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Illustration by Meike Zane

Fuck me, people like drawing Benedict Cumberbatch. And they—both the artists and their artwork—are extraordinary. Such is the popularity of "The Internet's Boyfriend" that, within a few seconds of searching, you discover there are many, many, many drawings of him online, composed by some of his most ardent fans.

Neither the man nor his fame needs much by way of introduction. Cumberbatch, along with Eddie Redmayne, is being spoken of as a likely recipient of Best Actor at the upcoming Oscars for his role as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. But who, exactly, are the CumberArtists?

They are almost exclusively self-taught. Generally they are young. Most of them are female. Some are hardcore fans, and some are artists who tackle other subjects but have decided to focus on Cumberbatch after noticing that their drawings of him tend to be more popular on the web.

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Illustration by Nicóla Pace

At age 50, Nicóla Pace isn't your stereotypical CumberArtist. She lives in Nebraska and works for an independent record store. When I speak to her, she is not alone in upbraiding me about any assumptions I or the media might have harbored toward the CumberCollective—namely that they are obsessive and lead fantasy lives in which they imagine themselves married to the man.

It's true. We dehumanize "fandom." There are fantastically talented and interesting people operating fan Twitter accounts and drawing fan pictures, and to portray them as cyber zombies baying for Cumberblood is to ignore the elements of the narrative that are so intriguing. And to suggest that all of them are fixated on Cumberbatch only because they dream of having sex with him is, if my interviewees are to be believed, far from the truth.

An artist from San Francisco who goes by the Tumblr name sleepingexplorer says that "so-called fangirls have really been taking it on the chin in the media lately." A piece by Jada Yuan forNew York magazine, she says, made much of the "rabid female fans" narrative, and, "while that might make for a little click-bait, it's disgusting, sexist, un-feminist, and (largely) inaccurate. Amazing fan communities are formed around men that wear numbered shirts and chase oddly-shaped balls through the mud. It shouldn't be thought of as so weird that they might form around an actor or a television show."

Others feel similarly. "I do not draw fanfic porn or fantasy art, I draw portraits," says Nicóla.

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Illustration by Nicóla Pace

The artwork of the CumberCollective can be sublime, some of it almost photographically accurate. I did a double take when I first saw one of Nicóla's pieces because I thought it was a photograph. The piece is her largest portrait, 13 by 26 inches, and took her over a month to complete. "Because of the size," she says, "I decided to use multiple mediums to achieve the finished look. I used Prismacolor Premier color pencils, graphite pencils, and acrylic paint."

Like others, Nicóla considers the eyes to be crucial: "If you don't get the eyes correct, it will never look right and the drawing will suffer. I knew the clothing would take the longest to do. I decided to use black acrylic paint to create the shadows and creases in the folds, then I went over it with pencil for color and detail."

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Illustration by Rachel Gray

At 24, Rachel Gray is typical in years for a Cumberbatch portraitist, but not typical in training: the high quality of her work is due, in part, to the fact that she has a BA in illustration. Her portrait of Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes in The Empty Hearse, in which he has drawn a tiny mustache onto his face to impersonate a waiter, captures the actor's smile with a remarkable likeness. Gray has taken commissions from people who wanted to be painted into pictures with Cumberbatch, but she has never painted herself into her works of art. "I don't count myself as a besotted fan," she says. "I just have tons of respect for what he does."

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Illustration by Olivia Booth

For some, the art is a form of relaxation, while for others it's part of an ambition to become professional. "It allows me to meet wonderful people," says Cécile Pellerin, who lives in northwest France. Performance student Olivia Booth, 18, tells me: "I do what I do because both art and Benedict give me great joy as an artistic individual, combining both my love for acting and art into one." Sleepingexplorer, a professional artist, claims that her "fandom-related works" are principally for practice—as a "vacation," or for the enjoyment that other fans will derive from them.

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Illustration by Georgina Lewis

A 22-year-old theater studies student named Georgina Lewis lives in London and has drawn between 40 and 55 portraits of Cumberbatch and says she has been a fan for about 18 months. Like a few others, it was Sherlock that brought Cumberbatch to her attention, but it was the "real" Benedict that crystallized her fascination. "I saw him in interviews and realized how much of a gentleman he was; very caring to others around him, fond of his fans, and funny, too."

Is this why women from all corners of the globe spend literally weeks sketching his face?

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Illustration by Clare Newman

"Away from a script, that's when you see Benedict," says Clare Newman, 33, from the Isle of Wight. "Benedict as a person is a passionate, informed, caring person with a really silly side that we see all too often. He's not conventional, not fake, and very much a person you could imagine having a good banter and a pint with down at the pub."

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Illustration by Meike Zane

Some have been lucky enough to meet him, and several have had their pieces signed by the man himself. Meike Zane, whose work is truly extraordinary, has a story that would be the envy of many within the CumberCollective.

"I've met Benedict twice now, and he's a really nice guy," says the 24-year-old from Holland. "He recognized me before I could introduce myself, because he had been shown my drawings before. He actually asked—about an ink drawing I had done of Tom Hiddleston as Loki—if Tom had seen it. Benedict then asked if he could take it with him to give to Tom. I agreed, and when I saw Benedict again he confirmed he gave the piece to Tom three days after we had met."

Cécile Pellerin is only 17 and has been drawing—every day if she can—since the age of nine. When asked about Cumberbatch's appeal, Cécile focuses on his chameleon-like ability to disappear into his roles. Surprisingly few say outright that he is attractive, preferring to dwell on other aspects of his character.

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Illustration by Cécile Pellerin

"He's highly intellectual, talented, and respectful, and I feel like it's becoming rarer for people to become famous or well known for that these days," says Rachel Gray. "What I do isn't borne from a desire to be close to him, but he is an interesting subject, aesthetically." Clare Newman says, "There's something incredibly other-worldly about his look—his eyes in particular. Anyone who has been lucky enough to meet him (I've struck gold and met him twice) will know he looks right at you with those aqua galaxies and that's it, you're held."

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Illustration by Rachel Gray

Newman, the sports editor of her local newspaper, and whose Twitter presence is almost exclusively Cumbercentric, tells me that the CumberCollective is an important presence in her life. "I have made friends around the world—more than I could ever have imagined," she says. "Hamlet next year [Cumberbatch will be playing the Danish prince at the Barbican in August 2015] will be the biggest meeting of friends ever."

Follow Ralph Jones on Twitter.

[body_image width='1024' height='683' path='images/content-images/2015/01/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/06/' filename='the-ceo-of-your-company-has-already-earned-more-than-you-744-body-image-1420557489.jpg' id='15811']The fattest cat of all. Photo via Sean Davis

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Bad news, you fucking worthless drones: By the time you read this, the average FTSE 100 (a list of top companies listed on the London Stock Exchange) CEO has earned $38,360 this year. No, hold on: $38,374. Actually, if you factor in the time this will take to get subbed and uploaded and for me to find a picture of a white dude in a monocle and a suitably Monopoly-esque top hat, you may as well factor another grand onto all that. Let's assume you're reading this early evening and call it a neat $39,000. Yeah. That much.

That's because today is "Fat Cat Tuesday," a thoroughly depressing new milestone that High Pay Centre has come up with to pseudo-celebrate the fact that today—as in, the second day of employment for basically anyone working an average 9-to-5 office shift—marks the day that CEOs will generally eclipse their employees' average earnings ($41,260 is the current UK figure) for the year. In two days .

Think about it like this: in a month where you are—and this is an example being made up entirely at random, and not at all connected to anyone's real life—actively avoiding phone calls from your landlord about where the rent is, a FTSE 100 CEO will earn enough to buy an averagely priced flat in one of London's most expensive boroughs in about two weeks.

Or, to give another example, if you are packing your own bleak little white bread and corned beef sandwiches to take to work with you every day between now and the 31st, your average FTSE 100 CEO has already earned enough to eat a slap-up meal with drinks, dessert, and a generous tip at the Chiltern Firehouse every single day for the rest of the year by about 10 AM this morning.

If you're into depressing math, have this: When the think tank made similar Fat Cat Tuesday calculations last year, they found FTSE 100 chiefs made an average of $6.5 million—in 2013, for which the latest set of CEO pay figures are available, they made on average $7.2 million, an across-the-board rise of about $700,000. In the same period, the average UK salary went up just $300, from around $41,000 to $41,300. But then so did train fares, and energy prices, and the average basket of goods. A Freddo Frog currently costs a quarter in Sainsbury's . Do those fat cats in their ivory towers care about the cost of Freddo Frogs? They don't even feel the cost of Freddo Frogs. Since you started reading this they have earned enough to buy 1,172 of them.

"Fatcat Tuesday highlights the problem of unfair pay in the UK," said the High Pay Centre's Deborah Hargreaves. "For top bosses to rake in more in two days than their staff earn in a year is clearly unfair, disproportionate, and doesn't make social or economic sense."

What's the solution? According to Deborah, politicians. "Politicians need to do more to stand up to big business and the super-rich," she said. "We must also give workers the power to force employers to share pay more fairly throughout their organization." So: decent unions and the impossible dream of politicians who don't live in the pocket of big corporations. That is our only hope.

These Fat Cat/average salary comparisons only apply to those earning above and beyond a living wage, though; an Office for National Statistics survey last year estimated that 583,000 Britons were working zero-hour contracts, with many of them working two separate zero-hour jobs to cover costs. It's thought there are around 1,386,000 minimum wage jobs in the UK, for which those over the age of 21 earn $10 per hour. And that's not to mention all the temporary minimum wage jobs taken in desperation that exploit a "probation period" loophole to pay below minimum wage for the first 20 hours of employment. Based on working eight-hour days, five days a week, straight-up no-messing minimum wage workers would earn $18,378 before tax each year, or "about ten hours of FTSE 100 CEO pay."

How to make politicians make this a priority? Making minimum-wage or public-sector job experience a requirement for anyone running for Parliament is one idea ; a more-than-$12-an-hour-by-2020 minimum wage pledge would also be useful; and more robust tax legislation for corporations would also help keep CEO salaries down, if only a little. Until then, enjoy your corned beef sandwiches and heart-attack landlord phone calls. HAPPY JANUARY.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

Since December 20, the NYPD has been locked into a sort of cold war with the mayor of New York City. That's when two officers were assassinated inside their patrol car in Brooklyn—a targeted killing that many cops blamed on Mayor Bill de Blasio, who said after the Eric Garner grand jury decision that he worried about his biracial son's interactions with police.

First, officers turned their backs on de Blasio when he came to speak at both Wenjian Lee and Rafael Ramos's funerals. More importantly, they basically stopped making arrests—last week, the cops only wrote about 8.5 percent of the criminal summonses they wrote during the same period last year. Although the president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association—a.k.a. the police union—has denied that cops are taking it easy, the numbers don't lie. Cops feel betrayed, and they're taking it out on their boss by letting the small stuff slide.

But as a police shooting Monday night revealed, city cops aren't totally reneging on their duties. Two off-duty officers were shot in the Bronx while pursuing a pair of robbery suspects. The NYPD confirmed to VICE that Andrew Dossi, who is 30, and Aliro Pellerano, 38, are still in stable condition. (Bloomberg News previously reported that Dossi, who was shot in the arm and back, was critical.)

The officers were part of a five-person plainclothes team in the 46th Precinct that was about to end its shift, the New York Times reports. Rather than clock out and go home, they decided to investigate. At around 10:30 PM, they approached two suspects who were outside a Chinese Restaurant on Tiebout Avenue and East 184th Street. The suspects opened fire and later carjacked a white Camaro to get away, but at least two suspects have been taken into custody, the NYPD confirmed to VICE (city tabloids are reporting three).

"These officers did something that was extraordinarily brave this evening," Mayor de Blasio said in a statement around 2:30 AM this morning. He added that the two went beyond the call of duty. Some say that the injured officers refute the claim of a policing slowdown—and that their actions suggest an easing of tensions between cops and everyone else.

Still, it's too early to say the police are ready to throw in the towel on this whole chilled out experiment. It's one thing to go after violent criminals and another to issue the quality-of-life citations that NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton insists are behind the city's incredibly low crime rates. Bratton came to visit Andrew Dossi three times, and brought around the mayor along the second time. The wounded cop's father told the New York Post—the most reliable pro-cop outlet in town—that the injured officer wasn't too pleased with the visit.

"He deals with some crappy people every day and [is] getting no support, come on," Joe Dossi told the paper. "These are the guys in the trenches dealing with anything and everything."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user MortAuPat

There may be no greater American taboo than neo-Nazism. It falls into the same tier of universally accepted evils as infanticide or child molestation. Institutional, garden-variety racism is an ordinary evil, but thoroughbred white power is far more profound. It's enough to turn the term "skinhead," originally a scene for roughhouse kids nursed on rocksteady and ska, into a term worthy of universal, Kanye West–ordained derision.

You probably know the gist already. Some skinheads aren't racist, but hate remains the lifeblood of plenty. For those skins who repent, who repudiate their white-power ideals, achieving any sort of atonement is a lengthy journey. That's as it should be: A community dedicated to the eradication of alleged inferiors ought to be treated with a healthy disrespect. But many former Nazi wannabes are dads and husbands now, their corrosive racism left in the mists of some ugly teenage years. As backward as it might seem, it's hard not to feel some small measure of sympathy for those whose lives are stuck in an endless cycle of remorse.

It's a thought that reminds me of a picture of a semicircle of British neo-Nazi skins, heads hung in despair, as they digest the death of Ian Stuart Donaldson. Donaldson was the lead singer and songwriter of Skrewdriver, one of the ugliest and most prolific of the wave of white-power skin bands throughout the 80s and early 90s. He died in a car accident in 1993, provoking a litany of postmortem tribute pieces. His music was hateful, ignorant, and horrifically naive, but there's something odd about all those pained faces. United in destruction, but still united—a faint echo of humanity in the corners of their eyes.

Can they be saved? Should we even try? And no matter how grave their injustice, is it fair to let a stage of someone's life haunt them forever? For Christian Picciolini and his Life After Hate organization, the answer is no.

Picciolini, after all, was a good kid—or at least that's what he says at the top of every interview. Born to Italian immigrants in ethnically diverse Blue Island, Illinois—a small suburban area outside of Chicago—he didn't come from a racist linage, and mostly kept to himself until he met a man named Clark Martell.

"I was 13 and smoking a joint in an alleyway with this kid I had met in the neighborhood, and then this '71 Firebird comes screaming down the street, and out steps this guy in Doc Martens, braces, and a shaved head," Picciolini recalls. "I'd never seen anything like that before. Most people in America didn't know what a skinhead was at that point.

"I took a drag off this joint and started coughing smoke into his face, and he just smacked me and said, 'My name is Clark Martell and I'm going to save your life.'"

At that time, Martell was the leader of the infamous Chicago Area Skinheads ( CASH). The organization ran a mail-order service called Romantic Violence, which at the time was the only way to get Skrewdriver records in America. Picciolini was infatuated with the 26-year-old's power, politics, and music, and by 1988, at the age of 15, he was a full-blown white-power skinhead.

Picciolini talks about his relationship with Martell like a seduction. This is how a well-meaning teen slowly gets indoctrinated into a world of radical backward politics.

Martell had a cult of personality, from his street proselytizing to his leather jackets, spelling out his ideology in big, bold letters.

"All of a sudden I was part of this cool group. when we'd walk down the streets, people would cross the other way," recalls Picciolini. "Twenty years later I realized what he was telling me wasn't true, but at the time it really made sense."

Martell was also capable of great violence. In 1984, he served a year in jail after firebombing an Hispanic household. In April of 1988, Martell, along with six conspirators, kicked his way into a woman's home and severely beat her before painting a swastika on the walls with her blood. She was a former member of CASH, and had been spotted with a black man on the streets. Martell was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

At the time of Martell's incarceration, Picciolini had gone from enterprising kid hanging with the wrong crowd to CASH's legitimate second-in-command. Simply put, Christian Picciolini was Clark Martell's understudy. At only 15 years old, he found himself in command of one of the most prominent neo-Nazi hate groups in America.

"I inherited the organization, and I started to do what I saw the guys do. I made flyers, set up a PO box, [and] before I knew it I had this army of kids. It seemed like every 13-, 14-, 15-year-old kid in town was either a white-power skinhead or an anti-racist skinhead," reflects Picciolini. "I served as one of the first leaders of the American White Power Movement until I was twenty-one."

Picciolini's resolve wavered as he matured, as he couldn't rationalize why he didn't want his wife and kids to be associated with the group. Eventually, he owned a record store, one of the only ones in the nation selling white-power music, and he credits his diverse patrons for salvation—reminding him that he had a lot more in common with people of color than he thought. He formally buried his beliefs in his early 20s, leaving the movement behind him. Picciolini was only a skinhead for seven years.

Since those days, he's managed bands, he's worked with Threadless and JBTV, he's got two kids and a wife, but he's still unable to escape the guilt. Those seven years are just too heavy. He played in bands called Final Solution before his rebirth, and he knows those records are still being sold today. He preached hate, and although he's never killed anyone, he still feels like there's blood on his hands.

"Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's ugly, sometimes it's no fun, but that's the cross I bear," says Picciolini.

In 2009, Picciolini founded Life After Hate, an outreach/activist group made up of former white-power skinheads. The organization stays in touch with at-risk youth in the Chicago area, keeping them from joining gangs or extremist groups, as well as providing a landing pad for those receding from their angry pasts. It's founded on the principle that we can have empathy, that all is not lost, that everyone can change.

Picciolini tells me that he's seen 40-something KKK members renounce their beliefs, so why not stay optimistic? Don't they need our help? He knows that it's frustrating, but he pleads for us not to give up.

"Getting out was one of the hardest things I've ever gone through and has shaped everything since," says John Harrelson, a former white-power skin from Albuquerque. "My whole identity was skinhead. I had plans to move after high school to prospect for a big national gang, with nothing beyond that."

Harrelson is only 23, and he's certainly still dealing with the shame, but figures like Picciolini helped him envision a future. He needed that compassion to make it through.

"I went to this really good high school and a lot of teachers saw what I was and wanted to kick me out. Luckily, a few of them saw past it and realized I wasn't an evil kid—I was just very angry and insecure," Harrelson tells me. "If they hadn't stuck up for me, I would be screwed right now. I knew a lot of really smart and ambitious skinheads—easily as many as I knew who were scumbags. It's not fair to say that because they've been misled or taken a bad path that we just write them off. That's essentially a death sentence for being a dumb kid, and that's not OK."

Whether or not it deserves to be a death sentence depends on your personal limits of forgiveness, and it's difficult to tell those who clashed with skinheads to bury the hatchet.

"He's only Christian Picciolini now. Back when I first knew him, it was Chris Pikolini and Clark Martell," says Ryan Tallon, who ran with the anti-racist skins in Chicago against CASH in its heyday. "Clark was infamous, and Chris was his pit bull. They were always the bad guys. So years later, when I saw his name in my tattoo shop, I was just like, Fuck. I haven't been in this shit for so long. It was a tense situation for me because we were the guys throwing bricks at the same Klan rallies he was speaking in."

Almost by fate, Tallon found himself tattooing someone he used to be terrified of. They shared war stories—two men diametrically opposed in their youth—mellowing back to the mean in maturity.

"Chris said, 'Man, that was a lifetime ago,' and I was like, 'Yeah, it kinda was, wasn't it?' And he told me that he wasn't like that anymore," Tallon says of Picciolini. "So we kinda hit it off because, you know, I had to readjust to normalcy, too. Us anti-racist guys were just as violent, but on a different playing field. You let it go. It happens across the board. There was something super sincere about him. He was calling shots when we were younger, but he was just as earnest about telling me he wasn't into that stuff anymore. Twenty years is a long time."

Tallon's thesis, as it were, is that young, angry men want to belong—they want power—and sometimes they can end up on the wrong side. He was lucky enough to find himself in a defendable anti-racist position, but Picciolini, that semicircle around Donaldson's grave—they weren't so lucky. Skinhead culture should be a stupid youth movement for antagonistic kids who let their politics get out of hand, but it's not easy explaining that to the people they terrorized.

"I did a lot of apologizing for a lot of years, I did a lot of nasty stuff, but it's a short sliver of your life..." Tallon's voice trails off. "Although he was super good at it, it's still a short sliver."

Follow Luke Winkie on Twitter.

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George Papandreou (left) and overjoyed fan (right)

This post originally appeared on VICE Greece

A couple of days before we waved goodbye to 2014, the Greek Parliament tried and failed to elect a new head of state for the third time. This, according to the country's constitution, means that the country now has to hold an early general election on January 26—the third in five years. Predictably, the rest of the world is now freaking out over how this local political turmoil might affect the European Union and the global financial system.

Greeks traditionally love to waste time discussing and involving themselves in politics, so politicians have in our modern history enjoyed rock-star status. Until recently, the two major rival parties were PASOK and New Democracy—our own versions of the Democrats and Republicans, respectively. However, due to the fact they were in power during much of the lead-up to the economic crisis— not to mention reports of corruption—PASOK gradually lost its luster and gave its place to SYRIZA—the Coalition of the Radical Left.

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A fan raises a flag graced by the portrait of Andreas Papandreou, father of George.

PASOK stands for Panhellenic Socialist Movement, and in 1981 it became the first left-of-center party to win a majority in the Greek Parliament. The founder and leader of the Party was Andreas Papandreou—a powerful but controversial figure in Greek politics. He was also the son of Georgios Papandreou, who served as prime minister in the middle of the last century, and the father of George Papandreou, who continued the family tradition by becoming prime minister in 2009. However, it took George less than a year to lose the confidence of the Greek people due to his severe austerity program as well as the undertaking of a €110 billion ($131 billion) bailout loan from the European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Within a couple of years, that last Papandreou government had resigned and PASOK's power had crumbled like a stale scone. Then, just three days into the new year, George Papandreou founded a new party—the Democrat Socialist Movement. For the unadulterated fans of the Papandreou dynasty this was "the party" of a lifetime. The moment they could finally feel the rush of what it means to have elections in Greece.

Here are some photos from the party in honor of Papandreou's new party.

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Photo via WikiCommons.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

The Department of Health's (DH) recently published guidance on how to handle adults with autism in Britain has revealed a lack of attention to women's special needs.

Released late last year, the report largely ignored the results provided by a survey conducted of over 100 women by Autism Women Matter, claims Monique Blakemore, a member of the campaign group. The survey showed that not only had many women had struggled to get a diagnosis from their GP, but even when they had, they'd been refused referrals for treatment. Of the 62 percent of the women surveyed that had been diagnosed, 29 percent had been forced to go private for treatment that, according to the Guardian, costs between £300 [$455] and £1,500 [$2,275].

The DH survey, which was specially ordered as part of the Autism Strategy Review, revealed that, among other issues, females are referred for an Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) assessment for diagnosis ten times less frequently than their male peers, despite autism being far more common in women than was previously thought.

We spoke to Blakemore, who was herself diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome—a form of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) characterized by social impairment, communication difficulties, and restrictive patterns of behavior—and has two young sons who are both on the autistic spectrum.

VICE: Hi Monica. What did you find was missing in the DH report?
Monique Blakemore: Women are struggling with the lack of training of professionals. The report does say they need to be trained, but that's not enough. They need appropriate training for the different types of autism, not just autism as an umbrella term. Social services' lack of efficiency is also a major issue—parents with autism sometimes have children with similar syndromes and the way they may need help to access the system as autistic, disabled individuals, has not been considered. This is where a lot of autistic women are really struggling to get the right support for themselves and for their children. If the parents can't access care, neither can the children.

What difficulties do autistic people encounter when it comes to healthcare?
In general terms, it can be very difficult to get access to a GP. There are executive difficulties in being able to figure out how to make an appointment amongst competing demands. A lot of them require you to make a telephone call and a lot of autistic people don't feel comfortable using the phone. Or, if you go into adult surgeries, where there are usually a lot of people, it's a social interaction that can be quite hard to navigate.

Is there a problem with autistic women having undiagnosed health issues, then?
Yes. It's thought that autistic women are more likely to get a polycystic ovary syndrome, but yet they have a lower diagnostic rate. Women may also have a poor understanding of their own body and may have never been given the right information about female reproductive health, so they don't know what's normal and what they should be questioning. If they lack that training it may not naturally appear to them that they have a problem. The government needs to make sure these women are given the information they need to understand their bodies, and that young women get the right prevention.

Your survey seemed to highlight a misunderstanding of autistic women.
Yes, women are sometimes wrongly accused or misunderstood by social services. The latter need to have an understanding of how they impact on an autistic family, and of how an autistic family can be different in its way of communicating. A great example of how they might feel is the Letter to a Social Worker we published on our website. People may think a woman is being obstructive, but it may just be a social communication delay related to her autism. Women very much struggle to get these basic, reasonable adjustments of behavior. They are often misjudged or wrongly accused of having a personality disorder, of being difficult, aggressive, or "bitchy." These are disempowering statements. Autistic people are often more likely to be harmed than to harm others.

What made you be part of the Autism Women Matter campaign?
There's a cruel lack of justice for autistic women. They have a lot to offer, but have too many difficulties accessing the same support as non autistic women. It's a sort of double discrimination: being female, and being disabled. Another thing that upsets me is how autistic women are misunderstood when it comes to motherhood. I've heard of cases where children are taken away from the family and put up for adoption—something that would be preventable with the right support. They are not even allowed to access the meeting where experts discuss your children's fate and decide on whether you can keep the children. That is a huge violation of basic women's rights, and of children's right to a family. Everyone knows this is an issue but no one wants to take it on.

How can society contribute to a better understanding of people with autism, do you think?
I think society has a long way to go in accepting differences across all disabilities. The best gift you can give autistic people is not to try and change them, but to accept the way they are and find their strengths.

Follow Alice on Twitter.

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Julian Fantino. Photo via Flickr user Michael Swan

The Prime Minister rung in the new year by appointing Canada's ex-spy chief Richard Fadden as his critically powerful national security advisor, while moving Julian Fantino, a grizzled ex-cop, to oversee military intelligence.

With new powers to collect Canadians' data, new legislation that allows our spooks to operate abroad, and a raft of new government agents on the security and intelligence file—it's a clear signal that 2015 will be Canada's year of the spy.

On Monday, Stephen Harper announced that embattled Veterans Affairs Minister Julian Fantino, lambasted for entirely screwing up his job, was moving back to his old gig, the associate minister for National Defence. While it was characterized as a demotion, his new job might prove to be significantly more important.

Then, on Tuesday, a press release from the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) announced that the Prime Minister had a new National Security Advisor—ex-CSIS boss Richard Fadden.

Normally, staffing changes like that wouldn't be terribly exciting.

But the job that Fantino is returning to isn't the same as the one he left. When he last held the post, his role was mostly to oversee and communicate on military procurement. Now, that job has moved to another office.

The PMO release says that Fantino "will support the Minister of National Defence in the areas of arctic sovereignty, information technology security and foreign intelligence, thus continuing the Government's efforts to defend our values and interests at home and around the world."

While current Defence Minister Rob Nicholson is considered pretty capable on the traditional aspects of the file, he has never fared particularly well when talking publicly about the intelligence side of Canada's military. Even though Nicholson is still the main minister in charge, Fantino may take on some of that workload.

The government has just recently updated the powers of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to allow them to conduct international spying operations. Those changes will certainly expand the powers of the Communication Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), which is run by the Department of National Defence, and conducts NSA-style bulk data collection—a file Fantino will likely become intimately familiar with.

Fadden, meanwhile, was the former head of CSIS. He was shuffled off to oversee the Department of National Defence, perhaps because of the controversy he generated by insinuating that foreign governments were employing spies to conduct political and industrial espionage in Canada.

Not long after, when Tory MP Bob Dechert was allegedly roped into a honeypot scheme by a Chinese state journalist, Fadden's claims took on some weight. Meanwhile, CSIS has warned Chinese hackers were targeting the Canadian government.

Fadden, also, showed effective foresight in a 2010 CBC interview, when he warned Canada's main threats came from cyber warfare and homegrown radicalization.

Also being shuffled is David McGovern, who had been running an overhaul of Canada's border plan, with a focus on improving security at Canada's airports and border crossings. He's now deputy national security advisor, under Fadden.

Fadden's gig falls within the Privy Council Office (PCO)—basically the bureaucracy nerve centre for the government working directly under the Prime Minister coordinating activities from various departments.

PMO spokesperson Jason MacDonald gave VICE a glowing review of Fadden, saying in an email that "he is an experienced, senior public servant with a deep background in a range of departments — like defence, like CSIS, among others — that will be invaluable for someone taking on this role which, as you point out, is an important one."

Fadden's predecessor in the job was Stephen Rigby, who was widely regarded as one of the most important, and most secretive, members of the Harper Government.

For some part of his tenure, Rigby was providing daily security briefings to the Prime Minister, which is no small feat for a boss not known for being people-friendly. Rigby boasted an eight-person staff—easily the biggest in the PCO—who focused on human smuggling, border security, defence, foreign affairs, and, of course, security and intelligence.

Rigby was also known as being about as secretive as the spy shop he worked alongside. Few senior Conservative staffers, even those who deal with security, knew much about Rigby. One of his only public appearances was when he took to a Parliamentary committee to deny that CSEC was secretly grabbing Canadians' data through wifi hotspots at domestic airports.

Meanwhile, Fantino—the ex-top cop for Toronto who was plagued with controversies like pushing the huge security apparatus around the Ontario G8/G20 summit—looks like he's going to be overseeing after CSEC's new powers and dealing with the constant threat of hostile hackers.

The shakeups makes it pretty clear, especially in light of the two terror attacks from October, Harper is seriously beefing up Canada's security and intelligence regime.

"I have been saying that our laws and police powers need to be strengthened in the area of surveillance, detention, and arrest," Harper told the House of Commons after the two attacks. "They need to be much strengthened. I assure members that work, which is already under way, will be expedited."

Ottawa was already planning new intelligence legislation before those attacks—the bill that turned CSIS into a foreign spy operation was already written when Michael Zehaf-Bibeau opened fire in Parliament—but more security legislation is expected when Parliament resumes at the end of January.

With that in mind, it's worth noting that Canada's security oversight regime has been pretty static for the past two decades, with the CSIS oversight body (the Security Intelligence Review Committee) and the CSEC Commissioner both complaining the inherent secrecy and obfuscation defining the two spy bodies is making it hard for them to actually play the role of watchdog.

While both Conservatives and opposition politicians have called for more oversight, the government has, thus far, refused.

Follow Justin on Twitter.

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Traditional Baining fire dancers in Papua New Guinea. Photo courtesy of WikiCommons.

Following reports last year of women and children fleeing torture and immolation by witch hunters in Papua New Guinea, yesterday a government worker in the remote Western Highlands province admitted that the region has a sorcery refugee problem on its hands.

Belief in sorcery is common and longstanding across Papua New Guinea, especially amongst the 80 percent of the seven-million-strong country who still live in rural villages. In 1971, rather than combat or deny these beliefs, the local government passed the Sorcery Act legalizing "white" (good) magic and criminalizing "black" (harmful) witchcraft to encourage locals to resolve their disputes with alleged sorcerers in court rather than via ad hoc accused lynch mobs.

But the killings never really stopped. And back in 2008 they started to become more common and gory, capturing international attention in February 2013 with the brutal public execution of a 20-year-old mother named Kepari Leniata. Despite efforts by the Papuan government to contain them, attacks against vulnerable men and women occur to this day.

In an effort to understand this crisis, VICE reached out to Father Franco Zocca, a long-serving clergyman and scholar in Goroka in the Eastern Highlands Province . The director of the local Melanesian Institute , a cultural research center helping churches, governments, and non-governmental organizations understand and react to regional needs, Zocca has spent much of the past few decades researching and writing extensively on sorcery in rural Papuan society. Over a spotty phone line, Zocca held forth on the role of economic displacement, cultural shifts, and weak governance in seeding and spreading the current witchcraft-related killings and migrations.

VICE: Why are sorcery killings getting so common and violent in Papua New Guinea?
Father Franco Zocca: When you say sorcery-related killings, people—95 percent—think other people were killed by sorcerers. The mentality is always that nobody dies for nothing. There is always a who—either a spirit of somebody or a magician—behind the death.

The problem of this physical killing of the sorcerers is most prominent in the highlands, especially in Simbu among the Kuman speakers . In the other highlands [this violent torture killing wasn't as practiced], but this pattern now is spreading because the Simbu people... because of the poverty of their region, they are spreading around and they are bringing that pattern of accusation, torture, and killing that they did for centuries in their own places.

Some anthropologists, they think that in the past people tended to accuse the spirit of the ancestors. They say that now modern education and missionaries have taken away the fear of the ancestors so now (because the people are not satisfied with knowing the natural causes of sickness) they tend to accuse human beings—living people.

[In] many cases people are using this mentality to get rid of people they want to get rid [of]. People, they wanted to punish them for some reason and then they accuse them of sorcery.

So part of it has to do with the migration of particular groups that have a history of this style of killing, and part of it has to do with people who just want to settle vendettas?
Yes. Also in our research into the cases that appeared over those last six years, we found that even if accusations happened in, say, Port Moresby [the capital], Simbu people were very important [in them]. The accused have to leave and now they're living in settlements there.

One former bishop who was for 50 years a Catholic bishop in Simbu—he reckoned that one-third of the population of Simbu is displaced because of accusations or fears of sorcery. So you find those people in the settlements everywhere and they still keep that kind of mindset.

Some people think the increased violence in the murders has more to do with the spread of drugs and home brew [moonshine] than economic displacement. Do you think there's any truth to that?
The accusation comes from elders usually, but the violence is always done by young people—sometimes under the influence of alcohol or marijuana or something like that. There is no work for them. Every year tens of thousands of people are kicked out of the system because it is very selective. Many people, they don't go to school, and even those who finish don't find a job. So there is a lot of frustration. These people are using something that wasn't around in the past—marijuana or alcohol were not around in the past, you know.

Some reports say these aren't ad hoc killings any more, but that these young people are now permanent witch hunting gangs. Is that true?
It could be, but in my research I didn't really find gangs going out and killing the sorcerers, because they're always people from the home of the accused. For the police, a part of [the problem] is they are afraid to deal with sorcery. But apart form that there are no witnesses. Nobody wants to talk. It's very much the locals who are doing it with the collusion of the whole community.

You say this is displacing a lot of people. What will happen to these communities when a third of the population is running from sorcery accusations?
There are consequences. In the villages we really suffer now from the lack of leaders. The leaders in the highlands in the past, they were warriors. Tribal fighters have diminished during the years. But there is also a lack of leaders because the ones who are clever, they used to move to town... [in part] because they are afraid to be struck [by sorcery]. They always say this sorcery is triggered by jealousy—envy. So if you become too successful, you're in danger to be struck by the sorcerer. In the highlands, this fear is paralyzing the economy.

The government has tried to deter witch-hunts by repealing the 1976 Sorcery Act, which witch hunters used to defend their actions in court, and by reinstating capital punishment [out of use since 1954]. But it doesn't seem to be having a great effect...
The government, yeah, they repealed the law under the pressure of the international media, but without much conviction. You cannot change a cultural mentality like that just by repealing a law. To change the mentality—to accept natural causes of death over spiritual ones—would stop this. It happened also in Europe. We killed lots of witches in the Middle Ages, and then finally we accepted the natural causes of sickness and death. Then witch hunting stopped.

In the case of Europe, it took many, many years and gradual change for people to stop hunting witches. But in a place like Papua New Guinea it seems like there's a lot of damage that could happen if people just leave it to sort itself out over that long.
Exactly, and that's why the churches have to stop giving credit to this kind of thing, because that's part of the problem. They are people possessed by evil spirits. They say things like that. The people possessed in the time of Jesus, they were sick people. That was a way of explaining sickness, but we still find a lot of churches today that enforce those kinds of beliefs.

For me, it's more a matter of education than other things.

What do you think is the best hope for bringing education like that out to remote regions?
Increase the education and bring a good health system. Our health is terrible here, especially in the villages. A lot of med centers are closed down. No doctors want to serve in the rural areas. The government is happy, because instead of accusing the system, [people] are accusing each other.

What would make it easier for police to intervene, or for people to report witch hunts to help solve this in the short-term?
We don't have many policemen. We only have 7,000 for the whole country. In my research, in [one area] in Simbu, there was only one policeman for those cases of sorcery. They don't have cars. They don't have fuel. Often they are people from the same region. They are themselves very, very afraid of sorcery.

My team here, the local research team, they always refuse to interview the sorcerers—the old ladies who survive—because they are afraid too.

Follow Mark on Twitter.

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Some chump getting a flu shot. Photo via Indiana Public Media

The holiday season is over, and now you're back to your germ-ridden office, where people are rubbing their snotty noses all over the communal spaces. You think you're safe from those sneezes a desk away? Think again. Flu season tends to ramp up around this time of year, and this season, it seems especially bad: Almost the entire country is suffering from "widespread" flu activity. Some schools are extending their winter breaks to keep kids from getting sick. For the first time, New York required children to get flu shots before attending preschools or day cares. All these factors have furnished a series of headlines about how rampant—and deadly—the flu is this year. Could this be the worst flu season since the Great Influenza of 1918?

Well, no. Put down your hazmat suit and calm down. You're (probably) not going to die from the flu. Let's go through a few of the misconceptions fueling the flu hysteria of late so that you don't have to walk around pretending like you're in the movie Contagion for the rest of winter.

Thousands of people are dying from the flu!
Yes, a lot of people have died from the flu so far this season. The Centers for Disease Control puts out a weekly report with mortality statistics, including the number of deaths from flu complications. During Christmas week—the most recent week for which we have data—there were 601 flu-related deaths nationwide. The week before that, there were 837. If these numbers sound high, it's probably because it's scary to imagine waking up with a sore throat and a mild fever one day and then dropping dead the next. But those numbers aren't really abnormal. Pick any week from the CDC's mortality records, and you'll see a few hundred flu-related deaths. Pritish Tosh, an infectious diseases physician at the Mayo Clinic and a member of the Mayo Vaccine Research Group, pointed out that this is basically par for the course. "Each year, there are tens of thousands of deaths related to influenza in the United States," he told me, "Again, that's every year."

Nationwide, there have been 21 flu-related deaths among children so far this season, which—again—sounds scary, but isn't really statistically unusual. There were over 100 flu-related deaths among children during last year's flu season and around 150 the year before. The flu has been more aggressive in some regions—Tosh noted that there have been three pediatric deaths in Minnesota already this year, compared to zero last year—but across the board, these numbers aren't unprecedented.

But isn't this a flu epidemic?
The CDC did state that the prevalence of the flu had reached epidemic levels—which, colloquially, sounds terrifying, but by the CDC's definition this basically just means that the illness is affecting a lot of people in a given area at the same time. With something as highly common and highly contagious as the flu, you can see how easily the "epidemic" status is achieved. In fact, "the United States experiences epidemics of seasonal flu each year," said Darlene Foote, a representative of the CDC, in an email. "So what we are seeing is a typical pattern for the flu season."

Tosh added that "some years are worse than others, in terms of hospitalizations and deaths and numbers of infections," but we have influenza epidemics every year.

Aren't anti-vaxxers putting us all at risk?
Generally speaking, the population's immunity to a particular flu strain is one of the big factors in how badly it affects people. And yet, people are awfully squeamish about getting vaccinated. CDC data suggests that less than half of Americans get the flu vaccine each year—and while it's always fun to blame anti-vaxxers for that, most people don't do it just because they're lazy. But even if you were one of the model citizens who got your flu shot this year, you still might not be protected against this year's virus, because the dominant strain this year—called H3N2—isn't the same one that was contained in the vaccine. That basically means that your flu shot is a lot less effective than it's supposed to be.

"There's a bit of a mismatch between what was contained in the vaccine and what is circulating," said Tosh. "Based on what we understand about how the vaccine works, we extrapolate that we'd expect the vaccine won't work as well in years where we have a mismatch. But there isn't great data to support that, and there's not data to suggest that years where there is a vaccine mismatch the flu is worse." So your vaccine isn't working, but that doesn't necessarily mean that more people will get sick and die.

Plus, the CDC is still recommending that people get flu shots, since the vaccine is still effective in about one-third of cases. "While some of the viruses spreading this season are different from what is in the vaccine, vaccination can still provide protection and might reduce severe outcomes such as hospitalization and death," said Foote.

Are we all going to die?
Unlikely. Remember, this is the flu—not the apocalypse. "In general, I would think about this season as we would about all flu seasons," said Tosh. "We need to be cautious and respect the virus for what it is, which, again, will cause tens of thousands of deaths in the United States." The people who are most at risk for hospitalization or death are the elderly, the very young, and people with poor immune systems—who, year in and year out, make up the majority of flu-related deaths. As for the rest of us? "Most healthy people who get influenza will do just fine with fluids and plenty of rest," said Tosh. If you are sick, keep your feverish self at home. Nobody needs your coughing ass around at work. But otherwise? It's just another relatively normal flu season. Just try not to puke on anyone.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

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^{Photo by Carlos Monino}

James Allister Sprang is one of the few people that I think can legitimately be referred to as a polymath. We met at an artist residency in the summer of 2014, and it's been fascinating to watch him continuously push himself in visual art and hip-hop. Further, he's one of the most likable people you'll ever meet, personable and authentic. Give him a mic, and he instantly transforms into GAZR, a dominating presence, fluidly navigating between spoken word, poetry, and rap with appropriate nods to comedy in exactly the right places. The balance between his on-stage confidence and humility is deeply engaging and rewarding for his audience. This Friday, January 9, GAZR will perform a unique and unorthodox one-man show, Life Does Not Live, at Dixon Place. You should buy tickets right now.

We got a chance to talk in depth over the holiday break about his upbringing, his time at the Cooper Union, and his new work.

VICE: Where did you grow up? What was that like?
James Allister Sprang: I grew up in Miami, Florida. Miami treated me well. My trajectory through the public school system seemed to intersect with a growth of art appreciation within the Miami community. I was lucky to have found my talents at an early age. Though some tried to dissuade me from making art, I felt vindicated because the Miami art community was literally building itself up around me. I went to school in the heart of the Design District... I was a sophomore in high school when Art Basel started to hit its stride.

I just went to Miami Art Fair Week for the first time ever, and it was outrageous.
It's actually crazy to think about when I compare my early experiences to current headlines about borderline nefarious activity. The childhood memories I have consist of getting drunk on Grolsch beer stolen from the VIP section and spazzing out at seeing a piece by Swoon in real life.

What was your community like before Miami became known mostly as the site of the US version of Art Basel?
The best part about growing up in Miami was that there was not a "hip" art scene. At least I wasn't aware of it. So, all of the older people around, putting in work, were so supportive. They were excited to see a young person genuinely trying to improve themselves. I felt like an explorer without a map. I was allowed to find my own boundaries. Believe me [ Drake voice]. The first memory that comes to mind, for example, is this one piece I did where I shaved my pubes onto a bible, burned it, and called it The Burning Bush— in front of a high school art class. Haha. It all felt like the Wild West.

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^{Photo by Jake McNulty}

When did you start rapping?
I started rapping at Cutler Ridge Middle School. The radio was still relevant and rap was a huge part of the culture I navigated on a day-to-day basis. I mean, when Cam decided to go pink the color had to be banned from our school because everyone wanted to rep their hood manicured homemade gang like they were running from the cops and the Miami police were Inspector Clousseau. Anyway, I digress...

In middle school I started hitting up Kazaa hard, downloading whatever caught my eye. It was an education with a rubric inspired by the radio and an understanding of what my peers perceived rap to be. But, the lesson plans were frenetic and entirely dependent on my own relationship to the internet. I would spend hours downloading albums and listening in awe of rappers like Canibus, Chino XL, Immortal Technique, Big L, Method Man, Mos Def—rappers that were not getting much radio time.

Then I started exclusively downloading freestyles. Which was when I realized that I could close my eyes, just talk, and make random shit rhyme.

So you were studying the music, and learning different approaches to the medium, much like somebody would in art school. Was there a moment when things clicked for you? When you figured out where you might fit?
Yea, I guess. I didn't really understood what rap could do until high school. I'll never forget being at the beginning of my two hour commute and hearing Jay-Z go, "I keep one eye open like CBS. Can I live?" It opened up something inside of me. Shit was bananas. I was on a school bus. It was like six in the morning. The lights on the bus were off. Everyone was sleeping. And that was the moment when I knew. I knew that rap could affect people as much as visual art could. The boundary between fine art and rap collapsed, for me, on that humid morning. If I were to make a sonic comparison to describe that epiphany, it would be the last line in Ye's "Last Call" off College Dropout. With the seemingly infinite echo and perfect reverb: "I said man, you think we can still get that deal with Roc-A-Fella?"

You went to the Cooper Union—is that why you moved to New York?
Yeah.

What was it like being at Cooper during the decision to begin charging tuition?
I knew about Cooper back in middle school. My sizth grade teacher had a son that went there. Even then, I was like, "Oh, so that's the best there is? Oh, and it's free? OK, see you there then." It sounds silly, but just the idea of possibly getting into Cooper was a strong reminder to be the best person I could be. I really don't know where I would be without that inspiration through those early developmental years. With the shift to a tuition-based model, I'm heartbroken by the loss of so much potential hope for kids from a background like mine.

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^{Cooper Union graduation, 2013}

You were chosen to give the commencement speech, and it's featured in the documentary film The Ivory Tower. I went to a screening of that at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and people were crying during your speech. Can you talk about the process of writing it? Was it like writing verses?
Writing that speech was tough. So many things were happening at once. I also didn't want to be up there for too long. So the goal was to speak from the heart and to distill that passion and anger as much as I could. To create something that would move my peers. Much like writing a song. The process took a month or three. I was preparing for my thesis show, working two jobs, taking way too many classes. I'm pretty sure the first draft of the speech began with the words, "Can I live?" [ laughs] A lot of my writing process has to do with writing through the ideas while knowing that I'll never use the majority of what I put to paper.

I think a lot of writers would relate to that process. How did you eventually rein in the speech?
Well, the speech was going nowhere, and then one day I was sitting at a cafe and suddenly realized that I needed to talk about the relationship between hope and doubt. Sometimes the simple connections are the hardest to make. I later printed a photograph that really inspired the energy of the speech. The photograph is called Gesture 115 [Edited and appropriated text from Charles Bukowski]. Which, in part, also went on to become the mic-check portion of the speech that is featured in The Ivory Tower.

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Hope and doubt seems integral to your music as well, giving way to a real earnest quality to your performances. You are your own DJ, projecting your computer desktop for all to see. Your stage setup resembles a bedroom recording studio. You do this, all while you rap live. I'm not sure I've seen that transparency before in hip-hop. How did you decide on this almost naked approach to performing?
I try to make work that is a part of life as much as it is representational of it.

Admittedly shitty question: You're a visual artist and a rapper—is that all part of the same practice, or do you differentiate?
It's not a shitty question. It demands insight. I differentiate between the sonic and visual experiences. However, I am interested in working with the slippage that results from engaging both of those experiences. As a result, I don't make a differentiation between art and rap. Because they both represent the slippage I am working with. It would be silly to deny awareness of the cultural differentiation that is made between art and rap by many. But, I believe that differentiation relies on the idea of a high/low binary, that calling something art elevates its significance. I don't necessarily agree with that.

A lot of artists right now are directly concerned with critically examining binaries of all sorts, be they political, artistic, or social. What's your angle?
To look at this in the round, let's entertain the high/low binary. I would first establish that the hip-hop movement was Art. With a capital "A." Rap is rooted in art. We consume, commission, and are informed by rap, much like art was commissioned, consumed, and informative during the Renaissance. An example of rap's effect can be seen in its astonishing influence on the larger American culture's shifting marginality. It represents an integration of "other" tropes and established "non-other" social constructs. So I look around and feel that it is important to not make a distinction between rapping and visual art-making. We are in a marked moment, in which all of pop culture is collapsing into the art world. We have returned to the rupture. What I do is an example of this.

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What can we expect to see in your show Life Does Not Live at Dixon Place on January 9?
Expect to watch GAZR record an album in real time, surf the net, maybe skype, send some emails, and interact with a small string section that is a figment of GAZR's imagination. All the while, GAZR will be engaging and befriending the audience, in an effort to successfully scramble codes that many of us have become quite familiar with. But most importantly, expect to laugh.

Check out James's website and Soundcloud, and Instagram.

Sean J Patrick Carney is a concrete comedian, visual artist, and writer based in Brooklyn. He is the founder and director of Social Malpractice Publishing and, since 2012, has been a member of GWC Investigators, a collaborative paranormal research team. Carney has taught at Pacific Northwest College of Art, the Virginia Commonwealth University, and New York University. He is currently full-time faculty at Bruce High Quality Foundation University. Follow him on Twitter.

Last week, Dr. Richard Smith wrote on the British Medical Journal website that dying of cancer—of all things—was the best way to go. His reasoning?

You can say goodbye, reflect on your life, leave last messages, perhaps visit special places for a last time, listen to favorite pieces of music, read loved poems, and prepare, according to your beliefs, to meet your maker or enjoy eternal oblivion.

Seemingly everyone in the entire world, many of whom have seen someone die horribly of cancer, immediately called Smith an idiot. Cancer eats your body away from the inside and leaves you a husk of a human. Cancer sucks. There must be a better way to leave the world behind. So what is it?

A few months ago, our colleagues at Motherboard tackled the opposite question, asking what the worst way to die is. It turned out it was basically anything that's slow and leaves you in a hospital bed for your final days. But what's the best way to go? Naturally, by asking that question in the title, I'm begging to be accused of exploiting the googling habits of the severely depressed.

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So, if you're thinking of killing yourself please go here. Also note that popular ways to bring about a pleasant form of self-termination like carbon monoxide, the tailpipe hose trick, having a doctor in Oregon give you a drug cocktail, or even plain old heroin overdose, won't get my endorsement today.

Instead, I got to the bottom of the myths and realities about some of the ways to die that people say are great. Most of them aren't. Here's what I learned.

Fantasy Scenarios:

NSFW Warning: The video above features the naked boobs of human women

It's tough to nail down what people mean when they talk about the "best" way to die, but I'll start by entertaining some of the popular fantasy death notions. First of all there's the one in which a person dies gloriously in battle—a notion so silly it has an entire movie genre dedicated to criticizing it.

Then there are the fantasies about doing some sex stuff before your life is painlessly extinguished—a heart attack at the orgasmic conclusion of a blowjob, say, or (as in the video above), being chased off a cliff by topless models (spoiler).

This doesn't really do much in terms of answering the question. First of all, falling off a cliff isn't the answer, nor are falls in general. Sure, landing on your head after falling out of a plane sounds like an instantaneous death, but falls can result in ruptured internal organs and broken bones, making that way extremely painful—and if you survive you'll have to deal with debilitating injuries.

As for internal causes of death brought on by the exertions of sex, they're often painful. Sudden cardiopulmonary events—embolism, aneurysm, AVM, etc—can feel like " the worst headache of your life," along with a whole world of weird symptoms like nausea and hallucinations. Heart attacks, as you probably already know, feel like an elephant sitting on your chest.

Sudden cardiac arrest, however, in which your heart just locks up like Windows 95 and the lights go out, is a strong contender for best way to die during sex. However as a person who suffers from arrhythmia, I can tell you that the feeling of your heartbeat going haywire is unpleasant, like butterflies in your chest and a lump in your throat. I can't recommend that scary sensation during intercourse.

But sexual fantasies culminating in death generally involve a partner, meaning your death will cause another person to suffer. After all, you're causing someone to witness your death, manhandle your naked corpse, and possibly have to touch your dead genitals. It could be a nice way to go in the best of all possible circumstances, like when Matthew McConaughey's dad died having sex with his mom, and she later called it "just the best way to go!" but on the other hand it could turn into the terrifying Stephen King novel Gerald's Game, or that one scene in Clerks.

In any case, I find it more useful to look at more realistic things anyway.

Hypothermia:
Hypothermia is a long trip that involves much more than shivering and numb skin; some say in the end you feel a sense of enormous wellbeing, and you'll want to be left to die even if someone tries to save you. That's just (literal) crazy talk though.

In his book Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance, Peter Stark gives a vivid scientific and narrative account of what it's like to freeze to death. After hours in the cold, as your body starts shutting down, you're likely to start hallucinating, or even feel warm. You might feel so warm, in fact, that you'll rip all your clothes off.

This is because when your body drops below a core temperature of 93 degrees, amnesia will set in. You won't know what's going on. By 88 degrees, you'll stop shivering. At 86 degrees your brain won't be working well enough to recognize your mother's face. It's down in this range, around 85 degrees, where you'll rip your clothes off and possibly bury yourself underneath a snowbank, which won't help.

From there, assuming you're in sub-zero weather, it can still take hours to for your temperature to drop below 70 degrees, the point at which most people die. If you do experience euphoria in that time, it's after you've been through hell and lost your mind. I seriously doubt that's worth it.

Drowning:

There's a piece of folk wisdom about drowning that you've probably read, and it says that drowning feels like a hug, or like being in the womb. There are famous accounts like the one from the late music producer Michael Case Kissel in which angelic voices told him, "There's nothing to be afraid of." But Kissel's experience sounds atypical.

Your body will do everything it can to prevent you from taking a lungful of water, as you can see from the video above of Christopher Hitchens being waterboarded. After just a few seconds of water down the wrong pipe, Hitchens experienced lasting anxiety and nightmares. (Afterward, he came to the rather no-duh conclusion that waterboarding was torture.)

In The Perfect Storm Sebastian Junger details exactly what happens when you drown. After the decrease in blood oxygen becomes so extreme that you're starting to lose consciousness already, you do finally breathe water. Ten percent of people experience such a strong spasm in their larynx that they die of suffocation without the water reaching their lungs. The other 90 percent will just breathe and breathe and breathe as they slip unconscious. There just might be something pleasant in the feeling of succumbing to the lack of oxygen, but everything that comes before that is literal torture.

Decapitation:

With the Islamic State killing journalists, it's no time to endorse decapitation in general as a good way to die. There's no reason to watch the videos, but if you did, you would see that people suffer horribly—and tragically—when their heads are sawed off by hand.

Still, there is something uniquely unambiguous and final about having your head cut off by something as elegant as a guillotine. Medical examiner and author Shiya Ribowsky once told the History Channel that he "can't imagine a quicker and more painless way to go." The blade is only in contact with your neck for 1/100th of a second, and after that, no one survives. Estimates of the failure rate of the Guillotine during the French Revolution vary, but there were as few as one, according to an essay in The Quarterly Review from 1843, and that's out of thousands of decapitations during the Reign of Terror.

But do you survive long enough to notice that you're just a head in a basket? When you talked about beheadings on the schoolyard, you were probably quoted something like five to seven seconds of life after you hear that loud chopping sound. That's the number Ribowsky quotes as well, and a written account of a beheaded criminal from 1905 describes the decapitated head looking around and making faces for that amount of time, but it doesn't take consciousness to do that. In any case, you'd lose blood so quickly, the drastic drop in blood pressure would cause you to lose consciousness very quickly, and you'd definitely never come back.

Still, no one's been executed by guillotine since 1977, and they probably aren't headed for a comeback. What's more, clean guillotine-esque decapitations do happen from time to time, and they're horrifying and gruesome for the people who find your body.

Dying in Your Sleep:
Dying in your sleep isn't something that's supposed to happen, and when young people do, it's tragic, horrifying even. Even heavily medicated, unresponsive cancer patients are typically clinging to consciousness, or at least experiencing something called agonal respiration, when they die. Plus, the onset of a sudden fatal condition like a heart attack would probably wake you up. Dying in your sleep should be rare.

So it's odd how often obituaries list people as having "died peacefully in [his/her] sleep." I'm not the only one who's noticed. Elizabeth Simpson of the Virginian-Pilot found the term strange and launched an investigation. The resulting article is a really good read.

Among the insights she gains about dying peacefully in your sleep:

• The term is often a euphemism for suicide.
• Sleep apnea often plays a role, particularly in the elderly.
• Relatively distressing conditions like strokes and ruptured aneurysms can cause people to die in their sleep later.

But the most interesting thing she learned was that the previously mentioned sudden cardiac arrest, the one caused by your heart just suddenly freaking out, was the most likely culprit in sudden deaths that occur while sleeping.

You can see from the example of Richard Smith the cancer lover that not all experts will agree about this stuff, but in sudden cardiac arrest during sleep, I think I have my answer. I know the fluttering sensation of a heart suddenly going off beat all too well. It's a weird feeling, but if that's really what sudden cardiac arrest feels like—and firsthand accounts describe them as painless—having one wouldn't wake me up. If that struck in the middle of the night, and the lights just never turned back on, I don't think there's a better way to go than that.

That or the guillotine.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Click to enlarge

As marijuana prohibition crumbles in the United States, the legalization movement's success has so far been limited to Western states, prompting marijuana policy reform advocates to build on their momentum in other regions across the country. In particular, a victory in the heavily populated—and largely liberal—Northeast would open up a new frontier for the movement, and advocates are now eyeing Vermont—whose legislature has been historically progressive when it comes to reform marijuana laws—as its best bet in the region.

Today, on the eve of the start of Vermont's 2015 legislative session, activists working to legalize marijuana in the state announced the launch of the Vermont Coalition to Regulate Marijuana, an umbrella group spearheaded by the Marijuana Policy Project and includes the Vermont ACLU, the Vermont Cancer Survivors Network, and the state's Progressive and Libertarian parties, among others. In a press conference at the Vermont State House Tuesday morning, representatives from the coalition announced their plans to support legislation this year that would legalize recreational marijuana in the state.

State Senator David Zuckerman, a Progressive, is expected to introduce the bill in this year's legislative session, perhaps within the next couple of weeks. If the legislation passes, Vermont would become the first state in the US to pass marijuana legalization through the legislature, rather than by ballot initiative. Matt Simon, the New England political director for the Marijuana Policy Project, said the state is "well-poised" to break this new ground, in part because the state legislature already voted to legalize medical marijuana in 2004 (and expanded that policy last year), and passed a bill decriminalizing marijuana in 2013. On top of that, a survey from the Castleton Polling Institute released last spring found that 57 percent of Vermonters support a policy change allowing for a legal, regulated market for marijuana.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Simon argued that legalization would allow people to buy weed from licensed sellers, creating a safer market as well as jobs and tax revenue. "Simply put, marijuana prohibition has proven to be a failure in the same way alcohol prohibition proved to be a failure in the 1920s and 30s," he said.

Speakers at the press conference tried to counter concerns about the legislation, in particular the argument that legalizing and regulating marijuana would encourage young users, noting that states that have loosened marijuana laws have not seen an uptick in underage users, and that regulation would force buyers to show ID. They also said that marijuana is not a gateway drug in the sense that it causes the brain to seek out harder drugs, but because of marijuana's place in the black market, where it sold by dealers who, if selling other illegal substances, have the financial incentive to encourage additional drug use.

"What criminalizing marijuana has succeeded in doing is getting more people arrested, sent to jail, and burdened with criminal record that limit opportunity for rest of their lives," Suzi Wizowaty, executive director of Vermonters for Criminal Justice Reform, said.

While the Vermont legislature's past openness to marijuana policy reform may be a good sign for legalization advocates, the coalition will still have to jump several hurdles before any legislation passes. Project SAM, a group that opposes marijuana legalization, has opened up a Vermont chapter to oppose any reform efforts in the state. A legalization bill introduced by Zuckerman last year failed, and convincing Vermont lawmakers to become the first in the country to legalize marijuana through the legislature is a steep hill to climb, in part because marijuana regulation is probably not the hill many Vermont legislators want to die on.

"It's tough to handicap whether the Senate has the votes this year," state Senator Tim Ashe, a Progressive, told Vermont's WCAX station last month. He added that other issues, like education finance reform and closing the state's $100 million budget gap, will be top priorities for the legislature this year.

Several Vermont lawmakers have also openly expressed opposition to legalization. The state House Minority Leader, Republican Don Turner told WCAX that "90 percent" of his caucus will be opposed to Zuckerman's marijuana legislation. "We'll do everything we can to raise the points of contention," Turner said. Similarly, Senate Minority Leader Joe Benning toldVPR, Vermont's NPR affiliate, that he doesn't think marijuana reform will be a major priority for lawmakers this year, adding, "I think people are still waiting to see how it works with the decriminalization, and also with Washington and Colorado, trying to figure out what they've done." Democratic House Speaker Shap Smith, too, has expressed opposition to the legislation, and could prevent the bill from going to the floor for a vote.

Some of the debate will likely revolve around the results of a RAND Corporation study commissioned by state lawmakers to examine the potential tax revenue of a legalized market. The report, which is due out next week, will provide crucial insight—and potential talking points—to legislators as they determine whether to support legalization. But it may not quell concerns that there will not be enough time in the busy legislative session for lawmakers to analyze all of the pros and cons of legalization.

But Simon sees a couple of silver linings, pointing out that while Smith, the House Speaker, blocked a marijuana decriminalization bill from a vote in 2012, he overcame his reservations and allowed a vote on similar legislation the following year. That law passed despite opposition from Project SAM, although Simon acknowledged that the group is "working harder this time around."

"They are organizing and trying to build own coalition, so I look forward to the debate," he said, "but I feel good about what's to come."

And some lawmakers have come out in support of marijuana reform. Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, has said he is " open" to legalization, and will be looking at the results in Colorado and Washington to see whether the reforms there have been effective. Vermont's Commissioner of Public Safety Keith Flynn has also said he supports taking "a hard look" at legalization, and Democratic Attorney General William Sorrell, who testified in favor of decriminalization in 2013, told MPP he would support legalization.

Should the legislature pull off marijuana legalization either this year or the next, Vermont would send an encouraging message to reformers in the region. "If Vermont legislators seize this opportunity to pass a marijuana regulation bill in 2015, that would set a strong example for legislators in other states. Public support is strong across the region, and legislators seem to be becoming more comfortable with the issue with each passing day," Simon said, "Ballot initiatives are planned for Massachusetts and Maine in 2016, and the New Hampshire House approved a marijuana regulation bill in January 2014, so the prospects appear to be very bright for the issue in New England."

Follow Kristen on Twitter

(We're putting the second season of our Emmy-winning HBO show online. Watch the first episode here.)

In this episode, Shane Smith travels to Greenland with climate scientist Jason Box to investigate why the glaciers are melting, and how the resulting rise in sea level will devastate our world sooner than expected. Then VICE goes to Pakistan, where millions of men, women, and children work as bonded laborers in brick kilns.

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Eddjei, Ridley Road Market, wears coat from Beyond Retro

PHOTOGRAPHY: TOM JOHNSON
STYLING: PHOEBE HAINES

Stylist's assistant: Nathan Henry
Photographer's assistant: Jamie Phelps

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Jim, Hoxton, wears JW Anderson

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Pat, Hackney, wears James Long

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Joyce, Muswell Hill, wears Issey Miyake

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Shakirat, Peckham, wears Issey Miyake

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Tanya, Hoxton, wears James Long

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Carolyn, Dalston, wears Heohwan Simulation

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Georgiana, Dalston, wears Ashish

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Hannah, Peckham, wears JW Anderson

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Barbara, Hoxton, wears jacket by Helen Lawrence

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

We all have a console that defines our youth. As this piece (and also this one) suggests, I was a Sega boy first, and everything else a distant second. I was lucky to grow up with two brothers who, between them, had a SNES and, later, the first PlayStation, so I could dip into what rivals were offering—but the machines in my bedroom, Amiga aside, were always black.

First the Master System; then a Mega Drive; and I even went as far as adding a Mega CD and 32X before dropping the fanboy ball when the Saturn arrived. By which I mean: I couldn't afford one, because I was 15, and they were fucking expensive. (Its US launch price of $399.99 is the equivalent of over $600 today.)

Nintendo wasn't quite the enemy, but Sega had dug its 8bit pixels in that bit deeper by the time I was finally allowed a games console of my own. I blame friendships. A best friend in primary school lived just around the corner, and he had a Master System. We'd sit in his living room playing Hang-On, Altered Beast, and some game set in a haunted mansion for hours, pausing only to pour ourselves too-strong squash or, just occasionally, listening to one of his dad's Thin Lizzy LPs.

A few years later, a friend who lived even closer—literally over the road—procured a Mega Drive with EA Hockey. (His dad preferred Genesis and Dire Straits.) It was with these guys who I'd swap games and brag about high scores with—the closest NES was several streets away, practically halfway to school, and it was a rare day I visited there.

I went cold turkey on video games for a while. I was spending a lot of time with a girl (she's my wife now, so that all worked out), and college meant classes skipped for both pub visits and rummaging through the racks of my shitty local town's record stores (none of which are open today).

I spent my money on CDs and gigs; on the bitter that none of my lager-drinking companions were into; on playing pool; and, once driving licenses were earned, on bowling and the pictures and clubbing (just occasionally we'd get someone like Pete Tong come through, which felt like a really big deal in the later stages of the 1990s—enough to make me button up a shirt for the evening rather than slum it in baggy jeans and knackered Cons).

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Grand Theft Auto IV : the title that rekindled my love of the game(s)

When I got back into gaming with zeal approaching—or even surpassing—my pre-teen enthusiasm, the Xbox 360 was the console of choice, and Grand Theft Auto IV the title I was most wowed by. I worked my way back a generation, picking up a PS2 off a music industry mate for a tenner, and my wife bought me a Dreamcast a few Christmases ago, to add to my Sega memories. I got a PlayStation 3 when the system had enough worthwhile exclusives to its name: the Uncharted series, LittleBigPlanet, Demon's Souls (which I've still not actually played), culminating in the generation-defining The Last of Us.

The whole time, I didn't really think of Nintendo. I'd spent time on my brothers' SNES, on RPGs like Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, and A Link to the Past, all of which trumped any comparable adventures on the Mega Drive, but the Wii didn't appeal. It was a console for people who didn't really like gaming, thought the me of back then. It had cooking games, dancing games, and countless Mario-branded mini-game collections. It had Petz and Imagine Fashion Party and Elmo's Musical Monsterpiece, for fuck's sake. Yeah, it sold a ton of units—over 100 million to date—but it was home to some absolute shit. I mean, what is this about?

Of course, I was naïve to think that the Wii was just for kids. But all the same, Nintendo seemed like a company adrift of the competition, a dwindling presence as its Wii U launched to confusion over its peripherals, dismay at its supposedly underpowered CPU and a lack of third-party support—the system's port of Watch Dogs came out a full six months after it'd appeared on Sony and Microsoft consoles both present and past gen, while versions of Crytek's Crysis 3 and Gearbox's Aliens: Colonial Marines were outright canceled. I couldn't think of a reason to own a Wii U—not when the PS4 was going great guns commercially and the Xbox One seemed a natural progression from my beloved 360.

Then Mario Kart 8 changed everything.

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The trailer for Mario Kart 8

It was a bit of a whim. The game—the first Mario Kart to be rendered in (absolutely, sparklingly, devastatingly beautiful) HD—looked like a trip down memory lane, and when I was asked if I'd like to come in and check it out, I did just that.

Might be OK—a flashback to the original that I'd been mercilessly thrashed at by SNES-owning mates. I wasn't expecting it to leave me not just eager to play more, but to rush out and get a Wii U as soon as possible, yet that's where I was as I packed away my notepad, gulped down the dregs of my Coke and set off for home. The whole journey I searched for the best Wii U bundle deals, and just a few days later I bit the Bullet Bill and clicked to collect.

I've not looked back; the Wii U was my machine of choice for the second half of 2014, home to some of my very favourites of the year. I'd read the summaries of its meager sales, of its struggles beside the bigger boys with their shiny shooters and resplendent racers—but reports of Nintendo's seemingly imminent death were greatly exaggerated, and the company was never at risk of " going bust." The 3DS was a solid seller, and the Wii U would, ultimately, begin to catch its rivals.

With over a million copies sold in just three days, Mario Kart 8 was the beginning of the Wii U's commercial turnaround. The posting of a net loss in its previous fiscal year seemed to spell doom for Nintendo, but come December Wii U sales were hitting new heights, with Super Smash Bros. for the system selling close to quarter of a million copies in week one, roughly representing a pick-up rate of one in ten among the console's user base. I've not been able to commit all that much time to the home version of Smash Bros. as yet—but that's only because my Wii U's been filled with other tempting attractions.

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The trailer for Bayonetta 2, the best kicking-things-in-the-face game of 2014

I downloaded Pikmin 3 as part of the bundle deal that delivered me my premium pack Wii U with Mario Kart 8—ooh, feel those whopping 32 gigabytes of storage. It's a gorgeous game, a hypnotic exploration of ankle-level annihilation. It makes decent use of the Wii U's GamePad—something not all (even first-party) titles can claim to do—delivering a really hands-on experience as you tap your finger, or the stylus, on the smaller screen to propel minuscule flower people at whatever target needs attacking. Hyrule Warriors was a minor distraction from my Karting, but its hacking and slashing was just the starter ahead of the arrival of perhaps the Wii U's very best game to date: Bayonetta 2.

Game of the year according to Edge, recipient of a 10/10 review at Destructoid and a topic of debate among those who want to see fairer representations of women in video games (which is basically everyone who didn't celebrate the return of Dapper Laughs), Bayonetta 2 is the most complete action game of 2014, a more-than-worthy successor to the 2009 original and one of the most elegantly engaging, compulsively challenging games I've ever played. It's a celebration of violence, of artistic destruction, of split-second timing and endorphin-flooding retribution. It's bloody and crude and mesmeric and just delightful—and it's the family-friendly Nintendo that is solely responsible for giving it the chance it deserved.

The first Bayonetta was a critical hit but hardly a substantial seller, more a cult classic than a cornerstone of collections the land over. Sega published that game, but as the company shrank in the wake of a 7.1 billion yen loss in 2012, it had to focus on fewer titles. So while Sega's logo does flash up when you start Bayonetta 2, it's Nintendo on publishing duties this time around—which is why it's exclusive to the Wii U. Atsushi Inaba, executive director at developers Platinum Games, told Polygon in 2013: "Would Bayonetta 2 not exist without Nintendo? The answer is yes."

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An early level from Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker

Right now, I'm powering up the Wii U for Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. Ostensibly a spin-off from a Super Mario 3D World minigame, this delightful puzzler is precisely what I want from the Wii U in 2015: an unmistakably Nintendo presentation that earns its Seal of Quality, and that makes decent use of the console's touchscreen GamePad. The player can tilt their controller to alter their perspective on each stage, poke the screen to move blocks and blow into the microphone to raise platforms. When there's projectiles (turnips) to fire the way of Para-Biddybuds and Piranha Creepers, the smaller screen becomes your sights, the A button your trigger. It's completely intuitive and terrifically tactile.

Did I envision that, at this stage of my life and with the options available across multiple formats, the game I'd be most keen to crack on with every evening would be a barely taxing physics teaser starring a mushroom and his mate? Never. I've got Far Cry 4 to finish, Destiny to catch up with, Dragon Age: Origins to start, and the PS4 remaster of Grand Theft Auto V to just soak myself in. I've left Alien: Isolation hanging, and I've still got giant swathes of the United States left to reveal in The Crew. Yet here I am, guiding Toad along a precarious pathway towards a diamond that I don't necessarily need—but I want to ace this game, damn it.

Nintendo's in the blood now, just as those Sega games were way back when – and I'm not ashamed in the slightest. Will I worry what the bigger boys with their level-30 raids are thinking when I'm buzzing around Old Russia at level 10 in a few months' time, when I finally dip back into Destiny? Will I hell. Sure, they can crack-shot a Cabal boss from a considerable distance—but can they say they just recently knocked out a giant, star-stealing bird with a freakishly massive turnip? I seriously doubt it.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

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Nigel Farage: "Don't we want to live in a country where we speak the same language?" Image via Chatham House

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Like an untied balloon filled with methane, Nigel Farage continues to release his stink over the immigrant population.

This time, he's said that doctors who can't speak "very good English" shouldn't be practicing medicine in the UK, which is a groundless issue seeing as all medical practitioners in Britain are required to pass a language test before being registered. Boris Johnson has since chimed in, adding that immigrants are so tuned in to their own communities that they don't feel the need to learn English and that the "multi-culti, balkanization" of society has been "disastrous" for London primary schools.

This is a damaging, sweeping generalization, and I'm living proof as to why.

I was born and brought up in the UK by Pakistani immigrant parents and did not learn any English at home. Instead, I learned Urdu. I have a two-year-old daughter now and don't speak to her in English, either. But why, considering I make my living from writing—in English—and feel more at ease speaking with it than Urdu?

Firstly, Urdu is a part of my daughter's cultural heritage. It will allow her to speak to her grandparents, great aunts, and uncles without constraint, giving her the chance to soak up her family history—the best pieces of advice, life lessons, and funny anecdotes. Translating those valuable memories into English just isn't the same. The magic of the words dissipate. Speaking Urdu allows me to talk to older members of my family easily, but the language itself also envelopes me with its history, idioms, cadence, and poetry. Why wouldn't I want to pass on such an extraordinary heirloom?

Secondly, being bilingual will allow my daughter to become a bridge between two communities and enjoy double the books, films, conversations, music, and politics. She'll take on more than one perspective and benefit from having a diverse vantage point, which is a huge positive in today's connected world. She is still picking up plenty of English from storybooks, cartoons, and preschool but she can only learn Urdu from me and her dad.

Who cares if other kids like her take a couple more months to master English than their peers? Short-term challenges can become long-term assets and a new language will give her unhindered access to her history, add depth to her world view, and ultimately affect the trajectory of her life. It's about playing the long game.

Of course, I absolutely agree that learning English is essential to living in the UK. That is a given. But harshly criticizing those adults and children who are in the process of learning it but haven't quite got there yet is harmful. Immigrant communities aren't avoiding English to remove themselves from British society and singling them out for being purposefully detached is simply false. It will only work to alienate them even further.

The people who continue to place a great emphasis on their native languages are trying to retain a piece of their cultural heritage, something that is integral to their personal identity. Their language and customs are the things that give them respite from feeling "other" in a country they are trying to find their place in. Their language is a gift that they want to pass onto their children. They shouldn't be vilified before being given the time and the opportunity to learn English at their own pace.

And although I recognize that Johnson isn't asking immigrants to assimilate but integrate, encouragement will go a lot further than admonition in helping those communities learn English. And so will recognizing the multitude of reasons why some people may find it challenging to pick up an entirely new lexicon in an alien environment.

It feels like we've lost a human-ness here. We've turned people into numbers, viewing our differences as aberrant peculiarities. People have forgotten to make each other feel valued and important. Scaring people into severing their heritage can be damaging in the long-term because, without roots, nothing grows.

Why not give immigrants them the space and the opportunity to feel at home in Britain? They will soak up the language if environment is warm enough, just like I did. In return we will imbibe their skills and talents as our own. Immigrants are not refusing to communicate with the English and neither are they trying to create divisions within the UK.

Maybe they just don't want to speak to cantankerous old dinosaurs who they have absolutely nothing in common with.

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