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I Followed Vape-Smuggling Teens to Find Out Why They’re So Obsessed with JUUL

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Chances are, if you’ve seen someone between the ages of 14 and 20 sucking on a fourth-generation iPod shuffle on your Instagram or on the subway or on the street, then you’ve witnessed the new chic obsession for tweens and teens alike—the JUUL—aka this cool new vape thing that's not quite legal in Canada.

JUULs lie somewhere in between play-puffing on those sweet candy sticks that we used to pretend were cigarettes when we were eight and stealing dad’s Marlboro Reds when we were 14. It’s kinda like smoking but it’s not, and it tastes like mango. Instead of passing round a spliff or baggies of plant fertiliser in bathrooms at parties, kids now are trading hits on each others’ JUULs—and something about that doesn't sit well with me.

JUULs are not as deadly as cigarettes, and yet somehow this lack of danger doesn’t render them lame. Well, at least not to kids in North America, where even the New York Times has declared them a trend. The vapedemic has hit Vancouver in full force with kids here desperate to get their hands on these rad little smoke sticks. If you go to Bar None, Twelve West or Republic (literally why though?) then you’ll see these smoking playthings being passed around the dance floor like someone more retro might pass around cocaine. To “take a hit of a JUUL” is all these kids are looking for on a night out now—just a little head-rush, and that’s quite sweet really.

But due to strict vape laws in BC, these e-cigs/pacifiers are nowhere to be found in any Canadian city as they’re seen to be too appealing to young children and might be a gateway to actual smoking. Rather than a deterrent, this has added appeal because somehow it makes it more risqué. All the kids want them, so what does that mean? It means over the last few months a JUUL smuggling ring has developed across the west coast of North America with regular JUUL pickups organised monthly. These baby Pablo Escobars are crossing the border into Washington state, picking up thousands of dollars worth of JUULs and smuggling them back over—all for that delish cucumber-flavoured air.

The main question I’m left with is why—how much can someone really love an e-cig that looks like a thumb drive? Blowing billowing clouds like a dragon might be entertaining the first few times you do it, but after that I’m just not sure I get the appeal. In order to see what all the fuss is about, I asked around to identify the big dog of the JUUL smuggling world and accompany them on one of their stateside pick-ups to get the inside on why oh why these JUULs are such a hot trend. I approached the bougiest kids I could find and apparently hit the jackpot. Was I about to get detained and arrested at the border for smuggling drugs/not drugs? Who knows.

On a rainy Monday at around 4 PM we were picked up in a black Honda Civic blasting Kygo with two glam 20-year-olds in the front seat: Tara and Tara’s friend (not their real names). Inside the car was a misty minty haze as they took hit after hit on their JUULs. At first I just sat there in this hotboxed car breathing in delightfully smelling vape juice, mainly confused about what was going on. “It’s an hour and a half to the border,” Tara told us as we drove off. “We’re picking up a lot.” “Is it safe?” I asked. “Totally, I don’t know anyone who’s ever been searched.” “Also I only have a new driver’s license,” she added as we were speeding down the highway, “hope that’s cool.” Woah, she was certainly playing a dangerous game. “If I get a ticket it's literally no big deal I just have to go to court.” That kinda sounded like a big deal to me but clearly I had stepped into a car with two thrill-seekers. I guess that’s what happens when you’re nailing 0.7 ml of nicotine all day every day.

I asked them both: what is so special about a JUUL? “They’re seen as cool. Whenever we go out people will be like, ‘Yo where’s your JUUL?’ That’s the first thing people say to us,” said Tara as she offered me hers. “I got kicked out of a club last week. He was like ‘you can’t vape inside’ and I was like ‘Hun, its a JUUL, I was JUULing not vaping’ and he let me back in.” These kids clearly have all the answers.

At this point I was encouraged to take a “hit.” The best way to describe it is just sucking in a bit of minty vapour and blowing it out again. I repeated to see if I had been missing something but that was it. “What makes them different from other vapes?” I asked. “Vapes are so large whereas JUULs are this tiny little thing and they’re not loud and they’re not aggressive,” said Tara’s friend. “Plus it looks more classy and it works better. You get a stronger head rush because its way higher in nicotine.” So, they’re pretty and they give you a teeny tiny buzz. Sure. If a head rush is what they’re after, I guess standing up too fast will be all the rage soon too.

“Also you can’t get it here and I think that makes it cooler,” Tara told me. So the fact that they’re contraband in BC really is what makes these kids mad for the JUULs. In that way, JUULs are like skipping curfew or Snapchatting after 10 PM—they are simply rules to be broken. Still, I see no one going mad for Orbit gum in Vancouver, and you can’t get that in BC. “They also come in yummy flavours,” added Tara’s friend. OK fine. But how much can someone really love mango?!

Clearly these clever girls had capitalised on something. It seemed like everyone they knew was smoking JUULs and going through a pack of pods every couple of weeks—the demand was high. “At least one person goes to pick up once every month,” Tara said. “Three of us have gone this month already… We all know who has a JUUL and whenever someone is going we’ll make a huge group chat for orders.”

This is when Tara showed me her list; one on paper and one on her phone. She had at least 10 people’s orders and more were being messaged in via Snapchat and Instagram. “Does it not feel risky?” I asked. “Not really. If you’re doing the runs all the time you have to have a reason for going otherwise they’re going to get suspicious, but I have a reason to be crossing the border because I have a beach house in the states—so it’s fine.” “So is that our reason for crossing today?” I asked, wanting to make sure I was clued in ahead of the intense questioning I predicted would ensue at border control. “No, we’re saying we’re going shopping for Coachella,” answered her friend. “Which is kinda true,” she added. Of course it is.

That sweet 0.7ml of nicotine was coursing through my veins by this point and I was slamming the JUUL like no tomorrow—clearly this is why the kids can’t stop. One JUUL pod is estimated to be the equivalent in nicotine as an entire pack of cigarettes, and Tara says she goes through one pod every few days—that’s a lot of nicotine. My photographer still hadn’t tried a hit of the JUUL. Turns out she was terrified we were going to get breathalysed at the border—I don’t even know if this minty nicotine air would show up as anything but she was having none of it—bless her. She was missing out on some sweeeeet head rushes tbh.

“So who brought JUULs to Vancouver?” I asked. “My little sister discovered it, she’s 17,” said Tara’s friend. “This guy came back from California with a JUUL, and he brought it to school and everyone wanted to hit it but he wouldn't let anyone hit it. So then everyone got really mad so they made their parents take them across the border to buy a JUUL.” This doesn't scream cool to me, but what do I know. “And Bella Hadid has one,” said Tara. “They’re really big in LA.”

Feeling sufficiently educated, we arrived at the border and like a pro Tara announced us and our shopping trip. We were waved through without a second glance. Do I look basic enough to be going to Coachella? I guess so.

Turns out the main pickup of this secret smooth-running operation happens at a gas station. Tara whipped out her extensive list as we approached the counter and started listing flavours and pods. “This is gonna max out my credit card,” she said as she turned to me. This was a an extremely large amount of stuff for one person to be buying. She racked up close to US$1,000 worth of JUUL products.

In this small convenience store, Tara and her glam red designer puffer and $1,500 purse stood out like a sore thumb. Especially as her eight-minute encounter with the man at the front desk meant that a long line had built up behind her. “Twelve mint, 12 mango, six creme brûlée” (ew creme brûlée) the list went on and on and on. The man behind the counter was exasperated handing them over and even lamented that she was too slow. After eight minutes, we were done. That was pretty easy. And did I almost buy myself a JUUL? No comment.

As we got the JUULs back to the car we loaded them all into the front seat. “Where do we hide them?” I asked. The JUULs weren’t particularly bulky: their packaging was like a mix between Apple products and something from the homeware section of Urban Outfitters, so minimalist and clean. But even with such svelte millennial casing, en masse they made for quite the hefty pile. “We have to take them all out of their packets,” she said, “in case we get searched at the border, they have no proof we bought them.” Damn. This was quite the system. As we diligently unwrapped each JUUL and pack of pods, Tara labelled every one so she knew she had everyone’s orders covered. “Done?” I asked as we put the last labelled pod and JUUL into the glovebox. “Done,” she said, sucking on hers. “Who wants kombucha?” she asked. And I did, not gonna lie.

Luckily we had to hang around Washington for a couple of hours so as to make our “shopping for Coachella” story a little more believable. Bellingham is quite nice actually, and has a spattering of edgy coffee shops and vegan spots—if they’ve found themselves inadvertently become a major spot on this ever-so-bougie JUUL smuggling ring, they must have to cater for rich tweens. After a little pit stop we jumped back into the Honda, whacked on some Cardi B and drove north to the border.

This was my chance to ask a little bit more about what we should expect trying to get through. “None of us have ever got searched,” Tara reassured me. So in that vein we brazenly stuffed all the $1,000 worth of JUULs into the glove box. “Won’t this be the first place they look?” I asked Tara, starting to get a little sketched. She didn't seem phased. “Maybe, it’s highly unlikely,” she said casually. But I wondered at this point if the story would be different if we weren’t a car of white, seemingly wealthy females?

It was all fun and games until we approached border control. I’m gonna be honest with you: I was feeling a little tense. “What do I do?” I asked. “Just act casual,” Tara told me. Clearly I had no idea what that meant. Our stash was unprotected so I put my elbow on the glove box as if by casually leaning on it there couldn't possibly be $1,000 worth of contraband inside. Leaning. Just leaning. Casually. As we got closer I started to get a little angsty, like I had too many limbs and I didn't know what to do with them all. Whilst one elbow leaned on the glove box the other sat in my lap—my lap?! What do I do with my second hand?! But it was too late for a existential hand crisis, we had arrived at border control. Before I could figure out if my second hand was appropriately positioned, Tara was speaking to the lady in the kiosk.

“What did you ladies get up to this evening?” she asked. I let Tara take this one, mainly because I had seemingly forgotten all words and was totally preoccupied with all the leaning. She must be a pro by now, but even as she started listing all the possible activities we were doing stateside I sensed even this JUUL heist veteran might be a little nervous. “We went shopping but we didn't find anything,” she said. OK. That’s OK, I thought. Surely that will do. “Then we went for dinner,” she said. That’s enough Tara, you don't want to overshare. I could feel my lean becoming more agitated as she kept talking. I was bearing a lot of weight on the glove box now. “Any tobacco or alcohol in the car?” the lady in the kiosk interrupted Tara. “No,” said Tara, smiling.

I chose this moment lean forward and wave from my seat. I guess that’s what I decided to do with my second hand. I found it. In my lap. And I waved. “Just these Funyuns,” I said. There was a pause. This was horrible. “Alright ladies, have a good one.” Oh Jesus Christ! We slowly drove away. “My heart is beating so fast right now,” said Tara. What a thrill! Once in Canada, our extensive stash was safe. Another successful trip for Tara and my first illegal drug run ticked off my list. And now I can safely say I know for sure I would be a truly terrible drug mule. But it doesn't matter now, we had done it. “But why did you declare the Funyuns?!” asked my photographer as we were plain sailing down the highway. I didn’t have an answer for her. And I still don't know.

Well what an adventure and what did I learn? Well in short, lots; I learned that I’m terrible under pressure, I learned that a constant inhaling of 0.7 mls of nicotine in the space of three hours will give me the shakes, and I learned that saying ‘no’ to teenagers is enough of a reason for something to become the height of cool. Teens of my generation went after hard drugs and sketchy things that will probably kill us one day, but teens now are innocently sucking on sticks that are actively designed to stop you smoking—and good for them.

So next time you catch a youngun pounding fruity smelly mist in the street from an iPod nano style vape—just know that it probably made its journey here in the glovebox of a bougie teenager’s parent’s Honda civic. And what a journey it was.

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Just Because You Can't Stop Taking Antidepressants Doesn't Mean You're Addicted

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"I try to get off them but can’t seem to do it, no matter how slowly I wean myself."

"I am having withdrawal symptoms of shaking, panic attacks, flulike symptoms, nausea, fatigue, night sweats, tingling and numbness in the arms and legs."

"I was awake for about two days in hell, this hell consisted of this just intense feeling of fear combined with a belief that this state was a permanent condition."

"Noises jarred every fibre in my body and my eyes seemed to shun the light of day. I shook from head to foot and enormous panic attacks would sweep through my body, leaving me exhausted and totally afraid. Complete fatigue took over the feeling of tiredness and sleep no longer came with the night. Many times I thought it would be best to die."



Given the opioid crisis raging in America right now, you could be forgiven for thinking these are stories of addiction. They’re not. Instead, they are accounts of people struggling to stop taking antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications. And they show that we're not going to be able to provide effective help for them—or for people with genuine addictions—until we properly understand the real role that withdrawal plays in substance misuse.

Essentially, you can have withdrawal without being addicted—and you can have addiction without obvious physical signs of withdrawal. Failing to understand this has confounded the treatment of pain, mental illness and addiction for decades. But when we recognize the differences, better approaches for all of these problems suddenly come into focus.

The correct term for the condition of needing a substance in order to function without symptoms is dependence—and dependence, by itself, is not a problem, so long as the benefits of the drug continue to outweigh its risks. That’s why, in many cases, the best treatment for depression, pain and opioid addiction is to stay on stable, appropriate doses of the drugs, not come off them despite the recently-highlighted problem of withdrawal.

Unfortunately, the dependence label was made to stand for addiction in all but the most recent edition of the diagnostic manual for psychiatry, the DSM. Charles O’Brien, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, was on the committee that made these decisions. For DSM III-R, which was published in 1987, the committee chose "dependence" as the official diagnostic term because the label of addiction was seen as “pejorative,” he recalled in an interview.

O’Brien objected at the time. "I said, ‘Please, it's already taken, it's a pharmacological term—and there are all of these other drugs that are not abused that produce dependence and a withdrawal syndrome… if you insist on using dependence as a severe form of addiction, you're going to confuse people, and that’s exactly what happened," he told me.

When he became chair of the DSM-5 committee, O’Brien was determined to end the confusion— and by that point, in 2013, there was widespread agreement that the prior language had been a mistake. The official diagnosis is now "substance use disorder," moderate to severe.

But five years later, both the public—and physicians—are still struggling to make the distinction. Among other things, this leads people to wrongly believe they are "addicted" to antidepressants even though they are neither getting high on them nor experiencing a craving for that high. By the same token, many also incorrectly conclude that if a drug addiction does not include severe withdrawal symptoms, it’s no big deal.

Cocaine is the classic example here: While coke withdrawal produces extreme craving and irritability, the lack of physical symptoms—like the vomiting and diarrhea seen in opioid withdrawal—led 1980s experts to incorrectly conclude that it was less addictive. The crack epidemic made clear that this perspective was wrong, but many people still view "physical addiction" as more severe than "psychological addiction," when, in fact, the psychology is the key here.

This matters in part because many people with opioid addiction describe withdrawal as the worst possible experience, the most agonizing condition imaginable. However, if you look at the histories of people with opioid addiction—mine included—you will rapidly discover that they go through complete withdrawal multiple times.

In my case, for example, I never relapsed during the time when I had active withdrawal symptoms. It was only a few weeks or months later, when I felt no physical need for the drugs, that I would decide that I could control my use and just shoot heroin on weekends. Of course, those weekends soon blended into daily use again.

If withdrawal were the key obstacle to recovery, one withdrawal experience would be enough to end it. That is, you should be able to cure people of opioid addiction by locking them away from drugs—because of how horrible it was to quit, they would never relapse, the thinking goes. This, obviously, is not what happens: within just one month of entering a detox program, studies have found, some 80 percent of people tend to relapse.

So, what really does matter in addiction? The National Institute on Drug Abuse, leaning on the DSM-5 definition, defines it as "compulsive drug seeking and use, despite harmful consequences"—withdrawal symptoms aren’t even required for the diagnosis. The hallmark trait of addiction is compulsion and craving: believing that the drug is essential to making your life work, even when it is clearly doing the opposite. "It's actually craving that matters," O'Brien said.

The distinction between addiction and dependence can even be seen in the brain, according to Ruben Baler, health scientist administrator at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "In the beginning of any addiction, the release of dopamine is triggered by the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in the mid brain, that’s at top of the spine," he said. At this point, the substance itself seems rewarding and pleasurable.

As addiction continues, however, the brain learns that certain cues—people, places and things, as the recovery slogan puts it—predict delivery of the drug. Now, these cues actually trigger the dopamine release before the stuff is even consumed, producing craving. And once the drug is obtained, the original dose no longer satisfies and people take more and more. Eventually, using seems necessary just to feel normal.

In the brain, these changes are reflected by a shift from dopamine being released primarily from the VTA to its release coming predominantly from a region called the substantia nigra (SN). The output of the circuit changes as well: instead of affecting the ventral (in this instance, physically lower in the brain) area, the SN affects the dorsal (in this instance, upper) part. (You can think of ventral being the underside of an animal while dorsal is its top, like the dorsal fin of a shark.)

"That’s where habit formation takes place," Baler said. "So these behaviors, once they are shifted from the ventral striatum to the dorsal, they become intensely learned behaviors and they become automatic and reflexive."

With dependence, in contrast, changes occur in different regions. “That transition from ventral to dorsal, it has nothing to do with the pharmacological emergence of the physical dependence on the drug," Baler continued. That’s why, in most cases of dependence, relapse is rare: once people have fully emerged from withdrawal and no longer need the substance to cope with the symptoms they had originally, they have no craving and don’t ever want to repeat withdrawal. With addiction, in contrast, relapse is common because the condition is defined by failure to respond to negative experiences, including withdrawal.

This doesn’t mean that dependence isn’t a problem for people who are taking drugs like antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications or opioids but are no longer benefitting from them. In those cases—when the drug genuinely no longer works or has greater risks than benefits—withdrawal can still cause serious suffering.

“Part of the problem is that tapers aren’t done gradually enough,” said David Juurlink, professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Toronto. He described a patient who had originally been prescribed tramadol for shoulder pain, but found that when he tried to stop taking it after the pain had passed, he couldn’t sleep. "Every time he tried to cut down by just 25 milligrams, he was ruined by insomnia [so] he kept taking it for a year and a half," Juurlink explained.

Instead, Juurlink tapered him just five milligrams at a time, which required getting the drug from a special compounding pharmacy. "And now he’s off, and he’s immensely better because he’s not taking the stuff that he was taking—not for analgesia, but because he had been taking it."

When we recognize the distinction between addiction and dependence, we can focus on the problems associated with each of them rather than stigmatizing anyone who has withdrawal and any drug that causes it. We can treat people with problematic dependence with greater respect, recognizing that relieving suffering by tapering slowly, voluntarily and gently is important no matter what medical condition someone might have. Just because someone isn't addicted doesn't mean abrupt withdrawal isn't a problem.

And we can stop seeing short term inpatient "rehab" or "detoxification programs" (typically, seven to 28 days)—which keep patients isolated for the acute period of withdrawal—as the best treatment for addiction. The real problem here is why someone feels the compulsive need for escape. If you simply take away the drug without resolving that existential dilemma, relapse of some type is pretty much inevitable.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Frat Bros Behind Racist Video Sue School for Jeopardizing Their 'Success'

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Last week, Syracuse was rattled by the release of two horrifying videos that appear to capture members of an engineering frat taking an oath to hate "n*ggers, sp*cs, and most importantly the fuckin' k*kes," and mocking a disabled person's "light rape." The school responded by expelling the frat and suspending 18 of its members, but now five Theta Tau brothers are suing the school for "injury to their reputation," Syracuse.com reports.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, the unnamed students—all members or pledges of Theta Tau—accused the school of "branding them as racist, anti-sematic [sic], sexist, and hostile to people with disabilities." It argues that the school "selectively commented on snippets" of the videos, which were meant as a "satirical sketch." As a result, the lawsuit states, the students have suffered from "ridicule and scorn."

The videos, each met with howls of laughter by members of the audience, capture what the lawsuit claims was "a time-honored Chapter tradition that builds unity by satirically and hyperbolically depicting brothers." In videos of the alleged "roast" that the school's paper, the Daily Orange, published last week, the brothers make Holocaust references, pretend to be disabled, and simulate forced oral sex—all apparently as a bonding exercise.

"He's drooling out of his mouth, because he’s retarded in a wheelchair," someone is heard saying in one of the videos mocking a disabled person's sexual assault. "Yankee is totally unaware of this light rape that’s occurring."

Still, now it seems five members involved believe they're entitled to damages from the school for "threatening their academic success and survival," according to the lawsuit. Aside from asking for $1 million apiece, the five unnamed students have demanded that Syracuse put a halt to the disciplinary proceedings against them and let them back into their classes.

For its part, the school has been clear about its thoughts on what went down—regardless of its context. In a school-wide email, Chancellor Kent Syverud slammed the videos as "extremely racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, sexist, and hostile to people with disabilities," and Syracuse's associate vice president for communications, Sarah Scalese, is standing behind the students' suspensions.

"The University stands by the actions it took to protect the well-being of the campus community and maintain a respectful and safe learning environment," Scalese said.

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Related: Bro Culture, A Capella, and the Frat House Legacy

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Everything You Should Know Before Seeing ‘Avengers: Infinity War’

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So you’re ready to put away that too-cool-for-school getup and trek down to the movies this weekend to see the latest in a long-ass line of Marvel cinematic goodness huh? Based on the sheer volume of comic films that have come out in the last decade, there’s a good chance you haven’t been paying attention to this whole superhero thing for a bit.

Still, I’ll bet you’ve got at least one friend who won’t shut up about how epic this one will be. And that friend is likely too lazy to explain any damn part of it. Well, I’ve spent way too much time reading up about this to leave you hanging. Remember, a lot of the backstory I’m about to tell you isn’t Avengers: Infinity War guaranteed, but let’s begin the class anyway.

What’s this war all about?

The Avengers: Infinity War, as we know it as a film, is basically a battle between a big purple Alien named Thanos with his intergalactically evil posse called The Black Order. They’re all looking to wreck some shit and find a particular set of items to do so. The Avengers, non-avengers Black Panther and Doctor Strange included, are the only individuals equipped to put a stop to their antics. Basically, one side wants to destroy half the universe, and everyone else is trying to stop them.

Who’s this purple dude?

If you’ve glanced at a poster, you know the biggest head belongs to the aforementioned purple alien. Thanos is a dude who talks a big game, but follows through in some major ways. Jim Starling himself describes the villain as the following:

“Thanos is an amoral philosopher. He’s not the Devil, although he sometimes has the devil standing next to him.”

Born of two enterals—which is basically Marvel comic speak for evolutionary humans who helped create us on the side—he's a titan with a shitty upbringing. These are high-browed eternals we’re talking about here; too damn high-browed to multitask as decent parents. His mother Sui-Sa, who was kinda nuts, tried to off Thanos because he came out with an ugly mug from the jump. And his father was just an absentee dad. So the dude already had trust issues. All in all, he had some next level trash for parents who fostered his whole “universe destroyer” thing.

Listen, I got mother issues too, but I don’t want to destroy the world. So what’s his deal?

It’s not like you had death whispering in your ear since you were a child, egging you like a psychotic cheerleader (I hope). And we’re not talking about the full on skull-and-bones type either. Mistress Death, in the Marvel Universe sense, actually isn’t bad looking in a marrow to bone sort of way; she’s a fully skinned dominatrix with a hood. Thanos already had issues with abandonment, so thanks to his own relationships with killing and destruction, Mistress Death took an interest in his potential, and convinced him that she’d be the only one that could truly love him for who he became.

Of course like all toxic relationships, her love had a price: destroy half the universe, because she’s death, I guess. If friendzoning were a thing (it’s not), Thanos would be the first villain to off entire galaxies to escape it.

So how does he manage this?

The purple bad guy needs some serious firepower if he’s going to complete his mission, so he sets out to get his hands on six ancient gems called Infinity Stones. These stones were created by a really powerful being who felt lonely one day, and split itself apart into six different fragments on some suicidal shit. (Note: Marvel Cinematic Universe wise, it’s explained through The Big Bang and six singularities that went bang with it.) Like a lovesick puppy, Thanos of course embarks on a quest to get the stones and mount them in a gauntlet for greater control of their power; like a steering wheel on a car.

So what can these gems do, and who has them in the MCU?

OK, let me break this down *cracks knuckles*:

The Mind Stone:
The Mind Stone makes specific appearances in both Avengers films. The first pops up in Loki’s (Tom Hiddleston) mind-control scepter from The Avengers, and in Avengers: Age of Ultron. It’s later seen within the forehead of the sentient robot, Vision, after the stone helped to create the lethally intelligent AI named Ultron.
Powers: An OP ability to hold energies that allow for mind control, energy and astral projection, along with telekinetic and telepathic powers.

The Space Stone:
This stone is first seen in The Avengers and Captain America films through the Tesseract (just think of a big blue glowing cube that holds a really powerful stone). Loki is the first to use it by opening a portal from one universe to Earth itself in The Avengers. It then takes up residence in Odin’s (Thor’s pops) own vault for safe keeping.
Powers: If you haven’t already guessed, the space stone has the power to create any sort of bridge between one end of space to another; the ultimate lazy man’s way to travel.

The Power Stone:
It made its first appearance in Guardians of the Galaxy, which was used by Ronan (Lee Pace), only to be taken from Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) and the Guardians. Right now, the Nova Corps (intergalactic police) are hanging onto it.
Powers: If you ever wanted to see a Superman knock off within the Marvel Universe, this is the gift that keeps on re-gifting. If you’re a jogger, you’re now a sprinter. If you’re a 20-pound lifter, you’re now a 20,000-pound lifter. It has the ability to boost the effects of power, from the other gems themselves to the duplication of any physical superhuman ability.

The Reality Stone:
Better known as the Aether from Thor: The Dark World, the stone deals in dark matter (which means it doesn’t interact with shit like light, it’s invisible, hard to detect). At the moment, it’s in the possession of The Collector (Benicio Del Toro), whose whole shtick is to collect shit.
Powers: The most powerful stone in this list. Reality is what is, and this stone manipulates that with a single thought. If Thanos wants Mistress Death to put a ring on it, he could make it happen (though he’d consider that cheating). No one can detect a change, nor see it coming, and if Thanos wanted to wipe out half a universe with a snap of his fingers (in the comic books, he did) he could.

The Time Stone:
This is nested in the Eye of Agamotto (a necklace by a powerful Sorcerer) from Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), where it’s first employed by our doctor-turned-reality-bender for spoilerific reasons.
Powers: The Time Stone is exactly what the name implies, it controls time in a wide or specific space. Reversed, sped up, slowed down, it’s all by the discretion of the wearer. Comic book wise, Thanos even had an altercation where he aged an astral being by a billion years or so, and then turned him into a thumb sucking infant just for kicks (cold).

The Soul Stone: The only stone that hasn’t appeared in a MCU based film and we still don’t know who’s rocking them.
Powers: The Soul Stone like all these plainly named gems is an absorber of souls, but with a twist. It can also snatch the knowledge of all those it swallows. There’s no such thing as a secret with this bastard.

Jesus Christ, they don’t have some purple kryptonite for the guy? How do you stop that?

Infinity Gauntlet (1991) | via Wikipedia Commons.

That’s kinda the point, the heroes themselves shouldn’t really stand a chance on their own. When the six-issue limited series Infinity Gauntlet landed on December, 1991, it became an immediate success by the suggestion that heroes would die. It had never really been done on that scale. Sure, half of the universe came back, but imagine being the fan waiting patiently for the next issue, knowing full well that Thor, Captain America, Spiderman and Iron Man could be gone for good. MCU-wise, every hero that has appeared from the Black Panther (Chadwick boseman), all the way to Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) are combining their chops to take this guy out thanks to the foreboding by Gamora (Zoe Saldana), the daughter of Thanos (yes he has kids). According to her, it ain’t gonna be pretty.

So who deserves the credit for this whole thing?

From left to right, Jim Starling and Mike Friedrich. | via Wikipedia Commons.

In the tradition of white men being behind most legacy comics, both Jim Starling and Mike Friedrich came up with the purple baddie that inspired this whole Infinity War business from the start. According to Jim Starling himself, he wanted to woo a woman with some higher education wordplay by attending a psychology class, but that got him interested in Freudian concepts of Thanatos—humanity’s obsession with death and destruction. So even before putting pen to paper, Jim here already had some sick thoughts about a universe destroying villain alternatively named as Thanos, who would eventually come to life on February 1973, Ironman #55, well before his six-part comic book series called The Infinity Gauntlet; what Avengers: Infinity War is partially based around.

Do I have to watch all the other Avengers movies first?

I don’t have time to give you a full recap of all the films up to this moment, as we’re now 18 films down the line. Just know that the most recent events involved a civil war between Captain America and Iron Man around the government registration of super-powered individuals. This of course split up the MCU heroes down a line; those for superhuman registration, and those against. If you want to dig deeper, save me some time and Wiki/YouTube that shit up in the following order to get the most:

Iron Man (2008)
The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Iron Man 2 (2010)
Thor (2011)
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
The Avengers (2012)
Iron Man 3 (2013)
Thor: The Dark World (2013)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
Ant-Man (2015)
Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Doctor Strange (2016)
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
Black Panther (2018)

So that’s why people are freaking out about this?

Yup. This is a 10 year build up of heroism, where fans will finally see said heroes die in several horrible and possibly ugly ways to possibly never see them again. (MCU contracts are ending). That’s some good watching.

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10 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask a Cleaner

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This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

She doesn't go digging for them, but Natalia* knows most of her customers' deepest, darkest secrets. The 43-year-old is one of an estimated 3.6 million people in Germany working as a domestic cleaner.

Natalia started in the industry at a young age, cleaning alongside her mother. She then worked as a waitress and a salesperson, until she decided to go back to being a cleaner ten years ago. Last year, she started her own cleaning company, which today has mostly elderly, financially well-off clients.

I spoke with Natalia to hear about the most horrible things she has ever been made to clean, and all the times she's found sex toys or dead people.

VICE: Hey Natalia. What's the worst thing you've ever had to clean up?
Natalia:
I'd say it was a toilet covered in an elderly man's shit. The weirdest thing about it was that it wasn't the first time. The only explanation I can think of is that he shits standing up. Another time, it took me and my colleagues 18 hours to clean a kitchen. The owner was super rich and the house was nicely furnished, but completely filthy. My boss at the time only accepted the job because of how much it paid.

Have you ever found a dead person in a flat?
The worst thing I've ever experienced on the job was walking into someone's flat with them and finding their dead father just lying on the floor. It was terrible. A similar thing happened again, but that time I was alone. I found this woman just lying on her bed, head pressed into the pillow. All I could do for a while was stand there in complete shock. Eventually, I used the emergency service button by her bed to get help. Now, I'm always afraid that I'll stumble on to a body.

How often do you find sex toys while you're cleaning?
It’s only ever happened once. I was making an 80-year-old woman's bed when I found a vibrator wrapped in a towel. She was pretty calm when she realised that I must have seen it. The woman just turned and said, "Well, we've known each other long enough."

What's the most personal secret you've uncovered?
I was having a conversation with one of my long-term customers – an 85-year-old widow who always seemed very angry and bitter – when she confessed that she had never loved her husband. She went on to explain how she had lost her first love in the war, and eventually married her husband as a backup. After hearing that, I could understand why she was perpetually in a bad mood.

Are you actually cleaning during all the hours you charge?
I'd say I spend about a quarter of my time not working – checking my phone, having a cigarette outside or grabbing something to eat. But a lot of my clients, especially the elderly ones, don't really mind, because I'm not only there to clean, but to offer them some company. Sometimes I'll grab a coffee with them, we'll go for a walk or just sit around and have a chat. Sadly, for many people their cleaner is the only person they have regular contact with. An older gentleman once even offered to take me on a sailing trip, but I thought that was taking things a bit far.

How many of your customers clean before you turn up?
A few do, which makes it so much more boring and leaves me wondering what exactly they want me to do. So I just end up wiping down a few tables and arranging the biscuits and thinking about what I'm going to do later.


WATCH: 10 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask the Wife of Britain's Most Notorious Prisoner


What the strangest personal document you've found?
I once found a payslip from a customer who made it seem he was filthy rich, but he was actually on a monthly pension of €1,200.

How do men react on dates when you tell them what you do for a living?
Men usually think it's great. I think it has something to do with their primal instincts – they think that if a woman cleans well, it's a sign she'd make a good wife. I don't mind being looked at in that way. In general, I don't really care what people think of me.

Have you ever been attracted to a customer?
No, but they've tried it on with me. A client once offered me €50 to have sex with him, but I politely declined. Then, while I was cleaning, he sat on his sofa and watched porn. I asked him several times to turn it off, but he ignored me. I left and reported him to my boss. In situations like that it's good to have someone you can go to for help who will make it easier for you to dump a customer without losing the work.

Have you ever stolen from someone?
No, and I never would. I don't even look in their drawers.

*Natalia's name has been changed to protect her identity and her clients

This article originally appeared on VICE DE.

We Asked People to Share Their Least Acceptable Opinions

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Take an honest look inside and you'll find some unfounded and ridiculous opinions about people you barely know. Ironically it seems to be something that binds humanity as a whole—our universal taste for intolerance. Usually this intolerance is just straight-up sexism or racism—which, for the record, we have no interest in sharing here—but it's also often directed at people who drive a certain way, or eat certain things, or enjoy a particular music. And we figured that it'd be a strange bonding experience to explore how we're all judgemental assholes. Each and every one of us.

With that in mind we walked around Sydney, inviting people to overshare.

Jack, 25, from the UK

VICE: Hey Jack, what’s your most unfashionable opinion?
Jack: I don’t like Australians. The last four Australians I worked for owe me money. So fuck Australians. I live in the place, I like Australia. But man, some of the people here piss me off.

So really, four of the people here piss you off.
Yeah just those four and they've changed my perspective on Australians. They're just so willing to screw backpackers over. Like if you get a backpacker, it’s a way of getting cheap labour and you can get them without paying.

And what kind of work were you doing?
Demolition. So I was demolishing a house, loading up my tipper truck and taking it to the tip. I worked like 150 hours for the last guy in like two weeks and he never paid me. So I rang him and said, “Look can I come back and work for you?” He said yeah so I went to his house and stole his tipper truck and parked it down there [points down the road]. It's still there and that was like four weeks ago. So that’s me getting revenge on Australians.

I’ll leave that part of the story out.
Fuck it, put it in. I don’t care.

Sam, 22, also originally from the UK

Hey Sam, what’s your most unfashionable opinion?
I have a prejudice against those who like mainstream music.

Why?
I think people just like it because it’s the main thing to do. They don’t really know what they like. It’s not their own thing.

You’re wearing a Guns N' Roses shirt. It's not like they're an obscure band.
The difference is that most people have heard about three of their songs. But I’ve been into them since day one. I’ve got every single piece of their music, got tracks on vinyl, like fucking everything.

So this is another way of saying that you think most people aren’t free-thinking individuals, yeah?
Yeah I think people just read magazines and click on the radio. They like what they hear and don’t really venture out. Just following what you hear and see, that’s about it. I’m particular when it comes to music I guess because I play music.

Julie, 23, originally from France

What’s your secret prejudice?
I don’t like old people. Old people are stupid

Why don’t you like old people?
It’s not that I don’t like them, as such. It’s just that they are very close-minded. All the time they say, “You need to find a boy, you need to find a job. When we were young we worked a lot. Now you young people have a really nice life.” They say their life was hard and shit and now young people are in paradise.

There has to be some truth to that though?
No, because I think life was better then, than now.

How do you come to that conclusion?
Because in France, the old people have money and I think when I am old, I don’t think I will have any money.

They probably have money because they have had all their lives to save it.
Before they were able to buy homes and now it's just so difficult. We do pay pensions now, but I think when I'm old it'll be harder because everyone's life expectancy will increase. We once lived to 80, now we can live to 100 and we won’t be able to afford to pay everyone’s pension. It makes us work longer too. We used to retire at 60 but now we have to work until 70.


Reece, 27, from North-West Sydney

What’s your most unfashionable opinion?
I don’t like rich people.

What’s the thinking behind this?
I’m a Marxist, so it goes hand in hand with the way that I see the world. Also where I see the main problems of the world coming from.

Do you think there are some cases where capitalism is a good thing?
No, I’m pretty much against the whole system.

I guess the main criticism against Marxism / Communism is that it’s never really been able to properly function in a society.
That’s one of the main things that people get wrong. They look at North Korea, Russia and China and they think that’s Marxism. I don’t think Communism can successfully operate on an isolated, country by country basis. It has to be a global revolution in order for it to work. But if you look at the 1917 Russian Revolution you can see a glimpse of what it would look like, before it was taken over and corrupted by the Stalinists.

Amy, 22, from Bankstown.

Hey Amy, what’s your most uncool opinion?
I think veganism should be the moral baseline for everyone.

Why?
Because most people already kind of believe in veganism. We all think that we shouldn’t harm others unnecessarily and we all believe that we should take care of animals. So we believe in the same thing.

What about plants?
Living sentient creatures, that’s the distinction. I’m not for plant rights because I don’t believe they suffer. I get that question a lot.

Can you understand why anyone would want to eat animals products?
The only logical thing—which is very rare for people to actually admit it—is they truly don’t care about anyone other than themselves. So the main reasons that people eat animal products boils down to four main things, taste, habit, tradition, and convenience. The difference between us vegans and everyone else is that our actions reflect our morals.

But people can still have a lot of empathy yet still eat animals.
It’s not that people don’t have empathy towards them. I just think we can’t dismiss that empathy by saying, “it’s food" or "we need to eat them for health reasons.”

Diana, 26. France

What’s your least fashionable opinion?
I have a problem with people who wear suits everyday.

What's wrong with wearing a sick suit?
I hate the oppression and the lack of freedom in business attire. I just don’t understand why you can’t look and feel like yourself when you go to work, whatever job you do.

So you think suits remove personality and freedom of expression?
Yeah. It's like trying to mould everyone into the same box so they look the same when difference is what makes the world rich and open-minded.

Do you think there may be a reason why wearing suits everyday has developed? I mean they can look pretty cool, better impressions can be created and you can look more classy.
Obviously you have to be presentable and clean. It’s common sense. But it’s all about extremes. I think it’s getting better anyway. I think in Australia it’s quite relaxed, but in France its totally opposite. You have to look this way if you work in a certain industry. You just won’t be accepted and you won't get a job if you don’t fit into this box.

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This article originally appeared on VICE AU.

I Love You, Violently Horny Drunk Woman

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Occasionally, things will leap out of the unknowable chaos of the world and have a profound effect on the way you live your life. A slight breeze can waft along at just the right time, at just the right temperature, and compel you to reconcile a long-standing beef with your mother. A dog on the bus can look at you with large, round eyes and suddenly you believe in soulmates. If you leave the city and look up at the night sky, an endless flurry of constellations will fill your eyes like those little spots you see when you get a head-rush, making you feel both deeply connected to the universe and entirely insignificant in context of its vastness. These moments of bliss offered up by chance are both fleeting and overwhelming.

Which is why we must treasure this video of a drunk woman in Ramsgate headbutting an advert.

Before we get to the main event, I must first draw your attention to several things taking place around it. Just like a roast dinner, it is necessary to take in the various vegetables and styles of potato around the meat in order to appreciate its beauty as a whole.

i) The additional yelling taking place behind the camera, which is largely indiscernible apart from the exclamations "fuck", "FUCK" and "AGGHHHH".

ii) The large group of people congregating across the road. Look how composed and nonplussed they are. Look how upright and steadily they are standing. Perhaps it's an optical illusion due to how completely fucking off it our star is, but they look unnervingly sober. What’s gone on that would cause 20 to 30 people on a night out to gather solemnly on the curb like the fire alarm just went off at work. None of these are questions to be answered, just points to bear in mind.

iii) The Merc parked the wrong way in a bus stop.

iv) Is that a yacht over there as well? Are there yachts in Ramsgate?

v) "Babe, I've pissed myself."

Great. Now we have those notes to refer to, let us consider, finally: the drunk woman in Ramsgate headbutting an advert. Here she is again:

The unbridled passion, the brute force, the poetry of it. "You fucking freak. I will fucking eat you alive," she says, performing a gesture with her arm that suggests she is physically pulling these sentences out of her mouth like a string of knotted flags. Fists clenched, spittle flying. Then, headbutting her own phone out of her own hand before confirming: "I will eat you a-fucking live, yeah? I don’t care who you are, I’ll FU-" *THWACK* "-CK you up."

There are three ways of interpreting what’s going on here. The first, I think, is that she and the man doing harmonised yelling in the background are having a fight but are both too drunk to see. So you’ve got our lady in patterned leggings body slamming head-first into an advert in the foreground, while a disembodied voice directs fury at a bin or something. This is what we call the "BBC Three comedy sketch version". The second is that this is one of several confrontations taking place, but still errs on the side of anger. This is what we call the cynical (and probably completely accurate) version. The third, which is the version to which I subscribe, is that this is an expression of the natural human emotion commonly known as: thirst.

Many studies have been undertaken on the subject of British Aggro and, specifically, its representation in viral videos, but it is my personal belief that is not what's going on here. Look at the way she squares up to the plastic, the fire in her eyes, and tell me this isn't flirting. This is lust in its purest form. This is me beholding yet another magazine spread of Timothée Chalamet. This is me scrolling through mouth-watering menus of faraway restaurants while I shovel a bland wrap into my mouth at work. This is me as I squat, blind drunk, in front of the oven and narrow my eyes at many rows of potato smileys as I wait for them to crisp. This is animalistic need, violent horniness, just a very aggressive coming on to a poster of a man who sort of looks like Jurassic Park-era Jeff Goldblum but probably isn’t (who is it? Someone who knows about adverts, please email me).

If you look close enough, you will find that everything here is brimming with positive energy. Firstly, there is the woman filming the video calling her "Babe" and announcing, in solidarity, "I've pissed myself" – which says to me, "We’re all in this together!" I like to think this event took place following a brief conference about the physique of the man in question and hopefully, like, not something morally upsetting happening after a night out in the former UKIP-dominated county of Thanet.

No: based on what information we have, let’s call this a message of joy communicated through non-traditional means. I choose to believe that this is someone so overwhelmed by love and appreciation for another person that there was no option but to smash her own phone into her own face and then ram her entire body into their likeness. When you think about it, it’s basically a DM slide. That thwack – the one that interrupts the core message of "I will fuck you up" – contains multitudes. If you’ve ever desperately loved someone from afar, that thwack is the sound of you being absolutely dismantled by nerves as you approach them for the first time, forget how to talk to people normally and just laugh really loudly at something they said that wasn’t a joke. That thwack is a burning desire for the unattainable, as you propel yourself full force towards an impossibility. Like the unrelenting bodying Ryan Gosling dishes out in the lift after planting one of the greatest all time snogs on Carey Mulligan in Drive. That thwack contains within it the duality of passion. It is both heartwarming tenderness and terrible violence, both a beginning and an end. It could plausibly be the sound of one bursting out of the womb, but also the last sound you will ever hear. It is the great Big Bang of the horn.

I salute it. And I love you, violently horny drunk woman. I love you.

@emmaggarland

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Even Celebrities Have Had Enough of Kanye's Shit

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This article originally appeared on VICE India.

The only person whose Twitter account might be more divisive than Donald Trump’s right now might be Kanye West's. Which is fitting since Ye seems to have gone HAM for Trump, signed MAGA hat and all.

West has published dozens of tweets on a number of topics, including his love of Trump. "You don't have to agree with Trump, but the mob can't make me not love him," he said. He also compared their dragon energy, which is Charlie Sheen levels of Bruh, wut?

Even as debates rage over his follower count in wake of these tweets, the only thing that matters is that Rihanna unfollowed him with no explanation.

Ice-T also tapped out, as did Teyana Taylor, Travis Scott, Cyhi The Prynce, Pusha T, 2 Chainz, Harry Styles, Kendrick Lamar, John Legend, and Chrissy Teigen.

Chance The Rapper tried to explain West’s politics, even as John Legend went deep with perhaps the longest and most educational subtweet.

Jaden Smith tweeted “false idols,” which is pretty much how we’re all feeling right now.

Then, the rest of twitter came out in full force with all the drags.

and maybe we’ll get a new Jordan Peele movie out of this.

Kim K, forever ride or die, had a lot to say, bandying about mental health casually, and put a word in Ye’s ear, which gave us the most Kanye tweet of all time.

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This article originally appeared on VICE IN.


Excellently Catered Sex Parties Are Wreaking Havoc on This Colorado Suburb

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During Wednesday's episode of Desus & Mero , the VICELAND hosts discussed a local news report about how residents of an upscale neighbourhood outside Denver, Colorado, are upset about a man's suburban sex parties. In fairness to the host, the catering at these fiestas seems on point. Just watch out for the ranch dip.

You can watch the latest episode of DESUS & MERO for free, online, right now. New episodes Monday to Thursday at 11PM on VICELAND.COM.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Parents Lost Their Shit When 'Hereditary' Trailer Played Before 'Peter Rabbit'

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A24's upcoming horror film Hereditary has already traumatized audiences at Sundance, creeped people out at SXSW, and been deemed "a new generation's The Exorcist." The film drops in June, but its deeply disturbing trailers, featuring dead birds, freaky ass dolls, and someone completely engulfed in flames, prove the thing is likely going to be one of the more terrifying movies of 2018—something a bunch of kids and their parents discovered accidentally at a screening of Peter Rabbit on Wednesday.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, a theater in Perth, Australia, devolved into complete pandemonium after a trailer full of families were treated to one of the film's horrifying trailers. Parents and kids hoping to catch a screening of the allergy-shaming bunny in Peter Rabbit, were given a taste of Hereditary's "pure emotional terrorism" before their feature presentation.

"It was dreadful. Very quickly you could tell this was not a kid's film. Parents were yelling at the projectionist to stop, covering their kids' eyes and ears," an unnamed parent told Australia's WAtoday. "Some parents fled the cinema with their kids in tow."

Eventually, the woman said, a staff member rushed in and called up to the projection room to get the guy to shut off the scenes of a kid banging his head bloody against a desk, a girl cutting the head off a dead bird, and ants swarming a sleeping body. She said that the theater offered up some free movie passes for the inconvenience, but the damage was already done.

"A lot of the kids were upset," the parent said. "And if you think back to your own childhood, you remember things that scared you when you saw them for the first time."

"Don't get me wrong, I understand mistakes happen," she added. "But surely there should be checks to make sure trailers like that don't get shown."

Needless to say, it doesn't seem like anyone in the theater that day will be using their free movie passes to see Hereditary when it debuts on June 8.

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Follow Lauren Messman on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

'Rick and Morty' Incest Porn Is Tearing the Show's Fans Apart

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In a dark corner of the internet, Rick and Morty isn’t just an irreverent animated send-up of Back to the Future. Here, in Twitter threads and Tumblr posts, the cartoon that over the past four years has inspired novelty fast-food sauce revivals and rabid devotion from fans also serves as a backdrop for thousands of pieces of incestuous art and prose. Known in its community as “C-137cest,” the art depicts Rick and Morty’s titular grandfather and grandson as they engage in all manner of forbidden love, from blowjobs to anal sex to leather and cum play.

The Adult Swim series, which follows aging scientist Rick Sanchez from Earth dimension C-137 in adventures across infinite universes, is more sexually charged than your average cartoon. In the very first episode, Morty daydreams about getting to second base with his crush in a surreal, math-filled void. By episode two, Morty and Rick are trapped in a fantasy BDSM sex dungeon ruled by a pro-incest version of Morty’s sister. A few episodes later, Morty buys a generously endowed sex robot and fucks it so much he fathers a child. Later, in season two, Rick reveals he’s as gifted sexually as he is intellectually when he out-fucks an entire planet of aliens who have assimilated into a Borg-like hive mind. By the end of the third season, there’s a club full of Morty strippers and a student version of Morty who wishes out loud that “incest porn had a more mainstream appeal... for a friend.”

Erotic fan fiction and shipping—the practice of supporting a relationship between fictional characters—are an inevitable byproduct of pop-culture franchises beloved by the internet. But the passion behind “RickMorty,” the name bestowed on this forbidden couple, is different because kinks are consistently validated by the show itself.

To understand why people love to imagine Rick and Morty fucking, it’s important to understand their relationship on the show. Rick is an all-powerful, misanthropic asshole who is often overbearing toward Morty, his sensitive and naïve sidekick. But there are moments where their relationship dynamic is reversed. Rick nearly sacrifices himself to save Morty in the season two premiere, “A Rickle in Time,” and he relies on Morty’s musical skills to save the planet from a deathly round of intergalactic American Idol in “Get Schwifty.” The power interplay between these two characters fits into a sub/dom archetype that C-137cest fans told me is crucial to comprehending their incestuous creations.

Futagogo*, who says they are twin sisters who write C-137cest fan fiction under the same online identity, wrote in an email that, “For all their contrasting qualities, the writers of the show [included] this undeniable link between them: Despite Rick’s seeming self-sufficiency/genius, Rick still needs Morty. This is, in part, explained in "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind" with a ‘brainwave cloaking’ element between Ricks and Mortys. It automatically makes a seasoned, fiercely independent genius like Rick at the absolute mercy of the powerless Morty. That power dynamic is very appealing for fan creators to explore and take to the next level.”

Rick and Morty’s most unique quality in comparison to other shows with big fan art communities is that there isn’t just one set of Rick and Morty. The show transverses multiple dimensions, each with its own dynamic duo, most of whom meet up in a spacebound metropolis called the Citadel of Ricks. Because there are infinite universes with infinite versions of Rick and Morty, there are possibly Ricks and Mortys out there who fuck even harder and weirder than the Rick and Morty we’re familiar with.

“The infinite universes are absolutely key to the RickMorty fandom,” Futagogo said. “Unlimited possible versions of these beloved characters conceivably exist, so this gives fan creators an endless sandbox in which to craft their own characters. [These fan-made Ricks and Mortys] can feel more valid than the average fan fiction since they could very well exist in the official Rick and Morty universe.”

Futagogo’s way of thinking is fueled in part by co-creator Justin Roiland, the 38-year-old who voices both Rick and Morty. He endorsed C-137cest’s reveries in a 2015 tweet. “In many realities, Morty and Rick ARE in a passionate healthy romantic relationship,” he suggested. “Maybe we'll do an episode about it.”

Co-creator Dan Harmon also made his feelings on C-137cest known during a 2017 interview with VICE. “I could never ever, as a bona fide, card-carrying nerd, pervert, and fantasy advocate want to see an internet where written words entertaining even the darkest of fantasies are somehow not allowed…” he said. “Why go down the path of making anybody so ashamed of their thoughts that they don’t express them?”

Composite by Lia Kantrowitz; art by r1ckcrte and Specs


With a storyline that lends itself particularly well to erotic fan art and acknowledgement from both co-creators, C-137cest artists have created a veritable Kama Sutra of graphic incestuous arrangements.

In one artwork (warning: links are NSFW), Morty tenderly gives Grandpa Rick some over-the-pants action, only to tie him up and drown him in cum in the next scene. In another work, Rick fucks and is fucked by versions of himself, his daughter, and his grandchildren from other dimensions in a mind-bending interdimensional orgy. Rick frequently gives into the temptation of Morticia, a version of Morty from the official Pocket Mortys video game who identifies as female. Another artist drew Morty punishing Pickle Rick by forcing him to deepthroat a penis the size of his entire vegetable body. Yet another drew them as characters from Blade Runner 2049, and another as Pennywise from IT. For their part, Futagogo wrote a novel-length fan fiction about the depraved sexual exploits of the rich and powerful Ricks and Mortys of the Citadel of Ricks. It’s one of the most extensive entries into RickMorty lore, and has inspired a subgenre of art depicting its characters. These tidbits are just a brief overview of the shameless creativity that thrives in C-137cest. Some accounts that share C-137cest have thousands of followers.

As popular as it is, there is a contingent of Tumblr and Twitter users who hate C-137cest and attack it at every opportunity. “Antis” barrage anyone who supports the ship with posts, comments, and direct messages deriding Rick and Morty incest porn as offensive. A relatively tame anti post will read something like, “Still shipping incest and pedophilic ships in 2018? God, you’re pathetic.” Multiple shippers I spoke to reported they or their friends received death threats and calls for them to kill themselves or be raped.

An anti named Sarah* said in an email that the crusade against C-137cest could be described as a “war.”

“The antis believe that it's disgusting for one to pour such heart and soul into anything so morally wrong,” said Sarah, who claims she put her Rick and Morty fan blog on hiatus due to exhaustion from incest-related skirmishes. “Even if the relationship is fictional, it is a big cesspool of incest and pedophilia. Which is why it brings up so much conflict. It's a morality thing.”

Antis can be as active in Tumblr’s Rick and Morty incest porn tags as the people who love and make the content. They argue that C-137cest isn’t just in bad taste, but normalizes child abuse.

"To kids, the message of RickMorty is that topics such as pedophilia are just for fun, and are perfectly acceptable to talk about with adults over the internet," adds Z*, who has posted about the danger of problematic ships, but doesn't necessarily identify as an anti. They point to sexual abuse in the science fiction fandom community, dating back to writer Walter H. Breen's conviction for child molestation in 1954, as an insidious precedent for the danger of erotic fan art. The RickMorty shippers I spoke to denied seeing evidence of grooming or the presence of actual pedophiles. "For me, and for most others, it's the framing that's troubling," Z adds. "These relationships are portrayed as sexy and star-crossed. I'm not against these ships because they're vulgar. I'm against them because they romanticize something that happens in real life far too often."

Others argue that C-137cest is triggering to survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA). In response, numerous RickMorty shippers claim in blog posts and their Tumblr bios to be CSA survivors themselves. I spoke to one who goes by the name Havok. “There is no use explaining to antis why you ship something they deem problematic or wrong,” she said in an email. “They will hunt you down in packs and harass you to the point that you are forced to deactivate your account.”

Havok told VICE that she and her sister were sexually abused for more than a year when she was nine. Her friends who share a passion for C-137cest have created a space where she feels safe talking about her history. “We're all very welcoming and protective of each other,” she said. “We respect each other and are like a family, sharing jokes, cares, worries, and pain. I couldn't ask for a better community to be a part of.”

Composite by Lia Kantrowitz; art by GhostyGoo-Girl, Wubba Lubba Weirdness, and Specs

Kat, a 22-year-old artist from the Midwest, told VICE she also uses incestual ships like C-137cest to heal from sexual abuse she suffered as a child. “For me personally, Morty is a character I heavily project myself onto,” she said in a phone call. She’s been interested in problematic ships since the age of 12, starting with the brothers from Naruto, Satsuke and Itachi. “My first reaction was, ‘Oh my God! They are brothers.’ I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she said. Soon she began to think of it as just a cartoon, separate from the morality by which she judged behaviour in everyday life.

Her new online friends helped her to accept herself. “I knew soon after what happened to me that it was not OK—it was disgusting, and if anybody knew about it, I would be considered the most disgusting creature on the planet,” Kat said. “I remember feeling so alone, and not knowing where to turn. But when I saw that people were out there shipping cartoon characters that would otherwise be considered disgusting relationships, I realized not everybody was going to hate me. It felt really good knowing that I could put myself in the shoes of these cartoon characters and there would be somebody out there giving me a thumbs up! It felt good to know I wasn’t a monster.” Kat told me that she has been in a healthy relationship for four years, and she credits the support she received from Tumblr communities like C-137cest.

But despite the therapeutic claims of C-137cest users like Kat and Havok, professionals caution CSA survivors who create or engage with this type of content. Dr. Kathleen M. Chard, PhD, the Director of the Trauma Recovery Center at the Cincinnati VA Medical Center and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Cincinnati, told me, “It’s common for individuals who have gone through a traumatic event to try to make sense of it, and art would certainly be a way to make sense of it.” She said in that way, communities like C-137cest “can be somewhat healing. But the best-case scenario is for survivors to use this as a way to develop a strength and a coping skill so that they could do the next step in therapy that would allow them to have a healthy relationship.”

Z added, "I really do get the desire to find relief wherever possible. That doesn't make any of it less harmful, though! There are better coping mechanisms that won't place minors at risk, and won't endanger other survivors in fandom spaces."

Antis also argue that Rick and Morty incest porn is illegal. It's a complicated question; American lawmakers have been arguing about whether virtual or simulated child pornography is protected by the First Amendment for the past 20 years. According to criminal defense lawyer and chairman of porn lobby The Free Speech Coalition Jeffrey Douglas, C-137cest is regulated as virtual or simulated child porn, which he had firsthand experience debating as a respondent in the landmark case Ashcroft vs Free Speech Coalition, which walked back over-vague language in The Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996.

In Douglas’s eyes, the law is clear: C-137cest porn is legal.

“If no human minor was recorded in the course of the creation, it is outside the scope of the child pornography laws,” Douglas said over the phone.

However, virtual child porn can still be prosecuted under obscenity law, according to Patrick A. Trueman, the CEO of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). Under George H.W. Bush, Trueman was also the chief of the Department of Justice's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section. He told VICE over the phone that obscenity cases have been rare since Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder shut down a George W. Bush-era Obscenity Prosecution Task Force. "It's not that these cases can't be won," Trueman said, pointing to USA vs Ira Isaacson, the sole obscenity trial to end in a conviction under Holder. "The Obama administration refused to initiate any obscenity prosecutions."

Since the law has left artwork like C-137cest alone in recent history, their biggest roadblocks come from the platforms they use to share their work. Tumblr, which hosts thousands of RickMorty shippers, has been permanently banning a portion of the blogs that share C-137cest. Even if the content is legal, Tumblr reserves the right to ban it on its own platform. A slew of sites were deactivated at the tail end of 2017, including Futagogo’s.

The twins first clashed with Tumblr back in September 2017. They said six of their websites, one of which contained no C-137cest, were removed in the span of two weeks. Five of the sites were dedicated to romantic illustrations and text depicting Rick and Morty doing everything from spooning to sucking each other off. The sixth was a safe-for-work site designed to let their friends know how to stay in touch. (We reached out to confirm this with Tumblr, and will update if we hear back.)

After several attempts to appeal the decision online, one of the sisters said she visited the physical location of a Tumblr help center in Virginia, not far from where she lives. She quickly learned that the centers aren’t equipped to deal with in-person complaints. She went there twice and was turned away both times. Eventually, a representative of Oath Security, which enforces community guidelines for Tumblr’s parent company, responded to explain their policy.

GhostyGoo-Girl

Futagogo recorded a 25-minute phone call in which the representative said, "You can't come back to Tumblr under any name." In Tumblr’s eyes, Futagogo’s blogs violated their policy against posting “anything relating to minors that is sexually suggestive or violent.” He compared the termination of their accounts to a convenience store banning a shoplifter.

I reached out to Tumblr to clarify its position. A spokeswoman told me, “We have a zero-tolerance policy for inappropriate content involving minors, which is clearly outlined in our Community Guidelines and applicable to both human depiction and animation.”

Futagogo’s erotic content was always labeled with a disclaimer stating that its version of Morty was over the age of consent. The spokeswoman said this sort of disclaimer cannot override Tumblr’s broader policy. “We have a skilled trust and safety team of human moderators that review each case, and the notification sent to users explains that terminated accounts are not eligible for an appeal,” she said.

C-137cest shippers frequently use disclaimers on their work signaling that their version of the characters are over 18. Futagogo was surprised by Tumblr’s conservative interpretation of the rules that negated this fact. “This stance really brings into question what art is, who judges what it is, and what an artist's intention is when drawing something,” they said in an email. “To deny that an artist can age up and down, switch genders, and add new physical traits to an existing character is to deny the very purpose of fanart. It denies the artist a right to their own creative license.”

While the landscape for niche kinks like C-137cest appears to be shrinking, Douglas thinks users like Futagogo will remain safe from legal action for the foreseeable future. “I don’t think the law will change,” he said. “There could be litigation out there, but it hasn’t gotten up to a level that there’s an opportunity for fundamental change.”

However, a shift in the US government's approach could be on the horizon. President Trump pledged to clamp down on obscenity during his campaign, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions publicly declared he would be willing to prosecute porn last year. Utah, Florida, and Kansas have declared pornography the cause of a "public health crisis," a decision activists like social psychologist Justin Lehmiller, PhD have criticized. Trueman is lobbying Sessions directly to bring obscenity prosecution to the federal level.

"I assembled a meeting last August with the Attorney General to talk about the need to prosecute obscenity, enforce the laws, because I believe that the nation is now undergoing a public health crisis caused by the widespread consumption of pornography," Trueman told VICE. "Now I've asked for a second meeting, and I'm bringing a team in to meet with him again."

GhostyGoo-Girl

With vitriol from antis, deplatforming from online institutions, and the legal status of C-137cest subject to change at a moment's notice, people who love Rick and Morty incest porn are retreating into darkness. Since they were perma-banned from Tumblr, the Futagogo sisters created a private chat community for like-minded shippers on Discord, and devoted their creative juices to publishing a zine with original work from C-137cest artists. Many of the artists who appear in the zine have also been banned from Tumblr. By forcing RickMorty shippers into a secluded bubble, the internet is becoming exactly the kind of place Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon fears.

“I don’t want to live in a universe where slash fiction of any kind is illegal,” Harmon elaborated on his thoughts about C-137cest. “I think it’s really important that people who have taboo thoughts are able to express them in a way that doesn’t hurt anybody else. But I think it’s equally important that people who are disgusted by those thoughts can say that they’re disgusting. I hope that nobody ever gains so much more power over the other that taboo thoughts are forced upon people or that they’re policed by roving drones that zap you for thinking a certain thought... Anything close to kink-shaming, no matter how taboo, I can’t abide.”

*EDITOR'S NOTE: Due to the incendiary nature of C-137cest, RickMorty shippers fear reprisal for their kink. Because of this, we're using their usernames or aliases.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

A Data Dominatrix Showed Us How Our Online Privacy Is Violated

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People all over the world have come to data dominatrix Mistress Harley with one wish: to be her online slave.

Mistress Harley, who holds a master’s in library science and information technology and worked for many years in the tech industry, takes over her servants’ entire tech-based life in order to scratch whatever kinky itch they have—humiliation, exposition, crossdressing, financial domination. This includes but not is limited to: accessing their social media, banking, email, and porn history.

For those without the desire to be exposed online, VICE reached out to Mistress Harley to ask for her insight into how our privacy can be easily violated, and what we can do to protect our online lives. She suggested ways to safeguard your data from sources more sinister than any dungeon dominatrix.

VICE: Say I was coming to you for your services. What kind of preliminary questions would you have? How do you set up boundaries with your clients?
Mistress Harley: If you were going to be one of my submissives you would approach me and say, ‘Mistress Harley, I’m really interested in you controlling my data, my computer, or my phone,’ and we would have a preliminary discussion about what your limits are. Just like any BDSM play, you can’t just choke someone to death, you have to talk to people about what they are looking for.

We would talk about your specific fetishes—what you want to get out of this, and what boundaries you’d like to keep. For example, a lot of people don’t want to be exposed to their friends or family members. Some people actually request that, but that’s specific to a certain kind of fetish. In controlling your technology I can force you—I’m using air quotes here—to do things. So, if you’re really into crossdressing, I can force you to only use your computer after you have sent me photos of you in reverse gender wear.

Once I’m inside someone’s computer, immediately the first thing I do is get their saved passwords on their browsers. Almost everyone saves their passwords. ‘Do you want Chrome or Firefox to remember your Facebook password so you don’t have to do this again?’ If you say yes, then you have now compromised your safety, and so it’s really easy for me. And then from there it’s a simple matter of getting inside your banking, your tax filing, resumes, Linkedin.

Can you tell me a bit about some of your current slaves? What are some kinds of domination are you doing now?
Many of my current slaves are under some form of tech control. Some have cameras in their homes so I can monitor them 24/7, others have my parental control app installed on their phones so i can track them via GPS and monitor their app usage, search history and social media on their phones. Other guys have given me total bank account access so I can control their finances.

Because our lives are so online, it’s almost like you have unprecedented access to work with people’s fetishes from every angle.
I agree. Imagine if you met a dominatrix in a dungeon, and you invited her to come to your office and look through all your files. Our lives are digitized now, people file their taxes online, you can really develop an online life and profile on someone.

Online security is on people’s minds today. If someone was, say, to take the password of their browser, how easy is it to get someone’s password for their social media accounts [from there]?
I mean, it’s really easy. Let’s say you’re not logged onto Facebook when I get on your computer. First I check your saved passwords. If it’s not in your saved passwords, I can find a loophole in your email, you probably had to have reset your password at least once or twice. Then if I can find out what email is associated with your Facebook it’s a one-two step. Also there are password retrieval tools, if you haven't saved your password the next time you login, I will get it.

When the Facebook data breach happened, were you concerned about the way that you store your information online? Are these kinds of incidents concerning for you?
You know, it didn’t concern me as much as make me double check all of my data. What I did do—of course I have a personal account that’s private—immediately I removed all of the personally identifying information from that. Quite frankly, Facebook doesn't need to know. Either you know where I went to college or you don’t care where we went to college because we get drunk together. You either know where I went to high school or you dont give a fuck where I went to high school because we're all adults now.

When these sites are asking for information, also stop and ask why. I also make email addresses that are completely unconnected to my personal life, something like abc@gmail.com, and when I want to login to a stupid app or try a new service, [I] sign up with such an anonymized profile that even if there’s a data breach they can't find [my] information they can’t connect it back to [me].

When you work with your clients, what are some of the stupid things that people keep doing over and over?
Saving passwords in the browser. 100 percent. I think the other option is not having any secrets, if you’re totally exposed and you’re comfortable with that then you don’t have anything to hide.

Do you see the new ways that we interact with technology affecting your work?
You know, that’s such an interesting question and something that I think a lot about because we do live in a rapidly evolving world. To me, I do think people have always gone to the internet for access to niche communities that they don’t have access to in real life, and I’m thinking specifically of the fetish community.

I think what I’m noticing is a lot of the guys that serve me, they’re kind of socially isolated—they don't have a lot of in-person friends. They are looking for ways to express their lifestyle that are comfortable for them and not alienating. It’s becoming increasingly normalized for people to feel like their real lives are online. That's such a shift away from our parents—Gen X and the Baby Boomers. But that allows for such a compromised position. Sex workers have experienced this with the passage of things like FOSTA-SESTA [a recently passed law that implicates online publishers on what content is being posted on their sites. The bill was intended to crack-down on sex trafficking but has lead to restrictions on consensual sex work].

I don’t engage in anything close to prostitution, I’m not even in the same room as people, but a lot of the avenues where these online communities meet are being shut down. So there’s a real vulnerability where people take comfort in the anonymity [online] but they don't realize how vulnerable those connections are, both in government oversight and to hackers, and information breaches.

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America's New Lynching Memorial Is Gut-Wrenching, Gruesome, and Beautiful

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I didn’t think a memorial about the horror of lynching could be beautiful. But that’s just what the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is.

Though I’m not sure it was done purposefully, it also gave off the sweet smell of tobacco, an aroma men who grew up in the South like I did can’t forget. The memorial panels that recount the more than 4,400 documented lynchings even evoke the color of tobacco going through its curing phase. It reminded me of the days I spent when I was a teenager picking leaves from the plant in mile-long rows for hours on end in a South Carolina heat that often hit triple digits.

My mother and father and aunts and uncles picked tobacco and cotton and other crops too—not as one in a series of summer jobs like me and my brothers and sisters did, but to fend off starvation and because just about every other option had been closed off to them. They were forced to be in fields my grandfather worked as a sharecropper instead of sitting in a desk at school until some of them headed north as part of a Great Migration that saw several million black people flee the South in the early and mid-20th century. It was the persistence of lynchings turned black people into refugees in their own country.

Before that, generations of my family were enslaved—we were able to track it on my mother’s side but not my father’s, who was an only child whose mother died during childbirth—in a system unlike any other in world history, one that began as a kind of indentured servitude but morphed into one based on the darkness of one’s skin. Those fields, those smells, they helped shape me, helped shape all of us.

That’s what I was thinking as I toured the memorial, and later the Legacy Museum, in downtown Montgomery, both of them the creation of Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative. The smell made me flash back. The sight of documented lynchings in areas near where I grew up initially made me angry, even though I began studying the issue years ago. Samuel Gaillard and George McFadden and Samuel Turner were lynched in Williamsburg, the county in South Carolina where my mother at the age of 13 was forced to marry a man two decades her senior. Bruce Tisdale was lynched in Georgetown, where I got married, where my wife’s family still lives.

“I think we should feel shattered and haunted by this history,” Stevenson said at a press conference after the tour.

I know I do.

There were other stories throughout the region, including one about a woman named Elizabeth Lawrence being lynched in 1933 Birmingham after reprimanding white children who had thrown rocks at her. Laura Wood was lynched in 1930 North Carolina after being accused of stealing a ham. Anthony Crawford was lynched in South Carolina two years before my father was born for “rejecting a white merchant’s bid for cottonseed.”

Thomas Miles allegedly wrote a note to a white woman in Shreveport, Louisiana. General Lee knocked on a white woman’s front door. A black construction worker committed the racial sin of demanding a white coworker return his shovel. Jesse Thornton didn’t address a white police officer with the title “mister.” Ernest McGowan had the audacity to report a group of white men who had attacked him. Robert Mallard dared to vote in 1948 Georgia. Sometimes the mobs attacked entire communities of black people because they had grown successful. Sometimes they paraded a bullet-riddled corpse in front of black homes as a warning.

Most such killings happened in the South, but hundreds were documented in the North. They were the worst, most effective kind of terror, often done in broad daylight and in the presence of sometimes thousands of white people—men, women, children, who looked on as Mary Turner and others were burned alive. Turner’s eight-month-old fetus was cut from her belly and stomped on as her lifeless body was hanging upside down. In Texas, two black men were burned to death and the female members of their family were gang-raped. The murders were arbitrary and backed by the force of law and institutions at all levels of government. Law enforcement officials often participated or looked the other way. If you were black, your guilt depended solely upon the discretion of white people, no matter your actual innocence. A black person’s greatest sin, aside from being a black man accused of having a relationship with a white woman, was daring to point out crimes for which whites were complicit.



This is the history of America too few know or want to acknowledge. It is connected to Jim Crow laws that accompanied it and a mass incarceration largely built upon black bodies that would follow it. Lynchings were a direct outgrowth of a slavery too many continue wanting to pretend didn’t shape this country in horrific ways. It’s why the first exhibit visitors will see in the memorial is a gut-wrenching sculpture of enslaved Africans—including of an anguished mother holding a child while reaching for a husband—each of them wearing chains and shackles and little else. It’s ugly, hard to look at, the despair on their faces inescapable, including a woman on her knees. It’s the most graphic portion of the memorial, which is followed by a serene pathway and greenery that lead to the panels engraved with names such as Charles Shipman, lynched in 1918 in Bend County, Texas, for “arguing with the white owner of the plantation where he lived and worked.”

And yet a memorial that documents all of that ugliness finds a way to be beautiful. I can’t fully explain why. Maybe it’s the wall in the middle of the memorial with its constant, gentle waterfall that guided me to a sober reflection, not an embittered reaction. It didn’t make me forget what I had seen, what I had just learned. But that wall, the soothing sound of the water, helped calm my soul. It made it easier for me to digest the sculpture of a series of young black men with their arms raised high, knowing they are perceived guilty until proven innocent, and sometimes not even then.

Maybe that’s the genius of the museum’s design. It neither shies away from nor revels in the horrors it asks you to contemplate. It makes clear that black people were deemed by the Supreme Court as something less than human, that slave traders “stored” black people among hogs, that lynchers thought black life was worth less than a ham or a shovel or an un-uttered “mister.” It grabs you by the throat but makes sure not to choke you. It confronts without condemning. It provides hope through the sculptures, and footprints, of brave women in Montgomery who were the catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement. They overcame and so can we.

A quote from Maya Angelou on the side of the museum, a few blocks away and connected to EJI’s main building, sums it up best: “History, despite its wrenching pain cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

As Stevenson said, the goal of the memorial is to begin a truth and reconciliation process—but that truth comes before reconciliation.

Before I walked through the memorial, I wondered if that was possible, especially during an age in which white supremacists feel emboldened. I wondered if I would walk in and anger would accompany me back out into the world without realizing the anger I felt was an unacknowledged anger I had unwittingly brought with me. I had every—have every right—to that anger. We all should be angry that that level of evil existed, was widespread and went unchallenged for far too long.

“I think it’s important that we acknowledge when we don’t do what we are supposed to do,” Stevenson said about the need to grapple with that past. That past has bled into our present in the form of mass incarceration, police brutality, a rebirth of open bigotry, and protest marches against white supremacists that have ended in death and heartache.

“We want everyone to understand this history,” he said. “There is a better America still waiting. There is a more just America that’s still waiting.”

How long it waits is up to us.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

#TBT: How a Philly Cheesesteak Destroyed America

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Welcome to POLI-TBT-ICS, a recurring column where we will take a look back at the weird political moments of our past that are still relevant to the present day.

In 2003, Cheese Whiz broke America.

When John Kerry came to Philadelphia that August, there was a lot at stake. The public was still riding high on post–9/11 war fever, and the United States was five months into what would become a 15-year project of shredding Iraq. The Bush administration was full of corruption and ineptitude—earlier that year, George W. Bush appointed the comically unqualified Michael D. Brown to lead FEMA, where he would, in due time, help grind New Orleans into the mud. Meanwhile, fat and drunk on a deregulated financial sector, the country was a few years away from one of the biggest economic crises in its history.

Despite all that, Bush, it was thought, was a shoo-in for re-election. By that time, it was already clear that the 2004 election wouldn’t be a substantive one. It would be an election about brands. That wasn’t new, of course, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last time. What was remarkable about 2004 was the way the media embraced Bush’s frame for the election, his narrative assumptions, even when they didn’t really like him. It’s a useful reference point when considering the 2016 presidential election, which featured yet another matchup between an out-of-touch northeastern senator and an opponent whose sole consistent policy position was that he wanted to make America’s enemies experience pain.

The main contention of Bush’s 2004 campaign, his frame, was that Democrats were kinda pussies and kinda gay. They were pussies because they didn’t love war enough, even though most Democratic legislators had voted for both of the wars. They were kinda gay because Bush had taken up the mantle for “traditional marriage” to great effect, and also because they were effete, fruity, Birkenstock-wearing nerds, as they were conventionally described on talk radio. They had gone to Oberlin and probably experimented while they were there. They were prissy and weak-wristed and didn’t know how to wave the flag.

Bush, on the other hand, the scion of America’s most successful political dynasty, a man cosseted his entire life by an almost inconceivable level of privilege and wealth, was a man’s man. You knew this because occasionally he would return to his adopted home state of Texas and cut down trees with a chainsaw. That image had been carefully crafted over many years—W., as the political journalist Wayne Slater once said, “always liked to picture himself as the Bush with a bass boat and not the Bush with a sailboat.”

Democrats, being Democrats, attempted to outflank these perceptions by leaning into them very hard. They promoted figures like Wesley Clark, a retired general, to rebut the idea that they were weak, only to look desperate when it turned out Clark didn’t seem to have any kind of meaningful ideas. Then there was the handsome, charismatic and heterosexual John Edwards, who it turned out loved women who weren't his wife a little too much. Also running were Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman, and Howard Dean, who ran a relatively substantive campaign that came to an effective end when he famously made a mildly strange noise on stage.

Then there was John Kerry, whose apparent strength was that he was a decorated war veteran. He had volunteered for service in Vietnam at the same time Bush had dodged the draft, and then came home and opposed the war. That sounded promising. But he was also from Massachusetts, which at the time, thanks to its legalization of same-sex marriage, was America’s gayest state. He spoke French. He had gone to Harvard. He had a stentorian, upper-class voice. And his wife was rich. This was a year in which political consultants were obsessed with the votes and orientation of two classes of people they called “NASCAR dads” and “security moms.”

And then, in August, the Incident happened.

“If Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential aspirations melt like a dollop of Cheez Whiz in the sun, the trouble may well be traced to an incident in South Philadelphia on Monday,” wrote Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. Kerry had gone to Pat’s, a Philly mainstay, and asked for Swiss cheese on his cheesesteak, instead of the Whiz or the American or provolone usually consumed. Then it got worse: “If that weren't bad enough, the candidate asked photographers not to take his picture while he ate the sandwich; shutters clicked anyway, and Kerry was caught nibbling daintily at his sandwich, another serious faux pas,” Milbank wrote.

The picture spread widely on the early internet. Milbank interviewed the Philadelphia Inquirer’s food critic, Craig LaBan, who called the act of requesting Swiss cheese evidence of “an alternative lifestyle.” In reference to what Milbank calls Kerry’s “dainty bites,” LaBan offers advice on the manly way to eat a bad sandwich. “Obviously, Kerry's a high-class candidate, and he misread the etiquette. Throwing fistfuls of steak into the gaping maw, fingers dripping—that's the proper way."



The story originated with the Inquirer, who printed it as a fun local item. But Milbank helped boost it to national prominence. In doing so, he participated in a very old pundit game, popular among the Millbanks of the world. They seize onto a “gaffe”—usually something that no real person could possibly care about it, or at least shouldn't—and publicize it on the grounds that while it isn’t very important but that it could be important to somebody.

But when you reduce yourself to making people’s reactions to meaningless events the story, you’ve created a system that’s easy for bad actors to game. In 2004, conservative media—Fox News, talk radio, and blogs—were flexing their muscles, demonstrating their ability to manufacture and amplify narratives, and the press embraced that narrative as one side of “the story.”

That’s the truck that hit Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. Conservatives kept talking amongst themselves about Clinton’s email server—a minor scandal at best—and that kept the media talking about what conservatives were talking about, which incentivized the conservative media to push harder, and it became a feedback loop. By October, it was the dominant story about Clinton, shoving other items out of the news. At the Trump rallies that I attended, people would just shout the word “emails.” Just “emails.”

The “emails” of 2004 was the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, which spread lies about Kerry’s military record on behalf of the Bush campaign, and the media covered that “controversy” in a similar way. But Cheez Whiz persisted—it became, in due course, a shorthand for the conservative narrative that Kerry was too limp-wristed to be president, too sissified to oversee the continuing dismantling of the Middle East. When listing other complaints, commenters would sprinkle it in. Remember the cheesesteak?

A year later, everything had gone to shit. Kerry was the nominee, and his greatest biographical strength had been made a weakness. In early life, he had been most proud of his opposition to the Vietnam war—now, boxed in by war fever, he ran on his pride at having merc’ed a lot of Vietcong with heavy machine guns. Yet the narrative—originating with the White House, tolerated by the media—was that he was a coward and a liar, and Bush, the draft-dodger, a warrior and hero.

The image of the cheesesteak kept popping up: not just a coward, an effete coward. When Bush campaigned in Pennsylvania during the general election, he made sure to tell reporters that “I like my cheesesteaks 'Whiz wit,'” referencing to a local neologism he had probably been alerted to by an aide. A few days later, an enterprising reporter from a local paper figured out the Bush campaign had actually ordered their cheesesteaks with American.

The powerful and immense stupidity of the 2004 presidential election has started to fade from the collective memory, which is a kind of blessing—except that we’re forgetting what led us to the current moment. Matthew Dowd, for example, the chief strategist of the Bush campaign that year, has reinvented himself as a mournful, saintly independent, calling out the crassness and degeneracy of contemporary politics. But his name is fairly prominent in the long list of people who got us stuck in the septic tank. The Bush administration and the conservative media expended extraordinary effort to bully domestic critics while much of the media retired from its responsibilities in separating truth from fact, and meaning from bullshit.

On election day Kerry lost, of course, but he didn’t lose Pennsylvania—he won the state by two points, after winning it by a comfortable margin in the primary. There’s no evidence that anyone in Philadelphia ultimately cared about the long-faced man’s consumption of bad cheese. All Milbank had done was birth a meme, a particularly damaging one, which proved useful to bad and dishonest people. The moment that picture captures—the Senator at pains to shovel the sandwich in his mouth, en route to electoral humiliation—is timeless. We live there now.

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The Single Stupid Gunshot That Got Me 27 Years in Prison

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This article was published in collaboration with the Marshall Project.

Soon, I will walk out of prison for the first time in 27 years. I’ve been preparing for this day for so long, I know exactly how it'll go: My wife will pick me up at the gates of Sing Sing, and we’ll drive over to Hudson Link, the prison college program that helped me earn my bachelor’s degree. They have a computer and a suit waiting for me. Then we’ll drive over to the DMV; I’ve been studying for my written driver’s test. I hear everything takes a long time at the DMV, but I’m hoping we’ll be done in time to pick up my son from school.

All the while, I’ll also be thinking about Tremain Hall. And about the boy I was decades ago before I came to prison.



I was 14 years old when my parents divorced. My father and I moved from our middle-class neighborhood in Laurelton, Queens, to an urban block in Jamaica, Queens. It was a community wrought with the typical symbols of urban ghettos: sneakers strung on telephone lines, drug paraphernalia-littered streets, and barely kept apartment buildings.

People earned what they could, how they could. If you weren’t lucky enough to secure a nine-to-five job, and at times even if you were, you had to find a hustle to make ends meet. Whether it was selling drugs, boosting cars, or robbing neighbors, both young and old were implicated in the struggle.

For naïve kids, the hustle was stimulating, invigorating, even exciting. Peer praise compounded the euphoric adrenaline rush that accompanied the risk, entrenching us deeper every day. I quickly assimilated into this new world where kids with empty pockets and hard eyes could afford the latest fashions and attract the most beautiful girls.

But within just two years, the lifestyle caught up with me. As I sat at the intersection of 150th Street and 89th Avenue with a few friends, a motorcycle turned the corner and sped in our direction. The passenger pulled out a gun and opened fire.

I woke up in the hospital with tubes plugged into seemingly every hole in my body; I had been shot four times. My father stood over me, his typically stern demeanor softened by emotion I had never seen before. Wiping away tears, he asked me what happened. I tried to muster the words to explain it, but there wasn’t much to say. He always warned me about hanging out in that part of town, but I didn’t listen and there was no excuse. So instead, I jumped to apologizing and promising that we wouldn’t be here again.

My father nodded. He put his head in his hands and mumbled, “Why is this happening to me?” But I was confused. Nothing happened to you, Dad. It happened to me, I thought. It would be a long time before I could understand what he felt—a pain that comes from comforting someone you love so deeply that you feel their pain viscerally inside your own frame, blurring the corporal boundaries that separate you. It’s a pain that comes from the realization that you failed to protect someone you swore you would—perhaps foolishly thought you could. It was the pain of a father who nearly lost his son.

Two weeks later, I was released from the hospital. My wounds had started to heal, but the trauma was still fresh. I had a persistent fear of death, paranoid everywhere I went and skeptical of everyone I met. Because my assailant had no name, face, or reason, he had every name, every face, and every reason. Not to mention, it was 1990 and the crack era had brought the deadliest year in New York City’s history. Murders hit a record high of 2,245, nearly three times the number that caused Chicago to lead the nation in murders in 2016.

Over time, my anxiety became overwhelming. I never wanted to be caught that open and unguarded again. I was not going to be a tally mark for that statistic.

So, I bought a gun.

The minute I held it in my hand, I felt empowered. For the first time, I thought I could guarantee my own safety. I had no intention of firing it—I knew that its mere presence, reinforced by my hard exterior, created a threat that no one would test. I wouldn’t be a victim again.

Later that year, on a crisp Christmas night, I headed to the movies with friends. About 15 minutes in, another group of teenagers walked in noisily. Others in the theater began shouting at them to quiet down. My friends joined in, and quickly we started exchanging offenses. The boys lunged toward us. One of them drew his gun and fired in the dark, crowded theater.

In a matter of seconds, more than two dozen shots rang out in both directions. And in that moment, time froze. The promise I made to my father to stay out of trouble competed with the promise I made to my boys to defend our respect. So, as smoke filled the room and the rapid succession of loud pops came to a deafening silence, I blindly fired once.

I crawled out of the theater and rushed home. I turned on the news to see if there was coverage. Four bystanders were injured and one of them was in critical condition. I pleaded to him, child to child, “Please don’t die. Please don’t die.”

Tremain Hall died in the next few hours. My heart throbbed, my stomach sank, and my mind raced as I wondered whether it was my shot that had taken his life. How could I live with myself if I had killed someone?

Two days later, I was arrested. According to the prosecutor, it was my shot. I was convicted and sentenced to 27 years to life in prison. After more than 27 years and dozens of understandably unanswered apology letters, I still sit in my cell thinking about Tremain and that one fatal shot—the dreadful, inexcusable, and irreversible action of my 17-year-old self.

Now I wake up at 6:15 AM every day to a quiet cell block. On my way to exercise, I pass a television in the common area airing the news. The other day, five gang members were arrested for conspiracy to commit murder. One of them was just 17 years old.

I looked at him intently, trying to imagine his state of mind: Is it chaotic? Is he fearful? Does he understand? I know that stage very well. He wants to believe a jury will find him innocent, but he resigns himself to hoping that his sentence will be a short one. I know his fate better than he does. He’ll probably be convicted, sentenced, and do life next to me. Then, a generation later, he will sit in front of the parole board to re-live the anxiety of sentencing.


It was recently my turn to be sentenced again; would it be parole or two more years? Leading up to my parole hearing, the men around me built up my hope for freedom, selfishly protecting their own. I was their champion. The one who had done everything right, as they say, and traded the hustle of the yard for homework in the school building. I took a risk in shedding the hard exterior prison culture encourages for something more human. If I couldn’t get free, how could they?

I brought the parole board my institutional file with my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, program certificates, employment records, community service acknowledgments, and letters of recommendation. They placed it right next to my 27-year-old criminal file, soberly reminding me of who I was: the boy who killed Tremain Hall. So, the question was: How do my accomplishments stack up against the fact that I had taken a life?

Apparently, they didn’t. I was denied parole the first time I sat in front of the Board.

Everyone was shocked. Many men around the facility were disheartened, and others angry, thinking about their own situations and how they’d fare. Officers were sympathetic. But me, I was defeated. I laid in bed and dreaded explaining the decision to my family. In the end, I found myself asking: What else could I have done?

I gave it some thought over the next day, and I knew I had earned my freedom. I started working on my appeal and filed two months later. Over the next eight months, I’d sit in front of the parole board another five times as they continued to measure the failures of my 17-year-old self against the successes of my 45-year-old self.

Finally, on April 16, I got my new birth certificate, the letter granting my parole. With my new lease on life, I still remember the one I took.

While I know I earned my freedom, I may be eternally undeserving of forgiveness. It’s something I continue to work toward without expectations. It’s how I live with myself.

Lawrence Bartley is currently incarcerated at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York. He is serving a 27-year-to-life sentence for second degree murder and other charges stemming from the incident he describes, and was granted parole in April 2018. As a member of Voices From Within, he works on various anti-gun violence initiatives. Lawrence also volunteers with the Corrections Accountability Project at the Urban Justice Center on issues related to the commercialization of justice. Lawrence can be reached at lawrencebartley210@gmail.com.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.


'RuPaul's Drag Race' Recap: It's Never Easy to be a Drag Queen

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There have been many moments of tears on the runway during RuPaul’s Drag Race. The most famous are probably Ongina disclosing her HIV status and Roxxxy Andrews breaking down about her mother abandoning her and her sister at a bus stop. Now we have a new scene to add to the canon: Blair St. Clair talking about her sexual assault.

It was a very sad moment indeed. The judges were ripping Blair for being too quiet during the challenge, where teams of three had to put on a panel like they will soon be doing at RuPaul’s DragCon. Blair, a professional hair stylist, was on a team with The Vixen and Miz Cracker explaining wigs to an excited audience. Not only was she shouted down by the other queens, she didn’t manage to be funny or informative on her own.

The critique was that she just relies on being pretty and innocent, something that’s easy for Blair since she looks like one of those Hummel figurines that Midwestern grandmas put on a special shelf in the hallway.

Blair explained that she tries to find daintiness because she feels dirty at times. Just when you were wondering what could possibly be so hard for the cute Indiana boy with the supportive mother who is his best friend, Blair revealed that her first sexual encounter was when she was sexually assaulted at a college party—something she’s been struggling with since.

It brought tears to my eyes and even The Vixen’s trademark aggressiveness turned sweet when she said, “I can’t wait to find that motherfucker.” Trust me, I would not want The Vixen coming after me in a dark alley brandishing a heel as a weapon. Blair talked even more about the incident during Untucked, saying it was the first time she was ever able to use the word “rape” when talking about it, and how hard it had been to try to stay positive.

A lot of people who have appeared on this season have been through a lot. Dusty Ray Bottoms talked about being raised in a religious family and forced to go to a “pray the gay away” camp. Monique Heart discussed how she has to make all of her outfits at the last minute because she can’t afford to have her looks specially made. During Untucked she went in deeper, talking about how she dropped out of seminary school (did Aquaria really know what that “seminary” and “semen” are not related?) because she didn’t have the money.

Earlier in the episode Monét talked about how hard it is to be gay and a drag queen in Saint Lucia, where she grew up. Her family didn’t even find out she was a drag queen until she landed on the cover of the island’s only newspaper for winning the Ms. Gay Caribbean pageant. That’s one of the inspiring things about this show. That all of these queens have reached the peak of their profession after enduring so much hardship. It’s enfranchising the disenfranchised—and once they all start selling merch, it’s franchising them too.


This week Blair really deserved to be in the bottom along with her teammates. Her performance in the challenge was underwhelming and her hat-themed looked was right out of My Fair Lady or Hello Dolly. Yes, as a Broadway Baby it was on brand, but it was also as uninspired as penis hats at a bachelorette party. At least when Miz Cracker did a very similar look she made her hat out of hair (which seems to be Miz Cracker’s signature gimmick).

This is a week when Asia O’Hara—still my current favorite—came out in a dandelion-inspired headdress that actually made everyone on the panel go, “Wow.” It was one of the best runway looks of all time and even earned a special commendation from Ru. Blair just couldn’t compete with that level of ingenuity or design.

I thought Blair was a dark horse. She was always well coiffed and had interesting costumes, so I assumed that when we finally focused on her as a performer she’d be more exciting. I was wrong. When she was forced to lip sync against her teammate The Vixen, I knew she was done for. While The Vixen was doing flips and drops and hustles all over the stage and really feeling “I’m Coming Out” by Diana Ross, Blair was giving us a very safe and expected performance.

The person I was really surprised by again this week was the usually mute Kameron Michaels. Unlike Blair he’s kind of quiet and has often been safe in the challenges, but when he needs to, he really steps it up. In the improv challenge everyone was worried that he wouldn’t be funny enough, but he managed to even outshine comedy queen Monét X Change. This week people were similarly worried about her panel performance and she did a serviceable (if not totally outstanding) job. Blair could have learned a thing or two.

Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

This Body Modder Wants to Turn Herself into a Sex Doll

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Alicia Amira has undergone countless procedures and spent thousands of dollars chasing a single goal: to make herself look as much like a plastic sex doll as humanly possible. The 27-year-old has had breast implants, hip enlargements, Botox injections, lip augmentations, and more—all in the name of what she calls "bimbofication." To help fund her constant surgeries, she makes a living as a cam girl, performing for private clients while trying to pioneer a new genre of pornography she calls “bimbo porn.”

On this episode of FAMEish, VICE met up with Amira in the UK to hear why she got into body modification, what it’s like to make a living as a cam girl, and how—no matter what people say about her—the self-proclaimed feminist finds “bimbofication” empowering.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Blindboy Is Breaking Taboos for a Generation of Irish Lads

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Being referred to as “cunt”, “gowl” ,“jolly Fontleroy” or “charming Joshua” has become something of a weekly experience for listeners who tune in to the phenomenon that is The Blindboy Podcast.

Blindboy (AKA Blindboy Boatclub) is one half of Irish rap duo The Rubberbandits, famous since 2011 for wearing plastic bags over their heads and rapping about Honda Civics while being chummy with Russell Brand. Over the years they’ve become a household name for their consistently anarcho-ludicrous sensibility and social commentary, that’s made them equally likely to play a pub in Edinburgh as perform at the Venice Biennale.

The Blindboy Podcast is equal parts irreverent and illuminating. Sometimes they tell stories about an otter called Yurty Ahern. In other episodes they talk about meditation, Carl Jung, “hot takes on the universe”, the paintings of Caravaggio, and a poem supposedly written by the actor Jeremy Renner that begins with the line “I’ve been kicked out of Portugal for fondling the pauper’s baubles”. Running without a proper sponsor and funded only by its Patreon page, the whole thing has a DIY, “socialistic” feel as Blindboy puts it. One fan even went out to his studio and soundproofed it as a show of support.

Topping the Irish charts almost constantly since it launched and currently with 250,000 weekly listeners (and over a million worldwide monthly), the podcast’s cult following has further cemented Blindboy’s status as the voice of his generation. It’s a title he gained after a widely shared appearance on Irish TV show The Late Late, in which he riffed eloquently on the motif: “My generation can’t afford houses. My generation can’t afford to have children. My generation are either leaving the country or jumping in rivers.”

It's his down-to-earth and erudite way of speaking that has seen Blindboy become a central figure in a consciousness-raising moment for Ireland right now, characterised by anti-establishment feelings that surfaced during the recession and deepened with its much touted recovery.

Over the past few years a number of societal debates and political scandals have made the country do some drastic soul-searching. There was the marriage referendum, the years of austerity, the Tuam babies scandal, the death of Savita Halappanavar, the direct provision system, and the recent Belfast rape trial to name but a few.

The result has been a renewed interest in politics among young people and a rise in grassroots activism, which has come to a head in what has become Ireland’s most polarising debate in over 25 years: the abortion referendum. On 25th May the Irish electorate will be asked to vote "Yes" or "No" in favour of repealing the 8th amendment of the constitution, which makes it illegal for women in Ireland to have abortions.

This week saw the launch of the #Men4Yes campaign which called on Irish men to publicly come out in favour of a "Yes" vote. Blindboy tweeted his support and on Thursday released a video in which he interviews actor Cillian Murphy about the importance of the male vote. “Cis lads will never personally need an abortion, I worry that their attitude to the referendum is apathetic,” Blindboy tells me. “My biggest fear is whether the men of Ireland get off their hoops and vote.”

On Twitter, as on the podcast, he’s appealed to people’s common sense and compassion. “It's about living in a society where we have more fairness,” he says. “Abortion is going nowhere, keeping the 8th won't do anything for the ten Irish women a week who receive abortions illegally. Repealing is about allowing for safe abortion that isn't criminalised.”

Over the years, he’s tackled subjects such as mental health and suicide through humour and by being, to borrow his phrase, “a fierce sound cunt”. It’s made him a significant voice among young Irish men. “I come from a culture," he says, "where as a lad, speaking about or exploring my emotions is essentially taboo."

Depression and anxiety loom large on the podcast, with Blindboy drawing from a bank of personal anecdotes to pull focus on what’s being seen as a crisis in male mental health at the moment. Over 80 percent of all suicides in Ireland involve men, with Blindboy’s hometown of Limerick accounting for the highest rate per capita in the country. “Honesty, openness, and fearlessness around emotional language, and introspective thinking, are great tools for tackling this,” he says.

With five weeks to go before the abortion referendum, the Yes vote has a slim lead with latest Irish Times/IPSOS MRBI polls suggesting 47 percent of all voters would vote in favour of a repeal of the 8th amendment. Blindboy offers no predictions, saying simply that if it passes, “it will give us a more just society, one where people aren't criminalised because of their bodies.” He’s continuing to appeal to young men to register to vote before the 8th May deadline.

As paperback copies of his book, The Gospel According To Blindboy, hit shelves this week what’s clear is that the podcast has given him a very real pulpit. “I regret not getting into podcasting earlier,” he says, “I've strived my entire career to have true creative control and I finally have it. Every moment that I'm making the podcast is intensely happy for me.” There’s rumours of more live shows, a possible Russell Brand appearance, and a confirmed Cillian Murphy episode this coming Monday, but he could do anything and people would still come back for their weekly “podcast hug.”

In characteristic fashion his hopefulness is tinged with the anti-ness that’s made him so beloved. He ends with a warning about the current state of Ireland, where money is flowing back in and there’s a real danger of collective amnesia falling over the place. “We shouldn't allow the current boost in the economy to lull us into a state where we keep our eyes off the ball," he says. "That's when we start to ignore the problems of our society. That's also when the government does snakey shit. Don't let that soothing drug of retail therapy confuse you into thinking that everything is grand now. It's not. It just has a new coat of paint.”

@Roisin_Agnew

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Photos From the Tiniest Tiny Homes in Hong Kong

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Hong Kong is known for its shopping, seafood, and financial institutions. It’s an island metropolis soaked in colour and light, but it’s also a classic dichotomy of rich and poor; a ground zero for some of the world’s worst living conditions.

In 2016, the number of Hong Kong residents living in poverty rose to 1.36 million, accounting for nearly 20 percent of its total population. While the government has introduced a relatively generous social welfare system, it's thought to have pulled only some 356,000 above the official poverty line, leaving the majority to live in minutely subdivided flats.

These tiny apartments within apartments are known as “coffin cubicles.” Originally single apartment spaces, they've been divided into units, and then again into wood-partitioned cubicles. A 400-square foot flat of these apartments can accommodate nearly 20 double-decker sealed bed spaces, each measuring 6 x 2.5 feet.

These spaces were captured by photographer Benny Lam, who grew up in Hong Kong, and has been long interested in the country’s housing problems. “I wanted to do something about the social issue,” he explained to us.

Working with the non-government organisation Society for Community Organization (SoCO), Lam contacted some of Hong Kong’s sub-divided flat residents and requested an invitation to visit. Most weren’t interested, but a few did welcome him into their “suffocating” homes, as he described them.

“There are no windows for ventilation and the beds are too short for residents to lay their bodies down flat,” he told us.

In one case, a lady whose house Lam photographed, prepared and cooked a meal for him and a few of the SoCO members. Her place was one of the more upscale cubicles, with both a sink and lavatory, but all jammed uncomfortably together in the same room.

“Did the food’s flavour come from the food or the toilet? It was difficult to know,” quipped Benny.

He says there are tens of thousands of low-income families packed into these boxes, but the photos don’t properly do their scale justice. If you haven’t been inside the confined space, Lam says: “you’re yet to understand the matter.”

This series is called “Home Ownership,” and comes from Benny Lam’s book and exhibition, Trapped

Interview by Harriet Renn

This article originally appeared on VICE AU.

The 11 Best Comedies on Netflix to Watch While Stoned

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Sometimes you get so high that everything is funny. Something as insignificant as a look or a sigh can send you into uncontrollable fits of laughter. Other times you get so high that nothing’s funny at all. No amount of deep-fried memes or Vine compilation videos on YouTube can break the spell.

Then, there’s that in-between moment, the one that comes when you’ve just smoked and are waiting for the shit to kick in. Everything hinges in the balance, ready to take you cruising to Good Time Town or on a one-way trip to Paranoid-Sadsville, population: you. These 11 comedies on Netflix (US) right now are the perfect answer for when you’re getting stoned and just want to let the good laughs roll.

Caddyshack

When you think of 1980’s golf classic Caddyshack you think of Bill Murray, who was most definitely a stoner once upon a time. Less well-known is the story of how he and Chevy Chase ended up scoring pot from Rodney Dangerfield in the '80s. Someone had to be high to come up with that dancing gopher scene.

The Money Pit

Even though the jury’s still out on whether or not America’s dad smokes weed, the physical comedy of The Money Pit is perfect for moments when you’re too stoned to stand up. The anti-weed Steven Spielberg co-executive produced this story about a yuppie couple who gets a too-good-to-be-true deal on a mansion, so having this on the “best comedies to watch while stoned” list is a must.

Cool Runnings

Even though the real Jamaican bobsled team never “ever smoked weed” this 1993 comedy sports film is supremely satisfying on drugs. Obviously rasta stereotypes abound, but it’s the way John Candy shows up in shades and a guayabera that suggests he took a trip to the Blue Mountains.

The Bucket List

When two men meet in a cancer ward, they decide to go on a road trip to cross off all the things they still want to do before they kick it. Bucket List stars Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman have spoken in favor of legalizing weed in the past, so toke one up for both those titans while watching them check off the boxes in this campy romp packed full of old men doing things old men aren't supposed to do.

Henry Poole Is Here

This 2008 sleeper-hit starring Luke Wilson is the perfect comedy for sitting around wondering what the hell the point of it all is. Wilson stars as the titular Poole, a dying man whose suburban Los Angeles home is discovered to have the image of Christ stuccoed into it. Trippy, huh? Miracles may or may not abound, which will certainly spark introspection whilst you spark your next big doink.

Drillbit Taylor

Did you know that the legendary John Hughes actually came up with the story idea for this Owen Wilson flick? Wow. After Hughes’s passing, Seth Rogen picked up the mantle with lead Beavis and Butt-Head scribe Kristofor Brown, and the resulting story about bullied high schoolers who hire a homeless Army deserter to be their bodyguard is simply *chef’s kiss*.

I Love You, Man

Without a doubt the most likeable film to come out of the Apatow production pipeline, Paul Rudd and Jason Segel’s paean to bro-hood is tailor-made for the sesh. It’s a brash, heartfelt, and happy reminder why you should appreciate your buds.

Jackass 3.5: The Unrated Movie

In 2010, the Jackasses reunited for what would be Ryan Dunn’s last ride with the crew. Port-a-potties on bungee cords and Africanized bees aside, you could show Jackass to a space alien and it’d learn what it means to be an American.

Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa .5

In Bad Grandpa, Johnny Knoxville reprises his iconic old-man character from Jackass, Irving Zisman. Knoxville’s turn as the hard-drinking, porn addicted octogenarian is something of a mirror to angry old white people, the kind that will make you understand why the fact that more old Americans than ever are smoking pot is actually a really big deal.

The Trip to Italy

If food and funny things are your high’s best company, this travel comedy from British comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon will go down like an ice-chilled bong hit. Following director Michael Winterbottom's hit tv series The Trip, the hapless misadventures of Steve and Rob make for a splendid, if stoney, celebration of the finer things.

Game Over, Man!

It’s every stoner’s dream to enjoy the runaway success of Workaholics creators Anders Holm, Adam DeVine, Blake Anderson, and Kyle Newacheck. Massive explosions aside, it’s not a huge leap from the Comedy Central series—if you like them as stoned pencil-pushers, you’ll also definitely enjoy them as stoned action heroes.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

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