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Left to right: normal author, health goth author, cutester author, normcore author

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

We are officially balls deep in 2015, and the world still doesn't have a new youth subculture to show for it. Sure, in a few months we might all be turning our Levi's inside out and the finance bros will start wearing multiple neckties, but at the moment we're stuck with the same fashion scenes as 2014. That's not good, because last year sucked for fashion. It felt like we were all too busy recoiling at the Fappening and beheadings in the desert to make any good stuff happen. No genuine new youth subculture was born last year, which is probably why the media went ahead and invented some themselves.

The biggest of these invented lifestyles was the art of dressing like a newly divorced dad, or "normcore," which was apparently the most googled fashion term of 2014. The most irritating youth tribe of the year came to bite us right at the death, when the Evening Standard looked at the Cereal Café on Brick Lane and conjured up the "cutesters." And then we had health goth. What is health goth? I always thought it was just a Facebook page full of monochrome sportswear and net art, but some journalists believe it's got something to do with Coal Chamber fans sweating their make-up out on crosstrainers. Either way, if that isn't a subculture that's gonna shake society to its foundations, I don't know what is.

In truth, none of these things are really subcultures—they're trends, ways to dress; you know that because you're not an idiot. As such, though you could probably find people who look health goth, normcore, and cutester in any major city, there doesn't seem to be any kind of coherent lifestyle behind the clothes. Where, for example, is the number one normcore bar in London? How does a health goth pay the rent? Where do cutesters go to find sex? Where's the sense of tribalism that led to the M25 raves and Mods getting their heads kicked in on Brighton beach?

I decided to try to flesh out these shallow clothing trends before they fade out and away from us forever. I spent one day living as a health goth, one living as a cutester, and one living normcore, in an attempt to find out if there was any kind of lifestyle beyond the clothes.

MAKING FRIENDS

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THE CUTESTER
Making friends was my first category; you can't have a youth tribe if there's only one of you, after all. You need a gang.

Cutester was my first lifestyle choice. As per the Standard's checklist, I swapped my typical all-black uniform for a cartoon jumper (I figured it should either be that or a onesie, the physical embodiment of the cutester's cloying, defining infantilism) and tried to conjure up the grating optimism necessary for a social life built on "ping-pong cafes" and "emoji tattoos."

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Unsurprisingly, not everyone was down with me dressing and acting like a spoilt American toddler. The guys in Hype—a store that has Swag Lord pretensions but just released a clothing range covered in Simpsons characters, i.e. cutester catnip—replied to my boundless enthusiasm with the nonchalance of three Odd Future-loving wank-fanatics whose mom just asked if they're interested in a night of live improv comedy based on a Jane Austen novel.

"Do you like what I'm wearing?" I asked.

"No," came the mass, stony-faced response.

I'd hate them for it if I didn't already hate myself.

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Fuck them, though; pretty much everyone else wanted to maintain a conversation with me. I guess it could have been the bubbly personality drawing them in, or the fact I looked like a lost child at a Disney shop. Maybe that was appealing to their sense of social responsibility.

Whatever the reason, I was having a lot more success making friends than I usually do.

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Friends like the staff at this entire shop dedicated to selling onesies.

At this point, in this shop, surrounded by $240 baby clothes, the cutester felt less like a media fabrication and more like a damning indictment of my generation. Yes: I had made friends. But they weren't cool friends. And up till the point when crying on the internet about how much you love Niall Horan became a thing that earned you cool points, that's what subcultures were always about.

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HEALTH GOTH
It immediately became clear that making friends as a health goth would be more difficult. But I guess that's the point? If you spend all your time looking moody, listening to MssingNo and the Haxan Cloak while droning on about "the role the digital space plays in the democratization of art" you have to expect a certain lack of love from the plebs.

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The nice barbers I visited seemed confused by my petulance, and offered me some chocolate from the fishbowl to cheer me up.

It didn't work, though; I'd gone full method, like a female Day-Lewis with a Nike+ subscription. You don't have time for celebrations when your life is about sweat and sadness.

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Flirting with the second definition of health goth I'd read, I headed to Gymbox, where I expected the staff to welcome me with open arms.

Instead, the receptionist told me they'd never heard of my adopted genre of person and told me I'd have to leave if I wasn't a member. Gymbox had claimed they were open for almost anything. Turns out health goth didn't make the cut.

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Sipping a protein shake, I wondered where the average health goth goes to find kindred spirits IRL. Your classic goths are still too hung up on crushed velvet and crows to care about Tumblr, and gyms are probably still full of the same dull-fuck City shitmunchers who can actually afford the membership.

It's a conclusion that might shock you, but maybe health goth just doesn't translate all that well into real life.

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NORMCORE
Lonelier still was the world of normcore. As trend forecasting company K-Hole wrote in the report that kickstarted the whole "movement," in normcore, "one does not pretend to be above the indignity of belonging."

While that's the kind of thing that probably sounds good in a trend report, in practice "the indignity of belonging" seemed to entail being so anonymous that I felt like I was slipping off the sides of the Earth.

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I tried to strike up a half-assed conversation with people in the street, but weirdly, nobody seemed particularly interested in anything I had to say. The "normcore personality" I had adopted was probably too drab and indifferent; I wondered if people thought me some kind of con artist or international assassin, looking as indistinguishable as possible in order to commit some awful atrocity.

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Instead of boring any more people with the normcore-y conversation-starters I'd come up with ("I still can't work out whether Berghaus beats North Face in terms of functionality;" "Have you heard of Seinfeld?") I decided to put pizza in my face, and realized that normcore's problem is in its name. You can't be in a gang with every single person you see; it stops being subculture and just becomes culture.

As I devoured the crust, I was forced to reflect on the sad fact that cutester was the most likeable look I'd tried.

EARNING MONEY

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CUTESTER
The way a subculture earns its money is vital; it helps to define its members' social class, political leaning and moral code. It also dictates other more important factors, like whether they're getting fucked up on Frosty Jack's or Courvoisier; whether they're getting thrown out of Boujis or Belushi's.

As a cutester, the streets of Shoreditch were paved with opportunity, the world of unskilled shift work my oyster. Acting like a baby and annoying people is one of the few boom industries in London right now, and several clothing shops took my CV. I also had a 15-minute chat with a man running a cyber-goth shop who offered me two weeks' work in return for my hairdresser's number (sorry, Loren).

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But I had my eye on the dream job. A job in the cutester coliseum: the Cereal Killer Cafe.

I turned up and, looking around for one of the workwear Jedwards who run the place, realized I fit in perfectly. My outfit looked like it belonged in a display case on the wall. I was Bon Jovi in a Hard Rock Cafe. I had fucking pink lippie and pigtails. I was made for this place.

Soon enough, one of the silver foxes appeared. He gave me his email and told me to get in touch right away. So there you have it: go to the concept cafe that a lot of people seem to hate, dressed up as a person a lot of people seem to hate, and you could well square that hatred and land yourself a job.

But then you could probably go anywhere as a cutester and be offered some kind of work. What kind of manager wouldn't want to employ someone with all the Technicolor spunk of an aspiring CBeebies presenter?

It was confirmed: the life of a full-time cutester would be rich and easy. Find them swigging Bolly in the club and swinging the election for the Tories.

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HEALTH GOTH
Again, the basic tenets of health gothism made finding a job highly problematic. I dialed down some of the attitude, but did tell all my potential employers that I'd insist on having full autonomy over my choice of outfit were I to gift them my time, bank details, and social security number.

This did not go down well; everywhere I went insisted that I'd have to represent the brand in their respective uniforms if I were to ever be offered a job there. And because I was asking at Pret not Nike, unlike the movement itself, I wasn't in the mood to sell out just yet.

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'POD might be up for it,' I thought, reasoning that I'd make a good brand ambassador for their healthy lunch thing. Alas, the clothes were once again an issue; the people behind the counter deemed my sliders a health hazard and stared at me until I left.

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Hope finally came in the shape of Elite Café. The friendly lady behind the counter asked what I was like. I told her I was moody with my default health goth resting bitchface. She told me that didn't matter and to ring her up for shifts.

In retrospect, I'm not sure the high street was a suitable working environment for a princess of nylon darkness. But if they can tear themselves away from posting photos of futuristic synthetic limbs on Facebook for long enough, their unique blend of physical fitness and infinite sadness could make health goths of both genders ideal candidates for the high-class escort game.

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NORMCORE
Staff in every café in East London seem to dress normcore in some form or other, so I thought getting a job would be easy. I was right. Every café I tried gave me a positive return on my pleas.

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Wearing a baggy sweatshirt and vacant expression, I probably seemed like a pretty docile creature. The sort of born follower who'd make BLT subs with my head down, return with five minutes of my lunchbreak to spare, and be too scared to ask for time off over reading week. Win-win.

What this tolerance for eating shit said about normcore's political stance or moral code, I had no idea. "Normcore moves away from a coolness that relies on difference to a post-authenticity coolness that opts in to sameness," isn't exactly a sentence that screams political partisanship.

Then again, all three of these fashion trends seemed morally blank. The closest anything came to a political statement was the cutester's ability to prosper effortlessly in Boris Johnson's weird new London. Call me old-fashioned but that doesn't seem like the right kind of basis for a youth movement.

SEX APPEAL

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One of the most important functions of youth subcultures is the way they pave to the loss of virginity and teenage sex; by narrowing the bang pool down from "everyone else in your school year" to "everyone else in your school year who likes Tool" nervous delta males become swaggering alphas; 6/10 wallflowers become Brazilian Carnival queens. Having an identity beyond anxious, horny teenager gives you confidence, conversation, and common ground. The youth subculture matrix is a glorious Royal Mail sorting office hellbent on delivering urgent supplies to your quivering libido.

As such, it's important that we work out if anyone actually wants to have sex with health goths, normcorers, or—fucking shudder—cutesters.

I used the same Tinder profile but different photos (of each outfit, obviously) to gauge the general reaction from the hounds. If I know Tinder (and I know Tinder), it wasn't going to matter whether I was dressed in slimy gym pants or a fucking Tweety Bird onesie; any swipers within a one-mile radius were going to swipe.

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Cutester me probably got the most swipes straight out the gates, which is a little worrying. Ladies: if 18-year-old boys with Louis Vuitton polos and iced gem haircuts are your thing, horrible garish clothes are apparently the way forward.

Health goth and normcore both got an equally warm reception, but I was proved correct: generally, Tinder didn't seem to give a fuck about what I was wearing.

Time for a second opinion: my male friends are alright, so I used them as a better yardstick for how fit I really was. Unhelpfully, my most trusted and cynical male confidant judged them all to be awful—cutester: "annoying," normcore: "looks like prison bait," health goth: "just straight up dickhead who thinks dressing like Sporty Spice is acceptable"—but even he agreed with the rest, who said normcore was the most attractive option.

This made sense. He lives in London, and is therefore desensitized to young women dressing like his pregnant mom in family photos from the 80s.

FASHION CRITIQUE

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Here's that comparison photo again, just for reference

Most important of all categories, perhaps, was someone who knows about fashion judging me and my appearance. Yes, I may have slurred normcore, health goth, and cutester as nothing more than clothing trends but looking cool is the means by which youth cultures rope in new recruits, grow and endure. For my assessment, I turned to Bertie Brandes, VICE writer and current contributing Features Editor at i-D.

These were her informed rulings:

"Cutester is so disgusting on so many levels. It's the go-to aesthetic for a self-loathing generation; VEVO filtered through Jeremy Scott and flooding into Primark quicker than you can say 'Squidward onesie.' Are those seriously bunches she's got in her hair? Honestly, the last time it was acceptable for any of us to wear a Mickey Mouse T-shirt was when we were trying to fuck the Cobrasnake for a new profile picture six years ago. Enough."

"Sorry, trend reporters, but though you think health goth was conceived this year, it's clearly been alive and well since So Solid Crew's Kaish wore white contact lenses on Top of the Pops. While it was cemented as a mainstream trend by Alexander Wang for H&M's asymmetric laser-cut travesty of a collection over summer, people with no personality have been wearing ribbed socks and Nike crop-tops to complement their dip-dyes for absolutely ages. Though this sportswear subculture might not be as sinister as the rich guys you meet on Tinder who wear Air Max with no socks, it still strikes me as a clusterfuck of symbols reserved largely for the sort of people so desperately in need of an identity they've got a tattoo of their own name. Not pictured: the obligatory septum piercing."

"The problem with normcore is it normally goes one of two ways: either you're so 'core in your stonewashed flares and ancient Stan Smiths that Refinery29 are sniffing around for an OOTD [Outfit of the Day], or you just shopped yourself silly on the ASOS basics vertical and you're less blasé, more just blah. Personally, I think normcore should be reserved for people with their natural hair color and an endearing number of pimples (exactly one) but you know what? Those jeans are truly hideous, so kudos for the effort."

My critique from Bertie confirmed what I'd suspected: cutester is straight-up gross, health goth is just the Spice Girls in an oil slick, and normcore is for vanilla humanities students who want to look like extras in a Woody Allen movie.

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But there's more to it than that. Interestingly, each of these trends seeks out comfort—both physical and emotional—in a city that is an increasingly hostile and confusing place for young people to live in. All the trends prize being cosy and comfy over any other criteria, be that health goths dressed in their slippers, normcorers dressed like their moms, or cutesters dressed in their childhoods.

Strutting around as a health goth gives you the camouflage of fitness. What is the camouflage of fitness? It is the reason no one takes the piss out of joggers in the street even though they look fucking stupid. These days, it seems there's some kind of unwritten rule that you can't knock an athlete.

Normcore is pure nostalgia; it's the sartorial equivalent of a family video on VHS. And just as the PC Music crew lift you from London concrete and drop you in a world made out of Haribo and candy floss, the whole cutester thing is a form of escape, a bunch of 20-somethings buying Hello Kitty phone cases and trying with all their might to dive back into the womb.

Sadly, none of them have any hope of becoming real subcultures; they are all too reliant on the internet and just don't translate IRL. Personally, I hold out hope for 2015, but there are those who argue that subcultures as we knew them died the day broadband started beaming every nascent youth movement into connected households the world over.

So for now until the Fall of Technology, I guess we'll have to make do with whatever op-ed writers and trend forecasters come up with. To 2015: the year of the Islamopunk and the Turbo Mod.

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

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For the last six months, for four hours at a time, Benjamin Bennett has been sitting alone in his empty room and livestreaming himself sitting motionless and smiling in zen-like silence. So far, he has uploaded 116 hours' worth of footage of him sitting, without giving any reasonable explanation. After Ben's work was discovered in the middle of his 25th livestream, it seemed like everybody wanted to know why anybody would take the time to do this. Was it art? Meditation? Mental illness?

At first glance, it seemed to be a form of durational art, which is more about the endurance of the performer than the content of the piece itself. For example, about a year and a half ago, Jay Z rapped "Picasso Baby" over and over and over for six hours straight at the Pace Gallery in New York. In 1963, John Cage forced a bunch of pianists to perform Erik Satie's "Vexations" 840 times in a row because of a joke notation in the composition's margins. Perhaps the most famous durational artist was Tehching Hsieh, who did a series of endurance projects, including one where he locked himself in a cage, unable to speak, read, write, or listen to TV or radio, for an entire year. He spent another year living on the streets, refusing to enter any buildings; another year, he tethered himself to a female artist by a rope and wasn't allowed to touch her.

By comparison, Ben's four-hour sessions of sitting and smiling seem tame, but his work seems to follow in the same tradition. I asked him to call me following his next session, which I watched intermittently during breakfast and then lunch. It was unsettling. He rang right after his video ended, and took long, ten-second pauses before answering each question.

VICE: So, you just ended a session. How do you feel right now?
Benjamin Bennett: Pretty normal. My face and legs are a little bit sore, but it seems like I recover from the soreness faster and faster.

Why did you start doing this?
I don't know. It seemed like something that the internet was lacking. It seemed like it needed to be done, and nobody else was going to do it.

But what do you feel was lacking? What's the purpose?
There isn't really a purpose. My inbox is full of people asking me why I'm doing this, but I don't think that question is really applicable to this type of activity.

Well, I mean, most people wouldn't sit and smile at a camera for four hours at a time...
Sure.

I guess I just don't really understand. Is it performance art?
Yeah, you could definitely place this into a performance-art context, and I definitely am interested in performance art and relational aesthetics. I think it's actually not so important what I consider it to be—it's more important what the viewer considers it. It's not necessary for me to categorize it. A book on this topic I was very influenced by is Claire Bishop's Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. She's brilliant. But I don't feel like this is a prescriptive thing; i's just what you see is what it is. If someone can watch it, I think they can understand it. Even if they think they don't understand it, I think that what they perceive to be their non-understanding is actually the correct understanding.

Do you prepare in any way?
I maybe drink a little bit of water, and take a pee beforehand.

Do you get hungry or have to go to the bathroom during your sessions?
No, I never get hungry doing it, and I don't have to eat very much food on the days that I do it. Once I forgot to pee beforehand, and I'm surprised that video hasn't gotten more comments.

What happened?
I think I'd like to leave that a mystery.

All right. Why the smiling?
I think if I weren't smiling, then it would just look like meditation, and I would just look like someone with a martyr complex. I don't think anybody would watch it or be interested in watching it. And I think that smiling is a better reflection of how I'd like to address the world than if I was just sitting there not smiling. I think it offsets the seriousness of the duration.

I've read that forcing yourself to smile when you don't want to makes you feel happier. Do you feel happier?
Sometimes I do. I think, more so earlier on, just looking at myself smiling was often really amusing and it would make me smile harder, which creates a feedback loop. Sometimes I feel hilarious, sometimes sad, but mostly I just feel normal. I think it's possible to see a range of emotions on my face, through the smile.

Do you watch yourself on screen the whole time?
Yes.

At one point, somebody broke into your house and you didn't react, what was that like?
It was around Thanksgiving, and I heard a knock on the door, and I was the only one home. Then I heard some loud bangs and somebody lurking around downstairs while I was upstairs. This was already suspicious to me because my housemate was gone for work, so I had an idea that it was somebody breaking in, but I knew from the beginning that I wasn't going to move. Then I heard him, you know, creeping up the stairs towards my room, and he opened the door and said "Hello?" and I didn't move, and he closed the door and left the house. And then I just finished the session. I found out he had kicked in the door.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/tmrXakd_r6I' width='640' height='480']

You can see someone opening the door at 2:36:30

Wow. Why was it so important to maintain while somebody was breaking into your house. Why not take a break, see who it is, do another session later?
Well, I knew that as long as I didn't react, whatever was going to happen in that situation would make a really amazing video. I think making that video was more important to me at that time. It was streaming live, but I don't think there was anyone watching at that point. My heart was beating like crazy, but I knew that not reacting was the best thing to do, and now there's that guy out there with his own crazy story to tell.

The frequency of these videos been increasing. Why is that?
I've just been finding it a good use of my time, I guess. Also, I was actually hoping that I would get more hours of this online before anybody noticed what I was doing, because then it would be all the more exciting for somebody to stumble upon.

Would you do this for more than four hours at a time?
I have had the thought of turning this into my full-time job, sitting and smiling for 40 hours a week, but I would still need to support myself in a way that is not degrading to the work. Getting donations would be a decent way to do it, but aside from that, continuing my day job [at a public radio station] might be the best way to do it. Or I could just slowly eat away at my savings until it's gone, and then figure out what to do next. So far, from the donation button on my website, I've received a total of $24—half of that being from my mom.

What kind of response have you gotten so far?
The comments on YouTube and other websites are more dismissive, but the emails that I'm getting are mostly positive and supportive. I get emails from around the world of people are saying very supportive things. I think that a lot of people who are emailing are really interested in meditation or they're meditators and for them they like the idea of what I'm doing. A lot of people say that it makes them smile.

Just the fact that you're broadcasting this seems like you want a reaction.
I'm not looking for a reaction, but I am making it available for people to take it or leave it. A couple of artists that are relevant to this are Tehching Hsieh and Tom Friedman with his piece 1,000 Hours of Staring, though what I'm doing is nothing by comparison.

Are you at all concerned about any lasting effects?
Somebody told me that people who work in the service industry—who have to smile all the time when they don't want to—die sooner. But I don't know if that's true.

Follow Jules Suzdaltsev on Twitter.

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Inspector General Philip Eure. All photos by Jason Bergman

The building has to be one of the most unassuming in downtown Manhattan.

The hallways are quiet and bare, lined by mostly empty offices where an encyclopedia-sized police patrol guide on the bookshelves instantly stands out. This is clearly a space in transition, but as a newcomer, you'd be unsure if the people were either moving out or settling in—a hollow quality rare in New York City's bureaucracy. In fact, the only reason I knew I was on the right floor was because of a classroom-ready whiteboard in the lobby, with a few words scribbled:

"Welcome to the Office of the Inspector General for the NYPD."

Established in May, this is the home of a 40-person team of investigators, lawyers, and policy analysts, all charged with the titanic mission of reforming the New York Police Department.

Stationed a few blocks from 1 Police Plaza, the oversight agency was the brainchild of the Community Safety Act, a veto-surviving bill passed in 2013 by the City Council in response to simmering tensions over the NYPD's most notorious practice, stop-and-frisk. It is the biggest Inspector General (IG) office of its kind, and at its helm is a 52-year-old African-American man named Philip Eure.

Eure is a calm, confident type with a wonky disposition. But figuring out whether he is a technocrat in policeman's clothing or vice versa isn't easy. For years, Eure served as the head of the Washington, DC police department's Office of Police Complaints, spreading what he calls the "gospel of police oversight" to the nation's capital. Before that, he spent a decade in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

Eure has had his eye on New York City policing for a while, too, but he's new to living here. In fact, when his selection was announced last year, one of the first challenges he faced as IG was finding an apartment—no small task in a city where rent never seems to stop rising. But he didn't have much time to settle in. Captured in a video now seen by millions, the choke hold death of Eric Garner at the hands of Officer Daniel Pantaleo on Staten Island took place just six weeks into his tenure.

Although Eure's office will not be investigating individual cases, the tumultuous sequence of events since Garner's death made it clear just how important reforming the NYPD was. For a time, Eure's office remained silent even as the city was deafened with protest, whether it was on the streets or at the funerals of fallen cops Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.

But last week saw Eure's office release its first report, which was focused—not coincidentally—on choke holds as an excessive use of police force. It's the first of many expected to come down in the months ahead. I met with Eure recently and talked about the ongoing debate over law enforcement in New York City and America at large, his racial identity as an African American throughout it all, and the question that's been on the mind of many New Yorkers lately: Will the NYPD ever change?

[body_image width='2000' height='1333' path='images/content-images/2015/01/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/22/' filename='can-this-guy-really-change-the-nypd-122-body-image-1421945176.jpg' id='20343']VICE: The past few months have been quite contentious for the New York Police Department in terms of protests and the vitriol on the streets. And you're the one person who has the power to reform the cops at a time when everyone's calling for change. With the protests, the counter-protests, and the slowdown—the breakdown of trust between the mayor and the police—how did you hold yourself back? Were there any times when you just wanted to burst out?
Inspector General Philip Eure: Having all of these things happen on our early watch, it certainly makes it a very busy time for us. But, at the same time, it creates opportunities. As I've said at staff meetings, yes, we're here while all of these things are happening in New York City. And that presents challenges for us, but it also presents great opportunities for us, for this office, and for the city. I don't fashion ourselves as the great savior, but I certainly think we have an important role to play in improving police department policies and procedures, improving community relations, promoting public safety in a way that other oversight agencies haven't been able to in New York City in the past.

When you first moved into these offices in late May, what were the first glaring problems you saw in how the NYPD does business?
So here I am, the new and first Inspector General of this office that provides oversight for the largest police department in the country; one of the best, in many ways. It's a very sophisticated police department, and it has a lot of strengths, which should not be forgotten. Having said that, I was coming on board to start an agency with 40-plus employees, and that was a challenge. I guess, in part, that was a reason why I was hired: because I had started an agency about half this size in Washington, DC, and I know my way around police oversight circles. We got to work immediately.

On the substantive side, in terms of the issues, we met with a number of groups over the summer, a number of stakeholders. We did a listening tour with presentations and briefings that were given to us by the leadership, whether it was the Transit Bureau, the Housing Bureau, Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB)—we pretty much had a broad introduction to the bureaus of the NYPD, and that was very helpful. But other stakeholders, too: community groups, advocacy groups that we met with, like the New York Civil Liberties Union, Communities United for Police Reform, Muslim groups, mothers of young men who had been killed in altercations with NYC police officers spanning 20 years.

In terms of the issues that we were confronted with, it was the issues that were brought to our attention through these groups—the full panoply of issues, ranging from use of force cases; of course, the tragic Eric Garner incident happened about six weeks or so into my watch. But we met with groups, and we heard concerns about political and religious surveillance from NYPD, the high number of misdemeanor arrests, " broken windows" policing theory, the way in which officers are trained, or not trained, to deal with the mentally ill. So I would say with the substantive challenges, the things I learned about the police department that needed to be changed or fixed was largely through the prism of these community groups, who were very prepared and came to us to present their lists of concerns. As we go along, we'll be dealing with these issues, looking at them from our data-driven, fact-based approach in the way that an IG can address those issues objectively.

There are changes that are afoot, and reform isn't always quick and easy.

As you mentioned, the death of Eric Garner happened six weeks into your tenure. So, in many ways, these police reform groups will say that a lot of things haven't changed under Mayor Bill de Blasio. Stop-and-frisks are down, but are still skewed towards minorities. "Broken windows" is, of course, a main talking point, too. What would you say to that criticism?
I would push back at that statement that things haven't changed. If you look at what's happened over the past year, you had the startup of the new IG's office—I'm here!—and there are about 20 people in my office that have joined me since we started up. You have the federal monitor in the Floyd v. New York City [stop-and-frisk] case, Peter Zimroth, starting up as well. They're going to be specifically looking at stop-and-frisk incidents, and we know the number of stops have gone down. You have changes to the Civilian Complaints Review Board (CCRB) that have happened.

So I would say there are changes that are afoot, and reform isn't always quick and easy. If people just look around and see the changes in the police accountability, which I've just listed for you, I think the infrastructure is there to bring about change. And we'll have to look at the numbers when inspecting any one of these particular issues to see what real progress is being made.

So what were your thoughts, then, when Eric Garner died?
I saw the video like anyone else. It was sad for the family, of course. Ferguson hadn't happened yet, but there had been heightened scrutiny of police-citizen encounters around the country, I would say, predating the Garner incident. So when we saw that, we instantly knew that the authorities would address that incident. There was a hope that it'd be done responsibly, but we knew that IAB would do the investigation, the Staten Island DA would look into it, and the CCRB as well. So we knew that was not a case we'd need to investigate ourselves for a couple of reasons.

The whole focus of this office is systematic issues, not investigating individual cases; we're not here to replicate the work of the IAB and CCRB. Having said that, we're obviously concerned about that incident, the impact on police-community relations in New York City, and so we wanted to contribute to the discussion here about choke holds. The work, the report we released this month, is the product of that: a way for us to contribute to the discussion in a very meaningful way that would help the city and the police department draw lessons from that experience and other choke hold cases.

Going to that report, it's clear that these police oversight agencies have issues in the way they run—how prone they are to outside influences. As the report says, former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly completely dropped a few of their recommendations to discipline officers involved in choke hold cases without explanation. I also think there's something wrong when relatives of police brutality victims say "internal investigation" is a sign nothing is going to happen. I'm wondering if that's a major concern to you as well.
I think, over time, this office will be looking at the quality of those investigations performed by whomever, whether it's CCRB or the IAB, who has a much more narrow focus in our report. Obviously we're looking at deficiency gaps in the disciplinary process, and just based on that small size of ten cases, we were able to reach troubling questions and come up with preliminary recommendations on how to make improvements in the process. The report indicates we'll be doing future studies; choke holds are just a subset of use of force, generally, so I suspect there will be additional lessons for the city, for the NYPD, to learn from forthcoming reports.

On Tuesday night, in President Obama's State of the Union, he said to take into account the lives of both police officers and young black men. What's that space, then, for this balancing act of sorts, where you don't infringe upon the police officers, nor the community groups?
I don't think they're necessarily opposite interests. It's a fair question of how do you find that space. I go back to what I said earlier: I think the space that we operate in is the one of fact-driven, data-driven analysis. "OK, let's look at the numbers, whether it's stop-and-frisk numbers, arrests for misdemeanor offenses, or quantifying in some measure officers' interaction with the mentally ill." The space that is created, that we operate within, is to look at those interactions, look at the impact on citizens, and look at the effects on officers, be it talking to the mentally ill, where officers' safety concerns obviously arise. We will bring a dispassionate, objective approach to whatever issue it is before us that we're going to be looking at. I'd push back at the notion that somehow officers' concerns are inconsistent with community concerns.

At the end of the day, there are a lot of common interests. If the goal of the whole city is to promote greater public safety, what that means is that officers want to have the trust and the confidence of citizens. If the citizens don't trust officers, they're not going to report crimes, not going to call their local precinct, not going to cooperate with officers when they're investigating crimes. So ultimately, citizens and the police department have the same interest in having a strong, effective, and respectful department that people can trust, so that the overall goal of public safety is served, all the while protecting peoples' civil rights and civil liberties. It does require some balancing: While we've been having this conversation in the city over community relations, I think there's a lot of space for common interest or even divergent interests to be expressed and analyzed, to result in very positive, forward-looking recommendations from this office to help improve the Police Department.

If the citizens don't trust officers, they're not going to report crimes, not going to call their local precinct, not going to cooperate with officers when they're investigating crimes.

I've met police reform groups that actually said they have agreed with some things Patrick Lynch, the head of the Patrolmen's' Benevolent Association, has said, like safer policing and not putting officers in the line of fire. But do you think it makes sense that these protests have lasted this long? We were out on Monday for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and they're still attracting hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
This is America. Everyone believes strongly in the First Amendment. It's the largest city in the country. In some cases, a lot of people have pent up grievances with respect to the police department, perceptions of unfairness—actual unfairness. And so people are taking to the streets in a way that they want to express themselves. We've got a police department that's helping them express their First Amendment rights, too. That's the beauty of it; I wouldn't say it's the irony of it. That's the way the system is designed to work. As long as people are protesting peacefully, the hope is that we're going to have a police department that is going to support the right of protest and protesters and counter-protesters, as well.

And you've said that you've met with the Mayor's Office, 1 Police Plaza, and the police union, as well. How did those conversations go?
Great! I've met several times with the mayor, and several times with Police Commissioner Bill Bratton. With Bratton, he's not new to an environment where there's an inspector general. When he was in Los Angeles, he worked with someone I know who's now a federal judge but was the IG at the time, Andre Birotte, and had a very good relationship with him. He knew what the IG's world would entail. I've met Pat Lynch between the time my selection was made in March and when I moved to New York in May. I made several trips up to New York to meet various representatives of different groups, including Lynch. We had a very good discussion, and the goal for me was to make him understand this IG's office was going to be something very different than the other types of oversight that his organization had been dealing with in NYC. It wasn't going to be like the CCRB, and investigating individual cases. I let him know in that meeting that over time, the PBA and him would bring to our attention issues that they were concerned about, like training issues and supervisory issues.

This goes back to your question before: How do you create the space of work? There are common interests among many of the stakeholder groups themselves, and issues we'll be looking at that would be of interest to many of these different groups, in a way that we might be proposing reforms that will serve to improve the police department and police some of these groups. We're not here to please all of these groups all of the time—that's not the purpose of the IG's office. But I think Pat Lynch understands that this office could potentially benefit his rank-and-file officers. You could look at the comments after we issued our first report. I urge you to study his comments very closely.

I've read op-eds by Lynch where he rails against the quota system, too. And that's another integral issue at the heart of police reform advocacy: this obsession with numbers apparent in policing. How do you respond to the statement that the problems with the NYPD are so much more core than one thinks, as in a quota system, if it does exist, or that this is an agency that cannot be changed?
I think the stars aligned in a way that we can offer some real change. We have a police commissioner who understands the challenges, which is not to say I'm going to agree with his office or that we'll issue reports the police commissioner will gladly embrace. But he's very smart and I think he understands the challenges of policing the largest city in the country. That factor cannot be underestimated.

You have a mayor who's sensitive to police-community relations. You have this new office, which is sort of on the cutting edge with hiring this huge team of investigators, lawyers, and analysts. It's not really replicated anywhere else in the country on this level. I'm hopeful that many of the important conditions are in place to bring about change that New Yorkers want or need.

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Do you think then that the mayor's reforms so far—promising to retrain the police force, a call for body cameras, and a change in marijuana policy—are significant steps in the right direction?
Well, we're going to be looking at it. I've gone on record with the last report issued from my old office in DC in May of last year, in which we embraced Washington, DC's efforts to implement a body camera program. I studied the issue before I came here; we're receptive to it. We're going to be looking at it in a unique context in which New York is unveiling its plans, on two fronts: the volunteer program that NYPD has started up in December, and the body camera program set up in the Floyd case, which the federal monitor will be looking at. We'll be looking at how the city plans to implement the body camera program. We've already started to look at the best practices around the country. I think you can expect that we'll be weighing in in a constructive way as that program is implemented.

I wouldn't have accepted the job if I didn't think we were going to be successful.

It seems as if there's this sort of wall between legal reforms that you cannot touch and actually fixing the police. You can train officers and go after choke holds, but a lot of this work may be more geared toward, say, the appointment of a special prosecutor or release of grand jury proceedings, which, of course, is not under your office's authority. It's a barrier; like, you can lead up to this point, but once the officers go into court, it's a whole different ballgame that usually ends pretty well for them. So how do you deal with hitting that wall?
We're focusing here on a big slice of that problem, if you will. Ideally, if you have officers properly trained, fewer bad things happen. When fewer bad things happen to people, peoples' rights are not being abridged; they're being arrested under proper circumstances, and that will hopefully facilitate the handling of those matters in the justice system in a fairer way. They get off to a good start, and things could go wrong in the court with jury selection process and other aspects of it, but ultimately we are focusing in on a big part of the criminal justice system here.

The other thing I would say is that whenever one thinks of the outcome of the grand jury decision in Staten Island, I think what that does is it points out the need for an effective, outside review of those cases, not touched by the CCRB or the IAB or the IG's office, and calls for a strong, robust, vigorous, external review. You can take any jurisdiction, even my old one in DC, and look at the very small number of excessive force cases against officers that were prosecuted by US Attorney's office. Oversight has always been seen as a way to address those issues, which would otherwise not properly or completely addressed by other parts of the criminal justice system.

It goes without saying at this point that the NYPD is the most famous police force in the country, and among the more notorious. So, coming from DC, I have to ask: Why'd you take the job?
It was obviously a new challenge. DC was a very different agency. Because New York City has the biggest police force in the country, I'd be following—even though I've never lived here before—policing here, and have known people in policing here over the years. And because of my involvement in oversight circles and a national organization that I was the president of for several years, I got to know many people from New York and around the country. I saw this as an opportunity to apply what I had learned in DC on a bigger scale in New York. We issued policy recommendations there, on some of the same topics that we'll be looking at here: body cameras, mental health, and so forth. And so it was an opportunity to bring my experience and background to bear on a larger stage, if you will. I wouldn't have accepted the job if I didn't think we were going to be successful.

Yes, there are big challenges and we talked about some of them. But I really do believe many of the conditions are in place to bring about real change, so I was honored to be selected for this position. I feel more honored every time a new hire comes on board. I've got this incredible staff; they're a talented people, some from law enforcement backgrounds, civil rights backgrounds, civilian backgrounds. It's an incredibly talented and diverse staff of people that reinforces my belief that this office will bring about some real changes.

My final question is this: The movement itself revolves around "Black Lives Matter." That has put a lot of pressure on black leaders. President Obama has been criticized for sidestepping the Ferguson and Staten Island incidents, while others are saying he's doing what he can. There's this divide between pragmatism and associating with racial identity. I'm wondering, as an African American, if you ever feel that personal division within yourself?
I don't have a division. Certainly, as an African American who has experienced certain things, I've had my opinions about those experiences, but at the end of the day, I think it helps to bring insight into this job in ways that are different than perhaps if someone else was selected for the job. It doesn't affect how this agency will go about this work. Perhaps it brings a better sensitivity to me, in terms of understanding some of these issues, but, in terms of the actual work this office is going to do, we are bringing on board top people, Ph.D types who have more years of schooling than I have or will ever have, helping us make sense of these policies and procedure.

My identity as an African-American male doesn't change how we're going to do our work. If anything, it allows me to have more sensitivity with respect to how I view these issues, but it doesn't change the dispassionate, objective approach.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

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Still from The House of Him

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I am addicted to horror movies. I fucking love them. And so do you, even if you won't admit it.

But the recent crop of mainstream horror films have all been pretty bad. Insidious, Annabelle, The Atticus Institute—they're all the same movie with a different gloss of blood-red paint. And beyond any good, old-fashioned lessons like "Dolls are fucking creepy, you weirdo," and, "Anyone who bangs outside of marriage is a sinner and must be smited," I can't remember what exactly I've gained from them—except the feeling that jump scares must be the cinematic equivalent of repeat shock therapy.

Horror is at its most popular when there's no gray area, when we know—without having to think too hard—who to root for and who to hate. When it's nice and simple. The attractive, intelligent girl with aspirations to go to college? Good guy. David Arquette? Good guy. The clown with tiny little daggers for teeth who lingers beneath a street vent? Bad, bad guy.

When the credits roll, everyone has either been mercilessly slaughtered or returned back to normal life, as if they suffered from an acute case of amnesia and totally forget that heady summer when all their loved ones got murdered by their ex-boyfriend. But it doesn't have to be like this. Horror can be a nuanced, complicated genre that'll make you cry and shit your pants.

Films like Psycho and Rosemary's Baby, for example, are terrifying because of their dependence on realism and their refusal to allow the absurdity of the situation (a man running around murdering people in his dead mom's thong and a bunch of old Satanists smuggling a woman away to a yacht to get screwed by the devil himself, respectively) to take control. They're films that resisted convention and created their own laws, without stupid scenes like this from Troll 2, which is, for my money, the greatest-worst moment in cinematic history. And I've seen Leprechaun 4: In Space, which makes me at least the fifth or sixth most qualified person in the entire world to talk about this.

Horror has the power to show us how fucked up we can be toward each other, rather than just show us how fucked up demons are. And independent cinema has had a bit of a maturity moment with horror recently, peeling back the old tropes to reveal the dank humanity beneath.

"I continue to watch modern horror films, despite the constant disappointment," Jennifer Kent, director of The Babadook, recently told The Cut. "Just because it's a horror film doesn't mean it can't be deep. I think a lot of filmmakers who make horror now go in with dubious motives—money, predominantly. They want to make a film that will feel like a theme-park ride, and ultimately make a lot of money."

Robert Florence, director of Scottish horror The House of Him, agrees. "I think it's always a struggle to tackle heavy stuff in mainstream films," he told me. "You can see it in what happened with The Descent, which was a great horror film with an incredible ending that had to be changed for a mainstream American audience. Studios are just nervous, understandably. It's all money, in the end. But audiences are ready for this stuff."

Screw any Freudian or Jungian theories that might explain our addiction to the horror genre—it's hard to overestimate the blunt power of watching Jack Nicholson take an axe to a bathroom door and seeing Shelley Duvall's powerless Wendy screaming, tears falling down that curiously-shaped face. Horror, at its best, makes for very clear and brutal social commentary. "The vehicle of horror," said Kent, "allows characters to be broken."

Horror, then, is witnessing Essie Davis's Amelia continually neglecting Samuel, her son, in The Babadook until the moment she snaps. It's seeing Anna in The House of Him stare at the camera and whisper, "In the end, he kills me." It isn't seeing a crop-top rocking Johnny Depp dragged through a hole in his bed and spewed back up again in the mother of all blood geysers, despite how fun and gruesome it is. That's popcorn fluff.

Often the most affecting horror films—The Shining, Let the Right One In, even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—come from a female perspective. "It's a commentary on men," Florence says of his film. "It's absolutely an anti-men film. I'm comfortable with saying that about it. It's not me that hates men, necessarily. But this film does. It's a film that hates men, completely."

"I've never felt comfortable talking too much about the themes of the film, because I'm a man too, and a large part of the message of The House Of Him is: 'Listen to women. Shut up and listen to women. Let other women help you. Trust in the experiences of other women.'"

That's not to say that a series like Paranormal Activity, which was made for $15,000 and earned over $190 million in the box office, isn't "good" or "worthwhile," despite being about as spiritually nourishing as a summer holiday to Myrtle Beach. But the very best horror, for me at least, is that which is designed to fuck both with your brainwaves as well as your heart.

"Horror audiences are open-minded and very accepting of zero-budget work as long as there is a strong idea behind it," adds Florence. But of course, in an industry that values familiarity over experimentation, there's only so many opportunities for these rare horror movies to be made. Instead, we keep getting the same movies rebranded, until the sound crescendo or the double-bluff jump scare becomes about as exhilarating as a teacups ride. Which makes films like The House of Him so exciting when they do come around.

"On the surface, The House Of Him appears to be a slasher film," continues Florence, "and these films often (but not always) have an array of victims who exist just to scream and look good on camera."

The real monster in these modern movies isn't a ghost or a demon, though. It's other humans—men, mostly—and mental illness. In The Babadook, Amelia is experiencing something akin to PTSD or depression. The threat to humanity came from within, not without. When films actually possess an end to their means, when they don't just stumble aimlessly around from spooky moment to spooky moment like a red-nosed inebriate at the bar, we get behind it. The Babadook has been pretty fucking successful so far.

"It's outlandish that a woman would be trapped overnight in a haunted house with a masked serial killer,' says Florence. "But there's nothing outlandish about a woman being trapped in a threatening situation with a man. That's commonplace, everyday stuff, unfortunately—exactly what the film is about—and we had to handle all of that with care and respect.'

In many ways, the labeling of these movies alongside commercial horror is reductive, like saying Star Wars and Primer are comparable because they're both sci-fi movies. Because one form of the horror genre exists, primarily, to entertain by providing the audience with what they expect to get. The other is to use familiar themes in order to reveal something new. "I hate any talk about 'deconstructing horror,'" says Florence. "That stuff annoys me. We were leaning on horror tropes to try to explore some serious themes." It was, you imagine, quite a balancing act.

Florence said he also wanted to make a film that felt very British, to make it "real," with touches like lots of "tea-making" and "conversations side-by-side on the sitting room couch—things you don't often see in horror," and not feel like a cartoonish fantasy. And that's precisely what he's done. The film—a slasher, by any standards—is terrifying because it's so believable. Because there is nothing cartoonish about domestic violence.

Follow David on Twitter.

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Photo by Andrew White

Last month, VICE turned the big 2-0, so we threw a huge party at the Duggal Greenhouse in Brooklyn to celebrate. Nick Zinner, guitarist for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, put together a mini–music festival for us, with our favorite musicians playing a few songs and even a cover or two. Everybody from Lil Wayne to Jonah Hill was there, and we filmed all the performances and have been releasing the whole shebang on our YouTube channel.

Pavement's Stephen Malkmus did a version of the Black Crowes's 1992 hit "Remedy." Then, Jarvis Cocker, Pulp frontman and dancer extraordinaire, busted out a cover of Sham 69's "If the Kids are United." He'd already tackled Celine Dion's "The Power of Love" earlier in the night, so his cover game was strong.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/lSKp-hj-87Y?rel=0' width='640' height='360']

Head to YouTube to see more videos from the rest of the night.

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Rossport lies on Ireland's wild Atlantic coast—a beautiful, unassuming fishing village in County Mayo, which has the misfortune of resting next to the country's hidden goldmine: the Corrib Gas Field.

Over more than a decade, the traditional, rural community has become synonymous with protest through its resistance to the attempts of Shell to exploit fossil fuels in one of Ireland's environmentally protected areas. The company wants to extract the gas and that has meant building the longest gas pipeline tunnel in Europe and a processing plant in the picture-postcard farming area.

Pat "Chief" O'Donnell, a fisherman from Rossport, was immediately wary of the environmental impacts of such a project on an area famed for its natural beauty. "I was worried from the beginning," he told me. "When I got the environmental impact statement in early 2000, I thought, This is colossal. It seemed like they wanted to build a monster in the middle of a palace. It was going to destroy our home and my livelihood."

But the fisherman could never have imagined the devastating impact the Corrib gas project would have on this once close-knit community. In 2005, five local men, who had been blocking construction, were imprisoned for refusing to obey a court injunction banning them from interfering with Shell's work. The "Rossport Five" made headlines internationally and many saw this as a turning point—finally people were paying attention to Rossport. Shell lifted the injunction and, after three months in prison, the men were free to return to their families. Little did they know that this was just the start of things turning nasty.

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Photo by William Hedderman

Maura Harrington is a retired teacher and a founding member of Shell to Sea—the campaign against the gas extraction. She remembers vividly the day the policing of the protests took a violent turn.

"People in different places have specific dates that symbolize something very meaningful," she said. "For me it's the second of October 2006. That's the date our police turned on their own people and a date every Garda (police) that held a baton against us should be ashamed of."

Over several weeks, police moved into the area from the Mayo hinterland and reports of violent clashes between protesters and police trickled into the country's media.

"They used to get psyched up before they came down," said Maura. "It was like the Mississippi police in the civil rights era. They knew they would get away with whatever they wanted. You had 200 to 300 police with batons hitting people. It was deliberately designed to intimidate us and destroy our protest movement. It was vicious and intense—people being beaten down by their neighbors. We were getting support from the larger Shell to Sea movement but some locals got scared. They were worried the protesters might get killed so they called it off. To this day, I feel that was our greatest mistake," she said.

Many in Ireland were shocked by scenes of police beating elderly residents with batons. The Gardai—and a private security firm Integrated Risk Management Services (IRMS)—were accused by locals of intimidation and brutality.

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Garda engage with Paul Murphy TD during a protest

Paul Murphy, Socialist TD (the Irish term for a member of parliament) for Dublin South-West, was active in the Shell to Sea movement during this period. When I spoke to him he recalled the violence used against the protesters. "Rossport was beyond anything I had ever seen," he said. "It was the most consistent brutality by the Gardai against citizens I've witnessed to date. There was a quote in the Garda Review—the police's industry publication—saying not to arrest the protesters. You could imply it was just a case of kicking the shit out of them instead. This went on for years."

While locals and protesters complained about police brutality, it was reported in 2013 that an oil services company, operating on behalf of Shell, claimed to have delivered €35,000 ($40,500) worth of booze to the local Garda station—something the Gardai and Shell flat out-denied. A subsequent investigation by The Garda Ombudsman concluded that there was no evidence of the purchase or delivery of alcohol to Garda stations. Nevertheless, the reports served to reinforce the villagers' underdog mentality.

The David and Goliath story wasn't always told in the media, which came in for criticism for failing to portray the protesters fairly. "We were made out to be criminals, every element of the state was behind Shell. I was so naive I really thought someone would pay attention and see this for what it was—a small community defending itself," Pat said.

Filmmaker Risteard Domhnaill, who filmed the Shell to Sea movement for internationally awarded documentary The Pipe, describes the Garda beatings as "unprecedented." They were so brutal he couldn't even put it all in his film. "I have more violent footage, but I had to pull back. I wanted to highlight the political issues surrounding Rossport and the Shell to Sea campaign and the actions of the Gardai would have overshadowed that. I did submit footage to the Garda Ombudsman but nothing came of it," he said.

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Photo by William Hedderman

For its part, Shell points out that it have created jobs—over 1,000 during the construction and 175 when it's up and running. The company says the field could provide 60 percent of the country's gas.

But events at Rossport have left a dark legacy—one that has split the local community and wrecked all confidence in the Irish state. Pat O'Donnell reflected on the innocence of the remote village: "We were so naive. I never imagined that the Gardai would turn on their own people let alone beat the living daylights out of us. And for what? For protecting the land we love? For not wanting huge companies to destroy our home?"

Maura Harrington believes the community's voice has been effectively shut up. "That was the first time Ireland tested out the state-corporate nexus. What they were doing was very simple. They were sorting out their template here in Rossport. The line is: 'Go in hard,'" she said.

Despite the objections, the project is progressing—although campaigners have taken credit for massively slowing it down and increasing the costs. "I was traveling with my son last night and we saw huge flares in the distance, which shows they're testing flaring now," Pat told me. "Massive flames in the sky, but if we burn a bit of rubber out the back we'd have the Gardai down on us straight away. If they had to kill people to get this through they would. Anything to clear the way," he said.

Shell expects gas to flow through the pipe this summer.

Follow Norma Costello on Twitter.

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Photo courtesy Hampshire Constabulary

Ben Moynihan was pissed off. The 17-year-old Brit was frustrated about not getting laid, a common source of anxiety for many young men. But he went off the rails, recording home videos—which police later found—in which he complained that woman were fussy and that he had no future. "Shall I stab you in the neck or in the heart?" he asked the camera while brandishing a knife. "Shall I slash your throat or should I just cigarette lighter you or just fire you?"

Moynihan ultimately decided a steak knife would be his best weapon, and began stalking potential victims. In June, he targeted a 20-year-old, who survived the stabbing. Then he turned to progressively older women. But Moynihan was inept in comparison to the serial killers he admired: Both the 45-year-old dog walker and the 66-year-old woman he stabbed lived to tell their tales, making it easy for prosecutors to convict him for attempted murder this week.

Calling himself the "Unhappy Geezer," Moynihan challenged the police to stop him before he found a fourth victim. "All women need to die and hopefully next time I can gouge their eyeballs out, " he wrote in a letter left in a police van. "Every time I stab someone, I run home and I like to smell the flesh I ripped out." He signed the note with the symbol from the video game Tomb Raider and a taunting "CATCH ME IF YOU CAN," prompting a manhunt.

The comparison to Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in last year's Isla Vista shootings, is tempting. After that rampage, the media picked apart Rodger's manifesto and determined that pick-up artist forums had, at least in part, shaped his demented worldview. The Red Pill—the subreddit where so-called "involuntary celibates" gather to gripe—spawned pages and pages worth of discussion about whether Rodger was one of their own.

Like Rodger, Moynihan is on the autistic spectrum. Both also blamed their problems on virginity, left behind gut-wrenching writings, and attacked random women. But the conversation about Moynihan on Red Pill has thus far been nonexistent, suggesting he hasn't quite achieved the same level of internet infamy—if that was, in fact, his goal.

Moynihan has yet to be sentenced, but when in the witness box he said he exaggerated his crimes to cops in hopes of getting locked up for ten years. In the evidence presented at trial, Moynihan comes off as simultaneously monstrous and lonely.

"I attack women because I grew up to believe them as a more weaker part of the human breed," he wrote in what prosecutors called his "Evil Diary." "I also done it to get out of this horrible life with more stress and to save myself and my family, I'm not a bad child and didn't want to do this but have no choice."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Look at Lane Milburn's website and get his book from Fantagraphics.

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Photo via Flickr user Rick Donaldson

Big white trucks with tinted windows crept behind us ominously as we drove. It was freezing that night, 24 degrees, as we cautiously made our way through the little town where Colorado City, Arizona, meets Hildale, Utah—the hub for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS).

The town is called Short Creek, though the locals know it as "the Creek" (pronounced crick). The FLDS settled here over a century ago, when they broke away from Mormonism in order to keep practicing polygamy after it was outlawed by the mainstream church. Since then, the Creek has been an isolated community of many wives, governed by the word of God, as interpreted by cult leader Warren Jeffs. Jeffs was convicted of raping multiple child brides over seven years ago, but the town still lives in his shadow.

A friend of mine, Willy Steed, had grown up here and volunteered to show me around while he was visiting with his new girlfriend. I grew up Mormon—not FLDS, though I did briefly follow a cult leader who practiced his own version of polygamy—so I'd felt like I was familiar with the culture. I had always imagined that life in the Creek would look like the boisterous houses in Big Love or the well-to-do suburbia of Sister Wives—weird, sure, but still cozy. Short Creek wasn't like that at all.

There's a single gas station in Short Creek, with some quiet-looking housing tracts nestled into the mountain on the other side of the road. At first, it looked like any other shitty desert community, but when we started looking a little closer, something felt... off. Houses sat half-completed, and the town was eerily stark and neglected-looking, though here and there was the occasional sprawling mansion. Framed portraits of Jeffs were displayed prominently on walls in many of the homes—so big and brightly lit that we could see them from the street at night. The women in pastel dresses, who could be seen rounding up their children during daylight hours, were all in for the night, leaving just the men in the trucks known as the "God Squad"—the church's security force designed to intimidate outsiders and maintain control.

Willy had left the Creek three years ago, when he was 18. He still spoke with a soft Southern accent, but since I'd seen him last, he'd grown his hair long and bought a leather jacket. He grew up here with three moms and 38 siblings; church leaders had sent him to work in construction when he was ten, traveling and building houses with other young "plygs" instead of learning to read. But he was a rule-breaker, and since the church has a way of kicking out men who might compete with the truly faithful for wives, he made the first move and escaped.

Willy's girlfriend, Alyssa Bistline, has barely been out a year. Her birth father was exiled from the Creek when she was a kid, so she was assigned an extra mom and a new dad who constantly told her he was going to marry her, too. He had a habit of beating her brothers and slamming the piano on her fingers when she tried to play non-religious music. But like Willy, she was a rebel—or at least that's how she puts it. Her defiant activities included watching Anne of Green Gables, sneaking off to a library, and, after finding it on a hard drive, secretly watching the music video for Michael Bublé's "I Just Haven't Met You Yet." (She had "never seen someone that cute," she gushed to me over IHOP pancakes. "He's, like, sliding around, dancing and stuff. Oh my God. I LOVE Michael Bublé.")

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Alyssa in Short Creek

When their living conditions went from bad to worse, Alyssa and her birth mother took a risk and Googled "FLDS escapee." They found a video of Willy on 20/20, talking about life post-FLDS and modeling at a photo shoot. Alyssa was floored—he looked happy. She'd dreamed of being a model and musician, but she'd never fathomed that it could actually be possible. Two weeks later, she and her mom snuck out in the middle of the night. Willy and Alyssa met at a party later that year, and they clicked.

So here they were, coming back to Short Creek together, rebellious attitudes in tow, to visit the few family members they were still allowed to see.

They took me to the duplex where they were staying. The biting cold didn't let up when we walked in, and the lights didn't go on—there was no electricity. Because Willy and Alyssa are both considered apostates, their FLDS neighbors, who share the other half of the duplex and the utility bill, had cut the wires to to literally freeze them out.

Shivering but intrigued, I was given the grand tour, the pitch-black dimly illuminated by our cellphones. It was a small, two-story place, bare except for some cheap furniture. We saw the mattress they slept on, near the closet where they kept wine and groceries (the freezing cold weather rendered a fridge unnecessary, which was convenient since it didn't work). Even in the dim lighting, I could see that the kitchen walls were stained with mold; the floor and stairs were in a state of disrepair. I asked if this was a typical home for the Creek. The answer was a resounding yes.

"Look," Alyssa said as she showed me a video of her old room, which she'd captured on her then-forbidden cellphone. In the video, she lifts a shoe and a cockroach scurries out. She lifts another and out come two more. She shakes her sheets, points the camera under her bed—more and more roaches. It's broad daylight in the video. The whole thing was horrifying. "[They] were so thick they were like a carpet every night," she told me. "They'd crawl over me in my sleep, like into my nose, into my sheets... every night."

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Alyssa (right) with her cousin, before she escaped Short Creek

Things weren't always quite this bad. In the past few years, Short Creek has become bisected by two big "judgments." At the command of Jeffs and his brother Lyle, the leaders interviewed everyone and decided who was worthy—and not worthy—of joining an elite institution called the United Order, or the UO. You could be judged unworthy for basically anything—having a miscarriage, playing sports, or not wanting to marry a man old enough to be your grandfather—and if you were judged unworthy, you were demoted to a lower, slave-like class.

Many people didn't make it into the UO even when their kids did. If those kids were over the age of eight, they were taken away to be raised by other mothers or sent out on unpaid work crews, like Willy was. Hundreds of families were split up, sometimes never to see each other again. Those who didn't make it into the UO, children included, were sent to live with a group of other "unworthy" people in crowded homes similar to the duplex, or in a series of large tents now being built for the unrighteous. We drove past the tents. They sat unsheltered in the freezing temperatures.

Alyssa and her mother did not make it into the UO. They were sent to live in a non-UO house, the one with the roaches, where 22 other children were living. "We had two ten-year-olds [living there] who weren't with their parents. Just orphans. 'Cause they were unworthy," Alyssa explained. "It was like the most horrible whack to their self-esteem... They didn't know what they did bad."

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Willy and Alyssa now, after escaping from Short Creek

Free choice is not a tenet of the FLDS. Your spouses, home, job, hairstyle, sex positions, how much food you get every week—it's all determined by the men in charge, who enforce the prophet's bizarre edicts from God. Willy and Alyssa listed some of the things that have been outlawed in Short Creek: toys, books, movies, sports, the color red. At one point, when the prophet announced that pets were sinful, all the families' dogs were gathered into a pit and shot. Even the water and power were controlled by the FLDS until one shunned family won a lawsuit for being denied utilities for over five years.

The local police force has a longstanding reputation for returning fleeing victims to their abusers and generally enforcing the church's law over the government's. I heard stories about Alyssa's cousin, whose children were taken away and whose failed escape led to her complete isolation and now-unknown whereabouts. I heard about Willy's mom's six escape attempts. The town is shrouded in a culture of silence, where speaking up means losing your family as well as your place in Heaven, so you learn to nod and smile and keep your mouth shut.

It all sounded like a dystopian nightmare, and it was amazing to see the outside world through Alyssa and Willy's eyes. Alyssa told me she loves Taylor Swift and Avril Lavigne. They can't wait to see Nickelback together in the summer. They're learning how to speak openly about their lives and use the word "fuck." Even Willy's sense of humor has sharpened in the two years I've known him. As we drove around the Creek, a town with one gas station and little connection to the wider culture, it became clear just how much their lives had expanded since they left.

Follow Lola Blanc on Twitter.

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The pot-smoking slacker duo is one of the most enduring tropes in mainstream American comedy. From Cheech and Chong to Harold and Kumar, the landscape of humor is littered with variations on the theme of weed use leading to outlandish adventures. The Lucas Bros, identical twins who left grad school to be comedians, are proudly carrying that tradition into the second decade of the 20th century with the second season of their FXX animated series The Lucas Bros. Moving Co., which premieres tonight at midnight. On the show, the brothers play slightly exaggerated versions of themselves who live in Bushwick and own a moving company that doesn't really do much actual moving. Their version of Brooklyn includes maniacal pro wrestlers, aliens, celebrity guests like Danny Brown, and plenty of weed.

In addition to the cartoon, they appear on TruTV's sketch show Friends of the People and had a scene-stealing role in 22 Jump Street. We spoke over the phone this week about comedy, gentrification, and our mutual love of WWE wrestler Bret "the Hitman" Hart.

VICE: Can we talk about pro wrestling just for my own sake, because I can tell you guys are fans and I'm a huge fan of wrestling myself. More specifically Bret Hart. Like what was cool about him? I can't even tell you now what was cool about him for me.
Kenny Lucas: I think we we're attracted to his height. He was a small guy. We're small guys. He also wore pink.
Keith Lucas: He was really the only wrestler who wore pink, which was oddly appealing at the time. We also had a friend on a block who was a huge Shawn Michaels fan and we didn't like him. So we thought, If he likes Shawn Michaels, then we have to like Bret Hart. So, it was the divide of our block. Either Bret Hart fans or Shawn Michaels fans.

I definitely think there is a very clear dividing line between the two. If you like Shawn Michaels it says something about who you are as a human being.
Kenny: That's absolutely true. You're a little bit more arrogant.

You're kind of a dick.
Kenny: Yeah, we're never into that kind of arrogance. Bret Hart was the kind of epitome of not being arrogant, at least in the ring, and that's what attracted us to him.

For someone who wore pink, he was very humble. I feel like there's a lot of people who are comedy people—either working in comedy or comedy nerds—who have an affinity for wrestling. Do you think there's a reason why, and what is it about wrestling that was attractive to you growing up?
Keith: There's something connected between comedy and wrestling. I think it's because a lot of us were just nerds growing up. We gravitated toward either wrestling or comic books or movies. A lot of nerds become comedians. Our best friend at the time was a huge wrestling fan.
Kenny: He showed us the way. He was our Obi-Wan.
Keith: He was an older guy and already was into wrestling. He introduced us to it and we fell in love with it. Then we never looked back.
Kenny: We really got into it. A lot of guys moved away from it as they got older, but we we're still into it. Throughout high school and college, we we're loving it. We loved the sport so much that we didn't want to leave. A lot of our friends stepped off of it as they got older to get the girls, but we didn't.

Are you still watching now? If not, was there a point where you jumped out?
Keith: We jumped out for a little bit in college and pretty much all through law school, but we would read articles and stuff like that. I wouldn't watch it or anything. I would follow it on the internet.

It's funny that you guys stopped watching in college because that was exactly when I stopped watching wrestling and I stopped liking Star Trek. In college, I wanted to get laid, but I couldn't get laid if I had a Mr. Spock poster or I was wearing Bret Hart sunglasses.
Keith: That was the same reasons we had. We got so into girls and into academics, so we thought maybe we have to give up that childhood stuff to rest, but then you go to comedy and it's like, Oh, I'm a kid again.

And you get to be paid for liking this stuff. Jake "the Snake" Roberts plays himself on The Lucas Bros. Moving Company. Have you interacted with him much or does he just come into the booth and record?
Kenny: We haven't really had a chance to interact with him because he records out of Atlanta, so he doesn't come to LA or New York. Whenever we've had a chance to talk, he tells these really weird long stories, and they're fantastic. I'm like, Wow, this is what I expected from Jake the Snake.

In his first episode you say, "I thought you we're dead," and I thought the same thing. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that he's still going strong.
Kenny: Yeah, he's doing much better now than he was a decade ago.

That's the thing that's so troubling to me about wrestling. They don't take care of the people.
Kenny: Yeah, it's terrible. They should start up a union to help those guys get health care, because it's a problem.

Law school is something that you guys brought up and something I know have talked about in other interviews before. What got you into quitting that? They are obviously different, but I'm sure there are commonalities between comedy and the law. Why did you decide to get out of it and do you think there's anything in that education that has informed your work or helped you?
Kenny: I realized I didn't want to be a lawyer. I didn't want to pursue it and I think Keith and I had [the same] sentiment. I just wanted to find something where I could work with my brother and have fun doing it; have fun creating. So I was at NYU, doing the New York thing, and I checked out some comedy teams. I went to the Cellar, the Improv, and I thought we could do comedy. I thought we could be successful. You're using a similar part of your brain [that you use for law school]. I had a conversation with myself. Do I want to be a lawyer? Is that something I'm going to pursue for the next 20 years? And if not, shouldn't I pick something I'm going to enjoy? So I transitioned into comedy like that.
Keith: Yeah, he pretty much told me what he just said. He convinced me throughout our time to drop out and come up there and start working. I asked the same questions: Do I want to be a lawyer for the next 30 years? Is it something I'm passionate about? When I answered no to both of them I knew right then and there it was time for me to move on. But the education has helped us in terms of navigating through the world of Hollywood; dealing with contracts and negotiations. So, I do believe that we speak the language a little bit better then our peers. We've been able to comprehend a lot of the different aspects of the legal realm.
Kenny: You have a better understanding of the stuff you have to do in the business process. It's certainly been helpful.
Keith: It's helpful to think like a lawyer.

Was it always intended to be a two-person act or did you go back and forth on how you wanted to do this?
Kenny: I wanted it to be a two-headed approach. I wanted it to be a collective effort.
Keith: I was definitely going through a depression and Kenny knew we had to work together. If we're not together we tend to be more depressed.
Kenny: We have a great working relationship. I mean we've been working together for so long with basketball and other sports. We're just used to working together.

Were there any challenges to figure out a way to serve each of you creatively? There's not a ton of duos in comedy anymore. There's the Sklar Brothers, but not much else. Historically there's been a lot of two-person groups: Nichols and May, Burns and Allen, and others, but it's a lot more rare now. What is the process that goes into writing and figuring out the beats of jokes or who says what and that kind of thing?
Kenny: Obviously, we're incredibly collaborative. For example, for the stand-up comedy, Keith will have an idea, then I'll punch it up, and then he will. Then we go on stage, and we'll try a couple of punchlines and use whichever one is effective.
Keith: We try to keep it really open. It's more improv now. We'll improv it, and then we'll try to transcribe it and find what parts of the idea need a little work.

I know a lot of comedians who say it takes years or decades to really hone an act, to figure out why you're saying what you're saying and who you are on stage. How long do you think it took you guys to really have that "a-ha moment"?
Kenny: So much of the stuff we do now is a combination of our backgrounds and has shaped what we do. The moment we go on stage, that's who we will be. It feels laid back. It's free and open and we don't take shit seriously, because life is way too short.
Keith: Taking it easy is something we sort of stumbled upon by studying philosophy. Our delivery is something we have trouble figuring out, and I think we're still trying to figure out to this day.

How much do you think New York plays a role in what you guys come up with and your creative process? It seems like it's an important part of the animated show and your stand-up. Your personas are very laconic and lackadaisical, but New York has a sort of oppressive energy all the time, where everyone is manic in some way. Do think that came out of New York or was that just who you are?
Keith: I would say New York has played an instrumental role in terms of why we create and the approach of how we create.
Kenny: It's a combination of what we listen to and what we see. I feel like Manhattan is less laid back. In Brooklyn, it's a creative force which revolves around different things. A lot of people are broke and are not worried about money. It's a different universe over there. We've been able to manifest ourselves from that background, because it doesn't really define how we approach our comedy, but it does play a role.

The gentrification that's going on in Brooklyn and other cities in America. It isn't really foregrounded in the show, but it does seem to have an element of that in there. I guess it's just because you're in New York with the show, but I was particularly struck by the image of the Barclays Center being destroyed in the first Jake the Snake episode. How do you guys feel about the cultural situation in Greenpoint and Bushwick? There was a good SNL sketch about that on the Kevin Hart episode.
Kenny: Since I'm not from New York—I'm from North Carolina and Jersey—I'm not as invested in the gentrification process, but you go back and forth. There are certain aspects of the culture that you would hope stay around, but you know, it's inevitable that it will be eradicated. That's kind of sad, but at the same time so much new culture is being brought in.
Keith: We were living in Bushwick for about a year, and you got that mixture. It was a beautiful thing.
Kenny: You hope it will stay like that. You want some of the locals to stay there, and I love new people coming in and bringing in a new type of energy. Sometimes when you're a local, you want to keep things the same. When you bring in that new kind of energy, it certainly vitalizes the area. I think Bushwick is the perfect epicenter for that, and I really appreciate it. But it obviously comes with its problems.
Keith: It's never going to be the same culture. It isn't what it once was.

When I go to Williamsburg, it feels very homogenized, but then I go to Clinton Hill and it still feels like an ethnic neighborhood with a lot of character.
Kenny: You never want to lose that character and look at a neighborhood like some object. There are people who live there who are being kicked out of their homes. That's always going to be tragic. There's no way around it, but it seems it can be avoided.

You guys are doing the animated series, you're developing a live-action sitcom, you're doing a sketch show, you're in movies. It's a lot of stuff to do at once. Is there anything you wouldn't do? Will we ever get a Lucas Bros. R&B album?
Kenny: [Laughs] We'll never do music. I think the animation is what we're really passionate about. I mean that's the stuff we've grown up on. That's the stuff we always loved as kids and to be able to produce it now is awesome.
Keith: I think the animation is the closest way of tapping into what we do, and I still think we're more creative within the animation world. We wanted to test out and try different things and see what we like and didn't like, but animation was the thing I would love to be remembered for.

What is it like collaborating with Ben Jones, the director of the show? Do you guys bounce things of him? Does he come to you or is it more like this is the show and this is what we're doing?
Kenny: Ben Jones is a genius. It's like, sometimes I'm intimidated.
Keith: It's very collaborative. We communicate consistently and work to see if we are all on the same page. I like the creative freedom. Like Kenny said he's a creative genius. He's done some amazing things on the show. He's helped us with our ideas.

Is there anything coming up with the new season that you're especially excited to share with the audience?
Kenny: There's an episode dedicated to Jay-Z and that will be fun for the audience.
Keith: We just previewed the Will Smith episode. An episode devoted to Will Smith and one about Jaleel White. That's one I was really proud of.
Kenny: We do an Inception-style episode...
Keith: Where we're trying to find the memory of Urkel. We loved Family Matters when we were growing up, so why not make something like that?

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

Over the past few years, female-friendly pornography has made a big splash in Japan. Our friends over at the Japanese VICE office decided to check out this new world of adult entertainment.

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A tent city in Hyderabad, India. Photo via Flickr user Dave Wilson

Ah, America. Land of opportunity. Take a deep breath and smell the possibilities. As Obama said in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, "a nation that gave someone like me a chance." A nation that allowed a wide-eyed kid from Hawaii and member of the Choom gang to become its president. But are the chances of upward mobility in America all that great? In a new report released on Tuesday, hours before Obama's remarks, the World Bank claimed that it is now about as easy to move out of poverty or from low-class to middle-class status in India as it is in America.

Entitled "Addressing Inequality in South Asia," the report notes that (based on gini coefficient measures of income distribution and inequality) between 2004 and 2010, roughly 40 percent of India's poor (or 9 percent of the total population) moved above the poverty line, with 11 percent moving into the middle class. The authors revel in the fact that, especially for historically socially immobile minorities, the place of one's birth and occupation of one's parents matter far less now than in the history of modern India. It credits this change largely to the abundance of non-farm jobs available in the country's ever-expanding urban spheres.

"There is good news," the study co-author and World Bank Chief Economist for South Asia Martin Rama told The Hindu. "India is no longer the land of extremes and there are some bright spots."

The report plays into some cheery narratives of the nation's newfound and heartening social fluidity, like the story of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's rise from low-class origins as a train station tea server. Yet America, where fears about waning social mobility and inequality dog most major public debates, might not be as phenomenal a marker of India's success as many would like to think.

According to a 2012 Economic Policy Institute study, "U.S. [social] mobility is amongst the lowest of major industrialized economies."

A 2013 Pew study showed that 70 percent of Americans born in the bottom fifth economic percentile never reach a middle percentile, while 17 percent achieve (roughly) middle class status, 9 percent upper-middle class, and 4 percent upper class. These findings were largely corroborated by a 2014 Harvard study, which further showed that movements from working class to wealth have actually fallen. Compared to a nation like Denmark, where up to 16 percent of the nation's poor will move to the top fifth economic percentile in their lives, the US seems like a pretty shitty standard by which to measure a nation's ascendant class mobility.

What's truly depressing from the American perspective is not just what a crap metric we are. It's that the World Bank study, if true, shows that India is kicking our ass by increasingly divorcing one's origins from one's future. Not only do most recent studies on the US suggest that the rate at which Americans escape poverty has been stagnant for decades, they also fairly explicitly show that one's race, parents' social status, or place of birth are still shockingly strong indicators of one's position later in life. And as inequality grows in America, this static class positioning and socio-economic pre-determination becomes all the more worrying.

But the study is not a universal coup for India, or a definitive blow to the American psyche. Many observers do not agree on what constitutes poverty in India, with the government claiming in 2012 that only 22 percent of its citizens fell below the poverty line, but outside auditors claiming a 30 percent poverty rate in 2014. The fact that the new World Bank study focuses on class attainment through income-based measures, but concedes a shocking lack of access throughout the nation to clean water, electricity, medical services, education, and welfare (despite billions of dollars spent yearly by New Delhi on subsidies and social services), especially for marginalized groups, suggests that this success in social mobility is mainly spreadsheet-deep. The McKinsey Global Institute in 2014 claims that, if one were to factor in access to amenities we traditionally associate with life above the poverty line, it would take a 50 percent larger income than the government's projects to escape destitution, leaving 56 percent of the population in privation.

The World Bank study also points out that in the same period as so many supposedly escaped on-paper destitution, 9 percent of Indians also slipped backwards over the poverty line.

While America is far from perfect in our provision of essential goods and social services, it is far more likely that US poverty escapees will have decent access to such vital resources. It's also far less likely to fall backward on the class ladder in America than it appears to be in India.

Congratulations are still certainly in order to India for becoming a regional leader in social mobility. Even if a class shift there might not look as significant as it could, the nation's upward trajectory, especially for marginalized groups, is promising—especially compared to America, where we're just happy not to reverse the stream of social fluidity. But for all its good news, the World Bank report is still a kick in the balls to India that should make it look at how to get its infrastructural and social services together to match its citizens' growing incomes, just as much as it's a sharp reminder to America to consider where we sit in terms of the global scale of class mobility.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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Just a group of friendly women getting ready to do some charity work. All photos courtesy Mercedes Carrera

One of the most evocative things about the Internet is its uncanny ability to connect seemingly random things in joyous cacophony. If you want to see a substitute teacher terrorized by Lebron James, it's here. If you're in the mood to watch a group of grandmas get stoned for the first time, here you go. And let's say you have the sudden desire to watch porn stars live-stream a sex show for an education scholarship. Well, god bless the internet because that exists too.

The Porn Charity is the brainchild of California porn star and former aerospace engineer Mercedes Carrera. Along with Toronto-based venture The Fine Young Capitalists, Carrera just held a live cam show to establish the first porn-funded STEM scholarship.

STEM programs, which loosely refers to studies in either Science, Technology, Engineering or Math, have gained particular importance in the last five years as the need for a tech-savvy workforce grows at an exponential rate. Tech companies, education coalitions and school boards alike have emphasized the importance of STEM—particularly with women and certain minority groups who are less likely to pursue studies in these areas. Recent studies have shown that Canada, compared to its peer countries, has something of a STEM problem.

Inspired by Carrera's own engineering career as well as her love of gaming, The Porn Charity's merit-based scholarship is open to any student pursuing a STEM program degree in the United States or Canada. "Tuition is like $40,000 [a year] nowadays at a state school," Mercedes emphasized. "I don't know how these kids are doing it." The application process is handled by The Fine Young Capitalists, a group of specializes in working with underrepresented groups looking to break into the technology sector. Prospective students will be able to apply for the scholarship this February and will be required to submit school transcripts and a short essay outlining why they should be chosen for the program.

The group's fundraising model was simple: top cam site Webcams.com donated free airtime to Carrera's team of five porn stars, which included well-known actresses like Paisley Parker and Holly Heart. As with most cam shows, subscribers were able to request specific sex acts for a fixed donation amount. Webcams.com charitably agreed to double all tips and donations.

VICE asked Carrera about the most outlandish thing she was asked to do on camera during the three-hour show. She said that much of what the performers did was standard cam repertoire: solo masturbating and playing with dildos and, of course, one another. But there was one exception.

"Well, Paisley and I did fist Holly for a thousand-dollar donation," she laughed. "And it was Paisley's first time fisting anybody. So she lost her fisting virginity on a live stream in front of a few thousand people. That was pretty funny."

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Their performance was dubbed "The View of Sex" and, despite conjuring up some very traumatic images of Joy Behar, raised over $5,000 in a mere few hours. The group received donations from across the world, with the biggest sums coming from the United States and Canada, respectively. Coupled with an Indiegogo campaign that sold Vivian James merchandise, The Porn Charity's inaugural campaign raised $11,280 in less than two weeks.

While the effectiveness of such a project seems like a no-brainer, similar sex- and porn-based initiatives have been riddled with controversy and clashing feminist politics.

Before deciding to build her own scholarship, Carrera initially tried to partner with Ablegamer—a foundation that works to make gaming accessible for people with disabilities. When the group learned of her plan to raise funds through a live cam show, they withdrew from the project. And famously, the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation snubbed Pornhub.com in 2012 by rejecting the reported $30,000 tube site's breast cancer campaign raised.

And while the rejection of funds in certain cases might be justified (see: motorboating bros with misogynistic ends), money fundraised as a result of sex work appears to still be viewed by charities as controversial and "dirty." Which is interesting when you consider that Goldman Sachs—a company whose image is far from squeaky clean—maintains a steady philanthropic relationship with dozens of universities, including here in Canada, where they've awarded scholarships at both The University of Western Ontario and Queen's University in recent years.

But when I asked Carrera if she would have any hang-ups accepting donations for The Porn Charity from potentially nefarious sources. She replied, "I would take money from Hitler himself if it was to fund something I believe in."

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The near-overnight success of The Porn Charity's first project proves the indisputable weight of porn consumers and just how easily they can finance charitable endeavours. It also highlights a persistent cultural discomfort with pornography and shows how our views about sex remain woefully antiquated.

"The mainstream still sees porn as it was in the 1970s... they think we're doing coke off each other's buttcracks," said Carrera.

I wasn't able to view a copy of the live-stream prior to writing this article, but the photos I saw were almost disappointingly banal. Sure, everyone was naked, but there was something so reassuringly familiar about a group of girlfriends playfully hanging out in front of a computer screen. In fact, I've spent many nights in a similar situation. Swap out the self-deprecating jokes for some dirty talk, add some double penetration, and you've got yourself a (raunchier) version of my Tuesday night.

I quickly realized that The Porn Charity also plays an important social function. Carrera and her team challenge the dominant narrative that sex workers are inherently oppressed and unable to practice self-determination. The women I saw in those photos seemed sly and funny. The kind of ladies you could easily open up to about an embarrassing sexual experience.

"The porn industry is full of very empowered women," said Carrera. "I'm on set and I'm talking to these women who are accountants and who have master's degrees—it's our dirty little secret from the outside world."

The Porn Charity is currently in the process of registering as a 501(c)(3) organization in the US and Carrera hopes to expand its reach to other educational areas. Her next project is to establish an education grant specifically for people in the adult entertainment industry who want to go on and pursue other fields.

"I would even love to see some adult performers apply for the STEM scholarship," Carrera said. "There are some brilliant people in porn and a lot of them are students."

If the success of The Porn Charity's first campaign tells us anything, it's that the future of fundraising is looking creative. And a hell of a lot less puritanical.

Follow Neha Chandrachud on Twitter.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/GbR6iQ62v9k' width='640' height='360'] Typically, a sit-down with the president is an honor reserved for only the most senior and respected White House reporters. But at 5 PM, President Obama will continue his administration's practice of working with new media by agreeing to take questions from some unusual interviewers.

Think of it as a teeny-bopper AMA, or at least a more fun version of Tuesday's State of the Union address. Three YouTube stars will be grilling the president, and they're not exactly known for their hard-hitting insight into domestic affairs.

The interviewers will be GloZell Green, who's perhaps best known for sitting in a tub full of cereal; a 19-year-old who gives beauty advice named Bethany Mota; and Hank Green, a notorious YouTube ranter whose brother wrote The Fault in Our Stars.

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Photo via Flickr user Azi Paybarah

It's not very often that prominent politicians actually get arrested for corruption in America, but New York is not like the rest of the country. On Thursday, Sheldon Silver, who has been speaker of the State Assembly in Albany for two decades, turned himself in to the FBI. According to a criminal complaint and charges announced by US Attorney Preet Bharara, Silver leveraged his influence to rake in millions of dollars in kickbacks and bribes, leaning on his private-sector legal work to disguise the extra income. The Feds seized over $3 million of his assets Thursday morning and accuse Silver of funneling official money to a doctor in exchange for referrals of asbestos cases to his law firm, giving tax favors to a real estate developer, and collecting bribes disguised as referral fees.

Silver is officially charged with five counts of wire fraud, mail fraud, conspiracy, and extortion, but the question now is whether the politician's arrest is just the first in a series of takedowns of key players in New York.

"For many years, New Yorkers have asked the question: How could Speaker Silver, one of the most powerful men in all of New York, earn millions of dollars in outside income without deeply compromising his ability to honestly serve his constituents?" Bharara said. "Today, we provide the answer: He didn't."

It says something about this place that even after Silver's arrest, many New York Democrats are standing by their man, a testament to the speaker's ability to wield power with ruthless efficiency in one of the more dysfunctional legislatures in the country.

"Although the charges announced today are certainly very serious, I want to note that I've always known Shelly Silver to be a man of integrity, and he certainly has due rights and I think that we should let the process play out here," New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters at City Hall Thursday.

But Bharara has made a name for himself as a lone wolf willing to go after just about anyone. He first popped up on the national radar by taking on Wall Street criminals, the guys who usually evade the criminal justice system's clutches. Last year, Bharara stunned the New York political establishment by announcing that he was probing the closure of the Moreland Commission, a state corruption panel set up by Governor Andrew Cuomo that was subsequently shut down as part of a deal with the state legislature—to "the great relief of Sheldon Silver," as Bharara crowed at his press conference Thursday.

Silver has not yet been indicted by a grand jury, but even if he's convicted, history suggests the guy has a good chance of getting off. Last May, Joseph Bruno, a former majority leader of the State Senate, was cleared of wrongdoing over charges he used mail fraud to disguise illegal payments. Of course, by that time, he had been forced out of power. Silver will probably stick around a while, and can remain in the legislature until convicted.

No matter what happens, a high-profile corruption case like this one will make it that much harder for Cuomo and others playing the game in Albany to do their thing.

"For good or ill, scandals really help reform," says Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham law professor and corruption sage who unsuccessfully challenged Cuomo in last year's Democratic primary.

If Bharara wants to cause a major upset in how business is done in Albany, however, he'll probably have to go after even bigger fish.

"One of the great unanswered questions here is what's going on with the investigation of the Moreland Commission itself," says Richard Brodsky, a former member of the State Assembly and columnist at the Albany Times-Union. Bharara is still being coy about the precise relationship between the shuttered corruption panel—and, by extension, Governor Cuomo—and the charges against Silver. But he's embracing the drama, practically begging the political press to engage in some rife speculation in the weeks ahead.

"You should stay tuned," Bharara said Thursday.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.