Everyone thought the Pink Panther gang would vanish—especially after the 2012 arrest of one of their leaders. Instead, the jewel thieves have started training new recruits as a way to take revenge on a world that they feel has robbed them blind.

The group, hailing from the former Yugoslavia, has stolen more than $350 million worth of jewelry in the past 15 years from the world's most exclusive jewelers, according to Interpol. Now, VICE takes you inside their secret world to learn their history and see how the jewel thieves train new recruits.

There's a shadow hanging over the sun-kissed greens at the Celtic Manor's golf course. The grim specter of the Islamic State looms heavy over the Nato summit. The jihadist group has, to a large extent, dictated the agenda of the event being held at the five-star resort in Newport and nearby Cardiff Castle. 

I wonder if the organizers could have guessed, when they announced the location of the 26th annual summit, that three young men from South Wales would fly to Syria to wage jihad. In the months before the summit, would-be extremists Aseel Muthana, Nasser Muthana and Reyaad Khan, were pictured enjoying a barbecue at a beauty spot just miles from where David Cameron and Barack Obama would later tuck into a stately banquet.

Fears that jihadi barbeques could become a regular occurrence around the summit led police to put in place a massive security operation, which saw Cardiff city center transformed into something that looks more like Berlin in 1961 or Belfast in 1972. A show of strength with steel fencing and armed police, which sent out a clear message: "Don't fuck with us." The whole summit could be seen as making the very same statement.

There was a giant tank parked on the fairway right next to the 18th hole. The roar of jets and helicopter rotary blades constantly passed overhead. A fleet of soldiers drove by in golf carts, there were soldiers at every turn, some of whom looked pretty on edge. 

Outside the media center, police were showing off their attack dogs. Bomb disposal experts displayed the latest anti-IED technology and army medics simulated battlefield surgery on "hyper realistic dummy." A team of surgeons battled to stem the flow of fake blood from the prosthetic limbs. "It's very realistic," one of them assured me.

I headed inside the media center which is slowly filling with the 1,500 odd reporters in attendance.

On the TVs inside, the headlines were dominated by the murder of Steven Sotloff—a man who lost his life trying to find light in the darkness. The room was already packed with producers, presenters and other miscellaneous media types. I imagine that for a lot of us this was the closest we will ever come to a war zone.

Everyone seemed to be waiting for pool cards—passes which allow you to attend a string of carefully orchestrated media opportunities. No one knew when they would be given out and who was going to get one. It appeared that one of the key security tactics was to keep everyone in a state of confusion until the last possible moment. The whole pool system is basically engineered to keep you away from anything you may actually want to report on.

One of the hundreds of volunteers told me, "It's all for security, it has to be done in this very bureaucratic way, there is absolutely no free movement. Some people think they can get around it but that's no going to cut much ice with a guy wielding a machine gun. That's why there are so many volunteers some of us are very busy, for them these two days are a living nightmare. Others, like myself, are trying to set the world coffee drinking record."

I walked to the Lodge, the luxurious clubhouse, which overlooked the sprawling course with its freshly raked sand bunkers and perfectly trimmed putting greens. The BBC's political editor Nick Robinson and his team were stationed here. His producer was trying to secure him exclusive access to the defense ministers' dinner at Cardiff Castle. 

Robinson was admiring the collection of armored vehicles parked on the course. "It's like a grown up [mini] golf," he said. His producer seemed less impressed. She had already been hit by a flying golf ball while looking for places to film.

Later in the evening Obama touched down in his Marine One helicopter. It was the second time the American president has managed to find himself on a golf course in the immediate aftermath of an Islamic State decapitation video. After the death of James Foley he was photographed teeing off just after a press conference condemning the killing. This time around I doubt he found time for a putt.

As the world leaders arrived for a day of talks they were all welcomed by Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones and Welsh Secretary Stephen Crabb MP. Jones looked suitably star struck when he met Obama. As the pair shook hands his wide eyes screamed "never washing this hand again!" Petro Poroshenko, the President of Ukraine, which has been trying to join NATO to Russia's chagrin, was a special guest. The Chocolate King looked like a melted Billy Fury with a greying quiff and anxious jowls. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and King Abdullah II of Jordan were also in attendance, attending talks about how to combat IS.

Once the world leaders have arrived it's time for them to pose, like children on their first day of school, for a “family photograph”. The family photograph is one of the more cuddly euphemisms deployed—letting everyone know who is “in” and, perhaps more importantly, which nations don’t qualify to be part of the world’s elite club.

On the morning the NATO conference opened, David Cameron was heard on Radio 4 describing Bashar al-Assad's Syria as an illegal government against which military action would be morally justified. His opening address teed up further pariahs. "We meet here at a solemn moment for our alliance and for the security of our nations," he said. "We meet at a crucial moment in the history of our alliance and we face new dangers and evolving threats and it's absolutely clear that NATO is as vital to our future as it has been to our past. Russian troops are illegally in Ukraine. The extremist Islamist threat has risen anew in Iraq and Syria. NATO is the anchor of our security and in the next two days we must reinvigorate and reform this alliance to tackle new threats and ensure it continues to foster stability around the world."

As the first day of the summit drew to a close the press tent is full of dark mutterings of “bomb Syria and bomb Iraq”.

Meanwhile NATO are patting themselves on the back over the job they've done in Afghanistan and have just announced the launch a new website about how great Afghanistan is now, called Return to Hope, which sounds like a bad Stars Wars sequel. Parts of it are equally as fictitious.  

It seems interventionism is back in fashion and Nato's “success” in Afghanistan could be a model for the whole region. Maybe Islamic State's decapitating, Yazidi slaughtering, female genital mutilating horde represents such a fundamental threat to our way of life that the only reasonable response is extreme force. Then again, why did Nato welcome representatives from Saudi Arabia, which has done much to promote Islamic extremism and carries out public beheadings, in May to discuss “outreach” in Middle East?

But as Operation Ismay, the 9,000 strong police presence in Newport and Cardiff demonstrated, IS is also a threat from within—with British born Muslims leaving our shores to fight to form a caliphate and then returning with combat experience and even more zeal than before. I guess there are some problems you can't just bomb away. 

A woman is detained by police for fighting near the scene of a shooting. Photos by Alex Wroblewski / Chicago Sun-Times

It’s 1:30 AM on the morning of July 5, and we’re flying down the expressway at 90 miles an hour. Someone has just been shot near West 63rd Street and South Austin Avenue—we know this from the Twitter accounts operated by police-scanner geeks and our own $50 RadioShack scanner, set to one of the many dispatch channels operated by the Chicago Police Department. All evening the device has been crackling with a constant stream of out-of-breath cops spitting out the addresses and conditions of victims. This is just our latest target in the middle of a long night.

Sitting in the driver’s seat is Alex Wroblewski, a 27-year-old Chicago Sun-Times contract photographer who spends his summer weekends chasing the voices that burst through his scanner’s cheap speaker, trying to get to the scenes before anyone else in order to capture the rawest images. With him is Sun-Times staff reporter Sam Charles, who’s on hand to pull quotes out of whatever cops and victims he runs into. In the 12 hours I’ll spend with Alex on this Independence Day weekend, we’ll travel to a dozen of these scenes, a fraction of the total carnage that will take place in the city. From Thursday night to Monday morning, 82 Chicagoans will have been shot and 14 killed, including five people—two of them boys under the age of 17—gunned down by police for making threats or refusing to drop their handguns. It’s an especially bad stretch of time for a city some have dubbed “Chiraq,” a nickname that causes Alex and Sam to groan.

“The term ‘Chiraq’ is a fucked-up point of pride for too many people in the city,” Sam says. “It’s disrespectful to our city as a whole and to the people of Iraq. Too many out-of-town stupid media outlets—VICE included, frankly—have parroted the term to give it undeserved credibility and staying power.”

Sam, a 24-year-old Chicago native, doesn’t get to hit the streets as often as he’d like. Usually he’s stuck on the Sun-Times’ breaking-news desk. Tonight, though, he’s out here to “capture the spirit of the thing,” as he puts it, while two editors back at the office work with the CPD News Affairs desk to get official statements and stats, the body count.

“It sucks this city has to be as violent as it is,” Sam says. “But that’s the breaks.”

The increasing gulf between the rich and the poor in the US is especially apparent in Chicago, where the headline–grabbing violence is mostly restricted to the economically depressed parts of town. The affluent white neighborhoods to the north remain relatively safe and insulated against the agonies devouring the West and South sides.

We arrived at our first scene of the night around 6 PM, a few minutes after an 18-year-old man had taken a bullet to the gut. This was in West Englewood, on the South Side, one of the most violent neighborhoods in the city. At a nearby rowdy block party, kids shot off fireworks in the street, narrowly avoiding the resulting bottle-rocket shrapnel.

“There’s nothing down there,” Alex said of West Englewood. “No good schools, no jobs, no grocery stores, nothing.”

There are also no white people there, a testament to the decades of de facto segregation in Chicago. At most scenes, Alex, Sam, and I are the only white people not in a CPD uniform. The racial tension isn’t hidden; it’s right on the surface. One cop told us to stay out of District 7, a CPD-demarcated area that includes Englewood and West Englewood, because “the blacks are really aggressive there, and you’re three white faces.” At the West Englewood shooting, a white cop argued with a visibly drunk black woman after he told her to turn down her music (Chris Brown’s “Run It!”).

“How you gonna tell us how to enjoy our holiday?” she yelled at the cop.

“It’s everybody’s holiday,” he replied. “Not just yours.”

In the early evening, the neighborhoods we cruised were covered in a mist of smoke from barbecues and fireworks—small ones that sounded like .25-caliber pistols, rapid-fire ones that chattered like assault rifles, big ones that resembled mortar blasts. As darkness enveloped the streets, the orange glow from downtown illuminated the sky above the vacant, overgrown lots that loom on so many corners.  

Near one such intersection, Alex and I stumbled upon a home that had just been raided by police. A boy cried as his father was arrested, pleading with the cops: “Officers, can I please give my daddy a hug?” Police said someone at the home had been firing a gun into the air to celebrate Independence Day, giving them cause to raid the house and seize its weapons and drugs.

“It was a good hit,” a cop smoking a Marlboro Light in the middle of the street said. He looked on edge, rattled by adrenaline. He told us what we’d heard over and over again that night: “You guys be careful out here. It’s a fucking war zone.”

The 10000 block of S. Normal Ave., where a person was shot and killed

The action dies down sometime after 4 AM, and we drop Sam off at the newsroom, his shift halfway over—now he has to write some copy. Alex is on the tail end of a 12-hour stretch of trying to get something “fresh,” an image that could represent the pointlessness and horror of the violence that thousands of Chicagoans have to live with daily. He’s been a few minutes behind all night and come up empty.

On the drive home he turns the scanner off and throws his press pass in the backseat just a few minutes before we come across the scene of a horrific car wreck on Lake Shore Drive, a winding stretch of highway hugging the contours of Lake Michigan. A sedan lies absolutely crushed after slamming into a concrete bridge support, and the driver’s head is just barely visible in the early-morning light, protruding from the mangled wreckage. Eyes closed. Lifeless.

A man in the backseat is stuck inside, reaching out the window for the door handle, screaming in pain. There’s another person, less visible, in the passenger seat. A collection of drivers who have stopped, including an undercover cop, are telling the man in the backseat to calm down and wait for the paramedics and firefighters to arrive. Alex bides his time. Without his press pass in hand he doesn’t have proof that he’s a representative of the Fourth Estate and not some amateur ghoul. He’s caught between two identities, expressing genuine concern for the injured passengers and the dead driver while simultaneously calculating the ethics involved in taking photos here. This isn’t technically a crime scene. Yet.

As the sun rises over the lake, fire trucks, cop cars, and ambulances begin to arrive. After a long, fruitless night of chasing, Alex beat everyone here by accident, and he’s in perfect position—the authorities are doing their job trying to save this man’s life, so it’s time for him to do his. As firefighters begin cutting the vehicle apart to save the passengers, Alex turns and sprints to his car and is back in moments, camera in hand.

Justin Glawe is a freelance journalist based in Peoria, Illinois. He writes about crime there, and recently launched a reporting project that will address issues of child welfare on the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation.

More of Alex's photos below:

Family members of a man who was shot by police talk to the press.

Cops rush to the scene after hearing gunshots near 80th St. and Muskegon Ave.

Winters in Chicago are too cold and too long for its people to survive without getting fucked up all the time. Similarly, the summers in Illinois are so painfully short that living there means you have to squeeze all of your outside fun and debauchery into just a couple of months per year. It seems like a pretty shitty deal, until you realize how cheap the rent is compared to New York or LA.

I've hated this city and I've loved this city. I've moved now, but I already miss it. Mostly because Brooklyn doesn’t have any alleys and it looks like I'm finally going to get a public urination ticket.

See more of Adam's work here.

Does your town or city qualify for paradise status? Send your pitches here. Don't be shy.

Mossless in America is a column featuring interviews with documentary photographers. The series is produced in partnership with Mossless magazine, an experimental photography publication run by Romke Hoogwaerts and Grace Leigh. Romke started Mossless in 2009, as a blog in which he interviewed a different photographer every two days; since 2012 the magazine has produced two print issues, each dealing with a different type of photography. Mossless was featured prominently in the landmark 2012 exhibition Millennium Magazine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; it is supported by Printed Matter, Inc. Its third issue, a major photographic volume on American documentary photography from the last ten years, titled The United States (2003–2013), was published last May.

Can body cameras stop them from committing acts of brutality? Photo via Flickr user Ed Yourdon

If nothing else, this summer from hell has put out-of-control policing front and center in the American conversation. Once Staten Island resident Eric Garner was killed by an NYPD officer's apparently illegal choke hold in July, the floodgates opened and flagrant civil liberties violations seemed to be all around us. The deluge culminated in the macabre spectacle that was the the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and its cartoonishly militarized aftermath. Now Ferguson cops are wearing cameras in a nod to concerns about their treatment of black citizens in the St. Louis suburb; such devices are already used (at least on a trial basis) in cities like Los Angeles, Oakland, Las Vegas, and Seattle. And on Thursday, embattled New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton announced that the NYPD would launch its own camera pilot program. But how big of a deal is it for local police to sport a recording device, and more importantly, do cameras actually reduce police brutality?

It's tempting to think that, like so many other problems in modern life, we can just invent some new technology–or in this case, adapt it—to meet our needs. Need a date? Fire up Tinder. Need a ride? Get an Uber. Worried about date rape? Just coat your nails with special polish. Hungry, stoned, and don't want to leave your couch? There's plenty of apps for that, too. Police cameras seem to promise a similar brand of instant relief. Presumably, your average beat cop is less likely to go on a power trip and beat a vulnerable person senseless if he thinks he might have to explain the video to a grand jury afterward. But slapping cameras on police officers' lapels is no panacea, and presents all sorts of tricky questions about privacy in this era of unchecked state surveillance. Besides, we know that, by way of example, cops in Albequerque, New Mexico, went ahead and killed a mentally ill homeless man on tape last year despite the officers' cameras. Remember, Rodney King was beat on tape (and so was Garner, for that matter)—for all the good it did him.

Police in major metropolitan areas seem just as anxious to have a map of everything civilians are doing at any given time as they are to ease up on the brutality. In fact, proponents for cameras on cops make that very argument: Police should welcome more documentation of their activities so that anti-cop agitators can't claim harassment or mistreatment when none occurred. 

"Body cameras ought to be a win-win for both the police and the communities they serve as long as their use is limited to police interactions and addressing complaints of abuse or wrongdoing," Donne Lieberman, head of the ACLU in NYC, said in a statement. "But we also have concerns about mission creep and privacy. The NYPD has a long history of engaging in surveillance of innocent New Yorkers, and body cameras can’t become yet another tool for massive police surveillance." Most notoriously, the NYPD has systematically spied on Muslims for over a decade now, with some of the cameras pointed at mosques easily visible in broad daylight. (One part of that spying program was shuttered to great fanfare earlier this year, but Muslim activists are confident surveillance of their friends and neighbors is ongoing.)

It's also rather convenient for Bratton to be making a show of the camera program, given that a court order stemming from his predecessor Ray Kelly's stop-and-frisk regime forced the cops to give it a try. The plan is to outfit 60 officers with cameras in neighborhoods where allegations of harassment are particularly common, the same neighborhoods at the center of the stop-and-frisk lawsuit (that includes the part of Staten Island where Garner was killed). So this isn't so much a gesture of accountability as it is a political response to a summer of rage.

"This kind of unilateral decision on the part of the NYPD follows the non-transparent, go-it-alone approach to police reform we saw with the prior NYPD and mayoral administration," according to Darius Charney, attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the stop-and-frisk lawsuit.

There's hope that Bratton is sincere in his desire to test and then expand this program, since during his time as LAPD commissioner he helped get a chunk of that department's cars get outfitted with cameras (though only now is the LAPD experimenting with actual body devices). But the commissioner (along with mayor Bill de Blasio) keeps whining about technological hurdles, like buying all the necessary cloud server space to store the videos. That raises another issue: How secure will the footage be, given that photos can be stolen from such servers by savvy hackers? And Bratton hasn't released details about when NYPD cops will be required to turn the cameras on, suggesting they'll have plenty of leeway depending on what kind of a mood they're in that day.

What we still don't know is whether the NYPD, which is such a far-reaching law enforcement agency that it maintains a presence in other countries, is simply trying to step up its surveillance game. It's not exactly comforting that the same private police foundation that funds the department's foreign counterterrorism bureaus is ponying up the cash for the cameras. In the end, body cams aren't necessarily about protecting civil liberties, brutality complaints, or frivolous lawsuits. They might just be about getting more electronic eyes out there.  

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

All photos via Becca Lemire.
Unless you live in Toronto and routinely collect bounties on lost cats, you probably don't get your information from telephone poles, which means you probably missed the posters for the High Park marijuana scavenger hunt. The ads were simple: text a number, get a map, and hunt for weed.

They began appearing around Toronto months ago, crediting an organization known as the “MIB” or Marijuana Info Bureau, who allegedly dispense free weed prizes daily. While the group’s borrowed logo from the 1997 Will Smith classic Men in Black, a sufficient amount of pot leaves decorating their colourless photocopied flyer, and the hashtag #FreeWeed all indicate the work of fully functioning stoners, the likelihood that a public weed scavenger hunt would actually take place seemed highly implausible.

Despite the apparent sketchiness of the whole operation, however, Chris, the man behind MIB, was incredibly easy to find.

After his secretary passed him his cell phone, Chris was able to offer a bit of an understanding as to how this all works. Firstly, for legal reasons, there's no actual pot at these events, instead participants scavenge vouchers for a total of $25,000 worth of weed paraphernalia like free bongs, pipes, rolling papers, vaporizers, and edibles as well as coupons for discounted weed. In order to get the pot you do need medical clearance, but as Chris explained, this is actually easier to obtain than most people think.

“People are still confused about what they need to qualify, most people think they need cancer or serious illness, but under the new program you can qualify with trouble eating, trouble sleeping, migraines, menstrual cramps, stress. Just plain old anxiety will get you qualified for a prescription.”

These two stoners won as big as they dressed.
So if all it takes is a stubbed toe or a serious case of FOMO to get a medical marijuana prescription, what's stopping everyone from exploiting the system? “It is up to doctors,” Chris offers. “You will get an evaluation, so if they feel like your symptoms aren’t real you won't get one. Realistically though people can qualify for many minor reasons.” If your doctor’s being a narc about it though, Chris is all too happy to refer you to his own doctor, who has helped many patients get their ‘scripts.

Chris—who can be seen in full medical marijuana fairy mode in this video from a hunt at Christie Pitts Park—receives medical pot himself for a blood-cell deficiency known as cytosis condition. He funds these events with the profits from “The Toronto Friends of Marijuana,” a compassion club that offers various strains of cannabis from licensed dispensaries in Vancouver, for purchase to those with a membership and a doctor approved diagnosis.

Many of the MIB weed hunt's attendees showed up in their Sunday's best.
These compassion clubs are not part of the federal medical cannabis program and their role within the marijuana distribution system is still being debated—and you can watch our short documentary piece on a particularly rowdy compassion club that was raided by Vancouver Police in the summer of this year. These clubs operate in a strange, lawless grey-zone in which they offer services for cheaper than licensed producer prices (i.e., the legal weed factories that the government authorizes to grow for patients).

“The whole purpose of doing these treasure hunts is to raise awareness about compassion clubs,” Chris says.

Whatever the cause, the event went ahead as promised. Participants came out on a sunny Sunday afternoon to scour the park for one of the many hidden prizes. As groups of stoner-chic teens drifted past me with their treasure maps in hand, I got the feeling that they weren’t learning anything about compassion clubs that day—but at least they were out of the house.

All of the park's greenery makes it hard to find the good stuff.
The disparate teams of chronic-hunters, which I would estimate in number between 50 and 100, seemed in good spirits, and without any organizers or rallying points set up, it would have been impossible to tell that anything of this nature was even taking place. When I came across two dudes poking into a recycling bin, I asked how their search was going. One somberly explained that someone had come first thing in the morning and found most of the prizes. But they weren’t going home empty handed—and flashed me a stack of MIB cards that entitled them to weed lollipops and cookies.

While these two pals were more inclined to find a chill place to hang out and smoke their own easily accessible weeds that day, I began to realize that the real treasure lay not in hidden black envelopes, but in the bonding experience we'd all just shared. Redeeming the prizes was another mission in itself, as you have to once again text a provided number and arrange a meet up. You may be better off just texting your dealer, but still, these hunts offer a higher chance of free weed and paraphernalia than most days at the park do.

Since quitting his job at a long distance phone call provider for the no brainer choice of organizing events like stoned dodgeball, Chris has made running weed hunts and MIB in general his full-time occupation: “Half the weeks I'm happy if I break even,” he told me. “But this feels like the best work I've ever done.”

With more events planned for fall, including a Halloween hunt at Canada's Wonderland, the organization will continue its mission of bleeding money and spreading the accessibility of medical weed.

Find them on Twitter and Instagram.

GAP shirt, American Apparel shorts

All good things come to an end. But it'd be weird to think that good things have a monopoly on ending; shitty things end too, only with those it's usually down to you to call them off.

If your boyfriend has become a shitty thing in your life, then it's time to tourniquet that creep. Here's how to do it in seven easy steps (each of them inspired by the good people at WikiHow).

PHOTOS BY ғ ʀ ᴇ ᴇ ʟ ᴀ ɴ ᴅ ɢ ᴏ ʀ s ᴇ 人間 キャプチャー
STYLING: KYLIE GRIFFITHS

Stylist assistant: Thomas Ramshaw and Hannah Gooding
Hair and Makeup: Lydia Warhurst using Mac Cosmetics and Tigi Bedhead
Makeup Assistant: Amelia Ferrari
Models: Alex and Kevin at FM, Charlie at M+P

Words: Elektra Kotsoni

Timberland T-shirt; Motel dress, Topshop choker 

STEP 1. MAKE SURE YOU WANT TO BREAK UP WITH YOUR BOYFRIEND

A feeling of utter disgust in his presence; avoiding his kisses; rolling your eyes at his jokes; creating arguments out of thin air about how fucking much you hate soup just so he leaves you alone. If two or more of these things sound like you right now, then it's time you make a break. It's one thing to split up with someone; it's another to carpet-bomb all his happy memories of young love with the image of you screaming at him in the street because he had the gall to make you minestrone for "dinner."

If you're still not sure, think long and hard: What are his most annoying habits? Everyone has her own irritation threshold. Maybe you'd kick a sweet guy to the curb just because he occasionally picks his nose; maybe for you it takes more, like him "sleepwalking" into your roommates' bed after a heavy midweek FIFA session.

There are a billion reasons to break up with someone. The main thing to get straight in your head is whether or not that reason really matters to you. Be selfish; the world is a lonely place, and it's about to turn cold and gray again. Before you commit to being alone this winter, you should be 100 percent certain that you hate your boyfriend's guts.

Vintage overalls, jacket and T-shirt from Beyond Retro, Topshop choker

STEP 2. MAKE YOUR BOYFRIEND THINK BREAKING UP WAS HIS IDEA

Now that you've made your decision, it's time to make him think it was really his all along. Maybe he "hasn't been happy for ages anyway," maybe you're "about to undergo genital-warts removal surgery," maybe he's simply "too good" for you. 

Turn those arguments into a brief speech, write it down, and take it with you wherever you go so that you can memorize it while you're on the bus or busy "clearing your head" with vodka in your favorite out-of-town friend's bedroom.

Vintage jacket from Beyond Retro; Timberland T-shirt, American Apparel hoodie, vintage jeans

STEP 3. CHOOSE AN APPROPRIATE TIME AND PLACE TO BREAK THE NEWS TO YOUR BOYFRIEND

Don't do it by text or at home—both can lead to kissing, and you don't want that because just being around him makes your stomach feel like someone shat in it, remember?

So choose a public space where it's impossible for him to make a scene. A pub is always a good idea, because getting drunk will lower your inhibitions and you will progressively give less and less of a fuck about his feelings. It's basically like those first dates when you had to get plastered to even dare hold his gaze, only in reverse—it's all come full circle!

Another decent choice would be taking him to the movies, because that way you reduce the risk of him coming prepared and wasting your time trying to win you back. He won't have the slightest idea he's about to get the boot—what kind of psycho breaks up with someone at the movies? Break the news to him during the trailers, then enjoy the movie and his silence.

Wherever you do it, make sure you have very strict plans afterwards—preferably with a family member so you can't change them at the last minute because he's too sad.

Calvin Klein T-shirt; Lazy Oaf T-shirt, vintage jeans from Beyond Retro, vintage shoes  

STEP 4. LOOK GREAT

Ensure you look good enough to make him rue what he'll be missing but not hot enough for him to start crying and end up ruining your after-cinema plans with your mom.

Keep it simple: Minimal makeup, jeans, and a nice T-shirt that accentuates your best features will make the transition from break-up convo to visiting grandma at the care home as smooth as your armpit on the first day of shaving.

Calvin Klein T-shirt

STEP 5. BREAK UP WITH YOUR BOYFRIEND

Revise your notes on the way to the pub, the cinema, or the spa. Once you get there, take a deep breath and kiss your boyfriend. I know the thought of his saliva on your face makes you wanna start slapping at your breasts, but you are about to give him a lifetime of insecurities and random complexes he didn't even know he could have. Be nice.

Have a couple of shots, take a deep breath, and start reciting your little speech. Look earnest but be adamant. Don't let him speak too much, or he'll interrupt your train of thought. Dumping someone doesn't really have to be awkward, so long as you don't give a shit.

Calvin Klein T-shirt; Lazy Oaf T-shirt 

STEP 6. RUN

Literally, run as soon as you are finished breaking up with your boyfriend. You're finally free of that loser; you're alive again; there is so much for you to do.

STEP 7. TIPS

–If you for whatever reason you do still find him attractive, text him later to say, "Thank you for understanding and paying for my tickets and popcorn and my taxi back home." This will make it OK for you to booty-call him in the future after lonely nights out.

–Know who your rebound is going to be before you break up. The fact you temporarily castrated an otherwise functioning young man doesn't mean you don't deserve love and affection yourself. We're all human.

Please don't email me to tell me that my "mom is a slut." Look at the nice photos, get some sartorial inspiration for your next date, and check out more of Freel and Gorse's work instead.

Follow Elektra on Twitter.

David Futrelle, whose site We Hunted the Mammoth has been tracking online misogyny

Californian blogger Anita Sarkeesian is one of the most famous cultural critics on the internet. Her Kickstarter to make a video series about “tropes vs. women in video games” was a huge success back in 2012 and raised much more than the $6,000 she had originally asked for. Her videos are some of the most thorough and well-researched examinations about gaming we’ve ever seen. It’s feminist criticism at its best: smart, witty, and intelligible to anyone who has spent time on YouTube.

Her work has also triggered one of the most violent abuse campaigns of recent internet history. Since her campaign took off, Sarkeesian has been blasted with misogynist bullshit: rape and death threats, Wikipedia vandalism, and even a game called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian. (It’s all detailed here.) Last week, Sarkeesian had to leave her home and notify police after someone sent her and her family very credible threats.

Sarkeesian isn’t the only feminist critic on the internet experiencing this. Other commentators are reporting violent reactions, and even male allies on the sidelines are getting sprayed with the hate shower. But Sarkeesian is the most prominent case, and she’s not stopping anytime soon. She is still posting her thoughtful videos, just as she has planned all along.

To understand what’s been going on, I spoke to David Futrelle, who has tracked anti-feminism, the Men’s Rights Movement, and the campaigns against Sarkeesian and other women on his blog We Hunted the Mammoth.

VICE: Who are the people harassing and threatening Anita Sarkeesian? It seems like it’s an organized action.
David Futrelle: It’s what I like to call the new misogyny—basically a large amorphous internet subculture that is consumed with hating and attacking women. Some of these people call themselves men’s rights activists and portray what they are doing as somehow beneficial for men. Others call themselves “men going their own way,” the basic premise being that they want to live independently of women but end up talking most of the time about how terrible women are. That whole subculture is very heavily represented among gamers and on websites like Reddit.

So is this mostly coming out of Men’s Rights Activism circles?
I don’t think the harassment against Sarkeesian is all done by men’s rights activists, but it comes out of this subculture. And the people in this subculture share some basic obsessions.

Like what?
One thing that happens again and again: They define certain cultural spaces as being properly male only and then go after women—women in general but often individual women—who they see as interlopers invading what they feel should be their safe space. You see this in general discussions about women and tech and women going into STEM fields. But also in other fields like atheist activism. For whatever reason that seems to draw a lot of very misogynistic guys too. Women like Rebecca Watson, who has talked about sexism in these spaces, face an enormous amount of harassment and abuse.

What did Rebecca Watson do?
That’s a good question. In most of these cases, if you look at it closely, what the woman being targeted has done turns out to be either nothing or something that has been exaggerated in all sorts of bizarre ways. Something that normal people wouldn’t see as provocation. In the case of Rebecca Watson, she was at the World Atheist Conference in 2011 and, after her return, posted a vlog in which she talked about her experience of sexism at the conference. Some guy followed her on the elevator and hit on her, asking her to come to his room. This was later known as the “elevator incident." Because of this she faced years and years of violent harassment.

So basically the “crime” these women commit is to call out sexism in a field that some men feel is their turf.
Yes. Watson’s case is really very similar to Sarkeesian's in that if you look at what the charges against her are, and you trace it back to the beginning, you see that there is really no argument. Basically people accuse her of scamming the public by raising a lot of money for her video series. These guys were harassing her before she even raised that money, and the fact that she was able to raise so much money was due to feminists particularly rallying around her because she was facing harassment for just proposing this.

Sarkeesian’s videos are very well researched. She’s not going for effect, but makes very sure to show lots of examples for any kind of sexist structure she is trying to point out in games. Why does this seemingly very levelheaded and not terribly offensive criticism still get people so angry?
Exactly. If you actually look at her videos, you see that she is not trying to censor games; she makes that very clear. She is critically analyzing them. But she is being made into some kind of demon when she is actually presenting a very straightforward and not very controversial set of arguments about the way sexist violence and sexism in general are prevalent in video games, which is pretty obvious to anyone who has spent any time playing video games.

So why all the anger?
What gets them really angry is when a feminist closes the comments on their YouTube videos or on their website. To them, that is an assault on free speech. So they harass her because she won’t let them harass her on YouTube, basically.

The extent of the vitriol is something that I don’t fully understand. My basic explanation, if I have one, is it’s a backlash against the successes of feminism since the 90s. Feminism has made progress redefining some things that men took for granted, such as sexual harassment and date rape. So I think it’s a backlash on what a lot of these guys see as restrictions on what they can say, how they can interact with women in a sexual way, and the idea that there may be consequences if they commit domestic violence. It’s mostly sexual resentment, the fact that they can’t get away with what guys used to be able to get away with with women, and that makes them very frustrated. Frankly I think a lot of them would prefer it if they could just go back to the way it was: Get women drunk and have sex with them. Without having the culture say, “Hey, this is date rape." And:  “Your office jokes are actually sexual harassment.”

For a lot of these guys their experience of feminism is being denied to do what they want to do. Maybe they had to go to a seminar about sexual harassment or they had to sit through a presentation on date rape in college. 

The other thing is women starting to move into these areas that these guys have just decided that they want to claim for men. They don’t want women to come into gaming and tell them not to call women whores when they are playing Call of Duty.

So the extent of the violence is a sign that feminism is actually winning, in the sense that it is calling out sexism and rallying to ban it?
Yes, you could say that. But at the same time I think that this backlash is a threat to the victories of feminism. Because of the nature of online culture and the anonymity it offers, you see these virtual mobs forming very quickly. And I do think it’s a threat to the gains that feminism has made in a wider culture, because a lot of women know that if they go online and talk about feminism, they will have to deal with an entire army of these guys showing up and harassing them.

So this is a free speech issue, in the sense that women on the internet who are trying to exercise this right by expressing feminist ideas are facing rape and death threats.
And not just women. As someone who writes about men’s rights activism on a regular basis, I get harassed as well. Some of it is awful, but what I get is really nothing compared with the kind of relentless harassment that Sarkeesian gets. I got death threats the other day after writing about her, and it’s very telling that the only time this happens is when I write about her. Guys get so mad at her that they are even threatening to kill people who defend her. Other people from the gaming community and beyond who have spoken out for Sarkeesian, like Joss Whedon, have faced similar attacks.

And it’s not just Sarkeesian or Watson. There’s lot of other women out there. Chanty Binx, a Canadian activist, got into an argument with some men’s rights activists a few years ago and yelled at them. She has been harassed ever since. It becomes a civil rights issue. Women, when they want to talk about anything concerning gender, face this kind of vicious harassment, and it does have a chilling effect. It takes a lot of courage for people like Sarkeesian to carry on and keep on doing the type of work that she’s doing.

In Germany there have recently been some similarly violent attacks against scientists researching gender. It’s always the same pattern.
If you talk to the people threatening Sarkeesian, they all feel completely justified. They are saying: She is trying to destroy gaming, so we have to destroy her. Women—mostly women—are getting targeted for critiques of sexism. When people write movie reviews, they don’t get death threats from movie fans. But feminist cultural critics writing about games do. Men’s right’s activists think like abusers. They actually do nothing to help out men who are having difficulty in society. They talk a lot about how men get killed more often. But basically all their “activism” is finding women they can scapegoat and attacking them. They go after academics, critics, individual people they see at demonstrations.

Do you think it’s a conscious strategy intended to make these women shut up?
Not for all the guys. Some actually do want to argue with her. Mostly they just want to force her to pay attention to them. A lot of times these guys will pick a woman and send her a list of questions and say, “You, as a representative of feminism, will have to answer all these question about feminism for me!” And if they decline to do it, they harass them and call them cowards. The guy who made the “Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian” game, when people asked why he made that, later said he thought it would get her attention and make her engage in a discussion with him. Which is funny, because if someone would make a game about beating me up, I would be less inclined to talk to them.

But for a lot of them it is a very conscious strategy to shut women up, and this is something you see a lot from men’s rights sites. The leading site A Voice For Men regularly goes after individual women they don’t like and spreads terrible lies about them. They say, “We don’t want to shut all women up, but feminists, if you keep posting, we are going to keep doing this and fuck your shit up."

When Elliot Rodger went on his killing spree in Santa Barbara earlier this year, his “manifesto” was full of the misogynist rhetoric found on the men’s rights sites. Their radical hatred of women was the ideological basis for his violence. Do we have to be worried about someone actually pulling a gun on a feminist critic or making true on the rape threats?
Aside from the very loopy stuff in Rodger's manifesto, most of what he wrote, if he had posted it in on a men's rights message board, people wouldn’t have batted an eye lash at. If you looked at his videos, you’d think this guy is a joke. He sounded like an actor trying his best to play some super villain, but he actually went out and shot people.

A lot of people are trying to blow off these threats, saying things like, "Oh, people threaten me all the time. Doesn’t mean they are going to act on it." But the fact is, it’s impossible to know. And threats directed at women from men—there are legitimate worries that those might be real. When a guy is threatened with rape, he doesn’t actually say, “Oh, that has me worried." At least outside of prison men don’t spend any amount of their time worrying about rape. But rape is something that women worry about. And some of these guys have the mentality of stalkers. When you look at men who stalk romantic partners, a lot of times it ends in violence. So there is a very real threat.

But regardless of actual physical violence, just the threats in themselves already do an incredible amount of damage.

In terms of psychological violence?
Yes, or threatening their reputation. Many of these men are trying to manipulate the Google results. Antifeminist activists very clearly try to harass women by making sure that all sorts of nasty things show up in their Google results. They say: We try to fuck things up for them and make sure they don’t get hired in the future.

Follow Chris Köver on Twitter.

David Thorpe sounds gay. And, though Thorpe is gay, for a long time, it really bothered him. But it bothered him more that he was bothered at all. So he decided to make a documentary about it. He talked to voice coaches and linguists about how and why some people “sound gay.” He worked hard to “sound straight.” He interviewed historians about the cultural history of the gay voice. And he talked to famous gay celebrities, like Tim Gunn, Dan Savage, and David Sedaris, about accepting how you sound and who you really are. 

I met up with Thorpe and Dan Savage during the Toronto International Film Festival to discuss Thorpe's debut feature documentary, Do I Sound Gay? We were seated in a crowded restaurant at the Intercontinental Hotel in Toronto and, after we all got over our excitement that Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany were sitting behind us (at least we thought it was them), we talked about what it means to “sound gay,” the use of the gay voice in kids movies, and one particularly contentious Louis C.K. skit.

VICE: When you set out to make this film, what did you want to accomplish? And how did that change over the course of making the film?
David Thorpe: I wanted to come to terms with my voice, whatever that meant. I broke up with a boyfriend, I had no confidence and I was on this trip to Fire Island that I should have been excited about, but instead of being excited, all I could think about was how much I hated the voices of the chattering gay men around me. That felt like a real low point for me, because I fought so hard to come out and embrace being gay, and I've really fought hard for the gay community as an LGBTQ and AIDS activist, and advocacy journalist. I couldn't believe that I was in my 40s and still hated sounding gay and was afraid of sounding gay. So, for me, the real Come-to-Jesus moment making the film was when I interviewed one of the men on the street, the young guy who says: I wish I didn't sound gay. I can't get a boyfriend because I'm too effeminate.”

He said other things that were not in the film, but he essentially said, I hate my voice and I wish I could change it. And I just thought, holy crap, what's going on?

Did you want to be someone he could look up to? What was it about what he said that struck a chord?
Thorpe: I just knew we had to have a conversation about it. I felt originally that it was my anxiety and my problem to deal with and I was just going to basically give in to the norm that I should sound like a hot, [straight] guy. I wasn't willing to give up that idea right away, by any stretch. But I just knew that there was enormous cultural baggage that needed to be unpacked, and I couldn't resist that.

Dan, why did you get involved? And what did you think was important about this question?
Dan Savage: Personally, I've never understood the gay hatred of the gay voice. I understand why a lot of straight people are annoyed by the gay voice. It's because a lot of straight people want to live in a world where they don't have to see gay people, and hearing a gay person means seeing that person as a gay person. Even a lot of people who consider themselves not homophobic will write me letters at Savage Love complaining about the gay voice. Well, that's homophobic. What you're saying is you want to live in a world where you don't have to hear us or see us.

But the gay thing, and what spoke to me about the film and why I said yes when David asked me to be interviewed—my only contribution is running my mouth in front of a camera, this is David's film—is I like the gay voice. My heart broke for that kid who couldn't get a boyfriend because of it and I watched that interview with that kid and I was like, "If I was his age, I would be on him." I like gay men. One of the things that a lot of gay people aren't comfortable acknowledging, not for all of us, but for many of us—and you interviewed that very sort of hetero-normative, straight guy with the butch voice—is that, for a lot of us, we're kind of a mix of masculine and feminine qualities and traits, and I find that mix and that tension, really hot. Not just attractive, but I find it really fucking sexy.

Thorpe and Dan Savage. Image via ThinkThorpe.
Thorpe: Is that because you have to be kind of ballsy to own that?

Savage: I did a piece for This American Life 20 years ago about it. I think that to be openly feminine as a gay man is a whole lot braver than to pass. To leave the house as a hairdresser who is swishy and effeminate—and they were the first people on the front lines. Those hairdressers made it safe for Jason Collins to come out. The masculine gay dudes do not make it safe for the feminine gay dudes to come out.

But like you say in the film, you understand why all these young kids try to hide their gay voice...
Savage: …because it draws violence. And that's one of the things I'm always telling straight people who write me almost every day. Young straight people [write, saying they] had a friend who came out of high school/college and suddenly he had a gay voice. 'What's that about? Why does he have to be so affected? Why is he switching it up?' I write them back and say the straight voice was the fake voice. That was the disguise. He was trying to pass as straight. When you're trying to pass as straight, you police not just the way you look and what you wear and how you move, but how you sound. So now that he's allowing himself to be gay, his authentic gay voice emerges—not that gay is an act or an affectation. Straight is an act and an affectation when you're gay and closeted.

David, when you were sitting in that voice coach's lobby and you saw all the photos of the stars she's worked with, you said, “I feel like I'm learning how to act.”
Thorpe: Yeah. I think one of the reasons I made the film was because I didn't know how I should act. I didn't know who I should be. I needed to go through the process of making that film to find out who I should be. So here I am—and I sound gay.

And after this whole experience, what does that mean to you now?
Thorpe: Gosh, well that's a really hard question. What does it mean? I was just saying to Dan, to me, it's amazing to have a platform to talk about what it's really like to be gay in America today. There are many big problems in the world. All civil rights battles are still ongoing. Women, African Americans, gay people's struggles are far from over. So, to really get down into the nitty gritty of what it means to be accepted is exciting. For me, the gay voice is a real issue, but it's also a symbol of how anything that makes you conspicuous can make you a target and how you have to fight for that, and fight to own it.

Savage: People talk about gay visibility, and you were saying that a friend made a point about gay audibility. When you're a member of a minority group that can be rendered invisible, by choice or by cultural wishful thinking, you can be wiped out. To be seen and heard is important. It is a political act. When it comes to the gay voice, when it comes to public displays of gay affection, when it comes to just being out, the personal is really deeply political.

Thorpe: Right, and that's a great example. In some ways the gay voice is like kissing your lover in public, or holding hands with your lover in public. It's a very small gesture that could have a profound impact on the way you're perceived and treated.

Savage: That's why I say it's brave. It's really masculine to sound [gay], to be yourself, to be ballsy, to be gay, to be out...to own your gay voice and shove it into other people's faces, other gay people's faces. One of the things I like very much about the film is that it really attacks and addresses the internalized homophobia of a lot of gay people.

Director David Thorpe with Project Runway's Tim Gunn. Image via ThinkThorpe.

One of the things that I thought was most interesting about the film was when you started talking about how the gay voice has developed in film and TV over the years. It was shocking to me to see all these cartoon villains who I grew up watching—Jaffar from Aladdin, Scar from The Lion King—being used to tell me that a gay voice equals bad and, therefore, gay equals bad. You can ignore overt homophobia, but when you don't know you're being sold these messages, it's pretty scary.
Savage: And who is likeliest to be sitting in front of a TV watching a Disney film over and over and over again? Not just kids—the gay kid. Who watched The Little Mermaid 4,000 times? Little girls and gay boys.

Thorpe: The Lion King is like The Wizard of Oz at this point. This is an iconic childhood experience. That portrayal is not going anywhere. We've made all these advances in equality and so forth, but these cultural stereotypes come with us. Aladdin is not going anywhere. The Lion King is going to be on Broadway forever.

Savage: We don't need to eradicate the gay stereotypical voice from film or TV, because some gay people sound like that, some gay kids sound like that. We need positive portrayals of that gay voice to balance it out. I don't want the gay villain to go away. I know some gay people who are really shitty, and kind of villainous. So the gay villain needs to be there.

Let Disney feel guilty about The Lion King and Aladdin, but let them make a movie where that voice is in the mouth of somebody who is a hero and not trying to kill the cub.

How is the gay voice portrayed on our film and TV now? I mean, you show that brutal Louis C.K. joke where he says he doesn't have a problem with gay men as long as they don't say anything “faggy.”
Savage: It’is funny. There's an extra bit on that subject that he doesn't do. He doesn't really indict himself in the end for his homophobia informing his reaction to that voice. But I do think that he portrays honestly where a lot of straight guys are right now, which is [they're] fine with gay dudes, fine with gay sex, [but] don't act like a fag. The missing piece is, some guys aren't acting. Faggy is what they are and that shouldn't be a problem.

Thorpe: I think we're doing well in terms of the gay voice. There are a lot of gay voices in popular culture. Jesse Tyler Ferguson on Modern Family, or Ross the Intern [from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno]

Savage: MSNBC, that's where you see gay voices. They have a lot of gay talking heads. Jonathan Capehart...

Thorpe: One of the reasons why I love Tim Gunn and love that he's in the movie...

Savage: Oh my God, Tim Gunn. Tim Gunn is the antidote to Jaffar.

Thorpe: Tim and Carson Kressley, for me, kind of pioneered this wave of sissies on reality TV, and usually style-related reality shows. But I love that. That's a part of our culture and our country needs men who are joyful and silly and giddy and smart and witty. So I think in some ways, we're having a little bit of a renaissance of sounding gay.

Savage: I think what's informing that is that so many gay people who are out now are well integrated into the culture and on their own terms. This idea that we've been assimilated is bullshit. We have carved out a space for ourselves in this culture where we are ourselves. That's what Tim Gunn and Carson Kressley have done. They've really pushed into the culture and been visible and audible in this way that gay people weren't for a very long time.

@reganreid2

Interpol is among the last major wave of rock bands gifted with both critical acclaim and financial success, most of which seem to have produced their best records before 2003, coincidentally the year the Pirate Bay began. In 2002, Interpol released Turn On the Bright Lights, which holds up as one of the few late-era rock records that somehow managed to be both best-selling and good. This brief wave is often referred to as "post-punk revival," which doesn’t make that much sense, but even I don’t want to be so pretentious as to say "post-post punk."

Interpol followed a common post-punk revival pattern: first album great, second album pretty good, everything thereafter too convoluted by overproduction, band drama, and hair stylists to feel authentic enough to deeply move anyone other than teens shopping at Urban Outfitters and/or their cool parents. Just take a look at the band’s hit song "The Heinrich Maneuver," off 2007’s Our Love to Admire. Supposedly a nod to novelist Don DeLillo's anti-consumerist opus White Noise, it was later featured in an AT&T commercial. Seems like a natural next step before, you know, touring with U2 (which they did). Post-punk revival my ass—Daddy needs a new Audi.

Now, four years after their last release, comes El Pintor, the band’s fifth studio album, titled after an anagram of their name. Nice! In honor of the release, the band played an hour-long set on Friday night at iHeartRadio’s corporate HQ’s bizarre pseudo-venue in Tribeca. I went down to check it out.

There were around 200 people there, most of whom appeared to be either jaded mid-30s music journalists or just-graduated PR interns named Stephanie. The band’s dramatic smoke-machine entrance was met with meticulously choreographed stage lighting, broadcast cameras, and at least 30 alt-yuppies holding flip cams.

The band went through the motions and did their little one-legged guitar dance moves despite wearing meticulously styled black Band with Extensive Label Funds clothing, and you know what? They played a great show. Old songs like "Evil," "Say Hello to Angels," and "Slow Hands" buttered me up for the new stuff: thoughtfully energetic tracks representing the band’s return to its old sound, but with a tasteful new layer of maturity and the mild cynicism one can only come to expect from an accomplished aging rock band. Paul Banks’s low drawl remains as strong as ever, especially when punctuated by Dan Kessler’s angular guitar parts.

I think I’m proud of Interpol. I was first introduced to them when "Obstacle 1" accompanied Brian Anderson’s part in Girl’s Yeah Right! skate video in 2004, and I've kept an eye on them ever since. The way Interpol has handled the balancing act of commercial success and artistic integrity serves as a reminder that it’s still possible to engage fruitfully with the music industry without having to suck Satan’s dick.

Up until this year, they appeared to have faded into bloated old John Varvatos sad-dad alt-rock obscurity, like the Strokes or Princesses of Leon. The outlook was grim for a while, but they’ve made a genuinely impressive comeback. Time to go to a goddamn Sam Goody and buy El Pintor on CD with my allowance money, because that’s what I would’ve done in 2004.

Forrest Gump triumphantly returned to theaters for a special one-week engagement last Friday. In honor of its 20th anniversary, it was digitally remastered and blown up into the IMAX format. Gump is a charming, lighthearted (albeit culturally problematic) dramedy with very little in the way of action or spectacle. Was the world really clamoring for this film in IMAX? This might be as unnecessary as The Great Gatsby in 3D... or the entirety of Transformers: Age of Extinction in all formats. We checked out the special edition to answer this, and the myriad other questions that have stumped us since 1994. 

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS (FOR A MOVIE FROM 20 YEARS AGO THAT YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN BY NOW)

–Forrest got his first pair of shoes when he was like, 10? That's child abuse, surely?

–How bad are those kids at riding their bikes if Forrest is able to outrun them? I get that he's meant to be really fast, but surely he can't be faster than a bike?

–Is Forrest Gump the only Academy Award winner for Best Picture to ever have a restaurant based on it? I suppose a Crash-themed restaurant wouldn't be a great idea.

–Has anyone figured out what "stupid is as stupid does" actually means? People actually took these sayings to be serious philosophical musings in 1994.

–What kind of chocolate is Forrest's mom eating if she doesn't know what kind she's gonna get? Did they package chocolates differently in the past or something? Did she buy a special brand of chocolates that came with absolutely no labeling? Or, wait, is she illiterate too? 

–Are we supposed to laugh at Forrest's parents naming him after the founder of the Ku Klux Klan? To explain this questionable decision, Mama says, "Sometimes we all do things that, well, just don't make no sense." That's basically the thesis statement of this whole movie.

–It's supposed to be funny that Forrest's mom has sex with the principal to get Forrest into school (with the implication being that this is kind of her thing), but it's supposed to be sad that Jenny is a free spirit who has many sexual partners not named Forrest Gump. Isn't it kinda cruel to shame Jenny for her life choices?

–Does Forrest have the mental capacity to give consent for sex? Are we watching Jenny rape him?

–How bad are the University of Alabama's academic standards if Forrest Gump can get a full athletic scholarship? Though, if the guy from The Blind Side can get into college, I guess anything is possible.

–Forrest Gump has serious disabilities, to the point where he needs an entire stadium full of people to hold up signs telling him to stop running after scoring a touchdown. So you give that guy a gun and send him to Vietnam?

–Did he kill anyone in Vietnam? If so, how did that make him feel?

–Did Forrest not get PTSD from Vietnam because he's a simpleton? 

–Why is every liberal activist in this movie a sexual deviant, drug addict, or abuser? Is the film implying that the only way to be happy is to be a complete dullard with no concept of politics or culture?

–Did this movie predict the cultural ascendancy of George W. Bush?

–Is it me or has the CGI in this movie aged badly? In particular, the CGI Richard Nixon looks like he's suffering from the early stages of Bell's Palsy.

–Why is it that, every time Forrest encounters a public figure, they are shot by someone shortly after? Lennon, the two Kennedys, that racist guy who stood in that doorway. Are they implying that Forrest is a serial killer of historical figures?

-Actually, why does everyone Forrest encounters die? Jenny, Bubba, mama... Is he cursed? I guess Lt. Dan only lost his legs.

–Forrest is super rich after Lt. Dan invests their money in Apple Computers. Does he have anyone handling his finances? Like, a trusted accountant? Again, he is very, very dumb. He's the kind of guy who talks to strangers for hours at a time. Can he actually manage his money, or would he have just bought a lifetime supply of mashed potatoes or something?

–Lt. Dan just turn up for the wedding without RSVPing? Kinda rude.

–Lt. Dan's wife takes a seat at the wedding and leaves him to stand? Jesus Christ lady, the guy has no legs. 

–Forrest Gump pretty much does and sees everything there is to do and see in 30 years of American history, and yet no one recognizes him? Ever? He never got a publicist?

–Jenny is meant to have AIDS, right? I mean, they never call it AIDS, but it's supposed to be AIDS. If so, she looks a lot better  on her death bed than most first-wave AIDS patients.

–Is the moral of this movie, "pay attention to the mentally ill people who talk to you while you're waiting for a bus because they might be rich"?

Follow Dave and Jamie on Twitter.

Fashion people doing their thing in New York. Photo via Flickr user Susan Sermoneta

Fashion Week brings together the beautiful, rich, and talented, along with moochers and lots of Europeans, to play dress-up on a big stage in cities like New York. It's easy to assume this crowd is a bunch of airheads who don't know shit about what's going on in the world. And for some of them—especially the male models—that is absolutely the case. But in interviewing folks at Fashion Week in NYC over the past few days, we found that most attendees had at least something interesting to say about the summer's big news stories—whether it was the police brutality (and subsequent protests) in Ferguson, Missouri, the killing of asthmatic father Eric Garner on Staten Island by police choke hold, or even the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. We set out to do some trolling, but were repeatedly stymied by just how savvy these people were. Annoying, for sure, but also a bit encouraging about the state of the planet.

Photos by Jesse Miller-Gordon

Paul, Model, Manhattan

VICE: What do you make of what went down in Ferguson?
It's gone as you could've expected. There's one side arguing the kid was innocent, another side arguing the cop was innocent. Although I recently heard—heard, could be a bunch of shit on the internet—that the cop suffered a bunch of head injuries. I've heard stuff, heard his friends were there and they witnessed him not being aggressive in any way. I don't think we'll know until we actually know. It's hard to pass judgment until then because we're just talking.

Do we have a problem with police brutality in general in this country?
Yeah, obviously a lot of it's coming to light now. I think something should be done about it. It's definitely an issue. It happens. Now we're learning about it with more frequency.

Know anything about ISIS or the Islamic State?
You know I haven't been following that honestly too closely—I've heard about it—but the most recent news segment I saw on ISIS was about how good their videos are. So it's just like, what the fuck are we talking about?

Devore Irvin, freelance stylist, Bronx

Was the unrest in Ferguson justified?
I think it goes both ways. When you kill a kid, you're killing someone's child, and no parent should bury their child. I can understand that people are pissed off at these kind of things. But at some point you have to realize what you're protesting. You can't go too far or it defeats the purpose. 

Do we have a police brutality problem in America?
Personally, I've never experienced it, but the evidence is there. It's not like you can fake a video. Clearly we do.

Is your experience unusual, do you think, or do most people not have these experiences with police overreach?
I think it depends on where you are. Out here, you won't get anything. But if you go to parts of Brooklyn, parts of the Bronx, parts of Queens, you'll definitely get that.

Is the Islamic State on your radar at all?
I mean, it's always been a sticky situation in the Middle East, because if we go in and we try and do too much they're going to push back. And if we leave, we're just leaving them unregulated. So what do you do? 

Are most people at fashion week plugged into current affairs?
I think they are, but during fashion week, people go to 10 shows. They [get one invitation after another and they] party, party, party. You just have to stay with your bubble. If you do too much you'll be worn out.

Shea-Marie, editor, Hollywood

Have you followed Ferguson at all?
I know about it but I don't speak politics or debate issues. I have my personal opinions but I keep them to myself.

Why do you think we're hearing more police brutality now?
The technology, for sure.

Any thoughts on ISIS (or the Islamic State)?
I'm terrified of ISIS. I've been reading up about it, trying to learn as much as I can. It scares me and I think Americans should just stay out of there. I don't want them to send our ground troops in. 

Sunny, student, Manhattan

Heard anything about the mess in Ferguson?
No I actually haven't. I heard like a little bit about it, but what was the whole thing about?

Basically an unarmed black teenager got shot and people were pissed. Do we have a police brutality problem in America?
I definitely think so and I support the whole, like, camera thing. If they don't have anything to hide, why not?

Have you heard anything about ISIS, or the Islamic State in the Middle East?
No, not really.

What do you make of the idea that the US would launch another war over there?
I think it's annoying, to be honest. I think we should figure out our problems first before we go over to other countries.

Krit, model, New York

What have you heard about Ferguson?
Honestly, like, I'm not too familiar with what's going on in Ferguson. I was a political science major in college but I haven't really been following the news because I've been so busy with Fashion Week. I normally try to read the newspaper every single day, and I try to read different publications every single day, but I'm not too sure. I literally have not heard a single thing.

What have you heard about ISIS, or the Islamic State?
My best friend is Lebanese. He was there this summer and I was worried about him being there.

How's the NYPD doing these days?
I think stop-and-frisk is absolutely ridiculous. There is a lot of police brutality, a lot of racism still existing—it's just undercover. I think it should stop.

Jordan, journalist, Upper West Side

What have you heard about Ferguson?
I feel like it got really really intense and really extreme. It was completely wrong and definitely unnecessary, but I just can't believe how quickly it escalated, and the fact that it was international news. Really, really insane. I was on a yacht for two weeks. I get back to London and everybody was talking about it. First of all, it's kind of, like, embarassing that that's what's being spread about us. The fact that it's even an issue is very very intolerable, that's not what American culture is about.

Do we have a police brutality problem in America?
I believe that obviously the idea of police is great, but in New York there's sometimes where it's just a complete powertrip—completely overstepping the boundaries of what is their call of duty. They have such a sense of power they feel like they can do whatever they want. It's so scary. I've seen cops go AWOL. 

You heard of ISIS or the Islamic State, and these beheadings of journalists?
That's been blowing up. In terms of killing journalists, that's nothing new—look at Egypt's revolution. I'm just proud to be a journalist and proud of those people covering it. I understand what goes behind getting the story and being a journalist and being in the trenches. 

The character-creation screen in Destiny

“I’m going to make a pretty lady,” my boyfriend says idly.

I’m watching him play the beta for Destiny (impressions of which can be read here), the massive interplanetary shooter-epic from Halo house Bungie. It’s not really my kind of game, but I kind of like Destiny: It’s stylish, and in a break from genre conventions, it actually has colors—Northern Lights, sky-blue atmospheric coronas. When you look at it, you can actually feel the stirrings of humanity’s real ambitions for space, rather than that anticipated sci-fi hard left into brown craters and neon-green robo-helms and things like that.

It has a beautiful user interface, too: Fine white text hangs subtly over its world, where in similar games you’d expect some awful corrugated metal roll-down menu ringed in warning lights. Yeah, it’s the kind of game where you spend hours zoning out with one of those headset microphones on, but it’s less dorky than usual.

More character customization in Destiny

The character creator is my favorite part, though. Pale, strange aliens with fine bone structures blink serenely at you, waiting for you to apply a color pattern to their faces. You can choose from what feels like an impossible array of hair sculptures. They all look incredibly real. It’s stunning.

Mostly, though, I’m watching closely to see what my boyfriend thinks a "pretty lady" is. He is choosing the skin color, hair color, lip color. He makes a dark-skinned woman with smooth hair. I’m a light-skinned woman with coarse hair.

It’s not like I’m jealous of a video-game character. I mean, she’s not even a “character,” really; she’s my boyfriend’s avatar. In a way, she’s not my rival; she’s him. Right? I mean, when you make a character in video games that allow you to do so, you’re really just making an incarnation of yourself.

A still from Destiny

“You” is a fundamentally present concept in games (Austin Grossman’s novel about the weird, distinctive work of game development goes by the same name). Despite all the contemporary industry’s talk about “storytelling,” and despite all the earnest comparisons to immersive cinema that people often make when trying to get others to take games seriously, we’re not acclimated to talking about them in narrative terms. We talk about you.

In Destiny, “you” do this, you do that. In Super Mario Bros., you have to rescue the princess. When you hand your friend a controller, you’re not likely to say, “OK, you are Lara Croft, and Lara is hunting for treasure.” Instead, you tell him or her: “Here’s how you jump. You need to get over there.”

There’s an interesting tension there. Games have many similarities with theater—you agree to perform within an imaginary circumstance, and you make moment-to-moment choices in pursuit of an objective determined by the story, for one. But an actor has internalized that she’s performing as someone else; although she has to channel that person’s nature through the instrument of her own body and her own experiences, she is expressly not herself. She is the character, and needs to behave as such.

But games, designed to let us act as some fantasy of ourselves, don’t often ask us to think about what someone else “would” do. That players have choices is considered one of the medium’s exciting traits, but I always struggled a little bit to connect to games that have that kind of openness—am I playing a character, or am I being me?

Male Shep, or female Shep? And that’s just the beginning. From Mass Effect

For example, I never got along with Mass Effect, BioWare’s popular space-opera trilogy, where players define the hero, from appearance to behavior, through choices and interactions with other characters. I had to decide who “Commander Shepard” is, and what she would be like, but I could never quite decide whether she was “me” or not. Should I make the decisions that feel innate to me, or should I decide on a trajectory for this individual, commit to that? Sometimes I did one, sometimes the other, and it was disruptive, often comic, and inconsistent.

Telltale’s The Walking Dead games excel in dunking the player headfirst into the slimy bucket of split-second decisions that have to get made in a zombie apocalypse. That’s the fun of apocalypse fiction, particularly the ubiquitous zombie sort: Everyone loves to think about what they would do, whom they would save, how they would allocate food among some ragtag band of accidental companions. When someone might have been bitten, do you shoot now, or wait and see? You know, that kind of thing.

But in The Walking Dead, you aren’t “you." You’re Lee Everett, responsible for caring for a kid named Clementine, who has a mysterious past that the player isn't immediately aware of. When your fellow survivors start to ask Lee questions about himself, you have to decide how he answers. These are profoundly uncomfortable decisions, hustling the player into a claustrophobic space crammed between their own wishes—who they think Lee is and what he might do, and who they hope he is, and what they hope he’ll do.

The self in games is an unsolved problem. Players seem to want strong characters, but we also want to make our own choices. They are our heroes, but they’re also our dolls.

I watch my boyfriend choose between two shades of deep red for the lips of his woman.

For almost all of the game, she’ll be wearing a helmet anyway. He’ll be focused on the field of play; she'll always be a vague shape seen mostly from the back, always aiming at something else.

Leigh Alexander’s Understanding Games will be back for another edition before long. In the meantime, find the author online here.

Previously: Do You Cut Off Your Arm or Eat a Baby?