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VICE Vs Video Games: Is the ‘Madden Curse' Real, or Just Amazing Bad Luck?

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A screenshot from 'Madden NFL 16'

Superstition and sport are tempestuous bedfellows. Simple quirks turn into religious beliefs, from a fan wearing a lucky shirt to a player entering the field, touching the grass, and making the sign of the cross enough times to skip a year of church. However, one sport, American football, has a very real superstition—and it revolves around a video game.

Being a cover star for an EA Sports game can be a professional highlight, showcasing athletes who have performed above and beyond, and won fan adulation from all corners. But none is so prominent, highly regarded and cursed as EA's Madden NFL series. EA used to decide which star from the previous year should grace their game, but recent installments have had their cover stars selected by a public vote, almost like the game's makers are trying to exonerate themselves from any blame.

I say blame because, with two exceptions, the Madden NFL cover curse is a very real thing. Once you have been "awarded" the honor of the slot, the following season will see you lose any of the momentum you had before and lead to a terrible year both on and off the field, through bad form, injury, or even criminal proceedings.

The Madden curse started in 1999 when PAL version cover star Garrison Hearst was sidelined after breaking his ankle. Hearst had a phenomenal 1998, setting franchise records and running one of the league's longest rushing touchdowns against the New York Jets. Sidelined is putting it lightly, as the injury and complications from surgery caused a bone in his foot to die (avascular necrosis), but he became the first ever player to bounce back from such an injury.

For the 2016 edition, released on August 25, fans voted for New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. His rookie year won him multiple plaudits including a Pro Bowl selection and the Associated Press Offensive Rookie of the Year. All of this is incredibly justified after a good season and what might not only be the greatest one-handed catch, but one of the greatest touchdown catches of all time against the Dallas Cowboys. The curse of Madden must be licking its metaphorical lips.

Odell Beckham Jr. on the Xbox One version cover of 'Madden NFL 16'

The second "victim" of the curse was probably a case of bad luck on EA's part more than the player, as in 2000 Barry Sanders not only left the Detroit Lions but also unexpectedly retired from football completely. Not to be put off, EA quickly remade the cover with Green Bay Packers running back Dorsey Levens on its PAL edition, who struggled with injuries and was released a year later from the team.

The curse continued. The star of Madden NFL 2001, Eddie George, fluffed a game-clinching catch that was intercepted and returned by the Baltimore Ravens, ending the Tennessee Titans' season. Madden 2002's Daunte Culpepper suffered a knee injury that affected his career dramatically. That was four for four for the Madden curse, and what had looked like something of an in-joke a few seasons earlier wasn't particularly funny any more.

Article continues after the video below


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For the 2003 Madden cover, Marshall Faulk, one of the NFL's best-ever running backs, had his worst ever season, failing to achieve 1,000 rushing yards in 2002, and three years later a knee injury would retire him.

Then we hit Madden NFL 2004, which put the Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick on the cover. Vick was undoubtedly one of the most complete athletes in the NFL at the time, but shortly after the cover was unveiled he fractured his fibula in a pre-season game and missed the first 11 weeks of the season. Off the field, Vick was arrested, charged, and incarcerated for his part in an illegal interstate dog-fighting ring.

So is this a legitimate curse or just a very unfortunate set of coincidences? Does the Madden NFL series have as much luck going for its cover stars as TV's adaptation of Game of Thrones does Sansa Stark? For EA, of course, this is nothing but business. Meanwhile, Michael Carlson, a sports writer and Channel 4's NFL analyst, likens it to a similar urban legend with Sports Illustrated. "It exists because you've done something at a high level, and they've finally noticed," he says.

Read VICE Sports: Bruce Weber Made an Insane Short Film About Rob Gronkowski

But, in practice, the cover is just a good tool to sell the game—and with Madden NFL 15 missing its retail targets, dropping nearly 40 percent from the previous year, it needs to turn things around. "Odell Beckham Jr. will drive sales in New York where the people and the money is," says Carlson. "No put down of his great rookie year, but he's a reflection of our times. The Madden cover is now the SportsCenter highlight play of the year."

So there's no curse, as business doesn't break people or cause injuries, right? Video games can't actually ruin a professional athlete's career, can they? This is all about the money and nothing to do with the person on the cover. "That doesn't explain the freakish bad luck in either the Madden or Sports Illustrated curses," Michael tells me, and he's right.

There's Ray Lewis for 2005 (wrist), Donovan McNabb for 2006 (ACL) and Shaun Alexander for 2007 (foot fracture). Troy Polamalu for 2010 (MCL and PCL), Peyton Hillis for 2012 (hamstring and strep throat)... The list feels endless.


Peyton Hillis on the cover of 'Madden NFL 2012'

For Madden NFL 08, LaDainian Tomlinson declined the cover for contract reasons, but San Diego fans actually campaigned to keep him off the cover because of the curse. Vince Young and Luis Castillo were chosen and both suffered injuries all season. For 2009, the recently retired Brett Favre was to be the cover star, honoring his long, loyal Green Bay career. Except he then signed with the New York Jets, ditching those retirement plans to pick up an injury and spend the following year being investigated for sexual misconduct. For Madden's 25th anniversary cover in 2014, Adrian Peterson suffered multiple foot injuries and was investigated for alleged child abuse. Although that one probably shouldn't be put down to a curse.

The curse has been dodged, though. Detroit Lions wide receiver Calvin Johnson had a stellar year in 2012, earning his place on the 2013 cover and earning his nickname "Megatron." Madden NFL 11 cover star Drew Brees had a relatively poor season after his appearance, but given that he was also named Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year at the end of 2010, he could have come off a lot worse. Richard Sherman also dodged any lasting effects of the curse last year as he made the Super Bowl.

Look "curse" up in a dictionary and you'll read that it's "a solemn utterance intended to invoke a supernatural power to inflict harm or punishment on someone or something." Which means either one of two things when it comes to the Madden Curse: that there is one very bitter and twisted American football fan somewhere with an excellent command of dark magic who's repented in recent years; or that this is just one unfortunate coincidence that may have finally run its course. At least, that's what Beckham Jr. will be hoping, right about now.

Follow Sean Cleaver on Twitter.


The Blobby Boys & Friends: The Final Blobby Boys Comic

Why You Shouldn't Hold People's Old Embarrassing Internet Bullshit Against Them

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Photo via the Internet

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Since the dawn of time (or, like, the late-1990s), the internet has been the source of a great deal of paranoia, much of it focused on the permanency of anything posted online. Once something is out there, it's out there for good, be it a comment in praise of Newzoids, or an aggressively close-up snap of your scrotum, the web will never forget such equally shameful moments.

Time was, you'd grow out of your "awful person" phase and could get on with your life without fear of the stuff you did when you were younger coming back to bite you. Now, any misdeed could present itself as a barrier when seeking gainful employment, or simply trying to pass as a credible adult human. We should absolutely be held accountable for our actions and beliefs, but we've now come so far in the opposite direction that we're wilfully denying people the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and grow. We live in an age where people totally unaffected by minor errors in a stranger's past actually, genuinely feel it's their moral duty to kick up a fuss. Sadly, these people will never go away; every time an ancient photo of a TV presenter snorting coke surfaces, they will be there, in your Twitter, on your timeline, screaming in outrage that someone involved in politics might have once tried cocaine. However, it's important that the rest of us learn to totally ignore them.

Recent examples of past social media misdemeanors being dredged up and used against their posters are numerous, but the latest was on Sunday night. In this case, DeRay McKesson—a man named by the LA Times as one of "the new civil rights leaders" for his prominent voice during the Ferguson protests—was forced to confront a tweet of his from 2013 in which he called for Chelsea Manning to be locked up for 35 years without parole.

It was genuinely surprising that McKesson could ever—let alone so recently—have held these views, such is his activism against the police state and his criticism of the kind of surveillance that Manning sacrificed her very freedom to expose. He also referred to Manning as "Bradley," although it's since been pointed out that the tweet was posted prior to the press release announcing Chelsea's transition, and DeRay has denied willfully misgendering her.

Although two years hardly seems like enough time to make great strides in one's personal views, DeRay has said most of his social awareness and activism began after Michael Brown's killing last August. Rather than deleting the original tweet and refusing to acknowledge it, he admitted he was ignorant to the issues back then, that he was wrong and that the tweet in no way reflects his current opinion. And honestly, that should be all he needs to say.

I've been on Twitter since I was 17. That's terrifying, because I was an even worse person at 17 than I am today. My first general election was 2010, and believing they would be the party to best represent my views, I voted for the Liberal Democrats, i.e. the party that allowed the Tories to completely fuck everything up for my generation. I was stupid five years ago, and christ forbid anyone digs up my old posts in support of this view when I eventually, inevitably become an internationally-recognized public figure. I mean, look at this garbage tweet. Recoil in the horror of its naivety and the inexplicable use of "wahey." Five years later, I doubt I could ever bring myself to vote for the party again.


Watch our documentary about Kim Dotcom, the man behind file-sharing site Mega, who's probably posted a few things online he won't be hugely into a decade from now:


A year after the election, Mark Duggan was shot dead by police, sparking riots across London. An inquest later concluded he was unarmed at the time of the shooting, and the Independent Police Complaints Commission admitted misleading journalists in the immediate aftermath. At the time, I sided with the cops.

In 14 years of state school, I can probably count on one hand all the classes I had in which every student wasn't white. I was hugely ignorant. I'd never considered quite what it was like to deal with the police as a young black man, because I'd never had to. That was four years ago, and I'm ashamed to look back on the person I was. However, thanks to the internet—particularly Twitter—I was able to educate myself, listen to voices that didn't sound like mine, and understand these experiences by going to the source, unadulterated by middle men.

As the recent media furore over Amnesty's calls to decriminalize sex work showed us, just about everyone except those directly affected was given a voice on the subject—which is why platforms such as Twitter are crucial. DeRay's ignorance on Chelsea Manning simply reflected the viewpoint put across by much of his country's media (not to mention the unwavering position on the issue held by the majority of US politicians, President Obama included), just as my opinion on the riots was informed by media coverage, before I was able to hear from independent voices.

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The person I was a few years ago, terrible tweets included, is not the person I am now: a person who occasionally does good tweets. While it's important that we are able to scrutinize this information from the past—particularly when it's indicative of hypocrisy—to continue to hold someone accountable for an opinion they have since distanced themselves from goes against the very nature of the internet: a portal of information with which we can continually better ourselves. Bad opinions must be called out, and if the person refuses to acknowledge ownership and demonstrate how they've changed, then, by all means, go in on them. But most of us fucked up sometime in the past and don't deserve to be punished for time already served: I'm ashamed of who I once was, because he was so different to the man I am today.

The internet is the most powerful tool we have at our disposal in the education of the masses; with it, we can seek out information from a much wider range of sources than ever before. But unless we're careful, our habits of digging up the past long after individuals have outgrown these opinions will prove devastatingly prohibitive. For once, let's at least try not to fuck this up too bad.

Follow Jack on Twitter.

My First Session at a Private Tech Addiction Clinic

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My First Session at a Private Tech Addiction Clinic

Muay Thai Fighters in Thailand Are Being Intentionally Poisoned

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Muay Thai Fighters in Thailand Are Being Intentionally Poisoned

Hushup: An Inside Look At Hong Kong’s Secret Pop-Up Parties (Part 3)

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Hushup: An Inside Look At Hong Kong’s Secret Pop-Up Parties (Part 3)

Election Class of 2016: Why America Is Waiting for Joe Biden

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[Editor's Note: In the run-up to the 2016 election, VICE will be profiling the individuals who are important to the presidential race. Some of them are famous, others you probably won't have heard of before—but all of them will have an outsize impact on how the country decides its future.]

Who is he? Joe Biden, 72, vice president of the United States.

Do you know him? Yes. He's America's Crazy Uncle Joe, the slightly senile older gentleman Obama keeps around the West Wing for high-fives and back rubs. Sure, Biden's been one heartbeat away from leading the free world for the past six years—but you know him better as the walking, close-talking Onion parody, famous for doing weird, mildly offensive shit like imitating Indian accents and groping someone else's female relative. And for the most part, he gets away with it because he's Joe "Big Fuckin' Deal" Biden, and he's just having so much damn fun.

Is he running? Good question. Biden's potential candidacy remains one of the biggest wild cards in this year's presidential race. He's run before—in 1988, when he withdrew due to a plagiarism scandal, and again in 2008, when he got the runner-up prize—and people have been speculating for months that he might try again.

The idea that Biden might actually get in the race started to look more plausible this month, following Maureen Dowd's revelation in the New York Timesthat the vice president was giving the idea serious consideration, and that one of the last wishes of Biden's recently deceased son, Beau, had been for his father to run for president again. Beau was also a politician, and according to Dowd, his tragic death from brain cancer robbed Biden of the prospect that he could live vicariously through the presidential aspirations of his son.

Why does it matter? A Biden run in 2016 would throw a wrench into what has otherwise been a pretty cut-and-dry Democratic primary. Clinton, the party's presumptive nominee, is essentially biding her time until the general election; so far, her only challenge has been fighting off Bernie Sanders, a septuagenarian socialist who has seen a groundswell of support from the left. But while Sanders has gained the devotion of progressive voters who don't trust Clinton, he's unlikely to pose a real threat to her coronation.

Biden, however, would give Democrats another well-known Establishment option—a sitting vice president well-liked by his party's voters. Ardent Obama fans, in particular, could see Biden's election as the next best thing to getting a third term. And with Clinton plagued by daily revelations about her shady email server, Crazy Joe might start to seem like an increasingly welcome alternative. Sure, Biden's weird, and might wander off to find some Costco pies, but at least he's not being investigated by the Justice Department.

Who wants him? Along with Al Gore, Biden is being held up by some Democratic donors and Establishment-types as the the most desirable answer to the party's Hillary problems—an emergency alternative who could take over should the email scandals end up mortally wounding Clinton's campaign.

In recent weeks, several independent groups have cropped up to support his campaign, coalescing into a Draft Biden movement that's been trying to drum up grassroots enthusiasm for a possible Biden bid. Despite not yet being a candidate, Biden is currently polling third in the Democratic field, with just over 10 percent support in most polls. According to a recent Gallup poll, though, Democratic voters remain pretty much split down the middle on whether Biden should actually run.

Who opposes him? At this point, Hillary Clinton's campaign and its allies appear to be quietly panicking about the possibility that Biden could make a late entry into the primary. Other Democrats, too, have suggested Biden stay out of the race, hoping to preserve the party's advantage of having a more or less organized front going into 2016.

Making matters more complicated for Biden is the fact that, thanks to Donald Trump and the GOP's 16-man circus, it looks like any coherent Democrat candidate will be the odds-on favorite to win the whole thing. That alone has Democratic donors telling reporters that they hope Biden stays out of the race, just to keep things uncomplicated. And as CNN reported this week, the White House has already thrown its weight behind Clinton, and doesn't seem particularly keen on having to shift that weight around in the event that Uncle Joe decides he wants another shot.

So when's his moment? Now. According to news reports, Biden's advisors have given him until October 1 to decide whether he wants to run. But the decision is likely to come sooner, given the practical demands of entering a presidential race that his opponents have been running for months.

What that decision will be, however, is still an open question. On the one hand, Biden is still in mourning, and it's not clear if he wants to engage in the open combat of a presidential race. After four decades in politics, he's managed to attain a sort of elder statesman status and respect, and that shit tends to get demoed in the humiliating ritual of running for president.

But it's also not clear that Biden can stay away. With the possible exception of Bill Clinton, no politician seems to get as pure a high from the bizarre pageantry of American campaigning as Roarin' Joe. The man feeds off of baby-kissing and butter statues and VFW hall fruit punch and, like any junkie, he might not be able to resist taking one last hit.

Kevin Lincoln contributed to this report.

Illustration by Drew Lerman. Follow him on Twitter.





Could New Orleans’ Public Drinking Culture Disappear?

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Could New Orleans’ Public Drinking Culture Disappear?

Rape Is at an All-Time High in Britain, So Why Are Its Sexual Abuse Charities Fighting for Funding?

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Image via Flickr user cascade_of_rant

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

By the time I was 25, within my close friendship circle, most of us had been raped. I feel quite lightheaded looking at that sentence. Surely it can't be right? Is there a way of writing it that sounds less harsh? I delete the sentence but type it again. If I'm going to be honest—and I decided I couldn't write this piece without mentioning my personal stake—then yes, those are the facts.

I'm in my thirties now and, looking back, our acceptance seems shocking. We all took a lot of drugs, often other people's, and waking up with a dick inside you was almost seen as an occupational risk. No one went to the police; it wasn't even talked about that much. The only time I remember a situation being dealt with—in a manner—was when a group of lads went over to the house of two men who had attacked me in Amsterdam and kicked the living daylights out of them. But police? Not a chance. When I was raped by my friend's boyfriend, passed out after a session, I didn't even tell her.

Some stats: Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that reports of rape are at an all-time high; more than 22,100 were recorded last year. This is the tip of the iceberg. According to the charity Rape Crisis, approximately 85,000 women and 12,000 men are raped in England and Wales every year; roughly 11 an hour. Only 15 percent of these are reported to the police.

It's against this backdrop that the lack of government funding of sexual abuse charities is so galling. According to a Guardian investigation, specialist organizations across the country are on the brink of collapse. Despite soaring numbers of survivors coming forward, not one Rape Crisis center has funding beyond March of 2016. After having its state funding taken away, Britain's biggest male rape charity, Survivors UK, is likely to lose its counseling service by Christmas.


Sophie Niechcial, 26, has waived her right to anonymity in order to speak out about her abuse. At 21, soon after having a baby, Sophie began a relationship with a guy she'd known for years. Looking back with the clarity that hindsight offers, Sophie says she can see early red flags: the ultra-possessiveness she mistook for adoration; the volatile outbursts she wrote off as a sign of passion.

When Sophie's boyfriend, Julian Burke, began cheating on her and taking money to feed his gambling habit, she decided to end the relationship.

"He's a big guy and I'd never seen him cry," she says. "But he broke down in tears and said he was going to kill himself. I was shocked but I stuck to my guns. Then he got really angry and he threw me down and raped me. I was shell-shocked, and how I reacted afterwards was really weird. I was too scared to end it with him."

Against Sophie's wishes, Julian moved his stuff into the one-bedroom flat she shared with her baby and 90-something Alzheimer's-sufferer grandmother. The violence stepped up.

"I didn't tell anyone because he'd say things like, 'I'm going to petrol bomb your house if you do,'" says Sophie.


Related: Broadly meets radical French author Virginie Despentes to talk rape, violence, misogyny, and female friendship


Sophie managed to get Julian out of the flat, but he began stalking her. He'd spend hours parked across the street; stand banging on the door; phone and text constantly; and, on some occasions, break in through the windows to rape her again. Eventually, Sophie's friends told her parents, and her parents went to the police.

Thanks to ample evidence, including witnesses and hundreds of phone messages, Julian was arrested, remanded in custody and, finally, sentenced to 13 years in prison.

But the story didn't stop there for Sophie. By the time the case went to crown court, she'd attempted suicide twice and was struggling to keep her drinking under control. Today, she's in a better place, gives talks to care professionals on how to spot signs of sexual violence, and is getting treatment for PTSD and anxiety.

Sophie credits her recovery to the help of Rape Crisis and Solace, a charity working with survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. The charity offered her an emotional "life jacket," Sophie says. She'd never have made it through the trial without their support.

"If services like this are cut, there will be more offenders getting away with it," she tells me. "I couldn't have faced going to court."


Solace has funding from the Home Office, but other specialist charities are less fortunate. In Scarborough, an organization called Hope—which works mainly with survivors of childhood sexual abuse—is struggling. Hope was founded by Pauline Carruthers, who set up what was originally a small support group for herself and other survivors. Thanks to soaring need and a lack of similar services in the area (Hope covers a 1,500-square-mile radius of rural North Yorkshire) the charity grew exponentially. At one point, after securing Lottery funding, Hope employed seven full time staff and had 43 volunteers.

Today, the charity is on the brink of financial collapse. All staff, Pauline included, work without pay, the well-attended counseling service for children has closed, and outreach work has been halted. Still, Hope works with around 300 people a year, and numbers increase every time a high-profile case of sexual abuse hits the news. The charity will carry on, Pauline says. They'll find a way because people need them.

Many of Hope's clients come here every day and stay as long as the center is open, sometimes just drinking tea and looking at Facebook, other times taking part in therapy sessions or being helped with job applications or benefits claims. Some have gone on to degrees and careers, to form stable relationships. For others, success is simply still being here, still being alive.

"If I hadn't got this help I'd be dead by now," says Craig.*

Craig was sexually abused at 14. He told no one. Not his brothers, not his parents, not his wife of 20 years. Certainly not the police. He thought he had a lid on things but, by 40, he was drinking a liter-and-a-half of vodka a day, had lost his job as an HGV driver and seen his marriage fall apart. With life disintegrating around him, Craig sought help and was referred to Hope.

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"I had to force myself to walk through the doors," Craig tells me. "You think people are looking at you. You think you've got 'been abused' on your forehead."

When I speak to him, Craig is confident and chirpy, a million miles away from the shattered man who first dragged himself through these doors. He's on the board of trustees for Hope and has rebuilt a network of relationships. "Making contact with Hope was the best thing I ever did," he says.

Likewise, 40-year-old Jenny*—who was sexually abused as a child, raped by her boss at 16, and whose own daughter was abused at three—felt she had nowhere to turn. "I didn't know there was anybody out there to tell until I came to Hope," she says.

Jenny tells me her story and, like Craig's, it speaks of society's deep failure. Let down by family, forced into silence by social convention, terrified of disbelief, distrusting of police and the justice system, people try to simply soldier on. Except they can't.

Some more stats: one in 20 children in the UK have been sexually abused. Of these, a third don't tell anyone until much later in their lives.

Last year, 40 percent of Hope's referrals came from doctors. Hope is being used as a frontline service and that's exactly what it provides. It seems fair to ask why a frontline service like this is being run on a shoestring by volunteers.


It's a decade ago, but I still vividly remember being driven out of Amsterdam in the rain, watching it sleet down on that flat Dutch landscape, crying in the back of the car because I really thought this would be the last thing I ever saw. In the end, I screamed so much they let me go.

It's hard to unpick why I didn't go to the police. Some possibilities: I thought they'd blame me, the fact that I was wasted. After all, I'd chosen to get into a car outside a club in the early hours of the morning, just planning to smoke a spliff, not expecting the doors to slam. I kind of blamed myself. And like I said, sexual abuse was so rife in the party scene we must all have normalized it in some way. Coupled with the fact that people avoided the police at the best of times, it was a bad combination

But that's just my story. Sophie, Jenny, Jenny's daughter, Craig, some of you reading this, have others.

On some levels, it does seem that things are getting better. Universities are leading the way in talking about consent; brilliant projects like Pavan Amara's My Body Back project, offering healthcare to survivors, are springing up; sexual abuse is increasingly brought into the open. But are things really changing?

Rape is still endemic in our society. Abusers feel entitled to abuse, survivors frequently remain silent.

The government cuts appear to give a thumbs up to all of this. They're saying: The status quo is A-OK everyone, nothing to worry about here. It's a message both abusers and survivors will hear.

*Names have been changed.

Follow Frankie Mullin on Twitter.

Here Are the Crimes Former Subway Spokesman Jared Fogle Has Been Charged With

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Former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle in 2007, around the time he allegedly began traveling to pay for sex. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday, we found out that Jared Fogle, the former Subway spokesman and reputed college porn kingpin, was expected to plead guilty on child pornography charges, and today we know what those charges are.

Documents released by the feds on Wednesday claim that the 37-year-old both possessed and shared child pornography—some depicting kids young enough to be in kindergarten—and traveled to pay for sex with underage girls, including encounters with teenagers in New York City hotels like the Plaza and Ritz Carlton.

Law enforcement officials held a press conference in Indianapolis shortly after noon today to announce the plea deal, which will be formally inked at a later date. Fogle was mobbed by a horde of media members and jeered as he left the federal courthouse.

In what she says will be her only public statement, Fogle's wife announced via her lawyer that she is currently seeking a divorce, the Associated Press reports.

The scandal began to intensify last month, when law enforcement raided Fogle's home in Zionsville, a well-off suburb of Indianapolis. Immediately, speculation ensued that the search was related to Russell Taylor, former head of Fogle's charitable foundation for kids, who was charged in May with producing more than 500 child porn images, at least some of which featured relatives staying in his homes. After the sandwich chain cut ties with Fogle in response, acquaintances began publicly sharing anecdotes about the former spokesman calling middle-school girls "hot," among other disturbing allegations.

The feds allege that Fogle possessed images that Taylor, the former head of the Jared Foundation, produced in his home, which featured a dozen partially or completely nude minors—some of which they knew to be as young as 13 or 14—doing things like getting out of the bathtub and engaging in sex acts. "If the defendant had promptly reported to law enforcement what he knew of these activities, the sexually explicit material involving later victims would not have been produced," according to the document. Taylor also allegedly hooked Fogle up with videos he did not produce himself depicting even younger children—some about six years old.

The government further alleges that Fogle traveled to pay for sex with women between 2007 and this spring, including underage women between 2010 and 2013. According to the document, one was a 17-year-old he met at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, whom Fogle offered a fee if she would refer him to a 16-year-old friend, or "the younger the better." The girl sent him explicit shots of herself, and they later had sex again at the Ritz Carlton, again in exchange for money. (Fogle also did eventually have sex with the younger friend, according to the 17-year-old.)

The government alleges Fogle distributed and received child pornography, conspired to distribute and receive it, and traveled and attempted to travel to engage in commercial sex with children.

"Jared is accepting responsibility for what he has done. He is also volunteering to make restitution to those affected by his deplorable behavior," said Fogle's attorney in a statement. "Jared also understands that he requires significant psychiatric medical treatment and counseling. He has already begun that process by being extensively examined by a world-renowned expert in sexual conditions in order to chart a course to recovery."

According to his petition to plead guilty—which the prosecution accepted Wednesday—Fogle faces between 60 to 240 months in prison for possessing and sharing the child porn, and up to 360 months for having sex with the girls. But the sentence is likely to be a good bit longer than the minimum.

"It isn't going to be five years," US Attorney Josh Minkler told reporters, later adding, in response to a question about whether Fogle might flee, "I don't think he's going anywhere... I don't think Jared can flee very far without being recognized."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Jared Fogle Information

Sorry Vancouver, Toronto, and Calgary, But 'Most Liveable City’ Doesn’t Mean Shit

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Calgary, 5:05 PM: totally deserted. Photo via Flickr user Teddy Kwok

If you're from Canada, there's a good chance you are living in one of the world's "most liveable cities," according to one list or another.

The latest rankings come from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and place Melbourne, Australia first, with Vienna, Vancouver, Toronto, and Calgary rounding out the top five.

That list, based on things like stability, healthcare, and infrastructure, is exactly the same as last year and nearly identical to the year before. Nonetheless, it's once again making the rounds on social media, filling locals with haughty smugness, and sparking pissing matches over which of the Canadian darlings is actually best.

This tradition is ridiculous, especially considering the origin of these rankings.

Liveability surveys were intended as a corporate tool, a way for businesses to assign salaries to employees being relocated. As for the term "liveable," EIU author Jon Copestake told the International Business Times "we try and look at what cities present the fewest challenges in your life." But Copestake conceded those challenges vary greatly amongst different demographic groups. And—this is crucial— "the most liveable city isn't necessarily the best city in the world." (This is why New York and Berlin don't make the cut.)

As a 20-something who has lived in Vancouver, Toronto, and Calgary, I tend to agree, and I'd like to point out some of their shared qualities that the Economist may have overlooked.

It looks nice from up here, but it's not like you're flying through Vancouver at a low altitude every night. Photo via Flickr user Stewart Butterfield

They're boring as fuck
My hometown Vancouver is set against a gorgeous mountainous backdrop bordered by the Pacific Ocean; people can hike, ski, and wakeboard all day. But what happens after sunset? Vancouver nightlife is notoriously shitty.

The insanely high land values have, in recent years, been the death knell of the city's few cool cultural institutions, leaving young people with little to do (besides drugs).

"Bars" (typically restaurants with a few black leather couches tossed in) shut down at 1 AM most nights, and clubs are corny and overpriced; long lineups that form as early as 10 PM mean greasing the bouncer is practically a prerequisite.

In Calgary, the nightlife situation is direr still. I spent last summer living downtown, assuming it would be the centre of the action. Evidently, that action (e.g. human beings actually doing things) only takes place from Monday-Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM The rest of the time, with the exception of a couple small strips, the city was dead, its inhabitants having retreated to the suburbs in their shiny trucks.

While it's hard to argue that Toronto is boring, it can be lonely. People flock here for work, but stiff competition for jobs creates a sense of hyper-competitiveness (Toronto has a youth unemployment rate of 17.1 percent), making it difficult to make connections. Just ask this group of straight girls using Tinder to make female friends (they've given up on getting asked out by dudes cause that just doesn't happen here).

Public transportation sucks
Calgarians love their cars, and that's not surprising considering the sprawl overwhelming the city. Aside from the CTrain, there isn't much connecting the outlying areas to downtown.

I once tried walking from work to the nearest lunch spot, only to find it was a 30-minute trek.

Research shows fewer people in the 18-34 demographic are bothering with their driver's licenses, but in Calgary you are pretty much screwed without a car.

As for Toronto's TTC, constant subway and streetcar breakdowns—not to mention decades overdue repair and expansion work—mean commuters are almost guaranteed a delay. People love to hate it so much, they complain about the complaints system.

Between busses, the SkyTrain, and the SeaBus, the handful of Vancouverites who aren't cycling, longboarding, or rollerblading to work can choose from a decent mix of transit options. That may not last long. When recently asked to vote on whether or not to expand these services to accommodate a growing population, greater Vancouverites came back with a resounding no.

Toronto's quaint streetcars both look and run as if they're from the early 20th century. Photo via Flickr user BriYYZ

$$$$$$$$$
Vancouver's beauty is in part what makes it one of the costliest places in the country to live. With an average rent of $1,345 for a two-bedroom unit, many young people are forced to live at home with their parents (I did) or in shabby basement suites.

It's no wonder this guy chose to hole up in a van and save cash for a 100-square-foot house. 100 square feet—literally the size of a storage locker.

Meanwhile in Toronto, the 1.9-percent rental vacancy rate means residents are spending half their income on housing.

Rent is cheaper in Calgary, but you'll pay the difference in gas, steaks, and shit you lose at the Stampede—like your marriage.

For the young, broke Canadian there's no easy answer to which city is most "liveable." You may as well choose the place that's most fun: Montreal.

(Slowly backs out of room)

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Vapers Rejoice: A British Report Says E-Cigs Are Safer Than Cigarettes

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Image via Flickr user TBEC Review

Read: Meet the Vapers of E3

Today, British government agency Public Health England (PHE) published an expert independent review that says, straight-up, "E-cigarettes are 95% less harmful to your health than normal cigarettes. When supported by a smoking cessation service, they help most smokers to quit tobacco altogether." According to the Guardian, this is "the first official recognition that e-cigarettes are less damaging to health than smoking tobacco."

Professor Peter Hajek of Queen Mary University London, one independent author of the review, wrote, "My reading of the evidence is that smokers who switch to vaping remove almost all the risks smoking poses to their health." Another independent author wrote, "E-cigarettes could be a game changer in public health in particular by reducing the enormous health inequalities caused by smoking."

England's Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, agrees with the report's conclusions, but also told the Guardian that "there continues to be a lack of evidence on the long-term use of e-cigarettes."

In the US, e-cigarettes haven't yet been regulated by the FDA, and vaping is banned in many places, despite protests by people who say that the devices look cool and don't hurt anyone. The question of whether they seriously harm users will likely be settled by science relatively soon—though whether anyone can make sucking on a metal tube with a light at the end look glamorous will be a topic of debate for much longer.

Follow Zach on Twitter.

The Fungus That Could Replace Plastic

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The Fungus That Could Replace Plastic

That's So Brazen: How Raven-Symoné Became This Summer's Biggest Contrarian

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That's So Brazen: How Raven-Symoné Became This Summer's Biggest Contrarian

Who Are Donald Trump's Supporters and What Do They Want?

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Over the last few months, a pattern has started to emerge in the 2016 presidential campaign. First, a new poll reveals that Donald Trump is leading the Republican primary field, that his momentum is growing, that his more than double that of his nearest rival. Then Trump says something outrageous—that illegal immigrants are "rapists" and "killers," that John McCain isn't really a war hero, that Megyn Kelly is on her period—and the chattering classes declare that his candidacy is effectively over. Because clearly Republican voters will reject this kind of erratic extremism, especially when they're directed at one of their own. Except then another poll comes out, and Trump's support has only gotten stronger.

It's tempting to dismiss all this as a fluke, a media bubble that's bound to pop sometime. True, there is virtually no way that Trump will end up winning anything, at least according to any one who analyzes politics for a living. And yes, the constant coverage of Trump's brash antics and outrageous rhetoric likely accounts for some of his popularity. But not all of it.

Want more VICE coverage of President Trump? Check out these stories:
Wait, What Would Happen if Donald Trump Actually Became President
How Donald Trump Explains America
What Mexican Criminals Think About Donald Trump
The Real Reason Donald Trump Will Never Be President

The reality is, that brash and outrageous message is resonating with voters—millions of them. And that's what makes it so fascinating. Whether it's his billionaire populism, or the fact that its fun to have a reality TV star in an otherwise dull presidential race, there's something about Trump that's firing up voters in a way the Jeb Bushes and Scott Walkers of the world are not.

In an effort to get to figure out just what it is that makes people want to vote for Donald Trump, I headed out to a high school in Hampton, New Hampshire, a small beach town where the real-estate mogul was holding a rally Friday night.

By the time I got there, a long line is already saking down the driveway. I find a couple of ladies near the end, chatting cheerfully while they wait for The Donald to arrive, and asked what brought them out to the event. The women—Massachusetts real-estate agent Kathryn O'Brien, a real estate agent who owns a horse farm, and her friend Elise Graves, a retiree who described herself as a "chauffeur for grandchildren"— said they've been big fans of Trump, and drove up to New Hampshire to hear him speak. Both said they consider themselves conservatives.

Kathryn O'Brien is a Massachusetts real estate agent who owns a horse farm. She also supports Donald Trump. Photos by author

"Actually," Graves clarified, "I'm an Americanist. America first." When I asked her what that meant, she explained: "It means that we need to look out for ourselves, be charitable to others but take care of ourselves," she explained. The US, for example, spends too much in foreign aid, she said. "And Trump is for less government and I think that's what we need in this country right now—and more individual responsibility."

"Less socialism," O'Brien chimed in.

What they like most about Trump, though, is that he doesn't care what any one else thinks. "The average person can relate to him because he doesn't put so much effort into being politically correct that he doesn't say anything," O'Brien said. "So many people are so interested in being politically correct that you don't even know what they say. They say nothing, but they say it loudly."

No one can't get enough of Donald Trump.

A little further up the line, Cameron Demarche, a registered nurse who'd also driven up from Massachusetts to see Trump, echoed this idea. "Even though he says things people don't like to hear, it's truthful," she said. I ask her what Trump comments she's thinking of. "Well, he's insulted women, and I'm a woman—I'm a professional woman—and he hasn't insulted me," Demarche replied. "I like what he has to say. He's honest."

I'm slightly baffled, but the next thing Demarche says helps me understand why she, and many other Trump supporters, put so much value in the fact that their candidate is, for lack of a better word, an asshole.

"I can see him dealing with Putin, and not sitting there being wishy-washy," Demarche said. "Telling it just like it is and facing Putin like somebody should face Putin, and ISIS also."


The Business of Life: Why Pay Your Taxes?


I hear variations of this again and again Friday night. Behind almost every policy issue is another sign of America's decline: Bridges and roads are crumbling because the US is spending too much money on foreign aid; American jobs are disappearing because Washington negotiated bad trade deals that benefit China and Mexico while America struggles; terrorism remains a threat because the US doesn't do enough to look after its own. And all of this is a result of US leaders who are just too nice—to politically correct. Trump, or at least the campaign caricature of himself that he's presented to voters, is the opposite: a tough guy who, as his campaign slogan promises, can "Make America Great Again."

Trump's signature issue, illegal immigration, falls squarely into this framework. If America was strong, it would have a strong border wall to protect them; if it was smart, it wouldn't have been outsmarted by the Mexican government, tricked into accepting anyone who manages to sneak across the border.

"I've had friends who came over here from other countries and went through legal means and went through all the right processes," said Tracy Bliss, a nurse in a Harley Davidson shirt who's come down from Maine to attend the rally. "And it's not right that they have to be threatened with deportation because a period wasn't in the right box on a piece of paper, and these people [undocumented immigrants]can just go walking right through and come right in."

"It's not how it should work," she added. "It's not how anybody else works."

Trump supporters Tracy Bliss and Doug Sabo outside a campaign rally in Hampton, New Hampshire.

Inside the auditorium, I'm seated next to Shirley Dustin, a New Hampshire retiree who volunteers at a charity for homeless veterans. When I asked her why she likes Trump, she responded with a litany of woes about the state of America. "We owe too much money to China. We can't take all of these people on welfare. Obama's given the country away. I used to be a proud American."

I asked why she's not feeling proud anymore. She responded with a wide-eyed look, as though the question is too stupid to even bother answering. People today, she explained, leave their hats on during the Pledge of Allegiance.

"Everything has changed," Dustin continued. "People don't know how to work, or they don't want to work. They want to go on the system... Everything's made in China."

In a tone of exasperated disbelief, she added that her 30-year-old granddaughter gives her old clothes away to poor Mexicans. Then she gave me that wide-eyed look again, as though she couldn't believe I was making her spell this out. "Take care of our own," she added.

Shirley Dustin cheers on Trump.

After a couple of minutes of blasting country pop campaign music, Trump finally took the stage, promising the audience he'd be speaking off the cuff, because "if you're running for president, you should not be allowed to use a teleprompter." Then he launched into his stump speech, talking a lot about just how he is smart and rich and accomplished he is, taking special care to compare himself to his 2016 opponents.

"I can't say anything because Carly [Fiorina]'s a woman, and I don't want to be accused of being tough on her," he joked, to laughter from the audience. "I promised I would not say that she ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground, that she laid off tens of thousands of people and she got viciously fired. I said I will not say it, so I will not say it."

But the main thrust of Trump's talk is that American politicians are naïve, and that the US is being taken advantage of. "I don't know about you but I'm ready for a sledgehammer in the White House," Trump remarked, before going off on a long tangent about how the airports in Dubai and Qatar are superior to those in the states. Bringing it back to Mexico and China, and all of the factories that US companies have moved overseas, Trump explained: "Their leaders are sharper and more cunning than our leaders. They know what's going on. We don't make good deals."

Of course, Trump added, he loves Mexico. He loves China and Qatar and Dubai. If he thinks America is a particularly nice and fair place, that's precisely the problem: The country has fallen behind the rest of the world, and needs to get shrewder and meaner to catch up.

"Do we want nice people, or do we want horrible human beings?" he asked the audience. "I want horrible!"

As he wrapped up, Trump cited an earlier speech, in which he'd told the audience that "the American Dream is dead, but I'm going to make it bigger, better, and stronger than ever." The media, he complained, just reported the first part of the quote. But, he asked the audience, isn't it true? Don't a lot of us think the American Dream is dead? The room erupted in applause.

"But we are going to make our country great again," Trump concluded. "We are going to be respected by the world again and not laughed at like we're all a bunch of stupid people."

Livia Gershon is on Twitter.


Dan Ball’s Unseen, Intimate Photographs of Memphis's Music Scene

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Three 6 Mafia performing at the New Daisy on Beale, 1996. All photos by Dan Ball

If you were in a band that played a show in one of Memphis's many clubs since the 90s, or if you were one of the many locals who made those clubs their second home, or even if you just caught some music while passing through the city, you might have seen Dan Ball standing in the front row with his camera.

Ball, a third-generation Memphian, has been taking photos of bands for three decades—while they performed, backstage, or wherever he could get them to sit for portraits. Some photos made their way into bands' publicity materials, or appeared in one alt-weekly or another, but most ended up filed away in Ball's house. When I first met Ball, he was somewhere in the midst of organizing and digitizing the past few decades of his work. We sat for hours in his living room, the blinds closed against the August heat, as he told me about how he went from studying film and photography at the University of Memphis to shooting some of the most influential musicians of the past 30 years—Alex Chilton, Jay Reatard, Three 6 Mafia, and Sonic Youth, to name a few—often in that very room.

VICE: How'd you get into photographing artists? Would you just show up to the gigs?
Dan Ball: I guess it all started around '94 or so. I'd known Tripp Lamkins, the bass player for the Grifters, since college. We worked at a record store together and then we'd bump into each other here and there over the years. I was sort of into an art thing at that time. I wasn't really thinking about shooting musicians so much, but then they got signed by Sub Pop. Dave Shouse [the Grifters' drummer] was my neighbor in this apartment complex then. The band suggested I shoot some pictures for them. I did and it seemed to go really well. Then slowly other people I knew in bands started asking me to shoot for them. The Oblivians, Impala (this surf rock band with Scott Bomar and John Stivers). From there I just started photographing bands that I would meet along the way.

On Noisey: Tim Kasher on Getting Older and Staying Relevant

What was it like shooting Jay Reatard early on? You mentioned that first time you saw him at [popular rock club] Barristers in '98.
Right. He'd already been around. Eric Friedl at Goner Records is the one that sort of really nurtured him and got him going. It was through Eric that I had heard about him and went to see him. I never got to be really close friends with him. I guess he intimidated me a little bit, but we were friendly. I think there was a mutual respect there. And then there's Lost Sounds. Alicja Trout [co-founder of Lost Sounds with Jay Reatard] was a dear friend and I wound up shooting them. Around 2007, Jay was really taking off. I shot a cover for his record Singles 06-07. We got together for that shoot and it was like we were old chums. Everything had come full circle and we were buddies.


Watch: Jay Reatard on Choosing Bandmates:


You shot a lot of these bands in your living room, right?
Yeah, right here in the house. A lot of them are bands that just came and went, commercial jobs or whatever. A lot of them I shot at Barristers and various places around town, and on Mike McCarthy's movie sets. That's where I shot people like Guitar Wolf.

Jay Reatard during a Lost Sounds shoot, 2002.

Why do you think Memphis has been home to so many different types of music?
It's one of those things I can't really put my finger on. That's why I just take pictures. There's just a vibe here that started a long time ago, long before the 60s. And I think people got attracted to it and came here. There's a real sort of community thing here where everybody's willing to help each other out. I don't know if it has to do with the mixture of races or the food. A lot of people say it's the water—some of the best water in the world is in this city. Nowadays, you see so much stuff that's mainstream that people like me can trace back to here. You can't get to Taylor Swift without going through Carl Perkins.

Do you think people should pay more attention to what's happening here?
I do, but I'm kind of careful about that because you don't want to spoil the soup. The thing that's going on here might not be commercially sustainable, but that might be the very thing that makes it interesting. I feel like people come here to learn and to get better and occasionally they take off and go around the world. Memphis is definitely a brewing pot. There are plenty of great recording studios here, great ones doing amazing things. But the big names don't necessarily come here that often.

Sonic Youth came in '95 to record Washing Machine at Easley-McCain Recording.
That was great. Unfortunately I didn't have access to them easily. They were protecting their privacy. I didn't know them and I wasn't going to bother Doug [Easley] about it, but I was informed that they were playing this show at Barristers so I got down there early and got in a good position for it. It was really hot. Barristers was never super well air-conditioned and there must have been a hundred people in that place. Everybody heard about it and it just got crammed packed. It was an all-instrumental show, basically.

What about the Antenna Club, what was that like?
The Antenna Club was the first of the alternative clubs, opened in '81. It was just a little tiny room right here on Madison, but that's where everybody played until Barristers. The Antenna was the main thing.

Even though so many of these places have been shuttered, the architecture of Memphis has stayed the same since Elvis's day. How do you look at the city's photographic potential?
It's kind of difficult, because it's so personal. I was born in the 60s, so I got to see a lot of that stuff as it was disappearing—just like, crying every time one of those old buildings got knocked. Baptist Memorial Hospital where Elvis died, got imploded, what, ten years ago? I guess there ain't a thing that could have been done about that, but I did get to go inside it and take some pictures before they dropped it.

If you look at William Eggleston's photography, you'll see a lot of it. He was instrumental in me staying in Memphis. I discovered him when I was in college. I was house sitting for this FedEx pilot and his wife. Going through their books I found an original copy of William Eggleston's Guide, from the MoMA show in '76. I'd heard the name Eggleston but I didn't really know what it was. I thought maybe he was a photographer for [the newspaper] The Commercial Appeal or something. I started looking through it and it was like my childhood in photographs. He delivered the idea that no matter where you are, it's about feeling the vibe, and trying to seize it somehow with a camera. I'm not sure anyone else could have done that for me because he was from right here. That's when I forgot about going to Paris and trying to join Magnum, an idea I had been playing around with.

What are some aesthetic considerations when shooting a live act?
Old films are a big influence. There's a certain raw and grittiness to it that I don't see as much of today. There's a whole generation of kids coming up who learn photography through Photoshop, whereas I learned it in a darkroom—everything was kind of grainy. Half the beauty of a photograph is the imperfections. Everybody tries so hard now to eliminate all the imperfections, it becomes so sanitized it looks like a Denny's menu.


Sonic Youth performing at Barristers in 1995. They were in town recording 'Washing Machine' at Easley-McCain studios.

How does shooting Three 6 Mafia differ from shooting the Oblivians or Jay Reatard?
It's a different kind of energy. When you go to a rap show, it's like a really cool pep rally, whereas at the Oblivians show it's like drunken cheerleaders. The energy's there, but it's a little more whittled down.

Jeff Buckley at Barristers, 1997.

Tell me the story behind that Jeff Buckley photograph.
I met Jeff in January of '97. I was taking pictures of a band that Dave Shouse had started called Those Bastard Souls. Jeff Buckley's girlfriend Joan Wasser played violin. We were in this hotel in St. Louis. Jeff came to visit Joan and that's where I first met him. He was real nice and we had a great time. A month or two later Dave told me that he was going to move here, and record at Easley. The vibe was that he was trying to avoid the media, so I was really cautious about approaching him because I didn't know him real well. We sort of ran in the same circle of people here so I knew we'd get to be better friends. I figured my best shot was just to leave him alone and get to be friends instead of grabbing paparazzi-type stuff.

So anyway I saw him play at Barristers a few times. It was impossible to really take a good picture of him because it was so dark and you couldn't use a flash without pissing everybody off. But this one particular night one of the Grifters said, "Take a picture." I was doing these long exposures at the time, but I didn't have my equipment, so I just set my camera down on a little cocktail table and set him down in the loft upstairs at Barristers and borrowed a flashlight and a piece of blue filter gel lying around. I rigged it all together and we tried to take these pictures with these long exposures, but it was really difficult because there were people all around us. Everybody was moving. People were smoking grass and the pictures turned out less than what I'd have liked. But he really liked them. He said let's definitely do some more, but let's wait till the band gets here. They were flying in. I was like "OK," and I decided to wait. Then the day that they flew in, he drowned. So I only got these few precious pictures of that whole thing.

He drowned because the Mississippi River moves so fast?
I don't know if anybody told him not to swim down there because every year somebody drowns in that river. It looks all still and quiet but underneath there's all kinds of other stuff going on. Apparently he was wearing his boots.

Is there anyone you regret not having shot?
I tried to get together with Isaac Hayes once, but for some reason his people wouldn't let it happen. He passed away right after that.

Isaac Haye's Cadillac Eldorado for sale, 1984.

You photographed his car though.
That's right. It was on Beale at the Orpheum Theatre. I'm pretty sure the fella that runs the Orpheum owned that car. He probably bought it at an auction and he was selling it for whatever reason. At the time I took it, I didn't even know what it was. I just pulled up and was like, "Holy crap, what it that?" I just took a picture of it. I was thinking about the Elvis statue in the background. Later on I realized it was Isaac's car.

When was this?
Oh, God. I took that in college. It probably was 1984.

Now the car's on display at Stax Museum of American Soul.
Yeah, spinning around in a circle.

See more of Dan Ball's photos below and visit his website.

Hunter Braithwaite is a writer living in Memphis. Visit his website.

In the UK, Writing Graffiti Can Get You Sent to Prison

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Trackside tribute graffiti for Skeam after his death in prison. Photo courtesy of UK Frontline

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I knew things had gone too far when it was announced that graffiti writer Skeam had been found dead, hanging in his prison cell. While many questions have been asked during the inquest into his death, an important one remains: why was this 23-year-old handed a 30-month jail sentence for painting walls and trains in the first place?

Barely a month goes by without a graffiti artist being sent to jail. While GCSE art students and Italian tourists pay £20 ($30) a pop for a Shoreditch street art tour, writers are receiving heavier punishments than ever before. The maximum penalty for 12 -to 17-year-olds is 24 months of detention, while adults can be sentenced to up to ten years in prison.

"Malicious mischief," as vandalism is legally termed, might be a nonviolent, victimless crime, but, for whatever reason, Britain has decided to make itself one of the only countries in Western Europe where artists can be punished with hefty custodial sentences. Whether or not you're a fan of graffiti, surely it's easy to recognize that it's an offense best punished with a fine or community service, not a prison sentence—a penalty that costs the taxpayer and inflicts far more suffering on the artist than is really deserved.

Graffiti writers after painting a train. Photo by F T

Mike Robson* has firsthand experience; after serving two years on bail, he was finally sentenced to two years in prison. "None of the other inmates believed our sentences when we went inside. They thought I was talking shit when I said I'd got two years for graffiti," he told me.

Initially charged with criminal damage, Robson's charge was later changed to conspiracy. "The conspiracy charge is a way of ramping up the seriousness of the case," he explained. "Graffiti might be putting paint on the surface of a train or a wall, but, in their eyes, it was organized crime and a conspiracy to commit these 'attacks,' as they called them. My flat was raided and they took my computer, phone, books, and CDs. I wasn't allowed to stay anywhere but my own address. I wasn't allowed to talk to friends that were involved in the case, or leave the country, or carry pens or paint on me."

As if these bail conditions weren't enough, it wasn't just Robson who got a visit from the police. "My mum's house was raided, even though I didn't live there. Detectives in suits turned up to my work saying, 'Don't move. We're confiscating this computer.' Nobody thought this was just for graff. People definitely thought it had to be some sort of drugs or money laundering [offence], or fraud," recounted Robson. "They did DNA testing on our clothing, matching particles to paint on trains, facial mapping from CCTV to mugshots. Suddenly this big spider web started coming together."

In Robson's opinion, "All of this stuff is meant to mentally break you. They want you to lose your job; your relationship with your girlfriend; possibly be cut off by your parents, depending on how they take it, all while facing the possibility of going to prison and getting your name dragged through the media. You're just painting with your pals [one minute], and all of a sudden you're an organized crime syndicate."

Even though Robson had no previous convictions, he served a year inside, followed by a year on probation. "Prison is a cold environment, and you have to mould into survival mode," he told me. "There's no normal conversation in prison; it's all about crime. Even if you don't want it, you get a big schooling in everything."

As such, Robson believes the whole ordeal criminalized him. "You're unwittingly dragged into this other world," he said. "You end up with a lot of criminal contacts. Also, it really broke my work ethic. I used to be in full-time employment, so being banged up, lying on a bed for 23 hours, talking to a crackhead about armed robbery for weeks at a time threw me off. Going through that whole process—the bail, the courts, the police, prison and probation—is really what makes you a criminal."

On top of this, Robson says the rehabilitation he received was nonexistent. "I was even asked to paint a graffiti mural in the prison, the same thing I would've done on a train. There's no other crime that they'd make you do inside," he pointed out, adding that he believes these double standards are deeply engrained in societal attitudes towards graffiti: "For example, around the time we were sentenced, the Tate Modern flew in writers from around the world for a graffiti exhibition. These artists made their name doing the same thing we did—illegal graffiti."

READ: Why Is Banksy the Only Person Allowed to Vandalize Britain's Walls?

Once he was released from prison, Robson struggled to adapt to life on the outside. "When you get out, it takes a long time to adjust, to get back into the world and out of the system, and to feel relaxed and to make amends in your personal life," he said. "Plus, when people know you've done time, they do treat you differently; people are wary of you."

Robson argues that there were many other ways he could have been punished: "It'd make more sense to give a community order or a fine, or put someone on tag, or all of the above, rather than to lock someone up. It's a shame that these kind of sentences are now the norm for what is a relatively harmless, nonviolent crime."

Unfortunately, the disproportionate sentencing that Robson and many other writers receive has glamorized prison for younger generations. "They think it's a badge of honor," said Robson. "They think to be a prolific graff writer you have to have done time. But you're supposed to be known for being prolific at what you do, not because the police have made you prolific."

Photo by F T

Like Robson, G.Money (his graffiti name, perhaps unsurprisingly) has also served time for spraying walls and trains, arrested in 2008 at his home address by Detective Colin Saysell, the UK's top anti-graffiti officer. Throughout his career he's helped to convict at least 300 graffiti artists, earning him the moniker "the graffiti bogeyman."

"I have the same name as my dad, so they actually told him he was being charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage," said G.Money. "When I came downstairs there were six officers, including Detective Saysell, who was wearing a Banksy T-shirt and a pair of baggy jeans, with some sailor tattoos on his arms."

G.Money went on to serve almost four years on bail, before eventually being sentenced to 21 months in prison. While this might sound like more than enough, the British Transport Police (BTP)—the force that deals with a large amount of graffiti cases, sending 569 suspects to court in 2005 alone—were far from pleased. "They were pushing for international conspiracy charges, but these were dropped on the last day," said G.Money. "BTP can't nick people for what they do abroad. In the end, our case cost way more than the damage we committed. After all, I was only found guilty of £50,000 ($78,000) worth of damage."

Inside, G.Money was surrounded by a selection of seasoned criminals. "I was mixed with murderers, rapists and serial killers. How am I rubbing shoulders with a high-profile armed robber who's killed people when all I've done is graffiti?" he asked. "Custodial sentences are way too strong. People would be less likely to paint if they got a £50,000 fine."


WATCH: An episode of VICE's 'Art Talk', with twin brothers and graffiti artists, Raoul and Davide Perre.


So what impact has hefty sentencing had on the graffiti community itself? What happens when writers like VAMP are sentenced to a staggering three and a half years in prison?

Noticeably, it's caused many talented writers—including Robson and G.Money—to put down their cans. However, it's worth noting that no matter how long sentences get, or how invasive surveillance becomes, graffiti will never cease to exist.

This leads to the question of what drives people to risk their lives to spray surfaces. G.Money told me he'd been electrocuted and had high-speed trains hurl past his face—and that he'd known people who'd been killed while painting—but that the danger never turns anyone off. Does it come down to thrill, notoriety, obsession, creative expression, escapism, straight-up insurrection or the drive to mark territory?

At its simplest, graffiti is a hobby—albeit a slightly more dangerous one than fishing or whittling—and it's as much about observing as partaking. The notoriety aspect may hold up with some, but things have changed since writers' primary objective was to spray a throw-up at as many spots as possible along the Metropolitan Line. These days, you might spend the night painting a train in a high-security yard, but it's likely the graffiti will be cleaned off before it ever leaves the depot, meaning no one else will ever see it in the flesh. Mind you, it's exactly this that makes it so precious. Graffiti as a transient artwork—here today, gone as soon as staff spot it and get it buffed—is something done for personal satisfaction; something individuals do for themselves rather than Instagram likes or a spot in a gallery.

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Of course, if they're caught in the act, that satisfaction changes hands. In a column called "Gotcha" in the BTP newsletter, the writer details "a young graffiti vandal who had earlier been caught on camera damaging property at Barry Dock railway station" looking directly at the CCTV camera, identifying himself to police. T/Inspector Gary Ash is then quoted as saying "[Barry Dock] station isn't the most inviting at the best of times, so catching this youth makes it all the more satisfying."

The relationship the anti-graffiti squad have with the artists extends beyond chasing them through train yards. As Detective Seargant Jez Walley, the cop who was responsible for tackling graffiti in the South East, explained in an issue of the BTP magazine: "Repeat offenders come to know us very well, and some regularly write abuse about us as part of their vandalism or on social networking sites. It can get pretty personal, but you accept that it comes with the role and shows, I think, that what we do is having an effect."

G.Money argued that some police officers, namely DC Saysell [who declined to be interviewed for this piece], make it personal themselves. "He's as obsessed with graffiti as we are, but he's obviously just backing the other team," said G.Money. "He's in the corner where he can pretty much pick who he wants to fuck. If he sees graff that he likes, then he wants to nick you."

A damaged wire fence outside a train yard (Photo by F T)

According to Saysell, he's just doing his job. "I am a disciple of the 'Broken Windows Theory,'" he said during a lecture at the Southbank Centre. "I personally, in my own experience, do think [graffiti] leads to antisocial behavior, other types of more serious crime and urban decay."

In other words, if a commuter sees some bubble letters on a panel rather an advert, they might think they're about to get their bag nicked.

The Broken Windows Theory has been widely criticized by criminologists, with one study concluding that "the relationship between disorder and serious crime is modest, and even that relationship is largely an artifact of more fundamental social forces." Effectively, some graffiti on a wall isn't going to inspire someone to rob a house; the societal and economic causes for this kind of crime could be numerous, and the solution is endlessly more complicated than just locking up some guys with spray cans. In Robson's case, it was spending a year in prison that really exposed him to crime, not painting some walls.

The fact is: People aren't going to stop doing graffiti, so why not direct already stretched resources towards crime that actually affects people?

Despite increasingly harsh sentences and enhanced surveillance tactics, graffiti writers will continue to paint. In turn, millions of pounds of taxpayer's money continues to be pumped into the prosecution of graffiti, without a thought to whether it's actually what the British public need or want.

* Name has been changed to protect Robson's identity.

Follow Maya on Twitter.

Portraits From ‘Stab City’

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All photos by Yasin Osman

This past May, I flew to Ireland from Toronto to be the official photographer at an anti-cyberbullying conference at Facebook's European HQ. The conferences were being held in Limerick and Dublin. Limerick was our first destination, an interesting welcome to the fresh and friendly country. I was a black guy from the inner-cities of Canada who somehow made his way to Ireland and so I wanted to explore the city as soon as I flung my luggage on my hotel bed. Unfortunately, Mustafa The Poet (my roommate during the trip) was too tired to entertain my taste for adventure. He wanted to be fully energized for his performance the next day. I was a little hesitant to go on my own, but then I remembered that whatever's meant to happen will happen.

As I started walking down the streets of Limerick, people smiled and said, "Hello"—just what I expected. I almost forgot the heaviness of being a black Muslim in North America; I felt redefined. But as I walked a bit further, it went from friendly to sketchy. There was a sudden cold in the air, and my gut was telling me to go back. I saw a little girl on a bike with two of her friends and, after snapping a quick photo, I asked them where their family was. They laughed and pointed at a house. After realizing that they looked like they were pulled out of a scene from The Shining, I asked myself why I was letting them walk me to their house. Moments later, I found myself talking to their full family—the mother of the children told me no one had ever taken a photo of them with a real camera. I sat down with them for hours. After zoning out for a split second to think that my life could be in danger, I remembered again that, in Ireland, almost no one had guns, I smiled and kept talking.

After taking some photos of her family, the mother advised me to put my camera and cellphone away since the sun was setting. I asked her why I shouldn't be out, and she said that some of the youth were violent and she didn't want me to get stabbed. One of the boys standing there said as he laughed, "Don't you know? Limerick's nickname is 'Stab City.'" I thought, Damn, am I really in Ireland?

As I was heading back to the hotel, I got lost, and I was forced to ask a teen on his bike where my hotel was. Waving my hotel card at him, I quickly realized that I made myself look like a rich foreigner asking for trouble. The guy looked at his watch and said "you have five minutes to get home" while pulling his shirt up and showing me a hidden knife. I turned the corner and sprinted. This was all too familiar—it felt like a dream. But I made it home safely thanks to an Irish woman who gave me proper directions.

I had so much on my mind. I thought back to the mother asking me to advise Jordan, her son, about his marijuana use. I realized then that the reason the interaction was so natural was because I knew that family. They were living in a tucked-away community like my own. They invited me into their home and the emptiness was familiar: they were poor. The son's bravado, their daughter, Aileen, whose dancing aspirations she fears may never become a reality—I'd heard these stories before, I've felt this all. Right down to my sprint home.

Follow Yasin Osman on Instagram.

Why Jeremy Corbyn Is Best Placed to Solve the UK's Future Economic Problems

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Jeremy Corbyn speaks to supporters gathered outside a rally in Norwich. Photo by David Henry Thomas

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Jeremy Corbyn's rise is motored by a surge of ordinary people getting involved in party politics. But for many in the media and Labour establishment, the emergence of a 66-year-old cheese aficionado from Wiltshire as one of the most recognizable politicians in England is deeply threatening.

One of the most cutting criticisms you hear is that Corbyn is a "throwback" or a "dinosaur"—a politician better suited to a time of soot-blackened factories and flat caps. A man who is, to put it bluntly, constrained by the ideas of yesterday.

Writing for the Telegraph, Leo McKinistry described him as a "permanent rebellious adolescent" whose "views have remained frozen ever since he attended his first demonstration in the late 1960s"; one of his rivals—Yvette Cooper—said he was offering "old solutions to old problems." He is talked about in terms of the Labour heroes and failures of the 1980s: his detractors say he's the new Michael Foot, and even his supporters post memes invoking the memory of their hero Tony Benn.

Like most of the mud thrown at Corbyn, this is pretty much the opposite of the truth. The people saying he's only fit for the past seem to be unaware of what the future might actually hold: yet more economic cluster-fuckery.

In the not unlikely event of an economic downturn before the next general election, Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader would be uniquely placed to benefit from it. Even leading Tories concede as much. Ken Clarke—a former Conservative chancellor—recently spoke of how any recession between now and 2020 could make the Government "very unpopular" and with it a Corbyn government more likely. In a similar vein, James Meadway, an economist with the New Economics Foundation, wrote of how a recession in the next several years would make Corbyn a highly credible prime minister in waiting.

Meadway sees the chances of another recession before the next general election as likely. Others, such as the chief economist of HSBC, are inclined to agree.

That's because right now it's private borrowing that is powering growth, with household debt rising at its fastest level since before 2008. Even the government's own forecasters expect personal debt to reach record levels before the end of the decade. "Throw in the productivity slump, a yawning current account deficit, and rumblings from Greece to China and you're looking at a crash in waiting. If the opposition is organized when it happens, it can win," says Meadway.

That is something Corbyn's rivals simply can't offer. Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham, and Liz Kendall agree with the government on the fundamentals of how to run an economy. Were it to hit the buffers in the next five years, they would be left pointing out how wrong the Tories had been, having gone along with them when it really mattered. In the event of all that, disaffection would energize the SNP, UKIP, and the Green Party rather than Labour.

Corbyn, on the other hand, is offering and entirely different economic program to the austerity model that could lead us into oblivion once more. In the UK, economic crises haven't coincided with major parties offering genuine change since the 1970s. That doesn't have to be the case again. If he can muster a large enough movement behind him, then the political overhead of a potential recession could be a Corbyn premiership.

And to be honest, that alternative is already looking attractive. It would mean not only scrapping tuition fees but bringing back student grants; ensuring that all workers, irrespective of age, earn a living wage of £10 [$15] an hour—including apprentices, who at the moment earn a shameful £2.73 [$4.27]; it means establishing a "Living Rent Commission" to implement rent controls and protect tenants in the private sector as well as bringing down the housing benefit bill. It means, in short, a future that might actually be exciting compared to one of dull work, debt, crap living conditions, and cosseted managerialism.


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Of course, any potential Corbyn victory in five years time would depend on events beyond his control. If a recession didn't happen, we'd be looking at a totally different situation.

But that is how politics works. Gordon Brown would have likely won the 2010 election were it not for the global financial crisis two years earlier, and it was the ERM crisis of 1992 which really killed John Major's electability, rather than a smiling Tony Blair's masterful game of "head tennis" with Kevin Keegan making the voters swoon.

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When Lehman Brothers collapsed in October 2008, and the British and US governments chose to nationalize swathes of their domestic banking systems, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic openly spoke about how close we had come to the end of capitalism itself. That didn't come to pass, as we now know, but it was those events and the disaffection they generated which led to the emergence of Corbyn-mania as much as the rise of the SNP and UKIP, and radical social movements and political parties—both left and right—across Europe.

For a generation that has only known neoliberalism—an economic model based on low wages, weak unions, and high corporate profits—what Corbyn is offering is a break with the present rather than a return to the past. That orthodoxy seemed to have died in 2008, but it has walked on, zombie-like, ever since. That same necrotic quality can easily be applied to Britain's two historic parties of government, and it seems particularly relevant to the Blairities, whose brand of "modernizing" swallowed whole the myth of markets knowing best. Their vision of the future is a Labour government of 20 years ago. It is they, not Corbyn, who are constrained by the past.

Follow Aaron Bastani on Twitter.

How to Talk to Your Spouse If You Were Outed In the Ashley Madison Leak

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On Tuesday the hackers who stole information on millions of Ashley Madison users last month followed through on their threat to make their haul public. The Impact Team, as the hackers refer to themselves, released a huge trove of personal data on potential adulterers that will in all likelihood severely fuck up a tremendous number of people's lives. The leak is the culmination of a month of threats made by the hackers as part of an apparent moral crusade against the site, whose purpose is to help married people find a little strange. The Impact Team promised to release what now appears to be 9.7 GB worth of files on about 33 million site users if the portal's parent company, Toronto's Avid Life Media, did not shut down Ashley Madison and sugar daddy site Established Men within one month. (The hackers oddly made no mention of ALM's CougarLife, a sugar mommy site.)

Although the hack was huge, comprising the bulk of Ashley Madison's claimed 40 million users, it is currently only posted on the dark web, which means the content is largely unreachable to the techno-unsavvy. And early reports indicate that, thanks to Ashley Madison's history of lax account detail verification, many of the 36 million leaked site e-mail addresses and names are fake (which may account for the presence of thousands of .gov and .mil accounts, as well as Tony Blair's e-mail). Add to all that the fact that there's just a lot of detritus to sort through for anyone trying to ferret out particularly compromising information, and it's not the easiest data dump to sift through.

Still, as the Awl points out, people are already posting excerpts of the documents on 4chan, Twitter, and other forums that can be easily read by normal people. And if you want to search for a specific person's email address, there are numerous services that will help you out. So what's someone to do if they come across their partner's name in one of these lists? That's a fucking big can of worms, and one countless people will likely be opening up in the coming days and weeks. Looking for some advice on how to handle such a theoretical outing, VICE turned to Dr. Lonnie Barbach, a San Francisco-based couples therapist with three decades of experience and author of numerous works on intimacy, sexuality, and building strong relationships to talk about how people implicated in the hack can take the initiative in talking about their involvement with the site, or deal with the aftermath of an (accurate or inaccurate) outing.

VICE: What should Ashley Madison users who have been outed to their partners do?
Dr. Lonnie Barbach: It's the same as any affair that's been found out, right? It's just that we now see technology's incredible ability—I have so many clients who are outed through technology: on WhatsApp or through their e-mails. I would say that right now that's the most common way that one partner finds out that the other partner's having an affair.

The people who are looking into this are likely the people who are already concerned about their partner for one reason or another. So they're already going to be suspecting something. This is just saying: Here's the reality in our relationship. And now it requires the couple to really talk about what's going on.

How do you start that conversation? You can easily imagine a lot of people just yelling and throwing around blame and things going to pot quickly.
People often do start with the yelling. And then they calm down and have the conversation. The most constructive way to talk about it is to say: What's going on? Why is this happening? What does it mean? How are you feeling about the relationship? How are you feeling about me? What isn't getting satisfied? What's going on inside of you?

There's something happening. And for lots of couples an affair has been the most incredibly positive change that could have occurred because it gets them out of this sleep mode where they're not putting anything into their relationship and one person's not really satisfied but they don't know how to change it and so they go outside their relationship to do it. Really talking about it is kind of a wake-up call. The other partner starts to see what their mate needs and what is missing and they start putting energy and attention into the relationship like they haven't possibly done in a long time.

Is it any different for people who find out without having been suspicious?
No, except that it's a total shock and they have no idea why this thing occurred.

I ask because this leak doesn't just make it easy for suspicious husbands and wives to search for their partners. Giant lists are likely going to be floating around spreading information on people. So it seems like there's a lot of potential for people to find out suddenly, by complete chance.
Yeah. But a lot of people find out unsuspectingly. I had one woman who found out when she found her husband at a restaurant with another woman. But again, it's still the same issue: What is going on? What is happening? In [that case] again it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened in their marriage. Because at first she really blamed him. She said: He didn't talk to me about it. He just went and did it. Well it turned out he had been trying to talk to her about the fact that he wasn't happy in their sexual relationship, but she wasn't dealing with it. She accepted responsibility for her part of it and he accepted responsibility for his part of it and they went and started over again in a way that was just great.

How common do you think that happy outcome is? Because I think a lot of us see cheating as far more threatening or damaging to relationships than you're making it sound.
That's so complicated. It depends on so many things. One of them is a level of commitment. One of them is their ability to understand each partner's part in a problem in a relationship, how good their relationship was before this happened. And also there are early history issues that can get triggered by this. Someone who has had trust issues in their childhood for example—this may be something that is just impossible to overcome because this awakens early trauma. Or another relationship where the partners had an affair and it just causes them to feel so badly about themselves that they can't forgive. It takes some people a long time to get over it. It's rarely just: Oh, this is fine. Tomorrow we'll start all over again. Trust is broken in an instant and it takes a long time to rebuild.

One thing that could affect that trust building and recovery is that this isn't going to be private. Your family, co-workers, friends—this information has the potential to spread rapidly and widely. Will that affect how someone can deal with infidelity?
Unless you're a very famous person, the probability of everyone trying to find out about it is not so great. You've got all these millions of users, which means that you would have to spend hours and hours scanning the list to see if you know anyone on it.

But there are a ton of groups trying to make this easily searchable for "my friend Joe."
If it does [spread], it's like all of these politicians who've been found out. It really requires somebody to do some soul-searching and talk about what's really true, if they want to, to the people who they care about in an honest way.

The leak doesn't just tell you about a partner trying to commit infidelities. You can potentially correlate these accounts to descriptions of fantasies or hidden peccadillos. How do you deal with the revelation of kinks and fetishes on top of cheating?
That's so interesting. I'm not sure about this. It would be so interesting in terms of sexuality to find out how many more people have all of these sexual interests and fantasies and how normal it actually is. If somehow all of this information out there [reveals] 75,000 people have this kind of fantasy, it could free up a lot of people who have this fantasy they think is really weird. It might make people less ashamed and more open about it.

Yeah, this could be a huge dataset on infidelity and sexuality as well, couldn't it? Are we going to see a spate of academic articles using "The Ashley Madison Dataset"?
Wouldn't that be great! I don't know, but what a huge sample. You don't have to know who it is. All you have to know [is the demographics].

Speaking of anonymity, this site wasn't rinky-dink. It apparently had decent security. So do you worry that the privacy concerns this raises could create a chilling effect on people's willingness to explore and talk about their sexual needs, or make people even more sneaky and secretive about their infidelities, building up even more relationship tensions?
Probably both. Everything is open to being hacked in any area.

But again, do those fetishes make it harder to address infidelity with your partner?
Obviously the more issues you have in a relationship the more difficulties you have. If you have an area of sexual interest that is not shared by your partner or that your partner finds disgusting or a turn-off, you have a problem. It's like any kind of area you have a real difference in. Sex just happens to be a really important one. There are lots of couples who have differences in [sexual] style that have nothing to do with fetishes or fantasy. For one of them sex is a quickie, and for the other one it's a long, drawn-out drama, or for one it's a puppy dog playful thing, and for the other it's a medieval endeavor. You've got to match up and sometimes this is more or less important.

We've been talking about the people who get outed, but what about users who know they're in the leak, but haven't been found out yet? What do they do with that info?
That's the same decision that people make whenever they're having an affair and their partner doesn't know about it. Whenever someone is having an affair, I say: It's not a matter of if your partner is going to find out. It's a matter of when. So how do you want that to happen? They can go to their partner and tell them because it can lead to positive change in the relationship—but there's always a risk. And then there are some people who would just rather deny it and say: Maybe nobody will ever find out, so that's how I'm going to act. Or I'm going to deny it. I'll just say my e-mail got hacked and it wasn't me. It depends upon the individual.

Let's say you decide you do want to broach this with a partner. What's the most constructive way to start that conversation?
Probably to tell their partner that there are things in the relationship that have been upsetting or bothering or not satisfying them and that they want to talk about those things and that they've been involved in this website and realize that it's not solving their relationship problems and they want to solve them. Assuming they do. Maybe they realize: I don't want to solve them and I want to get out of this relationship and that's what I need.

Could this force a lot of people to confront divorce or the end of a relationship who wouldn't have done it without the external pressure of the leak?
Possibly. I think [the leak's] going to require people to talk and examine what's going on in their relationship that they wouldn't have otherwise because it's bringing these subjects up for discussion. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I think there's a complacency that can set in in a marriage. You get married and then you start paying attention to other things. It's almost like the relationship takes last place because you've got your work priorities, you've got the kids, you've got your hobbies, whatever these other things are. But the marriage is going to take care of itself. And it doesn't. That's one of the causes of relationships going awry. [Marriages] need to be nourished like a plant needs water. You've got to put energy into it; you've got to have conversations, let each other know what's going on inside of you. That's the intimacy. Without talking about those things you've got a business relationship about managing a home. So it does have the possibility—it's like an earthquake, things have to get rebuilt.

Should we try to turn Ashley Madison into a national conversation on fidelity and how to manage a relationship, deal with cheating, and treat monogamy? Wouldn't I love that? And how we treat sexual diversity. I'm putting together an app, it's called "Happy Couple." It'll be in the app stores in about a month. It's an attempt to get couples to talk to each other in a game and to give them ideas of things to do to keep their relationship alive and interesting. I think that is hugely needed probably at an international level, but certainly at a national level.

What about people whose e-mails or names show up in the hack but who were just used by someone else as a fake ID? The wrongfully accused cheaters, what do they do to save their marriages, or their wider personal lives, their jobs and social standings?
That's an awful thing like when you find yourself in a lawsuit or crime that you had nothing to do with and you're stuck in this morass of having to clear something. It takes over your life. But if you have a partner who is trustworthy you may wonder for a moment what went on and think this is suspicious and uneasy, but I don't think it takes too long before you say: I don't think this is real. If something comes up I'll notice it, but this doesn't seem like it has a basis . Without considering somebody who has a traumatic trust issue in the past where this pops up and stimulates this old injury.


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