Since they’re not drinking, doing drugs, or having sex anymore, today’s teens are finding all kinds of creative ways to kill time, from dressing up like bushes to hijacking bulldozers. One such ostensibly bored child in California decided he'd have a little fun by pretending to be a cop—tossing police lights on an SUV, somehow wrangling an official-looking sheriff's uniform, and getting himself into enough trouble to wind up grounded for all eternity.

According to KTLA, the 14-year-old somehow made enough money mowing lawns and walking dogs or whatever to afford all the trappings of a police officer: full uniform, replica firearms, badges, holsters, a bulletproof vest—you name it. He decked himself out like a sheriff's deputy, stuck some red-and-blue emergency lights on his great-grandma's car, and took to the streets of San Bernadino County looking for some imaginary crime to solve.

On Monday, he pulled up to a house with his lights flashing, a walkie-talkie on his chest, and a fake pistol on his hip, and told the folks inside he'd come to investigate a domestic disturbance. Jasmine Jones answered the door, and told him there was nothing wrong—no one had even called the cops. She told KTLA something seemed off about the "officer" who'd come to the door, and—after he ran back to his car and drove away—she called 911.

"I saw the police uniform and I thought, That just doesn’t look right," Jones said. "It’s loose, and the belt buckle isn’t staying on his hips.”

Meanwhile, despite the fact that he's not even old enough to drive, the kid decided to make a traffic stop. He pulled over a woman, asked for her ID, and pretended to run her plates, KABC reports. Apparently wise enough to avoid actually trying to arrest someone, he gave the driver a warning and sent her on her way. After one last stop at some random house—again, for a phony domestic disturbance call—he packed it in for the night.

The next day, a real police officer spotted the white SUV and pulled it over, finding a 77-year-old woman behind the wheel and her 14-year-old great-grandson riding shotgun. He detained the kid while a few detectives searched his home, finding everything he'd used to play sheriff for the night.

Screengrab via the San Bernadino County Sheriff

According to a police report, he's since been arrested on what must be about a dozen different charges. There's no word on what kind of time he might be facing in juvie—he was already out on probation—but there's probably no sentence on Earth that compares to the grounding he's likely facing once he gets home.

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Related: Teen Too Lit at Wedding

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

If you’re a woman of colour living through this political moment, it is incredibly easy to fall into a pit of despair, to feel as though you are being crushed from all sides. But while some of us might be content to disengage and even hide from the steady diet of agony being served up by American culture, Aja Monet uses her poetry to mobilize the public and face the miserable state of society head on. Her steady voice over the loud speaker at the Women’s March last year brought a hush over tens of thousands of pussy-hat clad people when she calmly leaned into the microphone and reminded us, “It was language, words that got Trump into office.”

I first met Monet in March 2009, when she was staying at the home of my best friend’s parents in Chicago. With long, dark coils of curly hair and tattoos strewn across the small sections of her arms, Monet struck me then as the sophisticated, slightly aloof older sibling I never had. Having shuffled between predominantly white institutions for most of my life, I didn’t think having natural hair was even an option, and yet there it was, staring me in the face, laughing at my straight strands.

Fast-forward to September of the same year. My English teacher, one of the few women of colour on the faculty, turned on the projector and announced to the class that we needed to watch a short piece on slam poetry by a talented young woman who was already an award-winning artist. She flicked off the lights and I found myself looking at Monet on a stage. She’d been busy since our first encounter in Chicago, and I later learned that Monet had become the youngest-ever champion of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam at 19—two years prior to our first meeting.

Turns out the Brooklyn native’s lifelong identity as a poet deeply intersects with her roots in activism, as she explained in her book, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter. I recently sat down with Monet to gain a better understanding of what it’s like for a poet, an activist, a newly minted author, and above all a woman of colour to practice her craft at a time of such incredible, white supremacist-tinged turmoil.

Aja Monet in Miami

VICE: I know you got noticed as a poet early on, when you were college-aged and won that prize. But you started younger, right?
Aja Monet: Really, I started when I was in high school. I was in love with Langston Hughes. Then I learned about Maya Angelou, and some of the [other] ones you learn in school, [like] Nikki Giovanni… And then I had written a poem for a poetry class, and it really compelled the teacher and they encouraged me to continue writing.

I competed with a poem for our school talent show, and won, and started to find ways to get more involved in the city. I looked up poetry and youth organizations, saw one called Urban Word NYC—they were a big part of making me believe that poetry could be a career, that poetry could be a real thing I could do in the world. I never [previously] really saw poetry as something beyond my own personal joy. Then I saw professional poets and started taking classes and being mentored and competing in youth poetry slams.

It really politicized me, too, because I learned a lot about issues that weren’t just happening locally in New York, but also I went to Nationals—this organization Youth Speaks, they have a ‘Brave New Voices’ event they host every year, it’s like a huge national youth slam. I remember that was my first time leaving home, I was like 17, on my own, and got to meet all these other kids across the country who were weirdos like me. It was from there that I just started to gravitate towards wherever I could find poetry in my life, and wherever I could be around poets, constantly reading and writing and reciting.

Dope. I understand that poetry acted as a bridge to your becoming more politically engaged, and ultimately an activist, but at what point did you feel that this was part of your mission? Was politicizing it always your goal?
I don’t think I really ever had a mission. I wanted to connect to people, you know what I’m saying? I wanted to build bridges to change conditions I saw a lot of people struggling through. I don’t understand people who do anything in their lives without some level of connection to how it affects other people. I never thought of myself as separate from everyone else. You’re taught that poetry is an act that is often carried out in solitude, an isolating act, but in actuality it should bring people together, and it should be a part of how we address the conditions that we’re facing—how we reimagine the world we live in.

OK, but how did you find yourself going from seeing poetry as just sort of a hobby to reciting to a massive crowd during the Women’s March?
I think we can create more truth-telling in our society, so I was inspired by poets that never saw their work as separate from activism and organizing. The people that I looked up to, that was the way they saw the world. What’s sad and unfortunate is that a lot of young people in schools and in formal education don’t get told the whole story about how this country was founded, don’t get told the real story about why education is the way that it is, and what education has been put in place to do…which is basically to numb and nullify a bunch of people into labor. We don’t develop critical thinking skills in school! People are made to follow orders and do what they’re told and not question or come up with their own ideas about how they see the world and how they would like to see the world, and to be curious about other cultures.

I’ve been hungry for information since I was little. I went to workshops where sometimes people left crying, sometimes people left feeling really good about themselves—there was always new profound things that happened in a workshop space or a poetry collective, and I got politicized there. One of my really good friends from high school, her name is Tahani Salah, this young, dope Palestinian chick from Brooklyn. She would read poems to me and talk to me about what her people were facing in Palestine. It made me care about it, and made me want to learn more, and it made me want to be an advocate. The work is not just a poem, you know? There has always been the question…like, what do we do beyond the poem, what do we do beyond? What do we do about changing the conditions we complain about, rather than just yelling about it?

How do you go about sitting down and getting something on the page that ends up being as impactful as it is?
I put a lot of pressure on myself. I feel like I am always not as good as I could be. Words are only approximations of feelings and thoughts and ideas and experiences, so they can never fully encapsulate a lived experience, truly, you know? So I think my creative process is constantly like, How do I deal with that frustration of the limitations of language? At the end of the day, I feel like a lot of the issues we have in society are a result of miscommunication. My process is basically like, How do I hold writing as a scared act?

I take on the responsibility of making sure I communicate words that are, first and foremost, freeing for me, and then: How do I communicate that feeling of freedom to others? Sometimes the words come easy, and other times it’s excruciating. As corny as it sounds, I feel like there are people who have come before me who have endured more than I ever could have imagined, and the least I could do is sit down and write a fuckin’ poem about it, you know?

That’s the least I can do, offer some type of creative intention amidst all of this destruction and depression, amidst being told that there is so much we are not capable of. When I go and sit down to write a poem, all of that goes out the window. I feel more powerful when I write.

What would you tell a younger writer and activist who shares this frustration?
Well, Keorapetse Kgositsile just passed recently, and I don’t know if you know about him…but he’s actually the father of Earl Sweatshirt. A lot of people know about him because of that, but I think people should actually know about him because he’s a pretty fundamental to the way we look at the world as black people. He was an incredible poet because he gave language to a really difficult time in South Africa apartheid—I think his words helped free people. One thing he wrote that was really powerful for me was that before one can be effective and instrumental in freeing a people, he must first himself be free. If you are truly free, there is no way you can live a life and see someone else who is oppressed or hurt and feel free. We don’t realize our collective power as people. We need to stop being so individualistic. If your self care is not in the purpose of a collective, then its not self-care.

How do you cope with police violence against the black community these days, and how does it fit into your art?
Take it day by day. There is no way we will all wake up one day and have the solution. The people that I love and my community help me cope with the issues at hand. Also, music. I mean, like, good, live, music. That shit that makes you travel-somewhere-kind-of music, you know? It makes me want to do something different the next day, that should be the goal. I don’t want to cope with this system, really. That’s not why I’m here. I’m here to grow, and to change, and to heal. I just wrote a piece for Black Lives Matter, they asked artists and writers to write pieces as an homage to a black feminist future, and they wanted everything to be dedicated to Erica Garner. If I was hurting watching her father being strangled to death, if it brought me to tears, I can't even imagine where she was in that moment. This series of events has really woken people up. But this is also a generation of numbness.

How do you stay hungry throughout this constant barrage of negative news? How do you not become desensitized?
Well, there’s levels to life. There is no way my life can be divorced from the struggle and the fight for liberation. My partner is an organizer, and I see his work and I see his sacrifices he makes everyday, and the investment organizers across this country make so that we can live better. I also know that there are people who are struggling more than me, so how can I become complacent? When I know I’m contributing, I feel whole.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

This article first appeared on VICE Quebec.

Cannabis can be smoked, eaten, taken in suppository form... and even drunk. With legalization looming, mixing alcohol and weed may emerge as the newest trend, as more and more industry players move into the liquid cannabis market.

Last month, Pernod Ricard President and CEO Alexandre Ricard told Bloomberg his industry is keeping an eye on newly legal cannabis markets around the world. The company's stable of brands includes Beefeater, Havana Club and Absolut Vodka, among others.

Constellation Brands, the company that distributes Corona beer in North America, may have an edge over its competitors. In October, Constellation acquired 9.9% of Canopy Growth, the largest authorized cannabis producer in Canada, in a deal worth $ 245 million. The companies are looking to develop weed-infused drinks.

"Drinkable cannabis is a good way to reintegrate it into society," says Canopy Growth's head of brands in Quebec, Adam Greenblatt. "People already drink in a recreational setting, it's less taboo than smoking."

In fact, the Ontario company has just hired Molson Coors's former Vice President of Marketing, Dave Bigioni, to be its marketing director.

Enrico Bouchard, a Quebec businessman in the cannabis industry, has also recently launched a sparkling wine with infused with terpenes, extracts of essential oils and plant resins. These components provide the full aromatic profile of the cannabis plant, without the psychoactive effects of the drug. The result is a drink that tastes like weed but doesn't get you high.

The wine is distributed by Les Quatre Vins is made in Spain and flavoured with cannabis from Canada. To make it, Enrico Bouchard and Alan Jaremowich teamed up with Viña Fragrance, a Spanish producer of cava, though they aren't allowed to call it "cava" because it's altered by terpenes.

"While everyone focuses on THC and CBD, the active agents of cannabis, we go for the natural essences that perfume the plant," he says. "Terpenes come from cannabis, but they do not contain any drugs. Legalization may be coming to Canada, but it's still illegal in most places. "

Ironically, Enrico Bouchard got the idea for terpene wine during the filming of the VICE documentary Le Peuple de l'herbe in Montreal. In the scene that inspired him, a cannabis extraction specialist, Hugo Senécal, produces a terpene-flavoured sparkling water. "We call it terp champagne," Senécal said. "My $4.99 bottle of water is now worth $150."

"I went back to Spain and I did the same thing with real sparkling wine," explains Enrico Bouchard. "Today, we have an international patent to add terpenes in any alcoholic or non-alcoholic drink. Our first product is a wine, but we plan to launch a vodka soon."

Bouchard is well known in the field of Canadian cannabis, notably as the inventor of the Sublimator, a high-end bong, and for his fertilizer company. In 2014, he was arrested by the Sûreté du Québec for selling seeds. He then went to British Columbia and lives in Spain today.

Bouchard hopes to obtain his export permit in the coming weeks. His wine should be on sale in Canada within two months, starting in Alberta and Ontario, and eventually in Quebec.

According a report by the New York-based Anderson Economic Group, the legal pot market is expected to eat into alcohol sales in Canada to the tune of a less than 1% (or about $160 million in an industry worth more than $22 billion). The figure may seem small, but booze companies aren't likely to just watch their market shrink.

In Canada, only 3% of cannabis users say they consume it in liquid form according to a survey conducted by Health Canada. The figure could well grow as major brands join the game as the market develops. For now, though, they'll have to watch from the sidelines, since the federal government has already decided that the marketing of edible products will not be allowed in the first year of legalization.

Simon Coutu is on Twitter .

This is a story from an anonymous photographer, as told to Julian Morgans

What you’re looking at is a derelict Russian space shuttle, covered in dust and forgotten in the bowels of a Kazak launch facility. It's a remnant of the USSR’s failed effort at building a reusable space shuttle as part of the Buran Program. Based on plans stolen from NASA, the program chewed up untold billions between 1974 and 1993, only to briefly put one shuttle into orbit in 1988.

When the USSR collapsed, the program was mothballed and half-finished space shuttles were left rotting around the former Soviet empire. One shuttle was destroyed in 2002 when the hangar it was housed in collapsed in a storm, while another prototype is now housed in a German museum. These two shuttles at Baikonur Cosmodrome in southwest Kazakhstan are likely the only other survivors.

Only a handful of people have broken into this facility and got away with their SD cards. We’ll hear from one of those people today. He’s a European based urbex photographer who didn’t want his name published for fear it’d make international travel difficult, which is obviously part of his job.

Here, he explains in his own words how he got into the facility, how he got away, and how Russian agents have been on his tail since. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

I first read about the Buran Program on the internet and I was like well, that’s going on my list. It just seemed like the climax for every urban explorer. The best of the best. So in October 2015, I travelled to Kazakhstan.

Now, the facility is huge. It’s about 70 kilometres by 90 kilometres of desert with hundreds of launch pads left over from the Cold War. A few of the launch pads are still active—it’s where they launch rockets at the International Space Station. But the main challenge is that the hangar is about 40 kilometres from the main road. Then the other problem is there’s nowhere to hide a car, so you can’t drive. And then on top of that there are jeeps constantly driving around on patrol.

I spent the 2015 trip watching with binoculars, just trying to learn where the patrols went and at what times. I had no plan. I just collected data trying to figure out how I’d avoid the patrols and get across the desert without a car, until I had this idea—a bicycle! Because once you’re inside you can ride your bicycle on the asphalt roads. I just had to cover the distance from the main road, to one of the inside roads, which is about 20 kilometres.

So I went back home and made a plan. I ordered a fold-up bike and kept an eye on the launches. You can check the launch schedule on the internet and I wanted a time when there’d be as little activity as possible. So then I saw that there weren’t any launches during August 2016. There was also a full moon in the middle of the month, which would make traveling at night easier. So that became the plan.

The first place he tried parking. The bike is on bottom right

I flew in on the Friday night and at first it was easy. I found somewhere to hide my car—just a pile of old tyres, carpets, and trash in the desert. So I was covering the car in carpets and tyres, when this patrol car drove right past. And I was like, shit! But they must have thought I was unloading trash like the locals and they just kept going.

But still, I knew they’d changed their patrol route to see what I was up to. So I knew I had to make a new plan and I drove seven kilometres further east. There, on the following night, I found a cemetery where I figured I could park and nobody would ask questions.

From there I started cycling until I hit the first inside road. And this is where I found my first problem because I thought the roads were sealed, but they weren’t. Instead they were just sand and gravel but I had no other choice. So I started riding through the sand.

I thought it’d take five hours, but it was really hard work and took more like nine. By the time I got to the hangar it was dawn and I was exhausted, only to hit another problem.

The hangar was supposed to be unlocked but I found everything sealed up. I was like oh my god, I came here and now I can’t get in. But then I stacked some oil barrels up in a pile to reach the fire ladder and get up to the second story. The second story was unlocked so I got in about 6:30 AM and it was really dark. Just this single line of windows, casting a glow into what looked like an enormous cathedral. And then I could see these two amazing space shuttles sitting below me.

It was like a mausoleum for the space age. I sat there for two hours just looking at them. I tried to sleep but my body was full of adrenaline so finally around 10 AM, when the light got better, I started taking photos.

It was just a typical calm Sunday at Baikonur Cosmodrome and I spent all day climbing around, trying to get the best shots. The shuttles had clearly been rotting there for 25 years and they were covered in bird shit. There was a ladder beneath one of them and you could climb inside but there wasn't actually much to see. They’re basically destroyed. Also the hangar is wrecked because of the 10-year period where the Kazakhs were unclear about what was happening at Baikonur and stripped the place. Everything of value has disappeared and I think the hangar will probably collapse, just like the other one.

The rocket which was supposed to carry the Buran space shuttle into orbit

After I spent the day taking photos I wanted to go see another hangar nearby. It’s the one with the big Energia rocket, about 400 metres away. So I crawled over and took some pictures. And then I was just about to leave when these three big Czar German Shepherds showed up. And they were making a lot of noise and one of the dogs was getting close so I grabbed a steel pole and got out my pepper spray, which I’d brought specifically for dogs. He was getting closer and closer, snapping at me, so I wacked him over the mouth and gave him a spray. After that all three backed off and I was alone again.

By this point it was dark and I had to get back. I didn’t want to be there on Monday morning so I needed to reach the car by daybreak. So I walked about eight kilometres back to my bike and started riding. Then all of a sudden I saw the lights of a jeep behind me. Quickly I threw my bike to the ground and ran about 50 metres into the desert.

I could see this guy coming down the road, careening right and then left, swerving into the desert and then back onto the road. I’m not sure if they were looking for me or what they were doing. But I guess it was the weekend, and these guards might have a few vodkas, and I was thinking please, god, don’t run over my bike. But somehow he drove right past and I got back onto the road and resumed riding.

After hours of riding through sand I was completely exhausted. Finally I figured it’d be just easier to walk so I ditched the bike and my bulletproof vest. So many times I wanted to lay down and rest but I knew I couldn’t. Waking up in the full sun of the desert without much water would be dangerous. I had six litres for 36 hours and that had worked out fine. But I knew it wouldn’t be fine in 37-degree heat.

Finally, about 6 AM, I got back to the car. I then drove about 20 kilometres away, turned up the air conditioner, and fell asleep. Then at noon I woke up again and kept going.

When I got home I had a big exhibition and the place was packed. I made great business and sold a lot of prints to business guys. The trip cost about 1,000 euros and I made 20,000 so it was a good profit.

But then four days later I came home to find the door of my condo open. Instantly I knew someone had broken in but it wasn’t the huge mess I expected. The only thing missing was my Nikon—the big Nikon which still had the rocket pictures on the card. And they stole my laptop too, but nothing else. I guess they were at the exhibition where they saw my computer projecting all the Baikonur pictures. But they left six lenses in the same camera bag, as well as my backup camera, the Sony A7. So it was like, a little weird.

I called the police and they came in and I made a statement. Later, they called me back and said, “Look, it doesn’t make sense these guys took only your camera and laptop. So, we think it might be a sign from Moscow.”

They told me to be careful because messing with those guys wouldn’t be fun. They thought, and I agree, that it’s was about honour. The Russians lose face when someone like me breaks into their top secret spaceport on a folding bike. And the Americans are paying tens of millions every time they use Baikonur to launch someone at the International Space Station, so it’s not good for business either. So since then, I've really tried to stay out of the media, which is another reason I’m being anonymous here.

I’m not scared. I haven’t been watching my back. I’m a very optimistic person and you have to be in this job. It’s a great story, and I’ve told it to a few friends already. I guess the main thing I learned was how important it is to be prepared. I had my pepper spray and my bulletproof vest. I learned the words for “hands up” in Russian. But I didn't have a plan B prepared for when my first parking spot was foiled. I should have had a plan B ready to go but instead I had to improvise.

So always be well prepared and if anybody wants to go in there, my recommendation is don’t. I was even asked by a TV station to guide a team in there. They offered me a lot of money but I’m not a guide. I’m not going to go in there just for money. I do what I do for photography and not for anything else.

You can catch more stories from Julian on Twitter or Instagram

This article originally appeared on VICE AU.

The return of Jessica Jones on Netflix at this moment in time almost feels engineered in how damn perfect it seems. This is 2018 we’re talking about here, a period in time when award shows come with #MeToo and #TimesUp addresses.

So, this feels like the right time for the return of Jessica Jones; a Marvel created, self-loathing, hard-drinking and damaged female hero whose trauma came from an horribly abusive man. She’s never been the pristine image a Wonder Woman who kicked ass before posing for pictures later. Instead, she’s a hero whose motivations manifested out of the desire to not want to be a victim anymore; the epitome of today's movements.

In Season 2, we begin to see Jessica in a period of recovery. With the main source of her worst purple shaded nightmares behind her, she’s now looking for her backstory to her super-powered origins. Whether this takes into more #metoo related scenarios, or Kilgrave-like adversaries, it’s all a season watch away.

I spoke to two very important women involved with the Netflix series that could shed some light on this season. Jessica Jones producer, Melissa Rosenberg, who also had a hand in Dexter, The OC and the Twilight Saga (won’t touch that), along with Rachel Taylor who plays Trish, the best friend/adoptive sister of Jessica Jones, about what this show is doing for women, in front and behind the camera.

VICE: Watching a good part of Season 2 felt like a recovery session. You had Trish and the producer, Jessica (PTSD) and even Jeri Hogarth and her issues with mortality. It was just interesting in how these characters had their own demons beyond some grand superhero story.
Rachael Taylor: Yeah, I have to say that Melissa has a way, even though this is a superhero show, of writing the world as it really is. We get topics around sexual harassment, and men’s violence against women. Abuse, and addiction threaded through the whole fabric of this show. She just has this knack for relaying culture through the prism of a Marvel world. It’s really kind of masterful to be honest the way she’s able to serve up a mirror to the world we’re living in now. To me, Season 2 seems even more relatable now compared to two years ago.

Trish (Rachel Taylor), confronting a former producer who exploited her in the past. | Image courtesy of Netflix.

Melissa Rosenberg: Ha, you know, the objective is always to find a story and take a character on a journey that resonates with an audience and contributes to the conversation.

But sticking to the women, there’s an authenticity right down to the things that they say. For instance, when Trish is holding a producer that exploited her sister down on a car, talking about not wanting to hold back her anger anymore. I mean, I’m curious, how much of yourselves did you guys put into these played out situations?
Rosenberg: You know, all of these episodes were actually all written and shot before the #metoo movement began, which is interesting. As writers, even producers, the objective is to use your own life and experience in story telling to make the feeling effective. This season in particular is very personal for me. I bring a lot of my experience into it, and my partner on this one, Raelle Tucker (executive producer), did as well. It was very emotional for us.

If you don’t mind me asking, what sort of experience as an example?
Rosenberg: Mostly from the emotion of it all. That scene with Jessica holding down a producer in a particular story line, that comes from a place of myself feeling unsafe in a world on that front. Very much something I’ve experienced in my life along with most women on one level or another. But then, there’s episode two, with Jeri Hogarth, when she gets in these bad moods, and her first reaction is to deny it, and do whatever she can to push it away. I’ve been in that place before. Not necessarily by drowning myself in a crowd of hookers though (laughs), but in that place of needing to drown out it out and distract or deny it as long as I can. Ultimately you have to face it.

As a comic book nerd, I respect the fact that as a Marvel property, you are are dealing a lot of non-comic-booky issues.
Taylor: Oh my god, have you read the ‘Alias’ Jessica Jones strip?

I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t just yet.
Taylor: It’s sooo dark, like really dark! As far as comic books go, the adult and mature themes are up there. I’ll be honest, I actually think the source material is way darker than you’d think. It’s why I adored being able to take part after I read the comic book series all the way through. It’s an extremely dark and rich world to draw from. And it’s funny, because my character, her maybe soon to be alter ego, Paty Walker, is so different in tone compared to Jessica’s line of stories. I gotta give it up to Melissa for being able to make a little wink to them by building up this rich backstory for Trish by simply making her a child star, with a show called Patsy Walker.

Does it really change a lot to have so many more women behind the camera Melissa? I know it was your decision to up the number, and as a fan whose a man, I’d like to know what that does to a set.
Rosenberg: If I’m going to be honest, nothing really changes on screen. A good director is a good director and vice versa. What actually does change though is the sense of parity. You have 50/50 men and women, and body walks onto a set feeling like some alien. It’s like, I’m not the only women, so there’s a real balance and I think with that, comes a certain level of safety and warmth.

I completely identify with what you’re saying actually.
Rosenberg: Yeah, people really do their best work in that sort of environment because it just becomes normalized. So when you walk off from our set, and you go to another, you’re like, wait a second, this isn’t normal at all. I’m actually the only one on set. That diverse, balanced environment just brings out the best work in everyone involved.

NY Premiere Screening and Afterparty -Pictured: Janet McTeer, Melissa Rosenberg (Showrunner, Exec. Producer) -Photo by: Marion Curtis / StarPix for Netflix.

And speaking of more women, we got some mysterious character played by the great Janet McTeer. Similar abilities to Jessica, but just as engaging as Kilgrave. What’s her deal?
Rosenberg: Oh my god, Janet, she brings such a gravitas with her. Such a presence. Watching her and Krysten Ritter play off one another as you’ll see more and more is like watching a masterclass. And she also brings a physicality with her alongside the depth. Definitely one of the most favourite people that I’ve gotten to work with. She’s just so delightful, passionate, and willing to go to some really interesting and courageous places.

No disrespect to Krysten, but she’s such a natural at playing a lovable asshole. This women who tries so hard to put up a shield, but constantly lowers it at the same time, like in the case of Malcolm and Jessica.
Rosenberg: Yeah! We get to really explore Jessica and Malcolm's characters this season in a way that we weren't able to much in the first when you're building your essential character. Being able to push them into some really interesting territory all ties back to Jessica's own experience. The richer the character that you had to play with and against, the better everyone's story was. With Malcolm, his story through addiction is very much like a coming of age. And going through that, alongside Jessica, was a really interesting look, I mean that's the mirror for him, Jessica Jones. For her though, he's something like a little brother, and a lot of that gets explored in this season. He invokes in her a caringness, that she's loathed to feel, but can't help but feel that for him.

I actually loved any scene where he actually stood up for himself for a change, like a certain elevator scene involving percentages.
Rosenberg: (Laughs) That is one of my most favourite scenes, I just love it!

At the same time, with this whole #metoo movement, and Wonder Woman release, Jessica as a character is a refreshing side to the anger and attitude the women have a right to display. What’s your takes on how that’s being handled.
Taylor: I’ve learned so much from working with Krysten Ritter around this to be honest. She’s all passion, commitment and her work is so incredibly detailed throughout when it comes to that balance. It’s funny, acting is kind of like playing tennis, you’re only as good as your partner, and she definitely makes me a better actor. Even off set, I just adore her. We’re genuinely great friends! And I think Jessica, just as a character, has been all about empowerment and bravery. Which Krysten does such a good job in portraying.

Rosenberg: It’s obviously a great and extraordinary thing to be able to contribute to the conversation. As a storyteller, you always hope to bring people into the experiences of of your characters, and your own. I’ve always approached my work as writing a character, not writing a “female” character. Jessica is a character. Certainly, her genre informs her. You walk through the world as a woman, and different things will happen to you compared to a man. But that does not define her. Whenever I read a screenplay in the past, it would be some strong and silent type, and then all these different complex, blah blah blah. For the women? It’s like, she’s the wife! (laughs). Again, these sides come with parity. We want the ability to be able to see ourselves on screen in whichever way that may come. The possibility in that will always be empowering.

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Having a bad neighbour is a unique kind of hell. Maybe you don’t want to call the cops on the bro blasting "Sandstorm" in the apartment next door, or the couple upstairs who insists on having impossibly loud sex every night, but you want it to stop. Most people would do nothing; the stronger among us might knock on a door, or complain to a super. If you’re Joel Rosquette—a 50-year-old tenant in New York City—apparently you skip straight to murder-for-hire.

According to a federal criminal complaint filed in Manhattan on Tuesday, Rosquette got so fed up with the unruly teens living across the hall, he hired a hitman to take them out. His neighbors—somewhere around 16 to 18 years old—allegedly threw parties constantly in their tiny apartment, raging long into the night and making a whole heap of noise. Rosquette had a feeling they were drug dealers, though given what we know about today's teens, he could have been mistaken.

In any case, Rosquette wanted the racket to stop. He went to a guy he knew and told him he wanted "to take care of" his superintendent, under the perplexing assumption that whoever replaced him would crack down on the teens across the hall, the complaint claims. When he asked the shady character if he knew anyone who did "that kind of work," the guy said he could pull it off for $10,000. Unbeknownst to Rosquette, the contract killer he'd just tapped for the job was an FBI informant.

"Are you absolutely 100 percent positive that you want me to knock this guy off?" the CI asked Rosquette, according to the complaint.

"One-hundred and ten percent, yes," Rosquette allegedly replied.

Rosquette later abandoned the idea to assassinate his superintendent, according to the complaint, eventually deciding to just go ahead and take out the reprobates themselves.

"Rage is rage,” Rosquette told the CI over the phone, according to the complaint. "When you have rage, you do things… Rage in the heart. When you have that, it's personal.”

The CI put him in touch with a hitman who was up for the job—but, unfortunately for Rosquette, the guy was actually an undercover FBI agent. According to the complaint, Rosquette, who was short on cash, told the agent he also wanted to kill a gas station clerk he knew in Staten Island—another enemy, apparently—and steal all the money in his safe, which Rosquette would use to pay for the hits on those loud-ass teens.

On Tuesday, Rosquette's "hitman" told him the deed was done. He'd robbed the gas station for about $12,000, he told Rosquette at a sit-down, which would be more than enough to pay for taking out the kids across the hall. Rosquette gave the undercover agent the teens' names, told him where they lived, and asked him to make the hit. As soon as they wrapped up their meeting, Rosquette was arrested.

He's now facing up to 30 years in prison, where—if he's convicted—he'll probably get some time away from those godforsaken teens. Maybe he'll have better neighbours in the clink.

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Related: Undercover Cop

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

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

US News

Experts Slam Trump's Plan to Meet One-on-One with Kim
The president accepted an invitation to speak directly with the North Korean leader after a White House meeting with South Korean officials who brokered the potentially historic encounter. South Korean National Security Adviser Chung Eui-Yong suggested the North was willing to suspend missile tests to enter negotiations with the US over denuclearization, but experts warned it could backfire horribly.—VICE News / The New York Times

Fake News Travels Faster Than the Real Thing, Study Shows
A study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded fake stories were the most rapidly shared on Twitter, and real users—rather than bots—were to blame. The MIT analysis found it took truthful information six times as long to reach 1,500 people as false information, and that bogus news was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted.—VICE News

Majority Believes #MeToo Movement Has Led to Change, Poll Finds
A new NBC News/Survey Monkey poll concluded 51 percent of US adults thought the wave of sexual misconduct stories in the past six months have “helped address gender inequality." Only 20 percent said they believed the #MeToo movement has treated men unfairly, while 26 percent said it has made no real impact.—NBC News

Interior Department Spending $139K on Ryan Zinke's Doors
The Secretary of the Interior denied knowing the huge sum had been set aside for the replacement of three sets of doors in his office. A spokeswoman for the Department said Zinke “agrees that this is a lot of money." —AP

International News

Pacific Nations Flout Trump with Free Trade Deal
Ministers from the 11 countries in the Trans-Pacific Partnership signed a pact cutting tariffs across the region ahead of new ones being imposed by the US. Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Brunei all signed the agreement to open up trade. Chile's foreign minister said the move was “a strong sign against the protectionist pressures."—AP

Aid Convoy Makes It to Eastern Ghouta
On Friday, UN trucks delivering food and medical supplies entered Eastern Ghouta, the brutally besieged suburb of Damascus. Despite a break in government strikes on the rebel-held area last night, new strikes on the Douma neighborhood were reported. The UN’s humanitarian chief said any attacks would violate “assurances of safety” for the convoy.—BBC News

Turkey Wants Another 243 People Arrested Over Attempted Coup
The country filed arrest warrants en masse once again, including nearly 100 for teachers accused of backing the US-based opposition leader Fethullah Gulen. Over 50,000 people have been sent to prison since the (failed) July 2016 coup attempt, with another 150,000 removed from government jobs.—Reuters

At Least Seven Killed in Kabul Bomb Attack
A suicide bombing on Friday near a Shia mosque in the Afghan capital left seven other people injured, according the interior ministry. The bomber was said to detonate the device while trying to enter a ceremony marking the anniversary of a local Shia leader’s death.—Al Jazeera

Everything Else

Obamas Negotiating for Netflix Series
Barack and Michelle Obama are reportedly hammering out a deal for a series of shows featuring “inspirational stories." Although the shows could feature political subjects, they were not expected to openly criticize Trump or his policies.—The New York Times

Toys R Us Close to Liquidation
The company was reportedly making plans to close stores across the US after attempts to find a buyer were at least initially unsuccessful. The toy giant’s US division filed for bankruptcy last year, and closed 180 of its 800 stores in January.—Los Angeles Times

Vince Staples Drops New Track
The rapper released the single “Get the Fuck Off My Dick,” his follow to last year’s album Big Fish Theory. Staples previously promoted the track with a GoFundMe page in which he asked fans to raise $2 million for his retirement.—Pitchfork

Prequel Movie for ‘The Sopranos’ is on the Way
The legendary TV series' creator David Chase reportedly inked a deal with New Line for his project The Many Saints of Newark. Set in 1960s New Jersey, the film was said to feature at least some characters from The Sopranos universe.—VICE

First Glimpse at ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Season 2
Hulu dropped the trailer for the dystopian drama’s follow-up season on International Women’s Day. It featured narration by Elisabeth Moss’s character Offred. The first episode was slated to drop on April 25.—i-D

Federal Judge Tells Trump to Mute, Not Block Followers
Naomi Reice Buchwald encouraged the president to use Twitter’s mute function in a case raised by the Knight First Amendment Institute and seven users Trump blocked. Buchwald advised the parties to settle the matter before she offers a ruling.—Motherboard

Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we’ll hear about how "depression tattoos" can help people cope.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

How to organize the hierarchy of voiceover masters? Does everybody look up to James Earl Jones, who himself looks up to Morgan Freeman? And does Freeman and his Voice of God look up to anyone? If so, then it is surely the Voice of Nature himself: Sir David Attenborough!

What is he saying? He is saying, as the clock starts on Blue Planet II, his just-premiered series, the latest in the blockbuster Planet Earth line, that, “The oceans, seemingly limitless, invoke in us a sense of awe and wonder, and also sometimes fear.” Yes, certainly yes. The oceans Attenborough shows us, over these seven hour-long episodes, are indeed full of awe and wonder and sometimes fear, full of never-before-seen stunners both animal and geographic.

An eel dives into a toxic brine lake on the bottom of the ocean and goes into shock, twisting and untwisting itself in painful and ecstatic spasms until it finally breaks free and swims away as if nothing has happened.

A family of sperm whales goes on a commando-style squid-hunting dive hundreds of meters down while we follow along from cameras that have apparently, somehow, been stuck on to the whales. An octopus, at the moment before her consumption by a shark, manages to slip her tentacles inside its gills so that it can’t breathe and is forced to let her go, her skin (if that’s what it’s called) all the while flickering with such vivid and electric colors she would be the toast of any rave.

And more and more brain-blasting, spine-prickling images, culled from half-a-decade’s worth of footage taken across the world by the BBC’s crack Natural History Unit, presented for our enjoyment in short animal-based meals that rotate every five or ten minutes or so. Awe and wonder indeed. Alas.

Alas? The problem is that in Blue Planet II’s presentation, awe and wonder seem to be the only things the oceans are full of. (They certainly aren’t so full of fish any more, as the series takes pains to make clear.) And awe and wonder get old quickly. There are so many beautiful shots and miraculous creatures you begin to crave something plain, and if you’re me, you begin to crave it quickly, about 15 or 20 minutes into any given episode. It’s like going to a museum filled almost exclusively with versions of Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog: after a while, the only wonder going is you wondering just how something so cool can be so boring.

Partly it’s that, on a closer look, the tricks turn out to be pretty cheap, ripped from blockbuster movies and used again and again. Put the creatures in slo-mo, slap on some custom-scored Hans Zimmer, add some detailed foley effects (I couldn’t help picturing the lucky person who makes the farting, whooshing noises for the dolphins), and you’re good to go. When, as in one episode here, this technique is applied to a rubber ducky, you know things have—pardon—jumped the shark. Several of the episodes, particularly the first, lapse into a kind of fish-salad, a greatest hits of the ocean, jumping around in time, place, and species so much it’s hard for the filmmakers to get anything except individual shots going, much less scenes or sense. No wonder everybody smokes weed to watch these shows—you couldn’t follow them otherwise.

The great exception is Blue Planet II’s second episode, about the depths of the oceans, which is so focused, eerie, and alien you can’t break away. Via the device of a dead whale carcass tracked as it falls from the water’s surface to its floor, you also learn something enduring: a good sense of how the depths relate to the rest of the ocean. A map of connection comes into your head and doesn’t leave.

The visual clichés are accompanied by linguistic ones. “The huntah... has become... the huntid," Attenborough intones on at least one instance. At another point, the males of a species “all have the same thing on their minds.” Worst of all, a male fish competing to mate is described as having “secured pole position.” I’ll never watch NASCAR the same way.

Then, in what feels likes a subconscious effort to mirror in language the amazement being urged upon us, Attenborough begins to drop his verbs. Creatures appear on screen and, rather than tell us in normal sentences that “These are emperor penguins,” he simply states their names, pauses for effect, and numbers their quantities. “Humpback whales... hundreds of them,” he says. “Grey reef sharks... hundreds of them.” Two minutes later: “Anchovies... millions of them.” “Spinners and blacktips... 10,000 of them.” Soon he’s doing it for islands too.

Sure, it’s a small thing, but as the series marches on and you hear it dozens of times, you begin to resent the absence of old “is” more and more. We’re all taught early on to abhor the passive voice, but what we’re now learning is that something even worse may lurk down there in the depths of the English language: a school of verbless sentences. If Attenborough were narrating the biblical creation, a shot of the sun, moon, seas would appear amidst a blaze of infinite hi-def and he would, truncating the illustrious phrase, utter a single word: “Light.”

This isn't just writerly nitpicking; sometimes the words get in the way of understanding what’s going on in front of your eyes. “The tide is beginning to turn,” Sir David says, before pausing dramatically and then continuing the thought—“this could be the moment to spawn.” But, because of the profusion of clichés that have come before, and the fact that he’s talking about the ocean here, the viewer doesn’t know if, hmm, the actual tide was beginning to turn, thereby prompting spawning, or if that was merely an exhausted metaphor meant to indicate that the spawning situation was starting to look more favorable. Some advice to future nature documentary producers: when describing fish, don’t use fish-related metaphors.

By the last episode, which is wholly focused on humanity’s horrifying effects on the oceans, the ultimate goal of Blue Planet II, a goal which is shared by its cousins in the Planet Earths and so on, becomes clear: to build such an appreciation in us for the natural world that we’ll inspired to protect it from the death it currently faces. You sense that the creators and Attenborough see themselves on a crucial mission, an echo of which can be felt in the mild pond of moral virtue that surrounds the watching of their shows. Nothing wrong with this mission—it’s as noble as any. Still, one suspects that, called (by themselves) to speak for nature, the creators’ sense of mission overtakes any full and honest representation of what nature, or an encounter with it, is actually like.

By this I mean they need to aim for some feeling fresher and more original than awe, which feels blazingly new when one encounters it but actually isn’t. Awe is, in fact, the default emotion people who don’t normally have anything to do with nature associate with nature. The usual tone, something we slip on without thinking when the time comes and slip off just as easily. A real intimacy with nature, by contrast, would require the full gamut of emotions we recognize as part of any other sort of intimacy: awe and love, yes, but also fondness, boredom, fear, anger, and contempt. I dare say that if nature docs didn’t adopt just this one emotion, this one godlike point of view, they might actually be more effective in bringing people closer to it. For instance: nature is sometimes incredibly dumb. Animals make mistakes all the time. Shouldn’t we also laugh at them, like we laugh at our stupid friends?

It’s not like examples of this sort of thing don’t exist. Meerkat Manor, say, offers much less on the spine-tingling scale but, in sticking around the same place and species for a long time, offers much more on the more-enduring scales of knowledge and humor. As for more negative feelings, there’s the great American writer Annie Dillard, whose work pulses with anger and horror at the natural world:

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives. Every glistening egg is a memento mori.

I admit I will probably end up regretting all this when the inevitable ironic nature shows come out. Attenborough’s docs, for all their limits, do form the rare high-toned break from the seas of televised crap we all swim in. And perhaps there really isn’t a better way to go about getting millions of people into nature than this. But still: Planet Earth and Blue Planet are the only nature series most people watch. They matter, so getting them right matters too. In the meantime, I’m getting bored.

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Hello there, uncorrupted young person.

You’ve discovered this article because you are about to embark on a lifelong relationship with alcohol, which will likely be the longest, most expensive and most complicated relationship of your natural life.

What kind of drinker will you be? Where will you go? What kind of people will you encounter and not remember along the way? Well, this article is here to help make sense of it all and our ace staff developed this definitive list of all of the types of drunkenness in existence that we’re aware of.

It’s probably not wise to see this as a bucket list; rather, perhaps view it as an unhealthy choose-your-own adventure. But, don’t let us limit you: There really are an infinite number of ways to get intoxicated if only you believe in yourself.

Pre-Drink Drunk
If you don’t have much money in the bank, the level you’ll be trying to get to might mean that you don’t even make it to the main event.

Drunk at Work Drunk We definitely wouldn’t know anything about this.

Angry Drunk You probably drank whiskey.

Bar Fight Drunk You were probably Angry Drunk at some point and someone bumped into you at the club/bar/outside and mumbled ‘sorry’ and you said “watch where you are going, buddy” and they said “I’m not your buddy, buddy” and you said “I don’t like your attitude, buddy” and they said “Have another drunk, buddy, really sounds like you need one” and you said “Go fuck yourself bud” and they said “why don’t you go home” and you said “Fuck you and your stupid hat” and they said “what you say” and you got in really close and said “I think your hat is stupid” and they said “Do you want to take this outside” and then you did and got the shit kicked out of you. So now you are drinking away the physical and emotional pain of losing a fight. Way to go.

DJing Drunk
Your transitions are choppy and terrible, but everyone is hopefully too drunk to notice. You end up playing “God’s Plan” at least five times throughout the night and make a point to turn down the volume so everyone can yell “I only love my bed and my mama, I’m sorry” in unison. An up-and-coming Soundcloud rapper with regrettable face tattoos convinces you to let him plug his USB into your computer. It seems like a good idea at the time, but you wake up the next morning and realize he posted his mixtape on all of your social media feeds. Congratulations. You get to spend your day being hungover and deleting tweets.

Dad Drunk
It’s Monday and this case of Stella ain’t gonna drink itself.

Mom Drunk
Mommy needs her juice!

Cracking Open Some Cold Ones with the Boys Drunk
Ahhhhhh yeah, baby. The boys are back in town. The boys are back in town.

What Am I Doing with My Life Drunk
An all-too-familiar and unfortunately evergreen variety of inebriation for some of us.

Drinking Game Drunk — Winning Edition
How the fuck you and your friend Jim have owned this court of beer pong/beers-bee/quarters is anyone's fucking guess but you're on like your eighth game. You are fucking hammered but just keep winning. The only thing keeping you standing is because you’re a competitive maniac. You’re shit talking super hard and just sucking back booze—this is as close to being god as you will ever get in your sad, miserable drunk life. Your winning streak will end when either you or Jim just drunkenly wander off.

Drinking Game Drunk — Losing Edition
FUCK THESE STUPID FUCKING GAMES! WHY DO WE NEED TO PLAY A GAME TO GET DRUNK ANYWAYS! NO JIM, I’M NOT MAD YOU FUCKING DICK, WE WOULD HAVE WON THAT IF YOU HAD ANY GODDAMN SKILL!!!

Wedding Drunk, Guest Edition
This is your best, lowest-commitment scenario where you can pretty much handily take full advantage of the (hopefully) open bar. Nobody will care if you disappear into the night or test out your acrobatic abilities on the dance floor. If you cause injuries and people start asking questions, you can say you’re someone else’s plus one.

Wedding Drunk, Bridal Party Edition
Without fail a member of the bridal party will take the commitment to be The Most Fun One a little too far and become the Drunkest Person at the Wedding. Yes, you’ve paid way too much money thanks to Bride and Groomzillas but don’t fuck up their perfect memories!

Wedding Drunk, Getting Married Edition
Possibly the closest you’ll get to feeling like a drunken king or queen your entire life. After too many speeches praising your ass and toasts supporting the statistically dubious decision you’ve just made, you’ll continue to be fed so many signature cocktails and glasses of sparkling wine that you are inches away from blacking out the entire reception. DO NOT BLACK OUT. The night will end in an attempt at hot drunk wedding night sex but you are both too tired to really put any effort into it and you both pass out. Little do you know this will come to define your sex life for years to come. Years later, you’ll look back on this regretful day and night as a huge waste of money but think, Hey, that was a pretty good drunk.

Happy Hour Drunk
Drink specials are great, but if you’ve found that you are experiencing this type of drunk more than once a week, it might be time to make a conscientious effort to cultivate friendship outside of work. That said, 4pm, when the sun is still up but it’s not too hot is a lovely time for drinking and longingly looking out a window.

Uber Drunk
You spend the entire ride annoying your driver in the following ways: asking for the aux cord (and for him to “Turn it the fuck up!” when you put on Drake), backseat driving, inquiring about his personal life, discussing politics, and insisting he gives you five stars when you stumble out of his car. You forget to tip.

Ladies’ Wine Night Drunk
Everyone drinks out of their own magnum bottle while you comfort your friend Jessica, who’s crying that her boyfriend cheated on her AGAIN. (You’ve all begged her to dump him for months, and this exact scenario has played out like deja vu at least six times now). You end up watching one of the following: Mean Girls, The Craft, Jawbreaker. You type up a lengthy text message on Jessica’s behalf to dump her boyfriend for her and take thirst trap pics of each other for Instagram. They get back together two days later.

Graduation Drunk
Celebratory drunkenness is some of the best in life. Just try not to think too hard about the student loan burden you’ve accrued over the last few years.

Sports Drunk A: The Arena
You are drinking arena beers which are somehow like 17% alcohol—your friend told you once it was because they don’t clean the lines but he’s usually full of shit. Nevertheless you are thusly slammed as hell off two beers. You are cheering and sharing emotions with 16,000 other drunk people. You will never be this happy again.

Sports Drunk B: The Sports Bar
This is the Epcot version of Sports Drunk A expect you are not happy and the beer isn’t as good.

Sports Drunk C: Tailgating

Strip Club Drunk
You have to buy a drink just to get in, so you might as well keep going. It won’t be long til you’re emptying your chequing account out of the ATM that has a $6 fee and making it rain like you’re in your own rap video. You’ll come to while on stage getting whipped with your own belt by a dancer named “Cookie” and your wallet empty.

Your Sports Team Won the Big Championship
AKA the Boston drunk.

Afterparty Drunk
When everyone starts asking who wants to pitch on the dial-a-bottle, you realize you should have just taken that cab home. Always take that cab home.

Wedding Crasher Drunk
You gotta go big or go home for this one. For starters, make sure the wedding is big—you’re not going to be able to blend in at a small wedding. Once you’ve infiltrated the reception, make sure you have a backstory, something that won’t prompt too many questions. Don’t go alone either, make sure you have your own personal Vince Vaughn with you at all times. From there, just make a bee-line for the open bar and go to town.

Election Day Drunk
This is the level of intoxication you achieved when you realized Donald Trump was actually going to be president.

Apocalypse Drunk
See ‘Election Day Drunk.’

Office Party Drunk
You’re playing with fire. Avoid managers and arch-nemesis coworkers.

Brunch Drunk
This is the most regularly acceptable form of day drunk because, A.) it’s a weekend, calm down and B.) did you fucking see the mimosa special, omg.

Country Bar Drunk
It’s the end of a hard week in the plants and you and your group of friends are headed up to the big city for a hootenanny. So, you get on your best wranglers, belt buckles, and button up flannel shirt and hit up a bar that will be for sure called something like Oil City. You can only drink (bad) whiskey and beer here. If you get a cocktail someone will fight you. You better have caught up on all the moves the the Cotton Eyed Joe line dance because there will be a time when EVERYONE gets up and starts dancing to it. They will be robotic in their line dancing proficiency. You will get some mad side eye when you undoubtedly mistake move No. 7 (clap your hands) for move No. 12 (stomp and turn.) The night will end with one of your boys fighting someone outside of the country bar.

Club Drunk
A close relative of Pre-Drink Drunk if only because the drinks here are so fucking expensive ($9 for a bar rail, are you joking?). You’re only getting through this one if you let the finance bros eyeing you and your friends up at the bar buy you shots. You spend the night trying to dance to the DJ’s poor taste in music (a mix of Top 40 and EDM, but at least the sound system is good) and evading non-consensual grinding. Your Instagram story when you replay it in the morning? Regrettable.

House Party Drunk: Hosting Edition
You are hosting a house party. Do you:

1. Keep yourself barely buzzing all night because you’re trying to stay on your toes to make sure everyone has a good time.
2. Wake up the next day covered in vomit amid the smashed wreckage of your coffee table only to discover that someone stole your priceless collection of racially insensitive misprint stamps.

House Party Drunk: Random’s House Edition
You think it’s cool to spit on the floor in here? I’m just gonna spit on the floor.

Breakup Drunk
Almost guaranteed to end in a blackout and regretful text messages. Bonus points if you wake up to find you messaged more than one ex.

Sick Drunk
You totally knew you were coming down with something and decided to go out anyway. You wake up the next day with a fever, a sore throat, and a headache regretting everything.

Drunk on Antibiotics
You know you shouldn’t be doing this. But you will probably be fine.

Prescription Medication Interaction Drunk
Also maybe don’t do this.

Social Anxiety Drunk
You started drinking when you got to a networking event because you felt awkward, didn’t know anyone, and thought alcohol would help you loosen up. Now you’re just wasted and gave out all your business cards (you end up noticing one in the trash can in the bathroom later). You end up cornered and listening to some dude on coke talk about his startup for an hour.

Beach Drunk
Literally the only thing beaches are good for is getting drunk on.

Airport Drunk
An age-old tradition.

Airplane Drunk: A
The first kind of airplane drunk comes because you’re not a good flyer and you decided to take a sleeping pill but because you’re stuck in a death trap in the sky you can’t sleep so you get a drink. Now you’re fucked and not in a fun way. You’re slurring your words, the person next to you thinks you’re a slob, and you’re like one bad moment away from causing an international incident.

Airplane Drunk: B

Vacation Drunk
Basically a socially acceptable bender that includes more ice-blended fruity beverages than straight-from-the-bottle swigs

Cottage Drunk
A particularly Canadian version of vacation drunk. You get so wasted you think you see Justin Trudeau paddling up to your dock. Then you realize Justin Trudeau actually paddled up to your dock.

One-Night Stand Drunk
Enjoy treading the fine line between “drunk enough to make this seem like a good idea” and “too drunk to fuck.”

Camping Drunk
You are hammered by nine in the morning. You don’t know where the fuck you put the Sidekicks. This is bad because the only thing you’ve bought for sustenance on this four-day excursion to a lake is 69 beers (nice), a bottle of whiskey, and four packs of Sidekicks. You will die here.

Bush Party Drunk
A time honoured tradition for rural high school kids. You have a special place in the woods just outside of town that you and your friends have taken to calling it “the Box” or something. All week you’ve been hyping up a “Box party” at school and 30 to 40 people showed up. At the centre of the party is undoubtedly a fire being stoked by pallets you stole. You’re standing with your friends chugging a bottle of whiskey and chanting “circle of death, fear no evil.” All around you is chaos and vomit, but you love it. You can see a fight brewing across the fire and go to investigate it. Someone has somehow, someway pulled their truck into the bush so you can listen to some tunes. People are fucking in the trees and think the party can’t see but everyone can. The party will end when your friend Jim puts too many pallets on the fire and you can see the smoke from miles away. The cops, who have nothing better to do, will now come break up the party causing you and your friends to scatter into the woods. Fucking Jim.

Wine Tour Drunk
Not the kind where you sip, swish, and spit. Hope you are good at biking drunk.

Alleyway Beers Drunk
There’s not much better than life than drinking some 40s on the curb during the summer.

Festival Drunk
Hazards include dehydration and sunstroke, if you can even afford to get to a decent level of intoxication with the inflated prices. Or just be like this guy and bury booze on the festival grounds weeks before. Added benefits include perpetually having to piss in festering porta-potties and losing your spot (and friends) in the crowd.

Drinking Someone Else’s Bottle Service at the Club Drunk
After sneaking into the VIP, you find the richest drunk dude with a booth and who is pouring Grey Goose into Instagram models’ mouths in a thinly veiled sexual metaphor. You line up, open your mouth, and continue to participate in this cycle until you’re so drunk you don’t care how vapid the entire scene is. When you start dancing on a table and screaming, a bouncer picks you up and carries you out of the club. You puke in your Uber on the way home.

Concert Drunk
God, you’ve been waiting for this concert for soooooo long and it’s finally here. The opening band isn’t that good so you stand near the bar and drink $14 cans of beer. You will soon be drunker than you thought because you and your friends pregamed for this. By the time your band comes on you will have to piss like a thousand racehorses. You can’t hold it anymore and sneak off to the washroom. While you’re urinating you will, without a doubt, miss the band playing your favourite song. Bonus tip: if you’re going to crowd surf, and you’re going to crowd surf, do not dive chest down.

Mid-Concert Meltdown Drunk

Hostel Drunk
You’re guaranteed to hear “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran a minimum of five times throughout this drinking session. Likely includes too many tequila shots, people talking about having “wanderlust” (whatever the f that is), and making out with a surfer dude.

Moonshine Drunk
The first thing you need to know about getting moonshine drunk is that you need to trade something to a farmer or Hutterite colony or something for the moonshine. All real moonshine comes from the barter system. We ain’t talkin’ ‘bout that boutique “moonshine” shit you buy in stores, this is the real deal—prepare yourself. It will taste like you drank kerosene and burn for minutes. You will at one point take off your flannel (you will be wearing flannel) and commit a crime. You will only drink it once and for the rest of your life you will be able to explain away what you did this night by “c’mon, I was drunk on moonshine.” Do. Not. Waste. This. Opportunity.

Funeral Drunk
One of the darkest varieties of intoxication. The peak is when you end up crying in the bathroom while talking about memories of the deceased with someone you just met, bonded in drunken grief.

Molly Water Drunk
The kind of drunk you are when you accidentally drink your friend’s molly water thinking it was just water. It wasn’t, and now you’re sweating, telling everyone you love them, and have to run to the bathroom to puke out the entire contents of your stomach.

Christmas Drunk
Obviously this varies family to family but hopefully yours skews towards rounds of shots as a dinner “warm up” rather than having to share a singular wine bottle for a whole table of twelve. All you have to do is get the uncles on a tear—it helps if they like your boyfriend or there is a sports game on—and the lot of you will be passed out by midnight. Bonus points if you somehow make it to church while blasted.

Hotel Bar Drunk
So this one is a bummer, eh? You’re away from home for work or something else not fun, it you were there for something fun you wouldn’t be drinking in a hotel bar. The drinks are just a little more expensive than they should be but that’s OK because you want to forget you’re in Winnipeg. At one point an older woman or man will try to take you up to their room, you haven’t done anything yet but one of these days…. well, one of these days you probably will. It’s better than being alone in a Winnipeg hotel bar.

Hometown Drunk
If your time visiting your parents’ house is limited to less than two weeks per calendar year, chances are you make a point of catching up with the people who helped you form all the unhealthy habits you took into adulthood. Since you know what kind of shady consequences you’re in for, you all end up focusing your energy on ONE night of brutal face-melting partying. Tendencies to egg each other on into getting blackout shithammered tend to get worse as time passes, as do your inevitable hangovers.

First Date Drunk
This is the kind of drunk you get when you realize your Tinder date’s photos are outdated and he’s a Jordan Peterson supporter. At least he’s eager to pick up the bar tab as a flex to show you how much money he makes. You drunkenly feign a family emergency (something about your sister’s cat) after an hour of listening to him drone on about bourbon and free speech, narrowly avoiding a night of looking at Jon Kay’s tweets.

Got Ripped Last Night and My Body Hurts so Much So I Might As Well Get Drunk Again Tonight Drunk
Also known as the 30-something’s Reprieve or the Reverse Murtaugh.

Hot Tub Drunk
Getting drunk in a hot tub is a special (but actually kind of dangerous) experience that can leave you a unique kind of uncontrollably wasted and dehydrated. Really, you’ve got to try it—but maybe don’t. ALso, beer cans kinda float!

Frat Party Drunk
A type of drunk no one but frat bros themselves should experience more than once in their lives. Flip cup, jungle juice, endless shotgunning of beers, and an inevitable mess of a dancefloor that is essentially barely legal group dry-humping en masse. You get drunk, but hopefully not too drunk, for you must keep your wits about you. A dude rushing the frat starts giving off rapey vibes to you and your friend after someone makes a bet with him that he can’t lock down a threesome tonight. It’s time to get the fuck out of there.

Europe Trip Drunk
You’re in Amsterdam or some such place with the two homies that you trust. You knew these damn dudes since forever. You get the shot glasses lined up, you’re going at the vodka and tequila hard because you think you can take your shit. Only, your friends haven’t been taking fucking shots at all. They’ve taken advantage of your ego. They’ve been pretending the whole time. By the tenth shot, you don’t know what the fuck is happening, but you black out thinking you won something. You wake up, and there’s vomit all over the hotel room, the curtain’s destroyed, the TV is on the ground, your pants is half down. You later find out that it was all shot on video, and you hear some story about how you tried to let loose a number one while laying on your side, eyes closed.You still haven’t seen the video, you still don’t know what happened, you’re still mad that you had to pay extra euros for half destroying a hotel room, and they still promise that the clip will be shown at your wedding. You probably won’t get married.

Four Loko Drunk
Your last memory will be cracking open that second fruit punch Loko. You’ll wake up projectile vomiting in tandem with your friend in a hotel bathroom and lie on the floor naked for many hours before you can overcome the migraine you’ve been afflicted with. You’ll never remember what happened in those hours between.

Frosh Drunk
Baby’s first visit to the stomach pump fairy.

Dorm Room Drunk
Getting drunk in a dorm is an elaborate game to see who will pass out first so you can draw penises on their face in permanent marker. Vodka that comes in a plastic bottle is a requirement.

Hotel Room on a Monday Afternoon Drunk
Tired: Getting drunk on those little expensive bottles in the mini-fridge.

Wired: Bringing your own bottle of cheap whiskey and drinking straight from the bottle.

Just Bought Your First Six-Pack With Your Older Brother’s ID Drunk
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! I TOLD YOU IT WOULD WORK!!!!!

Layoffs Drunk
Sparked by the trauma of seeing some of your favourite coworkers suddenly laid off without so much as ten minutes to collect their belongings from their desks, you and your colleagues make your way to the nearest bar. There, you drink until everyone gets to the point of crying, hugging, and reminiscing. You feel survivor’s guilt but push forward.

Fired Drunk
Joke’s on you, boss: I’VE BEEN DRUNK THIS WHOLE TIME. Oh, I see. Yes, it makes sense actually that this is why I’m being let go.

St. Patrick’s Day Drunk
Yes, it’s 11 in the morning. Yes, I am blasting “Come Out Ye Black And Tans.” Yes, I am going to keep drinking green lager and Guinness until I just start punching everything indiscriminately because the only two Irish stereotypes I know to celebrate are getting fucked up and fighting. Fuck you and fuck the Queen of England. Slainte mhath, motherfuckers!!

May 24 Drunk
A type of day drunk in which Canadians acknowledge that they are Commonwealth by getting absolutely sloshed on the Queen’s birthday.

Canoeing Drunk
You’re up north at an overpriced Airbnb cottage with your pals, and the property has a few canoes that back out onto a lake. Being on vacation, you proceed to play drinking games the moment you arrive. After a couple of hours, someone decides that it would be a good idea to take those canoes out on the lake. Nobody in your group wears a lifejacket, of course, because only lame people care about safety. You paddle out into the lake with a couple of road beers in tow. You end up tipping over after about 10 minutes, and your immediate concern is losing the beer, not losing your life. While trying to get back on to the canoe, you reevaluate your priorities in life, and head back to the cottage after realizing the error of your ways.

New Year’s Drunk
You went to another New Year’s party on the false belief that this one would be fun. It is not, in the same way that every New Year’s party isn’t fun because the pressure and expectation of fun is so high that it’s impossible to actually enjoy anything. But masking a disappointing reality with artificial joy is literally why booze was invented, so there’s a good chance this will be the most fucked up you’ll be all years.

Found Out I Got Cheated On Drunk
Shit is about to get hella dark. Also see ‘Breakup Drunk.’ Hide your phone.

Solo Meal at a Hotel Restaurant in a Strange City for a Work Conference Drunk
Sometimes the only way to kill all that downtime at an airport Doubletree in the middle of nowhere is to throw back just enough happy hour cocktails to convince yourself you’re in a mumblecore movie about the loneliness of the modern corporate executive.

Sneaking Booze into a Lame Awards Reception with an Overpriced Bar Drunk
We wouldn’t know anything about this either.

Existential Crisis Drunk
AKA any drinking that occurs in and around “milestone” birthdays or when you rewatch The Wire for the seventh time and get way too involved in McNulty’s storyline.

Just Got Out Of Jail Drunk
Hell yeah. We’re getting drunk as fuck and we’re getting donairs tonight. You hear me, Bubbles? We’re getting drunk as fuck tonight. Drunk. As. Fuck.

Public Park Drunk
Since most basement apartments in major cities don’t feature backyard access, this is the next best thing for drinking outside in the summer (and far cheaper than an afternoon on a bar patio). Cons: it might be illegal where you live.

Boat Cruise Drunk
You thought it was a great idea to take a little cruise around the Halifax harbour but joke’s on you, bud. You are trapped on a floating barge with nowhere to go and if you hear one more song with a fiddle so help me god I am jumping into the tampon and poo-filled harbour water and swimming back to shore.

Homemade Raft Drunk
Ok, so this one is rather specific, but if you end up doing it it'll rule. So, to start, you and your friend Evan need to build a 12 X 12 foot raft in your backyard—for extra points you should astroturf it and cut a hole so a cooler can sit in the river to keep the beer cold. From here you need to get a bunch of aluminum boats to haul all your beer and camping gear alongside the raft and then launch that bitch into the North Saskatchewan River. You have brought a beer bong and under every bridge you pass will beer bong—for even more bonus points you will beer bong the amount of beers equal to the number of bridges (eg. one for the first bridge, two for the second bridge, three for the third bridge.) You will sleep on the shores for the next three days. You will be drunk the whole time. You will have brought only two CDs for the trip—John Denver and CCR—but that’s OK because at one point someone will piss on the stereo and it will go into the river. It will be exceedingly dangerous and at times you will be so drunk you fall into the river and have to swim back to the raft. You will have one of the best times of your life on this trip. You will miss your hometown friends while you write this post.

Underage and Stole Your Parents’ Alcohol Drunk
You’re totally brilliant for refilling the half bottle of liquor you took with water—they’ll never notice! Except, later, after you get too wasted at a high school house party, your one responsible friend brings you home and your mom ends up holding back your hair while you puke and she cries while wondering where she went wrong with raising you.

Friend’s Birthday Party Drunk
Why do they always want to go to some shitty, expensive club? Obligatory: show up, spend hella cash on getting them fucked up, and participate in an embarrassing Instagram story. Please see “Afterparty Drunk” to find out how you’ll end your night/morning.

Birthday Drunk
THIS NIGHT IS ABOUT ME!!!! WHOOOOOOOO!!!! HOW DID I GET SO MANY SHOTS IN FRONT OF ME!!!!???!!!! OHHHH MY GOD!!! FUCK YOU, JIM!!! NO FUUUUUUUUUCCCCKKKK YOU!!!! IT’S MY BIRTHDAY, I’M NOT GOING HOME EARLY!!!!! JIM, FOR FUCK’S SAKE, STOP!!! OK, FINE, YOU KNOW WHAT, MAYBE I WILL GO HOME!!! NOT BECAUSE OF YOU, JIM, BUT BECAUSE I WANT TO!!!!!

Jim and you will never be as good of friends again.

Real Dive Bar Drunk
Well a person can work up a mean mean thirst
After a hard day of nothin' much at all
Summer's passed, it's too late to cut the grass
There ain't much to rake anyway in the fall
And sometimes I just ain't in the mood
To take my place in back with the loudmouths
You're like a picture on the fridge that's never stocked with food
I used to live at home, now I stay at the house
And everybody wants to be special here
They call your name out loud and clear
Here comes a regular
Call out your name
Here comes a regular
Am I the only one here today?
Well a drinkin' buddy that's bound to another town
Once the police made you go away
And even if you're in the arms of someone's baby now
I'll take a great big whiskey to ya anyway
Everybody wants to be someone's here
Someone's gonna show up, never fear
'Cause here comes a regular
Call out your name
Yes here comes a regular
Am I the only one who feels ashamed?
Kneeling alongside old Sad Eyes
He says opportunity knocks once then the door slams shut
All I know is I'm sick of everything that my money can buy
A fool who wastes his life, God rest his guts
First the lights, then the collar goes up, and the wind begins to blow
Turn your back on a pay-you-back, last call
First the glass, then the leaves that pass, then comes the snow
Ain't much to rake anyway in the fall

Bachelorette Party Drunk
A precursor to the bridal party variety of Wedding Drunk. The only difference is that you drink beverages out of penis straws, are forced to wear embarrassing crowns and pins that say “Bride Crew,” and end up holding the bride-to-be’s hair back while she pukes her guts out and cries, mumbling through sobs about how she isn’t sure she is ready to get married.

Bachelor Party Drunk
You’ve put on your finest chambray and vintage tie and you are off to the vineyard and seven-course tasting from a local chef who tells you the name of each farmer who helped bring this meal to your plate. You and your three friends talk about your hopes and fears about marriage and about how lovely Jessica is and how her mother-in-law will make such a wonderful grandmother. You all hug and bask in your emotional intelligence and your long, loving friendship among your guy friends.

Or: you’ve gotten crushed on a bus to Buffalo and got kicked out of a Bisons game and are we gonna spend a few hours asking around for cocaine? Yes, I guess we are.

Literary Wannabe Drunk
You are not [pick one: Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Hunter S. Thompson, Bukowski] and no amount of day drinking will change that fact.

Apres-Ski Drunk
A close relative of “Hot Tub Drunk”: When it’s -10 and snowing outside and you’re drinking scotch in a hot tub after skiing, the water somehow massively increases one’s intoxication. I don’t quite understand the science behind this, but it definitely leads to a unique, bourgeois, chalet-style hangover and cigarette butts floating in the pool the next morning.

Working Up the Nerve to Sing ________ at Karaoke Drunk
“Hello”
“Life on Mars”
“Bohemian Rhapsody”
“I Believe in a Thing Called Love”
“Love Shack”
“I would do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do that)”

Roadtrip Drunk
Not applicable (or shouldn’t be) if you’re the one driving. You drink so much tequila you think you’re Lana Del Rey in the music video for “Ride.” If you are a passenger and having some beers (WHICH WE DO NOT RECOMMEND) you must call your drinks “road pops.”

Mario Kart Drinking Game Drunk
The rules? You’ve got three laps to crush an entire brewski before crossing the finish line. There’s a catch though: no drinking and driving, meaning that you have to pull over to the side of the (rainbow) road in order to even take a sip. Commonly played as a pre-drink party game—or simply whenever you have equally nerdy/stupid friends around—this game will get you wasted faster than you can say Moo Moo Farm.

Pool Party Drunk
Wow, you did it! You finally made friends with someone rich enough to have an in-ground pool! You show up already half in the bag (see: Pre-Drink Drunk) to feel better about being half-naked and out-of-shape around a bunch of unfriendly hotties. You try to do a flip into the pool but end up belly-flopping and splashing the one girl you were trying to impress.

Arbor Day Drunk
Oh shit, it’s Arbor Day! Time to get fucked up, amiright?

You Just Moved Across the Country Drunk
So, you just moved across a country with your cat and you know no one in this fucking city. You’re not upacked because you’re exhausted but you’ve picked up a bottle of whiskey to celebrate the end of the painful journey. You throw on “Rumours” by Fleetwood Mac to cut the painful fact that you know you’re not going to see your friends and family for quite some time. From here it will go one of two ways: you will start out drinking homesick and toasting your old friends which will then build to you drinking to your new adventure or you will start out drinking to your new adventure and build till you’re a blubbering pile of drunk on the floor as the feeling built into a homesickness so large it is essentially all-consuming. Choose wisely.

Baseball Game Drunk
It’s the top of the fourth and you just remembered that baseball is objectively the most boring sport. Hark! A young lad with a gnarly sunburn and calf tattoo approaches bearing alcoholic beverages. “Beer here!”, his angelic voice cries. You raise a twenty dollar bill in the air and scream “Shut up and take my money!” à la Fry from that Futurama meme. Rinse and repeat, you are now baseball drunk.

“YOU SUCK, JETER!”

Oktoberfest Drunk
Look at yourself. You’re wearing lederhosen like an asshole in some dank rec center in Kitchener, Ontario. How did it come to this? Someone slides a ski in your direction—like, an actual fucking ski—with a shot of Jäger balanced on it. Eight “shotskis” later and you suddenly find yourself making out with a stranger on a party bus while everyone else is singing Kings of Leon’s “Sex on Fire”—a decidedly not German song. The fuck.

Listening to The National Alone on a Rainy Saturday Night Drunk
This seems suspiciously specific, Chris Bilton.

Empty Stomach Drunk
Skipping dinner sounded like a good idea until you wake up the next morning puking up bile and wondering where your phone is, where you are, and what in the actual fuck happened last night. Bonus: can easily be combined with most drunk genres on this list.

Writing This Article Drunk (AKA meta-drunk)
Fuck! Josh keeps messaging me about this garbage piece. OK. Whatever. Alright whiskey, work your magic and let’s write some goddamn content. Haha, yeah, dorm room drunk, I can do that one. Or can I? Seems like at best all I can do is recall my own particular experiences getting dorm room drunk—those idyllic nights at the close of adolescence, away from home for the first time, drinking deep an overwhelming array of new experiences with new people, the first great fruiting time of the human being, deep draws from shitty beer under the fluorescent lights in a circle of friends all reinventing ourselves for one another.

But those experiences were so long ago, and I now remember the mid-aughts distantly through the misty accretion of memory. Was it really like that? Is it like that now? Or am I dreaming of a world long dead among the dozen years that intervened? I can no longer tell; perhaps it was always impossible to know, a limit of the flesh. Or is that limit actually a condition of possibility for that which we call humanity itself? Hmm.

Man, I love this job.

For a time in 2016, back when Trump was still a shameful and odious presidential candidate and not yet America's shameful and odious president, it seemed like his whole plan was to use his candidacy to springboard into his own media conglomerate. The guy's supposed dream of Trump TV didn't come to pass since he somehow wound up actually winning, but it looks like we may soon get a very different kind of presidential television—Obama TV.

Former president and big-time Netflix enthusiast Barack Obama is in "advanced talks" to develop a slate of new content for the streaming service, the New York Times reported Thursday, potentially giving Obama his first big, post–White House project after learning to kiteboard.

According to the Times, the deal would allow both Barack and Michelle Obama to develop "high-profile shows" for Netflix. It's still unknown what these shows will look like—scripted? Unscripted? An Obama sitcom? A gritty reboot of the Obama presidency?—but sources told the Times that the Obamas have no plans to crank out content with Trump in their sights. Instead, they want to focus on "inspirational stories."

"President and Mrs. Obama have always believed in the power of storytelling to inspire," Obama's senior adviser, Eric Schultz, told the Times. "Throughout their lives, they have lifted up stories of people whose efforts to make a difference are quietly changing the world for the better. As they consider their future personal plans, they continue to explore new ways to help others tell and share their stories."

Netflix has already spent its last few years pulling high-profile TV and film stars like Shonda Rhimes, David Letterman, and Ryan Murphy into their orbit, but a content deal with a goddamn former president of the United States is a pretty massive get, even for Netflix. The streaming site reportedly paid a whopping $300 million for the Murphy deal—we can only imagine the kind of fat stacks it's dropping for Obama TV.

The contract isn't inked just yet, but it looks like it's moving in that direction. There's no word on how Trump feels about his predecessor heading into his old stomping ground—but at least the guy won't be able to tweet about ratings, since Netflix keeps those under wraps for its original content.

Between this upcoming Netflix deal and the Obamas' massive book deal, it looks like a flood of Obama content is about to be upon us. Hopefully, this will inspire Obama to take Spotify up on its offer to make him the "President of Playlists," too.

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Martin Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison on Friday in a Brooklyn federal courtroom packed to the brim with reporters. The 34-year-old known as "pharma bro" hung his head in disbelief as Judge Kiyo Matsumoto cited his "egregious multitude of lies" and effectively brought a close to the saga of one of the most despised American public figures in recent memory.

"There's no conspiracy to take down Martin Shkreli," the convict conceded to the judge through tears before being sentenced. "I took down Martin Shkreli with my disgraceful actions."

Of course, years before he was a convicted fraudster, Shkreli had already been condemned in the court of public opinion. His national star-turn came in 2015, when he snatched up a rarely used but livesaving drug called Daraprim. Although drug patents traditionally expire after 20 years, massively consolidated drug companies rarely invest heavily into improving such medicines. With no generic competitors emerging to challenge him, Shkreli was able to charge whatever he wanted, and proceeded to jack up the price by 5,000 percent overnight.

Once he was notorious for price-gouging, Shkreli made alternating overtures between egalitarianism and greed. He assured me in an interview that the extra money was going straight into research and development that would make the drug safer, but also declared that he deserved to be rich.

More than anything else, though, the self-made businessman emerged as an interminable troll. In fact, he may have earned even more scorn for purchasing a one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album no one else could hear than for being the public face of drug-market exploitation. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump called Shkreli out over his Daraphrim mischief, but the entire internet lost its damn mind when he told me in an interview that he was thinking of putting Once Upon a Time in Shaolin on top of a mountain.

Ultimately, Shkreli didn't—legally speaking, anyway—get his comeuppance for any of the things that made people hate him so much. Price gouging is still legal in the drug world, and the pharma bro would go on to claim sole possession of another hip-hop Holy Grail—Lil Wayne's Tha Carter V. Instead, what got him indicted, convicted of three counts of fraud, and ultimately sentenced to hard time Friday was lying to fellow rich people.

The feds alleged that Shkreli tanked a couple of hedge funds, repeatedly misled his investors, and then paid them back with money he stole from his own drug company. His attorney countered by arguing that, because none of those investors lost money, no crime was committed—or at least no one really got hurt. Problem is, that isn't how the law works, and Judge Matsumoto decided Shkreli caused losses of more than $7 million. If he can't come up with the money, some of his rich-guy assets will be sold—including a brokerage account with about $5 million in it, as well as a Picasso painting and those two ultra-rare rap albums.

Judge Matsumoto revoked Shkreli's initial bail in September after he offered a $5,000 bounty on a strand of Hillary Clinton's hair. And although the convict told me soon after his indictment over two years ago that he wasn't afraid of going to prison because it would be "like dorms," he's spent the past six months in the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center, presumably hanging out with suspected terrorists and mobsters.

While he may have sung a different tune at the sentencing hearing Friday, Shkreli initially presented the whole case as a bid for attention by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn. "This is their fucking limelight," he told me in 2016. "This is their chance to be gods, to be a rockstar, to be whatever it is—celebrated."

Prosecutors said during sentencing that he deserved at least 15 years because they felt he showed no remorse. In closing statements, Shkreli's lawyer, Ben Brafman, characterized his client as someone lacking certain social graces but begged Judge Matsumoto not to hand down a harsh sentence based on that. "I've gotten to know him quite well," Brafman said of his past two years with the pharma bro. "There are times I wanna hug him and hold him and comfort him, and there's times I want to punch him in the face." He also presented a softer side of the pharma bro—one he said taught math to his fellow inmates—and touted his potential to do good in the world.

The prosecution countered by noting there were, in fact, victims in the crime to Shkreli's fraud scheme: sick people who might have benefited from the $10 million he pilfered from his own drug company to pay back hedge-fund investors. They added that his overtures at altruism constituted its own scheme, and that plenty of anxious or depressed people are high-functioning citizens who don't commit felonies.

"He thinks he's different," a government lawyer said. "He thinks he's better than us."

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Florida police are looking into a Miami nightclub that supposedly let a woman ride a live horse in its crowded club, Miami New Times reports.

Cellphone footage of the alleged incident at Mokai Lounge hit social media this week, causing an uproar from animal rights supporters and generally decent people who know that horses are beautiful, majestic creatures that don't deserve to be dragged into a club as a PR stunt or whatever.

Nightclubs are terrible places to hang out if you're a human, let alone a confused animal, so the dumbass plan appears to have gone about as poorly as you'd expect. In the video, the horse gets spooked by the wild, noisy crowd and then bucks its bikini-clad rider, frantically looking for an escape while the audience cheers.

According to the New Times, a woman claimed on Facebook that she was inside the club on Tuesday night when the horse was brought in, writing that she was "totally shocked" by the move and called it "animal cruelty."

"They’re lucky nobody including the horse was seriously injured or killed," a Facebook user named Jetta Kreider wrote in a separate comment. "People are so fucking stupid I swear."

A spokesman for the Miami PD told the New Times that it has been alerted to the alleged incident and is currently looking into Mokai. "We are very concerned over the allegations," Officer Ernesto Rodriguez told the paper. "As such, we have launched a joint investigation with Miami Beach Code Enforcement."

As of Friday afternoon, Mokai has not yet responded to the New Times's requests for comment and it's unclear if the club in the video is actually Mokai Lounge. What is clear is that some dumbass out there actually thought it'd be a good idea to stroll a scared horse on into a packed club for spectacle's sake. Just stick with animatronic robot strippers, alright?

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Armando Iannucci is perhaps best known to audiences at the creator of the HBO series Veep, an absurd, hilarious take on the bureaucracies that undergird—or barely maintain—the facade of a functioning American government, accented by ridiculous personalities and violently barbed insults. His previous work, the British series The Thick of It and its movie spin-off In the Loop, took on similar ground across the Atlantic. Now he’s turned his attention to another country and another era.

In The Death of Stalin, out in theaters today, Iannucci commands a stellar cast including Steve Buscemi, Paddy Considine, Jason Isaacs, Andrea Riseborough, Rupert Friend, and Jeffrey Tambor in a farce about the tumultuous days surrounding the death of the Soviet dictator. Adapted from the graphic novel of the same name, The Death of Stalin alternates between wildly funny set-pieces, hilarious machinations among Stalin acolytes vying for power, and unsettling scenes of extrajudicial arrests and murder.

VICE sat down with Iannucci last year at the Toronto International Film Festival where the film premiered to talk about his comedic approach to such dark material and his persistent interest in the absurdities of politics.

VICE: What was going through your mind in terms of depicting this specific era?
Armando Iannucci: I had been thinking of doing something about dictators, or autocrats, or, How does one person captivate a nation? So that's where I was looking, and at the same time they approached me with [The Death of Stalin graphic novel]. And you know, there's something about that era. Maybe it's because George Orwell wrote about it in 1984, and the music at the time, Shostakovich, and his kind of crisis when he wrote something and Stalin took against it. I just found it fascinating. It's so absurd and yet horrific, and yet it's strangely not a story that's often told.

No, you don't see it much at all.
It's like Hitler's the "sexy one," in a way.

And these days, usually when there's a movie about the Soviet Union it's usually the 70s or 80s and the fall.
I thought, for all those reasons, the comedy about it is a comedy of hysteria.

You walk this tightrope. There's a lot of killing in the movie.
Although not much of it is on the screen, but it's felt.

It's felt, and it's quite disturbing.
Absolutely.

But then the next moment there's a huge, uproarious laugh.
What I wanted to do is recreate what it must have felt like to life in that environment. And actually, it wasn't a kind of high-pitched terror, it was a low, background terror. People just had to accommodate themselves to it over decades. You couldn't live with that intensity, so you had to just be aware of it.

In your work, you're making comedy out of the absurdity out of the banality of everything, though here it goes very dark.
We start with banality and absurdity, and the only rational response to it is comedy because the alternative is to go mad.

Was that common in the Soviet Union?
They circulated joke books, Stalin joke books, and jokes about Lavrenti Beria, and rape, and all sorts of things. It's almost like they felt they had to tell these jokes about these people.

Steve Buscemi as Krushchev, Adrian McLoughlin as Stalin, Jeffrey Tambor as Malenkov, Dermot Crowley as Kaganovich, and Simon Russell Beale as Beria in Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin. Photo by Nicola Dove. Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films release

How hard was it to identify, even just in the history, those moments where there were conflicts you could exploit for comedy?
When you read that when Stalin made a speech, everyone had to get up and applaud, but no one wanted to be the first person to stop applauding, you just think, Well, gee, take that to its logical extreme and they're still applauding now. It's that craziness.

That's evident in the committee meeting after Stalin has died, where it's almost a problem of how communism operated. This idea that it's for the group, so it's unanimous, but it isn't. Not at all.
I was listening to a writer-historian [Sheila Fitzpatrick] who wrote a book recently called On Stalin's Team. It's about the others around Stalin. And she said that Stalin welcomed criticism, if the person criticizing the topic was responsible for that topic. So if you were in charge of transport, then you could say to Stalin, "I disagree." But what he didn't like was someone who had nothing to do with transport taking an opposing view about the trains. He regarded that as factionalism.

The way that it manifests is particular to communism and communism under Stalin in that era, but it's a thing you see quite commonly, this idea that we can achieve a consensus.
Why don't we all just get together and hammer it out?

But it seems like that's not what politics is actually about.
Well, because for a politician to achieve consensus means that politician is compromised, and also they've ceded power to someone else. So that's why, although politicians talk about it, they don't actually do it that often. It's not in their nature. That's going on in the UK at the moment, because after the latest election result, which was very much—no one won. You'd then think that all the parties would get together to discuss Brexit negotiations, but that's not what happened at all. The Conservative Party is carrying on carrying on as if they've still got a huge majority, but they have a minority.

As though the election has gone as intended.
The only minor issue we have with it is the result. Other than that, the lead up to it, the process, all went brilliantly.

The movie seems to draw on things that are happening today, even though you're really just dealing with things that happened back then.
Absolutely, and that wasn't a conscious, do it like this and that will remind people of this [thing]. There was none of that. We shot it [in the summer of 2016], so it was before Trump had even won the nomination, let alone the presidency. But I think it's because these things go around in cycles. History has lessons to teach us, and we should remember them.

There were some odd casting choices in a number of respects. At the top of my mind is Steve Buscemi, who I wouldn't have expected in the role of Nikita Khrushchev. Did you have him in mind when you were putting it together?
When we were writing it, we didn't have anyone. But Steve can do funny, but he can also do scary. He's such a versatile actor. And when I was chatting with him about it, I was talking about how Khrushchev is very verbose and there's almost something Italian in him. He uses his hands a lot.

Part of the dynamic of the movie is that you have these bureaucrats who are dealing with bureaucratic things, who all aspire to be more than that, but who can't actually accomplish it. Beria goes way too far, for example. What responsibility did you feel to the history?
Responsibility is the right word. I mean, I said right from the start, millions died, the terror, the gulags, is something that we have to respect and acknowledge. The comedy isn't making fun of those people, the comedy is about the absurd logic that went on in the minds of those deciding the fate of these people. But I knew from the start that we had to show the very real consequence of the decisions that you see being taken in the Kremlin. That's why, every now and then, we go out and you see people being taken away or being released.

In terms of the political maneuvering, how much of that was true to history?
When Stalin died there were already the beginnings of what seemed like another huge purge being planned, this time of the Jews. He was preparing lots of lists of Jewish doctors and others, and there were actually some buses being lined up ready to round them up, and then when he died, Beria, in his attempt to become the liberal, all the buses went away and everything stood down.

The way you throw in "liberal" vs. "radical" in the movie, and the fact that they seem to confuse the two, it almost implies that there isn't a coherent ideology.
It's about survival in the end. It's about I want to take over, because if I don't take over I'll be shot.

But then where does the ideology come in? You've got a country that's founded on ideology, and yet they don't seem to hold to it.
But did they ever?

Probably not. Was that part of your exploration? Not just the bureaucratic bumbling, but the fact that these people are deeply hypocritical.
Yes. In a strange way, apart from [Vyacheslav] Molotov, Michael Palin's character, who is trying rigidly to adhere to the party.

Even the way he keeps switching sides.
It just drives him crazy. He's a crazy man. But you get that in any belief system, don't you? In any religion there'll be those who are fundamentalist and end up doing really absurd things because they're taking it literally, to the letter.

In your films and TV work, you see that kind of bureaucratic absurdity, and you see that it happens everywhere.
Any system that has a power structure in it, you forget that it's human beings, and human beings are all fallible. But we don't seem to have a system to deal with our fallibility.

But that's the attempt of politics, right?
Publicly it's the attempt, but privately it's the same rushed meetings, quick decisions made, changes of mind, trying to cover your tracks, trying just not to be found out.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

As western society becomes increasingly sexually-liberated and willing to have frank discussions about their romantic preferences and peccadilloes, an army of columnists, podcasters, and personalities have emerged to dole out advice to every conceivable sort of person. But these folks all stand on the shoulders of one four-foot, seven-inch giant: Dr. Ruth Westheimer.

America first became familiar with Dr. Ruth in the early '80s, her candid call-in sex therapy sessions catapulting her from New York radio to national TV. Over the following 35 years, the good doctor has become a household name and never stopped working, somehow finding the time to write scores of sex and relationship advice books between all her TV tapings and other media appearances.

Her latest book, Stay or Go, attempts to lay out a framework for evaluating the salvageability of a relationship on rocky shores. I chatted with Dr. Ruth about this and a few other titillating subjects.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

VICE: You’ve been giving public advice on sex and relationships for about four
decades now and have written dozens of books during that time. How do you keep
finding new things to write and talk about and avoid rehashing old topics?
Dr. Ruth Westheimer: I’m trying not to write about things that I have already written about because I don’t want to be bored—never mind the reader, it’s for me! But this one here is because I hear so many stories about people who are sitting on the fence. They’re unhappy, maybe they go to therapy, then they stop therapy, they just don’t know if they should end the relationship or not. So I thought that, from lots of advice on my Twitter, let’s get a little book. And I love the book. And I also like working with Amazon, they work very well, and I like that I have something new to say, that I don’t just talk again about sex education, or contraception, or AIDS, or orgasms or erections.

I talk a lot about relationships and, these days, my one concern is about loneliness. Despite all of the dating services, I do hear a lot about loneliness.

What would you say is the most common mistake that people make when they’re weighing out whether or not to stay with someone?
I wouldn’t say there that there’s one common [mistake], but a couple common [ones]. One is fear of being alone. One is [wondering] what will the people around me say? What is my family going to say? What are my friends going to say? So it’s a lot about what are other people going to say if I make the decision to go. Sometimes it’s important to use a therapist to make that decision, and sometimes even after therapy, people have to make that decision by themselves.

How does [the advice in your book] pertain to this kind of grim new reality where Americans are working longer hours for less real wage growth than in previous generations, basically working themselves to the bone just to get by? Can truly healthy relationships exist for an overworked underclass?
You have to really balance your work experience and the demands of the work and the demands of cultivating a relationship. And cultivating a relationship is not just the money that you bring home or gifts for Valentine’s Day. Cultivating a relationship is to make sure that both partners know that you value each other and that you make time for each other, even if you have to sacrifice some television viewing and have to say "I do have to talk to my partner." That holds true for straight or gay relationships. Relationships have to be cultivated.

Also, when you do get a chance to talk to each other, it’s very important to really listen carefully and to watch each other’s gestures and facial expressions in order to know there is something here that I have to pay attention to. I have to pay more attention to the needs of the other partner, of the other person.

Taking a step back to the loneliness aspect you mentioned. Many people reference our social media-connected world as bringing us together while also isolating us. What's your assessment?
I said that what’s going to happen with that younger generation that is addicted—I’m purposely using that word—to those phones so that they don’t even eat dinner without having that mechanical device next to them is going to be a catastrophe. It’s also going to be very bad physically because people are looking down all the time—they’re going to develop neck problems. But more importantly, I don’t have dinner with people—except if it’s a medical doctor who is on call—I do not have dinner with people who are addicted to watching their phones. Nothing is so important. Look, people who really have sick people at home, I’m not talking about that. I’m not talking about people who are in situations where there is an emergency. But you and I are talking about people in general. This addiction to that mechanism in their hands is very worrisome, and it has an effect on the relationship. They don’t even look at each other! They cross the street without even pulling their eyes out of that phone.

Do you see any redeeming value to technology's increased role in our love lives?
Absolutely. Look, nobody today would write a love letter that will take two weeks to get there by mail. There are many redeeming factors—for example you can email or text your partner, "I’m really thinking of you right now, let’s have dinner out tonight, we should get a babysitter and have dinner out tonight, without the phones." Or, you can say something like, "I just passed by the theater, and if it’s okay with you I’m going to get us tickets for tomorrow night, text me back if it’s okay." So there are advantages.

How about the new normal of social media connecting us to all of our exes permanently? Can you see it possibly being healthy to maintain ongoing friendships with former lovers?
No, I don’t see that. I think that if there is a break, and if they listened and they didn’t stay, then I think they should make a break. They should give the other person the luxury of starting a new relationship without having all of the past dragging with them. Maybe after some time passes they can become friends. Not often.

Going beyond the communication aspect, it does seem that technology is becoming inextricably intertwined with our love lives. Do you have any concerns about some of the stuff on the horizon, like whether it’s healthy to date someone solely in a virtual reality space, or on the ethics of hiring a sex robot?
I’m now going to be 90 in June, and I don’t want anyone to be in a virtual space. I want them to be in a room, in privacy, to be able to hug, to kiss, to engage in foreplay, to caress, and to have good sex and to learn about giving each other pleasure.

No to sex robots either, then?
No! A sex robot of what?

Robots to have sex with. People are programming them now. The beta prototypes for them are already hitting the market.
You can tell everyone, Justin, you are a fortunate man, because I have never heard about that. But now you are going to be a very unhappy man, I’m against it!

What a couple in a relationship that is good and working can do is try a new sexual position and then tomorrow to call me, or you, so that I learn something new.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Moms are basically all the same. They all comment on Facebook pictures of you from 2011, all have a genuine passion for soap operas, will all eat half a Mars bar and put it back in the fridge, and they all talk constantly about Zumba classes after attending precisely one eight months ago.

For better or worse, moms are also often the people we'll be the closest to throughout our lives. Some of us even lived inside them. And yet, they are just so insufferably annoying sometimes. Treating you like a teenager even though you’re acting like one, and getting annoyed when they have to give you lifts places like it wasn’t them who chose to live in the middle of nowhere.

But that's just a mere aperitif of the annoying shit moms do. To celebrate their special day, see below for every other argument you will ever have with your one. Happy Mother’s Day!

THAT ARGUMENT WHEN YOUR MOM IS INEXPLICABLY RUTHLESS WHEN YOU'RE HUNGOVER

Your mom hasn’t come into your room since she saw that Ann Summers butt plug under your bed. So why is it when you’re debilitatingly hungover she decides to invade your personal space? You wake up after a night out, your body a shrivelled sack of skin, gums dry, head throbbing, flakes of last night's Dixie Chicken congealing around your teeth. She marches in and flings open the curtains. "What did you get up to last night? It smells like a bloody brewery in here." She’s pleased with that comment.

All day she sniffs you like you’re some day-old salmon that she doesn’t know whether or not to chuck. You sulk in your room and tell her to fuck off when she comes near. She has successfully reduced you to your fluffy armpit-haired pre-pubescent self.

THAT ARGUMENT WHEN YOUR MOM MAKES YOU TURN UP TO THE AIRPORT FIVE HOURS EARLY

She wakes you up at 4AM. Your face is swollen like a blow-up mattress. You drive to the airport with Radio 4 mumbling into your ears and hurry through arrivals, feeling your arse crack slip out your jeans. It’s only when you get to Gatwick’s departure gate that you realise the time of the flight. You could have woken up at midday. "Well, now we can just take our time," she says.

Obviously you're furious. You try to nap on those departure lounge chairs with the stiff armrests, but you crick your neck. Unable to sleep, you buy Pick Me Up! and wait for your dad to bring you a McDonald’s breakfast bap. You’re sitting there for so long you actually read the magazine twice, before moving onto the health and safety requirements written by the nearby fire hydrant. You even play "guess the stranger's job" with your younger brother.

It’s only so long before you lose it, exploding into a teary sleep-deprived diatribe about the stressful nature of your family unit. God help your mom if she dismisses the whole thing by saying you’re "just tired".

Ian Allenden / Alamy Stock Photo

THAT ARGUMENT WHEN YOUR MOM WON'T LET YOU SNACK

You head towards the fridge and withdraw a Müller Corner. "You sure you want to eat that, darling?"

"What do you mean?"

"Dinner’s in ten minutes – have some fruit."

Have some fruit? Have some fruit? You’re starving. You could pass out from low blood sugar for all she knows. Who is this Gillian McKeith-wannabe, fat-shaming cow? You feel the fleshy muffin top spilling over your checked PJ bottoms. How dare she? You storm off and sob into the yogurt before eating two helpings of her fish pie out of spite.

THAT ARGUMENT WHEN YOUR MOM IS ON THE PHONE AND YOU ASK HER A QUESTION

Mom has been on the landline for two hours and 25 minutes, talking to Janine, who lives one mile away.

"Where’s the iron?" you ask.

She points at the phone.

"Can you just tell me where the iron is?"

She opens her eyes wide with anger.

"Mom????"

Janine is balls deep into describing how her spaniel Barney won't eat Pedigree dry dog food any more, and after five minutes your mom yells, fully incensed, "IT’S IN THE FUCKING KITCHEN."

"Right," you say, cool, calm and collected. "That is all you had to do."

Mature child 1, mother 0.

THAT ARGUMENT WHERE YOUR MOM OFFERS YOU A LIFT AND THEN FIVE MINUTES LATER GETS ANNOYED AT YOU FOR ACCEPTING HER OFFER OF A LIFT

It’s the Christmas holidays. You have returned to the suburban graveyard that is your hometown and you’re off out. The buses arrive every 20 minutes and every hour after 8PM. The bus shelter smells of aged urine and teenagers' wet kisses. To save you the trauma of public transport in regional England, mom offers to drive you in. Five minutes into the journey and she’s already salty.

[Gassy exhale of breath] "I might as well run a bloody taxi service."

"Take me home then?"

[More breath comes out of her] "Well I’m here now."

Mom is fuming. She gave up that glass of Tesco Finest Sauvignon Blanc just so you’d be comfortable. She could be propped up against the radiator in front of the new season of Masterchef. If she was an actual taxi service, she deserves a 2.5 UBER rating for this piss-poor attitude. She shouldn’t have had kids if she didn’t want to make sacrifices. Although, don’t say this to her because it will tip her over the edge and you'll have to walk the remaining 0.8 miles to the pub.

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THAT ARGUMENT WHEN YOUR MOM KEEPS ASKING THE SAME SHIT QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR FRIENDS

Moms only remember friends names if i) at any point they threw up on the carpet; ii) are very polite; or iii) she likes their parents. Other than that, they genuinely don’t have a clue.

"So tell me again – who are you going to Croatia with?"

"I’ve told you this like seven times."

"Alright! I just want to know about your life, is that a crime?"

"Jonny, Freddie, Will and Max."

"I like Max, he’s the one with the dad who’s an accountant? They have that lovely house in Alwoodley, don’t they?"

"Nah, that’s Jonny."

The only person your mom remembers is someone you're not even mates with any more. Like nice Amy who came over for tea in Year 7 because you sat together in Science. You point this out and she gets upset, taking it as an indication of a torn relationship, the out of touch mother, the forgotten child. "I just don’t know who you are any more."

THAT ARGUMENT WHEN YOUR MOM SUDDENLY CARES ABOUT YOUR PHYSICAL HEALTH ADN BECOMES INCREDIBLY UPSET THAT YOU'RE NOT BRINGING A COAT OUT WITH YOU

On the surface, this is a nice gesture. Mom doesn’t want your skin to become cold and pink. But why does she have to be so aggressive? Her voice shrills: "No coat? You’ll catch your death!" You would rather lose a toe to frostbite than concede. It’s like Touching the Void, except instead of a mountain, the crisis is caused by a nightclub with no cloakroom.

THAT ARGUMENT WHEN YOU LEAVE THE LIGHT ON

Like most people, moms don’t give a fuck about the planet. They would rather drive their Toyota Yaris that barely scraped through its last MOT down the M1 for five hours than get on a train. Pretty sure the last time my mom used public transport was when she was 28. And yet, when you leave the bathroom light on for two seconds your mom will turn into some environmental crusader – Britain’s answer to Al Gore.

THAT ARGUMENT WHEN YOUR MOM SAYS SOMETHING MILDLY PROBLEMATIC AND YOU POINT IT OUT

"This lovely Polish builder came round the other day to plaster the living room."

"Why did you feel the need to point out he was Polish, mom?"

"For Christ’s sake, I can’t say anything any more."

You've backed her into a corner now. She's finished. Pass me the fork because I’m about to do her in with a preliminary understanding of identity politics.

THAT ARGUMENT WHEN YOU HUG YOUR MOM AND SHE IMMEDIATELY ACCUSES YOU OF WANTING SOMETHING

You probs do want something tbh.

@annielord8

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Russell Crowe is about to finalize his divorce, which he's apparently decided is as good a time as any to take stock of all the weird shit he’s got lying around the house and auction it off to the public. While you’ve been busy not thinking about him, he’s been working with Sotheby’s to turn his split from Danielle Spencer (they were married, they separated, you didn’t notice, it's OK) into an epic sale, complete with a promo poster and an elegant, literary title: "The Art of Divorce."

I've taken the liberty of combing through all 227 items up for grabs and separating the useless junk from what's actually worth bidding on come April 7—if you happen to have a few thousand dollars lying around. Amid all the bougie watches, priceless artwork, and weird cricket gear, Rus is letting go of some real gems—perhaps most notably...

Denzel Washington's seat back from the film American Gangster (2007)

All images via Sotheby's. Estimate: $400–$600

While Denzel, Ridley Scott, Josh Brolin, and RZA ostensibly celebrated after wrapping up American Gangster, Russell Crowe somehow ended up with the seat backs from those fancy chairs all the important movie people get. Sure, lot 36 doesn't really have anything to do with Russell Crowe; but Denzel Washington's BACK actually TOUCHED this thing! Pretty cool.

The important stunt cuirass worn in the scene depicting the death of the character 'Maximus' in the film Gladiator (2000)

Estimate: $20,000–$30,000

Spoiler alert: Maximus dies at the end of Gladiator! But Russell Crowe's "important stunt cuirass" from the movie will live on forever, mounted on a mannequin's chest, encased in glass, or worn once or twice on Halloween by whoever's lucky and rich enough to win it at the auction. Crowe poured his heart into that movie, and probably poured a lot of sweat into the ornate, protective, and undeniably badass breastplate pictured above. Honestly, 20 grand would be a steal.

Not one, but TWO life-size prop horses used in the film Gladiator (2000)

Estimate: $2,000–$4,000

Estimate $2,000–$4,000

These majestic, curiously gleaming beasts made out of "rubberized material" with textured faux fur look so realistic they could pass for actual stallions, if only their faces weren't petrified in expressions of sheer terror. Aside from all the great gags you could play with these things (think The Godfather, only an entire horse), if you combine them with a few other items up for sale—a fully functioning chariot, aluminum prop sword, and a set of General's Army leg wraps—you could pretty much remake the entirety of Gladiator at home.

A Muhammad Ali plaster relief life cast face plaque, presented to Russell Crowe by Angelo Dundee

Estimate: $800–$1,200

Why Muhammad Ali ever made a plaster cast of his face and how the hell Russell Crowe ended up with it I am powerless to explain, but I can tell you this: Crowe got really into boxing after Cinderella Man, and started buying all kinds of weird shit. Remember Cinderella Man? I hope so, because you'll need to in order to appreciate this next item, the ultimate piece of Russell Crowe memorabilia, The Art of Divorce's pièce de résistance—the last, worthwhile thing Crowe dragged out of his attic and slapped a price tag on.

A brown leather boxer's protector used in the film Cinderella Man (1994)

Estimate: $500–$600 but, honestly, priceless

This is it. This is what it's all about.

Russell Crowe, onetime fictional heavyweight champion of the world, pulled this weird leather, protective thong over his crotch, duked it out in the thing for months in front of Ron Howard and Paul Giamatti, and kept it. He kept it. It has to be imbued with some kind of mystical, world-altering power, bestowing upon the wearer the ability to punch with the force of a thousand Joe Fraziers. It is, simply put, the best piece of celebrity memorabilia on the market since Patrick Swayze's G-string.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Over the past 14 months, 113 people in the UK have been killed by the super-strength painkiller fentanyl. That's eight a month, three times the monthly average of fentanyl-related deaths in 2015.

This sharp and sudden increase should perhaps come as no surprise, considering NHS prescriptions for the opioid have increased by 143 percent over the past decade, and – more importantly – because Britain buys more fentanyl on the dark net than any other European country. It also fits within the context of the UK experiencing a record number of drug-related deaths.

Abuse of the drug in the UK pales in comparison to what's going on in the US, where more than 20,000 people were killed by fentanyl in 2016. The problem in the States stems from a culture of doctors prescribing opioid medication for pain issues, patients becoming addicted to them and then moving on to black market drugs when their script runs out. Thankfully, that problem does not exist to nearly the same extent in the UK. Still, in light of the increasing number of deaths here and the fact that, throughout Europe, Britain has the highest proportion of people addicted to heroin – which fentanyl is sometimes mixed with – I wondered what potential there is for the UK to one day find itself in a similar situation to the US.

To find out, I tracked fentanyl's path across the globe, speaking to dealers and users on different continents and submerging myself in drug boards and the dark net. Only when we understand the trip fentanyl takes to reach the UK – along with the journeys of those who sell it and use it – can we predict its next step.

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What is fentanyl? Basically: an opioid painkiller used since the 1960s, which can be administered intravenously, up the nose in sprays or in patches applied to the skin. It's 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, 30 to 50 times more powerful than heroin, and its close relative carfentanil (used as an elephant tranquilliser) is 100 times more powerful than that. As many believe it can be absorbed by touch – it can't – gloves are often used when handling it, and the recommended surgical dose is just 50 micrograms – .00005 of a gram. Like all strong opioids it depresses heart rate, meaning that if you take more than you can tolerate, you die.

Until 2017 there were Chinese websites on the regular internet where you could buy fentanyl legally – sort of. These websites sell "research chemicals" to scientists and, at least in China, fentanyl was considered one. Under pressure from the US government, China banned the sale and production of fentanyl last March, and since then these websites list it as permanently sold out.

Fentanyl-laced heroin hit UK streets – in Hull, Barnsley, Leeds and Normanton, West Yorkshire – last summer, months after the ban, a result of sales moving onto the dark net, which is infinitely more accessible to a generation of tech-savvy users and dealers than obscure Chinese science websites (over a quarter of British drug users now buy their supplies on there).

A Canadian dark net vendor who sells fentanyl extensively to the UK agreed to talk to me on the condition of anonymity. He described the ineffectuality of the ban: "We don't manufacture any fentanyl; we use a local supplier who imports it from China," he said. "The ban hasn't affected us – we're still able to purchase bulk amounts as long as we give one week's notice."

As few users have confidence ordering directly from Chinese vendors, the Canadian serves as a middleman to UK users. "Most customers don’t like ordering internationally due to customs and border protection," he explained. But packages coming in from Canada and Germany – which also sells a lot of fentanyl to the UK – are less likely to be caught. The vendor estimates that he ships 25 to 30 orders to Britain every week, most a gram or half-gram in weight. Though this sounds like a small amount, with 50 micrograms being the recommended surgical dose – and less than 2 milligrams (the equivalent of two grains of salt) being enough to kill an inexperienced user – it goes a long way. One gram costs roughly £85 on the dark net, where it's sometimes marketed as "China White" or "synthetic heroin".

"I've many repeat customers from the UK," the Canadian told me, "and I'd say I get ten new customers a week. But because I'm considered an international vendor I'm sure I get nowhere near as many sales as a British vendor would."

Today, there's just one fentanyl vendor on the dark net in the UK. His profile points to dozens of orders per day and many thousands since 2015. I contacted him multiple times for an interview, but he never responded. Before him, though, was Kyle Enos, a 25-year-old who was sentenced to eight years in prison in February after police raided his home in Newport, Wales last May. Though considered bad practice for a vendor, Enos kept his customers' details on file, and when police tracked them down they discovered that, out of 168 over a one-year period, four had died after using fentanyl – but they couldn't say with certainty which dealer the drugs had come from.

Aware of how dangerous the drug is, Enos included handwritten notes with his fentanyl, saying things like "Please consider this" – but the National Crime Agency concluded that ultimately he was "play[ing] Russian roulette with the lives of his customers". In a statement last month, the NCA said that his arrest had "had a direct impact on the availability of fentanyl in the UK".

And it had, for as long as it took users to refresh the page.

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A gram of heroin on the street is about £50. As fentanyl is so powerful, it's possible to remove most of the heroin from a batch, bulk up the weight with a cutting agent like milk powder, and add a bit of fentanyl to jack up the high. To a heroin dealer trying to establish himself on the street, the appeal is obvious, but if a user is expecting just heroin – or if the fentanyl is unevenly spread (or "hotspotted") – the result can be deadly.

The problem when talking about fentanyl deaths, however, is that no one knows exactly how many there have been. Though the published number is 113 in the UK over the last 14 months, the standard toxicology test in Britain doesn't test for the drug, meaning some fentanyl deaths are likely attributed to just heroin. In fact, the 113 number was only arrived at after specific backtesting in areas where fentanyl was known to be rife, on bloods that had been retained (after six months, bloods are discarded).

The question is: if every OD death was tested for fentanyl, what would that number be?

The people who we know died of fentanyl overdoses come mainly from the Humber region and Yorkshire, but the drug has also been reported elsewhere – London, Birmingham and the Scottish Borders being three examples. Every death is tragic, but a noteworthy case was that of three musicians who lived in the same house in Kent, who died five days apart last August. James Truscott (25) overdosed on the 24th, followed by Joshua Lambert-Price and Maximum Martin (22 and 35, respectively) on the 29th. Lambert-Price had even given evidence to police after Truscott's death.

Meanwhile, hundreds of British users buy heroin on the dark net every week. One well-known vendor, based in London, has been accused by multiple customers of selling fentanyl-laced heroin, with some even claiming to have had it tested. When I approached him for comment he called his accusers "deluded and degenerate", and when I asked for an interview he wrote, "Send us 5 Bitcoins [£36,000] and we can arrange a brunch appointment at Canary Wharf, my friend."

Judging by the orders on his profile – 1,500 in one year – his business seems unaffected, which comes as no surprise. Researching this story, I came across a prevailing theory among law enforcement and journalists that fentanyl-laced heroin use is almost always accidental. Yet, from talking to users and reading hundreds of posts on websites like Reddit's "Opiates" forum, it’s clear a huge number specifically search for this stuff, the same way they hunt down pure fentanyl.

John* (27) lives in Brighton and hasn't used fentanyl – knowingly, at least – for five months. He did, however, use it for several years before that, and is now a near-daily heroin user. He explained to me how he got started: "I'd already tried and liked codeine and Oxycontin, so when my guy mentioned he had this other opioid I figured I might as well give it a go. This guy sold Oxy and fent patches while I was living up north. Where he got them, I don't know, but he had some serious pharmacy connections."

Despite doing fentanyl for years, John has only ever used the patches: "I started smoking them off of foil, then for a bit switched to shooting them. But it was a lot of work to prep them – over 45 minutes per shot – and not much fun, so I switched back to smoking."

A similar story of opioid graduation came from Dave* (25), who lives in the north-west of England and has used fentanyl for three years. When we spoke he was going through heavy withdrawals, waiting for his latest order of fentanyl-laced heroin to arrive in the post. "I started climbing the opioid ladder with pills like Tramadol and codeine," he said. "When they got expensive and [my] tolerance grew, I moved to heroin. Then, when heroin became too weak, there was another option: fentanyl."

Fentanyl withdrawals occur much more rapidly than with heroin – sometimes three to four hours after a hit. Dave describes them as, "The equivalent of being sent to hell and burning alive for all eternity. Unsurprisingly, when you're detoxing you can't even leave the bed without the obligatory need to shoot water out your asshole, so my state of mind is a bit wired right now."

For John, the fentanyl high is completely different to that of heroin. Heroin is much more euphoric and warm, he says, whereas fentanyl is just extremely sedating. "I really don’t know why I like it so much," he says. "When smoked it's like the crack of the opioid world – it hits very hard, very fast, but then 15 minutes later you're sober enough to be getting the next hit ready."

Dave tells me of a near-overdose he had on the drug. He'd clearly snorted too much, and felt his breathing become shallow. "I had to go for a walk to calm down, and so that if I collapsed I'd be in public with a note in my hand that read: '999, opioid OD, use Narcan'."

Though Narcan – or naloxone, a medication used to block the effects of opioids – works with fentanyl, more doses are required than with heroin. It's likely that even the most privileged fentanyl user, with naloxone on hand, won’t have enough to counteract an OD.

I asked the Canadian vendor if he felt any responsibility for fentanyl deaths or addiction. He told me that if people were using the drug they should know what it does and what safety precautions to take, adding, "I’m supplying only fentanyl, not any fentanyl-laced products. I hope each user knows what they’re doing but, from my point of view, I’m selling a product as advertised."

I wondered if the anonymity provided by the dark net was separating him from the reality of what he was selling, so I asked a follow-up: "Have you ever used fentanyl yourself?" His answer surprised me: "Yes, I’ve used it in the past. I was addicted to it for a year-and-a-half and had to go to rehab to get off it. I've had a few relapses but am still clean."

Clearly, for him and everyone else selling fentanyl, the money to be made outweighs any perceived immorality. Instead of scaring him off the drug, his addiction – which began before he started vending – evidently made him more aware of fentanyl's economic potential. "I won’t say how much I make or have made," he said, "but I can tell you the profit margin is more than 60 percent."

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For some in the dark net generation, hope of recovery lies in their youth – both John and Dave are in their mid-twenties, as are plenty on Reddit's Opiates forum. But for other fentanyl users, like those living on Britain's streets, the outlook is grim.

Naturally, if Britain's drug policies were based on harm reduction, improving mental health and homelessness would be a priority, along with providing free fentanyl tests and supervised injection sites (SIV), where naloxone would be endless. Instead, the government has blocked the UK's first SIV from opening in Glasgow. Other Conservative responses to record-high drug deaths in the UK include pushing people off methadone and the baffling Psychoactive Substances Act.

At the beginning of this, I wondered about Britain’s potential to follow the US down a fentanyl blackhole. Realistically, with a private healthcare system foisting opioids on everyone, the US is a special case. Nevertheless, the UK's problem is significant enough to warrant a health-based response, but the government have merely spent money trying to stop fentanyl hitting the streets, when, obviously, they can't.

The Canadian tells me how he avoids detection: "Law enforcement are always on my mind. I'm always switching my source of internet, my computers, phones, stash spots and packaging locations."

John, meanwhile, believes it's only a matter of time until fentanyl shows up in Brighton, his current hometown. "The amount of money that can be made shotting the stuff is too good for some people to pass up."

At the beginning of this article I wrote that, to predict its next step, we must understand the journey fentanyl takes to the UK. As I'm afraid fentanyl’s next step may be carfentanil – its more powerful cousin, recently found in several deaths in Hull – maybe our next step should be understanding the journey the UK has taken, headlong, towards it.

*Names have been changed

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A fact: Withnail and I is a cult film beloved by bohemian students. A darkly-funny jaunt through the misadventures of two shabby London actors as they navigate dreadful weather, pervy uncles and their drug and alcohol abuse.

Or wait. Is it – contrary to everything we assumed about the film, its director and its stars – basically an argument for conservative, traditionalist values?

In May of last year, at central London's Strand Palace Hotel, alt-right vlogger Colin Robertson – AKA "Millennial Woes" – was giving a talk about the movie, suggesting it is a warning against the decadence of the modern world, longing for a purer time for strong, white, male characters such as Withnail. According to Robertson, the film "violates PC at a subliminal level". You "would not be able to make a film about being English today", he suggests.

Robertson – once described by a Scottish tabloid as a "vile vlogger whose racist rants have made him a global internet sensation" – was doing a sort of Slavoj Žižek-style film analysis, but from a far-right perspective, rather than drawing on Marx and Hegel.

This talk was taking place at the London Forum, which brands itself "the home of the UK alt-right" – and is more than just an ethno-nationalist film club. Speaking on an American far-right podcast, Jeremy "Jez" Bedford-Turner explained why he founded the shadowy neo-Nazi meeting network: "We [the far-right] aimed for the football hooligans, for elements who weren't really into intellectual thinking. I realised this was a mistake… There was a definite need for a leadership cadre, for a new intelligentsia, for a new mass media."

In February of last year, a member of Britain's neo-Nazi intellectual cadre was stuck in the glass revolving-door of a high end west London hotel, surrounded by anti-fascist activists. Peter Rushton – a balding, white-haired man with the air of an elderly academic – munched on a shop-bought wrap as he waited for the attending police to unblock the door so he could listen to a series of anti-Semitic speeches. Anti-fascists stood around looking at him, knocking on the glass and laughing at the "Nazi in a box".

A London Forum attendee stuck in a revolving door, protected by police

The event, which brought together neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, alt-right students and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, was one of a series of meetings organised by the London Forum.

The network has become one of the organising hubs for the British far-right, attracting the types listed above – as well as former British National Party (BNP) activists and the kind of old men who write books advocating pseudo-scientific racism – for lengthy meetings where they listen to speeches, organise far-right protests, sell books and raise money to support neo-Nazis being repressed by the state.

Access to the meetings is restricted to people who have been vetted through a screening process. Potential attendees have to meet with one of the organisers before being added to email and text message lists. The night before the meetings, attendees are texted a redirection point, generally outside a central London train station. When they arrive they are escorted to the nearby secret venue in groups – a bit like an illegal rave, only for racists rather than crusties.

Some of the most controversial far-right speakers from around the world have addressed Forum meetings. Regular speakers include David Irving, the notorious Holocaust denier; veteran British fascist Richard Edmonds of the National Front (NF); and Alex Davies, one of the founders of banned Nazi terror gang National Action (NA). Talks in the past have been on topics such as "National Socialism and the Green Movement", "Straightening out the White Man’s thinking" and "Was Jesus a Nazi?"

Alison Chabloz, a London Forum attendee, is currently going through the courts for a song she allegedly sang about the Holocaust at one of the events. She denies any criminal wrongdoing.

American Nazi Matthew Heimbach, who has been called "the face of a new generation of white nationalists", was forced to address a meeting via a video recorded in Prague after being denied entry to the UK. Finnish nationalist Kai Murros has addressed Forum meetings twice – once using the opportunity to call for a violent revolution in the UK, which would see gangs of masked and black-clad Nazis storming universities and dragging academics out into the streets.

Screengrab via Millenial Woes Youtube

The London Forum meetings act as a bridge between the UK and American alt-right. Colin "Millennial Woes" Robertson spoke in London, having previously addressed the infamous "Hail Trump" meeting of Richard Spencer's National Policy Institute. Some of the key names in the US alt-right have spoken at Forum meetings. Richard Spencer's flatmate, Jason Reza-Jorjani, from alt-right publisher Arktos Media, has attended, as has Greg Johnson, from Arktos' rivals Counter Currents.

Johnson was inspired by the Forum meetings to import the model to the US, holding similar events in New York and Seattle. When Reza-Jorjani spoke in February, Arktos Media had a large stall, selling books and pamphlets. When launching his New York meetings, Johnson described the Forum network as "the most important organisation in the British nationalist scene after the collapse of the British National Party and the subsequent wave of party fatigue".

The network also acts as a hub for neo-Nazi and far-right street activity in the UK, particularly in London and the South East. Eddy Morrison, the veteran British Nazi who was involved in the founding of the Rock Against Communism scene, has described the Forum meetings as "a great place for cross fertilisation of our shared ideology".

Nearly every neo-Nazi protest in London over the past few years, like the anti-Shomrim protest in 2015 or the Golden Dawn solidarity protests in 2013, can be linked back to Forum meetings. Either the organisers have been regular attendees, speakers at protests have also spoken at Forum meetings, or the majority of attendees have been to Forums.

If someone on the far-right is trying to organise a protest, the Forum meetings give them a networking event they can use to find potential speakers, and an opportunity to drum up interest among potential attendees. One of the organisers of the violent anti-immigration protests in Dover, Paul Prodromou, appears in a video addressing a Forum meeting to explain how he had organised those protests. After Prodromou’s speech, £300 was raised by Forum attendees for the more than 60 far-right activists who were in jail at the time for their involvement in the violence.

Photo: Guy Corbishley / Alamy Stock Photo

There have also been a handful of protests organised directly by Bedford-Turner or other Forum organisers. One was a remembrance event, held in July of 2016, for the victims of a terror attack carried out by Jews who were fighting to create the state of Israel. Another was held outside the German embassy in February of 2017, expressing solidarity with the German far-right NPD party, which was facing a ban.

Bedford-Turner has said his involvement in British nationalism began with the National Front in the 1980s. In 1992, he stood as an NF candidate in a council election in Twickenham, picking up 40 votes. Like many British fascists, he then moved to the BNP. Bedford-Turner himself is currently being prosecuted for the speech he gave at the anti-Shomrim protest in Whitehall. The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAA) reported Bedford-Turner's speech to the police, but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decided not to prosecute, so the CAA launched a judicial review which forced the CPS to reconsider their decision not to prosecute.

Anti-fascists have been targeting the Forum network for years. In January of 2017 a South West Forum meeting near Bristol was attacked by around 40 anti-fascists who smashed windows with rocks and fought with attendees. A meeting in February of 2017 in London was opposed by anti-fascists, who surrounded the entrance and set off smoke bombs. Forum meetings have been cancelled after their venues have been leaked in advance, and are regularly infiltrated by journalists and anti-fascist researchers. Those efforts have kept the meetings underground, but they haven't been able to stop the Forum network from expanding.

There is now a South West Forum, headed up by former BNP organiser and current senior NF activist Julie Lake; a Welsh Forum organised by former postman Milton Ellis; a Yorkshire Forum organised by former BNP activist Liam Kernaghan, now of the British Democratic Party; and a Scottish Forum.

These groups are intending to help create a new set of leaders for British fascism. Bedford-Turner has said the meetings exist to provide British fascists some face-to-face interaction; a space where fascists can "come together, socialise, network, knock ideas around, hear some good speeches, buy some hard-to-find literature and go away inspired and motivated", because "all the great leaders in history have always been close to, or met with, or been inspired by other great leaders".

Anti-racist charity Hope Not Hate has reported that senior individuals in the Forum network are attempting to launch a new fascist political party. And as many of the Forum attendees are former BNP activists, candidates and organisers, it wouldn't be a surprise if they were able to pull this off at some point. Former BNP youth leader Mark Collett, who is now attempting to re-market himself as an alt-right YouTuber, has been earmarked as the future leader of such a party. If any section of the UK far-right is able to create a new fascist party, it's the Forum network.

That's significant, given where it came from. The London Forum emerged as a split from something called New Right – a set of far-right meetings in London which took place in the 2000s. One of the leaders of National Action, Benjamin Raymond, told me a rumour he'd heard about that split. Apparently the founder "invited a gay national-anarchist from Germany to deliver a talk on 'alternative communities', which he did in green spandex. You can imagine the impression this left on a room full of ageing neo-Nazis and posh gits. Attendance went from 70 to seven, and that is why there is now London Forum." When I put this rumour to New Right organiser Troy Southgate, he told me it was "hilarious" and "completely untrue".

True or not, the Forum network has gone from existing on the most bizarre, extreme fringe of British far-right politics to something that has genuine organisational capacity, and which hosts relatively popular YouTubers who understand how to communicate their hateful ideas in terms that look out towards the mainstream.

@jdpoulter

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The Islamic State called it the "grayzone" – where Muslims can be loyal to their religion and identity while still fitting into wider society. Islamist terrorists want to destroy this grayzone and give Muslims a black-and-white choice: become an apostate or become an extremist.

All over the internet and throughout the country, a phalanx of right-wing hate preachers are ready to take every monstrous event and blame it on all Muslims, perpetuating that false black-and-white idea. In doing so, those who profess to care the most about defeating terrorism continue to contribute directly to the exact spiral of alienation and division the terrorists want.

While the words of these right-wing hate preachers may be snake oil bullshit, they have real consequences for communities across the UK who are subjected to a spike in racist incidents after every attack. Our special investigation – Hate Island – is a guide to the movements, individuals and subcultures that incubate this hatred and unleash it on the world.

The recent trial of far-right terrorist Darren Osborne gave proof – if proof were needed – of the impact of this toxic discourse. Before ploughing a rented van into worshippers outside the Finsbury Park Mosque, Osborne had printed out tweets written by Tommy Robinson – the former EDL leader, turned far-right gonzo journalist – and placed them on his dashboard.

Sadly, Osborne is far from the only person whose online obsession has quickly manifested itself in a murderous act, as evidenced by our look at IronMarch, an obscure neo-Nazi forum that took its members on a shared journey of radicalisation that resulted in an international wave of terror attacks.

Alarmingly, thanks to the current global political climate, this rhetoric is not confined to online spaces. As interest in the so-called alt-right continues to grow in America, we look at its self-declared UK home: the London Forum, where unhinged racists give talks asking, "Was Jesus a Nazi?" From its beginnings as a meeting of cranks interested in head measurements, the forum has become an organisational and ideological hub for far-right street protests, and a link between white supremacists on either side of the Atlantic.

The people we discuss in these articles may exist on the fringes, but that doesn't stop some of their ideas finding acceptance in society. They filter down, perhaps even subconsciously.

Take, for example, Prime Minister Theresa May: she was accused of using the language of the fascist National Front when she was Home Secretary, after telling undocumented migrants to "go home". Or Jacob Rees Mogg – the PG Wodehouse character many grassroots Tory campaigners would love to see at the helm of the Conservative Party – who has had to repeatedly distance himself from the Traditional Britain Group, an organisation where conservatives rub shoulders with the far-right.

None of this makes these people far-right agitators, and we're not suggesting they have Nazi or neo-Nazi sympathies, but it does demonstrate that it is not enough to simply cast the far-right as a bunch of obsessive weirdos, or far-right thought as an isolated aberration. What we must do is understand how it relates to the mainstream and prays on common concerns.

There is always a way of legitimising the ugliest of ideas – whether it's a dinner jacket or a victimhood narrative, as in the case of Generation Identity – and it's time we faced up to these preachers of hate before the idea that we can live side-by-side recedes entirely.

Get stuck into our special investigation with these articles:

Alt-Right Figures Pretending to Be Journalists Are Playing a Dangerous Game

Meet the Snowflakes Who Are the New Face of Race Hate

The Neo-Nazi Home of the UK Alt-Right

The Obscure Neo-Nazi Forum Linked to a Wave of Terror

How British Police Shut Down the Original UK Antifa

The Rise and Demise of the EDL

Is It Okay to Be Gay (and in the Far-Right)?

My Curious Search for That Guy in the 'Muslamic Ray Guns' Video

@SimonChilds13

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Taking to the streets in protest is a long and noble national tradition. On the 5th of February, 2011, the emphasis was on national rather than noble. It was a Saturday morning and protesters from all over the country had descended on Luton. As they paraded through the streets, penned in on all sides by lines of police officers in high-vis vests, they held aloft St George's flags and chanted anti-Muslim slogans.

The English Defence League (EDL) had begun life in Luton less than two years before. On that occasion, several hundred far-right activists had marched through the streets. Now, they were in their thousands. Support for the group had been steadily building, with demonstrations taking place every few weeks throughout 2010. Tommy Robinson, the group's leader, told the crowd they represented a "tidal wave of patriotism". The far-right had not seemed so emboldened in Britain since the 1970s. Who knew where the movement might lead?

Luton turned out to be a high-water mark for the EDL. The group survives today in splintered form on Facebook, but its reputation as a serious street movement is fading fast; its demonstrations regularly fail to attract more than a handful of activists. Anti-fascist campaign group Hope Not Hate describes this change in fortunes as a "lethargic and alcohol-fuelled almost comic collapse".

So what happened?

The EDL story began in June of 2009, when Islamist group Al-Muhajiroun protested a parade held by the Royal Anglian Regiment to mark its return from Afghanistan. A group calling itself the United Peoples of Luton called a counter-protest and persuaded hundreds of young white men to take to the streets. In the weeks that followed, the group formed loose alliances with firms of football casuals, rebranded as the English Defence League and began holding demonstrations in towns and cities across the country. They attracted hundreds of supporters who wanted to go on the piss, bait anti-fascists and shout about Muslims.

From the beginning, there was a contrast between the behaviour seen at demonstrations and the messages being issued by the group’s leadership. The EDL described itself as a "human rights organisation" and adopted the slogan: "Not racist, not violent, just no longer silent." It claimed to be standing up for the white working class and raising legitimate concerns about radical Islam.

For some EDL members, that may have been the case. But many supporters were simply old-fashioned racists: members of the BNP and the National Front marched under its banner, racist chants rang out at its rallies.

Despite this, some among the group's leadership believed they had a future in mainstream politics. In March of 2011, Robinson told the Independent he was considering launching a political party. "We know the support we've got from one end of the country to the other, because we talk sense," he said. "It's something we're seriously looking at."

Unfortunately for Robinson, the EDL was already beginning to break apart. In the beginning, the absence of any clear ideology meant the group could mobilise large numbers of supporters with a broad anti-Islam call to arms. But as time went on, disputes over the group's core beliefs and tactics became increasingly common.

Joel Busher is the author of The Making of Anti-Muslim Protest: Grassroots Activism in the English Defence League. He believes the EDL's political ambitions helped deepen cracks that were already starting to emerge. "They needed to clean up the image of the EDL, but other people in the organisation didn't want to go that way. That made it hard for the group to continue," he says.

In April of 2011, the EDL's North East division formed a splinter group, the Infidels, adopting an openly racist ideology. The two groups clashed at a protest in Blackburn later that month. "By mid-2011, I think the wheels were already coming off," says Busher.

The EDL held regular protests throughout 2012, with a few hundred supporters turning out in Leicester, Bristol and Walsall, but it struggled to achieve anything like its early notoriety. Then, in May of 2013, fusilier Lee Rigby was murdered by two Islamists in Woolwich. For a short time, this terrorist attack on the streets of London looked like it could drive a surge in support for the EDL. The group held a series of significant demonstrations, and gathered more than 1,000 supporters outside 10 Downing Street. But the momentum turned out to be short-lived.

In October of 2013, Robinson resigned as the group's leader. The announcement shocked both his supporters and critics, not least because he claimed his decision was prompted by concerns about the "danger of far-right extremism". Robinson went on to launch Pegida UK, an anti-Islamic organisation hoping to attract a different class of far-right activist, but has since taken to popping up at the scene of terrorist attacks and traffic accidents to stir up racial tension.

The EDL has never really recovered. Another recent leader, Ian Crossland, who stepped down recently, was largely unknown until he appeared as the scowling subject of a photo taken at an EDL protest in Birmingham. The photo, which quickly went viral, showed Crossland squaring up to a young woman, Saffiyah Khan, as she smiled back nonchalantly. It was clear where the power lay. The EDL was in the news again, but this time it was seen as a laughing stock. Last September, an EDL march in Essex also made headlines – after fewer than 10 people turned up.

It would be tempting to think the EDL's views have died, but it's more likely its members have simply gone their separate ways. Hilary Pilkington, author of Loud and Proud: Passion and Politics in the English Defence League, says the EDL has been squeezed on both sides by the likes of Britain First and the Football Lads Alliance (FLA).

"It's not clear whether either of these two movements will continue to flourish or eclipse the EDL altogether, but certainly at the moment, Britain First are proving a more effective force in terms of controlling the social media space, while the FLA have managed to get tens of thousands of feet on the street,” she says.

But there have also been other, more positive, legacies. An attempt to fight the EDL using SEO led to the formation of the English Disco Lovers in 2012 – and a group that began as a joke now hosts regular charity events and looks set to outlive the organisation it was set up to parody. "The success of English Disco Lovers is raising money for people affected by the English Defence League and other extremist groups," says Elaine, the group’s community organiser in Brighton.

The EDL lives on, but not as its founding members might have imagined.

@mark_wilding

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.