On a warm fall day in South Dallas, ten revolutionaries dressed in kaffiyehs and ski masks jog the perimeter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Park bellowing "No more pigs in our community!" Military discipline is in full effect as the joggers respond to two former Army Rangers in desert-camo brimmed hats with cries of "Sir, yes, sir!" The Huey P. Newton Gun Club is holding its regular Saturday fitness-training and self-defense class. Men in Che fatigues run with weight bags and roll around on the grass, knife-fighting one another with dull machetes. "I used to salute the fucking flag!" the cadets chant. "Now I use it for a rag!"

"A knife changes the whole game," one of the drill sergeants, who goes by the name Chief, explains, demonstrating how to perform a slash-and-stab maneuver on the torso of a wide-eyed girl in her 20s. A panhandler wanders up from the street. He is about to ask for spare change but then becomes interested. "What is this? Self-defense? That's cool." A pack of black bikers throw up their fists as they roar by.

Charles Goodson, the gun club's 31-year-old dreadlocked vegan co-founder, grew up less than a mile away. Both he and Darren X, the national field marshal of the New Black Panther Party, have been organizing around police-violence issues in Dallas for the past decade. Goodson says they worked together last year, during an armed rally in the small East Texas town of Hemphill, where they protested the police's failure to fully investigate the murder of a black man named Alfred Wright. The Dallas New Black Panthers have been carrying guns for years. In an effort to ratchet up their organizing efforts, they formed the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, uniting five local black and brown paramilitary organizations under a single banner. "We accept all oppressed people of color with weapons," Darren X, who is 48, tells me in a deep, authoritative baritone. "The complete agenda involves going into our communities and educating our people on federal, state, and local gun laws. We want to stop fratricide, genocide—all the 'cides."

Huey P. Newton Gun Club members march through the Dixon Circle neighbourhood of Dallas.

This past August, the gun club staged their first openly armed patrol through Dixon Circle, a predominately African American neighbourhood in Dallas where police killed a young unarmed black man named James Harper in 2012. About two weeks before the rally, a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, had killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, and in July a white cop had choked Eric Garner, a Staten Island dad, to death over the alleged sale of untaxed cigarettes. In Dallas, several dozen black militants stood at attention in front of a field officer, holding assault rifles and AR-15s. "This is perfectly legal!" the leader bellowed. "Justice for Michael Brown! Justice for Eric Garner!" came the hoarse cries from the formation. "No longer will we let the pigs slaughter our brothers and sisters and not say a damn thing about it," the leader answered back. "Black power! Black power! Black power! Black power!"

Since then, Goodson says, donations to the gun club have poured in from across the country and their membership has more than doubled. Support has come from unlikely sources such as Russell Wilson, a bureau chief in the Dallas district attorney's office. "They have an absolute right to do what they do," he told me. He believes they may be "restoring some people's confidence and saying, 'We're not going to keep getting pushed around here.'"

At the park, I ask Goodson what he thinks would happen if an armed black self-defense group like his had appeared in Ferguson. As we talk, a drill sergeant behind him commands a pair of grappling members to fight for their lives. "I think it would really wake America up."

Huey P. Newton Gun Club members march through the Dixon Circle neighbourhood of Dallas.

Shootings of civilians by police officers reached a 20-year peak in 2013, even as the incidence of violent crime in America went down overall. According to FBI statistics, police in the United States killed 1,688 people between 2010 and 2013. The actual number of black and brown people shot by police is almost certainly much higher, but a lack of data means that no one knows for sure how many people have been killed. Very few of America's 12,000 police and sheriff's departments report officer-involved shootings. But based on the data that has been reported, according to a study by ProPublica, young black men are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than young white men.

"What we see in Ferguson is just the tip of the iceberg," National Bar Association president Pamela Meanes told a Dallas TV station in August, calling for Department of Justice investigations of the police departments of 25 cities, including Dallas. Federal authorities have recently come down hard on the Albuquerque and Cleveland police departments for unnecessarily Tasering people, striking suspects after they've been handcuffed, using excessive force against the mentally ill, and drawing their weapons and shooting suspects when not in danger.

David Brown, Dallas's African American police chief, has said he will overhaul the department's use-of-force policy, and he has been openly critical of the Ferguson police department in the wake of Michael Brown's death. (David Brown's own son, David Brown Jr., was killed by a police officer after shooting at a cop in 2010.) While Brown has attempted reforms during his tenure, the Dallas Police Department has a dismal record. The city's cops have shot at least 185 people since 2002. Seventy-four percent of those shot fatally have been black and Hispanic, according to a report, "A History of Violence," compiled through open-records requests made by the group Dallas Communities Organizing for Change. Dallas police shot 14 people in 2014 alone, among them Jason Harrison, a 38-year-old mentally ill man who was killed by officers after he allegedly threatened them with a screwdriver. Harrison's brother had to mop the blood off the front steps of their home after the fatal encounter. His family filed a wrongful-death suit against the city in October.

Huey P. Newton Gun Club members march through the Dixon Circle neighbourhood of Dallas.

When David Brown and Craig Watkins, Dallas's outgoing district attorney, who is also black, held a series of town-hall meetings after Michael Brown's death, they were met with stories about racial profiling, shouts of "killing our innocent young men," and bereaved mothers attempting to get copies of police videos. If Dallas, with its diverse command staff and plans for a civil rights unit can't stop shooting black and brown men, it's no wonder that more radical solutions, like the Huey P. Newton Gun Club's call for an armed black citizenry, are gaining traction.

Dallas earned the nickname the "City of Hate" after John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dealey Plaza in 1963. But eleven months earlier, it was Martin Luther King Jr. who was terrorized by the city's convulsive mix of enraged whites, anti-communists, and John Birch Society members. His speech on segregation and the American dream at the Music Hall at Fair Park in January of that year was met with a bomb threat and large protests. According to The Accommodation: The Politics of Race in an American City, Jim Schutze's history of Dallas race relations, in the 50s and 60s the city's black leadership and clergy allied themselves with the white business elite to keep the civil rights movement at bay. "There was no movement in Dallas," said veteran Texas civil rights leader Reverend Peter Johnson. "Jackson was a movement town, Biloxi was a movement town, Selma, Birmingham, Louisiana. Texas was the only state with no civil rights movement." King was boycotted and rejected by black clergy leaders in Dallas because of a dispute within the Baptist church involving his father. "There were bad feelings between the ministers and MLK Sr.," Schutze told me when I met him at his home in Old East Dallas. "When MLK Jr. came with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he was received very badly."

Dallas race relations remained suspended in a kind of arrested development at least until the 1980s. "We called it the time warp," Schutze said. "Dallas was always about 20 years behind the rest of the country. You could tell it hadn't really happened—the awakening—black people and white people meeting eyeball to eyeball. I had come from Detroit, and here, in the late 70s and 80s, it was just bizarre, like a fifties black-and-white Colonel Sanders chicken ad."

In 1984, Dallas was the host city for the Reagan reelection convention—a risky move, given the city's history, but it was the "star of the Republican universe," according to Schutze, who covered the event. "The tone of it was, 'This is the city that never made the mistakes the rest of the country made,'" Schutze said. "They never took the boot off. God favors Dallas because Dallas has done things the right way. In particular it has done things the right way racially."

A participant in the October march through Dixon Circle

The Huey P. Newton Gun Club was formed partially as a response to a grassroots gun-advocacy group called Open Carry Texas. Texas is one of only six states in the country that still outlaws the open carrying of handguns, but it legally permits brandishing assault rifles and shotguns. Open Carry Texas garnered national attention last May after pictures from its "open-carry walks" went viral: Groups of schlubby white guys schlepping AK-47s into Chipotle, Target, and Starbucks provided a convenient opportunity for Northern liberals to mock Texan gun culture. Yet the movement attracted so much attention and support that it looks like Open Carry Texas will achieve its advocacy goal of getting state legislators to pass a new open-carry bill this year, adding handguns to the list of firearms citizens can legally tote.

Riding this wave of enthusiasm, Open Carry Texas announced in July that it would stage a walk through Houston's Fifth Ward, a predominately black neighbourhood and the birthplace of the rap group the Geto Boys. "The black community has got its butt kicked for some time," David Amad, a white Open Carry Houston leader, told a local TV station. "We're going to go in there and help with that, put a stop to that." C. J. Grisham, the president of Open Carry Texas, then compared himself to Rosa Parks, telling another paper that the heavily armed group needed to walk through a black neighbourhood because "somebody's got to stand up and sit in the front of the bus."

Fifth Ward community leaders and Houston's New Black Panther Party, led by the charismatic Quanell X, were not impressed by the group's offer of assistance. The New Black Panther Party has made news in the past couple of years for putting a bounty on the head of George Zimmerman and intimidating voters in Philadelphia, where they canvassed for Obama and one member allegedly brandished a nightstick and shouted, "You are about to be ruled by a black man, cracker!" (The Department of Justice dropped the case.) Recently, the group has been pilloried—mostly on Fox News—as outside agitators in Ferguson. Since Darren Wilson, the cop who shot Michael Brown, escaped indictment, two New Black Panthers in Ferguson have been brought to court on gun charges, though right-wing news outlets claim the men were actually planning to blow up the Gateway Arch and murder the Ferguson police chief. The surviving leadership of the original Black Panther Party has also repudiated the movement for inflammatory and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Bobby Seale, a founder, speculated to me that this new incarnation of his group is a front organization funded by right-wing money, "maybe by the Koch Brothers." But despite the New Black Panther Party's dismal reputation, in Dallas its members are, at least, the most thoughtful and professional revolutionaries around. They have a platform, an ideology, work as barbers and electricians, and are serious about their politics and the importance of being armed. "What you see in the media relates to them on a national level, but their organization is a lot different here on a local level," Goodson tells me. Darren X says that his Party is trying to move away from the inflammatory rhetoric of its leadership and "transition from black power to all power to all the people."

Darren X, the national field marshal of the New Black Panther Party

Days after Michael Brown was shot in August, Houston's New Black Panthers, community leaders, and Open Carry Texas leaders sat down at a folding card table by a Walgreens to attempt to discuss the proposed march through Fifth Ward. Fifteen Houston police officers, along with a detachment of New Black Panthers carrying assault rifles, stood by. The clean-cut, middle-aged, white Open Carry leadership had arrived unarmed and looked befuddled. The tone of the neighbourhood leaders was openly hostile.

"You're coming into Fifth Ward, into the black community, as an insurgence," Krystal Muhammad, of the New Black Panthers, said.

"I beg your pardon?" replied David Amad, of Houston Open Carry.

"You are an insurgence," Muhammad repeated.

"Let me just say, just for the record, we don't want you here," said Kathy Blueford-Daniels, the neighbourhood president of Fifth Ward.

"Do you even care how people who live here feel?" Quanell X asked Open Carry Texas founder C. J. Grisham.

"I absolutely care," Grisham said.

"If you're coming to help, don't tell us how you're going to help us," Quanell X said. "Ask us if we want the help."

The negotiations quickly devolved into shouting, and the Houston police stepped in to break up an ensuing fight. Quanell X told Open Carry that if they marched, they would be matched "gun for gun." After stomping off, Grisham paused for a post-meeting interview with a local TV station. "I still don't understand why we've got to have racial division," he said. "I don't even understand why this is a racial issue."

Darren X and his AR-15

In the end, the group indefinitely postponed its walk through Fifth Ward. "It was supposed to be Fifth Ward with Open Carry Texas, not Open Carry Texas in Fifth Ward," Open Carry spokesman Tov Henderson told me when I met him in the parking lot of a Home Depot in Lake Worth, an exurb of Dallas. Henderson, 35, looks like a rockabilly character from a David Lynch movie, and carried three concealed handguns and a Confederate-era black-powder revolver strapped to his leg. "We wanted to stand with African Americans and say, 'Hey, you guys have rights—stand up and take them. Firearms make us equal to those who aggress us."

But Open Carry Texas's attempt to bring Fifth Ward residents into the fold failed, just as the NRA's attempts to diversify have. "We saw it as a move of intimidation—we didn't see it as people expressing their Second Amendment rights," Darren X says. "They have other places to do that than the black community. The black community is full of guns. We already know our rights when it comes to guns." The concerns facing black gun owners are fundamentally different from those facing white gun owners, and it's not hard to imagine that the ancestors of the white Texas gun-rights crowd were, at one point in time, instrumental in keeping black Texans disarmed and compliant. Goodson hopes the Huey P. Newton Gun Club will continue to grow and eventually become a mainstream gun-rights organization, the "black alternative to the NRA."

A widely circulated Black Panther poster featuring Huey P. Newton. Photo by Blair Stapp, circa 1967

From America's colonial era until at least the late 1960s, fear of an armed black population was one of the driving forces behind gun-control legislation. In his 2010 opinion in the Supreme Court case McDonald v. Chicago—in which the court held that the Second Amendment applies to the states after an elderly black man challenged a Chicago handgun ban—Justice Clarence Thomas wrote about the aftermath of Nat Turner's 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia. "The fear generated by these and other rebellions led Southern legislatures to take particularly vicious aim at the rights of free blacks and slaves to speak or to keep and bear arms for their defense." From 1842 to 1850, Texas explicitly prohibited blacks from possessing arms. After the Civil War, fearing a backlash by veterans or freed slaves, Texas and other Southern states passed a series of repressive laws known as the Black Codes, again limiting the right to bear arms for black citizens. It was the Black Panthers' armed march on the California legislature in 1967—led by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale—that helped Ronald Reagan get the votes for a ban on the open carry of guns in that state. And the Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed partially in response to the shootings and racial upheaval that engulfed America's cities in the wake of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis.

The seeds of what was to become the Black Panther Party lie in the 1940s, when black veterans returned to the South after fighting in World War II and found themselves dehumanized by segregation. Before and during the era when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and King pricked the moral conscience of white America, it was the gun that kept the white racists at bay, particularly in the South. The famous, "nonviolent" godmother of the Mississippi civil rights movement, Fannie Lou Hamer, said, "I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom, and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won't write his mama again." The original Black Panthers were particularly inspired by the example of Robert F. Williams, a renegade NAACP chapter president and the author of the book Negroes with Guns. After World War II, Williams returned to his hometown of Monroe, North Carolina, and took over its dormant NAACP chapter. Going against the moderate national leadership, the Monroe chapter practiced armed, militant self-defense. The Monroe NAACP first came to rely on weapons after the Ku Klux Klan tried to drag the corpse of a black man out of a funeral home. The man had received lethal injection in Raleigh for allegedly murdering his white landlord, but the Klan didn't think the execution was enough. A group of 40 black men, including Williams, kept watch over the body, clutching rifles. "That was one of the first incidents that really started us to understanding that we had to resist," wrote Williams, "and that resistance could be effective if we resisted in groups."

Tina González of the Indigenous People's Liberation Party

In Negroes with Guns, Williams recounts finding himself in the middle of a murderous white mob during the 1961 campaign to allow blacks to use the town's swimming pool for one day a week:

There was a very old man, an old white man out in the crowd, and he started screaming and crying like a baby, and he kept crying, and he said, "God damn, God damn, what is this God damn country coming to that the niggers have got guns, the niggers are armed and the police can't even arrest them!" He kept crying and somebody led him away through the crowd.

After repeatedly being attacked and terrorized by the KKK, police, and mobs of white citizens, Williams concluded, "The lawful authorities of Monroe and North Carolina acted to enforce order only after, and as a direct result of, our being armed."

Williams, of course, had to contend with the double bind of white supremacy: whether to supplicate to white morality or to openly resist. By getting armed, Williams put himself and his community in considerable danger, but had they not defended themselves, they could have been killed. Williams, like Assata Shakur, managed to escape the dead-or-in-jail fate of so many black revolutionaries. He fled to exile in Cuba and kept a copy of Thoreau's essay "A Plea For Captain John Brown" with him at all times. In it, the founding father of nonviolent civil disobedience vociferously defends the militant abolitionist who waged a failed armed insurrection against slavery. Thoreau wrote, "I think for once the Sharpe's rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them."

Darren X and Charles Goodson

"We're trying to expose the contradiction," a delicate-looking man with a limp, going by the name of the Chairman, tells me as he pulls assault rifles out of the trunk of a car. We are in a South Dallas pawnshop parking lot on a bright October morning. The Huey P. Newton Gun Club is staging another armed patrol through Dixon Circle. Afterward, the group will deliver the Dallas Communities Organizing for Change report on police violence to the US Attorney's office downtown. As the members gather and strap on their weapons, a police helicopter circles lazily overhead. The mood is tense. "When you go up against the state, you have to stay focused," the Chairman mutters.

He seems preoccupied by the poor turnout. Only a dozen or so members arrive—eight have weapons, some of them quite old. Goodson's AK-47 looks like it was last used in the Afghan-Soviet War. In contrast, Darren X holds a brand-new, glistening AR-15. "We know our puny weapons won't be able to match Dallas police one for one," Goodson says, "but what they fear is seeing us with weapons." Most of the attendees are dressed in black fatigues and dreadlocks, sporting the iconic Black Panther buttons. Stu, the lone white man, is wearing an oxford shirt and starched khakis.

As the armed march files out of the parking lot, a woman in a PT Cruiser pulls up to talk to Darren X. "I need to call you if something happens to me. Nobody helps me here in Dallas—the police don't help me. What's your number?" Darren X gives her his cell, and the group marches on.

"Who are we? Huey P!" the militia chants as they make their way down the wide, bleached sidewalks, followed at a distance by an unmarked police car. They are greeted in Dixon Circle like guerrilla heroes coming down from the mountains. Guys hanging out in front of bodegas and gambling spots shout "Black power, baby!" and throw up their fists. Drivers in Range Rovers lie on their horns and stop in the middle of the road to take pictures. Teenagers and kids peer out from behind apartment-complex gates in awe. A woman in her 40s named Dorothy runs out of a bodega with a cigarette dangling from her lips and joins them. When I ask her why she came, she says, "Because they're walking for black people and black power and real reasons."

The gun club marches on downtown Dallas.

Down the road, the gun club encounters a group of bedraggled guys standing in a patch of dirt, sipping from brown bags.

"Join us, brothers!" a field sergeant implores them. "Come on, we need people from the neighbourhood."

"Aight!" one of the men shouts, drinking from his tall can but making no attempt to move. The gun club mills about, waiting.

"Y'all walk up to the church with us!" Dorothy shouts. "We need you to join us!"

"Aight!" the guy shouts back. But they don't come, and the patrol eventually marches on.

In a lot across the street from where James Harper was killed by police in 2012, the group finally succeeds in wooing a neighbourhood resident over to its side. "This brother lives here. This is his neighbourhood. Come over here and get a picture with us, brother," a field sergeant says. The guy, skinny and in his 40s, gets down on one knee and the armed marchers fall in around him, holding their AK-47s and looking hard. A couple of teenagers pull up in their cars and stare, devouring the guns hungrily with their eyes. "Respect," they say, before taking off.

In downtown Dallas, members of the Indigenous People's Liberation Party—young Latino Communists in olive fatigues and berets, carrying rifles on twine shoulder straps that look like they date back to Castro's Granma landing—join the march. One member of the IPLP carries her rifle upside down and another lets his gun flop against his back and into the faces of those marching behind him.

As I walk along with the gun club, the mood is so laid-back, the police response so placid, that it lulls me into a false sense of safety—but then the frame snaps back out, and it's clear how tenuous and potentially explosive the whole situation is. No one really knows what to do about the racial disparities in police violence. After all, even as America has yet another frank "national conversation" about race with op-eds and statistics and MSNBC spots, the tide of young black blood continues to flow. All the use-of-force re-training and psychological counseling and efforts against racial profiling don't seem to stanch it. Body cameras are a nice idea—but the infamous video of Eric Garner's death shows that even with firm evidence, a cop can kill a black man over practically nothing and escape indictment. "I can't breathe," Garner said 11 times before his death. Given these failures, and given the militarized police's ability to crush any kind of people's insurrection, arming oneself might be a futile act, but it's a partial—and very American—response to centuries of psychological humiliation.

Andrew, an original Black Panther, greets the gun club.

At the Earle Cabell Federal Building, Goodson, Stu, and the Chairman leave their weapons at the door and go inside to deliver the "History of Violence" report. On the fourth floor, Goodson tells a receptionist behind plate glass that he has an appointment. She doesn't know what he's talking about and calls the office manager. Goodson looks uncomfortable and embarrassed—two middle-aged white guys in suits stand in the corner staring and laughing.

The courteous, middle-aged office manager comes out to meet him, seeming confused and annoyed. Goodson tells her, "Our position today is we wanted to let the Department of Justice know about this particular issue. This is a report that deals with excessive force as it relates to the Dallas Police Department."

She says she's unaware of any report or appointment and that they have nothing pending. "If you believe yourself to be a plaintiff in that kind of action, you can file with us. But any report you give us is just going to sit in a drawer in the back room. Us receiving a report isn't going to do anything but waste your paper."

Going back and forth, they eventually compromise, with Goodson taking a business card that says they've spoken and her taking the report, likely to go into a filing drawer where it will never be seen. "I wish you luck with your citizen's action," she says, officiously shaking Goodson's hand.

Back outside in the Dallas sun, Darren X sidles up and asks, "How did it go?" Goodson clears his throat and says the report has been successfully delivered.

Heading away from the Federal Building, the marchers pause to take pictures of themselves in front of a large public fountain. They seem a little deflated. A middle-aged man strolling by sees the group and turns around to shake their hands. He introduces himself as Andrew, an original Dallas Black Panther. "This is the first time I've seen armed people—I thought it was like a military group going into infantry or something," he says. "But then I heard them say Huey Newton, and that's what stopped me. I said, 'Whoa...' It lets me know something is changing in the times."

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Photo of Alana Evans by Michael Dorausch

With all the choreographed blowjobs and cheesy soft jazz, we often forget porn stars go home to their families after shoots. Women encompass a huge chunk of the porn industry, so naturally many of these women spend their time balancing their careers and raising kids.

"While 'MILF' is one of our top categories, when you picture your favorite star, you aren't fantasizing about [her] changing diapers or packing a lunch for school," a PornHub marketer told me. "There are very few advantages to girls exposing their families and private lives to the public, but things seem to be changing in recent years with stars like Lisa Ann becoming mainstream."

For many mothers in porn, coming clean about their personal lives can have benefits. One actress, Marie Williams, even told me her eldest son's friends wanted to come over once they had discovered she worked as a professional MILF.

Assuming this role may feel glamorous, but there are also serious ramifications for stars' children.

"What we know is that kids who grow up in overly permissive households develop a more restrictive outlook on sex," said Dr. Laurie Betito, a psychologist, sex therapist, and radio show host. "It could affect their friendships because of the responses from peers. It could have repercussions everywhere, depending on the constitution of the child. You're imparting values. How are they supposed to make sense of what a healthy relationship looks like, let alone a marriage?"

To learn more about the working moms of porn, I spoke to three professional MILFs about their careers' impact on their family lives, what they buy their kids, and the pros and cons of being "cool moms."

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Photo courtesy of Kasey Storm

KASEY STORM

Some porn moms have no plans to stop shooting porn as they age. One, Kasey Storm, didn't even launch her career until two years ago when she was 47 and all three of her children were adults with kids of their own.

"I can say with no hesitation I would not have [gone into porn when they were young]," Kasey said. "There would not be enough money on the planet to make me. Strictly the modeling with swimsuits and lingerie—that stuff was fine."

According to her children, her decision was predictable. In Ohio, Kasey worked at Hustler's sales division in between oil wrestling and lingerie and swimsuit modeling gigs. When she moved to California, she received a lucrative porn offer and started dating porn star Tommy Gunn. Sadly, her decision to go into porn devastated her children.

"I think it's disgusting," her 31-year-old daughter Paige said. "It's ruined our relationship. We don't talk very often, but she's doing what she's always wanted to do."

Kasey's son, Nate, has refused to tell his friends about his mother's occupation, but said most of them expect her to work in porn anyways: "Growing up, my friends were always like, 'Your mom's hot,'" he said.

His 22-year-old sister, Cori, sees benefits to growing up with a "cool mom." Unlike other kids, she could get piercings as a teenager, but even she still feels a need to set boundaries to maintain their relationship. When Storm visits her daughter in Ohio, she sets ground rules, like, "No guys over, no bringing the industry into my house." (Kasey occasionally breaks the rules, telling her daughter about sexual positions she has tried.)

Kasey concedes that had she gone into porn when her kids attended school, it would have affected her children's development, but she said she's still shocked by some of their reactions: "I'm still blown away that even one daughter is hardcore against it."

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Photo courtesy of Nina Elle

NINA ELLE

A self-described "pretty blonde with big boobs," Nina Elle didn't always use her looks to support her family. She once worked as a dental hygienist, but when she learned how much porn stars made, she figured it was too lucrative to pass up. To her, starring in porn meant paying for her five-year-old daughter's singing and ballet lessons and buying her 11-year-old son Nike sneakers.

At the start of her porn career, she kept the fact that she had a family a secret to protect her kids from scrutiny, but eventually she decided to go public to correct some misconceptions about being a mom in the industry.

"You can be a better mother because you're more open," she said. "Things don't shock me as much. I've seen this, done that, so when my kids do it, I'll be like, 'Meh.'"

Elle is still keeping her occupation a secret from her kids, however. Her son has started to dabble in social media, and she worries he will find her account where she interacts with her fans: "I blocked him and told him he can't have an account until he's 16 or 17," she said. "He was like, 'God, mom, you're being weird.'"

Elle anticipates the day her children will discover her job. What will that day entail? Will she prefer her kids see her perform a blowjob rather than get gangbanged? "Basically," she said.

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Photo courtesy of Alana Evans

ALANA EVANS

Alana Evans has worked as a porn star for over 15 years, but when she's not on set, she prefers to bake cookies and play video games with her kids. In her eyes, her family embodies straight-edge values—traits she says motivated her 21-year-old son to join the Marines.

"I like to believe it's my parenting that led him to be what he is," she said. "We're careful about the movies and porn magazines we keep around. We're model parents because of the stigma."

She was wary of that stigma from the start; her ex-husband works as a cop, and when the daughter of his supervisor appeared in Playboy, as a joke he and his coworkers decorated their boss's office with spreads of his nude daughter.

"He took it fine," Evans said, "but I remember thinking, This is what I'm in for, dealing with people wanting to put [my porn career] in my family members' faces ."

She was sort of right: By the time her son was 12 years old, people started recognizing Alana during their trips to the grocery store. She had to come clean to her son about what mommy did for a living.

"I had to start explaining why they know who I am. It's the most crucial thing," she said. "My dad was in the military and a hippie lover-man and my mom had lots of male suitors, so sexuality was something in my life that's not frowned upon. I know there's something like that in my son."

Follow Marissa on Twitter.

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Dwaine George and Daniel Dale in 2001. Photos courtesy of the Greater Manchester Police

This article first appeared on VICE UK

In January of 2001, 16-year-old Daniel Dale was shot in the Collyhurst area of Manchester, England. The bullet pierced his heart and he eventually died from the wound.

According to his mother, Dale had never been involved with gangs. However, his best friend had recently been fatally stabbed in Manchester's Cheetham Hill—home to the notorious Cheetham Hill Gang—and Dale was due to give evidence about the killing when he was shot in the back, allegedly by a member of the Cheetham Hill Gang.

The man eventually convicted of Dale's shooting, Dwaine George, was a member of that gang, and the case against him had initially been considered strong. However, during the court proceedings much of the evidence was discredited through witness cross-examination.

By the end of the trial the case was looking thin, but George was convicted anyway, largely on the basis of forensic evidence. Tiny particles of gunshot residue found on his jacket were enough, as the jury saw it, to prove him responsible for Dale's murder.

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(Left to right) Dr Dennis Eady, Professor Julie Price, Lisa Musgrave, Alanna Tregear, Caitlin Gallagher, Dwaine George, Sarah Magill, Lisa-Marie Knight and Tunde Okewale (a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers) outside the Royal Courts of Justice on the day of Dawine's appeal hearing

Skip forward almost 14 years to December 9. After serving 13 years in prison, George's legal team managed to have his conviction quashed at London's Court of Appeal. More incredible still is that George's legal team consisted of a group of law students from Cardiff University and two of their lecturers.

Those who worked on George's case are part of The Innocence Project, a pro bono, university-run body of academics and students who take up cases where they believe someone is innocent of a crime they're convicted for. They do this with a view to overturning wrongful convictions for prisoners and ex-prisoners, especially those protesting their innocence over murder convictions.

The scheme was first created in the United States in 1994, and several British universities have now adopted the model, helping to provide a vital service for people in a system where legal aid is drastically underfunded—and becoming more so—due to Tory cuts.

Sarah Magill, who was 24 when she worked on George's case, has since left university and is now a criminal lawyer handling serious cases involving sex offences, drugs, robbery, firearms, and murder in Lancaster Crown Court.

Sarah joined The Innocence Project as a team member while at Cardiff, but as she'd previously worked with criminal lawyers she was soon running her own team and placed in charge of the George case when it was submitted in 2006.

"[Dwaine] presented as a very intelligent, eloquent gentleman—we established a rapport very quickly," she told us. "Meeting him was vital, as he filled in all the blanks and provided a holistic view of the case one simply cannot achieve from reading the papers alone."

When we asked Sarah whether she believed George to be innocent, her response was emphatic.

"Yes, I was convinced from the first read of the papers," she said. "I have always been convinced that Dwaine was not present at the scene of the shooting that tragically killed Daniel, and am only sad that it took so long. I firmly believe the police will discover the true murderer and that Dale's family will one day achieve justice."

Caitlin Gallagher also worked on George's case. "I got involved with The Innocence Project as it was part of the reason I chose to study at Cardiff Law School," she said. "It's a unique opportunity to work on real cases—there's a chance to make a difference to an individual's life. I'm still convinced that [Dwaine] did not commit this crime. It matters that the students believe there to have been a miscarriage of justice as it motivates them to continue working on the case. This is why Dwaine's team worked so tirelessly on his case between 2006 and 2010."

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Rhiannon Hughes

Although not directly involved with George's case, 23-year-old Rhiannon Hughes worked on cases with the Innocence Project from her second year of university, continuing after she graduated in 2012. She's deeply passionate about miscarriages of justice, inspired by books she had read on the topic. One book she told us about details the murder of Billie-Jo Jenkins, in which Jenkins's father Sion was initially convicted and sentenced to jail, before later having his conviction overturned.

"When people come to consult a lawyer, it's usually not for a very good reason," she said. "If we're able to assist someone through a very difficult time in their lives, I find that very rewarding. Sometimes you can see a real difference between the client you see in the first instance and the client you say goodbye to at the end of the process."

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Two recent front covers of Inside Time

How do the students decide which cases to take on? "Some prisoners write to us directly, and sometimes we have barristers and solicitors writing to us," says Rhiannon. "We also have a contact at the prisoner magazine Inside Time; she'll give us news and write articles about the Innocence Project. They're usually serious offenses—murder, GBH, and sexual assault—which makes it all the more important."

When asked how they had managed to get George's case overturned, she told us: "New scientific evidence came to light. The new evidence [...] about the gunshot residue meant the jury threw out what happened at trial."

Since the trial in 2001, an amount of gunshot residue as tiny as that found on George's jacket is no longer considered significant enough to base a conviction. It the main reason his conviction was finally quashed.

Julie Price is the lecturer who introduced the Innocence Project to Cardiff and, with her colleague, helped to guide the students through the long-winded process. "They're still quite idealistic about the law, which is great," she says. "They're attracted by the idea of social justice, I suppose—and there's no grander thought than getting someone out of prison who shouldn't be there."

How did the students—and George—react to the news of the acquittal?"[Dwaine] is relieved, because he said from day one that it wasn't him who did it," she told us. "He has absolute respect for the victim of the family. It isn't right to say anyone's celebrating. We're not at all. I suppose [we're] relieved that this can be done, even though it takes such a long time. A group of students working under supervision can actually achieve a wrongful conviction being overturned. It's significant, but we're mindful always of the victim's family, as they have to go through all this again."

It's understandable, of course, that—despite the Innocence Project's achievement—there's not a whole lot of air punching going on. Dale's mother has already made it clear that she believes the responsibility is on George to reveal who really killed her son.

When we asked Julie whether lawyers should be doing more pro bono work, she said it was a complex question, but argued: "As legal aid gets eaten away at even more, you're going to see more miscarriages of justice. Definitely. There's no doubt about that."

Tory cuts to legal aid mean there's less and less money available to those caught up in a criminal case who—like George—can't afford to pay for their own lawyers. This is clearly far from ideal, as the criminal law firms that are best placed to take on pro bono work are now, according to Sarah Magill, too stretched to accept cases.

For now, the Innocence Project is doing all that it can to plug that gap. But there are only so many cases a team of students and their lecturers can accept.

See more of Henry Wilkins's work on his website.

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Look at Simon Hanselmann's blog and buy his books from Fantagraphics and Space Face Books.

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A collection of hentai magazines. Photo by Miki Yoshihito via

"People get the wrong impression of Japan—it's a conservative country," said Peter Payne, skyping me from Gunma Prefecture, 60 miles north of Tokyo.

The hentai cartoon porn I'd been looking at didn't seem to support that statement: There was a naked girl lying on the ground with four guys standing over her; a boy fondling his stepmother's double-H breasts over the breakfast table; and a boy dressed as a girl with a huge erection bulging through his pants.

Seems pretty liberal to me, and also fairly bizarre. But I was prepared to take Payne's word for it—he owns the online store J-List, which sells hentai DVDs and comics as well as plenty of non-adult anime products. An American who's lived in Japan for 23 years, Payne originally moved there for a year to be a teacher—but "that didn't work out" and he ended up staying.

When the internet boom began in the late 90s, he told his wife he was going to start up an online international mail order company for fans of sci-fi and anime, and the business grew from there.

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A bookshelf in Japan full of hentai. Photo by Ignis via Wikimedia Commons

In a display cabinet over his shoulder were a bunch of Star Wars figures. He seemed excited about the forthcoming films, as only a genuine sci-fi fan could be. But hentai (the Japanese word for "perverse" or "bizarre") isn't like other sci-fi or animated popular culture; it's been accused of both promoting the sexualization of children and being aggressively misogynistic.

That's because a good amount of hentai involves cutesy schoolgirls (drawn to be more European-looking than Japanese) with unfeasibly large boobs and big doe eyes who are inevitably sexually assaulted by bad boys with anger management issues and deep-rooted psychosexual problems—or by actual demons; alien, ogre-type characters from other planets who use phallic tentacles to penetrate the girls' various orifices while they squeal and beg not to be penetrated by tentacles.

Hey Japan, what's up with all the tentacles?

"Tentacles exist because you can't draw a penis without censoring it," Payne explained, citing the 1907 censorship law that still holds firm. "It's the same thing with bukkake—you can see it as either really sick or really artistic, but here it's kind of passé."

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Hokusai's "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife"

That multiple men ejaculating all over a woman's face is old hat in Japan isn't particularly surprising, considering tentacle sex has been depicted in Japanese art for over 200 years. Last year's shunga exhibition at the British Museum, for instance, featured an 1814 print, The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, in which a couple of octopuses are making love to the titular wife.

But classical Japanese art is one thing—a thing to be enjoyed by men and women who own personalized wax seals and imported antique katanas. Cartoons, however, are for kids—surely?

Tell that to Toshio Maeda.

In 1986, Maeda introduced tentacle porn to Japanese anime, which had always featured titillating shower scenes but nothing overtly explicit. His creation Urotsukidōj – Legend of the Overfiend invented the hentai genre.

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Toshio Maeda. Photo by Yves Tennevin via Wikimedia Commons

I tried to contact Maeda while researching this article. In fact, I contacted several Japanese hentai illustrators, but they never got back to me. Payne explained why.

"Firstly, the idea of contacting a Japanese person, because I do this for a living... almost every Japanese person will say: 'An email from a foreigner... I can't possibly reply to that.' Even though they've spent six to ten years learning English, they're just too embarrassed they'll get something wrong. It's very difficult to talk to them except at a convention. It's a major barrier.

"Secondly, hentai and anime in Japan is kind of a dying industry—animators earn so little here; their salaries are around $9,000 a year on average—that nobody does it as a career any more, so all the illustrating and production gets outsourced to companies in Korea, China, and the Philippines."

§

Payne showed me a graph of the wage structure. Animators are right at the bottom of the pile, even though their job requires real skill and a ton of work. Meanwhile, at the other end of the food chain, the hentai voice actors (often stars from the film industry) are paid six-figure incomes.

I'd set out to find a Japanese hentai illustrator to interview so I could ask them whether this was the career they'd envisioned while studying at art school, and whether they had any moral issues about the work they do. But as my search went on it became clear I would have to look towards Korea for answers. Eventually, I found a jobbing animator working for a tiny graphics company just outside Seoul, who agreed to talk to me on the basis that he would remain completely anonymous.

"My parents don't know I do this," he told me in broken English on a long-distance phone call. "They think I design posters. I do design posters, but I like doing this, too—it's a bit of an obsession for me."

It sounded like it was as much a hobby for this young man as it was a profession.

"This is better than real porn," he told me. "Some of the things I get to draw are really beautiful and sexy, and some things are kind of... not OK, you know?"

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Photo by Dave Fayram via Wikimedia Commons

I asked whether it got boring doing hours of monotonous production work, drawing frames and sending them to Japan to be assembled. He admitted it was repetitive, but added, "The scripts and trends are so strange that you can't really get that bored with it. The Japanese are a little bit crazy."

When I put it to Payne that even Japan's neighbors believe their popular culture to be a little bit odd, he said, "One problem is when you look at a thing and you don't really know it yet, you just know a few key things about it. Like the Netherlands: People know about the cafes, pot, the red light district, and tulips. It's not logical to assume that tulips are everywhere in the Netherlands. It's the same with hentai. You've noticed the tentacle monster porn more, but that's what I call distortion based on the lens of the internet. The really weird parts of Japan are often made to push our buttons."

So why are the characters so young-looking? In Sweden, in 2011, Simon Lundstrom, whose job was translating hentai comics, was convicted of 39 counts of possessing child pornography. Despite the images being imaginary cartoon characters, the Swedish supreme court upheld the decision in 2012, rejecting his appeal, and ruling that the images depicted underage children having sex.

Payne didn't have much of an explanation. "It's not seen in that light here," he said. "They would tell you all the characters are over 18. There's creative license taken. There are standards in the industry and a morality standards group, which bans incest and things like that. It's just that high school, for some reason, is the setting for most stories."

He was keen to stress that there is a hugely diverse range of hentai, not just the stuff on porn aggregator sites.

"There are hentais you probably haven't seen," he told me. "There's yuri, meaning 'girl's love', which are stories about two girls falling in love—and it's not even very sexual. There's an amazingly rich set of gay hentai porn called yaoi, 'boy's love,' which is not for gay guys at all—it's almost entirely watched by straight girls who like the drama. There's another type of gay hentai, enjoyed by girls and guys, called bara—'rose' in Japanese—and that's basically muscular gay 'bear' porn."

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Photo by Sam Clements

I stumbled upon the latter on the website of an artist called Gengoroh Tagame: big gay men with rippling muscles and veiny dicks choking each other or tying each other up in bondage ropes.

I emailed Tagame but, unsurprisingly, got no response.

Is being gay accepted in Japan?

"It is in the cities," said Payne, before telling me about another style of hentai, otonoko ("trap"), which is sort of like transvestite porn: pretty, effeminate boys drawn to look like girls, but when their skirts are ripped off their massive cocks are revealed.

§

And what about the rape-y aspect of hentai?

"They definitely go overboard with that more than in other genres, but it's not really typical—there are fetish shops for that stuff," said Payne. "Usually porn here has pretty girls being treated like idols, or weird things like putting her in a tanning salon."

Finally, how does conservative Japanese society respond to all of this?

"They have a phrase they like to say: shikata ga nai, or, 'It can't be helped,'" Payne replied. "The number of people who would object to a breast scene in a cartoon here would be zero. The attitude is: of course guys like boobs and panties."

Follow Josh on Twitter.

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William Wilde dress, Libidex gloves, Fabulously Fetish heels, Yael Salomon bracelet and ring

PHOTOGRAPHY: OLIVIA RICHARDSON
STYLING: ALICE BURNFIELD

Hair: Satomi Suzuki
Set designer and props: Marisha Green
Make-up: Nicola Moores-Brittin at Untitled Artists LDN
Photographer's assistant: Alice Bullough
Models: Paloma at Profile and Abby at Anti-Agency

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William Wilde bra, Manuela Dack skirt, Angels lab coat, So High Soho hat

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William Wilde dress, Libidex gloves, Yael Salomon bracelet

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William Wilde bra, Manuela Dack skirt, So High Soho hat; William Wilde bow; Lucilla Gray white bodysuit

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William Wilde bow

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William Wilde top

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William Wilde top and knickers, Honour latex stockings, Fabulously Fetish heels

You probably know that we have an Emmy-winning show on HBO, but you may not have seen all the episodes. We know how it goes—not everyone has a premium cable subscription, and maybe you just haven't had time to tune in. If you aren't all caught up, you're in luck, because we're going to be putting the second season online, starting today. In the first episode, Shane Smith travels to Kabul to follow the trail of American money pouring into the Afghan reconstruction—one of the most expensive, fraudulent, and wasteful uses of American tax dollars ever. Then, VICE correspondent Ben Anderson travels to Rio de Janeiro, where the Brazilian government took extreme measures to clean up the city's rampant drugs and crime in advance of the World Cup and Olympics.

Last month, a federal judge sentenced Terry "Lil' Wood" Sillers, a general in the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT), to ten years in prison. It was a break offered by prosecutors after Sillers helped get members of his old gang sentenced to nearly 1,000 total years behind bars.

For a career prison gangster like Lil' Wood, this is a big no-no.

The rules for members of prison gangs are clear, and "no snitching" is at the top of the list. To be called a rat in the criminal underworld is the gravest of insults and can promptly lead to bloodshed. "Blood in, Blood out," "Omertà," and "Death Before Dishonor" are the credos, along with "Snitches get stiches," as they say in the penitentiary. So what would cause a lifelong hardcore gang leader to snitch and turn on his own gang?

We see these types of stories in the media all the time, and the question is usually left open. Why did the con betray his brothers, his comrades in arms, his family? Many explanations, none of them satisfactory, are offered up: He was tired of the life, he didn't like the way things were going with the gang, he wanted to do the right thing. In reality, most times it's about simple revenge. If you feel someone wronged you in some way and you get yourself in a situation that you can't get out of with the law, the easiest escape is to turn informant.

That's exactly what happened with Lil' Wood.

I met the short but stocky convict at Federal Correctional Institution Forrest City Low in Arkansas shortly after arriving there in January 2011. He was one of the Texas shot-callers on the compound, and I got to know him because several Texas cons lived in the six-man cell I was assigned to. As soon as I met the go-hard white boy, I could tell he had done a lot of time. When you've been in prison for a while, it's easy to mark others who have traveled the same path. Lil' Wood was covered in jailhouse tattoos and had the arrogance and bravado typical of a prison gang member who is used to having his way. After his first appearance in my living space, I asked his homeboy about him.

"He's a general in the ABT. He speaks for the Texas dudes," my bunkie, B-Rad, told me. "He did a lot of time in the Texas system and was an original member of the gang. He joined them in the early 1980s and has been going hard ever since. That's how we do it in Texas."

I had my doubts. If Lil' Wood was a general in the ABT, what was he doing in a low-security prison in Arkansas? It just didn't make sense. I had been at higher-level institutions, and from what I had seen, most current and active gang members—especially ranking ones—weren't even allowed to walk the main lines. And they were often kept in lockdown units or held in the hole.

But Lil' Wood kept coming around. He was a little standoffish at first, and then we got along okay in time. As I got to know other white boys on the compound, I heard more stories about Lil' Wood. "I don't fuck with dude," a diesel white boy from Texas who went by Big G said. "I was in FCI Beaumont when he got ran off the yard. Lil' Wood came into Beaumont talking all that gang shit and showing his tattoos and flexing his rank and had all the young Texas guys out on the yard meeting for church and paying dues and basically doing whatever the fuck he told them to do. But guys got sick of him and a bunch of younger ABT dudes decided to beat him down, check him in, and run him off the yard. And that's what they did."

Being disgraced and betrayed by his own gang—by men half his age who hadn't been through the battles that Lil' Wood had—left him seething.

He carried a chip on his shoulder and wasn't afraid to jump, which in prison parlance meant he was ready to fight at a moment's notice. He was also known to carry a shank. Guys who feel that they have something to prove in prison are the worst, because when their backs are against the wall, they are capable of absolutely anything. I had no doubt Lil' Wood would have stabbed someone.

I talked to him but also kept him at arm's length. This was not someone you wanted to let get close. I watched how Lil' Wood softly extorted his homeboys, coming in our six-man and just going through their lockers and taking what he wanted, always saying he was going to pay them back, but never following up. That was just how he got down.

There was this con on my unit called Johnny Savage Lil' Wood used to hang around. I don't know what they were up to, but both of them had that dope-fiend kind of way to them.

Still, Lil' Wood did look out for his fellow white dudes. That was his claim to fame: a white boy prison gangster who wasn't afraid to get busy. His homeboy B-Rad told me, "In Marianna Upper, the white boys didn't have a TV when Lil' Wood got there, and he went right in and just took a TV and said, 'This is the white boys' TV now.' They called him out to the yard about it, but nothing came of it and the white boys in Marianna Upper got their TV to this day." That's what is expected of a member of the ABT, since their number one priority in prison is to look out for their racial brethren.

But what I noticed about Lil' Wood foretold his future betrayal of the Brotherhood. He was bitter and angry—felt like he was cheated on, denied his right to something.

And he actually did want out of the life. He even talked to me about doing a book and telling his story, something that's unheard of for an active gang member, especially a general giving orders and conducting business. So there were some cracks in the façade—the hard prison gangster front was eroding. As Lil' Wood got older, it was probably hard for him to keep living up to the image and reputation he had established for himself.

And then he was released. He gave me an email and told me to keep in touch, that he wanted to tell his story and maybe get some money for it and go legit. I emailed him a couple of times and never heard back, but B-Rad used to call him and tell me he was doing OK.

Then we heard about the infamous motorcycle chase in June 2011. When we saw the news broadcasts at the prison, it was crazy—everyone was buzzing about it. Lil' Wood, who had only been out a couple months and in fact was still in the halfway house, had gone off the deep end. An outlaw to the core, he led police on a high-speed chase—on his Harley, of course. The chase was videotaped and Lil' Wood quickly became a YouTube sensation as his flight from the cops gathered over a million views.

I thought it was a shame that Lil' Wood had gotten back up to his old tricks. I mean, he was a general who had done his time, so what was he doing getting his hands dirty again? But he apparently found it tough going out in the real world. After the chase, the feds revoked his probation and started preparing a new case against him. By May 2012, he was facing federal charges of conspiracy to participate in racketeering, as well as charges for drug trafficking, attempted murder, and murder. All that would likely mean a life sentence in the feds.

That was when Lil' Wood did the unthinkable. After he was indicted, he made the decision to snitch. At FCI Forrest City, his homeboys couldn't believe it.

"I can't believe Lil' Wood is going out like that," B-Rad told me. "He talked all that death before dishonor shit and now he's a rat." In fact, Lil' Wood might go down as the greatest (or most notorious) informant in ABT history. The information he provided led to the sprawling racketeering indictment against the gang's hierarchy in late 2012. Lil' Wood gave it all up, going back 25 years to name names in unsolved murder cases from inside the Texas Department of Corrections and on the street.

His testimony has contributed to the convictions of 73 of his former comrades, ABT gang members who would surely like nothing more than to kill Lil' Wood now. The ABT's motto is "God forgives, brothers don't." So Lil' Wood will be living as a marked man with a price on his head. If the gang ever gets their hands on him, it will be lights out.

At the age of 50, Lil' Wood's career as a gangster is over. He showed contrition at his sentencing and told the judge about how he grew disillusioned with the actions of the gang he helped put on the map. Lil' Wood would have us believe the ABT has changed dramatically and that he just can't stomach it anymore. Don't believe it. The truth of the matter is that he was just trying to get back at the gang he felt didn't give him his due respect. It's a clear case of self-preservation through retribution.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

It's 2015, which means that the end is nigh. The world is melting, nations are crumbling, and our leaders have given up. With the exception of doom metal and reruns of Seinfeld, you may be hard-pressed to find anything to be enthusiastic about. Luckily we have the band Spook the Horses.

This track, "Drought," from Spook the Horses' upcoming record Rainmaker,is slow, textured, devastating, and refreshing. There seems to be an endless stream of guitarists recycling the same stoner riffs, acting like they haven't listened to a new record since Black Sabbath Vol. 4. Not to fear—this is a new doom record worth listening to. Happy New Year.

Preorder Rainmaker here.

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Mohamed Fahmy on his way to a court appearance in early June, 2014. Screencap via YouTube

Egyptian-Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy, along with his colleagues Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed have been granted a retrial. On Thursday, the Egyptian court of cassation dismissed the sentencing of the Al-Jazeera English (AJE) journalists, citing flaws within the case. In June, a court had issued a sentence of seven years to both Fahmy and Greste, and ten years to Mohamed for "conspiring with terrorists," "producing false news," and "using unlicensed equipment." The verdict received international condemnation and was denounced as a sham by Amnesty International.

The date of the retrial has yet to be announced, but is expected to be set within a month. Fahmy, Greste, and Mohamed can only apply for a release on bail at the first session of retrial, since it is not under the jurisdiction of the court of cassation. The three have been behind bars for over a year now.

Fahmy: From Producer to Prisoner
Fahmy was born in Egypt and raised between Egypt and Kuwait, eventually moving to Montreal with his family in 1991. In 2003 he began working as a stringer, and eventually a reporter, during the Iraq war. Fahmy spent the majority of his career reporting from the Middle East, working as a producer for Dubai TV, a reporter for the New York Times, and eventually as a correspondent for CNN. In the summer of 2013, Fahmy was offered a position with AJE. However, by that time, Al-Jazeera Arabic's image in Egypt had begun to deteriorate.

Egyptian government officials perceived the network's Arabic channel, Mubasher Misr, as a biased news source—and following former president Mohamed Morsi's ouster, Egyptian security forces labeled the network a "mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood," painting it as a media branch for the group, and tantamount to a terrorist transmission. However, the English channel maintained a reputation of objectivity, distancing itself from its Arabic counterpart. Assured of a distinction between the English and Arabic networks, Fahmy joined AJE as its Cairo bureau chief in September 2013.

His tenure as bureau chief lasted less than three months. On December 29, security forces raided the temporary offices of AJE set up in a Marriott hotel room, and arrested Fahmy and Greste. The trio would later be dubbed the "Marriott Cell" by authorities who accused the journalists of working with the Muslim Brotherhood to undermine state security. Mohamed had been arrested at his home a few hours before.

Al-Jazeera Observed Warning Signs
Al-Jazeera, for its part, seems to have avoided getting official accreditation for its own correspondents. In September 2013, security forces had already raided and shut down Mubasher Misr. Just days later, AJE's office was also raided, resulting in the confiscation of broadcast equipment and the arrest of Mostafa Hawa, the office's financial manager.

In an email to senior management in Doha, dated September 5, 2013, AJE producer Heba Fahmy (unrelated to Mohamed Fahmy) wrote, "I would like to stress that AJE is 'not free' to operate in Cairo, because the prosecution considers us as a channel without permits." Management's response was to set up the temporary office in the Marriott hotel.

Two days later, on his first day as bureau chief, Fahmy also voiced concern to management. In an email he wrote, "I would just like to suggest that I am willing to meet the lawyers myself to try and get a better picture of where we stand legally."

Afaf Saoudi, an executive producer for AJE, responded to Fahmy: "I appreciate your concern about the legal issue but Doha management will deal with it from here. Please just focus on the production side at the moment and on how best we can tell the story with the limitations we have."

However, none of it seems to have been dealt with, given that from September up until the December arrest, neither Fahmy, Greste, nor Mohamed ever held press cards, meaning that senior management never got their staff accredited.

Al-Jazeera also failed to maintain a distinction between its Arabic and English networks. Footage produced by Fahmy and his AJE team was edited and broadcast over the Arabic channel. Upon seeing his footage aired on Mubasher Misr, Fahmy pointed it out to management and warned that "due to the security situation this action may come back to bite us."

Farag Fathy Farag, the lawyer formerly representing Al-Jazeera, quit the case in the middle of a court session back in May. "If I continued to work with Al-Jazeera I would have been working against the journalists," said Farag. "Al-Jazeera was using my clients for self-promotion and endangered the reporters' chance for freedom."

Farag alleges that Al-Jazeera worked against the case his legal team prepared for the journalists' trial. "When we were making our defense, one article stipulated that it was the responsibility of the network [to obtain licensing], not the journalists. Al-Jazeera didn't accept this." According to Farag, management also disregarded his advice to ensure a division between AJ Arabic and AJE during the trial.

Meanwhile, the three journalists were left in the dark about the lawyer's decision until his sudden resignation, and voiced their shock at his actions.

Still, one of Fahmy's current lawyers, Negad Borai, also maintains that the broadcast of AJE-intended footage on the Arabic channel was a "deep mistake" made by the network, and said that effectively, Al-Jazeera broke its contract with his client. For all of Al-Jazeera's missteps, however, many observe that it is precisely because of their Al-Jazeera affiliation that the reporters remain behind bars.

"Egyptian authorities want to punish Fahmy and the others on behalf of Al-Jazeera," said Borai.

Qatar and Egypt's Feud
With state television largely avoiding coverage of the 2011 uprisings, Al-Jazeera, including its Arabic channel, was well-regarded for the fact that it covered the protests. Al-Jazeera was founded and is funded by the royal family of Qatar, and has been criticized for being largely influenced by the Qatari emir and, in turn, his foreign policy.

Last month, in a letter to the Canadian Journalists for Freedom of Expression, Fahmy wrote that he and his colleagues "are victims of a real ongoing war between Egypt and Qatar." Many support the view that the case had political undertones and was driven by a vendetta between the two governments.

Qatar has a long history with the Brotherhood, and as the group gained prominence in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Syria in the wake of the Arab Spring, Qatar saw an opportunity to back Brotherhood-affiliated political parties. In 2012, Qatar pledged $9.3 billion CAD to Morsi's government. When the military ousted Morsi, and subsequently denounced the Muslim Brotherhood as "terrorists," members of the islamist group fled Egypt. Some took refuge in Doha, where Al-Jazeera footed their hotel bills. Qatar's continued support for the group obviously did not sit well with Egypt's incoming authorities, resulting in the freezing over of relations between the two countries.

Recently, there seems to have been a thaw in the conflict. Qatar announced its "full support" of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at the latest GCC meeting. al-Sisi said he would consider a pardon for the AJE journalists in November. Mubasher Misr was officially taken off the airwaves last week. The end of the rift seems to be more about pragmatism and maintaining a sense of stability in the region than any mutual agreement. Regardless, speculation arose that the political reconciliation could affect the outcome of the journalists' trial, or at the very least, encourage the Egyptian president to issue a pardon.

"We can expect al-Sisi to declare a pardon to indicate a rapprochement between Qatar and Egypt," said Lina Khattib, the director of Carnegie's Middle East Centre.

Likelihood of Release
al-Sisi has more than just foreign politics as an impetus to issue a pardon. Following widespread condemnation of the verdict for the three journalists, in June al-Sisi said he would not intervene in the court's decision. By autumn, he seems to have recognized the stain this verdict made on Egypt's international image. He announced a decree that would allow for the repatriation of foreign prisoners, and followed that up by saying he would consider a pardon for the three journalists.

This pardon, however, can only come after the full legal process has been exhausted. This means that the court needs to issue another guilty verdict in order for the president to issue the potential pardon. According to Borai, it will take somewhere between six months to a year for the second trial. In the meantime, Fahmy's legal team are applying for temporary release on health grounds because of his broken shoulder and Hepatitis C, which he needs treated.

Following Thursday's decision, Fahmy's family said that they will apply for deportation for Fahmy. However, because of Fahmy's dual citizenship, the legal process for repatriation remains muddled. Borai told VICE that, in order for the deportation decree to be applied, Fahmy would have to give up his Egyptian citizenship.

Compared to other governments, Canada had one of the most subdued responses to June's verdict. Fahmy's family has said that the Canadian government has been helpful, but has also called on the prime minister to exercise more pressure on the Egyptian government to have Fahmy released from prison. Foreign Minister John Baird announced he would travel to Cairo in January to "push for Fahmy's release."

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Mick Jones and Joe Strummer, The Clash. Photo via.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Julien Temple is the great British music documentarian. He began his career filming the Sex Pistols and the Clash's earliest gigs in 1970s London at now-legendary venues like the 100 Club and the Roxy. Later, he turned the footage into the feature films The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury. Eventually, Temple would put together the 'Best Of' and 'Greatest Hits' films for the likes of the Rolling Stones, Blur, Bowie, and the Culture Club.

After sitting on some of his early Clash footage for almost 40 years, Temple has just put together a new film called The Clash: New Year's Day 1977, centered around a gig they played on January 1 at the Roxy. The documentary contextualizes that moment in time and space for punk by pitting chaotic live footage of the band alongside regular Londoners talking about their hopes and fears for the new year.

I talked to Temple about how the film pays homage to Joe Strummer, the Clash's frontman, who died 12 years ago last month.

VICE: What are your earliest memories of cinema and how did you get into filmmaking?
Julien Temple: I didn't really see any movies at school—apart from maybe A Hard Day's Night , which everyone saw. But when I was 18 I went to see a film with some friends of mine, Jean Luc Godard's Les Mépris, or Contempt. I hadn't seen any art films, so I was kind of shocked. Apart from Brigitte Bardot reclining naked across the cinema screen, I couldn't understand any of it. I had to go back five or six times, secretly, to get my head around the grammar of it. I ended up really liking it. And so that was the first film I really got into.

Later, I was studying architecture at Cambridge and got very bored with it, so started a film society. My college, King's, was the only college without one. It meant we could then see 75 films a week on 16mm prints because all the colleges hired free movies and you could swap them around. That way, you could spend all of your time watching films.

The first film I actually made was called The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng, which was a John Skelton poem about a witch who brewed psychedelic ale at the top of a hill. I made that with a bunch of students and friends and, with it, got into the National Film School. I was studying there when I came across the Sex Pistols.

How did you first meet them?
I used to go walking in the East End and the docks on Sundays. It was great because they'd just been closed down so it was this wonderfully derelict, atmospheric space with rusting cranes and ships. Ghostly quiet. One summer afternoon in 1975, I heard the sound of a Small Faces song on the wind and followed it to an old warehouse. The door was open and I went up these rickety stairs and, as I got higher and higher, I could hear some people just destroying this song. They were shouting, "I want you to know that I hate you. I don't love you."

When I got to the top of the stairs it opened up into this kind of loft and my head poked up from the stairwell with a worm's eye view of this extraordinary, silhouetted band who seemed like nothing you'd expect a band to be; spiky hair, skinny legs, mohair stripe jumpers in black and yellow and black and red. They looked like weird cartoon monsters from space.

No other band was like that. This was a very, very new sensation.

Did you speak to them?
I asked them what they were doing, and they were just rehearsing. They hadn't played a gig, actually, so it was a very fortuitous encounter. I asked them if they might be interested in doing a soundtrack for my little student film that was set in the 60s—because I loved the Small Faces—and they told me to fuck off. But they did say they were going to do a gig, so I watched them rehearse for a bit and went back to West London and told all my mates I'd just seen this incredible band. They asked me their name and I realized I'd forgotten to ask.

[body_image width='1280' height='720' path='images/content-images/2015/01/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/05/' filename='an-interview-with-punk-documentarian-julien-temple-273-body-image-1420464506.jpg' id='15431']Still from The Filth and the Fury (Julien Temple, 2000)

How did you find them?
I spent weeks looking in music papers trying to see a name of a band that could possibly be them. As a result I missed the first gig, but I later saw this thing saying "Sex Pistols" and I thought that it must be them because it was such a great name.

When I went to the second gig I realized I should film it. It was at the Central School of Art [now Central St. Martins' old Holborn campus]. Sid was there, and Susie. The audience was tiny but theatrical—the same as the band. It was very clear that this was something great. I got a key cut to the film school camera room so that I could take a camera out at night as long as I put it back in the morning. There are 50,000 iPhones at a gig these days, but back then I was the only person with a camera.

Amazing. Did you go on to strike up a relationship with them because you filmed them so often?
Well, yes, I suppose so. But I was a middle class cunt and they were very keen to point that out at every opportunity. They would kick me whenever they could, spitting at the camera and hitting the lens. But yeah, we did develop a friendship—or an understanding, certainly.

How did your first feature film, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle , come about?
The Sex Pistols became huge—or at least hugely notorious—so various people were making films about them. Only, they kept coming and going. They went from Ken Loach for a moment to Stephen Frears for a moment, and then Russ Meyer did it while I was his assistant, and then that all fell apart. Princess Grace of Monaco refused to let Twentieth Century Fox—of which she was on the board—make that film, so we were left with the film I'd shot over time and bits of stuff from television and so on. We made this kind of Godardian, ten-lessons-in-how-to- swindle-your-way-to-the-top-of-the-music-industry type film. Me and Malcolm [ McLaren] wrote and made it together.

[body_image width='400' height='687' path='images/content-images/2015/01/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/05/' filename='an-interview-with-punk-documentarian-julien-temple-273-body-image-1420461580.jpg' id='15416']

How did you come across the Clash?
Well I knew Joe Strummer from the squats in West London, or, rather, I knew of him. He knew of me because there was one house that bizarrely still had milk delivered to its doorstep among all these squats. So, if you were up late or hadn't gone to bed, you could always find a bottle of milk for your tea. I would meet Joe Strummer approaching this doorstep and either he got there before me or I got there before him. So we were aware of each other. I also knew his band. I used to go and see them at the Elgin pub in Notting Hill.

[body_image width='1024' height='768' path='images/content-images/2015/01/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/05/' filename='an-interview-with-punk-documentarian-julien-temple-273-body-image-1420463035.jpg' id='15428'] Still from The Clash: New Year's Day 1977 (Julien Temple, 2014)

How do you remember him?
He was kind of a hippy at that point. I next saw him outside the 100 Club in Oxford Street at the Punk Festival with the Pistols, and he was standing there with short, bleached hair like Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar—like, too much bleach on his head—and I thought: He's this hippy guy, he's never going to make it. I didn't think he could possibly pull off being like the Sex Pistols. But then we went downstairs where the Clash played a gig and he was extraordinary.

Your film about them aired for the first time on New Year's Day this year. Why only now? After so much time?
I was allowed for a while to film the Clash in that autumn of 1976 up until early 1977, and then I was told by their manager that I couldn't, that I had to choose between the Sex Pistols or the Clash. Bernie [ Rhodes] was like that. He'd issue ultimatums. I'd filmed them for six weeks rehearsing and working up their songs, and then they were on the Anarchy Tour with the Pistols and he wouldn't let me carry on filming. There's also the fact that I'd filmed on a really early reel-to-reel video thing—you wound the tape on yourself and it was on your shoulder as you were filming, so it's a really funky quality, shall we say.

So the whole thing was aborted. I've had the footage lying around for 40 years. It's a unique thing because it's the last film artifact of British punk that hasn't been seen. It's an interesting insight into that period of time, before punk broke. It's been very nice to be able to finally make something of it. Especially as this is the time of year that Joe died. So really, it's dedicated to him.

Watch The Clash: New Year's Day 1977 on BBC iPlayer

Follow Amelia on Twitter.

Li Wenjing, a 24-year-old full-time bodyguard, demonstrates wushu (Chinese martial arts) at a five-star resort run by her employer on the outskirts of Beijing. All photos by the author

Wearing a form-fitting black leather jacket with studded shoulders, leather pants, and two-inch-high platform boots, Li Wenjing looked more like a B-movie assassin than an undercover bodyguard. The 24-year-old former shadowboxing champion was patrolling her home base, a five-star resort run by her employer in the eastern suburbs of Beijing. As I approached her, bathrobe-clad patrons shuffled from their rooms to the sauna, and a muzak rendition of Simon & Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence" echoed on loop through the marble lobby.

"When I'm with my client at home, I can dress a little more casual," she remarked of her cyberpunk get-up, her hair pulled into a high ponytail. "Out at galas or other functions, I dress more feminine. I present myself as a secretary so no one realizes I'm a bodyguard."

After I met Li I found myself looking through photos of the all-female Amazonian Guards of flamboyant Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi. The group served as the late leader's protectors as well as his captive harem and garnered attention worldwide. In China today, newspaper spreads and click-bait blog posts featuring images of bikini-clad local bodyguards-in-training have caused a similar reaction.

But it isn't the sex factor that's made female bodyguards so popular. With more than 2 million millionaires in China—the second-highest concentration of millionaires behind the US—new-moneyed entrepreneurs, actors, and other members of the elite have begun to seek out private bodyguard services since private security firms became legalized in 2010. Valued as secret weapons, female bodyguards are regarded as innocuous protectors who can disguise themselves as assistants or dance partners. Even more so, wealthy female clients prize these defenders for their ability to keep close by at all hours of the day without provoking salacious rumors.

Ms. Guo, who hosts an antique-collecting show on China Central Television, shares this sentiment. She employs bodyguards from Yunhai Elite Security, a training center in Beijing, on a part-time basis. "A bodyguard is indispensable—even more so than a makeup artist or assistant," she said. In the condo complex where Guo lives in Beijing's northern suburbs, vacant storefronts still await occupants, but the mock-up signage for a "Jamay Choo" footwear boutique and "Y-Eleven" convenience store attest to the property developer's Westernized aspirations. "This is the best time in China's history, but it's also the worst time," Guo told me. "I want to believe that every person is beautiful and good, but I'm not that naive."

In response to the rising demand, a young crop of female bodyguards, many barely out of college, have flocked to training schools like Yunhai to perfect their fighting skills and etiquette. They're enticed by high salaries and the opportunity to establish a future removed from the instability of martial arts competitions and the tedium of underpaid office work.

Li, the bodyguard, first came to Yunhai in 2010 as a veteran martial arts competitor looking for a way to put her college-level fight training to use. "I wanted to achieve my full potential," she told me. "If I were just a regular white-collar worker, I'd have no platform for that. And the money turned out to be good." After completing her training, Li started working for Yunhai, which also serves as a private security firm catering to wealthy Chinese and visiting dignitaries. Today, she makes about 40,000 yuan ($6,500) a month, an enviable wage roughly ten times the average monthly urban salary in China.

Ma Zeng, a student at Yunhai Elite Security, practices disarming a would-be attacker.

The Yunhai training school is a small compound not far from the Beijing airport. When I visited, I was greeted by Xin Yang, the school's president and a former Chinese military martial arts instructor, who'd agreed to give me a tour. With 20-odd fresh-faced students, three of them girls, living in dorms on site, it reminded me of a high school retreat. The padded training area was flanked by computer-generated images of G.I. Joe characters and buxom video-game heroines. Stacks of Chinese cabbage were drying outside in the cold air, to be turned into traditional northeastern-style pickles served as a condiment at mealtime.

Students at Yunhai apply to the school and must be selected to join the bodyguard program. They're responsible for paying for room and board, but the instruction comes for free. Regular training consists of an early-morning three-mile run followed by punching drills, kickboxing, and wushu sparring. In the afternoon, trainees practice drills such as how to safely lead a client into and out of a car.

The group goes through instruction together, though there's a wide range of skill levels. For this reason, the duration of the training program varies from student to student. Many have only recently arrived at Yunhai and will continue practicing for one year.

On the day that I visited Yunhai, trainees were being taught how to subdue and immobilize attackers armed with everything from prop daggers to AK-47 assault rifles. An instructor, Lu Qingxin, demonstrated the necessary technique to take control of a cleaver-wielding aggressor and force him to slit his own throat.

Later, the sparring area partially cleared of mats, I watched two of the school's female trainees teeter in three-inch heels as Ding Jia, an etiquette teacher, instructed them in how to maintain a poised, upright posture. "Learning to walk like this is a necessary part of the job," reasoned Ma Zeng, a 20-year-old, rail-thin, rosy-cheeked trainee who used to work in a textile factory. "It's about showing basic respect to the client."

Violent crime is comparatively rare in China, in part because access to guns is so difficult. "In Chinese law, no person is allowed to carry weapons, especially not bodyguards," Xin told me. "Without weapons, you need to have good kung fu, observational skills, defense techniques, and fast reaction times in the face of danger."

But some Yunhai bodyguards do carry one weapon, a "self-defense pen" designed by Xin himself. Made out of black aluminum with a sculpted point at one end, the tool is a glorified shank and looks like it could easily puncture vital organs. "It's also a massager!" Xin enthused, prodding the end of the pen into a stress-release pressure point on my hand to demonstrate.

As training continued, I watched Ma practice unrelenting punches on a male teammate, releasing a terse shout with each blow as her adversary struggled to keep his padded hands up. The days are long, the training exhausting, and I asked Ma why anyone would choose this as a career. "I feel very proud when I can protect my client and make her feel safe, because it's a demonstration of my abilities," she told me. "It means my sweat, my effort, was not in vain."

Watch the documentary on these female bodyguards, part of our VICE Reports series, coming soon.

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An MRI scan of the brain. Image via Helmut Januschka

This story originally appeared on VICE UK.

Our understanding and awareness of depression has, thankfully, evolved some way beyond the old-fashioned, "Pull yourself together" response. Most now know that it's a multi-faceted, shape-shifting, and frequently debilitating condition that transcends race, sex, and creed. But we still don't know exactly why some become depressed and some don't.

We know that people may be genetically predisposed to depression and anxiety disorders. We also know that specific life events may trigger depressive episodes in those who have previously been the picture of mental health. But so far we've been unable to identify one single, definitive catalyst. However, new research suggests that, for some people, depression may be caused by something as simple as an allergic reaction. A reaction to inflammation—a product of the body, not the mind.

George Slavich, a clinical psychologist at the University of California in Los Angeles, is one of an increasing number of scientists who believe we need to be looking at our physiology to better understand depression—that, perhaps, it's not all in the head. "I don't even talk about it as a psychiatric condition any more," he told the Guardian. "It does involve psychology, but it also involves equal parts of biology and physical health."

The thesis is simple: Everyone feels like shit when they're sick. That ennui we feel when we're unwell—listlessness, lack of enthusiasm, troubled sleep, tearfulness, and a general feeling of wading through tar—is apparently known among psychologists as "sickness behavior." Our bodies are pretty intelligent, see—they behave this way so that we stop, lie still, and let our system fight whatever infection of virus has us croaking for Gatorade on the couch.

These kinds of emotional responses are also typical of depression, though. So, scientists are asking: If sick people feel and act a lot like depressed people, might there be a link?

Yes, basically. It's all about inflammation—that clever red siren we have in our immune system that lets the body know something is wrong and it needs to be fixed. Proteins called cytokines cause inflammation and flick the brain's "sickness" switch—i.e. make us sad and still. Cytokines skyrocket during depressive episodes and, in those with bipolar disorder, halt in remission. The fact that "normal," healthy people can become temporarily anxious or depressed after receiving an inflammatory vaccine—like typhoid—lends further credence to the theory. There are even those who think we should re-brand depression altogether as an infectious disease.

As someone who has experienced two major, debilitating episodes of depression that were both linked to illness, surgery, and painful recovery, it makes sense. When I was recovering from a bowel operation two years ago, my physiological and mental discomfort became one and the same; the pain around my stitches was the same shade as the silent, foggy scream of nothingness and vertigo in my head.

Being physically unable to do much, over time, led to a near-complete inability to function mentally and do anything other than obsessively watch Friends reruns and nibble crackers. My thoughts got stuck in loops of, You're never going to come out of this, and, It's not just your body that's fucked now—it's your head," and it took intensive CBT coupled with anti-depressants to come out of it both times. When things flare up now, the fear creeps in on a hair trigger, a reminder that, when I am ill, I have a two-fold fight on my hands.

On the one hand, the theory linking physical illness and depression is encouraging. Carmine Pariante, a Kings College psychiatrist who is quoted in the Guardian report, says that we're between five and ten years away from a blood test that can measure levels of inflammation in depressed people. If both Pariante's estimate and the inflammation-depression theory are correct, we could potentially be just five years from an adequate "cure" for depression.

But if the theory gains more weight, it's possible that it could have negative consequences. As Nick Haslam, professor of psychology at University of Melbourne points out, it might be wrong to believe that a better understanding of mental illness will automatically lead to "social progress." Believing that a mentally ill person has a deep-rooted, physical defect "may lead us to see them as unpredictable, incurable, and categorically different from the rest of us." So, if we shift the blame from the mind to the body, will the stigma surrounding the mentally ill decrease? Maybe it will. Hopefully it will. But even though there's greater awareness now that depression is a result of a "chemical imbalance" in the brain—i.e. a physical problem—studies have suggested there's been no significant reduction in the stigma that surrounds the mentally ill.

And stigma is important, largely because it has helped create the mental healthcare system at work in this country today. With stories like there being more children hospitalized for self-harming than ever, and the knowledge that our doctors still have antiquated "flag" systems for identifying anorexia in boys, it can feel like we remain stuck in the dark ages. Our general language surrounding mental health doesn't ever feel quite right, either—consider the phrase "nervous breakdown," a pair of words that feel both too sensationalist and reductive to describe an evolving disorder whose myriad symptoms can include insomnia, rigid anxiety, panic, intense gut discomfort, weight loss, total lack of libido, and body tremors.

While there are certainly many other physiological causes of inflammation that support the theory—obesity (excess body fat, particularly around the belly, harbors huge amounts of cytokines) being one—it would be naive to suggest that all depression is a side effect of physical illness. For so many of us, day-to-day life is practically booby-trapped with despair; you could argue that we're chronically inflamed all the time. However, at least this new research from people like Slavich is opening up the discussion and revealing the complexities of mental illness. And if the realisation that basically anyone can be mentally ill doesn't make people more sympathetic to mental illness, is there anything that will?

Follow Eleanor Morgan on Twitter.

[body_image width='1000' height='664' path='images/content-images/2014/12/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/29/' filename='tragedy-khadafi-is-still-queensbridges-realest-456-body-image-1419881317.jpg' id='14740']

The year is 1997. New York rap duo Capone-N-Noreaga have just released their seminal street classic, The War Report. The city's hardcore hip-hop faithful loves it. Featured on the album, and considered to be its mastermind, is rapper Tragedy Khadafi. Tragedy, like Capone-N-Noreaga, Nas, and Mobb Deep, hails from the Queensbridge Houses, arguably New York's hip-hop Holy Mecca. He's played a part, either physically or stylistically, in all of their careers. With The War Report, it would seem like he's finally catching his big break. Things can only get better from here.

But somehow, Tragedy Khadafi's career lived up to his first name. In the 2000s, he was besieged by label struggles, legal situations, and personal demons. While he managed to get some albums out, he never quite rose to the prominence that his Queensbridge contemporaries achieved. While any New York hip-hop historian would go nuts over the guy, he seems to have been glossed over by the establishment. It's not for lack of talent—he's notoriously slept-on.

Tragedy Khadafi was born into poverty, to a single, heroin-addicted mother. After gaining hype as a teenager by releasing "Go, Queensbridge" in 1985, coining the term "illmatic" in 1988, and running with Marley Marl and the Juice Crew, he was convicted at 16 on robbery charges and sentenced to prison. In prison, he became a member of the Five-Percent Nation and changed his name to Intelligent Hoodlum. He rose to prominence in the 1990s, but struggled in the 2000s. While he concluded that decade with a jail sentence for selling narcotics, he started this one more productively, dropping albums like Hood Father, Militant Minds, and the most recent one, released on December 16, Pre Magnum Opus.

Tragedy is a man who's lived a full life. He's been to jail and had real shit happen to him but he doesn't glorify it.He's a hip-hop legend, but he hasn't had celebrity distort his experiences or his view of himself. To paraphrase from the documentary about his life—Nas might be Queensbridge's finest, but Tragedy Khadafi is Queensbridge's realest.

To find out more about his career, tribulations, and new album, I walked and talked with the MC around downtown Manhattan.

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ON THE AFTERMATH OF "THE WAR REPORT"

"Of course it was good, receiving recognition for The War Report. It took a lot for us to really put that project together. Once we broke into the game with the answer record to the Dogg Pound's ' New York, New York,' which was 'LA, LA,' our record, things started moving at a faster pace for us. Before that, it seemed slow, it was grueling at times. But we always kept that focus and that belief that things were going to happen. So to see our work be compensated by recognition, especially from New York City, our hometown, it felt excellent.

"I was getting a lot of attention. I'd be going to the supermarket to buy milk for my newborn son and people would be stopping me for autographs. Honestly, I didn't really like it. Anybody that knows me, they know I like to kind of be low. I like to be like an enigma, a mystery to people.

"Eventually, I had to move out of Queensbridge and into Jersey City. I had an incident in Queensbridge where some dudes came to rob me. I got cut very badly in my arm and in my head. I took my aunt's advice, who had been telling me for months that I should move out. I had the money to move out, but my mentality at that time was 'Stay in the Bridge, keep it true to the Bridge.'

"Unfortunately, when you making a name for yourself and things start clicking, you're going to [face] jealousy. Any time you trying to make a mark, you're going to have people who come at you with that negative energy. So once I moved out of the Bridge, it was a hard transition for me, because I was so used to having those elements around me, and drawing energy from it, musically."

ON DINNER WITH RICHARD BRANSON

"After The War Report was released, I was signed to Richard Branson's label, Virgin, working on my album Against All Odds . This was around 1999. I actually sat down and had dinner with Richard Branson. It was amazing. Richard Branson was like the illest dude in the world because he's a billionaire yet he never spoke about money. Any time he made reference to money, it was more or less as a resource. And I noticed that immediately between people who had real money as opposed to people who were just hood rich. People who are hood rich, they're always talking about money. But people who have real wealth, they talk about resources and ideas.

"We didn't go to a fancy restaurant or anything, we went to some little burger joint right around Broadway and West Fourth. And no one even really noticed him. And I'm like, 'Wow, this is one of the richest dudes in the world right here.' We sat in there for a few hours just talking and I absorbed it all.

"Someone like that is in a totally different world, financially and status-wise. After that I didn't really see him too much, but I got enough out of the conversation and just being in his company to last me a lifetime.

ON FRIENDSHIPS WITH IRV GOTTI AND KENNETH "SUPREME" MCGRIFF

"There were some other people like that, high-status, that I was friends with. Of course there was Russell Simmons, who I gained a lot of wisdom from. Also Lyor Cohen. I met Lyor around the same time because I was working real closely with Ja Rule and Irv Gotti. Irv Gotti actually got me on the How to Be a Player soundtrack after they heard 'Thug Paradise.' I heard Jay-Z actually stopped the mastering session just to get 'Thug Paradise' on there.

"Another memorable meeting I had was with Kenneth 'Supreme; McGriff, the one who's been incarcerated. Very intelligent guy. He gave me a lot of good advice. Sadly he got caught up in a situation with the federal government... I was just hurt to see such a great mind have to go through so much trials and tribulations.

"One of the most meaningful life lessons I ever had ones came from Kenneth. It basically came down to, 'If you can't be used, then you're useless.' And not in the way where you take advantage of people or allow yourself to be taken advantage of, but more so in the way that we learn to be of value to each other. And taking that in a more positive way, it's about adding on and advancing each other in life, instead of just having these idle relationships."

ON BEING TORTURED AS A TEENAGER

"Way back, when I was a kid, I had been recording and working with Marley Marl and the Juice Crew. And Marley kept telling me to stay focused and hold on. And it was hard to do that when you're the oldest of five children, and you got to be the man of the house and help feed your brothers and sisters. So half of my life was recording at that time, and half of it was trying to get money the best way I could and survive.

"I wound up doing a robbery. The people whose spot I ran up in, they found out it was me. They ran up on me, they kidnapped me and tortured me for two days. They beat me up, burned me with cigarette butts. You know, sucka shit. After that they threw me in the East River. I couldn't swim either. Yeah.

"I don't even know what I thought during those two days. In my mind, I was just trying to ignore the pain, stay focused, hold on, and just believe that I was going to make it out of there.

"I just remember waking up on the rocks. When I realized where I was, I crawled my way through the park and into the street and passed out there. A car almost hit me. The car wound up summoning the ambulance and I wound up going to the hospital."

ON WATCHING HIS SON FALL OUT THE WINDOW

"Another crazy experience that changed my life was when my son fell out the window. This is around 2002. My son's mother had to work, and I had to keep an eye on him. He was about two years old. And I have a song called 'Crying on the Inside,' which basically breaks down the whole incident, word-for-word.

"I was cooking and I let the grease in the pain get hot. I wound up opening the windows and he was in front of the television because I put Stuart Little on. And I thought he'd be fine. Next thing I know, a little girl came running up the stairs, knocking on the door. She was like, 'Sir, do you have a baby?' When she said that, my heart just fell out on the floor.

"I ran down the stairs and there he was on the concrete. That's a three story fall. And I lost my mind. I literally lost my mind.

"It was funny because when that happened, me and his mother, obviously our relationship deteriorated, because she blamed me at first. Which was only right—now when I look back at it, I can't even be mad at her for the anger she felt. But there was a lot on me at the time. I had been going through an attempted murder charge, my mother was dying of HIV, AIDS. I was having a lot of money issues. I wound up having to sell my home and move back to the Queensbridge Projects to help my family and basically help my defense.

"Right after that, if you look at that time period, that's when my whole music career went void. Because I didn't even have the motivation to even create anything.

"I just started drinking, drugging, keeping myself numb. I couldn't look at my son. And the ironic thing about it is, all he had was a hairline fracture. But for me to see him on the ground like that, I had to get therapy, because when I saw him, my mind registered that he was dead. I could never get past that."

ON DEALING WITH TRAUMA

"After me and my son's mother broke up, I got in another relationship. It wasn't really good for the both of us. Sometimes two people could love each other and they could both be good people but be toxic to each other.

"During that relationship, and just going through the whole thing with my son, I kind of went on a path of self-destruction. And basically devalued myself in a lot of ways. Music was so far from my mind at that time... I didn't even think about music anymore.

"I got back into a certain kind of lifestyle that wasn't healthy. Putting myself in dangerous situations. And a lot of people didn't understand that, a lot of people looked at it like, 'He's throwing his career away,' but a lot of people aren't walking in my shoes and don't know the situations I was in outside of music.

"It's just like if a man fought in Vietnam. If he was in active duty and he was in battle, and he made it out, he's going to have scars. Mental, emotional scars. Some call it post-traumatic stress.

"Unfortunately, there's not a real clinical categorized disease for going through the struggle of life in the hood, but it's similar to going through a war, because you suffer stress traumatically. And the same way you come from a war with scars, you'll come from that particular type of life with scars."

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ON GOING BACK TO PRISON

"In 2007, I ended up catching a weapons and drug trafficking charge and getting sentenced to some time in prison.

"Prison was extremely hard. I mean, I was respected tremendously in there because of what I represent to this life and to those that go through that struggle. But after having a recognized level of success and then going back into the system, it was very humbling.

"But the thing that people love about me and my lyrics, they don't come at an easy price. My lyrics and my message come from life experience. I'm battle tested. I speak this way because I've lived this way."

ON DEALING WITH ADVERSITY

"I mean, all these trials and tribulations that I've had, it gives me the fuel I need to keep going. Someone once told me, 'Yo, if you can't hold on, hang on.' In other words, hang on for dear life for life. That's what I keep in my mind.

"I was also blessed to have people around me who kept reaching for me. You know, somebody once told me, 'A true comrade is someone who sings your song back to you after you forget it.' Luckily I had people who kept reminding me of who I was, who kept trying to get me back into the studio. Phantom, my brother, my stepfather, a lot of different people. I can't even think of everyone who was a real blessing in my life who, even when I fell and slipped and went back into my little dark hole, they still kept reaching for me.

"And gradually I began to come out of it. This was a period from 2002 all the way until 2011, after I got out of jail. And today, I can honestly say I'm out of that hole." [body_image width='800' height='800' path='images/content-images/2014/12/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/29/' filename='tragedy-khadafi-is-still-queensbridges-realest-456-body-image-1419881709.jpg' id='14743']

ON HIS NEW ALBUM

"It was great to make it. It came at a time when I got the fighter in my spirit back. Like my dad said, you've never had a fight until you've fought for your life. And now I'm at a point where I'm fighting for my life, not in a negative way, but I'm fighting for my life to make my mark. It's not so much for money, but I don't want to leave this planet and my own self undone.

"It's funny because my younger brother Castro was like, 'I'm proud of you. Because the man I see before me is the same kid who was fighting to get into the Juice Crew.' And I was like, 'Yo that's exactly how I feel right now.'

"I called my album Pre Magnum Opus because I look at my life as a great work. Pre, that's Latin for before. So this is for my fans, my friends, my family, while I finish up my magnum opus, the magnum opus being my life. People look at someone's magnum opus and they say, 'Oh, that's the greatest work.' No, I'm looking at life as being the greatest work within itself.

"Everyone should look at their lives the same way. Your life itself is your great work. You are of value. And that's what I lost along the way, somewhere in my life. I forgot the value of my own life. So in my own way, I'm trying to tell everyone, value your life. You are your own greatest work."

Follow Zach Schwartz on Twitter.

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There are seven days in a week. Photo via Flickr user Joe Lanman

Back in 2008, a user on a popular bodybuilding forum had a question. He wanted to know if it was too much to do a full-body workout every other day, or, as he put it "four to five times a week." While the safety factor was addressed almost immediately, the query spawned five pages of heated debate over that "four or five times a week" bit. How many days, the bodybuilders collectively tried to figure out, are really in a week?

Unlike other online math-related debacles that are quickly resolved, the hashing-out of this one wasn't pretty. There was debate over whether or not Sunday is a day and arguments about how to count days that verged on the philosophical. Eventually it devolved into the bros calling each other fat and just giving up.

So how many days are in a week? How does one really work out every other day, when, like, two is an even number and seven is odd? Are there a bunch of dudes out there trying to squeeze in .5 of a workout? Who is looking out for them?

To settle the mater, we decided to call a bunch of renowned mathematicians to get their takes. Our hope was to put to rest a debate that had been raging in the minds of roid-ragers since 2008.

Unfortunately, though, it didn't work out as well as we thought. Turns out people who have spent decades researching things like hyperbolic geometry don't like to be cold-called and asked if Sunday is a "real day." Lots of mathematicians didn't pick up. Others, probably assuming it was some sort of prank, hung up. Here's a sample interaction from a nice woman who at least listened politely to our spiel before declining to be helpful whatsoever. She actually sounded kind of scared:

VICE: If you were to tell someone a workout plan that involved working out every other day, how many days per week is that?
Maureen Armstrong, mathematics professor at Harvard University: I'm sorry, we can't help you. I have to go. Bye-bye.

Another professor at an Ivy League school claimed she was busy and in a meeting (a likely story). Although these professors like to sit around and talk all day about things like string theory, they seem averse to answer the questions that plague the common man. What good is becoming an expert when you'll only converse with other experts? That's like scoffing at an adult illiterate who's struggling with Hop on Pop because someone gave you PhD funding to write a dissertation on Anna Karenina that no one will ever look at again. What happened to giving back to the less fortunate? Damn.

Regardless, we were committed to getting the bros an answer, so we linked up with Joanna Nelson, a post-doc student at Columbia who specializes in symplectic and contact topology. I have no idea what that means for her, but for our purposes it meant she's a really smart math lady who could settle this argument once and for all.

"It would make sense to talk about working out in two week intervals, because you can't evenly divide a week by two," she told me. "So I would say over two weeks you'd want to exercise seven times. You'd have to look at it in two-week chunks to make the schedule." She also added, for the record, that a full week goes Monday through Sunday. So there you have it, meatheads. You're fucking welcome.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Thumbnail photo via Flickr User Ryan Melaugh

We have a "first time" for everything. The things we do in our lives now, no matter how mundane, had to start somewhere. That's what "Firsts" is all about. Looking back, and remembering moments in our lives that we often try to forget.

The debut episode was about the most obvious "first" there is: having sex. This second episode, however, took a turn. I wanted to get a little more heartfelt, and force my comedian friends to open a bit. So I had us talk about our first heartbreak.

I know this might sound like a total bummer, but my co-host, VICE Associate Editor Dave Schilling along with comedian Dave Ross (Terrified, Drunk History) managed to turn heartbreak into a laughing matter. We delved into the people that broke our fragile souls for the very first time, and even go on some lovely tangents about dating, toddlers, and Donkey Kong Country. Listen to the sheer and utter agony for yourself. Reflect on your own first heartbreak, and thank me later.

Listen to Dave Ross's podcast, Terrified, on the Nerdist Network and follow him on Twitter.

In Los Angeles? Come see Alison and Dave at the Entitlement live show on Wednesday, January 7, at the Grand Star in Chinatown at 8:30 PM. Cheap drink specials and tickets are only $5. Headliners include Kyle Kinane, David Koechner, and Andy Kindler!

Podcast produced and mixed by Jorge Reyes

Music by LA Font

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