The man accused of attacking a group of Muslim worshippers, killing one, was “brainwashed” by far-right propaganda, the prosecution argued in a UK court today. The Crown said the man had emails from the far-right Canadian outlet Rebel Media saved on his phone.

The prosecution alleges that 48-year-old Darren Osborne drove his van into a mass of Muslim worshippers outside of London’s Finsbury Park Mosque on June 18. The attack claimed the life of 51-year-old Makram Ali. Eleven other people were hit by the van but survived their injuries. Osborne has denied he was behind the attack in the trial that began yesterday.

In court, Osborne has been described by the Crown as a “loner” who was quickly radicalized by media in just a few weeks. The Guardian reports that the incident that incited Osborne’s radicalization was when he first watched a BBC drama about the Rochdale grooming scandal. From there he was, as his former partner of 20 years described it in court, “obsessed” with Islam.

This obsession brought Osborne to far-right outlets like Rebel Media and Infowars, according to the prosecution. Osborne searched for material posted by former English Defence League leader turned Rebel Media host Tommy Robinson several times in the days leading up to the attack. The court heard that Osborne received a direct message from Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First—the account US President Donald Trump controversially retweeted—but prosecutors do not know what message the DM contained.

In the days leading up to the attack, the court heard, Osborne had screengrabbed two mass emails written by Robinson, according to information gathered by investigators from the defendant’s iphones and ipad. The emails were mass sent to Rebel subscribers in the UK and signed by Robinson. The first came on June 11 ahead of the Rebel Media-supported UK Against Hate rally, a reaction to the Manchester suicide bombing terrorist attack perpetrated by Salman Abedi in May of last year. The email invitation stated that “there is a nation within a nation forming just beneath the surface of the UK. It is a nation built on hatred, on violence and on Islam.”

“It has now been left to us, the ordinary people of the United Kingdom to stand up to hate, to unite and in one voice say 'no more,'”the Rebel Media email said.

The second mail out related to another Rebel Media campaign, regarding a rape allegation against Syrian refugees sent out on June 14.

Rebel Media founder Ezra Levant refused to offer comment to VICE Canada for this story.

The court also heard that Osborne had visited the Infowars website for a story written by the conspiracy site’s Paul Joseph Watson called “Proof: Muslims celebrated terror attack in London.” The story, at one point, states that polls have shown a significant amount of “Muslims living in both the Middle East and the west show alarmingly high levels of support for violent jihad”—a recent Pew research study has said that assertion is not accurate.

Several patrons who were at a pub with Osborne the day before the attack spoke to the court as well. The Independent reports that the patrons described Osborne as “mentally agitated and disturbed” and said he was writing a letter in the pub. A bartender said that Osborne was murmuring about Muslims, saying—in reference to an al-Quds Day pro-Palestinian march—that “Muslims were going to March in London tomorrow… all the Muslims are getting together and marching for ISIS.’”

According to the witnesses who testified, Osborne was telling people at the bar he was a soldier (he’s not) and was confronted by Callum Spencer, a Royal Engineers soldier who asked what regiment he was in. The Independent reports that Spencer told the court that Osborne said, "I'm going to kill Muslims, your family are going to be Muslims, they're all terrorists and I'm going to take it into my own hands.”

The letter, which CCTV also caught Osborne writing, was found in the van after the attack; CCTV footage also showed the man renting a van the day before the attack. The letter, which addresses Sadiq Khan, Lily Allen, and Jeremy Corbyn is a rambling, racist read and includes lines like “get back to the desert, you raping inbred bastards and climb back on your camels.”

Tommy Robinson has been frequently criticized for his coverage and the tone of his commentaries—one Guardian journalist called him a “hate preacher” in a tweet after the Finsbury attack. Robinson is the founder of the far-right English Defence League which has been criticized for having connections to white supremacy—Robinson left the EDL in 2013 after he deemed it too extreme. For several years Robinson has been one of the most vocal voices against Muslims in the UK—he condemned the Finsbury Mosque attack after it happened.

The Rebel Media has long-faced criticism for their content—frequently anti-Islam—on both sides of the Atlantic, such as the spreading of a truther movement around the Quebec City Mosque shootings, and coverage of “white genocide” (a conspiracy which is a favourite of the neo-Nazi and alt-right movement). This all came to a head for the news outlet last summer when Rebel Media correspondent Faith Goldy attended the Charlottesville protest that resulted in the death of Heather Heyer. Goldy was criticized for her sympathetic coverage for the alt-right participants of the rally. She was fired later in the week for going on a neo-Nazi podcast affiliated with the Daily Stormer. The fallout from their coverage saw Rebel Media get blasted from news outlets of all stripes, a mass exodus of its correspondents, a highly publicized loss of advertisers, and a denouncement by Canadian Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer.

Osborne’s trial carries on tomorrow.

William Blake says he has no issue with people smoking weed—but he doesn’t want it happening in his homes.

Blake is landlord at a number of duplexes, multiplexes, townhouses, and condominiums in and around Toronto. He said he’s also one of many Ontario landlords with major concerns about how cannabis legalization will impact rental housing if tenants are allowed to grow their own plants and smoke weed legally.

“This is one of the most important issues for Ontario landlords in many, many years,” Blake, who is a member of the Ontario Landlords Association told VICE.

When the federal government legalizes cannabis this summer, Canadians will be allowed to grow up to four plants in their homes and possess and consume weed legally, but provinces have the authority to set their own rules. In Ontario, the only place it will be legal to consume weed recreationally will be in private residences, which the province defines as “private self-contained living quarters in any multi-unit building or facility." All public spaces, workplaces, cars, and boats are off-limits. Medical cannabis users will be subject to the same restrictions as tobacco-smokers.

But now landlords like Blake are saying they want their properties to be off limits as well. Blake told VICE the issue of cigarette smoke is one of the most common complaints he comes across. He includes a no-smoking stipulation as part of his lease agreements with tenants but said in the past he’s had an issue where someone in the basement was smoking and it became a problem for the upstairs tenants—a family with a baby. In the end, he had to go through the landlord-tenant dispute process to evict his tenant, a process that took months.

Ontario landlords can’t update current leases to include a ban on smoking weed, though they can add it to new leases.

Blake said he wants the province to take Saskatchewan’s approach of potentially banning using, selling, and growing weed in rental units.

“It seems draconian,” Blake said, “but we don’t know any other way to protect the other tenants.” He said he would be OK with people smoking weed on a balcony or in a yard, as long as it wasn't bothering anyone else.

The primary concerns around both growing and consuming in rental housing seem to be that the smell will bother other tenants or that the second-hand smoke could pose health issues. However, there is very little actual research to suggest that second-hand cannabis smoke coming from a neighbouring apartment would pose a health risk. Additionally, Blake told VICE cleaning out the smell of weed from an apartment could cost more than $5,000 and could drive tenants from wanting to rent units—or force seniors to flee their homes. Because Ontario landlords can’t charge damage deposits, he suggested allowing people to smoke inside could even drive up rents.

Jim Murphy, president of the Federation of Rental Housing Providers of Ontario, told VICE he’s also concerned that growing weed at home could cause issues around “energy use in an apartment” and mold “if it becomes a grow-op.” While growing more than four plants is illegal, he said you’d need to provide at least 24 hours notice before inspecting a rental unit.

He also said the residual smoke could be an issue for neighbours who have asthma.

But Karen Andrews, a lawyer with the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, said landlords are overreaching.

“I think it’s very unfair to tenants that they can’t do things in their homes that homeowners can do,” she said, pointing out that there are 1.3 million tenant households in Ontario.

“I think landlords don’t want tenants to do anything in their properties. The perfect tenant is the airline pilot who is never there.”

Even when it comes to smoking cigarettes, Andrews isn’t convinced landlords should be able to restrict something the government has deemed legal. It could even be a human rights issue, if someone was addicted to cigarettes and was banned from smoking in their own home, she said. She also made a comparison to cooking curry, in cases where tenants complain about a strong smell.

“We’ve heard these complaints about ‘my neighbour cooks foreign food and I don’t like it.’ It’s not illegal to cook curry, get used it. And it won’t be illegal to smoke marijuana in your apartment so get used to it.”

The province is also considering opening designated consumption rooms and lounges for cannabis—something Blake and Murphy said could be a good idea for larger apartment buildings.

But so far, the proposed regulations are looking very strict. Effectively, smoking could be banned for people who live in public housing, college students, renters, condo dwellers, and the homeless, raising questions as to whether anyone who isn’t wealthy enough to own their homes will be able to enjoy legalization.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Jack London was mesmerized the first time he saw surfers riding the waves of the ocean. It was 1907, and he’d docked at Waikiki Beach in Honolulu during a sailing trip from San Francisco when he spotted them: “One after another they come, a mile long, with smoking crests, the white battalions of the infinite army of the sea,” he wrote in a magazine essay published later that year.

Word of the “royal sport for the natural kings of the earth,” as London called it, spread quickly to Southern California, where the railroad tycoon and real estate developer Henry Huntington saw an opportunity. He invited the Hawaiian surfer George Freeth, whom London had described as “a young god bronzed with a sunburn,” to help bring in crowds at his recently acquired Redondo Beach pier, just south of LAX.

Billed as the "Man Who Can Walk on Water,” Freeth gave surfing demonstrations that brought in thousands of onlookers who traveled to the pier on the Pacific Electric Railway, which, conveniently, Huntington also owned. At least, that’s the way the Redondo Beach Historical Society remembers this story, a version of which is engraved on a memorial statue they’ve erected in Freeth’s likeness on the pier. Ask city officials 30 miles south in Huntington Beach, however, and they’ll tell you a different story. The Orange County city, which was also developed by Huntington, held a centennial event in 2014 honoring the 100-year anniversary of the year they claim Freeth launched the surfing craze at their pier—not Redondo’s. (The International Surfing Museum, based in Huntington Beach, unsurprisingly backs this telling of history.)

By that time, Hawaiian surfer Duke Kahanamoku would’ve already won a gold medal as an Olympic swimmer; he settled in Southern California not long after. Today, both men are considered the fathers of modern surfing and among the first to popularize the Polynesian-born sport on the mainland. This is a point of contention for people who live in Santa Cruz, on California’s Central Coast. The way they see it, American surfing actually began in their city in 1885, when three teenage princes from Hawaii surfed the San Lorenzo River on redwood planks while attending a school nearby. (The issue is so contentious that the cities of Santa Cruz and Huntington Beach went to court over the rights to use the name “Surf City, USA” after Huntington Beach successfully trademarked it.) While the origins of American surfing remain as murky as ocean water in a rip current, no one would dispute the sport’s influence in California, which birthed the Beach Boys and The Endless Summer, and, perhaps regrettably, Baywatch and board shorts.

Watch:

Assembly member Al Muratsuchi, a surfer who represents California’s 66th District, which encompasses Redondo Beach and most of the South Bay, wants everyone to recognize the state’s surfing history—whether or not its own cities can agree on it.

Last Wednesday, the Democrat introduced a bill that would make surfing California’s official sport. Muratsuchi, a former army brat, grew up surfing in typhoons in Japan’s Okinawa Island—but “I don’t want to claim to be a Kelly Slater or a Laird Hamilton,” he says—before moving to California to attend UC Berkeley for undergrad and UCLA for law school. He says the bill, which he coauthored with LA-area assembly member Ian Calderon, is more than just a symbolic gesture toward his favorite pastime. Rather, he sees it as part of his broader legislative agenda to protect California’s beaches and oppose President Donald Trump’s proposed expansion of offshore drilling. We asked him why he wrote the bill, what he hopes it will do, and how surfers can lead the fight to protect the planet.

What would this designation do? Is there anything that comes along with it that would encourage surfing or legitimize the sport in some way?
Al Muratsuchi: Well, I think surfing’s come a long way from its slacker image. Nowadays even legislators are surfers. I like to go out as much as I can when I’m not doing the people’s work. I think it’s not only a recognition of the rich history and culture, but also there’s a huge retail industry that got started from the surfing lifestyle that inspires people from all around the world to come to California. It’s not only recognizing the history and the culture but also recognizing the retail, the tourism, and the recreation industries—the multibillion dollar coastal economy that rests upon the image of surfing in California.

[Another big part of it is] how surfing is all about being, you know, in sync and in harmony with our beaches and our ocean. I’m tying this with my efforts for years to fight to protect our beaches and our coastline. The Trump administration just announced that he wants to reopen offshore oil drilling off the coast of California. I introduce the bill also on the more serious side to fight back against Trump on this proposal to restart offshore oil drilling.

What is the relationship between surfing and protecting the environment? Do you think that surfers are more likely to be environmentalists?
Yeah. In fact, the Surfrider Foundation is a great example. They’re a nonprofit organization of surfers committed to protecting the beaches, the ocean, and the coastline. My assembly district goes from Manhattan Beach down through Palos Verdes, and one of the cities in my district, Hermosa Beach, had a huge fight against oil drilling in Hermosa Beach, and the Surfrider Foundation was a big part of that campaign to oppose oil drilling. We don’t want oil drilling threatening our beautiful beaches and ocean.

What’s the best beach for surfing?
In the South Bay we have El Porto, we have some great breaks off the Palos Verdes Peninsula, but we have issues with some of the localism in Palos Verdes, as you might have heard. But California, everywhere from Mavericks up north [in Half Moon Bay] down through my neck of the woods, the LA South Bay down to Orange County, down to San Diego, we have some of the world’s best surfing here.

I noticed that Hawaii already made surfing an official sport for their state. Does that mean that California is second best?
Any surfer will give their proper respect to Hawaii. Surfing was invented by the Hawaiians. I’ve heard all kinds of surfer stories, but it’s my understanding that the first Hawaiian that introduced surfing to California came here either in Hermosa Beach or Redondo Beach. I’ve had Dennis Jarvis, the owner of Spyder Surfboards in Hermosa Beach, tell me that it first started in Hermosa Beach and then Bill Brand, the mayor of Redondo Beach and another surfer, was telling me that the first Hawaiian to introduce surfing to California came to Redondo Beach. I don’t know who’s telling the truth.

I was surprised that California didn’t already have an official sport. Do you know whether legislators have made attempts to propose state sports in the past, and if so, has there been any pushback? Do you expect that there will be any pushback on this?
I’m not aware of anyone making any previous attempts, but I think anyone who’s ever seen any marketing campaign promoting California and our tourism and recreation industries, again, the most iconic sport has always been surfing. Whether you’re living on the coast or living inland, I think everyone recognizes that when they think of California they think of surfing. I expect some pretty interesting debate over this bill. I have yet to see what kind of response I’m going to get from some of my colleagues that don’t live in coastal communities. I don’t want to write off our inland communities. As you may know, there’s the city of Lemoore out in Central Valley where Kelly Slater created [a pool with] these man-made wavesman-made waves that allow people living inland to also go surfing. That’s another example of innovative surfers in California that can help promote the sport throughout the state.

Do you think that the world would be a better place if everyone surfed?
Yeah. I think that the world would be a lot more peaceful place if everyone went surfing and got in touch with our beautiful beaches and our ocean. Maybe if President Trump came surfing in California he’d think twice about offshore oil drilling off our coast.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Dear So Sad Today,

Do you think young people need to stop listening to their elders telling them what to think and think for themselves instead?

Thanks,

A Young Person

Dear Young Person,

Some people say that baby boomers and Gen Xers are the problem with society. Others say that millennials are fragile flowers who are fucking up everything. They’re probably all wrong.

I think it’s important to remember that our brains attempt to make sense of the world by compartmentalizing things, and humans too, into groups. It’s a sort of “packaging” thing we do, and, like most packaging, it doesn’t really reflect the true nature of what is inside the package. Therefore, I prefer to avoid blanket statements altogether.

We do live in a culture that reveres youth, and in which there is a media bias toward youth. As an example, look at the way we treat the elderly in this country as opposed to other countries. I, myself, admit to fearing the aging process in terms of a perceived loss of beauty, meaning, and the feeling that everything is already over. I have feared it since I was young, and I don’t think this fear was born in a cipher—uninfluenced by our culture.

At the same time, where age can definitely bring wisdom through the lens of experience, there is also an innate brilliance in seeing the world through fresh eyes. Philosopher Jiddu Krihnamurti said, “The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.”

For me, finding people to trust has a lot less to do with age and more to do with who possesses beginner’s mind. The older I get, the more I know that I don’t know shit. I actually prefer it that way. In keeping, I trust those people the most who know that they don’t know, who are not convinced of their own righteousness, who maintain a sense of curiosity and reverence for the mystery that is life.

So, if you want my advice (and I’m guessing I might be a little older than you, so you can take it with a grain of salt), I would say that it’s less about the age of the individual and more about how much humility they bring to their perspective. Do they possess the ability to maintain an open mind? Can they ever see past their own self-interest? To me, that’s a good person to listen to.

xo

sst

Dear So Sad Today,

What’s the deal with the disconnect between the analysis of a mental health issue and the experiential side of it. For every time a well-intentioned family member says (for the millionth time) “I just read this article, I think you might find it useful…” I stifle an urge to reply, “Have any helpful articles about what it’s like to be on fire? I’m sure reading about it makes it easier to endure.”

Sincerely,

Burning Up

Dear Burning Up,

In my experience with anxiety and depression, as well as in my partner’s progressive illness, I’ve found that most people deal with discomfort by wanting to fix and solve things. Sometimes this is born from their sincere desire to help. A compassionate person does not want to see someone they care about, or anyone really, in pain. Sometimes it’s done out of ego: the notion that everything in this world is fixable in a linear way. In these moments, people feel that they should be able to fix any problem. And of course, sometimes, a person will try to “fix” another person, because they are tired of hearing the person talk or feel that the condition reflects negatively on themselves in some way.

Regardless of the motive, this is when boundaries come into play. It’s like, sometimes we have to teach people how to treat us—let them know we actually do not want any advice or tips or medical perspectives right now. Maybe we just need an ear. We just want to vent. It definitely sucks to have to set these boundaries, because it can be exhausting. But I find that ultimately, the setting of a boundary is a lot less exhausting than what happens when I don’t.

Also, an old expression I like to say is, “Don’t go to the hardware store looking for milk.” It’s taken me many years to learn that not only should I not seek help from certain family members, but it’s actually better not to share any details of my life with them at all. It’s been a complicated journey in learning this. Not only do I feel guilty when I set these boundaries, but I still sometimes have a sincere desire to find comfort in these people. There’s a mourning involved when we finally realize that comfort and compassion are not something a certain person has to give.

I’m still in no way perfect at this. At times I forget, or choose to forget, that these hardware store people don’t have milk. At other times, the hardware store comes to me and tries to force itself upon me. This can happen. But if you feel like you are continually facing the same dead end with a person, ask yourself if you are playing any part in letting them in in the first place.

xo

sst

Buy So Sad Today: Personal Essays on Amazon, and follow her on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Welcome to Evesplaining, politics writer Eve Peyser's column about why everyone else is wrong and she's right.

Life is all about swallowing difficult truths, but I respect you enough to give it to you straight: The Boss Baby is a good movie. When I first mentioned this to my co-workers and Twitter followers after watching it on an airplane, I was swiftly ridiculed. After all, it had become fodder for social media shitposting, memed to death by people who had probably not seen the movie.

In response to one of my tweets praising the film—yes, film—the @VICE account responded, "delete this." But it looks like the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has vindicated me, because The Boss Baby was nominated for Best Animated Feature.

I understand the instinct to dismiss The Boss Baby, which stars Alec Baldwin as the eponymous baby who is also a boss, solely based off its promotional materials. The way the film was advertised was exceedingly silly—its tagline, "cookies are for closers," is a reference to Glengarry Glen Ross, which as we all know, is every kid's most favoritest movie after Frozen. But chances are, if you brushed aside Boss Baby as a garbage kids movie in the same category as the The Emoji Movie—which was bad in a soulless mediocre way—it's probably because you haven't seen it.

I saw The Boss Baby on an airplane six months ago, and it would be dishonest to say I remember it well. But unlike a lot of children's movies and art films, The Boss Baby was actually able to hold my attention for all of its 97 minutes. Alec Baldwin's voice-acting was pretty excellent, infusing what could have been a forgettable Dreamworks picture with the Jack Donaghy edge that made the film appealing to adults.

In conclusion, don't judge a film by its poster. Also, my haters are always wrong and I am always right.

Follow Eve Peyser on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

This story was published in partnership with the Marshall Project.

On criminal justice, Donald J. Trump’s predecessor was a late-blooming activist. By the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, his administration had exhorted prosecutors to stop measuring success by the number of defendants sent away for the maximum, taken a hands-off approach to states legalizing marijuana and urged local courts not to punish the poor with confiscatory fines and fees. His Justice Department intervened in cities where communities had lost trust in their police.

After a few years when he had earned the nickname "Deporter-in-Chief," Obama pivoted to refocus immigration authorities—in effect, a parallel criminal justice system—on migrants considered dangerous, and created safeguards for those brought here as children. He visited a prison, endorsed congressional reform of mandatory-minimum sentences, and spoke empathetically of the Black Lives Matter movement. He nominated judges regarded as progressives.

In less than a year, President Trump demolished Obama's legacy.

In its place, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has framed his mission as restoring the “rule of law", which often means stiffening the spines and limiting the discretion of prosecutors, judges and law officers. And under President Trump’s “America first” mandate, being tough on crime is inextricably tied to being tough on immigration.

“I think all roads in Trump's rhetoric and Sessions’s rhetoric sort of lead to immigration,” said Ames Grawert, an attorney in the left-leaning Brennan Center’s Justice Program who has been studying the administration’s ideology. “I think that's going to make it even harder for people trying to advance criminal justice reform because that's bound up in the president's mind, in the attorney general's mind, as an issue that they feel very, very passionately on—restricting immigration of all sorts.”

Here are nine ways Trump has transformed the landscape of criminal justice, just one tumultuous year into his presidency.

He changed the tone

Words matter, and Trump’s words were a loud, often racially charged departure from the reformist talk of being “smart on crime” and making police “guardians, not warriors.” His response to a New York City terrorist truck attack last year reflects the new tone:

“We... have to come up with punishment that's far quicker and far greater than the punishment these animals are getting right now,” Trump said. “They'll go through court for years. And at the end, they'll be—who knows what happens. We need quick justice and we need strong justice—much quicker and much stronger than we have right now. Because what we have right now is a joke and it's a laughingstock. And no wonder so much of this stuff takes place.”

The president’s rhetoric seemed to trickle down. Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, adopted what many call “Trumpism” during his fall campaign, vilifying Democrat Ralph Northam as being soft on crime. His ads accused Democrats of restoring the voting rights of a child pornography collector—targeting one man out of the 168,000 former felons who had had their voting rights restored.

In a hotly contested Alabama senate race, Trump accused the Democrat—a prosecutor who had won convictions against two Klansmen who helped plot the 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls—of being “soft on crime.”

While both of the Republicans lost, prisoner advocates worry the discourse has re-sparked irrational fears and will spook conservatives who have in recent years joined the reform movement. And Trump has not limited his target set to Democrats. He has attacked members of his own party, like Arizona senator Jeff Flake, as “weak on crime and border.”

He wants to keep the “mass” in mass incarceration

Of all the moves Sessions made in 2017, none brought as much consternation from all sides of the political spectrum—from the Koch brothers and Rand Paul to the ACLU and Cory Booker—as this: He revoked the Obama-era instruction to federal prosecutors to be more flexible in charging low-level, nonviolent offenders. Under this policy, federal prosecutions had declined for five consecutive years and, in 2016, were at their lowest level in nearly two decades, according to the Pew Research Center.

Sessions ordered prosecutors to seek the maximum punishment available, prompting widespread fear of a return to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the federal prisons filled with drug offenders. In what it is calling a budget cut, the Bureau of Prisons has also ordered the closure of several halfway houses, which can extend the length of time soon-to-be released prisoners are spending behind bars.

The administration has also cast doubt on the prospect of legislation aimed at reducing mandatory-minimum sentences and encouraging diversion to drug treatment and mental health care. Governors and advocates who boast of success at reducing state prison populations—notably in red states—met with the president and son-in-law Jared Kushner on January 11 to plead for similar measures in the federal system, but the discussion was largely confined to rehabilitating the incarcerated rather than incarcerating fewer people in the first place. While sentencing reform seems to be fading, there appears to be progress toward a Kushner-led crusade that calls on churches and private businesses to mentor prisoners upon release and help them find jobs and housing. Trump may also look to cut regulations such as licensing requirements that prohibit applicants with felony records from some lines of work.

He made immigration synonymous with crime

Perhaps the most consistent theme of his young administration is that immigrants, especially immigrants of color, are a danger. From the Mexican “rapists” to the “shithole countries” of the third world, the president has played to a base that believes—evidence to the contrary—that immigrants bring crime and displace American workers.

Deportation orders have surged. The Department of Justice said in early December that total orders of removal and voluntary departures were up 34 percent compared with the same time in 2016. Actual removals have not kept pace—in fact, they were at their lowest level since 2006, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University—but it is clear the Trump administration is ramping up ways to deport undocumented immigrants.

The declared ending of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was met with wide consternation from Republicans and Democrats, and is being fought out in courts and bipartisan political negotiations. Trump has given mixed signals as to whether the DACA recipients, brought into the US illegally as children, get to stay, and at what political price. But in the meantime he has ordered an end to protection of refugees from Haiti (at least 60,000) and El Salvador (at least 200,000) who were granted temporary legal status under a bill signed by the first President Bush. And just the other day Sessions limited the power of immigration judges to close complicated cases, a move that could lead to thousands more deportations.

The immigrants-as-menace meme recurs in the argument over “sanctuary cities,” where officials have declined to help in the roundup of the undocumented. Sessions has threatened to withhold federal policing funds from uncooperative venues, so far unsuccessfully.

He rejuvenated the War on Drugs

Sessions’s first major action of 2018 was to issue a memo reminding federal attorneys that marijuana remains an illegal drug under federal law, no matter how many states have legalized the use of marijuana for recreation (eight) or for medical use (29). Sessions has pointed to drugs as a major cause of violent crime, often stating in his speeches that drug dealers don’t file lawsuits to settle drug debts but collect “with the barrel of a gun.” Rescinding a 2013 order that gave states tacit approval to legalize marijuana, he drew fire from the left (the ACLU called it a “regressive agenda”) and the right, where some critics called it a violation of states’ rights. Meanwhile, the opioid crisis rages on. For the second straight year, life expectancy in the United States declined in 2016 because of drug overdose deaths. In October, the Trump administration labeled the epidemic a public health emergency but fell short of allocating significant federal funds to fight the crisis. He seems to think, contrary to informed opinion, that the answer to heroin smuggling is a border wall.

He unleashed the police

Police reform, at least the federal enthusiasm for it, died a sudden death in 2017. The Department of Justice has shown no interest in continuing to seek consent decrees or court orders requiring police departments that have been found to have violated civil rights to reform their practices. A voluntary process known as collaborative reform, where police departments could seek the Justice Department’s expertise to improve its relations and performance with communities, was killed off.

Instead, Sessions has pledged his unwavering support for law enforcement, and in speeches has blamed “divisive rhetoric,” meaning the protests of groups such as Black Lives Matter, for violence against law officers. “So it can come as no surprise when we see rising levels of violence against law enforcement,” Sessions told the National Fraternal Order of Police last year, overlooking the fact that the number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty last year dropped to its second-lowest level in more than 50 years.

Civil rights advocates were alarmed by a leaked FBI report on “black identity extremists.” Groups such as the NAACP worry that such labels will be used to discredit anyone protesting police abuse or illegal uses of force—like, to cite a favorite presidential target, NFL players taking a knee or raising a fist against police violence.

The Department of Justice has not backed away from prosecuting individual police officers for abuses. Most notably, last month, prosecutors secured a 20-year sentence for former North Charleston, South Carolina, police officer Michael T. Slager after he pleaded guilty to civil rights violations in the killing of Walter Scott in April 2015.

In another rollback of an Obama move to discourage police excess, Sessions in August removed federal restrictions on what is known as the “1033 program” allowing state and local law enforcement agencies to request surplus Defense Department equipment for police officers. The program had come under fire in 2014 as Ferguson, Missouri, police had used hulking armored vehicles to control crowds during unrest precipitated by the police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

Months later, Obama issued an executive order that prohibited police from acquiring DOD issue bayonets, tracked armored vehicles and grenade launchers. Police say the equipment is necessary as they are facing greater threats and more firepower from terrorists and active shooters while also contending that the value of items such as bayonets has been misconstrued.

But others, including former law enforcement officials, say police should be working harder to make inroads with communities and not be presenting as occupying forces on tanks.

He’s been a boon to for-profit prisons

The private prison industry saw a quick turnaround with the election of Trump. In August 2016, former interim attorney general Sally Yates signaled a phasing-out of the federal government’s use of private prisons in light of a shrinking prison population and a scathing inspector general’s report on conditions. Nearly six months later, Sessions reversed Yates's order, saying it “impaired” the Bureau of Prisons’ ability to meet future needs.

Stock prices for Geo Group and CoreCivic, two of the country’s largest private prison operators, more than doubled after Sessions's announcement.

It soon became clear that the federal government plans for private prisons were meant for immigration detention, said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, author of "Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration." More than 60 percent of immigration detention beds are operated by private prisons.

Arrests along the southern border of the United States have actually decreased, Eisen said, most likely because people looking to breach the border have been scared away by the government’s aggressive policies. Much of the immigration enforcement and detention is occurring in the interior of the country, which private prisons view as a “boon” for the industry, Eisen said. ICE is proposing five new private detention centers in cities such as Detroit, Chicago, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Salt Lake City.

He wants more executions

Obama’s first attorney general, Eric Holder, opposed capital punishment, and President Obama had misgivings. Donald Trump has been a death-penalty enthusiast since at least 1989, when he bought full-page ads demanding capital punishment after the rape of a jogger in Central Park.

In recent weeks, the Department of Justice has indicated that it will seek the death penalty in two federal cases. Executions at the state and federal levels have been on the wane over the last several years. The last time a federal prisoner was put to death was 2003. Public support for the death penalty, meanwhile, remains at its lowest level since 1972, according to a Gallup poll.

He makes the NRA very happy

The mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 was seen as a turning point in the public tolerance of gun violence, but after last year it doesn’t even rank among America’s ten deadliest mass shootings in modern history. On October 1, 58 victims were killed and more than 500 injured outside the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas. A month later 26 people were killed and 20 more were injured in the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas. For an instant, it seemed as if this time Congress might pass some type of gun control measure. The National Rifle Association even took a rare stance, saying the "bump stock" that had basically transformed the Las Vegas shooter’s semiautomatic weapons into automatic rifles should be regulated. But as soon as there were bills that sought to do so, the organization opposed them, saying the legislation was overreaching and that the ATF should review bump stocks to see if they comply with federal law.

Once again, any talk of gun control was dead. On the contrary, Republicans and the NRA are pushing a law that would require all states to recognize a gun owner’s concealed carry permit. The bill passed the US House in December.

Paradoxically, Trump, while a hero to the NRA, has not been great for gun manufacturers. Gun sales dipped last year. It seems sales soared when owners were afraid Obama would be coming after their weapons.

“The NRA and the industry used Obama to scare gun owners into thinking the President and the federal government were going to come after their guns or otherwise severely restrict gun purchases,” said Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. “Obama would regularly talk about gun control and the NRA and industry would twist it into a move to come after folks’ guns. There may be some saturation of the market post-Obama and few have fears of serious gun control under Trump and a Republican Congress.”

He’s remaking the US court system

If there is one area where Trump has made the greatest and most lasting impact, it’s the judiciary.

The confirmation of Neil Gorsuch as a justice of the Supreme Court may be Trump’s most conspicuous prize, but it’s the lower courts the president has been busily stacking with conservative nominees. Six of his appointees have been confirmed to the federal district court while he has filled the appellate court with 12 new judges. More than 100 federal judgeships remain to be filled by the end of his term. Given the ages of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg, 84, and Anthony Kennedy, 81, Trump could get at least one more chance to appoint a Supreme Court nominee.

The Trump administration is also helping to enrich the court system. In December, Sessions informed court systems across the country that he was revoking a letter the Justice Department had sent out in 2016 that urged court systems to be cognizant of court fees and fines and defendants abilities to pay them. The letter outlined what it called constitutional principles, instructing court systems not to jail indigent defendants who were unable—not unwilling—to pay fees and fines and to consider alternatives.

In revoking the letter, as well as several other Obama-era guidelines, Sessions said he was stopping yet another overreach of government power. He said Congress sets the fees and fines and any instruction to sidestep that was “improper” and “unnecessary” guidance.

Postscript: Where reform lives on

For all the rollbacks Trump has instituted, reforms are continuing at the state level—even in states like Louisiana, once considered the world’s “prison capital.” In 2017, 19 states passed 57 pieces of bipartisan reform legislation, according to the ACLU.

Here are some of the changes states instituted in their penal systems last year, according to the Pew Public Safety Performance Project, which works with states on reforms:

-Louisiana lowered mandatory-minimum sentences, extended parole eligibility and removed some crimes from violent crime classification.

-Utah allowed families to monitor low-level juvenile offenders rather than remove them to state custody, strengthened supervision and treatment for youth and lowered time under state supervision or custody for some juvenile crimes.

-Arkansas required crisis intervention training for law enforcement, allowed for the creation of mental-health crisis stabilization units and changed rules to decrease jail time for technical or misdemeanor probation violations.

-Georgia limited probation terms to end supervision sooner for good behavior, and reduced the number of probationers.

-Montana reduced mandatory minimums for theft and drug offenses and created early probation discharge opportunities for those judged low risk.

-North Dakota allowed agencies to prioritize prison and jail admissions if facilities exceed capacity, expanded behavioral health services, expanded probation use, established medical parole for people with terminal conditions and repealed the denial of food stamps for people with certain drug convictions.

-Rhode Island established a batterer’s intervention program, expanded the type of expenses crime victims can be reimbursed for and increased the statute of limitations to file claims, and granted judges more discretion.

A version of this article was originally published by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US criminal justice system. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Two decades ago, the erotologist Katharine Gates published a book called Deviant Desires that chronicled, as she put it, "incredibly strange sex." Its cover depicts a leering clown, a man imposing himself on a balloon, and a figure on all fours in high heels and a horse's saddle. Inside there's even more: Robots, giantesses, body inflation, and beyond.

For nearly two decades, the book has served as an anthropological compass, nudging perverts and experimenters and the merely curious toward kinks that most have never even thought possible. But sexual appetites are in a state of constant flux, and so Gates recently released an updated and expanded second edition of her book with new interviews with its original subjects and an added section on cannibal play (simulated, of course).

How much could sex have possibly shifted in just 20 years? A lot—and that's in large part thanks to the internet. In 2000, internet access had only just begun to penetrate middle America; online video was clunky and social media barely existed. But today, geography is no barrier to sexual exploration, sophisticated media production tools are within easy reach, and even the most obscure fetishists can find each other online.

Additionally, attitudes around consent have taken a light-speed leap since Deviant Desires was first published. Particularly in the last year, the national conversation around sexual best practices (and violations thereof) has taken center stage. But within kink communities, consent has always been the focus. Behind the arcane sexual tastes of most kinksters lies a culture of consideration and mindfulness where communication is established long before any clothes come off. (Or before clothes are doused in baked beans, or traded for farm animal equipment.)

The second edition of Deviant Desires takes these changes into account, and is made particularly timely by the intensity of recent conversations around consent and "bad sex.” From vanilla encounters to yet-undiscovered practices, the communities documented in Deviant Desires have lessons for us all.

I talked to Gates about all of that:

Photo by Ron H.

VICE: Tell me about the work that you do and how you got started.
Katharine Gates: In the late 80s and early 90s, I was involved in the punk rock zine scene, and friend with a lot of sex workers and general sort of freaks and oddballs. When I was out distributing my zines, I would go to these little zine shops, like Atomic Books in Baltimore or See Here in New York City, and they had big sections of their zine racks for kink stuff. These were magazines that some guy or girl put out devoted to their very particular obsession—with, say, women with shaved heads, or ponygirls [google it], or sploshing [a fetish that involves using food in sex].

There was a zine called The Ticker, and it was just about feet being tickled. Or there was one website just for spanking, so you would just see red butts. I also had a lot of friends who were sex workers and did some sex work myself, so we'd get clients who had very very particular requests that seemed like they were from left field—a guy who wanted to see women stripped naked and painted with the little dotted lines that outline the various cuts of meat, for example.

I would hear these stories and witness these things and really just wanted to know, first, what's going on here, why is this hot, and second, is this really totally exotic and strange, or is it something that seems exotic and strange but is actually totally comprehensible to people who don't share those interests? Is there something here we all share as humans in our erotic toolbox?

Did you find answers to those questions?
I think we're all wired to be aroused on many different levels—physiological and emotional and psychological—by things that are touchy-feely and smelly, things that involve power, that involve comfort, that involve intimacy, fear. All of these things are really part of the toolbox that we can use to intensify an erotic or sexual experience. It’s just that many of us have shut all that down because we're afraid that if we do anything that's not, like, genital stuff, then we're weird. And one of the things it made clear to me is that anything and everything can become erotic fodder.

Did any kinks you ran across in your research surprise you?
One of the stories that sparked the first book was from a friend I knew who was a dominatrix, who had a client she called the Turkey Man. Whenever he was traveling in her town, she would come to his hotel room, strip him naked, tie him up, put him in a box, and say she was cooking him. And he would just have an orgasm right then and there. I just thought, wow, this seems really unique and specific and niche, the desire to be a Thanksgiving turkey—maybe he's the only guy like this. But then if there's ten people who have the same interest no matter where they are in the world, the internet makes it possible for them to find each other. You may be the only turkey man in New York, but there may be one in England and one in Australia. There are, in fact, turkey men all over the world now, and there are now real-world communities of people who meet up to talk about what's called cannibal play. And that became a whole new chapter in the book.

What does cannibal play look like?
This is a scene where the majority of those involved want to be turned into food for other people. They want to see themselves transformed into an object, so they're being objectified, but they're also an object of intense desire, so they want to be something that other people are going to find so good that they'll want to eat it. They might want to be in a small enclosed box, because that form of containment is very exciting, or they may want to imagine themselves cooked in a pot, almost like a cartoon.

A lot of what my book is about is people who are like, Well, nobody's gonna make this porn for me, so I guess I'm just gonna have to make it myself. Many are people who became artists so they could make images that fed that erotic need that they had.

There’s a real DIY approach in this community, from the 90s zines to today.
Absolutely. And that's what gets me so excited, honestly. Because the audience for cannibal stuff is small enough that there's no huge corporate conglomerate that's going to decide that it's going to serve up cannibal porn, you know? And so people have to make it themselves. And they are making it themselves, and they're doing it ingeniously. I mean, as one of the meat girls I interviewed said, she just loves to go to fancy cooking stores like Sur La Table and think to herself, How can I use that in sex? Oh, look at that giant baster. That looks like something I can use.

Are there ways to indulge a kink that might be more dangerous than others?
Some kinks are dangerous enough that they're sort of unsafe at any speed. There are people who deeply crave the sense of being pressed really really hard by a heavy weight, and some people crave heavier and heavier weights, so there is a kink for having your partner run you over with their car. This is not something that can be done safely.

What about risks that are more emotional, or ethical?
This is a huge issue right now, obviously. We're talking about situations in which people have not listened to "no," or not listened to "please slow down," or "please stop." The issue of negotiation and communication should be at the forefront of any kind of interpersonal interaction. And I think that one of the things that has become very clear is that the BDSM community should be really held up as a kind of guide for that.

If you have a kink for doing something like, you know, mummifying somebody or being mummified, you're really gonna have to talk with the person you're playing with to describe exactly what it is you do like and don't like. All of that is built in to the ethos of BDSM. And that had to happen. It was clear that in order to make BDSM and this community work, if you're going to want to see a partner again or be able to have other partners—and this is a community where people talk to each other—you can't go violating consent. You'll never play again if you do that. And so there's a way in which that community has created a sense of responsibility and communication. There have been problems within that community, but people have spoken up and communicated and taken responsibility, and I think that's a model for everybody.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Follow Matt Baume on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

This story was published in partnership with the Marshall Project.

Brandon Hewett wants to go to prison.

There, he might have a shot at fresh air, sunshine and substance abuse treatment. Instead, the 38-year-old Hewett is serving a nine-year drunk driving sentence in a North Carolina county jail, a facility not designed or equipped for long-term stays.

Hewett is among a growing number of DWI offenders serving multi-year sentences in North Carolina’s jails, snagged between a reform that cut the prison population and a popular law that cracked down on repeat drunk drivers.

More than 170 people with DWI sentences of two years or more are serving their time in the state’s jails, which were built to detain people awaiting trial or serving short sentences. Unlike prisons, jails have little or no programs for drug treatment, education and job training, and they lack outside yards with basketball courts, ball fields and weight racks.

Hewett, who admits he is an alcoholic, has a 20-year record of alcohol and traffic violations. He said he was shocked when his guilty plea led to nine years in the jail, a one-story block structure at a corner of the Brunswick County office complex. He glimpses the sky for a few minutes a day when he helps unload meals from a truck. The hardest part of the sentence is the prospect of serving nine years with no time outside.

“It’s inhumane,” he said. “They treat me like a murderer.”

Hewett grew up in the country and worked on a dredge boat and as a roofer. He asked to work at the county animal shelter, about ten miles from the jail. The Brunswick County Sheriff’s Department runs the shelter and has employed inmates there. Sheriff John Ingram did not respond to requests for comment.

“I could keep ‘em clean, keep ‘em fed, keep ‘em watered,” Hewett said. “But they’re scared I might run.”

The road to Hewett’s nine-year sentence began in July 2010, when 17-year-old Laura Fortenberry was killed by a drunk driver with a history of DWI convictions.

The girl’s mother began campaigning for “Laura’s Law,” which called for mandatory prison sentences of 12 to 36 months for certain repeat offenders.

The bill had no opposition in the Republican-controlled legislature; the Democratic governor invited Laura’s mother to the bill-signing. The same year saw the passage of the state Justice Reinvestment Act, which, among other changes, reduced the prison population by sending most misdemeanor offenders to county jails, where they would serve a maximum of 300 days. In a later session, lawmakers amended the law to send everyone convicted of a misdemeanor to jail—which includes people sentenced under Laura’s Law.

Gregg Stahl, director of government relations at the North Carolina Sheriffs Association, realized that these drunk drivers would be the longest serving jail inmates in modern history. Given their high risk of recidivism, they would need treatment.

“Should these inmates be encouraged to participate and complete a drug treatment program while incarcerated?” Stahl wrote in an internal 2014 memo. “What type of drug treatment program can be effectively delivered in a jail setting?”

Association Director Eddie Caldwell said in an interview he doesn’t recall Stahl’s memo or discussion about it. He said it was the legislature’s job to decide the location and length of criminal sentences.

County sheriffs are paid $40 a day to house the misdemeanor offenders who used to go to state prison. The state pays the Sheriff’s Association $1 million a year to administer the program.

Guilford County, the state’s third largest, is one of the few jails to offer drug treatment. Major Chuck Williamson of the county sheriff’s office said 12 months has been the longest sentence served in the two jails and prison farm he oversees. Guilford County may boast the most programs of any jail, but Williamson said jails aren’t designed to handle long-term stays. There’s no law library. Training and education programs are limited.

“You can’t go outside,” he said. “If we saw someone with a three- or six-year sentence here, we’d probably be up in arms.”

Brandon Hewett is serving a nine-year drunk driving sentence in a North Carolina county jail. Photo courtesy Hewett family

Hewett’s problem with alcohol and driving dates to 1997, when the 18-year-old refused a Breathalyzer test at a traffic stop in Brunswick County, which sits on the Atlantic coast at the southeastern corner of North Carolina. He racked up three DWIs through 2013 and became eligible for Laura’s Law.

In February 2017, he pleaded guilty to two additional counts of DWI. Six days later, he was arrested for a third DWI. When he appeared in court in May to plead guilty to all three, he admitted that he was under the influence.

Judge James Bell gave him the maximum: three three-year terms to be served back to back. Bell ordered substance abuse treatment, which the jail does not offer.

Bell said his hands were tied. The law requires all people convicted of misdemeanors to go to jail.

“It’s hard to be easy on the drunk driving cases because the community wants to be tough on them,” Bell said. “Nine years at the jail is tough.”

A version of this article was originally published by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US criminal justice system. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

It's 6PM when I meet German businessman Michael* in a car park behind Munich's Theresienwiese Square – the spot where millions of people gather every year for the city's famed Oktoberfest celebrations.

Michael isn't Michael's real name; he doesn't want to be attached to this article because he's already been at the receiving end of too much negative press over the last few months. At the centre of all that attention was his empire under this car park, four metres below my feet – a palatial space adorned with glittering chandeliers and pompous, rococo furniture that looks like it's been stolen from an opera house's prop department.

Michael's project is a private gentlemen's club called The Contenance Club. The venue opened in December of 2017 and currently only hosts private functions, but Michael hopes it will attract plenty of new members soon, who would be able to visit every night of the week.

Michael opening the door to his kingdom.

Though "contenance" is an Old French term for moderation and restraint, Michael's vision is anything but. He wants his club to be a loud and brash haven for influential, rich men to socialise, while surrounded by beautiful women, who – according to the club's house rules – are only allowed to speak after being spoken to first.

Private social gentlemen's clubs started popping up in London in the 17th century, as spaces where upper class men could go to network. In Germany, the concept has never really existed in this form. Unlike The Contenance Club, the few members clubs that do exist in Germany don't market themselves as flashy party caves for rich men, which is why Michael's concept attracted so much negative media attention and public anger when it opened – and why I wanted to see whether that reaction is fair or not.

The steps leading four metres below ground to The Contenance Club.

A little after 6PM, Michael steps out of a white door and onto the car park, where I'm waiting for him. He's dressed completely in black – a pretty slick look, but his eyes look tired. He's accompanied by his events manager, a dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties who doesn't want to tell me her name.

After a few rushed pleasantries, Michael leads me into the club. The first thing I see inside is a massive chandelier hanging from the ceiling. On one side of the main room is a blue sofa with "Beluga" stitched in with gold lettering. "It's a type of caviar," Michael explains, assuming I wouldn't know, as we head down some more stairs. "€300 [£260] for 100 grams," he continues. "I've had so much of it, I can’t eat the stuff any more."

Below the main floor is a 400 square-metre, four-room cellar with brick walls and a domed ceiling. Michael plans to convert this space into a bar serving oysters and Kobe beef. "Kobe beef tastes insane," Michael says. "The meat is massaged and caressed all day."

Giant pictures hang from the walls – images of naked angels, the Last Supper and one of a woman having a foursome while suspended in the sky. Michael tells me it takes about a month to paint every picture, and that they were done by an art student taking night classes.

The only two facts I know about Michael's personal life are that he is 63 years old and that he was born in Munich. "I don't want the publicity any more," he says. A public perception he does revel in, however, is that of "friend to the rich, famous and beautiful". He's constantly name-dropping German rock stars, actors and socialites – for instance, when he tells me he once warned Boris Becker off his first wife.

Michael sits down on a sofa in the club’s cigar room-to-be, which will double as a space for members to watch live football matches. For now, it's being used as a storage room for what seems like the world's biggest supply of gold upholstered sofas. As he reclines further, he reveals he hasn’t put any of his own money into the club. The Contenance Club's main investor is a friend, while for his part Michael says he's made a number of sponsorship deals with champagne and vodka brands.

WATCH:

However, he takes full credit for the concept and design of the place: "I didn't need an interior decorator," he says, proudly. "I’ve been dreaming about this for the past five years."

Michael won’t tell me how many members his club already has, but he claims to field about two new membership requests a day. Recently, he boasts, the son of a famous footballer asked to join. If he's accepted, he will pay an annual membership fee between €10,000 and €1 million. "For a million, a private jet will pick you up from anywhere in Europe," Michael promises.

The difference between the price categories is simple: the less you pay, the further in advance you have to reserve your spot in the club on any given night. According to Michael, rich men don't like to wait, so he thinks paying a little more will always be worth it to them. "Normal people", he says, aren’t allowed in. "They complain too much. I don’t want anyone in here who just sits in the corner all night drinking Coke and looking sour."

Michael’s mysterious events manager is in charge of hiring the women who'll be working in the club. A German tabloid recently published the size, age, weight and personal requirements for all prospective female employees: they have to be taller than 1.75m, under 35, no heavier than nine stone and single.

According to Michael, these are just guidelines. "For example, I weigh more than nine stone," his associate offers. "The women here just need to be elegant," Michael adds, "and sexy."

The champagne room is located next to an oyster bar which will also serve Kobe beef.

Recently, a model turned down an offer to work at the The Contenance Club. "She didn’t want to work for €200 [£180] a night," says Michael, stunned. In his view, all women dream of owning expensive shoes and Gucci handbags, and the easiest way to get those is by securing a rich man. "Ninety percent of women prostitute themselves in one way or another," he explains to me.

However, he feels compelled to add that this isn't a sex club. "Look around you – there aren’t any beds here. We'll employ girls to spy on the others and make sure that no one offers themselves to the men. If they do, they’re fired. To be sure, we have a strict rule: women here aren’t allowed to initiate conversation with the male guests. But, if I'm being honest, I don't think we should need it as a rule, because a normal woman wouldn’t do that anyway." In return for staying mute unless spoken to, Michael claims to offer his female staff a safe working environment, where security will always be around to stop any members getting too hands-on.

Michael’s favourite room is the Bavarian chamber. On a glass column stands a bust of Ludwig II of Bavaria – the "Mad King" who built the kitschy Neuschwanstein Castle in the 19th century. Michael says he isn’t bothered if people think his taste in interior design is harrowingly corny. "Two million people a year visit Neuschwanstein Castle," he counters. "Are they all arseholes?"

The Contenance Club is no Neuschwanstein – it's mostly a cave filled with faux-gold and glitter – but the comparison clearly plays on Michael's mind. "I'm a monarchist," he says, before describing the beauty of another of King Ludwig's castles, Schloss Herrenchiemsee, with its sunken tables, ropeways and ornate ceiling decorations. "I’m also a dreamer, a madman," he proudly confesses.

He flicks some music on – "Also Sprach Zarathustra", by Richard Strauss. Zarathustra was a sixth century Iranian philosopher, who, according to Nietzsche, descended from a mountain to teach people that there were higher goals worth striving for.

Next up is Andrea Bocelli. Michael starts singing along – his arms raised like he's performing for a crowd, even though it's just his events manager and me. Soon, he's no longer singing, just randomly screaming to the music. I ask what wrong. "Honestly, I just like messing around with people," he says. "I want people around me to feel like anything could happen at any moment."

In the Bavarian room stands a bust of Michael's idol, the "Mad King" Ludwig II.

Looking around, it's clear that Michael wants to associate himself with the beautiful, the exclusive and the glamorous – but he mostly seems to have missed the point. The place feels like it's set in this bygone era, when men with his worldview were never challenged and women were objects to open the door for, but not take seriously enough to engage in actual conversation with.

Recently, Michael signed up to Instagram. "It's full of half-naked women taking selfies," he scoffs. "But if a man were to approach these women on the street and invite them back to his or give them a compliment, they'd say, 'I'm not that sort of girl.'" In a world where women have confusing things like "sexual agency", The Contenance Club is clearly his sanctuary.

Michael has turned the music off. He's suddenly in a hurry – another journalist is here to take pictures of the "most secretive place in Munich". He walks me back up to the car park. I ask if he's confident that the whole thing is going to work. "Of course," he says. "But either way, we're going to have some fun."

This article originally appeared on VICE DE.

This article originally appeared on VICE Serbia

Pavle Korcagin is a family-run restaurant in central Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. The establishment's unique selling point is its varied international menu, serving Angolan, Spanish, Iraqi and Indian cuisine, next to Jamaican, Kazakhstani, Moroccan and Israeli dishes. Korcagin has only one rule when it comes to selecting which national delicacies to serve – the dish in question must come from a country that does not recognise Kosovo's independence.

After the breakup of communist Yugoslavia in 1992, Kosovo remained a part of Serbia – even though 90 percent of Kosovo's population is ethnically Albanian. After the landlocked state declared independence from Serbia in 2008, 110 countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States, formally recognised the Republic of Kosovo. However, Serbia continues to insist that the region is part of the country. So far, several attempts at negotiating a lasting solution have failed, though an agreement in 2013 helped normalise the relationship between Serbia and Kosovo.

Almost every inch of wall space is covered in communist memorabilia.

To find out why someone would run a restaurant entirely based on ideology, I decide to stop by Korcagin to speak with its owner. Inside, it doesn't just smell of tasty food – it reeks of nostalgia, too. The restaurant's walls are covered with communist memorabilia – images and slogans from famous communist and socialist leaders, and pictures of Tito, Stalin, Lenin and Che Guevara hanging side by side.

It's lunchtime, and the place is filled with a mix of young and old people – many of them actors on break from their rehearsal, still in their costumes. In the corner, two workers in bright orange uniforms are having lunch under a map of the former Yugoslavia. I order the Sunday special – a Belarusian dish of chicken wrapped in bacon and stuffed with ham, mushrooms and boiled eggs. New items are added to the menu whenever Korcagin's owner hears about another country that doesn't recognise Kosovo, and all meals are prepared by his Serbian chefs.

Cucic hopes that people will leave his restaurant wanting to learn more about countries opposing Kosovo's independence.

That owner is Vojin Cucic, and he's inherited Korcagin from his father – who, Vojin says, was a self-proclaimed "Yugo-nostalgic". Vojin agrees to an interview, but tells me he doesn't have much time for me, since he looks after several other restaurants and has a christening to prepare for. He does insist that I answer a few of his questions first, in order to "get to know each other". When I've sufficiently convinced him that I'm not a "pro-Albanian extremist", he agrees to talk about Korcagin and the message it's trying to promote.

VICE: Do you think a lot of people in Serbia support the theme of your restaurant?
Vojin Cucic: I can't really imagine anyone living in Serbia today can have anything against our place. Apart from some NGOs, everyone is really supportive – we're always full.

So you don't see anything wrong with Korcagin's message?
No, not from our point of view. Maybe an Albanian might have a problem with it. This is just our way of making Serbians aware of our allies. Hopefully, people will leave the restaurant and go learn more about the countries and cultures that appear on our menu. So many countries don't recognise Kosovo's independence, and people should know about them.

Customers recommend cuisines that should be added to the menu.

How do you decide what goes on your menu?
Our customers are always recommending cuisines we should feature next. We try to be as contemporary as we can. This week, we've added Belarusian dishes, and next up we'll add a delicacy from Guinea-Bissau.

Would an Albanian be welcomed here?
Sure, as long as they're not an extremist. Everyone is welcome here.

Watch: I Made My Shed The #1 Restaurant in London

In our chat earlier, you mentioned that you had a "problem with homosexuals". So when you say everyone is welcome, does that include gay people?
I do not support homosexuality, and I never will. But what people do outside of this restaurant is entirely up to them. Everyone has a right to their own opinion, but I don't think we will ever agree on this one.

Do you think it's a smart move to mix ideology and food?
So far, we haven't had any negative reactions. We do not support any political parties, but what we do support is something that most people in Serbia already believe in.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Recently, Roxy Hervé has been taking photos of strangers having sex. Not professionals or performers, but regular civilian strangers who are happy to invite the 27-year-old Parisian photographer and artist into their bedrooms for her project "Lovers", which she describes as an "accurate" exploration of "the human form and its environment".

I had some questions, so met up with Roxy in north London, where she’s currently based.

[Some slightly NSFW images follow]

VICE: Roxy, how did this come about?
Roxy Hervé: So, a couple in Paris contacted me and said, "I like your photos and I want to do a shoot with my boyfriend. Do you think you’d be up for it?" I said yes and just thought I’d figure it out along the way.

What happened then?
We met at their flat and they started talking to me, quite straightforward, about their relationship. We spent the whole evening drinking, and they were telling me super intimate stuff that I had no right knowing; they had never met me before. We got close and I ended up taking pictures of them in their bedroom. I loved the experience of it, so I was like, "I’m going to do this now."

From a technical perspective, is it difficult to photograph people writhing around on a bed?
It is, especially if I’m standing over them. If I think it’s really worth it, I sometimes tell them: "This pose is really nice – don’t move." But usually I have to try and guess what position they’re about to go in so I have time to take the right photos. But, yeah, we talk to each other – it’s a collaboration.

Do you think that the participants act differently because there is someone in the room with a camera?
I think, at first yeah – I always sense a bit of discomfort at the beginning, but I ease it up with a joke or something. But then I get the trust going. By the end of the shoots, everyone has been really enthusiastic about it and said they love it.

How do you build the trust?
That takes up most of the time, actually. As part of the process I [audio] record them. I ask every lover the same question individually: "Can you remember the moment that you realised you liked the other person? Not the moment that you were attracted to them, when you realised that you really liked them and it wasn’t just sex." That helps to build the trust. I also think it helps that I’m a girl. The girls don't get shy at all; it’s mostly the boys that get a bit shy.

Has it ever been people that you know personally?
I knew them two of the times. [I've seen] them at parties, but it was fine. I have one coming up which I think is going to be the most awkward, though. I’m trying to find older people, rather than people in their twenties and thirties, so I asked my parents if they knew anyone who could help me out. My mother’s best friend, who I’ve known since I was a child, got back in touch with me. But they’re polite and nice, so I think it’s going to be a good experience.

How do you distinguish between artistic photos of sex and pornographic photos?
When I look at mine, I don’t think that there’s anything pornographic about them. You don’t see an erect penis or any vaginas, or anything like that. You do see boobs, but for me boobs are not something erotic – they are just boobs. So, it’s more about the positions and merging of whole bodies rather than specific parts.

What have you learned about human sexuality from this?
Hmm, I’m not sure, because the project isn’t completely about that. My photos are not very erotic in many ways. They are on the verge of it, but it’s not about that. It’s more about the moment when bodies mix, the shapes of the bodies collectively. I’m taking pictures of bodies, but the fact I’m cropping it that way makes the body a bit less like the human body and more like a totally different shape.

Have you learned anything about yourself?
Yeah, I’m someone who can be quite awkward; I don’t make friends super easily. But meeting people I’ve never met before and making them feel comfortable enough to get naked and let me take pictures of them having sex made me realise that I am a bit more confident. I always feel that, because the lovers got so close, by the end, when I leave, I leave them in a good way. Maybe in a better way than when I arrived.

Where do you want to go with this project?
I had a couple of galleries contact me, which was cool. I would love to do a sound and image exhibition; recordings of the couples telling their stories would accompany huge pictures. Different rooms would have people telling different stories with both their words and bodies.

Roxy is looking for all types of people to take part in this project. You can follow her on Instagram or email her about it, at: onlylovers@yahoo.com.

@oldspeak1

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Without sounding negative, 2017 was a piece of shit. We were nearly blown to pieces by North Korea, Trump wasn’t banned from Twitter, and next to nothing was done about climate change.

But when it all gets too much, you can do one of two things. Try and enact change, or remain in denial and and distract yourself with wistful thoughts about “the good old days.” And by the good old days, we’re talking about 2012, when internet challenges were at their peak. And the peakiest of those challenges was The Cinnamon Challenge.

The Cinnamon Challenge invited people to see if they could eat a spoon of powdered cinnamon, which they never could because powdered cinnamon turns to cement soon as it hits saliva. And then it always made people choke, which was hilarious.

With this in mind, we took some spoons and cinnamon to Sugar Mountain—which is a day festival in Melbourne, headlined by such legends as Joey Bada$$ and Cut Copy—to bring back The Cinnamon Challenge and remind people of simpler times. Those times when the only thing to worry about was choking to death on a spoonful of cinnamon.

Jack, 25, Carpenter

VICE: Hey Jack, have you heard of the cinnamon challenge?
Jack: No, not really…

It was a big internet thing back in 2012 where you eat a dry teaspoon of cinnamon.
That’s a weird thing to do. The only phenomenon I know of that’s sort of similar was the nutmeg thing.

I’ve never heard of a nutmeg version, tell me more about that.
Yeah, so if you snort enough nutmeg, it makes you high, kind of woozy and spaced out. You have to snort a lot of it though, like I remember people carrying around whole bags of it.

Have you tried it yourself?
Almost, as a prank. One of my friends gave me coriander crushed up and told me it was nutmeg. Nothing happened when I snorted it though. It was just bad, so don’t do that.

Ok, so is eating cinnamon the weirdest thing you’ve been asked to do at a festival?
It’s in my top three, that’s for sure. But I reckon my number one was when we were at Meredith and my friend found some dental floss on the ground. We then all thought it was a good idea to floss our teeth on the dance floor. It was three days into the festival though, so it was kind of nice to have my teeth flossed.

Do you have a game plan for the challenge?
Not really, I think it’s going to be very dry but also soggy. I’ll just have to go with the experience I think.

Note: Jack did not win the The Cinnamon Challenge.

Alex, 27, Radio producer

Is this the weirdest thing you’ve been asked to do at a festival?
Oh no, this is definitely the weirdest thing I’ve been asked to do at a festival, most definitely. No one has ever come up to me and gone, ‘hey do you want to take a teaspoon of cinnamon, just for a laugh?’.

Is there anything that comes close?
I got flooded out by the ocean one time. Back in Auckland, I went to Big Day Out one year, and was camping out in Takapuna, North Auckland. We got back to the campsite from the festival and kept partying, eventually passed out, and then woke up about an hour later with the ocean lapping at my face. It was a stormy weekend, and the king tide had risen so much that it flooded out the camp site.

Cool. Now, throwing it back to 2012, when the cinnamon challenge was actually relevant, if you could have any artist who really big then, play here today, who would it be?
Kanye West, because he bailed on us in 2012. He came to Australia, but then bailed on us in New Zealand for Big Day Out in 2012.

Classic Kanye. Ok I think it’s time to actually eat the cinnamon. How are you feeling?
Well, I didn’t actually do it back when it was big, but I’ve seen videos. I dunno, I think I’ll be fine, it’s just a teaspoon right?

Note: Alex did not win the The Cinnamon Challenge.

Izzy, 24

Izzy! Are you up for the challenge?
Sure.

Some don’t handle it very well, do you think this will be at the top of your list for festival horror stories?
Maybe not, because when I was at Strawberry Fields back in 2012, I had to go to the festival hospital because I had a really bad stomach ache. I was in absolute agony, and they were really concerned because it wasn’t to do with anything I’d had at the festival. The doctor actually thought I might be pregnant and wanted me to go see him at his practice back home for a blood test. Turns out, two hours later I realised I just had to go to the toilet. So yeah I guess it’s not a horror story, but fairly embarrassing.

2012 also happened to be the year the cinnamon challenge was big, was that a good year for you?
Well I missed out on the whole cinnamon thing I think because I was a bit old? Maybe that’s why it was a good year… but yeah it was great. It was my first year out of school and I was finding my feet. I kind of had an idea about my future, but still no idea really. I had a lot of confidence in myself that year I think.

Have you done anything similar to this?
I did the “pass out challenge” once. That’s where you hold your breath, and try and make yourself pass out at school. A lot of people I know did it. I’m not really sure how it started or where it came from. You’re not putting anything into your body so I’m not sure if that counts.

Ok wow, well this one is a little less fucked.
Yeah I feel like this isn’t going to risk my life.

Note: Izzy did not win the The Cinnamon Challenge.

Maddie, 21, Musician
Jackson, 22, Electrician

Hey Maddie and Jackson! How’s your Sugar Mountain been so far?
Maddie: Excellent! It’s my friends birthday weekend, and this is the second year in a row we’ve celebrated by coming here.

I might just be about to ruin your festival experience. Have you heard of the Cinnamon Challenge, if so, would you like to give it a go today?
Maddie: Yes, I’ve done it, and it didn’t go well… it came out my nose, but yes, I will do it again, because why not.
Jackson: Yes! It sounds great, I’ve never done it but would love to do it.

Jackson, I feel like you are far too enthusiastic. Before we get into it, tell me about a time you were asked to do something weirder than this.
Maddie: I’m pretty sure someone asked me to shaft a pinger. I didn’t know them and obviously I said no, but it could have been fun, who knows?
Jackson: I can’t really think of any this is probably the weirdest thing I’ve been asked to do actually.

Ok can you rate the portaloos on offer here today?
Maddie: I actually haven’t been to the toilet yet, but I’m assuming they’ll be pretty good. Anything is better than when I went to Falls and had to deal with those “natural” ones where you chuck the sawdust on top. The sawdust definitely didn’t help. My friend actually dropped her keys down there had to fish them out.

Note: Neither Maddie nor Luke won the The Cinnamon Challenge. In fact, Luke threw up behind some bins.

Luke, 22, TV producer
Bronte, 23, Fashion Blogger

Hey Luke and Bronte, have you ever done the cinnamon challenge?
Luke: Yes! I have, and I think I passed. People say I didn’t have enough cinnamon on the spoon, but I think they were just angry I managed to do it.
Bronte: No, but you know what, I’m actually willing to give it a go. I remember walking in on some girls in the bathroom at school doing it and they were crying… I honestly don’t know why I’m doing it, it seemed stupid in 2012, so am I getting stupider?

You have to do everything once.
Luke: Yeah, I mean, you either die, or you don’t… it’s pretty good.

Aside from doing a teaspoon of dry cinnamon, how does this festival rate against others you’ve been to?
Luke: It’s the second time I’ve been, and it’s definitely one of the best day festivals I’ve been to.
Bronte: Yeah, there’s the whole arty aspect of it, good food, good crowd.

What’s least favourite festival crowd?
Luke: The people who used to go to Stereosonic before it shut down.
Bronte: They’ve all gone to Beyond the Valley… We know because we were there this year. They just want to fight everyone, like ALL the time.

So before you do the challenge, Luke do you have any advice for Bronte on how to succeed?
Luke: If you start to choke, just spit, do not swallow.

Note: Luke won the The Cinnamon Challenge!!

Follow Maggie on Twitter

This article originally appeared on VICE AU.

People don't like it when other people see their eyes leak. Our first instinct is to feign normalcy then rush off somewhere private, like a toilet cubicle. But people sure do like to talk about what things make them cry. Here, in no particular order and collated following an extensive survey of office staff and People We Know, are some of the common categories.

Dogs doing virtually anything

'Dogs that sleep on their owners' graves.'

'Dogs that are a little bit old or are missing a limb or are running into the sea.'

'YouTube clips where neglected dogs get rescued by an animal charity and it's touch and go as to whether they'll live, but then they get all cleaned up and start to perk up a bit, and eventually you see them running around and happy with their new owners.'

'Good dogs, Bad dogs.'

'The thought of dogs dying in movies, before I've even started watching the movie.'

'Clips of dogs reuniting with their owner-soldier who is back from war.'

Scottish wind tunes

'Bagpipes. Every time.'

'Bagpipes get me.'

'Bagpipes. So mournful.'

'Ugh. Bagpipes.'

'Bagpipes. Proper tears. Might just be me, though.'

Old people, just living their lives

'Old men in cardigans with their flies down and mismatched socks. Also, when they have combed their hair in a side part with just a little splodge of gel. Gets me right in the heart.'

'When I see an adult drinking out of a juice box. (I'm almost crying just writing this.) They just look vulnerable and sad. Just thinking about them going to the supermarket and buying the juice box instead of just a normal bottle of juice. Also, the straw in the mouth is childlike; it makes me think about how everyone starts out as a baby and needs someone to look after them but that doesn’t always happen.'

'Seeing an 80 or 90-something being delighted by a baby. The circle of life. So raw.'

'Elderly people walking on the street carrying groceries all the way home.'

Screen entertainment

'The auditions on singing shows where the person has come through adversity to knock everyone's socks off. Or if they are particularly unattractive and the audience is laughing but then stunned by their talent.'

'Spock's funeral in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Every time.'

'I once cried during an episode of Full House. It was about how their mother had died and it was just really moving.'

'At the end of the Jem and the Holograms movie when the dead dad hologram tells his daughter he's proud of her.'

'The sequence in Wall-E when he and Eva are swirling through the stars with the fire extinguisher.'

'When the deaf woman hit her date on First Dates.'

Famous people

'Beyonce; live performances. Not even sad ones, just anything where she seems powerful. I get quite overwhelmed, I think it's the same as 'Beatlemania' where they all lost their shit for no reason, but I do it just watching clips on my laptop. I nearly passed out at the concert.'

'How amazing Stephen Hawking is. I can't read too many quotes or I cry, like when he says how much more he has to do with his life.'

'I cried when Shania Twain was on Martha Stewart, but I think it was because I was really hungover and hungry and stuck on holiday with my parents.'

Air travel

'The Heathrow arrivals hall. I was waiting for my mum and couldn't stop crying at all of the reunited families. None of them were crying. I looked like an idiot.'

'Anything watched on an aeroplane - Bob's Burgers, 30 Rock, the terrible 2014 romcom Blended, you name it.'

'Any movie on an airplane. Or just generally being on an airplane.'

Miscellaneous

'When I realised I was gonna see humpback whales for the first time.'

'My boyfriend cries when he hears about small businesses doing well.'

'Musicals on closing night. I feel sad thinking that they've put so much work into something they won't get to perform again.'

'When a Muppet opens its mouth to talk and its voice is different due to its original performer having passed away. Even though I know it's coming... every goddamn time.'

'I cried at a description of my sister in law's yoga class: "We will focus on melting away tension in our muscular tissues, as well as removing blockage from our energetic pathways.'

'When you have been away from New Zealand for a while and the person at Customs says, "Welcome home" as they stamp your passport (pre-machines).'

'I cried watching the five-year-olds in a running race. And bagpipes.'

This article originally appeared on VICE AU.

Ah, happiness. It’s one of those existential mysteries alongside death, selfhood, and how we let the Kardashians get famous. It’s something we often feign for social media, or extended family members, or the high school friends we see once a year. And because of these insecurities over the size our happiness, a colossally clichéd TED Talk industry has made big bucks telling us how to take charge of that happiness.

A few months ago—having also bought into this industry—I was reading Paul Dolan’s Happiness by Design on a plane when the guy beside me asked what it was about. As the title suggests, it was a study on how and why we feel happiness. When I explained this, the man shot me a quizzical look. “I think that’s only up to you to decide, no?”

He was right. Not to mention I felt like a damn fool for reading the book in public in the first place. But after our subsequent conversation, I realized that if this incredibly normal-seeming dad was able to crack the mystery of happiness with one simple question, practically any person could help provide clarity for us all.

Alas, that’s where Chatroulette comes in. Even though the archaic video chatting platform peaked only *very* briefly in 2010, people are for some reason still using it. There probably aren’t too many Eat, Pray, Lovers on the site, but flying on my hunch that this happiness economy is full of shit, I figured I could just as easily turn to random naked strangers on the internet to help me truly understand the meaning of happiness.

So, I propped in front of Chatroulette for a day, hoping for the best.

At first, it was awkward. Skipping over many dicks (still with the dicks, never change Chatroulette!), I stopped whenever someone showed a glimmer of interest in actually talking with me. The conversations generally started with a barrage of questions on their end, or (and often in combination with) sexual requests.

How would I direct a Chatroulette conversation towards anything meaningful? I had an advantage because I’m probably one of the 10 women that have been on Chatroulette in the last year, but I needed the guys to stick around.

“So, I’m asking people about the meaning of happiness today,” I’d say.

Often before I forayed any deeper into conversation, they would skip, especially the total four women I saw. But many genuinely surprised me with their willingness to comply.

After about a half-day online, I’d learned more than I never thought I would about the happiness of strangers across the globe.

Here are my findings.

Happiness is often found in achieving your goals

Early on, I succeeded in having a full-on conversation with a naked man. He was a British university student and enthusiastic to chat, explaining that he simply liked to lounge in the nude out of comfort.

I asked if he was happy.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, I'm probably an 8.5.”

“Why not a 10?” I asked.

“At the moment, I'm still studying, and when I'm finished I'm going to have finally achieved my goal. When I'm settled and independent and a bit more financially free, then I'll probably be closer to a 10.”

A teen on his gap year in the Seychelles shared a similar sentiment.

"Happiness is knowing what you want. My goal is to be back here on this island with a house looking at the sunset every day." How he would get there though, he had “no fucking idea.”

Money can make life easier, not happier

You’d think money would be the obvious answer, but it came up way less than I expected. One particularly interesting conversation I had was with this guy Michael in Jersey. If you’ve never heard of Jersey, it’s a small island in the English Channel that’s basically just a tax haven for rich white people. Apparently it represents $5 billion of private financial wealth, per square mile. So yeah, like, really rich white people.

Michael told me he makes $500,000 a year, so take from that what you want, and he uses Chatroulette out of boredom, and not being attracted to other white people. Shocked that anyone still includes Chatroulette as a regular pastime, I asked him if he was happy and he said, “not particularly.”

“I’d rather be doing something else,” he said. “I do what I wanted to do since I was 18, I make a lot of money and I go on really fat holidays, so my lifestyle is good, but am I really happy? I'd rather be a safari guide or tracker. I fucking love animals.”

And that was quite sad, really. Whether or not this man is truly as rich as he says, his life, from what he described, sounded like one big money-bound prison. Naturally, I told him he should just move and become a safari guide but that was unthinkable to him—he couldn’t leave his business in Jersey.

As much as I’d still love to be Jersey-rich, the fact that our lives, often burdened by lack of money, can be burdened more so with all the money in the world, makes me think that perhaps that age-old saying about money not buying you happiness maybe has some truth to it.

Happiness is situational

Not long after Michael, I came across two men smoking in a car in Jordan. Following a few jokes and small talk, I asked them what happiness is.

“First, you should be out of Jordan to feel happiness,” he said. “We are in hell here.” He told me to guess the age of his friend beside him. I guessed 33.

“He's 25,” both men laughed. “This is what happens. If you come to Jordan, you will get old very fast.”

“Why is that?”

He said that Jordan is expensive. He said they couldn’t consider moving because that’s even more expensive. And he had no confidence in obtaining visas anywhere.

“Did you hear the news about Trump forbidding the visa programs for new immigrants?” he asked. “About 700,000 workers will be sent back home because of Trump. Everyone.”

He then said that his friend beside him (who couldn’t speak much English) has a lot of family in the US, and one of his relatives had to marry his cousin in order to stay there.

“Life is very hard here,” he said, taking another drag and changing the subject.

We laughed about the absurd amount of naked men we’d all seen on Chatroulette and when I asked if a lot of people use the site in Jordan, he said, “Actually, no. They are all going to the new apps.” Then he proceeded to turn the camera around to show me their garden, but we disconnected.

How so many people were speaking so openly to me, I have no idea. But again and again, they entertained my questions.

Relationships are great but they can also make life suck (duh)

This one’s a given, no matter where you’re from. Most of the people I spoke with credited their girlfriends, friends, and families for their happiness.

But when I came across a guy in Mexico who was hesitant to approach the topic, he showed the opposite.

“Maybe it's not the best time for me. I have some problems,” he said after I asked him about happiness.

“Problems?”

“With my family. It’s a difficult time for me right now.”

“Do you have friends you can talk to?”

“Yeah, but they’re busy all the time. Right now I’m in my father's house. I had problems with my girlfriend and...I don't know. It's difficult, I can't explain.”

I wanted to press for more, but refrained. The pain in his voice pointed to the now obvious fact that most people use Chatroulette as a distraction from the less pleasant real world.

Thousands of miles away, a man in a dark bedroom in France faced my question with the same hesitation.

Eventually he wrote on a piece of paper: I need happiness.

“You’re not happy?” I said, and he rolled his arm like a wave across the screen.

Then there were others who described happiness in the simplest ways; salsa, playing the piano, having sex, seeing the musical Grease. One man told me the entire story of his proposal to his fiance.

And it turns out the people on Chatroulette were capable of saying some legitimately real, non-sexual things.

“I think part of the journey we're all on is to make mistakes. You're more likely to have a happy life if you've gone through trials and tribulations,” Michael in Jersey said. I agreed wholeheartedly.

“I mean I've never really had troubles,” he continued. “But it's probably true.”

My time on Chatroulette taught me that if you try hard enough, you can find diamonds in the roughest of roughs. Just as I had hoped, a bunch of randoms online were able to provide me with a genuine insight on the realities of happiness—or more often, unhappiness.

Whether it’s a house by the ocean or a box of chocolates or having two sex friends at the same time (according to Ian from France), as long as you have something that makes you feel content with your life, maybe that’s all we need to be happy...for at least one moment in time.

For me, knowing that I won’t have to look at a nightmarish stream of men masturbating anymore makes me content, therefore I am definitely happy.

Follow Ebony on Twitter.

Weed gummies are pretty great—unless you're a fifth grader who thought you were eating a handful of Haribo bears. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, a nine-year-old girl stole some of her grandpa's medical marijuana gummies, mistaking them for candy, and passed them around to her classmates. As you'd expect, they all got pretty stoned.

The mishap just made a few of the kids pretty "giggly," according to the Albuquerque Journal, but the girl who brought them in ended up downing five. She wound up in the nurse's office, where the school quickly found out what happened.

On the latest episode of Desus & Mero, the hosts talked about what happened to the kids that fateful day, the school's strange reaction, and why weed candy might not be the worst thing kids are putting in their mouths these days.

You can watch the latest episode of Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

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

US News

Chuck Schumer Withdraws Border Wall Offer
The Senate Minority Leader said his party’s reported offer of $25 billion to help construct a wall on the southern border was now “off the table.” Schumer added that negotiations with the GOP over DACA and border security funding would “have to start on a new basis.” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn said an agreement on immigration before the next budget deadline of February 8 “strikes me as highly difficult.”—AP

Mueller Questioned Sessions and Comey
Both the attorney general and the former FBI director have been interviewed by Robert Mueller’s special counsel team investigating Russia's role in the 2016 election. Jeff Sessions was questioned last week, while James Comey reportedly answered investigators’ questions in late 2017. Asked about Sessions’s interview, President Trump said he was “not at all concerned."—NBC News

Trump Reportedly Asked Acting FBI Director How He Voted
The president asked the then-acting director of the FBI Andrew McCabe which presidential candidate he had voted for during a White House meeting in May, according to anonymous officials. McCabe, now the deputy director of the bureau, is said to have told Trump he didn’t vote. One official said McCabe found the exchange “disturbing.”—The Washington Post

Teenager Facing Murder Charges After School Shooting
A 15-year-old boy suspected of killing two people after opening fire at Marshall County High School in Kentucky on Tuesday has been taken into police custody. The Kentucky State Police commissioner said he faced several charges, including two counts of murder and more than one count of attempted murder. A 15-year-old girl and 15-year-old boy were killed and 18 others injured in the shooting.—ABC News

International News

Children's Charity Attacked in Afghanistan
At least two people died in an apparent ISIS assault on the offices of the international aid agency Save the Children in Jalalabad Wednesday morning. A suicide car bomb and rocket-propelled grenade were reportedly used to force entry into the agency's compound, leaving Afghan forces battling with militants to secure it. At least 12 people were wounded, according to officials.—BBC News

Benghazi Rocked by Deadly Car Bombings
Dozens of people—at least 33—were killed when two car bombs went off outside of a mosque in the Libyan city Tuesday night. The second bomb reportedly went off after medical workers and security forces arrived at the scene.—Al Jazeera

Earthquake Hits Off Coast of Japan
The magnitude 6.2 quake struck in the Pacific Ocean Wednesday, just over 60 miles northeast of the Japanese island of Honshu. Although felt on Honshu and the nearby island of Hokkaido, no destruction had yet been reported. It was the third major earthquake registered in the especially seismically active Pacific region in just two days.—The Independent

Venezuelan President Seeks Re-election
Incumbent Nicolas Maduro told the media he's “ready to be a candidate” in a presidential election set to take place before the end of April. Opposition politician Maria Corina Machado voiced doubts the vote would be legitimate. “These are not elections, it’s a military occupation with a fraudulent election board,” she said.—Reuters

Everything Else

Author Ursula K. Le Guin Dies at 88
The sci-fi and fantasy writer died Monday at her home in Portland, Oregon, her family announced Tuesday. Stephen King paid tribute to “one of the greats” on Twitter: “Not just a science fiction writer; a literary icon. Godspeed into the galaxy.”—The Guardian

Shakira Investigated for Possible Tax Evasion
Spanish tax authorities have passed their examination of the Colombian pop star’s finances onto Barcelona’s prosecutor, suspecting she may owe income taxes for a period between 2012 to 2014. Shakira has hired the accounting firm PwC.—Billboard

Jordan Peele Cried When Oscar Nominations Dropped
After his film Get Out received four nominations, Peele responded by calling its star Daniel Kaluuya, nominated for best actor. “You know when you’re on the phone trying to disguise the sound of an ugly cry? I failed at that,” Peele shared on Twitter.—The AV Club

Dylan Farrow Criticizes Justin Timberlake
Farrow went after the singer for working with Woody Allen, whom she has accused of sexually assaulting her as a child. She responded to a question posed by Timberlake on Twitter by saying “you can’t support #TIMESUP and praise sexual predators at the same time.”—Noisey

A$AP Rocky Drops New Track
The rapper shared a new song on Soundcloud called “5IVE $TAR$.” A description for the track on his “AWGE Shit” page also suggested a new project titled “TESTING” was in the works.—Noisey

Chloë Sevigny Had a Séance in Lizzie Borden’s House
The actress said she prepared for Lizzie, a new movie about the 19th century woman who allegedly killed her parents with a hatchet, by taking part in a séance. “It was terrifying,” Sevigny said, claiming an ex-boyfriend “felt a presence pushing down on him.”—VICE

Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we’re taking a closer look at the famously disastrous Fyre Festival.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Talking about sex can be uncomfortable—unless you're Karley Sciortino, resident sexpert and host of VICELAND's SLUTEVER. On this episode of Ask SLUTEVER, she helps one fan who feels a little weird about being into Harry Potter porn unpack what his fetish says about his sex life, explaining that it's OK to fantasize about wizards, witches, and hell, even Dobby. As Karley sees it, it's probably best to embrace what you're into, even if you're embarrassed.

One of the weirdest bits from the Stormy Daniels interview about allegedly having sex with our president revealed he is "terrified" of sharks. Trump reportedly told the former porn star he "would never donate to any charity that helps sharks," and that he hoped "all the sharks die."

But now it looks like donations to charities that protect sharks have shot up since InTouch dropped its 2011 interview with Daniels, MarketWatch reports. The heads of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society told the site they've been flooded with contributions made in Trump's name or sent along with a message about his anti-shark tirade.

"Anything that focuses attention on the plight of sharks worldwide is valuable, so I guess in that way the president did good service," the Conservation Society's founder Captain Paul Watson told MarketWatch.

Not only are people shelling out donations to shark conservation efforts, but someone even paid to adopt a 13-foot Great White last week in the president's name, Newsweek reports. (They named it Lola, though Stormy could've been a stronger choice.) And that's not to mention the the Left Shark wannabe who became a #Resistance mascot at Washington DC's Women's March over the weekend.

While it's still not clear whether Trump and Daniels really had an affair back in 2006—something she was reportedly paid $130,000 to stay quiet about—her analysis of Trump's apparent fish phobia seems pretty spot on.

And to think: all this over something Trump shouldn't even be that scared of. According to Captain Watson, "it's actually more dangerous to play golf than it is to go swimming in the ocean with sharks."

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

A Domino’s delivery guy in Surrey, British Columbia was caught on video devouring toppings off a customer’s pizza in an elevator on the way to drop it off to a customer.

In a phone interview with CTV News, Domino’s Pizza expressed embarrassment and apologized to its customers. Jeff Kacmarek, Domino’s vice-president of marketing, said in the interview, “Obviously we don’t condone this behaviour… We have thousands of hard-working, good drivers, working for us every day and providing great service to our customers and it’s just unfortunate that this particular incident hurts them.”

Be that as it may, we have some questions for this hungry rogue delivery person.

What stage is this in the Domino’s Tracker?

Can someone please tell us if this guy is including this in the “Quality Check” stage or the “Out for Delivery” stage?

What is his opinion on Hawaiian pizza?

Could this delivery man actually be a hero saving his customer from the scourge that is pineapple on pizza?

How many times has this happened and the delivery person didn’t get caught?

Apparently it happened another time with a different pizza company in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2013. Really makes you wonder how many times this happened around the world without an elevator camera catching it. Quite troubling indeed. If I owned a frozen pizza company, I’d consider “Know Your Pizza is Safe. Buy Frozen. It Comes in Plastic” as a tagline. (Dr. Oetker, hmu.)

Is there a strategy to picking off toppings so that the customer doesn’t notice their pizza has been meddled with?

It appears at about 20 seconds into the video of the Domino’s driver in BC that he’s snacking on toppings with calculated precision. I mean, you can’t eat all the sausage off the meat lover’s pizza, gotta spread the topping love around.

Are you more likely to get your pizza toppings eaten by the delivery person if you live on an upper floor rather than a lower one?

In the video from BC, it appears the guy pushes a pretty up-there number in a condo building elevator. Certainly upper floors allow more time for topping-eating. One could reason that those on lower floors are less likely to have delivery people dipping into their goods before arrival at their door.

To echo the concierge of the building who reported the topping-munching delivery person to the resident whom it was delivered to, “Who likes to eat used pizza, right?” Even bad pizza can still be good, but certainly having a stranger eat off your pie with their bare hands takes it down a notch.

Domino’s said it fired the employee after finding out about his snacking misadventure and reported him to authorities. He was reportedly a college student (OK, this checks out) and had been employed by the company since July.

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Karley Sciortino has been covering sex and relationships for years, a niche she carved out for herself when she started her blog Slutever back in 2007. She's gone on to write Vogue's sex column and serve as VICE's resident sexpert, exploring kinks, polygamy, bondage, and beyond on her very own show, SLUTEVER.

Later this month, SLUTEVER is coming to VICELAND, kicking off the season by following Karley as she tries to track down a happy ending for women. Finding someone willing to provide the service isn't easy, and Karley's quest takes her coast to coast—meeting up with escorts, sexological bodyworkers, and a mysterious character named "Dr. M."

You can watch this episode of SLUTEVER for free online before the season premieres on VICELAND January 24. Want to know if you get VICELAND? Head here to find out how to tune in.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.