The author's daily pills. Photo courtesy of the author.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Every day when I wake up, long before I grab my keys and head out of the door, I take three pills. They're to keep me alive. They're a constant reminder, not that I could ever forget, that I nearly died. Knowing you're not immortal is something most people can be forgiven for forgetting, but it's a fact I'm made vividly aware of every morning.

But the pills are more than just a physical and pharmaceutical legacy of my illness: They're also a reminder that life is good. I nearly died. I'm still here and, despite everything, I'm happy. I made it, I'm feeling healthier than ever right now, and I'm alive.

I was 31 when I had my heart attack, three years ago. Not an old man, not really even particularly unhealthy. It shook my world in a way that I don't expect you to imagine—it made me feel like an alien, an unreal element in the world I'd known before. Coming home from the hospital after a life-saving operation, I felt inhuman, and like every eye in the world was silently judging me. I was the "young lad who'd had a heart attack"—not the worst stigma in the world perhaps, but a weight to carry that I didn't need. I hope you never experience what I did. I hope you never squeeze your wife tighter than you ever had before through sheer fear, scared it'll be the last time you get to do it. I hope you never understand mortality the way I do today.

My path from then to this point has been long and winding, one that's involved therapy for anxiety along the way. But it's a path that's been directed by two constants: the support of my family and video games.

The first thing I did after my attack that made me feel normal again was play a video game. It was Tank! Tank! Tank!, if that even matters, an average game made better by multiplayer, but a game nonetheless. I forgot about my maladies, I forgot about the world's judging eyes, and I felt safe again.

And it made me realize something more sharply than I'd ever considered it, previously. People who make you feel bad because you like video games: forget them. Even in 2015, with the games industry bigger than Hollywood, if you tell someone you love playing on your PlayStation 4 you run the risk of getting looked at a certain way. A negative way. I was a guy who'd had a heart attack, that was one thing—but a gamer who'd had a heart attack? I was ripe for mockery amongst a crowd that has nothing but the most absurd ideas about what sort of person plays video games. And you know what? That's simply not right.

A screen shot from 'Tank! Tank! Tank!', because nothing says "I feel better" quite like shooting a robot dragon hydra thing in its faces

Now, I'm not going to pretend that everything is rosy in gaming right now—it's not, and it's a pretty significant distance from being that way. But I am going to say that there are so many positives to gaming, way more than there are negatives to the hobby, the passion, but many of these pluses get lost in a haze of anger and resentment amongst a "mainstream" that no longer represents the majority. Video games made me feel good about myself in that moment, when I needed them, and they continued to do so for the entirety of my recovery.

Look around you, at the quiet, the introverted, the people in your office who don't laugh at every bawdy joke or cough up for cans of lager on a Friday afternoon or stick around after working hours to drink the sun beneath the horizon. Perhaps they're just that: quiet, shy, content. Or maybe they're trapped in their own minds, unable to communicate as well as they'd like to with their peers. Depression and anxiety are real illnesses, and they're as debilitating as they are destructive. There are those who aren't lucky enough to have support groups, and gaming is their therapy. It's something that's hard to understand unless you've experienced it, but anxiety (especially) is crippling.

My anxiety manifested through the feeling that I was going to die. Despite being told, multiple times, that I was fine, I felt a sensation akin to someone jabbing at my ribs, repeatedly saying: "But what if...?" It'd get to the point where I couldn't take it anymore, and for many there's just no escaping that feeling.

But I had an escape. I'd turn on a gaming console, I'd play, and it would all fade away—if only for a while.

Related: 'Maisie,' VICE's film about a 13-year-old sectioned under the Mental Health Act

See also: VICE sits down with Brett Morgen to discuss his Kurt Cobain documentary, 'Montage of Heck'

I tried Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but I couldn't get my head around placing my thoughts onto a cloud and letting them float away (your mileage may vary, so don't write it off without trying it). For me, games worked every single time. Of course they didn't make my problems go away forever, and therapy, combined with my support group and relaxation time (games, again), proved the ultimate cure. But when I was well enough to see outside of my own personal bubble, I realized that other people played games, and nobody seemed to be angry about them. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, seeing and experiencing these things for what they are: games. Playthings. Distractions. Relief.

Of course they can be more, and gaming's continued evolution is presenting players with wonderful interactive experiences that the medium's greatest creative powers of just a decade ago could not have foreseen, but sometimes picking up a Wii U GamePad and driving a tank around, shooting huge spiders and other monstrous creations, is just what you need. It makes you feel good, and that's enough—there needn't be an underlying moral or message of some resonant kind that you carry with you through future gaming adventures. Sometimes, flying around a track in the latest Need for Speed game is the perfect antidote to what's ailing you, regardless of the piss-taking the title's getting on Twitter. It's even OK to admit to enjoying the story side of Gears of War. (Which definitely should not be underestimated, anyway.) It's fine to derive pleasure, satisfaction, a sense of calm, from all of these things and more. You should feel good about them.

My heart attack, and more pertinently my recuperation, taught me two things. Firstly, the National Health Service is something we should be loud and proud about. It saves lives every day on a stupidly shrinking budget that beggars belief. Secondly, games are brilliant. They let us explore worlds we alone could never imagine. We can be heroes or villains. We can disappear into the life of a teenage girl with time-rewinding powers in the same game as walking in the boots of a monster-hunting white-haired dude with cat eyes. And that is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds, and all the more amazing for it.

On MUNCHIES: Gardening Is Better Than Anti-Depressants for Some Mentally Ill Patients

So do me a favor: the next time someone tells you "games are for kids," or mocks you for your chosen passion, tell them to get lost. Do it for me, and do it for yourself. Nobody has the right to tell you what you can or can't enjoy. Because the people that will try to, they truly haven't got a clue—about your loves, your pursuits, and certainly not about what you're going through if you're gaming as a means of medication. If it worked for me, it's working right now for countless others.

The stigma of mental health is alive, of that I'm sure, and that gaming can help with these terrible illnesses is something we should celebrate. I love games, and I'm proud to say it. A mix of stupid, throwaway experiences, along with deep, meaningful tales that touch you in a way no other medium can, and everything else in between. Games helped me through a period of my life that I'll never forget. Nowadays, I don't want to pretend my heart attack didn't happen. I'm glad that, ultimately, it made me no longer ashamed or embarrassed to tell people that I play games. And you, whether you're eight, 18 or 80, pills or no pills, should play them, too.

Follow Adam Cook on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The "golden age" of movie-license video games is long behind us, but the current console generation has provided a platform for a handful of excellent experiences based on franchises familiar to cinemagoers. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor turned Tolkien's famous fantasy fiction into an open-world stab 'em up, setting its story between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The newly released Batman: Arkham Knight is the final chapter in its developers' own interpretation of DC's comic universe. And in September, Avalanche Studios' Mad Max will appear, riffing on the lore laid down by director George Miller way back in 1979, when the first Mad Max movie turned a $400,000 AU budget into a $100 million US box office.

Like Arkham Knight and Shadow of Mordor before it, Mad Max the game isn't based explicitly on cinematic depictions of its titular antihero and the violent, post-apocalyptic wastes he inhabits—which means that, while the timing would seem perfect, it bears no narrative similarity to Miller's reboot flick from earlier this year, the critically acclaimed Mad Max: Fury Road. Movie and game developed independently of one another, despite the roots of the two projects originating from the same place. When I speak to the game's director, Frank Rooke, at Avalanche's Stockholm headquarters (the privately held company's also got an office in New York, currently finishing up Just Cause 3), he tells me that, once upon a time, this game was supposed to be a movie tie-in.

"At some point in the past, this movie got green-lit, and it felt like the right thing to do to put out a game attached to it," Rooke tells me, adding that he wasn't a part of the development team while these explicit movie-to-game adaptation discussions were happening. "I don't know what happened before my arrival. But for me, this is a perfect IP to make a video game from, so I'm glad that someone, somewhere along the line, made the decision to go for it."

The foundations for a fourth Mad Max movie, what would become Fury Road, were laid as far back as 1998. Years of development hell followed. At what point precisely a video game revival for the franchise was given the go ahead isn't entirely clear. Miller mentioned the possibility of a new game in 2008, and there was the intent to base it on an animated Mad Max movie, but that all came to nothing. The Mad Max I get to spend a fair few hours in the company of, the first Mad Max-based game since a 1990 release for the NES, was given its debut public reveal as recently as 2013 and shows all the signs of being shaped over the course of several years.

One, it's absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, visually. Like, ridiculously pretty, which is really saying something given a whole lot of what you see on screen is sand and dust. Two, even in a demo build, the gameplay is tight, responsive, rewarding, and most importantly of all a shit ton of fun. You fight antagonistic War Boys both in-car and on-foot, and the offensive options available in both modes lead to some spectacular action. Three, the way that its makers talk about it, outside of formal interview situations, is akin to how someone might describe a long-term romantic relationship. It's in the blood, pumping through the hearts and minds of these men and women day in, day out. This really means something to Avalanche's relatively sizable—there are over 200 employees in the Stockholm studio—but seemingly super-connected team.

As an open-world game providing potentially hundreds of hours of gameplay, the look and feel of Mad Max's environment was of paramount importance to its makers. After all, sand, sand, and more sand might be a pretty depressing prospect for anyone about to embark on a new interactive adventure, in a medium where artistic possibilities are near endless.

'Mad Max,' Eye of the Storm trailer from E3 2015.

"Our artists were scared stiff at the beginning of this project," Rooke says. "When you look at what Mad Max could be, you're looking at a 100-hour game, basically made out of sand. I mean, seriously, there were a lot of sleepless nights over how to make an environment where the player's interest can be sustained over a long period of time. But one day it dawned on us that this wasn't about sand, at all—it was about what this place used to be, and once we started thinking along those lines, everything fell into place."

This is no ordinary desert that your Max—not quite Gibson, definitely not Hardy—finds himself in, left for dead at the beginning of the game by a warlord by the name of Scrotus (who loosely ties the game with Fury Road, as his dad is, apparently, that film's Immortan Joe). He's had his car nicked along with all of his supplies, so must explore the wastes in search of both sustenance—water, maggots, half-eaten tins of dog food—and a new car, and gas, with which to proceed on his way to "somewhere quiet." A set of (heavily customizable and constantly upgradeable) wheels comes his way via an encounter with a supporting protagonist, the borderline insane "blackfinger" Chumbucket (he's a mechanic), and the pair take the Magnum Opus on a wild ride across a landscape once only traversable by something that floated.

"So, this area used to be an ancient seabed," Rooke confirms, "and within that seabed, you'll see heavy coral areas, places where lighthouses stood, or where docks once were. Your initial reaction is just: sand. But when you look closer you see these hints of other things, and you begin to unravel the mysteries of this place, which is a very satisfying feeling. In your own mind, you can work out what these places used to be."

Related: VICE meets 'Mad Max: Fury Road' director, George Miller

Do also check out VICE's documentary on the growing world of eSports

As I play through a relatively compact but challenge-loaded section of the game, some way on from its start and with the essential story components turned off (or else: spoilers), I pass rusted boats, decayed oil tankers, delicate skeletons of long-dead coral. This world was once alive, and as the sand is picked up by the game's dynamic wind system, shifting in volume from place to place, so the movement of the present reveals the beauty of the past. A half-collapsed lighthouse, now a monument without purpose, has become the base for a crew of bandits bearing brightly colored paint and wielding primitive but deadly weapons—something sharp on the end of something stiff, mainly. I clear it out, and Scotus's influence on the surrounding territory shrinks a little. "Allies" (or, at least, men and women who don't immediately want to kill Max) move into the camp, making it their own. They provide scrap to upgrade the car—this scrap is everywhere, too, picked up from junked motors, abandoned settlements, and wrecked War Boy transports alike.

And how you take these enemy cars out is a joy. I was skeptical of Mad Max's vehicle combat going into hands-on time (what are we looking at here, I wondered; Road Rash meets Desert Bus?) but I really needn't have been, as Avalanche has made the physicality of these encounters so very palpable that they can't fail to impress from the first chase of a War Boy convoy through to the last head-on collision with a weaponized Volkswagen. Sometimes you'll come across just a couple of low-armored opponents, which can be dealt with by rams, or disabled by harpooning a rear wheel and snapping it from its axle. When you're pinned between two rivals, you can spray fire (at the cost of fuel, which isn't always easy to come across) from the sides of the Magnum Opus, setting drivers and rides alike aflame. Alternatively, you could get real close to your target and take aim with a shotgun, eliminating the human threat before the mechanical one—but, again, ammo isn't exactly abundant, so it's best to pick your shots very carefully and vary your attacks.

"We wanted the heaviness of these cars to feel right," Rooke tells me. "We wanted real muscle cars. We looked back at how George shot vehicle combat in the movies. He goes from this macro thing, a huge convoy with all this dust, to suddenly being in very tight on the action—on the fan belt, or the sweat on someone's forehead. And it's also very directional—it always goes forward. In the movies, cars are these heavy, metallic beasts, with raw power. The engines are huge, bare metal everywhere—there's no fiberglass anywhere, or anything like that. So that's how we began to approach our car combat, to look at those elements. The directionality of the combat is important, too. You can get into a 'dogfight' situation, but you'll soon learn that you become more efficient at car combat if you take it to the road."

Not that there are any roads, as such, out here in the wastes that Avalanche have crafted—but there are well-worn routes, marked by tire tracks, and the game has a mini-map in the bottom left corner that'll be very familiar to anyone who's played an open-world game like Grand Theft Auto V or Far Cry 4, full of waypoints and markers of interest. What shows up on your larger map needs to be discovered, and there's two ways to do this. Firstly, point your car at the horizon and see what you drive across. Mines, probably. (Seriously, watch out for mines.) Or, more sensibly, find a tethered balloon—this game's take on Assassin's Creed's viewpoints, or the Far Cry series' radio towers—and hop into the basket. Up you go, binoculars out, get spying. Everything you see gets marked for future investigation.

When you arrive at a War Boys-held stronghold, you need to step outside the car and get furious with the fists, and it's here that Mad Max shows its strengths as a brawler. Hand-to-hand combat is very Arkham-series of design, with counter attacks a necessity for thinning out enemy numbers. Build your combo meter and you activate a more powerful Max, where a single blow to an attacker's face is enough to put them permanently in the dirt. Each base has secondary objectives, beyond the essential requirement to do away with all the angry, antagonistic types screaming bloody murder from its walkways and tin sheds. These include foraging for essential scrap, discovering relics from the world before this one—postcards, photos, letters, and the like—and busting up gang insignias. Max, like the Magnum Opus, can be upgraded, gaining extra health, increased strength and so on, and he receives these perks by visiting a strange, mystical man by the name of Griffa. This supporting character is a little like an outback version of Resident Evil 4's merchant, only rather more at one with the spirits.

Mad Max plays great, looks ace, and sounds sublime—from the roar of engines to explosions to the raw percussive punch of the soundtrack, the audio's generally excellent, even if some of the dialogue is on the stiff side. But what's Max's, and by turn the player's, motivation for doing any of this? Max is selfish, insular, a man deliberately withdrawn from whatever society is left in this fuel- and water-scarce world. His sole goal is finding a place where the noise of survival is drowned out by silence. He begins the game without much hope, in a do-or-die situation. But are we, come the end of the game, likely to have seen him rediscover aspects of the human spirit that we consider essential, but are absent here, buried under the dunes? Compassion for starters, and also empathy for other people in dire straits, those suffering under the tyrannical rule of Scrotus?

On Motherboard:This 'Mario Kart' and 'Mad Max' Mash-Up Is Exactly What We Needed

"Max would never do something purely out of the kindness of his heart," Rooke explains, "and he definitely would not try to build himself up as a legend, or a savior. But he does have this wake behind him as a result of him getting what he needs, and how good he is at surviving. And that can lead to him helping people around him."

The Max of 1979's original movie left fellow men to die, horribly. He acted with cold, definitive precision. The Max of 2015's game sets out the same way: to get what he needs he'll have to go through hell, but go through hell is what he's prepared to do, as it's either that or just give up and die. And yet, I get the distinct impression, as friendly forces gather at once-hostile camps and the along-for-the-ride Chumbucket rambles on about him being some sort of saint, sent to aid his creation of the Magnum Opus, and do away with the warlord menace, Avalanche's Max is a more nuanced creation than previous iterations. Perhaps he's one who might, ultimately, want to change the world around him.

"Compassion has been completely stripped away from this world," Rooke tells me. But that's not to say that the player can't inject some of it back into this wonderfully realized expanse of never-looked-better dust and widescreen skies that mesmerize. Now, all Avalanche need to do is hope that this very accomplished game resonates positively with a public already spoiled by the excellent Fury Road, and that it can hold its own, sales wise, againstMetal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, another open-world affair that is releasing the same day. Two very different challenges, both equally tough, but from what I've seen Mad Max deserves a chance to stand on its own terms. And with such polished promise evident, it could yet prove to be an unlikely champion of open-world gaming in 2015.

Mad Max is released for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC (version tested) on September 1.

Follow Mad Max on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Greece

Photos by Christos Sarris

According to official figures released by the Greek Deputy Health Minister Theano Fotiou, there are 17,729 homeless living in the Attica region. Given the events of the last few days—endless talk of the nation going broke, lines at the ATM, the mounting social divide—we decided to talk to those who've suffered from the crisis more than most: the homeless.

I met Dimitris under a bridge on the outskirts of Athens. Over the last few years, this particular bridge has acted as a shelter for many who've found themselves on the streets.

Before ending up there himself, Dimitris toured the world as a dancer. He's the first to admit that he's thought about jumping off the very same bridge more than a few times. He says it's a bit quieter out here and he prefers it to the city center, although it doesn't make him feel any safer. When I asked him what he thinks about the upcoming referendum, he's lost all faith in politicians. He's aware of what the country is going through but has no intention of voting.

Dimitris

"I know what's going on. I'm not out of synch with the world around me. Being homeless doesn't mean that you get cut off from everything that's going on. It's a terrible situation. I've known for quite a while that this was where we were heading.

"I don't want to vote on Sunday. Whether we have the drachma or the euro won't change anything. Who am I supposed to vote for? If I could, I'd vote for my own future, of course I would. I would vote for the future of my children. But to vote for those few sitting on all the money? Those are the guys that have had it the easiest during the crisis. I won't be blackmailed into a 'Yes' or 'No' vote. I don't think it'll be too long before there's more and more homeless people sleeping next to me. People who probably thought they were fine," he said.

For more on Greece, watch our doc on immigrants walking hundred of miles from Greece to Germany:

As I stood chatting to him, I watched Marilena get out of her bed and walk over to her cats to feed them. She sat down at a little table in a corner and turned her radio on to listen to the news.

Marilena

"I'm from Crete so I can't travel over there to vote. I would if I could. I would say yes to the European Union so we wouldn't end up all alone. But I'd say no to the euro—I'd like us to have our own currency. The euro is such a hard currency, I've never liked it. I've always preferred the drachma. I wanted Tspiras to negotiate, since I thought that something good could have come from that. I don't know what goes on behind closed doors, but I'm really scared of the divide in our country.

"Personally, I don't have anything to lose, except my ID and passport and the few pieces of clothing that I have left. That's the lot—I have nothing else. I do think of other people, though. I think about this bridge filling up with all the other people that will inevitably turn it into their home. Whatever happens, whether it's a 'Yes' or a 'No,' I think this bridge will fill up and none of us will be getting out of here any time soon."

Georgia

A few miles away from the bridge, I met Georgia. She sat by a traffic light, waiting for whatever spare change she could beg off of passing drivers. Like many homeless in the city center, Georgia lives in cardboard boxes. She hasn't heard anything about what's been going on over the last few days.

"I haven't heard the news. I've seen people queuing up outside banks but I didn't hear anything about bankruptcy. Nobody told me. It hasn't changed my life, anyway. My life is here, at this traffic light all day, then I find somewhere to sleep, and then I'm back here again. I haven't eaten in three days. I've got psoriasis but I can't get it seen to as I have no money and no health coverage.

"This is what we've come to—there's no health care. There's no money coming in from anywhere. I've been struggling for small change for ten days now, but people aren't giving anything away. I guess they got nothing to spare. All I get is pennies. I'm not going to vote in the referendum but I do wish we could go back to the drachma. I have nothing to lose."

Disarm the NYPD's flag-burning protest brought out plenty of counter-protestors to Fort Greene Park Wednesday night. Photo by Pete Voelker

The slaying of nine people at an historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina last month is still resonating across the country. A handful of black churches have gone up in flames in the days since, raising questions about copycat racial violence. And in states where the Confederate flag—a favorite of alleged shooter Dylann Roof—still flies, calls to take it down are having an impact, with Alabama's governor ordering the four in his state capitol taken down, and South Carolina inching in the same direction.

In Brooklyn, New York's Fort Greene Park Wednesday night, local police reform activists with the group Disarm the NYPD promised to burn both the Confederate flag and the US flag to highlight America's troubled racial history.

"We maintain, unwaveringly, that both the Confederate flag, and the American flag are symbols of oppression," the group wrote on Facebook.

By the time 7:30 PM rolled around, a bevy of angry bikers apparently affiliated with the Hallowed Sons crew, as well as some large men armed with Super Soakers, had shown up to make sure the stars and stripes weren't burned. These are the kind of reactionary middle-aged guys you don't normally encounter at a park in New Brooklyn. But someone—whether they were with Disarm the NYPD or not remains unclear—did, in fact, burn an American flag. Apparently determined to evade the patriotic horde, the activists set the flag alight at the Prison Ship Martyr's Monument, beyond the reach of most of the crowd, which was assembled downhill.

In a statement, Mayor Bill de Blasio expressed disapproval through spokeswoman Monica Klein.

"This protest is a divisive, disrespectful way to express views, and does not reflect the values of our city. The American flag represents national unity, our shared ideals and honors the brave women and men who have served our country."

Here's a look at the bizarre spectacle as it unfolded.

Abortion has been a legal medical procedure in Canada for more than 25 years, but in spite of that, access varies wildly across the country. Urban residents are far likelier to have easy access to the procedure, while rural people may face extra costs and time requirements like travel and figuring out where to go.

In this edition of VICE Canada Reports, Sarah Ratchford investigates abortion access in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, two provinces with restricted access to abortions and conservative political climates that make access a difficult issue even to discuss. She attends a pro-life rally crashed by pro-choice activists, goes undercover into a pregnancy crisis centre, and talks to an activist helping people access under-the-counter abortions in PEI.

New Brunswick has few options for people in need of abortions, especially for the rural majority of its population. PEI, though, offers no official abortions on the island; a recent change to increase access saw the provincial government deciding to pay for abortions in New Brunswick.

See Sarah and producer Patrick McGuire talking about the production in our new series Field Notes, and read Sarah's longform piece on this story.

Sia is, allegedly, the world's sixth most influential woman. Photo via Flickr Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It's official. The top ten most influential women in the world have been decided by BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour. And fucking Sia is number six.

The word "list" might be a tad generous for what appears to be a vague sort-of mind-map, sketched out on scraps of paper in the back of old Filofaxes and discussed tersely over instant coffees made by the intern. There doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason to anything that happens on it and there's the all too real feeling that Siri would have a better idea of who's actually influencing people in 2015—or should have a place on it herself.

As it is, the list reads as follows:

1. Nicola Sturgeon – SNP leader

2. Anna Wintour – editor of US Vogue

3. Angelina Jolie – actress and activist

4. Katharine Viner – newly appointed editor of the Guardian

5. Camilla Cavendish – Sunday Times columnist and director of Downing Street Policy Unit

6. Sia – pop star

7. Caitlyn Jenner – reality star and transwoman

8. Karen Blackett – CEO of MediaCom UK

9. Zanny Minton Beddoes – editor of the Economist

10. Sara Khan – co-founder of women's human rights organization, Inspire

To start with, the five-strong panel responsible for deciding who made the cut—Telegraph's Women's Editor Emma Barnett, Whistles CEO Jane Shepherdson, human rights lawyer Helena Kennedy QC, Radio 1's Gemma Cairney, and good old Sarah Vine of Ed Miliband's kitchen fame—have selected nobody under the age of 39 or older than 65. So, if you're not a middle-aged lady with a blow-dry there's scant chance you're going to be seen as influential. (The question about who these women are actually meant to be influencing is never really answered.) Nicola Sturgeon takes the top spot—fine, whatever—but it's from two down that it all starts to get a bit prog.

Caitlyn Jenner in her first magazine shoot for Vanity Fair. Photo by Alberto Frank, via

Because Anna Wintour? Really? It feels like she could have featured on any list over the last 26 years other than this one. Dwindling magazine circulation aside, can you think of one thing she's done in the last 12 months that was more interesting than anything she's ever done since she started editing Vogue? She wore sunglasses at the Oscars, I think. That's it.

Jane Shepherdson said Wintour was given the silver medal in this peri-menopausal Olympics because she "influences the world in what to wear, how to look, and who to celebrate," which only begs the question: Why wasn't Alexa Chung, or Kate Middleton, or Kylie Jenner, who famously influenced a generation of girls across the world to destroy their lips with the aid of a shot glass, given the slot instead? Because surely, surely, they're the actual people who decide what we look like. Not an editor of a magazine everybody's now too poor to buy.

WATCH: VICE journalist Brigitte Noël enters the world of FEMEN Quebec:

Then we've got Sia at number six. SIA. There's the vague sense here that a Woman's Hour producer was on the school run and desperately trying to think of a way of injecting some pop culture onto the list, and then "Chandelier" came on Capital FM and that was it. Job done.

It's awesome that Caitlyn Jenner is included—some might say her inclusion is an attempt at bandwagon-jumping, but she's globalized the conversation around trans rights in a way that, say, Laverne Cox probably couldn't.

That said, there are clearly people who do commendable, important work on the list, but to scale the upper reaches it seems that those who have entered into the "media elite" get a disproportionately massive shout-out. What is the top ten? Is it a celebrity thing? Is it a celebration of worthiness? Is it about money? Is it about giving your friend a leg-up? Is it a code that needs to be cracked?

There's nothing more annoying than people going "but why wasn't X person chosen?" when an award is announced. Awards and lists are reductive and subjective by nature. But there are so many glaring omissions that you wonder whether any of the panel has opened a web browser since 2013. Or if they're maybe just trying to think of slightly more "leftfield" personalities to mark this list as different to the dozens of others, and then chucking Angelina Jolie and Anna Wintour in there anyway because they ran out of ideas.

How about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the 82-year-old US Justice of the Supreme Court who ushered through the law allowing gay couples to marry? Or Taylor Swift, who is probably the most famous woman in the world right now, and known for high-profile acts of good will, not to mention her ability to get major corporations such as Apple to eat out the palm of her hand. If that's not influence, what is?

Not to bang on and on about this, but Katy Perry featured on the front cover of Forbes this week because she is SO GOOD at making money—why Sia? What about Emma Watson for launching a hugely media-friendly and influential UN campaign to try to get men interested in feminism?

Michelle Obama? Angela Merkel? Amy Schumer? Reddit CEO Ellen Pao? Naz Shah?

Hillary fucking Clinton?

Follow Helen on Twitter.

The first canned speech I give clients when I'm working as a wilderness guide out of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, starts just as we leave town, headed north toward Yellowstone National Park.

"On your right, that sun-dappled, unkempt field is the National Elk Refuge. It's federally protected land where they grow hay all summer, so in the winter, tens of thousands of elk can come down from the mountains to feed there. You can take a horse-drawn sleigh ride out among all the animals. It's really neat."

Murmurs of vague interest issue from the rear of the van, as clients chew on breakfast burritos just procured from Creekside Deli.

"Can anyone guess why the elk might need a refuge?" I continue.

An inquisitive silence.

"It's because the town of Jackson blocked the elk's migration route to their historic winter feeding grounds. In the early 1900s, when settlers filled up the valley, elk would try to head south, reach this point, and stop. Thousands would starve to death, their corpses strewn everywhere right here outside of town. So they created the National Elk Refuge. But the question is, then: Refuge from what?"

I check the rearview mirror to see my clients gazing thoughtfully out at the empty field, processing this rhetorical enigma and the cheese, egg, and tortilla in their mouths.

After a moment I point out my favorite instance of contemporary Western architecture, immediately on our left. The National Museum of Wildlife Art is nestled into the grassy hills overlooking the elk refuge. While, even today, most architects in the region insist on variations of the log cabin, this museum looks like a castle or a fort, its rough stone façade resembling something crumbling and ancient, its squat posture making it seem as though it's sinking into the earth. It reminds me of the deteriorating ghost towns scattered throughout the desert in the southwestern part of the state, where I grew up—structures in the process of breaking down, rejoining the land.

The National Museum of Wildlife Artin Jackson, Wyoming

Of course, there's nothing actually crumbling about the museum. It currently hosts an exhibition by one of the most famous contemporary artists in the world, Ai Weiwei. His outdoor installation Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads has been displayed in the Grand Army Plaza in New York, the Somerset House in London, and in venues across the globe since its debut at the São Paulo Biennale in 2010. Now, his massive bronze renderings of the 12 phases of the Chinese zodiac line the museum's scenic Sculpture Trail.

It's a peculiar place for the exhibition, and few people in the state give a shit that it's the most important contemporary art show to ever come to Wyoming. But the heads cast a poignantly long and dark shadow over the supposed animal sanctuary in the valley below.

Ai's zodiac sculptures are recreations of statues that once lined a pool in an imperial palace in China called Yuanming Yuan, but were looted when British and French soldiers sacked and burned the place in 1860, at the end of the Second Opium War. For years, Chinese schoolchildren have learned about this event as the low point of what's referred to as the Century of National Humiliation, during which China suffered invasion, unequal treaties, and loss of land at the hands of other nations. The original zodiac heads, which were smuggled to Europe and have recently become hot commodities on the global art market, are now potent symbols for the Chinese government, which heralds them as national treasures and demands their repatriation. When two of the heads came up for bid at Christie's during the estate sale of French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent in 2009, a member of China's Lost Cultural Relics Recovery Program sabotaged the auction.

Given this heavy narrative, it seems as though exhibiting reproductions of these zodiac heads on land stolen from Native Americans would be rife with meaning—for millennia, the area around Jackson Hole was crucial hunting ground for more than a dozen tribes, who experienced invasion, unequal treaties, and loss of land at the hands of white settlers during their own century of national humiliation. In fact, a dispute between settlers and a party of Shoshone and Bannock Indians near Jackson Hole led to one of the most devastating Supreme Court rulings for indigenous people— Ward v. Race Horse, which stripped tribes' legal right to take game on their historic hunting grounds. The Chinese have built a mythology around the animals of the zodiac that seems comparable in depth and intricacy to traditional Native American beliefs about wildlife. Ai's sculptures of the monkey, the rat, the rooster, the dragon, and the rest stand like totems overlooking the valley, land now allocated for tourism and the rich.

It's impossible to stand anywhere in downtown Jackson and be more than a few hundred yards from an elk statue, a mounted elk head, or other elk-related décor.

I arrived in Jackson on a rainy Friday in May to enjoy a "sneak peek" of the exhibition before it opened. May is a drag in Jackson for my friends who work seasonal jobs there as guides and ski lift operators—there's no snow left to ski, and it's still too cold to run the river. Most are broke, aside from the lucky few who find landscaping gigs clearing winter debris from the grounds of estates owned by titans of finance, movie stars, and other members of the One Percent. Jackson is a tax haven—people who own multiple homes like to keep one here, even though they only dwell here for a week or two each year, to avoid state income tax, estate tax, capital gains tax, and other pesky threats to their wealth. The lesser rich sometimes rent their luxury digs to tourists, who stream into the town in steady supply—enamored by the grand scenery and plentiful wildlife, eager to dine on seared elk medallions—and provide Jackson the majority of its economy.

The sneak peek consisted of 30 or so people—museum patrons wrapped in Columbia, Patagonia, and North Face coats, standing in stylish yet sensible urban mountaineering boots—gathered around the statues to listen to Adam Duncan Harris, the museum's curator, give a basic presentation before turning it over to a student from a local private school. The 17-year-old lad sported a blazer with a pocket square, leather oxfords, and moved so comfortably in expensive preppy clothes one imagines he was born wearing a tennis sweater. Well-versed in Mandarin, Chinese history, and active in Model UN, he told the story of why the animals of the zodiac are arranged in their particular order: A mythical emperor pitted the animals in a race across a river, and they appear in the zodiac according to the place they finished. He provided historical context to the narrative, addressed linguistic issues that may have altered the telling of the tale over time, and peppered his talk with words like "incongruities" and "furthermore." He spoke for ten minutes without notes. It was impressive, and kind of cute. I pictured him decades in the future toasting a round of rice wine with his associates in Chengdu to celebrate a new trans-Pacific trade pact.

But the story of the zodiac animals, and even the interpretation of the artworks that draws parallels between imperialist woes suffered by China and Native American tribes, misses the artist's point. Ai Weiwei considers the Chinese government his adversary, and as the country's leading dissident artist, his work would never echo its sentiments regarding, say, the national importance of some looted sculptures. "I consider myself more of a chess player," he told an interviewer who asked him to describe the type of artist he is in the documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. "My opponent makes a move, I make a move." His opponent is the government.

In this case, the government's move to which Ai reacted by creating replicas of the zodiac heads was its trumpeting of the original heads as national treasures in the first place. Ai is keenly attuned to his government's hypocrisy. The Communist Party only began lamenting the loss of looted Chinese cultural objects and making the Century of National Humiliation a talking point after the military quashed the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, killing hundreds of civilians and jailing thousands more. The government needed to point the public's attention toward another (external) enemy, so European imperialists who had desecrated China's cultural heritage became targets—never mind that during Mao's Cultural Revolution, the government destroyed exponentially more historic Chinese objects than any foreigners ever had, from urns to art to temples, in an effort to erase the country's feudal past.

To Ai, the fact that the original zodiac heads had been designed by an Italian Jesuit—who had been hanging around Yuanming Yuan painting pictures that "looked Chinese" for the emperor—made his government's squawking about the heads as paragons of Chinese culture smell all the more like bullshit. "Twelve playthings manufactured in the West are not the quintessence of Chinese culture," he wrote on his blog. In an essay on the Yves Saint Laurent auction, author Colin Jones wrote that the heads are "only a fraction more Chinese than Saint Laurent's 1977 fragrance, Opium ('for those addicted to Yves Saint Laurent')."

Governments misuse and skew symbols all the time: Think of how the World Trade Center became a symbol for post-9/11 patriotism cloaked neatly in the Bush administration's arguments for war with Iraq. Jackson, Wyoming, relies on a hefty set of questionable symbols to sell itself to tourists—intrepid mountain men who conquered this vast wilderness alone (but who really would have died of exposure or starvation had it not been for the help of Indians), the community's steadfast embrace of Western architectural aesthetic (city ordinance mandates that public and commercial buildings have wooden facades), its bountiful wild-trout streams (stocked for a century with non-native species to encourage fly-fishing tourism), and so on. But no symbol in Jackson is more potent or prominent than the elk.

An elk-antler arch in Jackson, Wyoming

It's impossible to stand anywhere in downtown Jackson and be more than a few hundred yards from an elk statue, a mounted elk head, or other elk-related décor—each of the four pathways into the town square leads beneath a massive arch made of antlers shed by elk on the refuge and collected by Boy Scouts.

The crowning attraction is the elk themselves, who cram into the refuge each December through April to feast on government hay. The sleigh rides out among them are more popular today than ever—a record 864 elk lovers partook last Valentine's Day alone, and annual visitors regularly top 20,000.

We spoke to Ai Weiwei over at the Creators Project, where he says "Twitter is art."

"There's no question that the elk-antler arches on the square are the most iconic images for the town of Jackson," said Jeff Golightly, the president of Jackson's chamber of commerce. "They are integral to our character. Whenever people are choosing to visit this community over another, particularly in the winter season, to be able to take a sleigh ride through a herd of elk and learn about the National Elk Refuge and the incredible event we have here, with the migration coming down to north of town here, is a huge draw." So when more and more wildlife biologists are calling for the feeding program that coaxes the elk to the refuge to be shut down, that's bad for local businesses, who depend on tourists to help generate income.

Chronic Wasting Disease isn't in the refuge yet, but it's been slowly marching that way for decades. Biologists argue it's only a matter of time before it reaches Jackson Hole.

The problem with the elk refuge is that it's basically a feedlot, with all the disgusting trappings that repel people from eating beef (or, at least, from thinking about where beef comes from). Foremost, it's an incubator for disease—all those animals packed in close, eating and sleeping for months on each other's piss and shit, the snow piled high behind them in the mountains covering any feed, and the quaint complex of Jackson's log mansions, hobby ranches, and overpriced kitsch stores blocking their path south. They succumb mostly to brucellosis, a cattle disease brought west by early herds that cause wildlife to stillbirth their young. More than 30 percent of elk on the refuge are infected. Since brucellosis is transmitted through bodily fluids like saliva and urine, humans rarely catch it—except, perhaps, in cases like one a Yellowstone park ranger told me about, when she walked up on a woman trying to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a stillborn elk calf.

More worrisome is something called Chronic Wasting Disease, an incurable, always fatal neurological malady that afflicts deer and elk in the region, giving them brain lesions, resulting in pretty much what the name implies—it causes the animals to simply waste away. The disease isn't in the refuge yet, but it's been slowly marching that way for decades and biologists argue it's only a matter of time before it reaches Jackson Hole. This group of elk is one of the last great herds of large animals in the lower 48 states, and while it's one thing to have emaciated animals falling dead on the refuge, the bigger threat comes from the fact that these elk live most of the year in game-rich Yellowstone National Park—a recently published map shows the disease is less than 40 miles from the park's borders. The arrival of Chronic Wasting Disease in Yellowstone, the core of the only remaining intact ecosystem in the continental United States, would give Yellowstone the air of a zombie apocalypse—gaunt, flesh-bare deer and elk with diseased brains staggering through forests, falling dead along roadways traversed by three million annual visitors.

Photo by S. N. Leek. Courtesy of the Stephen Leek Collection, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department's bright idea to fight illness on the refuge—besides 30 years of administering a brucellosis vaccine its own scientists deem ineffective—is to let people hunt there in late fall, before the merry sleigh riders arrive. The idea is that hunting culls animals from the herd, decreasing overpopulation and, therefore, disease transmission—hunters killed a record 268 elk on the refuge last fall. The hunt is a grotesque spectacle, the killing of elk lured year after year to a certain spot by food is barely a step up from bison "hunts" for which people pay thousands of dollars to have someone drive them out onto a ranch to shoot a domestic buffalo. My buddy Danny helped pack out an elk his neighbor shot on the refuge this fall. As they were cutting up the carcass into manageable pieces to carry, Danny said, "There were elk running right past us, and all these rednecks just blasting them."

The best solution to saving the elk would be to restore their ability to migrate south of Jackson by creating a corridor for them through the valley, but that's not going to happen—just like the Chinese government isn't going to stop harping about the zodiac heads as though someone stole the goddamned Great Wall of China. Land is too expensive in Jackson, and the valley is full—contractors razed part of a hillside last year to make more room for a new Walgreens, only to have the hill partially collapse and destroy the drugstore under a landslide. Besides, elk draw tourists, and tourists mean money, so anyone who might threaten tourism in Jackson is invited to kindly shut the hell up.

Watch our documentary 'Kingdom of the Little People':

Lloyd Dorsey, conservation director of the Sierra Club in Wyoming, has petitioned the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department repeatedly to end the refuge's feeding program. Even though Congress passed a law in the late 90s mandating that refuge management follow the lead of contemporary science, the agencies, under outside pressure, demur—even though they are well aware of how the feeding program turns the refuge into a cesspit.

"It appears to be a matter of politically influenced reluctance and denial," Dorsey told me over email. "The entrenched interests over the past several generations are accustomed to feeding elk in western Wyoming. Any change of that significance is challenging. But change is inevitable. We're either going to get away from the feeding paradigm before Chronic Wasting Disease takes ahold of these elk, or we're going to do it afterward."

Meanwhile, Ai Weiwei remains under house arrest in Beijing, where he's been forbidden to leave since his arrest in 2011 and subsequent 81 days in solitary confinement—punishment for his increasingly outspoken criticisms of the Chinese government. His zodiac heads have traveled the world, but he hasn't seen them since they left China. Like the elk in Jackson, he's stuck, detained by authorities too greedy and proud to admit they're wrong. The officials cling to symbols so transparently distorted that the most casually critical glance reveals the objects—the zodiac heads, the elk refuge—to be emblems of their proponents' own fraud.

Ai Weiwei's Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads is on view at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming through October 1.

Nathan C. Martin is a writer living in Wyoming. Follow him on Twitter.

Tim Tyler. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

With the Grateful Dead set to play three massive 50th anniversary shows at Chicago's Soldier Field this weekend, the spotlight is back on the band and its legacy. But almost as resonant as the actual music has been the LSD culture that sprung up around the Dead: the parking lot scene—a.k.a. Shakedown Street—and the roving "Deadhead" community that followed the musicians from show to show.

When the War on Drugs was in full swing in the 80s and early 90s, the feds were targeting LSD dealers almost as often as they targeted inner-city crack dealers. I know, having been arrested and sentenced to 25 years for selling LSD at East Coast colleges in 1993. I'm out now, but some of those arrested are still incarcerated, serving life sentences for non-violent offenses. Their Deadhead sojourns turned into a ghastly nightmare.

Trapped in an American gulag due to the draconian mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, men like Tim Tyler—who has been down for almost a quarter of a century—are on a seriously bad trip that has no end date.

"I was at the [Grateful Dead] shows from 1988 to 1992 and was known as the Fried Dough Man," Tim Tyler tells me from his prison cell at FCI Jesup in Georgia.

The 46-year-old federal prisoner first heard about the Grateful Dead in 1988, when he was 19. "I was in Hartford, Connecticut and went to see all these people camping at the governor's mansion, which was unheard of," Tyler remembers.

The parking lot scene that surrounded the Dead was like an open-air drug market and counterculture bazaar. Deadheads would pitch tents wherever and just take over.

Besides the band, LSD was the main attraction.

"Someone gave me a dose and I thought I was in a time warp," Tyler says. "I did not go inside the show. I knew nothing about them. As sad and true as it was, I saw a nitrous seller with a line around the building. I tried it while on the trip and I ended up selling it the next day at the shows in Boston. I didn't go in these shows either, but at the end of the third show, I wanted to know what went on inside."

Like many Deadheads, Tim quickly found the magnetic pull of the band as strong as the spectacle surrounding them. The whole atmosphere was magic.

"I bought a ticket at the last Boston show. I was doing nothing with my life at the time but searching for something," Tyler says. "When I walked inside the show, a man was handing out paper [acid] for free, asking, 'How many do you want? 'I said three for no real reason. I did the three and felt like this was the entranceway into what I searched my [whole] life for. Without another moment, I was on the bus, as you say."

But as Tim was getting on the bus, the feds were busy enforcing mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines. A collision course was set.

After dipping his feet into the Deadhead scene, Tyler got an old truck from his dad, and followed the band on tour. Like other Deadheads, he found various things to sell to support himself—whippets, fruit smoothies and, finally, fried dough. Eventually, Tyler got involved moving LSD, falling in with some older guys who preached to him about the band and supplied him with the acid.

"We did the kind doses and that made me realize even more that I was meant to be in this family—like a world family where the rest of the planet had not found themselves yet," Tyler says.

But the brotherhood wasn't all tripping balls and good vibes, as Tyler soon found out.

"I was arrested because a friend was arrested in Florida and set me up," Tyler says. "I did not actually go up and do the deal, because I was flying out to see Jerry at the Warfield [in San Francisco] the next day. My other friend drove up there to Bay County and they arrested him. Then they came to me and brought me up there from Pinellas County. I denied knowing anyone there, and in 37 days they had not filed formal charges against me, so they released me on promise to appear."

By not snitching, Tyler endeared himself to the Deadhead community. LSD fueled their illicit economy and allowed them to follow the band around, but they were always looking for new blood that was committed to the cause.

Tyler was now in full Deadhead outlaw mode, running from the cops and the court cases piling up against him.

"I went right back dealing to my Florida friends," Tyler says. "One of them beeped me all night when I had just flown in with a gram. He wanted a tenth. I gave 1300 hits to him. The narcotic officers came in two van-loads at 3 AM in the morning with black masks on. It was like in the movies."

The feds were going after LSD dealers with a passion. (It's still a schedule one drug according to the United States government, by the way, making it a priority for DEA agents and narcotics cops.)

"They brought me in a room and I told them I considered LSD a sacrament, and I would never help them in anyway," Tyler says. "No formal charges were filed and they released me on my own recognizance. I traded some paper for a car, got a friend to register it, and we went on tour."

Tyler was now in full Deadhead outlaw mode, running from the cops and the court cases piling up against him.

"I blew both of those cases off for two years," he says. "When they finally caught me again in Florida, they offered me 18 months in prison, or three years probation to plead guilty. I pleaded guilty and then went to take care of the other case. They eventually gave me three more years concurrent probation after I requested a speedy trial. I also had a failure to appear on top of it all, and they gave me probation for that, too."

With a light slap on the wrist for his youthful indiscretions, Tyler was ready to go back on tour. But with two felony convictions, he was setting himself up for a big fall because of how the three strikes law was configured. Tyler was just one of many Deadheads living this type of life, but in the eyes of law enforcement, he was a big drug dealer, flying across the country and sending large quantities of LSD through the US mail.

"I only sold to my friends. I wanted it for myself and felt like I could help them get it since I knew where to get it," he says. "This guy named Jeff Rhodes was my friend and I sold to him. Jeff was arrested. I told him that they would give him probation for his first offense in Florida, but he was secretly setting me up. He recorded all our conversations. They had 26 audio taped conversations of me and him talking."

Through Rhodes, the feds assembled a serious case against Tyler.

"I eventually told Jeff that I was leaving Florida," Tyler says. "They could have arrested me. I had sold him 4000 hits up to that time. I ended up sending 9045 hits to an address and that guy—who knew me my whole life—cooperated. I called every one I knew and told them I gave them permission to go against me in case it ever came about."

Tyler was dealing with the feds now, and the feds didn't play—especially with LSD.

"I was charged with conspiracy to possess with attempt to deliver ten grams or more of a substance or mixture containing a detectable amount of LSD," Tyler explains. "I pled guilty because my dad was involved and the only defense I saw plausible was calling it a sacrament and using the band as a witness. I elected to place no burden on Jerry and friends and plead guilty. My dad wanted me to tell, and I am proud that I have gotten no one in trouble—ever."

Tyler's father died while serving a ten-year sentence of his own.

"At my sentencing, I was calm. I knew I was going to prison for a long time. I thought it would be 21 to 27 years but it was minimum mandatory life," Tyler says. "To me at the time, it didn't matter. My sister was there and started crying. The police that made the arrest high-fived each other openly in the court room. When I walked away into the elevator, I shed some tears because of my sister. Then I was OK after that."

"I am optimistic that the president will step in and help. He has done it for some people that I know. Maybe this year I can get a break." -Tim Tyler

And so began Tyler's long, strange trip inside the belly of the beast. At the age most kids are graduating from college, he was looking at life in the federal pen. A gregarious Deadhead surrounded by brutal gangsters, thugs, bank robbers, and drug dealers, Tyler's seen his share of sticky situations. Still, he endures.

Tim Tyler in prison. Photo courtesy Tim Tyler

"I never checked in [voluntarily going to solitary confinement for protective custody], and spent 20 of 23 years in pens including USP Atlanta and USP Beaumont," Tyler says. "I play handball as much as possible to try to keep in shape. I have an MP3 player and can listen to the Dead now. Of course, I spent 20 calendars with no access to my favorite band, other than listening to them over the telephone. But anyone coming into the system now can instantly get their favorite music. It has helped plenty."

But what would help more is Tyler's release. He has served more than enough time for a nonviolent offense. There's been a lot of media attention surrounding his case, including from Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul, and with the pardons President Obama has been granting, Tyler could be in line for forgiveness. Public opinion has swayed, and federal prisons cost taxpayers over $6.5 billion a year.

"I am optimistic that the president will step in and help. He has done it for some people that I know. Maybe this year I can get a break," Tyler says hopefully.

Unfortunately, if that does happen, it won't be in time to catch the Dead this weekend. Still, a pardon would be a very welcome respite from the way Tyler's been living.

Mandatory minimums and the War on Drugs have cost our country enough—in dollars, in wasted lives and in human wreckage. It's time to right the wrongs of the drug war and let nonviolent offenders like Tim Tyler out of prison.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

Pro-choice activists staged a die-in after crashing a pro-life rally in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Images courtesy VICE Canada Reports

Kandace Hagen's strong, clear speech patterns break ever so briefly as her eyes well up with tears. She's just told me about being forced to travel from her home province of Prince Edward Island to have an abortion, and about helping many others who come to her desperately trying to do the same.

Hagen is not a doctor. She's not a politician. She's not paid for the work that goes into helping uterus-bearing people obtain abortions. Hagen is an activist, and it's through her and a network of others like her that rural Islanders are able to access abortion services.

PEI is the only Canadian province in which abortion is technically not available: Hospitals and clinics do not provide surgical abortions. But in practice, if you know the right people, you can be put in touch with physicians who offer what Island women sometimes call a "chemical cocktail," or a medical abortion. The cocktail is made up of Misoprostol and Methotrexate. Administration of the cocktail can go awry, but for rural people (who constitute 53 percent of the population) with limited income, it can also be the only choice.

VICE Canada Reports: Abortion Access in the Maritimes

Some doctors and activists are campaigning for surgical abortions to be brought to the island, and they've been doing so for years. But the government is standing firmly against it. As it stands, Islanders wanting surgical abortions paid for by the province can get them only if they get a referral to Moncton, New Brunswick or Halifax, Nova Scotia. They can also go to Fredericton's Clinic 554, but abortions there are not provincially funded. Patients there have to pay between $700 and $850 dollars, depending on how far along they are.

Ordinary people, like Chelsey Buchanan—a Halifax woman who's been offering lodgings and transportation for those travelling to her city for an abortion—feel compelled to ensure the service is accessible, since the government won't do it.

Hagen is one of those people. She acts as a go-between amongst those needing abortions and the physicians who will help them. Earlier this spring, she perched on the edge of a wharf in downtown Charlottetown to tell me her story. The Hillsborough River flows in from the Northumberland Strait and sparkles in the background. The Strait is uncharacteristically warm for the Maritimes, but right now, the water just looks mean.

Hagen became an activist after she had an abortion in 2009. She went to the doctor, announced she was pregnant and needed not to be, and was met with icy disapproval. She left the doctor's office with a Post-it in hand, the number to Fredericton's Morgentaler Clinic scrawled on one side.

Pro-choice activists in New Brunswick gathered in front of Clinic 554 with the author (far left)

She says she's lucky she was able to overcome the challenges that Islanders face in going out of province for the procedure: She had an understanding boss who gave her time off work, a friend who could drive her to Fredericton, and the extra money to pay for transportation, overnight accommodations, and the procedure itself. It cost her $1,200 total. For too many, however, that's not going to happen. The cost for a surgical abortion is so out of reach for some, according to Hagen, that pro-choice people and organizations are crowdsourcing the cost of abortions.

Now, people come to her when they need help accessing reproductive health care. One day, a stranger recognized her in a coffee shop, came up to her, plunked down at her table, and said flat out, "I need an abortion."

Another time, a friend came to her and told her that her physician told her to try to overdose on Vitamin C in order to induce a miscarriage.

"She recommended that she keep taking them and taking them and taking them until she just started to bleed," Hagen says.

In true Maritime fashion, as Hagen says, "It's become [about] who you know in order to access basic healthcare."

Right before her eyes well up, Hagen tells me about another woman who came to her for help. Hagen told her she could go to either Halifax or Fredericton, but that there was also a doctor on the Island offering medical abortions. The woman eventually got in to see that physician, but the process didn't go well. The physician was abrupt, and when she got home, she didn't start to bleed within the given timeframe.

At this point, Hagen says she felt "medically responsible for her, because I had set her on this course." The patient called the doctor's office for help, but they wouldn't return her calls. Hagen was left to research online, trying to let the woman know if what was happening was normal.

Eventually, the woman started to bleed, but the drugs didn't work. She went back for a sonogram, hoping they would give her a dilation and curettage, which is offered on the Island for people who miscarry. They didn't. She waited two weeks, and when she heard back from the doctor's office, she found out she was still pregnant. The fetus's development had stopped, but the majority of it was still there. She had to take the medication again. She bled for days, and again, the doctor wouldn't answer her calls. She went to the office and was sent home after being told the doctor didn't have time to see her.

"She [went] through this for two months in total. By the end, the pain was excruciating. And then she felt this shift and this very intense cramp happening. She got up to go to the bathroom, but she didn't make it. She violently expelled everything that was in her uterus all over her kitchen floor."

After cleaning the bloody contents of her own uterus off of her floor, the woman messaged Kandace. Kandace cried—she felt like she had failed the woman she'd promised to help.

"And then I realized that the bigger problem wasn't that I had failed. It was that society keeps on letting women down, over and over."

A pro-life protester in New Brunswick

Self-harm, suicidality among consequences of lack of access
Hagen is right. That story does not describe an isolated occurrence. Lower income people living in rural areas are routinely forced to orchestrate their abortions without much help from the medical community. A similar story to the one Kandace told me made headlines last month, when Courtney Cudmore was prescribed a medical abortion at a Charlottetown walk-in clinic. If she bled too much or not at all, she was instructed, she should seek medical help. When, a few days later, she went to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown with her concerns, the doctor refused to examine her because he was "uncomfortable" with the situation. He said if she wanted, she could go to Halifax (a four-hour drive away) for more information.

Initially, the government said that was a perfectly fine response. But, after considerable media pressure, PEI premier Wade MacLauchlan now says the government has decided to do away with "cumbersome" processes that stand in the way of access. He says it's time to "eliminate the main barriers women have identified." Their idea of improved access, however, means sending women to Moncton for abortions instead of Fredericton or Halifax. They make it sound like this is good enough, but it's actually a deeply problematic "solution." People leaving the Island for the care they need are left to cover all associated costs, and leaving the Island isn't always possible in the winter, when the bridge can be snowed in and the roads treacherous.

The government's steadfast refusal to bring adequate reproductive health services to the Island persists despite a leaked report from Health PEI, which found that, if abortions were performed in the province as opposed to sending people off-Island, it would save the province $37,000 per year.

As it stands, many physicians and healthcare providers are openly anti-choice, and those who provide medical abortions must do so under the table. It's no surprise, really, given that you see more churches than human beings on PEI's roads, and 93 percent of the province's population identifies as Christian. As a result, Christian values are very much a part of PEI's cultural climate, and aborting unwanted fetuses is decidedly against those values.

As Donald Savoie, a professor of Canadian public policy and administration at the Université de Moncton, explained in a National Post article exploring the persistence of social conservatism in the Maritimes, there are a few reasons for this aspect of Maritime culture. It's a rural society in many ways, and "fundamental religion resonates more in rural areas than it does in urban areas traditionally."

"Church still matters a great deal in the Maritime provinces," he said. Because the population is aging at a faster rate than in other parts of the country and young people are fleeing for larger cities or out West, the population remains, in many ways, a "closed society."

In order to access the care they needed, then, 153 people left the province to abort unwanted fetuses in 2013. There are no statistics on how many people had medical abortions, or otherwise induced abortions.

Pro-life and pro-choice protesters clashed in Fredericton.

Surgical and medical abortions are not the only methods people use to abort unwanted fetuses, though. (I say "people" because it's not only women who have uteruses. Some trans and non-binary people do, too. Going forward, I'll say "women" when I mean women, and "people" when I mean uterus-bearers in general). Dr. Colleen MacQuarrie is an associate professor in the University of PEI's psychology department. She began a community-oriented research project in 2010 that set out to explore the impacts on Islanders facing a lack of access. The research spanned two decades, and the results showed the degree to which people would resort to self harm to try to induce an abortion when they felt desperate. The findings also showed who is most desperate: young, rural, low-income people.

MacQuarrie found people are routinely self-poisoning in order to expel unwanted fetuses, and inflicting harm on their entire bodies through such acts as throwing themselves down stairs. Her research also indicates that some people with unwanted pregnancies consider suicide because they don't know how else to deal with the situation.

"One 14-year-old girl punished her body every day for two weeks," MacQuarrie told me, her eyes welling up behind her purple cateye glasses. "She was not going to carry that pregnancy through. She knew that if her periods didn't come back, she would have to kill herself."

The bodily harm people engage in is twofold, she found: many use excessive substances to be able to get themselves to that point.

"The thing with falling down is you have to really fall good, and excessive alcohol and drug use is important to be able to relax the body enough to fall."

She says that, for Island women, the same obstacles that were in place 20 years ago still exist today. Those obstacles include no services on the Island, no support for women in crisis, and very little accessible information about traveling off-Island. In a Western, industrialized country in which abortion has been fully legal since 1988, MacQuarrie says that there is absolutely no need for this. But, again, the militant anti-choice camp has played a major role in the state of access today. Abortion, she explains, used to be available on the Island, if people accessed it from a facility with a therapeutic abortion committee. But due to overwhelming anti-choice influence, the last one was dissolved in 1986, and the procedure ceased to be available. Between 1986 and 1995, people from the Island had no publicly supported abortion option. That changed in 1995, when the government started paying for abortions at a hospital in Halifax. The government, though, didn't make that change clear to the public.

"It's the cruellest place that you would ever want to live to access basic healthcare. Basic," she says. "It's 2015, and it might as well be the 1700s in terms of how women get supported here. It's horrific."

But PEI is not the only province where tensions run high and access is scarce, and it's not the only province where people are driven to such drastic measures, either.

It's Not Just PEI
On a bright, windy Thursday in May, about 30 teenagers march out from behind a downtown coach house in Fredericton, NB. They've been summoned by a spy holding court on the front lawn of the legislature nearby. Wielding signs, a siren, and a bullhorn, the group begins to chant as they round the corner.

"What about our lives!" they yell.

As they make their way onto the lawn, the anti-abortion protesters run over, shaking fists and signs in their faces. A woman grabs one young feminist's face, screaming, "Your mother has given birth to you!" It's May 14, the day of the National March for Life. Fredericton Youth Feminists are crashing the protest to draw attention to the prohibitive lack of access faced by New Brunswickers needing abortions. They're the only ones there to speak up against hundreds of religious people and a stalwart pack of Tory MPs calling for all abortion access in the province to end.

They stage a die-in on the lawn in counter-protest. As one of the young feminists, Keighley Nunes, explains, the purpose of the die-in is to represent "uterus-bearing people who die from DIY abortions." Her colleague Sorcha Beirne tells me about some of the methods people are using to induce their abortions.

"A classic is coat hangers," she says. "People unravel coat hangers and insert them into their uterus." She's also heard of people beating their stomachs and throwing themselves down stairs. She adds knitting needles and chopsticks to the list, too.

"More commonly, now," she explains, "people buy pills off the internet that induce miscarriages. People don't stop having abortions. They just start having unsafe abortions."

Clearly, access to abortion services is out of reach for uterus-bearing people living in New Brunswick, too. In that province, one can go to Fredericton's Clinic 554 (the former Morgentaler Clinic, which was forced to close last summer due to lack of funding) and pay out of pocket for the procedure. But it will cost anywhere from $700 to $850, because New Brunswick is the only province that doesn't fund abortions in its clinics. In fact, activist group Reproductive Justice N.B. had to crowdsource the money required for the clinic to re-open in the first place.

Aside from the Fredericton clinic, two hospitals in Moncton and one in Bathurst also perform the service. At those locations, the procedure is provincially funded.

It may seem that four locations in a province the size of New Brunswick constitutes adequate provision. But in reality, New Brunswickers needing abortions face many of the same barriers as people in PEI. People living outside of those areas sometimes cannot afford to travel to their nearest provider.

Poverty is a real challenge in the province. As of 2008, women living in New Brunswick were second only to those from Newfoundland when it came to the country's lowest incomes for women: Their average total income was $24,600, which is just above the poverty line. Those who have to travel for the procedure still need to worry about accommodations, childcare if necessary, transportation, and travel costs. Obviously, the less money you have, the less likely you are to have your own vehicle, and about 48 percent of the province's population lives in a rural area poorly served by buses.

Religion is another challenge: 84 percent of residents identified as Christian in 2011. Religion has such a stronghold on the province, in fact, that it's partially responsible for the current lack of abortion access in Saint John. The CEO of New Brunswick's English-language hospital network admitted this, albeit tentatively, in an email to his colleagues in January. As he phrased it:

"SJ [Saint John] is a very significant Irish Catholic community and it was quite a surprise to me that the hospital physicians would even entertain the matter."

A severe misreading of MLK's political views at the pro-life rally in Fredericton

Another clear example of the religious climate exists within a so-called "Women's Care Center" nestled right beside Fredericton's Clinic 554. The two organizations are so close together they look like they're housed in the very same building. The former claims to offer counselling for all options available to women with unwanted pregnancies, but in reality, it's run by N.B. Right to Life, and the people who work there try to talk people out of having abortions.

I know this firsthand. In a new VICE documentary, I posed as an unintentionally pregnant 22-year-old student named Julie needing more information on abortion access. I struggled with this decision, because from an ethics standpoint, a journalist should only go undercover if it's seriously warranted—if there's no other way to get that information or perspective, and if it doesn't harm anyone in any way. In this case, I needed to see how pregnant people in crisis are treated at this "crisis centre," and I decided that there was no other way to get that information.

When I arrived for my counselling session, I was paired with an older woman with long grey hair who floated every option but abortion. I told her I was a few weeks pregnant, that my partner and I had split up and that he had moved away, and that I was estranged from my parents. She said no matter how horrible my relationship with my parents was, they would change their minds and morph into loving grandparents once the baby was born. It would all be fine! She also said she didn't experience any pain when she gave birth (and that she hadn't had an epidural).

A choice quote from the counsellor:

"Keeping your baby—most girls, deep down, that's what they want to do if they listen to their heart."

I left with a stack of very scientific pamphlets explaining that abortion causes death and breast cancer, and that my fetus was "dancing."

Because the Christian population is so large, and because older people are so vocal about this issue (and it's largely older people who vote), some politicians feel they have no choice but to pander to that crowd. Other politicians are explicitly anti-choice, speaking at pro-life rallies and clearly aligning themselves with the religious right. As a result, anti-abortion sentiment has been built right into the laws, despite abortion being fully legalized in this country for the past 27 years under the Morgentaler decision. In 1989, one year after the Morgentaler decision passed in the Supreme Court, Frank McKenna's Liberal government put regulation 84-20 of the Medical Services Payment Act into effect. That regulation stipulated that, for an abortion to be covered by Medicare, it had to be deemed "medically necessary" by two doctors, in writing, and then performed by a gynecologist at one of two hospitals authorized to conduct the procedure.

New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant's Liberal government recently scrapped regulation 84-20. The government claimed that this would allow for more widespread access, but the service was extended to exactly one hospital in Moncton—a city in which the procedure was already available.

We reached out to physicians in the province, but none would speak with us out of concern for their safety—even under condition of anonymity. The concern is real: several Canadian abortion providers have been victims of shootings, arson, and other crimes in the past. And in the US, it happens even more frequently.

While some doctors are, understandably, afraid to speak out, others are committed to drawing attention to this issue. Dr. Robyn MacQuarrie, an OB/GYN with a practice based in Amherst, NS, is one of them, and she puts it perfectly when she says politicians are "making women's bodies political fodder."

Despite dangers, government response remains inadequate
Though circumstances preventing adequate access differ between the two provinces, the equation that makes for such difficulty is the same: Religion → government + Rural environment and low income = DIY abortions. Attitudes of religious conservatism, in other words, are the reality in the Maritimes, and they dominate much of the cultural climate. As a result, if you're a low-income person living in an isolated area and you have an unwanted pregnancy, the challenges you face may be insurmountable.

In both provinces, the onus lies on the government to do what's right by women and others needing abortions, but government officials won't even talk about the great need that demonstrably still exists. I called and emailed the premiers' offices in both provinces for a week straight, and was finally and flatly refused with barely a "no comment" from their respective press people. Given that both premiers are Liberal and the leader of their federal party says his MPs are required to vote pro-choice, it's interesting, if not exactly surprising, that they had absolutely nothing to say to me.

As Colleen MacQuarrie said, "our politicians are incredibly gutless, frankly." She said after Justin Trudeau made his pledge, she thought the situation might change for the better, but was ultimately let down.

"I had hope, but I was very disappointed during the last campaign when Trudeau was here with [Wade] MacLauchlan," she said. "With a straight face, they said the status quo is a good compromise."

"They have zero respect for the evidence that's been created that shows that barriers to access are harmful to women's health, and exactly how they're harmful," MacQuarrie said.

Provincial government officials offer up this nonresponse as federal politicians repeatedly push back a discussion about legalizing RU-486, or mifepristone, which is a pill that induces abortion in a safer way. (Health Canada has had the application to approve the drug since 2012, and it's already being used in 57 countries. It's maybe being delivered to Poland by drone as we speak).

While politicians are doing next to nothing, doctors do have some, albeit limited, power. Colleen MacQuarrie, for example, does her best to connect patients with medical abortions when she can. Some Island physicians are offering those medical abortions, and doctors in New Brunswick continue to perform surgical abortions despite what many of them feel is a dangerous climate.

Then you have Robyn MacQuarrie, whose practice is located at the foot of the Confederation Bridge. She's trying to bring surgical abortions to the Island. She says she'll perform them herself in clinics, and only at certain times if need be so that other services can continue uninterrupted. Despite her campaigning and the health department's own report stating that on-Island abortions will save the province money, she was effectively blocked by the government from carrying through with her plans. She's not backing down, though: The restrictions surrounding abortion already violate the Canada Health Act, and right now, she says, physicians are looking to see if there's room for a Charter complaint.

"It's the wrong service and there's no need for it," Robyn MacQuarrie (who is not related to Colleen) says in reference to the medical abortions happening on the Island.

In the meantime, the people making decisions about reproductive health are mostly men—both provinces' premiers and health ministers are men. These men will not provide access because it's not politically convenient, and could prevent them from getting voted back in come election time.

Watch our episode of VICE Canada Reports on this topic, hosted by Sarah Ratchford, and behind-the-scenes discussion with Sarah and producer Patrick McGuire on Field Notes.

Follow Sarah Ratchford on Twitter.

Regular "Cominco" Greg Loftus and friend. All photos by Angela Gzowski for EdgeYK.

With its wooden walls covered in mining-inspired artwork and memorabilia, Harley's Hardrock Saloon feels more basement rec room than strip club.

Since 1994, it has occupied a unique spot in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories as the most northern strip club in all of Canada.

To the regulars, it's an unpretentious, no-nonsense place to down a beer or 12. To more than a few citizens, it's a slightly spicy final stop after a night of carousing. To others, it's straight up a den of iniquity.

Love it or hate it, its habitués are fascinating: from the dancers are independent contractors who travel thousands of kilometres for two weeks of work, many of whom love the place and regularly return. To the staff—in a town where people constantly change jobs—many have worked there since just after it opened. And then of course there's the cast of characters that make up the regulars.

In the end, Harley's is a community and it's really beautiful. That's what I found, anyway, and these are the photos I took, along with some conversations I had while taking them.

Follow Angela Gzowski on Twitter.

When Daryl Atkinson arrived at the White House last June, he had a lot to be proud of.

In the nearly two decades since he'd been convicted on nonviolent drug charges and spent 40 months in prison, he'd built a reputation as a criminal justice reformer. He graduated law school, earning his license in two different states, and helped found the North Carolina Second Chance Alliance, a statewide organization that works to provide the formerly incarcerated with employment opportunities. Then he was hired as a staff attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a firm that works to negate the collateral consequences of mass incarceration in America.

For this work, Atkinson was invited to be honored as a "Champion of Change" by then Attorney General Eric Holder, who, at the June 30, 2014, ceremony, said Daryl "overcame his own involvement with the criminal justice system and has since worked to build a better future not only for himself—but for countless others who deserve a second chance."

But none of that mattered when Atkinson got to security at the most famous mansion in America.

"I was not given a lot of specific info," Atkinson later told me over the phone. "I was just told I couldn't proceed, or walk around the grounds, without an escort. That was it."

As part of visitors' check-in at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building near the White House, Atkinson was given a special pink badge that he says read "Appointment A, Escort," while everyone else received a green badge. As his colleagues entered the grounds to attend the ceremony honoring their work, Atkinson was told to stay back because of his past.

"It's a very sobering reminder that no matter what your accomplishments are in helping the formerly incarcerated, even yourself, with second chances and employment, you're still very much treated as a second-class citizen," he told me angrily. "It flies in the face of what the administration is trying to do in regards to the integration of the formerly incarcerated into society.

"And, I was invited!" he added.

Atkinson was singled out by the Secret Service as part of standard White House practice, according to interviews with recent visitors. Despite the Obama administration making strides on mandatory minimums and other federal criminal justice policies, the president's security operation still brands ex-cons who visit as suspect—regardless of what they've been up to lately.

In the early 1990s, Glenn Martin did time for a robbery charge in New York City. It was a traumatic experience that drove him to make reintegration his life's work upon release from prison. He hooked up with the Fortune Society, which helps former prisoners navigate society, and, more recently, founded JustLeadershipUSA, a criminal justice reform group.

In early June, Martin, along with other activists, was invited to the White House to discuss mass incarceration and law enforcement issues after meeting down the block at George Washington University Law School. The group of domestic policymakers and advocates headed to the Eisenhower Building for check-in before continuing the conversation inside the White House. Martin remembers walking with Paul Howard, the district attorney of Atlanta's Fulton County, when he was handed a pink badge and stopped by a Secret Service official he described as "menacing."

The agent was flanked by a huge German shepherd.

"He told me we were waiting here to find someone to come get me," Martin said. "I said, 'What do you mean?' Another colleague walked by and asked me what was wrong. I told him, 'I need an escort!' It was embarrassing."

Eventually, a White House staffer began to bring Martin upstairs before realizing he was not the person she was looking for. She escorted him to the meeting anyway upon discovering that he was invited. Everyone in the conference room was already seated when Martin arrived, and the discussion had begun. When it came time for him to speak, he chastised the officials for what he, like Atkinson, sees as a glaring problem.

"I used that experience as a learning moment and the context for the conversation," he told me later. "I said, 'I will sit here and have this discussion, but I'm gonna use my moment to talk about my experience downstairs.'

Of course, if any institution is going to have a strict visitors' policy, it's the place where the president of the free world lays his head at night. That's especially true given what's happened in the past year: An intruder hopped the gates on the North Lawn and made it in as deep as the East Room in September, and another managed to carry a suspicious package over the fence in April. As a new security precaution, the White House announced on Wednesday that sharp metal spikes will be temporarily placed on the fences until a permanent security plan is approved.

But Martin doesn't think the security risks warrant branding him and other reformed ex-cons as shady.

"You may ask, 'What's the big deal?'" Martin said. "But it's this idea that I'll do something again, while all of my work I've done, rebuilding my life and hoping to do the same with others, points to the opposite. Especially when I'm supposed to be their colleague and equal. It's a shame, too, that this happened in the highest office in the land."

An estimated 77.7 million Americans have some type of criminal record. That's a statistic that, in Martin's opinion, demonstrates how out of step the White House is with the realities of the American criminal justice system. The institutional barriers for those nearly 80 million people extend to all reaches of society, from employment to education.

In an open letter to President Obama on June 25, Martin wrote, "Along with millions of others, I have watched with tremendous pride and optimism as your administration has stated that our carceral policies are patently counterproductive. Further, those policies disproportionately target communities of color, running roughshod over our declared principles of justice, fairness, and proportionality in the process.

"I submit to you that the treatment I received as an invited White House guest, and by extension all others with prior convictions, further erodes the life of those principles," Martin continued. After posting the letter on Facebook, Martin told me he was taken aback by how many people responded with similar tales of special treatment at the White House.

On the White House tour webpage, there is no mention of the appointment screening process. Tour members are asked to submit their requests at least 21 days in advance. However, the people I interviewed for this story told me that this was a Secret Service policy affecting them, rather than something that came down from White House staff. (The White House declined to comment for this story.)

In an emailed statement, Brian Leary, a spokesperson for the Secret Service, told VICE, "Every visitor to the White House Complex undergoes a comprehensive security check prior to the scheduled visit. There are many considerations taken into account in making a final determination before allowing an individual access to the White House Complex. Every visitor is subjected to a thorough security screening procedure upon his/her arrival, prior to entering the White House Complex."

Strangely enough, some of the people Daryl Atkinson entered the White House with had also been incarcerated. But they were given a green badge and proceeded without an escort, leading Atkinson to question what it was about his past that stood out to officials. What had he done differently?

Check out our documentary on Norway's famously progressive prison system.

At least Atkinson and Martin made it inside.

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Vicki Lopez, a criminal justice and government consultant, was excited about his administration and the boost it might offer to prisoner-reentry programs across the nation. This was the first black president, one with an extensive history of community organizing in the South Side of Chicago, she thought.

"The White House should have signs that say, 'Formerly incarcerated, not invited.'" —Vicki Lopez

But when Lopez, who served a year in federal prison for bribery after a 1997 conviction, and Julio Medina—a convicted drug dealer turned reentry advocate honored by George W. Bush in his 2004 State of the Union speech—visited the White House in 2009, their pasts came back to haunt them.

After arranging a meeting with several agencies, Lopez and Medina were held back at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building by Secret Service for half an hour, without any indication as to why, Lopez told me. She said at the time to Medina, "Julio, I bet this has something to do with our records." Medina, she said, was shocked, and then angry. "I told him to stay calm," she said. "That we just came to say what we need to say."

Soon enough, an Obama administration official arrived, but with no pink badge in sight. She escorted Medina and Lopez across the street to a White House satellite office, where the meeting was held. It didn't take long for Medina to say something. "He told her, 'Listen, let's talk about why we're here,'" Lopez recounted. "'I've been in the Oval Office before. Going across the street to talk feels a lot like getting put at the back of the bus.'"

Lopez said the same thing happened in early 2010. This time, though, a White House official brought her to a nearby coffee shop. Again in 2012, even after her crime was formally vacated by a Florida court, Lopez was escorted to another White House meeting off the mansion's grounds, she told me.

"It's very sad, and very egregious. And I don't think the administration is cognizant of what it does to our lives," Lopez said. "Of all the administrations, too, this is the last one I'd expect to let this happen."

When Lopez read Martin's letter to the president on Facebook, she said it "awoke something in her psyche" that she hadn't thought about in years. And now, as the president seems to be dedicating his last months in office to the intertwined issues of race and criminal justice, she believes awareness of how the Secret Service treats the formerly incarcerated is more important than ever.

"The White House should have signs that say, 'Formerly incarcerated, not invited,'" she said. "What are their expectations of us? You just shake your head and wonder."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Cartel Land is a riveting, on-the-ground documentary following parallel stories of US and Mexican vigilantes fighting back against the ruthless drug cartels on either side of the border. It's an excellent documentary, and VICE has teamed with the Orchard distributors to help promote it nationwide.

For this episode of VICE Talks Film, Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker)—who recently signed on as an executive producer of the film—sat down with filmmaker Matthew Heineman to discuss his fearless process in capturing this harrowing story and the ever-evolving world of the cartel's stranglehold on communities north and south of the border.

In the early 70s, American singer and songwriter Leon Russell was having a moment. An Oklahoma native, Russell had spent much of his 20s as a session keyboardist in Los Angeles, recording with the biggest musicians of his time, including George Harrison and Bob Dylan. His modestly selling eponymous debut built up enough of a fan base to launch his second record, 1971's Leon Russell and the Shelter People, to a perky ranking of 17 on the Billboard 100. Carney, his third solo album, released in 1972, reached number 2.

Soon after the release of Carney, then up-and-coming filmmaker Les Blank was hired to make a film on Russell's life and career. Blank's previous films films included a short on the Los Angeles counterculture and a longer feature on the blues musician Lightnin' Hopkins—his pairing with Russell seemed an ideal match. Blank and his assistant, Maureen Gosling, then spent two years filming Russell on tour and at his home studio in Grand Lake o' the Cherokees, Oklahoma, during which time musicians and artists such as Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and Jim Franklin paid a visit. But Blank also pointed the camera at his surroundings, capturing the bizarre and feral atmosphere of rural Oklahoma. The resulting film, A Poem Is a Naked Person, is a bricolage of live performances and studio sessions interlaced with footage of everything from a building demolition, to a snake feeding on a chick, to a man (rumored to be famed plane hijacker D. B. Cooper) chugging a beer and chewing on glass.

Watch this exclusive clip of George Jones performing 'Take Me' and Jim Franklin's otherworldly painting from 'A Poem Is a Naked Person':

Russell was displeased by A Poem Is a Naked Person 's loose and arty structure and rejected the film upon receiving it. Blank was subsequently prevented from screening the documentary unless he was physically present in the audience. The subject was so sore for both men that they never spoke again. It wasn't until almost 40 years later, in 2013, that Blank's son, the documentarian Harrod Blank , reestablished contact with Russell, and revived the idea of publicly releasing the film. After two years of negotiations, Russell has finally given his consent. The film has been acquired by Janus Films and will soon be available as part of the Criterion Collection.

I met with Leon Russell and Harrod Blank at Criterion's quiet and decorated Manhattan offices. Cowboy hats adorned both men's heads, and a long white beard hung from Russell's chin. "I still can't believe this is happening," Harrod said after greeting me. The film would have its official theater premiere only a few hours after the following conversation took place.

VICE: Let's start by going back in time to the early 70s. A time, it seems, of great flux between two generational paradigms. The hippie movement had all but burned out, and disco and punk had yet to take off. How do you remember it?
Leon Russell: It was definitely a time of change and to some degree of fear. I remember playing venues that housed 20,000 seats and suspecting that at least a couple of people in the audience were crazy enough to kill me. And then, you know, John Lennon was later shot. So it wasn't complete paranoia.

In the documentary, I get less of a sense of fear than of freedom. There's footage of people dancing at your shows, of jam sessions, of sunsets over your home, of catfishing at your lake—almost everyone filmed seems to be in a good mood, even euphoric. And perhaps that's due to Les's artistic vision. What was the impetus of getting him to create what would become A Poem Is a Naked Person?
Well, it was my partner [Denny Cordell]'s idea. I didn't know anything about it.

Harrod Blank: Denny Cordell probably commissioned Les either through a recommendation by the American Film Institute or by seeing The Blues According to Lightnin' Hopkins and requesting him thereafter. Or both.

The whole project ended up taking two years.
Two years of shooting, I believe.

And during that time, did he become part of your community and group?
Well, he lived up at my property at Grand Lake o' the Cherokees the whole time he was working on the film, just about.

And you were living there as well, Harrod?
Blank: I was only there one summer in either '72 or '73.

And what was that time like for you?
I was a boy in the wild with a lake and catfish and scorpions and crazy artists. I didn't see Leon, unfortunately. He was on tour while I was there. I spent my time swimming and catfishing with Les.

He had two films come out while he was there, right?
Hot Pepper and Dry Wood. But he never put aside A Poem Is a Naked Person for very long.

When he finished the film and handed it in, what was your initial reaction, Leon?
Russell: I wasn't really that excited about it. I felt that there was a lot of stuff of mine that was missing, but an abundance of stuff about him. It looked like it was more his film than mine.

Were there certain scenes that particularly rankled you?
Blank: Maybe the snake eating the chick?

Russell: Well, sometimes I force myself to watch that stuff because it's the reality of nature. But I don't think I would have put that scene in there.

Blank: Not many people would.

Russell: My wife objects to it pretty strongly.

"They hadn't spoken in 40 years. After the Leon rejected the film, the only communication Les and Leon ever had was between lawyers." —Harrod Blank

After you and Les went your separate ways, did you remain in communication?
No, we didn't. I never spoke to him again.

Is it strange for you two to be sitting next to one another?
Blank: Leon and I have become friends, actually. I even learned that Leon had seen, and enjoyed, my PBS documentary on car art, Wild Wheels.

I noticed there's some car art in the beginning of the A Poem Is a Naked Person. The title is written on a car door.
I've since discovered these slides of Jim Franklin, who painted that title and had also painted someone's portrait onto a car. So there's this interesting car-art connection there.

Russell: Jim's a mad painter. He never stops. I went down to the Armadillo World Headquarters, the old music venue in Austin, to an art auction, and his paintings were everywhere.

I've read that Jim's has an affinity toward armadillos, and that it was he who gave the Armadillo World Headquarters its name.
He did paint Freddie King with an armadillo exploding out of his chest.

I loved Jim's role in the documentary, the oddball artist who embodies the free spirit of that time. There's a particularly mesmerizing moment [in the clip above] when the camera is sweeping over Jim's pool mural, and your choral, psychedelic track "Acid Annapolis" is playing over it. It's the film's 2001: A Space Odyssey obelisk moment.
You know how I made that track? I brought in a bunch of people to play and sing, but I wouldn't let them hear what they were playing or singing along to. Occasionally I would turn up the main track and they would get with it for a moment. Then I would turn it off. I then pieced fragments of those recordings together to make "Acid Annapolis."

"I remember when I was a kid—I used to sing in a duet with another guy. We made a recording, and I heard him singing, and I heard this other voice, and I thought, Who's that awful-sounding guy? It was me." —Leon Russell

That brings to mind another great thing that the film highlights: your ability to conduct. You can lead people, and when you aren't satisfied with a take, you can have them repeat a bar, just by a gesture or simple phrase.
Well, I used to conduct for a living.

It's almost as if A Poem Is A Naked Person is an album on film with many guest performers.
Blank: I think it was Leon's conductor's sense that was vital in bringing together the people that make up the film. Jim, Les, and all the various musicians who came around, from George Jones to Willie Nelson. Leon says it wasn't a conscious decision, but to me, it was him who really brought them all in.

On Fightland: Did you know Willie Nelson has a fifth-degree black belt (and it's not in weed-smoking)?

There's a sense of leadership that you have throughout the film. How do you see yourself when you watch it?
Russell: There's a well-known reality when people see themselves for the first time on film, or hear themselves for the first time on record... I remember when I was a kid—I used to sing in a duet with another guy. We made a recording, and I heard him singing, and I heard this other voice, and I thought, Who's that awful-sounding guy? It was me.

Do you feel that repugnance fed into your hesitancy to put out the film?
By the time A Poem Is a Naked Person was finished I'd already seen myself on film.

Seeing the documentary now, are you happier with it?
There's been a lot of work done to it. Some unnecessary scenes removed. That's nice.

What was it like for you, Harrod, to connect with Leon? I know that putting out the film was your dad's dying wish.
Blank: We got in touch while Les was still alive, though very sick. I reached out to Leon and said that Les was ill, but that we wanted to show A Poem Is a Naked Person a final time and hoped he might consider attending. Leon replied with a polite and friendly email saying that he had a prior engagement,but wished us the best. This response pleased my father. It was the first he heard from Leon. You have to remember that they hadn't spoken in 40 years. After Leon rejected the film, the only communication Les and Leon ever had was between lawyers.

"Les had a mean streak. I remember one time we were driving and Les said, 'I should've never taken this job. I should've documented the Rolling Stones and got all the free cocaine and champagne I'd ever want.'" —Leon Russell

What was that last screening of A Poem Is a Naked Person with your father in attendance like?
After the film, Les got up and spoke to the audience. Now Les was normally a quiet man, but that night he was more talkative than ever. He gave his side of things and talked at length about the documentary. He passed away shortly after that screening. Leon and I remained in touch after Les's death, and I finally broached the idea of releasing the film.

Was there anything specific, Leon, that made you reconsider putting it out?
Russell: I don't know what it was. I think maybe I just liked Harrod more than his father. Les had a mean streak. I remember one time we were driving and Les said, "I should've never taken this job. I should've documented the Rolling Stones and got all the free cocaine and champagne I'd ever want."

Blank: It was the 70s, and Les was hitting it hard. And when Les drank too much, he did have a bit of mean streak in him. He would delve into a person's vulnerability and nail them. And maybe he did that to Leon—I don't know, I wasn't there. But I've seen him do that to other people. He cut back on all that as he got older. And I think that helped him edit the film anew. When he quit smoking, for instance, he was so disgusted by the habit that he wanted all pictures and footage of him smoking removed from the film. And some of what he did cut from the original 100 minutes was of him smoking.

What were some of the other things he cut?
Honestly, a lot of hippie-dippy lagniappe. It wasn't necessary for the film. It was actually slowing it down.

Did you put anything he cut back in?
I put the segment for "Satisfied Mind" back in after Les's last cut. And the only footage we had was from the original film, so I used "Satisfied Mind." It's a nice note to end on. I think Les left this world with a satisfied mind, and I think Leon has done so much that he couldn't not be satisfied. The film is about being creative. It doesn't matter if it's Leon Russell or Jim Franklin or whoever. Being creative was Les's mantra. And that's what everyone in the film is doing—being creative.

Russell: Except for the guy eating the glass.

Les Blank's A Poem Is a Naked Person is playing at Film Forum in New York through July 14.

Michael Barron is on Twitter.

A screen shot from the E3 2015 trailer for 'ReCore'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Few know much about ReCore right now. A complete surprise (to me anyway) following the bombastic Halo 5 demo that opened Microsoft's E3 2015 press conference, the new game from Keiji Inafune and Austin, Texas–based Armature Studio didn't belabor in getting to its point; rather, the essence of this new sci-fi adventure was distilled into a quick teaser.

No gameplay was on display—as is now standard practice in Video Game Reveal Marketing 101—just a Pixar-like CG trailer starring a hardy female sand-warrior, a desert, some mean robots, and a sole friendly robot resembling a canine pal, at least until it sacrificed itself in a life-saving explosion that allowed the heroine to move the pup's blue core into the form of a larger proverbial iron giant.

Of course, Inafune's storied history at Capcom and the eclectic range of games he's put out with his own Japanese studio, Comcept, since 2012—some successful, some anything but—shows that he's capable of making whatever kind of game he likes. If the father of Mega Man (OK, co-creator), Onimusha, and the forthcoming Mighty No. 9, not to mention countless others, wants to make an exploratory adventure where you (I assume) interact with a cast of colorful robot characters in a presumably nonlinear-ish game about the relationships between man and machine, that sounds fine by me. (And if he's working with some of the folks who helped make Metroid Prime, so much the better.)

'ReCore,' E3 2015 trailer

What I do know is that not knowing much about ReCore itself (those glowing cores play a big role with your robot allies, I'm told) put me in an interesting position when interviewing Inafune in Los Angeles, though he's no less fascinating when talking about concepts and philosophy.

Sadly, my time with Inafune was all too brief. I wasn't able to follow up on his thoughts about Kickstarter and the somewhat murky ethics of, say, Yu Suzuki and Sony's tangled relationship with Shenmue III's funding. Still, Japanese games need creators like Inafune, who continuously preach the need for risk-taking and imaginative thought in a market that often struggles to find its footing in the modern era. Rest assured he had plenty to say about the state of Japan and that undying need for creativity.

VICE: From the little information I've been able to glean about ReCore, I know that it deals with the relationship between robots and man, and the kinds of emotional bonds that might be forged. Is there any particular story, thought, or event that inspired you to come up with this idea?
Keiji Inafune: So I guess there is a big theme that I've always sort of loved and craved and gravitated towards, and that is how to illustrate what we think of when we think of the end of humanity. And if you really think about it, aside from ReCore, when you watch zombie films, TV shows, or games, it is all about survival. And it is all about the potential of, OK, there are no more humans anymore, it's all "zombified." So [ReCore is] just a different way of expressing that theme—the same can be said about Lost Planet. I also love Mad Max.

There are many other things, if you think about it on a very high level and not just restrict it to sci-fi. There are ways to illustrate or tell that story in every project I work on. With ReCore, it's not going for a Dead Rising–type feel or tone, and it's not a Lost Planet–type feel or tone, either. It's just a different dimension, a different angle—a different take on that larger theme. So, that's something that's not new to me. I've always had very similar themes throughout a lot of the work that I've done, I think.

And what about the "humanity's end" theme is so fascinating to you? Why do you like it so much?
I'm going to draw a parallel to my personal life, my personal surroundings. When you think about the games industry, we could potentially reach a point where there is an "end of games." What I mean by that is this: If games makers and developers lose that sense that we are making something creative to entertain people, and all we want to do is basically get paid to make a game, then I feel like the spirit of game creation, why we make games, could all be lost. And that's what I mean by the idea that there could be an end to games, or gaming. I don't want that to happen, and I don't think anyone else here wants that to happen.

So even though we don't think about it probably, in our daily lives, there are so many things [that could point to an "end" of humanity], whether on a very personal level or on a very large scale, [like an] act of war or environmental destruction. In Japan, there's this whole societal problem with the population of people in the country over a certain age—it's looking lopsided. We don't have a lot of younger generations having kids, so Japan is going to turn into this country that's heavy on the elderly with a low population of youngsters. So there are all these things where, by just a simple act of human kindness or hostility, things could very drastically change in the future.

And so, filtering that all down, if you take when the movie Back to the Future was made, we were looking into the future. And now we've reached that year, 2015 (the future of Back to the Future II), we're trying to see if our sense of what the future might really be like is right or wrong. And then you see a list of problems, and it's like: oh shit, this stuff is actually really happening in real life.

Going back to ReCore and your question, I feel like my job as a game creator is to—in an exaggerated sense, but not negatively—illustrate what the world could be like in the form of entertainment, in the form of games. And so I've taken that as my job and my mission, to create a world where you could get a sense of what the future might be like. And telling a story of that. So I'm continuously attracted to that, and I take that as my own mission.

Since starting Comcept you've created a lot of different takes on this kind of idea, which all seem to circle thematically around your thoughts on the Japanese game industry. How have those varied experiences informed your approach for ReCore?
I've been making games for about 30 years now, but from the very beginning all the way up until this year, I think my basic approach to making games has really not changed. It's all about trying and learning, putting things out. And there are so many lessons that come from putting a game out. So I try to take the good, learn and improve on the bad, so to speak, and try to reflect as I go into my next project. That hasn't changed even since my Capcom days. There was a lot I learned at Capcom. And even though Comcept has only been around for a handful of years, there are plenty of things that we've already learned as an independent studio. So there's a multitude of things that go into the next creation. So we've grown, and along the way you gain that confidence to make that next step.

That being said, one thing that you can't really read or control is the market conditions, the climate of the user's demands and needs and desire. And to be able to slot yourself into that, it's like you have to be able to look into a crystal ball and know exactly what people want two years from now. So the harder part isn't picking and choosing from what I've learned and what I should do next—it's more about how that can sync with what we think people want to experience. That's actually the harder part. That's the hardest work that we have as craftsmen—and, you know, we call ourselves skilled in games making. We can be as technically-skilled as we want, but if we're either behind the curve or what people might say is way ahead of its time, then you don't get your fans to listen to you every step of the way. So you kind of have to look for that perfect range to jump into. And that's probably the hardest thing.

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

Also check out: How to Hack a Car

Where do you strike that balance between what people are interested in playing, and fan expectations, and what you want to make? You've already made a number of pretty varied games since leaving Capcom, and it doesn't seem like anyone, or anything really stops you from going forward with an original idea that you're interested in pursuing.
[Laughs] That's a good question. So, there's a big sort of simple but very important meaning, and reason, behind why I left Capcom and why our company is called Comcept, with an "M," which, phonetically in Japanese, is very much like "concept." We're a conceptual studio, an idea house. With confidence I can say why I left Capcom wasn't because I was kicked out, or because there were no other projects to work on. It was just me thinking that there was nothing left for me to do as a creative lead at that studio.

After I left it wouldn't be like me to get put in a position where I would form an independent studio that worked on externally sourced projects. The main reason why I left is because I wanted to continue challenging myself with new ideas and push those through, just like you said—and maybe not taking no for an answer has almost been a motto, too. So, I've declined pitches and offers to work on external ideas—working on sequels, working on licensed properties, and such.

Even if the money is great, and I know we are all attracted to that, what's more important for us is to challenge ourselves, and continue to do so. There's no guarantee that a challenge is going to reward us with great results—it could end badly, too. But regardless of which way it falls, the most important thing for me is that we have a motive to continue to challenge ourselves and create something new. So that, in and of itself, sort of defines us as creators and "conceptors," and that's why I'm where I am.

'Mighty No. 9,' Beat Them at Their Own Game, E3 2015 trailer.

So, what's your ideal situation of the game industry changing for the better? Is it just designers taking more risks, or is there more to it than that?
I'm going to preface this response by saying that it's limited to the Japanese market. I feel like there's hope, in the sense that there could one day be a very ideal game industry, or a healthy scenario in the business of games. And for me, from my own personal experience using Kickstarter to launch Mighty No. 9, I see the potential of creating games that way as one example. You know, if I had shopped Mighty No. 9 around to publishers, it would have been very tough. It would've been a lot of, "No, we don't see potential, you need a smaller budget, we want to take less risks," et cetera. Not going down that route, and using Kickstarter instead, what that allowed me to do was pitch an idea to people who want to play a game like that. Audiences aren't restricted to any territory, so fans and gamers from around the world pitched in. And now they feel like they're part of the project. Technically if you pledged above a certain tier you bought the product, but what you're investing in is a creator's creation because you're interested in it.

That's a shared experience amongst everyone involved—and they can feel that creation being made. And so I feel like I've been able to kind of plant the seed to somehow prove that these things can be done without getting doors shut in your face from publishers—people saying, "No, that's not a good business opportunity for us, so you can't make it."

That's not really an option for me. As long as I'm creating games I want to make them happen on my terms. And so after Mighty No. 9's success, more recently on Kickstarter you've seen Koji Igarashi and his Bloodstained project and Yu Suzuki's Shenmue III. So with the support and motivation of these people who crave these kinds of creations, I think I've helped realize [a new model of financing them]. And whether or not you call it a model, it's something that will hopefully help the industry become healthier, help it continue to grow, and hopefully bring back a healthier cycle for the business overall.

On Motherboard: Why Robots Need Ears

Finally, and a bit off-topic, you've said before how much you love robots, and your body of work certainly confirms that. Is that just a product of growing up within a culture of anime and manga? ReCore touches on the connection between humans and machines, so what do they mean to you, personally?
You basically asked and answered your question in a very compact way, but it's funny, because everyone comes up to me and says, "Inafune-san, I know you love robots!" And I kind of do a double-take because for me it's like, "Oh yeah, I do love robots," but they've been a part of me for so long that they're in my DNA. I'm not saying it's something that non-Japanese people wouldn't understand, but by the time you're able to comprehend things in life at a very young age [in Japan], you're exposed to the subject matter of robots.

So if you're Japanese and you're in a creative industry—games, film, TV, entertainment—robots are second nature. It's almost a given that they become favorite subjects. And on top of that, for myself as a game creator, and for any creator, for that matter, you know you're probably going to do your best work if you work with themes and concepts that you really love. So I think for me it's only natural for me to gravitate towards robotic things, and that's why everyone's perception of me is that I love robots. But, really, it's always been a part of me.

ReCore is due for release in mid-2016, exclusively for Xbox One. Mighty No. 9 is released for multiple platforms on September 18.

Follow Steve Haske on Twitter.