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Artwork from 'Skyrim.' Icy.

Ah. Smell that? That waft of predetermined disappointment? That thick miasma of the hopes of many being dashed by a swathe of millionaires? Oh yes. I can smell it too. And it can only mean one thing: E3 is in town.

Well, not quite yet. And not in this town. The industry-only event will be rolling into the Los Angeles Convention Center on June 16. It's the big dog of game showcases, where all the top developers swagger in, codpieces bulging, with their new products, trailers, whatever else. It's a chance for Blizzard to announce another World of Warcraft expansion. It's a chance for a Japanese man with a tenuous grasp on English to address a stadium full of antsy Americans. It's a chance for executives from large corporations to do their annual cosplay as someone with a heart and a soul. E3 is the ultimate opportunity for developers and companies to give the people what they want, but this rarely happens, because people are fickle and games companies are thick as shit.

One publisher with its bright red balls clenched in its fist this year is Bethesda Softworks. Bethesda is responsible for the Fallout series, and acquired the Wolfenstein franchise in 2014. The company is promising something big this year, hosting their first ever conference at the... conference, and getting fans hyped the fuck up.

It, naturally, hasn't been confirmed what exactly it is they'll be showcasing this year, but beside the hype for a fourth Fallout proper, rumors abound of a new Elder Scrolls game, the next in line after the goblin tundra of 2011's Skyrim. There's a bag of Reddit-based whispers that the next game will be set in the Black Marsh, home of gravelly voiced reptilian race the Argonians, but most of these have been poopooed. Perhaps Bethesda will fob off ES6 entirely, and exclusively focus on another Fallout game that I won't play. But here's hoping that doesn't happen.

Recently, buoyed by these rumors and my festering unemployment, I decided to play the past two Elder Scrolls games back to back: 2006's Oblivion and then Skyrim. It had been a while since I'd played either, and I knew in my head which one I preferred, but wanted to give them an intensive run through. All quest lines, all achievements, all everything with bells on.

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A screen shot from 'Oblivion.' Not so icy.

The first thing I noticed when going through Oblivion was how much I'd missed it. It really is a sweet and charming little world Bethesda created for the fourth ES game, which might have something to do with the (comparatively) rudimentary engine it was running on. The colors were bright, everything had a hazy sheen to it, the whole place felt like a dream sequence in a low-budget movie. The voice acting, while not varied in any way whatsoever (only about eight cast members play basically everyone everywhere in the entire game), had a satisfyingly pleasant familiarity to it. I'm not going to say I felt like "I knew them" or anything excruciating like that, but man, there was something so nice about hanging around in one of the towns and hearing the same voice actor have a conversation with himself. It was ridiculous, but in an "Oh, you!" way.

Oblivion's soundtrack is also one of the best modern gaming has to offer. Exactly the kind of whimsical fantasy stuff you'd expect, but somehow limitlessly listenable.

Oblivion feels like a game in its purest sense—just how you imagine the dictionary definition of a game in this genre to be like. It's totally unserious, camp, silly, bright, pretty, lush. Skyrim, on the other hand, isn't. It's a game that, at times, feels more like some kind of Chernobyl fallout simulator than a quest-based fantasy adventure. It was almost uniformly drab. You could argue that when the scenes of natural beauty occur it makes them all the more stunning, but the blizzards and the bullshit are just too much. I don't feel like I'm in a fantastical land, prepared to give my life and sword fighting dragons and beasts of burden, but like Bethesda has sex-trafficked me to Russia to be some frost troll's rent boy. In short, it's not a very fun place to be in.

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These 'Skyrim' citizens are not ideally dressed for the region's inclement weather. Image via.

So what can this big publisher do to ensure that their fantasy RPG isn't a recreation of the last scene in The Shining? For one they can remember that within the genre they work they're exempt from having to make their games gritty. There are enough gritty, serious games out there without something where you literally have to shout at a cloud to progress being among them. Bethesda needs to realize that reveling in the ridiculousness of what they do is something that needs to be embraced with as many arms as they give themselves. If the next Elder Scrolls game tries to out-serious or out-bleak Skyrim, then the experience will be about as enjoyable as watching the last bus's tires deflate in front of your eyes as it pisses down with rain.

Nothing is more depressing than the cold, and now that the "snow one" is out of the way Bethesda can concentrate on making something that's a bit cheerier. Keep all the violence and drama and duplicitousness and assassinations and what have you in, they're key to the experience, but put all of those things in an environment that's as bleak as the subjects they hold and all you're left with is a taxing experience with none of the glee that draws you to these kinds of things in the first place.

Or, Bethesda can do what they most likely will end up doing: standing on stage, unveiling a new Elder Scrolls game set in a barren sandy wasteland in which you and everyone around you is under constant threat from an airborne bird flu-like virus. It's impossible to get past level one. A harsh lesson to be learned for $65.

Or Modern Wolfenstein 2: Rise of Robo-Goebbels.

- - -

We don't know about Elder Scrolls VI, but the series' MMO, The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited, (re)launches on PC on March 17, with Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions due in June.

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Clerical clothing by House of Ilona

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

You'd assume female priests might have slightly weightier things on their mind than what to wear for work. And they do. Most of the time. But we all have to get dressed in the morning, and when you're working from dawn until evensong for literally (or figuratively, depending on your beliefs) the biggest boss going, you've got to look the part.

The two decades that have passed since the Church of England first started to ordain women are a drop in the baptismal font compared to the thousands of years of all-male clergy. One side effect of this is that, until recently, workwear options have been limited: borrow a frock from the boys (fit: large; colors: black) or borrow one of their shirts (fit: large; breasts: problematic).

Archbishops aside, there isn't a lot of variation to choose from when it comes to clerical clothing, and as the ranks of female clergy slowly swell (in 2012, and for the first time ever, more were reported to be joining the Church of England than men) the web is awash with women of the cloth agonizing over what constitutes appropriate workwear (see: We Demand Better Looking Clergy Shirts for Women and Collar This! ). Do they resign themselves to looking frumpy and uncomfortable in the pastoral equivalent of their dad's suit? Or risk Rev. Sally Hitchiner–esque controversy by daring to care about clothes as well as catechisms? Join the men in head-to-toe black, or flirt with "flamboyance" in pinks and blues?

On christianitytoday.com, an anonymous female pastor writes of wanting her clothing to reflect who she is, which means acknowledging that she is a woman. Fair enough. "But," she goes on, "not in a way that trips off any negative stereotypes (too emotional, sexy, sentimental, girly, insecure, or matriarchal). I want to say that I am strong, confident in God's ability to use me, but not in a way that comes across as masculine or ambitious." Ah.

Obviously this is not about women wanting to sashay into a service like Gigi Hadid on a LFW runway, but about working out how to be women in what used to be a man's world. When you're part of a new(ish) and much-scrutinized "minority" group within a centuries-old institution, what you wear matters, says Part-Time Priest (a.k.a. the Reverend Claire Alcock), who reviews women's clergy wear on her blog.

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Outfit by Camelle Daley's House of Ilona

So what does a discerning female priest wear in 2015? A new wave of designers offer some solutions. A robe featuring a dove with "flames of Pentecost passing through its wings" (as modeled at the 2013 Christian Resource Centre's "Clergy Catwalk") might be a bit much for a christening. But what about Camelle Daley's fashion-forward range of clergy wear featuring peplum hems, balloon sleeves, and pencil skirts in stained-glass hues?

The London College of Fashion graduate grew up in the church and was struck by the number of stylish women she knew whose sartorial flair wilted the minute they joined the ministry. She founded her label House of Ilona with these women in mind.

"Some of my clients want something that's fuss-free but fits them properly. Others are like, 'Bling up the women in ministry!' Your personality informs how you preach, so it seems wrong that everyone should look the same," says Daley, who in naming her designs after favorite female Biblical characters reminds us that, actually, women have been working it in this field for a while.

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A double cross necklace by Casual Priest

Canon Rosie Harper, who gamely appeared on the BBC's What Not to Wear, likes Sweden's Casual Priest, whose demure but modern jersey dresses look like the sort of thing Alexa Chung might wear were she to find God. The label was founded by designer Maria Sjodin with the aim of "strengthening ordained women in their role through clothing" and was one of the first to offer jersey tops (more radical than it sounds) and dresses that enhanced rather than disguised the wearer's shape. Her designs don't come cheap, at upwards of $260, but for Harper and the label's many other fans they're worth every pound.

"They make me feel confident and professional," she says. "Women get a bad enough deal in life and in the church, and if you present a slightly downtrodden front it implies you don't care much about yourself and may not care about other people either. You need to look like you have self-respect."

Harper has suffered for her interest in fashion, though. Renowned for wearing bright color amid the sea of blacks and grays at the General Synod—"Every single paper takes your picture; I see that as doing my bit for the visibility of women in the church"—when she spoke out in support of the Assisted Dying Bill last year, almost every commenter in the ensuing Twitter storm criticized what she was wearing. It's an issue sadly familiar to any woman in the public eye (Teresa May and her leopard print shoes, for instance, or Mary Beard's Twitter trolls) but it can sting all the same. It's not surprising some women choose to wear their individuality more discreetly.

"I had one client who was only allowed to wear black in church but asked me to line her cloak in cerise pink," says Helene Cross, whose company Cross Designs was one of the first to recognize the particular needs of female clergy with made-to-measure, mail-order designs. "I advised her to wear satin knickers to match."

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/YZIi_VxSMJ8' width='640' height='360']

Helen Cross talking about Cross Designs

Cross launched her business in 1995 when the answer to women's clergy wear was menswear with a couple of darts in it. "I knew that wasn't good enough," she tells me. "These aren't men. They're women who have been called by God. Why shouldn't they look like women?"

She now takes orders from all over the world. By making clothes to measure, Cross can accommodate breasts and hips and waists, and she seems to relish the mild insubordination her work involves: "Some women love purple, but of course that's only for bishops, so unless you're [the first CoE female bishop] Libby Lane, it's out of the question. You can do a purple mix, though..."

Her designs are inspired by what she sees women wearing on the street and on TV—the latest was based on what a doctor was wearing in Holby City. And why not?

"These are often women who've been in industry before they found their vocation. They just want to wear what they would normally wear, but with a clerical collar in it," she says.

Cross sees her work as both a contribution to her faith and a leg-up to the women making their way within it. As she says: "How can you feel like the church is a place for you when you're wearing someone else's clothes?"

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On November 21, 1811, Heinrich von Kleist took his own life moments after shooting a woman named Henriette Vogel. A notable writer of the Romantic tradition in his native Germany and abroad, Kleist is said to have been planning the consensual act for quite some time. The fulfillment of a suicide pact may sound like an unlikely premise for a romantic comedy, but filmmaker Jessica Hausner is no stranger to upturning expectations. Her last movie, the resplendent religious drama Lourdes, was both funny and tragic in its exploration of a supposed miracle; Amour fou, her dramatization of Kleist and Vogel's relationship, likewise vacillates from one tone to another, appearing to settle on one end of the spectrum before shifting back to the other.

Adding to the strangeness of this real-life tale is the fact that Henriette wasn't even Heinrich's first choice for suicidal partner. He courts a few other women en route to the soft "yes" he eventually receives, all of whom are puzzled by his bizarre request. Henriette is clearly different from his other prospects, however. We learn early on that she's enamored with his poem about a woman who suffers a most tragic fate at the hands of the man she thought loved her. Despite her repeated insistence that she would never want to experience such an ordeal, the tale sticks with her—there's a vicarious thrill to its morbidity. Something similar occurs while watching Amour fou, its contemplative musings and understated beauty contributing to an oddly immersive rhythm that, once established, is easy to get lost in.

Hausner guides the action along gently but confidently; there's rarely any doubt that she knows exactly what she's doing and that it's in our best interest to follow along carefully. Her film counts on the audience being as impressionable as Henriette and proves just as persuasive as Heinrich. The Austrian writer-director sets up scenes in a seemingly unassuming manner, drawing our attention to the smallest ostentatious detail: where one character stands in relation to another, or how two of them might dance during one of their many musical fetes.

Heinrich is sometimes spoken of in hushed tones during these elite soirees, and at one point it's questioned whether his melancholia may be a symptom of his gall. That everyone in Amour fou is beholden to the old-world explanations and pseudosciences of the day is no surprise, but Hausner doesn't mind contrasting their outdated ideas with their supposed sophistication. Like much else in the film, it's lightly ridiculous and presented so straightforwardly that you can't help but laugh.

Though initially dismissive of her suitor's offer, Henriette's demeanor shifts considerably when she's struck by a mystery ailment with no apparent physical cause. Doctors' explanations are less psychosomatic than spiritual, which the patient is forced to accept. Her diagnosis shifts back and forth throughout—one physician declares her terminally ill with either a tumor or an ulcer, while another agrees with the original, more spiritual explanation—and, this being 1811 and all, the matter is certainly up for debate. Regardless, thinking she's going to die causes Henriette to reconsider Heinrich's macabre proposal, but still he's unsatisfied. He wants her to depart this mortal coil with him because she'd rather die with him than live alone, not because she's afraid of the end that awaits her.

Amour fou translates to "mad love," though not from German. Hausner's appropriation of the title made famous by French auteur Jacques Rivette's 1969 film is apropos of the oddball story, as well as the only plausible explanation for such a highly improbable act. We never see any sort of physical intimacy between Henriette (who's married with children) and Heinrich, nor does Hausner explicitly imply any. But matters of the heart are rarely as they appear, and neither is Amour fou.

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While the world churns itself into a frenzy over the prospect of Iran's development of nuclear weapons, life goes on for the young people of Tehran. Six years after the Green Movement protests that engulfed the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2009, memories of the government's swift and ruthless response still linger. When it was all over, 36 people (according to government estimates) were dead, hundreds were imprisoned and tortured, and the thick residue of tear gas clouded any hope the young revolutionaries had for change.

Parastoo, whose name has been changed, is 23—a pretty, big-eyed girl. She speaks softly over the app Viber, but the fitful Iranian internet cuts her off from time to time. "I was 18 during the protests, and I had to pass a big exam to go to university," she says. "I remember at the library we were studying, lots of students were there and protesting. I liked those days so much. You could see hope in everyone's eyes... There was so much dancing in the street and people were so hopeful and happy, and then everything changed suddenly."

Still, talks regarding Iran's nuclear program, which are resuming in Switzerland Monday, reignited a small spark of that hope for many young Iranians. Most long for the harsh US-led sanctions imposed on their country to be lifted, so they can enjoy economic opportunities that have eluded them. But renewed dialogue between Iran and the US has introduced a new element to Persian youth's fraught relationship with their government. Some even see it as an indication that their voices are starting to be heard again, even though their shouts have been quieted to whispers.

The letter Republican senators recently wrote to Iran's leaders, which warned that any deal regarding the Islamic Republic's efforts to build up a nuclear program would only last as long as Obama was in office, almost ruined everything. Although the White House quickly moved to condemn the letter, Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei countered with a blistering speech on Thursday, describing it as "a sign of the decay of political ethics in the American system." And in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress on March 3, he made clear his opinions on a possible nuclear deal, saying it "would all but guarantee" that Iran succeeds in building a nuclear weapon. Iran has always maintained it has no desire to do so, and cables leaked in February seem to indicate that Israeli spy agency Mossad has been verifying that claim to Netanyahu for years. But still, the chorus of condemnation regarding the nuclear talks is difficult to ignore.

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All photos taken in 2013 by a photographer in Tehran who wishes to remain anonymous. Interviewees are not pictured.

"You can't have a discussion about Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability without talking about the nature of the Iranian regime and its elected officials," says David Ibsen, executive director of United Against a Nuclear Iran, a conservative US organization with a name that's pretty self-explanatory. "If you look at... how they treat their own population, you're going to see some concerning things that certainly impact young people living in the country... I don't think anyone believes all Iranians think 'Death to America' is a great slogan. But unfortunately, when it comes to nuclear policy or state support of terrorism by the regime and individuals who are in power, their brutality is what you have to observe when you decide whether Iran is to be trusted."

Then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's violent reaction to the 2009 Green Movement protests appeared to have put an end to any revolutionary aspirations on the part of Persian youth. But some young Iranians see the nuclear talks as an opportunity for better relations with the West, with which they share certain values—values that helped drive the Green Movement, and that conservative elements in the regime have historically had zero tolerance for.

Persian youth's attachment to Western culture has been much discussed by the American media over the years. Many Iranians feel their underground life of house parties and hanging out at cafes has become the real face of young Iran, and resent the perception that their country is all angry Ayatollahs and women in burkas. But even under relatively moderate President Hassan Rouhani's much less stifling regime, young people are sometimes reminded of the restrictions imposed upon them by their government.

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Parastoo discovered this the hard way when she was recently arrested for an expression of free speech we can't identify for fear of inviting more retribution on her. "It was really scary when they came to my house," she says quietly. "I wasn't expecting such a thing at all. My friend and I were drinking coffee and talking, and it was 10 PM at night. Suddenly, someone knocked on the door and said, 'Hi, I'm your neighbor. I want to talk to you about something. Could you open the door?' When I opened the door, all of them came in with a camera and they were recording everything and had guns. It was terrifying... They were asking me if I knew why they were there, and I said, 'No, I have no idea,' but I knew.

"Tehran is a nice place," she continues. "We have this young generation who loves to be dancing, partying, things like that. But they showed me that we also have that kind of generation; we have the opposite kind, too. I forgot about that part. I was so involved with my own life and people like me that I forgot so many people are against us."

As a result of the restrictions they still face, Persian youth are adopting a new approach to achieving more social freedoms—a sort of quiet yet assertive brand of civil disobedience that seems to be taking conservatives in the government by surprise. This was apparent when a little-known Persian musician, Morteza Pashaei, died of cancer last November. Through social media, word began to spread of his death, and the fans trickling into the streets to mourn him soon became a flood. Tehran likely hadn't seen such crowds since the Green Movement, and at some point, someone decided to start singing one of Pashaei's songs. The mob of young people soon followed suit, and the streets of Tehran echoed with music. This may not seem particularly controversial to Westerners, but singing in public is illegal (at least for women) in Iran—yet the government did nothing.

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Bahman, 27, whose name has also been changed, says he wasn't there, but he followed the whole thing on Facebook and Twitter. "That singer was not really popular," he says. "He was not a huge celebrity. When he was fighting cancer, he became famous little by little. People started talking about him on social networks. When he died, even if many people didn't really know who he was, they just joined in. I call it a social movement, because I think Iranians, especially the younger generation, they look forward to finding an opportunity to show themselves and to say that we are here; you cannot really suffocate us as a nation. It was kind of an opportunity for them to demonstrate their existence."

Bahman has a unique experience of Iran, by virtue of the fact that he's gay, and he says he's even seen some shift in attitudes regarding homosexuality. "Being gay is quite a challenge for everyone over here," he explains. "It is so difficult because you cannot really talk about it in the society, but I think that there has been some effort in our society to change the mindset of the people. Social media has... played a big role in that. There are some Persian-speaking satellite channels as well, so they have TV shows talking about such issues and people normally watch them. We have a very famous Persian singer, Googoosh...She released this song, 'Behesht,' for a lesbian couple. That song was like a bomb in our society... the internet has somewhat put Iran back in the hands of the people."

Hoomam Majd, an Iranian journalist and author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran, says all this is an indication of the way efforts to transform the status quo in Iran have evolved. "People, generally speaking, don't want revolution and uncertainty; but they do want change," Majd explains. "This is why in elections they vote for candidates like Rouhani who promise them change, a better life... in the early days of the revolution, people were afraid, but the revolution has matured to some degree, and will continue to."

And as the atmosphere changes, some Persian youth want to see the long and bitter enmity between their country and the US evolve as well. Others fear the nuclear talks, and that pushback from Washington—such as the senators' letter—will lead to an even harsher crackdown by the American government, despite President Obama's apparent wish to come to an understanding with Iran.

"I don't know why the government is insisting on this issue," Bahman says. "Some of us are really fed up with it because it might be really bad for us... This is something totally strategic for them. I think they gain a kind of power or strength if they're successful. Besides, [Rouhani] should be focusing on making our lives less difficult in terms of social restrictions."

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But other young Iranians look at a nuclear deal as the beginning of a new relationship with the rest of the world, and perhaps one day between the Iranian government and its people. "I am hopeful to see there is a movement toward peace between Iran and the West," writes Parihan, 27, in an email. "It's not because I think the United States is right, but because there is no win-win way out of this dead end other than nuclear talks. I do think that some sort of consensus will be reached. I am hopeful that it will be to the benefit of my country both politically and economically. But I think the most important change will be the hope people would have for a brighter future."

Parastoo is hopeful as well. She describes the throngs that gathered after Pashaei's death with wonder in her voice. "The crowd was so big," she says. "I haven't seen such a thing in years. It must have been really scary for the regime...Maybe that was a way for us to remember things. I'm not sure. It's so complicated. But I was seeing this, and imagining what would happen if someone more popular dies. I was thinking, what could happen to Tehran? All the people will come to the streets."

Additional reporting by Omid Memarian

Sulome Anderson is a journalist based between Beirut and New York City. Follow her on Twitter.

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Russian MiG planes. Photo via Flickr user Sergey Vladimirov

Today, in the morning hours of Moscow time, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave orders for snap military exercises in the Russian Far North. The sudden "combat readiness" maneuvers of the Northern Fleet are just the latest military flexing in the Arctic by Putin since the Ukraine crisis began in 2013.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu is quoted in Sputnik News, the English wing of the state media apparatus, explaining that the exercises are designed to test Russia's ability to defend its Arctic regions.

"New challenges and threats of military security demand the further heightening of military capabilities of the Armed Forces and special attention will be paid to the state of the newly formed strategic merging [of forces] in the North," said Shoigu.

Back in January, Putin announced major spending plans for Russian military infrastructure in the Arctic as well as expanding the very Northern Fleet currently testing its mettle.

Canada, a major Arctic player and key opponent to Russia in the quest for expanded borders in the Far North looked at that military expansionism with concern.

"Canada is aware of Russia's announced military infrastructure developments in its North," said a spokesperson for Foreign Affairs at the time, "[W]e remain vigilant in our surveillance of the Arctic."

Along with Canada, Russia and other Arctic nations are making competing United Nations bids over potentially lucrative Arctic lands, staking a claim on a region with reportedly 90 billion barrels worth of oil sitting untapped beneath the frozen crust.

"Our objective has been to obtain the most expansive continental shelf for Canada. We are working to ensure that Canada secures international recognition of the full extent of our continental shelf, including the North Pole," said the Foreign Affairs spokesperson.

At the same time, the North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD) is detecting an uptick in Russian long range bombers approaching the the US and Canadian Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ)—something that hasn't happened as regularly since the end of the Cold War.

"While we recognize the need for routine military training activity," said Major Beth Smith of US military to VICE Canada in an emailed statement. "We have noticed an increase in the number of these flights near North America in recent months since Russia's incursion into Ukraine and Crimea."

American and Canadian fighters have repeatedly intercepted Russian MiGs and Tu-95 heavy bombers approaching sovereign airspace in a replay of Cold War gamesmanship.

For its part, the Canadian Armed Forces told us it was vigilantly protecting the Arctic region, but admits "there is no foreseeable military threat to Canada's northern region."

Other nations bordering Russia, such as Poland, which announced new defence spending and the creation of a volunteer military force, aren't taking the exercises of the Russian Bear lightly. Currently, NATO is even staging maritime exercises in the Black Sea in an apparent message to Russia for its alleged operations in Eastern Ukraine—something the Stephen Harper government has made political hay over.

Nonetheless, with reportedly 38,000 Russian soldiers along with over a hundred helicopters and planes scouring the Russian Arctic for the next five days, you can bet NORAD and other Arctic nations like Canada are keeping a close "surveillance" watch over Putin's latest military chest puff.

Follow Ben Makuch on Twitter.

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Follow Gilbert Hernandez on Twitter and buy his books from Fantagraphics and Drawn And Quarterly.

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A woman wearing a niqab. Photo via Flickr user David Dennis

A seven-year resident of Canada—a woman who has proven herself fluent in English and passed a test showing that she knows about the history of residential schools and understands the concept of the equality between men and women—is being told that she can't become a citizen of Canada until she reveals her face.

Her name is Zunera Ishaq and she's going toe-to-toe with Stephen Harper to fight for her right to wear whatever she wants when she takes the oath of citizenship, even if most Canadians don't agree with her.

Ishaq wears the niqab—a veil that covers everything but a woman's eyes that some conservative Sunni scholars say is required by Islam. Government policies drawn up by the Tories in 2011 require that all would-be Canadians need to show their face when they take that oath. Earlier this year, a federal court struck that policy down.

Apparently driven by some fear that underneath their cloth these women may actually be two children standing on each other's shoulders, or that they secretly hate the Queen, the prime minister is fighting to revive that policy.

No Niqabs Policy
The citizenship policy banning niqabs required two things: that anyone wearing a face covering must prove their identity to a citizenship judge, and that the soon-to-be-Canadian must take off their face covering when reciting the oath at a citizenship ceremony.

The first part is relatively uncontroversial, and wasn't challenged in this case. Women wearing the niqab are generally amenable to removing their veil to strangers, so long as only women are present. The rules allow for that—a Citizenship and Immigration policy guide reads that confirming someone's identity "should be done in private, by a female citizenship official." That's what Ishaq did.

But when it comes for the oath, the guide reads "the candidates must be advised at this time that, they will need to remove their face covering during the taking of the oath. Failure to do so will result in the candidates not receiving their Canadian citizenship on that day."

Ishaq was getting ready for her citizenship ceremony—and was more than happy to swear an oath to the head of a Anglo-Saxon hereditary monarchy that only comes to Canada every few years—but was concerned that the policy, by forcing her to take her veil off, would either force her to betray her faith, or give up her bid for citizenship.

Ishaq wasn't the only one put in this position. According to the Federal Court decision that sparked the debate, about 100 women a year apply for Canadian citizenship while wearing the niqab.

But as Ishaq pointed out, things were working pretty well for those other women before the federal government came in and made a mess of things. So she launched a lawsuit against the policy.

"I decided to raise my voice so that I can challenge this policy, which was a personal attack on me and Muslim women like me," Ishaq told Postmedia.

Last month, she won: The judge declared the policy illegal.

"According to [Ishaq], it would be easy for a female citizenship judge or official to take those women's oaths in private if there was doubt that they recited the oath, which is what used to be done before the policy was adopted. Alternately, women like the applicant could be seated closer to the officials or have a microphone attached to them, so that the officials could hear them taking the oath," the federal judge wrote.

Ishaq and her lawyer also cleverly pointed out that the policy on the books "requires people to take the oath, not to be seen taking the oath." Further, would-be Canadians also need to sign an Oath of Citizenship form.

The government lawyers fighting Ishaq presented a bit of a confusing case.

They argued in court that the policy was not actually a law, and that officials and judges weren't actually required to enforce it. That is, the lawyers argued, the officials could have simply let Ishaq keep her niqab on.

But, they added, if Ishaq "chooses not to remove her face covering and is denied citizenship, she nevertheless retains all the benefits of her status as a permanent resident."

The government has contended that the niqab is a personal choice, not a religious one, even though there is a long history of Islamic scholars saying exactly the opposite.

The lawyers didn't address the obvious remedy: that the policy be changed to allow for women like Ishaq to take the oath among only women, so that they may remove their veil.

Accommodations for those small number of women who wear the niqab—the status quo that existed before the policies came into effect in 2011—appear to be exactly what the government is fighting.

In announcing the policy in 2011, then-Immigration Minister Jason Kenney appeared to reject the seemingly obvious solution, saying "we cannot have two classes of citizenship ceremonies."

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Jason Kenney. Photo via Flickr user michael_swan

What Not To Wear
The federal court decision has sparked a row that has split along odd lines—the anti-niqab camp is a strange alliance of conservative, second-wave-type feminists, conservatives, and secularists. Many have characterized this as a cynical ploy to win votes. The Harper government's nationalistic chest-thumping plays into that point.

"It is offensive that someone would hide their identity at the very moment where they are committing to join the Canadian family," the minister of immigration's office told Maclean's.

The Canadian Press has rated that talking point "full baloney."

The minister, Chris Alexander, hasn't gone full bore on the matter. Last month, he sent an email to Conservative supporters—where he, or whoever wrote the email under his name, confused "hijab" and "niqab"—asking them to sign a petition affirming that letting women wear whatever they want at a citizenship ceremony is "not the way we do things here." The email added that, in order to prove that "women are full and equal members of society," the government has to force them to take their niqab off.

"The requirement of Citizenship and Immigration Canada to remove full face coverings during citizenship ceremonies is not onerous and is consistent with the customs and conventions of an open liberal democratic society such as ours," the prime minister piled on.

NDP leader Thomas Mulcair said that the prime minister's comments were "undignified." Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, has spent the past week honing in on it.

"For me, it is basic truth that prime ministers of liberal democracies ought not to be in the business of telling women what they can and cannot wear on their head during public ceremonies," Trudeau said in a speech last week.

The Conservatives do have the Bloc Quebecois on their side, however. That is no coincidence: both parties are banking on rural, pure laine Quebecois getting behind their anti-niqab crusade. The province, especially those Eastern Township ridings that both parties are aggressively targeting, tends to be significantly less in favour of accommodations for religious minorities.

The whole thing has led to some mockery, however, with the snarkiest of Twitter taking to the hashtag #DressCodePM.

The feminist messaging from the Conservatives, however, belies the fact that these women are not the damsels in distress that they've made out to be.

According to a 2014 study from the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, which interviewed 81 niqab-wearing women, those in Canada who wear the garment tended to be "mobile and socially active, wished to work, and had a fairly high level of education."

Not a single woman indicated that they were being forced into wearing the niqab (though seven percent said a spouse "encouraged" them to do so, while another eight percent said the encouragement came from a friend). A total of 78 percent said it was either a religious obligation or a part of their Muslim identity.

The women interviewed included engineers, consultants, students small business owners, and web designers. While many were homemakers, most said they wanted to work at some point.

Further, the report found that "all of the women... believed that there were instances in which they should show their faces for identification purposes and were not opposed to the idea."

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Former Quebec premier Pauline Marois, who championed the Charter of Values. Photo via Flickr user Montreal metropole culturelle

Not Just Harper
While scorn has been heaped on the prime minister and his ministers, they're not the only ones who are pushing an anti-niqab agenda.

Ex-Quebec Premier Pauline Marois, of course, proposed a Charter of Values to ban all sorts of religious symbols—and the Liberals who defeated her have promised a toned-down version of the Charter. A Quebec judge recently made waves for telling a woman to remove her hijab in the courtroom.

It's not just Quebec, either. Canadians as a whole are increasingly wary of immigration. Two-thirds support the government's insistence on banning niqabs in citizenship ceremonies.

A slew of Mosques nationwide have also been vandalized in recent months.

Even the Supreme Court, supposedly a bastion of liberal bias, ruled against a woman's request to testify with her niqab on against the men who allegedly sexually assaulted her. (Justice Rosalie Abella dissented, arguing that doing so would discourage the woman from testifying in her own defence, and that would be more harmful than depriving the judge and jury to look at her face.)

Of course, the federal government is also pushing through Bill C-51, which Muslim groups say will disproportionately affect them.

The Canadian Council of Muslim women say the hysteria over the niqab, specifically the ban, "provokes, exploits, and sustains hate and fear," and puts Muslim women in the "cross-hairs."

They might not be wrong. According to national police data from 2012, Muslim and Middle Eastern residents are more likely to be the victims of hate crimes. Five percent of hate crimes were motivated by the victim's Arab/West Asian ethnicity (despite them being less than two percent of the population), while another three percent of the crimes were driven by hatred of Islam.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

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Prior to the advent of photography, the first order of business when a person of significance died was to take an imprint of their face. The purpose was to enable the creation of posthumous sculptures—death masks, if you will. These are meant to resemble what the person looked like at the moment they died. Death masks were created from the faces of well-known men like Dante, Pascal, Newton, Nietzsche, Napoleon, Blake, and Keats, to name a few. During the French Revolution, the woman now known as Madame Tussaud created death masks out of the decapitated heads of Louis XVI and Robespierre.

Death masks fell out of favor after the popularization of photography and the changing nature of European cultural attitudes about the dead. There is, however, at least one man that keeps the craft alive: British sculptor Nick Reynolds. I spoke with Reynolds about his most recent death masks, what it's like to chip off ice from a dead man's face, his rationale for commemorating someone executed on Texas death row, and what it is about them that is so appealing to him.

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VICE: What are your most recent death masks? Are you working on any currently?
Nick Reynolds: The last two I did were Peter O'Toole and Sir William Rees Mogg. I'm working on three at the moment. One of them is Dr. Manouchehr Sabetian, an Iranian surgeon. His mask will be finished in bronze and will go on his headstone in Highgate Cemetery which will be my third one there after my dad and Malcolm McLaren.

Talk about how you got started doing death masks and what it is about them that appeals to you.
I came into them by accident really. At the particular time in the mid 90s I was doing an exhibition called Cons to Icons and I was exploring the fact that there'd been a sort of "gangster chic" revival. I'd grown up in the shadow of my father being a criminal [Reynold's father is Bruce Reynolds, the mastermind of the 1963 Great Train Robbery] and in those days there was a stigma attached to having a relative in prison. In the mid 90s, that changed. Various criminals that had been locked up since the 60s that were coming out with sort of folkloric status—films and books being made about them. I found this quite strange considering how I'd been brought up. I wanted to explore the paradox of people who are vilified by the media but can also be fated on the celebrity circuit.

I was trying to illustrate this by doing life casts of nine of England's most infamous living criminals. One of the guys on my list was George "Taters" Chatham, a guy who a newspaper had referred to as "the thief of the century." But by the time I tracked him down he'd just died, and I was determined to cast him anyway. I thought, It can't be that different from doing the live cast... except I don't have to worry about them breathing through the mask. I managed to persuade his sister to let me do a cast of him. She was dead against it at first, but then she went and visited him and then she rang me back and said "he had a smile on his face" and that she thought perhaps he'd made his peace with God. What I didn't tell her is that it was just the fact that he had quite weighty cheeks and gravity tends to pull the mouth in a kind of funereal rictus if you like. It was because of that she gave me the go-ahead. He was the first dead person that I did for this show.

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What was it that made you think this is something worth pursuing more actively?
After that, a friend of mine died who was a lord and his family were very keen to get a death mask made. The undertaker remembered that he'd read an article about this show, so they rang me up and asked if I would do the death mask. It's only when they said they'd scoured the country to try to find somebody doing it—that nobody does this anymore—that I thought maybe this is something I should specialize in. It's probably [also] got something to do with the fact that I grew up in Mexico and I have the memories of seeing all the death masks that the Mayans had.

I try to keep it pretty small [though]. I don't really advertise; I have a website but you have to be looking for me. There's quite a bit of work that goes into it [and] I don't want to get overwhelmed.

What makes these death masks so special?
For me, any kind of other work I do there is nowhere near the amount of satisfaction that I get from work on other mediums—even when I sell them—to handing over a death mask and seeing the reaction that you get. You can see that every wrinkle is a repository for a million memories that can be triggered off. Yeah sure, you can look at a photograph and remember a happy moment, but they're not tangible, they're not tactile, they don't occupy any space. There's something magical about death masks so that's why it's the only area in death that I am really fascinated by.

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Where do your death masks get displayed?
Everyone has a slightly different attitude to these kind of things. Some people have them on the wall. Some people actually have them by the side of their bed and talk to them. Some people have them in a drawer and just take them out at special occasions. Some are on tombstones.

Do you have a death mask you did that was particularly challenging that stands out to you?
It's pretty well documented—when I had to go to Texas and do the executed prisoner [John Joe Amador]. It was very traumatic, with his family taking the body from the morgue and we took the body to a little shack in the woods and cast his head there. It was all very stressful. His body was still warm. When I cast his face, his skin still reacted to the temperature of the water. He got goose pimples and that came out in the cast. That was probably the most outstanding.

Here in the US, the idea of commemorating someone who was convicted of a capital offense like John Joe Amador is considered quite controversial. Talk about why you did that.
I wouldn't have done it if I thought the guy was guilty. The evidence wouldn't have stood up anywhere other than Texas. The whole point of it was I believed they were killing an innocent man, and that's what that was all about. I'm not glorifying what he is supposed to have done, I'm pointing out how horrible the death penalty is.

You mentioned elsewhere that, unlike with Amador, you don't always get access to the body right away. However it is your preference to have immediate access, yes?
That's right. Ideally within the first day. Because [usually] they've been embalmed and it's totally different. They've got as much personality as a piece of cling-filmed chicken on the cold counter of a supermarket. But obviously when they've only just died, the muscles in their face and their eyes...it just really still looks like them sleeping. In the old days when death masks were very very popular—particularly around Victorian times—they believed that you had to do it as soon as possible. In some cases they'd call in the death mask guy before the doctor had come in to officially certify them dead.

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Any cases where things didn't quite go as expected?
I had a bit of a disaster once. I did the ex-president of Biafra. A guy called General Ojukwu. They had him in a cooler for quite a long time. They had done quite an expensive reconstruction job using wax and makeup. In the past, I've never had a problem with it, but this particular time when I took the mold off all the bits and pieces that had been added to him came off with the mold. So I was panicking and I'm in the morgue thinking, Well, I've never had to do this before. But I had to redo all the bits before [the family] comes in to view the body. Anyway, did the best job I could. His relatives turned up and they went absolutely bananas. It wasn't how he looked—it's the moment they realized he was wearing makeup in the first place that they threw an absolute fit. Nobody had set their expectations. [So] that's why I like to get to them before they've had much work done to them. That was probably the most stressful mask that I've done.

I notice that most of the death masks you've done have been of men. Why is that?
I've only done one [woman]. I know, it's strange. It was a top United Nations official from Switzerland I believe. I did my mother too but obviously that wasn't a commission. But yeah, haven't had much call. Generally speaking, the men tend to go first and it's the widows who request them.

What do you think it is about displaying a bust with a post-mortem facial expression that makes it more fitting than say, something of them when they were still alive?
They're two entirely different things. To some people, I say if you want a mask of them to remember them by, it's probably better to do it while they're alive. Because every time you look at it you'll remember them alive, you won't think of them dead obviously. But the whole point of a death mask is that it is the final portrait. The fact that it's taken of them when they're dead kind of imbibes the sculpture with a special kind of ethereal quality, if you like. It's almost as if in the process of casting the person's face, part of the mystery of death become entwined in the finished sculpture. I guess, because the person's dead, it's easy for you to suspend belief to kind of imagine that somehow a part of their spirit could possibly be residing within that. You don't get that with a life mask. It doesn't have any spiritual capability, I don't think.

The Greeks and the Romans believed in animism, that if you made a statue out of something—through incantations, prayers, music, whatever—they could summon up the spirit of that person to inhabit that sculpture. It was like a residence for them in our world, if you like. So for me there's a lot more power to a death mask. It's them dead. There's something very mystical about that.

I heard you mention sometimes you've had to chip away ice off someone's face?
That was a friend of mine who was a lord.. He had an epileptic fit in the bath just before he was due to inherit his estate. So the autopsy was a very long, drawn-out thing. He was actually on ice for a year before I got to cast him. He was pretty much frozen solid by then, so I had to chip bits of ice off and use a hair dryer so I could actually get to him.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

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Robert Durst's arrest mug shot courtesy Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office

By now, even if you've never seen a single episode of HBO's The Jinx, you know that creepy old guy Robert Durst said he "killed them all" after being interviewed by the show but while his mic was still on. Unlike just about every other TV show, social media denizens haven't even tried to conceal or couch the extraordinary spoiler with a warning. After all, given that this is a documentary that led to its protagonist getting arrested in real life this weekend, the agreed-upon rules about ruining plot lines don't apply.

For those catching up in wake of the explosive finale, Robert Durst is the son of Seymour Durst, one of the most powerful real estate moguls in New York City. Robert was long considered the (super) strange one of the family, with his younger brother Douglas telling the New York Times he used to piss in wastebaskets, lie constantly, and talk loudly to himself.

That last part is important.

Durst first popped on the radar of law enforcement when his wife, Kathie, disappeared in 1982. He drew further suspicion when his longtime confidante, Susan Berman, was killed execution-style in 2000. He was finally charged with murder in 2001, for killing and dismembering a neighbor in Galveston, Texas. But he was acquitted even though he confessed to chopping up the body because his (pricey) lawyers successfully made the case he acted in self-defense.

The Jinx is filmmaker Andrew Jarecki's investigation of those murders, and it's most notable for the inclusion of Durst himself. After all, it doesn't take a high-priced criminal defense lawyer to know that it's probably not in your best interest to participate in a documentary about murders you have been accused of committing. Case in point: After his final interview, Durst retreated into a bathroom and gave a bizarre sorta-confession. Without realizing his mic was hot, and keeping with his habit of talking to himself, he said, "What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course." It was one of the most chilling moments ever broadcast by a mainstream cable channel, and Esquire has already suggested it will "likely be remembered as one of the most jaw-dropping moments in television history."

But besides making for captivating TV, The Jinx is part of an emerging genre of true-crime journalism—pioneered only a few months back by the hit podcast Serial—that is presenting people in the legal profession with a slew of tricky questions. Never before have audiences watched an investigation unfold in real time, and besides complicating the question of jury selection, this kind of popular programming is blurring the lines between journalists and law enforcement officers.

Indeed, one of the most vexing questions to come out of The Jinx is whether the accidentally-recorded confession is admissible in court.

Harvard legal historian Noah Feldman, writing for Bloomberg View, says the answer is no because "Durst's question and answer isn't at all the same as a positive statement that Durst committed the murders." According to the law professor, the so-called confession was more of a soliloquy in which Durst floated hypotheticals:

Even the question-and-answer form ("What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course") is reminiscent of the untrustworthy soliloquies delivered by Hamlet. The soliloquist asks himself the big questions while alone on stage ("To be or not to be?"), and tries on different answers. Yes, Shakespeare's Richard III announces his plans for murder to the audience. But the better model here is Hamlet, who says both that he is mad and that he is mad north by northwest, meaning that he may not be mad after all. Ambiguity is the order of the day, and we accept the ambiguity in part because we know that talking to yourself isn't like talking to other people.

But criminal defense attorneys I spoke to disagree and think Durst's hot mic confession should be treated like any other piece of evidence. "It's 100 percent admissible," Dmitry Gorin, a criminal defense lawyer and UCLA professor, told me. "Miranda [rights, i.e., the right to remain silent after being arrested don't] apply here, because he wasn't in custody. But the fact that he was a voluntary subject in the documentary proves he wasn't coerced."

Jeffrey Jacobovitz, a seasoned criminal defense attorney with the firm Arnall Golden Gregory LLP in Washington DC, echoed that view. He says that intent is not important, but proving the authenticity of the tape is key: "I would think it's admissible unless they could prove somehow it's not him talking or it was somehow spliced together."

The producers of The Jinxare currently being scrutinized for the timeline of events they've dished to reporters. According to the New York Times, the audio confession was discovered "more than two years" after it was recorded. But as Gawker and others quickly pointed out, that's not really possible given the chronology of events, and Jarecki seemed to backtrack Monday, suggesting the tape was undiscovered for just a matter of months. Still, the likelihood that the audio was entirely fabricated or spliced together is pretty remote.

If anything, the confession was real. After all, in episode four of the show, Durst was warned about ad libbing with a hot mic. And as Jarecki told the New York Times before the filmmaker was advised to stop giving interviews: "[Durst] seems to like to put himself at risk. It may make him feel more vital. It may be something he's just compelled to grasp for. In this case, we felt he had a kind of compulsion to confess."

It would make sense that Durst has a problem with compulsive and irrational behavior. And in fact that might be the key to getting the so-called confession swept under the rug.

"If I was his defense lawyer, I would just say [his statement] wasn't linked to anything specific," says Jacobovitz. "And maybe that he needs a mental examination. Most people don't just blurt those kinds of things out."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user r..m

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Science has figured out just how average your alcohol consumption is. Did you wake up in a small, sour patch of your own sick today? That could be normal, depending on your age. Did you have a warm tin of lager in a bubble-less bath? That could also be entirely normal. Just you, a bottle of port, and some Celine Dion songs? Could that ever be OK? Let's find out, via science.

The BioMed Central (BMC) journal published new research from University College London's Department of Epidemiology and Public Health this month, showing the trajectory of alcohol consumption over the average UK lifetime. The key findings were this: For men, alcohol consumption peaks at the age of 25, with around 13 units per week, while for women it was much lower: Their peak weekly alcohol consumption was only four drinks.

If you are confused because you are a young drunk woman and you have more than four drinks directly in front of you right now, be chill. The data for this study was collected from a series of cross-sectional surveys and industry data, so that means it encompasses all those people who don't drink for religious or health reasons, who don't drink because otherwise they have nothing to talk about on Facebook during Lent, everyone who takes drugs instead of drinking, and all those people who had a bad can of cider when they were 15 and ended up ruining all the floor mats in their dad's Volvo. Four drinks per week is just the peak average out of that.

But hey, if you're past 25 and you're worried that your best drinking days are behind you: Do not be worried about that thing. While drug and alcohol consumption tends to peak in the mid 20s (this is not an astonishing trend), the study did find more regular consumption in early 30s to middle age—so instead of going out on a Friday and waking up on a Sunday in a McDonald's parking lot with a suspiciously bitter taste in your mouth, you tend to spread your drinking out over the week.

"Frequent drinking (daily or most days of the week) became more common during mid to older age, most notably among men," the study's authors write. And going teetotal becomes more of a thing with age, too, although the numbers are still low: "Non-drinkers were uncommon, particularly among men, where the proportion remained under 10 percent until old age, when it rose to above 20 percent among those aged over 90," the research said.

If you think about it, your life's story is told by your drinking habits. The malt liquor and Smirnoff Ice binges of irresponsible, inexperienced youth fade into the macrobrews-by-the-case weekends of higher education, followed by a slide into a series of blurry, vaguely desperate mid-twenties nights during which your self-medication routine becomes more rote, the venues you inhabit less likely to be pumping in aggressive dance music. Your appetite for performatively excessive drinking wanes, or maybe your appetite for drinking, period, goes away.

Then it's just you, a couple friends, and a six-pack of IPAs or a bottle of wine—the taste of which, you realize, you can actually describe and comment on. Drinking becomes something you do, not something that happens to you. By that time you don't have the constitution for long nights that turn into early mornings, and you're doing cardio and watching your carbs. You have a couple beers when the NFL is on, maybe, or a glass of decent red wine after the kids go to sleep. And then they flee the nest, and you are free—free at last—retired and ready to live, waking up at 6 AM in that way old people do and waiting around until you can crack out the pale cream sherry and the ruby port. Granddad dying with a whiskey in his hand. Anyway: happy drinking!

Follow Joel on Twitter.

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VICE has covered the Jewish holiday of Purim from the US and the UK in years past, but never from Jerusalem. This year I found myself in Mea Shearim, a neighborhood in the holy city that seems stuck in an 18th century time-warp, and decided to document the drunken revelry.

Purim is celebrated in commemoration of the Jews in ancient Persia who were saved from Haman's plot to exterminate them. There is an obligation to drink during Purim until you can no longer tell the difference between the goodie (Mordechai) and the baddie (Haman) in the story. The ultra-orthodox community of Mea Shearim take this requirement extremely seriously, and—for reasons that remain unclear—while the adults are getting slaughtered on Kosher Vodka the kids smoke like chimneys.

Below is a collection of photos from the streets of Mea Shearim on Thursday, March 5.

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It is last Thursday morning and Rudy Giuliani is on the radio. The host asks him about a vicious brawl at a McDonald's in Brooklyn; about police shootings in Ferguson, Missouri; about the NYPD Commissioner who was booed by protesters at a City Council hearing.

Giuliani says this: "It all starts at the top. It's the tone that's set by the President. It is the obligation of the President to explain . . . that our police are the best in the world. I hate to mention it because of what happened afterwards, but (he should be saying) the kinds of stuff Bill Cosby used to say."

Giuliani is the same man who said that Ferguson officer Darren Wilson should be "commended" for killing Michael Brown. Who said that Obama "wasn't brought up the way I was brought up, through love of this country." In Giuliani's world, the only wise black men are the ones who condemn their own and put them over their knees to teach 'em some manners. Context be damned.

He has hacked apart America for every scrap of nostalgia, of In Memoriam, of sorrow, of flags billowing in slow motion. To Giuliani it is all just kindling to fuel the Patriot Machine. He loves America, and you could not possibly understand, because he was there, man, he was on the ground, and you just watched the smoke on television. He is the human manifestation of the 9/11 Enya montage: a flaming disaster, hollow sentimentality, men saluting with a ribbon pinned to their lapel.

He is a poison, an arrow tipped with bad memories, fired directly at your heart, and he should be ignored at every cost. He is a stammering, slimy man with a face like a lima bean and the morals of a starved rat. He is an allegedly impotent runt who paraded his mistress around town while still married to his second wife, Donna Hanover, then left his house one morning and let Hanover know he was divorcing her at a press conference hours later. A man whose attorney described Hanover, mother of his children, to the media as, "howling like a stuck pig." He is a vindictive, rotten worm with posture as crooked as his ethics, who took the portraits of two former Mayors off the walls of City Hall just because they had the nerve to acknowledge his blunders in public. When a New York University professor criticized Giuliani for police brutality in a New York Times editorial, a city official told the school to get rid of him. An AIDS group challenged him in public and their application for a housing grant was squashed. When James Schillaci reported a red light trap to the Daily News, police came to his door and arrested him for a 13-year-old traffic ticket. His arrest record was later released to the media, complete with a fabricated sodomy conviction. Giuliani said the man "was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower," and "maybe he's dishonest enough to lie about police officers." Schillaci eventually won a $290,000 lawsuit against the city.

He is barreling down the road with boxes of heisted DEMOCRACY he wants to sell you out of the back of his van for half price.

Giuliani is a barnacle clinging to the hull of the black-and-white, picket fence, glossy postcard American mirage. He is barreling down the road with boxes of heisted DEMOCRACY he wants to sell you out of the back of his van for half price. He is dragged to fundraisers around the country to holler incoherent zingers about the glory days and FRIGGIN OBAMA by GOP candidates who still have something to play for. He is more Pat Robertson than John McCain, and he has no idea. Fox News screws his rickety bones into a chair for a seven-minute segment so they can semi-covertly mock him for the latest heap of bullshit he has tumbled into. He is a stooge who had the good fortune of being a white Republican faced with a catastrophe perpetrated by foreigners. He is a man hawking emotional trinkets to people prone to making their Facebook profile pictures crudely-done photoshops of the Twin Towers or firemen or Dalmatians digging through a pile of rubble. He has only one move—an arm-flailing remember-when, and he will be mocked for it until he is no more, by everyone except teary-eyed old ladies who respond only to that tragedy and the birth of grandchildren.

It is all he's ever been. A blind cock-and-fire. He is all bombast and nonsense and empty rhetoric. If he could, he would spend the rest of his life walking a demolished city with a handkerchief over his mouth, because he is brave, you see, his life is on the line, he is down there digging alongside you Resilient Americans ™, and he won't rest until America is back and bigger and stronger and flexing its bicep in the side view mirror of a parked sedan. He is the sort of bumbling incompetent who would stare for 15 seconds at a whisk wondering how to clean it, then scratch his head and throw it in the trash.

Even the headline of his "apology" editorial to Obama in the Wall Street Journal was a celebration of himself. "My bluntness overshadowed my message," it read. Giuliani is too real, too tough, he is saying. He doesn't play around, he does not negotiate, get it?

He is fixed permanently in a narrative where everything is a schoolboy dream, a comeback, an Us vs. Them, Hail Marys and vengeance, impulse and a fuck it, a let's roll, cornering the bully on his way home, gut feelings, walk-off homeruns, men relying only on their Explicit Manliness, George Washington riding steadfast at the front of a boat. All delusion and myth and big, emphatic triumphs set to "We Will Rock You." Every sentence is the residue of some primitive caveman code, where the gravest offense is to have your Loyalty questioned, things written in all-caps red letters on the manual for AMERICA. He has spent his career touting the New York crime reductions he had barely anything to do with. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, he boasted that the Sicilian mafia once put an $800,000 contract on his head after he sent a number of its members to jail.

He has spare time, no shame, and nothing to do besides spew offensive nonsense. Because he is 70, and there is no Old Timers Day for imbecile politicians, even if they root for the Yankees. He is the Republican ideology writ large: there is nothing more important than combat, lies, threats, and the scars you get from them. And once, years ago, there he was, walking the streets of a smoldering New York, wearing it forever like the biggest scar of all.

Follow John Saward on Twitter.

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Follow Simon Hanselmann on Twitter and look at his blog. Also buy his books from Fantagraphics and Space Face.

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'Taphobos,' the "interactive coffin experience." Hmm, nah.

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

For three days in the middle of March 2015, Tobacco Dock in east London played host to a games industry expo a step left from the mainstream. EGX Rezzed is an indie developer-focused celebration of creativity, attracting the big guns of PlayStation and Xbox (the biggest queue is for Bloodborne) but putting them on a level playing field beside a cornucopia of compellingly different digital experiences.

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Many dudes wanted to play 'Bloodborne'

At no point did any of the exhibiting parties impose themselves on attendees in a salesman-chasing-commission capacity—games were there to play, to watch, to discuss with the people who actually made them, and the atmosphere was a really welcoming, friendly one. A guy was walking around dressed as a Ghostbuster. School kids drifted in after 3 PM to play graphic shooting games beyond their parents' gaze. Most things I played reinforced the fact that I suck at video games. What's not to like?

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The event showcased the good people, those who pour everything into their efforts to change how we appreciate video games—maybe just for a five-minute session, turning a frown upside down with a title that has participants laughing themselves hoarse; or maybe for the foreseeable future, by producing something never seen before.

These are just some of the games that stood out.

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TITAN SOULS

Acid Nerve's forthcoming boss-battler began as a games jam project but will become a full release next month, and of all the titles I saw at Rezzed it's Titan Souls that perhaps I'm most psyched to get hands-on with again. Recalling the top-down-perspective RPGs of the 16-bit era—Zelda, Pokémon, Shining Force—but with a paler palette, the game looks like a throwback. But it plays as a very modern menace, combining the difficulty of Dark Souls with the nothing-but-behemoths enemy design of Shadow of the Colossus.

Your character has a single hit point—one touch, he's dead. Yet all the bosses are beatable with just a blow, too, assuming it strikes a well-protected sweet spot. Your only weapon is an arrow, which you can retrieve by limited-range telepathy or by simply walking over. It's hard. Damned hard. I died, and died, and died a third time before having a quick word with programmer Mark Forster.

"It makes everyone look shit at video games, at the start," he says of his creation, made alongside two others, artist Andrew Gleeson and composer David Fenn. "But you get better. We never set out to make grown men cry, but we've balanced the game to represent a challenge to us. We just like hard games, and we're fans of Dark Souls, as you can tell by the title. We want people to feel good about overcoming the challenge of the game, and we've polished that as much as possible and made the entire game about that experience. Every fight is tense, as you always feel as if it could swing either way."

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Titan Souls is one of the more press-previewed games on show at Rezzed—from initial screens onwards it has successfully courted the attention of gamers that grew up through the late 1980s and early 1990s, when RPGs were made up of bundles of sprites that you fell in love with. Back then, developers didn't care so much that you saw the story out—they were more concerned with placing incredible obstacles along your path. Here, some of the bosses gloop, covering the screen in slime; others pound magical fists, attempting to crush the life out of you; others roll wildly around their arenas, aggressively pursuing their quarry—you. None is quite like the next, and all will end you before you do them.

"The actual concept of there just being boss fights is quite cool, I think. I found it weird, when we were making the jam game, that so few people had done this before," Forster said. "I was really intrigued, too, by the one-hit thing. You don't chip away at an enemy's health like in Dark Souls.

"In terms of the art style, I don't think anyone is making games that look like this purely from a nostalgia standpoint. Resources is more of a factor, and we're a small team. Our artist, Andrew, is a pixel artist, that's what he does, and that's his style. His colour sense is really good—we have really saturated colours, and the whole thing looks almost cell-shaded, I think. It does remind me of Wind Waker, and the SNES Zelda, in terms of aesthetic."

Titan Souls will be released for Mac, PC, PlayStation 4 and Vita on April 14.

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RADIAL-G

There was plenty of virtual reality on show at Rezzed, including Taphobos, an "interactive coffin experience," which gave me the willies just looking at it. Less claustrophobic, not to mention morbid, and a million miles per hour faster, was Tammeka Games' Radial-G, a game I'd played before in a previous build but here added extra gameplay elements: a boost to aid the overtaking of rival racers, and numerous jumps which, if approached from the wrong trajectory, will send you into the abyss that surrounds the game's cylindrical track.

If you ever wished you could be inside the cockpit of a Wipeout vessel, this is that game. Such is its speed, though, that it's easy to imagine the hardiest of adrenaline junkies spewing forth their power lunch after a ten-minute session. The game's in Early Access on Steam right now, if you want to put that theory to the test. It's not exclusively for VR users, as the video below shows: You can play third-person, like the Wipeout of old.

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BEYOND EYES

This was found in Team 17's space, quietly placed beside the stylized blood and bullets of LA Cops and the "sadistic circus extravaganza" of Penarium. And, conceptually, it's certainly one of the more alluring indie games that 2015 has to offer. You play, from the third-person perspective, as ten-year-old girl Rae, searching for a missing cat. The world around you only reveals itself slowly, though, as Rae cannot see the grass, the fences, the trees and bridges before her. She's blind, and these features only appear when smelled, touched or heard.

The work of one woman initially, Sherida Halatoe under the name Tiger & Squid, Beyond Eyes looks delightful. Its art style is appealingly painterly, and you just know it's going to stir up the feels in you when it releases for PC and Xbox One later this year. Expect the end product to be fleeting but beautifully formed.

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FLAME OVER

Puns can make or break a game, but in the case of Laughing Jackal's "squirt 'em up," the cheesiness fits the kid-friendly art style, even if it also suggests a rather easier time that what's actually presented. This isometric action-puzzler pits a fireman — you—against the clock and plenty of that suit-singeing stuff. Save workers from the smoke and flames and you earn extra time, earning coins as you go to, presumably, upgrade your character with. (I'd love to say more, but I didn't last more than three minutes.) Its roguelike structure means no playthrough is quite like the last as levels are randomly generated, and it's a game you can play yourself right now, as it came out for PS Vita on March 10. (PC and PS4 versions are forthcoming, too.)

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A LIGHT IN CHORUS

"The prettiest game you've never heard of," is how Eurogamer described this distinctive exploration title in 2014. At Rezzed, the two-man-team's immersive affair was a star attraction of the Leftfield Collection space. The aim is to eliminate lights, and the everything's-a-particle build of the visuals means that color plays a massive part in navigation. It's not supposed to challenge the player too much, with maker Eliott Johnson saying it's about "being in a relaxing, meditative environment." It's a long way off completion with a release date of 2016 all we've got to go on, but if the gameplay of A Light In Chorus is as attractive as its looks, it'll be an indie essential.

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THE LAST NIGHT

Another game being built up from a jam project—which you can play here —The Last Night flicks all of my I-bloody-loved-Flashback switches. The was nothing to play of the game at Rezzed, but the look and sound of what was shown on video couldn't fail to connect with Delphine aficionados of old. The makers, Oddtales, promise "a two-dimensional cyberpunk open world," with plenty of emergent elements and a gripping story. A Kickstarter is set to commence soon, with planned platforms being PC, Mac, and PS4.

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NOT A HERO

At the 2015 BAFTA Games Awards, the side-on skateboarder OlliOlli won in the category of best sports title. It's the work of tiny Deptford-based studio Roll7, who've done the right thing and stuck a sequel out—it's available now. But what comes next for the team is something rather different.

Not a Hero is a hyper-violent, super-fast pixel-art cover-shooter that plays a bit like Hotline Miami meets the old arcade version of RoboCop. There's a criminal underworld to deal with, and only one man to run the offensive against it—or, rather, a rabbit. You control one of nine assassin types, each given orders by "BunnyLord"—a time-traveling anthropomorphic animal who wants to run for mayor, obviously – to wipe out level after level of armed-to-the-teeth bad guys. There's blood. Lots and lots of blood. Delicious, pixelly blood.

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"It started as a completely different game called Geoffrey Archer," Roll7's John Ribbins tells me after I've cleared out a couple of stages. "That might still exist, we'll see—we're spelling 'Geoffrey' differently, so we might be okay. So it started as that, about an archer, but then we put guns in. And then I played this old Blizzard game called Blackthorne, which had this 2D cover mechanic where the guy backed into the shadows. I thought: 'This is so sick!' And nobody's really done that since. So we went from there. I wanted it to be faster than Blackthorne, and have elements of a modern shooter, but in 2D."

Not a Hero is a gleefully gory twist on modern shooters, nostalgic only in the sense that it taps the past for a frenetic present. It's not quite finished yet, but Roll7 are aiming for release on May 7 for PC, with PS4 and Vita ports a possibility before the year is out.

All photos by Jake Lewis.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

According to Mike Austin, the E line was the most popular subway for homeless people in New York City this winter. It never goes aboveground, he says, making it ideal for a warm night of sleep. The B and D trains were nice, too: You could ride them back and forth all night, from the Bronx to Brooklyn.

Just be ready for the cops.

It happens quickly. All of a sudden, a late-night subway freezes at the platform, that brake sound suggesting the train isn't going anywhere fast—or at least that it will stick around long enough for undercover NYPD officers (as Austin describes them) to scour each car. For cops, the line's last stops must make for natural targets: That way, all they have to do is wait for whoever is sleeping on the train to roll right in.

The night before we spoke, Austin, an elderly black man, sought refuge on another train, the A—which in his previous experience attracted fewer cops. It was windy and cold, so he took it to its Queens terminus, in Far Rockaway, and awoke to an NYPD badge. The 51-year-old was given a fair warning: He could get on another line, but the cop didn't want him to see him on that train again. Other officers weren't as forgiving; over this past winter, Austin tells me, he was locked up for 72 hours in jail simply for being homeless on a Bronx-bound D train.

"The thing that always confused me was the club crowd. They'd come on the subway late at night after drinking," Austin says. "And the cops would single us out. I don't whether it was because of nationality or the way we dressed. How can you determine who's homeless or not?"

(The NYPD has been reached for comment on this policy, but I have yet to hear back.)

Several homeless men tell me subway cars would regularly be filled at night with those temporarily escaping blizzard after blizzard—at least until the morning commute. "It's a major resource for us, so without it, I don't know what to do," Alberto Lora, 42 and homeless, told me the night of the first major blizzard, right before the subways were shut down. "The cops don't know what to do with us anymore."

The stories I heard throughout the winter paint a picture of the bad old days of New York in the 70s and 80s, when crime and poverty spiked. Except this time around, the city has escaped everything but the specter of the homeless—and the late-night scene on the subway system was just one testament to a Luxury City that hasn't figured out how to look after its most vulnerable.

Throughout the winter at the intersection of 127th Street and Park Avenue, men could be seen side by side underneath an East Harlem school's awnings, heavily drinking just to cope with the cold. A tent was pitched across from the New York Public Library, at 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue, and "cardboard condos" went up throughout Midtown—under scaffolds, in alcoves, and next to churches. And then there were hubs: Port Authority Bus Terminal, Penn Station, Atlantic Terminal, Fulton Street, along with the major subway stations.

When he wasn't underground, Austin would stay awake and walk around South Street Seaport, close to Wall Street businesses where he could dumpster dive for dinner. He heard that many homeless folks set up shop again on the West Side of Manhattan, and even that some headed back down the old Amtrak tracks—home to the mole people of urban legend.

"I wouldn't go down there if I was you," he advises me.

As of this article's publication, over 60,000 New Yorkers are sleeping in the largest shelter system in America every night, according to the Coalition for the Homeless. But some refuse to go there, at least in part out of resentment. "A shelter is more of a jail than going to a jail cell," Austin tells me. A recent Department of Investigation probe found rats, leaks, and all sorts of trouble inside 25 of New York City's shelters.

The Bedford-Pacific Armory in Crown Heights, Brooklyn is the site of an enormous shelter for homeless men, as well as a busy work corner. But homeless people sometimes chose to sleep in the indents of the Armory's rigid brick exterior, rather than inside the place. "I feel much more safe being out here than in there," a homeless man who goes by the name Fashion tells me. "No matter the temperature."

The structure, he says, helped block out the snow and wind.

If temperatures drop below freezing, the city issues what is known as a Code Blue. In essence, it's homeless crisis mode: Emergency drop-in shelters must take anyone who enters, and homeless individuals sleeping on the streets or on subways are asked by Department of Homeless Services (DHS) officials and police officers if they want to go to a shelter or hospital until the morning.

There were no forcible removals of homeless people—those who refuse services but are suffering from hypothermia, for example—from the street this year, according to a DHS spokesperson. And the number of Code Blues compared to last winter was pretty much the same. Even so, individuals I spoke to say it wasn't the temperatures that made things worse—it was the stuff on the ground they were sleeping on.

"Last year, you had the polar vortex, and in my 52 years of life, I've never felt cold like that," Austin says. "But this year was worse because of the snow."

The DHS budget for this type of outreach doubled this past year, from $35 million to $45 million, the spokesperson says. The number of outreach vans on overnight shifts, too, went from five to ten. Another ten vans were added to the subway outreach fleet. The most vulnerable clients were checked four times per shift for hypothermia and frostbite, and the beds for them increased from 750 to 1,000.

But there's a frustratingly familiar sense out there among advocates for the city's homeless that they just can't meet demand.

"It's this gap between what we're able to request, and what we can fill," Gary Bagley, the executive director of New York Cares, says. "That gap is a story that has nagged at us for a couple of years now."

Each winter, New York Cares hosts its citywide coat drive, the largest of its kind in New York and one made famous by its mascot: a Statue of Liberty shivering in the cold. This year, the group received 103,000 coat requests, but could only fill 75,000 of them. They ran out in February, just as the worst of winter was settling in.

Bagley attributes the disparity to the rise in requests from the working poor. The homeless aren't alone in needing warm coats—low-income families with housing are in the mix, too. And New Yorkers who do have coats are less willing to give them up. That's why the majority of New York Cares' local fundraising efforts come from the Upper West Side, the Upper East Side, and Park Slope—neighborhoods where New Yorkers have a bit more disposable income.

It "keeps getting harder to get to that 75,000 coats," Bagley explained. "And requests just keep going up."

Fortunately for the sake of the city's massive homeless population, winter is (finally) coming to an end. The snow on the corner of Bedford Avenue and Pacific Street has melted, and now that temperatures are on the rise, the police have cleared most subway stations of homeless at night, Austin tells me. This winter is one he'll never forget: He had to be constantly on the move, avoiding the cold cruelty of the NYPD and the weather at the same time.

"It's like a war on the homeless," he tells me solemnly. "As a homeless man, you become an invisible person."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Family in the Picture 1958–2013, Yale University Art Gallery/Yale University Press, 2014

In May 2013, Pratt Institute photography chair Stephen Hilger had a daring idea: to collect every book made by the photographer Lee Friedlander. After speaking to Friedlander, Hilger approached the director of libraries, Russell Abell, and explained that he wanted students to have access to Friedlander's complete bibliography. Abell not only agreed but took the plan a step further, suggesting that Pratt host an exhibition of the books in the library space.

The result was Lee Friedlander: The Printed Picture, an exhibition in Pratt's Brooklyn campus library that ran from April to October 2014, featuring a conversation between Friedlander and his book-production team at the opening and culminating in what academic types call a Festschrift—a short book designed to accompany and celebrate the exhibition. The reason Hilger's initial idea was daring, and indeed the reason the acquisition of the books was worthy of celebration, is that Friedlander has published an enormous amount of them—almost 50, depending on how you count—in his career, which spans from 1969 to the present day. ("The book is more my medium than the wall," he has said.) For the exhibition, the cover of every Friedlander book was reprinted to exact size and hung on the wall along the staircases, almost in the way family pictures might be in someone's home. The magnitude of Friedlander's output was overwhelming—the book covers lined three flights of stairs.

While most retrospectives address this sort of breadth by sorting an artist's career chronologically into eras, Hilger decided it was more apt to organize Friedlander's oeuvre into ten thematic categories: Self-Portrait & Family in the Picture; Work & Collaboration; Flowers, Trees, & Stems; Landscapes; Nudes; Musicians; American Icons; Monuments; Sticks, Stones, & Letters; and Retrospective.

Given Friedlander's artistic process, it seems this is a more valuable way to view his work. In his first monograph, Self Portrait, Friedlander says the photographs "were not done as a specific preoccupation, but rather, they happened as a peripheral extension of my work... they came about slowly and not with a plan but more as another discovery each time... I try not to think about it, to work intuitively." For Friedlander, whom Hilger describes as a "workhorse," it's shoot first, ask questions later. When looking at his contact sheets, Friedlander sees where his eye has been taking him and groups his pictures into books, much in the same way that Hilger tried to sort those books into categories. In the Q&A portion of the conversation at the opening, a photography student asked Friedlander for advice. "Go out and work," he responded. "When the sun comes out." The work, though, is not just in taking pictures but in going through them.

Page 57 from Letters from the People, Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 1993

Flipping through the Festschrift or strolling through the exhibition, which contained vitrines displaying books correlated with each of the ten categories, you'd see themes continuously weaving in and out of Friedlander's consciousness—often decades apart, he will revisit an idea but come to a completely different conclusion. Perhaps the most striking example is the contrast between the 1970 Self Portrait and the 2000 book of self-portraits eponymously titled Lee Friedlander. In the former, a young Friedlander inserts himself, sometimes playfully, into the world around him; in the latter, an older Friedlander often stares directly into the camera, close to the lens, almost confrontationally—same photographer, same concept, drastically different significance.

When I sat down with Hilger in his office at Pratt, he stressed "the monumentality of Lee's entire project as a photographer" but also emphasized that "his subjects are accessible in a way, very much a part of everyday life, and very much a part of experience." From Factory Valleys: Ohio & Pennsylvania to The Desert Seen to The Jazz People of New Orleans, there is a distinctly American, "from sea to shining sea" quality to Friedlander's work. Perhaps on one end of this spectrum is America by Car, a collection of pictures taken from a car window with the scenery constantly changing outside, an ode to the everyman American road trip; and on the other is American Monument, a book of statues across the country and possibly Friedlander's most famous work, exploring our collective fascination with forever commemorating the best of us in static representations. Taken as a whole, his oeuvre could be classified under the heading of "the social landscape"—a term Friedlander actually coined, Hilger pointed out, in a 1963 interview with Contemporary Photographer magazine. But there's another category to Friedlander's work that's even more unique to him as a photographer and doesn't fit as neatly under this heading: family.

At this point, I'll divulge something that I probably should have at the beginning of the article: Lee is my grandfather. This certainly does not qualify me as an expert on his work, but I've been present for more of his photographs than most. It's not because I go with him when he goes out shooting—I've done that only a handful of times—but because he is always photographing. Always. Seeing him without a camera around his neck is like seeing someone who always wears glasses with his glasses off—it's immediately noticeable, and it doesn't look right. Often at a family gathering, at home or at a restaurant, I'll be speaking to someone and all of a sudden a flash will go off. At this point, though, it's not startling to me (although it can be to a friend or a date the first time). My only reaction is to wonder, for a moment, what I was doing that would look interesting in a photograph. Other times, I'll be speaking directly to him, and in mid-sentence he'll abruptly put the camera up to his eye and take a picture of me, like a gunslinger drawing in a duel, all without breaking conversation. What he sees in any given split second that compels him to immediately take a picture, almost like a reflex, has been a great source of mystery and wonderment to me my whole life. One of the benefits of being photographed to this degree is that, as many of my friends have pointed out when flipping through one of Lee's family books, Family (2004) or Family in the Picture (2014), my family photo albums are published and bound. But my personal connection to my grandfather's work has more to do with the photographs I'm not in.

In 1993, Lee came out with Letters from the People and dedicated to it me (I was two at the time). The book consists of photographs of letters and words posted or written on the street, with the opening pages depicting numerous iterations of each letter of the alphabet. I've always felt a strong connection to this book that I could never fully explain. Recently, I mentioned this to my mother (Lee's daughter), and she laughed at me for not putting it together. She reminded me that on the way to most of the many hundreds of baseball games I played growing up in Brooklyn, I insisted we play a game where we had to find the letters of the alphabet, in order, on signs and billboards (no license plates allowed) we passed in the car. It was one of the very few things that relaxed me before games. "It was your own Letters from the People," she said.

I've come to understand my relationship to my grandfather's photography in moments like this—finding a piece of myself somewhere in his work, and by extension him, and what swirls around his consciousness. Some of these moments have been small and tender, as with Letters, and some larger, like sifting through American Musicians and Playing for the Benefit of the Band after deciding to leave baseball to play blues guitar. To me, it's not just the family photo albums that were bound and published but little strands linking me to my grandfather, waiting to be discovered.