Corrie Ottenbreit. Photo courtesy PorchlightCanada

A few months before Corrie Ottenbreit was last seen by a family member at her home in Edmonton more than a decade ago, she gave the RCMP a sample of her hair so officers would have her DNA on file in the event that she ever went missing or ended up dead.

Ottenbreit, then 27, was a sex worker who regularly met with clients along 118 Avenue in northeast Edmonton, and likely knew that her line of work could lead to danger. She vanished on May 9, 2004.

Yesterday, RCMP officers announced they had identified her remains near a rural property in Leduc, Alberta, using the hair she provided. Her remains were found near those of three other women, which RCMP say means a serial killer could have been involved.

"We consider Corrie's death to be a homicide," said RCMP Inspector Stacey Talbot during a press interview on Tuesday. "One of the investigative theories in relation to these deaths is we may be dealing with a serial predator."

Earlier today, VICE spoke with another Alberta RCMP Inspector Gibson Glavin, who said that for Ottenbreit's case, and the others, the main task for investigators is to consider anybody who might have been capable of the deaths.

This could include two men, Thomas Svelka and Joseph Laboucan, who are already behind bars for killing other Edmonton sex workers. Svelka is currently serving an indefinite prison sentence for second-degree murder of a sex worker. Laboucan was convicted of first-degree murder for killing a sex worker in 2005, while he was already serving a life sentence for sexually assaulting and beating another girl to death.

Since 2003, a special unit of RCMP officers called Project KARE has been taking voluntary DNA samples from women in precarious positions, such as Ottenbreit, so they can track and identify them if they go missing or are killed. Project KARE was formed in response to growing number of cases involving missing women and remains of dead people being discovered on the outskirts of the city.

The list of names in the database has since grown to 1,200, and women still are adding themselves every day.

Ottenbreit is the fourth woman officers with Project KARE have identified since 2003—all within a few kilometres of each other near Leduc, which is south of Edmonton.

In 2003, the remains of Katie Ballantyne were found in a field, a months after she disappeared.

In 2010, another woman, Amber Tuccaro, went missing. Her remains were found in September 2012.

And the remains of Delores Brower, an Aboriginal sex worker from Edmonton who went missing in 2004, were discovered this April.

Ottenbreit's family released a statement today asking for privacy. "Our only hope now is that we will someday learn more about what led to her disappearance and death," the statement reads. "We ask anyone who has any information that could help the police to come forward."

Follow Rachel Browne on Twitter.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Remember when you were a kid and you'd ask for something you really wanted for your birthday, only to open your presents and find that you got something totally lame, like socks or an ugly t-shirt, instead? That's the kind of grave disappointment I imagine women felt this week when the covers came off a new museum in East London. The museum had been billed as a women's history museum, celebrating the accomplishments of British women. Instead, it had been inexplicably turned into a museum about Jack the Ripper—who, to jog your memory, was made famous for killing women, mutilating their bodies, and then removing their uteruses.

The original application for the space proposed a museum to "recognize and celebrate the women of the East End who have shaped history, telling the story of how they have been instrumental in changing society." Everyone thought it was a perfectly nice idea, and the local council approved the application. There was no mention of Jack the Ripper in that application.

According to the London Evening Standard, Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe—the guy who created this monstrosity—wasn't trying to pull a fast one. "We did plan to do a museum about social history of women but as the project developed we decided a more interesting angle was from the perspective of the victims of Jack the Ripper." Which says a lot about women's accomplishments. :(

While locals feel understandably "hoodwinked," the local council told The Guardian that it "has no control in planning terms of the nature of the museum," which is an awfully polite way of saying "we're shit out of luck."

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

The post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Sandy Hill Estate lies to the north west of Farnham, on the border of Surrey and Hampshire. A mixture of private and council housing, the estate was designed around a throughroad, which runs like a spine, with cul-de-sacs leading off it to parking areas made up of open space and garages. The houses are of unusual design, with the back of the homes facing the roads and garages, and the fronts opening out to small interlocking courtyards interlaced with a network of footways.

I discovered this place in 1987, while studying photography at a local art college. I felt alienated from my fellow students, but found a home on the Sandy Hill Estate. Over the next three years I gave people photo prints, which led to taking more pictures. The camera was an excuse, really—I liked talking to "normal" people. They were obsessed with cars and bikes, and they were "normal" to me.

Image via Facebook

The tragic, confusing, and politically volatile death of Black Lives Matter activist Sandra Bland has shifted some of the recent media focus away from deaths involving street-level law enforcement officers, and toward the horrors that can occur behind bars. Bland's death was officially ruled a suicide by hanging, but an investigation into "lingering questions" is ongoing.

Stories of other women dying in police custody have been cropping up these past few weeks. With Monday's report of a 43-year-old woman named Raynette Turner dying mysteriously in a Westchester County, New York, jail, the issue seemed impossible to ignore. Is this an epidemic that is only getting worse? Are more women of color dying in police custody than usual?

Sandra Bland was found hanging in a Hempstead, Texas jail cell on July 13, three days after being cuffed and arrested during a traffic stop for failing to indicate a turn. A week before, on July 6, a young Lakota woman named Sarah Lee Circle Bear was reportedly found dead in a jail cell in Aberdeen, South Dakota. The day after Bland's death, there was another death by apparent suicide of an 18-year-old Black Lives Matter protester named Kindra Chapman, who had been arrested at a demonstration in Homewood, Alabama, for allegedly stealing a cellphone. Joyce Curnell, a 50-year-old who had been arrested for shoplifting in Charleston County, South Carolina, was found dead in a jail cell on July 22. Earlier this week, in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, a woman named Ralkina Jones, who had been arrested after a fight with her husband, died in custody. Jones had been suffering from medical conditions that had been "documented during her intake process and she was administered her prescribed medication as directed," according to Cleveland Heights Police.

These deaths are tragic, but the sad truth is that these sorts of incidents happen routinely. In 2012, the latest year for which the Bureau of Justice Statistics' Deaths in Custody Reporting Program has released data, 4,309 people died while being held in local jails or state prisons. In local jails, where there were 958 deaths—an 8 percent increase from 2011—the number-one cause of death was suicide.

Watch our documentary about the militarization of America's police:

In total, 122 women died in local jails in 2012, or about ten per month—which means, depressingly, that if the six women mentioned above were the only women who died in custody in July, that wouldn't be unusual. (All of the women mentioned died in jail rather than in prison.)

We spoke to Jamira Burley, an Amnesty senior campaigner about the issue. She told VICE of the need for "transparency," and "independent investigations from outside of police departments to look into those matters," but added, "We haven't done an independent study on deaths in police custody."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

The author (right) with a friend on a night out

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Stevie Wonder is a hero of mine. "Time is long but life is short," he once told the Guardian, alluding to that very irritating fact about time: It's all relative. Take school. The minutes fly by when you're outside on break, sharing Richmonds before coating yourself head-to-toe in Lynx (because that will definitely mask the ashtray aroma, and not just smell exactly like you've had a smoke and then, weirdly, decided to cover yourself in deodorant). However, as soon as you get back inside and pick up a protractor, the seconds turn to minutes and the minutes to hours, and you're suddenly acutely aware of your own mortality, The End screaming towards you in a tsunami of sin, cos, and tan symbols.

That's why I've always tried to live by that mantra of Stevie's. Aware that we all have a finite number of years on Earth, I found ways to break every reasonable rule my mother set for me when I was younger. I almost put her in an early grave when she caught me, a blind nine-year-old, riding my brother's BMX at the skate park. And I'm still very much the same now: Last year, I skydived and took on the third highest bungee jump in the world, all in the space of a day. "You're out to kill me, boy!" screamed my mother down the phone.

With all that plummeting towards the ground at high speeds, you might think that clubbing for a young blind student like myself would be a walk in the park. You would, however, be mistaken. I'm not saying I don't have a screamer most nights, but I've had to craft a number of techniques to help me negotiate the unique problems I face in this oh-so ablest world. Here, I've gone and written them all down so you have a read.

GETTING IN

For most students—blind or sighted, sober or shitfaced, wearing a fucking waistcoat to a nightclub or not—this is the highest hurdle to clear. The good thing for most is that pre-drinking in dorms in a great social leveler: You're all as wasted as each other, and so equally as likely to mess up when it comes to keeping your composure and stringing together enough words to convince the judges at whatever kangaroo court you're queueing up for that you're in a fit state to enter. Their judgments are often quick, their decisions irreversible. "Fuck off and don't came back," means you're not getting in all night, even if you go back and try again with a hat on.

For me, the hurdle is slightly higher. Acting sober is not the primary concern of a blind clubber; from experience, I know that, upon first sight of me and my eyes, the decision has already been made: "He's definitely a no." Waiting in line is like waiting on death row—I know what's coming. Thankfully, I'm now well-versed in how to handle the situation.

"Go to a hospital or go home, mate!" the bouncer barks.

Presenting my ID, I gently explain that I have a visual impairment: "Don't judge a book by its cover; I'm not as fucked as you think I am." He snatches my ID and glares at it. My eyes, at 1 AM on a Saturday, are the same as those in the photo (this, of course, would also work for sighted people if you just got really, really drunk before taking your ID photo). Defeated, the judges are forced to reverse their decision.

THE BAR

Without access to any visible drinks lists or prices—and because asking busy bar staff for an itemized rundown of everything on offer is a proper dick move—I avoid my favorite, gin and tonic, for fear of immediately ridding myself of whatever's left of my maintenance loan. My policy is simple: go for vodka and Coke—it's usually the one on special offer.

"£5.50 please, darling."

Drink already poured, it turns out the vodka and Coke is not on offer whatsoever. I walk out to the smoking area and find my mates, all of them drinking £3 gin and tonics. I weep at a world that has let me down.

READ ON THUMP: Pretty Much Everything That's Happened in a Nightclub Ever Vol. 1

THE DANCE FLOOR

After forcing myself to drink every last drop of my bank-breaking, gag-inducing drink—because you need a bit of fire in you're belly if you're spending seven hours shaking your limbs around near strangers—I, like anyone else who goes to a nightclub, will head for the dance floor. I can't get too carried away, lest I lose my friends, but that gets increasingly hard when you've had a few and the DJ starts dropping red hot bangers.

Picture an oversized blind man in a furry poncho flailing around on a dance floor designed for the sighted. That's pretty much exactly what it looks like when this happens.

POST-DANCE STRESS DISORDER

I stop for breath and reality strikes: I've lost my friends. Conveniently, as someone with a visual impairment, my sense of smell is heightened—I can usually sniff my friends out whenever I lose them. So I weave through the moist mass on the dance floor, knowing exactly what to look for: a distinctive mix of Persil washing powder, Paco Rabanne, Marlboro Menthols, and sweat.

My nose rarely fails me, but it does tonight. Thinking I've tracked Zak down, I go for the hand grab. To my dismay, the hand I've grabbed is too rough to belong to sweet, supple Zak. I've just grabbed the hand of someone who, I can only imagine from the tone of his voice, shares at least four Britain First posts a day on Facebook. "Good point," he writes beneath it: "Makes you think."

"You're fucked, mate. What have you been taking? Your eyes look loopy."

A derogatory comment about my eyes; my life no longer hangs in the balance. I've developed a method of dealing with these kind of remarks—a method that can also help me out of situations I'd rather not be in. I take his hand again.

"I haven't taken anything. I am blind."

He starts stuttering. "Oh shit, sorry. I feel so guilty, mate—is there anything I can do to apologize?"

"Yes, I'll have a gin and tonic, please."

WATCH – Big Night Out: The Drunken Student Disco

THE SMOKING AREA

I take my apology drink and walk out to the smoking area, still in search of my friends. Someone belts out my name: "Allan!"

I wander over, quickly realizing that it's not my mates I'm standing next to. I ask a few questions in a bid to decipher who it is I'm speaking to: "What did you do this morning? How were lectures? What were they on?"

Ah, it's a philosophy student.

"Who are you here with?" I ask.

"Oh, just with Melissa and Sadie"

Then it hits me: I've been speaking to someone I profoundly dislike for a whole five minutes.

I cart off and finally bump into my friends. I tell Jamie to "sort me out," which by now he understands to mean: "Roll me a cigarette because I'm too blind to do it myself."

POSING FOR PHOTOS

This is always a worrying process. I simply stare into the distance and hope, when the shutter closes, that I'm looking in the right direction. The next morning, I check Facebook to see if I've been successful.

Nailed it!

HEADING HOME

The music winds down as the sun rises and the birds start flirting with each other. By this point I've lost everyone I came with at least three more times, which I suppose is actually a pretty universal experience for anyone ingesting entire pints of cheap vodka in a dark room. I normally give up after scouring the club a couple of times, leaving my friends to locate me at the end of the night, ready to head back to halls and throw up until my morning seminar.

Next time you see someone with "loopy eyes" galloping around the dance floor, it may well be me or another blind clubber. I know we're not common, but we do exist. Treat us well, because otherwise you'll end up feeling guilty and buying us drinks all night.

Follow Allan on Twitter.

More on VICE:

I'm 33 Years Old and I'm Gradually Going Blind

This Greek Teen Invented a Pair of Smartglasses for the Blind

What It's Like to be Blind in the Age of the Internet

The author (left), his sister, and his brother in Disneyland. All photos courtesy of the author.

This article originally appeared on VICE France

The town of Marne-la-Vallée was established in the west suburbs of Paris in the 1960s. It extends over a 20 km [12 mile] radius, from Bry-sur-Marne until Bailly-Romainvilliers and is divided into four parts. The eastern part of the town is called Val d'Europ. That is where I grew up.

In the mid-1980s, Disney expressed an interest in building an amusement park in Europe. A couple of years later—on March 24, 1987—it was agreed that a Euro Disney Resort would be developed in France. The park would be called Disneyland Paris and settle in Val d'Europe. It is said that the Disney representative wanted a Mickey Mouse mascot to sign the agreement instead of him, but then French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac politely refused. The park finally opened its doors in 1992.

My family moved to Val d'Europe in 1998, when I was 5 years old. I can only vaguely remember the Seine-Saint-Denis flat in which we lived before that. When we first arrived in Val d'Europe everything seemed to be under construction but, then again, everything is always under construction over there: You can always see a crane popping above the strategically planted trees that flank the town's quiet streets. Our new home was a kit house—much like every other building on our street or in town. I distinctly remember feeling extremely excited to finally live in a house instead of a flat.

The 1987 agreement established a partnership between the public and private sectors the likes of which France had never seen before. To put it simply, Disneyland owns my house and almost everything in it. Out of the 3,233 hectares making up Val d'Europe, 2,230 have been granted to Disney. It was the company who decided what the houses and the neighborhoods would look like and who would occupy them. In exchange, it would attract tourism and decrease taxes.

Everything in Val d'Europe exists thanks to Mickey—the house in which I experienced my first memories, the park in which I played with my best friend, the lake around which I smoked my first cigarettes, even the trees I climbed pretending I was a wood elf and not a kid who ate alone in the school cafeteria.

The author and his sister in their constantly changing neighborhood

My parents always dreamed of owning a house in a developing part of France. Like many couples of their generation, they saw it as an opportunity to raise their kids in a privileged environment. Schools and shops kept opening—throughout my childhood, the town's as well as my family's finances were good. The park was only a few minutes away by car or half an hour away on foot, if you knew which roads to take. As soon as we moved there, my dad bought us annual passes to the theme park. Being a kid in Val d'Europe was truly a magical experience.

Truth be told, almost everybody living in the area had an annual pass, or a member of the family working at the park who could let other people in. I celebrated too many birthdays in Disneyland—always under the supervision of tired adults who wanted nothing less but to be spending weekends in their workplace.

Still, I am very grateful to have grown up in Europe's leading tourist destination. The park offered bars, restaurants, a cinema, and diverse activities during the holidays. I got to know its roller coasters by heart—my friends and I memorized each turn, each loop, and the exact moment we should make a face if we wanted to spoil the family photo of the tourists sitting in the front. Without an inch of irony, we would agree to meet in Adventureland, in front of Alice in Wonderland's Labyrinth, or the X-Wing.

Related: Watch our documentary, 'Kingdom of the Little People'

Disney has also built some houses for its employees, right in the middle of the resort. These guys are often young people from all over the world, looking to get bored while dressed as Peter Pan for a season or two. The largest portion of Val D'Europe's residents also work for Mickey. When my friends and I reached summer job age, guess who employed us.

Once we reached puberty, Disneyland began to lose its seductive power. The park started to resemble a workplace, while the Disney Village and its extremely expensive bars were slowly abandoned for the few places in which it was possible to drink and dance without the fear of knocking down a child.

I quickly fled that environment by going to high school in Paris. I turned my back on Disneyland's characters and attractions, its loud and fake colors, and I stopped buying annual subscriptions to the park. It must be a little less than five years since I was last there. Much like the rest of the components of my childhood, Disney's influence on my soul is starting to wane.

Still, I find the extent of Disney's control over our lives fascinating. Without the park my parents would have probably never been able to open their small business but, at the same time, Disney swallowed our entire lives. We over-consumed the park and its artificial pleasures, often forgetting the outside world was a far cry from all that. Still, like a child's favorite toy, Disneyland will forever have a special place in my heart, even if I never go back.

Follow Ilyass on Twitter.

Photo by Bruno Bayley

A version of this article originally appeared on VICE UK.

There needs to be a guide to one-night stands because one-night stands are impossibly complicated. The challenges involved are also totally different to those you'll encounter in a loving relationship. Figuring out what to do with your spooning arm, "learning to say sorry" and creating iCals for oral sex almost make settling down seem like a good idea when you consider the risks of one-night stands—whether that's fucking over a friend, being forced to confront your self-esteem issues head-on, or catching an exotic disease that ends up making someone's penis look like a sea anemone.

Here's an A–Z guide for any of love's true soldiers who find themselves caught up in the sturm und drang that is one-night stand living.

READ: The VICE Guide to Adulthood

A
ALCOHOL

Hooking up with someone while blacked out is an actual nightmare, of course, and going home with someone who is sloppy sloppy makes you an official Bad Person and you will one day answer for that shit. But can you imagine negotiating the steps from yelling "I'm Jane!" in someone's ear over a deafening club throb to touching their genitals in some unfamiliar room while stone-cold Steve Austin sober? With 100 percent of your senses, including your sense of shame, fully operational? It's called social lubricant for a reason, people.

B
BOUNDARIES

Unless you meet your temporary partner in some sort of sex dungeon or leather cave or, I dunno, fuck marquee, chances are you're not gonna be down for some strap-me-into-this-chair-and-shock-my-junk-with-batteries kink-off when you get back to theirs—instead, you're both planning some straightforward, if dizzier than usual, S-E-X.

And thus you both enter into the invisible laser maze that is "unspoken sexual boundaries." Together, you have to navigate this sexual etiquette labyrinth and slay the mutual orgasm Minotaur using little more than "no thank you"–grunts and nervous laughter as navigation. But tread softly, sexy Theseus: You don't want to slip between the sheets and feel their fingers trying to board the midnight train to Brown Town when that's quite literally Rule Number 1 of Nope, do you?

Photo by Jamie Taete

C
COFFEE

"Do you want to come upstairs for coffee?" Eight little words that—thank Christ—no real human has ever actually used to usher in coitus, at least not outside of George Clooney Nespresso ads or romcoms for no-sex moms. The only people who conflate coffee with sex are people who appreciate neither coffee nor sex. Fuck those people, and not in a sexual way.

While we're at it, let's run through a quick tick-list of other shit you should avoid saying before, during, and after a one-night stand: "I'm going to split you in half"; "Sorry I didn't shave"; "I like you"; "Brown Town"; "usher"; "coitus"; "daddy" and fucking hell, unless the situation very much demands it, please don't say "cum." You just met. Don't say "cum."

D
DATING APPS

Grindr, Tinder, Happn... let's be frank, this is probably where most of you are hoping to score these days. How do you know if a guy is down for a one-time thing? Easy: iCloud sent you a notification telling you to upgrade your dickpic storage. How do you know if a girl is down for a one-time thing? We're not. At least not until we've had one subsequent night of Pizza Express dough balls and joyless, sub-orgasmic sex. For girls, one-night stands almost always happen in retrospect.

Photo by Jamie Taete

E
EMOTIONS

Chemicals are fucked up. When you're going down on someone you just met, your brain will trick you into thinking the person you just met in the puke queue at Walkabout is your soulmate. Couple this with something like MDMA and you're in a pickle—your mouth might be otherwise engaged, but your mind is imagining clinking champagne glasses and wedding cake. So, remember: This person is not your soulmate. Sex is sex. Sex is wonderful. Attachment is for emails.

F
FREAK OUTS

There will be a moment in most one-night stands where you give yourself a little reality check—often in a club toilet, often while smirking at yourself in the mirror like an idiot—and get hit by a sonic boom of dread. Here is the most important advice: At any point during this silly singleton dance you are perfectly within your rights to change your mind.

Some tricks to get out of there smoothly: Say, "Sorry, I forgot about my dog's chemo" and order a taxi; ask, "Actually, do you fancy a threesome?" then point to the worst-looking bouncer; growl, "Here's to our new lives!" just as you're about to do a shot together. Or, you know, you could just say you're not feeling it.

Photo by Jake Lewis

G
GLAM, GRACEFUL, AND GROWN UP

Basically, G is for all the things you will not be during this encounter. Fact: You will probably period the bed. Or shit on it a bit. Or at least get the bed moist in some gruesome way. Coming out of this looking or feeling in any way sophisticated is going to be a challenge, but here are some basic don'ts:

–DON'T make someone wait outside your room when you get back to yours. The thought of what you're hiding is so much worse than the actual sight of it ever could be. Equally: it's better to survey a collection of wank cloths, excessive dildos, and severed human heads than make small talk on the landing with your going-for-a-piss flatmate as they say, "Well, if you do do it, please be quiet, I'm up for work at six";

–And finally, at least try to pretend you DON'T do this often. No one wants to know they're going home with a serial shagger. Talking about the last time this happened is the only move that's worse than hitting on someone, then, when they reject you, hitting on the friend standing next to them. But if you're reading this you're probably the kind of awful sex bandit who does that anyway, aren't you?

H
HOUSEMATES

Don't drink their Baileys, don't wake them up to ponce drugs/condoms, don't use their razor to emergency shave anyone's pubes, and don't bring back an absolute lunatic who steals your keys and get themselves a copy cut while you're still sleeping, breaks in at a later date and then cuts off all your dog's paws one by one. Because it's inevitably your touchiest housemate who gets up first and finds the leftover fries arranged in the shape of a heart on the front lawn.

Photo by Miki Yoshihito via Flickr

I
INFECTIONS

Two days after, your pee stings. A week later, you can't walk without the help of an ice pack. Congratulations: You've got an infection. You have become what every pamphlet you were forced to read during PHSE lessons at school warned you about. You should have used a fucking condom, you idiot.

The first thing you need to do is be chill and go to clinic. Often there are places where you can get tested for free—here, for instance, are a bunch of them in New York City.

Come on: You don't need an article on a website to tell you to use protection and to get your junk checked out, do you? Because the only thing more awkward than bumping into the person you slept with at the STI clinic is getting an angry text saying, "THANKS FOR THE GENITAL WARTS, THEY MADE IT EVEN MORE UNPLEASANT WHEN I FOUND YOUR PESTILENT UNDERPANTS DOWN THE SIDE OF MY RADIATOR."

TRENDING ON NOISEY: What I Learned from Being a Groupie

J
JOKES

No jokes during sex on a one-night stand. This cannot be stressed enough. Jokes should be retained entirely for the Before and After periods—moments when you're either trying to woo them in or kick them out. Even the next day, don't think you've got the all clear to make fun of the situation: You have no idea how well this stranger deals with a hangover. Definitely don't try to squeeze some humor out of the Saturday morning morning-after pill run to Planned Parenthood, past the inevitable protester with the dead baby sign. Don't try saying to the pharmacist, "She'll need two after that," before nudging your latest fuck-buddy in the ribs.

Obviously do try to see the funny side if she actually gets pregnant though, because at that point, laughter is probably all you will have left.

K
KEEPSAKES

Every one-night stand will leave behind something unfathomably weird, some gewgaw or trinket, some bra pad or H Samuels earring, some flattened trilby, some Happy Meal toy donkey. If you buy some No More Nails, you could stick all of these keepsakes together into one giant shrine to your own libido, which—when crowned with some joss sticks and rosary beads—would allow you to summon a booty call at any wicked hour of the night. Alternatively, give them to a charity shop. Everything in a charity shop is there because of dead people and dead shags.

Photo by Jamie Taete

L
LOCATION SCOUTING

You know that John Waters quote about how you shouldn't sleep with someone who hasn't got any books in their house? Well you also shouldn't sleep with someone if they've got a UV light, a reptile, or a popular vlog, either. Or a balaclava. Or hundreds upon hundreds of delicately painted airfix models.

If this sounds like you, or you still live at home with your parents, you're going to need to come up with a plan B location for your one-night stand. Just make sure you do it carefully. Here's a cautionary tale from an unnamed VICE UK editorial staffer:

Once I was giving someone a blowjob behind a Surrey branch of Waitrose. Midway through the act, I felt the warm glow of a flashlight on my bulging cheek. It was the flashlight of a police officer, and he was shining that light right on me. The worst part of this incident was not when the cop chuckled to himself and said, "I'd arrest you for public indecency, but I remember what I was like at your age." No: It was the part when he addressed the stranger by their first name, because they were KNOWN TO THE POLICE ALREADY.

Learn from our mistakes.

Photo by Jamie Taete

M
MATING RITUAL

Through history, man has developed a number of nuanced, sophisticated mating rituals: the four-base system, worked through in breathless order; the candlelit slow-sex experience; having a shower together and doing some hand stuff then getting the mattress all fucked up by damply clumsily fucking on it. That all goes out the absolute window on a one-night stand, though. One-night stands are peeling your clothes off and getting stuck in your jeans but with your underpants still somehow down, until you are hopping backwards into a loud door, until you are clattering to the floor over a big lamp.

It's fun, but just be aware that when you're high kicking your pants off in some drunk-erotic fervor that this is how they get lost. If you want to walk home with your junk tucked in tomorrow, check the arc and see where they landed before you go and put your mouth on something.

N
NAMES

You have to remember their name. You have to remember their name. Only... hold on, is it John or James? Always confusing, the mediocre J names. Jamie? Jack? Fucking hell. Best to just say a sort of quiet J sound and hope for the best. "Right there, Jhmm. Up there a little, juh-[quietly]-heems." If all else fails you can wait till they piss and root through their pockets for an ID, or ask them if they have any nicknames, or just get their attention by clicking at them loudly.

WATCH: Our documentary about the digital love and online sex industries

O
ORGASMS

What everyone on a one-night stand is desperate for until it actually happens.


P
PISSING WHERE YOU EAT

Workmates are fine fuck buddies, right? No. The point of a one-night stand is in the name: one. In, out, like a covert-ops mission held at dawn before the bombs hit. You don't really want to see a one-night stand again, is the point. You especially don't want to see them for eight hours, every single day.

Plus, it's incredibly hard to explain away. Office workers are always in sexual detective mode anyway, and it doesn't help that you did a drunk Facebook post at 1 AM moaning about the budget and accidentally left Location on, so it immediately checked you in to "Derek from Accounts' Fuck Palace." It doesn't help that you both have the smudgy stamps from the same nightclub on your inner wrist and it doesn't help that you both walked in awkwardly at the same time this morning. Just whatever you do, don't let Sandra from HR figure out that you two got it on last night. And the best way to do that is not to fuck your coworkers.

Photo by Bruno Bayley

Q
QUIET MOMENT

Eerie, eerie silence. This is like F for Freak Out but infinitely bleaker: the moment when the residual buzz of last night's speakers become audible in your head, the substances wear off, and you realize there's absolutely no chemistry between you and the person with their hands wrapped around your neck.

Now the passion under the club lights seems a lifetime away and the reality is you don't know this person. There isn't really any advice we can give you if this is happening, because that probably means it's too late. But if you are struck with this vapid feeling relatively often, it's probably time to start looking for other confidence boosters, like regular fresh air or getting a pet.

R
ROLE PLAY

On the plus side, one-night-stand nights let you be whoever you wanna be. Usually a top? Try being a bottom for a change—apart from maybe a bit of blood and screaming, nobody is going to know. Usually a prude? Don't go home until your breath smells like Anusol. Use the person's slipper as a paddle. Your new friend has absolutely no pre-formed opinions and will probably never encounter you again. Peg them hard and call them a bitch boy.

Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

S
SECOND WIND

The kind of people who have one-night stands fall into two categories: There's the folks who think, If we're only going to do this once, let's make the most of it. I'm not going to be able to sleep next to this stranger anyway, they could smother me in my sleep, before going again, and again, and again. Then there's the other camp of people, who will drop multiple hints about how much they love their sleep, how they have work to do tomorrow, how their mom is coming over in the morning, but still you keep squeezing their butt and dinging the bell for another round. This is fine enough at night but pro-tip: Don't try and initiate sex again in the morning. Your sex window is between the hours of 11 PM and 6 AM. This is not an all-you-can-eat sex buffet. Do not try and grab a plate of chow mein for breakfast.

T
TALKING

At some point, usually dawn, you will reach a point where you have to actually speak to your one-night stand. Sober. You don't know the importance of being selective with conversation until you have lain in bed with a stranger, post-morning sex, traced your fingers around their tattoo and jokingly persisted that they tell you what it means, only for them to yell, "IT'S MY DEAD BROTHER'S NAME, OK?" Your words are the glue that hold the vibe together: Do not come unstuck.

Photo by Jo Fuertes-Knight

U / V
UBER / VANISHING ACT

These go together because they are the same thing. You can be out of this weirdo's house in four to six minutes, depending on the traffic. Unlock the handcuffs, wriggle out of the sex swing, and just say, "Thank you. I had a lot of fun." Then give them a tight smile and a pat-hug and they'll know not to call you.

Remember, whoever leaves the one-night stand first wins. Relationships are, after all, just extended games of chicken where the goal is to charge into someone else until you're entwined in the twisted metal of emotional codependency. Leaving before daylight is seedy, but aim to make a quick exit the next morning instead of sitting about re-lacing your shoes in the hope the other party wants to eat eggs Benedict.

W
WALK OF SHAME

Too broke to pay for an Uber? Then we are sorry but you are just going to have to walk or get public transport. lol at all the times we left the person's house prematurely, realized we left our wallet there, quietly accepted it was swallowed into the sands of time—and, instead of going back to get it and facing our post-fuck shower—just soldiered a four-mile walk home.

Photo by Natalie Meziani

X
XENOPHILIA

Listen, it's really hard to find things that begin with X, right, but: Xenophilia is when you fancy something alien to you. So it sort of applies here, for those of you who've ever clambered off a Yates's bartender you never spoke to previously beyond demanding the right change, or those who've ever woken up in a tangle of dicks when you swore you were a vagina-only kind of person. That is the beautiful thing about one-night stands: They connect you with the people that lie outside the peripheries of your social sphere, they allow you to transcend and surf an entirely different sexual plane without the guilt or the shame or the involvement. You know how sometimes you blag a day pass to a gym, and it's really cool and you feel quite good and everything, but you wouldn't really want to make it a lifestyle choice, would you? You wouldn't want to pay $80 a month for it? That's you, only with a stranger's foot in your mouth.

Y
YOUR MATES

The only mitigating thing about a terrible one-night stand is that it makes for great pub fodder with your mates. Your horror stories about coming on a stranger's face 48 hours ago and having no idea what that face looks like now are the only thing keeping your boring, coupled friends up-to-date with modern sexual mores. Essentially: They don't want to be you. They like their safe little lives of sharing a Netflix account and having a holiday to the Italian Riviera to look forward to. They like jokily calling their girlfriend's dad "Pops." But they also really want to live vicariously through your genitals. So give them some titbits—not the entire roast dinner; you don't need to tell them about the Happy Meal toy donkey getting lost inside you and you having to dig it out with your fingernails over a garbage bin—give them some crumbs to keep them ticking over on their way down the path marked: WEDDING... KIDS... DEATH.

Photo by Ben Bentley

Z
Z-LIST

The sun is rising and your pants are back on and your one night-stand has now made it into the party of misspelt names dotted through your iPhone address book for bootycalling in the twilight hours. This is the casual sex Z-list: the people who you will end up reaching out to at the loneliest moments possible—Christmas Eve, the tail end of someone's engagement party, the cold and dreadful hours following a Tinder date with someone who looked a little bit like your mom.

If you're organized, you'll have a glyph-like language unique only to you, where you mark each name with an emoji. Umbrella emoji means "perspired too much," for instance, while shady moon means they cheerfully eat ass. But yeah, you're not this organized, are you? You've got a comb stuck in your hair and your phone is too out of battery to call a U for Uber. Somehow there is a sanitary pad stuck to the inside of your trainer. Forget saving their number, you need a shower and a little look at yourself in the mirror. You need a good breakfast and a decent night's sleep.

Follow the authors on Twitter:

@MillyAbraham / @joelgolby

@sophwilkinson / @MrDavidWhelan

Is she waving hello to economic stability? Goodbye to the environment? It's a mystery! Photo via Flickr user Premier of Alberta

It's near impossible to find a modern scenario as reminiscent of the Parable of the Prodigal Son as present-day Alberta.

The province has been blackout drunk on oil money for decades. All conventions of modern statehood have been disregarded, with the comatose citizenry convinced they deserve hospitals and highways without paying for them. Unfortunately, Alberta's bread and gooey black butter (the gargantuan and highly profitable energy industry, typically responsible for three-quarters of exports and over 120,000 jobs) has turned out to be quite the environmental clusterfuck, resulting in staggering amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, habitat destruction, and sludge pits.

Now, the province is starting to realize that its debaucherous ways can't be maintained. Next up: hangover, potential detox, attaining nirvana, all that good stuff.

"It's a cruel addiction," says Andrew Nikiforuk, journalist and author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent. "Governments love oil and gas: what other commodity on the planet is going to generate as much revenue for their coffers other than heroin and cocaine and meth, which, technically, governments can't tax?"

In May, the NDP stormed in from stage left with dynasty-toppling vigour. Yet the massive change didn't solve the fundamental problem Alberta faces: how to convincingly juggle economic and environmental priorities. Swing the pendulum too far one way and jobs and tax revenues in the important sector dry up; too far the other way and emissions skyrocket and the world burns.

There is a potential upside, however: If a place like Alberta can figure out its shit, then most other jurisdictions should be able to learn from whatever reformation the province undergoes. Rather than seeing Alberta as the proverbial canary in the coal mine for our environmental apocalypse, we should think of it as the guinea pig who's forced to solve the unfairly convoluted maze before any other creatures are dropped in.

"We're so dependent on this resource and our ability to get it to market," says Ricardo Acuña, executive director of the Parkland Institute, a left-leaning think tank situated in the University of Alberta. "It so directly flies in the face of what we need to do for environmental issues and climate change. I don't think there's any other jurisdiction in Canada, perhaps North America, that's facing the same kind of conflict or internal pressures."

The infamous Alberta tar sands are almost pretty here. Almost, but not quite. Photo via Flickr user Howl Arts Collective

Bitumen's hellishly difficult to extract and refine, producing 20 percent more emissions on average than conventional crude according to a recent US Department of Energy study. Jennifer Winter, associate director of energy and environmental policy at University of Calgary's School of Public Policy, notes there have been "incredible strides in technology" over the years, reducing total emissions per-barrel by 28 per cent between 1990 and 2012. Chris Ragan, associate professor of economics at McGill University and chair of Canada's Ecofiscal Commission, notes that all provinces sport a "family business" of sorts: think Ontario's auto manufacturing or beer in BC. Unfortunately, Alberta's "family business" will still account for the largest chunk of the country's emissions by 2020.

"Alberta wants to be able to sell its oil," Ragan says. "Even if it doesn't expand by one drop it's still developing 3.5 million barrels a day. It would like to be able to produce that and sell it in a world that is going to continue to use oil for a long time. That's going to be a challenge for Alberta as the world moves towards lower carbon intensity oil."

But there are a few potential role models. As environmental groups geared up to watch premiers convene and unrepentantly worship pipeline expansion at the recent Canadian Energy Strategy summit, news reports started circulating that Saudi Arabia—the world's largest oil producer and environmental pariah—was kickstarting intense investments in solar power. Apparently, the plan is to switch all electricity demand over to renewables by 2040 or 2050, a huge shift for a country that relies on oil and natural gas to power air conditioning and lighting. Then there's Germany, which sports the fourth largest economy in the world: it's guided by the energiewende ("energy transition" in German) that uses feed-in tariffs to aggressively incentivize renewable electricity.

The closest—albeit imperfect—potential source of inspiration is British Columbia, which has featured a revenue-neutral carbon tax since 2008; fossil fuel consumption has dropped by over 17 percent while economic growth has proceeded unhindered. It's why Winter and Ragan both advocate strongly for a higher carbon tax: "It would tilt the direction away from the marginal producer in the oilsands or marginal well drilled, meaning capital will be reallocated to something different," says Winter. The climate change panel chaired by the University of Alberta's Andrew Leach will likely advise the NDP cabinet on the subject when it delivers its fall report. But Nikiforuk suggests the tar sands shouldn't grow regardless of tweaks to the system.

"I don't think the project can expand at this point: it's folly to do so," he says. "The market signals are clearly telling the province that cheap oil is going to be here for a long, long time. The foreign markets for bitumen are disappearing. The province has to do something much more dramatic in terms of curbing carbon emissions."

These are everywhere in rural Alberta. What a majestic landscape. Photo via Flickr user davebloggs007

It's unclear what the provincial government's long game looks like. Many environmental groups voiced disappointment at the removal of the commitment to reduce absolute emissions from the Canadian Energy Strategy summit and Notley's glowing endorsement of the oil sector at the Calgary Stampede. The appointment of Leach, a bit of a superstar in environmental economics in a Ben Wyatt kind of way, boosted her case. But given that Alberta's performance will make or break Canada's attempt to escape its current status as climate criminal, there's going to have to be some seriously monumental changes.

"Rachel Notley and the rest of her MLAs want to be re-elected, of course," Winter notes. "They want to prove that they're more than the next best alternative to the PCs. I think they are being very cautious in their messaging, not wanting to scare away investment—not only in the oil sands but investment in Alberta. They're not trying to destroy the province. They don't want it to go into a recession."

Follow James Wilt on Twitter.

The black onyx Chakrub, on the author's bed

Here I am, lying on my bed, unenthusiastically swiping left and right on a few dozen dudes on Tinder, many of whom look like they own mustache wax and/or one too many wide-brimmed hats. I don't want to fuck any of them. Dejected, I throw my phone away, letting it land wherever the hell it wants. I'm officially in another one of my funks because yet another courtship recently ended with yet another man who decided a few months in that he can't be with me because "life is so crazy right now" and "the timing is just not right." Back to the goddamn drawing board. Who will be the next emotionally stunted man-child to use his eternal quarter-life crisis as an excuse to not want to commit to me?

Before resolving to get up and find my phone (which, hopefully, I didn't break) I decide to partake in one of my favorite mood-boosting activities: masturbation. This time, with a dildo made of 100 percent black onyx crystal. I stare at it, sigh, pull my underwear down and begin rubbing.

Since I got the Chakrub over a week ago, I've masturbated with it every day. Chakrubs belong to an emerging market of crystal sex toys (you can find them all over Etsy), which are made of expensive rocks instead of your standard silicone or plastic. Crystals are theorized to contain metaphysical properties that can be used for things such as healing, enlightenment, positivity, and other crap like that.

I have spent much of my hard-earned money on crystals. My apartment is decorated with various citrines and quartzes; taped to the wall by my desk are two small creativity crystals under a framed photo of Divine. On the nightstand by my bed is another crystal which claims to hold the ability to rid me of stress. While crystals have been around for ages, their healing properties seem uniquely marketable right now—there have been all kinds of objects made or remade with stone crystals, like jewelry, candle holders, lamps, smoking pipes, and now, taking this trend to its logical conclusion, dildos.

Despite the proliferation and promotion of crystals, science scoffs at the idea that these rocks hold magical powers. In 2001, Dr. Christopher French, a professor at Godlsmith's College in London, conducted a study to test the supposed healing effects of crystals. He gave half of his participants real crystals and the other half fake crystals, and then gave them booklets explaining the sensations they might experience from the crystals. Of the 80 participants in the study, only six claimed to not experience a sensation. The rest, whether they held a real or a fake crystal, reported things like feeling warmer in certain areas or having increased concentration. French told the Telegraph, "The fact that the same effects were found with both genuine and fake crystals undermines any claims that crystals have the mysterious powers which they are claimed to have."

To skeptics, the only real power these things are proven to have is the power of suggestion. But then again, I pride myself on being the most hopeful of cynics, and I willingly choose to take part in all kinds of bullshit, just in case some of it ends up being right.

Screenshot from the Chakrubs website

That's why I went through with obtaining the black onyx Chakrub. It claims to heal via self-pleasure, so I was down to give it the old college try. The description of the onyx promises to help in "overcoming past relationships." It also "guards against negativity and helps create emotional stability." These are three pretty important things I've been needing help in overcoming. It's no surprise to anyone who reads my column that my romantic life is a mess. On top of that, the majority of my anxiety is centered around sex. I figured maybe if I got this Chakrub and actually took it seriously, I could accomplish some much needed healing, which would in turn help rid me of my anxiety and make my love life less disappointing.

In an effort to take my dildo-rock more seriously, I reached out to the creator of the Chakrub, Vanessa Cuccia, to get some clarification as to how exactly I should masturbate in order to get the most of its magical powers. First, Cuccia clarified that my Chakrub did not have magical powers. "The molecular structures of crystals are so perfect that they vibrate at, and emit, very strong, very harmonious, very healthy frequencies. When you share a space with a crystal, your own energy adapts and adjusts to that of the crystal, thus making you healthier."

Makes sense to me.

Related: On this episode of Slutever, VICE explores the fashion of sex.

As for how to go about self-pleasure with this thing, I wasn't sure I could do my normal routine. Do I have to be repeating a mantra? Am I allowed to watch porn in its presence? Should I be sitting in some sort of yoga position? According to Cuccia, there is no right or wrong way to jerk off with your crystal dildo. They key is to make sure you stay aware while using it, and dedicate yourself to clearing any physical and emotional blockages that prevent you from feeling true pleasure.

With all that in mind, I got to rubbing. The Chakrub is pretty heavy, and has no vibrating functions—at least not the kind of vibrations I'm used to experiencing from a dildo. However, it's incredibly smooth and feels cold against my clitoris and surrounding parts which is, as pop-culture icon Borat would say, "very nice." Due to its lack of physically noticeable vibrations, my masturbation sessions now doubled in length. My trusty vibrator before this made masturbation an incredibly swift ordeal. In fact, now that I think about it, things were like clockwork. The job was succinct, with a guaranteed orgasm in five minutes or less.

On Motherboard: Sex, the Occult, and the Witches Who Do Porn

My black onyx Chakrub, on the other hand, was making me work harder for my orgasm, but it doesn't feel like hard work necessarily. Spending so much more time with my clit is making my masturbation sessions feel much more intimate and special. I'm reminded of the first year I started masturbating, when orgasms were a brand new discovery. I was around 12, and the only phallic thing I could legally buy was a toothbrush. I got the kind that had a tongue cleaner in the back, which I remember being very effective. I kept it under my bed, and waited until I was absolutely sure my parents were asleep before I pulled it out from under me. To this day, my vagina has never had a cavity.

After a week with my Chakrub, I am definitely feeling things I never before felt with other sex toys. It even feels wrong to call it a "toy." Knowing the spiritual weight so many people put on crystals forces me to give it a respect I don't give to even my most efficient vibrators.

While my masturbatory sessions have improved, I don't quite feel like my anxiety around sex and dating has lifted. I am still feeling the weight of past relationships, still feeling guarded, and still yearning for emotional stability. Perhaps I just need more time with the rock cock? Perhaps I'm not being fully aware enough? Or, perhaps the Chakrub is a load of bullshit?

Regardless, I don't regret using it, and will continue to. If nothing else, masturbation has taken on a new meaning. It's an ordeal again—something to look forward to at the end of the day as opposed to something to get over with. The Chakrub has given me the ability to love myself better, and now that I think of it, that's really what I should be focused on more than my relationships with men.

Thumbnail photo via Take Back Your Health Conference Flickr.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Tony Alter

Carl Thompson was Britain's fattest man. Earlier this year, the 910-pound 33-year-old died in his home. It took emergency services several hours to remove his corpse from his flat in Dover, Kent. How did Thompson get to this point? The simple answer is that he ate a lot. Why do people like Thompson eat a lot? There's no clear-cut explanation, but many psychologists would argue Thompson suffered from a mental illness that compelled him to eat.

According to the Telegraph, UK Prime Minister David Cameron is set to announce that anyone diagnosed as clinically obese who refuses to seek treatment could see their benefits cut or suspended. "We must look at what we do when people simply say no thanks and refuse that help, but expect taxpayers to carry on funding their benefits," he expected to say.

But what's the best to treat those who are clinically obese when many people's obesity is arguably due to their mental health, meaning "dieting" just won't cut it?

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In 2013, the Guardian reported that 67 percent of men and 57 percent of women in the UK were overweight or obese (in the UK, a person with a BMI of 25 to 29.9 is considered to be overweight, and a BMI over 30 is considered to be obese). The same study found 71 percent of US men were obese, compared to 62 percent of women. Obesity can be caused by a number of factors, one of which is overeating—compulsive eating, without purging, that is usually done with discretion.

The question remains: where does overeating come from? What makes someone like Thompson literally eat themselves to death? Is there a genetic disposition to it, or is it a case of nurture over nature?

Dr. Cary Savage, director of the Center for Health Behavior Neuroscience at the University of Kansas, has worked for many years to uncover brain differences in obese and healthy weight people. "Words like willpower imply a certain dichotomy that either you have it or you don't," he tells me. "In reality, it's more complicated."

By scanning children as they looked at different food logos, Savage discovered obese children's prefrontal cortices (the area of the brain involved in control) were less active—suggesting they were more susceptible to food advertising. "We don't know cause and effect yet," he says. "We don't know if it's because people are born more susceptible to this or if it's the result of poor eating habits over time."

One thing it demonstrates, however, as Savage emphasizes to me, is that "none of us have perfect control over our behavior."

Daniel Pérez when he was overweight (left) and after he got down to a healthy weight (right).

Daniel Pérez is a 20-year-old from Barquisimeto, Venezuela, who, last year, reached his heaviest weight of 379 pounds. He currently weighs just over 230 pounds. Thin as a child, Pérez believes his poor eating habits were a result of psychological triggers. After his brother passed away of heart disease when Pérez was just seven, he was heartbroken, devastated at seeing his mother cry for months on end.

"Eating became an addiction to me," he says, "and the most addictive foods were carbs. Pastas specifically. I would eat pastas three times a day, at least five days a week. It became so bad that my parents had to throw away leftovers when everyone was done eating."

Pérez's brother's disease made him extremely thin, and Pérez recalls being shocked at being able to see his bones. "I think all of this really had an impact on me," he says. "Being a small kid and not wanting to go like him definitely helped me to binge eat."

Pérez is not alone in believing his eating problem was down to a psychological trigger; Carl Thompson had also discussed how his issues worsened after the death of his mother.

Dr. Jen Nash is a member of the British Psychological Society and founder of Eating Blueprint, the world's first exclusively psychological weight-loss solution. Nash notes that there is an established body of evidence that, for many people, psychological issues are at the root of their overeating. "For some, this fundamental issue may indeed be grief—as with Thompson and Pérez—but there are a multitude of other factors, including trauma and abuse, particularly in early life," she says.

"Overeating" isn't classified as a psychiatric disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), the American Psychology Association's official catalogue of mental disorders, which is also used in the UK. "Binge eating," however, is. "Overeating is a challenge for many Americans," it reads, but "recurrent binge eating is much less common, far more severe and is associated with significant physical and psychological problems."

And what about food addiction? "Obesity is a complex issue, and food addiction is a relatively new and controversial term," says Nash. "Although food addiction does have a number of similarities to other addictive behaviors, we do not yet have enough data to fully and confidently conceptualize it in this way."

"I've actually spoken with a therapist," says Brian, a 27-year-old from Buffalo, New York, who weighs 400 pounds. "I asked if there was help out there for obese people, the same way that alcoholics can get help at a rehab center. I was told that unless I go on 'one of those TLC [competitive weight loss TV] shows,' there was not. Maybe I should start drinking more so I can get some help."

Steven when he was overweight (left) and after he lost weight (right)

Of course, some overweight people do not identify with the idea that they are suffering from an addiction—or whatever you want to call it: overeating, compulsive eating disorder. Steven Sherman is a 29-year-old from New Ulm, Minnesota. He currently weighs 266 pounds, but at his heaviest was 399 pounds. He feels that, often, people use psychology and biology to excuse their own behavior. "I would definitely consider my weight my own responsibility," he says.

Sherman claims he sees his overeating as a cause of bad mental health, rather than the effect of it. "I used to break out sweating doing almost any physical activity, which would give me a certain level of social anxiety," Steven told me. "Now I don't need to deal with that any more. Overall I feel much better." He's lucky that losing weight helped him to deal with his anxiety, but other sufferers may have to confront the psychological issues first before they can shed the pounds.

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The main issue with food addiction and overeating not being classified in the DSM-5, and being widely considered as biological issues, is that there is not much psychological support out there. Cameron wants British people who are obese to seek treatment, but, as Nash puts it: "The challenge we have in the NHS [National Health Service] is that obesity is dealt with in medical settings and in a medical paradigm, and so medical causes and solutions are the primary approach. This is slowly changing—NHS Weight Management Tier 3 services now should have a clinical psychologist in their multidisciplinary approach to supporting people to lose weight."

The complex experiences of Thompson, Pérez, Brian, and Sherman demonstrate that there is no clear and proven connection between obesity and mental illness. "We know people who are depressed are more likely to be obese, and people that are obese are more likely to be depressed," says Savage. "In most cases, what we don't know is which is cause and which is effect."

Ultimately, we cannot attribute morbid obesity to one factor—be it biology, psychology or addiction. In cases like Thompson's, it is likely that all these factors come together. "Words like blame imply total fault—there are often more factors involved," says Savage. "We all have the ability to make choices. For some of us, that is more challenging, because of our genetics, our hormones, our learning history, our environment, our parents, and what we were taught—all of these things work together to sabotage control."

Many of us, overweight or not, lose control daily. Most people are guilty of eating for reasons other than hunger. If you examine your own life, you can see that overeating often has psychological triggers, even if there isn't one underlying psychological disorder. The real—and perhaps scariest—lesson, then, seems to be that the capacity to become 910 pounds is within us all, somewhere on a deep psychological level. The British government's framework for the treatment of obesity—and the overeating that causes it—needs to reflect that.

Follow Amelia on Twitter.

Hans and his crack pipe. All photos courtesy of the author

Hans has two rules for himself: Before he gets high, he needs to make sure his Labrador has enough food for a day, and while he is high, he's got to "not get on other people's nerves." Hans is homeless, has pancreatic cancer in the terminal stage, and doesn't give himself "more than a year." Next to him sits Robert, his hunched back bending toward the right. HIV gives Robert just as short a life expectancy as Hans. I met both of them in Frankfurt's Taunusanlage train station; in the 1980s this place would be packed with several hundred heroin addicts shooting up. Today, Hans and Robert can smoke crack in peace.

The pipe sizzles when Hans ignites his butane lighter, and then the air smells disgustingly sweet, like burnt plastic and ammonia. "I've already smoked three times since this morning," he says.

Most of the users who hang out in Frankfurt's Bahnhofsviertel neighborhood rarely make the trip to Taunusanlage, even though it's only feet away. The craving for crack can at times get so consuming, they just light up on the street immediately after buying it—huddled against buildings, between cars, or in shop entrances. The ones who can't afford to score hold out hope for some charity, biting their nails and clenching their jaws.

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A crack dealer with two customers

In Germany, crack is a rather rare drug. Even though the 1980s tabloid press warned that the "deadly drug" was about to wash over the country like a flood, crack hardly spread beyond Frankfurt. According to a national report on narcotics, Hessen, the state that Frankfurt belongs to, is Germany's absolute forerunner in first-time crack users—217 people registered there in 2013. Hamburg follows in second place with a mere 17.

The drug has probably taken hold in Frankfurt because the city is geographically central and people fly here from all over the world. There's also been an open and visible drug scene for a long tim in the Bahnhofsviertel, where crack use spread in the late 1990s. Cocaine in powder form has rarely been sold on the street since then. Meanwhile, crack's popularity has been rising continuously for years.

More than half of the addicts in this neighborhood consume the mixture of cocaine, baking powder, and chemical fillers, according to local police. It outsells heroin, while 97 percent of the drug addicts in the district have had experiences with crack. It's now the number-one drug consumed by addicts, with two dying last year from an overdose of crack mixed with other drugs.

In the Bahnhofsviertel, the "rocks" are having a devastating effect on users. No other drug is quite so addictive or as voraciously consumed. Few other substances take such a toll on the body, while faces also become gaunt and skeletal.

Many feel the drug is poisoning the entire neighborhood, while the reports of instances of aggression are frequent. A lot of residents, however, don't want to speak openly, fearing retribution from drug dealers. The dealers operate on shopping streets and threaten business owners; they stash their product in hourly hotels, dodgy cafés, and abandoned buildings. Addiction is also causing a rise in petty crime, even forcing some in the neighborhood to turn to the Hells Angles for protection.

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The crack trade is really booming on Taunusstrasse street. At peak times—between six and eight in the morning—there's a dealer posted every few feet, offering their services to any passerby. If the police pick any of them up, a replacement will quickly take their place. North African and Albanian gangs dominate the trade and fights inevitably break out, often resulting in stabbings. "Hey, man, what's up, you need anything?"—at certain hours of the day, you'll hear this repeatedly while walking down a short stretch of Taunusstrasse.

It's good for Hans and Robert to get away from it all, for a while. Both of them have succumbed to their addiction and are heavy users. Thanks to a 17-year prison sentence for dealing cocaine, Hans's body is more or less intact; Robert on the other hand, is 47 and looks twice his age. He owes his countless ailments to the virus, he says, but the skin problems on his legs are due to crystal meth and the crack fillers. Robert lifts up his trousers to reveal the crusted elephant skin on his legs: "Most of the people around here have this, because more and more people are shooting crack." Hans shares his rock with Robert, even though he's broke. The pipe passes back and forth between them.

Hans, Klaus, and Robert at Taunusanlage.

"Everybody fucks each other over here. The worst time is just after the goods have arrived. People get aggressive—they fight, they hit each other," Hans explains. A fellow user named Hamsa, 43, who also hangs out in the Taunusanlage, paints a weirdly nostalgic picture of the time when heroin was still the favored drug in the Bahnhofsviertel: "Back then, everyone was friends. People talked to each other, did things together. Now that's all over." These days, drug addicts can stay awake for days at a time, just looking for ways to support their habits. Any sense of community is long gone.

Detective chief superintendent Thomas Zosel, from the prevention division of the Frankfurt Police, tells me that crack is in demand partly because the high is so short-lived." The high lasts about ten seconds so if you're addicted, you're going to need more really soon." Provided that they deal, steal, whore, or beg to get the ten to 20 euros ($10 to $20) that 0.1 gram of crack costs, they will have enough for a bowl.

Thomas Zosel has known Frankfurt's drug scene for decades. He used to drive a patrol car around the area himself and he really doesn't envy his colleagues who work that beat today. "Officers get threatened and attacked all the time. The scene is more aggressive, because most of the people aren't just using a single drug." The police call these addicts "poly drug users"—they'll basically consume anything they can get their hands on.

"They'll do anything to feel good. But their highs will never be as good as they used to be, thanks to all the filth that the stuff is mixed with today," Zosel says.

Bernie in front of his shop.

Shop owners on Taunusstrasse have a front row seat to the decline of the Bahnhofsviertel. When a dealer perches on the windowsill of GM Foto, the owner screams, "How often do I have to tell you to get the fuck out of here?"

Bernie, from Cream Music, a neighboring shop, watches the dealers with distain from the entrance. "Our revenue has sunken to threatening levels due to the conditions here. Customers stay away, or just enter the shop with their jaws on the floor. A trainee cut his stay with us short because he couldn't stand it anymore," he tells me.

Because of the drug scene, Bernie is often in contact with the city of Frankfurt and the police chief, Gerhard Bereswill. "The city is aware of the problem and they're very anxious. They definitely don't want to lose us or GM Foto," Bernie says.

Nobody is holding their breath waiting for overnight improvements in the Bahnhofsviertel though. Thomas Zosel knows that if they want to get a grip on the problem, patience is needed. A bitter "war on drugs" won't do anything, as proven by the still-rampant drug problem in many American cities. In the 1980s and 90s the American government tried to beat the crack epidemic by handing out long prison sentences for possession and deploying the full force of the police. You can still see the consequences of this policy today, with American jails full of one-time crack dealers.

Hamsa injecting a cocktail of crack and heroin

"If we decided to confiscate all of the drugs in the Bahnhofsviertel all of a sudden, complete chaos would break out. Some has to remain on the streets so that the people don't flip out. We need to find a solution for the sick people there," Thomas Zosel explains.

Frankfurt has been much more successful at reducing heroin use. Street workers offered support to addicts, and "shooting galleries" have been set up where junkies can get their methadone as well as clean needles and check ups from medical professionals. Currently, almost two-thirds of intravenous heroin consumption takes place in these shooting galleries.

"This also creates a situation where it's very easy to get in contact with addicted people, so you can move them towards getting clean," Zosel says. "That's how demand sinks, and so does supply." In a similar move, there are plans for a smoking room to be set up in Frankfurt's Niddastrasse, in which crack addicts will be able to safely consume the drug.

Tom Holz is a street-worker for Project OSSIP (which stands for Offense, Social Work, Safety, Intervention, and Prevention). The city of Frankfurt founded the project eleven years ago so that street workers, together with the police, could improve the situation for drug users and the residents of Bahnhofsviertel affected by the drug scene. Holz favors the decriminalization and controlled distribution of crack. "In Holland there used to be projects that set up consumption rooms for addicts with so-called house dealers that sold relatively clean crack, cocaine, and heroin for reasonable prices. This lead to a noticeable calming of the public space but was no longer politically favored after seven years and was shut down." Holz mostly takes care of crack addicts and has found that without direct contact, drug users can quickly lose control of their addiction.

Robert's legs

The Frankfurt police are moving forward with a "four pillars" approach: harm reduction, prevention, treatment, and enforcement. Police chief Zosel didn't want to go into specifics regarding enforcement, but he targets the dealers in the Bahnhofsviertel, rather than the users. The dealers are smart, however. "The small amount they're found with is usually not even enough to arrest them," says Zosel. He still thinks the police are making progress even if they won't solve the problem with force alone. "We need the residents to be brave. They need to be vigilant and report what they see."

Hans and Robert suffer heavily from their drug use, but still find something to live for. "If you don't retain a little bit of humanity, then it's all over," Hans believes. In spite of the heavy drug cocktail he just used, he can still hold a conversation. He emphasized how important it is for him to never leave traces of his consumption behind, no matter how high he is. "Because dogs or children could step on the needles."

Things in Frankfurt have come a long way since the 1980s. The conditions in the park and the neighboring Bahnhofsviertel have improved without a doubt but crack still ravages the community and the lives of the users who live here. Whatever happens to the Bahnhofsviertel though, Hans and Robert probably won't be around to experience it.

All screenshots from 'Madden 15'

As an Englishman, I get a lot of confused looks when I tell people that my favourite sport is American football. This hasn't always been the case though. Of course I love our football (soccer, if you're weird and/or simply raised in North America), even though consistent problems constantly attempt to break down my unwavering love of Newcastle United. I'm also a big fan of cricket, with England's 2005 Ashes victory an obvious high point. Back then, I thought American football was just rugby where the players wore padding and helmets because they didn't want to get hurt. I called it American hand-egg. Actually I still do because, come on, they barely ever touch the ball with their feet.

I didn't know what I was missing until my first year of university. In February 2010 there was an event in the student union building that lasted well into the early hours of the morning. Instead of the usual Jägerbombs and dubstep, there were chicken wings and The Who. Hundreds of us turned up to watch the New Orleans Saints defeat the Indianapolis Colts in Super Bowl XLIV. And while I barely knew what was going on, I felt like there might be something to all of this.

However, the Super Bowl marks the end of the American football season, so I figured I'd have to wait until September to get my next taste. But I didn't have to wait quite that long, because in August Madden NFL 11 came out. I was hesitant at first. Did I really want to spend 40 quid [$60] on a game I might not even like? Then I remembered I had a student loan, so later that day I was booting up my PS3 to see what I could learn.

New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees was on the game's cover, the man I had seen lift the Super Bowl trophy a few months ago. Dressed in gold and black, captured in the middle of his throwing action, he almost looked like he was part of a poster for Marvel's next superhero movie. I was excited to start playing and learn what this game was all about. But instantly I hit a snag.

Sports games these days all do that thing where it asks you to select your favourite team when you first load the game. I didn't even know the rules of American football, let alone who my favourite team was. The Saints were the obvious choice. They were the champions, and their quarterback was on the cover of the game. But I didn't want to make it that easy. I wanted to learn the game, and I didn't think I'd do that by having the best team and winning every matchup. I flicked through all the teams, 32 of them, each of their logos further suggesting to me that the players are seen as superheroes. Big cats, lightning bolts, pirate flags, birds of prey... this was a daunting choice.

I ruled out the top teams. I also ruled out the bottom teams—I didn't want the experience to be too hard. So I was left with the mid-tablers, the Evertons, and Southamptons of the NFL. A friend of mine was studying at Washington State University at the time, I like a lot of bands from Seattle, and birds are pretty cool, so I ended up picking the Seahawks. Back in the 2009 season, the Seahawks only won five of their 16 games. In this new installment of Madden, their rating was 75, compared to the Saints' 92. I was interested to discover how important this statistical difference was.

Related: Watch VICE's new Superhuman series documentary, 'ICEMAN'

Jumping into my first game with the Seahawks, I was immediately struck by how deep American football really is. I knew that the team on offense has four "downs" to move the ball ten yards down the field. If they get past that mark, they get another four opportunities to go another ten. The team defending has the simple task of stopping them. But watching on TV hadn't given me the right idea about just how many plays a team can run on each down. I flipped through page after page of different formations for runs and throws, not knowing what any of the words meant. Shotgun formation? Maybe they really do need those helmets after all.

Thankfully, gridiron legend and playbook genius John Madden was on hand to help out—having leant his name to EA's series since 1988 (just look at this cover art, seriously), he sees it as being educational, and a place for simulating plays before attempting them for real. For every play, you get a recommended action. The Seahawks have a strong running back, a player occupying the offensive backfield that can rush the opposition, so I was often told to hand the ball off to him rather than throw it through the air. Arrows on the screen before the play gave me a rough idea of where I was trying to get the ball. It was still complicated, but it was being presented to me in a relatively understandable manner. I was fascinated by the depth and variety, something I probably wouldn't have gotten a grasp of outside of a video game interpretation of the sport.

Real sports: VICE Sports

Madden taught me that American football is very much about discipline. You have to do exactly what you're told, at exactly the right time, or the entire thing breaks down. This is especially true when you're defending. If you're supposed to be covering a guy, and you're not, then the attacking team will exploit that instantly. Just like when you're attacking, Madden will suggest a defensive formation for you when the opposition has the ball. In this situation you have no idea where the opposing players are going to be running, so the arrows aren't as much help. The other team would throw the ball to players I was supposed to be covering nearly every play. I took to controlling players on the defensive line—the huge guys who are there to combat the huge guys on the other team—until I could learn the game a bit more.

It was slow progress at first, but as matches went by I began to gather more knowledge. Time management was a big step. I noticed the clock stopped at the end of the play sometimes, but not all the time. Why was that? It turns out that if a player has possession of the ball and they are brought down within bounds, then the clock keeps running. Each team gets three timeouts per half that they can use to stop the clock at strategic intervals, but I soon learned that the two-minute warning that comes before half time and the end of the game acted as an extra timeout. As the team on offense, you want to eat up as much of the clock as possible if you're in the lead. This equates to using a lot of runs rather than throws, because these are more likely to result in the clock continuing to run at the end of the play. The defending team often use timeouts to prevent this.

The Madden games also taught me about irrational hatred. The NFL is split up into divisions, and you play each team in your division twice over the course of a season. I lost both my games to the San Francisco 49ers in my first season, and even began coming up with vicious names for the opposing players, which I won't share here. Little did I know at the time that this is a hatred shared by actual Seahawks fans, which made me feel a little better when I started watching the real thing—I was doing American football right!

The next thing I learned about was the pageantry. Obviously, watching the Super Bowl is often just as much about the spectacle as the game's result, with the halftime show in particular being a multi-million-dollar performance. But even in regular season games, the teams run out to booming music and the crowd roars as their favourite players emerge from the tunnel. I'm used to football—as in, soccer—teams walking out, standing in a line and then participating in a reserved hand-shaking ritual. So this was all very exciting. It got better when I won the Super Bowl in my first season (despite those losses to the 49ers, I wasn't playing on a very hard difficulty setting). I was treated to a hilarious cutscene that ended in a visit to the White House where an animated Barack Obama congratulated me on my victory. Five years later, I'm a giant Seahawks fan, and we've reached the Super Bowl two years in a row. The first ended in a huge win against the Denver Broncos, and a few months ago the second ended in a bitter defeat in the dying moments of the game to the New England Patriots.

It was lucky that I decided to purchase Madden NFL 11 when I did. If I had waited a month for the season to start, I probably would've been clueless while watching on television. I may have even given up right then. Even if I had continued, I probably would've ended up on the Saints bandwagon, and would've been disappointed a few months later when the Seahawks ended their playoff run, in part thanks to Marshawn Lynch's famous "Beastquake" run. Instead, the Beastquake just cemented my love of Seattle, and, thanks to Madden, American football became my favourite sport. Roll on the new Madden, and the new season.

Follow Matt Porter on Twitter.

A bully doing some bullying—but is it sexy? Screen grab from 'Stand By Me'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

There's a lot of talk about bullying in British schools, but less about the bullies and what becomes of them. We'd like to imagine them poor, broken, and repentant, but look around you: Our society is practically run by jumped-up, megalomaniac dickheads. Maybe being a bully is good practice for later life?

"Child bullies are sexier, more popular and have more dates than their victims when they grow up," reported the Daily Mail this week, puncturing my schadenfreude. I wouldn't normally rely on the Mail's reporting, but on this topic they're bona fide experts: If they're not belittling women in their "sidebar of shame," they're comparing poverty-stricken migrants to Hitler's Nazis, or bullying a transgender teacher just before she kills herself.

Anyway, the Mail's story is based on two studies published recently in Canada, land of the polite. A criminologist at Simon Fraser University called Jennifer Wong carried out the first study, which found that, compared to other kids, bullies had higher social status and self-esteem, and lower rates of depression. The second was by Anthony Volk, a psychologist and renowned bullying expert at Brock University, who carried out fieldwork in a school in Arizona and found that about 90 percent of bullies showed no real social or mental "deficits." He gave the following headline-writer's dream of a quote to the Mail: "Bullies as young adolescents or as university students are getting more sexual partners and are less likely to be virgins than victims or people who are not involved in bullying."

So does bog-washing children make you more attractive? Let's put down the elastic band catapults and back up a second. First off, there's actually nothing here that says that bullies are "sexier." They may have more sex as teenagers, but that doesn't mean they're more attractive per se, especially in later life. The relationship between sex and attractiveness is a complicated one, especially at 17 (it's been suggested, for example, that more attractive women tend to have less casual sex).

Second, these are pretty tiny studies. Wong's research surveyed 135 kids in one Vancouver school, of which 11 percent were identified as bullies based on their answers to questions like, "How often are you hit, kicked, or shoved?"

Eleven percent of 135 is 12, so all this news coverage is based on a study that looks at only 12 bullies in one school in one city in one part of Canada. That's not to say it doesn't have some value, but it's not exactly the slam-dunk result dozens of news outlets have pitched it as. In fairness, Wong admits this and plans to do a bigger follow up.

Volk's finding that bullies have more sex is based on a similarly tiny group, again from one school, and only follows the kids in their teen years—it says nothing at all about sexual prowess in later life.

READ ON NOISEY: Why Do So Many Musicians Act Like Terrible People Online?

So is it all bollocks? Well, actually, no. The studies aren't big, but they fit with a bigger and more terrifying pattern that's emerging from countless other bits of evidence. The idea that bullies are broken people lashing out seems to be bullshit in all but a tiny minority of the more obvious cases. Most bullying happens because well-adjusted kids look at the world they live in and realize that bullying people is actually the best choice they can make. It's not Nelson Muntz who kids should be afraid of, it's Frank fucking Underwood.

Volk reckons there are three basic and rational reasons why bullies bully: "To get resources (lunch money, for example), to get or maintain dating partners, and to get social power that can be cashed in to get resources, dates or other favors." The victims are chosen very deliberately because of their vulnerability or inability to fight back effectively. Schools provide a perfect environment where bullies can get what they want with very few consequences.

Watch our film about Europe's beauty capital, 'Beautiful Liverpool':

Once you realize that bullying is a rational choice, it's obvious that a lot of the measures adults take to stop it are completely pointless. As Volk puts it, "We're asking bullies to stop using a strategy that serves their interest with few costs." Trading a few detentions for being the most popular kid in the class is a no-brainer, and bullies can easy switch to methods that can't easily be punished—cyber-bullying, for example, or just constant low-level psychological abuse.

In schools around the world, bullying weak people is just a sensible thing to do. It sounds shocking, but then step back and look at wider society—is it really much different? We have whole sections of the media dedicated to identifying and bullying people who don't conform to our specific ideals. Adults harass and abuse people they disagree with online. We treat politicians and public figures with contempt, while politicians in turn enact brutal crackdowns on the sick and the vulnerable. Is it really that surprising that being a bully is a good way to start out in life?

Follow Martin on Twitter.

Last night in Cincinnati, residents came together as a community to show support for a man named Samuel Debose who wrongfully lost his life. After being pulled over for not having a license plate earlier this month, the 43-year-old was shot in the head by University of Cincinnati Police Officer Ray Tensing without provocation. After reviewing the evidence, including Tensing's body camera footage, Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph Deters pressed a felony murder charge, along with a voluntary manslaughter charge, at a Wednesday press conference.

"I've been doing this for over 30 years," Deters told the press. "This is the most asinine act I've ever seen a police officer make. Totally unwarranted... It's an absolute tragedy and that in the year 2015 that anyone would behave in this manner. It was senseless... It's just horrible."

Tensing has turned himself in and has been fired from his job.

A rally began soon after at the city's courthouse, passing along the Central Parkway and continuing up Vine Street—where some of Cincinnati's most visible gentrification has occurred. Protesters chanting "Black Lives Matter" and "I am Samuel Dubose" passed high-end restaurants whose patrons made their way outside with camera phones at the ready. Then they made their way to Police District 1 and stood in front of the doors, where they were met by a line of armed officers. There was some serious tension in the air—some cops wouldn't remove their hands from their guns and seemed to have an overwhelming sense of fear about them. But as protesters began making snide comments to the officers, rally organizers led the procession back to the courthouse, where things settled down.

It was beautiful to see so many different people come together and march for all of our freedom. It's horrible that it takes something so tragic to bring us all together.

Check out more of Catherine Viox's work here.

How do you construct a portrait of a man who tried to deconstruct his own image at every turn? That is the feat undertaken by director Stevan Riley in his boldly imaged new documentary, Listen to Me Marlon, which plots the coordinates of the legendary actor Marlon Brando's complex and, at times, contradictory psyche.

Riley's aspirations aren't so much to eulogize Brando's story as to let it be told, albeit posthumously, by the man himself—at times through a nearly holographic, talking 3D head from when Brando had his face digitized in the 80s. The result is an impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness pastiche from Brando's archives: feature films, private home videos, and interviews set against an aural bevy curated from hundreds of hours of audiotapes. Though a self-proclaimed atheist, Brando was drawn to mystical strains of Jungian psychotherapy after Brando's son was convicted of murdering his sister's boyfriend in a drunken episode, after which she committed suicide. The paired tragedies shattered the Brando household—something the media would later dub, scathingly, the "House of Pain." The already reclusive and eccentric star drew further into his own mind for reconciliation and relief.

Watch an exclusive clip from 'Listen to Me Marlon' here:

Marlon Brando's impact on American culture is hard to overstress. After all, it was his rugged outlaw style that informed rebellious icons James Dean and Elvis Presley. It was his unorthodox insistence on the Stanislavsky system—method acting—that gave Hollywood a license to aspire to realism, a far cry from the theatrical grandeur of his contemporaries Clark Gable and Cary Grant. His powerful performances in The Godfather, On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Apocalypse Now forever changed the nature of drama on celluloid. "He is the marker," Martin Scorsese famously said. "There's 'before Brando' and 'after Brando.'"

Brando's political commitment went equally as deep. A champion for civil rights at a time where alliance with the marginalized was not in vogue, the actor marched with figures such as Harry Belafonte and James Baldwin, and opted out of major Hollywood productions after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in order to devote himself fully to the cause. In a move that is now somewhat infamous, he declined his second Academy Award, for The Godfather, in protest against the ill treatment of Native Americans by the film industry. Instead of attending, he sent up activist Sacheen Littlefeather to reject the Oscar on his behalf, for which she was heavily booed.

His passion for social justice isn't spared from his own relentless self-critique in the documentary, though: Far from self-aggrandizing, Brando's ruminations swing from louche to wise to weary, from contradictory to simply unfair. He shows himself to be both an artist ("When the camera is close on you, your face becomes the stage") and a realist, proclaiming that actors are essentially just businessmen, with their publicists and press and their catering to the masses.

I met with director Stevan Riley and Rebecca Brando, Marlon's daughter, earlier this week in New York to talk about the film, the great actor's process and stardom, as well as his activism for social justice. In the context of our own tense socio-political climate, Riley and Brando said the film's timing is "serendipitous."

Director Stevan Riley on the set of 'Listen to Me.' Photo by Abi Campbell. Courtesy of Showtime

VICE: How did you conceive of constructing the narrative in this unusual structure as opposed to a more traditional documentary?
Stevan Riley: Initially, I listened to a handful of tapes—there were five or six that had come out. One of the self-hypnosis ones was obviously very revealing. It showed a deep sense of inquiry and a philosophical side of him. This self-therapeutic side was the film's initial proposal.

I went to the estate to interview people for research, but also to find out potentially who would be in the film, if that plan A couldn't be told. Even at the last minute, more tapes would arrive and we'd edit and there was more for the story to develop on. The farther I got into it, the more people I spoke to, the more books I read, the more keen I was actually to go and do the original plan. Going the talking-head route or the perspectives route, where you've got loads of people involved in it, [would have been] actually more confusing than not.

"[Brando] could be full of vengeful rage in a scene in one minute and real tenderness in another because he knew all those extremes from his own life that had inhabited him and analyzed them and brought them into his acting." –Stevan Riley

Rebecca Brando: I'm laughing because you're saying something very true. Only people who had known him for years think that they had known him, but when in fact you probably know my father far better than I do. I don't even know if I should be saying that out loud, but you've heard him from the 1960s to the present day. You even talk about his job, which he never really talked to us about.

Stevan: I didn't feel like I knew him at all initially. [But later] I understood how he could talk two opposing views because both were true and he was wrestling with the in-between and that ambivalence of him. That was one of the things that I think really characterized him—these opposites, these opposite sides of a character, the idealism and the cynicism. The womanizer, the romantic. All these things were still coherent in his character, and actually allowed him to bring that breadth and range to the characters he played. He could be full of vengeful rage in a scene in one minute and real tenderness and sensitivity in another because he just knew all those extremes from his own life that had inhabited him and analyzed them and brought them into his acting.

"In Streetcar he actually didn't want to act that out because it wasn't a role he enjoyed. That's why he never went to the theater."­ –Stevan Riley

Brando really didn't like being a public figure. You highlighted that in the film as well. I thought he had this shell he tried to fill with all these different characters because he was so troubled by childhood and the demons that he was fighting for much of his life.
Stevan: I think he recognized the therapeutic role of acting—[actors] could express emotions that they couldn't express otherwise. In the same way, some of it he was running away from. In Streetcar he actually didn't want to act that out because it wasn't a role he enjoyed. That's why he never went to the theater. I think he was quite happy with the outside world when he wasn't trapped by fame in his early years.

One quote he said is about what defines you: "Two things, trying to solve the problems of my youth and also how can I be of service to my fellow man." I think, in roles, his bigger issue was how he could bring forward messages that he was interested in. He really wanted to put messages into films, which he didn't think he always could. Sometimes he would take on characters just for that purpose. It wasn't so he could lose himself in this dark, dark place, although he ended up going there. It was almost to convey to the audience the nature of evil so that we can understand its logic. If you can make that logic as pure as possible, you can let the audience know how psychopaths could get to that point.

I read somewhere in the press release that Brando was trying to take control of his autobiography/biography and he wanted to have something that he left behind. Was this part of that narrative?
Rebecca: I think it's interesting that he left all this information behind. All throughout my childhood I know that my dad wanted to make a mark in his life. In the film you see [his philosophy] "We are our neighbor's keeper." I think that's what he's always conveyed to us. I think on the one hand, yes, he didn't like people knocking on his door and tapping him on the shoulder to get a picture, to talk about his personal life. At dinner tables or when we were with him on trips or together anytime, he wouldn't talk about his career. He wouldn't talk about acting at all.

Marlon Brando with his father, Marlon Brando, Sr., in 1955. Photo: Getty Images. Courtesy of Showtime

So if he saw this documentary today he wouldn't feel embarrassed?
Rebecca: Maybe some parts, yes, to be honest, but not entirely. I think that if it reaches people and excites them, and if it inspires them in any degree to better themselves as an actor or as humans, [or] even to relate to him. I think a lot of the time the film says, "I'm just like you. I have these fears, I'm a contender, I want to be admired, I want to be regarded as something more that what I really am."

Which is, of course, like the classic scene in On the Waterfront. It's a very self-aware moment when he says that. In the documentary he implies similar things in hypnosis and in real life.
Stevan: He got an Oscar for that. His perfectionism meant that he wasn't happy with that scene, but obviously it was an iconic scene, so then we're trying to figure out what's going on. It's amazing because he was often thought of as the mumbler—someone who's a bit lazy or cavalier with their approach with acting. I was amazed by how much he really did prepare and he really studied for his roles. He'd say he would try to access the character emotionally first and then his emotions, whatever emotions he felt, which could be quite painful if it related to his own traumas. On the rational side, this is where his preparation would really kick in. He would really study the character, figure out all of their backstory—the tiniest details, what their ticks were, what their mannerisms are, what else is going on in their mind, what the different layers to their thoughts are, so that when he comes on screen and he's in that moment of spontaneity, he could forget all that studying and just be in the moment, but his brain is full. He didn't take shortcuts in that regard. I know he wore his earpiece and there were cruxes to making him even more relaxed and making him more comfortable on the set. But there was a lot of hard work.

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I thought the film's synopsis of self-analysis sounded very in tune with the psychoanalytic trends happening at the time, especially with young and holistic therapy, like stream of consciousness.
Stevan: He was actually a lot into Eastern religions. He said he could relate more to Buddhism and Daoism than a lot of Western thought. There's one quote in the film where he says, "We spend all of our life trying to fix the bad habits picked up in the first ten years." He said whether you're a Catholic going through rosary beads or doing Hail Mary's—repetition, repetition, repetition to rewind yourself and change your behavior—or doing yogic mantras, or meditation, only with a superhuman amount of effort could you change yourself. So I find it really encouraging that by the end of the self-hypnosis series of tapes, when he was saying the system has worked for [him]. He thought he had cured a lot of his symptoms of stress.

Rebecca: I do have memories of him telling me to take deep breaths. Well, first of all, he called himself an atheist. He would give me books on Krishnamurti and Jung. He wasn't a big fan of Freud.

Marlon Brando with his daughter Cheyenne in 'Listen to Me.' Photo by Mike Gillman. Courtesy of Showtime

Stevan: It's interesting because there's so much of his analysis of his own life, which is Freudian.

Rebecca: But he relied a lot upon meditation. I remember my sister telling me that she had fallen asleep in his bedroom, lying down on his couch, and in the middle of the night she woke up and he was sitting on the floor meditating and she was calling to him and he wouldn't answer. I remember we would go into the sauna, and it would be really hot. He and I would quiet our mind so that we wouldn't feel the heat. And then we'd jump into a cold tub, which was like 56 degrees. He would help me to meditate, mind over matter, and not feel this bone-chilling freezing temperature.

Stevan: He said he could control his heart rate and blood pressure well towards the end, that he reached a very high yogic state. It's complete blissfulness. He said that he'd actually achieved that a couple of times. In a way Taoism feels to me like a form of atheism. I remember when I was doing Chinese at university, I read the Taoist texts that said, "The path that can be explained is not the real path," or "The God that can be explained is not the real God"—that's the first line of the Tao Te Ching, and I'm translating that. That was the first time a religion spoke to me as well. You can have a sense of the ineffable, the magnificent, and I think that's what Brando was feeling.

"At restaurants the press would be outside. If we had to come out of the driveway from his home in Beverly Hills, he would hide in the trunk. People would be waiting to photograph him." –Rebecca Brando

I want to segue now into your own experiences with your father Rebecca, being a child of this huge Hollywood celebrity at the time, and a still massive cultural icon now. How was that for you?
Rebecca: I think we grew up in a humble environment. My mother [Movita Castaneda] grew up in the Depression and that's how she became an actress because nobody was hiring in Los Angeles except Hollywood. She actually lied about her age and said she was 18 when she was really 17 when she did the first Mutiny on the Bounty. For my father, we didn't talk about his career at all. I only knew that my dad was as big as he was because of the way people treated us outside, like at school, or we would be photographed on the streets, or when we went [out] to dinners, which was rare. At restaurants the press would be outside. If we had to come out of the driveway from his home in Beverly Hills, he would hide in the trunk. People would be waiting to photograph him. We as children were not allowed to get into the business either—not at all. My mother thought it was a great career because you get to travel and meet people and it's a wonderful way to explore who you are as a person. My father did not encourage us to follow the business.

Do you think that today with activism and movements like Black Lives Matter—would he have been active or interested in social justice causes?
Rebecca: Probably. I think any time anyone was oppressed or treated unjustly, he would definitely step up. He did help Mexican immigrants who were escaping the police and who were beaten brutally—that's why he went to Larry King. He asked to go on the show, despite his distaste for public life. He was trying to find ways to help the Palestinians get some kind of earnings so they could feel good about themselves. He was also very curious about my ex-husband, who was Israeli. He was constantly interested in people's ways of life.

Stevan: Marlon's sense of empathy with these disaffected groups [was because he also] felt like he was an outsider. They'd go to a place and sometimes be treated with suspicion by local communities because his mum had problems with alcohol, and clearly there were family issues going on there. As a kid, he was unkempt and wasn't always wearing the cleanest clothes. He felt incredibly lonely—he would walk the railroad tracks for hours. He was an outsider and he could relate to outsiders.

Listen to Me Marlon is now playing at Film Forum in New York.

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All illustrations by Michael Dockery.

Leaving a religion is an existential headfuck. There's no other way to describe it. It's like a breakup, a death, and a midlife crisis all at once, except your drinking buddies don't drink because they're religious, and your other friends don't exist.

So for those of you on the edge of the abyss, or for those of you who are curious about what goes through the mind of a Jesus freak confronted with meaninglessness for the first time, here's some things I wish I'd been prepared for but wasn't.

You'll Spend a Lot of Time Looking Back

I grew up in the semi-rural areas of South Australia as an atheist, and quite a happy one. My parents took our family to a Lutheran church on Easter and Christmas, but none of us took it seriously.

Then when I was 15, I found God. My relationship with my religious girlfriend had gone long distance, and one night, upset at the general state of affairs, I had a strong desire to pray. I remember calling out, to "God, whoever and wherever if you are, if you even are at all," and in return being filled with warmth. I was certain that God had answered my prayer.

Related: What It's Like to Be Homeschooled in the American South

The next day I visited the only religious friend I had. She sent me to the only church she'd been to. It was a Pentecostal church, which meant nothing to me at the time but basically means it was the most outrageous kind of church this side of Australia's apocalyptic Agape Ministries. The four years that followed were a roller coaster of visions, prophecies, hymns, fasting, and a whole lot of overwhelming guilt and confusion.

Christians Don't Want to Hear About Doubt

At the age of 19, I stopped believing. It took about a year and I kept praying and hoping God would save me from disbelief. But He didn't.

My Christian friends didn't want to hear that the entire New Testament might be a fable or that the concept of an all-loving, all-powerful God was possibly an intellectual fallacy. So we generally avoided the topic and I tried to tempt them across with my tales of sin and debauchery. After a while, well, we didn't actually have that much in common.

I remember one conversation I had with a really nice guy from church. He was one of those dependable, all-round good guys that had come to the church in his 30s. He always asked why I wasn't at church. He was genuinely concerned and when I told him, rather sheepishly, about not believing anymore, he told me it was a phase. Religious people just didn't understand.

No One Else Understands Either

Were there any atheists waiting to embrace me? No, they were too busy enjoying the worldly pleasures I'd been warned about. I had my toes in a few friendship pools in first semester of university, but after I became Christian my friends really dropped off. Only one or two people could stand me after that.

At the time I didn't care about losing friends, but later I regretted making such a spectacle of myself. I used to wear a T-shirt to uni with a logo that I'd printed myself saying that I "hearted" Jesus. I would read my pocket-size New Testament in the quadrangle and announce in tutorials that I was a Christian. Once, I even told someone off for exclaiming "Jesus Christ!" about some assignment we had to do.

Later I was too embarrassed to tell anyone that I didn't believe in those things anymore.

There Ain't No Party Like a Jesus Freak Party

As a Christian I loved going to youth group. That was a crowd of about 15 or 20 gathered in a church hall. We'd spend the whole night talking about God, singing worship songs, praying, and speaking in tongues. I really loved "feeling the holy spirit" within me. It was like a drug.

As an atheist I wasn't going to parties, so to compensate I got into the TV show Californication in a big way. I watched every episode multiple times. I even bought the DVD set that came with the bonus Californication G-string. I never wore it, though I would have for David Duchovny. He was my hero for understanding existential angst and dealing with it in the correct way. Even if, after six seasons, his character hadn't developed at all.

You Will Discover Sex and It Will Blow Your Mind

Believing in God is on par with great sex, maybe even better, but the feelings are remarkably similar. As an atheist, trying to have sex with women gave me something to focus on, instead of just pining about mortal life.

I was 19 and embarrassed about my complete lack of sexual experience, but I dove in with the zest of an optimistic puppy. We were drunk at my house, listening to folk music , and she was also a virgin. It made me realize why the church is so against sex outside the bounds of marriage—because it's so incredibly good.

Your Dating Pool Will Increase Dramatically

Normal, non-religious women were refreshingly... normal. They didn't have all these hang-ups about sex and intimacy. They didn't have all these preprogrammed ideas about marriage and children, unlike almost everyone in the church, and they didn't wear so many polo shirts. Also there were a lot more of them.

You Will Understand Why People Get Drunk

The first time I got drunk, I made out with my best friend and her best friend in an RV in their backyard while doing tequila shots. I passed out, vomited, then passed out again. It was bliss.

You Will Be Beyond Embarrassed

It's not just the things I did, but the things I believed. Speaking in tongues? It's just spouting gibberish. I can still speak in tongues, anyone can. All you have to do is relax and let any noise that comes into your head come out of your mouth.

But my worst story is this: One time I was catching a bus through the Adelaide Hills in South Australia. It was fairly empty, maybe three or four passengers, when suddenly I heard God inside my head. He was telling me to preach to the woman in front of me. Naturally I didn't want to, but I told myself that whatever God had in store was more important than my own hang-ups. So I did. I sat next to her and, as casually as I could, asked her if she'd like to know about Jesus. She said no. Are you sure? I asked. It really is quite important, you know. But she was sure, so I went back to my seat. What a letdown. The only conclusion I could come to was that either God was working in some mysterious way I couldn't understand, or I had fucked it up somehow. God was silent on the issue.

The Emptiness Is Soul-Crushing

I didn't become religious to fill a hole, but after religion, there was a hole. I used to think I was going to spend eternity in the clouds with my BFF Jesus, just talking about how weird Earth was.

All that was gone now, so I backpacked around Europe. I walked through beautiful cities: Paris, Amsterdam Berlin. I soul-searched. I thought, if I'm going to figure out what to do now, this is where I'll figure it out. But I was looking for something that wasn't there and wasn't anywhere. I drank a lot, ate in tourist traps, and eventually went home. Everything was the same. I continued to wrestle with depression on and off for years.

But You Will Get Over It

Some people immerse themselves in their careers. Others in relationships, or video games, or craft activities. I tried everything, but these things were like band-aids for my existential anguish. They got weird quickly, I had to rip them off and afterwards I knew they never really did anything anyway.

The transition will take time. First you're a Pentecostal nerd with a mission to read every single exhausting page of the Old Testament (even Deuteronomy), then you start to question your faith (what is faith anyway?), then you're an agnostic admitting the possibility there could be a god but unable to say for sure... and finally you realize it's all stupidity and you're a full blown hedonistic, religion-hating, virgin-sacrificing heathen.

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