This article originally appeared on VICE Switzerland

Roshan Adhihetty had never given much thought to why some people love getting naked in public, until he accidentally ended up on a nudist campsite while on holiday in Corsica. When he came home to Switzerland, he wanted to learn more about the lifestyle and got in touch with members from the local nudist scene. It took a few months, but after he had earned the trust of a nudist hiking club, he was allowed to accompany them with his camera on several unclothed treks through the Swiss, German and Austrian Alps.

He documented over 30 hikes – some with over 90 participants – and turned his collection of photographs into a book, Nacktwanderer (Naked hikers). Because many areas in Switzerland have banned nudist hiking – punishable by fines of at least 100 CHF (£76) – the majority of his photos were taken in Germany. In order to feel like less of a voyeur among the group of largely elderly men, Roshan stripped down too, and hiked along wearing nothing more than a pair of sturdy boots and a lot of sunscreen.

Scroll down to see photos from Roshan's book, Nacktwanderer.

On Sunday morning, as America reeled from another horrific shooting—this one in a rural Texas church, at the hands of a 26-year-old man with a Ruger AR-556 rifle, resulting in 26 deaths—pro-gun activists focused on how the shooting ended. The gunman had been shot at by a local firearm owner named Stephen Willeford, and then fled before killing himself.

Within minutes, this story of heroism in the face of danger had spread far and wide, especially on the right. The outspokenly pro-Trump actor James Woods scooped 28,000 retweets by using the law-abiding gun-owner to slap down an anti-gun activist. Pundits took to Fox News to label Willeford a hero.

Willeford is just the latest and most prominent example of a "good guy with a gun," a concept promoted by the gun lobby and mocked by its detractors. (In the wake of October's Las Vegas killings, a British satirical website offered a brutal take: "Good guy with a gun fails to prevent 2,916th successive mass shooting.") But though gun control advocates dismiss the idea that the answer to gun violence is more guns, and have data to back that up, many Americans are embracing the narrative of the virtuous responder.

Just ask Jimmy Graham, a 15-year Navy SEAL veteran who runs one of America's most popular courses in how to respond to an incident involving an armed shooter.

Five years ago, Graham got a call from a gun club–owning friend who told him there had been a dramatic rise in everyday civilians looking for training on what to do in the event of a mass shooting attack. Working together, they put together a new course designed to focus on the "tactical application" of firearms.

"The problem was that conventional firearms training had become very dated," said Graham from his office in Centennial, Colorado. "We wanted to do something more reality-based—to show people how these skills actually applied to their life."

Studies have found that statistically, states with permissive concealed-carry laws have more violent crime—in other words, having more guns in public spaces does not make life safer. But those statistics aren't likely to convince gun owners who fantasize about stopping a tragedy with a bullet.

Each year around 150 Americans undertake Graham's intense seven-month evening course to achieve the rank of Able Shepherd. (The name is self-consciously religious—"Shepherds are guided by biblical principles and hold themselves to a higher standard," explains a marketing blurb.) The training incorporates live scenarios, enabled by a new technology that allows real-life guns to be converted to fire non-lethal rounds comprised of coloured soap at a velocity of 400 feet per second—a kind of extreme paintball. Budding Shepherds are thrown into a high-octane scenario where they're tasked with neutralizing the terrorists without harming bystanders.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, over 90 percent of applicants are men, largely civilians with no professional firearms experience. Graham insists, though, they're not just Dwight Shrutes. "A lot are dads who just want to be sure they can defend their family if a horrible situation arises," he explained. "We tend to be fortunate in that most of them aren't overly gung-ho, but every now and then you'll get someone with this notion that they're going to come in and save the day.

"What tends to focus their mind is when they go into the training and accidentally shoot one of the innocents—that's when they say, Maybe I'm not ready for this just yet, and maybe I need a bit more training."

"If somebody is going to play an active role, they need to make sure they have both the right skillset and mindset," Sergeant Vincent Lewis of the Phoenix Police Department told me. He approved of more vigilant civilians, but didn't want anyone to underestimate the training necessary to confront a shooter. For police officers, he said, that typically takes over 700 hours of full-time training and a year on probation. "You have to know what's expected of you in that kind of situation—the sacrifices you might have to make in order to protect the lives of people around you," he said.

Gun ownership has always gone hand-in-hand with a focus on personal protection, though in past generations it was more wrapped up in the idea that a gun could shield your family and home from harm. When I first started spending time with Second Amendment enthusiasts in 2016—as part of an impromptu study into the modern psychology of gun ownership—I met folks who still matched the old stereotype: God-fearing family types who said grace before meals, refrained from cussing on Sundays, and kept firearms largely to protect their property against potential intruders.

But as the fears within American society have grown, reasons for firearm ownership have shifted. Speak to buyers at a small-town gun show and you're just as likely to hear about rampant jihadis or unhinged wife-beaters who shoot up churches as you are about home invasions. On the fringes of the Three Percenter militia movement, adherents amass guns to ward off the rise of Illuminati-style world government.

Perhaps linked to this is a 2016 study by Harvard and Northeastern universities that charted the rise of "super-owners," who typically own more than eight guns and favor heavier-duty weapons such as the AR-15. Polls have shown a rise in the number of Americans who fear terrorist incidents, with four in ten Americans saying that they fear being caught up in a mass shooting.

So it's not surprising that whenever attacks like Sutherland Springs hit the news, Graham's phone starts ringing.

"We get accused of trying to exploit tragedy, but it's like I always say—we don't stop talking about what we do; it's just that everyone else stops listening," he told me. "Two weeks after a shooting like Vegas and the attention fades away."

Graham's company website makes comprehensive use of a 2013 FBI publication highlighting a rise in mass shooting attacks, showing a breakdown of the most common targets (46 percent of mass shootings between 2000 and 2013 were on places relate to commerce). A promo video shows a black-and-white dramatization of an attack on a nondescript office, explaining how 60 percent of attacks are over before law enforcement arrives.

The fear of these attacks has become so widespread that the Department of Homeland Security has published its own guidance on what it calls "active shooter preparedness," which is in turn distributed to thousands of federal premises and private employers across the US. That guidance confirms Graham's assessment that most incidents end before law enforcement arrive, and calls on citizens to be "mentally and physically" prepared for a potential incident. It also stresses that citizens should only attempt to take down the shooter as a very last resort.

"The government has been clear what citizens should do if they are caught in an attack," Sergeant Lewis told me. "Run if you can, hide if you're stuck, and fight back if the shooter finds you." (The federal guidance omits any suggestion of firearms and instead mentions everything from hot coffee to office chairs as potential weapons).

Fighting back can come at enormous emotional cost. "These situations can be psychologically devastating to the individuals involved; both to the innocents nearby, and anyone attempting to stop them," said Brian Coss, deputy director of the New Mexico Department of Public Safety, a body that trains police officers.

"Having said that, when it comes to the worst case scenario like in Vegas or Texas—and if we are going to see more of those kinds of incidents—then there is a case to be made that doing something is better than nothing," he told me. "And in that case, a program which gives a better level of awareness, and some level of empowerment, to those who choose to do something could be a positive thing."

Robert Jackman is a writer interested in personal freedoms—however strange or provocative—in today's America.

Back in September, the superintendent of the US Air Force Academy (USAFA) rounded up 4,000 cadets and 1,500 staff members to give them a stern warning that's since been viewed online more than a million times.

"If you can't treat someone with dignity and respect, then you need to get out," Lieutenant General Jay Silveria said. "If you demean someone in any way, then you need to get out."

Lt. Silveria made the speech after five black students at the USAFA prep school found the words "get out n****r" scrawled on their dorm room message boards, an incident that roiled the campus and made national headlines. Silveria vowed that whoever was responsible would be brought to justice.

On Tuesday, USAFA announced that the slurs were actually written by one of the black students who had reported them, according to the Associated Press. The Colorado Springs Gazette reports that the student scrawled the racist messages "in a bizarre bid to get out of trouble [they] faced at the school for other misconduct." The person responsible is no longer enrolled at the prep school, though it's unclear whether they were expelled or decided to withdraw.

"Regardless of the circumstances under which those words were written, they were written, and that deserved to be addressed," Silveria told the Gazette. "You can never over-emphasize the need for a culture of dignity and respect—and those who don't understand those concepts, aren't welcome here."

Falsely reported hate crimes have cropped up across the US for decades, threatening to undermine legitimate reports of hate-fueled harassment and violence. After the election, two different women fabricated stories about men ripping off their hijabs while mentioning Trump and an Israeli-American teen orchestrated a wave of anti-Semitic bomb threats. On Monday, a Kansas State University student admitted to scrawling racist graffiti on his own car in what he called a "Halloween prank."

Similar incidents have served as ammunition for right-wing politicians and pundits who claim a significant number of hate crimes are hoaxes perpetrated by the left, despite the fact that genuine hate crimes are on the rise in the US and far outnumber the fakes.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

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It wasn’t often that Sydney, Australia’s residents saw a shark up close, so when Coogee Aquarium wrangled in a mammoth tiger shark, many wanted to see the live animal in person. The creature revealed a lot about the nature of sharks—and Sydney’s criminal underbelly—when it vomited a half-digested rat, a bird… and a severed human arm with a boxer tattoo.

Coogee Beach set the scene for one of the most chilling murders in Sydney’s history. The spring of 1935 was a turbulent time for the country: the Great Depression was in full-swing and it was just a year after the horrific Pyjama Girl murder where a young woman’s body was found badly burned. It was clear that Sydney residents needed a little levity. Many had their sights set on the down-on-its-luck Coogee Aquarium which opened in 1887 as an entertainment center for less jaded patrons. On the heels of recession and the shift to modernity catching up to it, it needed a face lift.

So in came one of Sydney’s hottest attraction: the four-meter long tiger shark at Coogee Aquarium that weighed nearly one ton. The proprietor at the time, Bert Hobson, and his son set out in the harbour to find a new star for their 25 by 15 pool. With shark attacks being on the rise that year, giving the public a chance to see one of these maneaters up close presented a good chance of saving their business. They came home with the four-meter long tiger shark and the public quickly took to the attraction. But as spectators ganged around the newly displaced mammoth beast, it became agitated. That’s when it vomited the key piece of evidence in the legendary Shark Arm Case.

When the police were called, they were convinced that the shark arm incident was a prank—either by the staff themselves or by local medical students that had too much time on their hands and access to spare cadaver parts. But no one was laughing as the arm with the boxer tattoo and suspicious rope tied around the wrist was fished from the water and brought to the coroner’s office. Things grew more frantic when the coroner reported that the arm hadn’t been bitten off by the shark at all—but was actually severed by a blunt knife in a suspected act of foul play.

The police had two glaring questions: whose arm was this? And how on earth did it end up in the belly of the beast? Before police could even begin to answer these questions, the press took off with the story, blaming exhibit tamperment or shark attacks. Finding the owner of the arm would be no easy feat seeing as 1930s forensic technology was limited. However, a brand new finger-printing technology was able to link the arm to a name. It was gruelling work, but a match soon came up: the man was Jim Smith, criminal and police informant.

Smith had previous brush-ups with crime and he was an opportunistic police informant. Smith’s brother confirmed the identity of the arm by the boxer tattoo when the image was published in Sydney’s Truth tabloid. Before the criminal life and brush-ups with law, Smith was a boxing hopeful, but was forced to leave his dream to fight behind when it was clear that he just didn’t have a professional-level talent for the sport. So he went from job to job before he landed work in a pub where he started developing connections with the criminal underworld. One of those connections was a wealthy boat-building businessman named Reginald Holmes, one of the last contacts Smith would make.

Reginald Holmes was a man of many titles. In addition to being a well-loved family man and respected member of society who gave back to the community with church donations, he was an active heroin smuggler and insurance and business fraud mastermind. Holmes was also involved in construction where he employed Smith to carry out different tasks like cheating builders of their building supplies and over-insuring property before putting it on the path of destruction through arson. Their operation had Holmes clandestinely wiring money over to Smith after each job. It went on until the ill-fated Pathfinder scandal sunk their relationship faster than the over-insured luxury yacht in Sydney’s harbour. When Holmes filed the fraudulent paperwork to insure the ship and sent Smith to destroy it, he didn’t know that he reported the destruction as “suspicious” to police. The insurance fell through and Holmes found himself out of pocket.

There was the mastermind and the muscle to get these jobs done, but they also required with a master forger. Patrick Brady was a long-time friend of Smith and also played the insurance fraud game. Despite coming from an honest, hard-working family, he strayed away from this lifestyle to mingle with the criminal underworld after discovering he had a talent for forging the signatures of generals in World War I. His talent brought him to Sydney’s harbour where he worked with Smith and Holmes—a perfect criminal trio.

This operation continued, despite Holmes falling behind in his finances as the Depression hit Australia unforgivingly. The pressure starkly worsened under Smith’s threats of blackmail for more and more money from Holmes. It was clear to Holmes that he had to cut off this expensive loose end. One evening, Smith told his wife that he was going fishing. A few restless nights later, his wife grew agitated. One night, she received a mysterious call from a man: “Don’t worry… Jimmy will be home in three days’ time.” Jimmy never made it home.

When the police looked into the case, they had little to work on. Unable to determine the exact cause of death, they had to follow other leads. They knew that Jim Smith was last seen drinking and playing cards with Patrick Brady at the Cecil Hotel, but hangouts like these were fairly commonplace for him. Pursuing Brady as a lead, they found that he had rented a small cottage on Taloombi Street, Cronulla (a scenic beachside locale that continues to be a luxury high-cost destination for real estate nowadays) at the time that Smith was missing. All signs seemed to lead to the cottage being the place where foul play took place. The working theory was that Brady used a boat to dump the body in a trunk in the ocean after the arm was severed.

They began investigating the moves Brady made in the days leading up to the disappearance. They found co-operative taxi drivers who were willing to discuss the trips Brady made a few days prior to the cottage rental. One of the last trips Brady took blindsided investigators with a new shocking lead: the residence of Reginald Holmes. Until now, they had not been aware of any connection between Brady and Holmes. With a few questions to ask, they moved in to get Brady.

When the cops nabbed Brady, they got him on completely unrelated forgery charges. They needed him in the station, but they lacked the physical evidence to detain him for that crime. Brady was under intense interrogation tactics for six hours, but he was steadfast in his refusal to tell them what they didn’t already know. It wasn’t until they questioned his sobbing wife that Brady’s cold demeanor softened. He finally agreed to issue a statement. He asked for a pen and paper—then wrote down everything the cops were already wise to, including his collusion with Holmes.

To get ahead in this case, investigators needed to tackle it from a different angle: it was time to go after Reginald Holmes. In another dramatic twist to this story, Holmes ripped out of his beachfront home into the harbour on his speedboat when it became clear to him that the police were on the approach. Cops were quick to speed out after him, but each time they came near, Holmes would abruptly jolt off again. He attracted a crowd of spectators near Sydney’s harbour who watched the hot pursuit go down.

Finally, Holmes killed the engine and demonstrably stepped up before the crowds, a pistol at hand. Reportedly, he uttered this cryptic phrase: “Jimmy Smith is dead and there is only another left… If you leave me until tonight, I will finish him.” It was clear that he was under the influence. If his behaviour didn’t make it clear, the empty bottle of gin at the bottom of the boat certainly did. The cops braced themselves for a firefight—but then Holmes raised the pistol to his own head, and fired. He fell to the water as the police converged.

But the shot to the head didn’t kill him, just grazed his temple. Defeated, Holmes finally turned himself over to police. Holmes, who was initially thought of as the mastermind to this whole case, pitifully told investigators a different story: he alleged that Brady was the man who killed Smith. He also claimed that Brady brought Smith’s severed arm in a grisly attempt to blackmail him for a sum. Holmes describing details of the cottage on Taloombi Street told them that he knew more than he let on. Police threatened him with an accessory to murder charge to get his inquest in court, to which he agreed. However, Holmes would never make it to court.

On the morning of June 12, 1935, the decisive coroner’s inquest was set to start soon. The police approached Holmes’ residence to bring him to court. Before they even got to the door, they found Holmes slumped over in his car in the driveway with three gunshot wounds to the left side of his chest. It didn’t take long for them to piece together what the insurance mastermind Holmes did: he must have hired hitmen and taken out a contract on himself. Of course, he didn’t put this into play until after he secured a hefty life insurance policy for his own life. The policy wasn’t applicable under suicide and his death would ensure that his wife and children wouldn’t be subjected to the public shame of his conviction. It would be his last successful case of insurance fraud.

The Brady trial went off without him, but on flimsy ground. Those present included Smith’s wife, Holmes’ wife, and a few of the cab drivers willing to testify against Patrick Brady. As the proceedings went on, the most glaring issue was the lack of a physical body. They had the arm, but no one could prove to the judge that Jim Smith was actually dead—or if he was wandering around in armless truancy. When it was decided that there was enough evidence to proceed, the case itself had an even shakier prosecution. Their problem was that Brady was never a violent man: he was charged with lesser crimes like forgery, but never pinned for assault. Standing at 5’4’’ and being a slight man, it was also unfeasible that he would be able to take on Smith by himself. Smith was a much larger man, a boxer, in fact. A day and a half into the trial, the prosecution fell apart and Brady was acquitted of all charges. That day, Brady walked away a free man.

The Shark Arm Case was never officially solved, but there are a few standing theories. A few years after the case, Brady’s wife admitted that she had gone to the cottage that Brady was staying at, suspecting that he was seeing another woman. She claimed that she overheard not two, but a group of men drinking and playing a card game. No one could ever confirm who these men were, but Australian legal historian Alex Castles argued that the murder likely took place at the cottage, but Brady himself was out fishing at the time and returned to find Smith dead. He would allegedly keep silent about this, fearing for his life. If Brady didn’t kill Smith, he would at least have a good idea who did. He would take this secret to the grave in 1965.

Until his death, Brady was sole survivor of the shark arm case. In an interview with Vince Kelly, a leading crime journalist in the 1960s, Brady explained that the case followed him to his death, suspecting that people around him would whisper “That’s Pat Brady.”

One of his last statements proved to be true: “The shark arm case will never be forgotten. It will be remembered after I’m dead.”

There are many reasons why one would want to disappear—debt, being in a shitty relationship, hating your life, your dead end job, the constant disapproval of your friends and parents and really anyone that has ever met you—that sort of thing—and if you’re going to disappear, well, there isn’t anything better than faking your own death.

Tricking people into thinking you’re a goner is a fantasy which has existed since time immemorial, but it’s one that we were all recently reminded of when it came out, yet again, that Olivia Newton-John’s ex-boyfriend probably faked his own death. The dude, Patrick McDermott, who is less a dead dad than a deadbeat dad, disappeared in 2005 while on an overnight fishing trip on his boat unironically named “Freedom.”

For years now it’s been reported that McDermott was living in Mexico—a 2009 Dateline investigation pretty much confirmed this, while finding—totally unrelated—that he owed a shitload in child support payments. The most recent reminder of McDermott’s possible trickery came to us from New Idea, a weekly Australian magazine, which claimed they had photo proof of McDermott living in Mexico earlier this week.

All this got me wondering what is the proper way to disappear, so that Australian weeklies can’t track me down. So, with the case of Patrick McDermott in mind, I decided to talk to an expert on how to actually pull off faking your own death. I reached out to Elizabeth Greenwood, the author of Playing Dead, a fascinating book that examines death fakery of all kinds.

At the immediate start of our conversation, Greenwood put a caveat on all her advice: “I honestly don’t recommend any of this.”

"Most of us just have the option of disappearing, just kind of walking out on your life,” Greenwood told VICE. “There is nothing really illegal in that, obviously what you leave behind will come back to haunt you like if you're jumping bail, but, if you're just a regular Joe, walking out of your life is better."

That said, if blowing up of your life isn’t an option, like perhaps you pissed off a cartel, maybe you need to actually fake your own death. But Greenwood says McDermott's method is a bad move. As it turns out, going missing over the ocean is actually a red flag for investigators, especially when a body (which will usually turn up in a few days) is never found. What you really should do is far, far simpler.

Go for a long walk in the woods.

"I spoke to the investigators about what kind of accident you should avoid and they told me not water and that the kind of accidents that seem believable are the open-ended scenarios,” said Greenwood. “For example, people go hiking and disappear off trails all the time and their bodies are never found and it's very open-ended to what happened to them.

“So it's something that's a little less clear-cut than toppling overboard and drowning where there is only singular answer to what could happen to you, you want something a little more nuanced... a situation where there is a more than one answer."

Photos via Pexel

So, you’ve gone and disappeared yourself up in a mountain or the Appalachian Trail, now what?

Well, faking one's own death isn’t illegal in its own sense but there are numerous ancillary crimes that are associated like it—such as fraud and identity theft if you try and pass yourself off as someone else. So, unless you are willing to break the law and get your hands on some passable documents, driving is out of the equation. So, again, in a counter-intuitive move, you’re not going to head to some faraway country or secluded farm but a big-ass city. Think about it, people move to cities all the time and it’s far easier to get work under the table and procure housing with no documents.

Greenwood mentioned a woman named Petra Pazsitka who, in the 80s, went missing at age 24. In a rather beneficial turn for someone who faked her own death, Pazstika was declared dead after a serial killer took responsibility for her murder. However, in 2015, after going to the police because of a break-in, Pazstika was found to be living in Germany under another name. She was able to work for cash under the table and get by for more than 30 years with no proper documentation. When she was finally found out investigators declared she wasn’t criminally liable because she didn’t falsify any documents.

This is the best way to go says, Greenwood.

"You don't need to travel, you don't need to get a passport unless you're willing to spend lots of money to get a fake but real passport essentially and to do that you need to know the right people. I think from what I've seen, it's just better to be able to fly under the radar doing as less as possible."

Photos via Pexel

A disguise is also important. One man named John Darwin, better known as the Canoe Man, was profiled in Greenwood’s book. Darwin, in the early 2000s, ran up some debt after buying some homes, so he took a canoe out to sea and promptly went missing. His body was never found and the wreckage of his canoe was found, he was declared dead and his family got a £25,000 insurance payoff which they then used against their debt.

Darwin was even able to live next door to his wife for years before they were caught in 2007 after being photographed together on vacation. Darwin and his wife were charged with fraud and sentenced to eight years—they are now out on probation. Darwin was interviewed by Greenwood for her book and told her that he had completely changed his appearance for his time dead. He became gaunt, grew out a beard, changed his hair, started wearing glasses, and walking with a limp. His disguise was so good that Darwin told Greenwood that he once even passed his father on the street and his pops had no idea.

It’s important to know that faking your own death is not a short con and you have to be prepared to play the long game. If you’re leaving like this, you’re leaving for good. You can’t have contact with your friends, your family, your 4,290 Twitter followers who live and die by your tweets, you can’t have anything at all to do with your former life or you run the risk of getting caught.

"The main reason why people usually get caught isn't because they get their image caught on CCTV or they're just spotted somewhere,” said Greenwood. “People get caught because they can't cut ties with their previous lives, that means they still try to reach out to family members or stay in touch some sort of way… You have to alter everything about you, so you have to go somewhere completely different than most people would expect."

Faking your death isn’t a one-size-fits-all sort of thing. There are many other things that you can do, like get in touch with some fixers who will help you, paying off doctors in third world countries for a death certificate, and what not. But kiddos, for a quick and dirty best practices for faking your own death, this [probably] works.

Best of luck! See you on the Appalachian Trail.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

In the middle of a decade-long marriage that would end in divorce, world-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall and her then husband—documentary filmmaker and photographer Hugo van Lawick—immersed themselves in the remote forests of Gombe, Tanzania. Her mission was to continue her anthropological research on chimpanzees; van Lawick's was to capture it all on 16mm, as commissioned by National Geographic. The fateful endeavor resulted in Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees, an hour-long, Orson Welles–narrated documentary that Goodall "despised." According to director Brett Morgen, who's revived the footage in his new documentary Jane, she felt the film was "filled with filled with inaccuracies and completely rejected it at the time and to this day."

Fifty years later, Morgen has righted van Lawick's wrongs. Unearthing more than 100 hours of never-before-seen 16mm footage buried in the National Geographic archives, Morgen's documentary is a riveting effort in what he calls "re-appropriating found footage." Interwoven with recent Goodall interviews, Jane is at once sumptuous and intimate, with Morgen guiding viewers in and out of the headspace of his titular subject—as well as her husband and son, Hugo Eric Louis, who went by "Grub."

Although Goodall has been well-documented over the years, Morgen's knack for stripping subjects of their personas—Cobain: Montage of Heck, The Kids Stay in the Picture—makes Jane one of her most transparent and honest portraits. We spoke with Morgen about his constant fear of failure, struggling with being a great filmmaker (and a great parent), and why Goodall just might be the light we need in these dark times.

VICE: It took you eight months to comb through the archival footage, just to understand what you had. How are you staying sane?
Brett Morgen: Fear of failure is a powerful motivator, and we have to work our way through it. There's nothing demoralizing about going in circles and re-cutting—it was actually a brilliant exercise to find the language of the film. We had to find it, and we just kept working until we arrived there. We did one test screening of the film for about 50 people, and I felt incredibly relieved that people were just treating it like a film.

You've said about Jane, "Her work is the love of her life. It is not even a question. There was her work, and there was her mother."
It was a story that resonated with me in my life, and with a lot of artists. It's very difficult to be a great parent and a great artist, because both require full commitment. They're very difficult to reconcile. I'd never seen a film about a woman whose primary love was her work. Someone said to me today, "Isn't it sad toward the end when Hugo and Jane get separated?" I said, "Absolutely not. They both found their purpose in life." From the moment Hugo got there, Jane was being pulled away from the light. Once she and Hugo split, that's when she was able to arrive at what might be her greatest epiphany: that she was meant to go around the world and be a conservationist.

Would you rather be a great filmmaker or a great parent?
I don't know if that's up to me. I try to be the best I can be, but I very much understood Hugo and Jane in terms of Hugo's need to be on the Serengeti and Jane's need to be in Gombe. Fortunately for the two of them, Grub accepted that his parents had these unique gifts, and I don't think he would've wanted it any other way.

I saw him the other day, and someone was asking me about him, and I said, "I get the sense that he recognizes that his mother is out saving the world every moment of the day—not just for him, but for his children." Certainly, she's not doing it for herself, because her days are numbered. I don't mean that in a sad way: She's coming up in her years, but instead of retiring like most people, she's spent nearly every day selflessly working for you and me since 1986. It's a heroic story, particularly at this moment in time.

Why do you say that?
I feel that we didn't pick this moment—the moment picked us. There's an irony to the fact that we did our Los Angeles premiere as the Harvey Weinstein story was breaking that can't be overlooked. I was on the carpet at the Hollywood Bowl—a woman asked me about Harvey and the toxicity in our industry, and all of the sudden I look over to my right and see Jane walking toward me. It was clear that, in these dark times we're living in—both within our industry and politically and the world at large—how great is it that we have a light that can guide us? In this year of the woman—the year of Wonder Woman and the year of Patty Jenkins—how fortunate are we to have a real-life hero in our midst?

Visit Janethemovie.com to find out about screenings near you.

It was shortly after midday when the engines started – a procession of motorcycles riding through the streets of Bristol in a mass-orchestrated show of defiance against bike theft in the city. The riders came from across the Southwest; bikers who, over the space of 18 months, had watched vehicle theft and joyriding develop from a nuisance into an epidemic, perpetrated by at least one local gang. Estimates vary, but between 400 to 700 vehicles were involved in the theft awareness ride.

For security reasons the route had been kept secret, but on their way to the final destination in the city centre the motorcade passed through Southmead – an unremarkable suburb of rough grassy banks and council housing, and importantly the turf of the suspected culprits. The harmonic growl of the engines brought people from their homes: curtains flicked and bus stop queues gawped as the army of bikers burned down the carriageways. Somewhere, from the onlooking pavement, a phone was raised and an Instagram story of the traffic recorded. It was captioned, "Benders bike ride", and decorated with a laughing emoji.

Eight months before, the now-deactivated Instagram account "bristolbiketaker" had around 1,000 uploaded images. The content of each post was pretty consistent: young lads sitting on motorbikes, faces obscured by stretched emojis or occasionally balaclavas, all of them posing for the Gram. The bikes themselves ranged in quality and condition – from pristine black Triumphs to scratched BMWs photographed in forest clearings, and even a Domino's delivery bike, complete with L-plate. The account bio read: "They call me Mr steal your bike... Jail rider/Bristol... we take anything and everything... everything's legal around here."

The account belonged to one – or perhaps multiple – members of a gang of young Bristolian bike thieves, supposedly somewhere between 15 and 17-people strong. It's estimated that since last summer they have stolen in excess of £500,000 worth of vehicles in North Bristol. Some they've sold, others they've torched and abandoned, and almost all they've posted about online.

Since the disappearance of bristolbiketaker, much of the activity has splintered off into different accounts. "Bristolstovecs" features the most up-to-date gallery of their acquisitions, while others like "timetostealyourbike" or "biketakerr" appear to be run by rival groups. It's tough to say how organised the gangs are, and to what extent they are working in unison – but mutual follows, likes and comments between the accounts suggest collusion, or at least regular communication.

@BristolStovecs

Bristol's motorcycle community first realised they were facing a real problem when the Instagram activity started picking up last year. Initially they had taken little notice of the bragging, but when bikes began to go missing in large numbers it was impossible to ignore.

Martin Keay runs "Four Counties Bikers UK" – a Facebook group with almost 4,000 members in the South-West. They organise regular pub meets, ride-outs, track days and charity events, recently raising £5,000 for a children's respite centre in Bristol. Martin recalls a number of alarming incidents that highlighted how brazen the thefts were becoming. "One of our female members was surrounded by scooters, and they tried to steal her bike there and then," he explains. "Four or five tried to kick her off but she managed to get away. It happened to another female member a few weeks later."

Martin's group are part of a thriving motorcycle culture in the city, which, as the third most congested place in the UK, is popular for bikers who like to weave in and out of traffic jams. Yet here, as they are all over the world, the bikes are so much more than a means of transport. Motorcycling remains one of the few subcultures that lasts well into adulthood – for riders, their bikes are an obsession and part of their identity. As Martin tells me, riding sits at the centre of their lives: a "common bond" between thousands of people. A stolen bike isn't an inconvenience, it's an injury – and the bike thieves of Instagram were rubbing salt.

Exactly why the bike thieves publicise their criminal activity so much is complicated. Some of it can be explained by reselling. The comments underneath images occasionally feature pricing requests, and some account bios make specific references to theft for sale. Users who ask about prices are often served a short "PM", instructing them to switch to the private inbox to find out more.

Yet mostly the posts are reserved for showboating. Interspersed between the Vespas and the KTMs are photos of buds, watches, rolled-up notes and bottles of Grey Goose. Captions and bios feature slogans like "no face no case" or "catch nothing but a cold". Pig emojis are stuck next to middle fingers, while bikes are tagged as "new toy" or "too fast too furious". They take pleasure in ridiculing screen-grabs of complaints from theft awareness groups, or headlines from news stories about their activities. Friends comment exchanging tips on stealing wheels, and speculating who is hiding behind the helmets. One image of a red moped is captioned "Chinese import #desprate time #needed to get home in time for tea #scrappah".

The users also upload videos. Most are fuzzy. Lit by blinking headlamps, engines buzz and whirr around indiscriminate locations. Some document late night motorway rides: riders burning through the darkness on stolen bikes, clocking speeds over well over 100KMH. Others show them tearing through the looping, sinuous streets of local estates. Several show bikes on fire.

@BristolStovecs

With the rise of the Instagram accounts, motorcyclists were not only dealing with the fear of losing their bikes, but the additional insult of seeing their stolen rides paraded on Instagram – little more than cheap trophies to be damaged or undersold. Many felt the local newspaper, the Bristol Post, was exacerbating things by "sensationalising" the activity and fuelling the thieves' desire for attention. Worse still, despite the online activity and what appeared to be an endless stream of photographic evidence, the police seemed unable to respond in any meaningful way. The thieves were growing in confidence and their victims felt increasingly alone.

Inspector Rob Cheeseman heads up Operation Buell – a special investigation into the bike thieves, named after American motorcycle manufacturer Erik Buell. He tells me Avon and Somerset Police had been monitoring them for some time, but it was the proliferation of Instagram activity that alerted them to how much anger was building within the motorcycle community – against the police almost as much as the thieves themselves.

"The community were very unhappy with the situation and the perceived lack of action from us," he tells me over the phone. "We were doing lots but we weren't getting that message across."

The complication, as Insp Cheeseman explains, is this: just because a photo shows someone sitting on a stolen bike, that doesn't mean it is usable evidence. Even if the police know full well who the rider is and where the bike has come from, a covered face or an obscured registration plate can render it completely redundant as part of a prosecution. "There's a real, vast difference between knowing who is in the picture and being able to prove it in a court of law, beyond all reasonable doubt."

While, for the police, prosecuting the bike thieves was proving difficult – the collected scraps of Snapchat stories and burnt bike parts going a very short way towards building a case – Bristol's bikers wanted see action. Many felt it was time to take things into their own hands.

@BristolStovecs

Dylan, 19, has been riding motorbikes since his 16th birthday. His first was handed down to him by his then-boss on the proviso that if he could get it working he could keep it, which he did. That same bike has been stolen twice by the Instagram bike thieves.

The first time was when Dylan was in college. In the weeks leading up to the theft he'd seen the same man loitering around his school's bike park – each time with a different group. On one occasion Dylan approached him and told him it was "obvious" what he was up to. "He kicked off," Dylan remembers. "He tried to start a fight with me." Another day, not long after, Dylan was running late for a science lesson and didn't have time to fully lock his bike. When he came back outside it was gone.

"I knew it would be this guy, so I did loads of digging on Facebook and Instagram and asked people around the college," Dylan tells me. "Eventually I found out who he was." He began exchanging heated messages with the alleged thief. "He pretty much told me himself – sent me pictures of my bike to ask me if I was missing it, sent me pictures of other bikes he'd stolen." Dylan took this information to the police, but was disappointed to learn there was nothing they could do. Eventually the bike was recovered, but ultimately cost him upwards of £500 in recovery and repair costs.

The second attempt happened a year later, while Dylan was working around Cribbs Causeway – a stretch of road north of town, home to a retail park and not much else. After finishing work and starting the drive home, his bike slammed still and fell from under him. "The bike only turned halfway. It turns out they'd tried snapping my steering lock." When he checked his work's CCTV the next day, he saw two men trying to steal the bike for as long as 40 minutes. One of them, Dylan says, was clearly the same culprit from a year ago. This time, using the footage and the messages from the year before, he was able to get £200 damages for the snapped steering lock. He believes the thief is now in prison.

Since then, Dylan admits he has taken his frustrations out on the road. "I chase bike thieves out of pure anger now," he tells me. "Police say you shouldn't do that sort of thing, but I've retrieved a friend's bike off the guy who stole it. I didn't see him steal it, but I saw him riding the stolen bike and then chased him down… kicked the guy off and it was a done deal."

He describes another occasion when he saw a teenager riding a moped he suspected to be stolen around a park in Mangotsfield. After challenging him, the teen sped off and Dylan gave chase. "From that moment it was half an hour of him driving like a lunatic – pulling out in front of cars, driving down the wrong side of the road. I caught up with him on a dual carriageway, and I was shouting at him: 'If you don't get off that bike I'm going to kick you off.'" In the end, Dylan says, all he managed to do was slap him in the face and nick his sunglasses.

Selfie posted by @BristolStovecs

Dylan's forays into seeking justice are part of a wave of vigilantism that spread throughout the Bristol biking community earlier in the year, as the anger at perceived police inaction reached breaking point. Confrontations took place on Instagram, where raging victims traded barbs with the thieves in comment sections, threatening violence if they ever saw them riding. In February of this year a makeshift shrine to Adam Nolan – an 18-year-old who died when the stolen motorbike he was riding crashed – was vandalised.

Hostilities peaked in the same month, when one anonymous biker built and shared a PDF document featuring a comprehensive list identifying the alleged bike thieves. The "dossier" – as the police reluctantly refer to it – charted the names, personal social media accounts and home addresses of the supposed culprits. The list was complete with photos and descriptions of their personalities, indicating how likely they were to react if confronted. The introduction simply stated, "This bunch of little bitches is about to be unmasked."

Both the police and spokespeople for Bristol's biking community have strongly condemned all vigilante behaviour. According to Insp Cheeseman, the dossier was full of inaccuracies, and Avon and Somerset Police have since located the person responsible and addressed it with them. One anonymous biker stressed that this behaviour was far from representative of the community at large, who had responded with "maturity and passion in equal measure" to the thefts. Martin Keay also dismissed the dossier, and all other forms of lawless retribution. "Don't ride around council estates looking for random bunches of lads to intimidate," he warned. "It will backfire."

However, Insp Cheeseman also concedes that the lengths some bikers were going to in order to resolve things was a rude awakening. "It was a clear message," he tells me. "Evidence from the local community about how much of an impact this crime type was having on them."

@BristolStovecs

Since then, Insp Cheeseman has made it a priority of Operation Buell to build trust between the police and the motorcycling community, in order for them to work together against the problem. He has been meeting with an independent advisory committee comprised of bike enthusiasts, which he says he is using to hold himself to account. Together they planned the Motorcycle Theft Awareness Ride at the end of September, which in addition to raising the profile of the situation was also an opportunity to give out advice around preventing bike theft.

One of the bikers who organised the awareness ride – who wished to remain anonymous – spoke hopefully of the change in mentality that had come about. "It [the awareness ride] showed solidarity with the police, and showed the wider community that they are not alone," they explained. "We feel this had a particularly great effect when we passed through some of the worst areas for bike theft." They promised this was the start of continued conversations with neighbourhoods and councils, as well as heralding a renewed push around prevention of theft and the protection of bikes.

In perhaps one of the more significant developments, Avon and Somerset Police are also re-evaluating how they deal with evidence supplied by social media. Insp Cheeseman tells me they are "reviewing all of the crimes that now come in and looking at where our opportunities lie". They have also just issued a Criminal Behaviour Order (CBO) for the first time, to a 17-year-old suspected of stealing bikes in the Henbury area. The order, similar to an ASBO, prevents him from sitting on a motorbike or moped in Bristol for two years, and also means he is not allowed to be in the company of more than two people in a public place, unless in the company of his mother. Insp Cheeseman heralds this as a real breakthrough, which should make prosecution much easier.

"We are trying to tackle it from a much wider viewpoint, and tackle the behaviours within it," he concludes. "I think we're making good progress."

Martin Keay tells me opinions of the police have improved significantly now that communication lines have been established – particularly since the awareness ride. "People expect instant results, but it doesn't work like that... we know that now," he tells me. "We know how much effort they are putting into it and how time-consuming it can be. There have been good results and there are more to come. I know for a fact there are more to come." The community, as tight-knit as ever, seem proud and positive about the progress they are making.

In London, incidents of bike theft have almost doubled in the past four years, with 14,971 motorcycles or mopeds stolen in 2016 alone. It's a sharp uptake that's been accompanied by the rise in muggings by teenagers on mopeds, who swipe phones from the hands of unsuspecting victims and race off before anyone can react. The threat of vigilantism is looming in the capital as well. Back in May a leaflet calling on bikers to "come TMAX [type of scooter] hunting with Jack th Lad" [sic] was spotted in the Ace Cafe, a popular London motorcyclist haunt. Similar calls have been clocked in Liverpool, Edinburgh and Birmingham.

The war against Bristol's Instagram bike thieves suggests the real work the police have to do is outreach – winning the trust of the motorcycling community, educating them on the law's limitations and demonstrating what they are doing. Only then will frustrated bikers be convinced not to pursue the problem themselves. It's a model for the rest of the UK, where thefts still represent a volatile blend of boiling frustrations, social media accounts and high-speed vehicles. Before anything can stop, the first challenge is slowing it down.

@BristolStovecs

After a series of messages, the anonymous user behind "bristolstovecs" eventually agreed to answer a few questions for this piece over Instagram.

In their responses, they claimed there is more than one person behind the account, that they started stealing bikes a few years ago and that they don't know how many they've stolen, only that it's "a lot". When I asked what a good night looks like for them, they told me: "It's just luck really... some nights we get 1 bike some nights we get a few bikes and we will have our fun on them then sell them or burn them." They claim they couldn't care less what the Bristol motorcycling community think of them, and that they saw the awareness ride but "don't really think anything of it". When I ask if they are worried about getting caught they say "kinda", and that they will stop stealing them "someday".

Finally, I ask why they post so much on Instagram. Why they make their crimes so public? "Dunno tbh," is the response, "just for the likes and that I guess."

@a_n_g_u_s

Where were you on 11/8/16?

The question feels equal parts daunting and demanding. In the intervening months since President Donald Trump was sworn into office, America has fractured into two groups: those with buyer's remorse, and those with just remorse.

It's difficult to contemplate Trump's presidency without replaying that fateful November night, where an outsized reality television star slowly started to gain momentum in Florida…then Pennsylvania…and then West Virginia, and Michigan, and so on. Grappling with the final results is something everyone's had to do, irrespective of political leanings—but that night lingers in the collective consciousness.

Producer Jeff Deutchman understood the importance of this day before we did. He's the creator of 11/8/16, the second installment in an election series where he calls upon a cavalcade of documentary talent to film around the country. This latest installment comes from "300 hours of footage," said Deutchman. "We had 50 characters and whittled it down to 16."

These characters come from across the country, shot by acclaimed documentarians like Vikram Gandhi ( Kumare) and Alison Klayman ( Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry). There are Democrats and Republicans, Trump diehards and Bernie bros, Hillary proponents and anti-establishment twentysomethings. To witness 11/8/16 unfurl is to accept dramatic irony. "It's not unlike watching certain narrative films where the audience knows the ending and the characters don't," said Deutchman. We know the ending to this story.

When we sat down with Klayman by phone, we discussed her portion of the project, how she's coped since, and why it's time we ask the right questions.

VICE: You woke up the morning of 8th. What happened next?
Alison Klayman: I was a bit nervous about it being a long day. I didn't have any plan for when it may end. My segment was in Philadelphia—where I'm registered to vote and where I grew up. My parents' address is the best permanent address for me, since I've mostly lived abroad the past decade. In the morning, I went to vote with my mom. We took a selfie, and it felt cool to vote for a woman for President. There was some joy in that moment and sharing it with my mom.

Did you ever consider that Donald Trump would win?
I thought there was a chance, because we're living in America. The fact that he was the candidate made it clear that there was a chance. When I think about it, I was somewhat uneasy in the morning. I didn't specifically picture how the night would play out, but it's kinda like documentary filmmaking: You want to go in with preparations, but you don't want to go in knowing the story because then there's no element of discovery in the process or the filmmaking. That's why an election seemed like a good thing to document.

At what point during that day did you feel the tide changing?
I know exactly when it was, and I was so glad it made the film. It was Ed Rendell's call on Radio Times, that point in the night where early returns were coming in. The hosts were asking leading questions about Hillary and what she'll need to do to heal the divide in the beginning of her term. He said, "Well I don't know if she's going to be the President elect. Let's just get through tonight." It was flippant. He wasn't playing devil's advocate. At that point I called my husband who was watching it with friends in New York and I said to him, "I'm feeling kinda nervous." People who should've sounded confident were not sounding confident.

When you were watching the film, did you feel like you learned something?

Never underestimate the malevolence of an old, powerful white man. I didn't learn that during the film, but I was reminded of it.
[Laughs] Right, and I think that's actually the right question: What have we learned? There's gotta be some lesson: Whatever reaction you had to that day, we know what happened now. It would be really hard to make a movie that teaches something, but I do think the film is asking what the lesson is.

Given your experiences, do you think you've learned anything in the last year about this country, or more specifically about what happened that day?
I'm in the process of figuring out what the right questions are. Globally, if there are blindspots, it means that we weren't focusing on the right things. If we're asking questions, do we understand the answers? I'm thinking about what I can make next, because that's going to guide what I make next. This project was "See what happens on this day," so now we're considering why we did that and where it's going to take us.

Hey guys, it's only World Book Day – that thing from school and also apparently adult life. Bad news, though: according to a new survey, one in five people in the UK cannot name a single author.

The study, from the Royal Society of Literature, also revealed that 15 percent of people find literature too difficult to understand. A quarter of those surveyed said they had not read any literature within the last six months.

Children's writer Michael Morpurgo, whose books every reluctant British schoolkid since the 1970s has been forced to read out loud in class at least once, expressed his view that reading literature is valuable. He told The Telegraph: "There seems to be a gulf that shuts off 20 percent of people from the benefits of literature, a gulf that I know the RSL and others are determined to bridge."

Apparently the situation is particularly dire among young people, so I headed out to ask a few people who basically resembled myself and everyone else in the VICE office if they could name an actual author.

RICARDO

VICE: Can you name one single author of literature?
Ricardo: Uhhhh….I don't really know... like er...I'm not really an expert about that.

So you can't name any books?
No, I don't read. I just watch movies or… But I mean one book, Siddhartha. Yes. You know Siddhartha? It's a Hermann Hesse book – it's an old one. It's, like, the life of a prince living in India and... yeah, it's a good book.

Did you know that one in five people in the UK can't name a single author? Does that surprise you?
Not really, no.

Why?
Because we don't have time. I mean, I do like to read, but I don't have time – and another problem is that I'm not focusing. It's impossible to read because if I start I'm like...

Do you find films easier to focus on?
Exactly. But I mean reading is fine. It's the best thing because it's good for your brain, but I can't.

JULIAN

VICE: Can you name an author in five seconds?
Julian: I'm gonna lose so bad.

Just name one.
Any author?

Yeah, any author.
Oh, George Orwell.

That's not bad, a lot of people would say, like, Shakespeare or JK Rowling.
Nah, George Orwell, man. He's ma boy.

Did you know that one in five people in the UK can't name a single author? Why do you think people don't read?
There's so many instant stimulations that are going on right now. Like, you've got the internet, obviously, and other things that distract you. And reading takes time. I don't read as much as I should.

Is that because you're busy?
I have these great chats with people about living in a world of, like, instant gratification and how we're all kind of connected with dating apps, Instagram. All these other like little things that we can easily just distract ourselves with. Getting these little hits of gratification – I think us as human beings find that a lot easier than doing stuff that takes time and effort especially with stuff like reading.

Cool.

CLAYTON

VICE: Can you name literally any author?
Clayton: Just someone I like?

Yeah.
Donna Tartt.

Did you know that one in five people in the UK can't name an author?
Really? Oh that's sad.

Does it surprise you?
I guess, because I don't really see that. I'm in a group of people who like stuff like literature and creative stuff like that.

Why do you think people don't read?
I went to a really shit school. I went to this all-boys state school in the south of England. It was when people were made to read out loud in class, because the school system was really traditional. It makes you feel embarrassed and you associate that with a negative thing and you don't want to read books any more.

WILLEMJIN

Can you name an author of literature?
An author of literature – well, from the Netherlands, or...

Anywhere. Just an author..
Well, it's really difficult to…

You can say a Dutch author.
Err, I know one, but she writes children's books.

SHALISHA

VICE: Can you name an author?
Shalisha: Oh god, I haven't read in ages. I mainly read poetry.

That counts.
Erm, Maya Angelou?

Congrats. Did you know that one in five people in the UK can't name an author?
Well, that would be expected.

Why do you think that?
Because I feel like people don't really read unless they need to, for like educational purposes.

Why do you think that is?
Probably just social media.

COREY

VICE: Name an author.
Corey: Erm, JK Rowling.

Cool. Can you name someone who's not JK Rowling?
Err, JR Tolkien.

Thanks!

JESS

VICE: Can you name an author in under five seconds?
Jess: Charles Dickens.

Can you name anyone else?
Jane... whatever her name is. Jane Austen. Do I win anything?

Nope. Does it surprise you at all that a lot of people don't read?
I mean, it's really sad. It's really, really sad, but it doesn't surprise me at all because some people come out of primary school not being able to read and write. It's a really high percentage. I couldn't tell you a percent, but it's really high.

Why do you think it's sad?
Because it develops your imagination, and people are so kind of dumbed down by PlayStation. I grew up in Spain and I was kind of free and at one with nature, like climbing trees – like the girl version of Mowgli – so I think it's just another side of your imagination that people might not have always gone down.

@amyrwalker

It is an indisputable fact of modern life that dogs are good and airports are bad. There’s nothing Los Angeles likes more, though, than bringing the good and the bad together (see also: paleo donuts, Will Ferrell and Mel Gibson in Daddy’s Home 2, etc.). It makes a certain kind of sense, then, that the Pets Unstressing Passengers program (PUP), in which dogs don scarlet “Pet Me!” vests and hang out in airports comforting stressed-out passengers, was launched at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) in 2013.

When I arrived at the PUP offices last Saturday, the volunteer pets of the hour—two Labrador retrievers, Ryu and Echo, and a portly French bulldog named Pierre—were snoozing under a table. The table was laden with stacks of trading cards displaying photos of the 72 dogs associated with the program, as well as their “statistics” (“Best reward: Belly rubs!”, “Favorite treat: Chicken!”).

"Kids go nuts for the cards," PUP program director Heidi Huebner told me as she and her three human volunteers grasped their dogs’ leashes and set off toward LAX Terminal 5. Huebner’s program is the first to bring dogs into airports for the express purpose of calming down fliers whose nerves have been frayed by lost luggage, long layovers, missed connections, and, of course, the increasingly present fear of harm; the PUP program’s dogs were in particularly high demand following the 2013 shooting at LAX that killed a TSA officer and injured several others, Huebner recalled.

The dogs were on call as thousands of Angelenos flocked to LAX in January to protest the Trump administration’s travel ban, and they have comforted traumatized travelers in the wake of national tragedies: “People light up when they see the dogs, and their minds go to a different place,” said PUP volunteer Naomi Jost, bending to scratch her dog Echo’s ear.

The PUP program requires that all its dogs be registered with the Alliance of Therapy Dogs. The dogs come in all breeds and sizes, and their shifts—which mostly consist of being petted with varying degrees of tenderness—tend to last about two hours, just long enough to tire them out (as pictured below).

Police dogs are the animals most commonly associated with airports, but there’s a strict non-fraternization policy in place for K9 dogs and PUP volunteer pets. "The K9 dogs are at the airport to work, so we make sure to keep them separated,” said Huebner. (At this point, I had to restrain myself from muttering into my tape recorder, “Script idea: a 2017 Lady and the Tramp reboot where a drug dog and a therapy dog fall in love against all odds.”)

PUP dogs certainly generate more delight than their badge-wearing counterparts. Watching Pierre, Ryu and Echo waddle through the arrivals hall was something like witnessing the Beatles on their first US tour. Hyper kids and exhausted parents alike ceased bickering, yawning, and texting and ran to the dogs, wearing identical expressions of wonder.

AT one point, a young woman fell to her knees and began repeatedly cooing "I love you" directly into Ryu’s mouth.

“That was the best moment of my life, I’m gonna go now,” she called over her shoulder as she disentangled herself, beaming, from the dog’s embrace.

Although the PUP dogs are meant to “un-stress” fliers, the level of excitement they unleash in some children doesn’t exactly seem to alleviate stress for parents. Upon witnessing Pierre and Echo engage in the ancient canine ritual of booping snoots, Sebastian, a one-year-old Catalonian boy in a Mickey Mouse shirt, let out a primal scream that lasted a full minute.

Watch: A visit to the only record label in the world making music for dogs

“He loves dogs,” sighed Sebastian’s mother wearily, watching her small son vibrate with the kind of manic joy normally unleashed only by a family size bag of Pixy Stix (or a medium-to-high dose of Ritalin.)

As we made our way through the terminal, Pierre started nosing in the direction of a tall, bandana-clad man leaning against a pillar. The man immediately stooped to pat Pierre, revealing the unmistakable countenance of 80s TV icon Mr. T.

Pierre, visibly thrilled to be meeting Mr. T

“Even Mr. T like dogs,” laughed the former A-Team star as he hoisted Pierre into his arms, emitting the kind of high-pitched sounds people tend to make when they cradle bulldogs.

“Wow, they’re amazing,” Mr. T marveled as Ryu and Echo sidled up to him. “I’ve heard about this program, but this is my first time seeing y’all.” As Mr. T bid adieu to his new canine devotees, whispers began to circulate among PUP program volunteers and the assembled crowd about celebrities they’d previously seen at LAX; one person had spotted Jeff Goldblum in coach on a flight to Boston, and another had caught a glimpse of Kelly Ripa at an in-terminal Starbucks.

As their moment in the limelight began to fade, Echo, Pierre and Ryu let out a harmony of yawns and curled up on the carpet of the terminal floor, seemingly soothed by the ambient noise of celebrity gossip around them— they are LA dogs, after all.

Follow Emma Specter on Twitter.

On Friday, Scott Smith found himself stuck behind a car stopped at a green light in St. Louis, Missouri, a predicament made all the more infuriating because he was late for work. He honked at the car right as it began to creep forward, and—ostensibly just to piss Smith off—it stopped moving, according to the Riverfront Times. Smith then said he laid on the horn until the vehicle got out of the way, only to find out that the guy in front of him was an undercover cop.

Just like Larry David on a recent episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Smith got pulled over, finding himself face to face with an angry police officer.

"Seriously?" Smith asked as the cop approached him, which ramped things up to a ten pretty quickly.

"Seriously," the cop replied. "Is your horn stuck?"

"Is your break stuck?" Smith asked.

"Is your fucking horn stuck, smart ass?" the cop said, the first of many F-bombs to come.

The officer then asked for Smith for his driver's license, before telling him he was being stopped for some unknown "traffic violation."

"This is fucking ridiculous," Smith said.

"Well, you know what?" the cop barked. "Maybe you shouldn't be a fucking asshole."

About 40 minutes later, after two more cop cars arrived at the scene, the officer told Smith he'd receive a ticket in the mail, though Smith said he wasn't informed what for. He told the Riverfront Times he plans to file a complaint with the St. Louis Police Department about the incident. According to the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the department is already conducting an internal investigation.

"A traffic violation shouldn't end up with 40 minutes on the side of the road with you being an angry prick yelling at me through the window," Smith told the Riverfront Times. "If I violated some violation, just give me my ticket and send me on my way."

There are plenty of great ways to turn your life into an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm—calling bullshit on chat and cuts, crusading for bald rights, generally respecting wood—but sometimes channeling Larry David can be a dangerous game. As Smith learned Friday, some people really are above the beep.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

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If you're like me, you gave self-defense classes a try when you were a kid, but punching air and going "kiai!" for an hour every other day seemed pretty useless, so you never made it to yellow belt status. Other kids earned many different-colored belts—perhaps even the prized black one—and good for them. They learned a valuable life skill and will surely pull some cool Jackie Chan shit if they ever get attacked by a homicidal maniac. Their maniac will rue the day he messed with them, but my maniac will simply murder me, which is a bummer.

This is decidedly not how "reality-based" self-defense instructor Tim Larkin views fighting with people who are hellbent on hurting you. He markets his pared-down, easy-to-digest style online as "Target Focus Training"—with the "targets" in question being whatever spot on a person is most convenient for delivering a catastrophic injury. Consequently, Larkin's new book, When Violence Is the Answer: Learning How to Do What It Takes When Your Life Is at Stake, is an expansion of this strategy. It won't teach you balance, or breathing, or athleticism, or really anything you would expect Demetrious Johnson to bust out in the Octagon. Instead, the book is a manual of abrupt, gruesome violence.

If you're attacked and it's time to use real violence, Larkin recommends "any injury that eliminates his ability to function." The idea is summed up in this downright inspiring passage:

Is he stronger than you? Not with a crushed throat, he isn't. Is he faster than you? Not with a shattered knee. Is he far more dangerous than you, with scads of training, expertise, a gun, and an indomitable iron will? Not with a broken neck.

If you're thinking this all sounds a little bit, um, evil, then congratulations: You're a reasonable person. Fortunately, When Violence Is the Answer has a philosophical side. Larkin loves combat sports as much as the next guy, but as he makes abundantly clear, we're not talking about squaring off against opponents in honorable fights. Larkin makes an impassioned case throughout the book that everyday people sometimes get attacked by vicious people, and in these situations, shooting the motherfucker with a gun would be legally justified. Guns, to be clear, are a delivery system for life-altering, or even lethal injuries, and if you understand a few basic principles, your body—any body really—can deliver those injuries too.

So after reading the book, I talked to Larkin, so he could teach me a little more about how I can—if I have literally no other option—do some George R. R. Martin shit to another living human being.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

VICE: Let's be very general for a second. Broadly speaking, how do you deliver a gruesome injury to someone?
Tim Larkin: It's not that complicated. All you need is to understand basic anatomy. It's physics and physiology, meeting poorly. You're going to take a hard part of your body, and put it in a weak part of the other person's body that's not rated for that type of power. It's a very simple concept.

Was there some methodology you used to hone these principles?
We went to sports injury data. Every injury in sports is a result of humans colliding with humans, or humans colliding with the planet. Those are forces that you and I can replicate. And in that data, the same 70-plus areas keep showing up as being injured.

Can you give me some example of one single injury that tends to work when your students get attacked and need to use violence?
No. You don't know what the actual components are going to be, but you [need to] understand the principles. You're saying, "Hey, Tim, I want to learn multiplication, so tell me the equation that comes up all the time." And I tell you, "OK, it's 42 times 45," and you memorize it, and you feel really, really good. And when the shit hits the fan, and it hits you, it's 27 times 32, and you've never seen that before. [I've] had a lot of people who have been able to strike the side of the neck. The reason they're so often successful striking the side of the neck is that the side of the neck has a vein, an artery, and two nerves, so when you strike the side of the neck, you'll either get a vasovagal response—kind of like a dimmer switch—or you can cause a concussion. I could, if I didn't actively care, say, "Oh, try hitting the side of the neck." But I'd be disingenuous if I told you that.

How do you respond when someone says you're encouraging people to "fight dirty"?
I'm not against that term. The problem is, if I use terms like that, I lose the audience. They say, "I'm not a criminal. I'm not a bad person. Therefore, I won't look at that." When I talk about violence, I look at it as a tool. How you use it will determine whether it's a justified use of violence, or if it was criminal. I educate people to use it with justification.

Don't you worry that the "tool" you're providing can be misused?
The real sad truth that everyone doesn't realize is, the best people in the world at doing violence to each other and being successful—using their bare hands or improvised tools—have zero training in combat sports or martial arts. They all reside in the prison system, and they look at violence in a very utilitarian way. They can't afford to look at it in a fantasy [way]. They have to be results-oriented. What works? When you look at it from that approach, you look at it more as doing mechanical work.

When people take a self-defense class, I think a lot of the time, they want someone to teach them to be Bruce Lee, and you're definitely not doing that. Is that a problem in your classes?
I'll show people the human body, lying on the ground, and I'm showing them how to stomp on something, and people will be doing all these weird versions of a stomp. And I'll stop them and say "show me how you would stomp a coke can and make it go spraying everywhere." And then often they'll do it mechanically perfectly, because when they think it's quote-unquote "martial arts" they do all this weird stuff. When they think of it as mechanical work, they naturally go right to the right structure, and they naturally know how to deploy their body weight. This is natural movement.

A lot of passages from your book with no context sound like a manual for an absolute psychopath. I mean, you are, in a sense, telling people to gouge people's eyes out after all.
Here's how you get around that. Try [these three scenarios] out: [Number one] "A guy comes into the bar and pushes me, and tells me that's his seat, so I reach out, and I grab his hair, and I gouge his eye out." [Number two] "I'm pulling into Whole Foods. I'm waiting for a parking spot for two minutes. A guy comes in with a Mercedes and grabs my spot. I get out of the car, pull him out of his car, throw him up against the car, and gouge his eye out, your honor."

Yeah, I'm not onboard so far. These are very bad justifications.
Yeah, so [number three]: "He came in the door of my office and shot two people already. I saw him drop down for a reload. When he dropped down for the reload, I was able to tackle him and get him on the ground. Then the first thing I saw was his eye, and I gouged his eye out, which stopped him from going on." Nobody laughs at that.

That's one example. Are there rules for when you should and shouldn't do these things?
When you're devoid of choice. That's number one. Number two: In that particular scenario, if you possessed a firearm, you would feel justified emptying the firearm into that person. That's the kind of situation we're talking about. Immediately, all of the social, stupid stuff goes right out the window—the bar-fight type of stuff—because it doesn't meet that threshold. The other thing is, if you don't take action, you're basically going to participate in your own murder. At the point where you're facing grievous bodily harm, and you have a choice, as a default, the only thing that works is injury to the human body, because that's the only thing that bypasses "bigger, faster, and stronger."

It seems like kids really shouldn't know this stuff. Do kids take your classes?
I have a 22-year-old son, and a six-year-old [son]. And I have twin four-year-old daughters. My 22-year-old navigated high school and didn't get exposed to my kind of training—although he knew it existed—until he was 17 and a half when he went to his first course. Boys have enough of a hard time navigating their high school years without this type of information. They're not mature enough in my experience to understand that you can irreparably harm people if you have this information. They might try to test it out. My daughters? They'll get it at eleven.

When Violence Is The Answer: Learning How to Do What It Takes When Your Life Is at Stake will be available from Hachette on September 5. It is available for preorder now.

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Wolf Blitzer was still trying to suggest that Hillary Clinton could win Florida when I closed my laptop and lay down to try and catch a few hours sleep. It was the middle of the night in the north of England and the snow was beginning to fall. My girlfriend lay sleeping beside me. My stomach churned.

I’d been covering Trump all year, and always thought he could win. While that thought—located in my stomach—hadn’t exactly gone away, in the days immediately before the election I had allowed myself to listen to the data crunchers who were insisting that the victory would belong to Clinton. Trump would go back from whence he came, leaving me free to pursue other topics. America had a different idea.

At 7:30 AM I woke up and looked at my phone, the news alerts telling me what I already knew: Trump had been elected president. The snow had settled on the fields outside, giving them a silvery hue. “Nate Silver lawn,” my girlfriend cracked, taking a picture for Instagram.

I got up, wrote two articles about what had happened, then drove back to London to spend the next three days working ceaselessly on a documentary my colleagues and I thought we might not ever make, a documentary about President Donald Trump. I was afraid and worried for the future but—and I’m not proud of this—I was also excited. My long-held belief that Trump could win wasn’t crazy after all and now I had work to do. I had a purpose.

Back then I was already a veteran of three hour-long documentaries about Trump, was in the middle of a fourth, and had been writing articles on top of that. I’ve now worked on seven TV programs, all broadcast on the British station Channel 4. I’m sure I’m not alone in consuming an unhealthy amount of information about Trump, but I’ve also spent the last 18 months paying my rent and even treating myself to some of life’s good things (food, mainly) with money made off the back of him. How did it come to this?

I’d written about him once before the campaign, back in 2012 when I saw the Apprentice star rattle through some clichés in front of a few thousand would-be entrepreneurs in a cavernous corporate center in London’s docklands. It was an absurd but melancholy experience and while part of me was laughing at the suckers paying to listen to him, the rest of me was sad that this is what it had come to. That sadness felt like anger defeated.

I had no specialist knowledge of Trump, though. I was just a freelance journalist who needed a job and a subject. In January 2016, the production company ITN called me up and asked me if I wanted to work on a documentary about the incendiary businessman turned outrageous—possibly dangerous—Republican candidate. I said yes, partly because it sounded interesting, partly because I needed the work.

Trump had kept me working through Easter and all summer, so while I hadn’t been able to take time off, I did have all this Trump money with which to go places. So just before Election Day, we made the 300-mile trip north from London to the Lake District, famous for sheep, hills, mountains, Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud, and, of course, lakes. Halfway through our holiday, Trump won and back we went to London. I spent the next 70 hours in or around edit suites working on the new Trump documentary, and my girlfriend spent the rest of her hard-earned holiday time in the city we had desperately wanted to escape for a little bit.

When we went to Sicily a few months later, we ended up re-arranging things in order to spend time in Taormina, a hilltop town that was hosting the G7 summit. They’d built a special helipad just for the president. We met a man who had created an ice cream that looked like the Trump. We bought red caps and got “Donald” embroidered on them. Wearing one of these caps, I joined a group of street musicians and tried to sing Italian songs in a Trumpian accent. We took photos and I began to think about what kind of story I could turn it into. When I ended up not writing it, I felt like I was missing out.

Living so much in this world, I became desensitized to Trump. I dreamed about him. I began to impersonate him all the time. The people I worked with called me TJ, short for Trump Junior. I started doing his hand gestures—the one where he makes an "O" with his thumb and index finger and the one where he does a sign with his thumb and index finger—when I was just having normal conversations with people, as myself.

While these symptoms may have been particularly pathetic, I’m not alone when it comes to making a living orbiting the Donald. By the time he won the election, I’d already spent close to a year in the Trump ecosystem, a laborer in the Trump industry, that group of people—from comedians to politicians, journalists to cartoonists—whose work is linked to the real estate mogul turned reality TV star turned president. There have been quickie biographies, Halloween costumes, “survival guides,” podcasts upon podcasts, too many documentaries to count. SNL as we know it would not exist without Trump. Entire media careers now rest on being vehemently pro-Trump or resolutely anti-Trump. To get your mind around this industry, imagine the orange-skinned president as some yuge creature trampling wildly forward, and thousands upon thousands of smaller creatures attached to its every orifice, grooming it and biting it, sucking its blood and burrowing into its tangled whips of blondish fur.

Whether it likes it or not, the Trump industry fuels the Trump person. Biographer Gwenda Blair, author of The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire, told me that Trump “has a very shrewd eye for the market of the media itself, and what it needs and what it wants to hear. He has kept our eye on him. Like it or not, for better or worse, he certainly gets an A+ for that.”

The Trump industry is made up of a group of people who, even if they hate him, earn their livings and reputations interpreting Trump in one way or another. Those of us in this tribe may fairly ask ourselves: Has Donald Trump becoming president been bad for the world but good for my career?

“Trump has been good for me, period. That’s a straight-up answer,” said the comedian and truly excellent Trump impersonator John Di Domenico. For years, he was an actor whose bread and butter was doing corporate work impersonating characters like Austin Powers, Dr. Phil, and Jay Leno. In 2004, he added a new look and voice to his repertoire: business blowhard Donald Trump.

This time, Di Domenico was impersonating someone he’d met. The comedian had performed as Austin Powers at Trump’s 55th birthday in Atlantic City in 2001. The negotiating process had been typically Trumpy, with Di Domenico getting asked again and again if he really wasn’t prepared to do the gig “gratis” for “Mr Trump.” Di Domenico was told this negotiating tactic “came from the top,” but once a fee was agreed, the impersonator, in character as Austin Powers, met Trump in the green room at Trump Castle.

“I felt the presence of Trump before he arrived,” Di Domenico recalled. “I’d been told again and again not to shake his hand but when he came into the room, he saw me sitting on the sofa and I was a cartoon character in front of him. He came over, thrust his hand in my face and said, ‘I’m Donald Trump.’ Everybody leaned in and said, ‘Shake it, shake it, shake it!”

Things exploded for Di Domenico after Trump decided to run for president. At the peak of the 2016 campaign, he was earning up to $40,000 per month as Trump. He appears regularly on a slew of shows. Last year, he was in one of documentaries I worked on. I remember him telling Channel 4’s Matt Frei that Trump would win in a landslide. (When Election Day came, Di Domenico told me, he was in Canada and didn’t vote.)

“In the short term, Trump is very good for our profession... In the long term, he might be helping to kill the fourth estate.”
–Matt Frei

Trump has become more or less a full-time job. “He’s like an abusive dad, in a way. I’m forced to understand him,” said Di Domenico, who had a “shitty” relationship with his own father, a steelworker who shared a good deal of the president’s reactionary anger.

“A lot of times, I have to divorce myself from the political part of Trump,” Di Domenico said. “As an actor, it was part of my training that you have to like the character you’re playing, that you identify and empathize.” Like me, he dreams of Trump, though he dreams “about him as me in character as him. It’s like Inception.”

Right now, he’s working on a special he hopes will be sold to Amazon or Netflix. John has done four feature films as Trump and is about to start recording calls between him and Transparent’s Jill Soloway.

“I’d love to say it’s because of how talented I am,” Di Domenico said of reaching this new level in his career, “but it really comes down to the fact that I have talent but the conduit to getting to this place has been Trump. I wouldn’t have gotten there otherwise, so it is kind of a conflicted relationship. Sometimes I read posts on Facebook that say I’m just another loser making a living off Trump, and I think, ‘I’ve been doing this a long time, but you’re also kind of right.’”

At the Royal Television Society awards earlier this year, Matt Frei, who was the reporter or presenter on every single one of the documentaries I worked on, picked up the gong for Television Journalist of the Year. In his speech, Frei joked that really he owed it all to Donald Trump, that one of his defining subjects had reinvigorated news. When I got in touch with him for this article, Frei’s response was less full of the spirit of the awards ceremony: “In the short term, Trump is very good for our profession,” he wrote. “In the long term, he might be helping to kill the fourth estate.”

In the last four weeks, according to an internal press archive, 3,000 stories solely about Trump—not counting stories in which he is simply mentioned—have appeared in print in British newspapers. At the time of writing, there are 44 million Google News results for Donald Trump, the top one being that, on his trip to Japan, the president dumped a box of fish food into a pond of koi carp, rather than sprinkling it.

In this case, Trump actually seems to have been following the lead of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, but no matter. The media cannot help itself. It needs cheaply produced, clickable content, and Trump is always on hand to provide it. In the end, even the most forensic dismantling of his policy platform or the most eloquent exposition of his white supremacy can end up getting lost in the sheer weight of nonsense produced by us, the Trump industry workers.

Trump’s political opponents can’t help it either. Some polls have indicated that Democrats would to better if they focused on issues like healthcare and tax cuts for the rich, but the anti-Trump message is hard to resist.

“I would say the entire nation has spent a considerable amount of its time thinking about Donald Trump. I don’t think to that extent that I’m very different to everyone else,” biographer Gwenda Blair told me. Having worked on her major book on the Trumps in the 90s (it was published in 2000 and has since been updated), she says she feels a “kind of vindication” now that everyone realizes what she knew then, that Trump was a force who needed to be examined.

I like to think that I’m doing good work in the Trump industry. I imagine I’m enlightening the people with the sacred flame of journalism. That's my excuse, anyway. I’m not such an industrious member of the industry these days, truth be told. I don’t know if that’s because the offers of work have dried up or because I’ve got bored with Trump, decided that he can be a distraction from other issues, and remembered that I’ve got my own country to think about.

And yet, it’s the middle of the night as I write these words and I can’t help but think back to the middle of that night one year ago, when Wolf Blitzer was trying to come to terms with the unraveling of his certainties as my girlfriend slept beside me and the snow came down on the northern fields outside. There was magic in that night for me, but there was also great darkness, a darkness that had always been there, a darkness that had been growing and was now enveloping, returned to claim its terrible prize.

Follow Oscar Rickett on Twitter.

Six years after Occupy Wall Street got many of us talking, however briefly, about the yawning gap between rich and poor, economic inequality still propels American life. Donald Trump became president in part because he spoke to the large number of white Americans who felt economically and culturally adrift—and believed an out-of-touch elite was screwing them over. Of course, even though the president talked the talk on populism, he's currently pushing a tax reform bill that would make life easier for rich people. The inequality that brought out protesters to Zuccotti Park is not going away. The 1 percent is still very much in charge.

A new report released Wednesday by the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) is designed in part to make sure the country at large doesn't forget that. Using the latest Forbes 400 data on the richest Americans and Federal Reserve numbers on household wealth, authors Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie concluded that the three richest people in the country—Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett—have a higher net worth than the bottom half of the population put together. The 400 billionaires on the list, meanwhile, have more in assets than nearly two-thirds of the population combined. Race is a big part of the story here: While "only" about a fifth of all households are underwater (meaning they have more in debt than in assets), over a quarter of Hispanic ones and nearly a third of black ones are.

As shown by the Paradise Papers, the latest leaked documents revealing the web of schemes hiding money for the world's wealthiest people, rich households not only have more capital to play with, but more ways to shield it from taxation. A lot of inequality is invisible because it's impossible to know how much wealth is being masked by layers of lawyers, trusts, and LLCs.

For some perspective on how we arrived at this moment and what we can do about it, I called up Chuck Collins, co-author of the IPS report, for a chat.

VICE: Why did you use the Forbes 400 as a measuring stick for the super rich?
Chuck Collins: There is some value in the fact that it's been a benchmark since 1982. And they actually have a pretty good methodology—we've met them at different points and taken a look at their methodology, and obviously Bloomberg does theirs and there's a British equivalent of this list. But [Forbes] do the most to calibrate private business holdings—who owns what shares of stock. There's obviously people missing and people who've been able to maybe keep themselves off the list.

Why do you think we don't talk more directly and openly about economic inequality?
We have a fairly high tolerance for inequality as a society if we believe the rules of the economy are relatively fair. I think what did shift in the economic meltdown is people came away from that thinking the rules of the economy were rigged to benefit the people at the top, and it aligned with the period where social mobility declined. And then you had Occupy, [and] the Bernie Sanders phenomenon.

You suggest in the report that you're probably underestimating how unequal society is, if anything, and the Paradise Papers this week showed why: Rich people are really good at hiding their money. But the observable scale of inequality is already so massive. How much worse could it be?
There's a couple of things I've observed and one is the explosion in private wealth management and family offices, which are kind of the vehicle through which wealthy families do their planning. In London alone now, there are a thousand family offices for extremely high-net-worth families. [Economist] Gabriel Zucman has said 10 percent of the world's wealth is hidden. Most of that is very high-net-worth families, $45 million and up—he thinks that 30 percent of that wealth is hidden [belonging to] those individuals. That's based on looking at missing gaps between reported income or shareholder earnings and actual taxes paid, as well as some leaks where the window opens slightly, and we get a little glimpse. Based on that we can start to begin to extrapolate how much wealth is hidden or missing.

But to be honest none of us really know. I can conjecture, though, that as wealth is concentrated, more and more people are deploying planners and using a combination of trusts and the offshore system, and that the wealth defense industry has become more sophisticated in creating mechanisms to hide wealth. As you and I sit here and talk, somebody's sitting in an office in Des Moines or any major metropolitan area and setting up trusts that will put wealth outside of accountability and taxation and measurement for generations.

Is it most sensible to simply begin the debate on economic policy from the perspective of: We don't and can't know how unequal our society is? Or is that simplifying too much?
I think it's absolutely possible to require the disclosure of beneficial ownership of a lot of these entities—to say who really owns and controls it, to pass laws to require that. My own congressman, Stephen Lynch [of Massachusetts], is somebody who I've talked to about this over the years, and he's the one who introduced legislation requiring private aircraft to disclose who the owners are. I think the US and England together as global dominant trading partners could raise the bar by requiring transparency and disclosure and could eliminate some of these trust mechanisms. Half the family offices in the world are in the United States and the UK.

So the idea is to do more to compel or enforce reporting?
Absolutely. It's totally within our power.

When it comes to the Republican tax plan, we've heard arguments already that it would reward people hiding wealth and worsen inequality. What do you think of it?
On the individual wealth side, I think eliminating the estate tax, abolishing the alternative minimum tax, and some of these pass-through structures, depending on how abused they are, could obviously be very advantageous to that top 1 percent group. On the corporate side, I have to say I'm still trying to understand. For instance, if they say Look, Apple, you can repatriate your $250 billion you have parked offshore and you're just going to have to pay 12 percent—that may open a door to a next level of transparency. They may want to bring back some of these assets if you give them enough of an advantageous tax break. We actually might have more disclosure.

I don't know yet if that's going to be a bigger loophole or if it might get some of these companies to stop playing quite the [same] level of games. You shouldn't reward bad behaviour, and these corporations have essentially dodged their responsibility to pay their fair share. We know from 2004, when we had an amnesty or a reduction, it didn't get invested in a way that was productive. So I don't think we should reward bad behavior or give away the store, but I don't think [Apple CEO] Tim Cook really likes the idea that he has to play these games. It's just the environment they're in. If you create a different set of rules, they might actually share more data.

It seems like countries with more progressive tax schemes are often deeply wrapped up in Paradise Papers-style leaks. Does higher taxation actually encourage wealth concealment?
The Scandinavian countries are interesting because there's not quite the same level of aggressive planning and tax avoidance [despite high taxes]. But I think that industry is global. There are people who are choosing not to play the global wealth-hiding game and there are people who are choosing to come out of the shadows. But it's basically a global phenomenon. I don't think you can really do meaningful tax reform without closing the most egregious loopholes.

Israel did a little bit of that and actually went to their wealth advisors and said, We're going to hire you to help us close down some of these most egregious loopholes and if you don't we're going to put you out of business. I think we let the wealth defense industry off the hook, and when we start to criminalize some of the behaviour and some of these trusts and mechanisms that are created entirely for the purpose of tax-dodging, we will start to get at one of the underlying drivers [of inequality]. Those wealth managers, they are like the agents of inequality. They're the people who get up every day and say, How can I hide wealth? We need to focus on them as a professional sector and hold them accountable.

Which reform you recommend in your report would do the most good on its own to reduce inequality—a wealth tax, a financial transaction tax, higher income tax, what?
I would focus on a wealth tax on very high net worth—start at $50 million and maybe make it graduated. I would dedicate the revenue to something that had a constituency to defend it. Let's create a debt-free college education fund, kind of like after World War II, a GI Bill for the next generation, and pay for it with a progressive tax on wealth. Not only do you reduce the concentration at the top but you do something in a way that expands opportunity.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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This article originally appeared on Noisey Italy.

The Arctic Monkeys will release their new album in 2018—or so it seems, according to Nick O'Malley, the band's bassist since 2006. And the Arctic Monkeys haven't recorded anything new since 2013 aside from collaborations and side projects. So, after all these years, there are still those like me (someone who has well surpassed that phase of adolescent mono-obsession with British pop), who are officially counting down the days until they can hear that celestial Sheffield accent once again. There are also those like me who've developed a morbid attachment to the band, and who know very well that the charisma of the Arctic Monkeys is due largely in part to the changeable and irresistible charm of its frontman, Alex Turner.

Sure, Matt Helders' drumming is notable, and you can't attribute beauty of the band's discography to Turner's efforts alone—surely it isn't that simple. But anyone who's experienced Arctic Monkeys mania, even if only for a brief period, knows what I'm talking about: Namely that deep, all-consuming infatuation that people feel towards Alex Turner once they enter in the tunnel of his veneration. This veneration is conveniently referred to as "artistic," but in reality it relies on the fact that Alex Turner is a total babe. To give a sense of the alarming dimension of this musical infatuation, I'll admit that I once waited over four hours, at night and in the bitter cold, outside of a venue in Barcelona—where I had travelled only and exclusively in order to see the Arctic Monkeys play, and where I spent an entire concert waving a poster that said "ALEX, YOU CAN CALL ME ANYTHING YOU WANT!" (for additional proof, please see this video). My wait was supposed to culminate in an eternal union between Turner and myself, but instead concluded with the silent and painful passage of an SUV with tinted windows, and to this day I'm not even sure he was inside of it. Who hasn't done something similar for their adolescent idols?

Pathetic anecdotes aside, at the dawn of what might be a new era of the Arctic Monkeys, I've decided to trace a brief but substantial historiography of the band that corresponds with a fundamental element of their artistic and spiritual growth: Alex Turner's hair, and all of the various phases that are derived from it. I'm absolutely aware that this tribute to their career might seem superficial and frivolous—it's exactly that, actually. But that's the nature of being a fan: They render everything they touch superficial and frivolous. So let's begin with the first historical account of Alex Turner's hair.

2005-2006: Whatever People Say I Am That's What I'm Not, AKA the "don't believe the hype" phase

The Arctic Monkeys have barely exploded, like Turner's hormones, which combines pimples with a Gallagher-esque haircut. In this phase, the little punk from Sheffield—who'd barely removed his high school uniform to don that of an indie musician making his grand debut on MySpace—is unaware of his potential charm, still hidden in the depths of his eyes, which makes him all the more charming in the purest sense of the word. In this way, like the popped collar of his polo and the classic Reeboks from "A Certain Romance," Turner's look and the looks of his bandmates coincide perfectly with the music from their first album: Dirty, bold, inappropriate, and uncertain, like only a 19-year-old knows how to be.

2007-2008: Favourite Worst Nightmare and the partnership with Miles Kane

The band's second album quickly confirms and redoubles the their success, with a thorough and inevitable clean-up job that is artistic and physical. Not yet entirely abandoning the late-teenager with acne look, Turner takes a specific direction thanks to the stylistic support of his side project colleague, Miles Kane. His haircut becomes more sophisticated, an obvious reference to a 1960s aesthetic, channeling his musical selection from the Last Shadow Puppets album and the borderline excessive use of black turtlenecks and a bob haircut, as seen in With The Beatles.

2009-2010: Humbug and the existential crisis

The Arctic Monkey's third record takes a different direction, marking a departure from the first two. Humbug is an under-appreciated album, but I consider it the band's best. Its atmosphere is so different from that of the band's earlier records—it's much darker and devoid of all that bubbly juvenile arrogance. Turner definitively says goodbye to what remained of his youth and also to his barber, sporting a center part and adorably outdated sweaters, reaching in what my opinion is the apex of his career and therefore his beauty. Gone are the aesthetic references to The Beatles and Oasis, and we say hello to long, unkempt hair and very serious songs.

2011: Suck it and See or when Alex Turner discovered the Americas

Suck It and See says goodbye to the melancholy of Humbug and to Alexa Chung, making room for the new and improved Alex Turner who rides a motorcycle and wears exclusively leather jackets. To accompany this biker spirit, he rocks a perennial slicked-back forelock and a deep, crooning voice, which sets the stage for the band's Amerophile phase, which was heavily supported by Josh Homme. There's no room for pimples or Paul McCartney-inspired bobs: Only aggressive guitars, American accents, and rock 'n' roll that's lightly tempered by forays into Turner's former style and the good old days of Submarine. It's unclear whether the music has been affected by Turner's hair or vice versa, but it's clear that something in him has changed, and his newfound occasional use of a comb is proof.

2013: AM and the definitive goodbye to the Old Continent

AM is the album of adulthood in which Alex Turner takes revenge on anyone who took him for a skinny nerd as a child, transforming himself into a hit-and-run bad boy who only drinks whiskey. His forelock now has a life of its own and he alternates his collection of studded leather jackets with white suits à la Elvis Presley. In the later phase of this era, Turner even manages to rock a pair of loafers, anticipating what might be the next incarnation of his persona and the band as a whole. What will be the destiny of this charming and chameleonic artist? Will the next Arctic Monkeys record feature Paul Anka or will Turner change direction again, discovering new and unexpected stylistic horizons?

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When you go to McDonald's, there's a solid chance you're ordering a Big Mac, a cheeseburger, chicken McNuggets, and/or fries. But true Micky D's connoisseurs are likely to pick something off the menu's deep cuts: Filet-O-Fish.

While there are many Filet-O-Fish devotees, others think the sandwich is a bit, well, fishy. And although VICELAND's Desus and Mero agree on a lot of things, this McDonald's meal is not one of them.

After battling it out on Tuesday's episode of Desus & Mero, the crew ordered the hosts two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches to have an official taste test.

You can watch all of this week's episodes of Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.

A class action lawsuit that alleges widespread sexual misconduct targeting WestJet flight attendants has another day in court, this time amid a global conversation about sexual assault.

Today a judge will look at the company’s request to strike down all or part of the case.

Former flight attendant Mandalena Lewis is suing WestJet for violating its own anti-harassment policies. Court filings allege she was sexually assaulted by a pilot in 2010 during a stopover in Hawaii. The pilot allegedly dragged Lewis to his hotel bed and groped her, but she pushed him off and got away. (Lewis’s allegations haven’t been tested in court.)

“I was not raped, but it was attempted, and it was an awful experience,” she told VICE. “It’s something nobody should ever have to go through.”

After the assault, Lewis says she filed reports with WestJet and Hawaii police, but the pilot was not disciplined or fired. “I was called in for a couple meetings. They were saying we can’t do anything about the pilot—it’s your word against his.” Lewis says she was asked to sign a document promising not to tell anyone about the assault.

Though Hawaii police opened an investigation, Lewis alleges WestJet took the pilot off Hawaii routes and did not cooperate with prosecutors there. She told VICE she later learned another flight attendant was allegedly assaulted by the same pilot in 2008, but was similarly instructed to keep quiet.

Lewis says the assault and the company’s handling of it demonstrate a company-wide culture that protects harassers and punishes women. She alleges this culture is enabled by the power imbalance between mostly male pilots and mostly female attendants.

Today WestJet will argue that the courts aren’t the right way for employees like Lewis to address sexual harassment. Court documents filed by the company say women like Lewis who have been assaulted or harassed are covered under human rights and workers' compensation law, and should take their cases to the appropriate tribunals. The company argues the class action claim is an abuse of process.

In a statement to Metro last week, Westjet said it could not comment on legal proceedings but said they were committed to "a harassment-free workplace."

Lewis alleges there are many more ways women flight attendants are degraded and sexualized on the job that go beyond individual cases. Court documents say attendants are commonly subject to gross jokes, inappropriate touching, and even blatant demands for sexual favours. The fact that there’s a term for attempts to enter flight attendants’ hotel rooms—the court filings call it “midnight knocking”—gives a sense of the industry.

WestJet’s day in court follows weeks of #metoo disclosures that have been shining a light on the pervasiveness of assault in other industries. Lewis says the hashtag is well timed for victims of harassment to come together. “The fact that women are breaking that silence is a really big deal because there’s an opportunity for us to find each other,” she said. “The courage is contagious.”

If the WestJet case moves forward and is successful, Lewis says there are potentially far-reaching implications for other service workers.

“Our claim has never been done before for any private industry,” she said. “If we certify and we win, we would set a precedent across the Canadian work sector, that means employers are going to be accountable and transparent about how they address harassment.”

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When he's not kite surfing with Richard Branson or hanging out on a yacht with Oprah and Bruce Springsteen, Barack Obama has been spending his post-presidency like a pretty normal dude. Sometimes he goes to plays. Occasionally, he'll eat a boxed sandwich.

On Wednesday, the former leader of the free world was even forced to comply with the grim business of showing up to jury duty. Still, the guy somehow made the world's most dreaded civic duty seem like a total blast.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Obama followed every step that all 168 jurors who reported to Chicago's Daley Center on Wednesday had to take. He watched a 20-minute instructional video on the process, donned a red "juror" sticker, and earned $17.20 for his time. The one difference was that a pack of reporters tailed him from the moment he left his house in Chicago's South Side.

The jurors who ran into Obama at Chicago's Daley Center pretty much lost their minds, as did a horde of folks on the internet, jealous they weren't able to have him sign their copy of The Audacity of Hope or whatever. A year to the day after President Trump was elected, people seemed thrilled at having Obama flash back into their everyday lives, even if only for a moment.

"He’s gorgeous!" court clerk Sonal Joshi told the Chicago Tribune, before running back to her desk.

"I am surprised that he's actually coming," another Daley Center worker, Sharon Mindock, told ABC 7. "I thought if anything he should have some political pull to get out."

Unfortunately for whoever made it to the next round on Wednesday, Obama won't be joining them on the panel. According to the Tribune, he was never tapped to serve, and was sent home for the day around noon.

After about two hours at the courthouse, Obama got the hell out of there—but not before thanking the folks who made the wise decision not to ditch work that day for their service, a "core part of the justice system."

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In this new column, I put my hopes in something from the spiritual, wellness or magical worlds to see it if will cure my mind, body and/or spirit. Because everyone wants a quick fix, and the only thing holding them back is the mission of finding the right one. Probably.

What is it? Aura photography.

Where did it come from? Having your "aura photo" taken has been a popular activity at psychic fairs and spiritual gatherings for the last 30 years. Your aura is an energy, invisible to the average eye, radiating from every person. The concept shows up in religions, like Buddhism, as well as new-age philosophies. You can trace the pseudoscience of the photography back to Russian scientist Semyon Kirlian, who, in 1939, accidentally discovered that an object on a photographic plate connected to a voltage produced an image of the object surrounded by a strange glowing contour. In the new-age 1980s, Dr Guy Coggins brought aura cameras to the wealthy few, introducing his "AuraCam3000" to the market.

Who's into it now? Fast-forward to our modern obsession with spirituality, coupled with a universal love of selfies, and aura photographs are in once again. Find them on Instagram accounts, sandwiched between West Coast desert shots, gazelle skulls against white bedroom walls and two-line poems about delicate bodies and quiet revolutions. They’ve been featured in Goop (yes), Diane Von Furstenberg is apparently a fan and one of my favourite artists, Miranda July, has had her aura photo done. There are a few major cities where you'll find someone providing this service – New York, LA, Mumbai – and some Insta-famous pop-ups that travel around the globe, announcing their arrival via the app.

What happened when I had it done? After eight months of spreading myself thin enough to feel like human jam, my internal energy was running out. Underneath, my mental health had been playing a new trick and I was angry – at everything happening in the world, abuses of power being played out around me, at mugs of tea going cold. On a trip to New York near the tail end of that, my friends took us to an aura photographer.

There, I put my left hand on a box covered in metallic lumps – "biofeedback" sensors – which would pick up the electrical current on the skin at each specific acupuncture point. The idea is that the energy at each point in our hands corresponds to the energy at different bits of our bodies. Through a hooked-up computer, a double exposure image is made: your field of energy made visible over you. I stared at an ancient camera on a tripod and tried not to blink for about two minutes so I wouldn’t look drunk.

The photos look beautiful; just visible, you’re surrounded by a halo of vibrant rainbow colours – deep blues, rich magenta, acidic yellows. The colours on your right represent your past, the present is above the body, and to your left is the future. Mine was red, magenta and orange, and a whole lot of black nothingness in my future.

The Chinese woman who took my photograph said "hmm" in a way that didn’t sound good. I was far too furious and anxious, she said, and if I don’t calm down soon I will come into problems. I am a creative sort, thinking too much about romance (again, this was true: sex and love in equal parts) and desperately keen to see a big project that I’d been working on for ages come to fruition (also on the nose). All too much "in my head" and not feeling 100 percent. Meditation was the recommendation. My friends' photos came with light palettes and positive feedback. I didn’t ask what the black future meant.

The night of writing this column, I sent aura photography expert Stephany Hurkos my image for a second analysis. Some of the comments were:

"You are holding in anger."
"Trying to bring love around you but it’s not real."
"At the time you took this photo you had low energy and were fighting off a cold."
"Who stole from you?"

There’s not a lot to argue with there, either, and now I have a bleak reading of my dating life to boot. Not sure what it is I've lost, though. I replied, "stole??" and she said it was a long time ago. My innocence? My youthful complexion? Could be anything.

WATCH: 10 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask... a Tantric Sex Guru

Do I trust this? A month after my photo was taken, I went to a haunted-looking building full of legal offices and abandoned filing cabinets to put my aura under scrutiny for a second time. I was convinced that aura photography was legit – despite there being absolutely no science to prove it – but I wanted to see what would happen a second time around. The room was musty and filled with Jesus leaflets, books about healing with horses and faded inspirational posters.

My halo this time was similar, but red, orange, yellow and far bigger. This time the comments were more positive. I am in a very creative and intellectually stimulating time of my life! Activity generating energy is coming into my field! I’m a charismatic character, friendship comes easily! I’m ambitious, curious and fearlessly want to experience all that life has to offer! "So much mind," the man said, his eyes wide.

But isn’t the red and orange all anxiety and bad stuff, too, I asked. He found this hilarious, nearly falling off his chair, and said, "Yes, of course," like I was a child asking if mummy and daddy loved me. "With more mind energy, stronger chakras, more stress and anxiety. Anger, too." His suggestion: more fucking meditation.

On the way out I saw that, watermarked all over the aura papers, was the message: In accordance with UK law: "All goods and services are for entertainment only and are not experimentally proven." But the packaging all vibrators come in say "Sold as a novelty only", so I don’t know how much I care for the scientific authenticity of products that interest me.

§

I couldn’t argue with anything these photographs said about me. I couldn’t have got a better reading of my personality, feelings and intentions if I’d had my therapist over one shoulder and my GP over the other.

For me, the merit was in being seen; the pigment of my "feelings" tangible confirmation of their reality. More than just an abstract anxious thought pattern being discussed in all its boring predictability, there was a comfort in each bright splodge of my life being spewed back at me. Mostly, I liked that between the two photos you could see that my energy had expanded and changed. As both photographers reassured me, your aura will not always be one way. There is always movement in your energy, and movement means change.

This is literally what a trained psychologist tells me on a weekly basis when I’m unwell, for a lot of money, and it has taken two cute pictures of myself to finally absorb the message. Trust me when I say I’ve thrown £30 away on worse than a great Instagram post.

@hannahrosewens

The first time I saw Kara Walker's art, I felt like I had been assaulted. It was 2008, and I was a sophomore taking a visual theory course at Georgetown University. At the time, our class was focused on artists who were challenging notions of race and gender, and I was the only black student among more than 20 white kids. My professor, a white liberal woman, handed out a case study focused on Walker, which featured a photograph of her 2000 installation, Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On).

The cyclorama featured cut-paper silhouettes of enslaved Africans and their white masters amid light projections of rural wilderness. The scenes were disturbing: a slave child wielding a machete; a black woman holding a staff topped with a severed head; shadowy figures running at breakneck speed to escape the horrors around them. But what disturbed me the most was an image of a black woman having sex with her white master while a black child pulled at the man's shoe.

At that point, I'd never even heard of Walker. I didn't know that she had won a MacArthur "Genius Grant" at the age of 27, or that her incendiary art about this country's racial history would belong to the vaunted permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Guggenheim Museum. All I knew was what her image made me feel, and in that moment, it was shame. So much so, I broke out in tears. But my embarrassment only multiplied when the class started to discuss it. One white student thought the black woman being ravaged looked like she was actually enjoying it. "Look at her face," he said of the silhouetted woman. Heated with angst, I felt like I needed to stand up and defend that woman from the prying eyes of white folks. "People did things to survive," I said to the whole class, before storming out.

I realize today that the shame I felt sprang from my acceptance of respectability politics. At that point, I still believed that if black people represented themselves in polite, distinguished ways, white folks might actually see our humanity. I had hope that the institutional racism that allows for police officers to go free after killing us unarmed might somehow correct itself if artists like Walker just painted pictures of black people singing "Kumbaya." That was what I had always been taught. It was the message I got every Black History Month when we held up 28 or 29 black leaders and said they were proof that black people had overcome, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The debasement and indignity exhibited in Walker's Insurrection! flew in the face of those notions. It wasn't what I wanted to see.

Brand X (Slave Market Painting). 2017. Oil stick on canvas. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Brand X (Slave Market Painting) (detail). 2017. Oil stick on canvas. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Of course, I was not alone in my shame. The 47-year-old artist has long been dogged by criticisms, both from black artists and the general public, for the ways in which she depicts black suffering. The arguments against Walker's art have been led by Betye Saar, the criminally underrated assemblage artist whose socially conscious work appropriates and subverts racist tropes like the mammy or the pickaninny in an attempt to empower black people.

"The work of Kara Walker [is] sort of revolting and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves, particularly women and children," Saar said during a 1999 PBS special called I'll Make Me a World. To Saar, Walker's art "was basically for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment."

Even today, despite the fact that Walker can draw large crowds and praise from white critics like Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz, she still faces ire from black artists and the black community. In 2012, Walker's art was briefly covered with cloth and censored at the Newark Public Library. The 6-by-9 1/2-foot graphite and pastel on paper drawing—titled The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos—shocked some of the library's black employees.

The scene showed a tiny version of former President Barack Obama standing at a lectern giving his famed "A More Perfect Union" speech while brutal depictions of Reconstruction-era physical and sexual violence swirl around him. According to the artist, the work "conjures horrors of reconstruction and 20th-century Jim Crow-ism and the Tea Party." Newark library associate Sandra West, however, told the Star-Ledger , "It can go back where it came from." West went on to call the work "disgusting" and asked instead to "see something uplifting and not demeaning." The 2010 work returned to view after the head librarian, Wilma Grey, led the staff in a conversation about Walker's art.

Christ's Entry into Journalism (detail). 2017. Sumi ink and collage on paper. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Christ's Entry into Journalism. 2017. Sumi ink and collage on paper. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

While Walker declined to talk to me about her latest exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., her scorching artist statement doubled down on the contention that her work inspires. Sidestepping respectability politics entirely, Walker rejected the notion that she should "'[be] a role model'" or "a featured member" of her race and gender. In light of her new offerings, Walker predicted that "Students of Color [would] eye her work suspiciously and exercise their free right to Culturally Annihilate [her] on social media."

Of course, some of them did. Hyperallergic's Lyric Prince, for example, wrote that the work was "at best, salacious," and commanded that Walker, who claimed she was "tired of standing up, being counted, tired of 'having a voice,'" go somewhere else and "sit down." But while standing up to be a savior isn't something Walker's willing to do, sitting down isn't, either. In the wake of her artist statement, it was easy to imagine Walker giving up her traumatic, triggering tableaux for something more banal, like naturalistic landscapes. The truth is, as Tariro Mzezewa noted in her review for the New York Times, "Kara Walker Is Tired of Talking. But Her Canvases Scream."

All the agony, energy, and violence of the streets of Charlottesville, Dallas, and Ferguson filled the gallery when I perused the selection of works in early October. Black-and-white figures and silhouettes of paper and linen, drawn and collaged, were there slanting their eyes, smirking, and contorting their faces with expressions of passion and pain. For those who didn't "get" the message, Walker hand-wrote it out in one painting: "You Must Hate Black People As Much As You Hate Yourself."

Dredging the Quagmire (Bottomless Pit). 2017. Oil stick and Sumi ink on paper collaged on linen. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

The bluntness of that statement brought me back to something the artist told me in 2014, at the site of the former Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, during an interview I was conducting for Complex. As we both gazed upon her 35-foot-tall sugar sculpture that crossed a sphinx with a black mammy—and attracted more than 10,000 viewers per day—she said, "I don't make subtle work."

Instead, her art incites. Of the scores of contemporary artists who take on race as a subject matter, the California-born Walker is most successful when it comes to pulling at the foundations of this very nation, asking us through a blend of fact and fantasy to consider the full force of its consistent and constant brutalizations and humiliations. She accounts for what it must have meant to be a slave and a slave owner—and, more important, what it means for us to be their descendants.

Walker grew up in Atlanta. Her father, Larry Walker, was a prolific artist in his own right, one who gained regional acclaim for his drawings and mixed-media paintings that explored sociopolitical themes in the spirit of artists like Betye Saar. His Wall Series , for example, contrasts black bodies against physical barriers in ways that attempt to call out injustices and empower the oppressed.

For decades, Larry worked as the chair of the art history department at Georgia State. It was here that a teenage Kara Walker first came in contact with Betye Saar, her greatest detractor. As Larry told me last year during an interview for the New York Times, "We had an exhibition of Saar's work. At that time, Kara was 14 and she came to the exhibit and had a chance to talk to Betye. Saar was very outgoing and spontaneous in her encouragement of [Kara], continuing her work and doing what she was doing as an art person." He said, "I wondered years later whether Betye Saar remembered or knew she had that kind of contact [with Kara] early on."

Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. Cut paper on wall. 1994. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2017 Kara Walker

Walker went on to pursue art fiercely. In 1994, freshly graduated from Rhode Island School of Design's MFA program, she made waves over her inclusion in a group exhibition entitled, Selections 1994 at the Drawing Center in New York. In the show, Walker displayed Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, a scene of black paper-cutouts of figures showing a violent master-slave romance gone awry. There's a woman being beaten to death, a white master's penis looking as though it's about to explode, a black child playing with a corpse... Unrelenting carnage glued onto the gallery's chalky walls.

This early exhibition was like nothing anyone in the art world had seen before. It represented a radical, individualistic shift away from the collective concerns of Larry Walker and Betye Saar's generation.

Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On). 2000. Cut paper and projection on wall. Installation view: Moving Pictures, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2002. Photo by Ellen Labenski

Take for comparison Saar's most iconic artwork, the 1972 The Liberation of Aunt Jemima. It features a figurine of the old racist symbol armed with a grenade and a shotgun. The goal of the work is to transform the stereotypical depiction of a mammy into one of black power. Walker's Gone, on the other hand, depicts racism as an ongoing horror of mutual debasement. Where Saar saw the need to present distinct images of freedom to empower black people, Walker wallowed in pain to unearth ugly truths that we need to reckon with.

For Walker, Gone was a breakthrough. It was the first work in her oeuvre that established her use of the silhouette, a thing she told New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz "kind of saved" her. Large-scale silhouettes allowed Walker to map imposing, lifelike figures into scenes of brutality that draw audiences inside of the trauma.

Utilizing the silhouette, Walker quickly became famous for works like 1997's Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or "Life at 'Ol' Virginny's Hole' (sketches from Plantation Life)" See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause. In that work she recast the violence of chattel slavery as room-sized, cartoon-like black paper tableaux. The piece shows enslaved blacks seeking revenge against their white masters, while also having sex with one another and being raped by their masters. This work has been described in sensational terms, with some critics bringing up Walker's own upbringing and marriage to a white man as a way to attack the art. "What is troubling and complicates the matter is that Walker's words in published interviews mock African Americans and Africans," said artist Howardena Pindell at the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale. "Walker consciously or unconsciously seems to be catering to the bestial fantasies about blacks created by white supremacy and racism."

The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos. 2010. Graphite and pastel on paper. © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

In the summer of 1997, Saar launched a fierce letter writing campaign against Walker. She sent more than 200 letters to prominent black artists, politicians, and writers, advocating against her art. "I am writing you, seeking your help to spread awareness about the negative images produced by the young African-American artist, Kara Walker," she wrote. "Are African-Americans being betrayed under the guise of art?" Saar asked, before calling Walker's art "revolting."

"It was an extremely personal attack on my work and my family," Walker told me last year, reflecting on Saar's outrageous efforts. Walker, who still has a "faded fax" of Saar's letter against her, believes, "it exceeded art criticism and sort of became that I was a bad child or student of the previous generation."

Installation view: Kara Walker, Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to present The most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season! Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, September 7–October 14, 2017. Photo by Jason Wyche. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Black female artist Shinique Smith, known for colourful installations and abstract mixed-media paintings that incorporate textiles, articulated to me the central question at the heart of criticisms like Saar's: "Who owns black pain?"

Walker's work grapples with the terror of American life, past and present. Calls to silence her representations box-in what it means to be black and reduce what it means to make art. In this spirit, Harvard professor and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. has come to Walker's defense. "Only the visually illiterate could mistake [Walker's work's] post-modern critiques for realistic portrayals," he said in the International Review of African American Art in 1997. "That is the difference between the racist original and the post-modern, signifying, anti-racist parody that characterizes this genre of artistic expression."

However, I was not so "visually illiterate" when I first saw Walker's art—I was just scared. Afraid of what her work exposed about myself and my people. Its vulnerable and revelatory nature struck me in a way few works ever have. And so I ran away from it, in the very same way as so many of her detractors.

I was reminded of that initial, awful feeling while I walked through the solo painting show, SIKKEMA JENKINS AND CO. IS COMPELLED TO PRESENT THE MOST ASTOUNDING AND IMPORTANT PAINTING SHOW OF THE FALL ART SHOW VIEWING SEASON! The most jarring work for me was called The Private Memorial Garden of Grandison Harris. It depicts a disturbing scene wherein, beneath a dark sky, a grave digger unearths a black woman's corpse from a hole amidst a barren, brown landscape. A little black girl appears frozen, eyes wide without expression, playing with a toy bull beside the grave. Overseeing the scene is the white silhouette of a shoeless master holding a rifle.

The (Private) Memorial Garden of Grandison Harris. 2017. Oil stick and Sumi ink on paper collaged on linen. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

The (Private) Memorial Garden of Grandison Harris (detail). 2017. Oil stick and sumi ink on paper collaged on linen. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

The Grandison Harris of the painting's namesake is not some figment of Walker's imagination. He was a real man with children, who was enslaved and taught how to read and write by his masters. His primary task as human chattel was to exhume cadavers that were used for training white Georgia Medical College students. When Harris was freed after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he continued doing his grotesque work. While we may never know exactly why, we can speculate that it has to do with the actual limitations of freedom after chattel slavery and the devil's bargains that some people make in order to carry on.

For me, the Harris piece characterizes how I finally came to terms with Walker's art. I had to accept that black people, then as well as now, live complicated lives. We enjoy many freedoms today while enduring the same horrors that defined Harris's time. And there is a need to show the full range of our humanity. That is what compelled the curators of the visual galleries at The National Museum of African American History and Culture, affectionately known as a "the Blacksonian," to hang Betye Saar's 1973 mixed-media work, Let Me Entertain You, above Walker's landscape, No World. What the museum communicates with this arrangement is that there is no one way to express blackness.

On Instagram, after Walker visited the museum in July, she posted a picture of her daughter smiling in front of the two works. The caption read: “In dialogue and not at war. Betye Saar work sitting over my print No World with my kiddo posed in front at the National Museum.”

It's been more than two decades since Betye Saar sent out numerous letters protesting Walker's art. Wondering if Saar's view of shared Walker notion of "dialogue and not at war," I reached out to the artist via her gallery, Roberts and Tilton.

"There are lots of works by Kara Walker that [Saar] does admire," a gallery representative wrote to me via email, "But she feels that her basic concept is still the same."

Three years ago, in the shadow of Walker's colossal sugar sphinx, after I finished our first interview, I turned off my tape recorder and told her about the first time I encountered her work—that awful classroom scene. I expressed to Walker the horror I felt at seeing her images, especially in that stifling, white environment.

She said, "I'm sorry." And then looked up at her sculpture, not yet seen by the public and asked me, "The work is difficult because the history is hard. But don't you want to see it?"

I do.

Follow Antwaun Sargent on Twitter.