VICE CA

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The Los Angeles Temptation team. Image via Wikimedia Commons

The Lingerie Football League employs some of the toughest, most badass people in the world. It trains selected women hard, makes them thirsty for blood, spray tans ten shades of hell out of them, mics them up and lets them go HAM on a rival team. It was even renamed the "Legends Football League."

Being a female athlete is no easy job, with or without the push-up bras. Women who literally sweat for a living earn a hell of a lot less than their male counterparts. T he highest-paid female athlete in 2014 is Maria Sharapova, who banked $24.4 million. Which looks like an alright day at the office on it's own, but is shameful when you consider the fact that the highest-paid male athlete, Floyd Mayweather, netted $105 million over the same period

Eating disorders are also prolific among women in sports, and more than a third of female athletes are at risk of anorexia. In short, chicks have to fight tooth and nail to keep their heads above water.

Enter LFL, which promises women sporting glory and has recently started being screened on British sports channels and is making inroads in Europe. Oh, and when I say "sporting glory," it's in underwear that's smaller than most bikinis. You'd need a pretty comprehensive wax before stepping out on the field, which is a problem that the Atlanta Falcons almost certainly don't have.

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Another LFL player. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Make no mistake: Whatever they're wearing, these women in the uniforms are often incredible athletes who, like all football players, want to smash some skulls and claim glory for their team.

That's exactly what Tessa Barrera, 29, a former LFL captain who played for LA Temptation, was looking for. A Texas-born girl who grew up watching football and dreamed of being the first woman in the NBA, Barrera saw the game and wanted everything it promised—competition and a real athletic challenge. She played for three years before quitting in disgust at how players were treated. "I actually saw it on YouTube first," she says, "and the league has a website that posts tryout dates and makes the whole thing seem really glamorous. I was like: 'I can do this shit, these girls think they're so tough.'"

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/AJ6kawB23h4' width='640' height='360']

If you're unfamiliar with LFL, here's the basics: It's a seven-on-seven tackle sport that tours arenas and stadiums. It started out as halftime entertainment and was later made a sport in its own right in 2009. Now it has nearly half a million fans on Facebook alone. Said fans seem fairly evenly split between earnest female and male supporters but there's that "u pervert LOL" contingent who like to comment on the women's appearances with the occasional "who's the hottest LFL player?" article. But then you have to consider the massive Playboy shoots and the fact that it was founded by Mitch Mortaza, who is, among other things, a man.

There's an underbelly to the LFL that goes beyond gender politics-y stuff like, "Is it morally OK for women to have to prove their worth in bikinis?" Beneath the fierce glamour of it all, these women play an incredibly dangerous sport with, apparently, no insurance or healthcare. Numerous players have launched lawsuits against the company—and player Marirose Roach claims she broke her neck during a game. Oh, and here's the real sweetener: The players don't get paid.

Barrera, who lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, and is the first female sports anchor in south Texas on KZ Action 10 News, compares LFL to "being in a bad relationship."

"You love your significant other even though you know you deserve to be treated better," she says. "You think: 'Oh, I'll stay and things just have to get better,' but eventually you just have to say: 'No this isn't right.' I would die for football but I'm not gonna play for a bad person who mistreats people. Mitch fired a lot of the real athletes because they were talking about forming a union. Ever since then it's not what it could be."

And is the stuff about no money and no health insurance true?

"Yeah, and I broke my hand playing. I'm still paying some of those bills off," says Barrera. "My first year we earned peanuts compared to the males. In my second we earned squat. I got to visit a bunch of cool places and that was paid for, but dang, we sold out those arenas so I feel like that's the least they could have done. I thought I could play and at the very least live off of my earnings but that was not the case."

But isn't it all incredibly dangerous? Like, doesn't your skin get grazed when your body rubs against Astroturf and you're only wearing a bikini? "Yes, things get bloody," she says. "But when I played I was out for blood. I would bust my lips, jam fingers, and strain muscles in every game, but I loved it! You have to have a couple of screws loose to play football."

She's right. Watching these women—all taut thighs and abs—smash the hell out of each other is terrifying. They mic up two women per game to get a reality-TV feel as they yell out the filthiest gutter trash-talk you've heard in your life. On surface level it's thrilling to watch.

"We practiced three times a week for at least four hours—sometimes longer—to stay in shape," says Barrera. "Then we had to promote at all different kinds of marketing things, so I would say it's like a job, around 20 to 30 hours a week. But we gotta look good in our uniforms, too, so most of the girls did some additional form of training." She says she was at Crossfit "at least four times a week" and in the regular gym up to three times. "I was a machine," she says. "And don't forget, we aren't paid for any of this. Then you have to look tan on game days, have nice hair and makeup, because there are photo shoots and promos shot. None of which you are reimbursed for." Sounds like a riot.

A San Diego Seduction team huddle. Image via Wikimedia Commons

The auditioning process to play is similarly brutal, too. "There were over 200 girls at my tryout. We ran the 40-yard dash, did footwork, speed, and agility drills and we were required to wear athletic gear that showed off our figures, which, yes, is taken into account. We had to be marketable," Barrera explains. "I never considered myself a model, but I guess my looks were decent enough to get me through."

So, with all the (potentially bankrupting) caveats, why do it? "I was only interested in the football, really," says Barrera. "I'm not really concerned if a person doesn't take me seriously as an athlete because of the risqué photo shoots. I know what I can do."

Despite the hell that LFL put Barrera through, she's does have good memories. "I remember playing for a sold-out crowd in Mexico City, and I was just giving it to the O-line... I mean, I could not be stopped!" she grins. "They went through, like, three quarterbacks, and the crowd didn't know my name so they were shouting 'veinte, veinte, veinte' which is my number (20) in Spanish. I am Mexican-American so it was a super-proud moment for me. I was like these are mi gente [my people] and they fucking love me. No one can ever take that from me."

But as for the busted hands, necks and dreams of the women who put their lives in the LFL management? That points at something much more sinister in how the sports world sees its female members.

Follow Helen Nianias on Twitter

[body_image width='1984' height='1432' path='images/content-images/2014/11/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/09/' filename='devil-in-the-white-mansion-556-body-image-1415558685.jpg' id='2329']John E. du Pont's mansion in Newton Square, Pennsylvania. (AP Photo/Bob Olender)

We heard about the murder on the radio. I was in the car with my mom on the way home from the grocery store. Words like "shot" and "bullets" and "killed" seemed to be pronounced by the reporter louder than the others, but it could have been my young brain's way of experiencing shock, processing a reality I had only seen in action movies or heard about in history class.

My mom pulled the minivan into our garage, got out, shut the door, and left me and the groceries in the car. I watched her through the car window. She picked up the phone on the wall of our garage, a phone we barely used. I saw her mouth a few concerned words, nod, and hang up.

I cracked open the car door. She looked at me. "That was Kyle's mom," she said. "They're OK."

Kyle was my best friend growing up. His father was an Olympic gold medal wrestler, and his family lived on Foxcatcher Farm, an 800-acre piece of land in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, about a mile down the road from my childhood home. Kyle's father was on Team Foxcatcher, a wrestling team coached and sponsored by multimillionaire heir to the du Pont family fortune, John du Pont. Other members of Team Foxcatcher included Dave Schultz, an Olympic gold medal wrestler and friend of John du Pont, Dave's brother Mark Schultz, and a pre-WWE Kurt Angle. Dave Schultz's family lived on the farm and his two kids went to my elementary school. His son was Kyle's other best friend—at ten, everyone has at least two best friends.

On January 26th, 1996, John du Pont drove the short distance from his mansion to Dave Schultz's house on the estate. When John stepped out of his silver Lincoln Lincoln Town Car, Dave said, "Hi coach." Du Pont drew a revolver and fired three bullets into Dave, hitting him in the elbow, chest, and back. Du Pont fled to his mansion and stayed bunkered for two days until the police turned off the boilers in his home. When he came outside to fix the heater, he was taken into custody.

I was aware of John du Pont but didn't know much about him before the murder. I knew he lived in the white mansion off Goshen Road on Foxcatcher Farm. I remember seeing the mansion for the first time. I was gazing out the window of the car. A fence covered in vines and brush separated the street from the farm. As we drove by, empty space in the fence filled with white. I leaned in, looked closer.

"Who lives there?" I asked my mom.

She doesn't have to look over to know what I'm talking about.

"John du Pont, a very rich man."

Our car passed, and the mansion was gone. I wanted more, so I continued to look whenever I drove by. I knew where to look through the fence, almost like I had my own peephole. Over time I would make out more of the mansion, piecing together a full view in my brain—the pillars, the ghostly color, the two crescent moon windows perched on top of the black roof like the beady eyes of a rattlesnake.

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The author as a child

I spent many school nights and weekends at Kyle's house on Foxcatcher Farm, a half-mile away from du Pont's mansion. His family had three German Shepherds and a cat named Hitler, aptly titled for the smudge of black fur above its upper lip. (I remember the name offending my parents—completely understandably—although I don't remember it bothering me.) Everyone in the family was always nice to me, including Hitler.

Whenever I went to Kyle's house, I'd look at the du Pont mansion. I got a different view than I'd get from the street. There was no fence to separate us—only space. I could see the back of the house, which seemed flatter and longer than the front, probably because there weren't any pillars. There were also more windows, none of which provided any glimpse inside. I only saw darkness.

One time, some point before the murder, Kyle saw me looking. We stood there together, staring at a house bigger than the two of ours combined.

"What's du Pont like?" I asked.

"He coaches my dad's wrestling team," Kyle shrugged. "He's weird."

"How come?"

"Sometimes he goes to the wrestlers' homes and asks if they're allowed to come out and play."

We laughed, then laughed some more, then went and played Playstation.

I'd learn later that that "weird" behavior was actually symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. After du Pont's murder of Dave Schultz, who had planned to leave Team Foxcatcher for a coaching gig at Stanford University, the jury found du Pont guilty of third-degree murder and sentenced him to 13 to 30 years in prison. He was diagnosed as mentally ill, which feels like an understatement.

Du Pont would pick at his skin with a knife to remove the "alien bugs" burrowed in his flesh. He believed he was the American Dalai Lama, a Russian Czar, and Jesus Christ—all at the same time. He thought the trees on his farm moved and he made videos in an attempt to prove it. While in jail, du Pont had the walls of the buildings on the farm painted black as a sign to the community that the farm was mourning, hoping the people would be so upset that they would request his release so the original color could be restored.

A year or two before the murder, a group of us went to Kyle's house for his birthday party. A few friends from school were there, including me and Dave Schultz's son. After birthday cake, Kyle's dad invited all of the kids to go see du Pont's wrestling facility on the farm. "Do you guys want to go see where Olympians train?" Everyone was excited except for me. Viewing du Pont's white mansion from afar was as close as I wanted to get. I didn't know if he'd be at the facility, but I didn't want to take a chance. I stayed back and played basketball alone. I found a dead mouse and showed it to the guys when they came back.

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I don't remember the Schultz kids returning to school after the murder. Kyle told me they moved to San Francisco with their mom. I thought about them a lot, wondering what their life would be like without their dad, knowing he was gone forever. I remember thinking I'd spend more time with Kyle, considering his other best friend had moved across the country, but that's when Kyle and I started to grow apart. We were in fifth grade and would be going to different middle schools. I would continue in public school, and Kyle would go to a private school to wrestle on a full scholarship.

I never went back to Foxcatcher Farm, but the neighborhood drive past the white mansion was unavoidable. I'd drive down Goshen Road in the school bus, or in the car with my parents, or years later in my own car, and try to make out the mansion through the fence covered in vines and brush. I would look in the same spot I always used to look, but couldn't see it. Rather, I didn't want to see it.

After I left Newtown Square for college, I forgot about the du Pont murder. The memories resurfaced in 2010 when I heard that John du Pont died in jail at 72 years old and was buried in a red Team Foxcatcher wrestling singlet. I clicked through the news stories. Recent pictures of du Pont featured his hook nose prominently surrounded by the kind of deathly gray beard you can only grow in confinement. Again, I put my memories out of my mind, only to have them return in 2014 while watching trailers for the film Foxcatcher.

John du Pont's murder of Dave Schultz was the first time I grappled with evil, and in some ways, the bookend to my childhood. Pre-adolescent life was simple—school, friends' houses, the grocery store with mom. Then the devil, or some version of him, pokes his head out. He exists, and he lives where you least expect it—in the white mansion down the street, next door to your best friend.

The du Pont mansion was demolished in 2013.

Alex J. Mann is a writer living in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter.

Just in time for Veterans Day, President Obama's new Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald has announced the biggest shake-up in its history in response to this summer's scandal over long wait times and poor healthcare at veterans' hospitals around the country. But despite McDonald's promises, many hospital administrators at the center of the VA scandal remain on the agency's payroll.

In an interview with CNN Monday, McDonald said that the department has taken "disciplinary action" against 5,600 employees so far this year, with more firings to come. Additionally, McDonald said the department plans to hire roughly 28,000 medical personnel across the country to deal with the central cause of the delay.

"We are acting aggressively, expeditiously, and consistent with the law," McDonald told Wolf Blitzer. "This is going to be the largest reorganization of the Department of Veterans Affairs since its establishment."

McDonald, a former CEO of Proctor & Gamble, was appointed to lead the agency three months ago, after his predecessor Eric Shinseki resigned over news reports and internal investigations that revealed veterans hospitals across the country were using secret lists to hide long wait times for patients. Overwhelmed by the wave of veterans returning after the drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan, many top hospital administrators were accused of sweeping scheduling problems under the rug, avoiding electronic wait lists and reporting rosy official numbers to the department in order to secure bonuses. Reports also contained numerous allegations of retaliation against staff that attempted to blow the whistle on how the system was being gamed.

In the meantime patients were waiting for treatment for up to year, sometimes with deadly consequences. At a Phoenix VA hospital alone, at least 40 veterans are alleged to have died as a result of delayed care. In April, the VA disclosed in April that, since 1999, 76 patients have been gravely injured because of delayed gastro-intestinal cancer screenings, and 23 have died. One of those patients, Barry Coates, testified before a congressional committee that he waited for more than a year for a colonoscopy at the William Jennings Bryan Dorn VA Medical Center in Columbia, South Carolina. When he finally received a screening, it revealed advanced colorectal cancer.

"It is likely too late for me," Coates said. "The gross negligence of my ongoing problems and crippling backlog epidemic of the VA medical system has not only handed me a death sentence, but ruined the quality of life I have for the meantime."

Earlier this year, Congress passed a bill loosening the VA's strict and time-consuming rules for terminating employees in an attempt to give McDonald greater leeway in cleaning house at the agency. Yet the only senior administrator who has been fired so far is James Talton, the director of the VA in central Alabama. Two other senior officials resigned before they could be fired, which means they will receive full pension benefits. And the VA placed Terry Wolf, the director of the Pittsburgh VA, on paid leave in June after an internal review of a deadly Legionnaire's disease outbreak that was initially hidden from the public and press. Sharon Helman, the director of the Phoenix VA hospital, where the scandal first surfaced, has been on paid leave since May.

McDonald has said that his hands are tied by ongoing criminal investigations. Nearly 70 hospitals used tactics similar to Phoenix, and the federal Office of Special Counsel is investigating alleged retaliation against 38 VA employees in 18 states who tried to report problems.

"We are moving as aggressively and expeditiously as possible," he told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast last week. "The FBI is involved in many of these investigations, the Department of Justice and the inspector general. And as all of that evidentiary material is created it is passed on to us if they decide not to do criminal prosecution. Criminal prosecution has the priority and then the administrative disciplinary action follows."

However, the Justice Department gave the VA a green light to fire Helman. In a Nov. 3 email to a congressional staffer, a DOJ attorney wrote that the "Department of Justice takes no position" on whether the VA should proceed with firing Helman.

Federal employees have strong protections and appeals rights if they are fired, even under the VA's new rules. "We understand that Secretary McDonald wants to make sure VA follows proper legal procedure in the firing of any employees, and that he doesn't want such actions thrown out on appeal," Verna Jones, executive director of the American Legion, told The Hill. However, Jones said she the American Legion is still "quite disappointed that only one senior VA executive has been fired thus far, and that at least two others remain on paid administrative leave at taxpayers' expense."

Republican Congressman Jeff Miller, the chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee and one of the VA's sharpest critics, argued that McDonald hasn't fully embraced his new authority to fire administrators involved in the scandal.

"New plans, initiatives and organizational structures are all well and good, but they will not produce their intended results until VA rids itself of the employees who have shaken veterans' trust in the system. So far VA hasn't done that – as evidenced by the fact that the majority of those who caused the VA scandal are still on the department payroll," Miller said in a statement. ""No one doubts that reforming VA is a tough job. But getting rid of failed executives should be the easiest part—not the most difficult."

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Gill Rosenberg. All photos via Facebook.

Earlier this afternoon, reports emerged from Israeli news agencies that a Canadian woman named Gill Rosenberg had joined Kurdish forces in northern Iraq to help them fight the Islamic State.

The reports say Rosenberg immigrated to Israel to fight for the Israeli Defence Forces and trained at some point as a civil aviation pilot.

Photos from Rosenberg's Facebook profile show her in uniform for the IDF. One shows her brandishing semi-automatic assault rifles in both hands wearing the familiar green fatigues of the IDF.

In the same profile Rosenberg says she's a native of White Rock, British Columbia and lists her current city as Tel Aviv.

Rosenberg reportedly took a plane from Amman airport in Jordan to Erbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

Over the last year Canadians joining the ranks of ISIS have become common. Indeed, I've communicated with several through online channels and they admittedly use Twitter and other social media tools to attract new recruits.

Not unlike those same Canadians who are known to have joined ISIS, Rosenberg reportedly communicated with Kurdish forces over the internet before joining their ranks.

According to her Facebook profile, friends of Rosenberg were somewhat aware of her plans to head to Kurdistan. On November 9th, one friend appears to encourage her plans to fight with the Kurds.

"Stay safe my friend," said the friend. "You are one tough woman and TERMINATE ISIS!!!!"

Other pictures from November 9th show Rosenberg in the Rojava Mountains of Kurdistan. It's not immediately clear whether she had joined any armed forces before those photos were taken.

[body_image width='789' height='436' path='images/content-images/2014/11/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/11/' filename='a-canadian-woman-just-joined-kurds-fighting-isis-453-body-image-1415742473.png' id='3063']Rosenberg in Kurdistan. Image via Facebook.

One friend with apparent Israeli origins cautions against Rosenberg's plans to fight with the Kurds:

"Sorry to disappoint you but in Israel if you want to fight there is enough to do! We need you in Israel! Gentiles never helped us in general except few exceptions. Comeback home fight for your Land Israel only!" said the Israeli friend.

A spokesperson for Foreign Affairs told VICE they are "aware of reports that a Canadian individual has joined Kurdish forces."

Canadian officials advise against all travel to Iraq or Syria, excluding the areas in Iraq controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government.

"Canadians in Iraq or Syria should consider departing by commercial means if it is safe to do so," said the same Foreign Affairs spokesperson. "Canadians travelling to those countries should review their security arrangements on a regular basis. The Government of Canada's ability to provide consular assistance in all parts of Iraq and Syria is severely limited."

Kurdish forces are no strangers to Canadian military assistance. The Peshmerga, famous Kurdish fighters, are currently being training by Canadian Special Forces operators while Canadian CF-18s bomb Islamic State targets. The Kurds are seeking their own sovereign state and have taken advantage of Iraqi turmoil seizing new lands.

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It's not yet clear whether or not Rosenberg joined one of the YPG's famous all female brigades facing down ISIS on the frontlines of an ever evolving Iraqi civil war.

But one thing is for sure: it's insane that a Canadian who already joined one foreign army with an eye for waging war in the Middle East, hopped over to another military entity currently under siege. And one that might just have her fighting with Canadians training the Kurds, and against the other Canadians among the ISIS ranks.

For her part, Rosenberg seems defiant and excited by the prospect of facing off against ISIS forces.

"In the IDF, we say אחריי - After Me. Let's show ISIS what that means," she said days ago on her Facebook profile.

@bmakuch

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"The Head Ache" by George Cruikshank. Image via

Imagine waking up in the middle of the night and feeling a drill in your eye. This is not a metaphor. Imagine feeling like somebody has pierced a hot metal rod through your neck and rammed it up into your brain. Again, this is not a metaphor. This is what a cluster headache feels like.

Cluster headaches are also known as "suicide disease", as sufferers have been known to take their own lives when they can't bear the pain any longer. The condition affects 0.1 percent of the world's population, and I'm in that exclusive club—a 27-year-old woman who's had to learn to live with the syndrome.

I had my first crisis at 17. From the very first moment I knew it wasn't a normal headache – mainly because I'd never felt pain remotely like it, centered around my left eye and extending to my ear, my teeth, and from the nape of my neck and beyond. In advanced stages it hurt to touch my own face. It was the kind of intense physical agony that could drive you to despair incredibly quickly, not helped by the fact I had no idea what was happening to me.

That's how I lived for two months, a victim of a pain that plagued me daily at 20-minute intervals. I ended up in the ER every day, but the pills they gave me may as well have been Tic Tacs – doctors couldn't do anything to ease the torture; I just had to wait for it to subside naturally.

My family was devastated by this first outbreak and how it weakened me, both physically and psychologically. I don't remember much of this stage as my mind has always had an innate tendency to remember the good and forget the bad (generally a big plus for me), but I do remember hitting my head against the wall, crawling along the floor, and threatening to jump out the window.

It wasn't until my second outbreak that I found an effective form of pain relief. By that time I'd left home and was living in Rota, a town in Andalucia, working in real estate. I'd take migraine pills whenever the pain came back, but ultimately they turned out to be a very expensive waste of time—two tablets at $16 a pair had little to no effect whatsoever.

One day, I wound up in an emergency room, expecting to hear the same bullshit I'd heard so many times before (from "Migraines are bad, but you shouldn't get so worried," to "Have you tried putting a lemon on your head?"). However, this doctor was different.

"Would you mind if I put you on oxygen?" he asked. Understandably, I assumed he was kidding, so laughed it off and told him to inject me with some real medicine. Instead, he placed an oxygen mask over my face and started walking out the door, saying, "See you in 20 minutes."

There was no need to wait that long; eight minutes later, the pain was gone. When I asked him about it, the doctor said he'd had another patient like me—a man of about 40 who described the same type of pain and suffered from cluster headaches. This doctor had dedicated his spare time to researching the man's symptoms and had come to the conclusion that oxygen could be more effective than a painkiller.

Since then, every time the pain's come back I've returned to that small clinic in Rota, where my doctor/savior prepares my oxygen and brings me back to life. I'll never live long enough to thank this man for what he's done for me.

"The Cluster Headache" by JD Fletcher. Image via

The outbreaks I endured between the ages of 19 and 26 usually came once a year and lasted from between three weeks to two and a half months, including contraction periods.

I hated seeing myself as a sick person, which is maybe why I never identified as one. To write openly about the condition, as I'm doing now, would have been absolutely unthinkable for me back then; I hated the thought of people pitying me, so I never told anyone what was going on.

I also never visited any online forums, because—in my honest opinion—reading online forums for sick people is, without a doubt, the quickest way to fool yourself into believing you have all sorts of other problems. However, my mother began visiting forums for cluster sufferers in order to find potential therapies, cures and tips.

She recently recounted their stories to me: how their Facebook feeds were full of photos of them holding oxygen bottles, how they all had the same profile picture (a teddy bear with an amputated eye), and how they'd let each other know that "the beast" (the headache) had visited them again. Some were on leave from work and struggling because society seemed unable to take care of them. I don't judge or pity them, but my own experience was entirely different to theirs, and I thought it was important to share that knowledge in a public forum.

During my outbreaks—which were usually in the summer for some reason—I would party day in, day out. I'd go to the pool, the beach, the hairdresser (risking hair pulls) and help with odd jobs that people asked of me. I even remember injecting myself with painkillers in a nightclub bathroom.

Helpfully, by that point I'd learned to recognize the symptoms of an outbreak ten minutes before the onset, which would give me about ten minutes to get myself into a taxi towards oxygen treatment. Since I got my own bottle of O at home my life has changed; I no longer depend on hospitals—I can fix myself on my own.

A far cry from how I acted during my period of teenage stubbornness, I now tend to stay at home when I have an outbreak. Not out of fear, but because it really is more comfortable to stay close to my tank.

Although it sounds unlikely, despite all the setbacks I believe that cluster headaches have been a great asset to my life. Surviving such severe pain can bolster your confidence, and—as cliched as it sounds—each outbreak makes me value my life a little more.

If you, or someone you know, identifies with my story and didn't know what was happening to you until now, don't hesitate to contact me. I'll share tips that help me manage the pain and sometimes even make it disappear.

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Late last month, the high-profile defense team of accused Chinese mobster Paul Phua and his associates got big press for claiming the government had shut down their clients' internet access to provide an excuse to illegally enter their Caesars Palace villas in Las Vegas. In response to the outcry that ensued, FBI Director Jim Comey scolded the media for judging the government's conduct before the Department of Justice had a chance to tell its side of the story.

"[I]t would have been better to wait for the government's response and a court decision before concluding that the FBI engaged in abusive conduct," he wrote in the New York Times.

Now the government has formally responded, and their explanation might be even more ridiculous than the defense attorneys suggested. In all seriousness, the feds argue (in part) that there are no legitimate reasons to find slow hotel Wi-Fi inadequate.

When Phua's lawyers first revealed details of the search of their clients' villas, they warned of the chaos that will result if people come to suspect their cable repairman is really an FBI agent.

"The next time you call for assistance because the internet service in your home is not working, the 'technician' who comes to your door may actually be an undercover government agent," Phua's lawyers claimed. "He will have secretly disconnected the service, knowing that you will naturally call for help and—when he shows up at your door, impersonating a technician—let him in." Rather than fixing your internet access, the brief continues, the FBI agent "will be videotaping everything (and everyone) inside."

That's sort of what happened to Phua. According to the government's own narrative, on July 3, it made a plan with a DSL contractor, Wood Telemanagement Services, "to disrupt DSL services with the help of DSL contractor the next morning" as part of a scheme to "surreptitiously gain entry to the Villas." On July 4, the cable contractor shut down the DSL for two villas, intending to include 8882, where Phua was staying, in the shutdown. But instead, he cut off service to an adjoining villa, 8881. Later that morning, the FBI accompanied the DSL contractor to villa 8882 to deliver a laptop Phua had asked for and unsuccessfully tried to use it as a ruse to enter the media room of the villa, going so far as to ignore the butler, who ordered them to stay in the butler's pantry.

Later in the day, the DSL contractor, having agreed to participate in a scheme to enter villas as part of the FBI ruse, and having realized he had screwed up and disconnected the wrong villa upon getting a service call from 8881, nevertheless entered that villa and took pictures the FBI used as evidence. The next day, finally having turned off the DSL in villa 8882 (and maybe another one—the brief admits no one can "precisely recall"), FBI agents pretending to be the DSL contractor entered Phua's villa and filmed what they claim is an illegal Asian online sports wagering website.

Real Keystone cops stuff here. But along the way, the feds have made several troubling arguments.

First, the government argues that Smith v. Maryland, a 1979 Supreme Court precedent involving the collection of phone records, legally authorized them to ask Caesars to shut down DSL service Phua had requested. Mind you, Smith v. Maryland—which is the same precedent the feds claim justifies the phone dragnet that aspires to collect all the phone records of all Americans—has to do with collecting data, not shutting down internet service. Yet the government offers no explanation of how the precedent applies but instead just plops it in the brief, as if invoking it magically authorizes all conduct involving third parties.

The government later makes a better argument: that according to its terms of service, Caesars had the right to turn off Phua's internet because Caesars' employees in yet another villa, which was occupied by his associates, had taken pictures of the equipment, suspecting it was used for a gambling operation (even though by the time they entered Phua's, the DSL had been turned off in that other villa for about a day with no one noticing, suggesting it could not possibly have been used for gambling at the time it was shut down). Yet the government also invoked a precedent to claim that the search of the villa 8881 had nothing to do with the search of Phua's, even though they are connected by an internal hallway, and in fact the FBI admits they may have gone back into 8881 to help a "middle-aged man who seemed concerned with connectivity issues" after entering via Phua's villa during the July 5 entry.

Then the government argues that it is not responsible for the DSL contractor's entry on July 4 into 8881. It claims a DSL contractor who had already signed onto a scheme to turn the DSL into these villas off to create the pretense to go into them was engaged in a "private frolic outside of any agency relation" when he did so in the villa where he did manage to turn off the DSL. That's right—a private frolic.

Perhaps the most disturbing claim, though, is that we all have to be satisfied with crummy hotel Wi-Fi. To dismiss the argument that by turning off the villas' DSL, FBI had created an urgent need that obviated any kind of consent when the villa residents let in the FBI agents pretending to be DSL repairmen, the government claims that there is no legitimate need to seek better internet access than hotel Wi-Fi or personal cell phone tethers: "Defendants do not identify a single legitimate service or application that could not be adequately supported through the hotel's WI-FI system, their personal hotspots, or personal cellphones, nor could they."

The FBI is now claiming, the experience of travelers the world over notwithstanding, that nothing legal could require better Internet access than a hotel's slow Wi-Fi connection. (Perhaps the Wi-Fi in high-roller villas is better than it is for average travelers, but DOJ's brief doesn't make that case by describing the internet speeds Caesars Palace makes available to privileged guests.) Moreover, the government admits that—as many travelers reliant on hotel Wi-Fi can attest—the Wi-Fi just wasn't all that fast. "The DSL service was faster," the brief reads.

DOJ may well win this argument anyway, because the alleged mobsters were in a hotel and not their own private dwelling. Nevertheless, along the way, the feds seem to confirm the defense attorneys' worries that the Comcast guy at your door really may be the FBI promising to turn on the cable they just turned off. And DOJ seems to dismiss the plain fact that hotel Wi-Fi is usually useless, even for surfing the web.

But this is not just about shitty Wi-Fi. If the court doesn't throw out these warrantless searches, it might green-light the FBI to turn off your utilities to create an excuse to invite itself inside your home. Not just alleged Asian mobsters' long-term hotel rooms, mind you, but all our homes.

Marcy Wheeler an an independent journalist who writes about national security and civil liberties. Follow her on Twitter.

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1970. I'm bumming off my friend Danny who pays the rent on a two-bedroom dump in Orange County. Orange County sucks but Danny likes it, so here I stay. I work a couple of days a week at a Newport Beach carwash for a buck-fifty an hour, which keeps me in Banquet TV dinners, Hostess cherry pies, and Kool Kings. Danny pays for the drugs and alcohol.

I'm wasting my life but can't seem to do what it takes to do anything else. My SoCal life of luxury ends when Danny goes to prison for hauling bales of marijuana. I stay in the apartment for two months and then the landlord changes the lock while I'm at the carwash. I go in and out through the window for a couple more weeks. My friend Larry, who is AWOL from Uncle Sam's Army, is also out on the street, so we partner up. I get my duffel and sleeping bag and we move to the carwash.

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Every morning at eight the carwash manager employs the workers who are first in line. We get there late so we've got the day off. Larry finds a nice spot behind the carwash under a stand of trees. He borrows a hammer and nails and swipes a bunch of orange crates from a fruit and vegetable stand. He builds himself a little crawlway home-away-from-home.

I thumb down to the beach and hang out and panhandle enough for dinner at IHOP. I bring a jug of wine back and hang with the five Mexicans who live in the carwash storage room. They sit a circle around a hotplate eating tortillas and beans. I finish the jug of wine and it's getting late and I haven't worked out a place to sleep. Larry has his hut and the Mexicans all sleep on the floor where they sit. A scrawny little guy named Jorge tells me I can bunk with him. He calls me Philippe and winks and grins. I tell him gracias but no.

I'm drunk and I should probably go pass out under a tree but I'm envious of Larry's house and want to sleep in a nice place of my own. There's not much light beyond the moon and I tie my army-surplus poncho to a fence, make a little lean-to and lay out my sleeping bag. I don't notice I'm backed up to a dumpster until seven in the morning when a garbage truck is beeping, cranking gears, and picking up the dumpster along with my poncho.

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A squeezable hippie chick named Patsy is working the window at the burger joint next door. She's a strawberry blonde with innocent eyes and freckles. I go over and get a chili burger and tell her I like her spots. I ask her if she wants to get high after work and she says absolutely. I nab four orange-crates and a box from behind an appliance store, and cobble together a deluxe bachelor pad, using my salvaged poncho for a ceiling. I lay out my sleeping bag and class the place up with a handful of flowers I picked from the nearest manicured lawn.

Six o'clock, the sun is low and Patsy and I are passing a joint in the master bedroom. I'm plotting a smooth move when she wiggles out of her clothes and advises I do the same. No smooth moves required. I strip and climb on top and we skip the incidentals. Right away she's gouging my back with her nails and telling me harder, harder. I push up on my arms and slam into her and I'm already counting down from ten to ejaculation. I look up for a moment and through the slats I see my little south-of-the-border amigo, Jorge, smiling, winking at me with his hand down his pants. I grit my teeth and come and yelp like it hurts. I tell Patsy, fuck, that guy was watching us. She says yeah, that's really hot, let's do it again. I can't get it back up and she says that's OK she has to go anyway, she has a date to take drugs and party with a bunch of guys. She says she will see me around and gives me a wet kiss goodbye.

The next day I start to itch and I know right away I've got crabs. Last time I had crabs it was a shared endeavor at a crash pad. We held crab races on a white Formica kitchen table but they move pretty slowly so we roasted the little cocksuckers with a butane lighter. I wash cars all day and then when I get off I hitch to the Rexall and buy a can of Sergeant's flea and tick spray and pick up another jug of red wine. Back at camp I spray everything I own, including myself. I give it an hour to make sure they're dead; then I strip and go into the boiler room where there is a rubber hose and a drain and a bar of soap. I lock the door and I get wet and soapy and decide to jerk off. It's coming along well but I lose my grip when I hear Jorge giggling. There is a transom window above the door and it's pushed open and Jorge has his head through the opening. I don't know how he got up there, but there he is, making kiss-kiss noises and having a good time.

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One afternoon, film legend John Wayne brings his Cadillac in for a wash. I'm up front working final dry and detail. John Wayne has an American flag sticker on his back window and I spray it with Windex until it fades and the colors run. He gives the car a quick appraisal and doesn't notice the desecrated flag. I give him the keys and he gives me a quarter and tells me to go get a haircut. I tell him power to the people and have a nice day.

One morning I wake with a twisting pain in my neck, bolts down the inside of my right arm. It hurts so much it's fucking scary. I ask around and the closest free clinic is in Santa Ana. It takes me two hours of hitching and walking to get there. It's another four hours before I see a doctor and describe my symptoms. He takes a look at my arm and asks me about the knot of scar tissue in the crook. I tell him it's from shooting up reds but that was about a year ago and not related to the pain I'm having now. He says how do I know it's not related, am I a doctor? Do I think I can just take drugs and do whatever I want to do?

I tell him if I could do whatever I want, I'd go to a real doctor. He tells me we're done and I thumb back to the car wash. A couple of days later I wake up and my neck and arm are better. The next time it starts to hurt, I score some Demerol from Patsy who is dealing meds from the take-out window at the hamburger joint. She wants ten dollars but all I've got is seven so I throw in the can of Sergeant's flea and tick spray.

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

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I told a friend we were running an excerpt from Sarah Gerard's forthcoming novel Binary Star, which will be published in January. A few minutes later, my friend wrote, "I think she wrote a novel about her experience as an anorexic. She got better. She wrote the core draft of the thing in a trailer where she secluded herself for a month and supposedly didn't get up to shower. She has a really interesting face. I was telling my friend about her. I said, 'Of course she had to get up to use the bathroom. Of course she could have showered. She just didn't want to shower. For some reason that woman just did not want to bathe.' I thought it was funny."

A few minutes later, she added, "I'd go crazy like that." She meant she could understand about the trailer and the showering. I thought that kind of nailed it. Sarah Gerard has an interesting fearlessness with regard to the subject of food and weight. It seems like there was a time when women wrote about that stuff, and then they stopped. Maybe it's the comment boards? Sarah Gerard has a bluntness about the subject, a simple statement of fact, so you can tell she just sat down determined to do it—to describe her relationship to food without lying—and she did it.

Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York's 'The Cut,' the Paris Review Daily, Slice Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, and other journals. She is the author of the chapbook Things I Told My Mother and a graduate of the New School's MFA program for fiction.

-Amie Barrodale

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Author photo by Josh Wool

Last winter, we spent a month driving around the country's perimeter. John's parents paid for everything: hotels, food, and gas. Our job was to drive and come back in January: to find something new. At first, we didn't know what.

To step out of time, place ourselves entirely in the present, which is also eternity.

The week before we're set to leave, I spend the night at a friend's house on Jones Beach, cramming for a final. I call John at two in the morning, speeding on Adderall, and tell him that I weigh 98 pounds, which is true at the time. I had weighed myself several times during the night. Then I'd become afraid.

I tell him that I'm bulimic, which is also true, but not the whole truth.

You can't purge when we're away.

Then you can't drink, I say.

Okay.

We'll find equilibrium.

We make a pact for balance.

We'll shed our lives in order to see ourselves clearly.

As long as we're together, we'll be fine.

I agree.

This will bring us closer, I say.

I'm here for you, he says.

And I'm here for you.

We start in Chicago and drive west toward North Dakota. All of our necessities are behind us in the backseat. Two cups of coffee sit between us and two iPhones full of music, none of the songs of which are repeated.

How long have you been doing it? John asks me.

Ever since I was little.

Why?

I don't know. Why do you need to drink?

I don't. I just like drinking.

Whatever.

Really.

Okay.

I never see more stars than I see driving along the edge of the buttes. We pull over so that I can see them still, and I lie down on the shoulder of the road to stare into the space between them. John stays in the car. The curve of the road is dangerous. John is often afraid, but he doesn't know it.

After a minute, he makes me get back in the car. He can't be alone.

We are inches away from the edge of the road and a plummet down the cliff.

I get in and shut the door. I strap into the car. It is dark like the vacuum of space.

I can't see my hands. As long as I'm in here, I'm safe.

We're silent with each other.

In the early days of space travel, researchers feared that astronauts would disassociate with Earth once they lost sight of it.

They would lose the sense of having a body that belonged on the ground, held by gravity.

They would lose their sense of human value.

Familial belonging.

And reimagine themselves as cosmic beings, bound by nothing.

They called it psychosis.

In July 1976, Russian cosmonaut Vasily Zholobov suffered a nervous breakdown when his spaceship failed to dock at the Salyut 5 station and lost power for 90 minutes.

No light, no oxygen coming in, no communication with Earth.

They were on the dark side of the orbit. It was Zholobov's first flight.

He had to go home.

The next day, John and I do donuts in the lot of a Butte community theater. Leaving, we're pulled over and searched by a cop who doesn't believe that John needs his pills even though he has a prescription. As we wait for him to check our IDs, I read the billboard across the street over and over.

Hail to the Beef. Hail to the Beef. Hail to the Beef. Hail to the Beef.

The events are unrelated except that, if you take a wide enough view, they happen at the same time.

We don't plan to stop in Seattle, but John hears about a vegan donut shop on the outskirts, so he makes me take a detour, saying it's for me. The shop is flanked by a Dunkin Donuts on one side and a Starbucks on the other, and is across the street from a Fantastic Sam's in an otherwise residential part of town. John orders six donuts and four holes and we sit in the window eating them and taking pictures of each other and the display case. We finish and I throw up in the bathroom. I don't make noise because I know how to open my throat and purge in silence.

When I come back, John knows what I've been doing.

Going to the bathroom, I say.

Let me smell your breath.

I know that it smells like donuts because donuts are all I've eaten.

Show me your hands.

My hands are washed.

Eat another.

I'm full.

He's angry.

We came here for you. I'm not the vegan one here.

You promised.

(I lie.)

Later, I look at the pictures and notice a cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee on a table in the background.

When I ask John to stop at Walgreens for Dramamine, I buy a bottle of Hydroxycut as well. I take them sitting alone on a toilet in a bathroom lined with stainless steel walls, like the inside of a spacecraft. I wash them down with water from the sink and hide the rest in the lining of my purse, so they don't rattle.

Most spacecraft don't have seats anymore because sitting is unnecessary without gravity.

Stand.

When I come out of the bathroom, John is at the cash registers buying a Mars bar. I read the racks of magazines near the register and stare down the aisles of corn chips and candy and Christmas decorations, beauty products and toys and Ace bandages, and over-the-counter medicine. I relax my focus and they all look the same. I feel far away from everything.

We find a Days Inn and I stay awake all night staring at the parking lot, buzzing all over while John sleeps and I finger the edges of a Star Magazine. In the morning, he asks me what's wrong.

I couldn't sleep.

Why not?

I wasn't tired. Something was upsetting me.

Are you sick?

(Yes.) No. I don't know what it was.

Another thing the researchers feared was that, sending astronauts into space alone, they would lose the feeling of belonging to any species.

They would forget what it's like to be human.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

A federal bill that would criminalize revenge porn is currently on the table, with Representative Jackie Speier (D-CA) likely set to introduce it by the year's end. But in order to make it through the crucible of free speech and liability concerns—the ACLU and other free speech crusaders will fight the bill tooth-and-nail—the law will have to be both cautious and very, very specific.

As it stands, 15 states have laws on the books that criminalize nonconsensual porn—an emerging category of material that includes hacked selfies as well as consensually-shot nudes later distributed without the subject's consent. But most of those laws have what the End Revenge Porn campaign refers to as "narrow applicability and/or constitutional infirmities."

That's basically what's happening with two laws—one criminal, one civil—in California right now.

On September 30, Governor Jerry Brown signed two important measures that would ostensibly protect people from being victimized by photo thieves looking to turn other people's privates into everyone else's business. The first thing Brown did was add selfies to a state penal code (colloquially referred to as the Revenge Porn 2.0 Act) introduced last year by Senator Anthony Cannella (R-Ceres), criminalizing revenge porn regardless of who created the image. (The fact that California's criminal revenge porn law was lacking such an obvious inclusion and needed amending only a year into its existence is indicative of how quickly nonconsensual porn is outpacing attempts to legislate.)

The same day that Brown amended California's criminal law, he also passed the first civil revenge porn law in the US. It has its pluses and minuses.

The pros:
A plaintiff can use a pseudonym in court and have court records redacted as well, protecting privacy. Another good thing is its inclusion of oral sex. Most revenge porn and sex surveillance laws only cover photos in which the victim is nude or partially nude, which wouldn't do shit to stop your ex-boyfriend from disseminating a picture of you blowing him if you're wearing a shirt. But this new law includes sex acts with or without nudity.

The cons:
The law contains some weird language that effectively strips it of any potential to protect anyone. For example, it says that there's no liability for sharing sexualized photos under certain circumstances, like if the photo is a matter of "public concern," if it was shot in a public place where the subject had "no reasonable expectation of privacy," or if the photo was previously distributed by another person. That would mean that the law doesn't cover hacked celebrity nudes, creepshots or sexts. So it's like: Then what's the fucking point?

The latter is especially problematic because it opens the door to legal arguments that anyone who sexted a photo to a partner was the "original distributor"—even if they had no intention for anyone else to ever see it. And it utterly erases the concept of downstream liability when victims' advocates say it is most needed. After all, a revenge porn victim can sue her ex-boyfriend all she wants, but it says nothing to the thousands of other people sharing and reposting the offending images.

When is a nude photo a "matter of public concern"? When it's of a celebrity, like Jennifer Lawrence? And adding an exception about photographs taken in public invites a quagmire of excuses for upskirting, since the "reasonable expectation of privacy" loophole has already been cited to exonerate cell lurkers like creepshot photographer Christopher Cleveland, whose case was thrown out by frustrated prosecutors in DC in October.

While advocates applauded the move to criminalize nonconsensual porn in both criminal and civil courts—thus expanding the prosecutorial options for victims—it quickly became clear that the civil law, too, is flawed. Almost to the point of impotence.

"The language kind of guts the law of its utility," internet privacy attorney Carrie Goldberg told VICE. Goldberg said that the liability exception regarding matters "of public concern" were likely targeted toward things like Abu Ghraib torture photos and protecting journalists who publish them as evidence.

"Any good lawyer for the [revenge porn] defendant is absolutely going to argue that it's a matter of public concern, but let's hope that's a losing argument," Goldberg said, before adding, "It would depend on the judge for sure."

Why include liability exceptions in a law designed to make "fappeners" and other pervs criminally liable? Because: free speech.

David Greene, senior staff attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation, told VICE that exceptions are required to make any law restricting free speech constitutional.

"Under first amendment law, someone who publishes truthful information that is a matter of public concern must be protected," Greene told VICE, "I'm always very skeptical of laws that restricts free speech. That's regardless of whether you have a really good reason to restrict that speech."

But the US has plenty of laws that do restrict speech and protect private information. Federal HIPAA laws protect people's sensitive medical information from being leaked by medical professionals and FERPA law protects the privacy of educational records. The list of laws protecting consumer credit information is so long it's almost ridiculous.

So why do the spate of emerging revenge porn laws keep colliding with concerns about free speech?

"It's absurd that there are not laws that protect us from having [pictures of] our genitals released," Goldberg told VICE, "Besides HIPAA and credit card laws, there are also laws against obscenity and hate speech, and laws against sexual harassment. [Those] were opposed in the beginning."

Even child pornography laws have traditionally been opposed by free speech advocates.

In 2002, the ACLU released a list of online privacy-related state bills it was actively opposing in court; those included an Illinois bill criminalizing the act of posting a child's name and contact information on a porn site, a Rhode Island bill that banned online transmission of a child's information for the purpose of engaging in "unlawful sexual conduct," and a multitude of laws that criminalized the electronic transmission of child pornography.

Why would anyone oppose child porn laws designed to protect kids from predators? Well, for starters, some of those laws contained hidden sections and attachments that expanded the criminalization to vague crimes like "obscene speech" or held internet service providers directly liable for things like the "dissemination of obscene material" and "pornographic material harmful to youth." Such slight adjustments in language made some laws applicable to a wide swath of electronic communications that could have nothing to do with children.

It should be stated that various ACLU chapters have taken a stance against child pornography as well as revenge porn. But the organization's primary mandate is to protect free speech and civil liberties; if a child porn or revenge porn law even slightly oversteps into unrelated territory or threatens the privacy of online communications in general, ACLU lawyers can be expected to attack it.

Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology project, told VICE that he couldn't comment on the laws and legislation regarding revenge porn. But from a technical perspective, he stressed the importance of keeping the government and third-party internet service providers from having policing power over the way we talk, post, and click online.

"If you want Google and Twitter to police what people are posting, you're creating the infrastructure for a surveillance state," Soghoian told VICE. "Once Google has the ability to recognize and remove any image on the internet, these are not the only requests that they receive. You're going to have the government coming along and saying that they want something removed."

Besides, explained Soghoian, it's technically impossible for companies like Twitter and Google to create the kind of automatic takedown mechanisms of which revenge porn victims' advocates dream. Such an ideal system might be able to recognize copies of an illegal image and instantly block them. But for programmers, it's not so simple.

"There's no magic way to prevent a particular photo from being subtly altered and reposted: You can slightly change the color of the image and it won't be picked up," Soghoian said. "There are some companies that have employed technical tools that look for similarities in content. But it's so easy to circumvent that it isn't effective. There are tools that scan email attachments looking for child porn, but it's sometimes as simple as placing it in a zip file and it will not be detected."

Soghoian has suggested ways that third parties could intensify security and privacy features, such as instituting a private photo mode similar to the privacy modes options accompanying browsers.

But between the technical difficulties inherent in policing online material, and in light of the potential affronts to civil liberties that arise when such policing is employed, it seems that the best way to shut down the whole nonconsensual porn thing is to legislate—and carefully.

Follow Mary Emily O'Hara on Twitter.

Pseudo-pot products at the International Cannabis Association's industry expo in New York. All photos by Ryan Meehan

To the naysaying hippies, the criminally entrenched, and the serial doubters who said weed would become corporate and boring once it was legal, I have to apologize for my skepticism. You were all correct, and I was wrong. Legalization (or at least pending medical legalization) has already made this a much lamer scene. In New York, changing laws have attracted all manner of opportunists to the industry, regardless of their experience with the plant, their love for it, or any understanding of how enthusiasts might perceive it.

Last month, the International Cannabis Association held an industry expo in New York City's Marriott Marquis Hotel, drawing a crowd of 900 to peruse the wares and services of 40 vendors slinging everything from vaporizer pens to IT consulting services. Missing from this scene was any actual cannabis. One booth demonstrated grow lights with regular houseplants. A seller of vaporizer pens revealed that every box in his display was empty. An edibles company touted a large jar of their activated chocolates, but when I attempted to eat one, their representative stopped me. "There's definitely no weed, and there's also candle wax in there so that it doesn't melt," he said. "That'll give you the shits." A guy behind me turned around and says, "Are you serious? I just ate two of them."

Weed is still very much illegal in New York, and despite the recent passage of the state's medical marijuana bill—and a pending change in New York City's pot enforcement practices—we are a long way off from a functioning marijuana economy. The medical pot bill isn't going to be implemented for another year, and when it does, it will limit dispensary licensing to only five companies with four outlets each statewide. That's 20 dispensaries for a population of about 20 million people. Worse still are the severe restrictions on getting a prescription. Only those suffering from a short list of diseases like cancer, HIV, and ALS will get a prescription, and smoking it will remain completely illegal. New York is nowhere near ready to meet the public demand for medical cannabis in the state, let alone foster a healthy cannabis industry. So why would anyone in their right mind have a cannabis industry trade show here?

"New York has that kill-or-be-killed business mentality," the event's founder Dan Humiston tells me as hotel workers are breaking down the booths at the end of the second day. "This industry needs a dose of New York—let's get up and let's get going or somebody else is going to take it from me."

Humiston says that he is a complete cannabis neophyte. He doesn't smoke weed or drink, so I ask him why someone without any personal stake in cannabis would embark on such a venture. "There's one piece in the puzzle that's missing in the cannabis community, and that's the business community. Until we get involved, it's going to keep stuttering and stuttering because, well, um... well, it's just a missing piece."

Humiston is referring to the state-contained cannabis industries in Colorado, Washington, and California that grew out of medical marijuana dispensaries typically run by passionate cannabis users and advocates. Before recreational legalization, the relatively high risk of the weed business kept the opportunists at bay. Now, as the barriers come down, anyone who can smell money is following their nose to weed.

For some, it's a chance for redemption in America's troubled economy. At one booth, I met a representative from Kassoy Jewelry Supplies, a maker of scales for the jewelry industry who turned her sights on cannabis dispensaries in the midst of a dive in the demand for bling. When I ask her if the illegal nature of the industry bothers her, she tells me, "Please. I'm a child of the 60s."

For others, it's about serving the gray areas of the new marijuana laws. In the next aisle is Blue Line, a security company that protects cannabis dispensaries and the large amounts of cash that they are forced to deal in thanks to flimsy federal guidelines on how to handle weed money. I ask one of their representatives, Sean Campbell, if his company supports federal reform of marijuana laws, considering that his business thrives thanks to a disagreement between the federal governments and some states. He tells me, "For our business that sounds positive, but we would prefer that the cash not be an issue. Our focus is to help these companies hit all the requirements of the Cole Memo."

He's referring to cannabis enforcement guidelines issued by the Department of Justice in 2013 offering scant assurance that the feds won't get involved in state-level marijuana. Based on the rate at which the federal government is easing up on cannabis prohibition, Blue Line's clients will be relying on heavily armed guards to move their cash and weed for years to come.

One of the more crowded booths belongs to HempMeds, which makes products containing cannibidiol (CBD), a marijuana compound thought to be therapeutic for a number of diseases. Medical CBD is usually extracted from marijuana, but HempMeds uses CBD oil extracted from hemp plants. "Today we're educating New Yorkers that they don't have to wait until 2016 to get CBD. They can get it from Hemp Meds today," Dr. Rob Streisfeld tells me.

He's standing next to a young man named Trevor who has a congenital brain disease called closed-lip schizencephaly, which causes seizures and partial paralysis. Trevor started medicating with cannabis on his own, finding that it alleviates his spasms and pains. Today, he's getting some guidance.

[body_image width='2000' height='1333' path='images/content-images/2014/11/12/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/12/' filename='the-marijuana-industry-has-come-to-new-york-and-its-terrible-1112-body-image-1415799302.jpg' id='3222']"This gentleman next to me has put me on the right track," Trevor says, pointing to Streisfeld. It's hard not to be moved as Trevor listens intently to dosage advice from the doctor. As delighted as Trevor is to have this new avenue for medicine, HempMeds' offerings might not treat his disorder. Amidst many companies advertising their legal hemp CBD extracts, the Hemp Industries Association was compelled to make a statement in July clarifying the difference between true CBD and hemp extracts mislabeled as containing CBD. As their director, Eric Steenstra, put it, "CBD is not a product or component of hemp seeds, and labeling to that effect is misleading and motivated by the desire to take advantage of the legal gray area of CBD under federal law."

When I ask Streisfeld about the efficacy of his hemp-based CBD product for Trevor's illness, the doctor tells me, "We're not saying that Hemp Meds or CBD will resolve it by any means, but if it can alleviate some of the symptoms or help with the neuroprotection or rehabilitations of brain cells, then it can improve the quality of life." However, if it's CBD that Trevor needs, he'll get far more of it from a bowl of weed than any supply of HempMeds products.

A few booths down, I spot a display styled in red with no discernble relation to cannabis. The man seated there is eager to tell me about his company's IT consulting services. I nod politely, realizing that such conversations are much easier when I'm stoned. This convention missing something I've gotten used to at Denver marijuana trade shows I've attended—namely, fun. There's no weed, no cannabis products of any sort, and a severe lack of the loud, laughy goofballs in silly hats who know exactly how to sell good and services to stoners.

It seems like the introduction of the general business element, which Humiston sees as essential to its success, is crushing the original spirit of the cannabis industry, where passion for the plant always came before money. Humiston is unconcerned with harshing the mellow, telling me, "Up until now the industry hasn't done a good job of opening itself up for the rest of the business community. I can understand why. If you're in business, why would you want competition? But it's shortsighted, because a rising tide raises all boats. The more business people we get in the industry, the better it will be."

[body_image width='2000' height='1333' path='images/content-images/2014/11/12/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/12/' filename='the-marijuana-industry-has-come-to-new-york-and-its-terrible-1112-body-image-1415798874.jpg' id='3213']Thus far, ICA's only participation in the industry has been holding two events—the first expo in Las Vegas over the summer, and the event I attended in New York. Unlike more established industry groups like the National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA), the ICA doesn't offer memberships, which is usually kind of essential to using the word "association" in your title. "We really don't know anything about [ICA]," NCIA representative Taylor West told me in an email. "They popped up out of nowhere this year... I'm not aware of them doing any advocacy or community-building or lobbying or any of the other things that we do." Humiston later told me in a text that he plans to offer memberships next year, but so far the only tangible benefit of the event to anyone was ICA's income from the $449 per-day ticket price. If all the 900 attendees were at both days of the expo, that's a stack of over $800,000. Not bad for throwing a weed extravaganza with no actual weed.

The event crew is just about done breaking down, whizzing past us with tables and chairs, as Humiston and I wrap up our chat. I have little left to ask him, so I press him about his personal interest in marijuana. "You don't blaze, man?" I ask him candidly. I add, "Maybe you should if you're going to go into this business." He looks flustered with his inability to convince me that he's cool. Finally, he finds an analogy. "You weren't at Woodstock. Does that mean that you can't really participate in the music there? I wasn't at Woodstock. I still love music. Just because I don't use cannabis doesn't mean I don't love the business of it and I don't see opportunities in it."

I continue staring at him and say nothing, hoping he will resume rambling. Finally, he says, "I don't drink either. Doesn't mean I don't appreciate people that drink." I thank him and exit the building.

Follow T. Kid on Twitter.

Dietmar Eckell has been snapping photos of plane wrecks for years. He began as a hobbyist who framed landscapes with ruins like disused train tracks, cars, and buildings. Then came a point in his life where he began working less at his job and more at photography, which culminated in him crashing a paraglider while taking aerial shots. He only broke a leg, but it gave him a lightbulb moment: What happens to crashed planes? Not the ones that kill people, but the ones ending in stories of wilderness survival.

He did some research and found that there are dozens of remote crash sites around the world. So in 2010, he quit his job and set out to photograph zero-fatality plane wrecks for his series Happy End. He's just returned from a week in the Australian bush, so I caught up with him to talk about what he'd found and what it all means.

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_{Eckell's most recent subject. A C-53 warplane. All six passengers survived}

VICE: What were you photographing in Australia?
Dietmar Eckell: It's a very old C-53. Some guy overshot Broome at night in 1942. Everything was dark in the cities in those days because of the Japanese bombing, so the pilot missed the airport and ran out of gas. It was all flat so he was able to bring the plane down and they were rescued, so it's a beautiful story. It's so remote that the plane is still there sitting in the bush. It's in pretty good shape after 72 years and only one engine is missing. It took seven days to get out there, sleeping on the roof of the 4WD. I actually wanted to sleep in the plane but the local Aboriginals wouldn't let me.

It sounds exciting. How do you find these things?
I go to internet forums like Pacific Wrecks and various pilot forums. All the old pilots love to tell stories so there's heaps of information there. And then there's data bases from the US military about crashes. You just look for the ones with zero fatalities for a starting point, and then I go to the airfields and talk to the pilots. There's always one who says call this guy, and then the guy is all like yeah, I saw that from above, and they help because it's fun. Or sometimes people don't believe me and say you come here from Germany to tell me there's a plane out there, I don't believe you! But that time I had the GPS info and we flew for hours to find a plane resting on the edge of a lake. The guy couldn't believe it.

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His most memorable plane, Alaska.}

What's the plane that sticks out most in your head?
I think it's the one in the Alaskan woods. It's totally colorful because it was fall and it's just fascinating what they guys were dealing with in the 1950s. The military were flying these planes called C-82 Packets and they didn't really work, so they sold the fleet to some transport company. These planes were then flying around Canada and Alaska but they were flying caskets. You could count the years until they came down. So one night the plane's whole electric system failed and the guys somehow brought it down in the forest. It was a freezing January, north of the Arctic Circle, and they figured their only chance they was to make a big fire. So they survived for three days with a fire and another plane noticed the glow on the horizon and they were rescued. The fun part is that this pilot contacted me and thanked me for writing down his story. So I sent him the book and he was thrilled. He said his kids were sick of hearing about it and now he had some proof.

Would you ever take photos of non-happy-ending plane crashes?
No. I'm never going to take a photo of a casket.

Do you feel your work given you any special perspective on planes that go down?
Well, it's a bit sad that I sell more books when there's a plane crash. People are googling crashes and they find me. Even a Chinese magazine contacted me when MH370 became lost and there was still hope. It's something I'm not really happy about.

What about ruins. Why do you find them so interesting?
There's a word, restwert. In German it means residual value, so it has no more functional use but there's still something there. It's the aesthetics or the story or the associations. You see an old plane, or an old merry-go-round overtaken by trees, and it provokes a story. It's the immaterial value that I still love. And you know that in maybe 200 years these things will look as they did a million years ago. It just gives you a perspective on how small we all are, and how small this lifecycle is.

Would you be interested in seeing functioning old planes?
No. I would never go to an old plane show or a museum.

So is there an element of death that interests you?
No, I don't think there's beauty in death. For me these planes are just resting there. Sometimes people see my photos and they say, Oh, that's depressing, but I don't think so. Things change and I think that's cool. If the world no longer has a use for an object, it's only because we've got something else. For me, that's beauty.

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_{Exhibition in Berlin}

What if someday your own work no longer has a use?
Sure, that's the cycle. But then someday my pictures might be worth more than the planes. I'm looking forward to that phase, not the one when they're falling off the wall. No, I'm joking. I don't take myself too seriously.

Were you always into photography?
I was a normal German kid, born in 1967 in a rather small German town called Frankenthal. I was always into exploring. I used to ride my motorbike to West Africa, which I actually did a few times and I'd always find something in those endless landscapes. Whether it was an abandoned mining operation in Algeria, or whatever. Then later I started doing this more systematically. I started following train lines, which I loved because they were once so important to everyone. Then I started taking photos and that became my first series. Now, since I quit my marketing job, I see myself more as an artist. You can't hire me. I don't do weddings or Hey can you take a photo of that plane for me? No.

How does your family feel about all the traveling?
Well, I live in Bangkok in winter where I've got a Thai girlfriend, then she visits me in Berlin in summer. It's a nice set-up. We met when I was already traveling so it's normal for her.

And where are going next?
There's a plane—actually two—in Palau, which is an island in Micronesia. Very remote again. And they're Japanese planes from WW2, so getting the details is difficult because Google isn't very good at translating Japanese forums. But as always, the mystery is half the fun.

Follow Julian Morgans on Twitter.

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The new cover of Paper Magazine

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Kim Kardashian has been shot by Jean-Paul Goude for the cover of Paper magazine, her famous behind oiled up, completely bare and jutted towards the camera. "Break the Internet Kim Kardashian," shouts the cover line.

It's interesting that it's Goude who has done this; the iconic French image-maker who—with his muse-then-lover, Grace Jones—brought a severe, alien new sexiness to pop culture in the late 70s and early 80s. Here was a tall, black, androgynous, sexually omnivorous, and muscular disco singer who challenged people's very ideas of what sexiness could be. Goude famously said at the time, "She's the only woman I can work with or talk to. I'm not interested in cupcakes anymore."

Goude capitalized on how absurd covers like Island Life presented a whole new way of being a woman: solid, strong, uncompromising. Gravity-defying. It was bare flesh, sure, but it was black, rock solid, and shiny, rapt with physical power. The Jones image was subversive because in 1985's world of Elnett-ed blondes like Samantha Fox, she really was an island and being attracted to her created inner tension. My dad said once that he admitted fancying her to his mate and they went, "Errr, she looks like a bloke," and he didn't know what to say. That was the conflict. You fancied her, but didn't know why, or whether you ought to.

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Kardashian isn't androgynous. Lord, she's like a Henry Moore sculpture. That ass is a feat of engineering; you almost need a degree in physics to fully understand it. Goude being excited about recreating his famous " Champagne Incident" image with her, with that ass that is pretty much a brand of its own, is a big moment for popular culture, I think. Why? Because Kardashian might be one of the most subversive cultural figures we have now. She is nothing like Jones, who was amazing because she purposefully embodied difference and strove to be "other." Kardashian is entirely a product of other people's influences and ideas of what will make her look, and be, fantastic and different.

As Paper points out, she is a woman who is able to generate headlines just by leaving her house. She can't just nip to the shop for a pint of milk, because every move, every walk with her kid, every trip out in the car, is documented. She is married to an incredibly successful and wealthy artist. Together, and apart, they pretty much bankroll certain areas of the media.

But despite the woman's power, her omnipresence in our culture, some people have a problem with her trajectory, how she came to be in the position she is. She provokes an intense snobbery in many people I know, and you can see the root of it: She's a reality TV star and famously made a sex tape with her then lover, Ray J. She hasn't actually (apart from the hugely successful clothing line) done anything but be famous. For being famous.

Image via Paper Magazine

"She's a slag who got rich for being on reality telly and for having sex on camera," oceans of pricks commented online when Kardashian was shot by Annie Leibowitz on the cover of Vogue with Kanye West. I'm paraphrasing, but friends said as much to me, too. And yes, she was filmed having sex once and was probably instrumental in putting it out there. Her mom, Kris Jenner, may have helped sell the tape, too, and it's all quite murky and unpalatable for some. And the marking of said tape has been indelible. She will never, ever be allowed to forget it.

But Kardashian is subversive because she creates conflict and tension. Like people may have felt with Jones, when she booted her way into public view with her wedge haircut and coral eye makeup, you want to love her, but find it hard to be fully OK with it. So many women I know say Kardashian is a "guilty pleasure," that they "shouldn't love her but I do." Kardashian is literally everywhere, her ass a pop cultural sun of sorts, but still finds herself playing the alien—as Jones once did—because people don't know what to do with their feelings about her.

Various slants on "vacuous cretin" have been a common denominator on Twitter today following the release of Paper's cover images, tempered with fervent appreciation of her oily cheeks. Female journalists have asked, "What is it, exactly, that we're meant to like or admire about Kim Kardashian?" and the truth is, I don't know what other people are supposed to admire in her. I don't know what kind of role model she's meant to be.

Personally, I see the multimillion-dollar business empire, the relentless schedules, the mother. Yes, the kid is forced to sit in fashion shows. Yes, she's had to blink away paparazzi flashes since the day she was born. Yes, Keeping Up with the Kardashians isn't "high culture" by any means, and she's a complete and utter brat to her parents on the show (even if it's eked out by the producers, she can be completely foul), but christ, what is high culture now? Does it even exist? In a world where our new celebrities are self-made vloggers who talk about literally anything on YouTube and generate millions of followers, how can we differentiate between what is "high" and what is "low"?

Kardashian's divisiveness is fascinating. Her being shot by Jean-Paul Goude in this way, as an absurd spectacle of utter female-ness, is fascinating. I've spoken to people who say, "I couldn't tell you a thing about her," who ask why on earth I'd be interested in reading an article about her, who have said to me this very morning, "Oh, give me a break."

I don't have these conversations about any other pop cultural figure and it makes me think that the Paper cover could become one of the most enduring, controversial images of our time. Having worked on women's magazines, I've also been part of the endless conversations about whether she wears padding or not, how no "white" (she's Armenian) woman could possibly have such proportions. Here, in all its slicked and ripe glory, she's presenting a big "fuck you" to all that.

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Image via

You might despise Kardashian and what she represents ("everything and nothing", says one friend), but if the Kardashian-West Vogue cover was jumping the shark, then the Paper cover, shot by someone who was instrumental in some of the most iconic, subversive female imagery of our time, is riding said shark around a bay screaming "I Am the Resurrection" through a megaphone. Goude obviously sees subversion in Kardashian, something that scratches at the modern psyche, else he wouldn't have done it. Kardashian has an ass that came from outer space; pop culture is her Area 51—a place of infinite intrigue, confusion and debate.

Follow Eleanor Morgan on Twitter

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Brian Shul in the cockpit of the SR-71 "Blackbird." Photo by Brian Shul via

Flying near the Cambodian border in 1974, US Air Force Major Brian Shul's plane was shot out of the sky. Unable to eject safely he was forced to crash land in the middle of the jungle. Miraculously, he survived the impact, but was left with severe burns and told he'd never fly again. However, instead of retiring from the military he underwent physical therapy and returned to his job, where he trained to fly the SR-71 spy plane, otherwise known as the "Blackbird."

Designed in the aftermath of the 1960 U-2 incident—in which American pilot Gary Powers was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission over Soviet airspace—the Blackbird was pegged as the plane that couldn't be hit. Retired from use in 1999, it was never struck by enemy missiles and still holds the official air speed record for a manned jet aircraft, flying at over three times the speed of sound.

Along with his copilot Walter Watson, Brian flew numerous reconnaissance missions from the UK and Okinawa in the Blackbird, including an operation over Libya that preceded Ronald Reagan's 1986 bombing of Tripoli and the Benghazi region. Brian's now a photographer and the author of a number of books about the Blackbird, so as this year is the 50th anniversary of the plane's first flight I thought I'd call him up for some of his stories.

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Brian standing in front of a SR-71 "Blackbird"

VICE: Hi Brian. Tell me about the time you crashed into the jungle.
Brian Shul: We were working as air advisors to the Thai and Laotians. I was flying over southern Thailand, near the Cambodian border, and was hit by small arms fire, of all things. I didn't even really know I'd been hit. I lost power and was unable to get out of the plane because I was too close to the ground, so I had to ride it into the jungle. It blew up, but I was lucky enough to get myself out of the burning plane, crawl out into the jungle, and wait for rescue. I was totally conscious and I remember every bit of it.

And you were taken to Okinawa to recover from your burn injuries?
Yes. They didn't think I'd survive a trip across the Pacific so they sent me there. They flew a burn team out from the US until I was able to fly back to San Antonio, where I underwent 15 surgeries. I was very lucky to be alive. I was pretty badly burned, but afterwards I was able to pass the physical and get back to flying planes.

You have to pass the astronaut physical to fly a Blackbird, right?
That's correct. Since you're flying at 90,000 feet—three times higher then a commercial airliner—you have to take the astronaut physical.

The Blackbird still looks crazy, like some futuristic spaceship. Do you remember the first time you saw it?
Absolutely—that's something you never forget. They took us out to the hangar during the interview to show us the plane, which was exciting. They also put us in the simulator to test our skills and demeanor under pressure. It was useful for some people; it showed them they didn't want to be part of the program because they didn't like wearing the space suit, or wearing the helmet, or being out of the country. But it made some of us want to do it even more.

How fast is the plane?
The Blackbird easily flew at over 2,000 miles per hour. You were doing a mile every two seconds, or faster. The jet always wanted to go faster, so you had to hold it back. It was at three times the speed of sound when we were cruising.

How did you mange to photograph the plane?
I was always interested in photography. But being around planes meant that I got into it a lot more, and I was always taking pictures. When I got to the Blackbird I got really serious about it because I realized how unique it was. Over the years I got a couple hundred pictures. You had to go through a lot of paperwork to get approval [to publish the photos], but I'm really glad I did.

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The view of the Earth from the SR-71 "Blackbird" at approximately 73,000 feet. Photo by Brian Shul via.

The views must have been incredible at 90,000 feet. Any highlights?
So many. I put a lot of it in my books. One that stands out to me personally was turning the lights out over the Pacific Ocean one dark night. I saw the Milky Way in a way that you'd never see on Earth because I was so high up above the atmosphere. It was breath-taking and I'll never forget it. Of course, I couldn't capture that view on film, but it will stay with me forever. I had a few missions in which I saw two sunrises and two sunsets in one day, as we'd fly up over the North Pole, and the tilt of the Earth gave you the opportunity to see the stars and then come back over the pole and land in England.

I also got to fly back over the area where I got shot down in South East Asia 13 years earlier. That was pretty meaningful for me. You saw scenes that you'd never see unless you were a piloting the world's fastest and highest-flying jet. I remember flying over the straits of Gibraltar during our infamous Libya raid in 1986, looking down in a turn at Spain and France. So needless to say it was memorable on many occasions.

Prior to Ronald Reagan authorizing the Libya strike in 1986, were you guys collecting information?
Yes. In 1986, when Ronald Reagan bombed Muammar Gaddafi, me and my back-seater Walter Watson flew three missions in three days from England. We're the only crew in history to fly three times in three days in that aircraft. And we gathered post and pre-strike reconnaissance for that raid. We devote our second book, The Untouchables, to that, as it was certainly a very interesting time for us.

Once a lot of the information became declassified a lot of the people who worked on the plane were able to open up and discuss their work. We flew much lower then a satellite—the Blackbird had optics you could zoom in with. While the plane stayed the same the sensors and cameras were always being upgraded and improved.

You've talked previously about a mission in which you flew over the Arctic to catalogue Russian missile bases. Were you ever worried about being shot down, or did you have faith in the plane and its speed?
Well, we had ultimate confidence in the machine. But you felt a little naked up there when people would target you. It certainly wasn't invulnerable despite the height and speed it flew at. If you got everything right you could theoretically shoot one down. But the odds against it were good. In 26 years they fired over 4,000 missiles at this airplane and they never hit one. But you never took it for granted. There was always the possibility they might fire something new at you and you could be shot down. But it proved its worth.

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Brian taking a selfie with his visor down. Photo by Brian Shul via

What kind of technology were you up against?
Well, the Russians designed the MiG-29 to try and shoot us down. But, nearly 30 years later, they couldn't come up with a better jet than what we'd come up with in the 1960s. They could certainly fly high and try to launch a missile at us—that was always a threat, and it was something they often tried to do desperately, but they never could pull it off.

It's a tough shot when you're traveling at that speed. The amount of lead you need to give is a difficult thing. We used to fly practice missions with US pilots. They would be in F-15s to see how difficult it is to shoot us down and they still couldn't get a lock on. They said it was possible, but it's a one in a million shot. We felt secure.

You've also previously talked about the plane having a psychological effect on, say, Russia and Korea. Can you elaborate?
The airplane itself had a double sonic boom off the nose of the plane and the inlets. Gathering intelligence over countries like Korea meant that the double sonic boom was an extra slap in the face. It was no secret that the plane was there above them. You couldn't hide its heat source, so they knew it was there. Many parts of the plane would heat up to 900 degrees. It wasn't a stealth jet. But that sonic boom let them know we were there.

Were there any missions that were particularly dicey?
We detail a lot of it in The Untouchables. One that stands out to me is losing an engine over Korea in a turn, which was pretty exiting as the plane was flying sideways for a minute. We could have easily lost the plane but we limped home to Okinawa that night and our training kicked in and paid off. We trained in the simulator again and again, so you became a cohesive unit with your back-seater. Once we got it under control we slowed it down and went home.

Do you miss it?
Well, it was a lot of work. A lot of exiting, terror-filled moments. I don't look back and say, "Gee, I wish I was doing that every day." Although, if someone offered me the chance to fly a mission I would probably go and do it. But life moves on. I'm now really into nature photography. I was lucky enough to be one of the 93 guys who got to fly the plane in real missions. I don't look backward in life. I like to look forward at the next challenge.

For more Blackbird stories check out Brian's site and books.

Follow Tom Breakwell on Twitter

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Rhiannon Colvin of AltGen talking to a student. All photos by the author

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

If you have recently started the final year of your studies, or your looming £44,000 ($70,000) debt means you're fretting ahead of time, you may have noticed—or even been to—one of the many parades of cheap suits and clammy handshakes that is the careers fair. In fact, with many universities dropping any pretense of academia and existing as sausage factories for the knowledge economy, you'd have to have buried your head deep in the sand to have avoided talking about what happens after uni—work, a career, or the lack thereof.

I went to a careers fair hosted jointly by Sussex and Brighton Universities last Wednesday. To put a twist on things, I went along with an organisation called AltGen ("Alternative Generation"). While it sounds like a failed X Factor band, AltGen was in fact started by a bunch of disillusioned graduates aiming to empower young people to set up workers' co-operatives—businesses owned and run by their workers—as a solution to youth unemployment and an alternative to the current graduate job market. Incorporated as workers' co-op itself this May, AltGen have been going to careers fairs across the UK telling students they don't have to accept a crappy job working for a boss they don't like for too little money. By clubbing together with mates and working for each other, they argue, you can have a whole bakery, rather than a little slice of swiss roll.

The general outlook to which they're posing this alternative is rather bleak. Despite a slight drop in graduate unemployment from 8.5 percent amongst 2012 graduates to 7.3 percent amongst the 2013 cohort (hi!), things are still fairly shit for graduates. A recent report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies estimated that a mere 27 percent of the students paying £9,000 ($14,250) a year will actually manage to pay off their entire debt. There is an average of 39 applicants for every graduate job, with at least 13 percent ending up settling for non-graduate jobs such as spending Friday night on the wrong side of the bar. Thirty-seven percent of people on zero-hours contracts are aged between 16 and 24, and for the last few years we have actually been competing with each other to work for free—racing to get scarce unpaid internships seem pretty normal now but this is a bit of a first in human history.

On arrival, we were told AltGen had been allocated a stand in the "not-for-profit" section of the careers fair, ironically located in the BMW Lounge, inside Brighton & Hove Football Club's American Express Stadium.

While AltGen is not-for-profit in practice, what it really wants is to encourage young entrepreneurial hopefuls to start co-operative businesses that share profits amongst their workers. That's instead of trying to float their tech start-ups on the stock market and getting a load of depressed people they just graduated with, or people in China, to do their work for peanuts. This, they argue, is not only a necessary shift in a UK economy that has seen real wages consistently falling under the coalition government. It is also better than competing with your mates for an unpaid internship at Poundland.

"It is a complete waste of energy fighting each other for unpaid internships. This hit me last year while waiting for an interview for an unpaid internship that 150 other graduates had applied for," Rhiannon Colvin, one of AltGen's founders. "It's not our fault that the economy isn't set up to put our generation's skills and talents to positive use. But I think that's going to have to be us that changes it. We believe workers' co-ops are a model which allow us to combine forces to change this and make the economy work for us."

AltGen have charged themselves with the role of bringing the idea of co-ops to young people. As well going to careers fairs across the country, they run workshops in universities explaining how co-operatives work, and have just launched the Young Co-operator's Prize—five £2,000 ($3,200) startup grants for 18–29 year olds with a cooperative business idea.

Professor Chris Pole gives a speech

Before students began flooding into the careers fair, there were speeches from bigwigs at Sussex and Brighton welcoming the room of corporate suits over hot drinks and dry pastries. It was a warm welcome—and so it should have been, with multinationals paying £300 ($475) for a stand, a bargain compared to the £500 ($800) they pay at Oxbridge and the University of London, according to the head of the careers service at the University of Brighton.

Professor Chris Pole, Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Brighton, said this was one of the most important services his university provided their "consumers." The Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Sussex, Professor Michael Davies, explained that students were now coming to careers fairs as early as first year, unlike when he went to university, where "getting a job at the end of it was probably the last thing on my mind." Oh the good old days! Unsurprisingly, no mention was made of the primary cause of this new breed of proactive students, i.e., the regime of astronomical student debt of which vice-chancellors such as these are the willing administrators and beneficiaries.

Old stereotypes about students being lazy don't really apply any more, because people just don't have the luxury of slacking these days. Come 11AM, students were turning up in droves and queuing outside in the bitter wind and resembling those famous "Labour Isn't Working" posters that Thatcher used in the 1970s.

These people were exemplars of the "squeezed middle". Most of the students I spoke to were unsure of what they wanted to do, and almost all of them felt they had a tougher deal than their parents. The phrase "first world problems" came to mind—except rather than people pretending to complain about pesto and thinking they're funny, these were people who were relatively privileged but had legitimate cause for grievance.

As you might imagine, the vibe of the "not-for-profit" section in the BMW Lounge—where AltGen was sitting—was somewhat different from the Entrepreneurship, Finance and IT section in the Bupa Lounge, filled with shady consultancy firms and the odd arms manufacturer (Thales, who left after a student "die-in" protest in front of their stand). In this wider context, AltGen were clearly a welcome relief for students—and not only to the kind of people who look like they occupy lecture theatres just for fun, such as Sammarah, who told me about her career plan: "I want to destroy capitalism."

Students studying degrees in childcare lit up on hearing of a new co-operatively run nursery in Lambeth, South London. Others were more enthused by the idea of the £2,000 startup grants. Still others were baffled or skeptical about their chances of creating a viable workers' co-op.

This didn't worry Constance Laisné, AltGen's other founder—she was convinced that horrible, horrible real life will bring people round to the idea. "I think a lot of students believe 'it'll be different for me'. But a couple of years into the bitter reality of being a graduate might push them into thinking about the alternatives. And not just for themselves, but for our whole generation."

Some see AltGen as naively optimistic, others find their practical emphasis on changing work timely and pragmatic. In any case, there is a buzz about them. A crowd of 100 excitable youth attended their launch in Bethnal Green in July. Last month ago they got flown over to Montréal to speak at the International Summit of Co-operatives. Whatever way you look at it, AltGen are undoubtedly tapping into some kind of global recession zeitgeist.

Follow Gabriel Bristow on Twitter

It didn't take long for the internet-at-large to learn about Julien Blanc, a self-proclaimed pick-up artist (PUA) who was filmed telling a room of his PUA pupils that in Tokyo, all you need to do to get lucky with a woman is grab her head and pull it to your crotch. In his words: "Head on dick, head on dick."

As a result of this video surfacing, Blanc has had his immigration visa to Australia revoked during a recent visit; he has also inspired the wrath of citizens the world over. A petition, addressed to the immigration minister of Canada to have Blanc banned from the country, has over 7,500 signatures at the time this article was written. A similar petition, to ban him from Japan where he was filmed physically harassing women, has over 36,000 signatures.

One of Blanc's business partners, however, has his own set of disturbing videos that are worthy of scrutiny. His name is Owen Cook and he was born in Ottawa, Ontario, but he goes by the alias Tyler Durden. Cook is written about extensively in Neil Strauss's famous seduction bible, The Game, and in it he's painted as a veritable pick-up artist antagonist. Strauss describes him as a disrupter who misinterpreted the tenets of seduction and took them to an uncomfortable new low.

In Strauss's words: "Tyler Durden advocated a new mission. He called it Project Mayhem, in honour of Fight Club. And the directive was to run up to an attractive woman and—before even uttering a word—lightly body-check her, whack her on the head with something soft, or physically accost her in some other playful manner."

Clearly this elementary school-style, inappropriately physical tactic has been expanded upon by Cook and his pick-up artist disciples, who run a PUA company called Real Social Dynamics (RSD). RSD travels the world to hold "boot camps" where they teach men for $2,500-$3,000 a piece how they can seduce women.

With the help of a group of activists who want to "take down Real Social Dynamics," three videos have come to my attention that detail Cook's physically aggressive style of meeting women, his bizarre allegories to teach men about seduction through an allegory about raping an animal, and a personal encounter Cook describes willingly where he says he forced sex on a woman he was dating.

The first video, posted to Cook's own YouTube channel, is entitled "Tyler's Most Gangster Exercise for Entitlement." In it, he describes a new "exercise" that he thinks is "very cool."

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/g5MwWBsOZ5Y' width='642' height='315']

Basically, this tactic involves grabbing strange women, pulling them towards you, and yelling "You! What's Up? Come!" Cook describes this as a "sloppy" move to "rip her in." In the video, Cook advises his audience to test this out on an unattractive woman first, in order to "get the exact feel for doing that." He then advises his pupils, after they have gotten accustomed to physically grabbing strange women in a nightclub, to approach and grab a woman they find attractive instead.

Cook tells his students to "not even focus on your emotions" and to "divorce your emotions" from the action of grabbing a strange woman without her permission. He tells his students to recognize the "blocker" in their mind that is preventing them from grabbing a strange woman at a nightclub and to ignore it. He insists that anyone who tries this sloppy tactic will receive a "very interesting result."

Yes, I'm sure they will.

Cook wraps up the video by letting his students know that practicing on unattractive women will help them get over their "entitlement block," or their "this is not the behaviour I'm supposed to be doing block." According to Owen Cook, "divorcing your emotions" and going against one's natural instincts to not grab strange women in public will help men get laid; because women are obviously looking for men to grab them without asking every time they leave the house.

There's another particularly off-putting video, filmed inside one of Owen Cook's boot camps, wherein Cook talks about raping a metaphorical lion. He sets this bizarre allegory up by telling his students that "attraction is not a choice," that "women are attracted to status," and how "looks aren't that important" for men to attract women.

The video, which is marked with a trigger warning for survivors of sexual assault, is disturbing and confusing. And, it's one of the more graphic and creepy things I've ever had to put in an article. So, be warned:

"Say you've got a tribe, and there's this fucking lion that's come and eaten five or six members of your tribe... Everyone's scared of the scary cat. So you come along, and that scary cat comes out, and you grab that thing by the fucking neck. [Cook begins to growl] And you fucking choke it to death. And you take it, you take its dead body. And you buttfuck it as you stare at the tribe. So you're the guy that killed and buttfucked the scary cat... Now you've got a poopy dick. This is where the 'attraction is not a choice' thing comes in... If you buttfucked the scary cat, those girls are going to line up to suck that poopy dick."

Cook's gleeful description of raping an imaginary dead lion in order to attract hypothetical women in a hypothetical tribe, in all of its gory detail, is clearly disturbing. But it's not even the worst instance of Cook's aggressive "seduction" philosophy that has been caught on video (the quote begins at 1:27 in the video).

In another clip that was again filmed in one of RDS' boot camps, Cook describes a forcible encounter he had with a woman who he was apparently dating. This is a video that could absolutely trigger victims of sexual assault, and the quote I've pasted below is highly troubling. So please tread lightly:

"She was a stripper... I fucking hated that fucking bitch. Fucking bitch. She even had the tramp stamp. You know what I'm saying? The full tramp stamp. She's just a full, slut whore slut. I fucked the shit out of her, dude...

The last way I fucked her too, it was in the morning, she was taking a shower, and I didn't think she wanted to have sex again, but I just threw her on the bed and I put it in her, and I could barely even get it in because she was just totally not in the mood. And I was like, 'Fuck it, I'm never seeing this bitch again. I don't care.' So I just like, jam it in, and it's all tight and dry and I fuck her, and I'm like 'I'll just make this quick because she doesn't even want it.' But then she starts to get into it, and once she gets into it I came prematurely."

Clearly, Julien Blanc is not acting alone when it comes to disseminating hurtful and abusive language to men who are trying to gain the confidence to approach women and find companions. Or, worse, they are enabling the misconceptions that men have about objectifying and taking advantage of women they want to sleep with. Either way, the information RDS is spreading is dangerous to say the least.

Cook's description of forcing sex on a woman he was dating is incredibly disturbing. It's a detailed encounter that he offers up voluntarily, and it is nauseating. In light of all this, the fact that Cook is touring around the world, and passing off his violent and disturbing behaviour as a method to pick-up women, is alarming. While Julien Blanc has received a lot of negative attention for the awful video that shows him bragging about physically grabbing strange women in Tokyo, these "lessons" from Owen Cook deserve scrutiny as well.

Turning back to Neil Strauss's book The Game, for perspective on Owen Cook, Strauss describes Cook as not even recognizing the humanity of the male pick-up artists he associates with: "He didn't seem to see the humanity in us. He didn't care about what we did for work; where we were from; or what our thoughts on culture, politics, and the world were. There was a distinction he didn't seem to understand: We weren't just PUAs. We were people."

If that's how these pick-up artists feel about Cook, then how has he impacted the women who he clearly treats horribly?

Owen Cook did not respond to multiple requests for comment from VICE.

@patrickmcguire

[body_image width='800' height='600' path='images/content-images/2014/11/12/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/12/' filename='joel-golby-free-will-and-the-need-to-pee-body-image-1415814564.jpg' id='3415']A man really enjoying a piss. Photo via Scott Liddle

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

I've made a lot of poor decisions when I have needed to piss. Once, I embarked on a drunken one down a dark alley somewhere near Finsbury Park station and I swear it lasted three straight minutes, during which time two police cars cruised by and I was sure I was going to be arrested. How do you tell people about that? How does that phonecall go? "Yeah, hiya. Yeah I know you were asleep, but I need £4,000 to make bail."

We piss all the time. Do you need a piss right now? Think about it. Really think. Waterfalls. Really think. That long, arcing sound that happens when you pour a bottle of water into a glass from a height. Really think about it. Do you maybe 6/10 need to piss? 7/10? Imagine one of those New York–style hydrants getting hit with a spanner so hard it explodes. Think. 8/10? Nine? Guess what: Your piss is right now changing your belief in free will.

That's a thing science has discovered, anyway. According to researchers Michael R. Ent and Roy F. Baumeister, the one variable that makes individuals believe in free will isn't smoking a single blunt and spending your undergraduate year reading an Intro to Philosophy book while sitting underneath a Bob Marley poster, and nor is it the result of a deep-seated belief in divine omnipotence. Instead it just depends on how many ounces of malt liquor you drank 90 minutes ago and how pressing your need is to piss it all out.

They found this out by the time-honored academic method of asking 81 people to fill in an online survey. First, the survey asked the participants' current hunger, thirst and piss levels, as well as how desirous of sex they were at that moment (scientifically known as their "horny levels"). Then, a series of questions designed to gauge how much they believed in their own destiny.

The results were those who had intense and pressing physical needs—needing a sandwich, a Coke, a piss or a shag—were less likely to consider themselves in control of their own destinies. Each time we need a piss but have to unzip ourselves from a sleeping bag and go outside is a test from the universe.

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Ent & Baumeister (who, if they haven't started a high-end speaker business on the side, immediately have to do so) also used the test to determine the free will of 23 people with panic disorder, 16 epileptics and 35 people from a healthy control group. What they found was those suffering from conditions generally considered to plunge the mind into a degree of mental chaos weren't actually that bothered about free will, which is fair, because it sounds like they've got plenty of other stuff to worry about anyway.

And there was a third test, too—after the initial results didn't find an especially banging correlation between hunger and free will, researchers administered the test to a new group of 112 dieters and non-dieters. What they found was, as predicted, non-dieters' belief in free will wavered the hungrier they were, while those on a diet found their free will increased. They had eaten so many carrots and denied so many doughnuts that they had bust on through and found inner peace.

What does this tell us about life, the universe, and big, string net-like philosophical concepts? Basically, that our body is more important to our decision-making than might have been first thought.

We're not just a bunch of wobbling brains with legs. We've also got bladders and stomachs and all sorts of stuff in between that effects how we think. It's a theory called embodied cognition—with roots in Kant—that holds that the nature of the mind is largely determined by the needs and form of the human body.

How do you apply such theories to everyday life? Not really sure. Just maybe eat a sandwich, take a piss or, heck, crack one out next time you need to make an important, life-altering decision.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

These days, Shoreditch is many things: a home for man buns and £6 sandwiches, a place for pop-ups to pop enthusiastically up and then deflatedly down. It's the place where they send The Apprentice contestants on week three, where Alan Sugar screws up his bollock-like face and tells them to sell T-shirts with a shit, hand-drawn Union Flag on it to anyone with lobotomy scars and a spare £45.

"These bladdy hipsters," Sugar is saying. "These young people, with their money." He's roaring now, in tears. Nick Hewer's covering Karren Brady's eyes as Sugar rips off his shirt, his tie still round his neck. Sweat rises off him like a steam. "I WANT YOU TO RINSE THESE CUNTS DRY," he's saying. Every single week three. "DON'T YOU FACKIN' WALK BACK IN THAT BOARDROOM WITHOUT AT LEAST A TON EACH IN YOUR BACK FACKIN' POCKETS."

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Importantly, though, "Shoreditch" has sort of become an adjective of late, a shorthand for "feckless hipster gobshite." Sometimes it's easy to forget that it's a reputation the area has worked hard for. In the last 12 years, more parties have been put on and more recreational drug deals struck than in the whole of a city like Manchester over the equivalent time period. I have absolutely no quantitative stats to back this up but luckily photographer Dougie Wallace has spent those 12 years capturing all of East London's stupid mess and now, he's releasing it in a new book called Shoreditch Wild Life.

If Wallace's hyperreal, double-flash, people-pulling-candid-faces-while-eating-chips aesthetic seems familiar to you, that's because his previous collection, Stags, Hens and Bunnies, was legitimately one of the greatest things ever. I spoke to him about the fuzzy concept of Shoreditch, why he likes taking photos of people with their mouths open and the sticky subject of permissions in street photography, just to lighten the mood.

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VICE: So, Dougie, how long have you been taking photos of Shoreditch?
Dougie Wallace: It's been, like, 12 years or something; since Gary's Bar was under the bridge on Kingsland Road. I've probably been taking pictures in the area longer than that, but the main ones are on digital cameras and before that it was film. I'm not really getting back into my film, so they've gone.

OK. You must have seen a fair old change in the area over 12 years.
To me it's always for the better, though. Twelve years ago it never used to be called "Shoreditch"—it was "Hoxton and Brick Lane" or "Old Street and Brick Lane." The only thing in Brick Lane was the Vibe Bar and maybe Sandra's bar [The Golden Heart]. There was nothing really in between, no Shoreditch House or these other places. But that's what people come for now. The people who come on the Overground at the weekend are the people that would have once been going to Camden. They're coming for the "Shoreditch experience," the idea.

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Do you think that Shoreditch becoming shorthand for "shit high haircut" and "expensive coffee wankers" means the area gets a bad rap?
People will always poke fun at it, won't they? But I suppose it does. I suppose I do as well. I mean, there are so many pictures from bars, aren't there? I don't come out of it looking too well. But I think what you do see in the book is that I've included pictures of people who are actually local to the area rather than those who just come in for the weekends. The Brick Lane market on a Sunday morning and stuff. I've not just just concentrated on clubbers and trendies—there's quite a good mix in there. Hopefully, the book will be in the British Library in 20 years' or 40 years' time, and people will be able to look at it and say, "This was Shoreditch."

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How do you take so many pictures of people without them seeming to notice?
Well, now I'm using two flashes and shooting high-speed sync, so it has to be a really sunny day for people not to notice. There's this market on Slater Street that's dodgy as anything and if I'm there with two flash guns I can't hide. If it's really sunny I put it up in really high-speed sync and then they can't really see it unless you shoot it right in their eyes. You can bob and weave, though. You need to treat it as a challenge, taking some of these pictures. But most of the time you're alright. You can use your instinct.

Do you think that some people think it's invasive in any way to be photographed in the street or on buses? Have you ever had people say, "I'd rather you didn't do that" or asked you to delete photos?
You do get people saying "delete that" but on the whole I don't. You can use wee tricks—it's kind of like being a street magician, you get the picture and then you need to sort of fade away. But where does it start and where does it stop if you can take people's pictures? I was in Victoria Park and took this picture of a girl with a dog, and then she said, "Can you use that?" I just said, "I'm taking a picture of the park."

It's a bit intrusive, yeah, but that's just what you do. If you're a writer, you base characters on real people. It's just seeing something and making art.

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It's like what they did in France, a year ago—you can't really take pictures without some sort of model release if you want to use them. You can't really take street photography in France, or any photography, if anybody is in the street. They're doing it more and more here, too—if you go to places like Trafalgar Square and you look professional they'll stop you now, and it's the same in big shopping centers. I just don't see how it's workable.

Maybe it's because you get so many pictures of people with their mouths open. How have you honed that particular skill?
Yeah, I catch them with their mouths open a lot. Especially in Blackpool. A lot of that's their reaction to the two flashguns. They're talking to somebody, or shouting, expressing themselves, and the flash helps capture that moment.

What is it about shooting everyday people going about their lives that appeals to you, rather than sitting in a studio with a model doing poses?
I've never taken a formal posed photo in my life. It would bore me too much.

Buy the book at Hoxton Mini Press or buy the Collector's Edition

See more of Dougie's work here

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

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