'Season's Hottest Trends' (2003)

The artist Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) is confounding. He worked across film, Xerox, painting, print, drawing, photography, sculpture, performance, and more—so many mediums that you’d be unlikely to look at a Polke piece and know it was his. There is no stand-out work, per se—no Sunflower, no Scream—which is perhaps one reason that his name has fallen afoul of the typical list of canonized, postwar painters. And yet there’s an ideological coherence through his art—running jokes, themes of anti-authority and anarchism, a policeman as a pig, a palm tree idly outlined on a piece of found fabric. Always playing with humor, Polke didn’t fuck the system—he mocked it.

It’s surprising to learn that the Tate Modern is about to hold a major retrospective of Polke’s work, and not only because he was a smartass and a punk, but because he never reached the level of recognition that many of his contemporaries achieved. He's like the less recognized Gerhard Richter; both are German, both began their careers in the early 60s, and both eventually helped coin the capitalist realism movement. The two artists created parallel paintings, but Polke never got as much credit—a Georges Braque to Richter's Picasso, in a way.

Sigmar Polke pictured right, with his friend Dieter Frowein-Lyasso. Photo via Wiki Commons

Born in the German-Polish no-man’s-land of Silesia during the Second World War, Polke fled with his family to Germany in 1945. It’s thought that around this time his father was working as an architect for the Nazis, and if there is truth in that, it resonates in his work. Clearly indignant toward führers, and troubled by his country’s repressive post-Holocaust silence on the subject, several Polke pieces confront guilt head on. He would tear images out of a eugenics guide that influenced the Nazis, and paint swastikas into his sketchbooks and murals. He once broke into a Dusseldorf gallery at night and installed a slideshow of ex-Nazi leaders under a banner that read “Art Will Make You Free," a play on “Work Will Make You Free”—the words that sat above the entrance to Auschwitz. 

'The Sausage Eater' (1963)

During Polke’s teen years, his family relocated from a post-industrial East Germany to a wealthier West Germany, where the postwar economic boom had created a new, consumerist climate that Polke had never experienced before. In his early 20s, he would paint products, satirizing the market for luxury holidays and processed foods; he would depict a girl shoving frankfurters down her neck, or paint an ordinary chocolate bar against a striped background. By affording these items the status of the canvas, he mocked the elevated status they were given by society. The style was dubbed capitalist realism. It was the antithesis of social realism, which was popular at the time, and instead drew on the shorthand of advertising as a figurative comment on capitalism. 

'Raster Drawing (Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald)' (1963)

The style was also a nod to the consumer-driven nature of the Western art world. In 1963, less than a year after Andy Warhol’s famous screenprints of American movie icons Troy Donahue and Marilyn Monroe, Polke created his own version, portraying President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald—as if to sarcastically say, “Buy this.” This sarcastic sense of humor stuck as Polke continued to pick upon the tropes of artistic trends and quietly deride them. One 1968 Malevich-inspired piece called Modern Art is described by Tate curator Mark Godfrey as “a collection of clichés amassed on a page”—arguably a parodist’s take on abstraction. You can walk the Tate retrospective playing "spot the references," knowing that the artist wasn’t borrowing the styles of others but acutely critiquing them. 

'Modern Art' (1968)

Polke’s humor frequently paired high and low culture for the sake of irony, pitting what we might consider “good art” against “bad art." In a piece called Plastic Tubs (1964), he painted a series of containers with delicate and realistic shading, and then deliberately left half of the painting unfinished, as if to suggest that “proper art” is boring. Critics have argued that he painted the tubs to demonstrate the banality of existing forms, in the same way that he’d appropriate other artists’ traits, or appropriate images from magazines and use patterned textiles. He used to joke that this was laziness, but a retrospective that features his later materials—everything from snail juice to uranium—proves that Polke was neither lazy nor lacking in imagination.

'Cardboardology' (1968-69)

If anything, he was a smartass—a master contrarian. When MoMA curator Kathy Halbreich approached him about a retrospective almost a decade ago, he was reluctant. He wanted to keep people dislodged and uncertain. She describes his sometimes caustic nature, and what sounds like a zero tolerance to the apparatus of bullshit: “Polke’s friends recall his unusual ability to see through the deceit, subterfuge, and artifice of polite society,” Kathy says, “to penetrate the trivialities of the status quo in order to make visible its unstable values.”

Halbreich acknowledges the risk in exhibiting Polke’s work: that his humor could be misinterpreted as cynicism. On this point, she quotes Slavoj Žižek: “Comedy does not rely on the undermining of our dignity with reminders of the ridiculous contingencies of our terrestrial existence… Or, to put it another way, what effectively happens when all universal features of dignity are mocked and subverted? The negative force that undermines them is that of the individual, of the hero with his attitude of disrespect toward all elevated universal values, and this negativity itself is the only true remaining universal force.” To quote Žižek seems fitting; both he and Polke are pop culture theorists in a way, questioning everything we think that we know, and making you do the same.  

Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010 runs from October 9, 2014, to February 8, 2015, at London's Tate Modern. 

You can find out more about the Tate's film program on Polke, which runs alongside the exhibition, here. 

Follow Amelia on Twitter.

All photos by the author unless otherwise stated

Driven by an agenda that's anti-corruption, anti-Zionist, anti-homosexuality, anti–European Union, and anti-Roma, Hungary's far-right Jobbik party won 20 percent of the vote in the country's April general elections. This coming weekend, Hungary is holding a municipal election and it looks as though Jobbik's popularity is likely to grow.

Twenty-six-year-old Ferenc Almassy—his name has been changed at his request—has been living in Hungary for the past four years working as a liaison of sorts between Jobbik and French nationalists, who have similarly gained power in recent elections as part of what seems like a general rightward drift in Europe. Budapest has more than 100 thermal spas in its area, so I thought it'd be fitting to meet Ferenc in on and try to understand how he had come to work for such an extremist group.

VICE : Why did you leave France for Hungary?
Ferenc Almassy: Paris was driving me insane. In Hungary I found a healthier environment, and above all, a country that doesn't ask for qualifications to give me a chance at a job. Before I moved to Hungary, I used to visit a month every year. When I was 22, I fell in love with a girl here and she convinced me to move.

Have you always been interested in politics?
I've never been affiliated with any French movement. Like any angry teenager, I was an anarchist for a while. Working on construction sites, I came face to face with corruption, to such an extent I never thought possible. It nourished in me a disgust for globalized capitalism. I spent a lot of time on the internet and I've had my Islamophobic, xenophobic, and racist phases. Eventually, I took interest in racialism, the scientific study of human races. I think that's what got me to stop being a racist.

Why did you choose to affiliate yourself with Jobbik?
It's a unique movement in Europe. It opposes the liberal world, economically as well as politically and morally. There's nothing like that in France. As far as I know, no party in Europe has such an intelligent, ideologically strong, and—most importantly—realist position. In France, this kind of movement would only gather 20 or so suckers. Here, Jobbik is the second most powerful political force, while still speaking a discourse that would have Marine Le Pen [The head of France's far-right National Front party] crying in fear.

A 2012 Jobbik rally in Budapest. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Can you describe what your role as a consultant to Jobbik entails?
I started last year as an interpreter, when a French guy came to visit Marton Gyöngyösi, Jobbik's number two. Gyöngyösi manages international affairs and I gained his confidence, and he told me it would be interesting if a half-French, half-Hungarian guy “kept an eye” on what happened in France.

I do press reviews in French when there is press on Jobbik, and I explain to them certain French social phenomena that are hard to understand from a Hungarian point of view.

And you're also looking for Francophone Hungarian nationalists to rally to your cause.
It's at the heart of my action. I'm using social networks, and I meet up with people each time I'm in France. Without trying to form official bonds, I'm closely following the French nationalist milieu, and I scout the talent. It's a small world; everyone knows each other. Besides, if a guy wants to spend a few days in Budapest, I host him, I tour the city with him, and I introduce him to the people he needs to know in Jobbik. I cannot give you names, but in total, I've hosted a good 50 or so people from the great French nationalist family.

With which French movements would Jobbik like to cooperate?
The problem with France is that the parties we're interested in don't want to associate with us. On the other hand, those who want to associate with us aren't serious enough partners. The National Front doesn't want anything to do with us since Marine Le Pen took charge. There are other groups, like the Bloc Identitaire, but we don't want to associate with them.

Why doesn't the National Front get along with Jobbik?
In Hungary, you can say things that in France, you cannot. Here, we can proclaim ourselves openly anti-Zionist, against immigration, say that democracy is full of shit and that Hungary is a Christian country. The National Front is secular, they can't say they're anti-Zionists, and they're for regulated immigration.

Jobbik is for re-migration, which is the return of immigrants and their descendants to their origin countries. Before Marine Le Pen took charge of the National Front, Jobbik was considered a young movement but appreciated by the party's old guard. Nowadays, [French nationalists] are conducting a type of de-demonization; they have to show they are clean, and that implies keeping Jobbik at a distance. It's understandable, but it's a pity.

How do you see the evolution of the nationalist movement in France?
Since the Dieudonné affair and the death of Clément Méric, there is not a single nationalist in France who doesn't think: It stinks for us here. The social stigma we face is harder and harder to bear, but it leads to us getting tougher. Still, there are many who want to stop the fight. Some have even gotten in touch with me to help them leave France and settle in Hungary.

Can you tell me more about it?
In the past four years, I've been nourishing this kind of crazy idea to create a community of French nationalists in Hungary. Four years ago, I was still told that it wouldn't work, but now, people are starting to show interest—people who went through a grieving process over France and don't see any future there for them or their children. This organization's aim would be to help French nationalists move to Hungary. Hungary has really flexible politics toward communities. If it reaches 1000 members, this community will be recognized as a French minority in Hungary.

What will that community look like?
I imagine villages whose economy is based on crafts, cooperative farming, and energy autonomy. Hungarian population numbers are down, with many villages starting to depopulate to the capital. It would be fantastic for French patriots to settle in those villages. Of course, Hungary is neither a paradise nor an El Dorado, but for these people, it will always be better than France. Eight people, including a young family, are settling in Hungary as part of this project. Some of them have already sold their house in France.

Follow Pierre Sautreuil on Twitter.

Southern China has always had a tradition of dining on dogs—people from other parts of the country even joke that Southerners will eat anything with legs but the dinner table. But despite becoming more prosperous in the 1990s, Yulin has maintained the unique tradition of holding a canine banquet every summer.

Animal rights activists across China and the rest of the globe have increasingly condemned the Dog Meat Festival, calling for an immediate stop to eating man’s best friend. They say the dog meat trade is illegal, unregulated, and cruel. Many claim that some of the dogs that end up in cooking pots are stolen pets or diseased strays.

In 2013, the Yulin festival gathered so much negative press that this year, the local government denied the Summer Solstice dog-eating tradition ever even existed. But that hasn’t stopped locals from celebrating—nor has it stopped die-hard activists from flooding the town in an attempt to rescue the dogs before the slaughter. VICE Reports headed to Yulin this year to get to the bottom of the most controversial festival in China.

In part two of "Dog Days of Yulin," VICE attends a family feast to eat some home-cooked dog. As one Yulin local explained, "Some dogs are people's friends, and others are for food. In India, cows are sacred. If you eat cow in England, all of India is against you... It's the same logic." On the other hand, we spoke to a woman who went so far as to sell her house in order to raise money to protect man's best friend.

After establishing a career as a solid working actor with over 40 film and television credits to his name, 37-year-old Torontonian Adam MacDonald decided to conquer a new mountain: directing. His debut feature, Backcountry, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival as a part of the Discovery program, and is an eerie backwoods horror film based on a true story of a couple that embarks on a camping trip in the Ontario wilderness that goes horribly awry, leaving them stranded without food and water, and forced to face the unforgiving elements in North Bay, Ontario.

In this episode of The Director's Canvas, we met up with Adam on the top of the Thompson Hotel to talk about his transition from actor to filmmaker, how legendary horror film director George A. Romero's multiple rejections inpired him to direct, and the fears of presenting your first feature to critics.

Nikola Tesla High School

A flooded study in the village of Mladici 

A pool filled with flood water

More flood water in the pool

Spice bottles in a kitchen after a flood

A waterlogged family photo album

NPA Bosnia engineer with mine-sniffing dog

A grenade

An NPA Bosnia worker

A television in a flooded school

The Bosnian landscape through a window

An NPA Bosnia worker in a minefield

A flooded home in Orasje

All photos by the author.

It's 1962. I’m in seventh grade and one of the popular kids. I’m not athletic but am quick-witted, and I balance my handicaps with sarcasm and put-downs. I think I’m pretty funny, but more likely I’m just mean. 

My mother wants me to learn humility and takes me away from afternoon cartoons to deliver care packages from the church to families experiencing hardship. I’m brooding in the front seat of the Oldsmobile, listening to the radio—Gene Pitney, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The song is pretty dorky but I liked the movie, where Lee Marvin was great as the bad guy. We drive over and down Central overpass into the poor side of town. I’m glad I don’t live here, but there’s something about the landscape, something romantic about the shadowy lifestyle—something dangerous like Lee Marvin as the bad guy.

In a neighborhood of rubble roads, we park in front of a rawboned house that looks waterlogged and soft. Mother goes to the door and talks for a minute to a woman with a turned-down face and a stick figure. We have six bags of groceries in the trunk of the car. I take two bags and mother takes one and we go inside. The living room has no rug, no paint or wallpaper, no furniture. At the back wall, two boys my age are on the floor watching a black and white television. I’ve seen them before at school: the Bramble brothers. One is big and the other is my size. They're watching the Three Stooges, which is what I wish I was doing. 

They don’t turn to acknowledge us, which is good—this is one of the few times I don’t want to be noticed. My luck turns bad when my mother, who is here for charity but remains a stickler for politeness, tells the Bramble brothers that maybe they could leave the television long enough to help us carry in the rest of the groceries.

They look up at mother, then at me, and for the first time in my young life I see hatred in the eyes of others. I don’t really understand it, but I don’t dwell on it for long. Tomorrow, when I’m joking and laughing and impressing the pretty girls in pretty dresses, these guys will be standing in the free lunch line, wishing they were dead.

A year later—eighth grade—an aberration called New Math is introduced to the American classroom. It won’t last more than a few years but is supposed to make us into scientists so we can beat the Soviets to the moon. In fact, it’s just a convoluted way around basic arithmetic and a total waste of time. I passed through elementary school without learning my multiplication tables and I’m unprepared for ciphering beyond ten fingers.

Sitting in class listening to the teacher and looking at the numbers and symbols in the book, my brain panics and runs screaming from the room. Because I can’t grasp New Math, or diagram a sentence in English class, the school puts a retard mark on my folder and when I start high school in ninth grade, I’m in special-ed. The kids in my homeroom are mostly disadvantaged—they don’t come from educated families and they’re slow on the uptake.

On the first day of English class, the Bramble brothers take seats on either side of me. The big one says as long as I’m just sitting here, maybe I’d like to suck his peter. I tell him ha ha, that’s funny as dead babies. The smaller brother calls me a stuck up shit-ass and a little pussy, and with that he slugs me hard on the arm. I tell him hey, fuck you, I’m no pussy, but I don’t hit him back. The bigger brother hits me hard on the other arm and nearly out of my chair.

For the rest of the year I take the hits but retaliate with derision. I’m just visiting, I remind them—they’re going to be hillbillies forever. The following three years of high school I don’t see the brothers much and change direction when I do. By the time I graduate, the Bramble brothers have long since dropped out.

In 1968, a year out of high school, I beat the draft and have no plans for college and am living at home. I was in southern California for a while but came back for a friend’s funeral, and now I’m stuck here until the next opportunity. I get a job in a print shop running a paper folder but it doesn’t work out. My dad gets me a job in a camera store and it doesn’t work out. I hear about a place that hires anyone willing to work and pays a dollar fifty an hour. It’s a turkey processing plant and all day long the turkeys come in from trucks, gobbling and wobbling through chutes and ladders and when they come out on the other side they’re wrapped and trussed like embryos, ready for the oven. 

I work the line. The turkeys have already been plucked, decapitated and gutted. They enter the damp, white-tiled factory hanging from eye-level bars and move around the room like a board game. Four women at a steel counter have buckets of guts and giblets which they put into little white paper bags and stuff inside the turkeys (along with wire trussing hooks). I’m standing, along with three other idiots, in front of a large vat of icy slush, and every fourth turkey is mine. I pull it up off the bar, slap it on my tray, force its legs down together, and push its tail-stub into the cavity. I wire it all together and then throw the turkey like a cannonball into the slush.

I’ve worked a couple of weeks and I’ve just finished a shift and I’m in the locker room changing out of the company coveralls when Mike Bramble, the one my size, comes in. He’s covered with turkey blood, which means his job, in another section, is more fucked up than mine. We nod but don’t say anything. I get dressed and go out to the parking lot and sit on my motorcycle, and when Mike Bramble comes out I ask him how’s he doing and how are things with his brother? He tells me his brother’s in Viet Nam, which is where he will be going as well sometime soon. I tell him that’s fucked up, and he says yeah, fuck you, you fuckin' pussy.

He turns and walks north, deeper into the bad side of town. I figure I’ve had enough of the turkey plant, so I leave a streak of rubber in the lot and never go back.

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released in 2011, and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.

All photos by author

Like many cities, Flagstaff, Arizona, is home to a sizeable homeless population. In the past, local police dealt with anyone “loitering to beg” by simply arresting them and sometimes tossing them in jail (which, all things considered, is not the best way to deal with homelessness.) This happens fairly often: Between 2012 and 2013, an estimated 135 people were placed in handcuffs for bumming change.

In June 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona filed a lawsuit on behalf of a 77-year-old woman who got thrown in jail for asking an undercover cop for bus fare, and a federal judge subsequently ruled that the law unconstitutional. But the court decision only seemed to increase the panhandler populace, according to Flagstaff Police Sergeant Margaret Bentzen, so the cops were forced to get creative. They teamed up with Shadows Foundation, a local nonprofit that financially assists folks with life-threatening diseases, and came up with was Better Bucks.

Here's what that is: Instead of giving cash to your friendly neighborhood panhandlers, you buy a booklet of five $1 vouchers to hand out. The program claims you can “give without enabling” because the coupons can’t be used purchase drugs, medications, tobacco, or alcohol. You also can’t buy things like spray paint, cologne, mouthwash, or hair spray, since those products can also be used to reach an altered state. As Vicki Burton, the president and founder of the Shadows Foundation, explained, “We’re hoping that [if] we get people to give the vouchers and not the cash, we’ll pull the substance out of the hands of those using it for the wrong things."

I decided to try them out for myself. The locations to buy Better Bucks weren’t well publicized, but I was eventually able to purchase a booklet from the UPS Store next to a Walmart. I asked the cashier if she’d been doling out many Better Bucks and she told me she'd given out about $100 worth and the store was restocked three times. She said she thought it was helping a lot.

In addition to the vouchers, the small, glossy booklet contained a free, all-day bus pass and contacts for local assistance services such as shelters and food banks. Each coupon was watermarked to prevent fraud and was valid at one of six stores: Bashas’ Grocery, Flagstaff Farmers Market, three gas stations, and Freddy’s Frozen Custard and Steakburgers.

“You can only use one voucher book at a time, per person, per transaction," Burton told me. "So you can’t go out and panhandle these and walk into the store with like six of these Better Bucks books and go grocery shopping. Not going to happen.”

I went out to see how aware homeless people were of the program, but I wasn’t able to find many people who appeared to be living on the streets despite hours of driving all over town and walking throughout the small downtown area. Wheeler Park was corralled off for some reason, and the only two people who looked remotely down on their luck were sleeping. I decided to leave them alone.

Most folks I talked to claimed they’d never heard of Better Bucks. One person scoffed, “The Monopoly money? I haven’t gotten any,” then told me he’d had a long day and wasn’t interested in answering my questions. Everyone else gave me blank looks. Another man, who had no idea what I was talking about, described himself as more of a "gypsy traveler" than "homeless," and pointed to his heart: “I live in here.”

I also met Davie and Crystal, two hitchhikers from Delaware. They had only been in Flagstaff for a few days and hadn’t heard of the Bucks, but they were holding a sign that said, “Smile! At least you’re not broke.” Davie told me he’d been traveling for years and came through Flagstaff because the money is good here. The couple was saving up for winter clothes to survive the cold.

Many homeless people in Flagstaff are just passing through or visiting from the nearby Native American reservations. If these people are drifters, wouldn't Better Bucks encourage them to stay in town? And would they even want something they can’t use on the next leg of their journey?

At Sunshine Rescue Mission, just south of the tracks, I spoke to Ken Repkie, the shelter’s assistant director. He said he knew very little about the program, but hadn’t seen many people with Better Bucks. I asked what he thought of them.

“I think it’s a great idea. They can’t buy alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes.” Ken laughed, holding up a smoldering cigarette.

Next, I contacted the businesses that supply Better Bucks. Merle Norman Cosmetics, which gives the booklets out but doesn’t accept them, was closed. I spoke to a cashier at Majestic Mobil, who told me he had plenty of people who purchased the Bucks, but so far only one person brought them back in. All he bought were cupcakes.

“Personally, I think it’s a very interesting scenario,” he said. “Boss really likes it. I think it kind of attracts the wrong crowd.”

Kelly Wagner, the manager at Flagstaff Farmers Market, was out for the day, but when I called him later he told me they’d sold about $30 worth of Bucks. Kelly said this was a great start, as they’d only been participating about two weeks. (The only person who used them so far had bought some fruit.)

Then there was Freddy’s. The manager, who asked to remain anonymous, also said she’d only seen a few vouchers come through. She explained the reason Freddy’s was taking part in the program was because they’ve done several fundraisers with the Shadows Foundation in the past.

The average combo meal at Freddy’s costs between $8 and $9, which was more than the Better Bucks would cover. The manager admitted this, adding, “Most of our meals are over $5. However, we will not put [an age] limit if someone wanted to order a kid's meal.”

Disappointingly, when I contacted several of the services printed on the booklets, I found that many of the phone numbers weren't in service. The Catholic Social Services sounded like a fax line, the American Legion listing was a non-working number, and the Community Service number beeped twice, then disconnected.

Finally, I decided to use the Better Bucks myself, to see what I could get with them. I went into Bashas’ Grocery, and asked Adam, an employee, about the program. He said to read the sign they posted—that’s all he knew. I asked if he’d gotten many. No, Adam said, but they were slowly seeing more.

In the aisles, I grabbed a soda, some gummy worms, and a stick of deodorant. I also added mouthwash, because I knew this item was on the no-no list. I told the frazzled young cashier, Kate, that I was given the Bucks—careful to emphasize "given." She looked embarrassed and stopped making eye contact with me. The people in line behind me awkwardly shuffled. Maybe I was just imagining things.

Kate asked another employee for help because she wasn’t sure how to ring up the coupons. I purposely attempted to purchase more than $5 worth, just to see what would happen. The leftover 75 cents wasn’t waived, so I had to use change. But I was able to get the mouthwash.

This was less of a "gotcha" investigative trope and more of a simple experiment to see if the program was working for the people who bought them, the people who used them, and the businesses that accepted them. There are problems, naturally: The program is new, so few people have any idea what it is or how it works, including many of the homeless who are supposed to pay for things in Better Bucks. Giving the Bucks out instead of cash also feels vaguely paternalistic, like I'm handing out condescension with my spare change. Truthfully, you shouldn’t just give money to the homeless—you should also give direction. Do a couple barely working phone numbers count as direction? 

Burton claims the response she’s gotten to Better Bucks is phenomenal. As more businesses come on board, and more people begin using them, I don’t doubt it could have a positive effect. It's certainly better than locking the homeless up. I’m left with something Burton told me as we ended our phone call: “Is this a perfect program? No. Is it something that could be? I think we’re on the right path. You have to start somewhere.”

Follow Troy Farah on Twitter.

Everything Is Terrible first established themselves through a DVD series, where bizarre and forgotten video clips are edited rhythmically to themes like “Holiday,” “Hip Hop,” and “Disneyland.” They’re intensely popular: Fans flock to their screenings around the country, and there’s even been two “movies” and their collaboration with Los Angeles's Cinefamily—the Everything Is Festival—is in its fifth year.

Dimitri Simakis and Nic Maier are the co-creators of Everything is Terrible and their long-running project, Maguirewatch, wants your VHS copies of Jerry Maguire. Their goal is to save billions of Jerry Maguire tapes “from their natural thrift store habitats.” There have been plenty of copycats, but the EIT folks have been at this since 2009. With their current collection of 7,489—I’d say they’ve been making some strides. We caught up with Simakis and Maier at Cinefamily, where they were unveiling a massive Jerry Maguire throne.

VICE: What’s important about chronicling Jerry Maguire VHS tapes versus other VHS tapes?
Dimitri Simakis: Absolutely nothing, and I think that’s the point. Jerry Maguire is a movie version of a piece of white paper, and yet every thrift shop, every flea market, and every fledgling video store has a disturbing amount of Jerry Maguire tapes. They’re like these perfectly ripe cherry tomatoes that you see from a mile away, and you can’t but notice a pattern. Like a jerk, I started placing them next to each other and taking photos, thinking, Oh, this’ll be cute! We’ll ask fans to post their own Jerry sightings and call it ‘Maguirewatch! But when we premiered our first movie at the Cinefamily, we really wanted to put on a show. We went to Amoeba, bought a hundred Jerrys and unveiled them onstage like "Eh? A hundred Jerry Maguire tapes looks pretty cool, right?" Cut to seven years later and our count is currently 7,489 Jerrys. At this point, I can’t fucking believe this is still happening. It’s gone from sort-of funny, to not as funny—to not even a little funny—to these tapes will be the death of us. That is, until we saw them all in one place at Everything Is Festival and we remembered why we started doing this in the first place—because a throne made of 7,489 Jerry Maguires looks fucking awesome.

Hell yeah, it does. I couldn’t help taking a photo with the cardboard bishop’s hat myself. On that note, why do you think so many Jerry Maguire tapes have been discarded over the years?
Nic Maier: There've been many theories tossed around over the years. They include the timing of the movie's release being the last huge hit before the DVD era; the false-flag popularity of it where every yokel with a VCR bought it because it won some award only to never pop that seal; the rise and fall of Cuba [Gooding Jr.]; the number of catchphrases per capita were higher than any other release ever; and so on. However, it is actually way bigger than all that. The fate of the Jerry is controlled by something far greater than the fickle hand of mere consumer godliness. The Jerrys exist on a cosmic level above all other consumer items. The creator made them, released them, and sent us to return them home—for what, we don't know. It is a very "Noah's yacht" type of scenario. Once we have them all, we'll be told what's next and possibly also why and whatnot. Until then, we're just going to keep mindlessly stacking and moving, moving and stacking...

It sounds oddly therapeutic, but still pretty maddening. How has the process been collecting them?
Maier: Unfortunately for us, it has been difficult and not fun. I guess it is fun as a whole, but no, not really fun nor easy. I guess it is easy because I find at least one every time I go to a thrift store. We get about 500 each two-week tour we do and about 20 to 50 are mailed to us each week. So yeah, it is not hard to get more. Every other moment of this project's existence is the hugest pain in the ass imaginable, but I couldn't think of doing anything else with my time and space!

If that’s what you’re feeling, that’s what you should be doing. How have the fans reacted since you started collecting and displaying?
Simakis: Honestly, the reaction from fans defies logic. On our tour for DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez! [a remake of Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain compiled only of dog-related movies], we started getting hundreds of tapes a night—sometimes from just one person. We still can’t believe that people we’d never met would spend hours scouring thrift stores, just to help the cause. Every time we return to a city for a show we get more and more and more Jerrys. They make us Jerry sculptures, they make us giant Jerrys, and in Nashville someone made a cake in the shape of Jerry Maguire. It’s all just from people being so nice.

Oh, man—a cake. So, specifically to the Everything is Terrible Fest this year, what were the highlights in unveiling the big collection there?
Maier: That was the first time that all of the Jerrys were in one place outside of boxes, since there were a mere 300 of them! It was amazing! Just seeing them all standing so proud while drunk people walked on them was nearly enough to draw tears. They are truly a thing of beauty! We're just excited to see people lose their fucking shit when they see it. Nobody can believe their eyes—and they shouldn't.

Have you gone so far as to write an artistic statement for the Jerrys?
Simakis: I’d like to say it’s about excess, mediocrity, and waste—don’t get me wrong, it totally is! But we have to face it that maybe it was such a dumb idea that we just have to see to the end (whatever that is). You do not look at 700 Jerrys and say, "That’s enough."

I’ll say. Do you believe the appeal of fans contributing Jerry Maguire tapes to your collection is through a nostalgia for the 90s?
Maier: What’s the opposite of nostalgia? That's what it is, that word.

Where do you see the future of this installation? What I mean is, would you like to build more upon it or are you considering starting a collection of other VHS tapes or other materials in “thrift store habitats”?
Simakis: We talk about this so much, it’s insane. The first idea was to rent an old Blockbuster and create a fully functional video store that only carries Jerry Maguire tapes. The clerks would wear Jerry red polos, every poster is for Jerry Maguire, and the electronic doorbell recites lines from the movie like, “The human head weighs eight pounds!” We’re also really excited about the possibility of building a church made entirely of Jerrys somewhere in the desert. We will give fans the coordinates, where they can take a pilgrimage and drop them into a giant pit. If anyone is reading this and can help, please let us know. Seriously! And of course, we dream of seeing this on display at a fancy museum, because why wouldn't we? One thing we know for sure is that we will never, ever do something like this again. Not to say we won’t continue on this path of doing really dumb stuff, but the buying and shipping of Jerrys has cost us thousands of dollars, and we want to give the project the grand finale it deserves.

To contribute your tape of Jerry Maguire to the Maguirewatch project, go to their site here.

Follow Julia Prescott on Twitter.

IS fighters. Still from the VICE News documentary The Islamic State

The beheading of Western civilians is the cocaine of global jihadist warfare. The executions don't just inflict death and terror on its victims—they radiate a potency that excites and galvanizes not only the fanatics who engage in it but also the “wannabes” outside their ranks who are awed by the spectacle of jihadist bloodletting.

On July 9, 2005, Ayman al Zawahiri—then al Qaeda’s second in command—purportedly wrote to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in order to caution him to tone down the violence and reconsider the wisdom of staged beheadings. The previous year, Zarqawi’s network, originally known as Tawhid and Jihad, had publicly released more than ten beheading videos, including the video believed to show Zarqawi himself beheading American businessman Nicholas Berg.

In recent weeks, Zawahiri’s letter has recaptured the headlines, partly to contextualize the Islamic State's strategy of showing the world gruesome beheadings, but also to amplify—if any amplification was needed—the group’s brutality. To quote the title of an excellent op-ed article by Mia Bloom in the Washington Post, “Even al Qaeda denounced beheading videos.”

Of course, Zawahiri’s letter had nothing to do with al Qaeda's moral scruples. It was exclusively about strategy. The beheading videos, warned Zawahiri, were bad PR and would serve only to alienate Muslims from the jihadist cause.

“We are in a race for the hearts and minds of our umma,” Zawahiri cautioned, advising that “the common folk” among Muslims “will never find palatable” Zarqawi’s brand of gruesome cutthroat jihad, especially “the scenes of slaughtering the hostages.”

It now looks as though Zawahiri wasn't completely right in his assumptions. For some, staged beheadings aren’t a turn-off; they’re a turn-on. And far from losing the “media battle” for “hearts and minds,” IS is making significant gains on this front, reportedly attracting 5,000 Western teenagers to its ranks. To paraphrase journalist Charles Krauthammer, IS’s “best recruiting tool” has been its own savagery.

IS fully understands this, which is why its extraordinarily effective and indefatigable media arm, Al Hayat, has made beheading videos its signature production.

“We take this opportunity to warn those governments that enter this evil alliance of America against the Islamic State to back off and leave our people alone,” declares the killer in the video in which American-Israeli journalist Steven Sotloff is decapitated. This is the proclaimed rationale behind the recorded executions of James Foley, Sotloff, David Haines, and, most recently, Alan Henning.

Only it isn’t credible. IS is staging beheadings not because it wants America and its allies to “back off,” but because it wants them to step up and take the fight to IS. As David Carr recently remarked in the New York Times, “It is a memo from a foe that has everything to gain by goading America into a fight in a faraway land where its enemies are legion.” And thus far, it has worked—the West has reacted. IS’s videos are everywhere. They have even made it to primetime television, albeit with careful redaction, thus taking jihadist gonzo porn out from its “virtual” subterranean gutter and into the mainstream.

They have rattled Scotland Yard, which initially reacted by warning the public that viewing, downloading, or disseminating the Foley video within the UK might constitute a criminal offence under terrorism legislation. And more important, the US has now gone from having “no strategy” when it comes to IS to launching military strikes against it in its Syrian stronghold. This has all been to IS’s immense benefit, catapulting it into the big time and to the forefront of the global jihadist movement—a status which, as IS well knows, only the “far enemy,” the US, can bestow.

But this is not their only purpose. IS’s beheading videos are also targeted at the entirety of the global jihadist movement, as well as the unknown number of wannabes who have yet to join it. They are a display of raw power and fanaticism. We are the real deal. Don’t fuck with us. We will show no mercy. And God is on our side. This is the obvious “narrative” in the videos.

Clearly, it is no accident that the masked executioner in all four videos released so far is British—or is uncannily good at doing a South London accent. This is intended to disseminate dread and unease among the denizens of the West, evoking the unnerving theme of the traitorous “enemy within.” If the 24-year-old British man Abdel Majed Abdel Bary, whom intelligence officials suspect may be the killer in the videos, can be persuaded to join IS, then why not others from Britain? But it is also intended to send a no less powerful message to the rank and file of IS and its jihadist competitors: We are now so unstoppable that even the citizens of infidel countries are desperate to leave their comfortable lives to join us. It is a message of vindication designed to further rouse IS’s troops and persuade wavering jihadist competitors to defect to it.

Krauthammer nailed it recently when he argued that “the Islamic State’s principal fight is intramural” and that the beheading videos must be understood in this context. “It seeks to supersede and supplant its jihadist rivals—from al Qaeda in Pakistan, to Jabhat al Nusra in Syria, to the various franchises throughout North Africa—to emerge as champion of the one true jihad.” Mia Bloom calls this “outbidding,” a process whereby competing groups vie for supremacy by carrying out ever more spectacular attacks. IS, in recent months, has thoroughly eclipsed its local competitor in Syria, the al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra, showing a degree of ferocity and military strength that is unparalleled in the annals of global jihadism. The beheading videos are a graphic embodiment of this and proof that IS is the only serious jihadist game in town.

IS’s beheading videos are rudimentary and certainly do not match the technical prowess of some of its other feature-length productions. But they are extraordinarily powerful, nonetheless, and they are a world away from the grainy and super-gory beheading videos pioneered by IS’s now deceased forefather Zarqawi. They are in high definition, filmed against a piercing blue sky in the desert. The masked killer, dressed all in black, towers theatrically over his victim, who is wearing an orange jumpsuit in a conscious reference to the uniform of the Guantánamo Bay detainees. The killer is armed with a pistol and is brandishing a small blade. Like Zarqawi, he employs a sawing motion, but we are given only a glimpse of this and the picture fades to black soon after the killer sets to work.

More importantly, they are a world away from the latest video released by Zawahiri, who talks for nearly an hour about the creation of a new branch of al Qaeda in South Asia. Zawahiri, all too plainly, is a man sorely lacking in a plan, charisma, and appeal. This has always been the case. But the rise of IS now serves to make this even more luminously apparent. If, as Peter Bergen wrote a year after Bin Laden’s death, al Qaeda “central”—the core of the organization in the tribal regions of Pakistan—is the “Blockbuster Video of global jihad,” IS represents the Instagram of this violent subculture, a wildly successful startup that has built an audience of millions in no time at all.

One suspects that the killer in the recent beheading videos wouldn’t be nearly as cocky if his victims were untied. But the contrast between this figure and the tired and aging Zawahiri is plain for everyone to see. Abdel Bary’s voice, his street-tough jihadist idiom, his demeanor—every dash and comma in his body language—exudes power and supreme confidence, whereas the body language of Zawahiri exudes the opposite: impotence, decline, irrelevance.

IS fighters. Still from VICE News documentary The Islamic State

In his alleged letter to Zarqawi, Zawahiri advises that a captive can be killed as easily by a bullet as by a knife. No doubt IS commanders would agree with this—the group has already shot and killed hundreds of defenseless captives. But it also clearly believes that nothing quite matches the knife in depth of symbolic power and reach.

In Martin Amis’s investigation into the dark and increasingly violent world of American pornography, John Stagliano, a former actor in the industry, tells Amis that “pussies are bullshit” and that anal sex is where the action is at. It is “more guttural, more animal,” he said. In recent weeks, IS has proved Zawahiri wrong. Bullets, though not quite yet “bullshit,” lack the dramatic propaganda impact of the knife. And it is the knife, with its raw and guttural symbolism, which has propelled IS to the next level.

Toward the end of David Fincher’s 1995 movie Seven, a veteran detective played by Morgan Freeman receives delivery of a box in a vast and desolate area of arid land. Cautiously, he opens it and is aghast at what he finds inside—the severed head of his colleague’s wife. We do not see the head, but we see the shock and repulsion italicized across Freeman’s face. “John Doe has the upper hand,” he says into his radio. Seven—which, spoiler alert, reaches its climax with an open-air execution of a man with a shaved head in an orange jumpsuit—is a movie about the seven deadly sins: wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. IS’s recent success has depended in large measure on the audacity with which it has sought to convert the worst of these sins—wrath—into a virtue and an asset.

Dr. Simon Cottee is a senior lecturer in criminology at Kent University, UK. His book The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam is out in November, published by Hurst & Co.

Illustration by Nick Gazin

Yesterday’s announcement of a new nine-episode season of Twin Peaks was met with almost universal enthusiasm. Pent-up demand will do that. Imagine being cooped up in a prison cell for 25 years with nothing but your thoughts and reruns of seaQuest DSV to tide you over. I know, that is the ultimate nightmare scenario. Now that we are free of our shackles and able to roam the moist, terrifying environs of the Pacific Northwest yet again, I can't help but wonder if this is really all that there is. Is there nothing more? Is my generation forever cursed to be given everything they want until the end of time? 

Call it the Power Rangers Rule: If a certain intellectual property reaches an undefined level of global awareness, you can just assume there will be more and more iterations of that property for as long as fiction exists. Inexplicably, there are two feature film versions of Street Fighter that were both terrible, and three financially unsuccessful movies starring Punisher, a superhero whose special power is guns. A Police Academy remake is in the works, which would be the eighth entry in the film series. There's also a Police Academy animated series (with accompanying action figure line) and a live-action Police Academy show that you can probably find on YouTube if you try hard enough. For the record, I have never met someone who feels strongly about their love for Police Academy, though I have never met Steve Guttenberg. (Please email me, Steve. We have many things to discuss. Many things.)

Remakes, revivals, and infinite sequels are now inescapable. They are the foundation upon which our entertainment industrial complex is founded. This is a given, and fighting it is a complete waste of time—especially in the case of an artistic triumph like Twin Peaks. If you are one of those grumpy bastards who is mad that a classic 25-year-old TV show is being brought back by its original creators sight unseen, you're missing the point. We have it all, and we should be grateful. The "white whale" of TV revivals is happening. David Lynch himself said it would never happen, and that he had given up on the medium of television. And yet, it happened. It took awhile, but it happened. If enough consumers love something, it will come back. How does an obsessive fan live in a world where the impossible is possible? Can anything actually stay underground?

In 1969, NBC aired the final episode of a weird sci-fi show about a space-age JFK banging aliens and convincing primatives to stop believing in God. It was called Star Trek, and nearly 50 years later, the show has spawned four live-action TV spinoffs, an animated series, 12 (soon to be 13) feature films, and countless books and comics. I own most of them in one form or another, because I'm the sort of spazoid that journalists and cultural critics used to mock for their relentless passion.

It's almost trite to point out yet again that the dweebs won, and the world economy now bows at our feet in efforts to pry cash from our chubby, potentially webbed fingers. Star Trek fans had to wait ten years for their favorite show to be revived as a movie. From there, the series basically never went away and today, Trek fandom is no longer defined by a bunch of fat dudes with latex on their faces sweating in a hotel ballroom while the guy who played Kodos the Executioner talks about his costume. The last two Trek films made the whole thing so mainstream that I can actually wear a Star Trek T-shirt outside the house on the 360 days that Comic-Con isn't happening. Star Trek's decades-long journey to mainstream acceptance could be a guidepost for what's to come with the Twin Peaks cult. But much like the show itself, the history of Twin Peaks mania is far more elaborate, mysterious, and disheartening. 

Twin Peaks was a massive hit when it premiered on ABC, tanked in the ratings a year later after what many considered to be a subpar second season, got a feature film adaptation that most of the moviegoing public absolutely hated, and then completely disappeared from the zeitgeist. The VHS box set went out of print, the show stopped being rerun on cable, a season one DVD set finally came out in 2001 and then the company issuing it went out of business. In the years before streaming services like Netflix and loquacious nerd communities on social media, Twin Peaks was less a TV series than a barely remembered dream.

A core group of fans kept the flame of a very peculiar, often times transgressive television series alive. Wrapped in Plastic, a Twin Peaks fan magazine, found a way to generate enough new material to publish all the way through to 2005. The Twin Peaks Festival in Snoqualmie, Washington—the location for the original pilot shoot—is the largest annual gathering of Twin Peaks fans in the world. Rob Lindley, an organizer for the Festival who has been working on it for a decade, has been at the forefront of making Twin Peaks the viable phenomenon it is today. He's already seen more and more young people joining the ranks of Twin Peaks fanatics.

"Two years ago, we had a young lady—her birthday was at the fest—so she had 200 people led by Jennifer Lynch [daughter of David and author of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer] singing happy birthday to her. That’s pretty cool," he told me. "The point is, we’ve got a lot of new fans and it’s their opportunity to enjoy it. It’s like with the original Star Trek fans and then The Next Generation opened up the whole genre. This is an opportunity for a whole new crop of fans to discover David Lynch."

Somehow, time actually made Twin Peaks more popular. TV audiences caught up to the show's surreal sensibilities, 20-somethings latched onto its casual hipness and nostalgia factor, and the scarcity of the DVDs, the Fire Walk with Me movie deleted scenes, the books, trading cards, etc. only added to the mystique of the series. The fact that it ended on a maddening cliffhanger didn't hurt either.

It's not uncommon to stumble upon writers who self-flagellate in order to make the final episode and Fire Walk with Me seem like a satisfying conclusion to the "franchise" (yes, calling Twin Peaks a franchise feels weird). In an AV Club review from 2008, Keith Phipps decided that "glaring proof to the contrary aside, I'm not sure there's anywhere to take the story from here." He continued his rhetorical striptease by saying, "In the final episode, Lynch and Frost take their characters into the Peaks equivalent of the 2001 monolith. We've heard about the Black Lodge for some time, now we plunge inside it. It's not full of stars but much darker stuff."

The inevitable triumph of darkness gets a lot of play in Twin Peaks fandom because the bad guys (TV executives) won. The show was canceled. It had to end this way, much like Deadwood fans' belief that the abrupt conclusion to that show was sufficient, despite it clearly not being the case. Now, that coping mechanism is unnecessary. Twin Peaks will return to wrap up the many questions left dangling since 1992, plus create a bunch more that will surely necessitate further adventures. Once you plug in the cash machine, there is no reason to unplug it as long as it keeps cranking out $100 bills. 

As Twin Peaks returns, another reconstituted former broadcast soap is being sent back to the old folks' home. TNT just canceled the revival of Dallas, which was one of the most obsessed-over programs in America in the 1980s, after three seasons. Only "Who Shot JR?" could rival "Who Killed Laura Palmer?" as TV's signature question—though "Why is Two and a Half Men still airing new episodes?" is a close third. The new Dallas picked up where the old show left off, moving the narrative forward based on the amount of actual time that had passed since the final episode, which is the same tack Twin Peaks is taking. And like Dallas, I wouldn't be surprised if a whole new cast of quirky character actors and smolderingly attractive "teens" is recruited to mix it up with the surviving original actors. Classic Dallas aired for 13 years before it was put to rest. The revival lasted ten years less than that, but I doubt anyone is going to start a petition to save it. 

Oh, nevermind.

Nothing truly dies. Breaking Bad had one of the most universally acclaimed finales in television history. It's getting a spinoff, and bringing Walter White back is not out of the question. The beauty of the soap opera form that Twin Peaks cleverly subverted is that it can go on forever, but classic soaps also replace their casts every few years before they get too old or start asking for too much money... or the audience loses interest. If done right, this show could go on forever, or it could irrevocably damage our perception of the series. I asked Lindley if the new season could taint the classic show by either commodifying it or being less than stellar.

"I’m going in it with an open mind because it’s David Lynch," he said. "It’s David writing these, directing these. So just the fact that he’s doing it right there, it’s like, 'OK, I’m in.' That’s all I had to know."

This revival signals that TV audiences and studios are ready for anything, that no matter how much goodwill is wasted by a show, it can still come back if enough people truly care about it. To the many fans who posted on message boards, went to the festival, shared their tapes and DVDs with friends, and preached the gospel, this is your moment to celebrate. Once the shows air, it will be real and no longer the apparition you've been chasing in the forest. Reality is always messier than fantasy, and I hope that this very special show can stick the landing in 2016.

Our pop culture is one where a loud enough voice can be heard. What separates Twin Peaks from Police Academy or any other revival is the sheer weight of enthusiasm. That people kept asking questions for 25 years is a testament to the power of the filmmakers, actors, and artisans who built this beloved world. Lindley summed up the fan experience: "We wanted that story to continue. We wanted to know what was gonna happen in season three, had there been one. That’s what we asked ourselves for many years: What did happen?"

The impossible is possible, but use that power wisely, friends. Twin Peaks is one of the greatest TV shows of all time, and its revival is sure to be something we'll never forget, but if you aren't prepared for season four of seaQuest DSV, then I suggest you start girding yourself. I just hope they bring back the talking dolphin.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

The author dressed as an urbane Iranian woman, complete with Bumpit and a bandage from a nose job. Photo by Michael Marcelle

Two Halloweens ago, after spending months among a community of newly emigrated Iranians, I decided to dress up as a modern Tehrani woman. My new friends—actual modern Tehrani women—served as my consultants. My costume required a mix of obvious elements and unexpected ones: a headscarf pushed back like Jackie Kennedy’s, layers of makeup (the screaming vanity of Tehrani women and all that), a skintight black dress (Iranian women love pushing the limits of the Islamic Republic’s rules), extra-tall Bumpits (big hair is a bit of cultural lunacy much like tight pants among European men. In Iran, a huge bulge under the headscarf is considered a major turn-on). Finally, my team of experts suggested a subtle but crucial detail to make my character a truly authentic upper-class Tehrani. Taking a last look at me, one of them said, “You need a Band-Aid across your nose.”

“And I already have the nose,” I said, pointing to my only purchased body part, dainty and upward-pointing since I was 18. I may be American, but I’m Persian too, I wanted to say. Of course I’ve had my nose done.

Walking around Tehran, one will see glamorous women in hijab and expensive glasses, “bandages of honor” prominently displayed across their noses, sometimes long after healing, unafraid of offending the authorities. The nose-job women of Tehran are nothing to marvel at anymore; they’re the standard, and Western media love to watch them saunter about in all their brazen glory. In November 2008, Oprah ran a story on Iranian cosmetic surgery: “Women see the bandage as a status symbol. ‘I had a friend who had a nose job, and she kept the bandage… after two years on her nose just to show everybody that she had nose job,’ [a young woman from Iran] says.” To many young Persian women, such displays make perfect sense, especially given the cultural focus on finding good husbands. The bandage signals that you come from a family who cares and provides for you—even if you don’t need a nose job, having a family that can afford to give you one is preferable to having the genetics for a petite nose.

Iran has the highest rate of nose surgery in the world per capita. According to most estimates, Iranians get four times the amount of nose jobs that Americans do. This is staggering for an Islamic country, and according to a March 2013 story in the Guardian, it’s not limited to the rich, as clothing sellers, office workers, university students, and even teenagers opt to spend their savings or go into debt for the procedure. Though cosmetic surgery has permeated the culture, the Islamic Republic has made only the slightest gestures of disapproval. Ayatollah Khomeini sanctioned rhinoplasty in the 1980s, referencing the Hadith: “God is beautiful and loves beauty.” And yet, in June 2014, the BBC reported that a state-run television station, Tehran Channel, banned from its programming any actors or actresses who had undergone plastic surgery.

It was only after 1979—and the revolution that ousted the shah and brought in the Islamic Republic—that people considered Tehran the nose-job capital of the world. Why would this strange trend occur in an Islamic country? There’s no question that Iranian culture influences the behavior of the people more than Islam does, and for centuries that culture has placed a deep focus on physical beauty in all its forms. Given that, one explanation seems to have caught on: Because the mandatory hijab leaves nothing but the small circle of the face as a canvas for beauty and self-expression, Iranian women have become obsessed with their faces. They want their features to be delicate, symmetrical, and European. Given many young women’s willingness to go under the knife and into debt for beauty, nose jobs have become an Iranian rite of passage.

After several decades the trend has spread throughout the Iranian diaspora, who also value their Persianness and are influenced by the culture back home. For Persian women and some men, the operation is a marker not just of physical beauty but also of wealth and social priorities. It’s not so much about vanity as about the desire to join a class of Iranians who look European, read American books, travel, and live Western lives. Ironically, removing the Persian bump, that distinctly Iranian hooked nose, contributes to one’s sense of cultural identity. The standard for an Iranian face has changed, and while the operation alters a distinctly Middle Eastern part of the face, it is ultimately a very Iranian decision.

But if the trend is fueled in part by the Islamic Republic’s restrictive dress codes, why is it so prevalent among the Iranian diaspora too? And why did it happen before 1979? My mother, grandmother, and aunt altered their noses at a young age, and all three are conservative women. My grandmother, who had the surgery in Tehran in the late 60s, had suffered from a fall that damaged her nose—though this is a common tale. As the story goes, before her doctor fixed the break, he said, “While we’re there, why not make your nose smaller?” My aunt and mother followed their mother in the early 70s. “Only a few other girls had it back then,” said my mother, who has a nose I’ve envied since I was a kid. “It was a luxury. But I was in medical school, so I could get it for free.” Rare as it was back then, the decision was still a by-product of Iranian standards in marriage and courtship. “After her nose job, everybody wanted to marry your aunt,” my mother said. “Her old nose… it was very najoor.” There isn’t a perfect translation for this exquisite word. It connotes something tragically arranged.

Dr. Benjamin Rafii, a Persian ear, nose, and throat surgeon practicing in Los Angeles, explained that the phenomenon isn’t a reaction to Islam. “Iranians over the last 50 years have had a strong cultural relationship with Europe,” he said. “Applying the European ideals of beauty, Persian women are considered to have many desirable facial features—almond-shaped eyes, full high-arched eyebrows, strong cheekbones, but the nose stands out as big and misshapen, often with a prominent dorsal hump. It’s an easy target for cosmetic ‘optimization.’”

In my mother’s time, before the revolution and the mandatory headscarf, this European influence drove famous people to the operating table. “In those days many Iranian celebrities had been altered,” my mother said. “You can tell actresses like Forouzan and Homeyra had done it. And Ramesh [a singer] and Jamileh [a dancer].” After a moment, she added the simple explanation that Dr. Rafii had also given. “We’re Persian,” she said. “We just have bad noses.”

In the early 70s, the procedure wasn’t sophisticated. Instead of a modern splint, my mother had to endure three yards of gauze “tampons,” as they were called, stuffed all the way up her nostrils and down her throat. The most skilled plastic surgeons were elevated to the level of artists and sought after by the wealthiest Iranians—“They call them golden paws,” my mother said. In the 60s and 70s each doctor had a personal rhinoplasty style. “Everyone that used my sister’s doctor came out with the same nose as her, flatter, with less of a point. Everyone that used mine came out with my nose, thin and pointed. And all three of us [mother and two daughters] ended up with a totally different nose. Now doctors let you choose. Back then, they each had one.”

I too was afflicted with the “Persian nose.” When I was a 17-year-old sporty book nerd in Oklahoma, I started to think about how I would look when I arrived at Princeton. My mother had discouraged me from dating, wearing makeup, and all other vanities, but she drove me unprompted to the surgeon’s office. She said, “You can have this if you want.” I happily accepted the offer.

Now, I have one remaining aunt who still has our original nose, and sometimes I look at her and her children with envy. A part of me wants to know what I would have looked like, as an adult, if I had my natural nose. Of course, on most days I don’t even want to imagine it—I’ve become accustomed to a certain level of perceived beauty, and I like to pretend that it’s mine by right, by Iranian tradition. I wouldn’t give back the confidence I have now, though I wonder if I would have gained it over the years regardless, even without the procedure. Sometimes I tell myself that I’m more Iranian because of the surgery. It is a rite of passage that I share with my mother, aunt, grandmother, and thousands of other women from my home country. So which version of me is more Persian? It’s a complicated question. I have my arguments and my data, but the psychology is a mess. Every time I’ve had an Iranian boyfriend or lover with my former nose, I’ve fallen a little too much in love. Does that mean I long for my original face? Do they have authentic, untainted Persian bodies?

There was something uncomfortable about that Halloween, about wearing a bandage on my nose in such a farcical way. Had I chosen this costume because I had something to prove? Look at me—I’m Iranian! Did I want to return to the days of my own surgical decision? All night I kept touching the plaster, and now and then I found myself preemptively explaining it. Finally, I ripped it off. I looked Iranian enough without it—I have the almond-shaped eyes, the eyebrows, the language, the scarf rebelliously askew. It’s been 15 years, I thought. My face is my face.

Dina Nayeri is the author of A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (Riverhead Books 2013).

The wreckage of Detroit on display at the Seafoam Palace. Photos courtesy of Julia Solis

Last October Detroit native Ryan Barrett went home for the first time in years. Indulging a spur-of-the-moment impulse, he jumped into his car and made the short trek from the gentrified section of Midtown to his childhood neighborhood on the outskirts of the city’s east side. Like a beloved VHS tape warped after years of rewinding, the landscape was unrecognizable and somewhat startling. The tidy rows of homes that Barrett left behind had transformed into an apocalyptic scene more befitting a Planet of the Apes spinoff than any childhood memory. Of the houses on the block where he grew up only two remained standing. The rest, homes that once belonged to friends and neighbors, were nothing more than dilapidated shells. 

The experience is common in Detroit. There are an estimated 78,000 abandoned buildings in the city, and these padlocked warehouses and neglected nooks have become fixtures in the collective visual impression of the city. Just google “Detroit”: Half of the top 20 images are of shattered windows, crumbling cement walls, and caved-in roofs. Derelict buildings have become such an issue that in 2013 Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr announced a “blight emergency” in order to expedite the demolition process. The federal government has even stepped in by creating the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force, which is spearheaded by the city’s polarizing billionaire Dan Gilbert. While getting rid of deteriorating—and frequently dangerous—buildings is seen as a necessary step to get Detroit back on its feet, some fear the city’s character and beautiful architecture will be destroyed in the process.

Enter the Seafoam Palace, a soon-to-be-opened museum of curiosities nestled within a formerly abandoned lumber factory’s headquarters. The artists involved in the project intend to use ruins and discarded memorabilia to create installations and interactive exhibitions, preserving—and making art of—relics that might otherwise disintegrate or be demolished.

The Seafoam Palace of Arts and Amusement 

The project is largely inspired by the “cabinets of wonder” of the Renaissance. Popularized by wealthy Europeans, these were ornate rooms filled with sculptures, paintings, items from the West Indies and Asia at a time when maps were still “working documents,” marbles, stuffed birds, etc.—basically a cross between an antique Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! and an obnoxious freshman dorm room. A precursor to museums, the cabinets—and their curators—were not hung up on historical or scientific accuracy, but focused instead on the absurd and the amusing. 

The Seafoam Palace intends to carry on this tradition. As a video on the museum’s successful Kickstarter page (it raised over $23,000 to repair the formerly vacant building it occupies) explains, “The Seafoam Palace can be found far, far way in a mythical land known as North America a continent surrounded by sea monsters. The palace itself is located in the capital of North America, the magical city of Detroit, Michigan.” Through a mix of fabricated and real narratives, the artists aim to breathe new life into forgotten and discarded pieces of rubble and debris. If you believe Detroit represents the death of the American city, the Seafoam Palace is the brainchild of modern necromancers. 

Seafoam artists reclaim Detroit's refuse for their museum of curiosities 

Julia Solis, the co-founder of Seafoam Palace, tries hard to avoid many of the clichés associated with ruin exploration, sometimes known as “ruin porn.” The German-born photographer has made a career out of examining urban abandonment and decay. The website for her previous project, Ars Subterranea, unabashedly states, “We like to play inside ruins.” Typically, all this would scream “exploitation” and “detachment,” conjuring eye-rolling images of suburbanites taking late night "tours" of the abandoned Fisher Body plant, a relic of the city’s declining auto industry, and posing for wedding photos in front of the iconic—and very, very empty—Michigan Central Station. But while that sort of tourism is cluelessly abrasive, Solis brings a refreshing thoughtfulness to her work.

She greets me at the museum entrance dressed in all black, her ring-stacked fingers slowly unraveling the chain guarding the building’s turquoise front door, which is painted with a giant red question mark. Pushing back a strand of ox-blood dyed hair, she introduces me to Bryan Papciak, a member of the museum’s board of directors, who is perched upon a ladder performing repairs. Solis is apologetic for the state of the building—the museum isn’t scheduled to officially open until early 2015, although they’ve already begun hosting events like an outdoor short film screening in August —and quickly whisks me into one of the more lively and decorated rooms. There is definitely a nautical theme going on, accentuated by the sea-green plaster that covers the building’s walls and a massive wooden ship hanging from the ceiling. One of the planned installations is a piece entitled Submerged Memories, at which, according to the Seafoam Palace website, visitors will be asked to ponder what lies beneath the Detroit River by looking at artifacts found and made in the city and examining historical and mythical narratives around these relics. In true cabinet-of-wonder fashion, history and science will be secondary to the imagination. 

Hammering home the shipwreck metaphor 

Inside a garish, but cozy, space that Solis and Papciak call “Monica’s room” in reference to the dreamy artist Monica Canilao, a project collaborator, they explain that the museum was an impulse buy. In 2012 Solis was skimming Craigslist, looking for somewhere new to move, when she stumbled upon the massive, and relatively cheap (the asking price was $65,000) building. Haggling the sellers down to $21,000, Solis and some fellow artists purchased the structure with the idea that they turn it into studio spaces and a possible gallery.

“That was fine initially, but then we thought, let’s try to do something greater than that, something that actually has a vision," Solis says. "Since we’re all so interested in cabinets of wonder and what a modern interpretation would be we decided to make it a museum of curiosity.”

While the museum still has work to be done, artists have already begun to visit the space. Upstairs, Solis shows me a new piece by visiting artist Aminah Slor. Using materials that include found photographs, lighters, and broken pieces of glass, Slor built an elegant “Double-Headed Bird” that will be on permanent display once the museum is completed. 

Looking at Slor’s work I began to understand how artists like Solis manage to revel in rot without getting the unpleasant label of “ruin pornographer.” Ruin porn is the documentation of disaster without context or history, reducing once-loved neighborhoods, like Barrett’s, into Tumblr-worthy memes. More to the point, this fascination with neglect fails to acknowledge that Detroit’s “urban wasteland” did not appear overnight, but is rather a slow and painful unraveling. The 1967 riots, white flight, scandal-ridden city politics, the diminishing relevance of the “Big Three” auto companies, the subprime mortgage crisis and the city’s recent bankruptcy—all of that has contributed to Detroit’s current state. While the Seafoam Palace is clearly an outgrowth of this decline, it manages to be something more than ruin porn—not because it addresses Detroit’s history, but because it is an attempt to create something entirely new.

Aminah Slor's 'Double-Headed Bird,' a permanent exhibit at the Seafoam Palace

“It’s more about saving objects that would otherwise deteriorate and with awareness of being respectful,” explained Detroit-based artist Vanessa Cronan, who is involved with the Seafoam project. “You know, you check out to make sure that house is actually abandoned, you check out to make sure that there is nobody coming back, and you check with the neighbors to make sure it’s OK you’re going in there and you tell them why you’re going in there and you get their permission, and then you go in. Those are the correct ways to go and scavenge a house, and I think that’s the ethos of most of the people involved with Seafoam.”

Still, there is a sensitivity when it comes to working with the abandoned and discarded remains of someone’s past life.

“If I had known that a part of my house was in this exhibit and had been turned into something else," Barrett said, "I would feel very weird about someone exhibiting a piece of my history with no reverence for what it was before.”

Occupy Wall Street activist Shawn Carrié always dreamed of becoming a classical pianist, and he was on his way, with a full music scholarship to New York University. That all changed on March 17, 2012, when, during a demonstration at Zuccotti Park, a New York City police officer pulled his thumb back and back and back until it broke. Six other cops kicked him until he bled from his ears, according to Shawn. He told me that while he was held at the Midtown South Precinct an officer named Perez tore a splint the hospital had given him from his finger and said, “You fucking Occupiers. Every time you come back, we’re going to kick your ass.”

Shawn would never play piano at a professional level again. 

In December 2013, New York City paid Shawn (whose legal name is Shawn Schrader) an $82,500 settlement as compensation for the beatings and for arresting him on an old warrant meant for a different person named Shawn Carrié. But the officers themselves paid not a cent. Nor were they arrested, as civilians who break peoples’ fingers might be. They admitted no wrongdoing. They suffered no consequences at all. Instead, New York City taxpayers bore the cost. 

Shawn’s lawsuit could be considered a success. But it did nothing to dissuade the cops who attacked him from attacking others. When we spoke in my living room, his pale eyes flashed with anger. “Justice might as well be a cotton candy castle in the sky,” he said. “I’ve never seen it.”

The multitude of black men killed by police led Maryam Monalisa Gharavi to call these last months “The Summer of Death” in her New Inquiry essay “The Killing Class.” In New York, police strangled grandfather Eric Garner. In Ohio, police gunned down John Crawford III in a Walmart while he was checking out an air rifle sold at the store. In Louisiana, Victor White III died of a mysterious gunshot wound while handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser. In Utah, cops shot anime fan Darrien Hunt in the back, blaming the incident on toy sword he was wearing with his cosplay outfit. Ferguson, Missouri, continues to protest officer Darren Wilson’s execution of Mike Brown. 

Every week, it seems, brings a story about police choking, beating, or falsely arresting civilians. In one instance captured on video, New York fruit vendor Jonathan Daza was kicked in the back while handcuffed. In a rare move, the NYPD suspended Vincent Ciardiello, an officer involved in the attack. But, like the cops who beat Shawn Carrié , he wasn’t charged with assault. 

At New York Fashion Week, Cosmopolitan’s Shiona Turini made a splash by wearing a T-shirt that listed the names of black men killed by the police. Their killers’ names are less publicized. In a country where daily life is increasingly criminalized—especially in poorer communities—police officers are protected from the consequences of their actions. Instead of being jailed, their punishment might be getting assigned to desk duty. 

“It is virtually unheard of for police officers to be arrested and charged for assaults committed against ordinary civilians. It just never happens.” Scott Levy, a lawyer who is director of the Fundamental Fairness Project at the Bronx Defenders, told me. 

“The mechanisms that exist outside the criminal justice system to ensure accountability—the civilian complaint review board (CCRB), the police internal affairs bureau, and civil litigation—are opaque, byzantine, and largely ineffective,” Levy said. “Victims of police brutality are systematically cut out of the process, and the countless obstacles they face silently communicate a subtle but clear message: Give in and give up.” 

While they are one of a citizen’s few recourses, CCRBs cannot actually discipline cops. They just make recommendations as to how a department can and should discipline its officers. Of 5,410 complaints to the New York City CCRB in 2013, a mere 144 officers were actually disciplined—and “discipline” can mean nothing more than time off with pay in some cases.

District attorneys, who have the power to charge police who brutalize civilians with crimes, rarely do. 

“Prosecutors largely ignore allegations of excessive use of force by police officers,” Levy said. “Unless there is incontrovertible evidence of a police assault—and sometimes even if there is incontrovertible evidence—prosecutors will almost always give an officer the benefit of the doubt and decline to prosecute, a benefit never extended to the thousands of regular people dragged into criminal justice system every day.” 

This is hardly surprising, as prosecutors generally view themselves as cops’ partners. (Not to mention that police union endorsements are often vital for DAs seeking reelection.) 

Given the scant chance of prosecution, the investigations departments promise after high-profile killings are generally merely mechanisms for drawing out the process until public rage fades away. Trauma, both collective and private, remains. 

In 2013, Clinton Allen, a 25-year-old black man, was killed by the Dallas police. He was ringing the doorbell at his friend’s apartment to ask her to return his TV set, his family said later. She called 9-1-1, summoning the cops; according to a witness, he had his hands up when officer Clark Staller shot him seven times. 

Staller returned to duty after only five days on leave—paid vacation, in other words—and a grand jury later declined to indict him. 

Like most cops who kill, Staller claimed he feared for his life. The Dallas police falsely claimed Clinton was high on PCP (a toxicology report said any drugs in his system would have been taken days before) and said that he was choking Staller (an account contradicted by the eyewitness). This is routine. After a police shooting, departments often tell the press the suspect lunged at the police, or that officers thought he had a weapon, even if the victim was unarmed, shot from behind or had his hands shackled. 

“I would not be surprised if they had a manual,” Clinton’s sister Chaédria told me. “The language, from Ferguson to Dallas to New York to Oakland is all the same if you’re paying attention.”

While police claim they shoot out of fear, they demand that the civilians they deal with possess an almost monk-like restraint. Remain still, as you are handcuffed, choked, slammed onto concrete. If you don’t, and you’re shot, it will be your fault.

Often after a shooting, the cops will engage in character assassination against the victim, as when the Ferguson police released tapes of Mike Brown allegedly shoplifting cigars. But the reputations of police are not similarly scrutinized. While many departments post presumed-innocent citizens’ mug shots online within a day of arrest, the identities of killer cops are withheld as long as possible.

Using their own money to pay for Open Record Requests, Chaédria and her mother Colette Flanegan found that before killing Clinton, Staller had accumulated eight charges of excessive force. He’d also falsified a police report after he tried to run over a fleeing suspect with his squad car in 2011. 

“This is clearly a reckless, dangerous man who did exactly what he his escalating behavior would suggest: He finally graduated to murder when he shot Clinton seven times,” Chaédria told me. 

She and her mother Colette Flanegan founded a nonprofit called Mothers Against Police Brutality to, in Chaédria’s words, “help the families of those victimized by police and to put an end to the policies and procedures in law enforcement that encourage this human rights issue.”

At best, cities offer victims’ families money as a substitute for justice. But “what’s $900,000 when your child is gone?” Chaédria asked. The money for settlements comes from taxpayers, not the abusive officers or the police departments that employ them. In New York City, payouts for Bronx detective Peter Valentine’s illegal raids cost taxpayers nearly $1.3 million. Valentine, meanwhile, continues to “serve” the city. 

If a victim accepts a settlement, the cop generally does not admit wrongdoing, which means the assault that led to the payout will not be held against him if and when he attacks others. During Occupy Wall Street protester Cecily McMillan’s trial, the cop she said grabbed her breast had previously been caught on a bodega security camera kicking a man. The city paid the victim off out of court, but the officer was not charged with anything, and ultimately the judge forbid McMillan’s attorney from bringing up his violent history. 

No politician will ever seriously challenge the police. Even those who run on reform, like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, generally fail to meaningfully curb brutality once they’re in charge. Politicians may promise investigations. They may offer kind words to victims’ families. But they will never treat violent cops same way they treat ordinary citizens who commit the same crimes. 

This is partly because no politician wants to be seen as “soft on crime.” But there is something more poisonous at play. The powerful covet power. Just as no president really wants to curb government overreach, no mayor wants to hinder what former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg once called his “army.”

Sometimes an assault is too brutal, nonsensical, or well documented for even the authorities to ignore. In these cases, those who believe in the system will call the perpetrator a bad apple. But it’s not just the cops who kick handcuffed street vendors. It’s not just their colleagues, who scream “Stop resisting arrest!” and block the assault from cameras with their bodies. It’s a structure that sees violence against civilians as ordinary—as the cops’ right—rather than an aberration.

So what should be done? I asked Mariame Kaba, the founding director of Project NIA, a group that works to end youth incarceration, and she recommended elected police civilian review boards and a reparations movement for police torture. But we ultimately need something more radical, she added.

“In order to end police violence, we have to start considering abolition [of the police],” she said. “At the very least, we are going to need to work on getting the cops ‘out of our heads and our hearts.’ As individuals and communities, we have to actively unlearn our fear of the police and also diminish our dependence on them.”

Though many dismiss this sort of thinking as a dream, it’s far more rational than a population resigning itself to police who constantly murder black men. 

Or here’s another, if somewhat facetious, idea: America is vengeful and loves punishment, so why not create a police force whose sole job is to arrest the police?

These meta-cops could be given quotas of officers to arrest each month. They’d no doubt lean heavily on quality of life violations, arresting cops who made communities unpleasant by groping black teens or hassling street vendors. As cops do now, these meta-cops could be promoted based on their arrest numbers. They might sometimes detain cops for rudeness, or failing to present ID, but that’s to be expected. Their jobs would be stressful. They’d have to lay down the law.

Of course, cops who used force against citizens would be handcuffed immediately, held for up to 72 hours in order to be processed and charged. If they didn’t plea out to a lesser crime, they’d be brought to trial, to determine if force was really used in self-defense or defense of others.

Who could object? America always claimed to have the fairest justice system in the world. These officers would be innocent until proven guilty. They’d be no different than anyone else. 

Follow Molly Crabapple on Twitter.

Photo by Jazzmin Nilsson

For 18 years I was a light yet stubbornly addicted smoker. Perhaps my habit was a result of growing up with a Dutch mom who handed me wisdom like: “Thijs, you’re 11 now. It’s time for you to learn how to roll smokes for your mommy.” There were periods where I’d just smoke one cigarette a day, and there were times when a pack wouldn’t see me through. But quitting—really quitting—was something I found I was able to manage for a week at most.

I was also a terribly annoying smoker. The kind that tries to quit for years by not buying his own packs, thus becoming the friend everyone avoids at parties (sorry, guys). I would smoke during school, but not during work. Like I said—light smoker, ridiculously addicted.

Earlier this year, I reached a few conclusions that seem completely obvious, but are still the kind of truths that addicts love to ignore:

• Smoking is a boring, useless addiction. The only joy in smoking is giving in to the addiction.
• There is only one moment out of billions of years of history in which I’m alive. What a waste to shorten that blip of time with something so boring.
• Going out with friends can be fun, but if we all went out for shots of apple juice instead, I’d be just as content. Smoking is more like a random compulsive activity than an actual experience.

Those thoughts started running through my head earlier this year, and went on for about a month. In the end, it was almost like something broke inside of me. I realized that smoking now filled me with self-hatred, and that realization came during a weekend binge on LSD.

It's always fun, LSD. It may have become slightly out of fashion since the 1960s, but I have always regarded it as a milder version of taking mushrooms—albeit a longer-lasting trip. The fear and panic surrounding it always seemed excessive to me, but of course everyone who takes it has a different experience.

As I was gazing up at the stars during that trippy night in spring, my best friend and I were talking about life and the three smokers' truths I mentioned above. I realized I had carried them with me for a while now, without ever making a disciplined decision.

I can’t describe it in any other way than feeling as if a switch were flipped inside me. Suddenly, I realized how ridiculous smoking was—why was I doing something that made me feel miserable? Of course I was completely spaced out, but the psychedelics helped me zoom out and break through my own frozen ideas about not being able to quit. I didn’t think, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I really need to quit soon. The only thought I had was: I don’t want to do this anymore.

"Sounds like a familiar story," says clinical psychologist Pål-Ørjan Johansen. Together with his wife Teri S. Krebs, Johansen has been conducting research into psychedelics and alcohol addiction as part of a research fellowship at Harvard Medical School. "We've heard of addictions to alcohol, heroin, and tobacco that were broken with help from psychedelics. The reason seems to be that substances like LSD can provide a moment of clarity that can help you see your existence as a whole and get a long-term perspective into certain personal issues.”

Research into the medical application of substances like LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms) are still in their very early phases. The 1950s and 1960s are remembered as a golden age of scientific research into psychedelics, but that doesn't mean it wasn't problematic. Some trials weren't big enough to prove anything in particular, other experiments (carried out by the CIA) were horrifically unethical, and once the drug became illegal in the mid 60s it never fully recovered from the cultural backlash that ensued.

Research efforts have expanded in the last few years, but scientific psychedelic inquiry is still pretty small-scale. "There are three clinical research projects in the United States right now, and several more are being prepared," says Johansen.

Right after I published a version of this story on VICE in the Netherlands last month, the results of the world’s first research into smoking and psychedelics came out. Out of 15 heavy smokers who took part in the study, 12 remained smoke-free after six months of psychotherapy aided with psilocybin.

Krebs and Johansen found similar conclusions after their analysis of randomized controlled trials of LSD for alcoholism.“Those who had taken a full dose of LSD," Krebs says, "were twice as likely to decrease their alcohol consumption or remain abstinent, as compared with subjects who took a low dose of LSD or a placebo.”

I count myself as a success story, too. In the days that followed my LSD trip, I could feel my body craving nicotine, but there was nothing in my mind telling me to give into that feeling. I treated it like a mosquito bite: Just wait till it's over and it won’t bother you again.

About two months later, Argentina kicked Holland out of the World Cup. If there was ever a moment to start smoking again, that was it. I wanted to test myself and see if I had really broken my addiction, so I grabbed my friend’s cigarette, took a drag—and couldn’t imagine there was ever a moment that I had enjoyed smoking. It tasted like a night at a bar that went on for too long.

People shouldn't think they can just drop acid once and expect that it will solve any illness or addiction they have, of course. It just so happened that I had an experience with psychedelics in which I tried to figure out why I had been smoking for such a long time, and I'm generally the type of person who enjoys psychoanalyzing myself.

“It's hard work to quit after years of alcoholism or smoking," says Johansen. "Our opinion is that patients will need to have several doses of psychedelics in combination with treatment. It is no magic tool, but it can act as a catalyst for epiphanies and can make you ask questions like, ‘If not now, when?’”

I don't think I would have ever been able to quit smoking without that hit of LSD. I'd tried giving up in the past, but my lack of self-discipline always stood in the way. Some people say drug use is something that shouldn’t be promoted, but I’m still waiting for the person who will explain to me why I should be ashamed for my experience. I’m extremely happy that I’m done with smoking. And who knows? Maybe my next dose of acid will finally send me to the gym.