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Addicted to the Lottery: Why People Buy False Hope and Lottery Tickets

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Harry Lewis scratches off a Big Money instant game. All photos by the author

Harry Lewis scratches his lottery tickets with baby strokes, always using his lucky penny. He likes to go slowly: First, he reveals his numbers, but not the prizes underneath them. Then he exposes the winning numbers—the ones he's trying to match—at a sluggish speed to build tension. I recently watched him play Big Money, a $20 instant game he hit for $500 once this summer. Harry stopped when a three appeared.

"If it's 36, 35, or 38, I win!" he said.

Harry's blue eyes filled with child-like excitement. We'd met at the gas station where I work, one of Pittsburgh's busiest, and were now sitting at a small pizza place nearby that also sells lottery tickets. Harry continued scratching and cursed when the number turned out to be 31. But then he matched 16 and scraped off the prize—$100. He waved the ticket.

"Are you a believer yet?" Harry asked. "I'm gonna get you so addicted."

I am neither a believer nor an addict, but I'm nowhere near the lottery skeptic I used to be. When I started working at the gas station this past April, I didn't understand how playing the lottery could be considered fun. Sure, I understood the fantasy of hitting it big, who doesn't? But holding a ticket while waiting for numbers to be read on TV or scratching off an instant game didn't seem particularly enjoyable.

I saw the lottery as state-run gambling with unbeatable odds, a government monopoly that raked in $70 billion nationwide in sales last year. That's more money than Americans dished out for movie tickets, music, porn, the NFL, Major League Baseball, and video games combined. Or, as John Oliver joked on a November episode of Last Week Tonight, "Americans spent more on the lottery than they did on America."

In Kentucky, the lottery slogan is: "Somebody's gotta win, might as well be you."

During my first shift, I was nervous as I was given a 30-second tutorial on operating the lottery station. Doing so demanded a fundamental understanding of the lottery, which I did not have. It's not like I'm some rich kid who had his nose turned up: I grew up middle class in suburban Pittsburgh, and my mom bought a ticket every week. I just didn't get it.

While I tried to master the lottery station, some customers were patient and helpful—but the majority were exasperated and rude. "God, can't they hire someone who knows what they're doing?" one woman exploded. Another blurted out, "They hire idiots here" when I made a mistake. The manager reminded me that cashiers need to have thick skin—people tend to be verbally abusive toward people in this line of work. But while other customers could be snippy and rude, lottery players were brutal.

One night, when I was the only person working the register, I got slammed. I was moving as fast as I could when a man yelled: "Excuse me?" I turned around and saw him leaning next to the lottery station. "Anyone gonna wait on me?" I asked the man to wait a moment, and he slapped the counter and grunted. I gave in to his tantrum and hurried over to sell him seven Mega Millions tickets. His attitude immediately changed once the tickets printed. He even smiled.

"You're gonna win, sir. I can feel it."

"I hope you're right," the man said, oblivious to my sarcasm.

That's when I realized lottery players run on hope, and that a little feigned enthusiasm could keep them in check. For weeks afterward, I started each sale by saying, "Are you ready to win?" People lapped it up.

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State lottery agencies have clearly learned this, marketing their games with corny slogans like New Jersey's "Give your dream a chance." In Kentucky, it's "Somebody's gotta win, might as well be you;" California's ads ask people to "Imagine what a buck could do." They're not just selling lottery tickets—they're selling hope.

A sign advertising lottery games in Pittsburgh's East Liberty neighborhood.

States spend millions on promoting the lottery. In 2011, Oregon's ad budget was $26.6 million over a two year period; in Ohio, the state used to time advertisements for its Super Lotto game to coincide with the delivery of Social Security and government benefit checks. Poor people are the primary targets of these campaigns—a fact that has made some of my interactions with lottery players uneasy. Multiple customers have told that they spend around $3,000 each year on the lottery and never win. Each person said they continue to play "because it's fun."

I often ask people what they would do if they hit the Powerball.Every customer I've asked has heard of the tragedies that have befallen past lottery winners, but they all retort with stories of people they know who won huge sums of money and lived happily ever after. Virginia Dingle is one of these people. She said used to work at Shadyside Hospital with a woman who won $1.1 million.

"And one of these days, I might be rich, too," she added. "Who knows?"

Read: Suddenly Coming Into Money Makes You More Right Wing

Virginia was a cardiac catheterization lab technician for 33 years. She lasted two months in retirement before she got bored and took a job as a gym security guard at the University of Pittsburgh. I talked to Virginia one day while she swiped ID cards. She's the most adorable security guard on campus—standing at five-foot-four, she has dark brown hair cropped short and wears thick bifocals. She likes to read steamy romance novels on the job, but that day she had a copy of the Pittsburgh Courier, the city's century-old African-American newspaper. She refused to tell me her age, but her face brightened when I suggested mid-60s.

She also refused to tell me her numbers. "You might give me bad luck," she said.

Virginia is the stereotypical little old lady gambler. A widow with five grandkids, she plays the slots at casinos in Pittsburgh and nearby Wheeling, West Virginia. She also bets on the ponies and the greyhounds. She told me that she's lost more than she's won on the lottery, and admits that she sees it as a form of gambling. But she's adamant that she doesn't have a problem. Swears she can stop any time. She used to play her numbers twice a day, but then cut back to just the afternoon drawing.

Virginia jumped out of her chair and dug through her jean jacket to check the tickets she'd bought that morning. She had forgotten to play one of her lucky numbers.

"I could play it tonight, but what if it comes out during the day?" she asked. "I should call my girlfriend and have her play it for me. But I don't want to get in her debt too much. I already owe her a dollar."

Harry, with his lucky penny and his scratch-off tickets, disagrees that the games amount to. He thinks it's just for kicks. "Going to a casino, now that's gambling," he said.

A billboard in the Hill District, one of Pittsburgh's poorest neighborhoods, promotes a scratch off lottery ticket that costs $20

Gary Miller, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Lottery, which is the only state lottery to benefit senior citizens, maintains that it's not gambling.

"We consider lottery games a form of entertainment," he said over the phone. "There is an element of chance involved, but primarily, it's entertainment."

The language is significant. If the states were to admit that the lottery is gambling, then the millions spent on advertising would seem even more sinister. It would also open the government up to accusations of running a monopoly, because public sector lotteries provide people like Virginia and Harry with better odds.

But I was struck by the notion that the lottery is entertainment—I saw the lottery as the antithesis of fun. Then again, I was starting to have fun myself, performing behind a gas station counter, egging on the people who bought lottery tickets.


The pinball machine started as an illegal gambling game.


One day, I waved a woman's Powerball stub in the air. "This ticket right here," I said. "It's gonna solve all your problems."

The woman laughed and thanked me. She said she now felt lucky. An hour later, I stopped a man as he was ordering a Match 6 ticket. "You're gonna win," I said. "I can feel it!"

The man said I was the greatest cashier he'd ever met, and for days, I considered becoming a preacher. Or a car salesman. Away from the gas station, I joked with friends that lottery players are like that buddy in your crew who everyone picks on, and he keeps coming back for more. Occasionally, I'd switch from amping people up to deflating them instead. "Actually, you're probably not gonna win," I'd say. "The odds are insane." Once, I even suggested that a customer invest in stocks and bonds.

The man cringed. "Where's the fun in that?" he said.

This couple has been turning dead lottery tickets into art.

There was that word again: fun. What was it that people got out of this? I finally broke down and decided to play, starting with Pick 3. My first ticket: 474. That night, I checked the drawing online and saw that 464 won. So close! I could've bought new tires!

Suddenly, I got it. I had once laughed at the TV drawings, but now I saw how they create drama and build suspense, especially for people with an attachment to the number.

I called Harry to talk about numbers. Over the phone, he told me to play the triples. "The triples are due," he said.

Sure enough, on a Friday in mid-July, the Pick 3 was 999. Harry won.

One guy ran into the gas station rambling about how he found 19 dimes under his couch, so he played 1910.

How people come up with their numbers can be pretty interesting. Once, a woman told me she saw her and her son's birthdays on a license plate and thought it was a sign. A lot of cops play their badge numbers. One guy ran into the gas station rambling about how he found 19 dimes under his couch, so he played 1910.

When I recounted this to Harry, he bit into his slice of pizza, shaking his head at that kind of logic. He used to keep track of what numbers were winning, which is pretty common among lottery players, but it became too frustrating.

"You have to just go with your gut," he said. Harry's wife, Carol, passed away in 2010, and he estimates that since her death he has won close to $20,000. "She's up there telling me what to do."

Harry Lewis holds up his lucky penny after winning $100 on an instant game

Harry really believes that. When he gets a gut feeling, he thinks it comes from Carol. He still wears his wedding ring, and he swears he doesn't have a gambling problem.

"I can stop at any time," he said.

Last summer, Harry won $1,000 playing a scratch-off game. In the morning, he took the ticket to a grocery store to cash in, and he bought three more instant games—and he claims he won $1,000 on each of those. That's when his lucky penny was born.

But it's not all about supernatural power and lucky charms. Harry swears he can tell a winning game by looking at the card. To prove it, he flipped over a Big Money ticket, and pointed at two small black lines around the edges. They were hardly noticeable, but according to Harry, the black lines always indicate a winner. He won $100 with that ticket.

I ordered a cheesesteak hoagie and bought a Big Money ticket myself. Harry inspected the back and pointed out the two black lines. We'd been scratching off instant games for almost two hours. He had pointed out tickets without the lines, and they were all duds. I revealed the numbers slowly, just like Harry, and I won my money back—$20.

"Hurry!" Harry said. "Go buy another one! There's always two winners in a row."

I handed in the winning ticket and got another Big Money game. There were black lines near the edges. It was a $40 winner.

"See!" Harry said. "Isn't this fun?"

Follow Gavin Jenkins on Twitter.


VICE Vs Video Games: ‘Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’ Is the Perfect Stealth Game

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I crawled to the edge of the cliff and scoped out the base with my binoculars, tagging every sentry I could spot—some were tucked behind sandbags, some in watchtowers, and a few were patrolling the base's perimeter. I noticed this reconnaissance spot en route, and had put a bear to sleep just to get to it. The base was at the top of a sloped road embedded into the side of a mountain. Getting up meant getting past about 20 eyes, and night was yet to fall. Just as I was about to light my Phantom Cigar to speed up the passing of time in a haze of mind-altering herbs, a sandstorm approached.

It was the perfect cover to sneak into the base, slipping between patrol routes and crawling on my stomach past unsuspecting sentries. It took some patience, but I managed to get up to the entrance unseen, just as the weather cleared. Inside were some barracks made of corrugated metal; Kim Wilde's "Kids in America" was playing on a distant radio. I had to snag the tape. This wasn't my mission, but who wouldn't want to be able to drive around Kabul, Afghanistan while listening to iconic 80s pop music? This, it turns out, was my downfall. One guard spotted me as I exited the barracks, alerted by my clumsy legs knocking over some pottery as I vaulted through the window.

Time slowed as he reached for his gun, and I put a bullet-shaped hole in his head as a reflex. His buddies weren't too happy about me venting their friend's skull, forcing me to dive back through the window under a hail of gunfire and hide under one of the beds. I was sure that would fool them, but the door opened and, instead of enemies pouring into my sights like in most video games, a grenade rolled into the room. All I could do was move to the next bed along as the explosion threw the room's contents all around me. The soldiers then stormed in, so I jumped out from my hiding spot and used close quarter combat to knock them down and escape in the confusion.

While the enemy searched the barracks for me, I used the opportunity to find and extract the prisoner—this was what I came for in the first place, after all. He was tucked away indoors, further into the base, and I managed to sneak in and pick the lock on his cell without any issues. I threw him over my shoulder and carried him outside, hooking him up to my Fulton recovery device which yanked him into the clouds with a yelp and ferried him safely back to my ever-expanding base. I was now at the mountain's peak looking down at the soldiers I had made my way past earlier, all now on alert. Thanks, Kim.

A jeep and a truck pulled into the entrance. Reinforcements.

Nearby was an enemy radar dish, so I planted some C4, crawled to the mountain's edge, and detonated it. The explosion drew them all up the mountain path and I slid down the rock face behind them, jumping into the jeep they came in and escaping before they could react. I mowed down one unfortunate grunt on the way to my helicopter extraction, and escaped the area unscathed.

Article continues after the video below


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This is a typical mission in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and there's hundreds of other ways it could have played out. While it's a stealth game through and through, MGSV provides you with some of the best tools in gaming and lets you test them out in some deftly sculpted scenarios. It actively encourages experimentation instead of chastising you for it like many stealth games do, urging you to play with all its toys. And what toys they are: you can create inflatable decoys to distract, slide down dunes in a cardboard box, whizz around on a personal bipedal mech, make your horse take a dump on the road to cause an enemy vehicle to spin out, call in artillery strikes, and loads more. Each of these has multiple options of its own, too: like how the decoy can inflate near an enemy and throw them off a cliff, or how you can hang from the side of your horse and pass by an unsuspecting enemy camp. Equipment can be airdropped in at any time, rendezvousing with it en route to your objective or landing it directly onto an enemy's stupid head.

Well, they're not actually stupid. The enemies in MGSV are some of the most convincing I've seen in a game. If you are spotted they will work together, moving in pairs to hunt you down, flanking you, and calling in backup from nearby outposts. You can disrupt this communication by taking down radio masts and power lines, or by subduing the enemies in surrounding outposts so there's no backup to call. It's overlapping systems like this that make the game so satisfying. You might choose to soften up a base with a mortar from afar before sneaking in, only to find that you've accidentally disrupted the enemy's communication network and lowered their air defenses.

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Obviously none of this would mean anything if the act of skulking through a base wasn't brilliant, but it is. MGSV's stealth takes camouflage, distraction, light and shadow, and line of sight, and blends them all together to create something incredible. You can use the topography to crawl unseen mere meters from an enemy, hide in foliage, shoot out lights, and dive behind cover. It's constantly tense—when creeping through an enemy compound you're like a coiled spring, ready to roll onto your back and fire at any sentry that makes a sudden movement.

Perhaps MGSV's best quality is how the spacing of its checkpoints encourages you to live with your mistakes and adapt, rather than reach for the restart button. It helps that there are as many combat options, and you can evade and slip back into the darkness or use the chaos as a distraction. MGSV is an anecdote generator, each mission creating a set piece through interacting systems. I've always been keen on stealth as a gameplay mechanic, with the original Metal Gear Solid on the PlayStation giving me my first taste as I entered my teens. It's fitting that this series' creator, Hideo Kojima, after so much iteration and experimentation with the core gameplay, would finally perfect the stealth formula with what is, presumably, his final Metal Gear release.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is released for PlayStation 4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC on September 1.

Follow Kirk McKeand on Twitter.

'I'm Desperate': Ashley Madison Users Confide in a Security Researcher

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'I'm Desperate': Ashley Madison Users Confide in a Security Researcher

What's Mavis Beacon Up To These Days? Nothing. She's Fake

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Earlier this month, VICE ran a story about the now-famous Berenstein/Berenstain Bears conspiracy theory, positing that we live in a Matrix-style reality simulation, not the reality of our childhoods, where "Berenstain" had a third "e" in it. Conspiracy theories, aside, however, it's spelled "Berenstain" and it always was.

But maybe it'll also blow your mind that there was never a living, breathing human being named Mavis Beacon, and that you learned to type from an emotionless robot with a human face slapped on it.

"She's our Betty Crocker. She's our symbol of excellence," Joe Abrams, one of Mavis Beacon's creators told VICE in an interview. Abrams was one of the founders of The Software Toolworks, the company that designed Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!.

If you grew up in the 80s, some tech-savvy person you knew forked over a whole $39.99 to get their hands on Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!, a sensational new educational tool. If you grew up in the 90s, maybe you remember Mavis as the least appealing "game" in the bundle of CD-Roms your dad picked up at Costco. Either way, it was always around.

And someone probably made you spend some time practicing on it. While there were actual great PC games out about killing Nazis, killing space demons, and killing it at puzzle-solving, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing! wasn't so much a game as, well, a system for teaching you how to type without looking at the keyboard.

Abrams told us the creation of a whole fictional character was part of the company's overall strategy at the time: Anthropomorphize the programs. This started with 1985's The Chessmaster 2000, which stood out from a large crop of early chess games and became a legendary franchise.

"We felt like if you could believe that you were playing another person, as opposed to a machine, that would make it much more engaging," Abrams said. He and his team hired character actor Will Hare to dress up as a wizard, and pose for the now iconic cover. Hare's chin-scratching old man character forever symbolized, as Abrams put it, "a person, a wizard, a chessmaster!" rather than a "black box," a term Abrams uses for the computerized rules and the opponent's artificial intelligence.

Mavis Beacon was the next logical step. Typing programs were huge at the time, Abrams told us, but there wasn't a solid system with brand recognition to work from. "As computer software became more mass-market, people were looking much more towards associating movies and other products with computer products, so there was a lot of licensing and promotion," Abrams said, adding, "It wasn't like Evelyn Wood's Speed Reading."

Evelyn Wood was a teacher in the mid-twentieth century who invented the term "speed reading," and made a name for herself by co-creating a program called Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics. In 1985, two years before Mavis Beacon debuted, an Evelyn Wood PC application had been released called The Evelyn Wood Dynamic Reader.

But there was more to the creation of Beacon than the company's policy of anthropomorphism in service of sales. According to Abrams, it's a story of serendipity.

The Software Toolworks had recently combined with a software company owned by a minor celebrity named Les Crane. Crane, who had an excess of personality, had been a talk show host in the 1960s, and a creator of weird, spoken-word music in the 1970s. According to Abrams, Crane was instrumental to the creation of Mavis Beacon.

One day at their office in Beverly Hills, during the creation of their typing program, Crane asked Abrams to join him on a trip to Saks Fifth Avenue. According to Abrams, there at the perfume counter, while shopping for a gift, Crane and Abrams met their typing teacher.

Abrams described Renee L'Esperance as a "stunning Haitian woman," with "three-inch fingernails." Crane instantly wanted to put her face on the box for his typing software. They got to talking, and despite the concerns Abrams voiced ("She's never been near a keyboard!"), they soon made a deal. Abrams told us they paid D'esprance a flat fee, bought her a conservative outfit that befitted a typist, and rented a business square in Century City on a Sunday, in order to take the cover photo. As for her long fingernails, Crane said "Don't worry. We won't show her hands," according to Abrams.

Owners of one of the first 10,000 printings of the program can get a glimpse of her hands, however. There's a flap, featuring a full body photo of D'esprance walking with someone who is ostensibly a pupil in her typing academy, played by Abrams' son.

Abrams said Crane came up with the first name, "Mavis," in honor of singer Mavis Staples. "Beacon," had something to do with a "beacon of light," Abrams said.

To this day "Mavis Beacon" somehow just sounds like a legendary mistress of the keys. I dare you to come up with something more plausible. Gladys Clackson Teaches Typing? Cheryl Tickering Teaches Typing? Margot Martindale Teaches Typing? Nothing even compares to Mavis Beacon.

If it's been a while since you actually "played" Mavis Beacon teaches typing, you should try nostalgia tripping on it for a while. It scratches the same itch as retrogaming with Oregon Trail, except it's even more educational.


In 1987, when the program debuted, there was no Snopes.com, so your imagination could run wild. From the moment you saw the box the floppy discs came in, with it's friendly and businesslike female figurehead, the narrative seemed to write itself: Mavis seemed to be a professional lady in Reagan's 1980s. She'd risen to such excellence as a speedy and accurate typist—at the UN maybe?—that now it was time for her to pass on her technique to her fellow Americans.

Was it a lie? Not really, according to Abrams. "We did not tell anybody that we had made it up, nor did we tell anybody that it was real," he said. But he does seem to have allowed the myth to perpetuate.

"One day I was walking through ComDex, which was a big computer show back in the 80s, and one of my frenemies—who worked for a competing company—said, 'How did you land Mavis Beacon to endorse your product and use your teaching method? We've been after her for years, and we never could find her and get her to endorse our product!'" Abrams told us the folks at The Software Toolworks didn't respond by falsely claiming to have scored the endorsement of a legendary typist, "nor did we come out and do anything to say, this is not a real person."

That frenemy was far from the only one. "I thought I read somewhere that she had won a big typing contest, or that she ran a school, or something," a guy named Brent Bynum told The Seattle Times in 1995. "Teachers call in and want to know more about Mavis and where she's teaching these days," Adrienne Hankin, who ran PR for the Mavis Beacon brand told The New York Times back in 1998.

When we pressed him to see if he ever had the same kind of possible backstory for Mavis Beacon that we did, Abrams claimed there really never was one. "We had three goals. To walk into a software display and have our package catch your eye, number one. Our second thing was, we wanted you to turn the package around and read the back copy. Third, we wanted you to take it to the cash register," he said.

According to Abrams, things got off to a rough start, and that might have been cause by old-fashioned racism. "There was feedback that said an educational product with a black woman on the cover will not sell in certain parts of the country." This led, he suspects, to early market performance that was only one third the rate of sales projections. Eventually, The New York Times endorsed it, Abrams said. "I think that the pull from that article caused distributors who were initially reluctant to take it because of the package to have to take it because the demand for the product was so great."

Regardless of the seemingly racial undertones of the early delay in success, Abrams said, over time, Mavis Beacon "just became part of the popular culture." Mavis Beacon taught millions of people to type. Today, her name means touch-typing. In February for instance, Techcrunch described a blank keyboard as "For Mavis Beacon Graduates Only." A good way to say you still "hunt-and-peck" as you type is "I'm no Mavis Beacon."

Today, Abrams no longer has any control over the Mavis Beacon brand, the rights to which are shared by two publishers. For a while, Beacon was digitally edited into new outfits. Today, she's played by a different model entirely. Abrams' feelings on that are mixed.

"It's a little strange, I have to say. I'm really glad it's still there, I'm glad that still, kids are learning how to type because of the product, but it doesn't look anywhere near the product was when we did it, so I don't have that strong association with it."

"She used to look much more conservative because teachers used to be viewed as much more conservative. Now she's more of a modern professorial type of teacher," Adrienne Hankin told The New York Times.

Where is Mavis—I mean Renee L'Esperance—today? Abrams can't quite say. "We had some occasional contact with her through 1990, and she was thrilled about the success, and started to be recognized," he said, but 1990 was the year The Software Toolworks left LA for San Francisco, and Abrams and D'esprance lost touch.

According to a 20-year-old story in The Seattle Times, the last anyone had heard of D'esprance, she was living a quiet life back in the Caribbean. And she's probably not sleeping on stacks of money either; according to that story she does not collect residuals.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

How We Rolled Up North: The Rise, Fall, and Renaissance of the Alaska Rap Scene

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How We Rolled Up North: The Rise, Fall, and Renaissance of the Alaska Rap Scene

The Best Musical of the Year Is a Hip-Hop Show About Alexander Hamilton

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Ensemble and Lin-Manuel Miranda in 'Hamilton.' All photos by Joan Marcus

Alexander Hamilton's handiwork is woven throughout our contemporary American republic—from the vast power of our federal government, to the centrality of big banks in our national and global financial system, to the location of Washington, DC, on the banks of the Potomac River. Yet it is probably fair to say that Hamilton is one of the least known of the United States's "Founding Fathers." Even his majestic home, the Grange, which still rises in all its grandeur in Harlem, probably eludes the notice of most New Yorkers, let alone tourists.

If there is any work that might transform popular knowledge about Hamilton's life and career—as well as relate key facts about early US history and spark a deeper discussion about our present-day conflicts and future solutions—Lin-Manuel Miranda's biographical musical Hamilton: An American Musical, now playing at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway, is a prime candidate. Not only have Miranda (who wrote the book, lyrics, and music) and his collaborators fashioned one of the most original and riveting theatrical pieces to grace a New York stage in years—the best since Stew's 2008 musical Passing Strange, I'd argue—but he has created a pedagogical marvel that is never pedantic, a savvy display of hip-hop's range and vitality, and a political showpiece that avoids ideological pratfalls.

Although Alexander Hamilton's biography is clearly the musical's fulcrum, it presents a compelling overview of our current political divide.

Miranda had already demonstrated his skills as a lyricist and writer with his acclaimed 2008 musical In the Heights. With Hamilton, which he based on Ron Chernow's biography of the US's first secretary of the treasury, he succeeds in simplifying a complex story without rendering it simplistic. This biomusical gets most of the big facts, along with many of the small ones, right. We learn about Hamilton's orphan, out-of-wedlock origins on the Caribbean island of Nevis; his service as a secretary for General George Washington during the Revolutionary War; his courtship of the socially elite Schuyler sisters and marriage to one of them; his decades-long, increasingly tense relationship with Aaron Burr; his tenure in the new, post-revolutionary US government and battles with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; his stint as banker and a founding editor of the New York Post; and numerous points in between, including the TMZ-worthy sex scandal with a married woman named Maria Reynolds he cannily seized control of toward the end of his life.

Miranda sketches these moments swiftly and confidently, grounding them in fantastic musical numbers. Although Alexander Hamilton's biography is clearly the musical's fulcrum, it could have been titled A Secret History of the Founding of America, because it presents a compelling overview of our current political divide. On the federalist side stands Hamilton, with his push for consolidating the colonies' individual powers into a national force and his reluctance to enter into other country's military conflicts, while on the other we see his antagonists pushing for states' rights, denouncing Wall Street, and wondering why the slave-owning states have to subsidize New York. Sound familiar? And yet Hamilton never beats its audience over the head while bringing these connections to life.

Phillipa Soo, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Jasmine Cephas Jones in 'Hamilton'

Also crucial to how Miranda changes the game is his masterful, often dazzling use of hip-hop, in its many forms and styles, seamlessly fused to Tin Pan Alley show tunes, Gilbert and Sullivan songs, Brit pop, Euro-American classical music, R&B, Shakespeare's plays, and more, as building blocks for the entire piece. There are riffs on and stylistic echoes of a wide array of the genre's superstars, including Grandmaster Flash, Biggie Smalls, Tech N9ne, the Fugees, and DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, as well as beat-box-flavored, Chopper, and freestyle-inspired moments. Especially notable are the rap battles; one between Thomas Jefferson (Daveed Diggs) and Hamilton (Miranda)—about the federal debt, of all things—brings the house down. Miranda has created what feels like a musical language not just for today, but for the future. More than once as I listened to Miranda's lyrical cunning, I thought that the score would make a brilliant rap concept album to rival those by Prince Paul or RZA.

Hamilton is a musical, however, and makes fullest use of the talented actors who bring it to life, bringing to the surface a deep current of American historical irony in the process. Instead of the usual whitewashing, here the American story comes to life through the voices and performances of a gifted, mostly black and brown cast. Among the many standouts are Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr, Hamilton's early supporter and eventual murderer. Odom starts out strong and continuously soars as the show proceeds. His set piece "The Room Where It Happens" is among the best in the show, his voice white-hot with resentment and envy. Odom endows his villainous role with nuance throughout the production, making Aaron Burr far more interesting than anyone might care to admit.

Other impressive performers include the dulcet-toned Phillipa Soo as Eliza Hamilton, the wife who must share her husband's affections with her sister, Angelica, vividly evoked by Renée Elise Goldsberry; and Diggs, a fount of humor and lyrical gifts, who plays both the Marquis de Lafayette and a Dougie-dancing, Cab Calloway–esque Jefferson in his Act II opening scene, "What'd I Miss." (In addition to razor-sharp comic timing and rap skills, Diggs's glorious coif alone ensures you will remember him.) The rest of the cast, including the nimble ensemble, sparkles too.


VICE Meets New York State Senator Chuck Schumer:


And then there is Lin-Manuel Miranda himself. Like a demiurge, Miranda commands the stage, every aspect of Hamilton appearing to course through his nerve fibers and emanate from his limbs. Whenever he raps, the words flow effortlessly from his tongue. And while he is perhaps less a natural singer or a dancer than others in the cast, when he utters the lines "I am not throwing away my shot," he tips the song's words with a gravity that feels as much Hamilton's life charge as Miranda's. His vision—striking, fresh, and so needed now—comes through whether he is onstage or not.

What is utterly clear when the cast takes its final bows at the musical's end is that Miranda not only has not thrown away his shot but has fired one across the bow of contemporary musical theater. With its inventive use of nontraditional casting, Hamilton manages to draw out a latent, ironic historical thread we too easily forget, filling a stage with a mostly black and brown cast playing what some would consider roles to be reserved for white actors. At the same time, by re-situating black and brown people—voices and bodies at the center of the historical conversation—it literally brings to life those heroic "saucy boys, Negroes, [and] mulattoes" that John Adams—who comes in for bit of ribbing in several scenes—denounced in his defense of the British troops who had participated in the Boston Massacre. Add in the anti-slavery references and the dramatization of political compromises that sunk any post-Revolutionary promises of freedom, and it's clear that Hamilton is resonating on multiple frequencies at a time when the Black Lives Matters movement has shifted discussions in the public sphere.

Daveed Diggs as Thomas Jefferson in 'Hamilton'

Hamilton also offers one of the best and most compelling counternarratives to the increasingly extreme conservative rhetoric around immigration. Alexander Hamilton, Miranda never lets the audience forget, was an immigrant from a small island, with a sketchy education, no money, and few prospects, and became the target of constant social and political antagonism. Even factoring in the neoliberal undercurrent of the hardworking, self-made man the musical espouses, Hamilton artfully hammers away at the idea that power should be concentrated in the hands of an elite, or that opportunity should not be extended as widely as possible, repeatedly connecting this thread to larger ideas about race and class. Many of the musical's catchphrases, including "We are a movement," "Rise up," and "The world turned upside down," would sound as fitting at a protest as they do on Broadway.

This thrilling work of art sets a high and invigorating standard, and everyone who can—especially every student in each one of New York's elementary and secondary schools—should hurry to see it. They will enjoy it and learn a great deal from it, and then want to see it again and again.

Follow John Keene on Twitter.

Click here for Hamilton tickets and showtimes.

Why We Need an Alternative History of the 20th Century

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Occultist Aleister Crowley, a recurring character in 'Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of The Twentieth Century'

The 20th century—like most centuries, I suppose—was an eventful one. It had a couple of world wars, the advent of pop music, inconceivable technological advancements, tremendous progress in human rights, unprecedented population growth, and the relentless draining of our planet's resources.

All these things together make one of the most peculiar, globe-changing centuries of recent history. But what we're taught about in school, and the historical occasions still written about today, only cover a slim portion of the people and events that shaped the world we live in now. What about the murkier, more confusing stuff—quantum entanglement, cubism, Aleister Crowley, relativity, psychedelics, "Emperor Norton," and chaos theory?

John Higgs, author of The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band That Burned a Million Quid, has decided to address some of these less covered 20th-century developments in his new book, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of The Twentieth Century, an alternative history of this weird and wild patch of time that we've just clambered out of.

I met up with Higgs to find out what else we should be concentrating on when it comes to the recent history of humanity.

John Higgs. Photo by the author

VICE: Hi, John. Why did you decide to rewrite the history of the 20th century?
John Higgs: I came to writing quite late in my life; it doesn't come naturally to me. I'm not a historian; I don't have a degree in English. My background is entirely wrong to be writing a history of the 20th century [laughs].

So where did the idea come from?
The idea behind the book is that we're very comfortable with all the innovations and discoveries up until the end of the 19th century; photography, electricity, agriculture, democracy—as a whole, we're fairly happy with these and understand how they work. Then we get to the turn of 20th century and we get relativity, existentialism, modernism, quantum mechanics, and all these things that are fairly terrifying for many of us, so we back away from them. Which results in some of us in the 21st century looking at the world through 19th-century eyes and not fully making sense of it all. We need to take on board everything we learned from the 20th century and not shy away from it all.

His Imperial Majesty Emperor Norton I, a.k.a. Joshua A Norton. Photo by Notwist via Wikimedia

Many of the characters in the book—rocket engineer and occultist Jack Parsons, say, or Joshua Norton, the self-proclaimed "Emperor of the United States"—aren't historical figures you often read about. How did you choose whom to focus on?
The story I wanted to tell was of the rise of the individual, so I was looking for characters that best encapsulated this main theme. They're the people that are right on the edge, the people that are so far out there that nobody understands them. These characters are often perfectly in tune with the direction that we're going. [The artist and poet] Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, for example, was one of the people that was truly surfing the change; I just had to write about her.

Yeah, in the book you write that the end of the 19th century marked the end of the hierarchical age of empires, and the 20th century was the age of the individual. Can you expand on that?
Pre–20th century, we lived in an age when large parts of the world were carved up by colonialism—where you were in the hierarchy was more important than who you were as a person. If you were a serf or peasant, then that's who you were, regardless of whether you were a good person. It seems appalling to us now, but it was how people understood themselves. It was extremely harsh on the majority of people, but it was stable, and it was the only model of society that we had. It was something that was so integral to all of history, so when it all disappeared almost in the blink of an eye when WWI ended, it was a really big deal.

The 20th century was about seeing and understanding ourselves as individuals. In the first half of the century we were rushing in that direction, through politics and other areas such as fiction like Buck Rogers and cowboy films. [Occultist] Aleister Crowley is a recurring character in the book because I feel that his idea of "Do What Thou Wilt" crystallized that change towards the individual. It's the individual defined at its most explicit. It is shocking and also a bit problematic.

This was the period where we tried to come to terms with different perspectives and with not having a fixed point of society, or omphalos [an object of world centrality]. This deletion of the arbitrary omphalos happened in many areas, including art, politics, and psychology, during this period. It was difficult, it was violent, but we kind of got there in the end.

What about elsewhere? Surely there are many countries and states that didn't change in quite the same way the West did during the 20th century?
In the East, it's slightly different. The Islamic world still has that fixed point in society. Mecca is the omphalos, and some elements of that pre-20th-century hierarchical age still exist in that part of the world. These places have now been plunged into the modern digital age, where they're connected to people from all over the world that see the world in different ways and have different beliefs. It's sad, but it's no surprise to me that there's so much violence because of it.

I believe there's a war of the Certain going on; people declaring loudly that they're right and that everyone else is wrong. To me, this seems to be missing the lessons we learned in the 20th century. There are 7 billion people on this earth, and no two people will see exactly eye-to-eye on their beliefs, so to say that you're indefinitely right in your beliefs and that your point of view is correct in a way that the others aren't is, if anything else, a poor grasp of mathematics and statistics. We're all just different perspectives looking at things. I think that's one of the things we learned from the 20th century.

TRENDING ON NOISEY: Here's Every Annoying Person You'll Meet at a Festival

In the book you write of how we're just at the beginning of the Network Age.
Yeah, we've gone from the "know your place" pre-20th-century structure to the individualistic "no such thing as society" Thatcherite structure, but it doesn't have to end there. Thinking of ourselves as individuals isn't enough to make sense of who we are.

For example, people born and raised in the 20th century, the age of the individual, see somebody taking a selfie and they immediately think of vanity and narcissism, but that's a dated perspective. The millennial generation would just see it as something to be shared in that person's networks, and the photo can only be understood—and only really exists—in that wider context. To them, it's just somebody smiling at their friends.

It's very easy to look at network society and think it's awful, and to be scared by it because it's arrived so suddenly and it's been traumatic for some people. In the hierarchical world, corruption would build up within institutions because of the way that information used to flow. Therefore, corruption became normalized, like in MP expenses, the Vatican child abuse, Fifa, and so on. However, because information now flows around the world in a network, there are fewer corners in which the corruption can hide. The feedback loops that are now in place have put responsibilities on our freedoms; we can still do what we want and become who we want to become, but we can't act and be entirely free from repercussions.

Because of things like the online mob mentality and public shaming.
Of course there are horrible, nasty people out there and people can get publicly shamed, but it's only because it's all so new. I can't help but think that all these feedback loops—this getting used to what other people think, and becoming responsible for your own actions, thoughts, and words—has got to be positive at the heart of it. The age is in its infancy, and the teething pains can be quite terrifying.

There are still huge unsustainable imbalances in wider society; the global economy, climate change, these things can't go on as they are. We can't hide away and pretend we don't know about these things any more—we're much more aware. We won't be skipping into a utopian future just yet, but the network seems to be our greatest hope for overcoming the problems that we've built up for ourselves.


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


What do you think the future of capitalism might be?
I do fear that because neoliberal capitalism funnels wealth and therefore power upward to an increasing minority, the people that have the power to change things have no desire to do so. They are just so heavily invested in the status quo. That's a very difficult problem to understand. The hope is that between where we are now and where we need to be, it doesn't turn violent. I can't see it continuing indefinitely on its current path peacefully. If the inequality continues at the same rate it has been, then I don't think CEOs will make it out alive.

In the book, you cover what you describe as "genuinely new, unexpected and radical" developments, like relativity, cubism, and quantum mechanics. Do you think there's room for innovations and events of that caliber in our immediate future?
I think the book shows that genuinely new, unexpected, and radical things keep coming, and that gives me hope. Things are changing in a different way. It used to be that a great individual would appear and put forward an idea. A figure like John Lennon, Sid Vicious, or Bob Marley would crystallize a movement. We don't seem to have these great individuals any more, but we have these huge movements. It's no longer about leaders.

Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century will be released on August 27. If you're in London, there's a book launch party on August 28 at the Social on Little Portland Street.

Follow Jak Hutchcraft on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: UK Man Receives Bionic Penis Implant 37 Years After Childhood Accident

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Yikes. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

An unfortunate childhood accident left him without a penis but thanks to a bionic implant, 43-year-old Mohammed Abad will be able to have sex for the first time.

Abad, who is from Edinburgh, Scotland, lost his penis when he was dragged under a car for 600 feet at age 6, according to the Sun.

"I lost all my genitals," he said.

Surgeons at University College London have spent the past three years using a skin graft from Abad's arm to fashion a replacement. His final operation was last month. The result? Twin tubes that inflate to an eight-inch erection with the push of a button.

"When you want a bit of action you press the 'on' button," Abad said. "It takes seconds. Doctors have told me to keep practising."

The button, located on Abad's testicles, allows his new penis to expand using fluid from a pump planted inside his stomach. University College London has also used the procedure to help men with micropenises—penises less than two inches in length—enjoy a more fulfilling sex life.

Abad, a security guard, is divorced. He married his ex-wife without revealing the accident and she left a year later.

He said he won't make that mistake again.

"I'm looking forward to a date, looking forward to meeting somebody who I can maybe practice with," he said.

"The ultimate goal would be to have kids, which would be a miracle."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.


Crust Punk Porn Is as Grimy as You Think It Is

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Myers and Alms. Photos via their Tumblr

It all started with Tumblr (because that's how things start these days).

Look At This Fucking Oogle: Pornography For Homeless People is a Tumblr devoted to throwing up photos of crust punk kids, train-hopping vagrants in ripped fish nets—sometimes naked and sporting butt plugs—white people with dreads, and so, so many street dogs. Spawned as a face-tatted, studded denim-vested version of that popular website Look at This Fucking Hipster, some people viewed it with noses turned up, others were looking for their friends, and a few squares got secretly turned on.

Byron Myers, a crust punk welder living in Philadelphia, decided with his friends that it would be fun to make a sexy calendar devoted to the same thing, and to raise money to start an independent porn website featuring porn they'd want to watch. They enlisted the help of an old New York punk named Slug (who famously gave G.G. Allin his last dose of heroin before he died) and let him put the thing together, and it was a success.

A few miles away, Ashley Alms, 24, met Myers through Tumblr and he told her about his plan to start making shitty punk traveler porn. Alms had been putting nudes of herself on the internet since she was 15 years old, had worked for alt-porn site God's Girls, and, moreover, was sick of living in Portland. Alms traveled out to Philadelphia to meet Myers and Fringe Fuckers was born.

Since then, the couple have made a bunch of movies for their site with their friends, other train hoppers, and random people. Unlike your average alternative porn shoot—which usually means a white girl in latex replicating Emily Strange, and a slightly slim blonde dude sporting early-2000s tattoo sleeves—the Fringe Fuckers aesthetic is pure grime. They fuck in their bedrooms or outside in the bushes, and have orgies in basements most would consider a health violation, because, as the original New York paparazzi photographer Ron Galella once said, when you are broke and poor "the world is your studio." Myers, Alms, and their friends have no interest in the so-called "alternative porn" provided by sites like Burning Angel and ALT POP. (Plus, Myers and Alms burned their bridges with Burning Angel long ago when Myers dressed up like a girl to apply for the website. They did not think his attempt was funny.)

You know those crust punks you see sitting on the curb downtown with scrawled Sharpie-on-cardboard signs asking for change? That's who fucks for Fringe Fuckers. And unlike many porn performers working today, Myers and Alms do it for chump change.

"There's nothing wrong with people pretending to be stuff if they're getting paid. Porn acting is definitely a skill set and an admirable trade, but a lot of [alternative porn] just seems kind of fake," Myers told VICE over Skype. "We actually live the lifestyle that we're portraying. It's not like us dressing up or putting on costumes or anything. It's basically just documenting our lifestyle, and that's it. We aren't even paid to do this."

The lack of pay means that people who do this are just really into it, and they are fine with the compensation of a mouth full of semen, a box of wine, and half a Klonopin. Fringe Fuckers stream their videos to the public through Clipvia and charge about $4.99 for an 11-minute video. The pair have people messaging them over Tumblr asking for new videos, but they can not always afford to make more or find new people to participate (punks say they are down to film and then often chicken out at the last minute). Without getting into details Alms and Myers say they use the money they make from Clipvia to buy supplies for shoots (drugs, booze and props) and as extra cash. It's by no means a main source of income.

Alms and Myers have found a lot of people on Tumblr who want to fuck, as well as friends who volunteer for a bottle of whiskey. But no matter who's involved, it's important for the couple that everything remain open and consensual. "We let everyone choose who they have sex with. It's important that people have ultimate control," says Myers.

Alms grew up in Illinois where she was adopted as a newborn. "My biological dad signed away his rights to me while I was being adopted, he signed them away on the back of a cop car on his way to prison. He died in a car accident years later," she says.

The family who raised her were "typical Midwest drunks" and she dropped out of school at 17 years old to be alone, earning her GED and eventually packing up to ride freight trains and travel. She ended up in Portland on the dime of a suitor, but eventually returned home to her small town and couldn't find a job.

"I drove my van out to Philly and never left," she says, laughing. She also never had any worries about having sex on camera and admits that she just likes people to see her naked, to the point where she walks around the couple's shared house nude half the day.

Myers grew up in Northern Virginia, obsessed with punk and metal, but tied down to baseball which he had been playing since he was a kid. He eventually landed a scholarship to play college ball. However, he blew his arm out during his final year but still finished his degree. He then enrolled in trade school to get his welding certificate, while earning money for class by stripping at DC's last all-nude gay strip club Secrets.

Myers started working at Secrets when he and his friends went there for a night that gave men free drinks if they remained shirtless all night. They offered his friend a job, but he declined and Myers, drunk and excited, said he would take the job. He had no idea what he was doing when he started and the weekends brought in packed crowds of 600-plus horny gay dudes. "Luckily, all you gotta do when you're dancing for gay men is be naked and spread your butt cheeks and move to the music," he laughs. Myers would often bend over and spread his ass with two hands but the club eventually told him to cut it out—he made too many tips and the other dancers complained.

"A lot of dudes there said that they had too much self-respect to [spread with two hands]," he says. "I would just laugh in their face. 'We're gay strippers, dude.'"

Since Alms and Myers got together, they've bonded over their love for one another and fucking. They've both been extremely sexual freaks since a young age—Myers even made a home brew Fleshlight when he was in the sixth grade out of Sculpey and a toilet paper roll. And they both say G.G. Allin ruined rock 'n' roll for them in the best way possible. Following his scumfuck mantra, they just want to live the way they want to live, no matter what anyone thinks.

Follow Mish Way on Twitter.

​Why 'Guantánamo North' Is a Terrible Idea

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A prisoner being transferred at Guantánamo Bay in 2007. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Last week, news broke that the Pentagon is considering several military and federal prisons to house some of the remaining 116 men held at Guantánamo Bay. The effort inaugurates a last-ditch bid to close the infamous facility, opened in 2002 at the inception of President George W. Bush's "Global War on Terror." The sites being toured by top military brass include a Navy brig in South Carolina and an Army Disciplinary Barracks in Kansas.

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Ash Carter went on a media blitz to persuade the public that establishing "Guantánamo North" makes both fiscal and security sense. "As long as this detention facility remains open, it will remain a rallying cry for jihadi propaganda," Carter explained, adding that US taxpayers are currently "paying too high a price" for Guantánamo.

The Obama administration, it seems, is stricken with the same peculiar penchant as its predecessor for self-servingly redefining commonly understood terms. Over a decade ago, the Bush Administration construed "torture" so narrowly as to allow waterboarding, anal rape (labelled "rectal feeding" in the purest Orwellian style), and other monstrosities it committed against supposed terrorists. Today, when the Obama administration talks of "closing" Guantánamo, what they actually mean is that they want to relocate the facility—along with everything that it represents—to the continental United States. This includes the practice of indefinite imprisonment without charge or fair process.

Since 2005, with my students in various law school clinics, I have represented 14 Guantánamo prisoners in federal court, all the way up to the US Supreme Court, as well as at trial before the Military Commission and before the Periodic Review Board at Guantánamo. In that decade, I have made 37 trips to that isolated corner of Cuba to visit the Guantánamo prison camps for countless hours of meetings with those men.

When lawyers like me, human rights groups and international organizations, friendly governments, and concerned citizens the world over call for Guantánamo to be closed, we are not asking for it to be imported to the continental US. Our objection to Guantánamo is not geographic in nature, and critics will not be satisfied if the same misconduct is merely transplanted elsewhere.

Guantánamo was never a single prison facility. From the beginning, it was always an idea, an ideology that purportedly liberated the US government from the fetters of domestic and international law. It also formed part of a larger, global network of shady and lawless prisons set up by the United States after the 9/11 attacks. Some of the men I've represented at Guantánamo and beyond previously survived torture at CIA black sites like the Salt Pit in Afghanistan and others. Their names are listed in the Senate's damning study of the CIA Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program, which was finally declassified and made public late last year. They have been held and tortured at proxy sites run by foreign governments, and they have been imprisoned at other US military prisons at Bagram and Kandahar, in Afghanistan.

When people call for Guantánamo to be closed, it is simply shorthand for a more comprehensive demand to end torture and arbitrary, indefinite imprisonment without trial or fair process. Obama administration officials who pretend that moving the prisoners to the United States for continued, open-ended imprisonment actually answers the charge leveled at the US government for maintaining the facility for 13 years and counting are either deluded or, worse, trying to fool whoever is listening.

My clients at Guantánamo certainly do not deem that sort of "closure" meaningful or more protective of their rights. Over the years, I've learned to defer to their analysis and instincts—to regard the prisoners as the foremost experts on all matters Guantánamo-related. After all, they have the most skin in the game and therefore the greatest stake in tracking and dissecting legal and political developments, as well as their manifold ramifications.

If these men are moved to the United States, they know all too well that US courts taking up the somewhat novel legal issues relating to their continuing, indefinite military imprisonment might embrace and entrench, in the context of stateside detention, the problematic body of law that already arose out of the Guantánamo experiment.

In a politically charged, fear-driven environment where timorous courts nationwide haven't exactly distinguished themselves as bold stalwarts of justice, it would not be wise to bank on those same courts tacking liberal when they could instead adapt to domestic detention the far more rights-restrictive concepts developed by courts in the extraterritorial, Cuban context.

In fact, the bitter lesson of the prisoners' experience is that even when they win in court, they still lose. The Supreme Court has taken up their legal issues four separate times, ostensibly to rule in their favor and against the US government after many years of litigation. But even the most seemingly favorable doctrinal outcomes exact a heavy price in years and do not necessarily correlate with meaningful real-world results. Today, these cases stand mostly as lofty—and costly—abstractions, taunting the 116 men still at Guantánamo.

Even assuming for the sake of argument that US courts eventually hold that Guantánamo prisoners enjoy greater rights by virtue of their presence on American soil, it would take even more years of litigation to reach that point, while prisoners languish in stateside facilities where conditions may be even worse than they are today at Guantánamo.

For the prisoners I represent, this is no academic dispute—it is quite literally a matter of life and death. Let's not kid ourselves about whose agenda would be served by bringing these long-suffering men to the United States. That move would enable the Obama administration to proclaim its promise to close Guantánamo fulfilled, declare victory, and blithely move on. The law and policy of indefinite military imprisonment would stand, largely intact and further normalized by expansion on the home-front. And, importantly, the prisoners will be promptly forgotten as the legal issues take years more to snake their way through the federal judiciary once again.

So what's the alternative? A fair and responsible approach would be to repatriate or resettle as many as possible of the 116 prisoners directly from Cuba. Any remaining prisoners should be given fair trials in a civilian US court, as opposed to an irregular and dysfunctional military commission (emphasis on fair here).

Then again, that would amount to actually closing Guantánamo.

Ramzi Kassem is a professor at the City University of New York School of Law. He directs the CLEAR project (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility) as well as the Immigrant & Non-Citizen Rights Clinic.

Visiting the Massage Parlor in Thailand That Only Employs Ex-Cons

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The first thing you notice in the Chiang Mai Women's Massage Center by Ex-Prisoners is the sign, which looks like a gimmick. The words "ex-prisoners" are printed in a delicate font, making it seem almost tongue-in-cheek. But this is Thailand, where most places of business have comically literal names like: OK, Just This Once Bar, or The Food Is Hot Café. Chiang Mai Women's Massage Center by Ex-Prisoners is no exception. Because even if Chiang Mai is basically the Portland of Thailand—grey skies, craft coffee—the people of Thailand aren't normally ironic.

Behind the sign, there are two sofas with foot sinks; a few Asian and European couples reading Lonely Planet travel guides in the waiting room. At the reception desk, a woman named Kae hands customers a menu listing foot and full-body massages, each for 200 Baht, or about $5, an hour. For that price, they're rumored to be some of the best massages in the country.

Every woman who gives massages here used to be an inmate at the nearby Chiang Mai Women's Correctional Facility. The program was started by a prison guard named Thunyanun Yajom, or Jinny, to help Thai women released from prison reintegrate back into society and find a job.

The Chiang Mai Women's Massage Center by Ex-Prisoners in Chiang Mai. All photos by the author

Jinny started the first branch of the massage parlor one year and seven months ago; she opened the second three months later, and a third within the year. Originally, the staff consisted of just three ex-cons, but today, the Chiang Mai Women's Massage Center by Ex-Prisoners employs 30 women across the three centers, and is the only program for ex-prisoners like it in the country.

Kae spent over five years in the nearby Chiang Mai Women's Correctional Facility for selling "ya-ba" (methamphetamines). She began working reception at the Women's Massage Center by Ex-Prisoners as soon as she was released

The center attracts a fair number of tourists like myself, which means business is often good. When I visited, Kae penciled me in for a full-body massage, but noted that the schedule was already almost fully booked. Kae, one of Jinny's first employees, has been working here since the joint opened over a year and a half ago. Prior to that, she had been in prison for five years and two months for selling methamphetamines.

"The ladies would tell me that it was very difficult to find jobs after prison," Jinny told me. "There's a stigma. People don't want to hire ex-convicts; they don't trust them and they're scared of them. Basically, employers don't want to have to worry about these ladies once they're hired."

"The ex-prisoner massage centers make things easier for the women because after being in prison for so many years, interacting with people that haven't been inside can be difficult for them," she added.

Jinny, the prison officer who first launched the program that is now three branches of Chiang Mai Women's Massage Centers by Ex-Prisoners

Upon introduction, it's clear that Jinny isn't your average prison guard—definitely more Tom Hanks in Green Mile than Warden Norton in Shawshank. She is even-toned, sweet, and seems to genuinely care about the well-being of ex-prisoners, who she refers to as "her girls." In the massage centers, she says, the women can be comfortable and relaxed, working around other women who have shared their experience.

Still, getting certified to become a masseuse at one of Jinny's centers isn't a breeze. First, the women need to get two certificates of 180 hours of massaging each. Then they need to have seen 100 clients, followed by another three months of training. Most of this training happens within the women's prison itself, at the Chiang Mai Women Prison Massage Shop, where the women can earn hours toward their certification. The program became the foundation for Jinny's ex-prisoner massage centers, providing a place that employ and continue to train the women after they are released.

"The women that are still prisoners practice and earn their hours here at the Prison Massage Shop," she continued. "But once they are freed, they are on their own, which is why I've opened three centers for ex-prisoners-only so that they can make money."

Women in the centers make an average wage of 10,000 Baht, or about $285, each month, depending on how many hours they put in each day. In the high season, they can earn as much as $420 in a month, according to Jinny. She plans to open two more massage centers in Chiang Mai and has considered even implementing the program further afield in Bangkok and Phuket.


Watch: Alexis Neiers on Drugs, Prison, The Bling Ring, and Redemption


According to Jinny, the majority of the women in her massage parlors were imprisoned for drug-related crimes, almost always involving methamphetamine. She explained that a lot of the women—like Kae, the receptionist, for example—were sucked into the drug trade by bad boyfriends; some, she said, got pregnant young, and in a Buddhist country where abortion is outlawed, turned to drug dealing to provide for their families.

Methamphetamine accounts for 95 percent of all drug-related convictions for women in Thailand. Meth, or ya-ba—methamphetamine mixed with caffeine in pill-form—is relatively cheap and easy to procure; a dealer can ya-ba from a supplier for 80 Baht a pill, or about $2.25, and sell it for more than double that price on the street in Thailand.

Suppliers are typically from Burma, and Jinny explained that because Chiang Mai is geographically so close to the Burmese border—well within the notorious Golden Triangle—women here get meth produced there and up-sell it in Thailand.

Because of all of the drug-related convictions, Thailand has the fourth-largest female prison population in the world and the highest rate of female imprisonment globally.

Related: El Salvador Is Imprisoning Women Who Miscarry

Inside the Chiang Mai Women's Massage Center by Ex-Prisoners

At the massage center, a small woman appeared behind Kae and ushered me over for my massage. She handed me a salmon-colored smock-and-pants that looked uncannily like a prison uniform, and then led me down the hall into a large room with a dozen massage beds and a few sofas.

I had pictured partitioned massage tables, but instead, the tables were positioned alongside each other in an open room. The lights were dimmed, the AC was on full-blast, and flute-heavy traditional Thai music, which sounded suspiciously like "My Heart Will Go On," looped softy in the background.

There were about 10 women in the room with clients as we entered. My masseuse, Meaw, pointed me to a bed, told me to lie on my back, and promptly started massaging my feet.

Ex-prisoners Toi, Nok, and Wun all served hard-time for meth dealing but are now employed as full-time masseuses at the Women's Massage Centers by Ex-Prisoners in Chiang Mai

When she got to my lower calves, I asked her, in the politest way possible, what she went to prison for.

"Drug," she replied in a thick Thai accent, planting her right foot on my left shoulder for leverage while simultaneously pulling my ankle into her chest to stretch a hip-flexor. She clarified that she got caught selling methamphetamines and was locked up for five years and three months.

"And her?" I asked, gesturing to the woman with her elbow in a patient's neck on the table beside us.

"Drug."

So it was with the masseuse beside her, and the one beside her, and the two across the room. In fact, nearly all the women in the room had gone to prison for meth—for selling, possession, and/or use, but mostly for selling. Usually for their boyfriends, Meaw add. She explained that one of the other masseuses, Nok, had been in prison for 13 years and four months for selling ya-ba.

My massage concluded with me upon my belly, hands behind my back, and Meaw mounted on my rump grabbing both arms and pulling my back into an ungodly arch. I let out a feeble squeal and Meaw laughed, looking over to her girls, saying something in Thai that I can only presume is, "Can you believe this pussy?"

I walked back to the reception area, refreshingly limber. The last of the tourists waiting for their massages was beginning to taper off and Jinny appeared in the foyer, smiling, saying hi to all of "her girls."

I asked Jinny about the rate of recidivism among the women working at each of the three branches of Chiang Mai Women's Massage Center by Ex-Prisoners. Only two women have fallen back into drugs, she said.

"It's not easy," Jinny admitted. "We have to constantly check the ladies to make sure they're not on drugs again or selling. But we're like a big family and the women check on each other. It's also not easy because some women that have been in prison for 15 years get out... and it's like another world. It's difficult for them to cross over. In ways, prison life is easier because you're given everything."

Some of the women move on to bigger spas, she said, where they can make better money, "But they've said it's harder for them," Jinny added. "Once everybody finds out that they're an ex-con, they're treated differently. The women can get depressed there, so most will settle for less money working here—but they're more comfortable."

Leslie's Diary Comics: Leslie Stein's Comic Book School for Little Girls

The History of Toplessness

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The History of Toplessness

VICE Vs Video Games: With ‘Shenmue 3’ and ‘The Last Guardian’ Coming, What’s Left for Gamers to Dream Of?

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A still from the trailer for 'Shenmue 3,' which is actually happening after years of uncertainty

The unthinkable happened in 2015. A full Final Fantasy VII remake was confirmed, The Last Guardian turned out to be A Real Thing that's Actually Probably Almost Certainly coming out, and the long-hungered-for Shenmue 3 launched with an ultimately record-breaking Kickstarter—and all three got announced at the same E3 presentation. Brilliant, obviously; but overnight, millions of 30-somethings clinging onto memories of their gaming youth now had no mythical release to delay getting married for anymore.

Will any of the above three be worth playing, though? Only time will answer that question. FFVII is surely doomed to fail however excellently it emerges, given its makers intent to effectively build a new game in its name. It's not going to be what you remember, and that'll turn favor amongst a great many fans, whatever its individual merits. The other two have their precedents, but also the factor of the unknown in their favor: we don't know what to expect, and that's a good thing. But we do know they're coming. So what do we have to pine for now?

Turns out, there are a few games in the "might happen" bracket that we can still pin our dreams to—most likely in vain, but you'd have said the same thing about Shenmue 3 just a couple of months ago. Another Syphon Filter? You might want to not hold your breath on that, you freak of gaming fandom. But it's a fair bet that many a pad-wrangler has let their mind wander into the what-if territory of their grey matter over one of these TBC titles, eyes glossy and gob dribbling.

Gordon Freeman from the 'Half-Life' series, and something nasty

Half-Life 3

We may as well get this out of the way immediately. Yes, there is a massive, too-big-to-fit-through-a-portal elephant in the room, and Half-Life 3 is its name. Half-Life 2: Episode Two left us with a cliff-hanger back in 2007, and the promise of a third chapter. Several years on, and bar some subtle references in 2011's Portal 2 to the worlds of these games being connected, makers Valve have maintained radio silence on a third Half-Life proper.

However, they'd be idiots to not do something more that fits within the official Half-Life canon—which leaves the question of: what, exactly? What form will the game that will ostensibly be Half-Life 3 take? The second game was more filmic than its 1998 predecessor, and relied heavily on its physics innovations within environments to tell a story; but since then Valve has created Steam, embraced online play, announced that all of its future games will involve multiplayer, and gotten into virtual reality. Is a modern gamer still okay with a silent protagonist like Gordon Freeman? Is a crossover with the Portal series a no brainer? C'mon Valve, shake a fucking leg.

A remake proper of GoldenEye 007

Let's just be clear from the off:Tthis is never going to happen, and even if it did, you wouldn't enjoy it. GoldenEye 007 defined my gaming youth. I spent all three years at university mastering Rare's N64 original and five subsequent years trying to emotionally blackmail mates into playing it again. But it's had its day.

Nobody is quite sure who owns its rights, for starters. It could be Rare, Nintendo, Activision, MGM Studios, Sean Bean, or some guy in a Reading bedsit. Which makes the successful negotiating of its license akin to getting six numbers on the Lotto: unlikely, to say the least. And have you played the N64 game recently? It's not what you remember: The once-huge stages can be completed in two minutes, the graphics are awful, and the slowdown is unbearable.

GoldenEye 007 is unfair, silly, occasionally (unintentionally) hilarious, and incredibly buggy—as this previous VICE article pointed out. And the thing is, that's what makes it work so well. A remake would remove the glitches that make replaying the game with mates in its groundbreaking multiplayer mode any fun at all, and could well do away with local multiplayer entirely, as we've seen with the forthcoming Halo 5: Guardians. Much like the TimeSplitters series, GoldenEye was great as much because of the people you played it with, the people right next to you, as the game itself.

The 2010 Wii remake maintained many of the original game's best aspects, once you optimized the controls, such as new objectives on higher difficulties, the choice of weapons, the option to be stealthy or gung-ho it, and featured local multiplayer. Yet it still failed to satisfy, coming out in a year that gave us such shooters as Call of Duty: Black Ops, Halo Reach, and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Today's array of FPS heavy hitters would make absolute mincemeat of a current-gen GoldenEye remake that really went for (aging) fan service over contemporary relevance. So maybe this is one to leave, forever. If you're desperate for some 007 action, dust off the N64 and book those old uni pals a babysitter so you can get together again for one night only.

Article continues after the video below


Related: Watch VICE talks film with Kevin Bacon


A screenshot from 'P.T.'

Silent Hills

The people of Konami are cleverer than you think. They know that gamers will do anything to get their hands on titles stuck in development limbo for the longest possible time. At least, that's one way of looking at the company's decision to cancel the Kojima and del Toro-helmed Silent Hills and pull its playable teaser, P.T., from the PlayStation Store—so that they can surprise everyone by releasing it in a few years' time, prompting fans across the world to open their wallets more willingly than ever.

This one has got folklore written all over it. A talented filmmaker with a terrifying artistic vision; a franchise fondly remembered waiting to be reborn; the unfulfilled potential of what the maverick behind Metal Gear Solid might have brought to the party; a fully playable preview of sorts of what could have been; and even a confirmed title. Everything was in place. Everything still might be, but when, who knows? What's certain is that all the ingredients were there for something truly special.

Another horror title that continues to be admired long after its release is Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, which came out for the GameCube in 2002. With Resident Evil unsure of what direction to take as a series, Penumbra last seen in 2008 and Dead Space having lost its way with an action-focused third installment, it's intriguing that Eternal Darkness is rarely mentioned as an IP worth reviving. The original studio, Silicon Knights, is no more, yet creator Denis Dyack's expressed interest in developing a sequel to Sanity's Requiem. He teased a follow-up in 2014, Shadow of the Eternals, and Nintendo intriguingly renewed the license earlier this year, prompting fans to get excited. At best, I'd imagine an HD remake of the original is coming, but you never know.

A still from the 2008 trailer for 'Beyond Good & Evil 2'

Beyond Good & Evil 2

On the subject of niche GameCube titles, we're at a point now where so few people will likely know of or still care about the first Beyond Good & Evil that a sane man might question: why bother, at all, in 2015? Yet the 2003 game—also released on PS2, Xbox, and PC—was a critical smash and a cult hit, coming across something like a Zelda title set in a very adult world. It had huge variety in its gameplay, and lead character Jade was immensely likable. Director Michel Ancel—who also created the Rayman series—had planned for a trilogy, but poor sales stalled development of a second Beyond... game.

A trailer came out in 2008 that got fan hopes up—but since then, nothing much has been released regarding the state of Beyond Good & Evil 2. Ancel said back in 2011 that his intent was to make it for what was then the next generation of consoles, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. That year also witnessed an HD reissue of the original, presumably put out to test the public's appetite for the franchise.

So where's the game at, now? Ansel's formed his own indie studio, Wild Sheep, but continues to contribute to Ubisoft projects. Perhaps he's waiting for the larger company to relinquish the Beyond... rights, so as to work on a sequel that he feels is worthy of its predecessor's reputation? Perhaps the scythe's already fallen, and we simply don't know about it? Whatever the game's official status, you can bet that right now, someone's getting excited about the possibility of its release, however far into the future that may be, frothing at the mouth whenever an image appears on the web of a humanoid pig wearing a dirty vest. It's okay. We'll wait for you to wipe your keyboard off.

New on Motherboard: Somebody Turned the Futility of Tinder Into an 8bit Game

A new Legacy of Kain title

We know that a new title in this series was being worked on as recently as 2012, but it has now been 12 years since we saw last saw the title character Kain properly, in a game of his own—he did appear in a playable form in DLC for Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. And that's a shame, as Kain is an interesting chap. He's dead, for starters. Well, sort of. He's a vampire who's not too happy about it. Kain came from a wealthy background, has some power issues, and a genuine character arc. In the Legacy of Kain titles he was essentially a complicated antihero you liked, becoming a jaded despot in the Soul Reaver games, casting his friend Raziel into damnation for evolving wings before him.

Two cancelled titles since Kain's last headlining appearance should suggest that this is a series that's run its course, but a spin-off multiplayer game Nosgoth, which launched its open beta in January 2015, could yet prove the kindling necessary to get a new Legacy of Kain title into a finished state, awakening latent interest in the franchise. Maybe not all is as lost as we thought.

The Sonic of 'Dash'

Anything vaguely decent by SEGA

Oh, SEGA. What have you become? Nintendo fans get angry when their new Metroid game isn't the Metroid game they think they deserve—but at least they're getting a Metroid game. Imagine being a diehard SEGA fan and lamenting the great many franchises the company is seemingly content to let rot.

Blazing Heroes. Crazy Taxi. Virtua Fighter. Gunstar Heroes. Space Harrier. Ecco the Dolphin. Headhunter. Space Channel 5. Virtua Cop. Wonder Boy. NiGHTS. Super Monkey Ball. Thunder Blade. Golden Axe. Skies of Arcadia. Daytona USA. Rez. Hang-On. Panzer Dragoon. Columns. After Burner. Jet Set Radio. Chu Chu Rocket. I could go on, but there's no point as you've got it, the point, already.

I'd take pretty much any of them. Arcade racers swapped fun for simulation years ago, Need for Speed and Burnout games aside, with the genre vanishing up its own boring "take-a-fucking-driving-test-using-this-$500-steering-wheel" backside. What I'd give to enjoy a new, proper SEGA racer, in the vein of Out Run, Daytona, or SEGA Rally. A new entry in the Streets of Rage series could be amazing, played cooperatively online. After Burner and Space Harrier make perfect VR games (we've already seen how well they work in 3D, on the 3DS). A whole host of SEGA's catalogue past can be applied to today's player habits and made to fit with barely any gameplay compromises.

There are more interesting, quirky characters in SEGA's dormant series than a generation of game designers could know what to do with. The company knows its sitting on an embarrassment of riches—but I suppose those 100 million downloads for Sonic Dash prove that all gamers want is throwaway distractions based on classics from yesteryear. What does it say about SEGA's ambitions when Yu Suzuki had to take his Shenmue series away from the company, to Sony, in order to proceed with the third game? On the plus side, Yakuza 5 is coming to the West later in 2015. Only took you three years, guys. Great job.

The Last Guardian

Guys, let's face it. We're being trolled and it'll get pushed back to the PlayStation 5 any day now. Put me down for a pre-order.

Follow Sean on Twitter.

Some Duke Freshmen Are Refusing to Read a Comic Book Because It's Too Sexy

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The cover of 'Fun Home'

Some incoming students at Duke University are refusing to read Fun Home, a critically acclaimed bestselling comic book memoir, because it has sex scenes that violate their religious and moral beliefs, according to the school's newspaper. In the novel, Alison Bechdel, who won the MacArthur Genius Grant last year, chronicles her coming out as a lesbian and her dealing with the suicide of her father, who kept his own homosexuality secret for decades.

"Duke did not seem to have people like me in mind," freshman Brian Grasso told the Duke Chronicle about the book selection. "It was like Duke didn't know we existed, which surprises me." He also said that other students had sent him private thank-you notes after he first posted his objection to the recommended reading in a class-wide Facebook group.

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It is absurd that someone attending a major university can refuse an assignment because it forces them to acknowledge gay people exist. And though the idea may make the prudish uncomfortable, getting a liberal arts education generally involves dealing with sexually explicit material, from Ulysses to Ingmar Bergman's Persona. But the arguments that students like Grasso are using to insulate themselves from discomfort are not very different from the ones progressive student activists are using to make college campuses free of anything that could be construed—however remotely—as hate speech against minorities or women.

Although "trigger warnings" have been around since the earliest days of the internet, the term has only recently made the leap from a cluster of forums and blogs to the larger web and IRL universe. The basic concept is that readers should be warned about certain types of explicit content—like descriptions of sexual assault—so it doesn't awaken memories of trauma.

Trigger warnings have become so prevalent today, however, that there's been a major backlash against them. It's easy to see why when you hear about more extreme examples of books being labeled objectionable. According to a recent article in the Atlantic, students have called for trigger warnings to be attached to Things Fall Apart, The Great Gatsby, and Ovid's Metamorphoses for their respective depictions of colonialism, misogyny, and rape. Professors have supposedly altered their curricula to avoid student complaints, and university administrators are trying to come up with standardized procedures for students who claim that reading a book like Mrs. Dalloway will trigger suicidal thoughts.

But if, as some Columbia students have said, special care should be taken to make sure sexual abuse survivors and people of color aren't offended by reading lists, why can't Christians refuse to read a book because it has a sketch of a sex scene in it?

"The book is a quick read but not an easy one; it made me uncomfortable at times, which I think is one of the most telling reasons why it's so important for students to read," one of the students involved in selection Fun Home said in a press release. "It has the potential to start many arguments and conversations, which, in my opinion, is an integral component of a liberal arts education."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.


What It's Like to Have Your Balls Inflated

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The author awaiting a saline infusions

My scrotum is a thin sack of skin that contains part of my reproductive system. Insert a needle, add a liter of saline, and it is apparently transformed into something more rewarding.

I've been interviewing body-modified humans for years and have frequently heard the phrase, "I like the pain." They always explain it the same way: In the brain, your pain and pleasure neural pathways overlap—so the two feelings are never all that far apart. I'm familiar with people pushing and punishing their bodies to extremes, but I was specifically interested in how that pleasure/pain dichotomy plays out in a sexual setting.

Bella van Nes and her partner Paulus of Piercing HQ

Wanting to learn more, I turned to Bella van Nes, owner of Melbourne's Piercing HQ. Bella and her partner Paulus have run Piercing HQ for three years. Although they specialize in genital piercings, they offer every modification imaginable—except tattooing. They also host various workshops on topics such as staple and superglue play, micro branding, medical play, scarification, piercing, spanking, and flogging. One, titled "From Finger to Fist," is a beginner's guide to anal fisting. Between them, their involvement within the fetish community is vast and notable.

Unsure if I wanted to permanently mark myself, Bella suggested a saline session. These can involve little injections of saline just under the skin—not into the actual muscle. Breast and scrotal infusions are the most popular, but labia, buttocks, clit hood, pubic mound, and penile shaft are all common requests too.

Each injection distributes 50 milliliters of saline. With many of the modifications calling for a liter of fluid, a session can involve a lot of needleplay. If that doesn't sound like something you're into, you can opt for an infusion. Here your selected body part is hooked up to a saline drip bag. Depending on the bag's volume, the stream's speed, and your own personal tastes, this can feel like a regular IV, or something much more painful.

Related: They Told Me I Could Be Anything I Wanted When I Grew Up, So I Became a Cyborg

Bella says saline infusions and injections are commonplace throughout the kink community, but getting exact figures on their prevalence is difficult as most participants "balloon" in private residences and behind closed doors. However, the sheer number of boys brandishing their ballooned balls on the internet is testament to its increasing popularity. But this didn't make me any less nervous.

Apparently sensing my remaining apprehension, Bella assured me that the body completely absorbs the saline within 48 hours. Meaning if I did choose to inflate a body part, I'd be back to normal in a couple of days. Speaking to the couple in such a relaxed, matter-of-fact way eased me over the edge. I decided to inflate my nutsack.

According to Paulus the testes actually become less sensitive after the procedure, as they're suspended in saline. "If we were to slap your testicles before the infusion, it would hurt," he explained, "but afterward we'd be able to give them a nice tap around." Other than being able to be more rough than usual, he adds that he personally likes the sensation of the weight during sex, "as they swing back and forth."

The saline that would find its way into my balls

With a mild pinching sensation, the cannula that would deliver half a liter of saline was inserted into my scrotum. Surprisingly, this was less painful than expected, but as the cold liquid started steadily flowing into my sac, I began to feel light-headed.

Casually, Paulus tried to reassure me. "For a momentary discomfort it's a lot of fun," he said soothingly, "although there's only 500 milliliters in a bag, I usually put a liter in. Once all the saline comes out of your body, your balls are back to normal, there's no adverse effect. The most liquid I've held in my sac has been around 1,400 milliliters." He raised his hands as if holding out an invisible basketball.


Watch: The Digital Love Industry


Despite his assurances, I still harbored some concerns for the long-term fate of my gonads. This had nothing to do with the setting, Piercing HQ looks impressively sterile. Bella wore medical-grade gloves and inserted the cannula into my scrotum with practiced ease, thankfully avoiding any potential nerve damage and missing my testes. She swabbed the insertion point before and after the procedure, and unwrapped new equipment prior to use.

I was told to be aware of my own physical limits, listen to my body, avoid bodies of water like baths or lakes that could harbor bacteria, and to play gentle with my freshly inflated sac. If I abided by these simple instructions any risk of scrotal cellulitis (infection of the skin) would be avoided.

While pumping a small milk bottle's worth of liquid into my balls, Paulus explained that pain is the body's way of protecting itself. But if you can push past it, your body realizes the pain is not going to stop, so it starts releasing chemicals to try make itself feel better.

Paulus and Bella show off their own body modifications

"I've done my fair share of drugs over time," Paulus continues, "and I'd say that the [organic] drugs that get released from heavy-impact play are far better than any chemical drug I've taken."

Perhaps noting my unease, Bella told me, "If I'm putting in a couple of liters into the balls, then you'll start getting expansion in the shaft of your cock and also around the pelvic area; you'll start to see that get a bit puffy." But in my case, I've insisted we keep the amount of fluid to a minimal and confined to the scrotum, so "it's like filling up a balloon."

For all the casual chatter of balls swinging during sex, they were very professional about the whole thing.

Soon my attention turned from our conversation back to my balls, which were becoming increasingly uncomfortable. As the saline inflated them, my testes sought asylum inside my abdomen. After 45 minutes of this I'd had enough. Gazing past my navel, it was hard to see objectively whether my sac looked enlarged or whether it was an optical illusion caused by my dick retreating like a frightened tortoise into its shell.

The results were not immediately life-changing

"Gee, Fareed," remarked Bella encouragingly, "you look like you've got a decent-sized package now." I appreciated the support but didn't feel like much of a hero.

Although I had taken on only 250 milliliters, increasing my ball size from prune to fig, I waddled home as though lugging an awkward tumor between my legs. Since my testes were encapsulated like small yolks in inordinately large eggs, the liquid acted like a shock absorber. Experiencing this, I could envisage that filled with a whole liter of saline, the sensation of having them smacked around could be pleasurable. But the discomfort was so overwhelming and foreign that I ensconced myself in bed.

I woke up the next morning to find that the saline had nearly completely dissipated; my scrotum was back to his usual wrinkled self.

It should go without saying, but if you do have a desire to inflate any part of your body remember to seek out a professional. Do not try this at home.

Follow Fareed on Twitter.

Pearl Jam’s Bassist Has Personally Funded More Than a Dozen Skateboard Parks in the Midwest

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All photos by Bryce Kanights

While the United States government doesn't openly assault Native Americans anymore, the problems and hardships that have been heaped on them over the centuries can still be felt on reservations across the country. Many of them, including South Dakota's Pine Ridge reservation, which I visited earlier this month, are poverty-stricken, and hopelessness, suicide, child diabetes, and alcoholism run rampant. Although no alcohol is sold on the Pine Ridge reservation, just across the Nebraska sits a three-block stretch of land called Whiteclay that looks like a set from The Walking Dead. The space consists of four dilapidated warehouses that act as taverns to service the Pine Ridge reservation. Outside each building droves of Native Americans stumbled about, drinking themselves to death. In 2010 the four liquor vendors sold five million cans of beer, a tremendous amount considering the size of the community.

I was visiting Pine Ridge to see the new Grindline-built skatepark at the Wounded Knee District School. In a place facing such hardship, the park represents a source of positivity for the community. The park was paid for by Levi's Skateboarding and, full disclosure, they flew me out to South Dakota for this trip. While there I met Walt Pourier, head of the Stronghold Society, a group whose goal is to inspire hope and confidence in the reservation's youth through a number of outlets, mainly skateboarding. With the help of Vans and Pearl Jam's bassist, Jeff Ament, Walt was able to get phase one of a skatepark built in 2011 and, thanks to his constant diligence, he eventually convinced Levi's to come in and not only finish phase two in Pine Ridge, but also build the smaller, satellite park on the Wounded Knee school grounds where I met him.

When I asked Pourier about Whiteclay he shrugged it off. "We don't want to focus on that. We know it's there and if that's the route the adults have chosen, so be it. We know the hundreds of skaters at the skatepark each day don't drink; they don't want anything to do with alcohol or drugs. The further back we look the further forward we can see and these kids are learning from that and taking a better path."

He was right; every kid I spoke to was all about skateboarding, stoked on life and the simple act of pushing around on their boards. No one drank, no one took drugs, and their scene was tighter than most any I've visited. There wasn't one bit of graffiti in the park, no trash strewn about, and regardless of being surrounded by a huge dirt lot there was no dust on the course. The kids policed the place like it was Fort Knox, going so far as to hide brooms in bushes and take turns sweeping every 20 minutes

It was apparent after watching the kids at the park that this place is a source of escapism for them, a fortress of solitude making a difference in their lives. "Former Alva pro Jim Murphy is here and he's giving away 100 Wounded Knee skateboards today. That's 100 more kids who will be at the park tomorrow." Walt said, beaming. "But you should really talk to Jeff, he's been so instrumental in helping this community."

Jeff, as I mentioned, is Pearl Jam's bassist, and more importantly a lifelong skateboarder. He has used his fame and success to help build skateparks all over Montana and South Dakota, many on reservations. He has paid for many of these parks with his own money, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I love when famous people back skateboarding. It says a lot when professional musicians, comedians, or athletes openly say they like to spend their free time riding a skateboard, because the underlying message is that regardless of how cool their day jobs are skating is still infinitely cooler.

Ament had come to the park the day I was there to show support for the opening. During a lull in the action, we went around the back of the little red Wounded Knee school building and sat on a set of stairs outside of a classroom. Ament spoke at length about his love for skateboarding and his drive to keep building skateparks.

VICE: How did you first get into skateboarding, Jeff?
Jeff Ament: My parents bought me a Grentech board in 1975 or 1976. I rode that a little bit but I wasn't super in love with it. There weren't a lot of good sidewalks or smooth pavement where I grew up. But in the summer of '76 we went to California to visit some cousins and my cousin, Gary, had made this killer stringered board with California Slaloms and Road Riders 4s on it. It was so much smoother than my Grentech board and we spent the entire vacation riding that board out in front of their house. When I left he gave me a Skateboarder magazine. It was a 20-hour drive home and by the time we got back to Montana I was 100% skateboarder. I was way in!

I can't imagine Montana having many—or any—skateparks back then.
There was only one park. It was a Fiber Rider park that got moved from somewhere in 1979 to Great Falls for eight or nine months.

Your band was huge in the Seattle scene, but was it always the game plan to eventually move back to Montana and build something?
No, by the time I moved to Seattle I couldn't wait to get the hell out of Montana. I was really into punk rock and art. I went out to Seattle in 1982, my freshman year in college, and saw The Clash and X play at the Show Box. My friend said they were opening a punk bar and the first show was Channel 3. So I quit school and lived in my buddy's closet for two months until I got job. I loved Seattle at that time. But when things blew up for the band this neighborhood that I lived in forever, lower Queen Anne, got weird. I couldn't go to the grocery store. You'd come back from tour and it felt like as much work as being on tour. I was just a small town kid so the band blowing up as big as it did, I wasn't used to any sort of adulation. So my bother and I went on a mountain biking trip back to Montana and then I started going back between every single tour leg. After about a year of that I decided I was going to buy a little chunk of property and if it all goes to hell in a hand basket with the band I'll have a little place and can get my life going in Montana. Montana was an escape for me at that point and I think I feel that way now more than ever.

Were you skating throughout those years of heavy touring?
I didn't skate from about 1988 until 1993. I always had a board I'd ride to the grocery store, but it wasn't until the first time we played Australia that I really got back into it. We played Sydney and we pulled up to Bondi and there was a vert ramp on the beach. The tour manager at the time, Eric Johnson, was a skater and we were both like, "We're here for four days, we need to go get boards!" We spent four days riding that ramp and I was like, "Why did I ever quit doing this?"

How did you get into building skateparks on Indian reservations?
The band gave some money when they built the first skatepark in Seattle Center when there were metal ramps, and then when they turned that into the first concrete park we gave them like 50 grand or something like that. It was a cool project to be involved with and I lived really close to that Seattle Center park, so I was over there a lot. After that I went to city council meetings for about five years to try and get something built in Missoula. That one was a brutal process because it was such a big city. But then I helped get the St. Ignatius Park built and that was super easy because it was a small town. That's when the focus became on these rural towns and these isolated areas, whether they're reservations or not—I don't really see color when it comes to that. I think kids who are in isolated places have a tough hill to climb and it just so happens that this time we did one at Wounded Knee and added onto Pine Ridge.

But you've built quite a few on Indian reservations. What are your ties to that community?
The town I grew up in, Big Sandy, Montana, was about ten miles from the Chippewa Cree reservation, so growing up I played basketball against two of the schools on the reservation. I got to be friends with a lot of those kids and you start to realize they're exactly like you and want to do the same stuff all kids want to do but they're not able to because the system is so broken.

Teen suicide is a huge issue on the reservation. Just this year Pine Ridge has had 15 young people—aged eight to 15—take their own lives. Were you impacted by that when you were younger?
Yeah, my little brother's best friend killed himself when he was 14 and that profoundly changed my brother's personality. Suicide is certainly an issue in Montana, but it's not like it is in Pine Ridge.

I have a six-year-old. I can't even imagine what would possess an eight-year-old to take his or her own life. Why do you think they're so plagued with youth suicide?
I don't know what happens in these kids' homes. Obviously there's abuse and things going on but I think whenever a community has that rampant alcoholism and drug abuse it's a recipe for disaster. I'm told there a lot of copycat suicides, which is crazy to me. I can't wrap my head around it. I don't know if I've ever felt that much despair. And the sad thing is that they're kids. They never got the opportunity to be 18 and run away and try to make it happen on their own. I don't have kids myself, so in building these skateparks I feel like I've gotten to know a lot of these kids. I exchange addresses and stuff so that if they need a board or something down the road I can sort of be some kind of lifeline for them.

What impact do you think these parks have had on the reservation kids?
The great thing about the park in Park Ridge was there were about 15 kids who were helping out when it was getting built and that core group of kids have real ownership of that park because they put their blood, sweat, and tears into it. That's what you try and do in each place—find even one kid who's going to be the steward of the park and take care of it. Who knows what that can turn into? Maybe that kid is on his way to being on the tribal council and trying to change bigger problems. And that's in addition to just getting kids outside and exercising and helping their self-esteem.

Most of these kids are super young. Do they even know about Pearl Jam?
Not really. I'm just the guy who helped them build a skatepark, which is awesome and way better. Some of the kids' moms are fans, but again, this is my connection to youth. I'm 52 but I'm still doing all the same stuff I did when I was 15. I'm still skateboarding, playing music, playing basketball, and riding my bike around. They keep me young.

What do you have lined up next?
The band will probably try and get another record going in the next year, and I just want to build more parks in Montana. We're starting a park in Stevensville in two weeks. We just finished a bowl in Havre and there are five or six more cities I'm talking to. The way I look at it is if I'm touring and doing more things with the band I make more money. If I make more money I build more parks. It helps me get more excited about touring because I'm usually not too excited about it.

Is it correct that you're personally reaching into your pocket and paying for these parks?
Oh yeah. The band's Vitalogy Foundation takes $3 from every ticket and we split that up five ways for our causes. That ends up being a good chunk of change, but most of the bowls I pay for out of my own pocket.

Can you ballpark how much of your own money you've spent on building skateparks?
I have no idea. The little foundation I have is called The Montana Pool Service and the bowls and pools we build end up being 60 to 80 grand each. I've probably built like 12 or 13 of those. I don't know what that works out to be.

When you think about your legacy do you think of it in terms of skateboarding or music?
I don't really think that much about my legacy. If global climate change has its way like it has in the past few years a legacy isn't going to mean anything. I think it's just about making life as comfortable for as many people as you can and being a good human.

But if you wake up dead tomorrow how would you like to be remembered?
Throw my ashes in some pool block and put me in parks all over the state.

To support the Native American skate movement go to http://strongholdsociety.org

For more on Bryce Kanights visit his website and follow him on Instagram.

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko

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