Culture, like anything on this planet, is contested. If you present something to the world—even something you find meaningful or beautiful—there is always the possibility that someone out there will challenge it, take it, curse its name, or flat out ignore it.

For so much of history there was only one kind of person doing all this choosing, challenging, taking, and ignoring. That cultural tides have shifted enough so that the powerful are finally thinking twice before mocking or rebranding the things they have no right to—at the very least to avoid Twitter roasting—is novel on many levels.

Here’s where Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas proves the conversation on cultural appropriation is far from settled. He’s reimagined his ancestors’ art both as large-scale mural and as serialized pages of Japanese manga-style comic book. It’s a project both thematically and stylistically about war.

“The undeclared war against Indigenous people in North America is marked by an almost unbelievable ‘taking’—an assault on every element of personal social intellectual and material identity,” he told VICE. “It is hard to identify a single characteristic of Indigeneity that has not been persistently and systematically assaulted over the last hundreds of years. The aggression is a marked and repeating feature of successful efforts to weaken the Constitution of Canada by legislating violence and theft.”

Yahgulanaas questions the borrowing in his own work, wondering if it is indeed a form of artistic “salvage” or “reconstruction” after centuries of destruction. “How is mimicry different than any other of the ongoing and historical ‘taking’s? How does cultural mimicry materially or morally contribute to the much attacked source of their artistic inspiration? Is it possible that they are just doing more of the same?”

At the very least there isn’t a stark systemic power imbalance that separates the two styles Yahgulanaas works in. It’s also not the first time he’s explored the same hybrid medium. He says both War of the Blink and his popular 2009 graphic novel RED: A Haida Manga play with the idea of separation, isolation and desire to connect with something “perceived as great, powerful and dominant.”

“I experience this when visiting the Notre Dame cathedral in Montreal. No doubt we have all stopped with mouths open and looked at huge edifices and symbols of authority,” he said. “Parliament buildings and corporate offices and castles and temples are much invested in the grand edifices. The great scale is intended to create a sense of insignificance in the observer. The observer then becomes a carefully crafted place encouraging passivity and subjection to a narrative designed to separate and isolate that which is made desirable and apparently powerful.”

To mark its release this month, VICE has excerpted panels from War of the Blink which give a sense of the scale and relationship to power Yahgulanaas describes. If assembled just right, the panels tell the same story as an intimidating, nonlinear, six-foot-tall whole.

“The mural approach that I am exploring replicates the monumental but is also married to the intimate and accessible book. Unlike the monumental a book is held in one’s hands,” he told VICE. “The reader is no longer an observer but now an active participant turning the pages forward or backwards, deciding when to read and when to stop. Contemplation and reflection and authority is encouraged in the intimacy between reader and narrative. They are conjoined to a greater possibility.”

Yahgulanaas’ other works hang in the British Museum, the MET, Seattle Art Museum, and Vancouver’s art gallery. He’s also a council member of the Haida Nation. Whatever reaction his new book elicits, he hopes it isn’t passive. His work reflects a heated, messy clash, and yet calls for appreciation of a wider political picture.

“Our current national society is much fashioned on the principle of passive citizens lending their authority to the elected and specialized institutions of federal and provincial and municipal governments. This generally works but the cost is borne by individuals of good moral conscience who have to grapple with some of the brutal economic and legislative desires of a small group of people, the elected, all who experience various degrees of disassociation from their own electorate.”

“Canada has a remarkable opportunity to learn from Indigenous government structures which at the very core are based on notions of inclusivity and responsibility to individuals and to the group.”

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As the bulls approach, I glance back over my shoulder to see a galloping dark gray bull swinging his wide horns out in front of the pack. I run. The runner behind me screams. Something pushes into my butt cheek. I glance back. The lead bull dips his head. Jump! I leap into the air as the bull’s horn hits me on the ass. I fly upward, twisting as the bull passes below me. The sidewalk rushes up. I reach my hand down and break my fall. My hips smack the cobbles, then my shoulder. My head lands softly. I didn’t know it, but these few seconds in Pamplona, Spain, in July would define my life for the next three months.

PART I: SPAIN

The horn came close but luckily didn’t perforate my anus. (I know this because the doctors checked several uncomfortable times.) Red Cross medics rushed me to the hospital, where they injected me with morphine, put me on IV antibiotics, did minor surgery to clean the wound, and stuck a tube in it attached to a drain capsule about the size and shape of half a roll of quarters.

After 36 hours in the hospital, the surgeon chose to release me at my request. This made the news because I told Reuters I planned to run again later in the week. (In fact, it trended on Twitter and Facebook.) My surgeon told me, “I don’t want you to run. You are seriously hurt, but you are a grown man, you have to decide for yourself.”

It wasn’t my first rodeo. A bull named Brevito had gored me twice in the thigh in 2014 resulting in a long hospital stay. In both cases I found the Spanish healthcare system to be superb, probably the best country in which to be gored by a bull.

After my release from the hospital, I ran again on July 10. As the herd approached, a hefty fellow runner smashed into my back, yanking my shoulder. My core muscles collapsed. I felt a spike of pain dig into my pelvis near my hip. Still, I ran alongside the pack of Fuente Ymbro bulls for ten yards, their eyes watching me curiously.

Complications from the goring and contusions took me on a healthcare odyssey that would send me from that well-run Spanish hospital to rural Panama to Chicago. People often criticize the US healthcare system and compare it unfavourably to European countries where the government is usually more involved in care and provides more benefits. From my perspective—as someone who needed a lot of medical treatment for a long time thanks to those bulls—there’s no competition. The closer the US can get to Spain, the better.

Enku Kebede-Francis, a Tufts professor and the author of Global Health Disparities: Closing The Gap Through Good Governance, finds it difficult to compare healthcare in Spain and the US. “The United States is like 50 nations in one when it comes to healthcare,” she told me over email. She feels Spain’s healthcare is “comparable to Hawaii, which has the US’s best healthcare system.”

“Spain spends less money per patient and they get better results than the United States,” she said, “because they practice preventative services and most medical workers are like public servants.”

After the run, two weird lumps formed on either side of my pelvis. All horn wounds infect because the bulls dig their horns in bull crap, turning them into poisonous spears. I took antibiotics but still the infection exhausted me. I spent a lot of time crashed out in my room in my friend's Pamplona apartment. The drain capsule nestled in my butt crack was hard to clean. It sat in the crook of my anus, every time I took a crap, the shit had to push the drain out of the way and smear around it, inevitably getting into the open wound. I took a shower afterward every time but still failed to clean it sufficiently. Doctors removed it after five days. The procedure was surprisingly painless but disgusting enough to make my nurse to start to tear up.

When I tried to get out of bed I screamed as daggers of pain stabbed into my hips and pelvis, even though I took 600 milligrams of Ibuprofen. My friend Kevin gave me a dab of topical marijuana cream and that really worked, but there was no way to replenish the supply.

The author in a Spanish hospital shortly after his injury. AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos

PART II: PANAMA

Twelve days after the goring, I headed to Panama where my wife works as volunteer for an aid group, an 18-hour voyage by plane and bus. My wife and I hadn’t seen each other in months so we immediately checked into a hotel and had somewhat violent sex. My pelvis and groin burned afterward.

We left for her mountain village and went to bed. When I woke from the pain, I turned to my wife and told her, “I’m scared.”

She took me to the local hospital, which looked nice but proved rougher than the Spanish ones. The nurse dug an IV needle in my arm until I yelled, “No mas!” When she finally got it in, it bled and leaked fluid all over me and the bed. They didn’t have the pain meds I needed, so my wife went across town to a drug store.

Kebede-Francis said my experience was a typical one—infrastructure spending in developing countries is often uneven. “When they build new facilities, they have to aim high and long-term. This is true even in places like Florida,” she told me. “You’ll find state-of-the-art buildings offering limited services and no specialties.”

We went home and within a few hours the pain in my crotch worsened. Anger got the better of me and I decided all I needed to do were some squats. My groin tightened with each angry dip. Then I decided to stretch my back. I arched my body, yanked my torso to get a deep stretch, and a pop jolted my lower back. My nerves came alive with electric twitches near my tailbone.

Within an hour I couldn’t walk.

We took a cab to a private hospital in the city of David, stop number three on my healthcare world tour. That’s when the money started flowing. Everything in the private healthcare system in Panama involves payment up front. Except for seeing the doctors—you pay them right after they look at you. Each one was $20 USD, with specialists costing $100. The bills stack up fast.

We paid $500 upfront for the X-rays of my hips and pelvis, which came back negative. I couldn’t afford the MRI. By the time we got out of there I had coughed up over a grand.

In the hotel that night, the pain got so bad I went back to the hospital where they injected me intravenously with morphine. I only remember waking up in my hotel room the next morning. We decided to go to the public hospital, also in David.

“Panama has an interesting, developing, mostly public healthcare system,” James Johnson, a professor at Central Michigan University and the author of Comparative Health Systems: A Global Perspective, told me. “They recently built a ‘medical city’ which is dedicated to providing world class health care. It’s an incredible complex. It’s located in Panama City. But the regional hospitals in Panama are a completely different story.”

I saw what that story looked like firsthand at the regional ER. Dozens of worried people milled in front of the doors to a massive high-rise concrete structure. We waited two hours to get inside. As they did my paperwork, a woman died directly behind me. They put me in a long hall with a bunch of people who looked like they were dying. Then people started to die. At one point a body bag containing a young boy wheeled to a stop in front of me, his mother weeping over the body. I sat in the wheelchair for ten hours in that hall before I complained and they wheeled me around the corner to a room so full of gravely ill people on stretchers that touched each other. After several hours a man stormed in, swore at everyone, picked up his dying mother in his arms, and walked out. We left not long after that.

Kebede-Francis wasn’t surprised with my experience at the regional hospital. “The care in Panama City is comparable to care in Illinois,” she said. It was a different story out in David. She added that you might experience crowded conditions in American hospitals—in a Manhattan ER on a Friday or Saturday night, for instance. “But you’ll receive good and fast care,” she noted. I definitely didn’t get that in David.

Johnson told me that understaffed and underfunded regional hospitals are the biggest healthcare problem in Panama today. “There is a large shortage of doctors and nurses in Panama,” he said. “It’s not like in Spain or the USA where we just bring in doctors from other countries. In Panama they have licensing laws that prevent (foreign) doctors from moving to Panama and working.”

We took a cab to a different private hospital where the MRI cost only $500, and were told that my liver, spleen, and lymph nodes were enlarged. They wanted to keep me and potentially operate. But fears of a botched third-world surgery sent me back to my wife’s house, where I sat for two days on antibiotics before we flew home to the US.

The author right after being gored by a bull in 2014 at the running of the bulls.

AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

PART III: America

That’s where I familiarized myself with the American healthcare system’s cruelty, which anyone who doesn't have insurance is all too aware of. My regular doctor sent me to a private hospital, but they only let me stay one night. They did some tests and then kicked me out.

“If you were insured they would have been more willing to help you,” Johnson told me.

“It’s like that Dickens quote, ‘It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times,’” he said of the US system. “You can go to Johns Hopkins and get the best possible care in the world. You can also go to a hospital on a Native American Reservation in New Mexico and get worse care than you got in that regional hospital in Panama. Our healthcare system is like Frankenstein, you take an arm, a leg, a heart, and you stitch it all together and you think it’s going to be a functioning human being? Well, actually it turns out to be a monster and that’s what we have in the United States, a malfunctioning monster of a healthcare system.”

After leaving the hospital I went to my parents’ house and fell right back into fever and pain for two days. Then I visited another general practitioner, who prescribed antibiotics and some powerful narcotic pain and inflammation medicine.

“What’s wrong with me?”I asked him.

“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “You got some kinda bruisy teary thing in there.”

I crossed the damn world for that diagnosis? I didn’t return to see him, giving up on healthcare in general at that point. I stopped going to see doctors and, miraculously, I slowly started to improve. I began to walk with a walker. After a week I could get up the stairs with it.

I convinced my wife to go back to Panama so she didn’t screw up her volunteer status, and the day she left I went back to work driving for a rideshare company because I felt completely worthless and miserable and I hoped working would help. I used the walker to get in the car.

The next morning, I felt better and walked into a physical therapy place. My therapist, a man named Ian, seemed to give a shit, the first time a medical professional has made me feel that way since I’ve been home. He prescribed good, old-fashioned therapy: stretches, exercises, heat, cold. We followed that plan for several weeks, with me continuing to work. One night I got some horrible back spasms but refused to go to the hospital. What would they do except throw me out?

Through several weeks of ups and downs, Ian continued to guide my therapy. At last I recovered physically and was back on my feet. His manager enrolled me in a financial assistance plan. The US healthcare system has huge, obvious problems, but there are people in it who just want to help.

The Trump administration has repeatedly made moves that damage the Affordable Care Act. If the president and congressional Republicans successfully scrap the ACA, it seems likely that millions more people will go without insurance because they can’t afford it, just as I did. (Because I earned very little over the past year, I have since qualified for Medicaid.)

After all I’ve seen of the world’s healthcare systems, I believe that if the US expanded Medicaid to cover working poor and middle-class Americans, a project begun by Barack Obama with the ACA, and allow the rich to buy insurance and use private healthcare, a lot like what Spain does, things would improve.

Instead, the people in charge seem hell-bent on taking us in the opposite direction. “The ACA needed the next president to pick it up and improve it,” Johnson told me. “If every president comes in and tosses the healthcare plan for something new, it will never work. Healthcare is too big and complex. Spain, Japan, Germany, those would be great examples of systems we could move toward. But Donald Trump is just not up to the job. He is ill-informed and just doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

The good news is that my pain has faded over time. Ian and I figured out in the end that it was the result some sort of injury in my lower spine from the bull goring me and tossing me to the ground. I still don’t have a clear answer, which is actually not that abnormal for odd injuries like mine. But today I’m fully recovered, feeling good, and looking forward to my next run with the bulls in Spain this coming July.

Bill Hillmann is the author of Mozos: A Decade Running with the Bulls of Spain.

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands

Tinder is a blessing. It heals broken hearts, makes meeting new people really easy and allows you to present the best looking version of yourself to potential lovers. Even so, not every date turns into a night of passion, let alone a lasting relationship. More often than not, things go wrong.

But why? Was it something I said or did? Did I have something stuck between my teeth? I got in touch with some of the girls I met through the app to find out.

The first girl I approached was Anne*. Back in October 2014, I remember lying in bed, flicking through Tinder while trying to overcome a hangover when I matched with Anne, and she sent me a message. Eventually, she asked if she could come over, promising she would bring a bottle of wine. We had a great night, but we never spoke again.

I looked her up on Facebook, and asked if she could tell me what had gone wrong. Half an hour later, she responded: "Hey, sure. But I honestly don't remember you and I've spent the last half hour feeling really bad about that. And embarrassed."

Screenshot of my Facebook Messenger conversation with Anne.

Awkward! Thankfully, I then managed to find three women who do remember me. Here's what they said:

Santi, 28

Photo courtesy of Santi

Our first date was on the 23rd of October, 2014. We only had the one, but we're great friends now.

VICE: What was your first impression of me?
Well, I already knew who you were because we had mutual friends who were planning to set us up. But we beat them to it by matching on Tinder. When we finally met, I thought you looked hot. I think you could work on your walk though – it’s pretty slow and nonchalant, and quite unattractive.

We went to the zoo on our date.
Yeah, I think we spent an hour talking about bacteria, and why dogs can eat their own shit and humans can’t. I’m pretty sure that after that, we only talked about politics and big philosophical concepts. Those are probably not the best topics of conversation on a first date. We should’ve been getting to know each other on a personal level. I had a great time, though. After the zoo we drank beer at a pub and talked about feminism. Later, we ate pizza and played pool.

Do you think there was any sexual tension between us?
That’s hard to say now. Not really, I guess. I was surprised when you kissed me in front of the pub. But our date had been going on for eight hours, so maybe it did make some sense. After we kissed, you wanted me to go home with you but I wasn't so sure. I really liked you and I was worried that if we went there too soon, we would both quickly lose interest. But we eventually ended up back at yours anyway. I remember your room feeling very sterile – the sort of place a tormented artist would live in.

Why didn’t we go on a second date?
I know exactly why. I thought our date was amazing. I never wondered what the time was, or thought about how I could bail. But I didn’t hear from you the next day. Later, when I sent you a dumb message asking about some TV show, you responded, but you didn’t ask anything back. I didn’t bother texting again – I guess we both fucked up.

You thought I was blowing you off?
Your text gave off the impression that you weren't into me. Thinking about it now, I was probably just protecting myself. I was insecure and I figured that if this wasn’t going anywhere, I should just end it before I got tied up. If I had never heard from you again, I'd still be under the impression that you hated our date. But when we eventually saw each other again, you told me that you had loved our date and had the best time, and that you didn't mean to just let it fade away. It was just a stupid case of miscommunication.

Eva, 22

Photo courtesy of Eva

Eva and I went on a couple of dates this summer.

VICE: We matched, but I remember it took a long time before we went on a date.
Yeah, true – our conversations didn’t really flow naturally at all. There was a lot of time between messages, but I thought that was fun. I think it was part of the game.

I eventually asked you out on a date, but you didn’t reply.
Yeah, I have no idea why. It wasn’t like I didn't want to go on a date with you.

But eventually you asked me, and I remember that we had both been drinking before our first date.
Yeah, I didn’t actually want to go, initially. I was nervous and still trying to get over someone else, but eventually a friend forced me to go. We arrived at the same time, and it all got a bit weird when – before we had barely said a word to each other – two drunk guys started chatting us up. But we joked around with them, which made it feel like we knew each other already.

I remember at one point you got really annoyed because those guys kept talking to us, and you just walked away. I found the way you clearly stated your boundaries like that pretty attractive. We continued to drink a lot and laugh a lot. I felt very comfortable around you.

Was there anything you didn’t like about me?
When we first met, I wasn’t really sexually attracted to you. Also, you didn't really know how to flirt – you weren’t looking at me seductively and you didn’t touch me or show that you were looking for some kind of sexual tension. It gave off the impression that you weren't really into me, but you were.

Yeah, I was. We dated for a couple of weeks, but then it fizzled out. Why do you think it didn't work out between us?
I don’t think either of us was ready for a relationship. At the time, I didn’t know what to do with my life and you had just broken up with someone. I was happy to date without expectations, but you couldn’t. We probably talked about it a bit too much. You wanted things to be clear early on, instead of letting yourself just go with the flow and see where that took us.

Daanie, 31

Photo courtesy of Daanie

Daanie and I matched in autumn 2013. We dated for two months.

VICE: Why did you swipe right?
I thought your profile was hilarious. Our chats were also really funny.

On our first date, I came to see you in Rotterdam.
We went to the Euromast (a landmark observation tower in Rotterdam) – to enjoy the sunset and the most amazing view over the city. Afterwards, we went for burgers and beers. When our date ended, I walked you to the train station and we kissed on the street.

We really liked each other, but it ended quickly.
On our second date, I came to see you in Amsterdam and you picked me up at the station on a tandem bike. That was funny, but it also sucked because I was afraid to ride it. Obviously, that tandem bike wasn’t the reason it didn’t work out between us. You were about to go study in Australia for six months, so I knew falling for you would be a bad idea. But I did anyway.

At your goodbye party in Amsterdam, I planned on going back to Rotterdam that evening, but I missed my train and ended up sleeping over at yours. You brought me to your place and we had a conversation, where it became clear that you wanted to be single while you were in Australia. Afterwards, you went back to your friends and the party, and I was left lying in your bed listening to your roommates having sex.

*Anne's name has been changed so she doesn't have to deal with hate mail.

You don’t know what a true vice grip feels like until you’ve been embraced by a six-foot-two Finnish metalhead. Dani's long fingernails dig into my arm as he surveys the crowd below us with the intense cognitive absorption you normally only see in someone who's just done a sizeable slug of coke.

Except there have been no narcotics. I'm not even drunk. We're just singing "Sweet Child O’ Mine".

"This is why I love to do the karaoke," Dani shouts to me after we perform, flecking my ear with spit. We met about ten minutes earlier, when he pulled the back of his high-rise jeans down to display a warped tattoo of Axl Rose’s face on his hip meat. "Has anyone on this planet been feeling such release as right now?"

Having totally forgotten about me, Dani (go-to karaoke track: "Welcome To The Jungle" – Guns N’ Roses) lurches across the room to plug his next song into the iPad.

Think of karaoke and you'll probably think of Japan. Those glass boxes set into skyscrapers where, for a reasonable fee, you can scream into a neon night that can't hear or see you. Karaoke was invented there in the 1970s, used in hotels and bars as a go-between for drinking and interacting after work hours.

But karaoke spots can also be found in abundance in the activity's lesser-known cultural home: Helsinki. It’s a small capital city with about 30 karaoke bars – one every few minutes walk in the centre. Many pubs also have their own machines. There is a metal karaoke bar. A gay karaoke bar. There is a public library with a karaoke booth. It is very possible that many Finnish people love karaoke even more than the Japanese.

"I used to think karaoke was just something for old men to do in bars, or [something] you did with your family at gatherings," 25-year-old shop assistant Salla ("Chasing Highs" – ALMA) tells me during my first day in Helsinki. "My grandfather would always bring out the karaoke machine at home and sing on it. Now it’s become cool. It’d be normal for you and your friends to casually do it every Friday or Saturday night."

I'm told by another Finn that "like the Japanese, we are shy and reserved" and don't like to talk about feelings. It's said offhand and in the same way Brits would habitually and accurately call themselves awkward and apologetic. "For some reason, karaoke makes us able to express ourselves more," Salla says. "It makes us friendly and we can show more of ourselves."

I’m in Helsinki not just for brief karaoke-based chats with strangers, but for the 2017 Karaoke World Championships.

On Friday evening it's the semi-finals of the competition, and I'm on a grey peninsula of land that couldn't feel lonelier. The Championships are apparently somewhere on an industrial park that no woman should be walking around alone, and the cold wind off the Baltic Sea is biting cracks into my red hands. No one is here. No one would hear the screams.

And then suddenly, I hear some screams myself. I'd know those haunting cries anywhere: "Bring Me To Life" by Evanescence, miraculously one of my favourite karaoke songs to perform. This is a divine sign.

The Championships are held inside the Tapahtumakeskus Telakka, a space decked out like something your dad would do to the kitchen after a mid-life crisis – arcade games, shiny reds and pinks, angled spotlights – with an awards ceremony set-up at the back. Every competing country has a table facing the stage, each of which is furnished with large monitors for the lyric videos. Members of the public can pay to watch at the back. There are three categories: male, female and duets. The hosts, Finland, and – of course – Japan are there, as are others, including Brazil, Canada, India and the Philippines. Notably, Britain is absent – further proof our country has lost its vital essence.

Thankfully, Ireland is here, represented by three brassy and brilliant women I later befriend. Elaine ("Hey Big Spender" – Shirley Bassey) is a mum and piano teacher in her forties who’d accidentally become the female rep for her fair country after doing karaoke pissed in a Dublin pub. Her mates, Louise and Maggie ("Purple Rain" – Prince and "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" – The Proclaimers) are on the Bacardi from the off. I meet them in the secondary karaoke room installed for anyone to use. "Oh god, I'm just here for the laugh of it," explains Elaine.

But how and why are any of these people here? It's not exactly clear. You had to be the "best" karaoke performer in your country – however that's decided – and then to have proved your worth in heats earlier in the week.

When I walk back into the main room there is a disheveled male contestant – Victor – dressed like Fat Mike, in a yellow and black stripy tie and pantaloon jeans, onstage. He sings "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" in an American accent, his Russian voice grappling awkwardly underneath the curve of the words. Back and forth he bounces, the chain on his jeans swinging like a metronome. "Give it to me babaaay," he begs one last time.

In front of the stage is an area that anyone can trot into, pick up a flag and start politely waving. Apparently there's an official WhatsApp group chat in which attendees are asked to rally if a contestant has a particularly weak crowd. The Japanese guy up on stage has a healthy audience though, and waves his way through every song.

"I think it sucked. It needed more personality," says a short bald American next to me. It turns out he's a songwriter and vocal coach from LA named Tracy ("Iris" – Goo Goo Dolls) and was previously a judge of the competition. This year, he’s hosting the livestream. He tells me three times that he's Finnish metal band Lordi’s vocal coach. He has one follower I know on Twitter, and that follower is Britney. "They defeat themselves, some of these performers," he says. "There’s an after party every night, and they go out and party and drink and blow their voices out."

I worry about Elaine, who – on the basis of her craic – may well have had a drink before her show.

Considering he’d been a judge, I ask Tracy what the panel is looking for. "Technique, stage presence, originality and song choice," he says. "You can be a great singer with massive stage presence and pick the wrong song: game over. Game over. If you pick an obvious song? That’ll bomb. But if you crush it, maybe it won't." An obvious song? He starts singing "Georgia On My Mind" by Ray Charles, and keeps going for a while longer than I know what to do with.

As we chat, the "King Of Karaoke" – a small Indian man in a huge red leather jacket with shades hanging from the neck of his T-shirt – swaggers over. He tells me he's the King Of Karaoke and that everyone calls him the King Of Karaoke. His real name is Savio D’Sa ("You And I" – Lady Gaga). "I’ve been in this game for years, from the 2000s to now," he says, putting his glasses on, even though it’s dark inside. "It gets tiring, but I was basically responsible for spreading karaoke to the entirety of India."

Savio's outlandishness is quite something, but it's nothing compared to the singers themselves.

There's a Singaporean female contestant in full red pleather and sparkling nine-inch boots singing something in her first language that segues into "Lady Marmalade" and ends in the splits; a Scandi Chad Kroeger with goatee and mirrored aviators singing Audioslave, who, upon noticing my camera pointed at him, begins eye-fucking it like a true karaoke champ; a Finnish former champion dressed all in black who sings Frozen’s "Let It Go" in Finnish.

The last one's face, body and long coarse ponytail are so utterly mismatched from his voice and tenderness of the melody that I find it hard to tie the two together. At the song's close, he turns, flings a teary, scorned look over his shoulder and half whispers-half kisses the final line in English: "The cold never bothered me anyway."

Between songs, all-American suited and booted host Michael ("White Wedding" – Billy Joel) hypes up the next contestant. Backstage, he tells me of his dream to expand the competition. He’d bought it after the old owners got too old because he couldn’t bear to see it die. He wants the British to pull their finger out and start a team. I strongly consider it. Elaine, Louise and Maggie start hyping me up, whooping, telling me I'm great even though they haven't seen me sing. But that's it, isn't it? Anyone can be great at karaoke.

At 10PM, the finalists are announced. Elaine's through: we have more Bacardi to celebrate. Everyone congratulates each other with the appropriate hug, air kiss or bow, according to their cultural customs, and grins and claps as they themselves are voted out. Not a sign of resentment on anyone’s face. This is what karaoke does. Karaoke is peace and karaoke is harmony.

Until the finals.

What is karaoke? For the first of many times this weekend, I try to work it out. It’s not the same as an open mic night where you sing your own songs, with no recorded track and a level of professionalism expected (for instance, actually knowing the words). Neither is it a Stars in Their Eyes-type scenario, since there's no pressure to perform the song like the artist. It’s not drag, because, apart from one contestant dressed like a queen and a couple of guys singing Whitney Houston numbers, there isn't anything political or subversive about what we've seen so far.

I'm not alone in my confusion: no one knows what karaoke is. Or, at least, everyone has conflicting ideas. Some countries go for gags and flamboyance. Canada and America, for example, are full Glee club, whipping out Broadway numbers. Others perform folk songs from their country in traditional dress. Every act is diverse to the point that they're completely incomparable. I wonder how the English-speaking judges will avoid unconscious bias towards lyrics they understand or melodies that are closer to the pop songs they’re familiar with.

The finals become, for a Brit, a slog. Banter and alcohol-fuelled performers diplomatically weeded out, all that remains – bar Elaine – are the serious singers pacing around, sipping lukewarm honey and lemon water, and getting back-rubs from their vocal coaches. Every imperceivable misstep – forgetting to glance in the direction of the judges, not enough vibrato on a single note – produces fury and yelps in the make-up room. I see one woman smash down a make-up bag so hard that its contents fly out across the floor.

Ballad after ballad after ballad, I become desensitised to the blooming emotions, the love, the heartbreak.

Elaine from Ireland

Ireland are my only hope. Elaine cruises into a big cock-rock number, microphone swinging, tongue out, horns to the crowd. They aren't the best vocals out of the remaining bunch, but there are balls. Colossal, swollen balls, bigger than anyone else's – and god, it looks fun.

Sadly, it isn't enough. Elaine's out. But she couldn't care less, because she's had a bloody laugh and that was the point, wasn't it. I say I'm proud of my mum, and Maggie calls me a cheeky cow and says we're all sisters. Elaine and Maggie both groan loudly when the next competitor kicks into another love song, and I find myself joining in.

Where, I wonder, is the fire, the devil that strikes your heart when you scream along in a booth with your mates to "Let Me Entertain You"? That wildness that comes from fully letting go, from embracing being bad. Had the Karaoke World Championships misunderstood karaoke?

Eventually, the judges announce the winners and they cry and cry and cry. Everyone steps forward holding their flags at awkward angles, and the bulbs flash, and family members weep too, and suddenly it’s time to recalibrate and remember we’re a global family and perform extremely long saccharine renditions of songs, the type that round off musicals and leave you itching to leave.

Me and the Irish lot do exactly that, escaping on a karaoke-bus, warming up with "In the Shadows" by Finnish band The Rasmus, and falling out at an afterparty.

It’s at these bars that you realise Finns love getting absolutely mortal. The queue time for karaoke is two hours long, so all there is to do is drink and go buck-wild for anyone performing. I smack the table with a glow-up foam rod branded with the Karaoke World Championships' logo, and a married couple extend a sincere invitation to come back to their sauna and do the same to them.

It’s outside the friendly competition of the championships, where the real amateurs are, that true karaoke can be found. Goateed Finns take off their tops, revealing belly tattoos, to beat out metal numbers. There is no hint of embarrassment, just full throttle earnestness.

For the British – who aren't cool enough to show up to the competition – I go up in a Hello Kitty hoodie, seven pints deep, and slut-drop to the Britney version of "I Love Rock 'N' Roll". A middle-aged male French contestant in a jazzy suit finds a second mic for backing vocals, and we work the crowd. I go down to audience level to find my new Irish mates, and we sing into the mic together. I try to laugh, but I can't, because we've all lost our voices.

This is not a skill that can be evaluated. The Championships, ironically, reinforced the fact that rules can't – or shouldn't – exist.

Karaoke is a free pass to be a tit. It's a therapeutic vessel for escape. You can cut through the noise and feel listened to for three minutes and 45 seconds, while also disappearing into someone else’s song, into someone else. It’s sexual and visceral and also completely neutered and platonic. It's as innocent and hearty as dancing to "Take On Me" at your aunty's wedding. It’s attention-seeking, but in a context in which everyone is seeking attention. There is no hero worship or hierarchy. After the outro, it'll be onto the next turn. The world is forgotten and nothing exists out of that living room, booth, stage, venue.

Waiting for my flight home, I see I've been added to a WhatsApp group by the Irish women, and sent a video of the four of us all singing into the microphone together, looking ecstatic. The message is signed off with an "E" and a heart emoji. I look like an idiot and it's fantastic.

@hannahrosewens

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

Congressman Conyers Relinquishes Key Committee Role
Rep. John Conyers has stepped down as the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee "in light of the attention drawn by recent allegations made against me." He's been referred to the ethics committee following a report he used office funds to settle a sexual misconduct claim made by a former female staffer, as well as a second sexual harassment claim made by another female staffer.—CBS News

Trump Administration Sued by Top Consumer Rights Official
Leandra English, recently named deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), has filed a lawsuit over the White House's decision to disregard her claim as acting boss of the independent watchdog. English's lawyer said the attempt to install Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney as the new watchdog chief—even though Mulvaney is still working at the White House—is "unprecedented." Both putative leaders reportedly showed up to work Monday.—CNN

Meredith Corporation to Purchase Time Inc.
The media company has agreed to buy the publisher of TIME, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated for an estimated $2.8 billion, having fixed a price of $18.50 per share. The right-wing Republican megadonors Charles and David Koch reportedly helped finance the deal through an affiliate, though initial indications were that they would have no influence on day-today operations.—CNBC / Reuters

Massage Chain Accused of Multiple Sexual Assaults
More than 180 people have claimed to endure sexual assault at the hands of masseurs working for the Massage Envy company, according to police, state, and court documents. Allegations include groping, touching of genitals, and penetration using fingers. A Massage Envy attorney insisted the company holds "franchise owners accountable to our policies."—BuzzFeed News

International News

Indonesia Warns of 'Imminent' Bali Volcano Eruption
Indonesia's Disaster Mitigation Agency issued a maximum level four alert for Mount Agung on Bali, warning of the "the potential for a larger eruption." Authorities established an evacuation zone up to six miles around the volcano and also shut down the island’s airport, hitting 59,000 passengers with canceled flights.—Reuters

Dozens of Syrians Reported Killed in Air Strikes
Russian bombing in Deir al-Zour left at least 53 civilians dead, including 21 children, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Russia claimed Sunday’s strikes had targeted and struck militants. Another 23 civilians were said to be killed in strikes in Eastern Ghouta near Damascus, an area held by rebel fighters, also on Sunday.—BBC News

Pope Francis Begins Visit to Myanmar and Bangladesh
The pope was set to meet the leader of Myanmar's ruling party Aung San Suu Kyi and a group of Rohingya Muslims this week, but began his stay by chatting with the head of the military. Catholic officials in Myanmar asked him not to use the contentious term "Rohingya" while in Myanmar, despite allegations of gross human rights violations by armed forces against the minority. The Pope was slated to finish his trip Saturday in Bangladesh, where more than 620,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar have taken refuge from what some call genocide.—AP

Opposition Candidate Leads in Honduras Election
Early results released by Honduras's Supreme Electoral Tribunal showed presidential challenger Salvador Nasralla leading President Juan Orlando Hernandez about 45 percent to 40 percent. Both Nasralla's Opposition Alliance party and Hernandez's conservative National Party attempted to claim victory overnight.—Al Jazeera

Everything Else

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to Marry
The royal bachelor is officially engaged to the American actress, with the wedding to take place in the spring. "To see her union with Harry, who shares the same qualities, is a source of great joy for us," said Markle's parents.—BBC News

Reverend Al Sharpton to Visit Meek Mill
The activist said he would go see the imprisoned rapper Monday, calling his case "representative of many young men of color that face an abuse of a probation or parole system." Meek Mill was sentenced to two to four years in prison for violating his probation.—Noisey

'Coco' Wins Thanksgiving Box Office
The animated Pixar-Disney movie took $71.2 million from its domestic debut over the five-day holiday, beating the $60 million earned by Justice League over the same period. The Warner Bros. superhero movie has taken more than $300 million internationally.—AP

Netflix to Produce Its First Bollywood Movie
The network will co-produce romantic comedy Love Per Square Foot along with RSVP, and will stream the film around the world. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said he wanted to work with "the best of Bollywood to deliver compelling stories."—The Hollywood Reporter

Trailer Released for Jodie Foster's 'Black Mirror' Episode
Netflix has dropped a teaser for a new episode of the sci-fi series directed by Jodie Foster. The upcoming season four installment "Arkangel" features a mother experimenting with troubling technology to protect her young daughter.— i-D

In Spike Lee’s original She’s Gotta Have It, the main character, Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), is assaulted by a former boyfriend, Jamie Overstreet. It begins with a slut-shame, a toss of the the label “freak” over her sexual promiscuity. His next words are a warning, “you don’t want me to make love to you, you want me to fuck you.” Then he pushes Nola onto a bed before the eventual rape scene. It’s a sequence that Spike Lee has since regretted, and one he’s often blamed on his own immaturity. It was clumsy, insensitive, and told through the optics of an unapologetic male perspective.

Spike Lee is pretty much that guy; the person you either love-to-hate, or hate-to-love for scenes like this—that fuck your lawn approach. It’s what you have to consider with Lee’s body of work. That his words, and actions are liable to be insensitive and batshit insane. He’s advanced a career in telling a “Truth” that’s paramount to anyone else’s, even when that truth is only his truth.

The Netflix remake of She’s Gotta Have It seems to be a side step from that approach through. Spike Lee isn’t in the fresh, non-woke, internet-less era of 1986, where he can freely write the story of a black woman as a black man. He’s in the now of 2017; a moment when women across the board are demanding that stories portray them without a bootleg, male-interpretation of the shit. And since then, Lee’s acknowledged it through his hirings.

via Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

Oklahoma City born artist, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh was one such hire. She was the Nola before the 2017 comeback—known over the years for her use of the craft as a means of social activism for women of colour. Her global Stop Telling Women to Smile 2012 campaign for instance around street harassment, was in part, a huge inspiration for Nola Darling’s newfound artistic expression. Through that same reputation found in the streets of New York, Spike Lee hired her as the show’s main art consultant and painter of Nola’s many pieces.

“I’ve had issues with his work over the years in how he’s portrayed black women,” says the soft spoken Tatyana over a phone conversation. “But it’s Spike Lee, he’s brilliant, he’s a legend, and absolutely, I was down.”

During a telephone call, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh spoke candidly with me about She’s Gotta Have It, the craft she uses to speak to women in particular, and why she’s hopeful for women in a post-Harvey Weinstein era.

In Conversation: Brooklyn Renaissance With Spike Lee And Tatyana Fazlalizadeh | via Getty

VICE: Let’s talk about She’s Gotta Have it, were you a fan the 1986 film?
Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: First of all, I loved the original. Yes, I had my issues, and yes, I didn’t like the sexual assault that happened in the original, but Spike has already addressed his regret in that. As a young black woman though, watching a movie like that, it was something I had never seen before. Because it’s now a 10-episode series, there’s greater opportunity to dig deeper into characters like Nola Darling. And this time around, her art work and profession seems to play an equal part. In the film, we never really got a chance to see all that. It was mostly about romantic relationships with these dudes, but in the remake, her art is another character. She’s passionate about it but also insecure at the same time. And we get to see her working through it all, which is really great. It only adds another layer to her as a human being.

Elaborate on that human being aspect, especially as a black woman.
As a black woman, I’m always looking for us portrayed as regular people. Yes, we go through a lot of stuff, and experience oppression all the time, but we’re also just regular people. We’re not the super or weak woman all the time. We’re not super sexual or non-sexual all the time, we’re just regular human beings. And yes, we don’t always have our career together. A lot of times in media, we the trope of women who are super successful, independent women. But a lot of times, we just don’t have our shit figured out. We’re trying to make it like everyone else. The show just gets that in a lot of ways, and I’m hoping that future seasons can unlayer that aspect to these women characters. It’s something we’re really starting to see, not just in this show but in others, where we’re being allowed to be full human beings. I’m really excited about that.

Nola Darling played by Dewanda Wise | Courtesy of Netflix.

Your art of course is featured throughout this show. It’s also inspired by your previous series, Stop Telling Women to Smile . You don’t have to be compelled to use your artistry or voice to do what you do. Elaborate on why it’s so important for you to do so.
I’m an artist, and through that, I’ve always had the desire to talk about the things that impact me through my work. I never wanted to just make pretty pictures or things that are aesthetically pleasing. My work had to address things that were important to me and my community. The truth is, I think about race and genre all the time, because I’m experiencing the world in a way that forces me to face them head on.

For me, the importance is always there. I always approach my work with an idea, issue and an audience in mind. It’s not just about myself, it’s for a particular audience. Usually when there’s an issue to address, there’s the oppressed and the oppressor, whether they know it, or want to be it or not. So in the case of Stop Telling Me to Smile, we’re talking about sexism, and the women that are oppressed by this group, men, who are perpetrating the problem. Basically, I’m making work for women. They’re the audience, and the men are as well, to a lesser degree. It’s always about who I’m talking to, what I’m trying to say to them, and where’s the best place to have an impact that can affect people positively. That always dictates the direction I want to go in.

So when talking about harassment, without the pressures of getting too personal, can you tell me about the kind of things you’ve faced that inspired works like Stop Telling Women to Smile ?
Honestly, I’ve been experiencing forms of sexual harassment since I was a kid. It’s always been a part of my life. It’s not so much the actual experience of what has happened, but the fact that it happens all the fucking time...a culmination. For example, I was working on a mural in Philly with a bunch of dudes for an art collective. Basically I was the only woman working on the project. So you’re outside, it’s summer, we’re on lifts, up in the air, and we’re painting walls. Of course, I’m wearing shorts because it’s hot out, so you’d have men walking down the street, whistling and talking at me while I’m on a lift working on a wall. I’ve had a bunch of male friends in my life, and I’ve always noticed how my public space is very different from the way they experience the same public spaces. It let me know that even while performing labour, I’m still in the hands of men. I’m still being sexually objectified. Things like that have been a huge motivator.

I gotta ask. As a black writer, because there’s so few like me, I sometimes feel like it's a responsibility to use my craft to further the causes that affect folks like me, vs. the fun stuff. Do you personally see what you do as a responsibility as a black woman?
You know...I don’t know if it’s a responsibility. Everyone doesn’t have to use their voice. Sure, it’s a grand and beautiful idea if every single person used their skill or talent for the act of activism, community, fighting and resisting the terrible things that are happening to us. It’s beautiful and lofty, but a lot of times, it’s asking a lot out of people who are simply trying to live their lives and get through the day, to march and be an activist. I don’t think that’s necessary nor my responsibility. I can easily paint pictures of flowers every day and I’d be good, but I’m doing this because I want to do it, and I really care about these things. If my art is the best way to help, I want to be able to contribute in the way that I can. If an artist doesn’t feel that way, it is what it is.

Follow Noel Ransome on Twitter.

No one does tragedy quite like the Greeks, so it’s fitting that the year’s most effective effort comes from Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, The Lobster). The Killing of a Sacred Deer, his fifth and latest film, eschews a literal retelling of its source material, Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, in favor of a dense chamber drama that exposes the heart of body horror—literally—and revitalizes the power of myths for a modern audience.

In Poetics, Aristotle defined tragedy as, “An imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” And if there’s one thing that unites each of Lanthimos’s films, it’s the classical tragic story arc: things get worse for characters in already-bad situations, then they get worse still. This is built into The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a film about what happens when you have to face a punishment that you don’t want to admit you’ve earned.

Dr. Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) is a heart surgeon who, by his own fault, has accidentally killed a patient. Years later, he’s visited by Martin (Barry Keoghan) the son of the deceased, who dishes out the doctor’s punishment: either he kill his daughter (Raffey Cassidy), son (Sunny Suljic), or wife (Nicole Kidman), or all three will lose the ability to walk, stop eating, start bleeding out of their eyes, and stop living—in that order. It’s chilling in its directness: less a character study than the ballad of a coward who has to face consequences.

This is the essence of the myth from which The Killing of a Sacred Deer takes its name, Iphigenia in Aulis. Dating back to 405 BCE, Agamemnon and his men are stranded on an island because the goddess of the hunt, Artemis, has suspended the winds they require to set sail for Troy. If the war effort is to continue—and it must—he has to sacrifice his own daughter, Iphigenia, because he was previously responsible for the death of a sacred deer belonging to the goddess.

The brunt of the play sees Agamemnon struggling with the decision to either kill his daughter, or have his family be killed by his own restless soldiers. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a de facto reimagining of Iphigenia, in all its its futility and absence of a moral checkpoint.

If further meaning can be distilled from The Killing of a Sacred Deer, it comes from the tension generated when forces of mobility come into conflict with forces of immobility. Inverting the way that American democracy can be interpreted through the Athenian city-state, The Killing of a Sacred Deer can be read using a uniquely American work of art as its roadmap. First exhibited in 1948, Christina’s World is the most famous work by painter Andrew Wyeth; It depicts Anna Christina Olson, a friend of the painter who was afflicted with an undiagnosed degenerative neuromuscular disease, reduced to crawling and dragging her lower body by her upper half.

Of his choice in subjects, Wyeth said, “If in some small way I have been able in paint to make the viewer sense that her world may be limited physically but by no means spiritually, then I have achieved what I set out do.” But Christina’s body is actually freed from the painting by its own design: the arms belong to Olson, but the torso was actually based on that of the artist’s wife, who was able to sit as a model for long periods of time. The effect is that the viewer is unable to tell whether this chimera-Christina is crawling towards or revolting away from the farmhouse in the painting’s background. The core of its tension, a body that can move but is unable to, colliding with a body that is unable to move but somehow still can, finds its modern expression in unforgiving shots of Steven’s kids dragging their bodies about their family home to bargain for their lives with a father who, no matter what, will not be able to save them.

People hate Christina’s World—and Wyeth’s oeuvre—for its literalness, sentimentalism, and abject lack of metaphor, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer is guaranteed to make such critics squirm in their seats. But love it or revile it, it’s undoubtedly one of the decade’s opaquest films. That an ancient myth can be used to root both a family drama and an explosive exposition of body horror in the modern American experience signifies a director entering the master-stage of his craft. Unruly tensions abound across multiple levels, simple and complex, and it just might be that unique film that has no answers; but, as with the catharsis that comes at the end of great tragedy, if viewers can prepare themselves for a singularly excruciating time at the theater, they’ll carry with them a lightness heading back out into the street.

Remember when Pokémon Go was a thing? It was a weird time.

People were heading to parks in the hundreds to catch themselves a Snorlax, illegally crossing borders, getting hit by cars, and in some cases, dying.

Also, Pokémon Go players might have caused billions of dollars in damage across the United States.

The game was downloaded and played by millions of people worldwide and was specifically designed for people to play while walking. But because humans are creatures that can’t be trusted with anything, a lot of those people played the game while driving— and you see where this is going, right?

In a new paper called “Death By Pokémon Go,” Purdue University economists Mara Faccio and John McConnell scrutinized 12,000 detailed police reports of one particular county in the United States—Tippecanoe County, Indiana—for the first 148 days after the game's release. In doing so, the duo found “a disproportionate increase in vehicular crashes and associated vehicular damage, personal injuries, and fatalities in the vicinity of locations, called PokéStops, where users can play the game while driving.”

The two then weighed this number against the gyms (places that you could fight with your caught Pokémon) you could fight in the game, as it wasn’t possible to take on these stops while driving. The publisher of the game did update it to not allow a player to hit PokéStops while driving but this could be quickly worked around by indicating you were a passenger not the driver.

When looking at this data, Faccio and McConnell found that there were 286 more car crashes than the prior year—134 of these occurring near PokéStops. The costs of these crashes were around $500,000 but, out of these crashes, two resulted in fatalities—which, sadly, increases the cost of damages way up. The economists estimates that the “incremental county-wide cost of users playing Pokémon Go while driving, including the value of the two incremental human lives lost, to be in the range of $5.2 million to $25.5 million.”

“Extrapolation of these estimates to nation-wide levels yields a total ranging from $2 to $7.3 billion for the same period.”

With that in mind I want you to just think about what the number would be worldwide. Actually, on further thought, it’s probably best not to.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter

After dropping a very cryptic trailer for the fourth season of Black Mirror back in August, Netflix has been slowly building anticipation for its upcoming slate of dystopian episodes with a few new standalone teasers. On Sunday, the streaming service followed the trailer for the Jodie Foster-directed "Arkangel" with a trailer for "Crocodile," which examines the power of unreliable memories.

According to IndieWire, the episode takes place in Iceland and follows a young woman on a quest to collect people's memories about a traumatic event. But because memories are often subjective, her interviewees are introduced to "a new device that can access your raw impressions of events."

"Crocodile" isn't the first Black Mirror episode that examines the privacy and accuracy surrounding remembered events. The first season's "The Entire History of You" explores a world in which people can record, erase, and play back their own memories—a technological advancement that ends up sinking a marriage.

Black Mirror co-creator Annabel Jones told the Independent that "Crocodile" is "set in the near future where your memories are no longer private so they can be dredged—sometimes in helpful ways. It's very different to 'The Entire History of You' in that they're not accurate—they're memories rather than recordings."

The new trailers for season four are apparently part of Netflix's "13 Days of Black Mirror" celebration, so there will likely be a steady stream of new teasers to chew on over the next couple of days. While they do shed some light on what horrors are to come in the new season, the show's creators are still staying pretty tight-lipped on when the new series will drop. According to the Independent, it'll likely be sometime later this year.

Until then, check out the latest trailer above.

Not every friendship is destined to last a lifetime. Sometimes friends just drift apart. Other times, a major rift occurs, or a huge fight changes things forever, ending a friendship outright. and a friendship is ended abruptly, Hurtful behaviour, destructive decisions, outright betrayal; whatever the transgression was, the friendship had to be severed. We asked friends and co-workers about why they pulled the plug on a close friendship. Here’s what they said.

“She told cops she'd kill me.” - Taylor, 32

“Not one more bad poetry reading.” - Oliver, 34

“Had a baby; she became bitchy.” - Jenna, 32

“Called me a 'left-wing whore.'" - Katie, 33

“Total dick when my dad died.” - Erin, 39

“Thought I was her dumping ground.” - Arielle, 26

“She said I stole her jokes.” - Kelly, 26

"Dick pic'd the girl I liked." - James, 23

"Flirted over Snapchat with my boyfriend." - Tonya, 22

"He was a drunk. Couldn't abide." - Logan, 25

“Didn't pick me up from surgery.” - Carissa, 34

“She married a possessive, mean man.” - Katie, 38

“I had a baby. Nobody came over.” - Juana, 31

“Cocaine turned them into Mr. Hyde.” - Mary, 32

“Tried working together. Didn't end well.” - Nicola, 33

“Hadn't seen her sober in years.” - Meaghan, 31

“Blamed me for my sexual assault.” - Alaina, 24

“Drunk-tossed lit matches at me.” - Jennifer, 45

“Halloween: white girl goes full geisha.” - Hannah, 34

“Threatened suicide to test my loyalty.” - Maggie, 35

“Die hard Trump supporter on Facebook.” - Paul, 40

“She stole my mom’s expensive jewelry.” - Irina, 30

“Everything about her eventually drained me.” - Candace, 31

“I am not her emotional tampon.” - Marianne, 29

“Sociopath who couldn't ever stop lying.” - Sarah, 45

“She went rollerblading with my boyfriend.” - Donna, 39

“I came out. She didn't approve.” - Emily, 27

“She couldn’t stand my wife’s presence.” - Brittany, 26

“I was done feeling like shit.” - Tracee, 38

“Debbie downer when I'm trying happiness.” - Sage, 24

“She saw me as a project.” - Jessica, 41

“Couldn't keep up with her cash flow.” - Frankie, 36

"Called me 'Poor' after her promotion." - Lindsey, 24

“Dated an ex-boyfriend I still loved.” - Jen, 35

“Wasn't there for me when ill.” - Sarah, 40

“She decided to join a cult.” - Awuor, 25

“Asked me to hide her cheating.” - Erin, 38

“She got naked with my guy.” - Chrissy, 34

“She wanted enablers, not real friends.” - Katie, 35

“Adults dating teens is just unforgivable.” - Cassie, 28

Follow Anna Goldfarb on Twitter.

It's officially the 2017 holiday season, and while Black Friday pilgrims wasted the weekend wrestling for various screened devices, it turns out the only thing worth spending money on isn't part of any Cyber Monday sale. Starting Monday, NBC is auctioning off hundreds of props from the set of Parks and Recreation, so stop shopping for Alexa pucks or whatever and treat yo'self to some real, honest-to-God, Pawnee treasures.

The auction, which NBC is putting on in partnership with Screenbid, features everything from Leslie Knope campaign gear to Entertainment 720 swag, all from the actual set of the show.

The auction also includes bottles of Tom Haverford's Snake Juice, a Sweetums apron with an oversized "small" soda cup, "Don't Recall Knope" merch from that season six arc, and—for the Perd Hapley heads out there—a "Final Word with Perd" mug.

You can even buy yourself a copy of the special Mouse Rat tribute to Lil Sebastian, "5,000 Candles in the Wind," and a Lil Sebastian sweater, in honor of the late mini-horse.

There are around 280 different props and costumes up for sale, along with some duplicates. They're all great collectables for Parks and Rec fans, but one item stands above the rest: Duke Silver's own fedora and vest, the actual outfit Ron Swanson wore when he lived his double life as a mustachioed smooth jazz sax player, though you'll probably have to outbid a fleet of aging Eagleton divorcees if you want to take that one home.

Bidding starts Monday at 1PM EST and will go until December 1, with opening bids between $25 and $300—though it's unlikely that prices will stay that low for long. Some proceeds from the auction will be donated to LA Conservation Corps, an organization that works with at-risk youth.

Check out everything on the auction block right now over at the Screenbid website and buy the Councilman Jamm "Brace Yourself" windbreaker you've always wanted.

Canadian media is a lot like a game of musical chairs. We dance around in circles trying to do an increasingly thankless job, and then every other month the music stops and a lot of good players find themselves out of the game without any rhyme or reason. You hardly get time to mourn for your colleagues or lament that the industry has come to this before the music returns and the madness begins again.

This is the game that everyone plays no matter if you’re working in TV or in tech, but there is an especially hellish quality to it for anyone still invested in print. “Every newspaper reader that dies leaves no heir,” it is said, which makes “deliver[ing] cost synergies” a quixotic quest at best.

But some media conglomerates still dare to dream that impossible dream and that’s where we find ourselves today. After months of negotiations, Postmedia and Torstar have swapped ownership of a bunch of community newspapers, seemingly for the express purpose of closing most of them. Of the 41 papers changing hands in this cashless transaction [think: hockey trade with no draft picks ‘cause there’s no future], only six will remain in operation when all is said and done. Almost 300 people will lose their job. The closures overwhelmingly impact smaller community newspapers.

As per CEO Paul Godfrey in the Postmedia press release: “the continuing costs of producing dozens of small community newspapers in these regions in the face of significantly declining advertising revenues means that most of these operations no longer have viable business models.” Expect to see this obituary re-run in every Canadian small-town paper before the industry’s autophagia is satisfied. Ask not for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee, and all that.

There is not much else to say, really, that hasn’t already been said. Print is in crisis because subscribers keep dying—or, at least, there are not enough readers in smaller markets to draw what little advertising money there is left that is not going to Facebook or Google. Digital devices continue to proliferate and a generation of people becomes accustomed to getting their news instantly and effectively for free. The cost of running a print operation quickly becomes prohibitive outside of a major urban centre [and with a few exceptions, inside a major urban centre, too.]

You can see where this vicious cycle goes. Fewer papers in fewer places staffing fewer people producing as much content as possible, with each new cut or pivot putting more journalists out of work. Small and local beats disappear. Everything is subsumed into more centralized, digital models of content production and distribution. (There a few local success stories that have bucked this trend, but they operate on a much smaller scale than the dying town papers.) Advertising revenue dries up as marketers hit more consumers by placing cheaper ads on news aggregators or social media feeds or search engines. Feeling the pinch, print conglomerates shave off another few jobs in another regional paper, using fewer resources to chase a dwindling revenue stream, ad infinitum.

It’s a bleak picture, not least because of the job losses, or the way local affairs get smothered under regional or national or international content, or the fact that the major players involved in the industry seem to have little ability or even desire to alter this course of events. A local newspaper is the link between an individual and their community; historically, it is the nucleus of democracy and the store of historical memory. How effective can you be as a citizen if you only know what’s happening at the national or global level but not in your own backyard?

(This is an unpopular opinion for a politics columnist in 2017 to hold, but: on the whole, people are better served by getting the scoop on their town council’s relationship with real estate developers than the garbage that goes on in Question Period, or whatever Donald Trump is getting mad about on Twitter.)

This is an especially dire situation in Canada, which has more than a little trouble with both. To quote Canadian media scholar David Taras in Digital Mosaic, “[local] papers are pipelines for national news in a country where the connecting links cannot be taken for granted. The great irony is that there may be no market solution for an institution that is vital to the survival of the market itself.”

This would all be less troubling if there was a healthy digital media system ready to fill the gap opened by the decline of print journalism, but we know that’s not the case. The traditional model of thoughtful, considered analysis in a paper where journalists are held accountable by local readers has been replaced with an arms race of instant takes, each more scorching than the last, delivered directly into the waiting maw of a faceless internet mob by companies like Google and Facebook that show people not the “news” they need but rather what the content their browsing history suggests they want.

It might be true that the web is the only media game left in town, but I’m not sure any of the players know how to win anymore [except for Paul Godfrey, that guy knows how to make money while sacking people]. And considering the relative ease with which you can build an algorithm that compiles short news hits and/or re-types press releases, I am starting to think it’s a game everyone is going to lose.

Anyway, chalk all this up to another dark day in Canadian journalism; another reminder that most of our jobs are underpaid, underappreciated, and dramatically precarious; another jolt on the bumpy road towards an uncertain but distinctly dystopian future. We don’t even have time to pour out a proper 40 ouncer before this danse macabre begins anew. Round and round and round she goes: where she stops, nobody knows.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

Almost five years ago, 26-year-old Emma Fillipoff vanished, virtually without a trace, off the streets of downtown Victoria.

Emma, a young, free-spirited woman had travelled to Victoria, British Columbia, like many young people do, to bask in the beauty of the West Coast. But some now suggest Emma may have been running from something in her life, or perhaps, someone. Days before Emma disappeared, those who knew Emma claim she was acting strange—that it looked like she was struggling with some sort of mental health crisis. On the night she went missing, Emma was left standing on the street, alone, barefoot, when she disappeared into the night. Since then, no one has ever publicly heard from Emma, or knows what exactly happened to her.

On the evening of November 28, 2012, a light rain periodically fell on the streets of downtown Victoria. The temperature was mild for late November, hovering around nine degrees Celsius. By 7 PM that evening it was already dark.

Emma was last seen in front of the Fairmont Empress Hotel—located in the heart of downtown Victoria—sometime between 7:30 and 8:30 PM, by two Victoria police officers who were called to check in on her.

Before police arrived, Dennis Quay, an acquaintance of Emma, had noticed her wandering the streets barefoot near the hotel. After walking and chatting with her for a while, Quay became concerned and called the police, citing a distressed woman in front of the hotel.

Sometime around 7 PM, the police arrived to talk to Emma. After more than 40 minutes of talking with her they decided she was not a threat to herself, or anyone else.

In the ensuing minutes, Emma disappeared.

Since then, her mother Shelley Fillipoff has searched endlessly for leads in her daughter’s disappearance.

“I don’t have a good scenario in my head anymore,” Shelley told VICE.

Despite almost five years of searching with very few leads, Shelley hasn’t given up looking for Emma. In fact, she plans to be in Victoria on November 28 for the five-year anniversary of Emma's disappearance to hold a candlelight vigil for her missing daughter, and plans to meet with the police in hopes of getting updates on the case.

***

Prior to Emma’s disappearance there is an extensive timeline of her whereabouts and activities. Anyone looking for a complete detailed outline of Emma’s activities should visit the Help Find Emma Fillipoff Facebook page and website. Like any mystery, there are a plethora of clues, happenstances, and details one could overlook. But for the sake of brevity, the following are some of the more important of Emma’s activities before she disappeared, starting on Tuesday, November 20, eight days before she’s last seen outside the hotel.

On Tuesday, surveillance footage captured at the YMCA near downtown Victoria shows her entering and exiting the building several times. Some have suggested Emma might be holding a cell phone in the picture, but it also looks like she could be fidgeting with her hands. Regardless, her behaviour appears to indicate she thought she may be being followed.

On Wednesday, November 21, Emma had a tow truck driver pick her up from the Sandy Merriman House, a women’s shelter, where she was staying. She told the driver to take her to Sooke, a community located approximately 40 kilometres west of Victoria, so they can tow her red Mazda MPV van back to Victoria. It’s later discovered that she told the tow-truck driver that she was planning on surprising her family by moving back to Ontario.

On Friday, November 23, Emma called Shelley in tears around midnight saying she wants to come home. Shelley said her daughter didn’t explain what was upsetting her, but urged her mother to book a flight to Victoria. On Saturday, November 24, Emma calls her mother back, telling her not to come out and that she’ll figure things out on her own. However, later that same evening, Emma called Shelley again. Once again, she sounded upset and asked her mother to fly out and help her pack her belongings. Again, the following morning, Emma called her mother back telling her not to come out.

On Tuesday, November 27, Shelley called the number from which Emma phoned the night before. Someone from the Sandy Merriman House picked up, which surprised Shelley, as she didn’t know her daughter was staying at a shelter. Later that night Emma, sounding in distress, called her mother again asking her to come out. Shelley immediately booked a flight to fly out the next day.

The following day Emma called her mother, yet again, asking her not to come out. However, Shelley decided enough was enough, and that she needed to see her daughter.

During the day of the 28th, Emma purchased a $200 prepaid credit card and a prepaid cell phone from a 7-Eleven in downtown Victoria. Shortly after, she got in a cab and asked to be taken to the airport, but when the driver told her how much the fare will cost (around $60) she said that’s too much (which was odd because she was believed to have had about $2,000-3,000 in one of her bank accounts).

Later that day, about 7PM, is when Dennis Quay ran into Emma, who was wandering the streets of downtown Victoria. Concerned for her safety, Quay called the police. The police arrived, talked to Emma, decided she was OK, and ultimately left her there standing in her bare feet.

Sometime thereafter, Emma was gone.

Some hours later, Shelley arrived in Victoria; Emma was declared a missing person. The police searched Emma’s van and found some of her most valuable possessions, including a laptop, journals, a camera, and her passport. The Victoria Police Department (VicPD), using a dive team, searched the waters of the inner harbour. Shelley formed a search party of volunteers to look for Emma; they scattered the streets of Victoria hoping for any signs of Emma. But other than some unconfirmed sightings of her along the harbour, it seems she’s disappeared without a trace.

During the immediate days following Emma’s disappearance, Shelley walked the streets of Victoria, putting up posters and talking to anyone who claimed to have seen her daughter. At one point, she traveled to the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, talking to the people on the streets there, hoping someone had seen Emma.

Then on the morning of December 5, the $200 prepaid credit card that Emma purchased at the 7-Eleven was “flagged for use” at a gas station near the Juan de Fuca Recreation Centre and Galloping Goose trail, approximately 12 km from downtown Victoria. The man who found the card was questioned by police, but ultimately let go. This same man later contacted Shelley, on multiple occasions, and told her that he’s not sure where he found the card, but the police told him he found the card at the Juan de Fuca Centre. He also told Shelley he’s an alcoholic.

Then Shelley and the Help Find Emma volunteers expanded the search, travelling to parts of Vancouver Island, the mainland, and the Gulf Islands looking for leads. But every tip they got turned up to be a dead end.

A year and a half passed, and then, in May of 2014, a man was captured on surveillance walking into a store in the Gastown neighbourhood of Vancouver with a crumpled-up poster of Emma. He claimed that Emma is his girlfriend and that she wants to be left alone. The man is seen in surveillance footage wearing a green shirt, has multiple tattoos on his arms, and walks with a noticeable limp. The store owners called 911 immediately, but Shelley says the police didn’t show up until the following day to take a report. (VICE contacted the Vancouver Police Department about why they took so long to follow up, they responded by saying any matters to Emma’s case should be directed towards VicPD. VicPD did not respond to a request for a comment on this detail of the case.) To this day, the man has never been publicly identified.

Missing in BC

Emma’s disappearance isn’t an anomaly. Every day, thousands of people vanish around the world. Locally, BC RCMP currently have approximately 57 active missing persons cases on their website.

VICE reached out to the BC RCMP for more information on missing persons in the province, but those emails were not returned. VICE also reached out to the Victoria Police Department for both a comment on Emma’s case, and more information on missing persons statistics in Victoria, but was told nothing more than a press release would be issued at some point in the future regarding Emma’s disappearance.

However, previous data collected by the RCMP in 2015 show that there were 71,000 reports of missing persons in Canada that year alone. British Columbia had, by far, the highest number of missing persons cases out of all the Canadian provinces—nearly 10,000 compared to Ontario’s 6,500—although the RCMP are unsure, statistically, why that is.

The database, or The National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains, was formed into a public site: http://www.canadasmissing.ca. Part of the reason for the creation of the initiative was the RCMP's probe into missing and murdered Indigenous women along Highway 16, or the Highway of Tears. In northern BC, police hoped the public initiative would help solve some of the cases.

However, what has made Emma’s case somewhat different is the amount of media attention it's received. Emma’s case has been covered extensively in newspaper articles, podcasts, and CBC’s Fifth Estate did an episode on the case. Part of the reason for this is how open Shelley is about talking about her daughter’s disappearance. However, not all of the press attention Shelley has received has been positive.

In 2016 Shelley and her son Matt were arrested on charges related to drugs and weapons offences. Although the charges were eventually withdrawn against Shelley (Shelley says she was unaware her son was using her house to store cocaine and weapons), the incident left a row of spiteful comments on the Help Find Emma Facebook Page, comments that Shelley says detracted from the search for Emma.

Theories

Emma Fillipoff spent most of her childhood and teens living with her family in the small town of Perth, Ontario, located just outside of Ottawa. Friends, family, and those who knew Emma say she embodied a “free-spirited” aura. Emma was known for her long walks, her interest in nature, her skills as a photographer, and her artistic expression. Those close to Emma also describe her as intensely loyal, independent, sensitive, and having a good sense of humour. She also kept a plethora of journals, some of which her mother still has. Her mother was a teacher, and her father James an artist. Emma has two brothers—one older, Matthew, one younger, Alexander—and an older sister, Erica.

Shelley told VICE that Emma was closer with her family, especially her younger brother Alexander. One of the reasons Shelley has such a hard time believing Emma is living a self-induced transient lifestyle is how close she is with her younger brother.

“She [Emma] would never do this to Alexander,” said Shelley, adding that if Emma was going to contact anyone, it would be her younger brother.

When asked about her own relationship with her daughter, Shelley said that she was the disciplinary figure in the family, something Emma didn’t always appreciate. Shelley described her relationship with Emma as “guarded, but loving.” Emma was known to be fiercely independent and protective of her thoughts and feelings.

“Never would Emma say she was in trouble or having a problem,” Shelley told VICE.

Emma moved to Victoria in the winter of 2011—prior to that she had lived in Campbell River where she took a cooking program at North Island College on Vancouver Island. She moved back to Perth for a brief while before she decided to move back to the West Coast. When she left Perth with plans to get work when she got to Victoria, and she told those around her that she was “drawn” to Victoria, although didn’t specifically say for what purpose.

While in Victoria Emma bounced around, sometimes staying with friends in their apartments, on boats, and on one occasion she even slept in a tree. She also worked various jobs, including a short stint at a coffee shop where was eventually let go from. Just before her disappearance Emma was working at Red Fish Blue Fish, a popular seasonal eatery located in the inner harbour of downtown Victoria.

Living a somewhat transient lifestyle, Emma seemed to attract a wide array of people. She seemed to enjoy hanging around the Inner Harbour and a popular area filled with colourful houseboats known as Fisherman’s Wharf.

A friend of Emma’s, who asked to remain anonymous citing safety concerns, said Emma stayed on their boat a few times, just weeks before her disappearance. This individual said that at the time they knew Emma to be “very happy,” but looking back they also said Emma seemed to give off the vibe she was running from something.

One of the popular theories, or contributing factors to Emma’s disappearance, is the possible (and likely) deterioration of her mental state prior to her disappearance.

Talking to friends and family it quickly becomes apparent that not only was Emma artistic, but she was poetic—even cryptic—in the way she both spoke and wrote. One of her friends, Mika, who lived with Emma for a bit in 2012, told VICE that emails she received from Emma were fantastical, almost childlike, in their description. And being that Emma was so private, she never really revealed what was going on in her life, often using generalities to describe how she was doing.

Jordan Bonaparte, the host and creator of The Night Time Podcast and Emma Fillipoff is Missing podcast, interviewed two people who Emma stayed with prior to her disappearance where they describe Emma as behaving oddly or displaying signs of mental unrest.

“There was some darkness to her life,” Mika told VICE. “She was mentally stable, and she didn’t want to get help with it…” Mika added she seemed to think that Emma thought she “had it under control.”

“She was in a place where she was trying to heal something in herself,” Mika concluded.

Mika also told VICE that Emma was known to binge drink from time-to-time, and that her diet was especially odd. At times she favoured only popcorn and olives, and at another point she ate primarily fish. Mika even said that Emma at one point joked about self-diagnosing herself as having scurvy.

Prior to moving out west, Emma's parents got divorced, an experience that many of Emma's friends speculate had an impact on her. However, true to Emma's private nature, she never really talked about it with anyone. Shelley also told VICE that several frontline workers from the Sandy Merriman House, where Emma was staying right before her disappearance, told her that in the days leading up to her disappearing she was acting strange, and one staff member even told Shelley she had become afraid of Emma. (Shelley eventually received a cease and desist order from the Victoria Cool Aid Society for repeatedly contacting the Sandy Merriman House. VICE reached out to the Victoria Cool Aid Society for a response, but did not receive a reply before deadline.)

Also, on the day of Emma’s disappearance she appeared to be acting paranoid, as indicated in both the YMCA and 7-Eleven surveillance footage. In both instances, it appears as though Emma is afraid, or anxious, of someone (real or perceived).

Another potential cause of Emma’s disappearance was that she was the victim of foul play. Publically, no one has ever been charged with a crime in relation to Emma’s disappearance, but during the immediate aftermath there was one potential person of interest who was questioned and polygraphed by VicPD and the RCMP: Julien Huard.

Julien and Emma met in Perth, prior to Emma moving to Victoria. They formed a friendship, and Julien developed a crush on Emma. Julien claimed on The Night Time Podcast that his relationship with Emma became somewhat romantic while in Perth, although even by his own account, she didn’t have much time for him once they were both in Victoria.

“I don't quite know what definition most people give to a crush but let's say that it happened in an instant, I just knew I had to get to know her, I don't get that feeling often. My feelings for her never changed but I was hoping I could get over that so we could be friends,” Julien told VICE in a Facebook message.

Sometime after Emma moved to Victoria, Julien also decided to move to Victoria. He outlined, quite extensively, his reasoning for the move in Bonaparte’s podcast, and it appears to be one giant coincidence, although some people remained suspicious of Julien’s actions, given the timing of his move, and his feelings for Emma.

“My two years in Victoria went by in a blur,” Julien told VICE. “First two months were great, everything was new, I was taking kayak courses, meeting new friends, I saw Emma, which… was the best 10 [minutes]. Then November came and everything including the weather turned upside down. I saw more of the island during [December] looking for her than during the next three years.”

Julien also claims he briefly saw Emma the day she disappeared. Julien was riding the bus when he spotted Emma on Pandora Street, near Alix Goolden Hall. He got off the bus and approached Emma asking if she needed help. According to the Help Find Emma site, Emma didn’t really respond to Julien (she shook her head in response to Julien’s questions), so Julien, frustrated, decided he was done interacting with Emma.

Julien was cleared by both the RCMP and VicPD, and, publicly, there appears to be no current suspects in Emma’s disappearance.

Another potential theory is that Emma vanished on purpose to live a transient lifestyle. Emma was known to move around and seemed to enjoy staying in different places. She also had no problem meeting people and making friends; however, given various account that paint a dire mental state of Emma on the day of her disappearance it’s hard to imagine this scenario.

Recently, Garry Gray, a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Victoria, and his colleague Brigitte Benning have written a paper (which is still under review and has not been published yet) called “Crowdsourcing Criminology: Social Media and Citizen Policing in Missing Persons Cases.” The paper explores crowdsourcing criminology with its relationship to news making criminology, using Emma’s case as a case study.

As part of the paper, Gray and a team of his students explored three different geographical possibilities of how Emma could have travelled from the Empress Hotel to the Juan de Fuca Recreation Centre (where the pre-paid credit card was allegedly found). They split up into three groups: one took a car from the area, another group took the bus, and the third walked. The groups concluded that the possibilities of where Emma went, or was taken, “was very broad.” Given the amount of roads, bus routes, and walking trails, there seemed to be an inordinate amount of directions of where Emma could have headed.

The paper also notes that while re-tracing the potential steps of Emma, members of the groups noticed “in certain areas along the way there was poor lighting and many of the outdoor spaces were far from the public eye. These physical elements, such as lighting and visibility in public spaces, speak to the possible absence of capable guardians in Emma’s situation if she walked a similar path.” In essence, Emma could have been a potential preferred target given the geographical and situational circumstances.

Jasper Smith, a private investigator who worked on Emma’s case, and owner of Due Diligence Canada, told VICE, “It’s a very difficult case…45-minutes after the police have spoken to her, she’s disappeared into thin air.” Smith added, “There are so many possibilities to this… it’s impossible to rule them all out.”

Smith added that there are a plethora of theories on what happened to Emma: she could have been abducted; she could have run away; she could have committed suicide; she could have gotten on a boat and sailed to the US; and she could be the victim of foul play.

“Without any evidence of wrongdoing you can suspect a number of people, but that’s useless if she went on her volition and intentionally disappeared,” Smith added.

For Shelley, Mika, and everyone else close to Emma, not knowing what happened is the most distressing feeling.

“There’s no frustration comparable…It happens, and it’s not like a death where you get over it, it’s always there…” Mika told VICE.

The disappearance of her daughter has left Shelley with post-traumatic stress and unable to work. She spends almost all of her time looking for Emma.

These days it’s hard for Shelley to think about a positive outcome when it comes to Emma.

“I am not buying a happy ending at all...unfortunately what’s sticking in my mind is that someone has her,” Shelley told VICE. She added that thoughts of sex work, Emma having a psychotic break, being involved in drugs, and even human trafficking are all potential scenarios.

But despite these negative thoughts and feelings, Shelley continues to search for Emma in hopes of any new leads, clues, or an indication that she’s OK.

“We are sick with worry and we just need to know that you’re OK. If you don’t want to come home, it’s fine, we just need to know you’re OK.”

If you have information regarding Emma Fillipoff’s disappearance please contact VicPD or the The Help Find Emma Fillipoff Facebook Page.

A Houston woman suspected of mailing a homemade bomb to President Obama last year was caught not by attentive neighbors or parents, but by the hair of her own cat, the Guardian reports.

According to court papers filed last week in Houston, Julia Poff, 46, was arrested on suspicion of sending homemade explosives to Obama, Texas governor Greg Abbott, and the head of the Social Security Administration, Carolyn Colvin, last year. While thankfully none of the devices detonated, the documents claim Abbott barely avoided "severe burns and death."

The decision to target three government officials allegedly grew from a domestic dispute between Poff and her ex-husband. According to court documents, Poff was upset "because she had not received support" from him and somehow decided that Abbott, the former Texas Attorney General, was to blame. She had also been denied Social Security benefits and had spoken openly about her distaste for President Obama, which may have influenced her to act against Colvin and the former president, according to the New York Times.

In October 2016, Poff allegedly cooked up a homemade explosive device using black powder, pyrotechnic powder, and a salad dressing cap, and stuffed the materials into a cigarette pack before mailing it off to Abbott, the Houston Chronicle reports. Abbott ended up opening the package, but it didn't detonate. Similar packages were also reportedly sent to the White House and the Social Security Administration, but were intercepted.

The package that had been addressed to Obama was the one that reportedly led the FBI straight to Poff. According to the Chronicle, the shoddy packaging job included some small cat hairs on one of the shipping labels. The FBI was then able to test the hairs and determined "the cat hair on the Obama package was microscopically consistent with the hair of one of Poff's cats." Authorities were able to track down the shipping label and cigarette purchase to Poff, as well.

According to the Guardian, Poff has been charged with "mailing injurious articles and transporting explosives with the intent to kill and injure," as well as food stamp fraud and false bankruptcy declaration. If convicted, she could spend multiple decades behind bars, the Times reports.

Tufts University has postponed an event featuring short-lived White House spokesman and colourful conversationalist Anthony Scaramucci after the Mooch threatened to sue his alma mater's paper over a negative article about him, the Boston Globe reports.

The article was written by 26-year-old Tufts grad student Camilo Caballero, who argued that Scaramucci should be removed from his spot on Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy advisory board, which Scaramucci has held since 2016.

In a pair of Tufts Daily op-eds published earlier this month, Caballero called Scaramucci "irresponsible, inconsistent, [and] an unethical opportunist" who "sold his soul in contradiction to his own purported beliefs" and will "diminish the values" of Tufts by remaining on the board.

Along with the articles, Caballero and nearly 250 other present and former students and staff signed a petition to boot the Mooch.

Scaramucci responded this weekend with a letter from his lawyer, demanding that Caballero and the Daily issue a retraction and an apology immediately.

"Neither Mr. Caballero nor the Tufts Daily can credibly hide behind shield of opinion, because the Article plainly presents as fact alleged Scaramucci conduct as unethical and dishonest," the letter reads. "The Article's allegations are not presented as opinion but rather as false facts."

If the Daily doesn't apologize and retract the statements, Scaramucci "will be forced to take further legal action," the letter concluded.

Instead of saying a tearful sorry, Daily published the cease-and-desist letter online and in print, and Tufts subsequently postponed Scaramucci's scheduled speech at the university on Monday until the "legal action" is resolved, Tufts spokesman Patrick Collins told the Globe.

"We're disappointed that Mr. Scaramucci has taken this action," Collins said.

It looks like the Mooch is feeling pretty disappointed, too. "I’m shocked that a university that I love and have been a part of for 35 years is silencing that debate because of my request for an apology," he said in an interview with the Globe Sunday.

It's unclear whether Tufts will ultimately remove Scaramucci from his position on the advisory board, but if he is, at least it would give him more time to work on his own journalistic aspirations.

Chris Herwig is a photographer who got obsessed with bus stops in the former Soviet Union. He's now put them together into the biggest collection of Soviet bus stop photos in the world, according to him. He's just launched a campaign on Kickstarter to put them all together in a book.

VICE: How did you get obsessed with Soviet bus stops?
Chris Herwig: They're just really cool. I expected that they'd have one standard bus stop, a mould. You need a bus stop? Ok we'll build you a standard bus stop.

A friend in Latvia said back in the day you could go from one end of the Soviet Union to the other, and you'd go to a canteen and order a chicken kiev, and it would be the exact same chicken kiev that you'd get in Riga, or freakin Vladivostock. It was like they only had one chicken kiev, you know? Everything was like, you know...

Mcdonalds?
Yeah. If it was going to be crap it was going to be crap for everyone. For some reason this isn't the case for bus stops. It was an opportunity for artists to make money, one of the only options for them. They grabbed as many materials and ideas as they could and put it all into their bus stops.

People don't even use them. Some of them are disgusting, they're dark, they're not inviting. Some of them are just normal bus stops, or they try but they just don't look that cool. Most of the really cool bus stops come in bunches. They're a lot more connected to the desire for local artists or communities to do something with their bus stops, and they're much more useful for their public art presence or to cheer up the town.

On some highways every 500 metres there will be great bus stops, with no houses or villages or anything around. There's these highways and then down in a field with corn growing around it is a bus stop. There's no road there. It's hard to work out why in a time they were watching their pennies and didn't want to be over the top, just functional, they built these.

In the book I'm trying to show the best of the best. If it's just sad it's.... well sad bus stops is another book.

Rokiskis, Lithuania

Do you know how this bus stop art project started? Why'd they do it?
I think it was for public art. A way that artists could do something, it's small and insignificant enough that they could be creative. Some of them promote local culture, like in Kyrgyzstan there are some that are shaped like a Kirghiz hat.

But mostly it was like, what the fuck are they doing? Why did they want fancy bus stops? To be honest I have no idea. It seems like the last place you'd see fancy bus stops. You expect them in a fancy place with fancy people.

Were they ever used as bus stops? Like, did buses stop there?
Back in the day probably. They'd drive by. People were working the farms or something, I don't know, maybe they caught buses. I did see people standing near a couple. Not inside. Next to it.

Some people might think it's weird for a guy to just go around taking photos of old bus stops. Did anyone have any problems with you doing it?
In Lithuania a mini-bus pulled up and the bus driver got out, he wasn't really yelling at me but he didn't want me to take pictures of bus stop. It was a cool bus stop! Like a scoop. Just cool, one line of curved concrete and some poles. There was a lot of garbage in it, around it was grimy.

In Kazakhstan people were yelling at me like I was going to take pictures of the nastiest stuff in their country to go back to the west and tell people how nasty their country is, and I was like, no, this is the coolest thing around here, I'm sorry, this is really cool, you just don't realise it.

In a few countries I hired taxis, so I'd have a local with me, I thought they'd be able to help me find cool bus stops. I didn't think they'd be fanatical or anything, but I thought that if they'd lived there for the last 60 years they might have noticed them, but the drivers were frickin clueless. We'd have to go to the taxi cafe and for hours they'd rack their brains, then we'd fly down the highway straight past one and I'd be like STOP STOP STOP and they'd go oh yeahhhh.

In Abkhazia, it's not a country but it seems like one, they've got the border locked up and they've ruled themselves for about 20 years, they're settled in. They're trying to become independent from Georgia. The taxi driver who was taking me around argued about the rate at the end of the day. I wasn't in the country as a photographer so if he'd brought the officials in I'd be caught being there without proper permission. He held his hand up to his head like a gun to say that I should be giving him $20,000 so I don't get put in front of a firing squad. No Abkhaz can go across the border to Georgia and he was driving me to the border so he just assumed I was a Georgian spy.

Yeah they freak out about pictures over there. I had to use two cards, and shoot one photo on one card which I could show the cops, and then put in the real card to take the rest. I'd keep the real card in my underpants and no-one wanted to search there.

Saratak, Armenia

Did finding cool bus stops in the Soviet Union change your mind about communism?
That is the worst question ever. It's not fair to equate communism with the Soviet Union. Did it change my opinion of the Soviet Union? Yes. It broke up some of the stereotypes. There were these individuals who were doing fun crazy things, people you could relate to. They weren't Stalin or Lenin, they were just ordinary people having fun and making a buck.

Why don't you take pictures of people like normal photographers do?
I took photos of people before I started hunting bus stops. I lived in Kazakhstan and spent a lot of time with people, they were really hospitable, sometimes too hospitable, like, the number of vodka shots before 8am was crazy. In one village in the north of Kazakhstan I was shooting something at a school for the UN and before school even started there was this 80-year-old principal with a stick in her hand standing over me saying YOU DRINK! TAKE THE SHOT! Really lovely and genuine people though. You get invited into yurts in the hills, sleep on the floor, they've got a pile of mats on the floor and when sleepytime comes you roll out the mats. It was great, I miss it.

@carlylearson

Karakol, Kyrgyzstan
Chris Herwig

Taraz, Kazakhstan
Chris Herwig

Saratak, Armenia
Chris Herwig

Saratak, Armenia
Chris Herwig

Rokiskis, Lithuania
Chris Herwig

Pitsunda, Abkhazia
Chris Herwig

Pitsunda, Abkhazia
Chris Herwig

Niitsiku, Estonia
Chris Herwig

Lelyukhivka, Ukraine
Chris Herwig

Kootsi, Estonia
Chris Herwig

Gagra, Abkhazia
Chris Herwig

Falesti, Moldova
Chris Herwig

This story first appeared on VICE Quebec.

Unlike in August, where far right group La Meute solely paraded quietly in the streets of Quebec, several ultranationalist groups agreed to demonstrate together in the capital on Saturday.

By 11 o'clock, a few hundred people were gathered in a park not far from the National Assembly. Some were wearing the colors of Storm Alliance, while others sported the paws of the wolf from La Meute or were wearing the military camo of the III%.

Some members of the militia III%. - Photo | Alice Chiche

Members of the III% militia were present to ensure, they said, the safety of their colleagues on the far right. "There are far-left groups that come to scrap, as we saw this summer, we are here to protect people who protest," said one III%er.

The closeness between the various ultranationalist groups was obvious.

Sylvain Brouillette from La Meute (left) and Dave Tregget from Storm Alliance - Photo by Alice Chiche

When the march began at 12:10 PM, the two organizing groups split in two. Storm Alliance took a first stand forward where public speaking was expected. One hundred meters behind, La Meute advanced without a word, as per the course during their march last August.

It looked relatively organized.

The counter-demonstration had been going on since 11 o'clock in front of the National Assembly, but the police, in large numbers, contained those people who came to contest the rally of the extreme right. A confrontation between the two camps seemed conceivable. Along the outskirts, the skinhead group Atalante Quebec showed itself, flags in the wind, chanting slogans against the Antifas.

Atalanta members left the police line as quickly as they arrived, but shortly after, sneaking in to take pictures, I found myself in front of their ranks. Always masked, they chanted slogans against the media and Antifa. Members of La Meute circled around them as they questioned the group. Some of them took up Atalanta's slogans in chorus.

Atalanta members. - Photo | Alice Chiche

While watching Atalanta members, I noticed that some were wearing hoodies with the logo of the Soldiers of Odin. I tried to speak to them, but I was quickly made to understand that no one was allowed to talk to the media.

When I questioned Dave Tregget, a former member of Odin's Soldiers about Atalanta's presence, he said, "They did not do anything illegal, they expressed their opinions."

By 2:30 PM about 20 people had been arrested by police, although the day ended with 44 arrests.

Photo | Alice Chiche

Photo | Alice Chiche

Photo | Alice Chiche

Photo | Alice Chiche

If you aren't already one of the majority of Americans who's embarrassed by our current president, then you may just want to see how Trump treated the Navajo code talkers he met with at the White House on Monday afternoon.

According to CBS News, a White House event on Monday was supposed to honour some of the 13 surviving Navajo who helped the US military in both world wars by using their unwritten language as code to share vital information. Standing alongside three Navajo war heroes, Trump somehow managed to turn a short speech about gratitude into a racist joke about Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren:

"You're very very special people. You were here long before any of us were here. Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago," Trump says in the video. "They call her Pocahontas. But you know what. I like you. Because you are special."

Trump, of course, was speaking about Warren, who has claimed to have Cherokee and Delaware tribal heritage. There's no documentation to prove that claim—she has said she was just going off family stories about her ancestry—but neither is there proof that Warren lied about being Native in order to get jobs, as some of her critics have alleged. Republicans have attacked Warren over the issue before, but the "Pocahontas" nickname is all Trump's doing.

"It is deeply unfortunate that President of the United States cannot even make it through a ceremony honoring these heroes without having to throw out a racial slur," Warren told CBS after the event.

Later on Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded to a question about the incident by saying, "I think what most people find offensive is Sen. Warren lying about her heritage to advance her career."

While cringeworthy, Trump's comment Monday was hardly surprising. He turned his Black History Month comments into a rant about fake news, botched the name of an African country at the UN, and launched paper towels at Puerto Rican hurricane victims. And while his inability to properly load a pickup truck with supplies might have been funny and equally embarrassing, on Monday no one was laughing.

The following piece contains spoilers for Call Me by Your Name.

Partway through Call Me by Your Name, which hit theaters Friday and may be the best queer film of the year, 17-year-old Elio nestles on the couch with his parents as his mother reads from a 16th century fairy tale. It’s about a knight torn over whether to confess his love to a princess: “Is it better to speak or to die?” he asks. The question hovers over Elio; though he hardly knows it himself, his parents can already see that he’s falling in love for the first time. We don’t yet know whether Elio (Timothée Chalamet) or Oliver (Armie Hammer), the 24-year-old American student visiting the family’s villa in Italy for the summer, is the knight or the princess. But it’s clear that what’s unfolding between them is a storybook romance.

And holy shit, is it beautiful. I don’t just mean the sun-dipped Italian countryside where Elio and Oliver spend languid summer days around the pool, or Luca Guadagnino’s delicate direction, or the stunning performances at the center of the film, or even the simple joy of watching Armie Hammer flail about to The Psychedelic Furs at the town disco. The film broadens the novel it’s based on into a paragon of homoerotic discovery, as ideal as the ancient statues Elio’s father, an American professor of Greco-Roman arts, pulls up from the sea to study.

Unlike so many other movies about romance between men, from Brokeback Mountain to Stranger by the Lake, the love that develops between Elio and Oliver isn’t marked by derision, violence, or the consequences of breaking with hetero norms. In fact, despite their difference in age and the early-80s setting, their relationship is hardly transgressive at all—least of all to Elio’s parents. Elio’s sexual coming of age, from his first kiss to his first time, is one that anyone could wish for, a near-Platonic ideal. All of which heralds Call Me by Your Name as a watershed moment in queer cinema.

And for all the same reasons, it’s almost painful to watch, too.

Straight people, of course, are used to seeing idealized portrayals of their past or potential sex lives on screen. But I don’t know that I've ever seen anything like this. Personally, I didn’t know what to do with myself when I say. This was the first idealized gay coming-of-age narrative I’d ever seen, and it made my heart swell. But it also made me reflect on how far from ideal my own list of firsts had been. The pleasures of finally getting a Call Me by Your Name were mixed with the ache of looking back at my own experience through a new lens.

Nearly every aspect of queer experience depicted in the film feels calibrated to smooth over the challenges gay men have faced. On the coast of Northern Italy in 1983, before the AIDS epidemic had reached a fever pitch that would come to associate gay sex with death and disease, Elio and Oliver are immersed in a world of music and art. Their courtship is one of ideas, a dance between intellects. The vigor of their young bodies is on display too, an eroticism echoed in the ancient art studied by Elio’s father. Just as Ancient Greece held up love between men as the highest ideal, to Elio’s intellectual parents, the love between their son and Oliver is more than natural; it’s beautiful and something to be cherished.

As heat between them builds, Elio isn’t content to torment himself over his desire, as so many queer adolescents might. He is the knight who eventually speaks his love to the princess: He gets horny and frustrated. He fools around and loses his virginity to a girl. He jerks off. He sticks his face in an empty pair of Oliver’s old swim trunks. And when he’s driven to write furiously in his journal, he doesn’t grappling with some existential sense of shame—it’s just the normal scribbles of a teenage crush, which is remarkable to see in itself when that boy’s crush is on a man.

Watch Todd Haynes discuss his lesbian drama Carol with VICE:

Even the movie’s resistance to showing Elio’s first time on screen, a fact some critics have lamented, or making clear which position he takes—though it’s assumed that he bottoms, as in the novel—fits with its overall glossing of gay experience into a high sheen. Yes, gay sex involves negotiation, doing something that might seem unnatural the first time around, and no small amount of pain. We already know this. What we do see as they begin to play around is Oliver ask Elio, “Are you okay?” and “Does this make you happy?” And we later see Oliver assure him, when Elio’s raging libido drives him to fuck a peach, that he’s not some sick freak for feeling overwhelmed by lust.

The pinnacle of this fairy tale, aside from a scene that finds its two main characters drunk and literally dancing in the streets, is the self-assurance inherent to doing as its title asks. “Call me by your name, and I’ll call you by mine,” Oliver whispers to Elio as they lay tangled up in bed, their first night together creeping into the early morning hours. Nothing could be further from feeling ashamed of your desire than calling out your name in the face of your lover's. Can you imagine feeling that way at 17? After your first time? I still can’t, and I’ve lived twice as long.

Maybe all the rest of this extraordinary film—a summer spent in Italy, a knight asleep in your own bed, freedom achieved from regressive social mores—can be chalked up to the stuff of fantasy. But Elio’s relationship with his parents, and their intuition, understanding, and complete emotional support as awakens to his sexuality, hits much closer to home. Portrayals of young queer people and their parents, from Ma Vie En Rose to Pariah, are generally fraught with pain and rejection, or at minimum deal with the struggles of acceptance. For so many, the truth is far worse: an estimated 40 percent of homeless youth are LGBTQ kids rejected by their families.

“Remember that I’m here,” Elio’s father tells him after Oliver heads home as summer ends. Many parents would wish their love away, the professor admits, and his own father would have carted him off. Then he offers his son the kind of validation and wisdom that so many queer people spend their whole lives searching for, having never found it at home: That the bond he shared with Oliver was rare and special and something to savor. That love, however fleeting, should never be taken for granted. That hearts only have so much fire in them—so tend to the blaze, even when it breaks.

I’m not sure how I might have felt, or what fantasies about my romantic life I might have been inspired to dream up, had Call Me by Your Name come out when I was Elio’s age. Maybe it was better not having a movie like this to compare to my keg-party first kiss (did that even count?), or to the first night I spent crammed into a single bed with a boy in my dorm, who seemed genuinely pissed (at me?) when he didn’t last very long. Without a film like this to watch growing up, I only felt estranged from my straight peers and the love stories they devoured (go ahead and let go of that board, Jack). There was nothing to show me what I was missing.

If straight fairy tales throw obstacles between straight lovers—witches, curses, sinking ships—then maybe a queer one takes away the real ones so many of us face every day, so we can see, perhaps for the first time, a world without so much standing in the way of love.

Follow Naveen Kumar on Twitter.

For decades, America’s largest city has faced seemingly indefatigable dual crises: mental health on one hand, and homelessness on the other. New York City is unique in having a “right to shelter” baked into local jurisprudence, and yet the sprawling network of homes and hospitals built to accommodate the masses hasn’t ever been enough to truly take care of every single person in need. In 2017, the city sits amid an especially cruel maelstrom: homelessness is at or near Great Depression-era levels; drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for people under 50 nationwide; and many of those affected pass through a savagely punitive criminal justice system every single day.

Whether because of budgetary constraints or a lack of political imagination, it has long been accepted that government—even New York's ostensibly progressive one—can only do so much about these problems. That’s where a plethora of nonprofit organizations have emerged over the years to care for thousands of the city’s most vulnerable. The Bridge is one of them.

A client taking part in a cooking class in a communal kitchen

“This is what I would say about our clients: People don’t see them," Susan Wiviott, the organization’s CEO, told me in a recent interview.

Photographer Aviva Klein recently spent time at a number of The Bridge’s housing units spread across New York City. The beauty here lies in the mundane, as Klein documented the daily lives of those American policymakers and cultural leaders often neglect to see. We also sat down with Wiviott to understand who it is, exactly, that The Bridge helps, and why their work is necessary. Here’s what she had to say.

VICE: Who is the target demographic for your work? Is there a type?
Susan Wiviott: You walk by them, you walk around them, or you walk away from them sometimes. You don't really sit down and listen to them, their stories, where they come from, and what their lives have been like. What always strikes me when I do that is that most of them have lived lives that many of us who are much more privileged can't even really imagine. It's not like they just became mentally ill. A lot of them have had very traumatic experiences in their lives. Starting back when they were children, a lot of them have been in foster care, institutions, hospitals, homeless shelters, prisons, jails. They've been physically abused. They sort of end up at a point in their lives where they want to take back some control of their life. We help them think about what they want to do, and help them do that, whatever that might be.

It varies widely, for different clients. For some, the fact that they now have their their own place to live that's their's is huge, because you can get to being 30 or 40, and never really had a place to live. For others, they want to go back to school, or work. I listen to people talk about how people don't want to work, and probably the first thing that so many people say is, "I want to get a job." They want to be part of the world. They want to work, be independent, make money, and want sort of everything that the rest of us want. We don't want to be dependent on people.

At its housing units, The Bridge tends to have a recreational community area where clients can socialize, watch TV, and play games

With that said, serious mental illness is a lifelong chronic illness. That really can be very debilitating, and make it difficult to do all of those things that people want to do. One of the fears a lot of our clients live with, particularly those who are doing really well, is that they're going to wake up one morning, and it's all going to crumble. So I think that's a stressor that, again, most of us don't live with.

The other thing that I think surprises people who aren't familiar with this is how long it can take somebody who, say, has had sort of a psychotic break, or has been hospitalized, to put the pieces back together again. You see this with young people, who are just developing a serious mental illness, which often happens in young adulthood, when people have their first psychotic break. We see a number of people like this, but who have their entire lives ahead of them. And you certainly don't want them to be in and out of hospitals their whole life.

What kind of services does The Bridge provide to these people?
We work with about 2,700 people a year, and 1,200 of those are living in our housing. So we don't work with huge numbers of people, but we work very intensively with the people that are part of our programs, or our housing, which is in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and in Manhattan. We own 23 buildings, so they're in different buildings in different locations. Then we lease about 500 apartments in the community, that we support with services, but the clients live independently in those apartments. The housing ranges from fairly intensive on-site rehab services, to much more independent, something we call ‘graduate apartments,’ which have a rental subsidy, but the level of support is fairly minimal. These are people who are very stable, and can really live on their own. It's just a way of staying connected to us, and we see them once a month. So there's a continuum of services for people.

We don't provide treatment in the housing; treatment is usually taking place in an outside program. But we have a sort of higher clinical presence, with a higher staff-to-client ratio. We’ll have social workers, part-time nurses, case managers, maybe a substance abuse counselor or vocational counselor, all on site. It sort of depends on who the population is, and the kind of program it is. Most of our clients are in treatment somewhere else, so they may come to our clinic, or day program, or a substance abuse treatment program. So they're engaged in a lot of treatment, and other kinds of support, to make sure that we're able to help them in the way that they want, and need.

Just by nature, it seems, The Bridge interacts with other organizations, and clients come into contact with a number of governmental institutions, be it public hospitals, shelters, or jails. How does The Bridge fit into this constellation of help?
Supportive housing in New York is very much a patchwork. The housing gets built with funding from different sources, which often depends on who's using that building. We have some buildings where most of the people are coming right out of hospitals, others where most people are coming right out of shelters, and buildings that just have younger people in them, because there was targeted money for young adults. The sort of good news part of supportive housing is that it really works: it keeps people healthy, and they live longer. We also have a growing aging population, and so we've developed specialized, targeted programming for our older adults.

A client from The Bridge taking a walk with a member of the ACT (Assertive Community Treatment) Team

I have a son who did some work in city government, and is now in graduate school in Chicago. He has a part-time job working for an organization that's trying to develop supportive housing there, and what he said to me is, 'You have no clue how bad things are here." There's nothing, even in other big cities. When they talk about supportive housing, they're talking about ten units at a time. It's just going nowhere, and there's no money, or funding, for it. Even though there are huge problems in New York, there's a lot of money in this realm. We're building a lot of new housing. It's a priority. If the governor and mayor can agree on anything, it is supportive housing. They've both really devoted significant resources to it, and we're really lucky in that way.

Like you mentioned with supportive housing, these services normally exist in a patchwork. There's a number of nonprofits and organizations that work together, to sort of fill in the gaps of government. Where did your group come from?
The Bridge is 64 years old. It came about when they were just starting to deinstitutionalize people, and the very first drugs were coming out. It was actually started by a group of mostly Jewish people, who were being released from hospitals when they realized that there was no help for them once they got out. It really started as a self-help organization. They were sort of running the organization; it was people who needed support in the community, and had no place. There weren't many organizations like this.

What happened over the years is that, as tens of thousands of people were relieved from psychiatric hospitals, the government realized that if you just set people out onto the street, this is going to be a failure. A lot of them were poor, didn't have a lot of education, had a serious mental illness, and were going to end up on the street. So [government] started thinking about what to do, and then it dovetailed with another trend, which was that government realized that it wasn't always very good at providing direct services. And it was very expensive; government employees are expensive, with unions and huge pensions. So they started contracting out these services.

IThat's how the organization grew up. In New York City, you had the additional factor, and this is very key in the field of mental illness: the right to shelter. We now have this absolutely huge, unmanageable problem that we sort of created, in a way, but if you had all of these seriously mentally-ill people in shelter: A) that's really a bad environment for them, and B) they ended up going in and out of hospitals, and jails. They tended to enter a shelter, and never leave. You had to have a solution for that. Since a lot of people would need support for a long period of time, the city, as part of its efforts to provide housing, really created an enormous and really incredibly well-functioning network for people who need help. When I said patchwork, I didn't mean it in a negative way—you just have a lot of different components.

But at this specific moment in New York City, with the growing crisis of homelessness, the kind of revolving door between criminal justice and substance abuse, with mentally ill patients going in and out of jail here, how much good can you really do?
Many of us know people who have a serious mental illness. I can't tell you how many times I go somewhere, and someone says, "What do you do?," and I tell them, and they go, "Oh my gosh, my brother has schizophrenia." But when you have resources, or families that have resources, the way that you engage with the system is very different. I know families where the parents and the siblings take care of that person. When they end up in the hospital, they make sure they're in the right hospital. They make sure they don't lose their housing, end up homeless, and that they always have their medication. But you can only do that if you have resources.

A lot of people who we work with, because of their behavior, have completely alienated their family. Mental illness runs in some families, and sometimes they can’t help, or are also struggling with homelessness, or incarceration. I like to think that what we do is provide that help, when they don't have other resources for getting it. I don't mean this in a condescending way, but they don't have other people to help them. Sometimes when you have a serious mental illness, you cannot do it by yourself. You can't fix it alone. You need help. So that's what we do.

Follow John Surico and Aviva Klein on Twitter and Instagram.