LA Girls is a diary of Maya Fuhr's trip to Los Angeles, where she attended the LA Book Fair and spent her days off smoking a shit-tonne of weed, listening to super oldies in the back seat. She found girls in the crowd who intrigued her by being comfortable in their skin and clothes. From friends like photographer Rebecca Storm, blissed out in the Hollywood hills, to actor Jena Malone being highly emotional, to tacky babes vibing hard while looking at magazines, they all represent the laid-back, stoner-comfy style coming out of LA.

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Photo by Adam Bielawski via Wikicommons.

Early in the morning on Wednesday, March 4, Australian officials delivered a letter to Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo written by Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi. In the note, Iommi pleads for the lives of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, two Australian citizens slated for an imminent execution alongside eight others in Indonesia for drug smuggling.

"The Indonesian prison system has had great success in transforming Andrew and Myuran," reads the letter, in which Iommi includes his contact information and acknowledges the threat of drugs and the need to protect Indonesia, but urges clemency.

"I appeal to you, as a forgiving man, to take note of their transformation. They are now reformed men who are making a positive difference in the lives of their fellow prisoners. That they have been transformed so much is a real credit to the Indonesian authorities. For this reason, I would ask that you stop the execution of Andrew and Myuran."

Iommi was convinced to intervene by Jon Dee of Australia's DoSomething charity, with which he has worked for 25 years. The pair apparently hoped they could sway Jokowi, a known fan of heavy metal, by appealing to his personal tastes. But given that previous overtures by world leaders, allies, and even other notorious rockers have failed, it seems like the letter will be for naught.

In fact, around the same time the letter arrived, Chan and Sukumaran were being transferred from Kerobokan Prison (their home for much of the last decade after they were arrested in 2005 for masterminding a heroin smuggling ring from Indonesia to Australia) to Nusakambangan Island to await a firing squad. No one is sure when the executions will occur, but the prisoners will be given 72 hours' notice, then isolated for 12 hours with optional visits by a spiritual advisor, before being taken into the woods, tied to a post, and shot in the heart by twelve guards simultaneously (then shot in the head by the squad leader if they survive the initial volley).

Although Chan and Sukumaran are not the only foreigners slated for execution (seven of the eight others to be executed along with them are non-Indonesians from Brazil, France, Ghana, Nigeria, and the Philippines), most protest has been focused on these two individuals thanks to their peculiar circumstances. Of the nine people involved in their smuggling ring, they are the only ones on death row. Yet extensive coverage of their lives by the Australian media indicates that they are exemplary inmates, involved in arts, ministry, and rehabilitation efforts with other prisoners. Even their guards have backed their clemency bids, but all efforts for a reprieve have been brushed aside by Jokowi's regime.

Concerns over the two men's case picked up in late January, when Indonesia executed six foreign nationals on drug charges, issued a blanket rejection on dozens of clemency bids, and scheduled about 20 executions for 2015. The executions scored points with local citizens, most of whom have a very negative perception of drugs and drug crimes. But in a nation that until 2013 had a moratorium on the death penalty, this uncompromising, hardline stance rattled nations around the world.

In the past few weeks, many countries have tried to sway Indonesia against further drug executions—especially of foreign nationals. Brazil and the Netherlands, both of which lost citizens to the January executions, lodged formal complaints and temporarily altered their diplomatic status with Indonesia. And now France and Brazil have both challenged Indonesian representatives about their citizens' inclusions on the latest drug-related execution docket.

But Australia, one of Indonesia's largest and most important neighbors, has been on the forefront of the diplomatic efforts to moderate Jokowi. The Foreign Ministry has postponed trade missions, all six living ex-Prime Ministers have united to urge a stay, and current Prime Minister Tony Abbott has even tried to guilt Jokowi toward a stay, saying it'd be a great way to pay Australia back the $1 billion it invested in relief after the 2004 tsunami. At the popular level, the Indonesian Consulate in Sydney has been hit with protests, and Chan and Sukumaran's family members have made constant visits to Indonesia and heartfelt appeals on local media channels.

Yet Jokowi and his officials insist that, while they are concerned about and monitoring global reactions, they are following due process and Indonesian legal codes, scoring points domestically for refusing to compromise their sovereignty and for standing up to major neighbors. It's pretty consistent with the nation's aggressive foreign policy and inward-focused populist bent (the nation, for instance, has threatened to shoot down illegal Chinese fishing ships in their water despite China's immense power and supremacy in Indonesian security, trade, and diplomatic relations).

"We are not trigger happy," The Guardian quoted Indonesian ambassador to Australia Nadjib Riphat Kesoema as saying in a speech where he cited Indonesia's 1,500 monthly drug-related deaths. "We [carry out these internationally unpopular executions] for a very big reason."

In light of this prior immobility, Iommi's letter seems last-ditch. But it wasn't entirely insane. During his 2014 electoral campaign, Jokowi got mileage out of his self-professed love for Deep Purple, Guns N' Roses, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Lamb of God, Led Zeppelin, Megadeth, Metallica, and Napalm Death. His appearances at concerts (and his joy over a signed Ibanez bass gifted to him by Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo, then taken away by anti-corruption officials in 2013) and self-avowed devotion to the notions of change advocated in heavy metal lyrics earned him credibility as an anti-establishment every man. He also scored direct support early in his regime from members of Guns N' Roses, Lamb of God, and Megadeth. So it wasn't entirely unreasonable, given his devotion to the genre and all that his credibility owes to mosh pits and high-distortion shredding that Jokowi might at least honestly hear out a musical icon like Iommi.

Yet the president had already ignored pleas from mercy from Mark "Barney" Greenway, the singer of one of his favorite bands, Napalm Death (probably far more personally important a figure to Jokowi than Iommi, despite the latter's overall stature) sent in a January letter.

"As a follower of our band Napalm Death," read Greenway's letter, "you would appreciate that our lyrics and ethos challenge the unbroken cycle of violence in the world, whether it comes from a state or as an individual. If these things are not challenged and ultimately changed, I believe we will never truly move forward as humankind."

If Greenway (much less major world leaders like Tony Abbott) couldn't sway Jokowi, and Chan and Sukumaran are already sitting on the island where they're set to be gunned down, there's probably not much hope that Black Sabbath's involvement will change anything. So we can probably look forward to more ruckus over another inevitable and arguably extremely senseless drug-related execution coming soon. Unless, that is, Iommi has the power to summon forth the intercessory powers of some dark metal god ripped from a Metalocalypse script.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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Travyon Warren is one of the original members of the Check It, an all-gay and trans gang in the nation's capital. Photo courtesy of Dana Flor.

Trayvon Warren remembers his first big bullying incident took place when he was elementary school and a slightly older kid started threatening him. He grew up in a a rough Trinidadian neighborhood of Washington, DC where there were no gay people, so his irrepressible flamboyance made him a target at a young age. But still, growing up with brothers had made him tough. The bully knew that Warren didn't scare easily, so he brought a gun to school in order to up the ante.

"A lot of people came, and he left," Warren, who has dreads and braces, told me. "He didn't come to school the next day. We just never said nothing else to each other."

Warren is one of the subjects of Check It, a new documentary produced by Steve Buscemi. The film tells the story of how three bullied DC teens started the only documented all-gay or transgendered gang in America—also called Check It—with Warren being one of the original ten members. The group formed to provide members safety in numbers and let people know that if you jumped a gay kid in DC, you'd likely get jumped back in retaliation.

Today, Check It has about 200 members, and they make their money committing crimes like petty theft, robbery, and carjacking, filmmaker Dana Flor told me. More crucially, they provide each other with a sense of community in a place where being gay can get you ostracized from your family, your church, and your classmates.

"They're not the Bloods or the Crips by any stretch of the imagination, but law enforcement calls them a gang," Flor, who co-directed with filmmaker Toby Oppenheimer, says. "They call themselves a family."

Unlike other gangs, the Check It aren't tied to a specific geographic location. They hang out at each others' houses, mostly, as well as a local Denny's and the Chinatown and Gallery Place Metro stations. And they didn't have to do much to spread their name. A local go-go band called ReAction wrote a song about the gang and name-checked individual members. That meant people like Warren had a certain amount of notoriety, which allowed him to go to pretty much any neighborhood in DC without people giving him much trouble for being, as he and his friends put it, "faggie."

Flor and Oppenheimer's documentary, which is currently crowdfunding its final stages of editing, follows Warren and some of his friends at a crucial point in their lives. After getting a grant for a fashion start-up, they're invited to a design bootcamp and eventually get a chance to work on a show at Men's Fashion Week in New York.

Today, Warren is no longer a part of the Check It. He's about to finish the Job Corps program, and the process of filming the documentary helped him learn to trust strangers and learn that there's more to the world than his neighborhood. Opening up to the camera was hard at first, because he was afraid of how the world would judge him. Now he wants to become an actor, and hopes his fame will someday transcend the notoriety he's created for himself in the black neighborhoods of DC.

"There's more to the world than just Check It," he says. "But no matter where I go in DC, my name will always be Tray [from] Check It. That name will come behind my name forever."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Making the observation that a film called Actress is about performance is easy. Less easy is discerning the difference between what's spontaneous and what's contrived. This gray area between observation and collaboration is where documentary films frequently shine brightest, and in this regard Actress may be one of the grayest films to appear since last year's The Act of Killing. Brandy Burre, the star of Robert Greene's film, muddles the current between actress and audience because she's still figuring out exactly who she's supposed to be. From 2004 to 2006 Burre was featured in a recurring role on HBO's The Wire before shifting gears and moving to the suburbs to raise a family with her boyfriend. Greene's camera follows Burre through a transformative chapter in her life as she separates from her partner and tries to rekindle her acting career, all of it complicated by parental responsibilities and an uncertain sense of self. Early in the film, she suffers a blow to the head from a falling box of toys in her children's playroom and crumples to the floor while moaning, "Death!" This moment more or less sums up where Burre is at in life. Regardless of the situation, she remains theatrical.

Actress represents a collaboration between filmmaker and subject, which is not how we typically think of documentaries, although we probably should. Robert Greene's body of work is defined by such creative partnerships. His breakthrough film Kati With An I follows his sister through her final days at an Alabama high school, while Fake It So Real chronicles a week spent with a cousin who performs in an independent pro-wrestling league. For this latest collaboration, Greene found Brandy Burre living next door to his family in Beacon, New York. The old trope that an artist reveals the universal through the familiar gets plenty of lip service, but Greene actually pulls it off.

I spoke with Robert Greene over the phone from Columbia, Missouri, where he has very recently moved after 15 years in New York to take a position as filmmaker in residence at the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri. That Greene the artist has found employment in an institution named for the creator of MTV's The Real World feels appropriate.

VICE: In addition to directing and editing documentaries, you've also worked as an editor on scripted films like Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up, Philip. How is working on a documentary different from working on a scripted film?

How did you begin working on Actress with Brandy Burre?

Before we know anything about how the injury happened, Brandy describes the different ways she could act to suggest different things that might have happened to her. It's a confrontational moment where a viewer might appreciate how she thinks as an actress, or else cast her in a negative light and see her as manipulative.

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We are always judging women. We judge men, too, but it has a different sort of effect because we're always looking at women to see whether they're being good or not. If I'm at a bar at 2 AM, and I'm showing off pictures of my children, it's like, "What a cute dad! He's drunk and showing off pictures of his kids! Isn't it great that he's always thinking about his children?" But if Brandy does it, she's a negligent mother. Why is she here when she should be at home with her kids?

Actress is the third in a series of films that have been described as being made in collaboration with people you are personally close to in some way, the others being Kati With An I and Fake It So Real. How would you describe Actress as a collaborative work?
With Kati With An I, I was working with my sister, so I knew that she would bring a certain level of awareness with her, a certain level of performance. Because I had been filming Kati for her whole life, I knew that she could be a movie character. And then with the wrestlers in Fake It So Real, I knew that they were working me on some level when they would tell me their life stories and begin to dip into wrestling-promo mode. I was always ready for this intersection of wrestling character and real human being. To me, wrestling was always such a great metaphor for documentary characters anyway, because there's reality plus an extra layer. In wrestling there's the cliche that you take your personality and turn it up to 11. I think documentary characters are the same way: you take your real self, and you tweak it for the camera a little bit and put on this sort of performance.

With Actress, the exciting part for me was to take this idea of performance and push it further. Brandy's a naturally theatrical person who plays to the rafters whether there's a camera around or not, and that was fascinating to me. She realized that her freedom—not necessarily freedom from her partner, but freedom in her soul—was connected to this film. I wasn't just dissecting this person, she was actively creating at the same time. What I mean by collaboration is a nicer way of saying that we went through something together, and the film wouldn't be the film without her art as well. She really took the camera and said, "OK, if we're going to do something then let's really do it, and I'm going to go there." And going there meant baring her soul.

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Actress is available now on iTunes and is available on DVD on March 24.

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Photo by Ben and Kaz Askins via.

Smokers, as any variety club comedian will tell you, are a dying breed. Just under 18 percent of adults in the United States now voluntarily suck carcinogenic fumes into their breathing apparatus, compared to around 37 percent in the 70s. Cigarettes are being nubbed out under the sharply-swiveling soles of a generation that prefers the taste of fresh air to an air of insouciance, that somehow acknowledges the essential meaningless of the universe and pointlessness of existence, yet still doesn't take that as carte blanche to actively do their lungs in.

Yes, despite motivational gurus sparking widespread confusion with their "winners never quit" spiel, quitting smoking is a growth industry. E-cigarette shops are springing up like cancerous cells in our cities, there among the head shops, bookies, tattooists, and bargain boozers administering the populace's soft addictions.

I've been successful at giving up smoking myself. Three times, actually. The first time, I was still a teenager, still immortal, before I came to realize that the cure for death—AKA religion—was a hoax. So I hit the burners again. I enjoyed it for several years, too. Then I stopped enjoying it, but carried on anyway. Later, I read a book that told me I'd never really enjoyed it. All I'd done was assuage cravings and give myself temporary relief. That one after a slap-up meal? With the cappuccino and paper? Down the at the bar with that first cold beer? All fleeting satiation.

That book's title was The Easy Way to Stop Smoking [EWTSS], which I'd serendipitously spotted in the library the same day a forlorn government-sponsored SmokeFree Quit Kit had struggled through the letterbox, promising to tackle one of the most addictive substances on the planet with a plastic hand toy called "tangles." Apparently, over 13 million copies of EWTSS have been shifted—a fraction over the number of cigarettes its author, 100-a-day former accountant Allen Carr, had sucked the tar from over his 33-year smoking journey—while it claims to have helped 53.3 percent of its readers quit.

How does Carr do it? Well, he actively encourages you to smoke as you read the book, while hitting you with short, sharp chapters drumming home the point that smoking's nothing to do with habit, but just a straightforward chemical addiction, anthropomorphized as the Nicotine Monster. You gotta slay the Monster (more scientifically: stop nicotine hijacking the brain's dopamine circuitry). Yes, the Monster will be lurking malevolently, but after three days he gets weaker, and after five you're more or less free from his grasp. (Incidentally, this is why e-cigs, patches, gums and suchlike are, in Carr's view, pointless: you're simply swapping one dependency for another.)

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A woman smoking an e-cig. Photo by Michael Dorausch via.

There are no scare stories—"We smoke when we are nervous," Carr writes. "Tell smokers that cigarettes are killing them and the first thing they will do is light one." Only the relentless demystification of the so-called benefits and the percussive message that, once you realize what you're actually doing, stopping doing it is, in fact, easy. There's no hair-shirt sacrifice, no heroic struggle; it's a pleasure, a great release, a joyous gambol into the fragrant meadows of a snout-free future.

EWTSS may have been the deal-sealer, but there were already several elements in place. Glib as it sounds, you first have to really, really want to do it, not simply flirt with the notion. I was primed and ready, and not by staring at images of emphysema on my cig packet. Nor by the prohibitive cost. Nor the social stigma of skulking around in the smoke-cages, for there are still options, places where the smoker is still embraced, still valued: somewhere like Greece, say, where, just as in the UK and the US, the ostracized minority are forced outside—the non-smokers, it's true—and where Stigma's just another tobacco brand.

No, the impetus for quitting was wheezing. Increasingly, as the cold, damp fingers of English winter mornings reached in to tickle my chest, it sounded like a set of samples for some Aphex Twin concept album: the sleeping bag zipper; the plaintive seagull; the howling alleyway; the Peruvian pan-pipe band sound-check; the sliding tarpaulins; the basketball court jostling; the cellar door. Not an attractive post-coital soundtrack.

Four years I went without a cigarette—four years without the desire for a cigarette—only I didn't completely slay the Monster. Like some slasher-movie psycho-killer, he was waiting at the bottom of the garden for me to leave the door ajar. You allow yourself one here, a couple there (followed by the magic five days off to convince yourself you're on top of it), and that's it: his foot was not only back in the door; he was sleeping on my sofa. Indefinitely. Smokes: here to stay.

It was probably after about six months' smoking as a non-smoker before I became a smoker again (it's like the Sorites paradox: if you remove one grain at a time from a heap of sand, at what stage does it cease to be a heap?). And once my smoking was smoking—fully-fledged, dedicated, non-negotiable—that frisson of smug self-satisfaction you get from answering "no" when people ask, "Are you a smoker?" was nixed. Gone in a puff of smoke. And no matter how clean the next break, I didn't think I'd ever get it back. Yep: back on the hamster wheel. Ich bin ein smoker.

Another resource I could no longer fall back on was the demonization of the smoker, a central tactic of Carr's that had not only helped wean me in the first place, but also cocooned me from relapsing. In moments of weakness I'd contemplate the old men with cracked leathery faces and brown teeth hacking up greenies outside bars; I'd watch the smokers' mugs—the mug smokers—outside A&E departments, putting up with the rain, the cold, the noxious fumes of cars for their urgent hourly tug, smoking as though about to board a 12-hour flight. Smoking as if their lives depended on it.

Of course, shame makes you want to quit again almost immediately (as soon as those four cartons of duty-free run out, anyway). So you revisit your old savior, your panacea: The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. Only, this time it's not so easy. Suddenly, you're immune to its rhetorical sledgehammers. Second time round, "the five-day rule," previously a marker of the freedom on the horizon, becomes the point at which the Nicotine Monster rears its head, suggesting you have a reward for your abstinence: perhaps a few drags on a sweet, sweet cigarette?

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/2jxPvmV0rrQ' width='640' height='360']

Watch this and try to resist having a cigarette.

The book became the self-help equivalent of a condom: usable only once. Paradoxically, Easy Way made you realize that quitting smoking gets more and more difficult each time. First time, you're faced with the improbability of a future free of those heavy chains. Second time, you know you've previously done it—and thought you'd beaten it—but there's also the recent knowledge that you hadn't beaten it. Because there you were doing it again, idiot. No worries, though. Since you've given up once before, you're sure you can do it again. So you carry on smoking. You get complacent. The sense of jeopardy is lost. Old Nic' sneaks in again. And the more you smoke, the less confident you'll slowly feel that you can ever pull it off, so the more you defer it... Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

A friend in the midst of an OD-flavored nervous breakdown once said to me, somewhat surprisingly: "The thing that depresses me most is the cigarettes." They were of course symbolic of his self-destructive tendencies, yet he couldn't take the risk of trying to quit because to do so and fail would be psychologically more harmful than contemplating one's chronic inability to quit. At least while you're smoking you have the hope that you'll soon knock it on the head. When you've crashed and burned—crashed a butt, burnt your oesophagus—there's only abjection. As the old proverb goes: better to have never tried than to have tried and failed. The addicted smoker tormented by, yet flirting with, quitting is thus always trying to get to the penultimate cigarette, not the last one (I've smoked a few last ones, and my last last one didn't turn out to be my last after all, though maybe the next last one will).

And here's the rub. Each time you succumb, trudging with guilty avidity to the corner store for some smokes, the mountain gets higher, the slope slippier. You'll always feel like shit for having fallen off the wagon, for having bought those last-gasp gaspers. You'll feel like the Monster will never leave you alone. So, don't rush in. Be ready. Know your enemy. Read Sun Tzu. Get it right. This is a worthy fucking adversary, and unless you treat it as such, you're fucked. And remember: if you can stop, breathing will feel like a breath of fresh air.

Follow Scott on Twitter.

It doesn't take Can being featured in Inherent Vice to remind us of the blessings that Krautrock has bestowed upon us. Kosmische, a lesser-known electronic variety of Krautrock popularized by Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream, has always made me feel like I'm riding a magic carpet through the desert, but the genre mostly went out of style in the 1970s. Thankfully there are some innovative electronic artists continuing the tradition to this day, and Mountains is one of the best.

"Parallel One" is the A-side from their new seven-inch, released as part of the You Can't Hide Your Love Forever series on Geographic North Records. Like the work of the aforementioned bands, it's a dreamy soundscape punctuated by ambient electronics and acoustic instruments. It's beautiful and after listening to it, I discovered a large glowing orb in my chest and realized that I suddenly knew how to do transcendental meditation. If you want to save some dough on those classes, listen to this song.

Get the seven-inch here for $7.

Institutionalized, Fight Club–esque beatings—some fatal—of inmates, especially mentally ill ones, by corrections officers. "The Box," a decrepit solitary-confinement cell reserved for the bad prisoners. Teenagers lost in a Kafkaesque abyss for years on end, having only been charged with minor crimes.

And the lawsuits, against not only the guards but the whole damn city.

In August, the US Attorney's office described what it saw on Rikers Island as a " deep-seated culture of violence" against teenagers. It was a portrait of doom at New York's most notorious detention complex that ultimately led to a federal lawsuit against New York City and plans to end solitary confinement (starting next year) for teenagers held there under the age of 21. In addition, Mayor Bill de Blasio's office plans to swap punitive segregation—which places young inmates in a separate unit for disorderly conduct—with positive rehabilitation. And separate housing for the most violent inmates was finally established last month, though just 20 people have been moved there so far.

Back in November, the mayor and his correction commissioner, Joseph Ponte, swore that dealing with Rikers abuse was a top priority of the administration. Change, it seemed, was in the air for a place that some of us might prefer to believe is not actually part of the United States of America. But as Glenn E. Martin, a prison reform advocate at JustLeadership USA, tells me, "The problem is that incremental fixes for Rikers is like prescribing Tylenol for cancer."

Now the disease that is violence at Rikers Island is rearing its ugly head again.

Last week, Michael Winerip and Michael Schwirtz, the two journalists at the New York Times who broke the Rikers abuse story in July, highlighted 62 new cases since August, suggesting in a story that this is a system of abuse that just won't go away—even with intense scrutiny from all tiers of government. They related stories like those of Tracy Johnson, an inmate who was pepper-sprayed and had his eye socket broken by being slammed against the floor the very month de Blasio vowed to reform Rikers, and Ambiorix Celedonio, an inmate with a low IQ who was beaten to a bloody pulp by officers in December.

While it might seem impossible, things actually took a turn for the worse this week. According to the New York Daily News, an inmate named Raleek Young had to be ripped off of an unnamed female officer by other inmates and officers as he attempted to rape her on Saturday. Young was serving a five-to-ten-year sentence in state prison for raping a 17-year-old, and, as happens in the cases of many other inmates, had been temporarily placed at Rikers while awaiting an unspecified court date. Now he's facing a whole slew of charges in Bronx Criminal Court, and the matter is being investigated by the Corrections Department.

To top it all off, 6,800 inmates at the island's four jails were confined to their cells, beginning on Tuesday morning, for 34 hours. The largest operation of its kind in recent Rikers history is a response to what officials say has been a spike in gang violence, notably between two groups of Bloods. (The Times also reports that after 93 stabbings or slashings at the complex in 2014, there have already been 24 this year.) Corrections officers meticulously searched each inmate for gang-related drugs and weapons. Inmates were only allowed to leave for court appearances or medical treatment. The search resulted in the discovery of a dozen homemade weapons, which, according to the Times, "included sharpened plexiglass, metal rods and shoe shanks."

Given all the media scrutiny and political attention to Rikers, how is this sort of thing still happening?

To Stanley Richards, the "culture of violence" at Rikers "is a pretty entrenched problem that has been building for many, many years." It has been been the norm since he was an inmate at Rikers himself.

"You knew which officers were hot-headed, short-tempered, or aggressive, and you knew which officers would lend you a hand," he told me. "But, as an officer, you don't get recognized for your help. You get recognized for keeping inmates in line, and that means using abuse or violence."

Richards serves as the Senior Vice President of Fortune Society, a Queens-based group dedicated to helping inmates re-enter society after imprisonment. He's been recognized by the White House for his 20-plus years of work in criminal justice reform, which started with his own incarceration.

A key problem at Rikers, he said, is the obvious one: Bad officers manage to get a badge and usually face no repercussions or punishment once in positions of authority. Borrowing a phrase from NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, Richards described these officers as "bad apples."

"Everyone in the department knows that these officers should not be uniform," he told me. "Some officers are good and do their jobs. But there are also some who should not be in prisons. And the administrative protocol that would weed out these bad apples, and lead to their swift removal, doesn't allow for this."

When he first read the Daily News story on Wednesday morning, Richards was confused as to why Young was even at Rikers in the first place. "Why didn't we have the perp in a program?" he asked me. "How could we have missed the need to have him in treatment to manage what was going on in his mind? It's a shame that a corrections officer was a subject of this."

To that end, Richards praised the "significant investment" placed by the de Blasio administration in mental health initiatives, and believes the mayor and Commissioner Ponte have a "vision about what's right." These gestures, along with Governor Andrew Cuomo's recent ruminations on criminal justice reform, are good signs for Rikers, he said, but just a start.

"In time, we can build a jail that does two things," he concluded. "It holds officers accountable for their actions, and helps inmates rebuild their lives."

A Department of Correction (DOC) spokesperson told us via email, "Under Commissioner Joe Ponte, the New York City Department of Correction has pursued an unprecedented comprehensive reform agenda to make our jails safer. The cornerstone of that agenda, Enhanced Supervision Housing for the small number of inmates who are responsible for most of the violence in our jails, opened February 23rd. It takes time to undo years of mismanagement, and change can temporarily exacerbate conditions as people adapt to new practices and standards. We are, however, well on our way to a jail system that is safer and more humane and that produces better long-term outcomes." (Officials at the mayor's office were reached for comment but did not get back before press time.)

On Tuesday, New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) Director Donna Lieberman testified to the City Council about Rikers in a tone that suggests nothing much has changed at New York's very own mini-Guantanamo.

"The systemic failure to address the health care needs of those incarcerated on Rikers Island—a population challenged by mental health and medical issues so severe that many shouldn't be incarcerated in the first place—exacerbates the culture of brutality that plagues Rikers Island," she said in a statement.

"That culture itself is inexcusable and has to be met head on, but at the same time, it must be acknowledged that corrections officers are simply not prepared or trained to deal with the level of suffering they are forced to confront at Rikers," she continued. "Defining the magnitude of the problem will be a crucial first step toward ending it."

When I reported on Rikers reforms in January, Martin of JustLeadership USA deemed that magnitude unsalvageable. In the end, he said Rikers must be shut down by the city, and stands by that notion today.

"With the momentum created by the recent scathing Department of Justice report and the existing lawsuit, the mayor needs to finally muster the courage to spend the political capital necessary to make comprehensive and immediate changes in Rikers, with a longer-term vision for shutting down the entire facility and redesigning the way we handle crime and corrections in NYC," he said. 'What we need now, more than ever, is leadership and vision.

"Entire communities are suffering in the meantime."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Two things struck me when I read about all those Chelsea fans being horrendous dickheads in Paris a couple of weeks ago. First, how depressing it is that this kind of shit still happens in 2015; second, that the press were using the phrases "football hooliganism" and "racism" almost interchangeably.

Obviously chanting racist stuff is an act of hooliganism, but there are distinctions to be made; I've met various members of various different firms, and while the majority have had radical political beliefs of one kind or another, they have been just as many leftists as right-wingers.

One from the former lot is Andrew "Little Benny" Bennion, the founding member of Man City's Young Guvnors firm. His political orientation is pretty hard left (he believes we should abolish money and revert to a bartering system), and was responsible for keeping the National Front away from Man City's ground during many of his years as an active hooligan in the 1980s.

I caught up with him recently to find out his views on the media merging of right-wing politics and football firm affiliation.

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Andrew "Little Benny" Bennion.

VICE: The media has compared the Paris train incident to hooliganism during the 70s and 80s. Would you say that's fair?
Little Benny: What, people with braces and Doc Martens and "love" and "hate" tattooed across their hands and all that? It ain't the case. I suppose they're making that association because the National Front had a hold on Chelsea when the NF was at its peak. If you look at Chelsea as an area, it's very rich and conservative, and if you've got a lot of things to conserve, you tend to be protective against the idea that you might have to share them with another group of people.

If you came to City's ground back in the day, you'd land in the middle of Moss Side, which is pretty representative of lots of areas of the city—people have very little, so they are more liberal and less conservative. That's why right-wing supporters tend to be from richer places. Really, if you look at Kent and the Home Counties and the hooligans from those areas, lots of them are racist because they're all rich areas.

Here's a good analogy; when I was a kid, I used to sleep rough from time to time, because my stepmom was emotionally abusive and neglectful towards me at home. One freezing winter's night, I huddled up underneath the doormat of an upmarket block of flats for warmth, and this bloke came out shouting at me, accusing me of stealing the doormat. Another equally cold night, I slept under some newspapers in a bin shed outside a house in Gorton, which is an ordinary, working-class area, where nobody has a lot. An old woman came out of the house in the morning and offered me a cup of tea. I guess the same thing is happening on a national scale, with Chelsea fulfilling the role of the bloke from the posh flats.

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Benny's Young Guvnors firm were the subject of a major police operation in the 1980s.

In previous conversations that I've had with you, you've linked hooliganism to the class struggle. Can you say a bit about that?
Well, as I say, rich conservatives who own a lot of things are also the quickest to crack down on anything that has a hint of danger or violence involved in it. That's because, in the past, if a man had a horse, someone could come up to him and say, "I'll fight you for that horse." The two men would have a fair fight and the winner would walk away with the horse. Nowadays, the powers that be want to restrain the working classes as much as possible when it comes to anything that hints that they might try and use their might to gain something; look at the way the miners got treated. The elite and the government try to belittle and deride hooligans so much, but they've taken so much from us that our fists are the only things we've got left that give us power.

You were involved in imposing an unofficial ban on National Front leafleting outside Maine Road, Man City's old ground. Can you tell me about that?
During the early-1980s, where I lived in Gorton, all of the houses were coming down and new estates were being built. Some people nicknamed these estates "the Paki estate" and "WIMPEY," which stood for "We Import More Pakis Every Year."

Some of the much older lads that I knew from the football would also regularly talk badly about blacks, which I didn't like, because I knew a few black lads who also went to the matches. The riots in Moss Side, Toxteth, and Brixton were still fresh in people's minds, so racial tension and racism were definitely prominent. With all this in mind, it isn't surprising that, when I first heard of the NF, they were gaining support. They were also boosted by the Falklands War and all the Thatcherite patriotic nonsense that the Sun was spouting at the time.

By the time I was emerging onto the hooligan scene, the NF had a grip on City, and would stand outside our ground, handing leaflets out. I had a lot of black friends from Moss Side, and the skinheads caused trouble for the residents there, stoked up by the NF, so we decided to turn those idiots away, because that's what we regarded the National Front as being: a bunch of idiots. They weren't there for football or there for what we were there for, and they were causing disharmony. At the end of the day, if you're in another team's city center one day and there's five of you and two are black, you aren't going to say, "I can't talk to you; you're black"—it doesn't make any sense. City needed unity, and the NF were intent on trying to ruin it. We said to them, "You can keep your leaflets and fuck off. We don't want you here. You aren't welcome, and there'll be trouble if you come back."

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The Guvnors in the 80s

Given that you're clearly opposed to racism, what are your opinions on the media conflation of hooliganism and right-wing politics?
It creates an image of hooligans as being dim-witted idiots in bovver boots, but really, in the firms, there's a democracy that doesn't exist in other places in society. The powers that be criticize us, but everybody has a say, which I think is a sign of truly being cultured. A lot of the lads I know are the opposite of what the media paints us as. I'd say that a high percentage of the right wing ends up at the football, but I wouldn't say that the majority of football fans are right-wing by any means. At the end of the day, people who are into all that are just sheep. You can't have a democracy that only consists of our culture; democracy is about accepting differences.

The media almost never mentions anything about radical, left-wing hooligans. Why do you think that is?
They like to pigeonhole people. At a lot of EDL marches now, there's just as many hooligans there who are making clear that they're against what the EDL stands for as there are who are taking part in the marches.

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Members of the Guvnors waiting for rivals in the 80s.

I take it you don't approve of the EDL?
No, I don't like them. The members I've seen on the TV spouting off at the marches just seem clueless. The hooligans who go in for that kind of thing are usually from smaller towns. You get a lot from Shrewsbury and Northampton and places like that. There's probably fewer EDL members from Manchester than there are from other places because it's so cosmopolitan.

So, to sum up, what's your message to people who think that all football hooligans are right-wing?
Don't believe everything that you read in the papers. You can rightfully level a lot of different accusations towards us, but that isn't one of them.

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News broke yesterday that secret koala culls are being carried out near Victoria's Great Ocean Road. Not surprisingly, the public as a whole was pretty bummed to learn almost 700 of the adorable animals have been put down over the last two years.

But koala advocates are defending the cull, and scolding those who criticize it—if officials hadn't killed the cute critters, the consequences for the koala population would have been dire.

"I was extremely pleased to see the government take action because I'd got fed up with watching animals starve to death," said Dr. Desley Whisson, a koala expert from Deakin University who assisted with the cull , said, adding that the operation was a response to a population spike caused by a lack of bushfires.

The koalas euthanized were starving due to that overpopulation, with many estimated as being days away from death. Population density in the area was up to 11 per hectare (2.5 acres), which is 11 times the sustainable rate of one per hectare. The problem wasn't that the animals were running out of food—they're surrounded by native bush—but rather that they had become fixated on their food source and failed to move on when they exhausted it. "The fact that the numbers continue to grow unchecked is really the problem," Whisson said.

She also takes issue with reports the cull was carried out in secret. A press release wasn't issued because of concern—largely from conservationists—that the resulting publicity would have stopped any action taking place. ("Let's kill some koalas!" is almost never a popular proposition.) But the euthanizations were performed publicly, and Whisson said some tourists were even present.

The growth in population is largely a result of our removal of fire from their habitats. Huge efforts are made each year to protect and rehabilitate animals affected by bushfire, but the seasonal occurrence is central in controlling the population.

The lack of bushfires leaves just two options: animals can be left to starve or euthanized by injection. Whisson also explained that koalas are difficult to relocate because they tend to specialize in certain tree species. According to her, moving them to an area of different trees "will almost certainly result in the death of the relocated animal," and zoos aren't an option since they don't have room for all the koalas, which normally don't do well in captivity.

"It was the kindest thing to do to those animals," Whisson said.

Follow Wendy on Twitter.

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This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Bulbous hairy guts bounce over tight Speedos. Teenage girls leap around while dads on towel duty pretend not to be watching. A group of naked boys dick about making manginas and smoking under the pier. It could be any day in the summer on Ventnor Beach, on the Isle of Wight. Except it's not. It's Boxing Day.

Each year, at 9 AM, everyone runs into the sea. Don't ask me why. No one seems to have a definitive answer. One landlord claims it was originally a pub owner's tradition. He says they'd meet beforehand to drink the leftover Christmas whiskey in preparation for the plunge. One of my dad's friends says his family has been doing it for generations. In recent history, the swim has turned into something of a charity event and an excuse for a few laughs and Likes on Facebook.

I did it once. With a mate when I was younger and going through a chubby phase. I stuffed myself into my old Florence & Fred tankini like a sausage bursting from its casing. I remember standing awkwardly, anticipating the seismic effect of my feet slapping on the cold sand and discomfort of it on my thighs, when a smug woman next to me gave a horsey laugh and said, "Someone had their Christmas lunch early, eh?" Fuck doing it again after that.

When it reaches the time to enter the water, everyone faces the stretch of sand ahead. The view from the coastline in Ventnor is truly isolating. From Ryde, the glow of the ports and Spinnaker Tower seem impossibly close. From Cowes, clouds billow across from Southampton's visible factories. But Ventnor faces nothing. The sea stretches onto France with emptiness on the horizon.

Out of nowhere, a voice starts a countdown. Others chime in. "Three. Two. One!"

And everyone is off, at varying speeds. Thighs clap and flesh ripples. The frontrunners reach the sea, and the screams are electric as water hits bodies. As the southernmost point of England and with a small, aging population, the Isle of Wight is a very weird and folkloric place.

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The author on the beach, Isle of Wight

In the novel Mansfield Park, Jane Austen wrote: "She thinks of nothing but the Isle of Wight and calls it 'the Island' as if there were no other island in the world." I haven't read much Austen, but she's got something right. When you live on the Island, it's the only thing that exists. You'll be asked by people whether you need a passport to visit and—although you might laugh at those asking—you may as well need one: It's completely cut off from the rest of British society, and for as long as you're living there, that's a fact and a feeling you won't forget.

The rest of the UK is branded (somewhat suspiciously, I've always thought) "the mainland." Sometimes now I'll talk to a mainlander and say something like, "Oh, I'm just going back to the Island this weekend." And they'll either look at me like I'm a posh wanker jet-setting back to a private getaway or tell me it sounds like something from the TV show Lost, before inevitably asking me if my brother is also my dad.

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Everything is behind by about 20 years. In Ryde, my hometown, we have a cinema where you can go and watch any film, any day, for $5. Not long ago, it was $4. When it rains there, it leaks through the ceiling. In winter, we wear multiple jumpers because there's no heating. But that's all part of the cinema's charm; no one cares whether you smuggle in cheesy chips.

In some ways, the Isle of Wight is like any other isolated seaside resort. Cider-fueled and lively enough in the summer, but a ghost town in winter. A lot of the houses are abandoned until the spring because they're owned by what we call DFLs (Down From London) who have a second home here. We'd spend our summers off from school with DFL kids making out and learning about the dangerous, exciting mainland that some of us had never experienced.

For the most part, though, it's far more obscure than, say, Blackpool or Eastbourne because, you know, you're surrounded by sea on all sides, plagued by a dodgy phone signal, and lacking in branches of most UK chain restaurants and shops. The only way off the Island is by using one of the disgustingly pricey boat services. Local rumor cites the Solent as the most expensive stretch of water to cross, per mile, in the world. The entire world.

Recently people have been arguing about whether to get a tunnel built across to make it cheaper and somehow connect the Island to the Real World. It probably won't happen, though. Island Purists insist the Island must be kept in its un-infiltrated state.

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Because it's so expensive to leave, only the posh people do. Being a kid, I had a scholarship to a decent school and, by proxy of that, was surrounded by people whose parents were better off than my own. You'd go into school on a Monday, and some smug bastard would be recounting a story about going to Little Chef or a girl would be sporting a new hairband you knew hadn't come from an Island shop.

But there are quirks to all that isolation, just like the cheap-as-cheesy-chips cinema. We have red squirrels, for one. At school we learned how the gray squirrels were massive bullies and forced the poor red squirrels—much smaller and less aggressive—across the Island for safety. Sometimes when you're driving around, the car radio picks up a French radio station and you can have a laugh about that for a while. We had loads of dinosaurs here once upon a time, and now there's a rubbish tourist center in Sandown to tell you all about them. If you go to the west side of the Island you'll find colored sands. If you came here on a school trip—and let's face it, everyone did, and it's the one time you came and you're never going to come again—you probably sieved some of it into a plastic bear or Groovy Chick memento.

Actually, you should come and enjoy it all while you have the chance. Unfortunately, because it's made of soft rock, the land is eroding at a decent rate, especially on the south coast. There's a theme park called Blackgang Chine in Ventnor that has, in part, been lost to the hungry waves. At one point you could go down there and look at all the plastic figures and fencing falling over the cliffs.

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Photo of the Three Needles by Dom Lewis

All these strange and wonderful things mean little when you're a young person living on the Isle of Wight. When my friends and I hit our angsty teenage years, we raged about getting out of our hometown. Regularly, between 50 to 150 of us in the throes of an emo phase would go down Ryde High Street with our tinnies and music, or drink down at Appley Beach. We could have chosen that spot because it was convenient and police-free and we wouldn't get told to move. I think it was actually because, when the sun went down and the Victorian lamps went on along the seafront, you could make out the mainland glaring across at us from the distance. The Spinnaker Tower had just opened in Portsmouth. A great big, ugly, metal structure shaped like a sail lit up in different colors across the Solent: a reminder that there was a real world out there. Sometimes when the tide went far out, it looked like you could almost walk across and reach it.

The older we got, the more obsessed with leaving we became. The only escape route became clear to everyone: university. It was almost like a competition of who could apply to the one farthest away. But when it came to it, people cracked. They deferred a year and reapplied to Portsmouth or Southampton—the nearest universities, just across the sea—and would commute every day. Some dropped out after their first term or became depressed. People who'd been popular and funny on the Island couldn't hack the mainland. It was obvious what had happened—we had lived in a bubble. When you follow a class of 30 all the way up to high school from nursery, in a way, you become socially stunted. A population of our own.

Something about the place draws everyone back eventually. There's something safe and warm about the Island: everyone knowing everyone from birth; no one ever really leaving; generations growing up, breeding, and dying. There aren't many places left in Britain that are genuinely like that.

For years, there's been a homeless man who sits on the High Street playing the accordion and asking for money to save up to go back to his home country. Everyone in town knew him well, because he pissed them off with his awful noise. One day, he had saved enough money and disappeared, much to everyone's delight. Then, a couple of months later, he came back. When I asked him why he'd returned, he shrugged and looked around, as if to say, I'm used to it here now. I feel the same way.

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.

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Look at the eyes. Those eyes have seen death. Those eyes have been death.

I first got into The Sims in 2000, after playing the SimCity games, by the same developer. It was a natural continuation from that. I was never really that astute at "joystick games," and I was rubbish at first-person shooters—my motor neuron skills proved incompatible with a control pad. Just clicking a mouse to make a decision was much easier. I had consoles when I was younger, but I was absolutely rubbish at most of the games—which was a positive thing for my social life, but something of a detriment when it comes to doing pieces like this. I've never, ever completed a full computer game, but I've played lots.

But The Sims isn't really a game you needed to complete. There's no real way you can fail at it—and the more you play it, the better you get. With The Sims, it's just like life: What are you judging it upon? On who's terms are you judging whether or not you're doing well on The Sims? It's like Championship Manager in that respect, another game that I was into at around the same time, when I was about 13. I remember my sister putting it the best way, with regard to Championship Manager: "I don't get it. You've just been sitting there, staring at those stupid spread sheets, for four hours." And she's not wrong.

Both The Sims and Championship Manager are games that I know some people have a hard time understanding. My mum would come over when I'd be playing The Sims, and ask what I was doing, and I'd try to explain that I'd created this whole other life. And she'd be like, "You're not going out with your friends tonight, or around to your auntie's, because you're creating this other life in a computer game?" She thought that was bonkers.

Playing The Sims for the first time was probably my original journey into shutting myself off to the rest of the world. The PC was in the corner of the living room, but I'd have my headphones on, listening to Pantera and Alice in Chains while I played, clicking my way through making up all these fabulous lives. And the game was completely what you made of it. It's not obviously as violent as some of those shooters, but I still used it as an outlet.

You could cause some real terror to the little Sims – I never really played the game to "succeed." I wasn't the player full of aspirations, who wanted to have the best business card, the best job, or the best girlfriend. I played it to wreak as much havoc as possible. And the violence you could find in it was much darker than the stuff you'd see in Manhunt, or Grand Theft Auto. With those games, it's just mindless rage. You don't stick a crowbar into someone's head in those games, and then phone up that guy's wife, invite her over and start kissing her straight afterwards. But that's what used to happen when I played The Sims.

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This is what 'The Sims' looked like in 2000. Confusing.

My friends would come over, and we'd play the game together. We'd find really creative ways to kill people. I know this is making me sound like some kind of teenage sociopath, but I know a lot of my friends played The Sims in a very similar fashion. But we'd create all our friends, first, before we did anything else—our real friends, in the game. You had to do that. I'd make it so the game versions of my friends would kiss each other. I'd show them: "Look at what youse are doing." They did not like that.

I sort of had a girlfriend for a while, when I was 13, so I made her in the game, and I moved her in with me. I was an adult in The Sims, so there was nothing my mum could say. "Sorry mum, I'm a grown-up, and my girlfriend's moving in." Into my little house on the internet—well, not even the internet, just on this computer in the corner of the living room. We broke up after just a couple of weeks though, in real life, so my friend Mickey and I, we hatched a plan.

You could pause the game to erect walls, in build mode, and when you did so all the people just stopped. So you could build walls around people. We built one around her, and she proceeded to wet herself over two days in there, trapped. We installed a bookcase and a fire, and then she died. The Sims was a really creative game, for sadists. My friend then created my girlfriend, after I got dumped, in his game, and moved her in with him. That was not cool.

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In 2014's 'The Sims 4,' your little people can be found playing the original game.

But Mickey did something worse than me killing my girlfriend. He managed to invite around the wife of a family that lived in his neighborhood, and was getting it on with her—this is in the game, I have to stress. He created a relationship for them, and they were living in sin for a couple of Sims months. Then he decided to kill her: "I'm bored of this." So he built a wall around her, and watched her slowly deteriorate. And then, when she was dead, he invited the husband around, and did the same to him. The sick fuck then invited around the son of this couple, and brought him around the back. The son saw his parents' tombstones, which would appear there when a character died, and just started crying. And then he did the same thing to the son.

The Sims taught me a lot. It taught me that if you get married to someone, you will definitely get them pregnant the first time you sleep with them. It taught me about rough neighborhoods, because the one it was set in must have been one of the worst in the world—your house would get burgled once a month, without fail. It taught me that the home life of a male divorcee is much like that of a 13-year-old boy. You made your character in your own image, so everything was in your room, and the only things outside of it was the fridge, and a mess. Now look at the habits of a single, divorced man: you see his house, it's the same as a 13-year-old's. Everything is in the same room, and the rest of the place is a barren wasteland.

It also gave you a really false sense of reality, because in the game people, neighbors, would just pop around to your house all the time. Like, every day, three neighbors would just come around. If three neighbors came round to my parents' house, today, my dad would be sitting out on the porch with a blunderbuss.

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Swimming's all fun and games until the dying starts. Photo via Kotaku.

I never had the attention span to play The Sims for any real length of time, as immersive as it was—I was more into it to just cause havoc. I mean, the only real reasons for playing video games are to simulate the playing of football, or to cause mayhem. Finding cruel ways to mess people up was what it was all about. The Sims taught me that if you invite someone around to swim in your pool, and you take the ladder out, they will die. Weirdly, there was no kind of retribution for these actions. This is making me sound like some kind of psychopath, but when you're a 13-year-old, red-blooded male, all that's going on in your pre-pubescent head is girls and chaos.

I never really talked about The Sims at school much, though, or any other games. We were actually pretty laddish. That's one of the most interesting things about playing computer games when you're 13 or 14 at an all-boys school, the dichotomy: the person who goes home to play computer games, but the lad full of bravado in the classroom. You go home to play Pokémon, and that's okay. But under no circumstances do you tell anyone at school about it, apart from really close-knit friends. You'd look at first years, when you're in the second year, talking about Pokémon: "What the fuck are you playing that for, you little dickhead?" When actually you're desperately after Mew, too.

As told to Mike Diver, in a pub, over a pint of the black stuff. Phil Taggart's opinions and experiences expressed above obviously do not reflect any official BBC standpoint on how to play The Sims, or handle teenage breakups. Phil can be heard on Radio 1 every Thursday and Sunday night. He no longer plays The Sims, which is probably for the best.

Follow Phil Taggart on Twitter.

A bit of weird news hit the wire today. Reportedly, Sony executive Amy Pascal won't move into her new offices until the lingering scent of leftover roaches and uncleaned bong water is removed. Sources told the Hollywood Reporter the space she's set to take on was previously occupied by potheads Seth Rogen and his creative partner Evan Goldberg.

Pascal, who was demoted from co-chair to producer after the Sony cyberattack led to a bunch of her emails becoming public, is supposed to be heading up projects like the new Ghostbusters movie. But fans may now have to wait until the exec can work in a space without having flashbacks to her sophomore year of college.

I want Pascal to move into her new office so we can get the gears in motion on these potential cinematic gems. So I spoke to Bob Hamilton, CEO of StinkInc® LLC, a company that focuses on "safe, smell-free, and non-masking odor control," to find out what it takes to get the resin funk out of the floors.

"Everyone's sense of smell is different... and certain odors or gases affect people differently," Hamilton told me. "Sense of smell can be heightened by pregnancy, immune system issues, or other aspects that can make people very sensitive to their environments. That office may smell fine to Seth. But to Amy Pascal, it could be the most potent thing she's ever whiffed."

He continued, "Just like we are unable to quantify 'sensitivity,' we often are unable to quantify level of contamination—i.e., How bad is it? One hundred bong rips a day or a few here and there? This, combined with how long Seth and friends were blazing up in there would be another factor in the severity as well."

But a hardcore pothead isn't going to ruin a house the way a chain smoker would. "Unlike cigarettes, marijuana does not have the same level of residual contamination issues," Hamilton said. "Nicotine and the other chemicals components seem to have a much larger impact visually on walls as well your sense of smell."

So what would be the best way to clean this office for Ms. Pascal? "Some people would never be happy even if the smell is gone due to the psychological aspect of it—say if they are fearful or truly disagree with exposing themselves to marijuana in any fashion," Hamilton said. "Understanding this 'objection' is critical."

The actual act of cleaning the office and removing the smell completely, sounds tricky. But Hamilton explained his process "would entail cleaning and/or misting the office surfaces and fibers with a proprietary, nontoxic, biodegradable, fragrance-free, odor counteractant we manufacture with professional cleaning techniques."

Then again, like he mentioned, some people just can't abide the smell of pot. Amy Pascal may always think of that office as a tainted drug den, but let's hope she's able to get over it—otherwise we may be waiting years to see Kristen Wiig kick some Slimer ass.

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If you're like me, climate change keeps you up at night on a regular basis. It's not so much that we're still on track for the worst-case global warming scenario, or that the survival of countless species—not to mention civilization as we know it—hangs in the balance, but the quiet understanding that our kids are going to feel some of the worst impacts in just a few brief decades.

In the last few weeks alone, Boston has been buried under record amounts of snow, an endless winter hell that's been linked to warmer-than-normal water temperatures in the Gulf Stream. Meanwhile, California is shriveling up, amid predictions of imminent mega-droughts across the western US. It's hard to predict how climate change will affect us next, but clearly it won't be good. Already, scientists are telling us to say goodbye to Miami and Manhattan, not to mention chocolate, coffee, and beer.

Increasingly, and understandably, these existential climate change crises have put a lot of us on edge, raising big, scary questions about the fate of humanity in the 21st century. That so many have opted for willful ignorance almost makes sense. For those who live in the real—and warming—world, though, the fact that the earth's atmosphere will undergo some pretty fundamental changes in the next generation can raise second thoughts about the idea of procreation.

I know firsthand. On the same day my wife and I gave up flying for good, I also publicly considered getting a vasectomy. (Fox News predictably ridiculed me for overreacting.) At that moment, I just couldn't bear the thought of contributing any more to the earth's pervasive climate problem. I had a breakdown. But I never got the vasectomy.

For natural pessimists, the inexorable destruction by climate change leads to thoughts that fall along the lines of this Jezebel headline, which asks: " Why Would I Ever Want to Bring a Child Into This Fucked Up World?" Because really, why the hell would someone of procreating age today even consider having a baby? It feels like an utter tragedy to create new life, fall in love with it, and then watch it writhe in agony as the world singes to a crisp.

There's a word for this sense of loss for things that haven't even happened yet: solastalgia, used to describe the sinking feeling of loss for places rendered utterly unrecognizable due to environmental ruin. In September, before a meeting of world leaders at the United Nations on climate, a young mother from the Marshall Islands brought people to tears with her own version of it.

According to Glenn Albrecht, the Australian environmental philosopher who coined the term after his work with people displaced by that country's rapidly expanding coal industry, "We've created something that has no historical precedent." That is, we're changing our environment so fast that our cultural cues no longer have a stable reference point.

Quite simply: Climate change is changing us.

Albrecht's goal is to create a linguistic framework that will help give voice to the increasingly pervasive emotional consequences of environmental change during this time of rapid transition. Albrecht himself is expecting a new granddaughter soon, and he told me "it's made me more determined to complete this work."

We live in a very critical time for human history, as the first generation to fully understand the implications of the damage we have done to the earth, and perhaps the last generation with the opportunity to change course. It's perfectly normal to get a little freaked out when you realize the implications of that at a personal level.

With more couples than ever choosing to remain child-free, deciding to have a baby has, in a sense, become a political statement. It's saying: There's still hope. And when you crunch the numbers, it's not really so much about how many people are on the planet, it's about how we live—another hopeful notion.

Jennie Ferrara, a mother of two and an American ex-pat living in Copenhagen, told me that in the last several years she's experienced bouts of a "climate angsty-anxiety-depression," which began soon after the birth of her first child. For Ferrara, reading news articles on the latest climate science amounted to "leaving one physical reality of how you think Earth is and then entering a new one that's a lot scarier." One afternoon while she was listening to a report on the UN climate negotiations, she'd had enough. She also gave up flying, for good. "Once you get to a certain point, you can't ignore knowledge anymore," she said.

It's true that the changes we're collectively inflicting on our planet are alarming, so it's understandable that people have started acting like it. In fact, it's possible that pervasive "stealth" denial—our emotional disconnect with the immediacy and personal nature of the climate problem—may be contributing to the sorts of "all of the above" half-measures on climate we've grown accustomed to from our leaders. It's difficult for us to wrap our brains around the fact that the carbon dioxide from our car's tailpipe will still be there warming the planet a thousand years later.

"I'm looking at my kids on a daily basis, and I don't think an hour—I don't think a half-hour—goes by without me thinking about the existential malaise that we're in," Ferrara said. "Had I not had kids, I'm not sure I would be where I am about the climate... That's my bubble, the climate bubble that I'm walking around in all the time."

After a three-year hiatus, Ferrara recently re-started her "Climate Worrier" podcast focusing on collecting stories related to the emotional responses people are having to climate change. Ferrara closes each episode with an appeal to her listeners: "It's good to be sad, it'll motivate us to do something."

But humans just aren't built to process intensely complex, deeply fundamental changes to the status quo (like, the impending inability for oceans to sustain life as a result of CO2 acidification). Instead, we choose to trust that the problem isn't happening, or is an elaborate hoax, or that we're too small to make a difference, or that somehow future technologies will fix the problem with minimal effort on our part.

By making global warming a science issue, campaigners against climate change lost the majority of the public's interest in the topic, even though the stakes have never been higher. It's time to admit that humans aren't perfect rational actors and just piling on more and more terrifying data isn't going to sway us. We are deeply emotional. Most of us don't make major life decisions based solely on science.

My wife and I just had a baby, and it's quickly becoming the best decision we ever made. Even though his future is uncertain, the knowledge that there's still time left to turn things around has become a tremendously powerful motivating factor in our lives. Our baby has brought us back from the brink. It's impossible to be hopeless with a newborn. Climate change has changed me. And I don't think I'm the only one.

Follow Eric on Twitter

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Photo courtesy Federal Bureau of Investigation

On April 15, 2013, at approximately 2:49 PM, two pressure cookers filled with shrapnel exploded on Boylston Street, ripping through Boston Marathon spectators and crowds streaming out of Fenway Park after a Red Sox win. Three days later, the FBI's website featured a photo of prime suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and after a manhunt that included a deadly shootout, the 19-year-old college student was apprehended inside a drydocked boat in Watertown, Massachussetts, on April 19.

Besides Tsarnaev—who went by the nickname Jahar with his UMass Dartmouth peers—police found messages scrawled on the beams of the boat. Among them were, "We Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all," and, "Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop."

On Wednesday, the trial for the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev began in Boston, and his defense lawyer opened up with the admission: "It was him."

So with the possibility of proving his innocence off the table, the trial—which could last until June—centers on whether Tsarnaev should be put to death or sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

To that end, the prosecution will argue that the defendant wanted to punish the United States for mistreating Muslims, while the defense will claim that he was merely a tool of his radicalized older brother, Tamerlan.

In his opening arguments, assistant US attorney William Weinreb talked about the three people who died in the attack, including an eight-year-old named Martin Richard, who had no blood left in his body by the time he arrived at the hospital. To highlight the atrocity of Tsarnaev's alleged crimes, Weinreb juxtaposed happy, smiling photos of the deceased with descriptions of their brutal final moments.

Tsarnaev's defense attorney, Judy Clarke, asked the jury to consider the fact that her client was a regular college kid. And, indeed, he was by many accounts typical in the sense that he loved watching the Walking Dead and smoking weed.

He was born in Kyrgyzstan to a Chechen father who wasn't religious. His older brother, according to Rolling Stone, discovered Islam in 2009 after his dreams of becoming a national boxing championship were dashed due to his non-citizen status. Soon he became devout and starting pressuring Dzhokhar to do the same.

"He was in a tough time in adolescence, which we all know, being vulnerable to the influence of his brother," Clarke told the jury. "We ask you to look further."

Keeping with the strategy of bombarding the jury with details of the tragedy, the prosecutor then called several witnesses to the stand to recount their horror, with the hopes that they would eliminate any sympathy the defense might try to engender. Clarke did not cross-examine any of them. On Thursday, more survivors and first responders shared their stories.

Rebekah Gregory, a woman who lost her leg in the bombing, was one of the people who testified Wednesday. Later, she wrote an open letter to Tsarnaev on Facebook about how she used to fear him but now pities him. She mocked the fact that he's sitting in solitary confinement and will either die or do so for the rest of his life.

"So man that really sucks for you bro," she wrote. "I truly hope it was worth it."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

This story was co-published with The Marshall Project, which, along with the New York Times, recently ran an investigation detailing a culture of abuse and violence against inmates at Attica, the prison in western New York State that was the site of a riot in 1971.

A sergeant at Attica Correctional Facility involved in a savage beating of an inmate in the summer of 2011 brought home several batons after the episode, then sanded them down and refinished them, prosecutors said.

The sergeant, Sean Warner, 41, was one of three guards who pleaded guilty this week to misdemeanor charges stemming from the August, 2011, episode in which a 29-year-old inmate named George Williams was beaten so badly that doctors had to insert a plate and six pins into one of his legs.

Had the case gone to trial, prosecutors said in an interview, they intended to present testimony regarding the batons from a source close to Warner: his wife, Maxine, from whom he has been separated since a few months after the episode.

While laying out new details of what they said was a powerful case against the guards, the prosecutors defended their agreement to a plea deal that cost the men their jobs but included no jail time. District Attorney Donald G. O'Geen noted the burden of convincing "not just any jury" but a jury in Wyoming County, where prison is the largest local industry and corrections officers are viewed as defenders of public order.

In a telephone interview from her home in New Hampshire, where she now lives with the couple's two children, Sergeant Warner's wife, 37, confirmed that she expected to testify for the prosecution. "After the incident, Sean brought home five or six batons and refinished them," she said.

She added that her husband, who was later accused of filing false reports about the beating along with other charges, had expressed surprise that it had become the subject of an investigation.

"He said, 'I thought this paperwork was going to go through, no problem. This is the last incident I would expect would come back on me,'" Ms. Warner said. The comment, she said, was a reference to other violent confrontations with inmates at the prison her husband had mentioned. "There were many others," she said.

Prosecutors confirmed that three batons were later found by investigators at Sgt. Warner's home, and that Ms. Warner would have been called to the witness stand to tell a jury about them.

"She was potentially a big part of the case," said District Attorney O'Geen.

As part of his guilty plea on Monday, Sergeant Warner acknowledged removing a single baton from the prison without authorization, a violation of state rules. His attorney, Cheryl Meyers Buth, did not return messages. In comments to the Buffalo News after Monday's guilty pleas, Buth denied that her client had had to clean blood off of any baton.

Attorneys for the defendants would almost surely have tried to keep Ms. Warner off the stand, arguing that secrets between spouses are privileged. But the evidence rule is not absolute. Prosecutors said they would have sought an exception.

In a last-minute deal struck just before trial was to begin in the village of Warsaw, Sergeant Warner and officers Keith Swack, 40, and Matthew Rademacher, 32, agreed to quit their jobs at the maximum security prison in exchange for an agreement that they will have to serve no jail time. The men will be permanently barred from working for the state's corrections department, officials said, but the agreement does not affect their pensions, which they will receive when eligible.

The decision to accept pleas that carried no jail sentence in a case marked by exceptional brutality has sparked widespread criticism. Among those disturbed by the plea was former Republican State Senator John R. Dunne, who was among the outside observers present in the yard at Attica during the September 1971 riot there that led to 43 deaths. "He virtually gave them stay-out-of-jail free cards," Dunne said. "It's a terrible indictment of the system. If defenseless people can't find justice in New York's legal system, who can expect them to believe in it?"

But in a telephone interview, together with his chief assistant, Vincent Hemming, O'Geen defended his decision.

"I, too, wish we could have done more," he said. "But getting a plea was a monumental step." The charges, originally filed in December 2011, included gang assault, conspiracy, and tampering with evidence. The felonies carried minimum sentences of five years if convicted.

The indictments represented the first time that New York State corrections officers have been criminally charged for a nonsexual assault of an inmate. After the charges were dismissed on technical grounds, O'Geen represented them to a second grand jury and obtained new indictments.

"We are breaking new ground here," said O'Geen. "Getting three guards—who have never, ever been charged before in the history of New York State—to stand in court and admit their guilt, is a huge step into making sure things like this don't happen again. Is it the perfect plea? Absolutely not. Does it mean that if they went to prison, I'd be upset? No. But the bottom line is, sometimes it's not perfect."

O'Geen said his office was prepared to present a case with strong evidence, but that he still faced major potential obstacles to a conviction. "It is a question of how the evidence is going to fall at a trial, what goes in, what doesn't go in." But in detailing what he would have presented to a jury if the case had gone forward, it appeared O'Geen held a strong hand.

In addition to the batons, he said, prosecutors would have also introduced evidence showing that laboratory tests on a weapon, a razor blade, that the guards claimed to have discovered hidden in Williams's underwear during a search showed that Williams' DNA was not present. Lawyers for the guards maintained that Williams prompted the fight by "resisting" efforts by the officers to search him.

Hemming said that they had also intended to show a jury a text message sent by Sgt. Warner to another guard involved in the beating as the investigation of the event was underway. "Stay strong, stick to the paperwork," the message read.

Prosecutors had planned to call as many as seven doctors and nurses regarding Williams' extensive injuries, which included two broken legs, a broken shoulder and ribs, and a fracture of his eye socket. The medical workers would have included the nurse at Attica who insisted that Williams be sent to an outside hospital for treatment. The move interrupted what inmates at Attica say is the usual chain of events when beatings occur, with victims removed to solitary confinement where their injuries are largely ignored.

O'Geen said he was likely to have called as many as ten current and former inmates who witnessed some aspect of the beating that took place in a day room used for classes and meetings on C Block, one of the vast cell tiers in the 2,240-inmate prison. One inmate, he said, would testify that he was ordered to burn a sack of blood-soiled shirts handed to him by Officer Rademacher after the beating. Another inmate would have described the orders he received from other officers to quietly mop up an extensive blood spill in the day room.

All of the inmate witnesses, however, were expected to face tough grilling about their criminal pasts on cross examination by Ms. Buth and her co-counsels, Norman Effman, and Joel L. Daniels. "One of our main witnesses had been locked up in Louisiana; he had tried to escape. He was no angel," said O'Geen.

Williams, who was serving a two to four year sentence for robbing a pair of Manhattan jewelry stores, would also have faced intense questioning about his own criminal past by the defense attorneys.

"The question is: How is that going to play before a jury?" said O'Geen. "And not just any jury, but a jury in our county." Wyoming County, just east of Buffalo, is a largely rural, overwhelmingly white area where state prisons represent the largest employers, and where most people have either friends or family members working in the corrections industry. Most of the inmates, including George Williams, are African American men with long rap sheets.

Had the men gone to trial and been acquitted, O'Geen said, the impact at Attica prison would have been severe. "If you lose and you get nothing, then the whole system becomes emboldened," he said. "The union, the staff; it's as if, 'Oh yeah, we got away with it.'"

O'Geen said that Williams supported the decision to accept the guilty pleas, and was "overcome with emotion" when he heard the news. But in a brief exchange with a reporter on Monday, just after the pleas were announced, Willliams sounded much more equivocal. Edward Sivin, an attorney who is representing Williams in a civil rights lawsuit against the guards, clarified his client's feelings. "He is disappointed that they got what amounts to a slap on the wrist," said Sivin. "But he is gratified they can no longer be correction officers and that they can no longer to do other inmates what they did to him."

Ms. Warner said that even though she and her husband are estranged and are seeking a divorce, she had cooperated with prosecutors out of a sense of obligation. Her husband, she said, had changed over his fifteen years working in prisons.

"He was a very calm, laid back, easy going, fun person to be around," she said. "There is right and wrong, and I think he forgot that."

This article was published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on the US criminal justice system. You can sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

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All photos courtesy Dennis McGrath and 'Heaven.'

To be canonized a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church you have to perform a miracle from the grave. To be deified in skateboarding you have to put out one good video part. Skateboarders have the uncanny ability to turn a blind eye on any former pro skater's shortcomings (drug addition, rape, murder, domestic violence, etc.) so long as he made some type of minuscule impact on skateboarding. That's the case with North Carolina's Lennie Kirk, a skater with a short-lived pro career who suffered major head trauma and wound up preaching the word of the Lord while robbing people with a sawed off shotgun.

But boy was his 1997 Alien Workshop Timecode video part good! That's why nearly 20 years later we're still talking about him. That and the fact that my old friend and roommate, legendary photographer Dennis McGrath, just so happened to document Lennie's entire ascent and the downward spiral that recently landed him in prison for 13 years on kidnapping charges. The whole journey is chronicled in his latest photo book, Heaven.

If you choose to search the internet you'll learn there's a whole lot more to Lennie's kidnapping charges than just driving a girl around in a car. And personally, I abhor any man who lays his hands on a woman. I grew up with extreme domestic abuse and have zero tolerance for it. So despite being a huge Alien Workshop fan and worshipping the Timecode video, including Lennie's part, I'm not inclined to place him into the annals of skateboarding greats. But it is quite the story, and Dennis captures it brilliantly in Heaven. And who knows? If Lennie can truly turn his life around in prison this could be the next big Hollywood movie.

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VICE: For those who don't know, who is Lennie Kirk and why should anyone care about him?
Dennis McGrath: Lennie was a pro skateboarder from North Carolina in the 90s. I first met him in 1992 in Houston. Then in 1994 I moved to San Francisco to go to art school and skate and Lennie moved there with my brother in 1995. He had just gotten sponsored by Alien Workshop and was skating really good. I had a flat on Grove Street with a bunch of skaters and our house was the hang out for a bunch of dudes. Lennie was there all the time. He was one of the more interesting people to photograph at the time, and that's where this book all started. Lennie was always kind of different.

How so?
He was crazier than most skaters, which says a lot. There are so many crazy stories about Lennie and they're all true. Like the time he followed the Planet Earth team on tour in his own car. The owner of one of the skateshops they stopped at had a party for them at his house around the 4th of July, and the one thing the guy said to everyone was, "No fireworks!" There was a dried up field across the street from his house and he didn't want it to catch on fire. Low and behold Lennie starts lighting Roman candles off and the whole field goes up in flames. Apparently it was a bad fire and everyone jumped in the van and had to leave town.

Another time Lennie was at a party in Houston and got beat up. He left the party, went to the liquor store and got whatever he needed to make Molotov cocktails and went back and drove by the party and threw them at the house. He's that dude.

I feel like back then kids weren't attracted to skating for its lucrative career options. Skaters tended to come from broken homes, and there was a lot of accepted mental health issues in the community.
It's true. But Lennie came from a nice Christian family, which is what I always trip out on because his mom was a really sweet woman. I know his dad was a fisherman and I don't know if he was around a lot. Maybe that was part of the problem. Of all the family photos his mom sent me for the book there's only one photo of him and his dad. I think that's real significant.

Thirty-three seconds into his part in the legendary Alien Workshop video Timecode, we see the footage your brother, Jon, shot of Lennie falling off a dumpster and hitting his head. That injury would ultimately change him forever. Let's talk about that.
He and my brother were out in the Presidio, in the middle of nowhere. Lennie was trying to grind a dumpster off a loading dock and basically flipped into it and hit the back of his head. He went temporarily blind and was bleeding out of his ears. Jon called 911 and they went to the hospital and the next day Lennie wakes up in SF General Hospital and doesn't know what happened. He doesn't remember anything. He rips the IVs out of his arms and runs out of the hospital. The nurses are screaming after him and a cop followed him but he got away somehow. He headed up Potrero, hopped a fence, and hid for two hours by the 101 Freeway in a hospital gown. Then he thought the coast was clear so he hopped on a city bus but the bus wouldn't move because they were warned that Lennie might try and get on a bus. A cop who worked for the hospital got on and grabbed him. Lennie was like, "You're not going to bring me to jail, right?" The cop was like, "No, you need to go back and lay down. We know you don't know what's going on because you hit your head so hard." And that day was when everything changed. He already had some screws loose...

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Didn't he also get hit by a car?
Yeah, after he hit his head. A few weeks later he got run over by a Pac Bell van. Ran up his leg and over his chest and barley missed his head. He got up and was fine. That's the night he called my house preaching, saying God had saved him and he was going to come over and save us all. From that day on he was saved by Jesus. And as much bullshit as I think it is it happens to some people. But I think it's a scapegoat at this point, because it's all about God's will, it's not up to Lennie what happens, it's up to God. And the reason he gets in trouble is because of Satan. That's what he wrote me in a letter, that the laws in California are of the devil and Satan wrote them. You can keep blaming it on someone else all your life but it's not helping you be a better person. I'll ask him when he's getting out of jail and he says, "When God wills," and I'm like, "You might be there for a while."

When he was out of jail last time he wasn't doing good stuff. He was missing court dates and had warrants out. Before he got to appeal his case he got chased by the cops on his motorcycle. He laid the bike down, his girlfriend fell off, and he got up and mashed out of there and kept going. He's gnarly. He's been in and out of prison for the last ten years of his life; he's institutionalized.

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Now he's locked up on the three-strike rule with the last offense being a kidnapping charge.
The 13-year sentence is stemming from the kidnapping and domestic violence charges. He said he didn't kidnap his ex-girlfriend. He said he put her in a car and made her drive with him, but if you move someone even ten feet that's kidnapping, technically, and it's a felony. And that's the law and the girl threw the book at him because she didn't like him. He obviously beat her up and so you can see where she's coming from.

There was another abuse story that Rob Dyrdek told me back in 2004 before Lennie went to jail the first time. Lennie was down in Nicaragua or El Salvador on a Christian mission with his girl and he didn't vibe with the mission people because he's so militant in his way, so the main preacher made him leave. Him and his girl trek through Central America and somehow get a bus to the Greyhound Station in San Diego. He calls Dyrdek and Rob goes and picks him up and takes him to his place. Lennie and his girl go for a walk and when they come back the girl has a big shiner. Rob was like, "Dude! What the fuck is going on? What did you do to her?" Lennie says, "She was acting up and God's will, I hit her with the Bible." Dyrdek got freaked out and told him he couldn't stay there, gave him $100 and brought him back to the Greyhound station and sent him to San Francisco.

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When he got back to SF that's when he started getting in trouble. He ended up having a kid with that girl. They were living in a car for a little while, she ended up getting a restraining order on him, and then Marcus Brown called me while we were working at Big Brother saying Karl Watson was down at the pier and Lennie was robbing people with a sawed off shotgun. Karl tried taking the gun from him and telling him he shouldn't do that because he'd get in a lot of trouble and Lennie was like, "Fuck that! Don't try to judge me. This is how the Lord is providing for me and my family." That's how delusional he was.

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There are some guys in skateboarding who just get a pass, no matter what they do. I was a big fan of Lennie's skating because we all loved Fred Gall and Alien so much, but I remember seeing him at a tradeshow, waiving his Bible, screaming that rhetoric in people's faces and I was like, Fuck this dude.
Exactly. A lot of people don't like him because of that; he's very overbearing with it. In the book there's a story that Dyrdek talks about, where Lennie gets on the plane to Australia, this is pre-9/11, and screams, "Everyone needs to get saved by God right now or this plane is going down!" They took him off the plane and detained him.

Do you think Lennie can exist outside of jail?
I don't think so. He just got 13 years; he'll probably serve six to eight. He's 37 now; he'll be 45 when he gets out, that's old. When he got out last time he didn't want to work. If you're an ex-con you have to try and be a part of society and be normal. It's not easy to get a job when you're an ex-con, but you have to try. The one thing I'm trying to do with this book project to get him some money was that we did a shoe and some t-shirts with DC Shoes, and after I pay taxes on it I'm giving him all the profits. I don't want people to ever think I'm exploiting him. I'm trying to give his life some dignity. He's going to have a lot of time to look at this book and maybe this time he will try and change. What he did isn't right, but by happenstance I was just there and able to document his life since he was 16 years old. I remember in 1997 I was in New York with a box of prints with a bunch of photos of Lennie and I showed them to Larry Clark and he said, pointing to Lennie, "Follow this kid around, every time you see him take a photo of him." That was the weird seed planted almost 20 years ago that started this book.

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