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The HSBC building in London. Photo by Barry Caruth via.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It was the biggest banking leak in history. At the beginning of this month, a report was released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that uncovered 30,000 accounts holding almost £78 billion [$120 billion] in HSBC's Swiss branch. It emerged that bankers helped super rich clients dodge taxes, hide millions of dollars, and, in some cases, walk out with suitcases of untraceable cash.

Of course, the trusty cogs of British justice whirred into action and guilty parties under UK jurisdiction were arrested, thrown in the back of a van and given hefty jail sentences. Only, that didn't happen, of course. In the five years since the data has been known to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), only one prosecution has materialized.

"You are left wondering, as you see the enormity of what's been going on, what it actually takes to bring a tax cheat to court," said Parliament Public Accounts Committee chair Margaret Hodge after the information was released.

"Why have we only had one prosecution out of 1,100 names?" echoed Labour shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Chris Leslie.

As the story continues to unfold—a Tory donor's account here, a top dog resignation there—it remains to be seen if the leak will be cataclysmic for its subjects. The shit hit the fan, but it may still glide off pin-striped shoulders and dissolve into thin air.

Why isn't anyone in jail yet? Here are some reasons.

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HMP Wormwood Scrubs, a massive jail that still wouldn't be able to accommodate London's many tax evaders. Photo by Chmee2 via.

THE PRISONS AREN'T BIG ENOUGH
Banking offshore isn't, in itself, illegal. Luckily for some. Ronen Palan is Professor of International Politics at City University London and an expert in offshore tax havens. He told me that, if you were to wander into a hypothetical party in Mayfair and kick out everyone who banks offshore, the room would empty.

"The leaks show that about 6,000 British people held accounts in HSBC Geneva," Palan says. "That's only one bank among many in Switzerland. It appears that so many of the British elites are using Swiss bank accounts that if the Inland Revenue began a program of prosecution we'd be in danger of losing a considerable portion of our business, political, and cultural elites. All these people are linked to the centers of power. If we went after them seriously, we'd decimate the British establishment."

THE TAX AVOIDANCE INDUSTRY IS MASSIVE
While tax evasion (cheating the tax authority by not declaring assets or misrepresenting information) is a criminal offense in the UK, tax avoidance (using a legal scheme to reduce your tax) is legal. A huge, lucrative industry is built around it.

A 2013 parliamentary investigation revealed that the four big accountancy firms—Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG, and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)—earn £2 billion [$3 billion] in the UK and around £16 billion [$25 billion] globally through advising companies on how to minimize their lax liability. HMRC is always one step behind.

"HMRC appears to be fighting a battle it cannot win in tackling tax avoidance," the report concluded. "HMRC has far fewer resources. In the area of transfer pricing alone there are four times as many staff working for the four firms than for HMRC."

For both companies and individuals, there's a sparkly range of "tax avoidance" products to choose from:

•If you're a company, shift your profits to a low-tax country like Luxembourg.

•If you're an individual, just call yourself a company. Your "company" might make a million pounds this year, but hey, you were only paid £20,000 [$30,000]. Corporation tax is much lower than high-bracket income tax. Jimmy Carr was slapped on the wrist for something similar.

•If you register this "company" offshore, all the better, as British tax authorities can't snoop around. You'll also benefit from another layer of offshore tax breaks.

•Having an offshore company is useful for real estate. You'll avoid taxes if your company does the buying and selling of your London mansion.

•If you're worried about the tax man getting his hands on your estate after you die, you can set up a trust fund and leave it as a gift, thus avoiding inheritance tax.

•Buy a yacht or sports car with " beneficial VAT arrangements and tax mitigation."

•Invest in something risky for possible big returns. The film rights scheme Eclipse, used by Alex Ferguson and Sven-Goran Eriksson, has just been confirmed a tax avoidance scheme by the Court of Appeal and fines have been handed out.

While schemes like these are, for the most part, legal, it's against this backdrop—in which avoiding tax is deeply ingrained into business culture—that illegal tax evasion happens. There's a gray area (only courts can decide if a scheme is tax avoidance or tax evasion), so it isn't the least bit surprising that corporations and individuals game the system for all it's worth.

WE'RE BUSY CHASING BENEFITS CHEATS
HMRC claims (rightly) that prosecuting high-earning tax cheats is time-consuming and costly. Instead, it often comes to an arrangement out of court. However, the disparity between resources devoted to catching benefits cheats and wealthy tax dodgers is kind of conspicuous.

In 2012/13, £1.2 billion [$1.85 billion] of benefits were fraudulently claimed, while £4.1 billion [$6.3 billion] went missing through tax evasion. Reports from bodies such as Tax Research UK suggest that, if you also take into account tax avoidance, the figure for missing taxes from high-earners is even higher.

Meanwhile, there are just 300 HMRC staff investigating tax evasion of £70 billion [$107 billion], while 3,250 Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) staff look for £1.2 billion [$1.85 billion] in benefit fraud.

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A protester smashing up an HSBC in London. Photo by Garry Knight via.

BECAUSE: THE IMPORTANT PEOPLE
The Swiss leaks uncovered accounts belonging to an impressive line-up of high-profile figures, from the heads of royal families to top bods in business, film, and sport. Having an account in a Swiss bank isn't illegal and doesn't prove tax avoidance; however, given the shady dealings which have emerged at HSBC, it's hard to believe that everyone's hands are clean.

"I tend to believe that protection of the elite plays an important role [in HMRC's historic failure to prosecute]," Palan told me. "Tax evasion—and, in particular, complex tax avoidance techniques—are a way for power and money to extend their power and money at the expense of all the rest. It's about entrenching inequality. The offshore system essentially allows the rich and powerful to avoid playing by the rules that everyone else has to play by."

Tax justice campaigner and director of Tax Research, Richard Murphy, agrees. "The rich get away with it because HMRC has been dominated, since its creation in 2005, by big business interests," he told me. "There is no political will in it to collect tax from these people."

THE LITTLE PEOPLE WILL PAY
A 2014 report by the Equality Trust revealed that the poorest 10 percent of British households pay eight percent more of their income in all taxes than the richest; 43 percent compared to 35 percent. And that's before tax avoidance schemes have been taken into account. What the rich fail to put in, the rest of the country must cover in taxes like income tax and VAT.

Meanwhile, small businesses are far more likely to feel the wrath of HMRC than big corporations.

"The UK isn't bad at chasing all tax issues," Murphy says. "Small businesses which send in tax returns but who make mistakes are easy targets for tax inspectors who have been set quotas of enquiries they must make."

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This man does not appear to be scared of banks. Photo by Henry Langston.

WE'RE SCARED OF THE BANKS
According to lawyers, if UK bankers misbehaved in Switzerland, they can't be prosecuted here unless they advised clients on UK soil, which, according to Panorama, they may have done. But how aggressively will they be pursued? Richard Brooks—former tax inspector, Private Eye writer, and author of The Great Tax Robbery—believes the answer is: not very.

"If you're inside an economy sustained by financial services then you have to protect the banks," Brooks told me. "All the stuff coming out from Switzerland and the let-off for HSBC is just part of the picture. Look at how the government reacted to charges HSBC faced a couple of years ago; it lobbied heavily to get them off prosecution in the US."

THE UK TAX CODE IS BULLSHIT
The UK has the longest tax code in the world. It's more than 17,000 jargon-packed pages long, loophole after glorious loophole. There is probably no one on the planet who understands our tax code in its entirety.

Anarcho-capitalist Christian Michel, who used to run a finance company in Geneva, is a cheerleader for legal tax avoidance.

"Our deal with governments is that we may do whatever the law does not specifically prohibit, while governments may do only what the law demands," Michel says. "So if the law says I can build a house that is 30-feet-high, officials have only one mission: measure the height. They would threaten the social contract if they started arguing, 'Yes, it's legal, but immoral.'

"HMRC doesn't tell Ms Jones that she's been a moral person, helping her neighbors, therefore she'll get a tax rebate. So why should we apply moral judgements, and pay more than the law forces us to, because it might be 'moral' to do so?"

So there we have it: UK tax law is shambolic and a lot of tax avoidance is legal, ergo people will take the piss. It's almost as if some might prefer it that way.

Follow Frankie on Twitter.

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Look at Hellen Jo's website, Instagram, and Twitter.

Last month, Spain's Directorate General of Traffic proposed a plan breathalyze pedestrians and issue fines for walking while drunk. The idea was to reclassify the unvehicled as "users of the road," putting them in the same category as motorists, bicyclists, and people driving Vespas (this is Spain, after all). The plan was attacked for being autocratic and was ultimately shot down. But when Spain's director of transportation María Seguí Gómez defended the proposal, she claimed, according to the Guardian, that "of the 370 pedestrians killed in 2014, more than half had alcohol or drugs in their blood."

It's not clear where she got that statistic from, but if walking while drunk is too dangerous, how the hell are you supposed to get home? We decided to evaluate all the possible methods of transportation you could take when heading home for your last call to see which was statistically the safest.

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Photo by Flickr user Tinou Bao

DRIVING

This is obviously a no-no. Drunk driving accounts for one-third of all traffic fatalities in the US and while some drugs can be said to be reasonably safe to drive on, operating a vehicle when you're not in full control of yourself is inviting disaster. A study published last year that looked at over 570,000 fatal collisions in the past two decades found that drivers with a BAC of 0.01—practically sober—were still 46 percent more likely to be found responsible for a car accident than sober drivers. The conclusion? "We find no safe combination of drinking and driving, no point at which it is harmless to consume alcohol and get behind the wheel of a car." So, let's just rule this one out right away. While we're at it, let's throw some other vehicles in there too—motorcycles, planes, helicopters, Vespas...

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Photo by Flickr user Monik Markus

WALKING

You'd think this would be a reasonably safe alternative to driving yourself home after a night of tossing them back. But as the Spanish debate over breathalyzing pedestrians brings to light, walking home drunk presents its own set of risks. A study from 2011 found that pedestrians who had been drinking were about twice as likely to ignore crosswalk signals, which made them more likely to get hit by oncoming traffic. When they did, their injuries were more severe and required longer hospital stays than injuries from sober pedestrians who had been hit by cars—likely because alcohol slows your reaction time, making it harder to jump out of the way of a car.

In about 10 percent of pedestrian-vehicle collisions, the pedestrian is drunk, according to a report from the US Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2012. And 35 percent of pedestrians who are fatally injured by car crashes have a blood alcohol content of .08 (the legal driving limit) or higher. Those figures are even more dramatic in other countries, said the report—in Australia, 45 percent of pedestrians struck and killed by cars were inebriated while walking; in the UK and in Sweden, drunkenness accounts for two-thirds of pedestrian fatalities. So while walking while drunk is less likely to harm others, it's still inarguably risky for the pedestrian.

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Photo by Flickr user Timothy L

RIDING A BIKE

Biking while drunk is less dangerous than driving and more dangerous than walking, which makes a kind of intuitive sense. It's also worth noting that it's illegal to ride a bicycle while under the influence, and you can get charged with "biking under the influence" if you blow over the legal limit.

Of the few hundred bicycle deaths each year, about a quarter of them involve a cyclist who had been drinking, according to a report from the Governors Highway Safety Association. Another study, from Johns Hopkins, suggested that drinking before riding a bicycle increased "the rider's risk of fatal or serious injury by 2,000 percent." That's partly because drunk-biking accidents often involve other factors—things like biking in high-traffic areas or biking without a helmet—but the point is clear. Biking isn't a good option when you're drunk. Same goes for skateboarding, rollerblading, or whatever the kids are into these days.

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Screenshot via YouTube

RIDING A HORSE

You can get charged with a DUI for this, too. Or, actually, it's called an "RUI" because you aren't driving the horse, you're riding it. From a legal perspective, it's worse to get on a horse drunk than ride a bike, because you can get charged with animal cruelty.

From a safety perspective, it's hard to say how dangerous it is to ride a horse while drunk. There aren't really any statistics on this kind of thing but one can imagine all kinds of horrible situations you could get into while trying to coax a horse to take you home. Then again, there's this public service announcement from Montana, which shows a man being picked up by his trusty horse as he leaves the bar. So this would work, I guess, depending on the trustiness of your horse.

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Photo by Flickr user smplstc

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

People who ride the subway drunk are usually more annoying than dangerous. Still, being drunk ups your chances of falling down, being hit by a train, or running into other trouble. About a year ago, the Washington Area Metro Transit Authority released surveillance footage from that city's train system that included showed multiple instances of intoxicated people falling down escalators, over walls, and onto the tracks. Metro spokesman Dan Stessel told the Washington Post, "The point here is that there is such a thing as too drunk to be on Metro."

There was also a 13-year study from Columbia University that found that in 46 percent of accidental subway fatalities, the victim had been drinking. The study suggested that drunk subway riders bring along a sober friend—a "designated rider," if you will—to spot them.

All in all, though, public transport seems to be a much safer option than driving, biking, or walking. The problem, of course, is that most cities' public transportation doesn't run all night, so if you're out until last call, you'll probably miss the last train home.

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Photo by Flickr user Jason Tester

CALLING AN UBER

Uber was practically invented to chauffeur drunk people around—it's such a big part of Uber's marketing model that the company recently partnered with the breathalyzer app Breathomoter to make it easier for people whose BAC is over the legal limit to get a ride.

A new report, issued by Uber and co-sponsored by Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, showed that the rideshare service has done a lot to curb drunk driving accidents. In Seattle, the report claimed, there was a 10 percent fall in drunk driving arrests associated with the use of Uber.

The biggest risk in taking an Uber while you're drunk is that you'll get charged out the ass for it. Surge pricing normally goes into effect right around the time when bars start to close, and there have been countless stories of drunk passengers stuck with exorbitantly expensive bills (like that girl who was charged $362 for a 20-minute ride). There have also been accounts of Uber drivers aimlessly driving around (something you'd be less likely to notice if you were drunk) to hike up the cost of the ride. One woman reported that she passed out in an Uber and woke up to a $293 bill for a ride that logged more than three times the distance that it should have.

The other safety concern involves getting into a car with a stranger. Every now and then, there's a truly horrifying story about an Uber ride gone wrong—like the woman who was kidnapped and sexually assaulted by an Uber driver, or the Uber driver who attacked his passengers with a hammer. But in the grand scheme of things, your chances of getting a psychotic driver are pretty slim. And if it weren't for the occasional bad apple of a driver and the price gouging, Uber would always be a safe, solid option for getting home when you're drunk.

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Photo by Flickr user James Palinsad

HAVING A DESIGNATED DRIVER

Before Uber and Lyft and all of the touch-of-a-button ridesharing apps saturated the market, there was an old-fashioned way of getting home safely: the designated driver. Here's a person who you know and trust, who isn't going to charge you anything for a ride home, who will unburden you from the responsibility of having to drive yourself, and who will probably go to extra lengths to make sure you're OK once you actually get home. It's a beautiful thing, really. There's just one little hiccup: Most designated drivers end up drinking anyway.

A team of researchers actually set out to quantify this a few years ago. Their study, which was published by the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs in 2013, showed that almost 40 percent of designated drivers didn't abstain from drinking, and 18 percent of them had BAC levels of 0.5 or greater by the end of the night. It's easy to fall into the logic that "one drink won't hurt," but we know that driving with any amount of alcohol in your blood can be dangerous. So the DD system isn't all that effective, unless you can trust that your designated driver is actually truly sober.

That said, if you happen to have one of those friends who you can be sure won't drink that night—because they're Mormon or straight edge or an alcoholic or whatever—then having a designated driver is, far and away, the safest option. Unless you have a really well-trained horse.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

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Sumaya Ysl. Photo via Facebook

Just a few short months ago, I was exchanging messages with a friend of mine on social media. She was an aspiring model based in Toronto, a naturally gorgeous gazelle of a human being who had big dreams. When her travels brought her to New York last fall on a photoshoot, we were making plans to meet up in Brooklyn where I was completing an internship. When I thought of Sumaya, I thought young money, a glamorous jetsetter with ambitions.

This past weekend, I was on social media again when, as it has so often lately, my screen flashed death. I was looking at a picture of two friends of mine, posted along with a cryptic message memorializing one of them. Clicking through, it never even occurred to me that this would be how I would learn my friend was gone.

Sumaya Dalmar, who went by Sumaya Ysl but was just Sumaya to many of us, was a light and a breath of fresh air. An out and proud Somali trans woman, she was the sort of person who was so authentically herself she gave others around her permission to do the same. But now Sumaya is one of an alarmingly high number of trans women of color whose lives have come to a premature end so far in 2015.

To speak of her beauty in the past tense is painful because like Lamia, Leelah, Ty, Penny, Bri, Yazmin, and so many other transwomen of color who have died just this calendar year, she left us too soon. When she passed early Sunday morning at just 26 years of age, she left her community reeling with loss. Police are investigating her death but it has not been ruled a homicide, despite posts on social media claiming otherwise.

Sumaya was the first Somali trans woman I ever met. She was a liberatory personality—no small thing in our community. Her portrait, taken by my friend artist Abdi Osman as part of a documentary project entitled Labeeb, hangs in a loft he shares with his partner. I remember spending time with Sumaya at the loft; the larger-than-life picture was once a source of laughter when she stood in proximity to it. Sumaya was the subject of Abdi's work because her visibility in the Somali and LGBT communities was so pivotal. Somali queers are a tribe, and it seems like everyone in that community knew her.

Sumaya's death throws into sharp relief that, in moments when we collapse the personal with the political, as Teju Cole has said, certain bodies become unmournable. While we are busy making a literal and figurative cult of death around trans bodies, we forget to pay attention to the ways we shortchange living, breathing trans women in our communities. The pain felt by trans women of color always becomes legible when it's too late, and even then, their humanity is not respected.

As my friend Asam Ahmad explains: "Death is only tragic if we insist on pretending that violence and suicide isn't the norm when it comes to the lives of trans women, especially trans women of color. If anything can be called tragic, it is a society that has normalized such disproportionate levels of violence against trans women that self-harm is the only answer many can find. This normalized violence impacts every single aspect of trans women's lives—from using public bathrooms to accessing healthcare to interacting with law enforcement."

Not long before her death, Sumaya posted a message to Facebook that now makes me queasy to think about. She was in disbelief at the violence that her immediate community was subject to, and emotionally fatigued that so many of her sisters were disappearing before her eyes. It's not just that we ask trans women of color to live impossible lives—it's that we ask them to do that while watching themselves die over and over again.

As Morgan Collado writes for Autostraddle, "The names of trans women of color will be in the mouths of the queer community after they've been murdered, but support for us while we are still alive is sporadic at best." The ugly truth is, people love to speculate over and fetishize violence—violent acts committed against trans women's bodies even more so. Social media has been cruel in the wake of her passing, but Sumaya's life is being celebrated and honored by those who loved her.

Sumaya's family and friends are demanding that police take the investigation into her death more seriously. An LGBT liaison is not much of a comfort to anyone when the TPS communications department posts updates on the investigation into your friend's suspicious death sandwiched between routine traffic posts and a photo of a lost dog. On the contrary, the rage this inspires is subsumed into an even sharper grief. If trans women of colour aren't outright ignored by institutions that should serve them, they're insulted, misgendered, or blamed for their own deaths.

Sumaya's life mattered to so many of us. Trans lives matter to so many of us. In a Facebook post before she died, my friend asked many questions of the world that I now find myself asking. When we speak of Black lives mattering, do we mean Black trans women? I am asking because things need to change. It feels pointless to say at this moment, but it's time to ask whose life really matters. Whose economic justice matters? Whose self determination matters? Which lives do we care about and when do we care about them? Why can't we put our emotional, material, and psychic efforts into changing what is so painful for so many people?

All we can do now is ask the questions that we should have been asking all along.

Sumaya's memorial fund can be found here. Donate to the Trans Women of Color Collective here. Follow Muna Mire on Twitter.

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This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

For many LGBT students who brave coming out at school, the harsh reality is getting bullied the hell out of. Schools themselves are rarely set up to cope with young people considering their sexual identities, and those thinking of leaving the confines of the closet are hardly encouraged by the institutional lack of support and near total invisibility of LGBT figures or culture across the curriculum. School is a tough enough gig without having to worry about coming out.

It doesn't get much easier for teachers, either. As well as dealing with the same discouraging factors that students face—namely, getting called a "faggot" in the playground—LGBT teachers also have to contend with resistance, even abuse, from senior management, co-workers, and parents. Those who do come out often find an already challenging job becomes even harder.

The question is: with so few role models for LGBT students to look up to, should more be done to encourage teacher visibility? And if so, what's preventing them from coming out in the classroom?

Ellie, a subject leader at a school in Greater Manchester, has been in a relationship with another female member of staff for the past eight years. While her colleagues are aware of her sexual orientation, her students aren't—something she doesn't plan on changing.

"The job of teaching is challenging enough," she says. "If I was an overweight teacher and I asked students to do something they didn't like, the immediate response would be some sort of fat comment. It would be exactly the same if I was known to be gay. It would be that instant, 'I'm going to hurt you with what I know about you,' reaction. I'm scared of that happening, if I'm honest."

Tony Fenwick, a teacher and co-chair of both School's Out and LGBT History Month (which is this month in the UK, by the way), says we have to ask what's so wrong with education that teachers don't feel safe coming out. "They're very often discouraged from doing so by their heads, although that's technically illegal," he says. "We've had a lot of LGBT teachers who've been driven out of the profession or out of the school they've worked at because of the approaches of the senior management team, or governors—people around them who have made life difficult."

In a recent report, 44 percent of teachers told Stonewall that students have used homophobic remarks against them. The report also found that the vast majority of teachers—nine in ten in secondary schools (89 percent) and seven in ten in primary schools (70 percent)—hear pupils use expressions like "that's so gay." It creates a negative culture for those students and teachers who do identify as homosexual—either privately or publicly.

Pupils at Ellie's school are generally pretty progressive. Plenty have felt confident and safe enough to "come out" to her, and the school's only transgender pupil receives no abuse that the teachers are aware of. "The parents are the main challenge," she says. "We're working in a deprived area and until fairly recently it's had a large BNP support group. It's not a very open-minded neighborhood. I reckon I could come out to the students that already know me and they'd be like, 'Cool, whatever,' because I've got a good relationship with the kids." She says she'd fear new students starting who were aware of her sexuality, and may come with negatives preconceptions. "Rather than getting to know me," she says, "the barriers would go up straight away."

Ellie's discretion hasn't stopped her from promoting diversity throughout the school. "I feel like I'm a positive role model for LGBT students, regardless of whether I'm out or not," she says. "I actively champion equality and diversity and have put together materials for assemblies as well as drop-down days that are all about challenging inequalities and promoting a diverse culture within the school. Students regularly come out to me, and yet, I've never felt the need to be out myself."

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Out teachers provide LGBT students with visible role models, but belonging to sexual or gender minority group shouldn't be a prerequisite for confronting discrimination. Heterosexuality isn't an excuse for delegating the responsibility for tackling homophobia and transphobia. "More often than not it would be an LGBT teacher or member of staff that is responsible for pushing that forward," says Ellie. And she doesn't believe that should necessarily be the case. "It should be everyone," she says.

Discretion with co-workers, let alone pupils, is arguably less of an option for trans teachers—a problem that trans activist and former teacher Juno Roche knows all too well. "If you're trans then by necessity everybody has to know; you can't transition subtly," she says. "If you're outwardly changing your gender then it's a far bigger thing."

After informing her head at the time of her intention to transition, Roche became locked in a two-year legal battle to save her job. Sensing defeat, the school eventually settled, magnanimously allowing her to return. To ensure that no teacher would ever have to experience such an ordeal again, Roche decided to tackle the issue head-on.

"I couldn't find any information at all on trans teachers, so I thought I'd find out as much data as I can," she says. "What I found was a really horrible picture—people leaving and pushed out of their jobs, people who'd been deputy heads or head of science for 27 years losing their posts and sitting at home being on benefits."

The resistance Roche faced is all too common for the few trans teachers who do transition while teaching. The suicide of primary school teacher Lucy Meadows, who's transition became the subject of intense, nationwide press coverage in the UK, is a poignant reminder of that. But while bigotry no doubt plays a role in this opposition to trans teachers, Roche believes fear and ignorance are just as culpable.

"I think the resistance comes from senior leadership who are just terrified," says Roche. "They don't know how to deal with it or take it forward. They're terrified about the response from parents, the response from pupils, of all the practical things." Until the fear is "trained out" of head teachers, she says, "they'll go on being scared."

Roche now spends much of her time supporting teachers who wish to transition, working with their schools to put the necessary policies and practices in place to guarantee protection. While many teachers might believe that their sexual orientation or gender identity should remain their private business, Roche believes it may be beneficial for trans teachers to be more open.

"Gender stereotypes and fixed gender points don't help anyone, really," says Roche. "When pupils go into the classroom they shouldn't look up and see a bunch of white, middle-class teachers, male or female. They should see a diverse range. In most schools I go into where there's a trans teacher, I always say to the head teacher: 'Get this right', because somewhere in this school is someone that's dealing with gender dysphoria. That young person can look up and have a role model."

Stonewall's report states that fewer than one in five secondary school teachers in the UK say students have a visible LGBT model in school. Raising this number won't suddenly eliminate all homophobia or transphobia, but it's an incremental step toward building an education system that doesn't marginalize, ignore, or neglect.

Follow Chris Godfrey on Twitter.

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This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

British films often fall into recognizable types: the gritty social drama, the gritty "urban" movie, and the, er, gritty gangster flick. Catch Me Daddy resists all of these. Instead, it grinds together elements of western, thriller, and fairy tale into something that we haven't quite seen before.

Laila (Sameena Jabeen Ahmed) is a pink-haired Pakistani-British teenager who's left home and shacked up with her white Scottish boyfriend, Aaron (Conor McCarron) in a caravan on the Yorkshire Moors. By day she works in a hair salon, while he slopes about, looking for work in a half-assed way. At night they get fucked up on codeine and dance to Patti Smith.

It won't last. Two crews of bounty hunters are after them, both hired by Laila's dad, Tariq (Wasim Zakir). There's a Pakistani-British contingent—made up of Laila's brother, Zaheed (Ali Ahmad), thuggish Junaid (Anwar Hussain) and two underlings—and, separately, a pair of white British men, conflicted cokehead Tony (Gary Lewis) and terrifying bruiser Barry (Barry Nunney). A mutual contempt between the two groups is obvious—but they have to work together.

Cutting between the couple and their pursuers, we get hints of familial backstory—just enough to make us care without losing the chase momentum. In an early scene Junaid goes out with his baby daughter, later we see Tony sniffing and looking forlornly at a photo on his phone that may or may not be his wife. When the men eventually figure out Laila and Aaron's location, the film cranks up several gears, and doesn't let us draw breath until the end.

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Catch Me Daddy is the first feature from brother team Daniel and Matthew Wolfe. Daniel made the Shoes' "Time to Dance" video with Jake Gyllenhaal as a slasher on the loose in Dalston and Paolo Nutini's entrancing "Iron Sky" video.

In his music videos, Daniel regularly uses non-actors, and he continued that trend with Catch Me Daddy. Certain roles, like Aaron, Tariq and Tony, are played by pros, but Sameena Jabeen Ahmed is a newbie, as are Anwar Hussain and Barry Nunney. They bring a rawness to the action. "You want it to be region-specific and you want it to be accent-specific and there weren't the actors and actresses that were right for these parts," Daniel says. "I wanted an authenticity that I think street casting brings. Not only that but something heightened—it's hard to articulate."

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Apart from those actors with agents, none of the cast had a copy of the script. "I'd make them learn the lines just before the scene or feed them the lines or tell them what we wanted the scene to be and tweak them," he explains. They shot chronologically so what we're watching is genuine reactions to situations as they unfold—observational fiction, almost.

Sameena Jabeen Ahmed made it clear that she wouldn't do anything that her mom wasn't cool with. "The film was probably more chaste because we cast her," says Daniel Wolfe. "She was like, 'I'll do this, this, I won't do this...' I think it's better for it. It brought an innocent quality—suddenly it looks like [Aaron and Laila are] a boy and a girl making a den."

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Critics have likened Catch Me Daddy to the classically British social realism of Ken Loach or Andrea Arnold. Daniel Wolfe objects. "It's too easy, isn't it? Because it's up north, it's got street cast people, [they label it as] Ken Loach," he says. "It's not social realism and it doesn't intend to be. None of our influences were that. I love Andrea Arnold; Wuthering Heights is in one of my favorite films of the last five years. But she wasn't an influence on this."

So who was? Bill Douglas, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sam Peckinpah, Bruno Dumont, Shōhei Imamura, Alan Clarke, Werner Herzog and Takeshi Kitano, says Daniel. To which Matthew adds the photographer Paul Graham, westerns like Wild Bunch, Pale Rider, and The Great Silence, along with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. "And chase stuff—from Terminator to Southern Comfort." Artworks, too. "During writing and pre-production we were looking at a lot of quite nightmarish paintings, interpretations of the Apocalypse and hell realms."

"Nightmarish" is the word. Throughout the film, dread builds through menacing sound design, tense pacing, and unnerving visual flourishes: the appearance of various strange animals—birds, fish, lizards and snakes, night scenes where we just make out characters' faces carved into the inky blue sky, and the moors, beautifully shot on 35mm by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, practically a character of their own. "Bleak and magnificent. Unforgiving," is how Matthew Wolfe describes them.

Despite the subject matter, says Daniel, "We didn't want it to be an issues thing. We thought, how can we take the landscape of Lancashire and Yorkshire and give that the mythic setting of the westerns we grew up watching?"

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But isn't it kind of awkward to be turning the topic of honor killing, among a population to which the directors themselves don't belong, into something "mythic"? Did they have reservations?

"It is sensitive material. But I didn't want to step away from it because of that," says Daniel. "It felt interesting and challenging. We spoke to honor crime charities, to people within the community; we did extensive research and the more we did, the more we felt that what we were doing was right." He stresses that the film isn't about representing "a whole broken community," but "a handful of people and their lives," adding: "I feel, from the feedback we've been getting, that we've been respectful."

Since premiering at Cannes last year, the film's had a lot of love. Sameena Jabeen Ahmed won the best newcomer award at the BFI London Film Festival (the Wolfes were also in the running) and Catch Me Daddy has been hailed as "blistering" (The Telegraph) and "one of the most exciting British debuts for years" (Dazed).

It's not perfect. Certain moments don't quite convince—I wasn't sold on the ending. But still, this is filmmaking talent to be reckoned with. Next up the brothers are working on another thriller, about a British snooker player having "an existential breakdown during a tournament in hedonistic, crazy China."

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All photographs by Jonathan Auch

Among new American street photographs, Jonathan Auch's pictures are a uniquely gutsy, blurry, and grainy mess of contradictions. Influenced by both postwar Japanese photographers and the American social documentarians of the 1960s and 70s, he also references painters like Caravaggio and Goya. Yet his work is emphatically photographic, hinging on decisive moments and the immediacy of the camera. Auch projects allegorical meanings onto his subjects, who are transient and interchangeable figures in the urban landscape of Midtown New York, rendered at close range, in alarming detail.

This leads to pictures made in the tradition of the great street photographers of yore that are somehow concretely rooted in the present. As any critic will tell you, taking a good picture on the street is one of the hardest things to do in photography, and shooting something that looks new is made even more difficult by the weight of all the incredible street photography made half a century ago.

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One contemporary influence is clearly discernable in Auch's pictures—that of VICE's resident street photographer and critic Bruce Gilden. In fact, after Auch submitted his work to our photo critique show Take It or Leave It, Gilden deemed his pictures the best work by a young photographer we had shown him to date. If you've seen the show, you will know that's no small feat. I sat down with Auch to talk about the relativity of beauty, why most new street photography is shit, and how owning a Leica camera does not make you a good photographer.

VICE: The look of your work reminds me of postwar Japanese photographers like Daidō Moriyama, or the Provoke movement in general.
Jonathan Auch: Well, I like Japanese photographers of the Provoke era. If I had to pigeonhole my influences to one movement, it would be that one.

Have you been to Japan?
No, but I studied martial arts: aikido and iu-jitsu, some judo as well. That's how I became interested in Japanese culture, and began studying Japanese. Then I began to get into drawing.

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You went to Art Center in Pasadena.
It's a technical school, started after WWII. It was meant to be a craft school. It has a harsh curriculum, focused on learning traditional techniques of design and illustration.

At some point I got fed up with paying through the nose. I began to think about what I was going to do with the skills I was learning. The thought of doing illustrations for Russian Vogue never appealed to me. I had something to say that was the opposite of that. So I took time off, and I started looking at pictures. I went to Europe, and that was when I bought a camera for the first time. I started taking pictures on the street.

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What kind of camera did you use?
Just an old Nikon beater.

I ask because you seem interested in the technical side of things.
I think the technical aspect gets you somewhere, but you can take a good picture using anything. You can take a good picture with a phone, although I haven't seen any. But, hypothetically, you could.

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You haven't seen any good pictures taken with a phone?
I'm not saying they don't exist. But people try to do photography with their phones like a regular camera. But the phone doesn't lend itself to that. The picture is low-resolution, and shit. They treat it like a regular camera, and it isn't one. I don't see anyone exploiting the phone in a way that's provocative or interesting. You don't need to have sharp photos—half of Moriyama's photos are out of focus or blurry—to be evocative. Some of them are quite compelling for that reason.

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There are more capabilities with a real camera than with a phone, because the automatic settings of a phone are trying to make everything sharp all the time.
Well, that's the difference between an artist and a craftsman. An artist makes those decisions all the way through from beginning to end. Like a director of a movie, you have to consider everything. I haven't seen anyone exploit the aesthetics of a phone picture.

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Do you have formal photographic training?
No, but I don't think photography is much different than drawing.

It is easier for people to use a pencil than a camera.
Maybe...

I mean, there's a certain amount of technical knowledge required to use a camera.
But, these days, what technical knowledge do you need? For a lot of my pictures I use something like this.

[He pulls two small point-and-shoot cameras out of his bag, a Ricoh and an Olympus, and lays them on the table. ]

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This is not what I expected at all, from looking at your work. It seems like the kind of pictures you take would require a lot of control over manual camera settings.
These are just small mirrorless cameras. I don't think it maters. You can use whatever is available to you. You could use a Leica to make these same pictures. I don't have any money so I use cameras that are inexpensive.

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How did you end up doing street photography? Is that what you'd call it?
Sure, whatever that term means. It's so broad it's almost meaningless. A "street photograph" could be anything.

I suppose what I'm trying to ask is, street photography is a genre most people would associate with new documentarian aesthetics in the mid 20th century. Winogrand, Klein, Arbus, and all the rest. You're also working in black-and-white much of the time, which is also not the most contemporary choice. How do you work inside of that history?
I think most street photography today is shit.

I agree completely. It's so hard to make a good picture on the street, especially considering the legacy of those legendary figures.
I think that street photography should be something that has guts. That asks a questions versus gives answers. It's an open genre—you can take a picture of whatever you deem important, attractive, or interesting. But to me, most street photography done today is a stage, or it's a one-lined joke, a bad cliche. I don't think that has any artistic value.

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It's often more of a fly-on-the-wall approach, and what you're doing is more confrontational.
Yeah, well, I see the world in a certain way, and that's why I take pictures the way I do. You can't escape your mind, your history, and your psychology. I think there are ideas that are not being addressed especially in our normal daily life, which is a subject that street photography is good at addressing.

But you're also working in a way that's out of style. Today people have an obsession with sharpness, and I would say noticeable grain is not in vogue. But somehow, your pictures end up looking very contemporary. It has something to do with the way people are dressed, and I also think it has to do with digital tools. But something about your approach is unmistakably current. Who are you influences, beyond Moriyama?
Early on I saw a Robert Capa exhibition in Berlin. I thought I could do something like that, meaning war photography.

Oh that's interesting, because I can kind of see a connection to those melted negatives from the beach at Normandy. Who else?
Yeah, that was a mistake, but it made the pictures better. The best photographs Capa took.

Well, like I said, Japanese photographers like Shōmei Tōmatsu, Eikoh Hosoe or Kikuji Kawada who did The Map. I like William Klein, and of course Robert Frank. Lisette Model, Gilden, Weegee...

Those are all photographers with political leanings. Do you have strong political views?
Yes.

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How do they influence your work?
I think the economic system we have structures the world, and it structures our relationships with each other. This is especially prevalent in New York. In a way we don't see each other as human. There is an unspoken violence that exists in the way we treat each other on the streets in New York. Instead of trying to romanticize that, I'd rather show it plain.

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How do you choose a subject? These guys (above) can really carry a picture.
I liked the pair of them. The man looks like he is walking toward death. The two of them lined up together looked like drama masks.

How do you recognize scenes like this so quickly?
There's an instinct that develops. If I see something that has potential, I try and charge my way through the swarms of people to where it might happen, and either it happens or it doesn't. It's a bit like surfing, although that's more peaceful. Maybe it's more like bullfighting, I don't know.

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Do people ever get angry when you take their picture? How do you deal with that?
Sometimes. I try to tell them what I am doing. If people become aggressive I will defend myself.

Do you ever end up dealing with the police?
Yeah, a lot.

What happens?
After September 11th, there is a hyper awareness of anyone who it outside of the boundaries of "normal social behavior." The parameters to determine whatever normal social behavior is have tightened. New York has become less welcoming to people who fall outside of that.

When you're taking pictures of people on the street, that's unusual behavior. The cops are there to keep people in line.

I'm respectful and polite, but I try to avoid [the cops] because I don't want to deal with that. They do not know the law the are sworn to protect. Many times I have had cops tell me it is illegal to take pictures without asking.

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It's not illegal, but people may not like it. You're focusing on those people as your subjects as well—people who may fall outside of social norms.
I have strong political views, and will are always lean towards people who are on the edge of society, or disenfranchised in some way.

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Do you think these people are beautiful?
There is an attraction and a repulsion that exists. I think some of them are beautiful, and some of them are ugly.

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Do you try to make them look ugly? Are these accurate depictions of these people?
What does that mean? You could take a camera and set it on burst, and shoot ten frames in one second. Every frame would have a different representation of what the person is. It's a still photograph, a split-second in time, and once you separate it from its original context it can be recontextualized again and again.

Also, as the viewer you bring your own interpretation to it. For example, I find this guy (above) quite beautiful in his own way, but some people would find him hideous. What is beauty anyways?

I don't have an answer for that one.
Me neither.

See more of Jonathan Auch's pictures on his blog.

Follow Matthew Leifheit on Twitter.

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Never change, Victoria. Photo via Flickr user Alejandro Erickson

You have to give Victoria, BC credit where it's due: that city does not rush into anything. When the rest of the world decided dumping raw sewage into the ocean was no longer a chill thing to do, Victorians held out for decades.

To this day, Victoria is still trying to figure out how to update its century-old waste system. They've added extra pipe and a few screens, but nevertheless pump untreated shit and chemicals out to the Juan de Fuca Strait at a rate of 130 million litres per day.

The capital city appears to be having some difficulty leaving the Victorian era behind, at least when it comes to cleaning up old messes. In fact, an even older marine dumpsite, left by a coal gasification plant operated from 1862 to 1952, is still costing taxpayers a few million in 2015.

Victoria's Rock Bay would be a highly valuable slice of scenic harbourfront property if it hadn't been storing massive amounts of toxic coal sludge for the last 150 years. The Victoria Gas and Electric Company, which used to process coal into the gas needed to light residents' 19th-century lamps, naturally dumped its leftover tar and chemicals straight into the harbour.

"A lot of the industrial harbour is super contaminated," says Torrance Coste, a Wilderness Committee campaigner on Vancouver Island. "There was a lot of activity there before environmental standards were even a thing."

The Rock Bay property is now jointly owned by Transport Canada and BC Hydro. The coal gasification plant is, of course, long-gone. "We weren't around then, but we're legally responsible for the site, and it was quite a mess," says BC Hydro spokesperson Ted Olynyk. "The site was at one time one of the most contaminated sites in the province, perhaps even the country."

BC Hydro and Transport Canada originally teamed up on the reclamation project in 2004. They started with $32 million and hopes of completing the cleanup in three years' time. But the project descended into something far murkier and much more expensive.

So far they've removed 250,000 tonnes of soil containing polychlorinated biphenyl and other bad stuff—but there's still more work to be done. "It was very complicated," Olynyk says of the project's time and cost overruns. Digging efforts revealed more toxins migrating in "weird directions," he explains. "Over the years, as we've moved along, the environmental standards changed."

"It was like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall," Olynyk says.

The most difficult phase of the cleanup has actually yet to happen. This involves draining part of the harbour and removing a bunch of toxic sediment from the seabed and foreshore. Transport Canada, which owns the wet half of the property, is building a dam in preparation for the drainage stage. The federal department expects to spend another $30 million dredging up some 88,000 tonnes of sediment, bringing the price tag up to about $138 million.

One stage they have completed, however, is the commission-a-First-Nations-mural phase. Last week, BC Hydro sent out a news release unveiling the 250-metre-long panel of artwork painted by Songhees and Esquimalt youth.

In June 2012, Transport Canada announced it would sell the property to Songhees and Esquimalt for $2.8 million once the remediation job is done. According to a "rough timeline," Olynyk says major construction phases should be completed by mid-November, with further monitoring work continuing until 2020.

Which, coincidentally, is the same far-off year Victoria is due for a 21st-century sewage treatment plant. Welcome to the future, Victorians.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE France.

Note: This article contains images with full-frontal nudity.

Alexandre Dupouy is a sex archaeologist. The French collector has spent his entire life collecting what he defines as "erotic and pornographic junk." His shop, the Tears of Eros—now open only by appointment—has been selling pictures, paintings, and sex objects for almost half a century. It's a sort of small museum that traces the history of sex in France.

In 1975, he received a call from a bookseller friend who said that he had an old gentleman with "something special to show him." What he had was a luxury car with a trunk full of black-and-white photographs of naked and smiling prostitutes from the 1930s. He explained that he took most of the pictures in a brothel on the Rue Pigalle. Given that he could feel his days were numbered, the old man agreed to part with the pictures as long as he could remain anonymous. That man became known as "Monsieur X."

Nearly four decades later, Dupouy has decided to reprint some of this impressive collection as a book called Bad Girls (La Manufacture Books, 2014). The book is co-authored by both Dupouy and Monsieur X. Given that the actual photographer is no longer alive, I decided to have a word with Depouy about the book.

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VICE: Can you try to describe a typical early-20th-century Parisian prostitute?
Alexandre Dupouy: The typical profile was a girl who came to Paris to make money so she could feed her family back on the farm somewhere in the countryside. Hungry and unemployed, the girl often stumbled across a madame who would promise her shelter and warmth. One would usually end up staying with ten or 15 girls in the same situation. At that time, a prostitute earned roughly ten times more than a regular worker. In 1900, a worker was earning two francs per day, whereas a street prostitute charged five francs per job—20 francs if she was in a brothel.

What were the working conditions for a prostitute of the time?
In a way, it was similar to sport. One could do the job for about two or three years before being totally damaged. Diseases were common, and the access to protection was really bad. Condoms existed but weren't mandatory. The girls cleaned themselves with something called "hygienic sponges." The sponges had, of course, absolutely no efficacy.

Some say that Paris used to be the prostitution capital of the world, right?
By the 1920s, it had calmed down a bit. But for a century before that, it certainly was. From Madeleine to the Bastille, there were red-light districts all over Paris.

In the early 20th century, the city was a hotspot for prostitution. In those days, men didn't have very exciting sex lives with their wives. Also, if you were a man in the middle class, you would get married by 35. There would always be some misbehaving uncle to show you the joys of a brothel once you hit puberty.

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How did you react to Monsieur X's collection?
It was immediately obvious that it was unique in terms of both quality and quantity. There were hundreds of pictures. Taken one by one, they gave a real insight into the hell of life on the Rue Pigalle.

How did you work on these photographs without being able to verify dates, time, or basically any accurate information?
Given the amount of photographs, I assumed that this work took place over the course of a decade. Taking into account some of the car models that you can see in the photos, I estimated they were shot between 1925 and 1935. Finally, because a couple of images were shot on a distinctive balcony, I figured out that the brothel was located at 75 Rue Jean Baptiste Pigalle.

Was it hard to figure out more?
No, we found some more photos by him that weren't at all erotic. Photos of upper-class women taken in beautiful homes. Today when his prints are sold at the Rue Drouot auction they're labelled as "Monsieur X." The guy has definitely gained respect as a photographer posthumously.

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On the back of the photos Monsieur X wrote the name of each girl: Mado, Suzette, Gypsi, Mimi, Nono, Pepe, etc.
Monsieur X must have been close, friendly, and generous with the ladies. What is amazing is that the girls seem very relaxed in the pictures—they are actually having fun. There are even outdoor pictures taken on the banks of the Marne. He also directed two ten-minute short films, shot both outdoors and indoors. These two pieces really revealed his biggest fantasy: putting two girls together. One played a modest girl, while the other tried to be a stripper.

There's also a lot of similarities to Gustave Courbet's The Origin of the World. He also liked pretty exhibitionists. Or E. J. Bellocq—the New Orleans photographer who was also a regular customer of a local brothel, eventually making friends with the girls so that he could take any picture he wanted.

Were these brothels legal?
Brothels in Paris remained completely legal until 1946. Most of the bigger brothels had already closed by 1925, though. The Sphinx was a typical 1930s brothel: There was a bar and a restaurant and women were allowed to come too. These things were a bit different from the earlier brothels. These new small brothels were called "appointment houses" or "houses of tolerance." Politicians, both Gaullists and Communists, accused some brothel owners of working with the Germans during the occupation.

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Was that the case?
It depends. The One-Two-Two (122 Rue de Provence) was actually used by the Germans. The Sphinx was, according to the memoirs of its madam, far closer to the resistance networks. What most people actually considered the most serious charge was that the Germans gave many brothels champagne and good food. If a woman got plump while others starved, you knew she wasn't all that interested in liberation.

How do you see the current state of prostitution in France?
What I see is that prostitution has decreased by leaps and bounds—there's not that many prostitutes. I think this is due to marital relations. In the 19th century, if a bourgeoisie man asked [his wife] for fellatio, he would often be denied. And when it was accepted, it wasn't done properly—often women hurt their husbands.

That's why the role of the prostitute is dying. Today, the regular customers are also the most depressing: people who haven't had sex in ages, husbands who love to cheat on their wives, or erotomaniac millionaires—Dominique Strauss-Kahn's sort of vibe.

In the Philippines, the 6,000-year­-old sport of cockfighting has been transformed into a fully ­legal billion-dollar industry. Known locally as sabong, it takes place in 2,500 dedicated stadiums across the country and kills an estimated 30 million roosters a year.

A few months back, VICE Australia hit the cockpits and hatcheries of Manila. There we met the breeders, trainers, and philosophers who help make sabong one of the Philippines' national obsessions.

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Photo by Koury Angelo for MADE

Almost every fashion show has some kind of historical reference or allusion-based theme underpinning it. Sometimes, these inspirations are a clever way to get weird, sensational stuff on the runway—like voguing or death metal. Other times, it's just an excuse to copy someone else's brilliant ideas because the designer can't think of anything better on their own. But, in general, these themes are almost always offered to help frame the collections for the buyers, who we suppose need a fancy little fairytale to prod them into emptying their pockets.

However, there is the rare occasion where some of these concepts are actually pretty illuminating. When they are good, they provide a window into the designer's creative process and taste, and they help expose folks like us, who only see the finished product, to cool new ideas and people we may have never heard of.

The most recent collections presented at New York Fashion Week offered a host of themes. A lot of them were nonsense and weren't even reflected in the clothes. But a few managed to stand out—some because they were awesome, and others because they were offensive. Below is a roundup of the ones we found worthy of exploring a little deeper, beyond the runway.

Martine Rothblatt

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Photo by Andrew Boyle for MADE

Martine Rothblatt is one of the world's most successful and influential transgender women. As the founder and CEO of United Therapeutics Corp., she earns more than $38 million a year, making her the highest paid female executive in the US. One of the most exciting new concepts she's pioneering right now is "mindfiles," which would allow you to upload your consciousness into a bioanotechnical body and attain techno-immortality. Martine used her "mindclone" technology to create a robot version of her wife Bina in 2010—which is kind of similar to what Nazi supervillain Arnim Zola did to himself in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but way more romantic.

Chromat, the Brooklyn label that outfits pop divas with "cage clothing," cited Rothblatt's mindfiles concept as a key inspiration behind its fall/winter 2015 collection. For the MADE runway show, designer Becca McCharen outfitted models in black geometric pieces with green lasers glowing around their neck and nipples, while others wore fuzzy white bustiers fastened to latex knee socks. Trans models Giselle Xtravaganza and Isis King modeled the S&M looks, while a series of other models represented different races and body sizes. Although McCharen didn't clone her brain for the show's finale, she culled together an army of futuristic-looking bionic girls that shows us how fashionable techno-immortality could be.

Native Americans

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From mass genocide to the theft of their land, Native Americans have suffered despicable treatment in this country. Despite these obstacles, they've somehow managed to hold on to their illustrious culture. But even that has been under attack in recent years as important signifiers like headdresses have been appropriated by everyone from Victoria Secret to drunk white girls at music festivals.

So when London-based brand KTZ made it known that their debut collection at MADE Fashion Week was going to be inspired by Native Americans, the question that loomed was whether the Brits would honor the beautiful and painful history of Native Americans or turn their culture into a grotesque caricature.

This wasn't the first time the duo behind the line, Marjan Pejoski and Sasko Bezovski, have used other cultures to inspire their collections. They pride themselves on "embracing ethnographic references and multiculturalism" with previous influences including the holy sadhu men in India and the Berbers in North Africa.

Unfortunately, as awesome as the collection looked—and it did look magnificent—it failed to live up its creators goals. With arrow headpieces and confederate caps, the runway show did a great job of inadvertently reminding everyone of the disrespectful way Native American culture has been commodified over the years. Although Marjan claims he did a lot of research, the thick bone necklaces, turquoise jewelry, and long fringe bags hardly offered an informed representation of the marginalized group. Not to mention, following the show, several indigenous media outlets accused KTZ of stealing the designs of Bethany Yellowtail, a Northern Cheyenne/Crow fashion designer. Whether there's truth or not in that accusation, it highlights our twisted reality where the people who originate a culture wallow in obscurity and the people who appropriate it are seen as "visionaries."

Prison Uniforms

Although it might seem weird at first, prison culture isn't such a strange place to draw fashion inspiration from. Just think, we incarcerate more people in the US than any other country in the world. So it is inevitable that the styles that develop behind bars will one day find their way onto the streets (remember sagging?) and eventually the runway, which is pretty much what happened with Hood by Air's latest collection. Some of Shayne Oliver's new pieces—like his chambray jacket and pant combo—referenced the prison attire directly, while more subtle pieces, like jackets and sweatshirts colored jailbird orange, also made their way down the runway. Shayne even put his own twist on the khaki and denim pieces that prisoners wear when they're toiling away for the CCA by adding his usual assortment of HBA logos, zippers, and patches.

As a concept, prison culture was an especially a fitting source for HBA to tap considering it can be both hypermasculine and homoerotic—one only needs to watch an episode of Oz to see that. And it's there, at the the nexus between those seemingly contradictory elements, that HBA's vision is its most powerful and affecting.

A Clockwork Orange

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Being inspired by painting or architecture to make a fashion collection is one thing. But basing your collection off of a movie can come off kind of lazy, considering a costume designer was already paid to make those clothes. This season, however, the Blonds managed to put their own exuberant spin on the look of the Droogs from A Clockwork Orange with glorious results.

The designers paid tribute to Stanley Kubrick right away, opening their most recent show with a song from the 1971 film's soundtrack. The tune was Wendy Carlos's darkly electronic take on Henry Purcell's classical march, "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary." In addition to being a crucial electronic composer, Carlos was also a pioneering transgender woman who started making her transition in the late 60s, which made her music's inclusion doubly perfect for the Blonds, who willfully challenge gender norms with their garments and have garnered a strong fan base in the LGBT community.

Not long after the music began to play, lights dramatically illuminated naked statutes of glittering divas which protruded from the walls in a similar fashion to the decorations of the infamous Korova Milk Bar from the film. And then out came three models in black bowlers and white leotards that offered a glamorous, feminine update on the iconic getups worn by Alex and his crew. What was interesting is the way the Blonds subverted the original costumes. Where Alex had an oversized codpiece that exaggerated the shape of his junk, the women on the Blonds runway had glittering jewels over their pelvic region in the shape of a womb. The crowd roared when they realized the middle, main model was none other than Phillipe Blond, the designer who runs the Blonds with his partner David Blond. It was definitely a real horrorshow moment.

Dolly Parton

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Photo by Andrew Boyle for MADE

This season, lovable oddball designer Jeremy Scott dubbed his latest offerings the "Dolly Pattern" collection, which was a pretty big hint that he was inspired by the big-breasted country artist. The influence of Parton on Scott makes perfect fashion sense—like her, when the Los Angeles–based designer is at his best, he represents high and low culture, trash and glamour.

The new collection shown at MADE Fashion Week featured patchwork fabrics that were a clear reference to Dolly Parton's classic song, "A Coat of Many Colors," about a poor little girl whose mother makes her a coat out of hand-me-down dishrags while telling her the biblical story of Joseph. It's a quaint little tale that kind of pooh-poohs highfalutin fashion, which makes it a pretty ironic source of inspiration for what will likely end up being some pricey shit at the VFiles store next fall.

Brutalist Architecture

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Photo by Koury Angelo for MADE

A lot of people hate brutalist architecture, and it's not hard to understand why. Often made of concrete, brutalist buildings have an imposing presence that doesn't necessarily put you at ease. The large fortress-like structures first started popping up around the world in the 1950s and continued through the mid 1970s. The harsh aesthetic was usually used for large modular government buildings and shopping centers that all resemble futuristic prisons.

The maligned architectural style has its fans. One being menswear designer Patrik Ervell, who used the aesthetic to explore new structural ideas in his latest collection. He used industrial-looking fabrics from the textile brand Maharam, and his jackets, sweaters, and trousers were presented in varying shades of gray reminiscent of concrete. And the set for the show was modeled after the Barbican Centre, a brutalist-style concrete ziggurat in London that received backlash for it's appearance in the early 80s and 90s but is now starting to be revered. Let's hope it doesn't take people that long to appreciate Ervell's latest offering.

Fencing

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Photo via Noveau PR

Aldi and Nedo Nadi were like the Manning brothers of fencing in the early 1900s. They grew up in Livornio, Italy, where they were born into a fencing family. And led Italy to sweep the 1912 Stockholm Olympics in three team events, with Nedo becoming the youngest person to win the individual gold medal for foil. Aldi also went on to win several gold medals of his own in 1920. It is said that the one time the brothers publicly faced each other, it ended in a draw. And they ended their awesome sword-fighting lives in California, where they taught fencing and worked on Hollywood movies.

While the brothers were very accomplished athletes, it was when they weren't rocking lames that inspired Robert Geller's fall 2015 collection In past seasons, Geller's called on everyone and everything from British rockstar David Bowie to the work of French photographer Sarah Moon to guide the theme of his collections. The Nadi brothers served him just as well this time around, tempering his dark palette with a hint of prep. The layered looks featured cropped trousers, colorful turtlenecks, and striped sweaters. Many of the models had their hair slicked back in the same way the brothers wore theirs while sporting tailored suiting with leather suspenders and waist-cinching belts set off by silk patterned scarves. The collection was a masterclass in how to take the badass yet archaic spirit of something like fencing and make it work in a day and age when the only sword fighting most guys do is with their dicks.

Follow Erica and Wilbert on Twitter.

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From 'Between Words' by Elisabeth S. Clark

Why does one book get published while another doesn't? Who makes this decision, and when, and why? It's a question that's been asked over and over since the dawn of publishing, I'm sure, and without any kind of actual answer, because in the end the answer is something unsatisfying and meaningless like: "It just did." Someone somewhere with specific tastes and access to power said it could exist outside itself, and so it did. And there are certainly elements, at least in mainstream publication, that one could list to try to define what makes something desirable for publication, probably to great snarky effect—you happened to have written a veiled novelization of the hit TV show Friends, for instance, or perhaps your Dad happens to be having sex with an editor at Knopf—but instead let's take a look at the opposite, more mysterious end: What makes something unpublishable?

At the end of the day, we know, unfortunately, that so much of this comes down to money. I think we all thought that when the internet came along and technology got cheaper we would see the reins be freed, that cheaper access to widespread distribution meant more insane shit could be given wide terrain, but somehow almost the opposite has become more true: There is so much now—major house presses, independent presses, vanity presses, electronic presses out the ears, not to mention the daily miles and miles of social media—it's hard to know where to ever look, and the majority often ends up looking where the most eyes go—the flash of keywords, sharing, brands.

Fortunately, at the same time, the nature of the archive also grew; that is, the more obscure things, while perhaps not trending on some barf-bag social website , can be housed, and searched out and found, all for a relatively low cost, if you are willing. One such vital experiment, as such, is UbuWeb, founded by celebrated poet and White House guest Kenneth Goldsmith, which for years has been housing massive gigabites of work that exists outside the lines—from audio archives of rare performances by avant-garde musicians and video artists, known and unknown, to whole lifetimes of textual and interpretative work dug up and given new life online.

Among their many recovery projects, available free for your perusal, one is Ubu Editions, whose stated goal out of the gate has been "bringing vital new literature to the attention of a wider public—while moving into an area that most small press publishers are not able to approach: reprinting important works from the past decades that are too commercially unviable to do as print books." Among these, their series, Publishing the Unpublishable , provides a particular kind of eye into the question of what makes something accessible, permissible, or not.

"What constitutes an unpublishable work?" Goldsmith asks on the introduction page. "It could be many things: too long, too experimental, too dull; too exciting; it could be a work of juvenilia or a style you've long since discarded; it could be a work that falls far outside the range of what you're best known for; it could be a guilty pleasure or it could simply be that the world judges it to be awful, but you think is quite good." Perhaps the most important idea here, in my mind, is the concluding one, distinguishing the importance of preserving uncompromised individual vision, beyond all cultural commodification, particularly in the era of the hashtag.

In whole, it's an appealing premise, and the result is an array of truly widespread, and often extremely fetishistic, personal, and astonishingly meticulous creations. Some of the manuscripts consist of huge dumps of every poem the author had written and not collected over their entire life, amassing vast catalogues of language, arrangement; others, rather, have particular intents of such unwieldy stature that they were likely imagined never to be seen by the world ever at all. Some had been withheld by the author for what they'd assumed was an ingrained weakness in the work, such as poetry written at a young age or while still learning a new language , which once then allowed to be seen in the context of a long career thereafter provide new light on the way one learns to write at all. And yes, some are simply too long, or too short, to be feasible as objects, or full of so much white space in relation to the text that it might have seemed wasteful to print it out.

Though what is waste in art? Who decides where the value lies? Often, we know, it is the people with the money, who in the end get to say yes or no to what exists and what won't, though now, with the supposed freedom of the internet, why couldn't anything be free? Why couldn't the most insane and unmanageable thing of all be the one that changed another's person's life? The greatest secret might be hidden in the most obscure document, while all the waste in the world might be the thing that fills the widest percentage of our minds. If nothing else, the chance to stare into the face of deletion and creep around in the bins of what might never have been gives us the chance to see the world a completely different way.

Below are some notes on highlights from this one corner of the Ubu archive, and how they do something all their own; the rest is out there waiting for you.

Bruce Andrews: " WhDiP," a sequence from White Dialect Poetry

This is a 445-page excerpt from a presumably much larger work, apparently consisting entirely of one-word snippets of speech borrowed from rednecks. "Purtiest," one line reads, a mangling, we must imagine of prettiest, leading then into "purty " for pretty, and "fer" for for. Gems like "look-a-here" and "rickollections" and "mistakend" are littered throughout the single column, ringing like a weird uncle in your ear. Putting on display one of the least historically literary ways of speaking ever, each word is a little window onto a world that you're free to imagine more deeply. This isn't a dictionary or a dialogue or even a transcription of conversation from the world, leaving the document in full as something like a skeleton of the brains of a whole certain sort of speaker who, with each word he speaks, offers a mangling of what came before.

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From 'By M,' by Mary Jo Bang

Mary Jo Bang: By M

The entirety of this text consists of an image of a single handwritten letter dated from 1951 and signed "To Daddy" and "From Mary Jo," presumably the author as a young girl. The letter is coined entirely in childish all-caps penmanship and with the labored grammar of someone learning how to write; its simply stated inquiry as to when the father is coming home, followed by a brief list of events experienced during Halloween without him, is moving in the way that child's art often is: because it does not know anyone else will ever be looking; because it does not attempt to mask its heart. Depicting this letter as an unpublishable manuscript alone asks several questions: What makes this one-page message any less publishable than a novel? In what way does it tell so much more of a story than hundreds of pages of constructed plot? How can there not be a story in almost anything? Better, it doesn't try to answer those questions; it just is.

Tan Lin:BIB.

BIB. appears to be a 269-page list of everything its author read over a seemingly arbitrary period from January 10, 2006, through October 31, 2007, including the time and place of taking in not only books and magazine articles but student work, emails, eBay and Amazon listings, invitations, insurance-claim requests, Netflix reviews, and any other possible form of incoming text. The list is surprising in that it is somehow satisfying to see the forming of the queue of kinds of things that had come in, and whether they were skimmed or not, where the reader was, etc. Like Knausgaard, but without the blather, it creates a kind of itinerary of one's life, realizing how much can be imagined of what was going on in a person's head simply by understanding what he was thinking about or was made to look at. Somehow you get the idea you are by his side throughout, experiencing a completely different kind of memoir.

Alan Licht:Spring Without Alan Licht

The first two lines of this text, composed by the avant-garde jazz guitarist, go like this: "O, we re ookg, u, weer, u, ross, u, Irq obvousy ere for e ex sever dys, u, we ve, u, uy some good, good weer s expeed. Tey dd ve sdsorm ere erer, u, over e s weve o wey-four ours ose wds ve subsded d w uy oue o subsde." It continues on like that to the end, only occasionally dropping a recognizable word or number. It offers one way in and no way out. It exists because it does and it doesn't give a shit what you do with it, where it takes you. And yet it is itself. It has a mind. It doesn't open the mind for you. You can't have what it has, unless you can. And whether it goes anywhere or not is less the point than to allow one's self to be beguiled by it, or angered by it, as sometimes the very thing that makes something art is that someone else would say it isn't. Either way, the utterance continues: "U, ere w be eoug of wd ross e souer poro of e oury s my use some bowg sd omorrow. Oerwse we're ookg er o pry oudy skes og d omorrow, u, e weeked, u, s good weer, d e we oud ve sorm, u, geerg some srog wds, u, for Sudy g d Mody, u, eve e possby of e r Bgdd. U, urrey we ve, u, u, resg oudess, u, fores oy og, u, 's go be brsk d y, empe- rures geg dow o e mdde-res, d e some, u, erme r s expeed omorrow d omorrow g."

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From 'Between Words' by Elisabeth S. Clark

Elisabeth S. Clark:Between Words

Perhaps the text with the most literal title in the database, Clark's text is an reimagining of a classic text, Raymond Roussel's insane and surreal Impressions of Africa, where Clark has gone through page by page in the original and removed everything but the punctuation. As such, she takes a work of extreme imagination and renders it brain-damaged, leaving only the scaffolding behind, and in the process revealing an underlying map of surprisingly sublime structure. Each page, removed of its language, has a nearly musical appearance of its own, at last removed of all the noise of syllables and sentences, and exposed to stand free, on its own. The pages weirdly remind me of levels of a crude video game, or perhaps a face, or some John Cage-creation no instrument could ever play. Perhaps this is not something you read like a book but instead hang on the wall and use as a reminder that within every book are hidden worlds, layers upon layers for the most part held forever behind the curtain.

Carlos Rowles:The History

And in the end, not all unpublishable texts have to be impenetrable in purpose, or willfully abstract, because the truth is, the components of the system of publication as it stands today are still as fucked and held strangled as they have ever been, despite what freedoms the internet would suggest having allowed. Because to look at a text like Rowles's The History here, one finds something not far off from what history has contextualized as its most titanic of components: work like Céline's, Beckett's, Joyce's, Stein's, Burroughs's, most of which if presented to a major house or even most independent presses would be pushed off into the pile. The obvious components here making Rowles's work difficult are that it begins in the middle of a sentence, employs what seems to be an ongoing run-on, cares little for obvious definition of character or plot, and instead generates its beautiful, frenetic feeling through the relentless melding of image, language, and sound. One page of this text, to be honest, carries more weight than so much of what I've found printed on paper in the last few years, and yet here it lurks buried in an archive labeled impossible. Unpresupposed beauty, it seems, is as much a reason something could be called unpublishable today as any other stumbling block above, calling forth the question of what the process of publication is for at all, outside of some shape of capitalism. I honestly don't know and don't want to know. If anything, it's a reminder that when it comes to creation, the work itself is what must hold up against itself; everything else around it—publication, attention, commendation, cash—means almost as little as the body after death does to the one who died.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

When my old boyfriend first proposed bringing some "toys" and dominant-submissive play into the bedroom after a few months of dating, I'll admit I feigned surprise.

Several weeks before, a venture in search of more towels ended in me finding a poorly-concealed drawer housing a small collection of props, toys, books, and other paraphernalia. So when he brought up the idea of "experimenting," I had already prepared my response.

I had no judgments—I found BDSM kind of cool, and definitely something I was willing to try. I knew enough about BDSM from years of research in sex-positive feminism, and understood the differentiation between consensual kink and full-on abuse.

Unfortunately, as our physical relationship took a turn down that road, the waters became muddy to me. After nearly two years serving as an equal partner outside of the bedroom and a quivering submissive inside it, I was no longer sure what fell inside and outside the realm of "OK."

At its highest points, I did feel a thrill and some joy—wondering if pain or pleasure would come next, the resistance of physical restraint, and an element of aggression and hunger added to my previously conventional sex life.

At its worst, I found myself having to cover up bruises I had never wanted, unable to sit down from welts I never anticipated. I remember sitting in the washroom after so many of our romps and telling myself over and over that it was my fault—that consenting to him spanking me probably did imply that I was OK with him punching me with a closed fist in the chest and on the legs.

I even managed to make myself feel guilty for his failure to adhere to my one hard and fast do-not-want—I told him early on that under no circumstances did I ever wish to be choked. After a few instances of his hand creeping closer and closer to my throat, it wasn't long before I felt his hand squeezing my neck.

I always managed to tell myself that it was me who had let it get a point of discomfort. That I could have said something early on when I felt his hands going into uncharted territory. By the time they were closing in on my neck, I felt too ashamed to say anything. Just as I felt too ashamed to tell him that I wanted to pick a different safe-word, which we'd only even mentioned once, or that I didn't like the way he would just roll over afterward while I tried to hasten the fading of the rope marks on my wrists.

I didn't bother correcting those little failures on his part because on the other side of the door, he was kind. We joked, we played around, we made good food together. We took long road trips, hiked through the Rockies, and, in the way that 20-something young professionals do, we found ourselves together. Ironically, his favourite thing about me seemed to be my independence, my conviction, my utter lack of giving a damn in the face of criticism or attempted control. His desire to almost literally shape me into what he wanted started and stopped at the perimeters of his bed.

Still, though, when we sat beside one another against his bedroom wall on a particularly hot summer's day and he told me, regarding his big drawer of props, "This is all about your comfort," I found that a little hard to believe.

Recently, while I read the various 50 Shades of Grey think-pieces concerned about how the film may affect the reputation or public perceptions of the doms and subs of this world, I couldn't help but think of my own real-life BDSM experience, or those of the women who have alleged abuse against Jian Ghomeshi.

Investigations into the former Q host's sexual and romantic life revealed disturbing allegations that Ghomeshi attempted to pass off in an infamous Facebook post as just being a little "kinky," I felt increasingly nauseated. It seemed like a page out of my own relationship.

Like most feminists and literature enthusiasts, I don't have to read or watch 50 Shades of Grey to know that I have a problem with it. I have a problem with the idea that abuse is sexy. I have a problem with safe words and aftercare barely being given lip service. I have a problem with literary tropes and painfully bad writing.

But I also have a problem with the lack of truly critical thought when it comes to this movie's portrayal of BDSM.

The real problem shouldn't be that fictional characters like Christian Grey are making BDSM look bad. The problem is that people like him exist in real life. And they don't think there's anything wrong with the way they are.

In the eyes of critics, BDSM is awesome, healthy, and A-OK—but this movie isn't. And there's a danger in the public, which is arguably under-exposed to the world of BDSM, thinking that this movie is what that lifestyle is all about. To name a few of Christian's more controversial expressions of passion, he and Ana do not establish a safe word (he even laughs at the idea), and he threatens to tie her feet and gag her despite a clearly defined "no" when he attempts to coerce her into sex. Outside the bedroom, Christian's behaviour is no better. He takes control of Ana's life, restricting what and when she eats and who she interacts with. He even tracks her phone.

And that's not what it's all about. BDSM is about consent, about safe exploration, about always making sure that everyone is comfortable.

But by defending that lifestyle with the same sword we use to hack at 50 Shades, we might be idealizing kinky sex a bit too much.

There's a dichotomy presented by many critics—that Christian Grey isn't a dom, he is an abuser. But is it possible to be both? If one self-identifies as a dom but abuses that power, they can still believe that they are a dom.

Much like Ghomeshi's Facebook post, my ex-boyfriend truly didn't believe that he had done anything wrong. He simply thought that he was experimenting and a little bit edgy, and that anyone who criticized him simply didn't "get it."

The anti-50 Shades campaign run by many devoted, sex-positive, pro-BDSM kinksters has done a great job of raising awareness of the nature of BDSM in general. The problem? It seems to be more of a PR campaign to elevate the reputation of BDSM than to address and condemn legitimate abuse.

When an article like that above states that doms actually care deeply for their sub, I want to cry out—then what was my ex-boyfriend doing when he repeatedly struck me without my consent to a point of breaking skin and refused to even take a shower with me after? Are there no concerns over people like him?

The idea that "real" BDSM is special, exempt from criticism in the name of sex positivity, ignores that there are men out there who are just like Christian Grey. That "fake" BDSM exists and harms people every day.

And again, these people often don't think there is a problem with what they do. Meanwhile, the pro-BDSM voices speaking out treat the crossing of comfort lines, muddled consent, and legitimate harm as matters of fiction. And when it does happen in the flesh, it's "not real BDSM," and therefore isn't their problem.

The fact is, not everyone who practices BDSM practices it responsibly. There are ill-informed and abusive doms.

The question then becomes, who is responsible for addressing the issue of BDSM partners who use the practice to be abusive? It's not as though the BDSM community is situated within a literal, tangible clubhouse with monthly meetings that has the power to formally condemn or expel someone from their "club."

But perhaps the critics of Christian and Ana's tangled tale want to do some research or talk to abused partners before they go around claiming that BDSM is some sort of ideal, trouble-free lifestyle. BDSM and abuse aren't mutually exclusive.

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Rehtaeh Parsons. Photo via Facebook

Military police made an arrest on Tuesday, months after someone using a Department of National Defence IP address vandalized the Rehtaeh Parsons' Suicide Wikipedia page and made comments on her father's blog suggesting his daughter wasn't raped.

Military police arrested a Canadian Forces member at the Shearwater base in Halifax, interviewed him, and released him on unspecified conditions, military public affairs officer Yves Desbiens told VICE over the phone Thursday.

An October 6 complaint about inappropriate online comments prompted a military police investigation, which led to a search warrant and an arrest, Desbiens said. He wasn't able to say who was arrested or who made the complaint, citing privacy concerns.

Glen Canning, Parsons' father, posted Thursday that on October 3, 2014, someone using a DND IP address commented on the blog Canning uses to share his daughter's story: "Buyer's remorse? Caught in the act, simply doing what she loved and was embarrassed that more people would find out what kind of person she was turning out to be?"

Canning, who was previously in the military, filed a report with military police in Halifax on October 6. He also suggested in his recent post that someone close to his daughter's case was responsible.

On January 29, someone using a DND IP address altered a direct quote from Canning on his daughter's Wikipedia page. The original quote said: "The two boys involved in taking and posing for the photograph stated Rehtaeh was throwing up when they had sex with her. That is not called consensual sex. That is called rape."

The DND user changed Canning's quote to say he didn't think she was raped: "The two boys involved in taking and posing for the photograph stated Rehtaeh was throwing up after they had sex with her. That is called consensual sex."

When she was 15, Parsons told police she was raped at a small gathering by several boys after they had been drinking. One of the boys snapped a photo of another boy grinning and flashing a thumbs-up as he penetrated Rehtaeh, who was vomiting at the time. One of the boys sent the photo to two girls and it quickly spread among her peers, who slut-shamed and harassed her.

When she was 17, Parsons locked herself in a bathroom and tried to commit suicide. Her parents took her off life support three days later.

Messages left for Canning were not immediately returned Thursday.

When he spoke to VICE earlier this month, Canning said it was "disgusting" for the DND user to change his direct quote to say what happened to his daughter was consensual. "I've never said anything like that at all," he said.

Canning said the online abuse was an ongoing pattern. "It's a low blow, but I'm not surprised," he said of the Wikipedia edits. "I'm getting used to that shit."

Parsons' father said he would consider legal action against the DND user who altered his direct quote.

Wikipedia mods have repeatedly flagged DND IP users' edits over the past six years, citing "unconstructive" edits that constitute "vandalizing" a number of its pages.

Canadian Forces members, presumably including the one who was arrested, have to follow a directive on acceptable internet use and an ethics code.

The DND's internet rules prohibit any online action that is contrary to the Canadian Criminal Code or "has or could reasonably have caused harm to others." Consequences could include revocation of access to DND computers, charges, civil liability, disciplinary action, and job termination.

If charges are laid in this case, the Department of National Defence will notify the public, military public affairs officer Desbiens said Thursday. He said the department takes any allegations of inappropriate conduct seriously.

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

SEGREGATION STORY
Gordon Parks
Steidl/ High Museum of Art, Atlanta

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In 1956, Gordon Parks was in Mobile, Alabama, shooting a story for Life that would be published in the magazine as "The Restraints: Open and Hidden." The wider project was an intimate portrait of a black family living in one of the most uneasy periods for the civil rights movement. The Jim Crow South that most people are used to seeing isn't here, though. There are no sweaty white policemen hosing down protesters, no marches, crime scenes, or burning crosses. The photos in Segregation Story are calm. They are also in color, which creates the disconcerting feeling that many of them could have been taken in 2014, in one of the South's still impoverished black communities. The dignity and beauty in Parks's pictures is just as moving as any photo of a spit-flecked racist berating a flag-waving black child.


SKINHEAD—AN ARCHIVE
Toby Mott
Ditto Press

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The last 15 years have seen the full cycle of renewed interest in skinhead culture and fashion. From cult books such as Gavin Watson's Skins to mainstream fascination sparked by This Is England,it's now got to the point where every bartender in London looks like they're off to an Oi!-themed fancy dress party. But irrespective of the boom, this is a complex subculture that remains misunderstood. Skinhead—An Archive is not an account, nor a history or photo project. It is, as it says, an archive—the result of artist Toby Mott's compulsive hoarding. His collection of skinhead paraphernalia, including Combat 18 manifestoes, Skrewdriver posters, gay skinhead zines, and suede head concert flyers, is reproduced here, offering an unusually objective look at how this aesthetic managed to mean so much to such a diverse range of people.

AFGHANISTAN
Larry Towell
Aperture

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We, as in "the West," have been slogging about in Afghanistan for a long time, and it feels like the war-torn country, its people and the lives they lead seem all to familiar to us. But this book reminds us that however long we think we've known Afghanistan and its war, its people have known war far longer: 30 years of conflict have shaped the nation. In Afghanistan, Magnum photographer Larry Towell offers and engrossing overview of his time in the country. Using a mixture of reportage, portrait and still-life photos in color and black-and-white, Towell's collages of everything from playing cards, weapons, hats, used targets, and unit insignia are tied together with his annotations and notes. This is as full and varied a memoir of a person's time in a country as you might hope to see.

THE MORE I LEARN ABOUT WOMEN
Lisa Kereszi
J&L Books

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I don't know what most people would do if they found a collection of moldy albums full of photos of biker chicks (in various states of undress) in their father's wardrobe. I suspect they wouldn't re-photograph them and publish a book of the images, but fortunately that's what Lisa Kereszi did. As much as this is an amazing smutty and tawdry window into the secret life of a biker dad, it is also a pretty sad book, one that, as Kereszi points out in the brief afterword, seems to explain the whereabouts of her often absent father. The More I Learn About Women treads a touching line between affection and curiosity, mixed with a sense of almost childlike vengeance for her father's infidelity and neglect.

INVISIBLE CITY
Ken Schles
Steidl

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The reprint of Ken Schles's 1988 original still hits as hard as it did back then. Arguably, the slow creep of gentrification this past decade makes the book feel weirdly prescient. Ten years of photos of New York's Lower East Side, in its grimy and raucous 80s incarnation, lets us into a world that seems further away than a quarter of a century. The photos of Schles's friends, their lives and the city are grainy, messy, intimate. But had you been in New York in 1988 would you have even glimpsed this world? Probably not. There's a feeling that this world is one that was only ever there for Schles and his coterie of pals. It makes the reader feel invasive, which only heightens the feeling of a lost era and way of life.

THE AL-ASSAD CAMPAIGN, DAMASCUS 2008
Tim Smyth
Bemojake

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After four years of bloody conflict in Syria, it is becoming hard for many non-Syrians to think of the country without conjuring up acres of rubble, maimed civilians and bullet-scarred buildings. Smyth's tabloid-sized publication transports us back to 2008, to the streets of Damascus, which seem, in retrospect, eerily tranquil. In every shot, often hidden from plain view, peeping from behind a curtain or nestled on a windowsill, is the face of Assad—an omniscient presence ready to clamp down at the first signs of unrest. Seeing these photos now suggests that the country's plight was always there. Where are these people now? How do these streets, pool halls, restaurants, and homes look today? This ghostly flashback is as chilling as it is striking.

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More stuff that has blown our minds on the internet: squirting is just peeing / one of the stars of '10 Things I Hate About You' started a religion / Reddit's spacedicks section is the internet's actual asshole

Something really weird happened on the internet today. A girl posted a picture of a dress on Tumblr, with a caption that sounded pretty desperate: "Guys please help me—is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can't agree and we are freaking the fuck out."

One of my friends sent me the link. "What colour is the dress?" he asked. "Blue and black, obviously," I replied. Then I asked my co-worker Mike Pearl, just to be sure. To my horror, he honestly and legitimately saw the dress as white and gold.

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At first, I thought he was just fucking with me, so I started asking everyone in the VICE LA office—half of whom saw blue and black, half of whom saw white and gold (with the latter group in the slight majority).

Hundreds of other people have weighed in on this, too. The Tumblr post is filled with reblogs from people debating the colour. The hashtag #Dressgate sprang up. It was kind of like the time a Redditor posted "TIL that roughly half of men wipe standing up and the other half wipe sitting down, and most people don't realize the other group exists."

About two-thirds of people see it as white and gold, according to a Buzzfeed quiz, which made me feel like I was going insane. I opened the link in multiple different browsers. I looked at it on my laptop and on my iPhone. I printed the image out. It still looked blue and black to me. Finally, I called up Dr. Jay Neitz, PhD, a colour vision researcher at the University of Washington.

I sent Dr. Neitz the link to the Tumblr post and asked him to tell me what colour he saw. "White and gold," he told me flatly. "What is it you're asking?"

After I explained that I saw the dress as blue and black, he said he wanted to ask one of the students working in his vision lab for a second opinion. "Blue and black," the student replied. There was a long pause on the other end of the phone.

"Why is this happening? I don't know," Dr. Neitz told me. "This is one of the most fascinating colour vision things I've seen in a long time."

It's important for me to tell you that Dr. Neitz has been working in the field of colour vision research for about 35 years. He runs a renowned laboratory called the Neitz Color Vision Lab. He has a Wikipedia page. And he had no fucking clue what was going on with this photo of a dress.

I pointed out to Dr. Neitz that there's another image, on the original Tumblr, purporting to show the dress as it appeared when the buyer wore it. In that image, Dr. Neitz (and everyone else we asked) agreed that the dress was black and blue.

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Some people in our office never saw blue in the original, but they did after they saw the second photo. Other people still couldn't perceive blue, even when they knew it was correct. The neuroscientist Beau Lotto pointed out in a TED Talk that sensory information is essentially meaningless without context, and that "the brain didn't actually evolve to see the world the way it is. We can't. Instead, the brain evolved to see the world the way it was useful to see in the past."

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Although Dr. Neitz was puzzled about what was happening, he posited a few theories. First, he suggested that the way we see it differently might have something to do with age. "The lens of your eye changes throughout your lifespan, and you're less sensitive to blue light when you're older." That might explain why Dr. Neitz saw white and his students saw blue, but here in the VICE LA office, the age differences were not distinct. So that theory was a bust.

A better theory is that it might have something to do with the lighting. Humans are equipped with something called "colour constancy," which basically means that the colour red still looks red whether you're in bright lighting or dim lighting. But something weird starts to happen if the lighting is coloured.

"If I go into a room and I turn on a light that's completely red, the white things will reflect all that red light," Dr. Neitz explained. "But if I also have a red thing, then that will reflecting the red light, too." So when your brain tries to process what colour something is in the red light, its best guess is to say that it's white—even if, in normal lighting, it's actually red.

"I used to own a red Volkswagon," Dr. Neitz told me. "I was out and it was dark and I was getting into my car. Someone next to me had just gotten into their car and put on their brake lights. When they did that, my car was illuminated just with the brake lights—and my car looked white!"

That's likely what's going on with the photo here: The photo was probably taken in blueish lighting, which makes your brain think that the dress is actually white. That makes sense. What doesn't make sense is why some peoples' brains perceive this as blue and others perceive this as white. Dr. Neitz specifically studies individual differences in how people see, and he'd never seen anything like this.

"In general, you're going to see differently than the person next to you. But this is a huge difference. I mean, this really takes the cake."

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With Dr. Neitz's explanation in mind, we started doing some in-office experiments. Mike Pearl, who saw the dress as white and gold, printed out an image of the dress and studied it for a very, very long time. He found that if he looked at the image straight-on, he saw it as white; if he tilted it, it looked blue.

When I started drafting this post, I still saw the dress as blue and black. But then, the weirdest thing happened: I suddenly saw the dress as white and gold. "Did you change this image?" I asked Mike. He hadn't. In fact, I hadn't even refreshed the page. I had uploaded an image that looked blue and black; now, it looked white and gold.

We still aren't totally sure what the hell is going on, though. Dr. Neitz seemed really fascinated by it, though.

"Now I'm going to spend the rest of my life working on this," he told me. "I thought I was going to cure blindness, but now I guess I'll do this."

Follow Arielle Pardes and Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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Like the average Tinder user, most games are all too keen to reveal themselves at the slightest provocation. Within 15 minutes of, say, The Order: 1886, its immaculate slacks are crumpled around its ankles and the only surprise left is how disappointingly quickly it climaxes.

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is no such easy lay. This recently released 3DS exclusive needs to be wined, dined and romanced before it'll let you steal a kiss, let alone invite you up for coffee. Which must sound terrible if you like your gratification instant, but as any fan of the series or tantric sex practitioner will tell you, protracted pleasure can be a wonderful thing.

Before this tortuous analogy spirals out of control, let's be clear: we're talking about a game called Monster Hunter that —surprise—is all about hunting monsters. It might have a title that's so Ronseal in its bluntness that it verges on parodic, but don't be fooled: this is a game of staggering depth and complexity that also happens to let you smash inflatable land sharks in the face with a giant tuna and dress up a bipedal cat as a vaguely offensive Mexican stereotype.

As the 11th game in the series, Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate —let's call it MH4U to save time—brings with it a lot of baggage from its predecessors and makes plenty of assumptions on the novice player's part as a result. But don't let that deter you! You'll soon submit to its hidden charms if you follow this utterly uncomprehensive guide to the letter. Or every other word, at least.

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Somewhere in here, you'll spy a Poogie

FOCUS ON THE FUNDAMENTALS

MH4U is designed to last hundreds of hours, and while it takes its sweet time to formally introduce you to its many, many facets, it doesn't make a great effort of hiding them from you before you've grasped their purpose. Phrases that might pass your lips include:

"Why am I fighting a giant sand whale in my pants?"
"What the fuck is a Glueglopper?"
"Why is a cat cooking my dinner?"
"Can I really name my pet pig 'Banderas'?"
"Wait, I have a pet pig?"

All of these things will make sense eventually (except the pig—nobody really knows what that's about), but your priority should be to suss the essential Monster Hunter loop. Which is: select quest, embark on quest, find monster, hit monster, kill monster, get loot.

A few dozen hours in and this will have mutated into a 20-step checklist that includes items like, "painstakingly organize my items," "go fishing with my cat army," and, "remember to go to the toilet."

Astonishingly, this routine will not only become rote, but you'll crave it, like an obedient lab monkey pushing and pulling an ever-growing number of buttons and levers to receive a delicious treat. Video games.

For now, though, just remember: you're a monster hunter and you hunt monsters. Get used to that, and the rest will follow. Eventually.

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That's not a knife

CHOOSE A WEAPON THAT FITS

Oh man, the weapons. Try not to think of the 14 varieties on offer as inanimate implements of monster spanking, but as characters that give your mute, blank slate of an avatar a personality.

You know how fans of fighting games like to "main" a brawler, and then maybe dabble in a few others? That's exactly how you should approach your choice of arms in MH4U, because for every weapon there are dozens of sub-varieties, and each of those sub-varieties has a dedicated upgrade tree. In short, you could spend hundreds of hours dedicating yourself to a single discipline and still not wield every iteration. Sounds: intimidating. Is: brilliant.

Your options range from the simple, self-explanatory Great Sword to the gloriously insane Insect Glaive, a battle staff that comes complete with a giant, vampiric bug that you can send off to suck performance-enhancing juices from your quarry.

Handily, there's a dedicated quest for every weapon right at the start of the game, which will give you a brief—if not thorough—tutorial, so take your time to find the one that suits your style because you're going to be spending a lot of time together. And when you think you've mastered your weapon of choice, watch a video like this and realize that you know nothing.

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Hunters that slay together, stay together

FORM A REGULAR HUNTING PARTY

As the old saying goes, a problem shared is a problem you've inflicted on other people. But when that problem is a monster that needs a dry slap, your friends won't quietly wish that you'd kept it to yourself for once.

Playing MH4U with others is pretty much its raison d'être or, "reason for falling into debt." You can play online while your lover/flatmate/imaginary friend gorges on rubbish TV or selfishly demands "conversation," or in the actual, physical presence of others. For local play, try somewhere really crowded, like a bar, so everyone can loudly mock your group for visibly having a great time without once critiquing a recent football game.

But what do they know? You're playing one of the greatest examples of cooperative gaming the world has seen, full of moments of heart-warming triumph and hilariously spectacular failure. You'll laugh together, you'll learn together, you'll love together. Don't actually say any of that, though, for it will only make your detractors despise you even more.

Get a few other people with an alarming amount of spare time to join you on this ultimately pointless* endeavor, and soon you too could be having utterly bewildering WhatsApp conversations like this:

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*Don't worry —everything's pointless!

LEARN TO LOCK-ON

The camera in MH4U is awful. Even if you're one of those swank folk with a New 3DS and its stiff-yet-sensitive C-nipple thing, you'll still find your view frequently obscured by a cliff face or the ass-end of a 45-yard-long death snake.

But look! LOOK. When, unlike popular boy band U2, you have found what you're looking for (a monster), you'll see a crude likeness of Bono (a monster) on the lower screen. Lick the crisp crumbs off your fingers and jab at the icon like a loved one's eyeball. Now, whenever you press the left shoulder button, the camera will whizz round to face the giant, toothy thing that's about to batter you senseless.

You have two options: 1) Use this all the time, or 2) Die.

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Do the 'MH' Prance

WHEN IN DOUBT, PRANCE (OR WAVE)

You can perform 16 "gestures" in MH4U, but only one matters.

Actually, that's not true. If you can't find your target and you see a balloon in the sky, use Wave and your friendly eye in the sky will highlight their location on the map for a few seconds. It only works once, mind, so lob a paintball beastward once you've found it and you'll be able to keep track of it for a good five minutes or so.

Congratulations, you are now a Monster Hunter expert. Here is your reward, some not-at-all frightening fan art.

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Via

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is exclusively available for Nintendo 3DS, which is a shame because it'd look great on a big TV.

Follow Dan on Twitter.