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All images © Lynsey Addario / Getty Images

"Libya was incredibly violent," frontline photojournalist Lynsey Addario begins. We're instantly a world away from the civilized lunchtime chatter and clanging crockery of the London member's club we're sat in. We're transported back to March 16, 2011, when Addario and three other New York Times colleagues were taken captive by pro-Gaddafi forces.

"We were bound, tied up, blindfolded, and beaten," she says, as calmly as her request for a latte minutes earlier. "I was punched in the face repeatedly and threatened with execution. I was groped over and over—basically by every single man that I came in contact with, whether it was my breasts or my butt, or touching me over my jeans. No one took my clothes off, I was not raped. But as a woman, my fear throughout that week we were held captive was that I would be raped. That was the ultimate fear for me."

Spanning 20 years, Addario's fearless photojournalistic work has taken her from Afghanistan and Iraq to Congo, Senegal, and Gaza. Her lens? Looking for the female experience, or, in her own words, "Looking at women in full picture of where they are."


As the title of her new memoir declares: "It's What I Do." And just how she does it, in an undeniably male-dominated industry, despite multiple kidnappings and near-death experiences—in addition to pregnancy and motherhood—is why we're here today. I'm not the only one fascinated by her story, either. Rumor has it that Steven Spielberg is set to direct a biopic based on her book, starring Jennifer Lawrence. You can imagine the film posters already.

As we talk about the book's full title— It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War—the question of love—specifically, love in wartime—comes up immediately. "There's always that sensation that you..." she falters before correcting herself, "that one might die at any moment. I felt very vulnerable in those moments. It's also been a struggle throughout my career to figure out how to balance love and have a personal life with such a demanding profession."

VICE: In the book, you speak of how the men you worked alongside on the frontline had wives and girlfriends at home, whereas the women chose not to have that set-up. Tell me a bit about that.
Lynsey Addario: Well, it's not like we chose not to. Myself and my female colleagues had a hard time finding men who would put up with our schedule, especially right after 9/11. There were very few people who came home if you were covering these wars: there was the war in Afghanistan followed by the war in Iraq and they were incredibly intense. I was on the road almost 300 days of the year—most men will not wait for a woman who is basically never home.

On the subject of gender-divide, one would assume—rightly or wrongly—that being a woman in a notoriously male-dominated industry, in male-dominated scenes of conflict, has meant you've has had to work twice as hard.
I think it's a very competitive profession, but everyone has to work hard. I think I've had to prove myself to my colleagues and not necessarily to my editors, ironically. I wasn't photographing to please my colleagues, so I couldn't care less if they accepted me or not—I was photographing to tell a story. Nevertheless, you want to be accepted by your peers because you're in these remote, lonely places and you want to hang out with them.

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You began your frontline photojournalistic career in 2000 when you traveled to Afghanistan without a single assignment commissioned. What went through your mind when you booked that ticket?
Well, I was never really raised with inhibitions and the fear of failure. I think everything always seems worse from the outside then when you get on the ground. I was curious, I wanted to see how women were living. I really wanted to see if life was as bad as the West thought it was and what the women themselves felt.

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You've written that, as a woman, you were able to access places no man or Taliban could go in Afghanistan.
First of all, the Taliban could go anywhere they wanted, but, because of their beliefs that women should not be viewed by men who aren't their relatives, they wouldn't have entered the women's hospital, for example, or women's homes. Those are the sorts of scenes I was able to see that my male colleagues could not. For me, that inspired a career of work covering women's issues.

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You've traveled extensively and seen women in the most extraordinary circumstances. What have you learned about the universal experience of being a woman?
I've learned about the resilience of women and how incredibly strong they are. Most women were built to survive. There is a biological and visceral need to take care of our children. I've seen the most incredible women in the most vulnerable circumstances and they have become role-models to me. Every difficult situation that I've been through, I think back to the women in the Democratic Republic of Congo, women in Darfur, women in Afghanistan, and women in Iraq who I've interviewed along the way and have survived.

A powerful example of that is the photograph you took of a woman in eastern Congo in 2008 with her two children...
...Under the bug nets, yes. Those children were born out of multiple gang rapes. And there she was, taking care of them with all the love in the world.

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You say that when you found out you were pregnant, you thought your life was over. Did you really think your career was finished?
Yes. And I knew I'd get criticism for writing that so openly, but I was terrified. I didn't know any women personally who were doing the work I was doing who even had boyfriends—much less were about to have a child.

Despite that terror, you did do it. In fact, you were on assignment in Gaza at seven months. Women who work the frontline are given such a hard time when it comes to work and family, yet men are never asked: Why did you become a father?
Sure, there's a total double standard. For me, when I was pregnant, I was so terrified of losing my identity—everything I've built my life around is this calling that I've had since I was 21. And so, when I was pregnant, I wanted to hold onto that identity as much as I could. I did my research in terms of speaking to doctors, and I wasn't in combat—I was in situations like Somalia, Afghanistan, and Gaza, where women are pregnant and give birth every day. I didn't feel like I was taking some crazy risk. You can monitor your pregnancy no matter where you are...

When a woman goes to war with children at home people say, "How can you do that, how can you leave your kids at home?" But pretty much all the men in the field have children and no one ever asks how they can do that. I've had colleagues who have been killed and left their children without a father. No one says, "How could he had gone off to war?" It is an issue that we need to address.

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You've written in the book: "Until you get injured or shot or kidnapped, you believe you are invincible." In Libya, in 2011, this became a reality for you. What goes through your mind at the point of capture?
At the immediate moment I'm being pulled out of a car it's: What the hell am I doing in Libya? Do I really care about this story that much? Will I ever see my cameras again? What will my husband think? It's everything you'd think as you think you're going to die. Then there's an odd peace, resigning yourself to the fact that you'll probably die. At a certain point when you're being held hostage, you don't have power to do anything. The only power you have is to listen to your captors and do what they ask you to do.

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How has Islamic State changed things in your field?
Their presence has changed the stakes, 100 percent. They are targeting journalists. There used to be this respect that, even in civil war, people always respect journalists as neutral observers. ISIS has no regard for journalists at all. In fact, we are seen as bargaining chips. There is no negotiating with ISIS. You don't have a second chance.

Will it ever become too hard to do what you do?
No. I would never throw in the towel, because you don't just walk away from this kind of job. It's who I am.

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Follow Kat on Twitter.

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Still from 'The Soultangler'

When VHS first became big in the early 1980s, major film studios didn't initially release their biggest blockbusters on video. They figured if you could watch stuff at home, people would stop going to the theater. But the public was desperate for something to watch, which meant that pretty much any old small-time stuff could get released commercially. Amateur weirdos could shoot a 70-minute feature on a consumer camcorder, and it could end up in video stores.

These "shot-on-video" (SOV) horror movies are like a fever dream glimpse into parallel worlds, made by people who thought they were making a masterpiece, but don't seem to have ever seen an actual film before. Since they had such small releases, many of these SOV movies are quickly becoming lost. However, Bleeding Skull Video is dedicating itself to making these films available again, both digitally and as cool, colored VHS tapes. DIY-style titles like Cards of Death and The Soultangler aren't necessarily "good" cinema, but they're a part of film history.

Bleeding Skull's latest project is the unfinished Jungle Trap, filmed in 1990 by porn-director-gone-straight James Bryan—they found the unedited masters and are now putting together a final cut, 25 years later. We spoke to Bleeding Skull team-members Joseph A. Ziemba, Annie Choi, and Zack Carlon about why resurrecting these films is so important.

VICE: Why did you decide you needed to start releasing these films?
Annie Choi: Over the years we've discovered some incredible, nutzoid films that hadn't even been released in the US. Cards of Death was exclusively released in Japan, and The Soultangler was briefly released in Canada and Korea before disappearing completely. So it just seemed logical to track down the filmmakers and release them.

What's the craziest shot-on-video film you've found?
Joe Ziemba: There are so many different variations on "crazy." Each SOV horror movie is singular on its own terms and for different reasons. The one that burns the biggest hole on the surface of my brain is Nick Millard's Death Nurse. It's an anti-movie about geriatric people sitting on couches and a nurse who stabs them. I still can't tell if it was meant for public consumption.

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Zack Carlon: With the best SOV stuff, you're dealing with a dividing line: either the ideas of the film are completely alien, or the people who made it approach reality differently than other humans do. People like David "The Rock" Nelson and Carl Sukenick have very unique brains and it's fascinating to see how they communicate their ideas to others. On the other hand, you have someone like W.G. MacMillan's Cards of Death. That movie definitely qualifies as bizarre and crazy, but when you talk to MacMillan, he's composed and professional; a warm, sedate family man. I'd pay good money to be his son.

Aren't some of them actually pretty boring to sit through?
Annie: Of course there are trash films out there that are snoozefests, containing 100 minutes of people paddling in a canoe. But there are plenty of films that push you to unexpected and sometimes dark places, or have a thousand crazy ideas that pull you in a million crazier directions. These are the movies that stick with you long after you turn off the VCR, and the ones that need to be preserved.

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Still from 'Jungle Trap'

How the hell do you get the rights to these films?
Zack: It's always either nearly impossible or it's the easiest thing in the world. Some of the filmmakers have been waiting for their work to be discovered, and have set up Facebook pages to showcase their old movies. Others are ashamed of their early work and try to hide it away. One of the directors whose films we want to release ran away to live in a shack in the middle of a French forest.

Tell me a bit about James Bryan. What's his backstory?
Joe: Along with Doris Wishman, James Bryan is one of the most important and radical exploitation filmmakers in history. His biggest "hit" is the ultra-violent Don't Go in the Woods. But he dipped his foot into every genre imaginable, from action to erotic melodrama to experimental counter-culture sexploitation. Bryan is a true independent renegade. His movies reject logic. They're driven by a level of intelligence and craft that's rarely seen in such low-budget filmmaking. He's also an incredibly kind and humble guy.

How did you come across the unfinished Jungle Trap?
Zack: We went to pick up the video masters for Run Coyote Run [which Bleeding Skull also released] from James. He has this massive hangar just filled with the remnants of his life's work; posters, press books, film prints, etc. And amidst all this stuff, he had the raw, unedited masters for Jungle Trap. Just sitting there for 24 years. He'd transferred them to a DVD for us to watch, and we were astounded by how solid and entertaining the movie is.

What's it like coming across an unfinished film like this?
Annie: We were speechless. We basically watched the whole thing with our mouths hanging open with puddles of drool at our feet. Here we have an unfinished movie from a filmmaker we respect, a movie that no one has seen except for himself and maybe a few cast and crew members. It's totally surreal. It's not edited, but there's a very rough cut. You hear Bryan's direction to the actors and you can feel his ambition and passion.

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Does it feel at all sacrilegious recreating a film from 1990?
Annie: Not at all. We aren't recreating Jungle Trap; we're completing it. We are working very closely with Bryan to help him realize his vision. It doesn't feel like sacrilege; it feels like an honor.

Where do you think the next generation of these films are going to come from? Kids making films on YouTube?
Annie: Digital filmmaking has made things much, much easier for filmmakers, but easy doesn't necessarily mean good. We love trash film for its innocence, which is a crazy thing to say when so many of these movies involve gore-drenched murder. But there are a lot of risks and ambition behind them—filmmakers who re-mortgaged their homes and went into debt to create a 72-minute hell ride with absolutely no script.

They had no experience and no clue; they were learning as they went along and making do with their extremely limited resources. But we're seeing a lot of self-awareness today that obliterates the whole experience, an aesthetic that screams, "Hey, look at me! I'm making a movie that's so bad it's good!" Exploitation and trash filmmaking came from a specific time and place, which is not the time and place we live in now.

See more at Bleeding Skull and Bleeding Skull Video.

Follow Will on Twitter.

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Lindsay Morris/INSTITUTE

Lindsay Morris has dedicated the last eight years to photographing a summer camp with a twist. A camp for gender non-conforming children and their families, it provides a safe place for biological boys who feel more—or just as—comfortable in dresses and wigs than in Spiderman t-shirts and jeans.

Morris is both a photographer and board member of the camp, giving her a close insight to what goes down. There's the same kind of stuff as regular camps, such as lake sports, kayaking, swimming, and arts and crafts. But on the second and third evenings a talent and fashion show take place, where gender-creative children are allowed to be as flamboyant at they choose. Kind of like a drag show for kids.

We spoke to Lindsay about her reasons for putting the project into a new book, You Are You, the struggles that are specific to LGBT children and their families, and how a safe space like this camp can aid kids to develop more comfortably in their true gender identities.

VICE: Hi, Lindsay. Why did you feel it was important to create the book?
Lindsay Morris: The book has been a long time coming. I'm very much a part of the community and it's been a personal project. For the parents who attend the camp they agree that the first step to empowerment is visibility. I started photographing the kids at camp for the first two years just as a service to the camp community so that they wouldn't have to be distracted by taking pictures. What we started to see was a beautiful story was beginning to be illustrated through the photographs and they suggested that we think about a book.

Can you explain the term "gender-fluid"?
We use so many different terms. A lot of the kids don't like referring to themselves as boys. Some of them will be gay, some of them will be trans, and some of them will be somewhere in between. "Gender-creative," "gender-independent," "gender-variant," "gender non-conforming"... essentially I would define it as children who do not conform to society's expectations of what a typical boy or girl should be. I think we're just beginning to form a vocabulary.

Why is the summer camp so important to some families? Why is it so positive that the camp exists?
It's really just a very safe place for them where they don't have to look over their shoulders and where they're experiencing 100 percent support from their family members and siblings. It's very important to us that the siblings attend camp so that they can see their brother or sister being celebrated. It's not all biological boys at camp, there are a few girls.

What are some of the anxieties parents have when raising gender-creative biological boys?
I think the biggest concern is bullying at school. Often the children might be excluded from activities—especially sleepovers and birthday parties—because the other parents aren't really open to having a child who is atypical in their midst. That's why the parents of these kids have become the most incredible advocates. They just hope to normalize gender non-conformity.

What sort of mental-health problems and social problems do gender non-conforming boys tend to face?
A lot of these kids experience low-grade bullying. It creates a lot of stress and anxiety about going to school or being in public places because of the fear of being excluded. However, if the school is very progressive and keeps an open dialogue, it can be great. Schools have such power to normalize gender non-conformity; some choose to and some really push against it.

Do you feel society has come a long way with in their attitudes towards gender non-conforming people?
Absolutely, every day I think you see it. Especially in the past year or two, with the change in gay marriage laws, non-conforming people, and the rights of LGBT people in the work place. We're seeing laws shifting. I think we're living in a historical moment and it's happening as we speak.

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Lindsay Morris/INSTITUTE

What kind of reactions do the boys have when they first arrive at the camp and realize they are surrounded by other children just like them?
Some of the kids really stand back observing and are quite shy while others jump in and it's like they've found their clan, their soul mates. The images don't really convey the wild frenzy of camp. They're more flowing and poetic while the camp is kind of a beautiful chaos. The kids are constantly changing clothes and dolls; they're like immediate kin and friends. It's very moving for the parents, most of all.

Are some family members at the camp still coming to terms with their child's gender non-conformity or is it a very empathetic and understanding environment?
The parents spend a lot of time together and they realize it isn't just their child. But not every parent who goes there is fully on board. It's difficult, it's a transition. If you're there you're there because you love your child, they know it's a move in the right direction. I hate to say it but a lot of the fathers—especially the fathers—come in a little bit shell shocked. This is not the little boy they anticipated raising and they're doing the best they can because they want their children to have a healthy life and a healthy mental state that comes from the support of your parents.

What happens during the fashion show?
The highlight of the camp is a fashion show, so a lot of the kids really go to great lengths to create incredibly accessorized outfits. We have a red carpet, we blow their hair back, we do make up and nails. It's just like this incredible celebration. I feel like the kids leave and they are set to carry on for the whole year. We always have a rack of clothing that the kids can use. Some of the kids make their own dresses with their moms or aunties; it's a really anticipated event.

Can you recall any special moments of at the camp?
One of the new campers who came two years ago brought all of the adults to tears. He's since transitioned to female but at the time he was going by his birth name. His parents had separated and his father was in complete denial, giving the mother a very hard time. When going through divorce court it can get very complicated when one parent supports a gender non-conforming child and another doesn't. The father and stepmother of this child were not allowing him to dress in the clothes that he felt comfortable in.

At camp he spent a whole weekend in beautiful gowns; he dressed himself so carefully and it just meant so much to him to have four whole days of complete and utter honesty and authenticity.

At the end of camp the kids are allowed to tell everyone about something that has particularly moved them. He announced in front of everyone: "I am so comfortable here and I am so comfortable in the clothes that I am wearing. I'm going to go home and I'm going to tell my dad who I really am, I'm not going to be afraid." Everybody was in tears. He has since transitioned and is an amazing, confident, and self-realized human being. That's sort of the goal of camp.

Do you know if there are plans for any further gender-non conformity camps?
We hope it will inspire a lot of other camps. We just organize each year near to where the parents are living and we want to create a template for people who want to create their own camp in other parts of the country.

Pick up the book here and follow Lindsay's project at youareyouproject.com

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons user United States Army

"A WEEK IS NOOOOTTTTT SUN-SUN!!!! IT'S SUN-SAT, S-E-V-E-N- DAYS!!!!"

Thus spoketh Bodybuilding.com forum user Justin-27, in a 2008 thread that was innocuously enough titled, "Full Body Workout Every Other Day?" The thread quickly devolved into a trainwreck of internet commenting, featuring more than five pages of users going back and forth, arguing about how to count days in a week and if one can effectively train four days every week. Last January, a Reddit user dug up the thread and posted screen shots from it to r/funny. From there, the thread quickly made the rounds, with writers from all corners of the web using this content as an opportunity to flex their humor muscles. It was also a nice reminder of when forums ruled the internet.

In 2011, the New York Timesbemoaned the inevitable death of web 1.0 forums like Bobdybuilding.com's, citing their inability to be properly monetized as their killer. In the same way that Napster was co-opted and eventually replaced by services such as iTunes and Spotify, forums have been supplanted by Facebook and Reddit. Unlike forums which allow people with similar interests to talk to each other anonymously, Facebook wants to be the hub of your personal and public social life. And it's not just the place you talk to friends and family, it's also a place where you scope out businesses and buy stuff. Facebook has got your life story on their servers, while back in the golden age of forums, your life story was spread out over several, less monetizable threads.

But the Bodybuilding.com forums are still kicking and it's largely thanks to the fact that it's supported by Bodybuilding.com, which is a fitness empire on the internet that boasts workout videos, diet plans, and a hell of a supplements store. Bodybuilding.com, is the 298th most visited site in the US, according to Alexa.com rankings. That's even higher than Gaia Online, which includes a forum full of anime-style virtual sprites, comedy site and forum Something Awful, and Battle.net, where the WoW forum lives. (Note: Alexa tracks overall site traffic, not just the forums.)

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All screen caps courtesy of the author

Users of Bodybuilding.com forums can chose to be anonymous or work to build reputations around their usernames and avatars. When another user gives you a boost because they like your content, the brahs call that "repping"—one of the many slang terms they use that has its roots in exercise lingo.

The forum has a strong sense of encouraging the reader to be the best they can be—but in very particular and strangely detailed ways. Here, you can learn how to determine your genetic potential for achieving great biceps. It requires you take off your shirt and strike a double-biceps-flexing pose in the mirror, then measure the distance between your elbow and the edge of your bicep. And people actually do it.

"This is a really old post, but it was just what I was looking for," responded user realtime247, ten years after the original post.

The response pushed the post to the top of the forum, sparking gleeful responses on the post's resurgence.

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Other users commented as well with simple acknowledgements that they'd read the post. Forums are inherently archival, and since most were established in their heyday of the early 2000s, it's not uncommon for decade-old posts to emerge from the depths.

"Forums still serve a purpose for specific info and reference guides, based on information posted over multiple years," says James Auerbach, founder of thebiggestboards.com and watchfreeks.com. TheBiggestBoards is an automated catalog of the web's forums from largest to smallest. Though it hasn't been actively updated since 2008, Auerbach's code still crawls forums and archives its number of users and posts. It's a relic of a time before the ubiquity of Google, when users needed directories to find people with their same niche interests, like bodybuilding or watch-collecting.

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User Sy2502 maintains a journal within the Bodybuilding.com forum, detailing her experiences preparing to compete. Much of her training centers around the forum. She even met her bodybuilding coach on the site. "I chose her to train me after seeing the quality of her posts and overall demeanor on the forum, and her philosophy," she tells me via forum private message, "And I was not disappointed." Her coach trains her virtually—they don't live close enough together to interact in the flesh. Her journal is a mix of workouts and diets, questions, balancing her routine between her job and her husband, and the occasional joke that only other bodybuilders would really understand. And of course, progress photos.

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Sy2502 started journaling in November 2013, preparing for her first competition. "My main concern at the time was not knowing if I could stick to a rigid competition prep plan, so I thought a public journal would make me accountable to myself and others," she says. "When I am working out and maybe not putting all the effort I could, I think that tomorrow I need to write in my journal what I did, and I am not going to write that I did the bare minimum or just went through the motions." Her readers are friends she interacts with across the forum boards, aspiring competitors looking for an insider's view, and colleagues working through similar training plans. It's something a little more than just her coach's diet plan or her supportive husband.

No one on the forums casually chats about what got them started in bodybuilding. Users rarely mention a time before it. It's like a themed cruise: you're there to get away with kindred souls, not discuss life back on the shores. There's an entire board for people seeking motivation—but it's motivation that can only come from other bodybuilders, motivation to push through a plateau or climb out of an emotional slump. That's the nature of forums. If you've sought out a forum, you're already invested. You're not looking for anyone to convert you.

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User Turtora began weightlifting in 2010, after he was diagnosed with autism. "A lot of people on the autism spectrum generally develop what are called 'obsessive/special interests,'" he explains, "Where they tend to focus on learning everything they can about just one thing. Weightlifting became mine." He was 20, underweight, a college dropout, and living alone in a moldy-walled cottage. He wanted to get his life back on track. Lifting stuck.

He looked to the T-Nation forums for guidance, which he now describes as "a cesspool of misinformation, internet experts, and mostly shitty advice." He migrated to the Bodybuilding.com forums, which proved a more supportive environment. "In the four years I was a member of the T-Nation forums, I made about 300 forum posts," he tells me via email. "I've made over 1000 posts in the last six months on the bbcom forums."

Turtora spreads his knowledge on the forums through detailed training programs and the Prehabiliton Broscience series. The series "is an effort to help save people from the mistakes that I've made," he tells me. "I've torn cartilage, muscles, and developed tendonitis among other things... It all comes down to helping people. I've struggled a lot in my life, and I just want to do everything I can to prevent people from making the same mistakes that I've made." Tortura went back to school at 21. Now 25, his goal is to deadlift 725 lbs.

For every place like the Bodybuilding.com forums, there's another place like WatchFreeks, or the Classic Horror Film Board, or BoardGameGeek. "The nice thing about forums," Auerbach tells me, "Is that you can anonymously be an active member of a community that cares about a topic, you can come and go as you please with no pressure, and learn from others who have your same interests." He points out that the forum-style of communication has shaped the way we communicate online—it exists on the comments in Facebook pages (ever noticed how a new comment will "bump" a thread to the top of a Facebook page?), Yahoo Answers, and Yelp. "[Forums are] still relevant if you have the ability to ask a question and get an answer."

Facebook has a tight grip on the internet, but it hasn't devoured the longstanding forums yet. Their age keeps them alive, because they have a wealth of unique insights, like how to determine if you are genetically predisposed to looking kickass when flexing in the mirror. No one on Facebook wants to see your deadlift progress photos. But guess what. The people on Bodybuilding.com do.

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/03/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/26/' filename='something-nice-to-do-an-interview-with-renata-adler-333-body-image-1427388955.jpg' id='40164']

Tell a bookish person you're going to interview Renata Adler and you can expect a range of reactions, everything from envy to wariness, to a sort of fear-stricken awe. Many know Adler from her two novels, Speedboat and Pitch Dark, first published in 1976 and 1983, respectively, and both reissued by New York Review Books in 2013 to much acclaim. (I read both of them the week after finishing my first book and felt I had just met an unknown relative, an uncanny feeling confirmed when a review of my novel placed it in Adler's lineage.) But before her novels emerged, Adler was best known for being an incisive critic and essayist for the New Yorker and the New York Times, though she quit her job as film critic for the latter after a year, and later criticized the paper for various editorial offenses in the introduction to her 2001 book, Canaries in the Mineshaft.

Her new book, After the Tall Timber, is a massive collection of greatest hits from her decades of nonfiction, including her most controversial review, a blast on Pauline Kael's collected film criticisms, When the Lights Go Down. (One deliciously blunt and oft-quoted phrase is that the book is "piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.") The controversy was mainly about the fact that Kael and Adler were both New Yorker writers at the time and less to do with the actual substance of the review. True to Adler's style, it was unsparing and unafraid to be contentious, but it also backed up each of its claims with quotes from the book itself and expansive arguments about the role of the critic in general. Still, it positioned Adler as a critic to be feared, as if she went around damning books for sport. In 1999, after a long hiatus from publishing, Adler released a memoir titled Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker and critics all over town nearly imploded that someone would actually criticize their beloved magazine so close to its 75th birthday.

Here is a woman who reported the march from Selma to Montgomery at 26 for the New Yorker, who covered Biafra and Vietnam and Black Power demonstrations in Mississippi, who was a speechwriter for the committee chair of Nixon impeachment hearings, who went to Yale Law School at what was arguably the height of her career, who cut her teeth in an era where female reporters—not to mention outspoken, fearless ones—were still relatively rare, and yet so many remember her as the woman who voiced a bracingly honest opinion about a highbrow magazine and another woman's movie reviews.

That a lifetime of such important work has been, to some, eclipsed by a handful of critical opinions about such dominant media powers is repulsive. Take whatever issue you might take with her work, but take it in context. This woman did not burn down New York.

Renata Adler and I met in a noisy coffee shop on the Upper West Side on a bright, near-spring morning. Just before leaving the publicist told us each, individually, to "be nice." And we were.

VICE: When did you want to start publishing essays and being a real, critical voice?
Renata Adler: It happened sort of accidentally. It was a series of accidents. When I first went to the New Yorker, it wasn't as a writer.

What was your job?
It was one of those unclear things they used to hire people for.

I don't think they do that anymore. Was it assisting or fact-checking?
No, no. They said, "It's too bad the only job we have that's suitable for you is fact-checker." But they only had male fact-checkers, but later they had women fact-checkers. That was a first. It was a very big first in the history of the New Yorker.

But my job was one of these strange jobs that weren't entirely clear. Someone would say, "Here are these booklists. Why don't you go and see if there's anything for us in here?"

Is there any advice to give that generation of young essayists and journalists coming up now, when we're supposed to "like" and "share" everything and backlashes can happen so fast?
It's funny because I've actually met some great young writers. And they're very good. Lots of them. But then there are others who have been cheated their whole lives educationally. They've never read anything. I remember saying at the beginning of the year, when I taught at Boston University, "Is there anything you all have read?"

There's much less than there used to be it seems.
Right. There's very little foundation. And then you get the craziest papers. So I had no idea that there are young people that are very, very good at writing. On the other hand, there's all this stuff on the internet about who's now and who's not. It's a very strange period in terms of judgment. But in a way it's not as bad because there's more chaos. You don't get the kind of ganging up that you used to. Or, well, I'm sure you do—

Yes, but it happens faster and you can get lost. There's always something and we can forget who we were supposed to hate last year.
Exactly. What used to be, for me and I think still is, the test of the critic is whether he quotes from the source or not. That's what's fair. I once got a review that said, "She writes so badly that it sets my teeth on edge." And then she quoted stuff. And I thought, Wait a minute. That's the best I can do. If she thinks that's bad, OK. [Laughs] And that's fair.

The test of the critic is whether he quotes from the source or not.

There's a part in the introduction to After the Tall Timber that talks about how a writer must have a successful relationship with media power in order to have a financially and emotionally solvent career. Did you think of it that way toward the beginning of your career?
No, but it started to work out that way. Looking back, I don't know. What was I thinking?

I've been very struck by this collection, by looking back at the range of nonfiction that you've written, and noticing how the pieces that people tend to know or get so riled up about are the relatively minor pieces in which you've been openly critical of various media powers—the Kael or New Yorker or the New York Times stuff. I say this is minor only in comparison to the Civil Rights movement or your coverage of Vietnam and Biafra or your working for Watergate or the fact that you went to Yale Law school at a very high point in your career. I find it disappointing that all this has been eclipsed by so little.
It's very strange. And it's funny. I mean, I was going to write a piece for the start of this book. I worked very hard on it and then I thought, No, this isn't done, this isn't done, this isn't done. And I thought it right up past the deadline. Then I thought, This is OK.

So you didn't write any new pieces for this?
I did, but I didn't finish in time. And that was that.

Are you going to publish that anywhere?
I don't know because it was sort of written for here and I can't imagine what else you can do with it. You sort of write into a situation. Now, what does that have to do with what you're interested in?

Well, I was curious about how you made sense of the backlash there was to some of your relatively smaller essays and critiques of the media, how people acted like you had burned down New York.
The thing is, I guess one isn't so aware of it. For various reasons I wrote the Pauline Kael piece. There was no question of bullying somebody. She was so big. She was incredibly powerful.

So it never occurred to me. And then I've thought about this a lot over the years and that is, How do people stand it when everything falls apart? And how does it happen that there's always someone nearby so that we sort of don't notice? It seems to me that in a way you don't notice how exiled they are.

Do you think that you noticed?
No. I mean, I sort of noticed. But then there are these people who say, "Thank god, somebody finally said something." And I couldn't really say to myself, "Poor me." It was funny that I just got asked, "How did you feel when you got fired because of the Pauline Kael piece?" But I left the New Yorker 20 years later, but when I did, it had nothing to do with it. But there wasn't such a big difference between leaving the New Yorker and being there.

Because you were a staff writer?
I was a staff writer, but not on salary. I was teaching so I had a much better insurance policy, but not thanks to them.

These are the tangible things people forget about with a writing career, how you have to be strategic and have a relationship with a media power.
Because [otherwise] you're going to be not eating.

Right, and then it becomes doubly important to still be able to criticize their authority. You don't want to have a situation when the writers are imprisoned in their jobs and have to behave based on what this authority figure wants them to do. It's important to be free to have the discussion, even if people disagree with you.
But it's funny because after a while there is no basis for a discussion anymore. Now it's really hard. That's why I had so much trouble with that piece that didn't make it into the book. It's funny what the media focuses on about the person's situation. One of the things that they focus on is the treatment of reporters. Maybe there's going to be a terrific reporter, maybe there won't.

But you're not seeing that happening now?
No. You?

I don't think people are reading very well. They're reading quickly. They're reading shortly.
I started watching television a little bit. I'm watching stuff I've never watched before, like serials. I started to watch West Wing, because of my son, and it's so good. So incredibly good, I think. And there's a lot to watch because it's already finished.

There are probably things in common between being a child and being a refugee and being an anthropologist.

Serials can end up substituting for the novel. I'm in the middle of writing a novel right now, so I'm not reading any. But I'm watching House of Cards.
Well, I've been watching that, too, and it's really good.

I find it very interesting because it was sort of going along at the same rhythm as one's own life, except a little slower. I really was just curious as to what was going to happen there today as what was going to happen to me that day. The fiction lover's dream is to keep going. But I wonder how much of people's lives is occupied with this. [Watching a serial] isn't their life in any technical way, and it certainly isn't their public life. That is, you can't do anything about public life. You have these terrible candidates, in my view. You have a 16-year administration which has just come to an end and there's nothing you can do...

So we outsource it to the West Wing and House of Cards.
Well, House of Cards has lost me now. House of Cards has lost me.

I just started the third season.
Well, you see, I cheated. I skip ahead. It's awful. You can't suddenly turn them into nice guys.

Do they become nice people?
Yes! They become suddenly completely confusing. Everything becomes arbitrary. And then I think, Why didn't everything seem arbitrary before? There are different writers now. There's different everybody.

How can you forget that he's done all these horrible, horrible things?
Right, and now suddenly he's a victim. It may be that in real life people are sometimes OK and sometimes villains. But mostly the good guys are the good guys and the not-good guys are not the good guys. And then other people are just whatever they are.

That could be one of your lines: "Some people are just whatever they are."
[Laughs]

You can start a whole novel just on a line.
Yes.

I feel like you can boil Pitch Dark, down to that one line, "Did I throw the most important thing away?" And I felt like when I was reading it, it landed to that end. And then I read in an interview you brought up that line...
There were one or two others, like, "You are, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life." I didn't even dare look back because there's a part in Speedboat about a certain academic situation and I thought, Well, nobody's going to believe this, it's so absolutely preposterous. But there was, and it was absolutely true, literally, word for word true.

And then there's another place where, I'm dead serious, there was something brilliant happening. There's a long monologue about synonymy and context. And some words are there for rhythm and some are there for cadence. So I'm carefully going through the German translation because these words are not arbitrary. But I found that they were using the English, but they choose their own words [instead].

I was saying something that has the rhythm of like, motherfucker, and then they were writing something like "robin." [Laughs] It was totally arbitrary. It used to be that virtually everything was translated in Japanese. So I got a note from the Japanese translator and he or she wrote, "I just have a few things remaining." And it turns out that she or he had absolutely no idea what any of it was. So I thought, Leave it. I can't be looking over the Japanese.

You can't be looking after anybody, really. Do you think that your writer DNA was sort of shaped by how your family was displaced by the Nazi regime before you were born?
It's funny that you should mention that because I think it affects a lot else, specifically being a refugee. I wasn't born there. I didn't experience any of it. But they were refugees. So then I was thinking of this business of being a refugee, no matter in what sense.

Prenatal refugee.
Prenatal refugee and actually postnatal refugee. And I thought there are probably things in common between being a child and being a refugee and being an anthropologist.

It gives you a sense of curiosity.
But also a complete displacement. You've got to read the situation. You're the new kid in school all the time. But I wasn't aware of it then. I'm aware of it now because language affects you differently, or not. But I used to talk to [director] Mike Nichols about it because he was a refugee. Do you envision an audience when you write? Do you envision a particular person?

No.
Every once in a while I think: Now, what would Mike say to that?

There's that idea that when you're blocked, you can always just write as if it was a letter to one specific person.
Oh, that's good. That's a wonderful idea. Mine is more in terms of criticism. If someone was to say, "I know what that is. Do you really want to do that?" But anyway, about Mike and his attitude toward language, I remember him saying—it was a question of whether something written was fresh or not—and he would ask, "Why not smell it?" Which, from an English speaker's point of view, is hysterical.

I'm going to take kind of a left turn, but did you see Selma?
No.

Do you have a reason for not seeing it?
Yeah, I think it really is tremendously important to not screw up the Lyndon Johnson thing. I mean the Lyndon Johnson thing is the most amazing thing. It's funny. It seems to me at the time, that I learned only later, it's unprecedented that is to have a collaboration between the government and the revolution in which the government wants civil disobedience, requires civil disobedience. You need cases and consequences. So people would come, civil-rights people, various people and they'd say, "But you're not protecting us." And the government would say 'We can't.' So they had to get into a certain kind of trouble and then provoke a certain kind of reaction and then for various reasons it had to be a governmental reaction. So there it is. You have something really unique in all of history, and Johnson is a hero. Dr. King's another.

But artistic expression does not admit you to say, "On one hand it was Hitler. And on the other hand it was..." It's not fair. It's not fair to miss the whole point of what happened. And it could only have happened because of that business of local law and federal law. OK, the local law says sit on the back of the bus. The federal law says whatever it says. Then there's the other extremely fascinating twist which is the federal judges being appointed for life. If you're president, you appoint someone from your party and in those days since the south was Democratic, Dixiecrats, and they were vicious terrible candidates. And the only totally wonderful judges were Republican judges—it's a fluke—who were appointed by Eisenhower and the reason was that there was an old tradition of being Republican and anybody who's crazy to be Republican was likely to be wonderful. So you had to keep going before these Republican judges, which was a lovable story, because of Frank Johnson (who was the judge in the district court for the Middle District of Alabama during the Selma march). His only son committed suicide and the town people turned over the grave stone and the administration said, would you like to be transferred somewhere else? It's a huge story. You don't have to fix it. The truth is a big help there. To demonize LBJ, which everybody does about the Vietnam war, [sure], but here, from his youth he was a civil-rights person, and it cost him.

If you were starting your career now, would you have gone to Ferguson?
Oh, that's interesting. Probably, yes. But it's a much more complicated situation. I mean, to think that that whole movement, all those years of incredible progress, incredible risks—no black violence at all. None. They were never wrong about anything. And you can say, "Well, that's too bad and you need to address it another way, but you can't address it by saying Johnson wasn't helpful." Nobody wants to say that stuff. So I don't even want to go see the movie. But I remember a long time ago somebody said to me, "You have to see this movie about the assassination of John Kennedy," and I said, "Oh no, no. It's not right." And they said, "You can't talk to me until you've seen the film." And I said, "Whatever you tell me about the film is fictional and there's all this documentation." It's sort of a dumb thing to say, but it's an OK thing to say. I don't want to see Selma and get all upset.

It's different to see a film of something you've lived through. But I guess the hope is that the some emotional truth of the situation came through.
Yes, but it leads to false analogies. I mean, there's nothing in common between Ferguson, except for some people were white and some people were black, which we knew.

You write about the radical middle in here too, and I think it's so hard to find the middle on these sorts of issues.
Radical Middle was a mistake. Radical Middle was just a joke. It was a temporary title just holding until we found a title. And then it turned out [Random House editor] Joe Fox was taking it seriously and that was the name of the book, Toward a Radical Middle. I used to call it "Radical Muddle." I used to call it all kinds of stuff.

It's very hard. It's particularly hard now because the positions are so false. There is no coherence to what position you hold. Some places you can have racial diversity and some places it's not a value. And you can't say that. You just can't say that.

Mostly the good guys are the good guys and the not-good guys are not the good guys. And then other people are just whatever they are.

I was always drawn in your books, in your novels, to all the run-ons and commas. That style has always made sense to me, but some people can't stand it. Are there any styles in fiction that just grate on you? And what do you think the purpose of writing in this way is? What purpose does it serve for you?
Are you a great fan of Evelyn Waugh?

I haven't read any of him.
But here is the amazing thing. One of his novels—he's so good, word for word—there is this book where a woman is having an affair and there's a moment when their little boy is killed during the hunt. He falls off his horse and is kicked in the head. I can't remember this exactly, but someone is telling her this because she's out of the country, and she freezes because she's so horrified. And then she learns it's just her little boy and she says, "Oh, thank God." The guy was so funny and so sharp to be able to do that in the middle of the sentence. It's a very different use of language. For example, take Hemingway. Hemingway is also very controlled, but he isn't drilled for precision. Hemingway has just been careful not to go off the rails.

In your work, what do you think the purpose is for letting the language be more associative both in structure and syntax?
Well then, of course, is there any limit? Because you don't want to go off the rails once there is.

Somehow there are rails.
I hope there are rails.

Maybe in editing.
Yes, it's a little bit like tuning. A little tightening over here, a little loosening over here. Do you know what it is?

No, I feel like we'll ask this question forever and not know.
Well, of course there's probably no answer to it. It's sort of like, "What made you say that?" Because up to a point you can trace it back, but you could have said something else.

I feel that if I try to plan what I'm writing, I'm wrong. It ends up something totally different. Do you feel you have more deliberate control?
No, the control thing is so far out. It's quite often happened to me that the whole point of writing something, the punch line, is this one line, but then I never get there. I miss it. I'd like to have got there. And it's a little bit like biting off the thread.

You have to let go of that original impulse sometimes.
That's right. If it's too clear what you're doing, that's trouble. If you're not in the business of suspense narrative, which is why there are always those series, because why do I care at all? I don't care in the slightest. I don't even like these people, and I know the story isn't true so why am I watching it?

Because there's some sense of tension that needs to be resolved.
Exactly, and I can't do that.

But you do know in a different sort of way. There's a tension in your novels of how this person will resolve their questions?
Well, do you have that in life? Are you curious about what will happen next? You're hoping this will happen and not that, which isn't suspense. You don't tune in because you want to know whether you passed the test or whether you'll marry. It's not the same sort of suspense at all.

Why get out of bed in the morning? It's not because you're curious about how the day will end.
Exactly. So, we got out of bed today because the weather was nice or there's something to do.

Renata Adler's After the Tall Timber will be published by New York Review Books on April 7, 2015.

Catherine Lacey is the author of Nobody Is Ever Missing and the forthcoming novel, The End of Uncertainty. Follow her on Twitter.

On July 22, 2004, just a few months before George W. Bush's re-election, the 9/11 Commission released its report. The document stands as the definitive review of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, essentially serving as a summary of what went wrong.

On Wednesday morning, the 9/11 Review Commission published an update, this one called "The FBI: Protecting the Homeland in the 21st Century." The co-authors—former Attorney General Edwin Meese, Georgetown University professor Bruce Hoffman, and former Congressman Timothy J. Roemer—were asked by Congress last year to check out what the intelligence community has done to make the country safer over the last decade. The result is an in-depth analysis of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, highlighting the agency's progress during a period that saw the nature of intelligence-gathering evolve dramatically.

Turns out the FBI has made some strides, but there's still a lot of work to do when it comes to warding off terrorist attacks while simultaneously addressing civil liberties concerns in the Edward Snowden era.

"Many of the findings and recommendations in this report will not be new to the FBI. The bureau is already taking steps to address them," the co-authors wrote. "In 2015, however, the FBI faces an increasingly complicated and dangerous global threat environment that will demand an accelerated commitment to reform."

The report conjures up this image of an omnipresent enemy that is constantly taking different shapes and forms, whether it's an ISIS-affiliated hacker or a young teenager in Boston who's been exposed to anti-American sentiment on YouTube. "Everything is moving faster," the co-authors wrote.

To match this pace, the report argues, the FBI needs to step up its game.

Prescriptions include hiring more linguists for operations at the local and state levels and better communication with the Department of Justice's National Security Division. The report simultaneously criticized "passive resistors," or officials who are dragging their feet on important measures, and argued that "visionary leadership" is needed "more than ever."

The authors examined five major cases of national security threats, including the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013 and a thwarted plot by al Qaeda to attack New York City's subways in 2009. In all five cases, the 9/11 Review Commission found that the FBI's use of informants failed; for example, in the months leading up to the Boston Marathon, the report faulted the bureau for not being aware that Tamerlan Tsarnaev angrily interrupted two separate events at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center.

To Daniel Byman, a professor at Georgetown University, fellow at the Brookings Institute, and staff member on the original 9/11 Commission back in '04,"deep, fundamental problems" with strategic analysis persist in the intelligence community. "They have small problems, and tend to treat them like big problems," he explained. But before 9/11, no system existed for these new threats. According to Byman, the FBI is now more plugged into local communities, but he argued that that a Cold-War mentality lingers.

"For the FBI, it involves a very different culture, with characters they're not used to working with," he told me. "And it takes a long time to change these cultures.... It takes new resources for all sorts of paradigms, and requires new training to deal with this stuff."

In the context of the Boston Marathon, the report mentioned "the civil liberties sensitivities of source networks within religious institutions," perhaps a nod to the notorious NYPD surveillance of Muslim mosques in the tri-state area. The authors suggested the FBI employ common sense, gathering its intelligence from actual humans living in any given area rather than using informants on the inside. Basically, someone in the Cambridge Muslim community should've been hit up for information on Tsarnaev. But how that would happen without an added dose of racial profiling or targeted surveillance is left unclear.

That's the hardest part of the report to swallow: the co-authors seem to teeter back and forth between advocating borderline-unconstitutional surveillance and the protection of civil liberties. To wit: the Patriot Act is mentioned eight times in the report, and the co-authors argue that the 2001 legislation is "essential" in America's counter-terrorism strategy. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an integral part of Snowden's NSA leaks, is mentioned ten times.

"Civil liberties" come up often too, and the co-authors argue that the FBI should set up an independent advisory board that keeps tabs on whether the shit they're doing—like reading emails without court orders—is street legal. (The same can be said of the report's 2004 predecessor, the original 9/11 Commission report, which had eight mentions of civil liberties—long before "metadata" became a thing.)

Back then, according to Byman, ours was a world without the same public personas—"No YouTube, no Twitter, no Facebook"—and the difference now is that there's "a lot of data to surveill," the idea being that the information we post online is "fair game" to law enforcement.

The passage of time is also key here. "Part of it was that we were working in the shadow of 9/11," he said.

People were less willing to take up arms (politically speaking) over domestic intelligence measures then. Now, over a decade later, the American people have not seen another massive terrorist attack on their shores, but the specter of intrusion by the federal government looms large in the cultural imagination.

Yet even a decade ago, the members warned that protecting civil liberties was a top priority, while also calling for the unification of intelligence, branches of government, and the American people to stomp out terrorism indefinitely—something that the Patriot Act was supposed to tie together unlike any other bill in modern history. For that reason, the members said a "full and informed debate on the Patriot Act would be healthy."

Unfortunately, the new report does not comment on whether or not this debate ever happened, either in Congress or within the FBI.

What the report does show, in essence, is that both the American intelligence apparatus and the public are still learning how to live in a post-9/11 world. The flawed strategies of the FBI since then are unfortunate trial and errors, but useful trials, nonetheless. Our discussions of civil liberties are much denser now than they were in the early days of Saddam Hussein's downfall, and continue to permeate the higher levels of government.

In a world that seems to offer a new terrorist threat every day, perhaps this reminder of where we've been is coming at exactly the right time.

"With the report, it's, 'Look how far we've come,'" Byman said, "but also, 'Look how far we have to go.'"

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

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Follow Lauren Monger on Twitter, look at her comics, and then see her paintings.

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'Super Street Fighter 4' brought back the car-smashing bonus stage of the second game in the classic series

There are some things we (apparently) can't do without in games, one of the most talked about being the act of killing. But what about killing inanimate objects—like decorative lamps, useful street signage, or entire buildings? While you can't technically kill those, if you relabel the act as "destruction" you've got yourself a key aspect of a hell of a lot of games.

Seriously, go back through the entire history of gaming, all just-a-few-decades of it, and you'll see smashing shit up being an element of almost everything. If we can't shoot a dude in the face, we can sure as hell destroy his house. Even one of the first games ever made, Spacewar, involved one ship trying to destroy another.

But the need to damage stuff stretched beyond merely fucking up your opponents (and friends); soon enough it became another one of those wonderful power fantasies we all get so invested in through gaming. When Rampage arrived in 1986, collateral damage became the entire point of the experience.

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'Rampage', original arcade gameplay

Catharsis for dummies—it would never win awards for its depth of thinking or the subtlety of its presentation, but Rampage keyed into that base, lizard part of all our brains that makes us want to Banner up and smash the shit out of everything.

Plus, I mean, I could try to bring down a building in real life, but swinging my fists at a brick wall hasn't ever served me well in life. Also writing a sentence like that will get SCO19 on my ass.

But there was a point to these flailing giant monkey limbs—that point being points. As simple and straightforward a reason as you'd expect from a game called Rampage, where you go on a rampage, but a reason nonetheless.

Destruction has evolved in gaming over the years, though. While it always boils down to making shit that was all put together nicely all not-put-together nicely, the ways we've done it—and the reasons it has featured—have always been changing. Well, they've usually been changing.

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'SimCity' disasters on the SNES

There might have been games before 1989 that expected you to mitigate and defend against destruction of your house and home, but SimCity—the original, not that tripe from the other year—brought with it a new way of thinking: you had to defend your house and home as well as the houses and homes (and workplaces and stadia and power plants and so on) of an entire city.

This destruction moved the goalposts—it changed your motivation from being one solely focused on the aggressive destruction of others to that of self-preservation. You'd spend hours crafting your perfect, blocky cityscape only to see a monster ravage through it, a blaze break out in the goddamn fire station, or an earthquake rumble into life to royally mess up your day. Oh, and kill people. Can't forget that.

But once again this symphony of destruction could—and would, given enough time—become a sort of catharsis. Had you been playing SimCity and successfully fending off random disasters, helping your township survive and thrive under the looming gaze of a monster that Definitely Wasn't Godzilla, it might get to a point where you'd choose to instigate disasters yourself.

Then... watch it all burn. Fuck that place, I hated it anyway. Destruction is cleansing. It relieves the pressure. When you want all your buildings to be devastated, SimCity becomes a much more relaxing experience.

Destruction sort of waddled along in a bit of a smashed-up daze for a few years, appearing in any and all games but not really doing much to mess with the idea of what it could be. Destruction Derby made us squeal with glee even when we were ruining the engine block of our own cars, while a dozen games came out on the Amiga, PC, and anywhere else that handled destruction in a manner very similar to a certain Angry Birds.

But as the technical arms race heated up, so did the need to impress beyond games just featuring "more emotive eyebrows" and "at least three faces"—we needed interactivity; the kind teased by Worms and its ilk, but from a more realistic point of origin. So we got our ass to Mars with Red Faction and its Geo-Mod engine—let's gloss over it and its awful sequel, though, because, well, Red Faction Guerrilla.

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Destruction in 'Red Faction Guerrilla'

There's a reason we still aren't seeing destruction of this scale in a lot of games, as the creator of the tech behind those very crumbly buildings, John Slagel, told me a few years ago: it's fucking hard to do. Alright, they weren't his exact words, but he seemed to know what he was talking about so let's pretend they were.

But good god if the payoff isn't worth it. Released in 2009, Red Faction Guerrilla was a mediocre shooter with a god-awful story and largely dull missions. Yet it is almost universally loved. Why? It made blowing shit up an art form. A science.

The technology backing up your blasting session (not a euphemism) had advanced to such a point that you could be methodical in your takedown of the residence of a corrupt government official. As soon as you realized thought could be applied to what was otherwise mindless smashology, it all clicked into place—and became a lot more fun.

Don't get me wrong, just going mental on something like Hulk: Ultimate Destruction (the clue's in the name) is great, but what Red Faction did for the desire to devastate in all of us shouldn't be overlooked. It took a constant side attraction of gaming, put it front and center and told us all: "Oh, this shit is fun, you should do it more."

And it keeps on coming. Goat Simulator wouldn't have offered even a minute of comedy fun without its rampant destruction. Even Spielberg loves it, designing a couple of games entirely around the theme of disassembling structures by lobbing balls at them (naturally, being a Spielberg creation, Boom Blox was incredible).

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'Boom Blox' trailer

While the likes of the recent Battlefield games and the upcoming Next Car Game: Wreckfest are taking up the Red Faction baton and running with it, making technical leaps in how we smash up our surroundings, destruction is also a quick fix for your base-level "pulse-pounding" action.

Name me a Call of Duty or Battlefield game of the past few years that hasn't gone all-out with the destruction in a cutscene. Can't? That's right, because it's too difficult to tell any of them apart. But if you could, you'd see that they all have it—collapsing buildings, fully blown attacks on 'Murica, nuking the site (not) from orbit. It's shorthand for excitement, even if it's being handled in a different way to the interactive destruction that makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

It will never end. It will only grow in complexity and, as far as I'm concerned, be more fun as a result. It's unlikely I'll ever smash a car to bits with my fists and feet, so the more realistic a recreation of that we realize in gaming, the better for me. Yes, I am angling for a photorealistic virtual reality version of the car mini-game from Final Fight or Street Fighter II.

Regardless, destruction is one of gaming's true constants. A form of death inflicted on the inanimate objects of the world. Delightfully cathartic. And, when done right, enough to elevate a decent game to "great" status—because toppling chimney stacks is a lot of fun.

Oh, and a special mention to the carpet-bombing in the original Mercenaries, too. That was another middling game saved by some damn fine explode-y bangs.

Follow Ian on Twitter.

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Anti-cop graffiti at a London protest against police violence. Photo by Jake Lewis

Related: Mark Duggan's "Just" Killing and the Battle Over Black Lives

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Like Michael Brown in Ferguson, the name of Mark Duggan is a shorthand for police violence that is either murderous and unaccountable, or necessary and laudable. This depends on the extent to which one is prepared to think critically about the state. Duggan, a 29-year-old man from Tottenham in North London, was shot dead by police on August 4, 2011. Yesterday the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) released a 499-page report into his death that clears the police of wrongdoing.

Duggan was shot twice on exiting a taxi on Ferry Lane, by an officer known as V53. A gun was later found 4.76 yards from his body, on a patch of grass over a fence. This gun had apparently been carried in a shoebox—the box bears prints from both the alleged supplier Kevin Hutchinson-Foster, and Duggan—but there are no prints or DNA from Duggan on the gun itself. The muzzle of the gun was covered by a sock, and no fibers from this sock were found on Duggan's body or clothing. In other words, in terms of the forensics, there's no evidence that Duggan ever touched the gun, only the box. It's important to bear this in mind.

At Hutchinson-Foster's trial, V53 claimed to have shot Duggan out of an "honest[ly]-held belief that he was about to shoot me or one of my colleagues." He attributed this belief to the fact that he saw the gun (the one which has none of Duggan's DNA on it) in Duggan's hand, pointed in his direction. He described this as "a 'freeze frame' moment," in which he saw the gun with total clarity. This moment, he said poetically, was "like when you pause your Sky Plus or your TV recorder," allowing him to view Duggan's hands with such precision that he "could make out the trigger guard, the barrel... I was 100 percent convinced that he was carrying a handgun." At this point, V53 said, Duggan aimed the gun at him, so he fired twice, killing him within ten seconds.

After the shooting, V53 and the other officers on the scene gave statements containing the barest minimum detail, doing little more than confirming that the taxi had been stopped, Duggan got out, and was shot dead. They gave more substantive statements a few days later, after getting together in a room and conferring amongst themselves. All refused to be interviewed by the IPCC, only giving written answers to the questions posed to them. The IPCC report admits at paragraph 1653 that "the lack of an open, face-to face dialogue limits the extent to which the IPCC can effectively probe and verify the detail of [V53's] account," yet claims at paragraph 1715 that they have "never simply accepted... the truthfulness and accuracy of the officers' accounts... [but have] attempted to probe, challenge, and question the officers' evidence throughout the investigation."

So the IPCC definitely probed the evidence, except when they couldn't.

Despite their empty criticisms of police collusion, and the blatant contempt which police exhibit towards the "independent" body that is supposed to investigate them, the IPCC report ultimately finds in the police's favor, accepting that V53's "honestly held belief" (a wording which, for obvious reasons, V53 seems to have lifted directly from "Beckford v. R" where the test for self-defense is defined) was indeed genuine.

There are still questions to be asked. All of the police accounts agree (naturally, since they conferred with each other when they wrote them) that Duggan did not throw anything during the incident. Witness B, who lived opposite and claimed to have seen the shooting, also said that Duggan had not thrown anything. So why was the gun found over four yards from his body? Some people have speculated that in fact the gun stayed in the shoebox during the incident and was moved after the shooting by police, a theory which fits with the forensic evidence, and with the evidence of some of the witnesses at last year's inquest. The IPCC dismiss the accounts of these witnesses out of hand, saying that their accounts have inconsistencies—a flaw which is arguably common in genuine memories of dramatic events that have not been robotically dictated by a police lawyer. The IPCC also claim, more convincingly, that mobile phone footage of the aftermath shot from a flat opposite, does not appear to show a gun being planted.

The alternative view is that Duggan threw the gun away. This was the conclusion of the jury at the inquest. Eight of the jurors thought that he had thrown it onto the grass before any police officers reached the pavement, and a ninth concluded that he had thrown it away shortly after exiting the taxi. Only one juror noted that none of the witnesses to the inquest had described seeing Duggan throw anything away.

The IPCC also opts for the thrown gun scenario, albeit with a conclusion that is slightly at odds with the inquest jury. Rather than throwing the gun away before the shooting, they conclude that Duggan was in the process of throwing it away in the exact moment that he was shot. This is, apparently, "the most plausible explanation" for its eventual location.

Why is this the most plausible explanation? What evidence, specifically, can the IPCC draw on to state that Duggan was in the act of throwing away a gun while shot? Certainly not the evidence of V53, who described in great detail a gun held in Duggan's hand and aimed at police. What permits the IPCC to essentially take on trust every single aspect of the police officers' accounts, except in the one crucial detail that Duggan did not hold or aim a gun? Why is this "the most plausible" account?

The answer here depends, crucially, on the definition of plausible. For the IPCC, it seems, it is almost impossible to imagine police wrongdoing. That claim might seem like quite a leap, but there's precedent in UK judicial history. In the case of the Birmingham Six—a group of innocent Irish men who police tortured into false confessions—the judge Lord Denning blocked their attempt to take a civil action against West Midlands Police for the violence they had suffered. He did so on the basis that, if they lost, it would be a waste of time, but if they won, "it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous... That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, 'It cannot be right that these actions should go any further.'" In other words, Denning simply would not entertain the prospect of police wrongdoing, and so declined to investigate any allegation of it.

In the same way, the IPCC seems to regard the police as moral by definition, and is inclined to regard any account of an event that exonerates the police as a priori the "most plausible." In this case, this has meant constructing a narrative whose crucial details have little basis in the available evidence. They have failed the family of Mark Duggan—remember, regardless of the frequently alleged, mostly unsubstantiated flaws of Mr. Duggan, it is his family that the IPCC are supposed to protect—just like they have failed the literally thousands of other people who have seen loved ones die at the hands of, or in the custody of, the police. If the purpose of the IPCC is to be independent, or to secure justice, or to make the police accountable, then it is not fit for purpose. It should be scrapped.

There is a final coda here. Last weekend, the Mail on Sunday suggested that Kevin Hutchinson-Foster could have been a protected police informant. It took police nine weeks to arrest him for allegedly supplying a gun to Duggan, and he had previously seen gun charges mysteriously dropped, in a case for which the Crown Prosecution Service claims to have lost the paperwork. This is significant because of the critical light it throws on the operation to follow and arrest Duggan. If Hutchinson-Foster had some kind of close, ongoing relationship with police, why did his handlers seemingly allow him to distribute guns? The Met often say following successful arrests that they have "taken a dangerous firearm off the streets." Keeping such weapons off the streets of London is a good aim, but less coherent as a policy if those dangerous firearms are put onto those same streets by protected police informants.

Follow Harry on Twitter.

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Image via

The Australian Crime Commission (ACC) released a report yesterday titled The Australian Methylamphetamine Market. As stated on the report's website it "consolidates open source information with operational and strategic intelligence" related to the trade of ice and all other forms of meth in Australia. This hasn't prevented some news organizations from covering the report's summation of old findings as if they were new.

Unlike the annual ACC Illicit Drug Data report this new document does not, and was not intended to, provide the public with fresh figures. For almost all of its statistics the report draws upon previously published ambulance data, hospital data, the National Drug Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS), and certain international reports such as those released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

New information contained in the report is based on "operational and strategic intelligence" and is therefore necessarily general in nature. There are case studies presented but they're mostly non-specific, probably due to ongoing investigations. If they are specific, like the report's breakdown of the town of Mildura's experience with outlaw biker gangs, the cases are more likely than not already public knowledge.

The report mostly concerns the ways in which organized crime has become more involved in meth production and distribution. It outlines how several different organized crime groups from around the world cooperate to bring the drug and its precursors (the chemicals needed to produce it) to Australia.

It further outlines the ingenuity of organized crime in Australia. "Several instances have been identified in which organised crime group members, or their associates, have established a chemical-related business with the intention of appearing legitimate and using it as a cover for purchasing and possessing precursors."

Organized crime increasing their involvement in an illicit drug trade is not surprising. Particularly given the premium prices Australian users pay for methamphetamine.

And some of the seemingly new information, focused on by several news organizations, has been previously announced by various police sources and reported on by the media. Yesterday the Sydney Morning Herald referred to the damage meth labs have on the local environment; the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) did that two months ago. The West Australian honed in how Iranian meth is imported through Asia to Australia; Perth Now had that story last month.

Some news organizations are reporting its listing of old findings from other reports as if they were new facts. For instance the Guardian website posted an article which claims "Crime commission report shows 1.3 million Australians have tried methamphetamine in the form of ice or speed." While that statistic can be found in the report, it is contained within a section outlining the findings of the 2013 NDSHS.

The report and the articles about it explicitly suggest that the number of users in Australia is increasing but provide no new data that directly demonstrates such a thing.

As some experts have posited, and was outlined in a VICE article from last year, there is a potential misunderstanding occurring in the interpretation of existing statistics related to the trade and use of methamphetamine in Australia. Because some reporting systems show increased use, many police spokespeople and most news organizations have leapt to the conclusion that this means Australia, in spite of the findings of the NDSHS, necessarily has an increasing number of users.

They either miss or ignore that increased use might be limited to existing addicts/users and that crime and ambulance statistics might have more to do with increased potency. This was the argument made by Paul Dietze from the Burnet Institute in Melbourne last year. The same number of users taking a stimulant of higher purity more frequently is bound to result in added pressure on Australia's hospital, ambulance, and police resources.

The potential hazards of meth are already serious and do not require news media alarmism.

Follow Girard on Twitter: @GirardDorney

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A protest in solidarity with Mike Brown in London. Photo by Jake Lewis

Related: The Police Watchdog That Cleared Mark Duggan's Killer Should Be Scrapped

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's been nearly four years since the killing of Mark Duggan—shot dead in Tottenham, North London, by an officer known as "V53"—and in some ways it feels as though we are even further from justice now than we were in August 2011. By this point, a number of state investigations have come to an end. Yesterday came the latest—the Independent Police Complaints Commission's (IPCC) investigation of the fatal shooting. Each of these successive inquiries and reviews have been unable to agree on simple facts. Last year, the inquest found that Mark Duggan was not holding a gun while he was shot; yesterday, the IPCC found that he was likely in the process of throwing away a gun while he was shot. Meanwhile the officer who killed him, V53, claims that he could see the barrel of the gun aimed towards him as he shot each of the two rounds, pausing to re-assess between each.

Whilst the facts change depending on which part of the state you ask, they are all quick to agree in unison that this was a lawful killing. The firearms officer's use of force was reasonable. The killing of Mark was just.

For the family and friends of Mark Duggan (as well as the countless number of people who have followed the case since the shooting with anger) the claim that he was killed justly is hard to stomach. Not least because the state seems to be saying that not only was killing Mark lawful, but that justice was served precisely by killing him. V53 didn't do an acceptable thing—he did the right thing. A criminal was taken out, and so any law-abiding citizen should be glad.

In opposition to the state's narrative, many are unwilling to accept this form of justice. Neither the killing nor the investigations that followed have brought the Duggan family anything approaching accountability. Pamela Duggan, Mark Duggan's mother, says that the IPCC report that took three and half years to be written was "another slap in the face" and she is right. At every stage, the state has tried to absolve itself of blame and in the process have repeated the trauma of Mark's killing over and over again.

If we have learned anything from the eruptions in the United States, it is that black people who are killed by the police are denied "life" before and after their deaths. We are criminals plain and simple, divested of all the standard hallmarks of being a person with strengths and faults. With each killing of a black person, you see the police and media very quickly working to rewrite personal histories, coloring people as having not deserved life anyway. Who cares if they're dead now? They had no life to begin with. In an instant Michael Brown went from a son and recent high school graduate to a criminal. Similarly Mark Duggan went from being a son and father to gangster as soon as he was shot.

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Carole Duggan, Mark Duggan's aunt, speaking at a protest for Michael Brown in London. Photo by Jake Lewis

The #BlackLivesMatter movement has made deaths in custody a problem not just of death but also of life. Calling for state accountability has become as much about living as it is about dying. A battleground has emerged over the lives of those killed, with the state on one side, erasing and extinguishing the value of black life. On the other are campaigners forcing a re-think—not only on the part of the state, but by privileged white people the law protects.

Saying that "black lives matter" is both an imperative as well as an interesting demand for justice. The justice we need recognizes institutional racism from police, educators, employers, health professionals, and governments as all part and parcel of the culture that leads to epidemic levels of black deaths at the hands of the state. For many black people in the US and elsewhere, there is little opportunity to live full and flourishing lives. Justice for these campaigners, then, is about radically transforming society so that this is no longer the case.

At this point it is a naked fact that the state criminalizes and brutalizes people based on the color of their skin and calls it justice.

The Institute of Race Relations published research this week on the deaths of 509 Black and Asian people who have died in all forms of state custody under suspicious circumstances in the UK. There has not been a single conviction following these deaths. With this kind of evidence it is easy to see which side criminal justice is on. At this point it is a naked fact that the state criminalizes and brutalizes people based on the color of their skin and calls it justice. This same prejudice means that the state will even kill and say that, in the process of killing, justice has taken its course.

This "justice" is so blind and toothless in the face of rampant unrepentant killings that it is no justice at all. Black people have a better chance of getting real justice if we invest our hopes in social movements—movements which have already vowed to be unrelenting in their pursuit of accountability—rather than having any faith in the state institutions that are supposed to hand that accountability out.

We have started to talk about black life as a central category around which to organize ourselves, and that means that there is perhaps now a chance for accountability from below. For the first time in quite a while, there seems to be a mass anti-racist movement building, not only across the Atlantic but here in the UK too, with young black people refusing to be the next unaddressed black death.

Where there is no justice there can be no peace. Where there is black death there can be no life. We remain suspended in a battle for justice that it is now decades long at least. But at long last it seems to have moved from being a fringe issue to a question of how we live with one another in the everyday. Not only has the excessive end of policing come under scrutiny, but day-to-day policing is now under attack for its racism too. Thousands were arrested and imprisoned for taking part in the uprisings following the killing of Mark Duggan, yet his shooter, V53, is essentially lauded as a hero by the state. They celebrate that their operation took a gun off the street, glossing over the fact it also took Mark's life.

We must be clear in saying that their claims to justice hold no sway over us. It is their justice, not ours. Alongside the Duggan family we will not tire from our fight for a justice that is just to us and for a society where black life matters.

Follow Wail on Twitter.

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Screenshot of Kearns' website

The Six Nations community in southern Ontario had been piling their garbage onto an overflowing landfill since 2006, but thought their trash troubles would finally be over when they were pitched a supposedly innovative solution.

Wearing a paddy cap and speaking with a charming Scottish brogue, John Kearns, 77, promised the southern Ontario First Nations community "a new and very unique technology," a waste disposal unit with zero (zero!) emissions. Kearns told them that his machine, which he called "The Disintegrator," would be easier to maintain and more cost efficient than a run-of-the-mill incinerator. Though he doesn't exactly cut the figure of an slick, Silicon Valley-type innovator, Kearns is no stranger to a powerful sales pitch. His "Disintegrator," having never been sold or tested in a practical environment, was a risk for Six Nations, but according to Kearns they were on the frontier of environmentally friendly waste-disposal technology, "[t]he world is full of people prepared to be second. It has taken us quite a bit to find someone to be first."

But a few weeks after firing up the device for the first time, community members noticed black smoke and the smell of burning plastic coming from the site. After they protested, the machine was shut down until an independent environmental assessment could be completed. When independent consultants looked at The Disintegrator, they discovered it was emitting 200 times the Ontario provincial limits of some toxins. Six Nations Elected Council (SNEC) held a meeting to consult with community about their options last week, but Kearns was nowhere to be found and unavailable to answer questions, nor has he responded to VICE's multiple interview requests by phone or by email. Six Nations put $805,000 into the project, but the inventor is nowhere in sight.

For Six Nations, the failure of another waste disposal device is a large problem. According to the Two Row Times, SNEC purchased a $1.3 million incinerator from the British Columbia-based EcoAceSolutions after the Six Nations landfill filled up in 2006. But the company went bankrupt before all the parts could be delivered, forcing the council to look for another option.

Though Kearns touted his machine as a "new and different" technology, Kearns actually created The Disintegrator three decades ago, which means the innovative technology is about as old as Michael Jackson's moonwalk. According to Pat Bates, who worked with Kearns as the vice-president of the Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation, he developed it for Sydney, Nova Scotia, but they declined to purchase it at the time. Ever since, he's been pitching the device to various communities, from Peel Region to Armour Township to Kawartha Lakes, who all declined, probably because Kearns is selling a machine with a name that sounds like the title to a straight-to-video Dolph Lundgren movie.

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Screenshot of Kearns' website

He advertised the device with a relatively slick website, which tells you a lot about the benefits of the device but not a lot about the science, and this hilariously overwrought video on YouTube that positions The Disintegrator as mankind's saviour from a world of trash. When a local newspaper asked him why the machine wasn't approved by governing authorities, Kearns said things like "they wouldn't give me a permit because I don't conform," positioning himself as a rebel against the supposed politics and corruption that governs much municipal waste management. His lone claim to The Disintegrator's effectiveness was a 130-page third-party report by AMEC (now AMEC Foster Wheeler), an engineering consultancy firm, from 2000.

But the stats that Kearns mentions from the report don't represent the whole story. Kearns told the CBC a little over a year ago that "Comparing the two [the incinerator to The Disintegrator] would be like comparing the biplane to the F18. They both fly, but one decidedly different to the other." But Murray Thomson, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto, says the system, as presented on Kearns's website, "looks on the face of it like a fairly conventional incineration system," and suspects that Kearns's decision to brand it as a new technology is motivated by PR rather than science. While Kearns positioned The Disintegrator as an entirely new technology, the machine was never anything more than a variant of existing incinerators, even if it functioned properly.

While Kearns emphasized the "zero-emissions" aspect of the machine in his pitch, he only used a couple metrics, such as The Disintegrator's 0.00 total hydrocarbon parts per million THC emissions, as proof. He said it does this by operating at a high temperature, but higher temperatures can also cause the release of non-hydrocarbon toxins. "Normally," says Thomson, "higher temperatures would give you more NOx [nitrous oxide] emissions and the other downside is higher temperatures might evaporate more metals."

While low-emission incinerators exist, and are quite common in Europe, a considerable amount of money is required to develop and maintain those technologies. Thomson points to Plasco Energy Group's "plasma gasification" process, in which waste is converted into gases that are used for energy, as an example. "When I went there on a tour everyone was excited and we were like, 'This is going to solve every problem in the world!'" But despite sound science (clearly explained in a video that doesn't suggest the apocalypse is nigh), $140 million in private investment, and a $180-million deal signed with the city of Ottawa, Plasco filed for creditor protection earlier this year. Technologies like that exist in a different world than The Disintegrator, which Kearns advertises as a low-cost and low-maintenance alternative to incineration.

Given the benefit of the doubt, The Disintegrator isn't bad technology, it's just not particularly novel. Instead of investing in a new, groundbreaking "zero-emissions" technology, Six Nations bought a faulty, ten-year-old incinerator with 30-year-old technology. If the Council had wanted to purchase a regular-non-disintegrating incinerator, they would have had better luck with a provincially-approved machine from a more trustworthy source, but they went with Kearns's plan, and now the community may now be stuck with it.

SNEC agreed to pay for a testing phase of the machine, which came to approximately $805,000, pending a $4.8 million purchase if the testing proved successful. According to a newsletter distributed at last week's community meeting, the council is still considering a purchase, despite the fact that the machine is emitting carcinogenic toxins and residents of the community are worried about the effect of the emissions on their health. Six Nations Elected Chief Ava Hill declined to talk to VICE about the situation, but the community still has to find a workable way to dispose of their excess trash, and soon.

It's not likely to come from some magical device like The Disintegrator.

Follow Alan Jones on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user TBEC Review

On October 17, 2014, Flavour Crafters, one of Canada's largest manufacturers of e-cigarette liquids, received a 26-page report from a chemical analysis laboratory in Durham, North Carolina. The report summarized testing performed on Flavour Crafters' line of e-liquids, found one of them to contain a chemical linked to a devastating respiratory disease, and led the London, Ontario company to rapidly recall from across Canada over 5,000 bottles of one of its flavours: Groovy Grape.

The recall was not the result of Groovy Grape failing to meet the standards set by consumer protection laws—as Canada has no federal and little provincial legislation tailored to govern the production and sale of e-cigarettes and e-liquids. Rather, Flavour Crafters withdrew its product in accordance with a set of best-practices that member companies of the Electronic Cigarette Trade Association of Canada (ECTA) impose on themselves to try fill the regulatory vacuum left by the federal government and bring scientific scrutiny to an industry where product testing is still not the norm and where producers and consumers alike may be ignorant of what's hiding in those clouds of vapor.

There's a growing belief within the medical community that—for smokers—e-cigarettes are a less dangerous alternative to their combustible counterparts. But there is also a great deal that is unknown about the long-term health effects of vaping.

In Canada, however, the legal status of e-cigarettes is just as unclear as their long-run effect on health.

Until very recently, the extent of Canadian government policy around e-cigarettes was contained in a 400-word notice Health Canada released on March 27, 2009. It stated that e-cigarettes fall under the Food and Drugs Act, that all products within the scope of this act require market authorization from Health Canada, and that e-cigarettes don't have that authorization.

Six years later, in an email responding to VICE's questions about the legality of e-cigarettes, a Health Canada spokesperson repeated these claims nearly verbatim: "E-cigarette products, including e-liquids, that contain any amount of nicotine or have a health claim fall within the scope of the Food and Drugs Act and require approval by Health Canada before they can be imported, advertised or sold in Canada. Health Canada has not approved any e-cigarette with nicotine for sale; it is not permitted to be sold."

According to Health Canada, this is the law.

But since 2009, despite scores of cease-and-desist letters and tens of thousand of dollars worth of e-cigarettes and e-liquids being effectively turned away at the Canadian border, a number of Canadian e-cigarette companies have stubbornly insisted that Health Canada is wrong about the law. And University of Ottawa law professor David Sweanor says they might be right.

"Just because a government entity says something is illegal, doesn't mean it is," explained Sweanor. "That's not how it works in a constitutional democracy. You can say, 'You're wrong. I'll see you in court.'"

This is just what Canadian e-cigarette companies have done, and Health Canada has not pursued court cases that would force the judicial system to settle indeterminacy around e-cigarettes.

In this legal grey zone Canada's e-cigarette industry has boomed.

In 2013, Sweanor, who studies health policy around nicotine and tobacco products, estimated that the Canadian e-cigarette market could be worth $150-million. Forecasts from investment banks suggest that global sales of e-cigarettes in 2015 may reach $6.5-billion, up from around $1.9-billion in 2012, and they are bullish about the future of the industry.

But operating outside the law, with no regulation or government oversight is hard for producers and creates risks for consumers. For years, many in both camps have been calling for the government to step in.

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A worker bottles and caps e-liquid. Photo courtesy Flavour Crafters

Popcorn-Worker's Lung
Groovy Grape, like most liquids vaporized in e-cigarettes, was a solution of vegetable glycerin, propylene glycol, and varying amounts of nicotine. Although little is known about the long-run effects of inhaling theses substances, in the short run, they are seen as fairly benign. But Groovy Grape also contained a flavouring agent, one that used the chemical diacetyl.

Most people haven't heard of diacetyl, but nearly everyone's consumed it.

The yellow-green liquid is an organic compound that occurs as a natural product of fermentation. Also known as butanedione, diacetyl is one of the two chemicals that give butter its distinctive rich, creamy taste. Health Canada and the United States Food and Drug Administration approve diacetyl for consumption in trace amounts, and it is found on the ingredients list of a wide range variety of foods under the obscurity, "Natural and Artificial Flavours."

Diacetyl is also used in flavourings added to e-liquids, most commonly in sweet ones—a practice that the ECTA is trying hard to end.

Numerous scientific studies—including several by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)—link the inhalation of diacetyl to a disease colloquially known as Popcorn-Workers Lung, for the eight people who contracted the rare malady after working in a Missouri popcorn plant where diacetyl was used as a flavouring.

The disease's medical name is less playful: it's bronchiolitis obliterans.

Bronchiolitis obliterans develops when an irritant inflames the bronchiole, the myriad tiny passageways that allow air to pass from the nose and mouth to the lungs. As the bronchiole try to heal themselves, scar tissue builds up, further obstructing the flow of air to the lungs. This damage is irreversible. By 2004, four of the eight originally diagnosed workers were on lung transplantation waiting lists.

A 2013 report from the CDC and NOISH cites diacetyl as the suspected cause of—at least— five deaths and hundreds of injuries from respiratory damage in the Missouri popcorn industry, and an investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel suggests that there have been many more.

It is difficult to establish a causal relationship through after-the-fact epidemiological analysis, but diacetyl has been repeatedly shown to cause severe lung damage through animal testing. The introduction of the 2013 CDC and NOISH report states, "Studies involving laboratory animals have demonstrated that exposure to butter flavouring chemicals, and specifically diacetyl and 2, 3-pentanedione, causes damage to the respiratory tract that is consistent with the development of bronchiolitis obliterans."

Few e-liquids have been recalled for diacetyl, but a 2014 study by the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco found that many contain the chemical.

The study was headed by Konstantinos Farsalinos, a leading researcher on e-cigarettes and doctor at the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center in Athens, Greece. It tested 159 samples of sweet-flavoured e-liquids from 36 different manufacturers in seven different countries. It found that 74.2 percent of the liquids contained diacetyl, and nearly half of those contained concentrations that exceeded the safety limit for occupational exposure (five parts per billion) proposed by NIOSH.

"Diacetyl is an avoidable risk because—unlike in smoking where the levels of diacetyl, which are several times higher than what we've found in e-cigarettes, are the result of combustion—in e-cigarettes it's present as an ingredient," said Farsalinos.

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Groovy Grape e-liquid. Photo courtesy Vape Nation

Sour grapes
Flavour Crafters operates two production labs: one dedicated to mixing batches of e-liquid and one for bottling them. On a daily basis, these labs pump out between 30 and 50 gallons of e-liquid, which is mixed in one-gallon jugs and separated into ten- and 30-milliliter bottles for retail.

Depending on size, nicotine concentration and volume being sold, a bottle of Flavour Crafters e-liquid will sell for between $6 and $20. On average, the company produces between 4,000 and 8,000 of these bottles each day.

Flavour Crafters revenue last year was close to $3 million, and Joel Verburg, the company's executive director, said that they have experienced nearly 400 percent annual growth every year since they began producing their own e-liquids in 2011.

When Flavour Crafters is mixing one of its e-liquids, each ingredient in every batch is documented with an identification number and the molecular weight used is recorded. The mixing jug is then assigned a batch date and all this information is stored in a database and used to print labels for the retail bottles filled from that batch. This system also serves to precisely track the contents of each bottle.

"We didn't start this detailed, but as we've done it, we've tried to perfect it as much as possible because we want to have full traceability of our products," said Verburg.

As a member of the ECTA, Flavour Crafters is required to submit samples of their e-liquids for testing every six months. In 2013, the ECTA began running these tests, supervised by an independent auditor, through Enthalpy Analytical, Inc., a North Carolina lab that specializes in analyzing gases. ECTA liquids are tested for acetaldehyde, acetoin, diacetyl, formaldehyde, pentanedione, nicotine concentration, acidity, and water content.

In October of last year, when Enthalpy found that Groovy Grape contained diacetyl in levels slightly above the ECTA's "maximum acceptable limit" (100 micrograms per milliliter, a cutoff a little lower than the one NIOSH recommended), Flavour Crafters' tracing system came into action.

Verburg told VICE that his company was able to recover every unsold bottle of Groovy Grape on the market, soon after it received Enthalpy's report. In a statement (since removed) on the company's website, it urged its clients to return any unused bottles of Groovy Grape for a full refund or exchange them for double the amount of another e-liquid. Flavour Crafters covered all shipping expenses and estimated that the recall cost them between $10,000 and $15,000.

"There was direct communication with all of our re-sellers to make sure everything was brought back," said Verburg. "We tried to make it really, really appealing for people to return it."

A few Canadian e-liquid retail websites still list Groovy Grape as in-stock and available for purchase. When contacted by VICE, these retailers said that they are no longer selling the flavour and that they have not yet updated their sites to reflect the recall.

Groovy Grape has been on the market in Canada since as early as April, 2012. According to the Flavour Crafters' testing records (available on their website), it was first tested for diacetyl in October 2014. However, Verburg said that Flavour Crafters had earlier tested a liquid that was a blend of equal parts Groovy Grape and a tobacco flavored liquid. These tests found no diacetyl.

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Bottling lab. Photo courtesy Flavour Crafters

Vape but verify
The strict production and testing standards of Flavour Crafters and the other 37 members of the ECTA, make these producers anomalous in Canada's large e-cigarette industry.

Making e-liquid is easy: it requires no specialized equipment or knowledge and the basic ingredients are readily attainable. In fact, vegetable glycerin, propylene glycol, nicotine, and a huge variety of flavourings can all be purchased on Amazon.

Home brewing e-liquid is extremely popular and even considered a sort of art by some enthusiasts. The DIY sub-forum on e-cigarette-forum.com has 15,213 threads and 244,842 individual posts. At the top of the forum is a disclaimer: "All DIY procedures are done at your own risk."

Although she said that many now well-established companies started this way, ECTA Director Kate Ackerman and owner of Electro Vapors admonished DIY mixing. "It is not OK to produce something for commercial use in your kitchen, at the table, while the kids are eating Kraft Dinner ... Not having any oversight, not having anyone to answer to, that's not a proper way to produce anything."

Even beyond the home brewers, it is impossible to get an accurate count of how many e-cigarette retailers and e-liquid producers there are in Canada. There is no distinct business type for e-cigarette stores: some are registered as electronics shops, others as personal accessory stores, still others seem not to be registered businesses at all.

Since around 2012, e-cigarette stores have been opening in cities across Canada with rapidity and in a volume reminiscent of the early days of Starbucks. Some of these shops purchase the e-liquids they sell from large producers like Flavour Crafters, but others mix their own liquids, sometimes right in the shop, as a way to increase profit.

John Aikman said that when he opened his e-cigarette shop, Vape Lion, in Montreal just over a year ago it was one of four or five devoted e-cigarette retailers in the city. He estimates that there are now closer to 40.

Vape Lion is one of the shops that produce their e-liquid in-house. Aikman purchases the ingredients in bulk and mixes them in a room in the back of his downtown store. When asked about the flavourings he uses and how he guards against diacetyl and other harmful chemicals, Aikman said that he relies on the e-cigarette web forums and guarantees from flavouring companies.

"There is a very strong online community and if anybody finds anything wrong with a particular brand of liquid, then it instantly goes viral," said Aikman, "We just deal with five or six large flavouring companies, and they'll say right out if a flavour contains diacetyl or not."

But guarantees without testing can't always be trusted, and even producers and home-brewers aware of the risks associated with the diacetyl may be ignorant of the fact that their liquids contain it.

Flavour Crafters stopped production of one other e-liquid due to diacetyl content. The results from Enthalpy Analytical's first testing of Flavour Crafters liquids showed that their butterscotch contained 1,779 micrograms of diacetyl per milliliter—more than 15 times what was later found in Groovy Grape.

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Premixed e-liquid waiting to be bottled. Photo courtesy Flavour Crafters

This came as a surprise to Flavour Crafters, who had been purchasing their flavouring from Flavor West, a California flavouring company. According to a statement on Flavour Crafter's website, Flavor West had advertised their butterscotch flavouring as being free of diacetyl, and after being contacted by Flavour Crafters with the test result they removed the diacetyl-free claim from the webpage.

Today, the page for butterscotch on the Flavor West's website states, "Independently laboratory tested diacetyl free. Contains 1.074% acetoin."

When contacted by VICE about the 2013 incident with Flavour Crafters and its present testing regime, Flavor West's corporate financial officer Jason Stern said that some of their flavours previously contained diacetyl but it has since been removed. Stern could not give specific dates for when this change was made or during what periods the Flavor West's website stated that their butterscotch flavouring was diacetyl free.

He was also unable to say exactly when Flavor West began having their flavourings tested for chemical content, although he said it was around a year-and-a-half or two years ago, and did not respond to follow-up emails asking for specific dates. Diacetyl was found in Flavour Crafters' butterscotch on June 16, 2013.

Stern declined to tell VICE who is conducting chemical testing for Flavor West.

"If someone is putting our flavouring in their juice, I don't know exactly what's going on with that," said Stern. "I've actually told everybody that if they want to test to see that it's diacetyl free, they need to do a third-party test on their end as well."

Discussing his study on diacetyl in e-liquids, Farsalinos said that a number of other e-liquid producers had been surprised when the test results for their products came back positive for the chemical. As with Flavour Crafters' butterscotch, they had been using flavourings advertised as diacetyl free.

Both Farsalinos and Ackerman are optimistic that the use of flavourings with diacetyl has declined since the publication of the study, but they also agreed that there is no substitute for testing.

"I think that taught a big lesson to the companies that they shouldn't just accept whatever they hear," said Farsalinos "They must provide test results to prove that the liquids are diacetyl free."

Earlier this month, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health (HESA) issued the Canadian government's first step towards creating a policy around e-cigarettes since Health Canada ineffectively prohibited them in 2009.

The HESA report makes 14 recommendations for government action on e-cigarettes. They include calling for more research funding, a number of measures to guard against children using e-cigarettes, requiring clear labeling of e-liquids, banning vaping in public spaces, and establishing "a new legislative framework ... for regulating electronic cigarettes."

The bi-partisan report does not take a stance on the health effects of vaping or the effectiveness of e-cigarettes for smoking cessation and there is no timeline for turning its recommendations into law.

Nowhere in its 58 pages does the HESA report specify standards for e-liquid testing or mention the word diacetyl.

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