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Photo via ​Wikimedia Commons

Love. Angel. Music. Baby. isn't exactly one of the greatest albums of all time. When the record came out, it received a mixed bag of reviews. The multiple moments of cultural appropriation surrounding the music and press campaign upset pretty much everyone. Today, we probably view the album even more harshly. I mean, I bet you probably hate Gwen Stefani—and why not, she's given you a million reasons to despise her. But, for girls and gay boys my age who heard "Hollaback Girl" for the first time when we were in middle or high school, Love. Angel. Music. Baby. was massive. It served as an important intersection between feminism, pop, rap, and Juicy Couture tracksuit-style capitalism and should be seen as a significant record. Even ten years later, the album continues to fulfill my desire for new wave nostalgia, pop hits, and pure, irresistible camp. I love this record, and I don't care what you say.

Gwen Stefani released this, her first solo album, ten years ago. I still remember holding the CD in my hands on the day it came out in 2004. Looking at its warped David LaChapelle-ian cover, I knew this was the work of a pop singer, not the plastic pop punk No Doubt lead singer I had grown up idolizing, but an honest-to-goodness pop singer. What I didn't know was how often I would revisit the record over the past decade, its sickly sweet dance songs growing more palatable with each listen until I fully understood Stefani's smart—and admittedly problematic—retro engineering. 

Stefani recorded the album during No Doubt's early-2000s hiatus. Repeated listens of Club Nouveau's 1986 song "Why You Treat Me So Bad" inspired​ her to create a record built around 80s dance music, but her finished album touches on a host of different genres—perhaps too many—from disco to new wave.

Although Stefani enlisted an impressive arrangement of contributors—Slim Thug, Andre 3000, and Linda Perry—she really​ wanted to craft a "silly dance record." But the album's first single, "What You Waiting For?" is anything but silly. Perry reportedly w​renched the song out of Stefani during painful writing sessions. On the song, she wrestles with herself regarding her ability to achieve and maintain success in music, life, and womanhood. "Naturally I'm worried if I do it alone," she sings. "Who really cares 'cause it's your life."

With references to the fact that her "moment will run out 'cause of [her] sex chromosome," and misogynist utterances a la "take a chance you stupid whore," Stefani stares the industry she's up against straight in the eyes and refuses to back down. Where is this track from Cher? From Britney Spears? After "What You Waiting For?" we didn't hear a 30-something pop star's balanced, feminist call-out until Beyonce's self-titled 2013 record—and even then Beyonce's laundry list of problems spans a whole album, not just one blow-out track.

Unlike Beyonce, Stefani isn't assured enough to make her "hot bitch" presence the album's core. With a few exceptions, like "Hollaback Girl," Stefani spends the rest of the album inhabiting the rote role of the lowly wide-eyed dreamer who can only imagine success. She sings a cover of Louchie Lou & Michie One's 1993 song "Ric​h Girl," which in itself is a re-working of "If I Were a Rich Man" from the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Ten years later, I still feel awkward hearing the lyrics come out of a wealthy white star's mouth, even though the song is a cover. 

Today's pop stars know they're hot shit, and their fans despise stars pretending to be underdogs. Listeners want female pop performers who own their status: fancy Iggy Azalea, boss-ass bitch Nicki Minaj, and flawless Beyonce. In 2014, pop stars never yearn for designer clothes—they're already wearing them. When she released Love. Angel. Music. Baby., Stefani was literally making designer clothes for her label, L.A.M.B., a.k.a. Love. Angel. Music. Baby. Stefani name-drops her brand frequently on the album, and several critics latched onto this in their reviews to critique the record's validity. David Bro​wne at Entertainment Weekly compared it to "one of those au courant retail magazines that resembles a catalog more than an old-fashioned collection of, say, articles." And Nick Sylve​ster at Pitchfork wrote, "Gwen Stefani should stick to making bum flaps."

These critics fail to realize that Stefani littering her album with "make me rich!" references aligns her music with gluttonous 80s reference points a la the Flying Lizards' "Money" or Robert Hazard's laughable "Escalator of Life." Take, for example, Stefani's "Luxurious," a deeply gaudy ode to Egyptian cotton, first-class flights, and champagne kisses. At one point, the singer objectifies her "mister" by referring to him as both a treasure chest and a limousine. During the refrain, she sings, "cha-ching, cha-ching." The song sounds bizarre because of the way Stefani lays down our extremely basic desires, and the track becomes almost comical thanks to the corny clutter of glittering synths and wind chimes. It makes "Material Girl" sound like Madonna was asking her boyfriend for a date to McDonalds—and this is where Stefani really shows what Love. Angel. Music. Baby. is about: pushing retro references to the extreme.

Stefani's horny sex ballad "Crash" sounds like what you'd get if you put Nu Shooz's anxious "I Can't Wait" and Sylvester's "Do You Wanna Funk" into a blender complete with, you guessed it, a sexually-charged car metaphor that compares driving a car to having sex with Stefani. The song even includes Stefani instructing you how to drive correctly, her voice dashing off in a chopped laugh like Alison Moyet's famous giggle in Yaz's "Situation."

Similarly, the song "Serious" starts off with an orchestral intro before diving into a Prince-ready bumping drum beat and ambient synth. The track's centered around Stefani's manic love, her proclamations intercut with breathy, vaudeville "Oohs" and "Yeahs." You hear, "I think I'm coming down with something / I know it's gonna need your medicine" and can't help think of Carol Douglas's anxieties on her much more level-headed "Doctor's Orders." 

Every second of the album sounds like a broken 1980s-era soundboard, but the album's bubblegum sound and materialism aren't bad things—if anything, the ridiculous deconstruction of Stefani's favorite dance genres is what makes Stefani's record so damn good. And on every single one of these maximalist tracks, Stefani's powerful and chameleon-like vocals never get lost in the pop chaos she builds around herself.​

​But even with her retreat into postmodern pop, there are glaring problems—problems that are still very much alive in 2014. Not all of Love. Angel. Music. Baby. stands the test of time; its more controversial influences didn't get past anyone when it was released. Many of the aesthetic references, for example, hinged on Stefani's fetishistic obsession with street girls from the Harajuku district of Tokyo, which is known for its Lolita-esque fashions. At press appearances, silent Harajuku sidekicks—who were aptly nicknamed Love, Angel, Music, and Baby—accompanied the star. The press campaign was so controversial, ​Margaret Cho even wrote a scathing takedown of Stefani's Harajuku accessorizing, calling it a minstrel show. Although no musicians had the gall to hire actual Japanese women as props, Asian fetishism and appropriation was rampant in 80s rock, from Siouxsie and the Banshees' "slanted eyes" referencing "Hong Kong Garden" to hits like The Vapors' "Turning Japanese" and Styx's' "Mr. Roboto."

Stefani, of course, didn't limit her cultural appropriation to Japan. In the video for "Luxurious," she surrounds herself with Latina women while she gets her nails done at a salon, and during "Long Way to Go," a duet with Andre 3000 and the album's most embarrassing track, she samples Martin Luther King Jr. soundbites in a cringing attempt at post-racial politics.

If Stefani created these songs and videos today, she would break the internet in the worst way. In 2014, cultural appropr​iation is practically a household term for at least the majority of the culturally aware. Stefani's behavior, of course, wasn't surprising, considering No Doubt's previous album, Rock Steady, had unapologetically appropriated Jamaican dancehall music, but the reception of Love. Angel. Music. Baby. should have been a major red flag for future stars like Sky Ferreira, Avril Lavigne, Miley Cyrus, or even Nicki Minaj, who has dressed up ​like a geisha Stefani-style. Like Cyrus, Stefani can play miffed high schoolers, as she does in the "Hollaback Girl" video, but she can't slip into Japanese or Latina culture like another music video costume.

Love. Angel. Music. Baby. is simultaneously a racist mess, a lyrical car crash, and a treasure chest containing champagne kisses. Stefani operates as both an offensive appropriator and a lovable star-crossed lover who wants money, clothes, and sex that hits her like a car crash. She leaves us with an addictive album that's a true Frankenstein pop monster, one that is blatantly uninterested in being intelligent and openly recognizes its influences. 

" You can try not to like this album, you can try real hard; but it will at least be your guilty pleasure," ​she told MTV about the record back in 2004. "It's like the ABCs — you can't get them out of your brain. I wasn't trying to go for an art record or a deep record. I just wanted to make you feel good for a moment and forget everything else."

What keeps me going back to Love. Angel. Music. Baby. time and time again is how, in all of its racism and spliced-up electronica madness, Stefani inadvertently made a classic. You can call it silly, you can call it bad, but you can't deny that Stefani aced her retro hodgepodge. It's a "problematic fav," but it's difficult to not sing along to Stefani's kitschy new wave homage.

"Heaven knows what will come next, so emotional, you're so complex," Gwen Stefani croons on "The Real Thing," as echoes of a ripped-off New Order beat play in the background. "A roller coaster built to crash, but I still love to have you around."

Right back at you, Love. Angel. Music. Baby. 

Follow Hazel Cills on ​Twitter. 

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I don't typically encourage guests to shit in our toilet—at least, I'm not enthusiastic about it—but this Thanksgiving was different. Let me explain.

Back in July,  ​I wrot​e an article about the primitive nature of American toilet technology. The crux of the article was that it doesn't make sense that we still use the archaic, germ-ridden flush toilet when there are technologies readily available to make the bathroom experience so much more enjoyable. 

After I wrote this article, a representative from American Standard contacted me and offered to send me the ​AT​200, their fanciest, smartest robo-toilet. I was, naturally, pretty stoked about this. But since I live in a rented apartment, I couldn't install it in my place. (I even asked our building manager, who kind of stared at me blankly and then said no.) So American Standard sent me the ​AT100 instead, their top-of-the-line bidet seat which is designed to sit on top of your existing toilet. Unfortunately, I couldn't install that in my apartment either since it requires a water and electrical hookup, so I gave it to my mom. She gave me life; I gave her a robot toilet.

The toilet itself looks like it's straight out of The Jetsons—sort of like how people in the past might have imagined toilets in the future. The bidet seat has two spray nozzles—one for "rear cleansing" and one for "front cleansing"—a drying feature, heated seats, and a deodorizer, which is supposed to keep the toilet smelling fresh for seven years. Although it fits on top of a normal toilet, it requires a fairly experienced plumber to install. It has a little remote control that can be used to adjust the water pressure, the positioning of the water stream, and the heat of the seat, water, and drying function. When you sit down, the toilet quietly hums at you—maybe to muffle pooping noises?

On Thanksgiving and the day after, when our friends and family were a little drunk and full of food and had their guard down, I asked them each to test it out. Here's what they had to say:

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CJ, my boyfriend
​"At first, I thought the remote was stuck to the back of the toilet, but then I realized you could remove it and put it in your lap. Everything went smoothly, until I decided to start pushing buttons. I quickly realized I was sitting much too far forward on the seat. As someone who hasn't used this kind of toilet before, I think the sensation was a little alarming at first, but I can understand the appeal. And while the cleaning certainly did its job, the drying left much to be desired. It was a supplement to the toilet paper rather than a replacement of the toilet paper."

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Marilyn, my neighbor
​"Ooh, I like it! I just can't believe that we're so primitive in that respect. It's comfortable. I like the remote control feature. It was really cool, sitting there and playing with it. I don't know. I just feel cleaner. I'd buy one. And I think there's a real market there for caretakers and people caring for the elderly."

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Sheila, my mom's friend
​"Since I read that article you wrote, I've been feeling really dirty... Every time I wipe myself, I think, Oh, this is filthy. I never feel completely clean. So I loved the cleansing process. I liked the warm spray, and I thought it was angled accurately. It's very pleasurable to feel so clean. I'm 74 years old and I've never used a bidet in my whole life! Now it seems like a no-brainer."

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Kenny, my friend. (He asked not to be pictured because he's unemployed and didn't want potential employers associating him with bidet toilets or whatever.)
​ "It was roughly analogous to a water park in my ass. It was the Knott's Soak City of the anus, which is not something I would typically pay money for or opt into voluntarily. It just wasn't doing it for me. I felt dirty insomuch as it felt slightly penetrative. Maybe I would enjoy it at a lower water pressure? Like, you're not going to start with the big butt play first. You're going to start small first. But, I don't know, it simply wasn't for me."

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Emily, my mom's coworker
"I couldn't stop laughing! It was definitely the most amusing pee I've ever had. You can call me a traditionalist, but I'm just not sure I could get used to that. I literally laughed the whole time I was in the bathroom. When I sat down, there were, like, woodland creature noises. So right away, I was taken aback. And then it was very warm, which I'm not used to. It kind of seemed like someone had been there before I got there. What really got me was that it kind of tickles. I mean, it sprayed me and it tickled. I can't get over it. It was amusing, but I'm definitely not buying one for my house."

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Kathleen, my family friend
​ "I feel refreshed. I feel clean. I found it very pleasant. I kind of had to adjust my bottom for it to hit just right, but it was very nice to feel the warmth. I did have to wipe down some overspray on the back of the seat, so maybe I wasn't sitting on it just right. I liked this better than the other bidets that I've used: the stream level was good, it was easier to use, and the fact that it was right there after using the toilet. I would like one of these! Can you get me one of these?"

Mike, my family friend
"It was a little bit surprising at first. I've never really... done that before. But once I got used to it, and the initial shock of it, it was fine. I maybe would've preferred the seat to be a little cooler. The dryer wasn't super dry, but I wouldn't really expect a full gust of wind."

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Doreen, my mom
"I just think it's a great way to get cleansed after using the toilet. I try to use it in the morning when I have my 'daily constitutional,' but I haven't become accustomed to using it more than that. The heated toilet seat is nice. I think you're supposed to mount the remote control on a wall, but we don't really have a good wall for that in our bathroom."

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​Sar​a​h, my family friend
​ "The heated toilet was totally lovely. I would hang out on that toilet. I never understand why people put books for you to read beside the toilet, but now I do. I would read books on that beautiful seat."

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Elaine, my aunt
​"I liked the heated seat. I liked being able to 'spray my asshole clean,' to quote you. What else? How much more can you say about a bidet?"

My thoughts? It was a little startling to feel that first spray.  Getting used to water cleansing is an adjustment, to be sure, and I found myself reaching for toilet paper every time out of habit. But I did feel clean—like, as clean as if I'd just showered. If everyone owned one of these, there would be no such thing as skid marks in your underwear. And, after inviting half a dozen people to use our bathroom in the course of a day, it smelled as clean as if we'd just spritzed air freshener. That's pretty amazing.

The AT100 doesn't have all of the deluxe features of the AT200—things like automatic flushing, seat opening, and closing—which I can imagine only make the bathroom experience even cleaner. And there are other smart toilets which come with even fancier features, like noise muffling. I'd be eager to try those out (anyone want to send me another free toilet?), but until then I'll be peeing over here in elegance. 

Follow Arielle Pardes on ​Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user ​Gregory W​ild-Smith

Welcome back to the Fear Digest, our weekly roundup of the top ten terrors currently percolating in the American subconscious. ​Read last week's ​column here.​

10. The empty void of the universe
​It's hard enough to get your average Black Friday shopper interested in international news, let alone interstellar news, but the headline " ​Cosmic rays render 90 percent of the universe a lifeless desert, astronomers say" surely gives even the most self-absorbed among us a second or two of pause. A pair of researchers found that radiation released by dying stars could make nearly every galaxy uninhabitable, as these gamma rays can rip apart a planet's ozone layer and leave any struggling life forms vulnerable to their sun. This could be part of the reason we haven't found any evidence of extraterrestrial life, and it makes it all the more likely that we're the only form of intelligence bumbling along in the near-endless void of space—which is bad news, since we're not doing all that great. 
​Last week's rank: unranked

9. The NSA
This week the NSA's Civil Liberties and Privacy Director said in a Tumblr Q&A that the notoriously secretive intelligence agency doesn't spy on Americans, at least not on purpose, so ​chill o​ut. Phew, ​that's a​ relief!  ​
Last week's rank: 8

8. The Islamic State
​ The jihadist group didn't behead any Westerners this week—though the US continued ​bombing the militants—and therefore it fell a bit out of the headlines and down in these rankings. Even on a relatively quiet week, however, the extremists kept up their streak of bragging about atrocities, spreading around videos showing how they ​train child soldiers.
​Last week's rank: 4

7. The Islamic State recruiting Ferguson protesters
​ This is a real thing, ​according to Fox News:

Islamic jihadists worldwide have launched a barrage of recruitment messages amid the latest unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, using Twitter accounts to call on African-Americans and others in the United States to join their cause.

Some messages urge direct revolt against the US government, while others evoke the names of former black leaders—among them Malcolm X—in a bid to convince people of color that living under an Islamic caliphate is in their best interests.

Last week's rank: unranked

6. Obama's coming dictatorship
In the week after the president issued an executive order allowing millions of immigrants to avoid deportation, conservatives have calmed down and are no longer hinting darkly that the country is on a slippery slope toward ethnic cleansing and chaos. But some on the right are now suggesting that the Republicans in control of the House refuse to let Barack Obama deliver the State of the Union address in person. ​Writes Arit John in Bloomberg:

The thinking behind this proposal is that it would aptly demonstrate the level of GOP discontentment with the president, in case he doesn't already know. Rich Lowry, the editor of the National Review, told The New Y​ork Times Tuesday night that if he were John Boehner "I'd say to the president: 'Send us your State of the Union in writing. You're not welcome in our chamber.'"

Last week, the conservative website Breitbart​ suggested Boehner do the same "so that the elected representatives of the people do not have to listen to, or applaud, a man who is violating his oath of office and governing as a tyrant."

Maybe Obama could call for a ​new era of political civility again? 
​Last week's rank: 1

5. Our own families
A supposed tyrant running the world's only superpower, a bunch of children having their heads filled with fundamentalist poison, the universe being essentially lifeless beyond our thin atmosphere—those troubles are far, far away, while our loved ones are close at hand this holiday season. And apparently, we hate and fear our loved ones more than any of those other things. At least, that's the conclusion you have to come to after reading this week's plethora of ​guides for how to ​win arguments with family members you apparently are forced to get into conversational sparring matches with every time you see them. Vox even ran a helpful ​package or articles detailing how to pick fights about everything from TV shows to Bill Cosby to the midterms. Because why tolerate a difference in opinion quietly when you can smugly recite the blogosphere's talking points?
​Last week's rank: unranked

4. America's fundamental racism 
​ Whether you convince your grandpa that Mexicans aren't stealing from him or not, there's still the dread-inducing fact of the whole horrible unjust system that left a black teen in Ferguson dead on the street and inspired a wave of ugly riots earlier this week. As usual, The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates ​crystallized all the hopelessness:

The death of all of our Michael Browns at the hands of people who are supposed to protect them originates in a force more powerful than any president: American society itself. This is the world our collective American ancestors wanted. This is the world our collective grandparents made. And this is the country that we, the people, now preserve in our fantastic dream. What can never be said is that the Fergusons of America can be changed—but, right now, we lack the will to do it. 

Last week's rank: unranked

3. Being shot by the cops
​ Maybe you believe that Michael Brown's death was at least partly avoidable on his part—don't get into fights with the cops and you won't get gunned down in the street. But when you see a video of the police pulling up in a car and casually ​shooting a 12-year-old with a toy gun, you come to realize that police violence is like lightning strikes or car accidents—a phenomenon of sudden, terrible calamity that is as unpredictable as it is unstoppable. 
​Last week's rank: unranked

2. Being shot by roving gunmen
If you can avoid being on the bad end of a state-owned service weapon, you've got all those other guns and their respective bad ends to watch out for. In the last few days alone there have been reports of an ​attempted murder-suicide in Chicago, a series of ​homeless killings in Atlanta, an armed nutjob in Austin who got ​killed after firing at buildings, and a ​double ho​micide in San Diego—and those were just news stories I came across without really looking; there are undoubtedly a lot more out there. It's a cliche to rant about gun violence in America, but it's also an undisputed fact that a lot of people get shot and killed for absolutely no reason because some idiot reached for his revolver.
​Last week's rank: unranked

1. Not having a gun
The proper way to deal with all these bullets flying through the air, Americans have decided, is to make sure that you're packing heat yourself. It's a scary world out there, and having a death-dealing barrel of your own nestled at your hip is the way to wipe away the fear—or at least, that's what ​over 144,000 people figured on Black Friday when they decided to buy guns at discount prices. We shrug at the deadly cops and amateur psychos roaming the landscape armed to the teeth, but we do want to make sure that when we're in that inevitable gun battle we don't die alone. And isn't that what the holidays are all about?
​Last week's rank: unranked​

Follow Harry Cheadle on ​Twitter.

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It hasn't been a bad year for video games. The newer consoles, Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4, are finding their feet with some neat exclusives around the time of their first anniversaries. 

A number of titles have proved better than expectations, from an overdue South Park game (that was actually funny) in the shape of The Stick of Truth, to Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor's all-action sideways take on Tolkien's stories. Factor in Alien: Isolation and Telltale's second season of The Walking Dead and it's been an entirely decent year for licensed games. Outgoing machines have hosted excellent releases, too, with Dark Souls II the sort of swansong that the long, celebrated histories of the PS3 and 360 warranted.

I can go on: Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare refreshed the series with an adrenaline shot of outright silliness; Bayonetta 2 smashed the Wii U's kid-friendly reputation into smithereens; Monument Valley turned your smartphone into a brain-teasing work of art; Far Cry 4 proved the pinnacle of the first-person shooter franchise so far (and is the year's best gun-perspective adventure, a visually stunning affair throughout); and Dragon Age: Inquisition is the Game of Thrones game that fantasy fans have lusted for without ever getting a properly licensed title of any merit.

It's hard to disagree, though, with ​Metacritic's scores-aggregated "revelation" that the best two games of the year have been ones initially released in 2013. Last year, the PS3-exclusive The Last of Us and Grand Theft Auto V, for 360 and PS3, pretty much swept the awards board, gobbling up acclaim like Pac-Man does power pills, chasing all other contenders away from their respective turfs.

The trailer for The Last of Us Remastered

The former, an intimate examination of close-to-the-edge emotions in the guise of a stealth-action game, is one that's stayed with me since first contact. I happily paid my $20 for the three-hour-long Left Behind DLC that came out earlier this year, elaborating on co-protagonist Ellie's story, revealing events that occurred before her meeting with Joel just an hour or two into the main game. 

That perfectly penned, single-sitting-compact add-on struck me profoundly, unlike a video game has since (honestly, I don't think that another game has imprinted itself on my forever-memory in quite the same way).

Developer Naughty Dog's high-water mark thus far, The Last of Us, is a masterpiece, albeit one that I can only enjoy in relatively modest sessions—and rarely right before bed, such is the tension of creeping through darkened halls and stinking sewers knowing that a lethal insta-kill Clicker, blind but deadly at close quarters, is but a few paces away. 

Right now I'm playing through its PS4 remaster, a sort of ultimate edition version that includes Left Behind on the disc. Suffice to say, the lights have been left on longer than usual of late.

The game's visuals are improved, the frame rate locked at 60 fps, which makes the dramatic instances of gunplay all the more electric and allows the swarms of runners to move with a grace more grotesque than ever. There's a photo mode, too, for sharing its more beautiful moments with friends on PSN. But, essentially, this is the PS3 game ported to appeal to 360 loyalists who moved not to the Xbox One, but to Sony's rival console, the current market leader.

It says a lot about the PS4's slow start in terms of genuine platform-exclusive must-haves that The Last of Us Remastered is, without a doubt, the one title that all owners of Sony's newest not-so-little black box should pick up. 

But if you already played the game on PS3, perhaps stall that acquisition, as the improvements—while noticeable—don't dramatically alter the story mode experience. (I have yet to play the PS4's multiplayer component, so can't comment on that.) The plot hasn't changed any, but that's fine, as it remains a sometimes shocking, always compelling (quite literal) journey—and seeing it play out with richer visuals just nails home the myriad subtleties that add up to a seductive whole.

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Left Behind focuses on Ellie's relationship with Riley, a friend only referenced in the main game.

Need I really stress that spoilers will follow? It's probably too late, but, yeah: spoilers, right now. When Tess faces up to her imminent demise, the long exhalation she offers as a last word seems to hang in the air that much longer on the more powerful platform. When Ellie stares out the window, as Joel cat-naps ahead of them leaving Boston, where the game "proper" begins, the rain that runs down the outside of the pane is that much sharper, enough to take an already memorable scene and make it more striking. 

When Joel and Bill stumble across the final act of resistance from the latter's ex-partner, Frank, the scene pops with a heart-wrenching clout the previous-gen version only hinted at. The criticism that The Last of Us is more movie than game still stands, despite its many sections of concentrated action. But, on PS4, it's as affecting a film as you'll see in 2014.

The Last of Us follows Joel and Ellie as they cross America, from Boston to Salt Lake City. It's a game of grand horizons, in theory—but most of the play is reserved for tight, closed-in areas set along the route, so that you never truly get a sense of motion across a nation ravaged by a pretty severe fungal infection, and the environments change behind cut-scenes and loading screens. 

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Grand Theft Auto V is set only in a single (very small) state of the US, its San Andreas an analogue of California with Los Santos its take on Los Angeles. And yet the player can cruise its every inch, seeing the weather change as they go, mountains giving way to the desert of Blaine County, the city fading in the rear view mirror as one floors it all the way to the northern beaches of a map measured at approximately 100 square miles. So while it's set in a much smaller "world" than The Last of Us, Grand Theft Auto V is much the bigger game.

And it's a game that's been massively overhauled for its current-gen release on Xbox One and PS4 (a PC port is coming too, in 2015). Everything positively sparkles—and it's not like the game was ever ugly on older machines. (Indeed, I gazed slack-jawed at my rattling, original 360 as it played the game first time around, dumbfounded as to where Rockstar had found all this extra juice for my aging white brick.)

Meteorological improvements mean that the city changes mood completely when the rain falls, lights bouncing from the flooded streets, and the sunsets: gorgeous. It's not like anything in GTA V is photo-real, but at certain times of day its environments look so good you want to reach through the screen, feel the sun on your skin and kick the (rather more widely dispersed) litter that plugs gutters from Vinewood to the Del Perro Pier.

Much like The Last of Us, the central premise of GTA V for new consoles is unchanged: You control three distinct characters as each of them looks to make a stack of cash, for quite different reasons. If you don't pay attention to on-mission discussions that usually play out while on the move, you'll miss details that color the campaign: comments on collusion, and on characters' murky pasts. 

The wince-worthy moments are untouched—again, spoilers. Seeing Trevor torture Mr. K for information so that Michael, across town, can ruin a party in murderous fashion, still feels unnecessary, and it's an uncomfortable mission that could well have been edited out without losing any narrative momentum. If you're the sort who likes to 100 percent their collection, you'll also have to play through a stripper mini-game where touching goes, so long as the bouncer doesn't see. It's awkward and entirely unsexy, and again might have been cut were it not already part of an (albeit pretty rare) achievement/trophy.

GTA V: first-person experience

However, it's not quite as unsexy as the first-person humping that you can now indulge in, you filthy perverts. And that's probably the biggest draw of the new GTA V—its anytime (save cut-scenes) first-person mode. Pick up a hooker and you can "enjoy" the sight of her still-clothed frame bouncing about in front of your character's eyes. I really wouldn't, though. As Kotaku's Keza MacDonald ​noted, the sex is the saddest thing about GTA V.

Rather better when viewed first person is the combat, both ballistic and in the kicking and punching sense. It lends a previously absent lurch to proceedings, a physicality to the brawling. It's a bit like Mirror's Edge meets Sleeping Dogs, only with an overweight 40-something as the aggressor.

Running around Los Santos in first person is dizzying, like the rush of some kind of substance that's got hold of the retinas and dialed everything up to awesome. It's not without its problems, most obviously when it comes to driving. I did get my car around a few blocks unscathed, taking it easy, but when the heat's on you and you've got to hammer it, it's best to switch to a behind-car position. 

Inside the vehicles, Rockstar has gone to town—the dials all respond to your fingers on the triggers, rev counter and speedometer twitching as they should, and changing the station will alter the display on the radio. Speaking of which, most of the game's music channels are expanded, with Taylor Dayne's "Tell It to My Heart" and Bobby Brown's "On Our Own" among my own favorite newcomers to the Non-Stop Pop frequency (which says more about my age than my taste in music).

Grand Theft Auto V and The Last of Us represent both of 2014's best "definitive editions," which the year's hardly been short on, and also its most outstanding "new" releases. Joel and Ellie's story remains unchanged, but is an absolute must for anyone who didn't already play it on PS3. And the overhauled GTA V is just an astounding achievement of game design, something that manages to build on an already 10/10 experience without adding anything that feels simply superfluous. 

The PS4 and Xbox One will see classics of their own emerge in the coming years, there's no doubt about that. But, in 2014, they were dominated by echoes from the previous era, all-time essentials that have transitioned to current technology and not only retained their prior appeal, but proven themselves better than ever.

Follow Mike Diver on ​Twitter.

Photos by Lucian Read

Reported in partnership with InsideClimate News

"O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do."
-WALT WHITMAN, " Me Imperturbe," Leaves of Grass

The campers woke to the sound of screams.

"Help me! Help me!"

It was 3:30 AM in the Nachvak Fjord, a gorgeously desolate chunk of grassy wilderness in the Canadian subarctic, and the sound ricocheted through the silence like a gunshot. The fjord is about 530 miles from the Arctic Circle, and not much warmer. Getting there requires multiple bouncy prop-plane flights or a ten-hour boat ride over choppy waters filled with icebergs, like ice cubes tumbling in a giant glass of ice water. The nearest bank or bar or convenience store is nearly 200 miles away, but who needs one when visitors to the fjord can drink directly out of its Brita-clean streams? In addition to Arctic char, a visitor here sees minke whales splashing in the sea, soaring ptarmigan, and seal skulls dotting the beach—leftover lunch scraps from the 2,000 or so polar bears that call this place home.

Rich Gross, the Sierra Club tour guide who had helped organize the trip, jolted awake at the shrieks. He grabbed a flare gun stashed inside the boot near his head. He tore open his sleeping bag and leaped out of his tent.

Marta Chase, the group's other guide, lay in a tent near Gross's. She was terrified. As Gross climbed outside, she peered through a little window and saw a polar bear, just a few feet away, standing over the tent beside hers. It was down on all fours, eye level with Chase, huge and white except for the black of its eyes and nose. It turned and stared right at her.

"Rich!" she screamed.

Her husband, a spritely man named Kicab Castañeda-Mendez, scrambled out of their tent while Chase searched for her flare gun. When Castañeda-Mendez emerged, Gross was standing in the grass, in his long underwear, aiming the gun at the bear as it started to run away. It was a moving target, now 75 feet down the beach, heading toward the shore of the fjord.

[body_image width='75' height='100' path='images/content-images/2014/12/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/01/' filename='polar-bear-man-0000501-v21n11-body-image-1417409588.jpg' id='7769']​For the full story of the attack, download Sabrina Shankman's e-book, Meltdown

By now it was 3:31, maybe 3:32 AM. The night around them wasn't pitch-black—like it might be in a horror movie—but it was still dark, that dusky twilight that makes the air feel as thick as smoke when it descends in far-northern climates. It was dark, in other words, but not so dark that Gross and Chase couldn't see that the fleeing polar bear had something in its mouth as it ran off into the night—it was one of their travel companions. Matthew Dyer. He was no longer screaming, "Help me."

The author, left, and Matt Dyer at the Nachvak Fjord, where Dyer was attacked on July 24, 2013

Nine months earlier, when Dyer read an ad in the fall 2012 issue of Sierra magazine, it described exactly the type of adventure he'd been waiting for: two weeks trekking through the untouched lower reaches of Canada's Arctic tundra, with the possibility of seeing the world's largest land carnivore, the polar bear. Dyer, a 49-year-old lawyer in a small city in Maine, had saved up some money and had always been fascinated by the bears.

Participants would have to be fit and experienced hikers, the ad warned. They would also have to accept an element of risk, including lack of access to emergency medical care. But the payoff would be big.

"If you dream of experiencing a place that is both pristine and magical, a land of spirits and polar bears rarely seen by humans, this is the trip you have been waiting for," the ad said.

Two seasoned Sierra Club guides, Rich Gross and Marta Chase, would be leading the adventure, called "Spirits and Polar Bears: Trek to Torngat Mountains National Park." Gross, 61, worked for a low-income-housing nonprofit in San Francisco, but since 1990 he had spent a week or two each year guiding Sierra Club trips in remote parts of the world. Chase, 60, was a medical-diagnostics consultant who'd been leading hikes since she was in high school. She and Gross had guided 14 excursions together.

It was Gross's idea to go into the Torngats, one of Canada's newest national parks, located in northeastern Labrador. He'd never seen a polar bear in the wild and was drawn to the spiritual appeal of the place. Torngat Mountains National Park was named after Torngarsuk, an ancient Inuit spirit that takes the likeness of a polar bear and controls the lives of sea animals. In photos Gross pored over, the terrain itself had a mystical appearance, with sharply peaked mountains and fjords cutting into the park from the coast of the Labrador Sea. Only a few hundred people venture there each year, and Gross wanted to be part of that exclusive group.

Chase wanted to see the park too. But she worried about hiking in polar bear country.

A large male bear can weigh as much as 1,700 pounds and stand ten feet tall. While they have evolved to eat seals, polar bears, unlike most species, will actively hunt humans in certain circumstances—especially if they're not able to access their typical prey. When the sea ice melts in summer, the bears come on land, and if there's a time and place to see a bear, it's midsummer in the Torngats.

Worldwide, the polar bear population is in trouble. The two best-studied bear populations, in Canada's western Hudson Bay and Alaska's southern Beaufort Sea, are both in decline, and experts predict it's just a matter of time before other bear populations start to plummet. Why is this happening? The sea ice where bears hunt seals is diminishing as a result of rising temperatures and man-made climate change, so the bears' hunting season is shrinking. In turn, bears are reproducing less and must migrate farther and farther to find food, even into cities, like the Canadian town of Arviat, more than 1,000 miles from the Torngat Mountains. Arviat recently hired an armed "bear monitor" to ward off the animals.

An increase of bears on the land is in turn leading to a rise in human and polar bear interactions—back in the 1960s and 1970s there were eight or nine attacks reported per decade, according to wildlife biologist James Wilder. Based on recent trends, that number is expected to reach 35 this decade. While no individual incident can be attributed to climate change, the rise in interactions is precisely what biologists have expected to see as the bears lose their habitat. The result is a paradoxical situation in which fewer polar bears may mean more attacks on humans.

Gross had learned some of this by the time he received an email from Matt Dyer, on November 17, 2012. Dyer was prepared to pay $6,000 for this trip into the unknown, and he wanted to sign up. But Gross wasn't sure Dyer was ready for such an extreme adventure.

"This trip requires backpacking experience and I don't see any on your forms," Gross said in an email after reading Dyer's application. "This is a particularly tough trip since it is all off trail and packs will be quite heavy (50+ pounds). The area is remote and evacuation is only by helicopter."

Dyer told Gross he was in good shape and had been hiking and camping in New England for years, including some trekking with the Appalachian Mountain Club.

"I'm not a city person (I grew up on an island about 8 miles from the mainland) so being away from the [7-Eleven] is not going to bother me," Dyer wrote. "I totally understand that you don't want to wind up a thousand miles from nowhere with a problem, but I think I can do this."

Dyer agreed to follow a strict training plan, and Gross agreed to take him.

Matt Dyer doesn't believe having a gun would have prevented his attack. "Even if I had an AK-47 in my tent, I never would have had time to use it."

On July 18, 2013, Dyer lugged his 50-pound pack into the Quality Hotel Dorval in Montreal, where he would meet his travel companions and then fly north to the Torngats. To save money, he'd taken a 12-hour overnight bus from Lewiston, Maine, and then spent the morning wandering around Montreal. He ate two breakfasts and napped in a park, feeling "kind of like a bum," killing time until he could check in to his hotel.

When Dyer arrived, Larry Rodman walked into the hotel lobby at the same time, fresh off the airport shuttle bus after a quick flight from New York City. Rodman, 65, was a corporate lawyer in Manhattan, and the walls of his office were adorned with photos he'd taken on previous wildlife trips, though he'd never seen a polar bear. He'd signed up the same day he read the "Spirits and Polar Bears" ad on the Sierra Club's website.

The big-city law partner and the legal-aid attorney with the scraggly gray ponytail hit if off immediately—they both loved opera and fencing and had an easy sense of humor. Dyer was relieved. He'd been less concerned about the arduous journey than about the people he'd be trapped with in the wilderness.

Gross and Chase had flown in the day before to buy supplies and make last-minute arrangements. When they saw Dyer he looked as ready for this trip as anyone.

He had a ropy frame, tattoos, and seemed to have a permanent grin on his face.

Later that night, Gross and Chase gathered the crew to go over final details. Another group member, a doctor from Arizona named Rick Isenberg, arrived in Montreal after midnight, and the next morning the crew boarded a plane and headed north.

There are two primary ways to get into the Torngat Mountains. The first is through the Torngat Mountains Base Camp and Research Station, a small collection of tents and outbuildings that serve as the official gateway into the park. The Canadian government opened it in 2006, but in 2009 handed it over to the local Nunatsiavut government, which runs Base Camp as a hub for researchers, visitors, and staff from Parks Canada, the government agency that oversees all of Canada's parks.

The other way in is through a privately run outfit called Barnoin River Camp, about 900 miles north of Montreal. When Chase emailed Base Camp officials and got no reply, she reached out to Vicki Storey, an adventure-travel agent who'd been booking trips to the Torngats for years. Storey put Chase in contact with Alain Lagacé, the owner of Barnoin River Camp, who had been leading fishing expeditions and wildlife tours into the Torngats for decades.

"The thought of polar bears is still a concern to me," Chase wrote in one of her emails to Lagacé before the trip. "I have experience with black and brown bears but not with polar."

Lagacé said they'd need flares, pepper spray, and portable electric fences to protect them while they slept.

"Regarding the safety against polar bears, we have it all," Lagacé wrote. "The 12 gauge magnesium [flare] gun are working extremely well, plus we have the pepper spray, and the pepper spray greanade ( sic) and electric fence. These have worked very well in the past but there are always precautions to be taken. Never cook food in your tent, don't leave trash around your camp site, avoid camping along the shore of a coastal lake, etc."

Previously, Chase and Gross had read that Parks Canada recommends that visitors to the Torngats hire a licensed Inuit bear guard who is allowed to carry a gun into the park and is trained in polar bear safety. But Chase and Gross say that when they confirmed their hiking route and let the government know they'd be traveling through Lagacé's camp, which does not employ bear guards for hire, nobody at the agency mentioned hiring a bear guard. The only requirements for visiting were that they register with the park and watch a DVD on polar bear safety, which a Parks Canada employee said would be sent to Lagacé's camp.

Instead of an armed bear guard, Gross picked up two electric fences from the Sierra Club—one to encircle their campsite, the other to protect the area where they would cook and store their food. The instructions weren't included, so with the help of a close friend who is an electrician, Gross practiced setting them up outside his house in San Francisco.

Each fence stood about two and a half feet high and consisted of three parallel wires suspended from four-foot posts. Although the wires looked flimsy, they carried five to seven kilovolts of charge—not enough to seriously injure a bear, but enough to send it running.

Before their trip, Gross emailed a picture of the fence set up in his front yard to Castañeda-Mendez.

"What's the polar bear supposed to do?" Castañeda-Mendez wrote back. "Die of laughter?"

This polar bear watched Dyer's group for several hours. Some believe it is the bear that attacked him. Photo by Marilyn Frankel

At Barnoin River Camp, Lagacé, a fit, middle-aged man with a gray mustache, gave the group an orientation, pointing out the bathrooms, kitchen, and the bunkhouses. After the group settled in, Gross began testing their equipment. On a patch of grass near the crystal-clear Barnoin River, he pulled out a flare gun. Lagacé had rented two orange Gemini 12-gauge flare guns to the group, but Gross had never shot one before and he wanted to get comfortable with the weapon. When he pressed the trigger, there was a burst of light and a flare shot forward about 150 yards in a straight path toward the ground. Upon impact, the flare cartridge exploded with a second burst.

Marilyn Frankel, a 66-year-old exercise physiologist from Oregon and the group's seventh and final member, saw the flashes from a shed where she was sorting food, pulling out the half that would be airdropped to them midway through the hike. OK, she thought after seeing the burst of flame, those are going to work.

At around 5 or 6 PM the group headed to one of the camp's main buildings for dinner. Chase and Gross had planned to show the group the DVD on bear safety. But they say Lagacé told them that the DVD hadn't arrived (in an interview, a Parks Canada representative claimed the DVD had been mailed to the camp). If they had watched it, they would have learned that the number of human and polar bear interactions is increasing, that the most common place to encounter bears is the coast, and that it's important to know the limitations of bear deterrents and not be lulled into a sense of false security by them.

In lieu of the video, Lagacé agreed to talk to the group about safety in polar bear country, sharing what he had learned in decades of bringing people into the Torngats. (When I interviewed Lagacé about the video, he said he had shown it to the group, and then he declined to answer any more questions.)

According to the hikers, Lagacé told them to be aware and prepared at all times. Polar bears aren't like the grizzlies they had come in contact with before, he warned—they're hunters. The bears travel along water, so the hikers should be sure to camp away from the edge of the fjord. Provided they slept inside the perimeter of the electric fence, he allegedly told the group, they should be just fine.

The Arctic's sea ice has receded rapidly as global temperatures climb. Since 1979, according to NASA scientist Claire Parkinson, about 695,000 square miles of sea ice there have been lost—an area about the size of California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Utah, and most of Idaho combined. In the Davis Strait, where the Torngat Mountains are located, there are about 15 fewer days of ice cover each decade, and 50 fewer days than in 1979. For two months of the year, where a visitor would have typically seen ice blanketing the strait and the Labrador Sea, he or she now sees dark water. This dark color further warms the earth by absorbing a greater amount of sunlight—the way wearing a black shirt on a summer day makes you hotter than wearing a white one.

In the early afternoon of July 21, 2013, the group traveled east on a floatplane toward the blue waters of the Labrador Sea and Torngat Mountains National Park. Dyer watched breathlessly as their plane skimmed over mountain peaks and then dipped into a desolate but spectacular valley—treeless, with steep peaks cutting down to the water's edge, leaving a spit of land and beach. The green vegetation covering the mountains and hills was new to the area. Years ago, the hills were all rock, but a shifting climate has brought with it new growth.

The plane landed flawlessly on Nachvak Fjord, backing into the shore so they could exit without getting their feet wet. Castañeda-Mendez held on to the plane's pontoon while the rest of the group unloaded their gear. The pilot quickly said his goodbyes and the roar of the engines receded into the distance, leaving the hikers alone with just the sound of water lapping quietly onto the shore.

A cold rain started to fall, but a rainbow stretched across the expansive sky. Dyer took it as a good omen.

Chase and Gross left the group on the shore while they scouted for a campsite. Lagacé had warned them not to camp on the beach and to find a high place to sleep because polar bears are known to come right up the fjord where they landed.

But when Chase and Gross reached an area that met Lagacé's recommendation—an elevated spot about a quarter mile away—they discovered it didn't have easy access to drinking water. Farther down, closer to where they had been dropped off, they found a spot that looked ideal: flat enough for comfortable sleeping and cooking, with easy access to fresh water. It was a bit closer to the shore, but still at least 150 yards away from the mouth of the fjord. People had obviously camped there before, because they'd left behind stakes and piles of rocks. But little did they know, according to Judy Rowell, the superintendent of the park, the campsite was smack in the middle of a "polar bear highway."

The Nachvak Fjord, where Dyer's group camped

"Hey!" Castañeda-Mendez called out in the dawning hours of the next morning. It was 5:40 AM and the group was cozily sleeping inside the perimeter of the electric fence. Castañeda-Mendez had climbed out of his tent to pee. That's when he saw a huge white object, like a cross between a large dog and an abominable snowman, lurking near the water's edge. "Polar bear on the beach!"

A mother and her cub were walking along the shore in the early-morning light. The mother bear's snout was raised in the air, sniffing out her neighbors.

Chase joined her husband outside the tent. Dyer and the others grabbed their cameras. Here they were, in shouting distance of some of the world's most violent predators, yet the scene was overwhelmingly peaceful. Dyer felt on the verge of joyful tears as he watched the bears walk along the shore, the cub close on its mother's heels.

It was only later, as they looked over their photos and zoomed in on the bears, that they got a sense of the animals' physical state. A concave hole fell between the mother bear's sharply pointed shoulder blades. Experts who examined the photos confirmed that the mother appeared underweight, and a native guide would tell the group that he had seen what he believed was the same mother just weeks earlier—but she had had two cubs with her, leading him to believe that one had died.

Mother bears and their cubs have the most tenuous future when it comes to climate change, according to biologist Charles Robbins. Studies have found a direct link between earlier sea-ice breakup and fewer cubs surviving. When biologist Elizabeth Peacock studied polar bears in the Davis Strait, which includes the Torngat Mountains, she found that while the population numbers were strong, litters were smaller than anywhere else in the world, and fewer cubs were surviving into adulthood. She also found that the bears' general health was in decline-a sign that a fall in population may be coming soon.

Essentially, Peacock found that there's an abundance of polar bears in the region, but not enough of their natural habitat—sea ice—to support them. In a year when the ice breaks up early and refreezes late, that could add up to lots of hungry bears.

But on this morning, luckily, changes in the ice did not translate into the mother and her cub being interested in the hikers. The bears just sniffed the air, laced with the scent of humans, and eventually sauntered away. Dyer and the crew marveled at how close they felt to nature, how lucky they were to have this National Geographic moment not even a full day into their trip.

Dyer hours after the attack. "He was probably going to drown in his own blood," said a medic who helped rescue him. Photo by Marilyn Frankel

Later that morning, after a breakfast of oatmeal, the group packed their day bags to get ready for a hike deeper into the land. Gross carefully placed one of the flare guns in his backpack. Chase took the other.

They headed east to explore the area around the fjord. The weather felt unpredictable, with heavy clouds settling in and wind and rain beginning to whip through their campsite.

The Torngat Mountains are technically subarctic, but they lie along the 58th parallel, putting them above the tree line and within the Arctic eco-region. The group hiked through scrub willows and grassy hills and along the ledges above the campsite. The rain turned to a cool mist and gradually cleared, revealing blue skies and spectacular views of the Labrador Sea.

As they walked, Castañeda-Mendez took the lead, relishing moments alone and allowing some distance to grow between himself and the group. Occasionally Gross would call out, "Slow down," "Wait up." Gross, Rodman, and Isenberg made up the middle of the pack, while Dyer, Chase, and Frankel brought up the rear. They bantered pleasantly and playfully while they walked through a landscape that relatively few humans had ever seen and that by its very nature-the extreme cold, the remoteness-was inhospitable to human life.

At about 3:30 PM, after they'd turned back toward camp, they reached a wide stream near their campsite. They sat on some rocks and removed their boots. The water was shallow, clear, and cold. For feet that had been banging around in hiking boots all day, the cool of the stream offered quick relief. Castañeda-Mendez was already halfway across the water when Dyer looked up and saw a creature lumbering toward them.

"Polar bear!" Dyer shouted.

"Get back here! Get back here!" Chase yelled at her husband. "We have a bear!"

The animal was about 150 yards away and closing in. Castañeda-Mendez high-stepped back through the water, and the group clustered together, following the protocol that Lagacé had rehearsed with them before they left Barnoin River Camp: Stand together. Make yourself seem big. Make loud noises, especially metal on metal, like the banging of poles.

The bear was larger and had a fuller coat than the female bear they had previously seen. Slowly it walked toward them, nose in the air, and tongue sticking out, apparently trying to assess the two-legged creatures it had stumbled upon.

Despite the group's banging and shouting, the bear approached. Castañeda-Mendez fired away with his camera. Gross pulled out one of the flare guns.

"I'm gonna shoot," he told Chase when the bear was within 50 yards.

"I think that's a good idea," she said.

As the flare fired, the animal kept coming toward them. But when it landed in front of the bear, causing a second burst, the animal turned and took off in a dead run.

The group burst into cheers, clapping, banging their poles, and celebrating their victory.

"It was like getting a touchdown at a football game," Dyer said later.

But the bear hadn't gone far. It settled itself on a ledge about 300 yards away and lay there quietly, watching the group make the short trek back to their camp.

By the time they reached the safety of their electric fence at about 4 PM, the rain was coming down heavily. Most of the group settled into their tents to rest until dinnertime, but Dyer was uneasy. He couldn't relax while the bear was perched on the nearby ledge.

"I mean, my goodness, there was a very large carnivore watching us," Dyer said.

As the rain poured down, Dyer stationed himself outside of his tent, leaning on his poles, staring down the bear as it watched them. Castañeda-Mendez said Dyer looked like one of the guards at the British palace. He stood staring at the bear for more than an hour, drenched under the dreary gray sky as the afternoon waned.

Eventually, the bear and the rain wore him down. Dyer asked Gross and Isenberg if they were watching the bear from within their tents, and they said they were. So Dyer retired to his shelter, escaping into Leaves of Grass, the only book he had brought with him.

After reading for a while, Dyer walked through the drizzle to the tent next to his, where Chase and Castañeda-Mendez were relaxing. It was just a few steps away, but on the walk he saw that the bear was still there. Dyer had just read a poem that felt so right he had to share it. He read to them Walt Whitman's "Me Imperturbe": "standing at ease in Nature, Master of all, or mistress of all, aplomb in the midst of irrational things..."

At about 6 PM the campers started making their way across the rocky strip that separated them from their cook area to prepare dinner. Up on the ledge, the bear now appeared to be lounging. Using the zoom lenses on their cameras, they watched it roll on its back and then lie on its belly, resting its head on its crossed arms. To Frankel, it looked like a big dog. To others, it looked like a menace.

At sundown, the bear was still there, and Dyer couldn't shake his sense of uneasiness.

"Why don't we post a watch?" he asked Gross after dinner. They could take two-hour shifts overnight until the bear was gone.

But Gross wasn't worried. "That's what the fence is for," he told Dyer. After all, Gross had done his research and spoken with the experts, who had reassured him that they would be fine. To be extra safe, he checked the fence again that night, making sure the wires were taut and the battery was switched on.

Dyer acquiesced, thinking back on their orientation at Barnoin River Camp where he remembered Lagacé telling them: "If the polar bear touches that, you won't have to worry."

The first thing Dyer saw was two giant arms coming over the top of his tent. It was 3:30 AM, two days later. Everyone else was fast asleep, and he had been too until seconds before, when he woke for some ineffable reason. The bear tore him out of the tent, its jaws quickly clamping around Dyers' skull. As he was dragged farther from the campsite and felt the bear's jaws sink into his head, he thought, This is it—you're going to die now.

To find out how Matt survived and learn more about the science behind climate change and polar bears, download the e-book, Meltdown, at InsideClimateNews.org, and watch our documentary, Polar Bear Man, airing soon.

There's a new documentary out, I Am Santa Claus, about how mall Santas do their jobs and what they get up to when it's not the Christmas season. It features WWE wrestling superstar Mick Foley transforming himself into a Santa and is actually a surprisingly touching movie about a bunch of guys who are really dedicated to creating little moments of magic for kids, and not in any way a controversial film. 

Oh, but one of the Santas,  Jim Stevenson, is gay.

Naturally, the ubiquitous YouTube goblins latched onto the gay thing, offering  ​comments like, "So, Santa Fag makes his film debut? How disgraceful! We, as a society, have become TOO accepting of immoral lifestyles. Fags need to be shamed not paraded around." No surprise there. YouTube comments are the dingleberries of the internet.

A prominent Santa (name redacted) reacting to the movie

What was unexpected was that prominent Santas denounced the film publicly. They took to Facebook, calling it things like "an abomination to real bearded Santas." One wrote, "Only in American (sic) can you make a mess of Santa and get away with it, they are all on my very, very, naughty list and they won't be getting off of it anytime soon either. Very bad writers, directors and actors as well, bad very bad!!!" 

The homophobia reached all the way to Mick Foley's personal Facebook account. He told ​the Mary Sue, "The hate I was getting from Facebook started to cancel out the joy I should have felt from the film."

I talked to director Tony Avallone about the ugly reaction to a film that was only meant to give you something to watch with your parents during the holidays other than Home Alone.

VICE: Hi Tommy. Why'd you make a movie about Santas?
​Tommy Avallone: Me and my wife were walking around the Cherry Hill Mall in New Jersey one day and we saw Santa Claus and I was like, "I wonder what life that guy goes home to." Like, what family is waiting for him December 26? And that was the seed that I needed to start the movie.

How'd you find them?
​ We found that Santa Clauses exist on Facebook and we would send a message to them like, "Hey, you look pretty interesting, what would you think about being in this documentary? We'd love to talk to you!"

So the big homophobia blow-up happened when you released the trailer. What were they saying?
​ [The Santas] couldn't actually say what they were upset about, because they didn't want to seem like blatant homophobic people, they would just say they don't feel that we should "ruin the magic" of Christmas. We got called the armageddon of Santa World, we got told we were going to be on the "very naughty" list and that we would stay there for a very long time.

And then the harassment got pretty constant?
​I'll post something that like, "Hey check out I Am Santa Claus on iTunes! DVD! Blu-ray!" and this one Santa from New York was like, "Don't waste your money!" and I'm like "Aaand, delete!"

You didn't engage, or try to argue with them online?
​ These guys are older men that don't quite understand the technology of Facebook and sometimes they like to fight, and I don't fight.

Not to stereotype older people...
​ No. Our Santa Claus who is gay is 73. It's all about where you're from. Where he lives in Dallas, they're very open to everything. 

And he's also a bear. Are there a lot of bear Santas?
I just think a bear is usually a hairy, heavy man, so it's likely that some of them would want to play Santa. I don't think it's a thing though. 

Negativity wasn't the only reaction you got from Santas, right?
​ Oh, any Santa Claus who actually took the time to watch the movie loved it. Because what we do is show that these are real men. We never said we were going to make a movie about Santa Claus. We're going to make a movie about the people who portray Santa Claus. 

At the end of the day, they're grandpas and they're good people. They just have strong opinions.

I Am Santa Claus can be streamed on ​Netflix, downloaded off ​iTunes, or ​purchased in a hard-copy format.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

Later, after the beating, after the intimidation by police, after the hours and hours spent going through legal documents and telling our story at depositions, after the media fixed us in its gaze and then released us, people still asked us the question. It's always the same question—they want reassurances that what happened to us couldn't happen to them.

"Why did those cops attack you?"

Sometimes, it's an honest query; other times it sounds more like an accusation. It's the same sort of question people ask when victims like Ferguson's Michael Brown are killed by the police—what did they to do deserve being targeted?

More than four years after our attack, we still don't know the answer. And we're unable to reassure anyone, regardless of the color of their skin, that what happened to us won't happen to them. All we know is that when we attempted to fight back we found out just how deeply dysfunctional the system can be.

CHAPTER 1: The Assault

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It was three in the morning on February 7, 2010, that our lives changed—not that we had any warning that that moment would hold any sort of significance. We were just two guys eating a late dinner at Arturo's Tacos, a 24-hour Mexican joint known for selling burritos the size of mini-footballs in the Logan Square neighborhood.

As we finished our meal, Greg stood to put his coat on in the narrow aisle of the restaurant and two men and a woman approached him. The first guy looked like a bodybuilder or a wannabe pro wrestler: a white dude with a concentrated, powerful build. The second guy was taller and slimmer but still muscular, with slicked-back hair and a leather jacket.

"What the fuck? Get out of my way!" barked the shorter one.

"What the hell? I'm just putting my coat on. I'll be out of your way in one second," Greg replied.

The man pushed Greg, and a waitress came over to see what was happening. Matt reassured her: "Everything's fine. We're not looking for any problems."

The group slipped past us to the exit, and we thought that was the end of it. But after we went to the register and paid, we found them waiting for us in the small parking lot outside. As we neared Matt's car, we could feel the tension ratchet up; the men were shouting obscenities as they moved toward us.

We didn't want a fight with these lunatics, and as they neared us Greg kept saying, "Let's just shake on it. We're here out of peace. We're not looking for any problems. Let's just go home and forget about it."

They weren't having it. The shorter one charged at Greg a few times with balled fists, stopping just short of making contact, and then he made his move: He charged again, this time shoving Greg and swinging around to hit Matt with a vicious right hook. Within seconds both the men were on top of Matt, throwing him to the ground and pounding him repeatedly in his face with their fists.

Greg pulled the instigator off Matt, and for a moment managed to pin his arms to his sides. But he broke free quickly, hit Greg in the head, then brought him to the ground with a practiced takedown maneuver and put him in a chokehold while kneeling behind him.

Matt, meanwhile, had blacked out when he was thrown to the ground, but the taller guy went on pummeling his head, tossing it from side to side. Matt's eyes shot open as he woke to the sound of his own blood splashing on the ground. The woman who'd accompanied the two guys was now leaning over Matt screaming, "Quit resisting! They're cops! They're going to beat your ass!"

Finally they stopped, either convinced by our pleas for mercy or simply tired of whaling on us. As they walked back to their car, Matt staggered to his feet, fishing his phone from his pocket while trying to make out the license plate of the vehicle the trio was getting into. As Matt dialed 9-1-1 in shock, he was just grasping the new reality: We've just been assaulted by some plainclothes cops and they're leaving.

The line rang, and in a heartbeat, the taller man sprinted at Matt. You can hear him scream on the recorded 9-1-1 call, "Who the fuck are you calling?" just before he hit Matt hard enough to knock him several feet backward and into the wall. They were on Matt again in seconds—Greg rushed to pull them off once more, but they violently slammed the back of Greg's head to the pavement. He lost consciousness.

Greg woke to the bright lights of a police cruiser rolling into the parking lot. Finally, he thought, his face still pressed into the cold pavement by his assailant, this is over. They're going to be arrested, everything will be fine.

It wasn't. When the uniformed officers got out of their car, they chatted with our attackers; they seemed to know each other. The man holding Greg stood up, wiping the blood off of his knuckles onto Greg's scalp. As Greg tried to rise to his feet, the uniformed cop put his knee on his back, pinning him to the ground. The cop punched Greg, rolled him over, and punched him again.

After a short conversation, the officers politely ushered the two men who had just left us bloodied and concussed to their car.

As Matt got to his feet—his face, light blue shirt, and brown suede jacket soaked in his own blood—he pleaded with the officers to arrest our attackers, file a report, to look at the blood on our faces and help us get medical attention.

Instead, we witnessed what appeared to be the infamous "blue code of silence" unfold before our eyes. After a short conversation, the officers politely ushered the two men who had just left us bloodied and concussed to their car. As our attackers drove away, the uniformed cops obstructed us from obtaining their license plate number and, when talking to us, repeated the same thing to us over and over:

"Just go home and forget this ever happened."

We didn't.

CHAPTER 2: "Very Serious Accusations"

After the police cruiser retreated into the darkness, we stood shell-shocked, staring at each other. We paused just for a moment before a passerby handed back Matt's glasses to him from beside the pool of Matt's blood on the ground. "Man your face is fucked up!" he said. "You need help, bro."

We called 9-1-1 again, but not wanting to wait in the parking lot we went to Matt's house, where the routine logistics of trauma began. A police officer arrived and immediately called an ambulance; we spent four hours being treated for broken noses, split lips and foreheads, and concussions at St. Mary's Hospital; we recounted the assault to the police there; we took a cab to Matt's in the harsh early morning light, feeling completely exposed and vulnerable.

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St. Mary's Hospital, where our injuries were treated

One thing we couldn't tell the officers who questioned us at St. Mary's was that our beating had been at the hands of plainclothes cops. Talking to the police, even in the confines of the hospital, terrified us. Only once we got back to Matt's did we realize we had to report what had happened, even if we didn't know quite how.

A 9-1-1 operator transferred us to the 14th District, where the front desk attendant transferred us to IPRA, a set of initials we'd never heard before but would come to loathe over the years that followed.

The Independent Police Review Authority is supposed to be, as its name suggests, an independent agency that handles complaints against Chicago cops. The City Council created IPRA—which replaced the old Office of Professional Standards—in 2007, after news emerged that significant effort had gone into covering up an incident involving a drunk off-duty Chicago cop violently beating a female bartender who dared to stop serving him.

IPRA quickly developed a reputation for dismissing complaints against cops, or  ​taking so long to investigate that the relevant statute of limitations ran out. A tiny percentage of alleged police misconduct cases brought to its attention have been sustained, and even though Chicagoans are by some estimates ​six times more likely to be shot by the cops than New Yorkers, in seven years IPRA has never found a police shooting to be unjustified.

We didn't know any of that when we spent an hour and a half talking on the phone with an IPRA investigator that morning. We started the call with a naive hope that this could all work itself out. In this initial interaction, however, we were repeatedly warned, "You should really think twice about what you're doing before you come in to report this. These are very serious accusations you're making!"

"But they aren't accusations; we're just telling you what happened to us," Matt responded. Every question of ours about the next step in the process of reporting the assault was met with the same warning, verbatim.

The call ended and Matt called his mom to tell her everything. After she overcame her shock, she pushed Matt to go to IPRA's office. "That's bullshit!" she said. "They're trying to intimidate you!"

A 9-1-1 call Matt made shortly after the attack​

So Matt, resolute but extremely fearful, limped down the stairs and cautiously made the short drive from his place to the IPRA office on the 12th floor of a nondescript mid-rise building near Chicago Police Headquarters. The interior, seemingly unchanged since the 80s, only added to the sense that he had entered the city's bureaucratic machine. Matt would give our first official statement while the investigator brought in a couple of uniformed Chicago cops to take photos of Matt's injuries. The wheels had begun to turn. ​

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Matthew Clark today

Greg, meanwhile, went home stitched and concussed to contemplate his plan of action and the list of serious questions suddenly thrust upon him. What would happen to his life if he decided to pursue a case against the police? Given the department's history of corruption and the degree of power it wielded, could he win such a case, and would the cops retaliate against him? If the media started taking an interest and his name were splashed all over TV and the internet, would that affect his future employment chances or romantic prospects? And he still had a lecture course to teach at the University of Chicago. As the hours and days went by, Greg decided, like Matt, to move forward. The words of one of his dissertation advisors proved influential: "If you don't pursue justice here, it will eat away at you forever."

Those first interactions with IPRA gave birth to our fears that there wouldn't be any real investigation into how we ended up bloodied in that parking lot. And we might have remained helpless, scarred by those long minutes of violence, if not for Matt's mom.

As soon as she got off the phone with Matt, she headed to the Seattle airport, flew to Chicago, and took a cab from O'Hare Airport to Matt's place because he wasn't going outdoors again after the unnerving trip to IPRA. She channeled her angst at seeing her oldest son so brutally beaten into her own investigation. That meant searching for attorneys who specialized in police brutality, coaxing Matt back to the scene of the assault, and looking for any security cameras that might have captured the beating. With her help, we persuaded the owners of Arturo's and Lazo's, a nearby Mexican restaurant, to give us copies of their security camera footage from that night. One, a close-up, would prove brutal to watch, but the other was key: It showed the entire assault and aftermath from a bird's-eye view, from which you could see the uniformed officers escorting our attackers off the scene.

In those early days, it was difficult to focus on anything but the fear that gnawed at us, consumed us, and was made worse by what we can only describe as textbook police intimidation.

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Gregory Malandrucco today. Photo by Sarah Jane Rhee

That first week after the beating, we were talking on the front deck at Matt's place when a black SUV with tinted windows pulled up to the curb. The passenger side windows were rolled down, revealing two open laptops on the dash and four plainclothes cops in bulletproof vests who leered at us stone-faced for a very, very long minute before the driver floored it down the street. It left us trembling, which we assumed was its intended purpose.

Another time, an IPRA investigator called Matt and snapped, "You need to stop interfering with the case. What were you doing at the 14th District?" In fact, Matt had never been to the 14th, but two days earlier he'd parked just south of the neighborhood post office, which he then learned was close to the police station. That was how we first learned about the practice of "GPS pinging," a process by which law enforcement can track your location by honing in on your cell phone. In the time before questionable government "observation" practices got mainstream media attention, we became aware that someone might be watching us at all times.

We each had our own issues and coping tactics. The prescribed meds and therapy for PTSD only reduced his anxiety so much, so Matt spent evenings smoking cigarette after cigarette. Greg had trouble falling asleep each night until just after 3:40 AM, the time the attack had ended. For both of us, just leaving our homes was a challenge. Sometimes this would take hours of peering out of windows—and if we saw a cop car nearby, we'd panic. When we did emerge into the wider world, prompted by work or some other unbreakable commitment, we'd remove our cell phone batteries to make sure we weren't being tracked. We carried cameras on us to record any potential police interactions. A once-familiar city now seemed full of risks.

By the end of that first intense week, we'd learned enough about police assaults to know we had to hire attorneys and file a civil rights lawsuit. Doing so would serve several purposes. First, it offered us protection. Once we were in the federal court system, we knew it would be harder for the authorities to intimidate us, as any such action would in theory provoke a federal investigation. It meant that Greg wouldn't have to give an interview with IPRA without a lawyer as Matt had done. Importantly, we were also told it could encourage a formal criminal investigation into the assault by Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez. It also meant that we could put the ordeal into someone else's hands so that we could focus on the work of healing.

We signed a retainer agreement with the law firm of Loevy and Loevy 13 days after the assault. We felt a swelling of confidence when we brought them aboard—L&L had a reputation for pursuing some high-profile police misconduct cases in city history, including those of  ​Juan Johnson, who spent 11 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of murder, and ​Joseph Regaldo, who was beaten into a coma by Chicago cops.

With the videos in our hands and legal representation at our backs we were optimistic about bringing our attackers to justice. Given the facts at hand and the sheer volume of evidence, it was the logical outcome, we told ourselves.

Matthew Clark shortly after the attack. Photo courtesy of the author

Our story is grim, but it's not unique. In the weeks after our assault, our injuries still fresh and visible, we encountered people who'd ask about our bruises and cuts. When we told them our story, a surprising number replied with personal and deeply troubling stories of their own about police-related violence they or those close to them had experienced. Our fear of Chicago's finest was all too common, our story tragically mundane. 

Our story got more attention than the vast majority of brutality cases, however, when our lawsuit against the city, our assailants, and the uniformed cops on the scene that night was filed on March 23, 2010.

CBS was the first media outlet to contact our attorneys for an interview. NBC, ABC, FOX, and Univision followed, along with newspapers, radio stations, and websites of all sorts. We have to guess the attention came from us having a video of the assault and, perhaps more importantly, being white academic types instead of the minorities who are Chicago's typical victims of police brutality.

Greg not long after the assault. Photo courtesy of the author

We had assurances from our attorneys that filing the suit was a nonevent that likely wouldn't register at all with the media, so Greg was visiting his parents in New Jersey for spring break the week our lawsuit was filed in federal court. That meant that when the media swooped in, Matt went to L&L's offices alone to meet the CBS team, get interviewed, and then do the apparently obligatory walk down a hallway with one of the lawyers, pretending to talk, so they'd have a visual for the broadcast. It was surreal, but we thought the coverage could lead to identifying our attackers and also pressure the city into taking action against the uniformed officers.

That night coverage aired of Mayor Richard M. Daley being asked about our case in a mayoral press conference, while television reporters showered Chicago police chief Jody Weis with similar questions. Inside Edition, the nationally syndicated tabloid news program, managed to track Greg down at his parents' house that week, leaving two voicemails requesting an interview. Greg didn't return the calls; he was exhausted by the constant stress of the last six weeks.

Despite all the attention, our case languished in the courts, and it took nine months just to fend off the city's motion to dismiss the lawsuit. Disappointed by the lack of progress and intimidated by the police, we retreated from everything—the media, the case, and the investigation. It was easier, when possible, to let our attorneys handle the legal aspect and focus on getting through our PTSD and returning to how we lived our lives before the assault.

That healing process was interrupted pretty regularly, however, by circumstances that required us to think and talk about the violence we'd endured. In December 2010, Greg was asked to provide a statement to IPRA, and Matt was asked to provide a second statement to the agency a month later. We handed over phone and medical records along with numerous emails and Facebook postings, though the uniformed officers would never provide anything other than phone records, the content of which we're not permitted to discuss.

Soon our every spare hour was spent reviewing legal documents and brainstorming on ways to ID our attackers.

Until that winter we were in a daze of sorts, trusting that our lawyers and the system would eventually do right by us. But around the time of Greg's IPRA statement we both snapped awake and realized we needed to be completely engaged if we wanted justice—a concept that we were still naïve enough to believe in at that point. A judge and jury would eventually hear us out, we assumed, and once that happened there would be no way for them not to be swayed by the facts, by the force of the evidence we already had and would continue to accumulate.

Soon our every spare hour was spent reviewing legal documents and brainstorming on ways to ID our attackers. One night we came to the conclusion that we needed the public's help. IPRA and the cops weren't helping, but somebody out there might know something, and might be willing to aid us, if provided with the right incentive. Most victims of police violence don't have the financial means to offer that incentive, but we did, and we needed to do everything possible to enlist the public's support.

We hired a public relations professional to help plan a press conference to announce the launch of a 1-800 number that would serve as a tip line and a $10,000 reward for information that would lead to positively identifying our attackers. This meant a lot of work, but we felt revitalized, though we remained cautious when outside our houses, never knowing if we could be recognized or targeted in some way. Given the publicity we'd experienced after we first filed the lawsuit, we felt our case wasn't just about us—it had become a battle to expose the city's corruption, and with a renewed sense of purpose we became less concerned with our safety or our personal lives.

On March 21, 2011, two days before the press conference, CBS Chicago did a piece on the one-year anniversary of our lawsuit, a story made possible by our connected PR person. We released new video clips, audio from the 9-1-1 calls, and gave interviews about the assault and ordeal. We emphasized that we were searching for the men who beat us. CBS reported that we'd soon be holding a press conference to try to get the public's help in identifying them.

While we were smart enough to know how to get our story out there, we had no clue how to control the spin.

When the day finally came, news vans lined the block around our attorneys' office; a couple of plainclothes detectives stared us down from their Crown Vic. We sat at a long table with our lawyers and faced the television cameras from all the major Chicago TV stations as we spoke about our case and our search for information. It was nerve-racking to put ourselves out there to the press and the city once again.

While we were smart enough to know how to get our story out there, we had no clue how to control the spin. By the time the four o'clock news came on, the incident had mostly begun to be depicted as a fight between two parties rather than an unprovoked attack. And except for Univision, none of the networks showed viewers the tip line number or our Facebook page URL, narrowing our ability to get the public's help in identifying our police attackers.

Nonetheless, a couple of weeks after our press conference a man called the law firm offering the names and photos of our attackers in exchange for the reward.

"Deep Throat," as we'd later nickname the caller, spoke in clipped sentences with an obviously fake Southern drawl. He told us he needed to remain anonymous and couldn't stay on the phone for long because he was worried about it being tapped. We began intently planning how to make the money drop to our source—not that it ended up mattering. After calling our lawyers sporadically for a month, Deep Throat claimed he'd provide a photo of one of our attackers the next day. We never heard from him again.

Another time the tip line received a voicemail from an Arturo's waitress who claimed that the restaurant's management knew the guys who attacked us but instructed the staff not to say anything—but she apparently got spooked and moved out of the country before our attorneys could reach her.

A call the authors received on the tip line

That was a common theme: We'd get what appeared to be a lead only to have it disintegrate in our hands. We had videos, but that was of little use without the names of our attackers or the close-up images that the squad car dashcam would have provided—had it not been "turned off or malfunctioning" as the city alleged.

Despite all our struggles, however, a year after we'd been brutally beaten we were no closer to figuring out the identities of our attackers. We were just going further down the rabbit hole.

CHAPTER 3: Grinding Through the Machine

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The courthouse where our case was decided

By the first week of April, our story had fallen out of the media cycle completely. Yet we still believed we would find the perpetrators of the assault. There were times we felt we'd truly made progress, like when the woman in the trio who had ordered Matt to "quit resisting" turned out to be the off-duty partner of the three uniformed officers who showed up on the scene.

Not a day went by where we didn't think about the case, or talk about it with our families and close friends. There were so many conversations, so many hopes of identifying the cops who beat us, and so many notes we prepped for court in an effort to catalogue every twist in logic, every blurring of fact the city used to defend itself. We spent almost all of a cool gray Memorial Day weekend in 2011 indoors analyzing the files IPRA had turned over to us. It was a depressing period. The deeper we looked, the more we began to understand how far the city would go to make a single case of police brutality go away.

We should note here that there are things we can't talk about as a result of the lawsuit. We've been silenced by the city with regard to what we can say in this account, though we fought to have that limited to the IPRA files. The pages upon pages of uniformed officers' depositions however aren't subject to that silence.

When Brian Postrelko, Michael Torres, and Nelson Crespo—the uniformed cops who let our assailants walk away—had been deposed in January 2011, we didn't attend the proceedings; seeing them, being closed off in a room with them, was something neither of us could get our heads around, even a year after the assault. But in June and July of 2011 we reviewed over 20 hours of deposition transcripts and began to attend other depositions.

Perhaps it's sad that we believed our only shot at justice was to take over the investigation into our own assault, but we were beside ourselves as we stared at the stonewalling and contradictions. For example, Postrelko stated under oath that we were ten feet away from our assailants and yelling at them when he and the other uniformed officers left the scene—which is completely contradicted by the full-length video of the assault that shows the uniformed officers walking them to their car.

While we prepared our notes on this and other deceptions, our lawsuit was proceeding at a snail's pace; after 18 months, neither IPRA, the Chicago Police, nor the state's attorney's office was interested in pursuing criminal charges. Having lost faith early on in IPRA's resolve to bring our attackers to justice, and now doubting the mechanics of the legal system, we went to the FBI. We walked into the agency's local headquarters against the advice of our attorneys, figuring that if local law enforcement was turning a blind eye, maybe the Feds would care.

After a formal check-in process we were sitting across a pane of bulletproof glass from a sharply dressed FBI agent, relating our story and outlining the evidence we'd assembled showing we'd been beaten by cops and that the police were lying to cover for our attackers. The agent told us he remembered our case from the news and expressed surprise that the Bureau hadn't reached out to us before. He thought our story was compelling and said there was a "95 percent chance the FBI would take up an investigation" to pursue the officers who beat us. He refused to take the documents we'd brought with us, as he would connect with the  ​color of law violations group, who'd follow up with us. If we didn't hear from that division, he said, we should call him back.

We never did hear back from him or anyone else, though e continued to follow up for six months to no avail. More energy wasted, more dead ends.

Greg now understood, viscerally, what it meant when you found yourself on the wrong side of the power structure.

Unsurprisingly, the case began to seep into our everyday lives. Greg was in Chicago for the summer, living in Hyde Park and teaching, and he began to study the history of policing and the sociology of police violence. The ordeal made him want to know more about the force we were dealing with, and he found himself drawn into an area of research that was intensely personal. If some upper-middle-class academics tended to talk about the power of the state on an intellectual level, Greg now understood, viscerally, what it meant when you found yourself on the wrong side of the power structure.

As Greg dug deeper into the historical context of their assault, Matt focused more intently on the investigation and every aspect of the legal proceedings, trying to resurrect the fading hope that there would be justice at the end of this ordeal. His efforts only led to hurt, sometimes in sad ways and sometimes in comical ones. There was a period where Matt firmly believed all cops were corrupt, which led to a horrible fight with his mother and sister. He also tried to get tattoo of a mantra that had been running through his head—"You Tried to Kill My Spirit"—but that attempt at empowerment was somewhat muted by the alternate spelling of "spirit" the artist went with. When you see "Sprit" on your body you can laugh or cry. That time, we laughed.

Moments of levity never lasted long. In September 2011, we were deposed individually by the city's lawyers in a staid corporate boardroom in a downtown high-rise. The team of attorneys facing us across the table—suited, cocky, aggressive—perfectly embodied the kind of institutional authority we had to overcome. They were joined by the uniformed cops, who were there in civilian clothes watching silently—presumably paid by tax dollars for time spent in legal proceedings—for the entire two-day affair.

Depositions are hours-long ordeals with question after question solely designed to intimidate, to make the victims look bad or react strongly to what's being said. There's no judge and you have to answer nearly everything they throw at you. It's exhausting, even when there aren't cops who contributed to the worst experience of your life sitting in the same room.

Officer Torres wore aviator sunglasses the whole time, while Postrelko sat two feet away from Matt during his deposition, staring him down with a perverse look on his face. Greg, watching the scene unfold, pressed our attorneys to demand that the officer move, which sparked a debate that ended with the cop finally retreating. Their apparent attempts at intimidation could have been shrugged off as childish if they hadn't distressed us so much.

Despite all this, we got through our depositions and we started to get some traction from the depositions that followed our own. The officer who came to Matt's home after his last 9-1-1 call readily admitted he decided to summon an ambulance as soon as he saw Matt's injuries and that he believed an assault had been committed and a report should be written, which went against the claims of the uniformed officer defendants. The lead EMT who transported us to the hospital for treatment testified that both of us were clear, coherent, and not visibly impaired by alcohol—contradicting the officers' story that we were a couple of "kids out partying." He also revealed that he didn't report our statement that we were beaten by cops out of fear for getting involved in a police assault. In another deposition, an IPRA investigator on the case testified that our assailants could be seen on video utilizing very specific tactical moves she had seen taught in the Chicago Police Academy.

Despite all the evidence that confirmed our account of events, fall moved to winter and then spring without any true progress. We trudged on.

By April 2012, we'd established a clear division of labor: Matt pushed our attorneys to deliver on the intensity they'd promised our case, while Greg began to organize with human rights activists in Chicago and elsewhere to advocate for the passage of laws that would hold police officers accountable for their crimes. At that point, we were more or less done with the idea of "justice"—our assailants wouldn't suffer for what they did, the uniformed officers likely wouldn't be punished for what they did and didn't do.

And the roller coaster sent us up again. On July 11, 2012, the judge ruled we could sue the city under Monell claims, meaning that the city itself could be sued for employing a policy and practice that promoted police violence. To date the lawsuit had been focused on holding the city accountable for the wrongdoing of the men who beat us and the actions of the uniformed cops who arrived on the scene. This ruling, our attorneys explained, was crucial—it meant the actions of the officers could be elevated to the level of an institutionally supported set of behaviors.

It was an important win in an ordeal that provided few tangible victories. That evening, we were reflecting on the potential ramifications of the ruling, hanging out in Matt's condo watching TV when we heard what sounded like a gunshot. Greg immediately hit the deck. Our hearts were racing. Something slammed into the third-floor window just above where we were sitting. What the fuck was happening?

After a minute, Matt went outside to assess the damage. It was dark, but he could tell the window was wrecked: A web of cracks covered the entire pane, centered around a tiny round hole a half-inch across. Some kind of projectile had clearly been fired at it.

If this had happened to us before the attack, we'd have called 9-1-1 immediately, but summoning the cops seemed like a risky proposition. What if the cops themselves were behind this? Who would respond to the call? We did nothing, feeling robbed of the security that law enforcement is supposed to provide. The next day our attorneys offered to come with us to file a police report, but in the end, we decided not to—we had our eyes on much more important things.

At times like that, the apparent intimidation we experienced seemed too perfectly timed to be coincidental. But that incident, unlike some of the others, inspired defiance in us. Matt decided to leave the shattered window on display for a couple of weeks before getting it fixed. One day he saw two uniformed cops in a CPD SUV driving by the house, pointing at the window. When the driver looked up, he saw Matt on his front porch and quickly pulled his arm back inside the car and turned his head away.

Matt, at least, looked at events like these as "plausibly deniable"—he was uncomfortable with the idea that the cops were targeting us. For Greg, however, the feeling that we were being watched only increased as he told our story and spoke out against police brutality at rallies and protests all over Chicago, where he met other victims who had been harassed and intimidated by the police after pursuing legal recourse.

By the time winter had set in, we were working together again, combing through stacks of federal civil rights lawsuits, motions, and rulings against the Chicago police for beatings and assaults. We reviewed every part of our case and prepped for our pending trial, tentatively set for March 2013.

Despite our focus on forcing the city to respond to our charges before a judge and jury, our attorneys began pushing us hard to settle out of court. They forcibly persuaded us to dial back the settlement request we'd earlier been required by law to make. Initially we'd set that amount close to $1 million for the two of us, a number we believed the city would never accept, thus forcing a trial. But the head lawyer of the firm stepped in and laid into us repeatedly, telling us we had to make a "reasonable offer" to the city. We finally agreed to sign a new settlement proposal of $185,000, but only because our attorney promised the city would never settle with us for one penny, let alone nearly 200 grand.

If they didn't want an ugly public courtroom brawl, well, we did.

All this coincided with the three-year anniversary of our assault, and the beginning of the system's final and most effective push to silence us.

Just weeks before we were supposed to go to trial in March 2013, the City of Chicago responded to our $185,000 settlement offer. Our attorneys said the government was worried about our proven ability to attract media attention. On the heels of several other high-profile police violence cases, the people in charge didn't look forward to a spring of headlines about cops participating in an assault and abandoning two men who'd been beaten to a pulp in a parking lot. (In November 2012, a jury ruled against both the city and an individual off-duty cop in the 2007 beating of bartender  ​Karolina Obrycka and she was awarded $850,000 in damages.)

We scoffed at the city's attempted resurrection of the expired offer without hesitation. If they didn't want an ugly public courtroom brawl, well, we did. It was now the only opportunity we saw to affect any sort of change with Chicago Police and the system that supports their violence.

Two days after we turned down the settlement, the federal judge delivered his summary judgment. Cases like ours go through two major hurdles before they ever see a courtroom with a jury in it. The first is defending against the city's "motion to dismiss," which happens very early on in the case. When we faced that challenge, we were shocked and elated with what the judge wrote in his November 17, 2010 denial of the motion:

It is plausible, based on the facts alleged in the amended complaint, that the Uniformed Officers discovered either before arriving or upon arriving at the scene that the Plainclothes Officers were police officers. It is not plausible that the Uniformed Officers would arrive at the scene of an altercation, proceed to participate with unknown private citizens in the beating of other private citizens, and then allow the private citizens to leave. Thus, based on the above, Plaintiffs have stated valid claims for failure to intervene, and we deny the motion to dismiss the claims for failure to intervene.

The judge had described the scene in this first statement just as the video showed it. During the summary judgment stage—nearly two and a half years later in February 2013—in which a case can be decided in part or in full by the judge, he reversed his previous assessment, stating instead that: "It is undisputed that Individual Moving Defendants did not arrive on the scene until after the altercation between Plaintiffs and Plainclothes Officers had ended," a description that is clearly refuted by video evidence.

With that sudden reversal, we watched our case crumble. This judge was now telling us the uniformed cops basically had done nothing wrong. If you're being beaten and bleeding, they don't need to get you medical help or file a report. Those points could never be revisited. Period. We only had the off-duty female officer left in the case—who Greg had identified—and Monell claims linked to her.

We had lengthy conversations with our attorneys in which they relayed the city attorneys' threats to countersue the two of us personally for the city's legal fees if we were to lose the trial—which could amount to six to seven figures. Our attorneys had their own "financial considerations," telling us they would re-negotiate our representation agreement ahead of any appeal, and they would require heavy up-front fees for their efforts. If we kept fighting, there was a real chance we'd be left with nothing to show for it—no justice, no closure, just debt.

We were forced to settle.

In the end, we each got about $45,000. That's $45,000 after three-plus years of fear and suffering, $45,000 for injuries both physical and mental inflicted upon us by city servants. The uniformed cops, meanwhile, were never charged with anything. As far as we know, they're still cops. And we never found out the identity of our attackers; to this day the city and the police department have never admitted that they're cops.

The city attorneys had one more insult for us, however. During our final interaction with them—the only time we were together in a courtroom—they insisted on including language in the settlement that would characterize the payment as taxable. While case law is clear in defining settlements in injury cases like ours as generally nontaxable, it is apparently routine for the city to insist otherwise. The opposing lawyers wouldn't budge, but their vindictiveness and pettiness was so obvious that the judge reprimanded the city: "So, you mean we're here because you're trying to force them to pay taxes on this settlement money? Get out of my court and adjust the language in the agreement." It was one of our few victories in our dealings with a completely broken system.

We now recognize that the government's ability to silence victims is a skill that's been honed through years of experience.

From the moment we walked into that parking lot four and a half years ago, the city machinery was set in motion to conceal the truth and make us go away. We don't mistake this settlement for fulfillment or cause for a celebration. Payouts like the one we got are empty victories and everyone close to us knew it was nothing more than the final insult we were forced to accept.

We now recognize that the government's ability to silence victims is a skill that's been honed through years of experience. The decks are stacked—heavily—on the side of the police, who can create the official record of events through their reports. Coupled with their legal authority, this instills a powerful sense of fear in victims, who are often dissuaded, as we were, to file complaints. Meanwhile, police accountability institutions, like IPRA, are often staffed by former cops who are hired and paid by the people who have every incentive to avoid lawsuits like ours. A slow official response makes it easy for the public to forget about incidents of police brutality, sluggish and ineffective complaint protocols make it difficult for incidents to become cases, and the common practice of essentially forcing people to take payouts makes it impossible for cases to effect change in the legal system.

Even if a case makes it into court, the odds continue to be stacked against the victims of police brutality. This can be seen in the biases of judges and other decision-makers in the justice system, or in the gross warping of normal legal processes, as we recently saw in Ferguson. The net effect is that it's virtually impossible to effect lasting change through the courts.

Our case didn't result in any lasting legal change either. We had one final victory, however: We got the city to delete their usual full gag order contingency clause, which would have barred us from discussing the case publicly in any form with anyone. This has allowed us to speak out about what happened to us. It's allowed us to regain some dignity by staying vocal and trying to add to the ongoing dialogue about police violence and the broken justice system in this city and in the country. It's allowed us to write this piece, and share our story. We hope it helps, somehow. All we can hope for is that the victims will continue to refuse to be silenced, that the system will change, and that what happened to us won't happen again.

Gregory Malandrucco is a PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago, an historian, and a human rights activist who has advocated for victims of state violence at the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

Matthew Clark is working in the life sciences industry, having received a PhD in Cancer Biology from the University of Chicago in 2006.

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​ Photos by Fryd​ Frydendahl

Since 1885,​ ​the Ca​mera Club of New York has been helping young photographers find their bearings in an ever-shifting art world. It's one of the city's oldest nonprofit arts organizations and boasts a pedigree befitting that status: ​Alfred Stieglitz helped put it together, and early members include the pioneering art photographer Paul Strand, who joined at age 17. Its more recent members include VICE contributors ​Pierr​e Le H​ors and ​Allen​ Frame (CCNY's current president), as well as ​yo​urs truly. When the lease on the club's Midtown space ran out last summer, it was time to come up with a new location, which would prove to be tricky: The old space included color as well as black-and-white darkroom facilities, in addition to a shooting studio and a small gallery. This kind of setup was no longer practical, and the Camera Club needed to modernize to remain in step with current trends in photography. So they packed everything up and moved to Chinatown, landing in a storefront on Baxter Street. Although the new spot lacks a traditional wet darkroom, members will have access to facilities at the International Center of Photography for all their printing needs. The gallery in the new space is much more beautiful than the old one, and its location near all new downtown galleries of contemporary art couldn't be more perfect given CCNY's focus on emerging photography.

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Baxter Street's first show fittingly focuses on family and on days to come. Mon's Future, an exhibition by ​Fryd Fr​ydendahl curated by Megumi Tomomitsu, imagines who a baby girl might grow up to become, and who she might fall in love with. We talked to Fryd, a graduate of the Morten Bo's acclaimed alternative Copenhagen photo school ​Fatamorg​ana, to find out more about her unusual way of predicting the future.

VICE: This is first show you've had at the Camera Club?
​Fryd Fydendahl: Yes. It's co-curated by my friend Megumi, who I went to the International Center for Photography with. To do a show at Camera Club, you also need to have a curator; that's a part of the way Camera Club does the shows. I didn't want to curate it myself because I just had two shows in Copenhagen—one that I curated, and another solo show. Megumi and I have a production company together called "​Birds Production," and we've been working together for like six years. She just had a baby and is not producing art right now, or not that much anyway. So thought this was a good way to keep our conversation going. The show is sort of about her new baby, and how that's changing our art practices.

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The production company is for commercial work?
​We do artsy music videos, and very conceptual work. It's fun, and it's always been a relief next to our own more heavyweight sort of "up your own ass" photography. It's lighter and fun.

I have a lot of friends who aren't into photography, but the more you get involved yourself, the easier it is to hang out with people who are also involved in the same thing you are, because all you want to do is work, right? So mixing friendship with work is perfect.

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So that's how it started. Megumi just had a Japanese American baby, she's Japanese, I'm Danish... We've been speculating a lot about how Mon is going to grow up in this place, how it's going to be different. So that was how it started, the conversation about doing all these portraits of different women. And then there are three portraits of boys, who are her potential future boyfriends.

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So the people in the show are women who Mon might become, and also her potential boyfriends.
​Yes. And it's supposed to be light and have humor to it—because the way I do portraiture, it can be very heavy. It's usually strained women in awkward poses.

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You also photograph your family.
​I work a lot with my family, and that comes from a really heavy story, too. So I think it's important sometimes to look at things in more of a light way. Photographers have an inclination to work from a place of trauma.

When you go to school, when you start figuring out how to work with yourself and the narrative coming from who you are, in personal photography and most art photography, that's where our jump-off point is: ourselves. When I teach, that's the way I "get" to people as well. It's the way of like, What happened when you were five in the kitchen with the... Someone died in my case. Several people died. And that's like, the trauma. And at some point you've worked with it enough to understand it and to deal with it in a way that's not so heavy all the time. I do think interesting work has a layer I don't understand. A surreal layer or a melancholy layer. It has to have more than just what's on the surface, you have to want to scratch the surface. And that's often something that has hurt in some way or another, right? But it's so exhausting to keep only nurturing those things. It's never going to get us anywhere, and I think it's redundant, and done to the point of exhaustion, too.

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I do a lot of video work that is about this slapstick, deadpan comedy thing. All the stories that these characters I do come from are always kind of sad. Humor is sad. It is that place. I was calling it the trauma pool the other day. You know, you can just dip into the trauma pool. Taking that trauma and using it in a productive way is important I think.

But this is a hopeful show.
​I am that person, but I'm also the person who is really excited that my partner in crime just had a beautiful baby, and it's bringing us a lot of laughter and conversations we've never had before. I have a Danish accent, Megumi has a Japanese accent, but this kid is going to grow up and is going to be speaking American English to us. Which is terrifying in a way, because that's so far from who we are.

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The big photograph in the show is Megumi. She needed to be in there. We have an intern in our company right now, a Danish girl, and there's a photo of her, too. We also went on a road trip and photographed strangers. Which was really interesting, because we did it with Mon on Megumi's belly and her husband and our intern in this little car filled with madness—we went to New Jersey and Staten Island and were like, "Hey can we photograph you, here's the story."

One of the photos in the show is my nephew. I do a project ab​out my nephews. Sort of like how the portrait of Megumi is in there—instead of doing a self-portrait, I wanted him in there. It's a representation of what I come from to give to Mon.

It's kind of a family affair.
​So many people who move to New York are so far away from where they come from, you know.

That's what the show Friends was about.
​Yes, Megumi and Mon are like my couch at the coffee shop.

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Some of the photos in the show are repeated with a gradient overlay. What's up with that? 
​I photograph analogue, often on old expired 120- or 35-mm film. That's what I've been doing for a long time. I just had a show in Denmark called Salad Days, which was sort of the same kind of sculptural portraits of young, nervous anxious beauties. I needed to do something to differentiate this show from that in my head. When I did the flyer for this show I used a gradient, and it gave it this feel of separating it from reality. We don't know what Mon's future will be like. We can only guess or make assumptions on her behalf. So I felt like the gradients give it a fantasy layer. It's sort of the color from a manga comic. I'm really excited about them. I think I have to do more.

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How has the Camera Club helped you?
​It differs from a lot of other communities in the photography world, because in a lot of the other communities I've been a part of there's also business involved. If you have a show at a gallery, it's also a business relationship. It might evolve to something else, but there will always be that layer of them wanting something from you. That's the thing with Camera Club as well, because it needs to live and breathe and function, but it's not about money, it's about keeping a community. Like in any small club there's chit-chatting and different groupings in the corners, but overall people love what it is. You know the same crew will be around, and it's going to be awesome.

I recently co-organized the Camera Club's Zine fair at Foley Gallery. It was my first time doing something for Camera Club like that. It was exciting because it was a new space, and it was a temporary space, but it still really felt like the Camera Club spirit. For me that was like, Ah, things are going to be alright. There's always a little anxiety when things change. But if you can have a Camera Club event at whatever gallery and make it feel like Camera Club, I feel like that's a good thing.

I also feel like this is a great first show to have in this new space. It's kind of about the future, and it's about a family, which I think the Camera Club is kind of a weird family.
​Yeah, like a put-together family. When you go to an opening, there are these features there, that always make me really happy. People are always helping each other. It's not selfish.

It's so not competitive! I don't know about Denmark, but photography in New York is a lot of people trying to step on each other to get jobs and shows, and I've never gotten that feeling from the Camera Club. Everyone wants to help each other.

It's genuine. Even after the show on Thursday, I went out with some people from the Camera Club, and I thought, Wow this is way better than some gallery dinner, where I have to network and talk bullshit. It's just fun, and people are happy because you're happy. It's like this weird ecstasy on your behalf.

Catch Fryd Frydendahl's exhibition Mon's Future, curated by Megumi Tomomitsu at the new ​Camera​ Club of New York before it closes December 2. 

See more of Fryd's work on her ​we​bsite.

Follow Matthew Leifheit on ​Twitter.

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Photo via ​Wikimedia Com​mons

As a football player, Chris Kluwe was a punter, not what you would call the NFL's most contact-prone position. But in his post-NFL life, he has been a beast, continuing his work as an activist for everyone from LGBT people to the victims of gamergate. 

Kluwe has always shot from the hip. As a punter for the Minnesota Vikings, ​he called out star players Peyton Manning and Drew Brees for their "greed" during the 2011 NFL lockout. The next year, he became a hero to LGBT America for his outspoken support for same-sex marriage that included a legendary open letter to a Maryland state legislator, assuring the official that allowing gays and lesbians the right to marry would not ​"magically turn you into a lustful cockmonster." It's the sort of advocacy that gets you canned by a controversy-averse NFL franchise, or so Kluwe contended in ​a Deadspin post from early this year titled "I Was An NFL Player Until I Was Fired By Two Cowards and a Bigot." In the article, he alleged, among other things, that Vikings special teams coordinator Mike Priefer once joked about how you should "nuke" gay people.  

Since then, Kluwe, a longtime gamer, has stepped into the hornet's nest of gamergate, defending women who've been subjected to ugly threats during the ongoing war. He recently took to ​the Cauldron to excoriate the "patently obvious white privilege and poorly disguised misogyny" of gamergaters, joking that they perceive themselves as "little Anne Franks, hiding in their basements from the PC Nazis and Social Justice Warrior brigades." 

Still, Kluwe's own politically incorrect remarks have sparked their own slew of controversy. During ​his protracted departure from the Vikings this summer, the team's investigation summary revealed how Kluwe once made a locker room joke making light of the sexual abuse scandal at Penn State. If that revelation was meant to undercut Kluwe or silence his outspokenness, it hasn't.

As the gamergate saga continued to unfold, I spoke to Kluwe about gamergaters, his decision to speak out against NFL figures, and the controversy surrounding him. 

VICE: Are you surprised that gamergate is still happening?
Chris Kluwe: Sadly, I'm not really that surprised, because I've been a gamer for a long time, and I've seen the message board flame wars that have erupted from year to year—and this is basically an extended version of a message board flame war. You have one group of people who think that they get to do whatever they want, simply because they want to do it, and then you have everyone else saying, "No, you can't do that, because it's harmful to people." And that's where the friction comes in.

In your Cauldron piece, you described gamergaters as mostly "angsty teenage Caucasian men." They claim they're not misogynists—they say they're only interested in ethical gaming journalism and there are plenty of women on their side. Are there actually women supporting them?
I think there are women and people of color on the gamergate side, but I don't think it's nearly as many as gamergate thinks there is, and I think that in the end it doesn't really matter what your idea is, if [you're] going about it the wrong way.

Do you think this is just one turf battle in a larger war over real gender equality?
Basically for the entirety of human history, it's been a patriarchal society. It's been men who've have had the power. [With the rise of the internet], we're seeing that a lot more people are understanding that there are these power structures still in place that primarily benefit men, generally white men. And they're saying, "No, this isn't right. If we want to live in a free and open society, then everyone has to have the same chance." 

I think that a lot of the backlash that you're seeing to that is from men's rights activists—the "manosphere" is I guess their online term for it. It's basically a bunch of people who are afraid that if they let the girls into the clubhouse then somehow there's going to be less for them. It's almost like it's this gut reaction of "No, we can't have women involved, because what happens if a woman takes a job that was meant for me, because I'm a man?" And when you step back and look at it, that means that you're OK with a woman not having a job simply because she's a woman, and that's not right.

Obviously domestic violence has been going on for a long time before it was captured on an elevator security camera, and the Ray Rice story coming out won't end it forever, but do you think the video footage has had an important effect on the league?
Obviously it's something important that needed to happen—not Janay Rice getting hit because that is horrible. Humans beings are very visually learning. We tend to pick things up much faster if we see it—if we see an example—so I think for a lot of people, when they heard that Ray Rice hit his wife, in the abstract they were like, "Oh yeah, that's bad but how bad could it be?" But then when the video came out, and people actually saw it, now they have a concrete example in their minds.

On Twitter, ​you have urged Redskins owner Dan Snyder to change the team's name. ​Snyder maintains there are many Native Americans who love his team. Is that a bit like gamergaters saying women support them?
For a long time, guys played video games that girls weren't generally interested in, and it wasn't generally a very safe place for women. But then people realized, "Hey, that's not right, it should change." And same thing with Dan Snyder. It's yeah, for a long time, this is what we've called the team and people were OK with it. Yeah, there were some people that were not OK with it, but they were just a small voice. And now more people are realizing that this is not OK, and therefore it needs to change. It doesn't matter how long something has been going on if it is ethically corrupt, or if it is not conducive to good human, societal relationships. Time is not a defense.

At the same time, you've been criticized for offending people. Over the summer, a story came out about you wearing underwear that had a hole in it in the Vikings locker room. You pretended you were one of the Penn State sexual abuse victims. What was the deal with that?
Obviously that was in poor taste on my part, but the other thing is, the relationship I had with my strength coach was like Cards Against Humanity with warped senses of humor. We would make fun of each other, we would make jokes at each other, and to me that was one of those instances where it was like, "OK, he's a very staunch Penn State supporter, one of those guys who's like, 'Penn State can do no wrong. What are they doing to Joe Pa?'" And I'm like, that kind of blind fanaticism is never good, no matter who it's directed at. And so yeah, this was a horrible thing that happened, and turning a blind eye to it isn't going to help anyone.

A lot of people hate when celebrities use their platform to talk about something bigger than themselves. Why do you think there are some people who just want entertainers to, as someone famously told the Dixie Chicks, "Shut up and sing?"
I think the underlying problem is the growing corporatization of our society and culture in general. Everyone wants to make the most money possible from the largest audience possible, and that means being bland and inoffensive and never possibly saying something that could upset someone. I think that's both a combination of unfettered capitalism and the rise of the internet. It's much easier to see someone saying something unpopular, which is great from an activist standpoint, but businesses are terrified of that, because it becomes very easy for them to be linked with one of their employees, or someone they are involved with, saying something.

Follow John on ​Twitter.

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Photo courtesy  ​Texas Defender Service

​ Scott Panetti claims Selena Gomez is his daughter and that prison guards implanted a listening device in his tooth. He also believes his imminent execution is part of a conspiracy between the state of Texas and the devil to stop him from preaching the gospel on death row. 

Texas officials, for their part, argue that Panetti—who murdered his in-laws in 1992—is mentally competent to be executed on Wednesday. 

At this point, it's tough to say who's more delusional.

What is plenty evident is that Texas has gone to great lengths and cut countless corners in an effort to kill a man with a long and well-documented history of paranoid schizophrenia, which was first diagnose​d by doctors in an army hospital in 1978. Over the next 14 years, Panetti would be hospitalized over a dozen times and diagnosed and re-diagnosed with schizophrenia and other menta​l disorders.

While Texas refuses to acknowledge Panetti's condition, a diverse group of individuals and organizations—beyond the usual prison reform suspects—are calling for clemency. These in​cl​ude 55 prominent Evangelical Christians and seven retired and active bishops from the United Methodist Church; former US Representative Ron​ Paul; former Texas Governor Mark White; ten Texas state legislators; nearly 30 former prosecutors and US attorneys general; Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation, the American Bar Association, and the European Union.

Michael Per​lin, a lawyer, law professor, and world-renowned expert on mental health and the law, didn't mince words when asked about Panetti.

"The Panetti case is as shameful a stain on our legal system as I have observed in my 43-plus years as a lawyer," he told me. "There is no question as to the profundity of his mental illness and similarly no question that his execution mocks the notion that due process is truly available to all in the criminal justice system."

The legal issue at hand is Panetti's ability to understand and thus undergo his execution. But the only reason he faces execution in the first place is because Texas failed to acknowledge his mental incompetence at the time of the crime and subsequent trial.

In 1986, Panetti hallucinate​d that he killed the devil—who had apparently entered his home—and washed the walls of his house to remove the "blood." On another occasion, he buried his furniture and valuables because the devil was supposedly hiding in them. As his co-counsel Kathryn K​ase told me, "It really can't be seriously disputed that he has schizophrenia. I assure you the Army doesn't go around casually diagnosing people with serious mental illnesses."

Nor does the Social Security Administration, which determined in 1986 that Panetti's schizophrenia was so debilitating it entitled him to disability benefits.

Like many people with psychotic illnesses, Panetti has not always taken his prescribed medications. In 1992, his mental health was so bad that his wife, Sonja Alvarado, took their three-year-old daughter and moved in with her parents. Alvarado obtained a restraining o​rder against her husband but was unable to have him committed. She asked the authorities to take away his guns, but they claimed they lacked the right to do so. As Kase told me, "We wouldn't be here if the authorities had only taken away his guns. The authorities knew that he was mentally ill and that he had cycled in and out of the hospitals."

A few days after the police refused to confiscate his weapons, Panetti  awoke before dawn, shaved his head, leaving strange patches of hair, and drove to the home of his wife's parents. Off his meds, and in front of his wife and daughter, Panetti fatally shot his in-laws at close range. He then put his wife and daughter in a bunkhouse he'd been living in. When police surrounded it, Panetti released his family unharmed, washed the blood off himself, changed into a suit, and surrendered.

It's hard to keep track of the number of times the court system failed Panetti, but let's start with his 1994 pre-trial competency hearing. Under Texas law, a person is considered co​mpetent to stand trial if he or she has "sufficient present ability to consult with his or her lawyer with a reasonable degree or rational understanding," and "a rational, as well as a factual, understanding of the proceedings against him or her."

Here's where Panetti's incompetence should have been a slam-dunk. One of Panetti's lawyers testi​fied that his delusional behavior made any useful communication between them impossible. Psychiatrists called by both the defense and the prosecution agreed that he was schizophrenic. And yet, somehow, the doctor​ testifying for the state was able to claim that Panetti was competent. And the jury agreed.

Panetti kicked off his trial by firing his lawyers, whom he believed to be conspiring against him. His sister said in an affidavit that her brother "had a delusion that only an insane person could prove insanity." The judge allowed the man to represent himself even as he entered a not guilty by reason of insanity plea.

He certainly looked the part in his purple cowboy suit, bandana, cowboy boots, and spurs. Panetti called over 200 witness​es, including Jesus Christ, the Pope, and JFK. He aimed an imaginary rifle at the jury and explained that he had killed his in-laws while under the control of "Sarge," one of his auditory hallucinations that had been docume​nted years earlier, when doctors noted that Panetti appeared to have suffered a "psychotic break" and had "started using assumed name Sgt. Iron Horse." In front of the jury, using the third person, Panetti test​ified:

Sarge woke up. Cut off Scott's hair. Sarge suited up. Shells, canteen pouch, 30.06, tropical hat, tropical top, bunkhouse, fast, haircut fast, suited up fast, boom, ready fast, fast, haircut, webgear, top, brush hat, boots, out the door, in the jeep, driving, wife, the bridge. Why is it taking so long? In front of Joe and Amanda's house . . . Sarge, everything fast. Everything fast. Everything slow. Tapped on the window, shattered window....Scott, what? Scott, what did you see Sarge do? ...Sarge not afraid, not threatened. Sarge not angry, not mad. Sarge, boom, boom. Sarge, boom, boom, boom. Sarge, boom, boom. Sarge is gone. No more Sarge... Boom, boom, boom, blood....Demons. Ha, ha, ha, ha, oh, Lord, oh, you.

The trial transcript suggests Judge Stephen Ables was more interested in getting on with the case than in justice. Particularly heartbreaking is an exchange in which Panetti repeatedly asked for a continuance so he could go to the doctor and get his medication:  "I'm not looking for a long delay, but I'm going to definitely need a couple of days to get the medicine, to see my doctor and to prepare my case." The judge refused, responding, "All right, we need to go ahead and stop and kind of catch our breath and we will be starting here in about ten minutes." Ables was more than happy to talk to Panetti like he was an intellectual and emotional child. He just didn't want to try him like one.

Kase, who now  represents Panetti, was shocked by how often "Scott was in distress... and how he was allowed to represent himself and how he was allowed to continue to represent himself after showing his mental illness. Why didn't the judge say, 'I'm going to require you to have counsel'?"

It took the jury only t​wo hours to find Panetti guilty in 1995. In the sentencing hearing that quickly followed, Dr. James P. Grigson testified that Panetti would kill again unless executed and that psychotropic drugs would have no effect on him. Grigson's penchant for predicting the dangerous behavior of defendants he'd never met earned him the nickname "Dr. Death" and got him expelled from the American Psychiatric Association that very year. It took the jury four hours to determine that Panetti deserved to die by lethal injection.

Fast-forward three decades. Panetti's lawyers have appealed his death sentence, arguing that he should never have been found competent to stand trial, should not have been permitted to represent himself, should have been found insane, and should not have been sentenced to die. But courts have denied all appeals, which is why his lawyers are focusing on his current mental incompetence.

In 2007, Panetti's lawyers argued in front of the US Supreme Court that Texas failed to prove that he met the ​standard of competence required by Ford v. Wainwright (1986), which ​established that "the Eighth Amendment forbids the execution only of those who are unaware of the punishment they are about to suffer and why they are to suffer it." While Panetti's lawyers claimed that Ford defined competence as having a "rational understanding," Senator Ted Cruz, then the state's Solicitor General, argued that a factual understanding was sufficient. It was, ​according to Cruz, irrelevant that Panetti was so delusional that he believed that his execution was part of "spiritual warfare" between Satan and himself. The Supreme Court disagreed with Cruz and established that competence required rational and not merely factual awareness in itsPanetti v. Quarterman decisi​on.

But instead of finding Panetti incompetent, the Supreme Court sent the case back down to the lower courts. All the Fifth Circuit—which has jurisdiction over Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas—had to do to move forward with the execution was find that Panetti was indeed competent under the new precedent, which it did last year. Now the clock is ticking.

Meanwhile, Texas law enforcement figures haven't done much to hide their disregard for Panetti. Neither the district attorney who sought an execution date—nor the judge who granted it, nor the Attorney General, nor the Texas Department of Criminal Justice—thought it important to let Panetti's lawyers know that their client would be executed this Wednesday, December 3. As Kase explained to me, this is bizarre. 

"The most active user of the death penalty in Texas is Harris County," she said. "That DA office routinely advises defense that it plans to seek an execution date and invites the defense lawyer to the hearing so that they lawyer can say if there is anything that's a barrier to setting an execution date."

It was a full two weeks after the hearing that Kase found out the client she'd been representing for nearly ten years had a date for execution. She read about it in the newspaper.

Panetti's lawyers lost two weeks of work in what is literally a matter of life and death. Kase told me that "mental health cases are extremely paper-heavy and we've been inundated with more than 8,000 pages of material regarding records for Mr. Panetti. I can't begin to describe how overwhelming that is and to have to do this all in a short period of time."

Since learning of the execution date, Panetti's lawyers have filed a clemency petition, as well as two other motions. One a​sks for a stay or modification of the execution date so they can assess his competence. Given that Panetti hasn't been evaluated or received any medical treatment in seven years, Texas can't even claim it's killing a man who is competent at this moment. While Panetti hasn't been competent since 1992, his mental health has also seriously deteriorated since then.

Though the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has failed to provide Panetti's lawyers with all the requested records, the ones that have been sent over rev​eal a change in behavior. After nearly 20 years of refusing to take psychotropic medication, Panetti is now seeking it. A staff member reported that Panetti is requesting medication because he is no longer able to cope through prayer and Bible reading. Notes from prison guards indicate he is misbehaving in ways he never has and his paranoia has increased. 

"He's just getting worse and worse," Kase said. "In our last visit he heard voice in front of me which was extremely disconcerting. I'm not a mental health professional and I could tell something was happening and when I asked him if he was hearing voices, he very reluctantly admitted it. He tried to hide it."

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied​ the first motion, and an appeal was filed at the Fifth Circuit on Sunday.

The other motion file​d could change the way this country deals with capital punishment and the mentally ill. Disturbingly, though the Supreme Court has prohibited the execution of the intellectually disabled (formerly called "mentally retarded"), it has not categorically banned the execution of people with severe mental illness. Last week, Panetti's lawyer's fi​led an Eighth Amendment Challenge arguing that the execution of the mentally ill is prohibited by the Constitution, thanks to an emerging consensus that it is wrong to execute those with severe mental illness.

Unfortunately, if not surprisingly, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCC) deni​ed this motion as well. But a TCC judge made history in his dissenting opinion. Tom Price became the first TCC judge ever and the first state-wide Republican judge anywhere to publ​icly oppose the death penalty from the bench. Panetti's lawyers have filed an ap​peal to the Fifth Circuit on this motion as well. While a ruling that the death penalty in itself should be abolished is highly unlikely, it is conceivable that the Fifth Circuit would at least recognize the cruel and unusual nature as well as the inhumanity of executing people who not only suffer a painful and debilitating disease, but have been utterly failed by the American criminal justice system.

When I asked Kase how she felt about the task of staving off the execution this week, she replied, "Determined."

​Katie Halper is a writer, filmmaker, comedian and sometimes history teacher born, raised and still living in New York City. She has appeared on MSNBC and writes for Salon, Jezebel, The Nation, and Comedy Central. Follow her on ​Twitter. 

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Photo via Flickr user Marco Paköe​ningrat 

Over the years, Facebook has slowly expanded its terms and conditions, and last month the company announced that come January 1, 2015 all users will have to agree to new Terms of S​ervice (TOS) or be locked out of the site. Since the social network has roughly 1.32 billion users, that is a BIG deal

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But just what is in these new TOS? And should you be worried about them? I spoke with Maninder Gill, a partner at London's Simons Muirhead & Burton and an expert in intellectual property and privacy law to find out just how far Facebook's new terms go and how it will affect your online life.

VICE: So these 10,000-word TOS every company has—they're long, complicated, and boring on purpose, right?
​ Maninder Gill: To be fair, Facebook has acknowledged that people rarely read these long and complicated TOS and have taken steps to simplify and shorten theirs. However the reality is probably that, no matter how short the TOS are, most people are still not going to read them—they would rather deal with the consequences of blindly agreeing to them than bothering to carefully read them. The reality is that most users would rather agree to sign away some of their privacy rights than not be on Facebook. And Facebook knows this and thus keeps widening its rights to use our data and personal information.

Do you see anything about Facebook's new TOS that are particularly alarming?
​ Facebook says that it has introduced "Privacy Basics" ["interactive guides to answer the most commonly asked questions about how you can control your information on Facebook"] in a bid to dispel confusion over how your information is used. It claims to be attempting to give more control to its users, provide location information to friends, and improve battery life and signal strength.

That sounds pretty benign. Is there more to it than that?
As with most companies, there is an additional unstated business goal: to sell more advertising. In pursuit of that goal, every bit of personal information is a valuable data point that the company can exploit, and Facebook gathers users' details so that they can sell more advertising at higher rates as, through this, they can truthfully claim to be able to better target their ads.

And how are the new TOS going to help Facebook target ads?
​ Individuals will be able to allow their friends to track their every move. So users can now inadvertently agree to sign away their privacy rights, implications of which they may not be aware of.

So you just touched upon location tracking. The new terms will require users to accept a new location data policy that says you allow Facebook to use your GPS, Bluetooth, and wi-fi signals to track your location. Should we be fine with this? What's the idea behind it?
​ The idea is to track the location of users in an effort to target them with localized adverts and thus attract more companies to advertise on Facebook at higher rates. The app will help users to find friends who are nearby and alert them when it detects one in close proximity, even when the app is not open on the handset. There is no doubt that this function is intrusive, but Facebook is trying to track us users for even more profits by offering even more carefully targeted adverts.

And they have permission to do this?
​​Facebook have obtained our permission, as their conditions state that the company may use information on location "to tell you and your friends about people or events nearby, or offer deals to you that you might be interested in." The company said it may also put together data "to serve you ads that might be more relevant." So while it is Big-Brotherish, users have agreed to this by agreeing to use Facebook. The reality is that users would prefer to allow Facebook to use their data in any way than to switch to another social media platform.

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Overall, how much will Facebook's new TOS affect our online lives?
​ With Facebook and their clients now knowing where you eat, where you travel, where you shop, and who you are with, they could have a detailed database covering all aspects of users' lives.

Furthermore, the idea now is that we will be targeted with ads that suit our personality—the objective is to change the way we spend and what we spend our money on—we could be subtly psychologically manipulated by large brands, which are richer than many governments, without realizing it. However, most users will not care and will not quit Facebook and will be too apathetic to bother to go into their privacy settings to recalibrate. And Facebook will just get richer and more powerful.

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Your expertise covers the crazy stuff companies try to hide in their TOS. How does Facebook compare to most of what you see?
​ Out of all the TOS I have dealt with in 20 years, Facebook's are the most intrusive. To be granted rights to track an individual's movements, and thus the people that would be with those individuals, and to potentially commercially exploit without permission all pictures posted on Facebook without specific consent, is breath-taking.

Users must take responsibility for their data. Facebook's ability to exploit our data is contingent upon our allowing them to do so. It is up to us to value our privacy and to spend a few minutes setting some restrictions on the privacy settings.

And tinkering with your privacy settings would help you opt out of these intrusive new TOS?
​ Well, no. You can adjust your settings to change which people can see what you post: Global—which is everyone, the whole internet—Friends of Friends, Just Friends, or you only. Most people will want to set it to Just Friends, but many leave it on Global. However, no matter what settings you use here, these settings only affect the way you share with others. It has no outcome on how Facebook shares your stuff—that's all dictated by the unchangeable TOS that you need to agree to to be allowed use Facebook in the first place.

Follow Michael on ​​Twitter.

Paul McCarthy's Tree at Place Vendôme, Paris, before it was vandalized

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Iconoclasts have dreamt up all sorts of ways to attack works of art over the years, from ​projectile-vo​miting colo​rful jelly and cake icing onto Piet Mondrian's Composition with Red, Blue,and Yellow to walking into the National Gallery and ​shooting a Leonardo Da Vinci ​painting of the Virgin and Child with a sawn-off shotgun. Sometimes art is attacked because it's famous, and sometimes because it's offensive.

Right now, in the run-up to Christmas, a lot of notoriously offensive artists are showing in London. In the grand old setting of the Royal Academy there's a solo show of 77-year-old British pop artist Allen Jones—you'll probably have seen its posters starring Kate Moss in a ​naked bronze​ bodysuitif you've traveled on the London tube recently—who has attracted criticism since 1969, when he first exhibited his sculptures ​that r​eima​gi​ned women as interior furnishings.

When these twisted mannequins, bent into the forms of Chair, Hat Stand, and Table and barely dressed in bondage-wear, were exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1978 they had stink bombs thrown at them. When one was shown at Tate Britain in 1986, it had its face melted off with a corrosive paint-stripper.

Allen Jones's   Chair. Image via Flickr user ​Régine Debatty

Likewise, a trio of artists who also rose to prominence in the 70s and 80s and have since had their work attacked or banned—Richard Prince, Paul McCarthy, and Andres Serrano—are included in the Saatchi Gallery's group show Post-Pop, East Meets West, which offers a nostalgic look back to the golden age of shock art.

Hanging on one wall is quite possibly the most blasphemous photograph ever taken, Andres Serrano's Immersions (Piss Christ), 1987, which shows a small model of Christ on the cross, sinking into a glass of the artist's urine. Serrano appears, from the dark, Fanta-ish shades of his piss at least, to be a rather sick man. But that's not to suggest he has a sick mind. He's not necessarily a devil-worshipper or a water-sports obsessive—he's an artist trying to provoke a reaction.

Unsurprisingly, Serrano's decision to golden shower our lord and savior did provoke quite a reaction. In the US he was denounced by senators and ​was sent death threats. In Melbourne, his Piss Christ was attacked with a hammer. In Avignon, almost a thousand Catholic fundamentalists marched through the streets in protest against it, and afterwards one of them slashed it. In Lund, his whole exhibition was ​smashed up by masked Swedish nationalists armed with crowbars and axes, who filmed their iconoclastic fury and uploaded it onto YouTube accompanied by a Scandinavian death-metal soundtrack.

No one in London has attacked the Piss Christ, of course. It's just not that sort of city. Worse still, this sort of artwork is actually seen as rather passé by the world-weary art crowd. Shock art provokes a dramatic, sensational reaction, rather than an intellectual one, and it's considered somewhat uncool—gauche, even—because of that.

There's not much of an esoteric response to be had with Paul McCarthy's Spaghetti Man, 1993, for instance. Right now, it lurks menacingly in the upstairs corridor of the Saatchi Gallery, a life-size figure with a rabbit's face and a never-ending phallus that flops to the floor and winds round and round in front of us. It's creepy. It's fucked up. It's unsettling. Especially as it's next to a window that looks out onto a King's Road primary school playing field, like some sort of Easter nightmare that haunts wealthy children. Spaghetti Man is unapologetically shocking.

Charles Saatchi likes to court controversy. This is, after all, the man that bought Marcus Harvey's portrait of Myra Hindley painted in children's handprints—a painting so shocking that it was ​vandalize​d twice in one day in 1997. Having witnessed one visitor to the Royal Academy throwing ink at it, another visitor was moved to buy half-a-dozen eggs across the road at Fortnum & Mason and egg the painting himself. This was an artwork so unpopular that even Myra Hindley herself wrote from prison to complain about it.

Saatchi is an advertising man. He likes shocking art that advertises itself. He likes it as much as he likes Margaret Thatcher. As the latest exhibition at his gallery reaches its last rooms, it descends into darkly pornographic work by the likes of Cindy Sherman, Linder Sterling, and Richard Prince which—like so many other things in life—are sort of horrific and, simultaneously, sort of titillating.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1992. Image ​via Artribune

Artists like these thrive on controversial imagery, but today's younger, cooler artists—the ones that are lauded, the ones that are too savvy to show their works at the Saatchi Gallery—like to work in a more nuanced, oblique manner. James Richards' short film Rosebud, for instance, which is currently on show in the Turner Prize exhibition, intersperses footage of censored books that have had every image of a vagina, dick, or asshole painstakingly scratched out by a disapproving Japanese librarian, with quiet, contemplative footage of rivers, flowers, and budgerigars. The artist is still interested in the subject of sexual desire, but he approaches it in a very different way.

Rosebud is brilliant—really it is—but it takes time to appreciate. It's not instantly accessible to everyone. Conversely, shock art is accessible to everyone, because it provokes an instant reaction—even if it is one of disgust. It's true that society needs great art that nourishes the soul, but it also needs grating art that makes you want to run to Fortnum & Mason and buy an expensive box of eggs to throw at it.

We're living in a world where the very notion of the capacity for shock is fraying. Truth is stranger—and more frightening—than fiction when, every few weeks, a new video surfaces online of another ISIS decapitation. How, then, do artists make art that still shocks?

One way—as Paul McCarthy showed earlier this year—is to install a colossal, ​green, inflatable butt plug the size of a palace in the otherwise decorous setting of the Place Vendôme in Paris, and pretend it's actually a Christmas tree. One passer-by was so furious at the 69-year-old artist that he slapped him. "First I find out there's such thing as Père Noël," he probably thought angrily to himself in French, "and now it turns out our Christmas tree is some sort of Brobdingnagian bum dildo."

Later that night, vandals deflated the sculpture and tore it from its moorings.

Another way is the shock public performance. Its star performer is surely ​ Mark McG​owan, who is actually a London taxi driver and was once described as the most "self-promoting, publicity-seeking sicko out there" by Steve Wright on The Wright Stuff.

Mark McGowan's Ballerina Pig outside New Scotland Yard ​

Although he's shunned by the professional art world—to be honest, he does sound like a bit of a handful—McGowan is renowned for bold protest performances such as Artist Eats Fox, 2004, for which he slow-roasted and ate a fox in order to demonstrate his objection to, "the public's fixation with a government ban on fox hunting and society's misplaced priorities."

On other occasions he's devoured a swan and ​a corgi—the latter live on art radio station Resonance FM—to protest against the behavior of the Royal Family. (Specifically, an incident in 2007 in which Prince Philip—allegedly—watched one of his mates beat up a fox with a flagpole on his Sandringham Estate.)

"I turned to performance art because I found it a much more accessible medium to deliver what I was trying to express," he ​told th​e BBC. "The way to engage in art is to bring it into the street, which is what I'm doing—not by putting it in the White Cube or the National Gallery."

To this end, McGowan once ​catapulted a (willi​ng) 71-year-old grandmother in a makeshift, tinfoil rocket-ship through a sheet of wood on the Peckham Road, in order to draw attention to the plight of neglected pensioners.

Indeed, desperate times call for desperate measures. To mark International Workers' Day in 2007, the radical Russian art collective ​Voi​na threw lots of cats over the counters of their local McDonald's, hoping to add excitement and joy to the employees' otherwise repetitive afternoons. The following year, in a preemptive protest against the inevitable election of Dmitry Medvedev, ten of them staged a public orgy in Moscow's Timiryazev State Museum of Biology. I'm not sure why, exactly, but it definitely piqued my attention.

Voina eventually splintered into various factions, one of which is Pussy Riot. They have stated that only by breaking the law, only by constructing lurid spectacles, can they capture the world's attention; and, with their musical protest Punk Prayer—Mother of God, Chase Putin Away! inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and their subsequent imprisonment, they certainly have.

Today, an artwork can be anything at all. But one of its roles is—still—to shock, provoke and appall us. We can all benefit from a good jarring by big, impressive, weird things. Maybe everyone needs the occasional museum-gang-bang or London fox-roasting to stay alert to life's possibilities, and maybe the art industry needs the odd, monumental butt plug to prevent itself from disappearing up its own ass?

In a world that's going to shit, it's a powerful tonic.

Follow Dean on ​Twi​tter.

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Dominatrix Ms. Tytania with a client. It's this kind of stuff that British porn producers aren't going to be able to produce from today onwards. All photos courtesy of Ms. Tytania

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

​This morning, the laws governing online porn changed. Somewhere in the UK, stooped over a keyboard, teeth bared, the men and women charged with shielding British eyes from anything deemed legally "off" are working from a new set of guidelines.

As of today, the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 comes into force, amending the 2003 Communications Act. All Video on Demand (VoD) services must now comply with this. Content is no longer permissible if it cannot be classified as an R18, according to guidelines laid out by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC).

That means this: last Friday, the team only had to contend with the usual, run-of-the-mill nasty stuff—content that either incited hatred or could "impair" children (whatever that means). From today, however, they've got all kinds of evil to suppress; from now on, VoD porn—online porn you still pay for, essentially—must fall in line with what's available on DVD. That means that British pornography producers will no longer be able to offer content online that couldn't be bought in a sex shop.

Acts that are no longer acceptable include: spanking, caning, and whipping beyond a gentle level; penetration by any object "associated with violence;" activities that can be classed as "life-endangering," such as strangulation and facesitting; fisting, if all knuckles are inserted; physical or verbal abuse, even if consensual; the portrayal of non-consensual sex; urination in various sexual contexts; and female ejaculation.

It's quite a list, but one mostly made up of stuff that seems to have been picked out pretty arbitrarily (women orgasming or exactly which items can or can't be inserted into a consenting adult's body).

"R18 is a strange thing," says Jerry Barnett, founder of anti-censorship campaign Sex and Censorship. "It's a set of weird and arbitrary censorship rules decided between the BBFC, the police, and the CPS. There appear to be no rational explanations for most of the R18 rules—they're simply a set of moral judgements designed by people who have struggled endlessly to stop the British people from watching pornography."

Stopping the British public from watching porn is one thing that today's legal revision will not do. That's because the new law only covers content produced in the UK, meaning that viewers—if they really want to—can still open up that private browsing window all the adverts claimed was for "buying an engagement present" and view as much fisting, strangulation, and urination as they like.

However, the law will have an impact on the British industry. Not on the large porn studios, which tend to favor the strip, blowjob, fuck, cum-all-over-a-woman's-face formula, but the UK's smaller, independent producers. Specifically—given the activities prohibited by the BBFC—fetish producers.

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Itziar Bilbao Urrutia, a.k.a. Ms. Tytania

Itziar Bilbao Urrutia, a.k.a. Ms. Tytania, is a professional dominatrix who also produces femdom porn, which she sells on her (obviously NSFW) website, the Urban Chick Supremacy Cell.

Part porn, part performance art, Urrutia's imagined female supremacist terror cell is a URL mostly full of feminism, fury, strap-ons, and anal hooks. One prominent feature is a fetish kidnapping service, where clients are offered the opportunity to be bundled into a van, driven to a remote spot and tortured (consensually). This—along with your traditional boot-licking, "electric emasculation" and "enforced brainwash hypnosis"—is filmed and available for download on her website.

Granted, watching men being forced to recite radical feminist writing from the 1960s might not be your thing. But I'd argue that it's a good deal more interesting than most of what you'll find on SpankWire. Lucky, then, that Urrutia is exempt from complying with the AVMS.

Earlier this year, Urrutia won ​what was dubbed a "David and Goliath battle" against the Authority for Television on Demand (ATVOD). Created in 2010 in response to an EU directive on audiovisual media, ATVOD works alongside Ofcom, regulating on-demand services including ITV Player and 4oD. Also in its remit is paid-for content on websites classed as "TV-like," a category into which many UK-based adult sites are thought to fall.​

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Urrutia managed to prove that not only was the content on her site not "TV-like" (something I'd have thought would be pretty obvious to the regulatory board), but that it also didn't contravene the Obscene Publications Act. As a result, the Urban Chick Supremacy Cell lives on. However, it may soon be one of the last UK fetish sites left standing.

"For the last week or so, fellow femdom producers—all of them women—have been emailing or messaging me, asking me to clarify some vague points," says Urrutia. "The truth is that nobody really knows how this new law is going to be enforced. Everybody is scared of losing their livelihoods."

The ambiguity of this "TV-like" definition is worrying many in the industry, particularly since ATVOD itself makes no bones about the fact the classification is not clear-cut.

"It is a deliberately dynamic concept, and the directorate the rules come from says it should be interpreted dynamically," says Pete Johnson, chief executive of ATVOD. "As the nature of television changes, so does the nature of what's TV-like. It does include a certain amount of room for judgements to be made."

Urrutia and others in the industry are angry that it seems to be small fetish sites being targeted. Because if there's one genre of British porn that can be classed as an underdog cottage industry, it's the one full of whips, latex masks, and ball-stomping.

Sites either closed down or made to come into compliance last year include Belted by Beauty, Mistress Whiplash, Pleasuring Herself, and Young Dommes. Looking at the list, femdom does seem to be disproportionately represented.

"The new legislation is absurd and surreal," says Urrutia. "I mean, why ban facesitting? What's so dangerous about it? It's a harmless activity that most femdom performers, myself included, do fully dressed anyway. Its power is symbolic: woman on top, unattainable.

"While mainstream porn will be peddled without fear by the large studios—often owned by the same media moguls who denounce the 'sexualization' of our culture—more niche, less clichéd sexual interests will disappear. It's the corporate shopping chain crushing independent shops on the high street by piling it high and marketing it to the dumbest common denominator. In five years' time we may only have one-size-fits-all porn, peddled by the porn equivalent of Primark."

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Barnett, meanwhile, is concerned that this legislation—seemingly pointless when it comes to "safeguarding children"—is part of a slow but steady march towards broader online censorship.

"I'm worried this will help build the case in the future for wide-scale blocking of 'illegal' sites," says Barnett. "Along with panics over terrorism and pressure over copyright theft, we seem to be edging towards a more censored network."

For his part, Johnson says he hopes that the future holds, "a well-regulated adult industry and that adult content is seen by adults and not by children." Of course, the latter part of that goal—the desire to protect children from seeing porn—is still a long way from realization. Not least because most of the stuff on sites like the Urban Chick Supremacy Cell is behind a paywall anyway (again, so consenting adults have the choice as to whether they want to pay for it and watch it).

However it all pans out today in that grand tower of British censorship, it would be a shame if the bland smut of the tube sites was all that existed, leaving the likes of Urrutia erased from the UK scene. I mean, where else can you find porn made by a woman who describes her mission thus: "To destroy the patriarchy. To hunt down all city boys and other capitalist sexist male scum vermin. To wipe the smug smile off their complacent faces whilst they wipe the dirt off [my] bovver boots."

Exactly.

Follow Frankie on ​Twi​tter.

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​This article originally appeared on VICE UK

 "He wasn't mean or aggressive. He was nice, well-educated, and OK."

These are the words used by a prostitute in an exclusive interview with VICE to describe regular client and former Merrill Lynch banker Rurik Jutting, who was arrested on the November 1 for the murder of two women in his Hong Kong flat, and ruled mentally​ fit to stand trial last week.

"Mandy" (not her real name) advertises herself on Craigslist as a "local chick that loves white stick," accompanied with close-up shots of her crotch. The petite 23-year-old is articulate and intelligent, with a girlfriend who also works as a prostitute. Born in Hong Kong, Mandy began sex work four years ago while studying at a university in northwest England, leaving "tart cards" in telephone booths across town. In Hong Kong, she finds customers online and charges HKD2000 ($260) for two hours' work.

She claims her relationship with Jutting began about a month before he—as she puts it—"went off the rails," after he saw her profile on Craigslist and texted her directly. Their first meeting was in a room on the 15th floor of a hotel less than five minutes away from his flat. They met 12 times, never at his place. "As a rule I stay away from anywhere I can't call for help," she told me.

Following his arrest, local media outlets reported that police had ​recovered a small amount of cocaine from his apartment. Mandy corroborates this. "We never did much, as the coke made him not able to [perform]," she says. "When he got jumpy, I would just ask him to sit down and talk."

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Texts allegedly sent to "Mandy" by Rurik Jutting

During their very first text conversation—before they'd even met in person—Jutting mentioned drugs as an incentive for her to pay him a visit: "If you like to get high... Have a lot of coke..."

For expat bankers like Jutting—those with cash to burn and a pair of restless nostrils—getting hold of drugs is as easy as walking down any street in Central or Wan Chai. While locals prefer ketamine and meth, cocaine is the drug of choice for most young expats in the city. It doesn't come cheap, at HKD1000 ($125) a gram, but then money is hardly a concern for a single young man earning up to $550,000 a year. These factors have united to create a culture where visiting prostitutes and taking lots and lots of cocaine quickly becomes normalized for young British expats arriving in Hong Kong.

Xander is a blond former public schoolboy originally from Eastbourne, who now works in the financial industry. He moved to Hong Kong last year and quickly gained a penchant for substances. "I get offered drugs more than once a day," said the 25-year-old. "You go out and everyone's on it."

After graduating from a prestigious Scottish university he was originally sent to work in Singapore—a country with a harsh anti-drugs policy—where he had his first experience of prostitution. "Before I came to Asia, I would never have dreamed of it," he told me. "I would never have slept with a prostitute back home."

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One of the clubs in Hong Kong's Wan Chai district. Photo by Amaury dR.

However, on his 24th birthday, he and his colleagues finished work and decided to go to a bar at the notorious Orchard Towers, the so-called "shopping mall of sex," known locally as the "four floors of whores." The group of guys ordered a round of drinks, and it wasn't long before a girl approached them.

"That's how it works—a girl starts talking to you, and you think she really likes you and she's just like any other girl," said Xander. "You start kissing her... maybe you finger her... and then she tells you how much she costs. I was shocked the first time, and then the ease of how it happens makes it OK."

From her time working as a prostitute in both the UK and Hong Kong, Mandy's come to believe that while all men pay for sex, the situation is considerably worse in the East. "In Asia it's generally easier to find, and cheaper," she said. "It's the kid in a candy store. Like, if I gave you a credit card with no cut off point and let you loose in Harrods, wouldn't you shop like crazy?"

I asked whether there are any perceptible differences between her work in the UK and Hong Kong, and she used an average English customer as her example in both situations. "[In England, he] hires me because his wife won't do anal and call him daddy," she said. "But in Hong Kong the same guy hires me just to talk about how he never sees his family. [He] just wants human connection."

By the time he arrived in Hong Kong, Xander had grown accustomed to paying for sex and vows never to return to London. "Hong Kong is just like an adult Disneyland—there are no laws here," he told me.

Russell, 29, from Hampstead Heath, felt the same way the first time he came to the city. The softly-spoken financial analyst, who spent four years working in Mainland China, recalls the day he landed at the airport and was greeted by an old grammar school friend.

Russell, who's paid for sex "over 50 times," showed me some of the websites he uses to find prostitutes. All of them are remarkably direct and simple to use, and available in both Chinese and English. Profiles can be filtered by location, price, and working hours, and there's a little icon that shows if one is on her "day off." Each individual profile lists the girl's physical details, mobile number, and a breakdown of what she is and isn't willing to do.

The criteria includes the usual "anal," "face cum," and "blowjob without condom," as well as the slightly more unusual "ice fire" and "heater provided." Prostitutes who are deemed OK have a friendly little green tick beside them. There's also a reports section, where users can post reviews and photographs of their experiences with said girl, TripAdvisor-style.

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Another club in the Wan Chai district. Photo by Eva Tomarmagas.

That first night, Russell picked a few girls off the site based on high user ratings. "Twenty minutes later, we were all getting sucked off in the same room," he says. "Though we were mostly too coked out to get hard."

Xander has a similar story. He'd just finished a meeting with an American client, who suggested going for drinks in a Wan Chai bar: "One minute he was telling me about his family and how he was planning on getting his wife and his kids and dog to fly over; the next he was half naked and getting blowjobs from these strippers, right in front of me. So I got one, too. I put it on his tab."

He added: "As a white guy, you feel like you're above the law."

He's not alone in feeling untouchable in a city teeming with young expats. "They feel like kings here," said Mandy. "They're like shooting stars. Normally good back home—real go-getters. They get sent here, they burn quick."

"S," a 22-year-old former escort who now manages a group of high-end prostitutes in Hong Kong and Macau, explained how Westerners generally choose accessibility over quality or comfort. "Foreigners go to Wanchai. They just want a random vagina to please their cock," she said.

While cash-rich expats congregate on the steep roads of Lan Kwai Fong to socialize, those looking to end their night in an hourly "love hotel" will more often than not head to the Wan Chai district. Five minutes away and less than $3 by taxi, the corner of Lockhart Road and Luard Road perfectly encapsulates the madness of Hong Kong's red-light district.

On one side of the road, drug dealers lean against the wall of a Chinese fast food restaurant. On the other side are the working girls, who alternate shifts on high stools next to a foreign exchange counter. Much like in Berlin, where the women on Oranienburger Straße can be identified by their black corsets over puffer jackets, Wan Chai's prostitutes have a kind of uniform of their own: long hair; minimal makeup, but for a slash of strawberry-red lipstick; and a skimpy outfit usually consisting of a tube top and hot pants. They rest their stilettos against the footrests of their stools or lean against the street signs outside their bars, texting or chatting with one another like bored schoolgirls.

As you approach the corner they look up to give you the once-over. If there are any women in a group they return to their nail files and smartphones. If it's a group of men or a lone wolf, they leap from their stations and call out to them: "Hey handsome! Want to party?"

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The New Makati Pub & Disco in Wan Chai. Photo by Eva Tomarmagas

New Makati Pub & Disco sits on a street corner. It's where Jutting reportedly met his second victim, 29-year-old Seneng Mujiasih (otherwise known as Jesse Lorena). Makati, along with a few other bars on the Lockhart Road strip and Jaffe Road, is also home to "freelancers" who don't have a mama-san—or female pimp—and are hassled away by the street girls who fiercely guard their territory.

The two women whose bodies were discovered in Jutting's flat—a mere three minutes walk from Makati—were both from Indonesia. Indonesians make up almost half of Hong Kong's 320,000 domestic workers, and many travel into the city looking for employment, only to find themselves working part-time as sex workers in order to pay off debts or make ends meet.

"Tiara," 24, moved from her hometown in Indonesia to Hong Kong five years ago and now works full-time as a prostitute, charging HKD1500 ($188) for up to two hours, or HKD3000 ($392) for a whole night. She used to find customers in Makati, but now also advertises online because she finds the internet to be a safer way of screening men. Business has deteriorated recently, and she pleads with me for help with drumming up customers. "You have many white male friends, right? If they need a fun girl then you can introduce me—I can do everything," she said, before listing all the sexual services on offer.

Most of Tiara's customers are Western expats and many of them take drugs. "They do hard sex to me. They pay, but sometimes they make me hurt," she said. I asked her what she thinks of the Jutting case. "He is a psychopath," she replied.

Mandy's last meeting with Jutting was only two days before he's said to have killed his first victim. I asked her if she ever felt unsafe during any of their meetings. "Never," she replied. "He was cool."

Jutting's last text message to her referred to his license being pulled, only four days before his arrest. "He was scared about something, but didn't say [what]," she told me. What was her first thought when she saw the news? "That they pushed a cokehead too far."

Mandy's attitude towards Jutting can be applied to all of her young British clients, those seeking out personal contact for cash in a country and culture that's as new and exciting as it is intense and isolating. "It's not that I liked him; it's that I knew he was going to burn—but not like that," she told me. "So I felt sorry for him, perhaps even pity."

via Dillon R Hillier on Facebook.

​ VICE Canada has obtained exclusive footage of ex-Canadian Forces soldier Dillon Hillier—a man who is not only the son of a Conservative member of prov​incial parliament in Ontario, but a veteran of the Afghan War—attacking ISIS forces in Kurdish Iraq.

In the video, shot using a GoPro camera, Hillier is seen, from his point of view, firing a number of rounds at ISIS forces. He raises what appears to be an M16 assault rifle over a trench, letting off a burst of rounds in the direction of enemy lines.
​

In another video Hillier bandages a fellow Peshmerga fighter with a gunshot wound on his head after ISIS forces ambushed their unit.

"That's all I can do for him right now," screams Hillier as he explains to non-English-speaking Peshmerga fighters how to bandage the Kurdish soldier's head.

"Like this, like this!" he yells. "Fuck! He got hit in the face. You're going to be alright man, tell him he's going to be alright!"
​

According to Hillier the videos were shot during operations aimed at liberating "Tal al-Ward from the clutches of evil," as he put it. "I accomplished more good in those 20 hours than the previous 26 years of my life. I dragged a man who had been shot in the face to safety and patched him while many others stood around not doing anything."

Hillier recently made headlines after it was revealed in the Nation​al Post he had hopped on a flight from Alberta to join Kurdish forces battling against the Islamic State.

But Hillier isn't alone when it comes to veterans looking for a combat role helping out in Iraq.

The fledgling 1st North American Expeditionary Force—a group of ex-soldiers ( led by a Cana​dian veteran)—is currently raising a military unit intent on helping Kurdish Peshmerga defend itself against ISIS forces. The group is entirely compose​d​ of volunteers with combat experience as professional soldiers, and is not a private military contractor.

In one Facebook post, Hillier brandishes his rifle in one hand, arm in arm with a Kurdish fighter with the other. The 26-year old was apparently inspired to protect Kurdish civilians against the reported atrocities of the Islamic State—a force known for mass decapitations and the systematic rape of eth​nic Yezidi women.

Hillier is one of several Canadian citizens to travel over to Syria or Iraq of their own volition, joining the escalating conflict as combatants with foreign paramilitary organizations. Aside from the several Canadians plying their trade as jihadists with the Islamic State, Gill R​o​senberg—an ex-IDF soldier and British Columbia native—recently joined Kurdish YPG forces in the battle against ISIS in Kobane.

Reports em​erged yesterday, citing Islamic State media sources, that claim Rosenberg had been kidnapped by the terrorist organization who were debating how best to execute the Canadian woman. One YPG source told VICE Canada that Rosenberg was not in the possession of the Islamic State.

Canadian law allows citizen soldiers to operate as combatants with sanctioned entities like the Peshmerga. But joining designated terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda and the Kurdish PKK (another operator in the region listed as a terrorist group by the Canadian government) would be considered illegal under Canadian law.

The rise of western volunteers keen to take on the Islamic State is a growing phenomenon in Iraqi Kurdistan. Along with Dutch bik​er​ gangs, who strangely enough have also seen some of their members join the battle, professional soldiers like Hillier will undoubtedly be seen by Peshmerga command as serious assets battling against formidable ISIS forces with superior heavy weaponry.

Canadian Forces training far outclasses any military schooling in the region and with combat experience facing down the Taliban, volunteer veterans like Hillier with real war chops, could change the tide of the conflict in certain regions where the Kurds are desperately holding off ISIS.
​

​ via the ​1st North American Expeditionary Force on Facebook.

Hillier's involvement in the conflict comes on the heels of expanded bombings by Canadian fighter jets in Iraq. Active CF-18 "sorties" have dropped smart bombs and precision missiles on Islamic State targets, while Canadian Special Forces operators train Kurdish soldiers in the region.

In an ironic twist, the same rounds Hillier is seen firing at ISIS forces in the above video could've easily been used against fellow Canadians: the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service said over 30 citizens are operating with terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, some in the same region as Hillier. One fighter, known by the nom de guerre Abu Usamah, once​ told​ VICE, "there are entire Kataibs (brigades) of English speakers all over Syria."

While we know a glut of Canadian terrorist recruits have joined the ranks of ISIS, the growing tide of professional Canadian soldiers counteracting those jihadists adds an interesting twist to the evolving conflict: it might be a war in Iraq, but it's taking on the tinge of a western civil war among expat combatants. 

@bmakuch

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(Photo by Anis Ali)

This article first appeared on VICE UK

The idea of "living for the weekend​" is nothing new. The history of what we call "youth culture" is really just a history of young people being unable to reconcile their day-to-day lives with their social lives, finding solace in the tribal rites of a Saturday night and workless mornings rather than careers, kids, whatever. A search for a brief few years of drug-taking, shame-walking, clan-fighting, shit-talking "other" before we finally become our own parents, whether we fucking like it or not.

Do you spend the first four days of your week scrolling through the Sport Bible Facebook page or waiting for Twitter to kick off about the latest moral catastrophe, nursing obscure chest pains, desperately awaiting that moment where the clock turns 5 or 6 or 6:30 so you can hit the nearest bar and throw a load of shit you wouldn't de-ice your car windows with down your scarred, collapsing airways? Your sense of disillusion is not unique. The only thing that's different about it is the Facebook part. Boundless indulgence is a decades-old problem, an inescapable part of the late-capitalist condition, a symptom of the endless, warless, nothingness of modern life.

You'll find similar feelings expressed in cultural artifacts as revered and ubiquitous as Saturday Night Fever, Quadrophenia and Bright Lights, Big City. You and your friends might feel like Young Soul Rebels, finding a higher truth through your boundless hedonism, but in actuality you're just shadowboxing your way through an increasingly unambitious cliche. You don't have to be the Christiane F. of your school year group to be a wreckhead now. Even the kids who read Redwall books in the library at lunch get it. These days, it's more transgressive to abstain than to overindulge.

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Photo by Jake Lewis

The concept of the teenager is now in its sixties and it's starting to look dated. Where once giving in to those idiot urges that arrive on Friday night was recognized as an essential, natural phase that young people just went through—a kind of existential pubescence that would be rinsed out of their systems once their hangovers started to last days rather than hours—it feels like people today are forgetting to do the moving on part.

It's no longer just teenagers and students who seem to be running away from real life, it's people in their twenties and thirties, too. People who should really know better, but don't seem to know how to do much else. Fully grown, semi-functioning adults who are unwilling to surrender those endless nights spent staring at their own harrowed reflections in club toilet cisterns, and can't find much reason to give them up, either. People like me.

This is my generation, the generation with no real incentive to grow up. No kids to feel guilty about, just jobs that let them ​scrape the money they need to feed, house and wash themselves. Only the screams of their bosses and worried phone calls from their families stand in the from the noble pursuit of getting on one. An army of first-world wasters trapped in an Escher maze of immaturity.

A friend of mine told me recently that he'd read it would be impossible to make Big now, because 30-year-olds still do the kind of things teenagers do. It wouldn't be funny or shocking any more to see a grown man buying a pinball table or wearing jeans to the office. It probably wouldn't work even if he were 40 in it.

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The author and friends, being wankers

I'm not 30, but I'm not that far off it either, and when I look at my life I find very little to differentiate it from when I was 17. Looking back at my summer; I can see it in my mind's eye as a slow strobe of wandering the streets of London with tens of blokes, wolfing down tinnies, singing football songs, trying to gatecrash parties, texting girls to find out what they're up to and getting ignored, posting stupid Vines in our secret Facebook group, quartering grams, ​listening to​ Underworld and wearing tracksuit bottoms. I'm in a badly cast remake of Goodbye Charlie Bright and I don't know how to get out of it. 

While such behavior is undeniably cathartic and entertaining, it's not really the kind of thing I thought I'd be doing at my age. As a teenager I assumed I'd be like a character from Manhattan by now, with a flourishing, yet refined social life enlivened by the occasional high society Beaujolais piss-up and BFI Bergman retrospective. I didn't think I'd be married with kids, but I didn't think I'd still be getting turned away from the Upper Street B@1 for wearing shorts. 

Now, you may cry "crisis of masculinity." You may cry "fear of commitment," or "quarter-life crisis," or just "stupid cunt"—but I think in doing so you'd be ignoring something that is basically true. You can claim that this malaise is purely a London thing, and that the Peter Pans who fill this city moved here for the express purpose of prolonging their adolescences for as long as possible. But even if you're the same age and are way more responsible, this pattern is something you'll see in every town and city in the country. In my mind there is little doubt that this massive, generational detachment from maturity is a nationwide problem, and probably the narrative that will come to define us when they begin to write our stories. It'll be told as the story of how the traditional routes out of our youth—babies, houses, a job worth breaking your back for—were all but sealed off, trapping us into what can only be described as a state of perpetual teenhood.

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The author's parents in their early twenties

Like a lot of people I know, I'm already older than my parents are when they had me. It was different back then; being in your mid-twenties was the time when responsibility started knocking, when you had to put your youth in the rearview in order to birth your own screaming, flakey-headed avatars of yourself, only returning to the life you'd put on ice years later on a Union Jack Vespa or an Audi TT, with a toyboy, a Thai Bride and some divorce papers in tow.

But now my generation has arrived about a third of the way into the average life expectancy, and most of us are finding out that our twenties are just another stage of an extended boozy montage we've no reason, and no cause to escape from. ​

In my parents' day, it was easier to grow up. It was borderline impossible not to; society dragged you up whether you wanted it or not. But on the plus side a life structure beyond FIFA and getting mashed was up for grabs. It was a time when even working-class people, even people in London, even people who didn't go to university, could find jobs that paid well, eventually buy a house, get married and have children, indulging in all the tropes that make British suburbia both the best and worst place in the world. Sure, they did it later than their own parents and probably had a lot more fun in the process, but not only was the pressure to conform to a traditional lifestyle much greater, it was so attainable that people often did it by mistake, birthing the generation of accidental firstborns that so many of us are.

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Photo by Nicholas Pomeroy 

But very few people make that mistake now. Just this year, The Economist published a piece entitled "​The End of the Ba​by Boom?", noting the sudden, massive birth-rate decline in the UK. This was the first drop in the birth rate since 2001, and the biggest since the 1970s.

The reports following the survey honed in on a few possible factors, but two are held up as being the most likely causes: the insane housing market and the faltering economy, which in recent years have become totally integral to each other, like a miserable free market Sonny and Cher. The simple facts are that unemployment is high, benefits are low and houses are ludicrously expensive. Another cheerful recent report suggested that to buy a house in London, you'd need to be clearing ​100 gran​d a year. Granted, that's London, but then again, London is the capital city ​where over one ​in ten of British people live now, and the place where by far the highest wages are on offer. Yes, other places are cheaper, but the picture is repeated nationwide. Wages have stagnated to the point where earning £40,000 ($63,000) a year puts you in the ​top 10 ​p​ercent of the population's earners. Essentially, it's all looking a bit shit out there. 

Sure, perhaps basing this on children and housing ownership does play into a very traditional view of what maturity is, but in an economy that is almost entirely based on house prices, investing in property is probably your best chance of doing anything with your money other than endlessly blowing it on uncontrolled rent and misery repellents. And children must be one of the few remaining catalysts in this world that'll convince you that the party needs to stop. 

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Photo by Natalie Meziani

These tenets of adulthood aren't for everyone, but this problem we have of people not being able to grow out of their party years has far more impact than a couple of drunk idiots crawling back into the creches of teenage nostalgia. 

All around us is the evidence of what happens when you deny a generation its ability to grow up. You see it in the armies of young men and women being carried out of clubs with puke on their shirts and rage in their hearts, in the broken teeth nestled in-between the cobbles of our pedestrianized shopping precincts, in the ​3.3 million young pe​ople still living with their parents, in the​ astonis​hingly high suicide rates of young men, in the ​cocaine-hea​vy water supply, in Dapper Laughs, in 90s R 'n' B nights in supposedly hip and forward-thinking places vomiting out tired, incapacitated tertiary workers, in ​the boy who became ad​dicted to selfies, in ​Mr O​i Oi and basically everything else that has come to define this generation that just can't get its shit together.

Instead of moving on with our lives, we've stuck to what we know, because finding anything else is just too hard. We spend most of our money renting flats we don't like, we eat supermarket pizzas, we mildly enjoy a few episodes of a new American comedy series before lying face down on a pillow trying to think of new ways not to go to work. On the weekends we get as fucked up as we've been doing for the last ten years despite the fact that it throws us into wild, vertiginous depressions, because it's the only thing we have left to believe in. We are the new aging Italian bachelors in our own mundane versions of ​The ​Great Beauty; the new-British professional wreckheads, the generation that doesn't know what to do with itself now that it's been forced to choose reality over the grand, overarching myths that steered our parents the way of relative peace and respectability. When you have no myth to guide you, what do you lock in on when the hangovers and comedowns demand some normalcy to return to? 

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Photo by Nicholas Pomeroy

If we're to expand our options beyond the dichotomy that is "emigrate or retreat", we need to find new ways to adapt to the world we have no choice but to live in. Times are hard, things are shit, but maybe it's time to try another plan other than partying ourselves into early, middle-aged oblivion. We may well be chiefly remembered for mephedrone, shufflers, and furious responses to Vine comedians, but maybe it'd pay to stop caring about what we'll be remembered for and just get on with finding our own routes out of this pissed-up purgatory.

You don't have to learn poi and move to an eco-farm to find ​alternative ways of liv​ing. Moving outside of London shouldn't mean you're ​giving up you​r life. We need to start taking steps beyond the "rent a flat in E9 and just try to survive" lifestyle that's being sold to us, otherwise we'll all just continue to throw money into ​Lynton Crosby's scumbag utopia.

We claim to hate the system that's made us like this, yet we're all so desperate to be a part of it. Maybe it's better to be young in a new world, than old in a one we know all too well. We're staring down the barrel of the first batch of acid house grandchildren, ffs. Maybe it's time we found a new way to grow up.

Follow Clive Martin on  ​Twitter.