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Broadly: Welcome to Broadly

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Broadly is VICE's new women's interest channel, with a focus on original reporting and documentary video. It's launching officially on August 3, but you can check out our trailer above and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.


How to Make Men Love You: Taking Apart a Ridiculous 'Glamour' Article That the Whole UK Is Upset About

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Nobody wants to talk about how Glamour has a section called "Smitten."

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

There is sort of this unwritten rule among digital writers that goes a little like this: "Do Not Slag Off Thine Neighborly Digital Writer, No Matter How Weaksauce Their Content Mighteth Be, For One Day You Will Wake Up On A Hangover And Dial A List In And You Wouldn't Want Somebody Going Through That Point-By-Point And Saying That It's Shit And Useless, Would You?" I mean, how can I go after anything i100 do when I write 4,000-word articles about all your different types of friends? I cannot, and if you are a digital writer, neither can you.

That fucking said, have you read this thing on Glamour, about how to make your man love you? Probably go and read this thing on Glamour, about how to make your man love you. There's a bit where it legitimately says sharing links from Twitter might make him get down on one knee. Like, we all want our man to love us—do we not? Desperately? Is it not all we live for, the simple grunting affection of a very basic man?—but this seems a bit too much. This feels just one try too hard.

Let's go through it point-by-point and slice it to bits and try to make some sense out of something that seems, on first glance, to be just slightly too insane:

1. Stocking the fridge with his favorite drinks. Bonus points: Bring him back to his fraternity days by handing him a cold one as he steps out of the shower.

"Oh cool, a beer. Sh–shall I just stand here and... drink it? I mean, it's just a tin of Red Stripe. My hair's still wet. My hair is dripping in the Red Stripe. Can I at least put some pants on first?"

2. Making him a snack after sex. It doesn't have to be a gourmet meal—a simple grilled cheese or milk and cookies will do.

In a way this one is the saddest, most desperate: Not only must you deliver an earth-trembling orgasm to the penis and/or butthole of your dude, but then you have to clamber out of bed and get the George Foreman on and whip up a cheese sandwich. We live in a future where, according to Glamour, jizzing isn't enough. Can't just let him finish on your face, not now. You also have to get butter all over your hands while making a grilled cheese or warm those nice Taste the Difference cookies up in a low oven and serve them to this strange infant-man with milk.

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3. Emailing him the latest online gossip about his favorite TV show. You don't have to have a BFF at HBO. Just share applicable links from your Twitter feed and pat yourself on the back.

"How many emails about Game of Thrones did you get today, mate?"

"Fucking seven. She's discovered Vulture. She didn't know Vulture existed until this morning, and now she's sent me six links from Vulture and an infographic about Game of Thrones that is too hard to read."

"She still doing the shower thing?"

"Eight AM, I had to drink a beer today. Eight AM. I didn't even have my contact lenses in, and she made me drink a beer, in full, right in front of her, while damp and wearing a towel. I feel like death. I feel like I am dying."

4. Bragging about him to your friends, family, the stranger on the street corner—whomever. Proclamations of pride will make his chest puff out and his heart swell.

I just really think telling a stranger on the street that you are in love with a man who drinks beer straight out the shower is somehow going to get you arrested for your own protection.

5. Answering the door in a negligee—or, better yet, naked.

"Why are you answering my door? I have a key. Why am I knocking on my own door? Why are you naked? Hold on, how did you get inside my flat? Why did... what's that boiling in a big pan in the kitchen?"

6. Being open to what he wants to try in the bedroom and out. An open mind is attractive no matter your playground.

I think this means "fuck in a park, once" or "consider butt stuff" but I can't be 100 percent sure because the wording of it is slowly killing my brain. I don't understand why the word "playground" is in there. Why is the word "playground" in there? Does someone want me to have sex in a playground? Surely no one ever wants that?

7. Letting him solve your petty work problem. Many men don't do gossip, but they do like to fix things.

In a way this is almost sweet, because men like fixing things, don't they? With their hammers and their glue, with their electrical tape and their scissors. That said, in my experience men and women tend to approach work problems in entirely different ways. My advice when I hear a female friend's work problem is almost certainly, "Well tell Brad to fuck off and then take his job from him, then! Ask for a £10,000 [$15,000] raise!" because I am beyond oblivious to the careful rules by which women at work have to play, the unfair odds that are stacked against them, the weird pay gap shit they have to deal with every day, the fact that they have to do it all in skirts. By the time you've carefully explained that to the type of man who is being described in this article he will probably be really bored and want to have a shower beer and watch his favorite TV show?


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8. Spitting out sports stats for his favorite team. Showing an interest in his favorite players will earn you points on and off the field.

HOW THAT WOULD GO:

"Olivier Giroud playing, is he? You know he got 14 goals in 28 games, last season? Neat one-in-two."
"Yeah. I mean I still think we need a slightly better striker, if not just to compete with him."
"[DEATHLY SILENCE]"
"I mean I suppose Danny Welbeck exists, but. I mean he's still Danny Welbeck, isn't he?"
"[DEATHLY SILENCE]"
"That's the thing with Danny Welbeck. The main trait. He exists."
"[SILENCE SO LARGE AND DEATHLY THAT SMALL ANIMALS DIE WITHIN IT, FLIES DROP TO THE GROUND, CATS HISS AWAY IN TERROR]"
"Might just go and have a beer in the shower, just to get away from this."

The thing about someone—anyone—who does not like sports suddenly knowing one thing about sports is it is weird, unnerving even, like a radiator that suddenly learned how to scream, or a lamp that does math. If you know about sports: fine, cool. If you do not know about sports: That is also totally fine, you do not have to try to know about sports. They are only sports. I have plenty of sadlads on Twitter I can talk to about sports.

9. Making a big deal out of his favorite meal. Does he like hot dogs cut up into his boxed mac-and-cheese? Serve it on a silver platter to really see him smile.

i. Yo sorry but if your man's favorite food is "mac and cheese with hot dogs cut up in it" then please check you didn't accidentally pick up someone's toddler from a nursery school before you get that silver platter out of the attic and wash it twice for dust.

ii. I do not want to eat my hot dog mac and cheese off a silver platter, man. Silver platters are large, and made of silver. They are too big for my lap when I am trying to watch TV. The stress of the silver platter seems to negate all the good intentions behind the silver platter.

10. Treating his friends as well as you treat your own. If you win their affections, you'll win his heart.

"Talk to human beings like they too are human beings" haha OK, done. NEXT...

11. Sitting side-by-side while he vegs out to the TV. It may not feel like quality time to you, but it's the best time to him.

"Sit in silence while a man watches sports"...

12. Giving him a massage—happy ending completely optional. In fact, a foot rub works just fine.

Essentially, the advice here is "wank him off," which, yes, everyone enjoys being wanked off, especially as part of an elaborate and shocking surprise. But this is the bit that, out of the whole list, just makes me feel depressed and empty, like those few grim little seconds after I've been wanked off. Number 12 on the list reduces women to wank off-givers and men to wank off-receivers, and never the twain shall meet or connect. Essentially this is saying the way to a man's heart is through a firm and stern wank off, performed on his dick, because—like cows busting their udders at the seams—men are in dire and constant need of a wanking, and women—with their fragile little hearts, with their feelings—need only love, and the best way of inducing that reluctant emotion is just pumping away at his dick under the guise of doing a massage, or a foot rub. This is all we are. Orgasm givers, orgasm receivers. Gender is a construct—there are only wank-havers, and wank-doers. The only love of which men are capable is the hollow gratitude of being wanked off. Glamour: you just made me hate wanking.

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13. Taking him back to third grade with a gentle tease over anything from how you'll dominate him on the basketball court to the weird way he just styled his hair.

Talk trash about my hair and I'm getting an Uber home, I don't care how fucking late it is.


The central truth is so obvious it is barely worth repeating but let's go through it anyway: This article is insulting to just about everyone on Earth. It reduces men to big dumb dogs who somehow figured out how to wear baseball caps backwards but more importantly it reduces women to creatures who are desperate to live forever alongside such grimly simple beasts. Central truth: There is literally no one this basic on Earth.

This isn't the way true love should be. And if it has to be then at least make sure you're getting back as much as you put in. Like, is the dude making milk and cookies while you are doing the grilled cheeses? Then you are going to have a post-sex feast together, a perfect team, happy and post-coital and filling yourselves with carbs while vegging out in front of the TV. If not, it's just him lying there, panting, in a sticky pool of his own essence, while you ferry him food and palm him off. Are there not better things to be doing, Glamour? Do you not have lives to live, passions to explore, friends to be hanging out with? Do you really not have anything better to do than learn obscure sporting facts and rub my feet and then my dick? Do you not have hobbies?

Follow Joel Gobly on Twitter.

Digging Through the Bungalow of One of the World’s Most Notorious Hoarders

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What differentiates a collector from a hoarder? Both passionately accumulate objects; both are intensely attached to them. Indeed, consumer sociologist Russell Belk notes that collectors see their collections as extensions of themselves, and suffer as acutely as any declutter-resistant hoarder if these are lost or destroyed. Objects serve as a means of comfort, even as repairers of damaged egos.

Collecting, however, is considered respectable behavior, while hoarding resides in the shadows of pathology. The collector is an empowered soul, showing selectivity, a focused ordering sense, and a decisiveness in acquiring. Even if, as Belk again notes, collectors will call themselves (smilingly) victims of a madness, an addiction. But they're proud of their objects, proud to display them to others. And they engage with their acquisitions—handling them, admiring them, researching their histories. They will let go of something to acquire another that better serves the theme, and needs, of their collection.

Hoarders amass without selectivity. They have no compunction about owning multiples of the same thing, as opposed to unique items to complete a set. They don't take public pride in what they have, are generally burdened and shamed. They don't display their objects to others, and they don't engage with their acquisitions themselves in more than a perfunctory way. They don't take care of their things, but they can't part with them, however miserable the state they're in. Their accumulations take over their disorderly living spaces, which become unfit to be properly used, or even accessible. Hoarders are powerless before their possessions; there's an inertness to them—both hoarder and hoard.

Of course, there can be overlaps between collecting and hoarding; gray areas. The line of separation isn't always bright.

The reflections above came to mind as I sat talking to Nicho (short for Nicholas) Lowry. A friend of a friend, whom I'd known slightly some years before, Nicho is president of his family's Manhattan auction house. He's also a veteran onscreen appraiser for PBS's Antiques Roadshow, conspicuous in his riotous three-piece plaid outfits. Initially, I'd contacted him hoping that as a member of the National Arts Club, he might have an angle on Aldon James Jr., the NAC's embattled former head, who was much in the news with his twin brother, John, for their scandalous hoarding at the venerable club. Yes, Nicho told me when we met for lunch, he'd run across Aldon many times at flea markets—was amusedly wary of him. But he'd never seen the twins' infamous hoards.

But as for hoarding as such, said Nicho, "You're talking to the right guy!"

A "self-diagnosed class-two hoarder" was what Nicho called himself. The scale was his own, from one up to five. "Clutteritis," he dubbed his condition.

Nicho was a huge fan of the Hoarders series on TV. "When I started watching with my then girlfriend," he told me, "she said, 'This show is all about you!' I said, 'I'm not a hoarder!' She said, 'You're a hoarder— how many ballpoint pens do you have ?'"

About 400, it turned out.

"She asked, why didn't I get rid of some of them, then? I said, OK, I will!"

It took Nicho about six weeks, going through all the pens—from airlines, from hotels—each with a little story to tell, a memory to reignite and tug. Eventually he had to cram pens by the handful into bags and run them down to the trash room in the middle of the night so he wouldn't change his mind. He now had less than 50.

I said I found the hoarding shows too awful to watch. I'd seen a brief excerpt or two; they struck me as exploitative freak fests. "One of the leading brain researchers of hoarding," I noted, "Sanjaya Saxena, told me he feels the same way. He used to go on them as an expert, but he refuses now. They won't yield air time to how proper treatment works."

Nicho shrugged. For him Hoarders struck a chord. He said he could relate to the mom crying "when her kids tried to get her to toss her thirty thousand unread magazines."

To be accurate, Nicho qualified, he had hoarding tendencies. He wasn't crippled by them. Indeed, he assured me, "People come to my house all the time." His personal style was, simply, maximalist.

And unlike me, Nicho was a serious art collector, building with his auctioneer father the finest collection of Czech posters outside museums. In my mind he began to loom as a distinctive bridge figure: collector and sub-hoarder; connoisseur on Antiques Roadshow and fan of hoarding TV.

We arranged to watch a show together at his place. As we parted he told me people's reaction to his apartment was a litmus test. "I consider my surroundings a manifestation of my internal world," he declared. "This is what my head is like, this is what my place is like." He didn't regard his "clutteritis" as negative—a problem that needed curing. He thought what made people hoarders (of his scale) made them more interesting.

"The Happy Hoarder," I told him. "That's you!"

The yard of Richard Wallace's bungalow

Nicho lives in an art deco building around the corner from the National Arts Club. His place was maximalist, all right.

The small crowded main room was part English men's club (handsome old leather sofa, a coat rack piled with hats, some dry-cleaned shirts, and a cricket-style striped jacket draped on a café chair), part curiosity shop (a huge sculpted eyeball staring from its high spindly pedestal), part art dealer-collector's lair (a speed-swept Czech art deco poster of a motorbiker on the wall, a portrait of Lenin propped on the floor).

"This house is pervaded with an ADD outlook," said Nicho. "It's meant to hold my attention."

Nicho's place was more object-crowded than mine, for sure. But conspicuously, it was clean—a maid came every two weeks. It also seemed object -happy. Nicho engaged with his things. He'd actively acquired them, and they gave him pleasure. "Surrounded by the objects he possesses," wrote cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, "the collector is preeminently the sultan of a... seraglio."

After I peeked into his petite kitchen (fridge door tree-barked with stickers, magnets, and notes), and admired his display of restaurant and bar matchbooks in the artwork-crowded hall, we settled on his leather seating with popcorn and a bottle of Alsatian Sylvaner to watch a hoarding TV show.

In the picturesque tony village of Westcott outside London, a three-bedroom bungalow and garden were engulfed by hoarding so extreme the mass was visible on Google Earth. To enter and exit his home, the owner had to wriggle body-length right under the ceiling on top of his piles. It took him 40 minutes to get from room to room.

Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder , the show was called—a TV documentary I'd come across and brought along about "Britain's Most Extreme Hoarder," a man named Richard Wallace.

"Awesome!" cried Nicho. "Terrifying!"

Richard Wallace lived—"existed," as he put it—in a couple of burrows within the debris of old newspapers and grocery packaging. We watched him cook his daily arduous supper of two boiled eggs on a gas stove he lit by scraping a match amid towering flammable walls of stuff. He slept in a chair.

"Definitely more intense than the American shows," offered Nicho. "I don't think Hoarders ever had such a fortress of a house."

A kindly local landscape gardener delightfully named Andy Honey broke through the village's standoffish hostility to the hoarder and his monstrous clutter in their picturesque midst. Andy helped Richard start on the long road to decluttering. He got others to pitch in on the junk-buried front yard.

Thirty tons of rubbish were hauled off.

A lot more remained, though. Richard wept quietly on camera now, registering his situation.

"On an American show," said Nicho, "they'd have him freaking out."

"My message to anybody thinking of collecting things," said Richard Wallace: "Don't."

Under the big staring eyeball sculpture, Nicho and I exchanged a look.

A view from outside Richard Wallace's bungalow

An only child and village loner, Richard Wallace became a hoarding celebrity thanks to the documentary, which aired on Britain's Channel 4 right before Christmas 2011. More than 4 million viewers had tuned in. There'd been a sequel doc since, and Australian and German TV had come to film. Major London papers had run profiles.

Richard had lived all his life in his family's bungalow and adjoining semidetached four-bedroom house (into which Andy Honey and his family had moved after decluttering it). His father, Maurice, was a bus driver and traffic warden; his mother, Freda, worked at the grocery store nearby, owned by her father, Frederick Balchin. Richard had inherited not only the two houses he crammed with his stuff but five similarly crammed garages. Overall property value: an estimated 1 million pounds. For a time Richard held a job as a TV repairman. During the last years of his mother's life, he was subsidized by the government as her full-time carer in the bungalow. Since her passing, he delivered newspapers in the village, rising at 6 AM daily. He'd never married, never had a girlfriend, had no real friends.

As a child Richard collected Dinky toy cars (he still had some of them). But his proper collecting began as a teen with Practical Electronics magazine (he still had the copies). Following the death in 1976 of his father—a man who liked to throw things out—he began seriously archiving papers and magazines, keeping them "tucked away" in piles in various rooms. But a year's worth of papers would stack to the ceiling. It didn't take long to accumulate a roomful. His mother kept things more or less in control. Once she died in 2005, at age 91, his hoarding became "ungoverned."

And then, in 2010, a young documentary filmmaker, Christian Trumble, sought him out after seeing him patronized in a TV interview after he won a legal victory over the local county council's attempt to make him clean up his hoarding. And then Andy Honey entered the picture.

Andy Honey and Richard Wallace at the pub

The commuter train pulled into Dorking, a picturesque market town in Surrey adjacent to picturesque Westcott village. It was four months later. My girlfriend Meddy had wangled us a three-week apartment exchange in London.

Andy Honey rumbled up in his old work van, his shorts spattered with grass from a neighborly chore. He was no longer a gardener, though. He'd become a hoarding advisor.

We turned off in Westcott by a pub, the Prince of Wales, and then we walked over to where a figure was standing in a cluttered yard by a brilliantly white plastic tent. The tent was the size for a small wedding.

"Mr. Wallace, I presume?" I announced genially, trying not to beam at my good fortune.

He looked like he did on TV—a mothier, gentler, more bald cousin of the old hambone horror-film star John Carradine. His face was nobly craggy-nosed and a bit skull-like. He wore an old green zippered cardigan over a grayish checkered shirt, and black pants. He was about my age. Not as gaunt as on TV—he'd been eating more than two eggs a day.

Andy left us to get on, and Richard led the way into the notorious brick bungalow.

Those astounding ceiling-high masses in the documentary I'd seen, figments of a claustrophobic subterranean bad dream, were reduced now. Meaning we could edge along a goat path through the clutter and shambles. Stacks of newspapers loomed just at shoulder height, topped with magazines, bottles, cartons, grocery packaging. We reached the kitchen where Richard used to so precariously scratch a match for his stove. He stood by, smiling demurely but hospitably as I tried not to gape.

"Wow," I gulped.

I'd never been anywhere like it. I was, at last, in hoarding Valhalla: ghastly, derelict, oppressive, aesthetically astounding, most piles and surfaces grayed with dust. But with a weird mundane coziness—because someone was living in all this. Had been for years. I recalled how Richard had reminded a TV interviewer: "An Englishman's home is his castle."

And the smell. At first I panicked, thinking I couldn't bear it. It didn't "reek"; it was high-pitched and punky, intimately piercing. Like the whole place was one long-moldering ancient intimate flesh.

I followed Richard as he went edging along a short narrow hallway into his main living area. It was formerly his parents' bedroom.

Another saucer-eyed "Wow."

Amid once cozily-papered walls, their pale leafy pattern streaked here, blotched there, a giant high mudslide of consumerist stuff appeared to have churned to a precarious, hodgepodge halt. The indoor hillside was made up— in part—of:

Old manuals and books (CLASSIC CARS, blared a spine; Richard was an avid car buff), old newspapers and magazines, VHS cartridges; high up, a jutting big cardboard carton for Miele (the vacuum-cleaner maker; did he own one?); farther down, uncovered smaller cartons, saggy and crammed, bearing tilted advertising logos—"Dell," "Free-Range Eggs," "Vine-Ripened Insecticide Free"; a couple of clunky pillows and alarm clocks; a Kellogg's Corn Flakes box, Weetabix box, Lyons French Sponge Sandwich box; bulky manila folders, clumps of sheets of paper; garish packaging for various Nestlé candies and cakes...

Buried underneath all this somewhere were the old beds, Richard informed me. A slovenly office chair was pressed against the mudslide; a wooden board, inserted into the mass, served as a desktop. The chair was piled now with condiment jars, soft-drink bottles, and a sack of something. The chair would be cleared for sleeping.

"And what's this?"

My gaze had fallen on another section of the hillside, where perched a crumb-scattered brass tray. On this gleamed Richard's white double eggcup, a poignant icon from the TV show I'd watched; one branch held the remnants of a brown eggshell. Alongside this eggy ensemble lay a dove-gray banana-like thing, frail and mysterious, almost surreal.

I pointed wonderingly.

Richard sniffed. "An old piece of bread," he informed me.

"Ah..." I said. For want of what else to say. (How long could it have been there?)

Now I noticed, by the tray, as if on display on the lid of a box for baked goods, some spindly swervy wads of dark hair, like oversized trout-fishing flies.

"You keep locks of your hair?" I piped lightly—hoping I wasn't leering or intruding on some awkward privacy.

"No, no," said Richard—slightly awkwardly—"it's a sample for comparison—of hair color."

(He dyed his hair?) I nodded. Feeling I'd intruded.

But then wasn't that what I was after? My own mini-version of the hoarder reality shows' prying voyeurism? My own fascination with the lurid spectacle that was extreme hoarding? Because in a way, a hoarded space was as gothic and gruesomely fascinating as a horror-movie set—one constructed by an outsider artist, a troubled soul. I admit I found something spooky and Poe-like, even mad, about extreme hoarders. How then wasn't I like Helen Worden, the journalist who'd hounded the famous hoarder-hermit Collyer brothers of yore? Or like today's hoarder TV? Contaminated by a contemporary popular culture that gorged on voyeurism.

But then, as a callow reporter after college, I'd often felt like a voyeur, a creep and intruder, whenever I had to interview people in trouble or in crisis. Ringing up a house for an obituary. In other words, doing my job.

So who was I, really? How did people feel when they entered my place? Did I want to experience the "phenomenology" of extreme hoarding as an inquiring observer or to intimately compare myself against a true big-timer, to sound out our solidarities, find fellowship and insight? Or did I expect revulsion to distance me—or scare me into cleaning? Every time I hauled out my iPad gallery, I had a tangled agenda. I both wanted acknowledgement (yes, a hoarding problem!) and reassuring denial (not full-blown hoarding). And here with Richard, was I using the role of writer-interviewer really as a nervous shield, to keep the sufferer similarities at less painful arm's length?

My ponderings were interrupted by Richard asking if I wanted to see more.

Richard Wallace in his home

A side room in the bungaglow

We resumed the house tour. Edging back along the way we'd come, I glanced at a dim room inaccessible for boxes heaped toward the ceiling.

Was it hard, I asked, deciding what to keep or throw?

Yes, if such decisions were thrust upon him. "But if I'm geared up to deal with something collectively," he declared, "then the decision comes quite easily. For example, I tend to hold on to packaging quite a lot."

I almost burst out hooting despite myself. "So I've noticed! " I replied good-naturedly.

"With a view to having one or two samples," Richard continued, unfazed, "because packaging changes. Manufacturers keep the price but reduce quantity, you're not supposed to notice it, but I do, because I compare. Not a lot of people do that." He was just being an exceptionally wily, thorough consumer, apparently. His aim was to have a couple samples of everything and put them into a scrapbook or scan them into a computer (though he didn't own one as yet). "Having done that," he concluded, "then I don't mind discarding en masse. Rather than disposing of them slowly."

So in a sense what he was doing was archiving, I offered. I paused to steer my shoulder bag around a jutting heap of papers and snap another photo.

"Yes, but only the sorts of things of interest to me."

"Do you find decision-making hard generally?" (I was interviewing clutteredly.)

It depended on the context, he said. "Right from a child or teenager, if I'd go into a shop and get confronted with a choice of two or three things, I'd usually end up with one of each."

"Do you collect things as such?"

To which Richard Wallace replied, "I principally regard myself as a collector rather than a hoarder."

He followed this astounding pronouncement, which I found quietly delusional—but which I knew was how many hoarders saw themselves—by noting that "various studies" had determined that once one's collection interfered with "domestic arrangements," then "of course" it became hoarding. The "of course" was a touch of pure-seeming rationality.

"And that's what happened to me," he admitted. "I literally ran out of space."

His voice suddenly rose at the existential absurdity. "You know you've got something," he cried, "but you can't find it because of the sheer scale of the stuff that gets in the way! So that's the same as not having it! Because of the sheer volume of the stuff! So it comes to same thing!"

"Water, water, everywhere," I quipped sympathetically, "nor any drop to drink." In my own lesser way, I knew the feeling. There was the gift certificate from Meddy and her mother I'd lost in the papery slush of my counters. The loss still stung.

"Absolutely right," said Richard. "The answer of course is to approach the problem logically and allocate a certain space for certain things."

That was his solution, then. Space, organization, and "shelving."

We edged around a claustrophobic corner, and then stopped because I wanted him to take my picture. I'd taken lots of him.

Then we entered his dingy bathroom.

The tub was cleared from the heaps I'd seen on TV, but it was filthy. The bathroom overall, though apparently in some use, was woebegone and derelict—wall tiles missing, wallpaper (where merry forest creatures cavorted) hanging in peels. The wooden lower panel of the bathroom door was warped and curling off. By the gross, grubby sink, another display of his locks sat beside two neat piles of rubber bands on a tall white carton for corn flakes. The display touched me: a small obsessive-aesthetic moment in the chaos. On the way out the cuffs of my jeans caught on the warped lower door panel and tore half of it right off.

"That's all right, all right," Richard murmured, waving off my embarrassed "Oh my God!"s.

Richard Wallace inspecting his hoard

A hallway in the bungalow

Outside, the white tent stood glossily in what was, I now gathered, Richard's backyard. The tent housed "temporarily" a bulky load of Richard's beleaguered newspapers—the tabloid Daily Mail (he'd subscribed for 34 years) and more respectable Telegraph. All awaited "sorting out" with an eye to scanning—along with, naturally, heaps of packaging.

I pointed out that newspapers these days had searchable websites.

"That's quite true," Richard conceded calmly. "Lots of people have been pointing that out to me."

He hadn't yet accessed the websites himself, though.

At my request he dug around in the jumbles and brought out some of the photos he liked to take with his old-fashioned film camera. He held up those now bygone bearers of memories—unartful snapshots. The grocery-store refuse around us made a fit background to his mother as pictured, shown by the shelves of Balchin's Stores, the grocery shop Richard's grandfather once owned. It was still there a hundred yards away on the main road, under different management.

Whereupon the obvious penny dropped. Richard's packaging hoard was a tumultuous echo of the grocery store where he'd helped out as a child.

We walked across the road to meet Andy Honey at the Prince of Wales pub.


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The dim Prince of Wales we had to ourselves. Wimbledon was being blurrily projected on a wall. Above the bar hung a busted pink umbrella Richard and Andy had haggled over on television. A dozen potentially useful—i.e., broken—umbrellas remained in the bungalow.

Richard ordered an orange soda (he doesn't drink alcohol, coffee, or tea). Andy called for a pint (that jumbo English pint) of lager. I settled on a half-pint of real ale.

Andy is burly and cheerfully benevolent, a more keen-eyed, playful version of Winnie-the-Pooh. He's "good with people," you can tell. He's become a celeb himself, toasted by online forums for his kindness and fellow-concern for Richard. There's just been a play based on their friendship; they've gone up to Scarborough, the Yorkshire seaside resort, for a performance and appearance. Andy, who's 40, ran his own shipping business before the landscape gardening. He's given that up to be a full-time hoarding consultant. He's being paid to continue working with Richard, but is now also engaged with other clients as well.

"Andy's got his drawbacks," Richard commented to me on the phone before I came.

"He's got a different train of thought to me, a bit more ruthless with stuff. We start off with an ordinary civilized discussion, then it gets a little more heated. But we get by. He helps with a faster pace."

TV celebrity culture has proved good to the both of them, thanks in no small part to the sympathetic director, Trumble. Richard is the opposite of the secretive Collyers and the NAC's James twins. He welcomes cameras through his derelict door—seems almost proud of his hoarding. It's made him a public figure, and he basks in the attention. He's less private than I am! And there's a touching philosophical dignity and candor to him. He suggests an eccentric—that venerable English type—rather than someone disturbed. But that he can tolerate such a radical shambles—make his home in it—that's pretty unsettling.

But then look at what I was able to tolerate in my way.

On Motherboard: Meet the Domain Hoarders

After debating the utility of keeping empty boxes on hand (Richard and I were both pro; Andy was against), the conversation wandered briefly to time travel, a pet interest of Richard's (he thinks Einstein got it wrong), then on to regular travel—of which Richard has done almost none. He's been on a plane exactly once.

Exactly being the word.

"Not a jet, a turbo-prop Viscount, with four engines, in 1965, from Gatwick."

"Richard's got a fair memory," grinned Andy.

And all at once I thought of Borges's short story, "Funes, the Memorious." A young gaucho, Funes, is blinded in an accident, after which he can recall everything he's ever seen or experienced—in hypermagnified detail. It's a wonder but a monstrous burden. Funes is engulfed by his excess of remembrance.

"My memory, sir," he complains, "is like a garbage heap." (My italics.)

The line leaped out when I read the story again recently. Isn't Richard with his memory, both mental and material (the archival heaps overwhelming his properties), a real-life cousin of poor memorious Funes?

Except the material has overtaxed Richard's memory capacity: He can't find things.

He's half-Funes.

And then what about me, with my mementos of travel, my postcards, calendars, receipts from Tokyo eyeglass shops, old train tickets, foreign newspapers—all slushed about?

In my way I was part-Funes too.

Finally, it was time for my iPad show-and-tell.

"Low to moderate," Andy rated the photo gallery of my apartment's clutter at its worst.

Richard shrugged. "Looks normal," he murmured.

Richard Wallace's bedroom

The author and Richard Wallace in Wallace's bungalow

Waiting for my train back to London, Andy and I sat chatting in his van. I'd return in a week to accompany Richard to a new support group that Andy had helped launch. He'd grown to realize, he told me, that he—Andy, the former gardener—had a gift for aiding hoarders. The TV documentaries opened a new life to him. There were TV-series possibilities to explore; he now had an agent; the small decluttering company he'd joined had ambitions to expand on a national scale.

He'd come to Richard's aid initially out of sympathy for the underdog (the director Trumble did likewise). His empathy and sensitivity, he confided, were inspired by watching his mother's struggle with depression.

I told him I sympathized myself with the pain of depression. And that he and Trumble were striking a blow against the freak shows of reality TV.

And now I learned that somewhere deep in Richard's chaotic hoarded jumbles, there was—supposedly—a set of crucial financial documents. But where? That was one of the urgencies to all the decluttering and sorting underway. But it was slow-going with Richard, as ever with hoarders. Despite so many tons of stuff having already been removed, Andy had few illusions.

"It's five-year project," he said to me.

Barry Yourgrau's memoir of clutter and hoarding, Mess: One Man's Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act,will be published by W. W. Norton on August 10. This article is adapted from the chapter "The Notorious Bungalow."

Barry Yourgrau's books of stories include Wearing Dad's Headand The Sadness of Sex, in whose film version he starred. VICE previously published his " Three Gangster Fables" in the 2012 Fiction Issue. He lives in New York and Istanbul. His website is barryyourgrau.com.

Do Songs by Female Pop Stars Always Need to Have a Feminist Message?

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Do Songs by Female Pop Stars Always Need to Have a Feminist Message?

What the Hell Happened at Kanye West's Closing Performance at the Pan Am Games?

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What the Hell Happened at Kanye West's Closing Performance at the Pan Am Games?

We Asked an Ashley Madison User if He's Screwed After the Hack

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Screenshot from AshleyMadison.com

You probably heard that Ashley Madison, the online dating site for cheaters, was hacked last week by a group known as Impact Team. Since 2001, 37 million people have created accounts on Ashley Madison, and the hackers stole millions of those users' personal data—including their names, addresses, credit card information, and specific kinks. So far, two users have been publicly outed, including a man in Ontario who had paid Ashley Madison to delete his profile years ago.

A lot of people say this is just #karma, but invading people's privacy is not cool and it's undeniable that shit is starting to get really real for Ashley Madison users. So we reached out to one Ashley Madison user, who previously wrote for VICE about what he learned from using the site, to get his reaction to the hack and what, if any, knowledge he's gained since the news broke.

VICE: So, that hack. What were your initial thoughts?
Ashley Madison User: When I found out, my initial reaction was to google "Ashley Madison Hack Data" every 20 minutes or so, just to keep up with what was being released. My wife isn't particularly into tech and isn't likely to find out by accident, but if my name's out there, I need to be the first to know.

Have you calmed down about it at all?
Still checking regularly.

Do you know if any of your personal data is being shared? You can check here.
Nothing so far. Honestly, having my name on a list of 37 million people doesn't bother me that much. Having it in the local paper is more of a worry.

On Motherboard: Who Needs Hackers? You Can Already See Who's on Cheating Site AshleyMadison

Which of your personal data feels the most sensitive to you?
All I care about is whether my name is made public, and [if] someone tells my wife. Otherwise, I have a very relaxed attitude to my personal information. I don't give a shit if some hacker knows what weird sexual stuff I'm into—I just don't want to have to get divorced. At least not while my mother's still alive.

Is there any part of you that feels relieved the hack happened?
Hell no. I'd happily stab the little shits who did this.

Has your wife talked about the hack at all?
No. I doubt she knows that Ashley Madison exists.

What about lovers you've met through AM?
No. After 18 months of being a cheating scumbag, I saw the error of my ways, and stopped. Actually, I came perilously close to getting caught, which bought the error of my ways into sharp focus. I haven't stayed in touch with anyone from AM.


Related: VICE investigates how love and sex is faring in the digital age, from the porn industry in Los Angeles to the emergence of "teledildonics" in Amsterdam.


Has your partner caught you cheating before?
My last AM affair ended up with me getting blackmailed. I had to instruct an attorney to scare her off with threats of legal action, which worked. That's the closest I've come to getting caught, and it was enough to scare me straight.

That sucks. Anyway, do you think the hack will impact you at all?
Only if my name gets published. If it does, I'm fucked. My wife—entirely reasonably—wouldn't see the funny side of me cruising the internet for sex.

On VICE News: Ashley Madison Hackers Release Info of Man Who Paid to Erase His Profile

Yeah. So, have you deleted your profile?
That ship has sailed. No point deleting it now.

Are you taking any other steps to retain your privacy?
No. Just not cheating.

For you, what's the most ideal outcome of this situation?
That AM pays someone to kill the hackers. Or that Western Europe suddenly experiences some kind of cataclysmic event, and in the post-apocalyptic society that emerges afterwards my cheating matters less than the daily fight for survival.

What about other AM users. You think they'll continue to use it?
Do men shit on the pope, etc.

If they leave, where did you think they'll go next for discreet hookups?
No idea. Not my world anymore.

Follow Scott Pierce on Twitter.

Habits: Boo Hoo

Inside the Satanic Temple's Secret Baphomet Monument Unveiling

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Photo by Matt Anderson

More Satan:

Here's the First Look at the New Baphomet Monument Being Built for Oklahoma's State House
Some Guy Drove His Car Into Oklahoma's Ten Commandments Monument
Satanists Turned the Founder of the Westboro Baptist Church's Dead Mom Gay

Despite protesters, death threats, and a torrential downpour, the Satanic Temple unveiled its one-and-a-half-ton, nine-foot goat-headed Baphomet monument in Detroit on Saturday. The statue was revealed to a sold-out crowd of hundreds just before midnight, at a secret party held in an industrial space outside of the city's downtown area.

Billing it as the "most controversial and politically charged contemporary work of art in the world" in a press release, the Temple kept the location of the unveiling a closely guarded secret in an effort to keep religious protesters away.

"It was almost impossible to throw this event," Satanic Temple spokesman Doug Mesner told VICE on Sunday. Chief among the problems faced by the group was finding a venue willing to host the ceremony.

Photo by Matt Anderson

The original location, the jazz and blues venue Bert's Warehouse, backed out following threats of violence and community backlash—later backpedaling by claiming they "weren't aware they were into devil worshipping." In all, seven other venues would agree to host the event before getting cold feet. The last venue canceled just three days before the scheduled date, and the final location was secured just hours later.

In the wake of numerous threats, organizers devised an elaborate scheme involving multiple security checkpoints. Hours before the event, ticket holders were emailed an address, which served not only as the first checkpoint but also a decoy location. Here, they were patted down and given another address where someone would meet them and guide them to the secret venue if they recited a password.

"We were thinking that having them sell their souls over to Satan would keep away some of the more radical superstitious people who would try to undermine the event."

Ticket holders were also required to sell their souls to the devil before being allowed into the venue. "We were thinking that having them sell their souls over to Satan would keep away some of the more radical superstitious people who would try to undermine the event," Mesner said.


Despite the online threats, the protesters who did show up at the decoy location were by and large well behaved. A U-Haul pickup circled the block, towing a sword-wielding statue of an angel. One woman sprinkled holy water on people while they waited in line. A couple busloads of people got out to sing hymns in front of the building. At one point, a woman attempted to block the entrance with a large sign; police later arrived to escort her off of the private property.

Photo by Matt Anderson

At the final location—one of the city's many drab, non-air-conditioned, post-industrial buildings—a heavy rain caused water to bubble up from a drain located in the middle of the floor, which organizers scrambled to sweep away. (The rain actually proved beneficial to the Satanic Temple by cooling the venue and possibly deterring further protesters.)

The statue unveiling was officially presented with a sermon by Satanic Temple co-founder Malcolm Jarry and Mesner, who read a statement tucked in the pages of a Bible, flanked by two men holding candles. As the two men removed the blanket from the monument (and started making out), Mesner ripped out pages from the Bible and threw them into the audience. Later, VIP ticket holders could get their photo taken on Baphomet's lap, while attendees hounded Mesner to autograph the torn Bible pages.

Photo by Matt Anderson

The tension between the Temple and Detroit's Christian community has been escalating since June, when the group announced the monument would be unveiled in the city. Mesner says he has repeatedly called on Saturday's protest organizer—Pastor David Bullock of Oxygen's reality TV show Preachers of Detroit fame—to publicly condemn the threats of violence against the Temple. Instead, Bullock posted a video on his Facebook page that featured a gunshot and blood-splatter graphical motif, calling on local Christians to meet at Bert's to pray for Detroit.

"It's such a controversial and charged object, it's almost unbelievable," Mesner said. "It was funny to see that contrast between protesters crying because they thought this great evil was being brought to the world, and some of the people during the unveiling with tears in their eyes because they thought this was the culmination of what they've been fighting for for so long finally becoming realized."

For now, the statue is en route to a secret storage location, where it awaits the next step. While originally conceived to be placed next to the Ten Commandments monument on Oklahoma's capitol grounds, that state's supreme court recently declared the Ten Commandments monument to be unconstitutional—a move Mesner believes was caused by the Satanic Temple's push. But the fight isn't over yet, with the state's attorney general recently filing an appeal and Governor Marry Fallin stating that the legislature is pursuing making changes to the state Constitution.

Photo by Chris Switzer

Last year, Mesner described Baphomet to VICE as "part man, part animal, points above, points below, the legs are crossed, upright pentagram on head, inverse pentagram behind the head, and the Caduceus on the lap representing balance and reconciliation." The Satanic Temple has maintained that their Satan is a metaphorical one and not a deity, stating on their website "to embrace the name Satan is to embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions.

"The whole idea of the reconciliation of the opposites is that they don't have war with one another, but that they can coexist in some kind of state of understanding," Mesner said. "That's really the message behind putting it with the Ten Commandments. I think it's a message worth hearing."

For more on the Satanic Temple, visit their website.

Follow Leyland DeVito on Twitter.


Rachel Paul Is the Face of Juggalo Feminism

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Photos by the author

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

More Juggalos:

The American Nightmare That Created the Insane Clown Posse
How to Become the Most Ratchet Stripper in Florida
Inside a Juggalo Motel Party

When Insane Clown Posse performs their 1994 classic "Chicken Huntin'," a song about killing a racist hillbilly, they throw scarecrows into the crowd for the Juggalos to rip to shreds. Saturday night, at their headlining performance at the 17th annual Gathering of the Juggalos, they added an especially relevant prop to the tradition. After rapping lyrics like, "To the hillbilly, stick my barrel in his eye / Boomshacka boomshacka, hair jumps in the sky," they threw a scarecrow draped in the Confederate Flag into the crowd and encouraged the Juggalos to rip it apart.

This political performance may seem odd coming from ICP, but like all subcultures, the Juggalo community exists within the mainstream. They react to the same news the media propagates, but often in more unapologetic ways than other American musicians. For example, as a new feminist wave has taken over the internet during the past five years, a Juggalette feminist project has arisen within the Juggalo community. It's called Lettes Respect, and the group aims to bring Juggalo culture to a middle ground where Juggalettes can both express their sexuality and earn respect for their music, art, and other talents. And like most feminist movements, Lettes Respect has its very own spokeswoman: 29-year-old Philidelphia-painter and writer Rachel Paul.


Watch the trailer for Broadly, a new women's interest channel coming soon from VICE.


"[They're] the most beautiful women on the planet," Paul explains to me over a bottle of Faygo at this weekend's Gathering. "There's nothing like the family that you choose."

Paul simultaneously resembles both a 1960s hippie feminist and a Juggalette. She wears wraps around her tent. Walking around the Gathering, you'll see her in a wife-beater, but at night she wears long robes while working as a Tarot Card reader in the Gathering's Bizzaro World tent.

"We don't turn people away [at the tarot tent]," Paul says. "It's important shit. We're like the camp counselors."

Paul grew up as a "scrub" in inner city Philadelphia. Today, she works a day job as an editor in publishing and uses her position to help young struggling ninjas and ninjettes. She recommends them for jobs and runs the Scrub House, a Detroit halfway house for Juggalos in need.

"Jugalettes are super smart and super intelligent and super loving. They will give you their shirts off their back—and show their titties." —Rachel Paul

Paul clearly loves the Juggalos, but in 2013, she realized her family needed to grow up in some departments. The Gathering's annual Ms. Juggalette pageant had dissolved from a celebration of women's talents to an event focused on their bodies. Porn legend Ron Jeremy had started hosting the pageant, and according to Paul and several other Juggalos I spoke to this weekend, he dismissed contestants who refused to perform sexual acts on stage, like putting a Faygo bottles in their vaginas.

"It's dangerous to [let outsiders in]," Paul says about Jeremy. "In the Juggalo world, there are a lot less snakes."

Like other feminists in the last ten years, Paul took to the internet to make her community better for her fellow girls. On FaygoLuvers.net, a popular Insane Clown Posse fansite, she wrote a post criticizing the pageant's treatment of women. She posted a controversial call to action that took on the Juggalo tradition of yelling "Show us your tiiiiiiiitttttts!"

"I hear you," Paul writes. "Ahahaha. Ha. It's funny. But right now, at this point... just this one moment in time... you can shut the fuck up and get out the way."

Paul encouraged the Juggalos to forbid longtime judge Ron Jeremy from attending the pageant and to revamp the contest to focus on women's talents: their rapping, art, and dances. Other Juggalettes and many male Juggalos agreed with her and took to the blog and other internet platforms to encourage Lettes Respect. During the project's first year, Paul took over the pageant and enacted her desired changes. Instead of resembling a glorified wet T-shirt contest, the pageant had three sections: one in which the girls were interviewed about their personalities, a talent portion, and a bikini segment that broke the mainstream concept of who looks good in a bikini.

Many Juggalettes found the changes created an atmosphere more supportive of different body types, including an up-and-coming overweight female MC named Ms. Cyainide. She hesitated to perform, but Paul encouraged Ms. Cyainide to forget her insecurities and compete in the 2014 pageant.

"[Paul wanted to] show it's for all Lettes," Ms. Cyainide says. "[The beauty pageant is significant] because it's about going out and proving people wrong."

Some Juggalos have complained about the changes online, painting Paul and the other Lettes Respect members as anti-sex, but Paul dismisses these perceptions. She simply wants women to receive positive attention for their talents as well as their sexuality.

The whole part of this is to bring it back to the middle," Paul says. "I'm about freedom of expression... I would never defy a super-freak."

Other feminist Juggalettes back up Paul's description of Lettes Respect as trying to create a nuanced world. Take Kace Kush, the Juggalo performer, who helps run the Sausage Castle's outdoor strip club at the Gathering. After years of opening for different rap groups, she considers the Gathering her favorite venue because she can perform comfortably without scorn from most men or women.

"As a feminist, I'm a proud, empowered woman and I'm comfortable with what I do," Kace Kush explains. "If you have to hide [your sexuality], that's you not being as strong as an individual."

Paul believes ninjettes deserve a place to safely explore their sexuality. "They roll with the insane clown posse," she says. "They've got to have a really good sense of humor."

"Jugalettes are super smart and super intelligent and super loving," Paul says. "They will give you their shirts off their back—and show their titties. They may [look stupid], but they're so wonderful."

Want more Juggalette feminism? Watch our Juggalette documentary coming soon to Broadly, VICE's forthcoming women's interest channel.

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: This Montreal Man Camped for a Year to Save Money During School

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Photo via Facebook

Read: With Sicilian Mafia in Rapid Decline, Just Who Is Running the Mob in Montreal?

Studying abroad is wildly expensive, as Montreal student Evan Eames knew when he was accepted to a master's astrophysics program at England's University of Manchester. Tuition for international students amounts to roughly $40,000 CAD per year. Eames thought his British citizenship would cut tuition costs, but when he found out that only applies to people who have lived in England for at least three years, he decided to drastically reduce one other cost: housing.

His initial request, made online, asked for space in someone's yard to pitch a tent as well as fridge space for food and an extension cord run through the yard. After receiving some less-than-amiable feedback, Eames cut back what he was asking for, and got a response from Manchester resident Charley Mantack.

"I loved telling people about it, I like weird, out of the ordinary things like that," Mantack told the Manchester Evening News.

Mantack offered Eames a space on her property in exchange for tutoring in math and science. She left school before graduating in order to care for her siblings, and is currently studying for her high school equivalency. Eames has been tutoring her twice a week and, while her exam results aren't going to be in for another month, she's been making top marks.

Eames was an experienced camper before he undertook this unorthodox living arrangement, which is in part how he came up with the idea. "I thought to myself... 'I bet I could do that for a little longer,'" he told The Canadian Press. "Even if I only did it for a month or two and then I decided it wasn't working, I would still have saved substantially."

Mantack intends to continue her education after receiving the results of her final exams. She plans to do the British A-level exams and then go into university to study science.

After tenting in Mantack's yard for the better part of a year, Eames will be moving back into "a building with heat and running water." He's also continuing his education, moving onto a PhD. The Paris Observatory is covering the costs of Eames' next degree, including room and board.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

Some People in BC are ‘Drought Shaming’ Rich Residents By Putting Pictures of Their Watered Lawns Online

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Stop watering your goddamn lawns. Stop it. Photo via Flickr user Gordon.

Frustrated residents in drought-stricken British Columbia have kicked off a new social media trend by calling out residents for breaking water restrictions.

On the coast where brown in the new green and wildfires are rampant, VICE reported last week on the Metro Vancouver announcement that the region is now in a Stage 3 water restriction. Residents are no longer be able to water lawns, wash cars, or refill public pools in an attempt to conserve water for drinking and hygienic purposes.

Drought shaming is the practice of neighbors ratting on each other over social media for indeed having greener grass on the other side of the fence—and also for not following water restrictions by wasting drinking water. It gained speed in California, after the state started to experience one of their worst droughts in decades. Californians began to name and shame celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, and other rich fancy-pants Angelenos for their eerily lush grass. Actor/mustache aficionado Tom Selleck has to pay $21,000 to a California water district for allegedly hiring a company to deliver water to him from another district.

BC's recent embrace of the drought shaming-movement includes folks like this Imgur user who has been posting images and addresses of rich people's houses where the lawns are still green—alleging that they have been watering them.

Meanwhile, a Facebook page called Grassholes asks residents to rat out their neighbours: "If you notices (sic) citizens of Metro Vancouver who choose green grass over having enough water to last the summer. Take a photo of the address and the water activity and call them a GRASSHOLE!!"

Urban Dictionary describes the Grasshole (not that this really needs an explanation) as a "Person who doesn't participate in eco-friendly living. They chuck their recyclables, leave their lights on, grab a handful of plastic bags, drive their rumbling Hummers through flocks of majestic birds and refuse to join the grassroots movement."

VICE spoke to Brian Crowe, the City of Vancouver's director for Water, Sewers and District Energy about the drought shaming movement.

"We're not trying to foster the shaming, and we don't participate directly in that, but we get the results of it because we get a huge number of calls since the restrictions have gone to level three," he said. Crowe also doesn't approve of the term "Grassholes," but prefers that residents still respect one another.

The city doesn't use social media to help track offenders, but a lot of neighbours have been calling in and alerting officials about others online.

"Last week, we were getting more than 100 calls per day, for just within the city of Vancouver," Crowe told VICE. "We had about 600 calls in the first five days of the level three restrictions."

As of Friday, the city had issued 21,080 warning letters and 36 violation tickets. There is a $250 fine for anyone who breaks the restrictions, but the city is aiming to inform and warn residents prior to issuing tickets, so they can do the right thing before facing penalties.

"Most years, there would only be two bylaw officers enforcing sprinkling regulation," he said. "This year, with the dry weather, we started with four, but as of the middle of last week we've increased that to 14."

Crowe says that more tickets are likely to come because this year, officers no longer give a warning ticket if they catch you wasting water. Instead, due to the severe drought, if a bylaw officer finds you offending, you will get a ticket right away.

However, in Nanaimo, which is currently under a Stage 4 water ban—the highest level of water restriction—they are trying to do the opposite of shaming. The region has started a weekly contest to call out people for saving water rather than wasting it. Guidelines to be a good little water saver include letting your lawn go brown, planting drought tolerant plants, and reusing water.

"Well, certainly it's a much better long-term approach," said Crowe of the suburb's tactics. "At this particular point... we're being a little more assertive in terms of enforcement."

Follow Sierra Bein on Twitter.

No Frowns in Clown Town: The People at the Gathering of the Juggalos 2015

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No Frowns in Clown Town: The People at the Gathering of the Juggalos 2015

The CIA Paid This Contractor $40 Million to Review Torture Documents

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The CIA Paid This Contractor $40 Million to Review Torture Documents

I Had My Personality Tested by Scientology

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I Had My Personality Tested by Scientology

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Google Has Finally Acknowledged That Google+ Isn't Working Out

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Photo by the Author

Read more about social media:

Who's Still Using Ello?

The Future of Social Media According to VICE

Will Tomorrow's Young Politicians Be Doomed by Their Social Media Indiscretions?

If you thought Google+ was just something for standup comedians to tack onto the end of a quip about technology when they can't think of a better punchline, have we got news for you: Google+ is actually a full-service social media site. But don't get too excited, because Google is now scaling it down.

In a post on Google's official blog today, Bradley Horowitz, Google's "VP of Streams, Photos, and Sharing" wrote, "We made a few choices that, in hindsight, we've needed to rethink."

Sure, Google+ has its share of avid users, but if you're like most people, you got a Google+ profile the same week in June of 2011 that everyone else on Earth got theirs, sorted everyone you knew into "circles," then posted on Facebook about how you didn't know what to do on Google+, and never used it again. By fall of 2011, the service was already in the dustbin of potential "Facebook killers" where it sits today, along with its pals Ello and Diaspora.

According to Horowitz, Google "heard that it doesn't make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use." It seems that Google's overall plan for our lives includes some potentially useful tools that we've been ignoring, like location sharing, the community aspects of YouTube, and some unnamed features in the Google Photos app. These are going to be unshackled from the iron ball called Google+, and once they're freed, who knows? Maybe we'll all start using them.

The first thing you might notice is that, effective immediately, YouTube comments won't also be fed to Google+. One commenter on YouTube's blog post about the conscious uncoupling of these features remarked that this development will actually benefit the 10 people still using Google+: "Great news for being able to share videos here without Youtube commenters ruining the conversation," he wrote.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.


Susan Meiselas & Magnum Foundation Present Olga Kravets

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A kebab maker on the outskirts of Grozny, outside of the restaurant where he works, which has been decorated with a poster of Shrek

OLGA KRAVETS

In 2009, Ramzan Kadyrov proudly announced that "peace has come to the land of Chechnya."The head of the Chechen Republic's rise to power started back in May 2004, when Vladimir Putin appointed him deputy prime minister of Chechnya after the death of Kadyrov's father. Since the age of 30, he has been given free rein in his country so long as he keeps the rebels at bay.

Officially, Chechnya remains part of Russia as the result of two wars, but Russia's constitution is applied selectively here. The government tortures young men if they show any sign of dissent. The houses of rebels' families are burned to ashes at the direct order of the president, and outspoken human rights activists face angry, violent mobs who torch their offices and beat them. Alcohol is sold only in five-star hotels to foreigners, and Kadyrov was able to summon about 60 percent of the republic's population to a "Love for the Prophet Muhammad" rally.

Once, when asked where he gets the money for his lavish lifestyle and Turkish-built skyscrapers, Kadyrov notoriously answered, "From Allah."

Students of the Russian Islamic University in Grozny (men in the front, women in the back) listen to a lecture by a guest mullah from Jordan.

A choir of schoolgirls sing a song dedicated to Akhmad Kadyrov, the father of the current Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. Ramzan has declared May 10 Remembrance Day in Chechnya, to commemorate his father's deportation and death. He couldn't make it May 9, when Kadyrov senior was actually killed, because Russia celebrates Victory Day then, marking the end of World War II.Chechen leader Ramzan Kadykrov greets a widow of a policemen killed in clashes with rebels during the parade dedicated to the 65th anniversary of the Soviet victory in the WWII held in downtown Grozny, 2010.

The election banners of Vladimir Putin outside of the infamous Knankala military base, which is now the main facility for the Russian forces, 2012.

Young Chechen men visit the shooting gallery in the newly opened Grozny City shopping mall, 2010.

Aset Borchashvili, 43, poses in the yard from where her son was seized by security forces. Unlike many others before, she is aware of his whereabouts. Her son, Yusup Ektumayev, is accused of participating in a terror attack and is awaiting trial in a detention centre. Mrs. Borchasvili claims that he was forces to confess under torture, 2013.

Mairbeck Yunusov, a healer and exorcist at the government-sponsored Islamic Medical Center in Grozny. An aide to the warlord Shamil Basayev in wartime, he changed sides after getting disillusioned with rebel ideology, 2013.

A gun that used to belong to a Chechen rebel during the wartime is on display at the republic's Ministry of Interior Museum, 2013.

Men belonging to the White Hats Sufi sect is attending Dhikr, a religious ceremony to praise Allah at the funerals.


Breaking Down the Republican War Against Legal Immigration

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Donald Trump might tell you he risked his life in south Texas last week. Wearing a "Make America Great Again" baseball cap, he strutted off his private jet in the city of Laredo and was chauffeured to the nearby US-Mexico border, trailed by a pack of reporters waiting to hear what the real-estate-mogul-turned-2016-presidential-candidate would say next.

"They say it is a great danger but I have to do it, I love the country and there's nothing more important than what I'm doing," Trump told the press herds (the FBI, incidentally, rated Laredo as one of Texas' safest cities in 2013). "I'm the one who brought up the problem of illegal immigration and it's a big problem, a huge problem."

Trump, whose theatrical tirades about the dangers posed by Mexican immigrants have launched him to the top of the 2016 GOP field, spent 40 minutes at the border Thursday, touring the line between the US and Mexico with the mayor of Laredo, and pontificating that "you have to make the people who come in [to the country], they have to be legal."

While even Republicans have acknowledged that Trump's comments are extreme, the GOP presidential candidates generally agree on his broader points, insisting that they too will tighten border security, crack down on undocumented workers, and require local law enforcement to hand illegal immigrants to Immigration Customs and Enforcement.

But some GOP candidates are taking the battle a step farther, calling for a reduction in the number of foreign immigrants who legally enter the US. "It's not just about being tough on the border. It's about legal immigration," Rick Santorum said in a speech at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa earlier this month. "We have to hold the line on illegal immigration, to stop it, but also to reduce legal immigration of unskilled workers by 25 percent so we can bring wages up in this country."

Santorum's comments echoed those of his fellow Republican 2016 hopeful, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who told Glenn Beck in April that the government should consider curbing legal migration limits to shield the domestic workforce.

"The next president and the next Congress need to make decisions on the legal immigration system that are based on, first and foremost, protecting American workers and American wages," Walker said in an interview, noting that the US now has its largest foreign-born population in history at about 40 million people, according to 2010 census data. "Because the more I've talked to folks...the more I see what is this doing for American workers looking for jobs, what is this doing for wages."

In Congress, Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, has argued several ties for the US limit its visas for foreigners to protect American workers. "We should not admit more people in this country than we can expect to vet, assimilate, and absorb into our labor markets and schools," Sessions said in a statement this month. "It is not mainstream, but extreme, to continue surging immigration beyond all historical precedent."

Related: We Asked an Expert What Would Happen If Donald Trump Actually Became President

Other Republicans, including several 2016 presidential candidates, have focused on reducing legal immigration from predominantly Muslim countries, citing an increased risk of terrorism. In the wake of the shooting in Chattanooga, Tennessee earlier this month, Rand Paul told Breitbart News that he is trying to restrict arrivals from "countries that have hotbeds of jihadism and hotbeds of Islamism." Ted Cruz also issued a statement after the shooting calling for heightened scrutiny of Muslim immigrants.

In the meantime, public opinion is split over the issue of legal immigration. A poll released by the Pew Research Center earlier this year found that 36 percent of Americans surveyed favored curbing legal immigration, while 31 percent supported an increase; 25 percent wanted rates to remain the same.

When it comes to the economic impact of immigration, Santorum and others have proposed that capping unskilled labor visas would benefit Americans, allowing raises to rise and opening up new opportunities for unemployed workers."What is in the best interest of American workers? What are we going to do to get those salaries up?" Santorum told the audience at the Family Leadership Summit. "The vast majority of people coming into this country are unskilled workers competing to keep wages down."

But analysts say that Santorum's proposal to cut unskilled worker visas by 25 percent would prompt a marginal—if any—shift for US employees. For one thing, the US State Department issues so few visas for unskilled workers that the population is a drop in the bucket in the overall workforce. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 500,000 people annually receive temporary unskilled labor visas, while the entire US labor force is composed of at least 93 million people , Santorum's proposal would cut temporary visas by 125,000 annually—reducing our workforce by just about .1 percent.

"Most of the research shows that immigration in the past 3 decades has had a modest impact on the least educated workers, people without high school degrees," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Research.


Like this? Watch The Business of Life: The USA and Its Immigration Dilemma


If temporary visas for unskilled workers are reduced, Baker warned, more individuals might choose to enter the country without papers. "If you decrease the number of people who can come here legally it may be offset by people who come here illegally," he said. "Most employers have very little fears when they hire an undocumented worker. They can face fines but it's rare. More effective controls would be enforcement at point of hiring, and serious penalties for employers who don't follow [the rules]."

Legal immigration has benefited the economy overall, said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a Cornell University Law School professor who works on immigration and asylum law. A 2011 report from the American Enterprise Institute found that temporary workers, both unskilled and skilled, actually add jobs to the US economy, and that there is no evidence that foreign-born workers, taken in aggregate, hurts American employment.

Despite the economic benefits, though, the visa programs for unskilled laborers, like most aspects of the country's broken immigration system, are in need of reform. Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research for the Economic Policy Institute, said employers could easily abuse their temporary workers, who rely on their bosses for permission to remain in the country, citing a 2011 review of the student worker program, in which he found that employers often failed to provide their employees promised accommodations or benefits.

"The employer essentially owns the guest worker visa, so if you're fired you're deportable," Costa said. "So it makes workers afraid to complain, because if they do they have to leave the country."

He added that the US government should institute greater safeguards for foreign workers, who are a "critical part of the economy."

"I'm less worried about the numbers [of visas] and more about creating a procedure that is fair for US and foreign workers, so foreign workers have more protections from retaliation and even wages," Costa told me. "I think the candidates are making blanket statements that reducing immigration is going to open up jobs, but it's not that simple."

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

Alleged Manchester Gangster 'Mr. Big' Was Shot Dead Last Night

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Paul Massey in 1998 Screenshot via Youtube

WATCH: Our documentary 'The Debt Collector'

Paul Massey, dubbed "Salford's Mr. Big" by a local councillor for his role in a riot in the early 90s (Massey always denied he was there), was shot dead outside his home in Salford, Greater Manchester, last night. Police responded to reports of gunfire at around 7:30 PM on Sunday, and eyewitnesses have claimed a lone gunman was responsible for Massey's death.

Massey was a notorious figure in Manchester, once brushing off allegations that he was a gangster with the words: "A gangster is a person who goes out letting guns off unnecessary, shooting people unnecessary, and basically getting involved in unnecessary crime."

In 1999, Massey was sentenced to 14 years in prison after stabbing a man in a nightclub. In 2011, after his release, he was arrested on suspicion of money laundering—a charge he denied at the time, then again this March as the investigation continued. In 2012, telling voters that his "Mr. Big" reputation was a thing of the past, he attempted to be Salford's mayor, promising to rid the city of heroin dealers. However, he came fifth out of seven candidates.

In a BBC interview from 1998, which was never broadcast, Massey was asked about attempts on his life. He responded: "They ain't going to do no harm to me, because they haven't got the fucking balls."

Manchester police are following several lines of enquir, and have asked the public to come forward if they have any information about Massey's death. "Clearly no one wants to see any further retaliation," said Manchester's Crime Commissioner Tony Lloyd.

Bizarre and Beautiful Photos from New York’s Biggest Vogue Ball

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Bizarre and Beautiful Photos from New York’s Biggest Vogue Ball

The Depraved, Sublime Art of 'True Detective'

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The Depraved, Sublime Art of 'True Detective'
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