​I went to an immersive theatre thing once. I was locked into a wheelchair and someone blew a fine mist of gin in my face and lit a match under my nose. There was a video of clowns laughing and burbling in some sort of inhuman language. Wow, I thought. Pointless.

But that's because I didn't have an Oculus Rift strapped to my face. Two Dutch ad-agency creatives—Henrik Leichsenring and Sofia Gillstrom—want to change that, after developing 11:57, ​a four-min​ute horror movie designed exclusively for the future-of-virtual-reality device. And obviously it's a shit-yourself-in-your-desk-chair jumps 'n' screams horror movie.

Here's how you film for the Oculus Rift: You have to build the equivalent of a human head only, with GoPro cameras. Henrik and Sofia strapped six of them to a pole, plunked it in the middle of a catacomb-like room, then realized they were constantly, constantly in the shot. That's just one of the many challenges that come from filming everything at once.

"We couldn't have lighting, you know?" Henrik told me. Instead, they went for spooky, flashing fluorescents, which come with the added benefit of sinking the whole shot into darkness so they can cut and edit. "We actually had to hide behind one the walls you see in the film. As soon as the actors moved in front of the camera we could only guess what they were doing, so we sort of had to direct by ear. Compared to making traditional films that was one of the biggest setbacks with making 360 films."

This isn't the first Oculus movie— ​produ​ction company Condition One released Zero Point last month, although it's more a bunch of panoramic tech demos stitched together with intense interviews about how Oculus Rift is, like, the future of everything—but 11:57 is the first to truly explore making the viewer (you) the protagonist as well. "I do think that the person with Oculus Rift should have an actual role in the film," Sofia said. "Whatever that might be."

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No thanks, faceless screaming lady! (Photo  ​via)

High violin shrieks, ghostly brunettes in white smocks, a man in a suit with hollow cheekbones—OK,  11:57 isn't groundbreaking in terms of content. But it's not really a film in any sense, more a stunt: something to prove what the Oculus is capable of. Because, despite being a $2-billion Facebook toy, the Oculus is still chiefly the domain of the DIY doers and the enthusiasts—it feels like something a time traveller dropped on his way through to punch baby Hitler rather than a bona fide 2014 invention. Too much technology for us quite to fathom right now, like dogs beholding a bike.

But since Facebook bought Oculus VR in March, the main question on people's lips has been: "Yo, how are these nerd goggles worth $2 billion?" While the gaming applications are obvious, it doesn't seem to translate to Farmville or Candy Crush or whatever other Facebook games your aunties and grandmas keep inviting you to play—so perhaps the future of the Oculus is in viewing and experiencing movies or the web. I asked Henrik and Sofia if they think Oculus movies like 11:57 are the future of film—do they ever see a blockbuster being developed for the device?

"No," they said. "No." But Henrik does think there is a niche for major production companies to take advantage of the device. "I think with major blockbuster movies you will see Occulus replace additional featurettes rather than full 90-minute movies. There are still a lot of difficulties with the recording technology to overcome, so actually shooting a picture-length production will be very, very tricky." And they have plenty of ideas: "We could build a world on top of a skyscraper. We could produce a stop-motion film. You can put the viewer in a really weird and strange situation—that's the strength of it." Which sounds like code for "someone is almost certainly already making a weird porno."

But if nothing else, 11:57 does offer a vision of the future—with 3D glasses generally considered a bomb and the concept of 4D confined to those bucking Shrek set-ups at Universal Studios, offering Oculus-friendly movies could be a way for the movie industry to present film—whatever its length—in a new and interesting light. And probably find a way to charge an extra $15 a ticket for the pleasure. Hooray for the future. 

Follow Joel Golby on ​Twitter

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Aldo Simoncini's life is an odd one. You've probably never heard of him before but his career in soccer is a striking example of human endurance.

A computer science student from the University of Cesena, in Italy, Aldo is also the goalkeeper of the San Marino national soccer team, which currently sits "proudly" at ​the bottom of FIFA's rankings along with Bhutan.
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Soccer players from small countries like San Marino rarely compete in professional leagues, and in the context of European soccer they function as the provider of a little pride and points boost for the rest of the continent's soccer-playing nations. For Aldo, though, being born in a country that finds it hard to put a team out because of its small population (32,538) has allowed him to confront the world's best professional players.

A few weeks ago, he played at Wembley for the ​Euro 2016 qualifier against England, and despite the five goals he didn't manage to stop he made a really good impression. We met him a few days before the match in his hometown and asked him to weigh in on the concept of defeat.

Aldo has played 40 games with San Marino, and yet he's never seen seen his team win or draw. They concede an average of 4.33 goals a game (537 in 124 matches to be exact), but they also still hold a record for ​the fastest goal in World Cup Qualifying hist​ory (against England, in a match that ended 7-1).

Even if picking the ball out of the back of the net again and again can be a thankless task, Aldo is a national symbol and he won't leave the team, at least until they win a game. Their last and only victory in 27 years—a historic defeat of Liechtenstein in a friendly match—dates back to April 28, 2004.

We met in front of Palazzo Pubblico in the City of San Marino. The small republic is flooded with Russian tourists in a shopping frenzy, gobbling up furs, perfumes, and handbags.

Aldo is tall and robust. He's innocent in the way college students are sometimes. We take a few pictures and start chatting—I let him explain the story behind his involvement in the national team. It was September 6, 2006 and San Marino was playing against Germany.

"I was 19 years old and it was the first time I was playing after a terrible car accident. I wasn't even sure I'd be able to play ever again. We lost 13-0, but that didn't matter to us."

Being San Marino's goalkeeper is more like target shooting than soccer: Aldo's conceded 120 goals guarding his country's net. How daunting is it to start a match hopelessly defeated? "Let's be honest here, losing by six, seven, eight goals isn't pleasing for anyone. Not even for me. When I notice that the others go four times faster than us, it pisses me off.

"We are aware of the difference between our team and our opponents, but we never take the field to lose. What is crucial is not to let yourself down when you concede the first goal. You have to maintain the nil-nil as long as you can. A beautiful save can cheer you up."

Aldo, now immune to the depression that comes with defeat, is able to value the positive side of things: "A professional player wouldn't be able to tolerate a series of similar defeats—he would surely collapse. I live it all like it's a dream, and I put all my effort into it: For me it's a privilege, and all the matches I've played have been a great life experience for me."

Aldo is a normal guy in extraordinary circumstances. He's come into contact with a world that doesn't belong to him. "I've never had a chance in the soccer teams that truly count," he said, "and although I play against people like Van Persie and Rooney, I've never been signed to teams that play in professional leagues. If this is not a paradox, I don't know what is."

When looking at other goalkeepers, he said, he often asks himself, "What would my life be if I'd been luckier, if I were given the chance to get involved at very high levels?" He told us this while playing nervously with a plastic water bottle left on the table.

What are some of the difficulties involved in playing against the world's top teams?

"Unfortunately, I don't believe that the referees take us seriously," he said. "They whistle just as if the result was a formality, and it's really irritating." Sometimes opponents fail to show what he feels is the proper respect. "My teammates told me that the Ukrainian national team mocked them, cheering for their 8-0 victory. It's humiliating, especially because they only do it to us because we are the weakest ones. I didn't even understand the 13 goals that Germany put past us—it is one thing to honor the commitment, it is another thing to punish us like that."

Those events are exceptions, fortunately. "The approach of other national teams is different. One of them is England: They are real gentlemen and they made us feel like we were on the same level." Aldo proudly showed off a picture with English keeper Joe Hart. "I also used it as my Facebook profile picture," he said.

And the same goes for Zlatan Ibrahimovic. During a game against Sweden, "One of my teammates asked him to avoid pounding us because we were playing poorly. He said, 'Don't you dare see it that way, just focus on giving it your best shot.' We lost 5-0, but at the end of the match Zlatan came over to congratulate me."
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Aldo Simoncini and Joe Hart. Photo courtesy of Aldo Simoncini

In San Marino, far away from the 90,000 people you get at Wembley, things can be really different. "We have a few fans that follow us, and when we play at home they come to support us.

"It is certainly not comparable to the great European nations, and 90 percent of our stadium is occupied by the other team's supporters. When I play for my club, Libertas, there are rarely more than a hundred fans. In the final playoffs a maximum of 250 to 300 people show up."

Aldo Simoncini is a man who can, in the same sentence, recall a match against Prandelli's Italy (where he swapped his shirt with Gianluigi Buffon) and a match against an ordinary Sunday Football league team, played the week after.

In Europe, it comes quite naturally to empathize with a team that faces every game knowing the outcome of the match. "Sometimes, after the game, the supporters chant 'San Marino! San Marino!' and they want to take pictures with us or get our autographs as if we were real celebrities. I even sent my jersey to a kid from Greece. Nobody pays us to play: We do it patriotically and Europe understands this."

Still, his career grants him a few benefits. "Once during an exam I was recognized by my professor," he said. "I hadn't studied at all, and he still gave me a mark of 24/30. Let's say I was very lucky." His schoolwork has collided with his soccer in other odd ways: "On 9 September, 2013, I was supposed to go to Lviv to play against Ukraine [the match ended 9-0], but I stayed home to study algebra and geometry. I know that it's hard to imagine a goalkeeper of a European national team ditching a match just to prepare for an exam. But I passed with a good grade."

In other words, he has learned how to handle the whole thing. All he can do now is try and enjoy it. "I know I'm privileged," he said. "I know many goalkeepers in the Premier League would wish to be in my position."

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"And how do they see you in San Marino?" we asked, assuming that, at least in his hometown, he's known a bit of glory. 

"Half of the people of San Marino can't wait for another heavy defeat. We don't give up and we always try to give our best performance in order to shut up the critics," he replied.  "In Sarajevo we were almost part of a historic qualification. In Bulgaria, local supporters surprised us by giving us their scarves. And just a few weeks before they had almost set their stadium on fire!"

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​Photo ​via Flickr user​ 36937478.

​​Despite nearly a year of protests and outcry, Canada's new anti-sex work law, Bill C-36, passed its third reading in the Senate on Tuesday, and only awaits royal assent to become law. Unfortunately these laws will create unsafe conditions​ for sex workers across the country. And according to experts I've spoken with, indigenous women and those who have been trafficked will face the most risk. Before I go there, though, a bit of background on what C-36 constitutes, and how we got to this point:

As of today, it is illegal to purchase sexual services, and to communicate for the purposes of those services. If youth could be expected to be in the vicinity, it is illegal to sell sexual services. It is illegal to advertise sexual services, and managerial relationships are illegal, too (read: "pimps" and "madams" will not be allowed to operate).

This law is what the government imagines to be an appropriate response to last year's strikedown of Canada's sex work laws. In December 2013, after a challenge by Terri-Jean Bedford, Valerie Scott, and Amy Lebovitch, the Supreme Court rul​ed that the laws surrounding living on the avails of sex work, operating a brothel, and communicating for the purposes of sex work were unconstitutional. It was a 9-0 decision. Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote at t​he time:

"Parliament has the power to regulate against nuisances, but not at the cost of the health, safety and lives of prostitutes... it is not a crime in Canada to sell sex for money."

Government had one year to create and implement new laws, and as December approaches, this is where they're choosing to go: in a direction that promotes violence against s​ex workers.

The old laws, sex workers told me nearly a year ago, were racist, class​ist, and sexist. Now, we're jumping right back into the same territory. According to those in the industry, these laws will actually cause more harm to trafficked individuals, rather than less, as the government claims. They will disproportionately affect indigenous women, making life more dangerous for them. And they will make the sale of sexual services illegal, despite the government's careful politicking.

Here's how:

Let's start with the issue of legality. Naomi Sayers is a law student at the University of Ottawa, and a former sex worker. She's been closely following the progression of Bill C-36 on her blog Kw​e Today.

"[The bill is close to] outright criminalization," she says. "You can't work indoors, you can't work outdoors. You can't communicate, you can't advertise. These are key parts of operating a business... This says a lot about how conservatives view women."

And because youth can reasonably be expected to be just about anywhere, there will be much wider grounds to arrest sex workers.

Laura Dilley is the executive director of PAC​E society, a sex worker led support organization in Vancouver's Downtown EastSide. The government claims only clients will be charged, but Dilley says sex workers will face issues with the law as well.

"Now, [sex workers] A) can't make a living, and B) if they do try to make a living, their clients are going to be really paranoid, really scared about getting caught by the police. So sex workers are going to have to go into darker alleys, make more provisions for these clients."

That might include measures like having sex in dark industrial areas, where there's no one around to look out for them. And that will be unsafe because sex workers won't have a chance to adequately screen clients. They'll be too rushed, trying to quickly conduct business in public without getting caught. They'll also have to live in fear of being "excessively monitored," Dilley points out. Police often know who is doing sex work, and they can simply follow those people around until a client shows up.

The new laws will make life harder for sex workers, especially street-based sex workers. And in street-based sex work, there is an overrepresentation of indigenous women, just like there's an overrepresentation of indigenous w​omen in jail in this country. One of John Lowman's studies from the late '90s suggests that up ​to 70 percent of Vancouver's street-based workers on the Downtown East Side were indigenous. In another 2005 study, it was found that 52 percent of​ the women working in Vancouver's lowest-paying tracks were young indigenous women.

Sayers is an indigenous woman herself, and she explains that under this law, as with the old, indigenous women will be more likely to be charged and arrested. This holds especially true because of the "communication for the purposes" clause, which most often pertains to street-based workers soliciting clients in public.

"Everyone is guilty of that offence," Sayers says. "This increases the opportunity for policing in public spaces, and we know police over-police indigenous women in public spaces."

"They're always around to arrest [sex workers,] yet they're never there to protect them from the violence."

Because it's now illegal to buy sexual services, those who are trafficked will also be in much greater danger, according to Dilley. She says "99 percent" of all clients are good people who are simply purchasing a service, and now, if they notice a provider looks underage or appears to be trafficked, they won't be able to report to police for fear of being persecuted. And because of added legal risks on sex workers themselves, they too will be largely unable to report to police if someone in their agency appears to be in trouble.

If the government had bothered to pay attention over the past year, it would see that evidence points to decriminalization as the better option, both for sex workers and society as a whole. No fewer than 306 acade​mics have sent an ope​n letter to the government warning of the bill's dangers. British medical journal The Lancet published a pi​ece this summer stressing that decriminalization of sex work leads to decreased rates of HIV transmission. Canadians voted in a government-issued poll, and we said selling sex should not be​ illegal. And sex workers prot​ested across the country, asserting their right to police their own bodies.

Sex workers have been fighting the controversial principles of the bill, before C-36 was even written. They've shared their experiences with government, letting them know there's a stark difference between those who are trafficked, and those who choose to do sex work. But there was no meaningful consultation with sex workers in the development of these laws. The few times they were invited to speak to government in an official capacity, they were infanti​lized, ignored, or escort​ed from the room by security.

One of many problems in the construction of this law is the fact that government conflates sex workers with victims of human trafficking, refusing to make any distinction. The government claims the bill's aim is to protect victims of human trafficking. But it also admits an intention to end prostitution, and tars all sex working people as trafficking victims. In a country that already has stringent human trafficking laws in place, there is no need for a law such as this to exist.

I ask Dilley what sex workers can do to organize and protect one another now that the dreaded C-36 is close to being law. She says efforts to stay safe and work together will be pushed underground, and sex worker responses to the law will have to depend largely on how police choose to operate in a given area. Police could, for example, say they saw a youth close-by and arrest a sex worker on that basis.

"There are so many ways in which they can create a charge when really, there's no need. [The law] is really problematic in that way. In Vancouver, she says, the police are more progressive in working with sex workers, but it could be nearly impossible for women in more rural areas to organize and find support.

Sayers says that private, sex worker-only message boards will now be more dangerous to use, as well. Those boards are used to discuss problem clients or areas, and they're a mode sex workers use to keep one another safe.

"This law says, 'We don't want to keep you safe, we don't want you working together, and we don't want safety mechanisms in place for you,'" Dilley explained. "It's based on a moral agenda, not because they want to base their legislation on evidence."

She says the law is sure to face another Charter challenge, but that "government is willing to have more murdered and missing women in Canada in the meantime."

When C-36 passed third reading, I phoned Valerie Scott to check in. She, too, said these laws, like the old, will eventually be deemed unconstitutional. Those behind Sweden's anti-sex work laws say the same. But that could take about five years to prove. Someone has to be arrested and charged, and then make the decision to come forward and fight it. That takes time.
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The Sex Professionals of Canada issued this statement on its website in the wake of Senate approval:

"Know this: we live to fight another day! In all of human history, no government, no army, no religion has ever stopped sex work, nor will they be able to stop what is now a global sex workers [sic] rights movement."

If you disagree with the laws, Sayers says, the best thing to do is to reach out to organizations supporting sex workers (emphasis on supporting, not victimizing) to see how you can help. 
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​​@sarratch

​"Do Know Harm" read the morale patch on the man's battle-dress uniform.

Even though he, like me, was a primary care doctor taking a tactical medicine course that teaches the skills needed to be part of a SWAT team, the sentiment stopped me cold. I had no designs on trading my white coat for a ballistic vest, but I'd been intrigued to learn that a colleague was a SWAT doctor. So during my vacation in Palm Springs last February, I signed up to join him.

It was more than curiosity. I found it troubling and wanted to find out for myself what it means to be part of a paradigm that imagines communities as battle zones, where choosing sides is expected and a willingness to use deadly force is taught. I wanted to know, as a doctor, what would happen in that context to my professional empathy, that essential capacity that makes doctors people who heal—or at least, people who treat the sick or injured and who try to "do no harm."

Tactical medicine began with the war on drugs and a commitment to "take care of the good guys." This battlefield medicine is now part of law enforcement doctrine and is practiced by physicians throughout the United States. SWAT team doctors are often deputized, and armed, and they serve at the will of local police. They help develop strategies by analyzing evacuation routes and planning for exposure to chemicals or animals. They even make sure that snipers who have an allergy to poison ivy know how to avoid it. Sometimes SWAT docs stay behind in armored vehicles, but often, especially on smaller teams, they enter with the rest of the team.

The class I took had SWAT officers, EMTs, firefighters, and physicians from a range of specialties. Some had found their way to SWAT duties through their local gun clubs, some as a form of community service, and others out of a desire for adventure and boredom with routine medicine. They all shared what our course materials described as a "law enforcement mentality."

Part of the allure of this hyper-masculinized medicine is, I believe, related to healthcare's new realities. Gone are the days of the solo practitioner, where all you needed was a shingle, a stethoscope, and a willingness to work long hours. Now medicine is all about multi-specialty groups, hospital systems, an emphasis on shared decision-making and models of caregiving that rely on teams of doctors, nurses, and other "physician extenders." This is a sharp contrast with the authoritarian traditionalism that many physicians expected to be their privilege.

The two weeks of training were divided into class and field work. Class focused on clandestine labs, bombs, WMDs, clearing buildings of threats, and a survey of the less lethal weapons used for crowd control. There were lectures on the treatment of hemorrhage, penetrating chest wounds, and a talk on team health that focused on diet, exercise, and attention to stress management. We learned how to survive being shot from a video featuring officers who had done so. The film included a cameo by Sylvester Stallone. We also learned the protocols that govern what to do if we shot someone ourselves.

We were always geared up for our field work. We were instructed to "train as you fight," so we did—with helmets, ballistic vests, elbow pads, knee pads, and water reservoirs on our backs. We shot on the move and from the ground, and we were taught the skills to keep fighting even if one of our weapons failed.

Every lesson was framed as good guys vs. bad guys. I thought I was resistant to that kind of siege mentality, but it left a mark. There was a moment as I was firing my M-4 rifle at the silhouetted man-shaped target in front of me when I heard my instructor shout "let it out," and all I thought was Kill, kill, kill.

The Force on Force scenarios—think live-action Call of Duty—stressed active shooter simulations, including one at a day-care center. By the end of the course, we had been flash-banged and shot at, and we ourselves had shot someone, placed tourniquets, sealed simulated chest wounds, and intubated patients, all under extreme conditions. The refrain was: "Good medicine can mean bad tactics—and bad tactics gets people killed."

We were much more than what former LAPD chief Daryl Gates imagined when he created the acronym SWAT in 1967. We were a special weapons attack team with full medical autonomy. There is no historical precedent for this: Even military doctors are not expecte​d to be "warriors in the sense of taking up arms, unless their own lives, or those of their patients, are threatened."

After our final exams, the police officers received peace officer standards and training credits, the doctors, continuing medical education credits, and everyone a challenge coin—a commemorative medallion, modeled on what members of the military receive, to recognize our achievement. 

I have great respect for the SWAT officers I met. They are highly trained and highly skilled; the best of them have the power and grace of a Heisman winner or a Bolshoi Ballet dancer. For hostage situations, barricaded suspects, and active shooters, I have no doubt that they're the guys for the job.

But for my medical colleagues, I worry. Volunteering for a militarized police unit, choosing tactics over medicine, and being in environments where someone who should be presumed innocent may be killed are disturbing mutations in our centuries-old ethic of care. "Injuring occurs," wro​te Harvard professor Elaine Scarry, "because we have trouble believing in the reality of other persons."

So to any doctor who wants to volunteer, I would say: Care for the police in your town, teach them techniques that can save their lives and help them save others, but don't forget to teach them empathy. Empathy is not only good medicine, but as ​Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol knows, good tactics, too.

Stuart Lewis is a General Practioner whose writing about medicine has appeared in the Guardian, Columbia: A Journal of Arts and Literature, and several medical publications. 

​The last time I saw Vincent "Buddy" Cianci in the Moses Brown School field house, he arrived by helicopter. It was 2000 or 2001, my senior year of high school, and the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island flew in to speak to an assembly at his alma mater. This was his thing, traveling by chopper and showing up in style, even though the state house is less than a mile away as the crow flies and only a tad further on city roads. Buddy lived to impress.

Cianci was the most compelling and successful politician the city ever saw. He helped revitalize the struggling metropolis, taking credit for moving rivers and building malls while heading an organization that some said resembled the mob families he busted as a prosecutor. He served as mayor from 1975-1984 before being forced to resign after pleading no contest to a felony assault charge.

He also drove the city into massive debt. According to a New England Monthly article titled "His Honor, The Felon" that ran in 1984, the city deficit grew from nearly $500,000 to almost $8 million during Cianci's first term as mayor and his second term saw a $3 million budget increase as Providence's bond rating dropped from AA to A1. "By any dispassionate standard, his financial administration of the city had been disastrous," the article wrote.

But the people of Providence loved his charisma and accomplishments, and he won again in 1991. "You know why I'm mayor? Because Providence has smart voters," he told The New Yorker's Philip Gourevitch at the bar in the Biltmore Hotel. "Yeah, I punched a guy in the mouth for fucking my wife. But look at the city. People come here from Boston to go to the zoo, go to the theatre, go to a restaurant. Used to be the reverse. Cities are about choices. Choices—having more shit you want to do than you can do. This hotel was about to be torn down when I became mayor."

The second reign lasted until 2002, when the FBI's Operation Plunder Dome resulted in the indictment of 30 people, 22 convictions, and 16 jail sentences. Cianci spent five years as inmate No. 05000-070 at Fort Dix, found guilty of one racketeering conspiracy charge. Judge Ronald R. Lagueux, who presided over part of the Plunder Dome trial, offered his thoughts on the endemic rottenness. "Clearly, there is a feeling in city government in Providence that corruption is tolerated. In this mayor's two administrations, there has been more corruption in the City of Providence than in the history of this state," he ​ said, more than a decade ago.

That was more than a decade ago. Cianci, who has spent the days since his 2007 release as a highly rated talk show host, maintains his innocence. And this year, he ran for mayor again.

In early October, Cianci was at Moses Brown to participate in a discussion between himself and two other mayoral candidates. He had a chance to win again. Polls leading up to Tuesday's election show him  ​closing on the Democratic primary winner, Jorge Elorza, an ex-Housing Court judge who had been ​endorsed by President Barack Obama, and who fashioned himself as the honest accountant the cash-strapped city desperately needs. Republican candidate Dan Harrop was a distant third in the race for the seat vacated by Providence Mayor Angel Taveras, who ran, unsuccessfully, for governor this year. "I think it's fabulous. He's just part of Providence. He's part of the fabric of Rhode Island history." Rhode Island-born TV anchor Meredith Vieri ​offered about Cianci's decision to run in 2014.

The twice-convicted, once-jailed felon ditched his trademark toupee while in prison but remains as charming as he is evasive. "He's such a charismatic guy, and he's so good at lying and obfuscating that he convinces people," said Mike Stanton, a former Providence Journal reporter who wrote  ​The Prince of Providence, a book about Cianci, told me the day after the debate while sitting in a cafe downtown. "He makes people forget the past, except for his nostalgic view when things were better. He's not as he used to be but he's still a formidable candidate."

Cianci, a few months into recovery from a battle with colon cancer, lost 50 pounds and looked all of his 73 years. Less pit bull and more aging greyhound, he sat with slumped shoulders between Elorza and Harrop, wearing a red tie, shuffling the stack of papers in front of him as he searched for answers to the questions moderator Alisha Pina Thounsavath, a journalist and 1996 graduate of Moses Brown, asked during the conversation billed as "a chance to for our students to see democracy at its best."

Cianci, back in the school where he'd felt like an outcast as a child because of his Italian heritage, was a student cramming for a test, passing but not excelling, too often reciting canned talking points prepared by his staff: "Strong pre-K programming is a solid investment... for kids so they can be strong learners in the future, the earlier, the better," he intoned, joylessly. While there were flashes of charm—a story about a woman who was bussing her child to pre-K and Cianci's concern that "the only thing he's going to learn how to do is be a bus driver"—and neither of the other candidates distinguished themselves, the old mayor's appeal didn't shine through until his closing statement.

Then, showtime: Without the need to frame his remarks around education, the topic of the debate, Cianci was free to spin his story. The man who takes credit, deserved and otherwise, for revitalizing downtown Providence during his previous administrations, has a powerful ally in nostalgia. "The one thing people ask me all the time is 'What is the thing your administration contributed most to the city of Providence?' It isn't building Providence Place Mall. It isn't creating WaterFire. It isn't making it one of the best cities in the country because a lot of people contributed. I think what happened was we raised the self-esteem of the people in the city of Providence to levels they never thought they could achieve. That is where I want to bring this city again."

The pro-Buddy audience went wild. He was flying again.

Debate over, the candidates stepped down to meet their constituents. While Harrop and Elorza worked the fringes of the room, Buddy found himself mobbed. The recognition, notoriety, and support follows him everywhere he goes, and he loves the spotlight. He is Providence.

After 20 minutes of mingling, the last hand shaken, the last photo taken, Cianci finally let his handlers lead him away from the crowd. He walked out of the field house and into a waiting SUV emblazoned with Buddy's face and the word "Leadership" written across the door in huge letters. When I visited his campaign headquarters the next week, I talked to the former mayor's driver. He told me he hated driving Buddy's monstrosity, that it was too big and drew too much attention.

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The Buddy mobile. Photos by author

Cianci has always been a master of finding votes. In his memoir, Pasta and Politics, he recounts a debate from years ago:

Let me understand something, I said. Mr. Lippitt says he's pro-choice. Mr. Annaldo says he's pro-choice. Is that right. Both men nodded. Good, I'm pro-life.

Beginning at that moment, I had always been pro-life. Why not? Was it hypocritical I prefer to consider it political. Anyone who doesn't believe that politicians choose at least some of their positions based on political expediency hasn't read the polls, some of which tell politicians what positions they should take.

He and his campaign sent a mailer to 2,400 names provided by the Catholic diocese. The letters, touting Buddy as the only pro-life candidate, arrived on a Saturday with the intention that they would be discussed in church on Sunday. He won the election by 317 votes. Buddy didn't invent political expediency, but he played it harder and better than most.

In the past, he also courted Providence's large gay community and did so again in 2014. On a rainy Thursday night in late October, I watched him ham it up on-stage at a bingo night with a drag queen named Miss Kitty Litter. More than 800 came that night, a record in the 18-year history of Drag Bingo. Buddy draws a crowd. Many people arrived in Halloween costumes: Wonder Woman, butterfly wings, Waldo, a wet tee shirt, a light socket, Salvador Dali carrying a melting clock, the Pope, and at least two Tom Brady jerseys. Participants brought candy and other snack food before settling in at their pre-assigned tables. Prizes include rides from Lyft and dildos from Fleshjack.

Before calling his assigned game, Cianci made the rounds followed by a camera from Meet the Press and a reporter from the Boston Globe. He shook hands, charmed old ladies and young men alike, and stood patiently while potential voters put their iPads into selfie mode. A half a dozen of tutu-wearing coeds ran up for a photo. Half the audience wanted a brush with Rhode Island fame. The other half hoped the charade would end so they could play bingo. A young woman dressed as Frida Kahlo shook her head as Cianci and his entourage passed her on the stairs. "I do not want to be on camera," her friend in a Harry Potter outfit said. The mayor donned two strands of Mardi Gras beads a bingo player handed him. "Running with the Devil" played over the speakers.

When Miss Kitty Litter finally called Buddy up to the stage, he walked up to cheers Rocky theme music blaring over the static-y speakers. As one of the two primary sponsors of the night, he had three minutes to sell his message, in this case himself:

"Back when I was mayor, I looked for support of the LGBT community, and I'll tell you why," he began. "I was the first man ever to give benefits to domestic partners who worked in the city of Providence. That was a long time ago. I was the first mayor ever to march in the gay pride parade. That was back in the 1990s."

"As a matter of fact, some of you might have read in the papers that  ​I was in the [Rhode Island] Supreme Court again, but it wasn't for anything bad. It was for something good. Back in the year 2001, I ordered a fire truck to go to the gay pride parade. There were three fire fighters who were supposed to drive it. They said no, that driving a fire truck in the gay pride parade was an insult to them and that I was interfering with their constitutional right, and their freedom of speech and freedom of religion. They ended up suing me. In that case, the wheels of justice grind real quickly in the state, don't they? "

"Thirteen years later, I find myself in Supreme Court because they wanted to make me pay because I violated their rights. The reason I talk about this tonight is because this community stood by me. They showed up in court. They supported me. And I appreciate that."

The crowd applauded, ignoring the fact that perhaps the wheels of justice spun slowly because he was in prison for five of those 13 years. No matter. The evening raised more than $15,000 for AIDS Care Ocean State and Meet the Press had b-roll for its ​"Addicted to Office" segment on Cianci.

Cianci, presumably, had a few more votes.

Selfies with Buddy.

If there's a leader of the current anti-Buddy brigade, it's Lorne Adrain.

"To me it's quite worrisome that there are so many people supporting Buddy at this point," the life insurance executive and former chairman of the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education told me in his office in the city's mill district, surrounded by photos of great men and a document certifying his successful climb of Mt. Kilimanjaro. "Let alone the corruption issues and the character issues, [people are] turning a blind or maybe an ignorant eye to the economics, the facts around decisions that he made, contracts that he did during the course of his administrations and what those contracts mean today."

Adrain, who had launched a campaign for mayor but latter pulled out with the explicit intention of harming Cianci's chances, was referencing the five to six percent annual "cost-of-living" adjustments city pensioners receive because of a 1991 contract signed while Cianci was in office. The COLA benefits cost the city somewhere between $35,000 and $50,000 per person in 2014, upwards of $6 million per year according to an  ​op-ed Adrain published in the Providence Journal. For a city desperate for cash with a massive whole in the pension budget, resulting at least in part from being ​underfunded during past Cianci administrations, some see this as a major failing.

"These are decisions he made as mayor," Adrain said. "He would call it leadership. I would call it irresponsible fiscal management that has us in this box today and leaves us uncompetitive with other cities as a place to do business from a cost perspective. It leaves our residents paying more taxes and businesses paying more taxes than lots and lots of places of this scale."

After leaving the race, Adrain considered launching a formal Anybody but Buddy PAC but instead started a grassroots effort to get information out about Cianci to "persuadable" voters, creating a clearinghouse for facts, figures, and the old articles sent anonymously to his mailbox. He hoped it would be enough to convince the 20 percent of voters who were undecided to side with Elorza rather than the former mayor and convicted felon.

Then, like everyone else, Adrain admitted the power of Cianci's political prowess. "When my daughter Grace died 12 years ago when she was five years old, one of the most beautiful letters of condolence that I got was from Buddy Cianci," he said. "Now, I'm sure he didn't write it but so what? I got it from his office. For political reasons, for whatever reasons they were, he sent a letter. There were a lot of other people who I would have expected to send letters who didn't. He knows how to impress people. He knows how to shape their feelings."

Despite the negative Cianci sentiment, even Adrian, one of the mayor's biggest detractors thinks he might have a strong third stint. "My guess is that if he were re-elected, he would be under intense scrutiny and he would be very careful," Adrain said. "I suspect that he might even do a good job."

Wendy Schiller, an associate professor of political science and public policy at Brown University who watched the 2014 mayor's race from the beginning, agreed: "Is there room for redemption? Are people underestimating the extent to which Buddy Cianci wants to go out on top as a clean, honest, successful mayor? The whole point of running was to get back in there to show people that he could do a good job without being corrupt. That's an argument that you can make. He has an even stronger incentive not to be corrupt because that's the whole point of why he's running."

She also wondered how his goals align with the type of strong leadership Providence desperately needs. "If you are only mayor for four years, you want to be popular," she said. "You want to be the good guy. You want people to like you. Typically, cutting budgets, cutting benefits, and cutting workers doesn't make people like you. The very things that Providence needs, Buddy has no incentive to do."

There's also an undercurrent of fear that he would use his position to return to what he considers the good old days when he and his cronies ran the city. "I admit I used campaign money for everything from a personal helicopter to get around the state to paying for dinners, and on occasion I even used my influence to do favors for people," Cianci wrote in Pasta and Politics, an honest tome he wrote in 2012 that's frequently cited by his detractors. "I even admit that I rewarded my friends and supporters and punished my political enemies."

"I have definitely heard a number of people express fear of the way he would run the city and that he would use it as an opportunity for payback against all the people who would oppose him," Schiller said. "These are private business people and public officials. That's a genuine fear based on the way he used to run the city."

Adrain laughed at the question, admitting that he worries he'll wake up one morning with all the snow on his street plowed into his driveway. "[Buddy's] done really crazy shit," he said.

Cianci will not get another opportunity to do "really crazy shit" from the bully pulpit of the Mayor's office. Despite backing from the teachers union as well as the fire and police departments and a decided advantage in fundraising, he  ​lost the election Tuesday by 10 percentage points. Strong turnout from the city's East Side—home, according to Cianci, to a "​handful of millionaires deciding what is best for the hardworking people who are the backbone of our city, our economy and our community" – helped Elorza beat the previously undefeated mayor.

Even Republican mayoral candidate Dan Harrop voted for his Democrat opponent. "I do not fear that an Elorza mayoral administration will make Providence the laughing stock of the nation," he told the Providence Journal in a prepared statement published the day before Election Day.

Cianci, always assessing his options as a politician, saw the defeat coming on Tuesday. While his supporters rallied and cheered that evening, spurred on by early exit polling that showed their man ahead in the south and west sides of the city, his personal pollsters privately informed him about his low chances.

Under a "Cianci for Mayor" banner in the Hilton Providence, Buddy conceded a mayor's race for the first time in his life. "The election is over and now we must come together as a city, a community of people who love their city, who want the best for their city, so that we can once again achieve the greatness that Providence once knew," he told his rabid following to cheers.

A half a mile east, Elorza held his victory celebration in the packed ballroom of the Providence Biltmore, the hotel Cianci saved from closing. The 37-year-old mayor-elect took the stage, waving to the adoring crowd standing just a few rooms down from the bar where Cianci held court on so many nights during his long reign, a drink in hand.

"One thing about Buddy Cianci is that he loves this city and no one can deny that," Elorza said. Then he began talking about the future.

​As the Islamic State massacred its way throughout Iraq and Syria this summer, a separate battle took place in neighboring Lebanon, as IS fighters invaded the Lebanese border town of Arsal, beheading captured soldiers and unleashing waves of lethal car bombs.

Hezbollah, one of the world's strongest guerrilla armies, has also become involved—the group is either defending Lebanon or making things worse, depending on who you ask.

VICE News traveled to Lebanon to explore the battle being waged by one of the world's fiercest militant groups against one of the Middle East's smallest and most fragile nations.

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Are you a deviant? Are your sexual fantasies normal, or are they the sign of a deeply disturbed little mind? That was the question ​posed last week by the Daily Mail, a newspaper whose own fantasies, for the record, seem to revolve around ​side boob, "dangerous curves," ​jailbait, and ​murder ​victims.

Anyway, the question posed by the  Mail is more important than you might think. Psychiatrists have wrestled with what they call " ​paraphilia" (being aroused by unusual things, people, or situations) for more than a century. Until recently, the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a kind of bible for American psychiatrists) declared that all people with a paraphilia were suffering from a mental disorder. Before 1973, that list included homosexuals. People have been imprisoned or sectioned on the basis of their supposed deviancy, with diagnosis ​regularly used in the US "as a legal basis for sentencing and/or committing sexually motivated criminals to psychiatric care."

The fifth version of the DSM, published last year, is slightly more liberal. It distinguishes between paraphilias and paraphilic disorders. So, your paraphilia only becomes a troubling "disorder" if it causes "distress" or harm to yourself or others. As Slate's Jillian Keenan ​put it, "Happy kinksters don't have a mental disorder. But unhappy kinksters do."

The idea seems to be that it's all fun and games until you cross some arbitrarily drawn line in the sand, at which point you become a potentially dangerous pervert. The thing is, pretty much every type of sexual desire can cause distress or harm to others, regardless of the kinkiness involved. Why fixate on kink? How can you even determine what is normal or paraphilic in the first place?

Canadian researchers tried to answer this question in a study ​published at the end of October, titled "What Exactly Is an Unusual Sexual Fantasy?" His team got 1,500 adults to respond to an online questionnaire asking them to rank 55 sexual fantasies and describe their favorite. Yet few of the fantasies they looked at were rare in the population, and most were actually pretty common.

There are a ton of problems with this study. The people questioned were volunteers, so probably more willing to talk about kink in the first place. The list of sexual fantasies was limited to just 55, when a quick scan of the larger porn clip sites reveals several hundred categories and sub-categories of porn available. If you're trying to find out what an unusual sexual fantasy is, but don't allow people to express their enthusiasm for any unusual sexual fantasies, it's debatable how useful your study is going to be.

Still, the study is good enough to show that, as the authors suggest, "Care should be taken before labelling a [sexual fantasy] as unusual, let alone deviant." That care hasn't been taken in the DSM-5, which happily talks about conditions like "exhibitionistic disorder," "fetishistic disorder," "sexual masochism disorder," "sexual sadism disorder," "transvestic disorder," and "voyeuristic disorder." ​BDSM is classified as an abnormal fantasy even though we're living in a post–50 Shades of Grey world. The DSM is still extravagantly fond of labeling things "disorders."

Defending this sort of position, Medscape ​claims that, "The new approach to paraphilias [separating paraphilias from paraphilic disroders] demedicalizes and destigmatizes unusual sexual preferences and behaviours, provided they are not distressing or detrimental to one's self or others." But then, if you don't want to attach a stigma to something, why mention it in the first place?

Besides, for several of these fetishes, you're fucked either way. "Transvestic disorder", ​according to the new DSM-5, "identifies people who are sexually aroused by dressing as the opposite sex but who experience significant distress or impairment in their lives—socially or occupationally—because of their behavior."

Given that it's basically impossible to prove why people do things, it's not hard to see how the "transvestic" diagnosis could be applied to huge swathes of trans people, and since the trans community are still stuck at the ass-end of the discrimination train, most could probably be described as "experiencing significant distress," which would classify them as having a mental disorder. For communities—like the trans one—that are already marginalized and have already had to listen to their preferences be categorized as unnatural, further distinctions that run along these lines are unhelpful, alienating and hurtful.

All this is happening in a wider culture that seems to have a real problem coming to terms with its sexuality. David Cameron spent a chunk of this government struggling to stop porn on the internet, apparently unaware that porn is why the internet was built in the first place. Mainstream media have spent the last decade desperately trying to airbrush every woman in culture into the same preternaturally titted, hermetically-skinned, post-pubescent fuck fantasy—FHM can ​barely even cope with the idea of a black woman, let alone something really deviant, like, say, I don't know, naturally occurring body hair. When something as mild as Fifty Shades enters the dull missionary-fuck-and-a-cigarette world of the press, journalists erupt in a fit of giggles, like kids looking at a naughty magazine in the playground.

How is it possible that in the 21st century, we're still studying people who like spanking for signs of some dark deviance? We're all into a whole range of stuff sexually but our society remains fixated on categorizing as much of it as possible as "abnormal". Why can't we just admit that kink is normal and healthy? Are the people who are trying to express their sexuality really mentally ill, or is the real sickness in the repressed culture that's so terrified of them?

Follow Martin Robbins on ​Twitter.

I have only been to a therapist once, and one of the first things she asked me was, "What is your relationship with your father?" She went straight for dad. I don't know if all therapists do this when dealing with female patients. Maybe it was her first day on the job, or perhaps my showing up in pajamas just screamed "daddy issues." I told her what she probably was not expecting to hear. "My dad and I have a wonderful relationship. My mom on the other hand..."

Yeah, that's right. Mommy issues. I've got them. You too? Grab a name tag and sit down. The singing of "Kumbaya" will commence after I vent for a little bit. The main stereotype about women with mommy issues involves shouting something about no wire hangers. This is an extreme. My mom was not horrific to this extent, nor was she violent, and yet our relationship was still awful.

I am a true '90s kid, meaning nostalgia is all I have left to live for in this world. That's why I have been watching Gilmore Girls every day since it has been available on Netflix. I have no shame in telling you that it is one of my favorite shows. Yes, like every single man Lorelai and Rory met on the series, I instantly fell in love with them and their quirky charm. Last night, I was up until 5:00 in the morning finishing season 4. Right before I finally gave into sleep, I remembered a moment from my childhood. I remembered the night, when I was around 12 or 13, I watched an episode of the show with my mom. She was on the couch and I was on the floor—closer to the television and further away from her. At the end of it she said,"I wish our relationship was like that." In case you don't know, this show was about a mother and daughter. The two were best friends who told each other everything, which to me was (and still is) completely insane. No mother-daughter relationship is really like that, is it?

As I got older, I started noticing how some of my best girl friends interacted with their moms. They made jokes together, talked about relationships, and even shared secrets—things I never did with my mom. Recently, I was having dinner with a friend and her mom ended up joining us. My friend talked candidly about being fingered on her date the night before. Her mom just kept eating salad like that was typical Tuesday night conversation. I don't know what disturbed me more—that, or the fact that she was enjoying capers. Regardless, I was amazed. I don't think my mom knows if I've even kissed a guy. I told her I was in a relationship once, and all she said was: "Is he Jewish?" The answer was no, and a few days later she called me to tell me that she gave my number to a guy my age she met at a Jewish film festival she went to.

Having a Jewish mother is like having a mother, times ten. Not only does she have to know what you're doing today, but she also has to know whom you're doing it with, why, where, and will it cost money? No matter how much older you get, this doesn't change. I have 20 unheard voicemails currently on my phone, and all but one are from my mom—who for the past three years has been saved on my phone as "Kiefer Sutherland." Her prying so much to tell her absolutely everything made me do the opposite. Instead of opening up to her, I shut her out. If I made her mad in public she would have no problem insulting me, in front of both strangers and friends. My mother was, and still is, extremely outspoken. If she sees something she doesn't like about you or what you're doing, she has no problem telling you this to your face. In short, waiters always hated us. She raised me to believe in the "evil eye." I was instructed by her to never trust even my closest friends, because they will give me said "evil eye." She would unknowingly (I hope) insult me by saying things like, "You were so skinny in elementary school. I don't know who gave you the evil eye to make you fat now."

It didn't help that we had nothing in common. She was not raised in America, and the things I liked she knew nothing about. Even if I wanted to open up to her, a lot of what I had to say would end up being lost in translation. My choosing to be a comedian made no sense to her, either. To her, I was not funny. I was moody and quiet. I locked myself in my room all day and only came out to complain about whatever dinner she had cooked. With my friends, and even my dad, I was a completely different person. I cracked jokes and was warm and inviting. With her, I was an uptight roommate. At least I never hogged the couch.

Something I just realized is that she was pregnant with me at exactly my age now. I cannot fathom being a mother right now—I'm still trying to figure out what taxes are. Though, admittedly, my development into adulthood is happening at a very slow rate. Maybe my mom is to blame for that? No, now I'm going too far. She had only been living in America for a year when she got pregnant. Her entire family was more than 9,000 miles away. She married my dad, and the two of them attempted to stay together for many years. My parents were married for most of my childhood, and not once throughout their marriage did I ever see them act lovingly towards one another. They just fought. Their fighting was constant and it was loud. I never really knew what it was about. All I knew is that they hated one another. Neighbors would complain, and one time went so far as to call the cops.

This is why I spent the majority of my childhood inside my room. I locked myself inside, and all I did was watch television. I learned quickly not to have friends over, or have sleepovers at my house. Most of my time was spent by myself, hoping All in the Family reruns on Nick at Nite would mute intense screams. I never told her, but this is how I developed my love for comedy. I didn't want to tell her, because then she'd want to talk about it. When my dad eventually moved out of the house, I blamed my mother. I idolized him and demonized her. The yells were gone, but now the animosity was suffocating me. So I kept locking myself in my tiny room... to feel less suffocated..

Writing this inside of Panera Bread, I was surprised to find myself holding back tears. The couple sitting at the booth across from me were trying not to notice the occasional tear running down my cheek. Hopefully they just thought that I was having the most inspiring turkey sandwich of my life.

I am happy to report that my relationship with my mother is better now. Kind of. Yes, we still fight and yes, I'm still annoyed by her constantly pressuring me to drop everything and go to law school. However, we are getting closer. I'm willing to listen more to what she has to say, as is she. Our phone conversations don't always end with one of us angrily hanging up. I'm even telling her when I'm going on dates. Kind of. She still has no idea how many fingers have been in my vagina. This, she will probably never know. Frankly, I'm not sure I know. 

Not only has she changed over the years, but so have I. As shitty as parents are, kids can be too. I now see all the ways I was not making things any easier. I was as stubborn as she was. Now that we're both older, we've both calmed down. She's also let go of that "evil eye" stuff. As the legendary pop-punk trio who I had some of my earliest wet dreams about, Blink-182, would say: I guess this is growing up.

Maybe this is how some mother-daughter relationships are. They don't always start off perfectly, but they can end up being great. We're not there yet, but it's nice to know that we are both willing to work on it.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

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​If you wake up in a hospital disoriented, the doctor asks three questions:

1) Do you know your name?

2) Do you know where you are?

3) Do you know what year it is?

Person, place and time—the three fundamental dimensions of orientation, the nuggets of knowledge that keep our existential feet on the ground. Without confident answers to those generally obvious questions, we become unmoored, like splinters of conscious driftwood. And understandably, most of us tend to panic without those answers, as they are pretty much the epistemological building blocks of our existences.

Of course, a lot of smart people throughout history have had their doubts about the solidity of "person," "place," and "time." Many great artists, philosophers, scientists, theologians, and plain old everyday people who have spent a bit of time thinking about the human experience have found that sometimes these anchors aren't all that heavy. And in the project East of the Sun, West of the Moon, you get the sense that photographers Gregory Halpern and Ahndraya Parlato worked with anchors heavy enough to keep them from floating out to sea, but light enough to afford them some slack to explore.

The body of work is composed of pictures taken exclusively on solstices or equinoxes because Halpern and Parlato "liked the idea of trying to rely on two continually shifting landmarks as navigational guides" and because they wanted to see "what time looked like" and "what time felt like." It's clear that the whole solstice/equinox thing isn't just a fun concept, but a statement about orientation.

See, we can't get our bearings using "shifting landmarks." When we get turned around, we use fixed points to right ourselves. We look to the eternally stationary North Star. We look to the immovable mountains. We use the constant stuff in environments flush with variables.

But in East of the Sun, West of the Moon, the imagery by Halpern and Parlato—along with a piece of writing by Nicholas Muellner—is blanketed with this recognition that, to some extent, these constants are never constant, always shifting. It's not just that in a big bang universe everything is in motion, but also that we can really only know who, where, and when we are in relation to landmarks that also need landmarks that also need landmarks, and so on—it's turtles all the way down. In the photographs, Halpern and Parlato play with light and composition and all that, but more so, they play with a vaguely Einsteinian notion that no one is truly anchored. Or maybe, they play with the idea that we're all somewhat adrift, oriented only to the extent that we're adrift together.

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To be clear, this project isn't weighed down by all this overwrought, heady thinking—it's actually rather pretty lighthearted and shot through with sincere curiosity. In other words, there's no panic in these pictures. Even the images freighted with bits of dread or pain—the defeated man with his head down in an airport cafeteria, or the scene of the crowd staring at what might be either a sunset or a brutal traffic accident—possess no real urgency. It's as if they're all a little more still than most still photographs.

Maybe the fourth question that doctor should ask if those first three are stumpers should be more open-ended: "What anchors you?" 

But ​East of the Su​n, West of the Moon isn't the kind of project that pretends to be able to answer that one either. Instead, its weight lies in the uncanny similarity between the subject (solstices and equinoxes) and the medium Halpern and Parlato use to capture it (photography). A special picture, like these special days of the year, are phenomenal in a true sense of the word. They both are the result of something that occurs when an infinite number of moving parts serendipitously relate to each other in a way that makes some sort of singular sense.

Those other 361 days a year? Those countless crappy photographs that get tossed? They are disorganized sets of zeroes and ones—readable but meaningless data. But four days of the year, like four frames out of 365 captures, things mix, match, and align in a way that feels vaguely intelligent, even planned. 

We are a weird species, innately attracted to what we can grab onto and hold firmly in our hands or head. So of course we become disoriented in world of shifting landmarks. If there are fixed points to be found, if there are orienting constants to use, they probably lie in the moments when all that arbitrary movement yields something remarkably still—when all the shifting somehow yields understanding. 

Below is a gallery of photographs by Andhraya Peralto and Gregory Halpern from their new book ​East of the Sun, West of ​the Moon, published by Études Studio this fall, including unpublished outtakes. 

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Gideon Jacobs is the creative director of Magnum Photos, New York. He was an actor and now is a writer, soon to publish a book called Letters to My Imaginary Friends. Follow him on Twitter.

As Putin's "​little green men" were taking Crimea back in March, I was speaking with both cops and gangsters in Moscow who saw this as a great business opportunity—a chance for Russian gangs to move into new turf, make new alliances, and open up new trafficking routes.

They were thinking far too small. Already it has become clear that the conflict in Ukraine is having an impact on not just the regional but the global underworld. As one Interpol analyst told me, "What's happening in Ukraine now matters to criminals from Bogotá to Beijing."

Crime, especially organized crime, has been at the heart of the events in Ukraine from the start. Many of the burly and well-armed "self-defense volunteers" who came out on the streets alongside the not-officially-Russian troops turned out to be local gangsters, and the governing elite there have close, long-term relations with organized crime. Likewise, in eastern Ukraine, criminals have been sworn in as members of local militias and even risen to senior ranks, while the police, long known for their corruption, are fighting alongside them.

Now Ukraine is beginning to shape crime around the rest of the planet.

While it was only to be expected that Crimea and eastern Ukraine might be integrated even more closely into the Russian organized crime networks, it looks as though Ukraine's gangsters are perversely stepping up their cooperation with their Russian counterparts even while Kiev fights a Moscow-backed insurgency.

Just as the Kremlin was setting up its new administration in newly annexed Crimea, so, too, were the big Moscow-based crime networks sending their  smotryashchye—the term means a local overseer, but now also means, in effect, an ambassador—there to connect with local gangs. In part, they're interested in the opportunities for fraud and embezzlement of the massive inflow​ of federal development funds perhaps $4.5 billion thi​s year alone—and the newly-announced casino complexes to be built near the resort city of Yalta. They're also looking to the Black Sea smuggling routes and the opportunity to make the Crimean port of Sevastopol the next big smuggling hub.

These days, the Ukrainian port of Odessa is the  ​smugglers' haven of choice on the Black Sea. There's Afghan heroin coming through Russia and heading into Western Europe through Romania and Bulgaria, stolen cars coming north from Turkey, unlicensed Kalashnikovs heading into the Mediterranean, Moldovan women being trafficked into the Middle East, and a whole range of criminal commodities head out of Odessa Maritime Trade Port, along with its satellite facilities of Illichivsk and southern ports. Routes head both ways, though, and increasingly there is an inward flow of global illicit goods: Latin American cocaine (either for retransfer by sea or else to be trucked into Russia or Central Europe), women trafficked from Africa, even guns heading to the war zone.

The criminal authorities of Odessa, who have more than a nodding relationship with elements of the "upperworld" authorities, have done well on the back of this trade, charging a "tax" in return for letting their ports become nodes in the global criminal economy. But all of a sudden, they face potential competition in the form of Sevastopol. The Crimean port may currently be under embargo, but it has powerful potential advantages. The main criminal business through Odessa is on behalf, directly or indirectly, of the Russian networks; if they chose to switch their business, then perhaps two thirds of the city's smuggling would be lost. The Russian Black Sea Fleet is based in Sevastopol, and military supply convoys—which are exempt from regular police and customs checks—are a cheap and secure way to transport illicit goods. Finally, the links between the gangsters and local political leaders are at least as close in Crimea as in Odessa. So, if the criminals of Sevastopol can establish reliable shipping routes and are willing to match or undercut Odessa's rates, we could see a major realignment of regional smuggling.

Why does it matter if the ships dock at Sevastopol rather than Odessa? Because if the former can offer lower transit costs and new routes, then not only does it mean the Crimeans can take over existing smuggling business, it also makes new ventures economically viable. For example, already, counterfeit cigarettes are being smuggled to northern Turkey, having been brought into Crimea on military supply ships. Perhaps most alarming are unconfirmed suggestions I have heard from Ukrainian intelligence services—admittedly hardly objective observers—that some oil illegally sold through Turkey by Islamic State militants in Syria might have been moved to Sevastopol's private Avlita docks for re-export.

The Ukraine conflict is also leading to increased organized crime in the rest of Ukraine proper. Protection racketeering, drug sales, even "raiding" (stealing property by presenting fake documents, backed by a bribed judge, thereby allegedly proving that the real owner signed away his rights or has unpaid debts) are all on the rise. To a large extent, this reflects a police force still in chaos (those who backed the old regime face charges and dismissal) and looming economic chaos. It is also a reflection of the country's endemic corruption: The international non-governmental organization Transparency International rank​s Ukraine 144 out of 177 countries in its Corruption Perception Index, and although the national parliament confirmed a new anti-corruption ​l​aw in October, it will take years to make a difference.

And this isn't just a Ukrainian problem. Preliminary reports from European police and customs bodies also suggest increased smuggling into Europe, and not just of Ukrainian commodities. Latin American cocaine, Afghan heroin, and even cars stolen in Scandinavia are being re-exported through Ukraine into Greece and the Balkans. According to my sources in Moscow, there is also an eastward route bringing illicit goods into Russia. In September, for example, the police broke a gunrunning​ ring that was spread across six regions of Russia and was caught in possession of 136 weapons, including a mortar and machine guns.

Most of this business again depends on the Russian crime networks. As a result, even ethnic Ukrainian criminals are now trying to forge closer strategic alliances with the Russians, even while their two countries are virtually at war. The Muscovites I spoke to on both sides of the law and order threshold pointed to such western Ukrainian nationalist strongholds as Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk as places where, suddenly, Russian gangster business is welcome. Of course, even as their gangsters are collaborating, Kiev and Moscow are scarcely talking—and any lingering police cooperation has essentially collapsed.

Where organized crime flourishes, so too do the shadowy financial businesses that launder their cash. Ukraine's financial sector is notoriously under-regulated and cozy with dubious customers, from the kleptocrats of the old elite (Prime Minister Yatsenyuk has claim​e​d that $37 billion disappeared from the state's coffers during former President Yanukovych's four-year reign) to organized criminals. Still, relatively little international money has traditionally flowed into and through Ukraine's banks, not least because other jurisdictions such as Cyprus, Latvia, and Israel offer equal opportunities with greater efficiency.

However, these other laundries are beginning to become less appealing, not least as countries clean up their acts under international pressure. So just at the time when the world's criminals are looking for new places to clean their ill-gotten gains, Ukraine's are both desperate for business—the country's economy is tanking,  having shrunk by 5 perc​net over the past year—and increasingly connected to the Russians, the global illegal service providers par excellence. Already, I understand that a US intelligence analysis has suggested that they will be used not only covertly to allow Crimea's embargoed businesses and gangs to move their money in and out, but also to offer up their laundering services to the world. And the world seems to be interested: According to a US Drug Enforcement Administration analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity, in September, a sizeable payment for Nigerian methamphetamine bound for Malaysia actually passed through Ukrainian banks.

As the varangians—slang for gangs from Moscow and European Russia—become increasingly strongly entrenched there, working with an array of local criminals, they bind Ukraine all the more tightly with the global underworld. Ukraine has all the resources and facilities of a modern, industrial nation, like ports and banks, but not the capacity to secure and control them. This kind of potential black hole is a priceless asset for the world's gangsters.

Of course, there is one last way the Ukrainian conflict could have a wider criminal impact. If Kiev is finally able to defeat the rebellion in the east, then what do the gangsters who fought for the rebellion do? Some of the most powerful might be able to cut deals with the government or find refuge in Russia, but Moscow shows no signs of wanting to incorporate hundreds of disgruntled and impoverished gun-happy thugs. If what happened after the 1990s civil wars in the Balkans is a guide—and many analysts think it will be—then they will seek to head into Europe and North America. There, they are most likely to turn to criminal activities that draw on their skills and experiences. One French prosecutor I spoke to called them "the next Albanians," referring to the violent and dangerous gangs, especially from Kosovo, that flowed into Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Europe in particular might find itself hard-pressed to respond. The Ukrainian authorities may well be willing to help, but they probably lack the ability to provide much usable intelligence. Meanwhile, the Russians, who probably have the best sense of who the fighters actually are, seem increasingly unlikely to provide any assistance. Jörg Ziercke, head of Germany's BKA, its equivalent of the FBI, recently complained that assistance from Moscow in dealing with Russian organized crime was drying up.

Forget tit-for-tat embargoes. One of the most effective responses to Western sanctions at the Kremlin's disposal may be to encourage the criminalization of Ukraine, and do nothing to help Europe and North America cope with the fallout. 

Dr. Mark Galeotti is Professor of Global Affairs at New York University's School of Professional Studies – Center for Global Affairs and an expert on transnational crime and security issues. Follow him on Twi​tter.

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Prince Naseem Hamed making a TV ad for Adidas in New York, 1996. Photo by Peter Marlow for Magnum

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

When I was a kid, I still had heroes. Sportsmen whose muscle memory I'd try to rip off on the wide open playing fields of suburbia; actors I'd get in trouble for impersonating at the ​Bentall Centre; chart rappers I'd wish my parents were more like. These were people who seemed to represent worlds of excitement and opportunity far beyond my own. People who seemed to be endowed with some kind of greatness. And—most importantly—people who carried that greatness with a magnanimous, maverick swagger, locked in a state of limitless grace.

Most of these heroes went on to achieve the kind of global stardom that means their faces still haunt the canvases of Leicester Square caricature artists today: Will Smith, Jim Carrey, Liam Gallagher. Others went on to have mediocre managerial careers at West Ham and Watford after years of doing things like this.

But only one had a career quite like Prince Naseem Hamed, the diminutive, crew-cut, god-fearing, subtlety-hating, flamboyant, street-wise, homoerotic Sheffield southpaw who won the World Title, went to prison, lost his house, and, for a brief time in the mid 90s, was one of the most dazzling men on earth.

Prince Naseem Hamed dancing into the arena to speed garage tunes

Prince Naseem spoke to me as a kid. A British Asian from the industrial heartland I'm not, but something about his cartoon cockiness, his leopard skin shorts, the way he ​dance-walked into the ring to speed garage tunes and moved around it like a gakked-up pair of scissors—banging with the uppercut and pulling his torso back and forth like an ​air ​dancer—captured my imagination.

He was, in short, an absolute fucking don. A boxer who released a ​hit s​ingle and who could pull off ring entrances that were ​elaborate "Thri​ller" routines or ​fly​ing carpet rides. A fighter who only lost one professional fight, and could count an astonishing ​31 knock outs in​ his 36 ​wins. A five-foot-four Yemeni kid from South Yorkshire whose dad got him boxing so he could defend himself against the growing National Front presence of the time, who later trained at Bing Crosby's old house and fist-bumped P Diddy ringside. He was the British immigrant dream realized in American television technicolor.

When Prince Nas first came to New York, to retain his WBO featherweight title against local hero Kevin Kelley at Madison Square Garden, he did not play the Hugh Grant character that threatened to ​define all British me​n abroad at the time. He was not going to be the bumbling Englishman who was sorry he was even there.

Nah, he decided to beat the Americans at their own game. He decided to be the most brilliant cunt on earth, entering the ring not as a noble contender from across the pond, but as his own silhouette, dancing for over four whole minutes to the sounds of "Men In Black" and a load of other bass-heavy rap cuts. The commentators seemed outraged, but happy to be. Seemingly transfixed by this supernova of self-confidence, they call him "Hector Camacho, Jorge Paez, Michael Jackson and PT Barnum rolled into one" before wondering aloud if they were witnessing "the end of Western civilization as we know it."

Finally, after seven minutes, Hamed somersaulted into the ring and knocked out Kelley in the fourth. It's unlikely that anyone who saw it will ever forget it. Some boxing heads still call it one of the most und​errated fights of all time. ​

Fifteen years or so later, after Hamed had ​lost t​o Barrera, fought his last fight, went bankrupt, and ​nearly killed a man i​n his McClaren, he pretty accurately summed up his own achievements through his usual prism of wonderful steel-town braggadocio. "Who do you know, who could come out on a flying carpet? P Diddy standing at the bottom, come out like a concert, dancing, oozing confidence and then get in and take somebody out? Come on, do you know anybody in the history of the sport that did what Prince Naseem did? I ain't trying to brag, but I was bloody good at it."

He's not wrong. The Fresh Prince, Zola, Carrey, and Gallagher were all heroes of mine, but in hindsight, Prince Naz (who came slightly before Zola and slightly after Carrey) was all of them rolled into one.

I suppose I was too young to really keep abreast of his career, to know how he'd performed in the majority of the fights and what weight he should've been doing it at, but that didn't matter. He loomed in nevertheless from the peripheries of my cultural consciousness, a strange traveling showman, usually tarted up like a Shepherd's Bush Market Tyson, who'd turn up occasionally in the things that were on before bedtime: Grandstand, TFI Friday, Top of the Pops. I might not have been able to pick up the weaknesses in his jab defense, but he became an abstract hero of mine all the same, as well as a constant in my young life.

Boxing was ​big in​ the 90s, possibly bigger than it ever was before or has been since, and aside from Iron Mike, Prince Naseem was arguably, strangely, the biggest character in all of it. There was something so British, yet so un-British about him. Whereas ​Fra​nk Bruno was ever the humble Panto bruiser constantly being taken down by Americans with harder heads and better gyms, Prince Naz was so outrageous that even the Americans thought he was a tosser. Then he battered them.

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Hamed doing his thing in a Sheffield nightclub. Photo by Chris Steele-Perkins for Magnum

He was a fighter that came of age in the ​Cool Britan​nia era, yet was always more than that; he was never going to be defined by Tony Blair and Brett Anderson. His entourage carried both a ​Yemeni flag ​a​nd a Union Jack; he was simultaneously Britpop and jungle at the same time. A young Muslim from the north of England who wore jean jackets, and knocked the fuck out of people.

As a fighter, he had his doubters. Even his Wikipedia uses the phrase "unfulfilled potential." They said he never fought enough, that he rode his luck too much, that he never fought Gatti or De La Hoya or Ward or Chavez. That he was more about the entrances than the fights, that he was a showman, not a sportsman. To this day, he ​still isn't in the Boxi​ng Hall of Fame.

"Naz Hamed was the best I've worked with," said promoter​ Frank Warren after all was said and done with The Prince's boxing career. "He had everything: real KO power, all the skills, the box office appeal... He was exciting, a showman, but he still didn't fulfill all his talent."

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But my enduring fascination with Naseem doesn't just reside in his performances as a fighter, or in his attempts to reinvent himself as a ​manager of ​fighters. For me, he's way, way bigger than that. He's an often overlooked cultural icon who'd probably be on the cover of every magazine in the world if he were fighting today.

I got to thinking about him again after years of him intermittently popping up in tabloid tragedies and late-night profiles in the Freeview backwaters. I realized that not only did his fights look great and not only were his entrances as brilliant and bizarre as I remembered them, but that he's had a massive effect on British culture as we know it today.

He was arguably Britain's first ghetto superstar; a young, sportswear-clad demigod who made a shitload of money and took on the world. You can find shades of his cocksure, vainglorious swagger in all kinds of places today, from British music (Wiley, shufflers, Novelist's " Nik​e tracksuit to the MOBOs" Twitter chat), to British fashion (Nasir Mahzar's last ​collection, Agi & Sam, Astrid Andersen, whatever the fuck a "chivster" is meant to be). Millions of young men across the country currently have his haircut. And how many gay guys got their first inkling of their sexuality while huddled round their mates' tellies one night back in the 90s, nursing stubbies at some Year 9 sleepover organized around one of Naz's late-night fights? The sheer weight of "scally porn" on the internet would seem testament to that.

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Nasir Mahzar's boxing-influenced collection. Photo by Piczo

It's easy to overlook just how pioneering Naz was in this attitude, which has now become so dominant in our culture. He was perhaps the first famous UK "street" celebrity, just before UK garage and way before Goldie started appearing in James Bond movies. He came of age in a time when racist shitheads like Jim Davidson were still on primetime BBC1, establishing himself as a flawed, world-beating role model for anyone who felt alienated in this staid country. As a white kid from the London suburbs, he was a vision of brilliance in a late childhood that often felt way too normal.

But that attitude which captured the hearts and minds of so many repelled a whole lot of others. There was no OBE for Naz; no lunch with the Prime Minister. In 1997, the year of the Kelley fight at Madison Square Garden, it was ​Greg Rusedski who won the Sports Personality o​f the Year award. Tim Henman came second, Steve Redgrave third. It was to be the story of Hamed's career; a champion who the establishment and the Sun-reading, Diana-loving masses never really took to. Blame an innate British distaste for showmanship, blame promoters who always seemed to have one eye on America, blame racism; for whatever reason Britain seemed to prefer ​sportsmen who​ advertised cereal to those who made bhangra rap tunes.

Jimmy Hill referees a penalty shoot-out skit on the 1996 Sports Personality of the Year award show

He was always a figure of fun within British culture, a slightly ridiculous human being, often accused of arrogance, indolence and not taking "the noble art" seriously enough. Tony Adams could get so ​piss​ed he'd have to wear a bin bag to catch his booze-sweat during training the next morning and he still got to captain his country. Prince Naz was a discredit to his sport and homeland because he had a bit of swagger.

Maybe it was because he was a Muslim, maybe it was because he did skirt pretty close to the realm of self-parody at times, maybe it was that he was just too cocksure, too menacing—too cool—to become a Question Of Sport team captain. He decided he'd rather ​hang ​out with Diddy than Sue Barker and for this he was viewed as some kind of traitor. Luckily, with million-dollar paydays, for a while he could do whatever he wanted.

Ever since Prince Naseem, British sportspeople seem to have been told not to behave like him. To be humble, to thank their coaches, to laugh at Phil fucking Tufnell's awful fucking jokes. To collect their ​MB​E in a tracksuit and do an advert ​promoting quasi-he​althy junk food. What they're told not to do is to be anything other than a conduit for banalities about "respect," "teamwork," and every other Team GB cliche you can imagine.

Even though we claim to love mavericks, we're quick to jump on their backs as soon as they falter. While I'm as amused as everyone else at Mario Balotelli's reinvention as the world's slowest winger at Liverpool—and yes, Ricky Hatton maybe could've stayed off the beers if he wanted to take on the Mayweather-Pacquiao duopoly—it irks me when we praise the "steady" and malign the imperfect. Because more often than not, it's the ones who make mistakes and let it go to their heads that veer closest to greatness.

Sport is about more than just medals; at its best it reflects the wider culture. And while you can praise Sir Chris Hoy's relentless professionalism to the high heavens, he'll never have the same kind of impact that Prince Naz did.

Naseem Hamed is younger than Ryan Giggs, yet it feels like he's been experiencing the hard ​fall from g​race the establishment always wanted him to for more than a decade. His retirement came at the age of just 28, put down to a combination of familial commitments and busted hands. Since then, his media caricature has gone from that of a motor-mouthed, moonwalking featherweight to a broke, fat, ex-con Yorkshireman. But look back on the entire package he created—the buzz, the late nights, the sheer, sweaty, glittering pomp that crystalized in that moment, Naz's moment, into something so alien and glorious—and you'll realize that he was a true UK original.

We didn't make a lot in this country after Thatcher came in. Prince Naz might have been one of our last truly great exports.

Follow Clive Martin on ​Twitt​er

It's often said that those who look back on their high school years as the best years of their life are incredibly miserable people today. Those who were outcasts, or were bullied, grew up to be so successful and rich that the trauma of their teenage years was completely erased, leaving no permanent damage to their psyche. I would like to dispel this misconception. You see, I fit into that latter group of people. When I reflect on my high school experience, there are no fond memories, and yet I am not at all successful or rich today. That's another point for the popular kids.

High school me was pretentious. My general attitude toward nearly everyone in my school was "fuck off." I had nothing in common with the popular kids because I refused to listen to Sublime and didn't participate in school activities. I never went to football games, homecoming parades, or school dances. Not even prom. I was that brand of teen that felt like no one understood me. I thought I was better than everyone because I watched, and pretended to understand, the occasional Fellini film by myself on Friday nights. My social life was limited to hanging out with the few people I deemed worthy of being my friends at lunch. I was probably so insufferable. I rarely went out on weekends, and maybe attended a total of three parties. To make things worse, I was also heavily involved in theater. At the time, my one wish in life was to get the hell out of there.

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However, lately I've been thinking, were those four years really as bad as I made them out to be? It seems that now, with the advent of social media and smartphones, teens are worse off than they were back when I was one. In my day, it was all about Myspace and LiveJournal, but that was pretty much it. The only distractions our cellphones provided were texting and playing Snake. The teens of today are uploading fights to YouTube, making racist Vines, SnapChatting naked pictures, tweeting insults at one another, and participating in idiotic trends like the Condom Challenge. Should I be thankful that I was a teen before these things were happening? Is the teenage experience really all that different?

I decided to relive high school and see for myself if being a teen again is worth it or not. I contacted my alma mater, conveniently located near me in the San Fernando Valley (where Los Angeles goes to die), and asked them if I could be an undercover student. After a lot of awkward conversations assuring the school board I really was a writer and not a pedophile, they finally agreed to let me do it for one day. 

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When I signed myself up to do this, I failed to remember the fact that school starts promptly at 8:01 AM, meaning I would have to wake up before 8 AM—something I have not done in a very long time. I always resented school starting so early. Back in my heyday of being a teen, I was late to school almost every single day, which resulted in several lunch detentions a month. Then again, I didn't mind those detentions because it was pretty much the only "badass" thing about me. 

My alarm went off at 6:30, and I made the immediate decision that I did not need to shower. I kept sleeping, and eventually forced myself to get up at 7:20. 

When it came to getting ready, I did not suspect that I would have a problem passing for a teen. I frequently get told I look younger than my real age—a comment that, one day, I am supposed to find flattering, because rumor has it that the inevitable passage of time will have a negative effect on me once I am middle-aged. At that point, I will have to defy the process of aging if I want to still be considered fuck-worthy to men my age. Right now, however, I know that the reason I look younger is because of my hereditary adult acne (shout out to Papa Stevenson) mixed with me having never grown past 5'1". Regardless, I still made sure to get rid of, or tone down, anything about me that still might make me look "adult." Basically, I didn't wear makeup.

I was supposed to get to the main office at 7:30 AM to get my class assignments and sign in. I arrived at 8:00 AM, rushed to the main office, and immediately started talking to the woman at the front desk. She shushed me, put her right hand over her heart, and pointed out the American flag behind me. I turned around, put my right hand over my heart, and waited for a teenaged boy to finish reciting the pledge of allegiance over the PA system. I completely forgot this was a thing I had to do every day. I even forgot the words, and there aren't even that many. Great job at keeping me a patriot, America.

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I was assigned five classes: creative writing, world history, English literature, biology, and film history. The teachers were told who I was, but the students were not. The first class was creative writing, and I knew exactly where to go. It was surprising to me how well I remembered where everything was. Almost nothing about the buildings had changed—though, I mean, I don't exactly know what kind of change I was expecting. I guess I thought that there might be some random iPads on the walls for some reason, something to signal that this school was not still in the year 2003. Back in 2003, it felt like my school was in the year 1994. So really, this place has not changed since at least 1994. 

I was stoked on creative writing. The perfect class to really listen to some good old-fashioned teen angst. When I took this class my senior year, I wrote dumb crap about Wes Anderson being the only person who got me even though we have never met, and how suburbia was going to be the DEATH of me. I was ready to hear it all again. This time as an adult who can be patronizing. Come on teens. Give me that drama. That emotion. That pain. Please, delve into your STRUGGLE. 

What did I get instead? One girl read to us a poem she wrote about her mom. A loving poem. She even said she gave it to her mom, who then cried. The fuck? Another guy read a story about how much he misses his grandma. What kind of bullshit is this? You're a teen. Family is the enemy. They don't buy you all the crap that you want and don't let you stay out past midnight. They're dictators who don't get you. You're supposed to hate them until they pay for you to go to college, and then miss them because now you have to do your own laundry. Ugh. I blame Obama.

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My next three class were academic classes, and not as disappointing. Well, not as disappointing in the sense that they were just as miserable as I remembered them being. My concentration broke frequently, as I looked around the room at all the students. They were not dressed very well. Again, don't know why, but I assumed that the teens of today put more effort into their clothing. Nope. I saw the same, stupid faux pas I took part in. The same baggy shirts and pants with too many pockets. The same act of tying jackets around the waist. The same Abercrombie & Fitch pants with the intentional holes in the knees. I even saw someone wearing read-and-black fingerless gloves similar to a pair I wore in high school. My pair (from Hot Topic, of course) had let everyone know that I was dark and mysterious, not like other kids. High school is still a fashion nightmare. 

When I did pay attention to teacher, I realized that I don't remember the majority of the things I learned in high school, and was now seeing exactly why. High school is easy to pass as long as you commit yourself to memorizing a lot of facts. I was not a good student as much as I was dedicated to memorizing shit. Biology especially reminded me of this. I definitely took biology in high school, but almost everything this teacher was talking about felt new to me. Bones? What the hell are those? Yeah, we all think we know what bones are. They're those things that make our skeleton and prevent our organs from jumbling around inside us or something. However, I didn't know what bones were made of. This is information I knew at one point in my life, and now I am clueless. The teacher asked the class, "What are the two types of tissue bones are composed of?" Kids raised their hands and read the answer directly from their textbook: Cortical and trabecular. Not even close to ringing a bell. What information did I replace with this? Memorizing the lyrics to "Nookie," because I thought that would be funny? I can't forget that song, but I can forget what's happening inside my own body. This is the reason doctors charge us a lot of money just to tell us that we sneeze because we have allergies. Because of Limp Bizkit. 

I will admit that I did develop a momentary crush on my history teacher, just like in the iconic Drew Barrymore film Never Been Kissed. He looked probably just a few years older than me and was ironically dressed like some sort of preppy private school student, equipped with blazer and bow-tie. I found him attractive, and was impressed by his teaching. He did the opposite of what the biology teacher did—he forbade students from looking at their textbook and encouraged them to answer questions using only their memory from what they were assigned to read. As he lectured, he emphasized to his class that note-taking is not repeating what he says word for word; rather they should be writing down the concepts he was teaching in their own words. I never thought it would happen, but learning was turning me on. I might have even been in love. Just a little.

I talked to him a bit after the class ended. He knew I was not a real student, and started talking to me about how he used to live in New York. It was weird for me to realize that I probably had a lot of teachers his age but assumed they were much older. Unlike Drew Barrymore and Michael Vartan, my crush fizzled as soon as I left the classroom. Being the only male close to my age who I had seen the entire day had a lot to do with my thinking I might be in love with him. Now I get why people in small towns marry their high school sweethearts. Who the hell else are they going to marry?

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At this point, it was lunch, and I was feeling flustered. I went inside a bathroom to collect my thoughts. The stalls were incredibly short, even for me, and paper towels were thrown everywhere. Two sinks somehow flooded. What the hell are teens doing in here? Inside my stall, I read an inspiring quote written in black marker: "No matter how big your house is. How big your bank account is. Our graves will be the same size. Stay humble hoes." She's right. This hoe has to stay humble. 

I had no one to eat with. No one in any of my classes had talked to me, or even asked who I was. I had hoped at least one kid would offer to show me around, assuming I was a new student. I should have reached out to speak to someone, but honestly, I was terrified. In English class, one girl asked me what page we were on and I froze for a complete ten seconds. I then stuttered for the first time in a decade. I don't know why, but these teens were intimidating. I feared that anything I said would scream, "I'm a grownup, hate me!" 

I stood in the long, crowded line of the cafeteria. In front of me, a group of three girls teased a group of four boys, telling them they have Ebola. Ebola jokes are really big in the high school circuit right now. The food options were limited: peanut butter and jelly sandwich or sloppy joes. There was also an apple and milk. I grabbed a sloppy joe, which came with a side of corn, an apple, and (begrudgingly) a milk carton. I didn't have a student ID, so the cashier charged me $3.50 for it. I was outraged. Back in my day, lunch only cost $1.50. The food didn't even change. In fact, these sloppy joes looked like they very well could have been leftovers from when I was in school. 

Out of habit, I walked to the area I used to eat lunch at the majority of the time I was in high school, a large planter by the quad. I remembered standing by this planter, with my three best friends. We spent our lunch finishing homework assignments and freaking out over lines we had to memorize because we were all in theater together. All us theater nerds hovered around this planter, then split into smaller groups. The really nerdy theater nerds could be heard from the other side of the planter singing songs from some Broadway musical I didn't give a crap about. The cool theater nerds were in the center. They were cool because they got the lead roles in every play, had friends outside of theater, and smoked pot. My friends and I the faction that hated musicals, but didn't smoke pot. 

I finished my lunch, and had a lot of time to wander. I decided to head toward where my next class would be. As I wandered, I marveled at how young everyone looked. When I was a freshman in high school, the seniors looked like full-fledged adults to me. The girls had boobs and the guys had facial hair. Not only that, but they could drive, and some could even vote. These things were a big deal. I could easily tell who was lucky enough to be a voter and who was a lowly noob like me. Now I can't tell the difference at all. They all look exactly the same. They are all the age of teen. 

I got closer to the classroom and looked inside. A bunch of kids were in the room, eating while watching Labyrinth. The teacher sat at her desk, ignoring them. I walked in and watched the film until the bell rang. This was all so confusing. Labyrinth? No one I knew in high school spent their lunch watching Labryinth. Is this a new phenomena or was it my fault for never bothering to enter a classroom when I didn't have to?

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This class, my last class of the day, was film history. I guess it does make sense that a bunch of kids were already inside watching a movie—although Labryinth was not on the syllabus. Our teacher gave a short lecture on the Marx Brothers and put on Duck Soup. About ten minutes in, half the class fell asleep. I was surprised to see that no one took out their phones. I had rarely seen anyone on their phones, in fact. The bell rang as I was mid-thought about poor Zeppo (the Rob Kardashian of the Marx Brothers). Film history was over, and so was my school day.

During the car ride home, I found myself thinking this wasn't all so bad. Maybe my attitude was the only thing that made high school so awful. Then I thought about having to repeat this day, every day. For nine months out of the year. Not only that, but having to live with my parents while doing so. The bad feelings quickly came back. Sorry kiddos, high school sucks and there's nothing you can do about it. It did feel good to see that not much has actually changed. Teens still have to write their notes with a pen and paper and sit in a series of wooden chairs, bored out of their mind. They ignore the temptations of their smartphones and use their lunch break to interact with people. It's true that the cliques will never change. There'll always be popular kids, outcasts, nerds, stoners, and whatever the classification JROTC kids fit into. Though these groups were much more apparent to me as a teen. Now they are all clumped together as whippersnappers with no respect for public restrooms.

Follow Alison Stevenson on ​Twitter.

In a nondescript building in Oakland, between a store that specializes in automobile tint and a palm reader, sits the headquarters of Family Radio, a Christian-based network that spreads " ​the word of God to the world." In 2011, they spent over $100 million dollars spreading God's word that ​the world was going to end.

It didn't, which begs the question: What happens after doomsday comes and goes?

It's probably best to start at the beginning. Family Radio was founded in 1958 by Dick Palmquist and Harold Camping as a fairly orthodox radio station, with programs alternating between blocks of early American hymns, contemporary Christian music, and original evangelism like Camping's daily show Open Forum, where he responded to call-in questions about the Bible. But over the years, the mission morphed.

"There was a problem with Harold," said Matt Tuter, a longtime and now-former employee of the network.

All Family Radio decisions were intended to be made by a three-person Board of Directors, one of which was Camping. But as members retired or became too ill to continue, Camping handpicked their replacements. "[They] were incapable of telling Harold 'no' on anything," said Tuter. When Camping could control the network as he pleased, the doomsday predictions began.

Camping's first big prediction was for the rapture to occur on September 4 or 6, 1994. The "or" is significant, evidence of his hesitancy, which extended to the punctuation on the title of his book, ​1994?​. Camping arrived at those specific dates through a convoluted crunching of Biblical numbers. (He believed Jesus died on April 1, 33 AD, exactly 1978 years before April 1, 2011, and when you multiply that by the days in a solar year, and divide it by zzzz...) As a result of his obsession, nearly every Open Forum between '92 and '94 was dominated by Camping detailing his proof to enraptured listeners around the world.

"It was a very distressing thing," said Tuter. "This was a real left-handed turn."

The predictions started getting in the way of the network's Christian-based missions. In 1993, the organization had an opportunity to distribute non-registered Bibles throughout China, an unheard-of happening in the country. But Camping would only approve if they'd also promote his book. "I said, 'So you're telling me your damn book is co-equal with the Bible,' and his words were 'Yes, it is,'" said Tuter. "I regret to this day I didn't knock his head off." Instead, they spent millions of listener-donated dollars to spread his false prophecy.

"There were a lot of people who sold their houses, who gave up their life savings," said Tuter. "And Harold thought it was funny. He would come into my office and say, 'So-and-so called me. They're broke, but I'm not giving their money back.' Harold was a very twisted man."

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Photo via Flickr user Len ​Matthews

1994 came and went, and the world was still standing. Which, you'd think, would end someone's credibility and, thusly, their source of income. And donations did wane, but only for a time. Soon enough, the topic of apocalypse was dropped from Camping's show and things normalized. "When Harold would shut up and be normal, people would support the organization," said Tuter. But while he was normal on-air, away from the microphone Camping was crunching more numbers and planning for the biggest doomsday media blitz ever.

In 2003, Family Radio sold off a station in Stockton for $65 million. In 2005, they swapped their San Francisco-based FM station with CBS's AM station, netting $40 million in the deal. And between 1997 and 2011, they brought in over $216 million in donations. So when the time was right—in this case May 21, 2011—Camping and his puppet board of directors blanketed the world with their warnings. Park bench ads were purchased around the country. Over 3,000 billboards were installed around the world. And a five-car caravan toured America and Canada, handing out pamphlets that prepped unbelievers for the end. "We had a pool of about $100 million dollars," said Tuter, "and he spent it like no tomorrow."

So, just who spent their time and money for this nonsense? One ​oft-quoted report told of a New York transportation agency worker who donated $150,000 of his savings to Camping's doomsday cause.

"One striking thing about the group/movement was its diversity, in both racial, ethnic terms, and socio-economic terms," said Charles Sarno, an associate professor of sociology at Holy Names University who's spent the past few years ​writing a book about Camping and Family Radio. "The educational backgrounds appeared to vary greatly from Ph.D.s to high school graduates. And the group did seem to attract a disproportionate number of engineers and engineering types, like Camping himself." 

Sarno also doesn't use the word "cult" when describing Family Radio, due to its pejorative connotations. "Family Radio has traversed all points on this spectrum and it currently 'fluctuates,' depending on the message being broadcast and who is listening." Like sports radio, in other words—just because a certain show has super-fans doesn't mean they're into the entire channel.

But just because it's not a "cult" doesn't mean it's benign. When you reach millions of true believers, you're going to wind up attracting some nuts. Tuter claims he personally received death threats for his skepticism. "We were a step away from Jonestown," he said. "In fact, Harold Camping was very enamored with Jim Jones. We had equipment that used to belong to People's Temple. He loved to show it off."

Even true believers had to reevaluate things when, on May 22, the world was still here. (Camping half-heartedly "clarified" that his May 21 prediction regarded final judgement, while the actual day of apocalypse wasn't until October 21. By that point, most folks didn't even have it in them to make fun.) "Many coped by deferring to the Bible and God as their ultimate source of truth," said Helen Shoemaker, Sarno's co-writer. "Seemingly, but respectfully, putting Camping in the benign position of a wise, but fallible human."

And so began the long slide into debt. The network, valued at $135 million in 2007, dwindled down to $29.2 million by the end of 2011 due to the spending spree. Donations dropped precipitously. In 2012, the network received only $6.2 million in donations, which seems like a lot, but doesn't come close to the $26 million in yearly expenses they needed to stay afloat. And unlike '94, Family Radio no longer had their ace-up-their-sleeve: the ability to ask new listeners for donations. "They sold the three biggest stations," said Tuter. "It's basically dying a slow death."

Following the false predictions, Camping apologized on a now-removed blog post, saying " ​even the most sincere and zealous of us can be mistaken." In fact, Camping has been excised from the Family Radio website. One of the remaining artifacts is a ​somewhat depressing video where he explains why there are "anti-Harold Camping websites on the internet." On December 15, 2013, after roughly 13 failed predictions, the end finally came for the 92-year-old Camping. He died in his Alameda home due to complications from a fall.

But Family Radio isn't dead just yet. And neither is Harold Camping.

If you live in the Bay Area, flip on 610 AM. If you're in Buffalo, try 89.9 FM. Or just forgo terrestrial radio and stream online. But my suggestion is, if you find yourself driving through the middle of nowhere late at night, unplug your iPod and give the Scan button a push. If it's around 6:30 on a weeknight, and your radio happens to pick up the right station, you might just hear the man's voice.

"I've had many people tell me that was what attracted them. It was his voice," said Tuter. "They were seduced."

Listen for a few minutes, but do so hesitantly. This is the voice, after all, that tricked people into believing the world was coming to an end.

(Emails to Family Radio went unreturned, as did my calls, although I'd like to point out that the woman answering the phone was very pleasant.)

Follow Rick on ​Twitter

As the chairman of Egypt's Zamalek soccer club was leaving his office on August 17, 2014, he was the target of what he claims was an assassination attempt. Mortada Mansour told the authorities that he was attacked by his team's own fans, a branch of the country's highly organized soccer enthusiasts known as Ultras. In the weeks that have followed, approximately 50 Ultras have been arrested, some of them tortured, and now a movement that is made up of tens of thousands of young Egyptian men faces charges of terrorism. But I have spoken to lawyers, journalists, and Ultras who believe the crackdown involves more than the accusations of a powerful sports figure or an uptick in soccer hooliganism. Many feel it is a campaign of revenge led by the state security forces that dominated Egypt before the revolution.

The Egyptian attorney Tarek El-Awady leads the defense team for the Ultras. "There is absolutely no evidence for any of this," he told me. "Mansour had television cameras there at three AM and a lawyer in his office, as if they knew. His injuries, the doctor said, couldn't have come from a gun. He claims he was shot at fourteen times, but the police could find only one casing, five hundred meters away. The casing was from a shotgun, and it's impossible to hit a target with a shotgun from that distance."

I recently visited El-Awady's office, tucked away in a dusty backstreet of northern Cairo. The defense team he heads with Dr. Walid El-Kateeb is all that stands between these young men and the brutal Egyptian prison system. For a lawyer, El-Awady was startlingly bold in telling me that the allegations had been entirely cooked up: "The ten arrested weren't captured at the scene-their houses were raided after. How did anyone know who they were?"

El-Awady confirmed rumors of detainee abuse, saying, "They were tortured in the presence of chairman Mansour. The confessions forced out of them were broadcast on TV, and when the kids made it to the court they all denied it."

Attorney Tarek El-Awady, right, and Dr. Walid El-Kateeb, from the Ultras' legal defense team

When millions of Egyptians took to the streets in 2011 to protest under the chant of "Bread, freedom, and social justice," the response of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president for 30 years, was anything but warm. The citizens who marched to Tahrir Square, high on the dream that they could create a better country, soon met the bullets and batons of Egypt's only efficient infrastructure: the ruthless state security forces. It is yet to be proved whether the orders to shoot came directly from the top-that is, from Mubarak's desk-but what is known for sure is that victory came from the bottom. The Ultras played a pivotal role in taking over the streets and ousting the leader of the world's oldest nation.

Now, after four presidents and three years of upheaval, the feeling in the new Egypt under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a former general, is not so much that things are back to the way they were as that things are worse. In the name of combating extremism, the government is suppressing any group that may voice dissent. The previously governing Muslim Brotherhood is now an official terrorist organization, and leftist activists, secularists, journalists, gay people, and NGOs are being made to fall in line or face imprisonment.

El-Awady told me more about the charges the Ultras are facing. Responding to the injustice they saw in the assassination arrests, Zamalek Ultras quickly gathered to demonstrate, the situation turned violent, and by the next day 78 had been arrested. Half were randomly let go, and the rest joined the hunger-striking journalists and activists jailed under Egypt's controversial new Protest Law, which effectively criminalizes any demonstration. Then, capitalizing on the hysteria, chairman Mansour went for the prize. He personally filed a lawsuit to have the whole country's Ultra movement follow in the footsteps of the Muslim Brotherhood and be officially branded an illegal terrorist network.

If the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination attempt turn out to be true, it won't surprise many. Mansour is a notorious figure from the pre-revolution establishment, a lawyer and loose-cannon television commentator who previously faced charges of orchestrating the bizarre Battle of the Camels, in which sword-wielding thugs rode into Tahrir Square and attacked protesters during the first days of the revolt. Mansour's time as chairman of Zamalek has inspired little enthusiasm among the team's Ultras White Knights: On October 12 he told the press that they'd thrown nitric acid on him as he prepared to unveil the team's new coach. The Ultras replied by posting a video of the incident on their Facebook page, informing him it was actually urine and calling him a "dog of the system."

El-Awady also believes that Mansour is a "tool being used by a bigger force" and that the security forces are flexing their muscles. "Their strategy is, if we can't control them, we'll put them in jail."

Many share the sentiment that the government is targeting the Ultras in order to put them in their place as a retribution for their displays of strength since the revolution. In early 2012 a match between Port Said's Al Masry club and the visiting Al Ahly team of Cairo became one of the bloodiest encounters in soccer history. As the game was ending, men from the Al Masry terraces invaded the pitch, leaped into the away stands, and set about attacking Al Ahly fans with knives, stones, and bottles. It was a bloodbath as people were thrown from the stands and fans died in the arms of soccer coaches hiding in the locker rooms. It didn't take long for questions to surface about how it had been orchestrated. Witnesses reported that the usual searches hadn't been carried out at the entryways, that the gates separating the fans had been opened, and that the lights had been turned off and the exit doors locked as people tried to escape. Many Ultras believe that baltageya (hired thugs) were present and that the security forces either ignored the massacre unfolding beneath their gaze or, much worse, watched their plan play out as intended.

Port Said is a tragedy that is deeply ingrained in the identity of Al Ahly's Ultras Ahlawy. Their 74 martyrs are commemorated on innumerable T-shirts and on many walls throughout Cairo. Since then, every major football game has been closed to fans, who can now only gather to watch matches on the TVs of cheap outdoor coffee shops. The convictions and death sentences handed down to those allegedly responsible sparked more armed street battles the following year, but with such strong suspicions of conspiracy it's hard to feel that justice has been served.

Ultras in Egypt have a long history of aggression-the biggest match of the season has been called "the world's most violent rivalry"-but as pro-ISIS crowds in Morocco are filmed chanting stadium hits, could the fan groups of the Middle East actually be breeding terrorists?

Whatever the motives of their violence, tensions will only increase if the government refuses to ease its grip. "The Ultras' main driver is soccer," James M. Dorsey, an expert on Middle Eastern politics and soccer, told me. "But the attempt to criminalize the Ultras, coupled with the ban on spectators and the mounting general repression in the country, is a recipe for escalation and radicalization."

I put the idea to two soccer fans, Nino and Mohammed, at a Cairo café where many Ultras smoke shisha and let off steam. "Nobody will ever forget the blood of their brother who has been killed in front of them, so of course they will want to take revenge," Mohammed said, though he added that few desire the ultimate form of retribution. "We don't want martyrs. We don't want to have to take revenge on someone, someone else's brother... But we don't know what to do. After the Port Said massacre we had hold of someone who was responsible, and people had weapons, but we couldn't kill him. We couldn't do what he did."

Nino shed some light on the shadowy logic he saw at work. "They are trying to push us to be more violent so instead of using a stick they can use bullets," he said.

Nino had been involved with the clashes leading up to the revolution, but given the current political climate, he was eager to distance himself from previous activities. He banged our café table with the anger of someone frustrated by a force bigger than he could challenge. "The thing is, I don't know whom I should be angry at-the interior ministry, the security services, people from Port Said... How can I define my anger toward them? I'm barehanded. I don't have the ability to face the people I should take revenge on."

When I asked them about the possibility of joint action from all of Egypt's Ultras against the state, Nino nodded as Mohammed told me that "we are all on the same page now. We have one case we are fighting for-to return to the stadiums, against the will of the government."

Back at El-Awady's office, I asked whether the Ultras could become more militant if the government's stranglehold on them continues. His response touched on the scale of what's at stake. "I hope it doesn't happen. I hope the government doesn't continue to push them, because at this point it could be a very critical situation. It could be a national security issue."

The world is full of stuff, and some of that stuff is cool and freaky. Almost everything in the world has a Wikipedia page, so it stands to reason that Wikipedia is home to lot of cool and freaky tidbits. The problem is, Wikipedia's so crammed with knowledge that it's hard to get your finger on the truly good nuggets of weirdness. Or it was hard, before ​Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club started doing all the digging for you.

CFWC is a 28,000-member Facebook group committed to finding every insane piece of knowledge buried in the Wiki annals. It's the only group I belong to, and for good reason: In the last few hours, the group has taught me that sleeping with an electric fan on migh​t kill me, I learned that the lowest-grossing movie of all time, Zz​yzx Road, only took in $30 at the US box office, and I absorbed more facts about pane​er than I could ever possibly use or need. Beyond the esoteric factoids, however, I've learned something more fundamental: People who are into Wikipedia are incredibly pedantic and sensitive to the slightest hint of something giving offense to someone.

That paneer Wikipedia post, for instance, somehow devolved into a platform for Cool Freaks commenters to argue that the world paneer simply means cheese, so giving it a separate Wikipedia page is a blatant form of Orientalism. Anybody who commented with skepticism—or just wanted to point out that, you know, it's kind of insane to turn a Facebook post about a cheese Wiki into a stage to rail against Orientalism—were immediately banned from the group.

Make an off-color comment? Banned. Laugh at the "anthropomorphism" trigger warning? Banned. Question why a Sonic the Hedgehog video game needs a "zoophilia" warning? Well, there's a cutscene where he kisses a princess. And you're banned just for asking.

My roommate turned me onto Cool Freaks six months ago. He has since been banned from Cool Freaks for making a bad joke on Facebook. Not a joke that he made on a Cool Freaks' post. Just a joke he made on someone's Facebook wall, which one of the Cool Freaks admins happened to read. Banned.

Periodically I see outbursts from members of CFWC pop up in my feed—people driven to Network-style meltdowns about the fascist hypersensitivity of the Cool Freaks' moderators. Those tirades quickly disappear as the writer is booted and the page is scrubbed clean again.

Ex-CFWC member Christian Larson was hooked from the first moment he found the page on Facebook. "I loved the group," Larson told me. "It was a bunch of nerds sharing obscure Wikipedia stories and discussing them. It felt like what social media should be all about.

"There was an obvious atmosphere of political correctness, for lack of a better term," he added. "But I thought, What's so wrong with that?"

Larson spread the group around to his friends, and soon their feeds were full of Wikipedia posts about    toast s​andwiches and AlphaS​marts and p​otato chip collectors.

Then his friend posted an article on a particularly cool and freaky Revolutionary War unit, and everything changed. The comments erupted, crying "Imperialism!" and "white dominance!" and berating Larson's friend from sharing the article. The guy, a college professor and staunch liberal, was completely caught off guard. His post had become the battleground for a back-and-forth about colonialism with the trigger-happy moderators laying down bans left and right.

"The gleeful way they banned people was chilling," Larson said to me. "I know it's lame for a white straight man to accuse someone of bullying. But there's no other word for it."

The professor was banned. His posts were deleted. Cool Freaks moved on as if nothing happened.

Larson eventually fell victim to the banhammer as well.  "One day, someone posted an article about the Dresden bombings, which caused quite a stir," he said. "Eventually [a commenter] made the point that, in war, there aren't any good guys. I was reminded of a ​famous UK comedy sketch where two Nazis sit around a campfire wondering whether or not they're bad guys."

He tossed in a funny quote from the sketch and headed to work. That night, he couldn't manage to log back onto the Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club Facebook page. Apparently, Larson—an activist who had been part of the protest movement against the Iraq War—had ignited a firestorm. Cool Freaks' labeled him a "Nazi sympathizer" and "genocide apologist" and then brought down a ban.

He tried to return to the group under a different account to apologize for the apparently tasteless joke, but they just ran him out again. The group soldiered on, posting cool and freaky articles while ejecting anyone who questions the need for a trigger warning for "ghosts."

With the CFWC nearing 30,000 members and hundreds of banned members piling up, displaced Facebook refugees who miss the stream of strange Wikipedia pages have come up with a few ways to combat their grief. Along with 700 other ex-members, Larson has started a rival Facebook group called Cool Nerds Trivia Club. Other banned members go crawling back to the Cool Freaks mods through a rehabilitation Facebook group called the "Banned Members Reinstatement Program." There they can state the offense that got them banned, prove to a moderator that they are repentant, and be welcomed back into the Cool Freaks family.

"It's just Facebook," one Cool Freaks' member said to me in Brooklyn yesterday. (He asked to remain nameless, out of fear of the mods.) "I respect Cool Freaks' commitment to inclusion and being mindful towards a topic that could be sensitive. I respect their vision to keep things civil.

"But if Sonic the Hedgehog getting a peck on the cheek from a cartoon princess triggers someone's bestiality PTSD, the internet might not be the best place for them anyway. I just want to share strange Wikipedia articles without being afraid that my phrasing will appear offensive."

The guy paused. "I'm really going to miss the group when I get banned for talking to you."

Follow River Donaghey on ​Twitt​er.

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Photo via Flickr user ​lu_lu

On Tuesday, a Japanese court decided that the family of a 24-year-old man who killed himself after being forced to work 190 overtime hours a month was due 51.7 million yen ($503,000) in damages. The man, who isn't named in media reports, started working for the Sun Challenge steakhouse chain in 2007 and worked his way up to manager in 2009 while suffering abuse at the hands of his superiors. He hung himself in 2010, which judge Aki​ra Yamada ruled was at least partially the fault of his employer and two fellow employees."With only one holiday given to him every several months, the psychological load of prolonged work and power harassment caused his mental disorder," the judge wrote.

Although Karojisatsu, which translates to "suicide from overwork," has been a phenomenon in Japan for decades, this is the first time that an employer has been considered legally culpable for causing an employee's mental collapse without a court also claiming the worker was negligent for agreeing to work an insane schedule. A lawyer for the deceased man's famil​y called it "epoch making," and it certainly could be a watershed moment that could lead to a revamping of the country's famously workaholic culture.

When a 29-year-old man working for Japan's largest newspaper company died from a stroke in 1969, it was referred to a​s "occupational sudden death." Ultimately, 18 similar cases in the newspaper industry were reported over the next decade, and hundreds of others were recorded, particularly among corporate types. The slew of strokes and heart attacks birthed the term karoshi, or "death by overwork," and the National Defense Council set up a karoshi hotline in​ 1988.

By then, suicide from overwork had become a social issue in Japan. Not only were people working so hard that their bodies gave out, they were feeling so trapped by excessive hours or unrealistic sales goals that they felt death was their only escape. Matters only got worse after Japan's bubble econom​y burst around 1991, because employers b​egan using fewer people to accomplish the same amount of work.

Although a 2007 report showed that Japanese workers were working fewer hours than their American counterparts, th​e Economist ​claimed the figures were misleading thanks to the rather self-explanatory Japanese concept of "free overtime." "During the past 20 years of economic doldrums, many companies have replaced full-time workers with part-time ones," wrote the Economist. "Regular staff who remain benefit from lifetime employment but feel obliged to work extra hours lest their positions be made temporary."

It's encouraging that the number of families receiving compensation for victims of Karoshi and Karojisatsu seems to be on ​the rise since 1997. This latest case, though, is an important one, because the ruling did not specify that the victim was partially to blame for working around the clock—it's a sign of recognition that in many employer-employee relationships, if your boss asks you to come in on Saturday or stay an extra couple hours, you don't have the leverage to say no. With any luck, it'll put a dent in a culture of conforming to unhealthy work habits.

"This is a ruling that encourages workers suffering from prolonged work and power harassment," the family's lawyer told r​eporters.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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The section of the Berlin Wall next to the Brandenburg Gate on the 1st of December, 1989. Photo by SSGT F Lee Corkran ​via Wikimedia Commons

Twenty-five years ago this Saturday, the Berlin Wall began to fall. On November 9, 1989, the East German government announced that all citizens from the German Democratic Republic could visit West Germany freely, concluding 28 years of strict border controls. That evening, Ossis overpowered the East German guards and started streaming through checkpoints, the Wessis on the other side greeting them with flowers and champagne.

Before long, the mauerspechte (wall woodpeckers) turned up to join the party. Charging the wall with hammers, they set about demolishing what had become the physical embodiment of the Iron Curtain, a 70-mile-long concrete barricade between Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc. Its destruction—which was finished off properly by bulldozers a few months later—heralded Germany's reunification and came to symbolize a pivotal moment in the Cold War finally thawing out.

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A photo of Laurent on the front page of the German magazine Bunte (Image courtesy of DPA

The photograph that made the front pages the following day was of a punk beating the shit out of the wall with a hammer. Some reports pegged the man as East German, but as I discovered a quarter of a decade later, he's a actually Frenchman named Laurent who still lives in Berlin.

"This thing had been there for 30 years and everyone was afraid of it," he told me recently, recalling the night he'd hauled himself atop the 12-foot-tall section of wall near the Brandenburg Gate. "Nobody knew what was on the other side—we could have been shot. But everything went OK."

Laurent had made his way there after work, grabbing a hammer "in case we ran into trouble with the East German police, and also to bring back a souvenir". When he arrived, the checkpoint at Bornholmer Strasse had been open for around an hour and a half, but the crowds of people—citizens from both sides, reunited families, drunk men with sledgehammers—were still only beginning to comprehend what had just happened.

"There were already a few guys on top of the wall who were trying to crack the concrete, but they were doing a bad job of it," said Laurent. "They were hammering the flat top of the wall. I took my hammer and showed them how to do it."

Laurent is a stonemason by trade, so had a good bit of experience when it came to smashing up massive bits of rock. Squatting, he began to chip away at the wall; those below collected the pieces falling to the ground and Laurent kept a couple of chunks for himself. Spurred on by the crowd, he kept hammering away for the best part of 30 metres, while photographers clambered to get a photo of this man in a mohawk making international history.

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Laurent today, holding the photo David Burnett took of him, the hammer he used to destroy the wall, and a couple of shards that he kept for himself.

A photographer from DPA, Germany's leading photography agency, was the first to capture the scene. Moments later, the photojournalist David Burnett took a color shot for TIME magazine, and Laurent's face was on its way into the hands of millions of readers around the world.

By Monday morning, Laurent's photo was in every newspaper. "Everybody was taking the piss out of me at work. I kept a low profile for a while," he said. I asked why some papers had reported him as being from the GDR. "The East Germans used to wear cheap jeans, just like the ones I wore that evening. So they thought I was one of them."

The photo of Laurent was distributed by AFP, it has appeared in the French newspaper Libération at least four times, it's in the history books German kids study at school, and it even made its way onto a commemorative stamp on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. However, there's no trace of the photographer's name anywhere; the DPA don't appear to have any record of who took the picture and there are no clues online. What is known, though, is that it was certainly one of the very first images shot of people tearing down the wall.

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Laurent posing in front of a portion of the wall that's still standing in Berlin

"You can tell it by the state of wall," Laurent explains, telling me that dating photos of the "Wall of Shame" has since become his hobby. "On my picture, the wall is intact. On most other pictures, it's already been damaged all over. Nobody pays attention to the concrete."

In the days after November 9, breaking down the wall became a business—everybody wanted a piece, and to have their photo taken as they were hacking away at it. As early as Saturday the 11th, small stands appeared renting hammers and chisels at three marks for 15 minutes, with some collecting as many fragments as they could in the hope of selling them. The wall business boomed for a year until its total destruction was finally complete.

Today, entire sections of the wall are still for sale on eBay—the portions tagged with graffiti going for the highest prices. Viktor Pawlowski, a construction entrepreneur from West Germany, was certain the souvenir market would take him into retirement. And he was right; he bought nearly 300 tons of the wall and provides most of the pieces you'll find in souvenir shops today.

If you personally happen to be in the market for an inanimate piece of history, a 2.75-ton slab of wall—measuring 12 by three feet—can be yours for a meager €7,000 ($8,700).

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Laurent in his apartment

A lot has changed in Berlin since the fall of the wall, and that's exactly not to everyone's liking. "I wish the city had evolved in a different way. It's much tougher today, and it's quite ironic to think I've played a role in this," said Laurent. "You can't regret the fall, but for me the years before it were the best."

Laurent was 30 in 1989, nearly as old as the wall. Born in the French town of Tours, he moved to Berlin for the squats and the punk scene. Before the wall was demolished, West Berlin included vast tracts of industrial wasteland and its residents were exempted from military service, which generally went down pretty well with the anti-militarists, hippies, punks, leftists, and artists who called it home.

Laurent stopped working a number of years ago after suffering from health problems, and has been making art ever since. His work is composed of recycled materials, like cooking utensils that he bends and welds together to create strange, abstract figures of musicians. He's also fascinated by the ties worn by businessmen—"How do they pick them?"—and uses them to form the central characters of his collages and paintings; Jesus on the cross, Marie Antoinette under the guillotine and Joan of Arc on the pyre. He gives his work away to friends or keeps it in the flat he's been living in for the past 25 years, stored among his vast record collection, gig posters, poetry, literature, political essays and the artwork given to him by friends. All his souvenirs.

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A crane removing a section of the wall in December, 1989. Photo by SGGT F Lee Corkan ​via Wikimedia Commons.

Today, Berlin looks nothing like the city Laurent moved to over three decades ago. The squats have closed and been turned into art galleries, bars or loft apartments. At the base of where the wall once stood, the empty land that used to belong to Berlin's Turkish working class is now being sold off at a fortune to developers. It's been a long time since you could spot any of the hippy community's tractors and farm animals circulating around town, and May Day—which traditionally drew people from all over Germany to battle with the police—now looks more like a shit Lollapalooza, only with political placards instead of those flags that very annoying people insist on waving around in front of the stage.

For Laurent and those who knew the city back then, the mid-90s were a golden age for Berlin. The city had finally reunified and had an influx of people from the East thirsty for the counterculture of the West. However, as often happens when an area is both cool and dirt cheap, the property tycoons moved in and made quick work of coating over the era of secret Dead Kennedys gigs and Bowie–Iggy Pop parties with brushed marble and bespoke bathrooms. Last September, Tacheles—Berlin's largest artist squat, located right in the middle of the city—was sold for €150 million ($186 million) to American investors who plan to turn it into shops and offices.

Today, Berlin is trying to establish itself as Germany's great modern capital. It's the fall of the wall that ultimately allowed the city to get to this point, and it's clearly a positive that neither Germany nor Berlin are no longer divided. But it's safe to say the Berlin that once was has well and truly disappeared. 

Guillaume Fontaine / Transterra Media

Translation by Dominique Nonnet and Melike Ulgezer

We've been hearing a lot lately about heroin overdoses and new drugs to combat them like  ​Naloxone, which can reverse an opiate overdose instantly. Police and fire departments are equipping their officers and EMTs with the drug antidote to help save lives across America. Statistics sho​w that the rate of accidental overdose deaths has been on a steady climb in the United States in the last ten years, and Naloxone has been a game-changer.

But as heroin use surges among the general public, the drug has become a mainstay in the American prison system, where Naloxone is still hard to come by.

​According to the US Bureau of Prisons, "Substance use disorders are highly prevalent among inmate populations, affecting an estimated 30 to 60 percent of inmates." With plenty of time to kill and nothing better to do, prisoners get high. It's just a matter of getting the drug in and making a homemade syringe.

"There's nothing better than shooting up some brown tar or—better yet, China White—when you're doing a bid," a prisoner we'll call Chance tells me. Chance is from Pittsburgh, 36 years old, and a three-time loser. He's in on a 20-year sentence for selling cocaine and is a member of a prison-based gang. He is heavily involved in the drug scene, using, abusing and smuggling heroin with frequency.

"I always make sure heroin is available in whatever prison I'm at," Chance says. "It takes the edge off and just makes the days go by."

For inmates who are addicts, overdosing is a constant threat, and they don't have Naloxone as a safety net. While the Bureau of Prisons National Formulary lists Naloxone as an available drug, it limits use for detox purposes only. "It is on our formulary," BOP spokesman Chris Burke told me. "The formulary is a list of drugs that have been pre-approved."

Perhaps Naloxone will be used to treat prison drug overdoses in the future, but until that day comes, prisoners will continue to combat overdoses the old-fashioned way. With the federal Narcotic Treatment Act of 1974 restricting the use of methadone for opiate dependence, there are no good options.

"I've seen many dudes OD in here," Chance says. "All you can do is get some ice and pack it on their balls and hope for the best." Notifying the correctional officers (COs) or medical staff that a prisoner is ODing is frowned upon by convicts and can quickly get the good Samaritan labeled as a rat or snitch.

"In prison the only thing lower than a rat or snitch is a chomo (child molester)." Chance says. "One time my homeboy and me shot up some junk with a binky and my homeboy nodded off. He laid down on the bunk, and next thing I knew he was turning blue. I ran to the ice machine and got some ice, put it in a towel and went back and packed it on his balls. I mean, what else could I do? I couldn't call the CO. I was high as a kite."

When prisoners shoot up heroin, they're begging for trouble. Not only are they susceptible to an overdose with no viable treatment available, but they also are likely to share needles, as syringes are scarce. (In case you're wondering, there is no needle exchange program in prison.)

"We just make a binky with a pen tube and guitar string," Chance says. "They aren't that hard to make. And if someone has heroin and you got the binky, then they got to kick down to use the needle. It doesn't matter about sharing needles because we are trying to get high. When you are doing time you just don't give a fuck." This leads to addicts in prison catching diseases like AIDS and Hep C.

Luckily, in the case of Chance's homeboy, death didn't rear its ugly head. The guy came out of it and was able to stand up, vomit, and walk it off. But prisoners under the influence often panic and leave their fellow user by the wayside as they seek to get the hell away from a possible crime scene.

"Man, that shit was messed up," Chance says. "Dude was in my cell. If he died in there, I woulda had a hell of a time explaining that. It woulda been a serious situation and  beaucoup drama for me." Drug addiction is a health problem, of course, but in a security-conscious environment like a prison, it becomes a custody concern, too. With the no-snitching code in full effect, most inmates would rather exit the area then call for help.

And without a drug like Naloxone within arm's reach, it would be too late to revive the prisoner even if medical staff were notified. With heroin widely available, an overdose is a daily threat. That's just the reality of shooting dope in prison.

"I've seen dudes die. I've seen them swallow balloons and they burst," Chance says. "No one is gonna say anything because ain't no one trying to catch another case." Safety takes a back seat to maintaining order of the institution. Prison is a reactive environment, not a proactive one.

"If the balloons burst in someone's stomach, that's it. He's fucked up," Chance says. "It's up to him to get himself to medical. We do what we can for people, but that's the code, everyone knows what the deal is. Ain't no one trying to see someone die, but when it comes down to you or me, I'm going with me."

The convict code is the law of the jungle—survival of the fittest at all times. It's a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil and speak-no-evil mentality, and this leads to tragedy.

The problem is compounded by the lack of effective medical services in most prisons. Stephen C. Richards, professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of The Marion Experiment: Long-Term Solitary Confinement and the Supermax Movement, told me: "Most prisons have very limited medical services. One large prison with 2,000 prisoners might have one or two part-time nurses that come to the institution once or twice a week. Prison systems have limited health care budgets, and few medical professionals want to work inside prisons."

Richards wonders if "maybe prison administrators don't care if a few junkie convicts expire."

Surprisingly often, prisoners don't care all that much either.

"Some dudes want to die. They are doing life and 20 and 30 years and they just don't care." Chance says. "All they want to do is get slammed so they don't have to think about all the time they gotta do. I can attest to that. I am a perfect example. If I'm not getting high, I'm trying to find some or figuring out a way to get some in. That's just how I do my time."

Packing ice on an overdosing addict's testicles is not a viable treatment, so let's hope the Bureau of Prisons gets it together on Naloxone sooner than later.

Seth ​Ferranti, author of Prison Stories, the Street Legends series, and The Supreme Team, has written for the Daily Beast, the Fix, and other outlets. Follow him on Twit​te​r.

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Photos by Baijie Curdt-Christiansen

​Lars Messerschmidt is ​Denmark's only exorcist. While you're busy going to school or getting drunk, he's out there fighting Satan and saving people from a life of demonic possession. Though Denmark is ​officially a Christ​ian country, there has been a ​massive decrease in true God-fea​ring believers as of late. This has—at least according to Lars—put Denmark on Satan's top friends list.
​
​Being curious, we sought him out for a chat and he invited us to his apartment in one of Copenhagen's older neighborhoods, Bredgade. The apartment's Gothic architectural style seemed very apt given our topic of conversation. Once up the winding staircase, he sat us in his living room on a low leather couch completely surrounded by religious paraphernalia. He poured us a cup of coffee and we had a little talk about his profession and how he saves folks from a life of fiddling themselves with a crucifix.

VICE: Exorcism. Where to start?
Lars Messerschmidt: I started in the 70s. It was back then when I started noticing more and more physical manifestations of demons. I remember this prayer meeting where a possessed woman was thrown back by something. Then one person yelled, "leave Satan!" It worked. I started seeing a lot of things and that's how I became interested. 

How many exorcisms have you performed?
I don't know exactly, but it's in the hundreds. True demonic possession can take years to exorcise. Right now, my calendar is booked because there seems to be more possessions than ever. My Spanish colleagues have told me that there are tons of people in Latin America in need of exorcism. It's because they mix Christianity and their old native beliefs. That particular religious cocktail is demonic. 

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So how exactly does it work?
People come to me because they are tormented by demons. I usually ask the patients to describe their symptoms and after they answer, I try to make a diagnosis, similar to a doctor. It's important for me to distinguish whether it's a psychological problem, or if the person is actually possessed by a demon. 

How can you tell the difference?
We have our ways. We use different tests—like a crucifix or holy water. Demons don't like either. I will ask my clients to hold the crucifix, and often, if they're possessed by a demon, they can't. We also sprinkle holy water on them.
​
​Yesterday, my client couldn't even look at the crucifix. I sprayed holy water on her and she said it burned her skin. 

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Meaning she was possessed by a demon?
Yes, it's my belief that this was a demon. We didn't finish, but we'll reconvene when she wants to. We'll continue our talk and at one point, I will have to perform an exorcism.

What exactly do you mean by an exorcism?
Exorcism is a special form of prayer, where the exorcist, in the name of God, commands the evil spirit to disappear. Normally, it doesn't want to. So it develops into a struggle, sometimes a physical one. It can literally throw a person to the ground. In such cases, we need some strong men to hold the person down.
​
​Thankfully, it's usually a lot less dramatic. Demons can cause unconsciousness, depending on how powerful they are. Sometimes, the demon will take over and reveal itself mid-sentence. After a couple of minutes of exorcism, the demon will leave and the person will pick up exactly were they left off, not knowing what has happened. 

Is there multiple prayers that work? Or just the one?
There are a couple of different ones. I have one in Latin, one in German, and one in Danish. What language I use depends on the situation. It's a well-known fact that demons understand all languages. 

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That is a well known fact, yes. So what's an exorcist's relationship to the Vatican?
This summer, ​the Pope approved our ​organiz​ation. It wasn't the profession itself he approved. Exorcists have been around as long as the church itself. To be an exorcist used to be an isolated occupation. That's why this organization was founded: to give exorcists the possibility to meet at a conference once a year. The organization also offers the possibility to educate oneself to become an exorcist, either at a university in the Vatican or in the US. However, first you need to be a priest. 

How many members does your organization have? 
I know that there were between 250 and 300 participants at the last conference. Everyone was allowed to bring one assistant, so that accounted for some of the guests. There was quite a few doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists.

Really? Did they share your opinions on demons?
I know one American psychiatrist. The first time I met him, I asked, "Do you believe that there are people, who are possessed by demons?" And he replied that he did. He's a consultant for a church in New York that deals with exorcism. They always ask for his opinion. That's the way it should work, I always ask for a person's medical history. 

Do you ever just conclude that it's a medical condition?
You can ask yourself if many of the people hospitalized with mental diseases aren't actually sick, but are in fact possessed by demons. You can't treat possession with medication. Maybe the person will become docile, but there will still be demonic activity. 

Why do people get possessed?
There are two reasons. The first is that you did something stupid, thereby opening the door to demonic activity. Alternative healing, new age stuff, clairvoyance, or tarot cards. That's the door to the world of the occult, and that's the world of demons. Some clairvoyants really want to help people, but are just naive. Others are just a tool for the devil. Abuse, like hash or sex, will also open the door for the devil.

Sex and hash, eh? Any other culprits?
Curses. I didn't believe it to begin with, but it's true. Many Africans are haunted by demons. I always ask them if there's anybody who hates them. If you have enemies, they will often go to a witch doctor and ask them to curse you and the devil will gladly oblige. 

Surely if you curse someone you're opening the gates to Hell?
They're in collusion with the devil; they're Satan's tools. It's scary. I helped a woman who had been cursed. Doctors hadn't been able to help her. We asked God if someone had cursed her. She remembered her uncle had given her a glass of juice when she was 15 and it just so turned out that the juice had been cursed. We prayed and asked God to help her. Suddenly she went to the toilet and began to vomit violently. Ten minutes later, she told me that she had been throwing up physical objects, like nails. That's very common after curses. She spent the night throwing up, but the next day she was free of her curse. 

A big part of our readers are young people—do you have any advice to them, so that they won't get possessed? Other than being vigilant with their orange juice.
They need to be careful. If they unwillingly get into a Satanic environment, they may be lost forever. Young people don't want to listen, they think they know everything and that's really dangerous. That's pride and the Devil will jump on that.