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Check out Esther Pearl Watson's website and Instagram, and get her books from Fantagraphics.

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Screen caps from the Northwest Passage Kickstarter campaign

Before Lost, Pretty Little Liars, Veronica Mars, True Detective, or any of the other weird and wonderful show that has come to dominate the new Golden Age of obsessive TV fandom, Twin Peaks was everything. While it only lasted two seasons, David Lynch's early-90s masterpiece was a game changer, an instant classic that even had then-President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, begging for spoilers.

So it comes as no surprise that Twin Peaks is making a comeback now that it's cool to geek out over television again. Although the long-awaited third season is currently in limbo, a new documentary about the impact of the film called Northwest Passage is in the works. The new doc will tell the story of Travis Blue, a teenager from the town where Twin Peaks was filmed who used the show and it's characters as an escape from his tormented childhood.

The producers of the documentary have gone to Kickstarter to raise funds. In only a few days, the film has raised nearly $5,000, handing out rewards that range from Log Lady tote bags, to signed copies of the oral history of Twin Peaks, to guided Twin Peaks tours led by Travis Blue himself.

The director of Northwest Passage, Adam Baran, is known for his edgy queer productions, like last year's music video of "Dirty Boots" by Holopaw, which premiered exclusively on VICE. Baran remembers coming into New York City on weekly pilgrimages to watch old episodes of Twin Peaks at the Museum of TV and Radio. His interest in the show was revived when he worked as a contributing editor for the legendary homo handbook, Butt magazine, where he hired Blue to write about his sexcapades at the Twin Peaks fan convention. Now Baran hopes to take a deeper look at the story of someone who—for better and worse—used Twin Peaks as a guidebook to surviving while growing up queer in the 90s.

To Blue, the show represented many, sometimes diametrically-opposed, things: A way out of his boring, at times brutal, Pacific Northwest childhood and a reminder of the area he loved so much. It served as a path to finding himself and one to get lost on.

VICE spoke with Baran and Blue to find out more about Northwest Passage, Blue's obsession with Twin Peaks, and why we all still give a shit about a short-lived show from 25 years ago.

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VICE: How did you first encounter Twin Peaks?
Travis Blue: The first time I came across [the show] was at Snoqualmie Falls. They were shooting the waterfall sequence in the credits. I was nine or ten. They were very kind to me. They let me walk around and touch things. Some of my earliest memories are very violent, horrific experiences, and at that point it didn't seem like there was any way out. No one had ever really given me that kind of attention. It made me feel really special.

Then [Twin Peaks] came on TV. TV, at that point in my life, was something to zone out to, or just pure entertainment. This was something else. Something I had to think about. I was just coming into puberty, at that point. Laura Palmer was obviously a very sexual creature, and she was essentially a role model. She provided lots of clues into that part of my life, with her secret diary and her sexuality and how she would seduce boys. I liked how all of that sounded. So I gave it a try.

Letting Twin Peaks be your guide to adulthood sounds like a terrible, or at least really dangerous, idea.
Adam Baran: It was a positive and a negative. For somebody who felt powerless to suddenly feel like they could claim some power by being a fictional character, or by doing the things a fictional character did, makes a lot of sense. I don't want people to get the impression that this is just a film of terror and bad things. There are a lot of good things that happened to Travis from being a Twin Peaks fanatic. He found this welcoming community of friends and fellow obsessives at fan festivals, and those things really gave him a sense of who he was and made him "in" in a certain way. Because he wasn't "in" in any other place.

But the dark side is definitely very present. When you take on a fictional character, or a series of fictional characters, or you decide that you're going to live your life as represented in a fictional construct, that's not actually you. You deny yourself the chance to figure out who you are. I think that's what he did for a number of years.

Laura Palmer provided lots of clues into my life, with her secret diary and her sexuality and how she would seduce boys.

How did you imitate Laura Palmer?
Blue: I loved how she made the tape recordings, so I'd make my own tape recordings to fake boyfriends. I remember even trying to sound like a girl so if anyone found them they wouldn't know it was me. She had secret hiding places and I had secret hiding places, and I'd hide my tapes in there. I got my little half heart necklace from a shitty place in the mall that does engravings and stuff. I probably stole it. I just started to rebel. Being rebellious is normal for that age, [I] just took a very specific tact.

I had the worst taste in role models. Subsequently, my role models were Madonna in the Sex Book era, and Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. I just didn't know how to pick them.

Are you going to tell this story like a normal documentary?
Baran: Every day I find somebody who has a new bit of footage of Travis, but I don't want to tell this in a traditional manner, with talking heads and Ken Burns photos and things like that. I want to really bring this film to life, using archival footage and reenactments as well.

I'm looking at films like Stories We Tell, The Impostor, and others that bring what is happening in their story to life by letting us see it and be a part of it. I'd like for us to be able to get lost in the fiction of this. Making it seem like a narrative film, not just a documentary, will play with the same line between fiction and reality that our subject is going through.

RELATED: Hey Musicians, You're Ruining the Twin Peaks Legacy

It's interesting that you're revisiting this as a queer story, since Twin Peaks wasn't really "gay" in any recognizable way, though there was David Duchovny's transgender FBI agent, Denise Bryson. Looking back, what do you make of Bryson?
Baran: I think overall it's a bad story line. You can tell that some people were trying to do something noble, but there's also another way to read it as completely exploitative, like "Twin Peaks is the weirdest town ever! Everyone in it is a freak! Let's add someone we know our audience will think is sooooo weird and freaky."

There are little asides where Cooper and Harry give each other looks like "Oh my god, what is this?" Those moments are problematic because they're basically saying we can laugh at this, when she's out of the room. That's not good at all.

Then again, Harvey Fierstein in The Celluloid Closet said any representation was OK, because people saw a gay character on screen, even if it wasn't a positive character, and he saw himself in the "sissies" they made fun of. So I'm sure there were people who got their life from seeing David Duchovny in just those three episodes as a trans FBI agent, but there was problematic stuff with that character. The fact that she quickly goes back to male drag in the final episode is probably the most problematic element of it for me—although she comes back into female garb, her true garb, to save the day.

For more obsessions, check out "The Two Kids Who Remade Indiana Jones Shot for Shot":

Blue: It seemed like my dad and his friend dressing up like women for Halloween. According to everybody, Lynch is a misogynist in his work, and probably isn't very gay-friendly either.

Bikini Kill had a song called "Fuck Twin Peaks," talking about his misogyny. That was a way for me to look at Twin Peaks critically. That's what led me to feminism, because I felt like, "There are other things happening here. Bikini Kill is a very gay-friendly band, so they must be saying something that's right."

Misogyny, violence against women: these are all pretty obvious things in Twin Peaks. And they're issues I think most gays feel like they are allies on. So those are also things that led me to feminism. I guess I'm not a typical superfan in that I think Twin Peaks has flaws. It changed my life, but I've been living with this thing for 25 years, so I hopefully have perspective on my fandom.

So why are we still interested in Twin Peaks today?
Baran:Twin Peaks was the most groundbreaking show in the history of television. It used all sorts of incredible cinematic techniques and combined that with an alluring narrative of mystery that inspired everything from The X-Files to The Sopranos to Mad Men to Breaking Bad to any of the big shows of the past 20 years, really. That influence, the thing that was Twin Peaks is everywhere now.

Twin Peaks was the first show where right after it aired, a community of people who were obsessed with it found each other online, before there was even real internet. It was like a BBS. People went on and debated all sorts of things. Hello! Look at what we do now. That is how we watch television [now]. That's tweeting at the stars of the show while the show is on, and hashtagging, and talking on Twitter, and endless blog post recaps of series—that whole culture came from something that grabbed people and made them want to talk about it amongst themselves, in a way that no other show had done up until that point. It's status as something that burned briefly and brightly only adds to that legend.

Blue: Nostalgia. And there are stories people are still interested in. It's unfinished. And because Twin Peaks is David Lynch, there's that anachronistic quality to it. It doesn't date itself as much, and the themes are universal. It's a woman in trouble who was abused and there's still probably a lot to say about it.

But why right now? Because they programmed it to be 25 years later. In the show, Laura Palmer says, "I will see you again in 25 years." So here she is.

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.

I'll begin by saying I was simultaneously the worst and best person to attend a #healthgoth SoulCycle spinoff. I'd never done a spin or SoulCycle class. I'd seen them in movies and have always wanted to try them, but they're generally weirdly expensive and I was afraid of being pushed too far out of my comfort zone. So I was really excited—and really anxious—about checking out Monster Cycle, a health studio with a goth, raver twist, on Lafayette Street in Manhattan. (Admittedly, not the most "goth" neighborhood in New York City.)

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All photos by Amy Lombard

I arrived about 45 minutes before class. I'd been running around the city for 24 hours in 80-degree weather and felt dirty and exhausted. As soon as I walked into Monster Cycle, I felt better. The young woman at the counter, Heatley, was personable and charming. A mini-fridge full of liter-sized Fiji waters sat behind her.

I told Heatley I had to pee before I could think, so she sent me downstairs to the bathroom. She told me that I might run into the owner, Michael, down there.

"What does he look like?" I asked.

"He has a wolf tattoo on his neck," she replied.

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I have a thing for bathrooms: I like comparing their different features and failings. So when I walked into the bathroom to pee, and found a shower and outlets and fresh towels, I was pleasantly surprised. To get the optimum experience of the studio, I decided to take a shower using the provided Monster Cycle brand shampoo and Dr. Bronner's soap. (Note: after class and right before class, the lines for the restrooms and showers were insane. I enjoyed this luxury only because I came early. I highly recommend it.)

Another extra touch at Monster Cycle is that they have the things you sometimes forget when you go to the gym; they had bowls overflowing with hair ties and socks. (My friend got a pair with unicorns on them, making me wish I'd also forgotten socks.)

The owner of Monster Cycle, Michael Macneal, has been featured as a leader in the health goth scene by the New York Times. Macneal grew up in Pennsylvania on the DJ/rave scene, and he explained that he had wanted to own his own SoulCycle studio by his thirtieth birthday. He's ahead of the game, because he just turned 30, and the studio is two years old. Macneal says that he and his partner—Demetre Daskalakis, a doctor—have been called a "health power couple." Macneal told VICE he was "obsessed with the high from group cycle classes" but felt that something was always missing—he wanted to feel like he'd attended an event while exercising. His idea evolved into his Monster Cycle class: 45-minute exercise sessions in the pitch dark, while music videos play to motivate and inspire you. Macneal says what sets Monster Cycle apart from other studios is that they embrace all types of music styles with specials rides like Metal Monday, Goth Pop, Punk, and Trap Week.

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You can reserve which bike you want, which is cool—if you're a frequent flier you probably have a spot you like. I chose the back row. Macneal was our leader (Teacher? Coach? Cycle Messiah?), and he was fantastic and unpretentious and inclusive. I like that in an exercise teacher. He had to come help me get my shoes into the slots. I kept my bike on really low resistance most of the time. (I'm not a runner or a biker.)

When we were two minutes into class, I turned to my friend, smiling, and said, "I love this! I'm into it!" Looking back, I cannot believe I was so naive.

My internal monologue went something like, Oh my God, when will this be over I hate it I'm so out of shape what time is it, this is fucking horrible actually it's kind of awesome I'm burning so many calories I love that it's pitch black this music video is fucking cool, the chick is like in her underwear drinking champagne with a gun to her head, oh there's Taylor Swift in the video, cool, if I lived in NYC I'd come here a few times a week and be in amazing shape I'm so fucking healthy that I'm here on a Friday night ARGH this can't be good for my body I can't do it I want to stop I hate this if I lived in NYC I would never come here! This feels really good no it feels really bad. And so on. Classic ego chatter.

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Macneal swooped by and danced around through the bikes, checking in on a few people, encouraging them. When he came up to me, I said, "I'm dying." He turned my resistance up a little, put his hands on my hands, and said, "You're doing great, see? You're not dying yet!" I have to say, it boosted my ego—this dude is good at what he does.

If the music videos weren't playing, it would be really hard to be in that class. I might have had to leave. But the videos made me want to dance.

Macneal danced and cheered us on the entire time, in a way that was not annoying at all. "Don't slow down!" "Don't take it easy on yourself!" "Push it!" (The opposite of the yoga classes I normally frequent: "Take it slow, take it easy, don't push yourself.")

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It wasn't till afterward that I realized there were no goth people in my class. I thought I was going to see lots of decked-out piercings and tats and black, but everyone looked normal. Apparently, bankers love this place. They sit in their offices all day and then go hard at Monster Cycle. I mean, they flow hard.

I didn't know how to get off the bike, which kind of gave me a panic attack, so I just took my feet out of the shoes and left. I was covered in sweat and stickiness like never before. It scared me. I stripped my clothes off and put my dress back on.

My friend and I left and went for pizza and wine in Little Italy, and that's when the effects kicked in, super similar to taking a taste of MDMA. We were giddy and high. My body was relaxed and loose. I could see that people go to places like Monster Cycle to drink the Kool-Aid. And I respect that, because you can feel like you did drugs without doing drugs, which at this point in my life is profoundly important to me.

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So it's a happy ending. Overall: Monster Cycle has fantastic service, an unpretentious vibe, and generally wants the best for you and your body and mental health. Michael says that the Monster Cycle Studio is the edgiest and sexiest studio you will ever encounter and that they will continue to push the envelope every chance they get. I believe him.

Though, I do think it would be more inclusive if they had one night a week where they offered classes at a sliding scale or a cheaper price. (Classes currently run around $35 a pop.) When I win the lottery, I'll go there every day of my life and find my higher self.

Follow Chloe Caldwell on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Kevin Dooley

It's 9 AM on a Saturday, and I'm feeling out of place. I'm surrounded by people who are alarmingly chipper, apparently unfazed by the early hour. Plus, I'm not wearing a red dress. I'm not wearing a heart-shaped pendant, and there isn't a single heart on my business card. I don't say things like, "I just love love." Most glaringly, I am not a professional matchmaker.

I'm at the annual conference of the Matchmaking Institute, held, fittingly, at a Greenwich Village space usually rented for wedding receptions. The guests had travelled from as far as China and Norway, and forked over up to $1,250 to spend the weekend networking and listening to lectures on business, marketing, and pop psychology.

Billed as the world's only school for matchmakers, the Institute was founded in 2003 by Lisa Clampitt, a matchmaker and former assistant of Bravo's "Millionaire Matchmaker" Patti Stanger. It offers a year-round certification course, where aspiring matchmakers learn how to set up shop, but its flagship event is the annual conference.

The conference draws a mix of seasoned matchmakers—founders and employees of established agencies with thousands of clients—and amateurs just trying to break in. A recent graduate of Boston College signed up for the convention after realizing he preferred helping his best friend hash out his dating problems to working at his corporate marketing job. A Maryland realtor told me he wants to add a matchmaking division to his real estate agency; he's noticed that after his clients find their dream home, some are still on the market for a soul mate.

The good matchmakers are always working, constantly scouting women and men to add to their databases of singles. It's hard to avoid the feeling of being sized up. Over the course of the weekend, I fielded a stream of questions about my age, religion, and marital status. Even Helen Fisher, the guest of honor at Thursday night's dinner, got the same treatment. Clampitt introduced the biological anthropologist as "a brilliant academic who has demonstrated scientific evidence of the ways people find love" and "freaking single." "I challenge everyone to think about who could be the love of her life," Clampitt said. Generous matchmakers traded tips on how to find men: get to know divorce lawyers, hang out at the Ritz Carlton in White Plains, frequent steakhouses.

They can get away with being intrusive, because they are an earnest and cheerful bunch. They say things like, "I believe in love" and "I want everybody to be happy." They say these things with a straight face.

A recent Pew survey found that a third of people using Internet dating sites have never actually met up with someone they found online.

Self-help cliché is the second language here. Attendees are fluent in personality types and Myers-Briggs scores. At dinner, two matchmakers for eHarmony debate whether or not a third's report of an "ENTJ" result is accurate. Francesca Hogi, founder of Made to Measure Matching, says she's "always reading about six different dating books." The room is rapt when life coach Paul Carrick Brunson advises, "Know your truth" and body image expert Tracy Campoli suggests we "make self-care the foundation for success."

Nearly one third of singles in this country met their last date online. 59 percent of Americans believe online dating is "a good way to meet people." In the age of Internet courtship, matchmaking may seem hopelessly old-fashioned. Yet the business is booming: Clampitt estimates that there are more than 3,000 professional matchmakers in the U.S., up from 1,200 in 2005. The online free-for-all may be fuelling a backlash, sending people in search of a dating scene with rules and accountability. People are less motivated to look for dates in real life, yet they're exhausted from scrolling through countless profiles. "They see hundreds of photos and meet no one," said Radboud Visser, the head of matchmaking agency Mens & Relatie ("People & Relationships") in the Dutch city of Venlo. Faced with a seemingly endless parade of options, people become paralyzed and picky: a recent Pew survey found that a third of people using Internet dating sites have never actually met up with someone they found online.

Maria Avgitidis, who founded Agape Match six years ago, says the rise of Tinder "oversaturated the market," driving younger clients to her offices. "All of a sudden we had men under 34. They're like, 'I'm sexed out. I can't do this anymore.'"

And while apps that pull information from Facebook offer some measure of accountability, users can still fudge their biographies. People "want to know the person's been vetted," said Hogi, an ex-Survivor contestant who joined Paul Brunson's matchmaking agency after connecting with him on Twitter. "The more online dating horror stories there are, the more it helps the industry. People are getting fed up."

With more apps suggesting matches based on users' social media networks, bumping into colleagues or employers is a growing problem. Avgitidis says her clients, 80 percent of whom are "Goldman guys," don't want to risk running into their bosses online. Despite its prevalence, online dating hasn't entirely lost its stigma; 21 percent of Americans still believe people who use online dating sites are "desperate."

Yet they offer enough anonymity that people have little incentive to act polite or even conform to basic social norms. Matchmakers, meanwhile, hold their clients accountable. Some, like Patti Stanger, will kick them out if they hear they've tried to sleep with a new partner too soon. Many agencies have clients and their dates fill out "feedback forms" after the first date; only if both are positive does the matchmaker arrange a second meeting.

Watch our documentary on the Digital Love Industry:

That may seem unromantic, but apps have already made a lot of headway toward stripping modern dating of any semblance of romance. Matchmaking actually preserves an element of mystery: Most matchmakers don't give their clients much information about their dates in advance. "I don't want them to Google each other," said Hogi. "I don't want them to have preconceived notions." Visser has a more pragmatic reason for keeping dates' names and photos a secret: the more a client knows about a potential match, he says, the more he finds to dislike. "Too much information makes it hard to get them to agree to meet," he's noticed.

Not every matchmaker, of course, sees online dating as the enemy. Some encourage their clients to go online, and even help them draft messages and spiff up their profiles. Others use dating apps to scout matches for their clients. Nor is the distinction between online dating and matchmaking always clear: Some sites, like eHarmony, offer in-person matchmaking services to high-paying customers.

Matchmakers' fees can run into the tens of thousands of dollars for several months of services, which often include dating lessons and image consulting as well as introductions. Just as there are niche dating sites—for farmers, for people with herpes, for Ayn Rand fans—there are matchmaking businesses catering to specific groups: Mormons, older professionals, gay men.

One demographic many matchmakers don't offer their services to, however, is women. At most agencies, it's men who sign up as clients. Women can apply to date them, but they can't join as paying customers. Their reasoning reflects some unsavory logic. "Women are more likely to be difficult to serve—to demand a refund, to complain online," said Julie Ferman, who runs a matchmaking agency in Los Angeles (and does take on female clients). Rachel Russo, who works for Clampitt, says it's an issue of numbers. In New York, "There are many more women than men," she said. "They're more difficult to match. A lot of matchmakers just don't want to deal with that."

Almost all of the matchmakers were women themselves; many of them came from careers in therapy, social work or communications. They tend to see themselves as "people people." "People always trust me," said Avgitidis. "They tell me their problems. I found a way to monetize that." "I'm a really good listener," said Julie Nguyen, a 23-year-old matchmaker at Modern Love Club in New York. Trea Tijmens, a Swiss matchmaker, summed up the matchmaker's credo: "You shouldn't be in this business if you don't have a big heart.

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Check out the animated version of this comic:

For more of Jimmy's work, check out his website and blog.

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Photo by Flickr user David Rosen

I don't remember many details about the first time my best friend told me she wanted to kill herself. She told me as we were sitting in my car, parked in her driveway, staring out my windshield at the dull white of her garage door. She said that she had almost done it a week earlier. After she told me, I started saying a lot of words that I knew wouldn't make any difference. I kept repeating, "You can't. You can't. You can't," until she finally looked back at me and wiped a tear from her own face.

Ever since that night, I think about her multiple times each day. I wonder when I'm going to get a call from her mother and hear a choked up voice on the other end struggling to get the words out. I panic when she goes days without answering my texts. I check her Instagram to see if she's posted anything. I go on her Tumblr. I look to see if she's reactivated her Facebook.

Seven months after that night in her driveway, she spoke to me on the phone from a psychiatric hospital, the same one she had checked into after she first told me she was suicidal. She told me this time her mother tricked her into being re-admitted. She was sobbing, taking deep breaths in between words, and she told me that the moment her mom dies, she's done. I told her not to say that. She said that's always been the plan, that even her mom knows that. I could feel myself getting frustrated. "That's not normal," I said. I wasn't sure if this was bad to say. I wasn't sure if I should try to be reassuring and tell her that it was OK for her to have these feelings, or if I could tell her how I really felt, which was that this was not OK.

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Photo via Flickr user Delores

When I first asked my friend what she thought of me writing this article, she didn't respond for a day. I was worried she was going to ask me not to write it, or worse, be angry at me for being so insensitive that I would even think of it as a possibility. But when she did eventually respond, she told that she was finally ready to get it out in the open, and started to tell me the details of the illness, the drugs, and the thoughts that have haunted her for years.

As of now, she has been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, one of the most common mental disorders in the United States. According to the World Health Organization, major depression also bears the heaviest burden of disability among mental and behavioral disorders.

It's possible that she could suffer from bipolar II disorder and schizoaffective disorder. However, these disorders are challenging to diagnose when patients are young, since it's difficult to separate the symptoms from normal youth angst. On average, it takes ten years for bipolar patients to be properly diagnosed and treated. Until then, it's basically just trial-and-error.

I am forever watching from the side, grasping at her whenever I can, trying to pull her back in.

Wendy Parker, a registered nurse clinical specialist who specializes in prescribing medication for children and teens, told me doctors often experiment with medication to see what works before they diagnose young people with things like bipolar disorder. "If you give her a medication like Prozac, you watch quickly to see if she responds to it," said Parker. "If she doesn't, and the mood starts to swing from depression to giddy, silly, happy, or from depression to fiercely angry," then doctors have to try a new diagnosis or a new drug.

A few years ago, my friend was prescribed 20 mg of Prozac. Then it was increased to 40 mg, and then to 60 mg, and then they added on 250 mg of the mood stabler Seroquel. She's told me again and again that the medication isn't working. This past December, she decided to stop taking everything altogether. Since then she's dropped out of college and relocated to the other side of the country for an indefinite amount of time. She says she doesn't know where she will be in a month which frightens me. She is always moving, uprooting herself in a merry-go-round of life-changing decisions. And I am forever watching from the side, grasping at her whenever I can, trying to pull her back in.

Two summers ago, when we were both living in New York City, she called me from her apartment on the other edge of Manhattan. She was alternating between laughing and whispering, asking me if I remembered the sneakers looped over the electric wires outside her window. I told her I did. "What if there's a camera in them?" she asked me, suspiciously. At the time, I assumed she'd just smoked a bowl and was high, paranoid—but I remember putting down the phone at the end of the conversation, laying back in my bed, unable to fall asleep, imagining her staring out the window into darkness with wide eyes.

Most of the time, the frustration that accompanies being friends with someone with mental illness has nothing to do with the friend herself. I am frustrated that this has happened to her. I am frustrated that the drugs don't work. I am frustrated that drugs seem to be her only option. I am frustrated that we don't have a better solution. I am frustrated that I can't do one fucking thing to help her.

"There are many people with bipolar disorder who live pretty good lives," Parker told me. "You learn to live with it and take care of yourself. But when you're young, it's really hard. People who deal with it have to come to accept the fact that as a person, they're OK, but their brain is doing this terrible thing that makes life very, very hard."

I asked Parker if there was anything I could do for my friend. She told me to always approach her from a place of understanding; that even if I don't understand, I can try, and that is what makes the difference. She told me when I get annoyed by the things she does to remember to separate my friend from the disorder. "Some of it is her and some of it is the illness," she said.

I'm frustrated that the drugs don't work. I am frustrated that drugs seem to be her only option.

There are the rare times when my friend opens up about what is going on inside her head and I don't know what to say. She mentions the suicide notes she's already written or her plan to kill herself once her mother is dead. In moments like these, when I don't know what the right words are, desperate to say something that will matter to her, and scared that what I say will do more harm than good, Parker told me it's best to keep it simple and honest.

"That would be a place for a friend to say 'Life is important. Your life is important.' It helps," she said.

And I can't give up on her until she understands that. I let her ignore my texts for days, without ever expressing my frustration. I don't complain that she keeps secrets from me and doesn't tell me about her life. I ignore the fact that we speak only when she decides she wants to. Our relationship is one entirely on her terms, and that's the way I imagine it will stay until she gets better. I don't pretend that maintaining our friendship is number one on her priority list. I wouldn't want it to be. Because each time I feel slighted by her, or ignored, or hurt in some way, I automatically forgive her the second after it happens. And I'm going to continue doing that.

If you are struggling with depression or suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

Follow Catherine Pears on Twitter.

[body_image width='1280' height='723' path='images/content-images/2015/05/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/17/' filename='betty-draper-body-image-1431892176.jpg' id='56826']January Jones as Betty Draper in 'Mad Men'

Warning: Spoiler alerts if you haven't watched season seven.

With last week's episode of Mad Men, Betty Draper's fate was irrevocably sealed. We still don't know when (or even if) Don will return from his Kerouacian road trip, whether the reunited Campbells will truly find a new beginning in Wichita, or what will become of the ascendant Peggy, rollerskating the night away to Roger's organ soundtrack. What we do know is far more dire: The show's most misunderstood character has terminal cancer and won't live another year.

Betty's arc ends at the same time as the show itself, meaning the audience will never get a sense of what this fictional world might look without her. She won't see her free-spirited daughter Sally grow up, but then again, neither will we.

Mad Men isn't the first to spice its final episodes with some high-profile deaths. Lost, Breaking Bad, and (depending which theory you subscribe to) The Sopranos all axed key characters in their last few episodes. But Betty has been at the periphery of AMC's flagship program since she and Don divorced in season three, with her (mostly) steady marriage to Henry Francis too self-contained to be relevant to the show as a whole.

So her sendoff is something of a shock. Couldn't she have remained vaguely dissatisfied with her lot in life for decades to come, placating herself with simple pleasures (her love of horses) and an established routine (being back in school), as we assume everyone else on this show will once the final credits roll?

And yet her death feels almost like a gift from series creator/frequent Betty-defender Weiner. Fine, he might as well be saying to reactionary viewers who've been calling for this sort of thing for years. You want her dead? Here. Not as satisfying as you thought it'd be, eh? Perhaps such a dramatic fate was necessary to finally getting everyone to understand where TV's most famous twice-married housewife is coming from.

On Motherboard: The 'Mad Men' Writers Are Working on a Show About NASA in the 60s

Betty's was always an unfulfilling existence full of low-level tragedy. After giving up her modeling career to become a mother, she's struggled to feel useful. Seemingly everyone knew of Don's philandering before she did, and at one point the only friend she has is Glen, the adolescent son of a neighbor, and even that ended on a sour note after he grew up and volunteered to fight in Vietnam.

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"[Betty] was a model. She talks about her school days," Weiner said in an interview with LA Weekly in 2013. "She's obviously educated and she reads. She's intelligent, but [beauty] is really how she's defined." Betty has suffered far more than the run-of-the-mill bored housewife, with few freedoms and fewer friends.

"I'm sort of sick of defending her," January Jones, who plays Betty, said in an ABC interview in April. "I love her, and I'm sad I'll never get to speak for her again because she's brave in a way I'll never be."

Even after Don's serial infidelity compelled her to strike out on her own, a strained relationship with her children (especially the willful Sally) followed her until what will prove to be her final days. Her ex-husband has never been happy either, but he at least has the agency and discretionary income to flee his mistakes and distract himself from the harsh realities that Betty is forced to confront every day.

Evidently, playing someone's wife on TV can be as thankless as actually being one of those wives.

In reaction, the media narrative finally shifted this week. Obituaries and dissections have been posted en masse, many by outlets who'd previously extolled the anti-Betty worldview. She may not have been likable at all times, but the rush to write her off was never fair. It's just unfortunate that it took her impending doom to make people reconsider her.

Not that this is anything new. Breaking Bad actress Anna Gunn received an astonishing level of vitriol from irate viewers who couldn't stand the way Skyler stood up to her meth-cooking husband—this started as early as the first season, when she was merely suspicious, and escalated throughout the show as she learned the full extent of his dealings. Betty's trajectory was quite similar. Evidently, playing someone's wife on TV can be as thankless as actually being one of those wives, and Jones has received misplaced criticism from the very beginning. Betty has long been one of the show's easiest characters to dismiss, whether detractors attributed it to the character's hollowness or the actress's limited range. Both complaints are, and have always been, overstated.

Related: The Real Don Draper from 'Mad Men'?

One of the easiest things to forget about the former Elizabeth Hofstadt, at least until she announced her plans to pursue a master's in psychology earlier this season, is that she already holds an anthropology degree from Bryn Mawr. She was too intelligent and too restless to be happy being arm candy and a perpetual hostess in the Draper and Francis households. She occasionally made gestures toward going back to work but never had the support or confidence to follow through. Though she struggled against that sad truth for years, she accepts death with a serenity that few others on the show could muster. Even her second husband, who's made a habit of relying on his political connections to solve their biggest problems, is absolutely incapable of processing the truth of what's happening.

In its way, this makes her one of the show's most complete and prescient characters. Mad Men has never been the most plot-intensive show, and the fact that so many people drifted in and out of it felt apropos of the hazy 60s. But Betty isn't fading away. Rather, she's burning out. What becomes of the Ken Cosgroves and Harry Cranes of this world will be hard to recall in a year's time. But no one who tuned in to AMC over the last eight years will forget Betty's fate anytime soon. No longer does she occupy the margins.

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"I'm so sad," Betty tells the ten-year-old Glen all the way back in season one. She'd remain sad for much of the following decade, but our last glimpse of her in this eventful episode offers the slimmest degree of hope. As Sally reads a letter from her and the two women silently, distantly come to the understanding that's eluded them for years, we see Betty with a faint smile as she heads to class. She's fought for years to get to this point and do something for herself—so why stop now? She's free in a way she never was before.

The series finale to Mad Men airs tonight on AMC.

Follow Michael on Twitter.

When Manie Foskey told his mother, Geraldine Waters, that he had lost more than a hundred pounds in three months, she knew something was wrong. At 45 years old, he had always been slightly overweight but still able-bodied and fit. In 2004, Foskey had been sent to State Correctional Institution Fayette, in La Belle, Pennsylvania, to serve a life sentence, and he had grown accustomed to spending his afternoons competing with other prisoners over who could lift the most weights. But the person who came out to see his mother in the prison's visiting room last March was a thin, weak-looking man in a wheelchair. A pus-like fluid was coming out of his fingers where the skin had busted open, and parts of his dark-brown complexion had turned white where the skin had tightened. Waters and her daughter, Tracey, almost didn't recognize him.

When Waters demanded her son go to the infirmary, he argued it would be a waste of his time. "No one wants to go to the infirmary," Foskey told her. The medical staff was indifferent and cruel to the patients at SCI Fayette. Foskey told his mother that a fellow inmate had once shown up at the infirmary vomiting and spitting up blood. The medical staff on duty insinuated that he was faking the symptoms in order to get time out of his cell. Foskey himself had been accused of faking symptoms on multiple occasions.

Unsatisfied, Waters began calling officials at the prison to push for proper medical attention for her son. "I already lost one child. I'm not losing another," she told a prison official. At first, the medical staff resisted sending Foskey to an outside doctor, but eventually he received a skin biopsy and was admitted to Allegheny General Hospital, in Pittsburgh, for six weeks. He was diagnosed with diffuse scleroderma, a disease of the skin and internal organs that is commonly found in coal miners because of their proximity to the silica in coal ash. Foskey was then transferred from SCI Fayette to SCI Laurel Highlands, which had a more advanced medical facility where he could receive dialysis for his emerging kidney problems, caused by the scleroderma.

Waters was confused as to what scleroderma was and how her son could have possibly gotten such a rare disease after being healthy for so long. While researching Foskey's illness, she found a 2010 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about health concerns in La Belle. Residents had been developing cancer, kidney disease, and bizarre skin issues at an alarming rate. On one street with only 18 houses, there were nine documented cases of cancer. In Luzerne Township, where La Belle is located, the death rate from heart disease was 26 percent higher than the national average and mortality levels from diseases linked to air pollution were "elevated." Another article Waters found mentioned a report and advocacy work done by the Abolitionist Law Center (ALC) and Pennsylvania's Human Rights Coalition, and she reached out to tell them what had happened to her son. Meanwhile, just because Foskey had been transferred didn't mean she was going to stop making noise at SCI Fayette: "I know people are dying," she told a Fayette official over the phone. "I'm gonna be the first one to let the world know what you are doing and how you're treating the inmates." She was referring to the fact that SCI Fayette sits on top of a coal-ash dump.

In 2000, the Pennsylvania government broke ground on a new maximum-security men's prison on 237 acres of land in La Belle that it received from Matt Canestrale Contracting, Inc. The plot of land where the new prison would be was shared with MCC's main business, a coal-refuse site with a coal-ash dump and two coal-slurry ponds that served a nearby mine. La Belle residents had been complaining about the coal ash, the fine-particle residue produced by the coal-mining process, drifting down from the site at the top of the hill since it opened in 1997. In their multiple complaints to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, they remarked on how the ash collecting like dust around their homes was making it difficult to breathe. Still, the state decided it was a good location for a new prison, and in 2003 SCI Fayette opened its doors to a few dozen inmates who would be tasked with manufacturing the state's license plates. It took about a year to fill the prison to its capacity of 1,826 inmates. When Foskey arrived, in 2004, after he pleaded guilty to shooting two people, he was placed in the F Block, the final cellblock to receive inmates. (He has since appealed his conviction, saying he was mentally ill and had ineffective legal counsel.) The prison, more than half of whose population is black, is now 11 percent over capacity, with 2,031 inmates.

Soon after arriving at SCI Fayette, Foskey began to notice that "trucks were dumping this black stuff on top of the mountain." At the time he didn't know what it was, but he wasn't the only one who noticed. Eric Garland, a guard at the prison, was familiar with the dangers of coal ash; his father has worked at a coal-fired power plant for 30 years. In 2010, he contacted the Center for Coalfield Justice (CCJ) with worries about the dump after he was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism. Concerns about the environmental and health effects of coal ash have been widespread in Pennsylvania for years. The state produces more than 15.4 million tons of the stuff a year, the most in the nation. Coal ash typically contains arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, and selenium—toxins that if ingested can cause cancer, heart damage, lung disease, respiratory problems, and a host of other ailments. Drinking water from a well near an unlined coal-slurry pond, like the one the coal-ash dump in La Belle was built on top of, increases your chance of getting cancer to one in 50.

After the CCJ heard from Garland, they forwarded his complaint to the ALC, a public-interest law firm in Pittsburgh that works on cases involving human rights abuses in prisons. In August 2013, the ALC began interviewing prisoners about their health issues and environmental concerns. In all, 75 inmates agreed to participate, but only 14 would be quoted by name, fearing retaliation from the prison. In "No Escape," a report released on September 2, 2014, the ALC outlined the health issues people were experiencing in the prison, including skin conditions, throat and respiratory illnesses, thyroid issues, and tumors. Out of the 75 people surveyed, 61 reported experiencing breathing and sinus conditions, 51 had experienced gastrointestinal issues, 39 had experienced skin issues, and nine had been diagnosed with a thyroid disease or had a previously diagnosed thyroid issue that worsened after incarceration at SCI Fayette. The report also noted an alarming rate of cancer—11 of the 17 prisoners who died at SCI Fayette between 2010 and 2013 passed away from the disease.

Perhaps most concerning in the report were the inmate accounts of lack of medical attention and, in some cases, accusations of medical neglect. Darin Hauman, an inmate at SCI Fayette since 2010 who works in the prison infirmary, outlined how medical staff deprived a sick man (who later died of brain cancer) of drinking water. He told the ALC, "In his last few weeks of life certain nursing staff deliberately induced dehydration by simply refusing to assist him in drinking water. No hydration by way of intravenously either. With healthy humans it takes a short time being dehydrated for organs to begin shutting down. Regarding Greg, I would have to sneak into his ward area, I would have to dip my finger into water to moisten his lips as they were 'glued' shut, then would have to drip a few drops of water onto his tongue just so he could use a straw to get a few sips of water. Of all things I was yelled at numerous times for doing this. This pisses me off each time I think of this. To deny a man a drink of water speaks volumes as to the ideology of this particular nursing staff."

One prisoner told the ALC that "almost with every inmate who is admitted into the infirmary, [the nursing staff] accuses those inmates of 'faking [symptoms].'" Another said that he hadn't seen a doctor in two and a half years despite having breathing problems and chronic headaches because "they charge too much for sick call and don't do nothing for symptoms." (Many inmates, who make at most 42 cents an hour, cannot afford the $5 charge per medical visit.) In some cases of cancer, "prisoners were denied evaluation until the cancer was life-threatening... evidence of the dangerous level of neglect exhibited by medical staff," the report said.

For Derek Downey, a 28-year-old who has been incarcerated for three years, the medical neglect he has been shown has had grave consequences. Downey's account didn't appear under his name in the ALC report, but he told me about his trials after it was released. On June 30, 2013, after a month of having bloody and liquid bowel movements, Downey was sent to the emergency room at Allegheny General Hospital. He was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and given a set of medications with instructions for the medical staff at SCI Fayette. But the prison staff failed repeatedly to follow the instructions, and they attempted to abruptly take him off the prescribed medication more than once. When this negligence caused Downey's health to deteriorate and his symptoms to flare back up, a doctor at SCI Fayette prescribed Downey medicine that caused him to develop a hernia. This past December, the doctor again prescribed Downey medication that he was instructed by outside specialists not to give him. (A spokesperson from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections would not comment on any of the allegations of poor medical treatment.)

Before coming to SCI Fayette, Downey said he had always been healthy. Now, the environmental effects coupled with the poor medical care at the prison seemed to have seriously affected his well-being. "It is draining everything out of me," he told me. "I just want to get healthy again."

In the end, the ALC investigators argued that if inmates were being exposed to contaminants that were adversely affecting their health, it would violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. They acknowledged that their findings were limited because they had spoken only to a small fraction of the prisoners, but they hoped their efforts would lead to transferring the inmates to another facility and closing SCI Fayette.

A week after the report was released, Anthony Willingham went to the prison infirmary because he had thrown out a muscle in his back from coughing so vigorously. Willingham, a 55-year-old African American standing at five feet seven, started experiencing shortness of breath, a chronic cough, and constant mucus discharge about six months after arriving at SCI Fayette, in December 2011. At the time, he was prescribed an inhaler and told he had a sore throat. He wasn't allowed to go to the hospital for tests for another year and a half, and when he finally did, doctors found that it was more than just a sore throat. He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and had to have a potentially cancerous growth removed from his throat. When he heard about the ALC investigation, Willingham agreed to participate, and he was one of the few still incarcerated at SCI Fayette who elected to have his name published.

At the infirmary last September, the medical staff examined his back but gave him only ibuprofen. They let him "lie out and scream for seven days," he said. His pain was so severe that he could not use his legs or get out of bed. Knowing this, the staff put his food tray on the chair, ten feet away. He was refused a bedpan and ended up peeing on himself several times. For a week, he was not even given a change of clothes or sheets. "It was brutal," he told me of the medical staff's reaction to his participation in the ALC report. "Everyone's demeanor changed... The physician's assistant who normally sees me has gotten arrogant and is pushing me to say something out of line."

The medical staff at the infirmary also took away the breathing treatments that Willingham is prescribed to take twice a day. They only restored the treatment when, according to Willingham, his doctor from Allegheny General Hospital, Billie Barker, called the prison and demanded it. But Willingham's fragile health has continued to deteriorate this year. He has lost 36 pounds in the past ten weeks, his ankles are swollen, and he has swollen lymph nodes.

In the fall, Willingham had been seeking a job at the prison so he could make more than the $14 a month given to unemployed people incarcerated at SCI Fayette. But after the report came out, no one at the prison would hire him. Willingham writes jazz scores, and he was hoping to get a job fixing musical instruments. He had been volunteering his help for several months, but at the end of September, his supervisor told him he wouldn't hire him for pay. Now, flat out broke, Willingham barely has enough to put in sick calls, let alone make calls to family or buy necessities at the commissary.

Surprisingly, Willingham doesn't regret being identified in the report. "I want the world to know what I've gone through," he said. "I may die tomorrow, but I refuse to die before I get the message out that brothers in this particular jail are being mistreated. This is a form of mistreatment." Willingham is worried about the younger guys also incarcerated at SCI Fayette. "I'm doing life, but a lot of these guys aren't. You already got sentenced once; you didn't come here to get sentenced to death."

Last New Year's Eve, the Pennsylvania DOC announced that it had completed an investigation into the health effects of the coal-ash dump, and a two-page press release was published. The press release stated that SCI Fayette's water supply had been tested in August and that it had met all relevant drinking standards. The DOC also compared the cancer death rates at Fayette with the cancer rates of other state prisons in Pennsylvania from 2010 to 2013. While the SCI Fayette cancer death rate (1.34 per 1,000 inmates) was higher than the statewide average (1.09 per 1,000 inmates), it still ranked only seventh out of the 26 state prisons. (Two days before the DOC findings were released, the state Department of Health announced that based on its own review of inmate cancer diagnoses at SCI Fayette, "there isn't an indication the environment contributed to the risk.") The DOC also looked at the number of medications ordered by the prison for pulmonary, gastrointestinal, and respiratory illnesses and compared it with those prescribed in other institutions; SCI Fayette fell in the middle or slightly below average, the DOC reported. In short, they said, there is no reason to be concerned.

However, after the report came out, many environmental experts questioned the DOC's findings and methodology. Lisa Evans, an environmental lawyer based in Massachusetts, told me that testing the prison's drinking water once was not sufficient to get an accurate sense of the contaminant levels. "Water monitoring is not reliable if you're just taking a snapshot once of what you're drawing from a well," she said. "When there's mandated groundwater monitoring it's not an annual requirement. It's usually semiannual, often quarterly." (The DOC told me that the results of a more recent water test, which they were not sharing with the press, were "good.")

The Tri-County Joint Municipal Authority, the water source for both the prison and the residents of La Belle, has been under fire from Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection for years. The water company's level of total trihalomethanes, the often carcinogenic byproducts of water disinfection, has been running above the maximum contaminant level (MCL) of .08 mg / L since at least 2008. In the last quarter of 2014, the level reached as high as .11 mg / L. The authority is required to send out a notice each time the level is above the drinking-water standard. The company's notice warns that "some people who drink water containing trihalomethanes in excess of the MCL over many years may experience problems with their liver, kidneys or central nervous system, and may have an increased risk of getting cancer." These notices have been sent to La Belle residents quarterly since at least 2008; the most recent one was dated March 2, 2015. But inmates at SCI Fayette do not see these letters, despite being the only population exposed to the water source that is not allowed to drink any water from another supply. (At SCI Fayette, bottled water is considered contraband.)

The ALC criticized the DOC for measuring the rate of gastrointestinal, respiratory, and pulmonary diseases by reviewing the amount of medication prescribed at the prison. Several inmates have pointed out the medical staff's failure to give proper treatments, stating they overprescribed ibuprofen and allergy medicine for problems that clearly necessitated stronger medication and refused to do further tests, even when remedies did not alleviate symptoms. One inmate, who had a large growth on his vocal cords that needed to be removed, was only prescribed Claritin. Another, who had been having muscle spasms for six months, was only prescribed Motrin, despite the fact that he is allergic to the drug. He told me that he is so frustrated that he has since "given up on putting in sick calls."

The DOC's investigation did not acknowledge the air quality of the prison or inmates' accounts of dark matter collecting in vents and on the windowsills—seemingly from the dry-coal-ash dump. High levels of fine particulate matter are one of the biggest concerns regarding dry coal ash. If lodged in your lungs over a period of time, it could cause significant respiratory diseases and contribute to premature death.

In July 2010, Analytical Laboratory Services, Inc. (ALSI) conducted a two-day air-quality test inside and outside SCI Fayette. It's possibly the only one conducted at the prison. ALSI found that the levels of particulate matter were as high as 390 mcg/m3 outside and 213 mcg/m3 inside the prison. In all, 25 out of 31 sections of the prison—including ten out of 11 cellblocks—were over the recommended guideline of 50 mcg/m3. The average measurement of particulate-matter levels in the cellblocks was two-and-a-half times what's considered healthy. The report also acknowledged that the most likely source of high particulate-matter levels was the "outdoor levels" of particulate, and "supply and/or return vents appeared dusty or dirty in some locations," corroborating the inmates' accounts of matter collecting on vents. When asked about the air quality at the prison, the DOC said the 2010 test showed the particular levels were healthy, in direct contradiction to the ALSI report obtained by VICE. A DOC spokesperson declined to comment on the discrepancy.

The ALC, unsatisfied with the DOC's findings, announced that it would expand its survey to all 2,031 people incarcerated at SCI Fayette and began sending out questionnaires by mail in February. The study asks inmates to describe symptoms and diagnoses for any gastrointestinal, pulmonary, or respiratory diseases or cancers. Dustin McDaniel at the ALC predicts that they'll receive about 500 or 600 responses total; they've already received more than 300 completed surveys. The health survey is coupled with one being conducted by La Belle residents, which will document the health diagnoses and symptoms of the 300 residents in the town.

"What we do know about the DOC's review is that it was a very narrow study designed to deny and dismiss the existence of a problem at SCI Fayette," McDaniel said in a press release. "Many people living next to this dump both in prison and in the community are sick. What we don't know is how many people and the extent to which they are suffering from the same problems. With this survey, prisoner advocates and community leaders are working together to find out."

After getting in touch with the ALC, Geraldine Waters, whose son was transferred after his scleroderma diagnosis, attended two meetings in Pittsburgh with family members of those incarcerated at SCI Fayette and two meetings at the firehouse in La Belle, where residents meet once a month. The community's goals are simple: to get the coal-ash dump closed down, to receive compensation for their health problems, and to get financial and logistical help relocating. For those advocating on behalf of the prisoners, the main goal is to close the facility. Family members of the incarcerated, calling themselves the Fayette Justice Project, have released a petition demanding Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf perform a special audit of both the Department of Environmental Protection and the DOC to determine "if and how [the departments] have put the health of prisoners, prison staff, and community members at risk due to pollution from both the dump and the water supply. This audit should also determine if and how both departments have been negligent of or have attempted to hide from the public evidence of pollution and health problems."

A month after the ALC's initial report was filed, Shirley McIntyre,* a Philadelphia woman whose grandson is incarcerated at SCI Fayette, heard a rumor that two guards had plans to sue the prison over the environmental health hazards. The four guards with documented thyroid issues denied they were preparing a lawsuit, but one current guard told me that officials wouldn't come forward because they feared retribution from management and backlash from their union. (He asked to remain anonymous for the same reasons.) "I don't want to say it was a cover-up, but I think [the DOC's] investigation was insufficient," he told me. "They're doing a poor job of protecting the people who work there." He was highly critical of the medical staff as well. "Whatever you heard from the inmates is probably spot on," he said. When McIntyre heard about the sick guards, she worried the prison would do something to protect them but ignore the concerns of the inmates. She decided to join up with the Fayette Justice Project.

McIntyre has been riding low-cost buses for family members organized by the Pennsylvania Prison Society since her 32-year-old grandson was sent to SCI Fayette, in 2009. After she discovered the health issues, she started to board the bus equipped with flyers detailing the findings of the ALC report and facts about the coal-ash dump. McIntyre had already started to contact her representatives, and she also felt it was her duty to tell the family members who take the bus to SCI Fayette. "The water is cloudy," she told me. "If something is going on up there at the prison, I feel as though we, the loved ones, should know, because we enter that property too. We also use their facilities."

On a recent trip back to Philadelphia from La Belle, McIntyre passed out information about the report, which included a list of symptoms to look out for in those incarcerated at Fayette. "Aren't you afraid they're going to start messing with your grandson?" the other mothers asked her. "The reason I didn't put my name on it is because I didn't want my grandson harassed [by prison officials]," she told me. She made sure to pass out the flyers on the way back so prison officials wouldn't see them or hear anyone talking about them during their visit.

In March, I met the families at the pickup spot in Philadelphia for a 2 AM bus to the prison. The seven-hour ride was very quiet as the passengers mostly slept, but arriving at SCI Fayette in the morning was a momentous affair. People visiting different inmates caught up with one another; many had become close after riding the bus together. One thing was certain: There was nothing solemn or sad about visiting day. It was exciting—the time when people get to see their partners, siblings, parents, or friends for the first time in months. There was no shame here. In its place was an understanding among visitors of the complex layers of America's criminal justice system. There was an impatience to pass through security and get to the visiting room as quickly as possible—the more time spent with loved ones, the better.

McIntyre nudged me as we got off the bus. "Don't forget to check out the water," she said. When I got inside, I went to the water fountain to fill up my bottle. It was cloudy, and I could see small particles floating, so I decided not to drink it. McIntyre then introduced me to her grandson, a young man just under six feet with a light brown complexion and a striking resemblance to his grandmother. With his baby face, he could pass for 20. He is serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, on a murder conviction. McIntyre has been helping him appeal the case, which has already cost them $10,000. She said he was in prison for a murder he didn't do. "It was a homicide, and he wasn't even around, didn't know nothing about it," she told me. "I'm his grandma. I know what he does, and I'm not [one to] cover up for nobody."

I was at the prison to meet and interview Willingham after a few months of exchanging letters and phone calls. We sat down on one side of the huge visiting hall, away from the guards peering over their elevated desk at the front. Willingham's voice was raspy, and he spoke softly. In the middle of the interview, he began to cough, and we had to stop. He went over to the guard to get his inhaler, pausing for about 20 minutes as he held his chest. People are "scared to death," he told me. Prisoners have been "trying their best to get transfers either one way or the other—by being nice and requesting it or being nasty and doing stuff to get out of here.

"It's gotta shake you up to watch everyone deteriorate and die," he said, motioning to the younger inmates around him. "They always worry about me." But Willingham is worried too. Just a few months ago, John Perry, one of his friends at SCI Fayette, died, after being diagnosed in September with stage IV lung cancer. He shared many symptoms with Willingham. "They say he was going to have ten months to live, [and] he didn't last four months," Willingham told me in disbelief.

Rural towns where prisons are being built are often home to toxic sites damaging the environment and the population's health—sometimes, the prisons are built right on top of the toxic land.

Before he died, Perry was among a loose group of inmates organizing from the inside. Led by an inmate who got sick last year after losing motor function in his arms and legs, the inmates all sign up for the same activity at the same time so they can meet without arousing the suspicion of prison officials. They've been coordinating their efforts along the same lines as the Fayette Justice Project. All the while, Foskey has been agitating from his cell 75 miles away in SCI Laurel Highlands, just as his mother has been doing on the outside. "They should close [the prison] down," he told me. He's also advocating for prisoners to receive compensation for their health issues. "When you're placing them in an environment that you know is unjust, you put them in harm's way. That's cruel and unusual punishment."

Environmental justice and prisoner rights have long been seen as two separate issues in this country, but they are often deeply intertwined. Rural towns where prisons are being built are often home to toxic sites damaging the environment and the population's health—sometimes, the prisons are built right on top of the toxic land. In New York, three quarters of Rikers Island jail is built on a landfill composed of substances not disclosed to the public. In recent lawsuits, corrections officers have accused the landfill of causing cancer. San Joaquin Valley, in California, is home to both a third of the state's adult prisons and a number of corporate polluters, toxic-waste dumps, and incinerators. In 2011, Pennsylvania allowed the land of 24 state prisons to be leased for fracking and drilling infrastructure.

Little Blue Run, the largest coal-ash impoundment in the United States, is about 75 miles from La Belle, on Pennsylvania's border with Ohio. Residents in the area have dealt with dozens of leaks and spills that have contaminated drinking water and killed wildlife. For years, they have been protesting and advocating for its closure—an act that will finally happen thanks to an agreement reached in 2012 between the site's operator and the Department of Environmental Protection. The government has ordered the company to stop dumping at Little Blue Run by the end of 2016, but the power plant producing the nearly 3.4 million tons of ash annually deposited there will still be operational. The plan? Ship it on barges up the Ohio and Monongahela rivers to the Matt Canestrale Contracting site in La Belle and dump it on the steps of SCI Fayette.

* Name has been changed.

Editor's Note: Some identifying details about current inmates have been removed from this article.

First off, in a crowded landscape of David Letterman tribute pieces, I want to thank you for choosing to click on this one. I will try to do justice to Letterman's immeasurable contribution to television comedy in the best way I know how: by making it about me.

I met David Letterman once. When I was 16 years old, I had my own late-night talk show on MTV. You can look it up if you want. It was "cool," and "incredibly groundbreaking." The Beastie Boys were "huge fans of it" and then it got "cancelled" when I was 17.

The day I got the bad news was the day I met Dave. It was the summer of 1996. I saw him walking on the corner of 53rd and Broadway, making his way from the Hello Deli back into the Ed Sullivan Theatre.

I had to say something. I couldn't stop myself. I remember at that moment feeling like I had no idea if I was ever going to be in show business again. It seems laughable now as I write this from my fancy Hollywood office (I am very successful), but at 17 I figured, "When am I ever going to get the chance to talk with David Letterman?" So with all the hubris only being a teenager can bring, I went up to him.

"Dave, I had my own talk show, but they just cancelled it. What do I do?"

Without stopping, as he continued his brisk walk back into the studio, Dave said to me in the most perfect I-am-not-happy-with-my-life Letterman deadpan:

"Do you want mine?"

And then he was gone. Dave breezed back into his insanely over air-conditioned studio, and I ended up at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. We both had another 20 years of struggle ahead of us.

I have no concept of comedy without David Letterman. I was four years old when Late Night premiered on NBC. My introduction was a VHS tape in my Dad's house of the 1985 David Letterman Holiday Film Festival, which included the Merrill Markoe–directed video for Dress Cool starring Paul Shaffer and the World's Most Dangerous Band.

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Watching Late Night with David Letterman felt dangerous. Try to imagine you're a small child and all at once, you are flooded through your entire body with a complete understanding of what it means to be subversive. I don't know what holds that kind of power today for young impressionable children who will sadly grow up to be comedy writers. For me, it was unquestionably Dave. He was the first guy I saw on television and said, "Oh, if I can somehow convince them to give me the camera, I bet I could get away with something."

Cher was right: Dave was an asshole. God, do I mean that with the greatest of affection. Think about the television landscape in 1985 when I first started watching Late Night. Sure, there was Cheers, but there was also a lot of Silver Spoons and Punky Brewster. I liked those shows too (I was six), but I knew even then, the real stuff, the stuff the grownups liked... that was happening in the middle of the night. We needed an asshole like Dave to say, "Alright, now that the kids are asleep, let's bring out Sandra Bernhard and Madonna. Oh, and by the way, they're probably fucking."

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We needed "Hal Gurnee's Network Time Killers," a bit that said, "Look, it's 12:30. We're trying to fill an hour here. This whole television thing is stupid to begin with, right? What, you're looking for some entertainment? How about a Kenny Rogers impersonator? Does that land? No? Whatever. We just killed two minutes. Let's bring out Bryant Gumbel."

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No one worked harder at putting together a show that looked like it was on the verge of falling apart at any moment more than the writers at Late Night with David Letterman. It was controlled chaos. I mean, look, they put this on TV:

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They actually put that on TV more than once. Bananas.

I was the one kid at school who watched Late Night with David Letterman. As I've gone through life, I've been lucky to connect with the other people who were also the one kid at school who watched it. I hate to think how depressing it would be if we all didn't find each other.

When NBC passed Dave over for The Tonight Show I took it personally. Those weasels at GE didn't pick my guy. Leno was fine, he made me laugh, I wasn't offended by him telling me, "Crunch all you want, we'll make more." Leno has been turned into some kind of comedy supervillain, but in 1993, he just wasn't my guy. I liked Dave. I still like Dave.

So when Dave jumped ship to CBS, I was there opening night. I knew things were going to be just fine the minute Paul Newman asked one simple question:

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"Where the hell are the singing cats?"

The show was a little bigger, but not that much. Dave was still Dave. And what strikes me is that he has remained utterly Dave on CBS for the past 22 years. I can't think of a single moment in my entire life where I turned on Letterman and thought, Wow, he's really pandering tonight. You never sensed a moment of desperation coming off him. This was broadcasting at its finest. He made us feel like he didn't care when of course, no one cared more. Night after night, he blended high status with self-deprecation.

He knew when to let Howard take over. He knew exactly how to make fun of Regis. He knew when to feign outrage at Madonna. He said what we needed to hear in the days after 9/11.

Dave cheated on his wife. He cheated on his wife and he got caught. Then he sort of forgot to apologize for it. People didn't like that. Like I said, Cher was right.

Related: The Real Kenny Powers?

I wonder sometimes if late-night network television can break the rules anymore. The truth is, Dave already broke them all. He smashed the genre into a million pieces. It's gonna take a while to put things back together. Not to say the guys with the job now (and yes they're all guys, we should fix that) can't do great stuff. They can and they do. Every night.

But there will never be anything like Dave.

We don't consume late-night television the way we used to. We see it the next day, in clips online. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, it's just new. David Letterman is retiring in a very different media landscape then the one he started in. And I have absolutely no doubt that if he chose to stay on the air longer he would've navigated that landscape brilliantly. The final years of his show are all the proof you need. Has Dave ever felt irrelevant? Not for a second.

I am incredibly lucky to be one of the writers for Billy on the Street. As we were working on the fourth season this year, Billy came in to tell us that Letterman had agreed to leave the studio and go out on the street with Billy. This is something he hadn't done in years. We were thrilled. We immediately started brainstorming with Billy on how we could take to the streets and ask people, "What the hell is Dave gonna do now?"

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I can't tell you what it meant to me to be involved with something that aired on Letterman's show. I called my Mom. Nineteen years earlier I was pestering Dave on the street. Now he was on the street with Billy doing the pestering.

Follow Jake Fogelnest on Twitter.

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Every year at midnight the night of May 2, followers of Jesús Malverde begin to arrive at a chapel in the city of Culiacán, Mexico, to celebrate his life and pay him back for the favors they have surely asked of him.

Malverde is a somewhat shadowy figure, but most agree that he was a real person who lived in the northwest state of Sinaloa at the turn of the 20th century. He was a Robin Hood–type figure who robbed from the rich to give to the poor and was eventually captured by the authorities and hanged on May 3, 1909, his body left to rot outside.

In the years after his death, his spirit gained a reputation for granting favors, especially to criminals; now he's commonly referred to as a "narco-saint," though like other such figures, he's not recognized by the Catholic Church. His image, reproduced on alters and in art, is that of a square-jawed man with thick black eyebrows, a mustache, a slightly sad expression, The chapel in Culiacán was built in 1969, just a block away from the state government building, and it is here that his annual festival takes place.

Related: I Saw Journey and Santana in Mexico and Learned a Lesson About Life.

The May 3 celebration begins around 9 AM, as his devotees enter the chapel and kneel down on the altar, washing their hands and the face of Malverde with holy water. Several bands take turns playing northern-style music; people crack open their still-chilled beers to combat the oppressive heat.

Around midday, the bust is taken out of the chapel, set upon the bonnet of a Ford truck painted in the saint's honor, and paraded around the streets, led by the chapel's guardian and the devotees who have brought along the biggest offerings. As the truck steers slowly through the streets surrounding the chapel, the bust is splashed with water, given cigarettes, caressed by his followers, and—a new occurrence this year—bathed in top-shelf whiskey donated by one particularly devoted worshipper.

Once the bust arrives back at the chapel, the celebration continues. The money collected throughout the year has been spent on preparing plates of food and soft drinks for all the attendees; later in the afternoon there is a raffle dedicated to the people from marginalized neighborhoods of Culiacán, including bags of food and toys for the children.

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Photo via Flickr user Joe Loong

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Miracle Mineral Supplement (MMS) is a toxic solution of sodium chlorite and citric acid that forms chlorine dioxide—a powerful chemical used to bleach textiles and wood pulp. In Ireland, parents are being investigated for forcing children to drink it, or take it as an enema, as a "cure" for autism.

MMS is touted as a "medicine" by followers of a cult called Genesis II. They believe bleach can cure children with autism, which they reckon is caused by parasitic worms that multiply during the full moon. MMS has been sold on the internet for some time, and last month, Ireland's Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA) and the Gardai opened a criminal investigation into it. A dentist and two nurses are currently be ing investigated for supplying the toxic solution as a medical treatment.

You don't have to complete a first aid course to know that drinking bleach is bad for you. It causes boils, intestinal bleeding, and renal failure, yet some parents in Ireland have been using the "treatment" introduced by Jim Humble, head of the US Genesis II Church of Health and Healing—regularly referred to as a cult. An active MMS website in Ireland pushes the solution as a cure for, well, loads of things.

This is despite the HPRA releasing a statement saying that selling MMS is illegal. "The HPRA confirms that the product referred to as Miracle Mineral Solution ('MMS') is not authorised as a medicine for sale or supply in Ireland," it said. "Any manufacture, supply or sale of this product for the purposes of treating a medical condition is thereby illegal."

Related: The US's attempts to extradite a deep web administrator living in Dublin.

I spoke to Patrick Merlehan, a member of the Genesis II church in Ireland. He told me MMS cures "pathogens" and is a miracle cure. He mentioned that the Red Cross have supposedly used MMS in clinical trials—a line often used by MMS supporters. There's even a YouTube video "proving" the treatment works against Malaria.

"MMS cures Malaria, it's been proven by the Red Cross. They're denying it now because big business influences all their decisions," said Merlehan. "I've met a few people who use MMS but they're nervous to go public because of harassment from the state through its organs like the HPRA. The media is very unfair on MMS here because they've got their advertisers to think about, who are of course big pharma companies."

The video "proving" that having bleach enemas cures autism

Unsurprisingly, the Red Cross disagrees with Merlehan's assessment that bleach can cure Malaria. They issued a statement slamming the practice and distancing themselves from the church. "The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies dissociates itself in the strongest terms from the content of the Master Mineral Solution newsletter entitled 'Malaria finally defeated' and supporting YouTube video," said the unequivocal statement.

On the MMS Ireland website, you can still register to become a "Health Minister" in Jim Humble's church. The ex-scientologist, described as a "former aerospace industry engineer and gold miner" is credited with developing lunar vehicles, atomic weapons and apparently he even invented the first automatic garage door.

Humble recommends parents give their children up to 60 drops a day and claims the nausea that follows in a signs the treatment is working. Sickness and intestinal bleeding are explained away as "pathogens being destroyed" while parents are encouraged to check the feces that follows ingestion for "worms" which are supposedly excreted, which is meant to prove that MMS is working.

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Fiona O'Leary, who describes the use of MMS as "torture"

Fiona O'Leary, the founder of Autistic Rights Together (ART)—who has autistic children—has monitored social media groups pushing the practice internationally. "The buzzwords these people use are 'unlocking' children, or 'freeing' them, but my buzzword for this is 'torture', plain and simple," she told me. "They put it into children's eyes to 'cure' any vision issues and some parents can give their children up to six bleach enemas a day. They post pictures of their children covered with boils and burns on social media", she said.

The Twitter hastag #mms brings up an alarming number of suppliers, claiming the bleaching solution can cure people of anything from HIV to cancer. Many pay homage to Jim Humble and his protégé Kerri Rivera. Rivera has claimed over 177 children have "lost" their diagnosis of autism since they started taking the "solution."

O'Leary says that legislation needs to be passed to protect children with autism from being abused. "It's torture and it makes it worse when the children are autistic... I see it as experimentation, these procedures are unregulated and unlicensed and these children pay the price. We need organisations to step up and push the government to pass legislation so this never happens again," she told me.

When I asked Patrick Merlehan why some people might think drinking industrial bleach is bad for you, he rambled on about big pharma before blaming social welfare. "If you're ill and you're living off the state and getting benefits you don't want to get well. You want to keep the money, it's that simple. They know what we have is the cure but they don't want it. They want to keep getting state money," he said.

O'Leary is hopeful that investigations like the one in Ireland could help prevent Genesis II from spreading MMS around the world. "I think Ireland is incredible in what we've achieved this year shutting down these people. I'm hoping that the investigation here will trigger more investigations on a global level. These kids need to be checked out and put into safe environments. They will carry the scars of this torture for the rest of their lives," she said.

Follow Norma on Twitter.

What does Britain look like to a New Yorker like Bruce Gilden? One glance at the photographer's work reveals a particular set of characteristics: deep-set wrinkles, furrowed brows, blemished skin, or, in his words, "People I can engage with: somebody whose face, and particularly eyes, screams a story."

Luckily, Britain has a lot of those.

Gilden's latest portrait project, A Complete Examination of Middlesex, will be exhibited from May 21 to 31, 2015 at the Cob Gallery. The photos were taken in London over a three-year period and will also be collated into a book, published by the Archive of Modern Conflict.

Street photography may have been bastardized by people in trilbies and bangles on fashion blogs, but Gilden is the master. His work is about getting up-close-and-personal, about creating photographs that are upfront without being confrontational, beautiful without being pretty.

Gilden is a long-standing contributor to VICE, but it's not often his work shows in the UK. Be sure to check it out.

For more on Gilden, watch our series 'Take It or Leave It with Bruce Gilden':

'A Complete Examination of Middlesex' has been curated by Next to Nothing: Imogen Prus, Hattie Moir and Natasha Wigoder. Scroll down for photos featured in the show.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

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Illustration by Tom Humberstone.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I've probably listened to hundreds of hours of video game podcasts over the last few years that explore the nerdy microversein depth. While there's a glut of gaming podcasts in existence, most of them are horrifyingly indistinguishable from one another. u=Usually it's a gaggle of milquetoast bros continuously asking one another, "So, whatchya been playing?" while interspersing their conversation with odious, verbalized meme humor. ("Hey, guys: What if Link was a girl? Hurr hurr." "Shut up and take my money! Hurr Hurr.") It's enough to make the heart of any judicious listener grieve.

There are, however, a few mighty oaks in this forest of dipshits, a precious handful of podcasts that represent a unique point of view on gaming. Below is a rundown of five of those special podcasts that really do warrant your subscription.

8-4 PLAY

Broadcasting from their offices in Shibuya, Tokyo, 8-4 Play is the podcast of a team of American video game localizers living in Japan. You've probably played some of the Japanese games they've translated for English-speaking/reading audiences: Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, Fire Emblem: Awakening, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Dragon's Dogma, various Tales RPGs – the list is long.

"We bill it as 'the only podcast about Japan and games and Japanese games,'" 8-4 executive director Mark MacDonald tells me over Skype. "Much of which is not true, but that's our mission statement."

One of the most compelling aspects about 8-4 Play is the insight it provides not only into the localization process itself, which invariably seeps into the show, but also the experience of American video game expats working in the heart of Tokyo. In addition to conversations about Nintendo's future or the latest Final Fantasy, you may also hear about a ma-and-pa shop in Tokyo's otaku neighborhood Akihabara where you can have your 3DS modded, or the verdict on an opening night visit to a Sailor Moon-themed restaurant.

"That is one of the bits [of] consistent feedback," MacDonald says. "People really do enjoy the glimpse of life here in Japan."

CANE AND RINSE

On the slightly more academic end of the spectrum is Cane and Rinse, whose hosts are mainly scattered around the UK. The show takes one video game per episode and dissects it like a science-class frog. The games chosen are usually at least a few years old in the hopes of lending some equanimity to the proceedings, after the hype or backlash that a game might have been cloaked in no longer wields any real power. Recent episodes have covered the Silent Hill series, Spelunky, Diddy Kong Racing, and System Shock 2.

Cane and Rinse applies exactly the same analytical structure each episode to avoid meandering down blind alleys. The hosts first discuss the development history of the game, their own individual experiences with it at the time of release, and then they pick the game apart by all its individual components: music, gameplay, story, and so forth. They always save their personal feelings about the game for the end.

"We wanted to get forensic with it," host Leon Cox tells me in his smooth, made-for-radio voice.

"The key thing about our manifesto," he elaborates, "is that we try to avoid hype, we try to avoid giving our opinions as if they are facts and we try to take each game on its own merits—not base it on its platform or its file size or its advertising budget or its development budget or its age. We just talk about the experience they give us."

Related: Watch our documentary on Magic: The Gathering

THE INDOOR KIDS

Co-hosted by comedy producer and writer Emily V. Gordon alongside her husband, stand-up comedian Kumail Nanjiani, and (usually) recorded in Los Angeles, The Indoor Kids may have the loosey-goosey "Whatchya Been Playin'" structure so heavily pooh-poohed above, but it distinguishes itself primarily through the infusion of intriguing weekly guests.

These guests are as likely to come from the entertainment industry as they are from the world of video games, and you end up learning a lot about them because Nanjiani habitually asks about their earliest experiences with video games in addition to what they are playing now. Folks like Community creator Dan Harmon will come on to talk about an infatuation with Minecraft, or omnipresent video game voice actor Troy Baker will describe what it was like acting in games like The Last of Us and BioShock Infinite. Some of The Indoor Kids' shows are recorded in front of live audiences. While video games were the original focus, the show has been increasingly open to discussing other aspects of nerd culture.

"It's a celebration of all the things that keep you from being outdoors, enjoying the sunshine, and playing sports," Gordon tells me over the phone, going on to specifically mention an interest in comics, books, movies, and TV shows. She says The Indoor Kids is ultimately about the "passion we have for the things that we consume."

I couldn't help but ask if it ever felt odd professionally cracking wise into a mic with one's significant other each week. "It weirdly kind of elevates our relationship. I recommend that all married couples do podcasts together."

Love technology? Click your way over to Motherboard for more technology than you can shake a ridiculously high-tech stick in the general direction of.

RETRONAUTS

If you can't suss it out from the name, Retronauts is "a podcast focused on classic video games." Originally part of the now deceased 1Up.com, Retronauts is presently untethered from any anchor and spends its episodes devoted to chronicling the history of retro games, with recent episodes, for example, covering the Bonk series and Nintendo's original 3D "portable," the Virtual Boy.

I ask co-host Jeremy Parish whether they ever worry about running out of retro games to cover. "The thing is, as people create current games," he tells me, "they are creating future retro games."

Parish speaks of something akin to a floating timeline, saying that they've loosely set the "cut-off line" to be considered retro at ten years. Which means that every year new retro games are inducted into the club, so to speak.

Like Cane and Rinse, the boutique nature of the show allows for the creation of evergreen episodes that don't lose value with time, and you can find yourself delving into the Retronauts back catalogue in search of a pixelated fix during the wait between new installments.

IDLE THUMBS

Idle Thumbs is hosted by a crew of San Francisco developers, formerly of such studios as Telltale Games and Double Fine. Recently, Polygon senior reviewer Danielle Riendeau also joined the show. Idle Thumbs offers some of the most consistently articulate conversation on video games you are likely to find. Admittedly, the focus is usually on indie titles, as that seems to be what most of those involved are personally interested in, but the addition of Riendeau has brought a wider variety of games to the table for discussion.

Over the phone, I ask co-host Chris Remo what his motivations are for doing the podcast. One reason, he tells me, is that presenting thoughts on games to other developers or journalists immediately subjects those opinions to alternative perspectives.

"I think for all of us, doing the podcast is a way to keep our critical faculties about games sharp. I'm definitely a better game developer and a better creative person generally for being on Idle Thumbs. It absolutely forces me to look at games in a broader way than I would otherwise have."

Of course, great gaming podcasts don't begin and end with the five highlighted here. Additionally, the great preserver that is the internet is home to brilliant productions that, alas, are no more, such as the on-location journalism and surreal, musical editing of A Life Well Wasted, as well as The Brainy Gamer Podcast, and Chet and Jon's Reassuringly Finite Gaming Playlist. They failed to rage hard enough against the dying of the light, but are worth a listen even after they're gone. Now, over to you—feel free to share your own favorite podcasts below, because we just might check them out, if we're not doing so on the regular already.

Follow Jagger Gravning on Twitter.

Follow Tom Humberstone on Twitter.