Spongebob Squarepants and Breaking Bad are the two finest works of art to grace the small screen in recent memory, excluding perhaps the first season of The O.C. and that episode of Mad Men when Lane Pryce decked Pete Campbell. It was only a matter of time before some brave soul attempted to knit the two legendary shows into one mega-show. That time has come, and YouTube user runningflannel is the aforementioned brave soul. Thank you, runningflannel. We've needed this.

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Don Ed Hardy is a legend in the tattoo world. A lifelong artist with formal training outside the tattoo shop, Hardy is known for developing the fine-art potential of a medium that was formerly the domain of street thugs, prisoners, and transient sailors.

Hardy started his tattooing apprenticeship as a teenager and studied with such colorful characters as Sailor Jerry and Phil Sparrow, always with a Beat-influenced emphasis on integrating Japanese art into his practice. In 1982, Hardy and his wife Francesca Passalacqua formed Hardy Marks Publications and have written, edited, and published more than 25 books on alternative art. Hardy still maintains a tattoo shop in California, where his son, Doug, carries on the family skin-marking tradition, but he has since retired from tattooing himself, spending his days on his own non-tattoo artwork.

Watch a video made by VICE's Chris Grosso for Hardy's gallery talks:

Last month, Kings Avenue Tattoo in New York hosted Pictures of the Gone World, a pop-up gallery show of Hardy's tattoo art and paintings. Recently, I met Hardy at the shop. We chatted in the parlor's black leather chairs while his artwork was being installed. He was dressed in a button-down with one of his pink Ed Hardy T-shirts poking out—yes, he's the same Ed Hardy behind the ill-fated clothing collaboration with Von Dutch's Christian Audigier. Several artists from Ed's Tattoo City were hanging out, and a film crew who was shooting a documentary on female tattooers buzzed around us. Hardy and I had a wide-ranging about his prominent role in the transformation of tattoo art from the fringes of society into a mainstream phenomenon.

VICE: Can you tell me about the artwork in this show?
Don Ed Hardy: I always did a lot of art besides tattooing. I was doing art before I was tattooing, and I eventually got back to being able to make my own art that was therapy art that didn't have to be for anyone. Or anyone's tattoo.

What do you mean by therapy art?
It's hard because tattooing is one of my art forms, but it's for somebody else, you know? It's for their idea or their choice. The stuff I do for myself doesn't have to be for anyone.

How much input would you have with your clients when you were tattooing?
A lot. I was the first person to open a studio that was strictly commission work. This was in 1974. I was determined to open a place that would have input from the person wearing the tattoo. A lot of tattooers, they didn't have to do it, or they didn't have the talent or the interest to do it. But it's what I was aiming for. I came out of a fine arts background—I have an undergraduate degree and all that.

'I hated that tattooing was just looked down on as this scumbag thing. I wanted to fight that fight, [to say] that the amount of ink in your skin didn't automatically reduce your brain cells.'

How was business?
My wife had a good job and kept us afloat during the first year when it was really, really slow. But it worked! People started coming in. I knew I could make it work in San Francisco or New York or LA because my feeling in those days was that a certain percentage of the populace would be interested in getting a tattoo. And SF was so alternative anyway. It was my home base, it was where I went to art school. So it made sense.

And after about a year, it really caught on, and it was really word of mouth. Some people had thought about a tattoo, but they didn't want to walk into a shop and get, like, the McDonald's menu that was on the wall, so my shop was different.

You mentioned a certain part of the population who would want a tattoo. Did you have an idea in mind about who would be seeking a tattoo at that time?
I didn't in those days, and of course now it's totally changed. When I started tattooing, there were about 500 tattooers in all of North America. In Canada, there were probably 25 tattooers in the whole country. So now there are 5,000 in LA County, there are 5,000 in Berlin... it was unreal.

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Don Ed Hardy in Reno in 1975. Photo by Emiko Omori

How do you feel about that growth in popularity? Tattooing was an outsider art when you started.
I came out of the 60s, and we were just fighting for acceptance or recognition on any level whatever it was, you know, race, gender, everything. I hated that tattooing was just looked down on as this scumbag thing. I wanted to fight that fight, [to say] that the amount of ink in your skin didn't automatically reduce your brain cells. On the other hand, I hope everyone has a sense of humor about it, because so many people get tattoos now. But it's a little weird now that it's so accepted. You know, I love meeting people who don't have tattoos.

They're the weirdos now.
Yeah. Like, "Oh my god, you don't have a tattoo?!" I was obsessed when I was a kid. My whole life was about wanting to be a tattooer.

I saw a picture of you drawing "tattoos" onto your friends as a kid. Can you tell me how you started doing that?
My best friend's dad had been in WWII, and he had a bunch of tattoos. One thing I thought was so poetic was that he had [a tattoo of] the name of his favorite song, "Stardust," a huge song by Hoagy Carmichael in the 1940s. And even at ten years old I thought, that's really far out! So I just saw these tattoos on this guy, and his son Lenny and I said, "Oh, we can start a little toy tattoo shop, you know, start drawing on neighborhood kids."

Want to learn about the artist Thom deVita, one of the most original masters of tattoo art, as part of our series Tattoo Age?

Did you charge?
Well, I tried to. I was charging like three cents. But nobody ever paid. We just wanted to tattoo because we wanted the practice.

When was your first time in a real tattoo shop?
There was a tattoo shop 20 miles north of where I lived, in Long Beach on the Pike, and there was this one guy, actually a really famous tattooer, named Bert Grimm. Amusement parks had bars and cooch shows and all this crazy stuff. This was before Disneyland, before theme parks. It was like the late 19th century still. In those innocent times, our parents would actually let us take the bus—we'd get on the Greyhound—and somebody would buy a pack of Marlboros and we'd go up and hang out all day in the tattoo shop and smoke and form our ducktails.

Wait—when you were how old?
Little kid—ten, 11. So it was cool, it was a whole other world, you know? I got to be 12. I thought, Well, you know, I dig the tattoo thing, and Grimm said, "Well, when you're 15, I'll teach you to tattoo." So I learned how to draw, but then I drifted off to other things. I started stand-up surfing and my life went a different direction. And then I got really serious about art when I turned 16 and realized it was my destiny.

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Don Ed Hardy at Kings Avenue Tattoo. Photo by the author

You studied with both Sailor Jerry and Hirohide, is that right?
Yeah, that's right. Sailor Jerry, when I got into tattooing, was the premiere tattooer, the most talented guy in the world, and tattooing was so secret. I mean, people didn't advertise—you had to know somebody. I just chanced it and wrote him and sent him some pictures of my work. And then Jerry started writing me, and Jerry was the first of many renegade intellectuals in the business that I met. He didn't have any formal schooling, but he was really brilliant and profound. So I connected with Jerry, went over to see him, flew to Hollywood in '68.

Through Jerry, I connected with Hirohide in Japan, and had a really avid correspondence with him, and we all met at Jerry's Christmas of '72 and we all got tattooed by Hirohide. He brought his handtools and did some outline tattoos on us. I asked him if I could work with him if I came to Japan. He said OK—I think he just said it because he was telling me what I wanted to hear. So I got all geared up and six months later I moved to Japan.

'When I started tattooing, there were about 500 tattooers in all of North America. Now there are 5,000 in LA County.'

Anyway, I [moved to] Japan and then talked to Jerry's widow and found out he had died—he died about three weeks after I went [to Japan]. I was first in line to buy his shop from his wife, but I said, "No, I'm going to stay in Japan," because I got into tattooing wanting to do Japanese-style work.

The two other guys who were in line to take over his shop, one of them was Michael Malone. He ended up buying the Sailor Jerry shop and taught my son Doug. Malone vowed that if Doug ever wanted to get in the business or if Jerry's son would get in the business (he's about Doug's age), he would love to teach them. I told Doug, and he said, "Oh, do you think he really means it?" [Laughs] And it was like in one of those movies: You don't wanna join the mob, son!

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Don Ed Hardy in the 'Newport Harbor Ensign' in 1956

Were you worried about it?
It shocked me because I didn't let him get tattooed when he was underage. I said, "You're not getting a tattoo when you're 15. You'll have all this Star Wars crap on you." So I made him wait until his 18th birthday.

When did you get your first tattoo?
I did these little ones on my hand, and I had some initials and stuff and things like that that I poked.

Wait, you did that to yourself? [Points to the markings on his left hand]
Mmm hmm, with some needle and thread—I wasn't even doing a design, I was poking around. And then I was like, "Well, this might stay there forever." I was having to keep my hand over my other hand so as not to show my mother. She couldn't believe it.

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Don Ed Hardy's hand. Photo by the author

What about your first professional tattoo?
My first one I got about a year before I got my bachelor's degree. I looked in the phone book and saw this guy Phil Sparrow was in Oakland. I'd seen him in the tattoo courses I'd gotten as a kid. I said [to my fellow art-school students], "He's a famous tattoo artist. We should drive over the Bay and get him to tattoo us." He wasn't open, and we ended up getting tattoos at some other guy's shop, because at that point we were all fired up. And so I got a little rose up on my arm. The next day I went with another buddy, and Phil Sparrow still wasn't open, and so I got another tattoo from another guy. The third day I went over, I made sure to go over when I knew Sparrow was open, and I walked in and saw him. His shop was set up more like an art gallery. Everything was in frames, it was red and black, he didn't have a "dummy rail"...

'The problem with tattooing is there's great potential for ego abuse. It's great to find a tattooer that is talented enough and sensitive enough to make the piece the way you want it.'

A dummy rail?
Yeah, the rail all the dummies leaned on to watch the tattooing. It was a carnival, you know? So Sparrow had this great thing, music playing, and I thought, This guy's not just from the street. He showed me the book of Japanese artists' stuff. I got a tattoo from him, and I started thinking, I really want to do this, and he tried to discourage me. He said, "You're on your way to getting a degree, you're going to teach art, you have an infant son..." He said, "It's a deep dark world, and it's a dying art form."

A dying art form, huh?
I just bugged him until he helped me. I said, "I know where to buy the equipment, and I'll just screw up my art school friends if you don't help me with this! So the first work I put on was tutelage in his shop. And he said [sarcastically], "Yeah, Ed's gonna be the Jesus Christ of tattooing." And I said, "Just wait."

On Noisey: What Your Regrettable Scene Tattoo Says About You

I think you proved him wrong about it being a dying art form.
But he was so cool. It was a fantastic life he had. He wrote all kinds of books under all these different pseudonyms. He was a fantastic author. He wrote really hardcore gay porn that was published in Denmark in those days, and he wrote these mysteries with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. He was connected to all these famous American and European writers. He really helped me because he gave me this sense you could be in tattooing and you didn't have to degenerate into some street thug. You could keep an intellectual life going, and do this.

You mentioned that Phil Sparrow had classical music playing in his studio. Do you listen to music at all when you're working?
In the tattoo shop, I just had whatever kind of pop music was on. When I paint, I can't listen to music I don't already know because when I paint, when I do my personal art—you have to get in the zone, you know? You have to get in a trance. And so I love the repeat button. Sometimes I'll listen to a track 30 times. And it's all stuff I've heard a million times.

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Don Ed Hardy in New York City in 2015. Photo by the author

What do you think is the essential difference in the form between tattoos and painting?
It's just the way you put it together, because essentially with tattooing, you can't use light pigments over dark pigments. So, technically, there's a certain method to the thing. There's no difference to me in terms of imagery and stuff.

When I started doing my own art again, it was a thrilling sense of freedom. I began doing stuff where I would blank out and not have any idea what I was going to do. [I went] from doing thousands of things you absolutely had to plot out in advance, and you couldn't really stop in the middle of them and think about them for a while.

I'd always wanted to work more freely. A lot of my work is really abstract now. It certainly has more painterly qualities.

If you were to give advice for people getting into tattoo arts now, what would you say?
They have to find somebody really talented and intelligent to work with. Somebody who knows what they're doing, that has the right attitude about it. The problem with tattooing is there's great potential for ego abuse. It's great to find a tattooer that is talented enough and sensitive enough to make the piece the way you want it.

How did you avoid getting that kind of god complex?
Because from the start, from way, way back, my whole deal was being a transmitter of the things that other people taught me. I was fortunate to encounter great people and then basically pester them until they helped me. I knew to pester them—you have to pester them! You have to push.

Follow Catherine LaSota on Twitter.

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The author, then five years old, visits the Associated Press office in Beirut while her father, Terry Anderson, was held captive in 1990. She pretends to call him and tells him she wants him to come home. Photo by Ahmed Azakir/AP

I was in a room full of boxes, but the boxes were full of almost nothing at all.

Flipping through the stacks of files felt like some kind of joke. Many of them consisted mostly of blank pages and line after forbidding line of black marker.

I had made the trip to George Washington University's National Security Archives in Washington, DC, to view documents my father requested two decades ago under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The process took more than four frustrating years because many of his requests were simply denied. Others yielded nothing but unremarkable information or the reams of redacted papers I was now examining in disbelief.

This wasn't the kind of story I normally report on. I was deeply, personally invested in those documents, and my father, Terry Anderson, wasn't just asking the government for documentation of some random event. He was researching his own kidnapping and seven-year captivity by a terrorist group.

Dad was a journalist when he was kidnapped in 1985, three months before I was born. As Middle East bureau chief for the Associated Press, he was covering the horrifically violent civil war that raged across Lebanon at the time. One March morning, he kissed my mother goodbye in Beirut and left for a tennis game with a friend. He didn't come home for almost seven years, because a Shia Muslim militant group calling itself Islamic Jihad took him hostage.

As a result, I didn't meet my father until he was released—when I was nearly seven years old.

I only knew the sound of his voice as a child because his kidnappers would periodically release hostage videos of him, footage my mother let me watch so I could see my dad's face. I didn't understand the angry propaganda he recited. All I knew was that my father was thin, pale, and sad-looking, and I wanted to make him smile at me.

Fast forward 30 years or so. I work as a reporter myself, based out of Beirut and New York City, and am in the process of writing a book that's mostly an investigation of the circumstances surrounding my father's kidnapping, which was at the center of a web of political intrigue. Most Americans of my generation have at least heard the name "Iran-Contra," even if they don't know what it means. Basically, it was a scandal that almost took down the Reagan administration: Against their government's public policy of not negotiating with terrorists, American officials engaged in a series of covert and blatantly illegal arms-for-hostages exchanges with the Iranian government, a faction of which was funding and sponsoring my father's captors.

That's the kind of political maelstrom that swirled around his captivity: an opaque cloud of government secrets and international machinations my father tried to unravel through FOIA requests after he was released, with little success.

Want to see what FOIA requests can uncover? Read this from VICE News: Inside Washington's Quest to Bring Down Edward Snowden

And there's clearly a problem with the way the FOIA is implemented, or I wouldn't have been shaking my head at the mostly useless documents federal agencies sent in response to his request. Members of Congress seem to think so too, because they've been holding panels and hearings designed to tease out problems with FOIA and ways in which the transparency process might be improved. Last Tuesday, my father testified in one of these panels along with some investigative journalists (including Jason Leopold of VICE News) in the hope that it would lead to some concrete results, like new legislation to ensure information about our government is as accessible as it should be under FOIA.

Every investigative journalist has a FOIA horror story or an instance in which powerful interests simply refused to play ball.

"We now have a society in which large areas of government decision and action are routinely kept from the public," Dad said during his testimony. "Think of Abu Ghraib and the torture of prisoners, official and unofficial. Think of massive spying on American citizens whose phones, computers, vehicle movements and bank accounts can be monitored without their knowledge....our fear is overwhelming the system of government that has served us for 240 years. Half of the Bill of Rights is now regularly ignored. Our own government agencies violate the Constitution at will and with impunity. And we can do nothing, because we know nothing."

That's what the FOIA is supposed to address: the public's right to know how the government operates and whether it's fulfilling the values of freedom and democracy we're so quick to hold up to the rest of the world. But reporters like Sharyl Attkisson, an investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author who also testified before the House Committee this week, argue that by employing stumbling block after bureaucratic stumbling block, government agencies are flouting FOIA in an effort to keep the American people blissfully ignorant of what's being done in their name.

"This is one of the most important tools we have as journalists, and it's something we're supposed to use to prevent what we've increasingly allowed in the past few years, which is for the powers that be to chip away at the tools we have to do our job," Attkisson says. "If we don't say something, we're complicit in the deterioration of journalism."

Every investigative journalist has a FOIA horror story or an instance in which powerful interests simply refused to play ball. My dad told me about a particularly disturbing response to one of his FOIA requests in a DC hotel room after the hearing.

"One of the first replies we got—still way after the deadline, but we did get a reply—was from the DEA," he said."They have intelligence people overseas in American embassies, and Lebanon is a drug country... They said, 'We can't give you the information. It would violate the privacy of the people you've named.'"

"But they're not American citizens," I pointed out.

"Right, and the law doesn't apply to non-American citizens, but that's what they said anyway. However, they did tell me, 'If you can get a signed, notarized affidavit and permission from these people, we can give you the files.' They wanted me to go back to my kidnappers and have them sign an attested statement saying that I could look at their files. Of course, the government had about a million dollars on each of their heads at the time, so I don't think it would have been practical for me to find them."

What could possibly prompt one of our government agencies to make such a ridiculous request—that my dad hit up his kidnappers for permission—with a straight face? Could it be that they were intentionally trying to mask flawed policies and institutional fuckups like Iran-Contra? To be fair, my own research on Dad's kidnapping indicates that most of the people involved in negotiating his release sincerely wanted to see him freed. But 30 years later, doesn't his daughter have the right to know what government officials did to free him? Doesn't an American deserve to know what efforts were made on his behalf as he sat blindfolded and chained to a radiator in a Beirut basement?

Check out our documentary on Lebanon's drug valley.

Leah McGrath Goodman is an investigative journalist and finance editor for Newsweek who also testified before the House. She thinks this kind of runaround by government agencies is purposeful, and that current FOIA procedures are designed to prevent the disclosure of information that might prove damaging to the people in charge.

"What we're seeing right now are rules that have been fudged and flouted so much that even where they specifically say, 'You have to give notice before 20 days,' they're completely ignoring it," Goodman tells me. "They have no incentive to provide results, since the money funding their time is coming from the taxpayers, so why wouldn't they go through this endless process? I think the way it's set up now is probably one of the worst possible ways. So could they revisit this so that it's set up in a way that doesn't encourage this kind of behavior? I hope so."

She argues that these agencies are so concerned with trying to find exemptions and obstacles to a FOIA request that they often miss opportunities to respond to allegations made against them. In other words, extra secrecy just makes the government look even more shady.

"You're trying to be a fair arbiter between multiple parties when other people are talking to you and this agency is giving you the runaround," Goodman says. "They don't want to share that information, but the public needs to know."

To their credit, when I asked for comment on the concerns put forth by journalists during the hearings, the Department of Justice put me in touch with Melanie Pustay, who heads their Office of Information Policy. The first thing Pustay tells me is that FOIA officials simply need more money to help speed responses to requests.

"Having a steady source of funding for FOIA and not having a government shutdown and all these fiscal challenges would go a long way to improve the FOIA program overall," she says by way of explanation. "But I think taking into account the exempting fiscal times we live in, agencies have managed to do a lot of things well. The areas where I think we have potential to have further improvement—well I think agencies want, and we continue to encourage, greater use of technology. Because any time you can replace a manual process with an electronic one, you can do things faster. It helps the processing time for individual requests, obviously, but it can also reduce staffing, which in turn can help in these fiscal times. So increasing the use of technology in FOIA is something that's universally desired by agencies."

When I point out that some critics argue federal agencies don't share information because they would prefer to keep secrets, Pustay responds with kindly incredulity.

"I was really perplexed by that characterization of how FOIA administration works, because it's really belied by the statistics," she says. "They show that 91 percent of requests are being released in full or in part, and only 9 percent of requests are withheld in full."

"Where can I find these statistics?" I ask.

"All these statistics are in annual agency FOIA reports, which are all available on FOIA.gov, and we do a summary of those that's available on our website. So I really think the culture is one of openness. At the same time, of course there's information that gets withheld, so every time somebody holds up a piece of paper that has redactions on it, that's obviously going to happen with FOIA, because it reflects a balance of the right of the public to know what the government is doing and the need of certain agencies to protect information. The most commonly cited reason for withholding information is personal privacy. Over 50 percent of the redactions are made to protect the privacy of individuals who are in government files. Most people understand the need to protect personal privacy."

I seize the opportunity. "I agree that protecting personal privacy is super important, but an agency denied one of my dad's FOIA requests by suggesting it would violate the personal privacy of his kidnappers."

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A photo of Terry Anderson taken by his captors in May, 1985. Photo courtesy of the AP

"Oh no," Pustay exclaims. "I think maybe there's sometimes a misunderstanding of why a case has been delayed, and certainly there are going to be examples where you say, 'Oh my goodness, I wish the agency would have done it a little bit differently.' But there are many success stories in FOIA. I see references from requests made under FOIA nearly every single day when I read the paper, and I know then that's what it's all about... We try our best to find lots of different ways to guide agencies on how to implement the process better, because the better it's implemented, the better for the public."

Well, sure. But some say more guidance is needed. Malcolm Byrne, deputy director and director of research for GWU's National Security Archive, was one of the people who assisted my father during his four-year FOIA saga, and says that process was almost as frustrating to watch as it is to experience firsthand.

"The way we process these requests is usually for average citizens with no personal stake in the request or the history," says Byrne. "In your dad's case, he had a very personal right to see this information, so it was even more galling to see him face some of the same excesses and in some cases abuses that average requesters often face... Those were records that not only meant a lot to him, so he could understand what happened to him, but they were extremely important for the rest of us to know. How does our government confront terrorism? How do we deal with hostage-taking? How much do we know about the forces involved, and how ultimately effective are we in dealing with these matters? Those were all hugely important questions, and it was doubly outrageous to see someone in his position who had been victimized by those forces be then dismissed by the agencies."

What is lost when journalists and citizens are prevented from obtaining information that could help us learn from our mistakes and change the way we face threats like terrorism? That's a question that's proven incredibly urgent in recent years as we struggle to cope with extremist groups like the Islamic State, who have taken kidnappings and acts of terror to a whole new level of brutality. So why did learning about his own kidnapping become such a Sisyphean task for my father, and why do so many people feel that FOIA has lost its purpose?

"Make no mistake, federal officials, politicians and bureaucrats are violating the law, just like any other criminals," Attkisson says. "One of the hallmarks of a society that's breaking down is when its leaders exempt themselves from the laws that the public is required to follow, and I think that's happening more and more in our society.

"Journalists should be writing about it and putting pressure on them to obey the law," she continues, with steel in her voice. "The only stories the government wants to give you because they like you are propaganda, not the ones about misconduct and flouting of our values. When journalists tell the government, 'We don't work for you,' we might not get their stories, but we'll get better stories, real stories."

So this is my message to our government: I want the real story of what happened to my father. I want to know if and when I decide to file a FOIA request, that it will be answered in a timely fashion, with full disclosure. I want it because it's my story as well, and it belongs to me, to my family, not to reluctant bureaucrats. Give me my story, and give America its story too, because it belongs to us, and we deserve to have it.

Follow Sulome Anderson on Twitter.

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All photos by Bruno Bayley

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I can still taste it. The thick fug, the stench. A gas so hot and odorous it felt like liquid wisping down my throat, a kind of bin-water dry ice. A smell so foul, so incomprehensible you wonder how evolution has allowed our senses to continue to let it register. It was the smell of 8.6 million people's indiscretion. The waft of a slob metropolis. Welcome to London's sewers: They're in a bit of a pickle.

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It was a perfectly fine day to dip my toes into the effluence of a city. A lovely warm morning in Whitehall, a place where men in bowler hats open doors for lazy rich people in their lazy clothes, the kind of rich people who can spend thousands on an outfit and still end up looking like they got it from Jacamo. Opposite the manhole I was about to descend into was a hotel called the Corinthia, and it was the muck of its cisterns, baths, showers and sinks that I'd be wading through. Perhaps it won't be so bad, I thought. Perhaps I will be able to forage for whole oysters, good enough to eat straight off the pipe, instead of the Peperami and Irn Bru dysentery hammered down the pipes by the proles elsewhere in the city.

My contact, Becky, was sitting on the step of the van parked near the manhole. She was already suited and booted, as were the rest of the team, a mixture of harrowed looking older men and eager young welps. One of the guys described himself as a "sewer nerd," such is his love of the complex architectural magnificence of London's shit-filtering system.

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They kitted me out with everything I'd need to not get covered in or swept away by a tidal wave of said shit: a hard hat with a light on, a harness, two different types of glove, a white protective suit, and a pair of boots that came up to my ass. We were all also fitted with what the guys call a "turtle," a kind of emergency breathing apparatus in case the miasma of lost lunches became too much to handle.

Prefer to read about what happens to food before you digest it? Read Munchies.

It was time to be lowered into the madness. Apparently, there are different types of sewer "tour." This one was a fatberg tour, people's interest in them being piqued by slow-news-day stories about 15-ton lumps of congealed alabaster hell being discovered beneath the ground we walk on, like new subterranean continents made out of human waste. Other tours take people down so they can marvel at the brickwork, little more than a trickle of slurry brushing past their wellies. Ours would be a bit more intense.

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Leaning over and looking into the dark hole wasn't as daunting as I thought it'd be. It was just like looking down a stinky chimney. It was only when two of the crew had gone below, their hat-mounted lights illuminating the darkness, that the apprehension started. The bottom of the pit was encrusted in a thick soup. It did not look inviting.

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I was helped into the goo by one of the team. What I found wasn't at all what I was expecting.

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Instead of the flowing brook of liquid crap and friendly looking mice I'd expected to find, there was a thigh-high river of fat running as far as torches allowed the eye to see in either direction. I'd expected to find basically an underground system of streets, punctuated by the odd gigantic, bus-sized fatberg but the sewers literally were a fatberg.

As I stepped down off the ladder, the pressure of the highly compacted fat immediately constricted, making sucking noises as it locked itself back round my legs. I felt like I was getting the bends off cooking oil and degraded napkins. My arteries shuddered.

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This stretch of sewer was truly dystopian. The gorgeous Victorian architecture, the helix brickwork spinning away overhead into the different tunnels, is undeniably remarkable. How it has lasted for so long is mind-destroying; the place that, surely, is the most susceptible to erosion still going strong after over 150 years. But what we're doing to it is sad. Clinging to the wall was a blackened, loamy bank of dark lard, riddled with white worms and weird bugs, and shining, almost moving, with deep orange fly eggs.

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The smell was just a bit musty to begin with, the sort of thing the London Dungeon pumps into its exhibits to simulate what a Jack the Ripper crime scene may have smelt like. But as soon as Gari, one of the team, tore open a ream of fat with a shovel, a hot reek assaulted your nasal passage. An indescribable odor, not shit, not vomit, not blood nor cum, but something else entirely. It was as if you'd opened the world's biggest dishwasher mid-cycle, the steamy stench of a thousand dirty plates, a thousand unfinished meals in various stages of digestion and decomposition, being blow-dried directly into your lungs.

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Not to mention the stuff found in this apple crumble of inhumanity. I spotted a condom—used, I presume—screaming in the fatty rubble. "I'll get that, I'm not afraid," said Gari, bravely. The stretchy latex of the 'dom proved hard to yank out from the tough sewage, but Gari managed it, pinging brown water all over my pristine white jumpsuit.

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He presented me with a caviar-swipe of gunk, almost steaming with scent. I recoiled and took time to look at what else laid in this bed of filth. Crisp packets, chocolate wrappers, lip balm, pens that could be stood up in the thick muck. Overhead was the sheen of condensation, the wet gasses moistening the masonry. There were three fibre-optic cables running along the curved ceiling, a thousand fire tweets and U Ok Hun? Facebook statuses whizzing over my head while I tried to navigate my legs through this bog of nightmares.

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After I'd had enough of being surrounded by soiled bottles and Tic Tac packets and tampon applicators, it was time to climb the mucky ladder to freedom. My photographer went first, and even just one fewer hard hat torch inside the tunnel made it considerably more terrifying. I realized then that there is no good way to die in a sewer.

Then it was time for a wash. But instead of the Ebola camp disinfectant shower from the future I was expecting, there was a cooler full of bleachy water and some sliced-up tea towels.

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I spoke to Phil Thorne, the leader of the crew, a grizzled sewer expert. I asked him how bad the Whitehall sewers were, really, and how you might go about trying to fix them. "This is bad. This is very bad. Leicester Square, right at the bottom of Piccadilly"—his voice trailed off, it sounded full of foreboding and remorse—"it's all bad. It's not as bad as this, but it is bad. We're trying to put chemicals down there the break up the fat. We had this sort of big cake which releases this enzyme every so often. It breaks up the flow, so it can move it on."

But will the big cake work? Or one day soon will the effluence underground come spilling up from the sewers to fill our streets with human shit, providing lazy satirists with a handy metaphor for our lazy 21st-century existences?

"It's working. But it takes time."

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The restaurants, bars, clubs, and hotels in the area are all responsible for funneling fat and grease and oil down the pipes, but all of them blame each other for it.

Sewers are inherently bleak places. And yet somehow humans have found a way to make them even bleaker, by coating them in a phenomenally large amount of soupy, crunchy, mustard yellow ultra-fat. The fatbergs and the swamps of oil are horrible reminders of our collective laziness.

Next time you're chucking your roast dinner run-off down the sink, think of Phil. Think of his team. They're doing the best they can, but it's a massive problem at Thames Water, and until people stop being dicks with their waste, we've all got a one-way ticket to Fatberg City.

Follow Joe Bish on Twitter.

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All stills, like this one—which looks like something out of Masters of the Universe meets G.I. Joe—taken from the 'XCOM 2' announcement trailer.

The X-COM games have always been terrifying, the turn-based story of scared troops up against the darkness and a brutal enemy. If this was all humans could muster, we were doomed. But hope prevails. Over time you turn the enemy's technology against them and save the human race.

This has been the story of every game in the X-COM universe, right up to 2012's critically acclaimed franchise reboot, XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Unreasonably macho soldiers engaging in battle after horrific battle to fight off the alien invasion and somehow managing to push back the untold horrors of other worlds.

This makes sequels difficult. Defeated alien invasion armies very rarely decide to "just have another go." MicroProse got around this by setting Terror from the Deep underwater and making most of your tech useless in the new environment. But it was still just a retreading.

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Alright, aliens, we get it. You didn't need a statue

With the just-announced XCOM 2, developers Firaxis are asking us a different question: What if the resistance of XCOM: Enemy Unknown had failed? I don't just mean accidentally throwing handfuls of under-equipped rookies at the alien menace and going back to the main menu—what if humans had failed to develop alien(-beating) technology, and had actually lost the war? What if we saw the world overrun, leading to armistice and capitulation, with the alien menace a presence on every street corner?

Like thinking about actual aliens? Read this from Motherboard.

Sounds bad, but that's the premise for XCOM 2. And it's the best news for fans of the series, because it's going to force palpable progress into the gameplay equation.

Prior games' tendency to make each country cut your funding as the alien invasion escalated around them was always jarring. This idea of being underfunded and overstretched fits better in a world where XCOM (the Earth's Extra-terrestrial Combat Unit) lost and has just broken cover to fight the occupation like a black ops version of the Wolverines.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/bgZ9QUJ9EiM' width='560' height='315']

'XCOM 2' announcement trailer.

Waging guerrilla warfare against the aliens has much more potential as a storyline mechanic then being thrust, again, into the role of the first, last, and only defense against the scum of the universe. It's a total change in the status quo. XCOM is outnumbered, the aliens have seized control, and civilians are getting security screened by other humans? Fighting an occupying force has never happened in the series before. It's a brave new world and it has the remnants of humanity living as second-class citizens on their own planet.

Considering the civilians have previously functioned as nothing more than objectives to play for, the moral ambiguity here is massive. The soldiers gunned down by XCOM in the announcement trailer: Did they deserve it? How do the civilians feel about a mob of gunmen showing up outside their workplace and firing wildly? It's annoying to have to go through an extended security check every time you get to work, but maybe that's better than a horde of Chryssalids being unleashed inside the local shopping center.

With XCOM now operating as a tough band of revolutionaries instead of a multi-national force, I guess the question you have to ask is: are XCOM the bad guys, now? Perhaps more importantly: do XCOM look like the bad guys? Going underground after the last war, the unit's return may not actually represent the salvation people need. The trailer is keeping it ambiguous about how benevolent the aliens and their puppet government actually are at this stage, but even if they were eating babies from time to time, would the everyday person on the street be up in arms about it, if the "greater good" is being taken care of? Do the bin men ever strike under alien rule? Do the trains run on time? Babies are everywhere, anyway.

Related: VICE's documentary on eSports

Relevant to your interests? The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

This would back the claims that XCOM 2 will involve stealthier play in its tactical stages. If everyone thinks you're a hostile presence, you're going to be feeling the pressure a lot more often, and rather than charging around to take down enemies like a SWAT team, missions may well be more nuanced.

Of course, it's entirely possible that Firaxis will skip this approach to its "good" and "bad" sides and simply present the aliens as straight-up enemies, there to be driven off Earth and nothing more. But I hope not, because the trope of the slow erosion of human rights by a secret (or not-so-secret) controlling minority is good for mechanical changes, but pretty plain for story resolution.

This could mean we'll see a big change in direction from a gameplay perspective, too. That hulking sky-base we see ascending from the canyon in the trailer could be indicative of hit-and-run tactics. Could this mean we'll see a less-reactionary XCOM experience, with players free to take more initiative? That'd be welcomed, as where's the fun in acting like the leader of a group of freedom fighters if you don't get to stir up some trouble for the (maybe) evil overlords?

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This guy probably isn't skulking in the shadows because he wants to be your friend

The freedom to pick your own targets and instigate your own missions brings us to the most appealing facet of what the next XCOM promises: We're going to see its formula completely change. You won't be touching down at a crash site or terror mission and setting up a perimeter, as you've done in hundreds of times over hundreds of hours before now. Instead, you'll be playing "the other side"—the predatory force scouting out the hostile positions and trying to remain hidden until you're ready to strike. When you choose to fight, you're going to be facing down not only alien ranks, but also human soldiers made to stand beside them. How is that going to make you feel? What is too great a cost to rid Earth of its invaders? Just how late is too late before you demand a refund from your regional train operator?

This kind of change should bring an end to an often-maligned area of the reboot. Being able to strike first lets you fire off a couple of shots before the incredibly annoying "reaction move," that all aliens receive when you first spot them, kicks in. These could trigger a chain reaction that might see you end your turn with a horde of angry enemies heading your way. With a bit of luck we'll also see an end to those damned satellites, too.

It's too early to make a definitive statement on whether or not XCOM 2 will live up to the family name, but by making a bold move and shredding the preconceptions associated with the series, it's moving in a new direction, and it seems like the right one.

XCOM 2 will be released in November.

Follow Jake on Twitter.

Any film that starts with a three-pronged dictionary definition of the word dope is clearly not targeting urban teenagers. Let's face it, you'd had to have been living on planet D. W. Griffith to not get the drug reference, the insinuation that someone is a fool, or that something is awesome. With its urban cast, Inglewood backdrop, and 90s gangster-comedy vibe, Dope is a film purporting to be a mash-up of Friday and Boyz n the Hood, but it is really a John Hughes tribute aimed at misguided white folk.

The cinema aficionados who program the sunny Cannes Film Festival rarely take films from snowy Sundance. When they do, they tend to be sensations like drummer drama Whiplash, which went onto Oscar glory. With Dope being the only film to make the transfer this year, it's positioned as one of this year's top American indie films.

Official trailer to 'Dope' (2015)

Where Dope will undoubtedly leave its mark is with its cast. Simply put, this is the freshest crop of young black actors to appear in a movie since the 90s . In the lead role of Malcolm is Shameik Moore, who seems like he was unearthed by taxmen wading through old Polaroids of Wesley Snipes. He has that energy, exuberance of youth, and aura that only comes once or twice a generation. And where would a film paying homage to 90s hip-hop be if it didn't have musicians crossing over to the silver screen? Rapper A$AP Rocky, who just-dropped an album that is at the top of the charts, plays a dope dealer whose thug reputation may not be all that it seems. His femme-fatale girlfriend, the Lisa Bonet-type babe, comes in the shape of Bonet's real-life daughter (with rocker Lenny Kravitz) Zoë Kravitz, in a role that thankfully demands more of her than posturing next to some scantily clad models as a truck tears up and down Fury Road.

It's eye opening that, seven years into Obama's presidency, we still need films whose raison d'être is to explode racial stereotyping. But what with all these young black men dying at the hands of cops, it also seems terribly urgent. Inglewood-born director Rick Famuyiwa has seemingly made it his life's work to disprove the criminal tarnishing of his peers. Previous credits include The Wood (1999) and Brown Sugar (2002), films that dared to show middle-class blacks as ordinary Americans.

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Still from 'Dope' (2015). Photo credit: Rachel Morrison

Famuyiwa follows the latest fashion for putting geeks at the center of high-school movies by having hero Malcolm and his best buddies, tomboy Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) and wide-eyed Jib (Tony Revolori, arriving from The Grand Budapest Hotel), as a trio of nerdy, computer-savvy, Harvard-applying friends, wise to the dangers of groupthink. Homework is put on ice as they fall headlong into a drug caper. Along the way, they learn a life lesson that living like Ferris Bueller is more fun than being a Menace II Society.

When we met, Famuyiwa was holding court on the rooftop of the Palais des Festivals. It sounds glamorous, conjuring up images of turrets, champagne, and bling—but in fact it's just the top room of a conference center with a fancy name. It seems that when you scratch beneath the surface, there's not that much separating Cannes from Inglewood.

Your three protagonists are fans of 90s hip-hop, despite being pretty far removed from that era. But isn't Dope actually a tribute to the 80s John Hughes films?
Rick Famuyiwa: I grew up on those movies—Ferris Bueller, The Breakfast Club , and Sixteen Candles . John Hughes was a big influence in terms of me wanting to do this as a career. I watched those films, and I could relate to so much of what he was conveying because there was a truth to those characters, even though they were from suburban Chicago, which was as far away from where I was living as anything. The same way I was a kid who grew up in Inglewood loving The Breakfast Club, I feel like there will be kids in suburban Chicago, or Brentwood, or somewhere else around the world, who will relate to the kids in Dope, even though their circumstances aren't exactly the same.

You seem obsessed with the homogenized image of the urban black youth, especially one pushed by cinema in the 90s. As well as being a teen comedy, there is a serious attempt to undercut the black urban stereotype?
I wanted to put a mirror to our perception versus reality. It was really important for me to get some of those ideas out there. I do feel like we all bring our points of view and prejudices and whatever to the cinema when we watch people on screen. So I was very aware of what some of those would be, and I wanted to turn some of those on their head.

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Still from 'Dope' (2015). Photo credit: Rachel Morrison

You gave the actors some iconic 90s films to watch as preparation, movies like Boyz n the Hood and Belly. Do you try and rip those apart by siding with the nerd?
I didn't want to pinpoint that collection of films as good or bad. I definitely wanted to bring a different point of view to telling that kind of story and use some of those things from those genres that have now become so ingrained. [I wanted to try] to flip them and say, "Let's give you another point of view," or "let me as a writer go on a certain journey and then turn it into a different journey," and hope that you understand what the flip was about.

On Munchies: Meet the Hip-Hop Pastry Chef of Sweden

Yes, but a lot of people when they watch Scarface, they just see the drugs and the lifestyle, and don't take in the message. Is there a danger that this film, viewers will see some of the misogyny and criminal antics, and want to ape that, rather than take in the message of the film?
Maybe that happens. Look, I want the film to stand on its own feet as what it is, a sort of comedy-adventure story about these three kids from this very specific part of Los Angeles who go on a journey that takes them to a lot of different, crazy places. I just want to be real with it. I think so many times when we see films, especially comedies, you want to walk away thinking, those kids are so cool , and we had such a good time, and you forget about the problems that exist and the reality of the world that they come from.

'I was thinking about Malcolm and what black masculinity means and how that would be. How if you were a kid from this part of the world, you could be looked upon as a menace and a geek at the same time.'

Why do we need a film with this message seven years into Obama? Or do you think we need a film with this message because it's seven years into Obama?
I feel like the Obama presidency allowed us to stop talking about race because that became what defined you as a person. Whether you voted for Obama, or you didn't, we still are living in a country that has a black president. So that means that [you think] you are progressive and cool and it just sort of froze things in a way. We stopped engaging. I think once that happened, you have elements that sort of arise. Race and the history of race in America is a part of its founding and will probably never completely go away. There will always be films that will deal with that in one way or another. This just comes at a time when, in the United States, we are reexamining race, especially in relation to young black males, in a way that we haven't had in a long time. And it does feel a lot like the 90s when I was growing up and we had hip-hop—Public Enemy, Ice Cube, and NWA—where we are screaming about things going on [and yet] nobody really knew about it.

How does that sense of race politics and art promoting social justice relate to Dope?
I think that now with social media we are seeing things that have been latently living under the surface for a long time, and so this just happened to come at that time. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't thinking about that as an influence. I was thinking about Malcolm and what black masculinity means and how that would be. How if you were a kid from this part of the world, you could be looked upon as a menace and a geek at the same time. [I wanted to explore] what that means.

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Still from 'Dope' (2015). Photo credit: Rachel Morrison

Hip-hop has a prominence on the sound track. You have tunes from A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, Pharrell, Nas, Naughty by Nature, but what really stands out is the choice of Gil Scott-Heron?
I always like to use music in my storytelling, and I use actual songs as score in many cases. The Gil Scott-Heron I thought connected a lot of the dots in that he was sort of an originator of hip-hop. He was sampled recently by Kanye West on one of his albums; from the younger crowd's perspective, when they hear that, they think of Kanye and not Gil Scott-Heron. I felt like there was this transition that Malcolm was taking at the time of sort of realizing what going home meant and how he's been defined by his home and how he wants to escape it. I felt like "Home is Where the Hatred Is" embodied that.

Check out our documentary on the beginnings of A$AP Rocky

Can you tell me about writing the women in the film? You made Diggy, played by Kiersey Clemons, a masculine tomboy figure, and this is juxtaposed with Nakia, who is super-feminine.
I just wanted to reflect different sides of characters. It was mainly about Malcolm, and it's hard when you have so many different ideas and you want to balance them all. You have one main character whose journey you have to service. I didn't have a specific idea that I wanted one woman to be like this and the other like that and to comment on anything about the women in the film, except that I wanted them to all feel like they were subverting part of expectation. I felt like [the role of] every character in the movie is to subvert expectation—whether it's Dom talking about Obama's drone policy, or the kid who is actually knows how to sell drugs being the white kid from Brentwood and not the black kid from Inglewood.

Is that why you cast A$AP Rocky, since he would go against the expectation that he's built up around his image. Yes, he's playing the drug dealer, but he doesn't have the journey one would normally expect ?
Look, I grew up with a lot of guys like the Dom character in the movie. There was a certain intelligence and charm that these guys would have, and I'd be fascinated and think where would this guy be if he wasn't born in Inglewood, California, if he was born in Brentwood, California? A$AP Rocky is so smart and such an intuitive actor, and I knew that sort of unexpected casting would play into how I wanted Dom to be perceived. You want to initially think of him in a certain way, but as you get into how and what he is, [you see] he isn't quite that.

Rick Famuyiwa's Dope opens in theaters June 16.

Kaleem Aftab is on Twitter.

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Protesters chant "hands up, don't shoot" during a protest against the Aug. 9, 2014 police shooting of unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Photo via AP/Charles Rex Arbogast

"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time." - James A. Baldwin

It was January 15, 2011 when Mutaz Elmardy, a Sudanese man residing in Toronto, was en route home on Shuter Street after an evening of prayers at his local mosque. Elmardy testified that, with both of his hands in pocket, his identification was requested before being punched twice by Const. Andrew Pak, then handcuffed for approximately 25 minutes on the ground. A victim of racial profiling, he won a suit of $27,000 against Toronto Police Services Board last month for battery, assault, and unlawful arrest, alongside the violation of his Charter rights. The claim of his suit attributed the colour of his skin as reason for his brutal arrest.

The policy for carding in Toronto at this time was set so that revelation of personal information was only voluntary: it was completely within Elmardy's right to deny providing his personal identification or warranting an illegal search. That changed earlier this year as Toronto Police announced revisions of its policy so that collection of personal information, stopping, and questioning people without arrest would become legal, providing leeway for more cases like Elmardy to potentially occur. A spokesperson for the Toronto Police has confirmed that this policy is currently on hold until further changes are made. This has come at a time where continuous dialogue has emerged across North America about the intricate relationship between authority and anti-blackness.

One month ago came the international news of Freddie Gray's murder: a 25-year old Baltimore native whose demise came abruptly at the hands of police. That event incited one of the largest riots in connection with #BlackLivesMatter since the movement's conception in 2013, with its emphasis on black suffering and the value of black life. Protests have since erupted internationally in solidarity with Baltimore, including Toronto—the same week that Mark Saunders, Toronto's new (and first black) Chief of Police, vowed to continue carding practices (without intent to arrest) despite evidence of racial profiling towards black and brown bodies more than others in the GTA.

"Black nihilism," a concept introduced by Cornel West, is black life textured with an overwhelming sense of meaninglessness, feelings of lack of hope and lovelessness. At its worst, the feeling leads to a path of self-destruction: living life without meaning, as black suffering transcends into an obstructive disposition towards the world. From police brutality to racist policies, black nihilism permeates black communities everywhere.

From Baltimore to Toronto, there is a history of anti-blackness in the relationship between police and citizen safety that is paradoxical, leading to the experience of black nihilism: the suffering of some citizens (black bodies) in protection of "all" (non-black bodies). However, black suffering is not and has never been an exclusive experience to Americans—a narrative often perpetuated through the telling of Canadian history as a "they" problem opposed to a "we."

Canada has perpetuated a multicultural con game through the guise of "progressive tolerance" for far too long: the notion that cities, such as Toronto, illustrate its country's diversity by emphasizing its spurts of immigration since the 1960s. However, this selective narrative has hidden Canada's longstanding history of anti-blackness: the prohibition of Black immigration from 1896 to 1915; buried slaves in cemeteries entitled Nigger Rock; the atrocities against black communities in Africville, or two centuries worth of slavery in Quebec since the 1600s.

This hidden history of anti-blackness has a direct relationship with contemporary black life in Canada from high unemployment rates, to over-representation (and poor conditions) of black bodies in prisons, alongside the current growing issue of racist carding practices in Canadian cities. Anti-black racism is not exclusively an American affair and never has been. The erasure and misrepresentation of an anti-black Canadian history serves as another form of black nihilism: the degradation of a history of black existence.

Evidence shows that in Toronto alone there is a disproportionate degree of carding towards black bodies compared to any other group; statistics that arguably show comparable numbers to racist carding practices in New York. After being appointed his new role, Saunders openly defended the practice of stopping and carding individuals not under arrest and recording the encounter—a new system very similar to New York's controversial Stop and Frisk program.

Saunders' carding controversy, however, has left Toronto's black community at a divide: serving in the role of first black police chief has sparked support for those who emphasize representation versus those in favour of substance and foundation. How progressive is a black figure as police chief if his impact is inimical for his community?

Saunders' public support of current carding practices—despite evidence of its many flaws— opens gateway to the potential increase of police harassment on black Canadian bodies in particular. His argument stands that although he is committed to putting a halt to random checks of innocent citizens, current carding practices are targeted to "suspected gang members" in hopes of making the city safer by getting rid of "collateral damage."

The negligence in perceived notions of who "suspected gang members" are or the racial implications that come with identities under these titles is what makes Saunders' new policy dangerous. The argument of safety becomes ironic here as open carding policies leaves an entire population, specifically 8.5 percent of Torontonians, unsafe and open to legal harassment by authorities, leaving citizens like Elmardy vulnerable to more black suffering.

A group of activists, academics, and community organizers have openly questioned and requested statistics from the Toronto Police Services Board to defend the premise that carding impacts crime in Toronto. To date, no stats have ever been publicly provided. In response, a petition went viral earlier this month calling for signatures against carding, urging Toronto Mayor John Tory, Police Services Board Chair Alok Mukherjee, and Saunders himself to cease the practice, in efforts to create a city that is "inclusive, diverse, welcoming, and respectful." Within 24 hours since its conception 2,500 people had signed.

Ignoring the ramifications of carding practices in Toronto, much like the denial of police brutality on black bodies in cities such as Baltimore, plays into the continuous dismissal of black suffering. The systems that have continuously allowed for police brutality against black bodies to occur almost daily in America have endured within Canadian borders with minimal mention in the country's history.

The most alarming part of black nihilism, after the progression of what James Baldwin describes as "Negro rage," is the development of a sense of pointlessness: a reclusive, sometimes deadly, depression that cultivates and expands every time another black body is harassed or murdered, serving as an umpteen reminder that black lives have never mattered, neither here nor there.

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Philip Stoddard keeps a bottle of a radiation sickness medicine called potassium iodide in a safe place in his home.

Just in case.

Just in case the sea rises as much as scientists predict, or a hurricane barrels through Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station, the nuclear power plant about 20 miles south of Miami, breaching its walls and overrunning its ancillary equipment.

Stoddard is not a typical doomsday conspiracy theorist, but a three-term mayor of South Miami and a local college professor. Those disaster scenarios are real possibilities, not just because of climate change, but because the plant is operating beyond its intended lifespan and capacity, according to local news reports and experts interviewed for this article.

Stoddard claims that everyone from the plant's operators in South Florida to the state's leadership in Tallahassee is in some stage of denial about the potential dangers of global climate change. That includes Florida's Governor, Rick Scott, who has reportedly banned the words "climate change" from being used by state employees.

Whatever terms you use to describe it, it's hard to deny that sea level rise is coming—and probably faster than predicted.

The implications are obvious and devastating. If the water rises, homes, buildings and businesses will be flooded, wreaking havoc and forcing an exodus of millions. Seawater would seep through South Florida's porous limestone foundation, pushing out all the freshwater and devastating the environment worse than any oil spill ever could.

"We're talking (a devastating loss of) food and a massive movement of people. We're talking disasters," Pete Harlem, a geologist at Florida International University, told VICE. "The ramifications are huge. It's maddening, and we have a governor who doesn't want to use the words, and our local senator (Marco Rubio) who's down here saying he's not a scientist, like, 'I don't know shit.' He's admitting his own stupidity."

What's most frustrating for experts like Mayor Stoddard and Harlem is the nagging feeling that nobody is listening.

Not to them, anyway. Money, of course, is a different story. All along the beach—known for the neon and stringed bathing wear of its denizens—contractors keep building like tomorrow isn't a thing. The money grab is blind to safety concerns, at least environmentally. Miami Beach is trying its best to straddle the line, pushing development to generate property tax revenue, which it will use to build pumps to suck out the seawater.

That seems like a shortsighted, expensive solution to Harlem and Stoddard, who say the best fix—their fix—would be to depopulate and move people out. But that's not happening any time soon.

So how bad is it? In 2008, Harlem made maps to chart the potential effects of sea level rise. According to his projections, by 2120 the sea will have risen by six feet, leaving just 44 percent of the eastern part of South Florida above the water—and by 2159, that number will have shrunk to only 3 percent.

In South Miami, Stoddard is on the front lines, watching the flooding and rising tides scrape city streets.

"We have enough heat in the ocean to put about 60 feet of water under us," he said. "And the slower it happens the better off it is. People need time to change what they're doing. If we got 16 feet tomorrow everybody would die. What we really need to do is start depopulating the area slowly and gradually."

Harlem agrees.

"Everyone's looking short-term," he said. "My concern is that when I look at this stuff as a geologist, it's not a big deal to look at 100 years from now. But it's 25 and 30 years. How do we get these political entities to create solutions to carry us through, when all they look at is the short-term business cycle?"

In a joint statement from the governor's office and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, I was told that there was a five-year project underway to evaluate sea level rise and "vulnerability assessments" in "two pilot communities."

"DEP will examine current water level monitoring protocols and engage local, state, and federal partners to determine the most effective way to monitor sea level changes," spokesperson Dee Ann Miller said. "In addition, the agency will administer the Salinity Monitoring Network, and will continue to address beach erosion through its beach restoration and nourishment program." (The Salinity Monitoring Network is used to measure how much seawater is coming into the environment. A recent study by the United States Geological Survey said it's flawed, and didn't do enough to accurately record where the saltwater is coming from.)

Perhaps the most eye-opening perspective on the topic comes from a 2014 report by the Miami-Dade Sea Level Rise Task Force, which was created by the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners.

"Sea Level Rise is an inevitable consequence of the warming of the oceans and the accelerated melting of the planet's ice sheets—regardless of cause," writes Task Force Chairperson Harvey Ruvin. "It is a measurable, trackable and relentless reality. Without innovative adaptive capital planning it will threaten trillions of dollars of the region's built environment, our future water supply, our unique natural resources, our agricultural soils, and our basic economy."

The report recommends the government speed up the adaption planning process and come up with a "robust capital plan."

As Stoddard does, it warns of the dangers of storm surges, which are just one of many threats to the Turkey Point power plant, which was built in the 1970s, before climate change was even a concern.

On Motherboard: The DIY Engineer Who Built a Nuclear Reactor in His Basement

Nuclear plants have huge stainless steel reactors where atoms are split, a process that unleashes a tremendous amount of heat to produce electricity. In the event of a shutdown, the reactors still need to cool for a long period of time, so a system of pumps circulate water. If the pumps go down, there are backup diesel generators, like the system that failed when they were overrun with water in the nuclear disaster that hit Fukushima, Japan, in 2011.

Another danger comes from the radioactive material itself, or fuel rods, which is stored in cool water on site. If the buildings are breached, the heat from the fuel rods could cause explosions and release more dangerous radioactive materials.

Sea level rise makes disasters more likely, Stoddard said, because the higher the water, the worse the danger of a storm surge breaching the walls and overrunning the diesel generators. It could pick up debris and smash through barriers. In addition, even just three feet of water could maroon the plant as an island. Imagine, he said, the logistical difficulties of containing an accident in those types of conditions.

"How would you get folks to work in the morning? A boat? Suppose there's a storm surge," Stoddard suggested, adding that a nuclear island probably isn't a good idea.

Florida Power and Light (FPL), the state's premier power company, seemed to suggest in a statement that sea level rise isn't a major concern for the current facility.

Greg Brostowicz, an FPL spokesman, told VICE that "based on our conservative projections, we have concluded that sea level rise is not a concern for the cooling canal system." In fact, FPL is planning to build two new reactors by 2027 and 2028, and the company will construct those in anticipation of climate change.

There are a few issues at work here. The power plant is old, and operating beyond its originally intended 40-year life. In 2002, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved the reactors to operate for an additional 20 years—extending one's lifespan to 2032 and the other's to 2033.

FPL says the licensing review process takes years and is extremely conservative in its approach. But Stoddard told VICE that the NRC relaxed the standards for reactor decay—also known as embrittlement—twice, and if they hadn't, the plant would no longer be open.

Thomas Saporito worked at Turkey Point for three years. He's a former instrument control technician and a safety whistleblower at nuclear power plants in Florida, Arizona, and Texas who now works as a consultant and nuclear power watchdog. He's basically dedicated himself to trumpeting the risks of the nuclear industry.

"To fully understand the enormous danger in operating a nuclear reactor beyond its 40-year safety design basis," he wrote in an email, "you need to understand that during power operations, billions of radioactive neutrons constantly bombard the inside of the reactor vessel, which is made of stainless steel. This constant neutron bombardment embrittles the vessel."

Think about what happens if you heat a regular drinking glass in the oven, over and over again: It would weaken structurally. Now imagine throwing cold water on it. It would probably crack. This, Saporito said, is the danger.

Currently, the plant uses surrounding canals to cool the reactors, but even the standards of those had to be relaxed, raising their maximum allowed temperature from 100 degrees Fahrenheit to 104. In other words, the reactors made the water so hot regulators had to raise the threshold.

Location is another obvious contention point. The plant is in a spot prone to hurricanes and storm surges. FPL said it took a direct hit from Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but Stoddard argues they got a surge off the coast, and not a direct one. Hurricane Andrew had blasts of up to 17 feet, and Stoddard said that despite FPL's claims that the plant is 20 feet above sea level, maps made by an FIU professor show it's actually closer to between 11 and 16 feet, and that a surge of that size could inundate 80 to 95 percent of the property.

South Florida, according to Stoddard, is completely unprepared for that eventuality.

Watch out HBO report about how Greenland is melting:

Residents within ten miles of the plant get a safety brochure and are told to either evacuate or stay in their homes. There are no drills. Close windows and listen to the radio, the brochure suggests, and watch TV for further instructions.

A meltdown would happen quickly, and potentially without warning. Even worse, Stoddard thinks the ten-mile evacuation zone is completely arbitrary.

"They limited it to a small enough (area) to where they could evacuate them," he said. "They have this idea that they'll make all the roads northbound."

He goes on to describe all the things that would have to go right in order to facilitate an orderly evacuation.

"They imagine that State Troopers will direct traffic with no radiation protection, ignoring their own families. They assume it'll be safe and that people will behave in an orderly fashion, and that they'll somehow be able to give all the young people (radiation medicine)."

For people living in this part of South Florida, uprooting their lives and moving to escape a potential future nuclear disaster or the rise of the ocean is obviously a drastic step. Stoddard isn't leaving, but he's still got that radiation sickness medicine, just in case.

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Image via Wikimedia.

Wikipedia is available in several indigenous languages, but no Australian ones. Which isn't super surprising—creating a fully translated digital web of information is a huge and complex job. But it's one that researchers from the University of Western Australia, Curtin, and Sydney Universities are willing to take on. They've set out to create of a version of the site in Nyungar—a language native to southwest Western Australia.

Sydney University's Clint Bracknell is an associate researcher on the project. He's aware of how complex the job his team is taking on, and wary of creating any unnecessary hierarchies in the process.

Their primary challenge lies in convincing Wikipedia to completely rethink the way it values Western knowledge. As it stands, the site defaults to Western ways of thinking—academic journals, senior academics, and other written materials back up most of the site's information. Nyungar won't be able to do this because it's primarily an oral language; it doesn't have an established written tradition. For a Nyungar Wikipedia to exist, the current site needs to accommodate non-Western ways of sharing knowledge.

"We don't want to impose Western-style academic authority, because we want to privilege Aboriginal voices on Aboriginal information," Clint told VICE.

One way they're looking to achieve this is to lodge citations orally. As opposed to a written document supporting each piece of information, you could potentially lodge an audio or video file to backup a statement.

"Who is speaking and where that person is from in the region has a big impact on the veracity of our information, and we'd be looking to cite that via audio or video," Bracknell says.

From Motherboard: Wikipedia's Gender Problem Has Finally Been Quantified

Australia's Indigenous languages have long been in a precarious position. During the late 18th century, there were as many as 750 distinct social groups with a similar number of languages and dialects. Today, only 250 of those languages remain, with many not being spoken daily.

Nyungar is one exception. The 2011 census recorded an additional 137 active speakers from 2006—and it's the only Australian indigenous language to have its own children's program. This makes it the perfect Indigenous dialect for this project to center on, given there's a growing user base that would ultimately benefit from the digitization of their language. If this proves successful, it could also act as a template to re-invigorate other Australian indigenous languages.

Shortly, the team will begin workshopping the process by inviting language teachers from the region to flesh out what the page could look like from a user's perspective. Bracknell says this will sort out the underlying problems in organizing an oral tradition—like sorting out standardized Nyungar spellings without discouraging diversity. Nyungar for example, also goes by Noongar, Nyoongar, Nyoongah, or Nyungah.

After the project's initial workshops finish, they will be looking to engage with the language's daily speakers.

"As researchers, it shouldn't be us making the call. The whole language community is special, and they've been doing what we've been doing for a lot longer than us," Bracknell says.

It's easy to get complacent if you're a native English speaker; your mother tongue is one of the best-resourced languages in history. Nyungar didn't have that advantage, so for the research team, there's a lot of people wanting to get this "Nyungarpedia" right.

"We've got to think about language, people, and country as one," Bracknell says. "They all take care of each other, and that'll be lost if we keep having to dilute the way we look at the world."

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Screencap via YouTube user US House History

Jolene Burdge, a woman in Billings, Montana, told the Associated Press Thursday that Dennis Hastert abused her brother, Steve Burdge, decades ago, when Steve was on the high school wrestling team Hastert coached. She told Good Morning America on Friday, "He damaged Steve, I think, more than any of us will ever know."

On May 29, Hastert was indicted for concealing transactions and lying to the FBI. Later that day, anonymous law enforcement officials whispered to the press that the hush money was being paid to conceal alleged sexual misconduct, per the terms of a clandestine agreement made in 2010, according to the indictment. The unidentified victim of that misconduct, known as "Individual A" claims he was touched inappropriately in Hastert's days as a high school wrestling coach in Illinois.

Burdge died of AIDS in Los Angeles in 1995, and doesn't appear to have been involved in a secret arrangement with Hastert in 2010. But this revelation points to the possibility of multiple victims. Jolene Burdge also claims there was much more than inappropriate touching involved. She says Burdge and Hastert carried on a relationship that continued throughout Burdge's time in high school.

Hastert, who has resigned from his lobbying firm in the wake of the indictment, has not been charged with sexual abuse. So far, he has not answered media requests for comment on this new accusation.

Want Some In-Depth Stories About Political Scandals?

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3. The State Department Will Start Releasing Hillary Clinton's Emails June 30
4. A Vegas Prankster Tricked Right-Wing Media With a Fake Story About Harry Reid Getting Beaten Up

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Protesters marching with the Fight for $15 movement in the US. Photo via Fight for $15 Facebook

Tens of thousands of workers laid off. Hundreds of adorable independent cafes closed. A rapid diaspora from the homeland as grocery stores are picked over for scraps of beef jerky and bridges collapse into rivers tainted by gallons of unnamable bodily fluids.

All of these things will happen if the minimum wage is raised.

At least, that was the gist of the fallout that occurred following Alberta Premier Rachel Notley's reiteration that the NDP would be fulfilling its campaign pledge to raise the province's minimum wage to $15-per-hour by 2018 (it's currently at $10.20 for most workers, and $9.20 for employees who serve alcohol). The Canadian Federation of Business wildly predicted that "between 53,500 and 195,000 jobs would be lost"—which seems like a rather extreme range—if the NDP does indeed decide to mandate that people should be paid enough to survive.

"There's a lot of disinformation out there," acknowledges Ian Hussey, research manager at the left-leaning Parkland Institute and author of a recent essay for the think tank on the subject.

Canada kind of blows at dealing with poverty; while there's indeed a great deal of prosperity kicking around, it's very unevenly divided. Anti-poverty advocates suggest increasing the take of minimum wage earners (7.6 percent of Canadian employees, and a mere 2.2 percent of Albertan workers) would assist in resolving that issue while simultaneously stimulating local economies: "All the money they make they end up spending," Hussey says.

Critics suggest such a move incentivizes businesses to slash jobs, downsize businesses, and hire a fleet of iPads. Such allegations inspired Jordan Brennan and Jim Stanford, two economists from Unifor, to conduct a study for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives to assess the validity of such claims based on the past 30 years of Canadian data. In short, they found that in 90 percent of cases, there was no statistically significant relationship between minimum wage increases and employment levels. In half of the remaining situations, employment actually received a boost.

"Workers who are paid more report higher job satisfaction," Brennan says. "There's less turnover and less absenteeism, which means less retraining. Ironically, there's a greater efficiency to paying more workers more: it reduces the cost businesses face which offsets some of the increase in the minimum wage."

If Alberta does go all the way to $15, it will become the first province in Canada to do so and only the fifth jurisdiction in North America (Seattle and Los Angeles both recently ceded to the demands of the Fight for $15 movement). Such a high benchmark has never been tried out before. As a result, few are expecting the NDP to spike the wage overnight: there's a lot riding on Alberta's leftist experiment and sabotaging small businesses or triggering hyperinflation wouldn't do much for their business-friendly image.

In recent weeks, the mayors of Calgary and Edmonton have combined forces to call upon the NDP to also introduce a guaranteed minimum income. It's a distinct concept from the minimum wage: the basic income is funded by the state and ensures every citizen a set allowance, while the minimum wage is obviously paid by businesses. If paired with a minimum wage increase in a reasonable way, the basic income could significantly improve the lives of Alberta's poorest and set an example for the rest of the country, according to advocates.

Franco Savoia, executive director of the anti-poverty organization Vibrant Communities Calgary, says: "If we don't provide adequately—and by that we don't just mean $350 for rent when the rent is $800—it can become a very, very vicious cycle. It's been anathema in the Canadian scene to think about some form of guaranteed income, but that would go a long, long way to improving quality of life."

The list of people who have historically supported a basic minimum income is long and diverse, including the likes of Milton Friedman and Martin Luther King, Jr. Timothy Ellis, an advocate with the Basic Income Canada Network (BICN), notes that India and Namibia have experimented with it. The Liberals and Green Party have also backed the idea. Such an initiative could help reverse the ongoing decline in real wages for low-income earners and consolidate social programs.

"The economic trend lines are not good in a lot of ways," Ellis says. "Look at automation and outsourcing: the value of labour on the market is decreasing for a lot of reasons. Systemically, that's not a bad thing. Expenses going down are good for the consumer. But, of course, there's some human costs to that."

The Alberta NDP has announced the first minimum wage increase will take place on Oct. 1 following a summer of consultations. Until then, Alberta will be tied with Saskatchewan for the lowest pre-tax minimum wage of all the provinces. Over 20 percent of Alberta's workers earn less than $15 an hour, with over three-quarters of those over the age of 20. Alberta also sports the highest household debt and wealth inequality in the country.

"Business has had its way for three decades," Brennan says. "We find ourselves with stagnant growth and soaring inequality. To recommend more of this as the antidote seems to me, frankly, crazy. I think we need a new direction."

Follow James Wilt on Twitter.

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Here's a stock photo we found of a women simulating an orgasm. All photos via Shuttershock

This article originally appeared on VICE Alps.

Girls may not talk about masturbation as openly as guys, but that doesn't mean we don't enjoy rubbing one out every now and then. In fact, all it means is that we don't feel everyone at the bar needs to know the minutiae of how "fucking cracking last night's hand shandy" was, so we keep it to ourselves, or talk about it in groups that don't contain 25 colleagues and Jake from accounting's weird friend Quentin.

Of course, all that reticence means you end up only discussing this kind of stuff with a relatively small circle of wankers. And considering there are many, many ways in which a lady can get herself off, we felt like we might be missing out on some valuable techniques, or just some information we hadn't come across before.

We were curious to find out what exactly it was we were missing, so asked a few ladies to break it down for us. Each paragraph below is from a different respondent, all of whom wanted to stay anonymous, presumably because they didn't want anyone who googled their name to find the phrase, "Usually, I think about things like roller skating on some cloud and then falling down onto a total stranger's dick."

"I'm a big fan of porn. I think that the Stoya films are amazing, for example. Most of the time I just watch short clips on PornHub, just because it's easy. You don't need to download anything. Still, though, it can take a while to find something good on there. Sometimes the actors are super gross, or the thumbnail was a total lie, or whatever. In terms of categories, I'm into things that I don't actually do myself—like toys (I don't have any), lesbians (I'm into men), and threesomes (not really my thing, but I have tried it). The execution isn't particularly spectacular—I just use my hand. As I said, I don't own a vibrator or anything like that. As lame as it seems, I usually just think about whoever it is that I fancy at that given moment."

"When I was 15 my best friend told me about the merits of shower heads and I developed a real taste for it. So that's basically all I use now. Sure, I've tried other things, too, but I think dildos are quite unappealing and flat—they just lack fantasy, don't they?"

"I guess I just do it normally, with my hand? When I was 17, me and my best friend bought a vibrator each—we'd heard that's what you do when you're a grown-up. I tried it and, for me, it was just really strange. I actually ended up throwing it out. Later on, I was given another one as a gift. It had this special little bit on it that would stimulate the clitoris while you had it inside you. That was pretty amazing. It changed my whole perception of vibrators. Once, I actually bought myself a really big dildo—purely out of curiosity. It wasn't that sexy; it was just massive."

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"Vibrators don't really turn me on. I don't need to have something up inside me to cum. They can be quite funny when you use them with your partner, but my hand is more than enough when I'm alone. For some reason I always use my left hand, even though I'm actually right-handed. Not sure why. I don't think women have that same urgent need to cum as men do. But I have to admit that sometimes I really just need to. It's rare, but it happens. Often I do it in order to get rid of a certain fantasy that I'm having about someone, or whatever. Porn can be good—I usually watch things I wouldn't ever like to try myself. A lot of the time I just use my imagination. I like using the shower head, but it needs to be the right kind. When you find the right one, it's the greatest invention on the planet. How often I masturbate varies a lot. If I spend, let's say, an entire Saturday in bed, I might get at it three times. Sometimes, if I've had a stressful week, I don't do it at all."

"The first time I masturbated, it was actually unintentional. I was 11 years old and in a swimming pool with a friend. I didn't really get what happened but I became a really big fan of water afterwards. Showers, pools—basically all running water. Shower heads are definitely the way to go, but a few years back I got really paranoid that the constant jet of water would desensitize my vagina, so I gave it up. I love it, but I have no interest in having a paralyzed pussy. Today, I rely on my boring fingers. Usually, I think about things like roller skating on some cloud and then falling down onto a total stranger's dick—a guy who just so happened to be waiting there with a huge boner."

Watch our film about porn and masturbation and sex: 'The Digital Love Industry'

"I always need to have a specific imagine in my head if I want to pleasure myself. Imagining the hottest guy alive isn't really enough. Porn is the best obviously, but all that monotonous in and out does nothing for me. I find things like manga and comics far more erotic. The writing is sort of like dirty talk to me—it really gets me going. If I've got access to the right material it doesn't really matter whether I'm standing up or laying down. It certainly doesn't take long, either. Sometimes it can all happen a little too quickly. If I could cum in the same way while having sex, I think I could happily call my life perfect."

"I don't masturbate that often. But when I do, it feels as if it's super necessary. It's usually when I'm worryingly under-fucked or dangerously horny. Now and then, I do it when I'm bored. I'm not the kind of girl that needs to stick some giant vibrator into each and every orifice of my body, to be honest. I was once given a vibrator as a birthday present, but it's just gathering dust in my drawer at home. When I have a wank I usually think about guys that I fancy. If it's a major emergency I'll watch porn—usually something with oral sex. I know exactly which buttons I need to press to get off quickly."

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"I started masturbating when I was 13. We were on a school trip and one of the boys explained clitoral pleasure to me. I tried it right away and that sort of sparked years of intensive masturbation. I did it for various reasons—boredom, to beat my daily record, etc. Back then, I was really into seeing myself do it and showing myself off on Skype and other video chats. I've got a pretty embarrassing story involving my family's camera. I'm not hugely into vaginal stimulation, I just stick to the clit. Using a vibrator is way too time-consuming for me, and it just doesn't turn me on. Sometimes, if I'm on coke or something, then my sense of self-worth is totally off and my tastes end up in the weirdest places. The porn I'm into is very much about the power dynamics between men and women, especially when the guy is stronger or in a position of power. Whether it's a babysitter, co-eds or whatever—if there's power dynamics involved, there's a good chance I won't last longer than a minute."

[body_image width='900' height='600' path='images/content-images/2015/06/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/05/' filename='meet-the-couple-who-just-spent-120-days-traveling-the-arctic-on-dogsled-981-body-image-1433532720.jpg' id='63608']No big deal. All photos courtesy Sarah McNair-Landry and Erik Boomer.

One hundred and twenty-six days ago, Sarah McNair-Landry and Erik Boomer set out on a quest to circumnavigate Baffin Island by dog team. Earlier this week, the pair returned to their starting point, Sarah's hometown of Iqaluit, Nunavut. All told, they spent 120 days outside, on the land, completely exposed to the ever-changing conditions of the Canadian Arctic.

I first met McNair-Landry and Boomer (as he is called in these parts) just over a year ago as they were in the planning stages of Yurt Fest, Iqaluit's own frozen version of Burning Man, which thanks to VICE, featured Rich Kidd performing on a stage made of ice. Friendly and unassuming, the duo's casual demeanor masked their accomplishments as extreme adventurists—McNair-Landry, the youngest woman to reach both the North and South Poles, and Boomer, a professional kayaker and nominee for National Geographic's Adventurer of the Year. And, oh yeah, did I mention that they're in love? Talk about a power couple.

Soon after their return to Iqaluit, I joined McNair-Landry and Boomer for a waffle breakfast. At the table with us was Matty McNair, mother to Sarah, polar explorer and guide, and half the inspiration behind their lengthy dogsled trip. As they told VICE prior to embarking, the couple decided to re-create McNair-Landry's parents' Baffin Island circumnavigation on its 25th anniversary. As Boomer tended to the waffle iron and McNair-Landry brewed creamy coffees, we reviewed their trip to talk dogs, money, and love—with the occasional quip from Matty.

VICE: I imagine that 120 days travelling in the Arctic brought no shortage of challenges. What was the most difficult part of your trip?
Erik Boomer: One of the most difficult things was keeping the dogs interested and motivated, because they've got pretty much unlimited energy, but sometimes when they get bored and they start to slow down, they'll act like they don't have energy. And you start to wonder, man, is this really going to be possible? And then it takes just one thing to catch their interest. Whether it's garbage or—

Sarah McNair-Landry: Skidoo trail, some bird.

Boomer: We had to be cheerleaders all the time and continually figure out different ways to keep it interesting for them. Sometimes that meant taking a little puppy that was in heat and skiing in front, and they would just go as hard as you can imagine to catch up.

McNair-Landry: We're so dependent on [the dogs]. We can't push a sled around Baffin Island. We need the dogs to be happy, we need them to want to pull. You can't tell them, "Guys it's just three days and you get a meal! Just keep going!" But they don't know. For all they know, we're just going somewhere, and we'll never go back home. They don't have egos. They don't need to get into VICE. [laughs]

Boomer: Doesn't matter if there's a storm or what, they're just dicking around, ready to get into a fight or ready to go piss on something.

McNair-Landry: We just spent a lot of time talking about the dogs and how they're doing. The dogs, they're like your entire life. Keeping them happy is a big thing. It was a lot more strategy and a lot more guessing, too. And hoping.

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Clearly this wasn't an easy trip by any means, but were there any really dangerous moments, a time where you feared the worst?
Boomer: We got a message from Willie, the other organizer of Yurt Fest. He said, "Big storm coming your way. Build snow walls. 90 km/h storm." We were about four days into the trip and we'd just made it up to this really high plateau on our way to Pangnirtung. This plateau is really notorious because it's so much higher than Iqaluit, so it's always about 10-15 degrees colder and winder. Iqaluit was experiencing solid -40 with 70-90 km winds, so we had at least -40 to 70-90 k winds, probably more. The dogs started to not want to run into these huge winds, so I went up to motivate them and point them in the right direction. The dogs decided they wanted to turn around and go back down the hill, but as they did that, the lines looped around Sarah's foot, and then they bolted down the hill. They had a ton of energy and so much power and the sled was really heavy and downhill was really fast. Sarah was dragging and getting sucked underneath the sled until the sled was literally on top of her leg going down the hill. The first thing I did was I ran to her to try to get the sled off of her leg, and I lost my glove trying to unclip her bindings. As I picked up the sled, that made the dogs pull back harder because when there's resistance, they pull harder. That just made it worse.

McNair-Landry: It properly got the sled on top of me.

Boomer: Sarah was just yelling, "Put the dogs down, put the dogs down!" and I had to pull my ski off with a bare hand and use my ski to tell them sit down, sit down, sit down. Once they were all sat down, Sarah was able to get out from the sled. And at that point I realized that my hand was really cold. It was definitely the coldest I'd ever got. If we're counting windchill, I'm sure it was -70 Celsius.

McNair-Landry: I was being dragged backwards, too, so I couldn't see. If a rock comes, I couldn't see what was coming. I was like, "I'm going to break my leg. I'm going to bust my knee right now." On day four!

Boomer: By the time the situation ended, we had zero visibility. If the team had just bolted off or say we'd both fallen down, we wouldn't be able to find them. You lose visibility at about 20 yards.

McNair-Landry: It does make you realize that it's great to have all those communication tools, but if you lose your sled, there's your mothership. There's your tent, your phone, and everything. And it's great that you have a phone, but nobody can come and get you during the storm. You're on your own.

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Sarah, you've done a slew of polar expeditions since you were a teen. In terms of extreme travel, how would this trip rank?
McNair-Landry: They're all extreme in their ways, you know? They're all different, what you're dealing with. And the dangers are different. This one definitely had a lot of them combined. Like, Antarctica has crevasses, but you have no open water, you have no rocks, you have no hills. This one, you definitely have exposure and cold, just as cold as a lot of other winter trips. Nobody travels in February and there's a good reason for it.

Boomer: As far as difficulty, too, it seemed to me that what made this trip difficult on top of all those other challenges was just the sheer mileage. This one was 4,000 kilometres. The Northwest Passage is only 3,500 kilometres, so this was longer than crossing the top of the continent. It was really long.

After visiting all the hamlets on Baffin Island, which community would you say made the strongest impression on you?
McNair-Landry: They all have their little highlights. Pond Inlet was definitely one that stands out. It was just so beautiful with Bylot Island and the mountains, and it was sunny and a beautiful day. We travelled up the coast with a friend from Clyde River. He had to get his dogs up there anyway to run the Nunavut Quest, and he dogsledded up with us. It was super welcoming and warm. People were really into the dogs. You know how it is in the north—a lot of people are scared of the dogs, but there I felt like there was a big dogsledding culture. There were a lot of other dog teams around.

Boomer: Pond was pretty awesome, and the next one for me that I thought was up there is Arctic Bay. There was an Elder [named Qappik Attgutsik] that we met that is 94 and lived in this little shack heated by qulliqs.

McNair-Landry: Somebody told us we should go down and meet her, but she doesn't speak English. Then this kid came down and wanted to help us feed our dogs, so he helped us cut seal. He was maybe ten or something.

Boomer: You ask him, "What's your favourite thing to do?" "Helping elders." Just a genuine, nice little kid.

McNair-Landry: We asked him if he knew [Qappik] and he said yeah so he came over and helped translate.

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You're not only extreme adventurists—you're also in a romantic relationship. How did you guys meet and start dating?

McNair-Landry: We met in Oregon. I was going down to kitesurf. I would spend my summers down there. I met Boomer on a kite beach.

Boomer: Sarah decided that it was a good day to get a bottle of tequila, so really we probably owe that bottle of tequila to us meeting. And she didn't know my first name was Erik for at least a month. And Sarah's mom is right over there eavesdropping on this conversation.

McNair-Landry: Maybe I'll tell you the real story when my mom leaves.

Matty McNair: I know it, because I was supposed to meet you at a restaurant and you friggin' never turned up! Where was she? She was romancing in Hawaii.

McNair-Landry: $300 round trip! How could you not go to Hawaii? My friend found tickets for like $250 return to Hawaii leaving the next morning at 6 AM, so we're like, sweet, who should we invite? So we just invited a bunch of people and we invited Boomer.

Boomer: I checked my bank account and I had $400 in my bank account so I was like, sweet, I can do that.

McNair-Landry: We packed up some kites at midnight, drove to Portland, got on the plane, and went to Hawaii for five days to kite.

Boomer: The day I got back I hopped in a car full of my friends we drove north to this crazy river in Alaska. I'd known Sara that one tequila night, which I didn't remember very much, and then those few days in Hawaii, but I just had a feeling that I'd be hanging out with her again. I think the next thing we did, was Sarah had a little bit of time before North Pole trip and wanted to do something different. So we looked up a company that taught paragliding in Utah, and we wrote them a letter and said hey we want to take pictures and write some stories if we can do a paragliding lessons, and see if we could get a deal so we could afford it. So we learned how to paraglide for a week and did photos and videos for that company. That's kind of how every date would go.

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So Sarah was going back and forth from the North Pole, Boomer was a professional kayaker. Do you think you could date someone who doesn't do these things?
Boomer: I could and I have, but it didn't make me very happy. This relationship is a lot easier for me, because Sarah understands how I feel about these adventures and putting it on the line and really just making adventure a priority. Looking at it like it's as important as a job or school or anything else. She totally supports me to go do all those things. and because of that, I also realize how important it is to her and I totally support her in that. And it's really double awesome when we get to go do the same thing. In other relationships I've felt like I've had something pulling me back. There was this struggle between life out there and life back home, and with this [relationship] I just feel untethered to do whatever I really, really want to do.

McNair-Landry: Good answer.

Sarah, do you feel the same way?
Boomer: Sarah doesn't think that deeply.

Most couples have trouble getting along on a one-week holiday to Europe. How did you manage to get through four months of being together 24 hours a day, on the land, in such challenging circumstances?
Boomer: I kind of prefer it. I enjoy the time out there with Sarah more than right now [laughs].

McNair-Landry: I think a lot of people are in a relationship and they work and then they see each other at night. From the beginning, because Boomer lives on the west coast and I'm up in Baffin in the middle of nowhere, it's always been that when we see each other, we do something together.

Boomer: We'd go from not seeing each for a month or two, to lets do two weeks on this river trip.

McNair-Landry: We're either together, and when we're together, we're together all the time, or we're apart. When I did my Northwest Passage trip and he was in Ellesmere, we went six months without seeing each other because the expeditions overlapped. It's always been all or nothing.

Alright, you're home now with coffee and waffles and time. What about the dogs? What are they doing now?
Sarah: They're on holidays. They're eating. Lots of fat and meat. They know they're home. As we got closer and closer, they started just running faster and faster and faster.

Boomer: I bet they miss the running right now, though.

Sarah: And us.

Boomer: These dogs are people dogs. One of the main times that there's a little tension or maybe a dog fight is when they would catch up to the skier and all the dogs just surround you and they all want pets. The one in the back that's not getting it will start to get jealous. They all want to get petted and you can only pet one at a time. Pretty much all they wanted the whole four months was just some puppy love.

Sarah: And to pee on stuff.

You can learn more about Sarah and Boomer's trip at wayofthenorth.com or on Facebook at Pittarak Expeditions. And be sure to follow Boomer on Instagram for more of his epic and inspiring photography.

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Placenta on a plate via Flickr user Moppet65535

My mom is a birth doula, which is kind of like a hippie version of a midwife but she doesn't actually catch the kid when it pops out. A lot of the time when she goes to the hospital with one of her clients, they ask her to save the placenta. That means my mom has to slop the placenta into a tupperware and bring it home for safe keeping, until the new family is out of the hospital. The new parents then do various ceremonies with the placenta, like eating it or burying it under a young tree in their backyard so their child's spirit becomes inextricably linked with the sapling. One time, my mom lost someone's placenta and the running joke was that my stoned friend scrambled it in his eggs by accident. She probably just set it on the roof of her Toyota Highlander and forgot it up there.

My buddy didn't actually eat the placenta, but plenty of people do, and not just the weird granola freaks who hire my mom. Khloe Kardashian famously served up a steaming plate of placenta to her family a few years ago and a guy ate placenta tacos and wrote about it for the Guardian. Unfortunately, some scientists at Northwestern University released a study yesterday that said that eating placenta doesn't actually have any miraculous health benefits—it may even lead to unknown risks.

Another problem, according to the study's lead author, Cynthia Coyle, is that there are "no regulations as to how the placenta is stored and prepared."

"Women really don't know what they are ingesting," Coyle said.

The study will probably come as a blow to my mother's future clients, who have dreams of placenta smoothies or a delicious placenta frittata. Luckily, the study said nothing about the metaphysical ramifications of fusing your new son's soul with a tree by fertilizing it with his placenta, so feel free to keep that up.

Want Some In-Depth Stories About Placenta?

1. Hospital Regulations Are Forcing Women to Steal Their Own Placentas
2. Girl Eats Placenta
3. Placenta Smoothies Aren't a Bloody Joke, People
4. Not Your Mom's Placenta

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