All photos by David Austin.

More on new and questionably legal drugs:

How Synthetic Weed is Ravaging Brooklyn's Homeless Population
The Hard Lives of Britain's Synthetic Marijuana Addicts
Inside New Zealand's Synthetic Drug Scene
A Young Chemist Explains How Legal Highs Work

Lining the littered sidewalk near the corner of San Pedro and 6th streets in downtown LA's Skid Row, men sit on folding chairs and milk crates as they roll joint after joint of what looks like really bad pot. They each serve as a solitary assembly line, holding cardboard box tops on their lap that contain a stack of rolling papers and mountainous piles of dry, greenish brown leaves that best resemble your grandma's potpourri.

This substance is spice, the laboratory-made and insanity-inducing synthetic cannabinoid that functions more like a mind-bending mash-up of PCP, LSD and pot than your run-of-the mill weed. Skid Row dealers typically sell a spice joint for $1, a bargain for the area's homeless.

When spice turns to smoke, it's been described as smelling like everything from potent pot to feces.

"It smells like rotten ass," said 34-year-old Diann Lakey, a former Skid Row resident who still regularly visits the area.

More troubling than its stench is the effect spice has on its users, especially those who already suffer from mental illnesses. Nearly 4,000 people live in the shelters or on the streets of Skid Row, according to 2015 data provided to me by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. The same organization estimates that upwards of 30% of these residents have some type of mental health issue. (Though one LAPD officer I spoke to told me he thought this number was actually around 50%.)

Spice first emerged on Skid Row about two years ago, and since then has spread like wildfire because of it's affordability and accessibility. It's lead to increasingly erratic behavior among an already vulnerable population, and contributed to a growing number of confrontations with police.

"I've seen people hit it [spice,] run around, lose their minds, talk about how people are after them, start humping the ground. I've seen it all," said Lakey.

Skid Row residents I spoke to told me they had seen users of the drug run into traffic, get hit by cars and continue on their way unphased. Another man I was told about climbed into a tree for two days and wouldn't come down.

Watch our documentary about spice addicts in the UK:

LAPD Officer Deon Joseph has been working on Skid Row for 17 years and has become the unofficial mayor of the homeless epicenter. He manages to straddle the line between enforcer and advocate, endearing many area residents to him. More than 250 pounds of pure muscle, Joseph's uniform clings to his biceps as if it's on the verge of splitting wide open.

He's be the last person you'd expect to struggle taking someone into custody, but spice makes people freakishly strong, and users are more inclined to confront police, according to Joseph.

"People are under the assumption that we don't know how to deal with mental illness down here in Central [Division]. That's not true, but when mental illness hits spice, not even the best-trained mental health clinician could be standing with us and would be able to stop it," Joseph said. "So confrontations with law enforcement seem to be increasing."

At a recent press conference hosted by LA Mayor Eric Garcetti, a man "flipped out" in front of City Hall. He was sweaty, delusional, walking in circles and saying that his deceased mom was there with him. Police officers were forced to intervene, according to Officer Joseph. The man admitted he had just smoked spice and proceeded to threaten to kill himself and beg Joseph to shoot him. Even for the burly cop, restraining the spice-fueled man was a challenge, he admitted.

A few months ago on Skid Row, a mentally ill man ended up dead after a series of confrontations that appear to have been driven by a combination of his mental issues and drug use, Joseph told me. The man, often bullied for being gay, was usually very cordial with the LAPD officer, but when spice hit Skid Row two years ago, the man's mental state began to deteriorate. He eventually picked a fight with Officer Joseph, attempted to assault a woman and ended up in a tussle on 7th and Wall streets that left him with stab wounds in the neck and chest. His injuries killed him a few months later.

"The agitation, the hallucinations, the paranoia, you add those three things together and you're going to have an MMA brawl, a free-for-all..." Officer Joseph said.

Fellow LAPD officer Stephen Nichols worked Skid Row for about a decade and has seen spice users demonstrate quasi-psychotic behavior, extreme rage and "almost superhuman strength." Unlike "passive" drugs like heroin that dramatically lower a person's body temperature and heart rate—and often lull users into a sedative state—spice has the opposite effect, according to Nichols.

"It tends to manifest itself in exhibitions of violence," he said.

One of the most high-profile instances of Skid Row violence happened earlier this year between a homeless man and the LAPD. On March 1, a mentally ill transient known to some as "Africa" (actually a 43-year-old named Charly Leundeu Keunang) was shot several times and killed by police. The incident garnered widespread attention and drew protesters to downtown LA.

An autopsy of Keunang was released on Wednesday and showed that the Cameroon native had methamphetamine and marijuana in his system at the time of death. Keunang's killing spurred LAPD Police Chief Charlie Beck to publicly comment on the state of homeless drug use in Los Angeles.

"The combination of mental illness and drug abuse on skid row leads to multiple violent confrontations, and it appeared to have an impact on this confrontation," he said. "It is a tragedy, and one of the things that makes addressing homelessness in Los Angeles so important."

Hard facts and figures on overall spice usage in Los Angeles are difficult to come by. An LAPD spokesperson who I spoke to by phone told me that this is in part because the LAPD doesn't keep department-wide stats on what drug a person is arrested for, just that the person was arrested for a substance-related violation in general.

Officer Nichols said he personally hasn't arrested anyone for smoking spice, in large part because it's difficult to arrest someone for merely being under the influence, unless that intoxication results in something like an overdose.

"I can't speak for any other officers, [but] it's not something that we have arrested for, not that we wouldn't," he said.

In the aftermath of California's Prop 47, which re-classified some drug infractions from felonies to misdemeanors, many offenders who are arrested are often quickly released, according to Nichols.

"What used to carry some significance in terms of jail time, parole, probation...have been lessoned to the extent that its almost as if they've been issued a misdemeanor citation," he said. "It's given and there are no real penalties."

The LAPD told me that, earlier this summer, they did seize and book 30 pounds of "uncut" spice on Skid Row. However, according to one police official I spoke to, there is no health and safety code on the books for spice, so officers were forced to classify the drug as "Potpourri" and merely issue citations to those involved.

Still, that amount of spice is nothing to sneeze at, and would constitute a "pretty significant hit," DEA Special Agent Timothy Massino told me in an email.

There's another reason that local spice arrest rates are unclear: until recently, spice was legal, and in some incarnations, still technically is. Although the feds have made spice illegal through efforts like the 2012 Synthetic Drug Abuse Prevention Act that outlaws 26 types of synthetic drugs like spice and bath salts, drug-makers stay one step ahead of the law by changing their recipe just enough to circumvent restrictions, explained DEA Special Agent Vijay Rathi.

"Legally, the drug has to be named by its exact chemical compound," in the law, he said. "If it's off by even one molecule...it's technically not illegal."

While the feds have a law that allows them to sidestep this formality, the definitions of legality become murkier at a local level. So Skid Row shelters and recovery programs have taken matters into their own hands.

Skid Row's Union Rescue Mission has begun testing incoming recovery clients for spice, according to Steven Borja, executive vice president of the mission's programs and operations. At about $2 per urine dipstick, the mission typically only tests for spice when people come up negative for other drugs but still appear intoxicated.

Spice use has become so prevalent that Borja is going to ask for more money in the budget to keep the tests on hand. Although little is known about the long-term effects of spice on the brain or the body, its immediate damage to those with mental health problems is apparent.

"It's certainly going to exacerbate somebody who's schizophrenic, or somebody who's bipolar, or somebody who's just dealing with depression," said Borja. "It's going to make those things worse."

Duane Mackey

Around the corner from Borja's mission, Duane Mackey works as a housing coordinator at the Midnight Mission. Mackey has been on Skid Row for 35 years and clean for the last two of them. His coiffed Jheri curl-esque hair is framed by a collared shirt and tie, exceedingly polite demeanor and a vast knowledge of how things work in the LA homeless community.

The mission's courtyard and entryway is a central hangout for many homeless in the area, and Mackey has seen firsthand the damage spice can do to the marginalized.

"It's crippling us down here," said Mackey. "It's made it very hard to tell who has mental illness and who has a drug addiction."

By all accounts, there are a lot of both. Diann Lakey and her 53-year-old boyfriend Tyrone Mason estimate that as many as one in five people on Skid Row are smoking spice. Both Lakey and Mason are now clean and live outside of the homeless epicenter, but have deep ties to the area and return to visit often.

"It's just sad that these individuals, that are on this particular drug, don't realize what they're smoking," Mason told me. "This is almost somewhat similar to, like, a cocaine epidemic. Because now that they got this new drug and they're liking it or whatever, everybody's smoking it."

In the world of Jennifer Phang's new film Advantageous, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has grown more precarious than ever. Set in the near future, Advantageous follows Gwen Ko (Jacqueline Kim), a single mother struggling to hold on to her job at a cosmetic surgery company while raising her daughter, Jules. Facing the prospect of being phased out as the company's public face, Gwen must weigh whether it is worthwhile or safe to undergo the center's latest breakthrough procedure: the wholesale transfer of conscience and soul into a fresh, new lab-designed body.

Declining the procedure would leave Gwen without a job or the means to pay for Jules' tuition; but it's not clear what the mental and emotional costs of procedure will be, or what it will mean to raise a daughter in a new body.

I liked the idea of having a traumatic past and being able to leave it behind somehow by transferring into a new body. —Jennifer Phang

Advantageous flips the promise of fresh, elective bodies and shows a darker reality. The film highlights the probability that women and people of color may feel compelled to undergo such a process because competition in the corporate world would compel them to perceive such measures as necessary, if not inevitable.

This story of competition and physical anxiety is set against Phang's vision of a future New York City, with a skyline inspired by buildings like the Hearst Tower and Frank Gehry's rippling structure at 8 Spruce Street. Firmly rooted in a tradition of earthbound sci-fi cinema which includes Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville and Shane Carruth's Upstream Color, Advantageous imagines a future where corporate America wields the power recast human bodies in the name of marketing.

VICE: How did you develop Advantageous from an idea into a feature film?
Jennifer Phang: I have a sensitivity to what women go through, in terms of how they look for ways to find a place in this world, to succeed or to find self worth. At school, at work, or at home they're constantly trying to change their appearance and self-improve. Men have struggles, but women are always reminded about how they look. I've witnessed and experienced so much suffering on that side. It was something that I wanted to talk about and explore, [to see] how we could get all those issues together in one story.

I liked the idea of having a traumatic past and being able to leave it behind somehow by transferring into a new body and having that crash into a mother-daughter story, all at once. I'd lived in Los Angeles and I'd lived in Malaysia and in the San Francisco area, but in New York you get exposed to a wide variety of people dealing with survival. For working-class parents, the struggle is finding ways to make sure that their kids become great people, and it seems like this would be so much easier for kids who have money and access. I began to better understand my own mother, who came to the United States by herself. We went through a lot of stressful times when she was trying to survive and working multiple shifts, and my awareness of this became more and more clear as I lived in New York and truly started to see what survival meant.

I want a society where we really look out for each other as humans, and it's almost embarrassing to even say that. —Jennifer Phang

The film's vision of New York City in some near future feels very plausible. Can you describe how you developed the New York of Advantageous?
I've always been influenced by water and nature in my previous work. My family made me start snorkeling when I was really young, so it just comes naturally for me to try and find beauty. I imagined a future where nature and water start to slip away from us, so we compensate for that with our technology and architecture. I worked with Katherine Tate and Jean Austin, who are my visual effects artists, to bring organic lines and forms into the architecture and holograms in the films. We emphasized that things should be curved, and explored all sorts of shapes.

There are two buildings I had some really specific ideas for. The headquarters of the Cryer Corporation has a feminine form and looks a little bit like a mannequin without a dress on, an ideal female form. We thought it would be cool if the building could be crying, so we let a waterfall cry from the neck. Then we had another building which we called The Orator, which looks like a crouching female form with smoke coming from her mouth. There's an idea behind that of thoughts and words dissipating into the atmosphere.

Screen still from Advantageous

What does it mean to work in sci-fi right now, and to work in sci-fi as a woman? Who are your influences and your contemporaries?
As a woman working with sci-fi, I've had a lot of support just because of the singular qualities of Advantageous and the fact that we were doing something exciting. It's hard to know what it's like to be a woman making sci-fi just because it's so unique. You have a lot of up-and-coming filmmakers who are women who are making sci-fi, but it's hard to identify role models. I was really inspired and excited by the transporting qualities of things like Blade Runner and Ghost In The Shell and lots of anime, like Neon Genesis Evangelion. What I loved about those kinds of sci-fi was that there was a lot of emotion that I could connect with, being an outsider and feeling rejected by normals. Sci-fi allows you to investigate real problems while also relaxing a little bit about your own world. If you're concerned about the state of your life in the moment, it's a little bit easier to extrapolate it to another planet.

The speculative technology of the film enables people to download their soul and consciousness into a new body, with the risk that critical memories and feelings may be permanently lost in the process. Where did this idea come from?
I became very suspicious of sales after I attended a few real estate seminars. There are these organizations that sell real estate courses, and I can say that they mostly work out fine. People take these courses and begin to show houses and become entrepreneurs. There was the audience that was receptive and desperate, and then there was me, who was questioning and observing the mode of the presentation and the instructors. I could tell that [the instructors were suspicious] of me for being too critical, but I was there trying to understand manipulation, because it's an important issue. There's a hopeful part of me that wants a society where honesty prevails, and we just kind of find a way to coexist that doesn't force us to deceive each other about our appearance or age. I want a society where we really look out for each other as humans, and it's almost embarrassing to even say that. I know that it just doesn't work to say that I want a beautiful world in a business environment.

Advantageous is available now on Netflix.

Follow Matthew on Twitter.

Illustration by Dan Evans

The first time my granddad didn't recognize me wasn't as bad as I expected it to be. He greeted me with warmth like always, except he didn't call me "Lauren" or "love" but "son." "Hello, son," he said to me in the stubborn Dublin accent that years of living in England could not uproot. "How are you?" He was looking right at me, but he didn't know who I was, and that was that.

When my granddad was initially diagnosed with dementia, my first predictably selfish response was to get really scared about him forgetting who I was. But when it eventually happened, it kind of just happened, the way that dementia itself just happens—quietly, with very little fanfare. It slips its thin, invisible fingers around sufferers' throats, wringing out the personhood so slowly that in the beginning, you don't even notice it. I didn't cry like I thought I would when my granddad didn't recognize me, because over time I had just got used to the idea that one day, he wouldn't. When someone close to you gets dementia, you are forced to resign yourself to the plain fact of degeneration; it is a terrible thing to "just get used to," but currently no cure exists, so getting used to it is all you can do if you'd rather not get sucked into an existential thought vortex concerning the cruelty, fragility, and ultimate futility of human life.

I don't mean to be cynical. I know that if my granddad could read this, he would disagree with that last bit: For him, while he was well, life had a lot of meaning. He was a pretty committed Catholic, and a guy who, in general, enjoyed being a human person living in the world. For most of his life he ran pubs in Birmingham, and when he gave that up, he and my nan, whom he adored (and who now makes the two-train trip across the city to see him in his nursing home almost daily, with a dedication that only a woman who has been in love for more than 50 years could muster), went on loads of those cruises for people who have retired where there are rock-climbing walls on the ship. He was funny, and really good at mental arithmetic, and he liked singing IRA songs and drinking pints of Guinness. He had, especially in later life, a properly good time.

So when he started becoming forgetful, and when his wit got a bit duller than it had been before, nobody really thought anything of it, because he just wasn't the type of person who would ever get a condition like dementia. He was too robust, too aggressively healthy in his old age, too different from the type of frail, elderly person we tend to commonly associate with dementia—he was just getting old. And even after a severe dissociative episode during a holiday in Spain, when he became convinced that he was sharing a bus with terrorists, and told hotel receptionists that my nan was trying to kill him, his GP diagnosed a nervous breakdown long before considering the possibility that the problem could be rooted in a degenerative disease. He simply was not that kind of man. Even the doctor thought so.

But of course, he was that kind of man, because any man can be that kind of man. Dementia can happen to literally anyone, regardless of physical health, though some people are more genetically predisposed to it than others. It is caused by some very complicated and very fucking scary and bad-sounding shit happening to your brain, and has some pretty horrific symptoms. In general, you gradually get worse at doing anything at all for yourself, turning previously simple daily tasks like going to the toilet and getting dressed into missions requiring approximately the same amount of organization and personnel as a moon landing. You lose your memory, to the extent that you start to forget some words. Eventually, you even forget how to move, and become bedbound. After that, your immune system packs in, and once that happens it's kind of game over. Dementia, one; you, very much nil.

I had never considered having to deal with any of these symptoms, because the grandparents whose home I grew up in seemed so youthful for so long. Degenerative diseases were, to my mind, obviously terrible but ultimately distant, like wars on the news or something. Until my granddad got sick, the closest I came to dementia and its related conditions was via a great-uncle I didn't really know, who died unusually young of Alzheimer's. But then, after the incident in Spain, dementia's spindly hands began to take hold of my granddad really quickly. I was 18, and had come home from my first term at university to a house where people had to take it in turns to sleep because my granddad had started pacing around every single night until dawn, the confusion in his head now torturous.

Related: Watch 'The Hard Lives of Britain's Synthetic Marijuana Addicts,' VICE's look at the Manchester lads using Spice.

It is difficult to get used to the idea of someone who raised you needing to be looked after so thoroughly. It is even more difficult to become one of the people doing the looking after. My granddad was integral to my upbringing—I have lived in his house at numerous intervals during my life (I'm back here now, writing this), and he always nurtured me. It is weird, small things that I remember best, like how he made me watch Countdown with him so that I'd get better at spelling, and how carried me on his shoulders when he fetched me from school. Dabbing the side of someone's mouth with a piece of kitchen roll after they drink a cup of tea is hard when you know that they used to clean up your baby sick, because you used to rely on them, and now they rely on you. It's life, and it happens, but isn't it fucking sad?

Dementia now affects an estimated 850,000 people in the UK, with the number expected to reach a million by 2025, which means that a lot of people reading this probably have firsthand experience of how fucking sad it is. But still, we don't really talk about it, and I think that's because it's a disease that forces us to confront our most basic, human fears—like losing your dignity, or becoming a burden to the people you love, or even not knowing who or what you are. Because fundamentally, ego is what makes us human, and dementia takes that very human self-interest away, drip by drip. The grim vastness of that is terrifying; it's no surprise that we don't really want to discuss a disease that has the potential to chew us as if we're tough pieces of meat, for a very, very, very long time, before eventually swallowing us forever.

Before necessarily succumbing to it, those who are unlucky enough to end their days with dementia usually go to live in nursing homes, because they need the kind of specialist, around-the-clock care that most families just can't provide. Nursing homes are not an-body's favorite places, and my granddad's, despite its cheery purple decor, is no exception. Sadness looms on its corridors like humidity—never suffocating, but always palpable. It clings to the curtains, the walls, the sticky laminate flooring, the people. The friendly staff, mostly women of varying ages, do their best on a low wage, kindly chatting to the patients whose pasts, behaviors, likes and dislikes they have gotten to know well as they flit about the ward wearing disposable plastic aprons, from which fluids of various kinds can be wiped away. The armchairs in the lounge are tall and straight-backed to discourage slouching; the bedrooms are large and practical and beige.

The walls of my granddad's bedroom are covered in photos of family members whom he mostly doesn't recognize. He knows my nan mainly by the sound of her voice, and even then his acknowledgement of her can wane from visit to visit. But there are still good days, when little rays of joyful humanity emit from him. When he gets a lot of stimulation from the staff or from visitors, there is still so much of my granddad that the illness has not been able to sap away yet. He comes to life when he hears music and is still a boisterous and enthusiastic singer; he dances and plays football, and receives visits from the local priest, who says prayers with him. All of this is, obviously, extremely cool to see. Equally, though, there are bad days. He can be angry, and anxious, and sometimes both. His life as a publican haunts him on those days, and his cloudy mind becomes fixated on money and work. If he doesn't get the answers he wants, he can become moody and aggressive for entire days. His mood can change in the blink of an eye, and when I go to visit him, I never know which side of him I'm going to meet that day.

But I guess I'm not the only one. These days, there are an awful lot of people affected by dementia, both directly and indirectly, all over the world. I'm sure most of the people who feel its influence on their lives never expected to, just like me. Because you never expect dementia—before you experience it for yourself it is just a kind of faraway thing that is sad and big and scary if you think about it for too long, and something that occasionally happens on TV soaps when old people need to be written out. Nobody expects dementia, because we think we know our loved ones too well; we think their traits are too indelible, their personalities too strong, to ever be wiped out by mere disease. When it does arrive, it is unannounced; it creeps in silently and straps itself in for the long haul.

Ironically, though, however unexpected it may be when dementia comes knocking, you immediately know exactly what to expect. The distance at which you held the disease in your mind narrows very quickly, and what begins as terror and grave uncertainty becomes resignation and pragmatism. You learn to deal with the illness because you love the person it's stealing away, and you eventually accept the fact that it's never going to get better. Somehow, you cope. You just get used to it.

A migrant in one of the "Jungle" camps in Calais. Photo by Jake Lewis

This article originally appeared in VICE UK.

As the migrant crisis unfolds in Calais, the human cost is rising. At least 11 migrants have died since the beginning of June in attempts to cross the border, including an Eritrean baby who died one hour after birth. On Saturday night, an estimated 200 migrants broke down security fences, and the French riot police reacted by spraying them with a chemical irritant, reported by Al Jazeera to be tear gas.

David Cameron has been giving it his a-grade dehumanizing chat, last week saying that migrants are "swarming" over here, as if the whole thing was an episode of The Walking Dead rather than people's actual lives. A Friday morning Cobra meeting promised to send sniffer dogs and fences to help the French authorities. One MP even called for the army to be sent in, because injecting some dudes with assault rifles into the situation is definitely the best way to help a bunch of PTSD shocked Afghans.

Or is it? We spoke to a real expert, Professor Alexander Betts, Director of the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, to get some perspective.

VICE: Numbers wise, how big an issue is migration for Calais? And what are the projections for the future?
Professor Alexander Betts: The numbers of people coming across from Calais are actually relatively small. In the so-called "Jungle Camp" in Calais there are probably only around 4,000 people waiting to try to cross. Last year, there were a total of about 31,000 asylum seekers entering the UK.

If we want to make predictions about the future, we need to understand what is driving the current movements across the Mediterranean and in turn from Calais. The majority of people coming to Europe and the UK at the moment are from refugee-producing countries like Syria, Somalia, Eritrea, and Afghanistan. These are war-torn or human rights abusing countries. Only a minority are coming simply to seek a better life. Whether the numbers will increase depends upon our ability to collectively tackle the root causes of why people are coming. Ninety-five percent of the world's refugees are in countries that neighbor conflict and crisis—like Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon—and unless we support greater protection for refugees in those counties, people will inevitably seek their own solutions.

What are the main concerns we should be having?
Many newspapers are depicting the Calais crisis as about the disruption to people's holidays. David Cameron said this week "of course people really look forward to their annual holidays and I have friends and family that are using this route." This misses the point in a context in which nine people this month have died trying to cross, and in which we know these people have come from desperate and refugee-producing countries. It's really important that the public understands who these people are and why they are coming. The reason they are coming is because we face a global refugee crisis.

Related: Our short documentary 'The Migrant Crisis in Calais: Britain's Border War'

What would happen if we just opened the gates and let everyone in?
If we let everyone in Calais in, and assessed their asylum claims here, the consequences would not be hugely significant. The public concern is that allowing access to the UK might serve as a "pull factor," but this is improbable. When we get a sense of perspective and look at the numbers, only a tiny proportion of the world's most vulnerable people are coming to the UK. To take the Syria case, where the highest number of people are coming from—there are 4 million Syrian refugees, less than 7 percent are in Europe, and only a few thousand have reached the UK.

What migration will we see in the future?
It's impossible to accurately predict future migrant trends. Migration is driven by a complex range of factors. However, what is obvious is that on a global scale, refugees and displacement will be one of the defining issues of the 21st Century. Conflict, human rights abuses, and climate change will force people to cross international borders in search of the minimal conditions for survival. Collectively, the world will have to find creative ways to protect and assist such people. It will rely upon international cooperation.

So what should we do?
There are a number of steps that can be taken. First, we need to allow asylum seekers access to the UK. Once here we need effective and humane ways to assess people's asylum claims, provide sanctuary to refugees, and sensible alternatives for others.

Second, we need better cooperation within the European Union to ensure equitable distribution of responsibility for refugees across Europe.

Third, we need to ensure we engage in effective search and rescue within the Mediterranean.

Fourth, we need to build the capacity of other countries around the world to host refugees, particularly offering assistance to states' neighboring conflict and other refugee-producing countries.

On Motherboard: Jack the Ripper's Final Victim Is Being Exhumed

The Syria crisis illustrates the lack of sustainability of current responses. Out of 4 million Syrian refugees, 1.6 million are in Turkey, 1.2 million in Lebanon, and 600,000 in Jordan. These countries' capacities are being stretched to the breaking point and, understandably, countries like Lebanon and Jordan are closing their borders, leading people to travel further in search of safety. To genuinely address this kind of challenge, we have to show greater solidarity and a willingness to share responsibility with the countries most affected by the crisis. One key way to do this is through development assistance, targeted to supporting the temporary integration and self-reliance of refugees within their regions of origin.

People gathering materials to make shelters in Calais. Photo by Jake Lewis

There have been calls to send in the army. How do you see that going? Is the problem here a lack of firepower?
It's rather absurd to adopt a militarized solution to address a relatively small immigration challenge. If we were to use the army to respond to desperate and vulnerable asylum seekers trying to come to the UK, it would be a deeply shameful and unnecessarily costly response. It would turn what should be a simple administrative challenge of ensuring access to an asylum process into an escalated security issue. It risks the unnecessary use of coercion and violence against vulnerable people, while also creating the damaging public perception that these people are actually a security threat.

What should our goals and priorities be? It seems like it's gonna be difficult to please everyone.
There are ways in which sensible policies can benefit both citizens and migrants. For me, there are a number of priorities, and they probably need to be in the following order.

First, to prevent the unnecessary loss of life that results from our immigration control policies.

Second, to ensure that people fleeing persecution and violence as refugees have a place to go where they can live in dignity until it becomes possible to return home.

Third, to ensure that all migrants are treated humanely even if they face deportation.

Fourth, to encourage an open, honest, and evidence-based debate on refugees and migration.

Fifth, to find policies that ensure that we minimize the costs and maximize the benefits of migration for society as a whole.

Follow Amber Roberts on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Axion23

This story was co-published with the Marshall Project.

Legal principles can be complicated, but in most courts, until eight months ago, there was a pretty simple one: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Then came Heien v. North Carolina, decided by the US Supreme Court in December. Now the principle is: Ignorance of the law is no excuse—unless you're the cop enforcing the law, in which case it is, or at least can be, depending upon whether your ignorance is reasonable or not, to be determined upon later review.

At a time when tension between police and citizenry was already at a pitch—the opinion came down three weeks after the no-indictment announcement regarding Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri—the court's ruling provided police with even greater leeway in how they conduct stops and subject people to questioning and searches. The law already allowed police to make stops on pretext—that is, to pull someone over for some minor infraction in order to investigate more serious wrongdoing. The law already set conditions under which police, in making stops, could be wrong about the facts. Now, with the Heien decision, police could also be wrong about the law.

On VICE News: Do You Trust the Cops?

In the eight months since, courts in at least a dozen states have excused mistakes made by police who initiated stops based on a misunderstanding of what is legal and what is not, according to a canvass of court rulings. Police from California to Kansas to Illinois to New Hampshire proved ignorant of the law on items ranging from tail lights to turn signals to tinted windows to fog lines to U-turns to red lights—only to be rewarded for it, as judges, in the typical scenario, refused to throw out evidence (drugs, most often) seized as a result of the ill-founded stops.

What's striking about these cases—aside from the officers' limited understanding of the laws they're entrusted to enforce—is how flimsy the pretext can be to pull someone over. The grounds cited for stopping drivers included entering an intersection when the light was yellow; or having, on the back of a car, a trailer hitch; or having, in the front of a car, an air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror—you know, the ones shaped like pine trees, the ones so ubiquitous that the president of the Car-Freshner Corporation once told the New York Times Magazine : "We've sold billions of trees. Probably right up there with the number of hamburgers McDonald's sells."

In February, in a case involving a traffic stop over a dangling parking pass, D. Arthur Kelsey, then a judge on Virginia's Court of Criminal Appeals, wrote: "So dense is the modern web of motor vehicle regulations that every motorist is likely to get caught in it every time he drives to the grocery store." And now, he wrote, "reasonable suspicion justifying the seizure of citizens will be found even if police officers are mistaken concerning the law as long as their testimony includes magic words such as 'I thought... I believed... I mistakenly believed... I suspected... I mistakenly suspected...' or as in this case, the officer just doesn't really know one way or the other."

Here's a look at some of the cases decided in the Heien opinion's wake:

The basis for the stop: Air freshener
The eventual charge : Possession of pot with intent to deliver
The case : State of Wisconsin v. Richard Houghton Jr., decided July 14, 2015, by the Wisconsin Supreme Court

When a police officer in the Village of East Troy (4,281 residents, 18 miles of roadways, 500 manholes, according to its quarterly newsletter) pulled over Richard Houghton's blue Ford Taurus, the officer was ignorant of the law in at least two ways. He thought the car needed a front license plate (in this case, it didn't), and he thought the car's air freshener was illegal, believing any object dangling from a rear-view mirror automatically violated the state's law on obstructing a driver's view (not so). Nonetheless, the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided that the marijuana and drug paraphernalia found in the officer's subsequent search of the car would not be thrown out. Just one year after it had ruled the opposite in another case, the court decided that in light of Heien, mistakes of law by police could now be forgiven, if reasonable.

Traffic stops based on hanging air fresheners have occurred in lots of states, despite the incredible sweep implicit in such a broad interpretation of the laws on driver visibility. "There must be a zillion cars driving around with air fresheners," one judge said. In an air-freshener case decided by the Vermont Supreme Court in March, justices noted the absurdity of the state's position that all hanging items, not just air fresheners, violate the law. Were that true, the court wrote, people could be pulled over for "spherical crystals, parking placards, medical-alert cards, dog tags, beads, crosses, crucifixes, and, of course, fuzzy dice. ... [T]he statute would subject a vast swath of the driving population to police stops without any safety rationale." Nonetheless, the Vermont Supreme Court forgave the officer's mistake.

When courts have decided a mistake is reasonable, they've typically concluded that the statute was ambiguous, subject to multiple interpretations, or that the law had yet to be interpreted by appellate judges, leaving police with but limited guidance.

But in at least two other air-freshener cases decided in the last eight months—one out of Kansas City, the other, Las Vegas—courts in those jurisdictions refused to forgive police for mistakenly believing that every dangling pine tree runs afoul of the law, saying the officers' ignorance was unreasonable. And if you're wondering why some police seem so keen to stop cars with pine trees, the Kansas City case offers a clue: An officer testified that in his experience, people often use fresheners to mask the smell of drugs.

The basis for the stop: Trailer hitch
The eventual charges : Possession of pot; possession of pot with intent to deliver
The case: State of Illinois v. Jose Gaytan, decided May 21, 2015, by the Illinois Supreme Court

Near Chenoa, Illinois ("Welcome to Chenoa!," the town's website says), a couple of local police officers were using radar to check the speed of passing cars when they elected to follow a purple Lincoln Mark V. One officer later said the car's color and big tires caught his eye. The officers wound up stopping the Lincoln and arresting Jose Gaytan, a passenger, on charges stemming from marijuana found in a diaper bag.

The basis for the stop was a ball-type trailer hitch. That hitch, the officers said, obscured their view of the rear license plate, in violation of the Illinois Vehicle Code. But the statute they cited says nothing of trailer hitches, and state legislators made no mention of hitches when passing the law. The statute requires keeping the license plate "free from" materials that obstruct visibility, "including, but not limited to, glass covers and plastic covers." Eyeballing a photo of the car's rear, the trial judge questioned just how much the hitch actually shielded: "The only thing it's obstructing is the little thing at the bottom that says Land of Lincoln or whatever," the judge said. More important, the Illinois Supreme Court concluded that the statute applied only to objects "physically connected" to the plate, an interpretation that excludes the trailer hitch.

Interpreting the statute as prosecutors and police wished "would have the effect of rendering a substantial amount of otherwise lawful conduct illegal in Illinois," the court wrote. Attached carriers for wheelchairs and scooters? Illegal. Rental trailers? Illegal. Bicycle racks? Illegal. "[E]ven a public bus equipped with a bicycle rack on its front would be unlawful under the State's reading," the court said. But in the end, the determination that police had misread the law did Gaytan no good. The court decided the police's mistake was reasonable, and, citing Heien, refused to throw out the drugs seized in the stop.

The basis for the stop: Bicycle on sidewalk
The eventual charge : Under the influence of a controlled substance
The case: People v. Felipe Campuzano, decided June 5, 2015, by the San Diego County Superior Court, Appellate Division

When a couple of San Diego police officers stopped Felipe Campuzano, he was straddling a bicycle on a sidewalk, "operating it at a 'very slow, walking speed' alongside of a female companion who was walking," a court would later write. The basis for the stop—which yielded a charge of being under the influence of a controlled substance—was a municipal code that prohibits riding a bike on a sidewalk "fronting any commercial business." The law's purpose is to protect people from being hit by a bicyclist upon walking into or leaving a store. But in this case, there was no store, at least none with people. There was only a former auto-repair shop, now shuttered, surrounded by a weed-choked chain-link fence.

In November 2014, an appellate court in San Diego County ruled that police made a mistake of law, so the evidence gathered during the stop should be tossed. But one month later, the US Supreme Court handed down Heien—prompting the appellate court to reconsider. The second time around, the appellate court ruled that the evidence against Campuzano could be used, because the police's mistake was reasonable. "We do not, and cannot, expect our police officers to be legal scholars," the court wrote.

The Indiana Court of Appeals went down the same road. Before Heien, it reversed a marijuana conviction because police misread the law on taillights when stopping the defendant; after Heien, the court reconsidered and reinstated the conviction.

The basis for the stop: Entering intersection on yellow light
The eventual charges : Possession of methamphetamine; possession of a controlled substance without a tax stamp; possession of drug paraphernalia
The case : State of Kansas v. Robert Alan Wilson, decided Jan. 16, 2015, by the Court of Appeals of Kansas

Here's a textbook example of a pretextual stop. At about 11 PM, a Kansas City police officer saw a Chevrolet Malibu leave a "known narcotics house." So the officer followed. He kept his tail until he saw the Malibu enter an intersection on a yellow light. "The vehicle was pretty much 50/50 on that white line" when the yellow light turned to red, the officer would later testify—and for the officer, 50/50 was good enough. He pulled the car over. After "evidently" getting the driver's consent to search ("evidently" is the Court of Appeals' word), the officer found a small glass pipe and a baggie of meth.

"We agree that simply entering an intersection on a yellow light is not—in and of itself—a legitimate basis for a traffic stop," the state Court of Appeals wrote in January. But the court noted that the officer believed the Malibu's driver could have stopped in time if he had wanted to. So even if the officer was mistaken about the law, his mistake was reasonable.

Since Heien, some courts have found mistakes of law by police to be so obvious as to be objectively unreasonable. That happened in Iowa, where police proved ignorant of the law on open alcohol containers. That happened in New Jersey, where police proved ignorant of the law on high beams.

But now police and prosecutors everywhere have a new argument to make, no matter the nature of their screw-up. In many cases, courts were already excusing mistakes of fact. In June, an appeals court in Minnesota excused a sheriff's deputy who said a driver didn't signal a lane change, when, the deputy's dash-cam showed, the driver did. That same month, an appeals court in Wisconsin excused a sheriff's deputy who stopped what he thought was a Pontiac Sunfire because the plates were registered to a Chevrolet Cavalier; it turned out, the car he pulled over was a Cavalier.

The argument for pretext stops is that they allow police to protect communities by being proactive instead of reactive. Take, for example, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. His arrest traced to a traffic stop over a missing license tag. Still, some legal commentators worry about the Heien decision's impact. Because investigatory traffic stops disproportionately target racial minorities, one writes that Heien "will very likely add to the growing tension between minorities and law enforcement." Another sees a "dangerous double standard," with those arrested expected to know the law—while those arresting, not so much.

This article was originally published by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow the Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

All screenshots via YouTube

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Let us dive into the glassy lake that is this video, this video that went viral over the weekend of a man losing his shit with a cyclist to the point where he chases after him, tries to kick his back tire and falls over, breaking his fingers and his face, exhibiting a rage so pure and intense that it becomes almost beautiful, a rage so ever-burning and infinite that the person in the passenger seat doesn't even blink at it, they are so used to it, they don't even say a thing.

Here's a viral video called "A clown takes a pratfall":

It is two minutes and 52 seconds into this video that possibly my favorite thing in the world happens, and that is the sentence "put your FUCKING MOUTH SHUT" being uttered. Unpackage: Peugeot Dad is angry for that classic angry dad reason: cyclists don't pay road tax, and by extension "do not obey the rules of the road." And then the cyclist notices he is not wearing his seatbelt, therefore also flouting the rules of the road, and tells him "put your seatbelt on." And then in his rage Peugeot Dad shouts "put your FUCKING MOUTH SHUT."

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This is the perfect sentence. This is the perfect sentence. In the wider theory of phonoaesthetics, it's generally considered that the English compound noun "cellar door" is the perfect combination of syllables and vowel sounds, the perfect phrase to glide and dance along the tongue. With respect: bollocks and bullshit. Replace the Wikipedia article for one about "put your FUCKING MOUTH SHUT," for it is perfection; a sentence so angry it has a distinct U-turn in it, between the "fucking" and the "mouth shut." The pause in this sentence kills me, renders me mute. "Put your..." he starts, echoing the instruction already issued to him, and then he pauses, realizing he hasn't got anything that the word "put" can apply to, and so swears, stalling for time—"FUCKING", his tone escalating—all the while tugging ungently on a sticky seatbelt, and then he realizes the nub of the sentence, the point of it: to ask the cyclist if he would mind being quiet—and then the words all come to him at once, in grunts and chirps, until he is bellowing the most simple building blocks of the instruction that he can manage—"MOUTH SHUT!" before driving half a yard and then braking. God that sentence is perfect. Carve it on my arm in Cyrillic text. Laser etch it into my gravestone when I die.

The pure, clear beauty of full tempo Dad-rage. Because that's what this is: a dad losing his shit in real time. The cyclist comes up behind him and says, "too close mate, waaaay too fucking close," and Peugeot Dad is already on full beam, bellowing-until-he-spits anger. He went to 100 without even getting near 0. He started at 0 the day he was born, and has been idling at 100 ever since. "OI," he says. "HOW FUCKING BIG IS THAT BICYCLE?" No back and forth, no "Oh, was I?", just full on rage. I love that. Imagine driving around, constantly, a bubbling pot of fury. In a Peugeot. And notice again that the person in the passenger seat says nothing. They are used to this. This is an ordinary amount of rage for him to have. He is the angriest man alive.

But the meat of this video is in the fall, a graceful and perfect moment of karma that transcends "hilarious" and becomes "basically art" when viewed in slow-motion.

It's the kick that is Peugeot Dad's undoing, the kick at 3:25, when he realizes his simple human body cannot compete pace-wise with a bicycle, and in one moment of sheer anger-induced desperation he tries to kick the back tire out, but then his stride is off, and his landing foot immediately wobbles, and then—

— and then he fucks the landing, and he knows instantly that he is going, veering off toward the left, propelled by his own weak kicking foot, the kicking foot Judas to his Jesus, the kicking foot betraying him when he needed it most—

—and he's going, still, and he knows it, his velocity somehow shaking his own glasses off his face—

—and then here, the moment of truth, the perfect swan dive, both feet off the ground now, arms extended to the inevitable impact of the ground beneath him, the gray concrete swimming up to say hello, and a clear, glass-like moment of calm; his face soft and accepting, his body ready for a fate his angry mind has dealt it, knowing now that the pain will come, a pain deep not only in his fingers and face but also in his ego, dented like a Peugeot hood after a low-speed impact with a cyclist. This is a moment that stretches for infinity. It is a moment of high beauty and art. Has 2015 rendered a moment more perfect than this? It has not. This moment should be blown-up large and put in a museum for the ages. You should have to pay a $15 entry fee and line up for hours just to see this moment. Security guards should stand on either side of this moment with walkie talkies. Sophisticated thieves should be trying to steal this moment through a prison of lasers. Forgers should be trying to render it anew on the cheap. This is our Mona Lisa.

Man on Pavement, 2015

Man Curiously Propelling Ass Into Air From a Sideways Landing Position And Despairing, 2015

Oof!, 2015

The YouTube comments on this—and much of the discussion in general, really, since it went viral—are focused on deciding who is right and who is wrong, breaking this road rage incident down into a simple good vs. evil, bikes vs. cars campaign.

But to focus on that is to take away from the true heart of this video, and that is that it is the most beautiful thing any recent generation has ever produced. Cars and bikes will be lost to the sands of time, but Peugeot Dad will endure. We will all live and we will all die, but Peugeot Dad faceplanting on the pavement thanks to his own petty rage will live forever.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

All photographs via the ESL Facebook page

Like many child stars, eSports is having an awkward adolescence. It's not quite straddling a wrecking ball and dry humping a middle-aged man at an awards show, but it could definitely do with a stint in rehab.

Despite having more money than it knows what to do with, the scene has a bit of a credibility problem. While it's drawing a crowd, if it wants to be taken seriously it's got to deal with issues like match-fixing scandals, sexism, and perhaps most importantly the ever-present rumors of doping.

Doping, for those who prefer their drug use to be strictly recreational, is "administering drugs to in order to inhibit or enhance sporting performance." Usually it's reserved for greyhounds, race horses, and traditional athletes, but for years now there's been many claims that professional gamers have been self-administering drugs to enhance their concentration for matches.

The industry hasn't been around long enough to see the impact of doping if these rumors are true. The problem is if we see a lack of trust in games as a competitive sport, we could see all players doping just to try and maintain a competitive edge—or, at least, that would be the public perception. Big money tournaments like Dota 2's the International (with a prize pool of almost $18 million at the time of writing) would be hounded by the accusations. The fallout from similar scandals in professional cycling still hasn't blown over, and if an eSports pro suddenly went full Lance Armstrong, we might see the death of the fledgling industry.

None of the eSport bodies have taken any actions toward the persistent rumors, until now. Recently, eSports organization ESL has announced it'll be introducing random drug tests in August and English outfit Gfinity spoke up to say it'll be following suit.

My initial reaction to eSports doping is: So what? Teenagers have been taking pills to excel in social situations for decades. Why shouldn't they dose up on Ritalin or Adderall to concentrate better at video games?

Related: Watch VICE's documentary on the world of eSports

It's all about image: eSports is striving towards mainstream visibility, but if it becomes tarnished by drug-taking rumors it's going to be hard to bring in and maintain the big corporate sponsors that keep everyone swimming in baths full of money.

This doesn't change my initial reaction, but I'm biased, of course. Teenage LAN parties I attended were littered with cans of Rockstar and first-person-failure. I think if you had offered me a pill that could enable me to whip my friends at video games I'd have taken it, and that's before considering getting my hands on a multi-million dollar prize for doing so.

So why ban performance-enhancing drugs? I thought I'd start by asking a doctor. Engaging dad mode for a minute, taking prescription drugs you haven't been prescribed is A Bad Idea—and if eSports dominance were really as easy as dropping a few Adderall and storming to a lucrative victory, we'd all be doing it. What could go wrong?

An ESL tournament stage

Ritalin and Adderall have long been the drugs of choice for those trying to gain a competitive edge in mental challenges like studying, exams, or in this case competitive video games. Ritalin is primarily used to treat ADHD, and on occasion narcolepsy. The doctor I speak to, who asks to remain anonymous, outlines precisely what could go wrong.

"In a healthy patient, [Ritalin use] will cause a flood of neurotransmitters which over-activates the system and can cause hyper attentiveness. What's actually happening is Ritalin is inducing a constant state of 'fight or flight' in the human body when taken. The strain this has on a healthy body should not be overlooked. Especially when taken chronically, in the long term."

Long-term effects of taking Ritalin read like a who's who of medical bad news: insomnia, anxiety, restlessness, hypertension (increase in blood pressure), and mild tachycardia (increase in heart rate) could all be on the cards for habitual users.

An overdose isn't going to do you much good, either: vomiting, muscle twitching, or even a coma could await if you take too much, and this is something that's easier done than you might think, factoring in that many of these drugs are acquired illegally and can have different formulas from country to country. Consider the young average age of eSports athletes—late teens to early 20s—and the prize money available at the biggest competitions and it's not hard to see why pressure to perform could lead people to take performance enhancers, despite the risks.

Stating the obvious, perhaps, but we are in no way saying that these players are on drugs. Just so we're clear.

Alex Tutty is an associate with the law firm Sheridans, and represents a variety of games and eSports companies. "The entities running the tournaments need these people to compete in their events, so making sure there's a level playing field would seem very sensible for them," he says. "It is also important that they take steps so that no one's going to get hurt because in order to gain a competitive advantage they take drugs that they probably shouldn't be taking."

Tutty is well placed to talk about the trouble eSports governing bodies might have bringing about a code of conduct that's fair: "Putting rules in place is potentially quite difficult, because whenever you put a rule in place—which is something lawyers love to do—you put together a framework and then some people will try and work out how to get around it. So you need to future-proof things as much as possible. But, eSports is in an enviable position in that there are so many other sports it can look to, and codes of conduct, and those governing bodies that they can say, 'What are your policies and how do you implement and enforce them?' By looking at other solutions they can pick out the best and most effective bits and learn from other's mistakes in this area. One example would be the WADA limits on certain prescribed drugs, the use of therapeutic use exemptions, and then the list of banned substances. eSports can use these examples to help create its own codes."

One thing to bear in mind is that it's important to be reactive with rules. "If something else comes onto the scene, someone will always go, 'Oh, actually, this drug's not banned. Let's start taking this one,'" Alex says, "and at that point in time you need to be reactive to that and say, 'Right, this one is banned, now.'"

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A code of conduct should go a long way towards lending eSports the legitimacy it's so eagerly searching for. Chris Higgins, editor of MCV's competitive gaming supplement, eSports Pro, thinks that this is a turning point.

"There have been a number of times in the past few years that the subject of performance-enhancing drugs has come up in eSports," he tells me. "Most of them have been as sort of phantom rumors and hearsay, but a few have been more credible—though still anonymous—whistleblower sources. But until now a lot of them have been brushed aside or not acted upon. The fact that ESL, one of the biggest tournament organizers for top-tier play, has reacted to another fairly unsubstantiated claim is notable.

"Them acting to prevent the use of PEDs (performance-enhancing drugs) shows that the industry has reached a point where it wants to shake off the specter of unsportsmanlike or unfair play, and involving a global authority on the matter cements the approach. There's a possibility others will want to follow suit to ensure that they aren't seen as allowing the cheats to prosper in their own ranks."

While eSports professionals messing about with drugs could be causing themselves hassle further down the line, the real reason to step in and mandate what you can and can't take is to present a squeaky clean image that sponsors can buy into. This testing is a public proclamation of eSports protecting its future.

It's too early to make a call on whether or not these drug testing measures will be the first steps towards a more comprehensive code of conduct and full testing or not, but it issues a strong message: eSports is growing up and has no place for performance-enhancing drugs.

Thanks to Alex Tutty and Chris Higgins for their contributions.

Follow Jake Tucker on Twitter.

All photos courtesy of Degrassi

The Degrassi franchise has been painting an indelible, can't-miss portrait of the middle, junior, and high school experience for more than 35 years and 300 episodes. This writer wasn't even born when the original show aired, but I was shown Degrassi Junior High in middle school and was immediately hooked into the show's particular brand that mixed sincere storytelling, kids who talk to each other like actual kids, cutesy synth music, general lo-fi aesthetic, and crazy plotlines like the one where a student jumped off a bridge on acid. More than anything, watching Degrassi is like looking into a real, living school that felt like people actually went to and hung out at.

"It goes there," was the advertising mantra for the post-9/11 iteration of the show, entitled Degrassi: The Next Generation . And it did. At the time, the show tackled issues—perhaps sometimes a bit absurdly—with an honesty rarely seen on teen shows. There were cyberstalkers, "MyFriend" pages, kids experimenting with weed, and school shootings (if you'll recall, Drake got his start playing Jimmy, the jock who became paraplegic following him getting shot by the bullying victim Rick). More recently, the show featured a Peabody Award-winning storyline about a trans student who must deal with pushback from a deadly, knife-wielding bully. The show also engaged in plenty of interesting, morally-ambiguous storytelling that never force-fed the viewers clear cut answers or endings to plotlines. While this is fairly commonplace in the world of prestige TV, it was pretty radical in a show aimed at high-schoolers.

After 14 seasons, the current era of Degrassi came to an end last week. In January of 2016, the show will have a new class, as well as a new home in Netflix. VICE caught up with Linda Schuyler, one of the creators of the original series and a member of the Order of Canada for gifting the show to Canadian society. We also spoke to her husband, Stephen Stohn, who was a lawyer for the original show and executive producer on Degrassi: Junior High.

VICE: What's up?
Stephen Stohn: The coolest thing just happened. I heard some screaming in the corridor. Some girls had talked their way in. They were rabid fans. From Ohio, Connecticut, and Michigan. We took pictures and one of the girls shyly pulled up her pants leg and it had the lyrics, "Whatever it takes" tattooed on her leg.

Can you just talk a little about the transition to Netflix? How is the show changing?
Linda Schuyler: We're in production and busy editing. When we came back this year, we would have been in season 15 of Degrassi. Without knowing anything about [Netflix or Teen Nick] creatively, the writers and I decided to take a hard look at the show. We've been on the air for 14 seasons which is something to be tremendously grateful for. We're very thrilled that we've had 14 years with Teen Nick and CTV in Canada. We realized that the kids we're talking to today are a new generation from the kids we talked to in 2001 when we came out with Degrassi: The Next Generation. Then, we were very much talking to millennials. There's a new generation, Generation Z, who weren't even born when we started that show. That was a very sobering fact...We've done a lot of research into Generation Z and decided we need a reboot.

Is there going to be some change to the flow of the show as it is coming out on Netflix?
Linda: There is going to be some change to how the narrative of the show unfolds. There will be two chapters of ten episodes each. Each chapter has its own thematic storyline. As we tell each story, there are some stories that compete with each other and then bits and pieces flow through. We actually don't have a roll out plan from Netflix yet but we are aware that our audience could be binge watching. We're trying to make an experience that will be satisfying on a weekly basis. But if you watch it at once it's a very juicy form of creative storytelling.

What are some things that are going to be different with the new generation
Linda: The millennials had an attitude that the world owes them something and that they're entitled. Generation Z is a very interesting bunch. If you look back and watch Degrassi in 2001... we all know what happened on 9/11. So this generation [of millennials] has grown up with a world that's known terror, they've seen recession, they've seen their parents struggle with money so they should be in despair. Interestingly, they collectively feel that we've made a mess of the world and it's they're going to be the ones to save it. So there is a great energy and hope with this generation. So it's quite fascinating...and social media is such a big part of their lives and how they communicate and trying to figure out how much information to put out there and what the dating protocols are. Degrassi's always been about relationship formation and who's cheating on who and when you're ready to have sex, and now the way to communicate is very complicated with this social media and we try to reflect all that.

Stephen: The centennials are going to save us all. As children of the 60's, we thought we were going to save the world. We thought our parents were part of these institutions that messed everything up. ISIS is still there, polarization of America is still there, school violence is still there... But generation Z, having grown up with their first memories of always having been Post-9/11 and having economic troubles and some sort of device in their hands... they're different. You might expect that they might run away and become dissolute. But their reaction is to say, "Yeah it'd be nice to be a movie star or a rock guitarist or ballerina," but when the rubber hits road they really want to be a doctor or a nurse or work with the United Nations and just try and make the world a better place. I am so looking forward to telling stories of this generation.

You talk about the post-9/11 years. I'm curious if was there a conscious decision to make the characters on Degrassi: The Next Generation a little more harsh and cruel to each other than in the original series? They're very mean to each other and there's a lot of blackmailing and backstabbing.
Linda: I'd say the second set of seven years tended to go in that direction. What I'm finding now as we're developing the Next Class: There's a little more kindness, a little more caring perhaps. They're a bit more hopeful.
Stephen: One key difference between Degrassi Classic and current Degrassi is how slow the pace is. With the current writers there is an imperative to make every moment as interesting as possible. There can still be breathing space. But when the breathing space is there, it's there to make a point. There's either some underlying tension or underlying thought. Usually we'll put music under it to reinforce that. But that means there's much more storyline in each episode. Which means people are constantly talking to each other and relating to each other.

I wonder if what you're talking about is how there isn't that easy camaraderie and people are reacting more to the point... As we sort of progress through characters, if the new characters come in and they're just nice and easy going so there's not that much drama. So the new characters will be abrasive. They'll be queen bees or they'll be pushing away. Or they're really sarcastic. What they're doing in all of that is trying to find their way into the school and into their friends, so they may be seen as unlikable.

Degrassi was always interesting in how many episodes and story arcs might end on a depressing down note or an inconclusive one, where we're not really sure the right decision was made. Is that something that was also intentional? Linda: I see high school kids as having one foot in childhood and one foot in adulthood. Trying to figure out who you are as you're growing up has given me years of storytelling... I feel like it's our job as producers to present all sides of the argument. Then the audience can make their own decisions. Ultimately that's what kids need growing up: the tools to make their own decisions without being be told what to do.

What should someone's goal in high school be? Go to college? Become an artist? Just get through it?
Linda: I see it as an opportunity to expand your horizons. One of the fundamental principles of our show is the acceptance of individual differences. Whether that's sexual differences, physical differences, economic differences... When kids come out of middle school, they're not exposed to much beyond their parents' own values. I think we were one of the first shows to have a transgender character as a main character. Especially kids from small communities don't get exposed to this level of diversity. One of the things I love people to get out of our show is an acceptance of diversity. Whether they get a job out of high school or go to university, we want people to feel that they don't need to be afraid of strangers and can accept individual differences, and also that they are not alone.

Do you feel that high school is generally a positive or negative experience? Linda: At Degrassi? Nooooo. We tackle some issues but that's not necessarily negative. If kids talk about it in the schoolyard or at sleepovers we need to talk about it on our show. We try very hard to be authentic. We're not trying to sensationalize them. At the same time we're not trying to penalize or minimize them either. Because these are real issues. We also have lovely stories about two girls arriving to prom in the same dress or a girl showing off a keychain to her friends and not realizing it's a sexual vibrator or about penis pumps and how they work. Really fun stories.

Related: For more teens, watch our documentary on teenage exorcists

Do you believe the old adage that what we go through in high school determines our personalities for the rest of our lives?
Linda: There's a comment I heard that's, "Show me the boy at seven and I will show you the man." That actually inspired the whole British documentary series called Seven Up that follows kids from seven for every seven years of their life. And then you look at our show and it's in groups of seven years. So I think there's something to that. On one hand, you don't like to think your life is preordained or predetermined but there are some truisms of your personality that are consistent over the years.

In the original series, characters insulted each other with the word "Broomhead." Where did that come from?
Linda: That was just a silly name because we wanted a derogatory name to use on the show. So we went through the phone book to try to find a name we could use and we found Broomhead.

So that was the person's last name?
Linda: [laughs] It was a person's last name.

How unfortunate. And who wrote the music for the Zit Remedy?
Linda: Our friends who wrote the music had a nephew in eighth grade. So they said to him, "Could you write us a song?" So it was written by an eighth grader. I can't believe how many people know that crazy song.

In this climate, is it still viable to try to send messages to kids in by using a TV show? Are kids necessarily still looking at you for advice?
Linda: Well, I think you just stumbled on why we are so thrilled at being on Netflix. We are where the kids are. Traditional broadcasters have trouble with this demographics. With us partnering with Netflix worldwide, we can reach kids wherever they are and not on some schedule. It's so exciting and so refreshing.
Stephen: Back in the day, when there was no internet and very few shows aimed at teenagers. Degrassi was genuinely a place for education. These days, kids have access to everything. So our mission now is, can we become the authentic voice of generation Z? That's like one of those mission statements you see on the wall of a McDonald's. To do that, we need to think about what it is we mean by making an impact or engagement. You have to tell stories about the audience but you also have to be reaching out to the audience. We're going to be a bunch of online productions this year in addition to the main show, where we have an issue like race or butts or catfishing, and we have the actor puts something up about it on YouTube, and then the audience responds with their experience, and of course the hidden agenda of this is that the audience becomes involved the more story ideas we get.

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Some of the author's still-boxed amiibos

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A few months ago, I found myself staring warily at Nintendo's online catalogue of amiibo figures. I'm a massive fan of the Star Fox and Fire Emblem series, so naturally my cursor was hovering over the Fox and Ike figurines. They looked great. Ike with his long red cloak and powerful stance. Fox and his big bushy tail and smarmy grin. I remember dragging them to the basket and yanking them back out at least a couple of times, cursing myself for even considering such a vain and stupid purchase. These figures are largely pointless, Jon. It's a waste of what little money you already have. But I gave in, bumbled my address and payment information into the fields, and pressed the yes please send me these stupid infantile figures before I have the opportunity to change my mind button, and a couple of days a later a bloke from Yodel waddled them onto my porch.

It was a decision that would go on to cost me nearly £400 [$620].

More of the author's collection

In front of me, right now, lined up along the wall in sealed plastic boxes, staring at me with mocking and cruel indifference, there are 22 new five-inch friends for Ike and Fox. In total, I've bought 33 amiibos from the Smash Bros set, the Splatoon kids (all of them), and even a couple of the so-cute-they-should-be-illegal yarn Yoshis.

I keep them in their boxes and they hate me. King Dedede leers at me with his gormless, shit-eating grin. From the confines of his plastic prison, Little Mac silently threatens to knock me out for being such a useless, frivolous man-child. The Animal Crossing Villager's gammy mug begs me to rip him from his casing and lob him forcefully into the house spider-infested bin area outside the flats. All of these figures are mine, they all despise me, and I hate them back with equal if not greater ferocity.

Of course, amiibo figures weren't designed to just sit in their boxes. I just like mine that way. You're meant to tear them out and use them as tap-to-access DLC vehicles. The gaming content offered by amiibo figures is flimsy at worst and interesting at best, ranging from new skins for your Mario Kart characters to exclusive challenges in Splatoon. The DLC on offer isn't exactly mind-blowing, but in spite of this, amiibo figures have taken the world and its wallet by the scruff of the neck and down into that alley you avoid on the way home from work for a damn good seeing to.

Why? And how did I get myself into this mess? There are two pertinent reasons.

The first is that amiibo figures look absolutely great. You can't deny it. Each one bursts with detail, and you can feel the love and attention that's gone into all of them. The blue chrome sheen of Zero Suit Samus. Shulk's Monado, the wooden rear of Toon Link's shield, and Olimar's transparent helmet. Kid Icarus's Palutena, arguably one the most lovingly crafted amiibo yet, shimmers with a jaw-dropping green-gold majesty. They're stunning.

Another shot provided by the author

On a good day, just looking at them can cause waves of euphoria to surge through my brain. On the shelf, they're a kaleidoscope of colors, Ike reds against sumptuous Meta Knight purples, all fiery oranges, nauseating pinks, and deep, rich swamp greens. That simple, chirpy little white strip along the bottom. As little pieces of memorabilia from Nintendo's history, they're incredibly well crafted and disgustingly satisfying.

There's a figure for everyone, too. From Nintendo staples like Mario and Peach, right the way through to EarthBound star Ness, Pokémon favorite Jigglypuff and lesser-known RPG characters like Shulk and Fire Emblem's Lucina. With Pac-Man and Mega Man, there's even a third party presence in the roster. It's testament to the exceptional line-up of characters on Smash 4, and the overwhelming, unprecedented, and insane popularity of the figures themselves. Which brings me onto the next reason.

Article continues after the following video

Related: Watch VICE's film, The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

Hype. I'm ashamed to write that I got swept up in it. But I did. It was impossible not to. The forum I frequent has a 60-page thread dedicated to the figures. Members swap hunting anecdotes, unboxing videos, and proud first-day purchase pictures. Neogaf's amiibo community is arguably the most healthily rabid, and boasts a bustling 300-page thread on the subject.

Around the time I started collecting the figures, street demand for amiibo went stratospheric. Popping into the local GAME or HMV would return the same old shower of fossilized, dust-covered Pikachus and Peaches, trying to pre-order the figures on Amazon became a soul crushing game of fastest-fingers-first, and the queue for one-per-person figures at NYC's Nintendo World regularly snakes around the block.

For a time, Little Mac, Shulk, and Rosalina amiibos were like gold dust. Liked EarthBound? Want a little Ness figure? Good fucking luck with that. Want a Robin without paying £40 [$60] for one or stumbling across one in a run-down shop thousands of miles away? Spare me sir, for your fanciful tales of fortune are too much for my ribs to bear.

In an ugly turn of events, a black market economy, and disinterested and greedy community of scalpers emerged, and sites like Amazon and eBay became filled with dot-eyed morons buying up stock to sell on at a profit. Nintendo was forced to publicly apologize for the shortages. Reddit set up an "obtainability chart" to help collectors find their favorites. For the discerning amiibo hunter, it was the best of times and it was the worst of times. And I wandered the crowds and lurked in forums, hopelessly addicted. Finding a rare figure in a shop or securing a sought after pre-order was like a drug, and I smoked, snorted, and swallowed that shit every single day.

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The brooding dark clouds of amiibogeddon have since parted, and our eyes are squeezing at the rays of restock sunlight. In fact, as I write this, you can pick up a healthy amount of the more rare figures for RRP. Prices are coming down on Amazon, and a lot of other independent retailers are following suit as more stock makes its way into the hands of hungry hunters. The bubble has been burst.

So, does Nintendo plan to ease up on amiibo production and concentrate on, oh, I don't know, making some games? If this year's E3 conference was anything to go by, you've got two hopes of that happening. Bob and no.

Nintendo's E3 spent a good deal of time on our little five-inch friends. There was a whole section dedicated to the new partnership between amiibo and Skylanders, and a serious amount of screen time discussing the upcoming Animal Crossing series amiibo line, the adorable yarn Yoshis and September's new wave. These little figures are plugging a gap in Nintendo's revenue stream following the relative consumer indifference towards the Wii U, and if that helps support for the company's next console, it can only be a good thing. Make no mistake: they are here to stay, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.

amiibos on show at E3 2015. Photo via technologytell.com

September's wave is looking great. Duck Hunt, Mr. Game, and Watch, and even R.O.B. the Robot will shortly trundle down the conveyor belt at amiibo HQ. And that retro Mario for Super Mario Maker looks pretty tasty too, doesn't it? Yeah. And who could meaningfully resist a Tom Nook amiibo? Of course you can't. Go on. Google some images of them. They're only £10.99 [$12.99]. You can afford that, right? You've always liked Kirby, too. So? Grab Dedede. Wouldn't you like to touch a woolly Yoshi? Of course you would. Buy one. Buy two. Buy three.

Just don't come crying to me when your girlfriend's threatening to leave you, there's 50 of them staring at you from the walls of your lonely little flat and you're eating beans out of a shoe.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter.

Andrew with decellularized bacon art. Photos by the author

"Biohackers approach science as a hacker approaches computers, looking at problems and experiments in ways that might elude conventional scientists," explains a guy in a blue jumper named Andrew Gray. He's the man behind the aptly named Melbourne biohacking group, Melbourne BIOhack, and president of Bioquisitive, a community lab and workspace.

Biohacking started in the US, but now there are groups in places as diverse as Germany and Indonesia. While these places are all working on different pursuits, the idea is the same: to get science out of universities and into the hands of anybody interested. That, in turn, fosters innovation and scientific advancement.

Priming the bacon

Melbourne's only biohacking group is based in a Brunswick warehouse. When I walk in, a group of five are injecting slices of decellularized bacon with dye, and making colorful prints on pieces of paper. The bacon has been put through a process to strip out its cells, leaving only the extracellular matrix, which is the scaffolding on which cells form. The end product looks like a cross-section of jellyfish.

Born in California but with family in Tasmania, Andrew joined the US Army and was deployed to Afghanistan where he studied biology through an online course. "I'd never studied biology before," he tells me. "It blew my mind." What he didn't expect however, was how it would affect the value he placed on life. "Learning how complicated and similar we all are made me not want to be in the military anymore. I wanted to get the hell out."

After being discharged from the army he arrived in Melbourne to find the city was without biohackers. Australia's only group was in Sydney, called Biofoundry. So with help from the Sydney hackers, Andrew assembled a makeshift laboratory from various bits of second-hand equipment, including two PCR machines—used to amplify DNA—which he calls Angel and Rudy. "There's one good thing about donated equipment," he says, grinning. "It comes with a little bit of character."

It's cool, but it's way slow

With this lab, the group is planning to map the microcosm of bacteria in Melbourne's public transport system. This, they hope, will reveal what bacteria is out there, and allow them to observe how it moves through the network. It will also look at the city's public transport system as a living being—a system through which people and bacteria move.

The concept is based on a similar project completed at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York last year, which found bubonic plague and antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the subway. The big difference between the two studies will be how they're presented. While New York's was somewhat dry, Andrew insists his version will be more akin to an art display.

The project is also being carried out with the Sydney biohackers, who will make a similar map of Sydney's transport system. But before the Melbourne team can begin, their warehouse needs to be air-tight to withhold experimental organisms.

In the meantime, the biohackers are working on short turn-around projects. As I left, they'd moved from painting with translucent bacon, to tearing apart webcams, and drilling holes in bits of plastic. Apparently they were about to make miniature microscopes to look at mold someone had been growing at home.

"When you think of a hacker, you think of someone doing malicious stuff, but hackers are actually the people doing the innovating," Andrew tells me. As I look around his lab, I have to agree. It's very innovative.

Follow Ian on Twitter.

Read more comics by Lauren Monger at her Tumblr and Twitter.

Andrew Quitmeyer isn't your average dildo designer. A PhD candidate in digital media at Georia Tech, Quitmeyer's research usually has nothing to do with sex. But he's long been fascinated by the overlap between computer technology and human behavior, and lately he's taken his interests to an intimate new level with his work on the Mod—an "open source" vibrator that can be synced up to smartphone apps, remote controls, and even a user's heart rate.

The Mod is the flagship product of Comingle, an Atlanta company Quitmeyer runs with three other tech-savvy designers. The firm is among a number of startups that have entered the burgeoning field of "teledildonics"—sex toys connected to computers, that could open up new possibilities for what people can do with their private parts.

"You can program it to be anything," said Quitmeyer, referring to the Mod's operating system, a hacker-friendly platform dubbed the Dilduino. "It's like the difference between television and a computer."

Comingle raised nearly $60,000 in an Indiegogo campaign earlier this year, and the company is now filling out preorders and hammering out manufacturing details for the first batch of Mods. But before Quitmeyer and his partners get to see their beloved dildos in the hands of customers, they have to first get past TZU Technologies, LLC, a mysterious Southern California firm that recently filed a lawsuit against Comingle and six other companies—arguing that they're all infringing on an obscure US patent TZU owns, which stakes an expansive claim on teledildonics technology.

On Motherboard: The Increasingly Intelligent Sex Toy

The lawsuit, filed in late July in US District Court in Central California, marks the beginning of what could be a drawn-out legal war that could shape the direction of the computerized sex toy market. The debate centers on questions about the validity of TZU's patent, and concerns that the TZU claim could lock future teledildonic innovation in a death grip of legal fees and court-ordered payouts.

"Our bank account is rapidly approaching zero, and it was never that high to begin with," Quitmeyer said, noting that the company has already put most of its money on designing the Mod. "All these great people who helped us and supported us in the crowdfunding thing on Indiegogo—basically there's a billionaire in Texas who's trying to take their dildos away from them. 'Nope, sorry! You can't have these!'"

The Mod. Photo courtesy of Comingle

In the world of sex toys, teledildonics have gotten a lot of buzz. Some of the products look bizarre and intimidating, and the technology itself is a ways off from promising human-to-human levels of ecstasy. But products like the Mod signal a new wave in toy design. Shaped like a giant, smooth finger, Comingle's made out of body safe silicone, outfitted with three vibrating motors, and comes with a USB-rechargeable battery—a popular feature of today's swankier vibrators.

But depending on how the courts decide, the Mod's hacker-friendly components may run afoul of US Patent No. 6,368,268. The patent was originally filed in 1998 by three inventors, including one Warren J. Sandvick, president of a Texas company called Hassex, LLC. Hassex doesn't appear to actually make sex toys—it doesn't appear to do anything, really, except own this patent. The patent itself vaguely describes an "interactive virtual sexual stimulation system" that features "one or more user interfaces," any one of which can be a video camera, a transmitter, or an "input device."

As blogger and engineer Kyle Machulis originally reported on his Metafetish blog when he broke the story, the TZU lawsuit takes aim at seven companies. The list includes makers of legitimate teledildonics toys—like Winzz and Vibease, a "wearable smart vibrator." But it also includes Kickstarter and a company called Holland Haptics, which makes an innocent-looking haptic device that's marketed as something parents can use to hold their children's hands over an internet connection.

Related: VICE investigates the digital love industry.

Since news of the lawsuit broke late last month, tech bloggers have dismissed Hassex and TZU Technologies as "patent trolls"—shell companies whose sole purpose is to extract payment from actual businesses by exploiting US patent law. Daniel Cotman, an attorney representing TZU in the case, sees things differently. In an email to VICE, Cotman said TZU is a "joint effort" with Sandvick, launched to protect the Texas patent-man's intellectual property rights. Cotman added that TZU now owns the patent and has plans to utilize it—presumably by developing a sex toy—although the company isn't ready to announce anything yet.

As for the "patent troll" accusations, Cotman retorted that alleged patent infringers like Comingle are the real villains here. He called them "patent ogres."

"People like to throw the term 'patent troll' around without a lot of thought rather than recognizing that this naming calling [sic] is intended to distract from the fact that a patent owner has a legitimate property interest," Cotman wrote. "Before a patent is issued the application undergoes a thorough and rather expensive examination process at the Patent Office. Once issued, a patent is a real property right just like land or a house. In the same way that you can stop a total stranger from sleeping in your living room or from building a structure on your front lawn, a patent owner can stop folks from trespassing on its patented technology."

Whether TZU is trollish or legit, the question remains whether the patent is bullshit, at least in the eyes of the law. Steve Korniczky, a patent litigator from the Sheppard Mullin law firm in San Diego, said that when these cases go to court, defendants typically argue against a patent's validity by examining its language. If the "claim" of the invention covers something that already existed prior to the existence of the patent—a term known as "prior art"—then the patent would be deemed invalid.

"They might be saying, 'Well, you infringe.' But if they're covering something that existed before 1998, for example, then they weren't first," Korniczky said.

It's possible that legitimate prior art does exist for TZU's teledildonics patent. The concept behind teledildonics dates back to the mid-1970s, and as early as 1993, newspapers were reporting on computer-aided sex. Primitive teledildonics systems also came out in the 1990s. In researching prior art, Quitmeyer found a couple videos from the early 90s that show a virtual system devised in Europe that let people engage in S&M sex using dial-up connections and kinky looking "stimulator suits."

CyberSM, featuring one of the earliest virtual reality sex get-ups in 1993.

Already, at least one legal expert has publicly balked at the broadness of the teledildonics patent. In a post last week, Vera Ranieri of the Electronic Frontier Foundation designated it the "Stupid Patent of the Month," pointing out that some of the language is so far-reaching that it could be talking about radio broadcast systems.

Yet even if the patent seems ridiculous, fighting it in court might prove to be a Sisyphean task. In 2013, total fees for defendants in patent cases brought by non-practicing entities—owners of the patent who, like TZU, aren't actively using the patent, or "trolls"—ranged anywhere from $820,000 to $4.4 million, according to a survey from the American Intellectual Property Law Association.

It might be easier for the teledildonics firms to simply settle—"patent trolls," said Korniczky, are often simply looking for a payout, and end up settling for a fraction of what the amount they initially sought in damages.

More on innovative sex technology: 3D-printed sex toys, remote-control operated sex toys, and a robot that makes virtual sex feel real.

Before the TZU lawsuit was filed, a handful of sex toy companies had already gotten licensed to use the teledildonics patent, including OhMiBod and Kiiroo. Troy Peterson, founder of VStroker, told VICE that his company pays an annual fee to license the patent.

But Quitmeyer, a champion of open source technology and DIY principles, feels these kinds of fees present an unfair hurdle for designers, hampering the disruptive quest to find new ways of stimulating the erogenous zones.

"Sex tech needs to be opened up," he said. "People's sexuality is super specific and weird. I don't want people to have general sex. I want them to have the weird, specific, crazy, kinky dragon sex of their dreams."

"More than anything, I want to fight this thing and shut it down, and just let it show people how ridiculous patent trolling can be," he added. "Now, whether that makes sense for our incredibly tiny business, I have no idea."

Follow Peter Holslin on Twitter.

More on David Foster Wallace:

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The posthumous David Foster Wallace industry churns on: In the eight years since his death, various publishing interests have seen fit to release an unfinished novel, an essay collection, a commencement speech, his collected recordings, and his honors thesis. And that's not even including the volumes about Wallace, which have proliferated to the point where one has gotten a film adaptation:The End of the Tour, which is directed by James Ponsoldt and stars Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel as David Lipsky and Wallace. The film is based heavily on Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up Being Yourself, an annotated transcript of interview recordings for his aborted Rolling Stone profile of Wallace—essentially a book-length interview, conducted over several days during the 1996 book tour for Infinite Jest.

Watch an exclusive clip:

The film dices and reshuffles this material into what its screenwriter, Pulitzer-winning playwright Donald Margulies, describes as a "really smart road movie." It's understandable that Wallace admirers would be bearish on any DFW adaptation after 2007's migraine-inflicting Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; it's even more understandable to wince at the prospect of seeing your literary hero played by a sitcom star whose dick we've all seen.

But I'm not alone in my opinion that Jason Segel does an impressive, attentive job of reproducing Wallace's mannerisms without a whiff of ham: the studious insta-lectures; the nonstop head movement; the fleeting sneers, flinches, and half-smiles. And while there's no helping the fact that Segel's deep-set eyes and plump cheeks make him look more like Judge Reinhold than David Foster Wallace, the vocal imitation is note-perfect. Eisenberg, meanwhile, has shed the cold skin of his own Zuckerberg biopic role; as Lipsky his smiles and jokes come easy, though he's still at his best when he's busy doing something furtive and skeezy, like scribbling down the contents of Wallace's medicine cabinet.

So the acting probably won't offend anyone. The more interesting question is about the whole business of putting Wallace onscreen in the first place. In literary biopics (take Capote, Howl, and Hemingway and Gellhorn as recent examples) the bulk of the effort is spent establishing not that the writer is worth reading, but worth watching, and so the quirks and sex are dialed up, and the genius-artist mythos (with all its torments, drugs, beefs, and eureka moments) is a given. What's left offscreen is usually the solitary reading and writing, which is what a writer's life mostly is. For that reason, these films tend to be either untrue or unwatchable, or both.

Even from the movie, it's plain that Wallace was mortally afraid of becoming a posturing fraud, of having control over his image wrested from him and turned into a pompous genius, holy man, or tortured savant.

These difficulties are compounded with a writer like Wallace, who throughout his entire career lampooned and lamented the alienating seductions of self-presentation. (See: "My Appearance," "E Unibus Pluram," "A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life," Infinite Jest, "Good Old Neon," "The Suffering Channel," etc.) Even from the movie, it's plain that Wallace was mortally afraid of becoming a posturing fraud, of having control over his image wrested from him and turned into a pompous genius, holy man, or tortured savant. (This probably accounts for the strenuous objections of his family and literary trust, who expressed the wish "that David be remembered for his extraordinary writing" instead.)

So it is very weird and sometimes unavoidably icky to see him converted into a form of watchable entertainment, played by one bankable celebrity opposite another, especially when his fictional representation says things like, "To have written a book about how seductive image is, how easy it is to get seduced off of any meaningful path—because of the way our culture is now, what if I've become a parody of that very thing?" Still, Margulies is careful to arrange the dialogue to underscore Wallace's anxieties about being observed and X-rayed in the same way he so often did with other people. The film may or may not portray Wallace accurately, but at the very least it addresses Wallace's crises about being portrayed, fitting for such a self-critical and involuted writer. At times it feels as if, with his panoptic foresight, Wallace had anticipated this movie, and chose his words specifically to jolt or undermine its attempt to represent him—"I've written enough of these pieces to know you could write this up a hundred ways," the fictional Wallace says, "90 of which I'm really gonna come off as a monumental asshole."

He doesn't, though—his portrayal is respectful to a fault, and largely avoids canonizing him (though a few shots of him dancing in a Baptist church, or sleeping with sunlight playing across his beatific face, definitely come close). If anything, the film relentlessly pushes the image of lowbrow "regular guy-ness" that Wallace himself claimed he treasured—it omits his critical lectures on John Updike, David Lynch, and Pauline Kael, and instead shows him eating junk food, watching TV, picking up dog shit, and enthusing on Die Hard and Alanis Morissette.

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No matter how flattering or accurate (or otherwise), it's clear Wallace would've preferred to have control. Both in Lipsky's book and Ponsoldt's film, he tirelessly edits and self-edits on the fly, switching off the tape recorder [1] to rehearse his thoughts, specifying what Lipsky can and can't include, humbling himself while subtly heading off any negative spin: "You could make me look like a real dick if you wanted to print this." Unlike the book, the movie is not a raw conversation, where Wallace is on more or less equal footing with Lipsky. Rather, it takes big editorial liberties, reframing the dialogue so that candid, friendly chitchat gets reimagined as tense bickering. A typical example comes from one of Lipsky's unvoiced observations in the book: "You don't crack open a thousand-page book because you heard the author is a regular guy. You do it because he's brilliant, because you want him to be brilliant." The film has Lipsky not only speak this thought aloud, but angrily add, "so who the fuck do you think you're kidding?" Another unnecessary addition has Lipsky flirting with Wallace's ex, causing Wallace to get testy and jealous: " Stay away from her, OK?"

To borrow a DFW pet phrase, these little "French curls" of drama might have made the real Wallace cringe, but anyone who cares enough to have read Infinite Jest, or to watch a biopic of its author, isn't likely to confuse the Hollywood DFW from the real deal. On this score, too, Wallace's words pierce the veil, in a scene where his fictional avatar chides the fictional Lipsky for buying into the temptations of fame: "This is nice, but this is not real."

The End of the Tour is in theaters nationwide.

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[1] That tape recorder is a vital presence in the movie: Not only does it represent Lipsky's agenda as a reporter, but whenever it's running, it functions like cinematic quotation marks, indicating the dialogue as something adapted from the book, if not quite word-for-word.