In a video Coolio posted on his Facebook page this week, the “Kenan & Kel Theme” rapper walks out his house wearing reindeer antlers. A cameraman asks Coolio about the deal he recently signed with a major company: “Who’d you sign with?” he asks “Steven Spielberg or some shit?”

“Fuck no,” Coolio says, exhaling sexiness with every breath.

“So what’s the deal? Tell us. Give us the scoop, Coolio.”

“Pornhub.”

“Pornhub? What are you doing with Pornhub, Coolio?”

“Doin’ your mama.”

That’s right. Coolio’s fucking your mama, and he’s celebrating living in a pussy paradise in his new song and music video, "Take It to the Hub".

A quenched libido is just as important as dieting and exercise. So go rub one out over at PornHub and keep an eye on their brand-new eponymous record imprint, PornHub Records. Oh, and support Coolio by buying his song—as you can tell, the struggle is very real for him right now.

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter.

Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

It wasn’t so long ago that the world’s eager young masturbators could happily jerk themselves into a state of exhaustion without a care in the world. But now there's a growing level of consciousness of something that should probably have been quite obvious to anyone whose blood hadn’t all been redirected away from his brain. Namely, that if you watch tons of videos of unlimited genres of depravity, you’re going to find it more difficult to get turned on by a living, breathing, naked human being who wants to do IRL sex stuff with you. If watching someone stick their big toe into someone’s asshole feels normal to you, for instance, you might find making out kind of boring.

One of the people who can be credited for raising this point is Gary Wilson. His site, yourbrainonporn.com, has been at the forefront of efforts to understand what porn is doing to many of its users. Now, he's turned all his knowledge into a book, Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction.

I called Gary to discuss his new book and the issue of porn addiction facing millions of young onanism enthusiasts around the world.

VICE: So the main premise of your book is that you can either watch porn or have sex, but you can't have both. Is that right?
Gary Wilson: It is of course possible to have both. But for some guys it is difficult to have both. With internet porn some men are having not only erectile dysfunction (ED) but they're also having other sexual symptoms such as inability to orgasm, delayed ejaculation, declining libido with real partners, loss of attraction to real partners, and also very commonly their sexual taste—at least in porn—have morphed into something which is strange and upsetting for them.

Can you watch some porn and still have a healthy sex life? Is there a safe level?
Watching porn will always affect you. How much it will affect you is hard to say. So in other words we have seen guys who are terribly addicted, and it has deeply affected their sex lives. They need a year or more off porn in order to get a real erection with a real partner. So that’s an extreme occurrence. On the other end of the spectrum however you will have some guys with a girlfriend and they will watch porn a couple of times a week. But here’s the deal. You don’t know how much it affects you until you remove the variables. So these guys will just do a challenge and say, “OK I’ll stop watching porn,” and what they find is that they will still get benefits. And the benefits that they’ll get is that real sex is far more exiting. Their wife or girlfriend looks a lot better. They didn’t think that porn was affecting them but once they quit they found out that it was. Essentially porn has a broad spectrum of effects.

Porn has been around for generations in varying forms. What has caused the rise in issues like ED? Is it simply a case of faster and faster internet speeds?
It’s definitely escalated over the past few years. Firstly, the delivery system of the internet has caused this escalation. Secondly, however, adolescents as a result have complete access to hardcore streaming videos as soon as they desire it. But the question we have to ask is why the internet is so appealing? Think about Facebook. There are studies that show Facebook causes addiction. It can cause brain changes that mirror the brain changes that occur in drug addicts. In fact there are 70 internet-brain studies showing that. And what can occur with the internet is that is raises arousal and dopamine levels. Dopamine powers this reward circuit and the internet is unique in this sense. Clicking on new pictures, new words, sending messages, receiving messages becomes a novelty which raises dopamine levels in the reward circuit. So does surprise, shock, and anxiety. If you combine that with sexual stimulation, the highest arousal available, and put it in front of a teenager via a tube site with hardcore videos, adolescents can maintain this kind of arousal and dopamine levels. You can train your brain to need that level of stimulus in order to be sexually exited. When you’re watching these videos of real people having so called “real” sex it completely replaces their imagination. You no longer imagine what it's like. You become a voyeur watching all this action rather than with a still picture imagining the action you can create.

In the book you discuss a disconnect between younger and older generations, which translates into typically younger people being exposed to porn far more than say those who grew up with magazines. Is this simply a general rule, or is there some crossover?
When you look at studies you get a completely different view. People ages 14 to 25 have a much higher use of porn than adults and of course the use goes down as the age goes up. A recent UK poll showed that the vast majority of people believed watching porn has negative effects, so their view is based on their experience as say an 18-year-old growing up over the past few years and seeing the effect it has had upon them.

What do you say to those sexologists who want to dismiss the argument that porn can cause ED?
Well, they’re wrong. Prominent urologists are starting to write articles about it. On top of that we’ve had two brain studies from Cambridge University and one from the Max Planck institute. The Cambridge one found the same kind of brain changes that occur with drug addicts and 60 percent of those subjects suffered from issues such as ED and loss of libido. The German study correlated the hours of porn use a week and the years of porn use with firstly the structure of the reward circuits. They found a correlation suggesting that those who watch porn actually have less gray matter. In addition those who had been watching porn for years had less activation of the reward circuits. So their conclusion was that more porn use correlated with a decrease in gray matter and less sexual arousal. And these were non-addicts. Many sexologists claim that porn “addiction” (they don’t even refer to it as addiction) is caused by a high libido, which you are somehow born with. But these studies counter that and show that heavy porn users have lower sexual desire causing in turn issues such as ED. So it goes against that myth, which has no truth to it.

Gary's widely viewed TED talk

You talk about the need for more education in your conclusion regarding sex conditioning and the issue of porn addiction. Will education really stop people from wanting to watch porn?
Will it stop people from watching porn? No. But what occurs is that many of the guys who eventually showed up on all these forums had no idea that porn use could cause the problems they had developed such as severe ED. This young generation sees porn use and masturbation as synonymous. They read articles claiming that masturbation is good and so they assume that must mean that porn is good. They never make the connection. So if there were education that makes the connection, that would be good. What’s missing as well is that sexologists don’t make the connection between porn and the adolescent brain, which undergoes a process of rewiring in order to reproduce. A highly malleable adolescent brain has much higher surges of dopamine and is seeking thrills and novelty, which create a bigger buzz for them.

You discuss the idea of "rebooting" by not watching porn. How effective is this? Is it easy to cure a porn addiction?
Rebooting refers to removing all sexual stimuli. There are different motivations, such as ED and loss of sexual stimulation. Some guys are doing it for other reasons. They notice friends on forums are quitting ending up with far more motivation, confidence, and concentration. So these guys have a different barometer of when they feel they are rebooted. Guys suffering from sexual dysfunction aged between 40 to 50 who grew up consuming porn through magazines are now developing ED having switched to Tube sites. Young guys often need much longer to reboot compared to older guys. Older guys can take eight to 12 weeks and be fine after that. Some of these young guys, aged 20 to 24, take up to two years to fully recover. These guys are at their peak of health and levels of testosterone and they take a lot longer. This links back to the use of porn in adolescence when the brain is incredibly malleable.  

Do the issues that guys experience from porn addiction transfer over to women?
Guys typically use porn far more often. By cycling through the usernames of people on forums such as NoFap what we find is that woman often simply don’t get exited by their partners. They needed porn to have an orgasm, they weren’t lubricating, and they were addicted. So women do experience similar problems. The difference however is that men have a barometer, which is their penis. Women don’t. So many women grow up not relating these problems to porn use.

What stage do you feel we are at when it comes to knowledge about the effect porn has on the brain?   
There is a huge divide, and actually a degree of animosity when it comes to studying the effects of porn addiction on the human brain. What we’ve learned is that addiction, thanks to the work of real neuroscientists, is by far the most studied mental condition. It’s been induced in animals for the last 30 years looking right down to the molecular and genetic level where brain changes occur. And we’ve compared it to the many types of addiction that occur in humans. So there is a huge body of evidence. On the other side you have the sexology groups who don’t study the mechanisms of the brain and whom are sociologists primarily carrying out questionnaires. They have a model within which they don’t want porn addiction to be recognized, as they are afraid that if you say porn use has negative effects then it’s labeled as sex negative. And they don’t want any shame associated with sexuality. Conceptually that’s OK to a certain degree, but what they don’t acknowledge is that porn is now sex negative and screen positive.

What is your view on the existence of websites, which only contain “good porn” and filter out what is described as “bad” porn?
It’s a trend that really bothers me. It’s a trend that tries to teach people the difference between “good” porn and “bad” porn, as if there’s such a thing. This idea is put forth by websites such as makelovenotporn.com and that’s fine except that you pay for it and of course no young person is ever going to pay for porn. But beyond that is the idea that some 15-year-old kid is going to say “Oh, I’ve been told that this website has good porn so I’ll just stay on this website.” Now that is ridiculous. That’s like taking a 15-year-old boy to the grocery store and saying “Buy whatever you want, just buy good food.” They’re not going to go and buy broccoli. Instead they are going to start clicking on the grossest and strangest stuff because that’s what teenage boys do. So of course it wouldn’t work. But on top of that what counts as “bad” porn? Is it BDSM, female domination, or anal? That’s a never-ending argument. It can never be solved and it doesn’t address the basic problem, which is that young men and woman are training their sexual arousal to high speed internet, clicking, and novelty. It’s the delivery system that really makes the difference in 2014.

In 1969, Medium Cool blew people’s minds because it was one of the first films to purposefully blend fact and fiction. Renowned cinematographer-cum-filmmaker Haskwell Wexler crafted a visceral, cinematic snapshot of the city of Chicago in turmoil during the riots surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

In this interview, Wexler’s reveals the power, oppression, and egos he was up against both creatively and politically in making one of Hollywood’s most prescient films. It also shows that Haskwell Wexler was—and always will be—a badass.

Vintage jacket from Beyond Retro, Kangol hat; Umbro sweatshirt

PHOTOS BY ROO LEWIS
STYLING: KYLIE GRIFFITHS

Makeup: Charli Avery using Bobby Brown
Hair: Anne Marie-Lawson using Bumble & bumble
Stylist's Assistants: Hannah Gooding and Thomas Ramshaw 
Motion: Greg Barnes
Models: Christie and Soraya at NEVS, Freddy at Supa, 

Timberland T-shirt, vintage overalls from from Blitz Vintage

Kangol hat

Vintage shirt from Rokit, Adidas shorts from Nordic Poetry; Ellesse top, Adidas pants from Blitz Vintage

Champion T-Shirt, Ellesse shorts; Kangol hat, Champion pants; Reebok sweatshirt from Nordic Poetry, vintage overalls from Rokit

Umbro jacket

Supreme Being T-shirt; Lacoste jacket, Bitching and Junkfood shorts, Kangol hat

Lazy Oaf jacket

Vintage jacket from Beyond Retro, Kangol hat

Umbro top; Timberland T-Shirt, Urban Renewal overalls from Urban Outfitters

Click here for last week's episode.

Campus police at Ohio University. Photo via Wikimedia

In 1968, students at Columbia University staged a mass uprising other college campuses in protesting not just the war in Vietnam, but their school’s collaboration with the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Defense Department affiliate that researches weapons technologies. Today, weapons produced by that institute are used by the US military throughout the world—and by campus police forces across the country. The war has come home.

The Pentagon’s 1033 program, which allows the Defense Department to unload its excess military equipment onto local police forces, has quietly overflowed onto college campuses. According to documents obtained by the website Muckrock, more than 100 campus police forces have received military materials from the Pentagon. Schools that participate in the program range from liberal arts to community colleges to the entire University of Texas system. Emory, Rice, Perdue, and the University of California, Berkeley, are all on the list.

In 1990, Congress enacted the National Defense Authorization Act, including the magnanimous section 1208, which since 1996 has been known as program 1033. Over the last 17 years, this trickle-down gift economy has distributed more than $4.3 billion worth of equipment, according to program administrators. As Ferguson police rolled up to peaceful protesters in military-grade tanks, firing tear gas and rubber bullets, President Obama ordered a review of the program, which reached new highs in regifting under his tenure. 

It’s clear why a review of the program is in order, because it isn’t clear at all what sort of equipment these colleges are receiving. David Perry, the president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, told Politico that 1033 mostly funnels “small items” to college police forces for daily use. These could be anything from office supplies or uniforms or car parts, but it’s probably not all that tame. Campus Safety magazine recommends that universities take part in the 1033 program to cover a range of needs from storage units to grenade launchers. That is, after all, what the program was designed to achieve.

But program 1033 doesn’t even come close to explaining all the ways in which campus police have been militarized over the past two decades. Colleges can also apply for Homeland Security grants, the same ones made available to every municipal police department in the country after 9/11. In 2012, UC Berkeley tried to use the program to purchase an eight-ton armored truck. After a backlash, university officials ultimately decided the truck was “not the best choice for a university setting.” The following year, Ohio State University acquired a mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicle. So far, it has yet to be targeted.

Other college policies are even more difficult to quantify, though they pose immense obstacles to the cultures of free action and thought that academic institutions are supposed to cultivate. One such policy is the Memorandum of Understanding, in which local law enforcement enters into an official partnership with campus “peace officers.” Sometimes memoranda of understanding can have positive impacts on students, as when they are established between universities and rape crisis centers to ensure that anyone seeking help receives proper care. In this sort of arrangement, universities work with centers and both institutions train one another, so that resources and knowledge are shared. This is what happens with local and campus police arrangements: The departments draft vague language to work in concert on operations both on and off campus, but the actual extent of this partnership is not well documented, with the line between campus police forces and those controlled by local government fuzzy at best.

Several campus police forces have also been vigorously trained in paramilitary tactics since 2007. In a country where SWAT teams raid private residencies more than 100 times a day, mostly in neighborhoods where people of color live, the decision to train campus officers in this overindulged art is a vote in favor of racist policing tactics on the part of institutions of higher education, even before the training is ever put to use.

In the 1960s, campuses went into lockdown because students were occupying buildings; now, they often go into lockdown because campus police are itching to stretch their military muscles. Horrible crimes have been committed with guns at colleges, but using the Virginia Tech massacre and other shootings to justify turning universities into police states is disingenuous considering that campuses are still among the safest places in the country—and these tactics clearly aren’t making them any safer. But amped up fears have made it easy for the Pentagon and local law enforcement to align with campus police while being met with little pushback.

Just last month, campus police at Cal State San Marcos put the university on lockdown based on intelligence that a man was walking around campus with a gun. The suspect, they later learned, was armed only with an umbrella. In December 2013, American University in Washington, DC shut down its academic operations to search for a reported gunman who turned out to be an off-duty police officer. On Wednesday, Denison University and all other schools in the district of Granville, Ohio, were locked down after police received a phony threat of an impending shooting.

Concurrent with increasing lockdown drills and stockpiling of weapons is the stifling of student dissent. In 2009, during the G-20 Summit, student protestors at the University of Pittsburgh were demonstrating peacefully on their campus when cops demanded they disperse, then quickly proceeded to arrest several of them. Police sprayed pepper gas at passersby and onto the balconies of residences where students were watching the scene below.

There was also the infamous mass pepper spraying of Occupy demonstrators at UC Davis in 2011. Police used CS gas, pepper pellets, and beanbag rounds on UC student protesters throughout 2012. When students and workers at UC Riverside publicly demanded the scaling back of university privatization in a number of sectors, they were met with batons and paintball pellets. 

The list of infringements upon student dissent, student space, and student bodies, is too long to enumerate here. Yet, importantly, it is also impossible to quantify, because incidents are never added up and detailed funding records never corralled into a comprehensible database. In the absence of serious oversight and accounting, narratives are stitched together, stories swapped, and a picture of violent state surveillance and control emerges. The picture squares with what we see in cities, towns, and communities across America.

And it squares with much of what’s taken place in response to the killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in important ways, including the swiftness and brutality with which police met protestors in Ferguson and the importance of young people and youth culture in conveying images of that brutality to the world. Most of the protesters in Ferguson and those marching in solidarity across the country are young, and young people are more likely to support curtailing police power than their aged peers. 

Perhaps this has something to do with the channels through which the story unfolding in Ferguson was most urgently told: grainy feeds on guerrilla news sites, social media, and, yes, websites geared toward millennials like VICE. It probably also has to do with the fact that so many young people mistrust the government, no matter who’s in charge. But perhaps most important, it’s young people, mostly young people of color, who are the targets of policies that feed the warrior cop ethos: increased surveillance, stop-and-frisk, and arrest quotas fueled by government grants. Joel Anderson wrote for Buzzfeed that most of the protestors in Ferguson “are young black men and some women from Ferguson and the surrounding inner suburbs of St. Louis who see themselves in Brown—not just because he was 18 and black, but also because they have their own tales of being harassed by police.”

A few weeks ago, activist and journalist Mariame Kaba asked on Twitter: “How can we build a movement to divest from police? Is there a way for us to do this? Can we go after local police budgets?”

One place to start is with those college campuses whose police forces receive 1033 and Homeland Security funding. The time is ripe for student journalists and activists to use the information furnished by Muckrock and to do their own digging to take on police divestment campaigns with the tenacity, political savvy, and exuberance that’s pushed universities nationwide to divest from fossil fuels, private prisons, and Israeli occupation. Young people in solidarity with the people of Ferguson and the families who have lost sons and daughters at the hands of militant police are poised to illuminate these connections between education, state surveillance, and state violence in a uniquely powerful way.

All illustrations by Nick Gazin

Sex. It’s important. So important, in fact, that it’s not only the title of this piece, it’s also the very first word. At this point you may be wondering if "sex" is also the last word of this piece. Go ahead! Skip to the end and find out! OK, happy now? Good. Let’s begin.

Sex. What the heck is it? Generally speaking, sex—shorthand for "sexual intercourse"—is the insertion and thrusting of a male’s penis into a female’s vagina for the purposes of reproduction and/or pleasure. Pretty erotic definition, huh? That's from Wikipedia, and needless to say I got so worked up reading it I almost "WikiLeaked" in my pants!

But that’s not all sex is these days—nay, not by a long shot. In fact, the bedroom antics of a modern sex-haver in Obama’s "anything goes" America is enough to make a Juggalo blush. And that’s why I put together the following compendium of carnal knowledge—to help you, the reader, navigate the topsy-turvy landscape of today’s dynamic fuckvironment.

Anal Sex
Anal sex is intercourse via the anus. Its popularity skyrocketed recently when scientists announced a woman is up to 50 percent less likely to conceive a child when getting ass-rammed than when having her pussy plowed. Anal is also the preferred method of intercourse among gay men. And understandably so—I mean, have you tried stuffing your entire cock into another man’s pee-hole?!? To quote ET: “OUCH!”

Ass-Eating
This disgusting act seems to be all the rage among millennials. I’m surprised they even have time to stick a tongue up a butthole what with all the time spent on selfies, memes, Snapchats, and Netflix. Heck, millennials think Girls is a good television program—is it really surprising they also enjoy the taste of shit? (Totally JK, to the two Girls writers who follow me on Twitter.)

Blowjobs
These are those things hack stand up comics complain about their wives not doing anymore during their "marriage is lame" chunks. Truth is, getting a BJ feels pretty darn good—but hearing someone refer to it as a "blowie" is almost enough to make you lose your boner.

Boners
The thing hearing someone say "blowie" is almost enough to make you lose.

Cheating
Remember: there’s no such thing as cheating. If your partner catches you in the act, just come up with a clever excuse, like you were “masturbating with my secretary’s vagina lips” or “using the pool guy’s dick as a dildo” or “cream-peeing some white urine into our son’s third grade teacher’s mouth-toilet.”

Dildo
An object shaped like a penis used for sexual simulation. Named for when Lucrecia Stansbury, a noted baker in the 1800s, discovered it felt awesome to stuff a tube of the raw dough she used to bake her famous dill bread (her "dill dough," if you will) into her cooch.

Double-Ended Dildo
The opposite of a double-beginninged dildo. By the way, if that scene at the end of Requiem For a Dream doesn’t get you at least a little horny, you’re less twisted than me, friend.

Eating Pussy
The technical term for this is cunnilingus. And that hilarious joke where you say you’re a "cunning linguist" never gets old—so keep on saying it, Lars Ulrich!

Fingerblasting
The sex product market has exploded (no pun intended) recently with innovative new devices designed to blast vaginas, but most sex-havers agree: the original is still the best. That’s right, the ol’ tried-and-true—the finger—remains the go-to vag-blasting tool among die-hard blasters and blastees. Notably, the finger also continues its dominance in the field of booger extraction.

Fisting
Ever felt an overwhelming desire to punch your enemy as hard as you can, square in the colon? Well, be warned: If she’s a fan of this fucked up freaky shit, she may actually enjoy your journey getting up in there!

Giraffes
All I know is I wouldn’t waste all day eating leaves if my neck was so long I could suck my own dick.

Handjobs
Too lazy to jack yourself off? Pay a stripper to do it for ya, King Henry VIII!

Happy Ending
When a masseuse sexually manipulates a man’s penis to completion at the end of a massage. Not to be confused with a "sad ending," where the masseuse pours semen into his dickhole.

Huge Penis-Haver Magazine
Fellas, always carry a copy of this fake magazine I just made up around so you can pretend to read it if an attractive woman sits across from you on the subway.

Jizz Rag
That Obama shirt MoveOn.org sent you back in ‘08, probably.

Kama Sutra
That book no one has ever read in your stoner fuck-buddy’s bedside lube drawer. Maybe replace those corny illustrations with some Aishwarya Rai nude action pics and we’ll give it a second chance, Ravi.

Masturbation
Woody Allen once jokingly called masturbation “sex with someone I love.” Pretty amazing that a jazz clarinet enthusiast who married his own daughter could love himself.

Monogamy
That thing your married friends won’t admit sucks until after they’re divorced.

Orgasm
Those five to 15 seconds before you start figuring out how to get this weirdo out of your apartment.

Polygamy
You don’t think one wife is enough? You’ve obviously never been married, Utah Joe.

Porn
A magical world where a bleach blonde bimbo with massive fake tits becomes a doctor by putting on a pair of glasses and a white lab coat.

Robin Thicke
The reason there’s suddenly so many lesbians.

S.E.X.
A song by Nickelback I’ve never heard but just stumbled across the existence of on Google. The lyrics are so stupid they make KISS’s discography look like a collection of Shakespeare sonnets.

Sex Trafficking
Look, all I know is the "sex traffic" going in and out of your mom’s bedroom last night was pretty heavy! HEY-OOOOOOOOOH

Sexpert
A hussy with a lit degree desperately trying to market her sex blog after realizing she’s a 35-year-old barista.

Sixty-Nine
Nothing says “I have a debilitating fear of intimacy that I’m occasionally horny enough to briefly overcome” like wanting to sixty-nine.

Titty Fucking
Every woman’s favorite position. Nothing brings the human female to orgasm faster than having to wrap her boobs around the dick of some tit-fixated perv whose mom refused to breastfeed him while he drags his sweaty balls across her belly. Ah, how she loves the full weight of a grown adult male bouncing on her midsection! Don’t forget to cum in her eyes to maximize her pleasure, guys!

Viagra
The common name for Sildenafil Citrate, a medication that helps prevent loss of erection. But don’t take too much—walking around with a perma-boner the next three days could be "viagra-vating." (Hey, I'm gonna use this joke in my stand-up act—please don’t steal it.)

Vibrator
A thing that vibrates. Duh! It’s in the name! Do I have to do all the work for you?

Congratulations! You now know absolutely everything you need to know about (Get ready! Here it comes! The last word of the piece!) sex.

Follow Eli Braden on Twitter.

All photos by the author

Telluride, Colorado, is hard to get to, doubly so if you’re going to the film festival. The first thing you have to do in order to attend the Labor Day weekend festivities is not die on the way, which is easier said than done if—like me—you hate flying and have never been on a charter flight. Booking the deathtrap in tandem with lodging was a logistical pain in the ass, not to mention stupidly expensive, but everyone who’s ever been to the 41-year-old festival is crazy about the place and assured me it was well worth it.

There’s an airport in Telluride, but because it's nestled so high up in the mountains, most flights land 65 miles away in Montrose. The drive from the airport was expectedly beautiful: You start out at 5,806 feet above sea level and gradually ascend 3,000 feet higher into the mountain air, with popped ears and altitude headaches that continue for the next several days.

I stayed in a lock-off apartment I found on Airbnb. On my first night there, the couple who lived in the house it was attached to brought me extra blankets, fed me steak, and drove me into town for a brief tour. On the way there, they made some jokes about killing me (“What do you mean the steak tasted like mercury?”) before taking me to a place called the Fly Me to the Moon Saloon, where a friend of theirs told me about how great it was to live here. I had only been in Colorado for a few hours and had yet to see any movies, but already, I loved it here.

On the way back, I asked how the town’s full-time residents feel about the festival. Like all film festivals, I was sure that this one brought in a good number of insufferable douchebags, present company (hopefully) excluded. They told me that anyone with common sense can see all the financial good it does for Telluride, but yes, some of the jetsetters are indeed hard to be around.

That turned out to be true. Seemingly every attendee who wasn't connected to the film industry was a wealthy retiree, who was either dividing their time between Telluride and Phoenix, or who had flown in for the festival every year from somewhere in Northern California. They discussed how good Wild was (it was terrible) and how they didn’t like Foxcatcher because it has no likable characters. Listening to them was maddening, especially as someone for whom attending this festival was a questionable decision financially. I spent a good deal of my time in line, silently resenting them.

Luckily, they weren't the only people I overheard. Telluride is known for how many celebrities freely walk around; one of the upsides of the festival being so difficult to get to, at least for them, is that there are no paparazzi and nobody really bothers them. I stood behind Gael García Bernal in line for a documentary about the New York Review of Books and was delighted to discover that I’m several inches taller than he is. You may be in the new Jon Stewart movie, Gael, but you’ll never be a towering 5’10”.

One other thing about my place in Telluride: It wasn't actually in Telluride. I didn’t know this when I booked it, but I was actually staying six miles away in Mountain Village. One gets to and from Telluride proper by taking a 20-minute gondola ride that’s advertised as only taking 13, which was terrifying the first time I rode it at night. It was pitch black (save for the rapidly disappearing lights of Telluride itself), 40-something degrees, and I don’t even want to know how high up.

During the day, however, the main thoroughfare came to life. The street was lined with a number of flags for some reason—Denmark, England, even China—as well as pricey restaurants and outdoorsy stores. There were dogs everywhere: one wandered into a burger joint late one night, another stood guard outside a pharmacy, and yet another chased after a gondola in what was surely the most adorable moment of the weekend.

The movies themselves were something of a mixed bag, as they are at every festival, though the good far outweighed the bad. There were films about the Troubles (‘71), Pablo Escobar (Escobar: Paradise Lost), and the Khmer Rouge (The Gate), but also two Pixar shorts (Feast and Lava) and a series of three short films about peace by Errol Morris. The scenic backdrop made the grimness more palatable, which ended up being more important than I would have guessed.

By far the realest, most intense experience of the entire festival was a Q&A for Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence. A companion piece to The Act of Killing, in which Oppenheimer had boastful perpetrators of Indonesia's anti-communist purge of 1965 reenact their unpunished crimes, this new film looks at the aftermath from the perspective of a man named Adi, whose brother Ramli was among the many victims. These people are still in power and thus able to justify what they’ve done pretty easily, having shaped the narrative for the last half-century.

I tend to think Q&As are worthless, but as soon as I realized that Adi was here, I knew I had to stay. The first question was directed toward him—something about how he prepared himself to confront these men. Oppenheimer translated the question for Adi, who spoke only Indonesian. Adi tried to answer but just couldn't. Just shook his head and looked down at the ground, seemingly on the verge of tears. Oppenheimer said something to the effect of "we’ll get back to it later," and I spent the next 20 or so minutes trying to imagine what that must be like—thousands upon thousands of miles from home in a Colorado opera house as people discuss a movie about the atrocities you’ve lived with your entire life, in a language you don’t understand.

Adi finally answered after Oppenheimer fielded a few other questions. He said he wanted to confront these men in order to have them acknowledge that what they did was wrong so that he could forgive them and hopefully move on with this life. It was a simple answer, free of the hatred and rage you could very reasonably expect, and one that provoked applause and tears from the small crowd that had gathered here on a Saturday night. Adi asked to sit down for the rest of the Q&A, and a few minutes later I bailed.

The next night, I happened to share a gondola with the two of them. They were the only people involved with the actual films whom I bothered talking to, and I used the opportunity to have the director tell his subject how much I admired his bravery. It felt like an insufficient gesture in the face of what he had done—something dozens of others have surely done and will continue to do as The Look of Silence screens elsewhere—and yet I couldn't just pretend not to be in awe of this man.

Much of Telluride’s allure was being so close to the people whose movies were playing there, but that's something I didn't fully appreciate until I shook Adi’s hand and walked off into the last night of the festival.

Follow Michael Nordine on Twitter.

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. This week, a UN report forecasts food shortages in Liberia, authorities arrest protesting fast food employees, and Russia's Western food ban creates an export opportunity for Argentina.

Photo courtesy of Pornhub

In the music video for “Take It to the Hub,” Coolio lives in a pussy paradise. Porn star Alexa Aimes dances in a banana costume, and girls flash their titties, but according to Coolio, the video shoot was anything but a day in heaven.

Filmed on location at a house in Whittier, California, for Pornhub Records, the video features Coolio along with porn stars like Skin Diamond, Missy Martinez, and Phoenix Marie. After Coolio arrived at the set, the rapper says white neighbors called the cops because they wanted him out of their neighborhood.

Anxious to learn more about the controversial production of Coolio’s new song about masturbation, I called the rapper to discuss racism, the time he watched a girl put a vodka bottle in her vagina, and why he decided to record a song for a porn site.  

VICE: How did you end up working with Pornhub?
Coolio: Me and my boy [Pornhub’s marketer] were just hanging out here in Vegas, man. We enjoyed hanging out, so we just exchanged numbers and was talking, and it was his idea. He was like, We should do a song, and we should shoot a video for it. I’ll put a bunch of porn stars in it. Whatever. Do something new and fun. And that’s what we did.

Is it true the cops came to the shoot?
At the first part of the shoot, we were shooting in a really upscale neighborhood at a really nice property. It was on like a hill overlooking a little section of the city—and the neighbors didn’t take kindly to seeing black people in their neighborhood, so they called the police. I guess the police didn’t take kindly to black people being in their city. They made it seem like some type of big commercial shoot and that we were doing something that was promotional. We told them what we were doing and that it was private, and they were like, “We don’t care.”

We said, “Well, you’re standing right here, and you see that there’s no noise. There’s no excessive traffic—there’s nothing going on that should be a problem with anybody, so why are you even here?” [The cops said], “If you guys don’t leave, somebody’s going to jail.”

I heard you left the shoot to hide from the cops. Is that true?
No, we didn’t go hide. We went and met at a [grocery store] parking lot to regroup and see where we were going to go finish the shoot at cause we were only halfway done. We just stopped there, and everybody ate a fucking popsicle.

You must have loved eating popsicles with porn stars. Who’s your favorite porn star? 
My favorite porn star is me. I’m in my mirror every day, and my second favorite porn star is Vanessa Del Rio. She got old, so she doesn’t do porn no more.

Who is your favorite girl from the video?
[This girl who] informed me that she does her porn in the butt. I don’t do in the butt too much though—that ain’t really my style—but she looks good. If she started doing it in other places besides the butt, then she’d probably be one of my favorites too. And then I liked the squirter girl.

Have you ever fucked a porn star?
That’s between me and me. You’re gonna have to ask me to find that out, and [I’m] not here.

You first met Pornhub’s marketing guy at the AVN Awards last year, right?
Me and [Pornhub’s marketer] hit it off really well. He’s cool as shit. Their whole staff, everybody I met, is about this life. Alexa was one girl there. She has a [degree] in something, but she’s sexy. When we first got to LA, it was the night before we did the shoot. We were sitting in one of the guy’s offices. I spilled some [tequila] on the desk, and Alexa said, “If you motorboat [tequila] off the desk, then I will do something.” I said, “If I motorboat this tequila off this desk, then I want you to stick that [vodka] bottle in yo cha-cha.” I motorboated it off the desk, and she did it! When I took it out, there was this other guy in the room, and he wanted to like lick it and eat the bottle with her.

Did it turn you on to watch her put the bottle in her vagina?
I’ve [seen] that before. I did that when I was like 15 or 16.

Wow Coolio. Your sex life sounds amazing!

Are you as horny as Coolio? Then check out Pornhub, Brazzers, and Pornhub Records.

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter. 

Based in Mariupol, Ukraine, the Azov Battalion is a volunteer militia allegedly linked to neo-Nazism. The fighters have been very active during the crisis in Eastern Ukraine, carrying out nightly patrols around the city and manning checkpoints. VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky recently embedded with the battalion while they trained and conducted a patrol, and then he watched as they retreated from their outposts when pro-Russia separatists began firing artillery toward the city.

Photos by Leonidas Toubanos 

Greek photographer Leonidas Toubanos grew up in Athens and lives in Scotland, but recently he's been spending time in Russia photographing the country’s LGBT community. Thanks to homophobic laws, the artist’s subjects face a hostile—and often violent—social environment. For this and other reasons, Toubanos calls his project Forbidden Identities. Wanting to learn more about the photos, I spoke to him about his subjects' difficult lives and the risks they took to participate in the project.

VICE: How did you end up photographing gay and lesbian couples in Russia?
Leonidas Toubanos: My aim is to create images of anthropological, social, and political interest. From my point of view, a society should depend on mutual understanding and aid for all of its members. Photography is used as a source of information for not only local but also for international current affairs as well. I believe that we, as image makers, have a duty to uncover all the aspects of a society—and definitely not just the positive ones. By bringing the negative ones into the public light, we contribute to the acknowledgement that it is something that society should improve.

How did you find your subjects?
I found the phone number of a LGBT community advocacy center on the internet, and I just made a phone call to their office in Saint Petersburg—I didn’t have any personal contacts. I explained to them the details of my project, and they sent emails to LGBT activists in Russia. I got positive answers from more than ten couples, plus some single LGBT members that were very keen to help me. One of them volunteered to help me with the production of my project and planned my trip in depth. She arranged all the appointments and also helped me with translation. Moreover, she tried to filter my meetings, because we were afraid of attacks by homophobic people. It is common for homophobic people to create an account in gay or lesbian chat sites and arrange appointments with them. We all know what happens next.

What’s daily life like for most of these people?
LGBT communities are very often at the center of criticism, as people with non-traditional sexual orientation are easy prey and treated as the scapegoat of society. Russia holds a special place even among countries with harsh conditions for LGBT members, as violent attacks and crimes occur almost on a daily basis. One girl told me that, at her current job, her manager asked her in her interview if she is a lesbian. She asks this question to everyone that they interview; they don’t accept gays or lesbians in her job. Another problem is the violent attacks from homophobic people—LGBT people can be beaten at any time if someone knows that they are gay.

Were your subjects concerned about the potential risks of appearing in the photographs?
Most of these people are activists, so their participation in my project is a way to protest against the law. But other participants asked me not to publish my project in Russia because they were afraid of losing their jobs or they didn’t want their relatives to know that they [identity as] gay or lesbian. It is a sensitive matter, and I have to be very careful regarding the distribution of my images. I am in touch with the participants, and I always ask them before a publication. My aim is to help them and not to create additional problems in their daily lives.

Did making these photographs put you at risk?
I don’t really think that I will have any problem. Maybe I will not visit Russia again. I know that what I am doing is right. I think the anti-LGBT propaganda laws and all these homophobic people are amoral. My only concerns were about the people that I photographed. I realized how brave they were, and that gives me courage. 

During the Sochi Olympics, the media paid attention to the issues facing Russia's LGBT community. In your opinion, has the media attention decreased since the Olympics ended?
I realized after the end of the Sochi Olympics that the interest of Western countries, and of the media in general, has not been the same. Nowadays, news changes rapidly, and I think that the problems that the LGBT community faces in Russia remain the same.

What are you ultimately trying to show in these images?
I am interested in developing a visual language that would push the viewer from the act of looking to the more important act of seeing—that would challenge [viewers'] preconceptions and force them to actively position themselves in the discourse of social matters. 

Jai, an epilepsy sufferer, during an EEG.

As the US edges closer towards marijuana decriminalization, Australia is resisting hard. Last week the country’s largest producer of medicinal cannabis, Tony Bower, was sentenced to a year’s jail, pending appeal. Bower is the man behind Mullaways Cannabinoid Tincture, which is an orally administered oil, given free of charge to around 400 clients, most of whom are epileptic children. Another supplier, the proprietor for The Don Medical Cannabis, is also appearing in court September 8. In summary, it’s a bad time for Australian prohibition reformists, and an even worse time for epileptic children.

Two questions emerge here: is medicinal cannabis is actually medicinal? And if so, will removing it adversely affect sick children. To find out, we spoke to some of the parents around the country who use the Mullaway tincture. Here’s what they said.

Melinda with her son, Mitchell.

VICE: So how did this all start?
Melinda: It started when Mitchell was nineteen months old. He had his first fit and was diagnosed with Lennox Gastaut Syndrome, which is a rare form of epilepsy. We tried all sorts of medications to stop the seizures—Epilim, Keppra and Clobazam—but the side effects were nearly as bad as the seizures. Headaches, excess drooling, unsteady feet, loss of appetite, shrinking gums, soft bones. If Mitchell fell over he’d break every bone in his body. That’s what ten years of Epilim does. Also instead of getting better, he was getting worse. He was having twenty seizures on a bad day, usually for three to five minutes each. I just couldn’t watch him suffer like that.

How did you arrive at marijuana?
Well, I was getting desperate so I started looking for answers online. I’d read about marijuana, but I’d never smoked and didn’t know anything about it. It took me a year to decide. Finally I thought fine, if I have to go that way, I will. I got the marijuana tincture from Tony, but I only gave him a tiny bit because I was nervous; I just didn’t think it would work.

And?
It sounds silly, but I noticed straight away. Mitchell had always been unsteady on his feet from the drugs, but from that one dose I saw a difference in how he walked. So we kept on trying it and now he only has two or three seizures a day, and only for a few seconds.  If you didn’t know him, you wouldn’t know they were seizures.

What will you do if Tony goes to jail?
I won’t stop using this. They can arrest who they want but I will do whatever it takes. To anyone who wants to stop me, I say let’s swap kids. Give me the healthy kid who goes to the movies, goes swimming, goes to Dreamworld; the kid who grows up and gets married. That’s all I want and I’ll do whatever it takes.

Cheri with her son Sean, and daughter Tara.

So you’ve got two children with epilepsy?
Cheri: Yes, Tara was diagnosed with epilepsy when she was six weeks old, but Sean was nine. We’d always thought there was something not quite right about him. He has autism and his teachers just thought he was daydreaming, but then sometimes I’d find that he’d fallen out of bed during the night. I thought what’s going on here? Then finally he had a seizure at school and we knew. He had epilepsy.

But it was Tara’s condition that made you consider cannabis?
Yeah, she’d been getting worse for a long time. Finally in 2012, after she’d been resuscitated eight times, we were told the end was coming. She’d probably have a final seizure in the next 24 months, and that would be it. That’s when we became desperate. We’d known about marijuana for a while but I’d always said no. Then a friend of ours, whose daughter died during a seizure, asked us, what do you have to lose?

You don’t look like it, but I’ll ask anyway, are you are a hippie?
Me? Absolutely not. I’ve just finished a Christian course to work as a Pastor, so that gives you an idea of how I feel about drugs. I’m not a hippie, or even a risk-taking person, and neither is my husband. In fact, when I received the tincture, I kept thinking that someone would show up at the door and take away my kids. But then I thought what are the police going to do? My daughter needs $1000 worth of medical attention every month. If they take her away, they’ll have to buy all that themselves.

What have your church friends said about this?
Everyone has been incredibly supportive. Although I’ve received angry calls from people outside of church, all who’ve had a drug related death in their own family. I just tell them that Tara is now 17 months seizure free, and it’s been 14 months for Sean. Down from thousands a year.

So what will you do if your suppliers are in jail?
I’m not sure. I know I’m prepared to break the law for my children, but I don’t want to lose my working with children certificate. It’s unfair that I have to choose.

Michelle and Andrew with their five children. Jai has epilepsy. (In the chair).

Hi Michelle, tell me, how you feel about drugs?
I’ve never touched recreational drugs. My husband is in the defense force, and I have a law degree so we’ve never broken the law. We’re a family of seven, and we’ve always put our foot down with drugs. But these aren’t recreational, they’re medical.

How do you see that distinction?
I see it because Mullaways Medical Cannabinoid tincture has been tested by the NSW Health Dept as a placebo dose of THC and THCA. Meaning it does not show up on testing. You can’t get stoned on a placebo dose. And then there’s the fact that it works as a medication. Our son Jai suffers from three different forms of epilepsy and two years ago, he’d got to the point where he was a zombie on the couch, wetting himself, completely incapacitated, and we knew we’d be soon burying him. An EEG was performed here in Brisbane—it’s basically a brain scan with lots of little electrodes attached to the head—and it showed a 92 percent seizure activity. You risk death at 100, so we knew we didn't have long. We then decided for a four week period to give Jai hemp seeds.

Why hemp seeds?
We thought about the tincture but it’s illegal, so we ended up getting the seeds. They’re legal for making into soaps, they just have a sticker warning against eating them. Australia and New Zealand are the only countries where it’s illegal to eat hemp seeds. Anyway, we gave Jai the hemp seeds for four weeks and then he had another EEG. He was down to 85 percent, which is the first time the seizures had ever gone down.

But he’s off the seeds now?
He’s off the hemp seeds now because he’s in remission. Epilepsy comes in cycles, and we just have to hope that next time, tincture will have been legalized.

Follow Julian on Twitter.