It's always interesting to see what skaters do after their time is up in professional skating, and the difficulties they face entering the real world. We tracked down Chocolate alumni everywhere from weed dispensaries to auto body shops to real estate firms. In the final Chocolate episode, we tried to tie up all the loose ends and take a look at the future of the team. We also caught up with some of the Trunk Boyz and went to East LA with Vincent.​

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In India, a woman's life is worth $3,000. 

Or so says official state policy if one of their doctors botches a sterilisation, like what has happened in the past few days at Nemi Chand hospital in Chhattisgarh, where at least 12 women died and a further 60 became critically ill after ​one doctor attempted 80 operations in a day.

The very best anti-poverty benefits come only to couples that have been sterilized. Want more land? Get the snip. Want a loan? Let me tie your tubes. In a government driven project, poor, disenfranchised women are being paid roughly between $13 and $22 for their sterility. There's a touch of Emma Goldman's  ​Why and How the Poor Should Not Have Children pamphlet in India's family planning methods and it's time it ended.

In February 2013, NDTV released footage of a large group of women passed out in an open space beside Manikchak hospital in West Bengal. This was the overspill of a mass sterilization of 103 women across one single day.

It's the stuff of fucking nightmares and it all comes down to numbers, to pulling India's birth rate into the realm of respectability as fast as possible.  ​The golden number is 2.1. That is how many children women should be having, currently 0.3 less than the national average.

In 2000, India officially abandoned its national goal-orientated birth rates, but that didn't prevent its states from  ​setting their own individual goals. This is sort of like saying you're done going to the gym but secretly doing butt crunches at your desk.

Long term climate goals are cited as reasons to cause short-term pain to living people, when spending a bit more on equality would get them there just as quickly and with much less of all the death stuff.

In India's pursuit of the dream birth rate, human beings are reduced to whole numbers, children to fractions and fallopian tubes to mobile phones. It's become a weird meta-game for states, where their total fertility rate (TFR) is  ​calculated, aggregated, and ranked. Rajasthan declared it would it would ​sterilize 1 percent of its pop​ulation during 2011 in exchange for mobile phones and lottery tickets for cars, like the monstrous Santa Claus of eugenics.

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Rural living conditions in Uttar Pradesh. Image  ​via Flickr user pingnews.com

Basic human rights go out the window. In 2012, a single surgeon, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, conducted 53 sterilizations in Bihar without the aid of, oh,  ​such trifles as running water or sterilizing equipment. One woman was apparently three months pregnant and miscarried 19 days later. In Uttar Pradesh ​you can trade getting snipped for guns, which is perhaps the most cynical population control ever conceived: Prevent people from reproducing and assist them in killing each other. Give whoever came up with that one the fucking Nobel Peace Prize.

What's happening is a queer and loathsome policy of entrenched sexism and classism, passed off as a national objective. But the problem isn't just contained within India's borders. It's global. 

The UK is reported to have  ​provided £166 million ($260 million) in aid, raised ​by taxes, that was then used in India's family planning. The US also helps out. In 2013 it was reported that, in India alone, 4.6 million people were sterilized, which is over 12,500 a day.

Assuming the Indian government pays 1,400 rupees ($23) to each woman willing to go through with the operation, the Indian government pumps almost $106 million a year on sterilizing women, which is a little more than it spent on constructing a gigantic " ​mega cow pen" to protect their beautiful bovine from harm.

Um. Have they not heard that  ​cows are responsible for global warming?

Devika Biswas, the convener of the  ​Health Watch Forum in India, was present at the Bihar mass sterilization and stressed to me that, if anyone wanted to help India, they should "promote to make facilities provide all comprehensive healthcare, including maternal health services to stop maternal deaths by effective management of anesthetic and other high-risk factors." India's medical facilities are simply not up to standard, she says, and women are, in particular, "at risk."

In India's latest National Family Health Survey, conducted between 2005 and 2006, the tubal ligation/vasectomy ratio  ​sits around the 37.3 to 1 mark, even though the male operation is safer, easier, and less invasive. Men simply won't let people mess with their junk, but they're quite happy signing up ​on behalf of their wives, who are then drugged and operated on for ​roughly a week or two's wages. In Chhattisgarh in 2003, a government health worker encountered the same refrain from almost every household she visited: "Take my wife."

Only 8.3 percent of India's population use condoms or the contraceptive pill as a means of family planning, despite initiatives to make them free across the country. "The sex education is poor," says Biswas. "It is only for high school children. In most rural schools, girls hardly attend classes and appear only for examinations. Many members of the castes and tribal communities leave primary schools by age of 11, so don't get any sex education whatsoever."

The spread of information and services are key to solving this issue, but it seems like the government is happier spinning propaganda. Women with more than two children, for example, are barred from some states from running for  panchayati, despite not having true control over their own bodies. Catchy phrases like "One is Fun!" or "We Two, Our Two!" are everywhere. According to Biswas, it's common for women to go for sterilization "unwillingly and under pressure."

India's policy social security doesn't help, either. There are few pensions around, which forces poor families to have larger families to assist them when they're old. This is the conundrum: Men will not get the snip, women are culturally and economically inferior. Men have sex, women give birth.

Women who have too many kids cannot stand for office. Thus, nobody is fighting within the establishment politically for their side.  It's a dangerous, self-fulfilling circle of bleakness. 

In July 2012, the Indian government announced at the London Summit for Family Planning that it had undergone a "paradigm shift" towards a buffet-style selection of contraceptive options. They had employed 860,000 community health workers to spread the word. This seems progressive. It isn't.

Evidence has surfaced that Accredited Social Health Activists—those who go from family to family promoting surgery as a family planning tool—work on a bonus per every person they convince to get sterilized. It's vaguely similar to how random telemarketers call you up every so often to nag you to swap broadband provider and sound so sweet and concerned about your crappy connection but really, just want to get in your wallet.  

Normal people have ended up coercing the poorest and most disenfranchised members of the country into sterilizing themselves for the price of a Mars Bar.

One doctor  ​admitted to being paid an extra $2 every time he performed an operation using a weaker, cheaper anesthetic. The same doctor spoke at length about how the government judged him on how many operations he had performed before the end of each fiscal year, in March. Jobs were on the line. Money was on the line.

But that's not the case for the victims.

"Poor and illiterate women are coaxed and forced to undergo sterilization operations," says Biswas. And it's not, primarily, for money. "But as they end up depending on the health activists for any health services and become very close to them, so they go for sterilization to please them."

Normal people have ended up coercing the poorest and most disenfranchised members of the country into sterilizing themselves for the price of a Mars Bar.

Kerala is often cited as an example of a place with an aspirational  ​low birth rate. But this probably has little to do with sterilization and more to with the fact that ​87.7 percent of Keralan women can read—the highest in the country. "The contraceptive pills are free in all the government health facilities—even in rural areas. But none promote them properly," says Biswas. "Intake and precautionary measure are not told clearly to each individual woman." Presumably, if you can't read packaging or an information leaflet, you might need to be told about what the pill does. 

The  New York Times ​published an article in 2001 describing how politician Chandrababu Naidu stood before a village and convinced them to sterilize themselves. "Nobody is supporting you," he said to one member of the crowd. "Immediately go for the operation."

Put yourself in these women's position. The husbands won't do it. The state won't educate you on alternatives. Consumer goods outside of the realm of realistic purchase are offered - blenders, fridges, mobile phones. All for the price of a little operation. You can make money. Support your family. Help the country you love hit its birth rate goals. Please your friends.

During the compulsory sterilization period in India, which ran for 21 months between 1975 and 1977, 8 million people were sterilized. In 2013, 4.6 million were sterilized.

There is, it seems, no other option.

Follow David Whelan on ​Twitter

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​​​Following another round of strikes on ISIS positions in Iraq, the Department of Defence says Canadian fighter jets are "very effective" in kneecapping the Islamic State's effort to reach Baghdad.

Wednesday night, Canada's jets took out ISIS artillery that had been firing on Iraqi forces.

This is the second strike on ISIS positions in the last two weeks. Since the mission began at the beginning of the month, the Royal Canadian Air Force has flown 68 sorties through Northern Iraq.

Canada's Operation IMPACT is a self-sustained effort—it consists of six CF-188 Hornet fighter jets, a CC-150T Polaris refueller, and two high-tech CP-140 Aurora surveillance aircrafts. Joining the aircraft, which are stationed at an ally base in Kuwait, are 600 Canadian Forces personnel.

Wednesday night, the Hornets flew their second sortie that saw action, hitting ISIS artillery just outside Baiji, a Northern Iraq town, just North of Tikrit and halfway between the Islamic State-controlled city of Mosul and the government-held capital of Baghdad.

Baiji is a hotspot of fighting between Iraqi security forces and the ISIS soldiers. The artillery, says the Canadian Forces, had been tucked behind a tree line, firing at the Iraqis. Video footage released by the Department of Defence shows laser-guided bombs reducing the artillery to rubble.

"There likely were ISIL casualties, but we don't have any data on numbers or anything like that," said Colonel Dan Constable in a technical briefing the morning after.

This would make it the first time that Canadian Forces took out ISIS fighters since the campaign began.
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​​The first strike, on November 2, pounded heavy machinery sitting on the banks of the Euphrates River, just outside Fallujah. That equipment, Lieutenant-General Jonathan Vance told reporters after the strike, was being used to re-route water from the Euphrates River: "to create flooding and displace the population in Anbar province while also denying water to other populations downstream. By flooding certain areas, ISIL forced civilians and Iraqi security force members to use specific roads where they had placed improvised explosive devices, or IEDs."

The Canadian mission's main goal to degrade and deter ISIS forces' ability to capture new territory in the region, while making it easier for the Iraqi forces to regroup and push the terrorist organization back. To that end, the leadership says they're succeeding.

"Our assessment is that ISIL is losing its freedom of movement," said Constable on Thursday. "They're hiding more. They're providing fewer targets, which also means that they're a less capable force. When you're on the defensive, when you're hiding, you're unable to have that freedom of manoeuvre that's critical to an offensive force."

In both strikes, the Canadian leadership say they're confident that no civilians were killed or injured.

Critics have contended that ISIS' changing tactics have made Canada's military contribution moot.

Jack Harris, the NDP' defence critic quizzed Major General Michael Hood on the mission in committee last week, after the first round of strikes.

"One of the early critiques of the notion of air strikes in Iraq, particularly given the large number of countries who had signed up to do that, was the perhaps very soon paucity of targets, that very soon you might 'run out of targets,'" Harris asked. "Are we in danger of being ineffective in a very short period of time?"

Hood returned: "Air power alone is not going to push back ISIL, but what it is going to do is it's going to deny them freedom of maneuver. So whether we're actually striking deliberate targets or targets that may arise over the course of events, the deterrent effect of air power being there and the success the coalition is enjoying in those strikes is having real effects."

Yesterday's strike appears to suggest exactly that desired effect.

Canada's mission is limited only to Iraq, where it is simultaneously ferrying aid and weapons to the Kurdish Peshmerga, who it is also training, as well as outfitting the Iraqi forces with much-needed equipment.

Ottawa has all but ruled out expanding its mission to Syria, where it has called for President Bashar al-Assad to step down, but has not endorsed a replacement government. The Harper Government's concerns of extremists coming to power in Damascus appear to have warned it away from becoming involved at all.

Given that, according to the Associated Press, ISIS has just struck a deal with its long-time rivals, the al-Nusra ​Front, Canada's concern that the more moderate Free Syrian Army doesn't have the support to take power in Syria appears to be well founded.

Back in Iraq, one particular area of pride for the Forces is the use of the Canadian-refurbished Auroras. The 30-year-old surveillance planes were primarily coastal surveillance crafts, until their quickly approaching technological irrelevance pushed Ottawa to retrofit the planes with new equipment. With a new top-of-the-line suite of surveillance equipment onboard—which Vance singled-out as "tremendous"—that were originally deployed in the Libya mission to scope out possible targets and identity civilians, the Auroras were reportedly requested directly by the Americans at the outset of the mission.

"The Aurora has aided in the assessment of targets through its role in battle-damage assessment, has acted as the airborne sensor directing—supporting the identification, analysis, and prosecution of targets inside Iraq," Constable told reporters.

While he couldn't confirm or deny it, it's possible that those Auroras were used to identify a high-level ISIS convoy that was struc​k near Mosul last week, reportedly injuring ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The allied command, Constable said, often tasks the Auroras to do reconnaissance on behalf of the entire operation.

During Vance's press conference, VICE asked specifically whether the Communications Security Establishment, or CSEC, was involved in intercepting data that could help Canadian Forces identify targets.

"You can imagine I'm not going to go into detail on something as sensitive as that," Vance said. "But we use all forms of intelligence at our disposal to try and understand both the battle space and the particular target that we wish to strike."

@Justin_L​ing

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​​For the past two years, Montreal's has had its very own super hero. Our super hero isn't part of the urban clan of crime fighters called the New Yo​rk Initiative or the slick looking Real Life Super Hero Project. Our super hero is short, slim, vegan, identifies as a queer radical feminist, and prefers to be referred to using the pronoun "they." So, in short, they are not what you'd expect of a super hero.

Meet LightStep.

LightStep is one of a burgeoning community of so-called Real-life Superheroes (RLSH)—citizens from Argentina to the UK who have decided to patrol their local streets, in costume, doing good deeds. These deeds can range from something as simple as helping to change a ti​re in Brampton, handing​ out socks and mitts to the homeless in Windsor, or to straight up vigilantism that led one Washington-based RLSH to being arrested for as​sault. But LightStep believes de-escalation and harm reduction training are much more important than a uniform, a sidekick, or pepper-spraying a bunch of people you suspect are in a street brawl (like the RLSH in Washington did)."People identify instantly with the idea of a superhero, someone who's anonymous, but public, doing good deeds, for whatever reason," LightStep tells me. "But that's not what I'm doing (...) For me, LightStep is a philosophy of being at the right place at the right time."

My costume had nothing on LightStep's, whose ensemble has a post-apocalyptic influence, with a black, custom, hooded morphsuit layered under a kevlar shirt, topped off with a motocross protective jacket, knee and shin guards, and a GoPro camera to document their patrol. "It's stab-proof and bullet proof," they tell me. "It's not a thrown together costume." LightStep agreed to let me tag along for a patrol around Montreal's busy St. Laurent Street this past Halloween. I was told to dress up. "If you're not in costume, it'll be sad." I put on a blue wig, some face paint, and some comfortable shoes—we would be walking all night.

As we start walking, most passers-by are curious about the bright yellow and blue luchador mask. LightStep tells me the mask is a way to protect not only their identity, but also the selflessness of their actions. "The only possibility of justice in giving a gift is for one of the parties to be anonymous," they say. "Otherwise, there's always a reflection on the person who did the giving, and then their generosity is undermined by a self-serving attitude."
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​As we get closer to the bar-filled zone of lower St Laurent, more groups of people stop us, asking for photos with LightStep. The level of general inebriation in the streets is overwhelming—given it's not even midnight.

We stop to buy crack pipes—to be given away free to users as a method of harm reduction—and LightStep puts them in a backpack along with the first aid kit, needle collection containers, latex gloves, condoms, and socks, gloves and hats.

"Hey, do you need a pipe?" LightStep asks a guy in a raggedy coat in his early 20s.

"Nah, man, but do you know where I can find some dope?" LightStep doesn't know where to get dope.

We continue our trek south, towards Berri-UQAM square, which at this hour is populated by drug deal​ers and junkies. "I've had junkies throw needles at me... jokingly, but I still had to dodge them," LightStep says. It was also in Berri Square that I learn about LightStep's origin story.

It was the middle of August 2012 and the person who would become LightStep had recently come to Montreal to start a new life with a partner. Seeking a sense of community, and a desire to understand the city, they began walking the streets and meeting the people who inhabit it at night. In Jeanne Mance park, at the foot of Mount Royal, they approached a man going through a backpack they suspected wasn't his, after securing the backpack and its contents, LightStep tracked down its real owner, who was surprised to get his MacBook Pro back. "He said, 'Why would you return it?' and I said that it was the right thing to do. He asked me if I did this all the time, and I was thinking to myself 'Not really.'"

But the idea had been planted.

The next day, LightStep wondered if it was possible to try and be at the right place at the right time to help someone. "My friends said, 'No, you're just going to put yourself in danger, you're just looking for trouble.'—And that was the night I first went into the streets," says LightStep.

"That's the night I met Hawk. On August 16th, 2012, LightStep went out in the streets in plain clothes, looking like everyone else on a Thursday evening. The night was mostly easy—guiding some lost tourists and breaking up mild street fights—it had been a success. But on the way home, LightStep spotted a man in cargo camo pants, a dusted leather jacket and a bowling shirt, carrying a large bag and limping. With a scarred face and milky, bloodshot eyes, he was a scary figure. LightStep asked him his name. The man was Hawk.​

"When I asked him questions he just grimaced or sneered. I said, 'What are you up to tonight?' and he just growled. Then he said, 'I'm looking for a tavern,' and I'm like, 'A tavern? What planet did you come from?"

But then Hawk said something that confirmed any suspicions LightStep had up to that moment. "I'm gonna kill someone tonight." He lifted his shirt and showed a pistol tucked into his pants. Hawk started repeating the phrase in sing-song, "I'm gonna kill someone tonight, I'm gonna kill someone tonight."

At this point, LightStep knew they had to stick around. "If he was gonna kill me, he would have killed me already, and that's what made me stay there. I understood that I was granted a kind of privilege that night that I had to flex in some way."

The two kept walking west, and ran into a group leaving a bar. Hawk said, "Oh, but not these brothers! I won't kill these brothers, they're my brothers." He high-fived them, chatted, and bummed a cigarette.

With Hawk distracted, LightStep decided it was safe to call 911. Not a full minute later a cop car came around. "The cop does this motion [phone gesture], and points at me, then points at Hawk, and I nod, he gives me a thumbs up, and that's it. Four cars come in, lights up, they have him against a fence, they grab him and his gun goes flying. It's like a flash and it's over. He's down, he's on the ground."
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​This was one of only three instances LightStep's ever called the police in two years. In fact, even though he hasn't had any direct encounters with the SPVM, LightStep is usually reluctant to involve law enforcement. "I think it's really fucked up to call the police on people with mental health issues, but in this case, this guy had intention to use his gun to harm someone, and that was enough."

LightStep went home thinking that Hawk had been the sign from the universe that called them out to the streets. "I thought that if I could handle that, I could handle anything."
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​We watch small crowds in costume dissipate into the bars and clubs of the Montreal's Gay Village and check in on a girl who we think is crying on a stoop. She smiles an energetic smile back at us and keeps talking on her cellphone.

We loop around and start heading west towards downtown. I stop in a Tim Hortons to get a coffee and warm up, and from the line I watch LightStep chat up a stranger. "That guy recognized me from my plain clothes patrol," LightStep tells me later. "He's a sex worker around here, we've met many times." There seems to be a special place in this masked stranger's heart for people who also roam the streets at night, that share this space with them. There was a connection there, something that was broken the moment I walked into the conversation. "See ya around," the sex worker said.

At the corner of St Denis and Ontario, a crowd gathers near an ambulance. We get a closer look and LightStep wants to make sure the person on the ground will be taken care of properly.
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​LightStep is very skeptical of the police, and that is one of their motivations to go on patrol, in the hopes that the project will turn into something bigger. "The police state is encroaching, there's an increasing militarization of the police, an increasing crackdown of our rights and freedoms, especially in the wake of all this terrorist jingoism. Two dead soldiers from terrorist attacks, and 1,200 missing and murdered indigenous women and [they say] it's not sociological?" LightStep says indignantly.​​
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​​We continue our hike north on St Denis and turn west on Sherbrooke towards where we started. We cut into St Louis Square through a shiny new condo with a colourful flowerbed, mostly dead from the frost.

"The question is, what are the ways that we can form a more resilient community? For example, imagine a world where there is no police," LightStep explains, in an almost naive tone. "What does that look like? Could you imagine a number other than 911 to call? Who would answer that phone?"

I can't help but wonder who would keep those people in check. Early police forces were nothing more than volunteers, and this sounds like power just changing institutions. LightStep didn't agree.

"Everything that's led up to where we are now, this entire arch of history—we understand that's not totally working. So we have to throw something different in the mix... I'm talking about acting ahistorically. Not to forget history, but to move with a kind of freedom and lightness that will allow us to act differently, to connect, to love differently, to learn, to share." Through the metal mesh on the mask, I see a sparkle in LightStep's eyes. "Could you please wipe my eyes one more time? It's fogging up again."

On the corner of St Laurent and Prince Arthur, a loud crowd forms in front of the late-night greasy spoon La Belle Province. LightStep runs toward it, followed by multiple police officers. People are cheering and enticing two young men to fight, but one of them is being held by two others. Within seconds, the officers are dispersing the crowd and I'm as confused as ever. I lose LS for a second.

A moment later I find him. "Look, I'm not here to replace the police," they tell me. "I'm not interested in chasing bank robbers carrying sacks of coins, or chasing people who are stealing to survive, or doing things in the streets like selling drugs, or prostituting themselves, or however the city has made their lives illegal. I'm not interested in those kind of petty crimes." They tell me the real criminals are the ones with desk jobs, keeping the poor poor, and that's not what LightStep is fighting either. LightStep is about community, about standing up for each other.
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I get the feeling that this is what LightStep does most—stepping into situations where something could go wrong, and just talking to people and observing. "Looking for crime to fight—and that's what other Real Lifers are always talking about—that is to misunderstand crime, to misunderstand poverty and desperation, and all these other things that cause violence in the first place." LightStep tells me we can't celebrate yet, that people are hungry, that there is no place to sleep for some folks. "We need to find a way to inspire ourselves to participate in our community," they say.

It's around four in the morning when Matt finally gets into an ambulance, and by then it was time for LightStep and I to part ways.

By the end of the evening I realize that LightStep isn't so much the person under the mask—the slender, vegan feminist queer—but rather a persona that exists with the help of this vegan feminist queer. LightStep could be anyone who is capable of getting up and taking direct action.

Riding my bike north on St. Dominique I heard a girl scream "Why don't you just shut the fuck up and leave me alone?" I turn around, dismount, and approach the group of young women, who must have been around 19. There was a tall, large man walking behind them. "Is everything OK here?" I ask. A girl with a loud voice tells me they can't remember where they parked their car. Within four seconds of my arrival, the man goes away. Just like that. With a few simple deductions, I take the group to the probable spot of their car. The girl with the loud voice squeals and hugs me, "You saved us," she says.​
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​​@juliatjones

​On November 13, 2003, I was arrested for the crimes I had committed in August of that year. I was carrying a book I had just picked up, but it was knocked out of my hand by an overly enthusiastic police officer and remained on the sidewalk. A decade was to go by before I could go back for it. The volume was a hardcover of Luc Sante's Lowlife, which explored the messy realities of life in Manhattan's slums in the 19th century—basically, the sort of life I was leading and the sort of topics I wanted to write about, only 100 years back in time.

I finally got to finish it years later when I located a copy in a prison library. I also own some of the author's discarded paperbacks—he had donated an entire box of French poetry to a prison I stayed in during 2008, Eastern Correctional Facility, in Napanoch, New York. Only the Haitians could read it and only I had the interest to pick up his Dadaist collection of Tristan Tzara. When I saw the stamp that announced where the books came from, I was astounded by the coincidence and even wrote the author, but he never answered. Still, his volumes of marginal poetry, hard to understand because they valued the avant-garde above readability, remain in my possession. But I never found Low Life.

Having returned to society earlier this year and kept as busy as possible with steady forays into journalism, I cannot satisfy my curiosity for marginal culture as much as I would like, but I did visit the square of pavement on the Bowery in Lower Manhattan where I was arrested in 2003. The book was gone—the New Museum sits over the parking lot where I left it.

The margins, the twilight, the edge of society—that's where the present first rolls over into the future, and this column aims to report from there. As the world around the corner and under the bridge often harbors things criminal and vicious, as well as delicate and subtle, the investigator must be a man of certain talents and experience. He has to be able to walk through the shadows of both art galleries and gangland, and return to describe the fringes of life in a way that makes sense.

Marginal culture is simply life beyond the mainstream, the work and world of those Americans far from the everyday, the ones who have not chosen wa​shing machines. And their stories tell us more about America than those of the hardworking citizens and safe, mediocre idols that television pushes on us. Michel Foucault wrote in Discipline and Punish that to measure the health of a society, one must examine how it treats it prisoners, as the correctional system of a nation is its filtering organs—its liver and kidneys. Having spent ten years in those very places after committing five robberies in the desperation of heroin addiction (and related debt to a crazed Ukrainian dealer), I have been freed with a passport that has helped gain the trust of many people who would not otherwise talk to me. It's a release ID from Fishkill Correctional Facility, where I finished my sentence, and it is useful to flash in project stairwells and ghetto cellars. I report back from the marginal parts of society to entertain, of course, but also because each manifestation of something new that is unheard of in the suburbs or middle America is another clue to how our society truly functions.

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The author's prison ID

The lowlife has been fodder for both literature and voyeurism for centuries. The Romans had Petronius, who explained how the poor and depraved lived in The Satyricon, which Fellini adapted into my favorite film. Then came a staid dark age of low literacy, when only things written in Latin were considered essential. But spoken languages defeated a dead one, and soon enough the marginal was being mined for literature again by racy authors like Rabelais and Boccaccio. The virtuous 19th century loved the reports Dickens made from the lawless East End of London in Sketches by Boz, despite the immorality of opium dens and fallen women. All of Europe waited on the serialized work of Eugene Sue to learn the truth about life in French sewers in The Mysteries of Paris. New York has had its share of chroniclers, like Liebling and Paul Auster. This column will continue in that tradition.

These days, mainstream American life is easy enough to observe, as so many others do it for us. The latest misdeeds of a pop celebrity or the current political squabble in Washington are mere clicks away. But what about the work of artists who descend into tunnels and climb water towers to spray-paint their work (without compensation, I might add), and then embed it into the digital world? Or the life of a stolen bicycle, which travels far and undergoes dissection, to fund many a drug habit? Advanced tools like nitrogen injectors for shattering frozen locks and rotary saws to defeat hardened steel are now wielded by bike thieves. And yet this crime is at the lowest end of the spectrum and therefore almost exclusively committed by junkies. These are common enough actions in the margins, but things that most Americans don't even think to think about.

Years ago, as I was being beaten with my own boot in an upstate prison during the process of entering solitary confinement, I never imagined that telling the story to guys on a corner who were drinking something cheap out of a paper bag would allow me access to a basement beneath a grocery store. Dogs were being bred there. Staging fights between animals for the amusement of an audience, usually low-class and bloodthirsty, with the propensity to gamble on the outcome, has a long pedigree. The amphitheaters that the Romans left all over Europe, like the well-known Coliseum, were not only for gladiators. The trade in exotic animals for the arena was lucrative. Giraffes were imported to battle rhinoceroses, and many a lion faced a tiger in the bloody sand. The Londoners Dickens described were just as creative, pitting badgers against hounds and bears against bulls and even dogs against rats, the contest being how many rodents the mutt could destroy in a set amount of time—a famous terrier could dispatch 40 in a minute.

With my educated speech, natty clothing, and pale face, it's unlikely that I would be allowed to learn about such things without establishing that I suffered the same fate as some of the corner drinkers. However, my incarcerated decade did nothing for me in  ​earning the trust of Jesse Mosher, a painter who goes to punk shows and paints to the music, a form of synesthesia. What did was having met the luminaries of the 80s art world, at least the Russian ones—my fa​ther is a writer of some note in that scene, and has also run a radio show about contemporary culture for 20 years. I spent a childhood surrounded by people who are now Wikipedia entries without even realizing it. Josef Brodsky was the most prominent, or perhaps Baryshnikov, but I also shook the hands of men like Andrei Sakharov, Shimon Peres, Kurt Vonnegut, and Norman Mailer. I met the latter writer in the Russian Tea Room, and sitting with Mailer was Milos Forman. But I didn't know who he was.

The margins include men who paint with spray cans at night and writers who post only parodies of the work of others. It includes chefs who illegally run restaurants in their homes, feeding those in the know exotic delicacies, and doctors without licenses who prescribe Soviet medication, available from old ladies in Brighton Beach as long as you have a "prescription." The margins include transgender folks who cater to the executives of Wall Street with strip shows that are invite-only—every performance culminates in the disclosure of an erection. A friend I met in prison makes a good living this way because she is very pretty but also wields a "nine-inch gun" to wave at the men in suits before they go home to their wives and children.  The margins are where Albanian brides are sold and junkies sing in musicals. It's where things get interesting, and where life gains texture and clarity. And sometimes a buzz.

America's taste for drugs is satisfied by an ever-increasing variety of chemicals, which remain legal for a bit, then become scheduled as banned substances, and then return to availability in head shops and on the Internet as outlaw chemists tweak the molecules. Despite the marginality of this occupation, fortunes are made in this business and specialized education of the highest levels is required. Underpaid Chin​ese and Ru​ssi​an scientists are hard at work right now creating chemicals to get Americans high, while their opposite numbers at the DEA work to identify molecules to ban. An entire chemical clash conducted in the margins! It almost makes me a former prisoner of war.

I paid heavily for my youthful foray into drugs and crime; my participation cost me ten years, but now I can continue my investigation with my calling card and without addiction. The margins are wider than one may think, and sometimes share space with conventional life, but at other times are hidden deep and far from the light of day. My last look into the lowlife of the past remained on the sidewalk as I was told at gunpoint to "Get on the floor, motherfucker!" But Lowlife explored the long-ago, whereas I want to see the future. As today melts into tomorrow, I am watching. This time I'll carry a notebook instead of a pocketknife, observe without participating, and report back to you.

Follow Daniel Ge​nis on Twitter.

Every day, America must find a place to park 5 billion gallons of human waste, and we're increasingly unable to find the space. We wake up in the morning, brush our teeth, and flush the toilet, thinking that the wastewater disappears into the center of the Earth. If only that were the case.

Between 8 AM and 9 AM each morning, the waste output of Manhattan's West Side swells from 70 million to 150 million gallons per day. This is known as "the big flush." The sewage will eventually end up on a NYC Department of Environmental Protection Sewage boat, which will take the sludge to a dewatering plant on Ward's Island, where the sludge will become "biosolids" that can be reused to create golf courses, cemeteries, and fertilizer for the human food chain.

Biosolids have become a financial asset worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but it's still possible that we'll go back to dumping our waste in the ocean. In this new documentary, VICE traces the trail of waste from butt to big-money biosolid and beyond.​

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Emerging in 2011 from the warped and squalid imagination of Tom Six, The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence is a monstrosity that takes to exorbitant extremes the depravity of its predecessor. If this film is about anything, it's about what it feels like to have your face stapled to the ass of a stranger—a stranger who releases heroic quantities of shit into your unwilling mouth.

The film zooms in on Martin Lomax, a—let's not mince words—middle-aged, near-mute, asthmatic loser who lives with his dickhead of a mom and feeds live insects to his pet centipede while saying "Eeeeeee." It's self-referential from start to finish. Martin is fixated with the first of the Human Centipede franchise, and as we begin, he is watching it end.

Like most of us, no doubt, Martin is inspired by the idea that it might be possible to create one of these human centipedes by attaching a line of people "ass to mouth," thereby creating one united digestive system. Unlike many of us however—though I can't speak for everyone—the thought makes Martin so excited that he masturbates with sandpaper.

I have The Human Centipede 2 playing on Netflix as I type this—a terrifying prospect, which, as you will probably now understand, means I am plagued by an unsettling feeling like knowing that one of your nails needs to be taken off sickeningly close to the root. And yet, in a perverse way, part of me can't help but feel a strange quiver of anticipation.

I watch aghast as Martin crowbars his way through victims, keeping them in a warehouse, bound and naked. He proceeds to sever knee tendons (you see all of this), hammer out teeth (you see all of this), and staple unwilling mouths to asses (hi there) until, literally crying with joy, he has orchestrated the most depressing conga line you've ever seen in your life.

Injecting his ten victims with laxative, he watches as each of them unleashes the contents of their bowels into the mouth of the person behind, who then does the same to the person behind, etc. etc. This is the film for which the phrase ad nauseam was invented.

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I'm not a horror devotee. And as far as gore goes, I've seen about five of the Saw films—but once you've survived The Human Centipede 2 that's like boasting that you've watched every episode of Ready Steady Cook, only it is unbelievably difficult to watch, offensively realistic, and set (mercifully) in black and white—well, not entirely; Six chooses to splatter the screen with brown at the appropriate moments, don't you worry.

The first time I watched The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence was in the fateful summer of 2012. I was staying with my best friend, who was to get married that week. The pair of us had spent a while watching episodes of An Idiot Abroad but, as everyone is always saying, what you really want to experience in the days before your wedding is a film about stapling lips to bums. Something old, something new, something borrowed, The Human Centipede 2.

Watching the film came about as a kind of dare. Initially it's just a laugh, talking about movies that are infamously disgusting or frightening; you hear them described and their horrors live in the abstract, not vivid enough to leave an imprint. My best friend and I had no real idea how nauseating the film would be; we were young and, hey, bloody heck, we were foolish. If we could have seen into the future, we would not have wanted to grimace and gurn our way through the poo-stained gore-fest. But grimace and gurn we did.

In the spirit of learning from your experiences, I can—with hindsight—tell you that the most disgusting film ever made is worth seeing for your own personal development. Given that the British Board of Film Classification said that the film posed "a real risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers," you're probably going to want to see it. Here's why you should.

It is not a good film. It is a woeful film. It is 86 minutes of shit, screams, and blood. But The Human Centipede 2 made me glad to be alive. Before I had seen it my world was carefree and virgin-white by comparison. You know the expression "You don't know what you've got till it's gone?" Well, I can tell you, you don't know what you've got till you've seen a bald man rip his stapled, excrement-stained face from the anus of an incontinent stranger.

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What The Human Centipede 2 does is make your life seem wonderful by comparison—in terms of both its premise and its production. However much my parents might inwardly wish I had chosen a different career path, I am always cheered by the thought of Tom Six having a monthly dinner with his mom and dad, who ask him what he's been up to recently.

TOM: Oh, not much. Still makin' those movies.

PAPA SIX: Well, if that's what makes you happy.

MAMA SIX: Can you pass the gravy, honey?

PAPA SIX: What have you been working on?

TOM: You know, this one's actually about an obese, bulbous-eyed reject who attaches ten people together by stapling them face to ass. Then he injects them with laxatives and watches as they're forced to eat the explosive shit of the person in front. One of them shoves a live centipede up the man's rectum.

PAPA SIX: Oh for fuck's sake.

MAMA SIX: Tom, what is it with you and asses?

A word so often associated with film is escapism: We go to the cinema to forget ourselves. In Brad Pitt we see the man we wish we were; we imagine in startling detail Scarlett Johansson giving us a sponge bath. A trip to the pictures is an evening lived vicariously: We wish we could rob banks, we wish we could deck enemies with one punch, we wish we could stroll into a bar and say, "Hey Jack, just my usual." Horror films are a sick visitor in this fantasy; why do we wish to force such distress upon ourselves?

The Human Centipede 2 is escapism of a different kind. What its grim, almost unbearable torture does is enable you to actually appreciate everything in your gorgeous life: colors are brighter; your other half is more angelic; the fact that you're not having your tongue ripped out with pliers is cause for celebration. Whereas George Clooney's latest film leaves you blinking into the real world feeling angry that you're not George Clooney, The Human Centipede 2 leaves you ecstatic that you have all your limbs and aren't being fucked by a man who looks like Gollum spent the last 30 years in a fudge shop.

If I am in need of cheering up, I have only to think of the film and I will get a boost from the knowledge that my life is nowhere near as shudderingly depressing. Further to this, it has the ability to empower: once you have endured The Human Centipede 2, you can face anything. I think I could become a surgeon after watching it. Bring on the gore. Bring on the bones. Nothing you can do will hurt me. I have walked into Hell and it's the color of shit.

The Human Centipede 2 is haunting; over the last two years I have found it truly difficult to shake off. This is why it is so repulsive and why having watched it is important. If a film leaves its fingerprints on your brain, it is telling you something. This may not have been its intention, but The Human Centipede 2 tells you that your life is good. Don't worry. Things are OK. They cannot possibly be as bad as they are for any of the people in the film, nor can your mind be as fucked as the one that made it.

VICE is rerunning the best TV Party episodes for your viewing pleasure. Watch them all ​he​re and read a note from Glenn below.

In 1978 I started a public access television show in New York along with a few friends. It was called TV Party, and by the time it ended in 1982 our list of guests included David Bowie, David Byrne, Robert Fripp, the B-52s, Chris Burden, George Clinton, Iggy Pop, Steven Meisel, Mick Jones, James Chance, John Lurie, Klaus Nomi, Kraftwerk, the Screamers, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nile Rodgers, Kid Creole, the Offs, Alex Chilton, the Brides of Funkenstein, Arthur Russell, David McDermott, and Charles Rocket, just to name a few.

I first became interest in public access when I was invited to appear on the show If I Can't Dance You Can Keep Your Revolution, hosted by a woman named Coca Crystal. It went well enough, but I didn't think much of it. Then the next day on the subway several strangers said that they had seen me on the show the night before. Then it happened more and more. I thought, Wow, people are actually watching this. In those days, the lack of decent cable options meant random dial-spinners had a very good chance of landing on your channel.

My friend Chris Stein, the guitarist of Blondie, lived in a Midtown penthouse around this time and had cable. I often watched it with him while smoking Rasta-sized joints. One night it just hit me and I called him up and said, "Chris, we have to start a public access show. People are actually watching this shit instead of Bonanza."

And so we did.

Public access offered something strange and exciting. In New York City that meant programming like Tele-Psychic, t​he Robin Byrd Show (which featured adult film stars dancing nude), the John Wallowitch Show, and the Vole Show. Then there was Hugh Hefner's cocktail party on the airwaves, Playboy After Dark, which featured guests like Ella Fitzgerald and Lenny Bruce. While it wasn't a public access show, After Dark was still an early influence on TV Party.

The show ran on Channel D and Channel J, and was quite popular with the kids. We lucked into following the Robin Byrd Show for a while, and so inherited an audience of horny guys. We also got a big high school following thanks to smoking a bunch of pot and talking shit. The show never officially ended—Chris got sick and almost died, I got married and decided I needed to make some money, some people went to rehab, some left town, and some died of AIDS, which had just appeared. It seemed like suddenly everything was changing, and it just got to be longer and longer since the last show. We had a good run fucking up television, though. Cursing, getting high, advocating subversion, being party desperados...

It all looks glamorous now, but that's because even with HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, CNN, ESPN, AMC, the Comedy Channel, and hundreds more, television is still monitored and censored by higher powers. And even though we sort of invented reality TV, if anything TV is less real than ever. So is reality. We still have our work cut out for us.

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Former alleged virgin Nick Jonas shows a drag queen his abs at a gay party in New York City. All photos by Amy Lombard unless otherwise specified

"He's got a great ass!" screamed the ripped gay man in front of me. He was losing his mind, as well you might, because Nick Jonas was standing on the stage of the Up & Down with a strapping black drag queen at his side. The former Disney Channel star had come to the popular Manhattan nightclub to host the first ​Up & Down Sundays of September. The weekly event is New York's latest party for twinks and the elderly gay vampires who want to fuck them.

A few years ago, gay men never would have expected Jonas to visit, let alone host, a party at a place like Up & Down. He's a former member of the Jonas Brothers, after all, the family boy band remembered for wearing purity rings to symbolize their virginity. He used to go out with Miley Cyrus pre-twerk, when she was still Hannah Montana and dating her was a mark of one's uprightness. But there he was, on the stage of a club that is more flamboyant than a high-end Cheesecake Factory, brandishing his "great ass."

"Have you ever had chocolate nuts?" the drag queen asked Jonas as her decorated eyes filled with lust. "I remember when you were a child. But in your new videos, you're a buff bitch."

She begged him to lift up his shirt and Jonas obeyed. "You can't do this to me, bitch! I'm an old black woman!" the drag queen yelped at the sight of the pop star's happy trail. 

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Gay men quench their thirst at a gay party hosted by Jonas 

This appearance marked the beginning of Jonas's aggressively gay-friendly publicity campaign for his first post-Jonas Brother album, Nick Jonas, and you might wonder why he bothers with the Up & Down and the drag queen and the ab-baring and all that. Why would the teeny bopper turn to homos to hawk his new record? It could be because his career is in a precarious position. Truth be told, only three stars have had impressive careers after being in a boy band—Justin Timberlake, Michael Jackson, and Bobby Brown. And the latter two aren't exactly role models. Jonas's brothers haven't been doing so great in the last few years: Joe's first solo album sold ​an abysmal 18,000 copies in its first week. Looking at his dim prospects, focusing his efforts to woo an oft-overlooked demographic that is estimated to be less than 3 percent of the population but exerts more than $800 billion in buying power doesn't sound like such a terrible strategy. 

He's not exactly subtle about his intention of courting the gay community. The day after Jonas hosted Up & Down Sundays, he ​removed his shirt again at On Air with Ryan Seacrest and tweeted out, "I love my gay fans." Later that week, he ​exposed his ripped abs at yet another gay club while sharing a stage with Cocky Boys porn star Levi Karter, who had stripped down to his skivvies. All the while, this gay club striptease tour was being pushed by ads on Grindr.

Since then, Jonas has taken his gay-baiting to television, appearing on The Real Housewives producer Andy Cohen's Bravo talk show ​Watch What Happens Live, where he ​revealed he would—once again—be stripping down on the new DirectTV show Kingdom, a dramatic series about a mixed martial arts gym.

Jonas has described his Kingdom character as an MMA fighter who goes through a crisis "revolving around his sexuality," but when I asked him if this meant he was playing a gay man, he acted coy. "I can't give any spoilers away, but I can say this: My character goes on a journey," he said. "I think it was a really beautiful story that was important to tell." Jonas did, however, confirm he bulked up for the role: "When the show came around, I really had to push myself, and I gained about 15 pounds of muscle." 

He has also ​shown off his new sexy body on the cover of ​Attitude—a gay mag that specializes in shots of muscular men wearing very little. (I once bought it when I was 12 years old and didn't have access to GayTube.) And a few weeks ago, Jonas practically broke the internet when he posed in his tighty-whities and showed off his rock-solid, hairy, and possibly unphotoshopped ass crack in a spread for ​Flaunt magazine. 

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This drag queen fell asleep before Jonas even showed up at his gay party

Many gay men have expressed happiness for this deluge of masturbation material, but others have taken to social media to question Jonas's motives. "Nick Jonas wants so bad to be part of the gay community," ​one Tumblr user said, and ​another posted photos of Jonas stripping followed by a Nicki Minaj GIF that said "...I know what the fuck you're doing."

​Dr. Michael D. Dwyer, an Assistant Professor of Communications at Arcadia University, also knows what the fuck Jonas is doing. In a phone interview with me he compared Jonas's publicity campaign—especially the Flaunt photos—to Marky Mark's relationship to the gay community in the 90s. The former rapper—who's now an actor and producer and goes by Mark Wahlberg—became a gay sex icon when he groped his crotch while wearing nothing but a hat and briefs in ​a 1992 Calvin Klein ad. (Jonas aped that iconic ad in his recent spread in Flaunt, all the way down to the groin grab.) The sexy ads made Marky Mark a sex object for gay men, and they became an important part of Marky Mark's audience according to Dwyer—but because of the AIDS crisis and the country's homophobia, Marky Mark couldn't directly cater to this segment of his market. At the same time, the rapper also probably couldn't afford to lose the gays. After people accused him of gay bashing and homophobia in 1993, he made a point to ​sit down with the gay magazine ​the Advocate for an interview to save face and keep that queer cash coming in.

Of course, Marky Mark was far from the first celebrity gay icon. American gay men have been idolizing female heterosexual stars at least since Judy Garland's suicide attempt in 1950, but their power as consumers only started to get recognized in the 1970s, when disco exploded and many states legalized same-sex dancing, according to Dwyer. 

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Jonas sings songs to the delight of both gays and girls, at his concert at Gramercy Theater 

From the get-go, the public associated disco with gay men. At first, ​music historian Alice Echols writes in her ​2010 book Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, gay men mainly championed songs by heterosexual black women like Donna Summer's "I Feel Love," helping catapult them onto the charts. After all, what gay man hasn't dealt with a homophobic boss and then had to tell himself he will, in Gloria Gaynor's words, survive?

Gay's fandom for disco, however, wasn't as beneficial for male performers, who found themselves in trouble for singing music that homosexuals loved. "The reason why 'disco sucks' was sort of a cultural movement was in large part due to homophobia," Dwyer said. "If you read through the early 80s press of Michael Jackson, prior to Thriller, there was so much concern of him being a disco star and what that meant for his masculinity. His success as a pop star meant disowning, or minimizing, the degree to which he would have gay fans."

Many other boy banders have needed to prove their masculinity after they left their groups behind. Justin Timberlake's first solo video, "Rock Your Body," featured a close-up on his patchy facial hair, as if to say, "Yo, my balls dropped. I'm a man who has sex, and I'm not on Disney anymore." Most of the time, however, this approach has failed. In 1972, Partridge Family star David Cassidy posed nude in Rolling Stone, hoping to transition from teen icon to sex icon, but his adult career never matched the heights of his teen superstardom. (Of course, Cassidy's music was also never as great as Timberlake's 21st century classic Future Sex/Love Sounds.) 

Nick Jonas's video for his single "Jealous"​

Female pop singers have faced easier transitions into adult stardom. Of the Disney Channel divas from the years when the Jonas Brothers dominated, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, and Demi Lovato have all had success as adults. Similarly, while Jackson had to act macho in the 1980s, Madonna's gender and origins in New York nightclubs allowed her to court gay listeners.

Up to Like a Prayer, gay men adored Madonna. But their perception changed, according to Dwyer, when she started behaving like a "colonizer," appropriating the vogue dancing that came from New York City's gay black scene in 90s. This critique expanded when Madonna kissed Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at the 2003 VMAS during a period when few genuine lesbians appeared on TV.

"She was too far removed from being at the disco cafeteria and being this sort of grimey New York girl. She's become seen as someone who just sort of capitalizes on [gay culture] for explicitly straight audiences," Dwyer said.​

Gay men loved Madonna until she appropriated their culture to entertain heteros in the "Vogue" video ​

​Throughout the Obama Era, gay audiences have accused other female pop stars of similar behavior. In a scathing ​Bitch magazine article called ​"Raise Your Glass if U R a Firework Who Was Born This Way," feminist writer Lauren Elmore describes how Ke$ha dedicated "We Are Who We Are" to Tyler Clementi, a gay Rutgers student who killed himself after being bullied. Less than two weeks later, Katy Perry followed her lead, dedicating the music video for "Fireworks," a song about feeling like a plastic bag drifting through the wind, to the It Gets Better Project—an online video series created by gay writer Dan Savage as a way for older LGBT people to tell young homos that their lives would improve as they aged. Perry and Ke$ha's public stances certainly didn't hurt their bottom lines: According to the Billboard charts, "We Are Who We R" became Ke$ha's ​second biggest single, and "Fireworks" became the third biggest single of 2011, ​spending 39 weeks on the charts.

In an email, Jonas's publicity team admitted what was obvious: He too was deliberately seeking the approval of gay men. "Nick's audience has long been diverse and he appreciates and loves all of his fans," they said. "With the roll out of his new album and TV show, it was important to him that he reached and embraced all of his fans and that includes the LGBT community."

At Jonas's birthday party last month at Queen of the Night, an extravagant dinner theater production in midtown Manhattan, I felt like Jonas and his team were gay-baiting me. I first got an inkling of this when I was conspicuously assigned to a table with two other gay professionals—an Us Weekly staff writer and an employee at MTV. Then I looked around and realized a large portion of the partygoers were gay media professionals. The whole scene felt ingeniously calculated.  

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Jonas poses for a publicist-approved photo at his birthday party at Queen of the Night. Photo by Gett/Jamie McCarthy

When I later confronted Jonas on the phone about how some LGBT people have seen his marketing strategy as exploitive, he went on the defensive. "I think it's really ignorant," he told me. "I think nobody should be wrong to embrace a large part of your audience, whether they're gay, straight, bi. It's all the same at the end of the day. Music is a universal language."

Dwyer views these tactics as part of a larger trend. Media companies are seeking passionate fan bases instead of large fan bases these days, and they know that gays can make for extremely loyal pop music fans. "I mean, 'leave Britney alone,' right?" Dwyer said.

At the same time, several people I spoke to, including Dwyer, believe Jonas has broken down a huge societal barrier: Although a heterosexual artist like Marky Mark posed in borderline soft-core porn photographs that generations of gay men have jacked off to, Jonas stripped for the gays and then openly declared his support for the LGBT community.

"Jonas is saying all the right things—things that God knows he wouldn't have been allowed to say when he worked for the House of Mouse," gay veteran rock journalist John Norris told me in an email. "I have no reason to doubt he means it, and honestly, credit to him for being a young straight guy who will turn up at a gay club and show some skin, even if it is promo for a record and TV show. Can you imagine Justin Bieber setting foot in a gay club? I actually support Justin more than most people I know, but gay-friendly he ain't."

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Girls lined up to see Jonas in concert like it was 2007

So far, Jonas's gay appeal seems to have worked. Although his songs haven't become global smashes, his album has hovered in the top five on the iTunes charts all week, and he has sold out several concerts.

He hasn't ridden the zeitgeist Miley-style, but he has formed a dedicated fan base—in other words, his strategy is working exactly as planned. Last week, a line of girls and gay men wrapped around the block before his sold out show at Gramercy Theatre. During the show, Jonas exhibited all the characteristics of a gay icon in the making. He danced like a male stripper and showed a self-aware sense of humor reminiscent of Liza Minnelli: "I will keep my pants on tonight!" Jonas joked before he removed his jacket during the song "Teacher."

Even more importantly, his new songs sounds incredible. He can be experimental like Frank Ocean, he can croon like Frank Sinatra, he can pop like Britney Spears, and he can make the kind of jams queens like to listen to as they rim assholes. He probably won't become the new Justin Timberlake, but there's a big chance he's our first heterosexual male Gloria Gaynor—and that is kind of revolutionary. 

To order Nick Jonas's new album, visit ​iTunes.

Follow ​Mitchell and ​Amy on Twitter. 

When I sat down to interview Black Dynamite writer and executive producer about Bill Cosby (and an upcoming episode of his show where Cosby is portrayed as an over-the-top villain), the last thing I expected was for him to come out and vehemently defend the ​alleged rapist. 

It didn't occur to me until later the power of celebrity in the black community. From ​OJ Simpson to Michael Jackson and beyond, African-Americans have a tendency to support their own in lockstep. The attitude is often that any attack on a black celebrity must be some kind of diabolical scheme cooked up to destroy a successful minority figure. As such, an "us versus them" mentality often colors scandals with prominent black figures. A threat to one of us is a threat to all of us. But is that true? As defensive and territorial as black folks can be, the heinousness of the crimes that Cosby is accused of cannot be denied. Why do we automatically side with the "brother who made good"? What makes someone continue to idolize a man despite the very real possibility that he's a sexual deviant? I re-read this interview, hoping for answers, but all I felt was perplexed by our collective lack of understanding for the severity of the crimes Cosby stands accused of.

VICE: A lot of people have been talking about Bill Cosby, both for good and bad. Tell me, why now? 
​Carl Jones : Well, in our show specifically, the 70s is always now, so the beauty of doing a show that is set in the 70s is our hindsight is 20/20. We're able to look at the character or events or people who we know today and tell our story, or our version of how they became who we all know. But, you know, it's funny because we didn't target Cosby because he was in the mainstream media or there was stuff going on with these legal cases—it was just seriously like a story that I wanted to tell, that I wanted to tell for a while. When we did the first season of Black Dynamite, we had a lot of show ideas that were left over because we only had a ten-episode order, so we always wanted to do something with Cosby, even at the beginning of the show's inception, but it just didn't make it into the first season.

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What does he mean specifically to you as someone who grew up in that time?​
​He's a hero to me, obviously. I don't even know that I would want to do cartoons if it weren't for Fat Albert and the Gang. I enjoyed his movies with Sidney Portier, and his standup, and even his TV show that he had back when I was a kid. I'm a huge, huge fan of Cosby, and I think over the course of the years he's become very critical about our culture in general. I understand where he's coming from, but I think there's also a lot more dimensions to the type of content that our people are making and also the culture—I know he's very critical about hip-hop culture and what it's done to the youth, but that's kind of like giving somebody Tylenol who has cancer. Hip-hop is just an expression of other things—other ills or woes in the community that are underlying our whole socioeconomic disposition. I think going after hip-hop and the youth because of the way that they're expressing how they feel and their attitude is not really, to me, the right way to circumvent the problem, or to bring any type of healing—but I understand where it comes from. 

It comes from a place of frustration, especially when he's someone who tried really hard to lay down a fertile ground for us, as creators and storytellers and writers and just black people in general. If you look at The Cosby Show, he was trying to set a standard. He was trying to give us another perspective on the black experience, which we never saw before, because most of our content hinged on the fact that the character was black. We'd rarely seen a show that didn't touch on race at all, so he has to be given props for being able to do that. It took a lot of courage, and it turned out to be one of the biggest shows in history—not just with black people, but with people in general. So I understand when he looks at the state of entertainment and popular black culture today, it's probably disheartening. But the reality is, it's necessary. I look at it as a part of what we're going through in terms of our evolution. It's necessary, and even the critical dialogue that happens between Cosby and the youth is necessary.

I was talking to the director of ​Dear White People a few weeks ago and we spoke about how there's this weird thing where there has to be a binary in black culture—you either assimilate or you are fiercely militant, and I think that kind of came out in the episode, and just in general with Bill Cosby. He's kind of on the side of assimilation. Maybe not completely, but he's saying, Tone it down—you don't need to wear your pants this way, or you don't need to wear your hat this way. You need to talk like this and not like this. Why do you think there's such a need, even going back to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, to divide black culture this way?
​Well, it's interesting because when you go back to the Civil Rights era, we were put into a situation where we thought we were fighting against injustice, but we were really fighting for the right to be like the people who were oppressing us. That, really, is just as bad as being treated unequally—meaning, we were striving to become the very same people, or the culture and society, that put us in the predicament we're in. So it became real important—especially during Bill Cosby's era and his prime—it was a big deal how white people look at you. It's a big deal how white society views our culture, and our standards were set by that. I remember growing up it was like, Well, we're in the grocery store, don't embarrass me in front of these white people, and that was the whole attitude across the board. You're supposed to be conducting yourself in a "civilized manner," so that they won't look at us in a certain light and believe that we are not valuable enough to have access to the same things that they have, which is wrong—that steers us off in a wrong direction, so now that's what it's all been about. 

And that's why I think a lot of the criticism is being rejected by the youth, because they don't really see it as a true concern or care, because it sounds like you just want us to create an image that is sufficient to white society, and that makes them not feel threatened. The attitude in the music and the aggressiveness in the music and the culture gave the impression that we weren't going to put up with bullshit, and we don't give a fuck what you think. And that's pretty scary, especially if they become informed about why they're in the predicament that they're in—then they're going to start looking for who's responsible. That's a very scary thing, and then so you have people—even black people are scared, because they don't want that kind of chaos, like, I've got a good job, I'm comfortable where I'm at, now you're stirring up the pot, we don't need that. And I think that's—at least I feel—is where it's coming from.

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Bill Cosby has always represented the fantasy of what black culture could be like, but blaxploitation films like The Mack or Superfly or Shaft or Coffy, were trying to be about what it's really like—these are the people who are trying to make something of themselves. Is that why there's so much pushback against Bill Cosby? Even back in the 80s when Eddie Murphy was talking shit about him in Raw and Delirious?
​You know what's funny? Both of them are right. You know, Cosby is right—we don't have to portray ourselves like that. We can make a good, clean, wholesome show about black people that doesn't have anything to do with race, and we can also make those shows that are portraying things that are going on on the other side of the tracks, right? It's unfortunate that we only feel like we have a small sliver or room to express ourselves so that we can't have a large variety of different perspectives. We don't have a Steven Spielberg and a George Lucas and a Judd Apatow and a Tarantino.

We've got two black directors at a time, basically.
​Yeah, and they're putting out the same type of shit. So what happens—even this morning I was on Twitter and this girl said she didn't like the show because of the way it was portraying black people, and I was like, man, it's so unfair that all the responsibility—because we're the only black cartoon on the air now since Boondocks is gone—it's like all the responsibility falls on our shoulders to project the right image to the world, so you can't be honest if you're trying to just make everybody happy with the image that they see. But unfortunately, when you tell stories that speak to the human condition—I'm saying black, white, whatever—it's going to be fucked up because human beings are fucked up, so that's the truth of the matter. We just hate to look at ourselves, so I always just try to tell stories that are honest, regardless of what perspective, what race, culture, whatever. If it's an honest story, it's an honest story, and I try not to focus too much on that great responsibility of projecting a specific type of image and idea to the world like that. As a writer, I don't think that's my responsibility.

It seems like a lot of black filmmakers, writers, and directors reject that responsibility, but Bill Cosby has been the one who has always said, I will be the icon for black culture—get on my back, I'm going to carry you up the hill. It's really just Hannibal Buress who has said anything, and he made a huge splash just talking about it. Do you think that people are afraid to criticize him in that way?
​It's weird. I was just talking to Hannibal the other day, and he was like, "Dude, I'm so over the Cosby thing. I don't want to do anything else about Cosby." It's tough when you're being critical in public, because it's this scenario when you have a little brother, and you'll talk shit to your little brother and you'll beat him up, but you don't want anyone outside of the house fucking with him. They can say the same shit that you said to him, but if they don't live in the house that you live in, you take it personally. 

Because I have a love for Cosby, just like a lot of other people who I'm somewhat critical of, but I wouldn't want to [criticize him] in front of the world because—it'd be different if we had hundreds of role models, people who we can aspire to be like, but we don't have a whole lot of them in that space, so I'd hate to come out and crush the image that he worked so hard to build. But at the same time, I think we have to be real and look at things for what they really are, and this is why comedy is such a dope tool because you can do satire, you can talk about certain issues, but with the right tone and the right jokes, you're able to look at it. 

I find that that's the only way you can swallow it, really, and I think we've done a good job of—like Michael Jackson, we did an episode about Michael Jackson, and everyone's like, What happened? Did the Jacksons try to get you? Did Joe come after you? Nothing happened, but I think that was because the tone was right and because it was silly enough to where it provoked thought, caused some dialogue, it made you laugh and also take some things from it. So anytime I'm critical of Bill, I definitely want to do it in a joking way because he's obviously like a giant, and I think we should keep him standing tall as much as we can.

Is it because of his place within the black community? How do we respond as people who looked up to him, who see him as important? What do we do then?
​I don't know how many of the people who are saying stuff really care about it, you know? Because my thing would be—I want to make sure that I'm very clear about this, so it doesn't sound hypocritical—but what I'm saying is, if you really cared about him, if you truly cared about him—as much energy as you're putting into criticizing him for being a human being, because these things that he's doing a lot of people are doing, but they're not in the limelight, so you just don't hear about it.

But anyway, I'm saying that obviously if he's involved in some debauchery that he supposedly doesn't stand for, there's a lot of places that you can take punches at him, whatever. But I guarantee you none of these people tried to reach out to him and see if there's something they could do to help him. I think they took the opportunity to either get some attention or I truly believe sometimes it's just in us to see other people fail, especially when they reach the top. When they're at the bottom, you root for them. As soon as you cross a certain threshold, then suddenly you don't really want to see them do well anymore. It's a weird psychological thing that human beings have.

He's a villain in this episode, but like I do with all villains, I make them human beings first. There used to be a time when you saw villains as just evil, hellbent on destroying the world just because they're villains, they're just evil. The first person I ever saw change that was Stan Lee—he created villains and superheroes that even had angst about their own powers and abilities. You rarely saw that. 

For example, I watched this movie called The Woodsman with Kevin Bacon. He was a pedophile in the movie, but I found myself rooting for him, because he was ostracized in his own community. They didn't want him living certain places, they treated him wrongly at his job, leaving stuff in his lockers. He was treated basically like a nigga, so I kind of related to him instantly. When he was struggling with it, I was perplexed: Do I want him to molest a kid? It was a weird feeling—I was rooting for someone who did something that was so horrible, you know? And that's human beings, and I think villains are the same way, and I think some of the great villains had that element, where you see them turn to that side. They didn't always start off like that. There were certain events and certain things that happened that traumatized them and brought them to that point—you don't see that a lot, especially with black villains.

It's always been, Cosby's perfect, he's a perfect guy, and now maybe it's like, Oh, he's not perfect, he's kind of fucked up. Because the criticism has always been, he's uppity and he's been telling us what to do and he's whitewashed himself and he's constantly wagging his finger at people.
​I think the only way it'll go away is one, he continues to ignore it or two, he just owns up to it and says, So what? I guess what I'm saying is, they poke him because they want some bees to come out, and if he doesn't give them anything—it happens with a lot of entertainment, Jay-Z as well, like he's one of the best that never really responds when people start poking him. Eventually it goes away, because there's no attention they can get from him. The moment he tries to say, Well, no, I didn't—that's when it gets real messy, I feel. But I think this will die down and it'll be someone else's head on the chopping block. Maybe Katt Williams, he seems to come back around every now and then.

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You made the point that Black Dynamite is like the last black-centric cartoon on television. Where do you see black comedy going? Because Hannibal is obviously coming up, and Eric Andre, Jerrod Carmichael, and all of these comedians who are doing great work, but no one has broken out in the way that Chappelle did. So what's next, as someone who's working in the business?
​Well, I think there's a lot of funny comedians—the question is, are there a lot of funny comedians with a very distinct point of view? Because it's easier to tell jokes, it's harder to have a point of view with your jokes. There are a lot of guys in this town who had pilots and just never went anywhere because they didn't have the point of view, and Dave was one of the very few people who had a very strong, strong, strong point of view. Like, when you watched the show, it all felt cohesive to his perspective, it was very, very specific.

Today, I think more comics are more like hos in a way, like they'd rather—and I'm not saying anybody specifically—but they'd rather just kind of prostitute themselves. Like, the cheap joke and the low-hanging fruit is always there, and usually if it's hard-to-get work, you end up going for it, and so you find yourself doing shit that you normally wouldn't do and compromise your own integrity, and it's especially difficult today because you have Tumblr, and Instagram, and Vine, which is really killing the game, so like if you were going to create a sketch show, I don't even know how you begin to approach a sketch show competing against Vine, because these kids are amazing.

It seems like it's becoming a good time for black comedy, but there isn't that political element yet, except for your show. Kevin Hart is huge, but he's not doing that satire that's been so important to black culture. Flip Wilson was really doing a lot of edgy satire, Eddie, and all these people, but it's not really there right now. It's more like—it's as splashy and mainstream as hip-hop is right now.
​I agree, I definitely agree. People want satire, it's just harder. I find personally, it's more challenging or harder for black people to get satire. I created this character named ​Tubesteak and it's just kind of making fun of the state of hip-hop. I saw an interview with ​Uncle Murda one time and he was talking about how somebody shot at him and apparently they just grazed his head, so he did a whole video about how fucked and weak they are because they only grazed his head. Like, If you was a real nigga, you would've shot me in the head. He was mad at them for missing. And that's the culture—it wasn't a joke. So I decide to create a character, I tried to go extreme with that idea, but because it's so close to reality, a lot of people didn't get it. Most people thought it was real, and not only did they think it was real, but they wanted to be like him.​

Follow Dave Schilling on ​Twitter.

A sampling of sketches new and old by James Jean. He drew the X-Men characters when he was 13 years old

James Jean is the person I most wish I could draw like. I practice often, and occasionally I see flashes of his delicate forms and lines appearing in my work, but these qualities always dissipate quickly. Like many other artists, I tried buying the same brand of sketchbooks Jean uses (widely known as "the James Jean sketchbook") and his preferred line of pens ("the James Jean pen"). Getting my hands on these sacred items actually helped a little. But even as I study his past work and try to understand how he made the amazing sketchbook images from his art-school days, he is methodically producing new work that is even more complex and multidimensional. There's a whole generation of artists tripping over themselves trying to imitate or at least understand how his six-time Eisner Award–winning brain is able to make his hand do what it does.

I recently had the chance to ask Jean some questions, but I don't know if I got any closer to understanding how to be more like him. I did get some insight into the way personal economics have influenced how he balances fine art and commercial work. We also talked about his heroes and how the internet dispenses with traditional hierarchies in the presentation of images. He also threatened to slap me.

VICE: Are your parents artists?
James Jean: My parents are not artists. I didn't grow up in an artistic environment. But a friend gave me a Wolverine comic book when I was thirteen, and I became addicted.

Do you remember which issue it was?
Wolverine 37, drawn by Marc Silvestri.

Who were the comic artists you looked at the most as a kid?
As a teenager, I looked at work from guys like Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, Geoff Darrow, Frank Miller. I was fascinated with the indecent anatomy and how they could describe different surfaces and textures with just a few variations in line weight.

Do you ever get annoyed when you see people imitating your style?
No. I've emulated many artists, but most of them are dead.

What sort of advice do you have for people who want to learn to draw like you do?
Draw constantly, but avoid cheap mannerisms.

Is your work influenced by the history of Asian art?
I moved to the States when I was three. In my early twenties, I was fascinated with the work of Giuseppe Castiglione. He was an Italian missionary who became a court painter in China during the Qing dynasty. The work is a beautiful blend of Western and Eastern sensibilities. Also, I was influenced early on by [Katsushika] Hokusai, [Tsukioka] Yoshitoshi, and manga artists like Maruo Suehiro. However, I'm not sure this predilection is genetic.

Was there ever a moment when you felt like you'd turned a corner and begun to really understand drawing?
There was a pivotal moment after my first year at art school when I started to work obsessively in my sketchbooks. I rejected the academic and experimental things we were being forced to draw, and returned to the imaginative doodles of my childhood. Interspersed through the pictures of figures and strange creatures were sketches of people riding the subway, and journal entries. It was very pure—each spread was a personal challenge to make something new and interesting. I kept working in my sketchbooks the following 12 years, but recently I stopped. I'm not sure I have the energy these days.

What forces have caused your work to evolve?
Certainly, doing so much commercial stuff from 2001 to 2008 has changed and influenced the way that I work. My first solo show, Kindling, in 2009, was a reflection of that refined kind of energy. But shortly thereafter, I started making art that was more painterly, expressionistic, and experimental. I find that I keep boomeranging around different approaches. Maybe it will only make sense in a macro view of my body of work—but at the moment, I understand that it can seem a bit schizophrenic.

One of the things I admire about you is that you are able to do "low art" like comic-book covers and "high art" like your paintings and you don't seem to pigeonhole yourself. Have you been living by a specific career plan, or have you just taken the work that comes your way?
In my early twenties, I was supporting someone else, so I felt compelled to take on as much work as possible to build up a safety net. I wanted to be a painter after graduating from art school, but I didn't plan on becoming so prolific and well known as a commercial artist. The world is changing so rapidly it's almost impossible to follow a plan or previous model of how your career should transpire. But at least now, I can be more selective.

What artists are interesting to you lately?
There's too much stuff out there. I'm not a very good filter. I followed a lot of artists in my twenties, but many of them aren't as prolific now. What informed some of my work in the early stages were etchings by [Albrecht] Dürer, Shanghai advertising posters, anatomical mezzotints. Cartoonists like Carlos Nine and Chris Ware. Painters like Neo Rauch and Michaël Borremans. But now, there's so much stuff out there that it's hard to be moved by anything in particular, and it all ends up looking the same or derivative.

Why?
I think the internet has encouraged and enabled more people to be visual artists. But there seemed to be a more linear progression of visual styles and approaches before. Now, there's no hierarchy to the access or presentation of images. It's all there in a multicolored stream of visual diarrhea.

Tell me about the new book you have coming out.
It's called Xenograph and will be published by Asuka Shinsha. It's around three hundred pages and will contain all new work.

What creative things do you still want to do that you haven't done yet?
I'd like to make ceramics. And play more music. But I love making images the most.

What sort of music would you like to make?
Dave Choe just invited me to play in his band, Mangchi.

Do you listen to music while you work? Do you ever paint to the rhythm?
Paint to the rhythm? I should smack you.

Oh man, I bet I could resell that slap for so much money.
My caresses are priceless.

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Image via user Momomonster on douban.com

Recently there have been some high-profile cases of suicidal people in China leaving behind poems in place of suicide notes. Some of the poetry has that "my life is a vortex of sorrow" quality you'd expect from someone in the throes of psychic agony, but some is downright literary.

Foxconn, the company responsible for low-wage mega-factories where some Apple products are made, famously installed  ​nets to stop their suicidal employees' skulls from cracking on the pavement. But that didn't stop Xu Lizhi, a 24-year-old Foxconn factory worker, from taking his life last month. Before he threw his own body off a building, he left behind a collection of haunting poetry that offered a peek into the regimented, soul-crushing state of factory life in China.

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An electronics factory in Shenzhen. Photo by  ​Steve Jurvetson

Here's something that Xu wrote about living in the kind of company-run dormitory that Foxconn workers occupy:

A space of ten square meters
​ Cramped and damp, no sunlight all year
​ Here I eat, sleep, shit, and think
​ Cough, get headaches, grow old, get sick but still fail to die
​ Under the dull yellow light again I stare blankly, chuckling like an idiot
​ I pace back and forth, singing softly, reading, writing poems
​ Every time I open the window or the wicker gate
​ I seem like a dead man
​ Slowly pushing open the lid of a coffin.

Here's another poem by Xu, written in January, with a dark premonition about his ultimate fate:

A screw fell to the ground
​ In this dark night of overtime​
​ Plunging vertically, lightly clinking
​ ​It won't attract anyone's attention
​ ​Just like last time
​ ​On a night like this
​ ​When someone plunged to the ground.

Both translations above are from libcom​.org. Try reading that last one from bottom to top. Equally eerie.

Unlike the subject of the above poem, Xu attracted a lot of attention. After his death, his suicide and his work was covered by outlets including  ​the Washington Post, ​Bloomberg Businessweek, and ​Business Insider. But there are other cases like his that haven't achieved that level of attention in the West. 

Lou Xuequan, a disgraced Chinese official from Nanjing, comm​itted suicide (link in Chinese) three months after being fired in June. In between losing his job and hanging himself, he expressed the depths of his desperation through poetry. His writing was censored online around the time of his death, but has since been shared thousands of times on social media. A sample:

At whom shall the sword of treachery point?
​ ​Intoxication hides rumbling thunder
​ ​In my roaming I have not found a confidant
​ ​I serve the master yet imbibe sorrow
​ ​My vision fills with young followers whom I can no longer protect
​ ​But a boat of old friends keep each other company
​ ​I suddenly awaken at the crossing into paradise
​ ​And relinquish a million responsibilities.

Lou's death poem is complex and written in a very traditional manner, and some words can't be properly translated. For those who can read Chinese, the original can be found here, along with some solid attempts at explanations. (In Chinese, the part about how he "serves the master yet imbibe[s] sorrow" is a much more subtle allusion to being a faithful servant to the Communist Party.​)

Persecution is the thread that seems to tie all the death poems together. An up-and-coming fashion designer named Li Yanmo killed herself in her Beijing studio in January last year and a couple months ago, it was discovered that she left behind a epicly long poem titled "A Still Portrait." Here is an excerpt:

The grass grows out of the asphalt
​ And someone pours more asphalt over it
​ I feel my left foot stopping my right hand
​ Between brain paralysis and shoulder pain
​ You chose the latter
​ I can only retreat
​ Watching you two fight has always been my pleasure
​ You take off your pants
​ I remove the adjectives
​ Is that how we can be honest with each other?

Li's story has a tabloid quality to it. She was a successful designer who had worked on the costumes of a major film in China, but Oscar-winning production designer Timmy Yip was making her life  ​difficult, according to a tell-all blog post written by Li's mother, which is how her poetry got publicized. 

Whenever I talk
​ You slap my face
​ I'll strangle you
​ Strangle your tenderness

​ Like a grand murder.

Her poem doesn't seem to be intended as a suicide note, but themes of hopelessness and depression run through it. The original Chinese version can be found ​here.

There's nothing to suggest that using poems as suicide notes is a new phenomenon, but these have all come to light in the last few months and the combination of tragedy and emotional writing has captured the public imagination. And in some cases these verses have attracted attention to topics that aren't often covered in the media. How many other Foxconn workers are sitting in ten-meter rooms writing poetry right now?

​For years, Glenn Beck, the man known for the great deluges of words and ideas that spewed out of his radio and TV programs, kept a secret from everyone: He was dying. Or at least, doctors thought he was dying. In an appearance on his online talk show Monday, Beck admitted that since his days at Fox News he has been silently suffering from a mysterious brain illness that baffled doctors and left him writhing in pain, sleepless, suffering from vocal chord paralysis and seizures.

For 40 minutes, Beck tearfully described how his brain had deteriorated, how doctors had told him he would likely lose normal brain function in five to ten years, and how, in a Willy Wonka–style plan for corporate succession, he had discreetly selected an heir to shadow him and realize his grand vision if—or when—he could no longer remember it.

"We didn't know at the time what was causing me to feel as though, out of nowhere, my hands and feet, or arms and legs would feel like someone had just crushed them, set them on fire, or pushed broken glass into them," Beck told his audience. ""Most afternoons my hands will start to shake or my hands and feet begin to curl up and I become in a fetal position," he added later. "When it gets real bad my friends just kind of try to uncurl me."

Beck is fine now. Doctors at a brain rehab center in Texas finally diagnosed him with adrenal fatigue and an autoimmune disorder, among other things, and after some lifestyle changes and a few months of hormone therapy—plus some help from God, naturally—Beck says his "brain is back online in a big way."

But staring down a painful early death has a way of making people rethink life. And if you're Glenn Beck, rethinking life means rethinking America—and specifically, how to save it.

In an exclusive interview with VICE this week, Beck described the illness as a "pivot point," a seminal life event that fundamentally altered his worldview, pushing him beyond right-wing punditry and toward bigger, even more elaborate ambitions.

"When somebody sits you down and says, 'Hey, you could be a vegetable in five years and not really remember the names of your children,' that tends to focus you on Gosh, what am I doing? What is important to me?" Beck told me. Unconvinced that the conservative politics that he had been synonymous with for years could salvage our reeling democracy, he turned his attention to soft power, building a sprawling media empire aimed at reclaiming space in mainstream culture. And quietly, he transformed into Glenn Beck 2.0—a quieter, gentler version who calls for national unity and optimism and who wants Americans to try to love each other a little more.

"I am still the same guy who believes that the country is in trouble, but it has nothing to do with one party over the other," Beck told me. "It has everything to do with all of us. We're choosing this course, and I think we're doing it blindly at times. And what we need to do is step back, look at that, and really choose what it is that we believe to be true, and does that tear down or lift up? I really want to get out of the tear-down business and into the lift-up business.

"I just lose more and more faith in being able to change things at the top," he added. "We have to change things in the individual and the heart and with our kids. It has nothing to do with policies or politics and has everything to do with our humanity."

To the casual Beck observer, all this might come as a surprise. The famed right-wing provocateur works under the mainstream media radar these days, and though he runs The Blaze, a news website and television channel, he is still mostly associated with Fox News. That's where he became famous during the early years of Obama's presidency, commanding the frontlines of the Tea Party and organizing daily field trips into the dark, apocalyptic mental landscapes of his conservative viewers (Fox host Shepard Smith used to tease Beck's studio as "the Fear Chamber"). Beck's show was many, many things, but it was not exactly in the business of lifting anything up.

But since leaving Fox in 2011, Beck has changed his tone, adopting a more conciliatory, even bored, approach to politics. Recently, he's started apologizing for some of his rhetoric at Fox and for his role in helping "tear the country apart." In our interview, Beck, who's been in AA since 1994, describes this transformation in the confessional cadence of 12-step programs.

"I made a lot of mistakes in the past, as anyone does," he said. "As I saw the trouble that we're in and the role that I played in it, that was one of the reasons that I got on [Monday's show] and why I've done interviews over the last year. It's pretty hard to believe people when they say they've changed and I don't believe people when they can't tell me their pivot point."

"Now that we have gotten this clean bill of health, I want to make sure I'm spending all the time that I have been given to do things that are empowering and uniting and good," he went on. "I think we have an opportunity to really change the way things are done in all arenas. I've spent a lot of time really doing some serious thought on, How do we do radio now? How do we do television? What kind of television do I want to do? Do we want to try to put some of these stories on film? What does the future look like? Where do I want to leave a mark?"

In the past few years, Beck has transformed into a conservative media mogul and red-state lifestyle brand—a sort of avuncular Oprah Winfrey-Arianna Huffington hybrid for people who go to megachurches, bury gold in their backyards, and read critical biographies of Woodrow Wilson. His media footprint is sprawling, including an online television network with 300,000 paid subscribers, the third-highest rated radio show in the country, a wildly successful imprint with Simon & Schuster (including 12 bestselling novels of his own), a movie studio, and a clothing company. He is also richer than ever: According to Forbes, he earned $90 million last year, which is more than Oprah and much more than he ever made doing cable news.

As the Glenn Beck Industrial Complex has mushroomed, Beck has also fashioned himself as a tech disrupter, intent on putting "old media"—that is, liberal media—out of business. There is an element of libertarian futurism in the newfound optimism of Beck 2.0 that hints at his old anxieties about America's moribund freedom."What gives me hope is Silicon Valley," he told me. "The vision of the future, and it's not some 'flying car' future, this is real, life will change as we know it in the next five to ten years. There's a real reason to feel optimistic about tomorrow.

"Instead of telling dystopian stories," he added, "we also need to look at the good side, look at what we can do: Man can be healthier, more well-connected, and we can end so much pain and suffering in a very good way and turn everything around... I really think that the freedom that is within our grasp is the exact kind of freedom that our Founders hoped someday we would find, but never understood the route that would get us there. Now, with technology, man can truly be as an individual is free."

With his health issues now in check, Beck said he plans on reshaping his media empire around his softer, more hopeful vision of America. Since announcing his illness Monday, he's rolled out a series of new media projects based around Beck's new love-and-hope message, including a national #IChooseHope event, when the Blaze website and television channel will black out bad news entirely and encourage viewers to share their feel-good stories. The goal, Beck said, is to reclaim the country's cultural narrative.

"I want people to be able to see and understand, and I mean this for the right and the left, that family-friendly doesn't have to mean sappy crap," he said. "Things that are clean doesn't mean that they're not gonna be good or dynamic."

As with most of Beck's media empire, this new vision is inspired by his idol, Walt Disney. "Disney knew that the world was about to change," he said. "You could tell a Disney story right off the bat... It was hopeful. It had a brighter tomorrow. That's not great for everybody, and that's fine, but somebody's gotta be out there in a contemporary way just telling great stories. And by the selection of our stories, it will tell a greater story about who we are, and what we believe in."

How Beck plans to execute all this isn't totally clear. And while Beck has a devoted following, it's not likely that relentless optimism and historical narratives will put Beck back into the mainstream. But that may not be the point. Beck seems to have made peace with his self-imposed exile, content to build a parallel media universe around his new vision for America.

So far, that includes a three-part miniseries on Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, a feature film about the life of Santa Claus, and a stop-motion animation series about history. There's another feature film in the works as well, but Beck won't give any details except that it's called The Revolutionary, and that "our intent at this point is it will not be in English." He told me he also wants to do a series on Crazy Horse, to "set the record straight on what America did to the Native Americans."

"That, coming from somebody like me, is confusing to people at best. But it shouldn't be, because it's the truth," he said. "We can correct American history, tell the truth about ourselves that's not all Red White and Blue Rah Rah, but still, in the end, if you understand it, will deepen and enrich our experience of America, while inspiring people. It'll be great." 

Two years on, tens of thousands of New Yorkers are still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Sandy, some with homes that remain completely demolished.

Many of these residents continue to wait on funding for construction from NYC Build It Back, the program launched by former mayor Michael Bloomberg to allocate the nearly $2 billion in received federal aid. Until recently, the program had exhibited unmanageable bureaucratic problems—as of January this year, there had been no construction under the program.

VICE News spoke with those still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Sandy and investigated what's being done to bolster New York's coastal communities and protect the population from future storms.​

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​Protesters outside the court.

A Nova Scotia man, who infamously took a sexually-explicit photo of a 15-year-old girl that later committed suicide, won't do jail time thanks to a judge's ruling yesterday. Instead the judge handed the man a one-year conditional discharge, to wrap up a highly contested case.

In other words, he walked out of the court a free man, with a few caveats: he has to give his DNA to a national offender database, take a sexual harassment course, and apologize to the girl's parents.

It's a case that has been widely covered in the press, including in VICE Canada, but the victim's name cannot be published due to a controversial publication ban. We're bound by Canada's criminal code to not publish her name. Even though other media outlets have got around this by publishing their Canadian stories on the American version of their outlet, we wanted to ensure we reached our Canadian audience directly. So, we're stuck with abiding by the same publication ban that all other Canadian media has to respect.

Outside of the media, however, the ban has been widely violated (just check Twitter).

The girl's parents told the court Thursday that the explicit photo was the cause of their daughter's death. The photo shows a separate man flashing a thumbs-up as he penetrates the girl from behind. She is vomiting out the window. When the photo was taken, she was 15.

The man who snapped the photo, the same man who was allowed to walk free yesterday, was 17 at the time. He sent it to his friend, and it quickly spread throughout the girl's high school. Her peers relentlessly harassed and slut-shamed her; and even though she told police the photo was visual proof of her being raped, they wouldn't lay charges.

Struggling with depression, she locked herself in a bathroom and attempted suicide. Her parents took her off life support three days later, on April 7, 2013. She was 17 when she died.

It wasn't until August 2013, after massive public backlash, that police charged the man who took the photo that ruined her life. Outside the courthouse after his sentencing, the girl's father told reporters that justice won't be served until the rape allegations are fully investigated.

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​The victim's father.

When he heard the attorneys and judge describing his daughter vomiting in the photo while a man penetrated her, he wondered why no one was ever charged with her rape.

"We always thought, and we always believed, that [our daughter] was sexually assaulted that night, and they're sitting there saying she was vomiting, throwing up from intoxication, and they were having sexual intercourse with her. What are we supposed to think sitting there listening to that?"

He questioned why the Crown laid the "easy" child pornography charges rather than charges of sexual assault. While the man who took the infamous photo of the victim has now gone through the legal system, the man who actually assaulted her that night has not.

"We thought there was powerful evidence to suggest she was sexually assaulted that night... There's no sentence that would be good enough or strong enough to ever reflect what this did to my daughter. There just won't be."

As he spoke, a small group of protesters—that identified themselves as part of the Anonymous collective, by wearing Guy Fawkes masks and bandanas—yelled his daughter's name, along with "Justice!" and "Fuck the ban!"

They held neon signs with her name and the words, "What if she was your daughter?"

When judge Gregory Lenehan read his decision, he asked the 20-year-old defendant: "How would you have acted if that were your sister?"

If she were his sister, he would have physically intervened instead of taking the photo, the judge said.

As he read his decision, Lenehan weighed the "severe" and "vile" nature of the photo, and its contribution to the girl's death, against the idea in Canadian law that young offenders should be rehabilitated into society.

"He is not as blameworthy as an adult," the judge said.

He believed the man, now 20, was remorseful, and had taken responsibility for his actions by entering a guilty plea.

In her statement to the court, the girl's mother said she didn't want the man to go to prison:

"Some may think I want the people involved, and the guilty party, to go to jail and be punished severely. The truth is, I don't want that for him at all. I don't feel jail time would serve anyone in this situation. My wish is that the accused actually felt remorse, that the accused does see the wrongdoing in this situation, not because he was caught and held accountable but because he actually felt accountable."

When the judge finished reading his decision, the packed courtroom was completely silent. Meanwhile on Twitter, the girl's name and the hashtag #youknowhername blew up and trended nationally as Canadians expressed their outrage at the decision, and the publication ban, which makes discussing and reporting this story even more difficult.

​Follow Hilary on Twitter.

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Victoria Sin

This article originally appeared in VICE UK

9 AM on a Sunday morning is for the walk of shame or going to church. But for the female queens of London, it's a time that straddles both; the foundation-smeared, grotty beauty of a morning creep home, and the towering feminine performance of your Sunday best.

Which is why I find myself in a studio beside a stagnant canal in Dalston watching eight women becoming drag queens—all faux fur, glitter beards, sprayed wigs, thick powder, and blushed on breasts. The atmosphere isn't decadent; it's concentrated. They build their eyeliner up like plasterers.

What does it say about our idea of femininity that women in wigs, corsets, stilettos and seven ounces of makeup can sing, strip, get groped, and shake to audiences in the name of gender fuck? Can we learn more about what it is to be women by disguising gender through a constructed, post-sex persona?

Victoria Sin turns up in a tracksuit, bare-faced, carrying an M&S shopping bag full of clothes, saying she's "never tried to do drag makeup on Sunday morning hungover before." And yet, the slow application of clown white, blue shadow and blusher-painted cleavage is fascinating. I watch like a gawker on the train. We talk about Judith Butler, post-break-up butch-ness, and gender performance. "A lot of women are female drag queens and they don't even know it," she says. "All those extremely sexy women like Beyonce have an inch of makeup, wigs, crazy clothes."

Eppie, a young queen from Newcastle, England, who was raised by her father and brothers, got the bus from Turnpike Lane wearing a full purple glitter beard. She doesn't want me to see her non-drag identity, doesn't tell me her birth name and leaves in full costume after the shoot. And so she should—for this project she is a bearded Barbie, not the girl from near-Gateshead. Her outfit is a £5 [$7] dress from Fonthill Road in Finsbury Park, a polyester world of overt femininity among evangelist churches and Islamic cultural centers. "I've got the same bones on my face as my dad," she says, painting a fake wig hairline across her natural hair with gold paint. "I like the feeling of being mistook for a man dressed as a woman."

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Eppie

Next to arrive is Lolo Brow, already in full makeup, beautiful and eloquent. A trained dancer, tight-laced into a truly unfathomable corset, she demands attention, even when drinking a giant blue can of Monster energy drink. Lolo describes drag as a way to be "more arrogant than I ever thought I could be" and the drag community as an amphitheater of "fierce, powerful women, not men dressed as women."

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Lolo Brow

Rubyyy Jones arrives with her girlfriend in flat shoes, red hair, glittered eyebrows, and a black T-shirt. Part of  ​The Familyyy Fierce Collective with Lolo Brown and fellow female queen star Lily Snatchdragon, Rubyyy has been grabbed by audiences, groped, poked by people wondering if her boobs are real, and yet she is intensely, undeniably female. "I shun a lot of female expectations in drag, as I do in burlesque," says Rubyyy, taking off her knickers and stepping into a pair of fishnet tights. "I don't shave any of my body, I don't generally wear heels. Drag can be another pressure put on women about how they could or should look. But you don't have to shave or wear heels or be thin to be fierce or beautiful. I have no interest in being beautiful. I am beautiful."

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When a small blonde woman appears at the door, dragging a suitcase, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, I think it's a member of the public lost. But this is Lisa Lee—part of  ​the Lipsinkers—who has been doing female drag for over ten years. "I definitely see it as exploring gender," she says, pulling on her silver jumpsuit and ratty Dolly Parton wig. "We're encouraging an audience to think about what constitutes male and female."

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Lisa Lee

Miss Terri—the woman behind Madame Jojo's Kitsch Cabaret—has been dragging up for over 20 years. A makeup artist and singer, she describes her look as "high glam drag, rather than funny drag." Watching her gum and paint out her eyebrows and freehand her peacock-like eyes is a masterclass in painted glamor. She got into drag "by accident" after answering an advert for a singer in The Stage and yet her look is, to my untrained eye, the most recognizable as drag—big wig, feathers, and a cocked eyebrow. 

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Miss Terri

Self-styled "tranny with a fanny," Holestar is a female drag pioneer. She's already come up in every conversation I've had before sailing in with full makeup on. From a stint in the army to her years as a dominatrix, Holestar is no stranger to discipline. Which is perhaps how she has sustained an 11-year career performing her aggressive, female form of drag, while railing against the "vile misogyny" of "bad" queens. "Women doing drag is still not mainstream," she says, balancing a huge pink wig on her dog's head. "Recently I got called a cunt and 'some chick who thinks she's a drag queen' by a queen who I called out for plagiarism. 

"Who the fuck says drag is owned by men? It never has been. It was carved out that way through pantomime and tradition, but if you look at old music hall you'd have lots of gender performance by both men and women."

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Holestar

Of course, it's not just female drag queens who use gender fuck and live performance to grind against the casual misogyny and political inequality of our society. "We're acting out the people we want to be, because society tells us we can't be them in our 'real life,'" says male drag artist and broadcaster, Scottee. "We're post-gendered drag. It's not important to me what someone's birth or perceived gender is—it's gender illusion and performance."

Is there a resistance among the male drag community? "Am I frightened that women are doing drag? No. I think it's brilliant," says Scottee. "There's a lot of misogyny that lies underneath historical drag. Talking about 'becoming fishes' to mean becoming more womanly—that comes from gay men's perceptions of women's vaginas smelling of fish. I don't want to be part of that world."

A world where young men and women, from the Lily Savage heartland of northern social clubs to grotty nightclubs of London suburbs can dress, dance, sing and paint on an identity that teeters above our traditional notion of sex and gender, is far more exciting. 

See more of Holly's photo work ​here.

Eyes are the window to your soul, and that doesn't stop being true no matter how many illegal substances you consume on a night out. But can your eyes really tell when you're actually on something? From pupils the size of a needlepoint to huge black holes with barely visible irises, we snapped our way through Berlin's nightclubs to see if people's eyeballs could tell us the night's story. How much does the size of your pupils actually have to do with the substances you've taken?

The stuff in drugs that makes you relaxed, happy or just really awake not only manipulates the neurotransmitters in your brain, but can also affect physiological processes in your body. This includes the muscles in your eyes that are responsible for making your pupils bigger (to let in more light, for example), or smaller.

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After taking cocaine, marijuana, or amphetamines, for example, your pupils get noticeably larger (​Mydriasis), while opiates such as heroin constrict the pupils (Miosis). 

Fun fact: Movie-goers with an affinity for drugs rained criti​cism down on Darren Aronofsky after seeing Requiem for a Dream, in which he uses stylistic closeups of his heroin-addicted protagonists' pupils growing, instead of realistically having them constrict.

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But how concretely related are the consumption of drugs and visible changes in the eyes? After our photographic field study, we wanted to get a better answer, so we talked to a few people who would know more about the myth of drug eyes.

"A change in pupil size can be an indication of drug consumption, though it doesn't have to be," explains Heike Krause from the emergency station for people at risk of addiction in Berlin. "The pupils can also widen for if you're an epileptic who's on medication. So we like to look for other, conclusive signs. For example, if someone is heavily sweating."

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However, the eyes still seem to offer clear clues to a person's sobriety or lack thereof. Why else would the Hamburg police be running tests on people's pupils? They use a pupillograph, a device that looks like how people in the 60s would have imagined super-futuristic 3D glasses, and it's supposed to be able to tell if a driver is under the influence of drugs or alcohol. But according to Holger Vehren from the Hamburg police's press office, the measuring device isn't "the wonder weapon of drug detection, it's more of a 'pre-test' before a blood test."

The toxicologist Thorsten Binschenck-Domaß went into more detail about the effectiveness of these kinds of light-driven reaction tests. "Cocaine, amphetamine and THC, as well as a limited number of hallucinogens, lead to the pupils' delayed or lack of reaction to light,' he said. "These symptoms can outlast the subjective effect of the substance for many hours and up to two days. They may also lead to an enhanced sensitivity to glare." 

Yet a normal reacting pupil doesn't automatically mean the subsequent blood test will come back negative. Although the pupillograph can measure the pupil size and reaction time, that doesn't mean it can tell without a doubt whether illegal substances have been consumed, let alone which ones.

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But what's also interesting here is the medical perspective, which is the reason we called up the Charité hospital in Berlin. After many phone calls with people on the drug ward who also don't think the eyes are a great indicator of addictive behavior, we landed in the eye clinic. Their response was as explicit as it was sobering: It's absolutely not possible to tell what drugs someone has consumed by looking at their pupils.

​​​If you've been watching Corner Gas, hockey, or The National lately, you've probably seen the Canadian government's new anti-weed ad. The commercial, which is obviously targeted towards boomers who lovingly recall their free-love get-high days, has a stern message: If your teenager smokes weed, their brain will melt.

The ad, which has been " disliked into obli​vion on YouTube," seems remarkably disingenuous for a couple of reasons. For one, the ad is funded by "Healthy Canadians," a group that boasts a stunning 259 YouTube subsc​r​ibers as of press time (but it's over 300 if you count the 74 subscribers on their French channel).

Their channel also advises Canadians on the importance of not strapping a gigantic fan suit to your body in times of extreme heat, what a talking zucchini can teach you about packing healthy lunches for you​r children, and how giganti​c furniture can crush your child if you're not careful.
​

But Healthy Canadians is, in part, a branch of Health Canada, an agency that has spent the better part of this year building a corporate medical marijuana system while simultaneously preventing medical marijuana users from growing their own weed. This medical system, known currently as the MMPR, is counting on those same baby boomers they're pumping evil-weed propaganda at, to become patrons of the legal weed revolution. And yet, even though the MMPR is in place, it's clearly not being supported politically by the Conservative government.

With an already stringent set of restrictions on how Canadians can get access to the MMPR, and given the very recent-history of Health Canada forcing medical patients to dispose of their homegrown wee​d by mixing it with kitty li​tter (lest they be turned over to the RCMP), it's no stretch to say that this government is only half-interested in capitalizing off the upcoming 'green rush' of marijuana industries.

With a federal election coming up, Trudeau will be running a platform with marijuana legalization front-and-centre. Some conservative media outlets say he's the g​uy​ to beat, so is it any wonder that this current government is stuffing anti-weed propaganda down our throats while we're checking out the latest hot sauce company to make $50,000 on Dragon's Den?

Then there's Health Canada's claim in their ad that marijuana is "300-400 percent stronger" now than it was when our parents were high on hash and listening to The Doors. This seems like a dubious claim, and that's because it is. No source is provided, and a recent report that look​ed i​nto it found the only source for this information is the government​ itself.

This underlines another big problem: there's very little research available to support the largely anecdotal claims that cannabis can help with a variety of issues; including chronic pain, anxiety, depression, migraines, and even cancer. This scarcity of research is a problem not lost on medical marijuana patients, who are facing a system where doctors are the gatekeepers to get them access to cannabis.

Health Canada has repeatedly told me they have no plans to fund any new research into how cannabis can actually help people, and yet they can find the money to pay a crappy CGI house to animate a brain so they can run this ad all over Canadian TV, in an effort to scare boomers away from condoning their teenagers' weed use?

Cool plan, guys.

At the end of the day, no one in their right mind would advise a teenager that it's healthy for them to be smoking blunts on the regular, but no television ad is going to curtail a Canadian teenager's chronic, chronic habit either. It's just not going to happen.

So how about we stop spending tax dollars on awful television ads (unless it's the fan-man ad, that one's cool) and start working on building a responsible medical marijuana program, which puts research and helping sick people ahead of petty politics and painfully Canadian advertising campaigns.
​
​​@patrickmcguire