Not the best protagonist for a romance novel. Photo via Flickr user summer1978

Kate Breslin's debut novel For Such a Time opens with a somewhat inauspicious line for a romance novel: "The stench was unmistakable." We quickly learn that the aforementioned stench is the smell of Jewish bodies burning in a crematorium; For Such a Time is set in the Czech concentration camp Theresienstadt. And that's not even why the novel has become so controversial.

The publisher's description introduces the story as the tale of "blonde and blue-eyed Jewess Hadassah Benjamin" who escapes a firing squad only to be pressed into service by SS Kommandant Colonel Aric von Schmidt—an unlikely romance novel hero if there ever was one—who believes her to be gentile Stella Muller. The heroine appeals to Aric on behalf of the other Jews in the camp, saving lives while simultaneously finding herself "battling a growing attraction for this man she knows she should despise as an enemy."

For Such a Time was inspired by the Book of Esther, a portion of the Hebrew Bible popular among Evangelical Christians about a Jewish woman who marries the king of Persia and convinces him to not massacre her people. (Esther's feat is celebrated during the Jewish holiday of Purim.) Breslin's book belongs to a Christian subgenre called "Inspirational Romance," whose protagonists go on a spiritual journey that coincide with their romantic ones. Published by Bethany House Publishers, a division of the Christian publisher Baker Publishing Group, For Such a Time ends with Stella's implied conversion to Christianity.

The book was entered into the Romance Writers of America contest for the RITA award, the romance genre's equivalent of the Oscars, and it was selected as a finalist in both the Best Inspirational Romance and Best First Book categories. And that's when people started to speak out against it.

Probably the most obvious accusation lobbed at For Such a Time is that it's tasteless, and that it's offensive to use the Holocaust as a backdrop for a romance (much less a Christian conversion tale). But the thrust of the criticism hinges on a more genre-specific issue. Like most romance novels, For Such a Time has a hero whose flaws are redeemed through his relationship with the heroine. Aric's flaws tend towards the genocidal, but the book portrays these crimes as on a par with character flaws common to other romance leading men, like commitment-phobia or arrogance.

Sarah Wendell is a doyenne of the romance community and editor of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, a website that reviews romance novels critically. Wendell, who converted to Judaism 15 years ago, published an open letter on her Tumblr account addressed to the board of RWA expressing her dismay.

"Reframing the Holocaust through a romance wherein God forgives a Nazi for his role in a genocide is a horrifyingly insensitive concept," Wendell told me. "This book appropriates a culture and religion, marginalizes Holocaust victims, reframes history, and erases a Jewish character's identity."

For Wendell, the book's problem is larger than the fact that it was a finalist in two RITA categories. "Responsibility also lies with a lot of other people," she said, "The authors who judged this book for the RITA, the reviewers at major publications like Library Journal who gave it glowing positive reviews, the author, and the editors and publisher at Bethany House who all missed how deeply offensive the entire premise is."

Other authors took to Twitter and Tumblr to agree with Wendell. "I don't think mass genocide is a forgivable thing," wrote author Katherine Locke. "Kate Breslin, her publishers, her readers, and RWA does."

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At another review site, Dear Author, writers registered complaints about the marketing of the book, from the use of the word "Jewess" to the cover art, which includes a photograph of actual Jews on their way to Auschwitz.

And over at Sorrywatch, a website devoted to analyzing apologies for their effectiveness, Marjorie Ingall objected to the book on the grounds that "there can be no true consent in a relationship in which one person has the power of life and death over another."

"Yiddish literature had a word for bad art—it was called schund—and that's really the question here." –Joseph Skibell

The book's publisher refused to comment for this article, but an earlier statement said that "Bethany House Publishers has been very saddened to learn of the offense some have taken at" the novel. "We deeply respect and honor the Jewish faith, and this novel, inspired by the events and redemptive theme of the biblical book of Esther, was intended to draw on our common faith heritage." He went on: "We have heard from many readers who have been moved by this honest portrayal of courage during a time of terrible evil, and we hope it continues to inspire and remind us to never forget the tragedy of the Holocaust."

RWA for its part released a statement justifying its award process by suggesting that what Wendell and others were asking for amounted to censorship. "If a book is banned from the contest because of its content, there will be a move for more content to be banned," the statement asserts. "This is true, even especially true, when a book addresses subjects that are difficult, complex, or offensive."

Others agreed, even seeing in the attacks on the book evidence of "a new era of censorship in the name of political correctness," as author Anne Rice put it on her Facebook page. "We must stand up for fiction as a place where transgressive behavior and ideas can be explored," she went on. "We must stand up for freedom in the arts. I think we have to be willing to stand up for the despised. It is always a matter of personal choice whether one buys or reads a book. No one can make you do it. But internet campaigns to destroy authors accused of inappropriate subject matter or attitudes are dangerous to us all." In a later post, since taken down, she specifically mentioned Breslin's book as the target of "an internet lynch mob."

But over at Sorrywatch, Ingall wasn't buying RWA's apology, on the grounds that criticism is not censorship. "No one suggested any content restrictions," she wrote. "What was suggested was not giving an award to an offensive book. Refraining from giving someone a cookie is not censorship."

Breslin declined to be interviewed for this story, but she did provide VICE with a statement in which she adamantly maintained that she hadn't intended to hurt anyone, quite the contrary: She says the book was borne out of "compassion for the Jewish people." In her statement, Breslin explains how reading the Book of Esther helped her realize how "the Jews have suffered at the hands of one society or another throughout history." Furthermore, Breslin writes, "I am heartsick and so very sorry that my book has caused any offense to the Jewish people, for whom I have the greatest love and respect."

In her statement, Breslin confuses the Book of Esther for a historical document rather than a Biblical narrative. Her stated intention with For Such a Time was to use the Holocaust as a quasi-fictional backdrop in order to stage the archetypal Esther story. Ironically, Breslin looked to the Biblical tale of Esther as proof of the Jews' suffering, using the horrific reality of the Nazi genocide as merely a fictional setting to convey that suffering. The mismatch between fiction and reality mirrors her publisher's insistence that the book was intended to draw on "our common faith heritage." Seeing as the Holocaust was certainly not shared by Christians and Jews, it provides at best a clumsy vehicle for this project.

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Is the Holocaust ever a legitimate setting for a novel, or is it totally off-limits? Holocaust pornography, which most would consider beyond the pale of good taste to say the least, originated in Israel in the 1960s, complementing the newly emergent testimonies of survivors of the camps with perverse narratives of captured Allied pilots being abused by sadistic female SS officers. Even earlier than that, Holocaust survivor Ka Tzetnik, the star witness at Eichmann's trial, published a book called House of Dolls in 1955, a best-selling novella which included a description of the "Joy Division" where Nazis would keep Jewish women for as prostitutes. Was his book "legitimate" because he himself had been through the camps? And who gets to decide what makes for legitimate art?

"In general, I don't think anything should be 'off limits' for fiction," Ruth Franklin, author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, told me. "But obviously certain plots strain both credulity and good taste." That has less to do with the Holocaust per se and more to do with what makes good fiction, Franklin says; in other words, it's most fundamentally an aesthetic question, rather than a historical, or even an ethical one. "Does the story a writer wants to tell happen to be a story about the Holocaust? Does the writer believe that he or she can do justice to the subject by making effective art out of it? Those are the important questions to answer."

Many critics of For Such a Time say there is something horrifying about seeing the tropes of romance—an alpha male paying particular attention to a heroine's well-being, for example—when that heroine is a prisoner in a concentration camp. But many enjoyed the book, too, and it has a 3.9 (out of five) rating on Goodreads. "Besides the enjoyment you'll get from reading For Such a Time, you might just come away with a fresh understand of a heroine Queen whom you thought you knew inside out," gushes one reader. "I was drawn to the idea of a Jewish woman and a Nazi officer in love and wondered if the author would be able to pull off such an unlikely pairing believably,"another mused. "The answer is yes!"

Books like For Such a Time are probably something we'll be seeing more of, said David Mikics, a professor of English at University of Houston and columnist for Tablet Magazine. "In a sense, this had to come," Mikics said. "You can't preserve a subject like this forever, especially when there's such a drive to draw on it... What authority can you invoke to prevent people from doing it?"

It would be a shame to exclude the Holocaust from all literature, Joseph Skibell, author of the Holocaust novel A Blessing on the Moon, told VICE. "Yiddish literature had a word for bad art—it was called schund—and that's really the question here," he told VICE. "Is a particular book schund? Is it trash? Is it bullshit? There's no reason to categorically impugn all novels that address the Holocaust simply because most of them are bad."

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Cajun Mardi Gras in Southwest Louisiana, 2014.

Photographer William Widmer calls New Orleans the "frontlines of climate change in America." Widmer moved South five years ago to document the way of life there before the land erodes and washes everything away. As a result, he spends a lot of time roaming the streets. He doesn't consider himself a storyteller so much as an observer, but what I love about his images are the narratives they evoke. The careful, knowing smile of a shirtless tattooed man, shelling crawfish and drinking Bud Light on a boat; a couple standing by their car, the man talking to someone outside of the frame, his arm proudly around a woman who stares at the camera, sullen and diffident. Whole lives are frozen there, and Widmer is able to make me feel like I know his subjects while also making me hungry to know more. The same goes for his images of landscapes, which are somehow post-apocalyptic, mundane, and beautiful all at once.

VICE spoke to Widmer about human ecology, vulnerability, and faith in honor of the ten-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

A parade attendee climbed a light pole on St. Claude Avenue during the Nine Times Second Line parade in New Orleans, 2010.

VICE: When did you first get into photography?
Will Widmer: I studied sociology and anthropology in undergrad, but decided I couldn't imagine myself just reading and writing all my life. I have a strong interest in people and places, and photography became a gateway to understanding that wasn't rooted in reading books. For me, photography is the ultimate excuse to go places I wouldn't otherwise go and speak with people I wouldn't otherwise speak with. Susan Meiselas said—and I'm paraphrasing—that photography can either be a degree of separation or connection, depending on how it's most needed. I love that push-pull.

How long have you been living in New Orleans?
I moved here in 2010, shortly after the BP oil spill, and five years after Katrina. Everything this summer has been about the ten-year anniversary of Katrina in one way or another, and I've been roaming these areas that are close to main levee breach sites, taking a broad look at what these neighborhoods look like ten years out. Katrina defines this place, for better or for worse.

Does being a photographer allow you to engage with/understand a place? Is that your intention?
My primary interest in this region is human ecology and peoples' relationships to the natural environment. That was one of the main components of me moving down here, actually: to work on issues in what I deem to be the frontlines of climate change for the United States. There's this huge, huge shift occurring along the Gulf Coast right now, we're losing land at a crazy catastrophic rate that nobody outside of Louisiana seems to know or care about. A lot of what I work on down here is showing these vulnerable coastal communities and their way of life, and the way things feel here now, because I feel that's what's at stake here. That's what I want to communicate.

Given the changing way that people read and respond to news and images, do you think being a photographer is the best way of effecting policy change? That saying that a picture speaks a thousand words is maybe cliché, but do you hope your images will enact change?
Of course I do, yes. It might be cliché, but it's part of what I want: I want to make succinct and powerful statements with an image that pulls people in, and makes them care. When my work is at its best, I feel like I'm advocating for this place and helping to articulate why it matters. We're in the Deep South and some of the country's most marginalized people live here, in vulnerable coastal eco-systems, and they don't really have a voice. When I do my best work I feel like it's able to speak toward this universal human experience, though it's very deeply rooted in this place.

I love your diptychs, and how the pairings give each individual image more strength. My favorite is the guy on the lamp paired with Jesus on the cross. Did you take the photo of the guy in the lamp because you thought it looked like a crucifix?
No, I wish I could say that!

No, no, I think it's better that it came afterward.
I like diptychs because they abstract the narrative, and allow the images to play off one another. They're a bit more open-ended, and maybe a bit more universal. I really like negative space in the photo of the guy on the lamppost, and that picture is one of the first I made in New Orleans that I was really excited about. It's from a second line parade, which are these roving parades or parties that are accompanied by brass bands, and people just go nuts, climbing on rooftops and dancing in the streets.

Living and working here, I've come to appreciate the way that organized faith and Catholicism play out, which is very different than it is anywhere else I've ever been. The pairing of this guy on the lamppost and Jesus on the cross in the church just made total sense—they're saying similar things. Parades are spiritual things here, and second lines take place every second Sunday. A lot of people say that that's their church. So narratively, it's an interesting juxtaposition.

It seems like you focus on story and narrative in your work, is this something that drives you?
There's a vulnerability to the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi Delta, and capturing that environmental change is what motivates me as a social photographer. Once I went to art school I started to care more about form and the visual aspects of photography, but yeah, my pictures are always socially motivated. It's a balance, and my most successful images have a bit of both.

Following up on what you were talking about with religion: faith is clearly a strong force in your work, and where you live. What do you think has the strongest power in the Bayou: nature, or God?
I think that they're very, very closely related for a lot of people that live down here, whether that's in Mississippi, which has some of the deepest pockets of poverty and disenfranchisement that I've ever seen in this country, or whether that's in coastal Louisiana. There's a photograph I took on a shrimp boat out there, of a Catholic mass held on the boat before they went out shrimping. The priests and deacons are at the front of the lead boat, all decorated with flags and forming a procession on the water, and they're sprinkling all the shrimp trawlers as they go down the Bayou to wish everyone a safe and bountiful shrimping season. So when you talk about land, and you talk about God or faith, for a lot of people here, they're synonymous.

Does the work that you do, and the magic that comes with it, come from the moment of photographing or the time you spend working on the photographs afterward, like arranging the diptychs and editing?
Normally when I'm making pictures I'm very much in the moment, and consumed by the immediate narrative of each picture. And then it's sort of reimagining it afterward, and like you said, giving it more strength by putting it with other pictures that might allow it to speak more broadly than it did on its own, giving each one more life outside of its initial context.

What do you think will happen with the environment in the South?
Sea-level rise is not helping here, but the real issue that we're up against is land loss and coastal erosion that's due largely to oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, and the environmental engineering that's gone into the Mississippi river. So we have a particular problem here in that it's largely man-made. The Eastern Seaboard and Miami are more concerned with sea levels, but it's mostly human engineering that's fucked us over down here, and that's fascinating because there are tangible causes. Like, there are barges going back and forth through the wetlands 24 hours a day and creating these wakes that knock down the fragile grasses, and you can show that as a photographer. It's hard to show what factors contribute to problems like melting ice caps, but here it's possible. And laying out the problem means that we might be able to create solutions on a statewide or national level.

Annual Catholic Shrimp Boat Blessing Ceremony in Southern Louisiana, 2011.

Top: A day at the Tabasco Headquarters in Louisiana, 2013. Bottom: Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, 2014.

4th Anniversary of BP Oil Spill in Southern Louisiana, 2014.

Top & Bottom: Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, 2014.

DJ Poppa's Birthday Party, New Orleans, 2010.

Second Line Jazz Parade Season in New Orleans, 2010

Left: New Orleans, LA - Parade attendees make their way down Elysian Fields Avenue during the Nine Times second line paade. Right:New Orleans, LA - Family photos framed in a collage in the hallway of Edward Buckner's house on Elysian Fields Avenue. Mr. Buckner is the president of the Original Big Seven Social Aid & Pleasure club, one of numerous second line clubs in the 7th Ward of New Orleans.

New Orleans, LA - Theris Valdery prepared his Mardi Gras Indian suit for the evening performances.

Lafitte, LA – Sunrise over Cochiara Marina in the middle of what many Southern Louisianans called the worst white shrimp season in their collective memory.

Left: Houma, LA - Mike Voisin, President of Motivatit Seafoods, Inc. points toward a map that illustrates the projected loss of land in coastal Louisiana by 2050.Right: Lafitte, LA – Obituaries for friends and family cover the walls next to a 'Fisherman's Prayer' at Nunez Seafoods, Inc.

New Orleans, LA - 2/21/2014 - The city of New Orleans has come a long way since the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina subsided. But in parts of the city like New Orleans East—a stretch of subdivisions developed in the 1960s and 1970s but accounting for around two-fifths of the city's geographic area—the slow pace of recovery has sparked outspoken frustration.

Three lovely pelicans, not in a thruple. Photo courtesy of Flickr user ali_arsh

The hardest part of having two boyfriends isn't awkwardly asking for a "plus two" to weddings, nor finding an apartment with enough closet space to hold all of our clothes, nor deciding who gets the dreaded middle seat in the back of the taxi. The worst part of my relationship is the language I have to use to talk about it.

"Thruple" is a hideous neologism that sounds like wet paper being torn. "Threeway" and "threesome" are great if you're writing copy for a porn site, but not if you're trying to have a polite conversation with your boyfriend's Sunday-school-teacher Southern mother. "Love triangle" comes with too much baggage, while "triad" calls to mind gangsters in Southeast Asia. "Tribunal" is too judicial, "troika" too communist, and "triumvirate" is just too damn long. "Triplex," when used with any kind of sexual connotation, sounds like a herpes medication. "Trio" makes us sound like three buds palling around, a mistake that already gets made often enough. My younger brother suggested "Neapolitan"—as in the packs of ice cream that combine vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry—but that feels like too far of a mental leap, and one that would inevitably come with all kinds of racial assumptions.

What's left? Tricycle? Triceratops? Tribble? No, no, and hell no.

I've had a lot of time to think about this in the past five years, ever since I met Jason and Tim, my boyfriend and my "other boyfriend" (yet another horrible bit of phraseology I find myself using on a regular basis). And I know it's been even more linguistically awkward for them. They were together for ten years before we met, which means a decade of being "a couple" and having "a boyfriend." In fact, shortly before we got together, they'd officially become domestic partners, another word that isn't particularly useful in our situation. (Threesome pro-tip: If you try explaining to someone that you have multiple partners, they will assume you work at a law firm.)

For a while, we went old-school with it: I was their "roommate" and "good friend." But with a cumulative 40 years out of the closet between us, that tired old dance lacked even the frisson of the forbidden that made it exciting in high school and college. So we came out, in a series of awkward but loving conversations with our families. My mother, God bless her, had only three questions for me: Are you all "intimate" at the same time? Do you all sleep in the same bed? And, lastly but most importantly: You know this doesn't get you out of having grandchildren, right? (My answers, for the record: "yes," "yes," and "Mom!")

More and more of us are experimenting with relationships we can't quite define. Yet. And I have faith that our language will catch up.

By far the most awkward part of the conversation was—and remains—how to name what we are. But then, that's part and parcel of exploring uncharted territory. As a society, the more unfamiliar or uncomfortable we are with an idea, the more awkward the words for it feel in our mouths. Once upon a time, homosexuality was "the love that dare not speak its name." Given that the options back then were sodomite, catamite, and ephebe, I might have held my tongue too. But, quoth Dan Savage, it got better. Or rather, we made it better through a century of verbal exploration. In order to get to "gay" and "lesbian," we had to pass through all kinds of linguistic podunks, the backwoods of verbiage where a menagerie of strange and wonderful terms now lay forgotten: invert and uranian and homophile; gynophile and tribade and urningtum. Next time you complain about how awkward it is to say LGBTQ, just remember, it could be IUHGTU.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with ordering strange products from the back of comic books. Things like joy buzzers and sea monkeys and other cheap mail order disappointments. Once, I ordered a device that looked like a cement mixer and promised to turn a handful of pebbles into a glittering array of semi-precious stones. After four days of constant grinding—a noise that sounded like the A-train was barreling infinitely through our suburban basement—my father tossed the whole thing out.

We, as a culture, are in that grinding phase, and the labels all feel like pebbles in our mouths. When I talk about my family, my words smash to the ground with the grace of hailstones. "Polyamorous," in particular, has all the kluged-together elegance of a chunk of concrete. Much like "homosexual," it forces a Greek prefix to lie with a Latin root, and the result is monstrously deformed.

To some people, that very awkwardness carries with it an overlay of aggression, as though I am forcing something upon them. Everything I say gets their dander up. It's nearly impossible to have a conversation about the issue, when the words alone are enough to make people stop listening.

Please don't call us a "threeway." Photo via Flickr user Tambako

This is grinding, I remind myself. Some days I can even see it in action: Small communities, mostly filled with people already on the sexual margins, where decades of use have filed "polyamorous" down to "poly." At least from this vantage point I can imagine that it might someday become common parlance. With every step, the next step seems a little more possible.

Mostly, though, I draw hope from other communities whose linguistic evolution is a little further along than ours. In just the last few years, there has been a sea change in public understanding of the concept of "transgender." Make no mistake: We do not yet have laws in place to protect the civil rights of trans people, and it is still somehow considered acceptable to debate the legitimacy of their identities in newspapers and on television. We are still not yet comfortable with trans people in many ways, but we have agreed upon some words with which to wage that discussion. And within LGBTQ communities, further debates are raging about who can use what slang for transgender, and when, and how. Trans people have begun to assert their right to say that certain words are offensive, and come with too much baggage, to be used—much as has every marginalized community at some point on the road to equality.

I dream of the day when Facebook will recognize us with a panoply of polyamorous relationship statuses, from "sister wives" to "primary partners."

But look how much our language has already changed, in just a few short years! And I'm not just talking about words that start with the prefix "trans." Today "sex change" sounds lurid and dated. Instead we say "sex reassignment surgeries." "Genderqueer," a label that goes back at least to the 1990s (if not further), now pulls up 691,000 hits on Google. Just recently, an article in this very paper discussed the use of "Mx." as a gender-neutral (or trans-specific) honorific. But perhaps the biggest change of all is the emergence of "cisgender," which uses the scientific, Latinate prefix "cis" (meaning "on the same side as") to create a word for people who are not transgender. If that feels like a funny progression, you should know that the word "homosexual" was in common usage long before "heterosexual"—and that "heterosexuality" was at first a psychiatric condition, a "morbid" attraction to a member of the opposite sex.

For families like mine, I can't say where things will go from here, what new words will emerge or what familiar ones we will reconfigure into more pleasing shapes. I dream of the day when Facebook will recognize us with a panoply of polyamorous relationship statuses, from "sister wives" to "primary partners." A day when our law and our language reflect the fact that our lives come in a diversity of shapes that detonate the limits of the "nuclear family." In our words, we're not there yet. But in daily practice, in the ways we actually live our lives, we're getting closer by the hour. More and more of us are experimenting with relationships we can't quite define. Yet. And I have faith that our language will catch up.

Until it does, most people refer to Tim, Jason, and me as "the boys," much in the way my father lovingly but awkwardly referred to our first lesbian neighbors as "the girls." Unless and until we have a bunch of sons, that works well enough. But I can envision a future time when kids will look back and think that sounds closeted and strange. In fact, I'm looking forward to it. I'm ready to be an eddy in the river English, a pause along the way to a better world, a better word.

Just—please God—don't let it be thruple.

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"Can you live as we do?" Sayeed asked me.

We were standing on the rooftop of his family home in Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank. The house, in the Old City, is several stories of lovely stone, its narrow rooms tucked away up spiral staircases. Less picturesque is the watchtower installed by the Israel Defense Forces on an adjoining section of roof.

The army does not permit the 25-year-old to lock his doors, and when soldiers use the watchtower during the day, they lock Sayeed's family in their rooms. His home, like many others in the area, is subject to frequent night raids in the name of security—in other words, investigation accusations of rock-throwing or other terroristic actions. (Throwing a stone at a moving vehicle is now punishable by up to 20 years in prison thanks to a new law that has been derided by its critics as racist against Palestinians.) Sayeed told me he'd been arrested many times; he lifted up his pant leg to show me scars he said came form beatings at the hands of the authorities.

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Then there are the settlers, Jews who have moved onto land in the West Bank—Palestinian land, land that Israel does not have a recognized right to. These settlers have been consistently supported by the Israeli government, despite condemnations from other nations, and despite the settlers frequently committing acts of violence against the Palestinians whose land they occupy. Some settlers are drawn by the lower tax rates and government subsidies enjoyed by those living outside of Israel's 1967 borders. But others, like many of those in Hebron, subscribe to a belief that God granted all of Eretz Israel—a geographic area including the West Bank—to the Jews.

The Israelis who have encamped in the Old City have gone so far to build atop existing structures, so that the modern architecture crushes the past. In Sayeed's case, settlers built a new wing fused onto his home. According to Sayeed, they cross over the adjoined rooftop and sometimes throw trash in his water tanks. In 2007, he claimed, they broke into one of his rooms and threw in a Molotov cocktail, an apparent attempt to drive the family from their home. Sayeed's kid brother took me down to the room, where the floor and walls were still scorched black.

On the roof I paused, considering Sayeed's question. "No," I answered, honestly.

I visited Hebron in early June, two months before yet another alleged arson attack by settlers burned alive an 18-month-old infant named Ali Dawabsheh in the West Bank village of Duma. Days later, Ali's father Saad succumbed to the burns that covered 80 percent of his body.

Following Ali's murder, Israeli politicians, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu, have scrambled to separate the extraordinary violence committed by settlers from the daily violence of the occupation. But the distinction is impossible to make. Settlers are an intrinsic, state-supported part of Israel's occupation. In their attacks, settlers serve as the occupation's shock troops. Their security serves as its excuse.

Nowhere is this more visually apparent than in Hebron's Old City.

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The Oslo Accords divides Hebron into two zones—H2, run by the Israeli military, and H1, run by the Palestinian Authority (PA). Old Hebron lies in H2, which is home to 30,000 Palestinians and approximately 500 Israeli settlers.

Old Hebron is honey-stoned and blue-doored—the sort of charming Mediterranean labyrinth that, in another universe, would be full of obnoxious tour groups. But thanks to the occupation, it's scarred by gates, concrete barriers, barbed wire, and checkpoints. A souk where gold was once sold lies empty, the doors of its many shops welded shut by the IDF, its merchandise still inside.

In Hebron, apartheid is imposed upon the architecture. Palestinians navigate a maze of barriers, fences, and settler-only roads, trapped in discursive loops that can take them kilometers out of their way. Soldiers, most of them bored Mizrahi teenagers, often leave Palestinians languishing at Hebron's checkpoints for hours. Long waits are the least of the problems created by this network of restrictions—every interaction between soldier and Palestinian civilian can lead to a beating, an arrest, or even a shooting at the hands of the army.

Of course, no such restrictions on movement apply to settlers.

The former main drag, Shuhada Street, is as silent as a corpse. Most Palestinian families have been driven out of Shuhada, either by the settlers or the army. Obscene graffiti joins the stars of David settlers have scrawled across its abandoned storefront.

Checkpoints on either end warn in misspelled Arabic that this road is pedestrian-only—for Palestinians, who can only walk until the last 600 feet. Israelis are welcome to drive.

Settlers have moved into apartments overlooking the shop-lined streets of Hebron's Old City. From their windows, they habitually throw down rocks, glass, piss, and dirty diapers at the Palestinian merchants beneath them. Merchants have hung nets to catch some of the refuse, but liquids still get through. One vendor showed me his shawls, which have been ruined by rotten eggs. Business is slow here, but shopkeepers persist, out of stubbornness, or pride, or just a desire for something to do.

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Many stores are bolted shut. Others are without doors, filled with trash, hidden and closed behind barricades. A playground for Arab kids has been turned into a settlers-only parking lot. According to a 2013 report the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 1,000 Palestinian homes adjacent to settlements have been abandoned, and 512 Palestinian businesses have been closed on Israeli military orders. An additional 1,100 businesses have have shut down due to restricted access for customers and suppliers.

Israel rationalizes its policy of separating Palestinians and settlers as a way to keep the peace between the two groups. However, the policy penalizes Palestinians alone, displacing them and restricting their freedom of movement in the name of counteracting "terrorism."

"We are not the terrorists that they are calling us. We just want nobody to kill us, and to live like anyone else," Ghassan Jabari, 19, told me.

A year ago Ghassan opened a small pottery shop across from the Ibrahimi Mosque. Despite the tour buses, business is slow. Ghassan, who has no allegiance to any political faction, told me that many Israeli tour operators warn their charges against shopping with him, claiming the money goes to Hamas.

The authorities also harass him. One YouTube video from November 2014 shows soldiers stopping Ghassan at a checkpoint just outside his shop. He did not have his ID, which was inside the shop. Rather than letting his retrieve it, the soldiers detained him, shoving him and twisting his arm behind his back. Another time, Ghassan said, four soldiers entered his shop and began throwing merchandise into the street. They handcuffed and blindfolded him, took his ID, and warned him to say goodbye to his shop, only releasing him when his family paid a 1,500-shekel (almost $400) fine. According to Ghassan, the soldiers dislike him having a shop in such a viable location. But these instances were also power trips, the mundane and humiliating fabric of life under military occupation.

About 650,000 Israelis live in West Bank settlements, including 300,000 who live in East Jerusalem. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, they attacked Palestinians and their property 399 times in 2013. Hebron settlers account for a disproportionate amount of violence. In one week in February 2015, settlers in Hebron governorate committed four out of five of the assaults logged by the UN—beating a ten-year-old boy with an iron bar, cutting down 40 olive trees, uprooting 550 saplings, and beating a 55-year-old shepherd while he was grazing his sheep.

The violence might be traced to the the man behind Hebron's settlement. A believer in the divine right of Jews to rule "Greater Israel," Rabbi Moshe Levinger rented rooms at a Hebron hotel under false pretenses in 1968. He and his followers then refused to leave. The Israeli army eventually moved the squatters to the base of Kiryat Arba, overlooking Hebron, where they established a settlement. In 1979, Levinger's wife Miriam led the illegal takeover of a Shuhada Street building she renamed Beit Hadassah. It is still occupied by Levinger's followers today, and its wall bears a plaque commemorating the 1929 massacre of 69 Jews in Hebron by Arabs from surrounding villages. The plaque also claims, falsely, that no Jews are allowed to enter the Arab part of Hebron.

Over the years, Levinger has been accused multiple times of committing violence against the Palestinians he lives alongside. In 1988, angry that his car had been stoned, he randomly fired bullets into a crowded marketplace, killing a Palestinian shopkeeper, an act for which he served 92 days in jail.

In 1994, American-born settler Baruch Goldstein opened fire in Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque, killing 29 Palestinians before survivors were able to beat him to death. Al Jazeera reported that, according to locals, the IDF killed an additional Palestinians protesting the massacre outside the mosque.

The settlers turned Goldstein's grave into a shrine. Though Palestinians were the victims, the Israeli army responded by issuing a 30-day curfew (that did not apply to settlers), partitioning the Ibrahimi Mosque, and closing Shuhada Street to Palestinian traffic. Later, during the Second Intifada, the army welded shut the doors of shops and homes.

The street remains closed today. Some families can only enter their homes by crossing over rooftops. Grates cover windows, to guard against tear gas canisters and rocks.

Under the occupation, an Arab can be arrested for carrying a knife. Israeli settlers, including teenagers, swagger around with assault rifles.

Outside Ghassan's shop, local kids slouch around, trading quips and selling the occasional Palestine flag bracelet to foreigners. One boy, a 14-year-old with a scarred face, told me about attacks by both IDF soldiers and gangs of settler teens; often, Palestinian kids are arrested on accusations of of rock-throwing. Soldiers then threaten to keep them locked up for months if they don't sign confessions. According to multiple Palestinians I spoke to in Hebron, to secure their children's release parents must pay 2,000 shekels (about $500) in fines, even though their children had never been brought before a judge.

Palestinians in the West Bank are usually tried in military court, where, according to human rights NGO B'Tselem, they are "as good as convicted"; settlers, meanwhile, are tried in civilian courts inside Israel. According to a report by human rights organization Yesh Din, only 7.4 percent of felony complaints from Palestinians against Israelis turn into indictments—and in nearly a quarter of those cases, the Israeli defendant is not convicted of any crime despite being found guilty.

I only witnessed the aftermath of one incidence of stone-throwing in Hebron. Every Friday, settlers, under heavy military escort, visit Ibrahimi Mosque (which Jews call the Cave of the Patriarchs) to pray. When I left the Old City, I saw settlers gathered, preparing to enter. Rows of identically dressed young Orthodox men stood behind Israeli soldiers, who were weighted with body armor and assault rifles. Meanwhile, Palestinians vendors manned stalls selling fruit. Kids ran back and forth. Volunteers from different violence-prevention NGOs stood around, some taking photos, others making notes, others just serving as physical barriers between the settlers and the Palestinians.

By the time I came upon the crowd, it was electric with tension. The settlers, behind their military guard, pointed at the Palestinians, shouting angrily in Hebrew. A man wearing a T-shirt bearing the logo of the faith-based organization Christian Peacemaker Team gestured me over and showed me his camera. On the viewer, he pointed to a picture of one his colleagues holding his bleeding head and being loaded into an ambulance.

In English, the man told me that the photo had been taken moments ago. As for the wound, that was courtesy of a stone hurled by a settler at his colleague's head.

Though rock-throwing is often treated as a serious crime when done by Palestinians, no settlers had been arrested. The soldiers stood idly by until, jostling the crowd aside, they cleared the settlers' path into the Old City.

The closed streets, the abandoned homes, the cut-up city—this is all for the safety of 600 settlers who live there in defiance of international law.

That moment shows how impossible it is to untangle the violence committed by settlers from the mechanisms of the state: The settler throws a rock; the army protects him. The closed streets, the abandoned homes, the cut-up city—this is all for the safety of 600 settlers who live there in defiance of international law. So it is that Sayeed's house has been taken over by both the settlers and the IDF; so it is that Ghassan's shop struggles, that Ali Dawabsheh burned to death.

The most extreme expressions of this system make headlines, but it permeates every moment of existence in the West Bank. Near the end of my stay in Hebron, I had to go to the government press office in Jerusalem's Malha neighborhood, to get the accreditation that would let me visit Gaza. A Palestinian friend offered to get me on the right bus. We walked down the Palestinian side of one of Hebron's divided streets, a downhill scramble made sharp by rocks (the Jewish side, of course, was neatly paved). In the distance hills shone green, topped by Rabbi Levinger's settlement of Kiryat Arba.

We walked farther downhill, beneath Beit Shalom, a cultural center for settlers with banners touting its warm welcome of the IDF. "We call that the terrorist house," smirked my friend.

He pointed out my bus, on the schedule at the Jewish-only bus stop. But he had stood too close. The soldiers manning a nearby checkpoint came over, shouted at us, and took his ID. We waited, sweating in the sun. They called him over to tell him he was a terrorist, waiting for his terrorist friends. Then they called me.

"What are you doing here?" one demanded.

"You took my friend's ID for no reason. Give it back," I said. "I'm a journalist."

As soon as he heard this, one solider began to justify his actions. He grinned, falsely, and told me that he treated all people equally. That he said hello to my friend every day. That he didn't start trouble. That he never wanted this. His partner snickered. The settlers laughed at us from the shade of their bus stop. I demanded my friend's ID again.

He finally handed it back. I gave it to my friend, who looked at me with the sort of pure anger that conceals a deep humiliation.

"Why did he give it to you?" he demanded. "Why did you take it?"

"I'm so sorry," I told him, not knowing what I had done wrong.

It was only later, on the luxurious, empty, Isreali-only bus back to Jerusalem that I realized the source of his shame and rage. I had been in Hebron for two days, yet as an American journalist, I could get his ID back in five minutes. I'd underscored how helpless he was in the city where he was born.

Update: An earlier version of this article referred to Israel's 1987 borders rather than its 1967 borders.

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Image via Wikimedia

At 32, the last place I expected to find myself was in an assisted conception operating room, half conked out on anesthetic with a lubricated ultrasound probe and an egg-retrieval needle passed through my vagina, but here I am. And there's my husband beside me, watching awkwardly.

Two days later I'm back again, this time to transfer the fertilized egg back to where it belongs. My feet are up in stirrups. "Can you see it?" the doctor asks, crouched somewhere between my splayed legs. I glance to a screen at the back of the operating theater and suddenly the tears roll down. Yes, I can see it: a grainy splodge on the monitor. My husband and I are face to face with our two-day-old embryo. I close my eyes and say a prayer for our microscopic universe in a Petri dish.

It hasn't been easy to get here. Over the last two months, self-administering 55 hormone injections and undergoing two invasive procedures, I've battled through IVF—or "in vitro fertilization," to give it its formal name. IVF is the process by which an egg is fertilized by sperm outside the body in a test tube. There aren't any assurances that it will even result in a pregnancy, but it's a very common procedure: The Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority (HFEA) states that in 2013, 49,636 women had a total of 64,600 cycles of IVF and ICSI here in the UK. According to Dr. Allen Pacey, fertility expert at the University of Sheffield, that means cycles are "now performed more frequently than other well-known procedures, such as having tonsils removed." How often do we hear these women's stories? Be honest: How comfortable are you at the prospect of hearing mine?

Despite constant news stories, it's hard to find one woman's narrative among the clinical statistics and clumsy opinions that fill newspaper columns. I know: I've googled and throughout this two-month emotional and physical slog I've felt increasingly isolated. The outside world, at times, reminds me of the time my dad didn't know how to deal with my first period. It's awkward. Friends often aren't sure what to say. Behind closed doors, online message boards quickly became my main source of real dialogue and reassurance. IVF, like infertility itself, is a whispered anguish. For many women, in vitro is yet another experience that is endured silently, without complaint.

IVF comes with a stigma. Mention the acronym and judgements abound. "She's waited too late," they say. "It's unnatural." "It's a desperate last resort and the chances of it working are nigh-on-impossible."

But wait: Let's look at the actual demographics. According to the HFEA, 43.7 percent of women who received IVF treatment in 2013 were aged between 18 and 34. We're having IVF while my husband undergoes chemotherapy, but it's worth considering that fertility problems affect one in seven heterosexual couples at any age. The number of single women seeking help has increased significantly, too—a 22 percent rise in just one year—and the same goes for same-sex couples.

Then there are the success rate stats: I'm under 35, fit, and healthy, but I still only have a 32 percent chance of conceiving through IVF. Doesn't sound great, right? But here's a thought: for all those who have struggled for years to conceive naturally, that 32 percent is like holding one of Willy Wonka's chocolate bars. Yes, the probability is there may not be a golden ticket waiting for us inside and we're well aware of the challenging success rates, but at least we're back in with a fighting chance.

Speaking to Infertility Network UK's chief executive, Susan Seenan, I ask how we can shift the narrative away from the kind of negative language that makes so many of us feel judged, pressured, and responsible for our own biological shortcomings: "IVF needs to be seen as a solution to a medical problem," he says, "with realistic links to success rates. It's not anyone's fault, no one is to blame for being unable to conceive any more than they are to blame for having any other medical condition."

A recent Guardian article entitled "A Day in the Life of a Fertility Clinic" followed a fertility unit in Oxford "on an out-of-town industrial estate," and picked up on this devastating blame game. In it, the nurse manager says: "They like the anonymity of this place. For many people, IVF is a sign of failure. It's not something they talk about, and they want things to happen in as discreet a way as possible."

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Anonymity. I couldn't help but remember this word when I arrived at the Assisted Conception Unit for the first time two months ago, hidden at the back of the hospital between some shipping containers and the delivery loading bays. "Is this it?" I asked my husband. "I guess so," he shrugged.

IVF can be the loneliest journey if you feel you can't share and normalize it—when it becomes some kind of shameful secret. Just like me, most women arrive at the clinic, undergo their uncomfortable transvaginal pelvic ultrasound, get on the bus, and return to work. Hormone injections are a daily covert operation. Some women inject their hormones in their office toilet between meetings. Some, like me, get up at the crack of dawn with only a husband and the blackbirds as quiet witnesses. I'd never self-injected before and the process was traumatic. I lost count of the mornings I clumsily punctured my thigh, half-asleep, and yowled as the liquid hormone slunk in with a sting in its tail. I hid my "sharps box" for used needles in the airing cupboard whenever friends came over. I put up with the hot flushes and cursed the air conditioning. I blamed the painful bloat on last night's pizza and I laughed over the cracks. The needles stung and the bruises mottled me. Thighs swelled. I cried, I laughed, I cried again.

If there's one word that's synonymous with IVF and infertility it's "failure" and, believe me, I've felt it intensely over the last few months. The cruel nature of the in vitro process is that it sets you up to feel so many self-perceived mini-failures in addition to the giant-failure of having to resort to medical-intervention in the first place. For context, let's rewind to last month. After 14 days of single daily injections to suppress my natural cycle to give me, as the nurse kindly put it, "a mini menopause," a transvaginal scan gave me the go-ahead to double my injections each day. For the next two weeks I added a human follicle stimulating hormone that would hopefully boost my body to create enough egg producing follicles to rival my neighbor's clucking hens next door. Disappointingly, ten days of painful double-injections later and the follicles still weren't growing. They upped my dose. Progress was slow and my exhaustion was beginning to make a simple trip to the co-op feel like wading through gelatinous mud. Over the weeks the doctors plotted my follicles on a graph like I were some kind of underperforming science experiment.

When your body is the vessel and it fails to respond, find me a woman who doesn't chastise or blame herself in some way and I'll show you a fembot.

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My IVF counsellor talked about the importance of "grieving" before I began my cycle. My loss is my inability to conceive naturally and the sense of bereavement is so deep that on some days it has threatened to consume me. Way back in 1949 Simone De Beauvoir asked "What is a woman? ...She is a womb..." and yet nearly 70 years later women are still defined as walking wombs and paying the price for the disservice. When our wombs fail us, we don't just blame ourselves: we question our womanhood. The pressure to reproduce perfectly before we hit 35 is daily media fodder. It's time the language changed and it's time we listened more.

As Susan Seenan says: "If you haven't been through infertility, it's hard to understand the emotional and physical impact, so people find they don't get the support they need from others who just don't 'get' the effect it can have."

Call me naive, but I hope I'll never see my IVF cycle as a failure, whether I succeed or not. And I refuse to stay quiet. I may have handed the keys to my ovaries over to science, but the control is mine.

Which leads us back to this moment in an operating theater in southeast London. Our tiny embryo is passed through a hatch. One doctor, an embryologist, and two hopeful parents-to-be wait. We count together, 1-2-3, and a 4-celled wonder hurtles down a catheter and into my womb like a silent explosion on the ultrasound screen.

There is no failure. There is always hope.

Follow Kat Lister on Twitter.

Liam Reynolds and some of the cannabis police seized from him

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In a world where drugs were completely legal, Liam Reynolds and his undergraduate mates would be hailed as over-achievers.

While others on the International Business degree at Leeds Beckett University were spending their downtime learning the best number-of-pints-to-tactical-chunder ratio, Reynolds et al. were putting theory into practice by running a successful drug ring.

After attending daytime lectures in modules such as Digital Marketing and Supply Chain Management, they ran their business from a student house in Leeds where four of them lived. They made payments for ecstasy, LSD, and cannabis by accessing the now defunct Silk Road, using the anonymous digital currency Bitcoin. The drug packages arrived in the post and all they had to do was dish them out.

Unfortunately for Reynolds and his team of entrepreneurs, the police soon caught wind of their mini-Medellin operation. An investigation found "a very sophisticated and highly organized criminal enterprise that for a sustained period of time imported substantial quantities of controlled drugs into the UK and supplied them in the city's student community."

Last week, 21-year-old Reynolds, the ringleader, started a four-year prison sentence after being found guilty of conspiracy to import and supply controlled drugs. His nine co-defendants, aged between 20 and 22, were convicted of a mixture of importation, supply, and money laundering offenses, but were all given suspended sentences and avoided jail.

What this case illustrates neatly is that anyone—even a fuzzy-faced student from —can now set up their own drug importation and sales business. All you need is a laptop, a student loan, a bit of dark web know-how and you've become the Pablo Escobar of your local student party scene. Of course, you could lose all your money, sell someone some deadly pills, or end up spending quite a long time in prison, but I guess those are the risks you take.

The online drug market, unsurprisingly, is widely known as a place where drug users go to buy drugs. But a report published last year called "Not an 'Ebay for Drugs': The Cryptomarket 'Silk Road' as a Paradigm Shifting Criminal Innovation" found that between a third and half of all sales on the Silk Road were bulk purchases worth £1,000 to £2,000 ($1,600 to $3,150), rather than the odd gram or two of mephedrone.

"These findings provide clear evidence," the report concluded, "that many customers on Silk Road will have been drug dealers sourcing stock, and that in revenue terms, these kinds of 'business-to-business' sales were key [to the entire] Silk Road business."

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All the evidence from the sales patter on the current raft of darknet markets—vendors offering large discounts for bulk orders, for example—indicate similar patterns of business. And because the dark web is increasingly becoming a go-to place for drug dealers to stock up on their wares before selling them on for profit, it is transforming the nature of drug selling—by making it such an accessible career.

It's no wonder that Reynolds and his "colleagues," especially the ones who were doing an entire degree on how to set up an international business, clocked an opportunity to make easy money. Buying drugs over the web is tailor-made for your average student: They're likely to have a pretty good understanding of the internet; they don't have to deal with any scary importers IRL; and they're living among thousands of other people very willing to spend a large chunk of their maintenance loan on drugs.

Less than a decade ago, the ability to source and smuggle illegal drugs was the preserve of an elite group of criminal outfits with good connections. Now, because of the dark web, anyone can do it. So they do.

It's hard for police to spot student dealers, as they are less exposed than dealers operating outside the student bubble. Even so, the Leeds lads have not been the only university students caught with their fingers in the online drug pie.

Speed being weighed up. Photo by Andoni Lubaki

In January last year, Michael Thompson, 22, a final year History student at Sheffield University, was sentenced to three years after police intercepted a package addressed to him from Holland that contained £600 ($950) worth of ecstasy pills. A raid on his flat, close to the university campus, found £1,400 ($2,200) in cash, 46 bags of ecstasy tablets, cannabis resin, weed, ketamine, valium, and LSD. He had bought them online and sold them to a core group of around 50 fellow students at the university.

This May, Dylan C Soeffing, a student at Oswego University in New York State, was nabbed by police after making $170,000 (£108,000) selling dark net-acquired cannabis and Xanax to his fellow students. He said he'd been trying to stop selling drugs for the past year, but that business was too lucrative. He said his local post office were completely cool with his package fetish. In fact, as he was making his statement to police, he said he was expecting a package containing nearly 500 grams of West Coast weed.

Dealers sourcing their drugs online are thriving in isolated markets such as Australia and New Zealand. Both countries are full of people wanting to get out of their minds, but where the traditional supply chain can only provide expensive, low-quality drugs. For dealers who are able and willing to navigate the online trade, buying drugs on the dark net for far lower prices than steep street prices and selling them to people who don't want to go online is sensible economics.

It was no surprise that the first drug dealer busted on the Silk Road was an Australian. In 2012, police intercepted two inbound packages from Germany and Holland, containing 46.9 grams of MDMA and 14.5 grams of cocaine addressed to Paul Howard's Melbourne home. All the drug dealer paraphernalia was there: digital scales, ziplock bags, $2,300 in cash and two mobile phones containing texts such as: "PROMOTE THE LSD I GOT MORE IN. I SOLD 200 CUBES LAST WEEK" and "I GOT FIVE GRAND WORTH IF YOU WANT."

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Like its equally isolated neighbor, New Zealand has seen a steady stream of online importer-dealers being convicted over the last two years.

Last year, Nicholas Heatley, a 22-year-old student from Dunedin, was jailed for four years after importing NZ$70,000 ($46,000) worth of LSD and MDMA into the country, which he then sold to people on his university campus. In May, another student from Dunedin, 20-year-old Daniel McKechnie, got seven years for importing a "supermarket of drugs" for onward sale, worth an estimated NZ$167,000 ($110,000). And the list goes on. New Zealand Customs admits it's making daily interceptions of drugs bought online, with many destined for university campuses.

"I guess that Silk Road and its successors enabled a new breed of drug lord," says Eileen Ormsby, an Australian journalist and the author of Silk Road. "Those buying in bulk for resale no longer have to buy it from whatever organized crime gang is in charge of that drug for their city. That means a different type of person can be in charge of supply and distribution in smallish enclosed communities, and a university or college really is an ideal environment for such a business to thrive."

With increasing links between dark net drug markets and a new breed of techie student dealers, universities could become the new battleground in a war on drugs where the goal posts are shifting fast.

Last month, three chemistry students at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand set up their own dark net site called NZ Underworld and challenged police to hunt them down. The site's still going. Their point is that with the arrival of the online trade, police are powerless to enforce prohibition. They say that they have a right to trade drugs, away from police and criminals. It's the police's move, but I'm not holding my breath.

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All illustrations from It All Dies Anyway: LA, Jabberjaw, and the End of an Era, courtesy of Bryan Ray Turcotte and Rizzoli

Though it was only open from 1989 to 1997, the LA venue Jabberjaw has had one of the most enduring legacies in independent music. It was located just north of South Central in the Arlington Heights neighborhood, putting it miles away—both geographically and aesthetically—from the plasticine Sunset Strip-based hair metal that has traditionally ruled LA. Jabberjaw served as a gathering place for kids who might not have fit into a specific genre, but still wanted to build a place for themselves. It was a hidden post-punk oasis. And that's the way the owners wanted it.

That wasn't because the operators, Gary Dent and Michelle Carr, were necessarily snobbish. It was just that in the beginning they never tried very hard to promote, relying exclusively on word of mouth to get the club off the ground, trusting in the power of their idea: put up what we like and let the community decide the rest.

Dent, the former owner, told me in an all-caps email (which serves as a visual representation for what I imagine it was like trying to talk to people in the notoriously loud venue): "THE THING THAT MADE JABBERJAW SO SPECIAL WAS THE FACT THAT IT WAS STRIPPED DOWN NO FRILLS JUST ROCK N ROLL. WE WERE ALL AGES & NO PAY TO PLAY—WHICH WAS BIG AT THE TIME; ALWAYS FIVE BUCKS TO GET IN, NO BACK STAGE, NO BAND RIDERS—YOU HUNG WITH YOUR FAVORITE BAND ALL NIGHT 'TIL IT WAS TIME TO WATCH THEM PLAY. IT WAS VERY PERSONAL AND REALLY MADE YOU FEEL LIKE A PART OF THE SHOW."

While Dent and Carr owned the place, Jabberjaw was built more or less by the people who went and contributed. It was part performance art space, part venue, part general hang-out-and-make-zines spot, part clubhouse. It was an experiment in a community-run space that ended up, through the movement of some sort of anarchic invisible hand, becoming one of the most celebrated indie venues in the US.

Over its eight-year run Jabberjaw hosted hundreds of influential post-punk and indie bands, including a famous pre-Nevermind Nirvana surprise set attended by Iggy Pop. Jabberjaw was also particularly accommodating to women and riot grrrl bands—which, sadly, made it stand out back in those days. It was a go-to for acts like Heavens to Betsy, Bikini Kill, and an early incarnation of Sleater-Kinney. Courtney Love's band Hole practiced at Jabberjaw and performed there frequently.

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A new book, It All Dies Anyway: LA, Jabberjaw, and the End of an Era, details the history of the club via hundreds of curated photos and anecdotes told by regulars, assembled in the cut-and-paste style of a typical early 90s flyer. The book was compiled by Bryan Ray Turcotte, a San Francisco punk musician who moved to LA right when Jabberjaw opened, spent years as a regular, and worked closely with Dent and Carr over the course nearly a decade to assemble the book. Dent said the book was a way for "the bands and people who went there to get to re-live the experiences again, and to document a special time in LA that I don't think people realized happened in LA."

I met up with Turcotte—who now both writes books about music (like punk rock flyer collection Fucked Up and Photocopied) and acts as a music supervisor for the film industry—in his memorabilia-rich office about the history of Jabberjaw, what made it such a unique venue, and how clubs that try to emulate the club's success fail by trying too hard to be cool.

Photo courtesy of Bryan Ray Turcotte

VICE: You moved to LA in 1989, the year Jabberjaw opened. What was LA's music scene like then?
Bryan Ray Turcotte: The thing about LA in 1989, the popular thing, was the Sunset Strip. Nirvana hadn't exploded yet. So Sunset Strip dominated, and it was a lot of music we hated. Guns n' Roses was king—and it was a bummer. The only clubs where we could see Jane's Addiction, or Nick Cave, or Iggy Pop, or Mudhoney, or anything like that was the Scream Club downtown, or the English Acid in Hollywood. Or a place like Jabberjaw, which was just starting to bubble up with local bands. They never had booked bigger bands at that point. It was in a really funky part of town.

But what really differentiated Jabberjaw from those other clubs is the other clubs were very obviously run by older people who had been at it a long time and were making a business of it. Jabberjaw felt like the place where we were getting away with something, It felt like we were hanging out with our friends. The people who owned it were our age. There was never any entertainment licensing, no alcohol except beers out of bags. It was a place like, nobody is even going to notice we're here. It was the true essence of "run by the people who were playing there and hanging out there."

It definitely felt like the Land of Misfit Toys, where everyone was young and cool. The nerds and freaks were finding their own place to hang. You couldn't get away with being a hipster. Or later on, A&R people would come along, you'd poke fun at them. Like, "You're going to show up here in your BMW? Good luck with that, your car is going to get stolen."

That area, Arlington Heights, is a little more cleaned up now. But what was the neighborhood like back then?
Like, when you saw the riots happening and the city burning, it was dead center on the fringe where that part of town ended and Hollywood. I don't know anyone who lived there. I never drove through that area. For our scene, it might as well have been Compton.

"It definitely felt like the Land of Misfit Toys, where everyone was young and cool." –Bryan Ray Turcotte

Jabberjaw was a destination. You have this place—an all-ages club with no alcohol—and basically every show was five bucks.
I didn't own the place, but you felt like, if it was a good day, and Gary or Michele was working the door, you could just walk in. If you were showing up with a bunch of teenyboppers, it could be "it's five bucks" or it could be "we're sold out." There were no real rules there. Nobody was really trying to make a business out of it. It was more we wanted to do stuff to have a place to go to.

It could be "I want to see this band" or it could be "I just want to play board games." For a long time there were no fixed hours. You couldn't even be guaranteed if someone said they were playing that night that it was gonna happen. It was a day-to-day thing. Sometimes they'd be shut down, sometimes they wouldn't. Sometime it would be sold out. One time I went to see the band Low, there were like four people there. And it was wonderful. For the people there, it was magic.

The nights the Make-Up played, or the infamous Nirvana show [in 1991], for me, it was so small and so hot and so crazy it was hard to deal with. The walls would sweat.

That's a recurring theme in the book—how hot that place was.
It was uncomfortable. I'm a little claustrophobic. I stood underneath the tree [in Jabberjaw's backyard] the whole time Nirvana played. I didn't go in and watch them because it was too crazy. There was no moving.

When you describe that Nirvana show as infamous, is that because of how crowded and out of control it got?
No. To be honest, I'd seen shows there that were more packed. The thing that made it infamous was that everyone in Hollywood knew this band was about to do something big. Nevermind hadn't come out yet, but everyone had loved Bleach, and there was a buzz. The demos had made their way around, so people sort of knew what was going on. They weren't supposed to play—it was a Fitz of Depression show, and they jumped on the bill to help out. So the people who were there were lucky enough to have heard and it was packed because word got around. And it was so uncomfortable that I stood outside.

It became legendary afterwards because just a few months later they became fucking huge. And it was like, "They played the Jabberjaw? Are you kidding me?" The next time they played it was like, at the Palace. If everybody who really says they saw that show actually saw that show, there would have been 5,000 people there. It was crazy, but it wasn't the most full I'd seen it.

When they played "Smells Like Teen Spirit," I can remember saying, "Oh, wow. This band has changed and evolved into something big." You could tell something was going on. Like, Oh shit, it's coming. But nobody had any idea of exactly how big it was gonna become. It just decimated Hollywood and got rid of all that shit.

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Would you say that's when Jabberjaw really started to take off then, around 1991?
No. It was pretty underground for awhile, and pretty haphazard. I would say its peak was around 1994. All of sudden you had bands like Helmet and the Jesus Lizard playing. People worldwide were like, "We want to play Jabberjaw."

The first year or so, Jabberjaw was an art place with no stage. It wasn't made to be a club. It was a coffeehouse; there were acoustic shows. Then after awhile, you had Imperial Butt Wizard and Celebrity Skin playing, real aggro bands.

Then Courtney Love started hanging out, and Hole would play. And it sort of grew to where the scene around the country became hip to what was happening there. You started seeing the big Kozik posters being made, and you're seeing Guided by Voices. So it was around 1994 where it started to become like, holy shit, everyone wants to play here. Everyone is bugging them to play. And the owners had to say no, we're not letting corporate rock in here.

At the same time, Jabberjaw didn't seem to have as much of a hardline stance about major label rock as, say, Gilman Street had in the Bay Area. It didn't seem like as much of a conscious ethical choice.
It was really based on what Gary and Michele wanted. In the book, there's a list of every band that played Jabberjaw. I know there were a few "suspicious" bands that played there. Those were shows where they were probably like, "Yeah, OK." I don't know if money exchanged hands, or if they just said, "Fine."

It wasn't rigid. It was DIY. There wasn't a hardcore punk rock, boxed-in ethic. It was more like, [Gary and Michele] built their scene around what they liked. And that would change. There would be complete weirdos doing performance art, to painting makeup, to Helmet, the Cows. The Make-Up—them and Brainiac, they were the two I would say are exclusively Jabberjaw-type of bands. Some bands would say, "We don't play anywhere but there."

I'm not familiar with the Make-Up and Brainiac, but they were super high-energy bands, right?
Real DIY, indie-label, that post-punk, nutty keyboard-guitar, crazy, and energetic. Really super cool.

It was really interesting. Spacemen 3 played there, Royal Trucks, Wesley Willis. The list was nuts. It's kind of hard to imagine that many bands that became something, whether they were huge when they played there or not, actually got away with playing there. Because like I said, there was no real business to be had. It was run by two people, with some help of friends. There was never an entertainment license, there was never a liquor license, and it was in a funky part of town. Sometimes it would get shut down. It's shocking it lasted as long as it did.

Watch: Kate Nash talks to Broadly about feminism, DIY ethos, and the internet.

Do you think a space like Jabberjaw could exist today?
I do. You just kind of have to not care. I don't think Gary and Michele ever thought, "We're going to own a club, and some day it'll be steeped in the legend of music like Max's Kansas City or CBGBs." I think they were just like, "Let's have a place to play where we can just go and hang out, and maybe serve coffee to our friends. And maybe charge admission. And if it pays the bills, cool."

[Gary and Michele] went in and bought the cheapest paint they could. They built the stage themselves—and the stage was so small you could barely fit on it. There was no thought given to "How will this work in a packed house?" They built it for their friends. And that's what made it so rad. You walked in the front door, and the stage was right there. It's like, as soon as you walked in the door you were in the backstage. So every time you open the door, everyone looking at the band is looking at you, and the band is looking at you as you try to squeak by the bar and the stage down the narrow hallway where everyone is standing. That, again though, is what made it so unique and so rad. They just did what they wanted.

Why did Jabberjaw eventually shut down?
I think it was a combination of the changing city and the community pressuring them. I had heard stories about certain new police officers coming in and not being as accepting of it anymore. I'm sure there was pressure from all angles, and maybe that pressure got to them. Pay or play; get more legit, get a license, let a fire marshal in there. Or you're done. There was just too much attention being brought to it.

They were lucky enough to have ended perfectly, on a big high note. It was packed and you were like, Shit, this is it. It didn't end with a whimper. It ended with their favorite band playing and it was nuts. I didn't see that show though.

That's always a shame, where you don't feel like you got your own closure.
It was definitely... It was my favorite place to go. It felt special. I can only imagine what it felt like to be a part of the early crews at Max's, or CBGBs, or Gilman. I felt very, very gracious to have ever played there. We played twice, and it felt like a bucket list for me. Like, I might have not fit in their perfect mold. But it made sense. We were friends. It just sort of worked. And you go, Fuck, this was amazing.

From a music perspective, what's Jabberjaw's legacy?
Some of the biggest bands in LA that used to play there a lot didn't go national. And some of the bands that played for a small audience exploded. And you were like, Shit, I was at that show! I mean, there were probably as many people at that Tool/Rage show as there were at that Nirvana show. But when Imperial Butt Wizard would play it would be just as packed. Outside of LA, nobody knew who they were. Even in LA people didn't know who they were. But they were the epitome of that club at that time. That's what made it so special. It was like a secret, for a lot of people. I would always pray that I would get their attention enough to be let in. It was like going to a party.

And then you're like, "I drove all the way to Pico for this?"
It was always like that. You never knew if it was going to be packed or not, or if you were going to get mugged [outside] or not, or if they would even be cool. It was a cool spot.

Follow Jacob Harper on Twitter.

This article was originally published on VICE Sweden

In 2014, Rome was the 14th most visited city in the world and the third most visited in the European Union. For years the most common accessory amongst the city's tourists was a digital SLR camera, but recently, in Rome as in the rest of the world, the camera has been replaced by the smartphone.

Along with that switch has come the rise of the selfie stick. In generations past visitors would point their cameras at Rome's beautiful antiquities. Today, people point the camera at themselves, with the Pantheon serving as a nice compliment to their new hat. Photographer Andreas Langeland Bjørseth recently spent some time in Rome documenting the ancient city's very modern obsession with the selfie stick.

Find more of Andreas's photos on his website.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Mexico

It was barely noon when the first of the painstakingly dressed danzón fans began to arrive at Mexico City's Plaza de la Ciudadela—or Plaza de Danzónas as it's locally known. Danzón, a Cuban style of music and dance dating back to 1879, has all but died out on its home island yet remains extremely popular in the Mexican capital—particularly among the elderly. Every Saturday for the past 20 years, about 200 people have gathered at the square to enjoy the traditional bands and jiggle their bodies a bit.

For many of the dancers, the outfits seem to be as important as the music. Many of the guys, or pachucos, get decked out in dramatic zoot suits, feathered fedoras, and shiny leather shoes, while others simply wear their every day attire. The women, or pachucas, glam up in evening gowns and high-heels, while their hairstyles are modeled after classic Mexican beauties like Sara Montiel and Rebeca Iturbide.

The Saturday I attended, the dance was organized as a benefit for single mothers who have been affected by domestic violence. Entry was free, but attendees had been asked to bring some clothes or canned food to help those in need. The donations sat just at the edge of the stage, right below the musicians' feet. There was a real sense of community in it all.

Plaza de la Ciudadela is a real melting pot of social classes. A place where people from every walk of life and corner of the city can gather on a weekly basis to keep the tradition of danzón alive. It doesn't matter whether you're from the posh neighborhoods of the north or the poorest slums of the east—danzón is for everyone as long as they love the music.

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"You see, the thing is... I'm just reeeeally not into talking to any of you. Okay no more questions, byeeee." Photo via Flickr user Prime Minister GR

"Go write a story about it."

That's the advice I was given by Conservative communications apparatchik Kory Teneycke when I complained about their arbitrary limit on who gets to ask questions of Stephen Harper.

"It's not arbitrary," he told me.

Judge for yourself.

At every event with the Conservative Party leader on the campaign trail, journalists get five questions—or, at least, they're supposed to get five questions.

That's a notable improvement from before the campaign, back when he was running the country full-time, when there was a slim chance of ever getting to ask questions of Harper.

But even so, there's a catch.

Four of the five questions go to tour media—those journalists who are on the official Conservative campaign bus—and one goes to the local media.

To get on that bus, you'll need to shell out $3,000 a day. Or, alternatively, you can get discounted long-term rates of $12,500 a week, or $78,000 for the entire two-and-a-half-month campaign.

Local reporters, on the other hand, have their questions vetted to ensure they're "local" enough. Local reporters are not permitted to ask national questions. Teneycke vets their questions.

We national reporters—who are neither paying that huge sum of money, nor are local reporters—assumed that we'd still be able to ask questions. Turns out not.

I got in the car on Sunday, foregoing an afternoon of laying on the beach, to cover Harper's event in Eastern Ontario. He was announcing another tax break for people who join service clubs, like the Masons or Knights of Columbus (though not, presumably, fight clubs).

I flipped an email to some Conservative staffers: Hey, I'm hoping to ask a question. Is that doable?

They said they'd look into it.

So Teneycke enters the media holding pen and I ask him about it. Turns out that there are only three media there from the bus—CTV, CBC, and the Canadian Press, with the usual francophone RDI reporter missing. That means that, under their five-question rule, there was space.

Teneycke pulls me into the hallway: he wants to know, in general strokes, my question. So that Harper can give a more detailed answer.

I tell him my question is on the fight against the Islamic State, and how Harper plans on dealing with Turkey, who is currently bombing our allies in the fight against ISIS, the Kurds.

Teneycke nods, and I get the impression that my question is on the roster. Booyah.

In my mind, I'm relieved. This campaign has been going on for nearly a month, and I've had virtually nothing to write about. None of the leaders have actually announced anything significant thus far—mostly just incredibly specific tax cuts that don't exactly allow for much in-depth reporting.

Put another way: I do not want to write another goddamn column about media access.

Other reporters, who have to fill the top story on the nightly newscast, want to ask about Duffy.

I, on the other hand, am thinking I can put together a great policy story about what this election means for Canada's involvement in the coalition effort to stop the Islamic State's expansion.

This story, by the way, would play exactly into Conservative Party messaging. They've been itching to talk about ISIS.

So I walk into the tiny room where Harper is speaking, relieved that the Conservatives have finally come to their senses and relaxed their media relations strategy to the point where Harper can finally be Harper, and field questions on an assortment of topics.

Inside, I doublecheck with Bryn Weese, who handles a lot of the media on the campaign. He, like Teneycke, is a former Sun News employee—a place where I also used to contribute—and generally a good guy.

So I get a question, right, Bryn?

"Let me check with Kory," he says.

He comes back and shakes his head. "You can go talk to Kory about it."

So I do.

"What the fuck, Kory?"

He explains that the tour media—the ones shelling out $78,000—get four questions, and local media get one question. I am neither tour, nor local. I get no questions.

I point out that there are only three tour media present and, lo, there is a question left! Can I have it? Will local media get two? What about Daniel Leblanc, the Globe and Mail reporter who's in the same spot as I?

Nope. There'll just be four questions.

I persist.

"Go write a story about it."

So Harper wraps up, and begins taking questions. One on Duffy. One on retirement benefits. Then Andy Blatchford, Canadian Press reporter, asks: "Why do you only take five questions at your campaign events?"

Harper's answer:

"I think you're all very aware of how we've structured our press conferences. This is a long-standing policy, it was cleared with everybody. And what's important to me is that we're able to answer a range of questions on a broad range of subjects. That's why every day I speak to a different topic."

Well that sounds nice.

So then Harper took a question from a local reporter about his tax break, and then it was a wrap. No fifth question. He does, however, take the mic one more time: "Friends, nobody asked about this, but..." he then preceded to underline how fragile our economy is, answering a question that nobody asked.

Naturally, I began yelling: "Mr. Harper! I have a question. I have a question. I HAVE A QUESTION. What about that fifth question?"

And so on. Harper initially looked at me, then shuffled off to glad-hand. Staffers nervously looked at me. I think one made a beeline for me, but another staffer stopped her. Security glared at me. One supporter turned around, and said something encouraging about how he wanted Harper to answer more questions, too.

Eventually, he departed through the back door. Frustrated, I made for the exit. Teneycke was waiting for me.

"Happy? That was really classy. Really good job," he says, obviously pissed off.

This is where we're at, folks. A half-dozen reporters, the ones that are willing to shell out the hefty sum of money, will be the only ones permitted to ask national questions of the prime minister. That's the media strategy of the Conservative Party on this campaign.

Also a possibility: the prime minister didn't want to answer my question, so he spiked it himself.

Either way, that fucking sucks.

Update: After this story was published, I got this picture in my inbox. It was sent, via sms, from a number that—if you google it—is attached to a press release from one Kory Teneycke regarding the failed TV network Sun News.

Right back at you, Kory.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Photo by Jenko88 via Wikimedia

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A year ago, I got a WhatsApp from a friend asking if I'd like to go to an air show in Ascot, England. Within seconds I replied: "Do not go to that. Have you never seen those disasters with the planes plummeting to the ground?"

An hour later he replied, "I can't go now." I felt genuinely relieved, a feeling that returned to me when I'd read that the event had passed off safely.

I feel slightly embarrassed writing the next line—like a perpetually outraged Daily Mail columnist, or someone who actually handwrites and posts a letter to complain about Rita Ora wearing revealing clothes on The One Show—but: The fact that air shows are still allowed to continue in the modern age is an absolute disgrace.

As a liberal, there aren't many recreational pursuits I would prohibit by law—in fact, there are a few illegal things I'd decriminalize—but I genuinely think air shows should be banned with immediate effect.

The horrific tragedy in Shoreham on Saturday, due to which up to 20 people may end up losing their lives, was not only shocking and sad, it was completely unnecessary. One day later, at a show in Basel in Switzerland, two planes crashed in mid-air and a pilot died. Three weeks ago at Chris Evans's garden party, the pilot of a stunt plane nosedived into the ground and died instantly.

It's legitimate to ask why air shows even exist. For the spectators, there are much safer, less anachronistic things to do on a summer Saturday with your family than watch planes do loop-the-loops while munching on cold chicken drumsticks and sipping warm Pinot Grigio. As for the pilots, are people really prepared to die for air acrobatics? Imagine if there was the same death rate at football matches or athletics meets, or any kind of event; it wouldn't be acceptable. So why do we make an exception for planes?

I'm asking a lot of questions here, but they're all relevant—and what confuses me is that nobody else is asking them.

READ ON MOTHERBOARD: It's Time for Robot Pilots

Google "air show" and it brings up the auto-suggestion "air show crash." Not "air show stunts" or "air show fun": air show crash. Google "air show disasters" and you get a Wikipedia page detailing the list of horrific accidents that have occurred, beginning in 1911, when airplanes barely even worked properly.

There isn't space to list them all here, but here's a quick rundown of just a few:

• There was the Sknyliv disaster in Ukraine, where—in 2002—a Ukrainian air force jet cartwheeled and exploded into a crowd of 10,000 people, killing 77 and injuring 543. The pilots ejected to safety.
• The 1938 Usaquen, Colombia crash, where an air force lieutenant attempted to dive through a narrow gap between two grandstands, failed, crashed, and exploded, raining flaming debris down on spectators. Up to 100 were killed.
• In August of 1988, 300,000 turned out to watch the Ramstein air show at a US air base in West Germany. Seventy people died when the Italian Air Force stunt pilots collided in mid-air and plummeted to the ground.
• At a recreation of the Battle of Britain in August of 2000, Ted Girdler's Aero L-29 Delfin jet failed to pull up from a diving roll and smashed into the English Channel. The show resumed within two hours after they'd fished his body out of the sea.
• In Mulhouse, France, in 1988, an Air France passenger plane did a fly-by, skimmed the top of some trees, crash landed, and caught fire, killing three of the 196 people on board, including a disabled boy who couldn't move to evacuate and a girl who couldn't undo her seat belt.

In the last decade, Britain has witnessed nine air show crashes. All of these—as well as all those others I listed, and the many others I didn't—were completely avoidable.

Related: Watch VICE's new film, 'Searching for Spitman'

I'm not against all thrill-seeking, per se. I can understand the allure of parachuting out of a plane—though it's not something I'd do myself—and the risk there is only with the person who's decided to hurl themselves towards the ground from 12,500 feet. But air shows are tragedies waiting to happen, and the danger lies with many more people than the pilot alone.

"The government, in a joint decision with the UK Civil Aviation Authority, has banned all air shows with immediate effect," are the words I hope to hear in the wake of the Shoreham crash. But air show disasters will continue, because no government minister or department seems remotely bothered about doing anything to stop them. Instead of being condemned, they're actually endorsed by the armed services, including the RAF's Red Arrows.

The very obvious reality, however, is that these shows are the cause of human tragedies every single summer, and it really wouldn't take much to stop them from happening.

Follow Joshua on Twitter.

Natasha Culzac, photographed by Michelle Marshall as part of the MC1R project

How would you describe a typical redhead? Do you think of Julianne Moore: light skinned and beautiful, with rust-coloured hair and a flush of crimson through her porcelain cheeks? Or do you think of Ed Sheeran?

Either way, it's likely the redhead in your mind is white. Red hair is mainly considered the preserve of northern Europe, a Celtic-Germanic trait. This is what resulted in London-based photographer Michelle Marshall's quest to capture as many Afro Caribbean redheads as possible as part of her project, MC1R.

MC1R , or Melanocortin 1 receptor if you're feeling fancy, is the gene responsible for red hair. Mutations in it can cause various degrees of pigmentation. It'll either work "properly," causing your hair to get darker, or it will become dysfunctional, not activate, and then fail to turn red pigment to brown, causing a build-up of red pigment and thus, red hair.

"To make sense of what's around us we put people in boxes—it's a natural reflex and is not intended in a malicious way," says Lyon-born Michelle, who finds her participants on social media, through recommendations or in passing in a packed shopping center. "I'm hoping that with these pictures that reflex changes a bit."

It's estimated that in Scotland, 13 percent of the population have ginger hair. Compare this with the world's population, where 1 to 2 percent is thought to be redhead, and redheads from ethnic minorities are even rarer.

However, there's no concrete data and a distinct lack of research on the ethnicity behind those with red hair. A quirk of nature it might seem, but the heritage of those with the distinctive trait doesn't point to just one isolated corner of the earth—parentage ranges from Brazil to Jamaica to Ghana.

Both parents need to be carriers of the recessive MC1R gene in order for a child to be a redhead, so I wondered whether it had been passed down and across through centuries of human migration, the slave trade and even Irish/Scottish indentured servitude in the British Caribbean in the 17th century.

"During Cromwell's reign thousands of Catholic Irish were deported to the 'West Indies' as indentured servants, and quite a number of people from England's Celtic fringe might have signed such indentures—more or less—voluntarily," Stephan Palmié, co-editor of The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, told me.

WATCH: VICE caught up with longtime activist Jane Fonda to talk climate change:

Barry Starr, a geneticist from Stanford University, took this further: "Red hair carriers in the Caribbean and Africa are for the most part due to migration or gene flow."

After all, in countries with equatorial or sunnier climes, natural selection wouldn't exactly favor physical features such as easily harmed light skin.

"The last evidence I saw, was that there was a strong selection pressure against changes in the MC1R gene that cause it not to work in regions with a lot of sunlight—think Africa," Dr. Starr explained.

"This probably has to do with the pale skin that comes with red hair. This means that even if an MC1R mutation did spontaneously appear previously in African populations, as it did multiple times in Europe, it did not spread and eventually petered out."

Dr. George Busby from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics agrees. He says that the red hair and freckles is the likely result of the historical interactions between Europeans and Africans in the formation of the Caribbean populations—most notably with Brits, as the Spanish and Portuguese went to South America.

George states: "This might also explain why you occasionally see red hair on a black Caribbean person who has two black parents. By chance alone, it might be that they are both carrying a European mutation which has come together in their child."

Most of Michelle's subjects have been in the UK, though she's had a lot of interest in the US and some in mainland Europe. "I've got the whole of London on this," she laughs, when describing her army of spotters.

She says the reaction to her project has been overwhelmingly positive. "The only thing is, a beautiful picture doesn't always relate what it's like to be different.

"There's a flipside to being different: it's not always accepted. Beautiful photography serves one purpose, but in the context of daily life people may not have that reaction."

And she's right. For me, growing up tall, mixed-raced, with thick, frizzy ginger hair, in a predominantly white, working-class seaside town was not the ticket. At 13 years old I was buying skin whitening cream from Boots to pulverize the freckles and at 14, during my Slipknot phase at the turn of the millennium, was violently straightening my newly-dyed black hair. Now, though, I couldn't care less and relish being unique.

One woman who has been in touch with Michelle says her 11-year-old sister is having a hard time because she doesn't fit in, and that she's trying to persuade the youngster to take part in the project to boost her confidence.

"A lot of people have been feeling quite isolated," Michelle says. "I got a message from one boy who said, 'I didn't realize there were so many of us'—I've not even shot 50 people. But the fact that he was able to see a cluster of people that matched his identify and could relate to that is quite positive."

Francis Johnson, a 24-year-old born and bred Bristolian, said: "I never thought to think of myself as different to other kids but... I was chronically made aware of it at times through bullying, unfortunately, as some people just didn't understand my afro hair, my freckles and birthmarks. It also made me question a lot of times what I was 'about' and the true meaning behind my make-up."

"My mother and her mother are both redheads with family deriving from Scotland, through the Celtic bloodline you could say, but looking back deep enough to the ancestry of Celtic people it can go as far back as the Viking era," the dancer and performer said.

Natasha as a child

"On my father's side, my grandfather was also pale-skinned and referred to as a 'white Jamaican' with green eyes, but prominent black features."

Coral Kwayie, a 23-year-old creative and stylist, explained that "growing up in Tunbridge Wells was good, it's a nice area... very white."

"I went to school with the same people from nursery through to primary and secondary school so I didn't realize I was different in that sense," she says. Coral's sister and half-brother are also ginger, so the gene definitely runs down her Ghanaian father's side at least.

"I never hated being ginger, to be honest," she adds. "I have never been bullied or made to feel bad about it apart from this guy once at secondary school who shouted 'ginger' at me on the bus and my friend hit him with a tennis racket and that was that. I have never and would never dye it. I like my hair colour."

West London-born Rosemarie Easom, 35, said: "I didn't like having red hair growing up... [but] I don't mind it now as I guess it's the main thing I'm complimented on.

"Most people assume I dye it, even people that have known me for years."

Given the lack of research on the subject it's impossible to establish the historical prevalence of ethnic gingers. Michelle's subjects are predominantly mixed-raced, which in the context of the UK's mushrooming mixed-raced population makes one think that we could only become more prominent.

And there has never been a better time to be ginger. "The only annoying thing," as Coral says, "is that it's becoming fashionable."

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Take the new magazine dedicated to redheads, also called MC1R. It has just published its first English-language edition profiling international redhead-specific projects from Phillip Gätz, Jens Kaesemann and Thomas Knights—the last of whom was behind the hugely successful "Red Hot" series, which aimed to redefine the ginger male stereotype. Thomas has just also published Red Hot's first ever female calendar, which along with the sale of its male version, raises money for anti-bullying charities.

Then there's Redhead Day UK, which now in its third year is taking place in London on 12 September—the previous incarnations were held in Manchester. The event states: "Redheads have been ridiculed and taunted for too long. Literally, it's been centuries. So it's time that gingers made a stand." They've even got an awards ceremony happening on the day called the MOGOs.

As for the photographic project, Michelle hopes to garner the interest of geneticists because she wants the "science side" to run alongside it: "I want some facts so I can make a final statement," she said. She hopes to have an exhibition some time in the near future, perhaps part funded by a Kickstarter campaign.

"I want to stir the perception that most of us have of a redhead as a white Caucasian individual potentially of Celtic descent," She told VSCO earlier this year. "While there seems to be an underlying Irish/Scottish connection to the MCR1 gene in the occurrence of red hair, I am not sure that being 'ginger' still only means being Scottish, Irish, Welsh, or even being white."

Follow Natasha on Instagram.