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The Cuba Diaries: One Day with a Havana Sports Fan

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The Cuba Diaries: One Day with a Havana Sports Fan

Canada's Government Is Getting Cozy with Egypt's Increasingly Repressive Regime

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Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird shakes Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's hand at Davos. Photo via Twitter

At least 20 civilians were killed in Egypt on Sunday as security forces opened fire on protests marking the fourth anniversary of the Revolution that toppled longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. Among the victims was 32-year-old poet and activist Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, shot by masked police officers at close range as she and others carried flowers to the uprising's epicenter, Tahrir Square. The New York Times noted that the killings were "a reminder of the ruthless crackdown the military-backed government has used to silence any echoes of that revolt."

For Canadians, the killings might also serve as a reminder that despite the violent crackdown, the Harper government has been far from critical of the regime. In fact, during a visit to Cairo earlier this month, his second in less than a year, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird declared Canada's "strong support" for the Egyptian government, praising its "transition to democracy and the inclusion of human rights and rule of law." Baird also announced increased collaboration with Egyptian security forces, unveiling an aid package that includes $2 million in funding and a new program for Canadian officers to train their Egyptian counterparts. And in what could be interpreted as an open endorsement of the regime's attacks on political opponents, Baird lauded what he called "the significant leadership that the new government of Egypt is taking first in confronting the terrorist acts of the Muslim Brotherhood."

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Protesters in Cambridge, MA supporting the Egyptian uprising. Photo via Flickr user Ian Murphy

"Far worse than anything under Mubarak"
Baird did acknowledge one snag in his "fruitful" talks with Egyptian counterparts: the over year-long and globally denounced imprisonment of Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy, which he described as "the only major irritant in our bilateral relationship."

"It's difficult to comprehend how Baird could consider the Fahmy case, important as it is, 'the only major irritant' in Canada's relationship with Egypt," Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, told VICE. "Egypt is in the midst of the most severe crackdown in recent history—far worse than anything ever experienced under Hosni Mubarak."

Roth has experienced the crackdown first hand. After visiting Egypt freely under Mubarak's three-decade dictatorship, he was denied entry at Cairo International Airport last August. Roth had come to unveil HRW's year-long investigation into the regime's mass killings of demonstrators the summer before, when tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters flooded the streets to demand the reinstatement of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first democratically elected civilian president. Morsi was ousted in early July 2013 after the Egyptian military seized upon massive street protests against his government. The armed forces installed a junta led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, now the Egyptian President.

The HRW probe concluded the Egyptian security forces carried out "systematic and widespread killing" in July and August 2013, claiming at least 1,150 lives and "probably [amounting] to crimes against humanity." In the worst attack, a minimum of 817 people and more likely at least 1,000 were killed on August 14, 2013, when Egyptian forces stormed a pro-Morsi encampment inside Cairo's Raba'a Square. Backed by armed personnel carriers and bulldozers, the Egyptian forces "gave little to no effective warning and opened fire into large crowds, leaving no safe exit for nearly 12 hours."

"What I saw was a bloodbath," Sharif Abdel Kouddous, an Egyptian-American journalist based in Cairo, told VICE. "In the hospital area, people were being brought in dead or dying every few minutes. Men and women, young and old."

After the shootings stopped, large parts of the Raba'a encampment were set ablaze, "probably by security forces," HRW found.

"The smell of death was in the air everywhere," Kouddous says of a makeshift morgue he visited the following day. "Many of the bodies were charred beyond recognition."

Eight police officers were killed during the Raba'a attack. The military regime claimed it opened fire in response to bullets and projectiles from the protesters. But Egypt's Interior Ministry acknowledged that just 15 guns were recovered from a square packed with tens of thousands of people. According to HRW, the low figure suggests "that few protesters were armed and further corroborates the extensive evidence... that police gunned down hundreds of unarmed protesters."

According to Roth, the Raba'a massacre "rivals if not exceeds Tiananmen Square," making it one of the worst attacks on political demonstrators in decades. To date, no officials or military personnel been held accountable for a single death. Instead, the Egyptian government gave bonuses to the officers involved, and even built a monument to the security forces in the centre of Raba'a Square.

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Protesters fill Tahrir Square in November 2012. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

"Repression unprecedented in Egypt's modern history"
The climate of brutality and impunity has continued under Egypt's military leaders in the year and a half since. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch recently warned that Egyptian authorities were "engaging in repression on a scale unprecedented in Egypt's modern history."

In addition to Raba'a, Amnesty and HRW found multiple other killings of protesters that left hundreds dead; a "grossly unfair" judicial system that has tried civilians in military courts and sentenced hundreds of people to death at once; the forcible disappearances of dozens of people; the rampant torture of prisoners; and a major assault on free speech and assembly, with thousands locked up "solely as a result of their peaceful exercise of these rights."

The Muslim Brotherhood has been the regime's prime target, with thousands of its members arrested since Morsi's ouster. The party was banned in September 2013 and later deemed a terrorist group, leading the government to seize its assets and take control of its affiliated groups and schools.

The crackdown has also extended to the non-Islamist activists and youths who played a major role in the uprising against Mubarak in 2011 and the protests against Morsi in 2013. A draconian law approved in November 2013 bans public gatherings of ten or more people without prior government approval. Protesters who have defied the ban have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from two to 15 years.

University campuses, one of the last bastions of dissent under the military regime, have also faced heavy repression. After the military crushed street protests in Raba'a and other areas around Cairo in the summer of 2013, student activists continued the resistance by shutting down several major schools. Egyptian forces killed at least 14 students and arrested thousands. El-Sisi reacted with a decree granting himself the power to personally appoint university presidents and department heads, who in turn were granted the authority to kick out students and faculty members at will. When protests resumed this past fall, dozen of students were again swept up in raids.

In addition to Canada's Mohamed Fahmy and his Al Jazeera colleagues, at least eight other reporters remain behind bars. Six TV outlets linked to the Muslim Brotherhood have been raided or shut down. The Committee to Protect Journalists has warned that journalists in Egypt face "unprecedented threats," forcing "independent and critical voices into silence, exile, or prison."

While the Egyptian judiciary acted with some degree of independence under Hosni Mubarak, it has now become a willing partner in the repression, issuing acquittal after acquittal of police officers and former regime members. This includes Mubarak himself, who in November was cleared of ordering the killing of hundreds of protesters during the Egyptian Revolution. He will likely walk free after finishing his current sentence on a corruption conviction, possibly within the next few months.

As with this weekend's anniversary protests, the Mubarak decision led to the killings of demonstrators by state forces. Occasional flare-ups notwithstanding, the protests that propelled the uprising four years ago have all but disappeared. Kouddous, who has covered Egypt since the revolution's first days, says the Raba'a massacre marked the "death knell" for the grassroots activism that forced Mubarak out of power. After the January 25 Revolution, a "surge of collective empowerment coursed through the citizenry, where public policy was guided by the streets or at least pressured in a real way by it," he recalls. But in the period since the el-Sisi-led coup of July 2013, "any and all political space has been closed—all decisions are made by the top."

The el-Sisi regime has justified its crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and other opponents under the familiar rubric of fighting "terrorism." The Egyptian military faces a deadly insurgency from al Qaeda-linked militants in the northern Sinai region, and attacks on state forces have increased since Morsi's ouster in July 2013. There is also no doubt the Muslim Brotherhood engaged in repression, including the torture of political opponents right before the coup. But as Amnesty and HRW noted in June, the current regime "has yet to put forward any evidence to support the [Brotherhood's] terrorist designation, or to link the group to specific terrorist attacks."

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Raba'a Square filled with tens of thousands of demonstrators protesting the 2013 military coup, and many hundreds were gunned down. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Return to stability
Immediately following the July 2013 coup, Canada's public approach to Egypt's police state alternated between tepid equivocation and silence. After hundreds of people were gunned down in Raba'a Square, Baird's Foreign Ministry issued a bland statement that refused to condemn the state forces responsible.

More recently, the milquetoast rhetoric has shifted to outright support. One year ago—just as el-Sisi prepared to run for the presidency—Prime Minister Stephen Harper voiced his open backing of the junta, calling Morsi's ouster a "return to stability." With the elected President removed, Harper explained, Egypt must "transition to democracy"—presumably, a version superior to the one that voted the wrong way. Morsi, Harper explained, had tried to use his democratic victory as a means "to achieve what was in fact going to be an authoritarian Islamic state."

That's a non-starter: Harper seems to prefer governments such as Saudi Arabia—arguably the world's most authoritarian state—to the point that he currently refuses to guarantee that a $15-billion arms deal with the fundamentalist Gulf oligarchy complies with Canadian law.

Egypt's Harper-approved democratic transition continued in May, when el-Sisi won presidential elections with 96 percent of the vote. Amid a low turnout, the junta promoted democracy by adding a third day of voting on the fly and threatening a $72 fine for any able voter who failed to cast a ballot.

"Egypt's repressive political environment," Democracy International—a US-government-funded group that monitored the vote—observed, "made a genuinely democratic presidential election impossible."

Even the White House, a key backer of the el-Sisi regime, felt compelled to publicly acknowledge "concerns ... about the restrictive political environment in which this election took place." Harper's government had no such qualms. Baird declared that Canada was "encouraged" by "a key step along Egypt's path to democracy," going on to "congratulate President-elect el-Sisi on the results."

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John Baird. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

"We stand with the Egyptian government and people"
In an email exchange with the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development, VICE posed several questions related to Egypt's human rights record—including Sunday's killings of 20 civilian protesters—and the closer security collaboration announced during Baird's visit to Cairo. None were answered directly. A DFATD spokesperson wrote: "Canada supports Egypt's transition and the continued implementation of Egypt's roadmap to democracy. We stand with the Egyptian government and people in their efforts to build a stable, inclusive, prosperous and democratic Egypt based on respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law."

On whether Canada will use its closer security ties with Egypt to raise human rights concerns, the spokesperson wrote: "In previous meetings with senior Egyptian officials, Minister Baird reiterated the importance that Canada attributes to respecting democratic principles and the human rights of all Egyptians... We will continue to engage with Egypt on a range of issues including regional security and human rights."

Events over just the past few days indicate what that engagement might look like. On Friday, Baird tweeted out a photograph of him and el-Sisi shaking hands at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "Great to have dinner & speak with President el-Sisi last night at a forum on Egypt's Economic Transformation," he wrote. Two days later came the deadly attacks on demonstrators marking the Egyptian Revolution's fourth anniversary. Graphic images that went viral across Egypt showed protester Shaimaa al-Sabbagh bloodied and motionless as friends prop her pellet-riddled body off the ground. As some Western allies voiced concern, Baird chose not to criticise el-Sisi, his dinner companion of just 48 hours earlier. Instead, the Foreign Ministry released a statement declaring "Canada Concerned About Freedom of Expression,"—in Malaysia.

Follow Aaron Maté on Twitter.

An Irish School Stopped an Anti-Homophobic Workshop Because It Didn't Include 'Both Sides'

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A school with a rainbow over it. Photo by via Wikimedia Commons.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Is bullying people for being gay fair enough? In Ireland, in 2015, this is still a bit of a head-scratcher, apparently. This week, an Irish school cancelled an anti-homophobic bullying workshop because people who think homophobic bullying is A-OK weren't invited to enlighten children with their side of this hotly contested moral maze.

Shout Out, a group that provided training to combat homophobic bullying, claim their workshop leader was told the school had decided that "both sides of the argument should be given," and so the workshop wasn't allowed to go ahead. The school's board of management then issued a statement saying that parents sent letters "outlining their concerns regarding the workshop."

Some of the pupils protested by wearing rainbow badges to school the next day, which is pretty great. But the real issue of Ireland's twisted relationship with sex education remains. The media storm currently surrounding the controversy is part of the typically reactive mesh that has dangerously defined sex ed in Ireland. Irish policy making on this issue continues to follow the mantra, "whoever shouts the loudest," often at the expense of rational logic.

The school in question, Colaiste Eoin in Dublin, has been lambasted as a backward institution. It is seen as actively promoting a "closeted" homophobic agenda while denying vulnerable students access to vital services. But the school is just a tiny player in a society that is silencing much needed voices in a changing society.

In its public statement, Colaiste Eoin management references its Catholic School status as a reason for the workshop cancellation. This excuse is unsurprising. In Ireland Catholic schools are the norm, with the church running 3,000 out of the 3,200 primary schools and a decent chunk of the country's secondary schools. So it's pretty normal to see "Catholic" stamped all over any panicked statement issued by an Irish school when asked to clarify their position on sex ed.

Dr. Leslie Sherlock is Ireland's leading sex educator, she sees Irish sex education as a by-product of the fallout of British rule, when large parts of Irish society were given over to the Church to run.

"This is a post-colonial remnant," she said. "Ireland handed over its health and education services to the Catholic church after Irish independence so Catholic-managed schools go way back. The issue here is society has changed in a marked way, so schools need to catch up with that."

Most Irish schools operate under the loose banner of "Catholic ethos," which varies in intensity from school to school, depending on the management. Sherlock feels this ad hoc arrangement has put teachers in a confusing position when it comes teaching to sex ed. "There are no written guidelines as to what exactly a 'Catholic ethos' is," she said. "It's arbitrary and confusing. Policies and laws are often interpreted from a position of fear which can be the default reaction when it comes to teaching other people's kids about sex."

If a school is Catholic, discussions on condoms, the pill, LGBT topics, masturbation, and pornography should technically be off limits as they fall foul of the Church's doctrine. In fact, if you are a gay teacher in Ireland, under current legislation you can be fired for not fitting the ideal Catholic mold.

But 21st Century Ireland is not a theocracy and this is reflected in the country's sexual practices. People are having sex younger and we are failing to prepare them for the fallout. Alarmingly, out of the 3,045 cases of chlamydia reported in the first half of 2013, ten were people aged 14 and under and 371 were teenagers between 15 and 19. Add to this the 81 cases of gonorrhoea found in people aged between 15 and 19 and for a small island you have a big problem with sexual education. A poll carried out by condom manufacturer Durex said over half of Irish school leavers receive no formal sex education. That's great when you consider Ireland still has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in Europe. We expect teenagers to just know stuff, or not have sex with each other, and it's a risky business. LGBT students are particularly vulnerable as the Catholic system is not set up to accommodate their needs.

Sherlock explained: "The Irish school system is set up to separate boys and girls, it's totally heteronormative and the idea is 'to stop them from temptation.' But this idea itself can foster a homophobic vibe. Then there's the curriculum, which doesn't reflect gay lifestyles so kids, well you know, they're already placed in a context that upholds gay bullying. Kids turn to self-harm, drugs, or alcohol to help them cope. Our school system tells kids, 'Don't come out until college.'"

Ireland's special relationship with the Church as outlined in the constitution is one thing, but the actions of secular institutions recently have been a further blow for LGBT rights. Last year a ruling by the Broadcast Authority of Ireland (BAI) said that if anyone wants to talk on Irish radio in favor of marriage equality, the program must also feature someone speaking against it.

This bizarre ruling gives an insight into why Coláiste Eoin initially toed the "both sides of the argument" line after abruptly canceling Shout Out's workshop. The BAI ruling has become a safe place for those uncomfortable with gay rights to retreat to when challenged on homophobic behavior.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/WXayhUzWnl0' width='640' height='360']

Panti Bliss's speech

If you want to kick up a stink about it, you're out of luck. In Ireland—if you call someone continuously spouting homophobic crap a "homophobe" you can get sued. It's a process described in a speech by rag-queen and gay rights activist Panti Bliss, hailed as one of the best gay rights monologues in decades. Panti called it a "spectacular and neat Orwellian trick, because now it turns out that gay people are not the victims of homophobia, homophobes are."

The Colaiste Eoin story highlights how LGBT students are fighting two lines of aggression. The governments failure to finally break Catholic influence in schools has let them down terribly, and our secular media and lawmakers have—through their cowardice—created a playground for homophobic bullies.

Follow Norma on Twitter.

Comics: Envoy #6 - 'Night Delivery'

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

How the Production Designer of 'A Most Violent Year' Recreated 1980s New York

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How the Production Designer of 'A Most Violent Year' Recreated 1980s New York

Meet the Canadian Trying to Make Elephant Poo Coffee a Thing

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Blake Dinkin, right, feeds an elephant in Thailand coffee cherries. Photo courtesy Black Ivory Coffee

Picking through a giant pile of shit to find coffee beans might not sound appealing, but what if you could sell said coffee for $50-60 a cup? Maybe you'd reconsider your career path. Ask Blake Dinkin. In 2002, after hearing that Kopi Luwak coffee (made with beans which are first digested by an animal called a civet) fetched those kind of prices, he decided to leave his job working for a Japanese trading company in Toronto and go full-tilt into the animal-poop coffee game.

"It really appealed to me as something that was international, entrepreneurial, and I thought I could try to do it on my own," Dinkin says. But other than these aspects, he says, making a positive social impact and ensuring the animals' health and safety during the process was crucial.

With the help of an expert from University of Guelph, he learned more about this exotic type of coffee, and eventually relocated to Ethiopia—one of the only places in the world, he says, where civets were kept in captivity at the time.

"[The farmers] totally thought I was nuts, and as a result, what they tried to do at first was take the dung of this animal, rub it on the beans, and sell it to me that way," Dinkins told VICE. On top of that, he wasn't happy with the conditions the civets were being kept in.

Of course, just covering beans in civet shit doesn't make them taste better. What makes coffee that's been ejected out of civets' buttholes so yummy is that their digestive system removes the protein—the main culprit responsible for bitterness in coffee.


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In 2003 and 2004, while Dinkin was dealing with bogus, shit-smeared coffee in Ethiopia, he hit another snag: the SARS outbreak. Dinkin quickly learned that civets were one of the animals that could be infected with the deadly virus. "It was a disaster; it's not good PR, it's not good marketing," Dinkin told me over the phone in Bangkok, where he now works. Scrambling to find an alternate animal, Dinkin looked into everything from hippos, rhinos, and giraffes to cows and buffalo. For various reasons—their dental structure, accessibility, and safety of being near them (gathering rhino shit is pretty terrifying)—nothing worked out.

Around the same time, he heard stories of elephants rampaging through villages in West African and South Asian countries during times of drought to eat coffee cherries because their usual food supply was scarce. There were accounts of elephants destroying crops and homes in the process, which eventually led to humans improvising some pachyderm pest control using poisoned watermelons.

Returning to Toronto armed with his newfound knowledge of coffee-hungry elephants, Dinkin says he convinced a local zoo near Guelph, Ontario to let him conduct trials with elephants to ensure they could safely digest coffee beans.

According to Dinkin, getting that final balance of flavours wasn't easy. "I honestly thought it was going to be as simple as giving them some good coffee, out it comes, wash it off, and you could start to drink it," he said. "I can tell you that first time, it tasted and smelled exactly as you would think; it was disgusting." After an exhausting number of trials, Dinkin headed back to school, temporarily defeated, to finish his MBA, and worked another job. But during his holidays, determined to make it work, he travelled to an elephant sanctuary in Indonesia to complete more trials.

In March 2012, he finally was happy with his recipe. The resulting taste with the elephant variety, according to Dinkin, is "dark chocolate, malt, spice, a hint of grass." He quit his job and looked for a place to set up his elephant-poop coffee empire. After surveying 35 different elephant sanctuaries, he landed on one in Thailand, intrigued by the country's strong history with elephants and their quality locally grown coffee (of the Thai Arabica variety). Other important factors, he says, were that this sanctuary was charitable (eight percent of his sales go to the foundation he works with), included a full-time vet or technician on site, and their elephants were street-rescued—almost all had gone through some kind of physical or mental abuse. And while his struggles in Ethiopia had set a precedent for cultural differences to be an issue, the ones he encountered in Bangkok were of a different variety.

At the elephant sanctuary in Thailand, the organization doesn't own the elephants, other people do. Therefore, Dinkin has to work with individual owners one-on-one. "Communication is difficult because never mind Thai, they're speaking a local language, so I have to rely on a translator," he says. "In the beginning, I discovered the translator was horrible. For example, if I said, 'Can you please work with me?' It would be translated as, 'You better get your ass over here and help me out or else!'"

In Thailand, Dinkin says, elephants are considered an important asset, almost like a house. The average income is around $3,600 per year and an elephant is worth about $30,000, so people are very protective of them. He had to constantly reassure elephant owners that the caffeine in the coffee beans wouldn't harm their animals, and his documented scientific proof didn't seem to make a difference. According to Dinkin, convincing elephant owners that their animals wouldn't die was one of the hardest parts since "they care more about their elephants than maybe their own wives or extended family."


[body_image width='3900' height='2600' path='images/content-images/2015/01/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/29/' filename='meet-the-canadian-trying-to-make-elephant-poo-coffee-a-thing-321-body-image-1422556880.jpg' id='22584']Only the finest accoutrements for your morning cup of elephant poop coffee. Photo courtesy Black Ivory Coffee

"To be blunt, I was hoping to have this nice, romantic vision where we're all one big, happy family, but it's not like that—it's kind of just monetary gain for them," Dinkin says. Dinkin offers a lucrative wage for those willing to pick coffee beans out of elephant dung, many times more than someone would get for a job working with regular coffee in Thailand. Within 45 minutes, one of his workers earns about $10, an amount equal to a whole day's regular pay in Thailand.

Today, he sells his Black Ivory Coffee's beans to select five-star hotels in Asia and the Middle East and is expanding this year to Europe and North America. Online, his coffee can be purchased for $180 US per 100 grams plus shipping.

So what's next for Dinkin? He has a harvest coming up this spring; last year he produced 200 kilos (an amount that would earn roughly $250,000), and this time around he's hoping for more. Oh, and he's currently at work with one of the top brewmasters in the world to create a beer tentatively pending release at the end of this year. Hopefully there won't be any animal poop involved.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

Are Canadian and British Spy Agencies Really Spying on People via Angry Birds?

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Photo via Flickr user Anthony Quintano

A new top-secret intelligence document pulled from whistleblower Edward Snowden's trove of confidential material, details how CSE (Canada's cybersurveillance agency, the Communications Security Establishment) and GCHQ (Britain's cybersurveillance agency, the Government Communications Headquarters) can "exploit" tracking and advertising data sent from "leaky apps" to reveal information about surveillance targets.

Originally published by Der Spiegel, and first analyzed by Micah Lee at The Intercept, the document reveals a previously unknown program called BADASS that specifically targets smartphone apps.

Organizations such as NSA, CSE, and GCHQ have had a conundrum on their hands when it comes to the sheer amount of data that they collect. While they've been able to suck up internet traffic from all around the world, analyzing that data has proven challenging to these secretive agencies. BADASS can exploit advertising tracking data found in mobile apps, in order to determine a target's unique smartphone ID. This, ostensibly, helps to tie together spy data. The more information they can connect to someone's ID—what apps they use, what websites they go on, etc—the more they can learn from a target.

In CSE and GCHQ's presentation, Angry Birds is used as a prime example of an app that these agencies can exploit. In fact, they brag in that internal document that they "know how bad you are" at the popular animal-catapulting game.

However, it's hard to tell if CSE and GCHQ are serious about their Angry Birds exploit. In a recap of how little we learned about CSE in 2014, VICE reported on a CSE presentation in which the author joked about spying on a message board for hockey fans from the country of "Canuckistan." Der Spiegel missed the humour and reported it as factual that CSE was, in fact, taking on the hockey fans of the nation.

At the time, CSE media relations spokesman Ryan Foreman said in a comment to VICE that the hockey example uses an "obviously fictitious country name and obviously fictitious content."

So, is the agency joking about Angry Birds as well? VICE reached out to Rovio, the developer of Angry Birds, and they insist it's not possible that they're being spied on. In a series of emails, Blanca Juti at Rovio told VICE: "We take the privacy of our fans very seriously and use all legal and technical steps available to ensure their details are secure. Any data that we have is encrypted and all advertising networks providing services to Rovio are well-known and reputable companies."

When asked directly about CSE and GCHQ's reference to Angry Birds, Juti wrote that "the reference to Angry Birds in this case is puzzling and probably based on the popularity of the game. The data is strictly encrypted game related data and is not connected to personal profiles."

Given CSE's penchant for including weird jokes in their top-secret spy program presentations, Angry Birds could be a throwaway example of an app that these agencies could spy on. It's also possible that, in the time since the presentation was released (it's a four year old document) Rovio has upgraded their encryption standards. Juti did not immediately respond to a question from VICE about whether or not Angry Birds uses HTTPS, an ostensibly secure form of HTTP, for their tracking data, but they did insist that their privacy and security policies are sound.

The third possibility, however, is that Angry Birds is being exploited and Rovio is simply unaware. When reached for comment, Jonathan Zdziarski, a hacking and forensics expert who specializes in security holes found in mobile apps, told VICE: "It's very likely that developers of mobile applications are appropriately encrypting their traffic as per our current best practices AND that the government has found ways to intercept and decrypt that data for analysis like these slides demonstrate."

We have certainly seen tech companies in the recent past, when faced with revelations about the NSA snooping on their customers, admit they had no idea it was happening—even if those claims have been proven to be somewhat dubious.

Chris Parsons, a cybersecurity researcher at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, told me how important programs like BADASS are to agencies like CSE: "Unencrypted analytics and tracking information is essential for today's global surveillance operations. Companies have used it for profit. The NSA and its partners use it to know what sites we read, what kinds of phones we use, and to whom we communicate with."

For that very reason, the Citizen Lab is working closely with a non-profit Chrome extension called TrackerSSL to address this very issue. Its developer, Andrew Hilts, launched the extension yesterday and explained its mission to VICE: "Just like smartphones, the web has a huge problem of leaking personal information through insecure ad trackers. That's why we [my non-profit Open Effect, in collaboration with the Citizen Lab] developed a Google Chrome extension called TrackerSSL to start a conversation about this problem."

So, while it's unclear if Angry Birds is actually a target of CSE and GCHQ's BADASS program, the advertising tracking data within mobile apps are being exploited by these agencies to identify their targets' behaviour online. And they're doing so using the same advertising tracking data that app developers, like Rovio, use to profit from their free software.

When asked directly if the CSE targets Angry Birds to track their targets, VICE was given a standard response: "CSE is a foreign intelligence and cyber defence agency that works to protect Canada and Canadians against serious global threats, such as terrorism and foreign cyber threats. CSE's activities are carried out in support of the Government of Canada's intelligence priorities and are critical in keeping Canadians' safe at home and abroad.

For reasons of national security, CSE cannot comment on its methods, techniques or capabilities. CSE conducts foreign intelligence and cyber defence activities in compliance with Canadian law. The independent CSE Commissioner and his staff review CSE's activities. In 17 years, the CSE Commissioner has never found CSE to have acted unlawfully."

Follow Patrick McGuire on Twitter.

VICE Premiere: All Music Should Be as Weird as Hot Nerds''Room One Flatulator'

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We live in very strange times. There are rural Chinese villagers who can watch hardcore fetish porn, rich, neo-luddites opting to live in mud huts, and flying robots will soon be able to air-drop you groceries. The world is really weird, but not much contemporary music reflects this weirdness.

Luckily, there's Hot Nerds, an up-and-coming San Diego band signed to Justin Pearson's Three One G label. Their spastic, demented, synth-heavy sound encapsulates all the insanity that is 2015.

This song, "One Room Flatulator," is from the group's upcoming album, Strategically Placed Bananas, out on March 10. You can pre-order it here.


A Ball Pit for Adults Has Just Opened in London

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[body_image width='726' height='539' path='images/content-images/2015/01/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/29/' filename='a-ball-pit-for-adults-has-just-opened-in-london-695-body-image-1422536619.jpg' id='22405']A man with balls on his face. Photo via Pearlfisher.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A pop-up ball pit filled with 81,000 white plastic balls has opened today in Hammersmith, West London. And it is for adults.

Before you get too "Oh, actually a ball pit for adults sounds like a good idea," bear in mind it is the brainchild of a creative agency, and creative agencies are fundamentally a force for evil in this world, collectives of 20-somethings in horn-rimmed glasses who, as children, were cursed by a wizard to have only bad ideas. A company called Pearlfisher is responsible for this particular scheme, and are promising to donate £1 to children's charity Right to Play for every grown-ass adult who takes time out of their working day to go and wallow in their pit of desperate nostalgia and craven, perverted infantilism.

The art installation is called Jump In! and runs until February 13. Here's a video of some actual adults playing in a ball pit.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/O73ycwec4v0' width='560' height='315']

Yes, it is easy to be cynical about this, but then it's even easier to draw a constellation-like connection between the Cereal Killer Café, the cutester movement, and grown adults dicking around in a ball pit to the Frozen soundtrack. Join enough dots and you can easily cite the infantilization of British culture: that we are so doomed as a generation, spiraling through a purgatory of high rent and low wages, that we are trying to retreat back into our youths by whatever means possible.

That may be more thought that has ever been put into the concept of a ball pit, but still: pretending to be a child and annoying people is a growing trend in London.

If you want to go and see this ball pit, be my guest—just be aware that ball pits were always shit and you are misremembering how much fun being a child was. If you want to reserve your place despite all that, email jumpin@pearlfisher.com and get yourself down to 50 Brook Green, W6 7BJ sometime between 10AM and 5PM, Monday to Friday.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

A Love Letter to Coming of Age with Soft Porn on Britain's Channel 5

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Shannon Whirry in Animal Instincts (1992)

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

What we wanked to before 1998 was limited. As dial-up internet took literally days to download videos of Jenna Jameson getting banged in an aircraft hangar, we were left with picture sites like the Hun's Yellow Pages, along with the underwear sections of Littlewoods catalogues and the Sun's Page 3.

Then there were the previews on the Adult Channel, but you could only see those if your parents went out and left you alone with the Sky box, which mine rarely did. Then there was Eurotrash, but I always found that a bit too weird to wank to.

Every night on my bedroom TV, I'd channel-hop looking for something to improve on the Page 3s I kept hidden underneath my bed, but nothing. That is, until 1998.

Until then, Channel 5 was known mainly for its association with the Spice Girls and for Jonathan Pierce's guttural roars on meaningless Thursday nights in the UEFA Cup. But in 1998 it redefined itself in the hearts of a generation by beginning to show the series Red Shoe Diaries—starring David Duchovny in perhaps his finest role—along with films that the Radio Times described as "containing sex scenes and nudity." From that point onwards, the landscape of wanking changed forever.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/LzRr0gwOb5A' width='640' height='480']

The NSFW trailer for 'Indecent Behavior' (1993), the first of three Indecent Behavior films

These erotic dramas were made mainly in the early 90s, with women wearing shoulder pads and houses decorated in floral designs. Each female star was beautiful, big-breasted, and thin. Each man was toned, tanned, and suffered neither from baldness nor premature ejaculation. Every film was named something like Mirror Images, Animal Instincts, or Body Chemistry, and they all had multiple sequels, suggesting—unlike Hollywood—it wasn't too hard to convince the same actors to return.

Most of the films were monopolized by the same two actresses: Shannon Tweed and Shannon Whirry. Both had blonde hair and both were goddesses, who—despite being young—were veterans at playing characters who wreaked havoc in environs like workplaces, marriages, and suburban neighborhoods. They both passed through like sex-spun tornados, causing men—and sometimes women—to lose themselves before inevitably setting sail. Each appeared strong but was actually weak; able to recognize their addiction to dick, but not cure it; driven to it with such vehemence that it could only be self-destruction.

Sex in these films is linked with darkness, dotted with dire faces, dreadful expressions and moody scores that all sound like Vangelis after a highly introspective cocaine experience. These women are proud of their ability to have sex, yet they're regretful once they have it, associating each new lover with one in their past. The men are the same: Despite having sex with goddesses, they all feel sinful.

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Shannon Tweed in 'Electra' (1996)

Los Angeles's role in these films is huge. With each being made there due to budgetary constraints, LA's dark heart looms large over proceedings, with its harsh sunlight exposing everything as transparent. The acting is horrendous: eye-lines lower constantly, leading us to believe they're using cue cards. But so what? Not a Friday went by without me in bed by 11 with a tissue spread out in front of me.

Though the makeup of these films is essentially the same as porn (man meets woman under ludicrously-contrived pretext, man fucks woman), the difference lies in what they showed or, indeed, didn't show. No dick, no fanny—just tits and the actors' faces forever in the throes of ecstasy.

The theatricality of it would have been hilarious if not for my desperate need to cum. It was a race against time because my parents went to bed around 12—sometimes even earlier—and insisted on saying goodnight, so I stayed alert by keeping my hand on the remote and the TV muted so that, when they came in, I could change it to something I'd preselected beforehand. And though an hour should have been plenty of time, I couldn't spurn the perfect orgasm by not waiting for the right scene. Their ploy was to make you work for the sex by teasing you with shower scenes and sly looks, with the good stuff not coming until later. Though it was frustrating to lie there waiting for the shot of insinuated penetration that I needed, what could I do but continue anyway, hoping with increased fury that the next would reveal the frames I so desperately wanted?

I guess it depended on the mood of the screenwriters. I imagined them sitting there knowing that they required a ton of nudity, but still wanting to maintain the illusion that they were artists. Naturally, then, they'd delay it as long as possible, hoping that—by the time they did show it—people would be so involved in the story that they'd barely even care.

Most weeks, though, my experiences with these were sublime. Sometimes, if their writing allowed it, I'd orgasm so quickly that I could even manage another go-round. But these wanks were hellacious—sweat thundering down my forehead, the orgasm producing little more than a drop onto the already-wet tissue.

We spoke about these films in school, some boys acting out parts to laughter. But it wasn't until friends outside of school began speaking of them that I comprehended their reach, how there were probably thousands of boys all over the UK wanking to them—a synchronized communal orgasm every Friday night. The ridiculousness of it struck me—how there were probably thousands of us, but we were all inevitably hidden from the adult world when, if these films were anything to go by, adults needed sexual satisfaction arguably as much as we did.

I say arguably because masturbation back then was more uncontrollable than it is now, back when we used to build our days around it and use it to escape from school, rejection and all the other shit we didn't want to face. It was a bunker into which we dug ourselves as protection against a world we didn't understand, yet in every wank we still felt the absence of other boys, girls and that which we'd be craving until the day we finally had it—real sex.

So though it was great looking at breasts, and though we played it off in school in a grandiose way—"DID YOU SEE 'EM?"—I think a large part of watching shit like that is learning what sex is for when we have actually it. And though erotic dramas aren't perfect, teenagers now are loading up PornHub on their phones and looking at double anals without enough real-life context to know that that's even bigger bullshit.

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Shannon Tweed in 'Body Chemistry 4: Full Exposure' (1995)

The women in these old films aren't feminist icons, but compared to porn, they're not that bad. And while some porn is decent, erotic dramas at least feature a sex that's wholly mutual, passionate and considerate, which—in a climate of gagging, 20-minute blowjobs—seems quite nice.

Certainly there's upsides to the way porn depicts sex. At least with its graphicness, when a young person finds themselves in a situation, they'll know where everything is—which was a worry for me until the age of 15, when we finally got high-speed internet: up until then, I kind of thought women had three holes.

Nowadays, the films that Channel 5 once showed seem ridiculous, but we can't blame them for that. I do wonder, however, if parents are making things worse by maintaining the same culture of embarrassment mine and everyone else's did when I was young. Back when the worst that teenagers could do was stumble onto Channel 5, shit was relatively harmless. But now that double anal is only a search away, parents might need to have more conversations with their kids about what sex actually is, lest they turn out like pricks and expect too much when they have it.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/JGJ_SqNh6bM' width='640' height='480']

The trailer for 'Mirror Images' (1991)

When I finally got high-speed internet myself, there became a point where, despite enjoying all the porn I was looking at, I was going back to the well too often. What'd once been an almost romantic act in masturbating (there, I said it) became something quick and quasi-medicinal because the stimulation I required was so readily available, and once I'd left the room I could barely remember anything that I'd just seen—not like Shannon Tweed and Shannon Whirry, who I still remember fondly over ten years later.

Tweed is 57 now and still looks great. She married KISS singer Gene Simmons and starred in their reality TV show Gene Simmons Family Jewels from 2006 to 2012. Whirry is 50. Though she doesn't seem to act as much any more, she did appear in the underrated Will Ferrell drama Everything Must Go in 2010.

So things change, and though in 2003 Channel 5 cancelled its erotic dramas in an attempt to redefine its image, the memory of them lives on in the hearts of thousands of 20-somethings across Britain who, because of those films, perhaps turned out sexually better adjusted than some in succeeding generations.

Follow James Nolan on Twitter.

Nick Carter Is No Longer a Backstreet Boy, but a Backstreet Man

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Nick Carter Is No Longer a Backstreet Boy, but a Backstreet Man

Resurrecting the Gay History of the Holocaust

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[body_image width='1000' height='1241' path='images/content-images/2015/01/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/29/' filename='reviving-the-gay-history-of-the-holocaust-405-body-image-1422534664.jpg' id='22355']Aryan Ideal, by Pacifico Silano

New York–based photographer Pacifico Silano's stunning and devastating exhibition Against Nature, on view at ClampArt until February 14, explores an often overlooked and frequently forgotten period of LGBT history: the persecution—and eventual slaughter—of gay men by Nazi Germany. The title is a reference to Joris-Karl Huysmans's infamous novel, as well as the phrase in Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code that both rendered homosexuality illegal and equated it with bestiality.

This show mines the same vein as his previous photographic series like Male Fantasy Icon, which examined the gay communities decimated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic through the figure of Al Parker, a 1970s gay porn star who died from complications from AIDS. In Against Nature, Silano uses archival sources from World War II and the earlier German Naturist movement to not only assert the importance of remembering the gay victims of the Holocaust but also explore the latent homoeroticism inherent in the Nazi's idealized vision of the Aryan male. With a bold and deceptively simple red, white, and black color scheme, Silano juxtaposes partially obscured photographs of men with beautiful Robert Mapplethorpe-esque flowers, creating a powerful statement on loss, identity, and historical memory.

[body_image width='1000' height='858' path='images/content-images/2015/01/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/29/' filename='reviving-the-gay-history-of-the-holocaust-405-body-image-1422534863.jpg' id='22360']Six Faces

I spoke with Silano about how he became interested in the history of gay men under Nazi Germany, the process behind his photographs, and what he sees as the significance of archives for LBGTQ history.

VICE: Against Nature examines the rarely discussed history of gay men during Nazi Germany. What inspired you to begin this project and investigate this?
Pacifico Silano: I was traveling in Amsterdam in 2012 and I was able to visit the Homomonument, which is the world's first public memorial dedicated to the lives of gays and lesbians killed by Nazis during the Holocaust. It was something I knew very little about—probably because in school, my history class completely ignored anything about the subjugation of LGBTQ people. It was hard to not be affected that day and so I pretty much decided that it would be my next project.

A significant portion of the work comes from archival materials related to the era. What was your process and where did you find your source materials?
It took me a while to get this project off the ground, partly because I wasn't sure how to approach making the photographs. Eventually I put my full attention into finding source material. I spent a lot of my time online purchasing found photographs and negatives related to the time period. I also put in a considerable amount of time researching in actual, physical libraries. I was thinking a lot about the idea of "the archive" and how I wanted this project to function, so the library seemed like an ideal place to find inspiration. Spending hours and hours in the quiet there definitely influenced the way I made a lot of those images.

[body_image width='980' height='622' path='images/content-images/2015/01/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/29/' filename='reviving-the-gay-history-of-the-holocaust-405-body-image-1422535800.jpg' id='22381']Installation View of Against Nature at ClampArt

Much of the work consists entirely of the colors red, white, and black. Why did you use only these colors?
I thought a lot about the use of these specific colors in reference to Nazi propaganda of World War II. They used this color combination a lot to help spread hate and intolerance throughout the world, and by creating work of this subject matter, I'm subverting that association. It was a very important decision that I had to make early on and really challenging creatively, but it helped the conceptual framework of the project.

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German Officer

The title of the exhibition refers to the German Criminal Code and Huysman's highly aesthetic 19th century novel. With these two seemingly opposing meanings, why did you choose this title?
During my research phase of this project I came across this Naturist movement that occurred in Germany prior to WWII. It was this celebration of the nude body that was embraced without shame and it included many photographic journals of male nudes, posed outdoors. Obviously that came to an abrupt end during Hitler's reign, but it was a jumping-off point for me to start making this work.

The Nazis removed the words "against nature" from Paragraph 175 in 1935, a term which historically referred to sodomy. It made it easier for them to convict and imprison presumed homosexuals. A kiss between the same sex, love letters, or even hand-holding could get a person arrested and convicted. I thought that those two missing words from the German Criminal Code were significant. Had they remained intact, more lives might have been spared.

[body_image width='1000' height='1249' path='images/content-images/2015/01/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/29/' filename='reviving-the-gay-history-of-the-holocaust-405-body-image-1422535760.jpg' id='22380']Floral in Red, Black, and White

In the exhibition, you juxtapose these altered archival images with black-and-white still lifes of flowers, which reminded me of Mapplethorpe's flower photographs. What is the relation of these flowers to the exhibition at large?
I created each still life as a memorial to those who fell victim to Paragraph 175 and fascism. I was interested in the obvious symbolism of floral still lifes and how you can have something so beautiful on the surface simultaneously have a heavier meaning.

In creating these particular pieces, it felt appropriate to reference someone like Robert Mapplethorpe, a real trailblazer who made it possible for people like myself to create work free of censorship. As a gay man who is also an artist it's next to impossible to not be inspired by his work. Robert Mapplethorpe was truly a bad bitch.

What I find interesting is that you not only address the gay victims of the Holocaust but you also represent the homoeroticism of the Nazi's " Ubermensch" in pieces like The Aryan Ideal or The German Officer. Why was it important to you to represent both of these aspects of the history of Nazi Germany?
I wanted to give agency to the gay victims of the Holocaust, something even history neglected for many years after the fact, while simultaneously undermining these macho, virile depictions of Nazi soldiers by gaying them up. By removing their identity and objectifying them through a gay gaze we render them powerless based on Hitler's ideology.

[body_image width='1000' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/01/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/29/' filename='reviving-the-gay-history-of-the-holocaust-405-body-image-1422536144.jpg' id='22388']Untitled

Throughout the exhibition, I kept thinking about how the work reveals an ongoing and almost haunted relationship between the past and the present. Much of your other work also deals this ongoing relationship—mostly in regards to pre-HIV/AIDS gay culture . What do you see as the significance of looking back to the gay history during Nazi Germany today, particularly through art?
Art can move people or piss them off, but I think the best kind of art can change our perspective about things we thought we knew. It is so important to make sure that these lost histories are seen and heard. It wasn't until the 1980s that homosexuals were even recognized as victims of the Holocaust, which is fucking insane. Something that even a lot of my gay friends didn't realize is that when WWII ended, homosexuals in the camps were, in many cases, sent to prison rather than freed. Not only were they denied the reparations of other victims, they were still locked up. Paragraph 175 had them still classified as criminals.

With an increasing amount of archival-based art related to LGBTQ history such as the Visual AIDS's 2014 exhibition Ephemera As Evidence, what do you see as the importance of the archive in relation to preserving gay history?
I'm deeply invested in queer subjugated histories, and unfortunately there happens to be a lot of it out there. I can't help but make work about these issues because it's so ingrained in me.

[body_image width='1000' height='1235' path='images/content-images/2015/01/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/29/' filename='reviving-the-gay-history-of-the-holocaust-405-body-image-1422536230.jpg' id='22390']Obscured Salute

I think that because of all the huge steps we have taken in the past few years that have helped legitimize us in the mainstream, we can finally look back on our culture and try and preserve it. The difficulty in looking back is realizing how much has been lost. An obvious example is all the truly amazing, talented people who died during the AIDS crisis. There is a lot of shitty things that have happened and we can't ignore them. The archive offers us the opportunity to study who we once were, where we have been and ultimately where we hope to be, going forward.

Pacifico Silano's Against Nature will be on view at ClampArt in New York through Valentine's Day. See more of his work on his website, or order his issue of MATTE magazine here.

Emily Colucci is a New York–based writer and the co-founder of Filthy Dreams, a blog that analyzes culture through a queer lens. Follow her on Twitter.

We Talked to Actress Caitlin Stasey About Female Masturbation and Hollywood's Sexist Bullshit

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Photo by Jennifer Toole

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Rachel from Neighbours is the only one of my teenage crushes who has stood the test of time. Aaron Carter is a fundamentally disturbing tribute to a lost childhood, Left Eye is dead (RIP), and Ben from A1 now does panto. Caitlin Stasey, however—who played Rachel's homeschool girl turned hot-teen-who-sleeps-with-her-teacher—is now 24, a feminist badass who gives no fucks and is more of a crush for me than ever.

This month, she launched a feminist website called Herself.com, where she publishes naked photos of women—including herself—and interviews them about their religion, masturbation habits, and deepest insecurities. The site, rather than simply presenting us with more porny pictures of naked ladies, is a beautiful, brutally truthful examination of the female form.

This is doubly impressive because Stasey's not your average arts graduate filling in some time breaking binaries before her masters in critical theory. She's an actor. Best known for playing "pretty girl roles," since Neighbours Stasey has moved to LA to make it big in Hollywood—most recently in historical fingering-fest Reign. Many in her position would steer clear of rocking the political boat; afraid of making casting agents think they're anything but basic. Stasey, on the other hand, is busy loudly calling the world out on its sexist bullshit. I phoned her up to ask how.

VICE: Why did you start the website?
Caitlin Stasey: I wanted women to be able to tell their own stories and talk about their own ideas rather than be subjected to other people's opinions and criticisms of them. I just wanted to make a place where we could say, "Fuck off, I'm doing what I want."

I also wanted to start a website where we could talk about women's medical problems, like yeast infections and UTIs and things like that. We've got a long way to go before we start treating women's sexual and reproductive functions as seriously as we treat men's. Viagra is covered by so many health plans in the US, but they don't cover Plan B or some contraceptives. There's a constant gender divide in all aspects of our community. It's fucking awful.

How did you come up with the format? Why was it important to have naked photos?
You never see pictures of naked women without them being sexualized. I've been used to seeing graphic depictions of violence all my life, but never of non-sexualized imagery of breasts or vaginas. Women are never just naked.

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Photo by Jennifer Toole

What do the photos on Herself.com do differently?
They just show women existing. Everybody has a fear of appearing naked on the internet. It has betrayed women again and again. But putting up photos on your own terms is incredibly powerful. I wanted to have pictures of them naked because lots of women aren't reflected in the entertainment they consume: women of color, trans women, bigger women, disabled women. We're bombarded by imagery of sleek, hairless women as the faces of humanity.

But a few of the women on the site do conform to that image.
When the website launched, we received 3,000 emails in a week from people who wanted to take part. Of these, 500 were accessible for us because of financial and geographical restrictions. And because of the way society has established beauty, we have validated a specific type of beauty for centuries. The majority of these people looked like that. The hardest thing is convincing women that they deserve to be on the site. I want to get as wide of an array of women as possible.

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Photo by Jennifer Toole for Herself.com

Do you think some people will just go there to look at pictures of naked women?
People will masturbate to anything. I was masturbated at when I was ten years old at the beach. I've had men say and do horrific things at me while I've been minding my own business. I get catcalled like a dozen times a day in summer. In the winter, it's thankfully too cold for them to stick their heads out of their windows. I will be sexualized regardless of what I do because I am a woman, no matter what I wear or where I am. That's why appearing on the site doesn't scare me.

If men are going to Herself.com to masturbate, there is something seriously wrong. If you divert your eyes for one second from jerking it, you'll read a story about how this woman was molested and how she has struggled with eating disorders.

Do you ever feel like you lose out on jobs because of your outspoken views?
I'm sure there are people in the industry who look at me and just think I'm this mouthy, opinionated individual. But I don't really give a fuck. I don't want to work for a company that would actively dismiss me because I was naked.

When I first moved to LA, I auditioned for a film and I got a call from my agents saying that they didn't want to hire me because I'd worn high-waisted jeans. They said, "the director just saw you in these jeans and thought you were the mouthy bitch next door." My worth in this industry is based on how much people want to fuck me. That doesn't happen to men.

Every time a woman is naked on screen it's for the benefit of her male counterpart or to fill a deviant fantasy. I'm desperately veering from "manic pixie dream girl." What I would love is to just play a woman on screen who is not a woman by definition.

You haven't really done any roles like that?
Look, no one wants to hear about a young, pretty actress talk about how hard it is, but for women there's an assumption that you can't be more than one thing. You can't be beautiful and funny, for example. Guys don't have this problem; people like Seth Rogen are funny and still get the girl. All I'm asking is that they write roles for women that aren't total bullshit. It's such a basic principle to want to see women as living, breathing, human three dimensional beings.

Did being the "hot one" in Neighbours make you feel like this way? Or is it something you've always believed?
When I started I was this home-schooled dork with one eyebrow, and I felt really comfortable like that. But over time it became easier and easier to sexualize me. I started to develop in front of their eyes. By the time I was 18, I was one of very few girls on the show that age. I never felt sexualized but the audience began to sexualize me. If you grow up on screen you become fair game and the target of a lot of creepy advances.


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Photo by Jennifer Toole for Herself.com

Did that make you feminist?
I always was, but I didn't have a name for it. I was like a lot of misled women in that I thought, Oh maybe we needed feminism before, but we're all equal now. I knew there was a bias in place that applied to me and not to boys. In high school, when boys started to sleep with other girls, these girls' burgeoning sexuality wasn't an exciting thing to be explored, it was a shameful secret you lie to people about because people would make fun of you. They would verbally abuse you for it. The men you chose to share this thing with would tell all of their friends and then their friends would treat you like shit. It became a really toxic environment and I just didn't like the way it was heading. I wish I'd had the tools by then to equip myself against those insults and arguments. I didn't know what to do. It just really hurt.

So I became a feminist, really, out of a desire to not feel shitty about myself. Also because I've been sexually attracted to women for as long as I've known. Growing up in a Catholic education system and going to an all-girls Catholic school at one point, I felt like I was sick. Like there was something wrong with me. None of the girls in my circle reflected that back to me. It was always like, if someone came out as a lesbian, they became the object of ridicule. I hated it.

I wish something like this [site] had existed when I was younger. I had no point of reference... nothing I was watching looked like anything I recognized within myself. There were never any young women or young boys falling in love with each other or anything other than heteronormative relationships, really.

But do you think things have got any better since you were a teenager?
There have been lots of great movements this year about body positivity and self-love but they're generally not paired with an in-depth profile of the people who are partaking in it. It is imperative we give a face and voice to the women we're using as examples. Without that, they're just figures.

We need to teach young girls to love themselves and be proud of their bodies. Masturbation needs to be talked about in sex education and rape needs to be talked about.

Follow Louise Callaghan on Twitter.


We Made Five Decades of Super Bowl Snacks Better

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We Made Five Decades of Super Bowl Snacks Better

Gangsters and Boxers in London's East End

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Gangsters and Boxers in London's East End

I Tried to Lie My Way Onto 'The Jerry Springer Show'

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My original plan was to write a story about the "talent" scouts for The Jerry Springer Show. I wanted to spend a day behind the scenes, observing how the bookers wrangle guests and eventually convince them to expose their most shameful secrets on national television, often resulting in a screaming match or a full-on brawl while the ringmaster, Jerry Springer, watches on. But when I contacted the show's publicist, that plan fell apart.

"The producers are very protective about their guest bookers and guests," the publicist eventually told me. "The producers decided to pass. I wish I had better news."

That could've been the end of it, but then I got a better idea: going undercover.

One way I could surely find out how Jerry Springer's guest bookers operated was by trying to be a guest. So I went to the website, found the "Jerry Springer be a Guest" page, and replied to every single damn guest scenario they requested. I used the pseudonym "Armando Leoni," a series of different email addresses, and numerous fabricated stories. I touched on all Springer hotspots: cross-dressing, cheating, gay sex, meth, drama, incest, and so on.

When they responded to me, two days later, it was for this scenario: "Are you gay or transsexual? Is your partner always trying to meet people on Grindr and you want them to stop?"

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"We are actually booking for this week's show," one of the guest bookers said to me in a voicemail. "If you're interested in coming on, definitely call me back."

This was it. With plot points written out on notecards, I called the number.

" Jerry Springer Show," answered the perky-sounding guest booker. And then: "What's up? Are you looking to be on the show?"

"Should I explain the situation?" I said, with the delivery of an erratic, upset man whose world was crumbling.

"Just the real situation—not the situation for the show; whatever your real situation is," she replied.

I wasn't sure what she meant. Are there usually two situations—a real one and a made-up one to use on the show? Since I only had one situation (and it wasn't real), I went with that, weaving a debaucherous tale of a gay man whose partner, Tony, was now addicted to having anonymous sex via Grindr. I emphasized that it was tearing us apart.

"You basically want him to stop the bullshit and be focused on you," she said, paraphrasing my story. "Do you think he would want to go on the show with you?"

"How would I approach him about doing that?" I asked. "I don't want him to freak out."

"You can tell him whatever you want to get him on the show," she insisted. "You can be up front with him and say, 'I got a call from Jerry Springer and they want us to come on the show.' And you can be like: 'I don't know what it's going to be about.' Just see what he says."

In a moment of spontaneity, I added a flourish about why we needed Jerry Springer to save our relationship: "I really need to confront Tony because I have a medical problem. I have a rare blood disease..."

"Really!?" she interrupted. "Oh wow!"

"That's why it's important for me to make this work out," I said, with the implication that my time left on this planet was very short.

I could tell that the wheels in her head were turning. "We could do a hypothetical situation," she said. "Do you guys have another gay friend that we could say Tony hooked up with?" At this point, she broke into a spontaneous chant of "JE-RRY! JE-RRY! JE-RRY!" before continuing on. "So we could bring out a friend that's down to play along with it—and say he hooked up with Tony!"

I was confused. She wanted us to fabricate a scenario on top of our already-fake scenario, bringing this whole thing to a new level of fakeness.

"I know in real life you want to confront him about Grindr, but I don't know how we can make that work for a show if we don't have anyone we can bring that's talking to him on Grindr. You know what I mean?"

I paused. "Yeah, OK. I understand."

She started brainstorming: "So for the show, we could say, 'Armando is here and he's suspicious that his boyfriend Tony has been messing around with him behind his back.' Then Tony comes out and says, 'I have to tell you something. I hooked up with a friend, blah blah blah.'"

"OK, yeah. I think I get it."

"Or we could do it a different way—just see if Tony wants to come on the show," she persisted. "We can figure out a story after that."

Her dishonesty was really throwing my dishonesty for a loop.

"So, does it have to be someone that Tony has hooked up with?" I asked.

"No, it doesn't have to be. It just has to be someone that would feel comfortable to say that he did. We can fabricate for the show."

Her dishonesty was really throwing my dishonesty for a loop. "OK. Um, yeah.That's fine," I said.

"I don't know what your schedule is like, but we have a slot open for this Tuesday to be on the show," she told me. "You'd come out Monday and do the show on Tuesday—and be back Tuesday night."

Like all Springer guests—from the man who cut off his own penis to the guy who married a horse—I was offered an all-expenses-paid trip to New York. Surely, this was meant to entice me to air my most intimate personal problems on national television.

Maybe I had it all wrong. Perhaps The Jerry Springer Show really was trying to help these troubled souls and not just exploit their problems. Maybe The Jerry Springer Show is a lighthouse of hope for fragile people with extreme problems who need a friend when their lifeboat begins to sink.

The Springer Show called my friend Tony DuShane, whom I had recruited to play the role of my Grindr-obsessed boyfriend, "Tony Knox."

"I think you guys would be super cute to come be on the show," the guest booker told him. I still don't understand the Springer Show's definition of "super cute." Our backstory involved cheating and hooking up on Grindr for anonymous fisting.

"Basically, we would have to add another person to your story because it's The Jerry Springer Show—it's like drama," she said, explaining we would have to concoct a storyline. "Do you know what I mean?"

"Oh, yeah. OK, OK," replied Tony.

"You don't actually have to have all that drama. Every relationship has drama, and we can just exaggerate the drama you have," she said, disclosing how they get pregnant strippers to punch it out on stage. "If you have another friend, we could do a cheating story or something."

Then Tony put a double-twist in his Grindr plot that would throw meat at the Springer audience: "What Armando doesn't know is that some of the sex was unprotected," he said, mentioning his anonymous hookups usually occurred during drunken meth-fueled blackouts.

"Ha! Ha! Ha!" she laughed. "I totally get it. All right. Cool."

She cheerfully added: "You guys sound really cute and I would love to work with you guys. We could do any kind of story."

The booker became super excited over the prospect of a gay couple fighting on their show. It didn't matter if we brought on a fake friend to stand in for one of Tony's Grindr dudes—all she seemed to want was a story and conflict. Anything so long as fireworks went off.

"We've got to bring someone who would be down with saying you hooked up with him, you know, for the show."

"OK, OK. Yeah."

"So I'm thinking, like, your story will be you've been hooking up with other people, and you bring someone you hooked up with. We could find a friend that could play that role of someone you hooked up with."

"Yeah, that makes a lot of sense," Tony said.

"So, do you know someone who would want to come on with you guys that knows your relationship that could say you guys hooked up—for the show?"

"Oh OK. Yeah, yeah. I have a couple of people in mind, but I'll ask them first because I don't want them to be surprised," Tony replied.

"Call some friends and ask them if they want to come on The Jerry Show with you. We can definitely make the story work. We could have you as the cheater in the relationship, and then bring a guy friend—that's down and cool for them to say, 'Yeah, I hooked up with him.'"

The booker said that they'd bring us out on Tuesday and added: "You're there to show you really want to be with Armando—and we'll make it a happy ending."

The Springer Show is basically the WWE of fucked up human problems, where good versus evil is orchestrated and scripted to get the audience frothing at the mouth. As such, I wanted to add a WWE-style twist to my story. I wanted to make the booker believe that my contact with the Springer show was unraveling my relationship. An hour later, I called the booker, sounding panicked and worried. "I got a text from Tony. I think he might have spoken to you, it was kind of vague," I said. "[He] sent me this text and it was hard to understand if he was angry or not angry."

"Yeah, I talked to him. He said he's going to look for a guy friend who could come with you guys and be part of the story," she said.

"I thank you in advance," I said, acting extremely grateful, like their production was doing good for humanity. "Going on the show would really help resolve our situation and improve our relationship."

So these guys want to bring Big Daddy Dino down to New York to slap them around on TV?

Perfect. I had already lined up my buddy Brad to play Tony's fabricated Grindr fuckmate (which meant he was to be a guy pretending to be a guy who was pretending to be a different guy). He used the pseudonym "Big Daddy Dino."

"They want Big Daddy Dino to come down and teach them a lesson?" said Brad, a.k.a. Big Daddy Dino, to the guest booker over the phone.

Ecstatic, the booker explained the scenario: "They need a guy who can say they hooked up with Tony for the show. Does that sound like something you could do?"

Pause.

"So these guys want to bring Big Daddy Dino down to New York to slap them around on TV? "

"Yeah, is that what you want to do?"

"If I'm allowed to I'll smack them around on TV, for sure. "

"Awesome," she laughed. "So you'll 'Jerry fight' them."

"Isn't that what the show is about?"

"Yeah, exactly! Awesome!"

The booker loved Big Daddy Dino: "I'm definitely going to give you a call tomorrow and give you more details and I'll set up a story with the three of you!"

The fabricated Armando side of me could barely sleep that night, awakened with dreams of sugar plum fairies and a vile studio audience chanting "JE-RRY! JE-RRY! JE-RRY!" at our misfortunes. It seemed like a sealed deal.

Surprisingly, though, neither Tony, Armando, nor Big Daddy Dino got the promised return phone call from The Jerry Springer Show. I called the booker and she told me we'd been bumped to the following week: "Our next available show would be Sunday and Monday of next week. I don't know if you guys would be available for that week?"

"Should we get off of work?" I asked. "I just have to know a little ahead of time because it's hard to get off of work."

"I'll be back in the office on Thursday, so I can definitely let you know then," she said. "I got Dino, right. You know him."

"He's a bit intense," I said, sounding a little scared.

"Yeah, he kept calling himself 'Big Daddy Dino.'"

"He's a little bit intense," I repeated.

"Yeah, he was," she said. "But he was funny! I think he would be good for the show, honestly. So definitely give me a call on Thursday and I could give the details with you, Tony, and Dino."

Taking a nod from The Jerry Springer Show, I heightened the drama of my fabricated story again. "Is it possible you could let Tony know, because we got into an argument yesterday," I said, adding that contacting Big Daddy Dino had caused turmoil to our relationship.

She said yes.

Thursday rolled around and no call from The Jerry Springer Show. I called the booker back and her phone went right to voicemail. I left a message. Tony and Big Daddy Dino did the same. I called her again later in the day, and once again got her voicemail. This time I left a panicked message: "I'm wondering if you've spoken to Tony because we got in an argument and he hasn't talked to me since last Sunday." I explained that all these calls about cheating, confrontation, Grindr, and Big Daddy Dino had opened a can of emotional worms and had put strain on our relationship. With desperation, I pleaded: "Can you please give me a call back?"

We were being blown off by The Springer Show. Previously, the booker had picked up her phone on the first or second ring. Now, our phone numbers were being screened. Perhaps she found a more fucked up Grindr addict who was having anonymous gay sex with his own brother, making us look too vanilla in comparison. We were already yesterday's dysfunctional news, discarded whores thrown to the wayside.

This is the sleaze of these shows that isn't seen on camera: How they stir up the worst moments in people's lives and sometimes completely drop them with no notice or regard that they packaged their emotional hell, leaving the situation they stirred up completely unresolved. Was this what the producers were so overly protective about?

I missed the happier times; how we laughed, how we shared. We each called again the next day and kept getting the voicemail.

I heightened the drama yet again, saying that Tony was back to doing meth and paranoid that trying to be on The Jerry Springer Show was just a ruse to get him to admit to cheating. I also mentioned my rare blood disease had gotten worse. Tony, for his part, called and confirmed that he was "back to old bad habits," that we'd broken up, and that he was very upset.

Our calls were never returned. Which is fine for me, a writer who's concocting a fabricated story with recruited actor friends—but what about the guy who's actually addicted to meth and destroying his life and knows nothing about the entertainment industry? The guy who put blind trust into the hope that a resolution to his life's problems would occur to the chants of "JE-RRY! JE-RRY! JE-RRY!"? Would the show actually try to help him out, or simply exploit his issues and throw him under the train for the price of a free trip to New York?

The Jerry Springer Show did not respond to a request for comment on this article.

Follow Harmon Leon on Twitter.

Skateboarding Makes Afghan Girls Feel Free

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All photography courtesy of Skateistan

Seven years ago, Australian skateboarder Oliver Percovich sparked a commotion on the streets of Kabul and inadvertently started a gender revolution. His board and four wheels attracted the attention of the kids around him, most of whom had never seen a skateboard before. He noticed something else: The girls were interested, too.

Skateistan began in 2007 when Percovich discovered a perfect spot to skate at the weekend—Mekroyan Fountain, an abandoned, Russian-era concrete relic located in the heart of Kabul. As the local kids began to congregate, to watch and to join in, a quick stop-off to visit his girlfriend turned into a lifelong commitment to stay.

Percovich channelled his efforts into the creation of a non-profit skate school in Afghanistan in 2009. They now have two: one in Kabul, the other in Mazar-e-Sharif in the north, near the border with Uzbekistan. The goal is simple: to use skateboarding as a tool for empowerment in a country worn away by 30 years of conflict and dislocation. The children come for skateboarding, they stay for education.

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But what makes Skateistan even more special is that 45 percent of their 800 students are girls. When 19-year-old Nelofar steps on a skateboard and flies down the big ramp she tells me she feels "very brave and very strong." She feels free.

"I like the 360 flip, that's very amazing," she laughs. Looking at Nelofar, wide-eyed with enthusiasm as she Skypes me from Mazar-e-Sharif's Skateistan school, I tell her I think she's pretty brave, too.

UNICEF identifies Afghanistan as one of the worst places to be born a woman in the world. Of the 4 million children not enrolled in school, 60 percent are girls. And, as international forces continue to withdraw from Afghanistan, violence against women is still prevalent. When Nelofar steps on a skateboard, she's breaking gender boundaries.

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These boundaries in Afghanistan are mainly set by social convention and enforced by family loyalty and tradition. "The father sets the rules to protect the honor of the family," Skateistan's Communications Manager Alix Buck explains. "There will be conflict sometimes, for sure."

Skateistan found the ultimate loophole when they discovered that skateboarding is still a fairly unknown sport in Afghanistan. Cycling, football and kite-flying might be socially taboo for girls in 2015, but no one quite knows what these boards with wheels actually are. "It's perceived more as a game than a sport," says Buck. Ignorance is most definitely bliss for Nelofar and the 400 girls who get on their boards and fly down the Skateistan ramps every week in their colorful headscarves.

"Before coming here I didn't know about the skaters," Nelofar says. "I heard on television about the skiing, but not the skates!" Encouraged by her aunt, she came down to the Skateistan school to check out the skaters for herself. "I was wondering how they could come down from the big ramp and not fall on the ground and was thinking they would have something on their feet to keep their body on the skateboard. It was very amazing." She can't stop smiling as she talks.

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Now, 18 months later, Nelofar isn't just a shit-hot skater—she also works for Skateistan, specializing in student administration and media, and is studying to be a doctor.

Beneath the smiles, however, there is also struggle. Outside the Skateistan cocoon, the concept of girls playing sport continues to cause friction among Afghan people. Out in the open air, women are still stifled by the past. Nelofar recounts a story that occurred only days previous to our conversation. "Two days ago I was running in the street and wanted to join in a running race. We ran about ten kilometers but there was one person on the other side of the street who tried to disturb us. We decided to do the running inside Skateistan instead. In the outside areas it is very difficult—it's impossible for girls to do any sport."

"Disturbed" is—regardless of Nelofar's English—exactly the right word to describe this interruption of self-development. Many of the kids who seek refuge at Skateistan come from disadvantaged backgrounds, often street-working from a young age, like ten-year-old student Mursal, who speaks to me from Kabul.

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"Before I came to Skateistan, life was so boring for me," she says. "Every day I went to work, selling chewing gum. Then an idea came to my mind: Only working cannot build my future." Like Nelofar, Mursal says skateboarding makes her "feel happy," although that happiness comes at a price. I have to remind myself that this is a girl yet to hit puberty when she says, "To build my future I have to study hard."

But it does feel like perceptions are slowly changing. For starters, Nelofar's father and brothers are fully in support of her skateboarding. "They like my skateboarding," she grins. "They encourage me. They know everybody has rights." Mursal is also fortunate enough to have a supportive family background. "They think it is good for me," she says. "That's why they are sending me to Skateistan."

Buck, too, rightly corrects my western assumptions—largely based on sensational headlines and @UN_Women tweets—that pigeonhole all Afghan women as "alone" in their fight for identity and independence. "Not many people are aware that there's a variety of experiences and varying levels of conservatism that they [girls] might come from," she says.

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When I ask Nelofar about her hopes for women in Afghanistan in 2015, she says, "It's my dream that everyone can do sport, especially girls in the street, and nobody will disturb them. Hopefully things will change."

Her hope is shared by her father, who says, "Go, my daughter, and build your future."

Follow Kat Lister on Twitter.

The Exchange Program That Puts College Kids in Classrooms with Prisoners

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Back in 2008, Jon McIntyre's favorite time to read was at dawn, when rays of sunlight would slowly creep into his cell's tiny window at Graterford State Correctional Institution in eastern Pennsylvania.

"I would just lay in my bed in the top bunk or bottom bunk and just kick my feet up and just keep the book on my chest and read a couple hundred pages," McIntyre, who had never read a book before going to prison, said in an interview.

Then 28, he was nearing the end of a 12-year sentence at the prison for flipping cocaine, ecstasy, and stolen firearms and burglarizing small businesses. During a botched convenience store robbery when he was 19, McIntyre's associate shot a clerk with a .357 magnum twice in the chest at point-blank range—all over $20. McIntyre was the getaway driver. He was arrested and charged with attempted murder, assault, firearms, and narcotics trafficking. The prosecutor on the case labeled McIntyre and his co-defendants as " dangerous, violent thugs" in the local press.

"After they arrested us, I didn't see the light of day again until August 27, 2011," he said.

McIntyre was lonely adapting to a routine behind prison walls. His home in Philadelphia was about two hours away and he had few visitors; even his parents didn't come by very often. His cellmate was constantly reading encyclopedias, newspapers, books, and Playboy magazines, sometimes lending McIntyre these literary scraps.

Books soon became his escape from the slog of incarceration.

McIntyre began relentlessly educating himself behind bars. He had dropped out of school in the 11th grade, so a high school equivalency exam, or a GED, was the first step. He passed. Vocational trades courses were next. He dabbled in automotive repair, construction, and business administration before moving on to community college courses.

The key was hearing about the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program Temple University was facilitating at Graterford. McIntyre was intrigued by the course's unorthodox dynamic: Half of his classmates would be regular college kids, but the other half would be his fellow inmates. The topic was criminal justice, and classes were to be held just a few hallways from his cell. Students who had never stepped foot in prison would be learning alongside—and from—men in brown prison-issued clothing.

"[It was] an opportunity to cross boundaries that are not supposed to be crossed. Students from the outside are not supposed to be sitting next to and learning from people on the inside," McIntyre recalled.

McIntyre quickly enrolled. He had no idea what to expect, least of all that Inside-Out would change his life.

On a Thursday afternoon in September 2008, McIntyre sat on his cell's bunk waiting to go to his first Inside-Out class. He was nervous. A million questions bubbled to the surface of his brain about the college students he was about to meet.

McIntyre left his cell and entered a white cinderblock classroom illuminated by fluorescent lights and decorated with self-help posters. Correctional officers stared through a thick pane of glass from the hallway. He found his seat and focused on his classmates: a dozen young Temple University students seated in a circle. It was a cauldron of eclectic people. Those serving life sentences were mingling with middle-class, suburban university students.

At first, he kept to himself, but soon one of the college kids caught McIntyre's attention.

His name was Frank Campanell, a bright and passionate 22-year-old Temple University student. Campanell and McIntyre had little in common, except that, for a semester, they occupied that little room in Graterford. Campanell was a guitar-playing country kid who grew up on a horse farm and was pursing a biochemistry degree. He was short and wiry, with dusty blond hair and glasses.

"It blew my mind. [Jon] shattered perceptions I had about people who were incarcerated. It shattered my understanding of education and what it could be." –Frank Campanell

"I never imagined myself—a little surfer kid from Maryland—would move to North Philly and take a class in prison with a guy who has a record, serious experience on the other side of the tracks and is someone the average person perceives as dangerous," said Campanell, who had never been arrested and knew nothing of prison.

And then there was McIntyre: a muscular Philadelphia suburbanite with a buzz cut and gorilla posture who had recently converted to Islam. When he was 26, McIntyre spent three months in solitary confinement at Albion State Correctional Institution for beating a fellow inmate within an inch of his life. Yet McIntyre and Campanell immediately connected over a class discussion on the racial disparities in the sentencing of crack-cocaine cases.

"[Jon] was more articulate, more open, and more intellectual than many students I've ever seen and professors I've met," said Campanell. "But he was just a regular dude with me. It blew my mind. [He] shattered perceptions I had about people who were incarcerated. It shattered my understanding of education and what it could be."

For three hours—once a week—for an entire semester, McIntyre and Campanell discussed the American criminal justice system, rehabilitation, restorative and social justice, as well as prison abolitionists like Angela Davis. They wrestled with the consequences of labeling, dissecting words like felon, prisoner, and convict.

When the Inside-Out class ended in December 2008, Campanell returned to his biochemistry classes at Temple. McIntyre, on the other hand, resumed a dreary existence in a cage. But he was changed. He was reminded that he wasn't just a criminal, that he actually had something to offer, and that he wasn't hopeless—all things he hadn't felt in a long time.

"You begin to think that that everyone thinks you are an animal," he said of incarcerated life. "So even though most of the outside population that I came in contact with on a daily basis treated me like that, it was reassuring and inspiring to know that there were some people who didn't and wouldn't."

Half a decade later, McIntyre and Campanell would coincidentally reconnect on the outside, but as irrevocably different people.

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Students from Philadelphia's University of the Sciences pass through security en route to an Inside-Out course

Since its inception in 1997, Inside-Out has been taught at more than 130 academic institutions in 37 states across America, and has graduated more than 20,000 incarcerated individuals and college students from Ohio State University to Stanford.

Hundreds of facilitators from around the world have been trained to teach Inside-Out's curriculum and now their correctional educational model is being adopted internationally. Canada became the first country outside the US to start teaching Inside-Out in 2011 and individuals from Norway, Australia, and the United Kingdom are moving to embrace it as well.

The program has also move beyond prison walls. Homeless shelters, halfway houses, and domestic violence centers are partnering with colleges and inviting students into these spaces to learn alongside the people who occupy them.

Despite Inside-Out's success, correctional education in America has, at least until recently, been atrophying. The 2008 economic downturn triggered a shrinkage of prison education programs, according to a 2014 RAND Corporation report conducted in cooperation with the Justice Department. Between 2009 and 2012, 36 states reported a decrease in correctional education funding.

"The recession had a profound effect on the field," said Lois Davis, a correctional education expert with RAND and co-author of that report.

Davis found that large states slashed spending on prison education programs by an average of 10 percent between 2009 and 2012. Medium-sized states experienced a 20 percent reduction, and nationally, prison education funding fell by an average of 6 percent.

"When you look at academic programs there has been a retraction, especially in states with larger prison populations," explained Davis. "There has been a dramatic reduction in the number of teachers, as well as the number of students participating in these programs."

According to Lori Pompa, Inside-Out's founder, her organization has largely avoided these funding issues and depends on nonprofit grant money and universities to pay their instructors' salaries.

Davis relied on research showing that, as of 2004, 37 percent of inmates in America's state prisons didn't have a high school education. Fewer than 15 percent had any college or university coursework in their history. Most are haunted by their criminal records, returning to a job market for which they are underequipped.

Correctional education programs are proven—by the RAND study and others—to counter recidivism. University students and inmates are equally eligible for university credits in Inside-Out and the program offers retroactive credit for incarcerated individuals, who do not pay for taking the course. Upon release, incarcerated individuals can receive credit but must continue their higher education at the university that facilitated the original Inside-Out class.

"We hope it stops the recidivism—this rotating door that's been going on for years and years," said Juanita Goodman, warden of Philadelphia's Alternative and Special Detention facility, where Inside-Out has been taught. "If we can get people interested in school or getting a job and they stay out, then that's good for us."

Most prisons offer pre-GED and GED testing, vocational programs in varying fields from horticulture to dog training, and a few community college courses. Inside-Out goes further.

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Inside-Out facilitators Mandy Nourse-Berwald and Danyell Williams teach at 600 University Avenue, a minimum-security work-release prison in West Philadelphia.

It gives [inmates] confidence and insight into something completely new," said Goodman, who insisted Inside-Out has set the benchmark for higher education in her prison. "They dealt with some of things personally that the students had only read about in books, so it made them feel like they had just as much to offer, if not more, than some of the [university] students taking the class."

By 2014, McIntyre, 34, had been out of prison for over two years. The sleepy Philadelphia suburb of Phoenixville was his new home and he was earning $80,000 annually as a salesman for a heating and plumbing company. Prison was in the rearview mirror. So were the days of burglarizing gun stores and moving eight balls of coke. Studying, boxing, and basketball were his chief leisurely pursuits. He was enrolled part-time at Temple pursuing a bachelor's degree in sociology. Apart from a probation officer regularly sniffing around his apartment, things were normal. But something was missing.

"At the end of the day there was still kind of a hole in me," McIntyre told me. "I didn't feel like I was really doing the things that made me happy."

He thought about Inside-Out and eventually looked up the organization's founder, Lori Pompa. She invited McIntyre to a staff retreat. There, McIntyre locked eyes with the familiar face of Frank Campanell. They hadn't seen each other since waving goodbye on the blocks of Graterford in 2008.

For a second, McIntyre was ecstatic. Then he was shocked. Campanell was supposed to be a biochemist, balancing equations and fiddling with beakers in a hospital laboratory somewhere in Maryland. Instead, now 29, the former college kid was teaching Inside-Out classes and working with incarcerated Philadelphia youth.

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Rodney Archangel, 28, an inmate at a minimum-security prison in Philadelphia, reflects on his Inside-Out experiences following a class in early 2014

"I kind of feel responsible—he gave up a degree in biochemistry," explained McIntyre, whose friendship with Campanell through Inside-Out completely altered the younger man's professional trajectory. "He gave up a career in that field because of the experience that we shared together. Had he had not given up his degree, he'd potentially be making some decent bank right now."

Following the pair's conversations at Graterford in 2008, Campanell became disinterested in his studies at Temple. Prison was his new obsession.

"I took a step back," said Campanell, who now works for JusticeWorks YouthCare. "I don't want to be in a lab or hospital for the rest of my life climbing the rungs of the ladder. Inside-Out helped me see how I could contribute to the world. That experience led me to believe."

The reunion inspired McIntyre and Campanell to soon found their own company. Nothing yet is concrete, but they have a few ideas. One is to bring the 3D and the virtual reality film technology Oculus Rift into courtrooms to expedite and increase the number of sentencing proceedings on a daily basis. Instead of a judge hearing 50 cases, for example, he or she could get through 100.

"It will increase the quality and the efficacy of the criminal justice system," McIntyre said.

The technology could also cut down on resources and costs required to transport prisoners from their cell to the courtroom. If their dreams come to fruition, the result will illustrate correctional education's potential to spark social change.

"If not for certain people and certain things I wouldn't be here right now," Campanell added. "Jon is one of those people. The first Inside-Out class was, too. That influenced so much of what I am and who I want to be."

On the other end of the spectrum, McIntyre has emerged as a criminal justice advocate since his release two years ago. He guest lectures at Inside-Out classes and speaks on university panels around Philadelphia.

"Life's a trip isn't it?" said McIntyre, whose own evolution still feels surreal, even to himself.

Policymakers and professors now accept him as peer. Students look up to him. They even take notes on the words coming out of his mouth during panels or lectures, a phenomenon that still makes McIntyre's eyeballs roll to the back of his skull.

"When I speak in front of kids, all these years later, and they're actually writing down the shit that I say and my coming to speak to them has meaning and influence—it's trippy. If you would have told me that five or six years ago, in prison, I might have believed you, but I would have thought it's a long, long shot."

Dorian Geiger is a Canadian multimedia journalist and filmmaker based out of Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter.

Why Are Movie Awards So Much Better Than Music Awards?

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Photo via Wikicommons

Last week, I cast my annual ballot in the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and as usual there were some tough calls: How to choose, for example, outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture when I had great ensembles like Birdman, Boyhood, and The Grand Budapest Hotel to pick from (Birdman won). Likewise, if I were voting in the upcoming Academy Awards, there would be some equally hard choices, because generally the greatest achievements in film—this year's sniping around Sniper and Selma notwithstanding—do in fact get nominated.

On the other hand, if I were a voting member of the Recording Academy, charged with casting a ballot for the Grammy Awards, I think I would often face the opposite problem—not enough worthy nominees. In this year's "top" Grammy category, Album of the Year, only Beyoncé's bold self-titled LP, easily her most interesting record to date, and Beck's Morning Phase have any business being in the running. Sam Smith may be the most gifted male pop vocalist to emerge in a generation—he's so award-friendly that he seems to have been crafted just for the purpose of collecting golden gramophones—but his album as a whole was underwhelming. And Pharrell Williams's Girl and Ed Sheeran's X? Classic cases of middling records by artists inoffensive enough to have become Recording Academy favorites.

Why do movie award ceremonies get it right so much more often than music awards do? You can quarrel with the whole concept of awards for art, period—plenty have and do for good reason—but that's a separate conversation. Awards exist. And among those that do exist, how is it that movie prizes regularly make credible choices, and music awards are so wildly off the mark? Here's what I think.

There's Too Much Music
According to the measurement company Rentrak (via the MPAA), somewhere between 600 and 700 movies are released in the US annually—659 in 2013, to be exact. Care to guess how many albums are released in the same amount of time? Try one hundred times that. Nielsen put the number of physical and digital album releases in 2010 at 75,000.

Since many awards require submission for consideration to be nominated, only a fraction of those films and records are really going to be contending. But according to the Recording Academy, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 music releases are considered for Grammy nomination every year. That's exponentially more than the number of movies. That means that anyone hoping to do a credible, comprehensive job of honoring music is taking on a Herculean task.

Music Awards Are More Worried About Money and Youth
Most music awards don't even bother to try and be comprehensive or particularly credible, they just opt for mass appeal. The imperative to honor the familiar and the most commercial (and hence, most beloved by teens) is overwhelming. Many music awards—including the American Music Awards, CMT Awards, and NME Awards—are unabashed popularity contests that rely on votes from fans. The Billboard Music Awards are effectively the same thing, since they rely on the charts. Others, like the MTV Video Music Awards, BRITs, and Academy of Country Music Awards, use some combination of fans and "industry professionals" to determine their winners. The Grammys, of course, rely solely on an academy of voters (more on that below).

Very few such mass-appeal awards exist in film—you won't see Guardians of the Galaxy or The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 in contention for top honors at anything but the perennially goofy MTV Movie Awards. In fact, when this year's Oscar nominations were announced, a slew of thinkpieces were written about the dearth of big-box-office popcorn movies in the leading categories, as though that is the purpose of the Academy Awards—to maintain some sort of connection to Joe Multiplex. The bottom line: Movie awards are more concerned with achievement, music awards are all about connecting with a huge mass of fans.

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Film Awards Have a Better Pool of Voters
Who better to bestow awards on you than your peers? That's the idea behind the DGA Awards, the SAG Awards, and the WGA Awards—directors, actors, and writers nominate and vote for those within their respective disciplines. Journalists and critics are in a good position to make informed decisions about film as well—think the National Board of Review, the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics' Awards, and so on.

But there are no comparable guild awards in music, and the closest thing to press awards would be prizes like Canada's media-determined Polaris Music Prize, or the UK's Mercury Prize, which is decided on by a panel of musicians, producers, and songwriters. The Oscars and Grammys are decided on by select academies of industry professionals who have either been invited to be members or applied to get in (unsurprisingly both are dominated by old white guys).

In the case of the Oscars, that occasionally may lead to something like Selma's lack of an acting or directorial nomination. As for the Grammys, you only need to consider the oft-noted fact that rap albums may get nominated for album of the year, but almost never win. Just ask Kendrick, Kanye, Wayne, and Eminem. It's been 11 years since a hip-hop record took the top Grammy—Outkast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. But really, the Grammys' credibility problems go way beyond that.

Music Is an Increasingly Balkanized Field
The Golden Globes separate films into dramas and comedy/musicals, which spreads the wealth, brings in twice as many stars, and gives comedies a moment to shine. However, most movie awards don't distinguish between genres (except for docs and shorts). Naturally there are rom-com fans and biopic devotees, but no one gets that worked up over their favorite kind of movie.

Music, on the other hand, has always been a more divisive, tribal game, and music awards (even the crowd-pleasing ones) regularly divide the spoils between genres. This results in head-scratchers like Lorde's designation as a "rock" artist at several award shows last year. And then there's the Grammys, which never met a genre it didn't like. In the past 20 years, music's gotten more splintered than ever, thank you internet. Being an all-encompassing, all-embracing music awards show is nearly impossible in 2015. But damn if the Grammys don't try.

The music awards of record is how they seem to see themselves. The people behind the Grammys approach their task with a sense of self-importance and ambition unlike any other music awards show on the planet, wrapping their arms around no less than 83 categories (lean and mean, compared to the even more bloated 109 they were up to in 2011), from classical to R&B, spoken word to world, jazz, rock, pop, "traditional" pop and so many, many more. Recording Academy members are encouraged, though not required, to vote within their field of expertise—a fact that goes a little way toward explaining decades of oddities in nominations and wins too numerous to go into here.

Even when you dig into genres like dance and alternative, there's a mix of the credible-yet-predictable and the just plain inexplicable. And never forget the most confounding category of all the 83—the arrogantly named "Best New Artist," which nearly every year sees the nomination of an artist who won't seem new to anyone who cares about music. That delay can be blamed on the vague criteria: "For a new artist who releases, during the Eligibility Year, the first recording which establishes the public identity of that artist." There's the rub. "Public identity"—whatever that means. This year's better-late-than-never best new artist nominee is HAIM, and I hope they win, though Sam Smith's probably got it in the bag (with an assist from Tom Petty).

That's the thing—the Grammys are still massively predictable. Years ago, when they awarded album of the year to the likes of Lionel Richie, Celine Dion, or Toto (look it up) the knock was that the awards were "out of touch" with what the kids were listening to. If they've made up some ground since on that score, and they have, there's still an undeniably clubby vibe to the whole thing, a feeling they are annually bestowing with self-satisfaction something of great consequence.

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Television Makes Music Awards Dumber
Most of the music awards shows and some of the movie awards are broadcast on TV, which brings with it even a greater push for populism. And while the movie shows will fish for millennials by having, say, Channing Tatum as a presenter, or James Franco and Anne Hathaway as Oscar co-hosts in 2011, their options are somewhat limited. But the music awards? They simply go full-bore for the biggest and hottest performers of the moment—not just in terms of nominees and recipients, but in performers and presenters as well. These days, it's come to the point where, in a tradition started by the VMAs, non-nominated superstars with new records to sell are regularly booked to perform. Even the staid Grammys has picked up on the practice—Justin Timberlake two years ago, and Madonna this year.

The desire to appeal to television audiences not only impacts who presents and who performs, it also seems to impact who gets nominated for awards. A quick look at the review aggregator site Metacritic showcases the weight the Grammys appear to put on popularity over critical acclaim. The average score of the Grammy nominees for album of the year is 72. The average score for the eight Oscar nominees for best picture? A much more impressive 84.

The Metacritic movie of the year is Boyhood, with a perfect score of 100, while its closest apparent competitor in the Oscar race, Birdman, has a very strong 88. The top-scoring Metacritic Grammy Album of the Year nominee, Beyoncé, has an impressive 85 score, but Sam Smith's record only mustered a 62. A film with a 62 score wouldn't have a prayer of landing a top category Oscar bid.

Conversely, the top-grossing film of 2014, Transformers: Age of Extinction, with its dismal Metascore of 32, won't be getting near any major movie awards. But the top-grossing album of 2014, according to Billboard, is Taylor Swift's pop turn, 1989. And although its release date didn't qualify it for this year's Grammys, it's basically a shoo-in for an Album of the Year nod next year.

I get it—music awards, including the Grammys, don't only want to get it right. They want viewers. But it wouldn't kill the music industry to create one music awards show that really acknowledged achievement with as little regard for popularity as movie awards have. Surely we can have one ceremony that digs deep and honors the musical equivalent of a Birdman or Boyhood—like the brilliant War on Drugs' Lost in the Dream, Angel Olsen's Burn Your Fire for No Witness, Run the Jewels' RTJ2, or FKA twigs' mesmerizing debut LP2. Is that too much to ask?

Follow John on Twitter.

VICE Meets: Directors Mark and Jay Duplass Discuss Their New Series, 'Togetherness'

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Filmmakers Jay and Mark Duplass have made a big name for themselves with the endearing hyperrealism of their mumblecore films. The brothers have now delved into the world of TV with their series Togetherness, which follows the tribulations of thirtysomethings trying to make sense of their adult lives.

Togetherness stars Amanda Peet, Melanie Lynskey, and Steve Zissis. The series premiered on HBO this January and has already been renewed for a second season. We sat down with the Duplass brothers to talk about the series and its parallels with their lives.

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