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Last week's protest at Adelaide's Parliament House

When it comes to sex work, South Australia has some of the most antiquated laws in the country. Under the Criminal Law Consolidation Act of 1935 and the Summary Offences Act of 1953, activities such as "keeping a common bawdy house" and "living on the earnings of prostitution" are crimes, which is why the state's 1000-odd sex workers are liable to prosecution, if a plaintiff so decides.

And all of this is why South Australia's sex industry has been fighting to comprehensibly decriminalise sex work for thirty years, with the latest push starting last week.

On June 2 the South Australian Sex Industry Network (SIN) and the Scarlet Alliance marked the 40th anniversary of International Sex Workers Day with a rally outside Adelaide's parliament house. There it was announced that state Labor backbencher, Steph Key, would introduce a reform bill in the coming weeks. And sure this is exciting, but it's also essentially the same bill that was stalled into parliamentary oblivion last year, and not for the first time either.

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Ari Reid talking to media

"There have been many, many attempts over the last few years," Ari Reid, from the Scarlet Alliance, told VICE. "In the last 20 years there's been 12 [reform bills] and seven of them have gone to vote. The other five, including the one Steph Key introduced last year, and the year before, never got voted on."

As frustrating as that sounds, sex worker law reform has been a slow process everywhere. While New South Wales and Victoria legalised prostitution in brothels around three decades ago, the ACT only reformed their laws in 1992, followed by Queensland in 1999. All other states, including the Northern Territory, continue to criminalise sex workers to varying degrees, but South Australian law is still the most punitive.

So all of this begs the question, why is South Australia so squeamish about sex work?

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'Joel' is an Adelaide sex worker. He says that legal scrutiny isn't as bad for men, but it's a "daily stress of the job".

At a first glance it might seem a religious thing. Adelaide, after all, is known as the City of Churches, but a look at the numbers show this isn't the case. The 2011 Census reported that 28 percent of South Australians consider themselves non-religious, which is six percent above the national average and 10 percent above NSW. In fact, South Australia was nearly the least religious state in the country, which is an honour garnered by Tasmania at 29 percent.

With these numbers it's hard to imagine that Catholicism is undermining law reform. In which case, it might be a simple case of politics.

Right now, few state electorates are twitchier than South Australia's. The state largely missed out on the mining boom and its biggest industries are shutting down. Meanwhile the current Labor government barely won the last election, which is a triumph attributed more to political maneuvering than actual support. So what it comes down to is a balance of fears.

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The Hon. Dennis Hood MLC from Family First

In South Australia left-leaning voters tend to agree with the right that decriminalisation is risky, although this often stems from fears about exploitation or people trafficking. The right however, argue that decriminalisation amounts to encouragement. This is a belief espoused by such MLCs as Dennis Hood from SA's Family First Party. As he summarised for VICE, "The simple fact is that everywhere prostitution has been decriminalised, it has resulted in proliferation." For this reason he promised to fight any reform bill introduced by Steph Key.

The fact that the left and right have aligned on the issue is unusual, but hardly surprising in the wilds of South Australia. For the Festival State, possibly more so than any other, is a swinger. It was the first state to decriminalise marijuana, as well as the first to try unilaterally legalising same-sex marriage, but then it's also got a reputation for treating bikies like terrorists. When considering any collective political idiom, it's worth remembering that both the Liberal Party's Cory Bernardi and the Greens' Sarah Hanson-Young were made in South Australia.

This swinging electorate scares politicians from both sides that God-fearing votes will go to the other party, or to Family First, as early attempts at reform in South Australia have shown. And for most that means it's easier to vote no, or to avoid the conversation altogether.

On the ground this means condoms are still being used as prosecution evidence, which means sex workers don't call the police, which in their industry can be lethal. On New Years' Day the body of murdered 25-year-old sex worker Ting Fang was found on the 12th floor of an Adelaide hotel. As another sex worker summed it up, "in the hours or minutes before it happened, that woman may have wanted to call the police. Had she felt that she could, she might have lived."

Follow Royce on Twitter: @RoyceRk2

As is often the case with scandals involving American politicians, the exact nature of former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert's major alleged misdeeds isn't in the charges filed against him in court. The news-reading public sometimes has to read between the lines.

In the past few weeks, rumors and accusations have swirled alleging that Hastert had inappropriate sexual relationships with minors back when he was a high school wrestling coach. But when he appeared in court on Tuesday, he was only dealing with charges of illegally concealing large transactions by withdrawing deceptively small amounts, and lying about it when the FBI came sniffing around. The indictment quotes him as having said, "Yeah, I kept the cash. That's what I was doing." It's a line that has become notorious for its Tommy Flanagan–esque poetry.

Hastert, who was once third in the presidential line of succession, pleaded not guilty to the felony charges against him on Tuesday. And he might never face molestation charges thanks to the Illinois statute of limitations on such crimes.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, before Hastert got into politics, he was a high school teacher and wrestling coach in Yorkville, Illinois. He wrote in his autobiography, Speaker: Lessons from Forty Years in Coaching and Politics, that "the coaches who have the most success put their best and most talented people out front to achieve, and everyone else comes together to work." He claimed that this was one of the guiding principles in his political career. According to the New York Times, in addition to coaching wrestling and football, Hastert was a Boy Scout leader, and a chaperone for male students on field trips to Utah, the Grand Canyon, and the Bahamas.

Politically speaking, his record was that of an uncompromising right-wing Republican. Around the time Hastert attained the speakership, Bob Kemper of the Chicago Tribune wrote critically of the Illinois congressman's politics, remarking:

He opposes even the most modest regulation of guns, and fought against the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion rights and other issues critical to women and moderate voters. He is cozy with many of the industries that he regulated as a lawmaker, including telephone companies, medical groups and utilities.

During his tenure as Speaker of the House, which lasted through most of George W. Bush's administration, Hastert was instrumental in the passing of the Patriot Act, beat the drum of war for the US invasion of Iraq, and advanced the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal law allowing states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages that was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.

He was also known for his avowed disinterest in allowing Democrats to have any say while the GOP held a majority in the House of Representatives. He ensured that this practice persisted by implementing the controversial "majority of the majority" rule, which discouraged GOP House leaders from allowing Democrats to pass any bills, even if they had help from dissenting Republicans.

In late 2007, Hastert resigned from Congress, and soon after joined a lobbying firm called Dickstein Shapiro, which worked to sway Congress on behalf of a variety of corporate clients, including Lorillard Tobacco, ServiceMaster, and Maersk Inc. According to the Chicago Tribune, Hastert's lobbying disclosure reports show that he pulled in $11 million for the firm before resigning in the wake of his indictment.

That indictment came down on May 29. As I mentioned, nowhere in the seven pages of allegations is there a mention of sexual misconduct. Instead, nearly all of the ink spilt goes toward describing how Hastert violated 31 U.S. Code § 5313, which concerns properly reporting financial transactions, and makes for exceptionally dull reading.

But the indictment also mentions a shadowy figure called "Individual A," the who allegedly received about $1.7 million from Hastert, $952,000 of which was illegally withdrawn over the course of at least 106 bank withdrawals. (The agreed-upon final amount was meant to be $3.5 million). Individual A, the indictment explains, made arrangements to receive the cash during one of a series of clandestine meetings. At these meetings, Hastert and Individual A "discussed past misconduct by defendant against Individual A that had occurred years earlier."

Later on May 29, while the public was still reeling from the news of Hastert's alleged white-collar crime, anonymous law enforcement officials quietly let the press in on a little secret: they claimed that the charges were tied to sexual abuse. The still-unidentified leakers allege that one of Hastert's old students—a male—had received hundreds of thousands of dollars to conceal the fact that he had been "inappropriately touched" by the then-high school coach. That male student is, they explained, Individual A, but they didn't leak his identity.

In other words, Individual A was apparently extorting Hastert, but given that the anonymous former student appears to be cooperating with the feds, he's unlikely to face charges.

Then, on June 5, a woman named Jolene Burdge appeared on Good Morning America to accuse Hastert of molesting her brother, Steve Reinboldt, one of the boys Hastert had taken to the Bahamas. Reinboldt, who died of AIDS in 1995, had been the equipment manager for Hastert's wrestling team back in the seventies. His family had held onto a yearbook Hastert had signed, calling Reinboldt, "a great righthand man." Burdge told Good Morning America that Hastert "damaged Steve, I think, more than any of us will ever know," and that the relationship had continued "all through high school."

According to the indictment, Individual A was still receiving payments as of last year, making Reinboldt the second alleged victim. With Hastert a possible serial offender, currently free and not facing charges for sexual misconduct, the Survivor's Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) stepped in, calling for Hastert's portrait to be taken off the wall of the Capital Building, and asking other victims to step forward.

Hastert's been very quiet through all of this, hiding out at home for 12 days before his court appearance this week. He has hired a lawyer named Thomas C. Green, a political scandal specialist of sorts, who has defended clients allegedly involved in Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair, and Whitewater. According to the New York Times, Hastert's defense is going to be a tricky double axel. Green might aver that Hastert's lying to the FBI didn't impede the investigation. But if he wants to get away with his sketchy bank withdrawals, Hastert will likely have to sit down on the witness stand and explain himself.

On Tuesday, Hastert waded through one of those courthouse media ambushes, and then meekly walked into the courtroom, while the journalists in attendance scrutinized the 73-year-old's newly decrepit posture. After pleading not guilty, he was allowed out on bond, but only after being asked to give a DNA sample, and hand over his passport along with any guns he might have.

The whole debacle has also resurrected a nine-year-old controversy over Hastert's handling of accusations against Mark Foley, a congressman who sent text messages to 16- and 17-year-old male pages, asking them questions about their penises, and later, blamed booze. It was later revealed that Hastert got wind of Foley's conduct, but didn't discipline him, and Hastert was forced to apologize.

"I'm deeply sorry that this has happened," Hastert said at the time, adding, "and the bottom line is we're taking responsibility because ultimately, as someone said in Washington, the buck stops here."

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Photo by the author

In a Reddit post on Wednesday afternoon, the team in charge of the link-sharing community and notoriously deep rabbit hole of procrastination just announced that they will ban subreddits that facilitate harassment.

The post isn't clear about how it will be determined that a community "break[s] our reddit rules based on their harassment of individuals," but Reddit has already banned five subreddits: /r/fatpeoplehate, a now-defunct community that gave Redditors a much-needed space for hating fat people, along with/r/hamplanethatred, /r/transfags, /r/neofag, and /r/shitniggerssay. (Of those five, fatpeoplehate was the only one with over 5,000 members.)

This announcement brought up long-running tensions between Reddit the company and its user base, who are generally adverse to any kind of censorship. Reddit has long been a bastion of free and chaotic speech, and that philosophy has spawned weirdo collective art projects and aggressive, envelop-pushing absurdism along with subreddits devoted to racism or "creepshots" of unsuspecting women, among other content that has drawn criticism.

As of this writing, 52 percent of users have downvoted the announcement post, and many of the top-voted comments reflect a belief that Reddit has lost credibility as a bastion of free speech. The site took its first step toward banning content that wasn't technically illegal in 2011 when it removed /r/jailbait, a community that posted scantily-clad, though not nude, photos of underage girls.

Ellen Pao, current Reddit CEO, told TIME last month, "It's not our site's goal to be a completely free-speech platform. We want to be a safe platform and we want to be a platform that also protects privacy at the same time."

Former CEO Yishan Wong felt differently, however, writing privately during his time at the company that Reddit was "not going to ban distasteful subreddits" or remove anything legal at all, even if company brass found it personally offensive.

Pao isn't popular among a wide swath of Redditors. In a discussion on the site of what makes her so terrible, a user named ilovecreamsoda claimed that she screens employees for political beliefs that are similar to hers, and that "she wants to turn Reddit into a feminist hivemind."

Of course, while the Constitution protects free speech, Reddit is a platform owned by a company, and that company can decide what it does and does not want to put on its site. Facebook does this when it openly bans hate speech and harassment, and Reddit may be leaning more in that direction.

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Lauren Daverin and her friends thought they were invincible. On August 22, 2013, they gathered on a bridge on Long Island one afternoon as they had done countless times before. They drank vodka and smoked pot. They all had problems to escape: absent parents, the deaths of friends, and the fact that school was starting in two weeks—at least for those of them who hadn't dropped out.

As Lauren's friend Vicky Tanza recalls, "It was a normal fucking day."

Lauren, who was about to turn 19, was the center of attention. Her hair was the first thing people noticed—that day it was almost shoulder-length and dyed the color of red wine. She had arched eyebrows, blue eyes that peered out from half-closed lids, and big lips made up to look even bigger.

Some outsiders considered her distant, but she treated friends like family. "If she liked you, she loved you and she would do anything for you," one friend tells VICE.

On VICE News: Inside the NY Prison Where Two Inmates Made a 'Shawshank'-Style Escape

The pedestrian bridge, located in the village of Rockville Centre, spans three lanes of traffic and lets people cross from one side to a park. There are no buildings nearby, just parking lots, a blue-and-white water tower, a river lined with cattails, and soccer fields covered in goose shit. That summer, overgrown trees and bushes hid the bridge from view. From its center, the kids could see the sunset. If they closed their eyes, the rushing cars sounded like the ocean.

As night fell, Max Sherman, 18, showed up on a bicycle with a green army-style duffel bag. He was a husky five foot six and 185 pounds, with red hair shorn into a buzz cut and teenage stubble on his chin. Vicky's boyfriend had invited him there; no one else knew him. "He seemed perfectly fine," Vicky says. "I just thought he was shy."

All those hours of swigging from a cheap bottle of vodka seemed to catch up with Lauren. Friends offered her water, but she was stumbling around, slurring her words and smashing bottles against the pavement. "She got, like, crazy when she was drunk," Vicky recalls. "Like, obliterated." Exhausted with her antics or preoccupied with their own, the group left Lauren and Max alone. "Lauren is a tough motherfucker," says Steve Garcia, Vicky's boyfriend. "I didn't even think twice about leaving her with Max."

When the friends returned a while later, Lauren was the only one still there. Her body was curled in an awkward position, her clothes strewn about nearby. She was slumped against the bridge's green metal fence—lifeless and naked except for her combat boots.

Rockville Centre, about an hour east of New York City, has a handful of pedestrian bridges leading to parks on the outskirts of town. They all have ramps or steps going up and down from them, and tall fences that run their lengths. The secluded locations naturally attract high school kids at night. The cops sometimes show up, but drinkers might walk away with just a warning. "We give it as much attention as we can," one local officer tells VICE, "but we do have to prioritize."

Being a teenager isn't easy on anyone, but people who work with kids on Long Island say they've never had it harder. High divorce rates and an economy in which people take on multiple jobs or work longer hours means parents aren't around as much. The college admissions process is always getting more competitive, putting more pressure on kids to score higher on SAT exams. Social media has given rise to meaner bullies. The number of teens using heroin is "exploding," news reports say. "You get groups of kids and they feel like throwaways, that nobody really needs anything from them. And that, to me, is heartbreaking," says Anthony Zenkus of the Safe Center LI, a local nonprofit that helps victims of abuse. A church employee who helps youth with substance-abuse issues adds, "They're raising each other."

Ray Longwood, a local church pastor, called Lauren's group the "fence kids" because when they weren't by the bridge they drank at the fence behind his church. Sometimes, Longwood would offer them pizza and Lauren would confide in him. He recalls her talking about how her father had left the family when she was little and why she drank. "I think over time she had built up some calluses from her past hurts," Longwood says. "But I felt like we were just at a place where we were starting to peel some of that back."

Lauren was sassy, loud, and did what she wanted. She dropped out of high school before completing ninth grade, never worked besides babysitting her nephew, and slept past noon. "She really didn't care what people thought of her, at least on the outside," according to Kathleen Daverin, her mother. "But on the inside it bothered her. People made fun of her. She always had this wall up, this shell of security."

Lauren used social media to build that wall higher. She posted on Twitter with the handle @fuckkk_youuu and her profile photo shows her with her pants unzipped, pink underwear exposed. Her bio reads, "I do my thing and you do yours. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine."

Watch: Stopping HIV? The Truvada Revolution

In early 2012, she met Kashawn Gresham at a house party in town. He had grown up nearby and was on leave from the Air Force. "Her first words to me were, 'You have no chance,'" Kashawn recalls. But when he returned to his base in Louisiana, they kept in touch. "It went from talking once every couple of days to every day," he says.

About a month and a half after they met, Lauren told him they were in a relationship. That summer, Kashawn proposed over the phone. Without hesitation, Lauren said yes, even though they had only seen each other in person a few times. When Kashawn visited New York again that fall, they married at a city clerk's office ceremony that lasted less than two minutes.

After the wedding, Lauren moved to Louisiana. The newlyweds rented a house next to Kashawn's Air Force base, but she didn't fit in with the other military wives, who were mostly Southern Belles who pulled rank. Sometimes the interracial couple got disapproving looks in public. Plus, their personalities clashed. He was older, a second-generation military man preparing for nuclear war; she just wanted to have fun, her friends say.

As summer 2013 approached, a major fight sent Lauren packing and back to Long Island. "The only time I've ever seen her cry was when she came home," her sister Catherine says. "He did something."

Kashawn won't go into details, but says, "We were having communication issues... We didn't know if we were going to make it. There were issues on both ends."

Lauren returned to her old routine, sleeping late and drinking with friends. But that May, a friend died of a heroin overdose. The loss affected Lauren, and she decided to get busy planning her future. She worked on a résumé and discussed getting her GED certificate and enrolling in community college. "She wanted to better herself," her mother says. "She didn't want to be the dropout. She didn't want to be left behind while everybody else was doing things." Her efforts inspired friends to make similar changes. "We both were really trying to get our lives together," Vicky says. "We realized we needed to grow up."

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Lauren Daverin. Photo courtesy of her family

By all accounts, Lauren Daverin and Max Sherman never crossed paths before the night on the bridge. Growing up, Max and his family split time between Rockville Centre and Barrington, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. (I grew up in Rockville Centre too, and knew Max's brother.) Max would get in trouble at home and with the cops; his parents accused him of stealing from them and doing drugs. Police records show that his parents called about a missing or runaway juvenile several times. He wrote in a Facebook message to someone he knew: "I don't mind growing up faster than others." (His family and lawyer declined to comment, and Max declined to meet me.)

Around the time he was 15, his parents may have sent him to a residential program to deal with his apparent drug use, according to three people with knowledge of his family history. But his troublemaking continued. He was adopted, and the Shermans thought maybe his issues stemmed from not knowing his real parents. So in 2012, they contacted his biological mother, Stephanie Hileman, with whom they had stayed in touch. She was 16 and a high school dropout when she was pregnant with Max. When the Shermans reached out, she was around 34, recently divorced with three more children, and was living in rural Washington State. She, too, wanted closure, and agreed to let him live with her.

By January 2013, Max had enough credits to graduate high school early, and he journeyed west.

Hileman prepared a room for Max, the Shermans enrolled him in college courses, and a resource center got him a job at Subway. But the plan fell apart. He and Hileman clashed over his cigarette and pot smoking. He left her house and crashed with people around town. He claimed someone stole his computer and likely never started his courses. And when Subway fired him for not having a Washington ID, Max went to the sandwich shop at night, smashed the front window, and stole $450, according to police records and the manager at the time.

"We live in a town with less people than a New York City block," Hileman tells VICE. "When Max broke into Subway, it made it in every paper in our county." In May 2013, days before he turned 18, police arrested him for theft, burglary, and vehicle prowling.

"He really looks like he's telling the truth a lot of the time, when you know he did something, you know he was lying, and yet his face was so convincing that you almost doubted yourself." —Susan Elser on Max Sherman

He gained a reputation in the small town of Davenport, population 1,700. "I've partied with the guy," says Paul Jurasin, a local. "He hung out with people that I know in town and just never was very trustworthy and was just always kind of shady. My girlfriend never liked him. Things would disappear when he was around... cigarettes, money, pills."

"Max made me feel really, really nervous," adds Susan Elser, Paul's girlfriend. "He really looks like he's telling the truth a lot of the time, when you know he did something, you know he was lying, and yet his face was so convincing that you almost doubted yourself."

In July, after his release for the earlier charges, locals discovered him squatting in a house blocks from Hileman's home while its owners were away. He was with a 16-year-old girl who had run away from home. The cops charged him with criminal trespass and unlawful harboring of a minor, according to police records. "He is very good at having this mask of, 'Oh no, not me, I wouldn't have done that ever,'" says Julie Lawson, who knew Max and found him that day.

Max was sent to county jail, where he spent about two weeks. When the Shermans agreed to look after him again, the county dropped the charges on August 2, 2013, according to records and the prosecuting attorney, Mel Hoit. Bill Dehler, a counselor and part-time jail chaplain with whom Max had become close, drove him to Spokane, the closest city. He bought Max some McDonald's and eight dollars worth of secondhand clothing and put him on a Greyhound to New York City, a three-day journey. He gave Max an old military duffel filled with food and water and handed him a Bible.

"Max, you have three days," the chaplain told him. "You need to really change your life around."

"I can't even wrap my mind around this right now," Vicky posted on Facebook. "Someone please wake me up from this nightmare."

Rockville Centre police arrived at the bridge around 10 PM, and pronounced Lauren dead 15 minutes later. Police reports say officers discovered signs of assault on her body, including blunt-force trauma to the back of her head, and noted it was "a dark secluded area" with "no streetlights or other lighting sources."

The cause of death, they determined, was strangulation. Her face was black, blue, and purple.

In the early-morning hours, word spread among the "fence kids" that Lauren was dead. "I can't even wrap my mind around this right now," Vicky posted on Facebook. "Someone please wake me up from this nightmare." Some of them guessed Lauren had fallen off the bridge or gotten alcohol poisoning. "We had been up to the bridge a million and ten times," Vicky tells me. "I had always assumed it was, like, a safe space." Detectives started showing up at kids' houses, and at least some of the kids said they last saw Lauren with Max.

"I thought it was Max that night, right away," claims one friend who spoke with detectives. "No one knew him, and he was sketchy as hell." Steve Garcia, who had invited Max, says he was social at first but later isolated himself. "He changed... Something flicked on in his head."

At the time, Max was living in his parents' beach house a few towns over. The morning after the murder, he returned to the bridge on his bicycle. He was chain-smoking and had cuts on his face and hands and a bruise below his left eye. He was wearing a gray plaid long-sleeve shirt. Reporters were interviewing passersby and Max agreed to a TV interview. He told the reporter he had been there the previous night.

"What was everybody doing? Just hanging out?" the reporter asked.

"They were chilling by the, uh, soccer post or whatever," he said. "I just rode by, saw my friend Steve, and got a cigarette from him."

"And what's your reaction to this now?"

"Amazed, kinda," he said, stumbling over the words. "It's right in the middle of town. Surprised." He was facing the sun and squinting. He brought his right hand to his mouth and inhaled from a cigarette, the hand shaking.

"And there was nothing going on in the group last night that would suggest that somebody was getting hurt?" the reporter asked.

"Nah, everybody was just chilling," he exhaled. "Hanging out."

It wouldn't be Max's only taped interview that day. Acting on tips, police got a court order to access his phone data. They also had Steve Garcia do controlled phone calls, which they recorded. "I got jumped last night," Max said to him in the recording, which was subsequently played in court. As for what happened with him and Lauren, he told Steve, "She said she was fine and I left."

That evening, police tracked down Max for questioning. He told them he had been in a fistfight after leaving Lauren alone on the bridge, and that he didn't have sex with Lauren. He offered up his DNA for testing. "A swab, a hair, whatever it is," he said according to a recording played at the pre-trial hearing. "I didn't do shit."

On August 24, 2013, police arrested Max for second-degree murder. By that time, Lauren's death had made headlines: "Teenager Found Dead on Long Island Footbridge"; "Long Island Teen 'Wild Child' Is Found Slain." The county held Max without bail. At his indictment, a grand jury added first-degree sex abuse to the charges. At his arraignment days later, dressed in a suit and tie and with his buzz cut grown out, Max pleaded not guilty.

Kashawn, Lauren's widower, watched from the gallery, wearing fatigues, as he had done at their wedding.

"I hope he rots in hell... because I'm in hell and he deserves to be." —Kathleen Daverin, Lauren's mother

The 21 months since Max's arrest have seemed interminable for everyone involved. Families have been crushed, and even those people who knew Max out west feel guilty. "Her family and mine will forever grieve," says Stephanie Hileman, his biological mother. Now 20 years old, Max has spent two birthdays behind bars. The Daverins have awaited justice.

After nearly two dozen closed-door conferences between the judge and lawyers, pretrial hearings began this year. Lauren's mother attended each one and would look upon her daughter's accused killer, a wooden railing the only thing separating them.

The judge set a trial date, but on April 24, Max changed his plea to guilty. His attorney told the press that Max wanted "to spare both his family and the victim's family a long, drawn-out trial," and that "his state of mind from the beginning was one of remorse, genuine remorse."

Kathleen doesn't buy it. "I hope he rots in hell," she says, "because I'm in hell and he deserves to be."

Sentencing is scheduled for Thursday. Max faces 18 years to life behind bars, according to his attorney. Lauren's family plans to attend, and afterward, they will either visit the cemetery or the makeshift memorial they set up on the bridge just after her death, which is still there. Burned-out tea candles and melted candle wax cover the ground. Plastic flowers poke through the fence. Mourners spray-painted "R.I.P. LAUREN" on the pavement.

"I knew this was going to affect me, but not so horribly," someone wrote in purple ink on a Hallmark card. "I know you wouldn't want anyone to feel sad, but it's just so bad."

Another person inscribed a message on a red candle with the image of Saint Michael, believed to assist the dying.

"I hear paradise has the best parties."

Max Kutner is a journalist from Long Island, New York. He has written for Boston and Smithsonian magazines and is a staff writer at Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter.

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All photos courtesy of the National Media Museum and Flickr.

In the early 20th century, a British guy named William Hope rose to prominence in Spiritualist circles because of his ability to allegedly capture images of paranormal spirits in his photographs. Eventually, Hope founded a group of spirit photographers called the Crewe Circle. He and his cohorts went on to prey on grieving families who lost loved ones in WWI and desperately wanted photographic proof that their relatives were still hovering around in spectral form. By 1922, Hope was making good money in London taking spirit photos and working as a professional medium—even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame was a staunch supporter.

A string of skeptics exposed Hope's spirit photos as fakes instead of honest-to-god proof of the supernatural, and a 1922 feature in Scientific American mapped out the photo tricks and double exposures Hope and other spirit photographers used to make their images. Despite the naysayers, Conan Doyle stood by Hope's side. He even penned an entire book to make a case for the legitimacy of Hope and spirit photography and named it, naturally, The Case for Spirit Photography. Even after being unmasked as a fraud, Hope continued taking spirit photos until his death in 1933. Conan Doyle supported him until the bitter end.

Hope's surviving spirit photographs are now part of a collection at the National Media Museum. The images are strange and unsettling, but it's pretty obvious that they're fakes. For someone who created the world's most famous detective and inquisitive mind, Arthur Conan Doyle was a real dope for falling for Hope's tricks. After discovering Hope's story and photos on the Public Domain Review website, I became curious about how Hope was able to manipulate photos like this back in the 1910s. So I tracked down Nathaniel Stein—Horace W. Goldsmith Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art—to get some more info on what went into spirit photography.

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VICE: Hey Nathaniel. Can you tell me a bit about how Hope faked these spirit photos?
Nathaniel Stein: Photography was as open to manipulation in the pre-digital era as it is now. Supernatural effects were mainly accomplished using good old-fashioned double exposure. Photographers like Hope would have been making their negatives on photosensitized glass plates. You set up your apparition (or ectoplasm, or whatever) for the camera and take the lens cap off for a short period of time. Then, later on, use the same glass plate to photograph your living sitter.

The developed negative comes out with both images on it—an incompletely exposed ghostly image as well as your sitter, looking perfectly unaware. Alternatively the doubling-up could be done during the making of the print, by printing multiple negatives to one piece of photographic paper.

Interesting. Were there a lot of photographers pulling tricks like this in the 19th and 20th centuries?
There are several famous figures in spirit photography—William Mumler is probably the most notable in the US. He had his heyday in the 1860s. Like Hope, Mumler was debunked in his own time (there was even a court case), but there were also many people who continued to believe in the veracity of his work.

Why do you think people kept believing, even after the whole thing was proved to be a hoax?
Spiritualism was quite a big thing in Europe and the US during this period, so the photographic aspect of this practice was building on an already thriving cultural phenomenon. Like mediums, I'm sure spirit photographers exercised a certain personal magnetism. I'm sure many of their adherents had a deep need to believe contact with the dead was possible.

Right. Seems like a lot of Hope's fans lost loved ones in the war, so they were really searching for ways to deal with that grief.
Yes. Also don't forget things like micro-photography, or the photographic registration of light beyond the visible spectrum, or x-ray photography—these are all instances where the camera was ordained by scientists as a machine that could see things human beings couldn't see. Would photography of spirit presences invisible to the human eye really be that much of a leap?

That makes sense. Thanks a lot!

Follow River on Twitter.

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Islamic State militants near the border of Iraq and Syria.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I can see why some people become radicalized. I'm half white-British, half Iraqi-Arab, born and raised in the UK. I was 15 when millions of my fellow countrymen marched against the imminent invasion of Iraq. My family in Mosul (uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandma) were happy, wealthy people in 2003. But since that fateful year, because of the actions of mine and other governments, they now fear for their lives every day. The sense of injustice I feel drove me to investigate why a tiny pocket of British Muslims are becoming radicalized.

When I was 15, I was worrying about getting grades for my GCSEs that wouldn't make my dad cry. The same year, my Iraqi family of teachers, doctors, and construction contractors stopped being able to work because of curfews and airstrikes. When my eight-year-old cousin broke her arm, they couldn't afford the cast to fix it.

The same year, while I was worrying what color trainers would go best with my school uniform, in the middle of the night, six US soldiers camped in one of Saddam's former palaces broke into the nearby house my grandma, uncle, aunt, and young cousin were living in. They held guns to my 70-year-old grandma's head and stole the last $100 the family had from her bedside table, before dragging my uncle out into the street, bundling him into a car, and interrogating him as a terrorist suspect for 24 hours at the palace before releasing him. As moderate Sunnis, my family have no affiliation with extremists. My grandma never fully recovered from the shock and died the following year.

When I was 18, I was caning it around Manchester's suburban streets in my hand-me-down Vauxhall Corsa, wondering if dropping biology in favor of film studies was really the best idea. Over in Iraq, my 19-year-old cousin was kidnapped by insurgents. He was blindfolded, handcuffed, thrown in the boot of a car, and held hostage in a house outside the city. His captors called his dad and told him to pay a ransom or they would chop his head off. Two days after being captured, my cousin was left alone for a few minutes. He untied himself, jumped out of a small window on the second floor, found his bearings and ran several miles home. He remained inside the house for years after so he wouldn't be found and killed.

From 2003 to 2009, they couldn't afford food, clothes, or medicine. I doubt they would have all survived without my parents being able to send money over to them.

To make sense of my anger at their suffering, I called Rana Allam, the former editor-in-chief of Daily News Egypt. She described seeing her colleague, a "genius, upper middle class young man in his mid 20s," become radicalized during the Arab Spring. After witnessing his father killed and his brother tortured by state forces, then losing his job, he became a vengeful extremist who celebrates when police officers, judges, and soldiers are murdered.

She said: "He's out of a job, his friends are jailed, his father was killed—that's a perfect environment for someone to become radicalized. These people need to fight back; that's a normal reaction. If it's between joining Isis or getting a life sentence, or executed, when you did nothing at all, then you will join Isis.

"Democratic countries should take care to maintain the peace they have and not persecute their own people into a place where they believe radicalization is the only option for them."

Unlike Rana's friend, I don't witness any of what my family is going through firsthand, yet I'm still enraged. Could other members of the diaspora—who maybe don't have as comfortable a life in the UK as I do—find such events cause to become radicalized?

Dr. Francesco Ragazzi, an expert in counter-radicalization who advises the European Parliament on counter-terrorism, said: "In terms of invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the CIA torture program, the drone extrajudicial bombings, killings, and so forth—in places like Birmingham or east London, people who are recruiting for the Islamic State don't even have to come up with conspiracy theories. They just say, 'Look what's happening in Pakistan, Guantanamo, what's happening to Moazzam Begg. What are you doing about it?'"

Related: Watch our film about life after Islamic State's massacres

So far, up to 700 people have left the UK to join the Islamic State—a number too large for us to simply dismiss them all as psychopathic monsters. Currently, the most high profile of those presumed to have joined the terrorist group are three teenagers from East London. School friends Shamima Begum, 15, Kadiza Sultana, 16, and Amira Abase, 15, left their homes for Syria in February.

Addressing why the girls decided to join the apocalyptic Islamist group, their solicitor, Mohammed Akunjee, cites "difficult family circumstances" and the tight bond between adolescent friends. He added: "They also have the promise of housing and income over there, which makes it look like a better option than staying in the UK. [Isis] provide a benefits system; al Qaeda never did that. This is the fundamental difference between them and ISIS, and why there are so many people going to join them."

While Akunjee has been branded an extremist by some sections of the right-wing press, he is not the only British lawyer encouraging the UK government to examine its role in creating a climate ripe for radicalization.

Solicitor advocate Sophie Khan said structural racism in the UK means 75 percent of Muslim women and 50 percent of Muslim men are unemployed. "So you have a very low standard of living here. The Muslims becoming radicalized are on the edge of society," she said. "They are suffering racism at school and then in the job market. The government should be asking how it can address this issue."

One of the main tactics the government is employing through its "toxic" Prevent strategies is to encourage "a move into the private space" of British Muslims. Last week, Commander Mak Chishty, the most senior Muslim police officer in the UK, told the Guardian that subtle changes in children's behavior—such as shunning Marks & Spencer, negative attitudes towards alcohol, social occasions, and Western clothing—could be signs of radicalization and should be reported to the police.

READ ON VICE NEWS: Families of Islamic State-Bound Schoolgirls Say UK Police "Let Them Walk Out"

Anjum Anwar, a Muslim teacher awarded an MBE in 2005 for her work in community cohesion, said, "Commander Chishty's comments have upset the [Muslim] community. It puts five-year-olds at risk of being targeted as extremists."

Dr. Ragazzi slammed Chishty's comments as "insane." He said, "Having a conversation about what the role of communities, doctors, [and] high school teachers have in fighting radicalization is entirely useless, and creating a completely counterproductive atmosphere of fear. Most of the attacks in the last few years, such as the Boston bombings, the Woolwich killing, the Charlie Hebdo and Copenhagen attacks—all of these people were on the watch lists of the intelligence services.

"The efforts should be on how we make sure that intelligence services, the police, investigative judges, and the Crown Prosecution Services have the means and the ability to stop wasting resources and focus on those who are really dangerous. All of that requires the respect of the law, human rights, and privacy, and to stop wasting resources on mass surveillance, which has been proven to be completely useless in terms of stopping these issues."

So with the UK's reprehensible foreign policy in the Middle East; increasing structural racism against Muslims resulting in disenfranchisement of many in the community; and the growing reality of what Greater Manchester Police chief Sir Peter Fahy called "a drift towards a police state", the government desperately needs to rethink how to tackle the radicalization happening on its doorstep.

As for my family, now Isis have come to prominence, we can only speak to them when one of the men manages to get outside of the city once every couple of months and call us, because of the block on communications. My aunties and female cousins aren't allowed out of their homes without a male chaperone. In between snatched phone calls, we hope they're all OK. I don't pray; I just cry angry tears at the injustice of it all.

Follow Sophia on Twitter.

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Iwan Rheon as Ramsay Bolton in 'Game of Thrones.' Photo by Helen Sloan. Courtesy of HBO

Warning: spoilers about the fifth season abound.

As Stannis Baratheon watched his daughter go up in flames towards the end of episode nine of this season of Game of Thrones, I finally realized what the show had been missing lately—a great villain. In fact, many of the choices made by the show creators over the last 18 episodes, choices that have puzzled, depressed, and sometimes angered me, can be explained by their need to create a villain worth hating.

A villain, a good villain, is something special. I'm not talking about an anti-hero—a protagonist who does bad things, but for whom viewers find themselves rooting anyway—but a genuine villain. A villain must serve as an enemy or nemesis to characters that you like, or at least would like to win. A villain needs to devour their scenes (and sometimes, if they are named Hannibal, their foes), progressing in their villainy until their ultimate defeat (Voldemort), redemption (Caprica 6, Black Widow, and Hawkeye), or both (Darth Vader). Villains need a plot arc that intensifies their menace or leads to some kind of character change, because even evil-doing, when constant and predictable, grows tedious.

And that's the problem with Game of Thrones, its bad guys and gals have either gotten incompetent or boring.

To be sure, the show is filled with lots of nasty people doing terrible things, and the Night King's raise-the-dead shrug at Jon Snow and the Wildlings foreshadows the existential threat to come, but there's just not a character that I love to hate. And there hasn't been since the death of Joffrey Baratheon.

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Lena Headey as Cersei Lannister. Photo by Macall B. Polay. Courtesy of HBO

By the time Joffrey died early in season four, he had achieved peak hate-watch status. We had seen him grow up from snotty bully to sadistic murderer, no longer content to have his minions do the violence for him. Still, even at his worst, he remained a golden boy, immaculately dressed, courtly, and terrifying. His cruelty ascended, following the classic serial-killer progression, from bullying local kids, causing the death of a harmless animal, to eventually (and controversially) killing a prostitute and spy in his bedroom. He died at his own wedding, drinking poisoned wine after humiliating his uncle Tyrion, in a beautifully shot, lengthy closing scene, in the episode "The Lion and the Rose."

Like the best moments in Game of Thrones and the associated books, Joffrey's death surprised us, whether we first encountered it on the page or the screen. I remember re-reading the pages describing his death several times to make sure I understood them correctly. I did this during the Red Wedding too, in which other major characters were suddenly snuffed out (moral of the story: Don't get married in Westeros). I couldn't believe what I was reading either time.

Want to see the real True Blood?

Lately, plenty of characters have done fucked up things, but there's neither progression nor surprise. Cersei and Littlefinger, both good candidates for villains, have grown incompetent. Littlefinger has turned from a master manipulator to a tool for the show's writers to spread information and make plots happen. There's no center to him anymore. Cersei is, at her best, when she's coldly calculating, and she's had great moments this season, such as when she casually rid herself of every contender on the small council, or the times she lovingly dotes on naïve Tommen and coerces him to do just what she needs. Still, I found no pleasure in watching her slurp water from the floor of a cell. She's become someone to pity, trapped by the stereotypically gendered emotions of jealousy and possessiveness, and her downfall makes her sympathetic.

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Dean-Charles Chapman as Tommen Baratheon and Lena Headey as Cersei Lannister in 'Game of Thrones.' Photo by Macall B. Polay. Courtesy of HBO

And then there's Ramsay Bolton and what I call the "Game of Theons." I have found that entire plot intensely boring, not because torture and horror are necessarily a problem to depict, but because the writing and action are so repetitive. Someday, the Man with the Bad Haircut will be killed by someone, and my feeling will be relief, not triumph. In the books, the transformation of Theon to Reek happens out of sight. One hears about the torturous methods of the Boltons, but they are hints used to set up the reveal of Reek's identity. Obviously, because the actor is who he is, Reek's identity couldn't have been hidden, but there's no reason to give him and Ramsay so much screen-time.

Unless, that is, the goal is to create a new Joffrey.

Jack Gleeson as Joffrey Baratheon in 'Game of Thrones.' Photo courtesy of HBO

But just being doing evil stuff does not make for a good villain. Last week, I wrote about the hero's quest in Game of Thrones, arguing that Jon Snow is the best fit (although Tyrion and Daenerys may still emerge). One can flip this idea around, though, and think about the villain's quest. Writers Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals suggest that the villain's journey is "one of declining power, while the hero's story is one of rising power." They identify villains from Jaws to the Wicked Witch, to Nurse Ratchet. I think it's also possible for the journey to be about intensifying depravity, loss of control, or consequences of horror. Joffrey started with a wolf and little power beyond tantrums. He ended by killing many people and with the power to wreck Westeros. Ramsay, on the other hand, is pretty much where he started. He's a one-note character.

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Which leave us with Stannis. As Amanda Marcotte has written in Slate, his murder of Shireen echoes the classical tragedy of Agamemnon and Iphigenia (Spoiler: Agamemnon's wife, Clytemnestra, kills him when he gets back home—does this fate await Stannis at the hands of Selyse?). I can easily imagine a pathway in which his growing religious fanaticism, uncompromising nature, and desire to win at all costs makes him into an enemy worth cheering against. I'm definitely ready to hate-watch him in conjunction with his priestess Melisandre.

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Stephen Dillane as Stannis Baratheon in 'Game of Thrones.' Photo courtesy of HBO

He's not there yet, though, and that's because Stannis's season five plot has been handled poorly in terms of writing and execution. How did Ramsay and his 20 men get past the guards? Presumably Stannis, the great general, knows how to train his army to set good watches when camping out in enemy territory. It was so improbable, that Ramsay's infiltration happened off-screen. At what point did Stannis shift from the man who defended Shireen at all costs (just a few episodes ago!) to the man who murdered her while his men were lightly shivering? Jason Concepcion over at Grantland points out that Stannis once survived a year's siege by eating rats (until he was saved by the smuggler Davos, who then lost his fingers but became the Onion Knight), and now we're supposed to believe that he's going to sacrifice his beloved daughter because of a little snow? Again, I think show creators D. B. Weiss and David Benioff are searching, awkwardly, for a new villain.

Ramsay and Stannis are on a collision course with each other in the North. One of them will likely fall, though perhaps not die, and I'm going to greet it with my own rendition of the Night King's shrug. Still, there's plenty of time for the show to recover its stride, and turn one of its many merely wicked characters, into a master villain truly worth watching.

Follow David on Twitter.

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Illustration via Wikimedia Commons

For young men of a certain temperament, the word orgy almost has a hypnotic effect. The mere mention of an orgy creates a pitch of excitement and expectation that sends all common sense flying out of the window. Of course, like the TV newscasters who salivate over conflict, the excitement is usually a symptom of inexperience. When I attempted to have my first and only group sex experience back in my early 20s, I had no idea what I was doing.

There were five of us: two other guys (brothers), two girls, and me. We tried to have our little orgy in a Premier Inn motel in my hometown, a small provincial backwater in post-industrial Northern England. We started out with the highest hopes of having the most debauched and orgasmic sexual escapades. But my experience ended up being so teeth-grindingly awful that all these years later, the memory of the night still hits me with such a paroxysm of shame, I feel like putting a bag on my head and facing the corner.

To figure out what I did wrong on that miserable night, I reached out to Miss Scorpio (whose real name is Larisa Fuchs), a New York-based sex party host who has a lot of experience in getting groups of people to rub their genitals together. I told her my sad group sex story and she gave me some advice to share with all of you would-be sex partiers on how to do it the right way.

Have Realistic Expectations

According to Miss Scorpio, young men's misguided fantasies of "a porn-perfect orgy" can detract from the experience—like making them forget that group sex is a shared encounter. "They miss that the others involved are real people with real feelings, and with their own expectations."

This was definitely a mistake I made the night I tried to have an orgy in a motel just outside of my hometown. Although I was no stranger to sexual humiliation before that night (I had been dumped by twice for my enduring struggles with premature ejaculation), I had insanely high expectations of what an orgy should be. I imagined something like the Summer of Love; something that echoed the grainy footage you see of naked lovers cavorting in the mud at Woodstock; something messy and ecstatic and really, really hot.

This is a ridiculous way to think—not least because "messy" and "ecstatic" and "really, really hot" are just not states of being you're likely to run into on the second floor of a Premier Inn. More than anything, those assumptions overlook the simpler truth, which is that if you want to know how good an orgy you're in for, you should probably take note of the regular sex you're having, since it's unlikely to be that much of a departure. In other words, if you're having trouble hitting the high notes in the confines of your bedroom, it's not like it's all going to suddenly come together when you find yourself headlining at The Garden.

Plan Ahead

Everyone wishes that life could be like the plot of classic porn—a couple of hot chicks wander casually into your apartment and after some bad dialogue, in which someone observes how hot it is, everyone promptly strips off and gets to fucking. However, Miss Scorpio says that planning sexual adventures in advance allows an opportunity for the discussion of boundaries and consent, "which gives you a lot more confidence during the main event." While it pains my romantic heart to admit it, she's probably right. It seems like the best orgies going on in the world probably happen in those bougie group sex clubs, where the participants are vetted in advance and everyone is carefully coached to get the most out of the experience. Although there's something really shitty about turning sex into such a formalized encounter, it does at least acknowledge the reality that fucking is much more of a skill than most of us will admit. You can't just wing it.

The impromptu nature of my attempted orgy was definitely one of the elements contributing to its downfall. The whole thing started in a pub in my hometown called the Cross Keys where they had a disco upstairs a few nights a week. Tuesday night was "Singles' Night," which my mom affectionately calls "Grab a Granny Night," for the place's reputation of having a lot of older divorced women. This was somewhat true. My older brother, for example, had once made out with a woman at least twice his age who had told him, by way of introduction, that she had a son a year older than him.

Most of the crowd, however, was bored 20-somethings like me. At the time, I had just come home from traveling, and I had returned with a bit of a wild boy attitude. It was only in that frame of mind that I could've made such an extraordinary suggestion. We were standing outside at closing time when I said it.

On Noisey: Ty Dolla $ign talks about his first orgy.

Dave, the older of the two brothers, both of whom I'd been to school with, asked what we should do next. This was a dead-end question because there was nothing to do in my hometown at 1 AM on a Tuesday night except to go home. The girls, a blond and brunette, looked around non-plussed. As a joke I said, "Let's have an orgy!"

I swear I only meant it as a joke—but after I said it, something weird happened. Through a vague series of nods and murmurs it became apparent that I was being taken seriously. And so it was decided.

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Photo by Flickr user Abhishek Singh Bailoo

Choose Your Location Carefully

Miss Scorpio tells me that a successful group sex location should exude a certain air of luxury. But unless luxury smells like carpet cleaner, we'd definitely picked the wrong place.

Dave was the one who suggested we go to the Premiere Inn. I had no idea my hometown even had a motel. I remembered there was a stuffy old hotel on the main road in to town that had been around forever, but a motel sounded dynamic. I mentioned how impressed I was to Dave.

"Yeah, it's on the industrial estate just before you hit the flyover," he said.

I know what you're thinking. Anyone who hears those words—"industrial estate" and "just before you hit the flyover"—en route to an orgy should immediately reconsider their plans. But my mind had been frazzled by the incredible opportunity life had suddenly thrown at me and there was only one word coming at me loud and clear on that cold, northern night. Orgy! Orgy! Orgy!

Better ways to spice up an orgy: VICE spends a day with a professional dominatrix to learn about BDSM.

The Premier Inn is a budget hotel chain in the UK. Its motels are usually located by highway services and in the hinterlands of towns and cities. They're not bad places to stay if you're passing through on business, but it's about the worst place on Earth if you're trying to get in touch with your inner sex god.

The branch we went to was a new-build set just off the main road out of town and looked from the outside like one of those sheltered housing complexes for the elderly. The hallways smelled like cleaning supplies and had aggressively bright lighting. The room itself was tiny with one double bed, en suite, and fake wood furnishings. You couldn't smoke in the room and there was no minibar. What's more, nothing could be moved: the bedside lights were screwed into the wall, the windows didn't open. It was as if it had been designed with the express purpose of preventing any kind of spontaneous fun.

An Orgy Is Only As Good As Its Leader

Group sex, I suppose, is no different to any other group event, in that it needs someone to get things going. Miss Scorpio calls this role a "playful fairy." Unfortunately, our playful fairy was Dave. Dave and his younger brother Colin were the sons of an executive at a nearby sports club. Locally, the father was quite famous and sometimes appeared on regional TV. He was not an especially charismatic man, nor were his sons. They had both inherited his grave, morbid features and dull voice. When you saw the three of them out drinking in town, you'd have sworn there'd been a death in the family.

At school, Dave had been shy and I had often felt sympathetic towards him, as I wasn't most confident of kids myself. But after school he had gone to live abroad. While the travel seemed to have brought him out of himself, what emerged almost made you wish he'd go back into his shell. He was kind of sleazy. But not in the sexy, sleazy way of Mick Jagger. More in the boorish, troubling way of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. (Thinking about it now, Dave and I are both terrible adverts for the benefits of travel.)

When we reached the Premier Inn, Dave told us all to wait while he went and got a room. So as not to attract attention, he suggested we follow him in pairs a few minutes after each other. This precaution turned out to be unnecessary since there was no one at the front desk.

Once we reached our dismal room, we all sort of milled around in that vaguely awkward way people do before meetings or night classes. Then Dave had the idea that we all get on the bed and play truth-or-dare. This was the beginning of my end.

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Photo via Flickr user Marcus Hansson

Choose Your Partners Carefully

According to Miss Scorpio, you should have your first orgy with people you know. This avoids misunderstanding and helps put everyone at ease. "Comfort is everything," she says. "You can graduate to the excitement of strangers after you have a few successful experiences and figure out what you, and others, may like."

I certainly didn't have all of that in mind when I jumped under the covers and took off all of my clothes in the middle of our little truth-or-dare game without being asked to do so. This, on reflection, was a bad tactic that did nothing to help the girls I had just met feel any more "comfortable" or at "ease." Also, nothing says "premature ejaculator" more than a man whipping off his clothes while everyone else is still dressed. It speaks of someone in far too much of a hurry to get things over and done with. Perhaps if the girls had known me better they might've looked upon my rash striptease more sympathetically, seen it as the awkward over-correction it surely was.

It wasn't long after I stripped down that the blond selected dare. Pointing to me and, in the same expressionless tone you might use to ask someone to take out the garbage, Dave said, "Give him a hand job."

The girl squirmed and looked at me warily. "No, I don't want to."

Fighting in my corner, Dave persisted: "Go on. Jerk him off!"

I imagine at this point some inward part of me was holding my head in my hands at the sheer awfulness of it all. But I tried to put on a brave face. "It's OK. She doesn't have to."

Colin suddenly got up to go to the toilet. Halfway across the room, he turned back to the dark-haired girl and asked her if she would join him. The girl got to her feet, crossing the room with a look of bored indifference. They disappeared into the bathroom. In that moment, it became clear that she'd had her eye on Colin all along. What was less easy to explain was the near-total silence that followed from the bathroom. Either they were having the quietest sex ever or were in there praying for our souls.

In their absence, the hand job negotiations continued. The blond had by now agreed to give Dave a hand job instead of me—but Dave, so determined when advocating for his friends, seemed reluctant to accept one for himself.

"Why won't you give him a hand job?" he whined, deflecting things back on to me.

The girl hesitated. She turned my way. "It's nothing personal," she said, and I'm sure she was telling the truth. After all, who in their right mind wants to jerk off a complete stranger in a motel. But at the time it felt deeply, horribly personal. At the time, I felt like a reject from the world's most unappealing party.

Whatever Happens, You'll Survive

This is more or less the end of the story, but I just can't leave it here with me reduced to such a tragic figure. The only thing to add about that night is that at some point in the night the girls left. The next morning I woke up naked in the bed with the brothers in a state of mild paranoia at what one of them might've done to me as I slept. I left the motel and took the bus home. I haven't tried to have an orgy since.

Real intimacy is something that few people ever experience. And while we crave it, we are also scared to hell of it. What made my experience so abysmal was this last point: It's hard to find intimacy in a group because it's hard to get beyond that sense of being on display. The sad reality of many group encounters is that dispiriting phenomenon where the accumulation of minds and souls has a paradoxically inverse effect on everyone's general intelligence and morality.

But Miss Scorpio says it doesn't have to be this way. She's been organizing upscale sex parties at her Manhattan venue, House of Scorpio, for the last five years and she says that so long as you follow her three golden rules—knowing boundaries, getting consent, and paying close attention to others' pleasure—there's no reason why group sex can be any less intimately powerful than one-to-one sex.

And maybe she's right? Maybe you can use my story as an anti-guide and think of me like that guy you went to school with who paralyzed himself in gym class. The thought of what happened to him might not be very pretty to contemplate, but at least you know the correct way to do a back flip—or in this case, hump and exchange bodily fluids with a group of consenting adults.

Thumbnail photo via Flickr user denisbin.

Follow Paul Willis on Twitter.

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Photo courtesy of the author.

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania.

Recently, after witnessing some coast guards flicking their cigarette buds into the Black Sea, I got to wondering just how much junk regular people throw in there daily. After doing some research, I was pretty shocked to find out that folks were dumping extreme amounts of crap into the ocean. So much so that apparently there's actual islands of plastic bottles floating around in the Black Sea, while the likelihood of catching fish in there pales in comparison to that of reeling in a syringe or a massive fridge.

The situation is so bad that dozens of species of animals are fast becoming endangered. That said, at least they're finding new species: the very poisonous fugu fish for example. There's also a really good chance that if you swim in what's fast becoming a glorified toilet, you'll catch enterocolitis and dysentery.

I called up Mare Nostrum (a maritime NGO) and the Romanian Institute of Marine Research and Development to find out more.

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Mihaela Cândea, Executive Director of Mare Nostrum. Photo courtesy of the author

VICE: Is the Romanian coastline polluted?
Mihaela Cândea: If we're talking about the beaches, then yes. The situation is completely out of control. Besides all the ordinary household waste, we've also fished household appliances out of the water. Once we found a fridge. We're seeing a staggering increase in medical waste. Syringes, for example. Unfortunately, a lot of locals regard the beach as some sort of giant dumpster. They think that the ocean will just come and wash everything away.

What about the level of pollution out on the high seas?
Sadly, it's very expensive to monitor the pollution on the high seas and we have no real data about it. What we do know is that water pollution has multiple sources: inland waste, waste tanks onboard boats, oil leaks, oil platforms, and so forth. Floating islands of waste have been spotted multiple times on the high seas. There's actually a lot of ships that just discharge their ballast water into the sea.

Related: Toxic: Linfen, China

Why would they do that?
To avoid paying tax for their discharge, which, according to legislation, is supposed to be disposed of in a controlled environment. Most ships prefer doing this out at sea, where they won't be seen. It's basically the same as poaching.

How much of an impact does it have on underwater life?
It's not only underwater life. This affects humans just as much as it does the marine environment. The plastic that ends up underwater decomposes into very tiny particles and gets ingested by all creatures. This means that, when you're eating fish, you're also consuming plastic micro particles. Also, all the pesticides and fertilizers that end up in the river Danube eventually make it into the Black Sea. To put all of this into perspective, DDT—a very toxic pesticide that was used up until about 15 years ago—can still be found in fish that's tested today. Basically, any chemical substance that ends up in the sea is still traceable 10-20 years later.

Are there any endangered species along the Romanian coastline?
Sure, there's an entire list of endangered species in the Black Sea. The most famous are dolphins and sea horses. There's also a lot of fish, including the turbot, on that list.

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Photo courtesy of Mare Nostrum

From what I've gathered, noise pollution also affects the marine environment?
Yeah, that's correct. Noise pollution is caused by sea traffic, petrol drilling, and military training, which are all actually getting more and more intense. All of this underwater noise messes up the fish's navigational systems so that they can't find food anymore. Noise alters their physiology and is a massive cause of the diminishing population.

Is the Romanian Ministry of Environment helping in any way?
They help a little bit. More on the research side, though. Other than that they don't really do much. They co-finance some European programs, like this environmental one that aids the creation of different projects in protected marine areas.

Who implements these projects?
They're never directly implemented by the government, because they just don't have the capacity to do so. They're implemented by NGOs, institutes and even some private companies. We are seeing some results, but obviously they don't just come overnight. It takes years. Things would move a lot faster if the authorities were more involved. Or if there was less red tape. Right now, there's no one assuming responsibility.

For another perspective, I paid a call to Tania Zaharia, the Scientific Director of the National Institute of Marine Research and Development.

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Tania Zaharia, Scientific Director of the National Institute of Marine Research and Development. Photo courtesy of the author.

Which coastal areas have the highest level of pollution?
Tania Zaharia: If we are referring to chemical substances, the most polluted areas are the industrial, waterside, and urban ones. Generally, the contamination level is still under control, but it depends where you take your samples from. For example, in our latest test, taken at Tomis Harbour, the level of contamination with toxic heavy metals and pathogenic bacteria was extremely high. People who eat oysters from there should be seriously careful.

Is it safe to go swimming in the Black Sea?
Well, anyone who takes a gulp of seawater could catch enteritis or enterocolitis. Besides that, the level of pollution found in the ocean could indirectly lead to dysentery. The oysters in that region act as a sort of filter and, if eaten, could easily cause damage.

Have any new species been found in the Black Sea?
Yes, but a lot have just disappeared too. Two species of crab were recently discovered. People have spotted a very poisonous Japanese fish off the Crimean coast. I'm talking about the fugu fish, which can be deadly if it isn't prepared by a specialist.

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Whitey Bulger, basis for the villain in The Departed, after his 2011 arrest. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/US Marshals Service

Every so often, authorities capture a member of an Italian organized crime syndicate who's been on the run for many years. They come from all the major organizations—the once-dominant Cosa Nostra of Godfather and Sopranos fame, the up-and-coming 'Ndrangheta, and the slow-and-steady Camorra. And they pop up all over the world, from rural farmhouses in Italy (where one Cosa Nostra boss who managed to lay low for 43 years was caught in 2006) to mild-mannered English suburbs, all the way to Recife, Brazil, where local police made the most recent high-profile bust late last month, taking down a Camorra boss who'd managed to start a new family using a new face and a new name for 28 years.

If you read about these long-term fugitives often enough, it's easy to feel like staying on the lam for decades is no big deal.

But for almost any other criminal, even ten years on the run is extraordinary. When, in 2011, American law enforcement finally managed to arrest notorious Boston Irish gangster James "Whitey" Bulger—the inspiration for Jack Nicholson's character in The Departed—it was considered miraculous and unusual that he'd managed to stay hidden for 16 years, a fraction of what some Mafiosi fugitives achieve.

Related: New York's Scariest Prison

Not every Mafioso is adept at evading the law, of course. In 2014, for instance, Italy managed to round up well over 100 members of the 'Ndrangheta. And not every Mafioso tries to escape justice by fleeing and assuming a new identity. In 2011, one member of the 'Ndrangheta was found trying to outwait the heat on him in a cushy bunker built a junkyard.

Still, the sheer number of Mafiosi who escape for so long raises serious questions as to whether or not these Italian mobsters are just better at hiding than other criminals—and if so, how they pull it off.

Eager to figure out why we hear so much about decades-long Mafiosi fugitives, I reached out to Howard Blum, a former New York Times investigative reporter and author of Gangland: How the FBI Broke the Mob , which centers on John Gotti of the American-Italian Gambino mafia and his evasion of justice. I also reached out to Richard Lehr, a former investigative reporter at the Boston Globe and author of Black Mass: The Irish Mob, The Underboss: The Rise and Fall of a Mafia Family , and Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss , for some comparative perspective on the fugitive life of non-mafia criminals.

VICE: Are Italian mafias better than other criminal groups at spiriting people underground or out of the country for prolonged periods of time?
Richard Lehr: They certainly have an organization that a lot of criminals don't have. A lot of street-level criminals who go on the run, they're basically on their own, which is the case of Whitey Bulger as well. But the mafia certainly has the kind of international organization where, if someone has to go on the run, he can resurface in some foreign village or someplace and live a different life.

William Blum: I don't think that there's any organized program of spiriting people away. There are two things: One is common sense. You change the way you look and you stay away from the people you usually hung out with. Two is if you're found out, you engage in intimidation. You use fear.

Watch our documentary on Europe's most notorious jewel thieves:

Why is it so hard for ordinary criminals to just sever their ties and walk away?
Blum: I think it's basically a psychological fortitude that certain people have. They can put the past behind them. They can walk away from ties to family. They can walk away form ties to the mob and just be isolated. If you can stop living the gangster's life, you have a much better chance of succeeding in your new identity.

Lehr: That's one of the biggest challenges for any fugitive. And that is remarkable when anyone has managed to stay out there for 20 or 30 years, because when you think about it, they're used to being the big man.

When you're on the run, not only do you have to cut ties, but you've got to someone find a way to calm [that ego] down or find different ways to satisfy your egomaniacal ways. And a lot of people, I think if you did a study you'd find, are caught rather quickly. They don't know what they're doing. They really don't know their way around the world after they leave their neighborhood street corner. So they call their old neighborhoods [saying], "I need help." And the US Marshals are all over them. So it requires a whole bunch of discipline in all different kinds of ways.

Why does the mafia has such a good track record of breeding people who can fully sever their ties and then evade justice for years or even decades on end?
Blum: I think the structure has some role in it. It is a mob and you have a role in the mob. It's your identity as a mobster by being part of the group. You're a soldier. You're a capo. You're someone in a regime. Once you separate yourself from that group, once you don't have that identity, you have a new definition of self. And you live with this new definition of yourself.

Perhaps you're still a tough guy. But you're not a tough guy as part of the mob. You don't have the mob to back you up. So you live a bit more cautiously, more prudently.

How do Mafiosi manage to flee so far and survive so well away from their gangs?
Blum: People who have access to funds can go further and live longer in hiding.

Lehr: [Whitey was] brilliant in anticipating that someday he might have to take off. So he hid money in safety deposit boxes. If you're smart about it, you're planning ahead for that sort of thing. [In the mafia] if you can find a back channel and you're still in good standing, they can help to take care of you, get you what you need.

But not a lot of non-mafia [have that]. They tend to be on their own and it's risky and bad to make a call back to the old neighborhood and say, "Hey, I need some support."

How exceptional it is for your average criminal to escape justice for decades?
Lehr: I don't have numbers or data, but getting a sense from dealing with the US Marshals whose job it is to find fugitives, I think [Bulger] would be in the category of a minority of people who manage to stay out there as long as he did without tripping up.

How many more crooks and Mafiosi might be floating around, uncaught, for long periods of time?
Blum: I think there are a lot of them. The longer you're away from home, if you can get away without missing [your old life], you'll succeed.

But ultimately many of them can't change who they were.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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The author in a dorm room. Photos courtesy of the author.

I'm the best there is at dropping out of colleges. I've done it three times, from three different colleges, accumulating enough credits to land myself somewhere around a sophomore. I always started classes strong, but the semesters just last too long. Every course was a new year's resolution I gave up on come February. I dropped out of a beautiful Hogwartsian college where I began having real sex and taking on real student loans (which, it turns out, you should probably repay). From there I moved on to the city universities of New York: first Hunter, then Brooklyn. After dropping out of both of them I got a job at a bike shop and wrote a poetry book. I published two more books by other people. I wrote a few articles. I got a paid internship and a few odd jobs. I made dropping out of college—and being a writer in New York—work.

And I'm not alone. With the post-graduate job market still looking bleak, more and more people are deciding college is a bunch of bullshit. From 2012 to 2013, the most recent time for which census data is available, college enrollment dropped by almost half a million students, the biggest decline since the census bureau began collecting data in 1966.

Related: What happens if you just stop paying your student debt?

This is a guide for those rudderless young souls. More specifically, the ones who want to get by as writers (or artists of any kind) in New York without a bachelor's degree. While these tips are based on surviving in New York, a lot of this stuff can be applied to any city. I just happened to do it in New York. And to be clear: I don't necessarily recommend dropping out of college. Personally, if I could go back and major in being a rich start-up bro, I probably would. I'd have a hot tub in every room. Fridge full of the most expensive drinks from the bodega. Kombucha and Blueprint juice everywhere. All of my peanut butter would be almond.

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From left: The author, Giancarlo DiTrapano, Giancarlo DiTrapano, the author

FIND YOUR REAL-LIFE PROFESSORS

Professors are cool. They're old, they know people, and they can write you a recommendation one day. But take that recommendation to the editor of a magazine and see what amount of shits they'll give. Instead, find the real-life equivalents: people older than you who have already done what you want to do. More often than not they'll be happy to have a protege, and that is your intro course. Except instead of reading a victorian novel, you're going out, having drinks, doing drugs. I wanted to get into publishing, and I found myself in the arms of Giancarlo DiTrapano, a guy who famously served coke on a silver platter to Michael Bible of the LA Review of Books and once fucked a catholic priest in a rectory.

FIND YOUR "CLASSMATES"

If nothing else, people say, college is for meeting people. You take classes together, come up with ideas together, graduate together, and succeed together. But I didn't want to spend six figures and four years just to find that kind of friendship. Instead, I often piggybacked on bonds from colleges I didn't go to. I ingratiated myself with cliques from schools I never got into, and while I didn't share many of their memories, I benefitted from their college network, met new people they took classes with, and built real work with them on their college foundation. Through one friend at Parsons I met two more (designers who took classes together) and now Erik Carter does my cover art and Lucas Sharp does the typography. I was in design circles I didn't know existed, and I knew nothing about design. But by showing appreciation for what they do, they appreciated what I did. They came to my readings and helped out by making posters to promote them, and I promote their work whenever I can. (Like now?)

DON'T MISS CLASS

In life, as in college, if you skip enough times you'll fail. So go to that opening, signing, reading, open mic, and party. Put your face in the right places. It's OK to go alone; you'll be more motivated to make friends. I did dozens of poetry open mics around Manhattan fresh out of high school. It was a pretty anonymous way to get better. I even gave the organizer a fake name sometimes. I often left right after I went on stage so no one would talk to me. Later, showing up meant putting events together myself and always saying yes when asked to read, even though the rooms were small and mostly filled with other readers. Sometimes the rooms got bigger. Sometimes the rooms paid.

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The author, reading in Montreal

GET A JOB

Having a part time job to pay rent will help you pay attention in "class." You'll be less stressed when you have enough money to survive and it will provide you with some structure to prioritize what is most important. Some days I'd wake up early to get writing done before I had to go to my job. I wrote when I got home to make up for the hours missed. Writing came easier when I wasn't trying to make ends meet. Making enough money to not work full time was crucial though—there's a fine line between a job offering structure and wearing you down. A flexible work schedule is ideal for taking on the minimum amount of hours you need to live. That means retail or service work. I found a bike shop that paid pretty well and have since sold more pricey carbon-fiber wheels than I can count. However, I'd recommend waiting tables or mixing drinks. After a few months washing dishes, working day shifts, or moving from restaurant to restaurant, you'll find yourself making a couple hundred a night, giving you plenty of free-time to pursue your "real work." I had a teacher who always said I could make quite a bit of money camming for old dudes, and that would probably work too.

IF THEY SEEM COOL NOW, THEY PROBABLY WON'T BE SOON

Identifying who is a waste of your time and who isn't is a skill that will only come with trial and error. In short, some of your friends bar-backing at a dive now will be working at a big magazine in a few months, and some of your friends bar-backing at a dive now will be bar-backing at a dive in five years. A good friend is always incredibly important to have, but if they're just an asshole with big ideas, remember, you're trying to graduate on time. A tip-off here is their ratio of talking : doing. Repeatedly tell everyone you're going to do something and you probably won't. Another tip-off is their personality. If they're likable as a person they're likely to go far. No one wants to work with a douche, not even douchey people.

Related: Black, White, and Greek

FOLLOW UP

If you meet someone you've been trying to meet, DM her the next day saying so. Don't leave unnecessary questions hanging. Keep it to a single sentence with two clauses. Overdoing the gesture will backfire every time. The goal is to be in their head just enough that you come up if they're looking to fill up a roster.

SAY YES

A poet I befriended happened to be a higher-up at a big publishing house. She emailed me one day asking if I had any friends who would want to be her intern because she had only gotten weirdos from the open interviews. I thought, hell, why not (the best thought there is) and asked if I could take the spot. It was minimum wage but it wasn't nothing, and it taught me a lot about what I didn't want from New York, what kind of publishing I didn't want to do, and the life I didn't want to have. Plus, it looks pretty dope on my resume, whatever good that does me. The jobs I really want, that I'd work 40 hours a week every week for, they don't come from going to the right school. They come from knowing the right person and being the right person.

DON'T HAVE A CHIP ON YOUR SHOULDER

If someone asks what college you went to, be honest. If you never went, say so. If you dropped out, say that. The truth is you've made it to the same room as them at this point in time, with fewer years gone and less money spent. You're here now, and—with good "study" habits—you're winning.

AND IF NONE OF THAT WORKS OUT

Figure out how to make apps or something.

Follow Spencer on Twitter.

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Screencap via Montreal Escort Review Community Board

"Got $40 quickies with this one, I just bent it over and pounded it."

In his critique of her services on the Montreal Escort Review Community board, a client known as "Jerking" says that while sex worker Anny* is "not a hottie," she is a "good price" and a "good fuck."

Welcome to the world of sex worker review boards, online forums that allow people to discuss and rate the appearance and skills of sex industry service providers. The general tone is a combination of blatant objectification of women ("it"?) and Yelp-style commentary (you can pretty much substitute "pussy" for "steak dinner" in the last sentence of the above screencap).

But as in other service industries, these often-slimy online critiques can have a very real impact on business.

VICE reached out to sex trade workers and clients alike to find out just how influential these forums can be and why they are dripping with this macho, misogynistic language.

Interestingly, the sex workers themselves were not so quick to condemn the forums and generally say there are many positive aspects to consider.

"They're a place where workers can seek economical empowerment, where they're able to share resources with other sex workers in terms of safety," says Audrey Garcia*, a former sex worker and community organizer at Montreal outreach group Stella. "They're very important tools."

She says that for sex workers, (also referred to as "providers" or "service providers"), the review boards provide a useful platforms on which they can communicate with each other to discuss clients and share tips and concerns.

There's also a financial advantage: "For some sex workers, that's the only place they advertise, because advertising can be expensive," she says.

However, Garcia says Canada's prohibitive new prostitution laws, which criminalize the advertising of sexual services as well as the purchase of sex (among myriad other aspects of sex work), have reduced the sites' reach and purpose and limited the kind of conversations users can have. And while a number of review boards are now hosted outside the country, operating in a sort of legislative grey zone, she says many users have simply been scared away.

While the language tends to be vulgar and chauvinistic, it's a tendency Garcia chalks up to the anonymity of reviewers. "Like any other online forum, people speak in a way they would never use around real people. They use language they would never use, take liberties they would never take."

Garcia says that relative to the industry's context, the comments are no worse that review sites devoted to other topics or professions. "Students all across country leave reviews about teachers, saying things about the way the teacher looks, dresses," she says. "They're extremely objectifying comments, but that doesn't mean that the sex industry review sites are more objectifying."

On the client side, workers say the sites can play the role of consumer watchdog. "I have heard many stories from clients where they hired someone and the person stole their money or just was not what they were expected," explains Chicago-based sex workers' rights advocate Serpent Libertine.

But the women agree there is an insidious side to the review system. "One of the issues is that if a client felt they were slighted for some reason, they would write a bad review and it would be detrimental to a girl's business," Libertine explains, adding that some reviews—which sometimes include the workers' names and contact info—are completely made up.

According to Libertine, the fear of negative reviews that can push women to eschew safety measures or to perform acts they're not comfortable doing."It really encourages people to take more risks, because these clients are now communicating with each other about who does what," she says. For instance, she says some men take to the boards to complain about women who use condoms. "You can't get a 10 unless you provide BBBJ (the industry acronym for unprotected blowjob), anal, or if you're really bi."

The women say this situation is made worse by the fact that many board administrators offer clients financial incentives to make reviews as explicit as possible, rewarding popular contributors with free membership and even rejecting posts deemed too reasonable.

Libertine says this has spawned a new and polarizing type of client, commonly referred to as a "hobbyist," who gets a kick out of constantly "trying out" and reviewing new girls. "That term did not come around until these message boards came around," Libertine says. "These guys, it's kind of like a flavour of the month thing, they see who is getting a lot of reviews, who's new."

These hobbyists then write up their own assessments, which, according to the women, tend to be the most sensationalist types of reviews—something that many sex workers don't appreciate.

VICE contacted several of these self-proclaimed hobbyists, many of whom use the forums on a near-daily basis, to find out what drives this occupation. Only one agreed to an email interview.

Brian Jackson*, a 60-ish IT professional who lives in the Montreal area, says he has been regularly hiring sex workers for more than 30 years. He claims to have spent about a quarter of a million dollars on his hobby, and his profile on Montreal's Escort Review Community shows that he's contributed to the forum's discussions nearly 2,000 times.

"For most veteran hobbyists, screwing lots of women is a normal activity, not different than going to the gym," Jackson says. "Like almost all hobbyists I like them young, say between 19 and 23, and new to the trade. Girl-next-door types are the most popular, the ones who don't look like escorts."

Read our full interview with the hobbyist.

He says that while his habit—and the concept of hobbyists—predates review sites, the forums have "wildly exacerbated" the situation. "I used to have to take a day off every week, sometimes two, just to track down one decent new young girl," he says. "Now the hobbyist has dozens of new young girls available at his fingertips at almost all times."

From his standpoint, Jackson says the boards offer no benefits for sex workers. "The critics are simply brutal, and if a girl has one bad date, they will fry her."

"All of the posts are derogatory, but this is a rough business. It brings out the worst in everyone," Jackson concedes.

Still, Garcia says not all hobbyists make for bad clients. "It really depends on what worker you speak to", she says. "You're not going to get the same response." Jackson says he's heard positive feedback from women. "The workers I meet all tell me that the clients they meet on the boards are pretty good, compared to what you would meet advertising online, in a bar or in a strip joint."

All in all, Garcia believes criticism of review boards has more to do with the way people use the internet than with the way clients treat sex workers.

"I think what's really tricky about (review boards) is that the content is taken out of context," Garcia says. "The way most people understand the sex industry is that women are victims, that they're being exploited. and when you read these reviews, it's easy to support that hypothesis.

"Of course they read in a certain way. People don't like to read about other people being judged for their sexuality."

Follow Brigitte Noël on Twitter.