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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

My fascination with drag culture began at the age of ten, when I demanded that my family rent Kinky Boots from Blockbuster, much to my mom's confusion. Fast-forward to 2014 and I'm rolling about on the floor, off my tits, as Sink the Pink hosts their late-night gender-fucking club night at Bestival. Drag, for me and so many, has always been the brightest jewel in the queer scene's crown, a glittery thread running through the fabric of what makes our community so wonderful.

This week, one of London's top drag venues, The Black Cap in Camden, shut its doors for the final time and it's a fucking travesty. Gay people had been going there since 1965, when homosexuality was still illegal. Meth, the queen whose notorious Lab has seen homegrown and international talent take to the Cap's stage in the past couple of years, is hurting. "The loss of such an incredible queer space and over 50 years of queer history is a devastating blow to our community."

Meth isn't throwing in the towel quite yet, though. "It has been an incredible, invigorating year for drag in the UK and though the Cap was an integral part of this movement, it does not end with her." Such is the determination shared by all the young queens I've spoken to.

Watching the outpourings of sadness and disappointment within the community at losing the Cap, it made me think about how much of a pull drag and drag nights have for young, gay 20-somethings. For something that has been around for so long, it's amazing how many young people find excitement and belonging with drag—and not just through watching Ru Paul's Drag Race. Nights hosted at the Cap weren't catering to a threadbare, niche audience—they were packed to the rafters each and every time, with young people. That says something.

I grew up thinking drag was supposed to give a boost to a section of society who, in the past, had been treated as pariahs for their whole lives. But in a country where we are continually told that the LGBT community has it better than we've ever had it before (we can marry each other now, y'know), why are young gay men still so excited by chucking on a maxi dress and taking to the stage?

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Meth, whose night "The Lab" was a Black Cap favorite

I went to The Meth Lab at the Cap a few weeks back, where a line of people were standing in the pissing rain to see Raja, of Drag Race fame. I asked some people in the line why they'd come along. "Have you got any ket?" was the first answer I got. But then I found 24-year-old Joshua, who'd traveled down from deepest Wales for the night. "Drag has always been both on the edge of and central to gay culture," he said. "They're the nasty, indigestible underbelly, but get on the stage and become a freaky ambassador for the community at large."

He's right, of course. Drag queens have a history of being at the forefront of the fight for LGBT rights. When the Stonewall riots sparked in New York in 1969, paving the way for a less shitty future for the queer community, it was when three drag queens and a lesbian were dragged into a paddy wagon by the NYPD that the community said, "Fuck this." The riots began at about 3 AM after a police raid of the Stonewall Inn—a gay club on Christopher Street—turned nasty. Although the police were legally justified in their raiding of the club (they were serving booze without a license), New York's queer community were sick of the police targeting their venues with such singular vision and fought back. The crowds gathering on the streets watched, quietly, as the bar's employees were arrested, but grew more animated when the queens and the lesbians were forced in the van. They started lobbing bottles at the police, who were forced to scurry into the bar for shelter. The protest bled into several neighboring blocks and was not abated until the riot police were called in.

Today, we still have plenty of politically-motivated queens. Ireland's Panti Bliss is a prominent example, using her platform to actively fight against homophobia wherever she can. But what's driving the young queens of today? The ones not long out of university, who can only relate to events like the Stonewall riots through historical texts?

For 23-year-old Lydia L'Scabies, drag has been a salvation. "I was going through a pretty messy break-up, woke up one morning on a stonking comedown, looked in the mirror, and saw a seven stone mess staring back at me." A quick trip to the doctor confirmed that she had scabies ("it looked like Freddy Kruger's leg by this stage"), and it suddenly seemed to just click. "I saw all these parallels," she says. In what way? "Drag queens are parasites too; they live off their audience, without which they die."

Lydia has now taken it upon herself to be a one-stop shop for STD awareness. "We're pushing the boundaries," she says. "Drag creatures have always kicked up a fuss, made a scene about something or other. For me it's openly discussing sexual health and HIV. I saved myself from something potentially really bad through drag." Lydia might have "more STD's than GCSEs" (her words not mine), but she's a fighter.

When Lydia talks about her inspiration, there's an air of vulnerability that we don't often associate with drag— something she says plays a massive role. I've been watching Drag Race religiously for a long time, and I reckon Lydia's right. One queen, Detox, reveals on stage that she was in a horrific car accident, having found her ex-boyfriend dead at her apartment. In a reading task (the girls rip each other to shreds, often holding a puppet), one says, "It's illegal to have sex with Detox, because the majority of her is under 18 years old." In the same season, a trans woman beautifully makes her transition public. There are those whose parents disowned them, the ones who ran away to New York as teens, and haven't spoken to their families since. She's not the only queen to say the drag persona is a way of dealing with personal trauma.

The now legendary documentary Paris Is Burning, 25 years old this year, follows the lives of queens back in 80s Manhattan, where the scene provided a home for many; rejected by their families, subject to abuse and attacks on the streets. In one notorious scene, two 14-year-old boys are out on the streets alone at night, telling the camera they've nowhere to be, they have no parents.

Today's young drag artists aren't all aspiring for a hyper-feminized alter ego, contrary to what many outside the scene believe. Rodent Decay describes herself as a "millennium Myspace brat, born and raised in the sewers," unlike Benedict Douglas Stewardson, raised in the suburbs of Birmingham. "I don't want her to be too obviously feminine—she has a punk aesthetic, not one gender but androgynous." Rodent lets Benedict explore his female personality, not defining as a specific gender all the time.

For Rodent, if female mimicry isn't high on the agenda, what is? "We need to move queer culture forward," she says, unequivocally. "We've got marriage, woopdy-fucking-doo. But trans people are still committing suicide. We've got internal racism and misogyny, and there's a fuck-ton of body shaming in the gay community. We've got different targets now."

I met up with Crystal Lubrikunt, a student at Brighton University who isn't convinced that we've come all that far, either. When Crystal and fellow queen Meth (yep) jumped out their taxi in February last year after a night out on the town, two men and a knife were waiting outside the flat. "Within a few seconds of leaving the car, these two men started some trouble," she says. "One of them shouted, 'Oh look, a bunch of trannies,' and I legged it over to the shop round the corner to get some help, but the bloke behind the counter refused to do anything. Meth and her partner were thrown to the floor."

For Crystal, getting up on stage and doing her thing is a chance to hit back. "I'm getting this platform and, rather than just talking about anal and slagging off some C-list celebs, I can talk about Pussy Riot while also having a laugh." She's not joking. The first time I saw Crystal and the other House of Grand Parade girls, they were tearing up pictures of Putin while slut-dropping to Lilly Allen's Fuck You on stage at Brighton Pride.

Rodent isn't alone in championing an ultra gender-bending style of drag, where the lines between male and female aren't just crossed, but intertwined and therefore dismantled in their entirety. For Cheddar Gawjus, an artist based in Manchester, everything she does plays with these boundaries. "Cheddar has the idealized male form, muscular and toned, and, in drag, a beautiful feminine face," she says. "There's no evening gown or padding involved." In some performances, she looks more like a sexy Avatar character rather than a traditional queen.

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Cheddar Gawjus

For Cheddar, drag is about challenging ideas of orthodox beauty. "When you combine the fetishized male body and feminine face," she says, "people become troubled. It disrupts the attractiveness of these features in isolation." Having studied for a PHD in anthropology, Cheddar's approach to drag is somewhat academic. "Drag is about pushing a boundary and it's also about variety. I think it is a lab for identity, a way of playing with different presentations of our self, which allows us to imagine different possibilities in life. This might be about gender, power, or simply the way we define beautiful."

Joe Harwood, just 23, is described by some as the Dalai Lama of contemporary UK drag—an expert on the scene and its look. For Joe, gender politics is at the center, too. "I never had a strong desire of performing as a conventional drag queen," he says. Instead, he's made his way as a make up artist, with an army of fans tuning into to each and every one of his tutorials and addicted to his range of slap. The internet is a whole new platform for people like Joe, who don't want to get up on stage to make their points. "I was mistaken for a girl as a child," he says, "and when I started becoming more in control of my image as a teenager, I looked very ambiguous without actually intending to. I was more interested in looking like a sci-fi character but in everyone else's eyes that looked very female, so I really didn't have much awareness when it came to gender identity and how binary we see things in our culture." For him, that's what the scene is addressing.

By rejecting the distinction of dressing like a boy or girl, you are fighting one of the most profoundly violent things in modern human history: the social distinction between men and women.

For many who seek out the drag community, it's in search of an extended family, a sense of belonging with other "others." For many of the guys I speak to, the drag community is a family for self-described misfits in a society where we don't all quite yet have the equality, acceptance, love, and protection that our hetero counterparts take for granted. "I like to think we are all playing a part in forming a community of artists that care for and lift one another—something that is really needed among queer communities," says Cheddar, who considers herself as an aunt to many, and "mamma" to two. "So much of the gay scene is orientated around drinking, drugs, and sex. I think the importance of looking after one another has been a little lost in the contemporary, commercially-focused gay village."

There's a lot of uncertainty, it seems, within drag communities, as to where it's all heading, though. Personally, I suspect it may well be onto primetime TV in the not so distant future. More international variations of Drag Race. But I can't help feeling that drag also needs to retain its fringe status, too. It's a necessary counterbalance to the cleansing that the gay community is experiencing.

Where drug-fueled underground clubs once stood, corporate G-A-Y takeovers are now, pumping out the same 80s pop club classics night after night. Grindr has paved the way for sexual encounters without the need for public toilets (a Good Thing, don't get me wrong), but people once had to actually leave the house to meet new partners. Apps, while fantastic as a conduit to satisfaction for people who might not yet feel confident to put themselves out there in the "real" world, are probably eroding a sense of community. For many, going to Pride now is little more than an excuse to get pissed against the backdrop of a giant Barclays ad being pushed down the street.

All this is fine and good, but the queens are right—we've got a long way to go still. This new wave of young drag artists, with foundations in performance, academia, and queer culture, are clawing a culture back. The Black Cap closing is terrible, but it isn't the first obstacle for this community to deal with, and it almost definitely won't be the last. Meth is confident that we will "continue to flourish and thrive." In the immortal words of Latrice Royale, she says, "we will 'get up, look sickening, and make them eat it.'"

Breaking gender binaries and saying fuck you to homophobes is all well and good, but the question you're left with is often: why do some people do it in a dress, and others don't. For me it's a two-fold thing. Crossing those boundaries is both the means and the end. By rejecting the distinction of dressing like a boy or girl, you are fighting one of the most profoundly violent things in modern human history: the social distinction between men and women.

But drag is more than that still. "Exhibition and spectacle are powerful things. You are immediately and sometimes intimately connected to every person in the room, sometimes that can be good other times bad," says Cheddar. "But you'd be surprised how putting three hours of make-up on makes people listen to what you've got to say."

Follow Mike on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Steve Isaacs

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In September of 1999, Rina Radloff, a 51-year-old millionaire businesswoman, was found dead in her luxury South African estate. She'd been stabbed to death after answering a knock at the door, a trail of blood leading to her study upstairs. A nonsensical riddle was left in a note on her desk. "Strange pictures" were found in a downstairs room by investigating police—images of five-point stars and shadowy figures.

Two weeks after the murder, notes containing details that only the killer could know were faxed to the police. Suspicion fell on Radloff's ex-husband, who had subsequently married a famously eccentric local woman with a penchant for the "occult," Antoinette Radloff. Investigations were initiated and Antoinette was taken in for questioning. It was a long process fraught with sensational reports in local tabloids that she was capable of "transforming" and "moving things with her eyes," and ended with her suicide in December of 2000.

Two years later, two young men from the neighboring township were sentenced to life in prison, having been convicted of Rina's murder and confessed to being hired by Antoinette. A strange case came to a mundane conclusion, though local media had missed one fact: It was South Africa's Occult-Related Crime Unit's head, Dr. Kobus "Hound of God" Jonker, who'd initially brought Antoinette in for questioning due to the case's "occult" nature.

The Occult Unit was—and possibly is—the first and only of its kind in the world. Jonker founded it in 1992 at the behest of former Minister of Law and Order Adriaan Vlok during the last days of Apartheid. However it had its origin in the 1980s, from the notorious Dungeons & Dragons–inspired global Satanic panic.

The phenomenon had hit white South Africa—a community with a rich vein of Calvinist and conservative religious heritage—harder than anywhere in the world, bar, perhaps, the United States. As late as the early 2000s, many Afrikaans kids were still banned from reading Harry Potter, with its graphic depictions of witchcraft, or buying Lay's chips, which contained novelty Pokemon collectibles that children were said to have killed each other for. What had been an almost forgotten occurrence of global paranoia had crystallized into a state-sponsored, community-sanctioned witch hunt in South Africa; the original Occult Crime Unit channeled all of this existing paranoia, fanaticism, and fear into its mandate.

Jonker is a born-again Christian; an apparent ritual sacrifice during his career shocked him into the world of occult investigating. The Radloff case hadn't been his first jaunt into what he believed was the dark underbelly of South African satanism, but it would be close to his last—he retired in an official capacity after suffering a heart attack in 2000. Before then he'd written several books on the subject, toured the country speaking at schools, penned articles for the community police mag SERVAMUS ("We Serve") on how to identify satanists, and investigated cases of murder that had alleged satanic links.

According to Jonker, he was investigating upwards of 250 such cases a year in the 90s. He believed that there were "thousands" of satanists active in South Africa. According to another piece in SERVAMUS, quoted by Sunday Paper City Press in September of 2000, Jonker had been receiving death threats from satanists and was sent a pair of severed baboon hands by post. The Occult Unit's section on the South African Police Service's (SAPS) website was only removed in 2006. However, thanks to the magic of the internet, it's still available.

The official webpage makes for baffling reading. Warning signs of "possible destructive occult-related discourse" included "changes to the appearance of the child's bedroom," "child experiences sudden gender confusion," "child plays/loves fantasy games," "rejection of parental values," "draping hair across left eye," and other descriptions of the kind of things plenty of teenagers tend to do while also not being satanists.

Predictably, Christianity was a prerequisite of joining the unit.

Magazine features during the time of the Radloff case paint a holistic picture of Jonker, one of a man who considers all sides and remains reasonable and steadfast amid a cloud of skepticism, even from his peers. Apparently, Jonker broke up seven satanic rings in the Eastern Cape, with only two eluding him. Tales from those times include finding the severed head of a Chinese woman in a cupboard in a flat, several episodes of what Jonker calls demonic possession, and allegations of satanist police officers breaking into Jonker's offices to sabotage his work.

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Kobus Jonker while he was working in the Occult Unit. Screen shot via.

Jonker moved his offices (and so presumably those of the Occult Unit) from main headquarters in Pretoria. His commissioner would refuse to enter his office, which was filled with creepy souvenirs from his adventures, like candles made from human fat, chained Bibles, and animal skulls. A plaque above the entrance read: " Onde Jesus Bloed," which means "Under Jesus's Blood [protection]" in Afrikaans.

A documentary series called Witness followed Jonker and his deputy, Rietta Everton, around for a spell towards the end of the millennium, during the beginnings of the Rina Radloff case. In the show the two first inspect the house before Antoinette is filmed being arrested. It's not really clear in which capacity Jonker and Everton are operating, but the narrator does describe their positions within the Occult Unit—they work from offices in Pretoria but are called across the country to other police districts, where detectives meet them to discuss individual cases, none of which are conclusive of supernatural involvement or the like. The pair operate in plainclothes, and no mention is made of the size, budget, or mandate of the unit. They're certainly not parading about as some kind of Ghosbusters-esque squad, merely as detectives called in on specific cases.

The point here, however, is that South Africa did—and still does, to a large extent—take satanism very, very seriously, at least among certain parts of the population. The fascination with the occult hasn't disappeared, even since Dr. Attie Lamprecht—who succeeded Jonker in 2000—announced in 2006 that the Occult Unit had been officially disbanded and reabsorbed into other departments within the Detective Services as a result of a potential infringement of the right to freedom of religion, guaranteed by South Africa's famously progressive 1996 post-Apartheid constitution. This came in the wake of outrage from several Pagan and other alternative religious groups in the country, who were accusing the unit of conflating Pagan practice and identity with harmful satanic rituals.

Despite these groups' protestations, however, the fear lives on. Case in point: Some in the country tried to boycott Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" tour, with its satanic influence, back in 2012, and local pop star Toya DeLazy was accused of satanism for her album cover last year. The tragedy is that in between the complex net of alternative belief systems that encompass paganism, satanism, and traditional African cultures involving alternative medicine practices, people do get murdered, assaulted, and brainwashed. Murders with ritualistic or satanic undertones almost always make headlines in South Africa—like here, and here, and here. In many of these cases, Jonker has been called as an "expert" to give evidence.

The sad reality of the situation is that there truly is a need for a specialized unit dealing with ritual murders in South Africa.

In 2012, a leaked internal police memo revealed that the dissolved Occult Unit appeared to have been revived, albeit under a different name: the SAPS Harmful Religious Practices Unit.

By redefining occult crime as "crime that relates to or emanates primarily from an ostensible belief in the supernatural that formed a driving force in the crime," the new unit lends itself to a more practical, less fanatical air. Emphasis is placed on preventing (literal) witch hunts, a common occurrence in rural sectors, as well as ritualistic abuse. However, all this effort to appear sensible is sort of undermined by the inclusion of "curses intended to cause harm," "vampirism," "spiritual intimidation, including astral coercion," and "allegations of rape by a tokoloshe spirit."

And then reports surfaced that Jonker himself had returned to train detectives and equip them with the necessary skills to combat the occult. The focus this time seemed to have been shifted to tangible and real occult threats and not factually dubious underground conspiracies, but seeing as the "Hound of God" had trained the officers and the list of occult crimes still echoed traces of early-90s sentiment, how could anyone be sure?

What made the deal even more unclear was the fact that Parliament was unable to supply questioning members of the opposition with official statistics about the number of occult-related crimes. Dianne Kohler Barnard of the Democratic Alliance, the official opposition to the ruling majority African National Congress, was the MP who led the charge.

In response to an email about the statistics, she said: "In 2012 the SAPS effectively re-established the Harmful Occult-Related Crime Unit. We asked a question the previous year and the response was that they needed to get the info from the provinces. The question posed to the Minister was the number of occult-related crimes which have occurred in the last financial year following reports in the Daily Sun that the Occult-Related Crime Unit was to be re-established. We were told the information is not readily available."

The sad reality of the situation is that there truly is a need for a specialized unit dealing with muti (traditional South African medicine) and ritual murders in the country. Kohler Barnard feels particularly strongly about this. "One of the most awful incidents was of a ten-year-old boy who had his nose, ears, eyes, and shoulder ripped off, and a bone from his arm removed. This was quite possibly a muti murder," she said.

Kohler Barnard once again queried Parliament towards the end of last year, and it was revealed officially that there are 40 detectives within the SAPS who had received additional training to deal with the occult, but that no dedicated task force exists. This, then, is the current situation in 2015—murky, unsure, with a troubled and controversial past. A group exists, but it's unsure whether they're addressing real problems or chasing phantoms from the 80s.

Among the questions of organizational structure, operating costs, and logistics, ideological aspirations of transparency and accountability this raises, one overarching question remains: What is the true mandate of these 40 officers, and how can South Africa be sure that they don't operate as the Occult Unit did in the 90s when its head is Lamprecht and Jonker is still involved?

Without official government statistics it's impossible to tell, meaning—for now—we'll have to make do with the few facts we have.

Follow Karl on Twitter.

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Eric Harris sprinted underneath an Oklahoma sky that looked straight out of the movie Twister. Trailing behind were cops who said he had sold a firearm to an undercover officer. One took him down. Moments later, a 73-year-old reserve deputy named Robert Bates pulled out his handgun and shot Harris in the back at close range.

"He shot me! He shot me, man!" the 44-year-old can be heard yelling in video taken April 2 but only released to the public a week later. "Oh my God. I'm losing my breath."

"I shot him!" Bates exclaims, realizing his mistake. "I'm sorry."

On Monday, Bates, a former insurance executive and buddy of Tulsa County Sheriff Stanley Glanz, was indicted for second-degree manslaughter. On Tuesday, he surrendered at the Tulsa County Jail. Meanwhile, the cops are sticking with the story that he had mistaken his handgun for a Taser by accident.

"He made an error," Sheriff Glanz told local paper Tulsa World. "How many errors are made in an operating room every week?"

At first brush, the incident seems like just another instance of a white cop freaking out and shooting a black man dead—whether by accident or not. But Harris's family says that the case doesn't have anything to do with race.

Regardless of whether that's true, the Tulsa tragedy poses a question unique to the recent string of shooting deaths: What, exactly, was a senior citizen civilian doing with a gun?

There are approximately 140 reserve deputies in Tulsa County, Meredith Baker, general counsel to Sheriff Glanz, explained to me in an email. All of them are equipped to carry both Tasers and guns, and Bates was assisting with the Violent Crimes Task Force on the day of the incident. That number isn't totally unusual, according to Doug Wyllie, editor-in-chief of the cop forum PoliceOne.com. The economic downturn forced a big increase in reserve officers, whose assistance has helped some departments avoid closing entirely in recent years, Wyllie said.

However, the budget for the Tulsa County Sheriff's Department has actually been on the uptick since Bates came on board in 2009, records show. The department's budget for the 2009-2010 fiscal year was $8.6 million, according to county records. In 2010-2011 it was nearly $9.1 million. That same number for 2014-2015 was $9.8 million.

If concerns about money don't explain why a 73-year-old was assisting on the Violent Crimes Task Force, politics might.

According to an April 2010 Tulsa World story that is not available online, Sheriff Glanz spent more than $12,000 in county funds to take Bates and a chief deputy to a five-day conference of the National Sheriff's Association that was being held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The county footed the bill for airfare, meals, and accommodations at the Harbor Beach Marriott Resort & Spa. At the time, Glanz told the local paper that Bates had been assisting with the drug task force for about a year and a half and "as a reward I asked him if he would like to go."

Bates also donated several cars to the department. In 2012, he even headed up Glanz's re-election campaign and donated $2,500 to the cause.

According to Tulsa County Sheriff's Department Major Shannon Clark, "There are lots of wealthy people in the reserve program. Many of them make donations of items. That's not unusual at all." She even told the LA Times, "He isn't the only millionaire we've got."

But Wyllie of PoliceOne says that while it might be normal in Tulsa, the trend there doesn't extend nationwide.

"That type of cronyism isn't common at all," he told me. "The programs that I'm aware of are actually really very stringent and highly selective and in many cases the reservists do more training than the full-time counterparts, because they're the people who wanna get on the job. They wanna become more attractive job candidates, so they're eager to be the best cop on the shift."

In an interview this week with the Tulsa World, a reporter raised concerns to Sheriff Glanz that Bates was too old to be a wielding cop. In response, he whipped out his cell phone to show off a picture of him and Bates hanging out an area lake.

"Bob and I both love to fish," Glanz explained. "Is it wrong to have a friend?"

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Look at that speedboat action. Photo via Government of Canada

In the last month alone, the Canadian Armed Forces—decked out with patrol ships, surveillance aircraft, and submarines—helped seize nearly seven tons of cocaine from drug cartels smuggling contraband across the Caribbean.

It's the scene of an increasingly high-tech confrontation between an international coalition and South American gangs.

"It's a huge ocean," Lieutenant Commander Christopher Rochon told VICE from onboard one of the ships patrolling the Atlantic. "Trying to find a small boat that's trying to avoid detection is very difficult."

It's all a part of Operation CARIBBE. So far in 2015, the mission has netted Canadian soldiers thousands of kilos of blow and deprived a lot of partygoers in the northeast of a good time.

Canada's ships, planes and subs have been doing logistical support for American law enforcement in the Caribbean basin, the eastern Pacific Ocean, and the coastal waters of Central America.

The American Coast Guard are the ones actually boarding the suspected vessels and wrestling the smugglers into handcuffs. Canadian resources are primarily used to surveil the area, patrol the waters, and provide defensive support if needed.

Operation CARIBBE is the Canadian version of a larger international effort to police the coke trade led by the American Coast Guard, with several continental and European allies contributing to the now over nine-year-old mission. The multinational effort conjoins with Operation MARTILLO—an American-led effort part of the war on drugs.

But that doesn't mean Canadian ships don't find themselves surrounded by cocaine every once and awhile.

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HMCS Glace Bay with an American Coast Guard chopper. Photo via Government of Canada

In one instance, crew members on the HMCS Nanaimo came across 50 one-kilogram packets of coke, floating freely without any traffickers in sight.

That find, made "over several miles of ocean" off the coast of Central America, continues to perplex the CAF. "There were no vessels in the immediate area and the source of the cocaine remains unknown," reads a Department of National Defence release on the incident. The cocaine was possibly jettisoned after the smugglers realized that the coast guard was after them.

Rochon laughs that one off. He's commanding HMCS Whitehorse, one of Nanaimo's sister ships and spoke to VICE via a satellite phone.

"A lot of these guys, if they think they're caught, it's something they will do, perhaps thinking it will save them from a later prosecution," he says of smugglers who jettison their cargo. "For us, that's a win. That's a whole bunch of cocaine."

The navy isn't messing around on this mission. They've committed ten ships to CARIBBE, which includes seven coastal defence vessels; a guided missile frigate, HMCS Winnipeg; and one Iroquois-class destroyer carrying Sea King helicopters. In previous years, the navy also kicked in Canada's fleet of old-as-hell subs: HMCS Victoria and HMCS Chicoutimi, the latter of which had a problem with suddenly catching fire. The subs are "bottomed," meaning they rest on the ocean floor, where they can clandestinely surveil vessels in the area.

The subs are no longer part of the mission, and Rochon says he's bummed out about that.

"My view is that they would be a ridiculously valuable resource," he says.

But what the mission does have is one of Canada's sought-after Aurora CP-140 spy planes.

The Auroras' high-tech imaging—radar, electromagnetic, infrared, sonar and the old-fashioned camera kind—means the navy can pinpoint suspicious crafts laden with fun-powder over vast stretches of otherwise empty ocean.

The CP-140s, which are 30-year-old aircraft stuffed with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, were previously deployed during the Canadian mission in Libya, and are now being used to identify bombing targets for the CAF in the fight against the Islamic State.

The Auroras, as one Kuwait-based Air Force commander deployed against the Islamic State told VICE, are "one of the best equipped assets here to do a surveillance mission."

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HMCS Calgary along with American and Mexican ships. Photo via Government of Canada

In other words, let's say you're ripping through international waters on your speedboat. Maybe you're flying a pirate flag. You've got a few beers in the cooler and enough food for the afternoon.

There's a good chance one of those multi-million dollar military surveillance planes are overhead, running your face through international databases to figure out whether or not you're a drug smuggler.

Rochon couldn't confirm that the Auroras are being used to that degree—generally, they're most useful for getting widespread imagery despite cloud cover—he did say that they've been a valuable asset to keep tabs on fleeing ne'er-do-wells. Mainly, they can tag suspicious vessels and the ships can do a followup.

"When targeted, they're the best asset to be able to follow a contact," he said, but couldn't elaborate much on just what sort of imagery they are obtaining.

The Americans also began deploying drones as part of the mission in 2013. The Pentagon is also, thanks to some painful spending cuts, sending a blimp.

As for what sort of things tip off the navy and coast guard to boats potentially heaving with cocaine? Rochon wouldn't say.

Generally, once a shady boat is flagged, that information gets passed back to an inter-agency task force to suss out whether the ship is a ferry for nose candy, or just a boat looking to host monkey knife fights.

In the past, the Canadian mission has bagged millions in cocaine and in 2011 they helped seize over 200 metric tonnes of coke worth they say is worth $4 billion (according to "street prices in Miami.") But, as usual, when law enforcement prices street drugs, that number is likely quite inflated.

Follow Justin Ling and Ben Makuch on Twittter.

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Look at Steven Weissman's Instagram, Tumblr, and website.

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Photo by the author

Last week, CBS News in Sarasota, Florida, reported the story of a 14-year-old named Domanik Green who got charged with a felony after changing his teacher's desktop wallpaper to a photo of two men kissing. Town Sheriff Chris Nocco called it an offense against a computer system, and unauthorized access, since the crime involved logging into an administrator account without permission.

But while the Sheriff's description calls to mind a hacker hunched over a terminal—penetrating the mainframe, or whatever—the eighth grader's own account of his future-crime sounds rather less diabolical. Green claims the administrator password was the teacher's last name—apparently the case with other administrator accounts at Paul R. Smith Middle School—and that the teacher had typed it in full view of the class. Green and other students had previously used accounts on various school computers to screen-share with each other.

Under Florida law, hacking government systems in a way that "interrupts or impairs a governmental operation or public communication, transportation, or supply of water, gas, or other public service," is a felony. But while a public school is a "governmental operation," forcing a teacher to look at men kissing doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

Misdemeanor offenders, meanwhile, are those who modify "equipment or supplies used or intended to be used in a computer, computer system, computer network, or electronic device," which sounds a lot like the extent of Green's criminal activity.

Of course, I'm not a technology lawyer, so I contacted Hanni Fakhoury, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"This is crazy," he said, before adding, "My jaw is on the floor."

When I asked Fakhoury to interpret the law for me, he said that the federal statute looks basically the same as my interpretation of Florida's. "The most basic violation is defined as accessing a protected computer without authorization and looking at data," he told me. "That's a misdemeanor."

It's only once you start "tacking on other things," he said, that hacking becomes a felony and can fetch a perpetrator a five-year maximum penalty. Example of things that might get tacked on, according to Fakhoury, are fraudulent stock trades, causing bodily injury, or stealing from the government.

But an even more important question is whether there was any actual hacking.

"I think you could make an argument there isn't [in this case]," Fakhoury told me. Green makes it sound as though student use of administrator credentials was something that was normally tolerated. In that case it wouldn't matter that the student had mischievous intent. "Purpose is irrelevant for determining whether a person has authorization to access a database. Hacking has to mean you hack into something you don't have access to, rather than having access for one person and using it for a different purpose."

Still, there may have been a violation of the law. If Green stole his teacher's password to gain access, that would be hacking, which is a legit crime. Then again, many minor crimes don't get prosecuted, even as cybercrimes attract special attention from prosecutors.

As David Segal pointed out in an op-ed he wrote for Motherboard, the criminal justice system bends over backward to make examples of hackers. He was referring to whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden and activists like Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond, and Cecily McMillan, and it's unlikely he would want to put this kid in the same illustrious category. But he clearly didn't make the same sorts of decisions those figures did, and shouldn't fact the same kinds of consequences. As Fakhoury pointed out, "We shouldn't be using the justice system to solve something that should be solved by having them write an apology letter to the teacher."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Video credit: Joshua Bastien

Alex Moskos is best known as the lead guitarist from Montreal noise punk band AIDS Wolf, but he's spent the last two years working on a solo record as Drainolith. The result is an off-kilter bluesy amalgamation with production help from Wolf Eyes's Nate Young and Neil Hagerty of Royal Trux. Drainolith's music is difficult to describe, but luckily Moskos has made a video that visualizes the vibe pretty well. It's monotonous, invigorating, and a little psychedelic. Watch the video for "Danny Kane's Blues" above.

Like Drainolith on Facebook.

[body_image width='1024' height='768' path='images/content-images/2015/04/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/14/' filename='a-tory-candidate-has-suggested-those-with-mental-illnesses-wear-coloured-wristbands-to-identify-themselves-903-body-image-1429024462.jpg' id='45906']Photo via Flickr user jonanamary

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A Conservative parliamentary candidate has suggested people with mental health problems wear colored wristbands to identify themselves to people, sort of like a fun mental illness-only traffic light party where, instead of fucking, you stand around and talk about the perks of cognitive behavioral therapy. The Conservatives: the People's Party.

As political blogger Richard Taylor reported, barrister and Cambridge area hopeful Chamali Fernando told a Keep Our NHS Public-hosted hustings of the wristband idea, suggesting different colored bands could be used to indicate various different mental health issues and suggesting lawyers such as herself could treat people differently based on their wristband color. Because you never know when someone's a mental health sufferer, do you? Ugh! So frustrating! Like: Be more upfront about it, sadlads. This wristband idea is definitely the solution to that particular problem.

"I would say, in answer to your question, there are issues surrounding early diagnosis," she said, in response to a question about mental health. "We need to make teachers, health professionals—lawyers, even—police officers, all aware of key mental health issues in the community. I would like to see more training for legal professionals and police officers." So far, so good!

Then, uh oh: "Maybe it's something as simple as there are certain conditions which are more common, where people can wear a wristband to identify they have that condition, so that then we can perhaps, not diagnose, but spot it earlier and ensure that we deal with it." Ooh. So close. Good intentions but ultimately you've gone "full Tory" there at the end.

Is it even worth wading in to how flawed this is as a concept? Well: yes, go on then, let's. If we cannot have a run at one of the most bizarre concepts ever pitched as part of a parliamentary campaign then what is the point of being here, frankly. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, did it make a noise? If a Tory candidate says something so out-of-touch it may as well have been telegraphed to us from the moon and nobody is around to call them a "silly fucker," did they say anything at all? And so:

i. Yeah, you can't really color-code people with mental health issues, mate, it's a bit concentration camp-y;

ii. One in four people in the UK will experience a mental health condition over the course of a year, meaning some 1.6 million people would have to wear a jaunty colored wristband under Fernando's hastily proposed reign of terror. The only people who really benefit from that are people who own wristband production factories. Have we ruled out the idea of Fernando being on the bung from a colored rubber wristband cartel, and this whole scheme is a way of keeping her rich Big Wristband friends even richer by handing them a government contract to produce 1.6 million zanily colored wristband per year? We absolutely have not;

iii. You'd really hope a well-educated law graduate with 12 years' experience as a barrister would be less of a colossal dumb-dumb than this, but nope: colossal dumb-dumb;

iv. The stigma surrounding mental health is bad enough as is, and wristbands or misfired policy suggestions that include the word "wristbands" aren't going to make it any easier. Here's a good troubleshooting rule of thumb I like to apply to any idea I ever have: how could a teenage boy misinterpret this in the most dickhead-ish way imaginable? Having been a teenage boy, I know that the urge to draw a cock on or take the piss out of every atom in the known universe is an overwhelming one. Q. How would a teenage boy react to seeing someone wearing a mental health wristband? A. By getting everyone on the bus they are on to shout abuse at them. I'm not saying we should shape UK policies around the base urges of teenage boys, but if your idea can be torn apart by one of them shouting on a bus, then maybe have a rethink;

v. Most crucially, you can tell what a bad idea it is from Fernando's own post-wristband reaction, revving the pedals so rapidly backwards that a fire could feasibly be started on the hubs. "Richard Taylor is distorting commentary for his self publicity purposes," Fernando tweeted today, before stating BBC Cambridge contacted her for a comment but dropped the subject "bcz they realised [Richard Taylor] was probably misleading public." She's yet to release a statement going, "Yo! I don't really think those with mental health issues should wear cute colored wristbands so we know where on the crazy scale they are!" and there's much to be read in the attack-your-accuser-instead-of-defending-yourself method of political firefighting. Much to be read, such as: you regret saying the words you previously said with your mouth in front of people, because of how wrong those words were;

vi. MAYBE TORIES SHOULD WEAR WRISTBANDS, EH? BIG WIDE BLUE ONES THAT SAY "CUNT" ON THEM! EH? AH!

The fact of all this is: Chamali Fernando is never going to be voted in as MP for Cambridge because it's a notorious left-of-center stronghold—currently Lib Dem after being Labour for a decade beforehand. Also because she said people with mental illnesses should wear colored wristbands, but mainly the other thing. That said, it doesn't mean she can't cause damage while she's running her doomed, doomed campaign for parliament, and comments such as this are just that: damage. The Conservative Party doesn't have an especially good track record on mental health, and archaic, ill thought-through comments such about wristbands only serve to push the policy conversation backwards.

Also, I thought we all accepted that wristbands were lame and appalling when Lance Armstrong turned out to be a uni-bollocked Bond villain? Come on, Chamali Fernando. Get up-to-date. At least suggest color-coded iPhone covers, or something.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

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Annotators at the event. Photo credit: Margarida Malarkey. Courtesy of MoMA PS1

You know that feeling when you find yourself in a place that you've seen on TV and read about in books and magazines, and everything in those portrayals turns out to be true? On a recent misty Friday night, as I milled about a party in the Williamsburg penthouse offices of Genius, the Silicon Valley startup formerly known as Rap Genius, I had that feeling. The decor was decidedly bro-licious. There was a whiteboard with the half-erased remnants of the last brainstorming session. Men visibly outnumbered women. The company recently raised $40 million in venture funding, but when I opened the fridge in search of ice, all I found was a bottle of San Pellegrino and three frozen bananas. There were, however, several boxes of Kind bars in circulation. One guy, who I was sure I'd seen in Fast Company or Wired, was holding what appeared to be a glass of milk.

The party was a sequitur to the public opening, earlier that evening, of The Innovator's Dilemma, a wicked and imperative solo exhibition by the New Zealand artist Simon Denny at MoMA PS1, an unflinchingly faithful and thus deeply confounding portrayal of the tech industry. In a stroke of either tremendous cunning or disastrous miscalculation, the opening was accompanied by a no-joke IRL tech event, the launch of Genius's beta annotation platform, featuring a live annotation battle projected onto a 40-foot screen and set to the beats of DJ Galcher Lustwerk. By the time I found myself standing on the Genius rooftop, washing down my Kind bar with lukewarm Tanqueray, it was unclear where the art stopped and Silicon Valley began.

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On first encounter, Dilemma feels like a technology trade show. Each piece is even announced with one of those round hanging banners. Corporate logos are ubiquitous. But you're in a gallery, so you pause. The most effective pieces in Dilemma are the ones that, like a crudo served in a fancy San Francisco restaurant, least manipulate the source material. For All You Need Is Data: The DLD 2012 Conference REDUX Rerun, Denny translated onto a series of canvases the 2012 edition of DLD, a tech conference billing itself as "a global network on innovation, digitization, science, and culture which connects business, creative and social leaders, opinion-formers, and influencers for crossover conversation and inspiration." Designed in what is apparently called a "skeumorphic iOS" style (think Garage Band and Photo Booth), the inkjet-printed canvases feature a series of notable quotes from presentations by a usual-suspects roster of tech luminaries like Sheryl Sandberg, rendered in a font not dissimilar from Journeys' logo. Some of the quotes are funny: "This is beer. I wanted water" (Groupon founder Andrew Mason). While others are dismayingly stereotypical: "We are hardwired to share" (AirBnB founder Brian Chesky). A few are genuinely insightful: "Data," said 4chan founder Christopher "moot" Poole, "is the oil of the 21st century."

In a similarly raw work, Disruptive Berlin, Denny turned custom gaming CPUs into sculptures commemorating the ten startups selected by Wired UK for the 2013 article "Europe's Hottest Startup Capitals: Berlin." The piece could pass for a display at the Consumer Electronics Show. And yet it is tweaked just enough to throw you off-balance. The plinths are actually upward-facing flat-screen TVs, and the promotional verbiage emblazoned directly onto the CPUs is awkwardly stilted and emphatic. A nonstop dubstep loop that accompanies the installation serves as an exquisitely germane soundtrack for the whole exhibition.

"When you bring things into an art context and look at it, it's a default expectation that one can analyze it a little bit more, and look at it more carefully," Denny told me a couple of days after the opening, over Skype. (He is based in Berlin.) While the show does certainly invite a level of scrutiny that, as Denny put it, might not be possible at a TechCrunch event, the works are so literal, and, in a way, so trusting that Dilemma may be less likely to challenge your preconceptions about the tech industry and more likely to simply validate them. For people who use words like "scalability" and "cached out" (which means "tired," in case you didn't know), the placement of these artifacts within the white walls of a venerable institution of culture likely comes across as adulatory. On the other hand, to those who, for whatever reason, see the tech industry as overly hyped, it's hard not to read one's own cynicism into the works.

For his part, Denny has insured himself against any personal charges of cynicism by actively—and sincerely—participating in the world that he portrays. For TEDxVaduz redux, he actually organized an IRL TEDx event, in Liechtenstein. This was no artifice. The application process, which the artists memorializes in a series of vitrines, was completely real; so were the talks, as was the stage, and requisite potted-plant prop (which are part of the piece).

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Simon Denny. Installation view of 'All You Need is Data—The DLD 2012 Conference Redux' at Walters Prize, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2014. Photo credit: Jennifer French. Courtesy of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

But nowhere was the line between art performance and serious tech event more thoroughly confounded than at the Genius launch, which took place in the VW-sponsored geodesic tent in the PS1 courtyard. It was, in every respect, fashioned from the same visual language as the art inside the exhibition, and was no less intriguing and confusing. Annotation, it turns out, isn't a spectator sport, and the DJs dance beats only served to exaggerate the downtempo pace of what was happening on screen. Toward the end of the event, some people started dancing, by which I mean three people started dancing. Was I supposed to dance? Was I supposed to dance and watch the annotation battle? (Is that even possible?) Was this supposed to be fun?

Later, I wondered whether Denny had effectively just tricked Silicon Valley's tricksteriest startup into demonstrating that the technology industry is as curious, mockable, intriguing, and complex as he portrays it to be. Seeking answers, I called Emily Segal, Genius's creative director. She said that having the launch at Denny's show had been her idea. I asked if she felt like Denny was making fun of Genius and the tech industry. "To call it a celebration isn't right, and to call it a cynicism is also not right," she explained. "There are elements of both delight and dismay that come from unpacking this thing."

For his part, Denny admitted that while the Genius event "had a lot of things that tech events had," he also expressed high praise for the startup and its strategy. Emily, he said, is "taking this company which has a lot of edginess to it and a lot of controversy around it and making it really productive."

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Simon Denny. Installation view of ' New Management' at Portikus, Frankfurt, 2014. Photo: Helena Schlichting. Courtesy of MoMA PS1

So maybe the real coup was for Genius. Just as Denny's active participation at events like TEDx Vaduz and DLD sets him apart from those of us who merely observe and critique the tech industry from the comforts of the non-tech world, by allying itself with the artist-observer, was it possible that Genius has effectively distanced itself from the increasingly stodgy industry zeitgeist? I asked Denny what he thought. "I'm not sure how possible that is," he said. Genius's gesture illustrates a point central to Dilemma: In the tech industry—as in avant-garde art—the very act of setting oneself apart is an exercise in conformity. In New Management , a piece memorializing an important meeting of Samsung executives, Denny quotes the technology giant's founder, who directs his employees to "change everything but your spouse and kids." But if you operate according to this logic, there is no opt-out. You're doomed if you do, doomed if you don't. That is the real innovator's dilemma.

Silicon Valley's at-times hilarious efforts to extricate itself from this conundrum has made it the subject of much mockery. And while I munched on my Kind bar and drank lukewarm Tanqueray, it was tempting to think that this was just another joke on the industry. But Denny's work is much more sophisticated than that. Maybe, then, the joke is actually on us. Or is there even any joke at all? On Skype, I asked Denny.

"I don't find it weird and funny," he said, without any sarcasm. "I find it serious and amazing."

Follow Arthur on Twitter.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

A loaded 22-calibre semi-automatic pistol with an oversized clip can fire 24 rounds in 3.5 seconds.

That's what Hussein Nur was carrying in 2009 when he was chased and arrested by police outside of a Jane and Finch community center in Toronto, a neighbourhood often plagued by gun violence.

The handgun in question is a " prohibited firearm," and shortly after, Nur was charged with possession of a loaded prohibited firearm and sentenced to three years imprisonment, the minimum under section 95 of the Criminal Code.

That is, until this morning, when the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the mandatory minimum which had been slipped into the Criminal Code via a Conservative omnibus crime bill in 2008.

Nur's lawyers argued that while their client got a sentence that reflected the severity of his crime, section 95 was fundamentally unconstitutional because it could unduly punish those accused of far less severe offences. In other words, "reasonable hypothetical cases."

In a 6-3 ruling, Canada's highest court agreed, thus upholding an earlier decision by Ontario's Court of Appeal.

"As the Court of Appeal concluded, there exists a 'cavernous disconnect' between the severity of the licensing-type offence and the mandatory minimum three-year term of imprisonment."

Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, writing for the majority, ruled that a minimum three-year sentence is "grossly disproportionate" because it could conceivably apply to cases as benign as somebody inheriting a firearm before they can get a licence or a spouse breaching the regulation with her husband's gun. These are basically licensing issues but section 95 would still force judges to impose a minimum sentence of three years for the first offence and five years for a repeat offence.

"A three-year term of imprisonment for a person who has essentially committed a licensing infraction is totally out of sync with the norms of criminal sentencing," McLachlin wrote in the decision, adding that these types of offences lack "any harm or real risk of harm flowing from the conduct."

As a result, the minimum three and five year sentences are in direct violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedom section 12, which protects us from "cruel and unusual punishment" by the state.

Mandatory minimums have become a staple of the Harper government's tough-on-crime agenda, and this particular case is a great example of how the Supreme Court has acted as a direct counterweight.

In fact, keeping the executive branch of government in check in matters of criminal law has become a defining feature of the McLachlin Court in recent years.

In February, they unanimously struck down Criminal Code provisions criminalizing assisted suicide, drawing the ire of many Conservatives.

And the Supremes have also turned out to be remarkably progressive in their rulings on surveillance and privacy matters. In another unanimous decision, the high court ruled that law enforcement agencies cannot simply ask internet service providers for users' personal addresses without judicial authorization, even if those users are suspected to be accessing, distributing or making child pornography.

That decision was hailed as a huge win for privacy advocates and a huge pain in the ass for the Conservatives, who were trying to pass not one but two bills that would have allowed ISP's to pass on your private information to law enforcement without a warrant.

The Supreme Court has also dealt big blows the Conservative crime agenda by striking down prostitution laws, keeping heroin injection sites open, repealing early parole abolition and upholding judicial discretion in sentencing. The list goes on. Not bad for nine unelected old white people in robes. If the NDP are the Conservatives' official opposition, the Supreme Court is their unofficial opposition.

Sukanya Pillay is the executive director and general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, a group that has been vindicated by today's decision.

"We're very happy about this decision," Pillay told VICE. "For many years we fought against mandatory minimums because we think they are completely unfair and disproportionate and they do nothing to further criminal justice goals of deterrence or rehabilitation or restorative justice."

"Our problem with the "tough-on-crime" agenda is that we have to see if it's actually making a difference in terms of deterring crime or is it simply constraining civil liberties in the name of deterring crime. We've been fighting this agenda on a piece by piece basis and we're very happy with today's decision."

Follow Nick Rose on Twitter.

Today's video - Nigeria's missing school girls and Boko Haram's devastating effect on children, one year later, Canadian drug busts in the Caribbean, and bionic body parts to make us superhuman.

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A children's book about gay penguins. A comic about an Iranian girl in the midst of political upheaval. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. These are some of the ten most-challenged, most hand-wrung-over books of 2014. And what's the overarching theme this year? People want to ban books with diversity.

Every year the American Library Association, along with its "State of America's Libraries" report, releases a list of the ten most-challenged books. To quote the ALA, "A challenge is defined as a formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that a book or other material be restricted or removed because of its content or appropriateness." These books aren't banned, but they're the most-oft formally complained about.

This year, eight of the ten books challenged feature diverse content, which they describe as "non-white main and/or secondary characters; LGBT main and/or secondary characters; disabled main and/or secondary characters; issues about race or racism; LGBT issues; issues about religion which encompass in this situation the Holocaust and terrorism; issues about disability and/or mental illness; non-Western settings..." This is a huge jump from the past few years, in which books containing diverse content averaged between four to five of the ten most-challenged.

For a visual, detailed breakdown of the ten most-challenged books, and reasons for their challenges, this infographic from the ALA is super-helpful:

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To try and grapple with why all of these challenges were leveled against these books, and what libraries have to go through with regard to censorship, I spoke to Lynn Lobash, manager of the reader services department of the New York Public Library. As she explains, "The New York Public Library is a very unique place to be in that we're very much in support of the ALA's Library Bill of Rights, which is about access to everything without censorship. And also, for us, we have to serve a very diverse community in New York City. So we want things that people will be able to see themselves in."

I asked her if any of the ten most-challenged books surprised her with their inclusion on the list.

"I was surprised by Sherman Alexie's book [ The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (number-one challenged)] because it shows up time and time again from our staff, either as a staff pick, or as a recommendation for specific reader advisory questions. It's quite beloved among staff members here."

Lynn went on, "I personally was surprised by [Khaled Hosseini's] The Kite Runner (number-seven challenged) because I'd read that at least 15 years ago and I loved it. I mean, it was a hard book, it was very heart breaking, but the reasons that they gave were that there was too much violence in it. But for me, it was such an eye-opener to a culture that I didn't know about, it was sort of a life-changing book."

Lynn explained that she can see where the complaints are coming from, "I can see that they outline in this list why they're challenging these books. They have explicit content, sexual content, racism, violence. Poverty is something they didn't mention, but it seems to be an overarching theme in these books. I can see where some people would be shocked by the content in these books. But for other people who read them, it makes them feel quite understood and less alone in the world."

I asked her about the huge presence of diversity in these challenged books, and she explained, "Starting last year, there was a big article in the Times about the lack of diversity in children's fiction." The numbers, when you sit down and look at them, are astonishing. Out of 3,200 children's books published in 2013, only a paltry 93 were about black characters. "And everybody just went crazy because that is really not OK. So there was this big campaign for more diversity in children's books, and we're very sensitive to that kind of thing in the library because we serve a diverse community and we want everything to be fair and balanced and representative, so I'm not terribly surprised that these are books being looked at as well, because it's part of the zeitgeist."

So maybe the fact that there's a sharp uptick in challenged books that include diversity is a result of more people reading books that include diversity. Maybe more cool kids are reading Persepolis (number-two challenged) and more uptight parents are writing in to ban it. Is that too hopeful?

But what is the role of a library to censor? Lynn, and the ALA, and the NYPL, think the library shouldn't play any role in censoring. And Lynn describes how most readers, looking for a good book, censor themselves: "People will say to me, 'I want a mystery, but I don 't want it to be too gory, and I don't want it to be too crazy, and I don 't want a lot of sex in it.' It kind of gives you an idea right off the bat when they're looking for a book what they don 't like, so it's easy to steer them towards a thing that would be good for them... So we're not hearing a lot of negatives like 'Horrible!' and 'Oh, I can't believe you gave me this' sort of thing."

We are, of course, a nation of crybabies when it comes to censorship (especially as it relates to public spaces). So NYPL's model of self-censoring feels right to me. Before I recommend a book to you, tell me what offends you. And who knows, maybe making people flat-out say that they're offended by people of different cultures or orientations might inspire the kind of conversations we need to help chip away the irrational fears that landed some these books on this infamous list.

Follow Giaco on Twitter.

One hot July weekend in 2010, I picked up a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer and happened to come across a short piece about a man who had just been shot and killed by local police officers.

According to the article, police had responded to a call and arrived to find a 53-year-old behaving erratically and brandishing a large knife. The account suggested that the incident had unfolded over some time, noting that "negotiations and confrontations" ensued. At one point, police officers tried to use a Taser to subdue the man, but that failed—and then the man "charged" the officers, prompting one to shoot, killing him.

This was in the middle of a bad time for police shooting and killing people in Philadelphia, especially people in the middle of apparent episodes of mental illness: A year before, a homeless man had been shot to death after allegedly brandishing a box cutter; not long before that, police officers had shot and killed a naked man they arrived to find allegedly wielding a knife.

The details of these stories, especially when put side by side, often seemed—as they did in the meat cleaver piece—a little hard to swallow. Philadelphia sure seemed to have a lot of suspects grabbing at weapons and charging armed officers. And the details weren't always being verified by any independent source. The meat cleaver story had included no interviews with witnesses, neighbors, or family members, and had instead relied on a single source: the police department itself. The same went for articles about the incident in other local news accounts.

A few days later I went out to the block where the shooting happened, a gritty stretch of row homes, half of them abandoned, in a beleaguered pocket of North Philadelphia, and started knocking on doors.

A woman answered at the first and, without opening the door, began to tell me a very different version of what had happened.

"It happened inside the house," the woman said—not outside, where police had gathered. A single officer had followed the man inside, away from witnesses. Then, she said, "They dragged the man out by his feet, letting his face hit the sidewalk and everything."

Over the following weeks, I would learn more about the man who was killed that day. His name was Harry Bennett, and he was a veteran, a father, grandfather and lifelong partner to his common-law wife. He'd struggled with disability—he had steel rods in his legs from an accident while serving in the Air Force—and with mental illness, for which he'd sought treatment at the Veterans Administration.

News accounts of Bennet's death hadn't included any witnesses, but several people, I learned, had in fact seen what had happened. I eventually gathered five independent accounts, which painted a very different picture of events than the one police officials had offered the local media—and which the local media had repeated in print. The Taser had worked, several people said, and Bennett had appeared shocked, or "frozen," as one described it, before he was shot. Rather than charging police, several witnesses said it was the officer who charged inside after Bennett and then, away from public view, shot him. Four witnesses independently verified that Bennett had then been dragged outside, in plain view of the street, by his ankles, his head knocking against the concrete steps, before emergency medical services had arrived.

It was a shocking alternative version of events that, accurate or not, had very nearly stayed entirely behind a few closed doors—not because no one was willing to talk, but because no one had come around asking.

The story I eventually wrote, "Why Is Harry Bennett Dead?" appeared on the cover of the Philadelphia City Paper in January 2011—and then seemed to disappear forever. It wasn't picked up by other news outlets, nor did the horrific descriptions of Bennett's death and the police's part in it receive any obvious further scrutiny. The news moved on, and so did I. Philadelphia Police Department officers would shoot at 44 civilians that year and nearly 60 the next. A few of the cases would get more scrutiny than did Bennett's, but most, like his, would warrant a brief headline and then vanish from public attention altogether.

Over the past year, as protesters have taken to the streets en masse to protest the deaths of young men of color at the hands of cops, the tragic story of Harry Bennett's death came floating like a deep-seated regret back into my consciousness. It seemed impossible—miraculous, in a way—that the country was suddenly engaged in a full-throated debate over the use of lethal force against unarmed persons by police officers, and the troublingly persistent fact that a profoundly disproportionate number of people dying at the hands of police officers are black.

Philadelphia cops had shot at civilians nearly 400 times in seven years, in numbers often equal to or exceeding those of New York, a city five times Philly's size.

The attention was also, in a way, frustrating: While the national media launched a thorough dissection of Ferguson's police force, the dozens of civilians shot and killed by the nation's fourth-largest police force were still just errant headlines stuffed into the back of the city's newspapers.

But that's finally changing, too.

Last month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a 188-page report, "An Assessment of Deadly Force in the Philadelphia Police Department," that comprised perhaps the most detailed analysis of officer-involved shootings in a major city police department ever undertaken.

The report had been spurred, in part at least, by reporting—a 2013 investigation by ­Philly.com found that police-involved shootings were soaring, even as crime was at an all-time low. Days later, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey announced that he was asking the DOJ to investigate the matter, essentially inviting the kind of federal intervention into police affairs that many cities have resisted or agreed to only when left with no other choice.

The report found problems, and lots of them. Philadelphia cops had shot at civilians nearly 400 times in seven years, in numbers often equal to or exceeding those of New York, a city five times Philly's size. Police had received poor training, the report found, and often didn't know Department policies on when to use lethal force. The Department's policies on Tasers ("Electronic Control Weapons") were muddled and confusing. Investigations into police-involved shootings were mired in unnecessary layers of bureaucracy and needlessly slow.

The findings are nuanced, and some defy the instinctive narratives that have cropped up in the wake of police-involved shootings, like that of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina. The report does not, for example suggest that white officers were more likely to improperly shoot or kill black offenders than black officers; in fact, the report suggests that white officers experienced a "threat perception failure" less often in dealing with black suspects than did black officers. (Blacks are still profoundly more likely to be shot by Philadelphia police officers, and made up 80 percent of all "suspects" in officer-involved shootings; it's also worth noting that a report by Pro Publica last year found that black men are 21 times more likely than white men to be shot by a police officer).

But the feds paint an overall picture of a deeply troubled police department in which Philly cops shoot civilians far too often, often for the wrong reasons. As you might expect, the report found the Department's own investigations into the incidents tend to be woefully inadequate.

And while the report focuses solely on the issue of officer-involved shootings, it comes at a time when the Philadelphia Police Department is under scrutiny in a way it hasn't been for decades.

In 2010, Philadelphia Daily News reporters Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman broke the Pulitzer Prize–winning series Tainted Justice, exposing a ring of narcotics officers who allegedly robbed bodegas and, according to hotly-disputed allegations, engaging in acts of sexual assault and other harassment of innocent civilians. (Last year, federal prosecutors declined to press charges).

Two years later, the District Attorney's office abruptly announced it would no longer call several narcotics officers to testify in criminal cases and, without saying why, agreed to begin dropping charges brought by those officers and overturn convictions based on their testimony. Last August, the officers were indicted for running what amounted to a drug dealing operation within the Philadelphia Police Department.

It had been satisfying to see so much attention on Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, she said, but also sad.

Also last summer, the District Attorney's office was hit with a class-action lawsuit alleging that it has improperly seized tens of millions in cash, cars, and houses seized via civil asset forfeiture—a legal but controversial process by which the government can take properly "linked" to a crime without bothering to convict a suspect, or even file criminal charges in the first place. I had detailed the DA's civil forfeiture apparatus for the Philadelphia City Paper in an investigative series two years prior, showing that police were routinely seizing cash from people who had been charged with no crime and turning it over—sometimes all of it, sometimes not—to the DA, with the Department getting a cut of the proceeds. I also wrote about the DA's practice of seizing houses from individuals charged with no crime, often from older women, based, sometimes, on a single allegation of drug dealing, often by a relative.

These various blemishes on the record of Philadelphia's criminal justice system can't be lumped into a single conclusion or a simple verdict, but there are intersections. Among the police officers whose reports were commonly used to seize these houses were the same six narcotics officers now facing federal racketeering charges. The DA has disavowed their police work, but kept the proceeds their work brought in. The officers exposed robbing bodegas weren't accused of wrongfully shooting at civilians, but the same District Attorney's office that didn't see fit to charge them has routinely declined to pursue charges in all but a tiny handful of police-involved shootings.

Still, for those who have waited for years, if not decades, for accountability in a city whose police officers seem never to face the glare of public scrutiny, the Department of Justice report has been a long-awaited break in the clouds.

"It's cold comfort, to some extent. But to see just how deep the rabbit hole was, when the report came out... I mean, yes: clearly, we feel a sense of vindication," says Kelvyn Anderson, executive director of the civilian-run Philadelphia Police Advisory Commission, which has re-emerged as a player in civilian police relations.

In years prior, Anderson had petitioned the police department to release even basic information about police-involved shootings to the Commission, which is empowered by the city charter to investigate such incidents, to no avail. Now, he says, police officials are meeting with his office, actually sitting down to go over what information he needs.

And among the recommendations made by the DOJ report—recommendations that Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has appointed a separate panel to make sure are implemented—is a significantly stronger role for his group.

But not included in all that support is the kind of funding that would allow for a civilian review board made up of more than a few people—Anderson and a couple of staffers—to properly monitor cops in Philly.

"Without more funding," according to Police Advisory Commission Chairwoman Ronda Goldfein, "they're not going to be able to look into every complaint."

More likely, they won't be able to look into any but a tiny handful.

It's a task that should be shared, if not taken up altogether, by the city's media. But we know that isn't likely, either.

Just a few days after the DOJ report was issued, in fact, police officers shot another man. He had been armed and reaching for a gun, according an account given by the police—the only account of the man's death that the article ever mentioned.

A few weeks ago, I dug out my old notes and found a long-forgotten number for Harry Bennett's niece, Christine Bennett Dawn Johnson. I called, and she answered. She remembered me well, and said that the events in Ferguson had made her think about Harry—whom her family called "Sonny"—too.

It had been satisfying to see so much attention on Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri, she said, but also sad. Bennett's death was never probed by authorities. The family had consulted lawyers, but ultimately decided not to pursue a lawsuit.

"It's nice to see that people care," she said over the phone. "But what about Sonny? What about the family he left behind?"

Isaiah Thompson is an enterprise and investigative reporter whose work has appeared in the Miami New Times, the Philadelphia City Paper, ProPublica, and on This American Life. He recently moved from Philadelphia to Boston, where he works for the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and WGBH.

[body_image width='1500' height='1045' path='images/content-images/2015/04/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/09/' filename='the-emperors-new-art-405-body-image-1428597032.jpg' id='44650']^{Picasso's 'Les Femmes d'Alger', at auction 1997, when it sold for $31.9 million (Photo by Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)}

In June 1956, the American collectors Victor and Sally Ganz purchased the complete series of Pablo Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger from his canny Parisian dealer, Daniel Henry Kahnweiler. The 15 paintings had been offered for 80 million francs, or about $213,000—nearly $2 million in today's dollars. After counter-offering 70 million francs, hoping for what is now the art world's standard 10 percent discount, Victor Ganz was rebuffed and agreed to the full amount. The Ganzes were Picasso's most ardent collectors in the States, and Kahnweiler convinced Victor Ganz that the artist would only consent to a sale which kept the full group together, though Picasso would express surprise when the couple mentioned this to him years later. In the midst of negotiations, however, Ganz thought it was all or nothing. Adding to the pressure, Kahnweiler had intimated there was another buyer who was eager to acquire all 15 paintings. The consequence was that if Ganz didn't have the nerve and the money, they would surely go to someone else.

By raising the specter of a rival buyer—whether or not anyone was actually waiting in the wings—Kahnweiler used a tried-and-true tactic to seal the deal. But it was the Ganzes who won out in the end. Having purchased the series, they would subsequently sell ten of the 15 paintings, recoup much of the money spent, and keep five of the more important works for themselves. (Perhaps the very best, at least as far as Picasso was concerned, Version N, the next-to-last in the series, had been let go, and is now in the collection of Washington University's museum in St. Louis.) In 1997, 40 years after their historic purchase, the series's final painting, Version O, for which they had paid $26,632, was sold at auction by their heirs for $31.9 million. That painting is now coming back on the market, to be offered at Christie's in New York on May 11. With a pre-sale estimate of $140 million, it is poised to set a record for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.

For this distinction, it will have to best Francis Bacon's Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), which fetched $142.2 million just 18 months ago. The previous top seller was a version of Edward Munch's iconic painting The Scream (1895), a pastel on board acquired in 2012 by Leon Black, founder of Apollo Global Management, for $119 million. The other three versions of the Munch, all in Norwegian museums, will likely never be carried off, silently screaming, to the auction block.

[body_image width='2000' height='1333' path='images/content-images/2015/04/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/09/' filename='the-emperors-new-art-405-body-image-1428594781.jpg' id='44632']^{Francis Bacon's Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), which sold for $142.2 million (AP Photo/Christie's Images LTD.)}

Bringing Home the Bacon
When the Bacon triptych was sold, an article on Forbes.com explained how such a stratospheric price had been achieved, giving every indication that this sort of money paid for modern masters is now the norm:

As the ultra-wealthy become even wealthier, the top-end of the art market, along with real estate and other luxury sectors, have experienced an incredible surge as cash is being channeled into alternative investments... If the Forbes 400 is any indication, the wealthy are getting wealthier, with the 400 richest Americans now worth a cumulative $2 trillion, up $300 billion from a year ago and with an average net worth of a record $5 billion, an $800 million increase from a year ago.

While these painting are among the most expensive to be sold at public auction, they are not the most expensive privately traded. It was recently reported that Rudolf Staechelin, a retired Sotheby's executive, had sold, for $300 million, an 1892 Gauguin painting, Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?), from a collection assembled by his grandfather in Switzerland during the first World War. While the buyer was not identified, it was widely rumored to be the State Museums in Qatar. They had previously spent nearly $250 million for The Card Players (1892-93), an Impressionist masterpiece by Cezanne—one of five devoted to this subject, and the only one held in private hands. With phenomenal wealth surging from their oil and gas fields, the royal family of the Persian Gulf nation has set its sights on assembling a world-class collection. In addition to these masterworks, paintings by Mark Rothko and Damien Hirst have gone to Qatar. (Though it troubles the mind to consider these works ending up in the same room, let alone the same sentence.) The ever-escalating sums attached to these paintings inevitably exceed, doubling and tripling, the previous prices paid. And for $300 million, wouldn't you expect that a Gauguin would come with an actual Tahitian island? Art, real estate, and money forever entwined.

[body_image width='2000' height='931' path='images/content-images/2015/04/10/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/10/' filename='the-emperors-new-art-405-body-image-1428679010.jpg' id='45014']
^{(L) Alien Workshop x Andy Warhol Skate Decks(R) Gaugin, Nafea Faa Ipoip}

What reporters for Forbes.com may not fully grasp, though critics and dealers in the art world, as well as art historians, certainly do, is that the status of certain artists, having their place in the history books, is set in stone, while for others, whose paint is barely dry, the jury is still out. Contemporary art is, in this respect, temporary, and history will not be rushed along. Not by the market speeding forward, and not by those who, as the old saying goes, know the price of everything and the value of nothing. From Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, van Gogh, and Klimt to masters in our time, a pantheon including Picasso, Pollock, de Kooning, Johns, and Warhol, there is absolutely no doubt as to importance and influence. If there's a speed bump encountered, it would be in the Warhol fast lane, where second- and third-rate works manage to fetch prices higher than they deserve, thanks to collectors and dealers who are ultimately buying and selling the name more than the art itself. Who knows, maybe one day "the worst of Warhol" will elbow out his iconic work, having been cheapened by a vast proliferation of tote bags, umbrellas, skateboards, and sweat pants—$29.90 at Uniqlo. Or maybe all this crass merchandise strengthens the brand? Have you seen any Pollock skateboards lately? Of course an action painter who died an action death may not be the best endorsement for a set of wheels. Warhol painted the car crash. Pollock died in one.

But maybe history can be rushed along, and in that racing toward the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the reality of what's happening—art and its value being hijacked—will pass by almost unnoticed in a hazy blur. Maybe "jury selection" has something to do with these skewed verdicts. The May 11 auction, in which Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger will serve as the shining star, is being organized by Loic Gouzer, an "International Specialist" at Christie's. In a recent New York Times article about the sale, Gouzer is quoted saying:

"I recently went to the reopened Picasso Museum and was blown away by what I saw. In a world where your latest iPhone is out of fashion in 10 days, everything he did still looked so relevant and fresh."

He was blown away. Everything was fresh. The article ends with the 34-year-old art expert posting an Instagram image of a Picasso portrait from 1938, with an estimate of $50 million, which will be included in his sale. Thirty-four going on 14? Did he just whizz by on a Picasso skateboard as he posted that $50 million Instagram? With that kind of money up for grabs, Christie's can afford to be a tad embarrassed as they appeal to a newly-minted clientele. On the one hand, to trend-conscious clients who know the name first and the art last, while on the other, to collectors of contemporary art—works not yet in the history books, and maybe never will be—who have the means to move upwards to the giants of modern art. Secure and riskier investments. These are what's being leveraged. Artworks that may or may not be worth the canvas they're painted on, in particular those of more recent vintage, are being buoyantly uplifted by theses hundred million dollar prices. They reason: If pantings by Cezanne and Gauguin can command $250 to $300 million, why can't a Peter Doig sell for $15 million? Or a Kehinde Wiley for $5 million? (Artists of color, like women artists, rarely achieve—or only post-mortem—the lofty prices awarded to their pasty-faced brothers.) As great masterworks ascend to the upper atmosphere, and lesser works become over-inflated, the updraft allows even the most bloated hot-air balloons to rise accordingly. This is the Emperor's New Art.

[body_image width='1348' height='608' path='images/content-images/2015/04/10/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/10/' filename='the-emperors-new-art-405-body-image-1428679519.jpg' id='45018']

Money—Now You See It, Now You Don't
Back down on Earth, a question inevitably presents itself: Does someone who buys a painting for $140 million simply take out their checkbook and ask for a pen? (Mont Blanc's $730,000 Ball-Point would do nicely.) Do they swipe their American Express Centurion? Do armored cars from Brinks pull up in front of Christie's or Sothebys, laden with gold bars? No. The money is transferred from one account to another as if by magic, a sleight-of-hand that has become absolutely normal, even unremarkable today. Money, in its abundance, is the new abstraction. Money is the immaterial object with which to accumulate material goods. Whether laundered or not, with art in the spin cycle, money is simultaneously there and not there. But the mirage suggested by the evanescence and evasions of the ultra-rich applies to us all. Many working people receive their salaries by direct deposit. There's no paycheck to be cashed, no waiting in the long line at the bank. The money appears in their account. And checks aren't written to pay monthly bills. Bills are paid automatically. There may, however, be a greater price for this increasingly suspect convenience. Money flows in and out without ever being physically in hand. It's as if you never had it to begin with, and maybe you never will. Even a pack of gum is routinely paid for at the corner deli with a debit card. One blows bubbles with invisible money. You don't have to grudgingly give spare change to the panhandler in the street because you don't have any. Tips are now entered—with amounts readily suggested—on a touch screen, rather than dropped into an old-fashioned jar. Apparently tips are bigger when they're electronically at one's fingertips. Wasn't it once true that the police couldn't charge a person with vagrancy if they had a minimum of $20 on them? Money as a form of I.D.—preferably a crisp Andrew Jackson and not 20 grubby singles—or at least as a guarantor to be left alone by those who protect and serve. (The potential for harassment is always in a sense a confrontation momentarily deferred.) And yet a sinister reversal may soon emerge, as if from the pages of Philip K. Dick, a future in which possessing cash will be criminalized, and the illusion of freedom, fluidity, and mobility will be just that. In a world where these pieces of plastic and the machines that read them can be switched off in an instant, an entire city can be immobilized. Imagine this lasting for days, or a week. Would martial law be declared? Would people take to the streets or roll over and play dead? A money-less culture ushers in the ultimate opportunity for social control.

[body_image width='1035' height='328' path='images/content-images/2015/04/10/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/10/' filename='the-emperors-new-art-405-body-image-1428679693.jpg' id='45023']

^{(L) Buddhas of Bamiyan, before and after (R) Militants attack ancient artifacts with sledgehammers in the Ninevah Museum in Mosul, Iraq. (AP Photo via militant social media account)}

The Picasso painting raises another obvious question. What does $140 million buy or represent? An oceanfront estate in the Hamptons, the NFL's salary cap, the net worth of Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson—whose fortune is owed less to his music and mostly to his sale of Vitamin Water in 2007. Do you actually feel better drinking Vitamin Water? Do you feel more intelligent sipping Smart Water? Or are you simply devoted to making others exorbitantly wealthy, richer than you'll ever be? Let's drink a toast, then, with some Kona Nigari Water from Hawaii, sourced at a depth of more than 900 feet, and $400 a bottle. Of course, if you were stranded in the middle of the Qatari desert and about to expire, you'd settle for a canteen filled with tap water. Off in the horizonless distance, you might think you were seeing things. Four enormous steel monoliths, 50 feet high, dwarfing the camels of passing caravans. This would be Richard Serra's East-West/West-East, a commission for which he was paid an undisclosed sum. Now the reason why the price would not be revealed—as if it was a state secret—is probably because it's so exorbitant that its revelation would further enrage critics of the world's richest country. (While monthly average household earnings are nearly $20,000, Qatar relies on migrant workers whose employment amounts to indentured labor, and in which they may be held eternally captive. They earn on average $300 per month, at jobs for which they were forced to pay excessive "recruitment fees.") Designated as a permanent installation, the Serra sculpture has appeared in a moment and in a part of the world where great monuments of antiquity and artifacts have been destroyed—the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, manuscripts and artworks in Iraq's Mosul Library and Museum. In a violent, volatile time, is there any real guarantee of permanence? Maybe the only apparition that can be trusted is the Mirage fighter jet, produced by France, and sold to countries in the Mideast including Egypt, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The aircraft cost around $23 million, and while that may seem like a steep price to pay, the payload of a Mirage 2000 is more than 6 tonnes. That's a lot of firepower, with radar-guided, air-to-air and heat-seeking missiles. You can trade ten Mirage jets for a single painting by Cezanne.

[body_image width='1108' height='395' path='images/content-images/2015/04/10/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/10/' filename='the-emperors-new-art-405-body-image-1428679350.jpg' id='45016'](L) The Mirage 2000C (R) Paul Cezanne, The Card Players, 1895

With that exchange in mind, a nightmarish scene rears its terrifying head: a sequel to Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (cost $127 million, worldwide earnings $350 million, or the price of a great Gauguin). In the new movie, the Abu Dabi Louvre, having risen as if by the slave labor that built the Pyramids at Giza, is descended upon by a fierce army of fanatics and marauders, wantonly looting and burning the masterpieces rented out from their Parisian guardians, laying waste to the patrimony of France. Mirage jets scramble and, spectacularly, amidst all the chaos and confusion, bomb and destroy the museum and its priceless contents. Smoke billows and darkens the deep blue skies over the Persian Gulf... as the credits roll.

[body_image width='2048' height='1371' path='images/content-images/2015/04/10/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/10/' filename='the-emperors-new-art-405-body-image-1428680079.jpg' id='45027']
Richard Serra's East-West_West-East, permanent installation (photo by Flickr user arwcheek)

On May 11, what will be the fate of Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger—the Women of Algiers, an image of concubines? No doubt a packed room of art lovers and speculators will burst into thunderous applause as the hammer nails down a staggering price paid. But where will Les Femmes ultimately reside? Will a wire transfer in excess of $140 million be authorized by the Qatar National Bank? Will they join a nubile Tahitian girl in attending to The Card Players? That's quite a high stakes game. $140 million. Think about that the next time you fill the tank of your Chevy Suburban. After all, to the victor go the spoils.

Read more from Bob on VICE.

1. MOZAMBIQUE
Industrial Fishing Is Wiping Out Sharks

There are more than 4,000 industrial fishing boats sweeping the Indian Ocean, many of them dropping more than 300 lines a day, each armed with more than 3,000 hooks—that's about a million hooks every day. While tremendously effective at catching fish, this method does not discriminate, and the fish that are reeled in—often already dead—include hundreds of sharks, despite the fact that in some places, like off the coast of Madagascar, catching sharks is illegal. Shark fins are incredibly valuable, and the appetite for these fins, and shark meat in general, is leading to a decimation of the world's shark populations. "When the sharks go, everything else starts to change," marine biologist Boris Worm tells VICE. "Where sharks are disappearing, the ecosystem becomes unstable, and it disintegrates the fabric of the food chain." These sharks are just the canary in the coal mine. Researchers estimate that if the rate of industrial fishing continues at its current pace, we could end up with no seafood species at all by the middle of this century—and local fishing communities in the Mozambique Channel are already feeling the effect.

Watch Countdown to Extinction now on VICE on HBO.

2. NEW YORK
The Reckless Disposal of Radioactive Waste

Ridgewood, Queens, was once home to the Wolff-Alport Chemical Company. For decades, the plant processed earth metals and disposed of the waste product, radioactive thorium, by flushing it down the sewer or burying it. They closed their doors in 1954, but the recklessly disposed thorium still lingers, making the site the most radioactive place in New York City. The area where the plant used to be is so radioactive that the Environmental Protection Agency has recently designated it a Superfund site. So we headed to Queens to explore the impact that the radioactivity has had on the surrounding businesses and to talk to the EPA about the site's history. From the new condos going up across the street to a nearby bodega, we met people who've been directly impacted by the 61-year-old nuclear relic and spoke to others who had no idea it existed.

Check out this episode of Transmissions, coming soon to Motherboard.VICE.com.

3. SWEDEN
Feasting on Reindeer Meat Like a Viking

Ever heard of palt, spettekaka, or surströmming? In The Munchies Guide to Sweden, our host Ivar Berglin explores the cuisine of his home country and Europe's emerging culinary star. From reindeer to fermented herring, Ivar eats his way through the dishes that define the nation. He constructs a traditional smorgasbord in Gothenburg, carves up a whole goose in Malmö, sacrifices a reindeer with the indigenous Sami people in snowy Umeå, and eats like a Viking with Swedish techno legend E-Type in Stockholm. Finally, Ivar hits some of Sweden's top restaurants and meets chefs who are embracing a fresh culinary approach called new Nordic cuisine. If you're expecting meatballs, prepare to be disappointed. But (SPOILER ALERT!) there is a hot tub.

Watch The Munchies Guide to Sweden now on Munchies.VICE.com.

4. MEXICO
The Fruit-and-Mud Cure

We went to Espinazo, a little town in northern Mexico, to witness the biannual pilgrimage to El Niño Fidencio, attended by more than 40,000 people. Otherwise known as José de Jesús Fidencio Constantino Síntora, he earned a huge number of followers after the Mexican Revolution due to his gift for healing people. It is said that he used to perform surgery without any anesthesia and caused his patients no pain. He made it so disabled people could walk again and blind people could see, and according to urban legend, he cured Mexican president Plutarco Elías Calles of leprosy. His followers say that his spirit possesses them, allowing them to heal people. They cure the sick by putting them on a swing, throwing fruit at them, and submerging them in a mud puddle.

Check out this episode of Mexicalia, now playing on VICE.com.

5. JAPAN
The Worst Internships Ever

Japan is facing a serious labor shortage, thanks to its aging population and fear that immigrants will dilute its pure gene pool. We recently traveled there to investigate a government-sponsored plan for keeping the world's third-largest economy afloat: an internship program that attracts foreign workers from China, Vietnam, and the Philippines­­—but lets them stick around for only three years. The idea is that the workers return home with a transferable new skill. But we saw that many are being forced into a form of indentured servitude—being placed in unskilled positions, like oyster shucking and construction, underpaid, and beset with insurmountable debt. Despite international condemnation, Japan plans to bring thousands of new foreign "interns" to build the infrastructure for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

Watch Japan's Labor Pains, coming soon to VICENews.com.

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Photo via Flickr user Waiting for the World

It was my 29th birthday and I was sitting on a couch in a strip club with a dancer named Heather hovering above me. She was wearing a silvery bra and a black thong. I was wearing a Harry Potter T-shirt and jeans. My friend had offered to buy me the lap dance as a birthday present. I'd taken her up on the offer partly because I was curious, but also because I had to prove to myself that my politics weren't just words, that I really had come a great distance from the fundamentalist Christian I was a decade ago.

When I turned 21, I wasn't sure if I believed in evolution. I was positive global warming couldn't be caused by humans, and I was never more aware of God's presence and work in my life. I hesitantly sipped a stout beer—my first drink ever—and proclaimed that I didn't know what the next couple of years would mean, but I was sure God had something awesome planned for me.

I was what you might call a fundamentalist evangelical. I didn't go all the way into wearing ankle-length denim skirts and head coverings, but I held all the same beliefs: Women should dress modestly. We should all save sex for marriage. Homosexuality was wrong and evil. Jesus came to save us from the total depravity of our sins, and liberals who claimed to be Christian were lying to themselves.

I was raised as an evangelical Christian and had been "saved" at five years old. This quickly became the most important part of my life. My old journal entries are filled with consternation and shame over wrong actions and sins done. In one memorable incident, I attended a dance at my state's political participation camp Girls State. The next day, I wrote: "I feel bad because I didn't act very Christian. I danced to 'Baby Got Back' and then sat and did nothing during 'I Touch Myself.' I failed you, God."

But some time around my junior year of college, things begin to shift. It may have been the liberal friends I made or the world not exploding into flames around me when I swore or drank alcohol. It may have just been my own curiosity about different religious traditions and variations within Christian theology itself. All I know is that when I was 22, I voted for a Democrat for the first time ever in my life, and confessed quietly to my roommate that I thought I was becoming pro-choice. Something shifted me away from my fundamentalist certainty and into the hazy realm of the moral gray.

Slowly, post-evangelical millennials find a home in feminist discourse and thought. Some, like me, discover it through higher education.

By the time I ended up in the bathroom of an Old Chicago strip club, scrubbing a stripper's lipstick off my neck, I'd not only done a complete 180 on my political views, but I had published them in a widely read book and spoke openly about my sex life to practically anyone who asked.

I am a long way from my conservative roots, and yet, I find myself in good company. There's a large group within Christianity nowadays who can effectively be called "post-evangelicals." We're millennials, mostly, who grew up in the fundamentalist evangelical churches of the 80s and 90s, and who have disengaged from those beliefs. There's quite a few of us, considering as many as three in five young Christians leave the church by the time they turn 15, according to a recent national study by Barna, an evangelical research group. We've found new ways of thinking and new ways of enacting our beliefs in God, usually resulting from the realization that gay people are, y'know, people, and that our former church is generally run by white, cisgender, straight men.

Many of these post-evangelicals are women whose voices went unheard in the church. We grew up in worlds where we were told, over and over, that our roles in the church and in life were set and defined by God before we were even born. We were to be wives and mothers, and virgins until the time we could provide children. And many of us, raised in a post–sexual revolution world, with women in careers outside the home and examples of powerful women on TV every week, found the predestined roles restrictive and chafing.

Related: VICE meets Brother Dean Saxton, the slut-shaming preacher of the University of Arizona.

Slowly, with baby steps, and quiet exploration, post-evangelical millennials found a home in feminist discourse and thought. Many, like me, discovered it through higher education. We expanded our views of Christ and the crucifixion to include a political axis as well. We began to see the center of Christianity not as a pursuit of individual salvation, but as a theological, political force that demands justice in all realms.

This eventually landed many post-evangelicals on the liberal end of the political spectrum, voting for the very people our fundamentalist background says are sending the country to hell. As we unravel the presupposition and boxes our faith put us in, we discover a brand new world, where conversations with friends weren't "witnessing opportunities" and where finding someone attractive didn't mean spending the next two hours self-flagellating.

One of the women I spoke to still fears pushback from her fundamentalist community for talking about her experiences (which is also why she wished to remain anonymous). She told me about her first experience at a Halloween party. She had grown up in a restrictive denomination—complete with rules about dress and manner for women, including mandatory head coverings. Halloween was considered a flirtation with evil, and was therefore banned. So she was in her 20s by the time she actually attended a Halloween party—and one with alcohol available, to boot.

"I was 25 years old. I was so worried about it," she told me. "I worked myself up so much that I had a massive migraine before going. But there were no orgies, no incantations, no drunken stupors, or horror. It was just a group of friends, having fun. It was eye-opening and freeing."

In the fundamentalist world, we're told horror stories of "secular" parties, of celebrating of the grandest debauchery. Friends who drink, friends who participate in "the culture of the world," are suspect, viewed as sinners justifying sin. So to discover that the world isn't going to explode, that you're not going to fall into a debauched world of orgiastic fervor, that parties are really just people talking to one another, is simultaneously liberating and terrifying.

Like many people with sudden, newfound freedom, we don't exactly know how to proceed. We're like Amish kids on an eternal rumspringa, discovering for the first time the world the Apostle Paul spoke about, where everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial.

There's a standing trope in popular culture of the freshman college kid who realizes that she's finally alone, she's finally away from her parents. She can do what she wants—like have ice cream for breakfast—and no one will stop her. Fundamentalist survivors are a bit like that. We're figuring out that we can have ice cream for breakfast, but we're still wondering if our mom is going to come around the corner and scold us. Except it's never just ice cream, and it's not an angry parent—it's the God of the universe sending us to hell.

Even after you've left the church, the fear is still with you. You think God's judgment is eventually coming to bear on all the sinful decisions you've made with your new freedom.

Staying in the church means that the scolding is never far off. New York Times bestselling author Rachel Held Evans has experienced this firsthand. When Evans dared to use "she" as a pronoun for God in a 2012 blog post, she didn't imagine that, two years later, the president of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood would take that one word, that one phrase, and write diatribes about it. Owen Strachan called her heretical, dangerous, and all manner of terrible things—because she exhibited a faith that prioritized women and acknowledged a long tradition of calling God the Spirit by feminine pronouns. For fundamentalist evangelicals, it is impossible to separate the subjugation of women and the holiness of God. We are in our right place when we are "submitting" to men, letting them take the lead. So when women realize that they have a humanity, a sexual drive, and a voice, our fundamentalism often falls apart. Many women move into post-evangelicalism because our identities no longer sit neatly in the categories evangelicalism proscribes for us.

But despite our efforts to leave behind the oppressive ideas of the church, some of them stay with you. In that poorly lit back room, behind a sheer curtain on a dirty couch, as Heather the stripper danced for me, all I could think was: I can never speak about this to anyone.

You're never without the fear that God's judgment will eventually come bearing down on you for all the sinful decisions you've made with your new freedom. This is the center of the struggle that former fundamentalist Christians face: We can never quite get away from the idea that we might be wrong, that God might punish us in the afterlife. And much of the church in America stands by with arms crossed, waiting for that judgment to fall.

Dianna E. Anderson is the author of Damaged Goods: New Perspectives on Christian Purity. Follow her on Twitter.