On Saturday, the Washington Post published an article announcing that, as of Friday, American police had killed 385 people so far this year. On Monday, the Guardian published a similar feature titled "The Counted," which also included police killings that didn't involve firearms for a grand total of 467.

Whatever the number, it definitely seems like American cops have been killing people, many of them black men, at an alarmingly rapid rate. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Walter Scott. The names are familiar to most of us by now—but hard data on police killings has always been hard to come by, because, incredibly, no government agency keeps track of those numbers.

On Tuesday morning, as if directly responding to the avalanche of reporting from major newspapers, Democratic senators Barbara Boxer and Cory Booker announced a proposal that would force all law enforcement agencies in the country to report every police killing to the Department of Justice. The senators also want info on race, age, and gender to be gathered, among other details.

The only question, of course, is why they aren't doing so already.

In an interview with VICE, Jon Swaine, the Guardian reporter who headed up that paper's project, applauded the Boxer-Booker proposal as a way to bring about transparency. "It doesn't seem likely to happen on its own," he said. Legislation does seem to be necessary, so we think it's a good step."

"We realized pretty early on that no one had collected the extent of the data we were trying to collect and that surprised [us] a bit," Steven Rich, database editor for investigations at the Washington Post, added in an email. "The biggest issue is that there's no simple way to do this."

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The two data sets have been mined for countless revelations already. More than 80 percent of the shooting victims, by the Post's count, had some kind of weapon. But put another way, 49 of the people shot to death this year by cops were completely unarmed (another 13, like Tamir Rice, were holding toys.) African Americans, the Post found, were killed at least three times as often as any other race after accounting for census numbers on population in any given area.

These tragedies will always spark outrage no matter what the data show, but reporting on police killings has historically made it impossible for the press to put them in context. That has been true whether claims are coming from protesters or a police department.

The existence of racial bias has been obvious, but without numbers, demonstrating its scale proved an incredible challenge.

Now we have those numbers, at least for this most violent of years. (The Post reported that the 385 people shot in the first five months of 2015—more than two per day—is more than double the rate reported by the feds over the previous decade.)

The Guardian's "The Counted," with its adjustable, filtered viewing modes, is an incredible resource as well. For instance, their numbers show that Oklahoma law enforcement has killed the most people per capita—22 in a state with a population under 4 million. We can also see that at least one person this year has been killed by cops in every state except North and South Dakota, Vermont, and Rhode Island. In addition to geography, the deaths can be arranged by factors like age, race, and cause of death.

[body_image width='946' height='446' path='images/content-images/2015/06/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/02/' filename='we-finally-know-how-many-people-police-have-been-killing-what-took-so-long-493-body-image-1433224170.jpg' id='61967']

Photo courtesy of the Guardian

Frequently, the Guardian offers a photo of each victim, arranged into a kind of grim calendar. The Washington Post, on the other hand, personalized their numbers by including the disjointed narratives of a few dozen incidents, superimposing events like the tragic final moments of a patient with mental illness next to stories of bona fide police heroism.

Since the US Department of Justice doesn't keep track of police killings, it relies on law enforcement agencies to report their own numbers. Before he stepped down, Attorney General Eric Holder told the press in January that this was "unacceptable." He complained that the Justice Department doesn't have "the ability right now to comprehensively track the number of incidents of either uses of force directed at police officers or uses of force by police."

Instead, we've had the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, which offers a small amount of help to data-hungry journalists. Their most useful publication has been the UCR's justifiable homicide numbers, which, again, are self-reported by cops around the country. These tend to be way behind—currently only counting up to 2013. To make matters worse, they include only those homicides deemed appropriate within the scope of the law, meaning a huge, and previously unknown, percentage of the picture has been left out. (And as the Wall Street Journal reported last year, even when it comes to so-called justifiable killings, police departments leave a healthy number out of their federal reports.)

Consequently, the FBI data revealed an average of about 400 deaths per year over the previous decade, according to the Post's calculations. Somewhat alarmingly, these new numbers reveal that there were around that many just in the first half of 2015. Part of the discrepancy stems from FBI's focus on "justified" deaths, but how big a part that plays is tricky to decipher.

"The trends that it purports to find and show are just completely meaningless," Swaine said of the UCR. "We don't know whether it's actually gone down when the figure has gone up, or vice versa."

For instance, the death of Walter Scott in April, an incident in which the officer shot the unarmed man repeatedly in the back, is unlikely to ever show up on a list of justifiable homicides given that the officer who pulled the trigger is being charged with murder. Thus, it most likely won't appear on the FBI list.

"The rate of participation [by local police with the UCR] has been falling steadily for years," said Jeffrey Fagan, a law professor at Columbia University in New York, before suggesting that the entire system of self-reporting is flawed.

"What are the incentives? They might be political," Fagan said. "A local police executive who wants the information to be publicized maybe? I don't know the incentive structures."

When reached for comment, the FBI pointed VICE to comments by Director James B. Comey who, like Holder, has publicly criticized the lack of data. He recently said that during the Ferguson protests last year, he asked his staff for a report on the number of police killings, but "they couldn't give it to me, and it wasn't their fault."

FBI spokesman Stephen G. Fischer wrote in a follow-up email, "We actually have several initiatives underway to improve the collection of crime data. One is to encourage agencies to submit data to the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Another is a proposal before our Advisory Policy Board to expand data collection efforts to include nonfatal shootings by law enforcement in the line of duty.

"But remember," Fischer added, "provision of any data to the UCR program is done on a voluntary basis."

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So two major newspapers are now offering up the data analysis the federal government wasn't able—or willing—to generate on its own. The figures highlight the incredible discrepancy between the number of deaths that have been going unreported in the UCR's justifiable homicide report and the tiny number of cops who face criminal prosecutions. The Post notes that less than 1 percent of the 385 fatal shootings in 2015 have resulted in criminal charges for the officers.

That's a total of three.

The Guardian and Washington Post are far from the first to attempt such analysis, however.

"It should be noted that various groups have attempted to track aspects of this in the past and at present," Rich, the Post's database editor told me, without naming names. "They collect varying levels of data, and do various levels of fact-checking." The organizations Fatal Encounters and Killed by Police are credited by both the Guardian and the Washington Post as having taken a crack at this mess. Deadspin launched an effort of its own last year, citing the work of blogger Jim Fisher. There's also a list of law enforcement killings compiled by Wikipedians.

Swaine differed with some of the methodology of Killed by Police in particular. They included car accidents, for instance, which the Guardian ruled out. "If you're stopped for a traffic stop, drive off to escape, and crash into a wall, we don't think that's really fair to include," he said.

But despite the obvious power of these reports, they aren't exactly panaceas. The highly controversial death of Baltimore's Freddie Gray, for example, was left off the Washington Post's list because he wasn't shot.

"It's immensely difficult to define what a 'police killing' is," according to Rich. "With guns it's obvious. With Tasers it can be, too. But it's very hard to make determinations on things like in-custody deaths without a coroner ruling the incident as a homicide. We thought we could collect the most data accurately if we didn't have to get into making determinations." (It's worth noting that the Baltimore medical examiner did, in fact, rule that Gray's death was a homicide right before local prosecutor Marilyn Mosby charged six cops over his death.)

Swaine said the Guardian's list includes any case where it "was clear that police actions had killed this person," which excludes the car accident mentioned above. "Self-inflicted deaths" in the presence of police don't count in the Guardian's list, nor apparently do they count in the Washington Post's version, but this is one of the trickiest areas of all.

"There are at least a few out there where it's unclear if police fired or if the citizen shot him or herself. We left those out unless there was complete certainty that a police officer fired the shot," Rich said.

The Guardian has a similar policy. For instance, the death of Bruce Lee Steward in Colton, Oregon, was officially ruled a suicide by cop, and Swaine pointed out that it "might have been missed or dismissed by other counts." However, he said, "the police shot him, so we decided to put him in our database."

In the end, both lists come with disclaimers about not being comprehensive. "Anyone claiming to be definitive or completely comprehensive is either not telling the truth or has effectively FOIA'd [Freedom of Information Act requested] 18,000 state and local police departments for the data," Rich said.

For his part, Fagan, the policing expert at Columbia, was less than euphoric about the new data sets, even if he sees value in them.

"They've got lots of fancy graphics," Fagan told VICE of the two newspapers' features, before later adding, "They both duplicate the Wikipedia page, and the Fatal Encounters website. Fatal Encounters is really interesting because it gives you a spreadsheet."

Fagan conceded that the Guardian's count was interesting for the simple reason that it includes non-gun deaths, but actually suspects that the Post's shootings-only figures might be more reliable.

"Inherently, the one with non-firearm deaths is [useful]," he said. "But things can happen in non-gun homicides. I'd be more confident from a social-science perspective in the shootings-only database."

Either way, this kind of rigorous numbers-gathering has undeniable long-term potential. The LA Times, for instance, has been keeping careful data on Los Angeles-area police killings as part of their ongoing "Homicide Report" series. In November, an activist scribbled some statistics on a sidewalk saying, "LAPD killed 1 person per week since 2000. 82 percent were black or brown." The folks at Homicide Report were able to check that intel against the cold hard facts, and found that the graffiti was inaccurate, if not absurdly so.

But it takes time and money to keep something like this going. Homicide Report has been in operation since 2007 and undergone vast transformations over that span. These new reports, which will require constant updates from every corner of the US, seem even tougher to maintain, and we already know the Washington Post's list isn't long for this world.

"We intend to continue collecting data through the end of the year," Rich told me.

Maybe by 2016 the federal government will have taken over the job. But even if they haven't, at least there's a framework being laid down by reputable sources for what it means to keep tabs on police violence in America. It's left to the rest of us to figure out what to do about it.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

[body_image width='1600' height='1064' path='images/content-images/2015/06/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/02/' filename='this-town-kinloch-is-ferguson-missouris-post-apocalyptic-neighbor-602-body-image-1433222602.jpg' id='61966']All is not well in Kinloch, Missouri. Photos by the author

Kinloch, Missouri, is an historic place. Located just northwest of St. Louis, adjacent to Ferguson, it was the first city in the state incorporated by blacks. When Theodore Roosevelt visited the local airfield in 1910, he became the first president to take an plane ride on one of those crazy boxy contraptions with bicycle wheels.

But though it once boasted more than 10,000 residents, Kinloch is in danger of falling off the map—literally. A whole grid of streets in the southwest part of town are unlabeled on Google Maps. When you take a real-life trip to visit them, you see power lines and paved streets there, but the homes are now rubble, and wilderness has overtaken nearly everything.

As of the last official US census in 2010, fewer than 300 people populated Kinloch. The place has a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max feel, with vagrants burning fires in bombed-out buildings, crater-sized potholes, and discarded semi trailers. There were once barber shops, chicken shacks, pharmacies, a YMCA, turkey farms, and even a cab company. B.B. King played a club here, called 12 Oaks, before it closed in the 50s. But now, beyond a salvage yard and an auto body shop, Kinloch doesn't have a single business, according to its city manager.

Ferguson is famous for Michael Brown's killing by a white police officer last August, and has subsequently been portrayed in the media as a poor, dangerous, kleptocracy. But compared to Kinloch, it's absolutely thriving with its spas, brewpubs, and manicured medians. Sure, the police there get a bad rap, but some locals say that Kinloch police make Ferguson cops look like social workers.

"They're crazy-ass motherfuckers," says a former Kinloch resident named Gene Lee, who lived here until the nearby airport bought him out in 1996. Today he's working on his truck, alongside a bunch of other old-timers in their friend's yard on Scott Avenue. That's Kinloch's main drag, not far from the Cotton Club, a coffee shop, and a history museum—all shuttered. The yard doubles as a junkyard, strewn with cars in various states of disrepair, old motors, and even a tractor.

Lee says he was arrested the previous evening for dumping trash, but claims he didn't do it. Residents painted a picture of a place where policing was even more out of control than Ferguson. (Kinloch has an annual average rate of 28.9 incidents of violent crime per 1,000 people, according to an April report from the Police Executive Research Foundation—six times the rate in Ferguson).

"They lock you up and tow your car for running a stop sign," Lee's friend CJ Jones said of local police. "Kinloch stopped me more times than Ferguson. Once you get to Ferguson, it's smooth sailing! Ferguson, they have to see you doing something wrong. Here, you just have to come through."

[body_image width='1200' height='798' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='fergusons-post-apocalyptic-neighbor-062-body-image-1433191875.jpg' id='61899'] A mostly abandoned housing project. All photos by the author

Mostly, though, Kinloch is depressing. There's a sign promoting an historic district, but that's just an overgrown wall trumpeting the town's accomplishments, like "First Black-Owned Movie Theater." Across the street, someone decided to build a walk of fame a few years back, and even installed dozens of rectangular placeholders into the sidewalk. The problem is that they're all empty except for one, which celebrates former Mayor Keith Conway—who, in 2011, was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison for allegedly using city funds for stuff like Caribbean cruises and paying his utility bills.

With so much history, it would be a tragedy if Kinloch faded away. So how did a place that was once so thriving become such a disaster? And is there any hope for it?

[body_image width='1200' height='798' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='fergusons-post-apocalyptic-neighbor-062-body-image-1433192587.jpg' id='61906'] This tattered American flag flies above Kinloch's City Hall

Kinloch City Hall and Police Department are now housed in an old elementary school after Robert Hill, a convicted cocaine dealer, purchased the old city hall. (Locals shook their heads at that sale, but it was just another blip in the city's storied history of shady dealings.) I visited the current town hall one recent Wednesday only to find them closed, so I came back later and met with the city manager, Justine Blue.

Wearing a bouffant-style hairdo, Blue looks much younger than her 48 years. She also seems to be the only one who knows what's going on around here. For example, if you send a message to the city's gmail account, she'll answer.

Kinloch has had four mayors in the past five years, and the most recently elected one, Betty McCray, was barred from taking office after being accused of giving out favors for votes. (The alleged voter fraud centered on the charge that non-residents were voting. The case is still working its way through court.)

Believe it or not, squatters make up something of a voting bloc here; they don't leave when their leases end, instead simply continuing to cast ballots. These folks populate the housing projects you see everywhere—one of which is abandoned, and where the uncut grass goes up to your waist—and have a lot of chutzpah. The interim mayor, Evelyn Carter, only comes into the office "when it's necessary," according to Blue.

[body_image width='1200' height='798' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='fergusons-post-apocalyptic-neighbor-062-body-image-1433191963.jpg' id='61901'] Kinloch's historic district

Blue disputes Gene Lee's account that he was unjustly arrested, but admits that local police profile people who drive trucks through town past dark. After all, why else would anyone come through if they didn't have garbage to unload? "We've caught a number of people in the act of dumping," she says. "They come under the cover of night and dump couches, entertainment centers, drywall, you name it."

Trash is undoubtedly a big problem, but like Ferguson, Kinloch has a reputation for recklessly imposing fines and fees to prop up its feeble city budget. Blue provided a copy of the city budget for last year, showing it collected about 16 percent of its $266,000 in revenue from court fees—most of which were from traffic. That's more than would be permitted under a bill recently passed by Missouri legislators limiting ticketing to 12.5 percent of general operating revenue. (The bill received bipartisan support in the wake of a Justice Department's report that found that Ferguson filled its coffers by unfairly ticketing and jailing poor blacks. The bill is awaiting Governor Jay Nixon's signature.)

Blue says she is unconcerned about the measure, as she is projecting Kinloch's ticketing revenue percentage will drop below the proposed threshold this year.

On VICE News: Want to Stop Crime? Legalize Drugs, Says Police Organization

It might seem pointless for a city this size to maintain its own fire department, police department, and city government when it's surrounded by other tiny, cash-strapped towns in the same boat. But that's just the way the dysfunctional St. Louis metro area does business.

Things weren't always this dire in the region: Around the start of the 20th century, St. Louis was the fourth-most populous city in the country. But as blacks arrived during the Great Migration, whites moved to the surrounding St. Louis County, which—for reasons too dumb to go into here—consists of 91 separate municipalities sporting names like Black Jack, Country Life Acres, and Beverly Hills. (Jonathan Franzen has a whole novel that's basically about how the city and county should merge.)

Of those 91, Kinloch might just be the poorest.

[body_image width='1200' height='798' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='fergusons-post-apocalyptic-neighbor-062-body-image-1433192655.jpg' id='61907'] Among the city's woes are people who illegally dump trash.

By the time Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, St. Louis was hemorrhaging residents. Blacks began moving to the north part of St. Louis County—called North County—which kicked off another round of white flight toward distant exurbs. In recent years, this process has been accelerating: Majority white towns become majority black towns in the snap of a finger. At my kid's preschool, I've talked with young, middle-class parents who grew up in North County but wouldn't dream of living there now.

But traditional white flight isn't really the problem in Kinloch, at least not since its white residents broke off and started their own city next door in the 30s called Berkeley. (Blacks had their own school, and racist whites didn't want their taxes to go toward educating black people.) What really sunk Kinloch was when St. Louis began buying up the city's homes in the 80s for a proposed expansion of the local airport that never actually happened. The population has yet to recover from the exodus.

[body_image width='1200' height='798' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='fergusons-post-apocalyptic-neighbor-062-body-image-1433192696.jpg' id='61908'] This housing project has seen several fires.

Still, as grim as Kinloch seems, former residents have fond memories of the place.

"Take the name Kinloch and stop with the first three letters: Kin," says Gene Lee. "We all kin, or close to it." Iconic comedian Dick Gregory is from here (he has a street named for him), as is California Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Hell, the rapper Huey (the "Pop, Lock, and Drop It" guy) still lives here, according to Blue.

CJ Jones says he was run out of town two years ago because the cops hounded him so much. But he remembers a Rockwellian time when "you didn't have to leave Kinloch, they had everything. And I'm talking about the 90s!"

No one's naïve enough to think that era is coming back anytime soon. But Blue and others still invested in the place are optimistic for Kinloch's future, thanks largely to a new, $100 million distribution center for Schnucks, the local grocery store chain, which is set to start construction this summer. Unless you're from St. Louis, you probably haven't heard of Schnucks, but it's everywhere around here. It's somewhat surprising they're moving in so soon after the Ferguson unrest, but it makes strategic sense considering the airport is just on the other side of the freeway.

[body_image width='1200' height='798' path='images/content-images/2015/06/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/01/' filename='fergusons-post-apocalyptic-neighbor-062-body-image-1433192721.jpg' id='61909'] A vacated street on the Southwest side of town

NorthPark, the industrial park the facility will inhabit, hasn't seen much action since its conception a decade ago—in fact, local urban farmers began to raise crops on the land. When the developers showed up, they told the farmers they had to leave but, astonishingly, gave them their own nearby plots, with an irrigation system to boot.

In any case, this grocery distribution center is really happening: Earth movers are moving earth as we speak, and it's expected to bring in about 450 jobs. There's no guarantee Kinloch residents will get them, but, hey, you can't beat the commute. "We have a poor community and many don't have transportation, so they'd be able to walk to work," Blue, the city manager, says. Schnucks has even promised to donate $20,000 annually to the local school district, and since the grocer moved ahead with the project, another tenant has signed up for space in the office park as well.

Kinloch's churches are another source of vitality. People drive in from all over the county to attend the six houses of worship here. One, Devotional Baptist, has been displaced by the distribution center, but will relocate to a prime Kinloch spot on North Hanley Road. "There will be good hope for us there," says Reverend Earbie Bledsoe, who is 80.

Bledsoe is less optimistic about Kinloch itself after living in a nearby town called Robertson, which was thriving and predominantly African-American but no longer exists thanks to the expansion of the airport. (Buyouts were common after former airliner TWA moved its hub to St. Louis in 1982 and air traffic swelled, but when American Airlines swallowed up TWA in 2001, the number of flights declined precipitously.)

Bledsoe suspects that besides filling somebody's pockets, development in NorthPark won't actually benefit local residents.

"I have a farmer's background. Commercial business is like cocklebur weed; once it gets in there, it smothers everything else out," he says, referencing the local plant that can grow six feet tall. Schnucks spokesman Paul Simon had no comment, but referred me to the company's official statement, which quotes St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenge as saying, "I commend Schnucks' commitment to building this facility in Kinloch. It's projects like this that will help revitalize our community."

In his 43 years of preaching, Bledsoe has had a front-row seat to the city's decline. He still remembers a time when black people could safely raise their families here, safe from the racism that surrounded them.

"The police never killed nobody, they didn't have to," he says, referencing Ferguson. "Now, in the black neighborhoods, they just bottle us up to do whatever they want to."

Follow Ben Westhoff on Twitter.

[body_image width='640' height='480' path='images/content-images/2015/06/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/02/' filename='why-are-nigerians-flocking-to-work-in-texas-prisons-603-body-image-1433287405.jpg' id='62451']

John Okperuvwe and his wife Ufuoma of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in Huntsville. Photos courtesy John Okperuvwe

This story was co-published with The Marshall Project.

John Okperuvwe flew from Lagos, Nigeria, to Boston in September 2008 after winning a visa through a lottery run by the US State Department. He spent three days in Boston with a friend, and then moved to Los Angeles, where he knew a pastor from back home. He worked as a security guard at the Staples Center and the city's main train depot, and took a second job transporting blood between doctors and laboratories. His wife and children—they now have two boys and two girls—eventually joined him, and they squeezed into a single room in the pastor's house. In terms of job opportunities, Okperuvwe says, "California was as dry as Africa."

In early 2010, Okperuvwe found a friend from his college days in Lagos on Facebook. He sent a message, and they started chatting. The friend was working in a Texas prison and making good money.

Okperuvwe prayed. He felt he had little to lose, and that March, he found a cheap apartment in Houston and took the entrance exam for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (known locally as TDCJ). He passed easily. In September, TDCJ offered him a job in Huntsville, a town of 30,000, about an hour from Houston, which houses many of the state's prisons and the agency's headquarters.

As soon as he arrived, Okperuvwe discovered that there were lots of Nigerians and other West Africans already living in Huntsville, all working for TDCJ. Some, like him, had brought their families and others were single men living in department dorms. Many, like him, already had college degrees from back home that wouldn't transfer so they were studying at Sam Houston State University, the local college, during the day and working at night.

Okperuvwe had discovered a phenomenon that had already become apparent to prisoners, their family members, and correctional officers: since around 2008, a wave of African immigrants have taken jobs as prison guards in Texas. The exact numbers are unknown—the Texas prison agency does not keep track of the birthplaces of its employees—but prisoners and correctional officers anecdotally ballpark it in the hundreds. Many come from Nigeria, but others hail from Cameroon, Liberia, Uganda, and Sierra Leone. In 2009, the newsletter Prison Legal News reported that at the Ramsey Unit, near Houston, entire shifts were "largely composed of Nigerians."

The rise of African correctional officers is a story of an immigrant community finding an economic niche, but it is also a story of how prisons have shifted from the kinds of places where one makes a career to transient way stations to the middle class. "A lot of these [African] guys I see coming in are going to college and also working," says Lance Lowry, head of the Huntsville local of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents correctional staff. "We see a lot of them leave the agency to make more money elsewhere. There's a lot of turnover."

Over the last decade, Texas prisons have struggled to find employees and keep them. As prisons expanded and incarceration numbers ballooned in the 1990s, many facilities were built in small towns with high unemployment, but then the rest of the economy improved and the state simply could not compete with private industry. A recent boom in natural gas drilling along the Eagle Ford Shale, which stretches across East and South Texas, has brought truck driving and rig jobs to the towns where most of the state's prisons are located.

Harder to document but no less real is what National Public Radio recently termed a "cultural stigma" around guarding prisons. Correctional officers have always suffered from a lack of the esteem Americans bestow on soldiers, police officers, firefighters, and other public servants who risk violent injury and death in their work. The 2015 edition of the textbook American Corrections baldly refers to being a "custodial officer" as a "dead-end job."

This perception has combined with low pay and poor conditions to produce staffing shortages. Over the last few years, understaffing has been reported in numerous state prison systems, including California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Nevada, and Virginia. Texas has more than 3,000 vacant guard positions and has tried to fill them through pay raises, recruiting bonuses up to $4000, and subsidized housing.

Other states with large prison systems and immigrant populations, including California, Florida, and New Mexico, require employees to have citizenship or be in the process of applying. In Texas, job applicants to the prison system only need to be authorized to work in the US. This policy, along with a major metropolitan center of immigration (Houston), a related entry-level industry (security), and a climate not so different from West Africa, have all contributed to the rise of African workers at Texas prisons. An online discussion forum called Nairaland, which has been rated the seventh most-visited website in Nigeria, features a post about TDCJ jobs, which reads, "The State Of Texas is the best Place for you to pick up in life again."

Related: Check out our documentary about Norway's progressive prison system.

The African immigrants working in Texas prisons have a reputation of being strict and serious. Steven Epperson, who served several years at the Darrington Unit, near Houston, describes the African officers he encountered to be "short-tempered and irritated by stupidity and ignorance." Okperuvwe shows flashes of this stereotype—he chuckles while recalling how one prisoner complained to him, "Man, they brought you here to oppress us!"

But as their numbers have grown, cultural tensions have become more noticeable. Some of the Nigerian men initially have trouble taking orders from female superiors. Veronica Williams, an African-American TDCJ employee who attends Okperuvwe's church, says she has seen these immigrants face discrimination and accusations that they're stealing jobs that should go to Americans—particularly in response to a program in which TDCJ hires immigrants on work visas (as opposed to ones who are already in the US). There are less than 50 Africans in this category. In 2009, a Nigerian officer in Huntsville named Marshall Akpanokop was accused of raping and impregnating a female prisoner. He was later proven innocent when a DNA test revealed that he was not the father, but Akpanokop sued the agency, arguing he had been "singled out as the culprit" because "he was a dark-skinned, Nigerian national with an accent."

Such dramatic incidents are rare, but language problems have been a consistent cause for grumbling. Family members of prisoners tell anecdotes about brothers and sons who don't understand the orders given by an African officer, due to his or her accent, and find themselves written up for failing to follow those orders. "The inmates don't know how to comply," says Jennifer Erschabek, who directs the Texas Inmate Families Association and whose son is at the Luther Unit, northwest of Houston. "The Africans think they're resisting, and then they write them up a case... And then other guards have a security issue; when there's a problem, they can't rely on some of the African guards to communicate in a bad situation." Anonymous officers have expressed similar frustrations on an employee blog.

Lance Lowry, the union head, brushes off these concerns. "There are immigrant COs who don't handle the population well, but I've also seen guys from Texas that can't do it," he says. "It's all about the traits you come in with."

Lowry mostly worries that these immigrant workers are particularly vulnerable to exploitation from the agency. Last year, as national anxiety about the spread of Ebola reached a peak, Glenn Beck started to wonder whether African prison guards in Texas might be bringing the disease over. TDCJ started requiring employees returning from a trip to West Africa to take off 21 days—the incubation period for Ebola—with their personal leave time or forgo pay.

Interested in America's mass incarceration system? Check out this VICE News documentary on maximum-security prisons.

One Sunday morning earlier this year, Okperuvwe stood in front of room of several dozen men and women, half in suits, dresses, and big hats, and half in bright African prints and head wraps. He had worked an overnight shift, supervising prisoners as they cooked an early breakfast, but he looked chipper in a black suit, shouting "praise the lord" while his teenage son pounded a drum set and an older man played a snaky line on an electric keyboard. The crowd clapped and danced. Six singers clutched microphones and belted out American Christian rock songs, standing against flashing stage lights and a wall painted to portray an ocean scene.

Okperuvwe became a pastor in Nigeria, and shortly after he arrived in Huntsville in 2010, he started this church, the Rhema International Assembly, out of his family's apartment. It is a branch of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, a revivalist movement founded in Nigeria in the early 1950s. Now housed in a small, undistinguished building within walking distance of the town square, the church has become the "meeting point for all the Africans" who live in Huntsville, virtually all of whom work for the local prisons.

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John Okperuvwe, right, with his wife Ufuoma and their children at church

Okperuvwe himself works at the Wynne Unit, a massive facility that houses up to 2,300 prisoners, where he supervises the kitchen and makes sure the inmates don't steal silverware to use as weapons. He does not love his job, but considers it far preferable to what he did before. Growing up in a small city called Warri, in the delta region of southern Nigeria, and then in Lagos, the country's capital, he farmed and collected money for microbus drivers. In his 20s, he tutored children in chemistry and managed a transport company.

Compared to the alternatives, he says, guarding a prison is a "blessing." Private security jobs like the ones he held before in Los Angeles and Houston start at under $18,000 a year. TDCJ jobs start around $29,000, and feature regular raises, health insurance, paid vacation, and sick days. He can also work night shifts, allowing him to take classes in public health at the local college (he has a microbiology degree from Nigeria, but it is not recognized here).

After delivering his sermon, which was called "The Strategy of Crossing Your Jordan," Okperuvwe took a seat behind his desk in a tiny office in the back of the church. A line of people stood outside the door waiting to speak with him. He has become a kind of therapist, helping church members with the problems of cultural dislocation, including divorce and the lack of a safety net when they are sick or injured. The church owns a van, which Okperuvwe uses to pick up new immigrant families as they arrive in Huntsville to "help them settle down." He has seen them come from New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Michigan, and Minnesota.

It is impossible to know whether Okperuvwe's efforts have caused the numbers of Nigerians and other Africans working in Huntsville to increase, but when old acquaintances reach out on Facebook or by phone, he talks up TDCJ jobs, just as his friend once did to get him here. His attitude toward the agency has an evangelical fervor; there is no trace of a "cultural stigma."

"It was when we came to Texas that we started living a better life, courtesy of TDCJ," Okperuvwe says. "It might not be the ultimate, it might not be the best, but it's a good starting point."

This article was originally published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on the US criminal justice system. You can sign-up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

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James Franco is a man of many passions. He's an actor, a director, a musician, a VICE columnist, and now he's made his first foray into the strange world of children's potty-training videos. Franco is not one to play by the rules. Although most videos aimed at teaching toddlers to poop in toilets rely on catchy songs to drive their point home, Franco just screams in a bathroom while wearing a T-shirt and baby-blue boxer briefs. It's obviously just a spoof on Shia LaBeouf's motivational video from a few days ago, but I can still hope that this is the start of a new phase of Franco's career where he reinvents himself as a child-rearing guru and leads seminars about how abject terror is the only way to teach a kid anything.

Want Some In-Depth Stories About James Franco?

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3. Behind the Scenes of 'Palo Alto'
4. Watch James Franco's Test for a Short Film Based on Faulkner's 'Red Leaves'

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Tourists and locals stranded in Williams Creek. Image via Trevor Wright

Dozens of people have spent the past five days stranded in far north South Australia after heavy rains made unsealed outback roads un-drivable. The remote towns of Marree and William Creek were cut off last Thursday when the Oodnadatta Track, a popular tourist drive, was flooded.

While parts of the track were cleared yesterday, allowing people in Marree to leave, around 40 tourists are still in William Creek. To give a sense of the imposition, the town's off-peak population is ten.

William Creek Hotel owner Trevor Wright told VICE that the tourists, who are holed up in tents or in the local pub, are running low on things to eat. "They're hoping like hell the government will send graders through on the roads, clean it up, and get them out before they get stuck again because a lot of them are very low on food," he said over a bad phone line.

Up until now, the tourists have been living on food they brought for their late autumn camping trips. But with those supplies dwindling, the town has had to step in and help out. Wright's been trying to get supplies flown in from Coober Pedy, but otherwise there's been little help from outside.

"People were using up all of their dry and camp food, and we're seeing what we can come up with for them tonight," Wright said. Although he did add that their water has run out, which means that locals are now sharing their own tanks.

Wright explained people are understandably starting to get freaked out. Most of the tourists are young families with kids and are running out of nappies. Many have now missed days of work, and are struggling to communicate the situation to their employers due to downed lines.

"If it rains again there's going to be a serious issue about getting people out, because it will be over a week," Wright said. "I think what's happened is frustration levels have built up so high that people are looking for answers."

Those answers are hard to come by with the area's lack of mobile phone coverage. Presently they've been given no sense of if or when help will come.

Three and a half hours away in Marree—off-peak population 100—things are looking a little less dire. Marree Hotel manager Phil Turner told VICE that the flooding has eased and the tourists have finally managed to leave. Turner housed 20 stranded visitors in his pub over the weekend, where the scene was a bit more joyful.

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Flooding in Marree from a light plane. Image via Phil Turner.

"We were lucky in that we had three separate groups caught here, and would you believe all of them were musicians," Turner happily reported, adding the group had spent much of the time jamming at the hotel.

At the end of our call, Turner heard the rattling of a road train in the background and told me to listen in. He declared it must have finally started again after being stuck there since Thursday. With a bit of luck, those people in Birdsville will get their supplies.

Both Wright and Turner stressed that the issue isn't just about roads, but about a lack of workable phone coverage to request help. Both men told VICE they've tried to get government attention about this in the past, but feel they've been ignored.

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Marree roads are now accessible. Image via Phil Turner.

"We get frustrated when we're treated flippantly by those in a position to do something about it. But you only have 50 to 60 people here, so you don't rate a mention on the voting scale in terms of importance," Turner lamented.

And as last week showed, without external help a lot of the responsibility falls to locals. Trying to run a tiny town while keeping a room full of tourists calm brings a lot of pressure.

As Wright summarized, "We're basically first-aiders—we're our own little fire brigade. We go and do retrievals, and we do search and rescue, so it is pretty full on."

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The Facebook "real name" problem came to light in October 2014, when Shane Creepingbear, a member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, tweeted that he had been kicked off Facebook (on Columbus Day, no less) for having a "fake name." This wasn't the first time this had happened to Creepingbear, who is, in fact, using his given name for his Facebook profile. It had happened twice before.

"The first time it happened, years ago, I didn't have to do much," Creepingbear told me. "The second time it happened I also didn't think much of it. I just sent them a picture of my state ID. The third time was when it really struck me."

He was in the middle of a Facebook chat, when suddenly it was cut off, and Creepingbear was prompted to "confirm [his] identity."

He started to go through the motions to confirm his identity, but stopped at one message that said "it looks like that name violates our name standards."

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All screenshots courtesy of Tiffany Pathkiller and Shane Creepingbear

At that point, he became frustrated.

Creepingbear took screenshots of what he was experiencing, and posted the photos to Tumblr and Twitter, using hashtags like #racism and #erasure. Media outlets like Colorlines picked up on the story. Eventually, a friend with media connections put Creepingbear in direct touch with Facebook. Facebook corrected the problem for Creepingbear—but not for others. Many people are under the impression that the issue has been corrected because Facebook had technically addressed the issue back in February with a wishy-washy statement that said they had "more work to do." But as recently as this week, Native American users are still experiencing the same problem.

Activists for the #MyNameIs coalition traveled to Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California yesterday, June 1, to protest. They carried signs that bore slogans like "Fake Name Reporting Punishes Identity, Not Behavior" and "Stop Badgering People for ID. My Name Is as Real as Yours." These activists included Native Americans and LGBT people, some of whom have been affected by the "real name" policy as well (drag performers, in particular, have reacted to the policy that requires them to use their legal names).

In a press release, Samuel White Swan-Perkins, one of the event's organizers, pointed out that Facebook was repeating history perhaps without knowing it: "Perhaps Facebook is not aware but an entire generation of Native children lost their cultural names after the Dawes Act of 1887 was implemented... Whatever the name is, it's not for you to question. Natives deserve better treatment, as do our LGBTIQA and other allies."

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Lil Miss Hot Mess, a drag queen and co-organizer of the #MyNameIsProtest, added: "This dangerous and discriminatory policy is yet another indication that Facebook is out of touch with the majority of its users, especially those who fall outside of the company's employee demographics are predominantly straight, white, and male. Whether you use Facebook or not, this fight is about the future of digital culture, including everyone's right to maintain privacy and express their truest selves."

More Facebook grievances: Facebook is suspending prison inmates' accounts. Read about it on Motherboard.

I asked a Facebook spokesperson if they had done anything to address the problem since their "more work to do" statement. The spokesperson told me Facebook is "committed to ensuring that all members of the Facebook community can use the names that they use in real life. Having people use their authentic names makes them more accountable, and also helps [Facebook] root out accounts created for malicious purposes, like harassment, fraud, impersonation, and hate speech. Over the last several months, [Facebook has] made some significant improvements in the implementation of this standard, including enhancing the overall experience and expanding the options available for verifying an authentic name. [They] have more work to do, and [their] teams will continue to prioritize these improvements."

He also told me that "in reference to the expanded options, option three [in Facebook's list of accepted forms of ID] is new." Option three states: "If you don't have an ID that shows your authentic name as well as your photo or date of birth, you can provide two forms of ID from option two [which includes non-government issued ID like credit cards and pay stubs] above, and then provide a government ID that includes a date of birth or photo that matches the information on your profile. [Facebook will not] add the name or other information from the government ID to your account."

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That doesn't solve the problem. Plus, as Creepingbear pointed out, "to 'confirm a name is real,' you have to turn over sensitive personal information (driver's license, etc.) to an organization that has a terrible history of privacy violations and poor information control."

Facebook has a set of internal name guidelines that, among other things, advise the user not to include "words, phrases, or nicknames in place of a middle name." This might be what's causing Facebook to recognize Native names as "not real." But if that's the case, that rule is obviously way too broad. As we've learned, some people have "phrases" in their given names, and it's not a joke or an "account created for malicious purposes." It's just a non-white name.

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Photo by Gareth Gooch

Facebook keeps the details of its "real name" enforcement system closely guarded in an effort to prevent people from gaming the system. What we do know, though, is that Facebook administrators do not go searching for "fake" names. Instead, users report what they believe to be inappropriate names, and the Facebook team then determines the legitimacy of these reports. This means that multiple times, other users reported Creepingbear's name, and multiple times, Facebook agreed with them.

Creepingbear agrees with Samuel White Swan-Perkins that Facebook's policy "supports the narrative of the centuries-long occupation and erasure of native land and culture. Facebook continues to insist that [Native American] names do not meet their name 'standards.' These 'standards' are a direct reflection of what society as a whole deems 'normal.'"

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Watch: VICE News travels to the Navajo Nation to find out how its abundance of coal is affecting the future of the Navajo people.

Indeed, there have been scarce (if any) complaints about the policy from anyone who's not part of a marginalized community. The policy has come under fire before, most famously when it forced drag queens to use their "real names," as previously mentioned. Facebook agreed to work with drag queen activists in order to address the problem, and they appear to have fixed it—for a select group of people. The drag queens in question are no longer locked out of their accounts, nor is Creepingbear and a handful of other Native people who publicly brought the issue to light. But as far as anyone can tell, there have been no changes across the board that will prevent this from happening again.

Dana Lone Hill, a Native American activist, had at one point planned to bring a class-action lawsuit against Facebook. However, Lone Hill was unavailable for comment, and I was unable to find any updates on the lawsuit after February of this year.

Facebook may not have malicious intent behind its "real name" policy, but the breadth of its scope, as well as the language used to enforce it, is exclusionary. They definitely have "more work to do," and that work is acknowledging that Native people—and their real names—exist.

Follow Allegra Ringo on Twitter.

CANADIANA is our new show where we explore the further reaches of our home and native land to find the strange and fascinating stories that make this country unique.

For nearly 250 years, the Canada's fur trade was a thriving industry that played a major role in the creation of the country.

After decades of suffering from an anti-fur image problem, Canada's fur trade has found a new market: thanks to China's booming middle class and Russia's luxury-starved oligarchy, the industry that founded the nation is on a comeback.

In the first episode of our new series CANADIANA, VICE travelled to the Northwest Territories to meet a modern day fur trapper—Andrew Stanley: the Metis YouTube star who's become the unlikely ambassador of Canada's trapping world.

We visit Andrew's remote cabin in the northern wilderness to go full tilt into the Canadian trap life—trapping beavers, skinning an otter, and learning the best way to deal with two frozen 160-pound wolves infected with mange.

Teens with ghastly open wounds. Girls touching themselves while deepthroating bottles filled with a strange fluid. Guys humping inanimate objects in a desolate field. And an old white dude swinging furiously at a piñata. All of this disparate, fucked up imagery isn't from some lost chapter of Naked Lunch. It's Mishka's summer 2015 lookbook.

For their latest collection, the gloriously offbeat streetwear brand teamed up with Miller Rodriguez, the eccentric photographer who goes by the name Pretty Puke and has been flooding the internet for years with images that are titillating, macabre, and darkly funny. Together, they've crafted a grotesque short video and a series of still images that mashup both of their aesthetics into one of the weirdest and most exciting presentations of streetwear we've seen in a long time.

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"That's why this collaboration was so wild," Rodriguez said while reflecting on the new lookbook. "It was two weirdos fucking with each other to create something artistic and something never seen before in streetwear. We just wanted to emphasize that, have fun, and create something all our own."

The collaboration made perfect sense to Rodriguez, who said he has long been a fan of the Mishka. "[They're] unlike other streetwear brands, they are not afraid to make noise. They're offensive but there is an innocence and playfulness to their aesthetic. They had something different to say and I wanted to illustrate that visually."

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Although the short video clip features shots of masturbating youth and badass grandpas in allover print bucket hats and jerseys splayed with Mishka's iconic graphics, it isn't just about getting off and slanging graphic tees. There are deeper things going on in the clip, especially the way it addresses the violence and sexuality inherent in our media.

"The hyper sexualization of the models juxtaposed with the piñata is what makes it uncanny instead of porn. It's definitely a reflection of our culture and the way violence is trivialized. I am not necessarily critiquing. It's more of a reaction to seeing a kids cartoon show, an Arby's ad, then a Grand Theft Auto commercial. We're playing with the tropes of advertising and subverting the traditional viewpoint by showcasing Mishka clothing in this way."

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The lookbook is truly a piece of badass art. If the powerful visuals don't make you want to sport a Keep Watch T-shirt while you fuck a piñata, I don't know what would.

Visit MishkaNYC.com to check out the entire lookbook and shop the full collection.

Mishka Summer 2015 Lookbook Credits
Photographer & Video Director: Pretty Puke
Video filmed, edited & sound design: ODOD Collective

Tyler Ross - DP/Editor
Dave Hung - DP/Special Effects
Cam Smith - AD/Sound Design
Madison Mckamey - First AC
Story Boards/Illustrations: Darin Vartanian
Producer: Andrew Fanelli

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Sabeen Mahmud. All photography by Tonje Thilesen.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

For nearly a decade, Pakistani human rights activist Sabeen Mahmud was the centerpiece of a flourishing counterculture in Karachi, Pakistan. In opening the doors of DIY community space T2F (formerly known as the Second Floor) in 2007, she provided a place for women and men to unfold their creative selves regardless of income, class, or age. But on the night of Friday, April 24, Sabeen was brutally silenced. After hosting a seminar with Baluch political activist Mama Quadeer, she was shot dead on the street outside T2F by two unidentified gunmen. Mahenaz Mahmud—Sabeen's mother, who was with her that night—survived the attack with minimal injuries.

I had originally travelled to Karachi to visit friends and document the underground music scene there. But when I first walked into the T2F conference room in mid April and saw Sabeen surrounded by female associates who all seemed to hang on her every word, in that moment I realized what my story was actually about—the women who make alternative art publicly accessible and freedom of speech possible in Pakistan. In fact, it seemed that much of the underground culture was made possible by the efforts of Sabeen Mahmud.

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T2F café

T2F is situated in a busy pocket of Karachi neighborhood Defence Housing Authorities Phase-II. In the eight years since T2F first opened its doors, it has hosted around 100 events annually, including Pakistan's first civic hackathon in April 2013. Talking with Sabeen in the café that afternoon, I spotted a group of art school girls sipping on their green smoothies and a middle-aged man browsing piles of international newspapers and feminist zines on the bookshelf. AC units buzzed over quite chatter in English and Urdu. On the wall, a poster of a traffic sign read, "Always keep left."

Sabeen rarely moved out of her signature crossed-arm position as she talked eagerly with coworkers Sana Nasir and Reem Khurshid. "At large, our population is quite politically apathetic," she said, frowning. "We've been under a military rule for most of our history, and we haven't really been able to build democratic movements—for a number of reasons. There is a general distrust of democracy." Reem agreed, adding: "The instability that comes with living here contributes to a testament to people's general drive. But despite that, they have the desire and willpower to be creative." As they spoke, I came to think of the T-shirt I saw Sabeen wear in a picture published online, which read: "I think, therefore I am dangerous."

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A few days later, I came back to T2F and found Sabeen talking on the phone. "I don't care if it's the ISI, or whoever it is threatening us. I frankly don't care."

It wasn't the first time T2F had been advised by the ISI—Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence—to cancel an event. But this time it was different. On Facebook, a description of the event read, "Unsilencing Balochistan: Take 2. A conversation between Baloch activist Mama Qadeer, Farzana Baloch, Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur, Wusat Ullah Khan, and Malik Siraj Akbar." The panel had been designed to springboard discussion around the Baloch missing persons—referring to the allegedly hundreds of people from the neighboring province Balochistan who had "disappeared," likely under a forceful act from the hands of Pakistani security and law enforcement agencies. It was—and still is—a very sensitive political subject in both the Sindh and Punjab provinces. The same panel with Qadeer was forcefully cancelled in Lahore, just a few weeks prior to the event rescheduling in Karachi. The cancellation caused uproar on social media, and Sabeen decided to take the risk of hosting the event in her own hands.

On Friday, April 24, 2015, the panel took place as scheduled. A few hours after Mama Qadeer and hundreds of curious attendees left T2F, two unidentified gunmen pulled up to Sabeen and her mother as they were leaving the building. They opened fire. Sabeen suffered serious injury from five gunshots and died on the way to the hospital.

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Mahenaz Mahmudday, Sabeen's mother, after the ceremony for her daughter.

The day after her murder, Sabeen's body rested peacefully in her casket at T2F. She was surrounded by hundreds of friends, relatives, coworkers, artists, journalists, and embassy representatives, who all spilled onto the street outside the community space. After the ceremony, I spotted Sabeen's mother, Mahenaz, sitting on a chair near the entrance. She spoke quietly with Sabeen's close friend, Marvi Mahzahr. A woman checked on her injury, and unwrapped the bandages around her arm to reveal a fresh gunshot wound. Mahenaz seemed unfazed by the pain as Marvi called me over. "You were the last person to photograph Sabeen," she told me.

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Sabeen's body being carried out to burial.

Now, although its leader might be gone, T2F will not cease to exist. Far from it. "Karachi still needs T2F," the community space's graphic designer, Sana Nasir, emphasized to me. "We need it as our haven, untainted by personal agendas and monetary profits. We need this inclusive community space that bridged the gap between people of various social classes. We need this community to grow and explore various disciplines, and not stop at one corner."

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Mourners after Sabeen's funeral.

As much as Karachi needs T2F, T2F also needs the people of Karachi.

Throughout my month in the heavily populated city, I started searching for other important women who represent the future of the community that Sabeen built, and the future of creative independence and freedom of speech. These are the women I met.

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PRESERVING HERITAGE HISTORY: MARVI MAHZAHR

"I met Sabeen at the Arts Council of Karachi Festival three years ago. Of course, like most things in Pakistan, it didn't start on time. I remember her shouting to someone, 'You said that it was going to start at 8:30! It's now 9:30 and my time is very precious!'"

Marvi's mother, a gynecologist turned politician, passed away after a targeted shooting in 1992. She worked closely with the eleventh Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, who the country's first, and so far only, female prime minister. Bhutto became a leading icon for Pakistani feminism after her first election, but was assassinated in 2007.

On her own activism, Marvi says it came from her mother. "Because of our mother, my sisters and I are all very strong women," she says. As a female architect, she explains, "Passing your idea or concept is always a fight, and you're always alone on that table. But women also have their own advantage here, I must say—you do get your way, eventually."

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T2F GRAPHIC DESIGNER AND ILLUSTRATOR: SANA NASIR

"I helped start a design-based organization while I was still in college. Our aim was to create poster exhibits and give 100 percent of the profits from the sales to charity," says Sana. "Our first show was based on the unrest in Gaza, but hardly anyone we knew were willing to give us space to exhibit in. A friend told me he had found a new and unusual space [T2F], and that its owner was willing to let us use it for no charge at all. That was the first time I met Sabeen."

Sana feels like everyone around her "needs to have some sort of an exit strategy now," as opposed to maybe five years ago, when people were "more patriotic, and there were less Taliban influences in the country." Life becomes discouraging, she says, "especially when people get killed. How much can you do when your enemy has actual weapons, and all you have is voice?"

In all the discouragement that the city projects, though, Sana is still optimistic about Karachi's future. "I want to see this place become better," she says. "I know it can, but things might get worse before they get better."

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ILLUSTRATOR: SAMYA ARIF

"The first time I met Sabeen she was really friendly, with contagious humor and a wry smile," Samya tells me. "In a city where there's a lack of mentorship, I knew that she was going to become one of my favorite people."

Downstairs in her room, Samya pulls some large sketches and paintings into the window light. She nonchalantly rolls a joint and shows me a series of drawings of a larger woman from her portfolio. "I modeled these after some photographs I shot of my friend on the beach. She was almost nude, and, you know, you're not supposed to expose any skin as a woman here. These men, these religious guys, were walking on the beach in our direction. I had to hide her behind my shawl and a large rock in the water. Just imagine if they had seen some female skin—a naked leg!"

Samya says her parents still ask her, "Where are you going?" and, "How long will you be out for?" It frustrates her. "To be a fucking 29-year-old and still have to answer those questions is ludicrous."

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STUDENT OF EASTERN CLASSICS: ZEERAK AHMED

Zeerak is, as well as a performer (recording under the musical moniker Slow Spin), a student of Eastern Classical music and has been in school for the last ten years. When asked to elaborate more on her knowledge in the field, she is modest in her words. "It's a lifelong relationship," she says. "Ten years of studying is essentially nothing under my belt. I'm not comfortable saying that I'm a 'classical singer' yet.

She smiles when she recalls her first ever show—at T2F. "Me and my best friend had a growing interest in social satire, street art, and psychedelic content," she says, "and one day found ourselves at Sabeen's house. It was the first time we felt like the adults were taking our opinion seriously."

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FEMINIST ARTIST: HAMIDA KHATRI

"My mom is my role model," says Hamida. "But my father doesn't know about my art. If he saw it, he'd think I was completely crazy."

Her work talks a lot about feminism, she says, "and the internal struggles that a woman faces in her life," particularly, "the issues that are visible for almost every girl in this country. It's not very easy for women here to express themselves, and many aren't as privileged as some of the girls you have met. They come from families where the girls aren't allowed to go outside."

In Hamida's solo exhibition at Karachi's Sanat Gallery in February, one of the drawings she exhibited shows an illustration of a woman screaming in pain, as she is seemingly about to cut into her own breast with a kitchen knife. "Someone I know—a very religious person—told me not to do the show," she says. "But I said, OK, I've read the Quran, I know what my religion says, but, at the end of the day, I need a voice. This is the best medium I have."

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FIGHTING THE INDUSTRY: SEHER NAVEED

"T2F served as a backbone to younger practitioners who were not getting support from other galleries and institutions," says Seher, matter-of-factly. "Cities like Karachi need places like T2F, where there is an open discourse, where one is encouraged to share ideas and thoughts and able to do experimental work." On Sabeen's legacy, she says: "We need more and more young people to be like her, to hold the city together like she did."

Seher explains, interestingly, how comfortable she now is traveling on her own within the city, but that it wasn't always that way. "In school, we were always forced to find alternative ways to travel if we didn't have a car that one day," she says. "So there was something significant about becoming comfortable enough to go out on our own as women.

"When I was studying for my MFA in London, I was pressured by the faculty to do something political, because I was from Pakistan. I have issues with artists doing political work here just for the sake of doing political work, even though the issues don't actually affect them, in any way possible." She also refuses to follow "the road paved by Pakistan's art industry," which she finds compromising in terms of self-expression.

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SCULPTOR: SEEMA NUSRAT

"When I was studying abroad, I felt lost," says Seema. "I realized that all my subjects were here, in Karachi. But I think that the experience of living away from my city made me closer and more observant to Karachi. When I came back from my studies, I saw a drastic change in the city—one thing was these barricades that started popping up everywhere and they started to become a part of the city. There is a power segregation there."

Seema's sculptural work focuses largely on the structural function of an object and its material. In April, she exhibited an outdoor installation at Frere Hall in Karachi, a former palace from the British colonial era in Pakistan. A labyrinth of sandbags made up the complete installation, and the untraditional shape of the stacked bags allowed the material to subvert from its original, political function. "I think those open art discussions at T2F has helped me a lot in my art exposure," she says.

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MULTI-MEDIA ARTIST: SARA PAGGANWALA

"There is a certain amount of censorship that we succumb to, both as women and men," Sara tells me over her desk. "And, you know, a lot of women are already liberated as it is, but it is a different kind of independence. It is stigmatized." Not that she'll ever let that deter her. "I mean, what is stopping you? Is it because a man is stronger than you?"

On Sara's work desk is a small, spinning object, projecting red and green light around the room. Looking closer, the spinning object is, in fact, a picture of Jesus, but on the other side of the double-printed cutout, she has covered the upper body of Jesus with a plastic burka. Sculptures made of various materials hang on the walls, while her work in progress is stored in the corners of the room. She points out one of her more conspicuous sculptures, an origami-shaped sculpture of a woman, made up by dozens of small, geometrical pieces.

"I wanted to work with a transient material," she says. "Something that would transform over time. I guess this piece comes down to the fact that I feel like we're often missing real connections with people. I feel like many people here are very superficial."

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THE WOMAN HELPING ACID VICTIMS: MUSARRAT MISBAH

Musarrat started her career as a beautician, and her first beauty salon opened in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1980. After a few years in the business, her female customers started coming in not just for beauty care, but also for personal consulting. In 2003, something changed. "I was about to leave my office when a young girl in a burka walked into my salon and asked for my help. Underneath the veil was a woman without a face," Musarrat pauses. "She had lost one of her eyes and, instead of a nose, there was a hole. Somebody had thrown acid on her. Soon after, I placed an ad in the newspaper, saying: 'If you're a victim of acid or kerosene oil attack, you can come to my salon and get a free medical check-up.' I arranged for some doctors to come and, the next day, 42 girls turned up."

Musarrat explains that many of the acid attacks happen when "the husband is jealous or suspicious of his wife, or when a young girl says, 'I don't want to get married, I want to continue with my studies,' and that the man then thinks, 'Well, if she can't be mine, she will never be anybody else's.'"

"Today," she continues, "when me and my team hear of recent acid attack on a Pakistani woman, our coordinator will travel there and get in touch with her. We raise money from family, friends, and the public at large to pay for their hospital bills, for the medicine and for the operations needed. At this point, I have 627 girls who are still with me. There's one girl who has become an advocate, there are a few girls who have become nurses and 13 of the girls have gotten married to normal boys." What Musarrat really does, though, although she wouldn't say it outright, is help these women regain control over their lives. She helps them rediscover their pride.

Follow Tonje on Twitter.

Often directors try to spin New York City tales that feel sterile and manufactured—not the sibling directors Joshua and Benny Safdie, whose potent and homespun movies go down easy but are impossible to forget. Their first two features, 2008's The Pleasure of Being Robbed and 2011's Daddy Longlegs concoct an askew, nostalgic, and ultimately humanist comedic sensibility that contains a bygone sense of the lower Manhattan depths. If their wandering and digressive narrative style is any indication, character interests them much more than plot. In Arielle Holmes, the young New York City junkie who stars in their newest and best film, Heaven Knows What, they have found their most compelling character yet. Based on her forthcoming memoir Mad Love in New York City, this stunning new drama explores the circumstances of her addiction, and the emotional manipulation of her lover Ilya, with unflinching panache.

Watch an exclusive clip here:

Earlier this month, we caught up with the Safdies and Holmes in the offices of the Weinstein Company's Radius imprint, which is releasing the movie this week. It's an unusual drug movie, but not without antecedents. Although not as baroque as The Man With the Golden Arm or as self-consciously stylish and tragic as Requiem for a Dream, in its treatment of an addict couple, the film does resemble Jerry Schatzberg's Panic in Needle Park. The immediacy of the performances, however—almost all by non-actors and real-life addicts—set this movie apart.

Holmes, who has already begun acting in other films following the movie's elite festival circuit that saw it travel to Venice and Toronto, New York and South by Southwest, is a tour de force. Her Raphaelite face, shot by Sean Price Williams with a jittery, colorful verisimilitude, gives the movie an urgency even when its focused on folks who have no goals but to get high at the very margins of society. And the film's willingness to find truth is equally unrelenting; where a lesser film would cop out and leave us with a glimmer of false sunshine for its young protagonist, Heaven Knows What uses understatement and irony to suggest just how strong the pull of community is for drug addicts as much as anyone else.

At the Radius office, Holmes and the brothers opened up to me about the politics of New York's Diamond District, addiction, and the death of Holmes's real-life former boyfriend.

VICE: You guys grew up in New York. I'm sure you've seen it before, but was Arielle your entry into the world of addicts?
Josh Safdie: We've had some stuff in our family. Grew up with it genetically kind of thing. It was around.

Benny Safdie: It's not something that's a foreign concept. But the important thing is that's not what kind of drew the project in. Josh saw her...

Where did you meet her?
Josh: I met her in the Diamond District.

While you were researching your next project?
Yeah, for the Diamond District movie we're going to do, Uncut Gems. I thought she was a Diamond-District girl.

Was she? Was she dressed like a religious Jewish girl or something?
No. The Diamond District now is changing. The Hasids have no hold on the Diamond District. Jacob the Jeweler changed the game there. So now there's a bunch of Bulgarian Jews who think they're black and roll around like Jay-Z.

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Arielle Holmes and Buddy Duress in 'Heaven Knows What' (2015). Photo by Oscar Boyson. Courtesy of Radius-TWC

Benny: They want to get in on everybody's Instagram, they want to be cool.

Josh: It's just a different game and all the women who work there are these like Russian kind of ingénues. They're definitely bought and they work there. I thought she was one of them. I thought she was Russian. She was dressed really nicely. And I talked to her and immediately I could tell that she wasn't. Something else was up. She had this thick Jersey accent. I was just like, "What's your deal? You should really be in this movie, but I don't know if you're right for it, but we should hang out and just get to know each other." And then when I met up with her she was dressed like a street kid, and actually it was majorly relieving because I didn't know how long I could maintain my persona, the Diamond-District persona that I was living up, this loaded, throwing-money-at-stuff thing.

And that 's just because you want access to these guys.
Josh: Yeah, you have to pretend. Liam, our producer who produced Heaven Knows What, used to throw money at crazy scenarios. Like, we hired an architect to design an Uzbeki lounge. It was crazy. We told them we dropped like 15 Gs—we actually only dropped like 700 bucks—but it was still $700 on nothing. We had an architect come. We had hard hats at one point. We showed up with hard hats, and I brought a designer through. It was amazing and they were looking at me like, "Who is this guy?" So anyway, so I met up with her and I started talking to her, she told me she lived, I said, "Do you want to meet up for something to eat? Where do you live?" And she goes, "Chinatown." I was like, "Oh, where in Chinatown? I used to live down there." She's like, um, Essex. I was like, "Oh, I used to live on Madison, where on Essex?" "Um, Jefferson?" She basically told me the address of the library, and I'm like, "Oh, right next to the library." And she goes, "Yeah, right next to the library." I met up with her and she just was dressed totally different. She was moonlighting as a dominatrix at a place called Pandora's in Chelsea. You make good money doing that. She was basically supporting her and her boyfriend Ilya's habit.

"A lot of people from the street are usually great actors because they have to act. In that case, the failure isn't a bad review in a movie—it's a punch in the face." —Josh Safdie

Arielle, has making a movie about yourself and then writing about yourself changed how you think of yourself, or of the past?
Arielle Holmes: Well, first it was that, when I first saw the movie, it had been like three months since I had been kind of removed from New York and dope and all that, so that gave me like a new perspective on myself. It allowed me to see things from somebody else's point of view. But it also... I don't know, it kind of just confirms that I can do whatever I want really. [ Laughs] I can do whatever I want in life. I can make something out of everything. I can take shitty things and turn them into something great somehow.

This is was my life. Of course, it was repetitive. You know, I'd wake up, I'd spange, I'd cut dope, that was the routine. But if you look at it, you can say that about anybody. Stuck in routines. You get up, you need to eat, you go to work, you go home. It's repetitive.

You have to have a new strategy every day to score.
You had to see the new problems that would arise, the this and the that. It was so chaotic. At the core of it all, I had to wake up and make this much money so I could cut. But how I did it would be different sometimes.

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Buddy Duress in 'Heaven Knows What' (2015). Photo by Oscar Boyson. Courtesy of Radius

The Caleb Landry Jones character is based on Arielle 's real life ex, Ilya, right?
Josh: Yes. He looked much different. He was really beautiful. He was actually kind of glamorous. He was really beautiful, but he didn't care. He was majorly into metal. He was on the street since he was like 11 years old. I speak in past tense because he died on April 12. It was actually really gnarly. I was with Ari. She was in town between movies, and we were in Central Park and she was like, "Yeah, I tried calling Ilya earlier and he kind of answered, his pocket answered, and I listened and he was being really weird with everybody that day." They found him in Central Park. No one really knows, but it was an OD. The family won't release the autopsy. It was a crime scene because he was found in Central Park.

Benny: Yeah, it was in the papers and stuff because that doesn't happen. I mean, it happens but in Strawberry Fields? To be found with a syringe? You don't see that.

Josh: He had gotten clean. His grandmother who I was in touch with got him, found him, brought him to Long Island where his mom just got out of prison, and was like... Also, the mom is dealing with some major guilt.

Benny: She kicked him out at 11! Look what happened to him.

Josh: We were at the funeral and it was gnarly, man. It was horrible. This woman is so young and his family was small. A lot of people from the Central Park scene were there at the funeral.

"You use the term addict as a label because you don't really understand your problem yet. So you call yourself an addict. But in reality, there's many different issues." —Arielle Holmes

It might not be the best way to process the grief.
Benny: Especially for the family. It was like, what is going on here?

Josh: A lot of people were really respectful, even people who were probably high. But there were one or two people who were just beyond obliterated and they just were not respectful. Ronnie [Bronstein, the film's co-writer] said it perfectly, because his grandfather died of cancer. He was like, "That's like cancer showing up to my grandfather's funeral." One guy [at Ilya's funeral] was like, "This is taking too long!" And like jumped into the mound of dirt and was pushing it into the fucking grave. It was gnarly.

Arielle: I don't believe in fucking addicts.

Benny: I mean, yes and no.

Arielle: There's no such thing as being an addict.

Benny: Really? Why so?

Arielle: It's not the drug you're addicted to. It's something else. It's other issues.

Benny: But it's still...

Arielle: You use drugs as an excuse.

Josh: Of course, it's medicating.

Arielle: You use the term addict as a label because you don't really understand your problem yet. So you call yourself an addict. But in reality, there's many different issues.

Benny: When you get physically addicted to it, that's what that term means, you get addicted.

Arielle: That's a physical sickness. But you don't get physically sick when you're addicted to coke or meth or weed. I mean, you can say that it is all physical you know, even the mental parts.

Learn about the peculiar and troubling side of the for-profit addiction treatment industry:

Did he see the film before he passed away?
Benny: Yeah, he loved it. He was at the New York Film Festival premiere and it was really something special. He sat in front of Jim Jarmusch at the premiere. Jim said Ilya spoke full volume the entire time, and was just like on cloud nine: "That's me, motherfucker!" It didn't matter how he looked at the time. It was like, "I don't care that's me!"

Josh: Beyond that Ilya was super smart and awesome.

Benny: He felt the movie. I wish I got to talk to him more about it, but I remember I had a very brief probably like ten-minute conversation with him a few days after the premiere. He just talked to me about how the movie nailed the feeling of the life. That meant a lot to me.

Arielle: He never talked to me about the movie.

The movie really captures in the most visceral ways the feeling of needing to use, regardless of what we call it.
Josh: We always wanted it to be more visceral. Sometimes when I would be around her, she would go into the junkie terror, which is such a terrible thing to witness and I've witnessed it way too many times in my life, when someone realizes you don't exist and all that exists is the drug, and it would exist in the same way with Ilya. I would see it, and she would get to be a certain way. She would get very manic. Sometimes she would get very loud and manic, but other times it would be bubbling underneath. So for the movie we wanted to externalize it a little bit more, and she knew that, and she'd say, "Well, this isn't exactly how that happened," and we'd tell her, "We know that. But in order to get at what it really felt like we need to kind of change things up a little bit."

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Caleb Landry Jones and Arielle Holmes in 'Heaven Knows What' (2015). Photo by Oscar Boyson. Courtesy of Radius

What was emotion like when you finally saw the movie? Did you guys show her the movie when you were cutting?
Benny: She was seeing scenes.

Arielle: Parts of it.

Josh: Like chunks on her phone or iPad or something. We were editing while we were doing it.

Arielle: Apparently Josh showed me like the final rough cut of it, but it was pretty much the whole thing, in his car with Buddy. But I do not remember that at all.

Josh: This was her. She wrote the book that we adapted, and a lot of her friends are in the movie and in this world. This was her way of basically chaptering that part of her life. Ronnie would constantly text me on set and say, "This girl is acting circles around people." Every movie is different and you'd have to adapt to someone's style. She and I have such a close, weird friendship that I can sense when she's not vibing something and so I know how to kind of move with her and give her stuff that I know will inspire her. Sometimes she would do stuff that she just didn't want to do and even then she would still do it well, which is a sign of a good actor. A non-actor will be given something that they don't feel and they don't feel like they can do, and they just shut down. And she wouldn't do that. She would bring out the street side of her.

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Arielle Holmes in 'Heaven Knows What' (2015). Photo by Oscar Boyson. Courtesy of Radius

Benny: She would do that and we would be able to watch and be like, "That's not as good as what we know you can do.

"

Josh: Do you know what kind of actor she was before I met her? She was working at Pandora's playing characters every single day. Before that she was working for some weird guy in the financial district doing the dominatrix thing except as a house call girl. And she was 17 years old, an underage girl doing it. And even beyond that, many times in her writing, I read about how she hustled someone off the street, pretending to be someone that she wasn't. She was an actress. I mean, a lot of people from the street are usually great actors because they have to act. In that case, the failure isn't a bad review in a movie, it's a punch in the face. You know what the Japanese title of the movie is? Fuck You, God. We didn't come up with that.

Benny: It's actually a good translation in a sense. There it's like, "Fuck you, God, I'm going to take this life and I'm going to live it," or "Fuck you, God, for making me have this life." But they got the energy.

The Safdie brothers' Heaven Knows What, starring Arielle Holmes, opens in theaters this week.

Brandon Harris is a contributing editor at Filmmaker Magazine. His directorial debut Redlegs has played over a dozen festivals worldwide and was a New YorkTimes critic's pick upon its commercial release in May of 2012. Follow him on Twitter.

There's a part of me that's terrified to write this. I'm a singer and a songwriter, and as a female who's not yet a household name, I can't help but feel the familiar, deep-seated fear that being open about this fact will lead to my professional demise. I'm fighting it. Here goes: I'm 27.

I've felt a sense of urgency since I can remember. I can feel it now, I could feel it ten years ago, and I felt it even as a kid. It looms just ahead at every moment, threatening me with its sinister little whisper: You are getting older.

It's hard to say how or why it started. Maybe it's because, as a kid, adults praised my songwriting by telling me how remarkable it was that I was so young. Or maybe it's because so many of the females I saw becoming big stars were teenagers, and it probably didn't help that even the older celebrity faces in magazines were airbrushed into eternal agelessness. Whatever it was, it seemed clear to me that women could only make it in Hollywood if they were not only youthful but actual youth. If I could just make it by 16, I thought, then I'll be OK. But the so-called big break never got the memo.

I finally worked my way into the pop music circuit in my early 20s. Inevitably, in the deluge of meetings that every singer or actor attends over the course of her career, the dreaded question comes up: "If you don't mind me asking," the other person in the room will say, "how old are you?" As 21 melted away into 25, I noticed that the reactions to my always-honest answers were beginning to change. What had at first been encouraging ("Oh, you have plenty of time!") was starting to turn sour: "Well, you look really young" or "You can always lie about your age!" I'd laugh and nod, meanwhile gritting my teeth and praying desperately that I'd find success before it came to that. But I worried. Would I have to?

I started to hear other girls, even those younger than me, speak fearfully about their inevitable birthdays and what they needed to accomplish before they were "too old" to be considered viable in the industry. I heard persistent rumors of certain beloved stars being a few years older than they claimed. I met with agents who remarked on how young I looked and then, in the same breath, expressed concern about me being in my late 20s. I read the smorgasbord of youth-worshipping, age-shaming articles, blogs, and comments that the internet had to offer, and realized the extent to which I, too, had believed that getting older, as a woman, meant somehow being less worthwhile.

On Noisey: How to Turn Your Worthless College Degree into a Job in the Music Industry

Meanwhile, the comments I heard, typically from men, grew more frequent:

"I think her career is just over," said a young executive about a fellow pop singer who was just a year older than me, "I mean, she's like 27 now."

"Well, I'm not gonna beat around the bush," one well-meaning music manager told me. "You don't have a lot of time here."

Another, in our first meeting: "You know you have a limited window of time, right? You need to do this quickly."

Want to feel really old? Watch VICE's documentary about Baby DJ school, where toddlers learn to make beats.

Time. Time. Time. Time.

As if I don't know. As if I don't feel it. As if it's not already beating the shit out of my subconscious. As if I'm not being crushed by the weight of time, every minute of every day. Limited time to write a hit song, limited time to be considered attractive, limited time before my maternal clock kicks in, limited time before, I'm told, I'll panic and feel the need to get married and then suddenly there won't be any time left at all.

You don't have to tell me. I've known my whole life. Every ambitious woman has. Wouldn't it be great if being reminded of that pressure could actually make success come faster? It's a race against time, and yet ultimately, the scheduling of one's big break, if it happens, is not up to you or me or anyone. So where does that leave me? Barring snapping my fingers and having a hit song on the radio tomorrow, what are my choices? Give up? Lie, as so many would have me do? I've wondered: What would it say about me if I hid my age—what would it mean about how I feel about my own value? Or, for that matter, any woman's value?

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The author at a recent performance

In a culture where artists and actresses and writers alike are either fibbing or withholding the truth of their birth dates, because everyone around us is telling us we're only as valuable as we are young, the impulse makes sense. It might mean fewer acting roles, or less interest from labels or agencies, or no longer having a "thing." And that's extremely daunting. But maybe it's only the norm until it's not. Sia and Tina Fey—women known for the merit of their talent rather than the size of the boners they induce (though they're both totally boner-worthy)—give me hope.

Yes, I am getting older. In a few years, I'll be 30, and maybe I'll be tempted to email all the websites that have ever listed how old I am and ask them to erase any evidence that I'm human. Tempted, perhaps, to do my darnedest to make the world believe that I am still young and fresh and sparkly and dumb and infantile and fuckable, available for the defiling, even as my humanity pulls me, faster and faster, into smarter, stronger adulthood. Tempted, as it were, to be a part of the problem.

Except I do believe it's a problem. Time is moving, and it's happening to all of us, no matter how well we conceal the shrinking lips and deepening lines that come with its passage, and what I can't quite wrap my head around is why women are supposed to be so goddamn ashamed of it.

The truth is, I'm thrilled to be beyond much of the insecurity and ignorance of my teenage years and early 20s. I feel beautiful. I'm doing the best work I've ever done, I know more than I've ever known, and I'm excited at the thought that, with every passing year, my work will improve and I'll know infinitely more than I do now. I believe that I am valuable. So why am I, along with countless other women, being told to feel like I'm not? I'm only in my 20s. What happens in ten years? Twenty?

I've been trying to beat the clock for my entire life. I don't want to panic anymore. If I stake my value on surface-level qualities that are fleeting and outside of my control, not to mention representative of nothing about who I am and what I'm capable of, then I have a future of heartbreak ahead of me. I would rather use the precious time I have to focus on creating music and words and art and film that I am genuinely passionate about, and becoming great. The rest is just noise.

Of course I'm afraid, but I'm more afraid of hiding. If I hide, and the problem lives on, and any girl, young or old, has even one more piece of evidence contributing to the idea that she is only as valuable as her youth, or her looks, or her fuckability, rather than her talent, her intelligence, her creativity, or her strength, then I have done the world a great disservice.

I am 27. In a couple decades, I'll be 50. Deal with it.

Follow Lola Blanc on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski

I recognize the absurdity of a dude suggesting everyone leave the toilet seat up.

Decades of Sitcom Dads fumbling at personal awareness and Sitcom Moms upset about falling through the bare bowl in the dark of night have led us to a reasonable orthodoxy: the toilet seat should always be down.

The notion has received a frankly hilarious level of intellectual attention.

In February, Vox summarized several academic hot takes on the matter, with lenses of efficiency (everyone should always leave the seat in the position it was in when they finished using it), physical safety (the seat should always be down), and fairness of incremental labour cost (standing pee-ers should lower the seat exactly half the time), each yielding different prescriptions.

The presumptions are narrow enough to be useless, each hypothesizing a two-person, male-who-stands and female-who-sits coupling, both of whom relieve themselves exclusively within their home.

Though gender is the square peg we habitually apply to discussions of where the toilet seat should live, let's use a more useful distinction here: sitters and standers.

Among those capable of peeing standing up, many choose to sit for a variety of reasons. People who would call themselves sitters or standers each count both female- and male-identified members.

At home, the calculation is pretty simple: don't be gross. At best you'll have to clean it up; at worst the next occupant will (rightly) judge you forever while they're wiping off a toilet seat.

But most public washrooms are a bit different. The toilet stalls inside men's galleys get more use than outsiders would imagine, mostly from standers who decide they can't wait for a urinal to open up. The results aren't always pretty.

Many users of women's washrooms employ a complex, practiced routine to excise any previous occupant's visible or invisible presence. For some valid and many invalid reasons, not everyone is great at taking a concise leak.

Yet the clunky multi-stalled, gendered washrooms we've grown accustomed to (surprisingly recent and decidedly Northern inventions) seem to be falling out of fashion.

Though fixtures of dusty shops and small restaurants for generations, an increasing number of the restrooms we use outside the home are marked as unisex (though I'd argue omnisex is an infinitely better word): typically self-contained, locking rooms available to anyone who wishes to use them. These private lavatories now grace everywhere from bars, to workplaces, to corporate behemoths like Starbucks and Tim Hortons.

As a metric for urban-Canadian saturation, the curmudgeonly Toronto Star picked up on the swell as early as 2011, and the configuration has surged from trend to norm in the half-decade since.

This may be for a number of reasons: smaller commercial footprints with less room for stacked facilities, updated building codes that no longer require gender-separated washrooms or low-barrier efforts to synthesize a laissez-faire social aesthetic.

More substantively, some of this shift undoubtedly reflects an emerging sensitivity to the comfort and security of patrons whose gender identities lie outside the binary. Comprehensive legal protections across the entire Human Rights Act and Criminal Code would be an infinitely better solution, but those are unlikely to come soon: Bill C-279, passed in the House of Commons back in 2013, appears destined to die on the Senate's pre-election order paper.

The shift isn't perfectly utopian. Many lament that these types of facilities often don't include amenities like repositories for menstrual products (in some cases, not even trash receptacles), while multiple-occupancy washrooms, and women's washrooms in particular, have for years functioned as a populated but segregated space for people to quietly escape others they find threatening.

Whatever the reasoning behind the increasing popularity of omnisex washrooms, the effect of these spaces is that sitters and standers are increasingly using the same toilets, and, as such, maybe it's time to consider a different set of rituals than Chandler Bing might advocate.

One idea is pretty simple: When using these universal facilities, the default position for the toilet seat is up.

If it isn't already, standers make sure the seat is up before they perform their horn solo (ideally the seat would already be raised), and leave it there after they're done. It's an easy way to show consideration for the experience of the next potential sitter, and correct for the libertarianism of Stand Paul in line behind them.

Sitters lower the seat (unsullied by the previous stander's four-hour-old Labatt 50) before they begin and replace it when they're done, again minimizing the damage from a subsequent stander and/or providing peace of mind for a less-splashy Sitt Romney (or any other good 2016 Republican bathroom puns, including Rick Can't-pour'em, Knarly Peeorina, Marco Pubio).

It should be lost on no one that this a risk-management model, one where sitters inherit excess labour for the sole purpose of minimizing the collateral impact of those isolated, fleeting moments of perceived dominance when standers decide they can piss wherever they want without consequence. It's difficult not to note how much of our world is structured that way.

An ideal dynamic would have the Stand Pauls of the world instantly gain the contextual sentience to think about the experiences of those around them.

So instead, let's call it hacking: a small, counter-cultural gesture to keep people from pissing all over our toilet seats.

Follow Seb FoxAllen on Twitter.

A drug called Truvada is the first FDA-approved means of preventing HIV infection. If an HIV-negative person takes the pill every day, he or she is nearly 99 percent protected from contracting the virus. Controversy continues to surround the broad uptake of Truvada, but the landscape of safer sex and HIV prevention changes fundamentally from this point forward—particularly within the gay male community, the population hit hardest by HIV in America. In this episode of VICE Reports, VICE explores the future of the Truvada and its revolutionary impact on ending HIV/AIDS.

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Murphy Cooper, seen in a screenshot from his infamous Facebook video.

By definition, a state-owned monopoly doesn't face any competition. So when Quebec vlogger Murphy Cooper invented a fictional rival for the hydro-electric energy service Hydro-Quebec last month, thousands of naive onlookers flocked towards the imaginary alternative, Hydro-Jeanson.

"I've been using this service for the past eight years," he says in a video viewed almost 125,000 times on Facebook, since it was posted on May 21. "And they're great, really. There's no such thing as a state monopoly guys, try this alternative. It costs me only $20 a month." That is compared to the hundreds Quebecers usually pay for their only energy option.

The prospect of a cheaper (though, again, non-existent) alternative was enough to make the hoax go viral. At first, Cooper had just given an email for the service, and was flooded with dozens, then hundreds, of emails from people asking for more information, craving the chance to switch to Hydro-Jeanson.

Hydro-Québec bashing has become somewhat of a go-to practice for many vloggers in certain Québec Facebook communities. People often feel cheated by the service, since its administrators make tons of cash for an essential and monopolized service.

The hoax clearly struck a chord with many Quebecers who were unhappy with their energy service. As the false campaign grew, fans took the initiative to create a logo for Hydro-Jeanson, scan a fake electricity bill and even create a website that is, actually,just a single tumblr post.

"They're all completely independent initiatives." Cooper told VICE. "Even the guy who made the Facebook page. I talk to him, but I don't know him, and I never know what he'll do next."

Cooper was doing very little work on his end, besides the obsessive back-and-forth between fans and the usual haters that show up when someone puts something disruptive on the internet. To some, this endeavour might seem like a monumental waste of time, but according to Matthieu Dugal, web expert and Radio-Canada host of tech show La Sphère, it's part of Cooper's success.

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The Hydro Jeanson 'official' page.

"One of the criteria for web success is authenticity, the proof that you are actually interacting with your fans," Dugal says. "And this guy is clearly one of the best community managers out there."

Cooper has been doing this for a long time. Last summer, he released a faceless video where he revealed that the Saint-Laurent river had been sold to Americans by ex-Parti Quebecois premier Pauline Marois. It went viral.

Every new video and stunt gets him more fans and followers, and some of these people have spread the message of the Hydro-Jeanson alternative knowing very well that it's a hoax. While not all of the sharing can be taken at face value, scrolling down among the thousands of shares reveals that some people really fell into it. It takes about two or three comments though before someone posts the hoax-stopper.

The buck stopped when a blogger called François Charron felt the need to clarify that Hydro-Jeanson didn't actually exist, which is sort of testament to the hoax's virality.

"Everything you need to know about Hydro-Jeanson" the headline reads, explaining briefly how this hydro-electric alternative does not exist.

This single article pops up almost automatically under each new share of Murphy's original video. The general response is, "Yeah, it was too good to be true" or "Haha, I knew it was a joke I just wanted to see who could believe it."

"That clearly put an end to the momentum," Cooper laughs, "but if you look on François Charron's official page, people are still asking for the prices on the alternative, because they don't care to click and learn."

It would be easy to dismiss Cooper's initiatives as attention-whoring or basic trolling, but there's definitely a philosophy behind the experiment.

"First and foremost, it's an artistic process," Cooper says. "I love recreating this sort of accident... I try to create this kind of chaos, but it's not easy."

Cooper wasn't expecting another Saint-Laurent River viral hoax.

"Here I am saying there was never any nationalisation, that there is no monopoly. I'm invalidating the Levesque and Lesage governments that founded Hydro-Québec. These people have access to search engines yet they have no idea that Hydro-Québec belongs to them. I have to say, getting all those emails made me sad," Cooper admits. "Here we are online, we're always up in arms about a lot of things, but there are basic principles so many people just don't understand. This is a state-owned monopoly. Its governance is an electoral issue. And these people probably vote!"

"People ask me if I'm a rip-off. They give me their phone numbers, their addresses. It's incredible how easily people can be fooled."

Dugal suggests this gullibility is inherent online.

"I think it's really revealing of a real-time web-culture" Dugal says. "People have knee-jerk reactions without asking any questions. All they want to do is participate. And it feeds into this fantasy of conspiracy theorists that are craving shaky videos from authentic sources confirming the existence of chemtrails or the Illuminati. Part of the reason why his videos are so successful is that, deep down, you want to believe them."

As for the inevitable haters, Dugal thinks that it's a predictable reaction.

"You have to look at this with a certain amount of respect. He's been working on his character and his vocabulary for a long time. There's an interesting thought process about what's wrong, what's right, and how to fact-check the information that we're exposed to on a daily basis, all the while being critical of things even if they get massive likes on Facebook," Dugal says.

"Even if the guy probably only thinks in terms of Facebook likes."

Follow Joseph Elfassi on Twitter.

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Image via Flickr user Fan the Fire

Doug Ellin and I are eating lunch at Porta Via, a posh restaurant on Canon Drive, in the part of Beverly Hills where it's OK to call something "posh" without feeling all dickish about it. Ellin is the former showrunner of Entourage, as well as the guy who wrote and directed the Entourage movie, which opens in theaters today. I am the guy who just inadvertently caused mass outrage among a group of paparazzi by blocking in a large SUV that was trying to escape with some celebrity in it. Doug Ellin is here with his dog, a rambunctious six-month-old German shepherd named Baron. I am here with my glasses, which have been chewed on by my two-year-old Pomeranian/Shetland mix. He's eating a stir-fry. I'm eating a tuna-salad sandwich. We're talking about friendship.

"Men," he tells me, "become consumed with careers and money. A lot of people get into the Ferraris and that stuff, but the ultimate wish fulfillment of Entourage is that men can be with their best friends, enjoy themselves, and have some peace."

Male friendship, I offer, might be the ultimate fantasy.

Ellin agrees. "Everyone's always like, 'Is this really Hollywood?' I'm like, 'Yeah, it's real.' The most unreal thing is that it's actually hard for four guys who are thirty or thirty-five to maintain those relationships."

When Entourage made its debut, in 2004, it was unlike anything else on TV. Like Sex and the City, it featured a set of personality archetypes discussing the various minutiae of human male-female interactions in a backdrop of glamorous locations. Like The Wire, meanwhile, it offered a detailed, no-holds-barred look inside an industry whose infrastructure was often shrouded in mystique and misinformation. But unlike the universe of Carrie and her friends, Entourage was centered around men, and instead of laying the Baltimore criminal underworld out in painstaking detail, the show was about Hollywood.

The show was based around both Ellin's experiences as a writer and director and those of executive producer Mark Wahlberg, who in the early days of his stardom used to have a camera crew follow him and his rough-and-tumble Boston friends around.

"Almost everything" from the show, Ellin tells me, was based on real-life events. "A lot of it from my own life," he adds, citing a story arc in Entourage's fourth season in which Vince's brother, Johnny "Drama" Chase, tries to get his house re-zoned for a Beverly Hills zip code. It turns out that Ellin had actually tried just that. "I lived on North Beverly Drive. I was fifty feet away, and then the street would change." He explains that unlike Drama, whose reasons for getting a Beverly Hills zip code were purely rooted in vanity, Ellin had actual reasons to lobby for the switch. "Once you're in Beverly Hills you're in paradise," he says. "It'll give your house greater value and your street will be paved."

Most of the characters have at least a sliver of reality in them. Ellin told me that Billy Walsh, the intense, perfectionist filmmaker, is based on his friend Rob Weiss (who eventually helped write and produce the Entourage movie). The savvy, verbally abusive superagent Ari Gold is based on Ari Emanuel, whose brother Rahm served as Barack Obama's chief of staff and is now the mayor of Chicago.

The issue the Entourage movie faces, essentially, is that of stakes. Entourage is a show that thrived on a sense of foregone conclusions—the guys go to a place and do some stuff, people are impressed by Vince's fame, and then the boys banter. Ari screams at his assistant, Lloyd, and everybody calls it a day.

Entourage the film has to deal with the same problems that the 1979 Star Trek movie did. If you'll recall, the first Star Trek movie was way too concerned with the fact that all of the characters from the show were in the same room, doing the same sorts of stuff they were doing on the show. They were given a non-plot to resolve that ended up being a lost research satellite, and the movie sucked. With Entourage, the metaphorical lost research satellite appears to be the fact that star Vinnie Chase wants to direct a movie. Manager Eric, meanwhile, has a pregnant ex. The ne'er-do-well turned tequila mogul Turtle wants to have sex with an MMA fighter, and the perpetually put-upon Johnny Drama just wants to have someone acknowledge he exists.

Entourage is amazing, and everyone who cares about anything should watch it.

Will Vince's film succeed? Will Eric and his ex get back together? Will Turtle land the pugilistic woman of his dreams? Will Drama fuck? Despite the fact that I haven't actually seen the movie, the answer to all of these questions is almost certainly "yes." In the world of Entourage, everything works out. (Assuming you are a member of the entourage.)

Before I moved to Los Angeles, I had never watched Entourage. Everyone I hated in college for being overly bro-y invariably loved it, which meant that in the interest of distancing myself from the scourge of bro-dom, I had to hate it. But when I moved to Los Angeles, I decided to mainline the entire series, watching multiple episodes per night and cramming the entire eight-season series into a few weeks. What I found was that I had been wrong. Entourage is amazing, and everyone who cares about anything should watch it.

The thing that enthralls me about Entourage is not the glitz. Nor am I invested in the process of how big-budget Hollywood films are made. And to be honest, I don't feel particularly connected to the characters. Instead, to me, Entourage is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a mindfuck, blurring the lines between reality and unreality until you truly believe the distinction between the two doesn't exist. If, as Ellin instructs you to, you ignore the bells and whistles of wealth and status that accompany Entourage, the show's central conceit reveals itself: Four childhood friends have the same conversation, over and over, for eight years. It's like Waiting for Godot, but longer, and with more dick jokes. Because of its cyclical nature and extremely low stakes, Entourage is one of the most watchable pieces of entertainment ever created. Like an episode of Law and Order, the viewer can instinctively anticipate what's going to happen, and instead of being upset that it does happen, is given a mental reward in the form of a shot of a cool car or the guys engaging in some arch camaraderie when things work out the way we assume they will.

Ellin describes Entourage as "the exact opposite" of Robert Altman's Hollywood satire The Player. "This is what it is," he continues. "I like it. I embrace it." Later I will float the idea to him over email that Entourage might be postmodern. He responds, "I guess some could view the movie as skeptical about the business. I try to make it as realistic as I see it while hopefully still entertaining."

That assumed reality that Ellin strives for is exactly what makes Entourage, in its own way, such a radical piece of entertainment. The show doesn't ask that the viewer suspend their disbelief; it actively encourages the viewer to assume what they're watching is more or less real. Scott Vener, a close friend of Ellin's who served as the show's music supervisor and also worked on the film, told me, "All of the places [used in the show] are real—where they go have coffee, where they go to a nightclub. Every place that was named was a real place." Celebrities pepper the show as well. When Vince stars in Aquaman, it is directed by the real James Cameron and shatters Spider-Man's real box office record. You can watch these fake people interact with Bob Saget, Gary Busey, and Sasha Grey, and the show's structure ensures the viewer assumes that this is a slanted take on how these people really act. If we are to assume that one of the facets of postmodernism is that a work is aware of its status as a fabrication, then Entourage is using its proximity to reality to constantly draw attention to the line between fact and fiction, and coming out all the stranger for its efforts. That Ellin is seemingly unaware of this (or just genuinely doesn't care) suggests that humans in Hollywood themselves are themselves unreal, and by holding a mirror up to that reality Entourage is unwittingly exposing this.

The principals of Entourage are as follows: Vincent "Vinnie" Chase, the beautiful soft-hearted star who his friends must keep happy. Eric "E" Murphy, Vinnie's overly cautious manager. Johnny "Drama" Chase, Vince's older brother who wishes to reclaim the glory he once had as a cast member of a show called Viking Quest. Finally, there is Salvatore "Turtle" Assante, Vince's "driver" who mainly smokes weed and tries to cash in on his friend's fame.

These guys are rooted in reality as well. Vinnie is based on an amalgam of Wahlberg, Tobey MacGuire, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Kevin Dillon, who plays Johnny Drama, is the less-famous brother of Matt Dillon. Kevin Connoly, who plays E, was once a member of Leonardo DiCaprio's late 90s crew known as the " pussy posse," which means that if we are to believe Vince is indeed somewhat based on DiCaprio, Connoly is more qualified to play this role than anyone else in the universe.

Because we're meant to assume that Entourage takes place in a universe that is nearly identical to ours, we're also meant to assume that both universes share the same celebrities. This becomes existentially interesting in scenes such as the one where Bow Wow (playing a screenwriter) punches Seth Green (playing Seth Green) in the face. Are we meant to assume that Bow Wow's music does not exist in the Entourage universe, despite the fact that Saigon, a rapper who is significantly less famous than Bow Wow, plays himself in an arc where he's managed by Turtle?

As Entourage unfolds, these questions only pile up. Former child actor Haley Joel Osment plays one of the villains of the Entourage movie, as does Billy Bob Thornton—does this mean that in the world of Entourage, movies such as The Sixth Sense and Sling Blade never happened? But they must have happened, because in season four, Ari meets Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan at a cemetery, and Ari tells his put-upon assistant, Lloyd, over the phone, "I see dead people." Do the characters who encounter Osment and Thornton in the movie ever think, Man, this guy sure does look like the creepy kid from that spooky Bruce Willis movie, or, Didn't this guy used to be married to Angelina Jolie? They must.

Just as Entourage imitates real life, every good Entourage scene imitates every other good Entourage scene. First, the boys are provided with some sort of stimulus. Then they banter. The banter is as follows:

Vinnie: I am famous, let's do something.
E: As your manager, I have concerns about this.
Turtle: Let's do it! I would like to leech off of Vince somehow.
Drama: I was once famous, and I have already done this thing (albeit in a somewhat pathetic manner).

The backdrops for these conversations rarely change. They are at a party, surrounded by beautiful women. They are at Urth Cafe, running into celebrities. They are in Vince's home, where they all live, and Johnny Drama is cooking everybody breakfast. They are at Ari's office, and Ari is yelling at Lloyd, and also them. And so on, and so forth, into a spiral of infinity.

As the show progresses the characters drift apart and somewhat come into their own ("They had to," Ellin tells me). Vince develops and loses a drug problem, Eric ends up owning a management company with a character played by Scott Caan (who is, confusingly enough, named "Scott"), Turtle goes to business school and becomes a tequila mogul, and Drama ends up starring in a Family Guy–esque animated series with Andrew Dice Clay. But no matter how high or low the boys soar, they return to this conversation format, usually at Urth, which serves as a joyous Greek chorus that reminds us we are in the fantasyland of Los Angeles and not some bullshit-ass podunk town where celebrities would never hang out in. No matter how dark the skies might seem for the crew, the clouds inevitably part and the sun of success shines upon our heroes.

Related: Meet Mike Judge, creator of Office Space, Silicon Valley, and Beavis and Butt-Head

"I love this place," Ellin tells me of Los Angeles, adding that he thinks Entourage is "one of the better-looking LA movies I've seen." Later, he will say, "A lot of people tell me they came to LA because of Entourage." He claims Tyler Thompson, who's producing the upcoming Tom Cruise vehicle Mena and in 2012 was named one of Forbes's 30 under 30 in the category of entertainment, was originally inspired by the show to come to Los Angeles.

If Entourage was a show about making movies and Entourage is a movie about making movies, it only makes sense that its actors, whose characters are far more famous than they are in real life, must now start portraying their characters in real life.

Indeed, the cast of the movie showed up to this year's Golden Globes in character to shoot for the film. Ari Gold, a fictional character, wrote a real book that you can buy with real money, and gave an interview to Matt Lauer in which he said "fuck" on national television, presumably incurring a real FCC fine. Kevin Dillon appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live as his Entourage character Johnny Drama. At an Entourage press day, Adrian Grenier gave advice to the actor who's set to play Aquaman, despite having merely portrayed an actor who played Aquaman in a TV show. Jerry Ferrara, who plays Turtle, opened up a restaurant called Fat Sal's Deli, which, given Turtle's business school background, seems like something he would do.

Ellin tells me that the studio is already gearing up for a sequel, and Vince—er, Grenier—told the New York Times his goal for Entourage is for it to become "A franchise that hopefully will never die until one of us does."

If this happens, Doug Ellin will become an extremely rich man. Until then, it's time to pay for lunch, and he's just realized he's forgotten his wallet. Still, just like everything works out in the universe of Entourage, a deus ex machina falls from the sky and into Ellin's lap. Turns out his brother has a tab at the restaurant—Ellin tells the restaurant to charge him instead.

Drew Millard is on Twitter.

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Above: Outgoing FIFA president Sepp Blatter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Yesterday evening, when Sepp Blatter announced he'd be resigning as FIFA president, it would not have come as a shock if he'd immediately leapt on a Segway and ridden it to a waiting chopper, the blades of which were already whirring for take-off. As a story, the 79-year-old's sudden fall after 17 years as the most powerful man in world football is complicated, hubristic, and funny. I honestly wish I could guide you through every twist and turn of the wider ongoing FIFA corruption scandal, which now appears to have put the destinations of the next two World Cups in doubt, but I'm not sure I have the forensic mind required. I mean, you would basically need to be a one-man Warren Commission to sift through all that. What I can do, though, is draw out some of the more intriguing aspects of the case as things currently stand.

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THE FEDS. This is probably the coolest thing about the entire scandal. The Feds—literally, the fucking FBI—are responsible for conducting the investigation that has ultimately led to Blatter's fall. We, in the inert Old World, spend years pissing and moaning and rolling our eyes about the fact that FIFA obviously stinks from top to bottom and that Blatter is like one of those Renaissance popes who lived in a solid gold palace full of hot nuns. But in the end, it's the States who actually care enough to do something about it. It helps that Blatter looks like a Steven Seagal film baddie. If the Americans love doing one thing, it's taking down baddies.

Read at VICE Sports: FIFA Has Announced the Reform We've All Been Waiting for—But Will It Follow Through?

It turns out that the US Justice Department—whose crest is literally a pissed-off bald eagle surfing on a bullet painted like the American flag—has been compiling a case against FIFA for a while. Personally, I like to imagine that when the seven senior officials were arrested last week, they were grilled by a load of gawky federal agents with Polish surnames, fraternity rings, and coffee in polystyrene cups. During the questioning, the agents'd play dumb about the rules of football, scratching their heads, shrugging, and making jokes about how they preferred baseball anyway. This would enrage the FIFA officials so much they'd incriminate themselves by letting vital pieces of information slip, before it eventually transpired that the interrogating Feds actually fucking loved football all along. If this were a film, the final shot would be of a jailed FIFA official peering down from his Alpine cell to see his FBI interrogators enjoying a game of five-a-side.

THE OFFICIALS. One of the least surprising things about the arrests was what the officials looked like. Seriously, take a good long look. A good 85 percent of them look like Sith Lords from the Star Wars prequels. If you don't want people to look at you and think, Could this person possibly be part of a shadowy, sinister, super-governmental elite? why not do your absolute best not to look like a corrupted Jedi wearing a $6,000 Italian suit?

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Chuck Blazer with one of his parrots.

THE STOOLIE. I'd never heard of Chuck Blazer prior to last week and yet the more I learn about him, the more I regret all those wasted years. He's the former senior FIFA administrator who reportedly acted as FBI snitch, and as grotesques go, he's absolutely amazing. Prior to 'fessing up to the Feds, the American had been riding the FIFA gravy train so hard and for so long that he apparently now requires a fleet of mobility scooters to get around on. According to reports, his cats had their own apartment in New York City's Trump Tower and, continuing with the animal theme, he would be seen scooting around Central Park with a parrot on his shoulder. He has many parrots. Apparently an ex-wife had trained one of them to insult him. I mean, the guy was so bent it was kind of brilliant. Not only had he not paid millions in tax—and this is ultimately what the FBI used as leverage against him—but newspaper investigations have shown that in 2005 he had the Confederation of North, Central American, and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) spend $48,554 on a Hummer for him plus an additional $21,600 in private Manhattan parking fees. Who the fuck needs a Hummer in Manhattan? I'll tell you who: Chuck Fucking Blazer.

He even kept a blog detailing all the famous people he met on his FIFA jollies. The best bit is probably the anecdote about high-fiving Vladimir Putin after the Russian president told him he looked like Karl Marx. I'm not even being sarcastic: that's a really good story.

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THE FATAL BRIBE? News about this came out yesterday, and was massive. Before we continue it's worth remembering that when Sepp Blatter had secured his fifth consecutive term as FIFA president last week, he was elected two days after the FBI had arrested all those Sith Lord FIFA officials. So while that was bad, it clearly wasn't fatal for him. But on Tuesday morning, a certain document was made public and by the end of that same day, Blatter was gone.

What was it? Well, it was a letter from 2008 that seemed to show the South African Football Association paying $10 million to bribery suspect and then-FIFA Vice President Jack Warner. South Africa, of course, was chosen to host the FIFA World Cup in 2010, and I would encourage you to have a look at this leaked document yourself. What I mean is, if you ever had to write a letter that basically said "HERE'S YOUR BRIBE LOL!" without actually using the words "HERE'S YOUR BRIBE LOL!" then it would probably look a lot like this document. It talks about setting aside $10 million to create something called "The Diaspora Legacy Program," which is almost impossible to type without adding a ";-)" afterwards, and then asks that Warner, in what was then his other capacity as the President of CONCACAF, be put in charge of it all. So... yeah. Bad.

THE FALL. And we're back to where we started: Tuesday night, at a hastily convened press conference at FIFA HQ in Zurich, with Blatter announcing his exit. It was some turnaround: the previous week, he'd been spunkily defiant after winning the election. "I am the president now, the president of everybody," he declared. With hindsight, this is probably the kind of thing that doomed despots are wont to say, but Blatter wasn't done. He then turned his attention to the regional football confederations who had not supported his bid, particularly UEFA. "I forgive," he told them. "But I do not forget." It was like he'd been watching far too much Game of Thrones. Shit, it was hard not to think to yourself. He actually fucking thinks this. For years, most of us had accepted that he was a cynical and calculating power player. But in this moment of triumphal crowing, it started to dawn that he might be genuinely deluded.

In reading up on Sepp Blatter, one of the things that really jumped out was the fact that, as a child, he was supposed to have been the only kid in his Swiss school who had a decent football and, as such, had been the alpha figure in his playground. Over the intervening 70 years, you wonder how much ever really changed, at least in his own head? "I am a mountain goat that keeps going and going and going," he has said in the past. "I cannot be stopped. I just keep going." Only, last night, the school bully mountain goat finally came to a halt. He announced his resignation after a period of "deep reflection" and exited the stage. If he could, you suspect he would have taken his ball with him. But he couldn't. Because it was never his ball in the first place.

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From the Rich Kids of Tehran Facebook page

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Rich Kids of Instagram is an account used by obnoxiously wealthy young guys and girls to flaunt their minted lifestyle to lowly strangers. A circle jerk of Rolexes and people pouring bottles of San Pellegrino down toilets. More recently, a bunch of copy-cat Instagram accounts have been created by well-off kids around the world. Perhaps the most popular of these spin-offs is the Rich Kids of Tehran, which offers a glimpse at Iran's golden youth.

RKoT follows the same template and stays faithful to its predecessor's preferred subjects: first-class brat mobiles, massive villas, and hot girls in bikinis. This brazen parade of cash, flesh, and champagne might seem surprising, given that it's coming out of a largely conservative, Muslim country—out of a culture that objects to iconography, where alcohol is prohibited and immodest dressing a crime.

Read on Motherboard: 'Iran's Smart Instagram Censorship Isn't That Smart'

Since the Iranian revolution of 1979—and, with it, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's new vision of an Islamic Republic of Iran—stern religious decrees still regulate social life, and the wearing of the hijab is still compulsory for girls in the country. In September last year, seven people who released a video of themselves dancing to Pharrell Williams's song "Happy" were arrested and given suspended sentences of up to one year in prison, as well as 91 lashes.

However, Iranian youth have managed to find room to maneuver, and the space in which they do it is largely online. On the Rich Kids of Tehran Instagram page, the country's strict government policies meet its aspirational youth culture head on. And for RKoT, so far, so good—none of the kids featured have been officially challenged or faced any judicial reprisal, despite all the photos of champagne and plunging V-neck-dresses.

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When I asked one of the founders of RKoT if they were facing any governmental or judicial backlash, he mentioned a filter being imposed on the account that requires a VPN in order to access it from within the country. This type of filter is apparently imposed on many other apps and websites in Iran, as the government has put particular effort into filtering the net and implementing "smart" internet censorship against sites they deem inappropriate or immoral.

After two super expensive luxury cars crashed last month, killing five people—one of the RKoT guys was at the wheel—Ali Khamenei stopped sweeping the problem under the carpet and intervened in the media, publicly condemning "a generation intoxicated by their money" causing "psychological insecurity" in Tehran. Still, no action has been taken against the page and it's still online.

So, how are the Rich Kids of Tehran getting away with it? Talking to 24-year-old Hamid, who follows the account, he explained that "80 percent of the kids feeding the account are the offsprings of the ruling elite." RKoT is not simply about a wealthy minority, he said, but is the showcase of a political class's progeny—exactly the same political class that advocates modest behavior and self-restraint.

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When I talked to some other Iranian followers of RKoT, I questioned them about the contradiction between a conservative elite denouncing a phenomenon of " Westoxication" and the existence of such a barefaced carnival of wealth. One of them, a 27-year-old artist called Saba, reminded me that, even if those kids were close (one way or another) to the people in power in Iran, it was "nouveaux riches" we were talking about and not traditional aristocracy, who remain more discreet about their wealth.

She said: "In traditional Iranian culture, we are actually not supposed to show off what we own, as we shouldn't hurt the feelings of the underprivileged."

When I spoke to the guys running the account, they were quick to defend its message. They think it shows off a more liberal, modern Iran than that portrayed elsewhere. Looking through the tweets the account gathers, it's easy to sense this desire to portray a different type of Iran; a few slogans, such as "We Don't Ride Camels," or "Stuff They Don't Want to See About Iran," punctuate the barrage of images, denouncing an inaccurate image of the country and trying to situate RKoT on the edge of proving something political. But who were "they"—the Iranian government (which didn't really make sense if these are their kids' selfies)? Or those in the West?

In an email exchange, the guys from the account made it clear: "Generally speaking, 'they' refers to the media who have printed a fabricated, scary image of Iran for their political goals, so basically you will see the 'Stuff They Don't Want You To See About Iran!'" He added: "Over the past eight years, 98 percent of the news has been about Iran's politics, sanctions, and nuclear issues. The Western media have used these topics to create a picture about Iran which would benefit their political agendas."

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This desire to show a different side of Iran was a running theme among everyone I contacted. Saba, who doesn't seem to hold RKoT particularly dear, wrote in our email exchange: "I don't oppose them because, as an Iranian young girl, I would like the international community to understand that Iran is not what they think it is. We don't systematically wear veils and our men don't grow chest-long beards. In Iran, people party, dance, sing, drink alcohol, smoke, go out on dates."

The backlash the account has provoked comes not only from the people in power, but also from the internet at large. Recently, an Instagram page called Poor Kids of Tehran was created, displaying pictures of Iran's poorest. When I confronted the guys running RKoT about it, one argued that the country's poverty had nothing to do with their wealth. "Iran has been under heavy sanctions for over a decade by the West, which has almost crippled Iran's economics. There are more poor people in Europe and North America than there are in Iran, and these countries have no sanctions being imposed upon them," he said.

For all their claims, I find it hard to believe that the account was set up to challenge any great global image of Iran; it was set up, almost definitely, so rich kids could flaunt their wealth. However, with its mere existence, it does also succeed in skirting preconceptions, even if what it's revealing is just a tiny minority of Iranian youth.