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Follow Simon Hanselmann on Twitter and look at his blog. Also buy his books from Fantagraphics and Space Face.

We all know that social media sites use algorithms to know what you buy, who your best friends are, and when you're about to get hitched. Apparently Twitter can even be used to predict crimes, elections, epidemics, and successful TV shows. But now, according to research published last month, it can also reveal a user's likelihood of being struck down by heart disease.

A University of Pennsylvania team of psychologists, doctors, and computer scientists analyzed 826 million tweets from 1,300 countries and found that particular words can predict the health condition, which is the leading cause of death in the US and Australia.

"High risk was associated with a lot of very negative emotion, aggressive words, and expletives. Words like hate, drama, bored," Dr. Margaret Kern told ABC News, while "lower risk was actually associated with a lot more positive things. Words like wonderful, friends, drink, company."

Last year Facebook drew criticism when it published the findings of a mass psychological experiment that proved it could make users happier or sadder. In doing so they caused many of us to express precisely the kind of negative emotions and words researchers now claim indicate a greater chance of fatal illness.

But does this mean the gods of social media (guys wearing "Keep Calm and Code On" T-shirts) can now use algorithms to break our hearts, and then calculate when those hearts will stop beating?

Nobody doubts that unprecedented amounts of data are currently being collected. But technology writer and commentator Stilgherrian told VICE that little is being achieved beyond individuals being targeted for specific advertising.

"This whole concept is now reaching a height of masturbatory buzz because this is the era of Big Data," he says. "As soon as you have numbers it gives the illusion of understanding, and with that comes the illusion of power.

"It's the technologist's dream. Our data has given us insight! Yeah, but hey, Silicon Valley kid, how do you use that to improve somebody's health? You don't. You sit there smugly and go, 'Oh, this person over here has 0.7 or whatever rate of heart disease.'"

Data is often referred to as the new oil . Companies understand its importance but they don't necessarily comprehend what they're sitting on. So while talk of the powers of social media's predictive analysis might be masturbatory buzz for now, nobody can say for sure what will be extracted from it in the future.

"Perhaps that's why it's dangerous. The people collecting it don't understand this stuff, let alone us," says Stilgherrian. "When this second dotcom bubble bursts people will be trying to offload these databases for as much as they can get. What happens after that?"

Studies like Pennsylvania's heart disease research, which made headlines around the world, demonstrated that when it comes to large scale numbers analysis, the new trend involves looking at huge amounts of social data and extracting patterns. It's not just academics who are doing this—companies and governments are also in on the act.

Even in our current primitive understanding of what all this data means and whether the research is worth a dime, it's not difficult to imagine how some of it could be used.

Futurist and academic Mark Pesce told VICE that health-based services delivering recommendations by correlating information from multiple streams and devices (your social networks, smart watches, phones, fitness doodads, etc.) aren't far away.

"They will produce some set of feedback that will look like suggestions around your own behavior, like 'Don't have that second coffee or that second piece of cake,' or 'Maybe you should walk to work,'" he says. "It's going to be all that stuff and most of the time it's going to seem quite banal. A set of suggestions to help us become healthier or happier."

But with the good will come the bad. Just as these streams can theoretically improve our lives, they can also theoretically make us worse. What's to stop a social media network covertly making us ill so they can sell us a remedy? This sort of concern ultimately comes down to who has access.

"Data security is something we think of because we don't want our credit card data out there," Pesce says. "But it's my well being data I don't want shared around. If we start having large pools of well-being data—individually and en masse—and they aren't secured then, well, that's a prescription for disaster."

Follow Luke on Twitter.

Image by Ben Thomson.

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1985. I'm married and living in San Diego with my three-year-old son. I haven't worked in a while and our little home is not a happy one. I get a call from a guy in New York who I worked with a couple of years ago in Saudi Arabia. He tells me he's with a firm that makes multimedia shows and special effect slides and they need an optical camera operator, do I know how to operate a Forox optical camera?

"Yeah, absolutely," I tell him. "I used to work with a guy who had a Forox camera. What's it pay?" I've never heard of a Forox camera and three days later I'm in NYC on the seventh floor of the Paramount Building in Times Square in a little room with a big camera on a rail and a console of toggle switches and numbers, looking for an on/off switch. A camera is just a camera and I get it figured out quickly enough and am employed for the next year and a half.

The company is called Spinner's Slides and I'm working the night shift. There's an oddball guy named Kershaw who develops the long rolls of Ektachrome in a little dip-and-dunk darkroom. He keeps the door closed with the lights off even when there is no film to develop. Because we are shooting slides we have containers of film cleaner and cotton swabs and hoses connected to a compressor to blow the dust away. The film cleaner is highly flammable, though it burns out quickly. I like to soak the swabs in the fluid, put the sticks into an air hose, light the cotton tip and shoot them through the air like a meteor. One night I'm having a cotton swab firefight with my friend and coworker, Josh, when I get an idea.

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Kershaw is in the dark darkroom listing to music. In the hallway outside the darkroom door we pour a puddle of film cleaner on the tile floor and flip out the lights. Josh pounds on the door, yelling Fire! Fire! When Kershaw opens the door I drop a match and a great blue and orange flame erupts, almost high enough to singe Kershaw's nose hairs. He whoops but then as the flame dissipates and he catches on he says, "Real funny! Shouldn't you be in your own room doing your own work? Leave me alone and go somewhere else and grow up." He closes his door and I can hear him flick out the lights. For weeks after Josh and I can't mention it without cracking up.

The Paramount building on Broadway between 43rd and 44th is 33 floors with four clock faces at the near top and a big round ball at the very top like the Daily Planet. Late night most offices are closed and I like riding the elevator and taking the stairs and exploring the nooks and crannies of other businesses. Every night for three weeks I break into an office and steal all the M&Ms in a tray at the reception desk.

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One night Josh and I take the elevator as high as it goes. We find the stairways and jimmy our way up to a ladder that takes us up and outside on top of the clocks, just below the ball. We are both photographers and neither of us has brought along a camera. I tell Josh I'll give him $100 if he will stand on the edge and take a leak. He tells me he'll give me $200 for the same thing. We crawl on our bellies to the edge and look down at Times Square. Because we are both boys, we spit and watch it fall.

At work we have a film dryer in the darkroom, a metal cabinet like a double-door armoire with a blower and heater inside. I'm walking by when the timer dings so I open the door and the rolls of hanging film are dry. I climb inside and squat down low. A minute later my friend and fellow employee, Ethan, opens the dryer doors. I jump up and growl like an angry dog. Ethan clutches his chest and falls to the floor and just lays there. I think maybe I've just killed him and I start putting a story together; I don't know what happened. I just walked into the room and there he was on the floor. Ethan begins to laugh hysterically and I'm glad he's not dead but a bit concerned when he just lies there laughing and doesn't get up for another ten minutes.

My buddy Mike, who is freelance at Spinner's Slides, is a computer whiz. Mike did the programming for a 12-projector show but there was a money dispute and they gave him $600 less than he invoiced. One day I come into work in the afternoon to find that the phones have not stopped ringing for five hours, every line is ringing and each time you pick up nobody is there and as soon as you hang up it starts ringing. It's pretty amusing and the next day Mike tells me he did it from his computer at home. I'm impressed and Mike feels somewhat vindicated.

There have been a couple of major fucks-ups at work and it looks like Spinner's is a goner. It's a shame because it's been fun and easy and I love New York. This is the third place I've worked that went kaput and I feel a little guilty. On my last day after a sad goodbye walking down to Penn Station my backpack is heavy with three hundred-foot 35mm rolls of Kodachrome, three camera lenses of varying dimensions, four boxes of mounts, a darkroom densitometer, a stapler, a three-hole punch, 35mm Pentex with a wide lens, various office and drafting supplies, a can of film cleaner, and a box of cotton swabs.

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released in 2011, and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.

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Inside the National Portrait Gallery. Image via Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It feels like a normal day in London's National Gallery. Bored kids, culture vultures, and art buffs shuffle around sizing up the paintings. Tourists take pictures of some of the world's finest artworks with their smartphones. And Charles I sits smugly on his horse, trying to fool the world into thinking that he wasn't 5' 4".

Nothing suggests that one of England's great cultural institutions is going through a crisis. But sitting down at the entrance of each room, guiding the visitors and explaining the art, the staff of the National Gallery are holding back fear.

In July last year, a decision was made to outsource 400 out of the 600 gallery staff. From the room wardens to the front-desk and school booking staff, almost everyone will be transferred from the public sector to a private company.

The National Gallery has offered a number of justifications for the plan. At first they spoke about government funding cuts and efficiency. Then they spoke about the need for flexibility. Like other cultural spaces, the National Gallery is being forced to diversify their revenue with evening events and commercial collaborations. They say that requires a more flexible labor force, and they say it can only be delivered through an external agency.

Whatever the precise reason, the outcome of outsourcing labor is almost always the same. Hard-earned public sector benefits will go, wages will become uncertain and shift patterns irregular. The staff of the National Gallery will become pawns in the UK public sector's outsourcing bonanza, a central component of the government's ideological agenda.

There was a time last year when it looked like it might not happen. After an online petition gathered over 35,000 signatures, the gallery agreed to temporarily suspend its proposal and open talks with the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS). But in August, gallery management walked away from meetings, pressed ahead with its plans, and threatened to sue anyone who took part in strike action.

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Image courtesy of PCS/Andrew Aitchinson

The results of a ballot for a five-day strike will be revealed later today, but a grim inevitability lingers in the giant rooms. Almost as soon as I walked through the front door on Wednesday, into the Sunley room, I could sense the fear. Two wardens standing by the entrance were nervously discussing an article the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee had written the day before. "We shouldn't be talking about it," one of them said before the hushed conversation came to a close.

Written into the contracts of the National Gallery workers are confidentiality agreements that ban staff from talking directly to the press about their grievances. As I moved from room to room, few wardens seemed comfortable talking beyond telling me how nervous they were.

One gallery assistant, who referred to himself only as "N," did agree to speak later that evening on the condition of anonymity. N has worked at the National Gallery as a room warden for the past 14 years and remembers his time fondly. Being so close to such great works of art and working at such a prestigious institution has been a remarkable experience, he told me. But now his future is uncertain.

"I'm certainly thinking about leaving," he said. "It's sad. I love going there and working with the people I work with. I've known them for the past 14 years, but I have to keep my options open."

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One of the artworks from gallery staff for the 'Not the Crown Jewels' exhibition. Image courtesy of PCS

The National Gallery claims that its staff will not be made worse off by the transfer. They say workers will be protected under Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) regulations ( TUPE), which guarantee outsourced workers move over on exactly the same terms. But TUPE regulations only apply for a limited amount of time, after which they can be changed according to different technical, operational, and economic reasons.

"We're going toward a situation where we'll be low paid, called in when they want, and will lose our rights to a civil service sick pay," N said. "Without the London Living wage, people already find it difficult and now they are asking how they will cope. If you work different hours of the day every week and can be called in with 24 hours notice you might not be able to continue."

It's not just personal terms that will be affected, either. At the heart of the dispute is a conviction that an external agency working to maximize profits cannot provide the same quality and commitment to art as an in-house team.

Like N, many of the current staff at the gallery have worked for years and are trained to protect and care for the paintings. Many are deeply knowledgeable about the institution and its collections. When I asked one warden to translate some Latin above a door he spent the next two minutes enthusiastically discussing various facts about the room.

"If you look at the agency run staff they are just brought in to fill a room," N said. "They don't tend to stay a long time and they don't usually have knowledge of the building or the paintings. The ethos of the place is bound to change."

Pointing out that an external agency may not be suitable to run the gallery is a dangerous thing to do for the building's staff. In July, the workers were informed that CIS—a private security firm more used to securing empty buildings than guarding a Rubens painting—would be brought in to manage the forthcoming Rembrandt exhibition to quell fears about possible strike action. After researching CIS online, Jim Rutherford, then team leader of the National Gallery's security team became extremely concerned.

"I was worried that such important artworks were going to be guarded by people with no experience," he told me. "I wrote anonymous letters to all the lenders of the Rembrandt exhibition pointing out my concerns. On August 12 I was called into a meeting with Senior Managers and HR and charged with gross misconduct. My office keys, radio and staff pass were removed and I was escorted out of the building. I was so angry at my treatment that I submitted my resignation on the same day."

On Monday, the Rembrandt exhibition finished, but CIS staff have been asked to remain at the gallery—taking over a third of the services without a tender. Nobody I spoke to seemed to fully understand why this is happening. None of the current in-house staff have been fired, and those who did work in the Sainsbury Wing galleries have been squeezed into a much smaller area.

"It's a threatening tactic," Clara Paillard, president of the culture sector at the major trade union PCS suggested. "At a time where we are fighting privatization, demanding consultation and negotiation with management, they've already brought in a private firm."

Back at the gallery, I walked down to the Sainsbury Wing to see if I could find out what working for CIS was like. The first thing you notice when you walk in is that the staff aren't allowed to sit down when the rooms are busy. In a gallery that's almost always packed, that means standing in more or less the same position for hours on end. I saw one assistant bent over with hands on her knees.

I approached her and quietly asked whether she enjoyed working for CIS. "I've got nothing to say, I like working here," she replied curtly. "I think it's a great company," another member of staff said after I struck up a conversation about the paintings. I was trying to be subtle but, not long after speaking, two members of senior management were called over to ask what I was doing. They weren't unfriendly, but their wariness spoke volumes.

During the Rembrandt exhibition, some CIS staff were found touching the paintings. Others were caught trying to physically eject a lady they thought had been there too long. This isn't the fault of the staff, but vindication, according to those I spoke to, that an external agency cannot understand how art should be approached.

In February, a five-day strike has been called in hope that a solution can be found that avoids privatization and remunerates staff for any new work they are asked to do. If that doesn't work—and it's looking less and less probable—the National Gallery is unlikely to stay the same. Charles I may still be sitting on his horse, but something else quite fundamental will be lost.

Follow Philip on Twitter.

In the summer of 1994, about 300 people gathered on the premises of James Quick Auctioneers near Naperville, Illinois, to burn some art. The bonfire faced none of the cries of censorship that usually accompany the destruction of creative works. The two dozen paintings set aflame were original works by serial killer John Wayne Gacy, and to most people back then, this wasn't fine art—these were talismans of an evil that needed to be destroyed. And that position is understandable, considering the "artist" behind the paintings had been convicted in 1980 of the rape and murder of more than two dozen boys.

Gacy picked up painting during his 14 years on death row. Some of his works—like Sex Skull, a mass of nude bodies in the shape of a cranium in a pool of blood—are horrific, while others—such as his childlike renderings of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Elvis, and Jesus, or various iterations of his clown alter ego, Pogo—have an innocent quality that makes them especially unsettling.

Upon his 1994 execution, Gacy had his lawyers put 40 of these paintings up for sale via James Quick Auctioneers, which garnered a great deal of national attention. For many, it was an abomination that works with such dark origins could be turned into commodities. It upset two local (and now late) businessmen, Joe Roth and Wally Knoebel, so much that they decided to attend the event and drop upward of $15,000 to buy up the bulk of the paintings. When they announced that they intended to burn all the artwork right there on the James Quick premises and would allow the families of Gacy's victims to toss the paintings onto the fire, they received a standing ovation. Other people even came out with more Gacy artifacts to place on the pyre.

For most people, the June 19 1994 bonfire was the end of the story. But in truth, Roth and Knoebe's bonfire barely made a dent in Gacy's catalogue. And Gacy's body of work is only a blip in the bigger world of art produced by murderers, which is coveted by many because of the sense of gore and infamy that hangs over such pieces.

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Charles Manson with William Harder. Photo courtesy of Harder

Collectively known as "murderabilia," these items have spawned an active and diverse market, much to the chagrin of both victim-rights advocates, who are afraid the profits from these sales go back to the killers, and the incarcerated murderers themselves, who are pissed that all the cash from these sales is going into the pockets of collectors. Yet neither group has made any traction in their efforts to dismantle and outlaw the sale of these items.

Beyond paintings, murderabilia encompasses any number of ghoulish artifacts—from an action figure with body parts inside of it made by Jeffrey Dahmer to string art made by Charles Manson to dirt pulled from the crawlspace where Gacy buried his victims.

Andy Kahan of the Mayor's Crime Victims Office in Houston, one of the chief opponents of the murderabilia industry, has been cataloguing sales since 2008. In that time, he's seen grotesque items like sperm-splattered photos of models, gruesome crime-scene pictures, fingernail clippings, and scrapings of foot calluses—all sourced from 234 different killers who hail from 41 states as well as Canada, England, Japan, and Russia.

"Some of the artwork is extremely sexually graphic," says Kahan. "[They can] contain the names of victims in the drawing... like a line of headstones with their names on it."

"The items that I sell are kind of dark," admits Eric Holler, the man behind Serial Killers Ink, one of the major sites that hawks the personal effects of criminals.

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Art by Charles Manson from William Harder's collection.

But despite the gruesome nature of this stuff, some murderabilia can fetch thousands of dollars.

"I know one guy who made eighty thousand dollars on my site last year. He had a lot of Gacy paintings [which have only gone up in demand as they've gained media attention due to events like 1994's bonfire] and a lot of money to put into it," says William Harder, who runs another site called Murder Auction.

Someone making as much money as Harder described is a bit of an anomaly, considering the industry is still relatively small. It only came into its own in 1998, with the birth of eBay. Thanks to pressure from advocates like Kahan, eBay banned the sale of murderabilia in 2001 and about six major American sellers, like Murder Auction, subsequently emerged to fill the void.

"Take the true crimes collectibles industry [another term for murderabilia] and compare it with the entertainment autographs industry," says Holler. The latter, he estimates, "is ten thousand times larger," and for people involved in it, "it's a hobby. There's not a ton of money in it, and you're not going to make a hundred thousand a year."

At any given time, there are 3,000 items on sale at Murder Auction. About 45 to 90 of these items change hands every month, with prices ranging from a few bucks for a letter to a few thousand for a painting.

Despite their financial interest in macabre merchandise, there's little that the major murderabilia site owners actually agree upon. In conversations with me, both Harder and Holler stressed that they don't want to be equated with the other's site, and accused their competition of sniping and backstabbing. They also have different philosophies on how they source their products.

"I don't sell things that I obtain from inmates I write to and meet in person," says Harder, who believes that many sellers who do that don't reveal to the murderers that they intend on selling that ephemera. "I buy stuff [from small collectors], and then I sell [it]. And half of the things I buy I keep personally.

"I still get [my stuff from] inmates, and I think that's how I will always do my business," says Holler, who believes it's the only way to guarantee the authenticity and quality of his products.

Most of the sites' customers don't get into the behind-the-scenes politics of the industry. Murderabilia collectors are a diverse lot, ranging from one-time buyers to full-on obsessives.

"My customer base is vast," says Holler. "There is no specific demographic. It's people from all walks of life—men, women, younger and older people... You can't pin it down."

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Art by Charles Manson from William Harder's collection

Still, there are few demographics that are consistently interested in certain offerings.

"Law enforcement agencies can always buy a lot of letters," he says. "There's one [department] in the US... They said they were doing handwriting analysis. They made two very large orders.

"There's a lot of college professors, too. There's a guy on the East Coast who works out of a university, and he's doing research on school shooters. He buys almost every school shooter letter, because it's part of his ongoing research."

Even Kahan keeps a small collection of murderabilia for lectures and workshops on the industry. He believes that there are a hundred or so hardcore collectors in the US who write to inmates, trade items back and forth, and idolize high-profile murderers. Harder, on the other hand, notes that at least 1,000 people use his site actively, which suggests there are more serious collectors than even Kahan estimates. And the culture around murderabilia has started to slowly filter out into the mainstream, thanks partly to CSI, which has featured episodes on true crime collectors. This has helped inspire more one-time buyers with a mild interest in getting a gory conversation piece.

"It's like owning a piece of [a mass murder's] soul," says Kahan. "It's a talking item."

"I'll get people from Podunk, Iowa," added Harder. "They just want to buy a letter from their town's most famous killer, and there just happens to be that letter on the site."

However, not everyone who catches wind of the murderabilia scene is eager to get a piece of it. Displays of murderabilia at galleries in Texas in 1998, Florida in 2006, and Las Vegas in 2011 sparked national conversations about whether making a profit off murderers' works should even be legal and whether the gallery shows were too insulting and painful to the families of victims to be tolerated.

"We all try to move on with our lives, but that's proven rather difficult," Shelly Mullins, whose relative James Byrd Jr. was killed in a gruesome hate crime in East Texas in 1998, told the Houston Chronicle in 2014 after learning that four items from two of Byrd's three murderers were up for sale on Harder's Murder Auction site.

"People out there continue to stir up things and make a mockery out of [his death] and do not take it seriously," Byrd's sister Louvon Harris told the Chronicle in 2010, when the site put up a bag of his grave dirt and photos of the crime scene. "He should be resting in peace. It's very selfish and disrespectful of the family."

Most efforts to restrict the production, display, or sale of items related to the crimes of murderers have failed on free speech grounds. Kahan's tried to refocus efforts on restricting direct payment to inmates for works sold by the major sites. He's had some success at the state level, as in his push for Texas's "Notoriety for Profit" legislation, which bans the use of the story or image of one's murders to make a profit. But without a federal bill (which he's tried and failed to push to a Senate vote three times) he believes he won't be able to make a difference.

"If I ever get a hearing, I'll knock their socks off," says Kahan. "Much as I believe in capitalism, you have to draw a line somewhere."

He thinks that if there is no way to pay inmates for their work, they will stop putting things into the world and the supply of murderabilia will dry up. However, Harder and Holler say that Kahan doesn't undestand the murderabilia market.

"A lot of this stuff has changed hands several times [by the time it gets to an auction site]," says Harder. "The common myth is that inmates are getting paid via third party sellers... That couldn't be further from the truth."

That said, Holler admits he does pay inmates who give him their personal effects. But he claims it's not a direct transaction and more of him "helping" out the guys who gave him stuff for "free."

Harder, on the other hand, claims that he's heard of inmates who've bashed his site in the media because they weren't getting paid for the sale of their items.

"[One inmate] wrote letters to people who didn't have good intentions. Some of those letters were purchased by me," he says. "And [now] I'm selling them and he's mad about it. I'm sorry, but he should have been more careful who he wrote to."

And so it seems, both the families of the victims and the murders get the short end of the stick in the trade of murderabilia. The one ones who come out on top are the collectors and site owners like Harder and Holler.

"This is the American dream," says Harder. "I found something I enjoy doing. I make a little money. I'm not breaking any laws. Anyone who gets offended by this—they've come to it on their own volition. They've brought it upon themselves."

Follow Mark on Twitter.

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An arsenal of embalming tools to make dead people look alive again. Photos courtesy of Daniella Marcantoni

If you've ever looked into an open casket at a funeral, your loved one was probably wearing makeup. Makeup application isn't strictly part of the embalming process, but most funeral homes will offer the service to families who want to have a viewing; after all, without cosmetics dead bodies can look a little lifeless.

Daniella Marcantoni is one of the people who performs this service—a makeup artist for the deceased, if you will. Marcantoni started out plying her trade on living people before becoming a licensed funeral director and embalmer. Having this dual background provided her with training in both of the skills required for this delicate art, which she did for several years before leaving the funeral industry recently. I reached out to Daniella to chat about the ins and outs of posthumous makeup application.

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A video of the embalming process. Warning: contains graphic images of the dead

VICE: How did you get involved in this trade and what drew you to it?
Daniella Marcantoni: I always had an interest in forensic pathology. I always had a fascination with serial killers, with the psychology of what causes people to kill, with death, and things like that. The funeral industry was a marriage of all these different things: It's art, it's science, I still get to be around the death. I finished my classes for my degree in administration of justice, and then I went straight to mortuary school. Embalming for me was therapeutic. I liked it because it was a very calming energy. I find a lot of people to be very overwhelming in terms of the energy that they put out. A lot of people are obviously scared of dead people, but you have a lot more to be scared around a live person than you do a dead person.

Makeup application is something that embalmers usually do, right?
Yes. It's very rare that they would hire a makeup artist. There are some funeral homes that have a lot of men who've been there a long time, and they don't know how to do makeup, so they'll have one person who has experience doing makeup, but it's very rare. A lot of the people who are embalmers in California—in my experience—are doing everything, so they're doing the makeup as well. Then there's larger mortuaries where everything is separated. Where I did my apprenticeship, I did everything, which was nice because it allowed me to have a very full-circle experience.

When people learn embalming, is makeup a big part of the training? Or did you learn more from your own background as an artist?
I was a freelance makeup artist and had a lot of experience doing that prior to going into the funeral industry. In California, if you want to be an embalmer, you need to go to school, and you take your national board exam and your California exam. I don't remember them teaching us makeup in school. I think maybe there might have been an optional workshop or something, but I didn't need that because I had tons of experience on all types of different people from my makeup artist years. So it was never something that I struggled with. But it's obviously very different from live application.

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Is embalming helpful for applying makeup?
Yes, absolutely. [People] start decomposing immediately. It's not like once they pass away they they turn purple. It takes time. It's just that the color and the tissue fixation... they're harder, they're more pliable. It's really hard to apply cosmetics to unembalmed tissue. On occasion we'd have to do that if a family didn't believe in embalming or if they couldn't afford embalming and they just wanted to do what we call a quick "ID" viewing.

A lot of people would ask us to put a little makeup on, but it was always really hard because it's really soft. The coloring is off. Not to say that embalming really restores the color, but there are dyes that kind of give a little pink hue. It kind of livens up the color a little and doesn't make them look so "dead," if you will. It's an easier foundation for makeup application.

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Daniella's makeup brushes for the dead, which are exactly the same as makeup brushes for the living

I know people's skin color can change after they die. Is there something you use to counteract that?
There's this stuff—we called it orange juice, because it literally looks like dark orange juice. It's like a tinted liquid, and it has a little bit of a moisturizing property in it. That worked really well. It's so old. Nobody likes it. I personally really liked it on darker complected skin. It's called Glow Tint. We had the really thick cadaver makeup. But a lot of it was just regular makeup. People just give you makeup—Oh, this is mom's favorite makeup, can you use this on her?—which is always great, because it was already matched to their color and everything. And they would just leave it with us, so you could just add that to the collection. Sometimes we get really great stuff.

Are there fluids in your arsenal for other ailments?
There's fluids that are specified for someone who's jaundiced—that was really heavy dye. Or you want what we call a "hot fluid," which was a really strong fluid to dehydrate somebody who was really edematous. And then you get people who are really dehydrated. There's all these different types of fluids you can use to kind of correct these issues. You're basically cooking up a recipe based upon whatever you know about that person. There's certain things that you can tell. After doing it for a long time you can look at somebody and see how they're reacting to the embalming and say this person must have this going on. It's just experience.

Do you sometimes get requests from family that you can't honor?
Sometimes we get a picture of mom from 1945, and it's 2000-whatever, and you're like, What am I supposed to do with this? That's always a challenge.

We also can't do anything that's considered mutilation. Well, we can and we can't—because technically when you embalm someone you're mutilating them. We can't remove teeth. We can't cut or excise tissue. We're not supposed to cut hair. For hair removal we have to have explicit written instructions, because that's something that's considered irreversible. And anything that's considered irreversible, you're supposed to have explicit instructions from the family—with good reason. I mean, you can't just assume the beard is just scruffy and shave dad or grandpa clean. Maybe that's how they wore their face. That's why I personally like as much instruction as possible. But there's some things families think we can do like, "Can we have grandma's teeth?" And it's like... No, we can't remove those. The only thing we can remove are pacemakers.

Wait, you mentioned requests for skin removal?
Like, if somebody has a neck tumor or something, we can't just cut it off. We can cover it but we can't remove it. You can add but you can't take away. The only thing you can take away is hair.

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A wax face mold, used in mortuary school to practice reconstructing faces

What are the types of things that a good embalmer could reconstruct?
Pretty much anything. We are literally taught in school to build someone's face out of nothing. Whatever the family requests is what we're gonna do. Decomposition is very hard to work with. It's not even the trauma issue there. The foundation is not stable. I never recreated someone's face, but we never had a case where we had to. I had several cases that were shotgun wounds, where obviously the upper half of their face was missing and we had to repair it. Every embalmer will tell you that they have a different technique, or they have some secret. As long as it's not considered trash, you can use it. In some states the coroners don't return the organs, so some people will stuff newspaper in there. We are not allowed to do that in California. I don't think anyone would come out and say that they did that [here], but it has happened before. Embalming is like art and science. And that's what makes it so great.

What are some of the most cumbersome or challenging reconstruction cases you worked on?
I had this guy who had a shotgun wound to the head and the family wanted a closed casket. I worked on his head and it was super smooth and you couldn't even tell. Not to toot my own horn, but it looked really phenomenal. They ended up having an open casket so I was really happy about that.

Another story is this case that we had—I think she was murdered—and they found her after three weeks in a field. So she was pretty much just kinda parts at this point. The family wanted to have her body in the casket—obviously not open. The smell was so bad. We had them sign an embalming authorization so we could put fluid and this stuff called paraformaldehyde. It's in powder form and [is] a really strong deodorizer. So we did that, and the day that I had to come it was a weekend and I woke up with the stomach flu. That was a really long day. It was spent doing one step, going to the bathroom, then coming back. It's really hard to work on a severely decomposed body when you're already throwing up! But nobody could ever say I wasn't dedicated to my job. Even with the closed casket, the smell was terrible. So what I did was I put her in two body bags with the deodorizer in the one bag, then another with formaldehyde. And then put more deodorizer in the casket. If there's a decomposed body, a closed casket doesn't mean it doesn't smell.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

Police in New Rochelle, New York, who were responding to a 9-1-1 call on Friday ended up pulling a gun on some teenagers. In a video posted on Liveleak, an officer can be heard yelling, "Don't fucking move, guys!" at a gaggle of teens kneeling on the snowy pavement. Five were subsequently detained.

"They were having a snowball fight," the woman filming the incident claims in the video as the boys are frisked. "This group of guys was having a snowball fight and now a cop has a gun on them."

But New Rochelle Deputy Police Commissioner Anthony Murphy told the Daily News that the video, which has since gone viral, isn't nearly as twisted as it seems. Although some news outlets previously reported the cops were responding to the snowball fight itself, Murphy claims that's not the case. Instead, he says cops were on the lookout for an armed teenager when the showdown ensued.

"We dispatched several cars to the area," Murphy explained. "Police officers got out of their cars and one of the individuals kneeled down, adjusted something in his waistband, and ran."

Not only that, but the officers say there wasn't even a snowball fight.

A couple of things are suspicious about the cops' version of events, however. For starters, the kid who supposedly ran away was never caught. And the police haven't released the 9-1-1 call that would corroborate their side of the story. They told the Daily News that they're considering releasing a transcript, but are worried someone might recognize the caller's voice and retaliate against his or her snitching.

"The video looks terrible, but it's completely out of context," another police source told the paper. "It's a completely different incident than it appears from that snippet. There's clearly a lot of misunderstanding. The record of the 9-1-1 call by itself will illustrate what was going on."

Whether this video resulted from mischievous editing or misconduct on behalf of the police, New Rochelle cops are getting a generous dose of internet-fueled outrage that their brethren in New York City are intimately familiar with.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has been making thoughtful experimental music for more than 20 years. He founded the Root Strata label, which put out stuff by Oneohtrix Point Never, Keith Fullerton Whitman, and Grouper, among others. His tunes have always been interesting and strange and ethereal, but he's reached a creative peak with his upcoming record, A Year with 13 Moons—a nod to a Fassbinder film with the same name.

The songs on the record are distilled from hundreds of hours of meandering experimental recordings, and they float effortlessly between genres without ever settling on one. This track "The Twins Shadows," hits everything from abrasive noise to Vaporwave grooves before wrapping up at three minutes. Cantu-Ledesma's music is dense and complicated, and "The Twins Shadows" reveals itself more and more through repeat listens. Live inside it for a while.

Preorder A Year with 13 Moons via Mexican Summer.

A wise woman named Lindsay Lohan once said, "I've pissed off a lot of people in my time. Never gays. I'm smart like that." The logic goes, if you're a ridiculous has-been, the gays will love you and keep your career and finances afloat. (How else do you think it's possible for Britney Spears to make millions lip-synching to Sia at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas?) Today, even straight men know this theory is true—last fall Nick Jonas used a gay-baiting strategy to launch a very successful comeback. But troubled rapper Azealia Banks apparently hasn't received the memo.

In the last few years, Banks has become better known for her homophobic Twitter beefs than her music. Most notoriously, she called gossip blogger Perez Hilton—the gay man who introduced Katy Perry and Lady Gaga to America—"a messy faggot." Instead of apologizing like most people would do in the age of Twitter and social justice Tumblrs, Banks defended her right to use hate speech: "Why has society accepted 'nigger' as a colloquialism... But will not accept 'faggot'?" she said in a (now deleted) tweet.

As a gay man and professional writer, I have mostly ignored her comments because her music occupies the middle ground between my love for loud, angry music, like the Smashing Pumpkins, and campy pop stars like Paris Hilton. If I can continue to listen to R. Kelly's "Bump N Grind" even though he married a teenage Aaliyah and allegedly did all manner of horrible things, I can listen to Broke with Expensive Taste despite Banks's Twitter account. Plus, like all other minorities, I live in an awful world dominated by straight white men—I have bigger problems to deal with than a one-hit wonder's Twitter account.

My views changed this weekend when I became the latest target of Banks's online homophobia. The spat started when Banks launched a series of questionable tweets mocking "twinks," a.k.a. skinny, barely legal gay boys.

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Banks regularly (and rightfully) complains about racism and white women appropriating black women's culture while black artists struggle to maintain mainstream success. Yet, here she was, a victim of bigotry, once again tweeting homophobic comments and believing she had the right to appropriate gay terminology. Nothing annoys me more than a hypocrite, so I impulsively tweeted, "Does Azealia Banks even know what a twink is?" without tagging her. She must search Twitter for her name though, because a few hours later, as I sang "Stars Are Blind" at my friend's karaoke party, my phone started to blow up. Banks had launched a homophobic rant about me:

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Is Azealia Banks spending her Saturday night searching for her name on Twitter?!?! I wondered. Is she that desperate for attention after her major record deal never took off?!?! Then I remembered her infamous Hot 97 interview where she described how she reads blogs obsessively. I showed the tweets to my friends. They laughed. I contemplated ignoring her, like how I ignore the VICE commenters who believe I'm skinny because I have AIDS or a heroin addiction. But my instincts ordered me to combat Banks. I wasn't sure why.

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Banks positions herself as a 21st century woman, but in these tweets she revealed how little she knows about gender and sexuality in 21st century America and the history of pop culture. She repeatedly insists she, and presumably other women, invented all feminine styles, as if Madonna never ripped off Harlem's vogue scene and Nicki Minaj never wore giant wigs like a drag queen. She also seems to insist women's ability to give birth to gay men means they can be as homophobic as they like.

Anyone who knows anything about gay cultures knows being a gay man doesn't mean you want to appear feminine. Many gays identify as masc (Grindr-speak for masculine) and deride femmes on a daily basis. Even if Banks invented feminine character traits—which she didn't, since she's not fucking Eve—these qualities would never apply to all gay men.

Even worse than these painfully 19th century views about homosexuality, Banks conflates gender with sexuality. She thinks gay males bloggers criticize her because we wish we had vaginas (her vagina specifically), even though today most people—even my Republican party–donating Midwestern father—understand the difference between gay men and trans women, a minority group Banks has also unfairly attacked. Banks views biological body parts as the marker of gender, although NYU students have been calling gender a construct since Judith Butler popped on the scene over two decades ago.

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As much as I wanted to ship Banks off to a liberal arts college to welcome her into the 21st century, I felt bad for her. In the last few years, she's dealt with more career disasters than Sky Ferreira. When "212" went viral, everyone thought she would become a radio star; she even signed with Interscope and Lady Gaga's manager Troy Carter. Then the label delayed Broke with Expensive Taste several times and Banks eventually had to release the album independently. The record may have shot to number three on iTunes, but that's far from from being the next "Poker Face."

For some reason, Banks blames gay men for her troubles, as if gay men have enough power in media to host a secret conference in Las Vegas and plot on how to annihilate her career. Yes, some gay men, like Hilton have a lot of clout, and a gay fan base can keep your career alive. But like all minorities, gay men in the media (and elsewhere) have to fight five times as hard as straight men to succeed.

I never get off on mocking people online. But Banks had written enough homophobic bullshit for me to feel comfortable to bring out what my childhood friends called "Bitchell":

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The tweet shut Banks down until the next morning, when she once again found a tweet I wrote without tagging her and decided to attack me. This time she went after my salary, as if anyone became a writer to make money:

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That last tweet traveled around social justice and gay tumblrs, receiving over 11,000 notes. "[sic] honestly can we leave her behind now?? like im done. im ready," one user wrote.

I wish things had gone differently; I wished I had changed her mind. She's one of my generation's most talented musicians, and she possesses a talent to speak her mind and verbally go where few people will go. She could use these gifts to change the entertainment industry and challenge its entrenched sexism and racism. But Banks has instead decided to pick on LGBT people, a group she perceives as weak, while she simultaneously appropriates gay culture (she sampled Zebra Katz's underground gay anthem "Ima Read" on her Fantasea mixtape, and also organized a drag-filled concert called Mermaid Ball in 2012).

Every time she makes a ignorant homophobic comment, or attacks trans women, claiming everyone wants her "femininity" or "hole," she invalidates her musical talent and her intelligent comments about race and sexism. Instead of going after rape culture or the straight men who make women and gay men's lives hell every day, she attacks other marginalized people. This weekend, for example, she decided to go after me, and I'm certainly not worth it. Once again, Azealea Banks decided to waste her talents.

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter.

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Albuquerque motel photo via WikiCommons.

Last Saturday a three-year-old boy shot his father, Justin Reynolds, and mother, Monique Villescas, with one bullet at the motel they were staying at in Albuquerque, New Mexico. According to reports of the incident, the boy was rummaging in his mother's purse, looking for her iPad, when he fumbled over a nine-millimeter handgun she had bought the day before. The gun discharged a shot into his father's ass, and the bullet ricocheted into the shoulder of his mother, who is eight months pregnant.

"I realized my girlfriend was bleeding," Reynolds told the BBC as he recalled the incident. "Then I sat down and realized I was shot too... I didn't know if [my son] had shot himself or not. He was shocked and crying. It was traumatizing."

The toddler's father has been released from the hospital, unharmed, and his mother appears to be set for a full recovery. The children (and dogs), however, have been removed into state custody while police investigate the incident, which may result in charges of felony negligence against the parents for leaving an armed and loaded firearm within their child's reach.

"On the kid's side, it's a horrible accident that happened," New York Daily News quoted Albuquerque Police Department officer Simon Drobik as saying. "But the parents are still culpable. They should have secured the gun."

This Albuquerque shooting has grabbed more attention than many (sadly common) incidents involving children and guns because it involves a child injuring an adult. More often than not the stories we read about the dangers of young children being exposed to loaded guns concern children injuring themselves or other children. Most of the existing data on guns and children—like the fact that one in ten accidental gun deaths are children, or the fact that well over 100 children die and 3,000 are injured by unintentional shootings in the US each year—likewise concerns the risk children pose to themselves and each other when they stumble upon untended firearms.

However over the past few months we've seen an increasing number of stories about toddlers injuring adults with unguarded weapons. In November 2014, for instance, a three-year-old shot and killed his mother in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a gun left by the sofa while she was changing his young sister's diaper. Then, toward the end of December, a two-year-old in Hayden, Idaho accidentally shot his mother with a concealed weapon left in her purse.

At present it's unclear how common it is for a child to injure an adult with a gun, but the fact that 1.7 million children live in homes with unsecured firearms (nearly 40 percent of gun-owning homes with children) suggests that these incidents can't be entirely anomalous by sheer probability.

"We are just beginning to examine the data on this issue," Professor David Hemenway of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center told VICE. He pointed out that the best database on such deaths, the National Violent Death Reporting System, is difficult to navigate and has not been mined for this information, and cautioned that even when searched this database will only point out the number of deaths in 18 states, leaving out non-fatal injuries entirely.

Some shootings of adults by children are assigned intent and motive when perhaps they were entirely accidental, as in an August 2013 incident where an eight-year-old boy in Slaughter, Louisiana, shot his grandmother after playing Grand Theft Auto IV. In that case, there does not appear to have been much evidence that the violence of the video game inspired the shooting. Even the sheriff's incident report suggests that the child's relationship with his grandmother was normal and caring. So it's entirely possible that a number of accidental shootings of adults by young children have been misattributed, skewing our sense of the risk of such deaths or injuries.

Yet even if we don't know how common such incidents are, they're just another data point on the already worrying pile of evidence about the risks of exposing young children to guns.

Gun rights advocates promote the idea that accidents caused by children can be mitigated if we take greater steps to familiarize kids with gun safety at an early age and make efforts to better secure the firearms in our own homes. (There's some merit in this logic, given studies like one at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which found that 18 percent of gun-owning parents and 52 percent of non-gun-owning parents never talk to their children about gun safety.) Programs like the National Rifle Association-affiliated Eddie EagleGunSafe project, which has taught gun awareness to preschool through grade school children since 1988 by use of a friendly mascot, attempt to drill the message to never touch a gun without training into young children's heads. And countless time is spent instructing adults on how to not just hide, but also unload guns, separate them from their ammo, and lock them up anytime a child is around.

However, existing research suggests that for most toddlers these lessons are ineffective. And even children as young as one have the finger strength to exert seven pounds of pressure, which is all you need to pull a trigger, before they have the facility to understand safety instructions.

"There have been various studies looking at the Eddie Eagle program, among others," Hemenway told VICE. "And it doesn't seem to be effective even for children substantially older than age three."

"Children can recite what to do if they find a gun," Professor Raymond Miltenberger, a behavioral analyst at the University of South Florida in Tampa, told Parents Magazine in 2013. "[But they] still do the wrong thing when it counts."

In several cases, children injure responsible adults—not just those who leave their guns lying around—in situations that cannot be predicted or controlled, or that should be safe. In June 2013, a four-year-old boy in Arizona killed his father with a gun he found in the home of a family friend, who they were visiting unexpectedly and hadn't had time to secure his weapons. And in August 2014, a nine-year-old Arizona girl accidentally shot a qualified firing range instructor in the head with an uzi after he left her to operate the powerful gun on her own. (The recoil caused the gun to jump up, firing into the air and eventually hitting the instructor in the left side of his head.)

Hemenway and others believe that smart guns that can only be activated by their owners may be one of the few good solutions to stem such unintentional shootings. However even the most optimistic studies don't believe that such (not yet fully commercialized) tech can solve every accidental shooting case, even if it can significantly reduce the threat by adding barriers to harm.

All of this suggests that, not only will there always be a risk that gun owners' children will wind up injuring themselves or others, but that risk may be greater than we currently believe as we don't often count incidents like the one in Albuquerque. Adding yet another risk to profligate gun ownership may help to increase vigilance amongst those who do not as of yet do a great job securing their firearms or educating their children. Maybe between that and advances in gun personalization, we can reduce child-related gun accidents to a minimum. But as long as we keep guns, kids will always find a way to injure themselves, each other, and even adults with them.

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I have to admit it. As a former professional dominatrix and a committed feminist, I have a penchant for penetrating male spaces. The race track. The boxing gym. The porn-editing suite. Essentially, wherever men hold high court, I am compelled to infiltrate. So during a recent trip from the UK to the US, when I was offered a trip to Sheri's Ranch—a legal brothel in Nevada—I could hardly say no.

Owned and operated by former law enforcer Chuck Lee, Sheri's Ranch is a 20-acre property 60 miles from Las Vegas, which features a brothel, bar, and hotel onsite. It's been running for nearly 15 years, but given the restrictions on brothel advertising, it's the kind of place you have to be in the know to know. The ranch hosts up to 25 escorts at any given time, and applying to work here is competitive—the brothel receives hundreds of applications each month from women around the world, and it is the job of Dena, the madam, to decide who takes residency next, along with her staff.

Sheri's is not the only ranch in Nevada, or even in the improbably named Pahrump where it's situated. A rival, Chicken Ranch, with its disconcerting logo of long legs hatching from an egg shell, advertises aggressively a few feet from the property. But it is the only brothel to offer nuru massage, a sensual, fully naked-body-on-naked-body massage devised in Japan, where the escort lubricates herself—and you—with a special massage gel derived from nori seaweed.

Popularized in Japan's " soaplands," nuru was once the perfect way to foil restrictions on the selling of penetrative sex. That said, technically speaking, nuru is illegal in the US—as is all massage that includes sexual stimulation—which effectively makes nuru at Sheri's the only legal nuru experience anywhere in America.

And it's enticing. When Sheri's launched their nuru massage room last October, revenue increased by 15 percent in a single month. The staff tell me that nuru is most popular with middle-aged men, although several couples have also added it to their threesome selection, the most popular service requested by visiting pairs.

What's more, if you were devising the perfect LGBTQI-friendly massage, nuru would probably be it. I'm not averse to strap-ons, but as a bi woman who prefers her cocks attached to male bodies, I felt like if I were ever to become a regular brothel client, this would be the kind of erotic experience I'd be likely to purchase.

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The (slightly blurry) sex menu at Sheri's

When I arrived at the ranch, I entered, like all patrons, through the bar. It's a cozy joint, a popular birthday destination for women as well as men, and quintessentially American, distinguished only by its required red lighting. We passed through to the parlor used for traditional lineups. I perched on one of the cream and mahogany couches for a minute and stared ahead at the free-standing sex menu, trying to imagine what it must be like to make a selection this way.

Then I was given a tour of the rest of the ranch, including the jacuzzi room and the Roman-themed VIP bungalow, complete with urns and marble and a framed poster of Russell Crowe. In every room where sex takes place sat a "Condoms Are Mandatory" sign. Everything was explicit here.

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The nuru massage bed, complete with waterproof mattress

The nuru-massage room was the most elegant: tasteful Japanese decor, low lighting, and a dark wood bed topped with a special waterproof mattress. It reminded me of the vacuum-pack topper I used to use in a dungeon in London's East End. I would stuff the clients into it before sucking the air out from around their bodies until they resembled shrink-wrapped salami.

Salami, of course, wouldn't be on today's sex menu.

Instead, there would be a nuru massage with a happy ending, executed by a brunette. Partly out of sisterly apologism, and partly out of the pleasure of surprise, "brunette" was all I could bring myself to stipulate when the staff asked me what I wanted. So when Juna arrived, she was a surprise: more petite than me, southeast Asian, with a very pretty face, and dressed in a girlish skirt and lace bralet.

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The author ahead of her nuru massage

I was surprisingly nervous and found myself regaling details of my domming days in a bid to differentiate myself from her usual male clientele. I've managed not to judge the men that visited me, yet here I was, eager for her to see me in solidarity as a service provider rather than as a punter.

Juna was not exactly straight, she told me—more straight for pay. "That's what the other girls tease me about," she laughed.

I've dallied with hundreds of clients; I've taken to bed a much smaller number of women. But this was neither of those situations. After I'd stripped and showered, she came to lie her body on mine, and began to massage me by sliding the whole of it upon me. I hesitated to touch her for a good 15 minutes. But the more we shared conversation about our sexual politics and she told me about the pleasure she gets from working—the more smiles and complicit nods that passed between us—the easier it became.

The gel on her limber skin felt too inviting. I plucked up the courage to touch her and started by sliding my hands up her thighs as she brought her hands down over mine. When she flipped me over, she slid her hands up the sides of my breasts and then under, and across my nipples. I've had sports massages and Swedish massages in my time, but this was pretty special. It was far more sensual than sexual, but for obvious reasons it wouldn't work clothed.

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One of the rooms in Sheri's, sporting the obligatory "Condoms Are Mandatory" sign

"How did you learn nuru?" I asked her.

"YouTube!" she replied promptly. "It got me too hot and bothered to watch a lot in one go—but that made me keen to learn."

When she told me I had amazing breasts, I blushed. She straddled me and rubbed her bikini-bottomed crotch against mine. She had tiny boobs and the most extraordinarily prominent nipples I'd ever seen or touched. I looked at her face sporadically, but it was almost unbearably intimate. And although she was touching my body, so have many before her. This was lovely, but—for me, at least—it wasn't intimacy. And that's just how it should be.

"Now. Would you like a little tongue action on those nipples?" she asked.

"If it's no bother," started my very English reply, "yes please."

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Art on one of the outside walls of Sheri's

During the course of the massage, I began to comprehend things about my former clients' experiences with a revelatory new kind of empathy. Namely the irrepressible urge to wonder, Is she enjoying this too? My fingers traced along and then ever so lightly under the bikini bottoms she was wearing. Before we made our way to the bed, I had made a point of saying that I would ask her if it was OK to touch—my experience had taught me that consideration. But to my shame, I found myself seeking permission with my fingers. I've shouted at clients before for the same, and reassured myself with the fact I had already been offered a plethora of more extensive sexual services to go with the massage, which I had turned down. But it gave me a new empathy for the way my clients tried to seek touching permission. It's what most of us do when we are sexual with a new lover. The rules are, of course, different when it's transactional—and I know this better than most—but intimate habits die hard.

Incidentally, at this point Juna offered to touch my vagina, but there was something inhibiting me that day: I had my period. Another inadvertent factor that makes paying for sex easier for men. When I told her, Juna was unperturbed, but the thought of bleeding on a stranger seemed plain rude.

However, the massage had certainly worked its magic: I was aroused. So I decided to get myself off while she continued with the tongue on nipple action—although I was concerned that she would have been doing that for nearly 15 minutes by the time we'd finish. And then she untied her briefs and I slid my fingers up inside her. It had been a while, as I have a male paramour these days, but she had an exquisite vagina. What's more, she felt wet. Or maybe that was just the nori—who knows—but now we'd created a sexual circuit, and as I touched her and she licked me, I climaxed quickly. It was a sensual, rolling kind of orgasm, like a long wave breaking.

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Afterwards, she lay next to me on the bed. This was never something I used to do when I worked, preferring instead to give my clients a minute or two of quiet by themselves. Post-orgasm minutes, after all, are the most intimate. I was impressed by how comfortable she seemed, and how caring she was. Juna was, quite simply, a professional delight.

By the time I'd left, I'd had a lovely time. I felt curiously reflective. I'm not single, so I won't be purchasing sexual services again any time soon, but now that I'd popped my paying-for-it cherry, I can see how—in the right circumstances—I might very well do it again. In particular, I felt that nuru may well be the way to a woman's purse.

"I would love to think nuru could entice the queer community," Juna told me, and, as a member of it myself, I think she's right.

Follow Nichi Hodgson on Twitter.

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The Salween River

This article first appeared on VICE UK.

The highland border village of Baan Thatafang sits alone on a small hilltop by the edge of North Thailand. Below, the Salween River's brown, treacle waters slowly wind south, the meandering current demarcating Thailand's border with neighboring Burma, whose dark green mountains dominate the village vista.

The view is breathtaking, yet Baan Thatafang's idyllic setting belies a major issue that affects many more villages like it: human trafficking. Baan Thatafang has now become one of the latest ethnic minority settlements to be identified by local NGOs as being at threat from Thailand's sprawling business in the trafficking of desperate people.

An estimated 1 million ethnic minority people live in North and West Thailand, but exact numbers are hard to come by. Many villages are informal; entire groups roam around large areas, surviving through swidden and subsistence agriculture. Most importantly, though, huge numbers of people are unregistered.

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The hill tribe area of Mae Sam Laep

In the Thai Government's last statement on registration, way back in 2005, its Interior Ministry estimated that some 50 percent of these groups remain unregistered under any legal status category. Without registration and ID cards, these peoples end up living in a limbo of "statelessness."

UN research in these regions has long identified this lack of legal identity as the single greatest threat to these communities.

In a UNIAP (UN Inter-Agency Project on Trafficking) report from 2001, the risks of being officially "stateless" is made brutally clear. Without their legal status, these peoples are put under a cornucopia of constraints and handicaps. They are not permitted ownership of land, access to state medical care, suffrage, school or marriage certifications, free travel nor the ability to work outside their own province. These suffocating restrictions are key ingredients to the melting pot of desperation and easy exploitation that traffickers have long preyed on.

Steps have certainly been taken at both the governmental level and on the international level, most notably the more decisive 2008 Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act and UNESCO's Highland Citizenship and Birth Registration Project.

Yet in mid-2014, the US State Department's latest Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report downgraded Thailand to Tier 3, the lowest grade, putting it amongst the likes of North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Iran. In the report, the US State Department specifically cited "...members of ethnic minorities, and stateless persons... are at the greatest risk of being trafficked."

The unregistered masses continue to be exploited.

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Mickey Choothesa, COSA

"We know a few girls who work in the red light district now who came from our target communities, because they couldn't find any jobs [due to their lack of registration]." Explains Mickey Choothesa, founder of the local anti-trafficking organisation COSA (Children of Southeast Asia). "Usually, if they have opportunities to stay at school, a strong community base, or any other opportunities really, you find that they will not get mixed up with trafficking."

Mickey has been actively working against the trafficking of young girls from hill tribe communities for nearly a decade with COSA. "We focus on girls who are being misled and don't have that opportunity of choice," he explains.

While we may think of trafficking through a western mindset, which evokes scenes of midnight snatch-and-grabs (which do happen), Mickey explains that most of those trafficked from the hill tribes are simply economically desperate. Devoid of opportunity, they sell themselves – or their children – without fully understanding the debt bondage and slave-like conditions they will end up in. At COSA, Mickey tries to identify these vulnerable individuals and provide decent opportunities for them before the spectre of trafficking strikes.

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Life at COSA's shelter for rescued girls

Since its inception in 2006, COSA's Chiang Mai base has slowly expanded to include a school bus service for isolated villages, outreach programmes in the hill tribes, educational programmes and a large shelter, where some 27 at-risk girls now live, and many more have found sanctuary in the past.

In his office, Mickey sits among a plethora of military-grade equipment – a reminder of his previous life as a US military photographer, and handy when working in the world of human trafficking. Bulletproof vests rest against a table heaving with first aid equipment. A small pistol peers out from a nearby bag. "You've got to be prepared man," he says with a shrug when I express my surprise.

Outside, a small group of girls trickle back to the shelter after finishing at the nearby school. Most have been taken in by COSA after their individual living situations were deemed "at-risk" to trafficking by Mickey and his social workers.

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"For example, we have two girls whose mother is a sex worker. We found she just couldn't take care of her two daughters," Mickey explains when I ask how he identifies who is vulnerable. "They have never been to school, are always alone at home. We deem that to be a high-risk environment, so we got the girls out and into our shelter."

As the years have progressed, COSA, like many other local NGOs, has found it necessary to work in conjunction with the local authorities. Unfortunately, these local forces are occasionally levied with charges ranging from incompetence to collaboration with the traffickers – a problem that local NGOs have experienced, too.

"It's absolutely necessary to make sure you know who you are working with," Phensiri Pansiri explains to me with regards to the authorities. As programme coordinator of FOCUS (Foundation of Child Understanding), previously TRAFCORD (Anti-Trafficking Coordination Unit Northern Thailand), Pansiri is in almost constant communication with the government and the local authorities for her work.

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Lunch time at the COSA shelter

"We have had times before where we have given details to some police and the details were leaked. Then you know that person cannot be trusted," she says.

"When you deal with human trafficking, you deal with a lot of corruption," says Mickey. "These guys earn next to nothing and a little more money can be very tempting, it's understandable to a degree." Despite this, both Mickey and Pansiri talk of the importance of involving the authorities, saying that "building relationships" and "trust" is of the utmost importance.

Back in Baan Thatafang, Mickey and our (trusted) police escort, Captain Pauridet from the local vice and trafficking unit, slowly trudge up the hill towards the local primary school.

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The local primary school where girls have been trafficked

"We heard of a few girls being trafficked here and have since been coming back and watching it closely," says Mickey, gesturing to the various huts that dot the surrounding hills. "Normally, it's the schools [who] tell us what has been happening, as they are with the children almost every day."

Captain Pauridet explains that, usually, people are lured away with the prospect of working in the restaurant business in the cities for better money, and are then forced into other work, saying, "Often, the girls end up in the sex industry."

50 years ago, Baan Thatafang was the setting for an outpost of the Border Patrol Police, a ruthless paramilitary unit created with CIA assistance to counter any perceived Communist threat from neighboring countries. Today, the area is home to a few hundred villagers, mostly of Karen ethnicity. The majority are from the state of Karen just a few hundred meters away in Burma, and the signs around the village are still written in both Thai and Burmese. Other Karen families, however, have been calling this plot of Thailand home for centuries.

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Artwork on the walls of the primary school

Baan Thatafang is about as isolated as they come. Located in a river valley among the mountainous Mae Sam Laep sub district of Mae Hong Son province, just getting there requires a dizzying drive through the mountains before a precarious dirt road forces us onto a boat for the final stretch.

Eventually, we make it to the primary school. The main hall of the school, I am told, was once the main office for the old BPP. Standing high on wooden stilts, flags from all the Southeast countries flicker in the light breeze.

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A primary school classroom

Inside one of the classrooms, a couple of 13-year-old Karenni sisters sit anxiously. Mickey and another staff member from COSA greet them warmly and slowly get a conversation going. "How are you?" They ask the girls, who shyly mumble back.

"We're meeting their family next week. They should be coming to COSA, it's just not safe for them at their homes now," explained Mickey, not wanting to elaborate further.

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Children on the banks of Mae Sam Laep

The school only accommodates those up to the age of 13, and the next school is almost 40km away through the winding mountains and dirt roads. Unsurprisingly, many won't undertake such a journey.

Outin, a teacher at the school for 12 years, tells me how the work of the UN and NGOs has helped register pupils, yet the numbers of unregistered remain shockingly high. "Right now I think we can estimate that it's around 50 percent who remain unregistered," she says, her colleague nodding his approval.

Her estimate isn't far off what was found in the 2010 UNESCO survey on the Mae Hong Son ethnic minority highland peoples, which estimated that at least 40 percent of those in Mae Sam Laep have no ID card at all.

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A bar in a red light district of Chiang Mai, where some previously trafficked employees worked

"We're very aware of the trafficking phenomenon, and the majority of kids here become vulnerable to it in different ways," says Outin. "Those that are unregistered have less choices than if they have that card." Mickey agrees wholeheartedly. "Without any sort of ID, they have zero opportunities. They won't go to high school and they will soon be tempted by those who offer them easy money from outside."

It is apposite that we meet at a school as, through his years of experience, Mickey is adamant that greater education is the key to battling trafficking. "We need to educate the older generation on what their rights are, as so many don't know," he says as we walk back to the boat. "Then we have to focus on the next generation."

"My battle is one kid at a time, one village at a time, one day at time. I may help one girl, but that girl could go on to educate and save more. That's my wish."

@aporamsey / @mustardphoto

More like this:

The Exploited Kids Selling Roses to Tourists on Bangkok's Khaosan Road

Does Thailand Secretly Think Its Dictator Is an Idiot?

The Seedy Underworld of Muay Thai Kickboxing

[body_image width='800' height='534' path='images/content-images/2015/02/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/02/' filename='visiting-the-worlds-first-poop-bank-202-body-image-1422909873.jpg' id='23500']Vials of fecal matter for transplant. Photo via WikiMedia Commons

Anyone who's ever taken a shit before—which is to say, everyone ever—has probably suffered from that form of anxiety when you're about to walk into a meeting or go on a first date and you worry that, midway through, you might have to stop to take a dump. Pooping may be natural, but it's not always welcome. But last week, I was struck by a different kind of performance anxiety: What if I got where I was going and I couldn't poop?

I was on my way to OpenBiome, a facility that pays people for their shit, and I was nervous as hell. Will it make me look like less of a man if I can't do the job? I worried? Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" was playing in the car, which seemed appropriate given the topic at hand.

OpenBiome is America's first "poop bank," which collects stool samples to help treat Clostridium difficile infections. C. diff, as it's often abbreviated, is a bacteria that causes gastrointestinal distress, and it's one of the more common hospital-borne infections: About 500,000 people suffer from it each year, resulting in around 30,000 deaths. For those who are living with it, leaving the house can be a nightmare. One of the most effective methods for treating the infection is through what's called a fecal microbiota transplantation—or, in layman's terms, injecting someone else's turds up your ass.

While that's sort of a crude way of putting it, much of the early experimentation with fecal transplants was done through just such DIY methods, which VICE wrote about a few months ago. While hospitals around the country have developed more medically-sound procedures—either through endoscopy, nasal tube, or capsules—fecal transplants are still a highly specialized treatment, and waiting times for finding a donor can prolong patients' suffering. The reason it can take so long is because the process for securing and treating a healthy specimen is a arduous and rife with bureaucratic delays. You can't just use any old piece of shit. You need the primo, uncut, fire turds.

That's where OpenBiome comes in. The nonprofit started out of MIT in 2013 by a group of friends led by Mark Smith, a postdoctoral associate, and James Burgess, who previously worked in the Agricultural Development Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. By collecting, treating, and storing a backlog of specimens, they hope to ensure that there is enough poop to go around for everyone who needs it.

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The idea came when one of their family members came down with a nasty case of C. difficile infection. "He went in for routine gall bladder surgery, and came out with a case he couldn't kick," Burgess told me. "After seven courses of antibiotics, he was really miserable and very sick. He was a young guy in his 20s, and for us—seeing that firsthand, as opposed to just reading about it or thinking about it academically—made us think this was a serious need. This was back before fecal transplants were widely available. He worked in health care, knew about FTP, but he couldn't find a doctor to give him the treatment."

The one in New York, where he lived, had a six-month waiting period. So he treated himself at home with a friend's stool sample and a blender.

"It's a pretty awful experience to go through, if you ask me. Having to go though all that and then in the end you have to stick it up your butt," Burgess said. "I think for us it was pretty eye-opening. Here's this idea we were thinking about, and this could really help a lot of people."

OpenBiome occupies two spaces in an unassuming office in Medford, Massachusetts, near Tufts University, where many of their donors come from. Across the driveway there's a Work Out World and a grim, snow-caked parking garage. In the background a commuter rail hurtles along the tracks toward Boston. Inside, the office looks like any other start up: 20-somethings are spread around working on laptops, everyone wears a hoodie, and they all seem really enthusiastic about their work. Containers full of take-out Indian food were strewn throughout the office, which seems like the equivalent of a sperm bank having porn on hand (turns out it was actually just lunch). In a conference room nearby, the team was working on getting a last minute grant proposal done. Everyone was laughing. Almost everyone is Canadian, which may explain why they were so welcoming.

You sort of have to laugh, most of the team members I met told me. This is a serious medical problem they're helping people deal with here, sure, but at the end of the day they still have a refrigerator full of poop. "Even those of us who don't have a science background have lost their filter," said Carolyn Edelstein, Director of Global Partnerships. "Our donors, everyone here is on board with the mission. Sure, at face value it's a funny concept, but at its heart it's making a real difference for people's lives and I think that changes the tenor of what we do now."

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Burgerss and Edelstein, holding a poster with poop-inspired cartoon characters

That life-changing poop can't come from just anywhere, though. The donation process, overseen by Zain Kassam, a gastroenterologist and physician of internal medicine, is exceptionally rigorous.

"It's harder than getting into Harvard," Edelstein said, walking me through the 109-item questionnaire potential applicants have to fill out. That comes after an 11-point exam done online, which 55 percent of people don't make it past. Another 65 percent are cut after a clinical interview. All told, only about 4 percent of the people who begin the process ever get to the point of actually donating poop.

Some of the things they're screening for are the typical transmissible pathogens you might see when attempting to donate blood, but they also are on the lookout for things like Chrohn's disease or IBS. Anyone on medication for anxiety or depression, or with diabetes or obesity complications, are also screened out.

"If you've done anything at all interesting, chances are you can't be a donor," Edelstein joked.

The reason for that is because each step along the way becomes more and more expensive. The stool has to be sent out for initial testing. After that, additional blood samples have to be taken. They don't want to waste their time and resources on someone who isn't fully committed—shit or get off the pot, you might say. For their troubles, donors receive $40 per poop, with a $50 bonus if they come in five times a week. It costs about $5,000 total to find a donor.

"We want them to come in as much as possible," Burgess told me. "Getting them to come in four times a week instead of three is the difference between us going bankrupt."

"Shit is literally gold for you," I joked.

"It's valuable stuff! A couple times we've run out, and demand is growing fast from hospitals. That's bad news if people are having their treatment get deferred. For us, it's important."

So how does it actually work? "Research has shown that if you take a sample of stool from a healthy person and transplant into the bowels of a patient, the bacteria in the healthy stool will repopulate their healthy microfloras," Edelstein explained. "Basically, the bacteria from the donor stool will out-compete the infection. The bacteria can't compete against this surge of healthy bacteria."

In sometimes as little as a day or two, patients who have been sick for months will find themselves feeling relieved.

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At OpenBiome, there are about 16 active donors at the moment. They've processed about 2,300 treatments since they've started, sending them out to a clinical network of 185 hospitals in 28 states and five countries. The poop market is a burgeoning one, it turns out.

But they've come to find out that not everyone poops the same way. Some are morning poopers, some are night poopers. They've also begun gathering data for research on the types of poops people contribute. To date, 581 grams is the biggest load they've received. "I think 100 grams is about the size of an apple," Edelstein said. "That's like six apples with a poop, to give you a pretty good picture of it."

Thank you for that.

A bigger sample isn't necessary, but it does allow them to be more efficient when preparing a treatment. The record-setting donor was pretty nonchalant when he dropped it off, she said. Just another day at the poop office.

"Ever since I can remember I've loved to poop, and often dreamt, like most young girls do, of making money from my excrement."

Downstairs in the lab, the stools are processed inside of a bio safety cabinet with an airflow curtain, which prevents contamination in either direction. Prior to that it's mixed with a saline solution, and run through a machine whose technical name is probably not a poop smasher, but does basically just that.

"It comes out looking like a chocolate milkshake consistency," Burgess said. It's processed in a plastic bag with a sort of strainer, that draws out the useable liquid and leaves behind corn, and other undigested leftovers. Then it's separated into bottles which are kept in a -80C fridge for months, where they wait for donors to pass a second round of screening. If all goes well, it's packed up in boxes filled with dry ice, and shipped out for use around the country. OpenBiome also in the process of perfecting a capsule-delivery system, which, common sense to the contrary, is a considerably more pleasant way to ingest poop than having it blasted up your butt.

Burgess gives me the impression that it's all pretty straightforward. "The complexity comes in when dealing with donors, trying to find healthy people, and keep on top of their health. Anyone can blend poop—we didn't invent that. The hard part is finding good donors and getting all the poop you can from them."

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After some recent attention in the press, potential donors are practically banging on the door to be considered. "Our email is blowing up right now from people all over the country," said Daniel Martin, another team member. "People are like, 'Hey, I got some poop, can I get money?'" One email in particular is a favorite among the staff: "Ever since I can remember I've loved to poop, and often dreamt, like most young girls do, of making money from my excrement," it read.

I've always loved to poop, too. And I do a pretty good job of it. Am I one of the top poopers in the Boston area? Maybe, but that's not for me to decide. The team provided me with a setup to go try it out for myself, for journalism's sake, to see what it's like when other donors come in. But after learning they weren't actually going to be able to use my donation for science, I sort of lost my poop boner.

Nonetheless, I set up the poop works on the rim of the toilet, hoping for inspiration. Then I sat there and thought about it. The idea that something that I do every day and take for granted had the potential to save someone's life made the occasion too fraught to confront.

"I couldn't do it," I said on the way out with an empty bowl. That's OK, they told me, it happens to a lot of people on their first time. But I think they were maybe just trying to make me feel better.

Follow Luke O'Neil on Twitter.

For years, people in certain villages in South India have been participating in a tradition that amounts to forced euthanasia: Young people have been finding ways to gently kill the elderly, with the tacit blessing of their communities.

According to the sociologist S. Gurusamy, a professor at the Gandhigram Rural Institute in Dindigul, this is called thalaikoothal, a Tamil term for "shower" or "oil bath." The method he's familiar with, called "milk therapy," involves pinching the victim's nose shut (which is presumably possibile because they're too old and enfeebled to fight back) and forcing them to drink fresh cow's milk until they suffer breathing problems and, eventually, die.

Gurusamy told me that often practitioners of thalaikoothal are "disposing of old people who are undergoing unbearable pain and suffering." According to him, these rural areas in South India are "marked by economic backwardness," and the elderly in these regions are a liability due to the high medical bills and the inaccessibility of health care.

Whatever the reasons for thalaikoothal, which is illegal in India, the details sound horrific. There's been a lot of media attention surrounding the practice since 2010, when the popular English language newspaper the Deccan Chronicleran the harrowing story of an 80-year-old man who narrowly escaped death at the hands of his own children. He told the Chronicle they'd been "discussing how they were going to share my lands." After a little while, he decided to return to his village with bodyguards.

The author of the story, Pramila Krishnan, followed up with an undercover investigation in the Virudhunagar District, where she pretended to be a woman who wanted her annoying grandfather out of the way. She quickly found a "quack" named Fathima who was willing to perform a version of thalaikoothal, one of many people who advertised themselves as medical professionals and would provide a Kevorkian-style lethal injection service. Krishnan recorded Fathima saying, "I killed a 76-year-old man only four days ago with an injection. I can do it for your old man too."

The stories she wrote were picked up by the mass media, and soon Krishnan found herself talking about thalaikoothal on a blockbuster TV special hosted by Bollywood megastar Aamir Khan.

[body_image width='1163' height='583' path='images/content-images/2015/01/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/29/' filename='people-in-one-region-of-southern-india-are-quietly-killing-their-elders-body-image-1422558058.jpg' id='22587']Screencap via YouTube user StarWorldIndia

Then, two weeks ago, Krishnan posted a small follow-up to the thalaikoothal coverage on her blog, writing that "with the help of voluntary organizations, elders in Virudhunagar district have now formed self-help groups to guard themselves from errant children and fight for their rights." (Krishnan wasn't available for comment for this piece.)

I reached out to Azaan Javaida, a reporter who covers poverty in India, to find out if things are truly improving. There weren't numbers to back up a decline in illegal mercy killing, he said, and his optimism was very cautious. He told me that people in the middle of nowhere who want to kill their relatives can probably get away with it. "Thus impunity prevails," he said.

Javaida did say that the police "sprang into action" after the flurry of media coverage. He explained that the police aren't exactly beloved in India, but the show of force was nice to see. "No such case has been reported ever since."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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A pair of trans activists. Photo via Flickr user David Shankbone

Michelle Vash Payne, a trans woman who was sometimes called Yazmin, and her boyfriend Ezekiel Dear had recently moved into an apartment in Van Nuys, California, together. Early Saturday morning, neighbors heard the couple arguing. Shortly afterward, police said, a fire started in a rear bedroom and around 5 AM, Payne was found dead in the kitchen, having suffered multiple stab wounds. On Sunday afternoon, Dear walked into a Los Angeles police station, accompanied by a pastor, and confessed to murdering Payne.

We don't know yet why Dear killed Payne, but we do know that there is an alarming trend of violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people. Some sources estimate that a transgender person is ten times more likely to be murdered than the general population. About 98 percent of that violence is against those on the male-to-female spectrum (as opposed to female-to-male). What does the extraordinary rate of violence against trans women say about our society? I asked Julia Serano, a trans activist, author of Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, and a trans woman herself.

VICE: What does a murder like Payne's indicate about the difficulties that trans women face?
Julia Serano: For one thing, transphobic violence disproportionately targets trans women, and especially trans women of color. A number of factors contribute to this singling out of trans women. First, trans women tend to be more "visibly trans" than trans men, in part due to the public being more aware of our existence. A second factor is "trans panic": when a person experiences unreasonable levels of anxiety or outrage over finding out that a person is trans. While this can theoretically happen to any trans person, trans women are more susceptible because straight men sometimes lash out in a violent "homophobic" rage upon finding out that they were attracted to someone who "used to be a man."

Statistically, 98 percent of violence against transgender people is against those on the male-to-female spectrum. Why do you think that is?
We live in a society where maleness and masculinity are celebrated, and seen as the norm. We have a long history of it. Sigmund Freud, for example, claimed that all women and girls have penis envy, and everyone just kind of went along with that. There's this idea in our culture that being male, being masculine, is a good thing. I think that for trans people on the trans male or trans masculine spectrum, while they definitely face a lot of discrimination because of the fact that they transgress gender norms, the fact that they want to become men, or want to become masculine, is not really questioned. It's like, of course you would want to be male, of course you would want to be masculine.

However, for those of us on the trans female or trans-feminine spectrum, people are disturbed not only by the fact that we're transgressing gender norms, but the fact that we want to be women, that we want to be feminine. Because of that, I think it's a lot easier for people to sensationalize us, to demonize us, to ridicule us, which is why jokes about trans people are almost always about "men who wear dresses" or "men who want their penises cut off." It's almost a crisis of people throwing away maleness and masculinity.

It seems like people get so angry at trans women.
Yes. There have been studies done by psychologists and sociologists that find that people are not all that bothered by female children who are tomboyish or masculine, whereas everybody—whether it's teachers, parents, other children—are often really disturbed by young boys or young male-bodied children who are feminine in gender expression. We live in a world where it's kind of OK to be a tomboy.

I think another factor that feeds into this is that for half a century now, the feminist movement has worked really hard to break barriers so that girls and women have access to what used to be specifically boys' and men's realms: for example, playing sports or having careers. However, neither feminists nor other segments of our culture have worked to make it OK for boys and men to explore jobs or interest that are typically coded as being feminine. I think the combination of all that creates a scenario where to this day, being a feminine boy is still seen as very disturbing and pretty much nonsensical to the majority of people.

What's your response to those people who think being trans is nonsensical, who say "I don't get it"?
I'd point out that most of us don't have any idea why anybody does anything. I have no idea why anyone would want to be an accountant. I have no idea why anyone would want to collect stamps. I have no idea! But I acknowledge the fact that OK, some people do. So it's not only that these people don't understand it, but amongst the many things that people in our society do that none of us understand, we're being singled out. And I think there's a history for people all throughout the queer/LGBT spectrum of being delegitimized them by being run through a bajillion questions, like "How do you know you're really gay?" People force us to answer for who we are, in a way that straight or cis people never have to.

It's also useful to point out that people who are gender non-conforming, or who want to live as members of another gender, have existed all throughout history and can be found in lots of different cultures. A lot of experts would say that there's variation in gender much like there's variation in gender like there's variation in sexuality. Nobody knows why people are trans. I spent most of my life trying to figure out why I was trans, and I have not come up with an answer yet. The only thing I can say is: "Some people are trans." I got the lucky card dealt to me.

Follow Allegra Ringo on Twitter.

Adelanto, California, is a small high desert town just a two-hour drive northeast of Los Angeles, but it feels a long, long way away from SoCal's stereotypical palm trees and beaches.

This is a town, like many others around the country, that exists largely thanks to America's overgrown prison industry. There are three incarceration facilities within its city limits, providing beds for up to 3,340 inmates. Two of these facilities are privately owned and operated by GEO Group, one of the US's largest private prison operators. The San Bernardino County Sheriff's department operates the third. On Adelanto's border with its neighbor city Victorville is a gigantic federal complex that's home to another 4,600 inmates.

Late last November, the town's outgoing city council decided that they needed more prisons, approving by a vote of four to one plans for the construction of two new correctional facilities. One was to be a privately owned and operated 1000-bed facility from GEO Group, and the other a $327 million, 3,264-bed facility developed independently by Doctor Crants, the founder of the private prisons company Corrections Corporation of America, that's intended to house overflow from Los Angeles County's embattled jail system.

GEO Group has since withdrawn the proposal for its facility—according to the city manager, James Hart, that was just a bureaucratic ploy to make sure the company's permits don't expire on land they might wish to build a jail upon in the future. But if the other facility is completed as promised, there will be space for more than 6,500 inmates in Adelanto—and there are only around 30,000 non-prisoners in the town.

Adelanto is a wasteland of tractor-trailers, trailer homes, and trains. It's a harsh place to live. Temperatures in the summer are often in the triple digits, the only relief coming in the form of a 60-mile-per-hour wind biting desert dust into your skin. Residents have to cope with one of the worstregional economies in the entire United States: At its peak, in 2011, the unemployment rate in Adelanto wasnearly22 percent. Today that number restscloserto 12 percent. But development is still painfully slow.

"You can't buy a pair of shoes in Adelanto," former Mayor Cari Thomas told me. "For those, you'll have to drive down to the Walmart in Victorville. There's very little opportunity for residents to work in the city,."

Aside from the jails, the big news in town is the construction of a Dollar General store, located adjacent the Circle K, across the street from City Hall.

For small, economically depressed towns like Adelanto, building a prison seems like a path toward salvation—but it seldom pans out as a wise long-term strategy.

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Adelanto is one of many such towns. Take Florence, Arizona, a city of 25,000 where there are no fewer than nine public and private prisons. McFarland, California, population 14,000, has three privately operated prisons.

All across the country, the story repeats itself: Dozens of small towns with little to no commercial development are dominated by millions of dollars of incarceration infrastructure. That's thanks largely to a prison-building boom in the 1990s, when by some estimates a new prison opened somewhere in rural America every 15 days.

But seldom does prison development become the economic engine cities hope for when approving them. Studies have shown these facilities do little to help local economies, and may even hurt. So why do depressed cities keep choosing to build more jails?

Adelanto's city manager, Dr. James Hart, spoke dispiritedly when he explained some of the history behind his home's current financial state. A $2.6 million budget deficit means the town struggles to provide basic city services like trash collection. Over the past decade, Hart's watched the city's payroll shrink from more than 200 employees to its current number of 43. Although about 90 of those jobs were lost when the city sold their correctional facility to GEO Group, Hart says he's had to lay off more than 50 employees during his tenure.

Adelanto was historically a bedroom community for workers and families affiliated with the nearby George Air Force Base. The base closed in 1992, robbing the town of a primary employment center and catapulting it into financial uncertainty.

Adelanto's first correctional facility opened in 1991. For Adelanto, building a prison and contracting with the state of California seemed like a good deal. The state contract offered a revenue stream, in addition to about 100 jobs for Adelanto residents who worked at the prison.

"Back then, the city felt correctional facilities would bring jobs in Adelanto" said Hart. "We hoped people could use their job to buy houses in the city, stimulating a housing boom with more development following."

Adelanto soon approved two more private prison projects, one from developer Terry Moreland and another from GEO Group. San Bernardino County has since purchased Moreland's facility, and Adelanto's original facility is now part of GEO Group's expanded 1,940-bed Immigrant Detention Center.

Despite the promises, the prisons have failed to stimulate lasting growth in Adelanto. None were compelled to hire exclusively from within city boundaries, and all ultimately ended up contributing little to the city's coffers.

Which brings us back to today, to a city that has three prisons but no McDonald's. The city's budget deficit means it's threatened with disincorporation unless it can somehow solve its monetary woes. The new prison project may help, but residents worry that building more prisons will do little more than further solidify the city's image as one big jail.

"Adelanto has always been considered the ghetto of the high desert," said Mario Novoa, a documentary producer who grew up in and recently moved back to Adelanto from Los Angeles to be closer to his aging parents. "There's always just been nothing here except the prisons, and as far as I can tell they haven't done much to help the city develop anything other than more prisons."

Novoa says he wasn't actually aware of the proposed prison expansion until right before the November election, when three of the five city council candidates, including the mayor, were up for re-election. He says, that other than an occasional mention, it was all kept very "hush-hush."

During the election, Mayor Cari Thomas supported the construction of new prisons, arguing that they would bring jobs to the city. Her chief opponent was a man named Rich Kerr, who advocated against more prison construction.

Kerr won the election, but changed his mind after assuming office, choosing to support the construction of new facilities. Kerr says it's a business opportunity that the city would be naive to pass up on.

"I know it's going to bring revenue to the city: $1.2 million a year [in reference to Doctor Crants's facility] almost cuts our deficit in half," Kerr said. "Let me do what I need to do to push the city in the right direction."

By profession, Kerr is a cell tower technician. During the day, he works for Motorola, installing and upgrading network infrastructure across the Southland. An ex-Marine, he's become resolute in his decision to support the construction.

"Sure I changed my mind. It's like when you're going for dinner at Shakey's but then you see Red Robin and decide to get that instead," Kerr said. "These facilities will bring good jobs to the town, jobs we need desperately."

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Of course, there's no guarantee that the new prison will generate jobs for residents of Adelanto—after all, the ones already there certainly haven't done the trick. An informal poll I took of the three GEO Group employees who were demanding I stop taking photos of their facility revealed that none actually lived within Adelanto's city limits.

Doctor Crants explained in a phone interview that his facility will give employment preference to residents of the high desert, but doesn't include any particular stipulation to hire from within the city of Adelanto itself. Nor was he clear about whether the construction jobs would be locally sourced.

Adelanto Councilman Jermaine Wright has been the lone dissenting vote against the prisons. He opposes the facilities because he doesn't believe incarceration is the correct answer when it comes to dealing with criminal activity, and opposes the premise of an industry invested in making sure people remain behind bars.

"When they come out of prison, they have nothing to go to," Wright told me. "Sure, they might be trained when they're inside the facility, but there isn't any support infrastructure to help these people once they walk out."

Wright understands that Adelanto is in a bind, but thinks that instead of developing more prisons, the city should seek out other development. Like so many others, Wright wants to refocus the incarceration spending binge on something more practical, specifically education.

"We spend way more on prisons than we do schools in this country. That's a fundamental wrong that needs to be righted," said Wright. "If we even thought about educating people the way we imprison them, then maybe we wouldn't be so stuck."

In California, statistics from the Legislative Analyst's Office show the average cost per prisoner per year exceeds $47,000 per year. By contrast, numbers from the California Department of Education reveal the state spends less than $9,000 per year on average per K–12 student. Indeed, Adelanto has a history of prioritizing jail development over education in the name of jobs. For a couple years, Adelanto high school students took classes in trailers in a corner of neighboring Victorville's continuation school while a brand new high-school campus sat vacant in Adelanto, unable to open since its completion in 2012 because the project was over budget by $3.4 million. At the same time, San Bernardino County was conducting a $145 million expansion of Adelanto's High Desert Detention Center, a project that ran $25.4 million over budget but still opened before the high school campus did in August.

"It felt like a slap in the face for us—the knowledge that our governments were spending millions to expand jails while our kids were being taught in trailers delivered a very clear message," said Vickie Mena, a resident of Adelanto and organizer with Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC). " We felt like the city was telling us, 'We don't care about your education or your school, but we'll open jails and more jails.'"

Companies that develop prisons, both for public and private operation, actively seek out economically depressed towns like Adelanto because they make for easier sells than places that might have other options.

"When the corporations pick up that a town is economically struggling, they come in promising economic security, jobs, and other benefits," said Bob Libal, executive director of Grassroots Foundation, an NGO working to end for-profit incarceration. "Affluent cities have the power to say no. That option doesn't really exist in smaller, depressed cities."

And when a facility closes down, it saddles local government with the responsibility of dealing with the abandoned prison infrastructure and the erasure of whatever income the facility provided.

They smell the desperation, people like Crants," Novoa, the producer, added. "They see the city as easy prey, where they can come in and essentially take over."

Not that any of this dissuades those in Adelanto who want to build more prisons.

"We can't look to the past because what's happened before hasn't gotten us anywhere," Mayor Kerr said. "I've got to look forward."

Matt Tinoco is a young reporter living in Los Angeles who wants work. Follow him on Twitter.

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The Hindu festival Thaipusam is held every year at the Batu Caves just outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It marks the occasion when the goddess Parvati gave Lord Murugan (the Tamil god of war) the golden spear (' vel') that he used to slay the evil demon Soorapadman.

On the eve of the festival, which this year falls on February 3, an entourage of priests, devotees, musicians, and dancers walk through the night to the caves. Penitents make offerings and repay spiritual debts to Murugan by carrying or wearing the vel kavadi (burdens), which can be anything from jugs of milk to heavy, extravagant altars hooked into the skin and decorated with peacock feathers.

Devotees have their heads shaved and pray while cleansing themselves with river water and smashing coconuts to symbolize the destruction of one's ego. The air is thick with incense. Encouraged by the swirling beat of drums, some offer prayers before entering a trance and attaching the kavadi to the skin of their chest or back with steel hooks. Others pierce their cheeks and tongues with vel—skewers—to remind themselves of their god and to stop themselves from speaking. Though these devices pierce the skin, no blood is spilled.

Bearing their kavadis, surrounded by musicians, friends and relatives crying "Vel! Vel! Vel!" the devotees climb past the statue of Lord Murugan on the 272 steps to the caves. Once inside at the shrine, swamis (Hindu priests) release the kavadis and their vows are fulfilled. These photos, from the 2011festivities, show what all that looks like.

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See more photos by Dominic Blewett on his website.