According to the National Institute of Child Health and Mental Development, Asperger's syndrome is a condition that affects roughly one in 500 people . It's on the autistic spectrum and has a significant impact on a person's social and behavioral abilities, making the already challenging notion of daily communication even more of an uphill climb.

Love is a condition that affects everybody. Regardless of how you see the world, it's human instinct to crave affection and attention, to establish bonds among those with whom we share the world. For someone who finds it difficult to express his or her basic interests or to understand the feelings and needs of others—two defining aspects of Asperger's—the search for such bonds might seem never-ending.

A new documentary, Aspie Seeks Love, goes right to the heart of this condition, taking as its subject an Aspergerian named David Matthews—not that Dave Matthews—who was not diagnosed until the age of 41. Suddenly aware of the condition's influence on a lifetime of behaviors, the film follows David in the midst of his quest to find someone with whom he might share his life.

The result is a refreshing, moving, and frequently awkwardly sublime exploration of one person's search for self-understanding and shared meaning in a world where even making proper eye contact can be hard. Like American Movie or Crumb, filmmaker Julie Sokolow's eye operates at a sharp but curious remove, allowing David's one-of-a-kind personality to shine through, whether on a blind date with a college professor or at a support-group holiday party for other socially challenged minds.

I spoke with Sokolow over the weekend, following the film's debut at Cinequest, where it won Best Documentary Feature Film.

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VICE: How did you meet David, and when did you decide you wanted to make a film about him?
Julie Sokolow: I was intrigued by David for a long time. I would see him around coffee shops and record stores in Pittsburgh, wearing his signature 1950s glasses and a long tweed coat. He was very awkward; he always ran places instead of walking. One day, out of the blue, I received a Facebook DM from him saying, "I've seen your documentaries, and I think you should make one about me."

I then discovered he had a reputation around Pittsburgh: For 20 years, he posted personal-ad flyers to telephone poles seeking love. A lot of people knew about his flyers, but they didn't know anything else about him. He was an enigma.

The first time I met Dave in person for coffee was surreal. He told me he was now looking for love on OKCupid and he wanted me to film his progress with women. He had the most incredible dry and offbeat sense of humor. That was 2011. I've been immersed in David's life ever since, over the past four years.

So you just began following him around after that, doing the filming, including riding along on the dates that he arranged? Did you ever feel your camera influenced his actions, or the actions of the people interacting with him?
I was really driven to make something authentic, and David made his entire love life open to me. All of his thoughts and insecurities about love and sex were on the table, which was brave! In the film, I follow him to an Ethiopian restaurant where he meets a German woman named Elisabeth, whom he exchanged messages with on OKCupid. Here they are—meeting in person for the first time, sniffing each other out as potential mates—as some awkward girl with a camera is sitting across from their candle-lit dinner.

The crazy thing is, I don't think filming really messed with the "realness" of things. A big part of getting genuine life on camera comes from a vibe you create as a filmmaker. I had no lights, no crew. It was just me, and I'm as un-Hollywood as they come. David is disarmingly honest, like a lot of people on the autism spectrum. He doesn't know how to put on social facades. I think David's sincerity paired with my awkwardness somehow made people feel at ease. People who watch the movie say it feels like my presence as the filmmaker is invisible. That's exactly what I want it to feel like.

What other definitive qualities did you have in mind for the film when you began, and how did that change as you went on?
I was really inspired by character-driven documentaries like Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, Albert Maysles's Grey Gardens, and Bennett Miller's The Cruise. I wanted to make a film about David as this fully realized human being beyond his quest for love or Asperger's diagnosis. I wasn't sure where the plot was going, and I didn't really care. The goal was to create a character portrait that felt real and raw and intimate. I thought that in order to achieve that, I had to stay out of the way as much as possible and be a "fly on the wall."

As David and I became friends, it became harder for me to remain distanced. David was working on a collection of short stories for ten years and was in a rut. As a friend, I decided to connect David with a few resources to help his literary ambitions. My friendly advice to David impacted the film's trajectory to a degree, but whatever. Impacting the people in your film is inevitable, but it can still be authentic. You just have to hope the impact is positive.

The film is framed around different holidays throughout the year, beginning with Halloween and moving through the release of David's first book. What inspired that organizational method?
Both David and I have always felt alienated by holidays. You're marketed this image of joy and togetherness that is unrealistic, especially for people who are lonely or experiencing various difficulties in life. Holidays are actually tough on a lot of people.

When I first started filming, I noticed that David's high-functioning-autism group threw parties for each holiday. I thought it would be intriguing to use holiday chapters to mark the passage of time in David's life. People on the autism spectrum are sensitive to noise, light, and stimulation, so they have these unconventional, minimalistic gatherings. During the Halloween potluck, no one wore costumes, and there was no music playing (unfortunately that scene didn't make the film).

During the Christmas-party scene, David says, "Suicides always spike during the year-end holidays, or if they don't, then they should." Then we cut to a shot of an angel on a Christmas tree directly under a moldy stain on the ceiling. When you establish a holiday scene, audiences often expect something heartwarming or cliché, and I wanted to subvert that expectation.

How many hours of footage did you end up with, and how did you go about tailoring it down to provide the best look at David's life?
I shot 100 hours of footage, and the final film is 73 minutes. I wanted Aspie Seeks Love to feel more like a character-driven fiction film than a talking-heads documentary. In Aspie, we see this protagonist on a quest, meeting potential lovers and mentors along the way. I cut the film to enhance that feeling.

I admittedly read The Writer's Journey (a self-help writer's book based on Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces) in preparation to edit the film. I had a lot of inner conflict between mainstream and indie storytelling inclinations. It's like, you want to make something new and original, but you also want to communicate effectively and tell a good story. In the end, I'm happy we arrived at a balance between conservative and experimental impulses. David likes the film, which is the most important thing.

Because David wasn't diagnosed with Asperger's until his 40s, it seems like a lot of this film is him figuring out what the condition even means, and how he can find his place in the world within that. I wonder if there's a change in him you noticed, or a change in his way of operation, that could be helpful to understanding that process of self-discovery?
David's situation with Asperger's resembles the struggles a lot of people face who have mental-health issues or neurological differences. It's scary when you feel like your psychology is abnormal or broken or imperfect. When you're constantly experiencing friction with the world, you want to know why, and a diagnosis can alleviate uncertainty. David says his diagnosis helped him realize his "so-called eccentricities had a neurological basis and were not self-willed."

The downside of the issue at large is over-diagnosis, misdiagnosis, and the ever-changing DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). A lot of people in David's support groups have been given multiple, changing diagnoses over the years. As a child, David was put on Ritalin for hyperactivity, which he has very mixed feelings about. We try to show the complexity of the issue in the film.

These days, David is very much attached to his Asperger's diagnosis, even since its removal from the DSM. Once he was diagnosed, he was connected to therapeutic resources and support groups focused around his condition. I think the diagnosis has increased his self-knowledge and discovery overall and decreased his social alienation.

For more information and showtimes go to AspieSeeksLove.com.

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Minecraft is not a game of bloodshed and carnage. It is not a game that encourages players to throw their morals out the window and murder their fellow man. According to its website, it "is a game about breaking and placing blocks." Another way to put that would be to say it is a very fucking boring game. So it seems odd that officials at the Children Services General Directorate of Turkey's Family and Social Policies Ministry announced on Tuesday that they would seek a nationwide ban on the block-based exploration game. Those conducting the probe argued that it had the potential to promote violence, social isolation, and cyber abuse amongst Turkish youths.

"Although the game can be seen as encouraging creativity in children by letting them build houses, farmlands and bridges," the report (as quoted in the Turkish daily Habertürk) reads, "mobs [zombie-like antagonists, which actually only exist in the game's optional Survival Mode] must be killed in order to protect these structures. In short, the game is based on violence."

Following these conclusions, officials passed their findings to the Ministry's legal affairs department, which would in turn lodge a legal complaint with the nation's courts. If the ban does clear the Turkish judicial system, it will become the first ever nation to ban Minecraft, which, as mentioned earlier, is pretty vanilla as far as video games go.

"Minecraft is one of the last games I would think would be banned based on violent content," Newsweek quoted Jonathan Jordan, editor of the UK's Games™ Magazine, as saying when the Turkish government first started investigating the game for potential violent content.

Turkey's probe into Minecraft began about a month ago , when Family and Social Policies Minister Aysenur Islam delivered a speech before the nation's parliament arguing that the game awarded points for violence (a dubious statement) and that it might promote violence against women specifically (a confounding statement). He apparently based his case on a 2013 incident in the United States, where a nine-year-old boy took weapons to school, saying he had been inspired to do so by a Minecraft character. But no further evidence or reason was provided.

On its face, the whole affair seems like a hyper-sensitive extension of the same sort of video games and violence debates the US has gone through for the past quarter century. (In the US, the furor has died down a bit and recent studies seem to suggest there is no real correlation.) Yet this case is a little odder and more inexplicable than that. Turkey has a history of censorship, but generally not over violence or video games. And Minecraft, while criticized for its addictiveness, doesn't have many accusations of violence against it, making it a weird target for silencing.

Most Turkish censorship involves web content that the increasingly conservative government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan deems inappropriate for political, religious, or prudish reasons. As of last month, the government has banned about 66,127 websites and thousands of Facebook and Twitter posts and issued over a hundred gag orders. Recently, they tried to ban Twitter. Yet in none of these instances does it appear that the government targeted games, much less violence in games. In fact, Turkey actually has no known record of banning video games at all.

The Turkish government may be getting a bit more paranoid about violence in video games now thanks to the fact that protestors in 2013 chanted about how they'd grown up beating on police in Grand Theft Auto. Yet the delay between 2013 and 2015, and the lack of prior action on more explicitly violent and popular games like Call of Duty , suggests that link is tenuous at best.

So analysts remain perplexed by the Minecraft decision. Violence in the game (which is used as an urban planning tool by the United Nations and a teaching tool in Sweden, the UK, and the US) is bloodless, not explicitly promoted, and solely directed against pixelated monsters , contributing to its age seven and up European rating and age ten and up US rating. Media experts stress that what violence there is promotes cooperation amongst human characters, furthering the game's good intentions.

In response to the Turkish ruling, a spokesperson from Mojang, the company behind Minecraft, stressed to GamesBeat that the game is malleable and even minimal violence is optional:

"Many enjoy the creative freedom that's presented by Minecraft and its tools, some are more interested by the opportunity to explore a landscape without boundaries and to go on exciting adventures with friends," said the spokesperson. "We encourage players to cooperate in order to succeed, whether they're building, exploring, or adventuring."

"The world of Minecraft can be a dangerous place: it's inhabited by scary, genderless monsters that come out at night. It might be necessary to defend against them to survive. If people find this level of fantasy conflict upsetting, we would encourage them to play in Creative Mode, or to enable the Peaceful setting. Both of these options will prevent monsters form appearing in the world."

But if Turkey were serious about its concerns for violence in Minecraft, then they'd have to start seriously investigating basically all children's playthings, or at least that's what Dr. Andrew Przybylski, a psychologist who works on videogame violence at Oxford University's Internet Institute, suggested to Newsweek back toward the start of the investigation last month:

"Thinking of investigating Minecraft for being violent," he said, "is the equivalent of ordering an investigation into violent LEGO playing."

This leads some to suspect that Turkey has an ulterior motive in targeting Minecraft—maybe to do with controlling communication channels, a la their attacks on major social media platforms:

"Banning Minecraft is similar to banning Twitter because it's a game played on a server," Rik Eberhardt, the manager of MIT Game Lab's Gaming Studios, told The Christian Science Monitor recently. "On a server those communicating can't be easily observed and monitored. I wonder if they see that Minecraft's popular, have a negative memory of video games influencing youth and worry this game is connected in some way."

Minecraft is incredibly popular in Turkey (a nation with a large and growing gaming market ). A local children's book on the game recently became a bestseller. And those joining Minecraft are hooked into a massive global user base. Since launching in 2009, Minecraft (which was recently sold to Microsoft for $2.5 billion ) has attracted over 100 million users, surpassing Call of Duty's popularity on the Xbox Live network. That makes it essentially a large communications network, which could be utilized to spread political or religious information in ways that are difficult for government's to scrap and monitor as they can do via social networking sites or search engines.

There's precedent for governments taking on online games as a potential vector for undesirable discourse. In 2013, documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that the US National Security Agency and the British Government Communications Headquarters, had both been deploying undercover agents into online gaming communities like Second Life and World of Warcraft to monitor their participants for suspicious communications. There is no evidence that these efforts were actually productive, but they do make it plausible that Turkey might, rather than drop agents into Minecraft, just seek to eliminate it as a communications channel.

Yet that may be giving Turkey too much strategic credit. The nation's in a weird place right now, veering deeper into protests and discontent amidst social upheavals and shifts. And it's being helmed by sporadic officials led by the increasingly bizarre Erdoğan, who over the past year has done many inexplicable and arbitrary things, like allegedly sucker punching a protestor after a mining disaster and pushing the idea that Muslims were the first to discover America. In all this swirling mess, almost any rationale for the potential Minecraft ban is possible. Or, as one gamer on Turkish website LeaderGamer summarized the situation:

"This is Turkey. At any moment, anything can happen."

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

After the voters of Washington State passed Initiative 502 to legalize recreational pot in 2012, some rural towns and counties—apprehensive about the legal and social implications—began instituting moratoriums on the operation of cannabis stores.

But North Bonneville—a small community of 1,000 residents in the southwestern corner of the state—decided to try and take control of the seemingly inevitable and turn it into a chance for civic rejuvenation.

The plan? City officials applied for their own license to sell weed.

On Saturday, after a year and a half of planning and waiting, the North Bonneville Public Development Authority opened the Cannabis Corner for business, making it the first government-owned marijuana store in the United States. What happens next could inspire other municipalities in Washington State and beyond, many of them desperate to find new sources of revenue for public services.

Entrepreneurial gears started turning in the heads of North Bonneville's elected officials when the Washington State Liquor Control Board—the body that developed regulations for the state's new recreational cannabis industry—announced in 2013 that two licenses to conduct retail sales of cannabis would be allocated to Skamania County. The area includes two small cities and five unincorporated communities situated along the north bank of the Columbia River; the remaining roughly 80 percent of Skamania County land belongs to the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, a federally protected national forest that extends south into Oregon's Hood River Valley, drawing thousands of tourists each year for all manner of year-round outdoor recreation. These visitors routinely pass through North Bonneville, and now there was a chance for the region to offer another kind of recreation that could be more lucrative—albeit not without risks.

As other public servants in Skamania signaled their lack of interest in hosting pot shops, North Bonneville's civic leaders realized in September 2013 that they would likely be home to one if not both of the two cannabis retailers licensed for the county, says North Bonneville Mayor Don Stevens. State regulations specify that pot retailers must be located 1,000 feet away from schools, parks, and other public facilities, effectively ruling out the more populous neighboring city of Stevenson, the only other viable candidate for a recreational cannabis store in Skamania. Because of its size, North Bonneville doesn't have any schools or other sensitive public resources, which makes regulatory compliance for a weed store much easier.

But Mayor Stevens and the city council didn't want to assume responsibility for a private cannabis retailer without ensuring they had the resources to police it.

"We were all looking at [Initiative 502], and one of the things that caught our attention was that the tax money was going up to Olympia and staying there. None of it was coming back to the cities or counties," Stevens tells VICE.

North Bonneville's administration, which has grappled with budget cuts in recent years and currently contracts police services from the county sheriff, believed it couldn't afford to let a private operator open up shop without having a direct means of controlling the cannabis trade.

Inspired by government-created Public Development Authorities (PDAs), which incubated Pike Place Market in Seattle and the Hilton Hotel development in downtown Vancouver, Washington, Mayor Stevens decided it was time to incorporate a PDA for North Bonneville charged with the sole task of developing a retail cannabis store. PDAs are legally autonomous entities which maintain separate finances from their government parents and are operated by their own volunteer boards. Creating a PDA to operate the store puts a "firewall" between the city and the store should any legal or financial liabilities arise, according to Stevens.

The city held a public forum for residents to offer feedback about the project, and heard comments during city council meetings. When I-502 was originally passed, voters in Skamania approved it by 53 percent and North Bonneville approved it by 54 percent, and Mayor Stevens says support and opposition within local meetings broke along the same lines. The city council quickly drafted Ordinance 1028 in November 2013 in order to meet the state's mid December deadline for retail cannabis applications. This legislation established the PDA's charter and bylaws, and appointed its first five-person board. Future board members are selected by the PDA itself, and any profit the PDA earns can be granted to worthy municipal projects, but "not directly to city coffers," according to PDA Board Chair Tim Dudley. (If the city council ever changes their minds about the value of the PDA and store, it can overturn its founding ordinance at any time to immediately dissolve both.)

While the PDA had been formed, it lacked start-up cash. To the consternation of some residents who opposed putting public money at risk, the city loaned $15,000 to the PDA as it began the search for private financing. As commercial banks still can't legally handle cannabis-related funds, the PDA couldn't turn to them for business loans. Instead, they found independent private lenders willing to invest in exchange for higher interest rates, but which allowed them to pay back the city's loan merely months later.

According to Mayor Stevens, once the public funds were repaid, local critics of the project went quiet.

The city also hired John Spencer—a former city administrator for North Bonneville who resigned in 2013 to start Pulse Consulting in nearby Camas—to guide the PDA's development and shepherd its application for a cannabis license. It took over a year for the state to review and approve North Bonneville's application, as the state apparently hadn't anticipated this type of local initiative.

"Two of the reasons it took so long to open was that the Liquor Control Board felt it was incumbent on them to review the entire structure of their codes with us in mind to ensure we actually fit within the rules, and because that if we were successful, other cities would follow," says Spencer. The Washington Liquor Control Board also conducted background checks on city officials and PDA board members. North Bonneville finally received approval for the store in February.

Spencer projects that the store will earn $2.7 million in revenue its first year, with the expectation that much of its traffic will come from tourists. While the PDA has to pay Washington's excise tax for cannabis of 25 percent, it's exempt from federal taxes, "just like the Oregon Lottery or state liquor stores," according to Spencer. This grants the PDA and its store a tremendous advantage over private operators, who are currently disallowed by the IRS from taking tax deductions due to dealing in a federally controlled substance. This has resulted in effective tax rates of 50 to 90 percent for many legal canna-businesses, threatening to put some out of business. The PDA will, however, pay sales tax to the city; Spencer says that even if the store only makes enough to pay employees and overhead costs, "We'll be sending 30, 40 grand of sales tax revenue per year to the city, which is an 8 percent increase to city's general fund. That's significant."

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Photo courtesy John Spencer

The Cannabis Corner has no competition for miles. The closest recreational shops are in Vancouver and other parts of Clark County to the west. Skamania County doesn't have any of the medical marijuana dispensaries that still dominate the cannabis market in areas such as Seattle, since they're taxed less, offer lower prices, and are subject to fewer zoning restrictions (the state legislature is currently weighing legislation that would phase out medical dispensaries in Washington by mid-2016). While Spencer and the PDA have some concerns about Washington customers seeking a far lesser taxed product in Oregon once that state's own cannabis stores open next year, Spencer says his conservative business plan for the Cannabis Corner already takes that into account. As supply continues to expand in Washington, the Cannabis Corner's own prices will also decrease, helping the store remain competitive and sustainable into the future.

Once the store has paid off its current loans, subsequent profit revenue will be granted to local organizations in support of purposes outlined in the PDA's charter, including public safety and substance abuse prevention. PDA members attend meetings of the One Prevention Alliance, a local drug awareness coalition that voiced preliminary concern with North Bonneville's plans, along with the county's drug enforcement meeting, every month.

"We spend most of our time talking about the money aspect of this, but the original discussion with the city council was not about money, it was about, 'What if it's Philip Morris that ends up owning this thing? Are we sure Philip Morris is going to have the best interests of the community at heart?' Probably not," says Spencer. "This board has been exceedingly scrupulous to ensure that public health and safety are its primary concerns."

By founding the store, the North Bonneville PDA also created 11 new jobs in town, one of which is held by the Cannabis Corner's store manager Robyn Legun. She applied for the position from Oregon after finding the PDA's ad on Craigslist, having spent "her whole life" working in retail. She laments that many retail positions, where one used to earn a living wage and develop transferable management skills, have been degraded into minimum-wage posts without real learning opportunities. She credits her use of medical cannabis to treat pain and insomnia caused by intensive back surgeries with allowing her to return to her previous retail management job after prescription drugs just made her feel woozy. Now, having relocated to North Bonneville, she looks forward to working with employees who are being paid higher-than-average wages with benefits, and where she can lean on some of her management experience to help others reach their own career goals.

Legun was responsible for picking the store's suppliers and products, which include a diverse range of cannabis strains, as well as edibles, tinctures, concentrates, and accessories—all sourced as locally as possible. Initial business has been promising: 700 customers made purchases on opening day, according to Legun.

The store's suppliers may eventually become more local—Mayor Stevens says he wouldn't be opposed to ancillary canna-businesses such as growers and processors moving to North Bonneville, and that some have already visited to scope out property.

"Without exception they all say they're going create 20 to 30 jobs that will be decent, family-wage, with benefits packages, and that's economic development we could really use," Stevens says.

The Cannabis Corner is also attracting businesses from outside the weed industry. Stevens cites the example of a mother-and-son team of restaurateurs from Vancouver who followed North Bonneville's plans over the past year in local press, and decided to open a pizza-and-burger joint in town this past September, gambling on the prospect of visitors to a new cannabis store and the lack of other restaurants nearby. He says they're doing well already.

Since Saturday, the weed store has grossed nearly $16,000 in sales, says Spencer; slightly lower than his projections but "people are still hearing about it". Regulation prevents the store from engaging in traditional advertising, so the Cannabis Corner must depend on word-of-mouth and press coverage to promote itself.

There are still complications to surmount, of course. The city pot store currently does not have banking services—its PDA status didn't sway federally chartered institutions. They're currently talking with banks in Vancouver and Seattle, to which the PDA will relay its cash deposits via armored car. But once the loans are serviced and overhead costs ironed out, the first spending item on the agenda is rebuilding a public playground that's been standing since the 70s, according to Dudley.

"This way the community can directly see that we're not the bad guys, that positive things can come from what we're doing."

Bill Kilby is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.

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Rachel Resheff and Larry David in 'Fish in the Dark,' by Larry David, directed by Anna D. Shapiro. Photo credit: Joan Marcus

Over his seven seasons at the helm of NBC's Seinfeld and eight at HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David's signature contribution to American comedy has been a form of Jewish levity that you could describe as a stark, bleak, utterly jarring attack on your comfort level. Think of George's nonplussed response to the death-by-envelope-licking of the fiancée he didn't want to marry, or Larry's screw-up writing an obituary for his wife's aunt that results in her being memorialized as a "Devoted wife and beloved cunt." With Seinfeld, Curb, and now his new hit Broadway play, Fish in the Dark, David has honed the well-worn comedy equation of tragedy plus time into an even simpler arithmetic: Tragedy equals comedy.

Fish in the Dark 's tragedy is the sudden death of the Drexel-family patriarch, Sidney (played in a mercilessly brief appearance by Jerry Adler). He is survived by his wife, Gloria (Jayne Houdyshell), and his two grown sons, Arthur (Ben Shenkman), a successful lawyer, and Norman, a failing urinal salesman, played by David. The comedy is about pretty much everything else in the lives of the Drexels, who gather in the hospital to see Sidney off, bringing with them any typically Jewish moodiness and neurosis you might expect in the infrastructure of a Larry David–created family. Before the curtain even goes up, a recording of a phone call is played in which Norman learns that his father is in the hospital; his immediate reaction is to jerk off. The play's first noteworthy conflict is over Sidney's request that one of the brothers take Gloria in after he dies. Who, specifically, he wanted to take care of his wife is unclear, and both Norman and Arthur—who agree on little save for how irritating they find their mother—are determined to prove the plea was aimed at the other.

Also in attendance for Sidney's parting are Norman's wife, Brenda (Rita Wilson), who is about as fond of Gloria as Norman or Arthur is, their self-involved actress daughter (Molly Ranson), her irritating boyfriend (Jonny Orsini), and Arthur's daughter (Rachel Resheff), Jessica. (The eulogy for Sidney delivered by Jessica later on gives David the opportunity to stage a variation on a Curb favorite, the argument with a child—Jessica's speech receives better reviews among the family than his did, but he's not convinced she wrote it herself.) The Drexel mishpocha is made complete by the trio of truculent uncle, nagging aunt, and schlemiel in-law played by Lewis Stadlen, Marylouise Burke, and Kenneth Tigar, respectively.

The family quickly drops into a pattern of bickering that you can tell gives them the comfort of an old shoe. Recent or historic, trivial or momentous, the disputes all receive the same supersaturated level of anger—who gets to visit Sidney in his room first? Who should get his Rolex? Who refused to make the lights brighter during dinner? Who may have called whom a cunt during dinner ten years ago? Among such questions are also loftier Larry David inquiries: Is it effective if the wood you knock on is faux? Are you supposed to tip your doctor? If Gandhi said you can't shake hands with a closed fist, how do you think he'd react to the fist bump?

Further complicating the family mishegas is Fabiana, the Drexel's longtime maid, played by Rosie Perez, who appears unexpectedly at the hospital to be with Sidney at his bedside. Her subsequent arrival at shiva to deliver a plate of cuchifritos and reveal to Norman that her relationship with Sidney extended beyond cleaning products into romance serves as the hinge for anything Fish in the Dark might claim resembles a plot.

The show and everyone in it is a delight—delight in Larry David terms being an oppressive mixture of contempt, obsession, and adversity, mingled with an inescapable sense of futility. And Larry David, despite claiming that he doesn't consider himself an actor , is great. Does he have the range of a Charles Durning or a Meryl Streep? Not so much. Is he the perfect Larry David? Absolutely.

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Larry David and Ben Shenkman. Photo credit: Joan Marcus

And for someone who lately has been better known for outlining episode scripts and then improvising all the dialogue in them, he also writes a great joke: "I've never felt more alive than at a funeral. It's like life is an elimination tournament and I advanced to the next round." And: "I'd like to get married again: I don't want to die alone. I want to live alone—I just don't want to die alone."

Fish in the Dark also contributes further commandments to the already swollen Larry David Guide to Ethics and Morality. It's a cardinal sin to earnestly quote Gandhi while trying to reconcile estranged siblings. It is morally neutral for one of those estranged siblings to try to fuck his brother's former girlfriend despite the brother's protests. It is basically a sacrament for that former girlfriend to allow the brothers' dying father to cop two extended feels upon her breasts as he whispers off this planet.

The play's commandments make clear, as did David's alter egos of George Costanza and TV Larry before it, that Larry David has a long history of doing something that breaks Seinfeld's cardinal rule of "no learning"—teaching us a lesson. Or, more accurately, reminding us of something that has been handed down from generation to generation of kvetching Jew. And no matter how many brow-furrowed goys writing very serious novels or memoirs have tried to convince me otherwise, I am an agreement with him. All of our worst feelings—and probably life itself, for that matter—they are all tremendous jokes.

Death is also pretty funny. A few years ago my wife's maternal grandfather, Leo, a kind man who resided in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, died at the age of 89. Leo was Jewish and, like the best of today's Jews, not religious. If a nonreligious Jew dies, he or she is likely to do so without belonging to a temple. And if you want to mourn that person with a Jewish ceremony, what you get is a rent-a-rabbi to conduct it—basically the first ringer from a local synagogue who happens to be free. Like I imagine many of these rabbis to be, Leo's rental wasn't so good. Among a variety of missteps was one particular error he made during his clearly boilerplate eulogy: Somewhere between the limp praise of a long life well-lived and the tepid admiration for the man so beloved by his family, the rental got Leo's name wrong and called him Louis.

In the rental's defense, it was a little confusing, because Leo's birth name was actually Louis, and the rabbi had picked up naming information from the birth certificate rather than talking to the family. Had he talked to the family he would have learned that nobody ever called Leo Louis. And had he taken a moment to put in a personal touch to his usual script—like, say, asking beforehand, "Do I have this guy's name right?"—he wouldn't have walked away from the service having had his mistake called out from the pulpit by an angry family member during an otherwise quite touching remembrance of Leo; nor would he have had to suffer standing two feet away from that same aggrieved relation as she used the post-service moments of tearful parting to wag an angry thumb in his direction and loudly proclaim for all to hear what a "useless motherfucker" he was. Thus goes the traditionally recited Mourner's Kaddish: "Glorified and sanctified be God's great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will."

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Rosie Perez and Larry David. Photo credit: Joan Marcus

Larry David (another Sheepshead Bay boy, by the way) and Fish in the Dark seem to be of the same opinion, though neither he nor the play, and neither the rabbi nor the cursing cousin for that matter, can claim rights to the idea; it isn't novel. In that sense there's not much of anything that is really "new" about Fish in the Dark. Angry family, broken relationships, neuroticism, insecurity, silly arguments. The play is a lot like an extended, scripted episode of Curb. But I don't always turn to the comedians I love for "new." I like when they dig deeper into the nooks of some issue you thought they'd completely hollowed out only to see them discover yet one more take on the subject. I like hearing Louis CK's latest joke about how shitty and wonderful it is to be a parent, rediscovering another way Richard Pryor told me black people and white people are different, watching Tina Fey explore every which way it's hilarious to be an awkward lady, or reading Philip Roth explode once again with ecstasy and shame over his relentless sexual pathologies.

David has always appeared committed to some very pure idea of situation comedy, where the situation directly leads to the comedy. If you think of "The Contest" in Seinfeld, there's not much plot to speak of. Just a simple proposition—everyone competes to see who can go the longest without masturbating—and then the following of how it plays out, i.e., how everyone pretty much fails. Even the much-lauded trick of tying threads together between Seinfeld or Curb's A, B, and C stories is more a sophisticated and brilliant version of the callback than it is a narrative device. It's not effective because action rose and fell, climaxes rolled breathlessly into dénouements, and certainly not because the characters ever changed or grew. Maybe that's why his recent HBO movie Clear History didn't really come together. Everyone in it was funny, and the scenes were great, but the movie had too tortured a plot and too much narrative. It killed the comedy.

Which is why I loved Fish in the Dark. There is barely any narrative; there's barely any plot: the backward sibling rivalry over the father's deathbed request, a few of the lesser conflicts between other family members, and one brief separation between Norman and Brenda. The storyline with Fabiana develops into something slightly more plot-like, but mostly it's just an excuse for a few more funny situations before we all leave the theater. So what you're really left with is the one big situation—death—opening up to a handful of smaller situations, and then hilarity, bleakness, anger, yelling. The end.

One surprising delight about Fish in the Dark is how well-suited it turns out Larry David's tone and style are for the theater. As poorly as they fared in a feature-length narrative comedy, they found the right home within the confines of a light two-hour play. I guess it's not surprising. A good Larry David scene relies on all the hallmarks of stage histrionics: copious gesticulation, excessive shouting, exaggerated pacing and intonation. And, of course, all that snappy talking. The visuals of the play, particularly some of the quiet costuming touches—Uncle Stewie's Birkenstocks over socks, brother-in-law Harry's half-century-old color-blind plaid coat—resonate with some deep buried memory of family members best left forgotten. But they're incidental. If a Larry David play doesn't ultimately win the day with the memorable and absurdly hilarious dialogue that you want from a Larry David play, then a Larry David play may as well not exist. In the case of Fish in the Dark, tragedy equals victory.

Follow Aidan on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Victor

Another alleged Islamic State sympathizer has been arrested in Canada for terrorist-related activities, the latest in a series of arrests since the high-profile attacks on Canadian military personnel in October.

In-the-news Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney confirmed an accused Islamic State supporter is in the custody of the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) after it foiled alleged plots to bomb the US consulate in Toronto and other financial targets in Canada's largest city.

According to a CBC report, on Monday Jahanzeb Malik, 33, a Pakistani national, was arrested after allegedly attempting to radicalize an RCMP undercover agent by showing him infamous ISIS beheading videos.

So far authorities are mum on exactly how far along Malik's plot really got, while no criminal charges have been laid against him.

"I would like to confirm that CBSA has arrested an individual, a supporter of the Islamic State who was allegedly planning a terrorist attack here in Canada," said Blaney in a press conference in Ottawa. "This individual was also promoting jihadi ideology. The arrest took place in Toronto and was conducted by our Canadian Border Service Agency."

Malik allegedly wanted to document his terrorist mission in a videoed statement in order to incite others to follow his example. That move has become standard tradecraft for several would-be or wannabe terrorist attackers in Canada.

Blaney said the arrest of the individual believed to be Malik, who is identified by name in several media reports, is the result of joint anti-terror operations between the CBSA, RCMP, and Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS)—the same national intelligence agency recently granted broad new foreign spying powers by Ottawa.

Currently, Canadian authorities are pushing for Malik to be deported to his native Pakistan, rather than face charges in Canada.

The public safety minister, under fire after calling a verse from the Qur'an against "Canadian values," said the foiled attack is proof alone why the Canadian Armed Forces is engaged in a military campaign against ISIS—and the reason parliamentarians should support Bill C-51.

"We believe this is a strong and robust tool while promoting the rights of Canadians," said Blaney about the controversial anti-terror bill set to empower Canada's law enforcement agencies with sweeping new surveillance and arresting powers. "So I urge all parliamentarians to support this important bill to increase the safety of Canadians."

After Blaney's statement, questions arose as to whether or not the law enforcement agencies, thanked and named by Blaney, were even in need of new legal capabilities given the success of Malik's arrest and the several others since the beginning of 2015.

In response, Blaney said the "the threat is real" and that law enforcement agencies like the RCMP have asked for the "many tools in C-51."

Follow Ben Makuch on Twitter.

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Screenshot via.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"We're racist, we're racist, we're racist / And that's the way we like it, we like it, we like it."

Aside from the illogic of a bunch of beered-up Chelsea fans goading black people to the tune of a song heavily popularized by Whoopi Goldberg's turn in Sister Act, February's videos of men being racist on trains were jarring for many reasons.

YouTube is full of videos of men being racist—the more violent the more popular, it seems—but until the recent videos shot on the Paris Métro and the London Underground came to light, most of the internet's public transport racists have tended to be lone women howling epithets as a shocked and awkward audience watches on. Women like Jacqueline Woodhouse, the 42-year-old from Romford who was jailed after a tirade on the tube, or the 34-year-old who said she hated white "Freemasons" on a bus in Hackney. And, perhaps most infamously, Emma West, the 36-year-old Croydon "tram racist" who wasn't technically alone, but was bouncing a toddler on her knee. Owing to the upset and injury racism causes to those who suffer it, it's worth exploring why we regularly see videos of British women being racist and why they—until recently—have seemed to make it into the news cycle over incidents of public male-perpetrated racism.

The West's film industry might be overburdened with men, but when it comes to hand-held citizen filming, it's just that much easier to film a woman. They're less physically intimidating than men—especially loud, racist ones. To gasps from the rest of the carriage, these women point fingers and lob bottles. But with every physical action they move closer to comeuppance—one is pushed from a moving bus, another has a bottle of beer poured over her head. She begins to cry, shouting, "I'm dying of cancer," her wig forming a too-neat bowl on her head. Others manage to avoid significant repercussions but are shamed online and arrested at a later date.

Another factor in why racist women end up being filmed more often is that for some reason it feels more surprising. A racist woman goes against our expectations, says internet psychologist Graham Jones. "A woman being racist is less expected than from a group of rowdy men. It is unexpected behavior, compared to the norm, which makes it more likely to be filmed."

A knock-on effect of this is that the videos are shared more. Jon Ronson, author of So You've Been Publicly Shamed?, tells me, "Women often have it a lot worse than men in the shaming world." A brief glance at the Google trends for the term "woman racist on train" and "man racist on train" show you female racists are searched for more, too.

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Once the videos are online, the women are spoken about in the comments section using rhetoric that just isn't directed at men. Gender cannot, in any world, be seen as some kind of get-out clause, but the reaction to women being outwardly racist in a public space provokes responses like, "She is so angry 'cause God poked her with the ugly stick;" "The species belongs to a gender which in society believes they can do what they want to the opposite sex without consequence;" "I'd fuck her;" and, more to-the-point, "I would of just raped her." The guys leaving these comments seem like tourists to the cause of toppling racial inequality, only jumping in on the fight when it presents them with an opportunity to be vicious about a woman.

The archetypal image of a racist in this country is a white man shrouded in the St George's cross. It's one that has been hammered into us by the media for decades: All the photos from butcher-than-butch EDL marches, archive footage of racist attackers like those who murdered Stephen Lawrence and UKIP's testosterone-heavy polling results seeming to indicate, on a surface level, that British women just aren't as racist as British men. However, in 2013's British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, the number of women self-identifying as having "some level of prejudice" was the highest it's been since 1983. Standing at 29 percent, it's still lower than men's 32 percent—but had actually risen by 5 percent from 2002, while the male figure has dropped by the same amount in that period.

"Women often have it a lot worse than men in the shaming world." – Jon Ronson

Racism is ignorance, it's anger, it's entitlement and privilege not knowing itself. Frequently, too, it's utterly baffling. Take the now infamous video of the woman on the Jubilee Line train at Stratford, losing her cool in an argument with a black passenger about personal space, saying, "You guys used to be slaves." You wonder what it was that blew the specific fuse that makes a person's mind jump from public transport etiquette to historic slavery.

When you watch these videos with the BSA stats in your mind, it does look as if more women are becoming racist. But are they? Or is it just easier to catch them in the act? Dr. Grace Lordan, from the London School of Economics, asserts that yes, "It is likely that it is easier to film females than males." However, beneath that, her own research of the BSA data has found that socio-economic factors could be playing a part in increased racism from women.

"Females who are part-time employed report higher levels of prejudice than other females," she says. "Overall, job uncertainty and scarcity encourages groups of individuals to form coalitions based on observed recognisable characteristics, such as ethnicity. From research in economics we know that competition for scarce resources can induce agents without discriminatory attitudes to aggressively discriminate."

Obviously it's not as easy as saying that austerity, and all its knock-on effects, is making British women racist. But since sweeping Coalition cuts were made to the public sector—which employs about two women to every man— 58 percent of the job losses have been women's, says the Women's Budget Group. Women are also more likely to be on zero-hour contracts than men and are much more likely to do unpaid labour—housework, childcare, healthcare for the old and infirm. It's not just job insecurity that is making women financially unstable; the Fawcett Society speaks of a "triple jeopardy," where jobs and benefits to women have been cut and councils, finally free to make their own funding decisions, have been given tiny budgets from which they cut frontline services to those women who are most in need.

In some of the women's racist rants, you don't just hear prejudice—you hear a discontent with the UK and its Government. Jacqueline Woodhouse, who was jailed for 21 months for her racist outburst, said: "Fucking country's a fucking joke." When she realized a camera was on her she gurned, waved, and said, "He's filming, 'Hello Government.'" Emma West, who was handed a 24-month community order (the judge said she was clearly suffering mental health problems at the time of her racist outburst) said: "Britain is nothing now, my Britain is fuck all now."

In times of hardship, people cling to what they know. So, perhaps, these women have neither the patience nor the energy they think is needed to sympathize with someone else's fight for equality. Too many women's lives have become a series of queues; for jobs, benefits... for trains. And they're in those queues with nothing to entertain them but tabloid scaremongering and echo-chamber Facebook memes telling of an establishment that's encouraging people to push in in front of them.

Could it be that, as our industries become more feminized as a whole—evolving from blue-collar industries like farming and mining to service industries like nursing and shop work—the hackneyed fear of "them lot coming over 'ere and taking our jobs" has transposed from the minds of working-class men to those of underpaid, overworked women? It provides no justification, but perhaps some explanation to Woodhouse's comment, "I've been overtaken by people like you."

Another old racist cliché is, "They're comin' over 'ere to steal our wimmin"—and it's one that still holds in the media representation of minorities. From the grooming gangs of Oxford, Rotherham and Rochdale being referred to as "Muslims" in a way that none of the Yewtree defendants have been referred to as "Christians," to the death of Alice Gross at the hands of Latvian ex-convict Arnis Zalkalns being used by commentators to leverage debate on immigration caps, the sexualized fear of The Other lives on.

As for stereotypes of black men as hypersexualized, Omar Khan, of the Runnymede Trust, told me: "The prejudiced attitudes underpinning stereotyped attitudes about black masculinity have still not been adequately tackled, and clearly also affect the day-to-day experiences of black people, whether at work, on public transport, on the football pitch, or even just walking down the street."

The result is tangible in one video where a woman heckles an "Arab" man on a bus, saying, "You could be a pervert who nonces kids!"

Could it be that, as our industries become more feminized as a whole—evolving from blue collar industries like farming and mining to service industries like nursing and shop work—the hackneyed fear of "them lot coming over 'ere and taking our jobs" has transposed to the minds of underpaid, overworked women?

White male writers of sensationalist headlines might feel more comfortable if they maintain the myth that the perpetrators of sexual violence don't look like them, but it's nonsense and it's dangerous. While 34 percent of women on London's public transport report feeling unsafe, when they're probably surrounded by strangers, 85 percent of sexual assaults are committed by someone known to the victim.

"The overwhelming majority of women and girls who are raped or sexually assaulted or abused know the perpetrator before the attack," says a representative from Rape Crisis. "Quite often a rapist can be someone the survivor has previously trusted and even loved. The idea that men of particular races or ethnic backgrounds are more likely to be sexually violent is one of the many harmful myths that it is vital we dispel if we are to properly tackle sexual violence."

Where is this taking us? We can theorize that racism is learned, and maybe, if there are more female racists than just five years ago, it's because they've failed to bat away the spoon feeding them the lazy, right-wing media narrative that they are economically and sexually at risk of people who aren't like them. Women are, of course, capable of independent and critical thought, but we've seen plenty of other examples of young women so disenfranchised from mainstream society that they're left vulnerable to the barkings of extremism.

It would be fantastic to suggest education as a solution to racism. However, there are plenty of supposedly well-educated people who still perpetrate racism on a daily basis—it is ingrained in the very structures of so many of our institutions where white men are either active or complicit in holding women and minorities back.

What's needed is not only the right kind of education, but the time, resources and clear mind to access that education, and the emotional stability to understand who's on your side and who really isn't. And, in economically uncertain times, emotional stability can be harder to come by.

Follow Sophie on Twitter.

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A still from VICE News VR: Millions March, a virtual reality film about anti-police-brutality protesters demonstrating in Manhattan. Courtesy of Chris Milk

A few weeks ago, I found myself in Spike Jonze's Chinatown home dodging Syrian kids as they played soccer. I was wearing a headset that had me immersed in a 360-degree virtual reality documentary shot at a refugee camp in Jordan. As I turned my head to follow the action on the field, I lost my balance and kicked the leg of the nearby kitchen table. I wasn't used to watching a convincing virtual reality movie (who is?) and felt bested by technology, like when an old person is listening to a museum's audio tour on headphones and keeps shouting at people because she can't hear her own voice.

The film was one of three that Jonze and the director Chris Milk had me experience using the headset. There was also an animation in which you're standing in the middle of a lake. A train chugs across the lake, right at you, and then through you, exploding into hundreds of birds. The third film is composed of super-close-up footage of protesters demonstrating at an anti-police-brutality march in Manhattan (it was produced in partnership with VICE News, and Jonze is a longtime VICE creative director). The company behind these movies is VRSE, a virtual reality production house founded by Milk and backed by Annapurna Pictures' Megan Ellison and venture-capital cash. VRSE has impressed the entertainment industry at Sundance and global leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The possible future of VRSE has Jonze and Milk ecstatic, like it's the early days of filmmaking and they're Eadweard Muybridge. And while the thrill you get from watching the movies can be hard to describe, it's safe to say these guys are on to something, even if no one's quite sure what that is yet.

I interviewed them while Jonze softly strummed an acoustic guitar.

VICE: If VRSE could become anything, what would you like it to be?
Spike Jonze: Right now it's just the first millimeter of a whole new medium. It's not really about what we want it to be; it's just about the possibilities.

Chris Milk: We're just figuring out what works and what doesn't work. Cinema is this empathy engine, and it allows us to feel compassion for people who are very different from us, in worlds that are very far from our own. VR takes this idea to an entirely new level. After five minutes you feel really deeply for those people in that refugee camp. What this technology is doing, fundamentally, is allowing you to feel like you're sitting with that person. Even though your brain knows that this is all an illusion, because of how it presents itself to your consciousness, it's so aligned to the way that you receive the real world. You come out of it feeling something deeper and connecting at a far more profound level.

Jonze: It's like you don't have a body. You're able to empathize without having the self-consciousness of being two feet away from someone or invading their space.

Can you explain the allure of watching these films?
Milk: There's a purity to being in that moment that isn't cluttered by all the things that usually go along with normal reality. You can exist there without any ego. You can see every nuance and quiver and breath in all the emotion. I showed it to someone the other day who was at the [anti-police-brutality] protest who thought it was powerful but never cried, and then they watched the virtual reality version and came out crying a lot.

Jonze: Being there is just different. I wouldn't want to say this is better, but it's a different experience. It's really moving.

Milk: The protest is something that you had the ability to go to, but you couldn't go to a refugee camp, most likely.

Jonze: Right. One of the things we're doing is giving the equipment to VICE News to create these immersive news experiences, which is really exciting to me. Like the idea of Simon Ostrovsky's pieces in Ukraine, which are already so immersive, and yet you can imagine in this medium they would be even more so. You'd be like, "Wow, this is what it's like to be in this conflict in Ukraine right now."

Do you think that having this weird-looking camera with lenses all around could affect peoples' behavior in these situations?
Jonze: In a sense, it's less imposing because the traditional camera's lens is like a barrel pointing at you. You are being aimed at. This isn't aiming at anything.

What's the next news documentary you plan on producing?
Milk: The one on the Syrian refugee camp comes out of a partnership with the United Nations, and we're going to do a series of films on different people in crises around the world. So a crew is going to Liberia in a couple weeks to do a story about Ebola. And the UN is doing a virtual reality lab where they're gonna show these films to different visiting leaders and dignitaries and people who work at the UN every day. I think that's where this really becomes something special—when you can share a story with someone who can actually take action and help.

Could you see VRSE producing scripted narrative features?
Jonze: Yeah, for sure. A hundred years ago cinema was a new technology, and the language of film has been invented and reinvented countless times, and rules have been created and broken endlessly. So even when we were editing this VICE News piece, we were making up rules and joking that in five years, or a year, every rule we make up will be broken and reinvented. So yeah, narrative, art, animation, documentary, anything. You know it's gonna get used for porn. That's probably where the technology will be advanced the most, because there's so much money in it.

Milk: Porn drove the adoption of VHS, the internet, etc. Ultimately, what virtual reality needs to succeed is not porn but compelling content that humans like to watch, and it needs humans to watch that content. You need an audience, and you need the stuff that the audience watches. The technology has finally caught up to the dream, and now the content needs to catch up to the technology.

Jonze: The most interesting thing will be when kids who grow up with this thing start writing for it. They'll be writing from the point of view where it's just inherent to the way they think. I started making music videos at a time when music videos were still pretty new. I always thought of it as so exciting because music videos could be anything set to music. This is even more so that. Usually the technology comes first, and then the rest adapts. This is the first step to that. I'm sure in five or ten years we'll look back at this and it'll look so dated.

Like the early days of the internet.
Jonze: Yeah, there was this idea of video on the internet, and it took a while for that to become what YouTube is today. Like six years. Hopefully it's not that long with VR and everyone will have a 360-degree camera and will be able to shoot and post stuff. Imagine Vimeo and YouTube with virtual reality.

Milk: Right, then you get stories that we can tell. You get intimacy with a subject, and people are opening themselves up because they're the authors of it. And also just recording moments and living them back again. I had this experience where we were shooting tests a few months ago, and at this test I was with my now ex-girlfriend, and we were holding hands and being happy together. And then we broke up a couple months later, and this footage was stitched together. And I put on the headset and looked at it, and it was like I was transported in this time machine and was there again, with my ex-girlfriend. And all those feelings came back. It wasn't like looking at a picture or a video. I was there again, experiencing it as a time-traveling ghost.

How do you feel about all the other groups that are starting to invest more in virtual reality right now?
Milk: There's definitely a VR gold rush going on. It's great. The community needs stimulus to create work. My only fear is that too many people will make stuff that's not great. What you need is great content to attract an audience. I want everybody to make great stuff. We're going to be producing VR films with different writers, directors, and producers, but there's also a larger effort to expand the language of VR storytelling and experiment and publish the results of the experiments. If you also want to do VR, we want to help you. There's the VRSE app for distributing VR content; VRSE.works, where we make the content; and VRSE.farm, our VR content incubator with Megan [Ellison], where we grow the content and language.

Jonze: It's a lab to explore what that medium would look like in different areas.

Milk: Anything we learn in that regard should be shared openly. If I figure out a compelling way of making a scene in a car between two people, I should be sharing what we learn about the language with everybody else because that only helps all of us. The more that people make good, compelling content in virtual reality, the more it helps the community. There's no limit to how much good content there can be. We've never reached a saturation point in any other medium where there's just too much good stuff to go around. No one says, "I don't want to go see this amazing movie because I just saw an amazing movie."

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Photo via Flickr user Vox Efx

Whether you have AIDS, malaria, cancer, or autism, there is a product sold on the internet that claims it can cure you. That product, called Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS), sounds a lot like other pseudoscientific remedies—but unlike many suspect forms of New Age medicine that are scientifically unproven but benign, MMS can actively harm you in serious ways. That's because it's a solution of 28 percent sodium chlorite which, when mixed with citric acid as instructed, forms chlorine dioxide (ClO2), a potent form of bleach used in industrial pulp and textile bleaching.

Obviously, this is not exactly something you want to put in your body. And yet some parents are giving this dangerous substance to their children, both orally and through enemas, in the belief that it will cure their child of autism.

The FDA has been aware of MMS for some time; in 2010 it issued a warning that the product turns into "a potent bleach" that "can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and symptoms of severe dehydration" if ingested. There are reports of at least one possible death from MMS use, and in January children were removed from a home in Arkansas on the suspicion that parents were giving them the solution in some form. Media investigations have shown that the substance will quickly bleach cloth, leading one scientist to tell North Carolina's WFMY News that she would only use it to clean her shower.

Nevertheless, there are a number of people who are convinced that using Miracle Mineral Solution—also known as following the "CD Protocol" (CD stands for chlorine dioxide)—will cure whatever ails them. They believe that it works by clearing the body of mystery parasites known as "rope worms" and other pathogens that they believe cause autism (this theory, to be clear, is wholly unsupported by medical science). And it's not just autism. MMS is marketed as a classic cure-all, purported to treat everything from diabetes to malaria to Ebola to AIDS. There's even a pseudo-Wikipedia where you can look up which "protocol" to follow to cure any illness, whether the complaint is baldness or brain cancer.

If this all sounds a little cultish, that's because it is. MMS was "discovered" by a man named Jim Humble, a former Scientologist who started his own church, called Genesis II, of which he is now the self-styled Archbishop. The church appears to be little more than a marketing organ for his alleged miracle cure, though it's worth noting that the site doesn't sell the actual wonder product it extolls, but offers a host of supplementary materials like a $199 "MMS Home Video Course" and information on expensive MMS seminars.

[tweet text="LEAKED: Proof the Red Cross Cured 154 Malaria Cases with MMS https://t.co/XIGLClMLfz" byline="— Genesis II Church (@GenesisIIChurch)" user_id="GenesisIIChurch" tweet_id="529621780265467904" tweet_visual_time="November 4, 2014"]

If Humble is the pater familias of this wolfpack of chicanery, a woman named Kerri Rivera seems to be its den mother. A bishop in Humble's church, Rivera is the author of a book titled Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism, in which she recommends giving autistic children "hourly doses" of chlorine dioxide and advocates chlorine dioxide enemas as a way to "kill pathogens in the brain."

Her website, CDAustism.org, is—like Humble's website—careful to state that it does not actually sell MMS. Instead it promotes the idea that it will cure autism, sells supporting materials like her book, and offers expensive Skype consultations on administering the "treatment" that cost over $100 per hour.

In other words, while stopping short of selling MMS (likely for legal reasons), Humble and Rivera instead advocate it as a lifestyle, thereby promoting the damaging idea that the complex neurological condition known as autism is essentially a gut problem that you can somehow power wash out of your body by pouring industrial bleach into both ends. And their followers believe them. (Attempts to contact Humble and Rivera for this story were unsuccessful.)

MMS enthusiasts talk casually, like they're swapping recipes, about how many inches to insert the catheter into their child's rectum.

There's no way to accurately estimate how many people are doing this to themselves or their children. One of Humble's websites outlandishly states 20 million people have been served by MMS, while Rivera claims a more modest (but chillingly specific) 164 children have been cured from autism, a number based on unverified testimonials.

As their behavior comes under increasing legal scrutiny, MMS enthusiasts have become an elusive bunch, recently abandoning a Facebook page that boasted over 7,000 members and moving to a more anonymous message board hosted on CDAutism.org where they say, with no apparent irony, that they feel more "safe," since making an account is required here.

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Yet it's in these threads, where those who have bought into the miracle cure share their stories and discuss dosing strategies, that the evidence against MMS/CD is most damning and most clear.

Going through these posts is like wading through a witches' brew of misinformation, pseudoscience, and paranoia. Here you can find parents speaking openly about the merits of drinking ocean water and performing parasitic cleanses timed to the cycles of the moon. MMS enthusiasts talk casually, like they're swapping recipes, about how many inches to insert the catheter into their child's rectum, how to force them into a chlorine dioxide bath, and how to use "tactics and tricks" to overcome resistance from children as young as two to receiving a bleach enema.

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Most horrifyingly, these "tactics and tricks" even include using the child's own autism—i.e. a "love of routine"—against them.

Guided by largely anonymous moderators, users trade anecdotes in place of science, all while making health decisions that will affect their children in intimate ways, with unknown physical and psychological side effects. Meanwhile, the mods issue reassuring comments not to worry about things like reduced bowel function or "hundreds of small red objects" in a child's stool after enemas. They are convinced it's all part of the healing process.

Many MMS fans believe that vaccines result in parasites, which in turn cause autism.

There's a strong strain of anti-vaxx sentiment that runs through this subculture, since vaccines are viewed by many chlorine dioxide users as the initial source of their child's autism. Much of this is the result of the ongoing ripple effect of a discredited 1998 study that posited a possible connection between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism. Despite being debunked, the study continues to infect the public debate around vaccines, contributing to recent outbreaks of long-beaten diseases like measles.

Unlike other strains of anti-vaxxers, though, many MMS fans believe that vaccines result in parasites, which in turn cause autism. I asked Emily Willingham, a science writer who's written about MMS for Forbes and Thinking Person's Guide to Autism, if she could explain this logic.

"One of the tenets of the vaccines-cause-autism movement is that the vaccines contain toxins, that a 'leaky gut' is somehow involved, and that these vulnerabilities lead to parasitic infections, yeast overload, and a host of other weird, unrelated things that 'need' to be treated," Willingham wrote in an email.

Indeed MMS/CD enthusiasts are downright obsessed with parasites. On CDAutism.org and elsewhere they post stomach-churning photos of what they believe to be "rope worms" or other parasites passed by their children after oral or rectal doses of chlorine dioxide. (The evidence that rope worms even exist is extremely limited.)

I corresponded with a doctor in South Africa, Louise Lindenberg, who has tested three such stool samples, given to her by a parent who admitted to using chlorine dioxide on herself and her children. She found no evidence of said parasites. "The microbiology did not reveal any parasites or even eggs," Lindenberg wrote in an email. "Histology confirmed that it was a combination of mucus, plant material, enterococci (probiotic flora), and gut cells."

What she did find, however, was "abdominal discomfort, aggravated behavior, weight loss, low sodium levels, [and] iron deficiency" in her patients. To be clear, I asked for her opinion on MMS/CD. Lindberg, who is herself an autism expert, replied: "I feel that it is potentially very harmful and does not 'cure autism' in any way."

When there are alarming side effects from the enemas the solution is... more enemas.

According to Fiona O'Leary, an autism advocate and activist based in Ireland and a leading opponent of MMS/chlorine dioxide use, the issue is clear: "We need to stop with these quack treatments because they're dangerous, they're not authorized, they're not proven, and if anything they're proven to cause real harm."

O'Leary—the mother of two autistic children, and who is on the spectrum herself—has been involved in activism against MMS in Ireland since 2014. She has catalogued numerous instances of apparent abuse on MMS message boards and Facebook groups. In a lengthy conversation, O'Leary discussed her ongoing campaign against MMS and compared chlorine dioxide use to other discredited treatments for autism like chelation and shock therapy.

"It's like something from a Stephen King horror film," she said. "They're guinea pigs. They don't have a life. From the minute that they wake up in the morning they're dosed with the [chlorine dioxide], and they're dosed throughout the day. Parents are removing them from school because they're not allowed to dose in school and they're hiding from child protection authorities because they know what they're doing is wrong."

O'Leary's claims seem as incredible as they are horrifying, but indeed, parents who frequent the CDAutism forums openly swap tips on how to duck Child Protective Services, which have become aware of chlorine dioxide's use on children in some areas.

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"It's so unbelievable that you have to pinch yourself. But it is happening. It's happening where I live," said O'Leary, who says she's been offered MMS in Ireland—in one case by a dentist.

If it defies belief, it certainly defies logic. Chlorine dioxide's fanatics are so wedded to their method that its core truth cannot be questioned. In fact, in their warped view, negative effects on the child like the alarming stools above are proof that the therapy is working and that more chlorine dioxide is needed to further purge the body.

When children are hyperactive or anxious—which is taken as evidence of autistic behavior—both advice on the CDAutism.org forums and in Rivera's book suggest "double dosing." In addition to irregular stools, parents report symptoms in their children such as nausea, diarrhea, and "pink urine"—things that seem clear to be a result of ingesting bleach, but are again taken as evidence of autism. The validity of the protocol itself is sacrosanct. And in this twisted world, when there are alarming side effects from the enemas the solution is... more enemas.

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Here a concerned parent wonders why his son "writhes around in pain after each dose" but explains that he had to "ramp up the dose pretty quickly" to avoid unwanted "behaviors."

O'Leary has no sympathy for anyone giving their children chlorine dioxide and painted a bleak portrait of life in an MMS household, one that sifting though the CDautism.org forums at length only reinforced: a life of tightly restricted diets, constant oral dosing with chlorine dioxide, and regular, invasive, chlorine dioxide enemas. A life of pain.

"They're so far removed from what they're doing sometimes that you think that they shouldn't even have a dog. They're not fit to have children," said O'Leary.

There is no cure for autism, which is increasingly being seen as an example of neurodiversity rather than as a disease, and Willingham believes it's the notion that autism is a "horrific tragedy, a disease that 'steals' the real child away" that's caused some people to buy into dangerous, quack "therapies."

"Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition that traces to early fetal development. You can't bleach it away, and autistic people deserve respect and attention to their personhood," said Willingham.

There are positive signs that the Department of Justice is cracking down on distributors in the United States—in 2013, a major MMS supplier named Louis Daniel Smith was arrested on charges related to smuggling and mislabeling the substance. (The trial starts this month, and Smith's supporters have been crowdfunding his defense fund.) But MMS remains technically legal.

O'Leary fears that without further regulation, phony treatments like chlorine dioxide will become worse and more widespread. Jim Humble regularly posts chilling photos of visits to impoverished countries where chlorine dioxide is given to already suffering people as a supposed cure for malaria and AIDS, and in February announced plans to build a Genesis II church in Sierra Leone.

Though several countries, including Canada and Ireland, have issued health warnings O'Leary says she hopes that increased media attention will move the powers that be to take more concrete action.

"I just hope to God that the government picks up on it and actually look at this as a human rights violation," said O'Leary. "It's nothing less than that."

Follow Stefan Sirucek on Twitter.

There are many reasons why Joe Biden will not be president in 2016. First of all, he's old—very old. Biden's already 72, and he would be 74 at the time of any inauguration. That's five years older than Ronald Reagan, the oldest person elected president to date. He's run twice before, and obviously lost, the first time in the wake of a major plagiarism scandal. And despite being one heartbeat away from the Oval Office, he's best known for saying weird, mildly offensive, shit and getting handsy with someone else's female relative. Imitating Indian 7-11 cashiers and groping the future Secretary of Defense's wife is great when you're Veep, America's mascot, but not as welcome in the leader of the free world.

Biden himself has given no strong indication that he'll even run, though he has said "there's a chance."The idea that he would mount a primary challenge against Hillary Clinton, his party's heir apparent, has always seemed farfetched. But this week's email scandal— the first big sign of trouble for Clinton's nascent presidential campaign—has sent the press, including this reporter, on a wild goose chase for Democrats not named Hillary. The main beneficiary—or victim, depending on how you feel about frenzied press coverage—of that is Biden, who's currently polling a distant secondbehind Clinton among potential Democratic candidates for 2016.

"The vice president was in New Hampshire last week, and he gave a couple of very impressive speeches," Lou D'Allesandro, a New Hampshire state senator and longtime Biden pal, told me. "He was very articulate in talking about the middle class and talking about the challenges facing the middle class, who have been left out of the progress we're making in the economic recovery. If he decides to run, we'll see what happens."

D'Allesandro's comments hint at what would likely be the major appeal of a Biden campaign, particularly in contrast to Clinton's candidacy. The VP seems approachable, likable, familiar—an average Joe who can advocate for the middle class because he is middle class, sort of. It also suggests that Biden's getting around. While he hasn't set up any of formal campaign apparatus, he's already visited the first three presidential primary states—Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina—so far this year, which means he's been visible to the voters who matter in the early campaign. He's also the vice president, so, unlike the rest of the 2016 longshots—Martin O'Malley, Bernie Sanders, Jim Webb—name recognition isn't a problem.

When you take a step back from the Biden speculation, a few consistencies begin to appear in stories about his possible 2016 plans. Dick Harpootlian, a Democratic Party official and lawyer in South Carolina, shows up in most of the articles floating the idea of another Biden campaign. Not to take anything away from Mr. Harpootlian, whose enthusiasm for the Vice President is apparently boundless, but this doesn't suggest much of a groundswell to get Biden in the race. Despite my best efforts, and Harpootlian's eagerness to talk up the VP, I could not get him to comment for this story—he never called me back.

In fact, with the exception of D'Allesandro, I could not get any of Biden's former aides or friends to go on the record about a potential 2016 run. The consensus seems to be that the man obviously knows what it's like to run for president, and that if he runs again, it'll be because he thinks he can win, and believes he's the party's best option to tag in for the Obama administration's third term.

At this point, that doesn't seem likely. Politico reported in October that Biden might not be willing to few in the White House to sacrifice his influence in the actual Obama administration for the thin possibility of extending it. The story points out that few in the White House consider a Biden 2016 run a serious possibility because the VP was too wrapped up actually governing to dip out in the home stretch.

Still, for the sake of balance, it's worth noting a few reasons why Biden actually could be president in 2016. After 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president, he would be one of the most experienced people to ever hold the Oval Office. He also tends to have more cred with progressives than his boss, especially after beating the president to the gate in supporting gay marriage. This week, he's been incredibly vocal in his opposition to the recent letter sent by Republicans to the government of Iran, a sign that he has a political brand and identity beyond the Obama administration. He's also not named Clinton, and for today at least, that works in his favor.

Follow Kevin on Twitter

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A publicity shot for the TV show 'Threesome'

Internet dating can be a fucking minefield. Are you female? Prepare to receive roughly one dick pic per day. Are you male? Keep on keeping on, man; now you've sent over 70 messages I'm sure someone will reply. Looking to set up a date for three people? Everything gets even trickier.

Lucky, then, that services like the Threeway Dating Club exist, where you – a man, a woman, or a couple—can link up with others looking for a threesome. The online dating agency arranges dates for trios as part of their commitment to introducing the masses to the joys of polyamory, then coaches them on how to go about it.

I got in touch with one of their matchmakers, Patrick, to find out what he does on his day-to-day.

VICE: So how does the technique involved in matching up a three-way date differ from that of matching up a conventional two-way date?
Patrick: Originally, we thought that matching three people at a time would be very different to conventional two-way matching, but it's not. Most of our clients are couples, so although we're dealing with the partnering of three people, it's really matching a couple with a third person.

The majority of your clients are couples?
Over 80 percent are couples. However, our largest growth spurt over the last six months has been young, single females. The majority of our clients are college-educated couples, aged 21 to 34.

Are the couples usually a man and a woman, or do you cater to LGBT couples as well?
Three-way dating is not restricted to heterosexual relationships; we are completely open to people exploring homosexuality and bisexuality. In fact, many people go on three-way dates to explore areas of their sexuality that would otherwise have gone unexpressed. Kinsey research has showed us that there is no one who is truly homosexual or heterosexual. We not only accept this, but advocate exploration and the pursuit of heterosexual and homosexual adventures. Bisexuality, as Kinsey's scale showed, is a natural state.

Do you ever match three single people for dates?
Absolutely. In these cases, we most frequently match a male with two females, but we have matched two females with a male, and we have also matched three females.

How does the process differ from matching a couple and a single person?
When a female is matched with two males, we often don't find it necessary for the two males to have input to one another.

Got you. How popular is your service? Do you get a regular stream of clients?
We get new applicants every day from varying walks of life, some wanting coaching and some wanting matching.

What does the coaching consist of?
Relationships between three people are naturally more challenging than those between two, so coaching is strongly recommended to help people fulfill their true relationship desires and goals. Communication is always paramount in dating coaching. The coaching starts with the clients' initial communication to us about their desires and goals. It then moves on to communication among the members of the three-way date. Coaching starts before the date, and continues well after. We teach issues ranging from health to fantasy fulfillment, and also teach our clients about identifying their boundaries.

"It's an unnatural notion that one is to love only and always one other."

How much do you charge for your service?
Everything we do is tailored to the male, female or couple we're matching. The variables considered include age, matchability and specific goals. The other primary variable in price is geography: there are more people looking for three-way dates in some places than there are in others. This means that the prices vary.

Fair enough. Do many of your clients wish to enter into long-term polyamorous relationships, or do they just want one-off three-way dates?
Although polyamory is something that we are huge proponents of, many people don't understand the challenges that are involved with that type of relationship, which is why we offer education along those lines. The primary goal of our clients is an initial three-way date.

So your service is aimed at opening people up to the possibilities of polyamorous relationships?
Of course. We believe that polyamorous relationships should be recognised as legitimate relationships. They have always existed, and will always exist, but, unfortunately, they have always been suppressed by a society that doesn't understand them. It's an unnatural notion that one is to love only and always one other. Infidelity and natural exploration has destroyed marriage, family, society and more for too long. Polyamory is a natural state that we should and could exist in.

Polyamorous relationships, to us, are more than one-night stands. We strive to match three people for the relationship that they desire, whether that be for a night or for a lifetime. We explain to people that the desires they have are natural, instinctive and fun. Ongoing education about polyamory is paramount to who we are. We offer free initial consultations with our matchmakers, and in these consultations our primary goal is understanding clients' short- and long-term goals so that we can properly educate them about how to achieve those goals.

How frequently do the dates that you arrange result in long-lasting three-way relationships?
We have received feedback informing us that lasting friendships frequently occur that continue past the initial three-way adventures.

Do you help to plan the details of the date or just match the trios?
Many times, the three people going on the adventure have never met. We listen, communicate, recommend and offer to facilitate a date that ensures that everyone's wishes are fulfilled. For instance, we once set up a date between two men and a woman who was initially nervous about being with two men in a three-way date. This was in spite of the fact that it was something that she had been interested in for years. We asked her what her interests were and she told us that they were jazz, wine, and fine dining in upscale hotels, so we set up a date that involved these things, ensuring everyone had a good, comfortable time.

Who usually foots the bill for the dates?
Typically couples pay the bill for single females. Rarely do we find a single female paying the bill. In the case of a couple and a single male, it can go either way. It boils down to personal preference.

It says on your website that you use criminal databases and face recognition software to vet your clients. Does this mean that people with minor criminal records are automatically barred?
Criminal databases and face records are used to ensure that we do not match clients with nefarious people. Criminal records do not automatically disqualify people, but sex offenders or people who we have found to have civil judgments against them for activities such as stalking or malicious assault are automatically excluded from matching.

That's good. Finally, how would you respond to critics who say that dating is only intended for two people?
Well, three-way dating isn't for closed-minded people; it's about freedom of expression and choice. I have difficulty understanding how two people, after limited courtship, enter into a monogamous and inseparable union vowing death 'til they part. I don't understand it, but I accept it for them. However, when I examine divorce rates, it makes me question why these critics are so against what we do. Why be against others' happiness with regards to love or friendship when your own institution is so clearly broken? If we had the same success rates in three-way dating as conventional marriages do, we would be out of business. So we say good luck to anyone seeking happiness through romantic couplings and friendships, and we hope you find a way that makes you happy.

Yesterday, law enforcement officials in Panama City Beach, Florida, went on TV to speak out against a local church called the Tabernacle that had been operating some kind of weird nightly event for young people that struck them as not sufficiently church-like. Now the owners will apparently have to pay property taxes and deal with an investigation into their "religious" practices.

Panama City Beach is one of those spring break-y areas in the panhandle where college students go to drink beer out of clear plastic cups, listen to Zedd, expose their nipples in public, and see the exposed nipples of others. With spring break and related activities being the area's primary economic engine, unrelated businesses can catch cash in if they're in the right neighborhoods. The Tabernacle is in such a neighborhood.

The spot is apparently called the Life Center: a Spiritual Community, but it's been operating as a church organization called the Tabernacle. The event that drew the ire of local law enforcement is called Amnesia, or, as its logo makes it look thanks to an oddly-placed oval, "AmnOesia." Or, in some of its more SEO-friendly incarnations: "Spring Break Amnesia," or "Amnesia at Tabernacle."

According to the Panama City News Herald, Amnesia been "hosting naked paint parties" holding "slumber-party Sundays" and boasting that it has the "sexiest ladies on the beach." Amnesia's Vimeo account features debauchery like, well, look...

[vimeo src='//player.vimeo.com/video/45602914' width='640' height='360']

Amnesia has claimed that the $20 taken from each patron at the door is actually a donation and that no alcoholic drinks are served, but local authorities didn't seem to buy it. "I've been in a lot of nightclubs and I've been in a lot of churches," police chief Drew Whitman told the New Herald. "That isn't a church."

"They might not sell alcohol, but that doesn't mean alcohol's not there," Sheriff Frank McKeithen told local TV station WJHG. "It's drug free, it doesn't mean drugs are not there. A lot of the bars on the beach and a lot of the nightclubs are drug free and don't serve alcohol to certain people and minors, but it's there, and when you read and you do your homework and do your background, it's a club."

That's not to say religions can't have fun, but when your church is hosting a party every night and the website of that party sells crappy T-shirts with PG-13-rated jokes on them, and also says that it's a "a rapidly growing entertainment company," well, that might set off alarms, and tell the authorities that this is simply a business and therefore ought to be paying taxes.

To make matters slightly uglier, the hard-partying pastor of the church, according to WJHG, is a guy named Markus Bishop who has had some run-ins with the law. Bishop, who is in his fifties, was booked four months ago on charges relating to him allegedly giving a 16-year-old girl weed and then making unwanted sexual advances toward her.

Amnesia's promotor couldn't immediately be reached for comment. However, sometime after yesterday's news story, a statement was posted on the Amnesia website:

The Tabernacle is a community that serves NO alcohol and bans illegal drugs for the youth to go during spring break at night to interact with each other in a fun safe environment up to 5 AM.

So everyone can definitely rest assured that everything is perfectly normal.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson. Photo via Flickr user Jamelle Bouie

After looking into the practices of the Ferguson Police Department, the feds announced last week that the city needed to take some extreme measures to get its act together. The Department of Justice's report said, essentially, that Ferguson's entire law enforcement system is a mess of flaws and bad practices—black citizens are stopped and harassed far more often than whites, city officials seem to look on constituents as little more than potential revenue sources, and some convoluted policies made it incredibly hard for people to pay fines.

Last Wednesday, a clerk named Mary Ann Twitty, who was repeatedly cited in the report and had a history of sending racist emails, was fired. Then, on Monday, Ferguson Municipal Judge Ronald J. Brockmeyer called it quits, with City Manager John Shaw following suit a day later. Shaw's parting words were that he had cooperated with the feds to help improve city police but that he "never instructed the police department to target African Americans, nor falsify charges to administer fines, nor heap abuses on the backs of the poor."

Of course, the guys actually carrying out those egregious practices reported to Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson. On Wednesday, he announced his own resignation, which will be effective March 19. The news came out of a city council meeting, and was approved 7-0 by council members. The St. Louis Post Dispatch has his (brief) resignation letter available online, and the local Fox affiliate in St. Louis will livestream a statement from the soon-to-be-ex-chief that's scheduled for 6:30 PM EST.

Ferguson will now launch a national search for Jackson's replacement, which will undoubtedly be a tricky process. After all, who would want to take over a mess like this, with federal investigators and the general public still seething at years of outrageous policing? Whoever it is, he or she will need a lot of luck.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Moschino Cheap and Chic dress from Harvey Nichols, Ursula Mascaro shoes

PHOTOGRAPHY: ZOE MCCONNELL
STYLING: KYLIE GRIFFITHS

Make-up: Adam Burrell using Mac
Hair and art direction: Sami Knight using Unite
Stylist's assistant: Thomas Ramshaw
Models: Yasmin and Gemma at Profile, Grace at Body

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Nordic Poetry shrug and trousers, Ashish top

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Ashish jacket, dress from Rokit

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Ashish dress, Charlotte Simone bag

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Sophia Webster bag from Harvey Nichols, top and trousers from Rokit; Jeremy Scott x Moschino jacket, dress from Rokit; Charlotte Simone scarf, Motel jumpsuit

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Marc by Marc Jacobs coat from Harvey Nichols,Nordic Poetry dungarees, Topshop shoes

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Moschino skirt from Harvey Nichols, Ursula Mascaro shoes

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Christopher Kane dress from Harvey Nichols

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Alice and Olivia skirt from Harvey Nichols

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Photos by Sarah Elizabeth Meyler

I've made a lot of new friends tonight. We're in a basement in the center of Dublin, inside a relatively respectable bar called the Turk's Head. It's the sort of place that serves two-for-$15 mojitos to office workers in nice shirts and tourists who've made it beyond main street's Temple Bar. A venue for humdrum Tinder dates and the kind of civilized leaving parties where Colleen in accounting has one too many wine coolers and says something offensive about Catholics.

Tonight, people are falling over each other, beady-eyed, hugging the walls and each other. There's little attempt to conceal the keys and tiny plastic bags being passed around. A congregation has formed on the staircase: chatty girls on breaks from the dance floor grouped around the lower steps, guys in pairs chewing invisible bubble gum, clenching their fists a lot and shouting at each other.

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Many, if not most, of the people here are on pills, because for tonight—by some merciful act of blue moon logic—the gods and Enda Kenny have made them legal.

On Tuesday, a Court of Appeal declared Ireland's 1977 Misuse of Drugs Act void after noting that new additions to the 1997 Act were being made without consulting the Oireachtas, the Irish national parliament. This slip-up has resulted in the temporary legalization of ecstasy, ketamine, mushrooms, crystal meth, and a weird class B drug that some people call "Jeff." Measures were quickly taken to rush new laws into being, meaning that by midnight on Thursday, possession will be illegal again.

It also means that people are feeling the need to celebrate quickly, before it's once again legally not OK to snort lines of MDMA off public benches. Chances are Ireland's only going to get one shot at Yokes Day ("yokes" being the word Irish people use most often for pills), so this one has to count.

Convenient, then, that the Turk's Head has somehow been convinced to give their venue over to something called the Loophole Pop Up Party.

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The event appears on Facebook with a banner of the Taoiseach (the Irish PM) Enda Kenny asking, "Any yokes?" A thousand people have clicked "attending." Evidently, a lot of people are very happy about this gigantic legislative fuck up.

When we arrive, the basement is swarming with sweaty, glassy-eyed revelers asking for water. The party has spilled out onto the street, and people I recognize from school and college and Twitter have joined together to share the synthetic joy. Because it's Dublin, everyone knows each other and is feeling particularly tactile; it's hard to get up the stairs without being taken down by hugs.

The sleazy guys selling pills at the back of the club are even sleazier tonight, smiling through firmly clenched teeth, their eyes half open under bucket hats. They add to the illusion that we've all stumbled into some PLUR-filled, retrograde acid rave universe, an homage to a time we were too young to remember.

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#Yokes and #Yokegate have been trending on Irish Twitter over the last couple of days. The story has consumed national and international media, and last night comedian Blind Boy of the Rubberbandits went on Newstalk 106, a radio station, sealing his status as national treasure by earnestly discussing getting yipped and directing attention to the serious short-sightedness of prohibition as a "binary solution" to the more complex issue of addiction.

Blind Boy, for all his piss-taking, makes a valid point. Today, as ever, Ireland has a tendency to revere self-destruction as an act of creativity. Dubliners take pride in being from a " Dirty Old Town," one where going on the session is a vital part of your formative years, where many families eventually end up ravaged by alcoholism or drug addiction. And the government seems forever inadequately prepared for it. One side note from the loophole story that might genuinely shock Irish people is that crystal meth has become a very real and increasing problem on our streets in recent months.

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Like me, lots of the people at this party are only in their late teens or early-to-mid-20s, yet—even within their short adult lives—Ireland has made a number of drastic about-turns on drug policy. We've had "legal" magic mushrooms and pills sold in head shops, the mephedrone craze, and subsequent ban in the summer of 2010—and now this bizarre state of affairs.

"I remember the head shops," a friend of mine says earlier in the day. "I did my school work experience in one. It was always normal people I'd see in the queue. We'd smoke Spice Gold every day. It was manky."

The hosts of this party are a crew of stringy boy-men with skateboards and girls who've flat-ironed their hair and are glammed up in heels and little dresses for the occasion. I ask the one who appears to be their leader how he feels about the government's fortuitous oversight.

"I don't want to look back in ten years and think, Oh, that day? I was in the office on time the next morning," he says. "It's everybody's choice to take drugs, and I want to facilitate that choice."

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He passes us on to a friend, who offers us three Yellow Monkeys.

"I think pills should be illegal so losers don't take them," somebody tells me outside, laughing. A bouncer holding a flashlight heads down the stairs. I wonder what he's searching for; drugs that aren't covered by this loophole? Can he tell one white powder from the next by sight alone? Is he the human Erowid, able to differentiate between ketamine and coke in the dim underground lighting?

A bag of the latter is now doing the rounds. The last time I saw it consumed so publicly was at an early house on the quays.

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Luke, a friend of mine, remarks, "It reminds you how flimsy laws really are."

He has a point: we're used to being screwed over by the government. Abortion legislation, gay marriage, all these things that apparently demand referendums to know if the Irish people are really, really sure we want them. Pills, by contrast, will be illegal within a day, with nobody offering us a choice in the matter.

The organizers of the loophole party have promised to give one euro of every entry to a homeless charity, heightening our warm fuzzy glow. And it is turning very fuzzy: outside, some crusty souls begin a round of On Raglan Road, a song old men tend to sing when they've drunk enough whiskey.

Glossy D4 rich girls are swaying on heels lodged in the cobblestones, listening, and somehow these disparate groups are getting along. They're downstairs dancing together with wobbly Stretch Armstrong limbs, or sitting on the footpath holding each other in their arms.

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This is the closest thing we'll ever see to an alternate Ireland, one where drugs—most drugs, at least—are legal. A world where we, the beaten-down perma-intern, dole-taking, prospect-less young people of Dublin can legally, chemically foster the illusion of hope.

Everyone here is either in college, staving off the real world, or already out there and struggling. This is our return to the strobe-lit womb.

I speak to a girl in the bathroom who started taking pills two months ago and now drops three weeks of every month, usually sticking to Blue Ghosts (the pills the media labeled deadly, but which everyone ended up taking anyway). She feels like she's building up a tolerance now, but isn't sure she wants to start doubling up.

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I also meet her friend Sinead, who's on a return trip from Toronto, where she emigrated. She'll only be here a week and the pills are speeding up the bonding process with friends she left behind. She seems embarrassed, mentions that she works full time now and doesn't take drugs in her new life away from Dublin. She mutters, "I'm not usually this mad out of it" and heads for the door.

It's getting late now, and ropey. Some apprentice conspiracy theorist is suggesting that the Water Tax is somehow connected to the loophole, that they're trying to make us spend more on water. Another guy lists the problems with previous "legal drugs," complaining that "mephedrone fucked me up." His friend points out that drink does similar damage: "Last week I got in a fight with another lad because I was drunk. I went home feeling like shit."

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While they may not be the best thing in the world for your heart or general health, at least pills are capable of creating Sensitive Lads—a chance for the typical Bud bros to get all vulnerable and mushy.

The guy who'd gone home feeling like shit asks to borrow my notebook and starts drawing an elaborate skull with a mohawk. I ask the club promoter, still alarmingly fresh-faced at 3AM, why he took it upon himself to host this government-sanctioned pills party.

"We decided everybody needed a reminder that things are going to be OK."

In the taxi I look at the skull drawn in my notebook. Beside it writing spells out "SURE JAYSUS WE'RE ALL ON YOKES." Not for long. At least, not legally.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Many of those we photographed pulled their best 'rolling balls' faces because they were at an ecstasy legalization "loophole pop-up party." Whether or not they were actually high, we can't say for sure.

Follow Roisin on Twitter and Sarah on Tumblr.

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Photo courtesy WSVN-TV

On Wednesday at about 12:23 PM, police in Miami Beach, Florida, received a tip that four people had been shot at Lil Wayne's $9.4 million waterfront property on La Gorce Island. Chillingly, the caller claimed to be the killer himself. "I don't give a fuck if you're a cop or not," the caller told the female operator in a monotone voice. "I'm shooting to kill everyone and everything, you fucking bitch."

Then what sounded like a different man called back and said he needed the cops to come to Lil Wayne's address. "I just shot like four people," he said casually. "I might shoot whoever I see. I don't know. I don't know what's wrong."

Although the guy sounded more like he was ordering a pizza than confessing to a mass murder, police are forced to take threats like these seriously. Although the 32-year-old rapper wasn't home at the time, a SWAT team swept all ten rooms of the property. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the tone of the 9-1-1 call, they deemed the whole thing a very unfunny prank.

As it turned out, Weezy was the latest high-profile victim of "swatting." It's a practice that's been around at least since 2007, according to the FBI, and involves getting a fake response out of law enforcement for the hell of it. So far, celebrities like Russell Brand, Ashton Kutcher, and Justin Bieber have been targets. The tactic is popular among the denizens of 4Chan and various other online subcultures, although it's now mainstream enough that the detectives in Law and Order: SVU threw around the term in the show's infamously terrible take on GamerGate.

Although swatting can have serious consequences, like 18 months in federal prison for one Pennsylvania hacker, or 30 months for a California gamer, it's unclear what punishment this particular perp will face if apprehended. A spokeswoman for the Miami Beach Police Department confirmed that at the time of this posting, no one has been arrested.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.