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Photo via Flickr user vxla

Last week, the Chicago City Council announced it will pay over $5 million in reparations to scores of African-American men tortured with electrocutions, beatings, and other brutal acts by the Chicago Police Department in the 1970s and 1980s. The majority of those men were the victims of Jon Burge, a disgraced former Chicago police commander who was spared from being convicted of human rights crimes by statutes of limitations and a friendly prosecutor's office that rarely found wrongdoing by cops.

Burge and his officers solicited confessions from at least ten men who were sent to death row based on their words of admission. Eventually, Former Illinois Governor George Ryan pardoned some of them, or handed down reduced sentences based on the revelations that their confessions may have come as a result of torture. Similarly harsh methods of eliciting confessions and cooperation may still be in use. As the Guardian reported Thursday, a man named Angel Perez claims two Chicago police officers sexually assaulted him with an unknown object inside Homan Square, a so-called "black site" where off-the-books interrogations allegedly take place.

Chicago's reparations package represents the end of a decades-long saga that began on a cold, gray day in early February 1982. Back then, two brothers who had designs on breaking a cop killer out of jail robbed a house in a search for guns. The brothers, Andrew and Jackie Wilson, didn't find any weapons in their burglary—just some bullets, a bit of cash, and a fifth of whiskey. They eventually crossed paths with two Chicago police officers, whom the brothers shot and killed during a traffic stop. Soon after, Andrew Wilson was subjected to electric shocks carried out by cops under the direction of Burge, and possibly Burge himself.

John Conroy, the former Chicago Reader reporter largely responsible for breaking the story of Burge and his gang of torturers, wrote in 1990 that the Wilson brothers should have been "...little more than a tragic footnote in Chicago's history, of consequence mainly to the children left without a father, the wife left without a husband, the mothers and fathers left without sons, and the policemen left without comrades." Conroy, a reporter's reporter who toiled for years in the hard-boiled Chicago journalistic spirit of Upton Sinclair and Studs Terkel, saw in Wilson's civil trial what few others did at the time: a man from a marginalized portion of society making unthinkable but authentic claims of police brutality. Still, convicted cop killers like Wilson don't exactly garner much sympathy in the Windy City, or elsewhere. So, in "House of Screams," Conroy's first story on Wilson and the allegations of torture he made in his civil trial, the reporter speculated on whether there would even be an investigation into Burge and the police officers who engaged in torture, not to mention society's position toward victims of such acts.

"House of Screams" kicked off a decades-long effort by Conroy and other reporters, lawyers, politicians, activists, and academics to unravel the web of Burge's torturous ways. The deal reached last week also includes an educational caveat: The city's public schools will have a new curriculum to educate students on Burge, the blind eye turned by others in the Chicago Police Department, the impact on victims, and why the whole situation was so damn wrong.

I reached out to John Conroy for perspective on how his journalism changed the course of Chicago history.

VICE: The Columbia Journalism Review once credited you with being largely responsible for exposing the torture ring that was overseen by Jon Burge. The Review lamented journalism's loss when you left the Chicago Reader, where many of your stories exposing Burge's practices ran, and said if not for your efforts the Chicago Tribune and others may not have become involved in the story. For those who may not be aware of the case of Andrew Wilson and his scarred ears, how did you first come upon Burge's misdeeds and the officers who utilized his torturous tactics?
John Conroy: You might say it was an accident. An editor at Alfred A. Knopf, horrified by the practice of torture, wanted to do a book on it and asked if I would be interested. I wanted to work with her and Knopf, so I said yes, though I feared I might end up with a noble book that no one would read. While I was looking for some case studies to provide the plot drive, a friend called and told me that a cop killer named Andrew Wilson alleged he'd been tortured in a Chicago police station seven years earlier, and that he had a civil suit pending. I walked in the courtroom on the first day of trial, not expecting much. Wilson was an inarticulate witness, he had a history of gun crimes, and he was clearly guilty of the murders of Officers Richard Fahey and William O'Brien. Furthermore, he was up against some likeable, seemingly honorable policemen who were very good on the witness stand. But the medical evidence—the burns on his chest, the scabs from alligator clips placed on his ears to administer electric shock—was impossible to discount.

"I didn't feel threatened because there was no response."

What started as an apparently minor civil case involving Wilson eventually evolved into the discovery of a widespread, decades-long program of torture in Chicago. Why the lack of interest in Wilson's case?
He'd killed two cops. Nobody had any sympathy for him. Furthermore, there was a trial of a sports agent going on at the same time and various celebrities were flying in to testify. The daily reporters had to cover the whole building, not just the Wilson case, so they were understandably distracted and missed the significance of some of the testimony and argument. As it turned out, Wilson had the most compelling medical evidence of any of the other victims—torture, properly administered, leaves no physical marks. So the case against the police department, even when a more sympathetic victim could be portrayed, always came back to the African American who'd killed two Irish American cops. To stand up for somebody you thought might be innocent meant you had to stand up for somebody who was certainly guilty of a heinous crime.

It was a test: Are we against torture? Or do we object only to the torture of people we like?

When you started digging into the practices of Burge and others, what was the response from the Chicago Police Department? City politicians? Did you feel threatened when exposing what became a major story about the unthinkable abuse of police power?
I didn't feel threatened because there was no response. The Reader received four letters concerning my first article. Two were in favor of the torture and two were opposed. None of them were from any city or county official. Nobody who wrote mentioned that he or she was a police officer. The story, which I thought could rock the city, came and went without a whimper from the CPD, from politicians, from prosecutors, and nearly everyone else.

What has your relationship been with the Department, and officers you know, been since then? I'm thinking specifically of 2008, when you were mugged on the West Side. Was there anyone with the Department who held a grudge against you at that time for your work on the Burge story?
During that incident I never felt there was any grudge on the part of the officers I came in contact with. Some were more helpful than I ever could have expected. There was a lot of response to the article I did about the mugging (far, far more than the response to anything I'd written about the torture of African Americans in Chicago), but no officer or state's attorney wrote in and said, "Delighted that he got whacked. Wish I'd been there to see it," or anything even vaguely of that nature.

Were there officers who held a grudge? I can't help but think so. I'd have held a grudge if I were working for CPD at the time. I was, in essence, standing up for the rights of a guy who'd killed two cops as well as other men who were guilty of murder and other crimes. But aside from an email that said, "You are scum," which could have come from anyone, and an anonymous letter from someone who blamed me for the suicide of a detective I'd never written about in connection with the torture, I've never received anything that resembled a threat.

As for officers I knew, most of them weren't the type to support that kind of egregious misconduct, so my reporting probably improved our relationships.

"For a teacher, it will be tempting to keep it simple: A few bad apples in the police department ran amuck for decades. It will be much more difficult to get across that it wasn't just the individual officers who sinned. Every system failed here."

One of the things that blew the case against Burge open—and helped to support the work of his attorney Flint Taylor and others—were the anonymous letters sent in Chicago Police Department envelopes about other incarcerated men with their own torture stories. Did you ever make any headway as to who was penning those letters?
No. It remains one of the great mysteries of the long saga. They clearly came from someone who knew the ins and outs of Area 2 [the police station where the torture took place]. He or she provided a list of those who went along with the torture ("Burge's Asskickers") and those who were opposed ("Weak Links"). The letters contained some misspellings that seem to suggest the sender went to a bad public school. Figuring that an African American officer was more likely to fall into that category, I once thought the letters might have come from one of the black detectives who worked under Burge. (Various African American detectives at Area 2 had complained about Burge over the years.) But I once showed the letters to a former high ranking CPD officer and he suggested that the writer was white, pretending to be someone who might be African American, because he spelled some difficult names and words correctly but failed on some easier ones.

There are many interesting things about the letters, among them that they provided a road map for a prosecutor to investigate the torture and the perjury used to cover it up. An interested prosecutor could start with the "Weak Links" and then move on to the "Asskickers." But nobody was interested.

The Chicago City Council announced last week that Burge's torture program and the blind eye turned to it by the Chicago Police Department (and some members of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office) will be taught to eighth- and tenth-graders. In addition to knowing about Burge and his officers, and the practices that led to wrongful convictions that were eventually overturned, what else should be taught as part of this curriculum?
Ideally there would be some visceral experience that could be imposed without harming the students, which would suggest what they might face if they end up in an interrogation room with officers who work for a department that has failed to discipline abusive cops for decades.

I'd also suggest that students study the inactive bystander phenomenon—why good people fail to act during emergencies. And at the very least teachers should drill home the lesson that "Sign here and you can go home," really means, "Sign here and you won't see home for maybe the next 20 years."

How can students be made aware of the full breadth of the wrongdoing?
It will be a challenge because responsibility for what happened must be shared by so many different actors and agencies. For a teacher, it will be tempting to keep it simple: A few bad apples in the police department ran amuck for decades. It will be much more difficult to get across that it wasn't just the individual officers who sinned. Every system failed here. Police supervisors failed. The Office of Professional Standards [the agency formerly responsible for investigating claims of police misconduct], largely failed. Certainly the Cook County State's Attorney's Office bears immense responsibility. That office knew that the torture had occurred as early as 1982, and as evidence mounted over the years, prosecutors did nothing, though innocent men on death row might have died as a result.

The judiciary failed often, from the County level through the Appellate Court and up to the Illinois Supreme Court. The US Attorney's Office failed until Patrick Fitzgerald came along, and the Department of Justice has failed since. (Though other officers were investigated, no one was indicted. Even if the statute of limitations on their offenses had passed, a DOJ report would go a long way toward helping those who are still incarcerated.) The City Council, the mayor, religious leaders, bar associations, the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, the media, and the universities failed. Probably there are others I am leaving out.

In a previous VICE story, Art Lurigio, a criminal justice professor at Loyola University in Chicago, said that teaching students about the Burge torture program could have harmful effects, that it may even create a larger rift between police and the Chicago communities they patrol. What's your take on Lurigio's stance?
He might be right. But what would you rather have, innocent people going to prison while the guilty remain on the street, free to commit more crimes, or a community, uninformed and complacent, happy to be relieved of perceived miscreants no matter how it is done?

Why are students just now being taught about this?
If you're suggesting this should have been done years ago, you'll get no argument from me. I have long thought that there should be a theater troupe that tours high schools in underprivileged areas re-enacting interrogations, portraying the methods that have been used to extract confessions here. If it could be done with students playing the suspects being interrogated without causing them harm, that would be even better. The program could cease when the police department convinces the community that it has disciplined bad officers.

"On the day of publication, impact on society was really not on my mind. What I was thinking, I suspect, was more on the nature of, 'Should I get out of town for a while?'"

Do you think that perhaps thanks to things like video footage and pressure from social media, like that in the case of the death of Walter Scott in South Carolina, we're being presented with facts about policing in America that were previously easy for authorities to deny?
I really hesitate to generalize from a few videotaped incidents in a few communities spread across a vast nation. And if social media is such a powerful tool, why are people who were tortured, abused and coerced by the Chicago Police still imprisoned? Those men are not asking for new trials. All they are asking for is a hearing. Of course the reason why that's not an easy thing to grant is that the State's Attorney's Office fears that officers called to testify will take the Fifth rather than risk prosecution for perjury. Burge, after all, went to prison not for torture but for perjury and obstruction committed in some broad denials he'd made in a civil suit.

It's the dream of every journalist, I think, to have an impact on society—a change in policy, a righting of wrongs, or educating the public of things hidden by those in power. Your stories about Jon Burge seem to have accomplished all of this. When you began working on the story, did any of that seem like a remote possibility?
I started on this story 26 years ago, and I worked on the first article for almost a year (the first Wilson v. Burge civil trial ended in a mistrial, so a second followed). I think dreams of impact were pretty submerged given how nervous I felt about what I was writing. You have to remember that the wrongful conviction movement was almost nonexistent—the first DNA exoneration in the United States occurred in August, 1989, while Wilson's trial was ongoing, and it involved a false rape accusation, not police misconduct. Back then, if the police said something, the overwhelming majority of people believed it to be true.

So in my first piece I was about to say that torture associated with repressive pariah governments had occurred in a Chicago Police station, that a cop-killer was more believable than the cops. None of the daily or radio or television reporters who had covered the case had come to the same conclusion, and they were far more experienced than I with federal cases. On the day of publication, impact on society was really not on my mind. What I was thinking, I suspect, was more on the nature of, "Should I get out of town for a while?"

"I think the vast majority of officers are straight arrows trying to do a difficult job. But I think the department still tolerates abuse and still supports abusive officers."

You and Burge met in 1989. Can you tell us about the context of that meeting, how it came about, where it occurred, and what was discussed?
We met during the trial. There was a lot of sitting around outside the courtroom, and after a while the accused officers knew who I was and were somewhat comfortable in my presence. I hadn't written anything, as I intended to file when the proceedings ended. When they were over, I asked Burge's attorney if I could interview him. The ground rules were that I wouldn't ask about the trial, as Wilson's attorneys were appealing the verdict. When I got to the station, Burge had invited a lieutenant to sit in, fearing I would put words in his mouth that he hadn't said. I offered instead to tape the interview and give him the cassette at the end of the interview, suggesting he could copy it and return it to me. He called his attorney, who said that was an even better solution, and so the interview proceeded with just the two of us in the room.

I asked him about his background, his parents, his schooling, his stint as an MP in Vietnam, where he'd been wounded and decorated for valor, and his police career. I knew of a couple of incidents in which he had acted very heroically—he'd once saved the life of an African American woman who was about to shoot herself—and I asked about those incidents. He was quite modest and self-effacing. Talking about his Purple Heart, for example, he said [the injury] laid him up "for about 15 minutes." At the end of the interview, I offered him the cassette. Instead he told me to keep it and drop off a copy.

We got along pretty well, and I liked him. He struck me as someone who would fit in at the extended family picnics I remember as a kid, and I could imagine that if one of my elderly aunts found that her car wouldn't start, he'd have been the first guy out there to help her.

Since then, has Burge ever reached out to you or have you spoken to him?
We exchanged words—just a sentence or two—about his health during his criminal trial in 2010. Back in the 1990s, at a court hearing probably a couple of years after my first story came out, Burge asked me if I knew a certain woman who had been in the audience. I told him her name (she was the mother of one of the men who had alleged that he'd been tortured). He said something on the order of, "I thought so," and then told me that she had almost been indicted herself for trying to cover up the murder that her son had committed. He claimed she'd poured lime on the corpse.

If I were to talk to him now, I'd probably ask about his health. Then I'd ask if we could do an interview. I'd be happy with any conditions he wanted to impose, including the release of what he had to say after his death. And if he didn't want to do that, I'd ask him what he thought about my journalism and what I've said about him in interviews.

When you look at the Chicago Police Department now, do you have a sixth sense about how they operate, what their practices are and what they do behind closed doors? Are they as foul as they were back then?
I don't claim to have a sixth sense about anything. I think the vast majority of officers are straight arrows trying to do a difficult job. But I think the department still tolerates abuse and still supports abusive officers. And the Cook County State's Attorney is still happy to turn a blind eye to the abuse. That makes it tough for the straight arrows as well as the community.

Last year, police Commander Glenn Evans, an African American, was actually indicted after a man named Rickey Williams claimed that the commander had shoved a gun deep down his throat while holding a TASER to his groin. It's highly likely that no charges would have been filed had Evans cleaned his gun properly, but it turned out that the Independent Police Review Authority, which has replaced the Office of Professional Standards, found Williams's DNA on Evans's gun.

Commander Evans has a history of abuse charges, including a 2006 allegation that he choked and beat a city water worker who served a shut-off notice on Evans's house and a 2007 allegation that he put a TASER up Cordell Simmons's rectum. The Cordell Simmons case allegedly took place in the 6th District station, and other officers allegedly helped by pulling down Simmons's pants.

So has the department changed?

John Conroy now works as the director of investigations at the DePaul University School of Law's legal clinic. He is the author of a book on The Troubles, Belfast Diary, and another on torture, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture. Conroy also authored a play about Burge and his torture program in Chicago called My Kind of Town.

Justin Glawe is a freelance journalist based in Chicago who writes regularly for VICE and The Daily Beast. Follow him on Twitter.

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Vermont State Senator Norman McAllister. Photo via his official government website

Residents of perpetually scandal-plagued states like New York and New Jersey might be accustomed to the sight of local legislators being hauled away in handcuffs, but in Vermont, such spectacles are considerably rarer. So it came as something of a shock last week when detectives showed up at the Capitol building in Montpelier during work hours and apprehended State Senator Norman McAllister.

The shock compounded as the charges against him became known: the longtime lawmaker was allegedly running a grizzly sexual extortion racket from his dairy farm in Franklin County, in the far northwestern corner of the state. So far, he's been accused of sexually assaulting two women who were previously employees. Police were tipped off when a third woman, the first victim's former mother-in-law, was allegedly propositioned by McAllister to have sex in exchange for a reduction in her son's rent.

McAllister didn't respond to phone messages from VICE seeking comment, but pleaded not guilty last Friday to three felony charges of sexual assault and three misdemeanors of prohibited acts after posting $20,000 bail a day earlier. The maximum penalty is life in prison.

According to the police affidavit, the first woman says McAllister began groping and kissing her when she arrived to interview for a position on his farm in October 2012. McAllister, a 63-year-old Republican widower, was apparently pleased that she expressed willingness to accommodate his workplace preferences. "As a man, that's what I like to hear," he allegedly purred at the time.

The woman claims the relationship progressed to include regular, coerced sex acts. The first time they had sex, McAllister allegedly bent her over a bale of hay. "I knew I was forcing you to do something you didn't want to do," the senator later acknowledged in a phone conversation recorded by police. "Even with just giving me a blow job. I knew that you didn't really want to do that."

McAllister hasn't said much to the media since the arrest, aside from a terse remark via his lawyer that he has "a much different version of events."

Some of the events in question, according to the affidavit, include the time he allegedly showed up unannounced to the same victim's residence and decided he wanted to stick his fist into her vagina, despite being told "no" and "stop." His response to these rebuffs, according to the victim's recollection, was to utter something along the lines of, "Be quiet and be a good girl."

In another incident, McAllister allegedly initiated anal sex with that victim as punishment for her causing an accident on the farm involving a skid steer. To justify this course of action, McAllister is quoted on a police-recorded call saying, "Here's the deal, you're like many women who have had children. You're not tight at all, and anal [sic] you are tight, and some women like it more than others."

By the terms of this sordid alleged arrangement, the victim was permitted to live in a trailer on McAllister's property. He also reportedly connected her with legal counsel so she could attempt to regain custody of a child who had been seized by the state. (The counsel apparently bailed when she stopped having sex with McAllister.)

If true, these allegations are the stuff of an actual horror show. Imagine the government taking your offspring away, with the only course of action seemingly available to become the sexual possession of a government representative.

As another strategy for ameliorating the first victim's economic deprivation, McAllister at one point allegedly recommended "using your pussy for something other than producing babies." He is said to have proposed that a "viable option" could be to traffic her to other farms in the area, where unspecified "Mexicans" might pay for sex. But the plan was thwarted when the victim became pregnant. "That kind of fucked things up a little bit," McAllister complained in a conversation recorded by police. "Although some guys, like me, like fucking pregnant women."

As the Vermont Digger reported, the second alleged victim became McAllister's "intern" after previously serving as a "cleaner," traveling with him to the state capitol in Montpelier. This victim alleges outright, unambiguous rape—as opposed to anything even remotely resembling a transaction. McAllister allegedly overpowered the 99-pound woman and forced her to have intercourse in the apartment he shared with two other legislators, Sen. Kevin Mullin, a Republican of Rutland, and Rep. Tim Corcoran, a Democrat of Bennington. Neither apparently noticed anything amiss or thought to question why McAllister was sharing a bedroom with a person who, according to another state senator who observed their relationship, "looked like she was 12." (The two legislators might be in hot water as well. Federal investigators reportedly interviewed them Monday.)

All of which raises the question: Why the hell is this guy still holding elective office? According to the Burlington Free Press, McAllister has been kicked out of his committees, but he left a phone message with Lieutenant Governor Phil Scott indicating he has no plans to resign. "He doesn't feel he is guilty," Scott told the paper.

Meanwhile, there's concern over how the victims will fare in light of the revelations. For some reason the prosecutor's office ended up naming the victims in paperwork filed at court, compromising their anonymity. Gaye Paquette, the Franklin County Superior Court clerk, told me this is not standard practice and that sexual assault victims are usually identified by initials or date of birth.

"It's a small area, so people know a lot of things," Kris Lukens, director of the advocacy group Voices Against Violence, which serves Franklin County, told me. "Your anonymity might be destroyed. Everybody knows everybody. So that's a difficult hurdle for victims coming forward. They have a lot to lose." She's already been hearing stray comments "out on the street" assigning blame to the victims.

Until these explosive allegations are resolved in some fashion, it's safe to say there's a dark cloud hanging over the Vermont legislature. Lieutenant Governor Scott told the Burlington Free Press that the Senate could move to expel McAllister when it reconvenes in January if the charges haven't been settled. Scott went on to say that it's still "premature to take that route."

Follow Michael Tracey on Twitter.

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Photo courtesy Federal Bureau of Investigation

Just after 3:30 PM on Friday, 21-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death. On April 8, the 12-member federal grand jury found him guilty of all 30 counts he was charged with in relation to the bombing of the Boston Marathon in April 2013. Of those counts, 17 carried the death penalty. After about 14 and a half hours of deliberation, the jury decided Tsarnaev deserved to die for six of the charges.

Back in March, Tsarnaev's defense team opened up the trial by admitting their client was guilty. They spent the following weeks trying to portray him as human. While he didn't take the stand, Tsarnaev conveyed remorse during the penalty portion of the trial, according to Sister Helen Prejean. The nun, who met with him several times in prison, said he was sorry and "absolutely sincere."

After closing arguments, the jury was whisked away and tasked with filling out a verdict form— what basically amounts to a checklist—that weighed the various factors proposed by the government and the defense teams.

Had the jury voted for life in prison, Tsarnaev would most likely have ended up at the federal supermax prison in Colorado. Also known as the "Alcatraz of the Rockies," it's said by a former warden to be a place "much worse than death." There, he would have spent 23 hours a day in isolation and the remaining time among the likes of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, and "Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid.

In fact, during the trial, Tsarnaev's attorneys tried to spare his life by arguing in front of the jury how horrible a punishment the supermax is. The verdict represents the first time a federal grand jury has sentenced a terrorist to death since 9/11, the New York Times reported.

The jury forewoman reportedly took a deep breath as she handed the verdict to the judge, and the only sound that could be heard in Courtroom 9 was apparently the frantic typing of reporters. Tsarnaev sat with his head bowed while awaiting word of his fate.

Despite the nun's testimony, the jury decided that Tsarnaev showed a lack of remorse for all capital counts. He showed no expression as the verdict was read, and while an appeal is likely, Tsarnaev is poised to become the first of celebrated defense attorney Judy Clarke's clients to be executed.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Tonight, Mitt Romney will fight Evander Holyfield. Seriously: the 68-year-old former Massachusetts governor and failed Republican presidential candidate will enter the ring with the 52-year-old ex-heavyweight champion of the world, and they're going to box. I mean, they're not actually going to box — the whole thing's a stunt to raise money for charity, which is cool; it's expected to bring in a cool $1 million for CharityVision. But it's somewhat bracing to realize that, if things had gone a little differently two years ago, Romney would be sitting in the Oval Office right now. Instead, he's about to fight the guy who got his ear bitten off by Mike Tyson.

The most surprising revelation from this particular fight is that it turns out Mitt Romney actually has a personality—an attribute he neglected to show during his two runs for president. In an interview with New York Times Magazine's Mark Leibovich, he was even quite funny: when Leibovich asked him if it'll be a "modest performance," Romney replied, "It'll be a modest performance in more ways than one." Politics aside, if Romney had spent more time during his campaigns saying things like, "[Under Armour] have graciously sent me their apparel items, which I will avail myself of," I would've liked him a lot more.

But the charity fight points to a subtly obvious truth about running for president: if you lose, nothing you do afterward will quite compare to being the leader of the free world. The last few major presidential candidates have all compensated for their failure by remaining serious and productive public servants: John McCain is still a Senator, and likely will be until after we're all dead; John Kerry is the Secretary of State; Al Gore made himself into the world's most famous climate-change advocate ; Michael Dukakis became an academic and a grassroots campaigner. Beyond that, though, there are plenty of others who, like Romney, put together post-campaign careers that were a stark contrast, or else an interesting commentary, on their presidential aspirations.

In 1996, Bill Clinton won in a landslide over Bob Dole, a former Republican Senator from Kansas. Dole was 73 years old at the time, making him the oldest first-time presidential nominee in history. After losing the election, he solidified his status as one of the chief elder statesman of American politics by... filming a Viagra commercial. Watching it now, the commercial is remarkably dignified, especially in light of what would come after — you know, people in bathtubs holding hands in the sunset. At the time, "dignity" was not what it brought to mind for the American people, though. "Bob Dole's penis" is what it brought to mind.

Fightland: Mitt Romney Is Going to Fight Evander Holyfield

Democrat George McGovern ran unsuccessfully against Richard Nixon in 1972. In 1988, he bought a hotel in Stratford, Connecticut. In 1991, it went bankrupt. Former Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, an amateur radio enthusiast who lost the 1964 election to President Lyndon Johnson, became increasingly interested in UFOs as he got older, and went on the record multiple times saying he believed that the US government was hiding evidence and information about UFOs from the American public. Democrat Adlai Stevenson may have failed to win the presidency multiple times, but Peter Sellers made him chief executive for posterity by basing Dr. Strangelove's President Merkin Muffley on Stevenson.

Going back farther, the activities of failed presidential contenders get weirder. It is unlikely that any major candidate will ever top Aaron Burr, who served as vice president after Thomas Jefferson won the election in 1800. (Because of the way presidential elections used to work, Burr wasn't a candidate in the same way that politicians now run for office.) During his final year as vice president, Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton during a duel, which seems even more insane now than it did in American History class.

After shooting Hamilton, Burr was charged with murder in New York and New Jersey but never tried. Amazingly, he managed to top himself by heading west after he left office and getting himself embroiled in what would come to be known as the Burr Conspiracy. Although it's unclear what actually happened, but President Thomas Jefferson accused him of treason, claiming his former vice president was plotting to lead a group of farmers and other armed men in forming a new independent country.

Related: How Bernie Sanders Shaped the Northeast Punk Scene

DeWitt Clinton may have failed in obtaining the presidency in 1812, but he did go on serve as the Freemason Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of New York and as the first, second, and third Grand Master of the Grand Encampment of the Knights Templar in the United States. John C. Frémont lost to James Buchanan in 1856 and then again in 1864, as a more radically abolitionist alternative to Abraham Lincoln. In 1878, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Frémont governor of the Arizona Territory, but he was eventually because he basically never went to Arizona. He died broke, in Staten Island. Following his attempts at winning the White House in 1896 and 1900, William Jennings Bryan became possessed of the evils of both alcohol and evolution, and fought against both, including as the prosecuting attorney in the Scopes trial, where he was embarrassed by Clarence Darrow.

If you were to consider anyone who ever ran for president, this piece would be a million words long: I mean, Michele Bachmann was a candidate, and I believe since her run she's returned to whatever Midwestern bunker she emerged from. But just among the major candidates for president, there's been some serious strangeness in trying to find that post-campaign career. So Romney should feel comforted. Better a boxing match than a gunfight.

Follow Kevin Lincoln on

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'Sleeping Dogs' found favor amongst critics where other 'GTA' clones could not.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with another gaming journalist because, believe it or not, people covering interactive entertainment are social creatures, too, regularly enjoying real-life conversations with human beings who aren't faceless swear buckets on the other side of a generic FPS capture the flag session. And also because we had business to discuss, but that's beside this point—which is that something she said to me has stuck with me ever since.

"Why," she posited, "would any development team coming together now bother to make a game that would only be, perhaps, the fourth-best version of what Grand Theft Auto does?" Actually, she might have said second best, but you don't need to rummage long through this and the previous generation's array of open-world games for evidence of most falling way short of the depth Rockstar's dominant series provides.

There's Sleeping Dogs (above), a good version of a great game, liked somewhat against the odds by a press enamored with its exotic aesthetics. Another writer told me, only earlier this week, how Square Enix's Hong Kong-set GTA-wannabe actually made him hungry, because the smells and flavors of its virtual city felt likethe real thing. Isn't that a wonderful thing to say about a video game? That just playing it made its gamer hungry? Anyway, you've also got the Infamous and Prototype series, "superhero" versions of a great game. Flick through a few more boxes of blue and green plastic and dog-eared inserts in your local second-hand retailer of physical software and you'll inevitably find Watch Dogs, a grim-souled sourpuss version of a great game. And so on: a whole lot of worlds to explore, but none with the almost endless appeal of a Los Santos or Liberty City.

Gradually, studios are learning that the popular genres—football sims, fighting titles, sandbox adventures—have become closed off to newcomers looking to go big. We have FIFA and PES, Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, Grand Theft Auto, and now the superlative Witcher 3. Look at the third-person action market and few games released since the Xbox 360 made its way under telly boxes the world over have come anywhere close to the adrenaline-soaked Hollywood showboating of Gears of War. Halo and Call of Duty are untouchable unit-shifters in the first-person-shooter sector. The top table for gaming franchises is a tough to gain a seat at—and once you're there, most of the people below will consistently throw abuse at you for daring to stick to a formula that works.

Related: Watch our documentary on Magic: The Gathering:

Really rather good games like Binary Domain, Bulletstorm, and Vanquish are frequently considered "underrated" by hacks running up Top Ten Games You Never Played lists because content, as they couldn't match the runaway sales of the established pace setters, those games coming out of companies with promotional budgets to burn. And when a studio's big investment reaps but meager rewards, questions get asked. It doesn't matter that Platinum Games' (genuinely thrilling) Vanquish has now sold around a million copies globally—on its week of release, in its makers' home of Japan, it debuted way down at 14 on the Xbox 360 chart. Not great. Pretty awful, actually, and the kind of performance that would get other studios closed down.

This is why gaming is changing, rapidly. Game makers who have taken knocks working on bigger projects are thinking differently, more creatively, operating in smaller teams and sticking to tighter budgets. The results can be staggering, and the independent games scene has never been so verdant—and it'll only get better, as PlayStation and Microsoft evolve their business models to an ever-more-accepting space for indie developers to work within. And while the console giants remain gatekeepers of the kind we no longer see in PC circles, where Steam allows anyone to put their release on a retail platform, there can be no doubt that they're so much more clued up now as to what comes next.

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'Vanquish' is really rather good, and you should play it.

I have no doubt whatsoever that the powers that be at Sony are more excited about upcoming indie exclusives like No Man's Sky, Rime, and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture than they are for whatever the next Killzone turns out to be. Not that they'd tell you that, naturally. We see the future in these games, in their creators. Foundations are being laid for developers who want no part of the triple-A machine to build upon. It's exciting, isn't it? When I wrote earlier this year that we're entering a "new golden age" (uh, how very cliché) for gaming, I meant it. I can't get a grip on the possibilities available to weavers of wonderful digital experiences to be, as they are so very near to infinite.

In music, things are different. Things are not brilliant. I spent last night exploring Brighton's The Great Escape, strolling between the coastal city's spread of small-and-sweaty venues to spy the New What's Next in the industry—the bands that would love to be choking our radios and spilling all over Spotify for years to come. What I saw and heard depressed the crap out of me, but that's a feeling that's been building for a couple of years now.

Until the beginning of 2015, I had held down editorial positions at music publications for a decade. I know what's likely to be a hit, and what isn't. I see through the bullshit. I can so easily peel away the façade of any new act's campaign and cut to the core of the supposed USP—which, scarily frequently right now, simply isn't there. I left my full-time position in the music industry by choice, before I was wholly overcome by the varying shades of grey covering the once-colorful cacophony of breaking bands that had been my life and livelihood since The X Factor was pitched as enjoyable Saturday night entertainment, rather than a production line for shit-eating sycophants. I left when it was clear that no new band in the UK was really turning me on, that not one act was doing something that felt fresh, that got my blood flowing that bit quicker, or that had the tips of my fingers tingling. My heart hasn't skipped a beat in the presence of others made by MPCs for months and months.

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'No Man's Sky' is an indie title that is shaping up to be a major commercial hit, too.

Every act I saw on day one of The Great Escape was a spotlit and fashionably garbed equivalent to a fourth-rate Grand Theft Auto. I watched a band from Paris reflect the back catalogue of any number of synth-rock outfits from the past 20 years. I watched a band from London whose "ambient electronica"—to quote from the festival's program—seemed to be an afterthought to their on-stage selling point of having two drummers and two vocalists. Every now and then the need for the brace of kits became apparent, but while the band's female singer led the outfit lyrically, her wingman's role was Just to Look Good in a Hat. I watched a gently hyped singer from LA lose her "experimental songwriting" in the stretched 6 PM shadow of FKA twigs, so very far from a source that, itself, isn't exactly tearing up any precedents.

Don't misunderstand my critique for complete dismissal—each of these acts did something(s) I enjoyed. I didn't show up at each show, stay for one song, and piss off elsewhere. I watched, listened, processed, and concluded. Firstly, that competence seems to have substituted inspiration for a lot of coming-up acts, and that even innovation by a single step at a time is a concept lost on jangling indie crews who, if they see a career in their jolly but insubstantial fare, are outright delusional. And secondly, perhaps it's generational, or in other words: maybe it's me?

On the way home from my final show of the night, I thought about where music was ten years or so ago. If these musicians are in their early 20s today, they'd have been in their early teens a decade back, perhaps, when music started to take hold of their senses, to take its place in the shaping of their identities. For me, between say 1992 and 1995, that meant Nas and Nirvana, Mudhoney and Massive Attack, The Prodigy and Pulp, the Beasties and Blur, and loads more. I thought that was a rich period—I expect those ten years older than me would say the same of their own teenage favorites. 2004's top-selling album worldwide was by Usher, and the same year saw James Blunt's Back to Bedlam begin its course to ten-times platinum status, while "Indie" was ruled by The Killers, Kasabian, The Libertines, and That Fucking Mylo Song. Hardly the perfect environment to get fledgling musicians pumped up.

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'Everybody's Gone to the Rapture' is a bucolic post-apocalypse game that removes any grey from its environmental equation.

Perhaps TV talent shows are to blame for acts of genuine artistry falling from the upper end of the mainstream charts—Leona Lewis's Spirit of 2007 was the fourth-best-selling album of the 00s in the UK, with over three million copies sold in her home territory alone. Perhaps the decline of the traditional music press has played a part in where we're at now, where NME feels forced to put reliable, likable, but changing-no-spots dad-rocker Noel Gallagher on its cover eight times in as many months (I exaggerate, obviously) to get copies off the Tesco shelves, because they know they can never Do Another Godspeed again. (Bloody hell, Mogwai vs Blur, remember that?)

Whatever the reason for new music feeling anything but right now, there's no doubt in my mind that we're in something of a funk. I still receive emails telling me all about great hopes for 2015 and beyond, and they are without fail a relative rerub of something I've heard before, done better. I was invited to have my say in the 2015 BRIT Critics' Choice shakedown, as I have been previously, but I declined to contribute this time. I don't see the point. Look at the winners since the award was introduced in 2008: Adele, Florence and the Machine, Ellie Goulding, Jessie J, Emeli Sandé, Tom Odell, Sam Smith, James Bay. These are the acts that the British music industry is claiming to represent something new and exciting, something that can inspire the next generation of BRIT-winners, even. They've all the edginess of a damp flannel between them, and every one of them was assured success long before their statuette took up pride of place in their downstairs bog.

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When 'Grand Theft Auto' is giving you all the open-world thrills you need, why play anything else?

Music needs to learn from gaming, quickly. I appreciate that the costs involved are significantly less—it's far cheaper to send out a stack of promo CDs to 1,000 journalists in the hope that five write something positive about what they're hearing than it is flying a handful of games critics to the other side of the world to get immersed in the creative process behind next year's record-breaker-to-be that ultimately picks up an Edge 6/10 and 300 people lose their jobs. But while the risk is reduced, the logic is transferable. Nobody needs the fourth-best Radiohead, the close-but-not-quite cousin of Arcade Fire, the Florence who forgot her machine but did pack an acoustic guitar so now we can all listen to her lovely, oh-so-delicate folksy songs while collectively thinking: We already have a Laura Marling, thanks.

Why am I watching a band with two drummers and a hat play music that sounds a lot like a whole load of records I already own and haven't listened to in years because they've dated worse than Dale Winton's student audience appeal? Why am I watching an on-trend singer flick her hair around while her trackpants-wearing DJ-cum-producer companion chews gum and looks so detached from the music that, on the other side of his laptop screen, there's probably a sedate game of Hearthstone going on. Why am I going back to The Great Escape later on today to witness more of this?

Because, just maybe, something will spark like nothing has before. And there's no thrill quite like being there when that happens. Music can move a man like no game can—it can happen instantly, uncontrollably, and the impact is worn for a lifetime. Music can change the world—or, at least, the way we see it—in a way that games can't, because the obstacles to access are entirely non-existent today: anyone can use a streaming service and immediately plug into a personal revelation. Gaming will never be as cool as music. Gaming will never inspire fashion and shape youth culture like music can. But music can learn a lot from gaming, and cutting a substantial amount of the slack holding it back from further progression would be a great start.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

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Screenshot via YouTube

Rob Shirkey jokes that he wants billionaires to call him, but he's serious. The Toronto lawyer is mortgaging his house to help fuel a personal mission to convince cities across North America to slap climate change warning stickers on gas pumps.

The stickers—which mimic the black-and-red warnings on cigarette packages and draw links between fuel consumption and catastrophes like famine and species extinction—face numerous legal, political, social, and financial barriers before they could be implemented, and it's not clear yet whether they would actually work.

None of that fazes Shirkey, however, who left his legal job as a city solicitor three years ago to lobby municipalities on the warning stickers.

"A lot of activists will vilify industry and say it's a problem with the oil sands, it's a problem with pipelines," Shirkey told VICE. "My thinking is, though, that the only reason any of that exists is because I use the product [and] there's a market for it. So if you actually want to address this issue, you have to address the demand side of the equation."

His idea is on the cusp of adoption.

The cities of West Vancouver and Moncton have supported pursuing the idea, while Guelph plans to bring the proposal before city council next week.

A resolution "that all vendors of retail petroleum products in Canada be legislated to provide warning labels on all pump handles (pump talkers) and/or pump panels, and that those companies who do not have this feature on their pump handle be obligated to fit them with the plastic sleeves which will allow warning labels to be displayed" is going to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) for consideration in June 2016. If the federation agrees, it would give municipalities the backing they need to pass bylaws to compel gas retailers to use the warning stickers.

It is also starting to take root in California, where San Francisco and Berkeley are working toward adopting the labels after 350.org pushed for a similar warning system.

Guelph councillor Bob Bell was impressed when he first encountered Shirkey touting his idea at a marketplace fair booth. To Bell, the stickers are a cost-effective way to remind consumers that their actions have an effect on climate change.

"I think it will work—the question is to what degree," he told VICE this week.

In the next year or two, Bell hopes Guelph will pass a bylaw to mandate the warning labels at all gas stations, but in the meantime he's asking gas retailers to voluntarily adopt them. One retailer in Guelph, Norm's Esso, immediately jumped on board, telling Bell he was concerned about climate change—though he too questioned the effect the labels would have. The owner of Norm's Esso, Brian Flewelling, was unavailable to comment.

Jeff McDonald, a spokesperson for the mayor of West Vancouver, said the city has no immediate plans to mandate climate change caution stickers, but they are looking for direction from the FCM.

But if cities start passing local bylaws, they'll likely face legal challenges from retailers, according to the Canadian Convenience Store Association (CCSA).

CCSA president Alex Scholten argued that mandating the labels would hurt small business owners who are already over-regulated. "To have something like this just added on is death by a thousand pin pricks," he told VICE.

"If a gas retailer feels strongly about the need to make consumers more aware of the issue, then I think it's a great thing," he said. "But in terms of mandating all retailers to do that, at their cost, at their expense, at their time, I don't think is the right way to go here."

He considers the upfront cost as being more of a concern to gas retailers than any potential decrease in gas sales, but Shirkey said the stickers would cost a meagre 25 to 50 cents to print. The rubber sock that goes over nozzles (and which many already have for advertising) retails for $15, Shirkey estimated.

Scholten also questioned whether the perceived effect of warning labels on cigarette packaging is overblown, since governments have adopted other anti-smoking regulations that could have contributed to the decline of smoking. However, at least one studysays graphic warning labels dropped smoking levels in Canada by 12 to 20 percent from 2000 to 2009.

"[Climate change stickers are] probably overkill and will get lost with all the white noise that's out there on the issue to start with," Scholten argued.

Shirkey pointed to a 2009 study commissioned by the European Union, which stated that "there is clear evidence that tobacco package health warnings increase consumers' knowledge about the health consequences of tobacco use and contribute to changing consumers' attitudes towards tobacco use as well as changing consumers' behaviour. They are also a critical element of an effective tobacco control policy."

As an environmentalist who started his own climate action group, Dan Dolderman wants Shirkey's idea to work. But, as a social psychologist at the University of Toronto, he's not convinced it will have much of an impact.

While they could act as a behavioural prompt—kind of like "turn off the lights" stickers by light switches—and they could potentially change drivers' perceptions, Dolderman believes that, over time, the effect would wear off as people get used to seeing the labels.

And the climate change stickers will likely be less effective than cigarette warning labels, he argued. "Cigarette warning labels are about you: if you smoke, you will die," he said. "Whereas climate change warning labels are about, if you drive, this will happen. It's much less personal, it's much more diffuse, it's much more abstract," he said, adding: "If you personally don't drive, it does very little to the overall global warming [and] climate change that we're facing."

If Shirkey wants an effective message, the psychologist advises, he should tell people how they can make a larger dent in the issue of climate change—by becoming politically active, for example. We need governments to act on climate change, he said.

Until then, Shirkey will focus on changing one city at a time; he hopes to tour the US and Europe ahead of the United Nations climate talks in Paris this December.

It's a labour of love, he said, that began with a $7,500 cheque left to him by his grandfather and has caused him to collapse from exhaustion on two separate occasions.

"For anyone who reads this article, my hope is, like, hey, if you like it, advocate for me in your own community. I can't do this alone, right?" he said. "If you run an environmental organization, work with me, let's work on this together."

"Or, if you're a billionaire," he half-jokes, "give me money."

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

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Omar Khadr at his first press conference after being granted bail. Photo via Nathan Dennette/Canadian Press

Shortly after Omar Khadr was released on bail last week, he pleaded with Canadians to give him a chance.

"I will prove to them that I'm more than what they thought of me," he said outside his lawyer's home in Edmonton, where he will live pending appeal of his war crimes conviction in the US. "I'll prove to them that I'm a good person."

But a new poll provided exclusively to VICE shows that the former Guantanamo Bay prisoner who spent 13 years behind bars has his work cut out for him.

Based on a new Forum Research poll of 1,286 Canadian voters, most Canadians either have an unfavourable view of him (34 percent) as a person or no opinion of him at all (46 percent). Almost half of those surveyed agreed with the court's decision to release Khadr on bail at 45 percent, compared to 33 percent who opposed bail.

There's a sliver of hope for Khadr yet, as 80 percent of those who agree with his release do not see him as a threat to Canadian society. Most of those who approve of Khadr's release are either from Quebec or earn more than $100,000. And 39 percent of voters see Khadr as "a child soldier," just as the Supreme Court of Canada ruled he was sentenced as a youth, not an adult, the third time it has sided with him. However, one quarter of voters—most of whom identified as Conservative—still think of him as a "terrorist."

Khadr, now 28, was 15 years old when he threw the grenade that killed US Sgt. Christopher Speer during a firefight in Afghanistan, according to the plea deal he signed with the US military.

"While Canadians may not like Omar Khadr, and may not like what he's done, they recognize he was dealt a grave injustice at far too young an age, and should now be allowed to live a normal life" said Forum Research president, Lorne Bozninoff.

Follow Rachel Browne on Twitter.

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Image via Flickr user Frank Boston

The New York State Assembly is now considering a bill that would make it the first state to ban the declawing of cats. It's a move that would do away with a cruel practice, but place the wellbeing of cats above the well-established desire of humans not to be clawed. But nothing stops a bill in its tracks quite like the possibility that the politicians who voted for it will be blamed for the untimely deaths of their constituents.

After all, including claws, cats are armed with a couple dozen sharp parts that can break human skin, and they can inflict a fair amount of pain. But could your cat kill you?

Well, cats have killed people through infection, and, tragically, through falling asleep on the face of a baby, but could a cat ever emerge victorious in mortal combat against a healthy human? According to Brian Palmer at Slate, it doesn't appear to have happened in recorded history, but just because something hasn't happened doesn't mean it can't.

Assuming the teeth and jaws would play an important role in a cat attempting to take out a human, I got on the phone with Frank J. M. Verstraete, professor of surgical and radiological sciences at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. Since Verstraete literally wrote the book on maxloifacial surgery for cats, it seemed like he could tell me a little about a determined cat's chances of delivering a lethal bite.

Related: For less lethal cat action, watch Lil Bub &Friendz

VICE: What can science tell us about a cat's ability to kill a human?
Frank J. M. Verstraete: There is very limited published information. In anticipation of your call, I also talked to a colleague about it, and he said the same thing. He was also not aware of any published material.

Cats kill other animals though. What can we learn from that?
When they eat a mouse, they basically kill it, and swallow it hole.

Amazing, but that doesn't speak to a cat's ability to do much damage to trachea, or the walls of a large blood vessel in a human.
Correct. Unlike a dog, who can cause a lot of crushing damage, they can't do that because they don't have crushing teeth. They have big canine teeth that are there for apprehending the prey, and they have rows of molars for cutting meat.

When you say "cutting" meat, you mean like literally slicing it?
Their upper-fourth molar, and their lower first molar are teeth that provide shearing action. Those are used for cutting meat. They don't have any teeth that are flat-topped for crushing like we have.

I checked on my cat, and those are way back in her mouth. Can she do any damage with the little teeth in front?
Cats have evolved in the sense that their incisors are very very small, and not really very functional. They have kept their disproportionally large canines.

But how hard can they bite? It takes a few pounds to crush a human trachea.
We don't know what the bite force is. I'm not aware of any published material about that. It's probably well below that of a dog. Dogs have a much more prominent temporal muscle. That's the muscle used for closing the mouth. If you look at the temporal fossa, which is where the muscle lies, it's much shallower.

Can we use any other factors to deduce how hard they bite?
Tooth fractures are very common in dogs, and not nearly as common in cats. That would be an indirect indication that they're not really biting hard.

But what about working the jaw back and forth, like when you try and chew through a tough steak?
All cats, be it a lion, or a cheetah, or a domestic cat, have a jaw joint that is pretty much cylindrical. It functions as a hinge, so they can open and close their mouths, but they cannot perform sideways movement. A cat's teeth interdigitate very precisely. If they're off by a millimeter or two, they can no longer close their mouths. In a case of dislocation, the teeth at the back of the mouth catch one another, which is why a cat will sit there with an open jaw.

That sounds terrible for the cat. Can you help when that happens?
It requires anesthesia, and then manipulation by a person who knows what he's doing.

Sounds like it's a "no" to the whole killing a human thing. Is there any chance a cat would try?
Domestication has been going on so long that I don't think cats retain much of a killing instinct, other than watching bird feeders and the occasional rodent.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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Mug shot via Broward County Sheriff's Department

According to the Associated Press, a woman in Florida was arrested on Thursday for contempt of court after fleeing with her son in an effort to prevent the father from having him circumcised. She vanished three months ago, and her lawyer claimed the kid, Chase, was "scared to death" of having his foreskin removed.

The woman, Heather Hironimus, has become a symbol for the anti-circumcision "intactivist" movement. One Twitter account named "FamilyPenis" has been using hashtags like #SaveChase, and #StopChildAbuse.

The tweets of other activists, styled as headlines like "Mother Held For Preventing Son's Circumcision," leave out the fact that Hironimus signed an agreement during pregnancy to have her child circumcised. She later changed her mind, and has been embroiled in a conflict with the father, Dennis Nebus, ever since.

Nebus has won in court repeatedly. But no doctor has yet agreed to perform Chase's disputed circumcision. According to the AP, doctors even considering performing the procedure have received complaints from intactivists.

The Intactivists' website paints a horrifying picture of circumcision:

Surgical removal of the foreskin involves immobilizing the baby by strapping him face-up onto a molded plastic board. In one common method, the doctor then inserts a metal instrument under the foreskin to forcibly separate it from the glans, slits the foreskin, and inserts a circumcision device. The foreskin is crushed and then cut off. The amount of skin removed in a typical infant circumcision is the equivalent of 15 square inches in an adult male.

According to Matt Sedensky who has been following the story for the Associated Press, vocal activists like M. Thomas Frederiksen have made their voices heard on behalf of Hironimus. Frederiksen has written at length on the issue, calling himself "a victim of this vile practice," and saying that those who are circumcised as children "have been forced to live our whole lives with the preferences of another permanently carved into our genitals."

Related: Check out our documentary about penises in Florida:

Before Hironimus was arrested, the story already had a long legal history. In addition to the initial agreement, Nebus initially sued for partial custody, which involved proving his paternity, and the resulting custody agreement involved decisions about Chase's last name, who he's allowed to call "mommy" and "daddy," and, fatefully, whether he would be allowed to have a foreskin.

The Telegraph quoted Nebus as saying he believes circumcision is "just the normal thing to do."

Hironimus, on the other hand, said "To me, it's not worth it to put my son's life at risk for a cosmetic procedure," before they agreed to a gag order in December of last year.

Then earlier this week, when Hironimus failed to appear in court, Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Jeffrey Gillen issued an arrest warrant for her and turned down a stack of requests from her legal team seeking a mental evaluation for Chase, along with an independent guardian to speak for his needs in court.

According to the Facebook page of The WHOLE Network, an intactivist group, after her arrest on Thursday, Hironimus's lawyer, Tom Hunker, requested a restraining order that would require everyone involved in the case to not go circumcising chase before the case can be resolved.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

This summer, VICE will be partnering with Magnolia Pictures to promote the release of the Sundance Award-winning documentary, The Wolfpack. The movie tells the true story of six brothers in Manhattan who have spent their entire lives locked up in a Lower East Side apartment by their father, only allowed outside a few times a year. They learn about the outside world strictly through what little they can glean from the movies they watch and re-enact for fun. They still live like this today.

The Wolfpack is an amazing documentary and we are really excited to help get it out there in the world. Watch the trailer above, and catch the full thing in theaters starting June 12.

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Sara Nović's dark, tension-riddled debut novel, Girl at War (Random House), explores the civil war that marred Croatia in the late 90s through the fictional life of Ana Jurić, a girl who experiences the war as a child and carries the trauma with her as a young adult in New York City.

As Nović writes in the first sentence of the novel, the war began over cigarettes. These small aggressions ignite tensions among Serbians and Croatians in the tinderbox region that was then known as Yugoslavia. In the end, more than 140,000 lives would be lost and more than four million people would be displaced.

At first, the protagonist is unaware of what being on the Croatian side means, but she soon learns after witnessing death among her family and community. The book is strung together by sentences taut with a potential for violence that Nović never lets subside. Likewise, the endemic warfare Ana experiences doesn't disappear when she leaves her home. Rather, it lives and breathes within her long after she's moved to America. Girl at War is a testament to just how the trauma of living through war can warp a life.

Nović's new novel, however, isn't the only thing the 27-year-old writer's been up to. As a deaf author, she also runs a blog called Redeafined, which is focused on giving a voice to the disabled. She's slowly becoming a public advocate for her disability, using her platform to grapple with how being deaf affects her understanding of language—or languages, in her case. Nović is fluent in American Sign Language (ASL).

Nović lives in Queens, New York, but met me in downtown Manhattan at the Housing Works Bookstore Café for a chat about her well-written new novel, the complexities of conflict, Cochlear implants, and how the timeworn editing advice "read it out loud" might mean something different to a writer who is deaf.

VICE: The book's mostly about the wars in Croatia and neighboring countries. What lead you to write about that?
Sara Nović: I have family there. The main thing that inspired it was I went and lived there after high school. It was a weird time for the country. It was about seven years after the war. Everyone was coming down from it. Particularly that war, there was a lot of hyper-nationalism and excitement—everyone was going to be independent. But then afterwards, things go back to their old ways. The new government is corrupt, as if the old government wasn't. People were feeling disillusioned and abandoned by the West. NATO came by and blew up some stuff and then they were gone.

So for me, coming in and having a relationship with these people but also being an American, it was kind of an inside/outside state. People talked to me a lot and they told me all these stories. So I wrote a book about what the war was like.

It's not a war that the West seems to think about that much or even remember that often.

People don't talk about girls as child soldiers.

The other thing was that the war started in Croatia before it started in Bosnia. So it went on for a couple years in Croatia before it spread to Bosnia and then at that point, a lot of people had been killed because the war had been going on for three or four years. That was the point when America was like, "Oh shit, maybe we should get involved."

How did you feel about having this insider's perspective but still kind of being outside of the culture?

This can also apply to other parts of your life. Did your hearing loss, as it gradually happened, change your relationship with language?
Yeah, sure. It's kind of isolating. And knowing different languages makes you think about language differently, in general. ASL is quite a direct language, culturally. A lot of the time it's iconic, in the way that the word looks like the thing you're talking about. A lot of it is part of the nature of being in the deaf community. When we're hanging out with our deaf friends, everyone tells each other everything: Where you're going what you're doing, when you're going to be there so that I can find you later. If you go to the bathroom and don't tell anyone, no one can find you. No one can yell to find you. So everyone is constantly telling everyone about everything they're doing, unless it's a detail you don't want anyone to know, obviously. I think that kind of obsessiveness affects the way that I write. English is so much more euphemistic or coy. I think it makes you work more than ASL does.

Do you find, in writing in English, trying to find the rhythm and the pulse of sentences and words has changed at all for you?
I think it made me more attentive to rhythm. That's the one thing you still have access to, right? The vibration and the feeling of the language.

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Sara Nović in 2015. Photo by Alan Caras. Courtesy of Random House

I guess it's something a lot of people do, complimenting a person with a disability for passing.
It's true. I think "passing" is the perfect word. I've been talking about it a lot with a friend of mine. What does it mean to pass for hearing? Part of it is changing the way you think and talk. If you look on the news, whenever there's some kind of interpreter at an event, the entire world freaks out because they're making a funny face while they're interpreting something. Really, they're just using grammar. The way you use your eyebrows when you're doing ASL, to know whether you're asking a question or whatever, is grammar.

So laughing at that is like laughing at somebody speaking German or another language?
Right, but people feel fine about it with ASL when they would never get away with it in any other language.

Could you talk about the work you do with your blog, Redeafined?
It kind of started because there are a lot of ideas with predispositions on deaf people and their intelligence. And that's just silly, but it comes embedded in the language, you know? If you type deaf into Google, you'll get things like "the people cried out for justice, but their cries fell on deaf ears." It becomes a synonym for ignorance.

The language that people use when describing it mischaracterizes it.
I started blogging because I wanted people to think about what doctors tell them. For example, let's say you've just given birth and are in the hospital. You've had a child. The doctor and the Cochlear implant people show up and say, "We're so sorry, your child is deaf. But don't worry, we can fix it." You know, putting a hole in this kid's skull. And I'm not saying that Cochlear implants are not a useful technology. But a part of most implant surgeries, and the therapy that goes along with it, forces kids not to learn sign language. That's another thing, you'd never say this about any other two languages. "If they learn how to sign, they'll never learn English," which we know is scientifically not true. No one would say that about Spanish. So I started the blog to say, "Actually, bilingualism is a good thing and it makes sure that your kid has 100 percent access to everything all the time." If you take the Cochlear implant off, you can't hear anything.

Related: VICE Meets Slavoj Žižek

It's that emphasis on trying to get their kids to pass for normal.
Yeah, it's just like, "Fix it, fix it, fix it immediately. Make the baby normal."

You don't have to start telling your kid right then that they're fucked up.
I just don't like the dichotomy of telling people: "Well, you either have this or you have this." Why can't you have both of them? That's the reason that I decided to start the blog. This is actually a binary that doesn't make any sense.

It's like, "You're welcome to have this opportunity to be a hearing person..."
And now you're not allowed to be a deaf person.

And hearing loss exists on such an ambiguous scale. You can tell people that you're hard of hearing or that you're deaf, but you might not be fully deaf, you might be almost deaf. You might have some hearing trouble. It's such a nebulous thing to have. You can't describe to someone exactly how well you can hear them.
Yeah, sure. But that's a weird question too. "How much do you hear?" I don't know. How much is there? What's the answer to that question?

I guess, like any other disability, there's not a lot of actual public discourse about it.
That's part of it. People want to talk about it, so they don't know anything about it.

Related: Deaf Artist Christine Sun Kim Is Reinventing Sound

So when you go into an interview like this, is it frustrating to have people always talk to you about your deafness?
No, I kind of like the opportunity to talk about it in a way that's intellectually interesting. It's obviously something I think about a lot too, the way it affects how I write. People always tell you to read your stuff out loud when editing and that's not a useful device to me.

And, being called Girl at War, the book mostly deals with a young girl's experience explicitly?
Yeah, and that's another thing. We don't get a lot of girls at war. I mean, you do get a lot of girls at war in reality, but not in books.

It's a perspective that's pretty maligned when people talk about war.
I mean, it didn't start out like that. But as I was writing the book, her gender started to become more important in the way that people interacted with her. It made me realize that people don't talk about girls as child soldiers or girls in the military at all.

If you type deaf into Google, you'll get things like 'the people cried out for justice, but their cries fell on deaf ears.' It becomes a synonym for ignorance.

Do you think the things that you've written about in this book—woman at war and the war in Croatia—will continue to occupy you going forward? Or have you said your piece about it?
When I finished the book, I felt like I didn't have any more thoughts at all. Probably a lot of people say that when they finish a book. It's a thing that is all of the ideas that you've ever had in your life. But now I have thoughts again, which is a relief. But that area of the world will always probably preoccupy me. Everything's in flux.

Yeah, it's like you said. There's still so much work to be done.
I had a professor in undergrad who said, "I don't think Yugoslavia can survive as separate countries." At the time, that pissed me off due to some feelings of patriotism. But as these governments form and time goes on, we'll see what happens.

Are there factions that really want the genocide to be a point of discussion and others that would prefer to forget about it?
Sure, and the thing that's hard about it is that the paramilitary groups are the ones responsible for the worst parts of the genocide. How do you hold them responsible when they don't exist anymore? They were just civilians.

I guess it's a question of how to deal with such a huge trauma publicly?
There was a big thing about this wall in Zagreb where whenever someone got killed they would write their name on a brick of the wall. It was called the Zid Boli, which means "Wall of Pain." It was huge and right in the center of the square. A couple years ago, the government moved it. I think they put it somewhere outside of town. People were mad about it, but the government said it was bad for tourism.

Sara Nović's Girl at War is in bookstores now.

Follow Aaron on Twitter.

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Still from 'L for Leisure' (2015). Courtesy of Special Affects Films

Way back in October of the paradigm-shifting year of 2001, my 19-year-old self bought a ticket to see Richard Linklater's Waking Life in Union Square with a group of friends from New York University, where I was studying film. About 20 minutes in, a woman possessed with an even greater degree of unqualified superiority rose up from her seat to loudly proclaim, "This is a college movie!" before exiting in protest. Fourteen years later, pieces of Waking Life have taken up permanent residence in my memory, along with the anonymous New Yorker who vocally rejected it and checked out after the first reel.

She regularly announces herself in my conscience when it seems like I am being drawn in by what appears to be a "college movie." Most recently, she manifested while I was settling into the peculiar rhythms of L for Leisure, the excellent new film by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn. A globe-hopping survey of American grad students and professors making the best of their leisure time in 1992 and 1993, L for Leisure is a slippery work that is sure to entertain and elude viewers in equal measure. L for Leisure eschews a central storyline and characters in favor of episodic riffing on a type of character in a specific situation: The American graduate student on break.

The film's first act has the trappings of a softcore porn, right down to the rollerblading stud who asks for a wine glass and a Snapple in the same breath upon arriving at a Southern California yacht club. Despite all the signs and signals, the Laguna lunk and sultry professor Sierra Paradise do not get around to doing it. They are simply laser-focused on relaxing their asses off. "I'm getting so mellow," says Sierra. "Oh, you are?" asks the guy. "Here, have some of my Snapple." Not for the first time in my cinematic life, I realize that the suggestion of sex has been used to harness my attention before slowing things down and diverting it elsewhere. In this case, elsewhere seems to be the work of "getting mellow." It's about this time that a familiar alarm sounds in my mind.

"This is a college movie!"

Official Trailer for 'L for Leisure' (2015)

And boy, is it ever. However, behind the handheld camerawork, the jokey acting, and thrift-store fashion sense are nuanced meditations on time, the environment, and politics. L for Leisure places smart, young adults against a vast and uncaring natural world, struggling against the odds to enjoy free time in spite of their tireless intellects. It's like Werner Herzog directed an after-school special about the importance of turning off your mind.

[body_image width='840' height='630' path='images/content-images/2015/05/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/15/' filename='the-new-film-l-for-leisure-depicts-intellectual-life-circa-1992-1993-body-image-1431711891.jpg' id='56693']Still from 'L for Leisure' (2015). Courtesy of Special Affects Films

After three viewings in as many cities, each rewarding me with details and insights that had escaped me previously, I spoke with filmmakers Lev Kalman in San Diego and Whitney Horn in New York City from my home in Portland, Oregon.

VICE: Where did the idea for L for Leisure come from?
Lev Kalman: The way we usually develop our movies is that we have the title and often the next thing will be the time in which it is set. So we said, all right, we're going to be making a 1992ish project, because Blondes in the Jungle was a 1988ish project. And that became the container for a lot of our ideas. If you were going to pick an era for that kind of useless intellectual, 1992 made a lot of sense. 1992 was the beginning of this fantasy of American-style globalization where the flattening of the world is going to be happening. It's close enough to the present that it's within our memories and we can draw upon it, and at the same time kind of distant.

As an academic, your work and your leisure time are always blended together.

One of the big questions that drove us to make a movie that was set in this recent past was this question of whether the future of that time was inevitable. Is their future open-ended, or is their future definitely our present? We both draw on evolution or geology as examples of super-linear ways of seeing time, where there's definitely no future and there's definitely a possibility for new openings. That's undercut by the fact that you can make a movie that's set in the past. Within that, there is a feeling of fate. In a sense, you know what's going to happen to these characters. So those are two different ideas that we're juggling in the movie, that they're doomed to repeat our history, but on the other hand, there's nothing that says things absolutely have to go in a particular direction.

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Bro Estes as Blake in 'L for Leisure' (2015). Courtesy of Special Affects Films

There's a critical piece of voiceover dialogue late in the film when Kelly, a professor, is writing a letter to his lab partner while he's on vacation surfing in Baja. He writes, "You know that moment when the environment becomes charged and opens up your faculties? And I'm talking, like, mind and body. When you become attuned to different possibilities. I think a disorienting experience like that can make your thinking more expansive." It's like L for Leisure is designed to be the disorienting experience that Kelley describes.
Lev: I don't think my thinking is all that off from Kelly's. He says something about vacations being too productive. As an academic, your work and your leisure time are always blended together. We tried to show them at the extremes of their vacation time, when they're the least productive, to show how that's awkward for them.

Have you and Whitney been grad students yourselves?
Lev and Whitney [in unison]: No.

So what are your thoughts on grad school and grad students?
Lev: We're friends with a lot of grad students. I work at the University of California at San Diego. My girlfriend is in a PhD program here at UCSD, and that's why I'm here. I used to work at the grad program at Columbia. What drew us to grad students is that they're sort of like teenagers, or at the least the way that teenagers are in movies. They're not like a motorcycle gang or anything, they're not rebels or outlaws, but at the same time they're not as tied to adult behaviors as other people are.

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Melissa Barrera as Kennedy in 'L for Leisure' (2015). Courtesy of Special Affects Films

What's your working relationship like? When you make a film what do you do, and what does Whitney do?
Lev: We met as undergrads at Columbia. At the time they didn't have a film-production major, so neither of us were film majors, but Whit's uncle gave us a cheapo 16mm camera and we just started making movies on our own with our friends. That's pretty much what we've been doing for the past ten years. We figured out our vibe very early on, like in 2003.

When we're getting started writing the movie, doing the dialogue, casting and all of that, it's 100 percent the two of us. Neither of us were making films at all before we started collaborating. We don't have an individual aesthetic, so if we both don't like it, it's not going to make it. When we get on set, Whitney is the cinematographer and I deal with the actors and doing sound, unless other people are doing the sound or assisting. And then we both edit together. All the titles in the film and on the poster are in Whitney's handwriting. Basically, there are no artistic decisions that we aren't making together.

Whitney, anything you'd care to say about either the cinematography or your contributions? I'd love to be able to quote you in this interview.
Whitney: Um. It's really hard. I don't really have anything to add.

Lev: Usually, when you're making a movie and you're shooting it in a gorgeous location, or you include location shots, those will always be subordinate to the story. So you have to find some way to include them. They would have to be motivated by the characters or the story. And one of the things we're kind of insistent about is that these things can be on their own and not just because the people are paying attention to them. Maybe they're missing it, but we're going to pay attention to it. Similarly, that kind of move of "these are the kinds of things that are cut out of the movie, [the things] that don't fit" is also why leisure is interesting to us, why we spend so much time on characters doing the same things, taking naps and stuff like that. Things that would be excessive to a plot are what we're trying to recenter in L for Leisure.

L for Leisure opens today, Friday, May 15, in New York City at IFP's Made in NY Center in Dumbo.

Follow Matthew 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 Vikram Gandhi went to the slums of Bangladesh where a thriving black market sells just about any human organ you might need for a transplant. We sat down with Gandhi 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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Photo via Flickr user Tom Simpson

It wasn't until after I interviewed John Gray, major British philosopher, public intellectual, and the author, most recently, of The Soul of the Marionette, that I realized he was—in the words of a British friend—"a total hero." Gray, who recently retired from a storied professorship at the London School of Economics, was not only blazingly smart, with a cracking wit; he also came across as down-to-earth, considerate, and rather even-keeled. Considering that his book makes a fairly damning case against the techno-utopian logic of Silicon Valley and cuts straight into our "self-flattering" ideas of freedom, Gray's moderate tone was a surprise. Our conversation ranged from ancient Greek warfare to cryogenically-frozen tech tycoons, from the state of the humanities to the works of Philip K. Dick, from robotic souls to the UK's astonishing general election results earlier this month. Much like Gray's book, our 75-minute chat flew by and left me electrified.

The Soul of the Marionette offers a mini-education over the span of 20 short chapters, which romp through major and minor works of philosophy, art, history, and science fiction. The book can be disorienting—each of the chapters can be read on its own, Gray notes—but it's never dull. Gray likens the style of this book to Pascal's Penseés. ("Though, of course, I'm no Pascal!" Gray laughed, perhaps underselling himself.)

Gray's ideal reader, in his words, is "a person who is curious, who thinks that there might be something wrong with our modern world, the world in which we expect human progress from science and technology." If that sounds like you, check out The Soul of the Marionette when it's released on May 19th in the US from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

VICE: The Soul of the Marionette addresses the fundamental question of whether or not human beings have freedom. You seem to say that we don't.
John Gray: I guess a different way of posing the question that the book asks is, "What kind of freedom do we think we want, and do we really want it?" The book is not really addressed to traditional philosophical issues of free will and metaphysics. We all think we want to be free. We all feel frustrated and thwarted and powerless when we think we're not free. But what is it that we want from freedom? Do we really want what we think we want?

Your book also discusses how torture and "hyper-modern techniques of control" are being used today, in the name of human rights and freedom. Do you see this situation improving, or worsening, over the coming decades?
All of these technologies, they're ambiguous. What they humanly mean, their human values, is always ambiguous. I'm old enough to remember when photocopiers and video machines were thought as bound to bring down tyrannies, back in the 70s and 80s. People said things like, "Well, if massacres can be videoed, no country would dare to commit a massacre!" It happens every day now. It happened with Tiananmen Square. They possibly even use that movie to show other people, in other parts of China, what might happen to them if they rebel.

Something I wrote shortly after 9/11 was Al Quaeda and What it Means to be Modern. I said that if technology develops the way that even then it seemed it would, over ten years ago, then one of the consequences of these new technologies, which are liberating in many ways—I use them myself all the time, for research, to buy books, to plan holidays—one of the consequences will be the extinction of privacy. What's happening now, it's not only snooping and the NSA. Anything that we do nowadays leaves an electronic trace. Practically anything—any phone call, any purchase—is recorded, and that can be, in one way or another, accessed. So as I say in [The Soul of the Marionette], rather than our situation being that of Andy Warhol's world where "Everyone can now look forward to 15 minutes of fame," the situation that we find ourselves in now is that no one can ever expect 15 minutes of anonymity.

If you were anonymous for 15 minutes, you'd probably become the most hunted person in the world.

Through flaws in the machine, [robots] might begin to develop what we have, what in traditional parlance we call a "soul."

Isn't this what so many people are protesting against, when they get angry about the NSA?
Another reason why I'm skeptical that anything will change or improve in this respect is that living in the virtual world created by new technology—living online—is, for many people, now taken for granted. It's part of the way they live and they don't want to really give it up! There are so many ways in which the virtual world created by the media around us entertains and distracts us that no one really wants to give it up. The question is not how can you get out of the bubble, the question is, Do we all want to get out of the bubble? Do we really want to be out of the bubble, do we really want to give up this kind of world?

The idea that human beings want [freedom] more than anything else is just a self-flattering myth. All human beings want many things more than they want freedom. So when people say, "I don't want to be spied on, I don't want to lose privacy, I don't want to do this or that," I can't take them all that seriously. What might happen is there may be a small elite that can encrypt parts of their lives. Privacy may become a luxury good, just like living a long time.

It's sort of terrifying to think of a world where longevity and privacy are luxuries.
Oh, ultra-luxuries. I read somewhere that the very worst thing that can happen to you now is to be famous and not rich. And the reason is that if you're famous and rich, you can surround yourself with lawyers and bodyguards and cocoons of protection. You can control to some extent the nature of your fame, of your celebrity. You can reconcile your celebrity with privacy, to a degree. But if by some terrible mischance you stumble into being world famous while being poor, then you have no way of defending yourself. Your whole life becomes public with no means of control.

On the other hand, the whole industry of social media depends on people not wanting to have privacy. If they report [on social media], "I am having a cup of coffee. I have just been reading X," they're opting to share their experience. They're choosing that, you could say. The trouble is that that's not the only way these media work. If someone reveals a thought on Twitter, and that thought is either misunderstood, or understood and considered to be offensive, then all hell will fall on them. So the idea that these media can be controlled by the people who use them doesn't seem to be true, does it? And yet countless people do use them! And this has created some of the wealthiest companies in the world.

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John Gray. Photo via Flickr user Robert Burdock

I hear your critique of opting into social media, but for my generation the choice to use Twitter and Facebook is less of a choice than an act of necessity—to remain relevant, to remain competitive in the job market.
What you say is absolutely right. Just as people are spending enormous amounts of money on cosmetics and surgery to remain in their current professions; they would say, "What choice do I have? If I don't do it, then I'd be out of a job." So there's that. But on the other hand, is it true that full participation is really necessary? How does that meld over into selfies on Instagram and posting things about personal relationships?

Social media has utterly transformed our lives. I don't think these changes will reverse or stop. I think technology is moving really very quickly. Jobs that require a lot of human judgment, like medical diagnoses, a lot of those will be done by machines. In the future, machines that diagnose more efficiently and successfully than human beings will be very common. You've got a kind of steep change, then. You say to the majority of people, "You need more job qualifications," but you know from your own generation that going back to school is not always a wise investment! If you look ahead ten, 20 years, there will be whole vocations and careers that will be depleted and reduced by technology.

Don't think that you can become free or the master of your life through knowledge!

But isn't the argument that these technologies will create new jobs, as well?
Of course, if you talk to people who believe in technology and science and human progress, they will say that in the past what has always happened is that new jobs and new activities are created by these technologies, and you don't end up with everybody unemployed. They say new things will come into being. They just think that the mechanisms will kick in, as they did in the past.

But is this current revolution the same, or is it different? Is it going to be more profound? There's this contradiction between what these technology prophets say. They say, "Nothing like this has ever happened before!" and they say "Well, if you look at the past, things always work themselves out." If it's really something that has never happened before, then it might leave the majority of the human species behind, which I suggest as a kind of danger in the book. And if, on the other hand, it isn't all that unique, why do they expect it to change everything?

You write that "in the longer run, the only rational course of action will be to reconstruct the humans that remain so that they more closely resemble machines." Do you see evidence around us now, with Apple Watches and other technologies attached to human bodies?
They're trying! Some people want to remodel themselves! When I wrote that sentence, it was partly ironic: If you assume [Silicon Valley's] way of thinking, it'd be a hell of a lot easier if humans were machines. In the book I suggest that we are machines, but fortunately we're flawed machines, faulty machines. People ask the question, "Can the Blade Runner world really come about if we invent it through artificial intelligence or new types of bioengineering? If we invented machines that didn't have conscious awareness, could it somehow develop over time so that they'd become like us?" I don't see why not. If you're religious and you think that God puts souls into people and not in machines, of course not. But if you're not religious—as I quote the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi in the book—we're beasts and we're machines, and we think!

So if you think of human beings as being brought about by a semi-random process, you can imagine a situation in which we human beings invent robots and artificial intelligence, and in the beginning they may not have conscious awareness. But they might go beyond that. Through flaws in the machine, they might begin to develop what we have, what in traditional parlance we call a "soul." That means the process will never be controlled. That's good, from my point of view. In the future there might well be entirely new species of humanoids who are like us, who may live longer or be stronger or think more quickly. But because they will be flawed—flaws will creep in—they will develop what we have: the sensation of choice and the consciousness of ourselves.

These Silicon Valley types, they're not going to be able to achieve what they want. If new technologies come up, it's not going to be the case that robots will take over and we'll have a world with no freedom or consciousness. These robots will develop flaws, and these flaws will be the saving grace, will bring self-awareness and the imperfections which I value, which I cherish, which other people want to get rid of. They won't be gotten rid of. They'll repeat themselves—either in their own lives, or in the lives of these new creatures that they're trying to create.

Another argument of your book is that science can never explain itself, and we will have to rely on philosophy and religion and humanistic endeavors to actually explain what science discovers. What will happen if the current trend at universities continues, of prioritizing those disciplines with concrete economic gains above those of humanistic inquiry?
People feel, for good reason, that when they're at university, if they spend their time on humanistic disciplines, they'll have no obvious, clear economic payoff. They feel they'll "pay for it" later. And that feeling was well-founded, was it not?

It could be that when people are in the privacy of the poling booth, what is revealed to them is something they've concealed from themselves: what they really value.

Certainly, in terms of starting salaries.
Certainly. We are moving to a situation in which the pressure to acquire definite skills in numeracy and scientific knowledge will override and exclude any interest in the humanities. But if the position that we are talking about earlier begins to develop, in which scientific and technological change occur [exponentially rapidly], then change in vocation and activities will be very profound and quick. It may very easily be that someone equipped with the humanities will be able to survive, and even to thrive, better over a lifetime than those who have a narrower range of skill.

Because one of the ideas that is redundant now is the traditional idea of a career as being a lifetime form of job commitment that is renewed through various phases. There was once an idea that there were fixed structures and fixed activities. Now the nature of change is so profound that there are huge swathes of vocations and professions that are vanishing and melting away.

But the human world isn't changing. We remain human beings with similar passions and hopes and impulses to those that are in Shakespeare, and the Bible, and ancient Chinese and African poetry. Some of the younger people that I have met, who have also had an education that has included history and ancient languages, they can jump more nimbly from one type of activity to another. They can see when certain types of industry are in decline. It may be that the skills of nimbleness, of judgment and resilience, of being able to see what changes will happen: that could actually help them.

By the time [other students] train up to a position, they'll turn to pursue an activity and all knowledge of it will be gone. It's a treadmill that many people are on. Of course, it's very difficult for any generation to step off. If you step off, you can step into a situation where you simply can't make a living and you're marginalized.

An education that is subordinated entirely to economic imperative is very narrowing. It might not even be that economically productive. You might be better off with that knowledge of how the ancient Greeks fought wars. If you read the ancient histories, the way they describe revolutions and tyrannies—you just change a few names and you see it's happening in Britain and America today. That's instructive. That's useful. One of the great benefits of the humanities is that they enable you to be more savvy in not swallowing current fads and trends as being final and categorical. It's happened so many times before. If you base your career life on something that is the "only way things can go," you might very well find five years down the line that everything is different.

We had a general election in my country, recently—

RELATED: Check out VICE UK's coverage of the General Election.

Yes, you did!
And that election was categorically different from what had been predicted for weeks or months, down to the very last minute. Every single poll except the one at the very end, the exit poll—they were all wrong. Interesting, fascinating. What was it that was missed? I'm sure it's not a technical flaw: Ten different polling organizations [were wrong], and they didn't share [data]. It could have been something as simple as: The people they talked to lied.

Or it could be something more subtle. It could be that when people are in the privacy of the poling booth, what is revealed to them is not something they concealed from others but something they've concealed to themselves: what they really value. This experience has revealed the enormous limitations of quantitative knowledge. None of the people I admire got it right. They were all predicting that no one would win. They were all wrong. I think that's profoundly interesting. It illustrates that we know much less about society and ourselves than we think we do. The quantitative precision of rigorous scientific techniques, when applied in the human world, can often give results that are misleading. This is a very important event, but think of even bigger events, like a war, being started on the basis of these techniques—it has been done before, with disastrous results.

Don't think that you can become free or the master of your life through knowledge! Knowledge is a slippery thing. Life is a slippery thing! Fortunately. Happily.

Follow Jennifer Schaffer on Twitter.

Welcome to our first installment of VICE Talks Film, the series where we sit down with the most talented and creative minds in the movie world to discuss their work and how they're seeking to push the boundaries of the medium. In this episode, we caught up with director George Miller, creator of movies like Happy Feet, Babe, and of course the mythic Mad Max series. Now he's back with his latest venture, Mad Max: Fury Road—which some are calling a badass feminist action flick. We talked to the 70-year-old director about the challenges he faced in recreating the Wasteland, his new crop of iconic characters, the insane practical stunts and why it took 17 years to make this movie happen.

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All photos courtesy of FlamingoAir

Legend has it that almost as soon as American aviator Lawrence Burst Sperry invented autopilot control in 1914, he started using this major development in flight safety to get laid in the air. A few years later, Sperry had a cockpit romp so vigorous that an errant heel knocked out the automation system. The plane crashed and a couple of duck hunters found Sperry and a married woman naked and scrambling for plausible excuses in a Long Island pond. Basically, as soon as humans learned to fly, they wanted to screw in the sky.

Celebrities from Richard Branson to Johnny Depp have fessed up to partaking in high-altitude hanky-panky. But while there are technically no regulations against two people sneaking off and using an airplane lavatory together, the inherent discomfort and judging looks of knowing passengers mean that most of us will never join the mile-high club.

But if you want to have sex above the clouds, all hope is not lost. Over the years, a number of small charter flight services have opened up offering private "mile-high club flights" around the country. Running anywhere from $300 to $1,000 per hour, and usually composed of a pilot with a Piper or a Cessna, a noise-canceling headset, and a sheet to partition the cockpit from the passenger cabin for basic privacy, these services offer seatless, well-cushioned fuselages like LoveCloud, a Cessna 421 Golden Eagle operating out of Las Vegas for the last year with mood lighting systems and a heart-shaped bed. Yet few of these fly-by-night operations survive more than a few years.

The one outfit with any real longevity is Cincinnati's FlamingoAir. Originally a mixed mile-high and charter flight service opened by pilot David MacDonald in 1991, FlamingoAir has slowly shifted to offering "flights of fancy" almost exclusively. Their flights, offered four to five times a week and up to eight times a day in the lead-up to Valentine's Day, have become a reference point for mile-high club aspirants and other airlines looking to get into the business.

Eager to learn more about what a "flight of fancy" entails and how to make sure one's mile-high experience is up to snuff, VICE got in touch with MacDonald to talk about overzealous couples, customer feedback on turbulence, and conducting quality control tests of his own product.

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VICE: How did you end up running a "romantic flight" service?
David MacDonald: It started as a dare. We were all "hanger-flying," which is basically sitting around bullshitting, and the topic of the mile-high club comes up. I said, "You know, I bet I could sell that." [My friends] said: "Man, not in Cincinnati. Way too conservative. You'll never pull it off." Well, that was like throwing down the gauntlet. That was 1991 and I'm still going strong. I mean the business is so good, we don't even do charter anymore.

We do all kinds of airplane rides. We've probably given more kids their first airplane rides than you can shake a stick at. But our biggest seller is our "flights of fancy." We do not bill it as the mile-high club. It's billed as romantic airplane rides. You get one hour. You get a private, curtained-off aircraft. We take out a whole row of seats and it's filled with big, fluffy cushions. You get champagne and chocolates and souvenirs and a very discreet pilot. And frankly, what goes on behind the curtains is no concern of mine!

We actually had a request from some people in Iceland who they wanted to know if we had an airplane which would accommodate ten couples.

You're established now, but did you have trouble being in Cincinnati at first?
No, I didn't! Everybody thinks that Cincinnati's the conservative capital of the world. That's only when the lights are on and the doors are open. Close the door, man, and have at it.

Motherboard: Sex in Space

I'm sure you're a dignified pro by now, but what was your first flight like?
The first flight was a blind date. It was set up by one of the local radio stations. I get to the airport, and there're two people in a pick-up truck. And man, they are going at it hot and heavy. I didn't think much of it, but then it turns out that this is [the couple I'm flying]. These two had never laid eyes on each other until they met at the airport. So that kind of set the stage.

Remember, this is a fun thing, so we try to keep [it] light and fun and everybody having a good time. I get 'em in the airplane and I say, "Now, we've gotta get your seatbelts on for us to move the airplane—you can take 'em off once we're airborne. I'll holler back at ya and let ya know when, and I'll just close this curtain." And [the woman] says, "Well, you can leave it open if you want." And everybody had a good laugh.

Then, as I'm going down the taxiway, she says, "Does this thing have an autopilot?" I say, "Yeah..." She says, "Well, I'll do you too!" I'm just going, "Oh jeeze... I don't need this!" But we laughed everything off and it was in good humor.

So I sit down and I'm going through the final checks on the airplane. Then I turn around to say, "OK guys, I'm gonna pull this curtain." But it was too late. They didn't even make it down the runway. They were going at it. I just closed the curtain and off we went.

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That's not how every flight goes down, is it?
Oh, absolutely not. It is kind of amazing—most of the folks who show up are middle-aged, straight-laced. I mean, you'd think they'd just stepped out of a Republicans Club meeting. Most of these folks are fairly well-to-do. They've got the disposable income. [The flight] is not that expensive—it's $425. But it's all part of how it's marketed.

Do they give you feedback on their experience in the back?
Sometimes I feel like a psychologist, a priest, and a hairdresser all rolled up into one. Sometimes they tell me everything! More than I want to know. I get a lot of feedback. Amazingly, I don't think I've ever had a complaint. I'm fortunate with that. I mean, who's going to complain after you make out at 7,000 feet?

I'd have thought that people might have trouble with turbulence and bumpy rides.
We've had a few incidents like that. And I said, "Hey, I'm sorry for the rough ride—can't control the weather." And they say, "It's OK. We just assumed the position and let Mother Nature do the rest."

Often the ladies will show up in a full-length fur coat and they've got nothing on under it.

So there've never been accidents or incidents caused by people getting carried away and, say, not buckling up or paying attention on descent?
I have never, ever had an incident of any kind like that. Folks are pretty good. I give them a 10-minute warning. I don't want to say we're tough, but we're damn firm on the rules.

Do you ever get any requests for extra services beyond just taking people to altitude?
Yes, I have. We had somebody bring their dog. We've had requests for threesomes. We actually had a request from some people in Iceland. Now, these folks have too much time on their hands in Iceland and they wanted to know if we had an airplane which would accommodate ten couples and are there any restrictions, save damage to the airplane or injury to the pilot. Now think about that for a minute! We actually do have an airplane that would accommodate that, but we didn't want to fool with it. We had a pretty interesting S&M couple one time and they wanted some personal involvement, but I didn't want to do that. I'm pretty straight-laced—I'm only concerned with flying the airplane. That's all I know.

For more hanky-panky, check out the VICE documentary on Icelandic elf sex:

Any favorite stories from your thousand-plus trips?
I have had folks show up in every manner of dress or undress that you can think of. The big one is [that] often the ladies will show up in a full-length fur coat and they've got nothing on under it.

I had this lady one time and she was going to surprise her husband with [the flight], so she didn't want him to know where they were going. At the time, I was working out of one of the main private terminals for all the corporate jets. It was a Thursday night and the place was packed and this gorgeous middle-aged creature walks through the door in a long fur coat and heels and she announces: "I have him blindfolded in the car. What do you want me to do with him?" And the whole place goes silent. It was like Black Bart just walked in the swinging doors.

We try to operate a little more discreetly, usually.

Have you ever sampled your own product for quality control though?
It's a little tough because all the pilots know me! But me and my wife, we have our interludes. And absolutely, I give it the Captain Dave seal of approval.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.