[body_image width='1000' height='2859' path='images/content-images/2015/05/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/29/' filename='blood-lady-commandos-pop-a-wheelie-body-image-1432931250.jpg' id='61421']

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

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

My first—and thankfully only—experience with a flasher was a few years back. There were rumors of a guy who roamed about naked in the forest right by the stables where I kept my horse. I didn't pay any attention to the story until one day when I was nearly thrown off my pony. We were out riding and, all of a sudden, after turning a bend in the road, there was a naked man standing right in front of me, leaning against a tree masturbating. I was totally startled and bolted off as fast the horse would allow. Thankfully, nothing really happened but I've certainly given a lot of thought to that man jacking off in a forest in the dead of winter.

In 2014 alone, the German police recorded 7722 instances of exhibitionism and indecent behavior. An act which, according to current laws, could land you up to a year in prison, as well as a hefty fine.

But this flashing act isn't restricted to men. According to Alfred Esser, founder and director of Germany's only support group for exhibitionists, just as many women are into flashing as guys. Apparently, it's harder to notice because many times ladies are capable of satisfying their urges by simply wearing a really low cut top. Few people would be offended by a pair of breasts, but that doesn't change the fact that being harassed by an exhibitionist can be seriously traumatic for some.

Read: An Interview with a Guy Who Really Likes Menstrual Blood

A study carried out by the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony states that exhibitionists aren't interested in actively harming women, but they are more likely to run the risk inflicting trauma on women and children than they are to restrict themselves from living out their sexual fantasies. It also states that the criminal relapse rate of exhibitionists—when compared to other sexual offenders—is extremely high, but exhibitionism itself isn't recognized to as a gateway offense to a some sort of criminal career.

[body_image width='1024' height='684' path='images/content-images/2015/05/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/29/' filename='an-exhibitionist-explained-why-he-just-cant-stop-harassing-people-876-body-image-1432908523.jpg' id='61346']

Photo via Flickr user

Obviously, most people consider it pretty uncool to whip your dick out and point it at whoever's looking. VICE gave Mr. Esser a call to find about more about this phenomenon.

VICE: When was the first time you flashed someone?
Alfred Esser: About 15 years ago. I pulled my pants down in front of an adult woman. It was an exhilarating feeling—especially because she wasn't shocked, frightened or disgusted. I don't think there's any "experts" out there that can explain exactly why I do this. I'd imagine it's something to do with genes, hormones, ones upbringing and whatever childhood sexual experiences you've had.

Can't you just go to a nudist beach or something?
I actually don't know why it's different. Exposing yourself just makes you feel like you're losing control, you know? As if you're intoxicated. It must give off some sort of chemical reaction in the brain or something. I really can't explain it more than that, sorry.

What about the women you flash? Don't you feel sorry for them?
Anytime I've ever shown myself to a woman and she got a fright, I've felt pretty uncomfortable. It's absolutely never been my attention to scare anyone. People are more than welcome just not to look if they don't want to. Luckily there are some women who enjoy it, too. People like that are a gift to us exhibitionists.

[body_image width='1024' height='692' path='images/content-images/2015/05/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/29/' filename='an-exhibitionist-explained-why-he-just-cant-stop-harassing-people-876-body-image-1432905887.jpg' id='61330']

Photo via Flickr user

But even if a woman chooses just to look away, you've already forced them to see your penis. That's pretty illegal.
Yeah, I know. I've actually been convicted for things like this more than 20 times. That's not even an exaggeration. It's also not a fact that I'm particularly proud of. With the amount of money that I've spent on court cases, I could've travelled the word or bought a Porsche.

A lot of women are scared that they're not only going to get flashed, but that something worse could happen. What do you think about that?
A study by the Center for Criminology in Wiesbaden states that exhibitionists are recognized to be mono-trope offenders, who aren't prone to violence and absolutely not prone to any sort of violent sexual crimes. Exhibitionism is not a typical gateway offense that leads to subsequent sexually-motivated violent crimes; rather, it's more likely to be more an isolated instance.

We also need to take into account that exhibitionism is unfortunately still a taboo in our society. A subject that is made more dramatic then it actually is because of a general lack of available information. If there was easy access to objective educational material regarding compulsive exhibitionism, then I think we could avoid all this unnecessary fear and scaremongering.

Recommended: Slutever

Well, that's one way to look at it. What about your partner? Does she know about this?
Yeah, my wife knows about all of this. Without her help I'd never have been able to devote myself 100 percent to this rather controversial topic.

Have you ever experienced anyone reacting positively to your dick waving? If that was to happen, would it kill the buzz?
See, there's a huge misunderstanding there — exhibitionists are often falsely accused of wanting to shock or disgust people, and that they're all violent. That's very much the opposite of what they're usually after. A favorable, curious glance is kind of a dream scenario for us "showmen".

You've been to therapy for this, right? How was that?
I could probably write a book about that experience, to be fair. Many well respected psychiatrists have actually said time and time again that this sort of exhibitionism is heavily anchored in the brain. Both in men and women. I personally think it would be more beneficial for everyone if we somehow taught society a way to deal with the issue, instead. But for that to be able to happen, we'd need to decriminalize it.

Read: An Interview with a Man That Rubs His Penis Against Women on Trains

So you think people should learn to deal with your passion, instead of having to keep it in your pants? Is that why you started a support group for exhibitionists?
Yeah. The biggest worry for most exhibitionists is that their relatives or friends will find out about what they're into and they'll lose their jobs and completely breakdown. After having so much therapy, I've come to learn that there's a lot of things that psychologists just aren't able to explain. I wanted to do some research for myself — to talk to the people who are involved.

My mission is to create an open space where people can talk freely about the subject. A place where people don't just consider it as some criminal act. We are trying to expand our knowledge of this phenomenon.

Sometimes, when needed, we recommend lawyers who deal with this sort of thing. We are also lobbying to have the outdated legislation concerning this matter changed. Because it's completely draconian and infringes on gender equality laws.

It does't sound like you're going to stop anytime soon. Don't you feel sorry for the victims?
Of course, but there's just some things that you simply can't control.

Right.

At this point, it seems like there's nothing more certain in politics than Hillary Clinton's eventual nomination as the Democratic candidate for president in 2016. The most recent polls show her with a 51 percent lead over the rest of the potential Democratic candidates, and her closest rivals, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, so far so no signs of running. Following those two is Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist who, as punk as he is, has effectively zero chance of winning anything. Most other serious candidates are either scared off by Clinton's inevitability or else comfortable with where they fit into the political machine.

Enter former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, the Democratic Establishment's newest—and so far, only—understudy. Because the reality is in electoral politics, as in life, nothing is guaranteed: No matter how inescapable Clinton's nomination seems, there is always the possibility that something could happen to change that. There could be a career-ending scandal, a personal tragedy, she and Bill could be abducted by aliens. And if that happens, O'Malley, who officially declared his campaign in Baltimore Saturday, is the only mainstream Democrat available.

This is strange because, in a normal election cycle, someone like O'Malley wouldn't get more than a head nod from the party establishment, and maybe a noncommittal promise of a low-level Cabinet position, before dropping out after the Iowa caucuses. A two-term governor of Maryland, O'Malley's record is indisputably progressive, but also fairly unremarkable.

Related: How Bernie Sanders Shaped the Northeast Punk Scene

By the time he left office last year, due to term limits, his approval rating was down to 41 percent. His lieutenant governor, and presumed successor, Anthony Brown lost to a Republican. In a poll taken last fall, 6 in 10 of Maryland's registered Democrats said O'Malley wouldn't make a good president. Those were his own constituents—and considering that nobody else in the country knows who O'Malley is, that's kind of important.

There's also the matter of Baltimore. O'Malley served as mayor of the city from 1999 until 2007. He was also, incidentally, the inspiration for Mayor Tommy Carcetti on The Wire, which helps explain some things about his current ambitions. As evidenced by his announcement location, O'Malley's record in Baltimore is central to his presidential campaign. It is also what makes his candidacy a little odd.

In case you hadn't noticed, the city has been torn apart riots, becoming ground zero for a national debate about police brutality, particularly against black men. Although O'Malley hasn't been mayor in almost a decade, much of the blame for the tensions divide between Baltimore's cops and black residents has been cast on the zero-tolerance approach he championed while in office. O'Malley, unsurprisingly, claims that his policing strategy was effective. Critics, including The Wire creator David Simon, say that his policies created a culture of fear, and had more to do with goosing crime statistics in the interest of helping O'Malley's eventual run for governor than with making the city safer.

Related: Watch raw coverage of the Baltimore protests from VICE News

Although he may receive some sort of bump from his announcement, O'Malley is currently at around 1 percent in national polls. To give you some perspective, on the Republican side, there are 14 candidates with more support, including hopeless long-shots like Carly Fiorina and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. In the eyes of the national voter, O'Malley is a Fiorina—an unknown, someone whose candidacy is so unconvincing that even voting for him in theory, in a poll 18 months before the election, feels like a waste.

Nevertheless, O'Malley is running his campaign as if he can compete with Hillary. His strategy is to outflank her on the left, playing up his liberal record as governor of Maryland, including his admittedly impressive accomplishments with public education. He's also started criticizing Wall Street, and talking up his opposition to things like the Keystone XL pipeline and Obama's trade deal, apparently positioning himself as a sort of bargain bin Elizabeth Warren.

"This is America," O'Malley's campaign launch video states, "we don't coronate or hand out turns. We earn it."

Could this all also be bullshit sloganeering? Maybe. And though he's noted that Jimmy Carter and Hillary's husband were similarly unknown at the beginning of their presidential campaigns, neither man had an opponent as formidable as Hillary. But if O'Malley does think he has a chance of outrunning Clinton, playing it progressive, whether its sincere or not, is his only chance.

Like I've been saying, though, it's not really a chance. At the end of the day, O'Malley's basically a technocrat with the charisma of an accountant in a dad band. Which makes it even more remarkable that he's the guy Democrats will likely be left with should anything happen to their heir apparent. With just one woman between him and the Democratic nomination, O'Malley may just be the luckiest man in politics.

Follow Kevin Lincoln on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/05/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/31/' filename='why-ill-never-move-to-new-york-or-los-angeles-529-body-image-1433080026.jpg' id='61535']

Photo via Flickr user Matthew Faltz

The most boring element of the Thinkpiece-Industrial Complex is that of whether LA or New York is a better place to live. Zach Lipez's recent VICE piece Hello to All That was the most recent rekindling of the decades-old Coastal Cold War but you can find veritable content oceans of millennials lining up to tell you why they left New York, and you can find the New York Times extolling the alleged virtues of LA over New York. The idea, I guess, is that we all care where these youngish "creatives" live and that the decision to live in one overpriced city or another is a monumental life choice on par with divorcing someone or joining the Marines.

I don't have a dog in this bicoastal bitch-fest—I've lived in the Midwest, perfectly happily, for all of my 29 years. I'm sure NYC and LA are fine places to live, but I'm also sure there is nothing wrong with staying put in your hometown, or moving to "just" the metropolis in your region, be that Raleigh, Minneapolis, Denver, Cleveland or hell, Pittsburgh. Fewer people write long essays about how wonderful those places are and how living there means you are by default ambitious, smart, and interesting. That's probably because no one in these places gives a shit about proving themselves by writing overwrought personal essays.

The first thing you have to get over is that not moving to New York, or leaving New York for LA or anywhere, is not "defeat." There is no scoreboard keeping track of your life that will penalize you for not moving there. There is genuinely nothing wrong with staying in your hometown and taking over your dad's shoe repair company. You can find happiness—or misery—wherever you decide to lay your head.

Every 12 months, the liberal arts colleges of America pump out more kindling for the NY/LA dream pyre, more starry-eyed cannon fodder for the creative class, more future why-I'm-leaving-New-Yorkers. In the five-year period between 2007 and 2012, more than 740,000 college grads between the ages of 20 and 30 moved to New York; LA gained more than 415,000. The vast majority will have run into a brick wall of reality: The age-old option of working a day job to bankroll your creative endeavors is damn near impossible in today's New York or LA, because the rents are insane. The median one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles rents for $1,800 (and the less said about NYC rents, the better). The average one-bedroom in Minneapolis is $889. New York may be more glamorous and LA may have beaches, but is living in those places more than twice as good as an existence in the Twin Cities?

The cultural scenes of "flyover cities" aren't as star-studded or moneyed as That means it's easier to make something of yourself out here—people will work together to elevate their local institutions, and you don't have to deal with the horrific overcrowding and backbiting competition that comes with big metropolises. If hell is other people, living in a place with 7,000 people per square mile must be its ninth circle.

Related: Drunken Glory

It takes all of two weeks of living in a middle-sized Midwestern city as a mature adult with access to Google to realize basically everything you want to do in LA or New York is possible everywhere. The stuff that Los Angeles and New York are celebrated for—fast-paced lifestyles, their music scenes, people who will have weird, no-strings-attached sex with you, drugs, etc.—are actually present all over the country. It's possible to look at art you pretend you understand, and it's possible to eat at restaurants that challenge you by serving squid or brain sandwiches or whatever. It's possible to meet people who like the same things you like, it's possible to meet people from all over who have all sorts of crazy perspectives on life, and it's possible to do pretty much whatever you want to do, wherever, if you try hard enough.

It's no longer necessary to pack yourself up and move to a sprawling metropolis that doesn't give a fuck about you or your artisanal cheese making. If you want to write and advance important conversations, your city (or one close to it) has an alt-weekly, and those people would love for you to write for them. Your band doesn't have to go to the big city to get noticed by labels. Just ask Zola Jesus, Atmosphere, or Spooky Black, all of whom transcended their non–New Yorkiness through making art whose appeal couldn't be contained by the circumstances of their geography. If building a "personal brand" is your thing, well, the currency for that stuff is measured in retweets and Tumblr notes, and you can get that stuff anywhere. The point of all of this is that some of the best art is created by people who find stimulation in the environments that they know best.

Another ancillary benefit of living in a city that is not New York or LA is that "influence" is treated as it should be: illusory and mostly bullshit. Bon Iver is the most famous person in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, but there's no way he'd even be allowed to cut in line for The Joynt. Real America has a way of leveling all playing fields you don't experience anywhere else.

Refusing to move to New York or LA is not some kind of "failure," and it's not "settling"; it's giving yourself over to being a reasonable human living in a reasonable city with reasonable goals. You and your dreams are not defined by your location, and success can mean anything.

I get asked all the time, working my day job at a college here in Madison, Wisconsin, why I haven't packed up and at least moved to Portland. The answer is complicated, but mostly I love that the Midwest is home to weird pockets of authentic culture that New Yorkers and Angelinos will never know. We have crazy clusterfuck country festivals attended by more people annually than Coachella or Lollapalooza combined. We have the Gathering of the Juggalos. We have punks who grew up on farms, and we have farm kids who listen to A$AP Rocky. I know this place. If I moved to New York, I'd just be another writer going to the same shows, visiting the same websites, and drinking at the same bars.

Success to me means knowing I will take my last breath clutching a container of locally-sourced Wisconsin cheese curds while in a too-tight Green Bay Packers jersey. I will die content, secure in the knowledge that I have accomplished what I set out to accomplish, and on my own terms.

Besides, I've heard the subway in New York sucks and the traffic in Los Angeles is hell. Why would anyone put up with that shit?

Andrew Winistorfer is on Twitter.

[body_image width='665' height='456' path='images/content-images/2015/05/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/26/' filename='rebecca-naomi-jones-is-the-first-black-woman-to-play-yitzhak-in-hedwig-and-the-angry-inch-on-broadway-body-image-1432658472.png' id='60138']

Photo by Joan Marcus

John Cameron Mitchell's groundbreaking rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch is primarily the story of Hedwig, the East German "internationally ignored song stylist" (and recipient of a botched sex change operation), and her connection to a pop star named Tommy Gnosis. But there is another beautifully told relationship in the show, one whose enactment is all the more impressive for its subtlety: That of Hedwig and her husband, a former drag queen from Croatia named Yitzhak.

The current revival on Broadway has had a string of big names playing Hedwig. Aside from Mitchell, who came back into the role for a brief period earlier this year, she has been played by such actors as Darren Criss ( Glee), Michael C. Hall (Dexter), and Andrew Rannells (Girls). Taye Diggs is up next. Yitzhak was initiated in this run by Lena Hall, but is currently played by Rebecca Naomi Jones, who has been on Broadway before in American Idiot and Passing Strange. The young star has made a name for herself by taking on interesting roles in genre-busting productions. Paper magazine said that Jones was "the girl to call when there's a cooler-than-thou musical in town." She's also the first black woman to play Yitzhak in a major production, a smart choice for a show that plays heavily with fluid identities and cross-casting.

VICE spoke with Jones to hear more of Yitzhak's story and find out what it's like to be the first black woman in this role.

"As a brown person in America—well, and everywhere—you feel your brownness and your blackness even when other people don't realize they're being offensive or hurtful." —Rebecca Namoi Jones

VICE: So tell us about Yitzhak, and why does he stay with Hedwig?
Jones: Yitzhak is a guy who has big dreams, and loves beautiful things. He wants to love and be loved, to be cared for. Unfortunately, he's been through a lot in life, in his own country and in order to flee that country. He has made really difficult choices in order to survive, and those choices involve him suppressing his own desires, his own beauty, and those finer things that he has inside him.

Hedwig is the reason Yitzhak was able to escape Croatia. Hedwig made a deal with Yitzhak that he would suppress those things so that Hedwig could be the only beautiful one in the relationship. So Yitzhak has this musical-theater-beauty-glitter-glam loving drag queen inside of him. He stays with Hedwig because it's the deal he made with the devil. It's his only way of surviving. And Hedwig has his passport, so he's really stuck in this abusive marriage.

But he's also found a way to love Hedwig, because it's how he learned to survive. So it's a really complicated relationship, but there is love and an intense sexuality there. It's very complicated, but he's making it work.

What do you think happens at the end of the show?
Hedwig has had this major moment of self-reconciliation. He's shed his many layers of skin, and is allowing herself to free herself. In that, she realizes that she needs to free Yitzhak as well. She gives Yitzhak the right to wear wigs again, and to be his true self, the way that she is allowing herself to be his/her truest self.

Do you think they stay together?
No. I don't think so. I think that they part, but they part in a way that is full of love.

Watch a documentary about a trans soccer team in Mexico:

How do you get into character?
I apply a healthy dose of make-up to create humungous eyebrows, a mustache, and a beard. The make-up helps quite a bit. Once I see myself in the mirror, my face immediately goes into a different form.

The costume is really amazing. It's this extra element to the character that helps so much. I have a chest compression top, and an actual gray fake penis that I wear just because it helps me. I'm aware of it between my legs, and it makes me have a wider stance. And it's something for Hedwig to grab onto in the show. I wear it with a harness belt that the wardrobe people got from a transgender website. And I have big old heavy jeans and a wallet chain and a big old heavy leather jacket and a big tie with studs on it. All these layers help conceal my body and make it feel like it has a much weightier stature.

Once I put the whole many-layered costume on, my body falls into place. My shoulders hunch forward, my chin juts forward, my pelvic area goes forward. So instead of my normal Rebecca lady-stance and lady-walk, I have this angst-y, sullen, broody dude inside of me that just comes out.

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/05/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/26/' filename='rebecca-naomi-jones-is-the-first-black-woman-to-play-yitzhak-in-hedwig-and-the-angry-inch-on-broadway-body-image-1432658583.jpeg' id='60140']

Rebecca Naomi Jones

You're the first black woman to play Yitzhak in a major production. Does your identity change the character, and if so, how?
Absolutely. A lot of the verbally abusive stuff that Hedwig slings at Yitzhak has become, for lack of a better word—or perhaps it's the best word to use—darker. It feels close to home in this sad but appropriate way.

Especially the version of the show John Cameron Mitchell was doing. Already, when Lena Hall was doing the role, there was a whole section where he would say "you're like a self-hating helper monkey." And, you know, the word monkey has been used toward black people in racially-charged, abusive ways for years. There was also one point I was chewing some gum and John's Hedwig would take the gum out of my mouth and chew it himself, and say "Mmm, watermelon." It's stuff that wasn't even on purpose, but when it came out, because I'm black, it had this extra dark layer to it.

With Darren [Criss, who is currently playing Hedwig], it's less dark but it's still there. As a brown person in America—well, and everywhere—you feel your brownness and your blackness even when other people don't realize they're being offensive or hurtful. It's something you feel all the time. It's lending itself to this role.

Were you familiar with the show before? How do you think its reception is different this time around?
I never got to see the show at Jane Street, but I was in love with the movie and I watched it many, many times. So doing this has been pretty exciting. It's interesting now to have Darren Criss be a part of the show, because he brings this audience who loved him on Glee. So I'm seeing all these eyes-wide-open people at the stage door, which is great.

But it's just really cool that they found a way to make this dark, witty, biting piece of theater about a transgender person with a botched sex change a big hit on Broadway. It's making an impact on young people and people in general who have never seen it before, which says a lot about the show as a piece about self-acceptance, redemption, addiction, abuse, and how we can come to terms with our complicated identities and embrace the freak within us!

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.

[body_image width='1024' height='683' path='images/content-images/2015/05/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/26/' filename='blind-in-the-age-of-images-what-its-like-to-be-blind-on-the-internet-body-image-1432654450.jpg' id='60086']

Photo via Flickr user Judit Klein

As Petr Kucheryavyy scrolls through his Facebook feed, his iPhone spews out a string of unintelligible syllables, not unlike the sounds C-3PO made in Empire Strikes Back when Chewbacca screwed his head on backward. The words move way too fast for me to understand, but Kucheryavyy navigates his audio-based internet world with ease. Images appear on the screen, but he doesn't see them: Kucheryavyy's been blind since the age of nine.

"If you go to one of the conventions for the National Federation for the Blind, you'll hear thousands of phones making these sounds," he tells VICE. "Apple has figured out that if they build these things on the front end, and make them accessible, there is a giant community of people who will reimburse their investment."

As Kucheryavyy explains this, a handful of students at the Colorado Center for the Blind (CCB) sit at computers with no monitors, wearing thick black "sleep masks" and headphones. It looks like a scene out of The Who's Tommy, but instead of training to be pinball wizards, these students are learning how to navigate the internet while blind.

They are being trained on the Jaws Screen Reader, which converts words into speech as they use the arrow keys to manipulate the cursor, tapping through button after button on each page. Considering the deluge of information displayed on a given webpage, you can imagine the encyclopedic mass of words they go through just by checking their email, or reading a blog post. In some ways, these programs have been a godsend for the blind, granting them access to a universe of digital information that would've been inaccessible to them on a screen. However, many apps, websites, and social media pages are still not constructed with the blind in mind, and are often incompatible with the programs they use to get online.

For a blind person on the internet, app updates are a source of dread and anxiety.

"Blind folks are always behind on computer technology," says Dan Burke, head of Academic and Youth Services for CCB, in an interview with VICE. "The internet is set up for the click of a mouse, but we have to go about things differently. The DOS-era of computers was great, because the screen readers worked well with the text user interface, but when everything became a graphic user interface, things became dicey."

Kucheryavyy often sings the praises of Steve Jobs for making his products so accessible for the blind. In classic Apple fashion, their products have readers to assist the blind already built in. Jaws, however, is a separate accessory that must be purchased in addition to a computer—it can cost up to $900 and isn't always compatible with all websites and operating systems.

Although Apple is a leader in helping the blind to access the internet today, it was Jobs who pioneered the graphic user interface that made computers more challenging for the visually impaired. Not to mention, he was on a mission for years to eliminate arrow keys—a primary tool for the blind—from all Apple computers. At the same time, Jobs had always been enamored with computers that could talk, evidenced as far back as the first Macintosh unveiling in 1984, where the computer introduced itself to the audience.

In 2007, when the iPhone first dropped, the blind community was locked out of the explosive smartphone trend, because the touch-screen was entirely sight-based. Previous cellphones always had a braille button on the center key, but the smooth glass surface of the iPhone left blind users with no way to navigate the device.

In response to an outcry from the blind community, Apple created the text to speech program VoiceOver for the iPhone 2, which has gone on to be one of the most celebrated tools for blind internet users, transforming the company from a target of criticism into a pioneer for accessibility. Apple now has accessibility tools on all of their devices, included at no extra charge. Though these features have earned praise from Stevie Wonder and the American Federation for the Blind, they are far from becoming a universal standard of blind technology.

RELATED: Watch VICE's documentary on Carey McWilliams, the first blind person in the USA to acquire a concealed-carry permit

"Jaws for Windows is made by Freedom Scientific, and they're by far the most popular screen reader, probably 70 to 75 percent of the market," says Chip Johnson, a technology instructor at CCB. "You can run into problems with Mac because app developers don't always follow accessibility guidelines. Just because you have speech software, doesn't mean that everything is going to be accessible. Sometimes you'll buy an app and it will work great, but then you update it and the voiceover can't read anything on the screen."

For a blind person on the internet, app updates are a source of dread and anxiety.

"With every other Facebook update, I can't use it," says Kucheryavyy. "And it can be days, weeks or months before they fix it. The other night I needed an Uber at 2 AM, but the app wouldn't let me use it until I updated it, and once I did it was inaccessible. It happens frequently."

With Facebook, blind users will often find themselves switching back and forth from a Mac with VoiceOver, to a PC with Jaws, to a smartphone mobile app, trying to find one that is compatible, in that moment, with the latest updates. Kucheravyy says he goes through this same process with LinkedIn, where one portion of the website works on a PC, and others work on his iPhone. Then there are portions of LinkedIn that aren't accessible on either one.

"We're in a time period where you're going to see more of a push for Americans with Disabilities Act standards to be applied to the internet," says Kucheravvy.

Enacted in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibited a number of discriminations against those with disabilities, thereby forcing all retailers to make accommodations for the blind (and others) inside their stores. The internet was hardly the place of commerce in 1990 that it is today, so there was little foresight given to extending ADA standards onto the web at the time.

That began to change in 2006 when the National Federation of the Blind sued Target because their website wasn't accessible to the blind. One of the plaintiffs in the suit cited a common problem with websites that aren't compatible with screen readers, saying that when he tried to click on a Dyson vacuum cleaner he was looking to buy, the reader described the product as "Link GP browse dot html reference zero six zero six one eight nine six three eight one eight zero seven two nine seven three five 12 million 957 thousand 121."

The case was settled two years later, with Target agreeing to pay $6 million to the plaintiffs, alongside $3.7 million in attorney's fees.

In 2010, the NFB and the American Council for the Blind represented a student from Arizona State University, who sued the school over a pilot program involving the use of Kindle e-book readers in the classroom. The Kindle did have an audio function that translates text to speech, but in order to activate it, the user must first navigate a series of visual-based menu options. The lawsuit was settled with no damages or attorney's fees sought by the plaintiffs, and Amazon promised to make the Kindle more accessible to the blind.

"Technology has been terrible for personal socialization. You get this environment on the street where [people] don't communicate with you." —Chris Parsons

"For a long time the unanswered question has been whether websites that operate as businesses but don't have a physical store—like Amazon—are the kinds of businesses that the Americans with Disabilities Act can address," says Mark Richert, Director of Public Policy for the American Foundation for the Blind. "In the Target lawsuit, the court said that anything that you can do online that you can also do in the store, that's the extent that the website must be accessible to people with disabilities. And anything [outside of retail] need not be accessible."

Richert also cites a case against Netflix wherein a federal judge ruled that the web-based company was legally bound to ADA standards, as well as a California state law that offers no distinction between physical and internet businesses when it comes to disability laws.

"With Netflix and the iPhone, those are mostly for fun, where things get a little more sober is when it comes to Health technology," says Richert. "If everything is online, and visually impaired people cannot access or use their [healthcare websites], then they can't read their health records, or manage their health insurance, or communicate with their doctor. These are pretty significant barriers."

Throughout my time at the Colorado Center for the Blind, independence was a subject strongly emphasized by every instructor I talked to. Being able to navigate the world on your own terms is essential to building confidence in the blind. At CCB, students work with power saws, cook large meals, and are dropped alone in unfamiliar parts of Denver, expected to find their way home by only asking one person a single question, without the aid of a smartphone.

[body_image width='1000' height='714' path='images/content-images/2015/05/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/26/' filename='blind-in-the-age-of-images-what-its-like-to-be-blind-on-the-internet-body-image-1432655067.jpg' id='60093']

Technology can help the blind, but it's also disconnected us from the human interactions and cues that helped the blind navigate the world. Photo via Flickr user Sascha Kohlmann

"Some people have low expectations of blind people, and are surprised when we can feed ourselves, or get on the bus," says Burke. "They think blind people are unaware of their environment, that because you can't see things you're therefore lost. But the best way to come to terms with being a blind person is to know that you don't have to change your life. You may not be able to drive a car, but it doesn't mean you can't go downtown, or work in a job that forces you to rely on technology."

"I've noticed that some blind people depend on their iPhones a lot," says Chris Parsons, a technology instructor at CCB. Parsons often warns her students not to become too dependent on smartphones, since the apps can at times be unreliable, and because some students will use voice to text messaging and not bother to correct the inevitable errors of the words.

"Technology in a way is a beautiful thing for blind people because we get a chance to access a computer, or scan paper and read documents [through optical character recognition software and text readers]," says Kucheryavyy. "But on the other end, we're suffering because the people who are using the same technology are distancing themselves in a personal way, in my opinion. Technology has been terrible for personal socialization. You get this environment on the street where they don't communicate with you, if somebody is walking toward you, a simple 'Hello, good morning,' that would allow a blind person in a noisy environment to navigate around you. But we don't say hi to each other. We're so busy on our phones."

Follow Josiah on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='952' path='images/content-images/2015/05/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/26/' filename='life-is-changing-for-californias-migrant-sheepherders-body-image-1432655454.jpg' id='60094']

Photo via Flickr user montanapets

I am sitting in a restaurant called the Wool Growers in Bakersfield, California, where a framed photograph of a sheep wearing a newsboy cap hangs on the wall opposite me. Its gaze makes me deeply uncomfortable as I cut into my lunch: a lamb chop. I can't remember the last time I had lamb and I definitely don't remember it being this good, and this is the problem currently facing California's sheep industry.

While pork is the other white meat and beef is what's for dinner, lamb has never had a marketing campaign to drive consumers to the grocery store. Last year, the average American's lamb consumption dropped below a pound per person, the lowest since such meat consumption has been recorded. It is a fact of which my lunch dates—Melchor Gragirena, owner and manager of El Tejon Sheep Co., and his wife, Karen—are intimately aware.

Bakersfield is a part of California's Central Valley, or what many know as the brown-beige expanse that one must drive through to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It's charming , in a Steinbeck kind of way. The flat valley, with its proximity to the Mojave desert, allows for easy trailing of livestock up to the neighboring Sierra Nevada mountain range, and the seasonal winter rains mixed with the warm dry summers mean that alfalfa and wild grass are almost always available for grazing. While far from California's most beautiful vista, it's a landscape ideal for agriculture, livestock, and the certain type of lifestyle that accompanies the two.

Melchor is a spry 70-something who speaks with a thick Spanish accent and talks about sheep with a passion usually reserved for politics or football rivalries. (In fact, the only thing that rivals Melchor's enthusiasm for sheep farming is that for his forty-five year marriage to Karen which, in Melchor's words, "is the best thing that ever happened to me.") At the age of 19, he came to the United States from the Navarra region of Spain. His father had recently passed away and, after seeing neighbors from his village successfully make the trek to Bakersfield, Melchor decided to do so himself in order to save money and buy his mother a house. He arrived in Bakersfield on October 27, 1961, and, as he remembers, "The next day I was a sheepherder."

Pride of ownership, the appreciation for a hard day's work, reverence for the land: It's all there in Bakersfield's sheep herders, tenants of the American dream.

Sheep herding came to Bakersfield the same way Melchor did, by way of the Pyrenees Mountains. The Pyrenees are a mountain range that make up the natural border between France and Spain, an area also known as the Basque Country. The Basques are a small ethnic group that boasts surnames with an impossible number of vowels and a seemingly inherent proclivity for livestock care. In Bakersfield, the sheep industry is closely tied to the Basque culture.

As with most migrations, ethnicities prefer to move to areas previously settled by those they know. So, the same way the Italians settled the Bronx and the retired took to Florida, the Basques flocked to the Central Valley. When Melchor arrived in Bakersfield, the majority of the sheep herders were Basque, with each sheep herder being placed in a "sheep camp " with a bundle of sheep for company. When imagining a sheep camp, picture a wooden tractor trailer with only a bed, single-burner stove, small storage space , and a retractable table. Hygiene was understandably lacking. Camp tenders would travel to each outpost with water, groceries and a contractual weekly two-gallon allotment of red wine.

[body_image width='1024' height='680' path='images/content-images/2015/05/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/26/' filename='life-is-changing-for-californias-migrant-sheepherders-body-image-1432655668.jpg' id='60096']Carrizo Plains. Photo via Flickr user Mikaku

The sheep herders came from the old country on the recommendation of fathers, brothers, in-laws , and neighbors, with some eventually going on to start sheep companies of their own. The first paycheck Melchor received was for $180 from the sheep company that he now runs. He proudly recalls, "The first check I ever got had the name El Tejon on it."

But, since Melchor's initial paycheck, the landscape of the sheep industry has changed. "Every sheepman is getting older," Melchor explains. "Even the young ones are old, now." A large danger to Bakersfield's sheep industry is that those who had dedicated their life to its continuation are aging out, and there are few replacements.

While talking over coffee, Frankie Iturriria, president of the California Wool Growers Association and manager of I&M Sheep Co., reiterates this threat. "I think the biggest thing is you are not having a lot of young people come back into this industry." He continues, "The kids are growing up and going to university and once you get your degree there is not a lot people that want to come back to the sheep business." A graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Iturriria just happens to be one of the people.

Iturriria's father, Paco, came to Bakersfield from the Basque Country, starting as sheep herder and then going into business with one of his brothers to start I&M. He explains that, in his experience, the sheep farmers do not expect their children to take over the family businesses, and that sending their kids to college is a major point of pride for many of the sheepmen. All three of Melchor's children graduated from prestigious California schools, and he is quick to talk about their successes, all which lie outside the sheep business.

Iturriria says that California has gone through prolonged droughts before, and he's confident that he can make it through the months and years of pitiful rainfall.

But Iturriria knows that tending sheep isn't for everyone, especially under current conditions. The sheep business has been in some amount of decline since the 80s. By both Frankie and Melchor's count, the number of sheep in Bakersfield's Kern County have decreased from roughly 150,000 to about 25,000, currently. The reasons for the decline span everything from the strength of the US dollar to desert tortoises.

Sure, Americans are also eating less lamb—and a lot of the lamb they do eat comes from outside the United States. Australia and New Zealand produce the majority of lamb that the United States imports, and imports make up nearly one-half of all lamb consumption. Iturrurua explains: "This year the dollar is strong so they can come in here and undercut our prices." Even after being shipped across the world, the Aussie and NZ lamb is still cheaper than domestic, including the cost of production. Australia and New Zealand have large, open expanses of land that can hold a lot of sheep and require few sheep herders to watch over them. In California, land has always been a sacred commodity.

Traditionally, sheep graze in Bakersfield and the surrounding foothills until the beginning of spring, when the sheep herders make the 45-day trek through the Mojave Dessert up into the Sierra Nevada, where the sheep do much of their feeding and are sheered for wool. The sheep are then sheared for wool, just in time for it to be deftly woven into a J. Crew pullover for Christmas. But due to the expansion of home developments and oil production, the grazing lands are shrinking. Sheep are required to stay a certain distance away from all farmlands growing leafy greens, for fear of E. coli.

Swaths of land are also set aside as protected habitat for endangered species that have a predisposition for respiratory illness. There are the California bighorn sheep that contract a pneumonia that is carried by domestic animals, or the endangered desert tortoise that often get respiratory infections. The later ailment is not directly associated with sheep but, when trailing through the Mojave Desert, the sheep are at risk of disturbing the tortoise's habitat. So the sheep are trucked from one acceptable grazing area to another, which Iturriria admits "is easier on the sheep and on the people. It's just different."

For more on California, check out our series California Soul:

And then, of course, there's the drought.

California's water shortage has been well documented in media, often portrayed in apocalyptic terms alongside scary statistics. Here's one more: For all of 2014, Bakersfield's Kern County only received slightly under seven inches of rain, and this winter has been the third driest on record for the state. The lack of rain equates to less growth for grazing, and for many sheep farmers this means reducing the size of their flock or seeking out external, often costly, sources for feed. "They either want you to cut back your time of use or they want you to cut your numbers back," Ithurriria explains. "They" are the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the land in the Sierra Nevada that many of the sheep farmers use for feed. But Iturriria says that California has gone through prolonged droughts before, and he's confident that he can make it through the months and years of pitiful rainfall.

When hearing Iturriria talk about his work, it all sounds very romantic—again, in that Steinbeck kind of way. Pride of ownership, the appreciation for a hard day's work, reverence for the land: It's all there in Bakersfield's sheep herders, tenants of the American dream. The day I sat down with Iturriria, his father, now 81 and still in the sheep business, was taking the day to make the eight hour drive up into the mountains, to Bridgeport and back, to check on the feed. "It's a love of the livestock and lifestyle," Iturriria tells me as his reasoning for staying in the sheep industry, even after he outlined the numerous external and internal threats to his chosen profession. "You are just forced to be a little more creative."

In fact, while we drank our coffee, Iturriria's 2000 ewes were grazing Carrizo Plains at one of the nation's biggest solar farms, clearing away grass from underneath the panels. Two types of farming: One so antiquated it holds biblical importance, the other distinctly of the 21st century.

Follow Mia on Twitter.

[body_image width='708' height='1000' path='images/content-images/2015/05/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/29/' filename='francis-and-the-kegs-body-image-1432931093.jpg' id='61419']

[body_image width='708' height='1000' path='images/content-images/2015/05/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/29/' filename='francis-and-the-kegs-body-image-1432931103.jpg' id='61420']

Check out Gregory Mackay's website and Tumblr.

For at least the next 200 years, weather forecasts predict shitstorms, with global temperatures now set to remain elevated for hundreds of years to come. The latest IPCC report explains that our emissions are nearing the point of no return. Even if industrialized nations switched to solar power overnight, it is now too late to fully reverse the planet's course.

Geologists have officially termed this new epoch, where the human species has irreparably shaped earth's geological history, the Anthropocene. Policymakers no longer have the luxury to decide how we might "stop" global warming. Instead, we have to figure out how we'll manage amidst climate instability.

With a dark future ahead comes a new set of existential questions. What do present generations owe those in the future? Should we value only what affects us as humans? Is there value to nature, or a culture, in its own right? Since Western economies were responsible for the rise in temperature to date, should they bear more of the burden for stopping it in the future?

Underlying the technical answers of scientists, economists, and politicians are some of the deepest moral dilemmas—problems that philosophers have been grappling with for centuries. "These issues of justice are brought into bold relief by climate change, but they are still traditional ethical questions," Lawerence Torcello, a philosopher who researches the moral implications of climate denial at the Rochester Institute of Technology, explained in an interview with VICE. "How should we live? That's as pressing now as ever. How are we going to live in the Anthropocene?"

Unlike other paradigmatic moral problems, there is no single individual intentionally harming another in the case of climate change. As the philosopher Dale Jamieson and othershavewritten, our moral judgments are more likely to fail in precisely these situations: where the connections between our bad behavior and the harm it causes are indirectly linked. In the case of invisibly emitting greenhouse gas, there is no single moment of pulling a trigger, nor is there a single smoking gun. The problem's global scale, complicated causality over space and time, and long-term effects is what the philosopher Stephen Gardiner has in mind when he refers to climate change as "a perfect moral storm."

What is it going to mean to love a place when it is no longer there?

Such a storm has led philosophers to call for new ethical framework around the issue—one that will ideally have political influence. "We need to start thinking in terms that we're just not used to thinking of as a human species," Torcello said. "We need to start thinking that things like driving cars and turning up our thermostats are harming people that haven't even been born yet."

Dale Jamieson, a founding expert in the field of climate ethics and a professor of environmental studies and philosophy at NYU, was one of the first people to argue that to live well in the Anthropocene requires the adoption of new values, or what he calls " green virtues." He sees temperance—which he defines as living moderately with relatively low consumption—as key. Another necessary virtue, Jamieson says, is mindfulness, which is the understanding that "when you bring something into your life, you see yourself as taking cradle-to-grave responsibility for its whole lifecycle." As in, every product you purchase will eventually have to go somewhere, if you discard it. And then, of course, there's the desperate need for more cooperation. Jamieson recommends that cooperative political measures be taken quickly to eliminate coal and put a price on carbon.

[body_image width='2048' height='1363' path='images/content-images/2015/05/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/26/' filename='philosophers-react-to-the-impending-anthropogenic-apocalypse-body-image-1432651977.jpg' id='60030']

Photo via NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center

Virtually all philosophers agree that developed countries should take the lead role in bearing these costs, while less developed countries should be allowed to increase or maintain emissions for the future. Yet, as Jamieson and others well know, no international mitigation and abatement efforts have been taking place on a large enough scale to freeze emissions. The source that provided the most new energy to the world economy in 2013 was, perversely, coal. Our increasing understanding of the damage caused by fossil fuels runs parallel to an increase in carbon emissions worldwide.

Economist turned Oxford philosopher John Broome sees this failure of intense geopolitical cooperation as a classic "tragedy of the commons": Each country will act within its own interest, which is always to emit. Broome explained to VICE that George Bush's refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol expressed "the bald truth": Countries are not going to do anything on behalf of others that requires them to sacrifice their own interests.

One the largest questions about climate change concerns our responsibilities to future generations. Some economists have argued that future generations will be better off, and therefore better equipped to pay environmental costs themselves, while others, most notably Nordhaus, have argued that waiting costs not only the present generation, but also the future. Broome has worked to demonstrate that in asking humans to weigh what they value the most, these economic arguments are, at heart, ethical decisions.

"It's the nature of climate change to inflict damages on a large part of our society and on humans who don't exist yet." —Dale Jamieson

This need to account for an unknown future population is part of what makes climate change difficult to square with traditional understandings of individual morality and global justice. One study shows that more than 60 percent of Americans believe that climate change will harm future generations, but only 38 percent believe it will harm them personally "a moderate amount." Jamieson explains that democracy, as it now stands, is not adequately equipped to represent the interests of future generations. "Everyone likes to talk about the future but there's a present generation narcissism that always goes on," he added, noting that conversations around intergenerational justice point to how "badly equipped the present system is to protect interests that go beyond an electoral cycle. A well-functioning democracy ideally represents everyone who shows up. But it's the nature of climate change to inflict damages on a large part of our society and on humans who don't exist yet."

Jamieson, who started working on environmental ethics in the early 1990s, notes that as climate change transitioned from a theoretical problem to be avoided to a full-blown disaster, the questions posed by philosophers began to change. "Once that happened, you found yourself in a world where you needed to think about the fact that different places in the world have different levels of emissions. How do we adapt? Who pays for this adaptation? What does it mean to live a human life? What about animals? What about endangered species?"

For more on climate change, watch our VICE on HBO episode on Greenland's melting glaciers:

Broome says the recognition of the inevitability of crisis has led philosophers to take a more "pessimistic turn." The titles of their books have likewise registered the dark mood, like Tim Mulgan's Radical Hope and Ethics for A Broken World: Imagining Philosophy After Catastrophe and Jamison's Reason in a Dark Time.

Broome noted that his own approach to publicly discussing climate change has evolved. He's realized that any statements he makes about "how we should live as individuals," ended up distracting people from their governments using powers to prevent people from emitting. "I used to say you should have a zero carbon footprint that you can achieve by offsetting," he said, "but that's not how you're going to solve climate change if the government doesn't make judgments on that behavior." The aim is not to discount what he calls private morality––refusing to fly on planes, for instance, could show the government that people care—but to ensure that public morality is mandated. But he notes that even government coercion can fail.

So if all else fails, it's possible that we'll be turning to philosophy for one of its oldest promises: to teach us how to die. "We're facing the most difficult problem that humanity has ever faced, and we're in this post-Enlightenment period where we've never been less confident of our ability to make decisions for the better." This crisis of meaning tends to get neglected: "What does it mean to live a meaningful life in a world where you and your kind have eliminated all wildness and forms of life from the planet?" Jamieson asked. "It's a philosophy for trying to keep the world from going to hell."

Follow Ava on Twitter.

On June 1, VICE on HBO is screening our upcoming segment, "Campus Cover-Up," about sexual assault on college campuses at the George Washington University. After the screening, host Gianna Toboni will interview Senator Claire McCaskill and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand about the issue. If you're in the DC area, RSVP for the event here.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/5Wbk0WrM78c' width='100%' height='360']

If you can't be there in person, we still want you to participate—we will be livestreaming the event at 7:50 EST on Periscope and featuring questions from our readers. Tweet us questions you want answered using #VICEonHBO and we'll pick a handful to answer on the livestream.

To learn more about how to prevent sexual assault from happening on college campuses, go to the official It's On Us website and follow them on Twitter.

Watch VICE Fridays on HBO at 11 PM, 10 PM central, or stream it via HBO Now.

[body_image width='603' height='783' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='welcome-to-the-fiction-issue-2015-body-image-1433125729.jpg' id='61577']

Cover photo by Paul Mpagi Sepuya

We were walking to a Starbucks after jogging our cream-colored labradoodle at the park near our home in Kansas City, Missouri. Our conversation turned from the fit of a pair of slacks we'd bought at the Saks Fifth Avenue outlet store near Schlitterbahn the day before to the introduction for this issue, the seventh annual VICE fiction issue. It is a themeless issue—meaning the stories aren't by people who live in LA, or by women, or all horror stories, or written by writers who have stayed in hotels (all ideas we have employed or considered, and reserve the right to use in the future)—and so we were having trouble introducing it without writing about ourselves. We even argued with each other. We questioned the whole enterprise of writing an introduction.

We tied our dog to the faux–wrought iron fence and came inside to order our two flat whites.

"You changed up your order," the barista said. "Gotta do it. Go hard or go home."

We started laughing. We laughed hard and genuinely. The barista was confused, but gratified, so we didn't tell her the story, which we can tell you now.

Last year we were in Kerala, India, trying to write a piece about Jyotish astrology, handmade jewelry, and surf resort pop-ups. We were staying at a place on the Arabian Sea and hanging out with the other guests—some English, some Australian—who could all surf better than we could. This was partly because we gave up on the third day—we just stopped going out to surf in the morning. One the fifth or sixth day we mustered our courage to try the 6 AM surf again, and were totally wiped out by a wave and nearly crashed into some rocks. Some Indian teenagers sitting on a jetty nearby laughed. To be fair, we were a comical sight. And that did it. "Enough fucking surfing!" we said. But we'd already paid for a month at a surf hotel.

Want more fiction? Motherboard has a whole big thing devoted to sci-fi. It's called Terraform.

Little cultures develop in hotels. At the surf hotel in Kerala, our decision to sleep in was regarded with confusion and discomfort. Some kinder people would say something gentle, like, "Missed you this morning." But others shunned us. Us not going to surf in the mornings was, for some guests, a little taboo. Taboo in the old fashioned sense: shameful, immoral, disgusting.

One guest was in his 60s. He was from Australia. He was a lifelong surfer, and perhaps overcompensated for feeling old (most of the guests were in their 20s) by being the best, most daring, and most tireless surfer. It's fair to say he was reckless. He went out mornings and afternoons. He had expeditions chartered. He rode advanced waves. He wore his wetsuit to meals and told stories of fishing off the nose of his board. One morning, we woke to found a message on the community chalkboard. It read, "Go hard or go home." It was written in the same writing as the name of the older man. We knew it was directed at us. We started to write an answer, then left it alone.

Then, the old Beach Boy zealot cracked his skull open while surfing. He also broke his spinal cord. He lost recent memories. He couldn't leave the hotel early due to complications with his ticket back to Sydney. So for a few days he walked around in a traction brace, with staples in his head, disoriented and frightened. And still, more ardently than before, even, he shunned us.

The night before he left, we passed his note on that damn surfer's announcements and sign-up chalkboard: "Go hard or go home." We picked up a piece of chalk and added the clause "go hospital," so that it read, "Go hard go hospital go home." We walked away, giggling. Then, brave souls that we are, we hurried back and erased it.

We could boil this all down, to talk about the importance of being willing to go to the hospital, in fiction writing, and how it's not so good to protect your image all the time. But maybe it's better just to say we are very happy with and proud of the stories in this issue. We have a great story by Brian Booker, an interview with David Sedaris, limericks by Anthony Madrid. We also have a haunting piece about a serial killer by David Means, and new stories from Joy Williams, Ottessa Moshfegh, and April Ayers Lawson.We have—well, do yourself a favor and read all of them. We hit up our favorite writers, and they came through for us.

[body_image width='1440' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/05/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/31/' filename='amanda-de-santa-and-grand-theft-auto-vs-feminine-mystique-022-body-image-1433100799.jpg' id='61554']

Amanda De Santa artwork for 'Grand Theft Auto V', via Rockstar

It is a common criticism, and a deservedly fair one, that Grand Theft Auto's treatment and objectification of women is pretty poor in a time where women make up over 50 percent of gamers. Anita Sarkeesian is completely right in her appraisal of non-playable women as background decoration designed for titillation. But I'm looking at non-playable characters that aren't just placed as misogynistic power-up fodder. Whatever the encouragement, a game's permission for you to act on such things as exploitation, prostitution, objectification and violent dehumanization isn't a free pass for you to do so. That's your prerogative as a player, or an asshole.

For all of Grand Theft Auto V's lampooning of West Coast/American culture, its obvious pastiches and satirical swipes, there isn't an excuse offered as to why stronger and more realistic/feminist characters don't feature in its world besides all the piss taking. But what if I told you, while it's probably unintentional, that there is one in GTA V, namely Amanda De Santa, wife of Michael De Santa, one of the game's three playable protagonists.

On the face of it, Amanda has led quite a nice life, one of Californian opulence and sunshine with a seemingly endless supply of money to help enhance her wardrobe, furnishings and body. Yet the game's story tries to say that this isn't enough for her. Her husband's inability to stem his early retirement boredom with anything except infidelity, violence and alcohol has led to her own perceived infidelity with a vast array of Hollywood housewife clichés, and turning to shoplifting in order to get any excitement out of life.

Two of those words echo with me: cliché and housewife. And they draw me to a book called The Feminine Mystique. Even if you haven't heard of its author Betty Friedan, you're probably aware of the message of her work thanks to Mad Men character Betty Draper (a name possibly inspired by the writer). It was the very real subterfuge of reversing feminist psychology in the 1950s United States that led to a nation of baby booming housewives. More accurately, it attempted to return women to a domestic role post–World War II, and allow masculine dominance to reign over employment and discourse. An entire generation of well-educated women were successfully coerced in to submissive roles and many became disillusioned with life without being exactly sure why. Friedan called this "the problem that has no name."

Friedan properly realized this problem when she surveyed the women at her college reunion. All of them were educated, yet had abandoned any real drive or desire to forge their own destiny, instead deferring to the search, mostly successfully, for a promising man to have a family with and to live beside as a doting housewife. This reversal of attitude occurred some five years after World War II where women, still full of vigor from the social battles they'd already won, played a vital role in the war effort and became an essential and equal people in American workplaces.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/L2eqwOUogys' width='560' height='315']

Amanda and Michael argue about Trevor showing up, and then do some yoga.

But as the men returned from war and found their places in society threatened, a concerted effort was made to readdress this balance. The US media of the time glamorized the housewife lifestyle, with magazines systematically reducing all of their content to a "Happy Housewife Heroine" theme, turning "career woman" into a dirty phrase. In just ten years, the American media and commercialism had shifted a lot of women to purely domestic positions and, for the most part, they went along with it, falsely considering it their duty. This led to confusion, silent suffering, and depression en masse in women, dismissed with medication and fruitless counseling.

Amanda De Santa, originally Amanda Townley, is quite similar to the women surveyed and studied for The Feminine Mystique: She is coerced in to marital and social solitude, sacrificing independence for security. Her husband's life of crime allowed her to move on from the low-paid adult dancer and sex worker that the game's narrative infers she was prior to Michael's bigger-money mischief. But then, she was suddenly uprooted from whatever life she had made for herself, whatever education or means that she had, and forced to live in witness protection thanks to her husband's FIB (the game's version of the FBI) dealings. So, much like her contemporaries of 50 years ago, she was given no choice but to live as a homemaker, raise the kids, and be happy that her family had all it needed to get by financially.

Watch: The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

Also: Harmony Korine's 'The Legend of Cambo'

Of course, the reality is that Friedan's unnamed problem has affected her. She's found herself rather cognitively in a situation that she never envisioned and, thanks to several years of societal anarchy and marital woe (Michael's psychology sessions provide us insights into his infidelity and alcohol problems, as does Trevor's unreliable narration), she reacts in the only way she knows how, which leads to her and Michael's separation. She enters into affairs with various men who prey on her vulnerability, and goes looking for a shred of independence in the only way she supposedly could with shoplifting, medication and fruitless counseling. She is by no means the perfect housewife that the 1950s America tried to make everyone become—instead, she remains very human.

By now you might be wondering why am I comparing a present-day character to tropes and writings from half a century ago. Surely Grand Theft Auto has just taken a fairly old and tired cliché of a female character and ran balls first into it. This is all just a hackneyed stereotype that is outdated, and the feminist commentators are right to criticize the game's makers, Rockstar, for it. Right? Of course they are, but there are further levels to this. Years of masculine dominance in the public and commercial discourse have bred this subjugation, and it feels like the post-war attitude evident in the States is returning.

Actor Mark Ruffalo (Hulk in the The Avengers movies) recently published a blog post criticizing women who were against feminism. In it he remarked upon women biting "the hand that has fed [them] freedom, safety, and a voice." Ruffalo lists many of the historical events in which women fought for these freedoms. Maybe our live-for-now modern mantra doesn't have the time to look back and realize how different things were not too long ago, or maybe the freedoms achieved inadvertently allow for the choice to not be a feminist. This is not to say that you can't do that and be happy, or that Ruffalo is anyone to tell you otherwise. The freedom of this choice is a freedom in itself, but only if it is a choice, and not just assumed by a cultural rhetoric.

[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2015/05/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/31/' filename='amanda-de-santa-and-grand-theft-auto-vs-feminine-mystique-022-body-image-1433100769.jpg' id='61552']

Tracey De Santa artwork for 'Grand Theft Auto V', via Rockstar

GTA V and Amanda De Santa live in a world of commercial excess and celebrity geared towards the pleasure of men. TV, the internet and years of cultural commentary has informed how she should feel and, much like the 1950s, her choices are only as limited as the media she's consumed in the satire. The advertising has evolved, but the rhetoric remains the same. So what if we try to make an entire gender self-subjugate in order to make more money? Let's light a cigar at the old boys' club and quaff brandy over our discussion of emerging markets while we force your wife to learn 14 different types of yoga in order to achieve an orgasm.

Amanda has her yoga instructor and the knowledge that she can pretty much have anything, but she also realizes it's under the duress of her situation. While you play the game, you do feel sorry for her, but not for the obvious reasons. You feel, as you are intended to, bad about the break-up of her marriage to Michael and the stagnant nature of the couple's lives. But the reasons why this has happened are buried underneath, connected to cultural and social forces that exist both inside and out of the game.

'GTA V''s music is pretty rad, and if it's music you want: Noisey

This is very dependent on how you read the character of Amanda De Santa, and she's obviously written to highlight the calamitous effects on Michael's personal life. However, she isn't the only character that falls into this patriarchal mystique. Her daughter, Tracey De Santa, spends the entire game trying to sexually objectify herself for fame after being actively and continuously encouraged to do so. Franklin's aunt Denise Clinton actively embarks on what is seen as a "new age feminist" discovery, parodying the many suggestions our own print and television media try to impart on women, yet the ends seem more imprisoning than liberating. Debra, a career lawyer whose work involves lots of travel, is constantly perceived to be a controlling and manipulative influence that has emasculated her partner, Floyd Hebert, and is demonized for doing so.

Yet if video games are art then we must be able to criticize and analyze their characters as openly and broadly as books, television or film. Hopefully this can lead to some much-needed debate both, critical and constructive. So in that regard, I'm saying Rockstar have, inadvertently, given us a character that epitomises and highlights a significant, real undercurrent of a society so convinced of its freedom by commercial messaging that it's freely, and dangerously, restricting its own gender equality. Much like Betty Draper, Amanda De Santa could be the most modern interpretation of the problem—not without a name, but rather with one widely forgotten.

Follow Sean on Twitter.

[body_image width='2000' height='1292' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='battle-of-the-beanfield-30-year-anniversary-344-body-image-1433160450.jpg' id='61733']

Police restraining a traveler at the Battle of the Beanfield. All photos by Alan Lodge.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"There was glass breaking, people screaming, black smoke towering out of burning caravans, and everywhere there seemed to be people being bashed and flattened and pulled by the hair... men, women, and children were led away, shivering, swearing, crying, bleeding, leaving their homes in pieces... Over the years I had seen all kinds of horrible and frightening things and always managed to grin and write it. But as I left the Beanfield, for the first time, I felt sick enough to cry."

These were the words of The Observer's Nick Davies, who, 30 years ago today, was one of the few journalists to witness a lopsided clash between 1,300 police and a convoy of new-age travelers congregating at Stonehenge. The event would become known as the Battle of The Beanfield, a misleadingly comical name for what was a milestone in Thatcher's iron-fisted assault on dissent.

[body_image width='2000' height='1238' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='battle-of-the-beanfield-30-year-anniversary-344-body-image-1433160667.jpg' id='61734']

The convoy of travelers making their way to The People's Free Festival

The morning of June 1, 1985. A convoy of around 600 travelers was making its way to The People's Free Festival at Stonehenge, an annual event that had been running since the mid-1970s. Some knew a High Court injunction had been taken out prohibiting the gathering, but no one was stressing. Dubbed the Peace Convoy, the procession of vehicles wound haltingly through idyllic countryside, all swaying wheat, sunshine, and fluffy clouds of hash.

Alan Lodge—a former paramedic in the London Ambulance Service, turned photographer, traveler, and charity volunteer—was used to this shambolic form of locomotion. "A convoy of two or three hundred motors doesn't get more than five miles before something happens and you all have to stop," he tells me.

When the convoy ground to a halt for the fifteenth time, Lodge assumed it was just another flat tire. He got out to take pictures. It wasn't until he heard screams that he knew something was wrong.

"There was shouting and the sound of glass smashing," Lodge says. "A group of coppers were running down the road towards me, smashing windscreens."

[body_image width='2000' height='1280' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='battle-of-the-beanfield-30-year-anniversary-344-body-image-1433161715.jpg' id='61740']

Lodge and his friends jumped back into their vehicles and drove through the nearest hedge. Police followed, eventually trapping a group of travelers in the eponymous bean field. An order was given that all the travelers be arrested.

The tribes were mismatched. On the one side, a newly coordinated police force, fresh from quashing the miners, eager to flex its politically-hitched might. As the Police Review reported a few days later, the operation at Stonehenge "had been planned for several months and lessons in rapid deployment learned from the miners' strike were implemented."

[body_image width='2000' height='1297' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='battle-of-the-beanfield-30-year-anniversary-344-body-image-1433160795.jpg' id='61735']

On the other side, new targets of what the miners called "Thatcher's army": the travelers. "We were weedy little dope-smoking hippies," says Lodge. They were also families.

Sensi was part of the Peace Convoy that day. She was 21, and had two small children in the bus with her.

"We were near the back, but we could hear screams and smashing glass," Sensi tells me. "We drove into the next field. We were chased by the police but we were some of the lucky ones. My friend Sheila was dragged from her bus holding her baby, Poppy. I ran to try and reach her, but I was hit back by the police. We took another lady and her partner into our bus with their two-year-old child. Her partner had been beaten and was bleeding. She was in shock. They'd lost their home that day and most of their belongings."

Related: Do you rave? Then you might enjoy our film 'Big Night Out: Ibiza'

At 7PM, police charged into the field in full riot gear. Chaos raged.

"I was trying to give first aid to people who'd been injured," Lodge says. "An observation I made was the number of people who'd been clouted around the back of the head. They must have been running away. One lad in his early-20s had gone into a bit of a coma and I was concerned about his welfare. He had quite a serious head injury. I went up to a police inspector in the line and told him I'd like an ambulance. We took him out on a stretcher."

In total, eight police officers and 16 travelers were hospitalized. More than 500 travelers were detained, the largest mass arrest of civilians in English legal history. (Few of these arrests resulted in a prosecution.) There wasn't enough space in local holding cells so some people were taken to the midlands, others to the north. Parents and children ended up in different counties, dogs were put down.

[body_image width='2000' height='1297' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='battle-of-the-beanfield-30-year-anniversary-344-body-image-1433160823.jpg' id='61736']

ITN news reporter Kim Sabido, who witnessed the battle, filmed an emotional report, saying:

"What we—the ITN camera crew and myself as a reporter—have seen in the last 30 minutes here in this field has been some of the most brutal police treatment of people that I've witnessed in my entire career as a journalist. The number of people who have been hit by policemen, who have been clubbed whilst holding babies in their arms in coaches around this field, is yet to be counted."

Sabido's report was never broadcast and, he claims, much of the footage shot that day, "particularly some of the nastier shots," subsequently disappeared. Some years later, parts of it were rediscovered and incorporated into a documentary, Operation Solstice.

WATCH ON THUMP - "You Realize You've Never Heard Anything Like This Before:" A Look at the Early Days of Dance Music

Back in 1985, however, most of the media was toeing Thatcher's line: the travelers were a bunch of dangerous, armed anarchists.

An unlikely ally came in the form of card-carrying Conservative, the Earl of Cardigan, whose land the convoy had just left. The Earl followed the convoy on his motorbike and described seeing a pregnant woman "repeatedly clubbed on the head" while vehicles—people's homes—were smashed with hammers by police whose ID numbers had been covered.

When 24 of the travelers, including Lodge, sued Wiltshire Police for assault and criminal damage, the Earl's testimony was key. The right wing press was furious and Cardigan was branded a class traitor (the Telegraph) and "barking mad" (the Times). He later sued every news outlet that had suggested his testimonies against the police were false.

[body_image width='2000' height='1408' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='battle-of-the-beanfield-30-year-anniversary-344-body-image-1433161505.jpg' id='61739']

Seven years later, the travelers won their case and were awarded damages. However, something had been permanently broken.

"There had been an optimism, a way of trying to sort our own lives out," Lodge says. "An awful lot of hope went that day. There was an influx of bad drugs that hadn't been allowed before. Suddenly people succumbed. They sold bits of their bus that had been broken. Vehicles were in a low state of maintenance because of police action, and there was a certain amount of 'fuck everything' attitude. Heroin use and Special Brew use increased dramatically. That's casualties of war right there. It was completely against the ethos of what we were trying to do."

The following year, 1986, the Public Order Act became the first major legislative attack on free festivals and the traveler's way of life. Although the free party scene of the late-80s and early-90s would provide a temporary adrenaline shot, after the Criminal Justice Act of 1994—which give police powers to shut down events featuring music "characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats," i.e. all raves—the way was paved for your V Festivals, "Morning Gloryville" raves and nightclubs that charge £20 [$30] on the door and £5 [$8] for a bottle of water.

It seems unbelievable now that 60,000 people once gathered for a six-week-long free party in the British countryside; getting your rave shut down by police in riot gear sadly seems so normal today. The Battle of the Beanfield was the date that set this all in motion, so if you want to mourn what's been lost, today's your day to do just that.

Follow Frankie on Twitter.

Photos by Paul Kwiatkowski

This article appears in the June Issue of VICE Magazine.

I am trying to think. Sometimes I catch myself saying just those words and just in my head. It seems I got to start everything in my head with something in my head saying I am trying to think. I remember how it begins but can't remember how it ends. Even though it's over now. It don't seem right that it could be over and me back where I've always been not even knowing what it was she gave me or what I should do with it.

Because the bridge is still here and the water and the shack. And though I haven't been to town since she disappeared, I imagine the town's still there too. Her fancy car is still here sitting on the beach, though it seems to be fading, sort of like a crummy photograph. It's a black car but the birds have crapped all over it and it's white now like the sand. Sometimes it hurts my eyes. The chrome catches the sun. But as I say, sometimes I can't hardly make it out at all. It ain't really a car anymore. It wouldn't take nobody anywhere.

What it is I think is that before she came I knew something was going to happen and now that she's been, I know it ain't. She didn't leave a single thing behind. Not a pair of panties or a stick of gum or nothing. Once she brought over a little round tin of chicken-liver patay. Now I know I've never eaten chicken-liver patay so it must be around here somewhere, but I can't find it. My head's fuller'n a tick on a dog. Full of blood or something. And my prick lies so tame in my blue jeans, I can't hardly believe it's even gone through what it's been through.

She was like smoke the way she went away. She was like that even when she stayed. She'd cover me up, wrapping herself around me tight, tasting sweet and as cool as an ice cream cone, smelling so good and working at loving me. Then she would just dissolve and I'd fill right up with her like a water glass. I can't recall it ending, as I say, but I know it's stopped. Black rain at four in the afternoon like it used to be. Black trees and empty sky. And the Gulf running a dirty green foam where it turns into the pass.

But I can think about it beginning. So. That first morning I come back to the shack to get a bottle of beer and there's a big brown dog sitting there drinking out of the toilet bowl. He'd drained it. And looked at me as though it was me and not him that had no right being there. Drained it and sat and stared at me, his jaws rolling and dripping at me. Now, I like dogs all right but I could see this one was a bum. In the Panhandle, I had two catch dogs that was something to watch. Them dogs just loved to catch. They was no nonsense dogs. But this canlicker was a bum. Somebody's pet. A poodle or something. The big kind. Before I got around to giving him a good kick, he pushed the screen door open with his paw and left.

I was so mad. It ruined my beer because I drank it all in one swallow and it was just too hot for that. I got a headache right away. And an ache around my ribs. So I got another beer and drank it real slow, thinking of how I could really cream that dog. I figured I wouldn't hunt him out. I got better things to do than that, I hope. But I'd coax him along and then push him off the bridge and that would be one sorry dog when he finally dimed out. And I was thinking and figuring how to get that brown dog, not even thinking then how queer it was that there should be any dog at all, because I hadn't seen a thing for six months around the bridge or on the beach except wild. And I hadn't seen another person in that time either and then as soon as I remember this, I see the girl walking along the beach with the dog.

She's in a bright bikini and long raggedywet hair and I remember how long it had been since I'd seen a girl in a bikini or any girl at all because my wife had left me a long while ago, even then having stopped being a girl in any way you could think of, and went back to living in Lowell, Massachusetts, the place she come from and left just to plague me. Somewhere, in that town, setting on a lawn outside a factory, is or was a chair fit for a giant's ass. Forty or fifty times bigger and crazier than a proper chair. And she come from that town. And she sold off my dogs to get back to it on a one-way ticket on a bubble-topped Trailways.

I never knew her real well. She wore more clothes, jesus, you'd think she was an Eskimo. Layers and layers of them. I never knew if I got to her or not and she'd be the last to tell me. She never talked about nothing except New England. Everything was better there, she'd say. Corn, roads, and movie houses. The horses ain't as mean, she'd say. The bread rises better up North. Even the sun, she'd say, is nicer because it sets in a different direction. It don't fall past the house this way at home, she'd say. I was a young man then and I never cheated. I was a young man and my balls were big as oranges. And I threw it all away, god knows where. She caught my stuff in her underwear and washed it away in the creek.

When I think about what a honey bear I was and how polite and wonderfully whanged and how it was all wasted on a loveless woman... She had a tongue wide and slick as a fried egg. And never used it once. I guess that's what I was waiting on but I might just as much have hoped for oil in the collards patch. She said she was a respectable woman and claimed to have worked in an office in Boston. But she didn't have no respect for the man and woman relationship and she didn't have no brain. She couldn't bring things together in her head. I'd bring her head together all right if I ever see her again. I'd fold it up for her so she'd be able to carry it in her handbag. Selling the best catch dogs in the State of Florida for a bus ticket.

So. I see the girl in the bright bikini and all I can think of is the old lady. It'd been so long and all I could think of was that witch I once had or maybe never had. I spent all this time here over the water not imagining anything. I just see that when I see the girl. And I got scared. I felt as though I caught myself dying. Like you'd catch yourself doing something stupid.

I walked across the bridge and climbed up into the box and got the binoculars. They belong to the state but they're mine as long as I leave them here. And, I figure, the girl's mine as long as she keeps herself in range. She's walking down the beach, stopping every few yards and squatting down and setting out a stick. She's got a bathing suit on that's like two Band-Aids. Promising but not too promising. She had a knife strapped around her waist and wore a big wristwatch. She also had a notebook.

It wore me out watching her. She'd squat down and write something and then spring up again so graceful like she knew someone was watching her and gave the bottoms of her bikini a little flip with her finger. I watched her for a long time, but she didn't do nothing spectacular. I was real happy just watching a near naked woman move. Every once in a while she'd go into the water and swim out a few hundred yards, that damn dog swimming beside her barking like hell, and each time when she come out it was like that bikini had shrunk a little bit more and she was falling out of it every which way all plump and bubbly white.

I watched her until she got out of sight, around a bend in the beach, and then I started looking at other things. Mess of birds in the mangroves. Mullet boats way offshore. And what I'd later know was the girl's car parked on the hard sand under some cedars. A weird-looking vehicle. I know right away it's from Europe or someplace foreign. A mean car shaped like a coffin. But it reminded me of sex too, you know, though I never seen a machine that reminded me of sex before. But that car set me to feeling things, like the girl, that I hadn't felt maybe never. Though I knew what they were. And it felt so good feeling them.

I finally put up the binoculars. Wiped them off. The glass was getting milky from all the wetness in the air. As a matter of fact, I think they was shot from my never using them, never caring for them at all. Lots of things are like that. Life, you know, it begins to rot if you don't use it. Everything gets bound or rusted up. Tools especially. Gear. My tool. Ha ha.

It worried me a little about the binoculars since they belong to the state. They could hassle me about them. Like they could about the bridge. Because the bridge sure ain't being what it's supposed to be. If a boat ever wanted to come through and I had to wind this devil back I believe it would just fall apart, the whole apparatus, like one of them paste and paper bridges you see blowing up in war movies. But no boats come through anyhow. It just ain't a proper waterway. The channel needs to be redug or a good hurricane's gotta come through here and clean everything out. A pretty beach. Good fishing but no boats come and no people either. Something happened here years ago, I heard. A sickness or something. In the water. An attack or something coming in on the tide. Somebody died or got hurt. You know the way these things are. People remember bad news even though they might never have heard it in the first place.

So the state has let it slide. Though you never know when they'll show up and raise all sorts of hell because things ain't how they want them. But it was them and not me who built this crazy beach and it was me and not them who saw, on my first day on the job, the sign just above them rotting joists around the crank that says caution when installed proper this sign will not be visible.

Well, it ain't my concern. And I'll tell you I never really expect the state to come and hassle me. They know they got a bargain. It takes a special man to put up with living out here. I don't think anybody will come at all. Though I'd been waiting on this girl. It sure is easy to see that now.

So. After she got out of range, I went back to the shack and took a shower. Goddamn frogs come out of the wood and sat there while I did it. Like to have broke my neck slipping on them. Put on clean clothes and cut my nails. Prettied myself up like a movie idol. Had a beer and fell asleep right in the chair in the middle of the day. Which was unusual. And when I woke up it was practically black out and the girl was there looking at me.

She was feeding Corn Flakes to her dog. Piece by piece. My Corn Flakes. She was so brown from the sun, she was shining. And she was so warm-looking that I started to sweat. And she started right in, hardly saying anything but chatting like we were old pals. Then she come over to me and darn if she didn't sit on my lap and blow in my ear. God, she was warm. It was like being baked in a biscuit. And chatting all the while. I'd forgotten, you know, it's a whole new vocabulary with a good woman.

So the first night went by and the sun come out. The dog was still working on his balls over by the sink. And my baby tickled me up with a pink bird's feather. Bright pink like it come out of a cartoon. A roseate spoonbill feather, she said, for her specialty was birds. Ha ha, I said. Because I knew where her talent was.

But she was a nut on seabirds. She talked about them all the time she was frying up breakfast. Eggs and side meat and pancakes. She made up the best plates of food every day she stayed and we fed each other up. But that first day she entertained me... honey and butter dripping all over. Like I had died and gone somewheres a lot better than heaven.

But when she wasn't tending to me and making up inventions, she was always going on about them birds. She had a canvas bag she was always toting around and damn if inside there weren't two dead birds, perfect in every way except for their being dead. She didn't know what kind they was and she was toting them around until she could find a book that would tell her. And there were little speckled eggs in that bag too, no bigger than my thumbnail, with a hole in them and all the insides gone. And other crap she picked up along the beach. And the knives. Dinky little things. She said they was for predators on land or in the sea but they couldn't do no real damage, I told her that. Do in a splinter is about all.

What she was doing with them birds was making a study on how they copulate. And what I learned, I'll tell you, is that them terns are dumb. They don't know what they're doing because all they're really thinking about is making nests and eggs. This is because, the girl said, they don't have the time. Their hearts beat so fast they don't live long and their heads are only full of getting food and keeping alive. But I never seen anything sloppier with screwing. No wonder I never noticed them doing it in other springs. It don't look like nothing at all, not even the big birds, the pelicans and whatever.

But that girl's big pretty eyes would fill up with tears when she talked about them. She told me to respect them because they live their lives so close to dying.

OK, I said. I understood that.

But it's the inventions she made up that I can't quite puzzle out. And she started in on them the first day directly after I lapped up all them pancakes. She never made me pretend to be things I wasn't. Only things I was. But I believe we went through a hundred changes the days she stayed with me. We didn't have costumes or nothing naturally but it was like we were playing other people doing things. Though all the time it was us. I was a gangster and she was the governor's daughter, you know, or I was a bombardier and she was the inside of the plane. Or I was a preacher, maybe Methodist, and she was a babysitter. And even her dog did it because sometimes he was like a whole other object, you know. Or like he became a feeling in the shack and quit being a dog.

She messed up time and place for me. And just with her, I felt I was loving the different women of a thousand different men. We just went on for five days with them inventions and never did the same one twice. She'd go off sometimes in her fancy car, I don't know where. I'd lie there while she was gone, not even able to move hardly nor sleep neither. Lie there with my eyes open, trying to think what was happening, listening to the sound her car made traveling over the bridge, and it was like the bridge went on for miles, it was the only car I'd heard traveling for so long. There were four silver pipes sticking off the end of that car. I never seen anything like it. I was trying to think, but never once did I think about her not coming back. She always come back.

On the fifth day, I went down with her to the beach. First time I been out of the shack. Hotter than a poor shotgun. No wind. We was walking over the bridge to the beach when she said, This isn't a drawbridge. It's a solid piece. There isn't any grid. And so what do you tend, I'd like to know?

Well, of course it ain't a drawbridge. Did she think I'd been here for all these years paid by the country, here every day with no vacation and never no real quitting time without knowing that the goddamn thing wasn't a drawbridge?

I didn't say nothing but just gave her a look telling her that she should tend to what she knows about and I'll tend to what I know about.

The beach was full of eggs. She kept steering me around so I wouldn't step on them. All them eggs cooking in the heat and the birds going crazy over us as we walked along. Diving down and screaming, shitting on our heads. I went down to the water to get away from them. I was still put out with the girl and wasn't paying her any mind. She was trotting up and down the beach, slaving like a field hand, writing things down in her book. Finally she run right by me and fell in the water. Tried to tease me in. Took off her suit and tossed it in my face. Skin there like the cream in a chocolate eclair. But I paid her no mind. That day was so white my eyes ached. I was floating and felt sick. All that sun, it never bothered me before. She come out and sprinkled water all over me from her hair and even that wasn't cool. It was hot as the air. I was mad because I felt she was thinking my thoughts weren't real. But then I said, Come on, I been without loving too long. Because I thought her loving would pick me up. And we went back to the shack, me with my eyes closed and my arms resting on her because it hurt so bad looking out on that day. It ain't never been that bright here before or since.

So we went back. And I was a lumberjack and she was a dancehall cutie. And I was a big black lake and she was a sailboat coming over me. But that night she and that dog was gone.

There are sharks, I know. I seen them rolling out there. And the bars sometimes are tricky. They change. Fall off one day where they didn't the day before. But it don't really seem dangerous here. I just don't know where she went to. Leaving nothing except that car, which like I say is sort of fading out. Rats building their nests beneath the hood. I hear them in it when I walk close.

So it's over but I can't help but feel it's still going on somewheres. Because it hasn't seemed to have ended even though it's stopped. And I don't know what it was she gave me. Maybe she even took something away. And I don't really even know if she's dead and it's me sitting here in the pilothouse or if I was the one who's been dead all the while and she's still going on back there on the Gulf with the birds in the sun.

This story will appear in The Visiting Privilege, to be published by Knopf in September. © 2015 by Joy Williams

[body_image width='1200' height='799' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='human-rights-activists-human-rights-act-protest-842-body-image-1433162586.jpg' id='61746']

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

With the Conservatives riding to election victory largely on the back of fears that Labour would piss tax payers' money up the wall, it's a little hard to gauge how much of a mandate they have for some of their more controversial social policies. Tucked away on page 60 of their manifesto is the line: "The next Conservative Government will scrap the Human Rights Act, and introduce a British Bill of Rights."

The hang-'em-and-flog-'em brigade hopes that this will make it easier for the government to thwart the terrorists trying to blow us up at any given moment, the hate preachers screaming "death to the West!" on every street corner, and the thieves trying to steal your possessions every time you leave the house. Advocates of the Human Rights Act (HRA), on the other hand, reckon that things like "the right not to be tortured," "freedom from slavery," and "the right to a fair trial" are probably worth hanging on to.

On Saturday, some people gathered outside Downing Street to protest the move. There were a lot of Lib Dems, presumably ruing that they were protesting outside Number 10 rather than ruling from inside it, and some socialists and various other campaigners. I went along to ask them what they think of the government's plans and why they love human rights so much. I also took a little white board along and asked people to write their favorite human right on it. Human rights are supposed to be indivisible, but with the government wanting to attack them, who knows, maybe it's time to prioritize.

[body_image width='1200' height='799' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='human-rights-activists-human-rights-act-protest-842-body-image-1433162257.jpg' id='61741']

Charley Hasted, student

VICE: You seem not to have chosen a favorite human right for the white board.
Charley: No. My degree is in human rights law, so I spent three years doing nothing but studying human rights, and they're all so lovely.

They are. But c'mon, what's your absolute fav?
If you absolutely pushed me I think I'd go for freedom from discrimination. I'm LGBT, I'm disabled, so it's the right that most crops up in my day-to-day life. I've helped with human rights cases, and when you've got one right being breached, you'll almost always find you've got several more alongside that. You can't just say that one is the essential essence of the HRA.

Do you think misinformation is feeding a disregard for the HRA?
Completely. It's people not understanding that human rights are there for them regardless of who they are. Most of the cases get brought by minority groups: They're brought by disabled people, LGBT people, black people. But that's because you only bring a case when your rights have been infringed. If you're white, if you're middle class, if you're male, if you're not disabled, more often than not, you're unlikely to find your rights are being breached. But that doesn't mean that the rights aren't still there protecting you. It's that right that allows you to go out and demonstrate, it's those rights that give you the right to a fair trial. And you have them, you have those rights, even if they're never breached, they're there protecting you all the time.

[body_image width='640' height='426' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='human-rights-activists-human-rights-act-protest-842-body-image-1433162336.jpg' id='61744']

Charlie Tuesday Gates, an artist from Kentish Town.

If you had to chose a favorite human right, what would it be?
Charlie Tuesday Gates: I love them all—I can't choose! They're too important.

How can humans save the HRA?
We can come together. We need to unite. People are power, and we have to do it together. There's people out there who care, like you—you've just got to join them.

[body_image width='1200' height='799' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='human-rights-activists-human-rights-act-protest-842-body-image-1433162282.jpg' id='61742']

Marcus Trower, deputy chair of the National Bargee Travellers Association

Why are you here today?
Marcus: In our organization, we use different rights in order to protect ourselves. One of them is the right to family life. That's one of the things the Tories wish to get rid of. If they do, it means it will be much more difficult for us to send our kids to school and argue for pregnant mothers to be around hospitals. So we wish to have as many tools as possible to protect our lives living on the water.

Do you feel that if the Tories withdraw the HRA, then you would be under threat?
We're under threat at the moment, it would just be another tool gone. We want to keep as many tools in our toolbox as possible. We're not going to stop if they get rid of it. It's our home, we deserve to be able to have a family and the rest of it. We'll still fight even if they get rid of it.

That leads us on to what you wrote on the white board—the right not to be punished unfairly. Could you tell me about that?
We believe that we're being targeted as people that are traveling, rather than with a mooring. We have so many rules put upon us that we're being targeted unfairly. We don't see it as fair to be able to target a particular minority, and we are being targeted as a minority. We get a lot of shit, and we believe it's unfair.

[body_image width='1200' height='799' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='human-rights-activists-human-rights-act-protest-842-body-image-1433162316.jpg' id='61743']

Jos Bell, chair of Socialist Health Association and health campaigner

Why are you down here today?
Jos Bell: I was invited to come and speak in my role as chair of the Socialist Health Association. I've been involved in health campaigning in London and nationally now for several years, throughout the last government my time was taken up with the Health and Social Care Act [which critics say will lead to the privatization of the NHS]. My role is health and well-being. I think an attack on the HRA is an attack on everybody's health and well-being.

Aren't the privatization of services and human rights two separate issues?
Absolutely not. If you look at the articles that are under threat, it includes the right to education, a right to freedom of expression, a right to be able to assemble and discuss things, the right to freedom of thought. The most sinister statement that has come out of a government in my living memory is David Cameron saying, "For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: 'Just because you are obeying the law, we will leave you alone.'" I found that to be a frightening statement—what does it mean? It must mean that they're going to take away these basic principles that have underpinned our society.

Another human right campaigners want recognized: the right to a safe period. Watch our film about how the government imposes a five percent tampon tax —'The Luxury Item'

We have to explain to the public what this means to their individual lives. Will their child be entitled to an education? Will they be entitled to find and have a GP? That's becoming increasingly difficult. Will the NHS Constitution stack up in law?

You seem quite frightened.
I am. This is the UK, we're supposed to stand up. The Magna Carta and human rights legislation we developed over time is something that we should be immensely proud of. And we should be proud of the NHS. The government we have now are hell-bent on destroying that.

[body_image width='1200' height='799' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='human-rights-activists-human-rights-act-protest-842-body-image-1433162405.jpg' id='61745']

Jon Warner, Campaigns Officer, TUC

So why is freedom of expression your favorite right?
Jon: I'm a law student, and us lawyers, we like fiddling around with the convention rights, and Article 10 in particular. I also believe it's an important right to prevent issues from being censored out and to have people's voices heard.

Do you think there is some strength in the government's argument that it would more effectively curtail people who are preaching hatred against Britain?
I don't believe that. I believe it's quite populist, this view that's being espoused by the government and I think it's quite dangerous for people to be misled into pandering to it. I don't believe the view that's being espoused—that the HRA is nothing more than a "charter for criminals." There's nothing that says you need to let them off. It simply offers basic protections to a person in the justice system.

Thanks, Jon.

Follow Will on Twitter.

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/05/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/29/' filename='rip-streatham-megabowl-the-sad-story-of-a-long-goodbye-998-body-image-1432909454.jpg' id='61350']

The Streatham Megabowl. Photo by Ashley Clark

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I was recently confronted by a grim surprise while scrolling through my Facebook news feed: an artfully composed snap dated May 11, 2015, depicting the demolition of the Streatham Megabowl building.

This once thriving two-story entertainment hub—a bowling alley, video-game arcade, fast-food joint, bar, hangout for scamps, laser tag, and occasional punch-up venue rolled into one—was situated near the Brixton Hill end of southwest London's Streatham High Road, a.k.a. "Britain's Worst Street," next to Caesars nightclub (also recently torn down, having been defunct for years).

A regular haunt of my childhood in the 1990s, and a place dear to my heart, Megabowl actually closed for business back in August of 2006 after its owners, Georgica Plc, flogged it for redevelopment for a cool £8 million (about $12 million). In an accompanying statement, the company boasted that "considerable progress has been made in unlocking potential redevelopment gains." But such confidence turned out to be misguided at best; this hulking, empty shell lay untouched for the best part of a decade.

[body_image width='640' height='641' path='images/content-images/2015/05/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/29/' filename='rip-streatham-megabowl-the-sad-story-of-a-long-goodbye-998-body-image-1432911103.jpg' id='61369']

The view from behind the demolition, with the front of the building still standing. Photo by Ronnie Hackston

After Megabowl's closure, its continuing presence from the outside was, for this reluctant Streatham nostalgist, oddly reassuring, despite being a depressingly wasteful monument to hapless civic planning. It was also ghoulish in an off-season Overlook Hotel kind of way. Yet, even in its unloved state, the building—with its strange blend of Doric columns, un-illuminated neon signs and graffiti-scrawled steel shutters—emanated a stately air, dating back to its 1932 origins, when it first opened as the lavish 2,341-seater Gaumont Palace cinema. The Gaumont was damaged by a German V1 rocket in July of 1944, closed in 1961 and then reopened as a bowling alley in January of 1962. In 1989, four years after I was born, it was rechristened Megabowl.

So, what made Megabowl so special? What cemented its place in the pantheon of near-mythical hotspots for 90s youngsters alongside Croydon's ill-fated Water Palace, or the Discovery Zone upstairs at Clapham Junction train station (which seemed too good to be true, even when you were scrapping with another child in one of the humongous ball pits)?

[body_image width='1163' height='754' path='images/content-images/2015/05/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/29/' filename='rip-streatham-megabowl-the-sad-story-of-a-long-goodbye-998-body-image-1432911192.jpg' id='61370']

The author in action as a child

First of all, it had everything a kid could want. Bowling was fun, especially the moment you realized you didn't need to use the bumpers any more; or the bit at the end when a staff member printed off your rubbish scores onto a little scrap of paper. There was a cheap fast food outlet, which briefly, excitingly, became a Burger King franchise. And then there was the truly stacked video game arcade, which always made me think of the neon-streaked lair in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, the place where Shredder would secrete his army of dispossessed, impressionable teens. Time Crisis II; Daytona USA; the amazing Simpsons arcade game; the bizarre Final Furlong with its clunky mechanical horses; and the ludicrously violent Mortal Kombat II: Megabowl had them all, not to mention the 2p machines into which you could dispense all of your parents' spare change.

Then, of course, there was Zapp Zone: the tense, Crystal Maze-esque game of laser tag that seemed to take place inside the smoke-filled set of an early Spandau Ballet video. The adjacent upstairs bar would receive parents for a quick drink while we all charged around in the dry ice, pointing rechargeable plastic handguns at each other and shouting "peow peow."

As an all-purpose birthday party venue, Megabowl was a godsend for parents, including my own; we lived just up the road. I probably had eight consecutive parties there, and the routine was like clockwork: a warm-up in the arcade; a couple of games of bowling; a trip up to Zapp Zone (if we were lucky); and then everyone in a pincer movement down to the nearby Pizza Hut to gorge on the buffet and Ice Cream Factory, and hopefully not vomit.

There were some less joyous occasions. I had my own Paul Gascoigne Italia 90 moment when I came down with scarlet fever on my birthday. There were no mobile phones in those days, and it was far too late to cancel, so I experienced the ignominy of being driven past my own in-progress Megabowl party en route to Kings College Hospital. Then, on another birthday—maybe my 14th—I had my brand new Motorola pager (briefly cutting-edge technology) ripped from my belt chain by a light-fingered ne'er-do-well while I overconfidently pretend-ollied on Sega's Top Skater. By the time I'd clambered down, he was dust.

Big fan of arcades, are you? Then you'll enjoy our documentary 'Tracing the History of Pinball from Illegal Gambling to Mac DeMarco:

Most of all, though, Megabowl was special because of its recreational, community centre vibe: a southern Byker Grove minus Jeff, but with added air hockey. It's not like south London was ever crawling with relatively safe, fun spaces for kids to hang out, but Megabowl fit the bill. I remember a happily collegial vibe among the staff, who counted in their midst some genuine characters, including the stalwart security force: the towering, mild-mannered Denver, and the compact, shaven-headed "Bash", whose nom de guerre was not, I suspect, a reference to an aptitude for organising parties. Whenever trouble did kick off, it wasn't long before "Bash" and/or Denver had it on lockdown.

As the years wore on, my visits became less frequent. A couple of quick, cheap games on a Monday before 6:30 PM remained an attractive option, but there comes a time when even the most ardent Megabowl fanboy grows out of having his birthday parties there. The boxy, insalubrious McCluski's Bar was added near the front. It was sparsely frequented by a peppering of grizzled Guinness-nursers by day, and gelled-up, white-trousered WKD-sinkers come nightfall.

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/05/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/29/' filename='rip-streatham-megabowl-the-sad-story-of-a-long-goodbye-998-body-image-1432910115.jpg' id='61361']

Photo by Ashley Clark

Even so, the sheer volume of good memories I associated with the place meant I was genuinely upset when I heard news of its sudden closure in 2006. I was living in America at the time, a little homesick, and so created the RIP Megabowl group on Facebook. Its wall swiftly filled up with rueful reminiscences. What nobody knew at that point, however, was just how long it would take for anything to happen with the venue.

Deal after deal allegedly fell through, to the chagrin of constituents, local business owners and politicians, including Streatham MP and short-lived Labour leadership candidate Chuka Umunna. "Over the last few years, I've lost count of the number of meetings I've had about the Megabowl site, or the number of people I've contacted about the issue," Umunna complained in a blog post in March of 2014. "Local cases, like that of Megabowl, tangibly show how three years of a flatlining economy can impact on an area."

[body_image width='1024' height='682' path='images/content-images/2015/05/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/29/' filename='rip-streatham-megabowl-the-sad-story-of-a-long-goodbye-998-body-image-1432910250.jpg' id='61365']

The empty Megabowl. Photo via 28dayslater.co.uk

Yet, while dead Megabowl festered, it was, brilliantly, used as the venue for at least one illegal rave. Later, its untended innards were documented in a series of evocative photographs by "urban explorers" with monikers like The_Raw and PlapPlap. Among the ruins, stray bowling shoes and dead foxes, the photographers discovered poignant graffiti from staff members: "May this building never be forgotten. Streatham will never be the same again without MEGABOWL," wrote one Lucy Beasley. (In case you were curious, the Megabowl company is now called "Tenpin," and currently only a handful of Megabowl-branded sites remain nationwide.)

A recent breakthrough has has been made, precipitating the demolition depicted in that heart-rending snap above. New developers London Square are promising to replace the Megabowl/Caesars site with 243 affordable new homes, a new play area for children, 3,786 square meters of retail space and, intriguingly, a new community and theatre space, all with a rumored completion date of 2019. (You can see the developers' full plans for the site here.)

READ ON MOTHERBOARD: Take a Photo Tour of Long-Forgotten Soviet Russian Arcade Games

These changes are in keeping with the gradual developments in Streatham's make-up, like the 2013 re-opening of the ice rink and leisure centre at the other end of the high road; or the transformation of the old ABC cinema into a gym and luxury flats. Yet, while Streatham has ostensibly avoided the aggressive gentrification of near-neighbour Brixton, house prices have in fact increased by almost 64 percent since 2010. One therefore wonders how "affordable" these new accommodations will be. Time will tell, but whatever happens, the genius mind behind Grand Theft Auto: Streatham Hill Stories (which is a real thing that exists) will have some updating to do.

Thankfully Megabowl's Grade 2-listed facade will remain – presumably without the enormous 36 LANE BOWLING CENTRE legend – yet the rest of its destruction brings with it a finality: a full-stop to a hitherto curiously unfinished chapter of my childhood. I suppose when it comes to these sorts of things it's best to move on. Change is, ultimately, preferable to stasis. But if this latest development doesn't work out, I have an idea. Why not simply bring back Megabowl and Zapp Zone? We can all make a collective promise to each other to pretend that a long decade of wasted space and pointlessly lost jobs simply never happened. And then we can all start shooting each other again with plastic laser guns. Peow peow.

Follow Ashley on Twitter.