Illustration by Ole Tillmann

It was a good idea, in theory anyway. The plan was to form a sustainable community made up of people who believed in capitalism, limited government, and self-reliance. The site was already picked out: 11,000 acres of fertile land nestled in the valleys of the Chilean Andes, just an hour’s drive away from the capital of Santiago, to the east, and the Pacific Ocean, to the west. Residents could make money growing and exporting organic produce while enjoying Chile’s low taxes and temperate climate. This was no crackpot scheme to establish a micronation on a platform floating in the middle of the ocean (a common libertarian dream)—this was a serious attempt to build a refuge where free marketers and anarcho-capitalists could hole up and wait for the world’s fiat currencies to collapse. They called it “Galt’s Gulch Chile” (GGC), naming it for the fictional place where the world’s competent capitalists flee to in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

The project was conceived in 2012 by four men: John Cobin, an American expat living in Chile who once ran unsuccessfully for Congress in South Carolina; Jeff Berwick, the globe-trotting founder of the Dollar Vigilante, a financial newsletter that preaches the coming end of the current monetary system; Cobin’s Chilean partner; and Ken Johnson, a roving entrepreneur whose previous investment projects included real estate, wind turbines, and “water ionizers,” pseudoscientific gizmos that are advertised as being able to slow aging.

That initial group quickly fell apart, though today the principals disagree on why. Now, two years after its founding, the would-be paradise is ensnared in a set of personal conflicts, mainly centered on Johnson. Instead of living in a picturesque valley selling Galt’s Gulch–branded juice, the libertarian founders are accusing one another of being drunks, liars, and sociopaths. GGC’s would-be inhabitants have called Johnson a “weirdo,” a “pathological liar,” “insane,” a “scammer,” and other, similar things. Some shareholders are pursuing legal action in an effort to remove him from the project, a drastic measure for antigovernment types to take. Johnson, who remains the manager of the trust that controls the land, claims all the allegations against him are false. So what happened?

Like most prospective utopias, Galt’s Gulch Chile started out on a positive note, at least after Berwick and Johnson broke from Cobin. Johnson was a savvy salesman, and it turned out that the somewhat apocalyptically minded people who read Berwick’s newsletter were intensely interested in the prospect of a South American sanctuary. For those who think that Western nations are turning into the world of Atlas Shrugged—dominated by parasitic governments, hostile to innovation and job creation, and on the verge of totalitarian socialism—GGC looked pretty good.

“We are very happy to offer the respite from the Western world of oppressive governments to freedom-minded people in which they can build a new, more prosperous community,” Berwick wrote in May 2013. Wendy McElroy, a Canadian libertarian feminist activist and writer who bought a lot on GGC, followed that up with her own blog post that said, “It is now time for a libertarian exodus that will not take you away from your true home, but toward it.” Johnson wrote about “sitting under the stars, inhaling the fresh air and sipping on some Yerba Mate, made with fresh clean Galt's Gulchwater.” Discounts were offered to those willing to pay in Bitcoin or precious metals.

People bought it, and bought into it. In November 2013, GGC hosted a celebration on the property, bringing in shareholders, and those interested in becoming shareholders, to view the land and meet one another. Josh Kirley, a commodities trader who was considering making an investment, was impressed by the quality of his potential neighbors.

“These were people who had made money in oil, had made money in real estate. They were former academics, former military. They were very liberty-minded people: non-litigious, hard-working, self-made, intelligent,” he told me. “It was the people I met there that sold it to me.”

After paying attorneys and investigators to perform a background check on Johnson and make sure GGC held the title to the land, Kirley bought land in the Gulch that included a 25-acre lemon farm for $200,000, and he gave the project an $800,000 interest-free loan. He wasn’t the only one putting down serious money: In December 2013 the Economist published a mostly positive write-up of GGC that claimed Johnson had brought in $1.5 million in sales in Bitcoin alone.

Earlier this year, however, it became apparent that something was wrong. In April, another event was held in the Gulch, this time, supposedly, so some buyers could pick out the lots where they would live. This wasn’t possible, however—the land wasn’t zoned for the 1.25-acre lots that Johnson had sold to many investors. The plan was to rezone the property, but that hadn’t happened yet. In addition, according to Kirley, a number of houses that were supposed to have been built were unfinished.

“You could just sense something was amiss,” said Kirley. A question-and-answer session for investors got rescheduled, and when his guests confronted Johnson about the problems with GGC, “he just told these ridiculous stories about all these enemies of the project and how Jeff Berwick was an enemy of the project, which made no sense.”

The investors took to the internet with their doubts about Johnson a few months later. McElroy, the Canadian activist, published a blog post on August 25 alleging that GGC owed “immense debts” to Chilean vendors and that she had been sold a lot that she couldn’t live on because of the zoning issues. Days later, Berwick published his own account of events on his website.

Berwick had apparently come to Johnson several times in 2013 with complaints about the project—he was worried they were selling lots before GGC had paid for the land, and that the property wasn’t zoned for the residential properties the company was handing out. But Johnson convinced him that his fears were unfounded, and none of those conflicts became public. Berwick said they had another fight when he found out that Johnson had transferred control of the land from a company the two of them had owned jointly into a trust that Johnson controlled. (The former partners also have a number of disagreements about non-GGC-related business, and each complains that the other has cheated him in various ways.)

Berwick, Kirley, McElroy, and others involved with GGC have accused Johnson of not paying his staff or vendors, of physically assaulting an employee, and of not delivering on his promises to get the land rezoned so people could live on it. They claim that Johnson traveled around with $250,000 of the investors’ money in cash, which he kept in a backpack he’d sometimes leave in his jeep; that he drank in bars and gambled on roulette with their money; that he fed his dog imported salmon; that he may have been involved with scams to sell phony passports; and that he still refuses to disclose the full list of investors in the project. Kirley says that he and 11 other major investors are owed, collectively, more than $4.3 million, and the group is now filing an injunction in Chilean court in an effort to wrest control of the Gulch from Johnson. They still believe in that original vision; they just don’t think it can work unless they replace the man at the top.

Josh Kirley and Ken Johnson in April. Photo courtesy of Josh Kirley

There are a few problems in trying to untangle what happened to GGC. One is that it appears that no one besides Johnson knows how many people have bought lots on the Gulch (he says there are around 50) or how much money has been invested in the project overall. Another problem is that Johnson’s account of events contradicts those of the disgruntled shareholders at every turn—to hear him tell it, the people calling him names are looking for money or fame or seeking to destroy him personally.

Last week I spoke to Johnson, who still lives and works in the Gulch, over the phone. According to him the company has “nine or ten” full-time employees, along with contractors making improvements on the land and working on the farm. He’s not making any new sales at the moment—in fact, he says, he’s offering refunds to disgruntled investors.

In Johnson’s version of events, nearly everyone involved with GGC was a liar or didn’t deliver on promises they had made. “There've been some interesting characters come and go at Galt's Gulch,” he told me with a chuckle. “It’s been a strange project, to say the least.”

So what about all the allegations against him: the unpaid workers and vendors, the man he supposedly assaulted, and so on? Johnson told me there are three former employees who claim they’re owed something, but he said that in two of the cases they had taken company property and in fact owe Johnson money. There are only “two or three invoices” that haven’t been paid, he insists. The guy who said Johnson attacked him actually fell over a duffel bag when the two of them “had some words.”

As for Berwick, Johnson insinuated that his former partner has a drinking problem, has suffered from various recent business failures, and as a result has “turned his anger and paranoia toward me.” He said Berwick knew all along that the two of them weren’t 50-50 partners in the company that operates GGC. Johnson added, “It's been a long, repetitive history of Jeff making a lot of threats against me and being very defamatory toward me.”

Johnson told me he has been trying to get the Gulch rezoned so that people can live on it, but said that these efforts were stymied by people who betrayed his trust, chief among them Adolfo Aguirre, a Chilean who was hired as GGC’s environmental planner in 2013 and left the company earlier this year. He says Aguirre promised that he could have the property divided into 450 lots by 2014, and that they even submitted a proposal to the government several months ago, but nothing came of it because of Aguirre’s lies. Johnson told me that his former employee hates Americans and was “actually working to make our approvals more difficult”; he also said Aguirre was investigated by police after a GGC employee accused him of stealing documents from the company.

(By email, Aguirre said the case against him was thrown out and that Johnson was a “swindler” and a “fuckup” who kept his buyers in the dark about the project, habitually abused his employees, and was driving GGC into the ground with his poor management.)

Johnson claims he just wants the Gulch to get up and running—he’s hopeful that one of several needed rezonings will get approved by the end of the month—and is happy to hand off the management of GGC to others if they want to take it over.

“If me staying is the best thing, great,” he said. “There are some people that don’t want me involved, and I can live with that. I can go on to other things with my life. I just want to look back and see Galt’s Gulch succeed… There’s been no schemes to take money whatsoever.”

A view of some of the land in the Gulch. Photo courtesy of Josh Kirley

Even now, everyone I spoke to who had been involved in Galt’s Gulch Chile said they want to see the original idea come to fruition.

“Almost all the investors, buyers, and myself are incredibly passionate about making this work and we are doing everything possible to do so,” Berwick wrote in an email.“There is only one person who stands in the way of any chance of GGC’s potential success and that is [Johnson].”

Berwick is sticking to his libertarian principals and not taking part in any legal action against his former partner. He’s resigned to taking a heavy loss in this affair, but he can evidently afford to do so. Kirley says there are people who have sunk their life savings into buying land in the Gulch, and he’s determined to make sure all the investors get the land they paid for.

The commodities trader, who is perhaps less of an anti-statist, has retained two Chilean law firms and intends to use the courts to force Johnson to give up control of GGC, after which the investors could attempt to work out the zoning issues and eventually live on the land, finally establishing their long-sought Randian paradise. According to him, Johnson asked for $5 million in exchange for handing over control of GGC, but Kirley balked at the price. When I tried to confirm this account with Johnson, he said only, “There’s been different talks.”

Johnson’s position is that he has given Kirley all the documents that he’s asked for (“That is a lie,” said Kirley by email), and that he’s ready to step down; he just wants Kirley to come down to Chile to sort things out. (“I'm not going to hang around in Chile while he continues to stall,” Kirley said. “Negotiations can be done over Skype or email… I will return [to Chile] once he has turned over control.”)

The most recent point of contention is the water rights owned by GGC. In Chile, water and mineral rights can be sold independently of land, and one of the project’s most important assets is the water under the ground that it controls. Johnson is currently selling off some of these water rights to raise capital and provide refunds to shareholders, a move that the already unhappy investors oppose. They say that it’s shortsighted to sell the water outright and that Johnson hasn’t even finished paying for the asset he’s trying to sell. Kirley pointed to this as another example of the man’s shady business practices.

“He said he owned the water rights, said they were so valuable that we could lease off the extra flow. In actuality, he never made the payments and still owes nearly [$2 million] before we own the water rights. Now he is working with the seller to sell those water rights for less than he told us we would be leasing them for,” wrote Kirley in an email.

“Gotta admit, the guy has balls.”

Map of the Gulch's location from an early version of the GGC website that is no longer online

If you believe Johnson, GGC’s difficulties can be chalked up mostly to the project’s incredible run of bad luck—his original partners were mentally unstable liars, and the Chileans he worked with were all too eager to take advantage of an American who was perhaps in over his head running an operation of that magnitude and complexity in a foreign country.

A less charitable view is that the Gulch was a scam from the beginning and Johnson has simply been taking in as much money from starry-eyed libertarians as he could without keeping much in the way of records or seriously trying to make their vision a reality. Some of those involved in GGC share a version of this opinion, and a couple founders say now that Johnson only pretended to believe in libertarian philosophy—Berwick claimed in an email that Johnson told him he “hates anarchists and libertarians.”

You could also, if you were so politically inclined, see GGC’s failure as an indictment of the libertarian principles that Gulchers hold so dear. “Unregulated capitalism… is presenting some problems!” is how a gleeful, schadenfreude-filled Gawker blog post summed up the mess. And it may be true that some of the founders’ aversion to government-run legal systems and reliance on handshake agreements hurt them—Berwick’s assumption that he owned half of the company with Johnson, though he apparently didn’t have documents that stated as much, seems oddly naïve in hindsight.

Libertarians are normally wary of governments and other large organizations, but in this case they seem to have been too trusting of the idea of the Gulch in general and Johnson in particular. There’s nothing uniquely libertarian about putting faith in people who say they share your beliefs, or about wanting to build a utopia far from the grubby reality of your current home—but the idea that you can buy your way into paradise seems tailor-made for that political tribe. Looking back, it seems the problem was that the Gulchers weren’t as skeptical of the scheme as they should have been simply because it was spun by their ideological allies.

“A con of this magnitude could only have existed in the libertarian community because [Johnson] used their paranoia and distrust of the government to say, ‘Put everything in a trust, I won’t tell anybody who you are, don’t let anyone find out you’re investing, and I prefer you use precious metal or Bitcoins so it can’t be traced,’” Kirley said. “It really worked out well, whether it was intentional or just the perfect storm.”

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Comedy album cover via Joe Fuda.
Canada has established itself as a breeding ground for bold, unusual, and decidedly bizarre comics in the last few years—many of them from the comedy collective Laugh Sabbath. Look no further than Comedy Central’s biggest star of this decade, Nathan Fielder, or his best friend, noted surrealist comedy weirdo Chris Locke.

Another standout oddball comic from the Laugh Sabbath crew is Toronto’s Tim Gilbert (who Nathan recently referred to as "the funniest guy he knows"). Gilbert has risen to the top of the comedy heap through his cuttingly acerbic and fearless style. His targets range from high school bullies, adults seeking to tap into their late-stage creative genes, to mimicking the craven hackiness of comedians.

Tim’s incisive comedy voice earned him a gig writing for This Hour Has 22 Minutes and a spot as a key sketch player on MTV’s short-lived Showtown, where he excelled by interviewing people with a clearly defined no-bullshit attitude that stood out on what was typically trite television.

The best of Tim’s vicious standup act is collected in a fantastic new album, Please Help Me I Am Very Sick, a pay-what-you-want 30-minute comedy album that’s alternatively dark, absurdist, and downright fucking goofy. With that in mind, we met up with Tim in a bar in downtown Toronto to discuss the time he and Nathan Fielder horrified an audience with the aid of DVDs, a dog, and a woman, interviewing the Ikea Monkey lady at the height of her microfame, and the time he may or may not have made an ass out of himself in front of Louis C.K.

VICE: Tell me about your comedy troupe Laugh Sabbath, you guys used to shoot a lot of videos, right?
Tim Gilbert: We used to make videos all of the time—some high concept, some dumb. It was a big deal at the time. It seemed like every comedian in Toronto was making videos. Once Nathan left, he took his camera and his editing ability, and everybody just stopped.

What kind of videos did you make?
Well, we had this… I don’t even know if I should talk about this… there was a show called the Wet N’ Sticky Show, where the theme was you came up with the grossest thing you could think of. One week, Nathan and I made a video of us, where he’s at his computer and I’m at mine, and someone comes in and is like, “What are you doing?” And I’m like, “Oh, nothing.” We found this dog porn online of this dog fucking a woman—like really fucking her from behind… and there’s a guy shooting it and they were speaking German. It was horrific—like really gross. So we just took that footage and intercut it with us watching, like that’s what I was watching. It was like five minutes long and we watched the whole thing. There was no ending, we just looked at each other and played it again.

How did people react to it?
People were screaming. That show was at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. People were freaking out. It was so fucking gross and awful. We destroyed the DVD right then and there so we never had to see it again.

You like to skewer other comedians and their styles. When and why did you start doing that?
Doesn’t comedy annoy you? I get annoyed by lame comedy and people doing the same thing over and over again. I remember even when I first started writing jokes—a lot of it was making fun of comedy. Maybe it’s too inside and the act appeals to comedians too much, but I still do it. If you go to comedy shows every night, see comedy constantly, you eventually start getting annoyed, like, Come on, what the fuck are you doing?

As a Canadian comic, you’ve done a lot of weird road gigs. What’s like the weirdest one you’ve done recently?
I’ll tell you the worst show I ever did. The worst show I ever had was in the town I was born in: St. Thomas, Ontario. I had been working on This Hour Has 22 Minutes for the past month and a half, and I hadn’t done any standup at all since then. It was my first show since I stopped working there. Two seasoned comics booked me on the show. It was in the meeting room of a fucking hockey arena. It was just this giant, white room with tables and chairs set up for 40 or 50 people.

I guess the people booking the show saw that I was on the roster of Yuk Yuks, and they thought: “Oh, we want Tim. He’s from here!” So I was like Great, let’s do it. I’m sure it’s going to be fine. My parents were there. There are girls that I grew up with that I had crushes on as a kid who were there with their new husbands who looked tougher than me. I was like OK, OK, this will be OK. So I go up and I just fucking eat it. I tanked so bad because they’re hyping me up being like, “The local kid is back to grace us with his presence, our hometown boy has finally returned!” And I walk up and just shit the bed so badly. It was packed with people there because it’s a fucking comedy show at the hockey arena in the meeting room. I did like, half the time I was supposed to do.

Ouch.
So I just sucked that whole time in my hometown. When you do a show at a bar in Toronto, you can leave, you can go sit in the dark and drink by yourself, or go to a bar next door. This is a hockey arena in central St. Thomas, Ontario, and my parents were still there, so I just had to sit at the back of this very brightly lit, white room and watch people as they would get up, go to the bar and get drinks, see me, and not make eye contact. It was one of the most horrific, painful experiences of my life.

As soon as we got in the car, my parents and I… I was just like, “Oh, God. This sucks.” And they were like, “Maybe it’s time to write some new material.” [Laughs]

You mentioned writing for This Hour Has 22 Minutes. You’ve also appeared on MTV and MuchMusic. How did Canadian broadcast media treat you?
It was great. The guy who got me that was Graham Chittenden, who hosted this show called Showtown. They brought on me and Chris Locke.  I would go in once a week, they’d be like, “What do you want to do?” I’d be like, “I don’t know, what do you guys want to do?” And if there was some news thing, we could do something about that. They would let me interview people, like I got to interview the Ikea Monkey Lady...

She seemed crazy.
She was majorly crazy. She had a very nice outfit—she was dressed head-to-toe in white and her husband was dressed head-to-toe in black with like a leather, black cowboy hat. They were so fucked and so weird. And that was the first thing I ever did with like an interview.



You goaded her into an emotional plea at the end.
She was so fucking insane. I don’t even know, but she took us on a tour of their house and showed us all of her other animals and shit. They had a huge tarp over their backyard so they could let their birds out and fly around, but not go away out of the net. They were just so fucking weird. And they obviously adopted a monkey and shit, which is pretty weird.

Since JFL42 is going on, can you tell me about the time you made an ass out of yourself in front of Louis C.K.?
I did not make an ass out of myself in front of Louis C.K. Here’s what happened: I was at Comedy Bar. There’s a little green room right beside the stage—so this was, I don’t remember, last year or the year before, maybe two years ago—I had been doing a lot of these shows, I was at Andy Kindler’s alternative show and he had been so nice to me and booked me on all of these shows. It was at his show and I was done for the night. I knew I was done for the night. So I’m here at Comedy Bar, it’s Just For Laughs, I’m getting all these free drink tickets, I ended up drinking a lot, and getting pretty drunk.

The show’s about to be over and I think the last person’s on stage. I just walk into the green room and there’s a bunch of people there hanging out talking and I’m like, “Hey everybody!” Then I see this guy over here that I think is somebody I know. He’s wearing black shirt and jeans and one of those stupid baseball caps with the leather strap. So seeing somebody in a baseball cap with a leather strap, you’re not instantly thinking I need to respect this person, you know what I mean? I thought he was a guy I knew.

So I’m talking to my friends that are there and all of the sudden, the guy in the stupid hat turns around and it’s Louis C.K. and he’s like, “Hey, man, you’ve got to keep it down. Somebody’s on stage.” And remember, I’m very, very drunk. So instead of turning apologetic, I turn defensive, thinking like I’m here all the time, I know how I can talk in the green room and not have it heard on stage. I’m not going to ruin somebody’s set. I don’t care if you’re Louis C.K. So he turns around and is like, “Hey, you’ve got to be quiet.” And I was like, [exaggerated baby voice] “I’m sorry, I’ve never been here before! I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” to Louis C.K. In front of everybody. There was dead silence. And then Andy was like, “This is Tim, he’s been on the show.” And I was like, “Yeah, hi, I’m Tim.” And he’s like, “Oh, hi.”

[Laughs] Solid first impression. Talk to me about your album.
It’s an accumulation of the last nine years of my career. The thing is only like a half-hour long, so it’s easily digestible and it has the best stuff from my career.

What’s your favourite joke on there?
I have this joke about the adult improv class I like a lot. It’s like a crushing blow to your senses because I drag it out. I really make it painful so people believe maybe I am really that big of an idiot.

People are showing you a lot of love for the album already. Nathan Fielder tweeted it and called you “the funniest guy he knows” and Judd Apatow hollered at you.
Yeah, right? I don’t know if Judd listened to it, but…

Your response to him was great.
I didn’t know if I should say that to him or not. Then I was like, ‘Why not?’

That attitude seems to power a lot of your career. What’s your end goal?
I just want to be able to drink beer with my friends every night and make some money.

Noble goal.
I think so, too.

If you're in Toronto, you can catch Tim perform as a part of JFL42 at the Rivoli on Monday, September 22 at 9, at the Bad Dog Theatre on Wednesday, September 24 at 9, and at Comedy Bar on Thursday, September 25 at 8. To listen to Tim's comedy album, Please Help Me I Am Very Sick, click here.

@jordanisjoso

The "Ninja Schoolgirl" videos have gone viral in Japan, earning 600 million views on YouTube in only a month. In them, a couple of young, uniformed girls pull moves that are half parkour stunts and half Chow Yun-Fat from Crouching Tiger. The girls flip off buildings, scale walls, and bust out flying kicks all while dressed like they're skipping Sophomore Econ class.

VICE Japan tracked down the new internet stars to get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of their viral video.

Photo by Alison Flowers

Starting in 1971, more than 100 people, mostly black men, were forced to confess to serious crimes at police headquarters on Chicago’s South Side, part of a sanctioned torture campaign that continued for almost 20 years under then Police Commander Jon Burge.

“They had a ball torturing me,” said Darrell Cannon, a torture victim who spent two decades in prison after falsely confessing to murder charges in 1983. Detectives suffocated Cannon, performed mock executions by stuffing a shotgun in his mouth, hit him with a rubber hose, and shocked his testicles with a cattle prod. “It was something that they liked doing,” he added.

The police brutality of the Burge era—and the years of cover-up that followed—fueled a deep mistrust between minorities and law enforcement in Chicago that has persisted for decades. While some victims have received millions in settlements, others, like Cannon, have not. Meanwhile, Burge, who is serving a federal sentence for perjury and obstruction of justice, continues to receive $54,000 a year in pension pay.

As recent incidents of police brutality gain national attention, they also provide a small window for local activists to push for justice. After more than three decades, advocates have managed to get an ordinance in front of the Chicago City Council that would provide $20 million in reparations to compensate, care for, and commemorate the torture survivors. And supporters say momentum for the ordinance is reaching a boiling point. Last month in Chicago, hundreds of protestors joined a national moment of silence to honor Brown and other victims of police brutality, standing in a federal plaza as law enforcement stood watch. (The Chicago Police Department did not respond to requests for comment.) 

“The Ferguson case serves as stark reminder that police abuse of authority is not something from the distant past,” said Chicago Alderman Joe Moore said.

Drafted by the People’s Law Office and the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial project, the ordinance would serve as a formal apology to the survivors. It also calls for public memorials about the torture cases and for a history lesson to be taught in Chicago Public Schools, as well as free enrollment in city colleges for the survivors and family members, and a counseling, medical and vocational center on the South Side. It has the support of victims’ advocacy groups, as well as human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Black People Against Torture. 

“Everybody knew about the torture, and the torture became to me, as an African-American woman, like a lynching,” said activist Dorothy Burge, who is part of the collective supporting the ordinance. “It is a way for us to start the healing between the city of Chicago and communities of color.”

But sponsors of the ordinance said the biggest challenge to passing the measure will be overcoming concerns about the cost of reparations, especially in light of Chicago’s troubled municipal finances. “The major challenge we face in getting this passed is overcoming concerns about the cost to the city of providing reparations during these very lean fiscal times,” said Alderman Joe Moore, a co-sponsor of the ordinance. 

For now, at least, the ordinance remains at a standstill in the council’s finance committee and needs to be called for a hearing in order to survive. Chicago Alderman Edward Burke, the chairman of the finance committee, did not respond to requests for comment on his plans.

I first discovered Yannick Murphy through her debut story collection, Stories in Another Language, published in 1987 by Knopf during its Gordon Lish era. While Lish has a reputation for being something of a heavy-handed editor, Murphy stands out from the other writers he worked with in the way that, for her, language is only the lip of the pool. She has a striking ability to provide structure and flow to her narratives through innovative ways, and is able to flesh out emotional weight in characters simply through their speaking styles, regardless of the dialog.

Murphy's new novel, This Is the Water, covers new ground, even for someone with a body of work as extensive as hers. The story follows a small-town mother with teenage daughters on a swim team. When a young woman is murdered, Murphy takes us through the town's reaction by weaving the narrative seamlessly from the mother's perspective—written in second person—through other characters, including the killer himself.

Unlike other True Detective-esque set ups, the power of This Is the Water rides less on the mystery of how things unfold and more in the mesmerizing way Murphy gives voice to the landscape, the people living on in fear. From the first page of the book we are led as if on a tour through psychological territory with the even hand of Hitchcock and the heart of Joy Williams. As with all great works, This Is the Water succeeds less because of what happens and more because of how it is told.

I reached out to Murphy over email to learn a little bit more about her book and writing process.

VICE: There's a very particular tone to this novel. In addition to the second person narration, you make use of listing in your exposition. For example, "This is the water, lapping the edge of the pool, coming up in small waves as children race through it." How did you originally begin this novel and how did you discover its particular voice?
Yannick Murphy: The second person is all for the benefit of Annie, the main character. Annie’s going through a difficult time—a wobbly marriage, grief over her brother’s death, and now a serial killer is in her midst. The only way she can deal with it is by stepping outside of herself.

The distance the second person provides gives Annie the strength to take action. It’s almost as if a director on a set is telling her, “OK, now this is you walking up to the man on the street.” She needs to feel that someone else is in charge, because otherwise she might not accomplish what she has to. The “you” form creates that for her.

I knew when I started this novel that water would be just as important as one of the characters, because the water—and the world of swimmers—is essential to the story. That’s why I started with “This is the water...” first. I wanted to alert the reader to this new way of being introduced to the story. It’s not a character at the forefront—it's an object. 

Since I wanted consistency, I continued with listing other elements in the book. “This is the water,” transferred to “This is you, Annie,” and “This is our serial killer,” in other places throughout the writing. I found that using “This is...” at the beginning of some of the sentences also had an added effect of keeping the reader sharp throughout the novel. It meant the reader was continually having to “see” what was being presented to them, instead of being told.

I agree that the "This is..." usage had a great orienting effect. It is interesting how well the balance between plot and exposition works, sometimes allowing long passages of description to carry the book without obvious action. How much do you think about plot as opposed to language when constructing a novel?
The reason there are long passages of description without action is because I was imagining how Annie would go about solving her dilemma. She’s the type of person who, when faced with problems, doesn’t constantly think about how she’s going to solve them. She might even avoid thinking about the problems by thinking about the trivial and mundane. She may be thinking about swimsuits, wet towels at the bottom of gym bags, and leaves on the roadside, but it’s important for her to think of those things in order to have the energy to deal with bigger problems.

By including those passages where there isn’t obvious action, we’re actually seeing Annie’s mind at work. She is retreating to the safety of her inconsequential thoughts. It’s the not constantly thinking about her problems that eventually gives her the reprieve to solve them. 

When writing, I’m thinking about plot and the language at the same time. Sometimes the language drives the plot, and sometimes it’s vice versa. People don’t realize how rhythmic and acoustical effects of language can give force to the writing. Even perturbations in the writing can create forward momentum. There are times when someone expects a phrase to be uttered in the usual way, but the writer plays with the phrase so it’s a little different, and that catches the reader’s attention.

There are a few lines from one of Amy Hempel’s stories that go, “I have a friend who worked one summer in a mortuary. He used to tell me stories. The one that really got to me was not the grisliest, but it’s the one that did.” The perturbation there, of using the word “did” at the very end of the sentence, made it stand out. At the same time, though, it’s natural-sounding speech, and it doesn’t alienate the reader. It makes the reader feel that the narrator is someone they could shoot the breeze with.

Any time a writer can move the plot forward while also using language to increase engagement with the reader, the writing becomes stronger. I try to juggle all of those things at once while I’m moving the plot forward. If I’m really lucky, then the language itself provides a pathway for the plot that I didn’t even anticipate. When that happens, you just have to sit back and be thankful to the writing gods.

How difficult was it for you, using that exploratory way of developing things, to switch between the mindsets of the different characters? Was writing from the mind of a man compelled to kill young women tough terrain? 
One of the ideas I had for the book was to somehow point to the question of whether or not everything we do is connected to something else. That's why the water is almost a character in the book, because it too has relevance to the final outcome—everyone who swims in it is somehow connected. We even get the sense that the doorknob on the bathroom door at the rest stop where a girl was murdered has a role in observing what took place.

The other characters also have equal relevance, and I hoped that see-sawing back and forth between their mindsets would enable the reader to see how important they were to Annie’s dilemma. It’s not just one thing that can sometimes determine an outcome, but many interconnected things. 

I didn’t like imagining the world from the killer’s POV, but a part of me enjoyed exploring the question of whether or not serial killers always want to be caught. It seems like so many experts believe that they do. I stay away from generalizations, and so having this killer be someone who adamantly had no intention of being caught was an interesting road to go down. It made him more interesting than I had originally thought he would be.

It was actually harder to write from Dinah’s POV—she’s another swim parent and nosey anti-hero who is always trying to get Annie in trouble. I had difficulty writing from her POV because I didn’t want to paint her as totally unlikable; she is as complex as anyone else. At times, she’s generous and supportive, and at other times she wants to tell Annie’s husband that she thinks Annie is having an affair. 

One thing that connects the characters is their reliance on memory, almost in a haunting way. Do you feel connected to your characters and their memories, their feelings and their senses?
I like imagining if I were one of my characters, what would I do? What would I see? How would I handle the situation? Unfortunately—or fortunately—I think all writers are bound by their own experiences and their own memories. Try as I might to completely imagine someone else’s life, whatever has happened in my own life will affect my descriptions of what they’re going through.

My senses are going to be at work when describing how the pool building feels when one of my characters enters it. My senses are going to be at work when I describe what it’s like for Annie to try on a swimsuit that belongs to her daughter. My senses are one of the strongest tools in my writer’s toolbox. I’m always trying to show the reader the world in a way they may never have seen it before.

In the case of This Is the Water, I wanted to give the reader an insider’s view of Annie: a woman connected to a competitive swim team going through emotional upheavals that heighten when a serial killer comes on the scene. I show what it’s like to be Annie, as well as what it’s like to be one of the swimmers. I show what it’s like to be some of the other parents of the team, the people who work at the facility, the serial killer, as well as some inanimate objects such as the water itself. I show what all of these people and objects are like through the use of description, memories, and sensory details.

My hope is that these different perspectives and descriptions all coalesce to form a story that lifts off the page, that has its own life, and that takes on its own kind of meaning and truth, apart from what I originally intended for it.  If it does that, then it is the best kind of novel, and one I myself would want to read.

Follow Blake Butler on Twitter.

Buy This Is the Water from Harper Collins here.

$73 million dollars-worth of new Manchester United talent (and Chris Smalling) nutmegged in ten seconds by Leicester City players

Louis van Gaal's New United Are Currently Just a Different Brand of Shit
It’s an impressive feat, but after the bizarre 5-3 capitulation to a brilliant Leicester City—the first time Manchester United had lost a match in the Premier League after being two goals ahead, and surely the first time a player has scored against both Manchester United and FC United—Van Gaal’s new team was there for all to be seen.

They might still be shit, but at least it's a slightly different brand of shit. In LvG's brave new world, Chris Smalling will replace Tom Cleverley as the team’s scapegoat-in-chief, while Di Maria rather than van Persie will now be put forward in dull arguments about the league's best player. Daley Blind comes in for Michael Carrick as the one whose weaknesses everyone will ignore, and Marcos Rojo is just a like-for-like replacement for whatever Alex Buttner was bringing to the party. The names on the back of the shirts have changed, but currently it's all weirdly familiar for a side with six unfamiliar faces in Sunday's starting XI.

And what of Wayne Rooney? Well, he’s still exactly the same as he has been for the past few years, having lost his touch, speed, vision and basic decency, but the perception is growing that he may not actually belong to United's A-list. Indeed, it’s quite an achievement for a striker to be the worst player on the field in a game that finishes 5-3.

In one moment for Esteban Cambiasso’s equalizer, Rooney summed up everything that's wrong with him. A botched clearance as he stormed back to save the day gave away the goal, before he turned round to embarrassingly yell at all of his teammates. It was the kind of leadership that impresses Territorial Army office workers; a men’s rights activist’s idea of an alpha male. That Rooney has remained undroppable for three very different managers is baffling.

Roy Keane Could Have Found His Niche as a #2 
Being named the manager of the month is as much a curse as it is a blessing. This weekend, Aston Villa found that an equally powerful poison exists for any manager doing well: the big broadsheet interview. Paul Lambert won a new contract off the back of his ludicrous start to the season, talked about it in The Telegraph on Friday and watched his squad get pumped on Saturday by Arsenal. It must have been particularly gutting for assistant manager Roy Keane, who hates Arsenal like ISIS hate the West.

That said, it’s possible that Keane is the man who's responsible for the upturn in Villa's fortune. He’s the only real variable, and if his playing and managerial career prove anything so far it’s that he’s a terrible leader but a born second-in-command. He’s the ultimate wartime consigliere to any godfather he's served under. The bad-cop-bad-cop dynamic doesn’t appear in many books on business management, but it has a long history in soccer. Walter Smith and Archie Knox; Jock Wallace and his drill sergeants; and, of course, Keane’s own period as underboss to Alex Ferguson.

Lambert looks too much like a cuddly little bear to fit the "bad cop" mold and will be sympathetic to a squad laid low by a virus in the build-up to Saturday's game. But with Keane looming over the manager's shoulder, his eyes burning into the players' souls like Mafia acid, they'll know that despite the sympathy this week, there's no room in the dressing room for piss-taking.

Never seen a player look that devasted after scoring, I actually feel bad for Lampard. pic.twitter.com/SBsthiwYKZ

— GM (@GoonerMind) September 21, 2014

You Definitely Could Make It Up
“You could not make it up!” was a strange way for literally thousands of people on Twitter to greet Large Frank’s late goal against Chelsea for Manchester City. Lampard is a goalscoring midfielder. Him scoring a goal from midfield is exactly the kind of thing you could make up.

Nonetheless, the way it happened, with Chelsea fans actually singing his name before the big moment—you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. It’s not exactly Denis Law relegating United, but what’s significant for City is that they had to rely on a geriatric legend to earn them a point against a title contender. With Chelsea now having put in a decent display against a team that won't be weighing up a deadline-day bid for Kenwyne Jones in January, the likelihood of a José Mourinho title win is growing.

I mentioned City’s lack of identity and genuine stardust in the weekend's preview piece, and it seems to be haunting them. Much as we may laugh at the Garry Cook days of trying and failing to buy Kaka about six different times, for the most part City have been depressingly sensible with their money. They've never really had that one player who single-handedly dominates a league, or a strike-partnership or back four that will make people misty-eyed for generations to come.

We live in strange times. The biggest surprise hasn’t been City overhauling United in terms of being a successful, effective soccer team. It’s that United have overtaken City in terms of embarrassing hubris, absurdly ambitious transfer moves and the pursuit of stars at the expense of people who know when to pull off a good tactical foul. Doesn’t seem to be doing Man U any good on the field at present, but there’s a balance to be struck, and at the moment it’s Chelsea who seem the closest to it.

It Takes More Than a Limp Protest to Get Rid of Men Like Pardew
Alan Pardew earned his stay of execution, thanks to a player who hasn’t scored in what seems like years. Cisse's second was almost an exact replica of the time Lee Clark scored a last-minute winner for Newcastle against Middlesbrough, and found himself on the receiving end of abuse from his own fans, their hopes of a defeat to finish off Graeme Souness's reign cruelly dashed.

The source of the goal is significant. It’s more evidence that while Pardew can do no right in the eyes of his own fans, in the eyes of the Dark Lord and the twisting wheel of fate, he can do no wrong. Something will always step out of the shadows to preserve his reign of terror. A dour 0-0 would’ve given the impression he was only clinging on by his fingertips, but the manner in which he rescued a point will be grim for the Pardew Out brigade—it will seem to confirm that he can never, ever be defeated, especially not in the face of what was, in the end, not nearly the all-out lynching that the press had trailed in the week.

Another man enjoying the warm after-buzz of a shot in the arm is Sam Allardyce, whose terrible rule over East London from his Tower of Babel in Canary Wharf looks set to continue. It’d be a major shock if Liverpool continued to be this dire for the whole season, so the only sensible point of view is that evil men like Allardyce and Pardew simply know how to get a result when they really need one. It’s already pretty obvious that Diafra Sakho will never score another Premier League goal again.

Felix Magath: fitness expert? Think again. Unbelievable Fulham anecdote from @DTguardian piece http://t.co/LxXE2UNjd4 pic.twitter.com/woolQYwMt8

— Archie Rhind-Tutt (@archiert1) September 20, 2014

Logic Is No Longer a Part of the Manager-Hiring Universe
The Championship usually takes a lot longer than most leagues to reveal its narratives, but already there’s some fascinating stuff going on. Nottingham Forest have a pretty long history of chokery, the obvious blip aside even providing the stat that they’re the only former European Cup winner to be relegated to the third tier. They also have Stuart Pearce as a manager, yet they’re looking genuinely dominant.

The real story, though, is probably going on at the bottom, Cardiff and Fulham bringing to an end the sad reigns of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Felix Magath. Both title-winners against the odds in their native lands, both having rotten times in a league below they one they were actually hired to manage in over here.

It’s strange, but there seems to be no logic as to how well a manager will do any more. Manuel Pellegrini pipping José Mourinho to the title. Garry Monk working out well at Swansea. Louis van Gaal’s side shipping about four goals a game. There’s been a sea change in English soccer, somewhere, and we’re just praying that Neil Warnock, the last of the brave, can continue to be a man for all seasons.

Follow Callum on Twitter

Toronto cops cruising down Yonge St. Not pictured: body-worn cameras. via Flickr user theghostofgraingertown.

After the controversial killing of 18-year old Sammy Yatim by the Toronto Police last summer, the discussion surrounding how police should react to distressed individuals has only continued to snowball.

Today, in response to a report published earlier this year by former Supreme Court judge Frank Iacobucci, which looked into the ways that cops can effectively approach “people in crisis,” along with a cosign from outgoing police chief Bill Blair in February, news broke that the Toronto Police service (TPS) has distributed a request for proposal (RFP) to find a private partner than can develop a body-worn camera system to be tested by a team of 100 police officers in the near future.

The RFP was announced today by the Toronto Police, but it appears as if the cops have been sniffing around for a corporate partner since early August—a search that was taken one-step further at an information session at Toronto Police headquarters on September 10th.

In a statement published by the Toronto Police earlier today, the cameras could be on a small group of officers as early as November, with the target length of the project set at one-year. It’s not clear if the Toronto Police have awarded the body-worn camera project to a particular vendor yet, but the statement mentions that the designated police units who will be wearing the cameras volunteered “for the most part” to do so.

Staff Sergeant Mike Barsky is quoted as saying: “I think our officers understand that, in today’s environment, we have to be ahead of the curve. It’s been very clear from other agencies that use this technology that there is a great benefit, not just to a policing best-evidence standpoint, but also for the community to get a pure version of what evolves over the course of a radio call or a traffic stop.”

Body-worn cameras have already been proven to be quite effective in Southern California, where use of force by cops fell 60 percent, and complaints against police officers dropped 80 percent after body-worn cameras were implemented there. In a world where we’re all armed with HD cameras in our phones anyhow, and where police brutality—in such cases as Sammy Yatim’s—can and will be captured by civilians, it seems to be a natural progression for police to take matters into their own hands by equipping their officers with point of view camera technology.

Where the footage from these cameras will end up and the public’s access to it, however, is another matter altogether. These cameras, when they’re implemented, will add an indispensable amount of transparency to the actions of our police force, but without reasonable regulations to ensure the footage is handled properly, this could all be for naught. For example, if the Toronto Police are involved in another case where police use of force leads to public outrage, would the footage be locked up in legal embargos and publicity bans, away from the public eye?

In Iacobucci’s report, he addresses the need for these kinds of rules to be written as such: “[TPS and their privacy protocol] should address the appropriate methods of storage and length of retention of body camera recordings, limits to accessing and sharing this information, and mechanisms through which individuals recorded can request access to, and the deletion of, information stored by the TPS.”

One of the major considerations, too, is the control these officers will have over their own cameras. If an officer gets into a heated situation, is he or she able to simply disable their camera? Iacobucci’s report addresses this issue as well:

“The TPS should establish the scope of discretion for officers to disable recording, reporting measures to be taken when a camera is deactivated, and consequences of misusing that discretion. Examples include requiring officers to notify Communications Services of the reason for disabling a body camera and the duration of the deactivation, or requiring officers to file reports detailing any circumstances in which their body cameras were deactivated.”

Clearly there a lot of very important logistics to be worked out when it comes to implementing a new body-worn camera system, but it’s encouraging to see that a pilot project is already underway. Multiple emails to the TPS to see the full text of their RFP were not immediately responded to.

In addition to the Toronto Police, it seems as if the Saskatchewan RCMP is also in the market for some fancy new body-worn cameras. The Saskatchewan RCMP did not immediately respond to a request for comment about this, either, but if the Toronto Police pilot project goes well, one would hope it will kickstart a trend that will bring body-worn cameras to Canadian cops from coast to coast.

And if this is the new face of Canadian policing, hopefully cop-cameras come with reasonable rules surrounding if and when they can be disabled, how the footage is stored, who can watch said footage, and when (if ever) it’s appropriate to delete video from police archives.

@patrickmcguire

Image via Flickr Creative Commons

Five months ago, the UN’s Human Rights Committee issued its fourth periodic review of the situation in the United States. Among other things, they cited ongoing concern about “cases of trafficking of persons… and criminalization of victims on prostitution-related charges.” I can’t blame them. Denying prostitutes, and people profiled as prostitutes, access to protection under the law is practically an American tradition. Robert Hansen, Alaska’s famous sex worker serial killer, had multiple victims escape and go to the police, sometimes still in his handcuffs. They were laughed at and threatened with arrest while he continued killing for years. When I was an eighteen-year-old stripper, I was raped, and the cops said, “What are you wearing? You’re just mad that he didn’t pay you—we should charge you with making a false report.” One even added, “You look familiar, have I seen you in jail?”

These memories came flooding back when another sex worker I know in Anchorage (I’ll call her Sarah) recently showed me an email she’d received:

Not at all. It's not hatred, Sarah. I do not hate you, I dislike your kind. This is my town now, you prostitutes are done here. This is your last trip, you got it? The other sluts are done too...and so are the drug dealers and other bad people. The only way you will be allowed to operate here again is if you pay me a percentage of what you make. It's either that or find another town sweet thing, because if you come here again without paying the tax, I promise you that you will be arrested and thrown in jail....not to mention you will lose everything you come up here with. Got it? Now if you want to work in this town again, I want you to pay $1000.00 dollars by tomorrow morning. And let's be honest, that's a small percentage for what you make here. At three hundred an hour, it will only take you 3 and a quarters hours to pay that tax. Either pay or leave and never come back. If you want to keep working here, you will tell me the hotel your staying at and I will give you a drop zone. To be made by midnight tonight. The 1000 covers you and [a friend] . And for your next visit I will personally make sure that you go about your business uninterrupted. Business as usual. What say you?

A quick google search revealed that the sender, a man I’ll call Gary, seemed to have committed the crime of extortion—a class B felony under Alaska state law. He also seemed to be attempting to commit felony sex trafficking in the third degree (receiving or agreeing to receive money from prostitution) under Alaska state law.

Unfortunately, before he tried to extort Sarah, Gary asked her to book a duo, writing: Welcome back, how much for an hour with you and [a friend]? I'm looking for some three person action.

That makes her potentially guilty of second-degree felony sex trafficking, which is when someone “procures or solicits a patron for a prostitute." In a bit of brutal irony, Alaska’s sex trafficking laws seem to be used primarily against sex workers rather than to protect them. The first two people to be charged with sex trafficking under Alaska state law were alleged prostitutes who were charged with prostitution of themselves in the same case they were charged with trafficking. Since then there've been a total of four people charged with trafficking and only one of them was not allegedly a prostitute. In 2012 and 2013, the state of Alaska didn’t charge anyone with prostitution without also charging them with sex trafficking or alleging that they were a victim of sex trafficking.

Our sex worker’s rights group knew that the Anchorage Police Department had made sex trafficking a priority, so we were hopeful that they would offer Sarah immunity and go after the bad guy, who it turned out had emailed similar threats to another sex worker. We printed the emails with Sarah’s name redacted and brought them to a meeting with the cops where Maxine Doogan—a labor organizer with the Erotic Service Providers Union—took the lead in trying to get them to process our report. 

Sergeant Lacey of the vice unit explained that anybody could make a report, and that she always tells sex workers to just come forward and say what happened. People can even report anonymously online, although they can't report sexual assaults anonymously, and anonymous reports are not likely to be investigated. “Our unbiased policing policy doesn’t identify groups specifically, because everybody has a right to unbiased policing regardless of your outlook or your experience or your job or whatever it is, and as a matter of fact, through the years we’ve prosecuted people for sexually assaulting, um, sex workers,” said Captain Bill Miller.

Sergeant Lacey maintained that no one could be arrested for simply being a sex worker (although at least one person mentioned being arrested by APD for saying they were an escort), but she agreed that Sarah would have “some exposure” under the sex trafficking laws if she came forward as the victim. 

Finally, after about an hour, Captain Miller agreed to take the report. “I’ll take a report from anybody,” he said. “Be happy to take a report and send it to Fairbanks, but I’ll be honest with you: the more information that we have, and the more information that we can corroborate through the report, the better the courts are gonna look at this. We’ll be more than happy to take a report. In fact that’s one of the things in our policy is that we’ll take a report from anyone, anywhere. The catch comes in how we can use the information in that report, um, to hold parties responsible. So what we can do with this? I’ll be more than happy, I’ll personally take this report.”

The cops refused to ask the local prosecutor for immunity for the victim, but they said we could always make an appointment and go talk to a prosecutor ourselves. Just a few hours later, in the courthouse, we ran into Adam Alexander, an assistant attorney general and special prosecutor for sex trafficking and prostitution charges for the state of Alaska, and he invited us back to his office. Mr. Alexander was sympathetic to our plight, but explained that Alaska law only allows one particular kind of blanket immunity that he wouldn’t be able to give our victim. Plus, he didn’t even know if the emails we showed him were real. (He declined to be interviewed on the record.) He did suggest that if we had a report to make of sex trafficking, we should call Sergeant Mike Ingram, the man in charge of the Alaska Bureau of Investigation’s Special Crimes Investigative Unit that focuses on sex trafficking and prostitution investigations.

I called Sergeant Ingram. He did not have time to meet with our group of sex workers to perhaps develop a relationship that would allow us to report crimes, nor did he want to take an account about an incident that had already been reported to another law enforcement agency. “You seem to have some issues with the system,” he said. “You need to trust the system. If you have something to report, call 911.”

The very next day, August 20, Captain Miller emailed a report number to Maxine:

Maxine,

The report number I am forwarding to Fairbanks PD is 14-34330. It will be a couple of days until the report makes its way through the process of being filed and when it does I’ll move it along to them. 

If you do happen to talk to one of their detectives please give them this report number and have him/her contact me.

Thanks
Bill

When Maxine called the Fairbanks Police Department eight days later, they still had not received the report from Anchorage. In the meantime, we’d heard from three more women who’d received emails from the same Gary, and learned that there was a police officer in Alaska with the same first and last name as that on the emails.

Later that day, Sarah received another email, this time with a threat: Bitch I told you not to come back here unless you pay the tax....I'll see you soon. With my badge and cuffs.

“Do you think he knows my real name?” Sarah asked me. “Does he know how to find me? What do I do if he shows up here? Do you think I have any recourse if I get arrested for not paying him a thousand dollars?” I didn’t have any answers.

Since the police report was apparently lost somewhere between the Anchorage and Fairbanks Police Departments, we decided to report the new email directly to the Alaska Bureau of Investigations, which was where it seemed like it belonged in the first place.

A new sex trafficking law has Alaska's law enforcement apparatus going after sex workers. Photo by the author

The month before, we had met with the Fairbanks women’s shelter director, who seemed to be one of those rare professionals capable of understanding that some women choose to be prostitutes. They’d sounded potentially helpful, so I called and asked if one of their advocates could go with us. They kindly offered to host the meeting and invited an investigator they work with.

Sergeant Bruce—his full name is Lee Bruce, and no, he didn’t get teased in school—was much friendlier than the other officers we’d spoken with. He fully understood the victim’s reluctance to come forward and risk prosecution and said he would talk to the district attorney about immunity. Without the victim and her computer, he said, this was what was called an “unreportable report.”

“What do you think needs to happen for sex workers to be able to access protection from law enforcement?” I asked him.

“Well from law enforcement it comes from the legislature,” he explained. “We’re dictated what we do and what we’re able to do through the legislature, through the statutes of the state." Basically, he was punting.

Kat, another one of our board members, tried to get to the heart of the matter by reminding Sergeant Bruce that the victim is a human being: Equal protection under the law becomes meaningless if victims of crime do not feel safe coming to the [police]. I’m glad to hear you say that you see sex trafficking and prostitution in their totality, because it’s a very complex issue. Every single person involved is a human being, and human beings come with some pretty complex dynamics. This is a woman who is fearful of coming forward to seek redress under law because the way she earns her living is illegal. It’s not at all an uncommon scenario for people who are outlaws or live outside the law. The greatest thing that our organization is concerned with is how do we change that so that people like this can come forward and say, ‘I’m being harmed.’”

“Like I said before, the best route is going through our legislatures,” Sergeant Bruce responded.

He seemed unable to say “sex work” or “the sex industry.” Instead, like other Alaskan law enforcement officers, he called it only “the sex-trafficking trade.”

“Why do you keep inserting the trafficking thing?” I asked him.

“Sex trafficking, you know, that involves a lot of prostitution and what have you,” he said. “Women get in bad situations with prostitution, you know, because prostitution is illegal and that makes it easy to take advantage of women in those situations. So that’s why I keep talking about trafficking.” (Although research shows that about half of underage sex trafficking victims are boys, Sergeant Bruce, like most officers, likes to focus on the women.)

It really boggles the mind. Even this sergeant seems to understand that prostitution laws cause sex trafficking. But instead of decriminalizing prostitution, the state made it more criminal by turning many things sex workers do to stay safe (like sharing hotel rooms and screening potential customers) into felony sex trafficking crimes. In effect, these laws have created an open season on Alaskan sex workers for violent criminals looking to target people with no recourse or access to protection under the law.

A few days later I got an email from Sergeant Bruce: the district attorney’s office would not be able to offer any immunity without the victim first coming forward and handing her computer over to the Technical Crimes Unit. 

The creepy, unexpected thing is that Gary stopped his constant emailing of two women immediately after our conversation with Sergeant Bruce. No one’s heard from him since. Now I wonder: Did he find out about our police report? Did he get my name off of it? Does he know where I live?

Terra is a writer and retired sex worker in Alaska whose name has been changed.

The Community United for Safety and Protection, a group of current and former Alaskan sex workers, sex trafficking victims, and allies, knows that the beginning of the answer to situations like this is to nullify unjust laws via a court challenge. They are in need of legal help to really start the process of bringing safety and protection to their community. Email them at sextraffickingalaska@gmail.com if you can help.

Last night, after hosting a segment on the effort to legalize weed in Alaska, local KTVA news anchor Charlo Greene quit her job in true “fuck you, fuck you, you’re cool” fashion. Charlo went off script and told her Alaskan audience, on live TV, that she owned Alaska’s only cannabis club and that she would be leaving the news world behind— in order to put all her energy towards supporting the marijuana legalization movement in Alaska. Effective immediately, Charlo has begun a new life advocating for the movement by continuing to run the only weed dispensary in the home state of Sarah Palin. Before signing off, she also added: “Fuck it, I quit.”

Unsurprisingly, the mix of weed, unexpected swearing on live local news, and the thrill of someone quitting their job scorched earth style, resulted in Charlo’s final news broadcast going viral. So, we caught up with her earlier today to talk about her decision to bail on the glamourous life of local news reporting, her cannabis club, and the legalization movement in Alaska.

VICE: So when did you start the cannabis club?
Charlo Greene: We purchased a business license on 4/20/2014!

How's the business been going?
It’s been going great! Well enough for me to feel comfortable in walking away from a career that I’ve spent all my adulthood building.

Why did you decide to quit in such an extravagant fashion?
[Laughs] To draw attention to the issue. You, as a journalist, know that all of us are replaceable. The people aren’t really going to miss you, or me, or any random reporter for the most part. So why not just use the position I was put in to make sure that my next chapter is just wide open for me?

What was the aftermath like in the studio?
Thank goodness it was on a Sunday night when most of the people were in the downstairs studio. I was doing my live hit in the upstairs one, so I didn’t see anything happening in the actual newsroom itself, but there were a couple of higher ups that were on my floor that were kinda freaking out—a little panicked. The phones were ringing off the hook, and I was escorted out. That was it.

And there’s been no fallout since?
The station took down my bio and all that stuff, but no one has been in touch with me.

Viewers, we sincerely apologize for the inappropriate language used by a KTVA reporter on the air tonight. The employee has been terminated.

— KTVA 11 News (@ktva) September 22, 2014

That’s good. Did you see their tweet saying that you had been terminated?
[Laughs] Yeah. [Laughs some more] I saw that. That was stupid.

It’s pretty rich, I think.
[Laughs] Yeah, and then the fact that there’s so much support… if you just go and look at the tweet they made, you’ll see the response is, “No, you guys got it wrong. She just quit. We heard it. We saw it.”

It’s really cool to see how many people are rallying behind this. I kinda did something that all of us, at least at some point or another, always wished we could do. Like, “Fuck it, I’m done. This is dumb. I’m going to do something else. I’m going to be my own boss. I’m going to make a difference because I have the opportunity to do so.”

So why don’t we talk about that opportunity. How did you get into cannabis in the first place?
I’m Alaskan. Alaskans smoke weed. It just is what it is. But I first tried it when I was in high school, and I didn’t like it at all, so I quit completely and I just drank like, a ton, which is also a really big issue here in Alaska. It got to the point when I was in college that I’d been drinking so much I ended up not even going to class, I failed out of an entire semester and I took a really heavy course load. Out of seven classes, I failed all of them, except for gym, and that’s only because he felt sorry for me.

I knew that alcohol, as a vice, wasn’t going to allow me to become the person I was meant to be. So I needed something else to do that maybe wasn’t so harmful, and I picked up smoking weed. I went from failing an entire semester, to the next semester, and every semester after that, being on the Dean’s List. I graduated cum laude... And that’s because I was smoking weed! I sat my ass at home and did what I needed to do, and I never woke up with a hangover because of it, or got behind the wheel and ran over a family or anything because of it.



Charlo, surrounded by green. Photo via Facebook.

Do you have medicinal reasons for smoking or is it all recreational?
I think recreational is a funny term, because who’s to say that you sitting down and smoking a joint, and it having a relaxing effect on you, is any different from you popping a Zoloft? You wouldn’t call popping a Zoloft recreational—well, you probably would…

I know what you’re getting at, though.
So mine’s medical. I think pretty much everyone that smokes weed is doing it medically.

For people who aren’t up on the situation in Alaska, what is the latest on the effort to legalize there?
Polling is showing that support is slipping, that’s why I stepped away from my career. Otherwise I would have just been behind the scenes [in the media] the entire time, just making sure the fear mongering, and the non-facts they put out there that journalists never want to do the work to actually fact check themselves—I would have just stayed there to make sure it’s a fair fight. But polling has been showing that the fear-mognering is working, so I had to step away to make sure that Alaskans know what’s really at stake. And the opportunity that is ahead of us.

Are you optimistic?
Oh yeah. If you were to look at our Facebook messages, and our comments, and the emails that we’re getting, it’s people that have never cared to vote. Like, “You have balls, and I am registering to vote, let’s go and do this. I’m behind you.” We already know that we’re shifting things back to the right side of where it should be, and getting the support behind legalizing marijuana in Alaska on November 4th.

Great! Do you have a favourite strain?
A favourite strain… I’m gonna go with Jack. Jack Herer. It’s a classic.

It sure is. So I presume your cannabis club is all private membership right now?
It is. For now, until we vote to legalize it. The medical side is always going to be running. We’re planning on branching out and getting into retail of course. But we need to ensure our medical marijuana patients aren’t screwed over when this vote is passed. This initiative makes no differentiation between medical and recreational marijuana.

Voters in Alaska decided to legalize medical marijuana back in 1998, and 16 years later the state hasn’t set up any framework for them to be able to get it—to allow any dispensaries. They were screwed over then. This effort, this ballot measure, cannot screw them a second time. I’m not going to let that happen.

Right on. Do you have any advice for anyone who wants to quit their job in a spectacular fashion?
Do it big. If you’re going to quit your job, do it big. Why not? Your job probably sucks, so go ahead and get whatever you can out of it. If your job gives you access to information that might help wherever you’re going to go next, then get that! If you’re just a cog in this massive machine, and you know you’re replaceable, and you’re treated that way. Then replace them. Be brave. Be ballsy. And make sure you’re going to be OK afterwards.


@patrickmcguire

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THE HOT ZONE

Black Death Returns to Madagascar

By Benjamin Shapiro

Malagasy plague specialists perform an autopsy on a potential plague rat. Photos by Lucian Read

I sat in a helicopter as it banked around and down toward a clearing in the center of Beranimbo, a village of 80 or so palm-thatched huts tucked away in the emerald mountains of Madagascar’s Northern Highlands. My pilot, a blocky German expat named Gerd, had already made one attempt to touch down the shaky single-engine copter, but he’d aborted the landing after the rotor blades kicked up enough dust to cause a brownout.

A few hours earlier, when we’d set out for Beranimbo—a three-hour journey from the Malagasy capital of Antananarivo—Gerd had seemed excited. He doesn’t normally get jobs like this, typically making his money flying film crews around the countryside to shoot B-roll for ecotourism documentaries, usually about lemurs. “You want me to do a pass?” he asked, and before I could find out what he meant, we were swooping low through the hills. My stomach lurched upward; from this altitude we could see the spiny forest vegetation, tall ravenala trees, and great gaping wounds in the countryside, scars of systematic deforestation.

We were there because, in the fall of 2013, Beranimbo had been an epicenter of a black plague outbreak that resulted in nearly 600 cases and more than 90 deaths across the country. Madagascar reports the most instances of the disease in the world. Depending on which century you’re talking about, it’s perhaps best known as the plague—a scourge generally associated with the Middle Ages, when rats, fleas, and poor hygiene resulted in the deaths of between 75 and 200 million people. The disease remains an enduring threat in third-world nations; public-health watchdogs report up to 2,000 cases a year.

In the 1930s, the rise of antibiotics dampened and then nearly extinguished the clinical threat of the disease, at least in the developed world, and it lost its status as a global killer. But for years, epidemiologists have warned that Madagascar is particularly vulnerable to widespread rural and urban contagion. I wanted to find out just how dangerous this medieval disease is in the 21st century, and why it persists in this corner of the world. That search led me to Beranimbo.

When we arrived, Gerd’s nervousness was apparent. “This may be too dangerous,” he muttered into his headset intercom as he tried to land the helicopter. Gerd’s concern wasn’t for his own safety, but rather the security of 200 people gathered around the makeshift landing pad below. Any one of them could have easily lost an eyeball to a pebble or twig whipped upward into the air. Helicopters are rare in Beranimbo and always attract attention, as they usually carry aid workers from the Red Cross. When we finally found a suitable spot to land, villagers ran from the dusty complex of huts to greet us.

On the ground, I was introduced to the village elder, a thin old man in a light jacket and safari hat. To celebrate our arrival, he had organized the slaughter of a zebu, a type of domestic cattle with a large, camel-like hump, for a celebratory lunch. “The sacrifice of the zebu marks our friendship,” he told me. “I can’t express enough our happiness. Enjoy it with all our gratitude.” The animal’s neck was cut, and I was taken to meet Rasoa Marozafy, a 59-year-old father of seven who’s spent his life in the village. Rasoa is a plague survivor, and part of the reason I’d come to this place.

Like his fellow villagers, Rasoa is of slight build and visibly, chronically malnourished. His limbs are knobby, like twisted sheets. He peered at me closely, looking me up and down before extending a hand for the traditional Malagasy handshake, a greeting with the left hand wrapped around the right wrist, then a quick flip into an open-palmed clasp and back down again.

I introduced Rasoa to my translator, and he recounted his brush with the Black Death.

The isolated village of Beranimbo, the epicenter of the plague that gripped Madagascar’s Northern Highlands in September 2013. Photo by the author

In September 2013, at the outset of the hot and rainy season, Beranimbo was gripped by an enigmatic pestilence. The index case was Rasoa’s cousin, a maize farmer, who suddenly took ill and died. Following tradition, his body was carried into the center of town and left unburied for a week while funereal arrangements were made.

Rasoa’s troubles began a few days later. The horror started with a high fever and searing chest pains, which jetted out from his trunk in red-hot strands. A day later he was coughing violently, spitting up black gobs of blood. Smooth, painful lesions appeared on his armpits and groin, and within 24 hours, his wife, Veloraza, had developed the same symptoms.

When the local healer took ill, Beranimbo devolved into open panic. Sick and dying villagers staggered into the countryside toward neighboring settlements they thought were uninfected, thus spreading the unknown disease throughout the Highlands. By early October, a full outbreak had ensued, and Beranimbo had become a hot zone. Rasoa and Veloraza, fearful of spreading the unknown disease any further, walked into the jungle together to die.

The sickness continued to rage unchecked through the countryside for weeks before a handful of villagers limped into Mandritsara, a nearby city and commune. Preliminary tests conducted by local doctors found the general risk factors associated with rural living: low body weight, chronic malnourishment, lack of sanitation. But the sick tested positive for Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the black plague.

Regional coordinators of the Red Cross were alerted and dispatched on October 5. When the aid workers arrived, Rasoa and Veloraza were still in the forest, waiting for death, so volunteers instructed villagers to search for them. It took a day, but the couple were located and carried back to the village, where they were administered injections of tetracycline and streptomycin, two strong antibiotics. They were on the verge of death and severely underweight. But within days, the mysterious illness vanished.

After a few weeks, Rasoa and Veloraza recovered. “Now we will never separate,” Veloraza told me, sitting next to her husband, tears welling in her eyes. Until she was treated, she had never heard of the plague. I took a deep breath of dry air and asked her what consequences the disease had had on the village.

“Consequences?” she snorted in traditional Malagasy. Her anger didn’t need translation. “It killed people,” she said. “Those were the consequences. It killed. We thought we were going to die.”

The villagers prepare a zebu for lunch.

I was born in the Year of the Rat. As a kid, scanning the printed mats beneath serving plates of dumplings and pork lo mein at Chinese restaurants, I was proud to be a rat. It’s the first in the Chinese zodiac, like Aries, my sun sign. I interpreted its character less as smarmy, filthy vermin than as industrious, instinct-driven survivor. Still, most people don’t think of rats that way. It takes a low position in the animal kingdom to qualify as vermin. Although I might reasonably argue that rats grade higher than cockroaches on the human scale of animal tolerability, they’re clearly below crows, bats, and even pigeons, and musophobia dates back to the earliest stages of civilization, when rats first crept into grain silos and contaminated food supplies.

Since then, they’ve been feared for spreading a mind-bogglingly vast array of illnesses, like rat-bite fever, cryptosporidiosis, viral hemorrhagic fever, leptospirosis, and, of course, the plague, by far the most horrifying of the great epidemic diseases. Over the course of history, the plague has earned a handful of aliases that convey its potential for destructive power (Black Death, black plague, Great Mortality, Great Pestilence, Great Plague, Red Death), but most know it as the bubonic plague and have a set of knee-jerk associations with it: fleas, nomadic packs of crazed flagellants whipping themselves, the Brueghelian triumph of death, Monty Python, and, naturally, disease-spreading rats.

Of course, there’s way more to know about the plague than most people care to learn about—it really just depends on how curious you are. Like many fantasy-obsessed middle schoolers, I became interested in the Middle Ages. And that led to a specific interest in the plague for a very specific reason: its status as the single most catastrophic killer in human history. Since it was first reported among the Philistines in 1320 BC, it has caused an estimated 300 million deaths, and there is currently no reliable vaccine. The Y. pestis bacterium has proven itself impossible to eradicate, and by all accounts it will be around long after our species is dead and gone.

“It’s a disease for a time and place,” Dr. Tim Brooks, a British epidemiologist who specializes in the plague at Public Health England’s Rare and Imported Pathogens Department, told me over the phone before my trip. “But, in fact, its time is not now.” While it may not be the plague’s moment, that doesn’t mean it’s not biding its time in the waiting room. There have actually been three global pandemics of the disease. The first happened in the sixth century, then there was the Black Death of 1347, and finally there was the so-called Third Pandemic, which began its march in the 19th century and, depending on how cynical your epidemiologist is, may still be happening in small numbers on all continents today. It even crops up in the United States, which reports about seven cases every year, mostly clustered around the western side of the country. Just last month, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment reported that a Denver man and two others had contracted pneumonic plague, while a fourth person had contracted a milder form. (It most likely originated from fleas that bit the first man’s dog.)

The number of actual cases in the 21st century is, admittedly, low. Cheap antibiotics like doxycycline, the same stuff the doc gives you for a urinary-tract infection, will treat the plague almost every time. My doctor explained what to do if I thought I might have contracted the plague while assuring me that I almost certainly wouldn’t die from it if I took immediate action.

The “almost” is what got me. I imagined what the last days of my life would be like if I somehow caught the plague in a remote village in Madagascar and became sick so quickly that I’d be unable to seek help. It’s not the job of a disease to recognize or respect human dignity, but to me, the plague seemed engineered to degrade and agonize its victims. Here’s how it works: In most untreated cases, an incubation period of two to six days is followed by the sudden onset of violent flu symptoms. Painful, rose-colored lesions often develop around the groin, armpits, or neck. Gangrene turns the extremities black, and blood is coughed up and vomited.

Bubonic plague is the most common form, taking its name from the inflamed swellings, or “buboes,” which in turn reference the Greek word for “groin” (boubon). Pneumonic plague can be a direct consequence of the bubonic form, occurring when the disease reaches the lungs and begins spreading like the flu. The third form of the disease, septicemic plague, is the rarest and occurs when the blood is directly infected.

Whichever variety of the plague, as the disease progresses its victim lapses into recurrent seizures, Alzheimic confusion, coma, and internal hemorrhaging. Without treatment, the bubonic plague has a 40–60 percent mortality rate within four days. The pneumonic form, which spreads like the flu, has a much higher fatality rate (close to 100 percent) and works faster than its bubonic cousin, killing its human host within a few days if left untreated.

The condition most commonly associated with the plague is, of course, the buboes: swollen lymph nodes that have been described throughout history as kernels, pimples, wheals, and biles. Giovanni Boccaccio’s generally accurate description from The Decameron of 1353 poetically sums up what it’s like to experience the plague:

In men and women alike there appeared, at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits, whereof some waxed of the bigness of a common apple, others like unto an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils. From these two parts the aforesaid death-bearing plague-boils proceeded, in brief space, to appear and come indifferently in every part of the body; wherefrom, after awhile, the fashion of the contagion began to change into black or livid blotches, which showed themselves in many [first] on the arms and about the thighs and [after spread to] every other part of the person, in some large and sparse and in others small and thick-sown; and like as the plague-boils had been first (and yet were) a very certain token of coming death, even so were these for every one to whom they came.

In 1894, during the Third Pandemic, Alexandre Yersin, a French physician and bacteriologist, determined that the plague was caused by the previously unknown bacillus pestis. As is common in scientific practice, the bacterium was later named in his honor: Yersinia pestis.

Infographic: A Recent History of the Plague.
Click to enlarge

Before my trip to Madagascar, I assumed the bare and chilling facts of the disease would allow the story to write itself. When I spoke with friends and colleagues about the story, I would get one of two contradictory responses—confusion as to what the big deal was (it only kills a few thousand people a year. How bad is it, really?) and shock that it is still around at all.

In Madagascar’s cities, everyone knows about the plague. They know it constantly threatens to disrupt the social order of the country’s towns and villages. They know it just takes a perfect storm of filth, fleas, garbage, rats, and diminished immune systems to set off an epidemic that could potentially make it off the island and spread to the African coast.

As history has taught us, by the time there are enough people with the plague to classify it as an “outbreak,” it’s already too late. Something about Madagascar has made it the most vulnerable country on the planet for a serious outbreak at this moment. I wanted to know what that something was.

Rasoa Marozafy and his wife, Veloraza, who both contracted plague in the fall of 2013. Photo by the author

When I arrived at the Ivato International Airport in Antananarivo, the first thing I noticed was the smell. It’s not an odor, exactly, more a general ruddiness in the air that followed me throughout my trip. There were moments when it was overpowered by brassier fragrances—the sick-sweet curdle of garbage, or fried-egg fart-wafts of human sweat—but it remained the bass note of every olfactory chord, as if the entire country were housed inside a potter’s lathe.

“In shape,” wrote Sir Mervyn Brown, Britain’s ambassador to the country in the 1970s, “Madagascar resembles the print of a gigantic left foot with an enlarged big toe pointing pigeon-toed slightly to the right of north.” Almost the size of Texas, the country is 1,000 miles long, 350 miles wide, and tropical along the coasts, with a warm, wet summer and a cool, dry winter.

Some 88 million years ago the island broke away from the supercontinent of Gondwana, eventually being pushed 250 miles off the coast of Mozambique. It is one of the rare places on earth that has preserved its own unique ecosystem. More than 75 percent of Madagascar’s flora and fauna are specific to the island, although many of these species have been eradicated, mostly due to local slash-and-burn farming techniques introduced by the island’s first settlers and still practiced to this day.

The country is populated by dark-skinned inhabitants, descendants of ancient Indonesians who arrived on the island around the ninth century, having sailed nearly 5,000 miles across the Indian Ocean in elegant outrigger canoes. They don’t consider themselves African and speak a traditional Malagasy language and French, a holdover from colonial days. At the turn of the 20th century, France unified the island under a single regime. The first recorded instances of the plague followed soon after, worming its way aboard merchant ships and into the port city of Toamasina. By 1921, the disease had become endemic in the rodents and small mammals of the Highlands. Since then, the plague has flared up here and there, mainly as a rural phenomenon with occasional urban epidemics.

The plague is almost impossible to eradicate from Madagascar, thanks to a complex interaction of natural and sociocultural factors. According to a 2013 report by the US National Library of Medicine, the high percentage of animals carrying the disease lays the foundation for transmission, and social and economic conditions further encourage the periodic leap to humans.

Outbreaks of the plague in Madagascar usually occur in villages above an altitude of 2,600 feet and can be linked to the activities of farmers. The agricultural infrastructure of the Highlands provides three distinct habitats for the plague to thrive: hilltop houses, hedges planted around livestock enclosures, and the irrigated rice fields of lower-lying areas. Food shortages and farming can serve as triggers that cause the rat population to drop significantly while, inversely, fleas flourish. Without the rats as a primary food source, fleas are forced to look for other mammals—such as humans—to serve as hosts.

In northern Madagascar, the plague spikes between October and April, when the warm rainy season ensures that the temperature rarely drops below 70 degrees. The sustained humidity acts as an incubator for Xenopsylla cheopis, better known as the Oriental rat flea, the primary vessel for the plague.

Compounding the difficulty of controlling the flea population during the rainy season, new research by the US National Library of Medicine suggests that the plague bacterium can quite literally persist underground between outbreaks via rats that infect themselves by burrowing into contaminated soil. While research is still in the preliminary stages, it has been demonstrated that Y. pestis bacilli can survive underground for at least 24 days under optimal conditions.

While vermin are the natural scapegoat for the plague, humans are the true culprits. In villages, crops are often stored inside houses to prevent robbery, attracting rats and fleas. Deforestation by illegal loggers, a timeless but growing problem in Madagascar, forces rats from the forests and into the villages. From there, impoverished living conditions and migrants fleeing those conditions can quickly result in outbreaks in previously uninfected communities.

Even more chilling, traditional Malagasy funereal practices help to ensure that the plague can continue to spread even after the victims have been buried. Most of Madagascar’s dead are interred in vaults and are exhumed from time to time for the Famadihana ceremony, which roughly translates to “the turning of the bones.” Upticks in plague activity are sometimes reported following these exhumation ceremonies, and it is enough of a problem that the Ministry of Health has recently recommended instituting a seven-year period between the death and exhumation of plague victims.

Despite these considerations, and evidence that instances of the plague may be increasing, the Malagasy government stopped tracking metrics on the plague in 2006, due to financial constraints. Today there remains only one reliable source for medical and biological data on the spread of the plague in Madagascar: the Unité Peste, or Plague Unit, of Antananarivo’s Institut Pasteur de Madagascar.

Evolving out of the Bacteriological Institute established by the French colonial government at the turn of the 20th century, throughout its various iterations the Institut Pasteur has long been crucial to the tracking of communicable diseases in the country. The health organization’s subsequent privatization has assured autonomy and, in an economically depressed Madagascar, its status as the last line of defense against the plague. A visit there was crucial if I hoped to understand just how bad things could get.

Andavamamba, a slum in Antananarivo whose name means “the Crocodile Mouth”

"There is a flea!” Michel Ranjalahy, a young lab technician with the Unité Peste, shouted from the deck of an open-air autopsy table. He’d just broken the neck of a rat with a pair of gleaming, silver tongs. He then cut open its carcass with a scalpel and scissors, using tweezers to extract its liver from a tightly packed coil of organs.

While he was scraping at the gutted rat’s fur with a pocket brush, the flea had fallen into a small basin. Some of the technicians instinctively backed away, raising their hands in morbid respect for the potential devastation this tiny flea was capable of causing. I asked Michel whether it was plausible that this particular Oriental rat flea carried the plague. “Yes,” he said, “because it drinks the blood of the rat, which may contain the plague bacterium.”

At its essence, the Unité Peste is a rogue team of die-hard rat catchers who conduct their work with lethal seriousness. As the only official group dedicated to fighting the plague in Madagascar, they have quite possibly the worst job in the country. Their days consist of traveling to remote, at-risk areas where the primary objective is to catch potentially infected rats and perform autopsies on them to search for signs of the highly virulent disease.

After a tour of the facilities, I was invited to tag along on one of Unité Peste’s search-and-capture missions. Within hours I found myself crawling on my hands and knees through the undergrowth around Antananarivo, hunting for rats that may or may not have been infected with one of the most devastating diseases known to man. Our field gear consisted of a pen and paper for note taking, sliced tilapia for bait, and two-door rattraps made from rust-resistant mesh cages that the team hides in the undergrowth, where they are left out overnight. With any luck, there would be live rats trapped inside when we checked the following morning.

Everyone I spoke to in Madagascar had heard of and expressed concern about the plague. I sensed an underlying fear that, if the disease were to reach the capital, the results would be catastrophic, as crowding could cause it to spread far more rapidly than in the countryside. This sentiment was echoed by the entire Unité Peste, including their boss, Dr. Christophe Rogier, a cheerful man with a thick French accent and a close-cropped buzz cut who serves as the director of the Institut Pasteur.

“There is an urgent need for funding the control of this neglected disease,” he told me when I visited him in his office in Antananarivo. “Because it is happening in neglected areas, where no politicians are going, and where no physicians want to go, since it’s too remote. The disease is dangerous for the population. But because people are moving, in fact, it’s dangerous for everybody. There are more rats in the city than in rural areas. The rats are in closer contact with the population, and the houses are overcrowded, so we can imagine that the spread of the plague from human to human would be faster in the cities than it would be in the country.” Suddenly the Black Death, which decimated Europe’s largest cities in the Middle Ages, didn’t seem so unfathomable.

The slums of Antananarivo share many characteristics with the densely populated medieval cities that were virtually wiped out in the mid 1300s. Among a total population of around 2 million, tens of thousands of Antananarivo’s most impoverished families live under ramshackle lean-tos fashioned from tarps and bamboo shoots with little or no access to clean water or indoor plumbing.

“If the plague were to hit the slums,” Rogier told me, “there could be dozens, hundreds, or thousands of cases.” It is a situation that has the potential to push the already troubled country off a cliff and further into failed statehood.

Michel Ranjalahy, of the Unité Peste, holding a potential plague rat outside the Institut Pasteur. Photo by the author

Antananarivo’s earliest known inhabitants settled atop the highest hills in the city, which spread out into three ranges that form the shape of a Y. This area wasn’t chosen for the nice views; rather, it offered a 360-degree tactical advantage over hostile invaders. As the city grew and developed, it sprawled down the mountains and into their low-lying valleys. As real estate on the mountain became increasingly scarce, the hillside communities became slums and have continued to grow unabated. An outbreak of the plague here would be catastrophic to the local population.

Just as they have for centuries, the men and women of Antananarivo walk barefoot through the streets, which are little more than mud ruts lined with open sewer systems clogged with trash and human waste. The latticework of canals that crisscrosses the city is also backed up with garbage. I watched as small bands of children waded and swam through the fetid sludge, hunting for anything worth selling that might be floating in the muck.

The day after I returned from the Highlands, I was given a private tour of one of the worst-off slums in the city by a 28-year-old security guard and father of three named Andriambeloson Solofo Pierre, who goes by Billo. He met me in a dilapidated café in the neighborhood of Andavamamba, which translates to “the Crocodile Hole.” (The settlement is built on top of a swamp, and local legend holds that the first people who moved into the area would often slip and fall into the deep pits where crocodiles laid their eggs.)

Billo earns between $3 and $5 a day. Like most people in Madagascar, he and his family cannot afford any real form of health care. “I fear for my family,” he told me, watching the sun setting over a canal choked with garbage.

He pointed to a group of children playing in the viscous water. “We’re located in an inner-city slum, so no one pays attention,” Billo said. “The roads are not repaired, and the projects to fix pathways and irrigation are gone since the coup. I know that politicians aren’t going to change things very much.”

The coup Billo referred to took place in 2009 and, like many of Madagascar’s most notable political moments, was a disaster for the country. When the French colonized the region in 1885, they set to work stripping the area of its resources and slaying more than 100,000 Malagasy who fought against the exploitation of their land. After a monitored independence was initiated in 1960, the country quickly devolved from the hope of autonomous democracy into total anarchy, and after that a failed Marxist utopia.

This all changed when President Marc Ravalomanana was voted into office in 2001. For the first time in the country’s modern history, Madagascar seemed poised to enjoy a degree of stability. The economy soared, bolstered by the land’s rich mineral wealth, which includes bounties of gemstones, nickel, and iron, and land-lease agreements with foreign investors like the Korean industrial giant Daewoo.

But this political and economic optimism was short-lived. In 2009, the Ravalomanana government was ousted in a bloody (and, many Malagasy believe, French-backed) coup, led by a former DJ and media entrepreneur named Andry Rajoelina, who at the time was serving as the mayor of Antananarivo. He immediately set up the so-called Fourth Republic and dubbed himself president of a fantasy regime called the High Transitional Authority.

As a result of Rajoelina’s coup and the dissolution of the elected government, foreign aid to the country, which formerly accounted for 70 percent of the national budget, evaporated almost overnight. A month later, Madagascar’s economy was in shambles. The country was suspended from the African Union, and according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, it was the most under-aided country on the planet.

Rajoelina’s junta countered by slashing public expenditures across the board, specifically in the irrigation, transportation, communication, and health sectors. These cuts affected virtually every facet of the Malagasy economy and evaporated the fragile middle class. The cost of Rajoelina’s coup will continue to be paid by average citizens for years, if not decades, to come.

The plague’s relationship to the country’s tangled political situation became apparent to me after I met Dr. Jean-Louis Robinson, the former minister of health who was ousted by the coup. We spoke at his compound, a lavishly decorated home overlooking a cluster of urban farms. A stout man with darting eyes and a hairpiece, Robinson told me that after Rajoelina took power, more than 400 health-care centers were closed across the country.

His main concern, like the Institut Pasteur’s, is that Madagascar’s urban population could be a conduit for a plague epidemic the likes of which the country has never seen. “There used to be established structure and control programs,” he said. “In the inner-city slums, there are no sanitation programs. Public restrooms are insufficient; garbage is not picked up regularly.” Everyone I spoke with who was in a position to do so identified these same sanitation issues as a potential tinderbox of widespread, communicable havoc, but there are few tenable solutions to such a problem when there’s no money to clean up mounting piles of garbage.

On December 20, 2013, following a series of political debacles surrounding the presidential election, Rajoelina and his High Transitional Authority lost control of the presidency to his former finance minister, Hery Rajaonarimampianina. Almost immediately, the US Department of State lifted all remaining restrictions on aid to Madagascar. But while this no doubt opened the door to an improvement of the country’s financial and public-health situations, according to a report issued by the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Transformation Index, these democratic elections should not “be expected to resolve the profound weakness of institutions and, particularly, the deeply eroded capacity of the state to govern, enforce, and regulate through critical sectors,” such as public health.

For his part, Billo told me, all he can do is wait for the next plague season, which begins in October. As we wandered through the throngs of bodies crowding the streets of Andavamamba, he wondered aloud about the chances of the plague reaching the capital—and how many might perish if it did.

Two girls in Beranimbo, firsthand witnesses to the plague outbreak

On one of my last days in Madagascar, I met a traditional healer named Dadafara who runs a small private practice out of a two-room hut off a dusty side street on the outskirts of Antananarivo. The exterior was lined with horned zebu skulls, and inside was a variety of plants and herbs in jars, and rainwater collected from the 12 sacred hills of Imerina, a cluster of mountains that surround the capital. In Madagascar, when people get sick, they generally consult people like Dadafara, although wealthier citizens refer to them as witch doctors and shun their practice. His frail body was clad in a traditional sari and topped with a worn baseball cap.

I wanted to know what sort of treatment a traditional healer would administer were he presented with a case of bubonic plague, and Dadafara agreed to consult with and treat me as if I were a sick patient. He explained to me how the consultation would work. First, I would tell him my symptoms. Then he and I would do a bit of chanting and invoke the ancestors to seek their advice. Dadafara held a small mirror up to the light. “This is my camera,” he told me. “I’m looking at everything through this and communicating with the ancestors. When I read a person through this, it’s like I’m watching a TV.” After we’d communicated with the spirits, they would tell Dadafara what my treatment should be, and he would prescribe some sacred water or boil herbs to treat me.

When we were ready to begin the ceremony, Dadafara asked me to tell him my symptoms, and I obliged. “I’ve got a fever of about 104 degrees,” I said, “and my groin and armpits are covered in smooth, open sores about the size of chicken eggs. I’m vomiting blood, I have a headache and painful muscle aches, and I’m experiencing violent, recurrent seizures. Also,” I added, “I live in an area that has no clean water and is infested with rats.”

My fixer told Dadafara what I’d said, and when he responded, she started to laugh. “What?” I asked. “What did he say?”

Dadafara crossed his arms as the translator gave me a deadpan stare. “He said, ‘You have the plague. You need to go to a doctor immediately.’”

A freshly chopped zebu head

Last month, in a scene reminiscent of Albert Camus’s 1947 masterpiece, La Peste, Yumen, a northwestern Chinese town of 30,000 people, was sealed off after a man died of bubonic plague. Police set up roadblocks on the perimeter and told motorists to find alternative routes around the town.

At the end of Camus’s novel, the protagonist, Dr. Bernard Rieux, surveys the Algerian city of Oran as its people celebrate the passing of a deadly plague and return to their old customs and habits. “He knew,” Camus writes, “what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books.

“The plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good… It can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests… It bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and… perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightenment of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”

God bless the booty video trend. Like any overwhelmed observer of popular music, I've had my moments of doubt about an aesthetic that more and more resembles those high-end porn videos for people who don't actually like porn. Those are the ones where the producers spend a bunch of money on saxophone music and a RED camera to make sure you don't feel gross about jerking off. You're not fooling anyone with your fancy lighting setups and fast-fashion knockoff wardrobe choices, guys. Still, there's a reason the booty genre has endured decades of music industry turmoil. The videos are great, and people love them. More vitally for our female music icons, it's a clear, surefire way to assert your relevance, no matter how old you are.

The clip for Jennifer Lopez's "Booty" remix that came out last week is yet another entry in the competition for filthiest music video of 2014. It excises the over-the-top, comical gyrations, garish set design, and knowing sense of humor of Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" video and replaces that with a rapid-fire succession of butts doing things most butts can't do. Yes, it found a way to be even less subtle than "Anaconda."

Also, this is the first time I've considered Jennifer Lopez sexy since 2005, which is no small feat when discussing the star of Monster-in-Law and The Wedding Planner. "Booty" has enough people talking (or not talking, depending how much they like the video's ample eroticism) that Lopez probably just punched her ticket off the music industry senior tour. The ass-centric, porny spank video is now the go-to career move for legacy pop stars like J-Lo who want an instant hot relevancy injection. 

I know I'm basically being manipulated by these videos—duped into believing I'm seeing something edgy solely for the purposes of getting me to care about the song that's tangentially related to the sex. In this case, the ruse worked, since if I had just heard the song on its own, I probably would tweet something snarky and forget about it forever (or at least until I'm doing commentary on the "Where Are They Now" segment of I Love the 2010s on VH1 Classic). The track that inspired the video is pretty unremarkable, modern pop music, but after years of dodgy film performances and captaining the flaming Hindenberg known as American Idol, it's more than a bit shocking to see J-Lo having oil poured all over her ass for my enjoyment. "Booty" director Hype Williams has been trading in titillation since before I could drive a car, but sexuality in videos has evolved greatly since Williams' heyday.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the sexual performance in music videos happened mostly in the rear (pun intended, obviously. I'm a pro, guys). Anonymous background dancers would grind and shake for the appreciation of both the stars of the video (usually male) and the audience simultaneously. One of Hype Williams' most well-known videos is Jay Z's "Big Pimpin," a clip that—along with Paul Hunter's video for Notorious B.I.G.'s "Hypnotize"—defines the classic "rich black men on a boat" genre. In that video, Jay and UGK are surrounded by hot women in an exotic location. The ladies dance for our amusement while the guys pop bottles, smoke phallic cigars, and throw money around. This is the template for any great hip-hop video, but has fallen out of favor in a climate where labels don't let you blow $200,000 on what is essentially a super entertaining commercial anymore. Today's videos lean on superhuman sexuality because they can't afford to toss $100 bills off the side of a yacht, send a film crew to Trinidad, and blow up Lamborghinis anymore.

When female hip-hop and R&B artists made videos in the last two decades, the focus of the sexuality was often wildly different from their male counterparts. Another Paul Hunter video from that era, Mariah Carey's "Honey," features Mariah stripping down to a bathing suit, getting very wet from a dip in the ocean, and a tame, almost corny dance routine inside yet another yacht. Her backup dancers are dressed like sailors, because they're on a boat. What else would they be dressed as? Cossacks? Chinese railroad workers? Power Rangers? Hunter was also the guy who put Missy Elliot inside a garbage bag for the video for "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)." What we have now is Nicki, J-Lo, Iggy, and others filling that traditional backup dancer role of shaking their ass, but with no guys around to smoke cigars.

The booty video genre is kind of a victory for the backup dancers of the world, in that their abilities and unique talents are an important part of making a pop star successful. These videos aren't just a vehicle to promote a song. They're also their own form of performance spectacle. I'm not sure this is even possible, but if one were to be able to remove the sensuality from "Booty," the viewer could still marvel at Lopez's immaculate fitness level. She is flexible in a way that a 45-year-old should not be. Beyond the obvious sexuality factor, the booty video's purpose is for the pop star to reassert vitality, to triumphantly declare, "I am not old!"

What we are looking at in "Booty" is a marvel of human ingenuity, and a symbol of what we can do with the human form if all we make it do is drink sparkling water, eat rice cakes, exercise, and judge talent shows. J-Lo's trainer should be eligible for some kind of Lifetime Achievement Award at the next VMAs, or at the very least, a gift certificate for Bath and Body Works. Just a little something to say thank you. We now know that Jennifer Lopez is in better shape than the whole world, which is now the number one prerequisite for musical success if you are a woman. Good luck living up to that standard, gals.

Of course, it shouldn't have to be that way. It just is. If you are a female singer past the age of 40, the market is constantly trying to turn you into metaphorical glue and repurpose you for a humiliating reality show about your precipitous decline in fortune instead of continuing to let you, you know, make music. Mariah Carey's last music video—a far cry from the glory days of "Honey"—came and went, and was notable for us never seeing a single clear shot of her body. She sits down backwards in a chair like a "cool" substitute teacher or covers herself with her arms for most of the video. Whether we like it or not, that's abdicating the throne in a pop climate where Miley Cyrus simulates fellatio as her opener. Mariah Carey is only a year younger than Jennifer Lopez (44 rather than 45), but didn't even come close to declaring her power the way J-Lo did.

For fun, I googled "Ashanti," a singer who blew up around the same time as J-Lo, but is 12 years younger than her. The first news article that came up was a piece on BuzzFeed called "Why You Should Still Care About Ashanti." In it, the author details Ashanti's early success, departure from Irv Gotti's Murder Inc. record label, her relationship with Nelly, and her comeback album, Braveheart. From the quotes and photos, Ashanti seems creatively fulfilled and healthy. Braveheart only sold 28,000 copies in its first week of release, barely squeaking into the top ten on the Billboard charts.

In February of this year, a video for a track from Braveheart called "I Got It" was released. It's a garish throwback with random shots of hot sports cars, a tough guy rapper looking tough (substitute Ja Rule with Rick Ross), and Ashanti alternating between sexy and intransigent poses. It's full of signifiers of wealth that are almost quaint—champagne, lapdances, fur coats, and gold chains—when compared to whatever wearable future tech I'm supposed to buy this Christmas. It's basically an HD version of a Blackstreet video up to around the 2:30 mark, when we see a man who may or may not be a Ja Rule impersonator tied to a chair. Ashanti pours a bottle of expensive liquor on his head, then grinds up on him for no reason.

I'm sure she expended a lot of energy on this video, but the last thing I thought was, "Wow, Ashanti looks really hot." I mean, she's in great shape and looks amazing, but it feels like so much posturing. I can't even properly articulate why I didn't care. I just didn't. I do know that Ashanti was never "sexy" to begin with. Her appeal came from being a sweet girl in the midst of a courtship with a guy from the "wrong side of the tracks," which was a posture Jennifer Lopez was more than happy to assume back in 2001. Despite coming out six months before the "Anaconda" video, I don't think anyone is calling the "I Got It" video a feminist statement. It didn't even make a dent on the culture. Despite her best efforts to embrace the new sexuality, Ashanti got old. 

Before she released "Booty," Jennifer Lopez was in real danger of going the Ashanti/Mariah Carey route. Of her peer group, she's the one who seemingly got left behind in the nursing home from Cocoon. Beyoncé is the powerful, vital media mogul. Justin Timberlake got the respectable acting career. Britney Spears is the living, breathing waxwork figure raking in millions of dollars a year doing Vegas pantomime. Christina Aguilera was on a talent show people still care about. 

As a film star, J-Lo never quite lived up to the promise of Selena and Out of Sight, nor did she go full-time as a pop star, so a new project from her is often met with the sort of muted interest more often associated with a new NCIS spinoff or State of the Union address. We know what we're going to get, it's not going to be that great, but we pay attention because. Her latest album, A.K.A., sold a modest 33,000 copies in its first week of release. American Idol somehow gets duller with every passing season. With relevance slowly slipping through her fingers, Jennifer Lopez did the one thing any female pop star in need of a popularity resurgence can do: She made a booty video. A really, porny booty video with Iggy Azalea and implied sapphic bliss.

These videos, when done well, serve a purpose in the pop universe. I am not ashamed to say I can be marketed to with sex, which is why I love the transparent appeal of the booty video. Before, I wasn't interested in anything J-Lo did, and now... well I'm only slightly embarrassed to say I'll pay attention to everything she does. Maybe a bit too much. The travesty known as "The Fappening" revealed that actresses, pop stars, and models have been so sexualized by the inescapable nature of their professions (and the accompanying need to stay young) that our prurient interest in their bodies has destroyed any remnant of privacy they had left. The audience can say, "sorry, not hot enough" to Ashanti or Mariah Carey through their apathy, but if Jennifer Lopez gets an Astroglide shower, she gets to be important again. 

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

All photos by Skyler Reid. Jody Harvine (left) of Terrell, Texas and Frank Mazzo of Azle, Texas wait outside the arena entrance for their event to begin.

My stereotype of Ohio is of straight-laced Midwesterners with an affinity for football and God, but I just watched grown men and women put tighty-whitey underwear on a goat. Competitively. This is totally screwing with my preconceptions. Welcome to the gay rodeo.  

In early August the Buckeye State hosted its first gay rodeo in Tallmadge, which is just outside Akron, which is just 40 miles south of Cleveland. The International Gay Rodeo Finals will be held in Fort Worth, Texas—a state that's been gay rodeoing since 1984—this coming October. The Ohio event may sound like a small feat, but the crowd of hundreds of mostly Wrangler-clad visitors that strode through the dust-filled arena represented a big win for gay rodeo, a community that's recently found itself in an unexpected flux.

 Participants attempt to put underwear on a goat during the "goat dressing" competition, one of the gay rodeo's "camp" events. 

The first gay rodeo was held back in 1976, a fundraiser in Reno, Nevada for muscular dystrophy sufferers. Idiosyncratic though it may be, the “queens and cowboys” mix worked out and the gay rodeo circuit grew rapidly in its early years.

Now, almost 40 years later, gay rodeo is facing a new challenge: maintaining its ranks. In 2013 the number of local chapters in the International Gay Rodeo Association—the be all and end all of the gay rodeo—that had closed down in the International Gay Rodeo Association overtook the number of chapters that were still active, a first in the organization's history. Three more chapters folded this year. There are now 23 local associations in the US and Canada, comprised of 3,350 members, but the tide isn't in their favor. Some participants suspect that it's a result of the increased acceptance of LGBT people: the rodeo is no longer a necessary sanctuary for the rural gay community. Others blame it on the economy and the high cost of living the classic, rural lifestyle: buying and maintaining land, equipment, livestock, and not to mention trucking a 1,000-pound animal hundreds of miles across the country to participate in multiple-day rodeo events, often with little to no financial return. Either way, the community is struggling.

Participants competing in the "wild drag race," one of the gay rodeo's "camp" events, try to drag a bucking steer across the arena while their teammate, in drag, tries to remain on top.

“Things have changed. Rodeo has changed,” John Beck told me. He’s a genial, tough-as-nails 65-year-old who's easily spotted by the long red feather sticking out of his white cowboy hat. Beck, a lifelong cowboy, is ostensibly the living godfather of the gay rodeo. “And for me, I'm old school in my training and old school in horses and I'm old school in my thoughts.” Admittedly, “old school” might not be how most people would describe an openly gay Nebraskan who dreamed up the “wild drag race,” an event where a team of three try to get a drag queen on the back a bucking steer.

It's these differences that distinguish the gay rodeo from mainstream rodeo. Aside from the standard rodeo fare—roping events, speed events, and rough stock events, like bull riding and other really painful shit—there are also a number of “camp” events: the above-mentioned tight-whitey on a goat, formally called “goat dressing”; steer decorating, which involves tying a ribbon to a steer's tail; and the wild drag race. The frequency of Janet Jackson tracks sneaking in over the PA, between the needling guitar of Blake Shelton and crooning of Tim McGraw, might also be unique to the gay rodeo circuit. And having a “for men” personal lubricant company as one of the main sponsors.

A participant competes in the barrel racing competition on the first day of the rodeo.

The other difference—the “meaningful” difference—is that the gay rodeo is explicitly all-inclusive. There are de facto gender divides on the rodeo circuit, in part due to cultural norms, in part due to explicit rules, whereas gay rodeo pushes for full participation in all events. It's a line that the organizers trumpet, an opportunity for everyone to compete equally and openly, a privilege that’s sadly uncommon. Barrel racing, a speed-based event, is explicitly a part of the Women's Professional Rodeo Association and isn't offered at Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association events, the largest rodeo organization in the world. Rough stock events like bull and bronco riding require an existing competition record in order to compete on the professional circuit. For example, a rider has to have already won $1,000 at the event, but aren't actually offered on the women's circuit. Gay rodeo keeps it simple: just sign up. The more, the merrier.

A participant catches a brief nap near a back entrance to the rodeo arena. 

“We've seen people we haven't seen in nine, ten years,” said Andy Pittman, a soft-spoken cowboy with a well-groomed walrus mustache. Pittman stood outside the Tallmadge arena as a light sprinkle started, waiting for his chance to run the barrel racing course. He and his partner, Louis Varnado, had been out of the rodeo since 2009, when costs, like for many other participants, started piling up. They began focusing more on their specific sports—in Pittman's case, speed events on horseback like barrel racing and pole bending. But this event in Ohio was worth returning for. “We're trying to bring back gay rodeo to the Washington, D.C. area,” said Pittman. “This was perfect.”

Andy Horner (front) and her partner Jennifer Nuss, both from Marion, Ohio, prepare Horner's horse for the barrel racing competition.

The Ohio event was the first rodeo held in conjunction with the perennial Gay Games, an international LGBT athletics and culture festival which hosts competitions in 35 sports. This year's events, held in Cleveland and Akron, drew in 30,000 visitors and added about $40 million to the local Ohio economy in the space of one week. By comparison, a good rodeo on the gay rodeo circuit might raise $10,000 for charity. “We want people to understand gay rodeo, see gay rodeo, get involved with gay rodeo” said Judy Munson, the director of the Ohio rodeo. “We just kind of want the world to know what we're about.”

Herbert Seamons, better known on the gay rodeo circuit as Red Hodeo, waits at the back of the arena.

Ohio was originally part of the Tri-State Gay Rodeo Association chapter of IGRA, founded in 1990, but it folded after only a few years. Other chapters that have covered the territory in the past have also failed and, in 25 years, Ohio has never hosted a gay rodeo “So for a year it's like, Gay Games is coming to Ohio,” said Herbert Seamons, a tall, gregarious chatterbox who goes by Red Hodeo in his rodeo life. He’s not regularly open about his sexuality, so I was surprised when he unwaveringly gave me permission to use his real name in this article. A resident of Michigan and a visible lynchpin for the community, Seamons has been shamelessly pushing for this rodeo for the past year. “This is our first chance to rodeo in Ohio. We gotta do this,” he said. “This is our big chance.”

Holding a gay rodeo in a new state can be a challenge—finding a venue, live stock suppliers and volunteers—but it also means a new audience and a chance to recruit new participants. “I get goosebumps just thinking that it's here,” said Jen Nuss, 32, one of the younger participants in the events. Nuss, who had never before run in a rodeo, lives with her partner, Andy Horner, and the two are competing in the barrel racing event, running horses in a clover-leaf pattern around barrels on the arena floor adorned with Budweiser logos—the oh-so-American lager is the rodeo's title sponsor. Together, the two raise horses and participate in their local National Barrel Horse Association chapter here in Ohio. Horner participated in NBHA Youth World Championships and had the fastest time of the female barrel racing participants on the gay rodeo's first day.

By one estimation, the median age of IGRA members is 47. It's essential for IGRA to bring in members like Nussman and Horner: young people who still live the rural lifestyle of classic Americana dreams, albeit with a certain Brokeback Mountain edge.

Andy Pittman (left) and his husband Louis Varnado wait outside the rodeo arena ahead of the barrel racing competition. 

“Our culture of people, the gay people, have fought for years and years and years to just let society know who we are, what we are and what we're capable of doing,” said Beck. He's seen the changes firsthand, and relates back tales of the death threats and attacks he endured as a gay man in rural Nebraska in the late 70s: his barn “mysteriously” catching fire, his dog being killed, finding the bloody message “Move or die. You're next,” on the windshield of his brand new Chevy Chavelle. He told me that he immediately called the sheriff after the death threat. When the police arrived they found a bomb underneath his car.

Despite his past trials, Beck is clearly still hopeful. Young people these days, he told me, are growing up in a different world. It's not perfect, but it's better.

The future of the gay rodeo, he figured, is still up in the air. “We've survived 33 years. We're not going to die out tomorrow. And you know, we have to keep out our Western style alive.”

Follow Skyler Reid on Twitter.

Topless selfie via Wikimedia commons (NSFW)

Over the weekend, Emma Watson got in trouble with the uglier parts of the internet when she spoke at the UN about women's rights. Having commited the crime of being an outspoken women's rights advocate, people now claim to have nude selfies of Watson, which they are prepared to leak—out of vengeance, I guess? It could be a hoax, but on the other hand, there was another such leak a coupld days ago, which makes the threat plausible. 

Although there are still crotchety columnists blaming singers and movie stars for having nude selfies on their phones in the first place, most of the media noise this time around has a very bored air about it. Maybe the voracious appetites of the crotch-pounders on Reddit and 4chan have given the media grainy-boob-shot fatigue. After all, stealing the dark, badly framed snapshots people take in haste to communicate "I'm horny" to their significant others isn't exactly like stealing their polished boudoir pictures. In fact, it's a step above stealing their chest X-rays and jerking off to the nipple outlines. 

In other words, this politically-motivated threat against Emma Watson is like the work of the most ineffectual, small-potatoes terrororist group in the world. But if former hacker and leading internet security blogger Nik Cubrilovic is correct, perhaps the only thing less impressive than the photos themselves is the process we're generously referring to as "hacking."

I talked to Cubrilovic about how these photos get stolen. At first I thought we would be discussing who's to blame when these diabolical photo leaks occur, but during our conversation I learned more than I ever thought I would about cloud storage. While it may have been old-school, penetrating-the-firewall-to-access-the-mainframe hacking, it's very possible that these photo thieves accomplish their heists simply by researching celebrities online for hours at a time, and then telling a bunch of lies to get what they're after—more or less the skillset of Hannah Horvath from Girls.

Authorized selfie of Nik Cubrilovic, courtesy of Nik Cubrilovic

Hi Nik! Who's to blame for all the nude photo leaks?
When you try to convey a story to the general public, they often perceive an issue to be very binary: good guy, bad guy. And this is a case where, outside of the actual hackers who broke into the accounts, the blame—and even “blame” is probably a strong word—but the responsibility can be distributed quite broadly.

Is it right to blame Apple?
Does Apple have a responsibility to secure their data? They do. Because the users are putting trust in them. 

But what makes Apple less secure?
The best way to explain their culpability (for lack of a better word), is to think about it in this perspective: there are three major mobile crowd providers—everyone belongs to one of these three ecosystems: you’ve got Apple, which is available on the iPhone, you’ve got Google’s cloud services, which are available on Android devices, then you have the Microsoft cloud services which are available on Nokia and other devices. Of those three, Apple is the only company that still has security questions. 

So, they’re doing something different, and it just happens that in this case, one of those things that they’re doing different than the other two major providers, was used to break into these accounts.

You’re anti-security question?
Oh yeah[...]. Security questions are a huge flaw. Google got rid of them four years ago or so. Microsoft abandoned them completely about three years ago. So, the core of this issue—if you want to summarize—is the ability to reset a user's password by simply providing their date of birth and then two security questions.

Those security questions have been making me feel safe. What's wrong with them?
When you hit reset, it will show you two of the three questions from when you signed up, and if you get them right, it lets you into the account. [...] The security question scheme is something that used to be used offline in banks and places like that in the 1960s and 1970s to prove your identity. It was adopted online in the 1990s, but companies quickly realized that it was very easy to bypass because on the web today, everybody is just sharing that information. It’s a lot easier to find. It’s a lot easier to go on to Facebook and find out some of these things like date of birth. It’s a lot easier to find what high school they went to, their pet's name, what type of car they drive. And for celebrities it’s even easier to find, because a lot of that information is either on Wikipedia, or on one of the gossip websites.

If I could figure out what Jennifer Lawrence would enter for “favorite city,” and “favorite sports team,” plus I knew her date of birth, then I could get in?
That’s right, yeah. And somebody did do that.

How do you know that's all it took?
It’s not confirmed 100 percent. [However], I knew where these guys hung out. I knew the forums they frequented, and I knew that they were all a part of this sort of subculture of hacking into online backups and stealing pornographic pictures, "revenge porn" or whatever you wanna call it. So [I've been] hanging out in those forums, and speaking to some of those members there. If you read some of their tutorials of how to hack an account—and this is actually the forum where these pictures came from—the number one tutorial is explaining how to answer the security questions.

It's a forum for exchanging tips?
I’ll give you a glimpse of what it looks like on the forum: You’d have somebody post a picture of a car, and it would be like, a maroon Mercedes, mid-1990s model, parked on a beach. Just a car completely in the middle of nowhere, and the question next to it would be, “What type of car is this?” I kept seeing those. There was a picture of a car interior, and some guy was asking what type of car that was. I couldn’t figure out why they were asking that. And it only occurred to me later that one of the security questions on iCloud is “what type of car do you drive?”

So [here's] what these guys were doing: Looking at the public photos of the people they were attempting to hack, and trying to find photos of their cars. Then, when they couldn’t identify them themselves, they were posting those pictures to these forums to get other people to help them out.

They're crowdsourcing their hacking, in a sense?
Yeah. And the penny dropped for me when somebody answered, “Sometimes the girls give their cars a nickname.” The entire forum—90 percent of it—is centered around, first of all, teaching people this method, and then second, helping people—crowdsourcing the answers to the questions. So teaching people techniques like how to stalk somebody online.

To answer some of these questions, you really gotta know your target intimately. You have to spend a lot of time absorbing as much information as you can about them. Then you go back and try and answer their questions. If you go into an Apple account you’ll see there are ten or twelve questions that users can choose from. But all of them, with enough persistence, an attacker can find the answers to.

What about the challenge of finding a person's main email address to begin with?
The way they do it is by paying to access the online people databases such as intelious.com, and there are a couple other providers where you can go in and plug in somebody's name. You pay anywhere from $2 to $60 and you get to get all their public records. So if you know someone’s full, Christian name and where they’re born, you can go and apply for their public database records. 

Is there a different method if they're famous?
The second method is social engineering, where you get in touch with an agent or something like that, pretending to be somebody else, and you try and fish out an email address that way. And the third way is that once you’ve hacked one celebrity, you extract their address book, and then you’ve got contacts for a whole lot of other celebrities. That’s what happened in this case. One celebrity getting hacked led to that celebrity having other celebrities in their address book, which then led to the other celebrities.

Should people think of themselves as security vulnerabilities for all of the people they know?
We talk about it being sort of the “weakest link” in the chain. With social networks and address books now, a weak link is often easy to find. An attacker only needs to find one weak link somewhere whereas the [victim] is sort of playing defense. You have to protect and secure everything which involves clues and, everybody that you’ve ever been in contact with, because most modern email clients now will automatically add anybody you’ve emailed into your address book automatically.

I'll have to be more careful then. Thanks Nik!

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Laurent Brogniet (on the right) with Paul-Henry Gendebien, co-founder of the RWF. Image courtesy of the RWF website

Do you remember what happened in Belgium in 2010 and 2011? I doubt you do, and the Belgians prefer it that way, because they didn't have any government for 541 days. It was a serious political crisis, symptomatic of the difficult cohabitation between Flemish people, who speak Dutch, and Walloons people, who speak French. The Flemings have wanted to secede from Wallonia for a long time, and it's quite easy to see where they're coming from: This region has some serious economic problems that have probably given birth to more serial killers than college graduates.

Nevertheless, members of the Rassemblement Wallonie France (RWF) decided to take action first. The RWF is the principal political party pleading for rattachism, which basically consists of transforming Wallonia into a French region.

Obviously, it's quite difficult to unite voters under such a slim banner, and their results in the 2014 legislative elections tend to prove it: Only 0.5 percent of the population who were old enough to vote put RWF ballots in the box. But rattachists are not throwing in the towel just yet, and some polls seem to indicate that there's sympathy for their cause in Wallonia as well as France. From a practical point of view, rattachism seems unavoidable in the long run, given the Fleming's secessionist leanings. I met with Laurent Brogniet, the RWF's president, to find out more.

VICE:What can you tell us about your party?
Laurent Brogniet: The RWF was created in 1999 after several Flemish parties announced their will to transform the Belgian state into a federal state. In response, a handful of militants successors of the Walloon Movement created the party, defending the unification of Wallonia with France.

Do you have any political program aside from rattachism?
Yes. We defend pluralism because we have left-wing and right-wing people. We don't take sides on important social issues, because it would cause a dichotomy inside the RWF. But we have opinions on education, secularism, etc. We want to pursue the legacy of Charles De Gaulle.

What's the deal with Flemish people?
Well, Flanders doesn't want Wallonia to be part of Belgium anymore. Since the 1970s, it ceaselessly demanded more autonomy. The state of Belgium has been ripped off of all its prerogatives. Basically, regions and communities have bigger budgets than the federal state. It's turning into an empty shell, a so-called state ruled by a powerless king. The proof is that, during the 2010-2011 crisis, we didn't have any federal government for 541 days but the country carried on thanks to the regions and communities that had taken the reins. So, what's the point of going independent? We have a linguistic, cultural, and political proximity with the French Republic.

The RWF flag

If I understand correctly, Wallonia is too small to be an independent state?
Not only is it too small but, above all, Wallonia has never been a nation. It was always part of a whole; the Netherlands, France, the Kingdom of Belgium. There is no national feeling in Wallonia, unlike Flanders, where it's been really powerful since the 19th century. It's not possible to create a Walloon state.

The number of votes your party has received has been low, but do you think the Walloon people are sympathetic toward rattachism?
There is sympathy, without a doubt. During the Belgian crisis, some surveys have been conducted in Wallonia. In case of Belgium's disappearance, the most desired option was a union with the French Republic; between 30 and 40 percent of Walloons were in favor of this solution.

That being said, the Belgian state still exists. Our prime minister, Elio Di Rupo, deceived people with a good PR campaign and our performance during the World Cup. But it's being ignorant of the Flemish secessionist dynamic; because of them, I'm convinced the Belgian state will come to an end.

You seem to be even less popular in Brussels, a French-speaking city isolated in Flanders.
Brussels is one of the three federal states of Belgium. This region has its own Parliament and ministers. Brussels inhabitants don't identify at all with Wallonia. They don't think rattachism could be good for them. We want to convince them, but we are not very optimistic. Even when Belgium falls down, I don't think they'll make the right choice.

Why would France accept this solution?
First of all, there's a geopolitical interest. Since Germany's reunification, France's influence in Europe has diminished. Concretely, Germany has more seats in the European Parliament, which wasn't the case in the past. Being able to recover our territory, people, and seats would close the gap between France and Germany.

The other interest is economic. Wallonia would be the eighth French region in terms of GDP. France could benefit from the multilingual and qualified workforce.

A RWF rally. Image courtesy of the RWF website

OK, but it seems that some French people don't want Wallonia to be part of France. It has even been compared to Crimea—
Opinion polls have been conducted in France and between 60 percent to 65 percent of French people are in favor of the union. It's noteworthy that in bordering counties, this rate rises to 70 percent. We're not talking about the [far-right] nationalists, obviously.

Do you have some discussion with French political parties?
We discuss with the Socialist Party and the Union for a Popular Movement, the two main parties. We reject all extremist parties. We have formal and informal connections with French representatives. They are really concerned about what's happening in Wallonia. They confirm that, when the time comes, if a legitimate authority—that is to say a referendum—expressed this demand, they would gladly accept it.

What about the King of Belgium?
He'll do whatever he wants. You know, our past king, Albert II, lived for 300 days a year in Grasse [a city in France]. These people live off the backs of taxpayers. The king will go to one of his many mansions and he'll live happily ever after with his family. Needless to say, we're republicans. We think monarchy can't be democratic because the citizens don't elect their head of state.

Follow Pierre-Alexis Chauvin on Twitter.

Back when the Nintendo 64 was still known as the Ultra 64, Super Mario overlord Shigeru Miyamoto told the Japanese press: “We are going to make lots of weird games from now on.” And he wasn't lying.

Despite a comparative lack of product when compared to its competitors in the fifth-generation console wars, the N64’s seven-year lifespan offered many fascinating anomalies alongside the Zeldas, GoldenEye 007 and influx of Mario Party games. And in their own way, each of the following titles were attempts at launching a gaming future that we now accept as the present—even if they were handled clumsily or marred by top-level corporate concern.

As Nintendo inches towards fixing the reputation of the Wii U and forgetting a cataclysmic financial year, we look at a history of mismanaged N64 ambition.

HEY YOU, PIKACHU! (1998)

To this day, Nintendo has a cagey relationship with third-party developers. Its late president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, was notorious for charging outside companies license fees to create no more than five games a year. His business plan was meant to improve Nintendo’s quality of stock and give them the edge over their rivals. During the Sega-era console wars, this strategy allowed Nintendo to keep a stranglehold on third-party developers, but also gave Yamauchi a dictatorial reputation. Speaking to Games Informer earlier this year, the author Blake J. Harris shared what these third-parties recalled: “Nintendo had you by the balls, and they knew it.”

These actions had long-lasting reverberations, and the company has since been trying to welcome these developers back into the fold. It may not be working. When the company suffered from the aforementioned fiscal disaster earlier this year, financial bodies pointed to the company’s lack of third-party support as a calamitous blunder. This comes with an extra dose of irony, with the Wii U leaving few outside developers interested in making games for the failing console. Ouch.

As the N64 rolled out in 1996 with little third-party support—a combination of sour grapes from jilted developers, overly complicated programming and the rise of the CD format—Nintendo funded a development conglomerate with the HR company Recruit to fill the gap. The result was Marigul, an umbrella company that housed Nintendo’s personal third-party product line. At least that was the idea, with many of the Marigul games not crossing international waters, being hindered by delays, ultimately canceled or intended for the ill-fated 64DD add-on.

Despite Nintendo’s problems with other gaming companies, they had struck a goldmine in their own house—Game Freak’s series of Pokémon titles for the Game Boy were already undergoing a world takeover, which allowed for plenty of N64 tie-ins and a reason for the Transfer Pak (a Game Boy support app) to exist. One of the most ambitious Pokémon tie-in titles was Pikachu Anane, aka Hey You, Pikachu! in the West; a life simulation game by development new guns Ambrella.

Hey You, Pikachu! gameplay

The hook behind Hey You, Pikachu! was that it allowed you to communicate with Nintendo’s latest mascot with a bulky microphone that attached to the N64 controller. This technology was called the Voice Recognition Unit (or VRU) and was meant to recognize the human voice. You were able to talk to Pikachu and build a relationship with the digital sprite, taking on different tasks as its friend.

However, the game is mostly remembered as an example of Nintendo abandoning their most interesting technology, with Hey You, Pikachu! only one of two titles that utilized the VRU. (The other was Densha de Go! 64, a train driving simulation ported over from a popular arcade game concerning the country’s railways. Only in Japan.) It also ran into problems as Pokémon garnered worldwide attention, with international localization efforts taking longer than expected.

Despite receiving a Japanese release months before the Dreamcast’s similarly themed Seaman and a rise of console games reliant on voice-recognition software, Hey You, Pikachu! And the VRU soon lapsed quietly out of the public memory.

MORITA SHŌGI 64 (1998)

In the same year that Ambrella developed voice recognition, Nintendo was making moves into the online gaming market. But only in Japan. And via dial-up. With a Japanese chess sequel.

1996’s Saikyō Habu Shōgi was a virtual representation of shōgi, a strategy game colloquially known as “Japanese chess” that dates back to the 16th century. Developed by third-party journeymen SETA Corporation, it held the honor of being one of the N64’s Japanese launch titles alongside Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64, and featured as its “special guest” shōgi master Yoshiharu Habu.

Despite being available in the first days of the console, SETA’s arrival into fifth-generation gaming was a sales catastrophe, as you might expect of a game about Japanese chess, pushing only one copy per hundred N64s. In a 2009 blog for Wired, Chris Kohler found a retro videogame shop in Tokyo giving boxes of Saikyō Habu Shōgi away for free, unable to shift them for 50 yen each, or about 50 cents.

Nintendo’s SpaceWorld ’96 presentation

And yet—somehow—SETA had a sequel green-lit, which brings us to Morita Shōgi 64. Launched at Nintendo’s Japanese trade show Space World ’96, it was placed alongside the Rumble Pak and the 64DD add-on as an acknowledgement of the N64 as a forward-looking, evolving console. Morita Shōgi 64’s online capabilities were charmingly low-key: the bulging cartridge (one of the few to not have an Official Nintendo model number, fact fans) merely had a RJ-42 Modem Connection where players could place an ethernet cable that came with the game. Upon connecting to a server—most likely the Randnet server saved for the 64DD’s online roll-out—you could challenge players around Japan.

The result was a clumsy if fascinating choice to push into the online gaming age, something Nintendo appeared cautious about, particularly with the effort charged with setting up the Randnet network for the ill-fated 64DD. By the end of 1998, however, the 64DD was still unreleased and Sega’s Dreamcast was rolling out across Japan with a built-in modem.

TETRIS 64 (1998)

Judging from their gameography, SETA were an unremarkable company, developing Japan-only simulations like their shōgi titles and golf games like the GameCube’s Legend of Golfer. However, they were able to present innovative and downright odd takes on the N64’s technology: they developed the Aleck64 arcade hardware around the N64’s inner workings, releasing arcade-only games like creepy nudie title Vivid Dolls, and found a way to place a Bio Sensor into Tetris 64.

Famicom Dojo’s Vinnk comes across a Bio Sensor

The Bio Sensor is a fascinating anomaly in the N64’s lifespan, an accessory that would read the player’s heartbeat via an uncomfortable-looking clip attached to his/her earlobe. The faster the heart, the faster the blocks fell, and the harder the game became to play. It is an odd but fascinating concept for a gaming accessory, albeit one that Nintendo still can’t wrap their heads around to this day: the Wii Vitality Sensor, using sensory technology similar to the Bio Sensor, was announced in 2009 and canceled in 2013 after failing tests.

PERFECT DARK (2000)

Nintendo’s most loyal outside developer was Rare, the development house that had previously handled Super Nintendo hits Killer Instinct and Donkey Kong Country. In due time, the console's commercial prospects appeared to rest on their laurels. Enter Perfect Dark: meant to even the scales in the fifth-generation console wars, acting as Rare’s semi-sequel to GoldenEye 007, a progressive leap for the console, an ambitiously top-notch shooter that would move the entire genre forward.

Like many of Rare’s successes, it was hit by frequent delays. The first-person shooter had a lot riding on it as the console’s latest killer app. Sony’s PlayStation continued to control the market, believed to be the coolest console about. The Dreamcast was starting a run across the world and, despite its eventual ill fate for Sega, it was exciting to the casual gamer with its promises of online gaming and those long-awaited Sonic escapades in 3D. Like every Nintendo console before and after it, the N64 was considered a kid’s machine and therefore, sneered at by some adult gamers.

The delays were understandable—Rare’s track record was reason enough to trust that they were in control. Rome wasn’t built in a day, after all. Rare’s developers pushed the N64 to its limit with Perfect Dark, and it showed: the game demanded the console’s recently released 4MB Expansion Pak to get the most from it, and despite the help of additional memory, there was too much happening onscreen for fluid gameplay.

Perfect Dark gameplay

Yet the game’s PerfectHead application was one of the most intriguing ideas cooked up at Rare. After the success of GoldenEye 007’s multiplayer option—its flawless design arguably copied by almost every console shooter since—it was time for the company to revolutionize the medium again. Making use of the N64’s Transfer Pak, it allowed a player to apply photos of family and friends (taken with the Game Boy Camera add-on) onto playable multiplayer characters. It was revolutionary in that it would have been the first time a game let you shoot your mum's head off with a rocket launcher.

As an opportunity to shift Nintendo product, PerfectHead was savvy and somewhat ruthless—it handily offered a non-Pokémon Stadium reason for buying the Transfer Pak and gave legitimacy to the Game Boy Camera peripheral. As a glimpse into a more interactive future of console gaming, it was scintillating—players were now able to insert themselves into the game, occupying a digital space. Much of the game’s pre-release press excitedly focused on this feature; publications unrelated to gaming culture even registered their excitement at the face-mapping possibilities. SPIN magazine previewed the game in their December 1999 issue, flippantly talking about using the face-mapping options to cathartically “blow [jocks] off of buildings with lasers."

It was a joke that cut too close to the bone. Earlier that year in April, the students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on a shooting spree at Columbine High School, killing 13 students before turning their guns on themselves. In a state of shock, the news media embarked on a witch hunt to find who and what to blame the slayings on. Bullying! Anti-depressants! Goths! The duo’s predilection for first-person shooters—particularly Doom, which Harris infamously programmed levels for—helped to turn video games into the focal point of outraged media outlets overnight.

In early 2000, the PerfectHead feature was quietly dropped from the final game. Ken Lobb, a Development Manager for Nintendo, claimed it was removed for “technical difficulties," saying that it would crash any time the player-made avatars entered play environments. However, in response, Gamespot reported that Rare removed the feature “to avoid controversy."

Despite the promise and hype surrounding PerfectHead, the feature remains inaccessible and has not been revived for any other Nintendo title—instead, the cartoonish Mii avatars and 2011’s 3DS port of The Sims 3 are the closest the company dares to come to PerfectHead. In 2006, Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Vegas would take on something similarly photo-based to the abandoned feature, this time free from the moral panic surrounding videogames and real-life crime.

NINTENDO’S FIRST TASTE OF FAILURE

The N64 boasted multiple killer games—Super Mario 64, The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, GoldenEye 007 et al—but it arguably represents the first time that Nintendo’s ambition began to turn to folly. New console bucks Sony gobbled up the market, the cartridge format cost too much to grab solid third-party support, while the much-ballyhooed 64DD arrived and whimpered away in the space of 14 months. The GameCube would follow, arguably becoming Nintendo’s first cult console merely by being overshadowed by its competitors, setting up the Wii as the company’s comeback story. And as for the Wii U, its slow start might not be its undoing, but it needs games, and it needs them fast.

Despite Nintendo’s rough-and-tumble record following the fifth-generation console wars, they have been responsible for some of the most innovative and downright weird approaches to console gaming. Their ongoing existence seems like a left brain/right brain struggle, with their savvy and business-minded corporate side flailing against their ingrained mad scientist. Years on, the N64’s failures fall somewhere between the amusing and the utterly crazy, but they also feel daring, admirable even. Miyamoto did warn us, of course—there was going to be a lot of weird games.

Follow Daniel Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy on Twitter.

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THE HOT ZONE

Black Death Returns to Madagascar

By Benjamin Shapiro

Malagasy plague specialists perform an autopsy on a potential plague rat. Photos by Lucian Read

I sat in a helicopter as it banked around and down toward a clearing in the center of Beranimbo, a village of 80 or so palm-thatched huts tucked away in the emerald mountains of Madagascar’s Northern Highlands. My pilot, a blocky German expat named Gerd, had already made one attempt to touch down the shaky single-engine copter, but he’d aborted the landing after the rotor blades kicked up enough dust to cause a brownout.

A few hours earlier, when we’d set out for Beranimbo—a three-hour journey from the Malagasy capital of Antananarivo—Gerd had seemed excited. He doesn’t normally get jobs like this, typically making his money flying film crews around the countryside to shoot B-roll for ecotourism documentaries, usually about lemurs. “You want me to do a pass?” he asked, and before I could find out what he meant, we were swooping low through the hills. My stomach lurched upward; from this altitude we could see the spiny forest vegetation, tall ravenala trees, and great gaping wounds in the countryside, scars of systematic deforestation.

We were there because, in the fall of 2013, Beranimbo had been an epicenter of a black plague outbreak that resulted in nearly 600 cases and more than 90 deaths across the country. Madagascar reports the most instances of the disease in the world. Depending on which century you’re talking about, it’s perhaps best known as the plague—a scourge generally associated with the Middle Ages, when rats, fleas, and poor hygiene resulted in the deaths of between 75 and 200 million people. The disease remains an enduring threat in third-world nations; public-health watchdogs report up to 2,000 cases a year.

In the 1930s, the rise of antibiotics dampened and then nearly extinguished the clinical threat of the disease, at least in the developed world, and it lost its status as a global killer. But for years, epidemiologists have warned that Madagascar is particularly vulnerable to widespread rural and urban contagion. I wanted to find out just how dangerous this medieval disease is in the 21st century, and why it persists in this corner of the world. That search led me to Beranimbo.

When we arrived, Gerd’s nervousness was apparent. “This may be too dangerous,” he muttered into his headset intercom as he tried to land the helicopter. Gerd’s concern wasn’t for his own safety, but rather the security of 200 people gathered around the makeshift landing pad below. Any one of them could have easily lost an eyeball to a pebble or twig whipped upward into the air. Helicopters are rare in Beranimbo and always attract attention, as they usually carry aid workers from the Red Cross. When we finally found a suitable spot to land, villagers ran from the dusty complex of huts to greet us.

On the ground, I was introduced to the village elder, a thin old man in a light jacket and safari hat. To celebrate our arrival, he had organized the slaughter of a zebu, a type of domestic cattle with a large, camel-like hump, for a celebratory lunch. “The sacrifice of the zebu marks our friendship,” he told me. “I can’t express enough our happiness. Enjoy it with all our gratitude.” The animal’s neck was cut, and I was taken to meet Rasoa Marozafy, a 59-year-old father of seven who’s spent his life in the village. Rasoa is a plague survivor, and part of the reason I’d come to this place.

Like his fellow villagers, Rasoa is of slight build and visibly, chronically malnourished. His limbs are knobby, like twisted sheets. He peered at me closely, looking me up and down before extending a hand for the traditional Malagasy handshake, a greeting with the left hand wrapped around the right wrist, then a quick flip into an open-palmed clasp and back down again.

I introduced Rasoa to my translator, and he recounted his brush with the Black Death.

The isolated village of Beranimbo, the epicenter of the plague that gripped Madagascar’s Northern Highlands in September 2013. Photo by the author

In September 2013, at the outset of the hot and rainy season, Beranimbo was gripped by an enigmatic pestilence. The index case was Rasoa’s cousin, a maize farmer, who suddenly took ill and died. Following tradition, his body was carried into the center of town and left unburied for a week while funereal arrangements were made.

Rasoa’s troubles began a few days later. The horror started with a high fever and searing chest pains, which jetted out from his trunk in red-hot strands. A day later he was coughing violently, spitting up black gobs of blood. Smooth, painful lesions appeared on his armpits and groin, and within 24 hours, his wife, Veloraza, had developed the same symptoms.

When the local healer took ill, Beranimbo devolved into open panic. Sick and dying villagers staggered into the countryside toward neighboring settlements they thought were uninfected, thus spreading the unknown disease throughout the Highlands. By early October, a full outbreak had ensued, and Beranimbo had become a hot zone. Rasoa and Veloraza, fearful of spreading the unknown disease any further, walked into the jungle together to die.

The sickness continued to rage unchecked through the countryside for weeks before a handful of villagers limped into Mandritsara, a nearby city and commune. Preliminary tests conducted by local doctors found the general risk factors associated with rural living: low body weight, chronic malnourishment, lack of sanitation. But the sick tested positive for Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the black plague.

Regional coordinators of the Red Cross were alerted and dispatched on October 5. When the aid workers arrived, Rasoa and Veloraza were still in the forest, waiting for death, so volunteers instructed villagers to search for them. It took a day, but the couple were located and carried back to the village, where they were administered injections of tetracycline and streptomycin, two strong antibiotics. They were on the verge of death and severely underweight. But within days, the mysterious illness vanished.

After a few weeks, Rasoa and Veloraza recovered. “Now we will never separate,” Veloraza told me, sitting next to her husband, tears welling in her eyes. Until she was treated, she had never heard of the plague. I took a deep breath of dry air and asked her what consequences the disease had had on the village.

“Consequences?” she snorted in traditional Malagasy. Her anger didn’t need translation. “It killed people,” she said. “Those were the consequences. It killed. We thought we were going to die.”

The villagers prepare a zebu for lunch.

I was born in the Year of the Rat. As a kid, scanning the printed mats beneath serving plates of dumplings and pork lo mein at Chinese restaurants, I was proud to be a rat. It’s the first in the Chinese zodiac, like Aries, my sun sign. I interpreted its character less as smarmy, filthy vermin than as industrious, instinct-driven survivor. Still, most people don’t think of rats that way. It takes a low position in the animal kingdom to qualify as vermin. Although I might reasonably argue that rats grade higher than cockroaches on the human scale of animal tolerability, they’re clearly below crows, bats, and even pigeons, and musophobia dates back to the earliest stages of civilization, when rats first crept into grain silos and contaminated food supplies.

Since then, they’ve been feared for spreading a mind-bogglingly vast array of illnesses, like rat-bite fever, cryptosporidiosis, viral hemorrhagic fever, leptospirosis, and, of course, the plague, by far the most horrifying of the great epidemic diseases. Over the course of history, the plague has earned a handful of aliases that convey its potential for destructive power (Black Death, black plague, Great Mortality, Great Pestilence, Great Plague, Red Death), but most know it as the bubonic plague and have a set of knee-jerk associations with it: fleas, nomadic packs of crazed flagellants whipping themselves, the Brueghelian triumph of death, Monty Python, and, naturally, disease-spreading rats.

Of course, there’s way more to know about the plague than most people care to learn about—it really just depends on how curious you are. Like many fantasy-obsessed middle schoolers, I became interested in the Middle Ages. And that led to a specific interest in the plague for a very specific reason: its status as the single most catastrophic killer in human history. Since it was first reported among the Philistines in 1320 BC, it has caused an estimated 300 million deaths, and there is currently no reliable vaccine. The Y. pestis bacterium has proven itself impossible to eradicate, and by all accounts it will be around long after our species is dead and gone.

“It’s a disease for a time and place,” Dr. Tim Brooks, a British epidemiologist who specializes in the plague at Public Health England’s Rare and Imported Pathogens Department, told me over the phone before my trip. “But, in fact, its time is not now.” While it may not be the plague’s moment, that doesn’t mean it’s not biding its time in the waiting room. There have actually been three global pandemics of the disease. The first happened in the sixth century, then there was the Black Death of 1347, and finally there was the so-called Third Pandemic, which began its march in the 19th century and, depending on how cynical your epidemiologist is, may still be happening in small numbers on all continents today. It even crops up in the United States, which reports about seven cases every year, mostly clustered around the western side of the country. Just last month, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment reported that a Denver man and two others had contracted pneumonic plague, while a fourth person had contracted a milder form. (It most likely originated from fleas that bit the first man’s dog.)

The number of actual cases in the 21st century is, admittedly, low. Cheap antibiotics like doxycycline, the same stuff the doc gives you for a urinary-tract infection, will treat the plague almost every time. My doctor explained what to do if I thought I might have contracted the plague while assuring me that I almost certainly wouldn’t die from it if I took immediate action.

The “almost” is what got me. I imagined what the last days of my life would be like if I somehow caught the plague in a remote village in Madagascar and became sick so quickly that I’d be unable to seek help. It’s not the job of a disease to recognize or respect human dignity, but to me, the plague seemed engineered to degrade and agonize its victims. Here’s how it works: In most untreated cases, an incubation period of two to six days is followed by the sudden onset of violent flu symptoms. Painful, rose-colored lesions often develop around the groin, armpits, or neck. Gangrene turns the extremities black, and blood is coughed up and vomited.

Bubonic plague is the most common form, taking its name from the inflamed swellings, or “buboes,” which in turn reference the Greek word for “groin” (boubon). Pneumonic plague can be a direct consequence of the bubonic form, occurring when the disease reaches the lungs and begins spreading like the flu. The third form of the disease, septicemic plague, is the rarest and occurs when the blood is directly infected.

Whichever variety of the plague, as the disease progresses its victim lapses into recurrent seizures, Alzheimic confusion, coma, and internal hemorrhaging. Without treatment, the bubonic plague has a 40–60 percent mortality rate within four days. The pneumonic form, which spreads like the flu, has a much higher fatality rate (close to 100 percent) and works faster than its bubonic cousin, killing its human host within a few days if left untreated.

The condition most commonly associated with the plague is, of course, the buboes: swollen lymph nodes that have been described throughout history as kernels, pimples, wheals, and biles. Giovanni Boccaccio’s generally accurate description from The Decameron of 1353 poetically sums up what it’s like to experience the plague:

In men and women alike there appeared, at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits, whereof some waxed of the bigness of a common apple, others like unto an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils. From these two parts the aforesaid death-bearing plague-boils proceeded, in brief space, to appear and come indifferently in every part of the body; wherefrom, after awhile, the fashion of the contagion began to change into black or livid blotches, which showed themselves in many [first] on the arms and about the thighs and [after spread to] every other part of the person, in some large and sparse and in others small and thick-sown; and like as the plague-boils had been first (and yet were) a very certain token of coming death, even so were these for every one to whom they came.

In 1894, during the Third Pandemic, Alexandre Yersin, a French physician and bacteriologist, determined that the plague was caused by the previously unknown bacillus pestis. As is common in scientific practice, the bacterium was later named in his honor: Yersinia pestis.

Infographic: A Recent History of the Plague.
Click to enlarge

Before my trip to Madagascar, I assumed the bare and chilling facts of the disease would allow the story to write itself. When I spoke with friends and colleagues about the story, I would get one of two contradictory responses—confusion as to what the big deal was (it only kills a few thousand people a year. How bad is it, really?) and shock that it is still around at all.

In Madagascar’s cities, everyone knows about the plague. They know it constantly threatens to disrupt the social order of the country’s towns and villages. They know it just takes a perfect storm of filth, fleas, garbage, rats, and diminished immune systems to set off an epidemic that could potentially make it off the island and spread to the African coast.

As history has taught us, by the time there are enough people with the plague to classify it as an “outbreak,” it’s already too late. Something about Madagascar has made it the most vulnerable country on the planet for a serious outbreak at this moment. I wanted to know what that something was.

Rasoa Marozafy and his wife, Veloraza, who both contracted plague in the fall of 2013. Photo by the author

When I arrived at the Ivato International Airport in Antananarivo, the first thing I noticed was the smell. It’s not an odor, exactly, more a general ruddiness in the air that followed me throughout my trip. There were moments when it was overpowered by brassier fragrances—the sick-sweet curdle of garbage, or fried-egg fart-wafts of human sweat—but it remained the bass note of every olfactory chord, as if the entire country were housed inside a potter’s lathe.

“In shape,” wrote Sir Mervyn Brown, Britain’s ambassador to the country in the 1970s, “Madagascar resembles the print of a gigantic left foot with an enlarged big toe pointing pigeon-toed slightly to the right of north.” Almost the size of Texas, the country is 1,000 miles long, 350 miles wide, and tropical along the coasts, with a warm, wet summer and a cool, dry winter.

Some 88 million years ago the island broke away from the supercontinent of Gondwana, eventually being pushed 250 miles off the coast of Mozambique. It is one of the rare places on earth that has preserved its own unique ecosystem. More than 75 percent of Madagascar’s flora and fauna are specific to the island, although many of these species have been eradicated, mostly due to local slash-and-burn farming techniques introduced by the island’s first settlers and still practiced to this day.

The country is populated by dark-skinned inhabitants, descendants of ancient Indonesians who arrived on the island around the ninth century, having sailed nearly 5,000 miles across the Indian Ocean in elegant outrigger canoes. They don’t consider themselves African and speak a traditional Malagasy language and French, a holdover from colonial days. At the turn of the 20th century, France unified the island under a single regime. The first recorded instances of the plague followed soon after, worming its way aboard merchant ships and into the port city of Toamasina. By 1921, the disease had become endemic in the rodents and small mammals of the Highlands. Since then, the plague has flared up here and there, mainly as a rural phenomenon with occasional urban epidemics.

The plague is almost impossible to eradicate from Madagascar, thanks to a complex interaction of natural and sociocultural factors. According to a 2013 report by the US National Library of Medicine, the high percentage of animals carrying the disease lays the foundation for transmission, and social and economic conditions further encourage the periodic leap to humans.

Outbreaks of the plague in Madagascar usually occur in villages above an altitude of 2,600 feet and can be linked to the activities of farmers. The agricultural infrastructure of the Highlands provides three distinct habitats for the plague to thrive: hilltop houses, hedges planted around livestock enclosures, and the irrigated rice fields of lower-lying areas. Food shortages and farming can serve as triggers that cause the rat population to drop significantly while, inversely, fleas flourish. Without the rats as a primary food source, fleas are forced to look for other mammals—such as humans—to serve as hosts.

In northern Madagascar, the plague spikes between October and April, when the warm rainy season ensures that the temperature rarely drops below 70 degrees. The sustained humidity acts as an incubator for Xenopsylla cheopis, better known as the Oriental rat flea, the primary vessel for the plague.

Compounding the difficulty of controlling the flea population during the rainy season, new research by the US National Library of Medicine suggests that the plague bacterium can quite literally persist underground between outbreaks via rats that infect themselves by burrowing into contaminated soil. While research is still in the preliminary stages, it has been demonstrated that Y. pestis bacilli can survive underground for at least 24 days under optimal conditions.

While vermin are the natural scapegoat for the plague, humans are the true culprits. In villages, crops are often stored inside houses to prevent robbery, attracting rats and fleas. Deforestation by illegal loggers, a timeless but growing problem in Madagascar, forces rats from the forests and into the villages. From there, impoverished living conditions and migrants fleeing those conditions can quickly result in outbreaks in previously uninfected communities.

Even more chilling, traditional Malagasy funereal practices help to ensure that the plague can continue to spread even after the victims have been buried. Most of Madagascar’s dead are interred in vaults and are exhumed from time to time for the Famadihana ceremony, which roughly translates to “the turning of the bones.” Upticks in plague activity are sometimes reported following these exhumation ceremonies, and it is enough of a problem that the Ministry of Health has recently recommended instituting a seven-year period between the death and exhumation of plague victims.

Despite these considerations, and evidence that instances of the plague may be increasing, the Malagasy government stopped tracking metrics on the plague in 2006, due to financial constraints. Today there remains only one reliable source for medical and biological data on the spread of the plague in Madagascar: the Unité Peste, or Plague Unit, of Antananarivo’s Institut Pasteur de Madagascar.

Evolving out of the Bacteriological Institute established by the French colonial government at the turn of the 20th century, throughout its various iterations the Institut Pasteur has long been crucial to the tracking of communicable diseases in the country. The health organization’s subsequent privatization has assured autonomy and, in an economically depressed Madagascar, its status as the last line of defense against the plague. A visit there was crucial if I hoped to understand just how bad things could get.

Andavamamba, a slum in Antananarivo whose name means “the Crocodile Mouth”

"There is a flea!” Michel Ranjalahy, a young lab technician with the Unité Peste, shouted from the deck of an open-air autopsy table. He’d just broken the neck of a rat with a pair of gleaming, silver tongs. He then cut open its carcass with a scalpel and scissors, using tweezers to extract its liver from a tightly packed coil of organs.

While he was scraping at the gutted rat’s fur with a pocket brush, the flea had fallen into a small basin. Some of the technicians instinctively backed away, raising their hands in morbid respect for the potential devastation this tiny flea was capable of causing. I asked Michel whether it was plausible that this particular Oriental rat flea carried the plague. “Yes,” he said, “because it drinks the blood of the rat, which may contain the plague bacterium.”

At its essence, the Unité Peste is a rogue team of die-hard rat catchers who conduct their work with lethal seriousness. As the only official group dedicated to fighting the plague in Madagascar, they have quite possibly the worst job in the country. Their days consist of traveling to remote, at-risk areas where the primary objective is to catch potentially infected rats and perform autopsies on them to search for signs of the highly virulent disease.

After a tour of the facilities, I was invited to tag along on one of Unité Peste’s search-and-capture missions. Within hours I found myself crawling on my hands and knees through the undergrowth around Antananarivo, hunting for rats that may or may not have been infected with one of the most devastating diseases known to man. Our field gear consisted of a pen and paper for note taking, sliced tilapia for bait, and two-door rattraps made from rust-resistant mesh cages that the team hides in the undergrowth, where they are left out overnight. With any luck, there would be live rats trapped inside when we checked the following morning.

Everyone I spoke to in Madagascar had heard of and expressed concern about the plague. I sensed an underlying fear that, if the disease were to reach the capital, the results would be catastrophic, as crowding could cause it to spread far more rapidly than in the countryside. This sentiment was echoed by the entire Unité Peste, including their boss, Dr. Christophe Rogier, a cheerful man with a thick French accent and a close-cropped buzz cut who serves as the director of the Institut Pasteur.

“There is an urgent need for funding the control of this neglected disease,” he told me when I visited him in his office in Antananarivo. “Because it is happening in neglected areas, where no politicians are going, and where no physicians want to go, since it’s too remote. The disease is dangerous for the population. But because people are moving, in fact, it’s dangerous for everybody. There are more rats in the city than in rural areas. The rats are in closer contact with the population, and the houses are overcrowded, so we can imagine that the spread of the plague from human to human would be faster in the cities than it would be in the country.” Suddenly the Black Death, which decimated Europe’s largest cities in the Middle Ages, didn’t seem so unfathomable.

The slums of Antananarivo share many characteristics with the densely populated medieval cities that were virtually wiped out in the mid 1300s. Among a total population of around 2 million, tens of thousands of Antananarivo’s most impoverished families live under ramshackle lean-tos fashioned from tarps and bamboo shoots with little or no access to clean water or indoor plumbing.

“If the plague were to hit the slums,” Rogier told me, “there could be dozens, hundreds, or thousands of cases.” It is a situation that has the potential to push the already troubled country off a cliff and further into failed statehood.

Michel Ranjalahy, of the Unité Peste, holding a potential plague rat outside the Institut Pasteur. Photo by the author

Antananarivo’s earliest known inhabitants settled atop the highest hills in the city, which spread out into three ranges that form the shape of a Y. This area wasn’t chosen for the nice views; rather, it offered a 360-degree tactical advantage over hostile invaders. As the city grew and developed, it sprawled down the mountains and into their low-lying valleys. As real estate on the mountain became increasingly scarce, the hillside communities became slums and have continued to grow unabated. An outbreak of the plague here would be catastrophic to the local population.

Just as they have for centuries, the men and women of Antananarivo walk barefoot through the streets, which are little more than mud ruts lined with open sewer systems clogged with trash and human waste. The latticework of canals that crisscrosses the city is also backed up with garbage. I watched as small bands of children waded and swam through the fetid sludge, hunting for anything worth selling that might be floating in the muck.

The day after I returned from the Highlands, I was given a private tour of one of the worst-off slums in the city by a 28-year-old security guard and father of three named Andriambeloson Solofo Pierre, who goes by Billo. He met me in a dilapidated café in the neighborhood of Andavamamba, which translates to “the Crocodile Hole.” (The settlement is built on top of a swamp, and local legend holds that the first people who moved into the area would often slip and fall into the deep pits where crocodiles laid their eggs.)

Billo earns between $3 and $5 a day. Like most people in Madagascar, he and his family cannot afford any real form of health care. “I fear for my family,” he told me, watching the sun setting over a canal choked with garbage.

He pointed to a group of children playing in the viscous water. “We’re located in an inner-city slum, so no one pays attention,” Billo said. “The roads are not repaired, and the projects to fix pathways and irrigation are gone since the coup. I know that politicians aren’t going to change things very much.”

The coup Billo referred to took place in 2009 and, like many of Madagascar’s most notable political moments, was a disaster for the country. When the French colonized the region in 1885, they set to work stripping the area of its resources and slaying more than 100,000 Malagasy who fought against the exploitation of their land. After a monitored independence was initiated in 1960, the country quickly devolved from the hope of autonomous democracy into total anarchy, and after that a failed Marxist utopia.

This all changed when President Marc Ravalomanana was voted into office in 2001. For the first time in the country’s modern history, Madagascar seemed poised to enjoy a degree of stability. The economy soared, bolstered by the land’s rich mineral wealth, which includes bounties of gemstones, nickel, and iron, and land-lease agreements with foreign investors like the Korean industrial giant Daewoo.

But this political and economic optimism was short-lived. In 2009, the Ravalomanana government was ousted in a bloody (and, many Malagasy believe, French-backed) coup, led by a former DJ and media entrepreneur named Andry Rajoelina, who at the time was serving as the mayor of Antananarivo. He immediately set up the so-called Fourth Republic and dubbed himself president of a fantasy regime called the High Transitional Authority.

As a result of Rajoelina’s coup and the dissolution of the elected government, foreign aid to the country, which formerly accounted for 70 percent of the national budget, evaporated almost overnight. A month later, Madagascar’s economy was in shambles. The country was suspended from the African Union, and according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, it was the most under-aided country on the planet.

Rajoelina’s junta countered by slashing public expenditures across the board, specifically in the irrigation, transportation, communication, and health sectors. These cuts affected virtually every facet of the Malagasy economy and evaporated the fragile middle class. The cost of Rajoelina’s coup will continue to be paid by average citizens for years, if not decades, to come.

The plague’s relationship to the country’s tangled political situation became apparent to me after I met Dr. Jean-Louis Robinson, the former minister of health who was ousted by the coup. We spoke at his compound, a lavishly decorated home overlooking a cluster of urban farms. A stout man with darting eyes and a hairpiece, Robinson told me that after Rajoelina took power, more than 400 health-care centers were closed across the country.

His main concern, like the Institut Pasteur’s, is that Madagascar’s urban population could be a conduit for a plague epidemic the likes of which the country has never seen. “There used to be established structure and control programs,” he said. “In the inner-city slums, there are no sanitation programs. Public restrooms are insufficient; garbage is not picked up regularly.” Everyone I spoke with who was in a position to do so identified these same sanitation issues as a potential tinderbox of widespread, communicable havoc, but there are few tenable solutions to such a problem when there’s no money to clean up mounting piles of garbage.

On December 20, 2013, following a series of political debacles surrounding the presidential election, Rajoelina and his High Transitional Authority lost control of the presidency to his former finance minister, Hery Rajaonarimampianina. Almost immediately, the US Department of State lifted all remaining restrictions on aid to Madagascar. But while this no doubt opened the door to an improvement of the country’s financial and public-health situations, according to a report issued by the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Transformation Index, these democratic elections should not “be expected to resolve the profound weakness of institutions and, particularly, the deeply eroded capacity of the state to govern, enforce, and regulate through critical sectors,” such as public health.

For his part, Billo told me, all he can do is wait for the next plague season, which begins in October. As we wandered through the throngs of bodies crowding the streets of Andavamamba, he wondered aloud about the chances of the plague reaching the capital—and how many might perish if it did.

Two girls in Beranimbo, firsthand witnesses to the plague outbreak

On one of my last days in Madagascar, I met a traditional healer named Dadafara who runs a small private practice out of a two-room hut off a dusty side street on the outskirts of Antananarivo. The exterior was lined with horned zebu skulls, and inside was a variety of plants and herbs in jars, and rainwater collected from the 12 sacred hills of Imerina, a cluster of mountains that surround the capital. In Madagascar, when people get sick, they generally consult people like Dadafara, although wealthier citizens refer to them as witch doctors and shun their practice. His frail body was clad in a traditional sari and topped with a worn baseball cap.

I wanted to know what sort of treatment a traditional healer would administer were he presented with a case of bubonic plague, and Dadafara agreed to consult with and treat me as if I were a sick patient. He explained to me how the consultation would work. First, I would tell him my symptoms. Then he and I would do a bit of chanting and invoke the ancestors to seek their advice. Dadafara held a small mirror up to the light. “This is my camera,” he told me. “I’m looking at everything through this and communicating with the ancestors. When I read a person through this, it’s like I’m watching a TV.” After we’d communicated with the spirits, they would tell Dadafara what my treatment should be, and he would prescribe some sacred water or boil herbs to treat me.

When we were ready to begin the ceremony, Dadafara asked me to tell him my symptoms, and I obliged. “I’ve got a fever of about 104 degrees,” I said, “and my groin and armpits are covered in smooth, open sores about the size of chicken eggs. I’m vomiting blood, I have a headache and painful muscle aches, and I’m experiencing violent, recurrent seizures. Also,” I added, “I live in an area that has no clean water and is infested with rats.”

My fixer told Dadafara what I’d said, and when he responded, she started to laugh. “What?” I asked. “What did he say?”

Dadafara crossed his arms as the translator gave me a deadpan stare. “He said, ‘You have the plague. You need to go to a doctor immediately.’”

A freshly chopped zebu head

Last month, in a scene reminiscent of Albert Camus’s 1947 masterpiece, La Peste, Yumen, a northwestern Chinese town of 30,000 people, was sealed off after a man died of bubonic plague. Police set up roadblocks on the perimeter and told motorists to find alternative routes around the town.

At the end of Camus’s novel, the protagonist, Dr. Bernard Rieux, surveys the Algerian city of Oran as its people celebrate the passing of a deadly plague and return to their old customs and habits. “He knew,” Camus writes, “what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books.

“The plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good… It can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests… It bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and… perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightenment of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”

Photo of a SWAT vehicle in Texas via Flickr user Steven Martin

On Tuesday, September 18, a US appeals court ruled that an August 2010 SWAT raid on a Florida barbershop was out of line.  

It's heartening to read the 44-page decision, which sarcastically insults the Orange County, Florida, Sheriff’s Department for launching absurdly over-the-top operations to check licenses of barbershops in the area. At one establishment, Strictly Skillz, about ten cops—some with their guns drawn and faces covered—stormed in looking for contraband. Police cuffed the shop owners and forcibly removed the customers, but found nothing illegal going on in the shop.

This bizarre use of heavy-handed tactics is not unique to Florida. Earlier this summer, several exotic dancers in San Diego filed a lawsuit after being allegedly mistreated by local police, whose excuse for detaining and photographing them was that they were checking identification. Last year, a 12-officer team raided an animal shelter in order to put down a baby deer. There are far too many examples to mention, but federal agencies in particular seem to have recently caught the raid first, question later bug.

With the Strictly Skillz court ruling, barbers can proceed with a lawsuit against the cops for violating their Fourth Amendment rights. But as the law blog Simple Justice noted, there are various complicating factors and technicalities involved (aren't there always). The main one is that the court didn’t broadly decree that a SWAT-style raid in the service of checking licenses is unconstitutional, just that this particular one was excessive in its forcefulness.

So it might be a minor victory, but I'll take it. This ruling combined with the Senate hearing on police militarization from earlier in the month should give some police-reform advocates hope. Could the US finally be tilting away from SWAT raids and prisons as the answer to every societal ill? If so, it’s a change that’s a long time coming—and it’ll be longer still until we see departments across the country actually change their behavior.

On that unusually hopeful note, let's look at this week’s bad cops:

-Last month, a DEA raid on a Manchester, New Hampshire apartment resulted in a woman being shot in the arm and torso. Daniel Nunez claims in an article published on September 18 in the New Hampshire Union-Leader that his mother, Lilian Alonzo, was shot after his little sister opened the door to police, who then rushed in, causing Alonzo to reach for one of her grandchildren, and then—according the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office—“one of the officer’s weapons discharged.” No drugs were found in the apartment, but two of her adult daughters were arrested elsewhere that day as part of the operation. Nunez noted that since this was a long-term investigation, law enforcement should have known there would be children in the apartment and prepared accordingly.

-When Peoria, Illinois, Mayor Jim Ardis sent police to the home of Jon Daniel in April, they were searching for evidence that Daniel created a parody Twitter account of the mayor. Once there, police were distracted by a felony’s worth of marijuana which belonged to Daniel’s roommate Jacob Elliot instead. Daniel got off after the case created a whirlwind of negative national publicity for Ardis and the Peoria authorities, but Circuit Judge Thomas Keith ruled last week that the police had probable cause for the raid on Daniel’s home. The judge added that police should have stuck with searching for evidence of the parody Twitter account, but, you know, they didn’t, so Elliot remains in trouble. What a fucking mess.

-A Volusia County, Florida, sheriff’s deputy fatally shot a 52-year-old man on Saturday after an argument about a towed car. Now Edward Miller’s son (also named Edward) says his dad was deaf and disabled, and that his attempts to inform the deputy of this were ignored. Miller the elder was reportedly “brandishing a firearm,” but considering that to do so at a cop is basically suicide attempt, one has to wonder if that's an accurate account of what happened. (The younger Miller also had a gun at his hip, which was found to be legal and was returned to him. Welcome to America, y'all.) Deputy Joel Hernandez, who fired the fatal shots at Miller and is now on paid administrative leave, was previously cleared in an fatal shooting of a reportedly suicidal armed man who came towards him and refused to stop.

-Also on Saturday, a Ballston, New York, man died after being repeatedly hit with a stun gun. Daniel Satre, 43, was reportedly violently fighting with police at the time of the shocks, and had previously been acting unhinged. Six officers from the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department and the New York State Police were present for the scuffle. Satre reportedly fell unconscious soon after being shocked, and was given CPR to no avail. A Monday autopsy might answer the question of just what killed Satre, and whether stun guns are as safe as cops and manufacturers pretend that they are. (Hint: They aren’t.)

-The scandal that is the Florida prison system continues, but it’s made some small steps toward accountability thanks to Florida Department of Corrections Secretary Michael Crews. On Friday, 32 guards from four correctional facilities were fired over their involvement in the deaths of three inmates over the past two years. These continued dismissals of staff are good, but what would be better would be criminal charges against the all the guards involved in inmate deaths—including those who in 2012 burned mentally ill inmate Darren Rainey to death in a shower.

-More good news, of which there isn’t enough: In response to critiques of their use of lethal force, and the ensuing lack of accountability, US Customs and Border Patrol has acquired body cameras and will begin testing them during training sessions.

-After footage of Baltimore cop Vincent Cosom punching a man in June was released last week, several members of the Baltimore City Council have begun pushing to institute body cameras on officers in the city. One member plans to introduce a bill mandating cameras at a meeting on Monday. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is also advocating to change the law which says police officers get a hearing before they are fired, and she says she will make sure that “police brutality is not tolerated.” Could this be the beginning of a cameras-on-cops trend?

-On September 17, New York City police officer Gregory Zakoscielny noticed a car slowing down while watching for speeders on the Bronx River Parkway. He approached the car and quickly realized the female driver was choking on a cough drop. Zakoscielny gave the woman the Heimlich and called an ambulance, making him our Good Cop of the Week.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.