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This post originally appeared on VICE UK

​Nothing better captures the state of British politics today than the top billing given to Nigel Farage and  ​Russell Brand on last night's BBC Question Time. Neither is in, or supports, any of the three major parties that have governed this country over the last century; Farage insists that the party he leads, the right-wing UK Independence Part (UKIP), is a natural home for defecting Conservative and Labour voters alike, while Brand's political trademark is a wholesale rejection of voting.

In their own distinct ways each man seeks to present himself as the outsider, their political currency forged on an aversion to the established order and a desire to remake it. For Farage, this means British exit from the much-loathed European Union, criticizing "ostentatious" breast-feeding and blaming traffic jams on migrants. For Brand, it means buying his bookie-wook, not voting, and hugging the police. Both, one might argue, are dreamers without a vision.

That expresses something significant: While last night's showdown was presented as a tale of two Britains and two opposing ideologies, there is a great deal that binds both men. Their near-simultaneous ascent should be viewed as emerging from the same political context that has been decades in the making.

That context is characterized by a crumbling of trust in the major institutions of public life, declining membership of the three major parties and a similarly declining share of the popular vote for them in general elections. Slowly but surely, Britain has been moving away from a culture of political deference and the two-party system for over a generation. What changed with the crisis of 2008, however—and the recession thereafter—was that those trends now found themselves aligned with a host of increasingly prominent grievances: falling real pay, public sector cuts, and a lack of affordable housing, to name the most dire.

In Scotland that has meant increased support for the Scottish National Party—who only formed a majority government in Holyrood for the first time in 2011—and an increasingly common view that the union exists exclusively to ensure the interests of the city of London. In September this year, 45 percent of Scots voted for independence—while not as close as some expected, that figure should be held against the fact that only four years earlier the SNP won just six out of a possible 59 Scottish spots in Parliament. Things are changing quickly.

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Similar dynamics underlie the rise of UKIP. While in the 2010 general election they won just 3 percent of the popular vote, this May saw them finish first in the European elections for the very first time. While that European success was not entirely without precedent, transferring it to the domestic arena has been and their massively increased support in local elections over the last two years was consummated with victory in two by-elections in the last several months, with the party sending their first elected MPs to the House of Commons. That figure will be well in excess of a dozen come next May.

While Farage blames migration and the EU for a host of problems, from the shape of bananas to spending commitments on climate change, it is increasingly clear that he and his party have sought to isolate those issues that matter most to the general public—declining living standards and falling pay. Speaking at his party's conference only this Autumn, Farage said, "Under the three main parties there has been a downward shift in living standards over the last decade or more"—UKIP, he promised, would change that.

While it may be difficult to believe, the Conservative and Labour parties were once large, extraordinarily successful organizations. In its 1950s heyday the former had three million members, whereas today it barely touches 100,000. Perhaps most astonishing, however, is that the average age of its members is 68 years old. Similar declines in membership, less pronounced for the Liberal Democrats and Labour but massive nonetheless, are a consequence of the decaying political constituencies upon which these parties historically relied—the industrial working class for Labour and civil society organizations, such as the Church of England, for the Conservative Party.

Over the last three decades those shifts meant that the political promised land was the "center," a mythical set of political calculations that would be adopted by "Middle England" and which—coincidentally of course—catered to the interests of international finance. This ideologically rudderless politics only grew as it became increasingly clear that the major parties were no longer electoral actors reflecting concrete sections of society but detached organizations seeking to temporarily club together just enough votes to form a government. The adhesive for that, first under Margaret Thatcher and later Tony Blair, was personal "charisma"—now the ultimate political virtue.

The only problem with that was that by 2010 it was clear that the current crop of Westminster politicians weren't particularly charismatic. And it wasn't just the leaders. If you looked across the front benches in the Commons you quickly realized that only political geeks and power-hungry megalomaniacs were now getting involved in party politics.

That meant that simultaneous with the biggest crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression of the 1920s and the culmination of a slow collapse in the legitimacy of the major parties was the absence of any "common touch" political figure—basically, anyone people actually like. While the United States saw the election of Barack Obama the same year as it bailed out the banks—and with that a temporary injection of collective hope—Britain got Nick Clegg and "Cleggmania." In retrospect, a hung parliament—with no overall winner—was inevitable. Expect a repeat performance next year.

These three factors—a crisis of capitalism, the collapse of the old parties and the absence of charismatic leaders on the front line of politics—fuel the fire regarding the rise of both Farage and Brand. As America is finding out, however, political charisma only quenches the thirst for so long. After that you need ideas and solutions that actually make people's lives better.

Whether you find them funny, compelling, attractive or outlandish, neither Brand nor Farage seems capable of that. While Brand's Primark Chomsky is preferable to Farage's Poundland Powell, last night's pantomime highlighted, if anything, that the former has a limited ability to convince those who don't already like him.

And while UKIP is increasingly inclined to speak to the problems of everyday Britain—from pay to housing—that's nothing more than a way to further the project upon which they were originally founded: exit from the European Union. Ultimately, however, they are incapable of solving these problems, simply because what they identify as the root causes is entirely incorrect. Opportunism can win votes, but only for so long.

Between the leaders debates of 2010 and last night's panel, it is clear how far the political debate has moved and how irrelevant the major parties have become. We don't need new personalities to fill the vacuum, but totally new political horizons.

Follow Aaron Bastani on ​Twitter.

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Casey Walker's hilarious, much-talked-about debut novel Last Days in Shanghai will be published December 16. It is about a Congressional aide, Luke, who goes on a junket to China with his boss. Disoriented and off-balance, he accepts a briefcase full of money from a small town's mayor.

In this excerpt, Luke has become separated from his hard-drinking boss. Their trip to China has been paid for by a firm called Bund International, and as Luke tries to locate the congressmen, he's also trying to keep up appearances with Bund—and falling apart in the process.

-​Amie Bar​rodale

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"This restaurant has a thousand years of history," the mayor of Kaifeng said when we arrived on the fifth floor of the building housing our banquet room. I wondered how that could be true, considering I'd just stepped off the elevator. No answers were forthcoming.

Whenever I returned from one of these trips abroad, other assistants always asked what the place was like, what I thought of where I'd been. I usually said a few obvious things about the quality of the food, or related some allegedly telling cultural attitude regarding punctuality or table etiquette. But the truth is I almost never met people who weren't working for a government, or a Western-directed business, people among the small minority of a country's English speakers—and these made poor, or at least abnormal, examples. So whatever I ended up "thinking" about the country was only some combination of what the host government was hoping I would, divided by whatever skepticism I retained, and helped along minimally by a very few unscripted interactions with people who, by the very fact that they could even converse with me, demonstrated our similarity rather than our difference.

The mayor led me to a private dining room, and twenty men stood to greet me. He presided robustly over the receiving line, and I gave each man one of Leo's business cards. I shook hands with a firm jerk, the way I saw the mayor do it. I watched every face, and none reacted to my English.

After introductions, the staff directed us to our place settings and the mayor began to address the gathered room in Mandarin. His translator stood mutely alongside, and I understood only "Congressman Fillmore" and the word for "thank you." It was obvious Leo had been expected as the guest of honor.

The mayor turned to me with a gesture of lifted hands. It was my turn to speak. I rose slowly, and my hands tremored until a private joke occurred to me. I huffed a few times and slouched my shoulders, in imitation of Leo's posture, and bowed deeply like an idiot who'd mistaken China for Japan.

"We may not always agree on matters of state," I said, not in my own voice, but in that loud, ponderous one I knew just as well. "But rest assured, honorable men, that America's best interests are also your best interests. We're strategic poker players, not weepy sentimentalists. And together we can all prosper." If I was smirking, and I might have been, I trusted the translator would render the words sincerely.

"To the good people of Henan Province!" I said.

The Henan officials applauded. The premier cru Bordeaux, poured by our waitresses until it nearly topped the glasses, was raised high and I was implored to chug it to the sediment.

I took my seat, and the man to my left tried to speak to me in English. It was something about how, given my youth, I must be full of talents. As he flailed, Shoes, at my right, offered no help. He dragged his chopsticks like a pen across his empty plate where they left behind no pattern. He closed his eyes tight and held them that way, and when he opened them he did not turn to my neighbor, who was still trying to get his attention. That guest gave up speaking to me and addressed something to the full table that made everyone laugh. I tried to play along and gave them Leo's laugh, from the base of my diaphragm.

The mayor watched me intently. Through his translator, he asked me a question much less pointed than his stare.

"Your ancestry?" he said.

"I'm just your regular American mutt," I said. "Scotch-Irish by way of Texas on my father's side. Southern European on my mother's, which is why you're looking at these thick eyebrows."

"Kaifeng has a history of Jewish traders," the Mayor said. "And it is well known that the Chinese empire under the Khans once stretched all the way to Babylon."

In the time this took to translate, I realized that I'd missed an opportunity to please him. I should have traced my family back to the Arabian Peninsula and the brotherhood of the Khans. Whenever the mayor wasn't looking, Shoes would set his flitting bird's eyes on the man and hold them there.

The waitresses began to serve: duck liver in jelly, shark-fin soup in a hollowed-out orange. Many fingers of the twenty at the table turned the glass lazy Susan. I looked to Shoes for how to avoid faux pas, but he didn't move. His neighbor served dishes onto his plate while Shoes stared mildly at his hands in his lap. The man next to me piled food up for me, too. I didn't see anything I wanted until a chicken dish spun near that looked familiar as Chinese takeout. I was clumsy with chopsticks, but reached for a thick piece I could handle. When my catch landed on my plate, I saw I had grabbed the head. Beak and skull—leathern flesh cooked to the color of a mummy's skin. I pushed it to the plate's edge and tried to ignore it. Was it stranger to see the head of the animal I was eating, or stranger not to? I knocked one of my chopsticks to the floor.

The mayor saw it happen and rose to shout at me.

"Chinese custom says that the person who drops a chopstick is the one to pay for dinner," the translator explained. It may have been a joke, but if so the mayor didn't laugh. The waitress brought me a fork.

The croaking translator ferried along the mayor's address to the table about the "modernization" of Henan Province, but several minutes of closing disquisition was rendered in a single English sentence: "Henan Province has the happiest labor force in East Asia," the mayor said.

The waitresses poured baijiu. A glass of it sat in front of me, clear and smelling of kerosene.

"Gan bei!" the mayor screamed.

"It means 'dry the glass,'" Shoes whispered.

I took the baijiu down. They compared baijiu to vodka, but vodka's virtue is neutrality. Henan baijiu was a militant grain.

"It's good you don't flinch," the mayor said to me. "You see? He drinks without flinching!"

With this endorsement, five enthusiastic officials of Kaifeng's government raised their glasses to me from several seats away. They expected me to stand, toast, and light a wildfire down my throat. I did, and they did, and we were all good friends.

The teenaged waitresses watched us like judges. Finally there was a lag between talk and toasts where people began to eat. The chicken head remained, its eyes on me like it might address me with recriminations. I wanted to mush it up into a ball and toss it under the table, butmy napkin was cloth and its top corner was tucked under my plate. Dumplings arrived in wooden steamers, and I speared two with my fork and built a small fortress around the head. The chicken eyes still poked above the dumpling wall. I looked so long into them—their hundred-yard stare—that I imagined a banquet of animals, with my own head spinning on the table's center.

The mayor stood—arm extended, palm face down, fingers wagging. He pivoted toward me and toasted to the congressman. I stood, shakily, as Leo's earthly representative. A waitress in a qipao dress crawled out of the wallpaper to pour me one step closer to death. I was goaded to speak again, so I repeated something I'd heard Shoes say earlier that day.

"The sky is high," I said. "And the emperor is far away!"

The mayor grinned. His associates raised glasses. When I thought no one was looking, I spit my baijiu into my water. It was the only trick I could think of to avoid heaving later in the bathroom.

"Thank you for that, Mr. Congressman!" my neighbor exclaimed in English. I turned to see myself beheld in glassy eyes. Only then did the depth of their misapprehension become clear. A shiver ran through me that I was afraid must be visible. Shoes might have been meditating, mouth and eyes closed, inhaling deeply through his nose. I looked into my lap, trying unsuccessfully to focus my eyes.

Before I could think of how I might begin correcting these men, the mayor made two fists with his hands and started swiveling his arms in a machine gun motion, with a stuttering ch-ch-ch-pop noise. You didn't have to know a single Mandarin tone to understand the shouts of "Rambo, Rambo!" that intercut the mayor mimicking heavy gunfire.

"The mayor now describes a very famous battle," the translator said. "The Chinese fighters were outnumbered by the Japanese. But all of the Chinese fought like Rambos. The Japanese were cowards."

At "cowards"—he apparently knew the English word—the mayor stood up on his chair. His porcelain eyes tried to lock onto his nearby deputies. They stared into their hands as their boss, arms exultant, searched the room for any object as vital as his beating heart. For the first time all night, the room was silent enough to hear footsteps in the outside hallway. I excused myself from the table. Twenty men could testify that an American congressman had born witness to it all.

Back in Shanghai, I took the Maglev train out of Pudong Airport—bullet speed through gray flatlands, the train barely swaying despite the ground it covered. I had apprehensions about Leo's drinking, and worried that I might have trouble corralling him, but it did comfort me, at least, to have arrived in the city from which our flight home would depart tomorrow. Wherever he was, he didn't want to stay in China forever.

Shanghai was dripping, gloomy. Skyscrapers pushed into view, a cloud city rising to life out of some old illustration of the future. From the Maglev stop at Luoyang Road, I found a taxi and crossed the Huangpu River in halting traffic, under global financial towers that crept up and groped the sky. Nothing in my imagination of the world's possibilities—the hands that built it, the lives it contained—could help me account for Shanghai's over-awing presence, its high-rises multiplying from the soil into a miasma of soot and acidic rain.

I dumped myself in a chair in the lobby of the Ritz Carlton. Two Chinese men behind me ordered Johnny Walker Red, and so I did, too. I waited for my thoughts to still. Only when my hands became unsteady did I realize how hard I must have been clenching them. I glared blankly at the lobby lights. I was consumed by the disoriented belief that my circumstances had become so unreal that I wasn't accountable to anyone anymore. I wasn't even accountable to myself.

I couldn't stand to be alone any longer, and finally I called the number on a certain business card a businessman had slipped to me. I spoke to a woman. Not for the first time it occurred to me: you will live all your life in thrall to your evasions, hurtling toward desires that can never be satisfied.

She could have been someone's translator, a concierge. For tonight, she was my company, my solace. I singled her out from the scan she gave the lobby. She could walk in and out of this hotel a hundred times and the men whose eyes gnawed into her would have forgotten her by the time the next pretty girl walked by.

I flashed two fingers at her. She came and sat: petite, expectedly; black hair, above the shoulders, cut in a flip popular in America in the last decade but just reaching China now. Pencil skirt, pin-tucked blouse, very little makeup. She wore glasses, but when she took them off the lenses didn't magnify or shrink the ice cubes in my drink. She asked me which room was mine and I sat stupidly silent. She asked if I wanted another drink.

"Could we go somewhere else?" I said. Anxiety put me in perpetual motion.

"I will call for the car," she said.

We went outside to wait. An early mist had turned rain. A car pulled around and I wasn't sure if the man at the wheel was just a driver or a bodyguard, too. He was big enough to knock me senseless if he needed to, but for now he was just handling the car.

"Xintiandi," she said to the driver.

"You will like it," she said, looking me over. "All the Americans like it."

I saw what she meant when the car let us out—Xintiandi was an outdoor shopping mall, distinct from its American cousins only by its patina of history: worn cobblestones, narrow alleyways. We took an outdoor table at a beer garden, under trees strangled in coils of lights.

"How long for your China visit?" she asked. She spun her beer until foam crawled up the glass. I watched beyond her head, behind the fountain. I looked into the next cafe and up at second-story windows.

"I'm supposed to leave in the morning," I said. "But I don't know. Maybe I'll die here."

In the ambient light of the coiled trees, her face was expectant, chin turned up, eyes squeezed open.

"Why did you come?" she asked.

"Actually, I'm a little lost about that myself."

"You don't know why you come to China?"

"Not strictly speaking, no."

She watched a passing woman who looked to be shivering. She looked down to the woman's high heels, and then below the heels to the uneven cobblestones.

"Are you from Shanghai?" I asked.

"I do not know anyone from Shanghai. Not one person."

"So where then?"

"Henan Province," she said. "You will not know it."

"I've been to Kaifeng," I said.

"It is all poor," she shrugged. "You have to leave. Some time I would like to go to Paris. For now, Shanghai."

"People say Shanghai is the Paris of the East," I said.

"I don't know why anyone says that. This is not Paris. How is it like Paris?"

"It's not, really," I said. "Not at all, actually."

Nothing would slow my heartbeat, but Xintiandi clamored in a way that made our conversation feel very private. I heard a jazz band trying to render Miles Davis. If I sat at this table long enough, listening to chattering groups, I could probably learn six languages. The face of the police captain appeared in every third person who passed, and I shuddered each time, but the image always dissolved into the features of a different man.

"You want to hear a story?" I asked her.

"What is the story about?"

"That's what I'll tell you, but I'm asking first if you want to hear it."

"I can listen," she said.

She must know better than anyone the private side of public men, I thought. She might even have some counsel, or wisdom. I told her a story of improbable cities, exquisite dinners—corruption and disappearance.

"I want you to be honest," I said when I was done. "What should the assistant do?"

She let me sit quietly.

"I don't know," she sighed.

"I thought you might have some ideas," I said. I realized how stupid it was to pay this woman for her affections and then spend my time trying to discern the truth of her feelings.

"My idea is I don't think you are this person you say you are," she said.

"Why would you doubt that?"

"I talk to liars all day," she said. "Are you married?"

"No," I said.

"I don't believe that, either," she said.

"Well, it doesn't matter. Let's say I made it all up," I said. "Why does the congressman disappear? What happens to the assistant?"

"I think the official is very corrupt," she said. "His assistant is, too."

"And so what happens to them?"

"They kill themselves from shame," she said. "The official jumps from a building. The assistant drowns himself."

"That's the end?" I said.

"That's the end."

"That's a sad fucking story," I said.

"I have more thoughts."

"Tell me."

"You don't like to hear the truth."

"Maybe not," I said.

She'd been right that I did like Xintiandi. The upmarket stores were still busy and blandly prosperous. It felt familiar—the wealthy familiarity of the cosmopolitan no-place—at a moment when any quantity of contentment seemed so out of reach that even the most bloodless form of consumer activity was desperately desirable. I left cash for our bill and we walked down an empty lane where stone walls rose around us on each side.

Eventually, as though she'd been thinking everything over, she said: "In your story, the truth is nothing happens."

"Nothing happens to who?" I said. Offering her my story had hurt more than it helped, made my confinement and poor choices feel more, not less, real.

"You see this in Shanghai," she continued, "once in a long time some person goes to jail for their lies. But it is not so common. And nobody very important. Or look at the man in my home province stealing children from the Zhengzhou train station. He took them to work in his factory. He beat the children and did not pay any money. When he is caught, he says to consider his situation. Running a factory is hard work, he says. He explains he is not so bad, that he did not murder anyone. For me, I would like people to be more honorable. They were this way in the past. In the old China, people take responsibility."

"And kill themselves?" I said.

"Sometimes," she said.

She took my hand, and I aligned my steps with this girl in the pencil skirt, without even knowing her name. Rain and mist returned, and revolved, one coming after the other. She led me through neighboring alleys of some of the oldest remaining sections of the city, a few gray stone houses with faded red roofs and bent lanes where narrow corridors cut to the width of my shoulders. She always knew which way to turn, like following the lines on her own familiar palm. I was too tired to believe I could ward off any harm coming to me. My thoughts were those of an escaped convict: if what was before me was the prospect of capture and long suffering, then tonight I would abuse my last few steps of freedom.

We returned to the Ritz Carlton. I wanted a room unknown to my hosts, or the police captain, and I paid the full rate out of my jacket stash of the mayor's money. Upstairs, I paid her—she wouldn't shut the door until I did. She asked what I wanted. I couldn't tell her what I was thinking. She paced the room running her hands on the raised fleur-de-lis wallpaper. I smelled lavender. I told her I wanted to shower, and she said she would wash off with me. She took off her shoes. She smiled when she discovered the radiant heating in the marble floor.

"Lights on or off?" she said.

"Off," I said.

Water from the rain-head shower instantly steamed the glass. As her body emerged out of the darkness around it, I felt her slight pearing, her nails bitten ragged, her cold hands. Everything was a surprise: Her shoulders were almost broad, like she was a swimmer, and her flat smile hid sharp teeth. Her wet skin was smooth as stream stones. Under the shower spray, in the dark, I thought she was right about everything she'd said—the assistant is guilty, too, and he drowns himself from shame. 

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​ It's that awful time of year again, when the Christmas marketing machine pummels you with the idea that the gifts you give are in direct proportion to the affection you have for your loved ones and your worth as a human being. If you are anything like me, the thought of purchasing presents for your family causes you so much anxiety you can't sleep at night. You franticly pace in and out of stores, sweating profusely as you try to figure out what Christmas tie—Santa or snowman—your senile grandfather would like to drool gravy on during Christmas dinner. You spend so many hours scrolling through internet stock that the wallets blend into the shoes and the pants look like shirts. Not to mention all the shitty gifts you've browsed online have been picked up by Google ads, so you see promotions for orthopedic slippers and fleece pajama sets on every fucking web page you visit. Eventually, you just give up and go to the bodega on Christmas Eve and buy $5 umbrellas and strawberry Nesquik for everyone, because fuck it.

Well, if you don't want to end up like that this year, let me make it easy for you with a few cool gifts ideas for the folks you love. 

For the Non-Blood Relative Who Doesn't Really Need to Be in the Family Photo

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Impossible x Hänska Bespoke Camera Bag (​buy at the ImpossibleProject.com for $124.49)

You aren't exactly sure how you're actually related to this person, but you probably call them "uncle" or "auntie" something. Get them this bespoke bag to lug their Polaroid camera to the next family get-together in so they can snap pictures of mom after she's had too many L ime-aritas.

For the Older Brother Who Still Reminisces About His High School Glory Days

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"Forgotten Franchises" Starter Jacket (buy at ​Ruvilla.com $100.00)

Do you have a brother who likes to bring up that game-winning touchdown pass from ten damn years ago? If you do, you should get him a Forgotten Franchises Starter Jacket. It mixes sports and 90s nostalgia, the only things that keep him from relapsing.

For the Friend Who Could Potentially Turn into a Cat Lady

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Lovelife Dream Traditional Vibrator (buy at ​OhMiBod.com for $69.00)

Is your friend constantly complaining about how she can't find a man while simultaneously gazing longingly at feral cats who "just need a home and a momma to love them"? Get her this vibrator to bring her back to reality. You don't want her pets feeding on her decaying carcass in 20 years.

For the Sister Who Is Still Going Through Her Rebellious Stage

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Fleet Ilya Classic Wrist Cuffs (buy at ​FleetIlya.com for $141.72)

Sometimes the end of high school doesn't mean the end of that "acting up" stage of life. Get these leather cuffs for your sister and let her know that you understand her struggle. It's not easy being the black sheep in the family.

For the Intellectual Boyfriend Who Brings Up Politics at the Dinner Table

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Black Panther Jacket (buy at ​Kinshipshop.com $350)

This wool and leather varsity jacket will be the perfect conversation starter, and a great way to make sure your liquor-soaked relatives leave in an angry huff.

For the Girlfriend Who Likes Fashion but Still Shops at the Mall

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Vashtie G-Shock (buy at ​GShock.com for $160.00)

You know how your homegirl is always talking about fashion but references Michael Kors and Coach? Get her this gold Vashtie x G-Shock watch, because it will completely blow her mind.

For the Dad Who Delays Christmas Dinner Because He Is Outside Smoking

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G Slim Vaporizer (buy at ​GrencoScience.com $29.95)

You don't want to have that annual conversation about how smoking is bad for his breath, his teeth, and his long-term health... so just get him this G Slim vaporizer to make sure he doesn't freeze to death while sucking nicotine into his lungs outside.

For the Mom Who Never Splurges on Herself but Deserves Something Nice

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Chiyome Wallet (buy at ​Chiyome.com $158)

You can never repay your mother for squeezing your baby body out of her vagina, but this fancy, handmade leather wallet is a nice way of saying, "Thanks for sacrificing your life for me, Merry Christmas!"

For the Antisocial Cousin Who Has Serial Killer Tendencies 

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Mansonic Socks (buy at ​MishkaNYC.com $22.00)

It's not that you want to encourage him by gifting him socks screen-printed with Manson's face—you just know he'll  really like it. And isn't spreading joy what Christmas is all about? 

For the Nephew Who Still Has Hope for the Future

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Hands Up Don't Shoot Hoodie (buy at ​Amazon.com $24.99)

Protesters around the country have been seen wearing clothing with this powerful message. Get your nephew in on the movement with this hoodie and lead him in a direction for change.

For the Best Friend from High School Who Dropped Out of College and Smokes a Lot of Pot

24K Gold Rolling Papers (buy at ShopJee​n.com $25.00)

I never know what to get this person, or why we feel obligated to do a gift exchange each year. Since you can't get him direction, goals, and a place of his own, maybe some fancy weed-smoking stuff will make him happy.

THE NEXT PHOTO IS OF A SHIRT WITH A BIG PENIS ON IT. DON'T SAY WE DIDN'T WARN YOU.

For the Gay BFF Who Likes Boners and Dresses Well

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Mr. WizHard Penis Shirt (buy at ​Mr. Wizhard $86.67)

It takes a real man to wear a  ​shirt with big erect schlong on it. The design was developed as a way to make images of the penis accepted and even revered—but hahahaha oh man there's a big ol' dick on it! If you know anyone with the balls to wear this, give it to them immediately.

For the Feminist Sister Who Needs a Distraction from Ignorant Family Members

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Yes Please by Amy Poehler (buy at Ama​zon.com $14.50)

Sometimes alcohol doesn't offer enough of an escape during the holiday. Give your sister something to do when she is hiding from the "women belong in the home" conversation.

Follow Erica Euse on ​Twitter

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Image via  ​Phyzome​

As I'm led underground through the labyrinthine corridors of a mortuary in the North of England, I come to a room with a large internal window that looks into another, dimly lit and murky space. It's filled with coffin-size metal containers that house all manner of sterilizers and medical equipment. The smell of sanitizer hangs in the air like the breath of a drunk. 

In the middle of the room is a shiny, stainless steel table where hundreds of dead bodies—including mass murderer ​Harold Shipman's—have been dissected, examined, and probed. "I knew who it was, but I just treated him as I would any other individual," says forensic pathologist Dr. Philip Lumb, a slightly built 43-year-old with a delicate northern lilt. "He was treated with respect, with the neutrality that I afford to everybody. He was just another guy." 

Lumb carries out postmortems on up to nine bodies a week, many of which are murders. Describing how bodies are "shredded" if they're hit by trains, the dryness in his tone is as if he was describing the decor in his home hallway—which is precisely what you'd expect from someone dealing with death and all its viscera day in, day out. Gallows humor, you imagine, is a prerequisite for his job. 

An important part of a forensic pathologist's job is to give evidence in murder trials. When a suspicious death occurs, the pathologist is an integral part of the investigation. Police will call a pathologist to the scene to examine the body of the deceased and look for clues pertaining to the cause of death. The pathologist will later carry out a postmortem on the body and write a report that determines the cause of death. If the pathologist suspects a murder, they will often be called to court.

Silent Witness was the first show that really brought the world of forensic pathology into popular culture, but every crime show in the world now touches upon it in some way. The Wire, Dexter, CSI, The Fall—all use bit-part actors to illustrate how important thorough post-death examination is in making cases. But Lumb can barely watch them without "tearing his hair out," as the reality of waiting for DNA and toxicology results is much more frustrating than TV shows let on. He explains that it can take weeks for results to come back from the lab and emphasizes the importance of these results being interpreted correctly. "If you make a mistake, somebody could go to prison for 20-odd years," he says. 

Because of the sensitive nature of his job, Lumb has to be discreet about his personal life and the specific cases he has worked on. The risks involved with regularly standing as a witness demands a certain degree of anonymity, so he is unable to reveal any details about his life outside of work. The small, bespectacled man therefore cuts quite a mysterious figure as he moves around the room. He is utterly defined by the intricacies of his work. I wonder, for a second, if Philip Lumb is even his real name. 

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A forensic toxicology lab. Image via  ​CAMIOKC

He is, however, able to discuss several high-profile cases that he's been involved in, as he is already named as the forensic pathologist who worked on the cases online. This includes the  ​double murder of Robert and Patricia Seddon by their son, Stephen. In July 2012, Stephen Seddon, 46, killed his parents with a sawn-off shotgun at their home in Sale, Greater Manchester. He'd tried before, by driving into a canal with them strapped in the back seats in a faked road accident, and when he did eventually succeeded in his plan to collect his $362,000 inheritance, Seddon tried to cover his tracks by placing the gun in his father's hands.

Lumb had originally been told that he was going to the scene of a murder-suicide. However, the positioning of the weapon and the angling of the bullet holes proved that it was impossible for Robert Seddon to have shot his wife and then himself. "It's quite nice to be able to turn round to the police and say, 'I'm sorry, but you've got a murder here.'" In March 2013, Stephen Seddon was found guilty of the double murder.

Dealing with the homicide of an 18-year-old is as difficult as dealing with a two-year-old. Nobody likes to see wee babies in that position, but we have to stay neutral.

While such cases provide an immense "sense of satisfaction" for Lumb, the job can also be incredibly taxing. Unpredictable hours mean that it is impossible for forensic pathologists like him to make many plans, as they are often on call. There is also no way of telling how long you will be required to stay on a scene. Lumb's longest shift lasted 24 hours. Such irregular, grueling hours are, he says, often a bigger downside than the gruesomeness. But again, his training affords him a sense of calm, a strictly clinical approach to the cold, blue cadavers in front of him. They aren't people. They're vessels, slabs of dark, dying flesh. 

"I've had to deal with murders of children many times, and I think everybody expects you to say that must be a lot harder, but again, our training helps us to remain neutral. Dealing with the homicide of an 18-year-old is as difficult as dealing with a two-year-old. Nobody likes to see wee babies in that position, but we have to stay neutral." 

Often, though, part of the pathologist's job can involve watching videos of victims in the run up to their murder—particularly in torture cases. They have to, to confirm whether the injury is compatible with the movement of the individual on the footage. "That's disturbing, even for us," says Lumb. "It's easy to disassociate and focus on the science when the person is inanimate. However, having to watch them walking and talking on such a video can be emotionally draining." He leans back in his chair and laughs nervously. "There's still a flicker of emotion in me."  

In Lumb's mind, a murder scene serves as  "a snapshot of somebody at the end of their life, when it's all over." The environment that he enters surrounding the death is so controlled, so precise, that it is easy for him to detach himself from it emotionally. Forensic pathologists are generally called to the scene toward the end of the investigation. Police will secure the environment and then get biologists and blood-spatter and ballistic experts to look for trace evidence before forensic pathologists come along and start looking at the body. This allows them to get all of the fragile evidence off before the pathologist begins moving the body around, looking at the injuries and assessing how he thinks they were attained. Much of their work is done alone, says Lumb, and although they do "ask each other's opinions on cases," they are examined as individuals in court. The final determination of the cause of death lies only with the pathologist assigned to the case.

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Blood-spatter analysis 

Before I leave, conversation turns to traceless murders and how it's incredibly difficult to commit them. "Though I can think of one or two ways," he deadpans. "So you'd better watch what you write."

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​ Oh, what a feeling, Fuck it, I want a Billion by Awol Erizku

Young black and brown men in skirts, do-rags, and military jackets with " ​HBA" emblazoned across them took over Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art on October 30. The event was called Hood by Air: Id, and was the result of a collaboration between MoMA's PopRally and Shayne Oliver, the black fashion designer who runs the eclectic and androgynous label Hood by Air. Since 2006, the label has sought to expand the vocabulary of street style—with the help of fellow travelers like Kanye West—by challenging gender norms while still grounding itself in hip-hop culture.

HBA's multidisciplinary work at the MoMA featured a performance by gender-bending rapper Mykki Bla​nco, a frenetic video installation, and a presentation of the brand's spring 2015 collection. It was incredible to see such a new, creative force like HBA, which has become so synonymous with hip-hop, be canonized in the same institution that exhibits works by Warhol and Picasso. The presence of HBA on that lofty platform signaled just how ever-present and impactful "post-black" art is today, while also highlighting how hip-hop has evolved into a creative form that fits within both entertainment and fine art.

Post-black art diverges from the late Amiri Baraka's black arts move​ment, which grew out of the racial tension of the 60s and 70s and sought to create radical new forms of expression removed from Western culture. Instead, post-black artists celebrate and indict an America that has given lip service to progress but ​still allows oppression to thrive. The differences between the black arts movements of the past and the present-day post-black arts movement grow even starker when you look at the impact of hip-hop on America. As esteemed curator Thelma Golden says, post-black artists "are both post-Basquiat and post-Biggie."

Golden helped introduce the first wave of this movement to the world back in 1994 with  Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, a show at the Whitney Museum. The show was so significant in signaling a new wave the Whitney will be holding an event this evening with Golden, writer Hilton Als, and critic Huey Copeland to commemorate and discuss its impact. 

As game-changing as Black Male was for exposing the world to post-black art, Golden didn't really start using the term until the 2001 in the exhibition catalogue for the seminal show F​reestyle. In that catalogue, she described the post-blacks as artists who are "adamant about not being labeled 'black' artists, though their work [is] steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness."

Golden followed up Freestyle with a series of high-profile shows—Frequency, Flow, and Fore. With reverence and indignation, these exhibits confronted the contradiction of being both the descendants of slaves and privileged American citizens. The shows featured work made by the first wave of post-black artists like Rashid Johnson, Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, Sanford Biggers, and Hank Willis Thomas. Although all the artists exhibited were different, Golden discovered that the crucial connecting tissue "that defined these practitioners [was] music."

In the time since Freestyle opened, the music and culture that helped birth and define the post-black movement has changed drastically. It went from older blacks and whites wanting hip-hop treated like contraband in the early 90s to the State Department hiring its first Hip-Hop Ambassador in 2013. Today, according to Forbes, hip-hop is a $10 billion industry; the results of a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study found that 65 percent of all American kids between the ages of eight and 18 are listening to rap on a daily basis.

The latest wave of post-black art is all about grappling with this new ascension of hip-hop culture and the realities of the black experience that are still mired in the struggles of the past—from police brutality to unemployment.

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On top of the Hood by Air-MoMA collaboration, this kind of new artistic consciousness is exemplified in the work of artist Rashaad Newsome, a 35-year-old New Orleans–born visual artist who uses hip-hop to explore symbols of status and power. His most recent work is the video K​not, which is currently on display at the Brooklyn Museum show Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe." The video features straight, gay, and trans black people voguing, the freeze-and-pose dance style created by blacks and Latinos in Harlem in the early 80s that was famously documented in the film Paris Is Burning. Newsome's dancers do the stylized modern dance with pain and pride in expensive red-heeled Christian Louboutins, signifying the mixed emotions that come with fetishized objects of desire.

To open the Killer Heels exhibition, Newsome staged a live performance of Knot, during which men and women vogued, twerked, and held up signs with the names of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Islan Nettles—a black trans woman who was murdered in Harlem across the street from a police station last year.

Newsome's work bridges the gap between the generation of artists who were coming of age when hip-hop was just starting to become a mainstream genre and the younger generation who have only known hip-hop as a dominant commercial and cultural touchstone.

New York native Awol Erizku is one of those artists. His most recent show, " ​The Only Way​ Is Up," featured a mixed media sculpture, Oh, what a feeling, Fuck it, I want a Billion. The piece is comprised of seven regulation-sized basketball rims with gold chains and an official NBA game basketball sitting atop the seventh rim, unattached. The work embodies the hopes and economic plight of our generation and was named after a line from a verse of Jay Z's "Picasso Baby," a song Hov famously performed for six hours straight at the Pace Gallery in front of performance art legends like Marina Abramovic.

To accompany the show, Erizku collaborated with DJ Kitty Cash to release a hip-hop mixt​ape. "The majority of that mixtape was trap, because trap is hot in hip-hop right now," says Erizku. "Music is universal and I wanted to create a musical definition of my work that spoke to my generation about the issues and ideas my work represents."

Erizku's work draws heavily on the current trends of hip-hop. However, other black artists are taking the same cultural elements and coming up with very different results. Painter Cameron Welch, who used to tag walls around Indianapolis when he was growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s, draws on the tradition of graffiti in hip-hop to inspire his work.

"Graffiti is such a loaded material given its historical context—it's how a lot of people growing up in hip-hop culture left their mark and made themselves known," explains Welch. In Goddess Braids, the painter injects the history of graffiti into his work in an effort to disrupt the long history of the triangle in abstract art. The picture features powerful images of black women modeling hairstyles that Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown wore in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Although artists like Welch and Erizku embrace it, the incorporation of hip-hop can sometimes overwhelm the artist's intent. Creating post-black art is a dangerous line to walk, because the artist can appear to some to be only concerned with questions of blackness. And the loaded symbolism can strip the work of its relatability to people outside the culture. However, as Erizku says, artists of his ilk do not seek to isolate their work by race, but to use their work to "elevate blackness to the same level of universality as whiteness."

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​ Goddess Braids by Cameron Welch

Painter Jordan Casteel latest work was born out of this paradox of representation. Her recent solo show  Visible Man featured a series of figurative paintings of unclothed black men in different hues, a reaction to the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. The paintings explore the power of clothing and the black body at a time when hip-hop-related garments like the hoodie look malevolent in the eyes of some Americans when worn by black men.

"When I first started this body of work, I painted a figure who was clothed," explains Casteel. "The figure was wearing a fitted hat and a 'U MAD' Nike shirt. [However, the clothes] immediately became a block for people."

Despite the fact that Casteel's initial art drew on a long established line of historical portraiture, viewers of her early drafts couldn't get past the hip-hop clothes of the figure because it echoed a singular and familiar ideal of blackness. This kept the viewers from engaging in the dialogue Casteel wanted to have about humanity, sexuality, and subjectivity.

"Those reactions in my studio became a part of my decision to make these figures nude, reposition their penises out of the painting, and paint them at home," says the 25-year-old Denver native. "That way, I could challenge the current mix of history and popular culture that place these men on the street and remove their humanity."

Casteel's initial dilemma and artful solution isn't removed from hip-hop, it's defined by hip-hop's new era. But instead of embracing it as other artists in the post-black scene have done, she reacted against it and created something that was revelatory in its mundanity, if only because it bucked a familiar narrative.

"[These days,] hip-hop and post-black art share the same questions of how an artist of color deals with visibility," says Jeff Chang, who heads the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University and wrote Who We Be: The Colorization of America and Can't Stop Won't Stop."Now, in addition to the old questions of invisibility, such as How can we be seen? and Who controls what we see? we add new ones like How can we change what people see? and How do we change what they think about when they see the work?"

These questions that Jeff Chang raise will certainly be at the heart of next phase of post-black art movement. They go hand in hand with the modern black experience, which is both President Barack Obama and deceased Eric Garner, wealthy superstar Jaden Smith and murdered teenager Trayvon Martin. As creative young people of color in America continue to explore this dual identity, they'll also undoubtedly be vibing to the next permutation of that ever-evolving rhythm that has helped carry black art from John Coltrane to James Brown to Jay Z and beyond.

Follow Antwaun Sargent on ​Twitter

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Illustrations by Claire Milbrath.

​After breaking up with a boyfriend in 2011, I wanted to explore online dating and give being single in Toronto a shot before jumping into anything serious. Unfortunately for me, I soon realized that the gay dating world came with its own set of rules, most of which are pretty weird and somewhat racist. Race, body shaming, identity politics, and masculinity seemed to come up a lot and eventually I just said "fuck it" and deleted every dating site I was on. I needed a break. I needed to hear something other than "looking for whites only" or "straight-acting only." It got to a point where I felt shitty about wanting to get laid and needed give the online thing a rest.

In 2013 I came out of "online dating retirement" and decided I wanted to explore it again. Every so often I'd hear my friends gush about all the great dates and hot sex they were having on Grindr and Scruff. It took a lot of convincing, but I decided to give a few of these apps a shot. I downloaded both Grindr and Scruff and immediately starting messaging people. Throughout that year, there were a few really nice conversations that didn't really go anywhere, the occasional good ass and/or dick pics, and an older couple in their 80s that always messaged me in Spanish. But aside from that, the string of weird encounters just got worse every time, and in January, I finally decided to delete all the apps and have sworn off online dating and hookups for good. But, below, you'll find three stories that I'll probably never forget.

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Picture Tag Gone Wrong
​Around Thanksgiving last year I got a message from an Irish guy visiting the city for a few weeks. I chatted him up about all things Ireland and told him about a trip I was planning for spring 2016. The vibe was friendly for the first few days, and then he wanted to see some pics, which I was more than willing to share. I sent a face pic to start and he sent one back. He was a bald, rugged, bearded man with green eyes. Suffice to say the dude was really hot and definitely checked off a few boxes in the "my type" department.

We talked for a week and he eventually asked me if I had a dick pic. I sent the most recent one and waited for him to send something back. Two hours later he sends a pic, but it's not of a body part or another sexy face pic, it's a picture of him and his sister with the caption "hot pic." I wasn't sure if this was a mistake or a joke, but I decided to just brush it off and send another dick pic. He then responded with a picture of him smiling with his grandmother, saying nothing else afterwards. Two days later he messaged me to ask what I was doing. I told him I was just enjoying my day off and asked him what he had planned for the day. He then sends a picture of his spread asshole dripping with cum, a picture of him and his dog, and then a picture of him having family dinner, again saying nothing else. At this point, I wasn't even mad or upset. The dude clearly wasn't serious. That or he had a fucked up sense of humor. As funny as the whole thing was, I decided to stop communicating with him entirely. I often wonder what a dripping asshole, playing with your dog, and eating dinner with your family could be code for, but I guess I'll ever know.

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"Racial Play"
​​I messaged a guy after work one day just to see if he'd reply. He messaged me back and said he comes to Toronto for work every day and wondered if we could hook up later that evening. I told him we should drink a few beers at my place and see where it goes. He came over around 10:30 PM, and made a few weird comments about the beer we were drinking, calling it "hipster beer." That sort of turned me off, but I decided not to read too much into it. I wasn't expecting things to heat up after the weird beer comment, but after six beers we just went for it and started making out. Before things escalated, he stopped me and said he needed to tell me something. I remember being puzzled and asking what was wrong. He told me he was into a few kinks, but didn't know how to talk about them. Fetish is always an awkward subject for people, but I assured him I wasn't easily weirded out. He looked extremely flustered and scared to say it, but after about five minutes of circling around the big confession, he sheepishly blurted out that he was into "racial play."

I kind of giggled and then looked at him again. At that moment I realized he was being serious and took a deep breath because, as a black man and a human being, the whole thing had just thrown me off. Solely based on curiosity, I asked him exactly what this type of roleplay scene would entail. It scared me to imagine where this conversation was going to go, but I still couldn't quite process what I just heard. I've done some weird shit, but this whole thing was fucked up and I didn't understand what turned him on about it exactly. He asked me if I was mad that he was into that. I told him no because I actually wasn't pissed at all. After having another beer he got into the finer details of how a "racial play" scene would go down.

According to him, a play scene would involve me in a cage, getting choked with his dick, while he spits on me and calls me nigger a few times. He assured me that while it was a lot to handle, it was actually a pretty popular fetish. It's just something that nobody talks about. I looked at him, extremely puzzled after that statement. He stood, confident in his belief that was an acceptable thing to get off to, and it took a minute for me to figure out the best way to respond to this very unsettling fetish. Wanting to end this interaction on a peaceful note, I told him that while I respect his honesty, the thought of a man getting off to calling me racial slurs and performing violent sex acts on me was enough to make me want to commit murder.

When I said that he laughed it off, but once he saw the expression on my face, I could tell he knew it was probably in his best interest to call it a night. After he left I Googled racial play and found a lot of crazy shit, most of which I wish I could unsee. There are certain thoughts and images that linger in the subconscious and lead us to the fetishes we have. I think most things are fair game, but if me picking cotton gets you horny, there probably won't be a second date.​

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Runaway Cucumber
​One of the first guys I met on Grindr was a university student who had just moved to Toronto for school. During our first hangout we drank a few beers and talked about Toronto, which was a nice change from the usual in-and-out hook up. We immediately hit it off and it turned into an ongoing thing. We met up for sex about twice a month for a couple of months. It was really low-key, which has awesome because I wasn't after anything serious at the time.

One night he came over and dropped a bomb on me. Apparently he had a girlfriend, which was news to me. He said he wasn't gay—he just met up with guys because his girlfriend wasn't into anal play. This all seemed messy and complicated, so I told him we should cool it on the sex until he and his girlfriend had a serious conversation. It would be one thing if they were in an open relationship, but it seemed more like their lack of communication had led to him sneaking out to get fucked by guys behind her back. It just didn't seem healthy for me to continue sleeping with him if that was the case.

He texted me out of the blue three months later, asking if we could meet. I had my reservations about it, but I decided to let him stop by and get an update on what was going on with him and his situation. He came over and immediately went for my crotch, but before I could let it go any further, I needed to ask what the status of his relationship was. Apparently he had broken up with his girlfriend and was exclusively fucking guys. The way he talked about these new relationships was very strange. He maintained that he was still straight, but just really loved bottoming now and couldn't get enough.

We proceeded to play around a bit and eventually I was fucking him. I don't know if fate was punishing me for allowing my thirst to blind me from the obvious mess of a situation this was, but ten minutes into it I'd felt something wet go down my leg. Lets just say that he wasn't ready to bottom and by the time I stopped the evidence of that was all over my bed.

When you're having butt sex, there's always the slight possibility of a little shit, but this was literally a shit storm. He felt really bad and I didn't want to make a big deal about it, so I said we should just shower and call it a night. I let him go first so I could throw away the sheets and after he got out I went in to get myself cleaned up. When I walked out of the shower, what I saw him doing brought new meaning to the phrase "by any means necessary." I stood quietly by the door and watched as he began squatting down on a cucumber from my fridge, trying to fuck himself with it. He was jerking off and heavily breathing as he attempted to fit the entire cucumber up his ass.

After a minute or so, I purposely slammed the washroom door and he freaked out when he saw me standing there. He could tell I was pissed and he kept trying to avoid eye contact. I asked him what he was doing still naked, which left him stuttering as he tried to make up a good excuse. I snatched the cucumber out of his hand and asked him to put on his clothes while I finished getting dressed in the bathroom. After we were both dressed I walked him out of my apartment and told him he shouldn't contact me again. I didn't want to be an asshole, but between his first lie about the girlfriend and the shit-stained bed I had to throw out, I felt like the universe was trying to tell me this needed to end.

To make matters worse, when I went back into the house, I checked the fridge and the fucking cucumber was gone. I was short an ingredient for my next lunch. I ordered a new bed and went to do groceries the next day. Thank you universe! I definitely got the message. 

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A soccer fan, shouting (Image via ; ​Brent Flanders)

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

At the age of seven, on returning from my first and only Saturday morning soccer practice, I solemnly asked my mom to run me a bubble bath, which I sunk into and declared the morning "a waste of my time." Beyond behaving like a single mom in a chocolate ad, that morning had long-term repercussions. I had scored an own-goal. I got weird-shaped bruises on my legs. My first taste of the beautiful game had been an ugly, degrading affair. The shin-pads went under the stairs, the boots were sold and I cracked on with the Chamber of Secrets.

It is a narrative familiar to many young men. In the face of being consistently picked last, I continued to not only ignore soccer but began a campaign of derision against its entire culture. I spent years honing my schtick, which was essentially based around the perceived inanity of spending every week watching slight variations on the same routine. "There is a ball," I would say. "They try and kick it in a big net." I know. I was hilarious.

But it was my first week at university that was the initial wake-up call. Suddenly forced to meet so many new people, it became apparent that despite the huge numbers of international students, I was the one who was truly inarticulate. There was a language, shared over web-streams and Foster's, that I wasn't privy to—a common tongue of rivalry, allegiance, and collective memory. I discovered that rather than making me look more interesting, nobody was particularly impressed or entertained that I didn't like soccer. No one ever had been.

So at the start of this season, now graduated and with an endless tract of unemployment ahead of me, I decided to start liking and watching soccer. I'm overwhelmed by quite how successful this attempt has been. Something that was once the avocation of people too boring to like anything interesting has become the only thing I can talk about when I'm drunk. I was Cat Stevens, now I am Yusuf Islam. The metamorphosis is complete.

This love affair is in its infancy (last week I had to Google the word rabona) and I can't claim these few months have offered me any expertise. But approaching soccer—and specifically the Premier League—after all this time, with no affiliations or expectations, have given me a bird's-eye view of its bizarre truths and practices. This is what I have learned:

Soccer Fans Are Not Idiots
One of the standbys of my pre-Prem attitude was to pick on the stupidity of soccer fans. Much of this was based around the theory that there was no logic to supporting Everton, and hating Liverpool. You are dividing your loyalties over indiscriminate territories. Worse, if I met a Manchester United fan from Leamington Spa I would question what possible affiliation they had to a city a hundred miles up the M6. We've discussed already how I was a bit of a twat.

Now I see that compared to nationalism, soccer support makes a lot of sense. Rather than pledging allegiance to land mass because they happened to be born there, soccer fans operate a system of results based micro-patriotism. They consider a team's ethos, its personality, its tactical mechanisms. They place their loyalty and it is tangibly tested week on week. Their opinions are the product of years spent dedicating time and energy to the love of a craft. It is a more active passion than any religion and a louder devotion than any relationship. They are not idiots: they are pilgrims and intellects. Ones who keep faith even when ;Darron Gibson starts warming up on the touchline.

Managers are the Main Characters
​From what I can work out there are two main stock types of manager. Firstly there is the weathered, ex-playing Brit: all growls and jowls, lacking in flair but fairly decent blokes. Highlights of this school include Sean Dyche, a man with so much grit he apparently gargles it, or Sam Allardyce, who looks like the main character in a 1970s sitcom that is now too racist to be on TV. The other group are the European and Latin American tacticians and engineers: Pochettino, Pellegrini, Mourinho. They are all expensive suits and wisdoms muttered through broken English, perched on the touchline of a foreign land, muting their expressions of anger or joy with a steady continental reserve.

Both groups carry on their shoulders the weight of a multi-million pound industry, and the highly-strung emotions of thousands of hungry hearts. They strike me as a strange mixture of power and vulnerability: alpha-males, constantly aware their position in the pack is under threat if they show any sign of weakness. Seated on thrones of ice, praying things don't heat up.

There Is Sadness in Its Eyes
Another thing that put me off soccer was my understanding that it was synonymous with pub brawls and old John Smiths-drinking men randomly shouting "cunt" at their televisions. Obviously the thuggish side is present, and everything I hear about the Scottish league makes it sound like a straight-to-video Mad Max sequel, but my experience has indicated that there is actually a universal sadness at play. Pursuing the title is like trying to hold water—both futile but essential at the same time.

They have to keep running but every time they get there the clock resets and the goal posts are moved (not literally, obviously: that wouldn't work). Ultimately the players are all facing the same opponent: time. Take Rickie Lambert, a man who has climbed the English leagues since 1999, finally making it to the top and his dream move to his childhood team... only to spend most of his weekends sitting on the bench, waiting to be brought on in the 89th minute. I can't decide if they are heroes, or just greyhounds with Instagram accounts.

Referees Are Way Out of Their Depth
​Referees have the air of a dad overseeing their teenage son's birthday party the first year the guests are taller than he is: on paper he is still in charge, but the basic physics of his situation mean he can only ever hope to look like a community support officer. In fact, and I'm not sure why, I was quite surprised when I found out they were paid. They buzz around with their little cards, vainly pretending they have the faintest hope of catching every exchange, across 100 metres of grass, between 22 men running faster than horses. When the bodies do hit the floor every face then turns to them, arms raised, yelping in protest; despite the fact that in every game I've watched so far the ref has never listened to a whining full back and said, "Oh, his arm wasn't up when he jumped? Sorry, I saw it wrong, carry on." Instead, they are forced to make speculative decisions that directly affect the lives of hundreds of different millionaires simultaneously on an international stage, and then pretend they aren't fazed. They are probably the most important person on the pitch, but I can't help but feel they are the least in control.

It Doesn't Matter That England Is Rubbish
​Before "The Awakening," the one time I couldn't help but avoid soccer was when the World Cup came around. It stopped being a private club and instead became a national obsession, with flags unfurling from windows, Tesco doing deals on Pringles and Ant and Dec releasing a single. Yet it did nothing to stoke my interest. Every four years I would watch as the cast of Dad's Army broke everybody's hearts and then tried not to make eye contact with photographers as they trundled back onto a huge coach with their iPod headphones in.

Now I realize they probably didn't care, and they were just waiting to get back to their way more entertaining day jobs. The prestige of English soccer knows no fixed nationality. The Premier League features all of your favorite characters from the World Cup, only now there are crossovers from universes, with all the main ones teaming up to form super teams against each other. It's like an Avengers movie being released every weekend, only without Robert Downey Jr. making smarmy remarks every time something explodes.

It Is Funnier Than Anything Else On TV
​The Premier League offers incredibly fertile ground for humor. It is a peculiar universe wherein glossy corporate giants have attempted to claim something that cannot be owned. However many billions the league generates, its beating heart remains bored middle Englanders and athletes with absolutely no TV training. Each week this dynamic makes for magical flashes of incongruity, moments where the discipline and precision of the industry is challenged. Yaya Toure kicking a ball into a five-year-old girl's face; a bird shitting in Ashley Young's mouth; everything about Arsenal Fan TV. Human errors among the super-humans. It is a world where David Brent is the CEO of JP Morgan. It is an Apple Store staffed by school children.

It Completely Changes Your Social Experience
​The Premier League is the best thing to happen to my social life since MSN. In terms of discussion it provides a framework within which infinite variations can and will occur. Soccer will always happen but it will always happen differently. You can never run out of conversation. Getting my hair cut has improved exponentially; I no longer have to sever my barber's olive branch with a curt, "Sorry, I don't watch football." Instead we can discuss how Brendan Rodgers deserves more time, or how Alexis Sanchez is the only thing keeping Arsenal afloat, or how much I don't want him to give me Jamie Vardy's hair.

Not only that, but the internet provides the platform for this conversation to continue through the week. I can stumble in absolutely off my tits and watch Best Goal Vines until I fall asleep. I check the BBC Sport app more than Facebook. I finally have something to tweet about beyond the Apprentice. It is my new best friend and I love it with all my heart.

Hull Is In It
Hull is in the Premier League. Who knew?​

​Follow Angus Harrison on ​Twitter

"Who invent capitalism? Yeah, the system that you're livin' through—who invented it? Is the guy who invented it still alive? That guy dead years ago, but system still alive."

-Bob Marley to Jeff Cathro​w, 1978

Last month, news emerged of a multinational marijuana brand called Marley​ Natural, endorsed posthumously by the reggae legend himself via the family members who control his trademark. Soon it will be possible for certain dorm-dwelling Marley fans to smoke Marley-branded weed rolled in Marley-branded papers while wearing Marley-branded T-shirts and looking at a post of Bob Marley. Bunny W​ailer is pissed off over the news, but apparently at least partly because his face isn't the one on the package.

Legal cannabis is on its way to becoming a massive worldwide business, and Bob Marley is probably the most famous ganja consumer in the world, so the choice is a no-brainer to the Yale MBAs who inked the Marley Natural deal. They weren't the first to think of it, though. The announcement of Marley Natural revived an old rumor among cannabis enthusiasts that now looms ever closer to becoming reality.

Philip Morris, manufacturers of Marlboro and other cigarettes, registered the brand name Marl​ey in France in 1993, along with a number of stree​t names for cannabis. It was a time of great reflection for the American tobacco industry. The previous decade had seen an escalation in public scrutiny of Big Tobacco, starting with ​Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's campaign against secondhand smoke and evolving into a rash of major lawsuits from terminally ill smokers, including a crusading former Marlboro Man who personified the dangers of cigarettes for the masses before dying of lung cancer in 1992.

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Photo via Flickr user ​Jack Samuels

The world had known that smoking causes cancer since as early as the 19​50s, and restrictions on the industry had been building for years, but the tobacco giants had always managed to adapt. When the FCC ban​ned broadcast tobacco ads back in 1971, the brands spilled onto enough billboards and magazines to fill the gap. If a scientific entity said something negative about tobacco, the industry's own Tobacco Industry Research Committee (later known as the Tobacco I​nstitute) promptly re​futed it. But the turn against smoking in the 90s was far more fundamental—a threat to the very idea of consuming tobacco. Things were changing, and all the marketing budgets and lobbying contributions in the world weren't going to change them back. Lucky for Big Tobacco, they had been planning for this since 1969.

(The following is based on documents studied by Stanton Glantz, director of the University of California at San Francisco Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, and author of the report "Wa​iting for the Opportune Moment: The Tobacco Industry and Marijuana Legalization." Glantz is responsible for making public 82 million pages of unreleased internal documents from major tobacco companies following a 1995 court case.)

At the tail end of the hippie heyday, not long after the Summer of Love, when an open-minded generation appeared poised to take the nation's reins or at least tilt politics and culture in a new direction, a scientist named Raymond Fagan from Philip Morris's Research & Development division sent a letter to his boss, VP of R&D Helmut Wakeham, with the idea to research cannabis in conjunction with the US Department of Justice's Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD). Without its own funding for such a study, the BNDD jumped at the opportunity to have Philip Morris do the lab work to analyze weed smoke the same way they analyzed tobacco smoke. Over the next couple of months, the chief of BNDD's Drug Sciences division, Dr. Milton Joffe, facilitated the creation of the program, and in 1970 Wakeham sent a memo to Philip Morris brass informing them that the Department of Justice had asked for the tobacco company's help in studying cannabis, a request that they could "hardly ignore... under any circumstances."

This was not simply a favor to the federal government, and Wakeham acknowledged Philip Morris's incentive in the same memo:

The human needs that our product fills will not go away. Thus, the only real threat to our business is that society will find other means of satisfying these needs... In this situation, business theory strongly suggests that we should learn as much as possible about this threat to our present product. We have done nothing so far because of the product's illegality and out of concern for our image. This request from the Justice Department, therefore, seems opportune.

Wakeham's words summarize Big Tobacco's ongoing doublethink on the matter of cannabis since its legalization became a viable prospect. On one hand, weed was a competitive smokable product with a great high that could potentially take out a chunk of the tobacco market. On the other hand, tobacco was becoming harder to sell in an increasingly health-conscious world, and since the tobacco companies had the infrastructure to cultivate, manufacture, and market any kind of cigarette, weed might be a perfect fallback. Around the time Philip Morris played ball with the BNDD, British American Tobacco, the UK-based maker of the all-American Lucky Strike, pursued their own interest in studying cannabis in European markets as those nations moved towards easing enforcement of anti-pot laws. All this appeared to be a promising direction for the industry until the anticipated liberalization of marijuana hit a series of roadblocks.

In 1970, while tobacco companies were just getting excited about weed, President Richard Nixon signed the Contr​olled Substances Act, complying with a new UN convention on drugs and placing marijuana in the category of the most dangerous substances with no potential for medical use. While the new law reduced penalties for possession of small amounts, it greatly increased the focus on enforcing prohibitions on manufacture and distribution, officially commencing the infamous war on drugs.

Throughout the 70s, a contingent of US states ranging from Alaska to Missisippi to New York decriminalized marijuana possession, running directly counter to federal law. This created a gulf between state and federal attitudes that was further widened when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, bringing modern conservative values to the presidency and dashing out hopes of further marijuana liberalization. A National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) ti​meline describes the 80s as "NORML's darkest days politically and financially," when all their efforts were focused on challenging the Controlled Substances Act. 

As a result, any plans tobacco had to enter the marijuana industry were seemingly moot. "My guess is that because the legalization movement kind of receded, they [tobacco companies] never have been pushed to the point where they actually had to make a decision," Glantz told me over the phone.

Then the 90s rolled around and cooler heads prevailed. Bill Clinton, a man who famously admitted to smoking (if not inhaling) weed became pre​sident. Mu​sic and mo​vies unabashedly promoted marijuana use. Social attitudes toward cannabis began to change, and in 1996 California passed the nation's first medical marijuana law. Big Tobacco sensed that things might be changing once again, and Glantz's research shows that British American Tobacco revived its efforts to study cannabis in 1992. The plant had reemerged as an opportunity, and the timing couldn't have been better.

After all, the tobacco business ate shit left and right in the 90s. Smoking was on its way to being banned on all flights, and by 1997  37 st​at​es had filed lawsuits that claimed the tobacco industry knowingly put a strain on state-level Medicaid programs by selling a sickening and often lethal product. In 1992, the Supreme Court r​uled that warning labels on cigarettes couldn't prevent someone from suing tobacco companies, and though the industry had enough legal firepower and money to defuse or settle many cases, they just kept piling up. Cigarette taxes continued to rise as well. Most importantly, the public was increasingly aware of the health risks of cigarettes. The nation watched in 1994 as tobacco industry executives denied that nicotine is addictive, a final shot in the dark to prevent what they seem to think was a pending meltdown.

How does a multinational company with increasing government and public scrutiny at every level of its operations safely enter an economy that exists in the gray area between state and federal law? 

Throughout this period, Big Tobacco denied any plans to enter the marijuana market. Glantz's document collection, which was not exhaustive to begin with, only includes communications until 1995. So there's no smoking gun that indicates tobacco companies are thinking about weed, and officially they deny that they have any plans in that direction. In an email, Altria (formerly Philip Morris) communications manager Jeffrey Caldwell told me, "Marijuana remains illegal under federal law. Altria and its companies have no plans to manufacture marijuana cigarettes." 

If tobacco companies were, in fact, interested in entering the legal cannabis market, how realistic would those aspirations be? How does a multinational company with increasing government and public scrutiny at every level of its operations safely enter an economy that exists in the gray area between state and federal law? 

According to Morgan Fox, communications manager at Marijuana Policy Project, they don't. "Given the difference between marijuana and tobacco, and the difference in the structure of the marijuana industry currently, it doesn't seem like something that they could transition into," Fox told me on the phone. "Tobacco requires a high level of addiction in order to make it profitable. You don't have nearly that level of addiction with marijuana."

Weed and tobacco are fundamentally different substances. Just because you roll both of them up and smoke them doesn't mean that their markets are necessarily similar. A large part of the current enthusiasm for cannabis centers on its medical use, its lack of addictive qualities, and its safety compared to other recreational and pharmaceutical drugs. In contrast, tobacco provides no known medical benefits and isn't a safe alternative to anything at all. The success of a tobacco brand relies on downplaying the negatives and engendering the early dependency of its customers. The success of the marijuana industry as a whole relies on the knowledge and understanding of a consumer base that was previously skeptical of the plant for many decades.

If that's not enough to discourage Big Tobacco from diving into the marijuana game, there are the logistical challenges of scaling a multinational operation down to service individual states. "Even relatively large cannabis businesses are nowhere near the size of the tobacco giants, which still have to follow a whole lot of federal regulations," Fox told me. "Operating in a bunch of different states with entirely different laws would be pretty difficult for a company to do while continuing to follow federal law."

As the free market would have it, those with clout need not respect the spirit behind the industries they upend. 

That leaves the state-level markets to the cannabis enthusiasts willing to take a risk in a quasi-legal business sector. Gabriel Sayegh from Drug Policy Alliance told me, "If we keep chipping away at prohibition state by state, as we are, it's going to leave intact this federal prohibition framework that's going to make it less advantageous for established companies to operate because they don't want to jeopardize their legal business operations." If the disagreement between state and federal law continues for a sufficient amount of time, one of these homegrown businesses could vie for market dominance ahead of the federal reform that would inevitably attract the participation of major corporations to the marijuana trade.

Glantz isn't so hopeful that this legislative gap will allow for enough low-level growth of the industry before the big boys come in, whether that means Big Tobacco or some other collection of multinationals. 

"The broader cautionary tale is not about cigarette companies," he said. "Although they would certainly have the easiest time getting in because they already know how to sell drugs as mass-market products, Pepsi or Coca Cola or Unilever or any of these big companies have all the same kinds of marketing muscle and product design muscle that the tobacco companies have." 

As the free market would have it, those with clout need not respect the spirit behind the industries they upend. In Glantz's view, not enough is being done to prevent this. "I think that the marijuana legalization debate has completely ignored that problem," he said.

Sayegh, whose organization has been instrumental in the legalization movement, acknowledges this, saying, "[DPA's] primary interest here is to end marijuana prohibition, but we're not particularly invested in defining exactly what the markets will look like. We don't see our role as trying to define that space." He added that he remains confident that once the injustices of prohibition are undone the rest will work itself out over time.

Whether it's a mom and pop shop that grows up fast, Marley Natural, a tobacco company that suddenly enters the game, or some other major company with the infrastructure to do so, there is probably a big marijuana company in our nation's future. The American economic system fosters such giants in every industry, and pot will be no exception. However, it doesn't have to be the ogre that pro​hibitionist groups make it out to be. When federal marijuana reform finally arrives, success will belong to the strongest business. As Bob Marley put it, "System still alive."

Follow T. Kid on ​Twitter.

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The courthouse where Luka Magnotta's trial took place. Photos by Nick Rose.

​On Monday, jurors in Montreal will begin deliberations in the most gruesome and highly publicized Canadian murder case in recent memory. By now we all know Luka Rocco Magnotta as the aspiring model turned gay porn star who made global headlines in 2012 following an international manhunt that led to him being charged with first-degree murder and criminally harassing Prime Minister Stephen Harper by mailing him Jun Lin's foot in pink wrapping-paper.

Unlike most murder trials, the issue is not whether Luka Magnotta killed 33-year-old exchange student Jun Lin—he's already admitted to that. But Magnotta has still pleaded not guilty. The jury will instead have to determine whether or not he is criminally responsible for his actions.

Canadian l​aw says that if you're suffering from a mental disorder so severe that you can't understand the crime you are committing, you cannot be held criminally responsible. If you are not criminally responsible (or NCR for short) for an offense, you don't go to prison.

A similar analogy is that in Canada, children under the age of 12 cann​ot be convicted of crimes they have committed. The logic is that they are incapable of fully grasping their actions. That's not a loophole; it's common sense.

But given how sadistic Magnotta's crimes are, an NCR verdict is lik​ely to piss off a lot of people in the public who don't r​eally understand what an NCR verdict means in the first place.

The most infamous evidence is the video Magnotta uploaded called "1 Lunatic 1 Icepick," which clearly shows him stabbing Lin with a screwdriver before decapitating him. He then proceeds to eat the dismembered body parts and perform deranged sex acts with them, all to the tune of New Order's "True​ Faith."

The footage is so horrific that there have been concerns of juror​s developing post-traumatic stress disorder from watching it during the ten-week murder trial. But "1 Lunatic 1 Icepick" was not Magnotta's first brush with internet no​toriety. Nor was it his first brush with the mental health system.

Court d​ocuments from 2005 show a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia dating back to Magnotta's late teens, and a barrage of prescriptions for anti-psychotic medication. The psychiatrist who treated Magnotta while he was institutionalized ends the letter with a warning: "if [Magnotta] does not comply in taking the medication, he would be prone to relapse of his symptoms, which include paranoia, auditory hallucinations, fear of the unknown etc." This is exactly what Magnotta's lawyer Luc Leclair says happened the night of May 24th 2012 when Jun Lin replied to a Craigslist ad for sex and bondage.

According to a 127-page psychiatric evaluation commissioned by his lawyer—the closest thing we'll get to Magnotta actually testifying in this case—their evening began with Luka being tied up and Lin initiating "rough" anal sex. When he asked Lin to slow down he instead started hitting him behind the head. After Lin untied him, the document states that Magnotta noticed a black car that he thought was spying on him since he had participated in student protests in Montreal that spring.

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Magnotta's defense lawyer, Luc Leclair.

All of this, the defense claims, triggered a psychotic episode in which voices in his head told Magnotta that Lin was a spy and that Magnotta had to kill him and send his body parts back to the government, which is why he says he mailed Lin's foot to Prime Minister Harper.

"I don't enjoy having sex with a dead body," Magnotta told forensic psychiatrist Dr. Marie-Frédérique Allard, who evaluated him. "I gave myself up to this bizarre energy, it's scary how I could do that."

Allard's report also paints a pretty awful picture of his childhood. His father was also diagnosed para​noid schizophrenic and left the home when Luka was 12. In the report, his mother, who he called "a fucking bitch," was an alcoholic who routinely locked him in a closet and would not let him go to school. The report goes on to say that in his teens, he was allegedly sexually assaul​ted by both his cousin and stepfather.

Dr. Allard, the defense's star witness, concluded that Luka Rocco Magnotta was definitely suffering from paranoid schizophrenia at the time of the murder and should be found NCR.

However, the prosecution is not buying it and says that Magnotta, ever the perfor​mer, is putting on an act.

VICE was inside the high-security courtroom as Superior Court Judge Guy Cournoyer heard the Crown's arguments.

Prosecutor Louis Bouthillier argued that Magnotta probably suffers from a broader personality disorder such as narcissistic personality, which would mean that at the time of the murder, he was more than capable of understanding his actions. Bouthillier further argued that Magnotta was actually motivated by a sick need for fame, which could explain why he filmed his crime and shared it with the world.

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Prosecutor Louis Bouthillier.

With such conflicting narratives, this case has basically become a battle of expert witnesses, a battle the jury will ultimately have to decide one way or the other. It's important to note that juries in the past have not hesitated to come to an NCR verdict in grisly murder cases.

In 2008, Vincent Li decapitated and ate pieces of his seatmate on a Greyhound bus because Li thought he was an ​alien. At trial, he claimed to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and the jury found him NCR. He has been in a mental hospital ever since—but is now free to take unsupervised day trips into Selkirk, Manitoba after a provincial mental health review board decided that he was no longer a threat to society.

In 2009, Quebec cardiologist Guy Turcotte stabbed his five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter 46 times. He argued that he was NCR because he was suffering from severe depression and could not understand his actions at the time of the murder. The jury believed him, and Turcotte was released from a psychiatric hospital just over a year after being admitted. He has been ordered to live with his uncle for now and will continue to do so pending a retr​ial.

This is not to say that convincing a jury that a violent offender is NCR is a simple task, because it's not.

VICE spoke with Université de Montréal law professor Hugues Parent, an expert in mental health and criminal law who worked on the Guy Turcotte trial in 2011. He said:

"An NCR defense is one of the very few instances in criminal law where the burden of proof is actually on the accused, which means that it is much harder for the defense to make its case, especially since Magnotta refused to be evaluated by the Crown's psychiatrist.

"Public reaction to the Li and Turcotte cases was so strong that it forced the Conservative government to tigh​ten the whole review process by making 'public safety' the paramount important factor to consider. These crimes are typically pretty violent and the public has a lot of trouble dealing with that."

Anita Szigeti agrees. She is a lawyer and chair of Toronto's Criminal Lawyers Association Committee on Mental Health.

"The propaganda people tend to hear that these people are 'getting away with murder' or 'walking,'" she says. "But the reality is that NCR is not really a defense but a special verdict; you are not acquitted or convicted. It's a stream unto itself. And unlike prison, individuals who are NCR can be monitored perpetually and indefinitely."

So it's not like Magnotta will just walk out of the courtroom a free man if he is found to be NCR. He would be turned over to a provincial mental health board that usually detains NCR individuals for even​ longer than if they had gone to prison.

And while it's obvious to most people why an 11-year-old shouldn't be criminally held responsible for their actions, it's often much harder to sympathize with a disturbed adult like Luka Rocco Magnotta, whose defense is using the same argument as the 11-year-old after confessing to a horrible crime. But mental health advocates argue that people with schizophrenia are struggling with a brutal disease and they deserve forgiveness and c​ompassion, even when they kill people.

At this point, whether or not Magnotta was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia when he killed Jun Lin is not up to a psychiatrist, lawyers or even the judge in this case to decide. It's up to the twelve men and women of the jury who won the lottery for shittiest job of 2014.

And when they do reach a verdict, whatever it may be, it's important to keep in mind that our system is not only designed to protect society from mentally ill people. It also has to protect mentally ill people, with trea​table conditions like schizophrenia, from the cesspool of rape and reci​divism that is our prison system.

Follow Nick Rose on Twitter.

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​ Venturing into the night with Spanto, everything becomes a threat. LAPD squad cars creep like sharks in shallow water, ghetto birds zigzag across the sky, and gangsters lurk in the shadows of front yards and in the fluorescent glow of liquor stores and gas stations. 

The freeway beneath us, even at 2 AM, was lousy with cars; each containing a potential snitch with a cell phone. Our clique of five stood vigilant while Spanto and 2Tone filled in a massive tribute to the late LA legend ​Trigz. Still, we were caught off-guard by a couple that walked by, one of whom was wearing only a lanyard and socks with no elastic.

"We'll be out of here in a minute," Spanto told the interlopers, painting all the while, unflustered. Amid the barbed wire, broken glass, dog shit, and human shit there's an odd, almost classy, civility to the bizarre encounter. Spanto is a man of tradition. As such, he carries himself with the dignity of a bygone era. It was a time when young Latino men palm-combed perfect pompadours in the rear-view mirrors of glistening lowriders. A time when correspondence from the penitentiary came painstakingly embellished with ballpoint pen renderings of peacocks and hourglasses. A time when the creases in your Dickies were as important as the burner in your belt. A time when the tough kids still slow-danced to their parents' jams, and the neighborhood was all they knew of the world. 

"[Our culture] is fuckin' romantic as hell," he told me. "It's beautiful. The way you dress, the music. Everything—the whole culture to me is just absolutely fucking gorgeous. You talk about what you wanna be when you grow up... I wanted to be like my big homies."

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Photos by Peepin Tom

Venice has always been fertile soil for outlaw subcultures, be it the famous skaters and surfers of Dogtown, the thrashers at a Suicidal Tendencies or Beowulf gig, or the wildstyle burners who riddled the wall of fame at the beach. Spanto's eyes beam when he recalls the significance of his home turf. "There was so much culture coming out of there, man. Skaters, punk rockers, graffiti artists, and so many gang members."

But before the taggers and skaters and punk rockers who started painting for the sake of painting, gangs adopted the medium for territorial and memorial markings. "My grandma, she's 86 years old. She used to tell me that the first writing she ever saw on the walls was Venice13, way before any sort of modern-day graffiti writer."

Venice13, to which Spanto claims allegiance, is a dominant gang in the city. It has a tumultuous 50-year history in the neighborhood, notorious enough to be targeted by the controversial LAPD gang injunctions of the 90s. His formal introduction to gang life began around the time most boys were learning the rules to touch-football, catching his first tags in the third grade. "I remember being little and hearing gunshots outside and hearing tires screech and shit. Most kids would freak the fuck out, go hide or grab their parents, but I was drawn to that shit. I wanted to go outside. I had to know what was going on outside."

It was in this environment that Spanto came to find himself, with the help of the older boys in the hood. "Everything that I learned from the big homies, I took with me," he explained. "I didn't learn shit in school, all my attention went to what the older homies taught me. I was studying for [the streets] like I was studying for school.  I got all my game from big homies—the way they dressed, ironed their bandanas, creased their clothes."

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There's something menacing about a Spanto tag. They're neither colorful nor flamboyant. They are rudimentary, and looming; with all of the sharp angles of a traditional cholo handstyle and the hard truth of the stock caps he uses. It's a utilitarian approach to vandalism, as opposed to an exclusively artistic one. "If I go to my enemy's neighborhood and I wanna go strike up one of their walls, the most disrespectful way I can do it is to be as big and as bold as I can—nothing cute or stylish. It's the biggest fuck you, you know what I mean?" He isn't getting up to flaunt his style or skills. He isn't getting up for internet fame or gallery appearances. Progression as an artist isn't the point; the importance is placed on preservation of both a mentality and a moment in time.

"Most of the graffiti that I saw isn't what you would call typical, or regular graff. It was gang graffiti, you know? Like Venice13 or Suicidal. These mad aggressive letters."

A strict adherence to raw aggression over artistic flourishes speaks more to the single-minded formality of gang life than it does to the larger culture of graffiti. It has more to do with living up to a code of conduct. The style is but a means to reflect an ideology. "Back then there were rules. If you're a gangster, you don't write this way. If you're a graffiti writer, you do write this way. For the gangs, every letter had its own rule, if that makes sense. If you were a Suis, or Suicidal, and you struck up on a side of a wall with a spraypaint can, you wrote a certain way. You didn't have curves on your letters. You didn't have flairs. You didn't have this or that. Growing up seeing this shit, molded how I write now." It's clear that he's talking less about preserving a way of writing, and more about preserving a way of lifestyle that's rapidly disappearing.

Much of gang life, like the pursuit of "fame" amongst vandals, is wrapped up in the basic human desire to leave a legacy. It is the reason gang-members invent an identity, so-and-so from such-and-such set, and then go about building a rep, and advertising it on the walls. It's also the reason that when a friend is murdered, it's important to have a name-bearing tribute displayed on a T-shirt, or wall. For Spanto, the concept of immortality, or at least legacy, is of greater significance as he faces the greatest challenge to his already precarious lifestyle.

In 2012, he checked himself into a hospital, seeking a quick cure to a persistent flu. This happened twice more and on the third visit, he refused to leave. His blood work was done, he was put in a wheelchair, and led to a different ward. There, he recalls, "A little Vietnamese lady came in and she was just like, 'you have cancer' and she dropped the fucking pamphlet on my chest. I opened it up and it pretty much said that I was going to die." What the blood work had revealed was a complicated case of cancer that included lymphoma, leukemia, and a tumor behind his heart. The doctor told him that if he didn't start chemotherapy within 24 hours, he would be dead. Even with the chemo, the prognosis was not good. Spanto was told that his treatment would only last about three years. At 15 months, he's nearly half-way done.

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He met the diagnosis with the same bravado that had served him well in the worlds of gangs and graffiti. It was just another threat to best, like rival bangers or cops or a hot spot that others are too shook to bomb. "It makes me angry," he says of the disease. "It makes me wanna go out there and do my thing even more. I climbed a billboard, yeah. I bombed some shit, yeah. I have cancer, yeah. I don't care. We can still fight, we can still shoot. I'm still a gangster. That's just me. I'll always be Spanto. Even if I die, man, it's nothing. That's the way I'll live until I'm put in the dirt."

Despite the hubris, he's contemplated his situation enough to develop something of a philosophy behind it. "There's definitely something really monumental that I'm supposed to learn from this, which I haven't exactly figured out yet. I just know that I'm supposed to learn something that's gonna drastically affect me, the people around me. There's a life lesson buried somewhere in this cancer." And despite the depression that surely comes with driving oneself to chemotherapy sessions and having your sleep induced by countless narcotics, it seems as if he rarely gets bogged down by it. 

"I've always kinda fancied myself as just that slick little dude. Always gonna get away. Never gonna get murdered. You can't kill me. I remember taking showers in the hospital, and beating on my chest, like, 'You can't fuckin' kill me!' I'm just not done yet."

He and his friends even gave the fight a name, striking up Chemo Boys beside his graffiti, as if it were a crew, or set. His battle against cancer reflects a gang mentality: by naming it, claiming it, making it his own, Spanto is essentially robbing his affliction of its power against him. 

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With this newfound resolve, while undergoing treatment, he became more active than ever in graffiti, in business, in recreation—in being Spanto.

Over the course of his life, he's found himself in the crossfire of numerous shootouts, and in three separate incidents, he's been shot. Yet, he finds these brushes with death pale in comparison to his battle with cancer. "Getting shot is quick. Getting shot is easy. I don't really bat an eye when that shit happens," he explains, "Getting shot, you don't really break it down in your head until later. Chemo is long. It's fuckin' painful. The mental part of the chemo is the worst... This is long, old, boring and dark; as opposed to the other one which is exciting, flashy and quick."

A case could be made that the graffiti is therapeutic, that the impetus to go out and bomb is really the instinct to keep on living. And the challenge of the action only bolsters this. "A lot of people know that I'm sick, so it's funny to me. Like, how the fuck did that fool do that shit? Isn't he half-dead or about to die? Isn't he in his hospital bed? How the fuck did he go out and catch this spot? I've never looked at it before as something that I gotta leave behind."

Despite his nefarious image, people admire and respect him. And the recent spate of "Spanto Lives" graffiti across Los Angeles—a gesture usually reserved for those who have passed away—is testament to that. 

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As the night settled down, Spanto admits that he hadn't been feeling well all day and that he was dreading the new round of chemo scheduled for the next morning, so we decided to grab some dinner at a nearby taqueria. Even though we spent the meal being eyeballed menacingly by both a pair of cops and a tableful of Salvadorians, he remained overwhelmingly positive.

"I feel like I take care and nurture my little homies now," he says. "Just giving that love back. I'm in love with the streets. I'm in love with my neighborhood. I'm in love with subculture and that'll never go away. Love is so strong. You get what you get, but it comes back."

On our way home, the streets were desolate enough for us to speed while Ice Cube's " ​Steady Mobbin" rattled our ride. Spanto was still griping about chemo in the morning when he suddenly thrust himself across the driver's seat, half-way out the window, and yelled "FUCK C.R.A.S.H.!' at the undercover gang-unit coyly lurking in the shadows of a nearby park.

Spanto still being Spanto.

Follow Sammy Winston on ​Twitter

It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: Two unnamed men in Canada

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Photos via Google Maps and Saskatoon Police

The incident: Some men wanted diced onions on their sandwiches in a restaurant that doesn't have diced onions.

The appropriate response: Going to a restaurant that has diced onions or ordering some other form of onion and dicing it yourself with your teeth while it's in your mouth.

The actual response: ​One of the men threw a live snake at the guy behind the counter.

On Tuesday, two unnamed 20-year-old men were buying sandwiches at a Tim Hortons restaurant in Saskatoon, Canada.  According to a  ​report on CBC News, the men attempted to order diced onions on their sandwiches. This created a problem for the man serving them, as Tim Hortons does not do diced onions.

According to  ​Saskatoon Police, this led to an argument between the two men and the person serving them.

Obviously yelling at someone over the availability of diced onions in a fast food restaurant is already a bit much, but these two men are said to have taken it one step further. One of them is reported to have taken a snake from the other's pocket, and thrown it across the counter at the server.

"Obviously [the workers] were very frightened," a police spokesperson told CBC. "There was quite a lot of screaming going on."

Police arrived and took the men and the snake (which turned out to be nonvenomous) into custody. The men face charges of mischief and causing a disturbance.

The snake has been placed in a temporary home until it can be released into the wild in the spring. Police did not specify why the fuck someone was walking around with a live snake in their pocket.
 

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Photos via Google Maps and Facebook.

The incident: A woman asked her ex-boyfriend to move out of the apartment they shared. 

The appropriate response: Moving out.

The actual response: The man allegedly killed and ate her pet rabbit.

Dimitri Diatchenko is a 46-year-old actor who lives in Los Angeles. According to his IMDB profile, he has played roles like "Head Russian" on Sons of Anarchy and "Thug #1/Carl" on Diagnosis Murder.

This past weekend, his ex-girlfriend, whom he shared an apartment with, told him that she didn't want to live with him anymore, ​CBS reports.

According to police, Dimitri responded to this by taking his ex-girlfriend's rabbit, Ella, killing it, skinning it, and eating half of it. He reportedly took photos of each step, which he sent to his ex. When she returned to the apartment, Dimitri ​allegedly told her that he would do the same thing to her.

A reporter from CBS ​spoke to Dimitri by phone, and he claimed that he had purchased rabbit meat at the store and set his ex's bunny free in order to trick her into thinking he had killed her pet. Which, if true, would still make him a pretty gigantic dick. 

Dimitri faces charges of cruelty to an animal with use of a knife and making a criminal threat.

Which of these guys is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here, please:

Previously: ​A cop allegedly shot a woman because she honked at him, and a man contacted his local newspaper because he saw a mouse outside.

Winner: The cop!!!

Follow Jamie "Lee Curtis" Taete on ​Twitter.

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​ ​Lightskinordarkskin.com

Nate Hill is nuts. The New York–based artist does things that make average people uncomfortable and sometimes angry. He was in the New York Times ​back in 2008 for hosting "Chinatown garbage taxidermy tours," where he showed people how to make grotesque art out of the mangled animal carcasses left in the streets of New York. And in 2013, he made waves with his Death Bear project, which involved him ​dressing up like a creepy bear and showing up at people's houses to take away items that incited regret or distress. 

Lately, he's focused his weirdness on issues of race. He moonlighted as the "White Ambassador," wearing whiteface along 125th Street in Harlem shouting, "We are white! We smell alright!" to passersby. He created the viral and unnerving ​White Power Milk website, which promotes a fake service that sells milk gargled by attractive young white women. And he produced Trophy Scarves, a series of photos posted to social media that featured him with ​half-naked white women draped across his shoulders in an attempt to explore the complexities of interracial relationships and objectification. 

Now the artist has set his sights on lampooning colorism in the African-American community with his project ​Lightskin or D​arkskin. Hill created a simple site that is reminiscent of the ​Hot or Not app that allows voters to pick whether a person photographed has light or dark skin.

This simple project tackles a division between black people that goes all the way back to the slavery era, when there was a distinction between house slaves, who were typically lighter, and field slaves, who were typically darker. The lighter slaves who worked in the house were often the mixed-race children of the rape (you can't have consensual sex with someone you own) of slaves by slave masters. On the plantation, these lighter slaves were given relatively better treatment, easier tasks, and higher status than their darker brethren who toiled away in the fields. 

The impact of this division has been felt long after slavery. We see it with racial passing, which is when a black person is so light he or she can "pass" for white. We see it too in the "​paper bag parties" held by some upper-class black people who wouldn't let anyone in who was darker than a paper bag. Still a topic of discussion, this division has inspired the 2011 documentary ​Dark Girls and led to controversies over the lightening of the skin of stars like Beyonce and Nicki Minaj in magazines and ads. 

I got kind of addicted to judging the pigment of black people on LightskinorDarkskin.com. And then found myself questioning the other voters. How could 32 percent of people find this girl dark-skinned, when she is clearly beige? I shared it on Facebook. One friend thought it showed people's insecurities. Another couldn't stop voting.

But that is exactly what Hill wants—to open a dialogue and explore the reasons people consciously or subconsciously critique skin color. I spoke with the artist about his project and here is what he had to say.

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​Nate Hill selfie from his Trophy Scarves project

VICE: What is the message you are trying to send with this project and how did the idea evolve?
Nate Hill: ​My wife and I have a five-month-old baby now. My wife is also mixed, black and white. So we didn't know what our baby was going to look like. So far, he is somewhat lighter than us. We just kind of chuckled about it like, Oh, that's good for us. We were happy about it. And that seems like such an embarrassing feeling to have. So then I started thinking. This is something that is within people and I wanted to comment on it. I wanted to make something that was satirical and absurd. The more I read the readouts of the percentages on the website, the more absurd it becomes to me.

Do you plan on doing anything with the data?
​There will be someone that scored 86 percent dark and then there will be another person that scored 88 percent dark. I want to try to compare the two and see how accurate the website is. Is it consistent? I should be able to map it, almost like a color chart.

When I went on the site, I would see statistics calling, in my opinion, really light African American women dark-skinned and I wondered who is voting on these images?
​Right now, I think it is mostly white people voting. I was first covered in an art blog and most of my audience is white, so I am afraid that it is mostly white people who have done it so far. But we have no way of knowing. And I don't know if that is really important, if it really matters who uses the site. And then I wonder about the white people that come to the site. Were they aware of this? Did some of them kind of learn what light skin is and what dark skin is through interacting with the site?

Who did you make the site for?
​For black people, but I don't know if my reputation within the art world has that influence. When people think about black artists, I am not who comes to mind. But I always try to make things for black people when I get the inspiration.

I put a link to the site on my Facebook and got a lot of feedback from my black friends: confusion, annoyance, impartiality. What do you say to people who question your purpose and reasoning behind this project?
​I feel like colorism, from what I've seen and lived, is still a problem in the black community and it's internalized. All you have to do is turn on the radio and listen to rappers talk about "yellowbone" this or "redbone" that or how they have a light-skin girl. I don't understand how it goes on without more people talking about it, honestly.

Where do you think that comes from?
​It touches on the self-hate factor, how some people who are darker will just not like their complexion. It all ties in to the history of white supremacy in this country. And it's fucked up that it is still in our heads. We are still thinking about this shit.

Who do you want to visit the site?
​Somebody who doesn't see a problem with it. Maybe they continue using it and then someone sees them on it and is like, "What the hell?" I want somebody to be changed by it. I am not just trying to preach to the choir. I made it to raise awareness. That is really what the piece is about. The site is direct. Some people call it shallow. I'd call it direct.

Follow Alexis Barnes on ​Twitter

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Photo via Patrick McGuire.

​The Supreme Court of Canada came down with a 4-3 ruling Thursday in the case of R. v. F​earon, giving police the go-ahead to search the contents of an individual's cell phone, without a warrant, during an arrest. The judgment has some privacy advocates up in arms over what, they say, could easily turn into an invasion of privacy.

"This decision is so contrary to recent judgments like R. v. Spe​ncer," said Raji Mangat from the BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA), referring to a recent case in which the Court ruled that police need a warrant to ask telecom companies for information about subscribers. "I'm quite shocked that the Supreme Court thinks an intrusion into a phone isn't a privacy breach."

The Fearon case stems from an incident involving a Toronto jewelry robbery in 2009. Cops had tracked down the suspect, Kevin Fearon, who was believed to have been responsible for the theft at gunpoint.

After a patdown search, police opened up his phone and found a Gu​cci Mane-inspired text to a friend about the stolen ice: "We did it were [sic] the jewelry at n*gga burrrrrrrrr." Accompanying this missive were some photos of a handgun. At this point, it didn't take Benedict C​umberbatch to realize they likely had their man.

That text message is probably one of the most entertaining shreds of evidence collected by Canadian police in recent years, but let's put that aside. What's troubling about this decision, according to Mangat, is that police already had powers to promptly get a telewarrant for a search.

"Because of the ubiquity of texting as primary communication today, looking through someone's phone is basically like a wiretap," she said. And since warrantless wiretaps are a no-no, the court has set two different standards with this decision, effectively authorizing a 'wiretap lite' upon arrest.

Mangat also pointed out that people who are arrested but not charged or tried could also be subject to police searching their cellphones (or computers, since the court ruled them equivalent). Victims of these kinds of warrantless searches would have little recourse, since there would be no trial to determine the legality of the search.

In certain situations, this could have a chilling effect on free speech. Since protesters routinely get arrested as a form of civil disobedience, they may be less inclined to do so knowing that unfriendly police officers could easily conduct an intrusive search of a protester's phone, potentially exposing intimate photos, medical conditions, or other private information—all with little consequence in a catch and release situation.

As digital policy expert Michael G​eist wrote, the court did put four conditions on phone searches. Any such search must stem from "a lawful arrest, the search is incidental to the arrest with a valid law enforcement purpose, the search is tailored or limited to the purpose (ie. limited to recent information), and police take detailed notes on what they have examined and how the phone was searched."

VICE reached out to the office of Daniel Therrien, the privacy commissioner of Canada; though his office was still analysing the decision, Therrien provided a holding statement about it. The commissioner's office was "pleased to see that the Supreme Court of Canada was unanimous in recognizing that there are very significant privacy interests at stake in cell phone searches."

The commissioner's office also pointed to a curious facet of the case: "the court was unanimous in its view that in this case there had been a violation of the individual's right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures under Section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In this specific case, however, the majority was of the view that the evidence should not be excluded even though police had violated the individual's rights."

In other words, even though Mr. Fearon's rights had been violated by the search, the evidence from that search was admissible. This seeming contradiction might embolden police to play fast and loose with suspects' rights in future, knowing that courts may admit evidence obtained thusly.

Although he hasn't yet released an official reaction, hopefully the privacy commissioner will adopt a more adversarial stance toward the court's decision—or at the very least, come out in favour of legislation to protect Canadians from warrantless phone searches in all but the most high-stakes situations, as the Toronto Star opined in an edit​orial. After all, it's his job as the nation's top privacy watchdog and advocate.

Mangat from the BCCLA contends that the court's ruling brings up questions that the majority justices didn't consider. For instance, "What happens if the phone has a password but the arrested person refuses to give it to police? The court only addressed this in passing," she said.

​Bill C-13, the government's controversial "cyber-bullying law," recently given royal assent, contains a provision allowing police to "remotely hack into computers, mobile devices, or cars in order to track location or record metadata." While it hasn't gained much attention, the ​National Post reported on this portion of the law this summer.

Hacking into any suspect's phone, car, or computer would be subject to judicial approval. But it's conceivable that police could use that power to track a suspect's location or metadata before an arrest, and then obtain full warrantless access to a suspect's device upon arrest.

The recent 4-3 ruling does attest to the Supreme Court's divided nature on this issue. Central to the minority opinion was the inescapable fact that our digital devices now often contain a great portion of our lives. Here's a passage from the opinion (more on Geist's pa​ge):

"It is not just the device itself and the information it has generated, but the gamut of (often intensely) personal data accessible via the device that gives rise to the significant and unique privacy interests in digital devices. The fact that a suspect may be carrying their house key at the time they are arrested does not justify the police using that key to enter the suspect's home. In the same way, seizing the key to the user's digital life should not justify a wholesale intrusion into that realm."

The minority opinion went on to conclude that the four conditions for warrantless phone searches provided unclear and "overly complicated" guidance to police, an opinion the BCCLA echoed. Alas, for privacy advocates, the decision stands as is.

As the Star noted, our current government axed the long-form census because it was a "coercive and intrusive" invasion of privacy. But the libertarian fire that burned down StatsCan's crowning achievement is nowhere to be found today, with privacy-killing bills C-​13 and S-​4 on the books, and government tenders out for 24/7 social me​dia monitoring. So we shouldn't expect legislative action anytime soon to protect citizens from warrantless phone searches.

The Supreme Court's decision won't affect Canadians, criminal or otherwise, who don't get arrested. But it's still good to know what to do to protect your privacy in case you do find yourself, say, kettled and arrested at a major urban int​ersection.

According to Mangat, putting a passcode on your phone before getting arrested is a good bet to protect your privacy. It may not legally stop police from searching through phone contents, but it will slow them down. 

Follow ​Chris Malmo on Twitter.

Courtesy of Uncivilized Books. Some translations from Farsi by Leila Mouri.

Mana Neyestani is a Persian illustrator and political commentator who was jailed  by Iranian authorities after publishing a children's comic strip in an entertainment magazine calledIran Jomeh in 2006. In the strip, a cockroach shares a scene with a child. "The cockroach was talking to the child," Neyestani explained to me, "in a fake language that I called 'Cockroach language.' But the cockroach did not understand the boy. So it responded 'Namanaa?' which means 'what?' in Azeri. Originally, this word came from the Iranian ethnic group that we call Azeri. Unfortunately, they considered this cartoon to be an insult."

Insult is an understatement. Azeris are the largest ethnic minority in Iran, and the cartoon led to major unrest throughout the country. When street demonstrations grew too large, the Iranian authorities shot and killed several protesters in the cities of Tabriz, Zanjan, and Ardebil. What should have been a short detention for Neyestani—or no detention at all, because he had not broken a law—suddenly grew longer and longer as he was increasingly blamed for the killings.

Neyestani's new graphic novel,   An Iranian Metamorphosis, is an autobiographical story that depicts his ensuing fall from grace as a popular cartoonist to a national pariah forced to flee his home country.

Ethnic minorities are often disparaged by being called vermin or insects—take the Rwandan genocide, for instance, when "cockroach" was a commonly used term on the radio—so I pressed Neyestani on this point. "I can promise you and swear from the bottom of my heart," he replied, "that I did not intend to offend anyone. I did not think about the origin of the word and it was misinterpreted." In his book, the cockroach cartoon serves as a vehicle for the Azeri to express long pent-up frustrations about economic and social marginalization. Neyestani becomes a victim of larger political struggles, and he realizes this first-hand when an Azeri protester is temporarily thrown into his cell. Instead of fighting, they amicably share books and talk politics.

Neyestani wrote the book in just ten months, while he was stranded in Malaysia with his wife seeking asylum. The title,  An Iranian Metamorphosis, can be misleading, because in many ways the novel is much closer to Kafka's The Trial, where the protagonist Josef K. learns that he is going to be tried for an unknown offense, and is forced to navigate a labyrinthine government administration just to muster his own feeble defense. "I agree that it's more like The Trial than the Metamorphosis," he admitted. "But, it is the identity crisis. Gregor Samsa wakes up one day in Metamorphosis and finds himself a cockroach. Me too. One day I woke up and found myself a criminal. I was a racist. I changed from being a respected artist to a prisoner, and then to a fugitive, and then a refugee. I tried hard to keep my identity as a human being. As an intellectual, a free man."

Political cartoonists have gained new power in the age of the internet. A witty image can quickly be passed around on Facebook or Twitter to millions of people, provoking the ire of authorities. At the same time, the creators themselves are more accessible than ever, and can be attacked by trolls or hate speech. Today, Neyestani ekes out a living by drawing editorial cartoons for websites outside Iran, and he has an enormous following both inside and outside the country.

For those illustrators still working inside the country, the rules have changed. Western media is trumpeting President Hassan Rouhani as a welcome moderate, but he has not managed to open space for human rights and free expression as people had hoped. "It is not easy to criticize the government directly," Neyestani told me, "so using a metaphor is a common technique to avoid getting into trouble." But that has changed in recent years. Many of his cartoonist friends have stopped drawing for newspapers, finding it too risky. "Even if they use metaphors, they cannot speak as directly as possible because there is the risk of a misunderstanding by the government and the audience." Instead, many now work as animators or leave the country.

There has not been a national reconciliation, as it were, with the underlying injustice and brutality that forced Neyestani to flee. President Hassan Rouhani is busy negotiating over centrifuges and enriched uranium, but creative artists in Iran are not free to express themselves. Last year, 11 writers and bloggers in Iran were imprisoned for using social media, and recent reports from human rights groups suggest that 2014 will be much worse. "I still receive angry letters from some Azeri people each May, which is the anniversary of the massacres. They still think I'm guilty and they blame me." But the cartoonist is glad he told his story. "The book helped me to get rid of some disturbing images in my head, some pictures, some bad experiences."

Deji Bryce Olukotun is the author of Nigerians in Space, a novel out now from Unnamed Press. He is an attorney who fights for digital rights worldwide with the organization Access. Follow him on Twitter.

Read the first chapter of An Iranian Metamorphosis below.

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Image via ​J J Ellison

This post originally appeared in VICE  UK

Good news:​ The old stereotypes of jobless people idling their days away in their underwear watching Top Gear reruns are long gone. Bad news: As supervised job search schemes and mandatory workfare programs have forced claimants to work for no wage, unemployment has become a full-time job, only without a pay slip at the end of the month.

Since November, the government has introduced the ​Pilot Supervised Job Search Scheme, where unemployed benefit claimants are expected to spend 35 hours a week searching for jobs inside the steamed-up windows of their local Jobcentre provider. Claimants are forced to sign an attendance register at 9 AM and search for jobs solidly until 5 PM, five days a week, for three months. If they fail to do so, sanctions will follow. Benefits will be cut.

After a late start, the pilot scheme is gradually being rolled out in East Anglia, West Yorkshire, Surrey, Sussex, Mercia and the Black Country. While the programme is only scheduled to run until March next year, if it is deemed a success by the Department for Work and Pensions, it will become nationwide. As the scheme runs its course, 6,000 claimants will be selected to participate. Jobseekers will be hand-picked based on two criteria: the first group will be aged between 18-24 and will have been claiming Jobseeker's Allowance for 20-24 weeks. The second batch will be over 25 and claiming for between 33-37 weeks.

Worcester—a place best known for its Lea & Perrins factory—is one of the areas where the Pilot Supervised Job Search Scheme is being put into practice. I spoke to 40-year-old Max Pheby, who has recently been placed on the Pilot Scheme. One week down and with 12 weeks of the program left, Pheby says he is already "bored to death."

"Every day I'm here from 9.30 until 4.30 with half an hour for lunch. On Mondays and Tuesdays you apply for all the jobs that are available and the rest of the week you just look busy or twiddle your thumbs."

Why is it felt that he isn't capable of looking for a job, alone, at home?

"Well, they obviously thought I wasn't doing it correctly," he says. "Not, of course, that there is a lack of jobs." So far, Pheby says he has received very little job advice at Worcester's LearnDirect center, where the program is being run. "The staff are incredibly busy. They're making endless phone calls, having shouting matches with the Jobcentre and are endlessly doing paperwork."

Despite it being 2014, claimants aren't granted access to printers or proper wi-fi. Instead, they are given dongles. Pheby brandishes his USB stick, laughing: "Not only do these dongle things get us online for cheap—all of our searching information goes on here and they're routinely checked!" There can be no idle YouTube searching, either—website usage is closely monitored during each supervised job search session. Pheby says Facebook is banned, that all outward emails are checked and that you have to ask permission to use Google. He thinks they might become short of computers, too, when more claimants arrive onto an already oversubscribed scheme.

The Pilot Supervised Job Search is unflinching in its rigidity. It claims to take into account "childcare/caring needs, such as lone parents or carers" but has failed to do so for Pheby. "I applied to have my hours restricted because I have to look after my elderly mother, but that wasn't considered a good enough excuse since she doesn't qualify for in-house care." Despite the fact that he is the sole carer of his mother, who has dementia, he stills has to attend the scheme every single day. "If I wasn't here all day, I'd do everything for her—do the shopping, make her lunch and dinner, just make sure she's OK. Now I have to leave her on her own all day." He's not allowed to leave a minute before 4.30 PM, either. "Our lives are worth so little to them that they think they can arbitrarily decide our time."

Pheby was last employed 18 months ago as an industrial cleaner. He strikes me as an astute man, one who spends his spare time building everything from furniture to computers and reading classic literature. Although there's less and less time for these things now that every day is spent at the center.

The oldest claimant in this particular pilot is an impressive 64 years old. Despite being just a year away from retirement, she is still expected to spend 35 hours a week on the pilot scheme in the meantime. Another older claimant selected for the scheme is Ray Crane. In his early 50s, Crane has spent most of his working life laboring and working in warehouses. Due to a lack of local jobs, he has recently relied on agencies to gain work, procuring several days of laboring at his local university and a nearby nursery in the last eight weeks. Nonetheless, Crane was selected for the pilot scheme. "I cannot see how they're going to make us sit down for five days a week in there. I still can't believe we have to be there for a full day on Christmas Eve," he says.

"I applied to have my hours restricted because I have to look after my elderly mother, but that wasn't considered a good enough excuse since she doesn't qualify for in-house care."

In the end, it seems that searching for jobs all day, all week, for quarter of a year, may be more counter-productive than effectual. Claimants like Crane and Pheby might be able to produce more applications, but they can't magically create jobs that don't exist. In just an afternoon of conversations with these people, the tension and frustration was palpable. They felt patronized and, crucially, utterly unmotivated. Forget any Paul Dacre headline about benefit fraudsters—there is nothing cushy about being unemployed under the current Coalition government.

It's hard to see this scheme—which increasingly feels like a farcical joke—as not setting its claimants up to fail. Pheby's ability to eat, drink, get around and heat his home now depends on it. If he switches off his alarm clock one morning and decides he can't face a day in the center, or has to call in sick because he's picked up norovirus, he might lose his benefits.

Across the UK, the amount of claimants receiving sanctions and losing their benefits has been consistently rising since October 2012, when the DWP issued a ​tougher policy on sanctions. The new sanctions regime increased the minimum sanction from a week to a month and the maximum length of a sanction to three whole years. The new rules meant that claimants could see their benefits cut for a number of reasons, including failure to partake in a mandatory workfare program, leaving a job or program with no good reason, missing a sign-on session or even arriving late.

Under the coalition, the annual number of Jobseeker Allowance and Employment Support Allowance sanctions has almost doubled. In the last quarter of 2013, ​227,629 people were sanctioned—that's 69,600 more than in the equivalent quarter in 2012. Still, the spokesperson who took my call at the Department for Work and Pensions says: "It's only right that we look at new ways to target support to people who are finding it difficult to get a job. The supervised job search pilots are all up and running in selected areas in the country and, if they are successful, the changes may be rolled out further."

But it's the sanctions that Pheby and others I spoke to believe is the whole point of this scheme: "T hey put as many hoops in the way so the people that they consider don't absolutely need the money will drop out."

Follow Maya Oppenheim on ​Twitter

​I'm in Houston in leggings and a neon T-shirt, about to run a 5K that's also ​an EDM festival. It's billed as the first of its kind in the world, and I'm intrigued by the weird combination: a bunch of hopped-up ravers forced to run 16,404.2 feet before they can reach the promised land of a headliner DJ? Sounds like heart attack central. 

My friend L and I were planning to run the whole thing, I promise, but it's raining hard and we get there late and instead of stretching we decide to drink wine in her car with the heat blasting. Girls with glowsticks scamper past the windows. Somewhere in the distance, columns of light shoot into the air at regular intervals. L and I finish our wine and trot onto the racetrack to join hundreds of neon-clad runners, all shuffling toward the faint ecstatic screaming coming from the finish line. But before we can work up any real momentum, we see something that stops us where we are: a black light selfie station.

This is ​Nocturnal Lands, the world's first "running music festival," and it turns out to be possibly the world's tamest rave—kids attend with their parents, rain forces the DJ to close his set two hours early, and you can't run 50 feet without coming across something that reminds you of Instagram. The 5K course snakes through the massive parking lot of the Sam Houston Race Park, a horse racing track, which lends the scene an dreamlike air—like, Where are the horses? And who follows horse racing anymore?—and there are small stages set up along the course, a la pit stops in auto racing. At each stage, a DJ plays, refueling the runners' increasingly hyped-up adrenal glands with the glory of music—or something like that. I wanted to come to Nocturnal Lands because the idea of 8,000 adrenaline junkies running and dancing and running again was, quite frankly, a little terrifying, and I wanted to see it all go down. 

But instead of frenzied movement, we're stuck in the selfie tent. L and I aren't immune; we take a photo under the black lights and then trot over to one of the smaller stages, where a gaggle of teenage volunteers is handing out water. We chat with a group of bros in tiny running shorts, who think the addition of a 5K to the EDM scene is a "cool idea" and who wore cross-country shorts because it was "hilarious." The rain is distracting but pleasantly misty. We sniff around for the slightest whiff of illegal activity, convinced that we'll stumble upon the dark underbelly of the festival at any moment, but nothing surfaces. Instead of darkness, we find children and med students. 

"There's been one kid for every four adults," one of the teenage volunteers tells me. "It was dead earlier, but it's gonna get crazy." It's 8:30 PM. The run started at 7:30.

The vibe is sweetly innocent, almost like a party sponsored by the Disney Channel. We had to sign waivers before running, but the risk of physical harm here seems nonexistent. The "run" eventually turns into a pleasant walk, as runners chat to each other and fidget with their glowsticks, making their way from tiny dance crowd to tiny dance crowd.

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This isn't the place to go into the history of EDM, but suffice it to say that, like plenty of other musical genres, there's an ongoing rivalry between the "mainstream" and the "underground," and people complain that, well, the scene used to be cooler. Today, the biggest EDM festivals rack up descriptions like "face-melting" and "mind-blowing" for their expensive pyrotechnics. If raves used to be illegal back in the good old days, and if today's EDM megafests are mostly sweaty rich kids doing coke off each other's bodies, then Nocturnal Lands is EDM made accessible and nonthreatening. You can bring your kids here. You can wear your comfortable shoes. No one is going to trample you. No one is going to offer you pills. The serious runners are stone-cold sober. The old ravers, dressed to the gills in feathers, are also stone-cold sober. The bros have naught but a lonely Bud Light cart to get them wild. 

I chat with Mike and Katherine, a couple in their 40s, who recently partied until five in the morning at a three-story Chicago nightclub. Here, they are sober, sweaty, and happy. Mike holds a lightsaber and describes the experience as "good clean fun." Katherine laughs from beneath her pink-and-yellow wig. "No one spilled beer on us," she says. They are the benevolent guardians of this new, accessible scene. They say, diplomatically, that the music has "changed" since their wilder days. How? "The DJs talk more," says Katherine.

Eventually, L and I jog over to the finish line, which slithers beneath a huge blown-up arch plastered with the Red Bull logo. It's raining hard now. The last of the runners are slowing down and taking selfies as they complete the race. There are smoke machines, confetti canons, girls in pink sweatsuits dancing onstage, all ruled over by the headliner DJ duo, Boombox Cartel, who have come up from Mexico City.

One of the DJs keeps interrupting his set to insist that people use the hashtag #nightnation. The Bud Light cart glows under the moon. A girl swirls inside her light-up hula hoop and tells me her experience here has been "low-key." Apparently that's the preferred adjective of the night. Turns out that running plus dancing doesn't necessarily equal more adrenaline, more insanity. In fact, it seems as though the infusion of running culture into the EDM scene is actually a stabilizing influence. If the old-school ravers don't mind this new, clean fun, then who am I to long for wilder days that I never experienced?

By 9:30 PM, it has not gotten "crazy," as my teenage friend predicted. The parking lot is turning to slush. L and I creep away from the soaked, happy crowd at the finish line. The track is almost empty now and one of the little stages, positioned over by the horse stables, has been abandoned. But it's still flashing with multicolored lights, and the DJ table rocks wildly in the wind. It's not sweaty or wild or crazy, but it looks really cool. Best of all, no one's paying attention to this little stripped-down scene: no DJ, no party, all vibe. It's in this moment, when no one is sponsoring or organizing or telling us what to do, that we want music.

Follow Tori Telfer on ​Twitter.