Do you believe in Faygo, hope, and alternative families? If so you're going to fucking love Insane Clown Posse's music video for "Explosions." The first single off their new LP, The Marvelous Missing Link: Lost, the song explores the album's theme of hope.

"[Living life without faith is like] living with sunglasses on with a shade of depression," Violent J told me earlier this year while talking about the album. "No matter what the weather is like, it's always gloomy and shitty."

Give the video a watch right now, exclusively on VICE.

Thumbnail image by Amy Lombard

It's not even noon, and already Zoe Ridolfi-Starr looks worn. The self-identified sexual assault survivor and lead complainant in a federal case against New York's Columbia University for its alleged mishandling of sexual violence hurries to join a small clutch of fellow activists in the school's central quad for a protest—part of April's national Carry That Weight Together event—that never quite forms.

News cameras circle the women, and because I am young and female and proximal, they sniff my skirt, too. To the men surrounding us, I'm as much a part of this as Zoe or any of the other survivors whose names have become shorthand for the social crisis of the year.

Simply standing here implies I was raped in my dorm room.

Statistically, the implication is, on the surface at least, sound. As the owner of both a baccalaureate degree and a vagina, the odds I was sexually assaulted on campus are roughly one in five, according to a widely-cited—if oft-disputed—study by the US Department of Justice published back in 2007. Like Columbia and at least 100 other other post-secondary schools around the country, my alma mater UC Berkeley is currently under investigation by the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights over its alleged mishandling of dozens of such assaults. Like Columbia and the other schools on the list, its federal funding hangs in the balance.

You know, in theory.

Despite the recent national outcry, experts believe rape has been commonplace at American universities for decades. So why have the feds just taken notice now? And will all the attention amount to anything?

"[The Feds] have never given a punitive financial sanction to schools, which they have the power to do," another Columbia University anti-sexual-assault activist, Allie Rickard, told me. "It's not a high enough incentive to encourage schools to proactively change their policies."

Instead, the unprecedented inquiry into byzantine and often foundering campus adjudication processes has inadvertently transformed rape from a violent crime into a civil rights issue, swelling its perceived impact from the actual percentage of women who survive sexual assault to the roughly 57 percent of college students who are female and whose equal access to education may be threatened by it.

"There is a civil rights obligation on the part of the school as well as potentially a criminal responsibility," for rapes committed on campus, explained Lara Kaufmann, a senior counselor at the National Women's Law Center in Washington, DC and an expert on campus sexual assault. "Students who are raped by other students—that kind of trauma can really impair your ability to learn and your ability to function in the school environment, so schools have to take steps to address that."

When those steps fail—as survivors say they often do—the fallback is a tangle of case law evolved from a 37-word amendment to an educational statute from 1972 called Title IX.

The trouble is that the actual punishments for so-called Title IX violators, like for rapists "found responsible" for sexual assault on campus, are usually gentle and infrequently meted out, activists and academics say. Expulsions are vanishingly rare, and to date no school has ever been stripped of funds in response to its handling of sexual assault.

"Not a single person we know of has been expelled for rape," said 19-year-old Barnard freshman Julia Crain, whose school, which is affiliated with Columbia, is also under federal investigation. "We've heard of one-semester suspensions, we've heard of reflective essays, but not really much more than suspensions."

Yet anxiety over wrongful convictions, universities unfairly branded as "rape schools," and extrajudicial punishment of the accused loom at least as large as the hotly-contested one-in-five figure in our national conversation. Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia senior who schleps her blue dorm bed across campus to protest the university's handling of her rape complaint, is a saint among activists and a bete noire for those who see the women scrawling their rapists' names on public toilet stalls as misandrist lynch mobs.

Meanwhile, sexual assault is one of the hottest controversies in the country, grabbing headlines in every national publication and eliciting pronouncements from no less than President Barack Obama.

The burst of national attention "certainly has created a groundswell," Department of Education spokesman Jim Bradshaw mused to me over the phone.

A casual observer could easily come away with the impression that we are in the throes of a rape epidemic. This is especially true in New York, where both the municipal and state governments have drafted anti-assault legislation and more colleges are under investigation for "gender-based misconduct" than in any other state in the country.

In fact, as a criminal phenomenon, campus sexual assault is neither new nor geographically specific: When you take thousands of relative sexual novices in extremely close, continuous proximity and mix in large quantities of consciousness-altering chemicals, anyone who wants to commit a crime can find a victim.

"The media's focus often creates a public impression that there's an epidemic—I don't think there's any real evidence that that's the case," said Dr. Cory Yung, a researcher at the Kentucky University School of Law, whose recent American Psychological Association (APA) study showed that universities chronically undercount rape, reporting 44 percent more sexual assaults while under investigation by the federal government than either before or after those investigations occur. "I don't think there's any reason to believe that now is a more dangerous time than ten years ago, 20 years ago."

Put another way, rape on campus has probably been at least as prevalent since the advent of America Online. It's just that no one was talking about it—at least in a steady, consciousness-altering way—until the age of Twitter.

"There've been many survivors who came out very publicly about their experiences and that's been incredibly empowering to other survivors," Rickard argued. "Part of those survivors coming out publicly has been calling attention to the structural and systematic ways that colleges are failing," as opposed to the classic he-said-she-said of individual prosecutions.

This shift in understanding of campus rape from an individual to a collective trauma lies at the heart of the current wave of activism, in part because it arms the only legal weapon students have against sexual assault on campus: Title IX, which began as one of the Education Amendments of 1972.

All Title IX cases hinge on the same theory: that by failing to adequately prosecute and punish sexual assaults, colleges are effectively denying survivors equal access to higher education on the basis of gender. (Title IX may also apply to men, who may also be victims of rape and sexual assault, but in both cases women are the default.)

"It's only within the last ten years that there was a move or an attempt to use Title IX to litigate or investigate rape or sexual assaults," Dr. Yung explained. "It took a while for it to ramp up. It's only really the last three years that there's this flood of investigation."

Universities too, have begun to frame sexual assault in these terms: Columbia, Berkeley and many schools like them have undertaken significant policy overhauls in the past 18 months, with the former saying it is "committed to providing a national model of the best policies and practices to help ensure that members of our University community feel safe and respected."

The problem is that rape cases are rarely clear-cut, experts say, which is part of what makes their already elevated threshold for prosecution an almost impossible hurdle for victims to clear.

"There've been far greater burdens that a prosecutor has to overcome in rape cases than in any other criminal offense," Dr. Yung explained. "[Adjudicators] fear false accusations—they've come to fear that women are prone to lie about it," a perception entirely abetted by the fetish for "perfect" victims like Jackie who turn out not to be.

What's more, discredited reports—like Rolling Stone's disastrous University of Virginia cover story—get wildly disproportionate play in the news and across social media.

"You have to imagine the burden faced by somebody coming forward with [a rape accusation]: it's not easy to do, it's not lucrative, it can be very humiliating, and it can be very difficult—there's not a huge incentive for someone to falsely accuse someone else of campus sexual assault," Ms. Kaufmann of the National Women's Law Center explained. "Unfortunately, those instances get a lot of attention in the media, and that can fuel a suspicion that it's more common than it really is."

Epidemics are exotic by definition. An endemic, by contrast, is determinately ordinary, which is what makes it so uncomfortable to contemplate in the context of assault. It's comforting to think of rape as a discrete criminal act, a horror visited on one individual by another, whether abetted by psychopathology or intoxication, carelessness or culture or a cruel twist of fate. It's tempting to think of villains-in-waiting driven to the apex of evil by power and privilege, of criminal conspiracies driving the most vile among us—frat boys, for instance—to satisfy yet viler urges.

What is terrifying is to imagine rape as what it has so often been throughout human history: collective punishment. It's terrifying to think of rape as an institutional fact awaiting as many as a fifth of women who seek higher education at a time when they already make up the majority at top tier public schools— UC Berkeley, UNC, UVAand UT Austin , to name a handful—and lag less than two percentage points behind men across the Ivies.

Naturally, our collective imagination—not to mention our criminal justice system—still abjures the idea that rape is anything less than an aberration, a one-in-a-million fluke.

To wit: In my decade-long career as a crime reporter, I've written about dozens of sexual assaults but covered just two convictions: a New York City police officer whom multiple witnesses watched rape a school teacher at gunpoint, and who was still "placing his genitals back into his pants," when police arrived; and an unlicensed Hasidic counselor who forced a young patient to perform sex acts on him from when she was 12 years old until she was 15.

Those cases share an almost incomprehensible level of horror—a stubborn prerequisite for our understanding of rape—and yet the defense in the former insists the victim "experienced something in her mind that didn't completely conform with what actually happened," and the latter maintains the victim made the whole thing up for revenge.

"It's always been a phenomenon that's relatively unique to rape and sexual assault," Dr. Yung said of such denial. "The simple fact is we have this perspective that overly identifies with the accused and seems to be entirely unsympathetic to the victim."

The doubt cast on survivors and the handwringing over due process for alleged assailants is even more pronounced in the ivory tower, where the social relationships between accused and accuser can be tangled and the attacks are rarely so straight-to- SVU. Sulkowicz's story alone has launched a thousand think pieces—many of them as anxious over the fates of theoretical young men as those of actual young women—and will undoubtedly continue to do so as her alleged rapist's new lawsuit against Columbia wends its way through court, dragging lurid details of her personal history along with it.

Such a protracted public battle is exactly the threat that deters most survivors from reporting their assaults, activists argue, especially if their relationship to their attacker is ambiguous. That Sulkowicz both reported and then publicized an account that sounds so little like the rape in Rolling Stone and so much like what we know rape to be in real life is what makes her such a singular figure in the current debate.

Sulkowicz maintains that her alleged attacker suddenly and violently forced her to have anal sex during a previously consensual encounter in her dorm room during her sophomore year at Columbia. But according to the lawsuit, "while they were still freshmen and before any physical relationship had begun, Emma broached the topic of anal sex with Paul by private Facebook messenger." It goes on to quote the exchange, in part:

Emma:
fuck me in the butt
Paul:
eehm maybe not?
jk
I miss your face tho.

Sulkowicz insists her comment was taken totally out of context.

"Back in freshman year, I used to say the phrase 'Fuck me in the butt' to mean 'OMG, that's sooo annoying.'" Sulkowicz explained to me over email, sharing a longer version of the Facebook exchange in which the comment clearly follows a note about having to wake up early. "We all said stupid shit freshman year. Over time, I worked that kink out of my lexicon, but now and then I still say stupid things. We all say stupid things!"

The word rape itself is often deployed in this manner, Sulkowicz pointed out.

"I hear people say things like, 'That test raped me' or 'I raped that test,' when they don't actually mean that a rape occurred," Sulkowicz wrote. "When I'm stressed, I might say, 'OMG kill me!'; or when something's awesome, I might say, 'Wow, that slayed me.' In neither of these situations would anyone think that I'm asking to be murdered or that I'd been slayed."

Sulkowicz' alleged assailant was found "not responsible" by the school's adjudication process, as well as in two separate cases involving other students. He remains at Columbia University, and will almost certainly graduate with his bachelor's in a few weeks. Yet the widely published anxiety that he and innumerable young men like him are having their lives torn apart by coddled young women who cry rape remains acute, despite all evidence to the contrary.

"I'm not as worried that people are being railroaded or that the system's overly biased against the accused, because we just don't see that," Dr. Yung said. "This fear of false accusations combined with a historical set of rules [that makes rape harder to prosecute] have made people overly concerned in this area with bad prosecutions...[but] we see very few people ever prosecuted. On the campuses, we see very few people expelled."

One underlying problem is that our culture expects rape to be thrilling. It is not. Yet the cameras still show up sniffing for blood, hoping to catch Sulkowicz dragging her mattress across the quad or Crain rehashing the tear-soaked details of her assault. The truth is, violence is sexy, and bureaucracy a bore. Ridolfi-Starr can talk systemic failure to the camera until her face is as blue as Sulkowicz's mattress, but as far as the media's concerned, rape still needs pretty victims to sell.

I am still sitting among the activists on the quad watching the television reporter walk toward the camera leaning into Ridolfi-Starr when I realize a magazine photographer has trained his camera on me. I glance up just in time to see him tighten the frame.

Click.

Follow Sonja Sharp on Twitter.

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Photo via Chris Lloyd's website

VICE: Bill C-51 is about to pass, and we're all under the impression the government really wants to snoop through our lives. But looking at your case, it kinda seems they're not really that thorough with their research, no?
Chris Lloyd: [Laughs] Maybe it just shows there's a lot of gaps. There might be lots of repositories of information, but not necessarily a smart way of connecting them all, connecting the dots.

What happened for you when this news broke?
I kinda sensed it was coming because I was asked to speak to the CBC when they were working on this story. I saw that it didn't look very good. So I approached the party to try and convince them that I was recorded without my knowledge or consent at that Fredericton event. It was a really long artist talk about my entire practice, 15 years. And I was speaking in a very theoretical manner and I felt very free to speak about all the potential, possible things that could happen, which is where of course that quote about "messing with the party" came up.

I had no clear plan though; I'd never been a candidate, or involved in a party this way before. So the entire thing was a learning experience for me, it was feeding my curiosity about the democratic process.

And what did you learn?
I'm still learning, still processing it. It's kind of still unfolding and teaching me things. My letters have always been about a disconnect between a lone individual voice and a kind of behemoth rift between media, politics, and personalities and how things can get twisted through the media as well. So what's kind of ironic is that that has now happened to me.

It's also interesting for me to see how these things play out at a different level between party politics and it's party politics that drives the country, so there's all these weird disconnections happening even within the power structures. Those are things that are interesting to me and...

It's ironic, too, that it would take me being kicked out to speak freely about it, whereas I wasn't really allowed to speak before because they were keeping me "safe" as a candidate. And I still wanted to explore that as far as it could go in terms of just what kind of message could I get out if I was within the confines of structures of that party doctrine.

So any interesting internal information? What was it like, being on the inside?
It felt a bit like summer camp. When I was a candidate, the persona that I was adopting was a conservative candidate.

So it was a persona?
I think everyone adopts a bit of a persona, especially people in public life. I don't think there's someone who is the exact same in every context of their everyday life. I explore those things with my letters a lot, because the types of topics I would talk about in my letters to the PM are the kinds of things that people write in their diary that no one else ever reads, because it's written for themselves. That's how they process their own identity.

So, I think people in politics and in public life... I mean, it is a performance. For me, what I was learning the most it that the most successful politicians are the ones that can perform the best. They're the ones that understand the script, they participate in crafting the script. They understand how it looks and feels and sounds, and they're probably the most convincing performance artists in the country.

Because they're the ones who can stay on message, own their message, they can deliver it in a very successful way. So, what I was seeing in the kind of boot camp, as a novice, is that some people are... I don't know if they're naturally good at it or they're just really well practiced. And [for] others, it's going to take them practice. You can see where there are different levels of success.

So you describe it as boot camp?
Oh, I think that's just a term that I'm making up to describe the learning process. We're not doing an official campaign right now, so I think every party is just trying to get their troops ready. It's like a big sporting event, really. The three or four main teams just kind of line up their players and discuss strategy. I think at the point where you're heading into elections, no one's really talking about the ideas anymore. It's about how to win, given the rules of the game.

And what I've been interested in even from the whole duration of my letter-writing project is the rules of the games. I've been more involved with one party in particular, and running for a party is where you really see that the rules of the game are made for the party.

Are you actually Conservative? What was that $600 donation about? You put a lot of effort into this, but were your convictions aligned with what you were doing?
Well I think this is also a flaw in our system. I don't think anyone is 100 percent aligned with the entire principles or policies of one party. I think that's true for almost everyone. It's just that you decide, OK, well, I'm more leaning this side. But my personal convictions are a little all over the map.

How do you feel about all the media coverage you've been getting?
It's kind of nerve wracking. I have a friend of mine who used to describe this feeling, when she suffered from panic attacks, she called it "terror belly." I feel like I understand that now, this knot in your gut because you kind of don't know what's going to happen next, and it's weird to see yourself in the news.

But it's one platform I was hoping to use, to discuss all these ideas about the individual and society and the artist, and using the campaign as a vehicle for that. But since i'm no longer an official candidate for the conservative party, I don't really have much of a platform left anymore, so it's kind of shifted over into this fear.

News is kind of a fleeting thing, right. In a week or so, there will be all sorts of other stories filling the same space.

But am I Conservative? It's not really even part of the issue, I think the issue, and the problem it stems from, from having made remarks that didn't seem in line with what the Conservative party would deem appropriate from a candidate. And my intention all along was to run a campaign using their messaging their platform and just see where it could get me and how I could work within that.

And what was the end game?
You don't know how badly I wanted to have a town hall debate with the other candidates in the riding, because that would have included Justin Trudeau. And I think that would have been the pinnacle, the best part of the whole campaign.

Why?
Well, I think this is where my personal views and the strategies or objectives of the Conservative party align nicely. They're trying to defeat him on a national level, to make sure that he doesn't become prime minister and they've invested a lot of time and money and effort trying to discredit him. They've almost ignored the official opposition, the party that has what, two or three times as many seats. So there's a persona, there's a buzz around him because of his heritage, because of his father, because of the kind of big boost that he got in the polls. I think there was a fear. So they've really really gone after that to try and discredit him.

I don't think he's ready to be prime minister. I also don't like the idea that people seem to be grooming themselves to become prime minister, like it's an objective. Honestly, I don't think anyone in their right mind would want that job.So all this talk and focus on leaders and who is going to become prime minister, and how much power gets concentrated around that. That's about as far as you can get from most people's day-to-day lives.

What do you think of the media coverage you've been getting?
One of of the best things I saw yesterday was the Beaverton article, I think that hit it on the head. Why do we have such barriers between that traditional view of politics and performance arts, why would it be such a bad thing if I was running a campaign as an art project, if it's still a legit campaign? What about fringe parties like the Rhino party and others that try to poke fun at our system but do it legitimately, within the system.

So the Tories asked you to resign?
We had a discussion about me resigning—it made sense to them at the time though personally, I think if they had gone the other way we would have a much more interesting story right now. Because essentially it's gone wild fire and it's made them look worse than they would have it they had actually stood by me and said "yeah, he's an artist, and he's merging these things and sure, it's a bit weird but we knew it from the beginning, he told us about his letters when he became a candidate and has been involved with the party for a long time and we're gonna stand by him."

That wouldn't have been as embarrassing for them.

Are you relieved that it's over?
I wouldn't say relief is the right word, because I was really looking forward to the real campaign, I would have liked to have that debate [with Trudeau]. But at the same time, it frees up time for my other project, for my family and for vacation this summer.

Follow Brigitte Noël on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

At the end of April, in the website's Underexplained Lists subsection, Kotaku writer Yannick LeJacq ranked all of Mario Kart 8's 48 tracks. (Just quickly: whatever happened to the "Super" in the title?) The timing was bang on—Nintendo's gleeful 2014 racer had just opened its garage to a second helping of DLC, featuring an adorable Animal Crossing–themed track with changing seasons and just the most delightful end-race music, as well as new drivers and vehicles. According to LeJacq's entirely unspecified logic—as befits the category the content ran in—Toad Turnpike was number one, Excitebike Arena way back in 48, and the HD re-rub of the classic SNES Rainbow Road a lowly 42nd. Boo!

Only, I don't think that any of us should take such a list seriously—mainly because it was (surely) an arbitrary sequence of MK8 courses, rather than anything produced with serious thinking involved. Or even unserious thinking—this is Mario Kart, after all, a game in which a dinosaur–turtle thing can ride an impossibly dimensioned motorcycle with button wheels around a circuit made entirely of cheese, dragging an oversized banana behind him and, just occasionally, whipping out a glider and leaving the ground entirely. A game in which gravity is a plaything, and where mushrooms have both legs and feelings—not that they come away from head-on collisions having suffered anything more than a popped balloon or two.

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Gamers are predisposed to turn their pastime of choice into a set of lists. Just as music fans are, likewise cinemagoers, theater admirers, and those weird people who still devour novels like they're the preeminent medium for storytelling in the 21st century. It's in our systems, and it has been since the days when Atari was a name you could trust rather than an "undead corpse" of its former self. Websites are full of top however-many moments in popular gaming series—hell, even we've had a go, with standout-scene reflections on The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy. We're never getting away from them. And, that's OK, when they're done OK.

On his personal blog, games writer (and treasured VICE Gaming contributor) Chris Schilling has taken a more-than-OK pop at putting MK8's pick-and-mix of magnificent road designs into a not-quite-the-best-to-absolute-genius order. His top two both come from the game's Star Cup—tracks are grouped into fours for grand prix events of escalating difficulty, with the Star circuits somewhere between piss easy and thumb-stick-cranking slippery buggers. Number two, Sunshine Airport: "Try not to smile... it's impossible." Number one, Mount Wario: "By turns breathless and breath taking." (He writes a lot more words, too. You should read them.)

Related: Watch VICE's documentary 'Boy Racer'

I love Chris's descriptions of each track. He says how Dolphin Shoals "lifts my spirits every time I play it," as it does mine—that change in the music when you burst from the water, just before you glide back to the start/finish line, and the way the sunlight rips across the screen, chasing away the remaining droplets from your GamePad, is every bit as gorgeous as he makes it out to be. Of the upgraded Wii track, Moo Moo Meadows, he offers: "[you] wish you could climb out of your kart, lie down in the grass, and gaze up at the fluffy clouds." Once again, I'm right there with him. Hopefully one of us remembered some beers, because being outside for prolonged periods without alcohol in 2015 is a fucking nightmare.

But it's while I'm in the game that I have the most problem picking favorite laps of my own. I'm sure if I took a step away from MK8, put the beer down, pulled out a notepad, and really got to scribbling, I could—after an hour and a whole pack of plain chocolate digestives—name a handful of favorites. Maybe. But there's no way I could take all 48 and, in the manner of Chris, go at a clutch of them with my critical senses sincerely engaged. He has little time for Grumble Volcano ("distinguishes itself with its sheer brownness") or Twisted Mansion ("an exercise in box-ticking")—yet I know that I have had an absolute ball on these courses, both offline and on, MK8 being one of few games that I'll happily play with strangers over a broadband connection.

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'MK8' racers on the Sunshine Airport track.

I just can't get mad at Mario Kart, I guess. Well, I know I can't—it's what I reach for if I'm having a shitty time, be that "in life" (I know, right?) or another video game, one of those horrible gray ones with lots of killing and swearing in it; something starring zombies, or Nazis, or both. The Wii U isn't quite home to all of my doses of digital uppers, as there's always Sony's Hohokum, the original Xbox port of Out Run 2 (it's never going in the loft) or any number of glorious 3DS and iOS distractions to turn to when the frown needs turning upside down, but it's a faithful friend when an injection of dazzling color's necessary, and MK8 is usually first in line due to its instant-fix factor. (Lovely though Pikmin 3 is, nobody's playing it in ten-minute bursts, and Captain Toad is just too slow for a time-sensitive pick-me-up.)

Stop me in the street now— don't, but imagine—and demand to know what my favorite Mario Kart 8 course is and, and... Seriously, I can't. It's like being forced to tell one of my sons that I love him more than the other one—impossible, apart from in the middle of those domestic maelstroms where the impudent offspring in question won't park his ass on the naughty step for any kind of "otherwise." It's like being told, walking into a random Baskin Robbins, that actually you can only choose from three flavors. I want them all. And the way I play Mario Kart, that's exactly what I get. I don't discriminate. I want Baby Park and Bone-Dry Dunes, and I'll play one right after the other, because I can.

Now, if we're talking about my favorite music from a track, well, that's easy. That saxophone flurry, right in the happy place, every time.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

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Photo by Evelyn Hill

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I'm in a house-share in Willesden, north London, talking to a 29-year-old woman about love, relationships, and vows. But while most women her age might want to discuss the pros and cons of marriage over their tea, or where to go for a cheap dinner with their other half this weekend, Theo is talking about a different kind of union altogether. In a few years time, her vows will be given, not to a husband or wife, but to God.

Like 44 other women in 2014, Theodora Hawksley has opted to become a nun and is now taking her first tentative steps into religious life. A growing number of young British women under 30 are doing the same. In fact, statistics from the Catholic Church in England and Wales reveal that the number of women entering convent life has hit a 25-year high, up from just seven entrants in 2004.

All this is happening despite steadily decreasing church attendance (according to Faith Survey, weekly Catholic mass attendance fell over 30 percent between 1993 and 2010), a gradual disengagement from the public as the Catholic church struggles to combat its, er, PR problems, and a global rise in secularism.

Sr. Cathy Jones, Religious Life Vocations Promoter at the National Office for Vocation, gives a little more context: "The numbers of women entering religious life in England and Wales has been steadily increasing over the past decade, having reached an all-time low 10 years ago," she explains.

Why? What makes being celibate and entering into a vow with God and only God attractive to young, educated women in 2015?

The way the Catholic church has been concentrating their efforts in recent years to engage with the general public in order to demystify religious life, especially for women, might have something to do with it. "The vast majority of men will go on to become priests and the Catholic priest has a very clear identifiable role, while what religious women do has been and still is a mystery to many," says Jones. "This is why it has been particularly important that apostolic religious women have worked to make what they actually do, and why they do what they do, more easily known and understood."

The internet has obviously helped the church to be more visible and accessible to potential nuns and sisters, too. "Nowadays, anyone wanting to know about becoming a nun or a sister goes to Google first," Jones explains. "Convents are aware of this and most now have websites and a growing number are present on social media. This all helps to 'normalize' religious life as one way of serving God as a Catholic and makes finding out about the many different types of convent as easy as possible."

Not only that, but "come-and-see" weekends and open-days give women an opportunity to try out different convents, which is what Theo did before she chose the Congregation of Jesus.

For more on religion, watch our profile on the 'Slut-Shaming Preacher':

Theo also dispels any Sister Act preconceptions. She's young, cool-looking with short dark hair, outfitted in a denim shirt and jeans. Not a habit.

"In the beginning of the 60s, lots of religious stopped wearing habits. But people have no idea," Theo tells. "They think they all just disappeared or died out like the dinosaurs. They're wearing normal clothes. You pass them in the street and you don't even know it."

A thought flashes in my head as Theo searches through the cupboards for a clean tea mug, She could be any one of my friends. She's funny, sweet, and charismatic. There is nothing in the way she talks or holds herself that screams "God" or religion. Nothing "other" about her whatsoever. Until, that is, she makes a quick aside about her house's washing-up situation. Theo's housemate likes to wash-up, she tells me, but her eyesight isn't the best. Said housemate is an octogenarian Sister of the Congregation of Jesus. Theo lives with "three [nuns] roughly the age of my parents and three roughly the age of my grandparents" who look back to the Jesuits as their founding influence.

Established in 1609 by Mary Ward, the Congregation of Jesus (or "CJs" as Theo refers to them) was one of the first to be founded for women who, according to Theo, wished to be "out and about in the world," "didn't wear distinctive dress," and favored active ministry over contemplative life. "There is no such difference between men and women that women may not do great things," declared Ward in 1617.

In 2015, Ward's hope for women to "do great things" is now inspiring a new generation, and, in January this year, Theo left her postdoctoral research post at University in Edinburgh. Fittingly, she was received as a Postulant—a person who aspires to religious life but has not been admitted into a particular order yet—on the 370th anniversary of Mary Ward's death in 1645.

But isn't 29 a very young age to commit to a religious life, though? How do you know?

"Well, it's the average age for getting married and it's pretty much the same commitment, right?" Theo says, smiling. But I can't help but wonder whether the threefold vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience aren't a far greater undertaking for a woman yet to hit 30. I am, evidently, mistaken.

"I can understand how it looks like an ordinary life from which you've removed the ability to decide for yourself (obedience), the ability to have relationships and sex (chastity) and the ability to have your own money (poverty). It looks like a life you've squished."

"My parents got married at 20, so I come from a background where making a life-shaping commitment at an early age isn't a big deal," she says, laughing this time. "I'm ready for it now at 29 in a way I wasn't when I was 21. The emotional maturity wasn't necessarily there. The experience I had in the intervening years was very important."

Which brings us to the next preconception-smasher. The big one: love.

Theo has been in love before. With someone other than God. In her early 20s, when she struggled to find an order that suited her, she "fell head-over-heels in love with someone" and had a relationship for over a year. Describing the relationship as a "hugely important experience", she says it made her "understand love better," what it was that she had to give, but also what she "had to give up."

As the words leave her mouth, I'm at once inspired but also feel pain. She's talking about the knowledge of a kind of love she'll never experience again. Doesn't having those memories make it harder to give it up? The answer, for Theo, is no. "The fundamental question is, 'where will I love best?'"

"For a lot of people you're going to love best in marriage and family life. I come from a large and very happy family and so I've had the best kind of introduction to that but, for all that, it was never something that particularly drew me."

What do her friends think about it?

"I think most of them saw it coming to be honest. They were much happier about it than I thought they'd be. It's not like I'm entering the porn industry or anything," she laughs. Some of Theo's social circle have struggled with her decision, though, expressing concern over what they see as a "narrowing" of her life. Theo—obviously—doesn't see it that way, but can see how people do.

"I can understand how it looks like an ordinary life from which you've removed the ability to decide for yourself (obedience), the ability to have relationships and sex (chastity) and the ability to have your own money (poverty)," she says. "It looks like a life you've squished."

So what is the main attraction?

"I think it's a very free life," she says. "And if you live the vows well you can become someone who is free from the games people play with money, sex, and power."

Freedom isn't a word often associated with religious life when you consider the vows. But with more young women committing to convent life, the cloistered stereotype is finally being challenged. You can find many accounts of nuns undertaking social outreach work in the community such as the women's center in King's Cross, Women at the Well. It was developed by the Institute of Our Lady of Mercy, who describe themselves as "a diverse group of Roman Catholic Women... with a special concern for women and children."

The center is dedicated to supporting vulnerable women with a range of complex needs, often relating to street-based prostitution, trafficking, and rough sleeping, and is run by by Sister Lynda Dearlove, who has been working with women in the east end of London for ten years. As Jones reiterates, apart from enclosed nuns, all religious sisters will be involved in social outreach in one way or another. Some do this in traditional ways such as teaching or nursing, but others reach out to those very much on the margins of society, such as refugees or those who are victims of trafficking."

VICE News: A Top Pope Aide Is Taking on the Pontiff's Climate Change Critics in the US

The CJs are no different, and involve themselves in a diverse range of social work. "We don't have a 'common' work," Theo says. "We engage in different ministries depending on what suits the person and what's needed in the world." This "engagement" could include working in schools, prisons, and hospitals. For instance, Theo lives with a university lecturer, a child psychotherapist, a student, and three older sisters including "one who works in the diocese even though she's in her 80s."

Does Jones really believe that such social outreach coupled with an increase in younger entrants might change the general public's assumptions about what it really means to be a nun?

"I would hope so," she replies. "Although I am very aware of how influential the images we have from The Sound of Music, Sister Act, and Call the Midwife are..."

For Theo, being a nun sometimes isn't that far removed from being a barman or a hairdresser. "Everyone tells you everything," she says. "I'm already in the position where I'm having extraordinarily privileged access to people's lives because you become publicly available to people. They trust themselves to you. I'm free in one sense to love more widely."

Follow Kat on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"It's pretty foggy in there," warned a girl walking out of Vape Jam, the UK's first ever vaping expo. She wasn't lying. The lower central hall of London's Olympia exhibition center was cloaked in thick billows of white haze—the result of the atomized "e-juice" being exhaled enthusiastically by the thousands of people in attendance.

The place was rammed with punters, many of them heavily tattooed, heavily built men; the majority of them in the uniform of a reformed Bring Me the Horizon fan: snapbacks, flesh tunnels, AF1s, and nose-rings. Around 120 exhibitors were displaying their vaping hardware, which included everything from e-cigarettes and advanced personal vaporizers (APVs) to new flavors of e-liquid and other stuff you're probably already familiar with if your preferred method of nicotine consumption is via a rechargeable piece of plastic.

Judging by the fanfare, the vape industry has found its place in the UK market. After exploding in the States a few years ago, it's now a multi-billion dollar business, and suppliers are starting to cash in over here. In the process, a serious, dedicated, and perhaps slightly unexpected subculture has emerged from what was once an attempt to help the masses kick their cigarette addictions.

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The act of puffing on a cigarette, cigar, or pipe has a rich history; people started smoking and chewing tobacco as far back as 1,000 BC, roughly 2,950 years before American doctors were advising consumers to smoke Lucky Strikes for their throat-soothing qualities. Christopher Columbus is widely credited for bringing tobacco to Europe from the Americas in the 1500s, and the plant's smoke has been blackening lungs, championing dependence, and snatching lives here ever since.

Today, the future of smoking is looking up. You can now compliment a pint with a lungful of nicotine-enriched, bubblegum-flavored mist that's allegedly much safer than cigarette smoke. There are countless flavors, you can do it indoors and, in general, it's cheaper than smoking.

"The UK vaping scene has grown so fast in the last two years; we have a very close community," said Jay Coligado, a "mod maker," i.e. someone who builds customized vape pens. "Vaping appeals to all sorts of people. It's very catchy, especially when you're standing outside vaping, people tend to come up to you and ask what you're doing. I always find myself encouraging people to switch from smoking to vaping."

I was quickly told that people who vape are "vapers," not "vapists," for obvious reasons. Tom Ferry from Atlantic Vape, a UK-based company importing vape devices and e-liquids from the US, explained that vaping has "come on leaps and bounds" over here due to the general awareness of health risks associated with smoking.

"Social media has played a huge role in the evolution of vaping—the number of groups on Facebook and Instagram popping up is insane!" he said. "The US really set the trend for the vaping 'lifestyle,' as opposed to simply being a smoking cessation. Vape Jam is a huge step for the UK vape scene, especially as there's so much hype around events like Vape Summit and the Electronic Cigarette Convention in the US. Vaping is here to stay. The community is so tightly knit, and it's so exciting being part of the industry from the beginning and watching it grow."

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Amir Saeed, AKA P-Vaper, is the brains behind Vape Jam. He's also one of the first UK vendors to bring premium US e-juice to the European markets, making him one of the bigger names in Britain's e-cigarette cottage industry.

"I didn't expect so many people to walk through the doors," he told me. "So far, all of the exhibitors—even the guys from America—have said it's one of the best, if not the best, show they have been to."

Many of the men (and the modest number of women) in attendance shared a similar vibe: somewhat reclusive—cloistered, almost—and fanatical, as if an obsession with vaping and all its supplementary tech is a natural step up from an enthusiasm for Minecraft, a new hobby rooted in real life, but with enough gadgetry and oneupmanship in terms of gear and accessories to keep the conversation moving. Others in attendance may disagree with that assessment, of course, but it's certainly what I picked up from a couple of hours of wandering around. The more mansplainer, reddit-y end of the crowd didn't help themselves much, either; there were a number of "vape babes" walking around in not many clothes, predominantly to a reaction of wide-eyed, slack-jawed gawps, and one man shouting, "I'm off for a wank!"

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Things really kicked off when Aaron Pederson, president of marketing at Space Jam and E-Gains (an American e-liquid producer and distribution company), took to the stage and challenged the growing crowd to a dance competition. A few unlucky souls were plucked from the front row before gyrating awkwardly for a couple of minutes to a blast of funk. The winner was chosen by the loudest roar, and a lady sporting a lacy Victorian frock walked off with enough e-juice to poison a large ecosystem.

Pederson then started throwing endless freebies into the crowd, and rounded off his appearance by commanding a giant, lung-busting vape inhalation. In one massive synchronized movement, the throng drew on their e-cigarettes and released a gigantic, breathy cloud of vapor into the already stifling atmosphere. It was an impressive sight, I suppose, if you enjoy seeing large clouds of vapor, but it did get me thinking about how safe this stuff is.

Watch: We Tried the Most Disgusting E-Cig Flavors So You Don't Have to:

E-liquid is normally comprised of four main ingredients: vegetable glycerin, nicotine, propylene glycol (PG), and flavoring. When the user takes a toke of an e-cigarette or vape pen, the battery sends a charge of power to the atomizer and cartomizer, which then heats the liquid (at a customizable voltage level) leading to vaporization. Although largely promoted as a safe alternative to cigarettes, there has been some noise about potentially harmful chemicals—such as multiple forms of formaldehyde—found in e-liquid when heated at a high voltage. One study even claimed that a heavy vaper, who sets the e-cigarette to high voltage on a regular basis, was five to 15 times more likely to develop cancer than a long-term smoker. However, these stats are still up for debate, and there's no doubt the e-cigarette industry has played a hand in reducing the number of people who smoke actual cigarettes.

"I quit smoking about 11 months ago because of my asthma," said Dave, one of the attendees. "Now I vape and I feel far better. The max PG juice does tend to aggravate my breathing a little, so I use 3G juice instead."

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Kieran Lambourne from Bracknell said he was "hacking his guts up every morning" after smoking 20 to 30 roll-ups a day for a decade, but vaping has helped him quit.

"To be honest, I never wanted to quit smoking because it was something I enjoyed. But now, I don't think I'll ever give up vaping—it's a healthy alternative," he told me. "I'm a member of the UK Vape Community on Facebook. It's full of loads of cool people. Everybody helps each other out."

I then had a chat with pipe smoker Kevin Nuttall, who was drawing on a special pipe-like vape pen.

"I took up vaping so I could vape while at work. I also use it in the car," he said. "It has improved my health because I don't smoke my pipe so much. I like the Druid (liquorice) and Summer Pudding (mixed berries) flavors, as well as a tobacco flavor called Navy Cut. I am certainly one of the more senior vapers."

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As the day wore on, the mist hanging over our heads gradually dissipated, the vapers leaving one by one. For the first time, it was actually possible to see each end of the huge exhibition space clearly. What also became clear is that vaping is big business, with an even larger following, and that people are starting to make serious money out of the industry. Give it five years and I wouldn't be surprised if the e-cigarette world had its very own Ivan Menezes, or Simon Cowell, or anyone else who's made a huge amount of money in their chosen field.

Like almost every subculture to emerge in the past decade, the one that's sprung up around vaping is based principally online. That's likely because the internet is a place where ideas and discussions can play out in a relatively neutral environment, where people can express themselves among likeminded people without fear of discrimination.

I get the feeling, after attending Vape Jam, that there's certainly an element of this within the vaping community: a sense of togetherness, as opposed to people who simply want to quit smoking hanging out together in a room. Is it healthy? We'll have to wait and see. Will Vape Jam be back? P-Vaper assured me it would: "Next year it's going to be double the size."

Thumbnail image via Miley's Instagram

Last night, Miley Cyrus—pop icon and walking definition of "post-empire"—pulled Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips on stage at Terminal 5 in Manhattan to perform a track from their upcoming collaborative album. Stereogum reports that the song is called "Tiger Dreams." It's a slow-burning psychedelic track that sounds like a more druggy Lana Del Rey with some Nancy and Lee mixed in. Frankly, it's good.

Want Some In-Depth Stories About Pop Stars?

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2. How Nick Jonas Became the King of Twinks
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4. Do Squeaky-Clean Child Pop Stars Even Matter Anymore?

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FYI, the guy in the photo isn't the person this story is based on.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Selling weed seems like an easy pay-day. I'll just buy an ounce and sell it in bits for a profit, you think. It can't be that hard—that guy Dean from college used to do it and he's fine, bar all the paranoia and debt and the fact he kept having to buy new phones. So you do just that, and the money starts trickling in—you're making a couple bucks on every dime bag. You're flush. You're eating at nice restaurants and buying rounds for everyone at the bar. You start telling customers to call you "Hitman."

Then the anxiety sets in. This whole selling large amounts of drugs thing is actually quite illegal, you realize. Driving around in a hot-boxed car full of cash and multiple baggies of skunk maybe isn't the best idea. And what if someone tries to rob me? Should I start carrying my mom's bread knife? Should I get my own name tattooed on my forearm so people know I'm hard?

And who has to deal with all that bullshit? Me. And other girls like me. Other girls who've dated small-fry weed dealers with a Scarface complex. Thing is, bad boys really are very hot (the distant prospect of only being able to speak to my boyfriend through a panel of glass gets me fucking fired up), so I can see why others might want to follow the same path as I did.

However, I wouldn't feel right endorsing doing such a thing without handing out some pointers, so here's everything you need to know about dating a weed dealer.

FALLING ASS OVER TIT INTO 'THE GAME'

Being broke and in love can be a dangerous combination. Think of Bonnie and Clyde, perhaps the only mass murderers to be name-checked aspirationally by a pair of multi-millionaire musicians. There was probably something like this going on in my head when my boyfriend and I made our disastrous first foray into the drugs trade.

A friend's older brother—let's call him Martin—asked my boyfriend if he'd transport several bin liners full of weed from Manchester to Huddersfield (about an hour's drive) for £100 [$157], plus gas money. Any moron could tell this was a terrible deal, including us. But the thrill in our relationship was gone, and I guess we both subconsciously figured that trafficking thousands of dollars worth of skunk might give it the recharge it needed.

READ: I Sent Every Girl I've Ever Slept with a Survey to Find Out How Good I Am in Bed

We collected everything and set off down the M60. Arriving at Martin's, we carried the weed to the back of the house, discovered that somebody had tried to smash the back door in—most likely to get their hands on the 60-plant grow ready for harvest upstairs—and freaked out. We told Martin, who somehow hadn't noticed his back door had been almost kicked in, and he called the police. Martin, a man with 60 marijuana plants growing in his house, invited the police over. His next move was to cry down the phone to his dad to come and pick him and all the plants up so he didn't get arrested and have to spend the next 18 months eating with plastic cutlery.

You'd have thought that ordeal would halt my boyfriend in his tracks. But it didn't. So, first tip: if, in their first large-ish job, your boyfriend almost runs into both police and a gang of men who'd happily bash his eye sockets in to steal some plants, perhaps reconsider what you're getting yourself into.

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Photo by Jake Lewis

YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO DEAL WITH LOADS OF STONERS

Hands down the best way to turn someone off selling weed is to let them know that they're going to have to deal with the tedious ramblings of stoners. Heard about the time an Airbus had to dip at 34,000ft above Berkshire to avoid a UFO? You will. Not particularly interested in the melting point of steel girders? Tough luck.

Not everyone who smokes weed is an intolerable bore. Not every stoner has a PhD from the University of Wikipedia and a semi-working knowledge of what the large hadron collider does. But fucking hell, a lot of them do, and trust me on this: it's impossible to convince them that you have zero interest in one of their lemon haze lectures. People who are very, very stoned tend not to pick up on basic visual cues—like the rolling of one or both eyes, or the tying of an invisible noose around your neck, or when you're making it blatantly clear you want to leave by entirely removing yourself from the room.

Generally, the longer you've been wherever your boyfriend's clients are getting high, the more the sedative effect has kicked in, and the more inane they become. Mind you, there are exceptions to the rule: I once saw a couple take turns on a bong like it was a portable oxygen tank, before heading into the next room to have a wall-rattling, furniture-smashing fight. I mean, it still wasn't the best Tuesday I've ever had, but it was far more interesting than hearing what a man with a Super Mario Bros poster on his wall thinks about Marxism.

Watch: Kings of Cannabis

IF ONE OF HIS CLIENTS ASKS YOU FOR A FAVOR, For Fuck's Sake, SAY NO

We all know that weed makes you sleepy and forgetful, among all the other apparently desirable outcomes, but one thing you've really got to look out for is its ability to make people lose all sense of rational perspective.

One of my boyfriend's customers, for example, once called him and asked to be picked up from a rave because he'd done too much K to get behind the wheel. That experience was the first time I'd seen a dealer do anything for a customer other than sell them drugs, and I soon understood why: we picked the guy up and he immediately started a small fire in the back seat after dropping a spliff and not being able to locate it (ketamine can make doing absolutely anything tricky).

Point is: don't do anyone any favors, because it's highly likely you'll end up getting fucked over by someone whose only involvement in your life is a stunted, bi-weekly exchange of cash for drugs.

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Photo by Jake Lewis.

WORKING NINE TO FIVE AND LIVING WITH A DEALER DOESN'T MIX

Weed gets everywhere. If your flavor of work necessitates any kind of situation where you might interact with people whose job it is to rifle through your stuff, check your pockets, wallet, and bag thoroughly before leaving the house.

While working as a reporter, I regularly had to cover court cases. One Monday morning I threw on the jacket I'd been wearing over the weekend and headed to a local courthouse to sit in on a trafficking case. Approaching the police, security guards, and metal detector at the entrance, I emptied my pockets into the tray as asked, same deal as at the airport. Pens, notepads, screwed up bits of paper, small change, cigarettes, a couple of loose Starburst (breakfast), and a bag of weed. A fucking bag of weed I had no idea was on my person.

I pictured kissing my job, my house, and my otherwise sound reputation goodbye as I calmly stepped through the gates, before secreting the items in the tray back into my pockets. I'd made smalltalk with the various officers so many times at this point that they didn't so much as glance at the contraband I'd coolly dropped in front of their very eyes. But I was lucky; chances are you don't regularly make smalltalk with police officers. I'm exceptionally lucky I didn't get a hand up my ass that day.

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Photo via.

GET READY TO DEAL WITH A CRUSHING SENSE OF PARANOIA

Imagine that feeling right before a math exam, where you're pretty certain an isosceles triangle is the one with two equal sides, but also you can't really concentrate on remembering because it feels like the front bit of your brain is melting and about to leak through your tear ducts. Both of us had that pervading sense of dread hanging over us the entire time, only instead of a bad grade the worst possible outcome was prison. This may not be the best mindset in which to conduct a relationship.

Alongside the custodial worries, we also had parents to fret over. The whole flat stank of skunk, and it was only a matter of time before questions about "that funny smell" and "those posh boys at the window with dreadlocks and bead bracelets" turned into a heartbroken mom and dad.

My boyfriend kept most of his cash in a hollowed-out Bible and most of the weed in a chest on a side table, because he's an idiot. Lord knows what we would have done if one of our parents decided to consult the Good Book or check out the interior lacquering on that chest, but it would presumably involve heart palpitations and a stern lecture from my dad about how he never thought his daughter would turn into a "weed addict." "What next?" your dad is saying. "Next you'll be wanting to go to Glastonbury!"

Top tip: make sure your boyfriend keeps his stash somewhere even Inspector Morse couldn't find it.

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Photo by Jake Lewis

HE WILL THINK DEALING MAKES HIM COOL (SPOILER ALERT: IT WILL NOT)

Most of us aren't averse to the idea of being incredibly rich and having a lot of free time. However, a big problem with being in your 20s is that it's very unlikely you'll be able to achieve either of those things; the majority of us are both time-poor and just generally poor. So when your job means not going to an office and making quite a decent amount of money for doing relatively little actual work, it's easy to understand why one might let the situation go to their head.

However, there's nothing glamorous about selling weed or going out with someone who sells weed, unless your definition of glamorous is watching your boyfriend look at his iPhone a lot. Because unless you enforce working hours, the fucker is never off the clock. On a date, with friends, watching TV, eating, sleeping, or fucking, his master's voice will call him, and he will follow its command.

WATCH: How to Make Weed Hot Chocolate

There's the rub: because he's rarely around, and when he is you'll never have his full attention, you'll either think he's cheating (your friends will make fun jokes about you being "paranoid," which will be always be hilarious), or you'll be so starved of time together that you'll follow him out on all-hours drug deals just to hang out. You'll often pray the next phone call will be a PPI claim, is how desperate it gets. But it won't be: it'll be some trust fund kid who calls himself "Blazer" and "needs a really fucking good ounce of kush right about now."

And before you know it, Blazer is in your front room, drinking your tea and making your surrounding curtains twitch, and stonily confiding in you both about his recent car accident / failed relationship / redundancy / how well he's been doing with his plan to stop smoking weed ("This is probably, like, the last ounce I'll buy, then I figure just going cold turkey is the best plan," Blazer says, before getting a literal fucking hacky sack out of his pocket), and you realize you haven't had sex in months—high or otherwise—and that the last time you ate something that wasn't from a McDonald's drive-thru was over a week ago, and you have a little nug of weed in your hair, and Blazer is in your toilet, pissing mainly over the seat but a little bit in the pan, and he is telling you that you shouldn't flush it away because "flushing toilets is a Big Energy con, actually," and you pack a small bag of things and go to your mom's house.

In short, ignoring your girlfriend in favor of making a tiny bit of profit isn't cool, even if you do it all in a Golf GTI and an inexplicably expensive pair of jeans.

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This is not going to happen. Photo via Flickr user Jes

Comedian Sarah Silverman has a bit where she tells the audience that one in six people have genital herpes. (In Canada, it's actually said to be one in five.) Then, she asks those in the audience who have the virus to raise their hands. The time I saw her perform, a dead silence fell over the room as Silverman squinted her eyes and raised her hand over her brow in an effort to spot any brave souls. Although statistically improbable, apparently no one in the room had the common virus, though it was far more likely that they didn't want to be a punchline at a crowded comedy show. And, if you've ever known a struggling actors who's dragged his or her ass to audition for a herpes commercial, you'll know that being the poster child for the virus is certainly not a sought after position.

That's slowly changing though.

According to ProjectAccept.org, a nonprofit that focuses on being a "voice and vehicle" for those affected by herpes and HPV, before medicine was available for the virus in the late '70s, standard medical textbooks made no mention of it since it was so not a big deal. Stigma started at the tail-end of the '70s and early '80s, around the time when pharmaceutical companies started manufacturing and marketing antiviral drugs to prevent and help speed up recovery of an outbreak. In 1982, Time magazine published a cover story called "The New Scarlet Letter" ("Herpes, an incurable virus, threatens to undo the sexual revolution," was the tagline), which featured a woman with a shameful expression, in mid-conversation with a man, who was not happy to be there. All this seemed incredibly overblown for what is essentially an uncomfortable skin condition that lasts up to two weeks in the nether regions.

While a handful of high profile people have gone on the record as having herpes—like retired porn star Belladonna, actor Anne Heche, and VICE's Tracie Egan Morrissey—it's not exactly a condition that will elicit the same amount of sympathy as, say, Kim Kardashian's psoriasis, or Kate Middleton's eczema.

Recently, though, there's been a noticeable shift in social attitudes, thanks in large part to Ella Dawson. The gleeful 22-year-old happily took on the role of being the herpes poster girl.

The New York–based social media assistant contracted the virus two years ago. While she experienced the predictable shame and shock—not to mention sore vagina—that comes with such a diagnosis, she's since learned to revel in the misfortune of contracting it. So far, it's worked favourably.

Last month, Dawson published a piece for Women's Health titled, " Why I love telling people I have herpes." It immediately went (excuse me) viral.

"I always knew there needed to be a conversation about herpes and I always suspected I might be one of the people who would lead the conversation," she says. "I always made it a long-term career goal to be the face of herpes. But I never expected the internet to lose its mind immediately."

While there have been predictable troll-y comments surrounding her confession, Dawson says reaction has been overwhelmingly heart-warming. She's even managed to attract a bunch of writing gigs out of it.

"It was clear that people were ready to have this conversation," she says. "There was this collective sigh of relief. I was overjoyed and excited to see how ready people are and how receptive people have been."

Dennis Williams, coordinator for Health Services Peer Education for Planned Parenthood in Toronto says often times, the most traumatic thing about contracting herpes is the diagnosis.

"It tends to be an emotional process for them," he says. "The stigma ends up having more of an impact on their life than the health impact of the actual infection."

Herpes is a tricky virus, which is why it's so easy to spread, but it's mostly harmless. There's herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) and herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2), which can both be spread by touching, kissing, and skin-to-skin sexual contact between all the orifices. It's most contagious when there's an open, seeping sore, though it can be spread without any symptoms. Many people pick up the virus as children, through sharing drinks or being kissed by a relative. Symptoms range for everyone, depending on things like stress levels and immune system, which is why some people carry the virus but never know it. Some people will experience sore blisters, while others won't feel a damn thing.

The times that the virus has the potential to be a health issue is when it's contracted during a pregnancy, which can affect gestation. There's also risk of transmitting the virus to the baby if there's an outbreak during birth, though those are rare circumstances.

Having herpes can also increase your risk of contracting HIV, if exposed to the virus. There's also been a study linking cervical cancer to genital herpes, but only among women who are also infected with human papillomavirus (HPV).

Williams says he aims to help those diagnosed with the virus understand that it's an incredibly common condition. That can be challenging to wrap your head around since there's still the pesky impression that it's a shameful thing to contract. He applauds Dawson for speaking out.

"It happens to so many people that it's kind of strange and unnecessary when people think they're alone when it happens to them," he says.

Dawson admits she's still sensitive about herpes humour, which is tough since it's often an easy go-to gag for comedians and sketch shows. She reminds herself that it's simply a result of stigma that's produced by society and not something she experiences daily with friends, co-workers and family.

"You come to realize how so insignificant it is, in terms of the life you live. It's stops being something that bothers you."

By being so frank about something that's not particularly sexy, Dawson hopes she and others can continue to change the way people come to terms with it.

"My goal would be for when people get diagnosed and Google herpes, instead of seeing terrifying WebMD results, they see people like me who've lived normal, awesome lives," she says.

Follow Elianna Lev on Twitter.

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A recent panel on youth gang violence in Surrey. Photo via Facebook user Kal Dosanjh

It's been a busy two months for Surrey's criminal element—and local law enforcement is just beginning to catch up.

Since March 9, Surrey RCMP say they've responded to 30 shootings, half of them connected to a street-level drug turf war. This week police arrested five dudes and laid hefty firearm and drug trafficking charges against three of them. The cops have seized 13 weapons, 21 vehicles, and $23,730 in the ongoing investigation.

When I last spoke to Mani Amar, filmmaker behind a critical Metro Vancouver gang documentary, nobody had died in the months-long shooting spree. After an April 19 shootout killed the 22-year-old nephew of a Surrey MLA, I asked him if he still thought these were low-level, wannabe gangsters.

"It's still street-level and very unorganized," Amar says of the 13 to 20 young guys still out there trying to make a name for themselves in Surrey's criminal underworld via drive-bys in broad daylight. Street-level or not, Amar worries the "tit-for-tat" attacks could escalate in coming months if the suspects' neighbours, friends, and families don't come forward and cooperate with police.

"It's the bravado mentality," Amar says of the retaliation threat. He sets this up with a handy NFL football metaphor: "One of their guys is down. He's done. He's not going to be playing anymore, so what's the other team going to do?

"If the Patriots just scored, now the Seahawks have to score."

Needless to say, this has been a tough battle for police. Cops went so far as to release names of a dozen suspects—most hail from middle-class, second-generation South Asian immigrant families—and still witnesses, neighbours, and extended families have kept relatively quiet. Wounded victims have been especially uncooperative.

When Arun Paul Singh Bains died in the street, his family and politician uncle both claimed he wasn't a gangster or a criminal. Amar doesn't go so far as to call bullshit, but he says he's skeptical. "You can claim to be ignorant, but that's still irresponsible parenting." Amar gets why his community is protective of their own, but says it's ultimately a mistake.

"The best thing to do as a community and for parents is to get law enforcement involved." Otherwise, he says, "it's just going to get worse and worse from here." Violent crime in the city is already up 40 percent over last year, though Amar says it's still a far cry from the levels seen during Metro Vancouver's gang war in 2009-10.

Bains' high-profile death seems to be turning the tides in police favour. The RCMP set up a 24-hour tip line after his murder, and recent arrests seem to suggest people are finally starting to call in. "Arun's death proves—this stuff only ends in death or jail."

Beyond the scare of "shots fired" three times a week, the conflict has unintended consequences, like kicking up racist sentiment in the region. He says local media repeatedly fail to mention two white kids have been named by police, yet often inexplicably fixate on the one kid of Somalian descent. This turns the public conversation to blaming perceived outsiders, rather than finding solutions.

Even Surrey Mayor Linda Hepner jumped on the blame bandwagon. She got in trouble last month for telling reporters "I'm not the sheriff." Amar says this is not a good look for a leader, saying everyone should take some sheriffing responsibility. "Gang violence, racism, they're all societal issues that affect everybody," he says. And often these issues migrate from one marginalized group to the next.

This trend fits with his study of Metro Vancouver gangs through the decades, where first and second generation immigrant kids use violence to "climb" the organized crime ladder. "Certain communities go through certain issues at certain times," he says.

For example, he says young Chinese-Canadians moved up through street-level crime in the 1980s. "Richmond was a bloodbath," he recalls. Now Amar sees Chinese Triads are the crime bosses in town. "It's never just one community's issue."

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

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One of the best things about a video game where you can do anything is the option of doing nothing. Which is to say for me, the most entertaining moments of Grand Theft Auto V weren't the elaborate set pieces (though the bank heist was certainly nice), or the thrill of driving expensive cars at dangerous speeds, or the ability to cause general mayhem and watch madness unfold. Nor was it the soundtrack, which was certainly excellent. Instead, I gravitated toward the calmer moments, the eyes of the storm in a game that was all hurricane.

One of those was golf. Over the six months I sunk into GTA V, I spent hours playing as Michael De Santa at the Los Santos Golf Club, taking a perverse pleasure in the fact that an entire virtual world swirled around me. As Michael, I'd killed hundreds (if not thousands) of virtual humans—some who deserved it, some who happened to be standing on the road as I was flying down the highway evading the fuzz—and was simultaneously under the employ of the Feds, a shady studio head, and a Mexican cartel.

But on the golf course, all of that melted away. There was no mechanic where I could accidentally trip up the next part of the story, or trigger someone into shooting me. There was only golf. The pleasure I took in knocking back nine holes on the course was immense. I eventually got so good that I even beat Castro Lagano, the golf-obsessed philanderer who needs a ride to the country club and is at least good enough to play on the GTA equivalent to the National Tour.

Another was driving around peacefully. No speeding, no driving in the other lane, no knocking trashcans or signs over for kicks. I covered the entirety of GTA's map, drinking in Los Santos, its virtual facsimile of Los Angeles. The streets, the mountains, the deserts, the beaches, the weird hippie encampments on the outskirts, all offered rich landscapes to be explored. And explore I did, until I knew Los Santos well enough to drive around it without a map.

Related: VICE's documentary on the American obsession with Pinball:

The similarities between Los Santos and Los Angeles are well-documented—the GTA fansite GTAist offers perhaps the most definitive proof of this, in which a fan recreates 22 stills from the game, showing the painstaking detail the team at Rockstar Games put into rendering the virtual world. One of the highlights of any GTA is the vivid setting they take place in, but in previous games the host cities were smaller; more like Epcot replicas than the real thing. Even GTA IV, which rendered a New York full of shadows and grays, failed to recreate the part of Brooklyn I lived in, eschewing the hipster milieu of Brooklyn and Greenpoint and instead focusing on the drab industrial wasteland it had once been. (Though it's worth mentioning that some elements of Williamsburg were folded into BOABO, the game's version of BK's tech-y, hip DUMBO neighborhood.)

When, six months ago, I moved from New York to Los Angeles, it was already like I knew the place. On one of my first days in the city, I drove from Venice to Santa Monica, and then to Beverly Hills, continuing upwards into the Hollywood Hills. I'd seen all of it before—the place in Venice (Vespucci in GTA V) where Michael vented to his mindless therapist; the Santa Monica (Del Perro) pier where Trevor snipes the crooked federal agent Steve Haines; Rodeo Drive (Portola Drive) where, as the gold-hearted gang-banger Franklin, I'd gone to buy myself some new clothes. I took in the Hollywood sign, rendered in the game as the Vinewood sign. It's sensations of familiarity that make a strange place feel more like home—even if I was seeing this stuff for the first time, I'd already been there virtually, and with few real friends to my name in the city, it was as close to a welcome as I was likely to get.

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The game doesn't stop at replicating Los Angeles geographically—it also renders the vapidity and general ridiculousness that people associate with the city. When he reviewed the game after beating it in a single, 38-hour session, BuzzFeed's Joe Bernstein wrote of Los Santos, "It is a funhouse, a place where cliché endlessly pinballs off cliché and yields something new. In its pastiche, and in its systems-level scope, GTA V resembles, at times, a high postmodern novel."

Which is to say, Los Santos people tend to do all of the things our worst perceptions of Los Angeles people do. Talk radio hosts scream about nonsense, ad infinitum. Michael's wife cheats on him with her yoga teacher. Franklin works out constantly at Muscle Beach. Trevor hangs out with a weed activist and hallucinates that aliens are attacking him (OK, the last part of that isn't quite realistic). Everyone is an asshole to you when you're driving, which in my experience, is a fairly accurate representation of how LA streets work.

Recently, it was announced that Rockstar was done expanding on GTA V, capping off a run that saw the game earn current-gen releases for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, as well as retrofitted for online gameplay with special, online-only heists. For those hoping that the game would never end and instead continue expanding until the sun exploded and the oceans boiled, this is a disappointment. But for me, not so much, as I've gotten all I need out of the game. And now, I live in it.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It goes without saying that it's time for The Simpsons to call it a day. To be ushered out the door, a FOX executive waiting with a samurai sword in hand, ready to lop off its head and watch cash pour—fountain-like—from its neck stump, in the form of movie deals and endless extortionate merchandise.

Problem is, we've now been having this conversation once a year for about 15 years. We reminisce on our favorite moments—the dog-faced woman, " One: where's the fife? Two: Give me the fife," Man Getting Hit By Football—then we bemoan its continued life and go back to forgetting it, only engaging when there's a good re-run on FXX.

However, a bigger question must now be asked of this childhood mainstay: How can it continue when the actor who voices half its cast wants to leave?

Harry Shearer—voice of Mr. Burns, Ned Flanders, Reverend Tim Lovejoy, Kent Brockman, Principal Skinner, Dr. Hibbert, and many more—has decided he will not be returning to the series. He tweeted a comment from executive producer James L. Brooks's lawyer stating as much, giving his reason as: "I've wanted what I've always had: the freedom to do other work."

Shearer can be seen as a metaphor for the show. He is 71-years-old, has been voicing all those characters for longer than I imagine he—or anyone—had anticipated, and is getting tired. He wants to do other things, and when you reach that age, the realization that you may not have a great deal of time to do so becomes startlingly apparent.

The Simpsons as a cultural phenomenon meant a great deal to a great many people. It informed and moulded the humor of a generation of kids, teens, and young adults. It provided a platform for exceptional talents like John Swartzwelder and a young Conan O'Brien, among others. It is untouchable in its glory years, the dates of which are subject to great debate. I personally think it started going downhill after the tragic murder of Phil Hartman, voice of Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz, two of the show's more pointedly ludicrous characters. A part of its soul was lost, and it appeared to be irredeemable.

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But what if it isn't? Perhaps the real reason so many people don't like it now is because they feel a sense of betrayal. It's not what it's supposed to be. It doesn't conform to the ideal you have in your head. The stories are different. The characters are different. I don't want to see Bart use an iPad. I don't want to hear Homer talking about retweets. I feel sick at the prospect of Moe's Tavern becoming a "hipster" bar. Even the use of the word hipster by any character strikes fear into my heart. But is my war cry for the preservation of the-way-it-was a fair one?

The Simpsons has endured for so long because, clearly, people still like it. Even though the show hit an all-time low in ratings this year, it still gets more viewers than new shows like ABC'sRevenge, and CBS' The Good Wife, or NBC'sBelieve. For every detractor saying the series peaked at "Last Exit to Springfield"—that everything from there on in has been an utter shitshow—there is a loyal viewer, watching week-in, week-out. That loyal viewer might be a child, like you were when you loved it. They might enjoy the old episodes, obscure as they may seem now to fresh eyes, but love that their favorite cartoon is saying something relevant to the world they're currently growing up in.

But really, older fans of the show will never rekindle their love for it. It has changed too much. It's too different, like Jack Nicholson after his lobotomy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. To us, Shearer's departure is the biggest nail yet in the coffin of something we all wanted buried long ago, a corpse whose odor makes us delirious as it seeps like a gas leak through the cracks in the wood. But there are others out there, who are still enjoying the show much the same way we did when we were young. I'm as opposed to the Simpsons still being on TV as much as anyone else who grew up in the 90s, but won't somebody please think of the children?

Follow Joe on Twitter.