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Look at Alex Schubert's Instagram, blog, and buy his books.

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Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley talking to a potential voter, as politicians are wont to do in campaign season. Photo via NDP website

The daughter of the late Ralph Klein, long-serving Progressive Conservative premier, is backing the Alberta NDP in the current election. Danielle Smith, former chief of the province's far-right Wildrose Party, agreed that New Democrat leader Rachel Notley emerged as clear victor of the leaders' debate. Ezra Levant, AKA the Rebel Commander, tweeted that he'd sooner vote for the social democratic party than the reigning Progressive Conservatives.

What the Ayn Randian-fuck is going on in Alberta?

When PC Premier Jim Prentice called an early election on April 7, many assumed the party would coast to another majority, as it has on 12 consecutive occasions. Sure, the NDP have managed to establish a foothold in Edmonton in past elections, while the Liberals solidified support in Calgary's urban areas via the strong personalities of David Swann and Kent Hehr. But given the extermination of the official opposition via a now-legendary floor-crossing, most assumed the verdict was essentially preordained. The election was more of a ceremonial gesture, a token of goodwill to the concept of democracy.

"Here you have a huge majority in an 87-seat legislature, you've got a budget that's not pleasant but not outrageous, you've got a decimated opposition," explains Bruce Foster, associate professor in political science at Mount Royal University. "And you go and call an election. I think people are angry at that: not only because it doesn't make sense but angry at the PCs for just lording it over everybody else. That anger is coming through in the polls as well."

The lefties are indeed surging in the polls. ThreeHundredEight.com, a website that aggregates polling data, has averaged NDP support at 38.7 percent, with the PCs and Wildrose clocking in at 28.7 and 25.1 percent respectively. Notley—a former labour lawyer and daughter of long-time party leader Grant Notley—has miraculously managed to convince a considerable number of Albertans to abandon their posts with the PCs; almost one-third of decided Albertans who backed the ruling party in the 2012 election are throwing their support behind the NDPs.

Pollsters are adamant that such numbers don't equate to seats given the high concentration of NDP support in Edmonton, Lethbridge, and parts of urban Calgary (compared to the Wildrose Party that are focusing more on rural ridings and suburban Calgary). Dave Cournoyer, a prominent political blogger, notes that it's very difficult for a party to form majority government without appealing to both urban and rural seats, which the NDP have not. Add in the reality that the PCs possess a sturdy fundraising and get-out-and-vote machine, and caution seems perhaps advisable.

Brian Singh, president of zinc tank and founder of 1AlbertaVote, notes that there are five or six elements the NDP have to fulfill: "The expectation of a win, how the neighbours are going to vote, all the measures on trust in terms of managing the economy, leadership, education and healthcare. It's not necessarily an even playing field. There's a social condition for the PCs to say that they've been in power for so long and they're naturally the ruling party."

So perhaps Alberta's progressives are getting prematurely excited. After all, there was that infamous situation in 2012 in which the Wildrose were forecasted to win a majority and ended up scoring a mere 20 percent of seats. Yet in many respects, the election isn't about policy issues at all: Andrew Leach, energy policy professor at the University of Alberta says that "the wonk view of tax policy and how corporate tax interacts with other elements in our system just hasn't grabbed the average person." This election, as many intelligent people are noting, is more about trust than anything else.

Prentice has only been premier since October but he's certainly made the most of his time. In the worst way, that is. Bribery, ethics breaches, backdoor funding cuts, suspicious nomination race disqualifications, arrogance, pretending to care about the opinion of Albertans: that's an impressive pile of dirt in just seven months. All of this comes on the heels of Alison Redford, the Red Tory and beneficiary of the "Lake of Fire" episode in 2012, who was turfed from premiership for bizarre travel expenses and attempting to build a private penthouse on public dime.

"The narrative of the election has really become about accountability," says Cournoyer. "And I don't think this is just about Jim Prentice: this goes back to three years ago when Alison Redford and the PCs squeaked out a victory over Danielle Smith and the Wildrose. PCs were really able to play the fear card in the last election. There isn't that fear of the Wildrose anymore because most of the Wildrose Party has moved over to the PCs."

The right-of-centre crowd—the "read my lips, no new taxes" voter base—has largely evacuated to the dominion of the Wildrose; the PCs introduced close to 60 taxes and user fees in their March 26 budget, something the far-right party hasn't let anyone forget. Meanwhile, the NDP have absorbed anyone remotely concerned with diminishing investments in healthcare and education, or the potential war against public-sector workers, or the initial opposition to gay-straight alliances.

But so much of it returns to confidence. That reality is perhaps one of the last strongholds the PCs can appeal to: by asserting that the NDP will cripple the economy and the Wildrose aren't prepared to govern, the party can again claim votes with the promise of consistency. But it will likely be more difficult to pull off this time, given the presence of not one but two threats (coming from polar opposites of the spectrum to boot). It's yet to be seen if the Red Scare tactics deployed by the PCs will be effective.

"They've given people enough information to confirm their preconceived notions," Leach notes. "If you believe the NDP's going to do crazy stuff, you can find enough in what they say to confirm that notion for yourself. Whereas if you believe they're not going to be that different from what we've seen thus far, you can also find that."

It seems one of the favoured tactics of Alberta's anti-NDP crowd is comparing the possibility of a social-democratic future to that of Manitoba, the only province that's currently governed by the NDP. Leach dismisses the parallel by noting: "If Manitoba had a two-trillion oil resource in its north, then that would be a fair comparison." David Camfield, associate professor of labour studies and sociology at the University of Manitoba, adds that the province's NDP—which have governed since 1999—haven't exactly offered much of a socialist alternative, opting instead for strikebreaking, tax cuts, and the adoption of federal crime-and-punishment legislation.

"People should vote NDP with their eyes wide open and without illusions about what the NDP today actually represents," Camfield advises. "Obviously if the NDP gets elected in Alberta they'll be under tremendous pressure from capital in the province. People should not expect that the NDP would withstand that pressure. It just points to the importance of unions and social movements in trying to resist things getting worse and trying to make positive change in an age of austerity."

Follow James Wilt on Twitter.

It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: An unnamed woman in Brentwood, England

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Screencap via Google Maps.

The incident: A guy hung a painting with the word fuck on it in his gallery window.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: An outraged passerby called the police.

Art dealer John Brandler owns a gallery/store called Brandler Galleries in Brentwood, England.

Last month, he hung a painting in the gallery's window. The painting, which is pictured above, is by some artists called the Connor Brothers and, as a pun on Much Ado About Nothing, has the words "A LOAD OF FUSS ABOUT FUCK ALL" written across the top of it. It has a sale price of £7,500 ($11,500).

According to a report in John's local paper, the Brentwood Gazette, John got a visit from a police officer a couple of weeks ago. The officer told him that he'd received a complaint from a member of the public about the painting, and told John that he would have to cover up the "fuck."

"There are 60,000 people in Brentwood and one person can object to something and by law it has to be removed," John told the paper. "I think it is fucking bonkers."

John put a piece of paper on the painting, covering up the offending word. Which satisfied the officer.

"He had to photograph that we had covered it so he could show that he had done his job. Is that what we pay the police for?" John fumed.

John says that, due to the UK's data protection laws, the officer was unable to tell him who had made the complaint. All he was able to reveal, John said, is that she had been a woman, and had contacted the police by phone. "Why not just come in and say 'I found that offensive' or phone me?" he said.

Cry-Baby #2: Cheryl Lynn (not the one who sang "Got to be Real")

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Screencap via Google Maps.

The incident: A woman was refused a refund for a haircut she didn't like.

The appropriate response: A VERY strongly worded Yelp review.

The actual response: She stabbed the stylist multiple times.

Last week, 20-year-old Cheryl Lynn (pictured above) of Utica, New York, was at a house party when she saw a stylist who had previously given her a haircut she was not happy with.

According to a report on WKTV, Cheryl "approached her, accusing her of styling her hair poorly and saying she wanted her money back."

No further details of this exchange are given in any of the news reports on this story, but, according to police, Cheryl left the party without getting a refund from the unnamed woman.

Some time later that night, police say, Cheryl ran into the hair stylist in the street. The two women then allegedly began fighting and Cheryl stabbed the victim three times in her neck, shoulder, and chest. The victim was able to flee the scene and called the police.

Cheryl was arrested later that night and charged with assault and criminal possession of a weapon, both of which are felonies.

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll right here:

Previously: A school that expelled a girl who missed too many days due to cancer vs. a woman who stabbed a man with a pen because he was snoring on a plane.

Winner: The cancer school!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user aMAZEme

It's pretty clear by now that everything is fucked. So much so that even sitting at home and reading seems insane. As such, it's become more and more difficult for me to believe a narrator who has any kind of clue what they are doing, where we're headed, or whose world is anything but a constantly mutating maze, where memory and reality collapse into one another as casually as all the other horrors.

Thankfully, and just in time for the throbbingly high temperatures and allergy plagues that come alongside spring-turning-to-summer, here are three short, feverish novels where the only things that seem for certain are fear and death, and that every coming sentence could be the one that changes everything.

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McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh ( Fence Books, 2014)

It's stereotypically not a great sign for a work of fiction to begin with a line like "I wake up." But in the case of McGlue's eponymous narrator, McGlue, who goes on to include that he is drunk and covered in blood, such a banal introduction is only a red herring, one of many the novella will reveal as it unwinds.

Essentially, McGlue is the story of a guy who has been accused of murdering a man while out at sea among a ship full of filthy sailors, and who can only remember in blips. The narration carries us through its body with all the lucidity of a self-inflicted victim of brain damage. One of the few things McGlue does know for sure is he likes to drink—to the point that the rest of his life and situation is so askew he can't tell the past from the present, the dead from the haunted, his penance from his crime.

What we are left with, then, is an interweaving of a prisoner's attempt to piece together his whole life. Fragments of memories of his best friend, Johnson—whom he may or may not have killed—intersperse as phantoms locked alongside the drifting ambience of a Melville-like black thrall. In the same breath as McGlue is calling the chamber boy assigned to keep him fed, he dreams he is in bed with Johnson in his arms. Memories bend into drunken stupors into passing aspirations to stay drunk, knitting the phases of perspective into a reckless whorl.

Holding together this open-map world of McGlue's wasted, wandering psyche is the flowing yet baroque voice with which he leads us through his mind. Extremely simple sentences such as "Blood leaks from my mouth" fit together with more deceptively declarative assessments of the space, such as: "I'd say my cell was six feet wide, ten feet long, and ten high last night, and this morning it's four feet wide, eight feet long, and seven feet high." No matter how far afield or deeply into spirits we are carried, McGlue's dark logic remains a guide, laying foundations line by line that, even as they fall away, provide another floor right there beneath it, traps on traps on traps.

In a time when mostly no one seems to be writing about drunk death freaks on the ocean anymore, and for all its self-deceptions, its stop-start miseries, its sprawl, McGlue is as satisfying as anything you're likely to find appearing in your weird little hands this year.

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The Dig by Cynan Jones ( Coffee House Press, 2015)

Like McGlue, Welsh novelist Cynan Jones's third and latest work, The Dig, begins with an act of violence, if one much more certain of its place: A country man is trying to unload the beaten body of a badger maimed by dogs in local illegal fights, the man's primary line of work. "The dogs had pulled the front of its face off and its nose hung loose and bloodied, hanging from a sock of skin. It hung off the badger like a separate animal." With even as little actual action as there is here, the idea of what has already happened, and what will soon happen again, alights its pain almost even more sickeningly than if shown directly, leaving the reader hung in the balance between moral horror and putrefaction.

Which, as it turns out, becomes one of this novel's greatest strengths. Whereas many works of such nature would use such an opening as foreshadowing toward greater monstrosity, The Dig is more interested in the space between brutality and justice. Interspersed between the scenes of the nameless gamesman—referred to throughout as "the big man"—are parallel accounts of a local farmer whose lambs are all giving birth. The two are pitted against one another from very early on in this way, indirectly, providing a sense of impending collision that grows and grows, layering each subsequent scene with a kind of lurking darkness, as though at any minute the whole world within the book might burst.

Jones has received numerous comparisons to Cormac McCarthy for his sense of minimalist meter and ink-black tone, and for once the comparison bears more weight than just being about strange country people. As the trapper goes about his illegal business hunting new badgers for fighting, the narration is content with exploring not so much the sprawl of action, but its space. Stark scenes of men digging through the earth after a live animal press up against the appearance of strange voices the farmer hears alone elsewhere in the night; the textures bend back and forth on one another, trading their friction, waiting, incubating. Even without any clear release, it is in this sense of meditation between opposite forces in the same land that we are carried, turned and turned as if in winds that have blown somewhere not far off in our world, one where the textured silences might hide as much menace as the loudest wailing.

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Love Hotel by Jane Unrue ( New Directions, 2015)

A sense of open menace also lurks throughout Love Hotel, the latest work from Jane Unrue, though its direction and intent might be the most unknown as yet. Compared to the two examples above, the terrain of Love Hotel is more skeletal, fragmentary, subject to shake. Here, the narration frequently interrupts itself even in mid-sentence or during a gesture left incomplete. Like the structure of the looping hallways and staircases in Alain Resnais's iconic maze-film, Last Year at Marienbad , the very architecture of the world continues to mutate alongside any understanding of itself, as well as in the logic of the narrator, a nameless woman whom we are left to follow through uncertain darkness as if haunting her ourselves, from just behind.

And yet it is primarily this very mutating structure that lends the book its most pressing sense of suspense and eerie charm. There's so much white space between the paragraphs, the pages, often leaving a single sentence or a word free, like a trail. I can't help but think of the text of a video game, the way you move through it searching for what will speak next, what colors will emerge, what direction you will be led in. However, if there is a game here, it's more like a corrupted version of middle hours of The Shining than anything with thr undead or guns.

The narrator is looking for something, or someone—we seem to know that much at least, even if we are not sure exactly what or who—in a hotel that seems to disintegrate at will, eventually rolling over into open landscapes, other houses. The narrator's understanding of the world multiplies, too, often seeming to shift between several perspectives contained within the same body, all of which bleed together, drown each other out. She seems primarily to be consumed with fulfilling a task for a couple whose presence also mutates: Sometimes they seem to want her to become impregnated for them, other times to be a sexual companion, and yet other times to function as a kind of errand-person, meant to wander from room to room waiting to be given meaning.

One page just reads: "I stuck the key into the" and ends without even punctuation, leaving you to move forward onto the next page, describing the architecture of a room. "402 / It was a double with an ivory eyelet canopy on top with ruffle around the bottom both in dusty pink coordinated loosely with the carpet more directly with the walls all painted in the same pink color." Like the rest of the world around it, the grammar mutates, as does the layout. And yet we sense that there is meaning behind a phrase or shape of space.

And, as continuously unfurling and unraveling as the plot is, it is magnetic in the way it draws you through from page to page. The landscape of the text itself is as alive and cryptic as the world it describes (or fails to describe): Jagged edges to the broken paragraphs climb down through single words stacked into columns sometimes in all caps and sometimes italics, ornate descriptions clipped off in mid-sentence, questions asked and immediately discarded. Inherent to it all is the sense of sacred unknowing of the narrator, a sense of unshakable conviction to keep throwing one's self forward within some faceless sorrow. Overall here is an actual experience, on paper, one charged with so sharp a sense of mystery you could probably keep reading the book over and again, finding new narrow areas to worm through, vivify, obsess with, open.

Follow Blake on Twitter.

The ceremony of blot starts with a blast. An ancient Moot Horn cuts through the congregation's idle chatter, allowing the clings of metallic pendants to rise and fill the new silence. The horn is a rallying call to all attendees—both in this realm and beyond. There is a period of meditation before fire-lighting and invocations, a time to considers ancestors, kin, future bloodlines. A runic mantra follows, linking congregants and immersing them in the energy of vibration. The ceremony closes with the passing of the Mead Horn, a curved drinking vessel filled with spirits. Everyone makes a toast, the horn is emptied, and the feast begins.

The ceremony of blot is carried out by followers of Odinism and Asatru, two denominations of the same religion focused on worshipping the Norse gods. There's Odin, the god of war, death, poetry, and the alphabet; Freyr, god of virility and fair weather; Freyja, goddess of love and fertility; and of course, Thor, the hammer-wielding god of thunder and lightning, as portrayed by Chris Hemsworth in the Marvel movies.

Together, Odinism and Asatru constitute the largest non-Christian religion in Iceland, officially recognized by Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. It's gaining steam in America, too, where Thor's Hammer is now allowed to be carved onto military gravestones and prisoners are granted special accommodations to carry out rituals.

But there's a dark side, too. "When I see the word Odinist, the red flags go off," says Joshua Rood, an expert who teaches an Old Norse Religion MA program at University of Iceland. "A lot of people who don't know any better, usually very new people, will consider themselves Odinists because they like Odin, they think he's cool. But they have no idea they're referring to themselves by a term that's connected to a movement that's racist."

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The Swedish Asatru Society performs a ceremony. Photo via WikiMedia Commons

To understand Odinism—and the way that it became a religion entangled with racism, exclusion, and American prison culture—you need to start with the original Scandinavian pagans. These groups worshipped Norse gods through songs and ceremonies, celebrating the mythology of gods like Thor and Odin, who went by many names. Between the 8th and 12th centuries AD, Christians "explained" to the heathens about the One True God, and so-long went paganism, until the mid-1800s, when a nationalistic climate led Scandinavian countries to rediscover their own history. They found something to call their own—Norse Gods—and rebirthed the religion into Germanic neopaganism.

In 1936, Australian author Alexander Rud Mills established the First Anglecyn Church of Odin, which claimed Odinism as "the indigenous religion of the northern European people." In his opening liturgical text, he mentioned "the fall from grace of the White Race by being untrue to the spirit of their forefathers." Else Christensen, a Danish woman, was struck by the work. After WWII, Christensen and her husband Alex emigrated to Canada and founded the Odinist Study Group after WWII with the claim that "religion is in our genes." After Alex's death in 1971, she moved to the United States and published The Odinist newsletter.

The return to Norse gods was regaining steam. In 1972, Icelandic farmer Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson founded the Asatru Fellowship (or Ásatrúarfélagið)—a spinoff of Odinism—which was granted recognition as an official religion in Iceland. While many components are the same as Odinism—including the celebration of blot, the worshipping of Norse gods, the same Moot Horn blasts and Mead Horn gulps—the religion wasn't based on an indigenous claim. "The Asatru has a holistic, environmental touch—and they feel very closely connected to Mother Earth," said Michael Nielsen, a professor of Viking History at Copenhagen University, in an email. All are welcome, no matter your heritage or color.

But a few years later, in 1976, American Stephen McNallen also adopted the term "Asatru" for the creation of his own organization, the Asatru Folk Assembly, a non-profit organization based in Nevada City, California. (McNallen created a precursor to this organization in 1972, under the name The Viking Brotherhood.)

"I found the Norse system of courage, honor, and daring much more compelling than the submission and submergence of the individual I saw in Christianity," McNallen told me through email.

But rather than following the tree-hugging vibe of the Beinteinsson-created Asatru Fellowship, McNallen's American version adopted the Mills/Christensen "folk" style regarding the worship of Norse gods, the more "classic" version of Odinism. Generally speaking, in this in this context, "folk" actually means "racist" and has caused many opponents to suggest that he has co-opted the term and ideas of the Icelandic "Asatru" for his own hateful devices.

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Odin, flanked by his two wolves and two ravens. Photo via WikiMedia Commons

"[Odinists] claim they are opposed to racism, but they define racism very differently from the average person," says Rood. "They say, 'We're not racist. We just believe in keeping ethnicity separate.' Which... it's racist."

McNallen's point-of-view—which mirrors that of Odinist organizations both in America and Europe—is that everyone has their own culture, and we should stick to it. "I do not believe we are born tabula rasa, or 'blank slate,'" writes McNallen. "We are the latest edition of our ancestors in this slice of space and time. Our native culture, or a logical permutation of it, is the one that suits us best because it arises from our very soul." Despite the fact that McNallen's ancestors have been in America for 200 years, his bloodline was in Europe for 40,000 years before then, and thus, he argues, his ancestral line "transcends space, time, and mortality."

For his part, McNallen says he's "never claimed that non-Europeans cannot practice Asatru. But I wonder why they would want to follow European native religion rather than the entirely valid and worthy native religions of their own ancestors. I wonder what their own ancestors must feel at being slighted so."

So, while the European followers of Asatru worship Thor without the emphasis on racial or ethnic heritage, the Asatrus in America look more like Odinists, who emphasize racial heritage. It all gets kind of confusing. "I feel a bit sorry for both movements," writes Nielsen. "The sources about Old Norse religion were written down after centuries of Christianity, and it is therefore possible to fill in whatever suits you."

Related: VICE visits "The Wizard of the Saddle" in Memphis, Tennessee, the epitome of racism in America.

The idea has caught on in American prisons. The Holy Nation of Odin, Inc., a non-profit church that worships the Old Norse gods, is run by Casper Crowell from his prison cell in California's maximum-security Corcoran State Prison. Crowell is serving a 54-years-to-life sentence as a California Three Strikes offender, the final strike coming when he shot a man in Palm Springs in 1995.

To join Crowell'sHoly Nation of Odin, Inc., you have to pay $40 membership fees, unless you're incarcerated, in which case it's free. In order to be considered, you must give up drugs (prescriptions are OK), leave your political ideology at home, follow the sacred runes, keep holy the blot, and, oh yeah, be white:

This religion and way of life was indigenous to the peoples of Northern and Western Europe and so it remains so of their descendants today, "us"!

Crowell is a former member of the Aryan Brotherhood. He left because it wasn't as pure as he'd liked. Instead, he turned to the teachings of David Lane, the white nationalist founder of The Order who was serving a 190-year sentence for the 1984 murder of liberal radio host Alan Berg. Lane also infamously coined the term that particulary resonated with Crowell, the so-called Fourteen Words: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children."

It's not shocking, then, that followers of Odinism aren't known as being the most sterling of citizens. Glenn Cross, the 73-year-old who killed three people at Jewish institutions in Kansas last year, wears a Thor's Hammer medallion. Ryan Giroux, who killed one and wounded five in a shooting spree at an Arizona motel earlier this year, has Thor's Hammer tattooed on his chin. According to some reports, 15 percent of American Odinists are "overtly racist."

It's not so much that the white inmates believe in the religiosity of Odinism as much as they need to be affiliated with religious organizations to be granted certain rights behind bars.

"In jail, registering as Odinist has a different significance," writes Daniel Genis, ex-con-turned-journalist, in an email. "It's important because prisons are compartmentalized for reasons of security and religious callouts are often the only way to see someone from the other side of the joint."

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For all kinds of socioeconomic reasons, prison affiliations tend to fall along racial lines, and each of these groups have their own religious affiliations. Jamaicans and Caribbean-based gangs meet at Rastafarian gatherings. The Latin Kings are members of Santeria. Asians are Buddhist, Russians are Jews, Italians are Catholic. In 2003, the black nationalist group The Five Percenters brand-shifted to the moniker The Nation of Gods and Earths, which allowed African-Americans their own officially-sanctioned prison religion. White prisoners wanted the same type of thing. So, the white prison population took over the only religion they could call their own: "the original, indigenous faith of the English people."

"In theory, becoming an Odinist offers brotherhood, protection, and identity to a white prisoner who can find himself [in] crowds [dominated by] men of a different race," writes Genis. "As familiar as this may be to African Americans, it's new and terrifying to many white convicts."

It also grants the ability to symbolically fight the system: Following a 2005 Supreme Court ruling, Asatru/Odinists are allowed to wear Thor's Hammer pendants around their necks. "Prison offers few chances to express one's identity," writes Genis. "Men fight back with tattoos, which cannot be taken away and hairstyles. The only jewelry allowed are wedding bands and necklaces with religious insignia."

Which is why, every now and then, you'll hear a loud horn blast rattling the cold prison walls before the mead cup is passed, and why prisons are now, if not chock-full (there are no stats kept on inmate religions), then at least somewhat comprised of large, angry, heavily-tattooed white guys wearing necklaces that your precocious pre-teen Avengers fan may have on his Christmas list.

Follow Rick Paulas on Twitter.

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Photos by Keem Griffey.

In Baltimore, it's easy to internalize the notion that no one outside of the city gives a fuck about you. You grow up feeling like where you're from is second-rate and nobody makes it unless they leave. Our culture, outside of drugs and vacant houses, is widely unknown but we make our own unique club music, we like slapping Old Bay on everything, we eat chicken boxes—you know, regular, non-The Wire shit. So to be the center of international attention feels strange, especially when that attention could have been so easily avoided if police did not allegedly facilitate the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man from West Baltimore. But since that did happen and since the people of Baltimore City decided to respond to that by taking to the streets in anger at not just Gray's death but the whole rigged system, we are where we are: Images of looting replayed on cable news, solidarity protests all over the country, and blacks and whites in Baltimore doing their best to repair their communities.

How is one supposed to act when their lives are decided for them before they're born? How are we as black people supposed to react when we are murdered by police, then blamed for our own deaths? I grew up in East Baltimore and while I can't claim to have suffered the exact hardships that Freddie Gray did, you can only do so much to escape the ills of inner city life as a black person in this town. From an early stage, you quickly learn that police are enforcers rather than protectors in black neighborhoods.

My first encounter with police came around the age of ten or 11 when my friends and I were playing with firecrackers in the alley. There were old toy cars scattered around that someone threw out. We took the firecrackers, lit them, and threw them into the toy cars. Someone called the police. They zipped around the block with their sirens, jumped out, and told us all to line up and sit down on the curb with our hands behind our backs. The officer told us if we didn't say who was responsible for the noise we weren't getting up. No one ratted. Any sign of us getting restless and moving was met by the look—the Get up and see what happens look that most black people, let alone children, will rarely challenge. We got off with a warning that day: "If I hear something else, y'all getting in the back of this car."

When my older sister Amanda was 15, she was taking the bus home from school when some kids on the bus started throwing eggs at people outside. The police pulled the bus over and, just as the cops did to me and my friends, asked them to turn over who was responsible. They didn't. The officers (six white and two black) made the driver get off and proceeded to call students niggers, monkeys, and coons because they didn't want to snitch. They then told a girl in front of Amanda to get off and when she reached down to grab her belongings, one of the white male cops punched her in the face and dragged her off of the bus. My sister couldn't endure any more. She ran toward the cops in anger and was met by a punch in the chest. She swung back, knocked the officer on his ass, and all eight of them jumped on her, pressing her face against the hot hood of a police car and twisting her hands in attempts to break them. They arrested her and threw her in the back of the wagon. When they got to the station, the officers joked among themselves about what charges they would give the five students they arrested, decided on a few, and processed each one of them. When my mother picked Amanda up from the station, local reporters who were outside asked what happened. Amanda told them everything, but only the part about students chanting, "Hell no! We won't go!" on the bus made the news that evening.

That one day derailed the rest of Amanda's high school education. She was kicked out of all Baltimore City schools and had to finish at an alternative school.

Other friends of mine have been pulled over and asked, "Where are the guns and drugs?" before they were asked for their licenses. Cops have taken their money when they felt like they were carrying too much cash, or planted drugs on them. In September, my stepbrother was beaten with batons by five officers because he was having a disagreement with a club bouncer. Someone took video of the beating on their phone, and it made the local news; my stepbrother was held on assault charges while the five officers were given paid administrative duties.

This deep-rooted tension, distrust, and toxic relationship with police in Baltimore has been brewing for a long, long time. Freddie Gray's untimely death was just the straw that broke the camel's back. But the people who acted out of rage have been called thugs on national television by their black president and their black mayor who was backed by a black police commissioner and have been made out to look like the cause of everything wrong with Baltimore.

What's most deflating is that a good deal of the people shaming the "thugs" are members of the black community. At various protests, community meetings and casual conversations this week I've heard "Violence isn't the answer," "You're proving white people right," and "Don't destroy your own neighborhood" so many times from my own people that my fucking head hurts. Black people in Baltimore, and in America, don't have any neighborhoods. We've been placed in ghettos. No matter where you look, black people, by design, live in the most under-developed parts of cities, and it's not by choice.

In 1911, Baltimore became the first place in America to adopt racially restrictive zoning rules that prevented one race from living on a block that was already occupied by people of another race. Consequently, the area with the largest concentration of black people was Old West Baltimore, now referred to as Zone 17—the same area Freddie Gray was from. A neighborhood is somewhere you live by your choice. Not where you've been systematically forced to live. That's nothing more than a prison without bars.

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So, what is actually being said when we publicly shun our people for acting on the frustrations bottled up from being oppressed? What is being said when a mother who beat her son on national television for defending himself is made into an overnight celebrity? If she had spanked her son on TV for anything other than him being a threat to the white supremacist structure, she would have been shamed if not hit with a charge. But because it paints what her son did as wrong, she's being championed for it, even out on the cover of pro-authority rags like the New York Post.Just like black people have been rewarded for turning on one another since they were brought to this country.

I don't advocate the harm of innocent people but I do know that destroying people's property—a.k.a. screwing with their money—is one way of forcing them to listen to you. None of the people who have tied themselves arguing for "nonviolent protest" this week gave a shit about Baltimore until someone set a cop car on fire.

This morning, Gray's death was ruled a homicide and the six officers involved in his death were handed charges ranging from second degree depraved heart murder to involuntary manslaughter to false imprisonment. I don't know what the final outcome of Gray's passing will be but I have a feeling that if justice is not brought down upon the officers involved in his death, no amount of scare tactics or projected embarrassment from within the black community will be able to limit what happened on April 27th to just one night of crying out.

Lawrence Burney is on Twitter.

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Screencap via VICE DU JOUR

A topless FEMEN protester stole the spotlight from Quebec's culture minister Thursday when she burst into a press conference with her breasts bared, shouting slogans about access to abortion.

As the cameras rolled, demonstrator Neda Topaloski yelled "Mon utérus, ma priorité" (my uterus, my priority), and flipped up her dress to reveal white underwear painted red to symbolize unsafe abortion.

Topaloski, who faces criminal charges for flashing her breasts for FEMEN at Montreal's Grand Prix last year, told VICE on Friday she believes a bill proposed by health minister Gaétan Barrette is threatening access to abortion in Quebec, where abortion rates far outstrip other areas of the western world.

"The minister doesn't have a uterus, and he has decided for the whole population of Quebec that the uterus is not a priority," Topaloski told VICE.

A government document leaked to newspaper Le Devoir in March said under the proposed Bill 20, abortion would no longer be considered a priority procedure, and the number of abortions each doctor could perform each year would be limited to 504.

This, plus a new proposed minimum patient quota for all doctors, led groups including the Quebec Federation of Nurses and the director of community clinic Centre de Santé des Femmes to question how Quebec's approximately 25,000 abortions per year could possibly be performed.

In a Facebook post, FEMEN says abortion would lose its priority medical status, "which means that the public health system will not be able to provide nearly enough abortions compared to what is needed."

After the controversy erupted in March, Barrette was quick to double the abortion limit to 1,008. The minister and Quebec's premierthen kicked into damage control mode, sayingthe bill would in fact allow doctors to perform more abortions.

Their words failed to halt Topaloski's topless outcry.

"My point yesterday," she told VICE Friday, "was to take one subject like abortion that is at the very foundation of male and female gender equality in Canada, in Quebec, and it is the first thing that puts us as equal people—having equal rights to our bodies, all of it. So that is being threatened by this law and I wanted to protest it because of that."

FEMEN, a feminist group that started in the Ukraine in 2008, has become internationally notorious for its female activists flashing their chests as a political statement. The group hijacks the news strategically by inserting the female body into the centre of debate, Topaloski explained.

However, some of the media coverage of her protest focused on security at the press conference. She gained access to the event using a press pass, but wouldn't say how she obtained the pass.

"The coverage always tries to avoid the important questions about women's rights we bring up in the public space," Topaloski said. "...But yesterday was a great success because the protest was understood clearly by everyone."

She said she joined the group a year and a half ago because she saw the activists unapologetically speaking out against a system of oppression without using violence.

Police told Topaloski to expect charges as a result of Thursday's protest.

FEMEN also staged a protest in Paris on Friday, upping the controversy of their bare-breasted schtick with Nazi salutes.

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

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Regular bullets. Photo via Flickr user Joe Loong

On Monday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), basically the US military's mad scientist division, announced it had cleared another milestone in its quest to develop self-guided bullets. The agency released footage of live-fire tests conducted earlier this year showing .50-caliber bullets making sharp turns in midair.

DARPA wants the new bullets to be an easily deployable technology, so it's designed them to be compatible with standard smooth-bore rifles and fit into traditional cartridges. The agency says their most recent tests suggest that even a novice shooter using the bullets for the first time could hit moving targets, but the stated goal is to make sniper's jobs easier and eventually adapt the technology to other calibers. The dream would be an arsenal of guns that the soldiers don't even have to aim.

Self-guided weapons technologies have been around for quite some time. The first American laser-guided bombs, which used optical sensors to hone in on targets, were launched during the Vietnam War. Scaling down the electronic systems needed to put these technologies in something the size of a bullet, however, has been a trickier task.

The first patent for a theoretically functional self-guided bullet was filed in 1997 by an academic. Rolin F. Barnett, Jr., now an associate professor of automotive engineering at North Carolina State University and head of Barnett Engineering, says that he first dreamed up his system as a graduate student, over two decades ago, as a personal challenge.

"I originated my work on the guided bullet in March of 1993," he says. "I was a graduate student at the time at Louisiana Tech University... The University had no desire to pursue it with me.

"The [first] guided system I considered was a type of optical system using a camera that was publicly available, but there were a variety of technical issues that prevented me from using that. [So] I came up with the laser-guided [system], wherein the laser is shined on the target and the reflection is seen by three or more eyes—laser detectors. They steer the bullet until the signal is equal between them. Thus it would be on target."

DARPA seems to have waded into self-guided small arms munitions around 2008, when the agency's first reported research contract on the subject popped up. The resulting project is known as the Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance program (EXACTO), and aims to increase US sniper lethality from 90 percent at 2,000 feet in good conditions to 90 percent at 6,500 feet. The project was inspired in part by the poor firing conditions of windy, dusty Afghanistan and the risk of a missed shot leading to return fire capable of hitting nearby snipers.

That 2008 contract, a $14.5 million grant to a Lockheed Martin subsidiary known as the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, yielded an impressive public demonstration of a self-guided bullet four years later. Sandia eliminated the grooves in a modern rifle, which normally help a bullet travel straight by making it spin, and instead crafted the .50-caliber bullet to be front-heavy so it would move through the air like a dart. The heaviness at the tip of the bullet was acheived by installing a series of laser-detecting optical sensors, which would follow a laser trained on a target using an internal, eight-bit processing system running a simple control algorithm to guide external fins that make up to 30 directional corrections per second. The system allowed trained snipers to make 90 percent accurate shots up to about 6,300 feet away—and yielded some cool trajectory-tracking photos.

"The DARPA project, I think, experimented with my technology," Barnett says. "The one that was demonstrated at Sandia looked to be identical to my patent and had four eyes instead of three."

Barnett is so convinced that the technology at play was based on his own that he's tried to file for patent-holder compensation, but he says he was rebuffed by DARPA representatives.

"At this time, they have claimed to me that what they have [used technologically] is different from my patent," says Barnett, although he believes too little information has been released to tell.

The footage released this year stems from work by a separate contractor, California's Teledyne Scientific & Imaging, which first received $25 million from DARPA to work on self-guided bullets in 2010. The company released initial footage of their bullets last summer, although it's not known precisely how they differ from the Sandia ammunition. It's tempting to assume the technology involved is similar to the laser-guidance system demonstrated in 2012, but some commentators have noted that these new bullets appear to lack steering fins like the ones Sandia's bullets used, making their navigation, and thus their general technological basis, harder to decipher.

"I don't know about what they're using [now]," says Barnett, "because simply there's not enough publicly available information."

No one's sure if and when DARPA's bullets will be ready for use on the battlefield. But details of the still-active Sandia project on its website and in interviews with researchers suggest that the technology may be marketed not just to the military but to civilian law enforcement officials or even recreational hunters.

James DeShaw Rae of California State University Sacramento, who works on the ethnics and governance of smart weapons, says there's good reason to believe the bullets—if functional—could spread rapidly within and be openly embraced by the military sphere.

"If they are proficient in the stated aims of making it easier to hit the intended target and lessen the likelihood of unintended victims, they will be employed by armed forces and they will not face any regulations," he says, noting that precision arms are generally viewed as more humane and thus desirable. "If they are cost-effective, they will become the regular bullet of choice.

"If they are employed and then found to be ineffective or inaccurate, then their usage may be voluntarily curtailed, or outside watchdog groups could launch a campaign to have them regulated," he adds.

But barring that, Rae believes the only real incentive to limit the use of such bullets would be a concern about them falling into enemy, non-state, or civilian hands. And even if the bullets do require regulation, the amount of money and enthusiasm lavished on these projects suggest that such fears won't be enough to keep them out of usage entirely.

So it seems likely that we'll see self-guided bullets in use in the not-so-distant future—in war at first and from there, who knows?

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

We're now deep into the third season of our show VICE on HBO. Among other stories, we've taken a look at climate change in Antarctica, American militias taking the law into their own hands, and the cocaine highway that leads from the streets of Venezuela to the sinuses of European teenagers. We just aired a new episode where host Gianna Toboni went to Egypt to investigate the recent plundering of ancient Egyptian artifacts and their sale on the black market. We sat down with Gianna to debrief the trip—check it out above.

Watch VICE Fridays on HBO at 11 PM, 10 PM central or on HBO's new online streaming service, HBO Now.

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Slum Village's current duo, Young RJ (right) and T3. Photos by Andy Rudd

Like their home city Detroit, rap group Slum Village is in a perpetual state of reinvention. Since Slum Village was established in 1993, the outfit has seen six members come and go, each taking away and bringing their own rich histories to the ever-evolving group. As life, deaths, and solo careers have shifted the make-up Slum Village over the years, the rap group has soldiered on, most recently completing a national tour.

The duo of T3 and Young RJ is the latest in Slum Village's series of evolving lineups. Their upcoming album, Yes, drops in June.

"We're the first of our kind," T3, the sole member present for the group's entire run, told VICE.

With a dramatic saga spanning two decades, their trajectory recalls earlier Detroit acts like the Temptations and the Four Tops, who pushed forward in the face of tragedy. Founded by T3 and his Pershing High classmates J Dilla and Baatin, Slum Village's early local acclaim led to a major label deal with A&M Records. Following A Tribe Called Quest's 1998 breakup, many expected Slum Village to carry the alterna-rap torch, especially since J Dilla produced the final two Tribe albums. Although A&M folded prior to releasing Slum's debut album Fan-Tas-Tic, Vol. 1, a retooled version titled Fantastic, Vol. 2 arrived to widespread acclaim through local impresario RJ Rice's Barak Records in 2000.

A fulfilling if belated triumph, the debut satisfied high expectations but was J Dilla's final outing as a member of Slum Village. Dilla left the group to focus on production and a solo career, releasing his solo debut Welcome 2 Detroit in 2001 and setting a revolving door of Slum Village members in motion. T3 and Baatin went to work on Slum Village's hotly anticipated sophomore effort, 2002's Trinity (Past, Present, and Future).

"That was the hardest album on Earth to make," T3 says. "Dilla was like, 'OK, you got it T!' I was like, 'I got what?' We was still signed and people didn't care whether Dilla was there or not. We still had a record deal, the money was on the table. I was looking around like, Who can help me produce this album?"

The answer, it turned out, was Elzhi, a young rapper who appeared on Welcome 2 Detroit. A versatile MC, his complex rhyme schemes and poignant introspection brought a heightened lyricism to Trinity, augmenting T3's upbeat presence and Baatin's spirituality. It was a second critical success for Slum Village, but the trio that composed Trinity didn't last either. Baatin left soon afterward, citing health and personal concerns.

T3 and Elzhi recorded the third Slum Village album, 2004's Detroit Deli (A Taste of Detroit), as a duo on Capitol Records, with whom Barak's RJ Rice had brokered a distribution deal. Detroit Deli spawned Slum Village's signature hit, a saccharine love song called "Selfish." Produced by Kanye West, then soaring on the surprise success of The College Dropout, "Selfish" featured a then-unknown Ivy League crooner named John Legend. Between a sing-along chorus over a wistful piano instrumental, West, Elzhi, and T3 pay charming tribute to tour stop love affairs, a vulnerable precursor to Ludacris's "Pimpin' All Over the World." "Selfish" opened Slum Village to a new audience in the age of iTunes, on their third lineup in as many outings.

On Villa Manifesto at least six men—founders, flag-bearers, stand-ins, and blood relatives—stake a claim. Two do so from the grave.

While Slum Village scaled the charts, J Dilla was establishing his own indelible imprint on hip hop. On albums by De La Soul, Talib Kweli, and Bilal, he developed an inimitable sound synthesizing Motown warmth with the Soulquarians' jam sessions, chopping samples with layered synths. 2003's Champion Sound was a landmark for beat junkies.

Dilla was hospitalized in 2004 and confined to a wheelchair by late 2005, suffering from TTP and lupus. He died the week of his 32nd birthday, and Donuts, the instrumental album compiled from his Los Angeles hospital bed, became his swan song. If quietly beloved in life, Dilla was canonized in death. Retrospectives and "Dilla Changed My Life" T-shirts proclaimed his legend, and a benefit circuit helped raise money for the estate and for his mother, who also suffers from lupus.

"His legacy is still growing," says J Dilla's younger brother John, who raps as Illa J. "Not only is his music timeless, but his approach to music [is too]."

But T3 worries that Slum Village has been lost in stories of J Dilla's life.

"Folks have tried to write us outta the Dilla history," he says. "They was acting like Donuts was the start of Dilla. I was seeing documentaries about Dilla that didn't say nothing about Slum Village. How you doing a whole documentary on James Yancey without talking about Slum Village?"

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Young RJ

Although Dilla had long ago separated from the group, Slum Village found renewed purpose in furthering his gospel after his death. Meanwhile, the group's other founding expat was facing his own serious issues. By the time Dilla died, Baatin was destitute, homeless, and smoking crack. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and manic depression, complicating the picture of an outwardly spiritual man who made consistently positive music. At a Slum Village show in Detroit he was arrested and jailed after trying to join T3 and Elzhi on stage.

By 2008, Baatin had cleaned up enough to record and perform, and Slum Village welcomed him back. He joined sessions for the purported reunion album Villa Manifesto and the infamously fell off the stage at Maryland's Rock the Bells festival in July 2009. He died later that month. Following a homicide investigation, the Detroit Free Press reported Wayne County had ruled accidental death by cocaine toxicity.

Baatin remains as irreconcilable in death as he was in life: a Muslim, a criminal, a father, a bipolar schizophrenic, an architect of Slum Village's foundational work who was absent for much of their heyday. Like Dilla, D12's Proof, and MC Breed, he's one of the fallen fathers of Detroit hip-hop, only without the attendant fanfare of T-shirts, tributes, and retrospectives in his honor.

"We're kind of like a cover band of our own stuff." —T3

With two of Slum Village's three founders dead in their early 30s, T3 and a circle of disciples committed to finishing the fraught Villa Manifesto. As the record neared completion, Elzhi's personal management complained they were excluded from the group's contract negotiations. His verses were scrapped from half of the record and he didn't appear in the promotional tour or videos.

"He always wanted to be a solo guy. He got caught up in the Slum Village whirlwind," says T3. "Originally, he was supposed to come in on Trinity and do five to six songs as a featured artist. But at the time Baatin was getting sick and I needed somebody to lean on. I can't be Slum Village by myself."

"I'm not mad at Elzhi," T3 continues. "He was there when I needed him to be there. He will always be a member of Slum Village."

With Elzhi on the outside looking in, Young RJ became a full-fledged member, rapping with a laid back nasal delivery in addition to his duties as producer and CEO of their new label Ne'Astra Records. The group also welcomed J Dilla's brother Illa J in a featured role.

Illa J debuted in 2008 with Yancey Boys, a Delicious Vinyl-distributed record built upon unused beats his brother had turned in for the label during the mid-90s. He remembers sitting in his family's Conant Gardens home as a young boy and hearing the Fantastic tapes take shape.

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T3

"I understood the musical foundation from which Slum Village was built," Illa J says. "One of the reasons I joined SV was because around the time of Villa Manifesto—I was featured on that album—there was a lot of controversy surrounding the group. It began to bring down the value of the brand. Personally, I felt that it was my duty to make sure that I helped keep the name alive being that that's such an important part of my brother's legacy."

Villa Manifesto finally arrived in 2010, a stark crossroad including posthumous contributions from Dilla and Baatin, an expanded role for Young RJ, performances from an estranged Elzhi, and Illa J's first contributions. It's a fascinating hodgepodge, equal parts tribute, audition, and post-millennial 2Pac record cobbled from cutting room outtakes. Villa Manifesto is probably best viewed as a discourse on identity. When, if ever, does a band cease to be itself? Who holds the rights to a legacy left rejected or unwilled? On Villa Manifesto at least six men—founders, flag-bearers, stand-ins, and blood relatives—stake a claim, and two do so from the grave.

RELATED: Germany's Most Controversial Rapper Talks Islam, Hypocrisy, and 'Charlie Hebdo'

T3, Young RJ, and Illa J continued to tour as a trio, Illa J posing a wiry bundle of energy next to the older T3 and Young RJ. "On stage, in some crazy way I felt I channeled Baatin's energy, as if he was with me. Sometimes my brother, too," Illa J says. Still, it was a conflicting experience. "I grew up listening to these songs but at a certain point it got weird for me performing my brother's verses because I felt I was turning into a cover artist," he acknowledges. "I felt obligated to give my energy towards this legacy... I thought I would be letting down fans and also letting down my brother."

"We're kind of like a cover band of our own stuff," T3 says, echoing Illa J's assessment. With a catalog spanning two decades and six rappers, Slum Village's second and third generations have been called to perform music recorded by the group's dead and departed members. The plug-and-play approach to band membership isn't uncommon in rock and soul, where a replacement might handle harmonies or instrumentation as well as his predecessor. But in hip-hop, it's unprecedented. One man cannot so easily tell another's story.

"It's only right to keep it going especially after the passing of Dilla and Baatin," T3 says. They continue to close live performances with "Selfish," even though only T3 can rap the verse he recorded for it, the sole survivor of the quartet which exposed Slum Village to a major hip-hop audience.

"I saw an interview where Andre 3000 was talking about how he hated ' Hey Ya' and never wanted to do that song again in his whole life," says T3. "I don't understand that. How can you get mad at a song people love?"

"The Temptations still gotta sing 'Just My Imagination' or 'My Girl' even though this guy died or that guy died," adds Young RJ.

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Illa J. Photo by Lionel Pierron

After 2013's Evolution, Illa J decided to cede most of his spotlight and reassume a featured role, becoming the second Yancey brother to vacate his third of Slum Village. Now living in Montreal and working on a solo project, he's struck a balance between upholding the family name and carving his own niche. "My solo career is my priority," he says. "I feel at peace. I've also regained my connection as a fan of the Slum Village legacy."

"I've always felt the spiritual presence of my brother guiding me throughout my career," Illa J says. "I could hear my brother's voice saying 'It's OK, you don't have to be in Slum to show that you have love for me, just do your thing.' No matter where I go in the world, I find pieces of my brother. It's like he never left."

" Yes is classic. We felt like we had to give you that last chapter of the vintage Slum." —T3

The new Slum Village album, Yes, hits stores in June. Illa J appears on the record but didn't join the national tour, during which T3 and Young RJ interspersed new material with standards from Fantastic and Detroit Deli.

" Yes is classic," T3 says. "We felt like we had to give you that last chapter of the vintage Slum." Guests include De La Soul, Jon Connor, and the elusive Phife Dawg, formerly of A Tribe Called Quest. After the release they hope to expand their respective reaches beyond the Slum-brella. Young RJ is planning an instrumental series and T3 is working on his first solo album. Elzhi also plans to follow up his lauded 2008 solo The Preface and 2011's Elmatic with a new record in 2015.

"I could see us continuing to morph," T3 forecasts. "Maybe one day I'll just be on the sidelines coaching some young dudes."

Slum Village's is a saga fraught by adversity and disappointment, but Detroit music is littered with tragedy. It's where young black vocalists flocked from churches and tenements and were packaged by an assembly line to make other men rich. It's where Proof and MC Breed died past their commercial pinnacles but before they could be properly venerated as pioneers. It's home to one of the nation's richest rap traditions, but one that remains largely overlooked save for 8 Mile. In Michigan winters, artists adapt or become footnotes.

T3, Elzhi, Young RJ, and Illa J stand beleaguered, but in their Village that's the only kind of survival.

"No man is greater than the legacy," T3 says.

Follow Pete on Twitter.

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Becky Stern. All photos courtesy of Adafruit/Stern

When most people think about the future of wearable technology, they picture Apple Watches and FitBit bracelets that are more affordable and wornas commonly as underwear. However, Becky Stern pictures a jacket whose zipper shuts off the annoying TVs in her favorite bar, a GPS dog harness that track's her dog's run, or a skirt with embedded LED sensors that sparkles as she moves. Then she sews and programs them, and shares for free what she's made and how-to make it in detailed step-by-step tutorials online.

Though Stern has been sewing, tinkering, photographing, filming and editing things since at least the age of eight, she didn't combine all of her skills until attending Parsons Design and Tech program. At Parsons she made one of her first electronic craft projects: a set of plush steaks embedded with LEDs. (They symbolized the "radiation process most American beef goes through during processing.") In graduate school, Stern started producing video tutorials for MAKE—a passion project that eventually turned into a full-time gig.

Since dropping out of grad school, Stern's work has been exhibited internationally, featured in books, and viewed hundreds of thousands of time online. She's become something of a celebrity on YouTube, hosting weekly wearable show-and-tells, uploading new videos of inventions, and answering questions as the go-to guru for hacking fashion.

Stern puts her expertise to use as the director of wearable electronics at Adafruit, a New York-based factory that manufactures smaller components and shares tutorials so that people can design and program their own open-source gadgets. Wearable computing projects promoted by Stern are turning crafting hobbyists into coders, strengthening the DIY-arm of the wearable revolution.

Taking a break from her work designing the future, Stern spoke with me about fashion-friendly tech, data privacy, and LED tiaras.

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VICE: You make projects that are useful (the Citi Bike Helmet), playful (the beating heart headband), and just plain fun (the firewalker LED sneakers). Your work feels different from other wearables. How would you describe your process, especially given your DIY approach?
Becky Stern: My work in wearables started long before the first Fitbit. It doesn't aim to be mass-produced, but rather radically customized through the interpretation of instructions I publish. Wearables are so personal that I think it's heavy­ handed to suppose that one [product] will work the same way for everyone.

Also, my work is rarely about the final device as much as it is about the design and building of it. Adafruit's wearables hope to reach enthusiastic novices in both craft and tech, and we hope to give those novices confidence, knowledge, and inspiration to build their own technology. This gives folks more agency over all the tech they use, encouraging more critical engagement about the devices we use every day. What's cooler to a little girl: the light up shoes her parent bought her or the accelerometer­laden magic wand that activates color changes on her LED tiara that her parent made with her?

DIY philosophy encourages free information sharing and open source. The consumers of the technology are presumed to be interested in becoming builders of that technology, which is very different from the "we create, you consume" mentality of Apple and other mass market companies in the wearable space.

Your work is about invention, but it's also about sharing and documenting your process through tutorials. Why make art in online spaces? Why share these tutorials?
I get a strange satisfaction from getting ideas and processes out of my head/hands and onto the internet. I've never been able to fully explain my motivation to finish projects and put them online. Readers often give back their own ideas and suggestions; sharing creates an open exchange that's very helpful when I'm stuck or out of my league.

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What becomes possible when coding turns into a mainstream hobby?
When coding knowledge becomes commonplace, the gap between technology maker and technology user will begin to close. Consumers will have more critical understanding of their devices and online networks, which will undoubtedly change their behavior, whether it decreases unintentional privacy violations or fundamentally changes tech company's product development and marketing campaigns.

Intel announced a collaboration with Fossil on tech­driven accessories, and Google Glass is working with the makers of Ray Ban and Oakley sunglasses to develop more fashionable eyewear. What do you think of tech companies' forays into fashion?
These collaborations are inevitable as tech and fashion companies finally learn how to relate to one another. They hardly speak the same language, have vastly different value systems, not to mention business models.

You better believe that if there is an activity, there will be a wearable for it soon. I'm sure in the coming years we'll see brilliant ideas executed poorly, and idiotic ideas made mega-popular through great business decisions. I think tech is moving quickly towards the seasonal replacement pattern that fashion has long established, and I find that a bit depressing for the planet, since circuit boards and batteries are far harder to reuse or recycle than out-­of-style garments.

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Could DIY wearables help us circumvent some of the problems of data ownership and privacy sidestepped by larger companies?
I like the idea that shiny metallic EMF-blocking clothing and accessories could become in vogue because they represent data privacy—this is a technological factor that informs a visual one. Building your own wearables definitely makes you understand more about what the big guys are up to. If you learn how to code your own GPS logger, you become painfully aware that your phone is probably logging your every move and uploading that info to a server somewhere, or at least that it could be doing that without your knowledge or consent.

I wouldn't say DIY wearables provide an alternative to the big guys, though, as smartphones and other "mandatory" devices of the modern era can't easily be DIY-ed at the level of compact reliability necessary for staying as connected as we like.

How do you get people to want to wear your products?
Fortunately I don't have to try to make people want to wear something, I get to try to get them to want to make something. Whether they wear it is often irrelevant to the goal of teaching and helping folks have a good time learning tech and crafts. Creating new use cases that are compelling enough to get people to buy products is a challenge for wearable tech companies: The scenario has to be more compelling than a slick marketing campaign, or the product will fizzle after the first users get tired of it. Motivations for putting something on your body range wildly and are very personal. I think it's easier to put something on your body if you made it yourself than if you bought it—you've already invested a part of yourself in it.

See Becky's products on her website.

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Saad Houssain's perplexingly weird debut novel, Escape From Baghdad!, captures the pure insanity of the Iraq War. At the same time, it's not a war novel. Instead, it's a skillfully constructed literary IED that brings together the sharpest aspects from multiple genres. It's a Tarantino-esque Heart of Darkness set in war-torn Iraq, filled with absurdism and dark humor, a mash-up of satirical Joseph Heller-style comedy and sci-fi fantasy with a gratuitous mixture of good old-fashioned ultra-violence.

Reminiscent of Hollywood's Gulf War comedy Three Kings, Houssain's Escape From Baghdad! takes place during the initial stages of the war, the narrative kicking off with an explosive punch. Two Iraqis, a US Marine, and an individual who previously served as a high-profile torturer under Saddam Hussein's regime take off on a journey to find a fabled mass of gold in war-torn Mosul.

I served in the United States Army and was deployed to Iraq between 2003 and 2004. I maintained a weblog, called My War, chronicling my experiences as an Infantryman while I was in Mosul. Saad Houssain read many similar war blogs by soldiers, as research for his novel. I spoke with Houssain, who currently lives in Bangladesh, about Sunnis, Shias, and suitable humor in war time.

VICE: Do you consider Escape From Baghdad! a war novel?
Saad Houssain: I think it is a war novel, but one of my aims was to show that Iraq, and Baghdad specifically, is such an old culture and an old city, with people living there for five or six thousand years at least. Instead, it's like we woke up in the 2000s and there was a place in Iraq and there was a big war there, but obviously there's been conflict there and hatreds and old grudges that have gone back thousands of years. I wanted to delve into that and that's why I made up all of this mythology. To say: Hey, look, there might have been a war involving Americans or Iraqis or Sadaam's party on the surface, but if you go beyond that, there are a lot of other conflicts. Removing the dictator has allowed those kinds of conflicts to come to the surface; the Sunnis and Shiaas are almost more interested in hurting each other than they are in hurting the occupying force.

In most armed conflicts, that craziness is there. Everything is going crazy and you're not in charge and nothing makes sense and you're hoping to come out of it in some living shape.

A lot of times when a car bomb would go off when I was in Mosul, it wouldn't be targeted at coalition forces. Instead it would be targeted and detonated at some well-populated "civilian" part of town, or insurgents would target each other.
Yeah, they [the insurgents] were looking beyond the US forces. I think they realize that sooner or later the US Army is going to leave and then they get to kill each other to their hearts' content. You always hate your neighbor more than you hate some random guy who's really far away. Even if you have a foreign enemy, the ones you really want to hurt are the ones you've been fighting for thousands of years.

It seems like every book that comes out of the Iraq war is heralded as a Catch-22. But your book is darkly funny, like Slaughterhouse Five. Can that kind of gallows humor be taught?
I don't know if any humor can be taught. It's attitude, right? It's a person's natural inclination towards finding horrific things funny. That's just part of your character.

RELATED: In Saddam's Shadow

You're a fiction writer. You could have chosen any setting, any war. Why the Iraq War?
This was defining war for our generation. Maybe because it's been so well-televised and written about, but it was the first time when general people were able to write about [a war], as compared to reporters. When you would write about an attack, like how you were in a firefight for hours, the newspaper just reported it in one line. War coverage like this, where you're getting this inside view instead of some made-up version by the press—that makes it much easier for people like me to write about it. It's the war people should be writing about because it's not over yet.

While I was reading your book I was smiling a majority of the time—when I probably shouldn't have, because it's page after page of fucked-up shit happening.
You want to create that atmosphere of craziness. In most armed conflicts, that craziness is there. Everything is going crazy and you're not in charge and nothing makes sense and you're hoping to come out of it in some living shape. That's what I was going for. That's why the story is a bit fantastical and the violence is over the top and really weird things [keep] happening. I wanted to create that sense of chaos, which is impossible if you read out a bunch of facts and figures.

There have been a lot of books about the Iraq war where you clearly have heroes and non-heroes, good guys and bad guys. Your characters are different. Would you consider them all anti-heroes?
Well, definitely there's no heroes at all. It's very simplistic if you portray good guys and bad guys. That rarely works out, and in this war it's easier to see the aftermath of that [kind of thinking]. Even though Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, many of his people were actually worse off after he was gone.

One of your main characters is a Marine named Private Hoffman, a character who's not your clichéd poster boy image of the American soldier. He does drugs, kind of has a fuck-authority mentality, and is pretty much there because he likes to blow shit up. I like him.
That was the kind of hero that I wanted. He's on that borderline where you're not sure if he's a genius or just a lucky idiot. Nobody is like that earnest guy who salutes and actually believes everything that's in the manual. Just because someone is a soldier doesn't mean they're without sophistication or without a nuanced understanding of the world.

Hoffman is one of my favorite characters and he lives in the end and he's one of those characters that doesn't deliberately do harm to people. In the army, you're always going to have psychotic men who are pleased about killing people, but you also have a lot of moral men who are kind-hearted. It's important to get those balances right.

Follow Colby Buzzell on Twitter and check out his book, My War: Killing Time in Iraq.

Check out Escape From Baghdad!, out now from Unnamed Press.