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Jacques Lacan's very name signifies fear in the hearts of graduate students who were once forced to wrangle with his notoriously difficult body of work. But for all his dense prose, the philosopher is widely considered one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. His weekly seminar was a veritable event and saw France’s most prominent thinkers in attendance, and he founded the Freudian School of Paris. Through his works, he transformed the fields of psychology, literary theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis.

But Lacan was also an asshole. He stole the work of colleagues, arrogantly intimidated undergrads, and was accused by feminists of being a sadistic narcissist. He romanced the ex-wives of his friends. At least one reviewer referred to him as “The Shrink from Hell.” In the current climate of notable thinkers making pricks of themselves—like the misanthropic Slavoj Žižek, the sometimes-thinker and full-time asshole Richard Dawkins, or the probably-Nazi Martin Heidegger—Lacan’s is a name that doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.

The fact that some love to hate the father of modern psychoanalysis is nothing new. Way back in 1995, Noam Chomsky, who had met Lacan several times, described him as an “amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan.” Three years later, the physicist and strident critic of postmodernism Alan Sokal referred to Lacan's work as “gibberish,” a viewpoint Richard Dawkins backed up, deriding the Frenchman as a “fake” for “equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one.” But for others—perhaps those impressed by someone with the temerity to find the penis's mathematical twin—Lacan is an endless source of inspiration.

Alongside Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser, Lacan stood as part of the movement to infuse the French humanities with structuralism, the idea that overarching invisible structures dictate society and culture. French structuralism stood in stark contrast with humanism at this time, the philosophical camp that celebrates agency and free will, because it argues that concepts like "free will" were always already governed by the structure of society. That debate rages on today, between those who believed an enlightened class have to “uncover” the oppression of the masses (the unconscious, the machinations of capital, etc), and those who see that resistance is everywhere around them in the status quo.

He ushered a return to Freud, declaring that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” For Freud, there is nothing literal about a dream, it’s all metaphor. Like language, the unconscious is beautifully complex and not reducible to appearances. To understand the human psyche, we need to understand how the language of the mind is structured.

"For Lacan, desire doesn't merely refer to our needs and wants. Rather, desire is something that can never be sated"

Arguably the most important of Lacan's theories is his theory of desire. For Lacan, desire doesn't merely refer to our needs and wants. Rather, desire is something that can never be sated. Desire arises from an existential lack, a gaping hole that can never be filled. According to Lacan, it’s actually the constant thwarting of our desire that drives our pleasure. Phrases like “You want what you can’t get” and “the grass is always greener on the other side” hint at this logic. Desiring something—a lover, a gadget, an event—is always more tantalizing than actually fulfilling a want. Slavoj Žižek, the much-discussed Slovenian writer and modern philosopher, elegantly uses the Lacanian language of desire to describe why Coke is the perfect commodity.

Many of Lacan’s students, even those who went on to eventually reject their teacher, still permeate the halls of Philosophy departments today. Some of those students, though indebted to his philosophy, have brought to light Lacan’s moral dubiousness. In a recent biography, Élisabeth Roudinesco describes the thinker of desire as a “temperamental child,” a man who'd often demand his preferred variety of liquor, cigar, or food at the click of his fingers, wherever he was. 

Lacan’s casual relationship with theft is also documented. Namely, towards the books he was lent by his friends. Unlike your friend who “lost” your copy of Fifty Shades of Grey, Lacan was far more premeditated. After poring through her archives of Lacan’s letters, Roudinesco discovered that Lacan would often write to friends to either borrow or purchase books that were rare and collectible. When asked to return them, they were often “lost,” and in the case of purchasing them he rarely shelled out the full agreed-to amount.

Many psychology undergrads know the case of Aimée (a pseudonym for Marguerite Anzieu), Lacan’s patient and the subject of his now famous 1932 doctoral thesis. Aimée was jailed and put under Lacan’s ward after she tried to stab famous French actress Huguette Duflos. Aimée was described as paranoid and delusional, but Lacan was fascinated by the novel she was writing while under his care. Even Aimée couldn’t escape his avarice, as Lacan “borrowed” the novel’s manuscripts for his own scholarly work. To this day, the descendants of Aimée are trying to recover the manuscripts.

More serious are accusations of plagiarism. Lacan is famously known for positing the “mirror stage,” a psychoanalytic term for the point in life at which infants can recognize themselves in mirrors. However, not unlike his book collection, it was stolen from somebody else. Roudinesco notes that the term comes from a Communist psychologist named Henri Wallon, and that Lacan—ever "quick to erase the original archive”—“always suppressed Wallon’s name.”

Another great Lacan scam was his “variable-length session,” a fancy way to justify bilking his therapy patients out of money. Throughout his life, Lacan slowly decreased the time he spent with each patient; what began as nearly an hour of psychoanalysis later dwindled to only a few minutes, and cost a bundle. And, if you were an aspiring student of Lacan, you too were required to pay to get on his couch.

Lacan enjoyed the stereotypically French “finer” things in life—food, booze, women, and art. He liked extravagant clothing “made in accordance with his instructions: furs, suits in unusual materials, hard collars without flaps or collars twisted and turned up, lavallières of various sizes, made-to-measure shoes in rare skins, gold pieces, ingots,” Roudinesco notes.

Roudinesco also describes Lacan as a “fetishistic” collector who kept detailed lists of all of his possessions. Besides his partially-stolen collection of rare and original books, he also owned various works of fine art, like L’Origine Du Monde, which was craftily covered by Sylvia with a painted panel that Lacan used to like to slide back for his friends—revealing the origin of the world like a teenager reveals their porn stash. “The phallus is in the painting,” Lacan liked to declare.

One of Lacan's students happened to be Felix Guattari, who, with French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, would eventually become famous as of Lacan’s greatest critics. Guattari was originally part of the Lacanian cult, a star student who paid for the privilege of driving Lacan home after his seminar. It was, Lacan argued, a part of the psychoanalysis.

However, when Guattari met with Lacan for dinner and explained his forthcoming book, Anti-Oedipus (a lengthy screed against Freudian and Lacanian thinking), Lacan broke off all contact with Guattari, and started spreading rumors to his friends to ruin his former disciple's career. (He also banned his students from discussing Guattari's book, as a biography of the duo notes.)

A frequent womanizer, Lacan’s friends weren’t immune to his self-centered desires. While his wife assumed she was in a monogamous marriage, Lacan was out philandering with famous French actresses. One of those actresses was Sylvia Bataille, and if the name sounds familiar it’s because she was married to the esteemed writer, and friend of Lacan, Georges Bataille. To Lacan’s credit, the two were separated before Lacan’s “intervention.” Against Lacan’s credit, he concealed the existence of the daughter he fathered with Sylvia to his other children.

"He named his beloved dog Justine, after the eponymous sex slave of the Marquis de Sade book"

Lacan had a twisted sense of humor; he named his beloved dog Justine, after the eponymous sex slave of the Marquis de Sade book. He also famously noted: “There’s a lot psychoanalysis can do, but it’s powerless against stupidity.” And winter sports, for Lacan, were a “kind of concentration camp for affluent old age.”

The idea that philosophers are shitty human beings has been all the rage these last few months. Whether it’s Martin Heidegger’s anti-Semitism or the fact that Žižek accidentally plagiarizes the occasional white supremacist magazine. But all these arguments, whether for or against these academics, assume that we should either wholly endorse, or reject, certain thinkers. And it all assumes an uncritical, unthinking reader who must be told by someone else what is and isn’t “true” and who we can and can’t read.

If the locus of Lacan’s work was “how not to be a dick," this might be a different conversation. That’s why Roudinesco argues that, in spite of everything, Lacan should still be read today.

All too often, great thinkers succumb to the crime of not living up to their own ideas. Maybe it’s better to have an idea to aspire to than a role model to emulate. Because chances are, they’re kind of a dick.

This past summer, we were traveling all around Canada with Mac Demarco, Kevin Drew, Tommy Kruise, and Rich Kidd, to produce our newest series: Tripping Out. We took Mac to Dawson City, Yukon; Kevin to Banff, Alberta; Rich Kidd to Iqaluit, Nunavut; and Tommy to St. John's, Newfoundland. In each episode, our hosts embed themselves in the arts community to meet bands, throat singers, DJs, painters, and anyone else who fits the bill of being awesome and creative in Canada to get a real sense of the local arts scene. At the end of it all, they play a show, and we were there to document the whole journey.

Check out Episode 1, featuring Mac Demarco, airing on October 15th. And thank you to our friends at Arts and Crafts, as well as FACTOR, for making it all happen. 

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. Photo via Flickr user cancilleriadeperu

Peace has long been a goal in Colombia, but until recently, no one had a very good idea of what it might look like.

While negotiations between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the largest and oldest left-wing rebel group in the country, have been ongoing since November 2012, the texts of preliminary agreements on political participation, “illicit crop” production, and rural development were only made available to the public last month.

The policy proposals have been framed as historic, if only in comparison to the retrograde state of current affairs. By guaranteeing political participation rights for the disenfranchised poor, the hope is to encourage democratic (rather than armed) dissent. Incentivizing small farmers to move away from coca production is seen as a more effective way of neutralizing drug funding for the conflict than the current aerial fumigation and manual eradication approach. And bringing much-needed social investment to the war-torn Colombian countryside is considered a necessary precursor to any lasting peace.

All of that sounds good on paper. What remains to be seen is whether Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who has tried to conflate his signature peace talks with an end to Colombia’s armed conflict in general, is more interested in the appearance of progress or a comprehensive approach to the underlying causes of Colombia’s notorious violence.

“Today I can say to the international community that we are closer than ever to achieving that peace,” Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said in remarks to the United Nations General Assembly on September 25, one day after the preliminary proposals’ release. “The process we’ve pushed forward with the FARC guerrillas in Havana these past two years has been serious, realistic, dignified, and effective, and has concrete advances.”

This iteration of talks—the third in the past 30 years—has indeed shown greater promise than previous tries at rapprochement with the guerrillas. Negotiations still have to tackle the issues of reconciliation for victims and transitional justice for demobilized rebels, the two most complicated topics on the agenda. And any overarching accord to emerge from Cuba will have to hold up to a national—and possibly mandatory—referendum vote, along with the wild right-wing fearmongering that would almost certainly precede it.

Still, Santos, re-elected this summer on the strength of a peace platform, has a mandate to see the process through. And the FARC leadership, battered by a long, CIA-aided campaign of covert strikes, doesn’t have sufficient leverage to stop it this time around. Favorability and confidence ratings for the talks have dipped below 50 percent in recent polls, but political and social leaders I spoke to share a sense that the country is on the verge of a historic moment. (Various officials from the right-wing Democratic Center party, the only major political force in Colombia opposed to the talks, did not respond to my requests for comment.)

Opposition senator and longtime human rights activist Ivan Cepeda, one of Santos’s most vocal critics in Congress, heralded the documents’ release as a sign of the peace talks’ “maturity.” Diogeno Orjuela, the international relations director of Colombia’s largest labor union (CUT), and Cesar Pachon, a farmer and prominent spokesman for the national Agrarian Strike protest movement, agreed that removing FARC from the picture would open space for their constituents' needs to be met.

Alberto Yepes, the director of Coordination Colombia-Europe-US, an international human rights network, told me that demobilizing the guerillas would force the country to confront the longstanding neglect and abuse traditionally justified within the context of the conflict. Even Senator Jorge Robledo, one of the few leftist leaders who declined to advocate for Santos during his recent runoff election against Democratic Center candidate Oscar Ivan Zuluaga, was emphatic in the need to “get rid of those guns.”

So there’s plenty of hope invested in the prospect of peace with the FARC. But if the release of the preliminary agreements tells us anything, it’s that the closer the country gets to a peace deal, the more doubts appear.

As Camilo Gonzalez Posso, president of the Institute for the Study of the Development of Peace, told me, much of the material in the agreements is already covered—in theory, at least—by laws that have been in place for at least 20 years. If there hasn’t been sufficient political will to make them a reality yet, why should civilian populations that have suffered as a result believe anything will change now?

More glaringly, the 2005 Justice and Peace Law, which promised demobilization of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the country’s largest paramilitary group at the time, has largely failed to produce much in the way of justice or peace. Those members who did demobilize have been reluctant to give up the politicians, military commanders, and business, landowning, and drug trafficking interests that supported Colombia’s devastating legacy of state-sponsored right-wing terrorism. Those who exploited or avoided the process altogether instead integrated into the national crime syndicates, or bacrim, that now control Colombia’s drug, prostitution, extortion, and illegal mining trades.

Would a left-wing guerrilla demobilization be any more effective? What happens once demobilized paramilitaries are released from prison starting this year? And what’s to stop disenchanted rebels from joining up with the bacrim or the National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombia’s second-largest leftist insurgency, whose repeated requests for a peace process of its own have so far yet to materialize into talks?

What could peace with the FARC possibly do to curb the rising power of these international criminal networks, and the prominent role they continue to play in Colombia’s human rights crisis? More to the point, in the absence of a global shift away from a disastrous supply-side drug war, does taking down any individual group really make a difference?

If the government doesn’t “fill the vacuum of rule of law and state presence, somebody will,” Adam Isacson, the senior Colombia expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, told me. But the Santos government, presented with similar opportunities to assert itself, has proved either unwilling or unable to implement systematic solutions to Colombia’s longstanding inequalities and injustices.

Santos’s victims restitution law, a legal reparations framework for Colombia’s 5.7 million internally displaced people, has been mired in bureaucratic stagnation and the continued non-compliance and active hostility of the original victimizers. The military is still killing people with impunity. Government efforts to intervene in devastated bacrim hotspots like the Pacific port city of Buenaventura and Choco, the Afro-indigenous department to its northwest, have barely scratched the surface. September was the worst month for death threats against human rights workers in years and the government just announced its special at-risk protection unit, tainted by a series of recent corruption scandals, is no longer financially viable.

After 50 years of an internecine civil war that has claimed over 200,000 lives, victimized millions more, and saddled Colombian society with one of the great lingering human rights burdens of our time, a peace deal with the FARC now seems a question of when rather than if. What that will actually mean for Colombia's depleted underclass is still unclear.

Steven Cohen is a freelance journalist based out of Colombia and former editor of Colombia Reports.

More than a thousand Kurdish demonstrators rallied in London last night as their countrymen and -women in Kobane battled with Islamic State (IS) forces. The town on the border of Syria and Turkey has been the site of clashes between the Kurds and the jihadists for weeks, and only now has the West intervened by bombing IS troops.

Marching from Dalston to Seven Sisters, the protesters expressed their fury at the world powers they feel have done so little to address the threat IS poses to the Kurdish people.

A man holds the Kurdish flag

“We have been neglected by the entire international community,” Aysegul Erdogan, a human rights activist who helped organize the rally told me as the march set off down Dalston Lane. “At first, when the anti-IS coalition was created, we Kurdish people were happy. We wanted them to keep an eye out for Rojava, in north Syria. Now we feel that yet again the Kurdish people have been left to be massacred.”

Most of the anger of those protesting was directed at Turkey, which has left its tanks immobile on the border and fired tear gas at Turkish Kurds protesting against IS attacks.

But their anger was also directed at America, Europe, and other members of the anti-IS coalition that only weeks earlier came to the aid of the Kurdish-speaking Yazidis in Iraq.

“We want to know why the international community will support northern Iraq but keep quiet about our home in Rojava,” said Kamaran, a 40-year-old originally from Sulaymaniyah in South Kurdistan. “We need to know why.”

“Nobody cares about Kurdish people,” added a young Turkish Kurd studying architecture in London who didn’t want to be named. “If this was other people, the world would have a different approach. But we’re talking about Kurdish people, and that means nobody gives a damn.”

The protestors were from different parts of Kurdistan but some, like Birsel Doyraz, a 35-year-old mother with two kids, came from Kobane itself. “One of my brothers has already passed away during the current battle,” she told me through a translator. “Another is still fighting alongside three of my cousins. All of my family are still there; none have been evacuated. Everyone is scared of death, but they will stay and fight to the end."

Birsel was one of 30 Kurdish activists that have been on a hunger strike outside the UK Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street over the past few days to implore the British government to arm the Kurdish resistance and help stop the genocide everyone is fearing.

“We decided to do the hunger strike so they can hear our voice,” she said, a bright Kurdish flag wrapped around her. “And we will carry on doing these hunger strikes even if it takes months. I will do my best until the world hears my voice and does something about it. But at the moment everyone is silent.”

Yesterday’s rally and the hunger strike were two of many actions the local Kurdish community has organized over the past few days. Earlier that morning, a number of activists occupied the Terminal 2 building at Heathrow airport. The day before, a short occupation took place at Oxford Circus station forcing British transport police to temporarily close it.

Similar actions have taken place across Europe. In Turkey, violence has flared between the government and thousands of Kurdish protesters, testing the fragile peace talks that had been developing since 2012. In Brussels, activists forced their way into the European Parliament to put pressure on the EU.

What activists are demanding is support for the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish militia group that has been fighting against IS with inferior resources but astonishing courage.

The YPG has been in control of Kobane and the whole of the autonomous Rojava region since 2012. They are considered by many to be the military wing of Syria’s main Kurdish group, the Democratic Union Party (PYD)—a group Turkey, America, and Europe consider to be terrorists because of its affiliation to the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

This is not how most of the demonstrators in London see things, though. Many waved the group’s yellow, red, and green flag while chanting, “We are YPG, YPG is us.” Others held posters with the face of Abdullah Ocala, the jailed leader of the PKK, whose face has become a symbol of Kurdish oppression. Kawah Milani a 50-year-old IT worker from Eastern Kurdistan told me he is horrified at Turkey’s refusal to help the YPG.

“Right now they are the main force fighting the Islamic terrorists and yet they are the ones called terrorists,” he said, taking a brief break from the megaphone he was using. “It’s related to Turkey’s long term plan and policy in the region. They want to defeat Rojava, an autonomous self-determined area in Western Kurdistan. That’s why the West doesn’t help the YPG resist in Kobane. It’s incredibly dangerous. There are thousands of people left in the city, woman and children included. We all know what their fate will be.”

Follow Philip Kleinfeld on Twitter.

A sign at the entrance to NYC's most notorious prison. Photo via Flickr user Matt Green

Rikers Island is the latest flashpoint in the debate over immigration in the United States. Inside the notorious New York detention center's US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office, 3,000 people were held on “detainer” last year; the city is legally required to hold any criminal suspect believed to have entered the country illegally in custody for two days before handing them over to federal authorities for further investigation and possible deportation. Since 2008, nearly 369,000 New Yorkers have been told to take a hike.

Now ICE officials are about to join them.

Legislation introduced in the City Council on Tuesday would have NYC cease honoring detainer requests made by the federal government, effectually forcing the ICE office on Riker’s Island to close up shop. The city would join 200 jurisdictions across the country—including LA, San Diego, Newark, and Chicago—that refuse to work with the Feds to imprison those believed to be illegal immigrants.

By doing so, New York could help compensate for the complete abandonment of the issue by Congress, according to Camille Mackler, the director of legal initiatives at the New York Immigrant Coalition. This is especially important in the context of a midterm election year in which Republicans hostile to illegal immigrants are expected to make gains.

“Using the criminal system to funnel individuals into removal proceedings often leads to deportation and permanent exile from one’s friends, family, and life in the United States regardless of the nature—or indeed the guilt—of the underlying offense,” Mackler told me. “In other words, the punishment does not fit the crime.”

That funneling began in 2008 with a post-9/11 initiative known as Secure Communities, which allowed ICE and other federal authorities to access local and statewide databases of fingerprints and hone in on those believed to belong to illegal immigrants. In New York City, any person arrested must be fingerprinted, no matter their country of origin. So in a city known for welcoming outsiders, this has provided a bevy of enforcement prospects for the US government.

But now the feds have to maneuver around city and state rules, as nearly 40 counties in New York have said they won't routinely jail suspected undocumented immigrants. However, the NYC bill will likely include two exceptions: one for subjects who are known to have committed a “violent or serious crime,” and another for those who have been issued a warrant by a federal judge. ICE insists these are top priority cases.

“ICE will continue to work cooperatively with law enforcement partners throughout New York as the agency seeks to enforce its priorities through the identification and removal of convicted criminals and other public safety threats,” Luis Martinez, an agency spokesman, told the Wall Street Journal.

But even  if ICE officials are stressing public safety as their main concern, the linchpin of our failed immigration policy for decades has been time. Immigrants are often stuck in the clogged pipelines of the bureaucracy for weeks, if not months. Some visa applicants wait years to receive a green card, and the current crisis at the border has thousands of migrant children being held in towns along the Rio Grande waiting for their fates to be decided.

On Riker’s Island, the situation is no different. If the recent New Yorker account of teenager Kalief Browder being held behind bars for years after allegedly stealing a backpack told us anything, it's that this is a place where people tend to slip through the cracks. For those detained on suspicion of illegal entry into the country, incarceration time can extend far longer than the letter of the law would have you believe.

Jordan Wells, a lawyer for the New York Civil Liberties Union, recounted one instance to me where he represented a man who was on held on detainer for two months in Rikers. Then he was held by federal authorities in immigrant detainment for seven months before finally being released. The offense: a subway turnstile jump.

In this strange concoction of federal rules and the “broken windows” policy, Wells said the US government classifies illegal immigration as a serious offense, which means people can be kept in cells for crimes that would “otherwise be a slap on the wrist in New York City criminal court.” In some jurisdictions, the NYCLU lawyer added, judges often set high bail on detainer subjects, providing yet another hurdle to due process.

Wells argues that the ICE policy has been an infringement upon Fourth Amendment rights for some time. After all, you’re not supposed to be arbitrarily incarcerated or thrown behind bars based on a hunch.

“ICE has tried to give local law enforcement officers the impression that it has the authority to instruct them to make immigration arrests on its behalf, and to do so even absent any judicial determination of probable cause,” Wells told me. “But now that places like New York City have become wise to the legal infirmity of ICE’s detainer regime, ICE is going to have to conform its enforcement practices to comply with the Constitution.”   

The bill, which is the brainchild of City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, is expected to pass easily and be signed into law by Mayor Bill de Blasio. Almost as important, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton has indicated he's on board with its goals. 

Mark-Viverito has also passed a bill to provide municipal IDs to the city’s 9 million residents in an effort to provide immigrants stuck in limbo with access to cultural institutions and services available to most New Yorkers.

More and more, NYC is becoming a place that can make sane immigration policy happen. It's a welcome contrast with the dysfunction we’ve grown used to down in Washington, DC.

John Surico is a Queens-based freelance journalist. His reporting can be found in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Village Voice, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter.

On October 3, 2013, over 360 migrants drowned in the Mediterranean Sea after their boat capsized near the island of Lampedusa. The geographical proximity of Lampedusa to the north coast of Africa has caused it to become one of Europe's gateways for migrants, who each week arrive in Italy by sea in droves.

The majority of the migrants are fleeing war in Syria and Eritrea's repressive regime in search of a better life. But unscrupulous traffickers and unsafe vessels often lead to many not surviving the journey. And under current European immigration laws, those who succeed in reaching Italian shores often end up stuck there.

In the first half of 2014, over 63,000 migrants arrived at Italy's shores. Of those attempting to make the deadly journey to Europe, over 3,000 migrants have drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean, according to the International Organization for Migration. Following the October 2013 tragedy, and amid pressure from the international community, Italy vowed to put some measures in place to help control the problem, and save lives.

VICE News headed to Lampedusa one year after the disaster to find out how Italy's soon to be defunct sea rescue mission, Mare-Nostrum, along with regulations such as the Dublin Treaty, are affecting the influx of migrants.

“It’s never been done before. Ever,” the Los Angeles-based rapper SIYA tells me over the phone. “The video, the song, my whole career... It’s never been done on a mainstream level in the industry."

SIYA is a lesbian rapper who, in her latest video, “Real MVP,” serenades her number one girl.

It starts with a Rolls Royce pulling up to a house in the hills. SIYA casually leans against it wearing a gray vest over a white button-down shirt. Pink pants lend a hint of rich WASPiness to the scene. She’s got the butch, low-femme look going on. SIYA opens the door and out comes a slim, round-in-all-the-right-places video girl—high-femme. SIYA leads her into the mansion singing, “You know it’s all yours.” She cracks open a bottle of white wine and they play with each other’s fingers. “You deserve some trophies,” SIYA says. They cuddle by a pool and SIYA tells her lover everything she deserves: that MVP, that crib in the hills, and that ring. Then they’re on a basketball court recreating a scene from Love & Basketball.

It’s mostly your typical rap video, which makes the whole brand new hip-hop lesbian thing seem comfortably familiar. It just so happens that one of the stars is replaced by a girl and that it premiered on prime time TV during Oxygen’s Sisterhood of Hip-Hop, a reality show about female rappers in which SIYA stars.

Who knew Oxygen would be hip-hop’s most progressive look?

On the lesbian rap circuit there’s been Kelow, Elektrik, Envy, MC Angel, RoxXxan, Yo Majesty, and God-des & She—but you’ve probably never heard of them. At least not like you’ve heard of Le1f, Mykki Blanco, and Cakes Da Killa. God-des & She were once on the L Word, but that’s about as far into the mainstream as they’ve teetered. There was that “Cocaine” video by the Internet, which featured Odd Future's Syd tha Kyd getting fucked up at a carnival with her female lover. However, the Internet is a more alternative, R&B-leaning brand of hip-hop, where there’s been a history of acceptance, like Me’Shell Ndegeocello, who has been out for her entire career. Within the realm of rap and rappers, Syd mostly acts as a producer, remaining behind the boards. 

The “[insert popular female rapper] is a lesbian” rumor mill runs deep—from Queen Latifah to Missy Elliott to Alicia Keys and beyond—but an actual black lesbian rapper speaking as a black lesbian rapper is nearly unheard of. Definitely not as a "Rapper to Watch" on Complex, like SIYA was in 2012. Definitely not as a rapper with a Chris Brown feature, like SIYA has on her forthcoming mixtape. Definitely not one TANK, the former preacher and R&B singer, would sign.     

Queen Pen is generally thought of as the first lesbian rapper. Her 1997 song “Girlfriend,” off her debut album My Melody, had Golden Era hip-hoppers caught between shock and disgust. “If that was your girlfriend, it wasn’t last night,” she raps. “Pull you out your closet, sex on the weekends. It’s my business what I do, him or her, he or she, inside you.” It incited beef when Foxy Brown responded slinging homophobic slurs in “10% Dis." Before there was World Star Hip-Hop to react, it made the New York Times, “This song is buggin’ everyone out right now,” she told the newspaper. “[If] you got Ellen, you got k.d. [Lang], why shouldn’t urban lesbians go to a girl club and hear their own thing?”

In Queen Pen’s music, she seemed out and proud. But she was coy about her sexuality in interviews. “Even if I sat here and said, 'I'm straight,' I could be lying. If I said, 'I'm gay,' it could be a publicity stunt," she told the New York Times. Then, in 2001, she released Conversations with Queen, where she rapped about her unwillingness to lick pussy and her crush on then-Minnesota Vikings quarterback Duante Culpepper.

What might have been the first lesbian rap song wasn’t written by an out-to-the-world, self-proclaimed lesbian.

Since then, the closest we’ve come to a mainstream, openly lesbian rapper is probably Angel Haze. She talks about her fluid sexuality in interviews while posting a barrage of Twitter love notes and make-out Instagram pics with her current lover, Ireland Baldwin. But when it comes to the music, “No, I wouldn’t do that,” Haze told the Independent when asked if she would ever rap about being gay." I like to make all my work ambiguous so that people can relate to it…There are no key words, no pronouns.” Haze leaves a stark split between her real life and her art, leaving the voice of the black lesbian rapper absent from public consciousness once again.

Enter SIYA.

“It took time for me to come around,” says SIYA. “I’ll never allow anyone to change me, change my music, change anything about me. If I ever did, then I’d be a fraud.”

SIYA is the closest to the mainstream that we’ve gotten. The black lesbian rapper has a voice, and, much like Drake, she’s rapping about trophies. 

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From the pages of The Watchtower magazine: Jehovah's flock spared following the war of Armageddon. 

The end is nigh, and it's going to be just as fiery and painful a scene as you'd expect from the total annihilation of an entire planet. But have you heard the good news? After all the death, destruction, and downed internet connections, exactly 144,000 faithful Christians will shoot up to heaven, while anyone else who died faithful to God will be resurrected into an earthly paradise where everything is perfect and nobody starts wars over religion or gives someone shit about a particular haircut.

This, in a very small nutshell, is what Jehovah’s Witnesses believe. I know because I was curious about the smartly-dressed people handing out magazines at the Oxford Circus metro station in London, and asked them what they were doing.

"It’s all Bible-based,” I was told by a nice lady dressed in gray. Yet the two magazines I’m given—The Watchtower and Awake!—are a curious mixture of stress-coping strategies, advice on reducing diabetes risks, and some weird, Jehovah-specific theology about Satan’s bad angels causing “the dramatic increase in wickedness and violence since 1914."

Full-time volunteers Deep Singh (left) and Bruce Young (right) witnessing at Oxford Circus

Deep Singh and Bruce Young—two volunteer coordinators of the London magazine drive—are happy to go for a coffee to explain some more. Singh, who grew up a Sikh, became a Jehovah’s Witness at the age of 17 after being contacted by door-to-door Witnesses in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. “For me, it was a process of reasoning, rather than any kind of sudden vision,” he says.

Singh and Young get out their iPad and show me the online sign-up system. Around 1,700 volunteers sign up for shifts at 23 central London locations—mostly metro stations. The “metropolitan public Witnessing program” is now a key part of the proselytizing work Jehovah’s Witnesses are expected to do, along with the traditional door-to-door ministry the group is known for.

“It’s very flexible around people’s jobs,” says Singh. “Some might do one four-hour shift a week; some want to give some time every day, around part-time jobs. We both do this full-time because this is the life course we’ve chosen.”

So how do they get by, financially? “Well, we have a modest cost of living bursary for the things we need,” Singh explains. “And housing costs and bills are covered. We’re like charity volunteer workers, in effect. Something like a new suit—we might get the cost of that donated to us by a Witness friend.”

And what about the stress-reduction stuff in the magazines? Is that a PR ruse? A way of slipping into a culture where the daily anxieties of work, life, and love are literally killing us? 

“How to cope with life—these are the questions we are often asked, rather than about Armageddon," says Singh. "The last days, as we call it, it’s very important, of course... but it’s not easy to start a conversation that way. God is a god of love, not of fear. Our motive is to help people love God, not to think, Oh no, the end is coming.”

“We’re not trying to talk doom and gloom,” adds Young.

"The scriptures do point out a timeline to us, and where we are in the stream of time shows us we are near the end,” Singh explains. “But that is good news for us, because we know it’s an end of evil. And Jesus emphasized that as many people need to know the good news of the kingdom as possible.”

The British Jehovah's Witnesses' headquarters in London's Mill Hill

Soon, I'm making arrangements to visit the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ British headquarters in Mill Hill, a green and sleepy suburb on the outskirts of north London. I know I've arrived in roughly the right place when I see a bunch of friendly men in gray suits nodding and smiling as I walk past them.

Around 800 people work in Mill Hill. Many of them also live in the area, sleeping in austere apartment buildings owned by the British branch of “Bethel," a Hebrew term meaning “House of God."

Rick Fenton from the Office of Public Information shows me around the large factory on the premises, where 94,000 magazines are printed every hour. On a good day, they'll cram one million copies into 24 hours (The Watchtower has a global run of 46 million copies a month, making it the most widely circulated magazine in the world).

The printing and packing factory

I ask about the more casually dressed workmen lifting crates and packing vans. They are all Jehovah’s Witnesses. Everyone here is a Jehovah’s Witness.

“Nobody gets a salary—everyone is here on a voluntary basis,” Fenton explains. “They’re here because they want to be here. Everyone is motivated. And as volunteers giving ourselves to the work full-time, board and lodgings, and expenses are all provided.”

How much does each person get in living expenses? “That’s a personal matter, but it’s safe to say it’s a small amount. Most of our needs are cared for, so not a lot of money is needed.”

The dining hall, where breakfast, lunch and dinner is served for Bethelites

In the huge dining room it becomes clear how all-consuming life as a Bethelite must be. When the flock gathers here each morning for breakfast, announcements and short lectures begin on the TV screens above the tables.   

Even outside of the Bethel hardcore, the demands placed upon ordinary Jehovah’s Witnesses are still pretty hefty. The more devoted members of each local congregation—“regular pioneers”—give 70 hours a month to ministry work.

I begin to wonder why any of it could possibly feel worthwhile. The vast majority of Oxford Circus shoppers have no interest in the Book of Revelation. The vast majority of doors will be slammed in Witnesses’ faces. Can’t they just keep God’s master plan to themselves?

“We’re not trying to push it down people’s throats—it doesn’t work that way,” says Fenton. “But we want to make sure they’re given the opportunity to know. The clue is in the name—we feel we are Witnesses for Jehovah, and a Witness tells others what he knows to be true.”

Some classic covers from both Awake! and The Watchtower magazines

But isn't all the Armageddon stuff a little offputting? In my experience, telling a stranger, "Your entire family is going to die!" probably won't make them warm to you.

“If you think of what Jesus said—that his followers should preach the good news—then we’re talking about the end of crime, disease, war, and the beginning of something else: God’s Kingdom, the kind of life we all want,” says Fenton. “So yes, the end of the world as we know it is coming, but not the end of the Earth, and we’re excited about that. Because God is going to replace the way the troubled world is now with the way he wants it to be.”

A long history of failed predictions about Christ’s 1,000-year reign on Earth aside, there are further oddities which leave most mainstream Christians wanting very little to do with Jehovah’s Witnesses. For example, esotericisms like the aversion to blood transfusion—something explained in a pamphlet as “those who respect life as a gift from the Creator do not try to sustain life by taking in blood."

And then there's the elaborate, hard-to-unravel system of “disfellowshipping," and the shunning of members who both cease to believe and break the Bible’s moral code in some identifiable way. “Individuals are free to leave as they wish,” Fenton says. “They are not disfellowshipped or shunned simply because they no longer wish to be one, or associate with, Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

It’s all very strange to me, and I can't say my trip to the beating heart of the British Witness community has changed any of my views. But, I suppose, as long as they're not actively hurting anybody, who am I to stop them from being consistently ignored by people in the street?

So I leave the Mill Hill building without saying a word, just as another truck full of crisp magazines heads out into the fallen, disbelieving world. The men in gray suits smile and nod goodbye.

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Photo by Zack Jones via Flickr

Jumping straight to raising a teenager is like skipping straight to the sixth season of LOST: You miss out on all the fun and wonder of the early years and dive right into a hormonal melodrama that has no idea where it’s going.

Last March I had my first parenting experience. A family situation sent my fiancé’s 14-year-old brother, Kevin, from the West Coast to come live with us in Cincinnati for four months. There we were, a yuppie twentysomething couple, handed a child who had to be enrolled in high school in the middle of the year.

And it wasn’t easy. For a time it looked as if the only way Kevin could attend school was if he enrolled as a “homeless youth” squatting in our house. To even get the legal authority to put him in school, my fiancé had to file for emergency custody at the juvenile court downtown, which she was denied on the grounds that Kevin was not in “imminent threat of physical harm” and that, since he was only going to be with us for a short time, jurisdiction actually belonged to Oregon, his home state. But since Oregon laws are much more lenient than those in Ohio, we were finally able to enroll him with a simple power of attorney form. 

We exhaled a collective sigh of relief—which turned out to be very premature. As temporary parents, we wanted to make sure Kevin went to a good school. Luckily for us, we lived within walking distance of an acclaimed high school. But after reaching out to the staff there, we were informed that the school was “at capacity,” and thus couldn’t take another student in the seventh grade.

In most of the country’s school districts, this wouldn’t be a problem: Schools are never full. Attendence is based on geographic proximity, and even if a neighborhood is so dense that every class has 40 students, so be it—everyone gets to go to the closest school. In these districts, the success of the program usually provides a socio-economic snapshot of the surrounding area. In fact, a 2011 study in the American Sociological Review determined that growing up in an impoverished neighborhood significantly reduces the chances a child will graduate from high school at all, and that “the longer a child lives in that kind of neighborhood, the more harmful the impact.” So how do you prevent an academically challenged school in a poor neighborhood from becoming a factory for failure?

Republicans, including several likely 2016 presidential contenders, have been aggressively championing school choice reforms as the small-government answer to providing kids from poor neighborhoods with higher quality education. The game plan calls for establishing more charter schools, distributing scholarships and vouchers to assist needy families with private school tuition, and essentially implementing a system in which local students have options to take control of their education and avoid going to troubled nearby schools.

“Rich families already have school choice: They can afford to live in expensive neighborhoods or to send kids to private school. Poor families don’t have those options, so they are stuck with the school assigned to them. It’s a one-size-fits-all approach based on a student’s geography,” says Jason Bedrick, a policy analyst for the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “School Choice empowers parents to send kids to the school that works best for them, whether that’s a school with a specialization such as technology or the arts, or a school with a higher graduation rate. It’s a passport out of poverty.”

In January, Republican senators Tim Scott of South Carolina and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee unveiled legislation that would allow states to use $24 billion in federal state education funds to expand school choice options. At the state level, similar proposals have cropped up nationwide; in Louisiana and Wisconsin, Republican governors Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker—both potential 2016 presidential candidates—have been locked in a protracted war with President Obama’s Justice Department over their states’ respective school voucher programs. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, another presidential contender, has also been an especially enthusiastic cheerleader for school choice, speaking at forums and roundtables across the country where he has pushed a slate of education choice reforms designed to broaden his appeal beyond the traditional GOP base.

“Washington has no clue how to fix education,” Paul told an audience at the National Urban League Convention in Cincinnati this summer. “Washington doesn't know whether you're a good teacher or a bad teacher. We should allow innovation to occur at the local level. I propose that we allow school charters, school choice, vouchers, competition. Competition breeds excellence and encourages innovation. And boy, we really need innovation."

But critics argue that school choice is akin to a boat captain jumping ship at the sight of an iceberg rather than just steering around it; in other words,  the proposals avoid the hard work of actually improving failing schools, and instead funnel taxpayer money that are unaccountable to the federal government.

“Innovation in [existing public schools] is what we need,” says Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, which represents nearly 3 million teachers and educators in the US. “Charters were originally supposed to be incubators for innovation. But then venture capitalists saw dollar signs and wanted in. These folks want to transfer money out of school budgets and into their pockets.”

Like most people under 30, I’d never given any of this much thought. That is, until my fiancé and I were unexpectedly thrust into the morass of the US public education system when we found ourselves responsible for a teenager who couldn’t enroll in high school. In Cincinnati, the public school district has implemented a hybrid school choice system, which lets students take control of their education by picking a high school based on interest or career focus regardless of where they live. Since it was first implemented in the early 2000s, the program has been touted as a success credited with a 12 percent improvement on state test scores in the district, and an increase in graduation rates, from about 51 percent in 2000 to nearly 74 percent in 2013.

But the system also has a downside. In Kevin’s case, administrators at the local high school told us that they had no obligation to take him, that they couldn’t make any exceptions. According to the logic of school choice, he could just attend another secondary school that had space. But of the 15 secondary public schools in Cincinnati, nine have graduation rates below the national average (about 80 percent in 2012–2013, according to a the US Department of Education)—statistics that suggest the district’s overall jump in graduation rates over the past decade might be skewed by a few high-performing schools.

We were faced with a choice: Kevin could take the city bus to a school nearly two hours across town, or he could attend the next closest high school with space—one that incidentally has 58 percent graduation rate and an F grade from the Ohio Department of Education. Neither seemed like a particularly good option.

Lots of kids have benefited tremendously from the Cincinnati school choice system. “I don’t know how to say this without sounding like it’s straight out of a rap video,” said Gabriel Gibson, a 16-year-old from Cincinnati’s crime-ridden Price Hill neighborhood who attends Walnut Hills High School, a nationally-ranked college prep school that requires students to pass an entrance exam. “I want to crawl out from the life I came from. I want to do better than my mom, my aunts. I want to influence change in the world." Now a junior, Gibson divides her time between high school and college courses, and has plans to earn a degree in bioengineering.

But while school choice incentivizes talented students to flee failing schools for better ones, it also sets up a catch-22: If good students are always leaving for better schools, it becomes increasingly difficult for schools to improve; and if schools never get better, then good students will continue to leave.

“I’m a huge advocate for neighborhood schools. When a school is local, students are inclined to take better care of it, have more pride and respect,” said Craig Hockenberry, a former Cincinnati public school principal. Now the superintendent of a small school district in southwestern Ohio, he said he has mixed feelings on the school choice program in Cincinnati, where he worked from 2000 until 2013. “When I was growing up I went to our local high school. Businesses, churches, the whole neighborhood would come together to make the school better.” With school choice, he added, “you risk losing that sense of community” because the system drives out young intelligent people from their neighborhoods.

All of which puts kids like Kevin, thrown into less than ideal educational circumstances beyond their control, at a constant disadvantage, exacerbating the very educational and social problems that the reforms were designed to resolve. 

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A Syrian bride makes her way to the Golan Heights, crossing the Israeli-Syrian border in her wedding dress with her fiancé. Photos by Andrea & Magda/ICRC

In the hilltop town of Majdal Shams, Israel, bridegroom Asad Khlone waits for his fiancée. Because she lives in war-torn Syria—Israel’s sworn enemy, now rife with Islamic State terrorists—Khlone must get special permission from the Israeli government to bring her over the country’s threshold. The only son of elderly parents, Khlone feels unable to leave home, and the insurmountable obstacles of crossing a 65-mile border mean the two lovers haven’t seen each other in seven years.

“I’m usually not a patient guy,” says Khlone, a short construction worker with thick, black-framed glasses. From his wallet he takes out a photo of his fiancée—a classic, red-haired beauty. Although no one says it, this woman is clearly worth the wait.

Long-distance marriages between Syrians living in Israel and those still in the motherland are common in the Golan Heights, a mountainous area that belonged to Syria until Israeli forces captured it during the Six-Day War of 1967. The place is sparsely populated by Israeli settlements and leftover land mines, but the border is packed with Arabs who identify as Syrian or “Golanese.” Although the territory has been occupied for almost half a century, some remain hopeful that it will be returned to Syria, and arranged marriages and college sweethearts wedded across the border are seen as a way to maintain the link. (Khlone and his fiancée are in fact first cousins once removed.)

But for the first time since Israel and Syria reached a ceasefire 47 years ago, brides from both countries are crossing a border that is rampant with the activities of war. Mortar shells and gunfire are exchanged just miles from the only crossing, called Quneitra, where brides pass dusty, barbed-wire checkpoints in their white wedding gowns.

Crossings are emotional affairs, as brides must bid goodbye to their family members not knowing when or if they’ll get permission from the Israeli government to go home again.

According to an official at the International Committee of the Red Cross, at least three brides have crossed the border every year since recordkeeping started in 1991—putting the Golan’s Syrian bride population at about 88, though locals say the number is closer to 300. But since the start of the Syrian civil war, three years ago, the number of bridal crossings has gone down by about 60 percent.

As I sit on the terrace of Khlone’s family home, we look out at the border, where mortar shells can be heard exploding on either side at night. Casually, Khlone refers to the hurdle of getting one’s fiancée out of Syria as “an exceptional situation.”

Although crossing the fence has always been difficult—Israel and Syria have intermittently been at war ever since the Golan occupation began—the current immigration procedure has become an emotional hell for grooms and brides alike. As men in the Golan Heights apply to Israeli immigration officials for permission to bring over their brides, fiancées in Syria deal with the ongoing realities of war—water and electricity shortages, inflation rates of more than 50 percent, and the threat of attack. Meanwhile, women already in the Golan Heights feel unable to help their Syrian families. Once the brides cross over, it’s almost impossible to go back. As their husbands did previously, the brides must get permission from the Israeli government to pass through what is essentially a closed border.

Just a few miles down a narrow road that winds between concrete stacks of homes, I meet with Hanan Fkeralden. A 38-year-old woman with blond highlights and a pink T-shirt, Fkeralden crossed the border with seven other brides back in 1998. Since then, both of her parents have passed away in Syria, and her nephew has been kidnapped.

“It’s the worst feeling,” she says from the dry-cleaning store she now runs in Majdal Shams.

Although Fkerladen wasn’t allowed to travel back for her mother’s funeral, she stays in touch with her sister daily with a mobile phone that’s constantly ringing with texts and calls via Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, and Tango.

“I’m deeply in love with my husband, and I knew the consequences before I came here,” she tells me. At seven years old, Fkeralden saw her first bride crossing on TV. Her youthful mind saw it as an adventure, an exciting journey for a young woman. Her mother, in turn, slapped her across the face, saying, “You’re not going anywhere,” Fkeralden recounts, now laughing at the distant memory.

For a few hours, family members are allowed to gather at the UN checkpoint to celebrate.

But for Khlone, it will probably be many years before he can laugh at his current trials. For the past year and eight months, he has dealt with an immigration process that’s caused other star-crossed lovers to divorce or move abroad. He claims to have sent the Israeli immigration authority no fewer than 50 papers detailing his relationship with his fiancée. Last year, he hired someone “with connections” to help him fill out the paperwork—a strategy some grooms are convinced can speed up the process. After a few months, Khlone’s middleman told him that the application was successful and his bride would cross in February. On the Syrian side, she threw a goodbye party for all her friends and family. Khlone made his way to the border, bringing food and dessert for the guests who would assemble at the no-man’s-land between Israel and Syria. Just as he was about to put on his wedding suit, the authorities told him the crossing had not been cleared. The middleman had never sent in the papers. It was all a scam.

“We totally didn’t expect that to happen,” Khlone says. “We get to the last second and then it was all… it didn’t exist.”

As I listen to his story, I can’t help thinking of Diana Ross’s song “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” originally recorded by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell the same year this bastion of Syrian pride became disconnected from its mainland. I play the song for Khlone and translate the lyrics. He’s never heard of Diana Ross, but he immediately identifies with the message.

“It’s so true,” he says. “I mean, that’s reality for me.”

Although Khlone admits he’s a bigger fan of Celine Dion, he says he’ll try to squeeze the song onto his wedding album.

Photo via Flickr user Joakim Formo

On New Year’s Eve, as 2013 became 2014, Syed Muzaffar, a driver in San Francisco for ridesharing company Uber, struck and killed six-year-old Sofia Liu as she and her family were walking across the street. Muzaffar, who had a previous conviction for reckless driving, was arrested and a wrongful death lawsuit was filed against Uber.

In June, Daveea Whitmire, another Uber driver from San Francisco with a criminal record, was charged with punching his passenger after the two got into a dispute. That same month, an Uber driver in the LA area allegedly kidnapped a woman and took her to a hotel in order to sexual assault her. Then there was Reshad Ahmad Chakari, a 32-year-old Uber driver in Washington, DC who was charged with second degree sexual abuse for raping a passenger in July.And just two weeks ago, in Florida, a man was arrested for groping a woman he picked up while working as an Uber driver.

And then, of course, there’s the now famous incident where Patrick Karajah, a 26-year-old Uber driver, struck a passenger with a hammer after a dispute over directions, leaving the victim hospitalized for days and at risk of losing his eye.

Ridesharing giants Uber and Lyft have attracted a lot of media attention for expanding exponentially in cities across America (Uber has an international presence as well) and for getting into fierce price wars with one another, along the way cutting their drivers’ pay and trying to sabotage one other. With such a high profile, it’s no surprise that incidents of drivers (who are not technically employees) committing crimes have made headlines. And drivers for ordinary taxi services certainly commit crimes as well. The question is, could some of these assaults been avoided if ridesharing companies simply did a better job performing background checks?

District attorneys in San Francisco and Los Angeles recently sent letters to Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar alleging that transportation network companies, or TNCs, are a threat to the public and routinely violate California law. Among other things, the DAs accused TNCs of misleading their customers by saying they screen out drivers who have been convicted of criminal offenses.

Though regulations differ from city to city, taxi drivers are generally fingerprinted by public agencies and get their names run through police and FBI databases to ensure they have clean records. Ridesharing companies, however, employ private agencies that conduct checks more cheaply and quicker—resulting, critics say, in drivers who shouldn’t be behind the wheel. 

A Lyft representative told me the company uses the firm Sterling BackCheck, which screens drivers using a social security number trace, a county criminal record check, an enhanced nationwide criminal search, and a Department of Justice sex offender search. Uber didn’t return emails concerning the name of its private firm, but it charges a safe rides fee of $1 for “an industry-leading background check process, regular motor vehicle checks [and] driver safety education,” according to its website.

Dave Sutton, a spokesperson for the Who’s Driving You campaign—an initiative to inform the public about what the group calls “unregulated taxi services”—says that the companies are legally permitted to skimp on background checks because they claim to be platforms for connecting independent drivers and riders.

Emme, a driver who works for both Lyft and Uber and runs the @Rideshare_in_LA Twitter account, says she knows drivers who were deactivated presumably because of dirt that turned up in background checks, but others say it’s very rare.

“I actually don’t know anyone who has ever been denied,” says Harry Campbell, who runs the blog the Rideshare Guy. Neither did other Uber and Lyft drivers I spoke with.

The efficacy of their background check systems is something that the city council in Austin, Texas, will consider as it weighs legalizing ridesharing companies. The city plans to perform an audit on the checks in place at both Lyft and Uber, according to Gordon Derr of the Austin Transportation Department, who said that if the checks are foolproof, the city may implement the cheaper and faster systems for its regular taxi services as well.

Whether or not these checks work is besides the point for those who have been victimized by their rideshare drivers and are trying to figure out who is liable for their pain and suffering.

Roberto Chicas, the victim of the hammer attack, will probably sue both his driver and Uber, but he’ll likely face an uphill battle in getting the company to pay up. Amanda Payton, an attorney at Rasansky Law Firm, says that since drivers are classified as independent contractors, a civil suit against Uber isn’t likely to be successful— and that’s the problem.

“There has to be a way to hold the company responsible for the people it chooses to put behind its vehicles,” says Payton.

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There’s no word for “hangover” in Vietnamese, which is surprising given the country’s culture of binge-drinking. There is, however, a beer club called the Hangover IV. It's basically a giant copyright infringement staffed by uniformed waitresses doling out limitless quantities of beers, with two backlit cartoon posters from the regrettable film (Zach Galifinakis with a monkey, Ken Jeong as the King of Hearts). The walls are pasted with Orwellian slogans extolling the virtues of beer on neon signs and mismatched posters:

“Good people drink good beer.”

“Keep calm and drink beer.”

“You can't buy happiness, but you can buy beer and that's kind of the same thing.”

The Hangover IV opened about a year ago, right around the time that “beer clubs” started flooding into Ho Chi Minh City. “Beer clubs” are the Vietnamese alternative to bars. For generations, men here mostly drank at testosterone-soaked restaurants where girls served warm beer over ice to groups of friends and co-workers who drank in unison—often counting out each drink. “Beer clubs” are different in that they serve huge quantities of beer from chilled plastic towers while ear-splitting music plays in the background.

They also appear designed to make you drink until you puke.

On a recent Friday night at 9 PM, Hangover IV was packed to capacity. A well-endowed female DJ spinning VinaHouse jerked her hips on an elevated platform while a young magician dressed entirely in black pulled a handkerchief from his eye. At least four tables had birthday cakes on them and everyone appeared to be in great spirits—posing for photographs, handing out slices of cake, and inviting strangers to clink glasses and pound a beer.

It’s all fun and games until you get to the bathroom, which has a big plastic sink with a faucet and a wide drain.

When asked about it, Tam, a waitress who'd been working there for ten days, scrunched up her nose: “You mean the lavabo?” A manager came over and confirmed that's what they were calling it—the Vietnamese term for “puke sink,” if you will.

By 11 PM I caught two young men projectile-vomiting into the lavabo. A cartoon sign loomed over them featuring a man with his head on a toilet.

“This is called HANGOVER,” it read.

In a week, I tracked down six similar beer clubs in Saigon—all of which contained puke sinks labeled bồn ói/nôn.

This wasn't always the case. Vietnam went from being one of the poorest countries in the world to a place with binge and purge birthday parties in roughly 20 years. Not everyone's happy about that. In fact, most people here hate the direction Vietnam's drinking culture is headed, but no one knows what to do about it.

On a policy level, official responses to binge consumption come across as pretty tone deaf. At least one public health official admitted that reckless drinking has resulted in a lot of wife beating and motorbike crashes. But legislation has only gone as far as seeking to ban beer sales after 10 PM, on the sidewalks, and to pregnant and breastfeeding women. Those draft laws were pilloried in newspaper editorials and struck down in the National Assembly.

Most recently, some genius floated a new law that seeks to mandate air conditioning in beer halls, which only makes the binge-drinking experience more comfortable. And of course, none of these efforts begin to touch on the national enthusiasm for getting shitty-drunk.

Here’s an example: On August 12, at a karaoke parlor/restaurant in rural Binh Phuoc Province, the Deputy Director of the Department of Foreign Affairs smashed a beer glass over the head of the Deputy Director of the Department of the Interior. As he ran out of the restaurant screaming and bleeding from his head, the Deputy Director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs shouted insults after him.

The fight started when one forgot to clink glasses with the other. It was noon on a Tuesday. They had just completed an official training. Both men later apologized. They were drunk.

That story's not typical per se (it made national news). But it also happened a year after the Deputy Prime Minister asked officials in the provinces to start enforcing a 2012 ban on drinking during working hours.

“Getting out of your turn to drink can be very, very difficult compared to being in Australia,” said Lukas Parker, an assistant Professor of Marketing who has been conducting covert research for the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's campus here. “That pressure to kick up is very strong,” he said.

And it's getting worse. Parker has been studying consumer behavior in beer clubs like the Hangover IV. The evil (or brilliant) thing about these new clubs, he said, is that they eliminate people's ability to keep track of what they drink.

At the Hangover IV, as in many of Vietnam’s other beer clubs, pretty beer girls and waitresses rush toward you when you enter trying to get you to buy whatever brand is printed on their cocktail dress. Once you order, they keep coming around to refill your glass.

To be fair, Vietnamese people drink about half as much beer as Americans do, though the gap narrows significantly every year. They are now the top beer drinkers per capita in Southeast Asia, and when they drink, they usually drink until they throw up.

A retired construction project manager from Hanoi told me he began seeing puke sinks roughly ten years ago in drinking restaurants in the Mekong Delta where they were called hò—the word rowers grunt to keep time and the sound people make when they puke.

The double-meaning is not a coincidence. Just as the rower must pull his oar, so must each down his glass in time.

“Just thank god you don't have to do official business here,” he said.

That said, the mention of puke sinks brought an Irish friend who spent two decades in Hanoi back to the “Army Bia Hơi”—so named because it sold cheap drafts next to the Museum of the Army. Before closing a few years ago, he said, the place catered to “comb-overs” looking to get annihilated. As such, every other bathroom stall contained nothing but a chin-high sink.

“Whenever you went in there, you'd just find puke plastered everywhere but the sinks,” he said with a touch of whimsy. “It was the kind of place that always smelled like beer, vomit, dog meat, and purple shrimp paste... but it was fun.”

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All photos by Rachel June

When legendary San Francisco drag queen Vinsantos Defonte first came to New Orleans five years ago, she was taken aback by the town's lack of drag performers and clubs. There wasn’t an outlet for more diverse forms of drag, or “alt queens,” as Defonte called them, and she couldn’t find a single "faux queen"—a biological woman dressing as a drag.

More importantly though, Defonte realized there wasn’t a gateway for young or inexperienced performers to learn the tricks of the trade. She quickly got to work, starting what might be considered the world’s first all-encompassing school for aspiring drag queens and kings. The three-month program, which is now in its third cycle, is an intensive crash course into the world of drag. Some students spend upwards of 20 hours a week perfecting their performances and mastering the many layers involved in the craft—everything from selecting and styling wigs to finding the correct size of fake breasts.

Defonte also brought in "adjunct professors," such as professional hair stylist and body padding experts instructed the students on various techniques. Raja, who won the third season of of RuPaul’s Drag Race, once gave a special guest lecture.

Upon completion of the grueling semester, there is but one final test for the students: a real drag show, in front of a sold-out audience. At the most recent graduation event, there were even scouts from local theaters and bars who are looking for potential full-time performers. 

Standing onstage in a bright blue sequined dress, as a small fan created a windblown effect in her hair, Defonte—whose drag persona is a bit of a mix between Harley Quinn and Phyllis Diller—introduced the performers. 

“Tonight, you’re going to see all kinds of the different sides of the world of drag,” Defonte said. “You’re gonna see a lot of boys as girls, girls as stuff, and some shit that I don’t even know what to call it. But it’s all drag, and I fucking love all of it.” 

Note: The pronouns used throughout correspond with the gender identities of the drag characters, which are not necessarily the same as the gender identities of the performers themselves.

Drop Dead Darling

The first performer I met was Drop Dead Darling, who looked like she came straight out of a David Lynch film. She told me that she had never performed onstage before in her entire life and that this was a “big, kind of everything moment.” 

Before meeting Defonte and joining the school, Darling was on a leave of absence from medical school, mostly for health reasons. “I had to have knee surgery done and another surgery after that... and I’m having another surgery again in two weeks,” she said. “It’s kind of been a bit of a tune up.” 

She had even considered dropping out of the drag school at one point. “I was in a really rough spot. I had backed out of the program halfway through," she said. "And Defonte sent me an email asking if I was sure and, at that point, I was the most depressed I had ever been. But she made me reconsider, so I decided just to continue on with it. It sounds cheesy and cliché, but I think the school helped." She described the experience as a "transformative process."

"I really did not expect to learn the things I did about myself and gained some of the personal qualities that I did through it," she said. “It’s just kind of changed the way that I’m going to proceed with my life, even if I don’t necessarily make drag a career.“

Glamdromeda Strange

Glamdromeda Strange was one of two biological females and the only faux queen to complete the course, though she doesn’t feel the particular men in the class gained any insights into the experiences of the opposite gender. 

“Obviously it’s not the easiest thing to walk in heels if you’ve never done it before, but I feel like that stuff is trivial in a lot of ways," she said. "As a female, you have a lot of stuff that you deal with on a daily basis—like how women have to deal with being catcalled, and a lot of [men], especially straight men, can’t understand why that’s a problem.”

She quickly added: “But I’m pretty sure all of the guys in my class were gay, or at least bisexual. There weren’t any straight guys in this group, so they have a whole different set of things they deal with, as far as gender and sexuality—and the things they face on a daily basis. I feel like I was trying to learn as much as I could about that experience as they would have been about becoming a woman.” 

Dasani C. Waters

Dasani C. Waters was one of the only students with actual drag experience. In her teens and early twenties she became friends with a group of drag queens in Northwest Arkansas and began performing with them. “It was just something that was fun and entertaining, but I never thought about it as being something that was a career—until now,” Dasani said. 

After a successful audition last week, she's now performing part-time at a local drag club. “The club said I could work them into my schedule—around my other job, that is.” 

HanniBelle Spector

Next up was HanniBelle Spector, adorned in a bright pink pearl necklace and giant blonde wing. When asked if any of her family members were in the audience, she told me, “They didn’t really know about the graduation. If they found out about it—it would just be another one of those things.” 

I asked her to elaborate. “I’m sure they would have a lot of questions, like if I wanted to be a woman, things like that. I think that they would have to warm up to it. I’ve encountered some resistance from them before. They’re a little more ignorant about what all goes in to it.” 

Eileen Dover (right)

Eileen Dover had never performed onstage in any capacity before. “On the first day of class, as we all sat around the table and introduced ourselves and a gave a little background about ourselves, I found that a lot of the class had, at least, some sort of background in theater—even if it had been in a school play or something," she said. 

“I had never been in anything before though. The whole artistic arc was brand new for me, definitely terrifying.” 

LiberRaunchy

LiberRaunchy, the second biological female graduate, knew she wanted to enroll from the moment she learned about the class. “There was just so much variety, and it’s something I’ve wanted to do for so long," she sad, "but there really hasn’t been much room for other types of gender representation in the drag world.” 

The character “comes from a Louis XIV, or Louis XV, kind of pompous androgyny style... It’s not drag queen and it’s not drag king. I think a lot of times when people see androgyny, people think more of, like, David Bowie. They think of a man, who has more mannish qualities, and a sprinkling of female qualities... Through this character, I’m trying to imagine androgyny from an almost pre-pubescent quality, like if gender was to be played with by someone who has no gender or by a child who is pre-gender.”

Through the class, LiberRaunchy was also able to come to terms with some gender issues that had perplexed him throughout his life. “Growing up, I used to do a form of drag before I knew what drag was. I would dress as a boy and do things to try and erase or hide my gender. And I used to think, Maybe I’m supposed to be a boy, but as I’ve gotten older I think it’s something beyond gender. I’m not really a boy or a girl. I feel something closer to pre- or post-gender somehow.”

To clarify all that, he told a story:

“When I was a kid I was in a sand castle contest at summer camp. And I decorated my sand castle with the most beautiful thing that I found on the beach, which were these dried silvery fish. When the other girls saw my sand castle, they were like, ‘Gross. That’s covered in dead fish.’ It hadn’t occurred to me that I had made this thing covered in dead fish. I thought I made it beautiful.

“And even though I knew they were making fun of me, I didn’t care. I felt like the workshop would be an experience like that. I’m gonna get onstage and do something weird. Maybe no one will get it and they’ll think, Gross—a pile of dead fish. Or maybe people will see my perspective and think there’s something beautiful there, even if there is something weird or grotesque about it."

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