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The Ferguson Report Shows Exactly What Living in a Police State Is Like

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[body_image width='1000' height='666' path='images/content-images/2015/03/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/04/' filename='the-ferguson-report-shows-exactly-what-living-in-a-police-state-is-like-304-body-image-1425501886.jpg' id='33078']

Kids hold up their hands at the site of the memorial to Michael Brown in Ferguson last August. Photo by Alice Speri/VICE News

On Tuesday, several media outlets began leaking bits of information from the report from the federal probe on the Ferguson Police Department, which has been eagerly awaited since the probe was launched last September. Today, the report was officially released, and it details how city officials and police officers systematically and routinely violated the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights of citizens, motivated both by the desire to increase revenue and, of course, straight-up bigotry.

Although there are 54 officers in the Ferguson Police Department, only four are African American. This is largely out of step with the city's population, which has changed greatly in the past 20 years to become 67 percent black. Although we knew before today that the Department of Justice was going to slam Ferguson, we now know for sure that, for example, "partly as a consequence of city and FPD priorities, many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson's predominately African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue," as the report's authors put it.

We also now have specific examples of what it's like to be black and live there—and it sounds a lot like being a character in a dystopian novel. According to the report, cops in Ferguson regularly engaged in "ped checks" or "Terry stops"—slang for stopping and searching people for no discernible reason. Here's one of many instances the DOJ found in which citizens were treated like dollar signs by cops:

In the summer of 2012, a 32-year-old African-American man sat in his car cooling off after playing basketball in a Ferguson public park. An officer pulled up behind the man's car, blocking him in, and demanded the man's social security number and identification.

Without any cause, the officer accused the man of being a pedophile, referring to the presence of children in the park, and ordered the man out of his car for a pat-down, although the officer had no reason to believe the man was armed. The officer also searched the man's car. The man objected, citing his constitutional rights.

In response, the officer arrested the man, reportedly at gunpoint, charging him with eight violations of Ferguson's municipal code. One charge, Making a False Declaration, was for intitially providing the short form of his first name (e.g. "Mike" instead of "Michael"). and an address which, although legitimate, was different from the one on his driver's license. Another charge was for not wearing a seat belt, even though he was seated in a parked car. The officer also charged the man both with having an expired operator's license, and with having no operator's license in his possession.

The man lost his government contracting job as a result of the arrests, according to the report.

Another example came in March 2013, when officers went to the station to take custody of a guy wanted on a state warrant:

When they arrived, they encountered a different man—not the subject of the warrant—who happened to be leaving the station. Having nothing to connect the man to the warrant subject, other than his presence at the station, the officers nonetheless stopped him and asked him to identify himself. The man asserted his rights, asking the officers, "Why do you need to know?" and declining to be frisked. When the man then extended his identification toward the officers, at their request, the officers interpreted his hand motion as an attempted assault and took him to the ground.

And these kinds of arrests-for-the-sake-of-arrests don't spare children, according to the report's documentation of a February 2014 incident in which officers responded to a group of African American teenage girls "play fighting" after school:

When one of the schoolgirls gave the middle finger to a white witness who had called the police, an officer ordered her over to him. One of the girl's friends accompanied her. Though the friend had the right to be present and observe the situation... the officers ordered her to leave and then attempted to arrest her when she refused.

Parents taking their kids to the park aren't safe either, per an incident that took place in June 2014. A pair of African American parents apparently allowed their small children to urinate in the bushes next to their parked car, which went bad quickly:

An officer stopped them, threatened to cite them for allowing the children to "expose themselves," and checked the father for warrants. When the mother asked if the officer had to detain the father in front of the children, the officer turned to the father and said, "You're going to jail because your wife keeps running her mouth." The mother then began recording the officer on her cell phone. The officer became irate, declaring, "You don't videotape me!" As the officer drove away with the father in custody for "parental neglect," the mother drove after them, continuing to record. The officer then pulled over and arrested her for traffic violations. When the father asked the officer to show mercy, he responded, "No more mercy since she wanted to videotape," and declared "Nobody videotapes me."

After posting bond, the couple saw the video had been deleted from the phone.

Besides this recurring pattern of pulling over, provoking, and then arresting black people on bullshit charges, there are also terrifying anecdotes about the misuse of police dogs and Tasers that disproportionately affect African Americans.

"There is a recurring pattern of officers claiming they had to use a canine to extract a suspect hiding in a closed space," the authors of the report concluded, offering the example of a 16-year-old boy accused of stealing a car who ran and hid in the closet of a vacant house, only to be dragged out of the enclosed space by the legs by a canine unit.

There's another whole section about people people shot with electricity, with one example being a man who was detained without reason in January 2013. The cop electrocuted him once, and then claimed that the man tried to stand up, so he jolted him again for 20 seconds. However, there was a video on the device that proved this was completely unnecessary, even if the cop had reason to stop the man. "The video makes clear, however, that the man never tried to stand—he only writhed in pain on the ground," the report states.

There are many, many more examples of cops making unlawful and forceful arrests in Ferguson in the report. If you've ever been curious about what it's like to live in a legit police state, you can read the whole thing here.

What's more, the city doesn't offer a community service option for arrestees, which means that poor people slapped with trumped-up or outright false charges often get stuck in a vicious cycle of missing court payments and ending back in jail.

This seems to be exactly what the city wanted. In March 2011, the police chief reported to the city manager that court revenue in February was $179,862.50, and that the total "beat our next biggest month in the past four years by $17,000. "Wonderful!" the city manager responded.

The city will either pay a settlement or likely face a lawsuit by the government.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.


Hillary Clinton's Secret Email Stash Is Shady, but Was It Illegal?

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Hillary Clinton has been having a very bad week. The presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, who might have the nomination more locked up at this point than any other candidate in history, has been embroiled in scandal, after the New York Times reported Monday that she exclusively used a personal email account during her four years as President Obama's Secretary of State.

The use of private email raises big questions about Clinton's transparency, dredging up old suspicions that the Clintons are secretive, shady operators with a habit of being less than truthful with the public they claim to serve. That's been compounded by new revelations, reported by the Associated Press Wednesday, that Clinton ran her emails through a private server out of the family's home in Chappaqua, New York—a practice that would have given her "impressive control over limiting access to her message archives."

Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill has insisted that the former Secretary of State adhered to both the "letter and spirit" of federal disclosure laws, and her staff maintains that she turned over more than 55,000 emails during her tenure in the Obama administration. That may be true, but Clinton's aides were responsible for choosing which emails were turned over, which doesn't exactly scream transparency. And given the level of sophistication required to run her own email system, it sure looks like Clinton went out of her way to keep her emails private.

Beyond the questions this raises about the likely 2016 candidate, the revelations have reignited debate over what sort of levels of accountability we should require of government officials. While Clinton's use of a private email account may look suspicious, in terms of both transparency and national security (as one Internet expert told Motherboard, "it doesn't strike me as particularly credible that in her entire tenure as Secretary of State she never sent any classified material in any email ever"), it's not clear that it was illegal. The question then is whether it should be.

VICE called up John Wonderlich, policy director for Sunlight Foundation, a Washington, DC-based organization that advocates for increased government transparency, to see if he could flush out the legal, security, and political implications of Clinton's hidden email stash.

VICE: Was it legal for Clinton to use a private email account to conduct official business?
John Wunderlich: The important point to make is we don't know. We don't know enough about what she did and how she used the account and who had access to it and who didn't. There's been a lot of back-and-forth about the preservation of her emails. There was an internal State Department guideline that said she had to preserve her emails by sending them to the State Department. She may or may not have done that. That would not necessarily have been illegal, but it would have been contrary to State Department regulations.

Beyond the preservation point, my concern is that she created this account, presumably, to avoid or be able to manage Freedom of Information Act Request access, Inspector General oversight access, or Congressional oversight requests. What it means is that instead of the government being able to access her email it is something that she personally manages with her personal staff.

The Benghazi hearings are the most obvious example of this, where Congress asked for her emails and it was up to her staff's discretion what she turned over.
Right. And that's exactly the situation we want to avoid. Oversight is something that should be based on statutory criteria and public interest, not private employees of a private citizen who report directly to her. It appears that the design of her whole system was to take her communications and remove them from public access.

But are there legal gray areas here?
The letter of the law doesn't say what is illegal and what is legal. That ends up being for courts to decide. The facts of the situation determine what is illegal or not and we don't know the facts. So it is very difficult to say whether she did something illegal or not, because there are a lot of different legal implications for a cabinet secretary's conduct.

It's also a gray area because there are guidelines, there are regulations, and there are laws. A lot of them are overlapping and they changed during her tenure. No one should claim that the email situation is simple. There are people who disagree about the plain meaning of the law. There's a lot of complexity.

That's one of the reasons we're hoping that the political debate elevates the substantive dialogue we all need to have about how government emails should work. If we don't fix the law and get real enforcement and oversight into government agencies for how email works for officials, this is going to keep happening, and it's only going to get worse.

Doesn't the Federal Records Act require her to turn over her emails?The Federal Records Act requires that relevant records be preserved. But if her staff is picking and choosing what records to preserve, that's different from having a public official from the National Archives who is trained to determine what is historically relevant and what's to be disposed of sift through the material. Whether or not that is illegal, it is certainly not how anyone expects a Cabinet official's records to be preserved.

How common is this approach to record keeping? I can't imagine that a regular employee at the State Department can use her Gmail account for government business. Does it get more common higher up the ladder?
Among rank-and-file federal employees it is unusual to use personal email at all, although I'm sure it happens. At more senior levels you'll find more examples of emails being used improperly or the use of aliases, but nothing of this scale, where she set up an entirely private system for her and her staff.

Does this raise security concerns?
It's certainly an open question now as to whether or not the account was secure. The security of that system isn't something that should be up to the whim of a private citizen. It should be something that is publicly verifiable based on public infrastructure. That shouldn't be a matter of trust and hope, but a matter of having criteria that are publicly verifiable. That's the whole point of having public infrastructure. I keep imaging if a Cabinet secretary said they were going to have their own office, their own security, and hired a private public relations firm to do all their work. No one would accept that and that's what Clinton set up for her information.

Given the Obama administration's promises that it would be the most open in history—and on the other hand, its fervent prosecution of whistleblowers—do you see this controversy as part of a larger issue surrounding government transparency?
Absolutely. When Obama ran for office the first time, he ran on a message of transforming government and of making decisions where the default is towards transparency and public access. Then to hear at a White House press briefing such vague standards about how Cabinet secretaries manage their work and whether Clinton did something wrong — it's all driven by politics. And the White House is not leading on the email question. And they should be. Because the Secretary of State should not be using a [personal] server set up in her home to conduct essential communications.

Follow Peter on Twitter

These Heti Days Are Yours and Mine: 'Happy Days' at the Kitchen

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[body_image width='1400' height='980' path='images/content-images/2015/03/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/04/' filename='these-heti-days-are-yours-and-mine-happy-days-at-the-kitchen-482-body-image-1425503462.jpg' id='33085']

Naomi Skwarna, Lorna Wright, and Alexander Carson in 'All Our Happy Days Are Stupid' (2015), by Sheila Heti

For those who read Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?, All Our Happy Days Are Stupid is notorious: the script that can't be written, the play that can't be staged. All Our Happy Days torments Sheila's character in the novel; ultimately, the play is abandoned altogether. If it wasn't for the runaway success of How Should a Person Be?, All Our Happy Days might have never seen the light of day. For over a decade—the play was written in 2001, when Heti was 24—the play failed to make it to the stage. But after reading HSAPB, Jordan Tannahill—a young director who knew Heti tangentially, as everybody seems to know everybody in the Toronto art scene—sent Heti an email asking if he could see an early draft of the unstageable play.

"There's something about the fact I felt a bit afraid of the play," Tannahill told me the day before All Our Happy Days opened in New York. "It felt so unwieldy and epic. But I always find that when I'm afraid of a project, that's usually a good sign that I should take it on. That usually means there's something there that I should reckon with."

The basic premise of the play is that two mothers, each accompanying their three-person families on summer vacations in Paris, wrestle with the way their lives have gone since marrying and baby-making. Ms. Oddi, played by Canadian journalist Naomi Skwarna, ends up leaving her family to pursue a career as a hedonist flutist in Cannes. Mrs. Sing, played by comedian Becky Johnson, follows Ms. Oddi to Paris, only to immediately realize the "freedom" of Cannes makes her miserable. Somewhere along the way there's a preteen love story, a randy older man in a panda suit, and a roaming troubadour strumming a score composed by the New Pornographers' Dan Bejar. The actors in AOHDAS are not, per se, actors. "I'm not so interested in the idea of the actor as empty vessel," Tannahill told me, "I'm interested in interesting people." And interesting people he's got: From a dude who was on that TV show Lex to Heti's ex-husband Carl Wilson, the world of AOHDAS is populated by people you'd like to get a beer with. The first time I watched AOHDAS's "merry band of heavy-hitting misfits" sing, sway, and play on stage, I felt pangs of jealousy towards Canada, a country I'd previously written off as too cold, too white, and too nice.

In all, I saw All Our Happy Days Are Stupid three times—twice in rehearsal and once in public. The first time, it was a triumph. I was one of five people in the audience, a fly-on-the-wall reporter watching the cast go through a tech run, and I couldn't stop grinning. The play had heart. Look at them! I thought. All these talented, attractive people—each successful in their own creative field—making art together, fearless and free! What the fuck, New York? As I watched the play unfold, I daydreamed about Toronto, imagining a fairytale land of tight-knit artistic community, where writers and directors make rent while running dilapidated performance spaces called Videofag, where artists support each other with astonishingly little insecurity or resentment. "I kept waiting for the moment of bitchiness, but no one was bitchy," Heti admitted to me, during rehearsal that week. "No one played the villain." New York is going to shit on this play, I thought, but only because New York is jealous.

I was half right. New York did shit on the play, in the form of a disappointed New York Times review, which praised the minimalist, comic-inspired set design and dismissed everything else, describing the play's actors as "even more uncomfortable in their skins than the characters they portray." If you ever want to make someone "even more uncomfortable," here's a tip: Call them out on it. On Friday night, when I watched the play on its second night, the cast appeared visibly deflated, rushing through lines and missing important comedic beats. Naomi Skwarna, who had positively dazzled me during rehearsals, abandoned her character's air of flamboyance for a bored affect.

"Those moments of failure, those moments of misfire," Erin Brubacher, Tannahill's collaborator, told me after the tech run. "Those are the moments of humanity that we, the audience, see ourselves reflected in." But on the play's Friday night performance, I didn't see myself—I saw disappointment. The beauty of the first show was that the cast didn't seem embarrassed, even when they misstepped. The play's central relationship—the attempted and aborted friendship between loud and unwieldy Mrs. Sing and suave but insecure Ms. Oddi—drew me in, at once absurd and true, a la Bowles or Beckett. Small moments in the play were charming, and as always with Heti's work, the writing peaked in brief aphorisms that stuck with me for days. (Ms. Oddi: "My first boyfriend—oh, he smoked a very big pipe—he always said: Men make the world, and women decorate it. Well, it turns out he was right!" And at another point: "Do you want all the older boys laughing at you. Well, they will if you go around talking about authenticity all the time.") When I spoke with Skwarna, who had dazzled me with her unapologetic but humanizing portrayal of Ms. Oddi, she told me of the haphazard way she'd been brought into the cast. (Like most of the actors, she'd been asked to a cold reading in a friend's backyard one summer night.) Skwarna seemed genuinely thrilled to be a part of the show; a writer and theater critic herself, she had visited New York before, on the other side of the stage. "And now I'm back, as the performer," she marveled.

The cast seemed like a group of friends dancing shamelessly at a stranger's party: the less skilled among them buoyed up by enthusiasm, the talented ones shining with ease and grace. The joy was infectious, and when I raved about the play to Brubacher, she laughed, "That wasn't even at 100 percent!" Multiple cast members told me that they'd enjoyed watching me watch the show, a dynamic I hadn't thought to consider. All Our Happy Days felt, to me, like a living, breathing organism made up of hodge-podge cells: cast, director, writer, audience. I left the Kitchen that evening, after 10 hours and two dress rehearsals, feeling like I'd been a welcome guest in a wonderful and nutso family home.

[body_image width='1050' height='750' path='images/content-images/2015/03/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/04/' filename='these-heti-days-are-yours-and-mine-happy-days-at-the-kitchen-482-body-image-1425503557.jpg' id='33086']

Michael McManus, Lorna Wright, Naomi Skwarna, and Alexander Carson in 'All Our Happy Days Are Stupid' (2015), by Sheila Heti

But when I returned on Friday, the spirit in the theater felt noticeably changed. Only one joy remained consistent from the first run to the third: the Hobbled Man's electrifying and show-stealing "happy" dance, brilliantly performed by Canadian comedian Kayla Lorette.

The dance arrives toward the end of the winding play, on a boardwalk in Cannes. Johnny Rockets, a Bieber-esque pop star, listens distractedly while the Hobbled Man reminisces about life. "When I was younger," he laments, "I would do little dances, when I was happy. Like this." Suddenly spry, Lorette's character does a quick cha-cha, swivels his hips, and gives a little pelvic thrust. "But I never wanted anyone else to see it," he admits, returning to his hunched-over stance. "I was embarrassed about it. I never saw anyone else do these dances, so I was very ashamed! I hid myself."

The moral here is easy enough: The old man's embarrassment consigns him to a life of isolation and loneliness. Aren't we better off risking a bit of shame for the chance to really live? It's one of many lessons Heti's aphorism-loaded play attempts to impart to its audience. The final lines of All Our Happy Days are, literally, "Don't become the thing you hated," sung over and over as a kind of outro. It's solid advice, if advice is what you're looking for.

You could say Sheila Heti is a self-help artist. It's a label I doubt that she, a self-professed self-help fan herself, would take serious issue with. Over the course of the past two decades, her work has been unapologetically concerned with the questions of living a Good Life: How should a woman dress? How should an introvert socialize? How Should a Person Be? Heti's work contains all of the qualities we're meant to find unseemly: earnestness, overt gratitude, easy poetry. "There's so much beauty in this world that it's hard to begin," Heti gushes in HSAPB. "There are no words with which to express my gratitude at having been given this one chance to live." The young men I would lend HSAPB wrote off Heti as "far too sentimental" and "whiney"; one critic called her "less self aware and less insightful than an episode of Sex and the City." But for my generation of hungry young women, Heti's work offers humor and shared humiliation and hubris, affirming the absurdity (and yes, the stupidity) of all our happy days. She is the drunk-mind sober-heart artist, putting bare and sentimental what others might dress in subtler clothes.

[body_image width='1600' height='1040' path='images/content-images/2015/03/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/04/' filename='these-heti-days-are-yours-and-mine-happy-days-at-the-kitchen-482-body-image-1425504227.jpg' id='33088']

Michael McManus and Naomi Skwarna in 'All Our Happy Days Are Stupid' (2015), by Sheila Heti

Perhaps it is this self-help quality that made All Our Happy Days Are Stupid such a pleasure to watch alone, as a reporter during their tech rehearsal, and such a discomfort to watch, next to a packed-house crowd on Friday night. Therapy requires intimacy, either through solitude or familiarity. I can imagine that the first run of All Our Happy Days—which took place in 2013, at Tannahill's Videofag, and had audiences of 30—didn't suffer from the problems the play faced in New York. This play is a play meant to be performed by friends for friends: The audience on Friday never really caught on to that idea, performing for each other (Should I laugh at this moment? Is this embarrassing?) instead of allowing themselves to be absorbed into the show.

The audience on Friday was full of women like me, observers of Heti's artistic orbit, eager to see it set to stage. The crowd skewed very young, very white, very female. No one seemed willing or ready to wholeheartedly endorse Heti. "I don't know anything about this," one young woman behind me said to her companion as she pushed her coat off her shoulders, "But her book was, like, a very big deal, right?" "Sure," her friend sighed, "in terms of attention." It was very apparent that neither had read the book, a reality that speaks to Heti's popularity even amongst those who have only seen her work across the subway aisle, in someone else's hands. (Later, during the intermission, the friend said blandly, "It's just all so familiar.")

When it came time for the Q&A after the show, no one raised their hands, but several raised their phones, to snap photos. Apparently, Heti has achieved Instagram-worthy levels of celebrity. At last, someone spoke up. "What's it like to see your creation finally come to life?" a 30-something woman in the crowd asked. Heti, surrounded on stage by all the play's actors, cocked her mic at an angle. "I find it less interesting every time I see it," she replied. When asked if she would write the same play again, Heti laughed. "No! It's a horrible play." The audience laughed, uncomfortably—no one could tell if she was being ironic. Tannahill, seated next to her with his own mic in hand, smiled amiably.

There's a concept in How Should a Person Be? that I think of often. Heti writes that while most people live private lives, a few walk around with their clothes off, "destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human." For the ungainly, for the young, and for the writer, this idea is one of tremendous comfort; it's probably the reason I read Heti. She makes you feel better about your embarrassments; she gives your shame a purpose. "Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate," she explains.

The first time I saw All Our Happy Days Are Stupid, the cast was a cast of naked people, and I was naked too. That Friday night, it felt like we were all grasping for a piece of clothing here or there, even Heti. But who can we blame? New York, these days, is terribly cold. Even if it's to the north, Toronto seems far warmer.

SUB.Culture Montréal: Part 1

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SUB.Culture Montréal: Part 1

Rikers Island Inmates Tear Into Locked Room to Save Prison Officer from Rape

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Rikers Island Inmates Tear Into Locked Room to Save Prison Officer from Rape

A New Lawsuit Aims to Decriminalize Prostitution in California

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[body_image width='2000' height='1489' path='images/content-images/2015/03/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/04/' filename='a-new-lawsuit-aims-to-decriminalize-prostitution-in-california-304-body-image-1425506384.jpg' id='33089']

Photo via Maxine Doogan/Erotic Service Provider Legal, Educational and Research Project

At noon local time on Wednesday, the Erotic Service Providers Legal, Education, and Research Project (ESPLERP) filed a lawsuit against the attorney general of the state of California, as well as several district attorneys, in a case they say has the potential to decriminalize prostitution in a handful of Western states.

The plaintiffs allege that their constitutional rights have been violated by enforcement of California's prostitution law.

All of the plaintiffs are listed anonymously, using initials and a pseudonym. Three are former prostitutes who hope to work as prostitutes again in the Northern District of California, but fear arrest and prosecution. The fourth plaintiff, John Doe, is a disabled man who wishes to hire prostitutes in the Northern District of California. Together, they claim that enforcement of prostitution laws violates their constitutional rights to privacy, free speech, substantive due process right to earn a living, and freedom of association. They are asking for a declaration that California's prostitution statute is unconstitutional, an order prohibiting the defendants from enforcing the prostitution statute, and attorney fees.

The plaintiffs started working on the suit in 2008, when Proposition K—which would have decriminalized prostitution in San Francisco—failed to pass. In the aftermath of that setback, Maxine Doogan, ESPLERP's president, wasn't sure what to try next. Margot St. James, who led COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) in filing the court case that forced the decriminalization of prostitution in Rhode Island in 1980, told Doogan it would take a legal threat to overturn California's prostitution laws.

ESPLERP coalesced in 2010, became a 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2012, and begun fundraising. The group has raised over $30,000 on GoFundMe, and is currently crowdfunding more money for the court case, which attorney Gill Sperlein says could go on for as long as five years.

Now that the case has been filed, the state could make a motion to dismiss, or it could go to trial. Sperlein says the case will inevitably be contested until it reaches the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. While that decision would ostensibly be tailored to California's prostitution law, it could be applied to other states' prostitution statutes through future cases under the Ninth Circuit's jurisdiction, which also includes Alaska, Montana, Idaho, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington state.

This California case is different than COYOTE's, which argued that Rhode Island's prostitution law was enforced in a gender-biased way, according to Doogan.

"Our case is being litigated because [California's prostitution law] discriminates against our free speech, our right to negotiate for our own labor and our own safe work conditions, our right to associate with each other, our right to equal protection under the law," she says.

According to the complaint, commercial sexual activity was integral to California's development, but was criminalized in 1961 for reasons of morality. While California's prostitution statute defines prostitution as physical contact, California courts have ruled that people can also be charged with prostitution for their words alone.

"There's a lot of benefit to the public to having these types of laws invalidated and to have our class of worker and customers, family members, and larger community enfranchised under the equal protection laws," Doogan tells me. "The really negative social stigma that is put on people who are prostitutes or people who are viewed as prostitutes and our customers extends to other people that are sexual who are seen as outside the bounds of what is OK. That's why you see rape victims not be taken seriously, they're made to be the right kind of rape victim in order to have their cases adjudicated, in order to have access to the California State Victims of Violent Crimes Compensation Fund, for example."

At the heart of the argument, according to Sperlein, the plaintiffs' attorney, are recent Supreme Court rulings on substantive due process. In Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned a law criminalizing anal sex in 2003, Sperlein says the justices used "language that was really extraordinary, the kind of language you never hear from the Supreme Court, which was that [criminalizing anal sex] was wrong, it was wrong when it was originally ruled on, it is wrong now, it's always been wrong. In that case they said that the government could not use morality as a basis for regulating private consensual sexual activity."

Sperlein is representing ESPLERP along with civil rights attorneys Louis Sirkin and Brian O'Connor. When asked why he took the case on, Sperlein told me, "I feel like sex workers are ostracized not only socially, but also under the law. To challenge laws that deny men and women sex workers protection of the law by criminalizing activity that is harmless is a pretty noble thing to do."

Though the case may seem like a long shot, Jessica Emerson, an Equal Justice Works Fellow and staff attorney with the Women's Law Center of Maryland, told VICE, "I think the argument that solicitation laws violate free speech is a strong one—if a sex act does not have to occur for a prostitution arrest to be made, then you are, essentially, criminalizing speech. And with a lead attorney of Mr. Sirkin's caliber on the case, I'd say the plaintiffs certainly have a shot at challenging the legality of California's laws!"

The complaint alleges that the plaintiffs have been severely and irreparably injured by the prostitution law, which has caused them "severe humiliation, emotional distress, pain, suffering, psychological harm, and stigma," along with the deprivation of their constitutional rights. Their only prayer for relief, they claim, is that the court find the prostitution law unconstitutional and prohibit the defendants from enforcing it.

"I have confidence that we'll prevail in the court," Doogan says, "as we've seen other minority people get their rights sustained in the court system."

Follow the Erotic Service Providers Legal Education and Research Program on Twitter and follow their fundraising efforts on GoFundMe.

Tara Burns is the author of Whore Diaries: My First Two Weeks as an Escort and Whore Diaries II: Adventures in Independent Escorting. Follow her on Twitter.

How Should We Handle Police Shootings in Post-Ferguson America?

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In the eyes of the law, Darren Wilson is not responsible for the shooting death of Michael Brown. The Ferguson, Missouri police officer acted in self defense, a St. Louis County grand jury decided in November, and he did so without racial motivation, the Department of Justice concluded Wednesday.

In summarizing the August incident, the feds exonerated Wilson as follows:

As detailed throughout this report, several witnesses stated that Brown appeared to pose a physical threat to Wilson as he moved toward Wilson. According to these witnesses, who are corroborated by blood evidence in the roadway, as Brown continued to move toward Wilson, Wilson fired at Brown in what appeared to be self-defense and stopped firing once Brown fell to the ground. Wilson stated that he feared Brown would again assault him because of Brown's conduct at the SUV and because as Brown moved toward him, Wilson saw Brown reach his right hand under his t-shirt into what appeared to be his waistband. There is no evidence upon which prosecutors can rely to disprove Wilson's stated subjective belief that he feared for his safety.

While Wilson gets off scot free, the DOJ on Wednesday also announced the results of its findings from a months-long examination of policing practices by the Ferguson Police Department. As teased by multiple media outlets on Tuesday, the feds' report details an environment of racial discrimination has existed for years in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, and that both the town's government and police force were complicit in enforcing laws and regulations that overwhelmingly targeted African Americans.

Neither announcement comes as much of a surprise, but both beg the question of how the investigations' findings will affect police-involved shootings going forward. Following Brown's death, and the deaths of Eric Garner in New York and scores of other killings of men of color by police, that was the question the country grappled with over the summer. For insight into that issue, we can look to the findings of President Barack Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which called Monday for independent investigations of police-involved shootings.

The task force suggested such investigations could be handled by neighboring jurisdictions, or state or federal law enforcement agencies, which is often already the case when police are accused of excessive force or misconduct. In fact, many of the suggestions are already in place. What's missing is a national protocol for how these incidents are investigated. As it stands now, police-involved shootings are handled in piecemeal fashion, with myriad paths for investigators, family members of the deceased, and community members to go down. In anticipation of the reports released today by the Justice Department, VICE began examining these various means of investigation in January, and has compiled them below.

Civil Lawsuits

The Windy City of Chicago may provide some of the best examples of this method of justice, as unsatisfying as it may be for the families of those killed by cops. If you had to guess, how much money do you think Chicago paid in excessive force and police misconduct claims in a single year? From the Better Government Association:

"In 2013 alone, the city shelled out $84.6 million—the largest annual payout in the decade analyzed by the BGA, and more than triple the $27.3 million the city had initially projected to spend [in 2013]."

Last year, the city paid $50 million for misconduct cases, "more than the budget for the offices of the mayor, the city treasurer, the city council, the council committees and the department of human resources—combined," according to Truth-Out.

Among those paid by the city are the families of some of the 116 people killed by Chicago police since 2007. Last year, the Chicago Police Department was responsible for the deaths of 18 people, my own examination of databases, media reports and police documents obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests suggests. (The FBI does not require law enforcement to report police-involved shootings, and I could find no comprehensive list of those killed by Chicago police among area media outlets.) A few of those deaths raised the ire of the black community in the wake of Michael Brown's death, but none garnered much in the way of national attention.

So what would a civil lawsuit mean for the Brown family, and families of future victims of police bullets? Not much, according to University of Missouri Law Professor Ben Trachtenberg. Families of those killed, wounded or mistreated by police must prove the offending officer was unjustified in his or her actions. That has been the recourse for many in Chicago, as the above figures indicate. For the Brown family, should they file a civil lawsuit, they'll have to prove what no one else has been able to—that Officer Wilson acted irrationally or with some form of bias in killing Brown.

The family "must still convince the jury that Wilson broke the law," Trachtenberg told me in an email about a possible civil suit. "If the jurors believe his self-defense story, Wilson should win in civil court."

Independent Investigations

Depending on who's performing an investigation into a police-involved killing, the level of independence can vary widely. St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch's ties to law enforcement created a massive conflict of interest in the minds of many following Brown's death. But critics of McCulloch and his handling of the case must at least concede that the final decision was up not to him, but a jury (even if jurors were misled—more on that later.)

While grand juries might seem like the norm for police-involved shootings and deaths, many of those incidents must first go through review boards that sometimes have strong ties to law enforcement. Again, Chicago provides a good example of this. There, the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) is, at least according to the reform advocates I spoke to, no better than its predecessor, the Office of Professional Standards, an in-house unit that had cops investigating their peers over misconduct and excessive force complaints.

Who handles those investigations now? Ex-cops, you likely won't be surprised to hear. From WBEZ-Chicago:

City records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show that IPRA's management now includes six former cops—officials who have spent most of their career in sworn law enforcement. Those include the agency's top three leaders.

"Complaints may be seen not through the eyes of the citizen but through the eyes of a police officer," said Paula Tillman, a former IPRA investigative supervisor who was a Chicago cop herself in the 1970s and 1980s. "The investigations can be engineered so that they have a tilt toward law enforcement and not what the citizen is trying to say."

Without bodies like IPRA, investigations of police are often handled by local prosecutors, who decide whether to proceed with criminal charges. That's the situation in New Jersey right now, where the January death of 36-year-old Jerame Reid is being looked into. The South Jersey Times used an Open Public Records Act (OPRA) request to obtain video of the fatal shooting of Reid—which occurred at a traffic stop and while Reid's hands appeared to be empty and in front of his chest. That county prosecutor, by the way, has recused herself from the case because she knows one of the officers who shot Reid. And the video—irrefutable evidence of the exchange between Reid and the cops who killed him—would never have been released if not for a reporter's diligence, according to Capt. Michael Giamari of the Bridgeton Police Department.

"In absence of the OPRA request this video would not be released to the public out of respect for the family of Jerame Reid, basic human dignity and to protect the constitutional rights of all those involved," Gaimari told the South Jersey Times.

The Reid case is still being mulled over by the Cumberland County Prosecutor's Office, and community members have called for the state's attorney general to step in.

Also in New Jersey, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka has created a "citizen review board" that will investigate claims of police misconduct independently of law enforcement by employing residents as watchdogs. But in Atlanta, Georgia, the effectiveness of a citizen review board is in question because it cannot investigate "allegations of discrimination, abuse of authority, lack of service or discourteous behavior," according to WXIA-Atlanta, and cannot accept anonymous tips. In Salt Lake City, Utah, the mayor has criticized the handling of reports compiled by a citizen review board, going so far as to pen an op-ed to the local paper.

"The presumption should be that the board's reports are considered public documents," not the other way around, Mayor Ralph Becker wrote, adding, "In the meantime, I have issued an executive order directing relevant city staff to expect that, unless there is a compelling need for privacy in a particular case, board reports will be made public when there is a substantial public interest in the matter at hand."

Defining what is of "substantial public interest" may be the tricky part, as anyone who has tried to avoid fees charged by government agencies responding to Freedom of Information Act requests has found. Public interest is in the eye of the beholder, and it can sometimes take a substantial public outcry to force accountability.

Jury Trials

Don't expect to see too many of these. Besides Albuquerque, New Mexico—where the local district attorney decided to sidestep the grand jury process, instead leaving it up to a judge to determine what charges to slap on two cops there for the death of knife-wielding homeless man James Boyd—cops rarely end up in court for on-duty killings (with one recent exception). The move by DA Kari Brandenburg in Albuquerque can be taken one of a few ways: It represents a passing of the buck to the judge who must decide whether to indict the officers; it creates more transparency by bringing witnesses into open court instead of a locked grand jury room; or it marks a dangerous precedent for future cases. That's the contention of the local police union vice president, Shaun Willoughby, who told KOAT-Albuquerque in January that the cops there "[...] are terrified" and "afraid to do their job."

For her part, Brandenburg said at the time that the decision to bring the officers before a judge was directly related to the aftermath following Michael Brown and Eric Garner's deaths.

"Unlike Ferguson and unlike in New York City, we're going to know. The public is going to have that information."

Regardless of the outcome for the two officers, Albuquerque's cops are now under the watchful eye of criminal justice expert Dr. James Ginger, appointed by the DOJ to oversee police reforms there.

Since announcing she would pursue charges, Brandenburg's case has hit a few snags, including conflict of interest allegations on both sides. Most recently, the attorney representing one of the officers who shot Boyd has been accused of having a conflict of interest because he represented both cops during the police department's own probe of the incident.

More Transparent Grand Juries

Grand juries are secretive by nature. In order to protect the identities of those deciding whether or not to charge someone with a crime—especially one as contentious as a cop killing an unarmed teenager—we're not guaranteed the names of those who serve. But at least one juror who helped to determine Darren Wilson's fate wants to go public with their experience, which currently would be a crime. "Grand Juror Doe" has filed a lawsuit in an attempt to speak publicly about the Ferguson grand jury proceedings. Carlton Lee, Michael Brown, Sr.'s pastor and a friend of the family, vehemently expressed his support for the juror in question when VICE reached him in January.

"McCulloch put people on the stand who lied," Lee told me, noting McCulloch's admission that he knew some grand jury witnesses were less than truthful in their grand jury testimony. "So, we know about these lies, and then you put a lifetime ban on the jurors who say 'Let us speak out about what we saw, let us speak about what we heard'? No, let these people talk."

Lee continued with more pointed criticism.

"He's a compulsive liar," Lee said of McCulloch. "So I think with [grand jurors] coming out, with them being able to speak out about this, we will hear how they were misguided, how McCulloch's office lied."

With so little trust between communities of color, law enforcement and the justice system in general, there is one other way to avoid situations like the one that consumed Ferguson by fire and national attention by news this past summer.

Police Outreach

As part of their annual meeting in late January, the US Conference of Mayors, like Obama's task force, called for "outside investigators" to look into police-involved shootings. Sounds like a solid recommendation, except that in both cases, it's just that: There are no guarantees that it will happen, and as of today no law has been inked that would require outside groups to take responsibility for investigating police-involved shootings.

Other than the DOJ—a body that people like Lee feel slighted by following the news that Wilson won't be charged with violating Brown's civil rights—there is no one entity that oversees deaths at the hands of police. Instead, there's just a hodge-podge conglomeration of review boards and watchdog groups, reporters and media outlets interested in the issue, and families who are looking for answers about the deaths of their loved ones.

Efforts by police to reach out to communities of color might help. But if the results of investigations into the deaths of black men remain similar to the one reached by the DOJ in Wilson's case, Lee is ready to dismiss law enforcement outreach as nothing more than lip service.

"To me, I feel like it's all for show, to appease people" he said of the DOJ's findings on Brown's death. "Over and over and over and over again we have been let down the same way."

For the pastor and his allies, it's not necessarily that the cops are solely to blame for the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and others. The police in those cases were performing as actors in a society where people of color are treated differently, and with more suspicion. The cops are part of a larger, systemic problem, Lee told me. It's a situation that can't be addressed by just one of the alternative methods for investigating police misconduct listed above, but possibly by all.

Brown may not have had his hands up, but that's besides the point, according to Lee. And, simple as it may sound, he and others have pointed to the case of Aurora movie theater shooter James Holmes as indicative of how suspects are treated differently based on their skin color.

"You mean to tell me that a murderer in a movie theater in Colorado can walk out of there after killing all those people and go to trial, but Michael Brown is killed because of a damn pack of cigarillos?" Lee said. "Give me a break."

Follow Justin Glawe on Twitter.

A Deep Look at Death Threats in Sports

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A Deep Look at Death Threats in Sports

Indigenous Australians Are Excluded from Managing Water on Their Own Land

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The Murray Darling Basin (MDB) spans a million square kilometers and crosses several state borders. It's by far Australia's largest water source, and its footprint contains 40 percent of the nation's farms as well as 70 percent of its irrigated agriculture.

For the many indigenous communities dotting its sprawl, the basin also carries deep cultural significance. However, a series of changes in law have led to the locking out of indigenous leaders from decisions relating to the basin's use and future. As a result, they're claiming, huge areas of their land have become uninhabitable.

In some regards, the lockout isn't new. Indigenous Australians have been left out of the basin's management for years, despite laws designed to ensure their involvement. To rectify this, a First Nations alliance of 46 indigenous groups has called for new water authorities to include them in water talks. They argue policies put in place to ensure their involvement are being ignored.

Indigenous groups allege this lack of consultation has resulted in the degradation of waterways on their land. They claim large-scale irrigation and the draining of water to fill dams and weirs has left communities around the Menindee Lakes and Stradbroke Island in crisis. This has forced thousands to move off of land with significant cultural value.

Jenny Whyman is a Paakintji woman and a representative on the Northern Basin Aboriginal Nations Committee. She talked to VICE about her experience with ground water mining by the New South Wales state Government destroying Menindee Lakes. "The local indigenous community of Sunset Strip were never consulted," she commented. "Instead, they were each offered $200,000 to move out of their homes." The lake is an indigenous burial site, and further water plans were going to drill through them. "We're not happy about it. How would they like if we dug up their relatives?" she said.

Darren Perry, an Ngintait man and chairman of the Murray Lower Darling Rivers indigenous Nations (MLDRIN), explained to VICE that Australian water policy specifies that indigenous groups must be consulted about how Australia's water is managed. "This simply isn't happening," he said. "We've had absolutely no involvement at all in Victoria—water authorities have made no movements to engage with indigenous communities."

Much of the breakdown comes from complications following the separation of land and water titles in the 1994 Council of Australian Government's Water Reform Framework. The reforms allowed for the control of land and water as two separate entities, with individual licenses for each. But this occurred at the same time Australia was processing native title claims, meaning that when indigenous groups retrieved land ownership, they discovered that water wasn't part of the deal.

Despite this, the Native Title Act 1993, the 2006 National Water Initiative (NWI), and an independent review in November all state water management must include indigenous interests. But Sue Jackson, a principal research fellow at Melbourne's Griffith University and an expert in this area says the breakdown could lie in vague terminology.

"In the National Water Initiative, phrases saying indigenous interests will be consulted 'wherever possible' obscures meaning. It allows governments and water planners to decide when and if they apply those clauses or not," she told VICE. There also exists no target or review in the policies, and Jackson highlighted this means no one is ensuring that engagement with indigenous communities actually happens.

In an attempting to revive Australia's diminishing river system, the Murray Darling Basin Authority is implementing a seven-year Basin Plan. It aims to achieve a balance between environmental, economic, and social interests—including those of indigenous communities—by 2019. But while this is a positive step, Darren Perry notes that the MDBA only has influence over how the water is managed, it doesn't own water licenses. These are owned by state governments, land irrigators, and private landowners whom the MDMA only assist.

Darren acknowledges that indigenous communities could be perceived as challenging the state governments and private companies who own the water as a way to assert control and influence. This, he said, is far from the case. "We just need an opportunity to build our own economy, and water is one of the few things we have," he said. "We want to go further into aquaculture, or alternative farming with water-friendly crops—rather than watch people try and grow rice and cotton in the driest continent on Earth."

Darren told VICE that ultimately a healthier partnership was all indigenous groups is needed. "Most of all we just care for this country, and every living thing of that country," he said. "Our responsibility is to care for the land, it's what makes us who we are."

Image by Flickr user Susan

Follow Jack on @Twitter.

I Traveled to Egypt for a Miracle Cure for My ALS

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In 1968, a light in the shape of a woman was seen radiating from the dome of the Church of Saint Mary in Zeitoun, Cairo. She disappeared after two or three minutes, but she reemerged the next week—again for just a few minutes. She continued to visit periodically, and crowds gathered, speculating that the light was the mother of God. The head of the Coptic Church at the time, Pope Kyrillos VI, investigated the sighting and concluded that it was, in fact, a Marian apparition. The (Muslim) president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, reportedly built a bigger church across the street as a testament to his own belief that this was Mary. The Egyptian police and government searched for an earthly explanation, but no one could find a projector within miles capable of producing the image. The photos all look different from one another, as though the apparition were too ethereal to be captured in a single image. She continued to visit the church until 1971, almost three years after the original sighting.

In the early 90s I was a religious child, growing up Christian in Egypt, and my mother surprised me when she revealed that people still camped en masse outside Our Lady of Zeitoun during the Virgin Mary Feast, hoping to see Mary reappear. I was only five or six, but spending all night praying and reciting hymns squeezed between hundreds of people in the African summer heat sounded like, well, fun. Besides, what if she returned and we missed it? My family seemed foolishly unprepared, which meant I'd never get her baraka, or blessing.

We never went, and Mary never came back. But other miracles surrounded me. In the West, the word miraculous has penetrated our vernacular in such a way that it's become a synonym for extraordinary, while extraordinary has become a synonym for amazing, and amazing is just what you call the barista who remembers how you like your coffee. All these words should mean something beyond our human capacity, but their place in our lexicon has shifted. None of these words would trigger thoughts of a supernatural force.

In Egypt, they do. There, miracles happen—and often. In Egypt, share a worry occupying your thoughts and people will spout off tales of the works of God. As a child, stories of icons weeping oil or the paralyzed suddenly walking fueled my belief that a divine hand often reached down to rearrange life's affairs. All you need is faith.

I lost my faith when I moved out of my parents' house after college. I didn't lose it in the sense that I was still looking for it—I lost it in the same way I had lost my childhood kitchen set when my family emigrated out of Egypt. I once imagined that a pale pink stovetop could cook eggs, but not anymore. I once believed that faith could move mountains, but not anymore. Still, on a sunny September morning last year, I found myself snuggled in the warmth and comfort of religion, faith, and wonderfully delusional hopefulness.

I needed to tell my parents that my 29-year-old brain was no longer properly communicating with my body—that it would, in no particular order, slowly stop telling my hands to move, then my arms, my legs, my jaw, vocal cords, and tongue. It would eventually forget to tell my lungs to expand, leaving me to slowly suffocate.

My parents were the last people I told, because every part of me believed that I'd tell them and then immediately have to begin planning their funerals. I didn't think my mother, who has a bad heart, has only one working kidney, and is a cancer survivor, could physically add bad news to that list. My sister, Deedee, even suggested I leave out details about the course of the disease.


On March 12, 1976, a Bible was found floating in the Nile outside the church opened to Isaiah 19:25: "Blessed be Egypt, my people." Photos by David Degner

I flew from New York to Cleveland, where they live, with my backpack and an Arabic translation of the Wikipedia page on ALS. I was ten when we left Egypt, so I never learned which words meant "amyotrophic lateral sclerosis." I had only learned what the acronym signified in English a year prior, when I told a team of doctors that my left hand didn't seem to work quite like it used to.

When I arrived at their home, before I even had the chance to pull up the Wikipedia page or taste a bite from the spread of food my mom had prepared for my arrival, I was gasping for air, and my body was convulsing. I went into a delirious cry, the kind that made my eyes look like a cartoon character's and left the skin on my cheeks leathery.

"The doctors say the paralysis will spread throughout my entire body and I'll die," I managed to pronounce in shattered Arabic. I started to tremble, like my body does now when I'm upset or stressed or cold, rhythmically tossing back and forth in between my mother's arms.

"Don't say that!" she repeated several times. Her eyes were dry.

That entire week I stayed in my old bed from high school, asleep or not, only moving to occasionally use the bathroom. When I experienced a gust of energy, I relocated my laptop and my Netflix marathons to the couch. I'd occasionally answer texts from Deedee, in Washington, DC.

At night my mother slept next to me, underneath the old glow-in-the-dark stars from Spencer Gifts that are still stuck to the ceiling. She always woke up before I did and delivered a breakfast tray with her eyebrows raised, her eyelashes extended to her brow bone, and her jaw slightly dropped with a goofy smile, the same way she'd tell me I was no longer in trouble when I was a kid. While I moped, she went about her day, cooking and cleaning and occasionally calling out to God, Ya Rab. If even a single tear fell across her face that week, I didn't see it. She was tough, a rebel who scoffed at science. Regardless of what the doctors had said, God—she was certain—would have the final word.

"God has never embarrassed me," she said, her words spoken with a confidence that I badly wanted to share. But I wasn't sure that the same God who watches over suffering and injustice in the world would make my rather insignificant heartache a priority.


The author writes a prayer next to relics of saints.

She told me to go to Egypt, convinced that I'd be healed there. This was my mom—God had never embarrassed her, and I definitely wouldn't, so by the end of the week I promised her that I would go to ask for a miracle. Eight weeks later I was on a flight to Cairo, numbing my anxious thoughts with tiny liquor bottles. For 12 hours I worried that a bishop, priest, or monk would expose that I lacked the one requirement to be miraculously healed—faith. I'd been taught to respect these people, that they weren't just people but servants of the Lord. That stuck with me, even as I shrugged off my religion. Before my trip, I had spoken to family members who seemed baffled and skeptical at how I, a young and otherwise healthy person, had suddenly become terminally ill. They all concluded, rather quickly, that "God tests us when we stray from Him." Even my cousin Evette, a pharmacist, told me, "He gives His toughest battles to His strongest soldiers. So put your faith in Him, before science."

Their judgment made me wonder what my tell was—what outed me as a nonbeliever. I had never told them about losing my faith. Had I spoken about my disease too matter-of-factly? Did I make a joke when I wasn't supposed to? It was apparent, whatever it was, and I doubted that I could mask it while I asked for a new central nervous system.

I traveled to Cairo with a purpose—to fulfill a promise to my mother—but I was also afraid that my skepticism flirted with mockery. I may have been going to be healed, but my instinct was still to approach the matter as a reporter, not a pilgrim. At first I couldn't even bring myself to tell anyone I was sick, and I spent as much time studying the occurrence of miracles in Egypt as I did looking for my own. In Egypt you don't have to look far: On my first day, I called a car to take me to Coptic Cairo, a small enclave of historic churches and religious sites, including one of the areas where the Holy Family is said to have hid while fleeing Herod's death sentence. In the car, my driver, also a Christian, told me with zero instigation, "I witnessed a miracle this morning on my way to pick you up."

I hadn't told him why I was in Egypt, that I was sick, or even that I was a journalist. But it was Sunday and we were visiting ancient churches, so he led his small talk with miracles. He looked back in his rearview mirror and occasionally flailed his right hand, showing off a coke nail in the process, as he detailed to me with both certainty and disbelief how only an hour earlier a priest had performed an exorcism and rid a young boy of demons.

"I don't believe in all that," I confessed. "Maybe the boy is just sick." But no matter how much I argued that people sometimes substitute a supernatural explanation for a scientific one, he wouldn't even consider it.

He dropped me off, and I was left to remember how ancient and beautiful and weird Coptic Cairo is. A stone wall three times my height surrounds the perimeter. Intertwined between the churches, which date back to the third century, are small square graveyards and limestone streets where people have been living since before the Arab conquest of Egypt. Walking up the steps to the Hanging Church, given its name because it's suspended over the Babylon Fortress, I passed couples and chatty teenagers and children with money in hand to purchase candles. Although it's technically the Saint Virgin Mary's Hanging Church, my eyes immediately focused on the icon and remains of Saint Demiana.


The author places a paper with her name written on it next to the remains of Pope Kyrillos VI, the patriarch of the Coptic Church from 1959 to 1971.

My parents say that when my mother was pregnant with my sister, the Virgin Mary came to my father in a dream and told him he would have a daughter. He would name her Demiana, and Demiana would be a nun. A healthy baby girl arrived. They named her Demiana. But she never quite made it to the convent.

Deedee, as I have called her since we were little, is a glammed-up, sexed-up, vivacious version of me who loves strippers and gluten-free diets equally. She's 18 months younger but treats me like the baby sister. In all fairness, she's now the more responsible one. Even though her eyes are wider, her cheekbones higher, and her lips poutier, she's the one who gets mad when someone says we don't look alike. She loves me so much that she broke her personal vow of exile from Egypt for the first time in 14 years and decided to meet me for her Thanksgiving break.

That icon could've been what triggered my tears: Saint Demiana is legendary for her bravery. She was tortured on the orders of a pagan emperor after she refused to renounce her faith. Deedee is brave. She was the first family member I told about my diagnosis. I had tried to protect her, exhausting all possibilities, and I waited six weeks before I finally broke down and called her from outside the ALS Clinic at Columbia University Medical Center. She drove from DC to Brooklyn without even packing a toothbrush. That night we walked to dinner hand in hand, and we fantasized over margaritas and tacos about how I'd be the first woman to be cured of ALS. She promised she'd take care of me, and that my last days wouldn't be spent underneath those awful glow-in-the-dark stars in my old bedroom.

Within seconds of seeing the image of Demiana, my lips curled, my eyebrows puckered, and I wept at the entrance of the Hanging Church. It had been four months since I was diagnosed, and these bursts of uncontrollable tears had mostly subsided. When the news was still fresh, nothing specific provoked my tears—they just came again and again and again. I cried on sidewalks in Manhattan and Brooklyn. I cried on the subway platform and in the subway cars. I cried at my desk and throughout my office. I once cried in a bar, with a pink tequila cocktail in hand.

I even cried before the doctors confirmed my diagnosis. For almost a year, my neurologist seemed confident that as long as the weakness was isolated to my left hand, it was treatable. Then one night in April, walking down the subway stairs, I suddenly had to catch myself when my left leg started to shake and I lost balance.

That night I sobbed the entire way home, passing strangers who probably assumed a boy had brought on my tears. The weakness in my left leg meant I was out of options, but I lied to myself and said I was being dramatic. I turned 29 two weeks later, on May 1, and as I blew out the candles on my birthday cake, I wished for anything but ALS.


A 2000-year-old well inside a Coptic church known for its miraculous healing

On July 9, 2014, during my routine neurology appointment, I finally gathered the strength to tell the doctor about my shaky leg. I can still vividly see the expression in his eyes when he checked my reflexes and my feet bobbed up and down in midair. He took a few steps back and said, "It seems you're displaying upper motor neuron symptoms."

To most, that would probably sound like jargon, but I had read enough to comprehend that those words meant doom. "Are you talking about ALS?" I asked. He nodded.

When he couldn't get me to stop crying, he asked, "Tell me, what's going on in the Middle East these days?"

Shocked, I stopped crying. "It's falling apart. Much like my body," I answered.

I left the office alone and confused. I chain-smoked, drank champagne, and spent the rest of the day annoyed at how inaccurately TV medical dramas depict the conversation I had just lived. The following six weeks I visited the best neurologists in the field, and when they thought I should repeat one test, I suggested we repeat them all. I just didn't want to call Deedee and inflict on her the worst possible news.

At the church I followed a lecture, wanting to learn about the history and powers of the place but unwilling to tell anyone my own story. One of the priests leading the talk spotted me and signaled for me to join the discussion. Although I had stopped crying, he maintained steady eye contact with me as he spoke. He was dressed in all black, with a long silver beard and big brown eyes. I wanted to run up to him, hug him, and list out the aches in my limbs and the pain in my heart, but I didn't. I sat and listened to him describe when the church was built, the details of the narthex, and how a painting of the Virgin Mary on the marble pillar was one of the unexplained things about the church. On one of the 13 pillars in the church was a peaceful portrait of Mary with disproportionately large eyes and ears and a tiny mouth, in the common manner of Coptic art. But, the priest went on to say, no one knew how or when this particular icon had been rendered—because, he said, it was impossible to paint on marble.

"An angel could've painted it, or the Virgin herself, or a human," he explained. "There is no way to truly know."

"Well, that would be considered a miracle," said a woman in her 40s, as if on cue.


Maximus Mahros, a volunteer who mans the well, fills a plastic bottle for the author.

The priest agreed and led his tour into another part of the church. I stayed behind and took photos of the miraculous painting of Mary, which was wrapped in clear plastic, as all the nice furniture at my great-aunt's house in Cairo had been when I was young. It may sound silly, but I believed him. I was taking photos with my iPhone, like some awestruck teenage fan, instead of googling "Is painting on marble possible?"

After his speech I wanted to abandon my life in Brooklyn and go scrub floors at the church. Something in the story had made me feel insignificant and powerful at once, had made my pain seem relative. Who cares if I'm dying? Angels were painting.

I sat at a pew for a few minutes, still unable to ask anyone at the church for my own miracle, and then left to go drink from a 2,000-year-old well, inside a different Virgin Mary church in the patchwork of the area. The Holy Family is said to have hid in an underground room next to the well, and the miracle is supposed to be that it hasn't dried up in the intervening two millennia. As soon as I set foot in the church, I wept again.

I was pointed to a volunteer with crooked teeth named Maximus Mahros who manned the well at the church—he boasted about all the miracles he'd encountered in his time as a servant. A month before, he claimed, a terminally ill man had come to him to pray to the Virgin Mary and drink the salty water. When the man returned a week later, he told Mahros that he'd been healed. His doctors, Mahros said, deemed it a miraculous recovery.

"Would you like some water?" he offered, and I handed him a bottle to fill from the old paint bucket he lowered into the well. I chugged the water, and my face must have betrayed suspicion, because Mahros continued: "He called me today and said he'd come by next Sunday to show me his x-rays and blood work."

I asked for this mysterious man's number, but Mahros became evasive. He shifted his story, said that he didn't have it. He insisted that the man called him and never from the same number. I stopped myself before I asked about caller ID. "But he's coming next Sunday," he assured me. "You should come by and speak to him directly." I agreed and left.


Demiana Fanous places the author's name next to the relics of her namesake, Saint Demiana.

I spent the following day touring churches and hearing about miracles that had supposedly been worked upon others, sobbing in each place from the minute I walked in. I went, as I had always wanted, to Zeitoun and sobbed. I sobbed as I collected oil for my wilting limbs. I even sobbed when I saw other people praying. I wrote pieces of paper with my name on them, and I sobbed as I placed them next to the icons and remains of saints. That would be the last time I recognized my handwriting. ALS would destroy my penmanship just a few weeks later.

Traveling through Cairo traffic and randomly crying at religious sites had wrung all the energy out of me. My right hand was also rapidly deteriorating around that time. Putting on socks went from a three-minute to a five-minute to a ten-minute chore. The Muslim Brotherhood had called for mass protests that Friday, and former president Mubarak's trial was scheduled for that Saturday. The entire country was on edge. Even the thick pollution that lazily idled over Cairo seemed anxious.

When Deedee arrived, eight days after I did, her presence helped palliate my grief. I took her to the well, where Mahros seemed surprised to see me, even though he was telling the same story he'd told me to other visitors. He said I was too early, because the man must have been attending Mass. I took him at his word. As Deedee and I went to have some coffee, she admitted that she believes in the supernatural and the possibility of miracles. I was happy, maybe even a little relieved, that she didn't hold my cynicism in her heart. Two unfiltered coffees later, Mahros was ignoring my phone calls, and it became evident that either the man wasn't coming or he didn't exist.

Deedee loved the idea of seeing her namesake's relics, so we walked to the Hanging Church to light candles and continue my hunt for miracles. Saint Demiana's remains are locked in a glass case underneath the icon. They're concealed in a foot-long velvet tube that's embroidered with gold thread and smells like dried roses. Deedee squeezed my name into the glass case.

A few minutes later, I asked a tour guide to tell me the story behind the Virgin Mary on the marble, hoping to again bask in the comfort of angels painting. Instead, he described a technique for painting on marble. He had no idea that his words were vacuuming all the magic out of the church for me.

He did tell me about a Coptic convent nearby to which a Muslim optometrist supposedly prescribed visits to suffering patients.

I asked for his name or number, a nonbeliever still doing my best to believe. After Mahros and the magical marble painting that wasn't magical at all, I was back to being the skeptical weirdo from New York.

He didn't even have the doctor's first name. He asked a few other people who were familiar with this phenomenon, but since no one verifies miracles and their faith is enough, nobody knew his name.

"You should go to the convent," one of them said. "The nuns would definitely know."


A man lights a candle at the Hanging Church in Cairo.

The Nativity Fast, when Coptic Christians give up all meat and dairy for the 40 days leading up to Christmas, had just begun, which meant the convent would be closed and the nuns would be praying. But something told me to chance it. When we got there, the iron gates were locked. Still unable to say why I'd really come, I told the guard that I was an American journalist reporting on miracles. He insisted that no visitors would be allowed in. I told him we wouldn't be long and asked whether the mother superior could make an exception. After a few minutes of silence, the iron gates opened and we entered into what felt like Eden.

I felt a strange sense of accomplishment that quickly vanished when I saw a young couple holding a baby in the middle of the convent. The bags under their eyes made it seem like they were deprived not only of sleep but of joy. Their baby looked too small to be out in the world, and they were clearly visiting to bless their child and pray for their own miracle. The sight sent the grief I had so proudly overcome rushing back, but Deedee was right next to me, so I held my tears.

"I'm wondering if you could give me the name of the Muslim doctor who prescribes visits to this convent?" I asked, but before they spoke I knew the answer. They had never heard of the doctor or even the tale.

"Don't believe everything you read on the net," one of them said to me in a comforting, hushed tone.

"Well, I have a second inquiry," I said, finally able to form the question. "Is there someone who could pray for me?"

The same nun began to write down my name, and when she asked me what was wrong, the only words I could form through my sobs were, "The doctors can't do anything for me." I saw that I'd infected my sister with my tears. She walked over and held my hand. The nun asked whether we were sisters, and we nodded in unison. Deedee kept squeezing my palm to comfort me.

Maybe miracles, like anything else, are relative. In my early 20s I agonized over carbs and boys, but now my thoughts only beg my body, "Please don't forget how to walk. Please don't forget how to walk. Please don't forget how to walk." Maybe my miracle is that my mother is living through her sadness—not by physical strength, love, or even a higher power, but by hope. Hope is what keeps us all alive, a beacon in a time of darkness. It's the most powerful force that I've ever encountered, and for some, nothing embodies hope more than prayer.

I waited for the nun to give me the speech about faith, about how I might have strayed from God, about how this "test" was only temporary. She didn't say any of that. "We don't live for this life," she told me. "We live for the afterlife. I wish I knew I would get to meet Jesus tomorrow."

And even though I'm young and agnostic and scared more of a wheelchair than of death, her words were more comforting than the promise of any miracle.

Follow Angelina Fanous on Twitter.

At Least the Opening Party for Björk's MoMA Show Was Interesting

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Artist and designer Ashley Eva Brock. All photos by Jessica Holland

"Björk is not an artist," the Brazilian fashion designer Geova Rodrigues said forcefully at the opening reception for the singer's much-anticipated exhibition last night at MoMA. He was sipping champagne underneath a spectacular black, feathery fascinator, and he said that that his favorite artists were Van Gogh and Picasso. "She is a musician," he said. "But I love her."

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Designer Geova Rodrigues

Reviews of the show have started coming in that use phrases like "unambitious hodgepodge," "bad, really bad," and "I felt sad and embarrassed leaving the museum." It turns out that a bunch of inanimate objects—dresses, robot mannequins, an airmail jacket—no matter how beautiful or iconic, can't capture the singer's mercurial spirit.

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Elliot Young

What the party managed to do, on the other hand, was show her impact on a generation, from the 20-something Biophilia fans, who were the only people dancing in front of the DJ booth, to artists like the Icelandic hair sculptor Hrafnhildur Arnardottir (a.k.a. Shoplifter), whose own ponytail was bound up in a kind of black-gridded hairnet, and who was hanging out with fashion consultant Edda Gudmundsdottir. (Both have worked on Björk's avant-garde looks.)

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Peaches and friend

It's a testament to the breadth of Björk's talent that it's impossible to generalize about her admirers and friends, other than to say that they are good at being themselves, and that they aren't afraid of wearing outlandish clothes.

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Artist Juliana Huxtable and friend

"She makes people want to show off," said MoMA visuals manager Jade White, who saw the singer buying "two or three gigantic bird feeders" at MoMA's design store with her daughter, Isadora, earlier. "She's an icon, man. She puts Lady Gaga to shame."

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Graphic designer Victor John Villanueva

Although the singer herself only made a brief appearance, Peaches and Le1f were circulating, and looking fabulous, as was the star artist of the New Museum Triennial, Juliana Huxtable, but there was a lot of competition for who was best dressed.

Susanne Bartsch, the influential party promoter, looked like an evil, seductive sprite in a sheer, floor-length black gown over a corset and suspenders, with eyelashes that reached to her hairline and a black pointy headpiece that was somewhere in between a unicorn's horn and a witch's hat.

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Promoter Susanne Bartsch

"She's the shit," she said of Angela Goding, the MoMA PS1 director of development, who joined her on the mezzanine overlooking the ground floor. "No, she's the shit," Goding insisted, pointing out that Bartsch had achieved generation-defining, fashion-icon status in her own right.

The designer and artist Ashley Eva Brock, who made leg-warmers that were in the exhibition, could have been a benign cult leader from the future in a hooded dress dyed with indigo. She'd used seawater for the process, collected near her home in northern California, because it was eco-friendly, she said, and because she's kind of a hippie.

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Heidi Lee and friend

It was a crowded field, but my vote for the look of the night goes to the scientifically minded milliner Heidi Lee, who was wearing her "Endless Echo Hat." 3D-printed from a scan of her own face, it made her look like a robot with eight overlapping faces, and according to Lee, is intended to raise questions about surveillance technologies and the age of the selfie.

The night ended early, and the only climactic moments were when a plasma globe suspended above everyone's heads crackled with electricity in the middle and at the end, but still, the event was full of clashing opinions, boundary-pushing couture, and active artists of every imaginable kind. It did a good job of encapsulating Bjork's boundless, curious energy—better, some might say, than a swan dress on a mannequin.

Australia in the 80s was Downbeat and Color-Drenched

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Pickles St, Port Melbourne, 1987

A couple of weeks ago Peter Milne showed us his memories of Melbourne in the 70s. A decade later, it a very different city. Frankston-born photographer Michael Williams shot most of his Chromophobia series in the 80s, when tourists didn't choke city laneways and suburban outskirts were virtually forgotten about.

With color as a connecting element, Michael's photos of red-walled Prahran cafés and twilight skies over St Kilda show there was something transfixing about the city in this period. Ahead of his show at Melbourne's Colour Factory, we chatted to him about assisting Rennie Ellis and why it's worth spending time in the outer suburbs.

VICE: I read you got started assisting Rennie Ellis?
Michael Williams: Yeah after I finished college I worked as his photographic assistant for a while. His studio was on Greville Street in Prahran. At the time I was obsessed with this film called Kodachrome, which gave out these fantastic saturated prints. But Rennie's darkroom had no ventilation and was just toxic.

Speaking of Kodachrome, tell me about your relationship with color.
Being fixated with color changes how I even just go out for a walk. Believe me, when a photographer has a camera they are awful company. They can hardly talk —they're too distracted. My partner never used to go walking with me. Chromophobia is an ironic twist on that color obsession. When I fill an image with color, it becomes difficult to know where you are. It creates these surreal images. They are timeless in a way, you don't know what year or place it is.

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Melbourne Show, 1987

What was Melbourne like in the 80s?
Younger people probably don't remember, but in the 80s Melbourne had this real downbeat feel. Artists could still rent a cheap studio in the city. Streets had all these old factories and warehouses on them, much like the Nicholas Building on Swanson Street—which really is the last remaining bastion of those sorts of spaces.

Do any of your shots capture parts of Melbourne that don't exist anymore?
Well, the shot of the circus van is in Melbourne Park in 1985. It's right where Rod Laver Arena is today, back when it all used to be just park and trees. In the 80s these daggy circuses and carnivals used to roll in and just set up all the time. This was Circus Oz, so it's just a local one. This was a time before 9/11 too, so there wasn't much security awareness. I could just walk in and set up equipment. I just loved this great big truck. The word CIRCUS is just enormous, like ten feet high—I could see it from the road.

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Melbourne Park, 1985

That's one of your less unsettling images. What did you aim to capture in those?
Whenever I travel I try to seek out the peripheries of wherever I am. In Melbourne, this meant going right out into the outer suburbs of Laverton or Altona. There was this strange mix of incongruous houses, old industrial sites, and these billboards advertising sunglasses or suntan lotion in the middle of nowhere. The whole space had elements so out of sync with each other, it was quite cinematic.

Is that where you took that horse shot?
That's out in Laverton, next to this weird North American taxidermy clinic. The horse was an agistment, meaning someone had paid a farmer to leave him wandering around there on this abandoned property. It was quite unusual really. I don't think it really happens anymore these days.

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Laverton, southwest of Melbourne, 1985

What do you like about the city's fringes?
It's what occurs out there, out there in that real no-man's land. Like in the picture of Station Pier, it used to be real desolate. There were all these old, gigantic pot plants, so I got down and experimented with my flash, trying to really accentuate that unsettling atmosphere. It felt like a different world, when you travel out just beyond the everyday environment.

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Station Pier, Port Melbourne, 1984

Are any images in Chromophobia taken outside of Melbourne?
Some. There's one from 1987 in Lefkas, Greece—that one of the old man in his underpants. He was the caretaker in some little council depot, he was guarding that strange statue next to him left over from a recent float. I sought out the same sort of thing here: I'd traveled to the fringe of the city and found this man. He must be well and truly gone by now. I remember going back a few years later and telling him he'd been in exhibitions and was famous—he didn't really care.

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Lafkas, Greece, 1987

While you're explaining shots, I've got to ask about the two women in the hats.
That one was taken in Hawaii in 1983. This was a seminal image for me, it sort of really ignited my color obsession. They were these professional twins, just having lunch together. I saw them the next day on the beach, in matching outfits again. It was pretty amazing.

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Hawaii, 1983

Chromophobia will be showing at the Colour Factory from March 5 to 28.

Words by Jack Callil, follow him on Twitter.


Meeting Charles Chahwan, the Arab World's Answer to Bukowski

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Charles Chahwan sitting in front of his bookshelf

Wearing thick-rimmed glasses, a hoody, and a leather jacket, his head framed by a chaotic tumbleweed of hair, Charles Chahwan sat in a family-run cafe in Jounieh, a coastal town just north of Beirut.

On the table, surrounded by a Lebanese mezze, was a decent-sized book. Its cover displayed an abstract painting in garish colors of a disheveled, bearded man in underwear, standing beside a cactus and drinking a bottle of beer. A crudely drawn, upside-down stick-person with tits and a vagina also peered out from the cover's right-hand corner.

The image somewhat resembled Chahwan, perhaps after a particularly heavy night of drinking. However, though it was painted by him, it in fact pays homage to another Charles: Bukowski.

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Chahwan's translation of 'Women'

Chahwan, a 50-year-old Lebanese author, best known in his home country for Harb A-Shawari'a ("Street Wars")—a collection of short stories profiling the lives of rival gunmen competing for control of Beirut's streets during the country's 1975–1990 civil war—is the first person to translate American author Charles Bukowski into Arabic. The book on the table is an Arabic-language copy of Bukowski's 1978 novel, Women. Previously, Chahwan has translated works by other 20th-century American literary figures, including Raymond Chandler and Paul Auster, as moonlight projects on the side of a career as a journalist and art and literary critic.

Chahwan became interested in Bukowski and writers of the Beat Generation during Lebanon's civil war while studying English literature at a faculty of the Lebanese University in Fanar, a town close to Jounieh.

"Back then, reading and writing provided me with an escape. I mean, they still do," said Chahwan, who penned his first book—a collection of short poems—at the age of 18. "I preferred American literature to British and other European writers. I felt like I could relate to it more—the aspirational side.

"Growing up in the 70s and 80s, the French colonial influence in Lebanon was still strong. Often I would first encounter excerpts from American writers in French magazines—I think maybe the first time I read Women was in French."

At just over 300 pages, Women is arguably Bukowski's most autobiographical work. It describes, in smutty, matter-of-fact detail, the life of protagonist Henry Chinaski—a 50-something sexually re-awakened alcoholic writer going through a steady stream of vomiting, women, poetry readings, dog races, quarts of half-water, half-whiskey, the occasional quaalude, and a desire to live to 80 and have promiscuous encounters with 18-year-olds.

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Three of Chahwan's books

Released in Lebanon shortly before Christmas, it has gained a fairly positive reception at book fairs in Beirut and in some of the local Lebanese press—the most liberal in the Arab world—albeit often as an oddity or point of intrigue. Given its subject matter, the book is unlikely to receive a pan-Arab release. Chahwan, understandably, was aware of such a reality before he undertook the translation.

"I can't imagine it going down well in the Gulf or Saudi," he laughed. "Saudi channels cut kisses when they show Western films. How can you have a romantic film with the kisses cut? The film won't make sense!"

Taking, on and off, two years to complete, once he was finished and had found a publisher, Chahwan was paid just $2,000 for his work.

"They're bloody thieves. I get screwed over every time," said Chahwan, shaking his head. " Women is pretty pornographic, so the translation was quite difficult—some modern Arabic dictionaries don't even have an entry for 'penis.' Conservatism has shrunk the language; I almost had to consult a medieval scientific text."

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Chahwan sitting in front of one of his paintings

In 2002, a comprehensive study conducted by the United Nations suggested that only 300 books are translated from Western languages into Arabic every year. Greece is said to annually translate five times more books from English than the entire Arab world, a stark contrast to realm of literary translations during the reign of the Ummayad Caliph al-Ma'mun in the ninth century.

During that era, Al-Ma'mun founded an unrivaled school of learning in Baghdad known as Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), which was home to a translation center marked by a vociferous appetite to translate the intellectual traditions of conquered foes. Among many of its achievements, it's through the endeavors of Bayt al-Hikma that the foundations of modern science were established and the philosophical legacy of Aristotle and Plato rediscovered by the West.

"It's a shame that more books are not translated into Arabic. Maybe if some of these guys from Daesh [the Islamic State] read Bukowski they would enjoy it and not go to war," said Chahwan, smiling. "I don't know. Maybe it would make some even more angry. These people are a nightmare—there was nothing comparable to them here during the [civil] war."

During the 80s, Jounieh—known for its casino, cobbled high street, and nightclubs—remained relatively conflict-free compared to other parts of Lebanon. However, Chahwan did, on a number of occasions, incur the wrath of the Lebanese Forces (LF), a Christian militia that came to control the area.

"The first time it was over a girl I had dated that an LF member wanted to marry," recalled Chahwan. "They basically parked a car full of armed men outside my house for a week to intimidate me out of seeing her again."

The tactic worked.

"Shame. She was a nice girl," said Chahwan.

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One of Chahwan's paintings

"Another time they accused me of sacrilege for this short story I published in a local leftist magazine. They took offense to a metaphor I wrote describing Jesus in the form of a blonde woman in a Ferrari," he told me. "It was called 'Jazz in Solitude.' That time I didn't leave the house for two weeks. They were really after me."

The relative dearth in translations of Western literature into Arabic is often attributed to religious conservatism and low literacy rates in the MENA region. The theory holds that this then leads to a focus on religious texts, written in Arabic. But in Lebanon, a large cross-section of the population is competent in both English and French.

"Most kids write text messages in [Lebanese] Arabic using the Latin script. In schools, they don't teach the children how to write proficiently in Arabic," said Chahwan, touching upon the difference between Arabic dialects (which differ from country to country, region to region) and written Arabic, which comes in a largely uniform style across the Arab world.

"It's sad that this connection with written Arabic is being lost. But speaking and writing in English and French creates opportunities to leave and establish better careers elsewhere. This has been happening since even before the civil war. It's also part of what makes Lebanon a bit different to other countries around here," reflected Chahwan.

"I mean, at least here in Lebanon people can buy my Bukowski translation," he added. "If you want, I can say I translated Bukowski as a counter-attack to ISIS – [that] I'm fighting against these kinds of mentalities. But really, I did it because I like Bukowski. If I was doing it for the money then I'd be an idiot, because there's no money in it."

Follow Martin Armstrong on Twitter.

VICE Profiles: Taxi to Mars

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Mars One is a space operation based out of the Netherlands, which aims to put ordinary people on the planet Mars—to live there—from the year 2024 onwards.

Relocating to the planet with a one-way ticket is an extreme life choice and one that Melissa Ede, a transgender taxi driver from England, is busy preparing for. Melissa is among 1,058 people picked from 200,000 candidates globally for the $6.1 billion Mars One Project.

Before these astronauts leave the Earth's atmosphere to travel to Mars, they must be put through eight years of required training. Taking place in simulation facilities, training will include electrical repairs to the settlement structures, learning how to cultivate crops in confined spaces, and addressing both routine and serious medical issues such as dental upkeep, muscle tears, and bone fractures. Participants will be taught how to be entirely self-sufficient because Mars One is a one-way trip.

In Taxi to Mars, VICE profiles Melissa, the unlikely astronaut, to understand what motivates a person to relocate to another, unknown planet. Having never found a reason to move from England, she now has the opportunity to make history as the first transgender person to step foot on Mars.

The Things I've Learned After Years of Being a French Swinger

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Photo via Flickr user Topher i

This article was originally published on VICE France.

All my life I've fantasized about orgies and debauchery. I realized this fantasy later in life, after meeting a girl who thought monogamy to be impossible. Just like me, that girl—who is now the mother of my child—believed that suppressed sexual desire can lead to tumors. I don't know if it's a coincidence, but to this day I haven't gotten cancer

As I said, the urge to be a libertine manifested early in my life—it probably dates back to my first readings of the hypersexual cartoons of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton when I was too young to be looking at such things. Still I had my first adventure quite late—at the age of 30.

It was during an orgy organized by a friend of mine at my place—at the time I had already been in a relationship for seven years. That same friend introduced me to a circle of other self-proclaimed "libertines," people who I have continued to come across sporadically at parties for several years now.

This lifestyle choice has allowed me to discover many things about myself and others, but it's also led to many moments of embarrassment, shame, and pain. I have long meditated on the negative consequences of the choices my partner and I made, and you should too if you'd one day like to to embark upon this great adventure beyond animal desire and vanity. Here's what I've learned so far:

THE IDIOTS

The first—and most obvious—complication of being a swinger is the high probability of meeting idiots. Most of the philanderers I know are brainless assholes. Whichever social class they come from, libertines—particularly swingers—are, to varying degrees, boring people with limited conversational skills. So don't think you're going to gain access to delightful new intellectual spheres by choosing this kind of sex life.

I showed up at her doorstep with a bag of croissants expecting to find her naked in bed with the guy. I thought that they would both be thankful for the breakfast delivery and that we would all eat them naked—perhaps we would even end up having a threesome. I mean, we are French libertines after all.

ORGANIZED FUN
Before I realized that orgies were not what I was looking for—unless they occur naturally, on a whim, at the end of a party—I had to deal with a shitload of sinister plans. Imagine the worst night of your life with your friends, add a dose of sex to it, and you will have a vague idea of the evening I had once.

An acquaintance of mine from the orgy scene dragged me along to a place belonging to a friend of his, to whom he was selling MDMA. It was 4 AM when we got there, and were met with a bunch of people who were all stoned and half naked. The atmosphere was sordid. They all sat in a circle, high and naked, and nagged me about their mundane, horrible lives. Apparently, they would meet up once a week to get high and fuck, but they had been doing it for so long they didn't enjoy it anymore. Everyone I met at that party complained about what a drag their weekly appointment was—"but we still do it" they kept telling me, one after the other.

After this, I decided to experience debauchery outside a network. It's a more difficult task—convincing women that it's OK to fuck a married guy is hard, for example—but ultimately far more rewarding.

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THE PURITANS
Because I am an honest man, I refuse to flirt with a girl without specifying that I am in a relationship. I learned that lesson the day I found myself naked in a bath with a girl I had also flirted with at some party the week before. It was during a party at my house and I had just proposed that all of my guests should enjoy a "naked moment" in the jacuzzi together.

I decided to set the example and she followed. She was shy and charming—a pleasure to be naked with. Then she asked me if I lived in that apartment and I said, "Yeah, with my girlfriend." Awkward silence. I thought she knew that I was dating someone, but she started to cry, jumped out of the jacuzzi in a hurry, got dressed, and left the party. I felt like an idiot and a jerk at the time, but eventually I stopped giving a fuck—I had sex with my girlfriend that night.

FALLING IN LOVE
This is the worst thing that can happen to you—if, like me, you're a good guy and you care about the person you are with. Falling in love with a girl who wasn't my girlfriend destroyed me. I finally confessed everything to my girlfriend after a night spent standing on the edge of a roof wondering if I should jump or not.

I was being a drama queen; at best, I'd have broken a leg since I was at a terrace on the first floor of a house in the Parisian suburbs, but still, I was depressed. After hearing my story, my girlfriend laughed and told me I was cute as I was whining at her feet.

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WHEN YOUR GIRLFRIEND THINKS YOU'VE FALLEN IN LOVE WITH SOMEONE ELSE
After that dramatic episode, something unexpectedly backfired. I was shooting a movie at the time and I started going out with one of the actresses. It was a rather easygoing affair, largely driven by a bohemian impulse that tends to hit people when they're working together in the creative context of say, shooting a very-low-budget horror film.

At a depressing New Year's Eve party, I was looking forward to that girl showing up and making things a little more fun. But she never came and, slightly upset, I texted her a "kiss." It so happened that that night was the night my girlfriend decided to start reading my texts—for the first time in our relationship—and she got really upset. She woke me up by kicking me out of bed and asked that we didn't see each other for a week. I respected her wish but thought it was a mistake—I had already been in love with another girl (the one my girlfriend had known about) and nothing felt the same this time.

I kept my mouth shut, but it was a tough time for me, and I vowed to never let a doubt of this kind enter my relationship again.

WHEN YOUR GIRLFRIEND FUCKS OTHER PEOPLE AT FANCY DRESS PARTIES
One night, my girlfriend went home with a guy in the middle of a party. It wasn't a problem for me, and I told myself I would meet with her the next day and we'd resume our life as a couple. She had told me she'd be taking him to her sister's, who was out of town that week, so in the morning, I showed up at her doorstep with a bag of croissants expecting to find her naked in bed with the guy. I thought that they would both be thankful for the breakfast delivery and that we would all eat them naked—perhaps we would even end up having a threesome. I mean, we are French libertines after all. It didn't go at all as I'd planned.

So I woke them up. They were naked—I was right about that part—but then my girlfriend started screaming at me to get out. I had to walk all the way back home barefoot, in a Jesus costume, while another guy fucked my wife in her sister's bed. The party I had been to the night before had a "Religious Icons" theme and I didn't have enough money to take a cab.

Still, at least I had the croissants.


Paralegal Punk

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[body_image width='1000' height='671' path='images/content-images/2015/03/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/04/' filename='paralegal-punks-405-body-image-1425485967.jpg' id='32987']Koonhor jacket, Topshop top, Tripp skirt and pants, Miyako Bellizzi necklace

Photographer/Stylist: Miyako Bellizzi
Model: Lyndsea Lamarr

See more of Miyako Belizzi's work on her website.

Britain's Premier 'Magic Mushroom Explorer' Says Shrooms Could Change the World

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Simon Powell with the artwork for his book, 'Magic Mushroom Explorer: Psilocybin and the Awakening Earth.'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

British author Simon G Powell thinks he'd have had a slightly less eventful job had he never discovered magic mushrooms. "Fuck knows—probably working in a bookshop, or something," he says when I ask him to speculate.

Instead of chasing up late DVD returns, however, the 50-year-old has just released his second book about shrooms titled Magic Mushroom Explorer: Psilocybin and the Awakening Earth. Psilocybin—if you haven't already been informed via those glow-in-the-dark velvet posters at your local record shop—is a psychedelic tryptamine compound found in around 200 types of mushrooms worldwide. Or, in layman's terms, the stuff that makes you see weird shit when you eat them.

Writing about magic mushrooms certainly hasn't made Simon rich, at least not in the monetary sense. I meet him in his cramped co-operative-owned flat (the only way he can afford to continue living in London) a five-minute walk from Oval tube station. But a lifetime of psilocybin exploration, Simon claims, has brought him more spiritual riches and wisdom than he could have ever asked for—and he wants you to discover them, too.

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In 1984, Simon was living on the dole as an unemployed, malnourished punk in a friend's east London council flat. Ironically, considering his current professional devotion to mushrooms, he detested them back then, always pushing them to the side of his plate if anyone dared serve them up. But that same year, during a period of particular penury, a chance encounter at his local library with several books on shrooms changed the course of his life forever.

Like many experimental-but-stupid young people, he made some unsuccessful attempts with a friend to get high on nutmeg and suffered awful stomach aches as a result. Inspired by the books he'd taken out of the library, he also tried to trip on fly agaric mushrooms, which, unlike psilocybin mushrooms, are widely considered to have undesirable and unpleasant effects, like nausea and death.

Perhaps fortunately, the fly agarics didn't work, and it was a full two years before he became acquainted with magic mushrooms again.

In 1986, Simon went in search of the psilocybin-containing liberty cap variety in London's Richmond Park and, to his astonishment, discovered a meadow a few miles from the park entrance where hundreds of magic mushrooms had sprouted. He picked some and ate about 40 of them one evening a few days later.

Until then, his only experience with drugs had been with alcohol and cannabis, so—despite doing his research—he was ill-prepared for the powerful, unforgiving effects of psilocybin.

Having thought he would just see some nice colors and experience a warm glowing feeling, Simon was terrified when, instead, he started to have a bad trip—a really bad trip. His head started to fill with "noise and garbage," so he curled up in bed in a fetal position and buried himself in blankets in the hope that everything would return to normal.

Unfortunately, as you'll know if you've ever eaten a ton of shrooms, covering yourself in fabric does little to halt their effects. In fact, it wasn't until something written by one of his favorite authors—Russian-born spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff—popped into Simon's head that he was able to view his negative thought patterns "as clearly as he could see physical objects in the real world."

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"The longer I was able to objectively observe my inner turmoil, the more and more clear it became. And the more clearly I saw it, the less powerful it became and the more I became free of it," he writes in the book.

At one point he felt like a reborn Native American: "I could hear tribal voices, or at least I had the sense of a native tribal language deep within me," he says.

The experience was, in the end, utterly liberating and fulfilling, and Simon was never the same again.

"I knew something that other people didn't," he says. "I knew there were realms of experience in which some bigger meaning could be grasped. I knew that we were part of a bigger picture and a bigger purpose."

Since that experience, Simon has spent his life experimenting with and researching psilocybin. I ask him when he last ate mushrooms, half expecting him to whip out a bag from his coat and offer me some on the spot. So I'm surprised when he says it was nearly half a year ago in the Lake District.

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In hindsight, my surprise was a little irrational. As Simon points out, ingesting psilocybin is in no way comparable to going for a pint, or smoking a joint, or even doing a line. It's just not a recreational drug.

Unlike the late, venerated psychonaut Terence McKenna, who recommended people take mushrooms indoors in the dark, Simon advocates the use of psilocybin out in nature.

"If you're an experienced trekker and have camping equipment, it's the best thing there is," he says. "I know of nothing greater than taking the mushroom out in an oak forest in a wild region of Snowdonia or the Lake District."

Simon's many experiences of tripping out in nature have led him to develop the paradigm of "natural intelligence," which he calls the "gift" he received from his research. He believes that evolution is a naturally intelligent process that "constructs naturally intelligent systems of bio-logic."

"I think nature, as a self-organizing system, is an unconscious intelligence that is becoming conscious through nervous systems and particularly through the human cortex," he says. "Nothing is smarter than life itself. Our technology pales in the face of the technology of life. Think about DNA, for instance—it is a digital code, which means that digital information processing is actually billions of years old. Evolution through natural selection is the way this smart code-driven organic technology continually hones itself. And it is only possible because life is written into nature, akin to an embedded potential that was always waiting to emerge."

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Simon believes adopting this view can benefit us because the tendency to take life for granted and disregard its innate intelligence is detrimental.

"If we don't see the biosphere as a network of living wisdom, we will not likely seek to learn from it," he writes. "Whereas it might make good survival sense to be wholly selfish and act in a thick-skinned way to everything else that lives in your vicinity, it makes more sense in the long term—and the payoff is greater—if you can cooperate in some way."

The whole theory is too complex to describe in full here, but is delineated in a 35-page chapter in Magic Mushroom Explorer, as well as in his 2012 book Darwin's Unfinished Business: The Self-Organising Intelligence of Nature.

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In a world where we're constantly assailed by advertisements that promise us wish fulfilment and, without fail, never deliver, Simon thinks psilocybin is one of the only real brands that can provide us true empowerment.

"We're always being led around by culture—how to dress, the places we should go, the music we should listen to, the political party we should follow," he explains. "We're not empowered, whereas psilocybin empowers the person, and that's one of its chief virtues. You experience the living moment—what it is to be alive and conscious in the universe. Most of the stuff in culture can't deliver that kind of empowerment."

Indeed, he believes psilocybin is so powerful that it's capable of breaking down the fundamental barriers between human beings and creating a more harmonious society, even removing long-entrenched prejudices like racism.

"Water, wheat and fuel and all these kinds of things are obviously crucial to life, but psilocybin is a higher level resource because it feeds the human spirit," he says.

The Aztecs and Mayans are known to have used psilocybin, and psilocybin-containing species were explained and described by European mycologists (fungi experts) as far back as the 18th century. But there is no hard evidence that its potential was ever harnessed by Europeans.

"We're at a very difficult part of human history at the moment, where horrific things are going on," he says. "We need something to shock the human psyche into real wakefulness where we're aware of the larger biosphere in which we're embedded, because we're fucking it up. If you have a full-blown mystical experience it will change your life—it's a boon to the human spirit."

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This fundamental unhappiness, Simon claims, stems from our disconnection with the natural world.

"We're alienated from nature and these mushrooms come from nature," he says. "This is the beauty of it: it's entirely natural. If you pick them out in the wild it's a free resource of the highest caliber. We've discovered things like copper, iron, and plants we can eat, yet we haven't discovered the potential of the mushroom."

A recent New Yorker article describes how psilocybin is being used in clinical trials at New York University, and Britain's top medical journal The Lancet came out in support of psilocybin research in January of this year. Simon believes that soon the UK authorities will have to reclassify psilocybin from its current class A status.

"One of the definitions of [a class A drug] is that it has no medical therapeutic application," he says. "That's patently wrong."

He says the onus on the state is to provide information to adults about psilocybin and other substances, not to criminalize people for their use. Soon, he believes, magic mushrooms will become more accepted in society, and eventually decriminalized. People will be allowed to use grow kits to cultivate mushrooms in their homes, and "revitalization centers" will offer people a safe place to have a psilocybin experience.

It took Simon more than a decade of effort to get his first psilocybin book published, so I ask him why he goes to such lengths for so little financial reward.

"I had all these incredible experiences," he says. "If you have these remarkable, precious experiences, you're obliged, I think, to try to spread word of it. It's the least you can do, really."

Follow Michael on Twitter.

Mexican Drug Lord Lived in a Cave and Was Caught Because His Girlfriend Brought Him Birthday Cake

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Mexican Drug Lord Lived in a Cave and Was Caught Because His Girlfriend Brought Him Birthday Cake

LSD Researchers Are Crowdfunding the First Images of the Brain on Acid

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LSD Researchers Are Crowdfunding the First Images of the Brain on Acid

The Money Shot: Product Placement in Porn Is Now a Thing

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Wall Street intern-cum-porn star Veronica Vain. Photos courtesy ArrangementFinders.com

Porn has entered the final stages of its manifest destiny takeover of all aspects of society. One of the clearest examples of this was Pornhub's entry into the music industry by launching a record company last October and shooting an NSFW hip-hop video with Coolio. Now, one dating website is blurring the lines further. In January, ArrangementFinders.com appointed Kayden Kross—an award-winning porn star—as its president. What initially seemed like a publicity stunt soon developed into real changes for the site. Last month, the company shot its first ArrangementFinders.com-sponsored porno, Screwing Wall Street: The ArrangementFinders IPO.

It seems that the future of porn is in product placement. The next time you go to your favourite tube site and feverishly type in "gangbang," you may soon encounter close-ups of an energy drink while your hands are down your pants. Thirsty?

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With abundant pirating and the advent of tube sites, the world of porn has changed rapidly over the past half decade. When YouTube launched in 2005, its porn equivalent was bound to surface. Within a year, three such sites existed, and adult DVD sales began to plummet. The number of porn-centric tube sites where you can fulfill nearly any sexual for free (see Rule 34 of the internet: if it exists, there's a porn version) is now in the thousands. In 2014 alone, Pornhub, one of the most prolific of these sites, had 78.9 billion video views (that's about 10 porno views per person on earth). Some adult production companies are now facing bankruptcy and are desperately looking for new ways to profit from their films. Unless you partner with a tube site, latch onto the live camming trend, or make high-quality content that's so effed up people want to pay for because they can't get it anywhere else, you're SOL.

"Product placement is just not in porn, and there's a lot of room for that to happen," Kross says. "It's not only daring and risk-taking, it's incredibly smart because most people do watch porn. More searches are for porn than any other one subject, so a lot of people are going to hear about ArrangementFinders without meaning to."

ArrangementFinders.com, a sugar-daddy dating website that helps young women coordinate relationships with older, wealthier men, is no stranger to using porn stars for endorsements. Previously it's had deals with Bree Olson, Charlie Sheen's ex, and Sydney Leathers, known for her affair with New York politician Anthony Weiner. However, this is the first time the company has gone as far as appointing a porn star to run the company.

Kross has been in the adult industry since she was scouted while attending University of California in 2006, and has been in over 100 films since. But her skills don't just involve the use of moist bodily orifices—she's been published in the New York Times and was a host on G4, the video-game TV channel. Almost immediately upon taking her seat at the helm of ArrangementFinders, Kross successfully pitched the Toronto-based company the idea of putting its brand in an adult film, but she knew it had to be with the right starlet.

Remember that Wall Street intern who got caught taking nudes at the office where she worked, quit, and declared to the world via tweet, "I left finance because if I'm going to take it up the ass for a decade, I'd prefer to get into a hall of fame for it"? Well, meet the star of Screwing Wall Street: The ArrangementFinders IPO—Veronica Vain (AKA Paige Jennings).

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Vain was approached by a number of major adult film companies with lucrative offers before making her decision. "I started thinking that if maybe if I took one of the other deals, I would have been furthering the current porn business model for girls... the biggest perk to me for the deal was that it was something that was unprecedented in the industry—the first product placement in a porn film," Vain told me over the phone in Manhattan while walking to do some last-minute filming in the financial district. "The Wall Street intern's first move in the porn world is to do something really disruptive that could catch on and become something pivotal in the industry."

The film itself plays on Vain's notoriety, placing her in the role of a Wall Street broker trying to manipulate the shares of a company. That's where the branding comes in—the company whose shares she is fucking with is ArrangementFinders.com. The first clip was released on Pornhub on February 13; in its first 48 hours, it was viewed one million times—a new record for a first-time adult star.

"[In the past,] maybe you went out and got porn quietly and hid it under your mattress or wherever," Kross says, "People talk about it now. People follow porn stars on Twitter, which is an admission that they watch porn... It's a snowball thing and it's taking off." Both Kross and Vain agree that the porn industry evolving—both in the sense that it's meshing with everyday culture and that the business side is on the verge of a major transformation.

"If the movie is being partially funded by product placement, you don't have to worry so much about your costs and therefore, your profitability goes up, which could be immediately really amazing for the industry," Vain explains to me, her past career choice shining through as she drops multiple financial terms. She says the potential options for product placement is limitless: e-cigarettes, lube, condoms, and even energy drinks (since presumably there's a large number of sugary caffeine beverage-drinking dudes who jerk off to porn).

Screwing Wall Street: The ArrangementFinders IPO will be released serially over the course of the next month and is slated to come out on DVD in April. Though it's the first porn release with product placement, it certainly won't be the last­—maybe someday you'll even get to see a porn star bent over a spread of tacos from your favourite Mexican fast-food chain.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

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