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If Cat Power and Liza Minnelli's gay dad gave birth to an emotional, pale sex god, he would probably look and sound like Perfume Genius, a.k.a. Mike Hadreas. The Seattle-born singer plays sad piano ballads and stars in music videos with drag queens and dudes wearing tacky jumpsuits. Unlike gay performers such as Sam Smith, who will sing melancholy songs about monogamous relationships and then criticize his peers for finding anonymous sex on Grindr, Hadreas is unafraid to wear glitter and then tell reporters that he hopes his drag-queen-filled video for "Queen" scares heterosexuals. Most important, when he covers Sade's "By Your Side" without the chorus, he can make you come and cry at the same time.

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I made plans to hang out with Hadreas before his concert at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, but he had to cancel last minute. He gave me a rain check, promising to eat greasy food with me next time he was in town (gay men love bad food as much as they love bad pop music). Since the Cheesecake Factory has yet to open in Brooklyn, I met Hadreas at a diner a few weeks later to discuss Madonna and why he loves scaring boring breeders.

VICE: How did you start playing sad songs for boys?
Mike Hadreas: I took piano lessons, and I would always make things up. They weren't really songs—more fragments. I didn't start writing words or official songs until five years ago. I'm untrained. I always wanted to sing, but I didn't like the way it sounded. I didn't think I was a good singer until recently. I feel like good singing and sex should be easy, but for me it's, like, ugh.

How did you come up with the idea for the song "Queen"?
I was mad—walking around guarded and self-conscious, internalizing things people said to me. I felt bad and embarrassed at myself for still carrying around stuff from when I was a kid. There are times on tour when I'm in a gas station and I have my nails done and I'm in a dress or whatever, and people are kind of backing up out of fear. Now, I'm like, "Fuck you—back up! I want some Nerds [candies]. Let me through." If you're gonna be scared, do that, 'cause if anything I'm gonna be even more gay later and even worse and more disgusting and scary than you ever thought.

Where did you work before you sang professionally?
I worked at a department store that was like Walmart but nicer. I made keys and mixed paint.

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Do you like America?
I like America because there are malls and chain restaurants open 24 hours. It's frustrating in Europe because you can only buy cigarettes at the cigarette store, and it closes at seven. You should be able to get a blanket, cigarettes, dinner, and a gun all at the same place.

What's your favorite chain restaurant?
I'm really into the Cheesecake Factory. The menu's like a book. People ask me, "Where should I eat in Seattle?" And I usually recommend the Olive Garden.

Why do you love what straight people would call "bad food?"
It tastes good, man. I don't know. I like fancy food too; I like richness in food. I don't like little flavors.

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You cover artists like Madonna and Sade. Why do you cut the refrains when you sing their songs?
That's what I do. I cover the Madonna song "Oh Father" from Like a Prayer and just take all the saddest, quietest, and weirdest lyrics.

Does being labeled a "gay singer" bother you?
Yeah, and I am a gay singer, so I can't get too mad at it. And I'm pretty explicit in my lyrics and I mean it. I feel very purposeful about it, but I think sometimes people talk about that more than the music. Still, that's what I signed up for. But I don't know—there's a duty to it. I don't mind that responsibility, no matter how small it is.

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What's the biggest misconception about you?
I guess that people always think of me as wounded and frazzled because there's a lot of vulnerability in my music. But talking about those things, to me, is very strong and brave. I don't mind saying that about myself. Someone wrote, "He makes music with the flair of the head of a drama camp." Like, shoot me. If Jack White gets emotional, people aren't like, "He seems so dramatic." Fuck you! Of course there's drama to it, but anybody who makes music needs a certain amount of drama to think [they're] good enough.

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter, and see more photos by Matthew Leifheit on his website.

Illustration by Daniela Carvalho

"A woman is taught that sex is so painful a man's penis will hurt her," my aesthetician told me in her shop in the back of a small mall in Heliopolis, a wealthy suburban neighborhood in Cairo. "That way she doesn't want to have sex and keeps her hymen intact."

Ghalia, who asked me not to use her last name, was giving me the "Bridal Works" package—peeling me, leaving not even a single flake of dead skin or body hair behind. We Egyptian women are a hirsute group, so for me this process involves a lot of breaks, a lot of deep breaths, a lot of going to my "happy place." In an alternate universe where my family had never left Egypt, I would have been sitting right here in front of Ghalia, or someone like her, preparing for my wedding night instead of researching a story.

I'd come to Egypt with one question: How do people—especially women—learn about sex in a country where sex is taboo? When I bought birth-control pills in Zamalek, an affluent part of Cairo, an Egyptian man next to me muttered, "Disgusting."

In 2010 the government dropped all sex education, the bare minimum requirement for reproductive health, because teachers were shyly skimming the curriculum anyway. Naturally, people turned to the internet: Egyptians are the second-most-likely people in the world to google "sex," but as of 2012, only 44 percent of the population had access to the web.

Egyptian mothers are notorious for avoiding the subject—prepping their daughters only for the customary wax that must take place before their wedding. They grab their daughters by the hand and take them to beauty centers. It's often only there that they can have real and honest conversations about sex, usually with women like Ghalia.

She laughed at the faces I made every time she flattened a cold ball of halawa—also called "sweet," a popular homemade wax—onto my leg, stripped it, and repeated the process. Halawa isn't exactly efficient. She had to strip the same area about three times, leaving my skin pulsating and red.

She was serious about leaving no hair behind, because Egyptian men want a hairless bride as much as they want a virgin bride. It's become a standard expectation of men in Egypt, the way oral sex has become a standard expectation among American men.

"Some girls start crying before I even begin," she said. Women are told their entire lives that this is just a part of marriage, as if any single arm hair or pubic hair looks like a defect. "One bride called her fiancé asking if she could skip the bikini wax."

"What did he say?"

"He asked her sweetly if she would do it for his sake," she recalled. "I tell them that the worst part of marriage is the sweet," she said and rolled the same hairy ball of halawa back onto my legs.

Ghalia was one of the few Egyptian women I spoke to who didn't change the subject when I brought up sex; she was used to the questions. The dynamic between Ghalia and her clients resembles the intimacy between therapists and their patients. She said she often meets women so anxious that their vaginal canals tighten to the point that penetration becomes impossible.

Dr. Wagid Boctor, a leading psychologist who appears regularly on TV, claimed this is not uncommon and told me how often he runs into women who physically can't have sex. He counsels the couple together, but also prescribes a combination of muscle relaxers and antianxiety pills.

Egypt is in dire need of sex education, and Boctor has taken on the job, at least when it comes to Egypt's Christian community. He's a pharmacist who went back to school to earn a PhD in family psychology, with a focus on sex counseling. He'd informally held the title of sex counselor for a while, offering advice to couples in his church, but in the past two years he began traveling throughout Egypt and to Dubai, teaching formal courses in Coptic Orthodox churches.

"When I ask them what the word 'sex' means to them, the response is almost uniform," he said of the high-school-age teens in his classes. "The boys start snickering, nudging each other, while the girls look down on the floor. I'm trying to change that."

He teaches four different levels of student: teenagers, college students, premarital adults, and parents. He believes that sex should be introduced at a young age as something "natural," "precious," and even "holy." He encourages questions both in front of the class and privately. He gets plenty.

"They ask about anal sex, oral sex, masturbation," he told me. Anal sex, according to Boctor, is out of the question—it's condemned in the Bible. Oral sex is OK, as long as both parties give and receive equally. Masturbation, he believes, is selfish; he focuses on mutual enjoyment of sex. Parents have protested his classes, forbidding their children from attending and berating the church for even offering it.

He's not fazed. He believes sex is a basic human need, and he witnesses firsthand how a lack of sex education is destroying lives.

Two decades ago, a woman sought his help for what she deemed a catastrophe: Her four-year-old daughter was constantly rubbing a throw pillow between her thighs. The woman tried slapping her daughter's wrists, scolding her that it was aaib—inappropriate and shameful—but her daughter wouldn't stop. In the woman's eyes, she was raising a sexual deviant.

"I explained that this was normal, counseled her mother, and the girl grew up to be just fine," he said. "She's married now."

Others aren't so lucky. Particularly in rural pockets of the country, parents—terrified and confused by their daughters' natural curiosity to explore their bodies—choose to circumcise their daughters, convinced the practice curbs sexual desire.

In Upper Egypt, a rural, impoverished, and traditional-minded part of the country, "honor" is synonymous with keeping your daughter a virgin. Men hang bloody sheets outside the morning after leilet el dokhla, or the consummation night, in a frat-boy-like ritual announcing, "I married a pure woman from a good family."

"They don't understand that desire comes from here," Boctor said, pointing to his head, "and not from the genitals."

While women are cautioned to stay away from sex, men prove their masculinity through sex.

The problem with this, of course, is that it ends up being an American Pie–esque situation where men learn everything from porn or exaggerated stories. Then, when the time comes to assert their manhood, or whatever, they often have difficulty.

They suffer from performance anxiety, which can lead to impotence or premature ejaculation, or both. Boctor described men in their 20s and 30s who pair Viagra and antianxiety meds to get erect and then be able to use that erection.

"Some get tramadol from their friends or friends of friends, quickly build a tolerance, and get addicted," Boctor told me, referring to an opioid used off-label for premature ejaculation. I immediately recognized the name because my driver had offered me the drug while also trying to sell me hash a few days earlier. It's technically legal, but police monitor it so closely that most pharmacies have stopped carrying it.

In a recent New Yorker story, Peter Hessler wrote about a garbage man who uses tramadol for sex, referring to it as the poor man's Viagra: "In truth, the drug doesn't function like Viagra, but many Egyptian men seem to believe that it does." He noted the unbalance in Egyptian homes—"the combination of men who take sex drugs and women who are circumcised and housebound."

"Sex is the number-one issue affecting marriages," Boctor said. "Even the pope [of the Coptic Church] is making sex education a requirement for any couple who want to get married."

Walking away from Boctor's apartment, I felt both lucky and uneasy. I returned to my alternate universe: I'd grown up Coptic with a saadi parent, a father from Upper Egypt, in El Badrashin, where we'd go days without running water or electricity. It's a neighborhood also known for female genital mutilation. My mother later told me she had intervened so my sister and I escaped unharmed. What if she hadn't?

My dad, like the rest of Egypt, was a victim of his environment. After 20 years in America, he wouldn't question sex-education classes in church; had I stayed in Egypt, I likely couldn't muster up the courage to ask to attend.

Those classes are only available to Christians, roughly 7 percent of the population. That leaves a big chunk of women's fate quite literally in the hands of Ghalia and other aestheticians.

"What do you say to a woman who physically can't have sex with her husband?" I asked her.

"I tell her that she has to provide him with sexual release or he'll end up with testicular cancer," she answered, wholly believing this. "She'll finally relax, and they'll have sex."

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Tyson Fury in the Team Fury HQ

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

All the best fighters come with their own legend.

From as far back as the early days of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion (who taunted whitey by flagrantly dating his women before knocking out the toughest men he could offer) and Jack Dempsey, the hobo champion who honed his trade fighting mountain men for small change, it's clear that we love some romantic context with our boxers. Think of Ali throwing his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River, Barry McGuigan's dad singing "Danny Boy" at Loftus Road, Marvin Hagler legally prefixing his name with "Marvelous," and basically everything Mike Tyson's ever done. Boxing, it's clear to see, is as much about myth as it is about sport.

It wouldn't be right to say there haven't been any legends in boxing recently—think of Vitali Klitschko facing down Putin's goons at Euromaidan, or, to a lesser extent, Kell Brook getting shanked in Tenerife. But there is a sense that there are those at the top (usually a Klitschko), and then a whole host of mandatory no marks for them to face.

However, there's one fighter who seemed to arrive as a ready-made folk hero, a six-foot-nine traveling boy with a face like an extra from The Departed, fists that could knock through a load-bearing wall and a name that doesn't seem real: Tyson. Fury.

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Still only 26 years old, Fury has become the cult star of British sport, the underground antihero I doubt we'll be seeing at this year's Pride of Britain Awards. Despite being one of the biggest draws in his division, his fame exists in a different realm to your Hoys, your Farahs, your Gerrards and even your Frochs. It exists on YouTube, on Sky Sports 4, in the still-printed pages of the old-school tabloids—and absolutely nowhere near Sports Personality of the Year.

The reasons for his exclusion from the world of mainstream sport are clear to see. He isn't Frank Bruno, the dignified British bruiser, still humble in the big time. He is outrageous, offensive, ungrateful. He called Wladimir Klitschko, the world heavyweight champion and an avid humanitarian, a "pussy" and a "shithouse." David Price, often characterized as the UK's most humble boxer, is merely a "scouse prick" in Fury's eyes

He is a deeply religious man, his beliefs manifesting themselves in a sort of visceral, Old-Testament kind of way. He drives on the hard shoulder of the M6 and fights Eastern Europeans on Channel 5. He is the bastard child of Rocky Graziano, Paul Sykes, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, and Tyler, The Creator: uncompromising, uncontrollable and utterly compelling.

Even as a close follower of his work (both in and out of the ring), I find him almost impossible to make sense of – a fighter and a man of gleeful contradictions. Sometimes he calls himself the fiercest, best looking man in boxing, other times he's a "useless lump of lard." He's been painted as a showboater, a homophobe, a bully, a bullshitter, a Muslim convert, a minor celebrity and a secretly brilliant sportsman. He once punched himself in the face during a fight. He is, in his own words, "a brash, outspoken gypsy warrior."

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I'd come to the outskirts of Bolton, where a media event would be taking place in the days leading up to Fury's next fight—the winner of which would be named the mandatory challenger for the world heavyweight title. Tyson was coming off the back of a tough (but still undefeated) 18 months; at the end of 2013 he briefly retired, incensed that David Haye had pulled out of their scheduled fight for a second time. Fury claimed that the cancelled fight left him broke and that Haye's "arse was flapping in his trousers," while Haye blamed injury. Whatever the reason, it left a bitter taste in both Fury's mouth.

But a few fights later (including a hard-fought second win against Derek Chisora), and Fury is only one match away from a world title shot against either Klitschko or Deontay Wilder, the young American with nearly as many knockouts as professional fights (Fury calls him "big bollocks" and claims he can't wait to fight him).

It seems that for all the ridicule and abuse leveled at him over his career, the boy from Wythenshawe had more than risen to every challenge. That he was now standing, if not quite on the threshold of greatness, then at least on its doormat, wiping his boots.

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Fury's shot at glory is being run out of this place, an old pub in the shadow of the West Pennines. Now converted into "Team Fury," it doubled up as both a gym and Tyson's living quarters in the run up to a fight. With the old signage still hanging, the only clues that this was now the HQ of a professional athlete were the frosted windows and Team Fury insignia—a perfect example of the low-key outlook that only serves to enhance Fury's cult hero status.

To put things in perspective, Wladimir Klitschko—the man who holds most of the belts Fury wants to win—trains at facilities in the grounds of a five-star hotel at the foot of the Wilder Kaiser Mountain in rural Austria. There are "energy centres," outdoor pools and horse-drawn carriages onsite, which would surely please his movie star fiancee.

Many boxing heads will tell you that Fury is the man Klitschko least wants to face for his title defense; he's just too up for it, they say—too unpredictable, too hungry, perhaps. Suburban Bolton might not be the most glamorous training spot on earth, but it's not going to strip him of any of the raw power and thirst for victory that keeps him winning.

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And if training for a title shot in a converted pub doesn't seem quintessentially Tyson Fury enough, the gym is directly opposite a pasty shop and flanked by a pizza/kebab emporium and a still-functioning pub. For somebody who's been criticized for his weight throughout his career—as well as admitting to having more than a little penchant for the sauce—Fury isn't exactly distancing himself from his demons.

Then again, you get the impression that he finds all this quite funny, and if the gym's proximity to these deep fried forbidden fruits isn't intentional, it's a coincidence he would surely find amusing. A heavyweight fighter, training for a big shot against a European behemoth, opposite a pasty shop in Bolton. It's like Rocky IV reimagined by Peter Kay. It's pure, pure Tyson Fury.

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The gym itself is decorated with pictures of boxing heroes gone by; both household name champions like Dempsey, Robinson and Louis, but also fighters whose names ring out in the Irish Traveller community that Tyson hails from. Fighters like Uriah "Big Just" Burton and Bartley "King of the Gypsies" Gorman, the one time "hardest man in Britain" and subject of an early Shane Meadows film.

Tyson himself was never on the bare knuckle circuit, but he very much comes from that tradition and fights not unlike a bare knuckle man, utilizing a philosophy that is as much about heart, fearlessness and stamina as big punches or steeled abs.

Hunkering down with him in the camp are his father and his uncle, both former fighters (Bare Knuckle and Queensbury), as well as a few brothers, cousins and second cousins, all of whom are up-and-coming fighters. As his father John Fury will later tell me: "There are no builders, no bricklayers, in this family—we're all fighting men."

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We're kept waiting for the Fury team while they finish their lunch in an unspecified location. Milling about the gym are his manager, a team of British Muslim guys from Stockton On Tees who seem to be sponsoring Tyson through their customized boxing glove business and a few of the local kids who train here when Team Fury aren't planning their scalping of a world champion.

The Sky and BBC cameras that had assembled to meet Fury didn't seem to know what to make of his extended entourage in the gym today. It wasn't that it was unprofessional (all boxers are late, all have their entourages), but there seemed to be a refreshingly laissez-faire attitude towards the proceedings. Here was one of the top contenders in international boxing, training in an old pub on the outskirts of Bolton, letting a bunch of kids mess around on the equipment while the nation's media assembled before them. A hater might call it amateurish, but surely anyone else would find it charming, which isn't a word you hear in boxing very often.

Calling to mind boxers who come from a dynasty—like "Irish" Mickey Ward, for instance, later immortalized in The Fighter—Tyson seems to be very much a community fighter. A man who sticks with his family, uninterested in award ceremonies and branded content deals. A real local hero. The whole thing was quite heartening to see.

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While we were waiting, one of the younger lads, 11-year-old Kai from Manchester, gave us a demonstration of what he'd been working on in the gym.

"We got him training here because it's the best place for him. He's been fighting 12- and 13-year-olds way bigger than him, and they keep pulling out because they've seen him on YouTube," his proud dad told me. "On the weekends, he busks in Manchester with his skipping rope. Makes £100 a day."

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I ask young Kai if Tyson ever helps him out with his training.

"He came down a couple of Sundays ago," he said. "I was shadowboxing for a bit and came out the ring. He said, 'How old are you?' I told him I was 11, and he said I'd be the next world champion in ten years."

Watching him hit the pads, it wasn't hard to share Tyson's optimism about the guy.

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Tyson Fury being mic'ed up

Eventually, the Fury crew rolled in: Tyson, his dad, his uncle, assorted brothers and cousins, and his sparring partners. It was obvious they were taking a certain glee in making us wait, and for all the down-to-earth, family feel of the gym, there was also a canny media operation at play here. Tyson seemed to find the whole thing pretty amusing as they wired him up under his tight red lycra, surely aware of the hold that he has over these people, surely aware that he looked just a little bit ridiculous, this hulking gypsy warrior turned out like a Canal Street podium dancer. But that's what Tyson is: a little bit ridiculous.

He looked in better shape than I'd seen him before; the belly he'd taken great delight in not caring about seemed to have been lost to the past. He doesn't have the Men's Health cover star body that Deontay Wilder has, but he's leaner than the critics give him credit for—and, aside from that, strikingly handsome (yet definitely not pretty), as well as being imbued with an astonishing physical and personal charisma. Fury is a star, and he knows it.

The embittered, vinegar-throated old fight hacks, some of whom looked like they were nursing a Travelodge-bar hangover, seemed enamored with him, poking at him to get the juiciest quotes and taking selfies to show their mates. Watching the fanfare, he reminded me not of any boxer of recent times, but of a pop star from just south of here: Robbie Williams. A cheeky, slightly out of shape, good looking northern lad who had somehow earned the chance to take on the world, and was going to milk it for every drop. A fight against Klitschko would surely be his Knebworth.

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My turn came to speak to him. I'd been promised 20 minutes, but in his presence every minute feels twice as long. In person, I found he gives off an air of tongue-just-about-in-cheek confidence, rather than the vulgar chest-beating and trash-talking he's often accused (and often guilty) of. He's polite, funny, intelligent, not too easily offended. I got the impression he was tired of answering the same questions about his opponent, his regime, the likelihood of fighting Klitschko... so I took a swing and asked him how much of his persona is real and how much is show.

"I just be myself, and if people don't like it, they can stick it, really. I'm not that interested in what people think of me," he shrugged.

Does he think he's made the sport more interesting with all his shenanigans?

"Boxers do the same thing: they punch somebody, they go to a gym, they train for a bit. But I don't think boxing should be boring; I think it's one of the hardest sports in the world, so why shouldn't the guys be outspoken and controversial? Not just being a stupid dummy and getting punched in the face. Muhammed Ali didn't do all that, Floyd Mayweather didn't do that—so why should I?"

But does all the controversy turn people against him? Judging from the sheer amount of time he spends calling out his haters on Twitter, it's evident he has a few. So what is it about him that winds people up?

"I think it's my arrogance and cockiness, and the fact that I'm undefeated and that I keep winning that drives people crazy. And I keep rubbing it in as well—salt in the wounds. It's very good for me to upset people and torment them. My success drives people's jealousy. I hope I become so successful that I drive everyone insane," he said with a sharky grin.

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Is it this seemingly endless confidence that lies behind his success so far?

"Confidence is the key to winning all fights, because a confident man is a winner. If you're negative and down in the ring, your opponent can see that. But if you're confident, and you're ready, then he's not gonna be so brave."

And is it this confidence that the likes of Haye and now Klitschko appear to be running scared of?

"I do think Klitschko's running scared of me, and he has done for a while, otherwise he would've fought me already."

But what are they running scared of, exactly?

"My unpredictability. It's very hard to prepare against somebody like me: you don't know whether I'm orthodox, southpaw... You don't know if I'm gonna come forward. They never can tell what I'm about to do, and that's what makes me so hard to prepare for, and why fighters don't wanna fight me. If you have three orthodox sparring partners, say, you'd also have to have three southpaws as well. I'm a crazy kind of person to train for."

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John Fury

Tyson wasn't exactly modest while appraising his own abilities—or the abilities of his future opponents—but he seemed quieter, more focused, more polite than I'd seen him in press conferences before. He hadn't called anyone a pussy, for one. Compared to how he can be, he was behaving like a hotel bellboy.

Some of this is surely down to the reemergence of his father in his life. John Fury is an ex-fighter himself—and a good one, too, going by the moniker "Gipsy" and facing up against English world champ Henry Akinwande in the early 90s. However, in 2011 he was jailed for gouging out the eye of a man named Oathie Sykes at a car auction. John served four years of his 11-year sentence for what he described at the time as "a fair fight between traveling people."

I asked him how it is being back in his son's life after watching his last few fights from prison. "It's a wonderful, wonderful feeling," he said. "I've got a second chance at life. It's like having cancer and getting the all-clear—it's on that sort of level for me. I'm here to provide relaxation of the mind. My brother [Tyson's trainer, Peter] has the boxing side covered, and he's doing a great job at what he does. I don't think I could do a better job; he's transformed a British fighter into a world fighter in two and a half years, and that's a feat on its own. But I'm hoping to relax my son's mind and get him to behave in the manner of a world champion.

"Sometimes he flares up, but it's only frustration. A lot's gone on in his life, and he's entitled to be like that from time to time. He's not perfect—he tips tables over, sometimes he swears, says the wrong things, but we've been through all that. He's got to look at life in a different manner, to not get so pent up about what people think of him. I tell him, 'If things aren't going your way, take it on the chin. Be patient.'"

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It's easy to mistake this kind of talk for PR chat—John playing the nice-guy card for the cameras. But I couldn't help but see a genuine sincerity in what he was saying. I wondered if these were lessons he'd learned in his own life.

"When I was a young man, I was a wild man," he told me. "I didn't fear anything. I thought that whatever I'd meet in my life, I'd meet it head on; never take a step back. But only a fool would think like that, and I've learnt that from my own life."

Does he think Tyson can fulfill the glory he never quite reached in his own fighting career?

"My son will reign as heavyweight champion of the world for many years, and the proof in the pudding is there," he said, adamantly. "He's a talent and a half. He's a gigantic fella. He's quick, fast, tough and he's a natural fighting man. He comes from a fighting stock."

I'm interested in this notion of "fighting stock." Obviously there are a lot of fighters within the family, but can John envisage a time in which Furys won't have to fight? Is it all just a means to a better life?

"All I can say about that is that if you've not got the talent to be a world class fighter, then don't bother with any kind of fighting. It's a mug's game. I'll say that because I've learnt that from the inside and the outside, but you only learn that when you get to this age and have been through what I've been through. If you can't excel in your sport, do something else—that's what I say."

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Through talking to John, I'd come to understand a different side to his son, one different to those we already know: the showboater, the thug and the comedian.

He told me that Tyson was a quiet kid who "loved McDonalds and riding in cars—the normal things teenagers do. He was actually the only one in our family who I didn't think would be a fighter, because of the kind of person he was. Tyson's had his parental guidance. I've always been there for him, but I got put away. If you're used to your dad always being there, and then he's not, how you gonna react? One thing I did say to him was, 'Stay out of trouble; don't get a criminal record.'"

Tyson might be from a traveling family that's had its fair share of scrapes with the law. But, if anything, he's the quiet, athletically centerd, goody-two-shoes of the bunch. He's never been to prison and his controversies have all been legitimate. He's a sportsman from a dynasty of street-fighters, and I wonder if the pressures that arise from such a situation play heavy on his shoulders.

For all his cocky bravado in reaction to the criticism he's faced, I wonder if part of it gets to him after all. Maybe the real Tyson Fury is the 26-year-old lad from Manchester who loves McDonalds, whose real fight is being accepted by the world he wants to sit atop.

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Fury seems to be a kind of outsider not just in the boxing world, but in the wider world as well. I overheard a young reporter from a local paper ask him about his relationship with Manchester—where he was born and raised.

Fury bitterly responded with: "Manchester's never had any time for me, and I've never had any time for Manchester; it's a kind of pact we seem to have. I'm not representing any country, any city—I'm representing me."

I wonder how much being a half-British, half-Irish, all-Traveller plays in this lack of interest in nationality or hometown allegiances.

Interestingly, many of the people around Fury appear (including his manager, Asif Vali) to be Muslims. He briefly grew a beard and started mentioning prayers and Islamic ceremonies on Twitter. This seemed odd, coming from a previously committed Catholic, and many assumed he'd converted. But spending time within the camp, I realized that may have come about because he's surrounded by Islamic culture, with these friends, in this part of the world. So perhaps his flirtations with the faith were a kind of tribute to them. That maybe this band of Travellers and Muslims had bonded in their community's common exile from the mainstream of British life. Team Fury seemed to be a kind of stateless group whose only real home is in the gym and the ring.

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Eventually the questions were halted and the main event was upon us: the sparring session. I'd never seen a professional boxer in such an intimate setting before, and as the preparation rituals got underway it wasn't hard to notice a change in the man. The showiness was replaced by a cool focus. He seemed to distance himself from what was going on in the room, gravitating instead towards the guidance of his uncle. Kai was watching on, the young apprentice searching for the lessons which could make his future in the sport.

It wouldn't be over-egging it to say there seemed to be an air of real anticipation around the sparring, like we were about to see something that we'd be recounting in late night pub debates for years to come: "Tyson Fury? I saw him spar once."

Even the proper boxing hacks—who probably go to events like this a few times a week—seemed excited, salivating at the prospect of seeing the beast in anywhere smaller than a football stadium. Even with head-guards on, the room was amok with bloodlust and butterflies.

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/02/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/25/' filename='tyson-fury-boxings-new-folk-hero-body-image-1424822808.jpg' id='30559']

It started off rather guarded, Tyson exchanging jabs with his sparring partners, Sean Turner—a wide-as-he-is-tall contender from Dublin, and the very picture of a professional brawler—and Marcin Rekowski, a quiet but highly rated Polish fighter with a speed comparable to a man far younger than his 37 years.

Marcin was wearing a head-guard, but neither Tyson nor Sean were. I asked Tyson's manager, Asif, why exactly Turner wasn't wearing one, considering he was there to be punched in the face all day.

"He's Irish—he doesn't care about getting hit," was his response.

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As the bouts wore on, Tyson's style became more apparent. This was only sparring, but with his partners clearly chosen to mimic the weight and height of his opponent, it was obvious that we were at a dress rehearsal for the real thing. I noticed Tyson's blows, which seemed almost innocuous at first, beginning to weigh down on his opponents. You could see the fatigue in their eyes, the "not another of one of these" in their knees with every hit, jab, hook, and uppercut (his best shot, I'd say) that landed clean. They were beginning to hurt.

The interesting thing about Fury's style is that for all his size and strength, he's not actually a power puncher. He doesn't punch anything like his namesake, Mike. His hits are bruising. They seem to send refraction waves through even the biggest of bodies, but they aren't crash, bang, wallop knockout hits. Some commentators have noted this as an embarrassment—that he's not as big a hitter as he might think. But the truth is that while Tyson is a talented boxer, his prowess comes from a very different kind of quality: heart.

As fights go on, Tyson gets better. He comes into his stride, whereas his opponents begin to stutter and mis-hit. He starts to enjoy himself. His shots, which once seemed conservative, suddenly seem wild and devastating. He stands taller, hits harder, moves his head more. He starts to look magnificent, like the fighter he claims to be. It comes from a natural stamina, but it also comes from his heart. And when John Fury says his son has got what it takes to be the champion, I think it's these qualities he's talking about, rather than his actual boxing technique. It's a style that you'll see in many a gypsy fighter, but not too many modern heavyweights. And that is perhaps what sets Fury apart.

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But is all that traveling-man bravado and sentimental "heart of a lion, never gives up" stuff really going to guide him through against a Teutonic machine like Christian Hammer, let alone Wilder or Klitschko? Are the big-bollock boys simply just too fit, too professional, too studied to falter to this rather old-fashioned style?

I really can't say. Having watched most of Tyson's fights, there is an element of getting through on a wing and a prayer in some of them (mind you, I have seen him dominate, too). Having said that, there is this sense that he might just be able to do it. That he's got enough about him—enough power and enough determination and enough madness to see him beat a freight train, let alone a man a couple of inches shorter than him.

I think the question is not whether he can beat the top boys in the division, but whether anyone can beat him. Not because he's unbeatable, but rather that he will not lose. He's either totally fallible, or near invincible. Anything in between wouldn't quite be right. Fury might not be the best boxer in the world, but it's going to take a hell of a man to tell him otherwise.

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Only time will tell where Tyson Fury will be viewed in the annals of boxing history when all is said and done. Will he reign at the top for years as his father believes? Or will he become a side note, a Question of Sport mystery guest, the future answer to an ItBox question about that British heavyweight whose title shot was knocked back by one of the big boys? A nearly-man, a heavyweight Ricky Hatton?

But maybe that doesn't matter too much, because his place in our folklore is all but assured. Whatever happens to him as a fighter, we'll surely be reminding ourselves of "Tyson Fury, the brash, outspoken gypsy warrior who took on the world and called Wladimir Klitschko a shithouse" for years to come. The movie they inevitably make about his life might even be better with an ending like that.

But Tyson Fury has ambitions far beyond being just a folk hero, because he's already that. He wants to be the world champion, and god knows he might just do it.

Tyson Fury's fight against Christian Hammer takes place on February 28 at the O2 Arena, London.

Tickets are on sale for Risky Business, priced at £50, £75, £100 and £250 + booking fees, from eventim.co.uk and 0844 249 1000 or AXS.com and 0844 824 4824.

BoxNation will televise live and exclusive on Sky 437/HD 490, Virgin 546 and Talk Talk 525.

Follow Clive on Twitter.

[body_image width='983' height='1254' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='envoy-idle-day-915-body-image-1425050766.jpg' id='31529']

[body_image width='983' height='1254' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='envoy-idle-day-915-body-image-1425050785.jpg' id='31530']Look at Lane Milburn's website and get his book from Fantagraphics.

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The author's newly digital self

A decade is a difficult amount of time to define. For fruit flies and children, it's pretty much forever. If you subtract my first seven years of existence—I mostly remember them as indiscreet bodily functions—ten years is also a third of my life. For the internet, quietly born in 1969, ten years is a lot or a little depending on which years you're talking about. Many of the early ones were uneventful, but the last decade can only be called revolutionary.

It's too bad I missed the whole thing.

The digital realm waits for no man. When I was sentenced to serve 12 years in prison, I knew that the earliest I would be online again was in 123 months. Released a year ago, after ten years and three months, my minor in computer studies did me no good. The 21st century is no longer as fresh as it was in 2003; there's been a sea change that overwhelmed me when I returned to the real world.

The internet was once confined, but while I was inside, it managed a daring escape. Cell phones with mobile computing have brought the web to the dinner table. Social media is a new human interaction zone, which already has its own etiquette, rules, and values. It's taken for granted now that along with a camera and music player, the entire sum of human accomplishment might be found in anyone's pocket.

In prison in upstate New York, I met plenty of slow adapters who never learned to type, use a computer, or—in extreme cases—read. They lost track of the world the moment they were cuffed. Armed with magazine subscriptions to fight the obsolescence I teetered over, I read New York magazine to know what was cool, at least in broad strokes. Music criticism tantalized me with entire styles that I couldn't hear; New York state had built its prisons in rural areas, far from the broadcasters of electroclash and bhangra. Convicts are only allowed cassettes, meaning classic rock, country music, and dated hip-hop are the chief genres available to them. Some of the 12 prisons I visited were in range of college radio stations, which allowed me to catch up a bit, but it was innovations in technology that were hardest to stay abreast of.

I read every issue of Wired and gleaned what I could from new arrivals with Facebook experience. Despite catching sight of a flat screen television and illicitly fingering a cop's touchscreen, I felt modern life slipping away from me. It didn't help that my peers were the least techno-savvy slice of American society; they would have called themselves Luddites, had they known the term.

I was born in 1978; my cohort was the last American generation not to have a social life dominated by digital tools. I never found a parent-less house party by mobile phone. I never nervously emailed a crush, and I never gossiped about school in chat rooms. BBSes were for nerds, printed schoolwork for kiss-asses, and I used pay phones so much that I liked to think I was buying beer with quarters saved thanks to the trick of making an external connection with a paperclip, thus avoiding the 25-cent fee for a local call. Beepers were used to sell drugs, but when I struck the dealer's pose at 18, I couldn't afford a proper one. My pager had no screen, and beeped mysteriously if I was left a voicemail. Raves were advertised with gorgeous flyers, and I knew all of my friends' phone numbers by heart. Still do.

Last February, there was a tablet in the car that took me home. The availability of information has thrilled me ever since. I gorged on the internet, which worked so much better than before! There was no denying that Wikipedia excelled compared to my beloved and leather-bound Britannica. Even my father's 1890's Bruckhaus encyclopedia cannot compete, and there are 130 Teutonically organized volumes of it. Porn is free now, and way more intense. I was so curious about those two girls and a cup when I could only read about them, and now I can never forget what I saw.

I'm smart enough to stay away from the games; enough of my time is eaten by social media as it is. Facebook played an enormous role in reconnecting with friends and networking. An ex-con has no better ally, and with some strategy he can tell his story himself. For a career, like mine, that requires an audience, digital exposure is a gift. Skype let me lecture to a Vancouver university's philosophy department when both the rules of parole and Canadian law forbid it. Every film and television show I missed is available. Every site lets me leave a comment. I even tweet.

But while it may seem that I enjoy these developments, the reality is more complicated. A metaphor is illustrative: In Escape from LA, Snake Plissken is played by Kurt Russell in a dashing eyepatch. He obtains a device that can turn off all the power around the globe, ushering in another Dark Age. Entering the numbers 666 will do the trick, and instead of returning this doomsday button to the president, he presses it.

I'd press it twice just to make sure.

Navigating the web is not my issue. I can vanquish a captcha after only a few attempts, and I do not fear the singularity and resultant apocalypse, whether of AI, nano, environmental, or other variety. But the web is part of everyday life now. Search engines settle every bar bet, yet deny the ice-breaking bar chatter that may have warmed your bed that night. The art of description is replaced with the accuracy of photography and video—more exact, less compelling. Facebook makes sure that no one misses my birthday while eradicating its meaning. The program is the one sending me cards; relying on the feature, my friends have long forgotten the actual date. I prefer a smaller handful to think of me than a wave of wishes from people who deign to press a button. Our information flows in a broader river than ever before, but it's so shallow. Keeping the digital realm largely confined to desktop cages once contained this devolution, but no more.

Becoming a prisoner means an erosion of identity: Numbers are used as names and uniforms replace clothes. Men scrawl mottos on prison walls in a bid for self-expression. Limited minds repetitively vandalize with slurs; inevitably someone is reported performing fellatio, sometimes with illustrations. I contributed, even though I can't draw.

In ironic states of mind I wrote "Yale '96" under the Blood tags and Latin King mementoes. When feeling earnest, I quoted Cicero, Omnia Mea Mecum Porto. It fit so well, as all that was mine I carried with me, up in my noggin. Before prison, my learning made me "well-rounded" with those who liked me, "erudite" in polite conversation, and a "wise-ass know-it-all" behind my back. Inside, where 68 percent of state prison convicts do not have a high school education, I was basically a genius.

However, upon my release I found that the sum of a lifetime processing information merely made me good at Jeopardy. Conundrums I once impressed girls by solving were easily figured out by smartphones. Arcane vocabulary in obscure tongues, the ability to thank waiters in Latvian, listing Hapsburg dominions—it was all available to anyone who could type. Via handheld devices, the internet reached out and took Omnia mea by giving it away. I'll never forgive it.

Adjusting to life after double-digit sentences was considered challenging enough that I took a class in it, perversely taught by men with 20 years inside. Even though they were the least qualified because of their decades away from society, the job had perks, so old-timers claimed it. In the class, I was shown how to balance a checkbook and warned of reentry difficulties. In prison, men turn their silverware in with great care, as losing a fork can mean 90 days in solitary. We were told anecdotes about released convicts handing their mothers spoons after meals. Crossing the street was supposed to scare me. Crowds and technology were said to be overwhelming. Granted, the cell phone in my pocket on the day I was arrested in 2003 was a black-and-white Hyundai (I think they've given up on that business) and passersby did get closer to me than inmates would, but this was nothing compared to social media. Adjusting habits only required observation, but I had a whole new arena to master.

Ten years of voraciously reading had worked, as much as possible, to keep me from falling behind. Communication with family, watching the right things on television (the news and The Office, rather than videos and sports), listening to radio and asking new arrivals all helped, but I lacked the internet's power. I hadn't been online since Compuserve worked.

It didn't seem like things could have changed much. Before my time in prison the world had laptop computers and cameras and address books and Blackberries already. But what's new is the interpersonal software, and what's shocking is how quickly and totally society has absorbed its presence. Adult social life is no less mediated by digital help. I was once invited to parties and RSVP'd by phone. Event pages perform that function today, but their interactivity makes them much more than the digital version of a preexisting thing. I can see who else was invited, who declined, and whether my friends are welcome. Googling someone is a digital background check, but once again, the information doesn't just flow one way. Expecting to be researched, I groom my image and control its presentation. This is important for those with criminal records—thanks to the press, we usually have less say in the matter. Knowing this, I maintain a website telling my own story, along with a Wikipedia entry. Having seen men serve decades under misspelled names, I know the importance of image control.

Etiquette around things digital has developed in silence, with everyone taking for granted that it's common knowledge. As a result I made several faux pas in the beginning; some of my victims were understanding, knowing about my absence, and some were not. I was taught fast lessons in the propriety of pasting things on people's Facebook walls and posting photographs without permission. I did my best by asking questions when I wasn't sure, and managed to present my explosive debacle of 2003 in the best light to those who didn't know. Facebook let me back into the world in a way impossible before it, and I only got blocked by one ex. Of course, she has a felony herself—Google works both ways.

I didn't mind giving up some privacy, especially when living off my pen, to advertise my side of the story. I learned the rules and accepted that my stock of superficial knowledge was just trivia now. But I remember a world without a digital layer with fondness. Perhaps I miss a smaller pond where I was a bigger fish, or merely resent unearned omniscience after learning to count in Turkish. But I know you can't fight the future. How can you go back?

There's a way, actually. I just don't want to.

Follow Daniel Genis on Twitter.

[body_image width='950' height='577' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='what-i-learned-from-talking-to-robot-version-of-myself-on-twitter-303-body-image-1425039855.jpg' id='31443']Illustration by Dan Evans.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Listen, it's no big deal or anything (it is; it is a very enormous deal), but I got a verified blue tick on Twitter last week. A lot of people—my girlfriend, especially—have told me that I do not deserve this accolade and the various perks that come with it: the special Uber car that has a blue tick vinyled on its side and is a Mercedes and is also free, Biz Stone calling you up and telling you how great you are, a special button that sends a trained marksman to go and assault anyone who disagrees with you online, all the blowjobs.

But I argue that, actually, I very much do deserve it. And people—again, my girlfriend being among the most vocal of these—say: "No, you are nobody. You are a turd person. I don't even know who you are, and I live with you. Who are you? Who are you?"

All in all it's been a humbling experience.

Historically, the blue tick was something that demarcates an actual celebrity from one of their parody accounts: the difference between @CarltonCole1 and @_CarltonCole9, for instance, or the difference between Nicki Minaj and one of those @da_real_nicki accounts that just posts motivational posters and cloyingly encouraging Tumblr quotes. It is a badge that says, "I am the plain-named X Factor contestant everyone is talking about, not all the other ones." It is a tick that says, "I am going to send you a lot of links to iTunes."

Now that Twitter has realized it needs to have a semi-symbiotic relationship with the large media companies that use its service to distribute their blazing hot content, you have it so nobody journalists who mainly write about shitting in swimming pools are on the same blue tick pantheon as, say, Justin Bieber. (For what it's worth, only two things that have changed since I've had a blue tick: There's an extra button on my app so I can filter out replies scum like you who don't have blue ticks, and a load of amateur rappers whose bios all say "#Musician and #Entrepreneur! Trying to get @verified!" now follow me on Twitter. That's it. Those are the only two changes. (I cannot help you, rappers. Please leave me alone.)

The point is, in order to truly feel like I had earned my blue tick, I needed a Twitter account to pretend to be me so that my many tens of fans would know that the Joel Golby with the blue tick is the real Joel Golby (me), while the imposter Joel Golby was just some joke account. Sadly, no human alive wants to waste even one second of their short and finite life pretending to be me, even as a joke, so I got my friend Felix to make a robot version instead.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a bot sending another bot a voucher code for a children's clothing store in Dumfries—forever. Thankfully, we can bring that nightmarish vision of our near future forward with surprising ease, because turning your every random thought into a monstrous doppelganger-esque robot is a piece of piss. Here's what you do:

You ask Felix to make you a bot, he does some stuff with Ruby (whatever that is) and then you download your Twitter archive and send it to him and then he does the rest. If you're that way inclined (i.e. you know what PERL is and you have a Google Alert set up for "it is now legal to marry a computer") there are fuller instructions here.

Anyway, and lo, like Aphrodite springing from the foam that formed in the sea around her father's severed genitals, a robot version of me was born. Basically: It scrapes my old tweets and conjoins two ends of them together—like how an alternate timeline Harry Redknapp might sell you a used car—to try and make sentences that make sense. It then tweets either once an hour or whenever someone replies to it, and the results alternate between the nonsensical and the Dalai Lama-esque.

Like, look: the beautiful:

[tweet text="It went down and I don't want to move." byline="— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)" user_id="joeIgolby" tweet_id="570423804628996096" tweet_visual_time="February 25, 2015"]

[tweet text="not a single PR has sent a really good e-mail." byline="— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)" user_id="joeIgolby" tweet_id="568276549394423808" tweet_visual_time="February 19, 2015"]

And the profane:

[tweet text="Want carbs but do a spellcheck you're going to see them retweeted every day until you die" byline="— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)" user_id="joeIgolby" tweet_id="570438904509280258" tweet_visual_time="February 25, 2015"]

There's a danger to this, though, as the Dutch owner of an _ebooks Twitter bot found out last week. From cobbling together Jeffry van der Goot's tweets, a robot version of him managed to say, "I seriously want to kill people," which led to the police turning up at Jeffry 1.0's door and suggesting that maybe he delete the murder robot. To that end, the programming community promotes a vague nu-Asimov's Law etiquette for bots that, though it doesn't stop them from becoming Skynet-style self-aware and firing rockets at them, at least stops them being less annoying to people as they try to go about their daily social media lives.

Anyway, while a robot was issuing vague death threats to the Dutch, an alternate version of me was trying to intimate that I have a medically shrunken penis:

[tweet text="Just got back from two hours of football in the freezing March cold #nomorepenis" byline="— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)" user_id="joeIgolby" tweet_id="570566321739603968" tweet_visual_time="February 25, 2015"]

I suppose it's all to do with the original content. Seeing as it just regurgitates words I frequently use or entire turns of phrase (apparently I tweet about my penis shrinking down to a thimble on the regular) my bot tweets, undeniably, in my "voice," which can actually be a bit disconcerting. It reminds me uncomfortably of something I might shout in a fever dream: words I say, in the way I say them, but fired through a prism that completely removes context. I guess this is the kind of thing I would say if I lost my mind and started shitting myself into adult-sized Pampers in some sort of futuro nursing home, squawking about Mario Gotze's pubes and complex carbohydrates while a doctor slowly injects me with a lethal dose of pentobarbital. This is the way my life ends: not with a bang, but with me whispering, "I HAD TO SEE A CROTCH HOLE!"

[tweet text="I mean fucking hell the girls are basically building Kryton" byline="— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)" user_id="joeIgolby" tweet_id="570469105364541440" tweet_visual_time="February 25, 2015"]

[tweet text="bringing you triple-X pants talk since the start of his Geography class" byline="— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)" user_id="joeIgolby" tweet_id="570393604268670977" tweet_visual_time="February 25, 2015"]

[tweet text="just went to the bathroom to weep and peel it out." byline="— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)" user_id="joeIgolby" tweet_id="569891504124264448" tweet_visual_time="February 23, 2015"]

Sometimes, annoyingly, it's just straight-up funnier than I am:

[tweet text="RIGHT, WE ASK: would Kevin James be a movie star if he wasn't such a FATTY?" byline="— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)" user_id="joeIgolby" tweet_id="570042507633033216" tweet_visual_time="February 24, 2015"]

But mainly, it shares the same themes. Two of the main things I am obsessed with—Lou Bega and my non-existent legacy following my inevitably early death—are both summed up in this tweet:

[tweet text="hit the ground, Lou Bega will endure, and I will be a footnote" byline="— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)" user_id="joeIgolby" tweet_id="569754315939811328" tweet_visual_time="February 23, 2015"]

People who work in creative agencies and Javier Mascherano's tattered asshole are also firmly in "my wheelhouse":

[tweet text=" @joelgolby COOL CREATIVE WITH A PONYTAIL: Yo, can we have some stats about Javier Mascherano's torn anus?" byline="— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)" user_id="joeIgolby" tweet_id="568493160332193792" tweet_visual_time="February 19, 2015"]

Shitting myself? Doing the splits? Something like that? Either way, I probably ruin three pairs of jeans a year just by falling over really solidly onto my knees on the pavement, so this is pretty accurate.

[tweet text="retroactively ruining my own trousers." byline="— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)" user_id="joeIgolby" tweet_id="569185485173751810" tweet_visual_time="February 21, 2015"]

Then there's this: my own self-worth scraped thin and exposed for the world to see; the true essence of my identity, knocked around the Twitter echo chamber like a squash ball.

[tweet text="Those who don't like me, you're a month behind the curve: #cooldude" byline="— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)" user_id="joeIgolby" tweet_id="568367148919353344" tweet_visual_time="February 19, 2015"]

It's strange to know that your life is divided into themes—death, carbs, humiliation, Lou Bega. Also strange to see long-dead and mostly useless thought trains dredged up anew. For instance, here's that time I got really mad because a Kickstarter I'd only backed to be polite had been resolutely not completed by the dicklord who undertook it; here's that afternoon I got really sad about scratching my Ray-Bans; here's that time I watched that Isabella Rossellini duck fuckin' video about six times in a row.

In a way, you could argue, Robogolby is a study in intertextuality: that everything that will be said has already been said; all we are doing with our mouths and our fingers is rehashing and amalgamating old thoughts into something vaguely new; that nobody has had an original idea in their head for over a thousand years. On the other hand, Golb-bot has dredged up a lot of strange, fragmented memories about Isabella Rossellini wriggling into a gigantic concentric duck vagina, reminding me: Man, you think about some trash.

With your Facebook feed now essentially just screenshots of other people's Timehop pages ("Relive my mundane memories," you are saying every time you post from Timehop. "Relive that time I went to Brighton and it was quite gray, but not gray enough to not go in the sea"), we're coming to the point where the internet is feasibly old enough to get misty-eyed and nostalgic about. And, as a generation, we're narcissistic enough to heave great importance on the swathing, zig-zagging path we make across the web. In a way, it's a shared nostalgia—"Heh, remember this thing I did? You saw me do it the first time and here is me doing it again"—that could hint to the way we share memories in years to come.

Is this how our lives will be marked out? Instead of photo albums, will we print and mount all the Twitter arguments we ever had with the Waitrose corporate account? When we try to relate to our teenage children in some vague and distant future, will we bequeath them a bound archive of our completed Buzzfeed quizzes and a load of Instagram photos of us wearing leather jackets ("Mommy used to be cool, look!"), which they won't even read because they will have invented new and unique ways to take heroin by then? Are the best days of our youth completely over, and is the only thing left to do look back?

I would say: yes. My bot would say: "there's no need for a thing."

Follow Joel, RoboJoel, and Dan on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Penetration testing isn't, as the name might suggest, a Babeland rep hurling a dildo at a giant rubber vagina as a quality control procedure. It's when a group of experienced parkour runners are hired to break out of a prison to see whether there are any faults in the building's security. In most cases, it turns out, there are.

Security companies that build maximum security prisons, mental facilities, and the homes of the paranoid super-wealthy will hire these parkour professionals from Parkour Generations, the only company in the UK to offer this service. Their guys will then be dumped in the middle of the prison and asked to escape by scaling walls and climbing fences. Likewise, they'll be asked to look for weak spots and test whether they can break in.

When the team manage to break out in a matter of minutes, the security company face-palms and goes to work making the place less, well, penetrable.

Parkour Generations also train the military in these techniques, showing soldiers and military police how to get into a "secure" building, how to escape pursuit and how to quickly withdraw from life threatening situations.

I spoke to Dan Edwardes, Managing Director at Parkour Generations. He's not only responsible for figuring out how to break out of these prisons in the first place, but helping to make sure nobody can do it again.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/02/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/23/' filename='professional-prison-break-body-image-1424732615.jpg' id='30162']

VICE: How many prison tests have you done? And how many have you managed to break in or out of?
Dan Edwardes: Quite a few, though it's still a relatively new practice. It's growing fast, though, as more and more facilities realize that they just haven't been "real-world" tested in this way. We have about an 85 percent success rate in terms of actually entering or exiting a facility despite existing safeguards.

What countries have you done this in?
So far, mainly the UK and USA.

What kind of companies hire you? Is it mainly prisons?
All kinds: penitentiaries, maximum-security mental health facilities, commercial buildings, police bodies, military bodies, private sites.

Do companies usually assume you won't be able to overcome their safeguards?
They're usually very surprised at how quickly we can get in or out. Most assume their buildings are impenetrable, and that's because they aren't thinking laterally enough or seeing the architecture in the way that we do.

What's the strangest way you've managed to find out of somewhere?
Most of the ways in or out that we find are fairly strange, which comes out of necessity—the obvious routes are the ones usually protected or made inaccessible. Often it's not the actually facility itself but other architecture or urban furniture nearby that enables access, which is something a lot of facility designers don't have any remit over when they create their designs. Every facility has to be thought about in the context of its location, situation, and surrounding terrain.

So a lot of companies hire you, but if you're the only company with the guys trained to do these tests, there must be a lot of places that aren't doing tests. Do you ever see a prison or mental hospital that you think should be made more secure?
Yes! All the time. We're constantly seeing possible routes in and out of supposedly secure facilities. Of course, it's up to every facility to be happy with its own security measures, but we bring an extra element that's very commonly overlooked—the raw physical capacity and ingenuity of a dedicated and motivated human being intent on getting past obstacles in his or her way.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/02/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/23/' filename='professional-prison-break-body-image-1424732729.jpg' id='30164']

How many people on your team are qualified to carry out these tests?
In the UK we have about six consultants on the team who provide our pen-testing services.

How do you qualify to carry out pen tests?
We have internal training programs for our tactical department, but most of the consultants have a background in either security, operational work, or something similar, along with their parkour expertise.

Your company also provides training on exfiltration and infiltration, right? What does this involve?
This training is a combination of teaching the necessary movement skills and aptitude, including the functional strengths and fitness, along with developing the vision for seeing and knowing routes in or out of a structure or a site. Having one without the other—either physical ability or technical vision—is useless.

So how do you guys get past obstacles? How can somebody see a tall brick wall, for example, as just an obstacle and not a dead end?
Once you know the right technique, combined with suitable momentum, and you can propel yourself very high up a wall, you begin to see it as a "vertical floor" of sorts. Obstacles built as barriers then become stepping stones to get somewhere else. It's about adaptive movement creating a new perspective to see possibilities.

Can it be dangerous?
To others it may appear dangerous, but that's simply perception—we train for years to be able to move in this way, so any risk is hugely reduced. We're all extremely well trained for this type of work. Plus, our assessment procedures involve surface and material checks, weather conditions, heights, access, etc. Effectively, we're looking to make sure our team can perform their task in as safe an environment as possible. Somebody who's breaking out of prison for real probably won't be doing checks like that.

And they probably won't care as much about their safety, either. How do you make sure the tests are realistic?
The physical movement abilities of our team are far beyond the average person under incarceration. To do what we do requires a combination of elite parkour practice and tactical and operational skills. If we can't find a way, it's highly unlikely a prisoner will be able to.

What was the fastest you've ever broken out of somewhere?
One mental health facility, I remember, we escaped from in under 15 seconds, getting from their secure yard to the external car park in that time. That was a real eye-opener to the clients.

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Image via Flickr user Matt Zimmerman.

This week officials from Brazil's Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) announced that on Saturday, February 21, a joint operation by federal police and national security forces in the state of Pará led to the arrest of Ezequiel Antonio Castanha, a supposed kingpin in the nation's massive black market deforestation industry. Ibama claims that Castanha, who faces up to 46 years in prison for organizing gangs to clear-cut protected forests and sell the lands to cattle herders for pasture (among other charges), may be responsible for up to 20 percent of all illegal cuttings in the Amazon rainforest over the past few years.

Ibama seems to have been tracking Castanha for some time—he and his family apparently owe the agency about $16 million in fines for illicit deforestation. So it's no surprise that agency head Luciano Evaristo declared his arrest a major win in the effort to control the nation's deforestation epidemic. Yet not everyone is as enthusiastic about the implications of the arrest as Evaristo and Ibama. Many believe that the lawless and permissive climate in Brazil's rural forests will make it fairly easy for someone to step in and continue or even escalate Castanha's operations unabated.

Brazil sits on 60 percent of the 3.8 million square mile Amazon rainforest, one of the world's biggest sources of biodiversity and carbon capture. Unfortunately, the forest has long been the target of massive and noxious clear-cutting campaigns, claiming land for infrastructure development, logging, mining, ranching, soya farming, and other industry and settlement.

For years, Brazil was making progress in combating excess and illicit development. As of 2012, Brazilian Amazon deforestation was at its lowest levels since measurements first began in 1988 (that year, 7,700 square miles disappeared annually, but in 2012 the figure was just 1,765 square miles), with about 80 percent of the original Amazon still standing.

Yet over the past couple of years deforestation has been on the rise again. As of August 2013, clear cutting in the Amazon was up by 30 percent over those promising 2012 numbers. Many believe that the consequences of recent and longstanding deforestation are now coming home to roost as well in the form of the massive droughts hitting Brazil as rainforest moisture vanishes.

In this environment, taking out the guy supposedly responsible for one-fifth of all Amazonian deforestation ought to be cause for unmitigated joy, as his gang's elimination could bring stats back down toward their 2012 low. But Castanha and his ilk aren't the sole cause of the recent uptick in deforestation. They're conjured into existence by an increasingly lax legal environment and market demands, unchecked by the supposedly hawkeyed and environmentally-minded state.

"We're concerned that deforestation will continue unabated despite the fact that [Castanha]'s been arrested," Christian Poirier, the Brazil-EU Advocacy Coordinator for the forest and indigenous rights protection group Amazon Watch, told VICE. (He also admitted that he'd never actually heard of Castanha before Ibama paraded him out as a kingpin.)

"There've been arrests made. There've been some serious attempts to break up these [deforestation] mafias. But I'm afraid that the structures that allow this to happen, which is to say the lack of governance and the signals that are coming from the central government in Brazil ... are all sending signals that [deforestation] is going to be tolerated."

Brazil has made big noise about their efforts to protect the rainforest, vowing to reduce Amazonian deforestation to a managed and licit 1,500 square miles by 2020 and devoting 44 percent of the rainforest as reserves for indigenous people, national parks, or wildlife sanctuaries.

But while the state could police large organizations and industries, deforestation increasingly operates in a diffuse manner on the most inaccessible fringes of the rainforest that makes it hard for authorities to enforce laws. Even kingpins and their mafias aren't really big and settled organizations, but groups that work on a piecemeal basis with the Amazon's 6 million or more usually poor and marginal smallholder farmers, who have over the past decade taken over from major industries as the agents of the vast bulk of deforestation work in the nation's hinterland.

"By asking smallholders to clear the forest," explains Poirier, "[these small farmers] will be leveled with fines from Ibama. Most of these fines are never paid, of course, but they'll be the ones suffering the consequences and leave their land devastated."

"It's very strategic ... [these mafias] will work with smallholders across the region and as they deforest they know that eventually this land will fall into their hands at very cheap costs and then they can resell it as pasture land."

Since Ibama rarely ever comes knocking to enforce rules on forest preservation or levy fines on smallholder lands, there's little reason for these farmers not to turn a buck by doing mafias' dirty work. This general environment of impunity allows the gangs and their leaders to operate under the radar, but they don't feel the need to be all that secretive about their operations. Even Castanha's surfaced in the press on occasion, openly flouting his activities in the Amazon.

"I don't regret deforesting land," the New York Times quoted Castanha as saying in 2014. "If it weren't for deforestation, Brazil would not exist."

Over the past couple of years, it's actually gotten even easier to carry out these deforestation operations. The government has slowly scaled back spending on conservation programs since the financial crisis and in 2012 amended their forestry code to make it easier for smallholders to clear forests on their land. This means that it's simpler now than ever before for someone(s) to replace a Castanha character, or even to surpass him in the scale and impenetrability of his work.

(Deforestation is even easier outside of the Amazon, too. The bulk of the nation's clear-cutting actually occurs in the Cerrado savannah area rimming but excluded from the Amazon, where a lack of international attention and advocacy has allowed far more lenient laws to prevail.)

Capturing Castanha is a great gesture. But if the Brazilian government really wants to stop Amazonian deforestation, they'd have to think seriously about how to disincentivize clear-cutting by smallholders, choking off mafias' collaborators. Barring that, this is just a Hydra problem, with each Castanha eliminated birthing a handful of other abusers to fill his place.

Follow Mark on Twitter.

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A Toronto march for an end to violence against indigenous women. Photo via Flickr user Neal Jennings

One of Melina Laboucan-Massimo's most important jobs in life was to be a good big sister to Bella, who was seven years her junior. Overnight on July 20, 2013 everything changed. At the age of 25, Bella died after falling 31 stories from a downtown Toronto condo.

"It was such a shock when it happened that it was—still is really a shock—I never would have thought that this is how my little baby sister would leave this world," says Laboucan-Massimo.

Toronto police list Bella's death as suspicious and her case remains open.

"This has just been a really big eye-opener for me to, in my struggle, to think about how many more families members are going through this across the country," says Laboucan-Massimo.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/EEOHNByapY0' width='500' height='281']

Read Bella's complete online tribute page here

Between 1980 and 2012, 1,181 indigenous women have gone missing or been murdered in Canada. The figure was recorded last year in a report compiled by the RCMP, but even the RCMP note that officers don't always record ethnicity; there could be a lot more. One researcher pegs the number at over 4,000 going back to 1946.

Indigenous women account for 16 percent of female homicide victims, despite Aboriginal women only making up just over four percent of Canada's female population. Indigenous women over the age of 15 are almost four times more likely to experience violence than non-indigenous women. If indigenous women are sex workers the figures are even higher.

It's a systemic problem indigenous communities and human rights organizations have been urging the Canadian government to take action on for decades, but the government refuses to recognize the elevated levels of violence as anything beyond crime despite the historical record.

The unanswered calls from the public for a national inquiry into the situation have resulted in premiers organizing a three-day national roundtable that began today, with representatives from the Assembly of First Nations and other indigenous organizations meeting with provincial and territorial representatives. Family members of murdered or missing women and survivors like Rinelle Harper will also be attending.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said that violence against indigenous women is a crime problem, not a "sociological phenomenon" in press conference after Tina Fontaine's body was found in Winnipeg. (Yesterday, a coalition of organizations including Amnesty International released a report debunking Harper's claim.) In December, he told CBC News that the idea of launching a national inquiry "isn't really high on our radar, to be honest." His office did not respond to media requests for this article. Minister of Aboriginal Affairs Bernard Valcourt told the Ottawa Citizen that indigenous men are the problem: "Obviously, there's a lack of respect for women and girls on reserves."

In lieu of meaningful government action, community-based organizations have filled the void for decades. They've advocated for justice in front of the United Nations and Amnesty International, held 25 years of vigils and memorials, conducted research, created an online database of the missing or murdered women and built cross-country support networks for families and loved ones, and called for the government to conduct a national inquiry, indigenous and non-indigenous supporters alike: conduct a national inquiry.

Unsurprisingly, the roundtable has some feeling skeptical.

"The roundtable is a political save face, there's no commitment to do anything," says Pamela Palmater, a Mi'kmaq lawyer and associate professor at Ryerson University.

Audrey Huntley is one of the organizers who's been involved for over a decade in these efforts and conducted a cross-country trip to speak with family members. She says the past 12 months has brought unprecedented media attention to the issue of murdered and missing indigenous women.

For Huntley, the current scenario feels familiar. "I don't have a lot of faith in the government investigating itself and we have an experience to draw from which is the BC Missing Women Inquiry which is commonly referred to as a sham," she explains.

She points out all the recommendations various reports have made to various levels of government—most of them never implemented. (Amnesty International et al's most recent report corroborates her claim.)

The action the government is most famous for taking on this issue was cutting the funding to the Sisters in Spirit research project on murdered and missing indigenous women, a widely supported project among indigenous communities. Then, in Feb. 2014, the government announced that it would allocated $25 million to addressing the problem and even tabled an action plan in Sept. 2014 that would be implemented between 2015 and 2020. Minister Kellie Leitch told the House they'd heard from victim's families directly. This month, an investigation showed many of the indigenous groups cited as consultants on the plan say they were never contacted.

In a statement from Status of Women Canada, spokesperson Léonie Roux confirmed Leitch and Valcourt will be representing the federal government at the roundtable. "We have heard from victims' families that now is the time for action, not more studies, and that's what we are committed to," the statement reads.

Huntley understands why there's support for the inquiry among family members. "There's been so much societal indifference and that is really painful for family members to endure. I think that's why there have been increased calls [for an inquiry] because it would validate that this is an issue."

Palmater admits the value in an "open, expansive inquiry" that would show the role of Canadian institutions and anti-indigenous stereotypes in relation to missing and murdered indigenous women. But she feels an emergency action plan is what's needed now—and she's done with waiting for Canada to act. This spring she's heading to London, England to explore whether the sovereign state could force Canadian hands to take action.

Therese Villeneuve, the chair of the AFN's women's council, is hopeful about the roundtable. In fact, she was part of the decision-making team who chose to go for the roundtable "instead of just waiting in limbo."

Dawn Harvard, president of the Native Women's Association of Canada who will be presenting at the roundtable echoed Villeneuve's sentiments. She's hoping for a commitment from all levels of government and national indigenous leaders on next steps in addressing this crisis to come out of the roundtable.

"We're not making any progress by trying to shout from outside the walls so we're hoping that you know this is an opportunity to get our foot in the door."

Villeneuve agrees with Huntley and Palmater that skepticism is always there when dealing with the federal government, but she's clear that though the AFN and others are seeking the support of the government through this roundtable, she doesn't see the government implementing solutions. "It has to come from the grassroots level. I don't think the government can come up with the answer."

For Laboucan-Massimo, whatever action is taken, "first and foremost I think it needs to include families that are actually impacted by these deaths."

Follow E.K. Hudson on Twitter.

Daniel Pujol makes a thoughtful and contained breed of punk rock. It doesn't pretend to be revolutionary, but it's still powerful and intellectually stimulating. He recently teamed up to make a video for his song "Manufactured Crisis Control" with the Everything Is Terrible group, a collective of hyperactive retro-futurist video bloggers from Ohio. The video shows Pujol as a mutant creature wandering the city, his silhouette lit with a demented assortment of clips from horror movies and 80s dram-coms spliced together into a unified, seizure-inducing stream.

Pujol's new album, Kludge, is out on Saddle Creek. Check it out here.

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Wildlife Victoria volunteer Steve McNeil took this photo while trying to capture the injured kangaroo

Australia is no stranger to brutal killings; think Snowtown or the work of backpacker murderer Ivan Milat. But there's now a new player in town who is targeting kangaroos. Thirteen kangaroo corpses have been found in the north east section of the Melbourne metropolitan area since the beginning of the month, while two survivors have been euthanized. All were shot with a crossbow.

The spree came to light on February 8, when an injured kangaroo was spotted in Westerfolds Park, Templestowe, with a bright orange arrow through its head. Then, on February 14, Wildlife Victoria volunteers looking for the injured animal discovered another kangaroo, this one shot through its neck. Its injuries were deemed too severe for it to survive, and both it and its joey were euthanized by vets on the scene.

On Friday February 20, Warrandyte carwash employee George Vattakuzhy found six small kangaroos in some trash cans. He thought it was a one-off incident and didn't notify police, but then on Tuesday he discovered five more kangaroos dumped in two of his trash cans, along with a discarded arrow. The police were called in—but less than 24 hours later, another headless kangaroo body was found dumped by the side of the road in nearby Wonga Park.

Police believe the slayings could be linked. Sergeant Stewart Henderson, from Warrandyte police station, told the radio station 3AW that the incidents looked suspicious. "It appears something untoward is going on. Somebody is taking it upon themselves to make a private cull," he said.

[body_image width='1280' height='960' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='a-kangaroo-serial-killer-is-working-melbournes-parks-body-image-1425019407.jpg' id='31351'] A camera phone image of the carwash bin. Image via George Vattakuzhy

Samantha O'Brien, who works at Warrandyte carwash, told VICE that they were currently reviewing their CCTV footage so they could hand over any images of suspects to the police.

The current theory, according to police, is that the killings may be by someone venting frustration over the local community's rejection of a controlled kangaroo kill. Sergeant Henderson explained to 3AW that a cull had been suggested to control the booming population, but local groups had opposed it. "They want proper culls and other parties are saying no," he said.

Despite this, Kate Masson, the CEO of Wildlife Victoria, told VICE she hadn't heard of anyone calling for a cull. "Certainly none have been made to us. The Westerfold park area has had kangaroos in it for a long long time and they're pretty well contained," she said. "They don't often wander out of the park area because they have everything they need there."

According to Masson, the kangaroo originally seen with the arrow in its head has likely succumbed to infection. And while she admits that Wildlife Victoria's volunteers are already overloaded with nearly 200 calls a day, she's determined to find whoever's responsible. "We're sure somebody has seen something," she said. "There's a lot of kangaroos that have been put through a lot of misery. We just need someone to speak up so we can catch these people."

Other wildlife societies were unable to shed any light on the circumstance or reasons behind the spree. Local bow maker Adam Moss was shocked to learn about the killings, and told VICE he didn't think his customers were responsible. "I'm a vegan and if any of my bows are used for hunting, I immediately void the warranty," he said.

If found, anyone surreptitiously killing kangaroos will face stiff penalties. Under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1986, any death or disablement can result in fines of up $72,624 or up to two years imprisonment. And don't think authorities aren't serious about enforcing it. In 2009, Thomastown man Justin Stavropoulos was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment for killing two kangaroos, one of which he ate.

Anyone with information should phone Wildlife Victoria on 1300 094 535 or at wildlifevictoria.org.au

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The authors have been digitally scanned and printed out as miniature faux marble busts. Because if the 'Extreme Present' is the feeling that the future is happening at an accelerated rate, being able to 3-D-print ourselves on demand is, they say, 'quintessentially #ExtremePresent.'

In Back To The Future: Part II, the year 2015 is awash with flying cars and hoverboards. In Neon Genesis Evangelion, teenage Shinji Ikari arrives in Tokyo-3 and begins piloting colossus-size flying robots. As you look out the window, however, our skies are still disappointingly quiet. The year 2015 is nothing like it looked on television; but then, who watches TV anymore anyway?

Many of us feel like technologies of the future are arriving too slowly, but a new philosophy-cum-modern-self-help book by novelist Douglas Coupland, writer Shumon Basar, and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist suggests that, in fact, it's dawning on us faster than we ever thought possible.

The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present hypothesizes that the internet is changing not only the way our minds are structured but also the way Earth itself is structured. The central premise is a dystopian one; just by reading this online, you're contributing to global warming and thus the increasing prevalence of earthquakes. You're becoming part of a collective mob, whereas if you were reading a book, you would be fostering your own sense of individualism.

Visually, The Age of Earthquakes isn't an ordinary book. Of course it's not. Rather, we are presented with experiments in sparse email- and meme-like layouts, heavily pictorial, and featuring specially commissioned artworks. There's also glossary of words of the authors' own invention, and it's all in quick-fire paperback—a deliberately archaic format for such stark discussions about our present and future.

I met with Coupland, Basar, and Obrist for an interview very early one morning in the latter's office above the Serpentine Gallery, where an idyllic panorama of Hyde Park is visible through the windows. A selfie stick hung from a coat hanger by the door, and we began our conversation on the morning after the night Obrist saw FKA Twigs perform.

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Trevor Yeung, 'Laughing Tears'

VICE: So Hans, you went to the FKA Twigs show last night?
Hans Ulrich Obrist: I went to the Roundhouse, yeah. It was very interesting because I know her voice really well from listening to her all the time, but for the first time her voice wasn't in the center anymore. She made it very polyphonic in a way. The dancers were super present, there was a Leigh Bowery moment involved—this very strange, transgressive figure in the middle of it all—and there were all these flex guys. You can't believe that they can move their arms and their legs in these incredible ways.

She wasn't really visible for the first 40 minutes and people almost got nervous, you know—"Where is she? What is this?"—so there was a suspense. I found it interesting... She's on to something because it was experimental and full of risk—not the kind of mainstream pop concert you expect her to do in front of 6,000 people. It was a weird experiment, yeah. It was good!

Let's talk about The Age of Earthquakes. In the book you suggest that, because of new technology, we now perceive time as faster. But how can we possibly slow down time?
Douglas Coupland: From what I've seen there are a few people who've written books along the lines of "I got rid of my mobile phone and went landline for a year," and what happens is they've just been living absolutely miserably and their brains haven't changed back. I don't know if it's possible to actually slow down time once you've already entered the process of speeding it up. I'm very curious about people who have been born after a certain time because the way that they discuss time will never ever match ours. It's like they're able to see a color that we can't.

Shumon Basar: I read somewhere that our experience of the present lasts roughly 2.5 seconds. When has this moment become the past, and when do I enter the future? Certain neurologists say it's between 2 and 2.5 seconds and then there are some people whose brains are wired in a way that actually it may be 3 seconds or 0.5 seconds. That small calibration changes everything and creates a sort of time autism.

Douglas: Would that be like ADD, or ADHD?

Shumon: Yeah. It's interesting because time is what's processing in our brain but is also this kind of cultural construct. I don't know if you've ever read it, but there's a famous book by Mircea Eliade called TheMyth of the Eternal Return, which is basically about how ancient man experienced time. It was cyclical, living the same day, the same month, and the same year through the commune of things like agriculture and other sorts of rituals.

Douglas: With no expectations of change?

Shumon: With no expectations of change. Then there's a radical shift. It's somewhere in the Renaissance, where time goes from cyclical to linear. Obviously you have eschatology, which says that the universe will end at some point, but ancient cultures could have notions of cyclical time and eschatology at the same time.

With modern time—especially when you get into industrialized work-life—you have a weird kind of capitalist eschatology, which also doesn't have an end. It's all about getting to the end of the work day, getting to the end of the work week, living for the weekend. I think there's a line in the book about it: We basically do the same things 22,000 times, and then we die.

Essentially, our perception of time is always the confluence of what our brains allow us to perceive, but then also how culture and, increasingly, technology mandate us to imagine our insignificant life in relation to something much, much larger.

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Douglas Coupland, 'Sexy Marshmallow Foamy Pop Head,' 2008 | Douglas Coupland, 'Big Oil No.001', 2014

Hans: Édouard Glissant [a recently deceased writer and poet from Martinique] also talked about the homogenization of time. He would say that what it's really all about is developing an idea to resist this homogenization of time, by creating almost like a roller coaster that moves across waves, with slow moments and fast moments, and draws on pauses and silences.

This idea of resistance wouldn't be about only slowing down, and it's interesting that there's this new movement in philosophy called accelerationism [the idea that the prevailing system of capitalism might be accelerated to the point that it self-destructs].

A lot of people think that our promised future has not arrived yet, as there are no hoverboards and such. Why do you believe it has?
Douglas: We tend to see time as horizontal in our culture, but in a lot of cultures it's actually vertical. The future used to be out there, but now it's like, "Oh, we're actually inhabiting the future." It's a perpetual state now—only going to get faster and weirder. I know what you mean about hoverboards, though. Growing up, it's the sort of Southern California version of the future—but no. Every day there's some sort of new insult to the past introduced to our culture. I wonder what will be today's?

Hans: In terms of the future, as a curator I'm often asked about the future of art, and I always categorically refuse any comment because, how could I? But there is this generation that was actually born with the internet, the "89plus" generation.

Simon Castets [a young French curator] and I started this research—given this impossibility that we can't speculate about the future—looking at where art might go, looking at this generation of artists and poets and philosophers and thinkers born after 1989, many of whom made illustrations for the book. In the art world, books as exhibitions have been an important thing.

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Bluish-white water ice clouds hang above the volcanoes of Tharsis, on Mars. Date: 8 September 2000. Author: NASA/JPL/MSSS.

Shumon: With the format of the paperback, if bells were the internet of the 15th century, then the paperback was kind of the internet of the late 60s and the early 70s. The 16th-century pamphlet was also a proto-internet, too, with its distribution systems.

Hans: It's amazing how this is back and incredibly present in publishing now, both in New York and more recently in LA, at the Printed Matter Art Book Fair—one of the events in the art world where most of the energy is. It's extraordinary what's happening there, and I was mesmerized by all these new publishers that publish zines and pamphlets.

Douglas: I think it's because of Hurricane Sandy and the flood of the basement at Printed Matter. Suddenly everyone's realizing, "Oh my God, this stuff's not transient, this is valuable." It kind of woke everyone up and galvanized people.

Is that why you wanted to make a book like you have?
Shumon: We knew that there was a certain perversity in doing a paperback in regard to our relationship to the internet, but that was a perversity we wanted to embrace. One thing that we're really interested in—we call it "screen matter"—is the immersive world of imagery and texts that we encounter pretty much 24/7 on a screen.

However, we may not accord it the significance that it takes on once you move it from there onto a piece of paper, and in a weird way I think it requires that translation into an old-fashioned paper book for the mirror to appear of what the internet really is today.

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Rami Farook

Douglas: I think the litmus test of this book is: Would any page of this book make any sense to someone from 1968? I think probably not. That's how far we've come.

Shumon: We all share a vivid interest in what makes the present moment the present moment. To ask that question in the last two or three years, you can't escape the way in which these very profound shifts have been taking place in terms of our relationship to time, to place, and how something as physically small as this [holding up his phone] precipitates that.

For me, one of the most important lessons of Marshall McLuhan (the Canadian philosopher of communications and the major inspiration for this book) was when he said that man creates media and then that media recreates man. We're in a constant feedback loop.

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Dominique Gonzales Foerster, 'La Deciennie' (Centre Pompidou, Metz), 2014

We create technology thinking and hoping it will do certain things for us. But, as we say somewhere, the unpredictable side effects of technology are what dictate the future—there is always an excess to what we invent. We would argue that it's those excess effects of technology that produce the most radical—and also sometimes most unsettling—moral, philosophical, social, and cultural changes.

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Lara Ogel, 'It Is What It Is,' a digital collage, 2014

Douglas: I just remembered—while I was just trying to gracelessly shake my leg and the table shook—going to art school in Japan every day and getting a little bit seasick. Recently, we found this article that showed that there'd been more earthquakes in the last decade than in the previous century, and then another article came out that said, "No, wait, look at their data! It could be anything!" And then Shumon said, "We have earthquake deniers!"

Maybe we'll have more volcanoes, and then we'll have more carbon, and then we really will have a permanent winter. And it's all because we want it now, all because you want a kitten video on that thing (my phone), and you want it now in real-time HD.

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Michael Stipe, 'Nick Variation'

OK. What do you watch on YouTube?
Douglas: Fukushima footage... La Dolce Vita, I'm really into Italy in the late 50s, early 60s right now, so anything to do with that... Oh, this guy from YouTube, I was talking to him and I said, "I'm sure you must have seen everything, what's the most boring thing you've ever seen on YouTube?" and he said, "Oh that's easy, elevator rides..." What about you Hans, what do you look up on YouTube?

Hans: Lots of conversations and interviews. It's super exciting that there's infinite conversations online. What else have I been watching lately? Lots of music clips, all of Jesse Kanda's things for Arca, which are amazing. Oh, and Adam Curtis, of course. Again and again Adam Curtis! And the new Afghanistan film by Adam Curtis [Bitter Lake]. Super urgent!

The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present will be published by Penguin on March 3.

Follow Dean on Twitter.

Conversion therapy is the practice of "curing" gay people by trying to turn them straight through counseling and lifestyle restrictions. The practice dates back to the early Freudian period, when homosexuality was considered pathological and attempts to treat it were deemed appropriate. Today, however, homosexuality has been removed from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental disorders, and conversion therapy is considered ineffective, harmful, and potentially deadly.

Regardless of a nationwide battle toward the acceptance of same­-sex marriage and equal rights for gay people, conversion therapy is still a problem, and it's being practiced every single day in the United States and throughout the world.

In this special report, VICE gets exclusive access to one of the hundreds of gay-conversion-therapy organizations, groups, and sessions in the United States. At the Journey into Manhood program, men pay more than $600 to attend a weekend retreat where they participate in exercises and activities the staff members claim will help them battle their same-sex ­orientation. The only qualification to become a staff member is to have successfully completed the program.

The report meets with the founder of reparative therapy, Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, who is illegally practicing on minors in the State of California, and investigates the controversial legal battle to fight conversion therapy for individuals under 18 years of age. We also travel to the annual Gay Christian Network Conference, speak with former "ex-gay" leaders including John Smid of Love in Action, who is now married to his gay partner, and hear the grueling stories of the individuals who have survived this brutal practice.

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Whatever. Photo via Tumblr

Last night I was at a Sleater-Kinney show and consumed myself in the music enough that I didn't glance at my phone for two and half hours, a remarkably long internet-free stretch by the standards of our age.

While I was reveling in my brief moment of Luddism, Caitlin McNeill did the opposite: She reached out to the internet for help. The Scottish 21-year-old had played a wedding in Scotland the previous weekend and was intrigued by the color of the dress worn by the bride's mother. She thought it was black and blue, but others made compelling arguments otherwise, saying it was white and gold.

"All of our friends disagreed," McNeill told Business Insider.

Seeking to settle the argument, she crowdsourced the question to Tumblr, and you already know the rest of it—it spread in the ineffable way things spread on the internet, through Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter and a Buzzfeed quiz that now has over 27 million views and Pinterest and probably Snapchat and all those other doodads. By midnight, smelling the traffic the way a dog smells raw meat in a trash can, pretty much every website in the world was blogging about it. VICE's own piece involved an interview with a color expert who had no idea what was going on. A bunch of celebrities tweeted about it, and like everyone else they disagreed on what color the dress was; entire articles went up last night that were literally just lists of famous people saying things about the dress, and they probably did extremely well for the sites that posted them. It was an orgy of traffic that everyone could get in on without trying very hard—and about as appetizing to watch as a lazy, everyone-gets-in orgy would be.

"It definitely has all the qualities of a viral hit," viral guru Neetzan Zimmerman told Motherboard when asked about the dress. "It's dumb, divisive, visual and eminently shareable."

You can probably imagine how confused I was when I finally fired up a laptop around midnight. At first I thought there was some sort of glitch. The same picture of the same dress comprised the entirety of my Facebook newsfeed. It was a veritable hell I could not scroll my way out of—everyone wanted to let everyone else know that the dress was gold and white, the dress was blue and black, or that colors are subjective phenomenons that depend on the lighting, our eyes, and the parts of our brains that interpret visual stimuli.

The dress is blue and black. You can see that pretty plainly on the website of its maker, Roman Originals, which has renamed the garment #TheDress. (The company also announced that it'll make another version in white and gold, in case you want to buy two kinds of what one writer called a "fugly shitrag.") WIRED had a more complicated way to determine the color of the dress that shows how hard it is to answer a simple question like, "Is that a blue dress?" but the magazine's Photoshop analysis was, in the end, pretty conclusive:

Even WIRED's own photo team—driven briefly into existential spasms of despair by how many of them saw a white-and-gold dress—eventually came around to the contextual, color-constancy explanation. "I initially thought it was white and gold," says Neil Harris, our senior photo editor. "When I attempted to white-balance the image based on that idea, though, it didn't make any sense." He saw blue in the highlights, telling him that the white he was seeing was blue, and the gold was black. And when Harris reversed the process, balancing to the darkest pixel in the image, the dress popped blue and black. "It became clear that the appropriate point in the image to balance from is the black point," Harris says.

Returning from the show after the entire thing had essentially played itself out made me feel like an alien on my own planet. Somehow, I had missed an entire cycle of memefication, "debate," reposting, recrimination, and regret—which was, actually, a pretty nice place to be. Then I went to bed.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Here in Ireland, a giant booze company wants us to stop our out-of-control drinking. Their "Stop Out-of-Control Drinking" scheme—a visionary name for a visionary campaign—is financially backed by the multinational alcoholic-beverage company Diageo, which now cares very much about your liver.

Diageo is the world's biggest producer of spirits; they make a lot of money off of people getting drunk. They also own Guinness, Bushmills, and Baileys, some of Ireland's most beloved drinks. A bit too beloved, in fact, according to the Stop Out-of-Control Drinking campaign, which hopes to "break the cycle of passing a cultural acceptance of excessive drinking from one generation to the next."

My question is this: Why is an alcohol company that makes millions from booze sales backing a public-health campaign about alcohol?

I spoke to Rolande Anderson, former alcohol project director for the Irish College of General Practitioners, who's now working full-time as a counselor to Ireland's alcoholics.

"Make no mistake, what they are doing is incredibly clever," he said. "I'm trying to help people who can't stop drinking while they are spreading a very intricate and complicated message about alcohol. The slogan to 'enjoy alcohol responsibly' is a good example. We all focus on the former, 'enjoy,' and leave out the latter. Using these types of slogans in a celebratory environment, like a sports game, pushes the 'enjoy' even further to the foreground. It's remarkably clever marketing."

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The link between sports and the alcohol industry in Ireland is colossal. Rugby players fly past the word "Heineken" on the pitch as drunk fans cheer on their team in the Carling Cup.

Over the past few decades, professional Irish sports events—like pretty much any sports events in any alcohol-consuming country—have become submerged in booze. This is something the Irish government has conspicuously failed to address in a new public-health bill dealing with Ireland's alcohol problem.

The bill, which introduces minimum pricing (bad news, White Lightning fans), along with a new health warning labeling, ignores the strange relationship between alcohol and sports in Ireland. When the Irish minister for health was asked if he was bullied by the drinks industry to drop a ban on alcohol companies sponsoring sporting events, he quickly shifted the blame to sports bodies, before noting that the alcohol industry had lobbied against it too.

So the alcohol industry wants to keep its claws firmly embedded in our sporting events, making me wonder whether this campaign to Stop Out-of-Control drinking—sponsored by Diageo, which makes a shitload of money from our out-of-control drinking—is all just a load of bullshit.

Suzanne Costello from Alcohol Action Ireland, a charity that deals with alcohol-related issues, spells it out in a statement offered to me about Diageo's involvement in a public health campaign:

The objective of the alcohol industry is to maximise its profits through the sale of its products, and it is legally entitled to do so. However, alcohol harm is a public health issue and the conflicting interests of private profit and public health cannot be reconciled when it comes to addressing our harmful relationship with alcohol. The alcohol industry, through funding campaigns such as this, seeks a role for itself in policy areas such as health that extend far beyond its responsibilities as a producer and retailer of alcohol, and in which it has no expertise simply as it provides an opportunity for it to influence the policy agenda in ways that favor its business interests.

To hear the other side, I contacted Conor Dempsey from Demsey Corporate, who runs PR for the Stop Out-of-Control Drinking campaign. I asked if I could speak to the campaign's board members to get some information on why they felt Diageo was a good choice to back this campaign. Dempsey asked me to supply the following:

• How do you see this feature being framed?
• The main editorial points.
• Who else do you think you will interview?
• Your perspective, if any, on our campaign.

When I refused to provide this information he sent me a link to an Irish Times article by board member Fergus Finlay, but declined to provide any further comment in robust terms.

Fergus Finlay is chief executive of the children's charity Barnardos and sits on the board of Stop Out-of-Control Drinking with 13 others, including Dr. Ciara Kelly, Ireland's premier media doctor, and the Country Director of Diageo, David Smith. It was reported by the Sunday Business Post in 2001 that Finlay previously worked as a public affairs consultant to three multinational tobacco companies.

In his Irish Times op-ed Finlay wrote: "The problem for some, it seems, is with Diageo. In their eyes they are some kind of evil empire. The rest of us are knaves or fools because we have been sucked in by some devious corporate entity, and are providing a front for some nefarious public relations stunt."

But he also previously told the Sunday Business Post: "Tobacco is perceived as a product that requires a very high degree of regulation because it's perceived as being dangerous. I work with the tobacco companies to ensure that regulation is addressed in a fair and reasonable way."

Finlay himself claims he left the tobacco account after one month and that the only representation he ever made on their behalf was to suggest meetings with the Department of Health. But Finlay is just one man who has been linked to the Stop Out-of-Control Drinking campaign with tobacco connections.

Another board member is Kieran Mulvey, who is chairman of the Irish Sports Council. He previously said that Ireland's competitive sporting edge would be " destroyed" by a ban on alcohol sponsorship of sporting events. So Kieran likes our booze-backed rugby games and was against the government's now abandoned plan to ban alcohol sponsorship of sporting events.

So that's a public health campaign about alcohol misuse that counts the following among its board members: A former public affairs man for the tobacco industry; a man opposed to proposed government legislation on the control of alcohol; the national director of the world's biggest drinks company.

The reality, of course, is that alcohol companies do not want you to stop drinking. They want you to keep buying their products, because otherwise they go bust.

I spoke to Professor Joe Barry, head of the Department of Public Health and Primary Care in Trinity College Dublin. He talked about the realities of an alcohol awareness campaign backed by the alcohol industry.

"My concern with Diageo is that they control the majority share of alcohol use in Ireland," he said. "They have fought and resisted global evidence-based initiatives, like minimum unit pricing of alcohol, [and] in the past they lobbied against drink-driving legislation. I would not trust them. They only have one aim."

Professor Barry also noted that the Stop Out-of-Control Drinking campaign does not follow guidelines recommended by the Word Health Organisation (WHO) on how much booze we should consume.

"We need to provide people with information," he said. "When Fergus Finlay was asked how much we should drink, he said it was 'unhelpful' to think like that. The WHO and HSE [Ireland's Health Service Executive] give explicit guidelines on alcohol consumption to help people reduce their intake and to stop them from drinking too much in one go."

I contacted Diageo's head of PR in Ireland, Hazel Chu, and asked for a statement about why an alcohol company would back an alcohol awareness campaign alerting people to the dangers of drinking. I got this:

Diageo is delighted to be able to be part of the 'Stop Out-of-Control Drinking' campaign and share in the learning with some of the most dedicated and passionate people in Ireland. We have always sought to work with people and organisations who genuinely want to make a real difference in how we think about and use alcohol. Diageo is one of the most trusted and respected companies in the world. We also own some of the most iconic Irish brands. We have a long term commitment to play a positive role in the Alcohol in Society debate and we are willing to work with any individual and organization with an interest in reducing alcohol misuse. We cannot address this problem adequately by working in silos; we have to work together as individuals, organizations and society to find a lasting solution to out of control drinking.

Let's dissect this a little: Diageo works with "dedicated and passionate people," with people who "genuinely want to make a real difference." We can trust them because they own "iconic Irish brands" and they want to find a lasting solution to our "out of control" drinking.

We've all seen Mad Men.

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Photo by Xavier B via.

Irish people are characterized as pissheads. We're told our culture is welded to booze. When Obama visited we threw a pint at him. On a recent trip to the High Court, I noticed the Harp symbol above where the judge was sitting. I immediately thought, Guinness. So yes, Ireland admittedly does need to deal with its alcohol problem, but it needs to do that with evidence-based campaigns, not with what we're currently being offered.

Suzanne Costello from Alcohol Action Ireland picks apart the flaws in this booze-company-backed campaign perfectly:

"Use of the phrase 'out of control' is indicative of the alcohol industry approach of attributing the wide range of serious problems associated with its products on a so-called 'minority' who, we are told, drink 'irresponsibly.' However, this flies in the face of all the evidence and is completely at odds with the reality of the situation in Ireland," she said. "The Health Research Board found last year that more than half [54 percent] of 18- to 75-year-old drinkers were classified as harmful drinkers and that 75 percent of all alcohol consumed in Ireland in 2013 was done so as part of a binge-drinking session. This is reflected by our unacceptably high levels of alcohol harm, which sees three people die every day in Ireland from alcohol-related harm."

Come on, Ireland, look out for your people; don't sell us down this sticky, boozy river.

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Eric McDavid as he was released in January. Photo by David Martinez/via Facebook

An extraordinary thing happened last month: US prosecutors admitted the government messed up.

Well, technically they admitted that a judge could conceivably decide that the government might have possibly messed up enough to warrant a new trial. But still.

As part of a unusual deal brokered between his defense team and chagrined US attorneys, Eric McDavid, who in 2007 was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison on domestic terrorism charges, walked free on January 8 after the government told a judge it had "inadvertently" failed to hand over thousands of pages of FBI documents to his defense counsel in his original trial.

McDavid, 37, served three days short of nine years in custody before US District Judge Morrison England agreed to reduce his sentence to a lone count of conspiracy and released him on time served.

"This is one of the most unusual things I've had to deal with, if not the most unusual, since I started on the bench in 1996 and on this court since 2002," England said, according to court transcripts. "I've never heard or seen of anything like this."

As part of his deal, McDavid waived his right to sue the government. He is now a free man, but the conclusion of his case is an embarrassing coda to the Bush-era surveillance of radical environmentalists and anti-capitalists in the years following the 9/11 attacks.

McDavid and two other radical environmentalists, Zach Jenson and Lauren Weiner, were convicted in 2007 of conspiring to blow up a dam, cellphone towers, and a US Forest Service lab after a paid FBI informant—an unassuming 18-year-old known only as "Anna"—infiltrated their group, egged them on, and exposed them.

That would have likely been the end of McDavid's story, but a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by two of his supporters dredged up nearly 2,500 pages of FBI documents that prosecutors had previously insisted did not exist.

The tranche of files led the US attorneys office in Sacramento to turn over even more documents that it had—according to a letter to McDavid's lawyers—"inadvertently not disclosed during discovery." Among the documents were flirty notes between McDavid and Anna, as well as a request from an FBI agent for a polygraph exam on Anna to test the veracity of her statements. All of which McDavid's attorneys say would have been crucial in bolstering McDavid's entrapment defense.

"It's somewhere along the continuum of mistake, malfeasance, and malevolence."

"[Anna] fomented the alleged conspiracy, literally herding defendants together from around the country for meetings, badgering them to form a plan, and mocking and berating them when they showed disinterest," McDavid's lawyers Ben Rosenfeld and Mark Vermeulen wrote in a motion last year.

The Sacramento Bee described England, who presided over McDavid's original ten-day trial, as "clearly exasperated" and "sometimes stopping to hold his head in his left hand" during last month's hearing.

"I know he's not necessarily a choirboy, but he doesn't deserve to go through this, either," England said. "It's not fair."

Prosecutors and top brass from the US Attorney's office, none of whom were involved in the original trial, had little to offer for explanation.

"We don't know exactly why they weren't turned over," John Vincent, chief of the US Attorney's criminal division, told England. According to the US Attorney's office, the documents were sitting in an FBI file in Sacramento.

In a statement released following the hearing, the US Attorney's Office of Eastern California said that "although those documents do not directly bear upon whether the defendant committed the underlying acts... the United States agreed that it is conceivable that a court could conclude that the failure to produce them required a retrial."

This is a master class in ass-covering, impressive even by government standards. Note how it starts by reaffirming McDavid's guilt, and then avoids admitting any wrongdoing by saying that the government agreed, in its great magnanimity, that others might come to the conclusion that it had seriously screwed the pooch

Some prosecutors were a bit more forthright.

"We absolutely admit that we made a mistake, but there was no deliberate, knowing withholding of any documents," said First Assistant US Attorney Philip A. Ferrari in January.

But the notion that the FBI and prosecutors simply misplaced thousands of pages of documents from a highly touted anti-terror investigation and then rediscovered them years later is hard to swallow for many who watched McDavid's case unfold.

"It's somewhere along the continuum of mistake, malfeasance, and malevolence," McDavid's lawyer Rosenfeld said in a phone interview. "The point is that only the government can explain what level of mistake this was, and the public should demand that explanation."

In an interview, Will Potter, an independent journalist who has written extensively about the government's surveillance of radical environmental groups, called the government's claim that it accidentally failed to hand over the documents "complete nonsense."

"The FBI and prosecutors have been intimately aware of how many boundaries have been pushed and crossed along the way, and they've relentlessly defended it," Potter said. "Jurors came afterward and said they thought they were misled. In recordings, the court heard [Anna] constantly berating McDavid for not taking action. Every step of the way the government pushed and pushed to get the conviction at any cost."

The Green Scare

McDavid first met Anna in 2004 at an invitation-only anarchist gathering in Des Moines, Iowa. It was a heady time for both radical leftists and federal law enforcement, which had been given broad discretion and nearly unlimited resources to root out terrorism threats. Love was in the air.

McDavid, 26 at the time, was an on-again, off-again college student from Auburn, California, with a muddled interest in anarchism and environmentalism.

Anna was a no-nonsense girl with pink hair, a short camo skirt, and a keffiyeh around her neck. She told McDavid she had hitchhiked to the gathering. In reality, she had flown out on the FBI's dime.

She had gotten a taste for informant work after infiltrating an anti-globalization protest group for a paper for her community college class. Impressed by her initiative, a police officer in her class put her in touch with the Miami Police Department, which in turn referred her to the FBI. In a flattering 2008 profile in Elle magazine, Anna said she was a patriotic hawk who wanted to do something for her country after 9/11.

She was a godsend for the FBI. Radicals seemed to be able to sniff out professional undercover officers before they even stepped through the door. But Anna was a natural—quick-thinking, reliable, and able to move through activist circles with ease. She didn't walk like a cop or otherwise exude cop-ness.

McDavid didn't know it when he first laid his smitten eyes on Anna in Iowa, but he had just been snared in what activists would later dub the "green scare," an allusion to the anti-communist red scare of the 1950s.

"The only reason they got on the radar was because they had a political viewpoint," Mark Reichel, McDavid's lawyer at his original trial, said in an interview. "At the same time, the head of the Justice Department was testifying before Congress, saying, 'No, we don't do that. We don't spy on people because of political reasons.'"

Indeed, here's former FBI director Robert Mueller speaking at a press conference announcing the 2006 indictment of 11 "eco-terrorists" responsible for an estimated $80 million in property damages: "The FBI becomes involved, as it did in this case, only when volatile talk crosses the line into violence and criminal activity."

This is a key point in McDavid's entrapment defense. Contrary to Mueller's reassurances, McDavid and Jenson's rhetoric when Anna first met them in '04 was about as violent as the average Rage Against the Machine album.

Anna caught up with McDavid again in '05 in Philadelphia, where he was staying with two friends, Jenson and Weiner. Anna reported back to the FBI that McDavid had become thoroughly radicalized since their first meeting.

Anna's FBI handlers put her on McDavid, Jenson, and Weiner full-time and outfitted her with the finest in spy gear: a bugged '96 Chevy Lumina that she used to drive the group around. The FBI also provided Anna with a small cabin in the Sierra Nevada foothills that was to act as the quartet's base of operations. She paid for groceries and even doled out spending money to the group, sometimes in $100 bills. She wasn't old enough to buy beer yet, but Anna was passing along fake bomb recipes from the FBI to the trio.

Anna's recordings of late-night bull sessions showed the trio talking about bombing targets like cell phone towers and fish hatcheries. Later in court, the three activists would try to play off the conversations as purely hypothetical, the musings of some stoned anarchists with delusions of grandeur.

"Anarchists usually just talk shit," Jenson said in a 2012 Outside story on the case, "but they never really do that much."

In court, the bumbling anarchists became cold, calculating terrorists.

But one day, the group drove to a Kmart in Auburn to pick up ingredients for a bomb test. McDavid was sitting on the back of Anna's car in the parking lot, waiting for Jenson and Weiner to return, when he heard the automatic locks on the car doors click shut. He looked in. Anna was on her cell phone. Moments later, black SUVs screeched into the parking lot, and he was surrounded by heavily armed agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force. In an interview with Democracy Now!—his first after being released from prison—McDavid said that that was the moment he realized Anna was a snitch.

McDavid, Jenson, and Weiner were charged with conspiracy based on their recorded conversations, their purchase of a book that included bomb-making instructions, their scouting of potential targets, and their purchase of bomb-making materials at Kmart.

For the government's prosecution of radical environmentalists, Potter said that the McDavid case "represented a turning point in a couple of ways.

"Around September 11, the actions by the radical environmental movement had really subsided significantly," Potter said. "There were not a lot of crimes by the Animal Liberation Front or Earth Liberation Front. There were very heavy prosecutions of a few cases, but the climate as a whole, there wasn't a lot happening. The McDavid case represented a shift. They manufactured terrorism plots, and that's precisely what McDavid's case was all about."

The Trial

In court, the bumbling anarchists became cold, calculating terrorists. US Attorney McGregor Scott claimed the group's plot to bomb the Nimbus dam, had it not been thwarted by Anna, would have made "what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina look like a Sunday pancake breakfast." (A spokesman for the dam later said that blowing up the gates would just cause water to "trickle" down the American and Sacramento rivers.)

Anna testified that she woke up in the cabin one night with McDavid looming above her holding an eight-inch hunting knife. Meanwhile, Jenson and Weiner both flipped and agreed to testify against McDavid in return for lighter sentences. Years later, Jenson would provide McDavid's lawyer with a sworn declaration saying he was pressured to contort his testimony to agree with the government's version of events.

"I became very aware that if I did not testify to the facts that the government felt occurred, which I did not believe occurred, that my plea bargain would be taken away and I would be charged with the major federal charge and would very likely receive a 20-year sentence," Jenson said. "This was a lot of pressure for me to handle."

The jury also received confusing, sometimes contradictory instructions. They were told entrapment required a government "agent," and Judge England told the jurors from the bench that Anna was an agent, but then later sent a written note to the jury that she was not one.

The jury was also told, when considering McDavid's predisposition for violence, to limit the timeframe to June 2005 and onward, not from when Anna first began reporting on him in 2004.

Of the 12 jurors, ten would later go on the record to various publications expressing serious doubts about the government's case against McDavid. "I hope he gets a new trial," Diane Bennett, one of the jurors, told Elle in 2008. "I'm not happy with the one he got."

England sentenced McDavid to 235 months in prison on an enhanced terrorism charge. He spent the first 28 months of his sentence in solitary confinement. Jenson and Weiner served six months and two weeks in prison, respectively. Anna consulted for the FBI for a bit longer before giving up the spy game and trying to move on with her life.

But perhaps more interesting than the vagaries of the case is what never made it to the jury's ears. During the trial, Reichel filed dozens of motions to suppress, dismiss, and otherwise muck up the government's case against McDavid. Among those were numerous motions for discovery for the FBI files on McDavid and Anna.

"The hell that we had been through for so long, we knew we had to pursue it, but it was like, 'God, is this even going to work?'"

"The FBI filed responses in writing saying none of this stuff exists. No cell phone records, no polygraphs, no internal FBI reports, no letters," Reichel said. "So I did a FOIA and it came back with not much, maybe 20 pages, items of discovery I already had."

Reichel also filed a motion to dismiss the case based on McDavid's infatuation with Anna. The prosecution's response to Reichel's motion: "The defendant's claim of a romantic relationship between him and the informant is categorically untrue."

"I Think You and I Could Be Great"

McDavid lost an appeal before the Ninth Circuit, and the Supreme Court refused to hear his case. He would have languished in prison for the rest of his long sentence had it not been for the dogged work of two of his supporters, Jenny Esquivel and Evan Tucker.

Tucker, now living in Spain, had started a group called Sacramento Prisoner Support in 2004 to help activists who had been targeted by the federal government. In 2008, Esquivel and Tucker filed a FOIA request for McDavid's FBI file.

"Jenny and I always felt that the government was hiding evidence from the defense," Tucker said. "How could a person who was investigated by the FBI for one and a half years and then convicted of a federal crime not have an FBI file? So we decided to do our own request. Originally they told us there was nothing, but we kept pushing and finally, one day, several thousand pages of documents showed up in our PO box."

Tucker says the FOIA sleuthing revealed the FBI was also interested in him.

"They interviewed people about me, sat outside my house, and followed me around," Tucker said. "They sent informants to our fundraisers and had them report back on me as well. There is a lot I still don't know about the investigation because they would only give me half my file and even that was heavily redacted."

With a batch of fresh evidence in hand, McDavid's lawyers filed a writ for habeas corpus in 2010. The government continued to fight the appeal, but in November 2014 it handed over even more files that should have been given to McDavid's defense counsel in his original trial. The new documents included mushy notes from McDavid professing his interest in Anna, as well as never-before-seen responses from Anna leading him on.

In a 2005 email six months before McDavid's arrest, Anna wrote, "I think you and I could be great, but we have LOTS of little kinks to work out. I hope in Indiana we can spend more quality time together, and really chat about life and our things."

McDavid replied three days later in his idiosyncratic syntax: "hey cheeka, so far as us B'n great, that i think is an understatement... along w/the 'LOTS of little kinks 2 wk out'... but if u aint learning, u aint live'n... & I do think we could learn a lot from each other."

It's fair to say they learned a lot from each other, although Anna and McDavid both clarified that their relationship was never physical. For the most part, it seemed one-sided, with Anna brushing McDavid off and telling him to wait until after their "mission."

The US Attorney's Office also handed over a request for a polygraph test on Anna. The request form said the polygraph was to "confirm veracity of [Anna's] reporting prior to the expenditure of substantial efforts and money based on source's reporting."

But the polygraph test never took place. No documents provided by the FBI or the US Attorney's Office explain why, and the name of the US prosecutor who signed off on the polygraph request was redacted for "privacy" reasons.

I asked Reichel if he was surprised at the contents of the documents, considering the FBI had insisted they didn't exist. He replied with the typical bravado of a criminal defense attorney who's been proven right.

"You remember that Johnny Carson bit, Carnac the Magnificent, where he would hold the letter up to his head and predict what was inside?" Reichel said. "I knew exactly what was in those documents."

But McDavid's release was far from certain. Even after securing a deal with the US attorneys office, no one was sure how Judge England, who had previously thrown the book at McDavid, would react to such a bizarre request.

"The hell that we had been through for so long, we knew we had to pursue it, but it was like, 'God is this even going to work?'" Esquivel said in an interview. "It was nine years of struggle and fighting and hoping against hope. A lot of hard work and luck came together."

There are lingering questions surrounding McDavid's case. According to Esquivel, the FBI is still withholding 900 pages of documents. And although McDavid cannot sue under the terms of his plea agreement to a single conspiracy charge, a lawyer for Weiner told the Guardian she is considering suing to get her own conviction lifted.

There is also the case of Steve Lapham, the assistant US attorney in McDavid's case. Lapham fought McDavid's Habeas appeal tooth and nail.

"The government concedes that a relatively small amount of information pertaining to the case was apparently not disclosed to the defense," Lapham wrote in response to the appeal. "However, the omitted material was either inculpatory or benign. None of the omitted material was exculpatory."

It was only after Lapham departed the US Attorney's Office, according to Tucker, that the government showed any interest in releasing the withheld documents. Lapham is now a judge for the Sacramento County Superior Court.

Follow CJ Ciaramella on Twitter.

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This article first appeared on VICE UK.

The women in Iraq look angry. In fairness, they have good reason to be—the Islamic State has taken over a third of their country, bombings have become causal occurrences, and the economy is riddled with corruption. Life, overall, is pretty shitty for many Iraqis. But this isn't why the women look so vexed.

It's not even the fiery temperament that Iraqi women are renowned for; it's their eyebrows. They all have the same eyebrows, tattooed on in two severe straight lines, as is currently in fashion. Cosmetic procedures are on the rise in Iraq—beauty clinics have sprung up in the major cities, and treatments like Botox and fillers are proving to be more popular than massages or facials—but it's these eyebrows that are particularly striking.

Many in the UK will be familiar with the "Scouse brow"—bold, dark arches achieved with stencils and pencils. The Iraqi versions are similar, but a bit straighter and a lot more permanent.

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Few women in Baghdad are without a freshly tattooed pair. They have become status symbols, a way to demonstrate one's wealth and pride in one's appearance, and the trend cares little for age.

At Baghdad's most upmarket beauty clinic—the Barbie Beauty Clinic—some 30 women were waiting to get their eyebrows tattooed when I visited. Some of them were alone, but most had come with their daughters. One woman waiting patiently was Um Zamen, a government employee in her 50s.

All the women at work have had their eyebrows done, she said, "So why not me? It's peer pressure."

The center was opened by 29-year-old plastic surgeon Dr. Afif al-Yusri last year and has fast gained a reputation as one of the most luxurious clinics in Baghdad. It's the place to go if you want a new nose, liposuction, or a head full of hair. Eyebrow tattoos are incredibly popular here, alongside Botox and filler treatments. Each of these treatments costs some $200, about two thirds of the average monthly salary in Baghdad.

"It's a form of self-expression," said Rabha Hamid, manager at the Barbie clinic. "People want to express themselves and stay in fashion."

She added that peer pressure plays a significant part, but mostly "people do this to feel happy. They want to be happy with themselves and to feel complete."

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Most of the women who leave these clinics come out with a pair of unbending, dark strips above their eyes, and a stiff face void of much expression except anger. For many, this sort of beautification is a way to escape the troubles they face in their daily lives, and it appears to have become almost an alternative to therapy.

"Our hearts and minds are not clear. There's no safety, no security. The people are depressed and stressed. Life is so rough that you just want to do something to express yourself," said Um Zamen. "You can see the stress on our face. If we had enough sleep and didn't need to worry, we wouldn't need to get these treatments."

It is a sentiment that many men in Iraq can also sympathize with. Beauty clinics are increasingly catering to men, with Barbie dedicating every Tuesday to its male clientele, providing them with a host of treatments that range from hair transplants to rhinoplasty.

The desire to look good for both sexes stems mainly from the proliferation of Turkish soap operas and Lebanese pop stars that dominate Iraqi television screens. Icons like Kivanc Tatlitug, better known as "Muhannad" from the Noor TV series, and songstress Haifa Wehbe have infiltrated the expectations and standards of beauty in Iraq. Images of these famous faces are shared across social media networks, which have helped open up a world to Iraqis beyond their violent borders.

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Up in the Kurdish north, things are slightly more muted. What was dubbed "the new Dubai" has turned into a stagnating region where the government struggles to pay salaries and the Islamic State poses a more imminent threat.

The women in the capital, Erbil, are starting to turn away from the salons and clinics. Unlike Baghdad, beauty clinics are not an alternative form of therapy here. In fact, perhaps unsurprisingly, demand has declined since the Islamic State appeared. Many families have suffered losses and are more tied up with funerals than facial peeling.

The rules are also more stringent here: Only certified doctors can inject people's faces, and beauty clinics have had their eyebrow tattoos and Botox facilities transferred over to doctor's surgeries.

"The situation has affected business," said Marwa Sabbah, owner of Senses Beauty Spa in Erbil. "But I have people come from all over Kurdistan because they want my organic treatments."

Even so, the standards of beauty in the Kurdish region do not differ much from those in the rest of the country. The desire to have fair skin, bold eyebrows, and a smooth, wrinkle-free face dominates. The women may look angry, but to Iraqis, this is beauty.

Follow Triska Hamid on Twitter.