Last year, the New York City Council passed the Community Safety Act, a landmark piece of legislation that expanded the rights of those discriminated against by NYPD cops. It also created the office of the Inspector General, who is now charged with independently overseeing the largest municipal police force in America.

But an accompanying bill—the Right to Know Act—couldn't get the votes it needed. Had it passed, it would have essentially forced officers to identify themselves during unwarranted searches, tell citizens why they were being searched, and ask them if they're OK with that. In other words, it is a modern reincarnation of the Fourth Amendment in the stop-and-frisk era that promises an idyllic Pleasantville brand of law enforcement where, supporters argue, cops would actually abide by that old thing called the Constitution. Unsurprisingly, the cops hated the idea—police union head Patrick Lynch told a ​reporter, "We don't live in Mister Roger's Neighborhood."

Similar laws already exist in Minnesota, Colorado, and Arkansas. But now it looks as if New York City is ready to ask itself again: Do we have a right to know?

"A while back, I was stopped, frisked, and searched. And at that moment, I held the NYPD to a higher standard—when it happened to me, I assumed everything they did was of procedure," Brooklyn Councilman Antonio Reynoso, a co-sponsor of the newly reintroduced bill, said on the steps of City Hall Thursday. "And it wasn't until I worked as a chief of staff to a local councilman that I realized the entire stop was illegal. It wasn't justified."

In order to combat these kinds of abuses, according to Reynoso, the Right to Know Act will require cops "to give information" to the people they search by reaffirming something that already exists: the right to say no. This, of course, is the basis of your Miranda rights. In 1966, the Supreme Court held that citizens legally must be told that they have "the right to remain silent" by police officers before being arrested. And as Donna Lieberman, the President of the New York Civil Liberties Union, argued Thursday, that decision was necessary because cops weren't playing by the rules.

"The Supreme Court said, 'You have a right to know!'" she told reporters. "You don't have to talk to cops when under arrest. You have the right to get a lawyer. The police would never have imposed that protection on their own."

The end goal of the Right to Know Act, the sponsors say, is a more fruitful relationship between the NYPD and New Yorkers, especially minorities. The dynamic has been sour for some time amidst videos of brutality, instances of stop-and-frisk, and, most recently, a return to "broken wind​ows" policing policy. Reynoso later told me that the Right to Know Act had a bit of "broken windows residue" on it, arguing that the prosecution of people for minor infractions "doesn't really bring the justice we seek."

Council Members Ritchie Torres, the other lead sponsor of the bill, and Brad Lander, the original sponsor of the Community Safety Act, added that the bill would bring new definition to the NYPD motto of "Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect."

"If... you know who you're interacting with, you know why you're interacting, you know how that interaction is gonna go," Lander said of how civilians handle police encounters. "Nine times out of ten, that interaction will go better."

(When reached for comment on this potential new era of friendliness, an NYPD official referred us to the Mayor's Office.)

Last time the bill was introduced in 2012, it garnered 30 co-sponsors, many of whom are now in more senior roles, including Public Advocate Letitia James and Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito (who hasn't decided if she'll support it). The bill was reintroduced to the Council Thursday, but with just 20 co-sponsors signed on. In any case, The future of the legislation depends on Mayor Bill de Blasio.

When asked for his stance on the matter, a spokesperson pointed me to remarks made by the mayor on Wednesday, in which he indicated he wasn't so sure how he felt about it.

"I had some concerns then. I certainly have concerns now," de Blasio said. "You know, we obviously have to protect the rights of our people, but we also have to make sure that we're not, in any way, undermining the ability of law enforcement to do its job. So, I have some concerns that, you know, I need to hear answered in this process."

This lack of clarity has landed the Democratic mayor in hot waters with the city's black and Hispanic communities, especially since he ran on a platform that called for police reform and accountability. The Council, which has been cast as an iron-clad ally of the mayor's, has begun to voice concern that he is too deferential to the city's law enforcement apparatus.

All too often, they say, de Blasio sides with Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, who told the Council Thursday that the bill is "totally unnecessary. It's part of an ongoing effort to bridle the police and the city of New York."

This week, opposition flared up again when the NYPD announced a shift in its marijuana arrest policy from​ arrests to sum​monses—a move many critics believe will inflict more harm on black and Latino individuals. "There is nothing ultimately progressive about replacing one form of discrimination with another," Councilman Torres said. "It may be progress, but it ain't progressive."

Then, on Thursday, de Blasio argued in defens​e of lawful chokeholds—a police tactic that, after the tragic death o​f Eric Garner in July at the hands of NYPD officials, has become a rallying cry for protesters. The City Council seeks to ban the practice altogether, but the mayor has expressed disapproval, saying that "the best way to handle that is through NYPD policy."

It remains to be seen whether the mayor's sympathies lie more with the police or the people they single out for searches.

Follow John Surico on ​Twitter.

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Attendants at this year's National Front Remembrance Sunday march. Photo by Gavin Cooper

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Remembrance Sunday is the high point in the UK white pride calendar—a day for the fascist National Front (NF) to parade past the Cenotaph, sullying the day with their presence, while others try to peacefully pay their respects to those who've died at war. 

This year there was a split among the NF ranks, meaning there were two separate marches and the slim chance of confrontation. However, thankfully,  ​it turne​d out to be a relatively low-key event—not like NF marches in the past.

In the 1980s, the Remembrance Day march was a much bigger deal, drawing thousands of racist boneheads to London. As such, people who hate fascists wanted to oppose it. And over a period of a few years in the late-1980s, Anti-Fascist Action (AFA), a militant antifascist organization, was able to significantly reduce the number of people attending the National Front's annual march through a combination of audacious organizing matched with gratuitous violence. 

I recently caught up with Joe, a former organizer for AFA. We chatted about beating up Nazis in pubs and burger bars, and he explained how AFA was able to bring the number of people going on the march down to a tenth of what it was at its peak.

VICE: You opposed the National Front Remembrance Sunday parades for several years in the late-80s, causing the numbers attending them to plummet. Why?
Joe: Well, AFA was set up in July of 1985 with the express purpose of meeting with the National Front and other far-right groups on the streets. One of the obvious areas of neglect was the Cenotaph march, where the NF were allowed to parade through central London utterly unopposed. At their high point our estimate was they'd be 2,000 strong, so that became an area of interest for us. I'm sure they were marching more or less permanently between the end of the Anti-Nazi League and the beginning of AFA, but it started to increase because it was a kind of meet 'n' greet. This was where any [prospective members] would be encouraged to come take part in the yearly big event. [With] no opposition [it looks] too strong to be defeated. For young kids it's impressive.

Opposing the NF Remembrance Sunday parade in 1985 was among the first occasions Anti-Fascist Action took to the streets. What happened?
​ We went there and we tried to occupy their rallying point around Victoria station. We were at the back of the station, which is where they used to group up. There were probably about 80 to 100 of us, not all of them fighters—[some of them] ordinary antifascists, if you like. The police were there, then after about half an hour [the NF]  appeared and saw the mixed social demographic from the group. 

They looked like wolves—their tongues hanging out. The coppers were quite happy, absolutely insouciant. But then, as they got closer, the people who were less keen were moving back and the others were stepping forward. By the time they got close, there was a look of keen anticipation to attack. Eventually they didn't, but if they'd have kept going they'd have probably won the day. Ian Stuart Donaldson [lead singer of Nazi-punk band Skrewdriver] actually stopped at the bus stop and joined the queue.

At the end of the day, the police were disgusted with them, obviously—letting down the white race. Eventually they got out of their vans and started to push our side around. The National Front then had to go around, having failed to do their basic stuff, which was taking their place to form up. They then had to find a new place to form up. That was a kind of tick in the win column. Obviously we couldn't have done that a second year.

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A National Front march in Yorkshire in the 1970s .Photo ​via

The following year you held a march—why was that?
We thought we needed to do something more high-profile, so the idea came up for AFA to do a march itself, in direct opposition to the NF. In fact, we were actually marching toward them.

Our first march attracted about 2,000 people, which was considered a success, much to the chagrin of the Daily Mail, which was disgusted by antifascism being involved with the Cenotaph—it was just something which was anathema to them. The following year we went to repeat that success, but a group of 80 to 100 [Chelsea] Headhunters [football hooligans] attacked the back of the march. That's when we realized the Achilles heel in having a student-led, student-dominated demonstration, because apart from two women stewards the whole demonstration ran to the front. The stewards were struggling to get back and had to get through people dropping banners and all that—absolute disgrace. All the Headhunters did was wheel past, really; they didn't really get into the nitty-gritty.

What was the fallout from that attack?
​ It was enough for us to look at the whole AFA structure and kind of go, "We obviously have a problem here." In the sense of, what was the point of being an antifascist if, as soon as you meet the opposition, you leg it? You might as well just describe yourself as a non-fascist. You're in a neutral corner—that's where you're happiest, that's where you're most comfortable.

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(Screen shot ​via)

Even though AFA was marching, you were still involved in clashes with the NF around central London through the course of the evening. There was one occasion mentioned in the book Beating the Fascists, where it kicked off in a Wimpy. Can you explain what happened there?
That was a devastating blow for them, because that was their leader guard. They were just not paying attention or sufficiently focused. They thought that because they were in King's Cross they were out of harm's way. But we used to redeploy—we used to pull our people off the streets after there was plenty of activity. The police were looking for us, but we'd suddenly go to ground. We'd have scouts out all the time, and they'd come back with something. Or, when the time was ready, we'd reappear, 150-strong, and just go hunting. That was how some of our people came across the fash.

So you're in the Wimpy, with these NF members...
The funny thing was, right—Euston Road, even on a Sunday evening, is still pretty busy. We were on one side of the road and they were stood outside a Wimpy bar on the other side. Two or three of us came down the steps from St. Pancras. They knew who we were straight away. They couldn't recognize us, but they understood the body language. They had a huge advantage—they had all the brass-tipped flagpoles and all the biggest brutes they could find; 21-inch necks. 

Even though we outnumbered them, if they stood their ground it would be such a tear-up that the police would be bound to turn up within minutes, because we'd be right across the road and all that. But their courage failed them and they decided they'd go into the Wimpy: "It'll be alright, and it might not be them anyway, and there's no need to panic." 

It was perfect, really—you can't use a flagpole in a Wimpy. There was a right old John Wayne tear-up. It went all the way over the counter and into the kitchen. Customers all fled, and most of the staff ran away as well. That was a coup, because they knew everybody and everybody knew them. By the end of the week everybody internally would know it was a PR disaster for them.

That was the kind of thing we relied on—being sharper than them, anticipating where they were going to go. Appearing where you weren't expected. It was all part of the AFA portfolio. You'd start off with ten times less than them, but you'd keep redeploying the same 100. You'd hit them about six or seven times without any casualties and just a few nickings. They think they're fighting an army. They don't know it's the same 100. It's just carnage. That was a nice finish to the day, I think.

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This year's National Front Remembrance Sunday march. Photo by Gavin Cooper

After a couple of years of marching, and clashes before and after, you decided to go back to Victoria to oppose the NF directly—the tactic you used in 1985. Why was that and what happened?
​ We felt we could repeat the original formula, but about five times stronger. Instead of putting 150 in the field, you put 500-plus in the field—but mainly fighters, which wasn't the case the first time we went down there. So that's what we did. They had a pub right on the Victoria concourse, which was used by the Chelsea Headhunters. We just took that over. That became our base of operations, which made a perfect honey trap for them, because that's where they would make for. You'd see them come and they'd get splattered. Whoever got away, got away. But then more would come, because you're talking about hundreds of people coming from all over, and they'd be—bang, bang, bang bang bang.

Weren't there any police about?
​ The coppers weren't really on top of it. They hadn't anticipated it and couldn't distinguish our side from the fascists. There was no particular distinguishing feature—there was no social demographic like there was with the first march. [At the 1985 there were] obvious students and lefties against obvious hooligans and fascists, so you separate them out and you've got a law and order situation. But this was completely fluid. 

There was one situation where a particularly notorious and soon-to-be member of [neo-Nazi organization] Combat 18 decided to march into the pub with one or two others. He took about two steps inside the door, got hit with an ashtray, staggered on, got hit by a chair making for the other door, took a pint pot straight over the nut and then staggered out the other side. It just kind of summed it all up. He was a big old brute—he was up for attempted murder charges at some stage later. It was the kind of thing they thought they could get away with, but obviously not to any great degree. He didn't repeat it.

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Screen shot ​via​

What effect did this have on the National Front?
​ That was a low point for them, obviously. Their own organization hadn't anticipated that. They weren't prepared for us. The police weren't prepared for us, either. A lot of this organization is done word of mouth; it was prior to mobile phones and email and all that, so you didn't get that kind of a trap where you've got a chain of evidence and people can build up an intelligence picture. There was nothing—it was done word of mouth. 

Also, the plans would change in the day at the discretion of the chief steward. You could only broadly anticipate what AFA was going to do, and AFA was also marching, so police were all geared up for the march. Five hundred-plus police went to Victoria, and they had people at Trafalgar Square, anticipating and trying to prevent another attack by the far-right, when in fact it was the far-right which was being attacked. They couldn't seem to move their feet quick enough—they couldn't adjust. It was a good day. The fascist recriminations went on and on after—who was to blame, etc.

The ramifications of that kind of humiliation just ripples through the organizations for months, if not years, afterwards. Sometimes they never recover at all. I think Richard Edmonds [formerly] of the BNP [and now a NF member] said later that they had a contingent there, [but] that there was no point in going to Victoria because it was just full of reds. That was his own direct experience—the BNP never took part in Remembrance Day after that at all, not even as a token force.

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National Front wreaths left at the Cenotaph during this year's Remembrance Sunday march. Photo by Gavin Cooper

The BNP weren't the only group you persuaded to stay away—there was a clash with the Chelsea Headhunters on Embankment. Do you think that stopped them returning?
​ They had a lot of young football hooligans with them for the day for a jolly, to attack the lefties and get the blacks and all that. They ended up meeting AFA instead. Just the look of horror on their faces... even though the tube had closed—the doors were closed when AFA charged the train—they were trying to get out of the carriage AFA was trying to get into, breaking the windows with fire extinguishers. They just scrambled all over each other and you just knew they'd never come back. 

The irony was that the ones who did manage to escape the carriage then got hit with bottles and other bits and pieces as they went from one carriage to another. If they'd just sat there and read the paper they would have been fine. But they couldn't... it was just terror, sheer terror. Which, for what we were trying to do, was pretty edifying, because for everyone who got hit, there were ten who would know it could have been them. That meant none of them came back, ever. It ended their whole political career. We used to say it's the first big lie—that lefties are all old men in duffel coats and sandals. That was what they were told, but instead they met the very opposite. It was just devastating—they just knew they'd been mugged off, and before they'd been blooded they were the ones who were bloodied and exited the stage.

By the end of the 80s the numbers going on the NF Remembrance Sunday parade had dropped to about a tenth of their peak—around 200 marchers. You then stopped opposing them. Why was that?
​ There was a strategic decision then to say, "Well, this will be the hardcore [members]—you won't be able to reduce them any more." So AFA redeployed to East London and got stuck into the BNP instead, and basically left the NF to it, saying its function as we saw it—an introduction to fascism—no longer served its purpose. We could deploy, but if the police had 500 coppers, there were two uniformed police officers for every fascist, and you could only do incremental damage after that. There was always going to be a hardcore that would continue, but the fellow travelers—the kind of people who would be the next generation—had been removed, so we moved on.

That was basically four years, and they were kiboshed. This was at a time when people were saying, "Fascism isn't a threat; the Tories are the real enemy; this is a deviation from the class struggle." The reality: right, but if you've got 2,000 fascists marching unopposed, that there is a major problem. It's what they represent, not what they could do. They were never particularly competent, but they represented something, and there was a continuum from them to the success of the BNP to the success of UKIP now. Now, people are seeing the size of the reactionary reservoir that the NF were trying to tap into at the time, 25 years ago.

That was the point. They knew there was something there to feed off. They were feeding off the march and the strategy of Oswald Moseley in the 1930s, which was to use violence. If nobody had stopped them, they could have done it.

Follow James Poulter on ​Twitter.

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​I first heard of reiki through my friend Jim, who has a habit of dating women who are certified reiki practitioners. This means they went through this whole process of learning in person from a teacher how to place their hands just so on people and transfer energy to them, thus—reiki folk believe—healing various maladies.

Reiki, also known as "palm healing," was developed in Japan in 1922 by Buddhist monk Mikao Usui. In the 1930s, reiki master Hawayo Takata introduced the practice to Hawaii, and in 1970, she began training other reiki masters. Takata was an early proponent of charging money for these services, and decided that her seminars would cost $10,000. When she died in 1980, Takta had trained 22 reiki masters, "reiking" in (sorry) a cool $220,000 from her teachings. That would be a little over $1.3 million in today's dollars, all from telling people precisely how to put their hands on other people.

Needless to say, evidence to support reiki as an effective treatment for anything is still forthcoming. Though it has a dedicated fan base of believers, it's widely considered pseudoscience. I had no reason to believe in it, but I decided I shouldn't knock it until I tried it. So I set out to find out if there was anything to this reiki business. And it is a business—I called multiple reiki masters in Los Angeles, and found that a session can cost anywhere from $80 to $120 per hour. 

But I really didn't need the energy for myself; I needed it for Pistachio, my perpetually anxious Chihuahua-terrier mix. And LA being a parody of itself, there are plenty of reiki practitioners who stand at the ready to use their powers to cure anything ailing pet bodies and pet minds.

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I went into this expecting reiki to accomplish nothing at all, but secretly hoping that I'd be wrong. I'm skeptical—some might say cynical—by nature, and reiki seemed like your standard New Age snake oil situation. But in this case, I wanted to be wrong. Pistachio has been extremely anxious since the day I adopted her. Her anxiety has resulted in plenty of barking when she's home alone, which has in turn resulted in multiple calls from my apartment manager. I'm running out of different kinds of apology cookies to bake my upstairs neighbor, and I could really stand to not get kicked out of my apartment. So Pistachio and I made our way to Wagville, a holistic dog daycare and groomer, for a 30-minute reiki session with Amber. 

Amber was probably one of the top five nicest people I've met. She came in carrying her own reiki pillow, ​which is apparently a thing, and led us down the hall to a small room. As we walked in, Amber admitted that the space wasn't ideal for reiki; you could hear dogs yelping as they got groomed in the background and it smelled like the vet's office, which was making Pistachio understandably nervous. She stuck very close to me. I asked Amber if this was a problem, and she said no, we should let Pistachio hang out wherever she felt comfortable. This seemed reasonable.

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Amber sat cross-legged on her pillow, closed her eyes, and began to meditate. And then... she kept on meditating. After ten minutes, I started to consider saying something like, "Uh, should I be doing anything right now?" I was sitting on a bench with Pistachio, whose expression kept oscillating between fear and bewilderment, and who had yet to go anywhere near Amber's pillow. But I was hesitant to disturb Amber, so I kept my mouth shut. As we passed the 15-minute mark, I began to wonder if Amber had fallen asleep. I kind of coughed to see if she jerked awake, but she didn't. I picked up Pistachio and set her on the floor near Amber to try and coax her toward the reiki energy. She sniffed at Amber's hands, looked at me like "I don't know what you expect me to do," came back to our bench, and fell asleep behind me (a common Pistachio move). 

We were now 25 minutes in, and I was really starting to doubt myself. This couldn't be right, I thought, that Amber needed 25 minutes to center herself to prepare for this pet reiki. Could it?​​

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After 30 minutes. Amber's phone alarm went off. She opened her eyes and asked, "How was that for Pistachio?" I told her Pistachio just kind of sat there, and eventually fell asleep. She said that sounded about right, and added, "Did you see when Pistachio came to my hands? That was her drawing the energy from me."

Amber was so earnest and so sweet that I just responded, "Oh wow! Interesting!" Internally, I was trying to wrap my mind around the fact that "pet reiki" just meant sitting in a room with a meditating woman for 30 minutes. For $40. I looked down at Pistachio and tried to find something different about her. She seemed relieved that this wasn't the vet's office, if nothing else.

I thanked Amber and walked outside with Pistachio, who immediately freaked out because a truck drove by. I loaded her into the car, went home, and started on a new batch of apology cookies for my upstairs neighbor.

Follow Allegra Ringo on ​Twitter.

​Director Bennett Miller spent seven years making his third feature film, Foxcatcher—a retelling of the true story of millionaire heir John du Pont's fateful relationship with a pair of Olympic wrestlers, Mark and Dave Schultz. Bizarre and haunting, Foxcatcher has an intensity that has come to be expected from the director of Moneyball and Capote. We sat down with Miller to talk about the film.

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The author, walking up some stairs (Photo by Ben Mitchell)

This post originally appeared in VICE UK​

The home is sacred. Who passes through your doors and who you keep out in the cold is the last form of socially acceptable prejudice. Which actually makes a lot of sense, because it's your house, and therefore your PS3 controller, or your fancy candle, or your set of commemorative Pogs that goes missing if you let the wrong person in.

Thing is, with the rise of apps like Airbnb, Couch Surfer, Tinder, and Grindr, the likelihood of some Jane or John Doe getting all up in your living quarters, creasing your sheets and leaving strange indentations in your furniture is probably higher than it's ever been. But has this gold rush of stranger-meeting services actually normalized the idea of housing people we barely know, or do we just do it more now because it usually ends in either sex or an online bank transfer?

I decided to answer my own question by visiting a cross section of London neighborhoods over a period of five nights. I'd knock on doors. People would (hopefully) open them. I'd ask if I could sleep in their house. 

The idea was pretty simple, but I needed a convincing back-story that would minimize any external influence on the host's decision to let me stay (i.e., "Hi, I'm a journalist writing about whether people in this area are kind and accommodating or selfish and fucking horrible. Which one are you?").

Eventually, I settled on this: I was visiting London (I'm from Australia) and had organized to stay at a family friend's house who I didn't really know all that well, and they hadn't turned up. Plus, I couldn't access my money until the following morning. If they accepted, I'd come clean. 

This is how my week went.

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WEDNESDAY - WHITECHAPEL

Knocked on: 37 doors
​ Had: Five conversations lasting more than five minutes
Weather: Drizzly and generally quite shit

Whitechapel was tough. There were a lot of no's very early on, all of them expressed in a way that didn't instill me with much confidence for how the rest of the week might go. After a while, I did manage to get into a conversation with one lady, who wasn't able to host me but did very kindly pawn me off to a neighbor three doors down. "It's a student house," she explained, promisingly.

A guy named Jack opened the door. He was around my age and seemed sympathetic to my fictitious cause. We built up a bit of a rapport and he told me to keep looking, but to come back in an hour or so if I had no luck, with the vague commitment that they'd sort something out. I went to the chicken shop next to the station, ate some chicken and walked straight back.

This time, Jack's roommate answered the door. I asked if Jack was still home and whether this guy was aware of the conversation I'd had with him earlier. He informed me that no, Jack was no longer home, and that he was unaware of any conversation that had taken place.

I pictured Jack in his room, playing Call of Duty with the sound off, trying to escape the consequences of his poor decision making.

I tried to turn his housemate around with an offer to both pay him £20 (the following morning) and to leave my passport and laptop as insurance. He wasn't having it, and I was left to continue my sullen traipse around E1.

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Xavi and his flatmate

After a few more rock solid no's I met 28-year-old Xavi from Barcelona, who listened to my story for about two minutes before inviting me inside. Straight away he offered me cigarettes, food, clean clothes, hash and beer. We spent the night smoking, drinking and talking about our respective homelands. It was great.

"You knock on my door and you look OK, but worried," he said. "And you tell me your story about having no place to stay. I let you in to stay. I thought, He is probably very stressed and I am not doing much tonight, so we can just make it fun and he can relax and not worry. I offer you hash and beer. I thought we can have a fun night."

Xavi was one of the best guys I've ever met—instant affinity, immediate Myspace Top 8 levels of brotherhood. We chatted about his job in the fish markets, his life away from Spain and his girlfriend, who was studying abroad in Germany. I asked him if he felt he should consult his housemate about me staying there. "Ah, yes, she is pretty open-minded—I don't think she'll care too much. But maybe her boyfriend might care," he laughed.

Xavi was intent on making the experience as positive as possible. I figured that him being away from his girlfriend and his homeland was probably why he seemed to appreciate the company, as well as explaining his empathy for my being alone.

"I've been in your situation before and I myself am not from here. I'm not from London. I'm from Spain. I can imagine how you must have felt," he said. "And you can't steal much from my place because I don't have much, so I wasn't really worried about that. I don't know—I like to be a friend with every brother ."

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THURSDAY - SHOREDITCH

Knocked on: 42 doors
​ Had: Three conversations longer than three minutes
Weather: Still raining and cold

One big problem with Shoreditch was the lack of homes with front doors. Soliciting a bed through an intercom is always going to be a no, unless you happen to chance upon a psychopath who wants to take your skin and use it to wallpaper their top floor flat. Which isn't really ideal in the grand scheme of things.

Knocking on any door I could, one lady told me through the letter slot that she'd call the police. Another kept saying that she really wanted to help, but that because she worked from home it would be difficult. I nodded unconsciously, before suggesting that this was actually a pretty ideal situation—she was in, and I was looking for somewhere to be in. And then I stopped mid-sentence. This wasn't a debate. She was a lady living by herself who understandably didn't want some creepy weirdo sleeping over.

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Victoria (right) and two of her daughters

My approach changed after that. After failing the entire way along Shepherdess Walk—which I'd got very excited about because all the houses had doors—it began to rain. Luckily, the next door I knocked on was answered by Victoria, a teacher and single mother of three teenagers, who invited me in for a decaffeinated vanilla-infused tea. I didn't feel great about imposing myself on them, but, you know, I still did.

I sat at their kitchen table for about 15 minutes, making polite conversation and trying to look normal. Not so normal that I appeared too relaxed about having nowhere to sleep, but normal enough that I didn't look like I was going to lose it and start kicking their windows in. I could hear the buzzing and beeps of the girls' mobiles, and a look of alarm washed over their mother's face. I felt really bad.

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The author's bed for the night in Shoreditch

"I thought it was my duty to ask and see what your circumstances were before turning you away," said Victoria, when I asked why she'd been so friendly. "I could tell by looking at you that you weren't a mass murderer. I asked you in and got the girls to ring around their friends to ask for a place for you to stay. I also called two friends, but they didn't pick up.

"We were out of options, but I didn't know what to tell you—I didn't want to send you back out into the rain. My girls started texting me, pleading with me to just let you stay on the floor. I was thinking you could have maybe slept in my car, or that I could drive you to my cousin's and say you were a friend from work. I didn't feel comfortable lying to her, but it was an option I considered."

I suggested sleeping between the radiator and the back door. Victoria accepted. I thanked her. That family reaffirmed my faith in humanity.

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The author's bed for the night in Brixton

SATURDAY - BRIXTON

Knocked on: One door
​ Weather: Mild and dry

My Brixton door-knocking experience was very brief; I was only on the streets for a total of seven minutes.

The first house I went to belonged to a 28-year-old IT systems manager who didn't want his real name to be searchable, so let's call him Bill Peterson, because that's a kind-sounding name for a very kind man. I was knocking on his neighbor's door when he opened his. I explained my made up situation and he let me in.

"I saw you skulking around and thought, 'Who is this chap?' My initial thought was aggression," he told me. "You were standing there looking tired, distressed and emotional. I guess hearing your story and seeing the way you looked changed the situation pretty much straight away."

(Not to negate Bill's incredible generosity, but I don't think I looked all that awful tbh.)

"I thought, OK, he's probably really going to struggle getting anywhere in Brixton. So I said, 'If you can't find anywhere and it's late, you're welcome to crash."

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"Bill Peterson"

I asked him if there was any initial hesitation about letting me stay. "Yes, definitely," he said. "There's been a bunch of guys who regularly come down here and smoke crack on our porch. Just last week our window was smashed, so I've been a bit touchy."

Bill was heading out for a couple of hours, so told me to come back at midnight to crash on his couch. Once we'd both returned we stayed up until 3:30 AM chatting about politics, him explaining China's corporate espionage into global server networks while his girlfriend slept in the bed next door.

He double-locked the front door before we went to sleep, "Just in case you try to take off with the telly."

I took the remote out of my back pack and returned it to the coffee table, disappointed.

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SUNDAY - GOLDERS GREEN

Knocked on: 49 doors
​ Weather: Cold but generally kind of fine

Golders Green was always going to be difficult. It was a Sunday, a night where it's traditional for people to be gearing up for a week at work/not hosting strange men in their home. It's also a residential area with a lot of families, so I didn't have high hopes for coming across many from the demographic that had so far been the most receptive: single men my age. The area did, however, have a lot of front doors.

My first conversation was with a doctor of some description, who had an in-house practice. He invited me into his office for a consultation. I declined. He suggested I try a Buddhist commune down the road.

I kept knocking for three streets, until I reached the home of a Japanese family. The door was opened by a 12-year-old boy and his mother. His mother seemed uncomfortable, which was understandable, and told me that it wouldn't be possible to have me to stay. I thanked her for her time and started walking away.

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The charitable Golders Green homeowners with the very philanthropic son

As I knocked on their neighbor's door, I heard the boy running up behind me.

"Mister, are you hungry?"

"No, I'm OK. But thanks anyway—really appreciate it."

"No, you have to eat something. My mother has lots of food for you."

"Thanks, mate, I'm OK."

He grabbed me by the arm and marched me back to his front door.

"Wait here."

After two minutes in the doorway, he came back with a shopping bag full of food. It's that type of selfless kindness I'd hoped to find. I explained what I was doing, gave the food back, thanked the boy and his mother again and carried on my search.

After close to three hours of door-knocking I was ready to call it a night on Golders Green. However, in a last=ditch attempt I rapped my knuckles on the door of a man who wasn't all that happy to have been interrupted late on a Sunday evening. He didn't let me in, but he did offer me £40 for a B&B. Turns out Golders Green is home to some very charitable people.

The man told me he could tell I wasn't a conman. "Good nose," I said. "I'm a journalist."

I asked why he'd offered someone he'd never met the equivalent of quite a decent meal for two.

"I have a son who's a similar age to you, and if he was in your situation in a foreign land I would like someone to help him," he explained. "The fact that you're Australian helped. If you had a local accent it's unlikely I would have helped."

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TUESDAY - KNIGHTSBRIDGE

Knocked on: 18 doors
​ Weather: Cold, windy, and shit

By Tuesday evening, my last day, I was fully over the door-knocking challenge. My knuckles were bruised, my confidence shook, my guilt at the lies I'd told countless strangers starting to become slightly overbearing.

I was also certain that nobody would help me in Knightsbridge. Bar your odd tech tycoon or hippie aristocrat, the kind of people who live in Knightsbridge aren't exactly known for their benevolence. Also, a lot of the buildings looked like embassies, and I figured it probably wasn't going to be in anyone's national interest to let a bearded man in chinos kip on their couch for the night.

I walked around for 20 minutes trying to find residential front doors. The few I did find didn't open. I found a close that looked promising. I knocked on all the doors. Nobody answered. To be honest, I was kind of relieved.

I kept on walking. The streets were dead. After one final hour, I gave up completely. I was done.

If my five nights taught me anything, it's that London is full of benevolent souls. And that all those listicles about Londoners being rude and unfriendly are dumb. 

Plenty of people turned me away, of course, which did make me feel kind of shitty about myself, even though—in retrospect—it likely had nothing to do with my personal character and everything to do with people just wanting to enjoy the comfort of their own home without some Australian alien making them feel incredibly uneasy all night.   

But for those of you who did let me in, thank you—it's amazing to know people like you exist.

Around 200 bombs have been either found or detonated in Chile over the past decade. Many of these bombs have been located in the capital of Santiago, and have generally avoided harming innocent civilians.

This changed on September 8, 2014, when a bomb was detonated inside a crowded subway station, leaving 14 civilians injured. Some blamed anarchist groups, while others suspected ultra-right terrorists.

In response to the threat, Chile's government has increasingly invoked its controversial anti-terror laws, which were originally enacted during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.

VICE News traveled to Chile to speak with lawyers, politicians, and civilians about the current climate following the September 8 attack, and to ask whether the government will be able to guarantee and protect the rights of its citizens as it seeks to solve the mystery of the bombings in Chile.​

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Tattoo associated with the original Aryan Brotherhood prison gang. Photo via ​Wikimedia Commons

This week, seven members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas ​were sentenced to prison, the latest result of a crackdown on the white supremacist prison gang stemming from a 2013 federal racketeering indictment out of Houston. But while the feds are working to wipe out this racist collective, the Brotherhood's tentacles are even now spreading outside the confines of the prison system.

The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT) emerged in the 1980s, adopting the name of a notorious California gang prison gang founded decades earlier. Legend has it the Texas inmates even asked the original for permission to start their own chapter. 

They ABT were initially feared for the brutal murders their members conducted while waging war with rivals, like the Aryan Circle and Texas Mafia. But as members got out, they organized on the streets and dove into the methamphetamine business. The Dallas/Fort Worth area is their stronghold, but they also have a presence in Houston and San Antonio. Although most of their founding and longtime members are in 24-hour lockdown units, their name and reputation elicits terror inside and outside the correctional system. The gang is known for their revenge killings and they live by the motto, "God forgives, brothers don't."

Like most serious prison gangs, the Brotherhood operate with a "blood in, blood out" policy and their shot-callers are career prison gangsters who act as generals for the gang and issue orders from their cells in super max units.

"It's all about brutality. The most violent ones have the most respect. The only intelligence needed is how to get in the drugs, other than that it's all about muscle," a federal prisoner we'll call Crazy Billy tells me. Crazy Billy is a 35-year-old Ohio native who got pinched for robbing a bank. He's been inside for the last 12 years and has had many dealings with the ABT and white prison gangs in general.

"People join gangs because they want to be a part of something. That or they're too weak to stand on their own. So they want to be in with whoever runs the yard. I've seen dudes from New York patching ABT because that's who's running the yard," Crazy Billy says. "I don't really like the gang. I've had my beefs with them. But I do know this: When they're deep on a yard, it makes other races respect the whites more. Because they know that at least that group will roll."

As the gang has grown and spread out into the world, street operations have expanded and the feds have brought several indictments against them. This latest racketeering case dates back to the early 1980s and lists a multitude of prison and street murders, assaults, and kidnappings along with charges related to conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine . But with the latest round of sentencing, much of the ganger's leadership has been dismantled.

"I know that in the state system the ABT are on permanent lockdown. The dudes are not happy about the indictments—it's cut off some of their communications," Crazy Billy says. "Most of them want to be looked up to. They're always in everyone's business. They want to be in the mix of whatever's going down. Why? Cause they don't have anything better to do. They're not trying to better themselves. They're trying to a) get more power, and b) get more money."

Despite federal prosecutions that have netted 73 convictions, no gang member has been charged with a hate crime. Instead, the feds have gone after the whites-only gang strictly as a criminal enterprise. The Aryan Brotherhood, of course, hold race-based beliefs but have repeatedly shown that when it comes to doing business they will work closely with Latino, black, and other groups. The only color they hold truly sacred is green.

"I haven't found too many that hold to their racial beliefs. Most of them are needle-Nazi's and only looking out for themselves and their gang." Crazy Billy says. "They won't let another race jump on anyone though. If they did, that'd be it for them. They don't have any problems working with other races business-wise. They'll also take advantage of weaker whites. Out West the AB's taxes white lames to walk the yard."

The Department of Justice has ​referred to the recent round of convictions as a "decimation of the gang's leadership and violent members and associates." The gang's acting leader, Larry "Slick" Bryan, 52, was sentenced to 300 months in federal prison. But Crazy Billy offers a different perspective.

"When the ABT takes over, they are on point. If there's gonna be some racial shit popping off... everyone is fucking going," he says. "The ABs in Cali started to protect white dudes back in the day. Then they got a taste of power and just flipped and prayed on their own kind."

So even if the current crop of Aryan Brotherhood of Texas leadership has been thinned, the tribalism inside the prison system—and the gang's apparent ability to make money on the outside—ensure it won't be fading from view any time soon.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Tw​itter.

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​Franck Gervais, via the ​CBC on Twitter.​

Earlier this week, many in the Canadian public were aghast to discover a man interviewed by the CBC during a Remembrance Day service in Ottawa, while fully garbed in a fraudulent Royal Canadian Regiment uniform, faked his status as one of Canada's soldiers. In the interview, Franck Gervais, a 40-year-old stair assembler and Quebec native, is introduced as "Sgt. Franck Gervais," and in a comically somber tone, spoke about the importance of Remembrance Day, while wearing a medal of bravery.

Soon after the interview, soldiers began alerting the CBC that there was something fishy about Gervais's appearance. His hat was ill-fitting, his beard wasn't trimmed to regulation length, and his beaver-shaped tags were worn crooked (a faux pas). Before long, Canada's public broadcaster and other media outlets carried out investigations revealing Franck Gervais never actually served in the military.

The reaction was swift and pointed. The CBC visited Gervais's home in Quebec, where he refused to talk to the CBC and his wife told reporters that they felt "trapped" and had received death threats.

The CBC then visited Gervais's workplace at Potvin Construction, where Gervais has worked for 12 years, co-workers expressed shock at the news. He's been suspended with pay while the company decides his fate. If that news wasn't bad enough, yesterday Ottawa police said they were investigating Gervais for the unlawful use of military uniform and medals, which comes with a maximum six-month jail sentence penalty. All of this attention for a strange prank—or the symptom of a mental health disorder—seems like a bit much. And media reports stating that "forces members and veteran groups were outraged," seemed slightly overblown, so we decided to reach out to a few soldiers to get their thoughts on the "scandal."

The few we spoke with (all of whom fought in Afghanistan) didn't actually seem to give a shit about this sad character. In fact, they tended to border on utter sympathy for a guy one soldier compared to the sad fate of the "Star Wars kid."

"I first saw this when it appeared in my Facebook news feed, and to be honest I thought it was fair that this imposter/sham [sic] was uncovered," said one soldier. "In fact, I even found that some of the evidence (photos with attached commentary) were entertaining."

The same soldier said "I'm not going to lie, I had a good chuckle" when he first saw the images of the ill-bearded Gervais. According to him "nothing quite works in the photos, it oozes amateur. This dude went through all this effort creating this persona, but yet had a beard, transition lenses, and petty problems with his uniform."

In other words, the average soldier could pick the razzle dazzle of a fake get up, in no time at all. One glance and a soldier knew Gervais was a liar. But for the public broadcaster it seemed genuine.

"I don't usually take a personal offence to this type of thing, though I can definitely understand why someone who's worked hard for their rank, their medals, and basically the right to wear the uniform would be. I also think that all of this is compounded by the fact that the 'unmasking' occurred on Remembrance Day, a day of solemn reflection for members who've made the ultimate sacrifice," said the soldier, who was also a veteran of the war in Afghanistan.

"I think it's gone a little too far. I almost feel pity for him, in a 'Star Wars kid' sort of way. He took his LARPing a step too far in the completely wrong forum."

Another soldier with serious combat chops in the same long running war, was more to the point: "lol i dont give a fuck," he said. "Not sure why it is a story."

The last soldier we communicated with told us he felt sympathy for a man that likely has serious mental health problems.

"I think he probably has some emotional or mental issues that led to this behaviour.

Frankly, it seems like he was doing it for emotional rather than material gain. If that's true, then I think he probably deserves some sympathy," said the soldier who also had combat experience in Afghanistan.

"He tried to bask in the attention and glory of others. He's not the first person to do it, nor is he the worst," said the soldier. "So we can get our hackles up about this and make a big deal, or we can just forget about it and feel bad for a guy who is clearly a loser."
​
​
​​@jordanisjoso
​​@bmakuch

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We live in branded times. These days, vomit art is sponsored by Doritos, Weird Twitter has been appropriated by Denny's, and plastering corporate logos all over yourself is ​the new signifier of cool. So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that this week's biggest outrage has to do with a net artist using Craigslist erotic masseuses to make penis drawings for an upscale hotel chain—all in the name of critiquing how the art world whores itself out to big business.

The brouhaha started on Sunday night, when artist Ryder Ripps was invited to spend a free night at New York City's Ace Hotel as part of its Artists in Residency program. In exchange, Ripps was required to produce a work of art during his stay. Previous participants made oyster shells, gabber CDs, and charcoal drawings. Ryder Ripps made a shitstorm.

Well, to be more specific, Ripps—a 28-year-old artist who the ​New York Times called "the consummate internet cool kid" in a profile earlier this year—decided to outsource his labor in order to make a statement. (Full disclosure: ​I've met and interviewed Ripps two years ago for the Creators ​Project.)

First, he invited a man and woman offering "sensual bodywork sessions" on Craigslist's Casual Encounters section to his hotel room. Then he asked them to draw whatever they wanted, filming everything (with their consent) with a computer web cam. Finally, he paid them $80 each, titled the project Art Whore, and ​posted a recap on his Livejournal.

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The art world exploded. Popular blog Art Fag City declared it ​one of the most offensive projects of 2014—criticizing Ripps for calling the masseuses "sex workers," using them to further his career, and throwing around the term "whore" in reference to his privileged position. Art organization Rhizome called the stunt "ethically un​sound." Gawker bellowed: "Artist's Scummy Escort Exploitation Turns Art World Against Him." And Dazed Digital concluded, "It's the same old story: a white dude co-opting someone else's labor in his struggle to Make A Point."

It didn't help that Ripps—who harbors a predilection towards trolling—initially responded to the criticism like a petulant child, facetiously claiming to be transgender and declaring that the "Ace hotel not paying me to make shit is more of an exploitation." Rhizome's Michael Connors acknowledged the troll, but still said it wasn't interesting even from that viewpoint. Later, when we reached out to him over Skype chat, he retracted a little, writing, "I regret referring to them as sex workers now. I feel this was an overstep on my part."

Still, the "sex workers" label is hardly the reason why Art Whore pissed off so many people. To understand why Ripps got his ass handed to him on a sizzling hotplate, you have to consider Art Whore in context of the larger media conversations surrounding it. Everything from ​Gamergate to ​Jian Ghomeshi, not to mention the ​NFL scandals, sexual assault on college campuses, and even concern-trolling over Nicki Minaj and ​Kim Kardashian's butts have kept us talking about all kinds of misogynistic bullshit. Meanwhile, blockbuster exhibitions like ​Kara Walker's sugar sphinx and the Whitney's Jeff Koons retrospective, as well as ​ongoing protests at the Guggenheim, have been big ticket news in the art world recently. In other words, Art Whore was hardly the first time that the internet outrage machine has circled around themes of sexism, exploitation, privilege, and race.[body_image width='1600' height='1200' path='images/content-images/2014/11/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/14/' filename='consent-is-sexy-in-defense-of-ryder-ripps-controversial-artwhore-456-body-image-1416007218.jpg' id='4103']

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Being sensitive to these kinds of issues is obviously important. But the immediate nature of the internet has caused many of the responses to Art Whore to sound more like kneejerk reactions. In its rush to condemn Art Whore as "icky," Gawker wrote:

"Ripps's sex workers... get no such voice. The artist writes that they 'really enjoyed the experience' on his blog, but ultimately, those words are his, not theirs. We learn their first names, but nothing else about them, and they're given no forum in which to give their drawings context."

This statement willfully ignores—or worse, is ignorant of—a crucial part of Art Whore: a two-hour video recording of Ripps's interactions with the Craigslist masseuses throughout that fateful night.
​​

This video was embedded at the end of Ripps's Livejournal post and shared on YouTube. It's impossible to miss. Yet, Gawker's criticism that we learn "nothing else" about Jay and Brooke suggests that they did. Both participants clearly explain their artistic choices to Ripps—"You know why I did the 16? It's a tarot number," says Brooke at one point—in between candid banter about their day-to-day lives. The video's effect is a humanizing and revealing—if somewhat voyeuristic—glimpse into who these people are beyond their Craigslist usernames.

Ripps says he was careful to make the video because "I knew [vilification] would be a possibility if I didn't document it. But I thought I made it clear that everyone was consenting." He also says that he was surprised by how ready people were to speak for others. (The irony that his detractors have accused him of the exact same thing is not lost here.) "I find this really dangerous," he adds. Near the end of our conversation, Ripps reads us an off-the-record email from Jay that (to us) sounds overwhelmingly supportive.

Jay and Brooke's consent is at the heart of what Art Whore is really about. Just as they appear willing and enthusiastic about participating in the project, Ripps, who heads up a creative agency called OKFocus, eagerly sells his cultural savvy to brands like Nike, Google, Red Bull, and even Kanye West. Consent is another subject that's been dominating our conversations of late—thanks to ​new affirmative consent laws, "yes means yes" is the new "no means no." Art Whore has been criticized by Rhizome for not reminding the viewer of their complicity in this perpetuation of inequality. But I think he does—by forcing us to re-think what "yes" really means. Everyone involved in Art Whore gave their consent, but the glaring imbalance of power and agency remains. This is the most troubling part of Art Whore. But, as a work of art, that's also what makes it so effective. 

Follow Michelle on ​Twitt​er.

Additional reporting by Annette Lamothe-Ramos

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Christian Isaiah Marin (left) is accused of killing and attempting to decapitate Jacob Crockett with a machete 

You'd be forgiven for thinking decapitation is back in fashion this year. Used by everyone from the   ​Islamic State to ​Boko Haram to some ​over-enthusiastic supermarket robbers in Coventry, England, it won't be surprising if a beheading turns up in Nicki Minaj's ​next music video.

Now even Christians are ​getting in on the act. When Isaiah Marin, a devout Christian student in Oklahoma, got pissed off with his 19-year-old goth roommate Jacob Crockett recently, he brought a machete to a card game and attempted to hack his head off.

Marin was reportedly upset about his victim's "un-Christian" interest in witchcraft (though didn't feel the same way, reportedly, toward his own heavy drug use). It sounds ludicrous, until you remember there are thousands of Christian parents out there shitting bricks over Harry Potter. Sure, ​GodHatesGoths.com, with its handy Harry Potter section, is almost definitely a parody, but it's a fact that the boy wizard's books were the most challenged in 21st-century America—more people tried to get them banned from libraries ​than any other text.

(And this isn't confined to the Bible Belt. My housemate at university had parents who took objection to his younger brother's Pokémon collection, buying it off him and putting it on the bonfire. Since he'd outgrown them by then, he was quite happy with the cash... but still.)

Fortunately, most societies have moved past chopping off heads as a way of settling scores. Instead we just bitch and whine on blogs and social media. The machete and the guillotine have been replaced by the downvote button and the passive-aggressive subtweet, or something like that.

But as the War Nerd ​points out, (in the best article on the topic I've ever seen), beheadings have been with us for most of history. They've been an execution method for thousands of years of course, but they can also be an effective propaganda tool—nothing says "I've won" better than carrying your opponent's head on a spike.

What makes recent cases seem different is the weird synergy between ancient propaganda and modern social media. Something remote and medieval that we'd largely forgotten about is suddenly right there on our computer screens. Seeing a beheading on YouTube is like seeing a knight turn up with an iPhone—it's something we just don't expect to see in our modern world.

That impression is more down to our ignorance than anything else. In Europe we've long since packed away our guillotines and nooses (well, for 30-odd years ​at least), and the Americans will probably ​get there eventually. In Saudi Arabia though, witchcraft is still a capital offense, and waving a wand too eagerly could see you strung up in the delightfully nicknamed "​Chop Chop square" for a public execution. The Islamic State may have brought the technique to wider attention, but those jihadists' efforts pale in comparison to ​the routine actions of the Saudi legal system.

That said, murder—whether by states or fanatics—is in a long period of decline. The death penalty is acknowledged by pretty much anyone with a brain to be costly, ineffective, and ​annoyingly prone to killing innocent people. It fails to deter criminals, and makes those states that take part in it look backward and barbaric. Countries have been ​abandoning it steadily for a few decades now. Murder rates have been ​falling worldwide, and violence generally has been ​trailing off for generations.

Of course you wouldn't get that impression from the press. The Daily Mail loves beheadings almost as much as it loves breasts, feigning moral outrage about both while eagerly lapping up page views for articles that blur the lines of what's acceptable to print in a newspaper. Photo editors used to figuring out exactly how much nipple they need to pixellate do pretty much the same with Jihadi murder scenes. The reputation of "Jihadi John" in the UK is almost entirely thanks to media outlets like the Mail ​eagerly building up his legend in pursuit of a compelling character to write about.

And as examples like Isaiah Marin's gothphobia show—and centuries of history before that—gruesome killings aren't the preserve of Muslims. Hell, violence isn't even the preserve of the religious—as barbaric as beheadings look in 1080p on LiveLeak, the end result isn't much different to a drone strike for the victim. In fact, there's really only one common theme when it comes to the causes of violence, and that's secular democracy. Secular democracies are ​less prone to beheadings, murders, and violence of any kind, even if they have large populations of religious people living in them. The more secularism in government spreads, the more peaceful the world gets.

So if there's anything to be drawn from our decreasingly bloody history, it's this: You probably won't lose your head to a crazed Muslim fanatic—or any other kind of fanatic—anytime soon, whatever the papers say, and while we don't all have to become atheists to live in a peaceful world, any move toward making our society more tolerant of different people and cultures is a pretty good thing.

Follow Martin Robbins on ​Twitter

[body_image width='867' height='589' path='images/content-images/2014/11/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/14/' filename='joel-golby-depressed-toddlers-mental-health-body-image-1415982444.jpg' id='3989']We've all been there, mate. Photo by ​Sharyn Morrow ​via

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

You'd have thought that three-year-olds had it fucking easy these days. For a start, they all have iPads. Like: My wee baby cousin has been able to piss all over me at Angry Birds since about 2010, and it's not like I'm even an Angry Birds amateur. I am good at it. I play it on the bus. 

"Joelistan," he says (he calls me Joelistan, and nobody in the family has worked out why). "Joelistan, you do have Angry Birds, don't you?" And I say: "Yes, I have it on my phone." And he says: "Then why are you so bad at it?" So not only am I getting beaten at Angry Birds by what now is a seven-year-old boy; I'm also getting bantered into oblivion by him along the way. I don't buy that kid Lego anymore. Fuck him. Fuck that kid.

But the point is that when I was a kid, legitimately one of my favorite toys was an army man that I wrapped a sort of paltry, flimsy parachute around and then dropped down the stairs. He floated for a bit, then three seconds later hit the floor. Then I went downstairs and untangled him and did it again. The 90s were awful and we should not bring them back.

So ​reading today that children as young as three can be depressed, I think back to that stupid little army guy and go: Well, yeah, that makes sense. And then I look at a current three-year-old—one who is better at operating Skype than I am—and I think: Hold up, that little shit is living in the future and doesn't even know it.

[body_image width='1280' height='1566' path='images/content-images/2014/11/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/14/' filename='joel-golby-depressed-toddlers-mental-health-body-image-1415982490.jpg' id='3990']You can lose a lot of time on the "sad toddlers" tag on Flickr. Photo by Allie ​via​

But then kids have a lot of pressures these days. They have to eat way more quinoa than I did when I was three. Even from nursery school they are put on a sort of educational factory line, with every B- on their handwriting homework another supposed nail in the coffin of their future career. Plus, we live in way more germaphobic times. How can you be happy if your mom won't even let you poke a dead rat with a stick? If you find a dead rat, you should be able to poke it with a stick. That is the rules.

But we're getting into that murky black-and-white, cause-and-effect, dead-rat-and-stick argument that muddies a lot of the conversation about depression. Instead, let's look at this ​new​ study by Washington University in St. Louis, which has found that the physical anatomy of children's brains can offer clues as to how the illness might develop in later life.

According to ​BU​PA, one in ten children will develop depression before the age of 18—sometimes they'll recover in less than three months, and sometimes they won't. In the US, it's estimated that 2.1 percent of children between the ages of three and 17 suffer from the illness in one way or another, and in the UK the adult depression stats currently ​hover ​around the 19 percent mark. That's a lot of people, young and old, who really can't face getting out of bed today.

But researchers, led by Dr. Andrew Belden, looking into preschool-aged children found that it's the part of the brain called the right anterior insula that can reliably predict the future risks of the illness. And they looked into how depression and guilt stayed with children as they aged, especially if they displayed signs of either at an early age.

"A child with pathological guilt can walk into a room and see a broken lamp, for example, and even if the child didn't break it, he or she will start apologising," said Belden. This is very useful information for me, because I am very clumsy and have broken more than one lamp at a party in my lifetime, and now I know that if there's a sad kid about then I've got a readymade fall guy.

More importantly, it's a useful study for those looking to garner a deeper understanding of an illness that affects so many people every day. After analyzing 129 children between the ages of three and six—47 of whom had been diagnosed with depression, and 82 who hadn't—researchers found two common strands among children who remained depressed into early adolescence: a noticeably smaller right anterior insula and, in 55 percent of cases, some deep and pathological guilt about all those lamps they keep breaking.

Belden reckons this research takes him closer to answering the "million-dollar question" about depression: Does a smaller insula predict a lifetime of depression and guilt, or does harboring depression and guilt from a young age squash and contort that little nestle of brain cells? Which is a very good question that nobody can really answer quite yet.

But what does all this mean for you, if you're already a fully grown depressed person? TIME MACHINE BACK TO WHEN YOU WERE A KID, DUDE. Or, slightly more realistically, keep eating cereal for dinner and just doing you and know that they've made a mental health breakthrough that connects the physical hardware of the brain to an illness affecting it. 

Follow Joel Golby on ​Twitter

Photos by Sam Hiscox

Food plays an important role at Guantánamo Bay. Over the years, detainees have undergone a series of hunger strikes, which the authorities tackle by force-feeding the detainees using tubes and using the liquid nutrient Ensure. But food also exists in the memory, as a potent reminder of a life before Gitmo. Through the detainee's lawyers, we found out what foods some inmates miss the most.

Not everything they crave is imbued with the poetry of their homeland—for example, more than one detainee has a big thing for  jalapeño Pringles. Shaker Aamer is more of a Snickers man, though he's also pretty big on Mountain Dew and cookies. He also loves English biscuits and Indian sweets, which is mad because pretty much no-one likes Indian sweets.

Ahmed Rabbani, a Pakistani citizen currently on hunger strike, went into great detail about the dish he missed the most, one that he used to make for weddings and special occasions. It seemed from his description to have endless layers of stuff: meat, rice, yogurt, tomatoes, sauce. It was a Tower of Babel made of food, a multi-story parking garage starring rice.

I couldn't figure out what it was, so I took the description to Tayyab's, the famed Punjabi restaurant in Whitechapel, East London. Before I'd finished my description I was told it was biryani, made the Sindhi way. They agreed to let me come back with a photographer to see the dish being made by Wasim Tayyab, who runs the restaurant with his two brothers, Saleem and Aleem.

Lamb is the meaty heart of Tayyab's biryani, cooked in a karahi, a deep circular cooking pot that is traditionally sat over coals. The dish is most commonly associated with Pakistan's Sindh province, and while Tayyab's is known for Punjabi food and all its cooks are Punjabi, biryani became a special dish cooked every Friday for lunch and dinner.

To go with the lamb: coriander, potatoes, orange and grapefruit, almonds, sultanas, saffron, ghee, and pre-soaked rice. Tayyab's, Wasim told me, was founded by his father Mohammed in "1972, officially, but it was way before that. There was a lot of rag trade in the area, so my father opened up a caff for home-cooked food."

For Mohammed Tayyab, making Friday's biryani was a military operation. Together with his wife, who ran the restaurant with him, he'd put the dish together with surgical precision. If you moved any of his utensils, you'd be in trouble.

Here's Wasim ladling a load of ghee into a saucepan for some onions. Wasim and his siblings grew up above the restaurant, which has expanded on the same site over the years. "We were born and brought up in the area. This kitchen was our playground," he says. Wasim was happily sucked into the family business and his father, now 80 years old, still comes every Friday.

In its early years, Tayyab's opened for breakfast at 7 AM, serving tea and toast to the occupants of the Salvation Army halfway house next door. Once breakfast was done, the tablecloths came out and the lamb chops, mixed grills, and curries Tayyab's is now famous for would be served for lunch.

Once the rice has been cooked and strained, the onions are put on a high heat with the ghee. 

When the rice and the lamb are cooked, it's time to start layering the dish. The base is yogurt.

Followed by tomato, coriander, ginger, and red peppers.

Then the meat, then the yogurt again, then the tomato, coriander, ginger, and more red peppers.

This is followed by the introduction of the twist to the Tayyab's biryani, which is the use of orange and grapefruit. 

Wasim squeezes both orange and grapefruit into the dish as it is being layered.

Here they are, those caramelized, almost-burnt onions, ready to go on the top of the dish once the first layer of rice has been introduced.

The process of layering is then repeated until the ingredients fill most of a large pot.

At the end, saffron is poured over the top.

A proud cook (Tayyab's doesn't call its cooks "chefs" because the restaurant does home cooking, no airs or graces needed) and his creation. The layers are now ready to go on the heat.

The pot is covered and heated for 20 minutes so the layers melt into one another and get hot.

To dish up a biryani you have to scoop it out using something that has a proper edge. This is to ensure that you get every layer of the dish.

See what I mean?

Many people make their biryani for weddings and other special occasions. It's a dish a bit like a Sunday roast, Wasim says, not one to be eaten all the time. And here it is, ready to eat, chili on the side (don't eat the chilli, I ate the chilli and it fucked me up).

Follow Oscar Rickett on Twitter here. More of Sam Hiscox's photography can be found here.

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Photo from ​A Big Night Out with... Britain's Biggest Lads? by Kieran Cudlip

This post​ originally appeared in VICE UK

You should know, in the interests of full disclosure, that I am an awful nerd. An awful, appalling nerd. I once went to the gym and struggled to lift the bar that you put the weights on. When there is a pub quiz question about Star Wars, my teammates turn in unison to me. That's how much of an awful nerd I am: I am the worst one out of a group of people who willingly spend their Tuesday at a pub quiz.

This means that, ostensibly, I am not a lad. I have never, for example, worn a vest. Even for one second. I don't have any tribal tattoos embedded deep and black in my pecs like some sort of inky skin bra. I have never been to Zante. I have never sincerely asked someone to smell my fingers. I have never got my asscheeks out for a nightclub photo opportunity, and if I did get mine out, it would be pale and lightly haired—like an omelette dropped in a barbershop, just as god intended—and not tanned and waxed. None of my friends have a nickname for me that is either my first name with an "-o" affixed to it—Joelo, Joelio—or a truncated version of my surname—Golbs, Golbinho. I am not a lad.

Which is good, for me, because lads are getting a bad rap at the moment. There are the lads of the London School of Economics, ​whose rugby club was disbanded and all of them given banter workshops after distributing incredibly, incredibly sexist literature—like, "hold the bridge of your nose and just mutter 'fucking hell' about it" literature—at a fresher's event in September. There was ​Magaluf Girl and the lad blowjob marathons in Spain. And then there is ​Dapper Laughs—the LADfather, the character comedian who forgot to be either a character or a comedian, the nearest thing date rapists have to a Pope—who this week swapped his River Island T-shirts for a muted turtleneck to ​renounce his own name on Newsnight. Rest in peaceLAD.

The thread running through all of these cases, cases in which lads have been punished for their lad antics, is simple misogyny. It's probably important to make a quick note here: I am not pro-misogyny. I do not spend my evenings taking up residence on a balcony and shouting moistness assessments of various passing women through a megaphone. This feels like a clarification worth making. I'm not about to say, "Actually, street harassment is alright in my book." I'm not like: "What exactly is wrong with howling at women out of a van and then driving off laughing? If I've got the van and you've got the ass to shout at, why the hell not?" No. This is not what I'm saying or about to say.

But I do think it's time to assess what we truly mean when we use the catch-all term lad.

In recent months the concept of the lad has been repainted, airbrushed into some sort of monstrous caricature: as though every dude in his early twenties is on some sort of constant arm-swinging fingering campaign

It might just be a case of linguistics, but in recent months the concept of the lad has been repainted, airbrushed into some sort of monstrous caricature: as though every dude in his early twenties is on some sort of constant arm-swinging fingering campaign; every guy who waxes his eyebrows has a Rohypnol nestled in his wallet next to a tired old chocolate-flavored condom; that every single man with those rosary bead necklaces from Topman says the word "minge" at least twice per minute and has a delicate collage of Nuts centerfolds fanned out in a vista above his bed.

I remember lads the first time round, because lads aren't new. Depending on who you ask, lads were either invented in the 90s, when Liam Gallagher did a lager piss on one of his parkas and a lad came out, or Scotland. For some reason, when the topic of lad etymology comes about, there is always a Scottish dude sat in the corner—even if he wasn't there before, but there's a clap of thunder and somehow he's present, in a LADS ON TOUR ZANTE '08 vest, going, "Ach, we've been calling boys 'laddie' for longer than anyone in England has had pubes." If you want lads so much, Scotland, fine: You invented lads.

But the point is that lads are nothing new. If I'm remembering the 90s correctly, everyone walked around in a bucket hat and that grey Euro '96 England strip, and said "Ulrika Jonsson" and "Gazza!" a lot, had a copy of Loaded about their person at all times, and a tattoo of some barbed wire around their arm, and they were constantly on ecstasy. I mean, I was a kid, but I'm pretty sure that's how it went.

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Photo by Kieran Cudlip. It's of a guy with his own face tattooed onto his ass 

Lads sort of went quiet in the early noughties, compared to now, when they are roaring. They rumbled back to life in the past couple years at universities and colleges, where UniLAD and shit banter reigns supreme. And there is a lot to be said for the argument that supposedly smart, savvy 18-year-olds should know better than to turn into howling, awful sexists when presented with a £1-a-pint bar at a Fresher's Week.

But there's another side to university lad culture, and it is pretty simple: when you're away from home for the first time and landed in the company of strangers, the quickest way to make friends is by sinking into a sort of cultural shorthand, a quick way of saying, "It's alright, chap, I'm sound as fuck mate." It's like how sad dads at barbecues always end up talking in some vague way about football: blokes are extremely crap at making friends, and the base pool of topics they can feasibly talk to a stranger about are extremely small, so if you can get people on side by showing them a video on your phone of you puking in a pint glass, then you take what you can get. I'm not saying the ladification of university campuses is a good thing, but I am saying I kind of understand how it has happened. It's a clique that is extremely easy to join. The entry bar is, "Do you like describing things as being 'sound'? Sound."

§

A few months ago I went to the pub in a daggy-ass jumper and a satchel, looking for all the world like I actually enjoyed reading poetry. I sat down and was immediately embraced by a group of nearby lads. They tacked me onto their rounds, talked to me about football and then moved it carefully onto their territory to slowly explain to me the concept of rugby; they admitted they felt bad flirting with other girls and enjoyed spending the weekends with their girlfriends; they told me touring Europe with their uni team was one of the best experiences they'd ever had. We talked about crisp flavors for a bit. We spoke in a way two alien social groups do when there's no aggression or friction, just a quiet seeking of some common ground, some vague lingua franca with which to communicate. At the end of the night I left with a promise to look them up on Facebook and an invite to a game at Twickenham. I didn't go because: rugby. But the point still stands.

Does a group of six lads being nice to a nerd once suddenly excuse years of sloping, high-piled misogyny? No. Lads have always been alien to me because I'm not very good at lifting large objects above my head and I can't call someone "chap" without sounding like I'm taking the piss. But the incident reminded me of similar ones in my school days, when I was a fat kid who looked sort of like a miserable shaved teddybear, and the divide I felt with the groups of hard boys who had Adidas trackies and knew how to smoke and had already, at the tender age of 13, achieved tops.

They are all in town, still, doing their decorating jobs or working as mid-level call centre types, or they work in Burtons almost exclusively so they can use the staff discount in Burtons, and they spend their weekends in Barracuda bars talking about the intricacies of Chris Smalling's defensive game, and they go out and they get pissed at night, and they hold each others' arms so they don't fall over in the gutter, and they break up fights and they get chips on the way home, and then they go for a roast with their family the next day in a shirt buttoned all the way up to the collar, and they are lads. They were lads before Dapper and they will be lads after Dapper. They transcend him and they birthed him.

The oft-cited danger in every Dapper Laughs being allowed to push a laddish agenda on TV still is that his antics will be parroted and copied by a generation of lads who think that street harassment is hilarious. It's clear that ITV responded to that by condemning him and yanking him from the air, and I dig that it's hard for me to fully process that danger because nobody has ever yelled "HE KNOWS" at me as I rocked down to the shop for a Twix. 

But in assuming that, you're also assuming that anyone who identifies as a lad or fits the mould of what it is to be one is utterly incapable of their own free will and thought. The subtext is: lads are stupid, and cannot be trusted with the entertainment they enjoy. And in using the term "lad" as a shorthand for sexism—even, at times, as a synonym for "rapist"—we're sort of ignoring the fact being one doesn't necessarily make you the other. It's true too that sexism is absolutely everywhere, at every single moment of every second of every day. It's not just dickheads who drink vodka-soda-lime on a night out who are cultivating it.

Personally, I think Dapper Laughs could have been forged anew as a force for good under the strict eye of ITV PR—sort of like an educational video for would-be rapists, disguised as entertainment. Instead, and understandably, he had to die. But so should the catch-all pejorative "lad."

Think of it like this: English is a rich, diverse, beautiful language, constantly evolving. And you can use it to call people a prick with. Or a shitheel. Fuckgobble. Dickslice. Turdsinker. Try it: "That rugby team are a bunch of handfuckers." Or: "Yeah, good walk home. A group of men shouted at me but I just figure they're all wound up from forgetting the order of numbers you have to type to make '8008135' show up on a calculator." 

We're losing sight of the fact that, if you repeat Dapper Laughs catchphrases in the street, you're not a lad, you're just a prick. So let pricks be pricks. Let lads be lads.

Follow Joel Golby on ​Twitter

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There are two types of people in this world: people who think that Pikachu is an awesome little creature, and people who would like to punch Pikachu over and over again. Super Smash Bros. is the only game in the world that caters to both of those broad demographics. (There is a possible third demographic: people who don't give a shit about Pikachu, but we'll ignore that for the sake of brevity.)

Smash Bros. is Mario Kart with punching, basically. It's easy to get into, colorful, chaotic, funny and most enjoyable when played against other actual human beings. It is also a giant Nintendo nerdgasm, starring 49 Nintendo characters from the obvious (Mario) to the ragingly obscure (Shulk from Xenoblade Chronicles) fighting across stages bristling with little Nintendo jokes and visual references that submerge anybody who grew up with a NES, SNES or N64 in waves of smug nostalgia. This is largely why people love it so much. Well, that and ​the "Falcon Punch."

For the next several months, as new iterations take over both the 3DS and Wii U, Super Smash Bros. is likely to become the sole reason for your social life shifting from a bar stool to a sofa. Here's how not to embarrass yourself in the process.

The first trailer for Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS

Know the Basics

In Smash Bros., the aim isn't to beat your opponents up until they collapse—it's to knock them off the stage. The more damage they've taken, the more readily they will fly off the edge of the screen when you smack 'em. This is shown as a percentage counter. Ridiculously, it goes up to 999 percent damage, but all you really need to know is the bigger the number, the more vulnerable you are. (You also punch harder when you've got a lot of damage on you, though, which is worth keeping in mind.)

So, it's not just about having a character that can hit hard; it's about having one that can recover when they're sent flying. Characters like Kirby can basically fly, which is massively unfair, but helpful for beginners.

The finishing moves are called Smash Attacks. If you master nothing else in Smash Bros., learn how to pull these off (you have to press the attack button and flick the control stick at the same time). Even if you never learn the intricacies of combos or "​teching," or any of the other jargon that super-serious Smash Bros. players use, you can at least find characters with high damage and have a good shot at knocking them the fuck out.

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Don't Worry Too Much About Picking a Character

See, the cool thing about Smash Bros. is that you can have fun with pretty much any character. That said, some are more technical than others. More importantly, some are funnier than others.

The most amusing character in the new Wii U and 3DS versions of Smash Bros., for my money, is the Villager—possibly the most benign video game character in existence. In his native game, Animal Crossing, all the Villager does is wander around watering flowers and collecting shells. In Smash Bros., he has a range of amazingly troll-y moves, like aggressive weed-pulling, burying opponents with a shovel, and catching things that are thrown at him before stuffing them into his pockets. He also has a three-stage move where he plants a seedling, waters it, and then chops down the resulting tree. If you manage to hit someone with that, it's probably the funniest thing in the game.

Villager's good for beginners, too, because he can use balloons to float back toward the stage after being knocked back. If you're not great at the game, it's also a good idea to use characters with projectiles, like Link and  ​Toon Link (endearingly effeminate/adorable stars of the Zelda series). That way you can hide at the side of the screen like a coward. If you want someone who just hits very hard, go for Punch-Out!!'s Little Mac, a diminutive boxer with comically oversized gloves. Mario is a safe but boring choice, too. It might be an idea to stay away from the super heavy guys—they're pretty reliant on timing, and they don't recover well after being hit.

Basically, though, don't worry too much about it. Every character can win, and only a few are genuinely difficult to use. There's an element of chaos to Smash Bros. that means character choice is only part of the battle.

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Be a Dirty KO-Stealer

KO-stealing is a wonderfully petulant expression for when one player spends ages beating up another, and then a third player comes in to score the last hit before they're sent flying off-screen—thus reaping the reward for the first player's effort. 

This is an excellent tactic if you are not particularly good at Smash Bros., or simply love to piss your friends off. During four-to-eight-player battles—i.e., the ones you're likely to be playing at friends' houses—try staying out of the fray and then leaping in to pick off the weak after someone else has done the hard work. Your friends will hate you, but then you can cover yourself in the glory of victory, and new friends will be jostling to touch you.

Upload Some Celebrity Miis to Beat Up

On both 3DS and Wii U, Smash Bros. lets you upload Miis—custom Nintendo characters—and fight with them. So, obviously, what you should do is go to ​this site, find some people / characters you really hate and scan the QR codes so that you can continually electrocute them with Pikachu's thunderbolt. I enjoyed beating up all of the James Bonds in sequence.

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Take Full Advantage of the Screenshot Mode

At any point during a Smash match you can pause, zoom around, and take screenshots that make it look like Nintendo characters are doing naughty things to each other. Or, if you're not 12 years old, you can content yourself with shots like these:

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Follow Keza MacDonald on Tw​itter

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This week, VICE premiered ​"This Charming ​Man," a meta music video from James Franco's band, Daddy, which is based off of a poem cycle inspired by the Smiths. Here are a few words about the project from James, as well as a few original poems.

I was at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, one of the best—if not the best—writing programs in the county. It's a low residency program: Teachers and students go twice a year for ten days for intense lectures and workshops, and then they spend the rest of the semester corresponding through email and snail mail.

Because there is a short campus time commitment, the program can attract the best writers from around the country to teach without interrupting their lives, work, or other teaching commitments. I had Tony Hoagland, James Longenbach, Rick Barot, Alan Williamson, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and Alan Shapiro as poetry teachers, in that order. Ellen Voigt was particularly helpful with the series of poems inspired by the Smiths.

I had been writing poems inspired by filmmaking—poems that used filmmaking as a metaphor for life and other things. I wanted to write a series of poems that used music in the same way, even though music is intrinsically closer to poetry than film. The Smiths were the perfect point of inspiration, because they speak of the darkness of youth and love.

I used their hits as leaping points for tone, style, character, and rhythm, but made the subjects of my poem all my own. The Smiths pointed the way to a poem series about high school students (loosely inspired by people I knew in the mid 90s when I was in high school in Palo Alto, California).

Once the poems were written, my art school buddy Tim O'Keefe put them to music for our band, Daddy. Tim met Andy Rourke, formerly of the actual Smiths, and he played on the album. The great Monika Heideman, formerly of the band Xylos, sang on it with us too.

Poems on a page need to carry music within them because they are read, not heard. But when they're put to music, a new level of significance is added. That is why pop songs can get away with cheesy lyrics and still be profound. I recently watched Annie Hall for the hundredth time and noticed a scene where Woody rolls his eyes as Shelly Duval recites Bob Dylan lyrics with dreamy admiration: "And she aches just like a woman/And she wakes just like a woman/Yeah but she breaks just like a little girl."

It's so easy to make song lyrics seems shallow, but that's because half of the meaning is in the music—in how they are sung. I remember reading Great Jones Street in a seminar at Columbia. It's a Don DeLillo novel that uses a Dylan-esque character and quotes some of his lyrics. People in class quickly ripped the songs apart. But that's like criticizing a movie based on a shot list—a movie isn't a movie until it is shot and edited and a song isn't a song until its sung.

Later, my mother's teenage students directed short films based on these poems. Tim and I used their short films to make David Lynchian music videos for all the songs. The last step was showing these videos at Palo Alto High School with the paintings featured in the videos. Everything came full circle. 

"There Is a Light That Never Goes Out"

I waited in the shadow of my stupid house.
​ The Mustang rolled up in the low black water,
​ Growling softly, then it stopped and purred.
​ Dark green paint like a deep flavor,
​ Like hard, sour-apple candy catching in my throat.

​A hint of his blond swoop, the red button of his cigarette.
​ ​Smoke out the window. Sterling:
​ ​His name like a sword reflecting light in a dark room.
​ ​I'm the sword swallower.
​ ​And the grass licked my shoes.

"Please, Please, Please"

Now the picture had him in it
​ Up the red path
​ To my house
​ In his coal tux
​ Slicked like a wet cat.
​ I did my best in a lime-green dress.

All his gang from school:
​ Inside they each had some from his flask;
​ And Sterling smiled a toothy smile, yellow and sharp.

​And then we danced.
​ Not to one song, but ten songs.
​ It was the scene where the audience came over to my side,
​ Because I got what I wanted.

I was in love with a cliché.

Boys his age have bodies like knives.
​ I was holding one by the blade.

"Girlfriend in a Coma"

Megan McKenna had a skinhead boyfriend,
​ He crashed his car into a pole.
​ The paramedics lifted her out of the crumpled car,
​ And laid her on the cement. They cut away her jeans.

​Sterling and I fought all the time,
​ Driving around in his rotten green Mustang.
​ I was the sweetest sixteen,
​ And when we hit the other car
​ Darkness met me at the windshield.

My father kept Sterling from the room.
​ I was plastered and sutured and puffed up.

When I go to heaven,
​ I'll think of Sterling.
​ I'll think that I loved him.
​ I'll think that he was human.
​ That he was a poor little brain in a dangerous body.

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I recently hired an international team of virtual dating assistants to impersonate me on Tinder and OK Cupid for a month. They wrote my bio, filtered through my matches, and sent messages on my behalf, all in the hope of getting me laid.

Scott Valdez, 30, the CEO of VirtualDatingAssistants.com, charges anywhere from $380 to $1,320 a month for this service, depending on which package and how many "guaranteed dates" his clients buy. And although it might seem farfetched (or just weird) that someone would hire an assistant to help them send girls winky faces on Tinder, Valdez's company is meeting a very real, albeit very niche, market demand. ViDa currently operates on every major dating site, has roughly a hundred clients, and, according to Valdez, takes in close to six figures a month.

Using a service like this raises obvious transparency and '​Multiplicity'-esque ethical concerns, but while Valdez admits that he operates "in a little bit of an ethical gray area," he believes "overall our service does a lot more good than it does bad."

After signing up with ViDa, the first step in the process was to let my ghost writers get to know me, which was accomplished by an hourlong phone interview. After that they asked me to send in a bunch of pictures (following the advice outlined in a 15-page PDF explaining the do's and don'ts of online profile pictures). They then gave me a spreadsheet containing a wide-range of girls on OK Cupid, and I was instructed to mark "yes" or "no" next to each account so they could better understand my taste in women. I was soon given a draft of my profile to approve.

My experiment underway, I called up Valdez to ask him about his enterprise.

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Scott Valdez

VICE: How did you come up with the idea to start a company that outsources online dating?
​ ​Scott Valdez: It happened naturally. I graduated from college in 2006 and took a job with a startup company working 40 to 50 hours a week. But as the company, and my responsibilities there, grew, I found myself working closer to 70 hours a week. So although I was making good money I didn't have any time left for my personal online dating endeavors.

I had an assistant at work, but I obviously couldn't ask her to online date for me, so I had an idea that I could get another assistant with a writing background who could do this for me. I put an ad on Craigslist and ended up hiring a creative writing grad with a little bit of online dating experience to be my virtual dating assistant. I showed him the ropes and he took over my accounts and was able to produce really good results for me.

And it sort of just snowballed from there?
​ I told a few friends how well it was working and they all started to ask if they could get my guy working for them. That's when I realized there are plenty of successful busy guys outs there who would prefer to focus on their careers and delegate this part of their life. I quit my job and started the company in June 2009.

What are your typical clients like?
​ Our typical clients are a mix of guys who are simply too busy to online date, and others who are having trouble getting results and just say, "This isn't working for me, you guys are professionals—show me how it's done."

How many customers do you have, and how much are they paying? I saw on your site that if you pay more per month you get more "guaranteed dates."
​ We have around 100 clients and we charge them anywhere between a few hundred dollars up to a little over a thousand a month. We do guaranteed dates, but our clients don't seem to care much about that because we usually over deliver on our guarantees—so we are going to move away from that model. Our average customer pays about $550 a month and will go on one or two dates a week. Generally speaking for every ten hours we put into an account we produce at least one or two in-person dates with matches that are pre-approved by the client.

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The Tinder profile you set up on my behalf had pictures with bizarre captions like "your dad will never approve," and "what are you waiting for, swipe right." What's the reasoning behind that?
​ We do that pretty often. Not for every client, but pretty often. The reason is because when we split-tested that method a few months ago, we got over double the match rate for our clients with captions on their pictures. I'm a stat freak, so that decision was based highly on testing, but it also adds an element of personality and humor to the photos that makes you stand out. It doesn't seem like it's overly try-hard, although it's obviously a little try-hard. The whole "your dad will never approve" was just a joke. It was a humorous reference to you being a bad boy, because women like bad boys.

At one point you guys started flirting with what turned out to be a sexbot trying to lure me into an expensive webcam session. It felt like my sexuality had been commercialized so many times that two different companies were actually just sexting each other and my pathetic little human penis had been completely left out. How often does that happen?
​ That's a funny angle. I've never thought about it that way. But that's a complete bot, and we actually have real people on our side.

That type of stuff used to happen on the classic dating sites, but they've gotten really good at cracking down on scammers and spammers. Now it just seems to happen on Tinder. I think that's because their service has exploded in popularity but they are still not making any money off it. It's just this huge cash-burning machine and they just don't have the moderators on staff to take that stuff off there. In comparison, OK Cupid has a thousand moderators on staff, and Tinder is already bigger than them, but with no revenue.

The women I talked to said they were originally attracted to my profile because it seemed clever and funny compared to other guys who just send dick pics. If you had a client who wanted you to send dick pics on his behalf, would you?
​ We probably wouldn't do that. It's just really not what we do. I have no problem with that kind of thing, but it's not going to work very well unless you're a really attractive dude going after girls who are less attractive than you. I have friends who have tried and I know they get very limited results. It's not really a strategy I recommend.

If a client was really looking at that I would be like "Listen dude, just let us get you on a lot of dates, and let the seduction happen on the dates. Because if your goal is just to get notches on your belt then you're going to get a lot more this way rather than sending creepy dick pics on these sites."

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​One of the phone numbers I finally received belonged to Krystal, a 22-year-old barista who I called and explained the service to. She said, "Matt from Tinder was very persistent and annoying. He just wouldn't stop. I would feel fooled and cheated if I met someone this way. That's why it's dangerous to meet people in real life from the Internet and I don't do it." What do you make of that?
​ I think a lot of time we are persistent as hell because that's how you get girls numbers on Tinder. Over 30 percent of numbers we get are from girls who at some point in the conversation stopped responding to our messages. So when they stop responding we do keep sending messages.

The style you saw on Tinder is a little more aggressive. Our style on classic dating sites is completely different. I mean you saw what your Tinder profile was—it's for a hook up app, and it requires game. We actually have some really good writers who we don't let use Tinder because they don't have game. On Tinder you have to game kind of hard and be a little bit aggressive. You just say shit that's over the top—that's what works on Tinder.

About what she said, well... she gave you her phone number so obviously she liked you online.

Yeah, but do you think using this service is dishonest?
​ Obviously I don't really think so. I understand the arguments against it. I think that online dating is a very superficial and mechanical screening process. What we do is help clients show an authentic and most attractive version of themselves. We really do work hard to represent them as accurately as possible.

We really try to get to know them and write a profile that's a good fit and ask them to give us feedback. As a business and from the inside we feel like we are doing a great job of representing people in an authentic way, and that's also the feedback we get from our clients.

I understand why on the outside the service might look deceptive, but we really do work hard to represent our clients as accurately as another person could. I also understand we are in a little bit of an ethical gray area but I think overall our service does a lot more good than it does bad.

Before the whole process got underway I had an hour-long interview with my "online wing woman" so that your company could get to know me. I spoke with her about how I don't drink alcohol. My profiles reflected this, but in chat I saw my standard opening line was asking girls to go "halfsies on a bottle of Cristal." What gives?
​ Yeah, the thing is a lot of time those openers aren't really supposed to be serious. The opener I created which that one was built off was "Why don't we go halfsies on a bottle of Jack and create a bastard child before next weekend?" It's a little too racy for some of our clients so we toned it down a bit, but I've sent that message to a lot of girls and I've gotten responses, met a lot of them, hooked up with some of them, and we've never actually gone halfsies on a bottle of Jack. I think the writer probably knew that about you but it didn't seem like a big deal because it's not relevant and the opener was just supposed to be a joke anyway.

Do you classify yourself a pick-up artist?
​ No! I'm not a pick up artist at all. We don't use a lot of what's taught in the pick-up industry. Our clients aren't pick-up artists who are trying to neg girls ("neg" means to a give backhanded compliment meant to lower a girls social value). Our clients would hate that stuff. We're virtual dating assistants.

Eventually my OK Cupid profile was "ghosted," meaning that other profiles could not see me, effectively banning me from the site. Is what your company doing against the rules of the site and how often do you run into issues with sites cracking down on your company's actions?
​ The sites occasionally upgrade their security systems to crack down on accounts with suspicious user activity. Since we have several dating experts from our team working on each account from different locations, we have naturally had some accounts flagged in the past. 

As far as it being against OK Cupid's rules, we basically operate in a gray area. Their Terms of Service states that third party services aren't allowed to open accounts on their site. But we tip-toe around that by having our clients open the account. We just manage it for them.

We have to game the system because obviously they don't want us to do this, but they can't stop us. And this is the first time they seem to be fighting us directly.

For the people who actually start a relationship through you guys, do they ever admit they used your service?
Some clients will ask us, "When should we tell him or her?" Because the other party would never find out unless you told them. We advise our clients to take it to your grave or wait until you know she loves you. 

Follow Matt Saincome on ​Twitter