In director Cutter Hodierne's VICE and Think Media-produced debut feature film, Fishing Without Nets, a poor Somali fisherman named Abdi (played by Abdikani Muktar) is desperate to find a way to provide for his family. The waters near his home have become polluted, killing off the fish. After spending his last bit of money to smuggle his wife and child out of the country, Abdi succumbs to the pressure and allure of piracy. With naturalistic performances borne mostly out of improvisation and a sweeping cinematic style, Fishing Without Nets balances art-house emotion with thrills that wouldn't seem out of place in a summer blockbuster.

Before I met Hodierne last year at the Sundance ShortsLab, I’d already heard enough about the young director to see him as a legend in the making. For starters, he was named after the 32-yard 'cutter-rigged' sailboat that he spent the first three years of his life on. Then, after a stint as U2's on-the-road cinematographer during their 360° tour, he cashed in his rockstar money and made the short film Fishing Without Nets at the ripe old age of 23. The short went on to win Sundance's Grand Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking, and it was at that point that VICE jumped on board to help expand it into a feature film.

Excited for the nationwide release of his first feature, I visited Hodierne late last week at the swanky McCarren Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to talk about the movie. I found him in his suite sprawled across the bed watching CNN. Contentious images of Ferguson, Missouri, flashed on screen, which led us into a conversation about class and race. He asked if I’d seen “the fucked-up video of cops killing a black dude.” I asked which one, because there seem to be so many. As we watched a few horrific videos, it became clear to me that Cutter was just as fascinated with the cops as the victims. He rewound one video twice to catch the decisive moment. This must have been the same sort of compulsion that led him to become obsessed with the plight of the Somali pirates after reading a New York Times article by Jeffrey Gettleman. He originally saw the pirate’s story as a sprawling epic, much like Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic or David Simon’s series The Wire—he wanted to show every side of it.

“I wanted to do the story of the sailors on the boat, the Navy SEALs, the shipping company owners, the people laundering money in Kenya, the real estate business, and the guys who actually drop the money into the ocean,” he said. Ultimately, the one he was most interested in was the pirates. In his words, “Who the fuck would do this? Who would be this bold and actually capture a ship?”

Although Fishing Without Nets is condensed from his initial vision, it is still a microcosm of the cultural and emotional complexities of Somalia today, and is noteworthy because it's completely genuine, pressing, and fresh. A previously unreleased clip from the film is below, along with what Cutter had to say about the project.

VICE: Fishing Without Nets started as a short film back in 2012. Did you always imagine turning it into a feature?
Cutter Hodierne: It was always meant to be a feature. It began as a short in order to explore the idea and raise money.

What made you want to tell this story?
Since 2008, I’ve wanted to do a movie about Somali pirates. I’ve never been so obsessed with something before in my life. I just really wanted to make a movie about pirates.

Why are you so obsessed with pirates?
There was a story in the New York Times in which [pirates] captured this Ukrainian tanker with military equipment. The pirates were just young kids. The government quickly discovered this wasn’t some big terrorist organization with a bunch of weapons. It was a bunch of young dudes who didn’t know exactly what they were doing, but they caused this big international incident. The pirates were fucking with people over the phone, since they didn’t know what to do. I was like, That’s what this movie should be about—the guys on the other end of the phone.

The guy who doesn’t know what he has.
…Or thinks he has something much bigger. When I went to Africa, I realized that’s what it should really be about—this misunderstanding of wealth. People were trying to take everything I had. They were trying to take my money and swindle me every way they could, which was hilarious. I didn’t have any money. 

Yeah, but you’re also new and shiny to them.
I could totally see why just having the $1,500 to fly to another country would do that. Right there you have more money than they would ever have at one time. With that misunderstanding, we realized we could magnify that with a huge ship. Of course they’d think it’s worth millions of dollars—it’s an enormous ship. The truth is, the ship we filmed on was a piece of shit. It was still in business, but could’ve gone out of business in like a month. Pirates don’t know that when they attack.

That misunderstanding of worth is crazy. The pirates are so sheltered from the reality of international shipping that they only act on rumors.
Fuck, some of the ship crew get captured and held for so long. But they’re poor, so no one gives a fuck. They aren’t the people who are going to get all of the attention from the news. There were hostages in Somalia held for 24 months or 36 months. A guy just got out a couple weeks ago who had been there for three years. It’s bonkers.

Everything is a compromise. In your film’s case, the compromises never seem to go the protagonist’s way.
That’s how we’re going to advertise the film. It’s a bummer.

You have cast and crew from all over the world including Kenya, Somalia, France, the United States, and Belgium. Did you come across any class divides or differences when dealing with your local and international actors?
The differences were shown in 1,000,000 different ways while making the movie. When the European actors came on set, they acted like us—like Westerners. They can’t sleep in the same sort of bed others slept in; they need a special bed. They need more time to do everything. It was a crazy culture clash on all levels. Movies are already a hierarchy.

What were some differences in people’s approach to making the movie?
One of the most visible ways differences played out was the fact that we shot in Kenya, where Somali’s are immigrants and sort of considered second-class. There was some xenophobia on set. Sometimes some of the Kenyan crew and some of the actors would freak out if a [Somali] said something to them without the appropriate degree of respect. Those are misunderstandings I wouldn’t even be aware of, because they were both speaking a language I couldn’t understand.

Did that not knowing ever get you into trouble? Did anything ever shock you?
The whole place feels slippery. Things fall into chaos casually.

Being in a vaguely lawless place, on boats constantly…
Being on a boat all of the time is really difficult, because I get seasick. People got seasick all the time.

You’re named after a boat, made two movies about boats, and you get seasick?
I like tales of the sea. I don’t think I necessarily wanted to do this because it was at sea, but because I like pirates and they're at sea.

Simple enough.
I just had to do it. That’s what I keep forgetting. When I try to over intellectualize why I made the movie, it was really simple: I I was excited and fascinated about piracy in a way I’d never been about anything. My other passion was to make movies. I had to make a movie about pirates. That’s it.

Fishing Without Nets premiered at Sundance earlier this year and won the festival’s Directing Award. The film will be released by VICE and Think Media on Friday, October 3. Check out the website for screenings in your area. And for a teaser, check out the original award-winning short film. 

Follow Jeff on Twitter.

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. This week, Israel reveals a controversial housing project ahead of Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to the US, South Africa rejects the Dalai Lama's visa application, Ecuador apologizes to a native tribe for allowing oil drilling on their land, and melting sea ice causes thousands of walruses to crowd an Alaskan beach.

Photo via Flickr user TheImpulsiveBuy

Nobody feels sympathy for a guy who complains about his big dick, but possessing a monster cock comes with its share of problems. A long (and I mean looooooong) penis can plop into a toilet when you sit down to poop; an extremely thick cock might have trouble fitting in certain holes. Most critically, many well-endowed men struggle to find condoms that fit them. 

Like many sexual health issues, this problem is made more complicated by the government. Although American penises come in all shapes and sizes, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) only allows condom companies to offer condoms with a minimum length of 6.29 inches and a maximum width of 2.13 inches, making manufacturing or purchasing latex condoms for oddly-shaped protrusions illegal in the US. In recent years, controversies have erupted surrounding condoms—many sex-positive writers have criticized Measure B, a law implemented in 2012 that requires performers to use condoms in pornography filmed in Los Angeles county—but an FDA representative told me the agency hasn't updated its condom rules since 1998.

“The best way I can describe [using an ill-fitted condom] is like putting a larger balloon inside a smaller balloon and trying to keep it blown up,” one guy recently told me about the drugstore condoms he’s tried to wrap around his large dick. “It's not impossible [to wear during sex,] but it definitely will cause red rings on your skin and breaks easily.”

Along with uncomfortable sex, the one-size-fits-all mentality can lead to condom breakages and guys deciding to forego wearing condoms altogether, which of course can result in all sorts of bad consequences. Well-hung men often turn to Trojan Magnums, but this condom is actually only slightly bigger. Where a Magnum has a length of 8.07 inches and a width of 2.13 inches, a Trojan Ultra Thin has a length of 7.59 inches and a width of 2.08 inches. With or without a Magnum, hung guys are screwed. 

Europeans rarely face this debacle. Many European states allow condom companies to sell custom-fitted contraceptives to consumers. One such company, UK-based TheyFit, produces condoms in 95 different sizes that can be shipped all over Europe. Customers enter their measurements on TheyFit’s site (if you haven't measured your dick—which I don't believe—you can print out a “FitKit” to find out), and the company tells them their size and ships them condoms in a discrete package. (Their condom wrappers don't include sizes, which is great for smaller guys.)

American men have tried to purchase the condoms, but I was told that the company doesn't "condone or encourage US citizens to ship TheyFit to the USA.” Interested in learning more about custom condoms and the problems of having a large penis, I called Thomas Newman, a customer support agent, at TheyFit to discuss dicks and American health laws. 

VICE: How does TheyFit work?
Thomas Newman: We make custom-fit condoms, so whatever size condom a particular gentleman requires. We don't cater to just the big guys, just the small guys, just the average guys—we cater to all the guys. Obviously, those who are particularly small or particularly large, or particularly atypical, come to us the most distressed and eager to fix their issue because they have suffered the most from the traditional sizes.

Why can’t you sell condoms to US customers?
Condoms are actually regulated medical devices, so it's a very serious business. You have to have permission from the medical regulator. We worked hard to get that permission in Europe. We're working hard to get official approval for the US and also for Canada.

Photo courtesy of TheyFit

Why should guys avoid wearing condoms that are too small for their penises?
Lots of guys who say they can't feel anything when using a condom don't realize that they're actually using a condom that's too small for them. The latex has to stretch to fit the penis. The stretching force is then reciprocated back onto the flesh of the penis—it has an equal and opposite interacting force. That force pressing on the penis compresses the nerve endings and the blood vessels that run through an erect penis, and that's what starts to impact what men feel and the pleasure they have from sex. What quickly happens is a guy then refuses to use the condom. Our research and our experience from the last two and a half years shows that all they have to do is adjust the size of the condom and they can have a great time with safe sex.

How does the measurement process work?
The measurement process is as simple as you might expect. To find the correct condom size, you simply have to measure up. Obviously people tend to have a funny reaction to that. You get aroused, have an erection, and you measure the length and the circumference. You enter that information online on our website, and we'll tell you which condom is going to be the best fit for you.

We allow a satisfaction guarantee. You can try us out, and if for whatever reason you're not happy, we'll give you all your money back no questions asked. We rarely [have to give money back] because people have such a great time—or occasionally people are a little nervous or anxious when they measure it up, so they will find that they'll be slightly bigger when they're not nervous and make a slight adjustment to their size. We say to that person, “Absolutely fine.” We offer a 50 percent rebate if a customer needs to adjust, but most get it right the first time.

What are the problems associated with ordinary condoms?
There is a lot of marketing around larger condoms. There are two ways: One is to imply that they are just for men that are well-endowed, such as Magnum and XL. The other way is to imply that the condom is thin and with thinner latex you will feel more. Both of those marketing tactics are very questionable. For example, in the US everyone knows Magnum condoms. Over in Europe we don't really have any understanding over what Magnum condoms are—a big company over here is Durex. When you look at the normal width of a standard Durex condom that is sold all across Europe, it is actually wider than a Trojan Magnum. The real issue there is that if you're a guy who genuinely needs a larger condom, you might go and try [Magnum], thinking it's a larger condom, and have a bad time, and then just think that condoms are no good and that you can't use them.

How do you plan to change the way guys use condoms?
This potentially can affect millions of men. The biggest problem [with condoms] is that people don't use them. In the heat of the moment, the guy either doesn't have one or chooses not to use one because he thinks it will impact his pleasure. We go straight to the heart of that, we fix that, and we convert guys—especially young guys into “OK. Actually, I can use a condom and enjoy sex.” That's a good thing.

Follow Sophie Saint Thomas on Twitter.

All photos by Simon Annand

This week, I attended the London production of Speed-the-Plow, David Mamet’s satirical take on the American movie business. The cast consists of Nigel Lindsay as Charlie Fox and a guy from The West Wing as Bobby Gould—two Hollywood execs trying to cut a deal on a script. Lindsay Lohan plays their meddlesome secretary, who—with an unclear motivation—seduces Gould and persuades him to pitch a different script altogether.

The play itself was unremarkable, but has been bitched about ceaselessly. Since the play’s first preview in the West End last week, the tabloids have obsessively reported on how Lohan needed line prompts. Critics have described her acting as that of "not an especially gifted schoolgirl," and audience members have dubbed the performance a “car crash”—a phrase that follows her around like the whiny sponsor from her reality TV show.

Only two days after the play’s first preview, the Wikipedia page for the play was amended, to include a note that “American actress Lindsay Lohan, […] was laughed at because she had forgotten her lines.” It's since been removed, but it's almost as if it must be duly written in history that Lohan has once again botched the job, once again sent her proverbial Porsche crashing into a brick wall of failure, drunk or high or whatever at the wheel.

Why does everyone take Lohan so seriously? Long profile pieces have questioned her art, pokerfaced in their tracing of her career from child stardom through to clichéd Oscar-less plight. Interviews have given over countless column inches to her trademark AA jargon. “I'm at a point when I want a diligent routine and I really want to get back into work,” she told Time Out. “Yes, I’ve made mistakes. But who doesn’t in life?” she told the Telegraph, echoing her previous admission: “I really haven’t done [cocaine] more than ten or 15 times. I’ve done it like ten or 15 times.”

Through all of this, the suspicion has rankled that Lohan might be having us on, that she might not be taking this all quite as seriously as we are, that there might be a bigger meta-fictional conspiracy at play. The only way I can make Lohan’s life make sense in my own head is to think of it as The Truman Show in reverse; I am certain that—like Kanye—she is supremely fucking with us all. That she has woven a myth of herself into the public consciousness that is impossible to unpick.

For Lohan, life imitates art, and her performance in Speed-the-Plow comes as close to the bone as any role yet. Most of the comedy comes from Gould’s attempts to sleaze on Lohan, and we, her doting audience, laugh along, complicit. The first act opens in Gould’s office, where he tells Lohan’s character, Karen, about The Bridge, the script he is about to give the green light. “Is it a good film?" she asks him, naively. "It's a commodity," he replies, as though explaining to Lohan her own place within film history. He talks about how the entertainment is about getting asses on seats, the exploitation of basic human epistemology: “If a tree fell in a forest would anyone hear it?” he says.

Would anyone give a fuck about this play if Lohan wasn’t in it? Lohan’s face is on the program and on the posters at the Playhouse and in the papers. The whole thing’s been a publicity coup. The Guardian ran a "Mean Girls or David Mamet" name-the-quote quiz, for God’s sake. The play’s plot has been entirely eclipsed by the narrative of Lohan’s attempted McConnaissance, her search for legitimacy. “I wanted to do something different,” she told Time Out, “people have certain perceptions of me, and I wanted to change them by doing something like a Mamet play. I’m hoping it’ll take away attention from me as a celebrity name and draw attention to the fact that I’m an actress.”

It's a telling quote. Lohan's life seems to lack any kind of fluid narrative, instead resembling more of a chain of unrelated, ludicrous events: community service at the morgue, a sleepover with Lady Gaga and Lana Del Rey at the Chateau Marmont, a 36-name list of her sexual conquests left in a bar, a tweet that she’s pregnant on April Fools’ Day. Charlie Sheen and Mel Gibson—men who have been considered mad by the world in the span of recent history–have said they’re worried about her. Only Lohan can purportedly sleep with Calum Best and that guy from The Wanted, pose for photos holding a gun to her head, hit someone with her car and flee the scene, and then pick herself up and dust herself off, ready to fuck things up all over again.

We focus on the car crash, but Lohan’s more concerned about the joy ride. “I’ve lived so many lives in one lifetime,” said an ever-self reflexive Lohan, who—despite the highs and lows—is always trying to reinvent herself, before failing and falling back into the same leather-jacketed Lohan again. We give her infinite second chances because we feel sorry for her—she’s been in a slump since Mean Girls—and now she’s the enfant terrible of Hollywood, battling her demons with David Letterman as her father figure and Oprah as her surrogate mother.

You can’t write this shit. How can this be anything other than a modern celebrity farce? Consider the layers of irony in which Lohan shrouds herself. It was surely ironic when she played Elizabeth Taylor, in the TV movie Liz and Dick, an actress hunted by the press. It was ironic when she played Tara in The Canyons, a desperate, sex-crazed ex-actress. And now, in Speed-the-Plow, she plays Karen, a character once again bearing an uncanny resemblance to the real Lohan—a young receptionist caught up in the Hollywood machine with nothing to bank on except her sexuality. 

In the flesh, the play is lukewarm. The set looks like an SNL version of Frasier, and Lohan seems fundamentally unnatural, reciting her lines with intonation in all of the wrong places. The New York Times lauded Madonna, who previously played the part in 1988, as, “the axis on which the play turns—an enigma within an enigma.” The calculating role of Karen ought to be powerfully seductive. Instead, Lohan oscillates between wooden and mawkish. And yes, she does forget her lines, but when someone shouts to her from the side of the stage, no one in the audience seems surprised. In the intermission, the audience gossips about her, her voice, what it means to see this strange Hollywood specter in the flesh. 

After the third act unravels, at a faster pace than the last, the curtain finally falls and the room fills with applause. Lohan appears on stage detonating a confetti bomb under which she showers herself. No one makes a move to take their things and leave. Everyone is transfixed on her. She is the ultimate figure in the cult of celebrity. And everything she does, all her farcical behavior, all her strangely self-referential and self-prophesizing roles, fuel this fire. While her performance as Karen failed to suspend my disbelief for more than three minutes, she ironically succeeded in lending more mystery and confusion to the real Lohan, whatever the hell that is. 

In her next role, Lohan will reportedly be starring in a biopic where she plays Clara Bow, a Hollywood actress from the 1920s who began her career when young and eventually lost her mind, supposedly because her mother had once tried to kill her. The layers of irony thicken into LA fog. Soon Lohan will play herself playing herself playing on a TV show about a failed actress who meets Lohan at rehab. "I've always known things about myself," Lohan once told Oprah. I can only take this to mean that Lohan is complicit in her own bizarre actions. Like in Being John Malkovich, Lohan is the puppeteer of her own giant celebrity, and we are on the outside, believing it, writing about it, caring.

Follow Amelia on Twitter.

“Roc, you got me on a good day,” Dr. James Fallon announced. The horses over at Saratoga racetrack had been running in his favor all morning. It was also the day that his best friend from college had died. Fallon received the news just four hours before he met me.

“I’m still waiting for it to hit,” he claimed. I smiled gamely and raised my eyebrows. He returned the smile and threw in a shrug. We both knew that it would never hit.

“When I really dissect my behavior,” the neuroscientist later confided to me, “everything in a strict sense is a lie. Everything. Even though I think I never lie, I’m lying all the time. I seem like a nice guy, but I want to be clear—I’m not as nice as I seem to be.”

In 2006, Fallon was studying the brain scans of psychopathic killers when he happened to compare them to a scan of his own brain. The characteristic deactivation of emotional regions was unmistakable. He discovered for himself what friends and family had been insisting for years: Fallon was a psychopath—albeit a “pro-social” one, as he likes to say. The 66-year-old father of three is happily married, highly successful in his field, and has no criminal record.

The aggression, the narcissism, the callousness, the recklessness typical of psychopaths—he can turn all of them off, he claims. The charm, however, is always on. At the door of his home in Irvine, California, Fallon greeted me like an old friend. He was on the phone with his bookie in Jersey—a six-foot-eight, 300-pound former Mafioso by the name of Big Moe. “His actual name is Joey,” Fallon chuckled. “He thinks it’s still 1965.” Within a minute of ringing his doorbell, he had me laughing and feeling at ease.

We took our drinks to the backyard where we could watch monarch butterflies feast on a milkweed garden—one of the scientist’s favorite distractions. He noted that the seasons elicit very different behaviors from the insects. “When they’re down in Mexico and up in Monterey hanging in the trees, they’re very sociable. But, in between, when they’re competing for food and sex—they’re killers. Two very different behaviors, one animal.”

“You can ask me anything, Roc,” he added through his beard as he spread his arms wide. “I am restricted somewhat, though. My mother is still alive, and my wife is still alive.”

“So, we’ll do the follow-up after they pass away?” I teased.

“Sure,” he laughed. “That’ll be quite a different interview.”

VICE: There are many definitions of psychopathy. What are the critical qualifications?
James Fallon: Core psychopathy is basically lack of empathy and extreme manipulation of anyone to get what you want. You don’t have to be sadistic like a lot of people think. You don’t have to be glib, but you often see glibness because the psychopath doesn’t have to make the loop into the limbic system [the brain’s emotional center], which slows you down.

Do you ever place pauses in your speaking in order to seem more authentic?
Sometimes—and, sometimes I’ll make up things so it appears I was wrong. I’ll insert a red herring, so that I can go back and say, “Gee, I was wrong about that.” It makes me more approachable, more believable.

You’re very good at building rapport.
But, I’m trying to slow down—trying to say, “Am I really being truthful here?” The game for me now is: Can I manipulate myself? The challenge is: Can I astonish somebody with purely the truth?

But you’ve also talked in your book about lying to achieve a certain effect.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve lied for some effect, in fact, in the opposite direction. So, for example, if I caught a 20-pound tuna, I’ll say I caught a 15-pound tuna, and somebody will say, “No, it was much bigger than that.” Those are manipulative techniques. I remember this really funny book called How to Cheat at Tennis from the 70s. A tennis court is supposed to be a perfect rectangle, but you can manipulate the court—repaint the lines to make it a parallelogram—screw with them that way.

So subtly that they won’t realize it.
Exactly. And then, of course, you do the obvious things—early in the match, if they hit a ball out, you call it in. That way, you can do the reverse later when you need it. Start lying the other way to set the person up later. I do that. It’s just a game, in a sense—a practical joke, but it’s still fucking with people. I never thought of myself as doing it in any malignant way. It was always fun.

Was it fun for the other guy?
Not all the time. It’s kind of intellectually bullying people, I guess—playing with their heads. There’s a darker side to it. In the past two years, I’ve come to realize how much I do that. I’ve never taken advantage of underdogs though. You know what I mean? I’m enough of the sportsman to play a fair game.

Is that a moral stance? It’s hard to imagine morality without empathy. Where does your sense of morality come from?
You know, growing up Catholic around priests, and nuns, and my parents—I just never did anything wrong. Lying, cheating, stealing, squeezing girls’ asses, I did none of that. But, it was part of an obsessive compulsiveness. I thought all behavior had to be perfect and in line with the universe. I had to keep everything in symmetry.

So, the code itself was arbitrary? I mean, if you had been raised under a different system, would that have become your ideal?
You know, there’s one psychiatrist I spent time with in India. She goes, “Jim, you’re actually a natural Buddhist. The type of empathy you have is not for people, but for mankind. That’s very Buddhist.” I think if I had been brought up in the Buddhist system, it might’ve been even easier.

What made Catholicism sub-optimal?
I had no problem with that strict code. I just went way beyond it. That’s the problem. You never lie, steal, cheat—all that stuff seemed obvious to me. People would say, “Geez, Jim. Relax.” The idea of adding the concept of morality to it was nonsense to me. The obsession with being perfect was just innate. You know, the first memory I had—and it may be from when I was two or three—is from when I would be going to sleep, and as I would close my eyes, I would see this… You ever live in the north?

Aurora borealis?
Right. Now, if you go really far north, and it’s a really good storm, the aurora borealis is right overhead, so dramatic, and you just feel like an ant on the stage. These silver curtains come down—whoosh! Well, every time when I closed my eyes, it was just like that. It wouldn’t have any color or brightness until it started to get closer and closer. It would come in like a funnel, faster and faster. And it would condense into something that felt, every time, like the entire universe was hitting me right in the forehead. It would go: ping! And, it was light as a feather. It’s the most exquisite feeling, because it’s infinity and infinitesimal all at once. It would happen just that way every night. It may have set up some kind of leitmotif, very early on, that really focused me on the whole universe and perfection.

When did you lose the morality fixation?
I was 19 or 20 when it suddenly switched. I went from thinking that everything was a moral issue to thinking that nothing was a moral issue. So, even though I can bring back the sense of that light, it’s detached from morality completely.

What’s your religious affiliation now?
I’m an agnostic atheist. I will manipulate groups, but I try to do it for ethical reasons. I don’t think of it so much as a moral issue, but there’s a certain beauty to it.

You sound almost like the God of the Old Testament—appearing in order to restore balance.
I’ve never heard it put that way. That’s good. I identify with that personality of God the Father intervening at the right time to make things right, and he does it dispassionately. It’s really important that there’s no emotion.

I can imagine that being a benefit in many situations. It seems to be helping you process the death of your friend.
Yeah, there is no emotional flinching. I remember we had a great time together. He was an interesting guy, but something about it just doesn’t emotionally connect with me. You can look at it objectively—I should be upset, and I’m not.

In a way, it sounds freeing. Would you want to have empathy?
No. I’m quite happy with who I am. I really love my life. And, actually, everybody’s got a little piece of what I have—not everybody, but a lot of people. They’re not categorical psychopaths, but they have some really nasty psychopathic behaviors.

They’re on the spectrum?
Definitely. If you took the raw sense of how people feel about the people they’re interacting with, it would be brutal! You could actually say that these behaviors are not psychopathic because so many people have them.

Do you think an individual’s behavior is consistent, or can different environments bring out morally conflicting behaviors from the same person? For example, the commandant of Auschwitz would go home and kiss his wife and kids at the end of the day. Is there a consistency to that?
Well, that’s why it’s really hard for any psychiatrist to say that Hitler was a real psychopath, as well as most of the Nazis. They were close to their families. They had real empathy. They all did. They’re not psychopaths. Hannah Arendt’s concept about everyone participating a little bit means that they had to believe in the ethos of what they were doing. I’m sure they convinced themselves that they were helping the world—like the Norwegian shooter Breivik. If you read his manifesto, he was quite sane.

Not a psychopath?
Not quite a psychopath. He had empathy, but he had a vision. The problem is, that’s the equivalent of what Gandhi had, what Mother Teresa had, what Mandela had. They really believed that they were going to fix the world, even if they had to walk over people to do it. They knew that it comes with a price. To save the children of the world, Mother Teresa would walk over people. Gandhi walked over his family all the time, so did Mandela. To them, what they were doing was good, even though in a local way they were just doing brutal things—things that would be considered psychopathic. But it’s just a different kind of empathy.

How does that play out neurologically?
In neuroscientific terms, all behaviors that are reinforced, whatever they are, go to a little spot in the brain called the dorsal medial notch of the nucleus accumbens. It’s where everything comes together: all the dopamine, endorphins, acetylcholine, oxytocin, vasopressin. It’s hedonism central. So any behavior that can be reinforced has to go through this tiny little spot. And, people will all pick a different thing. Some people have a shopping addiction, some have an eating addiction, some have drug addictions—it just depends on the wiring.

So, essentially, you’re a slave to it?
Exactly. So, if you look at evil behaviors—if it’s going through that little spot, it basically takes the evil out of it, because it’s driven the same as everybody. I think a candidate for a truly evil act is unhooking from that. If you can do something for no other reason than for the pure rationale of what it is—only then could you start to consider something pure evil.

But if you’re not rewarded, why do it?
Exactly. Why do it? Because, if it all goes through that little spot, it means there is no evil, and there is no free will. Instead of evil, it’s just behavior we don’t agree with. And, that’s a real quandary, because I don’t know how you conduct a civilized society and have any kind of common ground.

So in order for society to function, we have to participate in the illusion of free will?
I think so. Participating in the illusion is important. But, it’s funny, you know—I started treating my wife better as a little experiment. She liked it, and I told her—because I can really be honest with her—I said, “I don’t mean this. I’m just doing this as a game.” She said, “I don’t care. You treat me better. Why would I care why you’re doing it?” That, I don’t understand, because it should be all about intention.

What are your relationships like with women in general?
I have a lot of female friends. When I go out roaming, they like me, even though I look like hell. It doesn’t matter, because I act like I don’t care, and I really don’t care, and they love it.

Why do you think that is?
We have to look at everything in terms of sexual fitness. If you don’t need them, it means that you can get anybody, therefore they want your genes. You can’t get me, therefore you want me. It’s a little too glib and slick, but it’s probably true. And, if I have a conversation like this with my female friends who are really very, very smart neuroscientists—they have to keep from getting mad, even though they know there’s some truth to it.

Their emotionality blinds them to it?
I love how my female friends, who are so smart, are fighting their emotions all the time. They know it, and they actually come asking for it. They want me to torture them. They want to push up against something. Most guys are always on the make. They’ll say anything to get laid, but to have a guy push against her, and say something to her like, “You’re never getting laid tonight,” they go crazy for it.

How do you think the world would be if everyone were like you?
Well, it would be bad for people like us. I think the biggest thought experiment would be if we got rid of all aggression-related genes, and got rid of some psychopathic traits—as a species, we’d be screwed. We’d be completely screwed if everybody becomes Jimmy Carter. Any aggressive person could run the world. People say that it would be great to have peace and love. Their heaven, to me, is the end of humanity.

You’ve written about the possible increase of aggressive genes in places of conflict. Is the reverse true? Is aggression being bred out in stable Western societies?
I think so. Right here in California—I don’t want to call it the feminization—but you have the idea that everybody wins. It’s about getting along so much that you have no competition. I see it as a very, very negative force, if you care about the species. But there’s always this dynamic about what’s good for the species and what’s good for the individual. These are very much at odds with one another. In a sense, we need psychopathy. We don’t need full-blown psychopath dangerous fuckers, but having a prevalence of psychopathic traits is associated with leadership. It’s in presidents, and prime ministers, and in people who take risks. They do things to protect against aggressors.

So you’re saying that they’re doing it for themselves, but it just so happens to protect society as well?
That’s why people like Jimmy Carter do not belong in those positions. Obama’s stuck on this a little bit.

He’s too good?
He’s not psychopathic enough. Almost all the great leaders have high levels of psychopathic traits. If they took the Psychopathic Personality Inventory, they’d score pretty high. In the end, this is a broader discussion that I’m not really qualified to talk about, but you are.

What do you mean?
See, what I did there was manipulative. I really don’t think you are, but I said that you are. I don’t think you are, and I don’t think I am either.

I wanted to ask about your brain scans. You have zero activity in your emotional regions in the presence of emotional stimuli, but obviously those regions are being used for something, right? Do you know what that might be?
It’s probably being used to inhibit my bad behavior. I guess there’s a way of testing that. You’d have to get people like me, and then give them an opportunity to do something bad and then have them stop themselves and see if that area turns on. That’s a very good experiment.

Well, I’m sure you wouldn’t have too much trouble finding subjects. I know you hang out with some rough characters.
That’s true. I get a lot of contacts from really bad guys and girls—people who are on the edge. I can’t give medical advice, but they see me as somebody who would understand. So, it’s almost like a brotherhood of psychopaths. They’re usually very earnest. The ones that aren’t earnest, I can sort out. I’ll say something to them, and they go fucking crazy. I can find people very quickly—I have my ways. If somebody’s in hiding and they’re trying to screw with me, I just have ways of knowing exactly where they are at any time, and showing them that I know where they are. They hightail it.

What’s your ultimate objective in life?
I’m actually trying to catch myself from trying to manipulate people all the time. I’m trying to get rid of it all.

Why?
Because, then I can beat myself. I’m my own best opponent. If I can beat myself, I’ve won.

But then the game is over, isn’t it?
In a way, it’s over. It’s checkmate, but I still make mistakes like I did with you earlier.

That comment you called yourself out on?
Right, because that wasn’t honest.

And, you didn’t set that up as a red herring?
No, I didn’t. I’m trying to be truthful here. The game for me now is to manipulate myself. In terms of the checkmate, I think the real prize would be ego death.

The universe tapping you on the forehead?
I think so.

What do you think you’ll find there?
Probably some existential realization that this is just this. But, that ego-desire is very strong, to the point of obnoxiousness. So, the game is to try to strip that part away. If I had my druthers, I would get rid of all the ego, and be able to do something truly good, just for the sake of goodness. But, the drive is really just to prove that I can do it—not for the action itself. It loops within itself and becomes instantly phony. Still, I like it as a target, as a goal. It’s the best game I can think of.

Follow Roc Morin’s latest project collecting dreams from around the globe at World Dream Atlas.

Photo courtesy of Plume

Thanks to the endless coverage of Justin Bieber’s Segway trips it can seem like our society has reached the nadir of celebrity obsession, but gossiping about stars has been a vibrant pastime since at least the early 20th century. For the last several years, academic Anne Helen Petersen has been opening the history books (and vintage issues of US Weekly), analyzing the gossip industry, and arguing that celebrities illuminate important aspects of American culture. 

After Petersen finished her dissertation on the history of gossip and received her PhD from University of Texas, Austin, in 2011, she spent several years teaching. In between classes, she updated her personal blog Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style and wrote a column on the Hairpin called Scandals of Classic Hollywood that explored old celebrity gossip through an academic lens. Earlier this year, her online writing became so popular that BuzzFeed offered her a full-time job. She accepted the position, making her one of the few academics to ever write articles millions of people enjoy reading. (I mean that as a very big compliment.)  

Plume recently released Petersen's new book (also called Scandals of Classic Hollywood), which features essays about stars like Judy Garland, Clara Bow, and Fatty Arbuckle. After I finished the addictive, engrossing, and illuminating book, I called Petersen to discuss her unique approach to writing, Judy Garland's suicide attempts, and the state of today’s gossip magazines. 

VICE: What’s the difference between reading a tabloid for fun and reading gossip as an academic?
Anne Helen Petersen: A lot of times people, whatever their education level, will read celebrity gossip as they would any other kind of pop culture mode of entertainment, like watching reality television or going to blockbuster movies, and know that it's enjoyable. But they don’t necessarily understand why they like it, or want to understand how these images are made or why we find them compelling or why we want to hear stories about people we otherwise don’t know at all. I saw that lots of people really want to think at a deeper level about celebrity gossip the same way that people want to read film criticism or television recaps. An academic approach to gossip asks how celebrity images are made, how they function ideologically, and how they point to things that matter in our society.

How is your new book different than other books about Hollywood?
Most books about Hollywood stars are very flattering. They’re either hagiographies in which the star is essentially sainted, or they use a lot of testimony from people many decades after the fact who say that they know something, like, “I am the person who can tell you that Cary Grant was gay. I know someone who slept with Cary Grant, and that is the truth.” They’re really trying to arrive at what is the truth of what happened, and for me, it’s always a matter less of what the truth is and more about how information about [the star] was mediated.  

The other type of coverage is scandal-mongering coverage. People love to believe the worst, and the far end of of the spectrum is where people say, “The stars were almost disgusting in their hedonism.” The problem with that for me is that—especially for women—these narratives become the narratives of the star. Until very recently the Wikipedia page for Clara Bow perpetuated the story that she slept with the entire USC football team. It’s not telling the truth, and its not fair to the way that she’s remembered. 

Clara Bow. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Your book discusses how the star system controlled young actors’ lives. Is there an analogy to be made between the studio system and Disney and Nickelodeon’s child star factories?
Totally. I think that Nickelodeon and especially Disney are the new version of the star system, and even some of the companies that seek out YouTube stars and then contract them control [the YouTube stars'] behavior.

When I read the Judy Garland chapter I thought, Oh my god, this is like Britney Spears.  
The difference in Britney’s case—with legal intervention and the way that her parents functioned differently—she didn’t go down the complete spiral that Garland went down, but I think it really easily could have gone that way. So many people are struck by the Garland chapter because of how publicly she was called an “ugly duckling” and ridiculed for her weight gain, but also the public knowledge of her suicide attempts and the anger directed towards her studio—which really played out in a visible way that we don’t usually think of in the 1950s. People knew that she attempted suicide, but the gossip columnists also blamed MGM for what they had done to her.   

Judy Garland. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Knowing what you know about classic Hollywood stars like Garland, do you look at today’s stars and think, I see what you’re doing, I can see through your shtick?
Yes. Part of that is just publicity and trying to create a coherent image is always going to be the same, no matter if the star is from the 1930s or 2010s. The difference is really that the means of producing that image are different. Beyonce is producing an image using Tumblr and Instagram, which obviously stars in the 30s didn’t have, but she’s still trying to create a very specific understanding of the type of woman that she is. She’s trying to also make it seem like there isn’t a publicity campaign and that she’s not doing that, which was also done in the 1930s.

As society progresses, does the gossip industry improve, or do tabloids and blogs remain as bad as ever?
I think that gossip is most often—even when we gossip about our friends—used as a way of socially policing behaviors, to see if someone is adhering to the status quo or not. I think that that line [defining the] status quo is always changing, so there are different ways that we police someone. In the 1930s, if someone was accused of being too sexual on screen by showing too much of her thighs, that was a certain sort of policing of female sexuality. Today it’s not so much a question of nudity, but [a question of] if someone is linked with too many men, or if they’re bisexual instead of declaring themselves as gay or straight in that very strict delineation, or if they don’t have kids. There are all sorts of behaviors that are still policed.

Why should we take the gossip industry more seriously?
I think that, at any given point in history, you can look at the people who were the main stars and celebrities and extrapolate so much about what American society valued or was feeling anxiety about at that time. If you take that lens and use it historically, but also on the way that we talk about celebrities now, it’s very illuminating. 

Follow Emalie Marthe on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of the Nest Collective

Africa, like much of the world, is awash in homophobia, and Africa's most prominent anti-gay apostles have painted homosexuality as a Western construct and called homosexuals  “un-African.” Earlier this year, Nigeria and Uganda passed anti-gay laws, and this summer, Kenya's Republican Liberty Party proposed "stone the gays" legislation. To dispel Kenya's myths about homosexuals, the Nairobi-based arts collective the Nest—including director Jim Chuchu, executive producer George Gachara, and screenwriter Njoki Ngumi—created Stories of Our Lives, an anthology of short films recently presented at the Toronto International Film Festival.

After collecting firsthand audio testimonials of LGBT Kenyans across the country, they adapted the recordings into fictional shorts that offer a compelling window into modern-day Kenya. In festival materials the filmmakers' names were not mentioned because they feared attacks from Kenyan homophobes, but on the day the film premiered, Chuchu, Gachara, and Ngumi revealed their identities to the world. While they were in Toronto, I sat down with them to discuss their movie, Kenya's prickly political climate, and how gay gym culture gets lost in translation. 

VICE: The film tells several stories, including a narrative about a girl getting expelled because of her lesbian relationship and another about a man risking his safety to attend a clandestine gay club. How did these various storylines come together?
Jim Chuchu: About a year ago, we began a documentary project, going around the country collecting stories of queer people in anonymous audio interviews. We wanted to get a sense of the human experience of being queer in Kenya—not just in the capital [Nairobi], but around the country. After several months of collecting stories, we felt some were so interesting that we wanted to create visual accompaniments for them.

Why did you decide to reveal your identities on the day of the film’s premiere?
George Gachara: It’s been an evolving conversation—and an emotional one. We initially felt that anonymity would be helpful for many reasons, like protecting the cast and crew, but people trusted us with their stories, the actors trusted us by appearing on camera, so we needed to honor that bravery and reveal our identities. Ultimately, it would be more damaging to be anonymous, as people back home might interpret that as us being ashamed.

Are there any plans to screen the movie in Kenya or in neighboring countries like Uganda?
Chuchu: We’ve had several private screenings at home for friends and people involved, and the response helped us realize we needed to make it available to people.
Gachara: It’s really a film about how we as Kenyans express ourselves, how love feels, and how we struggle. It belongs to our people and communities, so it has to return to that place.

Given the country’s harsh anti-gay laws, could there be any consequences to screening it publicly?
Chuchu: I’m not entirely sure how Kenyans would react. So far, since revealing our identities, we’ve received a lot of positive feedback, but who knows. It’s an unpredictable space, so we’ve been preparing for every possible scenario.

In recent months, the press has pegged Kenya as the next battleground for gay rights. Is that a fair assessment?
Gachara: There’s very tough stuff happening in Uganda, Nigeria, North Africa, and Somalia, but people in Kenya are still living their lives. It’s tempting to rush to conclusions about queer life in Kenya based on headlines, but there’s also so much that gets lost with reductive, Africa-wide assumptions. 

Do you find Western coverage of African countries’ LGBT issues to be accurate?
Chuchu: We sometimes get the sense that countries that are “over it” [the struggle for LGBT rights] get impatient with the rest of the world. It’s almost like a big brother who’s done with school and is standing next to you, screaming, “C’mon already!” The language developed in countries where they’ve already dealt with LGBT issues is now being imposed to us—already packaged—and I think there’s some resistance from people in our part of the world, who want to define things for themselves.

Gachara: To me, it goes back to this European ideal of an urbanized queer life—that my milestones should be pride, coming out, and the gym. I appreciate those—they play a role in the expression of gay life in a faraway place—but it has nothing to do with my life. Some people are transposing those assumptions to Kenya. We’re asked, “Are you guys gay because it’s an economic thing?” and “Are you doing this film to make money?” When my mom tries to understand me being queer, I have to remind her: “You know how much I earn, how I hate going to the gym, so why are you using this to understand who I am?”

How do you feel about the Christians who fly into countries like Uganda to woo the country’s top politicians and religious leaders?
Gachara: The recent rise of the Christian right is actually happening in Kenya as well, not just in Uganda. For the last 20 years, Kenya has tried to rid itself of its British-imposed constitution—we’ve always looked up to people who fought against oppression—but just when we had an opportunity to vote in a popular, locally-driven constitution, the American right starts to fund our conservative movement directly. These white [religous leaders] visit the country in the name of being “pro-family,” saying things that Kenyans can identify with. It’s unfortunate, because this global ideological war is happening on the bodies of black kids who just want to love.

Do you feel resentment towards the West for introducing anti-sodomy laws during colonial times?
Gachara: Every society has had mechanisms for dealing with difference, whether they’re cultural or legal. We know of grandfathers who were queer, but these stories were erased with the Christianizing and moralizing used to police people during colonialism.

Chuchu: There’s this interesting piece of history from Uganda. Back in 1885, King Mwanga II of Buganda had relations with men that would now be called homosexual, but the Christian missionaries couldn’t handle it, so they removed him from the throne. Now, [over] a century later, the British return and say, “Wow, you guys are so homophobic!”

For upcoming screenings of Stories of Our Lives, visit the film’s website. 

Thorstein Veblen and Lena Dunham, together at last. Images via Wikipedia

The internet is always stupider than you think. When you’re telling a joke to an audience of anonymous online strangers, as long as the setup is believable no amount of absurdism in the punchline will give the game away.

Here’s  an example: The week before Breaking Bad ended, I tweeted, “My uncle is a teamster and got a copy of the ending.” And I attached a fake script page that clearly demonstrated I had never seen the show. I referred to the main character as “Bryan Cranston from Malcolm in the Middle,” gave him lines like “Here goes nothing! Suicide!” and wrote in the AMC copyright information with a Sharpie. But people still got furious and demanded I immediately take it down. One guy said my uncle wouldn’t find work again. Another told me, “Teamsters are pieces of shit.”

So every once in awhile I try to test the limits of that joke format. And on Friday, I struck the mother lode: I took a quote from economist/sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s seminal 1899 work The Theory of the Leisure Class and attributed it to Lena Dunham’s new book of essays. I know almost nothing about Veblen; I just thought it was a funny way to say I don’t like rich people.

Obviously, Lena Dunham, who has chapters like “Take My Virginity (No, Really, Take It),” is not writing anything in the same universe as the Veblen quote, which critiques the cultural fallout of the Gilded Age while using words like “impinge” and “forfeiture” and “exigencies.” The joke made ten or so of my political science major friends smirk, which is all I thought it would do.

Then a miracle happened: It got retweeted by Instapundit, a conservative blogger who is read by a lot of relatively respectable people. That led to syndicated radio host and frequent FOX News contributor Tammy Bruce picking it up. She has since deleted the post, but she sent my joke along and added one word: “OMG.” All of a sudden, my joke was hopping around the right-wing Twittersphere, only nobody knew I was joking. As far as my new audience was concerned, that Veblen quote was the work of 28-year-old comedy auteur Lena Dunham, a known liberal.

These FOX News viewers were instantly angry with the Not That Kind of Girl author—not that it takes that much to get conservatives pissed off at Dunahm. She needed an editor; she had the audacity to use the word “exigencies”; she just wrote the world’s worst term paper. It was time for her to go down. This was the last straw. Comments generally fell into four categories, all of them convinced of the quote’s veracity. (Note: I reorganized these tweets to aid smoother categorization. They don’t represent the actual timeline.)

First up: the obvious one. Ad hominems.

The second: criticisms of her editor. The marketplace had clearly failed.

The third: so many permutations of “did she get exigencies from a word-a-day calendar?” that I had to stop counting.

The fourth: This is just awful writing!

Finally, just as my joke was about to be canonized as the most controversial quote from Lena Dunham’s big debut, Andy Levy, who often appears on FOX News’s Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld, stepped in and told everybody where the quote came from. As far as I can tell from Twitter’s buggy notifications feature, he was the first person to “debunk” my joke after it got traction.

That’s when people started getting mad at me. One guy gave me the #tcot version of the scarlet letter by adding me to a Twitter list called “liberals,” even though I had made no meaningful political statement. I should get kicked off Twitter for my grievous ethical violation, I was told. There’s such a thing as “Twitter law,” people said, and my bullshit had violated it.

I swear my tweet wasn’t intended as a disinformation campaign. But the damage is done. I imagine there are one or two people who haven’t seen Levy’s tweet and are still pissed off that Dunham would write such things. Even now, that quote may be making the rounds via forwarded chain emails that are mostly about Obama taking our guns away. Sorry everyone. It was only a joke.

Follow Kaleb Horton on Twitter.

A Centre for Effective Altruism event. Photo via the organization's website.

Social media charity campaigns like the Ice Bucket Challenge and No Makeup Selfie are becoming pretty inescapable. At any given time there's at least one person in my Facebook feed running, walking, or cycling across one country or another, always in order to raise money for the less fortunate. Obviously, all this selflessness is commendable and the effort involved catches people's imagination, but you could be forgiven for wondering if there's an easier and more effective way to help good causes.

"Effective altruism" is a fast-growing social movement dedicated to maximizing the effectiveness of charitable giving. It aims to persuade people to give a significant chuck of their time and money to improving the world—and to do so in the most cost-effective way possible. Effective altruists don’t see giving as merely "doing one’s bit." They ask, Where can we do the most good with our money, time, and effort? How can we choose our careers with this in mind? And how can we best use scientific data to back up our decisions? 

Niel Bowerman, co-founder and Director of Special Projects at the Centre for Effective Altruism in England, stresses that the ultimate aim of effective altruism is to look at all the problems in the world, then solve as many of them as possible.

“One way of talking about effective altruism is as ‘the last social movement that need ever exist,’” he told me. “We simply ask the question of, 'Where can we have the most impact?' We’re not tied down to any specific cause, or any specific area.” 

The movement earned some publicity last year when influential moral philosopher Peter Singer gave a TED talk  in which he advised, “Make sure what you do is reasoned, effective and well-directed.” (The clip has over 1.1 million views.) Recently, 180 of these data-minded do-gooders gathered at the Effective Altruism Summit in San Francisco, and similar events have been held in the UK. Clearly, the movement is gaining traction. 

Philosopher Peter Singer. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

According to Bowerman, there are three key currents which gave rise to this movement. The first is the rise of data-driven development. The second is a burgeoning rationalist community, influenced by research on cognitive biases by Thinking, Fast and Slow author Daniel Kahneman, who divides thinking into two categories: the fast, emotional one that we tend to use, and the slow, logical one that we all too often ignore. The idea is that we tend to place too much emphasis on irrational human judgment. Charitable giving should be directed where the money will be spent best, not to whichever cause is currently tugging on your heartstrings.

The third reason for the growth of effective altruism, according to Bowerman, is “the expanding moral circle,” a concept promoted by Singer. This is “basically this idea that we should care not just about people in our local community, but also about people far away from us.” A convincing example was provided by Singer in his TED talk: If it costs $40,000 to train a guide dog for a blind person, but between $20 and $50 to cure a blind person with trachoma in a developing country, would you rather train that guide dog, or cure between 800 and 2,000 people of blindness? With Effective Altruism, charity no longer begins at home—it begins wherever you can have the most impact.

Peter Singer's TED Talk

Many effective altruists pledge to give away substantial portions of their income—the most common fraction being 10 percent (which parallels the old concept of tithing to one's church). Will MacAskill, a research fellow in Philosophy at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, is currently writing a book—Effective Altruism—due out in the summer 2015, and is co-founder of the nonprofit organizations 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can, both based at the Centre for Effective Altruism. He’s pledged to give away everything he earns above £20,000 ($32,000) per year. MacAskill aims for 80,000 Hours (which takes its name from the estimated amount of time we spend working) to become “the careers place.” 

“It’s a longer-term aim, but we think it’s doable,” he told me. “In ten years’ time, as well as having a presence at all major universities, it’ll just become the default that you pursue a career in order to make an impact. Just in the same way that it’s the default that you want a good salary—no one ever questions that as an idea.” 

Bowerman agrees. “Recent surveys have suggested that approximately 75 percent of students about to graduate consider social impact to be one of the factors they use in weighing up their career choice,” he said. “Ultimately, ‘Which of these jobs will allow me to have more impact?’ is a difficult, but factual question. You can’t just answer by thinking about the world, you also need to go and collect data. And so that’s one of the things that 80,000 Hours does.”

Matthew van der Merwe, the head of the Cambridge Student Group, is certainly convinced. “Effective altruism has definitely influenced my career ambitions”, he says. “I'm choosing my career based largely on altruistic considerations, and I’ve drawn a great deal on 80,000 Hours’ resources to help figure out which career is best for me.”

One of the more left-field ideas is that people should do highly paid work in an industry that's not usually considered "ethical"—say, finance—with the intention of giving away nearly all of the money they earn.

“This isn’t really what many people think of as an ethical career choice,” admitted MacAskill. “It’s not something on their radar, and so we’ve made a lot of progress by just letting people know that this is actually an option.”

Notably, former programmer Jason Trigg hit the front page of the Washington Post last year—he reportedly sends half of his Wall Street salary straight for the Against Malaria Foundation. Previous 80,000 Hours advisees include Matt Gibb, who’s pledged to donate 33 percent of his income plus the value of the equity of his startups; Robbie Shade, who gives away major portions of what he makes as a software engineer for Google; and Alex Foster, CEO of the "Race Yourself" app for Google Glass.

Giving What We Can, which was co-founded by MacAskill and Toby Ord in 2009 aims to eliminate global poverty by getting its members to pledge at least 10 percent of their income over the course of their lives. This nonprofit currently has 614 members and an estimated £194 million ($310 million) pledged. Taking a page from US-based  GiveWell's book, the organization also conducts research into evaluating how cost-effective the charities themselves are, as well as how much funding they can actually, profitably use.

In the course of advocating some unorthodox approaches, Effective Altruism ends up pouring cold water on some of the current charity trends like the Ice Bucket Challenge. As MacAskill argued in a piece for Quartz in August, most participation can be explained by "moral licensing." 

“This is a term used by psychologists,” he told me. “There’s an effect where if someone does one good deed, that can make it more likely for them to do something unethical at a later date.” So people might do a charity run one day, allowing them to feel justified to do something shitty the next. This kind of giving is also prone to "the wrong donation," or what MacAskill dubs “funding cannibalization”—money flowing only to certain causes célèbres at the expense of other charities

“I think young people have always wanted to be altruistic,” said Bowerman. “With the internet now, research and ideas about high-impact routes as to how we can make a difference can be spread throughout the world much more easily. And what effective altruism tries to do is provide people with the tools, so that they can use that altruistic spirit to make the greatest impact they can.”

Follow Huw Oliver on Twitter.

A Swedish Air Force drone pilot watching a kid play a video game. Photo by Lucian Muntean

During the 2010 White House Correspondents' Dinner, Barack Obama told the Jonas Brothers to stay away from his daughters. “I’ve got two words for you," he said, cueing up the punchline: “Predator drones. You’ll never see it coming.” The crowd burst into hysterics.

Back then, flying death machines that kill innocent people were a lot of laughs. Nowadays, it's unlikely the president's joke would get the same response. The Obama administration has launched eight times more drone attacks in the past five years than Bush did throughout his entire presidency, the deaths of civilians in drone strikes are frequently publicized, and in late 2012 the world became aware of “double taps," which involve two attacks in quick succession, ensuring the slaughter of friends and family trying to rescue their loved ones from the bomb site.

DRONE, a new documentary by director Tonje Hessen Schei, focuses on the people piloting these aerial assassins. In the film, she looks at how pilots are being recruited via video games and investigates the relationship between the military and the entertainment industry. I caught up with her recently for a chat. 

Tonje Hessen Schei

VICE: Why did you want to make this film?
Tonje Hessen Schei: I got the idea for DRONE when I was working on my last film, Play Again, where I follow a group of teenagers in the United States who spent most of their time gaming. I came across a story of a gamer who dropped out of high school, joined the military, and very quickly became a drone pilot through the kind of skills he'd acquired gaming. 

So having studied the impact that gaming has on our brains—and also having looked at the relationship between the entertainment world and the military industrial complex—I was concerned about this. And when Obama ramped up the drone program, deciding to create this battlefield with no questions asked and no transparency or accountability, we decided to make the film.

You mentioned the kid who dropped out of school. Were his gaming skills really that transferrable?
Well, most young people today are gamers. Not all drone pilots are gamers, but a lot of young people are gamers, and a lot of drone pilots are quite young. The US Army has used virtual reality and video games as a recruiting tool for a long time. They've been testing out different games and strategies, and they actually created their own video game, America’s Army, which is very much a recruiting tool. You enter your user information before you begin playing the game. They use real sounds and try to create a realistic feeling of being in a battle.

Oh, yeah, that ended up becoming pretty popular, right?
Yeah. It was supposed to be a recruiting tool, and it ended up being a very popular online video game played by around 9 million people worldwide. Gamers have skills such as multitasking, being able to relate to the user interfaces on screen, and hand-to-eye coordination. In the beginning of the drone program, the training that pilots got was minimal.

The boy who inspired my story basically became an instructor for drone pilots at the age of 19 with hardly any training whatsoever. However, this has changed quite a bit. The drone pilots we follow in the film have similar stories. They were placed in the drone program by pure coincidence, as when they ramped up the drone strikes they needed drone pilots, so they looked to recruit people from all kinds of places.

Is there a similar pattern occurring outside of America?
In the film, we look at how this is spreading to other countries. We've filmed in Sweden and Norway at gaming conferences where the military has been actively recruiting, targeting people down to 12 years old.

What's the training like? Is it very much the same as playing a video game?
The pilots we spoke to initially thought it would be super cool, as they felt it might be like a video game. They had a background in gaming. But they got very surprised, as being a drone pilot can be incredibly boring. It involves, for example, watching a house or place for months at a time, during which there is no action whatsoever. So that’s one of the things that the US Air Force is coming to terms with—the boredom of being a drone pilot.

But there are also stories of drone pilots gaming while at work and then using the headsets from work when they play videogames after work. Also, when the military designed the software they use in the drone operations, they talked to the gaming industry to figure out how kids think so they could create the most sensible interface. So the connection between the military and the entertainment industry is something that is very important to look at.

The trailer for DRONE

How did the drone pilots you spoke to feel about their line of work?
The pilots we followed during the film aren't part of current CIA operations. They did fly over Osama Bin Laden, but they weren't part of the main operation. They had strong objections to the manner in which the program is run from a constitutional standpoint. They feel that drones are an incredibly powerful tool and that they should be used purely for surveillance; that they aren't the right way to kill somebody. That’s something we’ve heard from a lot of people during this production. This technology is being used incorrectly, and there are serious questions around war crimes when it comes to how the strikes are conducted.

Would you be able to explain the term "double-tap"?
Sure. It involves targeting rescuers in a second strike. It’s horrible. Through this production, we've found that it’s quite common. So you basically have one drone strike, after which rescuers come in to try and help the injured in the rubble. A second strike then occurs. We've heard stories from people in which those trapped tell their rescuers to run away as a second strike is imminent. So people have stopped helping their loved ones.

Can you imagine having to listen to the cries of pain for hours and hours of your loved ones who you're terrified to go and help? This is a clear war crime. We've also talked to the Red Cross, who operate under a protocol to not visit the site of drone strikes for six hours. So they are very much aware of this.

What does the future hold for the use of drones in warfare?
This is just the beginning, and it's just getting started. There are countries all around the world developing this technology. It paints a terrifying future ahead, I think. And it's crucial that we now ask ourselves where we are headed.

DRONE gets it theatrical release this autumn. Keep up to date on the official website.

Follow Tom on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Franck Berthelet

David Hooks’s death reads like a boilerplate tale of a police raid gone wrong. Around 11 PM on September 24, deputies from the Laurens County, Georgia, sheriff’s department stormed their way into his house looking, they say, for meth. A reported 16 shots later, the 59-year-old was dead, and naturally there are conflicting accounts about what happened. The cops claim Hooks brandished his shotgun at them when they came in; Hooks’s family’s lawyer says that the raid victim’s wife, Teresa, had seen cops in hoods lurking around the house and was worried they were robbers (the home had been burglarized only a couple nights before) and Hooks was merely worried about defending his property. No drugs or anything illegal was found in the home, according to the lawyer.

The complicating factor here is that the warrant was issued on the say-so of an informant, Rodney Garrett, who had stolen an SUV, a firearm, and—he claimed—a bag containing scales and 20 grams of meth from the Hooks residence. Garrett turned himself in and told the police about the alleged drugs, saying that he feared for his life.

The raid, then, can serve a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with the war on drugs: a door busted down on what, in hindsight at least, was flimsy evidence; a search warrant that was seemingly signed off on and executed in a hurry; an operation that was unnecessarily militaristic. Whoever was at fault for Hooks’s death, the man himself seems completely blameless—if his wife’s account is accurate, he was merely defending himself against what he thought was a home invasion.

Dubious informants are a familiar catalyst for this kind of raid. Virginian Ryan Frederick is currently serving ten years for manslaughter because he shot the cop who broke down his door during a 2008 narcotics raid that was the result of a tip from a man who said Frederick was growing pot. The informant saw plants that resembled a marijuana grow, Frederick’s supporters told Radley Balko, when he broke into the man’s house.

Not all informants are as obviously suspect as that, but many of them have ulterior motives—and too often their half-baked or biased information leads to guns-out raids on old women or emotionally damaged veterans. Then there’s the phenomenon of pranksters “swatting” people they don’t like, which can result in confused operations that are dangerous for both the cops and their confused civilian targets—who, as the Hooks case reminds us, might very well have guns in their homes. As long as judges sign warrants on flimsy evidence and cops eagerly bust down doors, people like Hooks will keep dying.  

Now onto this week’s bad cops:

-On Thursday, former Chicago police officer Jon Burge was released to a halfway house after only three years and change in prison. Burge is infamous for overseeing a 30-year reign of terror during which (mostly black) suspects were tortured and false confessions were extracted. Several men who were sent to prison because of Burge’s misdeeds have won their freedom, including Anthony Holmes, who lost 30 years of his life after what he says was an electrocution-induced murder confession. Unlike some victims, Holmes never got a cent for the misery he suffered, while Burge—who was convicted only of lying to federal investigators about his actions, not the actions themselves, hence his short stay behind bars—is getting a $4,000-a-month pension.

-A Georgia man was surprised by a drug task force on Wednesday morning because he was growing okra. Dwayne Perry woke up to Barlow County deputies (including a K-9 unit) at his door and a  helicopter hovering over his house because the cops mistook his five-leafed crop for seven-leafed weed plants. Thankfully, nobody was injured or killed during this incident, but it seems bizarre that the police in Georgia would be unfamiliar with the traditional soul food green. Perry got an apology for his trouble, but he told local media that the raid made his neighbors suspicious.

-Most people agree that freedom of speech is important; similarly, most would say that police officers who are out-and-out racists should find other work. So it’s probably for the best that Charleston, South Carolina cop Shawn Williams was put on leave when police found videos on his computer that showed, according to a local media account, “Williams’s young daughter dressed in what appear to be articles of a police uniform and dancing to an anthem of the Ku Klux Klan. The refrain of the song repeats the words, ‘Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man. Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan.’” 

-The Flordell Hills, Missouri, police department came into being on October 1. On that very day, officer Jeremy Quate was arrested for stealing prescription medication from the evidence room. Maybe shut the whole thing down and start over?

-Luddites start your whimpering: On September 26, while pursuing four underage drunk driving suspects who had fled from their car, police in Grand Forks, North Dakota decided to let their drone do the work for them. Don't picture a Predator or Reaper drone hovering over the drunken pipsqueaks; the flying robot was a simple quadcopter—basically, a remote-controlled helicopter. Let’s remind ourselves that drones in the hands of police can serve a useful purpose—like finding a lost child or hiker—while not losing sight of the fact that they’ll probably end up butting into the private affairs of citizens and monitoring okra grow operations.

-Last Monday, a Red Hook, New York cop saved a toddler in cinematic fashion. After Matt Morgan’s 22-month-old son Matthew had a seizure and fell unconscious. Morgan began speeding frantically to the hospital, but stopped his car when he spotted officer Patrick Hildenbrand. The officer took both Morgans into his car, then rushed to the nearest hospital while simultaneously performing CPR on the little boy. Matt was taken care of at the hospital, and will be fine, but the emergency room doctor said it would have been too late without Hildenbrand, who is one of our most deserving Good Cops of the Week in a while.

Previously: Why Did a Black Man Get Gunned Down in Walmart for Carrying an Unloaded Air Rifle?

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.

Clacton-on-Sea, a small town on the Tendring peninsula in Essex, England, is poised to become a stronghold for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which advocates abandoning the European Union for the purity that comes with being an island nation. In August, local member of parliament (MP) Douglas Carswell jumped ship from the ruling Conservatives to join UKIP, sparking a by-election. On Thursday, the follow-up vote takes place and the town looks set to install Carswell as the country's first UKIP member of the lower house of parliament.

Clacton is one of Britain’s depressed seaside towns. It was a busy tourist spot until the 1980s, when people started to look to the Costa del Sol rather than Essex's Sunshine Coast for their holidays. A local holiday retreat shut down and took with it much of the jobs and money; today, the tourism trade is at the mercy of day-trippers. Last year, an area near Clacton's once-lucrative pier had an unemployment rate of 54 percent, the fifth highest in the country. Many of the B&Bs now provide emergency accommodation for welfare recipients and the town is a popular retirement destination for Londoners, who price locals out of the market and then sit around being economically inactive. In recent years, Clacton's mean income hovers around half the national average.

It’s in these eastern coastal towns—Great Yarmouth, Thanet and Rochester are others—that politician Nigel Farage’s UKIP insurgency is gaining the most traction. When I visited Clacton on Saturday, the town was laden with UKIP paraphernalia, its purple and yellow logo visible on almost every street. The million pounds ($1.6 million) gifted to UKIP by former Tory (Conservative Party) donor Aaron Banks was being spent on signs in front gardens, wrap-around ads in the local paper, lapels for the blazers of campaigners and posters in windows.

As I left the station and looked at the UKIP HQ across the street, a guy called Tristan walked past with a poster. Immigration was on his mind—he'd never voted before and told me he'd never vote Tory, but due to the “200,000, 400,000, 1.5 million” coming in, said he was backing Carswell this time. UKIP’s not right wing, Tristan said, because it’s not right wing to look after your own.

Virtually the only traces of anti-UKIP sentiment I saw were in the town's main square. On one side, a Green Party candidate was canvassing, while opposite protesters handed out leaflets asking people to “say no to racism." Bob Lambert, who's lived in Clacton all his life, was pretty unhappy at the thought of waking up in UKIP-land on Thursday. “It’s always easy to blame someone else, no matter how low you are in the pecking order," he said. "The main parties blame minorities rather than mend what’s wrong."

Ex-Labour Party member Malcome Mead had come from Wycombe to warn people about UKIP. “The Labour Party should be here. They’re no longer for the working people. A lot of people are very ignorant here and are voting UKIP. They say 'immigration, immigration, immigration'—terrible… Not many people are coming over to us,” he admitted.

To be honest, their effort seemed a little despondent. I asked Malcome who he'll be voting for at next year's general election. “I don’t know. I’ll have to vote Green I suppose."

Down at the seafront, the pier was doing a decent trade in day-trippers pumping coins into the machines. But just round the corner were signs of decay—an empty hotel that happened to be covered in Carswell posters, for instance. UKIP’s vision is a nostalgic one, harking back to a pre-EU, pre-immigration Britain. It’s easy to see why people in places like Clacton would buy into it. Things were much better here 60 years ago.

Just southwest of Clacton is the village of Jaywick. Its fine sandy beaches haven't helped it escape from being officially named the most deprived place in the UK. Right on cue, the black clouds hanging over Jaywick emptied their rain as soon as I got there.

The bungalow development was built in 1928 as part of the “plotlands” movement, which sold little strips of land to Londoners seeking respite from the city. People ended up staying all year round and, while other plotlands developments were demolished after the Second World War, Jaywick held on.

Nowadays, it’s a place to escape from rather than to. Jaywick tops the English Indices of Multiple Deprivation—a kind of league table that uses stats for income, employment, health, disability, crime and living standards to figure out the best and worst places to live in the country.

Jaywick no longer attracts Londoners who can afford a little taste of paradise by the sea, but rather retirees and benefits claimants who can’t afford to go anywhere else. It only got modern sewerage in the 1980s. Some of the roads are private and not maintained by the local government. In an area this poor, that means that they’re falling apart. In the Brooklands estate, at the west end of Jaywick, a lot of the houses have been abandoned, and some of those have been burned out. Most of the shops have closed down and are slowly rotting.

In London, until everything gets totally gentrified, poverty lives beside wealth, making the experience of living in the city a diverse one. Jaywick, on the other hand, feels like a concentration of bad luck and grim prospects. There were no office blocks or better residences to aspire to, envy or throw bricks at—just abandoned buildings reminding people that things haven’t always been this bad.

Alan Olford, the chairman of the Jaywick Action Group, invited me into his house, which had Douglas Carswell signage in the windows. As a UKIPer of 15 years, he said he was voting to get out of Europe. He believed that pretty much everyone in the area was voting for his party. “They’re all fed up, for the simple reason that all the London boroughs are pushing all their immigrants and stuff like that down into Jaywick.

“I’ve been coming to Jaywick since I was that high,” he continued, putting his hand a couple of feet from the floor. “In fact, I was born in Jaywick. I’ve noticed it go down and down and down and down, because nothing is ever spent on Jaywick. They think a penny spent on Jaywick is a penny wasted, so they spend it elsewhere… We used to have someone clean the promenade and empty the bins but the chap who used to do that has been taken away.”

Down the road at a café decked out in UKIP's purple and yellow, people were cagey about talking to me. They were upset that their area was only ever paid any attention because it’s a dive. Despite the problems, they were proud of their community but it didn’t take much for the place to erupt into political discussion, with people shouting over each other to reel off tabloid complaints. Immigrants and money being spent on foreign aid topped the list. Then they moved onto more parochial issues—the street lights are switched off at midnight to save money, they said, making comparisons to the £500,000 ($800,400) recently spent building the “Taj Mahal of toilets” in Frinton, the comparatively affluent town to the north of the constituency.

Was everyone here voting UKIP? “Definitely," they told me. "Too bloody right.” They claimed that the by-election had brought Conservative and Labour Party reps to Jaywick for the first time in 20 years.

Some of the people I met in Jaywick probably have more in common than they’d like to admit with economic migrants. Neither group is doing particularly well these days. But it was easy to see why UKIP’s narrative is so seductive here. Their arguments took on a new meaning among Jaywick’s burnt-out shacks. The appeal of the idea that the country should “look after its own people first” is obvious in a place that obviously hasn’t been looked after very well by elites in London.

How Douglas Carswell, who has already been the area's MP for several years, will help the people I met is anyone’s guess. As ever, beyond EU and immigration, UKIP don’t seem to have any policy positions that its politicians will actually admit to. In any case, it seems that in Jaywick, more than anything, UKIP represent a generalized shout into the wilderness for attention—a cry for help from a place lacking a path out of its present predicament.

This copy was amended at 3.30PM GMT on Monday, October 6 due to an innaccuracy regarding the by-election date.

@SimonChilds13 / @owebb