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A still from Blade Runner​

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

Roy Batty's speech at the end of Blade Runner is the stuff of movie legend. As a murderous android nearing the end of his battery life, Rutger Hauer moved crew members on Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi classic to tears with a semi-improvised soliloquy that showed his nominal villain had the soul of a poet.

"I have... seen things you people wouldn't believe," he tells Harrison Ford's dumbstruck detective Rick Deckard. "Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die."

As monologues go, it's short and sweet (Hauer reportedly cut some of the techno-babble from the scripted lines and added the "tears in the rain" part himself). But it also tells us everything we need to know about Batty's capacity to feel—pain, wonder, existential anguish... the whole human shebang, basically. Which makes him a great baddie, but also the sneaky hero of the piece.

It's long been said that bad guys get all the best lines. But too often, villainous speeches are little more than an opportunity for vain showboating—not so much revealing of anything about the character as they are excuses for the hero to get out of a jam.

But what of the bad guys whose words cut to the core of their complicated, tortured, or plain depraved souls? Keep your Voldemorts and your Sarumans—the best villains are those with depth. Here are a few of them, along with a MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT.

JOHNNY IN NAKED
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Mike Leigh's darkest creation is a work-shy drifter who drowns out his own self-hatred with meaningless sexual encounters and relentless bullying of his intellectual inferiors. Somehow, we still love him: 

"Was I bored? No, I wasn't fuckin' bored. I'm never bored. That's the trouble with everybody—you're all so bored. You've had nature explained to you and you're bored with it; you've had the living body explained to you and you're bored with it; you've had the universe explained to you and you're bored with it; so now you want cheap thrills and plenty of them, and it doesn't matter how tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it's new, as long as it flashes and fuckin' bleeps in 40 fuckin' different colors. So whatever else you can say about me, I'm not fuckin' bored." 

​LADY EBOSHI IN PRINCESS MONONOKE

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Though ostensibly the baddie in  ​Hayao Mi​yazaki's eco-minded masterwork, Lady Eboshi is the probably the one character you'll become the most enamored with. Because she's really fucking cool. 

As the boss of Iron Town, a fortress city that derives its wealth through the systematic plunder of the surrounding countryside (and the gods that call it home), her green credentials are admittedly shaky. But she's also a feminist, philanthropist and stone-cold hardass who's prepared to risk it all for the sake of progress. Plus she says shit like this:

"Now watch closely, everyone. I'm going to show you how to kill a god. A god of life and death. The trick is not to fear him." 

Leave it to a kids' film to show everybody how it's done.

​WITHNAIL IN WITHNAIL & I
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Bad guys are typically creatures of want, craving everything over the course of their disgusting lives from revenge and money to helicopters, rings of power, and the indiscriminate slaughter of  ​Jedi younglings. But sometimes, all a rotter needs is some cake and the finest wines available to humanity. Richard E. Grant's Withnail may not be a villain in the strictest sense, but you'd be hard pressed to argue he isn't a bully, coward, misanthrope and self-pitying wretch.
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His last scene performing Hamlet to a pair of disinterested wolves at London Zoo is genuinely tragic. "What a piece of work is a man!" he says ruefully from under an umbrella in the rain. Cheer up, mate—at least you didn't top yourself, like Bruce Robinson originally envisioned in his unpublished novel of the same name.

NOAH CROSS IN CHINATOWN
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When he's not busy plunging half of California into drought, Noah Cross is the kind of guy who likes to kick back with a spot of incestual child abuse. His mea culpa regarding the rape of his own daughter is evil incarnate, revealing the true end-game of his senseless greed. 

"I don't blame myself," he tells Jack Nicholson's private dick Jake Gittes. "You see, Mr Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything." 

John Huston's performance as Noah Cross was echoed by ​Daniel Day Lewis more than 30 years later as...

DANIEL PLAINVIEW IN THERE WILL BE BLOOD

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The milkshake scene may drink up the plaudits (and the YouTube  ​remixes), but Day-Lewis's most revealing moment in Paul Thomas Anderson's quasi-biblical epic comes during a scene where his character, the ruthless oil prospector Daniel Plainview, lays bare his hatred of humanity in a speech which chips away at the heart of American capitalism. 

"I have a competition in me," he says, hellfire twinkling visibly in his eyes. "I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. Well, if it's in me, it's in you. There are times when I... I look at people and I see nothing worth liking." 

COLONEL JESSUP IN A FEW GOOD MEN
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Right wingers. All horrible evil baddies, right? I tend to think so, too. But Jack Nicholson's endlessly parodied speech ("You can't handle the truth!") as a Navy colonel in the dock has me welling up like George Osborne at Maggie Thatcher's funeral. Chalk that one up to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who—with one beautifully weighted monologue—gifts us a three-dimensional baddie to stalk the dreams of hand-wringing liberals for years:

"Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns... You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honour, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline."

LILLY DILLON IN THE GRIFTERS

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For John Cusack's character Roy in The Grifters, Anjelica Huston is a MILF in the worst possible way. Stephen Frears's adaptation of characteristically bleak crime novel by Jim Thompson, the film sees Anjelica play Lilly Dillon, a veteran scam artist who tries to hook up with her own son (Cusack) in order to pay her way out of a spot. 

Oedipally-obsessed little bastard that he is, Johnny comes perilously close to accepting before things get quickly out of hand and we see that Huston's ruthless baddie does have a heart, after all. Quite amazingly dark, and a wonderful performance from Huston to boot: "I have to have that money, Roy. What do I have to do to get it?"

​HAL IN 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
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Forty-odd years after his creation, HAL still sets the gold-standard in sci-fi robot villainy. The crew of the Discovery One pulls the plug on their monotonously voiced computer after he tries to bump them off for reasons unknown—but that doesn't make powering him down any less traumatic: "I'm afraid... I'm afraid, Dave." 

Indeed, HAL's influence is such that modern-day cinema-goers are conditioned to believe that all robots in space must have some sort of hidden agenda, a fact which Christopher Nolan took full advantage of in Interstellar with TARS, an aspiring joker-bot who makes endless bad-taste gags about abandoning the crew and looks like an 80s businessman's ​stress-relieving toy. Needless to add, he's no HAL.

HARRY LIME IN THE THIRD MAN

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Carol Reed's film noir is dominated by Orson Welles's performance as Harry Lime—and he's only on screen for five minutes. An American ex-pat who stages his own death in postwar Vienna, Lime is revealed near the film's climax as a murderous black marketeer who's been bumping off the locals with dodgy penicillin. 

Confronted about his diabolical deeds by his former friend, played by Joseph Cotton, Lime chides: "Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me, would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?" 

Which is already pretty great (as you'd expect from a script by Graham Greene), but then Welles himself reportedly added the topper: "In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

KURTZ IN APOCALYPSE NOW

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Despite surrounding his jungle home with a picket fence of severed human heads on sticks, Colonel Kurtz is honestly a sensitive soul. A military genius haunted by the worst excesses of the US's war in Vietnam, he has, in the modern-day parlance, "gone native" on his superiors, using a tribe of locals (who revere him as a god) to commit nameless atrocities.

"Horror has a face," he tells his would-be assassin Captain Willard (Martin Sheen). "And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared." Brando famously refused to learn any lines for the part— here's​ a glimpse of how the scene could have taken a turn for the distinctly less terrifying.

Follow Alex Denney on ​Twitter

​The HBO comedy Eastbound and Down ushered in of a new type of dark hilarity and became a television cult classic in the process. The protagonist, Kenny Powers, is an obnoxious, crass Southerner who has fallen from grace after his professional baseball career has abruptly ended. But who was the inspiration for the character? 

At the height of his career, John Rocker was one of the best closers in professional baseball, and also one of the most disliked people in the game. In 1999, comments he made that were printed in Sports Illustrated came to represent the worst of American culture: racist, homophobic, and xenophobic. He apologized for the remarks later, but Rocker's crass and confrontational nature never died, and there's something kind of lovable and funny about the guy; after all, he's just a baseball player. Or maybe not? This is the real Kenny Powers.

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Fazza doing his thing. Image by Jennifer Jane Mills ​via Flickr

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

The immigration debate is getting pretty loud. One way or another, it's harder than ever to ​ignore the UKIP—with their ​breast-shunning and ​their calypso and the fact that they've got Big Alan Titchmarsh on board—and, despite their tiny two MP presence in Parliament, the purple-and-yellow party seem to be steering a debate that's getting louder and louder as we creep closer to an election. And that debate simply boils down to this: "Yo, what should we do about people coming into the UK? Should we let them? Should we let them claim benefits when they get here? Do we let them seek medical treatment when they are ill or hurt? What the fuck do we do about other humans?"

But the immigration chat isn't just getting louder—it's also getting narrower. Back in the good old days of 2006, left-leaning newspapers such as the Guardian and Independent at least made a fist of presenting immigration as a human issue, scattering Comment Is Free with headlines that basically went: "Hey, guys? Immigrants are humans, too. Let's not be dicks about it." 

Fast forward to 2014 and that human argument has gone by the wayside, with the main gist of the pro-immigration argument being, "Well, they're pretty good for the economy, I guess? Let them in, maybe?" With the Mail still chundering on about immigrants coming into the country and ruining school nativities and making kosher a thing and shooting the St George's flag with high-powered rifles or whatever, the left-leaning press has quietly turned immigrants from actual humans into economic units.

With each political party seemingly drawing their respective line in the immigration sand in recent weeks, I reached out to Dr. Alex Balch, International Relations expert at the University of Liverpool's politics department. His latest research looks at the changing way immigration has been reported in the British media over the past eight years. He and his colleague Ekaterina Balabanova went through over 500 articles from various British tabloids and broadsheets between 2006 and 2013, and found that the immigration debate was narrowing—the human side was being cited less and less, basically—more right-leaning and more dehumanizing: the word "flood" cropped up a lot.

I spoke to Dr. Balch about the changing public opinion on immigration and how it's shaped and reflected by the press, as well as the influence it might have on next year's general election.

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A UK Border Agency agent rounding up illegal immigrants (Photo by Nathalie Olah, from "​Hunting for Illegal Immigrants with the UK Border Police")

VICE: So give me a brief overview of your latest research. What was the reasoning behind it?
Dr. Alex Balch:​ It really starts from a point that a lot of people agree on: that the media isn't doing a great job on immigration. It's a problematic issue. We often hear people saying the Daily Mail is terrible on immigration—that there are lots of inaccuracies and stereotyping. But it's no longer just a tabloid thing; it's part of the culture of the press here.

And to prove how not good it is, you analyzed over 500 articles from 2006 to 2013—what is it you were looking for?
​ What we wanted to do with our research was test that out and go a bit beyond the surface level—go beyond what nasty words were used in relation to immigrants and look at what sort of arguments are out there in the press. What is underlying these vicious statements and words? Because, in the end, although it's worrying if the stereotypes are used, we were more interested in asking: "What are the fundamental arguments being put forward?" Because it feels like the debate has narrowed and it's become almost a panic. It seems to be spiraling and getting worse and worse.

The main thing I noticed in your research is that you found the human representation of immigration had fallen out of fashion. Where did it go?
​ It's vanished, basically. What we found was that, in 2006, there was a little bit of that going on. There was a little bit in the left wing broadsheets of a human rights angle—a more cosmopolitan notion—that immigration isn't all about money; that it's not about "how much they cost" or "how much we get from them"; that there are other things going on. But it was marginal in 2006, and what we've found is that it has gone from being marginal to being absent. So it's gone from being unbalanced to being skewed or completely lopsided.

In 2006, the Independent did a campaign against the Daily Mail, saying, basically, "Look at all these horrible tabloids doing these horrible things." It really put up a bit of a fight. In 2013, they sort of gave in. They let the right wing press have its way. They've really withdrawn from that debate.

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Protesters demonstrating against the Daily Mail's various prejudices (Photo by Jake Lewis)

What arguments have specifically gone by the wayside in recent years?
We looked at the political arguments about immigration and initially found around five arguments for a reduction in immigration—economic arguments, arguments from the basis of social justice, public security and identity, as well as more democratic arguments—but now it's more like three.

Interestingly, the identity-based arguments, which are the most similar to racism—you know, "We shouldn't allow these people because they're different to us"—weren't something we found, particularly. So there's this idea that, in terms of the stereotypes and language used by those who oppose immigration, that everything's about racism. But when it comes to the underlying arguments, people don't use racist arguments to justify immigration control.

So what are people's concerns?
​ People's main concerns are the public security arguments—the idea that immigrants bring problems, the worst one being disease, or that they bring petty crime. That was something that was introduced into the debate in 2006, when the government leaked an informal report suggesting that 40,000 criminals were going to come from Bulgaria and Romania. It was a report that we never actually saw, but it was leaked. Public security arguments—this idea that immigrants are bringing insecurity, danger—became more common after that.

The other obvious one was welfare chauvinism: the idea that immigrants are going to come and take our public goods, an argument that often breaks down to "things that we deserve" and "things they don't deserve." That chimes with welfare chauvinism more broadly across society—the old argument of who deserves benefits and who does not—an issue that, equally, has come to the fore more recently. So you can see it fits with the general shift in public debate.

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Johnny Biles (far right), founder of the London Welcome Project, an organization focused on welcoming asylum seekers and refugees new to the UK. Photo by Chris Matthews

It's interesting that you can pinpoint key moments when the debate changed. Was the financial collapse in 2008 something that spurred the welfare chauvinism side of things?
​There's definitely a link there. The more troubled times we have, the more we look at who to blame—and also who to exclude. In 2006, where our research started, there were more arguments saying, "Immigration is mainly making us money, so it's a good thing." I think most economists agreed—and still agree—that, during a recession, immigration is, on balance, going to benefit the country. What we've seen in the later period is less willingness to make that argument.

It's about sensitivity to public opinion. Newspapers obviously want to say things that their readers want to hear, and I don't think the public are now as happy to say, "OK, well it's good for all of us, so I'm happy. I'll go along with that because the country as a whole is better off." While the arguments at the national level still hold that immigration is a positive, people are much more focused on the local level.

Was public opinion something you tracked? Did you see it change in any way?
​The public opinion is very steadily going toward being against more immigration. But it's often about perspective: when people are asked if they favor large-scale immigration, there's a very high percentage that say no. But if they're asked, "If an immigrant has worked and contributed taxes for 10 years, should they be allowed to bring their partner into the country and access the health system?" then everyone says yes. So if you talk on the macro level it's very easy for people to say they're anti-immigration, but when you bring it down to local communities—the people who run the local shop, the family down the road—the opinions change. So public opinion surveys are maybe measuring one thing, but not the whole picture.

There's a general election coming up, and the immigration debate looks like it's going to be a big factor
​It's going to be massive, isn't it?

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Some "patriots," who presumably aren't that keen on immigrants, at the March for England. Photo by Henry Langston from "​English Fascists Took Their First Beating of the Summer in Brighton This Weekend"

Every political party seems to be coming out with a tough line on immigration, and obviously UKIP have two MPs now and are loudly on the rise. How do you think UKIP and the immigration debate might shape next year's election?
​Even if UKIP don't get that many seats—we're insulated a bit through our first past post system—they don't need to win that many seats to have an impact. I'm interested in where this is going to end in terms of how far it will go. There's an arms race here on how strict we can be on immigration and how much we can count people going people in and out and how much we can interfere in the life of the individual.

Landlords in Birmingham now have to check immigration status. At the university we now have to check immigration status. The same thing will happen with the NHS. I can see the arguments for that and I'm not going to just completely discount them, but they are probably a bit misguided and over the top. The question is: How far can we go?

There was one moment with Mark Reckless in the Rochester by-election recently where he just made a little slip and ​said something about deporting the immigrants who are already here—potentially asking them to leave the country after they have legally entered. You can tell that a shiver went down everyone in the audience's back. Even those who are quite worried about immigration wouldn't accept the idea of literally rounding people up and putting them on planes.

I'm interested in how far this arms race will go before someone flinches and says, "Hold on, we're actually being ridiculously security focused here." It's also a question of which party can benefit from the UKIP backlash, which I'm still waiting for. I thought it would come sooner. I thought that as soon as UKIP got any sort of scrutiny that they would implode, but they've been remarkably resilient.

When do you expect it, then?
​The implosion is probably round the corner, and I think it will come because people will feel how unjust something is. The idea of deporting your neighbor is key—there have been lots of local campaigns against deportation, and a lot of people now have mixed nationality families.

The government has to be careful because when it starts saying something about immigrants, it's actually threatening a large number of families. We've seen that in America where there have been loads of families split up because of their deportation policy. Children getting left behind and families getting broken up—that's really powerful politically. Causing that human damage, that's the limit of how far we can go. The question is when we can get there, and I hope it's soon because we've spent far too long traveling down that particular road.

The idea of dealing with the illegal immigrants and then moving on to the legal immigrants and the hidden immigrants and the children sounds a lot like the BNP, with their talk of going back generation by generation and purifying society. That's when it's going to start getting really scary—that's the point where the public will become revolted by the whole thing. I wonder if, in this general election, there might be a little bit of that happening and, maybe I'm being optimistic, but UKIP finding its message doesn't have quite the impact it thinks.

Follow Joel Golby on ​Twitter.

​Despite watching many hours of Fox News each week, I rarely find myself agreeing with the network's outrage cheerleaders. But last month when ​Charles Krauthammer appeared on The O'Reilly Factor and referred to President Obama's gum chewing during a summit in China as disrespectful, I found myself nodding in feverish approval. I've said similar things myself, though my remarks are usually met with, "He's chewing Nicorette gum. Would you rather he smoked?" Yes. Yes, I would, because I think chewing gum is the most disgusting thing you can possibly do with your face.

A few years ago a girlfriend of mine said my aversion to looking anyone in the eye while they chewed gum was symptomatic of a phobia. She did some research, and to my delight she introduced me to the term c​hiclephobia. Although it's obscure, I'm not the only person who might suffer with this condition outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Although there aren't statistics available on exactly how many people are afraid of gum, we do know that there are folks diagnosed with chiclephobia in every echelon of life. Even Oprah Winfrey, one of the most powerful women of the 20th century, famously suffers from the disorder.

Back in 2010, Oprah told People magazine, "I hate chewing gum. It makes me sick just to think about it. When people chew loudly or smack it and pull it out of their mouth, that's the worst." She is so turned off by gum, she is rumored to have had the stuff banned from her production studio.

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As someone who finds his incessant gum chewing the most disgusting thing about Jerry Lee Lewis, a man who married his 13-year-old cousin, I could definitely relate to Oprah's desire to rid her world of gum. But because most people don't find chewing a synthetic paste repulsive, people like Oprah and myself are forced to encounter it constantly.

As a child, I almost threw up when reading about Violet Beauregarde sticking her three-month old chewed gum on her bedpost at night in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, (or behind her ear in Wonka). When Kirsten Dunst surprised Josh Hartnett with an unexpected make-out session in his Pontiac Firebird to the soundtrack of Heart's "Crazy on You" in The Virgin Suicides, an otherwise thrilling scene of pubescent recklessness was ruined for me by the across-the-line disgusting moment when, immediately after they kiss, Hartnett finds Dunst's old gum in his mouth.

I've had desperate crushes on women that I'd suddenly feel nothing for after watching them chew gum. I've had important lunch meetings ruined when someone I'm supposed to be paying attention to puts his or her old gum on the side of their plate. Suddenly my appetite is gone, and I can think of nothing but counting the minutes until the waiter takes that plate away.

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"Of all the consumer products, chewing gum is perhaps the most ridiculous. It literally has no nourishment—you just chew it to give yourself something to do with your stupid idiot Western mouth," Russell Brand wrote in his memoir, My Booky Wook. "Half the world is starving, and the other's going, 'I don't actually need any nutrition, but it would be good to masticate, just to keep my mind off things.'" 

I often cite Brand's point when explaining chiclephobia to people. Though if I'm honest, my hatred for gum has nothing to do with class or decadence or famine. I just think it's gross. Really, really gross. But does a deep-rooted aversion to gum really qualify as a legitimate phobia? ​

"Usually a phobia is defined as an intense fear that is irrational, and the person tends to realize it's irrational, but still can't help feeling it," Dr. Gregory Carey of University of Colorado Boulder's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience tells me. "A phobic disorder is when a phobia gets so intense it starts interfering in your life or those around you."

I do have pretty strong reactions to the sight of gum, but I couldn't say that it impacts my life on a daily basis. When I think of the word phobia, I think of people who are terrified of innocuous things like balloons ( glob​ophobia), moths (mottep​hobia), or the color purple (porphyroph​obia, not to be confused with a fear of the Oprah film The Color Purple). Dr. Carey says that these types of cases are rare, and that most common phobias are of usual suspects like heights, enclosed spaces, public speaking, and various sorts of animals.

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Like much of our emotional makeup as adults, Dr. Carey says that often phobias have their origins in a negative childhood experience. "We're evolutionarily predisposed to develop certain fears at certain times in our lives," he explains. "It's always been important for children to learn quickly about their environment, especially when it comes to things like animals."

This was certainly the case with Oprah, who once told  InTouch weekly that as a child her family was so poor they would recycle chewed gum. "My grandmother used to save it in little rows in the cabinet," she said. "I'd be scared to touch it because it was so gross, so I have a thing about gum."

I suppose I do have a memory of my sister sticking her gum into my hair as a kid. Having gum in my hair freaked me out more than the time I had a leach  stuck to my belly. I was livid. I threw an explosive tantrum until my Mom just cut it out with scissors. I feel nauseous every time I think about that. Though at the same time, I don't feel I fit Carey's criteria for a phobia sufferer since I don't see my feelings as irrational. To me, chewed gum is like used toilet paper, and I don't understand why no one else sees that. If I had gum stuck in my hair today as an adult I'd react about the same as I did as a child and freak the fuck out.

In our conversation, Carey makes the distinction between fear and disgust by proposing that "if you are walking along and step in dog poop, you say, Yuck, that's disgusting. But you're not afraid." When I take his parable one step further and ask about the person who avoids parks or walking in grass altogether to avoid dog poop, he reiterates that "you're still just disgusted by the poop, not afraid of it. Unless you're having panic attacks about it." 

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So what's a gum-fearing boy to do?  Ultimately, I've mostly accepted the fact that pretty much everyone in the world other than me and Oprah likes to chew gum. So I typically avoid mentioning my chiclephobia to anyone. You can only pick so many battles in life, and if some people enjoy gnawing on sorbitol, gum base, maltitol, caffeine, Xylitol, and stuff like niacinamide, soy lecithin, calcium pantothenate, taurine, maltodextrin, sucralose, titanium dioxide, refined glaze, carnauba wax, pyridoxine hydrochloride, riboflavin, Calcium silicate, and Red 40, then far be it from me to deprive them of their fun. If I were to mention my disgust with gum, then no one would chew gum around me, which sounds nice, but won't actually help my condition.  

According to Dr. Carey, if I have any interest in desensitizing myself to the sight of humans debasing themselves with their open-mouthed chomping, then I need to soberly face down the source of my discomfort. 

"Usually the best [method of overcoming a phobia], is a combination of cognitive therapy and actual in vivo exposure," he says. "If someone's afraid of snakes, you work your way into actually handling snakes. People can be anxious during the initial stages of this treatment, but it can be very effective, leading to their anxiety going down by the end of treatment."

So perhaps it's for the best that I'm not a gazillionaire like Oprah who can have gum banished from my sight at all times. If I'm ever going to get to the point where I can handle a lunch meeting involving chewed gum on a plate, or even kiss a girl with gum in her mouth (I just squirmed in my seat typing that sentence), then I guess I need to witness this unsightly, inexplicably acceptable culinary custom as often as possible.

...On second thought, fuck that. Gum's gross. 

Follow Josiah on ​Twitter.

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

​The New English Library was the maniacal king of pulp publishing in 1970s Britain. Thrashing out books relentlessly, it excelled in the more brutal end of youth-oriented fiction: rampant gang violence, skinheads marauding around in bovver boots, Satanic cult worship... basically anything that was causing a moral fuss in the decade of disco.

Formed in 1961 as a subsidiary of the New American Library, they initially published genre fiction—Westerns, sci- fi, mysteries, that kind of thing. However, the editors quickly realized they were missing something of a trick: by gearing books toward a working-class youth audience—something American pulp merchants had been doing for some time with great success—they would be all but guaranteed a higher circulation.

Hells Angels, skinheads, punks, mods, girl gangs and bent coppers all found their place in an expanding catalogue that was, by the early 70s, essentially a production line of sleaze. The basic premise was simple: find a youth cult and write about them—and, crucially, to them—including every gritty detail necessary. It proved a winning formula.

Speed was of the essence; this was adrenalized story telling stripped down to the absolute base essentials, as former editor Mark Howell—who worked at the NEL during their early-70s heyday—explained to me.

"That damn delivery schedule was the most driving force I've ever met in publishing," he said. "You just had to get it out there—it was breakneck, insane. I started a series called Deathlands, and the first writer I gave it to had done a wonderful first story and was given the green light—and spent his entire advance on heroin, which, back in those days, was not unknown. It was crippling for some, but most of our writers were addicts of the typewriter, and one of the glories of this was that it was a conveyer belt—we thoroughly addicted our readers. It was endless repetition stemming from unresolved anomaly.

"Take a book like Forgive the Executioner by Andrew Lane. The hook there was, 'Can an agent of the government really kill people with indemnity?' The reaction you want from the reader is, 'Say that again? I don't believe it!' [Adopts solemn newsreader voice] 'I said, "Can an agent of the government really kill people with total and utter indemnity?"' 'Say it again?!' [Laughs] You repeat the premise.'

"And, of course, we had a market who were always hungry for more. The James Moffat Skinhead books sold in their millions."

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Three covers from the Skinhead series

Indeed, of the staggering number of books published by the New English Library, it was undoubtedly Moffat's Skinhead series (written under one of his many pseudonyms: "Richard Allen") that remains the most iconic. Following misanthropic 16-year-old thug Joe Hawkins through windy football terraces, brutal borstals, and peeling Bethnal Green boozers, the series ran to 17 books and drew considerable controversy thanks to its nonchalant approach to a constant stream of gang violence, racist dialogue, rape, and robbery. Moffat himself was often compelled to add disclaimers to the introductions of his books, insisting he was merely "reflecting violent times in the language of the streets."

However, his prose was also peppered with the kind of troubling vitriol you might have seen on a Daily Express front page, ensuring the reader knew precisely which side of the political spectrum he sat on (somewhere between Nigel Farage and Enoch Powell). Nonetheless, the books remain a fascinating and compellingly readable document of the early70s youthsploitation landscape.

Regardless of his politics, Moffat could really write. Mean spirited and morally bankrupt, his novels spoke of cold rain, futility, bad sex, spilt blood and stale beer, all played out against a backdrop of decrepit East London hinterlands and grey estuary towns.

A prolific writer who was capable of knocking out 10,000 words a day, Moffat's background in writing pulp stories for American newsstand magazines ensured he could turn his hand to almost any subject. He also had literally dozens of pseudonyms—he once wrote a novel entitled Diary of a Female Wrestler under the pen name "Trudi Maxwell", for instance—and was a master of "recycling" his own plots, once stating that you just needed to "change the locations and method of killing".

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Mark Howell remembered the impact his books had on an emergent literary counterculture.

"The underground was bursting out, and the NEL was not a mainstream operation; after the 60s we looked for more drama and more realism, and it was the skinheads and the bikers, etc, who provided that. Our writers were using imagination to get there. The British press was such that you could read the Sunday papers and pick up what the youth cults were about, and write about them—and to them—very quickly, provided you had the aptitude. We needed the youth side of it; these weren't essays in sociology, they were attempts at writing adventure novels with new characters and themes. It was very original."

And there lies the rub. Although the format was original, authors like James Moffat and Laurence James (writer of the "Mick Norman" Hells Angels books) had extraordinarily limited firsthand experience of the subjects they covered.

Moffat was a middle aged Canadian who wrote from rural Devon and had never been anywhere near Upton Park. Laurence James—himself an editor at the NEL, as well as one of their star novelists—was a peaceful hippy. Moffat based his books on imagination and rudimentary research gleaned from a few conversations with "local toughs" down the pub. That the books were so convincing is testament to both the energy of the writing and the ability of the writers to get under the hood of their characters.

The 1996 BBC documentary Skinhead Farewell

As an ageing skinhead says in the fascinating 1996 BBC documentary Skinhead Farewell: "I'll keep the books forever. It was my era; it was me and my mates. I'd never sell them. We used to wonder who 'Richard Allen' really was. We thought he had to be involved; he had to have actually been a skinhead or been involved in football violence. The way he wrote... he had to have been in the know—it was just like real life. And even if he wasn't a thug, he thought like one."

Other NEL writers were more thorough in their research methods. GF Newman, for instance, wrote the superbly named "Bastard trilogy"—Sir, You Bastard, You Flash Bastard, and You Nice Bastard—which chronicled the misadventures of the corrupt DC Terry Sneed.

Climbing the greasy pole at the Met and patrolling the wilds of early-70s Battersea, Sneed is a borderline sociopath who apathetically sets up grasses, cheats colleagues, and batters villains with impunity. Predating "corrupt cop" fiction like Irvine Welsh's Filth or David Peace's "Red Riding Quartet" by some decades, the "Bastard" trilogy has aged remarkably well, and—like so many NEL titles—the originals are highly sought after by collectors today.

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The Bastard Trilogy by GF Newman

"I was never heavily involved with the police per se, but I did know detectives and how they operated," explained Newman when I asked about his research. "It was intensely, rampantly corrupt in those days. Sometimes I used to go out with them and see what they were up to. And, of course, you got accepted by other policemen as a result of that; they just went ahead and did things as they normally did things—they didn't think, 'Oh, this person is going to write about us.' Most of the things that happen in the Terry Sneed books are based on things that I actually saw and heard—the fiction is in the way that I stitched them together. Almost none of it is invented."

Unlike the Skinhead series, the Sneed novels didn't hinge on titillation, right wing propaganda or violence; rather, they sustain a level of taut suspense, painting a vivid picture of the Met as a seedy, closed-ranks boys' club that will do anything to stay afloat, Sneed himself a brilliantly realized antihero. The Met in the early 1970s—in all its fetid, unscrupulous and villainous glory—is rendered with such detail that you can practically taste the Embassy Number 1s, rancid Scotch, and canteen bacon rolls.

"The detectives would go to pubs and clubs, and that was where it all happened," said Newman. "I lived in Soho at the time—it was far rougher back then. There was a lot of crime on the streets; prostitutes operating out of doorways. There were clubs. A lot of them were unlicensed, and detectives did a lot of work in them. They met informers, grasses, other policemen. They were quite familiar with criminals. It was like a game—they all knew who was doing what, professionally. And they were often taking money from them as well.

"My time at the New English library was great, though. Publishing was fun back then. There was a lot of dope going down in publishing; some of the editors were often stoned in the office, but curiously able to function, as others did on booze. On occasion, James Moffat would turn up at the NEL offices, pissed out of his skull, and run up the stairs to drop off a manuscript and cadge a couple of quid for the taxi, which would be waiting downstairs."

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By the late-70s, the NEL was no longer the paperback powerhouse it once was. Moffat was in bad physical shape, suffering the effects of decades of hardcore writing and drinking. New inspiration—in the form of emergent youth cults—was not forthcoming, and one editor had to physically lock him in an office for ten days to deliver a contracted manuscript.

However, while the NEL books formed an indelible mark on the British urban landscape, very few emerge on the second hand market, a sign of how highly regarded they remain today. These books sold in the hundreds of thousands 40 years ago, but are incredibly—legendarily—rare. People held onto them at the time and still do now. For many readers in the 70s, NEL first editions remain as impossible to part with as a lovingly collected box of reggae seven-inches—and the lasting legacy is surely one of the most idiosyncratic stories in cult fiction, as Mark Howell concluded.

"It was a fun experience," he said. "Just imagine it—we were being paid to hang out with these wild boys. But we really did feel that we were contributing to youth culture, and even though it was the seedy side, it was still youth culture. Most of our writers were true believers." 

Follow Harry Sword on ​Twitter

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This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Just a few weeks ago David Cameron and other MPs sat in the House of Commons and wore red World AIDS Day ribbons for a community they clearly don't understand.

"The ribbon is the universal symbol of HIV awareness and it was good to see so many MPs showing solidarity with people who live with HIV in the UK and around the world," ​said Cameron in his statement on December 1. "Whilst the overall number of new diagnoses last year was down slightly on 2010, there was an increase amongst men who have sex with men. And a quarter of people living with HIV don't know they have it. I am absolutely clear that there can be no complacency in our fight against HIV and AIDS."

Cameron concluded by saying how the red ribbon is about more than showing solidarity with those living with HIV in the UK and abroad. 

"It should also be a spur to increase testing and a symbol of our commitment to carrying on work to reduce infection levels whilst tackling the stigma, discrimination and prejudice often associated with HIV and sexual health."

But we've heard it all before. Politicians deliver compassionate messages one day and deliver crushing blows the next. Despite more and more young people ​being diagnosed HIV positive because of a lack of information about the issue, the government has announced that there will be ​devastating cuts to the national HIV prevention program in England. 

Funding will be halved for the year commencing April 2015 and there is, as yet, no government commitment to fund further years of the program. It seems like yet another complete refusal to believe that the most imperative is needed at ground-level. 

"This is not the right time for the government to pare back spending on HIV prevention," says Dr. Rosemary Gillespie, Chief Executive at ​Terrence Higgins Trust. "In recent years, we have made good progress in driving down rates of undiagnosed and late-diagnosed HIV. However, tens of thousands of people with HIV across England are still undiagnosed and at increased risk of passing the virus on unwittingly. We have not yet reached the tipping point in our fight against the epidemic, and halving government spending on HIV prevention now would be a regressive step that risks undermining the headway we have made."

The government's ill-considered decision is in direct contradiction to Simon Stevens's ​NHS Five Year Forward View, released in October. "The future health of millions of children, the sustainability of the NHS, and the economic prosperity of Britain all now depend on a radical upgrade in prevention and public health," he wrote. "Twelve years ago, Derek Wanless' health review warned that unless the country took prevention seriously we would be faced with a sharply rising burden of avoidable illness. That warning has not been heeded—and the NHS is on the hook for the consequences."

Stevens' report has been immensely influential and all the main political parties have expressed their support for its vision for the future of the NHS. It is striking that, within weeks of the government stating its support for the health vision of this publication, they are expressly contradicting one if its key tenets—the absolute centrality of prevention if we are to regain control of NHS finances.

"We have not yet reached the tipping point in our fight against the epidemic, and halving government spending on HIV prevention now would be a regressive step that risks undermining the headway we have made"—Dr. Rosemary Gillespie 

In 2004 there were 38,117 people with diagnosed HIV living in England. In 2013, that figure had risen to 74,760. Meanwhile, funding for HIV prevention work has drastically declined during that same period while transmission rates soared. Rather than increasing its efforts to tackle the spread of HIV and the existing stigma, the government's response is to further squeeze the sector of its resources.

What's more shocking still is how the government cuts affect two specific minority communities. The national HIV prevention program focuses on two groups—men who have sex with men, and black African men and women. Yusef Azad of ​National AIDS Trust agrees that the government is ignoring the needs of these communities. 

"HIV is a health inequalities issue, since it disproportionately affects these minorities. Were British-born heterosexuals seeing the same percentages getting HIV as gay men and Africans there would be immense efforts by government to address the problem. When gay men and Africans experience such a public health crisis the response is to reduce further already inadequate funding."

What this farce highlights is that the government, yet again, is looking for short-term gain at long-term sacrifice. Save money today, but let's not think about the consequences of tomorrow. Azad agrees. "All governments pay lip-service to this principle and to the fact prevention is cost-effective and often cost-saving. It is only in a time of budgetary pressure that we learn whether they really mean it. 

Preventing just one HIV transmission saves the public purse ​£360,777 (about $568,000), according to recent modeling. The national prevention program pays for itself many times over. "This cut will not save £1 million, says Azad. "It will mean spending many millions in preventable treatment costs."

Follow Cliff Joannou on ​Twitter

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Photo via Wikipedia Creative Commons

Yesterday the Russian ruble ​fell by some 11 percent against the US dollar, a sudden collapse that suddenly made a major global power look a lot less stable and sent jitters through the international financial system.

The Russian economy—which has become increasingly dominated by state-run enterprises—has been in trouble ​for some time, but the combination of US-led sanctions against Vladimir Putin's government and the ​falling price of oil (the country's chief export) has put it in an especially dire spot. Russia's central bank has raised a key interest rate to a stunning ​17 percent in an effort to stave off high inflation and further depreciation of the ruble. For any fan of palace intrigue, the prospect of Putin losing power in some shadowy Kremlin coup as a result of all this is, however remote, fairly riveting.

Putin, he of the  ​87 percent approval rating, $50 billion Olympics, and ​shirtless propaganda, is failing at the one thing he needs to do most: prop up the nation's middle class. Russia is, by some measures, a borderline developing country lacking both a free press and a political counterweight to Putinism, and possesses whatever smooth veneer it has only because of its oil revenues. The economy could shrink by 4.5 percent a year if oil stays below $60 a barrel, ​Russia's central bank said—that could mean defaults, capital flight, and waves of street protests that could dwarf the ​demonstrations surrounding Putin's return to the presidency in 2012.

Certainly, Russia is feeling the pain of being isolated by the West after invading Ukraine; today President Obama signed a new package into law today placing even more sanctions on Putin's government. The Russian leader may favor bold gestures to demonstrate his power—like cutting off the flow of natural gas to Europe as the Ukrainian crisis ramped up—but it's hard for a country to demonstrate strength when its citizens are unloading their currency as fast as they can by buying appliances.

For Russia to teeter on the brink of prolonged economic contraction undoubtedly means pain for its citizens, but it might also be a blow to its newly assertive posture on the world stage—unless, that is, Putin decides to make a big move like re-establishing Russian hegemony over another lost limb of the Soviet Union. But what are the odds of the 15-time  ​Russian Man of the Year doing something rash like that?

Follow Peter Lawrence Kane on ​Twitter.

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Never a battle-shy country, Vietnam takes particular pride in taking on their neighbors as well as countries mightier than them like Japan, France, and America. That pride shows in a continuous production of war films that has also proven lucrative for white expats, as it provides them with opportunities to work as extras—particularly soldiers. After all, wouldn't want to "star" in a low-budget Vietnamese version of Full Metal Jacket?

Because the pool of white people with plenty of time and not enough money in Saigon is relatively small—mostly hippie English teachers and Russians in exile—many of these guys end up being seen on Vietnamese screens again and again. While dating one of the Russians, I got hold of a part as a background nurse and thus, entered the industry.

I instantly found that it's fairly typical to be bundled into a car at 4 AM and taken to a faraway swampland where multiple war scenes for different films are being filmed at the same time. Actors and extras-in-waiting slump in hammocks strung between vehicles. Since the weather is too hot to do anything but chase flies, all the extras are left to torpidly watch a weird amalgamation of Vietnam's history of warfare.

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​Kris as an 1860s French general with the colonial power's Vietnamese lackeys.

To one side, ninja types (presumably Cambodians) get faux-boxed by a Vietnamese militia. In the other direction, Caucasian soldiers in French uniforms dart between clumps of elephant grass. AK-47s sound in the distance, where the Viet Cong slaughter Americans and their Southern Vietnamese allies. Camera ops are everywhere. Occasionally, a bossy woman will shove me into either a French or American nurse outfit, depending on whom I am aiding at the time.

My fellow extras are also interchangeable as French and American soldiers. I suppose squeezing one extra into two or three films a day is a cost-effective strategy for production companies. It also seems to increase an extra's exposure—Kris Wilkins, a British expat who's been living in Vietnam since 2007, claims to be regularly recognized in the streets.

Wilkins has climbed the extra-ing ladder to become the main casting agent of foreigners for Vietnamese productions. We made friends at work and he agreed to speak to me about his role in the industry over a plate of fried silkworms. ​

Apparently, a friend who used to work in a sitcom got him into the game. Wilkins simply buddied up with the production crew, who started calling on him to play more and more white parts, and eventually supply more foreigners to fill the remaining roles.

In Wilkins' words, that sitcom was about "these two girls from the countryside who come to Saigon to make money through being naughty, no-good skanks." It was his introduction to playing the bad boyfriend—another type-casted role for expats: the wealthy yet immoral American who almost succeeds in getting a naive Mekong girl to have sex before marriage before a virtuous peasant sweeps her off to the altar.

Wilkins says that when he's not playing a bad boyfriend or a soldier, he's usually in the guise of a good American businessman: "If they don't involve the rejection of a foreign lover or the defeat of a foreign army, happy endings in Vietnamese films most often require the signing of a contract with a foreign company."

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Nigerian actors, Kris, and a Vietnamese actress at a film event

These rather incongruous motifs are good reflections of the communist government's somewhat odd blend of nationalism and free market economics. Of course, it's they who pick what gets aired.

Wilkins gets paid varying sums for signing up expats—from less than 50 bucks for a small local production, to several grand for something like Australian blockbuster The Sapphires (in which I play a nurse again!). He, in turn, pays extras according to their attitude. Apparently enthusiasm gets you less, as Wilkins figures such people are either a) in it for a wacky experience rather than to pay bills, or b) more likely to make friends with the production crew and poach his job.

Such scenarios have also made Wilkins bitter and suspicious. "I've never in my life had to deal with so many two-faced, backstabbing double-crossers as in the film industry," he says vehemently, recounting the so-called friends who've wound up as competition.

"Nowadays, if someone is really excited and says they've always wanted to work in TV, I might think, Hmm, maybe you're not the guy for it. Maybe I'll go find someone who's not very keen at all."

Hippie English teachers are Wilkins's biggest headache: "They're either massively ambitious and want to steal my job, or they flake out at the last minute because it's too hot, they're too stoned, or they don't fancy an early morning after all."

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​ Nigerian and American soldier extras in The Sapphires

Sometimes he needs to hunt talent more exotic than teachers. Wilkins's first assignment was to find an elderly German couple "who could speak really good German." He found the male easily, because aged Germans are rife in Saigon's seedy backpacker zone, but struggled with the female. Another time he was asked to find "ten Turks." He got the producers with a group of Pakistanis, which was apparently fine

According to Wilkins, the toughest extras to get are white children. He puts this down to parents having "a sort of responsibility to not let their offspring get exploited like this," resentfully adding that "Western parents tend to want their kids in school and getting a good night's sleep."

Wilkins says that the actors he most likes to hire are Nigerian ones. Why? Because they "work hard and keep their word," he tells me. Luckily for Wilkins, Nigerians happen to make up the bulk of Vietnam's black expats. "Also, Vietnamese actresses love them," he notes with admiration.

Has extra-ing enhanced his own love life? "Are you asking whether girls recognize me, get all star struck and go to bed with me? Well, yes," he says. 
​

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​We leave the silkworm place and head to a convenience store. Wilkins points out a fetching actress/model on one of the pages. "Scored her," he notes nonchalantly. I'd find it hard to believe, if I didn't vaguely remember seeing them together. Wilkins describes the way their characters met on set—she crashed her motorbike into the taxi he was riding in. "It was a very realistic scene because it was real," he recalls. "She was genuinely hurt but the director made her do it again... and again."

Have you ever looked at a plastic bag and thought, fuck, that looks delicious? If not, perhaps a new device called the Fungi Mutarium will change your mind. Unveiled last week by the Austrian design and innovation firm L I V I N, the contraption uses the roots of common mushrooms to degrade plastic placed within their agar (the fungi's nutrient base), then allows humans to harvest and consume the byproduct.

L I V I N, which bills itself as a collaboration of designers, scientists, and culinary artists interested in bringing us closer to our food, has made some strange products before. Their Farm 432 is a self-harvesting maggot protein producer, and their Phora is... a wine vape? But this latest design may be the most radical. The world would have applauded the simple fact that the process can, in the space of a few months, break down plastics that degrade naturally over 20 to 1,000 years, but the team took it one step further and found a way to turn the byproduct into something edible. At least in theory. They've even developed a new line of cutlery to use on the jelly-like pods.

Yesterday Motherboard broke down how the Fungi Mutarium works, and today VICE caught up with L I V I N leader and one of two product designers Katharina Unger to talk about pushing the boundaries of edibility and adapting to our industrial reality by putting plastic into the human food chain.

VICE: Which came first, the idea of working with plastic or the idea of working with fungi?
​Katherina Unger: The idea of working with fungi, actually. The work was initiated through the Bio Art & Design Award. It's a Dutch award that matches designers with research institutes to push forward research and see where the boundaries are—find new applications for great scientific research.

Before we decided to look into the plastic matter, we were really fascinated by the mycelium. So usually we eat the mushrooms, which is basically everything that comes out of the soil, and the mycelium are, more or less, the roots and the majority of the fungus. The texture and the flavor of the mycelium is often very similar, if not the same as the mushroom itself.

We've been eating mushrooms for quite a long time. Why do you think we haven't messed with the mycelium before?
​ It's easier to harvest just from the soil rather than going under the soil. You would need to clean it up before you eat it. And I think it's also because the roots are the main thing, so if you take it all out, it can't reproduce.

And where did the plastic enter into it?
​ We were really interested in going a step further [than existing research on mycelium] and seeing what's the limit that you can induce the fungus to eat and what's still edible. And our research partner said that they have the potential to degrade even plastic waste. So we thought, OK, we're going to research that.

You talk about pushing the borders of what would be edible. Did you explore any substances that didn't work out?
​ If the matter is too toxic, then the fungus will not grow. One measure of how safe it is to eat, or if you can eat it, is if the fungi doesn't even grow. If it gets too crazy, it will die itself.

So we did test malachite green—it's a dye matter that's used in the textile industry and in some other related industries. If you put the fungus into the liquid that malachite green is in, then they will basically degrade it as well. But we made tests where we put a lot of the malachite green into the probe, and then the fungi really died. So it can take quite a bit of toxic material, but there are limits.

So you always had the idea of making this into something edible, but how did you guys feel when it came time to find out, if I eat this product, what's it going to do to me?
​ Yeah, it's certainly strange. At this moment in time we have no specific data that we can release to say it is fully safe to eat and there will be no trace [toxic] elements. We have research that tells us it is possible. But what remains is this strange gut feeling about eating something that's been eating waste.

But I think that in the normal food chain, or in the industrial process, there are sometimes toxic elements that come in, even in the packaging. Soups are packaged in cans that, over a while, the aluminum is also diluting into the soup, and also becoming slightly toxic. There's no way to totally protect us from anything that comes in through an industrial process or from growing outside.

So basically we have to embrace the industrial reality that we live in?
​ I think that it's important to come up with a lot of ideas on how we can deal with things. Our environment is getting increasingly wasteful and we have to find new measures of coping with it, like finding ways to farm on more and more extreme land, for example.

Have you eaten it yourself?
​ Yes.

What was that like?
​ I think it is definitely strange. Also the type of [jelly-like] food product that we developed is not something that as Westerners we eat all the time. So already without the fungi it is a strange new food—but quite exciting.

What is your vision for this food?
It won't be approved as a food anytime soon. But even if we can optimize these processes to efficiently degrade plastic matter through a biological organism, that's already a huge step ahead.

The device itself looks super-futuristic, like something that would be in the background of a 1980s sci-fi movie.
[Laughing] Yeah.

Was that your goal?
​ No! It just seems that these projects turn out this way for some reason. But I think it deserves it! It's kind of a crazy idea and I think that it deserves a special form as well.​

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

​ [body_image width='640' height='480' path='images/content-images/2014/12/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/16/' filename='this-racist-liar-was-a-key-witness-in-the-darren-wilson-case-1216-body-image-1418768084.jpg' id='11829']

Photo courtesy KMOV

"Well I'm gonna take my random drive to Florisant," [sic] Sand​ra McElroy wrote in a diary entry labeled August 9. "Need to understand the Black race better so I can stop calling Blacks niggers and start calling them people." Her exploration took her 30 miles to Ferguson, Missouri.

Months later, the 45-year-old would testify that she has a history of head injuries, memory lapses, and racist remarks. And now an investig​ation by the Smoking Gun has revealed McElroy to be "Witness 40" in the grand jury proceedings over the death of Michael Brown, which she confirmed to the outlet on Tuesday. Although McElroy claimed that the diary passage was real, the report suggests that it was part of a story invented to dovetail with the account of Officer Darren Wilson, the cop who killed Brown in August.

Since the grand jury ​decided not to indict Wilson, McElroy has only been known as Witness 40, a favorite of the cop's defenders. But now there's strong evidence that ​Sean Hannity's darling might not have even been at the scene that day.

She also might be one of the reasons that a Ferguson grand jury didn't indict a killer cop.

McElroy's history of being a public whackjob apparently began in 2001, when she was seriously injured in a head-on car collision. She would have memory problems thereafter and would file for bankruptcy in part due to medical bills. As part of the bankruptcy proceedings, the Smoking G​un found, she berated an attorney's secretary with racial slurs.

In 2007, McElroy lied on local TV about knowing a child abductor and about giving the police information about him, the outlet discovered. About a year ago, she apparently posted comments on YouTube comparing black people to monkeys. These and numerous other incidents suggest that McElroy vacillates between being a pathological liar and a straight-up racist.

McElroy first gave St. Louis Police a statement on September 11. By then, there were media reports of the shooting circulating as well as in-depths breakdowns of the scene ​online, making it possible for her to craft a story that would fit in with Wilson's narrative.

Throughout the months of August and September, McElroy made her opinions known about the case on Facebook. Arguably, the worst came on September 13, when she posted a​ phot​o of Brown lying dead in the street with the text: "Michael Brown already received justice. So please, stop asking for it." Other posts make liberal use of the N-word and included phrases such as "ape-fest."

Despite all of this, McElroy was apparently still deemed a credible witness by prosecutors. When she finally spoke on Octob​er 23, she first said that she was in Ferguson to visit an old friend from high school she hadn't seen since 1988. Then, she claimed, she got lost and asked a man for directions while smoking a cigarette. That's when the confrontation happened—McElroy said Brown charged Officer Wilson "like a football player" and that he "looked like he was on something."

Here, at least, the prosecutor was skeptical. "There are a few things that concern us," he said at the time of McElroy's testimony. Had she been reading about the case online?

"Reading is not the easiest thing," the witness confessed on page 160 of her testimony. "And then when I start to read the words get jumbled and I get bored." Despite her claims of near illiteracy, the witness clearly had gathered enough information to form an opinion. She was part of a small group that raised money for Ferguson cops and made them cards, she testified.

"What you told us sounds a lot like what we have read in the newspaper," the prosecutor pressed. He asked if it was possible that she was trying to fill in her memory gaps with what others were saying online. McElroy admitted that it was.

Suddenly, she remembered that she'd actually written a diary that could help her testify and get the details down right. (McElroy had apparently never mentioned this fact before.) So on November 3, she came back with the diary. That's when she claimed that she was in the area because she was trying to learn about black people.

According to her testimony, she would "go in and have coffee and I will strike up a conversation with an African-American and I will try to talk to them because I'm trying to understand more." She then reiterated that Michael Brown had been the aggressor, mirroring Wilson's account of the incident.

Of course, the jury's deliberations are secret, so it's impossible to know how exactly Witness 40 affected the outcome. But the fact that prosecutors allowed someone to appear before a grand jury who identified herself as mentally incompetent and had shown clear signs of both bias and racism is disturbing.

McElroy's last "diary" entry for August 9 came at 9 PM. "Talked to [my husband] without telling him everything," she wro​te. "He told me I was nuts taking drive up there and 2^nd keep my mouth shut. He's prob right. No one would believe me anyway."

During questioning, McElroy said she was scared and felt like she was being judged. She said she decided to speak up after praying and remembering the lessons her father taught her. "You can screw up in life—we're human—but you are to respect the law," she reasoned. "You respect your elders, you were always to speak the truth and if you know something, you are to come forward."

Follow Allie Conti on ​Twitter.

​This year will likely be the hottest ever measured, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Data thr​ough October show that 2014 was on pace to be hotter than 2010, which was hotter than 2005, which was hotter than 1998, which was hotter than 1997, which was hotter than 1995, which was hotter than 1990, which was hotter than 1988, which... well, you get the idea. The last record cold year on a global scale was​ in 1909—more than 100 years ago. Don't expect another one for at least another few centuries or so.

"The provisional information for 2014 means that 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all occurred in the 21st century," WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said in a statement this month. "There is no standstill in global warming."

So what happened to the planet this year? Here are a few highlights: 

EXTREME WEATHER IS THE NEW NORMAL
​This year, drought caused substantial changes in the Colo​rado River system, in California's Centra​l Valley, in Bra​zil, in Central Ame​rica, in Austral​ia, and in China. ​California's drought is now estimated to be the state's worst in at least 1,200 years. In Sao Paulo, where a mixture of Amazon deforestation, lack of rain, and mismanagement have produced the worst hydrological crisis in 80 years, they're now mak​ing plans to extract water from mud. Severe flooding hit the United Kingdom, which recorded its wettest January on record. The Met Office linked the floods to abnormal behavior of the jet stream. February saw the warmest ever Winter ​Olympics being held in Sochi, Russia.

But in much of the United States, it's been the ​freezing cold that's made headlines recently. The term polar vortex was trotted out to describe some of the most bitterly frigid temperatures ever recorded in the Midwest. It's counterintuitive that global warming should con​tribute to extreme cold snaps of this magnitude—ice persisted on Lake Superior until ​June—but that's just the world we live in: It's almost always too hot, unless it is much, much too cold.

Recent studies have tied lingering "blocking patterns" (where hot or wet weather hovers over an area for w​eeks) and extreme events to the ​changing nature of the jet stream—an emerging theory that's been hotly debated. But whatever the cause for all this, it's clear that the atmosphere has a profoundly different chemical composition than it did just 100 years ago. That we should see things we can't immediately explain shouldn't be that shocking.

It was a year full of holy shit moments—for example, the world's oceans have never been warmer.

THE OCEANS ARE HEATING UP AT AN ALARMING RATE 
​Longer-range climate problems were also in the news this year. There's more Antarctic sea ice than ​ever—a phenomenon scientists attribute at least partially to changes in the southern hemisphere jet stream—and there were bold ​new warnings about the melting rate of Antarctic glaciers, which is a driving force for global sea level rise. Climate journalist Chris Mooney called the An​tarctic news a "holy shit moment for global warming."

It was a year full of holy shit moments—for example, the world's oceans have never been ​warmer, and that's without the boost of an official El Niño, though the tropical Pacific has flirted with one alm​ost all year. Odds are good that El Niño will finally arrive in 2015, potentially propelling next year to be ev​en warmer than this one.

That the ocean is now capable of setting heat records without an El Niño is a grim new developm​ent, but probably not so surprising considering greenhouse gas emissions and concentrations also hit new record highs in 2014. April was the first month in at least 800,00​0 years in which there was more than 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The rate of increase is also increasing: 2014 gave us the highest emissions in hum​an history, due mostly to China's continued growth and the West's continued high per-capit​a fossil fuel use.

BUT PEOPLE ARE FINALLY PAYING ATTENTION TO ALL THIS... MAYBE
​You've probably heard variations of these statistics before. Scientists have been telling us about climate change for a long time. But this year, it was increasingly clear that it's now up to us to actually listen. If 2013 ​was the year that scientists had their final word—human-induced global warming is "unequivocal," according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—then 2014 was the year that reality finally hit home for leaders and citizens around the world. I hope.

In September, poet, mother, and Marshall Islander Kathy Jetnil-Kijner made a passionat​e appeal in front of world leaders gathered at the United Nations Climate Summit in New York City, just hours after more than 300,000 people marched nearby in the largest climate rally in w​orld history. Her poem, according to many who were in the room, moved some heads of state to tears. 

WE HAVE HOPE FOR THE FUTURE
​Undergirding all this is, I believe, a hint of a turning point.

Headlining efforts to address global warming this year was a surpr​ise deal between the US and China in November that was widely ​regarded as a "watershed moment for climate politics." For the first time China announced that it would look to hit a carbon emission "peak" in 2030—a precedent that seems to have put renewed life into the previously stagnant global climate negotiations. Now there are signs that India may ​also be considering a similar announcement. We can debate whether or not these are ambitious enough goals to keep the world beneath the agreed-upon 2°C warming target (the​y're almost certainly not) but there's at least now a glimmer of a chance that the global economy might transform and kick the carbon habit. And despite their "I'm not a scientist" meme, even Republicans may be co​ming around to the idea that meaningful action on climate change is necessary.

The comfortable ​myths we've been telling ourselves—that we can reverse global warming without changing our lifestyles, or that some fantastical genius will invent a way to produce clean energy cheaply and efficiently—will have to slip away first. In their place, we'll have to build a vision of a world where people will want to live that's compatible with a zero-carbon economy. What that would look like isn't exactly clear yet, but it's clear that 2015 is starting with a twinge​ more optimism than in the past.

 It seems negotiators have finally learned their lessons from the failures of Kyoto and Copenhagen—to have an ambitious deal, you first have to have a deal at all.

OF COURSE, EVERYTHING IS STILL UP IN THE AIR
​For close climate watchers, 2015 represents a line in the sand and the final run-up to a big meeting in Paris that should culminate in a first-ever global accord on climate change, an agreement that will bridge the longstanding divide between developed countries and developing countries—the polluters and the places that stand to be hit the hardest in a warmer and wilder world. As with most matters of geopolitics, America exerts an outsize influence. Any global plan on climate change can​'t be legally binding, the thinking goes, because there's no chance the US Congress would approve it. It seems negotiators have finally learned their lessons from the failures of Kyoto and Copenhagen—to have an ambitious deal, you first have to have a deal at all.

Negotiations could always fall apart, and in that case this article will sound pathetically naïve in hindsight. As we know by now, nothing is certain when it comes to climate change politics—the only thing we can say for sure is that the world is getting warmer, fast.

​Eric Holthaus is a meteorologist whose writing on weather and climate has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Quartz, the Daily Beast, Wired, and Slate.​

Photos by Sam Clarke

As I walk into Bob Sillerman's Park Avenue office, there is no question as to what his favorite word is. It's spelled out inside a snow globe on his desk. It's represented in mylar FYYFF—Fuck You, You Fucking Fuck—balloons that wave in front of his windows, no doubt visible to the passersby six floors below. "I hate this fuckin' office," he says. "We're moving down to Twentieth and Broadway."

Still, the abundant F word isn't so much a birdie to the denizens of midtown Manhattan as a fuck-you to the American financial system, which has lured Sillerman and his particular brand of business—live-music roll-up conglomerates—back to play in the world's biggest concert venues and on the stock market.

To say Sillerman is brash is to belie his sense of humor (he pokes fun at our young photographer's age by immediately asking him what year he graduated from high school). To say he is enterprising is to disregard the fun he clearly has doing his job. At 66, Sillerman is a seasoned music executive, having pioneered the model for his current company, SFX, with a previous business of the same name. That company eventually became what is now Live Nation (and, ironically, Sillerman's archrival).

He is also a cancer survivor and speaks through a tracheotomy, typically concealed by a turtleneck or a high-collared shirt. For our interview he attaches a discreet microphone to his ear, which amplifies his voice through a small speaker he places on the table in front of him (he jokes about how it can also pick up his flatulence). It's a small reminder of mortality that even a reported billion-dollar fortune can't alter.

In the past few years, Sillerman has become notorious in the dance-music industry for buying up a string of once-independent rave promoters and affiliated service companies to form the second incarnation of SFX, a NASDAQ-traded company (SFXE) as of October 2013. Through acquisitions of the Amsterdam-based ID&T, New York's Made Event, Chicago's React Presents, Disco Donnie Presents, and Beatport (the pioneering digital music store for electronic music), SFX has taken the once-underground culture of raves to Wall Street.

"Some of the growth was incorrect," Sillerman concedes, alluding to but not naming some SFX purchases that may have been made in haste. "Live events are so energetic and incredible, but it's an industry where people put on a festival once a year yet everybody listens to music year round. When we acquired Beatport the idea was to create a community three hundred sixty-five days a year. I was interested in protecting the fan experience and not doing what everybody thought I would do, which was corporatize it."

In business, of course, the fan experience becomes secondary to the stockholder experience. At the one-year mark of SFX's IPO, the stock price fell from its opening $13 to under $5 (and briefly under $4). The CEO remains unfazed.

"I don't mean this arrogantly, but this is my tenth public company and the twenty-sixth one I've started," he states flatly. "If people are impatient and they want more [immediate returns], they don't need to buy the stock. That's what the sell-off was on this. And that's fine.

Like other F-word paraphernalia in Bob Sillerman's office, this snow globe is a fuck-you to the American financial system.

"I have the good fortune of having the capacity to buy stock," he continues, while acknowledging that because he is already rich from his previous ventures, in his current position his salary is a nominal $1 a year.

The scepter that looms larger than stock prices over all of dance music is the reality of drug-related illnesses and fatalities at events. A month before SFX's IPO in 2013, Made Event's Electric Zoo canceled its third day of music after two ravers died from drug-related causes at the New York City festival. In 2014, festivals across North America were beleaguered by similar incidents despite efforts by some in the industry to increase onsite safety measures.

"Let's not be naive," Sillerman levels. "Kids are going to do what we all did. They're going to make decisions, some of which might be bad decisions about alcohol use or drugs. Trying to mandate against that is impossible. You can educate, but most importantly, what you can do is protect kids from their bad decisions."

At some SFX-owned events, like TomorrowWorld, outside Atlanta, promoters have partnered with DanceSafe, a harm-reduction and drug-health-awareness group, to provide substance-specific information on site in the form of pamphlets and access to public-health professionals who answer questions, though they do not sell or distribute controversial drug-testing kits. To Sillerman, education is smarter than scare tactics, and investments in extensive medical services at SFX festivals (in North America, at least) are an undisputed priority.

"In thinking about my generation where drinking was so vilified, the people who became troubled by alcohol were the ones who had no experience with it," he says. "I'm not making a moral statement. I want kids to be informed, to make good decisions, but I know they won't always."

Sillerman pauses and warns that he will not answer a follow-up about what he is about to say.

"I lost my daughter two years ago at age eighteen. No kid who can be helped or saved is going to suffer on my watch. Period. Full stop."

He pauses, then refocuses his attention.

"Let's lighten it up a little bit," he says, impishly. "How do you dye your hair?"

Zel McCarthy is the Editor-in-Chief of ​THUMP, the electronic music and culture channel from VICE.

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The author outside her favorite Wetherspoons. Photos by Jake Lewis​

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

For some reason, people love to sneer at Wetherspoons. "Ha! Morons go there to drink affordable, name-brand beer," they scoff. "It's full of plebs eating burgers that don't taste as good as the ones we got at Byron for double the price!"

It's the most maligned pub chain in the UK—the high street Heskey to Yates's Bobby Moore; a collection of rooms containing pint glasses and chairs that, inexplicably, is on the receiving end of far more shit than O'Neill's, Belushi's and Slug and Lettuce combined. It's a place people tend to associate with a kind of somnambulant sadness, the ambient mutterings of the lonely and the ill interrupted only by the announcement of a gourmet hot dog or the occasional student bar fight.

But it's time for a rethink.

For the past decade, Great British Pub Culture as our parents knew it has been eroded at a worrying pace; according to Camra, ​around 31 pubs are closing every week. Clearly, it's tricky for your independent White Harts and Red Lions to convince the nation that a £3.50 pint is something worth preserving when they can pick up four cans for an extra 50p at their nearest Tesco Metro.

However, in the midst of all this, Wetherspoons continues to grow. The chain currently has 925 locations in the UK, a figure that's set to rise to 931 by Christmas. Not only are they propping up the presence of pubs on our high streets, but—based on their own merits—they're now a legitimate destination in their own right, not just a roof for you and your mates to huddle under before heading to a gig, or a rugby match, or a bowling alley, or anywhere they water down the beer in the hope it'll stop the customers from getting too rowdy. 

I couldn't be happier about this. It was over a Wetherspoons lunch that my dad told our young family we were going on our first surprise holiday; over a dinner that my friend and I shared a pretend Christmas while our respective parents were going through rough patches in their marriages; and, post-divorce, when my dad came out for an £5 pint and burger with my sister and I that I realized he was pretty much my best friend in the world.

But away from all the personal sentimentality, there's something in there for everyone, and that's because the chain has spent the past 35 years perfecting a formula that's made them everything you could ever really ask for in a boozer. Fine, they may not be the absolute best option in any given zip code—and it's likely that formula which has some decrying a certain cookie-cutter feel to a number of their branches—but the chain still deserves far more credit than it's given, mostly thanks to three key factors.

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First—and most important—is the price. Money makes the world go round, which is a little inconvenient for the  ​22 percent of us earning under living wage who still want to have some semblance of a social life. A social life that includes competitive drinking or moaning about your eight-pint hangover into a five-man WhatsApp group.

No matter where you are, seek out those golden letters and promotional chalkboards and you know you're getting the most for your money. This can be handy for all manner of things, but let's use a burgeoning relationship as a case in point: an actually pretty decent roast (so quite a good first date, imho) is about £7 a plate; Valentine's for two is £20; and you can hold a wedding reception for 100 people at the Knights Templar branch for £3,000, or £30 a head (an average wedding in the UK costs an unbelievable £18,000). So that's every stage of your relationship sorted on a budget you might actually be able to afford.

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There's arguably nowhere this is needed more than in London, where a minimum wage job won't cover your rent and bills, let alone a Thursday evening drink.  ​According to pintprice.com, a pint in the capital will set you back—on average—£3.68. That might be true of the satellite zones, but seems a little optimistic in the areas you're actually going to meet your friends: probably somewhere near work, probably in Zone 1 or 2. There, it's not out of the ordinary to pay around a fiver for a pint. But go to the Spoons next door and you'll get the same glass for under £4.

The second key ingredient is ambience. A JD Wetherspoon is a melting pot like no other; seemingly the only pubs where literally anyone and everyone can enjoy a pint, a Tottenham match with bonus subtitles and a slightly sub-par curry together on a Thursday night. Want a pub full of aspiring gentry? Head to Parsons Green or Oxshott. Somewhere you might meet an American? Covent Garden or Edinburgh. A tavern teeming with pewter tankards, bits of dead animal and men who own guns? Northumberland or Somerset. All of these people all at once? A Wetherspoons, basically anywhere in the UK.

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Fun fact: Spoons was, in fact, established by a man called Tim Martin, not Mr. Wetherspoon. Tim had a teacher called Mr. Wetherspoon who told him he'd never amount to anything. Now he's a millionaire business fat-cat who owns close to a thousand pubs across the UK. It's the pub of the underdog; a big fuck you to Mr. Wetherspoon. And in this pub of the underdog, there's no pretense. No one is too good, old, young, rich, or poor to take a seat.

As a freelance writer, it's also the holy grail of working spaces—the only place with WiFi that'll let you hang around all day, nursing cold coffee dregs. And very best of all, there's no music, only a sweet silence peppered with the light chatter of bar staff and the hacking cough of a tobacco-stained regular. No Avicii and no Sam Smith invading your ear canals at four in the afternoon.

The third and final ingredient is class. I know they're a chain and they're all branded and blah, blah, blah, but that doesn't detract from the fact that a number of branches are housed inside some beautiful buildings. In London, we have Crosse Keys, a pub built inside a spectacular former bank lobby, complete with some fuck off massive marble pillars; as well as the aforementioned Knights Templar inside the former Union Bank, which boasts the poshest toilets.

Many others are repurposed cinemas, churches and pubs that would have otherwise been redeveloped. Yes, Spoons buys these historical buildings and rebrands them, but an effort is always made to retain the original style—and even if you're of the anti-fun school of thought, wouldn't you still rather that than all of these buildings being converted into yet more luxury flats?

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Look: ale

For anyone big into real ale and craft beer—anyone really, properly passionate about yeast—the chain has also started to focus on both those things, too. I seriously doubt there's anywhere else within the M25 you could grab a guest ale from £2.70 a pint, and every year there's the JD Real Ale & Cider Festival, featuring 60 British and international ales and ciders in all their pubs.

As pub culture continues to falter, we should appreciate—not lament—the fact that we have a public house behemoth we can trust to stand the test of time. An unsavory idea or not, JD Wetherspoon has the formula right; the fact they have more pubs listed in the Good Beer Guide than any other pub company in the UK is testament to this.

They're the places that'll be with us from adolescence to death: where we try to buy a Red Bull and vodka with a shitty fake ID; where we go for a birthday meal when we're 30 years old and still on £18,000 a year; where we get pissed on Prosecco for our 50th; and where we congregate for our friends' wakes when we're 60, or 70, or 80.

Our high streets will change and evolve and decay, but I'd wager these distinctly average pubs are going to remain a constant, giving us a roof and some walls in which we'll continue to experience more of life's most seminal moments. And thanks to Spoons that's something I can actually afford to drink to.

Follow Hannah Ewens on ​Twitter.

I've been dumped into Detroit. Before I got here: something about a prison spell being curtailed to assist the FBI in chasing down a crooked cop and some gang leader. Honestly, I couldn't give any less of a shit. The Crew throws its hackneyed plot at the player inside its opening 20-or-so minutes: you've been framed for a crime and now the powers that be want you to infiltrate this... blah, blah, bored.

All I want to do, as soon as I'm let loose with a Camaro SS—familiar to anyone who's seen a Transformers movie, so obviously I color it Bumblebee yellow—is tear out of the city and aim for the coast. Any coast. I just want to see this world that The Crew's makers have assembled: a condensed but still epically proportioned working model of the United States, full of recognizable cities and landmarks, clouds-brushing mountain peaks and horizon-reaching salt flats. I floor it—by which I mean I claw a finger around the right trigger—and aim my waypoint at New Orleans. The Actual Activities can wait while I'm taking in the southern sun.

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Which is, essentially, my way of playing The Crew "wrong"—but something that many newcomers to this Ubisoft-published open-world vehicular adventure with slight MMO and stats-heavy RPG stylings will surely relate to. Win this street race, beat that scramble time, escape these goons with their overpowered rival vehicles: actually doing the missions that splatter across your map is a tedious task for the most part, very few delivering the thrills you might associate with being pursued across city and state lines by sirens-wailing squad cars or rival thugs with murderous intentions.

I dip in and out of these assignments, undertaken both for the FBI in an undercover capacity and regional crews battling for turf war supremacy—you have to, to level-up your car/character, in order to unlock access to later missions and to even the odds. Attempting races when you're underpowered is a waste of time—and even when you're rolling in a supremely pimped beast of an asphalt-eating machine, the rubber-banding effect that The Crew employs means that significantly lower-ranked competitors always have a chance of exploiting your mistakes, overtaking and parking your ass at a retry if you happen to slide from the racing line.

Other missions—such as takedowns that follow scripted patterns and getaway sequences that feel more emergent but are short on palpable drama—reward you with vehicle perks and overall level increases... but they're really not any fun, which is quite the problem. Main missions can be attempted solo or with whoever else is in your game with you—this being an always-online title, you can see other players on the map, and their IDs and distance from you clutter an already crowded HUD. Reports ​elsewhere suggest that this PVP approach has its share of problems, as in it's inherently broken, so I don't feel I'm missing anything by not indulging in the game's factions right now. Or ever.

So the appeal of The Crew (to me) is not its level grinding, its micro-challenges where you have to weave around markers or speed your car off a ramp to hit a landing zone, or pointing my headlights at the many Ubisoft-standard unlockables spread around the US, from data stations (this game's take on Assassin's Creed's sync points, or Far Cry's radio/bell towers) to bonus car parts. I do that sorta stuff just because it's there, but I'm not actively looking for it. All I want to do is reveal this entire map, by driving around every inch of a truly spectacular gaming world.

The Crew launch trailer

It's not the most aesthetically arresting environment you'll see on current-gen hardware, with some blocky flora and cut-and-paste buildings, but The Crew's America is still an astounding achievement. "10,000 kilometers of open road" claims its box, set in 1,900 square miles divided into five regions: the West Coast, Mountain States, the South, the Midwest, and the East Coast. Within these areas are settlements large and small, from obvious inclusions like Las Vegas and New York to less-likely municipalities, such as Sacramento, Amarillo, and Millersburg. There are some weird omissions, like Houston and Boston, but designers had to draw their line somewhere, I suppose. And it's not like there isn't wonderful variety across regions and conurbations—you'll recognize San Francisco easily enough, and can run rings around Ground Zero if that's your thing.

It's the changes in the landscape, as you drive east to west or south to north, that make this the game I'm playing right now: American Road Trip Simulator 2014. You can cruise cautiously, taking in the mountains as they rise before you, flipping perspective to see that last city fade in the rear-view mirror. Or, you can scorch around the place like a mechanized bat out of hell, antagonizing local cops (all with regional accents as their calls crackle over your own radio) and burning rubber across the pumpkin patches of Salem or through the redwoods of northern California. At times it's astonishingly beautiful, and you have to stop to appreciate the moment: The Crew's painterly sunsets are some of the best around, although whoever approved that top-left smearage on the screen shouldn't be let near a video game ever again.

If you want, The Crew can be your own feature-length take on Sega's eternal Out Run, each city a checkpoint as you choose your next destination: head south to the swamplands or hightail it into the mountains, where the roads become dirt tracks and you just might collide with a moose. (You won't—the fauna of The Crew is remarkably adept at dodging your missile-like attempts to flatten it, including drone-like city center pedestrians.) This is something The Crew gets so awesomely right: it gives you this playground from the very beginning. Yes, if you're at all bothered about the paper-thin plot—Gordon Freeman look-alike voiced by games stalwart Troy Baker must get his "ink" because... sorry, I'm bored again—you've got to nail the numerous missions dished out by a cast of immediately forgettable smartphone-screen faces. But you could just not do those things. Nobody's making you do anything here—not even the FBI.

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Just as Out Run designer Yu Suzuki called his arcade masterpiece a "driving" game, rather than a "racing" one, so The Crew should be appreciated in the same way. There are races—there are even proper circuits dotted around the States—but no way is this experience comparable to your regular so-many-laps-around-the-track release. Cars might handle as they do in Blur, power-ups sadly absent, and irregular collision detection makes for some wholly random wipe-outs, but even as an arcade-feel affair The Crew doesn't deliver, just as it can't as a strict simulator. It's too twitchy, too glitchy, too unfinished—it drives, sure enough, but unconvincingly so.

It has the elements it needs to begin to deliver on its promise of being an "MMO driving game," with multiple cars to earn or purchase and upgrade accordingly, but nothing is as fully realized as it could be. It'll be interesting to see how updates improve The Crew's core gameplay, as comparing its present state with an older open-world driving title like 2008's Burnout Paradise does this fresher release few favors. In many ways, Paradise is a superior game, even today—its irritating DJ Atomika aside, Criterion's colorful concoction drove racing into an open-world arena, offering a generous progression system with plenty of new vehicles to play with and a host of subsequent updates. For one thing, it included motorbikes—a mode of transport curiously missing from The Crew. (Anyone else smell DLC?)

But in the here and now, I can forgive a lot of what The Crew does wrong: the oddly stiff flags scattered around the land—they won't ripple in the wind, instead remaining Moon Landing rigid—as well as the same three-birds-fleeing-a-verge animations and the trucks manifesting from nowhere right in front of me at an intersection. I can just about let all of its failings go—I must be able to, or I wouldn't be playing it every night. Each time it pisses me off with some ridiculous difficulty spike or pop-up semi-trailer that wrecks my escape, I take a breath, smile and just get on with American Road Trip Simulator 2014.

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My car's only at level 15 or something, well short of where it could be for the hours I've put into The Crew so far—probably because I keep avoiding the challenges that pepper its tangled roadways, if only to prevent more statistical detritus from polluting my screen. But I don't much care. There are numerous areas left to visit—I'm yet to hit Seattle, or any of the north west; and the likes of Tampa, Santa Fe, Newport and Kingsman are still awaiting my arrival—and plenty of grey to shift from this expansive, genuinely awe-inspiring world that Lyon-based developer Ivory Tower (working alongside the UK's Ubisoft Reflections) has crafted. Tonight, I'll set my in-game GPS to somewhere new and rip up the tarmac all the way there.

By the time I've money and time enough to take a road trip across the States for real, most of it will be underwater, on fire, or both. So I'm loving The Crew because of the fantasy it provides me: that I can drop the world I know and head into the unknown, seeing sights that I'd never be able to with my own eyes. Yeah, the Golden Gate Bridge isn't really that short, and the Statue of Liberty is nowhere near that close to the mainland. But these concessions don't matter to me; I'm more than content to get my kicks on this virtual Route 66—it's just a bloody shame I can't mute the persistent calls to get back on mission. When do video game mobile phones run out of battery, roughly?

Follow Mike Diver on ​Twitter

The South Dakota Office of Highway Safety needed a way to tell drivers what to do when their cars hit icy patches of road. The agency came up with a great cartoon video and billboard campaign that instructed drivers to let up rather than panic. The punchline—"Besides, nobody likes a jerker"—was even funny, since ha ha the PSA is calling aggressive male drivers jerks. 

But some people took this ad—which, again, was a great, effective way to inform people about something that could save their lives—as some sort of perverted joke. They though the "Don't Jerk and Drive" campaign, and it's "resist the urge to jerk" tagline was a SEX THING of some kind.

As the Argus Leader ex​plained last Friday, the word "jerk" can "also be used as a euphemism for masturbation." People started complaining, forcing Highway Safety to pull the ad, despite the fact that it was outperforming previ​ous campaigns 25 to 1. (Hopefully, no one lets the God-fearing people​ of Yankton, South Dakota, know, well, y'know.)

"I decided to pull the ad," Trevor Jones, secretary of the Department of Public Safety, said in a statement. "This is an important safety message, and I don't want this innuendo to distract from our goal to save lives on the road."

On behalf of everyone, Trevor, we're sorry. Here's the ad in question, which as you can see is very well made:

Follow Allie Conti on ​Twitter.

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In the beginning of September, I travelled to Gaza to explore child trauma in the region and take a look at the work being done by charities like ​Hope and Play and their local partners, ​the Canaan Institute. This journey took me to mostly residential areas, and it's there that I was shocked to find the levels of destruction that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon said in October were "beyond description." 

The IDF's ​Operation Protective Edge in Gaza last summer resulted in more than 2,000 deaths and 11,000 injuries. These figures are a shocking reminder that it's always the innocent civilians who get the short end of the stick in conflicts. Whole neighborhoods were razed to the ground and 18,000 houses were destroyed, leaving 108,000 people homeless. 

In a place like Gaza, where there is such little security and freedom, the home represents something extremely powerful, an island of normality and peace. A seven-year-old child here has already lived through three wars, making their need for a home more acute than ever.

I wanted to take a series of photographs that portrayed the devastation in a way that people across the world could somehow relate to. I focused on the details of what remained rather than what was destroyed. Fragments of people's lives filled the bomb craters and lined the roadsides of Shuja'iyya and Beit Hanoun—two of Gaza's worst-hit neighborhoods. An iron, a toilet seat, toys, or a glass; I photographed items that are commonly found in households around the world, exactly where they lay, trying not to interfere with the layout.

I felt uncomfortable poking my camera around so much destruction. Many of these homes are now tombs—I saw families desperately picking through the rubble, trying to dig out the bodies of loved ones buried underneath, even weeks after the bombing had stopped. 

One family I met was digging into their old home to retrieve some of the presents from their brother's recent wedding. They wanted dignity in death and a proper burial, but there is little dignity in having everything you hold dear destroyed and what remains of your home displayed across the city. 

This is why I still feel uncomfortable about these pictures. But had I not been invited in by the families who were picking up the pieces of their lives, I wouldn't have taken them. And if looking at them didn't make me feel uncomfortable, then I guess they would have failed to bring us closer to the devastation, and that ism after all, their purpose.

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This post originally appeared on VICE UK

Every year, around January 5, Christmas trees are thrown out on the streets, alleyways, and skips of London and I feel like a tiny pink elf inside me dies. So, around this time last year, I decided to find out where these trees come from and exactly what they go through.

I took the train to a farm in Cheshire that I'd heard is the main supplier of Christmas trees in London. When I got there, I was met with a frenzy of excited families and chainsaw men cutting down five-year-old trees from a field. People were buying trees straight from the source and tying them on the roof of their cars to then drive them home.

The trees that are not bought in farms like the one in Cheshire make their way to the city, where they are sold at a higher price. They range in size and age from tiny to mature. But only the prettiest ones get picked.

They get dragged on streets, carried around the city by pairs of humans like they are injured, or stuffed in public transport carriages. They are taken to cosy terrace houses, carpeted flats, and boutique shops for suburban magpies. They get pruned, blinged out, and placed by windows to be shown off to passersby.

Then, a few days after New Year's, you start to see them dumped on their backs on cold, wet pavements—it's not a pretty sight. Completely stripped off their ornaments, they just lie between garbage bags. A few lucky ones will end up in a park so at least it looks like they're ending their life back home, but for most, the end is as gruesome as it will be for us humans.

See more of Toufic's work here.

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Check out Rick Altergott's other work on his ​website.