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Still courtesy of Abounnaddara

In the four years since the start of the Syrian uprising, the formerly stable but repressive country has been plunged into near total chaos. As the rebel army engages in combat with Bashir Al Assad's forces, and ISIS's brutal regime moves further into the fray, the images coming out of the embattled nation have been of devastation: stacked and bloody bodies, ruined buildings, and hordes of refugees fleeing the country. Syria, previously a functioning country, was home to artists and entrepreneurs, bankers, and doctors.

Today, our view of life inside its borders is opaque, with little news escaping beyond the jarring war reports on the evening news. Anonymous DIY filmmaking collective Abounaddara, composed of several self-taught shooters mostly in and around Damascus, wants to shift this one-dimensional coverage by the media. Since its emergence during the initial phase of the uprising, the Abounaddara upload one video online each week, spotlighting individual Syrians, both for and against Assad, and how they are coping—or not coping—with this devastating humanitarian crisis.

موسم الهجرة إلى الشمال Leaving for Pitchipoï from abou naddara on Vimeo

In a deliberate attempt to stay vague about numbers and location, both for safety and artistic reasons, the collective offers a faceless, surreal, fly-on-the wall perspective of the conflict. They interview subjects both in and outside of Syria in a self-named form of visual pastiche called "emergency cinema." The work is poignant, thought provoking, and frequently disturbing. The films, which feel like snapchats from purgatory, often focus on the banality of a single individual, in a single moment, living in conflict.

In one of the most powerful shorts—few are longer than a handful of minutes—a sniper casually speaks into the camera about the roughly 600 people he has killed (having lost count) showing emotion only when discussing his wife's miscarriage. Rather than demonize the subject, you sense his weariness at a conflict with no end in sight that's had a dehumanizing effect on the population. In another, an Alawite woman from Syria's ruling ethnic group discusses how and why she became a rebel sympathizer. These are just two experiences out of the 250 plus that have been captured, a visual record in the spirit of Rashoman and told with multiple angles and viewpoints.

Although the group was briefly featured last summer at the New Museum in Here and Elsewhere, a multimedia exhibition of contemporary art "from and about the Arab world," their first widespread attention came when they won the short-film grand-jury prize at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. Now their greatest challenge is infiltrating the mainstream consciousness of the average American.

باسم الأب In the Name of the Father from abou naddara on Vimeo

Last year, the New School granted the Abounaddara its 2014 Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics, a prestigious award in honor of the noted philanthropist. "Transcending political, disciplinary, and artistic boundaries, Abounaddara's videos reveal the conflict in Syria on a human scale, creating a crucial link between Syria and the rest of the world, outside of the political framework of war," said New School president David E. Van Zandt in a press release. The international jury that nominated Abounaddara includes activist playwright Tony Kushner of Angels in America fame and Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo, whose work embodies the often repressed and marginalized voices of the victims of political violence and social upheaval. The prize offers the chance to both work with the school on an exhibition, which will open in October, and monetary support to continue their work.

In their unofficial manifesto, the group says it defends the "right to the image," which it feels has been taken from them by opportunistic media outlets hungry for a one-sided debate. The group also had the unfortunate experience of being asked to take part in the Venice Biennale only to have their work censored, even at this fairly liberal event. To the group, these weekly video missives are a way of creatively fighting for the freedom and dignity of all Syrians. Last weekend, VICE had the chance to speak with Charif Kiwan, the spokesperson for Abounaddara, who was in town for the Human Rights Film Festival, to show and discuss the collective's films at the UN, and to plan the collective's October showcase with curators. Now in permanent exile somewhere on the border of Syria, Kiwan has made it clear that he is just the mouthpiece for a broader movement for change in and outside the country.

VICE: Can you tell me a little bit about what you discussed at the UN?
Charif Kiwan: I told them, "We need your help. It's not fair that people in Syria are represented in an undignified way." We don't have the right to [free speech] without the right to our images. We need to reconsider and rethink how to inform [viewers] while respecting certain ethical principals regarding dignity. Reporting is no longer created by professional correspondents. In Syria there are no journalists. So everything is based on images taken by anonymous citizen reporters. We have to consider this. Nobody has interest in letting these images circulate without any rules or principals [or agendas]. We have the duty to think how we portray the situation. [Our work] is mainly on informing [readers] about this huge tragedy without exhibiting just the bloody, murdered bodies. If we do so, we play the game of the regime and ISIS, who want to use media against the democracy.

Even on the internet, if you don't have the support of media, you cannot exist and be seen.

Without giving away identities, can you tell me who is a part of this collective?
We want you, the regime—we want everyone to think that the filmmaker is everywhere. We want to empower our society to produce its own images independently of its all power systems. To use the anonymity, and the mystery [to its benefit]. It's very important for us to let you imagine that the films we produce are created by the collective society, not just one person who has a specific religious or political opinion. Our films are not products of the market. Our films are addressed to humanity.

Was it difficult to reach a broader audience on the internet?
Yes, at the beginning it was very difficult. We have no budget, nobody knows us, and we don't have the support of the media. We are totally underground, and had zero funding from the beginning. We are all volunteers. Even to organize the contact with journalists, this meeting with you, we needed to be helped. In this case, the university, the New School, is supporting us. Even on the internet, if you don't have the support of media, you cannot exist and be seen.

Still courtesy of Abounnaddara

How do you plan each video? Do you let volunteers take cameras and shoot their own experiences, or do you conceptualize first?
We are shooting all the time. We shoot our friends, our neighbors—we are living amongst our subjects. We are not like the correspondents or the filmmakers who come to just shoot and leave. This is our home and our people. We try to blur the boundaries between journalism, art, and cinema, and highlight propaganda. We listen, we shoot, we look over the footage, and we let our imagination make the rest. Sometimes we add effects or other images. We are totally free, creatively. Our job is to let you feel something very strong, to haunt your imagination. To make you ask for more. We are not obliged, like journalists or reporters, to give you facts. We are not addressing the viewer as a judge. We want just them to be punched, touched, and linger in their imagination. To invite them to reconsider the way they see Syrian society or the Middle East in general.

How long has this collective been active?
We started one year before the revolution began. In 2010 we released, on the internet, a series of 12 short documentaries. At the time we couldn't find a producer because media outlets all wanted the same thing; they wanted us to tell the story of our society through a geopolitical, or religious perspective, Muslim versus Christian, Israeli against Arab, Sunni against Alawi—and we hated that. So we decided to use the internet to prove there is another way to represent those people. We released our first series without official censorship [and approval] in Syria, which was very important but risky. But we were then ready when the uprising started, and in March 2011, we decided to go further and make a very short piece every Friday. As filmmakers, we wanted to demonstrate with our people. We have a duty to fight for freedom and dignity, so we had to do so through films.

Watch our documentary Inside Syria:

Even though it's an anonymous collective, all of you have put yourselves into incredible amounts of danger. Do you feel scared?
Not more than any Syrian who is fighting for freedom. We hate intellectuals and filmmakers who say, "I am brave! I am in risk! The regime wants to kill me!" In fact, the regime killed few intellectuals or filmmakers comparatively. Our Collective lost some beloved colleagues and one of them, Osama al-Habali, has been in jail for over three years. But we are more able to protect ourselves than the majority of Syrians. And also, we are anonymous. So even if the regime wanted to kill us, they couldn't. We are anonymous also because we hate ego. We don't have the right to speak about ourselves when ordinary people are taking the real risks. Our society is being totally destroyed. We just take a little part of the risk experienced openly on the street. Also, because we are not making propaganda, we are not considered to be making films against the regime. We are not screening them on Al Jazeera, or VICE—although maybe now we are, ha!—and because of all that we are not really in big danger.

As filmmakers, we wanted to demonstrate with our people. We have a duty to fight for freedom and dignity, so we had to do so through films.

As the spokesperson, you more than anyone should be in danger. Have you received any threats?
I have the chance to be outside of Syria if I am in danger. I am no longer based in Syria, which is under regime control. My enemy is not the regime. I have friends who are with the regime—all of us do. We have to respect those people and represent them as well. So our issues are as filmmakers. Of course as a citizen I want to finish with this criminal, but as a filmmaker my job is to represent my society in an accurate and dignified way.

Are there any artists or filmmakers who the collective admires?
Samuel Fuller. We are impressed that, to begin with, he filmed in a concentration camp without exhibiting the murdered bodies, which was a huge artistic lesson for us: how to evoke the horrors, how to let people imagine the worst thing possible, without actually exhibiting it. We also liked that Samuel Fuller brought together both dryness and lyricism. In order to represent a tragedy, we have to be very dry. We have to represent it with minimalism. But Fuller also had a sense of poetry. We admire him greatly because, like us, he made his films with very little budget. Do it yourself! That could be our main principle: Let's do art with nothing. Create with just desire, and without the market. Be authentic. Samuel Fuller was an artist, a filmmaker, and a soldier, and was interested in the deepest aspects of society, and could represent it with dignity.

On Munchies: What It's Like to Cook in a Syrian Refugee Camp

Many Americans don't understand what life in Syria was like before the conflict. How has it changed after the uprising?
The main change now is that we are surrounded death. It is everywhere. People have the feeling that they could die at any moment. It's why the people we film seem so deep—they speak with very clear idea of what and who they are, and their experiences. The boundary now between life and death is very fragile. For example, if you see our first documentaries, released just before the revolution, people are reserved and silent. The films we are making now go faster and faster. It's like people don't have the time.

Abounaddara releases a new film on their website every Friday. There Vera List Prize exhibition will be opening at the New School this fall. More information is available here.

Laura Feinstein is a writer and editor who has contributed to T/The New York Times, the Guardian, the Creators Project, and many others. Follow her on Twitter.

Modern day Klansmen doing their thing. Photo via Flickr user arete13

These days the Ku Klux Klan is mostly an unfunny joke, a smattering of ignorant racists who play dress-up and hold poorly planned, sparsely attended rallies to protest the renaming of parks. But half a century ago the Klan's power stretched from coast to coast, and members of the hooded hate group carried out firebombing attacks and murdered Civil Rights workers in the South. In the 1970s, internal conflicts and infiltration by the FBI weakened the Klan, but it was still dangerous enough that in 1979 KKK members killed five protesters in North Carolina.

It was during this era that Ron Stallworth, the first black cop in Colorado Springs, infiltrated the local Klan organization. He first made headlines in 2006 when he went public with his story and explained how he stumbled upon the Klan and managed to become a leader in the local chapter by faking racist sentiments over the phone and sending a white colleague to meetings in his stead. He just released a book, Black Klansman, about his experience, so I figured now was as good a time as any to talk about how he pulled off a trick straight out of Blazing Saddles (and one that made for the first great skit on Dave Chappelle's short-lived TV show).

VICE: How did you first get into the police force, and how quickly after that did you realize undercover work was your thing?
Ron Stallworth: My family moved from El Paso, Texas, to Colorado Springs in the summer of 1972. I had an uncle who was a sergeant in the army stationed at Fort Carson in the state, and my mother's sister was married to him. I had toyed with the idea of joining the El Paso police department, who had lowered their age to enter the police academy from 21 to 20 as long as you turn 21 by the time you graduate. I was approaching 20 years of age, so that's when I started paying serious attention to a law enforcement career.

When I became a cadet, I immediately decided I wanted to be an undercover cop because I don't like uniforms. You put the uniform on the same way, you march in lockstep with one another. That's not my personality. When I first saw the narcotics officers walking around—these guys with long beards and long hair looking like San Francisco hippies—I liked the fact that these guys were actually cops wearing guns, carrying badges. I thought that was the neatest thing, to look like that and be a police officer. So I started a campaign to try to become a narc. Every time I saw the sergeant in charge of narcotics, I started questioning him about the job they did, how they went about doing it, basically asking him how to become an undercover cop. So I campaigned to become a narcotics officer. Every time I saw him, I said, "Hey Art, make me a narc!" That became my standard routine. It became a kind of running joke between us. I'd see him in the department, he'd always laugh and say, "When you turn 21 and wear a uniform for two years, come see me."

How would you describe race relations in Colorado Springs at the time?
The cadet program was designed to boost minority hiring in the department, especially black employment. In that sense, the program was a failure—they only hired two blacks, myself and a female who came on about a year after I did.

I was specifically told that I would not be welcomed by the rank and file within the department because it had been white for so long. I was told on more than one occasion by my interview panel, "Essentially, you're going to be in the same position as Jackie Robinson. You will be the only black face in that department. You will be challenged at every opportunity, and you will be in a hostile environment. The challenge for you is to exist in that hostile environment without fighting back." They mentioned Jackie Robinson two or three times. They gave me some scenarios: "How would you feel if an officer came up to you and referred you to as a nigger? How about a citizen?" They threw out two or three "nigger" scenarios, using the word nigger. This was 1972. This was the environment I existed in to pave a path for future generations. Did it change anything, by the way? I can tell you right now that the manager in that department is black, and a friend of mine. There's also a female lieutenant among 43 total officers who are black.

You got your shot as an undercover because Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panther leader, was coming to town. What can you tell me about that episode?
They were concerned about his fiery and bombastic rhetoric and his ability to raise the masses through his use of words, so I was asked if I wanted to go undercover in the black night club that was hosting him. They knew that I wanted to do undercover work. That was my opportunity. I was given that special assignment, which I eagerly took.

I went undercover in the night club, with lots of apprehensions about whether I would be recognized given the time I'd been in uniform. Naturally I had butterflies in my stomach. That's something everybody goes through when they're working a new assignment, especially when they're trying to keep their identity from being recognized. It all came very naturally to me. I found myself at various times caught up in Stokely's rhetoric—what he was saying, as a black man, made a lot of sense to me. I found myself caught up in the hype of what he was saying. At various times when everybody was responding, yelling, "Right on brother! Black power!" I found myself caught up in it too and would jump up and yell, "Black Power!" But then I'd think, You're supposed to be working this fool, you're supposed to be undercover.

But you were able to get in and out without being detected?
After Stokely finished his speech, he got a round of rousing applause, and there was a reception line there to greet him. I got in the line. It was barely seven years or so earlier that I had been watching him on TV when in high school. This was a piece of living contemporary black history, American history for me, and I wanted to meet him. So I got in the reception line and shook his hand.

I asked him, "Brother Stokely, do you honestly believe there is going to be a war between blacks and whites and they're going to kill people?" He leaned in and said, "Brother, the war is coming and we're going to have to kill white people." Then he said, "Thank you, brother." I walked out, and that was my brief moment with a living piece of black history.

So how did you first get assigned to keeping tabs on the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado?
I was assigned to the intelligence section of my department, and in intelligence you handle a variety of issues: criminal intelligence, organized crime, VIP protection. One of the things we routinely did was read the newspapers to see what, if anything, in there might warrant our attention. I saw this classified ad that said Ku Klux Klan, and there was a PO box address, so I wrote a little letter basically under the guise of being a white racist: I said I hated all niggers, Jews, spics, chinks, wops. I used all the derogatory terms for the various races they like to use. And I said I wanted to do something about it, that I wanted—to use a popular term of the day—to take back our country from these people, But I made a crucial mistake: I signed my real name to the letter. To be quite honest with you, I had a brain cramp. So I signed my real name to this letter instead of one of my undercover names, but then I put the undercover phone number and PO box we used. I honestly thought that the PO box on the classified ad was not legitimate, but responded to it just in case. I was expecting to get a leaflet or phamphlet. That's as far as I expected it go.

What happened next—how did they bring you into the fold?
Maybe a week later, I got a phone call at the undercover phone line in my office. I answered it, and the guy on the other end of the line said, "Am I speaking to Ron Stallworth?" I sat there thinking, Who the heck is calling me on this line? And then he explained he was the local organizer of the Ku Klux Klan. That's how he referred to himself. He said he had gotten my letter. And that's when I realized: Uh oh, I gotta come up with a plan real quick.

He wanted to know why I decided to join my Klan. I told him again I hated niggers, Jews, spics, chinks, wops, Mexicans, and they were taking over the country and I wanted to take our country back. Again, the rhetoric you're hearing today, I was using back then. And then I added something else to flavor it up a bit: I said my sister is dating a nigger and every time he puts his filthy black hands on her white body, it pisses me off and I want to do something to stop that from happening in the future. He responded by saying, "You're just the kind of guy we're looking for!" and, "How can we meet?"

That's how this investigation started. Obviously I couldn't meet him because of my skin color, so I postponed our meeting for a week to give me time to set something up. We talked further. I tried to get him to tell me how big they were. He wouldn't, but said they were relatively small. Most of 'em were from Fort Carson, Colorado. He told me he was a soldier at Fort Carson. I asked him activities they were planning to do as a group. This started in October of '78, this conversation. One of the things they were planning to do was have a Poor White Folks Christmas during the holiday season in which they would give care packages to poor white families. He said all niggers ever did was take advantage of white people by gaming the system—welfare and things like that. He said Jews control the system, and they use niggers to do their evil deeds. Nobody ever thought about poor whites.

Did he let you know about any illegal Klan activity?
We had two gay bars in town at the time, and he said he wanted to "bomb the two fag bars." That really got my radar up. He asked for my description, so I identified a fellow officer of mine, a detective in the narcotics division who was my height and weight. I even described how he'd be dressed because I knew how this officer came dressed to work. I spoke to the officer—in my book, I refer to him as Chuck, or as the white Ron Stallworth.

That was the challenge we faced throughout our conversation. Anything I said on the phone, Chuck had to pretend like he was the one who'd been talking to them on th phone and carry it to the next level. I on the other hand had to pretend like I'd been at that face-to-face meeting. We had to maintain that conversational flow at all times so that they believed they were talking to one person and one person only. That was the tricky part because Chuck's voice is totally different than mine.

Didn't they get suspicious?
Only once in the entire seven months of the investigation was I ever challenged as to why my voice sounded different than Chuck's. Chuck had gone to a meeting I set up, and later that day, as I thought about something that had been said at that meeting, I got on the phone and called Ken, the local organizer. I started talking to him as if I'd been at the meeting, but he said, "You sound different, what's the matter?" I coughed a couple times and said I had a sinus infection. And he said, "Oh, I get those all the time, here's what you need to do to take care of that."

Did you ever fear for your own safety?
The only time I was apprehensive about this falling apart was on January 10, 1979, when David Duke—the grand wizard—came into town. I describe it in my book as the "camera showdown." I had been talking to Duke on the phone periodically, and I had been talking to a gentleman by the name of Fred Wilkens—he was the Colorado grand dragon, the state leader. Duke came into town for a recruiting trip, and was going to be addressing print and television media. During the course of the morning of his arrival, my chief of police contacted me and told me he wanted me to be David Duke's bodyguard during his stay in town. We had been getting death threats.

Was your commander trying to get under Duke's skin, so to speak, by assigning you to guard him, or what?
No, I was the only one available in the intelligence division. I argued with the chief over the fact that I had this investigation going on and putting me in close contact with David Duke and these people could jeopardize the entire thing because they might recognize my voice. He said he was willing to take that chance and didn't want anything happening to Duke while he was in his city.

So I saluted and went to the steakhouse where Duke was having a luncheon. Fred Wilkins and David Duke were there, and then there was a gentleman by the name of Charles or Chuck Howarth—he was head of the ultra-right-wing group Posse Comitatus. They were big pains in our collective police butts in Colorado. It was the forerunner of what later became the militia movement in America. I introduced myself to David Duke, told him I was a detective assigned to be his bodyguard because of threats made against him. I said that I did not believe in his political philosophy or ideology but I was a professional and would do anything within my means to make sure he got out safe from my city. He thanked me very cordially, very graciously—he shook my hand, even gave me the Klan handshake. He didn't know that I knew it but he gave me the Klan handshake. He was pleased, as was the local organizer. And then I asked him for a picture. I said, "Mr. Duke, nobody will ever believe me if I told them I was your bodyguard, would you mind taking a picture with me?" He said, "No, not at all." I gave the camera to Chuck, the white Ron Stallworth, and stood between David Duke and the grand dragon. I put my arm on both their shoulders, and the grand dragon thought it was funny, but David Duke was offended—he pushed my arm away. He said, "I'm sorry, I can't be seen in a photo with you like that." I said to Chuck, "When you hear me say three, snap the photo."

I said one, two, and on the count of three put my hand back on David Duke's shoulder and Chuck snapped the photo. And at that moment David Duke ran away from me and tried to grab the camera from Chuck's hand. I was half a step quicker than Duke, and when he reached over to grab the camera from my hand, I looked at him and said, "If you touch me, I'll arrest you for assault on a police officer. Don't do it." Duke stopped dead in his tracks and we had a staredown. All of his entourage stopped smiling and they stared at me. It seemed like forever but was probably only three to five seconds that were staring at each other, but at that precise moment the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan knew the meaning of a black man having control over him because I owned him—I was his nightmare: I was a nigger with a badge, and I controlled his destiny and he knew it.

What's your sense of where the Klan stands these days?
The Ku Klux Klan has never died in America. It has ebbs and flows, but it never really dies, and it's never been as strong as it once was in the 20s, and in the 50s and 60s at the height of the Civil Rights movement. I don't think it ever will be [that strong] again—society has changed too much—but the very fact that it exists is what America should be concerned about. We should always be vigilant of that fact and be mindful of it and ready to combat it in whatever form it exists in.

Did you ever find yourself sympathizing with any of the Klansmen you came into contact with?
No, they were all assholes. There was no sympathy whatsoever. My only regret was that I couldn't reveal who I was and what I was doing to thoroughly embarrass them and show them what idiots they were. I had to maintain the secrecy of it. The pleasure I got is that I was making fools out of them and they didn't know they being made fools out of at the time it was happening. I got satisfaction out of that duality. They were a bunch of racist idiots.

Has the reaction to the book surprised you at all?
It has surprised me a little bit. I know the story fascinates a lot of people when they hear me, a black man conning a grand wizard of the KKK and his followers the way I did. When I hear that it's spreading around the world... I was interviewed this morning by a radio station in Dublin, Ireland, I have a great niece who's a teacher in Japan and she says it's in magazines and newspapers over there in foreign languages she can't understand. That's where it's kind of overwhelming.

You can buy Stallworth's book online here.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

Neda Topaloski at Quebec's National Assembly. VICE image via VICE DU JOUR

When we walked in to our first shoot with the FEMEN crew, Neda Topaloski was standing in the middle of the living room with her breasts bare. Her co-conspirator, Delphine Bergeron, stood before her with a paintbrush, staring at her human canvas in quiet reflection.

"What if I write 'Access to abortion?'" Bergeron suggested.

"Or you could put 'Bill 20' with a red cross through it?" proposed Topaloski. The message they chose would be painted on her nude torso and, if everything went according to their plan, broadcast across the province.

This is a glimpse into the life of FEMEN's self-proclaimed "sextremists," members of a European-born movement that uses nudity as a shock-and-awe tactic against patriarchy. This past spring, VICE was invited to spend some time with the Quebec branch of the radical feminist group as they set out on a mission to protect Canadian women's abortion rights.

VICE, QC documentary FEMEN: Sextremism in Canada

In North America, the only active FEMEN group is based out of Montreal. FEMEN Quebec (or FEMEN Canada, depending on your sovereignist sensibilities) is considerably smaller than its overseas contemporaries, but its rotating cast of about a half-dozen activists has been making a name for itself nonetheless. "It's even the only group in an Anglo-Saxon country," Topaloski points out, adding that even the United Kingdom has yet to produce a real, active membership.

Considering the province's religious and cultural past—the Quiet Revolution, the language debate and a general preponderance for protest—it's perhaps no coincidence that FEMEN's only successful offshoot on this side of the Atlantic has taken root in Quebec.

But in the Quebec City apartment where they gave us the rendez-vous, the women were concerned that some of the province's habitually progressive mores are in jeopardy. They say Bill 20, a controversial health care reform proposed by Health Minister Gaétan Barrette, could reduce access to abortion, and they travelled from their Montreal homes to the provincial capital to share their concerns with those in charge.

Whether or not the law would actually limit access to abortion is still up for debate. Barrette vehemently denies that there would be any impact, but FEMEN believe the simple fact that the topic has been brought back to the political arena is disturbing. They wanted to confront him in person at the Quebec Parliament.

After settling on a slogan they deemed sufficiently intelligent and concise (the French abbreviation for voluntary termination of pregnancy and the word "priority"), Neda showed us the rest of her costume, which consisted of white underwear painted red at the crotch.

"The message couldn't be clearer: this is where my priorities are, you know," she said. It's provocative, but that's the point: "I want to show him, so we're putting our body in his face and no one will ignore us."

Neda Topaloski shows off the outfit they've designed for her National Assembly stunt. VICE image

FEMEN's critics (and there's no shortage of those) say the women's approach is all flash and no substance, or that their use of nudity and theatrics actually distracts from their intended message.

For freelance journalist and women's rights activist Toula Drimonis, the message itself is also problematic. She says the group's seemingly immovable (and often criticized) condemnation of both religion and sex work—which FEMEN perceive as patriarchy incarnate—is exclusionary. "Feminism is about the choice to make whatever decision you want as a human being," Drimonis explains. "Their Eurocentric white feminism is very patronizing."

Drimonis says she believes the FEMEN formula is doing more harm than good for the feminist cause. "I've never seen any demonstration, anything that they've done, produce results," Drimonis told VICE. She says the coverage their actions generate is usually treated as clickbait. "Every time there has been a conversation, most people never get past the breasts. [The message] is always lost in the noise," she says.

For Topaloski, however, the group's stance and its guerrilla-esque methods are a necessary part of the feminist landscape. "It desacralizes feminism, carries it out of the realm of ideas, out of academia, where a lot is said but little is achieved."

The 29-year-old was born in Serbia, leaving for Canada just as the Yugoslav Wars started. She says the country's socialist system had a big influence on her upbringing. "My mom grew up in a country where no one talked about religious holidays but women's day was a big deal," she described. "[The nation] boasted pretty great egalitarian principles, and these principles shaped me."

The French literature grad said her interest in FEMEN came from a realization that, while women have come a long way in the past few decades, there was still a battle to be fought. "The nature of the oppression has now changed: capitalism, a consumerist society, the pernicious return of religion within democracies," she listed off. "These are just a reiteration of male domination, these are new ways of establishing male domination over women, of enslaving women to a patriarchal economy."

"We can't help but acknowledge that we're in the same shit as before," Topaloski said, adding that, for her, FEMEN's felt like the best way to tackle these modern inequalities. "They're out there and they say it out loud."

FEMEN members Neda Topaloski and Delphine Bergeron. Photo by Yannick Fornacciari

During the National Assembly stunt, Topaloski managed to pass herself off as a journalist, using her real (and very Google-able) name. With Barrette MIA, she opted to storm a press conference hosted by Culture Minister Hélène David instead, pouncing in front of the podium with her breasts bare and skirt lifted, wailing "NO TO BILL 20."

Much like choosing base jumping over a less-extreme sport like cycling, favouring FEMEN's approach to tamer forms of protest seems to have a lot to do with adrenaline. Their stunts are not for the faint of heart and, even for a bystander, the rush they generate can get overwhelming.

In the chaos, with security guards rushing to grab her and cameramen piling atop one another to film her, the FEMEN perspective comes into sharper focus: if politicians have a literal pedestal to share their message, how does society ensure dissenting voices are heard just as loudly? Could the bare-breasted ambush be a kind of great equalizer, a flash of attention for the disenfranchised?

Perhaps, in theory.

But in practice, Topaloski's stunt catalyzed a flurry of panic and finger pointing, resulting in what was likely a pretty horrible day for the person in charge of press accreditations. New to the National Assembly, VICE journalists were even suspected of orchestrating or facilitating the coup (we didn't), and at one point we were chased down by a camera crew trying to get "to the bottom of the story." A few seconds of pretty innocuous topless yelling seemed to stir up more hostility than productive conversation.

The ensuing media coverage took a different path than the women had hoped. The news stories mostly sidestepped FEMEN's access to abortion message, focusing instead on the National Assembly's security measures (understandably) and the parliament's subsequent decision to review its accreditation protocol.

CTV News story about FEMEN's National Assembly stunt focused mostly on security issues. Screencap

For Topaloski, however, the mission's shortcomings have more to do with the media's failures than with problems with the FEMEN formula."They diverted the matter and used our political action to talk about something else," she says of reporters. "That type of rhetorical diversion is actually very common with FEMEN. It makes 'pacifist activism" rhyme with 'terrorism,' as if they were equal."

Yet "pacifist" is not exactly the word that comes to mind when one sees a FEMEN protest. The women are instructed to resist when police or security guards try to put an end to their outbursts, and the images of this grapple can be incredibly violent. This visual, she says, is part of the message they wish to convey: "It's a resistance to a system that uses our bodies, and the real resistance is represented in the physical struggle," she says.

Neda Topaloski during a stunt at an F1 Grand Prix event. Photo by Yannick Fornacciari

"FEMEN don't physically fight, per say, but we don't stop. What leads to change is the visual, the spectacle that perhaps goes too far."

Drimonis says this fight, and its manufactured images of women being dominated by men, is another problematic element: "The more she resists, the more she can talk about how she was treated, how badly women are treated.

"There's so many undertones of sexism that we live in, that I don't have too much patience for someone who puts themselves in that situation where violence is very circumstantial," she explained.

Over the past year and a half, Topaloski has taken part in about ten actions, and now faces a handful of criminal charges including indecent exposure and assault on a peace officer. Still, she says the FEMEN brand is one she's committed to for the long run. "I wouldn't be doing this today if I didn't think I would maintain these convictions for the rest of my life," she says. That's a good attitude, since her name is likely to be associated with FEMEN in Google searches for years to come.

"It's a long-fought battle. It's an ideological struggle, a long-winded affair, through small gestures and things," she says. "If we don't do it, nobody will."

But that—FEMEN slowing down—says Drimonis, could be a good thing. "Feminism has a hard enough time as it is," she says. "The last thing we need is a movement that makes kind of a mockery of what we're doing."

Follow Brigitte Noël on Twitter.

David Sweat and Richard Matt are still nowhere to be found. Photo via New York State Police

Escaped New York State prisoner and convicted murderer Richard Matt reportedly had a way with women. But now officials have alleged that Officer Gene Palmer, a 57-year-old prison guard at New York's Clinton Correctional Facility, fell prey to his charms as well. More than a week after local prosecutors charged civilian prison employee Joyce Mitchell with giving Matt and fellow convicted murderer David Sweat power tools for their tabloid-friendly escape, they charged Palmer with playing a part too.

It's the latest chapter in a mystery that's made headlines from the New York Times to El Pais. Ever since they went on the lam June 6, investigators have been scrambling to figure out how Matt and Sweat made it out of what's known colloquially as "Little Siberia," a maximum-security facility in the upstate town of Dannemora that is known among prisoners as the scariest facility in New York.

When police announced Monday that they were closing in on the convicts thanks to some DNA evidence found in a cabin, Mitchell's alleged romantic attachment to the cons was still the best—and only—way to explain their initial escape.

But Palmer was arrested Wednesday, and now NBC News is reporting that it's because he traded a flat-headed screwdriver and needle-nose pliers for Matt's paintings on several occasions. (A couple weeks ago, the New York Daily News reported that Matt is an accomplished celebrity portraitist.)

Besides being charged with promoting prison contraband and official misconduct, Palmer's also been slapped with two counts of tampering with evidence because he allegedly burned the paintings after the prison break. According to NBC News, he could be facing up to seven years in jail and has already confessed to the trades—while denying being aware of the escape plot—in a statement to police.

Mitchell, a 51-year-old married woman, reportedly admitted to investigators that she had sex with Matt, and had previously been investigated for being too close to Sweat. She also reportedly hid hacksaw blades and drill bits in a batch of hamburger meat brought into the prison and had Palmer, who's worked at the jail for 27 years, bring the meat to the prisoners's block without running it through a metal detector.

Mitchell pleaded not guilty to promoting prison contraband and criminal facilitation on June 13, and Palmer claims he had no idea what was in the ground hamburger he brought to Clinton's honors block. He will reportedly plead not guilty sometime Thursday.

"He understands he made a mistake with the whole meat fiasco," Palmer's attorney told CNN. "The only mistake he made with trusting Joyce Mitchell."

Meanwhile, it seemed like the whole manhunt for Matt and Sweat was about to end on Monday, after police found evidence that they had spent time at a hunting cabin about 20 miles west of the prison, and had been there as recently as Saturday morning. Although one local official told a local paper he expected an arrest soon, the convicts remain unaccounted for.

When a confrontation between the fugitives and police finally happens, it could be explosive. On Wednesday, Major Charles E. Guess announced in a press conference that weapons at the hunting cabin couldn't be accounted for.

"They put an inordinate amount of weapons and ammunition and other tools in these shared seasonal hunting camps and cabins," Guess said. "They can't tell us what is missing and what is not."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Photo by Flickr user Christian Benseler

At this point in my life, I have experienced rejection in nearly every form. In stand-up comedy, I learned quickly that not everyone is going to like me. In writing for the internet, I've learned this much more ( much, much more). I now react to people telling me on Twitter that I'm a cunt the same way I react to seeing a fly in my drink—annoying, sure, but it's not going to ruin my day.

So why is it that I can't handle romantic rejection? If I can brush off someone heckling me onstage, why can't I handle being told by men on the internet that I'm not hot enough to say no to sucking dick?

Romantic rejection has turned me into my worst self. Take my first boyfriend, for instance—let's call him Sid. Sid dumped me after I told him I loved him. At the time, I knew that I wasn't genuinely in love with him. I was just eager to say it to someone who wasn't a member of my family, or a close friend, or a loaf of bread. But it was too late. I had thrown my shit directly into the fan. Two days later, we were over. I didn't take it well.

I decided that the only way to deal with my pain would be to get incredibly drunk. My two best friends agreed, and we proceeded to drink copious amount of whiskey together. Four hours later, a bumbling, horny, mess of an idiot, I had texted Sid approximately 15 times. He responded to the last one, asking me to stop texting him. So, naturally, I called.

We spoke for around 20 minutes. I don't remember anything that was said. All I remember is how I ended our conversation. I told him that if he wanted to get back together, to text me tomorrow morning the word "bacon." If he didn't want to get back together, he should text "scrambled eggs." We hung up, and I woke up the next day reflecting on what I had done. I must have sounded like one of those early ringtone commercials where horrific graphics would dance around the screen while a far too enthusiastic voice would say something along the lines of, "Want this hee-hawing donkey noise to be your ring tone? Text DONKEY to 44544!" That was me. I was that commercial. "Want this self-loathing drunk woman to be your girlfriend again? Text BACON." He never did end up texting me—not even "scrambled eggs." I haven't said "I love you" to anyone since.

Two years ago, a guy I hooked up with wouldn't accept my friend request on Facebook, even though he told me to add him. I mean, he even pressed the "request" button on my goddamn phone. The next day, hours after he pretended to still be asleep as I left his apartment, I looked at his page. He posted a status. He definitely saw my request. He purposely ignored it.

I was furious. Rather than be the bigger person and leave it be, I got over-the-top drunk on my friend's couch and sent him a series of irate messages. I believe a "fuck you" was thrown somewhere in there, along with "you suck," and I think even "you have a stupid haircut." The next morning, I woke up and again regretted it all. Three months later, he finally responded by writing "whoa." He then ended up requesting to be friends with me.

On Motherboard: Being rejected hurts worse than you think. Trust us, it's science.

Every instance I've done something like this (and there are more instances than I'd like to admit) I've always thought to myself afterwards, This is not me. I am not this person. So, why did I keep being that person?

As it turns out, self-esteem had a lot to do with it. Rejection hits everyone harshly, but those with lower self-esteem take it far worse. On a biological level, a study in 2011 conducted by the University of Michigan found that intense social rejection activates the same regions in the brain that become active when experiencing physical pain. In 2013, a different group of researchers at the University of Michigan explored this even further and found that not only do rejection and physical pain share the same kind of hurt, but our brains even emit the same opioids as a response to try and ease this hurt. This same study adds that "people who score high on a personality trait called resilience—the ability to adjust to environmental change—had the highest amount of natural painkiller activation."

So, that's where that self-esteem stuff comes in. As psychologist and author Guy Winch explained in an article for the Huffington Post, "Research says that people whose self-esteem is lower will experience rejection as more painful, and it'll take them a little longer to get over it. Meanwhile, those who have higher self-esteem—but who aren't narcissists—tend to be more resilient."

Motherboard delves further into how The Brain Takes Rejection Like Physical Pain.

Oh. So that must be my problem. I have confidence in my abilities as a writer and performer, which is why rejection doesn't affect me harshly onstage. But I've never been confidence when it comes to love. My formative dating years were filled with immense disappointment and abject hopelessness. It makes sense to put the blame on one's self, especially when the amount of rejection received is triple that of the amount of rejection doled out. Over the years, I created two key reactions upon being dismissed by potential suitors: I either angrily lashed out, or refused to accept their dismissal and stayed invested in them, convinced they might change their mind. I have a history of prolonging my heartbreak with the same uninterested man for years. The more they told me "no," the more I was determined to make them say "yes."

Lately, I've been trying to learn from my previous mistakes, and I've been handling rejection far better than I have in the past. Most importantly, I've forced myself to stop wondering "why?" every time a guy turned me down. In the past, things with a guy would be going great for a short while, and then, out of nowhere I'd be told that we need to stop seeing one another. Immediately, I wanted to know what it was about me they suddenly found unattractive. As if that was going to help my self-esteem in any way. I no longer let myself go through that investigation.

Thinking about giving up on love? Watch this video about The Digital Love Industry:

Recently, I met this guy Julian on Tinder. We had a great first date—we hung out until 5 AM, kissed goodnight, and went on a second date the following weekend. On this second date, Julian bought me dinner. We had drinks, and were up until very late again. This time, things got hotter and heavier. Julian begged to eat me out. I told him I was on my period, but he didn't care. He still wanted to do it. Being the giving lover that I am, I granted him his wish. He ate me out for over 30 minutes, then told me he wanted to give me a massage. I let him do that too. He left my apartment that next morning telling me he'd see me again soon.

We spoke the next day, and I asked when we should hang out again. That's when I got a text from him reading, "You probably don't want to hear this, but I don't want to date you. I'd love to hang out as friends though."

If I received this text just a year ago, I'd be demanding more information—like, what the fuck? What happened in the span of one day to make you change your mind? Was it my vagina? Did it scare you? I told you I was on my period. Do you not know what a period is?

I restrained myself, and simply said, "That's cool, but I have enough friends." After that, I deleted his number from my phone.

It's not that I didn't still wonder why he'd rejected. It's just that I decided I didn't need to know. I'm finding the confidence in myself not to care.

I'm finally taming this wretched beast inside me. Now that it's down to a controllable size, it only gets easier and easier. I still have my hiccups here and there. After all, I only deleted Julian's number because I knew the next time I got drunk, there was a good chance I would text him. Hey, I never said I defeated the beast. It's not possible. The pain of rejection will always be there. Dealing properly with how to process that pain, that's what makes for a better and more confident person.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

All images used with permission of the Morbid Anatomy Museum

The squat, pitch-black building that houses the Morbid Anatomy Museum rises up from an unassuming block in the heart of Gowanus, a few blocks down from the G train and within sniffing distance of the diseased canal. Glass walls offer a peek into the abyss, while dead-eyed statues patrol the windows and beckon visitors inside. The museum is nearing the end of its first year, and business is—if not booming—chugging along at a healthy pace, buoyed by a cheeky social media presence and a built-in community of artists, taxidermists, filmmakers, grown-up goths, and assorted oddballs.

I make my way up the stairs past an assortment of skulls and taxidermied critters, and co-founder and curator Joanna Ebenstein greets me in the main exhibition room. Dressed in a simple black shift and owlish spectacles, Ebenstein's vibe is far more Earth Mother than Vampira. She radiates positive energy and genuine excitement as she walks me through the current exhibit, and beams like a kid on Christmas when we get to the two-headed kitten. Her enthusiasm is contagious and is reflected in the contented faces of the staff and volunteers who busily scurry around us. For a place that functions as a modern-day temple of death, it's pretty damn sunny inside, and that's exactly how Ebenstein likes it.

Two-headed kitten in a bell jar, 19th century. Prepared by legendary Victorian anthropomorphic taxidermist Walter Potter, England; from the collection of Carol Holzner. Photo courtesy of Chris Bradley

"The idea of Morbid Anatomy itself came from me wanting to reclaim the idea of morbidity," she explains. It's a funny thought, given how warm and smiley she is. She makes as little noise as possible when we talk, gently directing my attention to treasures like the small jar of tattooed human skin or the Bosch-esque painting of dancing cats. Her eyes crinkle with delight when we discover a mutual acquaintance or happen upon a particularly precious print. It's not hard to imagine a bookish version of her younger self blasting New Order and disappearing between the pages of a medical history tome. "My whole life I've been called morbid, and at a certain point, I thought, why? Why is it morbid to think about death? It's the greatest human mystery, which religion used to answer but no longer does. How could you not think about death, and what does it say about you if you don't? I think it's morbid to live in a world where you think you can make it go away by not thinking about it."

Humanity has been obsessed with the concept of death since the first Homo sapiens keeled over, and over the centuries, we have found countless ways to express that fear and curiosity. The Morbid Anatomy Museum is full of them: Whether it takes the form of the waxen memento mori figurine trailing entrails onto an oaken table, the baroque Day of the Dead skull winking out from behind a display case, or the shadowbox decorated with wreaths of human hair that graces the museum's whitewashed walls, our relationship with death and mourning has always dominated our most sacred moments. Those rituals are fading, though; as increasing numbers of Americans turn away from organized religion, heaven seems further away than ever, and the growing popularity of cremation and green burial shows that we're rethinking the ways we dispose of our corporeal selves. Ebenstein's convinced that we're in the midst of a transitional stage in our evolution as a secular society.

"I think all of the rituals we have around death used to serve a function and were meaningful, but now ring hollow for people; they don't work anymore. I think there's something really wonderful in how people are trying to find meaningful ways to communicate and commemorate their loss now that the old rituals are falling short of our needs because we've changed in such significant ways," she says, breezing by a whimsical display of taxidermied squirrels clustered around a Lilliputian bar to point out a tiny malformed pig fetus. "What really strikes me in a post-religious age is how people relate to objects. They still hold power. Maybe that is the church of the modern age—a way to have this feeling of something beyond ourselves that moves us in a certain deep way. Maybe we don't necessarily believe in God anymore, but there's still this need to have that exchange with something bigger than ourselves."

At this point, I'm fully converted. I'd gone into this assignment with a healthy appreciation for the morbid and macabre but left fully ensnared by Ebenstein's disarming manner, bright-eyed zeal, and trove of treasures. My own fascination with death arose after the unexpected and tragic demise of a dear friend. Being forced to confront mortality generally leads people in one of two directions—either their fear of the end increases, or, less commonly, they reach out and embrace it. I took the lefthand path, perhaps encouraged by a lifetime spent worshipping black metal (the Devil's lounge music) and a childhood spent helping my dad butcher deer carcasses. Either way, as soon as I set foot in that monolith of the macabre, I felt at home. I find myself eager to learn more, to keep talking and keep listening and avoid leaving that sacred place at all costs. The library alone could've kept me busy until my bones turned to dust, and it's gratifying to know that I'm far from the only person who sees the beauty in decay, deformity, and dreadful tales.

Tableau of chipmunks at a bar

As it turns out, I'd played right into Ebenstein's hand. Above all, her goal with the museum is to cultivate the kind of space where those with an interest in death, the macabre, the odd, and the occult can gather and explore their interests in peace. Morbid Anatomy itself started as a photography project of Ebenstein's, then grew once she started her blog, made her collection of books available to the public, and started hosting lectures out of a tiny room in Gowanus. Once she crossed paths with museum co-founder and now CEO Tracy Hurley Martin (who comes from a family of morticians and is married to British musician Vincent Clarke of Depeche Mode) things picked up steam rapidly.

On Noisey: Why Iron Maiden Still Rules, and Heavy Metal Will Never Die

Now, not only does the museum host myriad lectures and special events, it also offers classes in arcane arts and ancient skills from taxidermy to Victorian hair art, and is gearing up to celebrate its first birthday next month. Its events have begun to sell out rapidly—I barely made it into a recent talk on how Soviet bootleggers sold Western music on discarded X-rays—and tickets to the museum's celebratory all-day Festival of Arcane Knowledge and Devil's Masquerade fundraiser are selling fast. Though Ebenstein confides that the nonprofit institution is "scraping by" on donations and the proceeds from its gift shop and its in-house, coffee-slinging, treat-shilling Black Gold cafe, she seems delighted with the success her kooky little venture has already found.

A mummified, seven-legged, two-bodied piglet

"When I started the blog, the reason it was successful is that it was online; it's super niche, but online, those super niche people can find you. At the time, I was working in children's publishing, and I wrote under my initials instead of my full name because I didn't want my boss to know I was into all of this weird death stuff. In 2007, it was a very different cultural scene, and this stuff was seen as very subversive at that point, and it's not anymore—now everybody thinks it's great!" Ebenstein explains, gesturing at a cluster of young women in silver and black huddled around a display case. "It's a moment, and I'm sure that what we've done with the MA project has had a part in creating that moment, but I also feel that it's part of a zeitgeist, a much broader interest in death and 'weird stuff' that's happening now. After I started the blog, I started getting emails from people, and then suddenly there was this whole world. I was blown away—I hadn't known anyone else liked this! There had never been anyone else in my life who liked this sort of thing, ever."

The feeling of being the only one—the only punk in town, the only kid in school who'd rather read Poe than play kickball—is surely something that a great deal of us can relate to, and Ebenstein understands it on a much deeper level than your average museum curator might. After all, she's one of us.

"That's the the tradition that has influenced me the most: goth, new wave, new romantic. I have a love-hate relationship with goth," she admits. "I love what they draw from, but hate how they execute it. I hate their poor quality control. I had funny-colored hair and crazy makeup, but I was disappointed by them, because I thought I'd found my people; they allegedly loved books and ideas, but the ones I met were not like that, and I was heartbroken. God bless 'em, they do have good music, but bad poetry."

Museum interior

Despite what its imposing black facade and decidedly eccentric subject matter might lead one to assume, the Morbid Anatomy Museum is far from gloomy. It's downright cheerful in there amid the specimen jars and books about cannibalism. To Ebenstein's chagrin, an experiment with Groupon led to a brace of bad reviews from penny-pinching Yelpers who'd walked in expecting to encounter pure gore, something out of American Horror Story, or rows of pickled babies à la Philadelphia's deformity lover's paradise, the Mütter Museum. She sighs, "It's here if you want to find it—open up any book and look at the pictures—but this place is intended to be thoughtful and thought-provoking, not shocking."

The museum feels more like a life-size version of a Victorian explorer's cabinet of curiosities, full of secrets and endlessly appealing, with a few creepy-crawlies lurking in the corners. Those who come in knowing what to expect are a loyal and diverse crowd, and Ebenstein glows as she describes a little girl whose mother gamely brings her over nearly every weekend to wander through the exhibits, offer suggestions, and take part in the museum's wildly popular taxidermy classes. "There is definitely a subcultural element, but there's an academic side too. If it has a good effect on people and helps girls feel better about what they like, then I will be a happy person," she chirps. "I wish it had existed when I was a little girl, and I just love it when smart, nerdy girls who like nature come in."

Related: The Return of the Black Death

Since Ebenstein and I spoke, the museum has moved on to its latest exhibition, Do the Spirits Return? From Dark Arts to Sleight of Hand in Early 20th Century Stage Magic, which illuminates the too-good-to-be-true story of the now obscure but wholly fascinating stage magician Howard Thurston—con man, carnival barker, missionary student, and, at one time, Houdini's greatest competition. "It's all about magic and the idea of the ways in which these older ideas of magic, of real magic, gets embedded in the imagery and practice of stage magic in the early twentieth century, when it was still big entertainment," Ebenstein says. "It's also about how humans want trickery, and the complexity of deception."

I haven't yet made the trek back down to Gowanus to visit this new set of visiting spirits, but I'm excited to do so. This time, instead of anthropomorphic animals or ancient prosthetics, I'll be met with talking skulls, séances, spiritualism, torture theater, and echoes of voices from beyond. Thanks to an obsessive collector named Rory Feldman, a slew of posters, artwork, and props from the golden Dark Ages of stage magic and sleight of hand will return to the spotlight once more and, in true Morbid Anatomy fashion, seek to lift the thin veil separating the living and the dead. If you've ever felt an inexplicable pull toward the weird, the esoteric, or the spooky, you'd do well to join the rest of us—the death-obsessed and morbidly inclined—down in our cozy corner of South Brooklyn. We're not too hard to find any more.

Kim Kelly is on Twitter.

General Thomas Lawson, Canadian Chief of the Defence Staff photo via Wikimedia Commons

Last week, Canada's highest ranking military man, General Tom Lawson, ignited a massive controversy during a conversation with Peter Mansbridge on The National.

When Mansbridge broached the topic of "endemic" sexual harassment in the military, Lawson casually responded that the underlying reason may be the fact that men are "biologically wired in a certain way" that makes them more likely to attack women, pointing to "situations where, largely men, will see themselves as able to press themselves onto our female members."

As Chief of the Defence Staff, there is technically nobody above him in the military hierarchy aside from our Commander-in-Chief, Queen Elizabeth II. So when a man of that stature dabbles in armchair psychology about sexual aggression during a national news interview, it's obviously going to draw a lot of scrutiny.

That's mainly because his remarks seemed to suggest that sexual assault is a biological phenomenon and that many men in the rigid ranks of the military are simply incapable of controlling their most base sexual desires vis-à-vis female counterparts because of their genetic makeup. This position obviously trivializes the very real and very macho sexist culture that exists in the military, but more on that later.

Lawson apologized almost immediately for the "awkward characterization" and acknowledged that what he said was "conjecture" and "unhelpful." Then, in a rare show of unanimity, politicians from each party took turns one-upping each others' outrage toward his remarks. Even Prime Minister Stephen Harper, not usually one to chime in on matters of gender politics, was apparently beside himself, calling the general's statement "offensive, inappropriate and completely unacceptable." Lawson has less than a month left as Chief of the Defence Staff, so it's unlikely he'll get fired.

While this matter appears to be settled politically, at least, Lawson's statements touch on an issue that's far from being resolved in the fields of biology and evolutionary psychology.

That is the issue of the biological roots of sexual aggression, which is often—and inaccurately—reduced to a debate over whether or not there is a "rape gene" that has been passed down genetically.

We spoke to evolutionary psychologists about Lawson's "awkward" remarks to see if they could hold up to the scrutiny of a field of science that, while often misunderstood by laypeople, has devoted a significant amount of research to human behaviour and sexuality.

Evolutionary psychology is an area of study that can be and has, in the past, been as controversial as the general's comments because it sometimes leads to unsavoury findings hinting at a genetic component for sexual assault.

Take, for instance, the possibility explored by the scientific journal Evolutionary Psychology that the "mushroom-capped" shape of the human penis may have evolved to "compete with sperm from other males by displacing rival semen from the cervical end of the vagina prior to ejaculation." The idea here is that, at one point in our ancestral history, women were having so much sex in a 24 hour period that mushroom-shaped penises evolved in order to scoop out the sperm of competing males. Or there's the theory that that spousal rape is most likely to occur when the husband suspects that his mate has been unfaithful, because he needs to override the other man's seed. These are not exactly the most flattering perspectives of human nature and and male sexuality.

Kelly Babchishin is an evolutionary psychologist and postdoc student at the University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research, and has learned firsthand about the controversy surrounding her field and findings.

In February, she authored an article entitled "Sexual offending runs in families: A 37-year nationwide study" which looked at over 21,000 convicted Swedish sex offenders and found that a child whose father or brother is a sex offender is four or five times (respectively) more likely to become a sexual offender and that this is "primarily accounted for by genes rather than shared environmental influences."

According to Babchishin, a big part of the problem, both in Lawson's case and in general, is the use of the word "biological," which can easily give the layperson the impression that sexual assault can be reduced to a gene and a lack of free will, one that, at some level, absolves the sexual offender.

"I wasn't surprised by it, but the way our study was received by the public was like, 'There is a sex offender gene!' But in reality, that's not the case," Babchishin said. "There is no 'sex offender gene,' but there is a genetic contribution to being a sexual offender. There isn't one gene but multiple genes. So if people don't know what we mean by genetic contribution, they aren't necessarily going to understand or they're going to say things like [what General Lawson] did."

Paul Andrews agrees. He is a professor of evolutionary psychology at McMaster University who focuses on the evolutionary roots of disorders like depression but also sexual infidelity. Andrews says that the cause of a lot of the controversy is largely semantic and that people outside the field associate the word "biological" with "automatic."

"It's not exactly clear to me what the general means by the term 'biological.' But I can tell you that a biologist would say that the term 'biological' just simply means something to do with living organisms. So if the question is, 'Is sexual assault a biological phenomenon?' of course it is! Even if the aggression that's involved is biological, it's all mediated through our brain and our physiology," Andrews said. "Every ability and every kind of behaviour is the product of genes and environment. For modern biology it's not nature or nurture, it's always both. It's both genes and environment that influence every trait."

But this doesn't absolve the sexual offender. To the contrary.

"In this loose sense of the term 'biological' that we're talking about [in evolutionary psychology], people evolved to go to the bathroom. In this sense, the use of the term 'biological' doesn't mean that it's automatic; we can control it. We can choose the time and the place where we go to the bathroom," Andrews said.

"In modern life, we might actually punish people for going to the bathroom or something like that. So that's part of how we control the behaviour. It's possible that murder or homicide had a reproductive or fitness advantage in our evolutionary past too. But is it possible to use that information and say the we should get rid of laws that punish murder? Of course not!"

So, contrary to what many critiques of evolutionary psychology say the field claims (and what the general was implying), genes do not equate automatic, uncontrollable behaviour.

Despite the controversial findings of her team's study—that there is indeed an underlying genetic component to a complex behaviour like sexual assault—Babchishin, like Andrews, cannot rule out obvious environmental factors like the sexualized and chauvinistic culture that exists in the military.

"A lot of times, these things have a culture issue," she said. "And yes, there are certainly some guys in the military who are at high risk to be sex offenders and if you put them in an environment where there aren't a lot of consequences and easily accessible victims because you know that they aren't going to say anything, it's really not the way to do it."

That assessment lines up perfectly with a scathing report written by Supreme Court Justice Marie Deschamps. After spending six months visiting bases and listening to the testimony of some 700 members, she described an organizational culture that is "hostile" to female and LGBT members and encourages "silence" by dissuading victims from reporting cases of sexual harassment and assault. The direction of an entire institution is hardly a matter of biology.

In Lawson's defence—a phrase you won't hear often these days—he did acknowledge the systemic roots of the problem after reading Deschamps' report, the findings of which he said were "disturbing," adding that "the most alarming finding is the existence of an underlying sexualized culture that, if not checked, is conducive to inappropriate behaviour including sexual harassment and, at its most extreme, sexual assault."

What wasn't helpful Lawson going on The National and talking about his grand theory of "biological wiring," which, if anything, proved yet again just how oblivious and insensitive the military brass can be when "tackling" the issue of sexual aggression, even after Deschamps' report was released.

Instead, he should have heeded Justice Deschamps' further recommendation. "The first step, however, is for the Canadian Forces leadership to demonstrate to members that they acknowledge that the problem of sexual harassment and sexual assault in the armed forces is real and that the forces will take the necessary steps to tackle the issue."

When asked specifically about Lawson's soundbite, Babchishin tried to be diplomatic.

"I knew you were going to ask me that and I was trying to think about how to answer in a nice way. I think he was ill-informed. I think it's true that there is a genetic contribution, but to say that we are all hard-wired to do that... I don't think that the data supports that at all."

Follow Nick Rose on Twitter.

Illustration by Ben Thomson.

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia.

Guessing a person's sexuality, for some reason, is a lot of people's business. If you're someone who doesn't perform masculinity or femininity in the "right" way, you'll know there are others out there who take great pleasure in letting you know about it.

But it's not just the bigots calling out slurs from passing cars or the back rows of classrooms—progressives are just as involved. It can be well-intentioned (like when we proactively support a friend we suspect is queer but hasn't said so themselves) or otherwise. One example is when homosexuality is used to ridicule those putting out anti-gay agendas. In the past week, media outlets and left-leaning readers lapped up the poetic irony that Nick Jensen—the Canberra man who said he'd divorce his wife if gay marriage passed in Australia—could've been gay.

But the question is, are we still tolerant when we shame others for being in the closet, or casually define another's sexuality for them?

For Dion Kagan, lecturer in gender and sexuality studies at the University of Melbourne, this behavior links into the maintenance of normativity.

"We're pretty tied to the 'born this way' idea of sexuality which totally reinforces a fixed, stable model of sexuality," he said.

In many respects, the greater visibility of queerness in the mainstream has led to greater normalization, one that privileges straight and gay binaries. For people who don't fit into either, this implies there's little choice in whom we decide to fuck.

This is why being supportive of people still unsure about their sexuality is a problem that's caught in a myriad of good intentions. For some people, assistance is welcomed when you're figuring out who you are. On the other hand, our need to demonstrate our empathy to our ambiguous peers could be getting our ethics in a twist. Is it our right to tell them who we think they're into when they're not ready yet?

This is something that could be pegged to the experience of Australian Olympian, Ian Thorpe. Despite fame, fortune, and even national worth, questions over his sexuality plagued his career. For years straight and gay allies either rebuffed his queerness, or jumped to a seemingly harmless, "we already know, come out already!?" invitation. While for some, coming out is an easy process; the process can often be a tortured, long one. In one sense the impatience for someone's 'coming out' could do as much damage as repressing it.

By the time Thorpe came out in mid-2014, it seemed the public taboo had been gone for a long time. Australian Olympic diver Matthew Mitcham was openly gay prior to the 2008 games, and English Olympic diver Tom Daley came out via video in late 2013. Meanwhile shows like Glee and Modern Family brought queerness into the domain of family television. In a world where a former Jonas brother performed at this year's Sydney Mardis Gras, it naturally begs the question: What was the hold up?

"Poor old Ian Thorpe's disavowal of his queerness just became all the more embarrassing as more and more mainstream figures confessed their sexuality. But who knows? He might've been vaguely asexual but was too busy being an Olympic swimmer," Dion said.

After centuries of queer discrimination, it's difficult to acknowledge that you're in fact the "other." It's this presumption that is a subtle form of discrimination. While most people usually aren't fully conscious of this, the idea of tapping your feet, rolling your eyes, and saying, "come out already" may just push others back in the closet. Coming out is a deeply personal process, and doing so because of someone else isn't really the best reason to do it.

"Outing is a controversial practice, and it's largely defunct now. The people 'outing'—or speculating about the sexuality of—certain public figures have other agendas, mostly around filing journalistic copy space," Dion said.

But in the grand scheme of things, Australia is a funny place to explore sexuality. While we valorize the kind of campiness that's propelled Priscilla and Kylie abroad, we've also got states where you can get off murder thanks to 'gay panic.'

Related: Gay Conversion Therapy

And for a lot of straight men who don't subscribe to Australian masculinity, it's no surprise they've been called a 'fag' a fair few times.

Sydney-based writer and teacher Jay* is one of these men. Despite being "resigned to the fact that he's straight," he's still left wondering why people think he's "obviously gay." He's someone who doesn't fit the archetype of the Australian bloke; this means he's constantly having to answer why he ticks certain queer boxes.

"It was always down to the way that I dressed, my mannerisms, and the way I talked. When I made new friends, some had been surprised that I was straight, or had already gone to 'outing' me. They'd casually drop, 'oh you're gay aren't you?' expecting I'd confirm their presumptions," he said.

But confirm he didn't. For Jay, it underlined to him the spheres of privilege that run throughout Western society.

"We've got centuries of homophobic conditioning to pick apart, and it's multi-layered. You don't need to be slinging hate speech at the supermarket, because if you're a straight white person you get to define what queer looks like from film and television," he said.

Jay went on to explain that he eventually found himself, though he's always wondered if things could have been different. For him, and a slew of people who readily fall between the boxes which society has made for them, they live in world where their sexuality's ambiguity is open to analysis—regardless of their consent.

"I guess the end-game for me with this—as a straight man who no longer questions my sexuality after doing so for a long time—was asking the question: Have I arrived at this because of homophobic conditioning?" he said.

But the simplest reason we should keep our suspicions to ourselves is this: sexuality is a massive deal. As Dion puts it, "Telling people that 'your sexuality doesn't matter' is a liberal platitude. Being queer isn't inconsequential—it's fundamental to how we organize and understand social and intimate relations."

*Jay's named has been changed for privacy reasons.

Follow Alan on Twitter.

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

I'm kind of on a quest for truth, but not really. Like, I'm a seeker, but I'm scared of what I might find. Many of the 'signs' of a spiritual awakening—changing sleep patterns, sudden waves of emotion, changes in eating habits, increased sensitivity, loss of interest in extroverted activities, a desire to break free from life-draining jobs and toxic people, a compelling need to find one's purpose, tingling in the head, racing heartbeat, changes in sexual desire—are exactly what I've experienced during periods of acute anxiety or depressive episodes. What if I can't emotionally handle the truth? What if the truth contains multitudes and some of those multitudes are horrifying, like a bad DMT trip? What if the truth is insanity?

Before I got sober, my drinking and using were what you might call a low-grade quest for god. Actually, they were a high-grade quest for god. I ate shrooms in fields and peyote in the forest, looking for light. I read Buddhist, Hindu, and American self-help books, fucked up on vodka, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I believed that spiritual 'experts' would have the answer.

After I got sober, I stopped looking to snake oil salesmen, gurus, and psychics for help. But there is one woman who I go see every Summer, when she travels from her home in Kerala India to America. Her name is Mata Amritanandamayi, otherwise known as Amma.

Amma is a revered guru, global humanitarian, and to some, a living saint. Embodying the goddess, or mother-figure, she has given hugs to over 34 million people across the world: a practice that began at a young age, in response to the suffering she witnessed. At the time, it was unheard of in her village that a woman would touch or be touched by strangers. But Amma felt compelled to perform this radical act, and as word traveled of her spiritual gifts, a following grew around her.

Since then, Amma's charities have fed over 100 million people per year in India and 100,000 meals per year internationally. They provided $1 million dollars in relief to the Japanese Tsunami and $1 million for Hurricane Katrina. They have built 100,000 homes, and provided $60 million in free healthcare. In response to the Hindu notion that suffering is a result of one's own karma, Amma has said, "If it is one man's karma to suffer, isn't it our dharma to help ease his suffering and pain?"

The first time I went to see Amma on her US tour, I was like, Get me away from these assholes. The event was at a ballroom in New York City and I was surrounded by thousands of her disciples: earthy MILFs, shady yoga bros, white people wearing saris, all waiting to receive a hug, or as it's called, "darshan." At an event celebrating compassion, these people didn't seem very nice to each other. They were snippy and uptight. They were saving seats. Also, I thought the giant bazaar at the entrance to the event selling Amma books, Amma socks, Amma dolls, Amma paintings, Amma jewelry, Amma oils, Amma soaps, Amma chocolates, was fucking weird.

But about 20 minutes into watching Amma hug, my judgments were disrupted. Suddenly, in my head, I heard the words: God loves all the children just the same wherever they are on the path. It was really weird. The words weren't coming from the music, which was in Sanskrit. They were coming from inside me. What happened next was even weirder. A surge of palpabale euphoria began to coarse through my body. It didn't stop until the following day. I was like, Oh no.

As a lifetime anxiety sufferer and hypochondriac, any unexplained change of state scares me: even a very good one. I always assume that I am either dying or going insane. This feeling was so strong that I wondered if i had been dosed. It was a feeling I had only ever known on opiates, or really dopey ecstasy: a peace so palpable that it was not the absence of negativity, but its own entity.

The thing was, I wasn't on any drugs. In fact, I had just gotten sober a few months before. But I didn't know how to interpret these sensations without the language of drugs. I didn't know how to interpret a positive, let alone blissful experience, as simply being alive. Ten years later, I sometimes still don't.

Since that first experience, I have gone to see Amma every year. Occasionally, I bring friends and loved ones. Some have felt what I felt, looked at me tearfully, and nodded. Others sat in the balcony eating doughnuts and checking their phones, like, whatev. I've never felt a desire to "convert" anyone, only to share an experience and maybe make sense of my own through the experiences of others close to me.

Every year with Amma is always a little different. One year, while basking in her heroin-y glow, the thought came to me that maybe I should volunteer. At Amma events, there are always opportunities to do service, like washing dishes or preparing food. But as quickly as the thought came, I dismissed it. I didn't want to kill my high. About an hour later, I literally 'o.d.'d' on Amma's vibe. I got severe vertigo and had to go home in a taxi. That was the year I realized that spirituality isn't about feeling good all the time, untouchable, sequestered on a lotus. It's about helping people. Since then I usually volunteer at Amma's events selling baked goods.

Another year, I went to see Amma in a state of anger and fear. There was an older dude with whom I had a professional falling out, who had begun harassing and threatening me. Convinced of my righteousness, I felt only hatred for him—and the hatred was consuming me. But as I sat there, watching Amma hugging human being after human being, I saw—for a brief second—the innocence in each person. Like, I saw everyone as a child. And I saw myself as a child. Then, I saw him as a child.

A few weeks ago, I told a very new age-y friend of mine that I was going to see Amma in Los Angeles. My friend said that she didn't like Amma. When I asked why, she said she thought that Amma sucked the positive energy out of children's ears. She said that Amma was a spiritual vampire and that the positive energy of her presence was energy that she sucked out of her followers.

I was like Oh no. I mean, my friend is someone who believes in alien implants. She's not exactly Aristotle in her empirical methodology. But at the same time, my own experiences with Amma are not quantifiable either. The sensations I've experienced have always remained enigmatic. So what my friend said made me curious.

I spent the next 24 hours googling everything negative I could find about Amma. I really tucked into it, got consumed, the way I might around a celebrity death or a scandal involving someone I know. It felt weird giving Amma the 'Gawker' treatment. But I also got off on it, the way we can get off on any compulsion. I found claims of false mysticism. Claims of misappropriation of funds. I found Amma allegedly sleeping with one of her swamis, while devotees on her Ashram were instructed to be celibate. I found accusations of murder and abuse.

Faith and doubt are really weird things. Like, it seems really easy for a lot of us to get into faith—not always in a god or a typical guru—but in our Kanyes, Elizabeth Warrens, Steve Jobses, Kardashians, Beyonces, or whomever we venerate. Also, for a lot of us, it's really easy to get into doubt: at least superficially. Doubt can be really fucking fun, especially when it's the kind that is meme-based and doesn't destroy the fabric of everything you thought you knew and make you go insane. Like, as long as the doubt isn't too deep—as long as it isn't the bad DMT trip doubt—it's cool.

Some of Amma's followers literally worship her as a god incarnate. I never felt quite this way, perhaps because I was raised a Jew and taught to never idolize god in one human form. Maybe I was scared of "going all the way" with my faith in her—that I would see a truth about the nature of human suffering, my contributions to it as an American, that would cause me to "go crazy" and be unable to participate in my life as I knew it. Maybe that would have even been a good thing?

Whatever the case, I see her as a human being—one who is spiritually elevated, yet not above error. There is god in her and she helps me see god in me, but she isn't a god. And since she isn't a god, I don't need her to be perfect. I don't need her to be real or fake, terrible, or evil. She can make human mistakes. She can make ugly ones.

I don't think that my experiences with Amma are the result of the power of suggestion. I think they are the real deal. But whether or not they are placebo, mystic, or somewhere in between, does it matter?

If I were to leave my life, move to Amma's ashram in India, become her devotee, I would need to know. I would have to block out any naysayers, build walls against my 21st century propensity to dig dirt, and vehemently defend what cannot be defended with science: only by the human heart. But the ability to walk in the not knowing is, perhaps, another form of knowing. And the truth is that I like the way magic feels, whether or not it is real.

So Sad Today is a never-ending existential crisis played out in 140 characters or less. Its author has struggled with consciousness since long before the creation of the Twitter feed in 2012, and has finally decided the time has come to project her anxieties on a larger screen, in the form of a biweekly column on this website.

David Felix. Photo by Ivan Monforte

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, the family of David Felix sat around a table in the ground-floor common room of the East Village building where he used to live, remembering the son and brother they hadn't seen in a decade, and trying to understand how he came to be shot to death by a New York City Police detective in the hallway of his own home on April 25.

It took weeks for word of Felix's death to reach his family. His parents, Dorrelien and Margaly Felix, live in Port au Prince, Haiti, but were in the countryside when a phone call finally reached them saying that David was in some trouble.

"We raced back to figure out what was going on," Margaly Felix said, speaking in Creole as her sons, Ramong and Ecclesiaste, translated into English. "The same person called us a day later, and we learned that it's not trouble he's in—he died."

Coming when it did, you might expect the death of David Felix, a 24-year-old black man, at the hands of the police to cause an uproar. In the wake of the deaths of Eric Garner on Staten Island, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and Walter Scott in South Carolina, police violence against people of color has been met with increasing condemnation and ongoing street protest across America.

But news of Felix's death sank almost without making a ripple.

One reason there was no angry response from New Yorkers, some of his friends believe, is that the police did an excellent job of getting out ahead of the story. Accounts in the Daily News, the New York Post and the New York Times the following day told the story, relying largely on unnamed police sources, from the perspective of the two detectives. The articles' portraits of Felix appear to have been derived almost entirely from his rap sheet, and initially transposed his first and last names, an inversion stemming from errors in police paperwork.

...Felix's family wasn't just trying to make sense of his death. They were also trying to piece together a picture of his life since they lost contact with him a decade ago.

According to the account police gave the press, Detectives Vicente Matias and Harold Carter were investigating an incident in which a woman was punched and her her purse stolen several days previously. They came looking for Felix at the East Sixth Street address where he lived in a supportive housing facility combining shelter with supervision and social services. Felix, who at times had been homeless and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was referred to the facility by social workers. The detectives proceeded upstairs to his room, and entered. Felix fled out his window and down a fire escape into a courtyard. The police intercepted him in the building's front hall, and shot him in the ensuing struggle after he allegedly hit one of the detectives with a police radio. Police said both detectives were treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

"There's no question the press made it less likely for people to protest this death," says Benjamin Ndugga-Kabuye, an organizer with theBlack Alliance for Just Immigration. "This movement is still concerned with respectability politics, and from the minute that story came out, he became a robbery suspect."

The media retelling of the police account certainly didn't do much to show Felix as anything but a deranged perp. He was "troubled," the Times reported, with "a history of mental illness and frequent run-ins with the law."

But, as noted in a recent letter to the Guardian by Marissa Ram and Brendan Conner, lawyers who had separately worked with Felix, the police version of the story recounted in the press left some questions unanswered. Why, having been informed of Felix's mental illness by a staff member at the supportive housing facility, did the detectives not follow the patrol guide instructions to contact a supervisor and the Emergency Service Unit? Did the detectives actually have a warrant for Felix's arrest? (Conner says building management told him cops presented a paper with Felix's picture on it, which sounds more like a rap sheet than a warrant. Staff members and leadership at the Bridge, the nonprofit that runs the facility, declined to comment for this story, and the NYPD did not respond to questions about the existence of a warrant.)

For that matter, Ram and Conner ask, why quote a former detective saying that getting hit with a police radio is like getting hit by a brick when, they argue, the former is about seven times lighter than the latter?

Felix's death also highlights ongoing questions about the NYPD's treatment of New Yorkers with mental illness, a bloody history that stretches back decades, from the death of Eleanor Bumpurs in 1984 to that of Shereese Francis in 2012. Felix, a runaway, eventually found his way off the streets and into his sixth-floor apartment at the Bridge. He had a lease, like most New York tenants, but the Bridge's supportive housing system meant that there were always staff members on hand to help. That staff wasn't able to protect David from what the police, though, and some homeless youth and their advocates argue that what happened to him that day fits into a larger context in which police violence against young runaways is increasingly moving into the housing facilities that are supposed to protect them from the dangers of the street.

"The newspaper says he has a mental problem; so put him in care, or get back up, or if you have to, shoot him somewhere in the arm, where it won't kill him." -Dorrelien Felix

"Police are supposed to protect us, especially in supportive housing," says Tee Emmanuel, a youth leader at Streetwise and Safe, an education group for young LGBT people of color in New York. "But police do not take us seriously, only our diagnoses, which may be a 'threat' to them."

Emmanuel said he recently called the police after being threatened by an ex. "The police know that my building houses primarily people of color and some people with mental health issues, and so there were over ten police at my door for just one individual," he says. "Even though I called for protection from him, I was afraid what the police might do to him. This doesn't make me safe."

Homeless youth advocates say staff at supportive housing facilities in the city are in a complicated bind. Protecting their tenants from invasive police attention is made more difficult by the desire to maintain good relations in case of a situation in which they need the cops to respond to a real emergency. For Emmanuel, the result feels like a raw deal.

"How can you call it 'supportive' housing but we aren't actually being supported?" he asks. "Police are constantly in our buildings. Staff do not protect residents from police encounters despite knowing our backgrounds and harmful experiences with the police."

Sitting in the common room of Felix's assisted living facility earlier this month, his father, Dorrelien, said the whole story still feels bizarre.

"The way that this happened, it doesn't seem normal at all," he said, speaking in Creole as his sons translated. "The newspaper says he has a mental problem; so put him in care, or get back up, or if you have to, shoot him somewhere in the arm, where it won't kill him."

Outside the glass door from the common room where the family gathered is the small cement courtyard David Felix descended into as he fled the police that day. The family had just visited David's room, accompanied by staff from the Bridge, but weren't allowed to take any of his possessions, including his well-thumbed Bible, because, they were told, the case is still under investigation by the police.

Visiting his room, Felix's family wasn't just trying to make sense of his death. They were also trying to piece together a picture of his life since they lost contact with him a decade ago. David grew up with his younger brothers and a sister, Phelina, in Haiti, but in 2005, when David was 15, Dorrelien brought the boys to Miami to go to school. He soon returned to Haiti, and the boys stayed on, living with a family friend.

His brothers remember him as a kind, ambitious, intellectually voracious person.

"He learned everything himself," Ramong said. "Spanish, English, proper French. He wrote poems. I remember the best thing he ever told me was that he wanted me to be even smarter than him."

But something wasn't right. David ran away from the place he was staying in Miami, eventually calling his mother in Haiti to tell her he was in New York. The life of teen runaways in New York City is brutally difficult, more so for people of color, and even more so for non-citizens.

"People in David's position have little access to housing, to employment, to the things you need to survive," says Ndugga-Kabuye of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. "So now you're existing in a black market. The things you do to survive—sex work, shoplifting, whatever it is—now criminalize you. We're talking about survival. We're not talking about perfect victims."

In his ten years in New York, David Felix had his share of encounters with the police. The Times story indicated that police classified him as a runaway in 2007. He was hospitalized in the Bronx the following year after police found him in a state of emotional distress, and over the next three years, he was arrested for assault and grand larceny. He spent time imprisoned on Rikers Island, the city jail complex legendary for its violence and abusive conditions.

Throughout this period, Felix stayed close to the faith of his childhood. In recent years, he attended services and activities at a youth ministry a couple times a week, forging lasting friendships with the people he met there. He actively sought assistance from lawyers and social services providers, and sometimes had steady work.

By all accounts, he charmed everyone he met.

Check out the VICE News documentary on how Chicago's Cook County Jail treats the mentally ill behind bars.

Conner, an attorney at Streetwise and Safe, met Felix when he helped him beat a bogus trespassing charge. Conner says after the case was over, he still visited David regularly at the Pret a Manger where he worked in inventory and food prep, buying a banana so they could catch up. "He was always so happy," Conner says. "He was proud of his work."

The day after the Felix family visited the place where David lived and died, his body was laid to rest at Rosehill Cemetery in Linden, New Jersey. Waiting for a Haitian Creole translator to arrive, people who had known Felix in different contexts shared their experience of him. One of the leaders of a church group David regularly attended pulled out his phone to show Ecclesiastes Felix his older brother's Instagram page.

"I never knew he had Instagram," Ecclesiastes said, his eyes locked on the phone, as he swiped slowly through a feed full of pictures of David posing with friends, working out, showing off a new Sisqo-style blonde dye job, always looking conspicuously fashionable.

Eventually the party gave up waiting for the translator and moved to David's grave, part of a new section of the cemetery, littered with equipment and mounds of red earth, sheets of half-inch plywood, rubber matting and burlap providing a pathway over the raw ground. At his mother's request, David's casket was all white, jogging a memory for Brendan Conner.

"The last time I saw David, he was dressed all in white, and I remember I gave him a hard time about it: 'Dude, it's not even Memorial Day yet,'" Conner said. "He just smiled and said something like, 'In fashion, you have to break the rules.'"

The burial ceremony was short but wrenching. Dorrelien Felix, David's father, spoke briefly in Creole, with Ecclesiaste interpreting. "What happened to David is not really fair," he translated. "We can't say how bad that feels. We can't really explain that."

"In the media now it's all hyped up because of Eric Garner, because of Mike Brown, because of BLM. But really this has been going on for decades...." -Reverend Valerie Ross

Ecclesiaste spoke of his brother as well. "He always had a smile on his face, a new joke to tell," he said. "He was one of the bravest men I have ever known. I miss him more than words can say." David's other brother, Ramong, stood to speak, but hung his head, wiping tears behind his glasses. "I don't find any words," he said, and sat again.

The Reverend Valerie Ross, officiating at the funeral, read from scripture and delivered a eulogy. "We've been here before," she said. "In the media now it's all hyped up because of Eric Garner, because of Mike Brown, because of BLM. But really this has been going on for decades, for far too long, not only in the city of New York but across America."

After the funeral, friends and family attended a repast at Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square. Sitting on folding chairs in the church basement, members of Felix's faith community remembered him as relentlessly friendly. "He was charismatic, but he wasn't abrasive," says Matthew Thompson, a young Irish leader with the New York Dream Center church group. "He was just a fun person. He was inclusive. If he saw you in the corner, he'd approach you and put you at your ease."

Najja Sadiki Plowden, a charismatic, dreadlocked man who also knew Felix through church activities, said they had a friendly rivalry over who could dress more fashionably. "He had a real heart for styling," Plowden said. "But he was really open. If you liked something, he liked it. He saw value in what you liked. Most people aren't like that."

When I asked David Felix's church friends what they thought of his death, how he died, they grew noticeably uncomfortable. "There are a lot of complexities in the world in general," said one man who asked not to be identified. "I choose to think about things that bring me peace and comfort."

Plowden was more open. "I'm sad and I'm angry," he said. "I was in the army. I believe in our government authorities. I pray for our government authorities. But I'm angry because I'm black. Because I know that if I don't comply with what's asked of me, because I know my rights, that because an officer may be lacking in training or having a bad day, I could be dead." He shook his head. "I have to be a part of this city, have to keep honoring the government I fought for. I'm sad that this government doesn't value me—didn't value David—because of the color of our skin. It's too close. It's too sensitive. David was a good kid. And now he's not here."

Why David Felix broke off contact with his family, whether it had to do with his mental health, family dynamics, or some other factor, is unclear. After the earthquake in 2010, communication infrastructure in Haiti was damaged and the Felix family got a new phone number. They comfort themselves with the possibility that maybe David had tried to reconnect with them but had simply been unable. As it turns out, earlier this year, David had approached a social service provider about locating his family and reestablishing contact. David was killed a few weeks later.

"Since he was young, I gave him everything," David's father said the day before the funeral. "My son died for I don't even know what reason. Even if they paid a million dollars, it wouldn't be enough. I want justice for his life. I want this to get to the government's ears. I want everyone to know David was a brave man, that he wasn't afraid to work. I want people to know who he was, and that what happened to him isn't right."

David Felix's friends are raising money to cover the costs of his burial and flying his family up from Haiti to attend it.

Follow Nick Pinto on Twitter.

Andy Tsege with Yemi Hailemariam and their children.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

This week marks a year since British citizen Andargachew Tsege was seized by Ethiopian agents at an airport in Yemen, flown to Ethiopia, and imprisoned in a still unknown facility. Tsege, known to his friends as Andy, grew up in Ethiopia but moved to the United Kingdom, where he was granted citizenship, in 1979. He is a member of the Ethiopian opposition group Ginbot 7, which the government in Addis Ababa has—under draconian legislation adapted from UK and US anti-terror laws—classified as a terrorist organization. Tsege's involvement with the group means that under Ethiopian law he, too, is a terrorist. He still potentially faces the death penalty, though this sentence is unlikely.

The legal charity Reprieve—acting as Tsege's lawyers—and Yemi Hailemariam, his longterm partner and the mother of his three children, insist that Tsege is a peaceful democrat intent only on helping to provide an opposition voice in a country whose rapid economic growth has masked a troubling human rights record. The ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has a fondness for locking up its detractors.

"The Ethiopian Government is going to great lengths to try to justify its year-long abuse of Andy Tsege," Maya Foa, director of Reprieve's death penalty team told me, "but no amount of staged propaganda can mask the appalling reality of Andy's incommunicado detention, torture, and death sentence for the so-called 'crime' of holding democratic ideals."

Recent "staged propaganda" includes photos taken by Tsege's captors of him visiting a new motorway (the Ethiopian authorities are very fond of trumpeting new infrastructure initiatives) and another photo of him with the caption, "The campaign by the British on behalf of a terrorist will not help."

The British campaign on the behalf of Tsege is complicated by the British government's relationship with Ethiopia. Tsege has found himself, so far, sacrificed on the geo-political altar. Ethiopia is a vital strategic ally to Britain and the United States in the war on terror, as well as being a recipient of aid money from both those countries. The fate of one man, however innocent he might be, is simply not going to change the British government's position on Ethiopia as an occasionally rather awkward but really pretty important ally.

On Monday, the final results the Ethiopian general elections confirmed the EPRDF's grip on the country. The ruling party and its allies won all 546 parliamentary seats. Andy Tsege, contemplating a year in prison, might have found some dark humor in the timing of the announcement of this electoral triumph. The UK's minister for Africa, James Duddridge, welcomed the "generally peaceful environment" the elections had taken place in, even though political opponents and journalists had been locked up in the run-up to the vote.

Recent reports from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) indicate that Tsege's condition is deteriorating significantly. Ethiopia's prisons are often synonymous with torture, disease, and intense surveillance. Fellow prisoners spy on each other and Ethiopian state television is regularly played as a sort of Clockwork Orange style of brainwashing. In 438 Days, an account of their time in an Ethiopian prison, the Swedish journalists Martin Schibbye and Johan Persson tell the story of a Rastafarian prisoner from Trinidad who screams that the prison is worse that one of the old slave ships.

Andy again

A year on from her partner's kidnapping, Yemi retains the hope that she will see him again but fears that by then he may be too traumatized by his experiences to live anything resembling a normal life. Her fears may be well founded. A source in the Ethiopian government told me that the "most probable" outcome for Tsege will be that his death sentence is "commuted to a life sentence via a presidential pardon. In turn, that could possibly lead to a full pardon in the future—though not for some years."

While she has not abandoned hope, Yemi feels as though she is at the mercy of forces far beyond her control. "Nothing has changed," she told me, "the situation is sickening. The British blame the Ethiopian government and say that they aren't predictable, but they are doing business with the Ethiopians, so they must be getting through to them somehow. They are letting the Ethiopians set the agenda but the UK government is not powerless. With minimal risk, they can go far, but they're just not willing."

"We will continue to lobby at all levels, conveying our concern over Andargachew Tsege being detained without regular consular visits and access to a lawyer," the FCO told me.

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It's been a year since Yemi last saw her partner and over six months since she last spoke to him on the telephone. She says that she "feels like a failure." She has come face-to-face with the cold realities of international politics and feels defeated. "I honestly thought we could be a lot further. I just think, 'Where are we going wrong?'" Local politicians have helped her though, particularly Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn. "He has been amazing," Yemi says. "His humanity is unbelievable. He doesn't have that personal ambition that you see in a lot of politicians. He believes in certain things and wants to make them a reality." She is now helping out on Corbyn's campaign.

One year on and the British government still stands accused of putting its political and commercial desires ahead of its duty to its citizens. One year on and the Ethiopian government continue to show that, in the words of a source in its foreign ministry, "human rights are low down on the lists of our priorities." For Reprieve's Maya Foa, the message is clear: "Now more than ever, the British government must demand his release, so he can be returned safely to his family in London."

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