Bedbug. Photo via Wikimedia

It starts with finding a single bug. After sending a flurry of voicemails to your landlord, the fear and paranoia begins to set in as you eagerly await a response. Your two roommates convince you that it's nothing to worry about while your girlfriend frantically searches Google and starts reading. Of course, once you get ahold of your landlord, you ask for an inspection. Multiple times.

That's how it started for me.

After weeks of uncertainty and radio silence from my landlord, I woke up with bedbugs on my chest. There was no denying it, so I started preparing the house and frantically calling the landlord. Then you get a charming little email saying that this is a "pitiful" problem and you can fix it yourself. You've only seen a couple, so it has to be manageable, right?

The couch was tossed, much to the protest of one particular roommate. I bought a paint suit and some poison, and started cleaning the four-floor row house room by room, finding more bedbugs as I went. I told my roommates how to prepare their stuff and finished off the house with the exception of one bedroom. At this point you can guess whose room it was.

The smell hit me first: decaying strawberries. Bedbug-sniffing dogs can pick up on this during the early stages of an infestation. Humans shouldn't. I knew they were there, but I didn't expect to find so many. I lifted the corner of his bed-sheet to find the mattress blackened by feces and the seams packed with eggs.

Unmistakable evidence of bedbugs. Photo via Flickr user NY State IPM Program

Families of well-fed monsters that are not the size of a fucking appleseed were just sitting there plain as goddamn day. They weren't hiding—they seemed very secure and comfortable. Wielding dual aerosol cans, I started blasting pesticide in a murderous and terrified rage. Hundreds of them started running, most went for the electrical outlets while the others slipped beneath the baseboard. They ran into the wireless router and through cracks in the wall.

Now shit was real. By the sheer number of bugs in this one room, I knew this had been ignored for a scary long time. I asked my roommate why in the fuck he didn't say anything. "I didn't think it mattered, they only eat your clothes," was his response. I had no way of knowing how far into the infestation we were. When you hit the-three month mark in a bedbug infestation, with constant access to food they grow exponentially. I sent my girlfriend to live with my boss while I tried to save our stuff.

We couldn't afford treatment for such a large space, so I went to a lawyer who told me to wait out the rest of my lease—three months—and then leave the house. "You could go to the landlord tenant board, but that would probably take just as long," was the best advice he could come up with before asking me if I had bugs in my clothes and eyeballing the chair I was sitting in.

Now I had to go to war. My initial assault had scattered the horde to the rest of the house. Mind you, the cat had helped spread them around, like a furry little party bus going bedroom to bedroom. Suddenly it made sense why he had started sleeping in my closet. But it was clear that the bugs were everywhere. I stopped going out, stopped turning off the lights, started disassembling electronics, threw away all my furniture, and put fresh boric acid powder in my bed every day. My flashlight was my best friend and I would frequently stop in public washrooms to undress and check for hitchhikers when I had to go to work.

Halting sleep altogether didn't help. Bedbugs like the night, but only because you're probably sleeping. If you don't sleep, they come after you when you're awake. Try taking a shit with bugs coming out of the vent and marching toward your toes. If I did manage to fall asleep I would wake up in a panic soon after. I stayed up so long that I would cry uncontrollably, and I was having trouble staying coherent. I stopped going to my classes; my grades slipped.

Bedbug bites clustered on a left wrist. Photo via Wikimedia

I went to a doctor, stammering and scratching myself, explaining the situation. A mental health exam revealed my anxiety, my insomnia, and all the other fun stuff that came with the insect horde. I was prescribed sleeping pills—the idea of knocking myself out to become an all-you-can-eat buffet was unappealing, but necessary—and a follow-up appointment when I wasn't living in such a stressful environment. I managed to do a fair bit of damage before that happened.

It's amazing how far people will go to stop the bugs. Poisoning yourself is really common, and seems totally rational in an infestation: trust me. There are plenty of pesticides that claim to kill bedbugs, but only stuff licensed to pest-control operators will actually work—and they're serious business. Avoid DDT and Phosphine or you might end up killing someone you love.

My weapon of choice was pyrethrin-based poisons, boric acid, and DE. I slept in the boric, it gives you a rash but at this point itching was a non-factor. The pyrethrins, on the other hand, are a bit more sinister—even if I was using the Mickey Mouse version for the general public. I can't remember how many cans I went through, but I would spray my bed and key rooms daily. It seemed totally worth it to endure the vomiting, dizziness, and headaches if it would keep the bugs from fucking in my pyjamas. The first time I coughed specks of blood into my fist, all I could do was laugh. Fuck it, right?

Just a coupla roly-poly bedbugs. Photo via Flickr user Medill DC

I tried other things to slow them down while I looked for somewhere else to live. Duct tape facing sticky-side-out around the cuffs of my clothes seemed like a great idea. They still got in my pants, but they had trouble getting back out.

Eventually, my girlfriend and I found a new place to live and abandoned that four-story hive for an apartment in a nice neighbourhood, but few things changed for me. I wasn't spraying poison—a pre-emptive sprinkling of good ol' Boric was all I asked—but I was still on high alert. The flashlight stayed under my pillow and I would wait until my partner fell asleep to crawl around the house and check the furniture.

This went on until I actually found one. I mean, I think I did. I couldn't catch it and my flashlight had burnt out—but I was pretty sure. My new landlord treated our apartment twice, but I was still suspicious of the things I believed I had salvaged from the old house. I kept doing my clothing checks in bathrooms, jumping whenever lint moved, and scratching blemishes to the point of bleeding. I was driving my girlfriend nuts. She would wake up in the middle of the night to find me under the blankets with my flashlight on, checking her body for insects.

"Are you ever going to be normal again? It's like you have PTSD." Maybe; there's evidence that infestations can lead to symptoms of PTSD, especially if you already suffer from a mental illness. Since most infestations won't get this bad if caught early and treated, bedbugs are seen as more of an indicator of mental health issues.

I booked the follow-up appointment and saw a counsellor for a little while. I was never tested for PTSD, but was instead tossed into the anxiety spectrum. I had picked up a phobia, but that implies irrationality. While subjecting myself to the same chemical bath as the bedbugs was really bloody irrational, not wanting bedbugs is, I think, pretty fucking reasonable.

My three-year relationship eroded over the next few months for myriad reasons. I'm not going to blame the bugs. That being said, I'm sure being a hyper-vigilant, obsessive, flashlight-wielding madman didn't help. I stopped going to regular counselling. It was hard to find time and I couldn't see myself doing any kind of exposure therapy involving bedbugs. It helped a bit. At least I could sit down on the subway.

Two years later, it hasn't really let up. Since I started writing this I've sliced open my box spring to apply boric acid and my back is bleeding from uncontrollable scratching. At least my new roommate thinks I'm getting laid. My trusty flashlight is back on the bedside table. When I see a discarded mattress, especially ones with the all-too-familiar knife wounds, I cross the street.

Lately, I've been waking up with bites, all relatively close together. That was absolutely terrifying, until I found a bunch of tiny spiders in the curtains above my bed. I was so damn happy to find those spiders that I couldn't help but laugh as I threw the curtains out the window.

For me there are two states of being: having bedbugs and possibly having bedbugs. The fear is something that I'm just going to have to deal with. When I think I'm infested I do the checks, set out some traps and try to calm down before I start filming myself sleeping. I try to take reasonable risks, like walking on the far end of the sidewalk instead of crossing the road. It's probably not the best way to go about it, but I still need these rituals. It's the only way I can scratch the itch inside my skull.

Follow Jake Scott on Twitter.

Last week, we shared a clip from IFC's upcoming series Documentary Now! where Bill Hader and Fred Armisen play journalists at a company called DRONEZ that looks an awful lot like VICE. Today IFC has sent over another clip from the show. This time it's Jack Black playing DRONEZ's bearded founder, Jamison Friend.

Give the clip a watch and check out Documentary Now! on IFC starting August 20.

Mariachi photo courtesy of the author

Evelyn Méndez Maldonado and Diego Quintana's dog Mariachi had been missing for almost a month when Quintana received a message via WhatsApp: "I want 2,500 pesos [$156] plus what I invested in caring for your dog."

A black and coffee-colored Chihuahua, Mariachi disappeared from the couple's yard in Oaxaca, Mexico in May. At first, they put up posters in their neighborhood, and asked around to see if anyone had seen the pooch. But around the time they started to receive correspondences about their dog, a woman told them Mariachi had been kidnapped, by a guy who worked at the local Green Party office.

"Ironically," Maldonado told VICE, "he worked for a party that has created many campaigns in favor of animal rights."

At first, the couple, who own a restaurant in the center of Oaxaca, tried to negotiate with the kidnapper. Quintana wrote to the kidnapper, "Look, I have a restaurant with delicious, fantastic food. You can come and eat for free five times." The kidnapper rejected the offer and responded that he wanted "what I invested in her [Mariachi] and the reward that you owe me." The kidnapper also mentioned that he needed to talk to his brother before confirming the price of the ransom. Maldonado and Quintana agreed to pay, although initially they didn't plan on actually handing over the money when they met up for the exchange.

"Knowing our country and with so much fear and knowledge of the many recent extortions, we didn't want to go and meet him," Maldonado said. "We asked him to meet us in the city center, but he refused." Instead, the kidnapper asked them to go to Santa Rosa, a neighborhood that Maldonado described as "pretty far away and very dangerous," to ransom their pet.

Eventually, the couple decided to go to the police to file a formal complaint, but the cops informed them that there wasn't enough evidence to conduct an investigation—although the police did offer to interrogate the alleged pet-snatcher if the couple tracked him down on their own. It seemed like an odd deal, but Maldonado and Quintana were set on getting Mariachi back.

"Legally speaking," said José Luis Carranza, a lawyer in Mexico City who specializes in animal rights, "pet kidnapping does not exist as a crime. According to the civil code of the country pets are things." However, Carranza added that gangs will often "drive around armed and rob pure-bred animals... to breed them, to sell them, and to extort the owners." In Mexico City, he added, pet robbery has increased in the last two years—there is even a Facebook page devoted to the problem.

"There are no statistics about these crimes because people don't report them," said Betsabe Torres from the animal defense group Hogar Mascota. However, the phenomenon is common enough that it pops up regularly in bar conversations, on the radio, and in TV announcements. Pet owners worried about kidnapping can ask their local vet to implant an identification chip in their pet or can find advice online like "Ten Things to Do When Pets Are Stolen or Kidnapped."

In an article published by the Mexican newspaper Milenio this January, Joaquín Carrillo of the Attorney General's office in Oaxaca said pet kidnappings are "isolated incidents." I called his office for more details, but his secretary said he was not available to speak with me.

Image via Flickr user Wonderlane

Unlike Maldonado and Quintana, Héctor Barraza, whose schnauzer Oliver was kidnapped from the Plaza Uruguay in the wealthy Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City, did not go to the police to report the crime. "I think it is useless to go to the police," he said. "If it's useless to go to them when you are assaulted, they aren't going to pay any attention to a pet kidnapping. The families that have expensive dogs have enough money to contract private security to find their pets."

According to Barraza, he and his brother investigated the kidnapping on their own by offering a small monetary reward for information about Oliver, and eventually found the kidnapper. An older lady had stolen Oliver and immediately sold the dog to a man in her neighborhood. Barraza tracked down the man, and negotiated Oliver's return in exchange for 500 pesos, or about $31.

In a country whose most notorious drug lord just tunneled his way out of prison—and where 1,621 people were murdered in May alone—dog-snatching may not seem like a particularly pressing crime problem. But the rise in pet kidnappings—and the lack of police interest in solving them—underscores thelarger problems that have plagued Mexico's notoriously corrupt and ill-trained law enforcement forces.A May 2014 study conducted by the Washington Office on Latin America on Mexico's police force, subtitled "Many reforms, little progress," found that only 12 percent of all crimes in Mexico are reported, explaining, "Forces at all levels are riddled with corruption and are widely seen as being ineffective in enforcing the law or even as enabling crime."

Which explains why small-time criminals feel free to take dogs and children and adult humans and hold them for ransom. A 2015 Crime and Safety Report for Mexico City noted, "The number of kidnappings reported throughout Mexico is of particular concern. The overall numbers of kidnapping incidents are difficult to determine because most of the cases are not reported to authorities."

In Oaxaca, Maldonado and Quintana decided to do whatever it took to catch the guy who stole their dog. The tipster provided them with a description of the culprit after seeing him walk into the local Green Party office with a dog who looked like Mariachi. Since the couple's house was close to the office in question, Maldonado and Quintana decided to keep a lookout for the dog.

One day, they saw a man matching the tipster's description walking to the Green Party offices, and called the police. When Maldonado, Quintana, and a policeman arrived at the Green Party offices, they asked where the thief was, but other people in the officesaid they hadn't seen him.

"But when we looked around, we found him hiding under a desk," Maldonado said. "We realized that he was a young kid, only 16-years-old. This is the saddest part of the story. How is it so easy for a young person to resort to extortion? It is the most practical thing these days, part of the decay of society."

Related: Oaxaca's Third Gender

When the boy's family arrived, Maldonado said, the couple began to suspect the parents might have put him up to it.

"They said, 'We aren't rich people.' And we replied, 'We aren't either. Just because we live in a different neighborhood doesn't mean we have more money.'"

One month and one week after the kidnapping, Mariachi was back home. "We went to their house alone to pick up our dog," Quintana said. "They asked us for money, and we gave it to them because we knew what type of people they were and we didn't want to have problems. We prefer not to have enemies."

Follow Alice Driver on Twitter.

Ruby Lott-Lavigna with her dad, Tim Lott. Photo from Ruby Lott-Lavigna

One of my earliest memories is painting in my living room at age four. My dad takes the brush off me, paints something on the mini easel and, dissatisfied, crumples it into a ball and throws it in the trash. Clearly unhappy with his lack of artistic ambition and perseverance, I encourage him to have another go. "Paint daddy, paint!" I cry.

Except, actually, I don't know if I remember this. What I do know is that it makes the ending of my father's memoirs, and I've read it enough times to construct it into a memory. Even if it's a secondhand one. Another early memory of mine is of going into Waterstones, picking out a copy of the book, reading the last pages, and being intrigued that my life was briefly referenced somewhere anyone could access.

Writing about family has been my dad's forte for a while. After publishing The Scent of Dried Roses in 1996, his first published book—a memoir about depression in his family—he proceeded to write columns for various papers and then three years ago, he was given the job as family columnist for the Guardian. And that's when my life started to get chronicled in the national press.

I was given a pseudonym and the pieces I'm explicitly in he will run past me, but to be perfectly honest I wouldn't have minded being named outright—I was so used to the personal becoming public that I had stopped objecting to it. Emotions were something penned weekly and dissected, and I was brought up feeling I had a language to discuss them, as well as not caring if they were publicized. If being repressed and British messes you up, then this was the opposite. For better or for worse, the columns have opened up conversations—conversations that we wouldn't have otherwise had.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not some fucked up over-sharer who can't wait to tweet about my own personal angst. It's more that I don't feel my thoughts or experiences belong to me any more than they do the other people who read about them. And I'm OK with that. I don't have a problem if people read those articles about me, because in an age where I—like pretty much everyone else—have curated my character through various different social media sites, the articles are only one of the many versions of me that exist online.

Obviously, having your dad write about you for a living isn't for everyone. But I suspect being confident (and a bit arrogant) has made the whole ordeal a lot easier. Humbler, more private friends have told me they'd hate it. My younger sister, subject to the same circumstances as myself, is, on the whole, less of a twat so I asked her how being written about felt. "I always read the articles because they kind of fascinated me," she told me. "But it felt like he rarely wrote about me because I was one of the less temperamental children. To be honest, if he did write about me, it was with rose-tinted glasses. I think he likes the contrast of the easy children and the hard children." I might have been a pain in the ass, but an irritating daughter is a surefire way to making some dollar in the family column business.

I've reconciled myself to the reality of being written about, but there's still been the occasional piece that's pissed me off. There was the "You-are-either-a-daughter-or-a-girlfriend piece," which used a Little Mermaid analogy to talk about how I'd gotten a boyfriend and how this was a profound shift in my life which was kind of absurd. A piece in the Observer Food Monthly, which featured a nice double spread of me looking disdainfully at a pea, upset me only because it detailed my childish attitude to food. Not nearly the most explicit thing that I've had written about me, but it exposed something I was ashamed of.

Related: Welcome to Broadly, VICE's new women's interest channel

The Observer piece got a fair amount of attention from people I knew, but, contrary to what you might think, I've never had friends come and tell me they've read about me (although inevitably they must have). I've had men try to impress me by reading my father's work, which is fucking weird when you think about it. For most people though, when the information becomes contextualized rather than abstract it seems more invasive, and so people who know me avoid it. I asked some exes of mine whether it was ever an allure to background check me, Guardian style. "I don't think it would've crossed my mind to like, research your past," one said. Another told me: "At first there was always a temptation, but it was too personal and insincere so I avoided it. As time went on it became less of an oddity for me—it's clear to me now how his own perception of who you are reads more like fiction than documentary."

It is exactly this sense of the unreal that limits any problems I have with being written about. Having a turbulent relationship with my father has drawn my attention to the subjectivity of our respective memories, and the fiction that our memories become for us. They're fragments of an incomplete narrative. We've had arguments that have been triggered from the articles, sparked by how he renders his conceptions of the truth. Make no mistake: being confronted by the interior thoughts of your father—by how he views things—can be heartbreaking.

There is a certain privilege in the way my father can write about his life and family with little-to-no criticism. Women are critiqued for talking candidly about themselves and their personal experiences, but men like my father have been doing it for years and no one's thought it was self-obsessed or indulgent. As a consequence of the articles, I've picked up (inherited?) a penchant for the biographical style and I'm glad: I write about myself because the personal is political, and I refuse to feel bothered by doing something men have done for years.

Follow Ruby Lott-Lavigna on Twitter.

Screenshot of Instagram user roryalbanese

Back in June, Colin Quinn suggested that after his stint on The Daily Show was done, Jon Stewart should come back to the Comedy Cellar in New York. Last night, for the first time in over a decade, he did.

The unsuspecting 9:30 crowd, who paid $14 tickets greeted the talk-show host with a standing ovation. (Louis CK had dropped in earlier.)

The Daily Show version of Jon Stewart is polished and slick, an almost fatherly figure who delivers liberal comedy sermons in an Armani suit. But in this small room he was in a T-shirt and a Mets cap and lamenting the years when he waited tables at a shitty Mexican restaurant down the street and nobody liked his jokes. He mentioned people asking how he could leave the show with Donald Trump serving up so much great material, and talked about how black people and Jews have so much in common they should really just unite. (That last bit is kind of a touchy subject, given former Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac's recent comments about his experience being the only black writer on the program.)

Despite his lengthy hiatus from standup, Stewart came off relaxed and confident, feeding into the speculation of what his post–Daily Show life might be like. Some think he'll turn to directing movies, as he did with 2014's Rosewater. Others have wondered whether he will go the route of Johnny Carson, who more or less rode off into the sunset and largely retired from public life.

For now, it appears Stewart himself doesn't even exactly know what he'll be doing. Should he choose to do a new special, it will be his first since HBO's 1996 special Unleavened, which is now available in its entirety on YouTube.

As he exited the stage, Stewart received a second standing ovation. This could have been a final farewell to the Cellar—or the start of a series of regular surprise sets. Not bad for the price of a mixed drink at most bars in the neighborhood.

UPDATE: Due to an editing error an earlier version of the headline of this piece and the piece itself stated that the author had attended the stand-up set, when in fact the author was not there. He spoke to people who were in attendance.

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The rotunda at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Photo via Flickr user Bob Mical

On Wednesday, three former Phi Kappa Psi frat brothers at the University of Virginia sued Rolling Stone, its parent company Wenner Media, and journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely over the magazine's famously discredited "A Rape on Campus" feature. According to the complaint, which was filed in US District Court in New York, George Elias IV, Stephen Hadford, and Ross Fowler were "interrogated," "humiliated," and "scolded" after Erdely wrote that members of their fraternity brutally gang-raped a freshman the magazine referred to only as "Jackie."

The lawsuit is just the latest chapter in a saga that has roiled the journalism and rape awareness communities alike. And the debacle is sure to color future discussions about campus sexual assault, as well as how the public views an iconic magazine that is now permanently associated with one of the biggest journalistic errors in recent years.

But even if "A Rape on Campus" has been disproven and scrubbed from the Rolling Stone website, it's unclear if the three frat brothers have a legit defamation case. For instance, the complaint says that the plaintiffs were identified on a message board called FairfaxUnderground.com, which caused them to be inundated with emails and messages. However, a review of the thread there about the UVA article shows that they were only identified once —in a list of 19 members of the fraternity. Although specific brothers are discussed by the thread's participants, no one discusses any of the three plaintiffs as possible rapists.

What's more, George Elias IV says he was identified as one of the gang rapists because his bedroom fit the description of the one Erdely described in her report. But the piece—still visible thanks to online archives—never says Jackie's date took her into "his room"— only "a room" on the second floor. The piece also makes no mention explicit mention of the room's actual occupant being present.

Meanwhile, the other two plaintiffs don't make any specific claims about how they were picked out of the group. For instance, the complaint notes that Hardford "wore his Phi Kappa Psi shirts almost daily" and that Fowler was a member of the fraternity—but offers no other explanation as to how they could possibly be identified.

The men are suing on three counts each, including defamation and negligent infliction of emotional distress, and are seeking $75,000 apiece for each count.

After "A Rape on Campus" first went blockbuster last fall, a blogger named Richard Bradley started questioning the veracity of its explosive opening scene, in which members of the frat brutally gang-rape a woman referred to only as "Jackie." Soon after, a reporter at the Washington Post determined that key parts of the piece were false, which led to an apology from Rolling Stone and an investigation by the Charlottesville Police Department, which couldn't prove a rape occurred.

In May, a 13,000-world a Columbia Journalism Review interrogation of the article found the magazine didn't do its due diligence in either the reporting or editing processes. After Erdley's report was completely eviscerated, a University of Virginia Dean sued her magazine for nearly $8 million and Phi Kappa Psi announced plans to pursue legal action as well. That suit hasn't emerged just yet, and it's not clear that it will, with three of its members having just filed their own claim.

"The rather remarkable thing about bringing this lawsuit is that if the frat member doesn't win his case, then he took his name and permanently associated it with this mess," said Stuart Karle, adjunct professor of media law at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and New York University Law School. "The Rolling Stone story was deeply flawed, as the Columbia report explained, but it's hard to imagine putting your name in the middle of it forever, which he has because he is now in court records, when your name actually never appeared in the article. If he doesn't hit the jackpot with a verdict or settlement, and perhaps even if he does, that will seem a very unfortunate choice."

For their part, the complainants argue that their names are already public—and, indeed, they could be found online at a handful of websites prior to media outlets reporting on their claims.

As word of the suit was still making the rounds on Wednesday evening, the New York Times reported that Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana is leaving the magazine on August 7. His departure comes after publisher Jann Wenner took considerable flack for leaving everyone involved on staff. In a statement Wednesday, Dana said, "After 19 years at Rolling Stone, I have decided that it is time to move on." Erdely could not be immediately reached for comment.

Somehow we suspect this isn't the last we'll hear of this saga, which has been bad for pretty much everyone except the lawyers filing all these lawsuits.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Rolling Stone lawsuit

The first time I heard Heather Christle read, I'd had more than my fair share of tequila. I'd taken up one of those states where both shouting and mumbling feel like normal forms of speech delivery, and nothing actually had walls. This is, of course, not the best state of mind to be in while attending a poetry reading, and yet I remember this one distinctly. As soon as Christle opened her mouth her voice controlled the room—not due to volume, or some kind of rigged-up performative maneuver certain readers might channel in an attempt to captivate, but because hers was so obviously the voice of someone in control of her own wavelength. It became immediately clear, even in tequila-hell, that it was time to listen.

Since then, both aloud and on the page, insane or sober, Christle's writing has vibrantly defined itself the bearer of a clear, incantatory quality, almost mythic. Across her first three books, The Difficult Farm (2009), The Trees The Trees (2011), and What Is Amazing (2012), a central spirit, somewhere between the real and the unreal, incorporates into its wake a both-mesmerized-and-mesmerizing tone, one through which nearly any kind of information could appear: the narrator of a Heather Christle poem is as likely to offer you shopping tips ("Any time you buy anything, / you should buy an extra, in case / you really like it. I am aware / this makes me sound dumb, like / I am a really dumb shopper. / But buried in my shoulder / is a light that swells constantly") as it is to push you head-first into the plain-faced statement of an otherworldly fact ("Someone shut down the local shimmer / but not the police who thought / it was Sunday and so spent hours / arranging their long and pliant hair.")

Throughout these poems, the surreal is as real as the actual. Anything can be invented and seem as if it has always been. I like to think of the collection's narrator as some fixed character buried in a video game fantasy, waiting for the player to arrive so it can deliver the epiphany it has been coded to transmit. The consequence is a refreshing, if simultaneously revelation-bearing, state of address, where what is transgressed is world-weariness and stasis—each line insists itself alive, a kind of organism.

Like words? Here are three short, savage books you have to read.

Heliopause, Christle's most recent book, is her most effective yet in that regard. It brushes that feverish imagination against a more historical anatomy, that of technology, communication, exploration, and death. The book is centered around a subset of three longer poems, in which the author's grip attends more meticulously than ever on its outline in space and time. There is, for instance, "Disintegration Loop 1.1," a 13-page work divided into segments that visually mimic the William Basinski recordings of the same name, a fragment-based ambient project the composer is said to have completed on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Pronounced effects produced from minor detail are a key component of Christle's writing, and help to make it so immersive, while at the same time unassuming of clear shape. The anatomy of her images are often simple ones—flowers, the sky, language, blood, birds, quiet, clothing, people—yet in the same breath made mysterious, contemplative, a drug-without-a-drug.

Nowhere could this effect be truer than in Heliopause's second long poem, "Elegy for Neil Armstrong." Here is an erasure poem taking as its body the transcript of communications between Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and mission control during the first moon landing. Seven stark black pages form a bed for blips of language culled from the edges of what we know, and yet as everyday as anything in their foundation. "Neil, / You're / a picture / on the TV / Oh." What is provided is so little, and yet in its breadth creates a hole around which the reader and the language come together, touch, like walking in the darkness with only words to guide you. The effect is obscuring, open, and at the same time, kind of funny, in an abstract sense; what we come to at the edges of our experience of the universe is the fragmentary communications of men in sealed suits, toddling without sure purpose but to be there, to have seen it, and continue.

It is in this uncanny valley that Christle's reach comes on strongest through the page, dislodging unexpected sensation where it seemed simple pain or listlessness could have been. There is as much left off the page as on it, allowing imagination and expectation space to take hold; and thereby, a patience in the power, a pleasure derived from experience itself instead of the old tropes of terror and sex, itself made that much larger by the ongoing trust placed in its pause. "It's not necessary / to write everything down," Christle writes in "Nature Poem," which constitutes itself by describing very simply a series of outdoor walks with loved ones, and ending, suddenly, with a consideration of how ants cannot masturbate, and the conclusion: "They do not love themselves enough / They only love each other."

In the last third of Heliopause Christle shifts the tone very distinctly from that of space and technology to something much more everyday and close to home. Mostly comprised of a series of poems written as letters to a close friend, it feels like a panel opened in the larger machine to reveal its simpler innards, its heart and other vital organs. Our otherworldly speaker also has a daily life, one concerned, at various times, with food, sports, relationships, current events. "Chris is very worried / about his eyes," she writes, "his mismatched pupils / but I think and say they're probably just fine." The relief of these more ordinary subjects, in reprieve against the incantatory elevation of the earlier two-thirds, humanize the machine in such a way as to make it even nearer; the face of the speaker is at last pressed against the glass.

And finally, moving from this subset of public private letters to the final poem, "Poem for Bill Cassidy," which the end notes of the book explain is addressed to a friend of Christle's who had recently died, the book's trajectory is again altered, this time veering into perhaps the most arcane-feeling logic yet encountered. It reads like a transmission between life and death, in a way of speaking that sometimes exists between two friends so close they are the only ones who understand. And yet, here we are again included; the cryptic joy is also ours: "But think how grand it would be / to glide as casual as the sun! / shining / light in mild trapezoids along / the floor or hill." A surprising way to address the dead, but also much more heartfelt in full, larger than something like the moon is, maybe, or at least more fundamental, inherently magical.

In the end, the magic is what it's all about. Say what you want about intent or position, but the point is, at its heart, here is a book easily larger than the sum of all its parts; it widens the rift between fantasy and reality in a way that makes the world somehow both clearer and more mysterious, a space outside of outer space itself.

Three poems from Heliopause

HATCH

In every place
you seem to end
I have loved you

There was that small
and dead and pink
bird we saw

near the sidewalk
with its smashed
open mouth

a place to let
the world in
a way of not ending

I loved you so
I had to crawl inside

DRAPES

There were erecting a conversational
in the middle of the inconsequential
afternoon
like one of those unnatural flowers
you drop into water and watch
immediately blossom
And then then what
Has anything changed?
They were emigrating from one wall
to the other
like swans of
ungodly proportions
They were not so much
humans as blood drenched with hair

NOT MUCH MORE ROOM IN THE CEMETERY

I will lie down on top of the graves
People beneath and people behind me
with their faces and their little horns
and the places from which they are shining
I know there is something else
that they have tried to teach me
and I am sorry for all of the times
I have listened and not learned it
No I am not crying
I'm maybe um a demon
For certain I am waving this fruit fly away

Buy Heliopause here.

Follow Blake on Twitter.

Promotional artwork for 'Haze'

Perhaps because of the way games are made, marketed, and reported, technical imperfections will always cloud the industry's collective judgement. Is it 1080p? Is it 60fps? How many people does the online mode support? Above interrogations into narrative, artistry, and politics, these questions are prioritized—that a game is technically efficient, and a viable "product," often feels more important than whether it's saying or doing or trying anything.

And that's a shame, because it means previous-console-gen games like Homefront, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, Haze, and Murdered: Soul Suspect—games which, given a chance, could have counterbalanced the industry's oft-bemoaned stagnancy—get left at the wayside. None of them are technically perfect—some of them are very technically bad. But they each have a narrative, visual, or creative flair that deserved more attention. There's something to each of these games which, had players, critics, and game-makers latched onto and nurtured it, could have been the progenitor to a much more interesting mainstream.

Take Homefront. It has a short campaign and mechanically is very plain, insofar as you aim, shoot, and take cover, so I can understand why it got pilloried on the grounds of not being a quality "product." I can also see why narratively it was an easy write-off. The John Milius-penned America-under-occupation story smacks of paranoid Republicanism, and the scene where you and your comrades hide from Korean troops by jumping into a mass grave is hysterical and overwrought—it's exactly the kind of ridiculous try-hard hyperbole that games like Hotline Miami and The Walking Dead are rightly pulled up on. But there are several details in Homefront that I think are really captivating, a handful of moments that I wish had been learned from and co-opted by more games.

The fact that, rather than a fictional fast-food restaurant, you wind up in a gunfight at a White Castle lends Homefront a tiny, but important amount of gravitas—it makes what could be absurd melodrama into something a little more relatable. Then there's this short scene where a homeless kid walks over to you and your friends to ask for some food. You all say no, and push him away, and he goes back and lies down on the pile of bin bags he's been sleeping on. It's a great moment not because it's bleak and miserable (I'm actually exhausted at how games, like Tomb Raider, confuse dreary world design and characters' suffering with narrative sophistication) but because it lends a slight nuance to the people you're playing as. They're not perfect.

A screenshot from 'Homefront'

And finally there's the shootout in the suburban house, where constantly in the background you've the sound of a baby, upstairs, screaming and crying. It's tense, it's frightening and again it gives just that slight element of humanity to an otherwise traditional video game trope. It makes the violence just that bit more nasty and urgent.

The same goes for Kane & Lynch, albeit in a slightly different way. The writers on the original 2007 game and its 2010 sequel, Dog Days, did such a great job of making the two characters not antiheroes in the "badass," admirable sense—they're losers, degenerates, grubby little men. In the first game Kane is constantly berated by his fellow criminals for skipping out on a job that happened several years ago, for leaving a lot of his friends to die. Typically, at the end of the game, you'd find out he didn't do it, and he's not a bad guy after all. But no: Kane really did run out on his pals—he is treacherous and selfish. And so the violence you commit in that game feels markedly less glorious. It always feels like you're killing and criminalizing not for any grand or cool purpose, like in GTA, but just because you're horrible guy. 2012's Spec Ops: The Line takes all the credit for satirizing and de-legitimizing videogame violence, but Kane & Lynch was—is—a lot subtler about it. It's one of the few games, ever, where what the player does matches the personality of their character.

Article continues after the video below

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And speaking of Spec Ops, Haze, thematically, pre-dates it by four years. Spec Ops scrutinizes players' susceptibility to received information, and their willingness to commit violence in games just because they're told. Haze has you play a soldier who is force-fed hallucinogens by his superiors in order to keep him obedient. The drugs also stop him from being able to see things like blood, wounds, and dead bodies—just as video games often sanitize violence, so do the drugs in Haze. It's a game where you're manipulated into following orders, and where your willingness to commit violence is characterized as ugly and misled. But like Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, because Haze had some bugs and technical shortcomings, it was overlooked. What could have been a real flag in the ground at the start of a new console generation was petulantly thrown aside, along with its developer Free Radical.

Which brings me to Murdered: Soul Suspect, a game I played recently, and the one that inspired this entire article. Its stealth sections are ridiculous, and like every other game in the history of man it doesn't get the investigation mechanics quite right, but there's no other mainstream game that so perfectly balances funny, scary, serious, and sad. Murdered is a consummate lesson in tone. It never spills over into melodrama, it never devolves into parody—it wears all of its conceits absolutely on its sleeve, and sticks to them.

A screenshot from 'Murdered: Soul Suspect'

Perhaps more than any other game mentioned in this article, I love Murdered. It's bright, it's honest, and it's filled with stark and amusing little moments. But it didn't sell very well and its makers, Airtight, got closed down, and that's an enormous, enormous shame. Why? Primarily because a lot of people who worked on Murdered lost their jobs. But also because whatever ideas it had are going to end up lost in time. For the foreseeable future, nobody is going to risk making anything even resembling Murdered, for fear of suffering the same financial backfire, and its lessons will go unlearned.

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And that's the drop. Shooters are the way they are because nobody showed up for Haze, or Homefront, or Kane & Lynch—nobody went to bat for what made those games important, and now we're stuck with Call of Duty. When priorities and tastes shift away from notions of technological efficiency, consumer satisfaction and "product quality," that's when the original, more intelligent, and frankly better games might rise to the surface.

Follow Ed Smith on Twitter.

The Harris County Juvenile Justice Center in Houston, Texas. Photo via Flickr user Roy Luck

On the morning of March 26, 2005, Jason Wang and two other teenagers, all disguised as utility workers, left a Mesquite, Texas, home with a safe containing nearly $70,000 in stolen cash and valuables. Having tied the family up at gunpoint inside, the three teens took a car parked in the garage and sped off to a rendezvous point nearby, where a getaway ride waited.

The house belonged to the owners of a nail salon in town, and the thieves had known there was plenty of cash inside, along with jewelry and electronics, Wang told me recently. But even with meticulous planning, which included scoping out the neighborhood a year prior, missteps during the getaway led to the gang's arrest.

When they were eventually charged with armed robbery, the friends faced divergent fates in Texas's sprawling criminal justice system. Wang, who was 15 and considered a juvenile at the time, now has an MBA and owns two businesses––success he attributes to the rehabilitative programs offered in Texas's juvenile system that helped reshape his life. But an accomplice who was 17 and automatically charged as an adult wasn't afforded the same benefits, and now struggles with a blighted criminal record, Wang said.

"

"The adult system is kind of a warehouse for human bodies, and they don't offer as many opportunities to succeed after you're released," Wang added.

Since 1918, Texas has prosecuted 17-year-olds—including those who commit misdemeanors—as adults, cramming them into a prison-industrial system bereft of the rehabilitative programs that have put Texas's juvenile system on the national radar for its effectiveness and progressive bent. But activists and some lawmakers argue the practice of treating teens as adults runs counter to the latest research showing that incarcerating youth in adult facilities puts them at a much greater risk to sexual abuse and suicide, results in higher recidivism rates, and costs the state unnecessary money––all problems that will continue so long as the state considers 17 the criminal age of responsibility.

"Texas is basically demonstrating the problems of having this inefficient system that treats 17-year-olds as their own class—they're neither adults, nor are they children," said Elizabeth Henneke, a policy attorney with the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a nonprofit that supported legislation to raise the age, which failed in the state's legislature this spring.

As Texas has reshaped its juvenile justice system in recent years, advocates and lawmakers have pushed to raise the adult criminal age to 18 and end what they see as a regressive policy in an otherwise forward-thinking state. According to Lauren Rose, a juvenile justice policy associate at the advocacy group Texans Care for Children, the continued practice in Texas has broad implications nationally.

"Often time, advocates in other states will tell their legislators, 'Texas has done this, how can we not be doing this?'" she said. "This is one of those issues where I think we're the outlier in the other direction."

Texas is one of just nine states in the US to prosecute 17-year-olds as adults, but it's part of a shrinking minority. In recent years, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Mississippi, and Connecticut have all enacted legislation to treat most or all of those accused of crimes under 18 as juveniles. (New York and North Carolina treat 16-year-olds as adults, though a proposal in New York this legislative session sought to change the state's law.)

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On top of moral concerns about incarcerating 17-year-olds as adults, there can be financial implications. Since 2003, the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which protects prisoners under 18 by separating them "sight and sound" from older populations, has put strains on prisons forced to house 17-year-olds separately. In addition to renovation costs, facilities out of compliance face penalties that can cut into their bottom lines––one reason why many sheriffs in Texas support raising the age.

Over the years, the Lone Star state has been in and out of compliance with PREA, and in May, Governor Greg Abbott wrote to US Attorney General Loretta Lynch promising that the state would comply "wherever feasible." But last year, Texas was docked over $800,000 in federal funding, and between 2016 and 2017, noncompliance could cost it $2.78 million in federal grants, according to Legislative Budget Board estimates.

Still, opponents of age reform say that the state is ill-equipped as is to handle an influx of 17-year-olds into its pricey juvenile system. According to a January Texas State House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence report, incarcerating adults costs around $50 per day, while juveniles cost $367. Probation costs $3 per day for adults and $22 for juveniles.

"Eighty percent of the counties in Texas don't have juvenile holding facilities," A.J. Louderback, president of Texas's Sheriff's Association, told the Houston Chronicle in December. "This is not a minor thing. It would affect a lot of counties financially."

Watch our HBO report on the longest drought in Texas history:

In 2014, 500 17-year-olds were sent to prisons across Texas, and 7,600 were placed on probation, according to Legislative Budget Board numbers. The office estimates that sending them through juvenile courts would have cost the state $16 million of its more than $200 billion budget for the next year, and $57 million by 2020.

County officials, whose juvenile justice budgets are largely internal, have voiced concern over runaway costs as well. Officials in Harris County, which houses some of the nation's largest prisons, predicted that the price of new juvenile facilities and courts would approach $70 million, while they would only save $6 million from housing fewer juveniles by 2020.

But reformers contend that counties already spend unnecessarily on housing 17-year-olds separately. "Dallas is spending almost $80,000 a week just to separate their 17-year-old population from their 18-year-old population," explained Henneke. Moreover, she argued, transfer costs are difficult to predict, and spending more upfront could save taxpayers money in the long run.

"The increase isn't going to be as drastic as some people expect," she said.

The January Committee report notes that most 17-year-olds in Texas are arrested for nonviolent offenses that would not necessarily require lock-up in the juvenile system, and with declining juvenile and 17-year-old arrest numbers, financial concerns could be overblown. "Our juvenile crime rate is dropping," Rose said, "so it's something that our system can absolutely handle."

If most 17-year-olds are locked up for nonviolent crimes, Wang's case is an outlier—albeit one that in its extremity highlights the tangible benefits for those who go through the juvenile system. When youths are ferried successfully through rehabilitative programs, they become "taxpayers rather than burdens on taxpayers," according to the report, which estimates that each successful rehabilitation case could ultimately save taxpayers between $1.7 and $2.3 million.

Though raise-the-age legislation failed, two other initiatives halting truancy prosecution and sending juveniles to facilities closer to home passed recently. Those bills were championed by one of the state's leading juvenile justice reformers, State Senator John Whitmire, who curiously nixed the raise-the-age amendment from the final bill.

Follow Alex Mierjeski on Twitter.

In the second half of the 20th century, New York City saw a boom in organized crime, with New York and New Jersey at the epicenter of mob rule in the US. Meanwhile, the gay scene had exploded.

The Mafia—which had a stranglehold on nightlife since the end of Prohibition—spotted a gap in the market. There was a whole new audience who wanted to go to a bar or nightclub to experience the then luxury of being among other gay people. In the aftermath of Prohibition, a new underground scene developed, and naturally the Mafia wanted in on the action. What followed was years of pimping, financial exploitation, the NYPD completely ignoring the LGBT community's concerns, and gossipy FBI files speculating about certain mobsters' sexualities.

Phillip Crawford Jr., author of the book The Mafia and the Gays, argues that the Mafia were much more than proprietors of illegal nightspots; he says that they are in fact an intrinsic part of the LGBT movement, sparking the Stonewall riots and enabling the gay community to thrive. VICE called him up to talk about all that.

VICE: Hi, Phillip. When did the link between the gay community and the Mafia begin?
Phillip Crawford Jr: The Mafia was behind many speakeasies in the big cities, such as Chicago and New York, during Prohibition. After Prohibition was repealed, state agencies regulated bars with vague standards against disorderly premises and moral indecency, which were interpreted to prohibit serving gays. Accordingly, the Mafia took its experience with speakeasies and used it to operate gay bars, which involved paying off the police departments and liquor authorities charged with enforcing these discriminatory laws.

It seems like an unusual fusion...
Well, the Mafia didn't much care about enforcing societal mores or respecting government rules. Ernest Sgroi Sr, one of the principal fronts for gay bars controlled by mob boss Vito Genovese in Greenwich Village, obtained his first liquor license right after the repeal of Prohibition. He was involved with some of the most popular gay bars during the post-war years, including the Bon Soir and the Lion, which started off as nightclubs with live entertainment attracting both straight and gay patrons but ultimately became predominantly gay bars. The Lion was where Barbra Streisand made her first public singing performance in 1960.

So do you think the Mafia exploited the gay community purely for their own financial ends?
The Mafia controlled most gay bars due to their illegal status, and extracted a monetary premium from the gay community. This recognized both the legal risk the Mob was taking and the near-monopoly status it enjoyed. After all, where else were gay folks going to meet? There were often high cover charges and minimum drink requirements. Moreover, gay men were at risk of blackmail from their Mob overlords. The Mob's exploitation of the gay community was among the reasons for the 1969 protests outside the Stonewall Inn. Indeed, after the Stonewall protests, once of the principal goals of the activist groups such as Gay Activists Alliance and Gay Liberation Front was to get organized crime out of the gay bars.

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Did anything change?
Unfortunately, the LGBT community's complaints about gay bars operating under the Mafia's thumb continued to be ignored for years by law enforcement and public officials. With the liberation movement, gay bars became cash cows for New York's Mafia families.

Your book says the Mafia pimped out gay men, too...
The gay bars were part of the vice rackets, and that also included the flesh trade. For example, Ed "the Skull" Murphy, a former pro wrestler who became a gay bar bouncer, had a proclivity for young boys, and he pimped them out through bars at which he worked. New York law enforcement investigated the mob's role in running gay bars and pimping underage boys pursuant to Operation Together in the mid 1970s but according to Assistant District Attorney Paul Flaxman "top brass" shut it down right before the indictment stage because it implicated powerful people in politics, business, and society.

Was that activity just confined to the Mafia?
I spoke with a now-retired detective who worked undercover vice on Operation Together, and he mentioned a couple of household names from the entertainment field who allegedly were involved with the jail bait. Moreover, the Mafia was also behind many of the hustler bars. For example, Matty Ianniello, the Genovese capo who controlled much of New York's gay nightlife, was behind the Hay Market in Times Square where generous men could find some young company.

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Does it seem strange given the stereotypical homophobic image of the Mob that they would get so closely involved with the gay scene?
Most mobsters are sociopaths only interested in making money, and their entire lives are about trafficking drugs, producing pornography, making bets, or whacking rivals. Running gay bars is a relatively minor break! Sure, many mobsters had a homophobic bent and often expressed their contempt for gay patrons, but generally there was a benign tolerance for the LGBT community based on financial interests, and they separated their personal lives from business affairs.

Did some Mafia members get involved in the gay scene in any meaningful way?
From the Mob's earliest days to the present time there have been many gay wise guys, although they operate on the down low. For example, David Petillo was "reputed to be a 'fairy'" according to FBI documents. In 1936 the 18-year-old Petillo was busted with Lucky Luciano for running female brothels, and after he got out of prison in 1956 became a Genovese soldier involved with gay bars and the smut trade into the 1970s. DeCavalcante boss John D'Amato was whacked in 1992 for being gay, and his killer Anthony Capo said in court: "Nobody's going to respect us if we have a gay homosexual boss sitting down discussing La Cosa Nostra business." More recently, Robert Mormando, a onetime Gambino hitman, came out of the closet in 2009 after entering the witness protection program.

How long did the connection between the gay scene and the Mafia go on for? Is it finished now?
There's some evidence to suggest that the Genovese and Gambino families still may have a hidden hand in some establishments. However, most gay bars today are run by legitimate business interests. The near-monopoly by the Mafia over gay bars was broken in the mid 80s when federal prosecutors aggressively targeted New York's crime families on multiple fronts, which included convictions against Matty Ianniello and several of his associates for skimming cash out of several of his Times Square gay bars and strip clubs to avoid income taxes.

The Mafia and the Gays is available at Amazon.

Follow Helen on Twitter.

Flags and trucks: history's greatest friends. Photo via Flickr user Duane Tate

Read: 'Racist' Painting Based on New Brunswick City Legend Taken Down After Public Outcry

Earlier this month, Saskatchewan resident Dale Pippin filed a human rights complaint over media coverage and debate around the Confederate flag, citing the "incorrect" connection drawn between racism and the flag. Now, a group in Nova Scotia is calling for Canadian governments at all levels to ban the use and display of the flag.

Nova Scotia Citizens Against White Supremacy is arguing that displaying the flag should be considered a hate crime. Lyn Jones, activist and organizer, explained her shock when she saw a Confederate flag-painted truck in her hometown of Truro, NS.

"It wasn't just a flag around the truck, the truck was painted with the Confederate flag. I thought, 'This is really, really scary.' I was afraid."

The flag associated with the American Confederacy has been the subject of renewed, intense debate since the massacre of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17 of this year by an avowed white supremacist. Activist and filmmaker Bree Newsome removed the Confederate flag hanging within sight of the state capitol, for which she was arrested, before the state voted to remove the flag from government property permanently. Other states and groups across the US are now engaging in similar discussions.

Many proponents of the flag claim that it stands not for the demand to own and traffic in (black) humans, but for "southern pride" and "heritage." Dalhousie history professor Isaac Saney disagreed in an interview with CTV News.

"The flag is not just a symbol, it had a material impact in society," he said. "It is a universal symbol of racism. That is without doubt and I think that there is no place for hate symbols, for symbols of white supremacy in Canada."

While the flag, one of the most recognizable symbols of the group of states that attempted to secede for the specific purpose of retaining the right to own and trade human beings, has no specific connection to Canadian history, some people feel a strong connection to the flag here.

Nova Scotia is home to a large population of black people, many of whom are descended from slaves who fled America. In spite of that superficially inclusive beginning, the province has a history of anti-black racism on both the individual and institutional levels, from the forced relocation of Africville residents in the mid-20th century to the Windsor, NS man convicted of burning a cross on an interracial couple's lawn five years ago.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

Screenshot via Google

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March last year. Despite scouring every possible crash zone for 18 months, including vast tracts of the southern Indian Ocean, searchers found nothing of the plane.

This is why a six-foot-long piece of wreckage, found on the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion, is potentially so exciting. Experts are already agreeing that the barnacle-encrusted object is likely a flaperon, which is the moving part of an airplane wing. Malaysia's deputy transport minister, Abdul Aziz Kaprawi, has added fuel to the speculation, saying "It is almost certain that the flaperon is from a Boeing 777 aircraft."

The next logical question is how searchers could potentially use this wreckage to find the missing aircraft. To find out we asked Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi, who is an oceanographer specializing in ocean currents and numerical modeling. He's also been one of the scientists to provide recommendations on search areas, based on ocean movements.

VICE: Professor, if this debris is from MH370, what does that tell us about the plane's location?
Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi: It tells us we've been looking in the right place. It will have come from the east of the Indian Ocean, in the area of the current crash search zone. We predicted finding debris in these areas 12 months ago, where this thing has come up. So personally I'm pleased we got it right.

What's the next step?
Keep searching. We hope that there will be more debris and if it is from MH370, then it's likely there will. Then if we have lots of debris in different locations, we can backtrack all the pieces with a much better accuracy.

There's some ambivalence about backtracking ocean currents. I understand there are so many variables that searchers can be thrown off by hundreds of miles.
Yes, but what else do you want to try? If this wreckage does come from MH370, it actually doesn't change anything. It gives us confidence that we're looking in the right place, but it doesn't make it very easy to find that place. We still have to locate that wreckage at the bottom of the ocean, four kilometers [2.5 miles] down.

So how do you feel right now, personally?
I feel empathy for these families because if this piece of wreckage is from MH370, it takes some of the load from their shoulders. Before they were thinking the plane could be anywhere. Their loved ones could have been starving, or they could have been held prisoner somewhere. But this could be a big step in helping some of these people get a sense of closure.

But it's not a big step in finding the plane?
It's something toward that. It's another part of the jigsaw puzzle and it gives us confidence that we're looking in the right place.

The last claim was that the plane could be traced by examining the species of barnacles growing on the wreckage. Supposedly that would tell us where it came from?
No, because we don't know when the barnacles attached themselves. We can say it's been in the water a certain amount of time, but we have no idea when any one particular barnacle attached itself. There are probably barnacles there from two weeks ago, and others from three months. No, unfortunately this single piece of debris won't tell us where the plane came from. It just tells us we're looking in the right place.

Follow Julian on Twitter.