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Gentrification Is Turning London's Soho Into a Gimmicky, Sex Work-Themed Theme Park

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La Bodega Negra, a Mexican restaurant. All photos by Bo Franklin

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

On D'Arblay Street in Soho there's a basement which was once a "hostess bar." I used to work there. It was a clip joint where we'd lure men into buying ludicrously-priced champagne that we poured onto the floor or into plant pots. Most of the girls were hookers, though not officially. I walked down there recently and it appears to be an accountant's office now. These places have disappeared, and rightly so—we ripped men off and watched bouncers threaten them if they complained. Soho has already been cleaned up. The sex workers who remain are operating legitimately, selling a legal service.

And yet, in December 2013, 250 police officers violently raided more than 25 Soho flats, purportedly looking for victims of trafficking. Doors were broken down, women were dragged onto the street in their underwear. Not a single victim of trafficking was found and, after a series of court hearings, most of the flats were allowed to reopen. However, evictions are still underway.

As Soho's sex trade is destroyed, a twee pastiche is being created in its place. A sex-work themed theme-park.

"We're bringing the red lights inside and turning them into art," says Jonny Grant, managing director of Soho's newest member's bar, Lights of Soho on Brewer Street.

Lights was once a brothel. Today, it's a gallery celebrating the historic lights of Soho's sex-steeped alleyways. Neon works by the late Chris Bracey feature heavily. It was Bracey, after all, who helped shape the visual landscape of Soho's sleazy heyday, designing many of the original signs which flashed their garish colors into this one-time fairground of sex.

Lights

"We're celebrating 'Old Soho,'" Grant says. And he's right.

Many of the peep shows, sex shops, and independent strip clubs have gone, phased out by the advent of online shopping and porn, shooed away by developers, evicted by landlords. Just around the corner from Lights, on Walker's Court—once the heart of sex-for-sale Soho—flats used by sex workers have been shut down, as development plans by Soho Estates push through. There's a pop-up shop selling Native American-inspired fashion on the corner.

Lights isn't the only place to cash in on the cache of Soho's sex trade past. At The Old Tom and English on Wardour Street, in slick rooms people sip £10 [$15] cocktails which are named after famous prostitutes of the area; Lulu, Nell, Chora, Cynthia. The venue's name itself is a knowing wink toward the old-school slang for sex workers. There's a red light above the door.

Outside La Bodega Negra on Moor Street, neon signs suggest a peep show and sex shop. In fact, it's a trendy Mexican restaurant. All the naughtiness without the grossness and moral ambiguity! Perfect to impress your date!

"I watched with great amusement as well dressed couples sheepishly approached the front door, tugged on the handle, and moved as fast as their feet would take them when they discovered the restaurant had not yet opened for the night," wrote food blogger Emily Johnson of Fashion Foie Gras. "There was no lingering here. Heaven forbid someone you know should recognize you waiting in line for the next sex show to start. However, people in 'the know' would of course realize you are waiting for a table at 'the' place to be at the moment."

Across Soho, the bordello theme is a default. You don't have to stumble far to find décor suggestive of dimly lit backrooms and women of the night; a fantasy, filmic version of the sex trade. As the reality of sex work in Soho disappears, its essence has become a marketing tool. Brothel chic. A Disneyland version of what was for many, a life, work—a world that wasn't particularly exotic or glamorous but simply the thing they did for a certain number of hours a week to pay the bills.

One of Bracey's most famous early signs read, "Girls, Girls, Girls." Old Soho was a playground for men. Nobody's saying that Soho's sex trade—the sex trade anywhere—is free from problems. But Soho was, until recently, one of the UK's safest places to work.

High on the list of game-changers in Soho, with an ever-increasing slice of the area, is Soho Estates, the legacy of Paul Raymond, who built a £650 million [$1 billion] empire on strippers and porn. Ironically, flats within its portfolio that used to house sex workers (for instance, Walker's Court) have been forced to close.

Other sex workers have been sent packing by landlords.

"Many landlords appear to be under enormous pressure from the police to sell up or change the use of the property," says Cari Mitchell of the English Collective of Prostitutes. "And the police are clearly backed by vulture property developers like Soho Estates who are hovering, ready to snap up any property, and pay over the odds to do so."


Related: The New Era of Canadian Sex Work


There's been a backlash against the obliteration of Soho's heritage. Grant's business partner and co-founder of Lights, Hamish Jenkinson, was among those who signed a petition after the closure of Madame JoJo's last year. However, while Save Soho is concerned about closing music and arts venues, it doesn't mention the sex trade. It begs the question, who exactly are we saving Soho for?

Standing in his gallery, amid the neon sex signs (selling for up to £66,000 [$103,000] a pop), I ask Grant about the evictions of sex workers. A flat on the same street as Lights is under threat.

"It honestly doesn't impact on us," he says. "I don't hear people talk about it much."

Around us, people's lives are being demolished and sold back to the wealthy as a gimmick; a fetishized, hyperreal version of London that, if you don't scratch too deeply, gives the illusion that all is well outside the Square Mile. We've got £5-a-beer bars decked out to look like squats, art installations in tower blocks, public school alumni dressed as barrow boys on your local farmers' market. In Soho, we've got brothel chic.

Soho's current wave of development is built on the cultural capital that, rightly or wrongly, exists around sex work. At the level of reality, in flats that bear little resemblance to the tasseled interiors of Soho's bordello-style bars, life is getting harder for Soho's sex workers. Most likely, all will eventually be driven out, forced to work in more dangerous conditions.

But don't worry, we can always name a tapas dish in their commemoration.

Follow Frankie Mullin on Twitter.


What in the Hell Is 'NCIS,' and Why Is It So Popular?

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Screen grab via 'NCIS' opening credits

According to Entertainment Weekly, the most watched scripted show on television is The Big Bang Theory. NCIS is the second most watched, and NCIS: New Orleans the third. We, the able-bodied, internet-using youth, are generally aware of Big Bang Theory. We know that it is a show that is, in some abstract capacity, about "nerds." We may have even watched at least one episode of the thing against our will. If nothing else, we've at least seen a guy walking around with a "Bazinga!" shirt on, because before we had Minions, we had "Bazinga."

The vexing thing about NCIS is that if you don't actually watch it, there's not a clear way to figure out what the hell's going on in the damn thing. Unlike The Office or Bar Rescue or Real Sex, its title doesn't give so much as a hint as to what it's about. "NCIS" is just a jumble of unpronounceable letters. It could stand for "No Comments in School" and be about hard-ass teachers in a private school trying to enlighten youths while dealing with their horrible, rich parents. It could stand for "Never Create Insane Sketches" and be about a group of artists whose art came to life and attacks them. It could stand for "North Carolina Is Shitty" and be inexplicable, anti–North Carolina propaganda. Tableau pictures of its cast don't reveal much, either. The people in this image could be literally anything: a group of teachers; a jury; the staff of an office; a sex cult. The only thing for certain is that one of them is a goth.

But guess what! They're not a sex cult at all! They are the cast of NCIS, a show whose audience on any given episode is double the population of North Carolina.

As every conservative dad and grandparent alive today knows, NCIS is a cop show. It's not just any cop show, however. It's about cops in the Navy (turns out "NCIS" stand for "Navy Criminal Investigative Service"). This means that the cops have jurisdiction over all the regular places cops can go, but can also do cop stuff pretty much anywhere they want, which allows it to break out of the conventions of the standard-issue police procedural. Throughout its frankly inconceivable 12-season run, the show has set episodes in New Orleans, Afghanistan, and an abandoned boat in the middle of the ocean. It has centered episodes around a knockoff of the game World of Warcraft, as well as a knockoff of the illicit online trading network Silk Road. One episode features a recurring gag in which investigators can't understand witnesses because they're all wearing Halloween masks.

For all its on-paper ubiquity, there's a reason NCIS doesn't get the same burn online as shows like Mad Men, True Detective, and Orange Is the New Black get, and that's because NCIS's audience is old. Like, really old. The median age of the show's viewers is 60. For context, the median age for TV watchers (i.e., people who watch TV on TV and not on the internet) is 44.4 years old—if you just look at broadcast TV, that number jumps up to 53.9 years old. In other words, NCIS is a show for old people on a medium that is itself, by and large, for old people. It's only logical that the most consumed piece of media on a medium with an increasingly aging audience would be one that appeals the most to that demographic.

Front to back: Gibbs, McGee, Dinozzo. Screen grab via 'NCIS'

Each episode of NCIS follows more or less the same formula as many other police procedurals: Episodes begin with a crime, generally an unusual death. Then we cut to the NCIS squad kickin' it in their high-tech office, bantering, until somebody (usually the incredibly named Leroy Jethro Gibbs, played by professional television actor Mark Harmon) barges in and announces they've got a murder to solve. From there, it's off to the races. Two guys—one named Dinozzo, whose entire character is based around the fact that he's a smartass, and one named McGee, whose entire character is based around the fact that everyone calls him "McGeek"—then go around and ask some questions and gather some evidence while bantering. Said evidence gets sent back to the lab, where the goth and a super old Scottish guy use it to figure some stuff out, and then Harmon's Gibbs solves the case with the gruff military detective equivalent of your dad beating you in a game of one-on-one with a sky hook.

Forgive me if I glossed over some of the finer points of NCIS lore; it's hard to sum up 282 episodes of a network-television juggernaut in a single paragraph. But then again, part of NCIS's fun is the fact that every episode is basically the same; in a sense, it's like listening to Krautrock. You settle into a predictable groove, and the joy of the show comes in the form of noticing the subtle deviations and tweaks to the formula. No matter how crazy things around them get, the characters remain dry and witty.

An image from the opening credits, just in case you were doubting its American bona fides. Screen grab via 'NCIS'

Like its contemporaries, NCIS draws plot lines from real-life conflicts. One episode from season two centers around protecting a veteran who accidentally killed civilians in Iraq from revenge-seeking terrorists. A later episode follows the crew to Afghanistan, where Gibbs rescues a female Marine from the terrorists who kidnapped her. Stories such as these present the War on Terror as an obvious, cut-and-dry concept. The American government, the show tells us, is good. The people who are against the American government are, presumably, bad.

It's been argued that this jingoistic undertone to NCIS is almost sinister: Indeed, the investigators cash in on their Big Data chips to solve crimes by tapping into every imaginable resource, whether it's diving into cell phone records, credit card statements, or someone's saved file in a game. By showing the good guys catching unapologetic bad guys using these privacy-invading methods, NCIS is definitely endorsing surveillance culture. The Atlantic points out that Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contractor, is a sponsor of NCIS: Los Angeles, which means that in addition to reminding television viewers that they should remain vigilant in the War on Terror and therefore keep their company in business, Lockheed Martin is also keeping star LL Cool J in newsboy caps.

Dinozzo finds himself. Screen grab via 'NCIS'

Arm of the military-industrial complex or no, NCIS is not without its charms. Like most bad shows, it's smarter about its badness than people give it credit for. In one episode, an NCIS crew bursts into a Halloween party to the applause of a crew of onlookers. Some dipshit goes, "Great group costume, guys! You spelled 'CSI' wrong on your hats!" In another episode, McGee(k) gives a juice cleanse a shot and hates it. In yet another, the technophobic Gibbs runs through a warehouse as he's guided, Pac-Man-like, to a computer he's meant to shut down, only to shoot the thing instead of pulling the plug. These aren't jokes you have to be a rocket surgeon to understand, but they're signs of self-awareness in a format that often gets dismissed too easily.

It's tempting to write something like NCIS off as "trash TV," and in a sense, it definitely is. There are certainly more intellectually stimulating ways of spending a Saturday than watching ten episodes of NCIS in a row, and I don't think anyone would claim that the show's made with the same craft care that goes into something like The Americans or Game of Thrones. Still, it's worth watching, if for no other reason than, because they're massively popular cultural documents, NCIS and shows of its ilk are a reflection of how a lot of people actually think. And so, next time you wonder why your uncle in some flyover state buys into the latest insane piece of right-wing propaganda, just remember that the charm of NCIS may very well have something to do with it.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

Black Women Have to Put Up with Bullshit Beauty Standards

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Photo via Flickr user Steven Depolo

Recently, I came across a video of 102-year-old Alice Barker, who had been part of a dance group called the Sepia Steppers during the Harlem Renaissance. In the video, you can see a younger Barker dancing alongside other light-skinned black women at various jazz clubs. It's rare to find this kind of positive historical footage of black women, and Barker's enthusiasm is contagious—but I couldn't help but notice that there were no dark-skinned women dancing.

This wasn't uncommon at the time. Some of the popular Harlem venues in the 20s and 30s, like The Cotton Club, only hired light-skinned dancers. But even today, in music videos and television shows, dark-skinned women are largely absent. The black women we do see in popular culture are those with the types of white features deemed beautiful: small noses, straight hair, thin bodies.

These beauty standards are the subject of a forthcoming documentary film by Natalie Bullock Brown, called Baartman, Beyoncé & Me. The film aims to dissect the messages black women receive about beauty, including the value placed on light-skinned women with "white" features. Her project is both historical and contemporary, ranging from the exoticization of black women like Sarah Baartman (sometimes called the Hottentot Venus) to the false sense of empowerment from black pop stars like Beyoncé. Brown also reflects on the messages she received about beauty growing up, from the way her mother tried to de-sexualize her black body, to the rejection she felt from boys, to the displacement she felt at her predominantly white school.

A Kickstarter campaign to fund the film, which ended last week, raised over $17,000. I caught up with Brown to learn more about the goals of the documentary and the types of messages society sends to black women and girls about who gets to be beautiful.

VICE: Could you tell me about your background?
Natalie Bullock Brown: I grew up in Chicago, Illinois. Part of what shaped my identity—and probably what directly led to this film—is that from second grade until I graduated from high school, I attended a 98 percent white, Jewish private school. I grew up on the [predominantly black] South Side of Chicago, and my school, which was called Francis W. Parker, was located on the [predominantly white] North Side. I took the bus out of my neighborhood into what was essentially another world.

Why did your parents send you there?
My parents separated when I was four. I lived with my mom and she's a retired public school teacher. She was determined not to allow me to have the public school experience. She wanted me to have more options and to be exposed to more kinds of people, [and have] academic opportunities that I wouldn't have had if I'd gone to public school. As a school teacher, she knew what the possibilities were for black students. Even with the better public schools, she was not pleased with the sort of education they provided.

Was it worth it, being sent to a school like that?
That's a really great question. I would not trade that experience for the world because of all the things that my mom hoped for me. Through that experience I got a grade-A education and my classmates donated very generously to my Kickstarter campaign. As far as my black identity, my mom tried very hard to balance my experiences: I went to a black church, I was a member of a choir in Chicago that was fairly diverse but predominantly black. That provided a counterpoint to what I was experiencing at school. But certainly, because I went to school with white kids who came from wealthy backgrounds—whereas I was living in a single parent home, pretty solidly lower middle class—the contrast was very stark.

As I became a teenager and became interested in boys, I know I experienced a bit of a quandary, knowing that there may not be as many opportunities for me to date someone at school. If I liked someone, [I knew] they might not like me because I'm back; because I didn't look like the white girls who were in my class, or even the mixed-race girls.

In hindsight, was that a justified fear or just typical teenage anxiety?
I think that it was a little bit of both. There's definitely an angst that comes along with being a teenager that guys aren't gonna like you, or the ones you like ain't gonna like you. It was exacerbated by the fact that I was one of four black kids, let alone girls, that were in a high school class of 60-something kids in a predominantly white and rich high school. The possibilities for a viable boyfriend were pretty low.

Want more documentaries about black women? Check out Noisey's review of the Netflix documentary on Nina Simone.

I have to say, that's a similar experience to my own. When did you first have the idea for the documentary?
A couple of years ago. I started really thinking about my experiences as a black female from girlhood on and really began to dissect it: things that had been said to me, choices I had made, things I'd allowed men—black men in particular—to perpetrate against me. I was going through an awakening. Really dealing with experiences that had happened in my life.

I also watched Venus Noir, about Sarah Baartmen, and I felt it really resonated with me. I struggled in one sense empathizing and sympathizing with her, and in another sense being in the seat of a white viewer or voyeur and looking at her and feeling repulsed by the size of her behind and her features and it was a head trip. I wanted to distance myself from her.

Illustration of Sarah Baartman from Illustrations de Histoire naturelle des mammifères, via Wikimedia Commons

Why do you think Baartmen had such an impact?
I was raised to contain my black body and my behind. My mom always made sure as a teenager that I wore a girdle and the impact that had was pretty negative.

Wait, what's a girdle?
A girdle is basically like underwear that's really tight. It holds everything in place so you don't jiggle. I was made to wear one from the age of 14 or 15 until I said "I ain't putting this on because it's uncomfortable."

Shit, that's a pretty big symbol of body oppression. Why do you think she wanted you to wear one?
My mom wore one herself and I think she had been raised to wear one. I think black women throughout generations have been doing it. It's not something that I would have my daughter wear, but I think that my mom was under the impression (without probably really thinking about it) that she wanted to de-sexualize me.

She said something to the effect of, "You don't want to tempt anyone." My family is fairly religious, so she didn't want anyone looking at my anatomy essentially. [She wanted] to contain it, because you know, when you get older and you're in puberty, everything is blossoming. It was about keeping that in check, so that I didn't come across as a sexual being.

Do you think being over-sexualized is a problem for many black women?
Yes, definitely. There is an assumption that is made about women, especially if our anatomy fits the stereotype, which is, you know, a Sarah Baartman-type body where everything is very pronounced, that is very different. And because it's different, it's not seen as seemly as it's a little more obvious than the typical white woman's body.


Watch: VICE visits Towson University, where one student formed a White Student Union to celebrate white people and exclude people of color.


I've noticed that with the explosion of the "booty" in popular culture, it seems to be less of a taboo to have a big butt or big lips these days. Would you agree?
I think it depends on who the woman is. That's a part of what I want to look at in the film. Someone like Beyoncé benefits from it, but pretty much every black women suffers from what society says about black bodies and their sexuality. But I think with people like Beyoncé or any other celebrity who has some of these attributes that we're talking about—either a large chest or a big behind—they can kind of get away with it in the sense that they have all of the protection within their lives because they're seen as exceptional.

The average black woman walking around with a big behind and a big chest is not seen as exceptional and we don't get a pass. They don't have to go through the harassment and ridicule and negative backlash the average black woman has to deal with.

On The Creators Project: A Taiwanese photographer who manipulates the female body in his art.

What about colorism? Have you experienced it?
I'm not an expert, but from what I have observed and what I've experienced, colorism is alive and well in the US. There are still assumptions darker-skinned people make about light-skinned or mixed-race people. The idea that light-skinned people generally think that they're better, or that they're more arrogant, definitely exists in America as well.

What about colorism in the media?
I think that there is a level of colorism that occurs in society as well, yeah. Someone like Lupita Nyong'o is again one of these "exceptional" dark-skinned woman who, because society has crowned her beautiful, is causing darker-skinned women to be given a different type of look now. But that consideration is pretty much limited to celebrities. It's not really extended to average black women. It's kind of like tokenism.

Beyoncé in concert. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Are there other examples that you've noticed?
If I think about the TV shows on a network like BET, I think that because it's BET there's an effort to show a diversity of black women. But if you look at the regular networks—the ABCs, the NBCs, the CBSs—unless you're Shonda Rhymes, for the most part you're going to see black female characters who are fairly light-skinned. And I think that's a reflection of what is deemed beautiful enough to fit into prime time television. You know what I'm saying?

I do. By the way, do you see yourself as a dark-skinned or light-skinned black woman?
I've thought as myself as dark-skinned actually—which is funny, because there are definitely people who would call me light-skinned. Looking at myself as dark-skinned has come from observing and feeling very strongly that [light-skinned women] are attractive. You've got to have some level of white blood in you to have the sort of features that are going to approximate white features to make you attractive. This is something I couldn't have articulated when I was 16 or 17 and really struggling with the way I looked. But that's what informed my thinking that I was dark-skinned.

Light-skinned or dark-skinned? One artist's website asks people to decide.

Are you more accepting of the way you look now?
It's taken a lot of work to understand how race functions in our culture, and the value of making a race feel a certain way about itself. I've had to learn a lot. It's taken the affirmation of people who are important to me to make me realize that it's a crock you've been buying into, and you are beautiful [even if] your nose isn't as straight as a model's.

I've learned to love myself. It's hard to dig all that stuff out and get rid of it altogether but I'm so much further along than I was. It's a work in progress. I'm grateful that I'm black and I believe that we are beautiful in all of our manifestations.

Is that part of your goal with the film?
My goal is to pull the cover off what white supremacy has done so insidiously for so long: They've turned us against each other as well as making black women feel ugly. I want people to realize, All these things that I've been doing to make myself look a certain way, I don't need to.

Follow Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff on Twitter.

I Learned the Truth About Stephen Harper’s Soul by Watching His Favourite Show

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Prime Minister Stephen Harper once appeared on his favourite TV show, Murdoch Mysteries. Handout via CBC

Stephen Harper is a man who does not reveal much about himself. Very rarely do we get a glimpse behind the mind-numbing lack of charisma and planned photo ops to see if there is a human being underneath all the strict talking points. Unlike other politicians, Harper does not slip up or goof around. He controls his message and image and very rarely gives Canadians any info to chew on other than policy. His appeal is meant to be professional not personal—I think he'd rather us think of him as abstract tax reform generator than as a person.

One of the few personal things he's revealed about himself is that his favourite show is the CBC's crusty mystery series Murdoch Mysteries. He watches it regularly with his daughter, which is a pretty cute image for a man who resembles clay. I am a firm believer that our artistic and cultural choices reveal who exactly we are and what we value. With that in mind, I decided to give the show a try in hopes of finding out more about who our Prime Minister is and where he is taking us.

I had never seen the show before, nor did I want to. Every image or ad I saw from it had that familiar stank of embarrassing Canadian television. The fact that it's Stephen Harper's favourite show also certainly wasn't working in its favor. But I love my country and have a strong desire to understand the psychopath in charge, so I cranked up the old Netflix and dove right in.

Murdoch Mysteries, as the name implies, is an old-fashioned whodunnit. Taking place in Toronto at the turn of the 20th century, each episode follows smartest-guy-in-the-room Detective William Murdoch as he attempts to solve history-inflected mysteries with his smarts and anachronistic gadgets. Rounding out the cast are his clownish sidekick, Crabtree, his gruff superior, Brackenreid, and two female medical examiners, Drs. Julia Ogden and Emily Grace.

I jumped around the series, watching whichever episodes that both caught my eye and would seem to appeal to old-knob-nose Harper himself. Confession time: about halfway through my second episode after chuckling again at a bumbling Crabtree, I had a troubling thought, Oh my god, do I like this show? After finishing the third, it was confirmed, Goddamnit I'm into this show, Crabtree is hilarious and Murdoch is like nice Sherlock Holmes. It's a charming show, I'm only slightly embarrassed to admit it. Watching it is like realizing your grandparents have actually been interesting people this whole time.

I am a history guy, can't get enough. Whenever I see a historical plaque on a building or in a park, I have to read it then tell my friends about it: "Hey, guys, don't you think it's cool that there used to be a bread factory here? Hello? Guys?" Murdoch Mysteries is the television equivalent of these signs, a quaint, painless way to absorb old Toronto trivia. References abound to old Toronto landmarks that are no longer with us like Mcmaster University, which was founded on Bloor Street before moving to Hamilton, or a Cabbagetown filled with factories and industry. While the show would fail many an accuracy test, it's still a blast for a nerd like me to watch the detectives hang out with Emma Goldman and discuss who was responsible for the Haymarket massacre.

Harper is always looking over your shoulder. Handout via CBC/City

Harper is a fellow history geek. No wonder this show grabbed his interest. This is the government that spent one futile summer and millions of futile dollars attempting to get us to care about the War of 1812. They spent years and millions finding a lost ship in the Arctic, and when they did, hyping it like they found a pre- Room For Improvement Drake mixtape in the Arctic. This government hasn't missed a chance to ignore historical milestones and figures associated with the Liberals while attempting to create milestones and idols out of Conservative events and figures.

Harper understands the power of history. If you can control the way people think they got here, it is easier to control where they are going (shout out to George Orwell). These moves are tactical. They are meant to reduce the influence of his hated Liberals, to change our view of ourselves from peacekeepers to cold warriors, to let Russia know we'll be the ones solving Arctic mysteries thank you very much. But I also think there is an aspect of the personal in his obsession with history. Harper is a history nerd, he takes joy from it. Just look at the nerdy excitement on his face below, like he's ten year old being visited by Robert Downey Jr. dressed as Iron Man. The guy wrote a book in his spare time about the roots of professional hockey in Canada, which inspired an episode of Murdoch (It was pretty good, I learned a ton about the Stanley Cup). This is a man who loves the past, who is potentially more comfortable in it.

This is how Harper wants you to remember him. Photo Courtesy Government of Canada

Stephen Harper did a cameo on the show in Ep. 7 of the fourth season. He appears as an extra and is awful—calling his acting wooden would be an insult to any tree that's appeared on film. There's backstage footage though where he is happy and alive in a way I had never seen. There is genuine glee in his eyes as opposed to mouldy doom. Certainly, he was excited to be on the set of his fav show with his daughter but perhaps he's so excited because for a moment he gets to exist in the Canada of 1899. This is a Canada where he would be happy, especially as portrayed in the show. This is a Canada that is still firmly and proudly part of the British empire. A character in the show is praised for going off to the Boer war and fighting for the Queen. We saw ourselves as part of that noble family of the Commonwealth and England's goals were our own, the Union Jack still our flag. Canada was on the frontlines of the civilizing force for the world, and Harper would love for the country to resume that stance.

This is a simpler Canada. It's orderly with strong rule. People obey and listen to their superiors. The word "sir" is said about 50 times an episode. Literally, it's crazy and every utterance must send a shiver of pleasure down Harper's spine: If only I can make more people call me sir, he wonders. This is a white Canada. There were barely any people of colour in any of the episodes I watched. Multiculturalism is a long way off. There are no Muslims in this Canada, there is one Persian but he is Zoroastrian. In this Canada, there is nary a hijab or niqab to be seen anywhere, never mind during a citizenship ceremony. A white man commits a murder to cover up his terrible secret: he's married and has fathered two children with an Indigenous woman.

The show does not criticize this moral order. There are no episodes devoted to the people who are crushed beneath its weight, nary a mention of residential school. Not that I'm expecting a gritty reevaluation of the racist structures of this country—this is television comfort-food after all. The comforting aspect is a judgement though. The nostalgia the show traffics in, while not explicitly condoning inequality, does leave the audience with a feeling of, "Weren't these days so nice." The show reflects the values that Harper espouses, this idea that the main story of our country is economic progress, stability and normalcy (whiteness). If you fall outside the comforting narrative, then you are worth ignoring or, worse, a threat.

The threats on many of these shows are straight out of Joe Oliver's nightmares. There are radicals and anarchists protesting for a fair wage with bombs. Bombs are also used by the New Agrarians, environmentalists opposed to progress. There is a sinister secret society of female academics that engages in bizarre rituals and murder most foul, which is what I imagine Harper thinks happens at the end of any Women's Studies seminar. The show paints these movements with the same brush the Conservatives do. They are either dangerous radicals, committed to destroying a Canadian way of life, or they are useless intellectuals, blathering hot air instead of getting a job and contributing. This is how Harper treats arguments from the left, they are either dangerous or childish and laughable.

The main characters of the show are not the capitalists or elites that would most object to these radicals. The Toronto cultured elites are often portrayed as obnoxious, judgmental bores and obstacles. The main characters are outsiders: Crabtree is lower class, Murdoch is a Roman Catholic. Harper must relate to this as that is the way he has always presented himself—as an outsider, as someone who was never accepted by the entrenched powers in Ottawa. Just because his policies often help Bay Street and the elites, I'm not sure Harper is doing it to be part of the club. He, like deceased finance minister Jim Flaherty, sees himself as serving the average man. Harper is not part of a club or following any lead. He must see himself like Murdoch, a man who is smarter than everyone in the room and is ahead of his time.

Watching the show has changed my opinion of Stephen Harper. Before, I basically thought Harper was full of shit. I thought he was a cynical liar, a drone man forged in a tank in a Koch Brothers' laboratory, programmed to remove any obstacle to cheap labour and selling natural resources. I thought he despised Canada, thinking we were lazy socialists and that he took power here more out of spite and hatred than anything else. This is not what he is, though. I was wrong. For one thing, if you do not like Canada, there is no way you would like this show. This show is as Canadian as watching The Guess Who learn how to curl.

That's the scariest thing I walk away from this viewing montage: that Harper isn't the liar that I thought he was. Much like Murdoch, he isn't working for anybody (The Elites, The Americans) other than his own sense of right and wrong. The pursuits of Harper's government are not meant to turn us into America lite, they are meant to turn back the clock. To take Canada back to what Harper sees as our golden (gilded) age. When Canada was mostly a white, Protestant place with faith in the Queen, the Empire, and the market. The scariest thing about Harper is that he is far too human, and he has done what he has done to this country not out of hate but love, because sometimes we hurt the ones we love the most.

Now I'm going to go watch six more episodes—just to make sure that I'm right.

Follow Jordan Foisy on Twitter or check out his new podcast at iTunes or brothersdepaul.com.

How to Be Caitlin Moran

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Photos by Mark Harrison, courtesy of HarperCollins

Broadly is a women's interest channel coming soon from VICE. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Within five minutes of meeting Caitlin Moran, I've seen her breasts and the contents of her suitcase, and the latter is far more revealing. Fresh off a trans-Atlantic flight during which she wrote 2000 words about celebrity gossip for one of her three weekly Times of London columns, the 40-year-old best-selling British writer walks into the VICE studio waving and mid-sentence, not so much making an entrance as seeming to live a perpetual one.

She has just "smoked all sweet Gregory's fags" (Gregory is her publicist) and is wearing: red pants, gigantic red sunglasses, red Birkenstocks, green eye shadow, very thick winged eyeliner, a black top with embroidery evoking Mexico, and three engraved dog tags. I ask if they're somehow for or about her daughters. (She has two, not three, ages 12 and 14. I know this, but I pose the dumb question anyway.) "No. Fuck them," she says. "Every year I get new mottos to remember to live by." This year's are: 1) Always ride out as if meeting your nemesis ; and 2) how we turn the roofs into floors; and 3) Hold steady at the center, "which sounds like a philosophical thing, but it's just to remind me to do pelvic floor exercises."

The black top with embroidery evoking Mexico is not allowed, which Moran knows—the day before, I emailed Gregory to say we would be shooting the video portion of our interview in front of a black background, so she shouldn't wear the color if she could avoid it. Gregory forwarded me Moran's reply: "Tell them I'll do it NAKED except a snorkel!!!" She parks her carry-on (maroon, scuffy, normal) in the middle of the room and begins going through her options, moving on to the next print before my producer and I have a chance to comment on the one before. I like her, but she quickly begins to stress me out. Ultimately she decides to swap the black top for a blouse covered in wispy, watercolor-y David Bowies: Bowies in blue, red, and yellow leotards; Bowies in patterned leotards; Bowies in red, green, and orange short-sleeved leotards; Bowies in powder blue suits. Of Moran and Stardust, this much can be said: They both have a lot of outfits. To my surprise, she has actually packed a snorkel.

As for the breasts, you can see those anytime. Moran is in New York for a weeklong book tour to promote How to Build a Girl, her semi-autobiographical YA-ish novel that was published in paperback in the US at the end of June and is kind of like Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging but with more "wanking," welfare, and riot grrrl. During Moran's reading at the Strand bookstore later, she will perform what she calls her "feminist smile" in front of a packed house, but for now she eagerly asks if we'd like an (un)dress rehearsal in the studio. Sure. Moran lifts up her shirt, revealing her entire torso and indicating that usually she would have eyes drawn on her bra so that, when she pulls her stomach fat in a happy half-circle around her belly button, like so, there is a body-positive face smiling back at you.

Like much of what Moran tells me over the afternoon we spend together, this sounds over-the-top empowered and kind of like shtick. Since the success of her 2011 memoir/manifesto How to Be a Woman—a bestseller the New York Times described as "a glorious, timely stand against sexism so ingrained we barely even notice it "—the already-public figure has become a feminist icon, doing frequent interviews and promoting her outspoken opinions on issues like abortion, body image, and masturbation. This last one is a particular focus; How to Build a Girl has been described as " Portnoy's Complaint for girls." (It has sold over half a million copies in more than 16 countries since it debuted in the UK last summer, will be followed by sequels called How to Be Famous and How to Change the World, and is currently being adapted for film by Moran herself.)

Moran also writes a sitcom, Raised by Wolves, and does the two-to-three pieces a week for the Times of London, where she started columning at age 18. At that point she had dropped out of formal schooling because she was bullied and because her mother needed her help caring for her seven younger siblings (age 11); written a novel called The Chronicles of Narmo in very precious adolescent hopes of earning enough money to get her family out of subsidized housing (age 15); won the Observer's Young Reporter award (age 15); started working as a music journalist for the weekly magazine Melody Maker (age 16); and began co-hosting a short-lived television show about music called Naked City (age 17). (Here's her 1992 interview with Björk, which takes place in what looks like a batik-tapestried squat. They eat "pot noodle." Moran: "They don't have these in Iceland. Do you have these in Iceland, at all?" They don't!)

The point is: Moran's career is founded on great material, but it's still material. She writes and performs an amount that, to me, remains unfathomable—indeed, even much of this interview feels like a performance. At times Moran still talks like a precocious teenager, as if she believes much of what she does is remarkable and knows you will find it remarkable, too. When I ask her if she ever finds Twitter, where she has over 500,000 followers, tedious or annoying, she says, "I live there on my biography. It says, 'Caitlin Moran lives on Twitter.'" Actually, it says, "Writing the fuck out of shit since 1992," followed by the names of her screenwriting agent and literary agent.

Photo courtesy of HarperCollins

I go back and forth about whether I should give a shit about the shtick; it's often pretty spot-on. Besides, she knows what she's doing; in addition to her How tobooks, she's published a collection of her columns called Moranthologyand is currently working on a Moranifesto(the official title). While some of what Moran says can feel exaggerated, or at least withholding of certain key details that might make it less funny or interesting, that she has been writing the fuck out of shit for nearly 25 years is incontestable. And she does love Twitter, even when it causes her strife.

"I've certainly learned to really think about what I tweet and not be as conversational and off the cuff as I used to be," she tells me. I've asked something along the lines of, "But isn't Twitter just so annoying?"

"I've learned a lot about language over the past couple of years," she continues. "I've got some grief referring to 'trannies'—I spent all of my teenage years in drag clubs, where trannies called each other trannies. I had no idea that was a derogatory term; I issued a big apology for that."

"It's useful to get feedback as well, you know? I didn't used to get feedback. I think maybe Ernest Hemingway would've been less of a dick if he was getting feedback on Twitter going, You know what? Some of the things you do are not so nice ."

I don't know enough to speculate about Hemingway's views on social media, so I steer the conversation toward Lena Dunham. Moran has also been accused of preaching to Dunham's white feminist choir—particularly after Moran tweeted she "literally couldn't give a shit about" the lack of diversity on Girls—but her politics are not as easy as her jokey delivery and obvious pro-choice, pro-masturbation stances would suggest. When talking about the Lena Dunham debacle, she admits that it was "not [her] finest hour," though she ultimately stands by her tweet. "If you're writing stories, you can't always be political," Moran says. "If Lena Dunham wants to write a show about spoiled white girls in New York because that's her experience, that's what she knows about, [and] those are the jokes that she feels comfortable making, then [she] can do that. We can't say that you're not allowed to simply talk about your personal experience. If she's going around saying racist things or being horrible to people, that's another conversation, but to say that every single piece of art must be representative of everybody is illogical. We've never made art like that; we never can."

Moran is also anti–strip club, anti–bikini wax, and anti–empowerment for empowerment's sake—none of which is particularly trendy right now. "To use feminism as a weapon, to castigate women [as antifeminist] when they are trying to do something or achieve something, is totally antithetical to my belief in feminism," she tells me. "Similarly, though, you can't do everything and then go, 'I'm doing it because I'm a feminist. I'm really drunk because I'm a feminist!' No, you're really drunk because you drank a lot of sangria, love; it's nothing to do with the struggle." She then cites an Onion article I believe to be this one.

As far as her own "personal experience" goes, it's not as if Moran has known no hardship. She grew up very poor, on a council estate in the English Midlands, sharing a makeshift bed on the floor with one of her younger siblings; she celebrated her 13th birthday with a "cake" made out of a baguette with Philadelphia cream cheese in the middle; to accuse her of perpetuating a white, middle-class narrative is a little rich. She has also, as a chapter heading in How to Be a Woman proclaims, "experience[d] some sexism!" In 1994 the Independent ran a profile of the 19-year-old Moran by Hunter Davies with the headline "Atrocious mess, precocious mind: Meet Caitlin Moran, newspaper columnist, television presenter, novelist, screenwriter, pop music pundit . . . and typical teenage slob." Davies goes on to describe her as "Not as plump as she looks on television, and much nicer, much funnier," which perhaps is credit to the feminist movement she has both benefited and benefited from: A mainstream newspaper has little chance of getting away with a comment like that today.

While internationally Moran is first associated with mainstream feminism because of the success of How to Be a Woman—the overarching point of which can be encapsulated in chapter four, where Moran tells both male and female readers to stand on a chair and declare, "I AM A FEMINIST!"—she is also a long-time advocate of the explicitly unacademic mainstream, which is another thing I find grating but can't really argue with. "There's no point in having a very pure, over-intellectualized feminism," she says. "There are some academics who just want feminism to be for them[selves] and their friends. They're just like, 'If everybody's talking about feminism, and everybody knows these jobs and these concepts, what do we do?' It's defensiveness in the same way there was in Britain in the 1980s, when the miners were having their coal mines closed down. I understand that defensiveness if you see your job is dying. It doesn't mean you're right, though."

Another times-have-changed moment in the 1994 Independent profile comes when Davies is discussing pop culture, which has been Moran's beat since she started writing at age 17. "At the ancient age of 19," Davies writes, "it seems surprising that [Moran] is still so obsessed by pop music, when she's seen so much, done so much—and, anyway, pop music is dead." Yeah, right. One of the less obvious achievements of How to Be a Woman is how it represents the sheer breadth of what a lot of people like. Moran name-drops a lot of the obvious proof that pop music did not die in 1994—Lady Gaga, "the 'Single Ladies' dance," etc.—but she also paints a pretty diverse portrait of the popular imagination in semi-recent history. A random selection of references: Dorothy Parker, Cagney and Lacey, "voluminously lipped sex-minx du jour Scarlett Johansson," Scarlett O'Hara, Working Girl, Urban Outfitters, the Illuminati, John Mayer (coincidence?), The Chronicles of Narnia , The Adams Family [sic], Blur, Graham Coxon from Blur (she spills a whiskey and Coke on him), Jennifer Lopez, Picasso's Guernica, Obama, Paula Abdul, the Slits, Chevy Chase in Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al" video (she is in love with him), Doc Martens (often), Kate Winslet, Crowded House, Lou Reed, The Grapes of Wrath, Care Bears.

But for all her "obsession," Moran is no poptimist, resoundingly positive on anything associated with something she likes. As in her feminism, she advocates a more common-sense approach. We start talking about the Rihanna video.

"I think Rihanna might have liquidized all of her assets and just put them into angry think pieces on the internet," Moran says. "I think the key thing to do is just [to] become amused by it and look at the slight logical inconsistencies. First of all, what happened to the dog? Secondly, it's her accountant that's embezzled all the money, so why is his wife being tortured?" (Well, yes, I think that is maybe perhaps the—) "Third, at the end of it, where she's going, The accountant stole all my money—that is why I've kidnapped his wife and I am torturing her. Are you sure he stole all your money? Because I've just seen you on a yacht throwing an iPhone 6 up in the air and shooting it with a gun. Can we just go through your [purse] and just check that maybe you didn't spunk quite a lot of it away yourself, before you start with the murders?"

Photo courtesy of HarperCollins

At the Strand reading, none of this controversy is apparent, though the event is packed with the controversially expected: white millennials in vintage-inspired dresses and Converse. Moran performs the feminist smile, calls it part of her standup routine, and says she suggested it for the cover of How to Be a Woman, but for some reason her publisher didn't go for it. Applause. In a moment that sharply contrasts the in-your-face confidence with which she performs the feminist smile, Moran ends her appearance with a throwaway, "So that's my tits, everyone, sorry" and veers off the makeshift stage. Maybe it's a remnant of the friendless, 182-pound, "femi-none" 13-year-old being chased by older male bullies who appears at the beginning of How to Be a Woman. Regardless, there's more applause. Kate Bush comes on over the speakers, a nod to Moran's taste and, I assume, Britishness.

Moran announces she will stick around to sign books. While most readings see a dramatic exodus at this point in the evening, hardly anyone here moves. A line system is established: Each row will snake around the Strand's bookcases as it is called to the front. Moran is spending several minutes with every fan, greeting each woman with a hug, sometimes a kiss on the cheek, and something very genuine, to the effect of "Hello beautiful!" If a selfie is requested, it is always granted. Women in the back pull their books out of their bags to settle in for the wait.

Although I end up spending over five hours with or around Moran, how she manages to do so much remains mysterious to me. Before I go in for my own farewell, I see her eyes are red and tired; she has also made repeated joke-calls for wine, once flinging herself on the table in mock desperation. But she does not waver, seem distracted, or start cutting the meet-and-greets short. As I'm lurking around the front of the line in hopes of sneaking a goodbye, I hear Moran ask a fan about her job. "That's her thing," her American editor at Harper, Jennifer Barth, who's there for the reading, tells me. She notes that at least their dinner reservation isn't for another hour and fifteen minutes, and I honestly don't know if they'll make it. "That's why they love her. It's all authentic."

Lauren Oyler is an editor at Broadly. Follow her on Twitter.

What US Federal Inmates Think of ​President Obama's Plan to Visit a Prison Today

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More on prisons:
Coal Ash May Be Making Pennsylvania Inmates Sick, and Now They're Fighting to Shut Their Prison Down
What Happens When You Build a Town Around a Prison?
How a Group of Female Inmates Won the Right to Live with Their Children

When it was announced on Friday that President Obama will be visiting the El Reno federal prison in Oklahoma this week—an occasion that will be filmed for a VICE HBO special on criminal justice—I couldn't help thinking of the time I spent in that very same facility more than 20 years ago.

It was 1993, and El Reno—a medium-security prison—was being used as a transit hub for inmates being shipped around the country. I can't even fathom how a presidential visit might have been received back then, when the war on drugs was in full swing and no one with any power seemed to care all that much about people behind bars. But interviews with inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Terre Haute, Indiana—another medium-security prison—suggest the planned visit is already making waves.

"I am not gonna lie; I went up to my room and cried," Steven Tyrone Johnson, a nonviolent crack cocaine offender serving life without parole, said about hearing the news. "I feel that after twenty years in these prisons, the good Lord brought us Barack Obama to set things right."

The mandatory-minimum sentencing scheme is what put Johnson in this lifelong fix, and he believes once US Pardon Attorney Deborah Leff receives his clemency petition, it's only be a matter of time before he gets out.

"I've done everything right: worked in the prison factory, remained clear conduct, stayed close to my lord and savior, Jesus Christ," Johnson says. "I believe this is almost over." President Obama having already announced 46 commutations on Monday, and with rumors of more to come, Johnson isn't exactly delusional.

Louis Younger, another prisoner serving life without the possibility of release for a nonviolent drug crime, says he can't believe the president is going into the belly of the beast himself.

"Ever since Obama has taken office I've been waiting for this day to come," Younger tells VICE. "I swear I knew that he would end up visiting a prison; I just didn't know which one. I only wish he would have came here, so I could talk to him."

If Younger could say just one thing to Obama, it would be, "Please sir, please: There are less than 3,500 guys in federal prison serving life sentences for nonviolent drug crimes. Can't you please just do one blanket commutation and reduce all of our sentences to 20 years? Just think of how many guys might be stuck in prison for the rest of our lives with drug offenses if you pick and chose."

Strong forces are at play when it comes to sentencing and clemency reform. The tide and mood of the country is changing—Americans are sick of being incarceration nation, and President Obama is taking a new course of action. Yet it's hard to fathom that this is the first time a sitting president will actually visit a federal prison. When I was in, I saw the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) director, judges, congressmen, regional directors, and law enforcement officials, but never a president.

For those incarcerated, Obama's historic gesture offers tremendous hope.

"I would like to compliment president Obama's on his unprecedented visit to El Reno, to obtain an up-close and in-depth view of life inside prison," George DeLuca, a 74-year-old former NYPD officer convicted in 1995 of nonviolent drug conspiracy and sentenced to life without the chance of parole, tells VICE. "This comes at a time when this country needs such honesty and compassion. Because in the past, presidents and members of Congress have never stepped up and taken responsibility for past poor decisions, such as the implementation of mandatory minimums that have had such devastating results not just on inmates but on their families and loved ones as well."


Watch our documentary on a former inmate trying to get his life back:


DeLuca adds that he hopes President Obama will seriously consider commuting the sentences of everyone serving life without parole in one sweeping executive order.

"This way he can concentrate on helping correct the unjust [sentences handed] to so many others, specifically the gun offenders," the former cop argues. "The feds came down hard on gun offenders when they enacted the mandatory minimums. The sentences have been outrageous."

Charles Scott knows that all too well. A first-time offender serving 51 and a half years for multiple gun crimes, he hopes President Obama will not just look at helping nonviolent offenders, but also at first-time criminals who were painted as murderers, terrorists, and career maniacs.

"My belief is that laws are made to reform and rehabilitate and enhance our societies. Stacking gun crimes does just the opposite,"Scott tells VICE.

Then there's people like Nathan Mikulak, who's tagged in the federal system as an Armed Career Criminal (ACC). He thinks his kind deserve a fresh look, too.

"The Supreme Court just ruled that a section of the ACC is unconstitutional," Mikulak tells VICE. "The problem is the decision is not retroactive, which means that it won't affect thousands of guys like me. I know Obama can't fix everything, but I really hope his sole focus isn't just on helping drug offenders."

Another federal prisoner named Kenneth Choice says he's simply overjoyed that our first African-American president is coming to federal prison. As a black man serving a life sentence for a first-time drug offense, he believes that once Obama actually sees all of the African americans behind bars, he will step up the commutation process.

"Obama once said that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin," Choice says. "Well, there's a whole lotta peoples in here who look like Trayvon, his uncle, his daddy and all his relatives. We are your people Obama—we all look like Trayvon. I just hope you take after your hero Abraham Lincoln and free us like the slaves that the mandatory minimum laws have made us."

No matter what happens, prisoners like Steven Johnson believe President Obama's visit will expedite the change that so many federal inmates have been clamoring for.

"I ain't never see so many happy prisoners in the 20 years that I've been in here," Johnson says. "Thank you President Obama. Thank you for all that you are doing for your country, our people, and this criminal justice system. Before you came, along many of us was ready to call it quits."

Inside the belly of the beast, prisoners are experiencing a flurry of emotion right now: optimism to be sure, but also some anger, jealousy, and resentment at those catching a break.

"You got to be a damn near saint to get the pardon," says a prisoner we'll call Dre from Chester, Pennsylvania, who's doing life for drug crimes and murder at the high-security US Penitentiary, Hazelton in West Virginia. "Catching [a] write-up is so easy because most of the time the officer lied and fabricated things on people for whatever reason."

Still, I suspect the buzz on most compounds right now is simply magical, as prisoners make plans and celebrate with their families and loved ones at the very thought that they might come home early. Only 46 people got an accelerated release date Monday, but where there were 46, there can be more.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

Man Convicted in Terror Plot in Canada Is 'Delusional,' Doctor Testifies

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Man Convicted in Terror Plot in Canada Is 'Delusional,' Doctor Testifies

We Asked a Space Doctor How We'll Survive Deep Space Travel

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We Asked a Space Doctor How We'll Survive Deep Space Travel

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Watch a Roomful of People Cheer for Caitlyn Jenner at Last Night's ESPYs

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Last night, Caitlyn Jenner's acceptance speech for the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the ESPYs was sandwiched between two standing ovations. And for good reason. Over the course of ten minutes, the former Olympian graciously deflected attention away from herself and turned it toward two transgender teenagers: Mercedes Williamson, who was murdered in June, and Sam Taub, who killed himself in April. The speech cemented Jenner's place as a much-needed role model for LGBT youth and as a liaison between the trans community and Middle America.

The award is named after a pioneering black tennis player who worked to educate the world about HIV after contracting it during a blood transfusion. He died in 1993, and starting that year, the eponymous honor has been given to legendary athletes like Muhammad Ali, as well as civil rights figures like Nelson Mandela. Oftentimes its given to athletes who help draw attention to civil rights issues, like Billie Jean King, Michael Sam (last year's honoree), and now Jenner.

In the speech, Jenner described her whole coming-out process as a very lonely one lacking in role models. "Well the real truth is that just before a few months ago, I had never met anybody else who was trans—who was like me," she said. "I had never met a trans person, never."

She went on:

You know, it is an honor to have the word "courage" associated with my life, but on this night another word comes to mind, and that is "fortunate." I owe a lot to sports. It's showed me the world. It's given me an identity. If someone wanted to bully me, well you know what, I was the MVP of the football team—that just wasn't going to be a problem. And the same goes tonight. If you want to call me names, make jokes, doubt my intentions, go ahead. Because the reality is, I can take it. But for the thousands of kids out there coming to terms with being true to who they are, they shouldn't have to take it.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Related: The Bureaucracy of Gender Transitioning

An Ex-MI5 Agent Says the UK's Secret Service Considered 'Blacking Up' to Infiltrate Mosques

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This is where spies live. Photo via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It's always fun when an ex-spy breaks cover and tells us spy things, isn't it? Such fun. Laser pens! Derring-do! Covert operations! Boat chases! If you did not dream of being a spy as a child, you did not truly have a childhood. If you have not spent a breaktime secretly pursuing one of your friends and speaking covertly into the lapel of your winter coat, you have not truly lived. Spies are just so fucking cool. Oh, no, wait, hang on—

An ex-spy says MI5 has so few Muslim officers that it considered 'blacking up' agents


The Independent, today, July 16, the Year of Our Lord 2015

Ah, no, that's a shame: says here the UK's spies are actually gigantic morons, whirling their arms blindly into a cocktail waiter at the swanky party, getting Martini all down their tuxedo, asking someone to remind them of the rules at a poker game, thinking brownface is a legitimate and subtle method of subterfuge. That is a shame. That truly makes me worry for the security of, like, the entire UK, and each and every one of us, and just suddenly very aware of the general concept and threat of terror, seeing as our main defense against it thinks that the best way of solving the sticky problem of infiltrating suspected Islamic terror units in the UK is with bad fancy dress. Our main defense against terror is literally a scene from Team America: World Police. Our main defense against terror watched Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice and went: yeah, cool, nice idea, good.

Trending on NOISEY: Were There Any Good Remixes For Summer, Or What?

Anyway the grass responsible for telling us all this is "Robert Acott," the codename of a former MI5 operative who spoke to Newsnight indicting the service after being drummed out following a breakdown.

Other highlights from the interview include him being sad when IRA suspect Dermot O'Neill was shot because he dressed fancy ("I actually felt a bit sad for him. Even though he was a terrorist—he had a lock up in Hornsey with four crate bombs, Kalashnikovs, pistols... but other than that, he was a normal bloke. He was quite fashion conscious. Always had Levi 501 jeans.") and that Abu Qatada's codename was "Dinosaur Egg," but the main bit was how higher ups at the Service intended to deal with the pesky lack of diversity in the force fucking up their attempts to infiltrate UK mosques post-9/11.

"We weren't used to dealing with the way they acted," Acott told Newsnight. "The good thing about following Irish targets was that they would meet in places like pubs, which you could go into. The Islamic targets would meet either round each other's houses or in mosques or whatever. You can't get away with going in there. And also they would live in mostly ethnic areas. Quite often you would find the only white people in the streets were surveillance officers."

How would you deal with that situation? If you said "send a spy intern down to Circus Circus in London Bridge with a pocketful of petty cash and the instruction 'get some of that brown face paint and some plastic pirate scimitars'": congratulations, you just passed spy school. Because that's what happened. With, as Acott estimated, there only being literally one Muslim surveillance officer on the force, one MI5 team leader suggested—and actually tried out, on a training exercise—blacking up as a method of infiltration. Just imagining a load of MI5 opps playing paintball in blackface. Tea towel turbans. Extremely problematic throat singing. Someone gets paint in the eyes and needs to go to the hospital.

Anyway, in short: Rachel Dolezal wasn't some cartoonish privilege-as-a-person strawman, she was actually the inspiration for some of the most sophisticated counter-terrorism operations of modern times. Further: the UK is doomed, our spies are shit.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

'Call Me Matt'—Life As a Transgender High School Athlete

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'Call Me Matt'—Life As a Transgender High School Athlete

Sleeping with the Devil

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In one generation the Indigenous people of Fort McKay First Nation have tenuously embraced the destruction of their traditional land as they have transitioned from a hunting and gathering way of life to an economy based on oil extraction.

On the Athabasca river in Northern Alberta, the Cree, Dene, and Métis people were once the historic backbone of Canada's fur trade. Today, the Hudson's Bay Company is only a memory, replaced by the likes of Syncrude, Shell, Imperial Oil and Suncor.

The latter was once called the Great Canadian Oil Sands and has been exploiting the wealth of the region for decades. On June 6, 1970, one of their pipelines ruptured and spilled 19,000 barrels of oil into the river, just 30 kilometres upstream of where the people of Fort McKay fished to feed their families.

Today, Fort McKay First Nation (pop. 800) is surrounded by tar sands developments, collectively the largest industrial operation in the world. With the collapse of the fur trade and a growing inability to live off the increasingly polluted land, they were faced with a choice; work for the oil companies or fall into a welfare economy that plagues reserves across Canada.

"Sleeping with the Devil" examines the transitory state of the community of Fort McKay. Prospering within a system that is destroying the very land that is at the heart of their identity, they must negotiate an inner conflict as their values, health, and culture are decimated in return for a standard of living most Canadians take for granted.

This Is What It's Really Like to Be a Refugee in Britain Today

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The story of Emad, a Syrian refugee living in the UK,either highlights a creaking immigration system, or a man with extraordinarily bad luck. It begins when the university he was attending in the UK got shut down, meaning he couldn't finish his degree. Then, Emad's passport was lost by the government, meaning that not only did he lose his job, he also couldn't leave the country to see his fiancée. This led to the breakdown of his relationship and left him stranded in the UK.

His father was a vocal opponent of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and has been in prison since Emad was a teenager. When his mother was denied entry to the country when they applied through the official channels—despite the fact she had fled from Syria to Jordan after being terrorized by pro-Assad thugs—she was beaten up in the neighboring state for her nationality, and Emad—her sole child—is her only close relative still living. After his mother finally made it to the UK, his girlfriend broke up with him as her family didn't approve, and he tried to take an overdose of painkillers.

Emad has spent the last decade in the UK, and lives in the World's End estate in Chelsea. For legal reasons, VICE cannot publish his full name.

His mother, Nawal, embarked on a terrifying journey from Jordan to Turkey to Italy, and then across mainland Europe. Diabetic and middle-aged, she spent two weeks in the blistering sun on a series of rickety boats with practically no food and a plastic box for a toilet. After several attempts with Emad to get across the border at Calais, she finally officially arrived in the UK in September 2014.

Now 39, Emad has spent over £15,000 [$23,000] getting Nawal to Britain, working illegally for £50 [$78] a day in a second-hand car shop for a while and racking up massive credit card bills. He is now £9,000 [$14,000] in debt and lives off £1 [$1.50] portions of Chicken Cottage. Presumably, this is what people mean when they talk about "the gravy train" of the British Welfare system. We spoke to Emad to find out what life's like for him now.

VICE: Hi, Emad. What's your impression of the way the media portrays the refugee crisis?
Emad: I haven't been reading anything in the media, to be honest—I've kind of had a really hard time, so I'm getting myself fixed, and giving myself a holiday.

You spent quite a lot of time in Calais trying to get across with your mother, Nawal. How long were you there for?
Nearly eight days.

What it was it like?
When we arrived in Calais the first time, we started trying to get across legally—to get to the border and apply for asylum. But I knew 100 percent they wouldn't let us in, because if they opened the door for us, everyone would do the same. I tried my best to do it legally. We arrived at Calais, waited, and tried to get across the Channel a few times, but we weren't lucky.

So what did you do?
We went to Holland, we were nearly at the police station when I got a call—and I was trying to apply for asylum for my mother in Holland, and my solicitor said under rules of regulation 3, I could bring her here to the UK. They said it might take a while, it might cost a lot of money, it might go to court... but my only option was to get her here straight away, whatever it costs. I'm the only person in life she has.

So we went back to Calais, and it's really horrible. First of all, there are too many people in Calais and everything is expensive. It's crowded. Because my mother is really ill, she's an old woman—she's now 59—she can't sleep on the road like other people. Lots of people are living in tents, some in an abandoned beer factory and they burn wood for heat. I've seen a lot of things.

Do you think government immigration rules are putting people into the hands of people smugglers?
Exactly. Western money is going toward these people. In my case, I'm my mother's sponsor. I have my own flat so she'd be staying with me, and I'm responsible for her expenses for five years. So she wouldn't get any benefits or anything. But they still refused her when we applied. The money I was going to spend would have been legal, but they forced me to do it illegally.

You had to deal with some menacing people smugglers—one of them even claimed he had links to ISIS, although there was no evidence to support this. How did you feel?
It was really terrifying. All of these people are liars and they're just using you—they just want your money, not to help you. They start out saying it will cost you £100 [$150]. Then it becomes £1,000 [$1,500], £1,500 [$2,350]. For a phone call they want £1,000 [$1,500]. Just for a call. People who want to bring our family over are not rich—I can hardly survive. How I got that money, I have no idea. These people are more than evil.

Are you angry that the Home Office lost your passport?
When I lost my passport, I lost everything. I was in a job, but without a passport... you can't get any kind of employment without it. I lost my fiancée. At the end, you find yourself with nothing.

Do you do any kind of work now?
Nothing, no. I'm very bored, it feels like wasting time in my life.

How do you fill your time?
Because I have certain disabilities, I sleep, visit friends, come back here. I'm fit to get out of the house. But now I'm dealing with my mother's health so I take her from doctor to doctor to the hospital.


Related: Freezing and Fighting for Aid: Syrian Refugees in Lebanon


Has your mother experienced much prejudice over here?
She can't believe she lives in the UK now, the way they treat her in the hospital, the roads, the police when she came over at Dover, she was saying: "Those police, they were unbelievable." One policewoman saw my mother had trouble with her leg, so she lay down and removed her shoes with her hands. The British are like this. She says she is treated like a proper human. However, since we moved here we have some problems with someone targeting us. We don't know if it's a coincidence, but since she moved in, we have some rubbish thrown at the door and someone—excuse my language—peeing at the door. A few times, it's happened. We can't tell the police every time it happens—I give up.

Is your mom still trying to set you up with women?
All the time. Everywhere! I would like to get married to someone I know, but if we're going shopping, she'll run up to women wearing hijab, saying: "Are you married? Do you have family in the UK?" She thinks all women in hijab are Syrian.

After everything you've been through, are you feeling more optimistic?
To be honest, I can sleep properly now, I can see my friends, but I'm not fully happy because there's still some things missing in my life. In general though I'm 80-90 percent happier. Sometimes I get angry because I spent a lot of money and I'm in debt, and I feel I wasted these years. But in the end I worked hard and got my mother here and that's what makes me happy.

For more stories of how people from across the globe came to settle in the UK, and for Emad's full story, buy Finding Home: Real Stories of Migrant Britain by Emily Dugan on Amazon.

You Will Change: Magnum Photographer Larry Towell Has Advice for Young Photojournalists

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We asked one of our favourite photographers, Aaron Vincent Elkaim (featured in the Canadian VICE Photo Issue), to interview award-winning photographer, Magnum Photos member, and co-curator of VICE's Annual Photo Show Larry Towell. This is what happened.

To a young Canadian photojournalist like myself, Larry Towell has always been sort of a legend. He was the first Canadian member of the prestigious Magnum Photos, an agency that rings through the halls of history. His work is about land, landlessness, and identity and he has covered stories of injustice and displacement around the world, from El Salvador to Palestine and beyond, often spending years developing his projects. He has published 13 books and lives on a farm in southern Ontario, which was the focus of a personal book project titled The World From My Front Porch documenting his life, family and the land that has defined his own identity. The farm, with its built-in darkroom, is a legend in itself.

If you know who Larry Towell is, you also probably know what he looks like. He always wears a signature straw hat and suspenders, and he fits the archetype of the peaceful country man who respects tradition and shies away from technology, not so unlike the Mennonites he photographed for 10 years. When I went to interview Towell, I was as much interested in him as I was about his work and his wisdom. As we conversed I found an inspiring humility. Towell doesn't like talking about himself—his work is his focus, and he feels a strong duty to the people and the stories he tells. It's clear that he doesn't want his own story to get in the way of his life's work and purpose. In a time when social media and celebrity culture have nurtured the ego to the point of being grotesque, humility such as his has become a rare quality. It's part of another time.

Portrait of Larry at home in rural Ontario. By Aaron Vincent Elkaim.

Aaron Vincent Elkaim: So how did you get into photography?
Larry Towell: When I was young, I studied visual arts. As a visual arts student you're told that you're special and that you have something to say by virtue of being an artist, and I learned that it's not true. When I went to Central America for the first time in the early '80s, there was a war going on and I realized as an artist I had nothing to say whatsoever because I hadn't even lived long enough to know anything. What I did discover was that I wanted to see what other people had to say and interpret their lives, record their stories, because their stories were far beyond mine both in terms of interest and meaning. This was at the time that the US was covertly funding the Contra in Nicaragua, the people had successfully overthrown the American backed dictatorship. The old National Guard of the Somoza Dictatorship had fled to Honduras where the CIA began to train them to try to overthrow the revolution in Nicaragua.

So I interviewed the family members and victims of the Contra in Nicaragua, which were mostly civilians... that started my trip. I met people who had their legs blown off by land mines provided by the US. We're talking about an impoverished country with a population smaller than Toronto fighting the largest superpower on earth, and I thought that was the story... and it was. It started from there. The work became a book called Somozas Last Stand, [published by] a small Canadian press. That led me to work in Guatemala where the CIA had overthrown the democratically-elected Arbenz Government in 1954. Since then, 100,000 Mayan Indians have been killed, something that wasn't even in our news. 40,000 people had disappeared, and people are still being exhumed from their shallow graves to this day. So I began to interview the relatives and I thought this is where I want to be this is what I want to hear—these are the stories that matter.

What kind of work were you producing and how were you getting it out there?
At the time I was doing writing, poetry—very bad poetry—and taking pictures. I was trying to survive, I had a wife and child, I was teaching folk music at night school. I wasn't publishing very much, a little bit here and there and that's why I called Magnum. I didn't know much about them, but I knew they were an agency and I hoped they could sell my pictures. So I sent them my work and they took me in. That's when I decided to be a photographer.


EL SALVADOR. San Salvador. 1991. A daughter comforts her mother who passed out while grieving at the grave of her son who was killed by government death squads. Some 70,000 persons died in the 12-year civil war. Photo by Larry Towell / Magnum Photos.

How important was Magnum in your development as a photographer?
Very important. Magnum was a community, I realized when I got in what Magnum was. I don't think they realized I wasn't a committed photographer yet. It provided a target, and it provided a huge challenge. Once I found out who Robert Capa was and Cartier Bresson, Susan Meiselas, Joseph Koudelka, Eugene Richards, I was like, who the freak am I? So I went to work as a photographer. And I continued to work in Central America, then Palestine and around the world in areas of conflict.

The main thing was to be challenged. In those days, there was no Facebook and Instagram—there was just you and your camera and the person you were with who was your subject. You weren't appealing to this audience out there, fans and all this bullshit that contemporary photographers unfortunately have to put up with. Some of them do very well at it, unfortunately.

So I learned to work alone—in those days it was a solitary profession. I fed my work through Magnum, but I also learned a lot from the photographers. I would shuffle my work and show it to different photographers and eventually it helped my editing process and my photography. In the arts in general, we are only as good as the people who come before us. We may think we're natural born but it's not true, it's all a lie. We learn as we go along and we owe a lot to the people who come before us.

Tell me about your photographic process. Do you often work on multiple projects at once?
Right now I'm working on four books or so. I try to work on a least two or three simultaneously. When I was in El Salvador, I was about midway through my Mennonite project and I was just beginning Palestine. That way I could take a trip for three weeks, edit, go back to where I came from or go somewhere else. As I'm editing and forming a train of thought, when I go back I know what I want to do, I know what I need, I know what to go for—I'm not just stabbing in the dark with individual pictures. And, of course, if you just work on one thing you burn out, you lose interest. So if I move from project to project, it's fresh again, because the environment is changing and the story is evolving when you're gone.

San Salvador. 1989. A wounded civilian woman recovers with her child after government straffing of civilian neighbourhoods from the air. Photo by Larry Towell / Magnum Photos.

You've worked on some stories that must be quite emotionally difficult. How does your work affect you as an individual?
I don't know? My wife tells me I have PTSD, but I know I don't... just kidding. Everybody asks that question, how does it affect you? A photojournalist's job is to monitor power. That doesn't mean you have to do it, but if you're not then you're not doing your job. I don't see it as The Bang Bang Club, but more asking: what's really going on here?

I just did this project on Afghanistan, photographing between 2008-2011, some of the time imbedded, and the problem is, you can never photograph what's going on. What's going on is in Washington, or other places in the world. Not what they are showing you, that's not what's going on, that's just the ramifications, you really cannot photograph power in certain situations. So I was trying to analyze what was going on outside of the range of the camera and I pursued that rather than, "Where is the next shot going to come from and how can I get there?" and I think that is what our job should be.

I heard you say that you try to work within the story, that you try to become part of it so you can truly understand it. Getting so close, that must affect you?
First of all, I can say I was always very honoured to be with the people I was with. If you're standing in front of the National Palace in Guatemala City with barefoot Mayan Indians whose relatives have been killed, and they are being photographed by the paramilitary and they know when they get back to their villages they could be killed, that's an honour. It's just an honour to be with those people. And I find very often that the subjects are very inspirational people. I think it's a healthy thing.

What drives your work?

These stories aren't getting out. Especially with the collapse of the media. So I think it's important to go and show people things that a) they don't know about; and b) they don't want to see; and c) are too challenging. As opposed to say social networks in this day and age when everything is about yourself—the degrading of photography as far as I'm concerned. It's aloof and non-professional. It's a different world now.

Do you find it difficult to publish with integrity in the modern age.

I think it's easier to maintain your integrity with mainstream media than with today's social networking environment. 'Cause at least the mainstream media is content oriented. Whereas pop-culture media and social media is often celebrity.

I think the work speaks for itself, I think it will always speak for itself. If the intent is right, it will find an audience—maybe small, I don't know if that's bad. And you never know if you're involved in a struggle, social or political. You never know what effect you're going to have. It's sort of like the gears of a clock, one little gear pushing against another little gear pushing against another little gear and eventually the whole clock starts to work but you may be pushing one little gear, and part of the whole process and not even realizing it. So you just don't know. You can't change the world but you can be part of the process for change, and sometimes you don't even know it.

ISRAEL. Shati, Gaza. 1993. Teenagers waiting for patroling Israeli soldiers to pass by an alley during the wake of Ahmed Salem Deep ELHAPAT, a 21-year-old activist killed on May 3 by Israeli security forces. Photo by Larry Towell / Magnum Photos.

I really agree with this philosophy because otherwise, how do you maintain your belief in what you do? You can't expect to see the ramifications of the work you do in terms of change, but that change might happen in any number of ways that you're associated with, but might never actually realize.

First of all, you will see change immediately, but the change will be you. You will change. That's the first step. Beyond that, the bad guys will never tell you that you affected them. Sometimes change takes generations. The main thing is to be on the right side, and if you're not on the right side... then you're probably going to make a lot of money. But If you believe you have to change the world with your work, which is a very pretentious belief, then if you don't change the world then you failed. But that's the only way to look at it. The only thing that makes sense, so you have to be governed by an inner clock, an integrity. I think that's what we should be doing. We lose it sometimes—I know lots of photographers who come in as journalists and go out as corporate advertising photographers making rather than $400 a day $15,000 a day. I know lots of those people.

Can you find a balance between the two?

Depends. Some people can, some people can't. I don't think I could. I do know people who walk the line in both worlds and I know people who don't. I can't speak for everybody. But I don't do corporate work as a matter of personal policy.

I know you play around quite a bit with multimedia, can you tell me about that a bit.

Play around is the word I guess. When the digital recorder was invented, I started carrying it and recording sound, because I'm a musician and I do audio recordings and music, and when video cameras became hi-definition and small, I started shooting video while i was recording sound. [I do that] almost all the time now. I'm actually hoping to make a film from the many many hours of footage I have from just my travels that I've never used for anything. Usually I write songs, and get some musicians together and make a record, which creates part of the soundtrack for multimedia pieces I've done.

I use it to challenge myself, I use it to reinvest myself. And it has certain capabilities, but a still photographer isn't necessarily going to be a good videographer, and a still photographer isn't necessarily a good songwriter either. But the music is something I've done all my life so it's not new to me. It was just displaced for a while. And multimedia, I think only because it's possible to do so nowadays that I do it, and everybody does it for that reason. But is it good or not? I don't know. Is it good enough? I don't know. It's more of a personal fulfilment and challenge. But at schools and universities, you meet students who are studying still photography and they are learning video editing simultaneously. It's part of the language today and there is so much of it, I don't know where it's going to find a home. So many pictures out there, so much video out there, it's non-stop. And people haven't really found their audience, that's the problem. Finding your audience so you know who you're talking to at least.


USA. NYC. 9/11/2001. A dazed man picks up a paper that was blown out of the towers after the attack of the World Trade Center, and begins to read it. Photo by Larry Towell / Magnum Photos.

As an emerging photographer, the reality today is that you must fund your own book. No publisher is going to take that risk on someone who is unproven. What are your thoughts on paying for your own book publishing/printing?

You shouldn't, it's vanity press. Although if you raise money together, with the help of the publisher, that is a different story... then it's a partnership. But don't pay with your own money, that's vanity press and it has always been around. Self publishing is also a little different, if you have an audience you can generate revenue by selling the books yourself.

How important is it to get the first book out?

It's very important for you morale, but the content won't be very good. The first book is always bad. At the time, you think it's great. My first books, I won't even show them to anybody. I've got boxes of them downstairs. I won't even take them out.

It's a process. Each one gets better, you get better at it, you become a better designer, you become a better photographer, or you become a better storyteller, become a better craftsman at your own work.

You have to be self motivated and you have to be able to take a lot of rejection. You have to be able to enjoy rejection until rejection becomes so wonderful that you just can't wait to get another rejection so that you can get back to the grindstone so you can get more rejection.

Anything else you would like to add Larry, any final words of wisdom?

I wish I had some wisdom... I guess the main thing is, you've got to get out of bed in the morning, you've got to get on a plane. Somehow, you have to find how to get somewhere and you have to be with the people you're with. That's all you can do. And not everybody is going to survive, let's face it. There are two things everyone is in the world: one of them is a photographer and one of them is a poet.

To see more of Larry's photos check out his website or his work with Magnum Photos. To see the photos he selected for our annual Photo Show, including the ones from Aaron, find out more here.

Here's What the Official Pokémon Symphony Sounds Like

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Here's What the Official Pokémon Symphony Sounds Like

'VICE' on HBO Just Got Nominated for Another Emmy

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Shane Smith. Photo via VICE on HBO

In the third season of VICE on HBO, which ended last month, our team of globe-trotting correspondents reported on everything from sexual assault on America's college campuses to the rise of dangerous legal highs in America to the Ebola epidemic. We think this is our best work yet, not to mention some pretty damn fine TV, and apparently some people agree—it's been nominated for a 2015 Emmy in the Outstanding Informational Series or Special category, the same award the show won last year.

We're extremely proud of Shane Smith, BJ Levin, Jonah Kaplan, Timothy Clancy, Ben Anderson, Eddy Morretti, and all the other producers, correspondents, camerapeople, and editors who put in work on the show. Well done, guys!

The new season of VICE may have ended, but you can still watch episodes on HBO's new online streaming service, HBO Now.

VICE Vs Video Games: Video Games Are Finally, Finally Including More Female Heroes

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An image from Guerrilla Games' forthcoming 'Horizon: Zero Dawn,' in which you play as the female hunter, Aloy.

Back in 2013, Gamespot (alongside other gaming sites) published news detailing how Dontnod Entertainment's creative director, Jean-Max Moris, had told Penny Arcade that while trying to secure funding for their first game, Remember Me, they had been faced with strong words from some publishers regarding their decision to feature a female protagonist.

According to Moris, there were a few publishers that told his Parisian studio: "We don't want to publish it because that's not going to succeed. You can't have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that." Despite these setbacks, Remember Me was released, with Capcom picking it up and releasing it as a multi-platform title in the summer of 2013. Its sales were disappointing, though, and at the start of 2014 the future of Dontnod was looking bleak. One can imagine those naysayers, silently mouthing from the other side of their computer screens: "Told you so."

A screenshot from 'Life Is Strange,' protagonist Max on the right

But things have changed for Dontnod. Today, just 18 months after they were reportedly filing for bankruptcy, the company is enjoying success with its second project, the episodic adventure Life Is Strange (which VICE Gaming has run plenty about—check these pieces out). Another female-fronted title, Dontnod's latest also bumped up against barriers with potential partners, thanks to the developers once again insisting that they didn't want a male lead.

"Some wanted us to change the gender of Max, the main character," co-director Michel Koch told Eurogamer. "Square Enix was the only publisher that would allow us to let the game be released as it was." A few episodes later—three of five are playable today—and Life Is Strange has proven to be a critical and commercial triumph, applauded for its character development. I've only played one episode, but I would highly recommend it. It's got its problems: The lip-syncing is worse than Ashlee Simpson in concert, for example. But so far I've found the choice system to be very thought-provoking, the story gripping me from the moment I walked up the rain-sodden hill of its dramatic opening scene. I also love the characters, protagonist Max in particular, her social awkwardness reminding me of my teenage self.


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


In 'Mirror's Edge' and its upcoming prequel, 'Mirror's Edge Catalyst,' you play as the 'runner' Faith Connors.

Dontnod's story serves as a terrific example of how a female-led video game can become successful in an era where it's not uncommon for bigger publishers to stick with the "safer" option of (usually muscular) male hero–fronted experiences. But it's not quite so simple as that. Life Is Strange is great because of its high quality writing, and how it effortlessly engages its player, whatever their sex or gender. In my experience, many people don't care what gender their main character is, as long as the title they're playing provides them with some sort of excitement, entertainment, or escape from the real life worries about paperwork and how many bacon sandwiches it is acceptable to eat in one day (that could just be me). Just days ago, the Guardian wrote that "teenage boys are sick of sexist video games," citing a Time magazine report concluding that "70 percent of girls and 78 percent of boys said it does not matter what gender the lead character is."

And older gamers feel the same way, too. Hassan is a 28-year-old PlayStation 4 enthusiast, a video games player for over 15 years. When I ask him whether he really cares or not as to the gender, sexuality, or religion of who he plays as in character-driven games, he responds: "Not at all. [I'm] not fussed as to what the character looks like, or what sexuality they are. If you're able to empathize, sympathize, and believe in their journey, that's all that matters."

Imagery from 'The Last of Us' DLC, 'Left Behind,' where the player takes exclusive control of Ellie, who you'd need a heart of stone to not connect with

I appreciate that some gamers prefer to play as characters that match their own gender, but scanning forums and listening to my own circle of friends reveals that a great many simply don't mind who that on-screen avatar is, so long as there's some means of relating to them. Personally, I don't discriminate against the "me" inside a video game, if "me" happens to be a burly space marine—though, that said, I do love a good female character who's got a thing for romancing the ladies. If a character is written well, if they have a believable personality, feelings, and thoughts that I can sympathize with, and they can make me laugh, then I'm in.

If (a great many) people really aren't fussed about their protagonist's gender, why up until last year were there still publishers insisting on male leads? The ignorance displayed by the potential partners that Dontnod spoke to prior to Square Enix signing Life Is Strange is an entirely alienating attitude to have, one that actively opposes the modern ideals of the gaming audience. Publishers have been harming themselves, too, by not appreciating that dudes don't mind being dames for the duration of a game, if that game is worth a damn. Have been, because this year's E3 highlighted that a sea change is underway.

'Horizon: Zero Dawn,' E3 2015 trailer

Ladies were everywhere at 2015's E3. ReCore, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, The Walking Dead: Michonne, Hellblade, Beyond Eyes, ADR1FT—the conference was swimming in leading-role women. My favorite of all the new games announced has to be Horizon: Zero Dawn, footage of which showed the hunter Aloy taking down a gigantic robot dinosaur in a (beautiful) post-apocalyptic future Earth. FIFA 16, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Fallout 4, Fable Legends, The Division, Battleborn, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, and Dishonored 2 all feature options to play as females, to varying degrees. E3 in 2015 was the most progressive the annual event's been in far too long, its lengthy roll call of female protagonists cause for celebration.

Perhaps the biggest introduction of females into gameplay, or certainly the most significant given the male-dominated sport it draws inspiration from, is in FIFA 16, which will include 12 international women's teams (some way from the 32 that contested this summer's Women's World Cup in Canada, and doesn't include beaten finalists Japan, but it's a start) when it launches in September. As a kid, I used to play football for a girls team, and I've long loved a good game of FIFA. The introduction of women's teams is a big deal for me, as I've always seen them as an important element of the football world. FIFA is, arguably, the most popular sports series of them all, so this is a massive step forward for female representation in the medium, regardless of genre.

'FIFA 16' trailer, women's national teams are in the game

E3 2015 illustrated, and about time too, that games publishers are beginning to come on board with the idea of having female characters leading, or at least being an option in, their titles. And while I don't condone telling anyone in another creative job what to do, I do believe that having a variety of different protagonists in video games is a great thing, benefiting everyone. I mean, who doesn't like choice? This year's E3 also caused some in the industry to reflect on 2014's event and suggest that, just maybe, it wasn't quite the sausage-fest we remember it as. Writing on Medium, game designer Adrian Chmielarz reinforces the "variety, please" mantra that's becoming prevalent, but posits that E3 2014 had its share of strong females, too. "We could swap the narratives (between the years)," he says, "and it would totally work." There most certainly have been more male leads than female ones in modern gaming, but all the same: the rush of playable women at E3 2015 didn't erupt from nowhere. The games industry has been making progress, behind the scenes largely, for a while, and there were traces of it at E3 2014. It just took the global spotlight of this year's event to catapult this evolution into the world's eyes.

Diversity is here, now, in the games industry. It's not yet as realized it will be, but the options are increasingly there for gamers who want to play as women, at least. Further representation is far from perfect, though, as people of color continue to find themselves so rarely reflected in their digital experiences. Would the actions and motives, emotions, and adventures of Nathan Drake be so different if he was a black or Asian character? Certainly not, so long as his surrounding story was strong enough to bring him to life. There aren't nearly enough homosexual or transgender characters in video games, either, and the problem of over-sexualizing female ones persists—the recent Batman: Arkham Knight is just one of many major games guilty of this.

On Motherboard: Why Trolls Still Love to Hate Feminists

What the likes of Samus Aran and Lara Croft began, Fetch, Ellie, Clementine, Aloy, and Faith are continuing, with a deeper cultural and commercial impact than ever before. These are all female characters, but importantly they're all incredibly different from one another, not defined by their gender but by their actions, which is a great deal more than can be said for the stereotypical space marines that action-shooters so often go in for. We're also seeing greater character customization, being asked to play as blind characters, and others struggling with mental illness. Sometimes we get to play as cuddly balls of yarn that are so damn cute I could eat them up.

So, let's no longer dwell on the past's promoting of all-dudes, all-the-time game design, as that's gone, over, done. We'll always have those games, full of machismo and muscles and sweat and blood and jiggle physics, but not at the expense of so many alternatives. It's time, therefore, to concentrate on what's really important: hey, Ubisoft, quit making a new Assassin's Creed every bloody year and give us another Beyond Good & Evil already.

Follow Emma Quinlan on Twitter.

How the War on Drugs Is Hurting Chronic Pain Patients

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Photo via Flickr user Marko Javorac

When 58-year-old Zyp Cyk* had a serious mountain biking accident in June, she refused to go to the emergency room even though her injuries knocked her out cold and her husband pleaded for her to seek help.

Instead, Cyk slept for two days—contrary to the conventional wisdom of what you're supposed to do after sustaining a head injury. Only then did she finally agree to go to an urgent care center, where she discovered she had broken her collarbone and some ribs and needed surgery.

Cyk isn't afraid of doctors, hospitals, or pain medication, and she's not opposed to Western medicine. In fact, she's been taking Oxycontin for chronic pain for nearly two decades. And that's the problem: She feared that if she went to the hospital she might be labeled a drug-seeker, which could lead to her doctor cutting off her opioid prescription, leaving her without the treatment that makes her life bearable.

Cyk is just one of the more than 100 million Americans with chronic pain caught in the latest drug war crossfire. These patients and their doctors are often targeted by federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in an intensifying crackdown on painkillers that fall in the same class of drugs—opioids—as heroin. But these efforts are as misguided as most "supply-side" drug war initiatives, and the collateral damage tends to be excruciating.

On VICE News: Why America's Ongoing Heroin Epidemic May Soon Run Its Course

Last week, the CDC released a report showing that the rate of heroin overdose deaths in America quadrupled between 2002 and 2013. In a press briefing, CDC director Thomas Friedman said that rising use of medical opioids "primed" Americans for heroin addiction and called for "an all-of-society response," including a reduction in prescriptions and better law enforcement. Likewise, in its 2015 assessment of the threat from heroin, the DEA reported, "Increased demand for, and use of, heroin is being driven by both increasing availability of heroin in the US market and by some controlled prescription drug (CPD) abusers using heroin."

You'd never know it from the official government line, but while the "opioid epidemic" is linked to increased use of pain medications, the overwhelming majority of addictions do not start with a prescription—and most opioid prescriptions do not cause addiction.

All of which is to say that chronic pain patients are bearing the brunt of yet another drug war blunder.

Like Cyk, those who genuinely need painkilling drugs are now subject to policies like random reports to the doctor's office for pill counts, prescription limits, extra refill appointments, urine testing, and other restrictions that can become expensive and onerous. Worse, they are often made to stop taking drugs that help them. While she knew she risked her health by postponing care after her crash, Cyk tells me that she felt waiting offered less risk than being falsely labeled an "addict" and was "not as dangerous as losing my pain medications."

Opioid addiction usually begins in the same place that all other addictions start: in the childhoods, traumas, mental illnesses, and genes of those affected.

Her fears are far from unrealistic given reports of pain doctors being arrested and charged with crimes resulting from so-called overprescribing, leaving their patients to seek emergency care. Chronic pain support groups are filled with horror stories about pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions and physicians simply dropping patients or deciding that they no longer want to risk treating pain with opioids.
But according to a new study in the journal Addictive Behaviors, the greatest predictor of whether a person misuses opioids is not poor health—instead, it's having used illegal drugs in the past year.

Opioid addiction usually begins in the same place that all other addictions start: in the childhoods, traumas, mental illnesses, and genes of those affected.

Drug warriors don't like to tell this story. In the stereotypical account, addiction starts with an evil doctor—probably high on Big Pharma propaganda—hooking innocent patients. For example, when Maine Governor Charlie Baker was inaugurated this January, he incorrectly described the experience of the parents of a young man who died of an overdose.

"After a routine medical procedure their 19-year-old son, Evan, was prescribed opiates for pain," Baker said. "Slowly and unknowingly, he became addicted to them. When the prescription ended, he turned to heroin,"

In fact, Evan started taking drugs with his friends, who introduced him to pills the same way they did marijuana—no doctors were involved. It's not clear what put him in the 10 to 20 percent of drug users who become addicted, but it definitely wasn't pain treatment.

And Evan's route to opioid addiction is by far the most common. Since the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration (SAMHSA) started collecting this data, it has always found that over 75 percent of people who misuse painkillers get them from friends, relatives, dealers, or other illicit sources—not physicians.

Data on people who start pain treatment yields the same conclusion: The vast majority don't misuse their drugs.

Even among the most frequent users, less than a third see doctors to get their drugs.

And there's more research supporting the idea that the vast majority of opioid addiction starts on the street. In 2014, a national study of nearly 136,000 emergency room patients admitted for overdoses containing opioids found that just under 13 percent had a chronic pain diagnosis. And a 2008 study, this one from an addiction-ravaged region in West Virginia, found that 78 percent of victims had a history of substance misuse and nearly two-thirds possessed prescription drugs that were not prescribed to them.

Looking at people treated for Oxycontin addiction alone, a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that the vast majority—78 percent—never had a legitimate prescription and a similar number reported cocaine use and previous treatment for substance abuse.

Unless you're ready to believe that doctors can turn pain patients into coke fiends, the simpler explanation is that painkiller addiction hits people who are already abusing other drugs. These people know where to buy stuff like coke and heroin, unlike pain patients—a.k.a. your parents and grandparents—who tend to be unfamiliar with how street drug markets operate.

Data on people who start pain treatment yields the same conclusion: The vast majority don't misuse their drugs. Here, Cyk's case is typical. Formerly a computer systems administrator, she had suffered inexplicable pain since childhood. Eventually, she was diagnosed by specialists at Stanford with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, a painful connective tissue disorder that often manifests in visible bruises. She says she has never misused her drugs, and even initially refused to take enough of them to effectively treat her pain.

In 1995, Cyk's doctor suggested that she try a newly-introduced drug called Oxycontin. "I took it as prescribed," she tells me. "I took as little I could as get away with." She adds that her doctor finally sat her down and said she'd get more relief if she "took enough that it would actually work."

Although opioids can make people sleepy, Cyk had the opposite experience. "I was able to work," she says, "When I took the pills, my energy went up because the pain [had been] so tiring." Ever since, she says she's used it judiciously. While chronic pain patients may suffer withdrawal symptoms if they stop using a drug abruptly, this is the not same thing as addiction, which is defined by experts as compulsively using a drug in the face of negative consequences.


Check out our documentary about teenagers and heroin addiction in South Wales, Britain.


Clinical studies of pain patients without a history of heavy drug use find that less than 1 percent become addicted during treatment—as summarized by a stringent review by the respected Cochrane Collaboration. (In actual pain practice, researchers find addiction rates of up to 33 percent, but this is more likely due to poor screening for addiction history and to drug-seekers faking pain than to new cases, given the rest of the data out there.)

Dee Dee Stout, an addictions consultant and expert counselor, has been taking opioids for fibromyalgia and pain from a car accident for ten years. Recently, she was refused a refill due to complex regulations that neither doctor nor patient had been warned about. Consequently, she had to spend a weekend enduring pain and withdrawal symptoms like diarrhea and restlessness until her doctor was back in the game on Monday.

"I can't begin to tell you how stressful it's been," she tells me, echoing the voices of other chronic pain patients who are often ignored in media coverage of the opioid "crisis" but appear in the comments en masse under most such articles.

If we really want to deal with opioid addiction, we have to face facts. Most cases don't start at doctors' offices. Instead, kids get drugs the way they always have: through friends and family. To do better, we need to stop tightening the screws on chronic pain patients and start looking at why so many young people are turning to the most dangerous class of drugs.

Mistreating patients doesn't stop addiction; that requires compassionate care.

Maia Szalavitz will be a 2015/2016 Soros Justice Fellow and is author of the forthcoming book Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction. Follow her on Twitter.

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