang stopped by to talk about representation of minorities on TV and his current relationship with the show. Oh, and then the foodie also shared stories about the perils of eating your way around the world with IBS.

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

(Illustrations courtesy of Penguin)

The city of Raqqa in Syria has become one of the most isolated places on earth. The population lives under the rule of the so-called Islamic State (IS), which made the city its de-facto capital in early 2014. Since then, IS's oppressive rule has made life hellish for its inhabitants; they're banned from smoking or watching TV, and have to follow strict dress codes, which – if defied – are punishable by lashing or death.

Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently is one group documenting the atrocities, but many of their high-profile activists have fled the city for fear of their lives. IS heavily monitors information coming in and out of Raqqa, and communicating with Western journalists is a death-sentence. which makes it all the more remarkable that BBC Correspondent Mike Thomson managed to make contact with someone who wanted to talk.

Samer (not his real name) is a 24-year-old student living in Raqqa who wanted to tell the world his story, at huge risk to his own life. Over the past year Mike has received Samer's diaries through encrypted messages sent via a third country. Translated by Nader Ibrahim, he describes a desperate and brutal situation.

An illustration of a destroyed area of Raqqa

Samer is part of Al-Sharqiya 24, a small media activist group. He participated in the initial uprising against President Assad, before his home city fell to the Free Syrian Army and a group of extreme Islamists in March of 2013. Shortly after, strangers – as he puts it – under the banner of IS began appearing in the city and taking control. Samer stayed in Raqqa longer than most moderates, but has now escaped. The publication of his diaries in a book edited by Thomson and published by Penguin, The Raqqa Diaries: Escape From 'Islamic State', makes him a high-profile target; they've been popular with activists still in Raqqa.

I spoke with Mike Thomson about Samer and his life under IS.

WATCH: Inside the Islamic State

VICE: How did the you first contact Samer?
Mike Thomson: I spent a couple of days on social media trying to find someone in Raqqa who would speak. I got in contact with a large, prominent group of activists called Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently. I explained I wanted to talk to someone who was inside Raqqa, but everyone they knew had fled. Eventually I was tipped off with a WhatsApp number. After a few days I received a message asking: "What do you want to do?" That's when I was first introduced to Samer.

Initially we recorded audio interviews for radio, but Samer and his friends felt the risk was too great. Each time we spoke they had to assemble incriminating audio equipment and take special precautions to avoid being tracked on the internet. They were also scared that IS, who claimed they had voice recognition technology, could track them down. They didn't know if this was true, but understandably it was enough to make them worried. Samer then began sending his diaries.

What do his diaries reveal about life under IS?
I did expect the violence, but when it's so graphically described it's shocking. Everything from turning your head from the sight of a public execution to the length of your trousers is an act of dissent. People stay inside and not many shops are open because of enforced Sharia classes. Despite this, there is still humour. In one diary entry, Samer jokes how he risks being lashed for turning up late for Sharia class, all because he has to wash up the dishes for his mother. His diaries enable you to picture the place. It staggers me how resilient people like Samer are.

Samer has risked his life by writing these diaries. Did he explain why he was compelled to send them?
I remember Samer telling me about a massacre that happened in 1982. In the city of Hamer, 130 miles north of the capital Damascus, Hafez al-Assad's forces killed between 2,000 to 40,000 people. There were no journalists, so the real number is not known. The stories of those who suffered have gone untold. Samer doesn't want the same to happen in Raqqa. He feels by writing the diary – detailing the terrible acts of crucifixion and torture – what happened won't be forgotten. He also told me writing the diaries was cathartic: "When you have a big worry, isn't it better when you can share it with the world?"

How did you view your own responsibility to him?
When he first agreed to send me his diaries he said: "My life is in your hands." I had to be careful not to reveal anything that might be traced back to him. In the past year there's been times where I've not heard from him for weeks. At one point I heard about two Syrian activists who had left Raqqa who had been killed in Turkey. Samer hadn't messaged me for two weeks and I didn't have the names of those who died. It was very worrying.

Do people in Raqqa know about The Raqqa Diaries?
I spoke to Samer a few weeks ago and he told me the parts of the diaries which are online have been very popular with activists in Raqqa. They've been translated into Arabic and have had quite a big reaction. They've even provoked IS to launch their own version called "A Young Man from Raqqa", which is about how wonderful everything is.

Samer has left Raqqa – where does he want to go in the future?
He talks in his diaries about how much he loves the city. He wants to go back and rebuild it. He believes that it's up to people like him, who've gone to university, to put the country back together. I also asked him whether he wanted to travel to Europe. He doesn't. He'd heard stories about refugees being treated badly and doesn't want to leave his family. Samer is wary about thinking too much about the future. He hates the Assad regime as much as IS. He worries Raqqa will ruled by government forces once IS are defeated. At times Samer questions whether any of this has been worth it. He writes in his diary about visiting his older friend for advice on how to cope with his present frightening life. His friend tells him, "Imagine you're walking on a rope between two mountains. The present is the ground below. Walk straight ahead and focus only on crossing to the other mountain. Never look down."

Thanks, Mike.

The Raqqa Diaries: Escape From 'Islamic State' is available to buy now.

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands

Every year in the days before Lent, people in the southern Dutch village of Grevenbicht hold a competition in which they rip the head off a dead goose. The goose is hung high on a track and competitors get on a horse, ride towards the dead bird and then try to decapitate it with their bare hands – in passing and without slowing down. Before it's hung there, the goose's neck is buttered up, to make getting a grip even more challenging. The first guy to manage to tear off its head is crowned that year's Goose King.

This tradition isn't unique for Grevenbicht or even the Netherlands – it happens in towns in Germany, Spain, France and Belgium too. But using real geese for it has become very rare in recent years. Unsurprisingly, animal rights organisations and other animal lovers have been protesting the custom. Several Dutch organisations have actively tried to ban the event in Grevenbicht since the early 80s, so far without any success.

Photographer Maarten Delobel went to Grevenbricht last week to witness the festival for himself.

(Photo via)

The summer I was 21, I burnt my arms several times. I used to hold a kitchen knife over the gas hob for a minute or so, grit my teeth, then press the blade flat on my skin for as long as I possibly could. The strangest thing about the sensation was that the knife would slip, the skin becoming almost soapy as it scalded. That's what it felt like anyway. Then a large clear blister would develop over the wound, eventually becoming a scar. I remember that these acts gave me a sensation of release, but I still don't know what it was that I was trying to get rid of, or why I thought that the only way to let something out of my mind was to mark it on my skin.

There are as many meanings to self-harm as there are self-harmers, Sarah Chaney explains in her new history of the phenomenon, Psyche on the Skin. Reading the archives from the Bethlem asylum in London, Chaney noticed that staff would record whether new patients were "suicidal or otherwise inclined to self-injury".

To Chaney this phrase seemed strangely familiar, at odds with her assumption that self-harm was a contemporary phenomenon. Indeed, the words from the Bethlem archives were remarkably similar to those used in the American Psychiatric Association's manual (usually called the DSM), which describes "non-suicidal self-injury" as a distinct condition.

In the book, Chaney sets out to understand the history of self-harm. As she explains, deliberately hurting oneself has a long history – for example, think of self-flagellation for religious reasons – but the category of "self-harm" as a distinct behaviour that is related to mental distress is an invention of the 19th century. According to Bethlem patient records from the 1850s, Sophia W had "a disposition to injure herself by knocking her head against the wall and biting herself", while Henry M had sores all over his head, face and legs from "picking and scratching himself".

Ever since these "perverted impulses" were identified, some psychiatrists have tried to explain them in universal terms. The American psychoanalyst Karl Menninger argued in Man Against Himself (1938) that self-harm was an unconscious redirection of suicidal impulses, and thus (at least according to some of his followers) proof of the Freudian model of human psychology.

But Chaney argues that the idea of an overarching category of self-harm doesn't really work. "Since the late Victorian period almost every medical category of self-harm [has assumed] that there is some kind of equivalence between behaviours and that there is some kind of universal meaning," she told me, "but why should someone trying to cut off their own hand be somehow the same as someone pulling out their hair?"

In contemporary British society, self-harm is most often portrayed as an individualised, private behaviour that expresses the inner turmoil of the self-harmer in some way, whereas in other eras it tended to be understood in terms of the environment, or the role of the family.

Self-harm should be understood as emerging from a cultural context, not simply from a solitary mind. Researchers like Armando Favazza, who came to psychiatry after first studying anthropology, believes that some forms of self-injury represent "an attempt at self-healing". Globally, he pointed out, culturally-sanctioned forms of self-mutilation are widespread.

Even Menninger was deeply influenced by the circumstances of his time. "His view of self-mutilation and suicidal behaviour as evidence of the Freudian death instinct was very much bound up in his view of what was happening in the world. As he put it [in some of his other writing], 'What suicide and self-harm is for the individual, so war is for the nation.' He was using these cases to prove a self destructive path for humanity, not just the individual."

For that reason, Chaney is convinced that prevailing ideas around self-harm actually say a lot more about the people who express them, or the culture that gives birth to them, than they do about the behaviour itself. In contemporary British society, self-harm is most often portrayed as an individualised, private behaviour that expresses the inner turmoil of the self-harmer in some way, whereas in other eras it tended to be understood in terms of the environment, or the role of the family. What Chaney suggests therefore is that the focus on private personal turmoil "reflects an increasingly individualised understanding of how human beings function".

When we spoke, Chaney was cautious on the subject of self-harm and its prevalence in Britain today, but said that it has probably increased in the last two decades. It's very difficult to say so with any certainty, though. NHS statistics are inconsistent, sometimes based on self-reporting and other times based on access to emergency services – which obviously favours certain, more severe, kinds of harm. There's little reason to believe that cutting yourself (or burning yourself, for that matter) causes the same level of harm as a near-fatal overdose or comes from the same place psychologically.

One thing we can be sure of is that self-harm is more visible than it has ever been. As with so many things, this can largely be attributed to the internet. "The types of quite public conversations that people might have on a forum are not the kinds of public conversations that you could view before that. If people were having them with friends they weren't recorded," Chaney explains.

Though events like the disappearance of (famous self-harmer) Manic Street Preachers' guitarist Richey James triggered an outpouring of emotion in the letters pages of the music press, "it was the NME and Melody Maker that decided what to print and when". Now, self-publication gives anybody who wants it the power to create their own narrative. While in itself this won't necessarily reduce levels of self-injury, it might help some people find their way out of an impasse which has been clouded by the fog of stereotype and misunderstanding.

If you are affected by any of the issues in this piece, help is available from Selfharm UK or the Samaritans

More from VICE:

How Tattoos Can Erase the Emotional Pain of Self-Harm Scars

How Self-Harm Became a Teenage Issue, and What Can Be Done About It

Seraching for Reasons Why I Self-Harmed for Seven Years, and For Why I Stopped

Leadership races are beautiful things. They represent the purest expression of the free marketplace of ideas that our political system can handle. Candidates appear as salespeople, hawking both themselves and their vision for the country to a group of rationally self-interested partisan supporters. Through the magic power of competitive forces, the products are honed until the superior one is purchased and/or is given monopoly rights within the party. Or something. I don't know, Conservatives love market metaphors.

But markets are rarely this elegant outside an economics textbook. The dialectic between the leader-commodity and the consumers it seeks to represent/articulate can lead to some pretty warped places. This can happen even under "normal" circumstances (there are no normal circumstances in the fluid history of politics) but things get significantly more unhinged when there are 14 forgettable candidates trying to shout over each other to fractured blocs of Tories at a historical moment when the worldwide right-wing zeitgeist is tracking in some wildly regressive directions. The Conservative leadership race looks less like a marketplace of ideas than a bizarre bazaar.

Kellie Leitch

Obviously, the reigning champion of surrealism this campaign is Kellie Leitch. The campaign videos are just icing on the cake—the real feast is how vacuous the whole schtick really is. It's all innuendo and winking and dancing around her central, unstated premise that there are too many immigrants who don't act white enough—most auspiciously, Muslims who continue to be visibly Muslim in public. She will never outright say "Muslims are dangerous and maybe there are too many," but presumably her Canadian Values testers won't be digging through the social media history posts of Basque or Flemish migrants.

She won't (or can't) explain how, exactly, nefarious and nebulous elites are keeping the common man down. Instead she is relying on an unspoken political vocabulary largely imported from America and grafted onto the regional grievances of Western Canadians, mostly thanks to Ezra Levant's perpetual outrage machine. Leitch doesn't need to specifically call out Muslims are the problem, as the bearers of this insidious social disease called Islam; the Rebel and their ilk in traditional media will do it for her, and she just has to shrug on stage next to them or smugly cock her eyebrows into a camera for another eight grueling minutes.

Why else did she make a major announcement yesterday about her immigrant-screening plans via the Rebel Media platform? She's coasting on their hate so she can court the heavy xenophobe vote but still wash her hands of the hatemonger charge when her campaign crashes and burns. Which it will, because Kellie Leitch is not very good at what she does.

Kellie Leitch at a Rebel Rally last month. Photo via Jake Kivanc

But as every market enthusiast will tell you, supply creates its own demand. Leitch's bargain-bin Trumpism has proved spectacular and darkly fascinating, like a circus freakshow where the geek threatening to eat Muslim children is given a cover story in Maclean's. The demand is there now, especially now in this brave new post-Trump world where the rock has been lifted and every dark impulse in the political life of our North American settler-state is slithering out into the sunlight. Every day the public discourse in this country lurches further toward total preoccupation with immigration and the porosity of our borders and threats to our way of life.

It's a good intellectual environment for a leadership race with 14 candidates and a ranked ballot. The winner will have to haul in other core constituencies by casting a wider net and dredging through the mud kicked up by candidates like Leitch. How else do you explain the strange turn of Maxime Bernier?

Mad Max: Fury Road

"Mad Max" Bernier—like Leitch, another forgettable Harper-era leftover reinventing himself as a contrarian maverick based on things he or his staffers have read on the internet—has spent most of the race angling for the libertarian vote. Two-tiered healthcare, slashed taxes, mass deregulation of nearly every economic sector bureaucrats meddle in, all the hits. In a regulatory race to the bottom, the best will soar to new heights and the moochers will get their just desserts.

It's a different core constituency than Leitch, so he's doing less scaremongering about Muslims and more clumsy trafficking in dank memes. Libertarians, largely, skew younger and more internet savvy than folks who froth about immigrants on talk radio. But it's late days now and Bernier has to broaden his appeal beyond people who get cheesed off about dairy supply management. Hence the sudden turn against "radical multiculturalism," the paranoid hand wringing about M-103, and his heel turn on a bill that would add gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Code. Hence also his dankest meme of all: urging supporters to join forces with Alberta Wildrose MLA Derek Fildebrandt in taking the red pill and liberating their minds from… the Social Justice Warriors, I guess.

Of course, as various Serious Pundit Men were quick to argue, cribbing a very famous metaphor from the biggest science fiction film of 1999 that has since been appropriated by nerdy misogynists on Reddit does not necessarily mean that Bernier is actively trying to court the anti-feminist underbelly of libertarianism.

But the timing is certainly auspicious. Here is Bernier, urging us to join Alberta's most obnoxious MLA in "taking the red pill" on the same night the Wildrose Campus Club at the University of Calgary sent out an email with the subject "Feminism Is Cancer" advertising an anti-feminist documentary called The Red Pill is either the greatest Freudian slip in Canadian political history or proof that God loves dunking on clowns as much as the rest of us. But given the general atmosphere of right-wing politics in 2017, Bernier's cozying up to figures like Jordan Peterson, and his core demographic of young contrarian Tories, it's pretty likely that this a Leitchian Bat Signal to the Rebel right that, hey, Bernier's sick of hearing about "gender issues" and "political correctness" too.

In retrospect, it's the logical endgame for a leadership race with a million candidates and no clear favourites that takes place in an ideological ecosystem poisoned by post-recession internet nihilism. Kellie Leitch created the demand (both in the party and in the media) for a candidate that would scandalize the political establishment and speak truth to the suffocating, spectral power of campus-driven "political correctness," even if she could never deliver. Maxime Bernier, ever tuned in to the subtle frequencies of market signals, is poised to swoop in and pick up the pieces. There's a good chance it could work.

Remember how comfortable we felt about a year ago that Trump was all fire and tweet brimstone and everything would be fine? Me too.

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House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz went on CNN Tuesday morning to defend the Republicans' new healthcare plan, which has received a glut of bipartisan criticism since it was unearthed from the basement of Congress less than 24 hours ago.

"Well, we're getting rid of the individual mandate," the congressman explained on New Day. (For the record, under the proposed American Healthcare Act, you'd still be financially penalized if you allowed your coverage to lapse for too long.) "We're getting rid of those things that people said that they don't want. And you know what? Americans have choices. And they've got to make a choice."

The "choice" Americans must make, Chaffetz believes, is simple: "Maybe rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own healthcare. They've got to make those decisions themselves."

A new iPhone 7 costs between $649 and $969, and Apple generally releases a new version once every year. To put that in perspective, with my current health insurance, my monthly premium and the cost of my medications add up to about $5,500 per year. That doesn't include any doctors visits or emergency care I might need. Unless the average American is buying ten iPhones a year—which would be its own problem—it seems Chaffetz either doesn't know how much healthcare actually costs or was just engaging in some old-fashioned smearing of the poor.

Also, as Motherboard's Derek Mead pointed out, for a lot of people without personal computers, smartphones are a necessity, and forcing them to choose between healthcare and internet access is pretty damn cruel.

Follow Eve Peyser on Twitter.

(Top image: 'The L Word' / Showtime)

"I will sit through anything, however bad it is, if it's got lesbians in it," admits Alice, 29, a London-based web designer. She's far from alone; my friends and I have also been doing the "endurtainment" thing for years. Why? Because five years on from the UK's last lesbian-centric TV series (RIP, Lip Service), we're still perpetually desperate for credible primetime portrayals of ourselves on the small screen.

This is despite living in a period in which queer female characters are more visible than ever – in soaps (Eastenders; Coronations Street), sci-fi (Dr Who), tea-time dramas (Call the Midwife) and popular imports (Wentworth; The Good Wife). But it's quality not quantity that matters – something Jacquie Lawrence, the BAFTA Award-winning producer wants to get across on her new series Different for Girls. "I've always said: you don't have to be a policeman to write The Bill, but it helps – enormously. LGBT writers know their world, and the lack of these writers in mainstream TV really shows."

Right now, we're kind-of here, and kind-of queer, but rarely for long enough or in any meaningful capacity. I spoke to other gay women about how they felt about LGBT characters on TV. "We're fed crumbs," says Bettie, 34, a mental health nurse from Sheffield. "We get rubbish stereotypes, or seasons of queerbaiting [all subtext, no pay-off]. And we get to see our faves killed off, over and over again."

It's true: execs are still, inexcusably, burying our gays: Last Tango in Halifax's Kate; The 100's Lexa; Dr Denise in The Walking Dead; Wendy in Jessica Jones; Poussey in Orange Is the New Black. Autostraddle crunched the numbers last year, and the results were un-fucking-forgivable. It doesn't just suck for viewers, points out Jacquie – it endangers the most vulnerable of us. "Disposing of lesbian characters so regularly has an acute effect on young lesbians and their self-esteem, particularly if they're struggling with their sexuality." It's a correlation The Trevor Project, a US suicide prevention helpline for LBGQT teens, have been vocal about in recent months.

Programming doesn't have to be this tragic. Ask queer women what (and who) they want on TV and they'll tell you, in precise and loquacious detail.

America Is Ahead of Britain By a Country Mile

UK programming is notoriously hit (Sugar Rush; Bad Girls; Skins) and miss (Candy Bar Girls) – especially when compared to our American counterparts. That's partly down to funding, says Sophie, 38, a feminist film critic from London. "There's more money in US television. In the UK, there are fewer pipelines for creators, and a narrower range of commissioning channels." Little wonder, then, that so many of us still cleave to boxset staples of lesbian yesteryear: The L World; Xena, Princess Warrior; Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy re-runs are a constant," says Sophie, "not just for lesbian/queer fandom, but for basic survival."

Amazon

Streaming Sites Are Killing it

The queer lady-next-door in straight-centric soaps and dramas may be increasingly common, but it's streaming sites – Netflix, Amazon – that are putting us centre stage, en masse, in flagship originals where we're myriad (Jessica Jones), diverse (Orange Is the New Black; Sense8) and playing the protagonist (Transparent) rather than the wing-woman. "Streaming shows have been a major driver of change – which is a problem, because they're expensive to access," notes Sophie. "Teenage me definitely wouldn't have been able to afford the subscription fees," agrees Alice. "It's so important to have positive LGBTQ representation easily accessible to young people, without needing their parents approval or credit card."

We Struggle On Primetime

However applause-worthy streaming shows are, terrestrial remains key. "You can't beat the power of [offline] TV's reach when it comes to straight audiences," says Dana, a London-via-Trinidad-based musician and activist. "We have to come to them, so to speak, in order to challenge their preconceived and often ignorant notions of who queer women are and how we live." Tara, 28, a film curator, agrees. Taking up space in conservative broadcast media is essential, she says. "I want to hit society right in the mainstream – especially for viewers who see lesbiqueer content as a niche thing; but also for people who would never seek it out online, for folk who would never otherwise realise they need to be seeing it."

Not All Lesbians Look Like They Do On 'The L-Word'

Young, thin, white and able-bodied remains the default portrayal of queer womanhood. "I want to see more lesbiqueers of colour," says Tara. "I want trans characters played by trans actors; disabled characters played by disabled actors. I want a landing place for queer TV, as in a regular lifestyle-type show. I want stories that feature multifaceted characters telling interesting stories." And when it comes to class, we're as hungry for reality as we are escapism, says Alice. "The bougie LA wealth of The L-Word is fun to watch, but it's nothing like most people's real lives."

Orange Is the New Black, Jenji Kohan's landmark prison drama, proved what we've been saying for years: queer women want diversity. We're hungry for the conspicuously absent woman: the older, fat, non-binary, disabled, migrant and polyamorous characters that straight TV has either studiously ignored or actively othered. When these characters are cast well, and given worthy arcs, dialogue and sets, we'll pay a monthly fee to keep them in our lives.

We're Done with Coming-Out Stories

As Dana points out, those narratives tend to serve straight voyeurism over the queer gaze. "I want to see more women who know who the fuck they are and are beyond struggling with self-acceptance. Its one of the reasons I love (L-Word favourite) Bette Porter so damn hard." Shows like The Fosters are great for depicting the bittersweet daily grind of family life in gay suburbia, but it's important to note that we're not all chasing that assimilationist dream, says Betty, 30, a London-based editor. "Can we say it's OK that not all of us want children?"

We Want Less Drama, More Ingenuity

Romance is nice but needn't define us, points out Sophie. "I'd like to see more queer women presented through their professional expertise, like Annalise Keating on How to Catch a Murderer; or queer women getting shit done in other ways, via politics and science, like Cosima and Delphine in Orphan Black." That said, we also want more sex. Lots of it. And we want those scenes written and directed by women with lived experience of queer sex. Don't think we can't tell the difference, Cosmo.

Crowdfunding Helps, But It's Not a Cure-All

Different for Girls – which promises not to skimp on NSFW scenes of the aforementioned kind – raised nearly 25 percent of its budget via IndieGogo. Is that route the best way forward when it comes to sharing our stories? Or should mainstream studios work harder to fold us into corporate programming? "In a perfect world, it would be both," says Jacquie.

On that note, what would our readers commission, if they had their own TV network to command? Dana would reboot The L-Word, starting with a re-write of the final series – a season so trash that even Lucy Lawless couldn't save it. Dana would play herself ("an out, gay musician") and cast Priyanka Chopra as her love interest. "We're meant to be together, but she can't/won't come out to her conservative Indian parents – her dad is a prominent Republican in Trump's administration, caping for family values – and I'm forced back into the closet. We have intense chemistry that rivals Sharmen/Tibette and everyone is rooting for us, but will it work out?"

Tara's hankering for an Afro-futurist space saga. "As a lover of ridiculous action movies and sci-fi, I dream of a feminist-style Firefly with QTIPOC characters of all backgrounds and abilities. The script would require lots of banter and kicking white men in the face."

Sophie doesn't have to dream; her ideal show is already in the works. "Kirsten Johnson announced last year that she's working on a pilot with the Soloway sisters. I have no idea what it will be about, but the meeting point of Cameraperson (Kirsten's 2016 documentary) and Transparent is everywhere I want to be."

Different for Girls premieres this month at BFI Flare. It will be on YouTube on Saturday the 18th of March.

@CharlotteR_A

"The human impulse to try to live a normal life, even under the most exceptionally bizarre conditions, is so potent," said Mohsin Hamid when we met for coffee the day before the publication date of his latest novel, Exit West. That morning, President Trump had issued his revised travel ban blocking migrants from six nations, casting in doubt the futures of individuals like the ones in Hamid's novel, who are themselves migrants in transit. A four-time novelist who may be best known for his 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Hamid has spent much of his life between Pakistan, the US, and the UK. "Whether you're in a prison camp, or a wartime situation, or in an America where a crazy election has just occurred, people try to still live their lives."

At a party in honor of his book the night before, Hamid spoke of the danger of political nostalgia, and of politicians who promise a better future based on a return to the way things used to be. Hamid raised a glass to people like Nadia and Saeed, the two central characters of his novel, who flee war in their home country in search of a better life.

Exit West is first of all a love story, based around two young people, Nadia and Saeed, who are trying to forge a relationship as violence looms in the background of their unspecified city and country. Hamid has said the setting is based on Lahore, Pakistan, where he partially grew up and now lives, but the it could also serve as a template for a number of war-torn countries in Southeast Asia or the Middle East

"Sometimes there are terrorist attacks, and people stop going to restaurants for a while, and they take their kids out of school, and everyone's scared. And then, after a week, people go back about their lives."

Saeed and Nadia meet in an evening business class. Saeed lives with his parents, he's close with them; Nadia is estranged from her family and lives alone, uncustomary for an unmarried woman in their country. She doesn't pray. She rides a motorcycle and wears black robes. Later we learn why: "So that men don't fuck with me."

As they continue their courtship, violence encroaches upon their daily lives. War becomes increasingly intimate: a cousin of Saeed is killed, then a former lover. A former student has joined the militants. Hostages are taken at the stock exchange. It's difficult to know if people have disappeared due to death or fleeing. Nadia and Saeed are constantly under surveillance by drones and helicopters. Areas around them are falling to militant forces, and it becomes increasingly unsafe to travel between neighborhoods. And yet they persist in their efforts to be together.

"Sometimes there are terrorist attacks, and people stop going to restaurants for a while, and they take their kids out school, and everyone's scared," he Hamid told me. "And then, after a week, people go back about their lives."

In a believable and fitting way, the tensions around Nadia and Saeed have a dramatic effect on the romance of their relationship. A frequent inability to see one another due to safety concerns, or to even speak or communicate online because mobile phones are shut off, heightens their desire for one another. "In a way, romance expresses itself when circumstances seem to naturally limit your romance," Hamid said. "You're free not to play the normal games that we all play in our romantic lives of limiting ourselves."

Many of these games are enabled by our phones and by social media. Hamid doesn't shy away from including modern-day devices and applications in the story; rather he explores the emotional side of technology, how phones and the internet can become emotionally charged in such a setting. The mingling of technology and emotion isn't new to Hamid's work. In his 2013 novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, the novel's protagonist sells pirated DVDs as a young boy. He falls in love with a woman who works at a beauty salon next door while bringing her DVDs each night, DVDs that help her learn about a West that she plans to escape to. In this exchange, technology takes on a charged emotional and transactional quality.

Hamid continues this investigation of technology's emotional component in Exit West. As Europe and richer countries build fences and barriers, and exiting through normal channels such as visas increasingly impossible, Nadia and Saeed encounter magic-like doors that, upon entering, act as portals that ferry you away to different places. "The doors depict the emotional reality of our current scientific and technological moment, and represent the emotional reality of how technology affects us," said Hamid. "We already live in a world where we are largely experiencing consciousness and transience through rectangular portals, be it your phone screen, or your computer, or an airplane door."

Additionally, with these efficient doors Hamid bypasses the over-attention heeded to the process of migration itself. "It's so easy to focus on the journey," he explained. "We forget that's a tiny part of the experience. The big part is the life you had before, and the life you have after that."

Life in Nadia and Saeed's home country ends for them with a devastating line: "When we migrate, we murder those we leave behind." They both have a desire to leave but different sentiments about doing so and a different way of being in transience. Nadia, in a way, is someone who's already migrated once, inside her own city. To be herself, she had to leave her family, so she's already had to murder certain people from her life. Saeed wants to travel and see the world, but he's terrified of what's happening to his country and he doesn't want to lose his family.

"There's a liberation that happens when you migrate," Hamid told me. "You're liberated from things you love and things you don't like." While Saeed finds people from his home country to connect with abroad, Nadia immerses herself in other communities. Saeed will always be looking back to what he's lost. Nadia is prone to looking forward. The trajectory of their experiences in the world is less emblematic of a traditional paradigm of East meeting West, but rather, of individuals encountering different people, different landscapes, and experiencing different, nuanced responses.

"If we can see in ourselves the way we're moving, and see in others the way they're moving, maybe we can be a little less terrified of each other."

The characters also embody different attitudes towards religion. While Nadia doesn't need a spiritually religious pillar, religious rituals are deeply important to Saeed. They help him deal with loss. For Hamid, it was very important to have a narrative in which a non-religious standpoint (Nadia's), and a sincerely religious practice, as opposed to a politicized one (Saeed's), to find a way together. "At the moment in the world too often we hear of a clash of these two things," he said, "but neither of these two will ever win over the other, so they'll have to coexist."

Exit West doesn't just consider the impact of migration of individuals who are physically in transit, on refugees or migrants, but on people who have never left their homes, people who live in countries receiving migrants, and different families arriving to different cities. Through vignettes that offer insight into the consciousness of such individuals, the novel attempts to account for what migration means for all of us. "It's not just Saeed and Nadia's experiences that are legitimate," Hamid said. "There are seven billion different experiences of what migration is. To expand the novel and represent a diversity of experience to say all of these are emotionally honest." Hamid wants readers of this book to explore whether they themselves are migrating. Aren't we all? If so, why do we treat this as something that divides us? "If we can see in ourselves the way we're moving, and see in others the way they're moving, maybe we can be less a little less terrified of each other."

If there is one constant in the lives of these migrants, it's uncertainty, as Nadia and Saeed continue to search for a better life, preserving their bond even as their relationship changes shape. As the novel progresses, part of what it tries to summon is the sense that while things can and will change and loss will inevitably ensue, we shouldn't resist transience, but rather, accept it, embrace it. "The reality is the human experience is really only about transience," said Hamid. "So we have to artistically, culturally, politically, rediscover its beauty."

Follow Zaina Arafat on Twitter.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid is available in bookstores and online.

Sex is good for you; we all know that. But a new study finds that getting it on on the regular can actually make you perform better at work.

Keith Leavitt, an associate professor at Oregon State University's College of Business, surveyed 159 married employees over a two-week period about their work and sex lives. He found that those who prioritized an active sex life gave themselves an advantage at work the following day. They were not only more likely to work harder, but also to enjoy their job more.

Sex causes the release of oxytocin and dopamine. Oxytocin is a hormone associated with pleasurable social bonding and attachment. The result is a flesh-on-flesh high that improves mood and lowers stress as well as blood pressure. And dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved with our brains' reward centers. The combination of the two makes sex an all-natural, fairly quick mood-enhancer, Leavitt said in a press release about the study.

Read more on Tonic

Former British spy Christopher Steele—the guy who allegedly put together that explosive Trump dossier—is returning to work at London's Orbis Business Intelligence, the Telegraph reports.

Steele put out a statement Tuesday announcing his plan to head back to Orbis, where he works as a director. According to the company's website, it works to provide "strategic advice, mount intelligence-gathering operations, and conduct complex, often cross-border investigations," which sounds like some freaky-ass shit disguised in jargon, but whatever.

"I'm really pleased to be back here working again at the Orbis's offices in London today," Steele said in his brief statement to the press.

Steele didn't comment on the dossier directly, which was made public by BuzzFeed in January and alleged that Trump had ties to Russia and that his campaign associates colluded on the DNC hacks. Steele reportedly went into hiding after it was released. Now, it looks the guy's coming back to his normal life, and his neighbor can stop feeding his cats.

"I'm now going to be focusing my efforts on supporting the broader interests of our company here," Steele continued. "I'd like to say a warm thank you to everyone who sent me kind messages and support over the last few weeks."

Last fall, before the dossier was made public, the FBI reportedly reached out to Steele—who Trump has called a "failed spy"—to potentially continue his work and keep digging up more intel on the then presidential candidate. Although the deal fell through, the intelligence community has been able to verify at least some of the claims Steele made in the dossier, which Trump has called "phony stuff."

Sunken-in eyes with bags underneath, a scab-covered face, disheveled hair, track marks, underweight, skin covered in dirt. This is what the general public has been taught to think someone who is addicted to drugs looks like. And even now in the midst of the biggest drug safety crisis in our history, largely caused by overprescribing of opioids by doctors and the proliferation of bootleg fentanyl, we have yet to fully depart from this.

Though the source of this stereotype is elusive and certainly not singular, the Faces of Meth campaign, which began in a county in Oregon in 2004, is one piece that majorly pushed this narrative forward. In the years following that first campaign showing before and after mugshots of people identified as meth users—often moderately healthy people in the before portion, then shifting to them some time after using meth looking aged, dirty, and covered in scabs—became well-known in the US and Canada through media attention.

Images via Faces of Meth

While these photos illustrate the reality of the effects of using meth for some people, this was also simply a perfect propaganda tool for the war on drugs. Living in New York State, I remember being shown the campaign in one of my high school classes. Most of my peers laughed at it or were simply grossed out. Seeing those reactions confirmed to me that the intention of this campaign is mainly to use a scare technique to get citizens to do what you want them to (in this case, abstain from drug use) by playing on our obsession with physical appearance. But a secondary effect is to say that gawking at people struggling with addiction is completely OK and can even be funny.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you why addiction isn't funny. In the past few years, there have been thousands of opioid-related deaths in Canada, mainly from fentanyl. People continue to die daily, and if you have not been affected by this personally thus far, you should consider yourself lucky.

Screenshot via CBC

Yet, this fall I was reminded of war on drugs propaganda when I saw a CBC article titled "The new face of fentanyl addiction: Kati's story" about a young woman named Kati Mathers living on the streets in Vancouver. With the accompanying image showing before and after photos of the blonde, white, 22-year-old—one side of her smiling, wearing makeup, and looking generally healthy; the other of her marked-up face as she pulled down her bottom lip to expose her teeth, looking generally disheveled and unwell.

There it was again, in 2016, in plain sight: shaming the appearance of someone struggling with addiction to scare others into abstaining from using drugs—or, perhaps in the case of this media organization, to get clicks. But it's not just shaming of addiction. It's the shaming of people pushed to living on the streets, homeless, impoverished, perhaps struggling with mental health issues, and without proper medical care. In a way, this is shaming some of the most disadvantaged people in our society. And yet, this narrative is alive and well. But it is not always so simple as these before and after images or the picture that you conjure up in your mind when you think of what someone who is addicted to heroin looks like. Drug addiction can have varying effects on one's appearance and life. We do not always adhere to this simplistic, black-and-white physical appearance a la the Faces of Meth: Sometimes the physical signs are not there, and addiction is invisible.

I've seen people gain weight while addicted to drugs, and I've seen people get addicted to stimulants in order to lose weight; I knew someone who was fully functioning with opioid addiction, worked a desk job, and shot up when they got home—their employer never found out. I knew a blue collar worker who became addicted to prescription opioids, yet I did not see a difference in his appearance nor his socioeconomic status. I've known many who frequently used drugs, showered, wore clean, stylish clothing, held down full-time jobs or schooling—all without their appearances or situations in life changing drastically.

When we find out someone who doesn't fit that dirty, scabbed, disheveled description has used drugs or become addicted to them, it shatters our narrative. Some of the most prominent stories during opioid crisis coverage in Canada have been about young, white, attractive people who don't "look" like they do drugs to much of society.

Those are the kinds of stories that get increased attention. There was this young, white couple from North Vancouver who died of fentanyl overdoses in 2015—one of the first stories of fentanyl-related deaths that got high-level media attention. There was the story of 20-year-old A'lisa Ramsey of Calgary, who was addicted to fentanyl and in recovery, that I wrote—the increased numbers of comments and responses I got certainly showed that my interview subject broke some stereotypes people had about those suffering from drug addiction.

Recently, on February 12, a 14-year-old girl from a suburb in Ottawa died due to fentanyl. On March 6, less than a month after the teen's death got significant media attention, there was an announcement that $2.5 million dollars would be pledged to fight the opioid crisis in Ottawa. Yet, many communities struggling with the opioid crisis—including First Nations reserves—have yet to see significant dedicated government money to deal with this issue. It might be in part due to them not having a young, white, attractive person that challenges our society's concept of what a drug user looks like as the face of their issue. I'm positive there is more nuance to it than that, but we should be looking critically at what stories affect change and why.

We need to support each person who use drugs regardless of how they look; their socioeconomic status; their age; their race; if they live in the suburbs, in a small town, in a city. We need to address access to treatment, increase harm reduction initiatives, consider the causes of addiction (such as trauma and mental health issues), and break down the widespread discrimination against drug users rampant in our society. Let's start by destroying the concept of what someone who consumes drugs looks like because just as every human being is unique and different from one another, so is drug use and the impact it has on our lives.

Follow Allison Tierney on Twitter .

Everyone knows about the usual sobriety tests cops use before pulling out the breathalyzer: touching your nose with either hand, walking a straight line, saying the alphabet backward. But in Conway, Arkansas, apparently pulling out a few bowling pins and proving you can juggle them flawlessly works, too.

According to Arkansas Matters, University of Central Arkansas junior Blayk Puckett was driving home from the library rather slowly one night, when his broken brake light attracted the attention of a couple of cops who decided to pull him over.

"A lot of times, especially around a college campus later in the night, the driving gets slower, especially if they almost hit a curb once," Sergeant Keith McKay, one of the officers, told KARK. "It's a typical indication they might be impaired."

In their exchange, which was all captured on the cops' dash and body cameras, McKay asks Puckett to get out of his car to take a look at the broken tail light. That's when the officer notices Puckett's personalized license plate—which read "JUGGLER"—and the student informed the cop that he was also a magician.

"Can I see a magic trick?" McKay asks. "You don't have to, I don't want you to feel any pressure."

"I'll do some magic, if you insist," Puckett says. "I'm also a juggler!"

Puckett then opens the rear door of his car to pull out three large bowling pins and decides to give the two officers a demonstration of his serious juggling skills. Luckily the whole thing was caught on camera, in a few angles, for our viewing pleasure.

After Puckett finished his routine, McKay thanked the young magician before letting him know that while he was pulled over for a broken tail light, they also thought he might have been drinking, too.

"You're obviously fine, though," McKay admits. "Nobody can do that intoxicated."

"It's just more fun when you can juggle and have more fun with the officers than a standard traffic stop that's boring and scary," Puckett told KARK after the incident. He liked the cops so much that he tracked them down later to fulfill their initial request to perform a few magic tricks for them.

Looking at Facebook or watching news coverage of protests and counterprotests, it's easy to imagine the US as split into two bitter political factions. On one side there's the "resistance," mostly Hillary Clinton voters who are so furious at each new Trump tweet they can barely focus at work. On the other are Donald Trump supporters, outraged that the media refuses give the president a chance to prove himself.

But more numerous than either Trump or Clinton supporters are the people who didn't vote at all. In 2016, 42 percent of eligible voters didn't make it to the polls, and that doesn't include US residents who can't vote for one reason or another: current or former prison inmates barred from the polls by state law, some people with mental disabilities, and immigrants and visa holders who aren't yet citizens. And in many states, concerted campaigns have made it more difficult for some would-be voters through photo ID requirements, limits on early voting, and new registration rules.

All told, a much smaller percentage of adults votes in the US than in most developed countries. Though there are many explanations for this oft-cited stat, one is that many people feel disengaged from the items on a ballot. A lot of nonvoters don't know or care much about politics, don't see how government decisions affect their lives, and see the whole mess in Washington as a waste of their time.

One of the key questions as we inch toward 2020—and toward local and congressional elections between now and then, which tend to attract far fewer voters than presidential contests—is whether the incredibly weird state of the country's politics will drive more people to turn out. That's particularly important for Democrats, since nonvoters tend to be younger, less white, and less affluent than voters—characteristics that also often predict more liberal political leanings. A February Pew poll found that Trump's disapproval rating was at 63 percent among US adults who aren't registered to vote, compared with 54 percent for registered voters.

To put some faces to these numbers, I asked some nonvoters who agree that Trump is doing a pretty terrible job what they think of the raucous political scene of 2017, why they didn't vote in November, and what might move them to get out to the voting booth next time around.

James Johnson

I met Johnson at a bus station in Lowell, Massachusetts. He came to the US from Grenada at age 14. Now he's 20, and he's never voted before.

On the travel ban: What makes this country powerful is that we have so much diversity. Yeah there are a few bad apples, but we shouldn't punish the entirety of a specific group just because of that. I've had Muslim friends, and they are some of the most peaceful people that I've ever met. It's just some of the radical sects and stuff like that. That's what we should try to focus on, but to ban the entirety of a cluster of countries, that's not right.

On not voting: There wasn't a candidate that I could fully stand behind morally. On one hand, you have a candidate [Trump] that was brazen, and I like that because I'm a very straightforward person myself. But some of the stuff he said I couldn't fully agree with. But then on the other hand, you have a candidate [Clinton], she's been in office for a while, she's held positions of power and stuff like that. But her track record as to the bad stuff that I've heard happened didn't really leave a good taste in my mouth, so to speak.

On whether he'll vote in future elections: Congress and stuff like that—I would have to educate myself on, because I have no clue really on those things. But for president, I don't know. Trump—he had that power. He was able to sway people with what he said. But I think he used the wrong emotion to do that.

On what policies would get him to vote: I guess the healthcare system. That's another reason why I didn't really vote for Trump. Everyone says Obamacare is bad, and he said he was going to repeal and replace, that's been the Republican motto for a very long time now. But he didn't give any idea or he didn't say anything that would give us an idea of what he was thinking, where his mind was. If he had done that then he would have had my support.

Someone I would have liked to see in office is Bernie Sanders. He seems like a very standup guy for someone who is about to seemingly kick the bucket. He's pretty powerful. And I don't say powerful as in moneywise or connections or nothing like that. He appeals to me as a young person because some of the issues he's focused on is what I'm sort of worried about.

Mark V. Pereira

Pereira can't vote because was convicted of a felony. When I met him, he was walking over to a friend's house in New Hampshire, where he was going to hang out with some friends who are veterans like him.

I'm all fucked up. We went to the war and shit. I was a wild child. I was in the Navy in Japan, on an aircraft carrier. I went in in '99. When the towers fell, we were on watch in Japan, we went straight to the Middle East and we were launching bombs from planes every day.

[After coming home] I was selling weed, driving around drunk. I crashed my car, ran from the scene. I had a half-pound. Yeah. I stopped doing all that. I ended up down here homeless. [A local veteran's support organization] helped me out. They're spectacular. So's the VA. It's not like everybody says. It's not really that much of a nightmare anymore. You go there, they give you services. They just gave me a vacuum cleaner for free because I'm poor.

I didn't really want Hillary, I didn't really want Trump. I wanted some new blood. I really just think it's a mess—the way he acts, and his personality, just does not fit what we are all about. The guy is actually racist. That's been bred into him and taught to him. It's just the way he is—the way he treats women, everything.

On why he wouldn't vote for Clinton: You can't mishandle information after you've been working with classified information for however long. That's a mess too. That whole thing is a mess. Everybody had a scandal coming into it.

I'm hoping to have my felony exonerated someday so I can vote. [I'd vote for] whoever has the opinions that I'm aligned with, that I think are in everybody's best interests. The world, the environment. Look what Trump just did with [EPA head Scott Pruitt]—this guy sued the EPA for not letting him do enough stuff, and then [Trump] makes him head of the EPA? That guy doesn't care about the environment. He cares about making money, same thing with Trump, so they're aligned. He wants more coal power, the dirtiest power we could possibly make, he wants that. He's like, "We'll bring the jobs back." Well, we'll destroy the planet too, till we all have terrible smog everywhere.

Mike McNulty

McNulty is a cook, a hip-hop artist, and the owner of a home recording studio in Nashua, New Hampshire. As we talked on his front porch two kids called to him from inside the house, asking if they could have some yogurt and apples.

I voted for Bernie [in the Democratic primary]. I just don't really support Trump. I don't like Hillary at all. Just the whole email thing, the lies and all that, I just don't support all that. I just don't want somebody running my country when they're lying. Trump? I just think he's an idiot. Some of the stuff I agree with. He's opened up jobs for everybody and all that, I see where he's trying to go with all that. But at the same time I just think he's going to start another civil war in our country, you know, with the whole trying to build a wall and the way he comes off when he talks about illegals, illegal immigrants. There's already riots and stuff in DC and all over happening because he's in office. It's just a matter of time.

Obama was a great candidate. Look at him, he ended the war over there in Iraq, caught Osama. The only thing I didn't agree with was some things, like he wanted to close Guantanamo Bay and release the prisoners and all that. That's not a good move. They're there for a reason.

[Also] if you want healthcare that should be a choice. With the whole Obamacare thing, you're taking my money from my taxes because I don't have health insurance. I don't want to be controlled like that. If I get sick, it's on me. If I get a $100,000 hospital bill, that's on me. I don't need somebody telling me, "Oh, you need this or I'm going to take your money." First of all, if I don't have health insurance it's because I can't afford it. So now you're going to take my money that I already can't afford because I don't have health insurance. That's just stupid.

I'd vote again, depending on who it is. I mean, I see all the rumors and everything about [Michelle Obama] supposedly going to run. I'd vote for her. That was my thing with Hillary too. Bill [Clinton] did good back in the day from what I've heard. I was young, I don't remember. I was thinking Bill did good, maybe Hilary would have been good in office. But I don't know what she did, deleted emails and just acted sketchy. I don't like the sketchiness. Just be honest.

Mike and Crystal Montgrain

The Montgrains have two young children, and both of them work at home caring for family members. When I approached them to talk at a laundromat in Lowell, Massachusetts, Mike said he didn't pay any attention to politics, but then he launched into a litany of his concerns about Trump's travel ban, and Crystal joined in.

Crystal: This little girl needed lifesaving surgery. She got permission to come over here for that lifesaving surgery, but because he put that ban on she couldn't come. But luckily, I guess it was a federal judge, did it and she got the surgery just in time.

Mike: The president should be helping the citizens and not keeping them from getting what they need of defunding Planned Parenthood, which helps teens learn about safe sex and diseases and stuff. He thinks it's helping them to actually have sex and that's not what they're about. I just think he's a womanizer. He hates women. Women have no rights to him. They fought their whole lives to get the rights they have now, and he's going to say women have no rights?

Crystal: If he had his way women wouldn't have jobs.

Mike: "They should be at home cooking meals for their husband." No, that's not what happens now. Back then maybe when you were a kid. Now—shit doesn't work that way now. That's why I don't follow politics.

Crystal: I haven't voted in years.

Mike: This whole world is about respect and common sense. Nobody has common sense or respect for anybody or anything anymore.

On whether they think about voting:

Mike: No. It's just not something I do.

Crystal: I have. When I used to live up in New Hampshire, but I was with my family at that time. Once I left my parents I haven't voted since.

Mike: I'm just not interested in voting. Like I said, I don't follow politics.

On having opinions even though he doesn't follow politics:

Mike: It's just common sense. You hear stuff, you read stuff, and you just put your own opinion into it—what's real what's fake.

Crystal: You kind of couldn't help seeing it over the election.

On whether they could be convinced to vote:

Mike: I probably wouldn't vote, but I probably would say, "Yes, that person would be the better president than that person they're running up against." I wouldn't literally go vote. It's not something I do. I'm not interested.

Crystal: We don't have time to go vote because we don't have people to watch our children.

Mike: We work at home just so we can have the time to take care of our kids.

Crystal: They don't want to go to daycare. They'd rather be home.

Megan Easy

I met Easy at a playground in Malden, Massachusetts, where she was playing soccer with her young son.

I'm a professional volleyball player. So I was in China playing and we kind of were trying to keep up when we were over there but it's a little tough because media there's a little more censored. I was there from the end of September to the first week of January.

I did [think of voting absentee] but by the time I started filling out everything it was way too late. It just kind of wasn't worth it. I didn't really see a great option either way, just in my opinion.

I was kind of stuck. I mean I definitely wasn't going to vote for Trump, but I wasn't going to feel settled voting for Hillary either. Politics in general, it's not really about trust because I don't think the politicians in general are very trustworthy people. But she just, I don't know, I just always felt like she was just putting on a face to try to get votes and not really saying what she meant. I don't know, it's tough. I wanted to support her, just as a woman, thinking that maybe we could take that step. But I don't think America is ready for that. Well, obviously. The people kind of said that that's not really what they're looking for.

To be honest I try not to watch too much [news about Trump] because, I don't know, he's not my kind of guy. At all. I'm not very political, but I just don't like the kind of bashing things and just the blatant lying. For me, I just feel it's disrespectful to the people thinking that they're that stupid. The Twitter stuff, that drives me nuts. When you're president you have a lot of stuff to do. How do you have time to use Twitter, going off on every- and anyone?

I've been playing volleyball for a long time, so I am always overseas during elections. But I just think now is the time [to get more engaged]. I think I've kind of put it off long enough, and just seeing how it went this past election—I mean yes, one vote isn't going to change everything, but it could help.

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The world which The Americans will return to tonight looks a bit different than it did when we last heard from the Jennings family. Showrunners Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg are well aware that their much-praised Cold War-era KGB spy series has taken on an unexpectedly prescient dimension since revelations began tumbling out earlier this year regarding Russian influence on US politics.

"We started this show at a relatively peaceful time in US/Russian relations, and a lot of the premise was that it was a good time to tell a story of a former enemy that's no longer an enemy," says Weisberg, a former CIA officer whose professional history has informed the show's often-painstaking attention to detail. "I don't think in our wildest imaginations we would have predicted this kind of turn in this very short period of time."

That said, he and Fields haven't worried about it that much. The Americans is a period piece, after all, and history is history, regardless of how it might resonate with current events. Last week, the pair spoke to VICE from New York, where they're finishing up filming this season while simultaneously preparing what will be the sixth and final 13-episode installment of their intense espionage drama. We chatted about their approach to balancing historical accuracy with storytelling, what to expect from the new episodes, and what they hope audiences will take away from the show in the end.

The following conversation was lightly edited for length and clarity.

Can you give readers a little insight into what they're going to be jumping into with these characters? A little time has passed when we start out the season.
Weisberg: What you'll first see when you start the episode is going to feel a little surprising—a little like a different show, almost. That won't last forever, but the faces, pacing, feel, and tone of the show that we're going to drop you into will be a little bit different.

What was behind the decision to do that right off the bat?
Fields: We always try to ask ourselves what's really happening with these characters. That's a curious question to ask about a fictional story, but once we decide on that story, we try to tell it in the most real way we can—so once we figured out what had happened for them, then the question becomes, "What are the most interesting scenes to show for an audience [to get] that story?" If we know we're not going to show every day of all of their lives, what are the most interesting thin slices of what has happened that we can serve up?

Oleg is back in Moscow, which is a pretty drastic shift for his character. Tell me a bit more about that decision.
Weisberg: We're still excited about that. It wasn't something we planned. Last year, of course, Nina was there for a while, but as a prisoner, most of the time. It never occurred to us that we would get to tell long, involved stories in the Soviet Union—that wasn't really the setup of the show.

But when the opportunity presented itself, it suddenly felt like a natural place it had wanted to go all along. It became an opportunity to talk about what was going on in that country and tell stories of real people living there—to show their world, their apartments, their offices, what they ate and drank, how they lived. It was this golden opportunity, and we had so much fun learning about what things in that era looked like, and seeing our incredible team here recreating those things and making sets to match them. It's been one of the most fun and exciting things that we've ever done on the show.

It seems like hunger is going to play a pretty big role this season.
Fields: I don't know! I'm trying to figure out how to speak on that—except to say yes, yes it will. Hunger is a very fundamental fear, and because the show, on some level, is about how we perceive our enemies…on one end, we're so connected by the fact that we're all human beings, and we're so similar in so many ways. But on the other, we're very different, based on our individual lives and on the cultures and times in which we were raised.

What we have or don't have.
Fields: Philip and Elizabeth experienced the end of the second World War as children, which means they knew hunger and privation ways that Americans couldn't conceive. When you can't conceive of that experience, you really run the risk of not understanding the fears of the people on the other side. It's hard for Americans to imagine being starved out.

The Americans has a reputation for being pretty politically complex, where it can be hard to keep track of what's going on. How do you straddle that line, between writing as experts (alongside in-depth consultants) and writing for an audience that likely doesn't know half of what you know about espionage and the Cold War?
Fields: We solve that problem by trying to know everything we can about the story. We try to do as much research as possible, and when we figure out our stories, we really try to understand every detail of what's happening and make sure that we know every nook and cranny of the logic and drama—of what's happening to everybody.

Then we tell the story from the character's point of view. So if there's something they know or that they're experiencing, we'll never have them stop and exposit to one another things they would know, even if it would make it easier for the audience. We just let the characters experience it as they would and hope that the audience will go along with the characters, and in so doing, the story will unfold and make sense. As you said, eventually people catch up. We hope that, by telling a character's story, what happens to them, and breaking a story in a way we know it makes sense, it will all feel real and come together in the end.

Was avoiding using expositional dialogue that something you talked about from the beginning?
Weisberg: We found that doing that with dialogue just didn't fit with the rest of our conception of the show. We're working hard in so many ways to keep the show feeling not just real, but increasingly more real, so writing dialogue that they wouldn't really say became increasingly anathema to us.

There are really only two solutions. One is having simple stories that people can just follow—but that didn't work for us, because these characters' stories were too complex. The espionage stories are complicated—espionage is just a complicated thing. You could follow those stories simply, but then spies couldn't do them, they'd be knocked out too easily. So the only other solution that remained was to just worry less about whether people were following the story and just assume that either they will or they won't—and if they don't, they'll be able to follow what's actually important, which is how the characters are feeling. We went with that approach, and it seems to have worked out well. Surprisingly, we don't get many complaints about people not following the stories.

You told Vox in January that you weren't surprised about what had been coming out about Russia and its involvement in the presidential election, but that was very early on in what's now become kind of a never-ending horror show. How do you feel now?
Fields: Some of the techniques that have been used were techniques that we were familiar with, so when we hear words like kompromat that were surprises to the general readership of most daily news, that's a word that has come up endlessly in our research. So in that sense, we weren't surprised—the vocabulary of the way these things go down are our bread and butter. But the fact that things have turned for the world again, and that suddenly we're looking at the Russians as enemies? That surprises anybody. It made me at least as bummed out as everybody else. Maybe a little more.

Is it odd to be in this position that you are right now, closer to the end than the beginning of a show like this, and have all this happening?
Weisberg: It's been a real shock. Even a couple years ago, when it was starting to get a little worse and people were saying there was going to be a new Cold War, we laughed it off and didn't think anything was really happening. But now it really has gotten ugly. In a way, it's gotten the show more attention, which I guess is good.

I also think it sort of warps how the audience views the show. I don't know if it makes it better or worse; I mean, people are going to see what they want to see. We all live and watch in our time, but people are not watching the show from the perspective that [we intended] when we began the show.

Does that shift impact you, either in how you're telling the story, or in the external factors of making a show like this?
Fields: No, it really hasn't. Maybe that's because it's season five and by now the show is very set. Everything's very much in motion. But we really write the show very much inside our historical bubble, and as much as we think about what's happening in the world after work or during lunch, when we're making the show, we're in the early 80s. And for that, we're pretty grateful.

Do we have anything to fear in terms of what will have happened to these characters? Are you going to break our hearts?
Weisberg: Well, you've gotten to know us pretty well over these four years. We're not nice people.

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It is not without the help of a person 617 days my senior that I ended up as borderline tolerable as I did.

From stealing his Space Jam cassette in third grade and jacking his Master of Puppets tee four years later, to making sure I credited Jason Alexander with his pivotal role not only in Seinfeld, but Duckman, too—my older brother has played a crucial role in the human I am now.

Firstborns usually have the filial upper-hand. They're the first. They're Moses. They've come to save us, or something. They have way better baby photo albums, and virtually no discoloured hand-me-downs. But, what they don't have is a sibling to (however aggressively or apathetically) lead them through life's hoops and build their social armour—whether in the form of pure physical or psychological torture, or through the runoff learning of all sorts of facts, stats, and other seemingly useless information (that would, years later, actualize themselves as arrows of pretentious pop culture references, earning the coveted conversational badges of "Who the hell is Randy Rhoads?" and "No one cares that Chef and Shaft are the same person.").

This said, my relationship with my brother is not necessarily a unique story, nor one of any extraordinary significance—siblings in general often sustain tumultuous rapport with one another, born of equal parts torture and love. For some, the scale tips more on either end. And, as you grow up, move out and talk less, it is easier to look back on the years and moments that, at the time, were total bullshit, with nostalgic enchantment.

So, I thought I'd ask some other younger siblings what fond memories or growing pains stand out.

KT Lamond, 28

My parents' general disdain for seeing their children happy, paired with their absolute inability to care for us, made for a weird mix of a negligent-yet-strict [upbringing]. I think the idea was if my sister was forced to bring me everywhere she went, she'd be forced to behave. This was a young girl who had multiple peace bonds—juvenile versions of restraining orders—against her by the age 14, who would grow up to be the loosest cannon you've ever met. Like, eat-her-and-her-partner's-passports-and-get-stuck-in-a-foreign-country kind of loose.

So, my childhood was pretty much a blur of being that 10-year-old kid at the party camo-clad in a raccoon hat. I was simultaneously a pain in the ass and a party favour. I'd be in elementary school driving my dad's Oldsmobile full of drunk teenagers around dirt roads. Or bare-knuckle boxing my friends cock-fight style for [my sister's] viewing pleasure; being forced to smoke and get loaded on Mike's Hard Lemonade, and generally just being the ringmaster of entertainment for countless drug trips. I also got the fucking tar pounded out of me regularly. One time, she broke my pinky finger by bending it back so far, my fingernail cut my arm. As a result, I was the toughest little fucker. Now, she's a mom with a real job, and I'm still out getting loaded in a raccoon hat. No more Mike's Hard though.

Photo courtesy of Anthony Filangeri

Anthony Filangeri, 27

Growing up the youngest of three, it's hard to think of the nicest thing my brothers have ever done for me. Most of my childhood consisted of them sending me to the hospital and treating me like crap. One of them smashed my head against the couch, so hard in fact that a padded surface still managed to split me open, requiring stitches. And the other, while play fighting I suppose, managed to fling me face-first into the corner of his bed frame, requiring even more stitches.

I do, though, have more good memories than bad with my brothers—video games and watching wrestling, etc. It was never fun being called a "fag" though—something I got from both brothers a lot. I mean, I did play with Sailor Moon barbies at one point, so it was pretty much a dead giveaway, even though I didn't know I was gay yet. The most surprising thing for me was actually after having come out as gay at 22 years old, both brothers turned out to be more than cool with it. When you grow up thinking it's wrong to be gay, you never know how people are going to react. It was a moment where I realized that I'll always be their brother, no matter who I am. It made the whole transition much easier.

Photo courtesy of Brian Stever

Brian Stever, 27

One night in early 2008, my identical twin brother, Dennis, and I went out for dinner. When we arrived at the restaurant, we ordered a shit-ton of food and couldn't wait to dig in, but then all of a sudden I totally lost my appetite. It happened almost instantaneously, and I quickly started to feel nauseous and like I really needed to take a shit.

After unsuccessfully sitting on the toilet for what felt like nearly 15 minutes, I came back to the table and told Dennis that I wasn't feeling well. We both agreed that a case of beer would be the best medicine I could take, so we left the restaurant and headed to the nearest liquor store. As we drove, the pain started to intensify, my belly started to cramp, and it felt as if something was growing inside of me. I thought that if I could just take a shit, everything would be better.

We arrived at our friend's house, and the guys started slamming back beers. I was double-fisting too, except in one hand was a bottle of beer and the other was a bottle of Pepto Bismol. The bottle of pink liquid went down faster than the beer itself, and I laid down on the floor as my senses started to go into overdrive. Light hurt my eyes, the music was too loud, and my skin felt like it was on fire. My friend Matt stood over me and jokingly said, "Dude, I think you need an appendectomy." If only we knew in that moment how right he was.

Nearly three hours passed by, and it was almost midnight. The guys were all drunk, and I was still laying on the floor, barely coherent. I was soaked in sweat and freezing cold. Nobody cared. I called my mom who was at a party down the street, I told her I needed to go to the hospital. I didn't think I could drive but I was the only sober one. I mustered up all the strength I had left and, clutching my abdomen, I got behind the wheel of our car. A couple minutes later, we pulled up to my mom's friend's house to pick her up, [and] a whole slew of drunk middle-aged women came staggering out to the car. She asked me if I could drive her friends home. This seemed like a cruel joke, but for some reason I said yes.

It was nearly 45 minutes until we finally reached the hospital, but that's when it hit me—I didn't have my health card. I started to panic. I thought I wouldn't get in, I was worried they wouldn't help me. I must have been thinking out loud or maybe it was twintuition, but that's when my brother [older than me by one minute] gave me the greatest gift I've ever received. He pulled his wallet out of his pocket and gave me his health card. "They'll never know," he said, "We have the same DNA."

It didn't really hit me until weeks later. My appendix was removed in reality, but on paper, my brother's was removed too. What if he has appendicitis some day? What will happen if he needs to get his removed? Will they know? Almost ten years later, to this day, I haven't sorted out this issue. I feel like I should probably tell the hospital, but I'm kind of nervous to admit that it happened. I'm also pretty sure it's illegal, but who's to say I'm not actually Dennis anyway?

Photo courtesy of PK Batth

PK Batth, 26

I started university right before the recession hit, and working in the auto industry in Windsor, Ontario, my dad lost his job. My parents have always guarded my brother and I from any financial issues, mostly because as immigrants growing up, they didn't have much and wanted us to have more than they did. Anyways, although my parents had saved up to send me to university, it was still a tough situation balancing all our family expenses.

My brother had become much more aware of the financial issues since he was living at home while I was away at school. I didn't know it at the time, but my brother had sat with my parents and offered to start working full-time to help support me through school. He was taking courses to become a cop at the time. His main concern was [making sure] our financial situation wouldn't affect my studies.

Years later, when I was upset with my brother over something, my mother told me the story and told me I really don't know how much he cares about me. I still get a bit choked up thinking about it. Knowing he believes in me enough to make such sacrifices for my success not only motivates me, but I think also shows the power of family.

Photo courtesy of Erin and Katie McKenna

Erin McKenna, 24, and Katie McKenna, 26

Erin: One March break, my mother thought it was a brilliant idea to pay my older brother to babysit me and my sister for the week. The whole week turned into "fight week." We trained in wrestling, jiu-jitsu, boxed, did MMA, and anything else my brother, Mike, had learned about in the library book [he'd recently taken out] about fighting.

I ended up in a boxing match with my sister, Katie, mid-week where I knocked her unconscious, and we were pouring water on her to wake her up, and I got a bloody lip. I was eight, and Katie was 10.  

I have a vivid memory of sitting cross-legged on a Rubbermaid toy container with my eyes closed. Mike was teaching me how to meditate, and then he just punched me as hard as he could in the stomach. He was so proud of how well I had meditated through the pain, which, I totally didn't, but pretended I did so he'd be proud and not do it again. It was hell, [but] I learned a lot. We [now] refer to this memory as "fight week." My mother found it all out about 10 years later and was mortified.

Katie: Also, I was one time literally crucified—strung up by the arms on the outside of our deck's railing. Erin prodded my ribs from below with a broomstick.

Photo courtesy of Alia Hack

Alia Hack, 27

That time my bro convinced me a junk-mail letter from Publishers Clearing House—addressed to my father, which had one of those really fancy golden stickers on it that read "grand prize winner"—was real and that we were millionaires.

Keep in mind, we didn't open the letter. He tricked me simply on my naivety and gullibility. He even made up a song—actually it was more like chanting. Something stupid like "We are millionaires, we are millionaires." But we were singing, while dancing in a circle, in our kitchen. We bowed down low, and then raised our hands high. It lasted for a solid ten minutes.

My brother Justin was always playing tricks on me. Another time, were playing Scrabble, and he wrote the word "nugget," but he used two blanks for the Gs, except they weren't blanks. He flipped over the letters and pretended they were Gs. I remember it perfectly for two reasons—one, he got triple word score, and two, he didn't reveal he did this until after the game was over. He always had everyone laughing, except for me. But it taught me to relax and not take life so seriously. I'm now a way cooler person because of him.

Photo courtesy of Rich Aucoin

Rich Aucoin, 33

I have a brother who is seven years older than me, so he's been [very] instrumental in shaping my interest in music my whole life. He helped curate my first album purchases— Led Zeppelin I and The Doors—instead of the regular radio teen-pop at age 12. He taught me how to play the drum set at 10. He had me down over my March break when I was in Grade 12 to perform on some records back when he had a studio in Seabright, Nova Scotia.

But probably, the one best thing was him inviting me to play in his band, The Hylozoists, and going on tour across Canada twice. Those were very formative experiences and definitely made me catch the touring bug and [led me to] follow the path of a musician.

Photo courtesy of Jonathan Loiselle

Jonathan Loiselle, 32

My sister is eight years older than I am. When I was four or five years old, she was babysitting me. It was my nap time, and she told me to go in my room. She had her friend hiding under my bed dressed in a monster costume, and when I was asleep, her friend lifted my bed from underneath and then chased me out of the house.

Another time, my sister and my dad were watching Child's Play, and I was trying to get a sneak peak at my first horror flick. My sister saw me.

I had one of those "My Buddy" dolls, and, while I was sleeping, she took it out of my room, painted its hair red, tied a knife to its hand, and left it for me when I woke up. She was pretty much the worst. She's OK now though.

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