The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. India and Pakistan clash in Kashmir, a St. Louis police officer shoots and kills 18-year-old; a source says Kim Jong Un still in control, and Deadly suicide bombs strike Yemen. 

All photos by author

Bella Mia’s has one of the biggest bedrooms I’ve seen in New York City. When I visited her this summer, toys were scattered around carpet, awards and photos from her modeling and pageant career lined the walls, a closet was stuffed with a decadent amount of hats, jewelry, and designer clothes. As I was soaking in my surroundings, Bella Mia situated herself on her bed, coming to rest between one pillow decorated with a portrait of herself and another that read “little princess.”

Bella Mia is a dog. A Maltese therapy dog, to be more specific. While I was admittedly slightly jealous that a dog had a closet and I, a grown-ass-woman, did not, having covered various dog events in the past I was not particularly surprised to find out that Bella Mia had her own room. She and her owner Rose Bolasny are part of a clique of New York’s “celebripups,” a group of dogs who flaunt freshly polished manicures, hats, necklaces, and sunglasses, among other accessories on a daily basis. These dogs walk in fashion shows, have boyfriends, participate in beauty pageants, wear custom-made designer gowns, and attend charity events.

Bella Mia is even part of this scene’s version of the Girl Scouts, the PupScouts.

Back in 2011, Susan Godwin, an actress and dog owner based in New York, was browsing through her friend Lela Hadick's online store, Whimsy Collection, in search of clothes for her dog Tasha. While sifting through items such as the Dog Wedding Dress Set and the Boys Rock Harness Vest, Godwin came across a Girl Scout outfit. She wanted to buy it for Tasha, but of course couldn’t in good conscience throw her dog in such a getup unless Tasha was in a troop.

So the PupScouts were born. Godwin built the group by recruiting new members at doggie birthday parties, which are a normal thing in her circle. She met others at places like Bloomingdales (where some dog owners get their pets photographed with Santa) or Halloween costume parties around the city.

The PupScouts also grew thanks to DPFamily, a private pre-Facebook internet community where dog owners could exchange photos, advice, and tips on upcoming dog events. Once a year, the site hosted an annual meetup in Washington, DC, and Godwin saw the event as the perfect place to hold the first PupScout meeting.

It was an instant hit, a safe haven from the competitive nature of pageants and fashion shows this crowd was familiar with. Troop 4, based in New York City, became the flagship troop; today there 100 members in nine troops worldwide; the newest, “Wigglebutt Warriors Troop 1017,” is a cocker spaniel–only group based in Pennsylvania. The PupScouts have gone Christmas caroling at retirement homes, donated money and supplies to local animal shelters, and were awarded the Golden Mutt Award during the Strut Your Mutt walk in 2013 for raising the highest amount of money for the Best Friends Animal Society.

On a September night in Madison Square Park, I found myself seated in a circle with nearly 15 dogs at my very first PupScout meeting. Passersby gawked, squealed, and take photos of the dogs parading in their uniforms—the owners and dogs, presumably accustomed to the attention, acted as if nothing were happening.

On my honor. I will try to do my duty, to help the dog community, and my country, to help make humans smile, and to be there to guard and protect, especially those at home.

That is the pledge that kicks off every PupScout meeting. Then they went into the first item on the agenda for the night: PupScout cookies. These are treats from Spoil Me Rotten Bakery and Little L’s to benefit animal-related charities and pay various administrative costs. The dogs taste-tested the products and played with one another while the owners discussed upcoming events, badges, and PupScout meetings. Then they launched into their closing song, to the tune of “Taps”:

Day is done gone the sun
from the lake , from the hill, from the sky.
All is well, safely rest. Dog is nigh.

A few weeks later I joined the PupScouts as Gia Marie, a Pomeranian, earns her leadership badge. Her task? To cross the Brooklyn Bridge and educate her fellow PupScouts about its history. Victoria, Gia's owner, clung to her dog as she read aloud the story of how the bridge was built while the other PupScouts listen attentively; everyone does, in fact, learn something they didn’t know about the landmark. Before we can actually get on the bridge, of course, bystanders hound the PupScouts for photos. This happens pretty much wherever they go.

On the bridge, I walked with Rose Bolasny and Bella Mia. To Bolasny, Bella Mia is the daughter she never had, and raising it as a child (she also has two grown sons) simply made sense. Other people may have qualms about having dogs who have social calendars and closets full of clothes—the dogs certainly are spoiled—but this lifestyle is all the canines have ever known, and it certainly doesn’t seem like they dislike the attention. Soon we’re in Brooklyn and ends over pizza, beers, and dog treats.

Amy Lombard is an NYC-based photographer. Follow her on Twitter.

Images courtesy of OR Books

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, before pornography went mainstream with Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door, men jacked off to girlie mags that had a macabre edge even Hugh Hefner wouldn't touch. Alongside soft-core pictorials of buxom women, these rags published infamous filmmaker Ed Wood’s short fiction—stories that touched on fetishism, horror, the sex trade, transvestitism, Westerns, and pulp crime.

Despite being awarded a Gold Turkey that named him the “Worst Director of All Time,” Wood’s hapless, eccentric career excites film buffs and artistic misfits alike, largely in part to Johnny Depp and Tim Burton, who immortalized Wood in the 1994 film that bears his name. Like Wood’s films, his stories are sordid in a maudlin American way. For 40 years, these prose pieces have been out of print, but this month OR Books will publish Blood Splatters Quickly, a collection of the cult director’s short fiction, which was authenticated by Bob Blackburn, a trusted associate of Kathy Wood, Ed’s widow.

Wood started writing these stories in the late 60s, after he met Bernie Bloom, the then general manager of the Golden State News, an adult magazine that ran sexual, psychedelic poetry and stories next to raunchy photos of women in various states of undress. Bloom had tremendous respect for Wood as a writer, saying in Rudolph Grey’s 1992 book, Ed Wood: Nightmare of Ecstasy, that Wood could “write better drunk than most writers could sober.”

The writer eventually followed Bloom to Pendulum Publishing, a house that churned out underground sex tabloids like Horror Sex Tales, Flesh & Fantasy, and Young Beavers, but the two had a turbulent relationship. Throughout their professional relationship, Bloom repeatedly hired and fired Wood, who was notorious for arriving at work with a thermos full of vodka and leaving the workplace smashed. He fired him for good in 1974, but 40 years later, the stories Bloom published still resonate.

Always on the outside looking in—into the lives of friends Bela Lugosi and Mae West, the world of studio executives, the haze emanating from the hills of Hollywood that shunned and humiliated him—Wood lived as an uninvited guest, scraping away a drunken existence making B-movies like Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), Glen or Glenda (1953), Jail Bait (1954), and Bride of the Monster (1955). Still, he remained a vulnerable writer at his core.

He wrote these stories a decade after his films had tanked at the box office and after many of his friends and co-writers went on to find success with major studios. His former roommate, Alex Gordon, achieved Hollywood accolades as a creator of American International Pictures, a horror and action studio that was making films with Vincent Price and Shelley Winters. Wood, on the other hand, had turned to writing for Bloom’s skin rags in order to make rent in a series of apartments he and his wife Kathy lived in as boozed-up nomads.

Blood Splatters Quickly preserves their blurred gender lines, occult themes, and convergence of sex and gore. Throughout the collection, clandestine meetings set the stage for different types of encounters, some with warlocks, some with werewolves, some with apparitions, and yet others with ordinary people who lead secret lives. In “Dracula Revisited,” which takes place in Transylvania, Wood makes readers wonder what will go down in “a cobweb-strewn, dust, filth littered, rat infested ballroom where the bats flashed from the darker corners to attack any moving object which had disturbed their silent solitude.”

The stories also, of course, feature kinky sex and blood galore, but beneath the tawdry goo of sexploitation exists a deep yearning for remembrance similar to Wood’s performance in Glen or Glenda, Wood’s 1953 movie about a man torn over whether or not to tell his fiancé that he likes to dress up in women’s clothes.

The title story, “Blood Splatters Quickly,” tells the tale of Ronnie, a grief-stricken brother seeking to avenge the murder of his twin sister Sheila, who Wood characterizes as a harlot. Ronnie visits her room where “her things were still laid out on the bed where she had left them that night, the last night of her life… her panties, brassiere, pantyhose, and the two-piece pink, wool-knit pantsuit. Her high-heeled pink shoes were on the floor beside the bed.” Convinced that Shelia’s lover murdered her, Ronnie dons Shelia’s clothing, applies her makeup and a wig from her collection, and transforms into a dead woman with one thing on her mind: revenge. Reading the story, I imagined Michael Caine as Dr. Robert Elliott in Brian De Palma’s classic erotic thriller Dressed to Kill (1980), but, then again, Wood was a man ahead of his time, willing to expose with candor and vulnerability, what Hollywood was too afraid to touch. As far back as the 1950s, crossdressing comprised a vital part of Wood’s identity. He played a “half-man–half-woman” in a traveling carnival after his military discharge in 1946, and people allegedly knew him as “Shirley” in parts of Los Angeles.

Wood’s odd fetish for angora wool turns up again and again in the collection. In “Sex Star,” a married couple wants to star in a porno to break the monotony of the thrice-weekly bedroom routine—behind each other’s backs, but for the same adult film studio. While the wife, Linda, mostly does straight porn, the husband has sex on camera as a transvestite and borrows Linda’s angora sweater. Like her husband, Linda worships the fabric: In one scene, she describes how the “angora cardigan felt luxurious traveling up the lengths of her arms.” During “Come In”—a story about a young couple (Danny and Shirley) and their attempt to cure Danny’s erectile dysfunction—Shirley “remove[s] all her clothing… then slip[s] into the pink nightie which did nothing to hide the luscious shape beneath.”

Wood’s fiction would stand out even without his personal quirks and reputation. In one scene in “Scream Your Bloody Head Off,” a tongue "rivers its way down,” suggesting a coy double entendre. Further on in the story, Wood describes the “terrifying utterances that gaping mouth made, ”joining the cries of orgasm and the throes of death—a theme that suits the pair of sociopathic lovers in this gory sex story. 

Whatever the personal reasons for Wood’s preoccupations, cross-dressing makes for a powerful conceit in this collection that couldn’t be more relevant today. Years before Facebook and Instagram, Wood captured how we cultivate our identities through artifice. Amidst our self-important hashtag-ed world, it’s easy to be an agent who’s fallen for one’s own cover story. Getting at what lies beneath is murky business, and usually an endeavor for introspective oddballs, who need a little angora to soften the edges. 

In the first half of 2014, more than 63,000 migrants ventured to Italy by sea from North Africa. Due to current European Union immigration laws, those who successfully reach Italy—about 3,000 have drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean—often end up stuck there.

If their asylum claims are accepted, the first stop for African migrants is often the cash-strapped Calabria region in the south of Italy. Residency permits can be subject to interminable delays, leaving migrants stuck in limbo. Unable to provide for themselves and without official documentation, their best option is irregular agricultural labor, which exposes them to financial exploitation. The situation became so dire in 2010 that the small agricultural town of Rosarno in Calabria saw some of the worst race riots in Italy's history.

VICE News traveled to Rosarno alongside busloads of newly arrived—and heavily guarded—migrants. Tensions in the town were still running high, with migrants living in Third World conditions despite being in an EU member state.

It’s 1 AM on a Saturday and I’m sober. I definitely don’t want to be, but I am. Sobriety at this hour is completely alien to me, as bizarre as the idea of being drunk at 8 AM, which is something, I shit you not, I’ve never done—despite the fact that everyone and my mother now sees me as the world’s largest lush.

I’m sober tonight because I wasn’t last night. Last night, I was shitfaced. My excuse? It was someone else’s birthday. A cavalcade of pals at the party I attended complimented me on the piece I recently wrote about my drinking problem, raising their glasses to meet mine. I accepted their kind words with the only grace I could muster in my highly altered, bleary-eyed state. I drank enough to brag about my junior high wrestling career. (I received a bronze medal for placing third in the state, but only because two other girls were in my weight class.) I drank more than enough.

I woke up at 3 PM today, ruined for the world, just like old times. I allowed myself to get fucked up because I did so in the context of a social gathering—my new rule is to never drink alone. But when surrounded by other warm-blooded mammals, I have permission to knock down a can (or eight) of shitty American macrobrew. Telling myself I can’t drink alone only means I stay up as late as humanly possible, imbibing in the presence of others. My new rule, as rules go, is fairly useless.

After an afternoon spent staring into the void and gathering my bearings, I performed comedy tonight and—wait for it—didn’t drink while doing so. It wasn’t that I wasn’t around alcohol. There was bourbon, my favorite, backstage. I chose, however, to ignore it, in spite of the fact that every fiber of my being screamed for it. It was free, for fuck’s sake! What was I, crazy? I couldn’t tell if my performance, normally “enhanced” by hooch, became sharper or more neutered without it. Realistically, it was better. Cogency, after all, makes communication easier.

Afterward, I went to another birthday party, located in a slightly la-di-da bar in Hollywood. Nursing my club soda, I patted myself on the back for not spending $8 on a cocktail. The smug satisfaction I took in saving money, though, was the only pleasure I experienced. With a blood alcohol content of .00, I found myself at a conversational loss. Eight dollars is small price to pay for social comfort. I left early.

Since I’ve cut down on my drinking—all eight fucking days, or however long it’s been—my hydration level has increased substantially. I now chug water with the same aplomb I formerly reserved for bourbon. I mean, you’ve gotta drink something, right? My bladder is heavy. I slosh when I walk. It’s becoming a problem.

Photo by Jamie "Lee Curtis" Taete

I used to drink in order to fall asleep—my ex bequeathed me some pot to try instead. It doesn’t work. After smoking, I stay up late doing the same stupid things I did when I was drunk (watching Veruca Salt videos and episodes of MTV's True Life while chain-smoking cigarettes). I wake up groggy, just like I did when I drank. How the fuck do people function smoking that shit all the time? I know asking that question makes me a mediocre Californian, but still.

Sleeping is, indeed, an issue. But it’s always been an issue. I fall asleep, wake up, fall asleep, wake up, stay up. The ceaseless drone of my white noise machine echoes the ceaseless drone of the thoughts, fears, regrets, and to-do lists that keep me awake. When my mind isn’t altered, they’re even louder. Goody.

Exercise. Meditate. That’s what my friend Merrill told me to do to in order to squash the demons within that lead me to demon alcohol. She even gave me a mantra to repeat. It’s similar to hers, but not hers, because in order to obtain a mantra of one’s own, one must go to the Transcendental Meditation Center and pay some sort of shaman a hefty fee. I don’t make shaman money. The mantra she gave me is just a combination of two meaningless syllables (and by “meaningless syllables,” I mean “a meaningful word in a more enlightened language”). I decided I needed to create my own—and in English, damnit! I settled on “in, out.” That’s how babies are made, machinery is produced, clocks are punched, and lungs work. It’s the source of all life. In, out. In, out.

I laid on my bed with the covers over my head and repeated my self-appointed mantra. In, out. It’s normal for unrelated thoughts to drift into my mind, Merrill told me, but I needed to ignore them as best I could. I tried my best to stop thinking about who my ex was fucking, and if my mother feels proud of me, and so on and so forth. I made a pretty decent go of it—until my cat started violently attacking me through the covers. He wasn’t a thought, he was a cat. And unlike thoughts, he was impossible to ignore. I gave up, unenlightened.

I actually used the rowing machine I normally smoke cigarettes on to, y’know, row. Thirty-five minutes is what it takes to get enough endorphins, or whatever the fuck, going, Merrill told me, in order to make me feel good. I found the activity unbearably tedious, every moment felt 35 minutes long. I made it halfway to nirvana before giving up.

I asked my friend Karen why she stopped drinking. “The seizures,” she replied. Fair enough. That’s a wonderful reason to quit. I’ve never had a seizure because I drank, but I have watched an entire episode of Last Call With Carson Daly because I was too loaded to change the channel, so, really, who had it worse? (She did. She definitely did.)

People ask me why I decided to cut down. Because the way in which I was living, I tell them, was untenable. To this, I receive many a blank stare. I’ve also received many compliments on how well I seemingly held my liquor, which is like complimenting a heroin addict for hiding her track marks. The fact that I never made a Zelda Fitzgerald–esque show when I got loaded impressed people. (But I did, full disclosure, fall down a staircase once.)

Since I wrote about my drinking problem, I’ve received dozens of Iliad-length emails from people who also struggle with booze. Their problems, by and large, appear to be worse than mine, which makes me feel like a fraud. I’m not a fucking expert. I’m just a lush. I like responding to them, though—they make me feel less alone, in spite of the fact that I’m sitting by myself when I reply.

The piece I wrote wasn’t a cry for help—it was more a statement of fact. It wasn’t me being resigned, either, though my default mode is resignation. It was me giving up on giving up. Forcing myself to try.

Actually trying is as foreign as not being loaded. I hate it. I hate trying. But I’m used to hate. That’s what got me here.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

Milan is often the last stop for migrants trying to get out of Italy and into other parts of Europe. Milan's central station, with its daily trains bound for the other side of the border, is a key strategic gateway out of the country.

European Union immigration law prevents asylum seekers from being able to simply buy a ticket and hop on a train. The Dublin Regulation stipulates that migrants have to stay in the country where they first claimed asylum. As a result, Italy is filling up with migrants who came by boat and don't want to stay there, as the country is notoriously bad at integrating immigrants into society.

VICE News visited a Milan park that has become a temporary home to hundreds of homeless Eritreans, who are awaiting their chance to flee Italy with the help of smugglers. We also met up with a group of 150 migrants staging a public defiance of the Dublin Regulation by attempting to board a train in Milan destined for Switzerland.

Still from the trailer of No No: A Dockumentary

Certain moments in baseball history have transcended the game to become bona fide pop culture memes. Babe Ruth pointing to the outfield wall before smashing a home run in that direction, a little kid asking Shoeless Joe Jackson to say it ain't so, Bobby Thomson hitting the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" to give the Giants the 1951 National League pennant. Then there was the time Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates while tripping on LSD.

If you're not familiar with the story, it must be because you didn't have internet access in 2009, when James Blagden's amazing animated short film Dock Ellis and the LSD No-No exploded across the web, turning what was a quirky footnote in baseball history into a modern-day tall tale known by fans and non-fans alike. 

If you've never seen it, enjoy:

Like with most legends, there's some controversy about how much of it is the unvarnished truth—there's no way to prove that Ellis was actually tripping balls while standing on the pitcher's mound that day as he maintained until his death in 2008. Deadspin tried to sort out the facts from fiction in 2011, noting that none of Ellis's teammates have ever corroborated his story about tripping on acid. But myth or not, Ellis was a fascinating man, and a worthy subject for a new film by Jeffrey Radice, No No: a Dockumentary. Although the pitcher consumed mountains of pills, weed, and cocaine before and during games in his career, Ellis's story is more complex than that of a simple drug-addled athlete.

The film, which played at Sundance earlier this year, tells the story of a man who fought against racism in baseball and worked hard to advocate for the right to free agency, before which players were largely at the mercy of owners who could buy and sell them at will. Ellis, who died in 2008, also turned the Pittsburgh Pirates' dugout into the biggest party in the major leagues.

I met with Radice to talk about why this story has such staying power.

VICE: Why did you want to make a movie about Ellis?
Jeffrey Radice: What brought me to the story of Dock Ellis is if you trace the history of LSD—in the United States at least—it goes back to the CIA and their MKUltra stuff. I had produced a short film about that. The CIA had hookers on the payroll dosing guys, and they were observing them through two-way mirrors. That, to me, is far stranger than any fiction that anyone could make up.

But you also love 1970s baseball, right? Did you want to spread that love?
[Between] baseball and counterculture, if you did a Venn diagram, there’s not a tremendous amount of overlap. [There’s] a little bit of “sticking it to the man,” and it’s also kind of a nod to a bygone era. The war on drugs started in 1970 and LSD was certainly a part of the war on drugs. What I tried to do with the film was use [Ellis] as the third eye, and that game as this kind of blossom to explore. To people in their 20s, the 1970 is [an alien] time and place. So Dock Ellis is kind of this “fuck you to the establishment!” character, and that’s where I was going with it. 

Dock kind of embodies that anti-establishment attitude. People who are kind of drawn to that—the Burning Man kinds of people—it causes them to take a step back and kind of say, “That’s cool! Not what I would have expected [from a baseball player].”

Pitching a no-hitter on acid seems hard. How'd he pull it off?
Dock was tripping for a couple of days. So, he took acid, came down, and took some more, but the more you take, the less of an effect it has. You can prolong your trip, but, it was at the tail end of a multi-day trip, and when he got to the stadium. He also took a lot of speed—which was his drug of choice for pitching—and so that helped him get more set mentally. 

Right. It seems like you would get psyched out by the people watching you.
Dock was able to handle that situation. I think pro athletes become real experts at tuning out the crowd and not paying attention to the roar. Another thing is muscle memory. Dan really talked about that. Especially for pitchers, more than any other position in baseball, it’s about just pounding the ball. You get into a groove. 

Do you think pitching is the only position where tripping doesn't interfere with your ability to play?
If you’re playing right field, you only have maybe one ball that comes to you an inning. Or maybe every two innings. So, there’s a lot of time for your mind to wander. But if you’re a pitcher, it’s like one thing after another and you hit this rhythm. That’s why I think it’s plausible from that perspective.

That's why you don't doubt the story?
At one point in time, I thought a lot of the doubt came from people who had no experience with LSD. It’s very much a mental drug, so I don’t think it’s obvious if someone is under the influence of LSD. It’s all practice and muscle memory at the end of the day. I think hallucinogens, with the right kind of mental focus, allow you to really just get into a groove and rely on your muscle memory. 

No No, a Dockumentary was just released online. You can stream it in several places, including YouTube.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz refuses to let his party stop talking about gay marriage. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

The American religious right has a lot of reasons to feel down these days. Every election year, for more than a decade, conservative Christian activists have come out from their megachurches and Appalachian tent revivals and strip mall Bible studies to wage a culture war battle over the definition of marriage. They’ve spent millions of dollars, diligently called their neighbors and knocked on doors, and on election days they loaded up their church vans to vote against gay marriage. And for a long time, they were winning: Between 1998 and 2012, voters in 30 states have passed constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage, often by overwhelming margins.

Then, last Monday, all of that work was washed away, when the Supreme Court, unceremoniously and without explanation, declined to review lower-court rulings overturning gay marriage bans in five states. The surprise decision, buried in an 81-page list of cases the court rejected, set off a gay rights earthquake: By the end of the week, following the Ninth Circuit court’s decision Tuesday to strike down gay marriage bans in Nevada and Idaho, gay marriage was effectively legal in 35 states.

It seems all but inevitable that the rest of the country will follow. While the Supreme Court could eventually take up the issue, it’s hard to imagine that the justices would turn back now. Politically, too, the issue has faded. According to recent polls, a majority of Americans—including 61 percent of Republicans between the ages of 18 and 29—now support gay marriage. In light of these numbers, most Republicans seem eager to drop the subject, fearing that the issue will have diminishing returns at the ballot box.

Unsurprisingly, religious conservatives don’t see it this way. They plan on fighting this culture war to the bitter end. Evangelical leaders I spoke to last week were already plotting new strategies to stem the tide of gay rights. And while their plans are still vague—most of them seemed to still be getting over the shock—their determination appears to guarantee a fiery debate over marriage and religious liberties as the GOP 2016 presidential primaries ramp up. So with that, here’s a look at what to expect from the Christian Right:

ELECT MORE CHRISTIANS
In the days since Monday’s decision, conservative groups have sprung into action, using the court’s decision to mobilize evangelical voters for the midterm elections and double down on electing Republican candidates who would continue to fight gay marriage. 

“This continues to be an issue that drives voters,” said Ralph Reed, a veteran evangelical strategist who heads the Faith and Freedom Coalition. “We’ve got it on every digital ad, on every voter guide… We’ve visited 137,000 churches in 27 states, and at each one, we’re telling them to care about gay marriage, to look at where the candidates stand on this issue.”

For Republican candidates—including (and perhaps especially) those running for president in 2016—“there will be no avoiding this issue,” he said.

Like most of the conservative leaders I spoke to, Reed is still not sure what kind of legislative or political avenues the Christian right will pursue to get around the federal marriage ruling. But he predicted that the lower court decisions to overturn state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage would spark a backlash among conservatives that would be “the marriage equivalent of the pro-life movement.”

“People voted on this issue—it is state constitutions that are being struck down,” Reed said. “I don’t think there is any way that you can redefine marriage for all 50 states without facing backlash.”

In some ways, this makes sense. In the last decade, the religious right has built up substantial amount of influence in the GOP due in large part to its ability to turn out evangelicals to cast ballots in favor of state ballot initiatives banning gay marriage—efforts that, more often than not, have helped Republicans get elected. Even as public support for gay rights grew, conservatives consistently showed up to vote on the marriage issue.

But the politics of gay rights are not what they were a decade ago, when George W. Bush’s reelection campaign used marriage as a wedge issue to help win in key swing states where constitutional same-sex marriage bans were on the ballot.

“We're done with this issue,” said Republican strategist Rick Wilson. “It doesn’t matter how you feel about the issue— this wasn't just a legal fight, it was a cultural fight and the cultural fight is in the rearview mirror.”

“There are parts of this coalition—people who have basically said they are going to make this part of the 2016 equation—making promises to the electorate that they can’t keep,” he added. “I advise [candidates] to fight on issues where we can win—issues where we don’t alienate enormous numbers of people, and give Democrats an excuse to scare voters.

“Math is a bitch. This issue is going to have diminishing returns going into 2014.”

NULLIFICATION
In a sign of the fundamental divides in the GOP, religious conservatives have actually made the opposite argument, warning that the party will lose elections if it abandons its conservative base by giving up on the marriage fight.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical favorite who seems to be genuinely rattled by the Supreme Court’s gay marriage dodge, laid out the argument in an interview on the American Family Association’s radio show Thursday, threatening to leave the Republican Party if its leaders didn’t start taking a hard line on gay marriage rights.

“I am utterly exasperated with Republicans and the so-called leadership of the Republicans who have abdicated on this issue when, if they continue this direction they guarantee they’re gonna lose every election in the future,” he said.  “Guarantee it.”

Rather than retreat, Huckabee, who ran for president in 2008 and is perennially “considering” a second campaign, has called for conservative governors to simply ignore the court rulings and continue enforcing their state gay marriage bans.

“It is shocking that many elected officials, attorneys, and judges think that a court ruling is the 'final word.' It most certainly is not,” Huckabee said in a statement. He added: “The courts can't make law. They can interpret it and even rule that a law is unconstitutional, but they have no power to create it or enforce it.”

Clearly, disregarding federal court rulings on gay marriage is a recipe for constitutional crisis (although Republicans in South Carolina and Kansas flirted with the idea last week). It’s easy to see this ending with the National Guard officiating mass gay weddings in occupied state rotundas and city halls. But social conservatives are more optimistic: They think that eventually, everyone would just ignore the court’s ruling.

“I think that history will ultimately look at this like the Dred Scott decision,” said Liberty Counsel founder Mat Staver, a leading Christian legal theorist. He was referring to the 1856 Supreme Court ruling that found black people could never be US citizens, which justified slavery in the South and indirectly caused the Civil War. 

Staver said he believes that, as with the Scott case, everyone will eventually disregard the court’s move on gay marriage. “I think this is going to come down to whether people take these decisions seriously,” he said. “If people lose confidence in the courts, the courts lose their power.”

A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT
Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, a Tea Party favorite who’s been very obvious about his 2016 presidential ambitions, has posed a slightly less aggressive strategy. While other GOP members of Congress tried to ignore the gay marriage tumult last week, Cruz issued a scathing statement criticizing the Supreme Court’s move and promising to introduce an amendment to the US Constitution that would prevent the government, including federal courts, from meddling with state marriage laws.

“The Supreme Court’s decision to let rulings by lower court judges stand that redefine marriage is both tragic and indefensible,” he said. “This is judicial activism at its worst. The Constitution entrusts state legislatures, elected by the People, to define marriage consistent with the values and mores of their citizens.”

IMPEACH FEDERAL JUDGES
For evangelical activists, the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage also underscored conservative frustration with judges who overturn laws passed by voters at the state level.

David Lane, a California-based operative who leads the evangelical American Renewal Project, said his group is planning to target judges who have ruled in favor of gay marriage, including those who issued the lower court rulings upheld by the Supreme Court on Monday.

“I want a fight over this,” he said. “I think the way to address it is to start removing these unelectable and unaccountable judges who are doing this to our country. They have no right to rule a free people. What they’re doing, it’s judicial anarchy.”

Lane added that evangelical activists are still figuring out how best to accomplish this—federal judges are appointed for life, and only 15 have ever been impeached—but said he is looking for a member of the House of Representatives to introduce an impeachment bill.

“The way we address this is we start removing unelected and unaccountable judges,” he said. “And then we remove the members of Congress who don’t vote to impeach them.”

FIND ANOTHER BATTLE TO FIGHT
Despite the outrage over the gay marriage rulings, many conservatives have, practically speaking at least, moved on, seizing on religious freedom as the next battleground in the culture wars and directing their energy toward passing legislation that would allow people to refuse services to gay people on religious grounds.

In Wisconsin, which fell under last week’s Supreme Court decision, opponents of gay marriage said that they have focused on warning people that, thanks to the decision, they may soon be forced to arrange bouquets for lesbian brides and bake cakes topped with two tiny grooms.

“The legal options [to fight gay marriage] are at this point exhausted for Wisconsin,” said Julaine Appling, president of Wisconsin Family Action. But, she added, “we've got bakers, we've got florists, we've got wedding venues—people where their individuals consciences are at odds with this quote-unquote ‘new right.’ So we’re working with businesses and churches, informing them that they could find themselves in, shall we say, interesting positions if they are challenged on their institutional beliefs on traditional marriage.”

In any state, churches, synagogues, and other places of worship are obviously free to perform marriages for whomever they choose. But’s it’s still not clear whether other religiously affiliated groups—such as schools, charities, and businesses—will have to accommodate same-sex weddings, particularly in the 29 states where gay people aren’t covered by anti-discrimination laws.

Lawmakers in Arizona and Kansas have already considered pieces of legislation that would let individuals and businesses deny services on religious grounds. Neither bill passed, but conservative activists and legal experts expect that other state legislatures will take up the issue in the wake of the federal court rulings on gay marriage. And they point to the Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby last year, which ruled that for-profit companies have the right to exercise religion, as evidence that, on this issue at least, the justices may come down on their side.

“We are very aware that individual conscience rights and religious freedoms are very much in jeopardy,” said Appling. “We’re going to be very aggressive in taking that message all over the state—to elected officials, to churches, to the citizens—to make sure that we give people the best legal protection for their religious freedoms.”

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Some airplane condensation trails, which conspiracy theorists believe are "chemtrails." Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The chemtrails conspiracy theory has been circulating for a while among the same sorts of people who believe that 9/11 was an inside job and celebrities are being controlled by the CIA. In brief, chemtrail enthusiasts think that those white trails of vapor you see pouring out of planes are actually nasty chemical or biological agents that governments are using to geo-engineer the weather, create a vast electromagnetic super-weapon, control the population, or—well, you get the idea. There's no science or proof whatsoever behind this, but plenty of people are still willing to entertain this vaguely supervillain-esque notion. 

Chris Bovey in Argentina

On October 1, Chris Bovey—a 41-year-old from Devon, England—thought he’d troll the chemtrails camp. During a flight from Buenos Aires to the UK, his plane had to make an emergency landing in Sao Paulo and dumped excess fuel to lighten the load. Since he had a window seat, Chris decided to film all the liquid being sprayed out of the wing next to him.

Touching down, he uploaded the video with a caption that suggested it could be evidence of chemtrails, hoping to mess with a couple of friends who he knew might fall for it. The video now has 1.1 million views, nearly 20,000 shares, and dozens of comments telling viewers to “wake the F up," or accusing naysayers of being “stupid paid shills."

He then claimed (falsely) that he’d been detained at Heathrow upon arrival, been interrogated by the authorities, and had his phone confiscated. That riled everyone up even more, with “conspiraloon” (Chris’s term) website neonnettle.com picking up the story and reporting it as evidence of chemtrails.

The video Chris filmed from his seat

Mick West—editor of anti-conspiracy theory website Metabunk, which published an article explaining why Chris’s video was a hoax—explained the history of the chemtrails theory to me. “It started back in the late 1990s,” he said. “People just noticed contrails—the condensation trails behind planes—for the first time, and got this idea that a normal contrail shouldn’t persist for very long. So if anything lasted for more than a few minutes, it must be something being sprayed.”

While chemtrails advocates might accuse sheeple of believing everything their governments tell them, they themselves tend to believe a lot of the stuff their internet tells them. West thinks its the proliferation of unverified “evidence” online that’s led to this particular conspiracy theory remaining so popular. 

“People share things that look interesting without really looking into them, and they take the word of whoever’s posting it that it’s a real thing,” he said. “I knew from the start that it was some kind of hoax, but people want to have their worldview confirmed, so when they see something that seems to fit their worldview they jump on it.”

In Chris’s case, that involved being invited onto a radio show hosted by Richie Allen, s a friend of David Icke—the man who claims we’re being ruled by a group of lizard overlords disguised as world leaders. On air, Chris admitted that the whole thing was a hoax and got into an argument with the host about the validity of the chemtrails theory.

Since then, Chris has been subject to a stream of “vulgar abuse” from pissed-off conspiracy theorists—which, admittedly, is completely his own fault. I gave him a call to find out how he was doing.

VICE: So I hear you’ve been receiving some pretty bad abuse since you duped these conspiracy theorists?
Chris Bovey: Yeah, I got some really foul messages. I got accused of being a government paid shill—so where’s my paycheck? The worst bit of abuse is on my Facebook page. I left it up there because it’s so insulting that it made the guy look like an idiot. It was about goat fucking and how I was going to get butt-fucked in prison.

Someone else said I was going to hell for breaking the First Commandment. I’m not religious; I don’t know what the First Commandment is. Maybe it’s, “Thou shalt not post fake chemtrail hoaxes.” [Note: it is actually, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."] Other people were saying I’d been leaned on to change my story, saying that it was really a chemtrail molecule dump.

Why do you think people were so quick to believe your video was evidence of chemtrails?
I think people want to believe it, and I think people are so distrusting of the government. It says a lot about our government that people are actually prepared to believe that they would do this. It’s a lack of basic scientific understanding. It doesn’t take much research—if you go onto contrailscience.com, you can quite easily see it explains why they’re formed.

A video claiming that easyJet wouldn't be able to sustain itself were it not being paid off to dump chemicals during flights.

Have people stopped claiming that the video is evidence of chemtrails now that you’ve come out and explained it?
Not at all. There are still people sharing it as we speak, saying “chemtrails” in all sorts of languages—some I don’t even recognize.

I’ve got a good 500 people who sent me friend requests, and I accepted them, but today I deleted them all because they kept on inviting me to "like" various strange pages. I knew these kinds of people existed—that’s why I posted it. But I absolutely didn’t realize how strongly these people believed this. With a few of them, I’ve tried to reason with them by sending evidence to explain why they are wrong, and they generally just called me a shill and blocked me.

How long have you been interested in chemtrails?
I remember seeing them as a little child when I was at primary school on the River Dart, where I grew up in South Devon. On the playground I used to look up in the air and notice that some planes had longer trails and wonder why. Of course, at that point I didn’t realize it was an Illuminati plot.

Why did you admit the video was a hoax and not keep it going?
At the time, I was getting a little bit uncomfortable with it, partly because I didn’t want my sane friends thinking I was an idiot. So it was an ideal opportunity to come clean and also a great opportunity to prank them.

Do you think there’s any evidence to support the chemtrail theory at all?
No, it’s just completely debunked. There’s zero evidence—zilch.

Follow Michael Allen on Twitter.

Illustrations by Amanda S. Lanzone

A long time ago in an economic, educational, and employment climate far, far away, I declared a college major. This was the early 1990s, and although nerds such as myself had already begun heeding the dark call of easy money in Silicon Valley, I chose creative writing. My father, a computer-security expert and corporate lifer, accepted this decision with grace. Confronted with a Jewish son determined to renounce his genetic birthright in private medical practice, he beat his breast but didn’t rend his garments, and he offered a bit of advice: “Would it kill you to take a computer class or two?” For reasons obscure to me now—getting stoned, getting laid—I studied the sestina and villanelle and ignored Java. My bank balance has regretted it ever since.

This past winter I found myself in need of a job, at a moment when some facility with technology (data journalism: boom!) might have helped. After being turned away by one high-profile employer, I mulled the idea of enrolling in a data-science class at a local tech incubator, in hopes of number-crunching myself into the second coming of Nate Silver. The only problem was the cost: $4,000 for an 11-week course. I was reluctant to join my millennial brethren in the student-loan market, which had reached a crisis point. US student debt amounts to more than $1 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve, a usurious fiasco seemingly designed to chain my fellow overeducated and underemployed Americans to our desks and credit scores. Crowdfunding my education didn’t seem quite right, either. Maybe I’ve grown delicate in my dotage, but a Kickstarter campaign to bankroll a 41-year-old’s attempt to learn to use his computer struck me as gauche.

I was almost ready to give up when I stumbled across a tech-world approach to personal finance. Pave and Upstart, two much-ballyhooed online start-ups, had figured out a way to “hack” the traditional loan formula, be it fixed, variable, jumbo, or liar. The “human capital contracts,” as they’re called, offered by these new companies didn’t require the return of the principal plus interest. Instead, borrowers, euphemistically referred to as “talent” and “upstarts,” pledged a portion of their future income—typically between 3 and 10 percent, for as many as ten years—to the backers who came onto the Pave or Upstart platforms to finance them. Basically, it was a Rumpelstiltskin arrangement: You promise a portion of your earnings (almost) forever, and an investor gives you the gold to get started.

Human capital contracts, according to their adherents, represent an end run around the entrenched and often predatory lending structures that had flimflammed so many young people into bankruptcy, one that could only be conceived of by tech companies unimpeded by the baggage and burdens of the past. “The old way of borrowing was predicated on a world in which the job market was stable and everyone had a steady income,” James Surowiecki wrote in the New Yorker. “That world of work is changing.”

Critics of human capital contracts, meanwhile, focus on the ethical dilemma of bartering one’s innate talents for cash. These aren’t loans, goes the logic, but a form of tech-enabled “indentured servitude,” a “suspect” or “dystopian” sleight of hand posing as financial innovation, yet another way for capitalism to dehumanize us all. “We will look at the upsides, the inspirational success stories,” predicted communist journalist Malcolm Harris on Al Jazeera America, “and we will rationalize [it] the same ways people have always rationalized buying and selling each other.”

Human capital contracts began as a footnote buried in economist Milton Friedman’s co-written 1945 book Income from Independent Professional Practice. Friedman, the patron saint of the free market, imagined a world in which individuals could transform themselves into living and breathing equities to be bought and sold like any other financial instrument. “If individuals sold ‘stock’ in themselves,” he wrote, “investors could ‘diversify’ their holdings and balance capital appreciation against capital losses.”

The first full-scale effort to implement human capital contracts, however, didn’t take place until 2001, when MyRichUncle.com, an unfortunately named, and now defunct, company began offering them out of an early tech-world belief that any problem could be solved simply by bringing it online. “We thought we were incredibly original for six weeks,” co-founder Raza Khan told me. “Then we found Friedman’s paper and realized everything old is new again.”

MyRichUncle’s attempt at this form of finance lasted only a couple of years. They were, according to Khan, too far ahead of their time. “No one had built a loan platform for this product,” Khan told me. “We were making logical arguments about how it would perform, but that isn’t as compelling as actual data.”

Pave and Upstart launched their sites in the US within a few months of each other in 2012, viewing themselves as a finance-world response to the crowdfunding and sharing economies. Americans were by then more familiar with online lending, and the scale of the student-loan problem was such that people were receptive to new solutions, even those that ran counter to centuries-old notions of debt. “We thought [human capital contracts] were a better option for a lot of people,” said Pave co-founder Oren Bass, a British banker and lawyer who started out at Goldman Sachs in London. “And it was an opportunity to have a profound socioeconomic effect by giving people access to funding that they’ve never had before.”

Investors and borrowers populated the sites of both companies, which resembled a hybrid of Facebook and your friendly neighborhood loan-origination shop. Prospective borrowers were matched with investors who could peruse their profiles, which featured well-lit photos and share-worthy videos and an outline of what they’d like to do with the money. The projects skewed heavily toward technology-dependent education notions like mine, but not exclusively. Pave, in particular, gravitated toward arts and culture. One Pave borrower I spoke to, an Ivy League–educated filmmaker named Clara Aranovich, raised $50,000 (in exchange for 5 percent of her income) to start a production company. Joshua Brueckner pulled in $7,000 for a novelty-necktie company called Skinnyfatties. (“People send me their ties, and I tailor them.”)

In some ways, the specific use for the money, and the demand for a market-moving return, didn’t really matter: Pave and Upstart had an app for all that. Each site boasted proprietary models for estimating the expected income of various careers, from doctor to lawyer to cinematic auteur (the tie guy may be sui generis). The percentage payment and the expected returns were based on the models, which were underpinned by data from the Census and other demographic sources.

The government also took an interest in human capital contracts. Democrats in Congress introduced “pay-it-forward” legislation, a modified version of human capital contracts that would replace college tuition with a share of each student’s future income, and that money would then be used to finance the next generation of students. Republicans favored the private route with the “Investing in Student Success Act.” Largely modeled on a paper by the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, it aimed to create regulatory exemptions from the tax code for human capital contracts.

Whatever dangers these loans entailed—people “buying and selling each other”—Pave and Upstart did have one inarguably revolutionary quality: They inverted the standard power dynamic of loan finance. Traditional loans are awarded based on the financial track record of the borrower and the returns on similar investments. Credit history becomes less relevant, however, when a loan depends on what you will do. Human capital contracts gamble on the latent potential of the individual—the future of a borrower rather than his or her past—and the majority of the risk is therefore borne by the lender and not the borrower.

One thing human capital contracts don’t change is the potential for lenders to turn a big profit on a little investment. Say, for example, my data-science course blossomed into a six-figure job as an online chart-bloviating soothsayer. If I reached the dizzying heights of the Ezra Klein–osphere, I might end up paying the lender significantly more than the initial $4,000 investment (although both companies cap repayment at about five times the loan). This scenario, in which the return outstrips the input without additional labor, is what the 19th-century writer and political economist Henry George liked to call economic “rent.” Human capital contracts won’t force this country’s usurers to get a job or anything. Nothing could be that radical.

Likewise, what if nothing came of it and I remained a miserable and forlorn writer? With a human capital contract, if I didn’t earn anything, then I would pay nothing back. The lender would lose money, but there would be no ritualized Chapter 13 seppuku, no nuclear detonation of my credit rating. For me, the only risk in failure would be just that: failure. My only debt would be to my father, whom I owe an apology either way.

Then, on May 7, as I was preparing to start using the Pave site, I came across a post on the Upstart company blog that announced it would be “sunsetting” human capital contracts. Within days, Pave followed suit, abandoning the loans in favor of conventional student financing. Cumulus Funding, a small outfit based in Chicago, continues to broker these deals, but only in four states, and largely for older borrowers who need to pay down debt on their credit cards or medical bills. Effectively, and abruptly, human capital contracts were once again no more.

So what happened? Early this summer, I met Pave’s Oren Bass, a slender man in his 30s, dressed casually in tan shorts and a white button-down, at a natural-foods restaurant not far from the company’s offices in lower Manhattan. Over a cranberry juice, he told me that Pave would attempt to continue a small human capital program, directed at low-income students, using a pay-it-forward model. But, he said, chagrin cutting through both his banker’s reserve and the upbeat energy of the tech entrepreneur, “you can’t sustain a business that has had as little growth rate as we’ve had.”

The biggest problem, Bass explained, was the lack of federal regulation over human capital contracts. Congress may be interested in these loans, but as is so often the case, it hadn’t taken any action. Students still pay tuition as they always have, and the Republican and Democratic bills have descended into committee, a legislative morass from which they may never emerge.

“Everyone knows how a loan is treated, how it’s taxed, how it’s enforced,” Bass said. “Everyone knows what happens when you invest in a start-up, or a company. If you invest in the future earnings of an individual, you don’t have the clarity around that.” Pave spent $1.7 million in search of that clarity, consulting with the IRS and the accounting firm Ernst & Young to make sure they worked within the law. But it didn’t matter. “People want to know that what you’re doing is blessed by the consumer regulators,” Bass said.

Another issue had to do with who was allowed to make the investments. By law, only so-called accredited investors could buy into people like me on Pave or Upstart. Accredited investors include large banks or investment firms, pension funds and charities, and individuals with a net worth of $1 million or $200,000 in annual income. That’s a rather high bar, and one that limited the “viral coefficient,” as Bass put it, needed to build online word of mouth. “Look at Kickstarter. It has a huge viral transition because people can tell their friends, ‘Invest in my project. Spend $70 or $80.’ But how many people raising money actually know accredited investors? How many know institutions? It’s very limited.”

Speaking to Bass, I detected none of the “fail fast, fail often” bravado of the tech visionary primed for the next seed round. “It’s always hard when you’re emotionally involved,” he said. “If I could have done this again, I may have done a very simple project first. Get traction, get credibility, and then bring in an innovative product.”

That might have helped. Or maybe not. I tend to be a fatalist when it comes to good things happening with money. Ultimately, dollars flow in directions that can’t always be controlled, even by computer programmers armed with Milton Friedman’s theories and ample venture capital. Pave and Upstart could have provided an intelligent, timely, and humane service, one that placed confidence in the abilities of individuals, which seems to me a safe harbor. But the belief that technology and a smart idea are all that’s needed to solve a problem is a simplistic one, and for now, the trillion-dollar tide of student loans will continue to swell. As for me, I’m still interested in data science, and I should have taken those classes like my father said. Perhaps I will one day. Once I figure out where to get the money.

On Friday, October 10, Edward Snowden appeared in New York's Union Square, though few recognized him at first. You couldn't blame passersby for missing him—the nine-and-a-half-foot-tall, 200-pound sculpture of the world's most famous whistleblower didn't have any distinguising marks; he was just a giant white man made of concrete hanging out in the park. In a moment too serendipitous to make up, the first person to clearly recognize the model of the controversial NSA document leaker was none other than Glenn Greenwald, who happened to be eating breakfast nearby. 

"It was totally random—we didn’t tweet at him or anything," said artist Jim Dessicino, who created the statue and put it in Union Square as part of the Art in Odd Places Festival. I talked to the Delaware-based sculptor and MFA candidate the next day, as he was unloading the sculpture in the Meatpacking District. "I emailed him months ago about the sculpture, and he never got back to me."

Dessicino's work focuses on representations of power, specifically "what it means to make monuments without a commissioning body—to deal with things like traditional monument-making and traditional art, especially in a public space," he said. "Because how often in America do we go out to public space not to purchase anything, but to just be there?" 

On Friday, in another oddly symbolic incident, the artist was approached by an employee of New York's Parks and Recreation Department, who explained that Union Square is a privately-owned space and Dessicino would have to move the sculpture or be fined. So the next day the Snowden statue was re-erected on the corner of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street, where it stood all afternoon without much interference, save one teenager who scribbled the word "TRAITOR" in chalk at the feet of artwork. 

Though some coverage of Dessicino's project has focused on how people haven't recognized Snowden, the artist told me that non-Americans immediately knew who the statue was supposed to be. As I stood with Dessicino and his work, I noticed that non–English speaking tourists all realized what they were seeing, while New Yorkers (especially young people) stopped to take photos, though many couldn't identify the white monolith. When I asked some of them why they were taking photos of someone they didn't recognized, they told me, "He seems important." (One kid said he thought it was a famous tech person, since the Snowden sculpture was facing the massive Apple store a block away.) 

Over the course of the afternoon, I spoke with the Dessicino about why the NSA whistleblower isn't as famous as he should be, and who he'd like to take a photo of next to the statue—besides Glenn Greenwald. 

Glenn Greenwald next to the sculpture in Union Square. Photo via Jeremey Scahill's Twitter.

VICE: At this point, Snowden’s face is pretty iconic, but did you model the sculpture off any photo in particular?
Jim Dessicino: I modeled the sculpture off the original Laura Poitras video. I started making the sculpture last September, and I did the head first in clay. I made that in about three weeks. Her video was the only thing [with his face in it], really. I watched it over and over again, and paused it to make stills.

You didn't use any computer modeling?
No, absolutely not. It was just by looking at it. I went to school at [Philadelphia's] University of the Arts and had two great sculpture teachers. I learned how to just look at people, and recreate them sculpturally.

When you were making his face, in particular, did you try to add any expression to it?
Yeah, I wanted an expression of him being a little unaware, or a little unsure. This is how I felt about what happened. It’s hard to talk about it now, since so much has changed. Snowden has become this very pivotal figure in the issue of surveillance. It’s the big information-age issue, and the issue of my generation. He and I are only a year apart in age. I was just happy that there was someone in my generation—which is always labeled as self-serving and full of themselves—who would sacrifice all his liberties to try and give us information.

So turning him into a statue, an object of idol-worship, is that your commentary on how we should view him?
I wouldn’t say that making a statue of someone makes them an idol. I’m trying to be critical of the whole concept of monumentality. It’s about discourse and a distance between you and what’s made. This can be a democratic activity that can make people pause, bring them together, and discuss things happening right now, in a public space. I thought it was important to try and take something slow and old and traditional that expresses clearly what I’m trying to say and what society could represent through sculptures, a very slow and permanent medium in a world of crazy-fast technological information. I just wanted to give people a chance to slow down and think about the fastest, most invasive, all-encompassing subject of privacy, technology, and surveillance. And here’s the oldest of art forms questioning the guy who’s the questioner.

I saw one article that said you were going to stand watch next to the sculpture to make sure it’s not vandalized. Do you think by the end of the Art in Odd Places Festival you’d be interested in seeing if people deface it without anyone stopping them?
I have to take it to the Delaware Center of Contemporary Art, where it will be in a show for the next three months. I’ve been getting a lot of offers from people in the South and Midwest who want to put him in public parks.

What are you thoughts about the public parks official coming to Union Square and kicking you out? That seems like an almost ironic incident.
A little bit, yeah! We had someone from the park security partnership come by and they were so happy. They took the postcards I was giving out, and said we love this, we love Snowden. Then a cop came by and he was really happy and he took a festival brochure and a postcard. Then this guy from the park service came by and said he really liked sculpture and took a postcard—but he said that unless we had a permit, we had to leave to go or he'd get in trouble with his boss. So I called the festival, and they didn’t have a permit. I was more than willing to leave because I didn’t want to cause this guy any trouble. I said, "Don’t give me a ticket and I won’t give you any trouble."

Why’d you put the Snowden sculpture specifically next to Abe Lincoln in Union Square?
It’s an American conversation, a conversation about liberty. Lincoln knew a lot about liberty. Here you have this young guy, Snowden, talking about civil liberties in a different way and different age, but the conversation is an American conversation—and it’s an old one, as well as an ongoing one. I’m sure people walk by and ignore that Abe Lincoln sculpture all day long. Or they think of Lincoln in a mythological way—as the preserver of the Union and the freer of slaves. By putting the Edward Snowden sculpture there, it hooks Lincoln back up into time and creates a direct link from the past to the present.

What do you think of many Americans not being able to recognize Snowden?
That general sense of apathy—of being disengaged with public life—is something very typical of our time. People aren’t concerned with someone like Snowden—a crusader for civil liberties. It’s none of their concern.

Why don't you think Snowden is a household name?
He is not a household name because he does not have a TV show. To be a household name in the internet age, you need to be in the news constantly and be entertaining. Edward Snowden is like history class—informative, insightful, and important—but he reveals uncomfortable truths that some do not want to hear. He is not entertaining.

For more of Jim Dessicino's work, visit his website here.

Follow Zach Sokol on Twitter.