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After a String of Suicides, Students in Palo Alto Are Demanding a Part in Reforming Their School's Culture

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Photos by Lauren Poor

This article appears in the September Issue of VICE

On a windy evening in June, families of the graduating class of Henry M. Gunn High School, in Palo Alto, California, trickled onto the turf football field for the annual commencement ceremony. Below the stage were more than 400 graduating seniors, donning black caps and gowns. Breaking from long-standing tradition, instead of indicating their college names or logos, students festooned their caps with phrases like BLACK LIVES MATTER, 9 TRUANCY LETTERS LATER, and I AM A LEAF ON THE WIND. WATCH HOW I SOAR. A few months earlier, principal Denise Herrmann had proposed a ban on adorning caps, but she allowed students to add non-collegiate decorations after they protested. Her rationale was that having college names on graduation caps suggests that the ultimate purpose of high school is to get admitted to a top college or university, and that there is only one path to success, an entrenched belief in Palo Alto that the administration has been recently trying to dispel.

Among the three student speakers at the ceremony was Allyna Moto-Melville, whose great-grandfather was the school's founder, Henry M. Gunn. "Even through the vicissitudes of high school, the friend drama, the C's and D's on math tests, the external and internal pressure to go to a top school, we, the Class of 2015, have that love and curiosity and strength in ourselves that Dr. Gunn dreamed of," she said from the podium. "We are resilient, courageous, and compassionate. We have gone through trials and tribulations that no high schoolers should ever have to go through, and yet we have come out of the battle stronger than before." Though she didn't say it explicitly, everyone in the audience knew what she was referencing: Starting last October, three students and one recent graduate from Gunn and Palo Alto (Paly) high schools had taken their own lives. And it wasn't the first encounter the town had had with youth suicide. Between 2009 and 2010, at least five Gunn students or recent graduates committed suicide. Then, in January 2011, a Paly senior killed herself.

In response to the most recent tragedies, the national media and school administration turned the deaths into a referendum on the schools' culture of achievement. Palo Alto, which lies in the shadow of Silicon Valley and is one of the wealthiest communities in the country, has long put enormous pressure on its children to earn the label "best and brightest." Their success has been measured in the number of Advanced Placement (AP) courses they take, their SAT scores, and how many elite college acceptances they receive. In the wake of the suicides, Gunn's administration and the larger community have begun to interrogate the damaging effects of this culture and realized that many students are forced to live up to unsustainably high expectations. Gunn has since pledged to "develop a culture that broadly defines and promotes multiple paths to success, embraces self-discovery and social emotional well-being, and values the love of learning beyond traditional metrics of achievement." But while parents and administrators have wrung their hands over the climate their kids have been raised in, Gunn students themselves have led their own efforts to have their voices heard and valued. For them, as much as the achievement culture needs to be reconsidered, it's the support the academic community provides that needs improvement. Students are asking whether their schools, which have led the nation in academic accolades, can turn themselves into models of mental health care.

When Gunn students arrived at school on the morning of Tuesday, November 4, the mood on campus was upbeat. The school was still high off its homecoming win the week before. At the beginning of first period, teachers in every classroom addressed their students, reading from a letter written by the administration: "Some of you may have heard that a young man took his own life last night. His name has just been released by the police, and it is with great sadness that I have to tell you that he is one of our current students, Cameron Lee."

Many of Lee's friends sat in complete shock. But soon the sound of screaming and weeping began echoing throughout the campus. Many of his closest friends left school. None of them saw it coming; he was the last person any of them suspected would commit suicide.

The day before, Gunn junior Kian Hooshmand was in a statistics class with Lee. They were sitting with a few other friends cracking jokes and talking about the Ebola epidemic. After school, Lee went to the gym to try out for the basketball team. By the evening, a few hours before his death, he and a few friends were reviewing a trade they were planning to make in their fantasy football league.

Short and lanky, Lee had a cherubic face and close-cropped black hair. At school, he was part of a clique called the Gunn Bike Crew (GBC), a group of nearly two dozen boys and girls who were among the most popular kids at school. He was also a high-achieving student. Friends told me that school came naturally to him, but he would do his homework late and pull many all-nighters and end up dozing off during class. Nobody really thought much of it. In the note he left for his family and friends, he wrote that it was nobody's fault—not his family, friends, or school. He said he felt he didn't have a future for himself in the world and he simply wanted to remove himself from it.

On Tuesday evening, dozens of Lee's friends came to campus. Using chalk, they covered nearly every surface—sidewalks, walls, doors, bathrooms, and the parking lot—with phrases like WE LOVE YOU, CAM; PLEASE COME BACK; BALL IS LIFE; and FLUSH FOR CAM. One student told me they were "treating him like a martyr." The next day, the administration, worried that the messages could be read as glorifying suicide and trigger suicidal thoughts in students who were already struggling with mental health issues, held a meeting with the student government. The school acknowledged that the chalk messages were part of the students' grieving process, but they said the writing had to be removed. After school, it was power-washed away. The rest of the week the school was eerily quiet. Teachers gave students flexibility on assignments and tests, but a few continued with their lesson plans. Gunn junior Arjun Sahdev said, "You don't have the time to mourn because you have to study for the exam the next day."

Many in Palo Alto were especially tense because they were worried that Lee's death had been a "copycat suicide" and evidence of a contagion in the community. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, suicide contagion is "a phenomenon in which additional, often similar suicides take place following the report of a suicide." A few weeks earlier, Quinn Gens had also taken his life. Gens was a freshman studying computer programming at Foothill College, a nearby community college, and had graduated from Gunn the year before. When a third student, Harry Lee (no relation to Cameron), committed suicide in January, there was increasing panic about a social contagion at Palo Alto high schools. His death happened on a Saturday, and students learned about it from Facebook and Twitter over the weekend, before it was formally announced on Monday morning at school. Once again, a letter was read to students, but it referred to Harry as "Henry."

His friends described him as "hilarious," "odd... in the most loving way possible," and "a class clown." He had once worn a horse mask to English class as a joke. In the senior poll, he was voted "most outrageous." An obituary published on Palo Alto Online noted that he loved to dance and ride bikes, but it also mentioned his ACT score—35 out of a possible 36.


For more on mental health, watch our doc 'Gone: How Mental Illness Derailed the Career of a Promising Young Skateboarder':



Then, in March, a Paly sophomore named Qingyao "Byron" Zhu took his life, marking the fourth and final student suicide of the 2014–2015 school year. His friends told me that he was taking many advanced classes, some intended for students in the next grade level. He was also involved in soccer and Science Olympiad. But looking back, they didn't recall any warning signs.

By the time of Zhu's death, parents and teachers had been scrutinizing their community and schools since the fall, and many had come to the conclusion that the intense pressure to succeed academically was driving the crisis. In all traditional metrics, Palo Alto high schools rank high. In 2014, Newsweek named Gunn America's 38th best high school, and Paly was judged to be the 56th. More than 30 students in Gunn's 2015 class and 24 in Paly's were named National Merit Scholarship finalists, and many more had received what are considered the "golden" acceptance letters from the nation's elite colleges. Though the community was proud of these achievements, some were quick to blame the suicides on the high-stakes "achievement culture" they created. But many ignored the broader mental health crisis and the lack of resources available to students that had also contributed. According to the 2013–2014 California Healthy Kids Survey, 16 percent of Gunn freshmen and 22 percent of juniors had recently "experienced chronic sadness/hopelessness," and 21 percent of freshmen and 23 percent of juniors had thought about killing themselves in the past year. At Paly, the numbers were similar. Sixty-one Gunn students had been hospitalized or treated for suicidal ideation during the 2014 school year, a disturbing share of the school's 1,900 students. In the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 4,600 people aged between ten and 24 commit suicide annually, the third leading cause of death for the age group.

By the time of his death, Harry Lee had been seeing mental health professionals to treat his clinical depression. Grant Fong, a senior at Gunn, said, "A lot of our friends considered it a failure of the system, as opposed to a personal failure. We had given him all the help he could receive. We set up therapist meetings. Unfortunately, none of them helped." And after Lee died, his parents released a statement in the Palo Alto Weekly questioning the prevailing wisdom in the community about the suicides. "Our son struggled with depression," they wrote. "He made it clear that the cause was not due to academic pressure at Gunn."

In the fall of 2014, Gunn junior Manon Piernot was not in a healthy state of mind. She had been struggling with mental health issues for a while. Before high school, she was a student for many years at an international bilingual school in Palo Alto, which had fewer than 50 students in a graduating class. She loved the school and felt connected to her teachers. Her transition to Gunn after eighth grade was tough. At a school with a much larger student population, she felt lost and had only a handful of friends. One of the very first school assemblies was about college admissions. "I remember being really shocked," Piernot told me. "I wanted to focus on learning things. I felt a lot of pressure to know exactly what I wanted to do." She became involved in activities she had no interest in for the sake of upgrading her résumé.

When she was a sophomore and had to begin selecting courses for her junior year, she felt embarrassed that she wasn't planning on taking an AP science course like many of her classmates. She loved sculpting and ceramics, and she intended to go to art school, a decision that few at Gunn seemed to support. By the end of the year, she started to feel depressed. Some of it had to do with problems at home, but most of it was affiliated with her feelings of inadequacy at school. Students constantly boasted about their grades and the number of AP classes they were taking. Their stress and college-oriented mindset began "rubbing off" on her. She told me that there was never an opportunity for her to candidly discuss what she was experiencing.

In November, the prevalent chalk drawings, the glorification of Cameron Lee's death, and the school community's failure to recognize what he had been going through triggered suicidal thoughts in Piernot. "Suicide seemed like a probable ending," she said. Afraid that she might hurt herself, Piernot's psychiatrist issued a 5150 hold—a 72-hour emergency stay at Mills-Peninsula Medical Center, a hospital just south of San Francisco. An ambulance was solicited, and Piernot was strapped to a stretcher and hauled to the emergency room. After waiting for a bed for eight hours, she was brought into the adolescent psychiatric ward.

Piernot ended up staying for two weeks. More than anything, she was relieved that she wasn't at school. While there she participated in occupational therapy, worked on art projects, did yoga, meditated, and played cards and board games with some of the other adolescent patients. She wasn't particularly impressed with her psychiatrist, who she said was not very helpful because he only asked about her mood and how she slept and then made adjustments to her medication. Most important, she soon discovered that a few of the patients were also students at Gunn, and for the first time in a long while she started to feel a little less alone. "Having a break from Gunn to understand my own priorities and goals saved my life," she said.

These students were not interested in waiting for the adults to act. They made themselves into agents of change.

In November, disturbed by the suicides and the effects they had had on the student body, Gunn sophomore Martha Cabot and retired Gunn English teacher Marc Vincenti launched a campaign called Save the 2,008 to "bring a healthier, more forgiving life to our high schools." The 2,008 refers to the number of students and teachers who remained at Gunn last fall after Cameron Lee's death. Vincenti told me, "Save the 2,008 believes that high schools do not cause teenage despair nor can high schools cure teenage despair. But there is much that high schools can do to make teenage despair more bearable and survivable." Cabot and Vincenti met for coffee to discuss ideas for the campaign, and at a school-board meeting a few weeks later, the duo presented a docket of six proposals, including trimming class sizes and amounts of homework; requiring meetings between parents, students, and guidance counselors to ensure that students who are taking AP classes are aware of what they are in for; decreasing the number of grade reports; banning the use of cell phones; and ending a climate of cheating by making consequences more explicit.

Many people in the community agreed that the academic environment had become toxic and unhealthy and supported Save the 2,008's campaign. The obsessive preoccupation with where students would go to college had had a corrosive effect on their academic and social lives. Students end up pursuing classes and activities that look impressive on college applications, even though they may have no interest in them. And with admissions rates at elite colleges entering the single digits, the competition has intensified. Students who get accepted to those colleges are well respected at school. Alex Hwang, a senior bound for Rice University, told me, "Kids are judged by which college they are going to. I may know nothing about a guy, but I know where he's going to college." And the focus on grades had similarly started to distort students' perceptions of their self-worth. Paly junior Sean Jawetz told me that when a friend says, "I failed that test," he often has to clarify: "Did you 'Palo Alto' fail it," meaning you got a B or worse, "or did you actually fail it?"

The Department of Pediatrics at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation tacitly came out for the Save the 2,008 plan with an op-ed published in the Palo Alto Weekly. "While we are not education specialists, as pediatricians we do recognize dangerously unhealthy lifestyle patterns and habits that are known to exacerbate stress, anxiety, depression, and physical illness," they wrote. "These include chronic sleep deprivation, lack of unscheduled time for thought and relaxation, unhealthy eating habits, lack of exercise, and unrealistic pressures (real or perceived) to achieve. Those unrealistic pressures include excessive homework, overly ambitious course loads, and a seeming demand for perfection in grades, sports, and extracurricular activities."

But many students felt that the campaign focused too heavily on addressing the school's academic climate and not enough on the lack of mental health support available to students. In December, Gunn's student newspaper, the Gunn Oracle, published an editorial signed by 36 of its 37 staff members, criticizing the campaign for "misperceiv[ing] the causes for student stress as purely academic" and disregarding the problems with mental health services at the school. While many in the community have supported the campaign, students at the school have mostly been critical, largely of the proposed cell phone ban and regulations of AP courses.

At Gunn and Paly, students have access to a free on-campus counseling program called Adolescent Counseling Services (ACS). One licensed therapist oversees a team of clinical interns who are earning counseling hours toward their marriage- and family-therapy license. But after the suicides, a negative stigma of mental health still looms, and many students are reluctant to use ACS. Students tell me they fear being seen as weak, overdramatic, or attention-seeking. Because of this, they are "very good at suppressing their emotions and struggles," said Paly senior Andrew Lu. Paly junior Sean Jawetz also notes the pressure to win academically and socially while "maintaining an aura of being cool or chill."

Then there's the lack of mental health education. Students told me that there have been assemblies on sleep, for example, but few have attended because they don't take them seriously. If you are not literate on the symptoms and causes of these problems, how can you possibly prevent and treat them?

Of the students who have visited ACS, few reported pleasant experiences. In the wake of the suicides, Gunn senior Jessica Lwi told me that the program, which is meant to help students handle stress and other issues, is ironically "a very stressful system." When she went in for an appointment over the years, she often met with a different counselor each time, so she ended up having to re-explain her story. She felt the counselors were too busy and inadequately trained.

Lwi brought several of her friends who were suicidal or self-harming to ACS, but she says it's actually made their situations worse because the school contacted their families, who then reacted poorly upon learning of their conditions. And the school never followed up with them later. Instead of waiting for students to come to them, Lwi argued, ACS should reach out to students who are expressing signs of mental illness. "Kids don't always know how to ask for help," she said. Part of the problem is that intern counselors only spend about a year at the school, so students have little emotional attachment to them. Principal Denise Hermann emphasized that the school's mental health services were just short-term care and that families needed to follow up with their own health-care providers, but she said that Gunn would be hiring a full-time licensed mental-health therapist for the new year. Despite the flaws, Lwi still thinks going to ACS is better than getting no help at all, and she is considering pursuing a career as a mental health counselor when she gets to college.

There are a few encouraging signs that the community is coming around to recognizing and ultimately fixing these flaws. In March, the school board voted to allocate $250,000 of the district's budget to hiring two more full-time therapists for the high schools, which will relieve the strained workload of the counseling staff. At Gunn, students took the matter of improving mental health into their own hands, organizing the Student Wellness Committee with the help of Herrmann. It organically grew out of their discussions on what needed to change at the school after Cameron Lee's death. One of the things they set up was a referral box, which allowed students to anonymously refer their friends to counseling. "A startling number of people have told me that they wouldn't talk to a counselor if they had a friend who was in trouble," Gunn sophomore class president Chloe Chang Sorensen explained.

The committee also launched a mental health awareness campaign to educate students about causes, symptoms, and resources available to them. And finally, the committee collaborated with an organization called Youth Empowerment Seminar (YES!) to implement a mindfulness curriculum in physical education classes starting in the fall. These students were not interested in waiting for the adults to act. They made themselves into agents of change.

Following each of the suicides, the school district faced criticism from the community for not doing enough to prevent them. On top of that, there has been a sustained barrage of scathing media coverage in the New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, and NPR, sporting headlines like IN PALO ALTO'S HIGH-PRESSURE SCHOOLS, SUICIDES LEAD TO SOUL-SEARCHING; BEST, BRIGHTEST—AND SADDEST? and WHY ARE PALO ALTO KIDS KILLING THEMSELVES?

Some students, usually the ones who are high-achieving or in leadership positions in student government, have been defensive of Gunn at school-board meetings and in the press. They don't deny that the stress and pressure exist, but they say that it's all a normal part of high school and growing up, that it's reasonable and only academic-related, and that Gunn isn't a "place where people's dreams die." The students who are arguing that the amount of stress and pressure in Palo Alto are a normal part of high school and growing up likely don't have a context of what life is like outside of a high-achieving community. It is not natural for stress levels to be this high and for this many students to be beset by mental heath issues. And so students who have that mentality have resisted proposals intended to relieve some of that pressure, like limiting the number of AP classes students can take. Gunn junior Kathleen Xue rebutted, "This is America. We should be able to choose how rigorous our workload is."

In April, Paly's online news publication, the Paly Voice, ran an editorial accusing the national media of perpetuating the "perceived image of the typical Palo Alto student as completely focused on academic success and nothing else" and inappropriately linking the suicides to stress at the schools. Gunn senior class president Mack Radin told me, "What I found at Gunn is that people do things very intensely. No matter what they are doing, they go all out."

Over spring break in April, Palo Alto schools superintendent Glenn McGee announced that academic classes during zero period would be scrapped at both high schools, starting the next school year. Zero period was an option for students who wanted to take a class before the school day officially began. It came into existence after Gunn shifted its start time from 7:55AM to 8:25AM in 2011.

Proponents of this decision say that students were not getting enough sleep and sleep deprivation has a clear connection to poor teenage mental health. While it wasn't advertised as a response to the student suicides, it was widely seen by the community as such. Supporters of the change cited a 2014 policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommended that schools start no earlier than 8:30AM.

Students, however, were overwhelmingly opposed to the change. Sorensen, the sophomore class president, conducted an online survey on zero period. Three hundred and seventy students responded, with 90 percent against the decision to ban academic classes during zero period. Students who had sports or work after school said zero period gave them more flexibility in their schedule, which actually reduced their stress. Some students said they preferred waking up earlier and getting a class out of the way to have a free period during the day. And some students who took a zero period said they went to bed earlier than the kids who didn't. Yet there were a handful of students who agreed with the change. Some of their responses included: "Made my sleep a lot worse." "Less sleep. Made everything more difficult. Impacted my grades harshly." "It was hell to be honest. I skipped class because I could not get up in the morning. I was tired all day and was not able to function. I had to drop the class."

Students were not willing to passively accept the superintendent's decision. Two Gunn juniors, Ben Lee and Nina Shirole, co-founded the Palo Alto Student Union to advocate for and promote the student voice. They put up posters with the words SUPPORT STUDENT CHOICE, SUPPORT STUDENT VOICE all over Gunn. And many teachers supported their efforts. With the superintendent sitting behind him on stage, retiring Gunn mathematics teacher Peter Herreshoff said in a speech at graduation, "Your class this year witnessed the imposition of an unjust policy regarding zero period. Although it didn't affect you directly, you united in solidarity with future graduating classes to oppose that policy. Although you didn't win, yet, you learned about taking agency over your lives and working collectively to do that." The student union considered holding a student walkout over the zero-period change but ultimately decided to host a sit-in at a school-board meeting.

A few weeks after the decision was announced, dozens of students attended a Tuesday-evening board meeting. This was the meeting at which zero period was originally meant to be discussed, but McGee had unexpectedly made a unilateral decision beforehand. One after another, students came up to the podium and blasted the superintendent. Gunn senior and school-board student representative Rose Weinmann called the move "misguided paternalism." What students were most peeved about was that the zero-period decision was orchestrated in a top-down manner without their consultation. Ben Lee told me later, "We were blatantly disregarded by the community. It was good to show that we weren't lesser beings. We were going to fight for our right to be heard." He believes that the decision was rashly made to "appease a few people." Shirole also thinks it's a contradiction that physical education and broadcasting classes during zero period will remain when the underlying intention of the change was to help all students get more sleep. And she says the research on later start times does not "account for the element of choice," as zero period is optional.

"We were blatantly disregarded by the community. It was good to show that we weren't lesser beings. We were going to fight for our right to be heard."

Later, at a May meeting, board member Camille Townsend took McGee to the woodshed: "I can assure you this, that in my twelve some years on the school board, there has never been a decision made like this with so little information that the board has been able to discuss." She continued, "Why is there secrecy behind this? Why was it that during break I received a directive from the superintendent? That is not how we do business here in Palo Alto."

Besides changing zero period, at another May board meeting, the school board approved the new block schedule at Gunn for the fall, in which students have fewer but longer classes in a day (Paly already had block scheduling). The purpose is to lighten the amount of work and studying that students need to do each night and thus lower their stress levels.

Many in the community appreciate the district for their efforts after the suicides, but there are others who believe it is simply making changes for the sake of change and not truly addressing an academic environment obsessed with grades, test scores, and college admissions.

Weeks after her stay in the hospital, Piernot was "still wallowing in depression." Then, at the end of January, Harry Lee's death re-triggered her suicidal ideation. She was given another 5150 and returned to the same hospital. This time her psychiatrist had lengthy, fruitful conversations with her about the challenges in her life. It became clear to her that she needed to start living in the present in order for her health to improve and to get back in touch with herself—"knowing who I was."

"In our minds, we like to do some fortunetelling," she said. "We often imagine the worst-case scenario, which is harmful. We feel inadequate. What if I don't get into this college? What if I don't get into my first choice? What if I don't get a scholarship? Which ends up hindering your present. You aren't doing things in the present. You're thinking more about the future. You're focused on getting a good grade in order to get into college."

After the two-week visit to the hospital, she joined an outpatient program for three hours every day after school for eight weeks in which she engaged in many types of therapy. "We discussed mindfulness and destructive behavior and how to get out of them," she said. "It helped me to separate myself from others. I was focused on myself and no one else. I stopped taking on others' problems and solved my own."

At school, Piernot started putting this new mindset into action. Whenever a student began talking about grades, she plugged her ears and walked away. And she said, "I stopped worrying about grades. It was so freeing to me." She added, "My aim is to be happy now. If I get bad grades, I don't give a shit."

If you are concerned about your mental health or that of someone you know, visit the Mental Health America website.

Why New Yorkers Love New York

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My family is one of those New York clans straight out of Seinfeld—we debate our fastest times taking the Van Wyck to JFK, we tell people about new restaurants by saying, "Oh my God, you have to try it—it's the best," and any suggestion that someone might move out of the five boroughs is treated as if they were talking about heading off to Syria. When my parents moved out of Queens and Brooklyn, where they were both raised, they stayed close, landing in a town at the border of Queens and Long Island's Nassau County. My aunts and uncles didn't make it far either. To them (and me), the question has always been: why leave?

If you ask some people that question, they'll give you a whole list of reasons. The rent is too damn high, and getting higher. Gentrification is destroying the fabric of the city and driving impoverished minority populations out of their homes. The weather is lousy for most of the year. It's cramped and crowded and user-unfriendly, and doesn't even have the anything-goes trashiness that made it fun—witness, for instance, the crackdown on topless ladies in Times Square.

But to my family and thousands of other New Yorkers, no matter how high the rents get, or how gilded it all becomes, or how many "Goodbye to All That" ripoff essays get penned, New York will always be what it always has been: the greatest city in the world.

Here are their stories:

Astoria, Queens. Photo via momentcaptured1

The Immigrant

In the high-rises, complexes, and condos of modern New York, your neighbors tend to exist mostly as names on buzzers. I've lived in buildings for an entire year without meeting the people I shared a wall with. But Astoria, where I live now, is an exception; the apartments here are true Queens residences: homely, small, and friendly. That's how I met Jamie Jinette.

My neighbor and his family moved here from Colombia 12 years ago, when he was 26, to find safety and opportunity from a country that was succumbing to violence and an economic downturn. He started off in Queens Village ("In the beginning, you just rent a basement, and make your way up," he says), moved to Astoria soon after, and has lived here ever since. He now owns a dry cleaning business just around the block from our apartment.

To him, New York has everything someone looking for a new home could want:

All the people you get to know, from different cultures: That's something you're looking for, and you appreciate it. You don't find that in other places. In Colombia, you'd see that in certain areas, but not like in New York. That's something that, if you're an outsider, it really captures your attention. If you're open, you can learn a lot from these different cultures, from the food to the ideas. That's the reason you stay. And even in the years that are rough, there's always opportunity here, if you're willing to do it. I guess, after a while, you get to become part of the community. It's your house now.

Photo courtesy of Thanu Yakupitiyage

The Advocate

When Thanu Yakupitiyage graduated college and moved to New York in 2007, the city—and the country, for that matter—was in rough shape.

Lehman Brothers had just collapsed Downtown, and Bear Stearns, along with the rest of the global financial system, would soon follow. The impact left Thanu scrambling to make rent in a city she was totally new to: Before attending college in Massachusetts, Thanu, a Sri Lankan by birth, lived in Bangkok, where she was raised in an expat community. When she arrived in New York, she had no work visa, so she hustled her way through restaurants and helped with research for The Accidental American by Rinku Sen, a book about the undocumented immigrants who worked at the Eyes of the World, the restaurant that was at the top of the World Trade Center.

The two positions inspired her to now work as the communications manager for the New York Immigration Coalition, which advocates for immigrants like herself in legal and economic struggles. She also DJs all over the city. But it was in those kitchens where she learned what coming to the Big Apple was all about:

People came to New York for a better life. People came because they needed to earn in dollars and send money home to their families. They wanted a better education. Some of them were escaping violence, or part of the LGBT community and couldn't be gay at home. These are all the reasons why people come to New York. You have to find something that you can't find in other places... And I think there's a sort of freedom that I haven't be able to experience anywhere else.

Photo courtesy of Tren'ness Woods-Black

The Restauranteur

Tren'ness Woods-Black has worked in Sylvia's since she was a young girl. During her life, the Harlem soul food joint—named after her grandmother, the "Queen of Soul Food," Sylvia Woods—has transformed into a renowned cultural institution. Now Tren'ness is in charge of the restaurant's communications, and has extended its influence beyond its doors. As a small business advocate, she helps organize the annual Harlem EatUp! Festival, which showcases local cuisines and is part of a larger entrepreneurial association called Harlem Park to Park.

The energy of this city is unlike no other. It's definitely twofold: It's good because it's this sense of "I've gotta get it done." The energy of the city keeps me here. It's like that hustle gene. When you're at an airport in a different state, and the plane lands in that particular state, everyone gradually gets up. But in New York, when your flight lands with a bunch of New Yorkers on it, everyone's up and headed toward the door. "OK, time's a wasting, I've gotta get it done..." A lot of other places are a bit more segregated, in a sense. The atmosphere doesn't lend itself to what New York has to offer. That's why celebrities like to live here; there's not the horde of paparazzi following them, like on the West Coast. They can blend in and just do their thing. Everyone is like, "I know that the person walking next to me has their own life, their own mission, and that's what they're about."

Greg (left) and Tom (right)

The Historians

Greg Young and Tom Meyers's informal yet highly educational podcast, " The Bowery Boys," started off in 2007 as a fascination the two had with the streets they walked on every day. It remains a side project—Young works for Sony, and Meyers owns a travel website—but they've been at it for 184 weekly episodes. In this city, they say, change has always been a constant: a perpetual push forward, with accompanying perpetual pushbacks. Our anxiety stems from how fast changes are happening now, but by dissecting the layers of history on each and every block, they argue we can better understand what's going on.

On coming to New York:

GREG: I moved here because I came from the Bible Belt, and I was closeted. So, what New York offered to me was the freedom to be myself. And you know what? In 2015, you can still come to New York and have that very same feeling. Those things, to me personally, haven't changed. When you come here to escape a background, or whether to gain knowledge, or whether to become a richer person, New York has always had that opportunity.

On its history:

TOM: The things that we saw as the quintessential New York—those things that give the accent that may be missing now—probably had already replaced something else before those people lamented. So sometimes, we start this lamentation process and reset it with our own experiences. Everybody's going to raise objections and start heckling... But New York, at its core, is a hyper-competitive city. It was founded as a trading city; it wasn't founded as a Puritanical retreat. It wasn't a place for people to finally practice their religious beliefs, like other settlements. This was a company town, and that has fueled multiethnic openness and multi-religious tolerance. It has made the city more open to others, but everybody is banded together in pushing forward to make it for themselves.

Photo via Flickr user Michael Dolan

The Lifer

Growing up in Astoria, Michael Stahl's world was marked by his mother's warnings: Don't go past 21st Street; don't go to Astoria Park at night; don't go to Manhattan alone until you're at least 16. This was in the 90s, when the threat of violent crime still hovered over nearly every block. Today, the train to Queens is packed, door-to-door, with people at 2 AM on a Friday night. Years ago, that would have been unfathomable.

"People in LA work to enjoy life, and in New York, people are just so driven, that their life's enjoyment is work."
–Michael Stahl

Stahl, a Queens lifer, says that the city has opened up since he was young. Astoria's 21st Street is bustling; Astoria Park is filled with strollers; and a Manhattan-bound subway is strange if it doesn't have teenagers on it. Yes, the rents have gone up, but Stahl—a freelance journalist, editor at Narratively, and friend of mine—will take Times Square with Mickey Mouse and Batman over Times Square with muggings and porn shops any day. Commercialization sucks, he argues, but being paranoid just walking down the street at night sucks even more.

I lived in LA for a year and a half, and if there's two American cities that are more polar opposite, I haven't been in them. They're just completely different. I feel like every city I've visited, there's a little LA in it, and certainly a bit of New York in it. I think people in LA work to enjoy life, and in New York, people are just so driven, that their life's enjoyment is work... In New York, it's more about proving it. Here, there just seems to be an ownership; that you have to earn it... I wish I could have that [LA] lifestyle, because maybe I'd be a little less anxious, and not need as much coffee. But in New York, it's different: I was born and raised here, and nowhere else is going to match that intensity. Maybe that means I die sooner. But I wouldn't want it any other way.

Photo via Flickr user Payton Chung

The Jack of All Trades

In 1970, Paul Bridgewater hitchhiked here from California. Not knowing anyone when he arrived, he spent his first night in New York sleeping at a homeless shelter in the East Village. When I met him 45 years later, he was still living in the East Village, just a few floors up from my girlfriend's apartment.

Paul is one of those people with a bottomless well of stories. When I spoke to him for this story, we started talking about his recent month-long trip to a friend's chateau in France, then wound up discussing trapezing transvestites at a club called the Peppermint Lounge, a conga line that he took from a cab to a club called Underground, and the gigantic spoon of cocaine on the wall in Studio 54. He also told me about his friend who dressed as a vampire and would crawl on the ground biting people's ankles at parties. He now owns that chateau in France.

A gallery owner, exhibit designer, former restaurant owner, and all-around savant, Bridgewater came here with $10 in his pocket and now has a wealth of anecdotes, featuring the most interesting people, places, and things in the world. According to him, that could only happen in New York.

It didn't matter if you had money. Just if you were fabulous, and beautiful, and interesting. I remember being at a party, and there were sailors in uniforms and someone came in and they were covered in jewels and a tiara; they had just come from the opera. And someone would say, "Oh, we're going to a party, do you want to come with us?" You would jump into a limousine and be gone. You'd start at a nice apartment but suddenly you'd be in a penthouse. You'd be sitting there, laughing and carrying on, and someone would turn to you and say, "Oh, I like you. We're going to a party. Do you wanna come with us?" And you just went. You never knew where you were gonna be.

Photo via Flickr user Jay Woodworth

The Brooklynite

In the handful of times I've spoken with Linda Sarsour, she has always found some way to sneak in her love for New York, or more specifically, Brooklyn.

When she replies to an email, her signature reads, "Sent from my Brooklyn iPhone." When I wrote to her for this story, she responded with, "I wish I had time; I would run a campaign and make Brooklyn its own city again, heck its own country if I could." A noted rights advocate and speaker, Sarsour was born and raised in the outer borough, after her parents emigrated from Palestine. When she discusses civil liberties for Muslim Americans in the city—an issue which, as the head of the Arab American Association of New York, she has become nationally recognized for—her Brooklyn accent and attitude is all too noticeable.

But, most importantly, her underlying argument is that the best city in the world shouldn't tolerate injustice.

New York City is the only city in the country where you can travel around the world at the cost of $2.75 each way. From Chinatown to Brooklyn's Little Arabia to Senegal in Harlem to Little Korea in Flushing to Liberia on Staten Island... New York City is the world within the world.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Scenes from the True Religion Store in 2007: The Peak of Noughties Hyperconsumption

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Illustration by Chiara Sbolci

In the summer of 2007, people were tapping their thumbs on iPhone screens for the first time. Amy Winehouse was alive, as were Alexander McQueen and Heath Ledger; Lindsay Lohan was still being hired to act in movies (more or less); and in a few months, a burned copy of Tha Carter III would play nonstop in my Nissan Maxima.

I had graduated earlier that spring and moved to Los Angeles in an effort to avoid the lawyers and wedding planners with whom I had gone to college. With an unspeakable amount of money owed in student loans, I needed cash and I needed to make some friends, so I took the first job I came across: working as a sales associate at the True Religion store in Beverly Hills.

Having grown up in a small town in New Hampshire, I thought True Religion was the epitome of sophistication. To pay $167 for a pair of jeans had to be cosmopolitan. I would soon learn that the brand's aesthetic was more Vegas cowboy than Sloaney pony, but that's really splitting hairs. It was a day job, anyway, and I was confident that I would soon be so inundated with auditions and writing gigs that I'd be out of there soon enough.

The shop was located on Robertson Boulevard across the street from Kitson, a store known for popularizing Team Aniston t-shirts and everything Heidi Montag ever wore. It was not unusual to see paparazzi chasing down Eva Longoria, Paris Hilton, or LiLo, as they perused the new seasons at Intermix and Tory Burch. Once, Kate Beckinsale ran straight through our shop and out the stockroom exit to escape the paps.

Charmingly enough, the neighborhood still hadn't decided exactly what it was, indicated by the presence of Robert Clergerie, Agnès B, and Camper in close proximity. Soon enough Kira Plastinina (the fashion label started by a 15-year-old Russian heiress) and Rock and Republic moved in, eliminating all doubt that this neighborhood embraced the apex of noughties ideals—trend over style.

My favorite co-worker at TRBJ was a young Japanese woman named Summer. She said she got her name because a group of kids in her neighborhood, who liked to play with her collection of Japanese toys, insisted that she was—not looked like, but actually was—the Asian American character from Clueless. Summer was married to a man of unknown employment, who occasionally swung by the back entrance of the shop wearing a hoodie and dark sunglasses, driving a gold Mercedes SL. Summer herself drove a top of the line Range Rover, which she whipped around with a confidence that no one should have in a car that size. When I asked why she was working retail, since she clearly wasn't struggling for dough, she vaguely dismissed it as a favor to the owner. I also asked why she didn't wear her wedding ring to work, to which she replied, "It's too flashy," without a whiff of irony.

The rest of the crew included the grumpy store manager who saved all her vacation and sick days to travel to Humboldt County for marijuana picking season; the often grumpier but always impeccably dressed assistant manager, who became my boyfriend during the interim months between my acceptance to and leaving for graduate school; a gaggle of models/actresses/FIDM students who lived for sales at Bebe; and a part-time employee we called the Germ.

The Germ would swoop in on weekends and steal everyone's sales (we worked for individual commission, which is a sound idea only if you want to create Machiavellian warfare among your employees). He would encourage customers to buy shirts that clearly didn't fit them (none of the men's shirts fit anyone, of any shape or size); convince them to splurge on the flashiest, most heavily stitched and rhinestone-encrusted denim; promise them that the canary yellow purse, "handmade" in Italy, was a wardrobe staple. And without fail, three days later, these people would be back returning it all.

The most surprising thing I learned at TRBJ was that shoppers actually wanted to hear the truth. Whereas the Germ would try any sort of flattery to close a deal, I found that a much more reliable way to engender a sale was to bring the customer down a peg—tell them, nope, you know what, that fit does nothing for your ass, let's try the ones without button pockets. They felt that you were honest, not just trying to up-sell them, which inclined them to buy everything you flung over the dressing room wall.

When you work retail, you develop a funny relationship to your customers. It's not that you know them, but you can start to feel like you do—and sometimes they feel like they know you, too. One of our customers tried to woo me into going on a date with him by presenting me with a Christian Audigier shirt. (Over the years, I watched the huge Christian Audigier shop on Melrose downgrade to an Ed Hardy store, then an Ed Hardy outlet, and then an empty retail space for lease.) He was a French rapper who came into the shop multiple times, but never bought anything. Then he sprung the shirt on me, and I learned that any person who has ever been in possession of an Amex Black Card believes that he is the member of a secret society that entitles him to constant adulation, fully expecting anyone in the service industry to drop to her knees when she encounters the card's metallic weight and sharp edges. The Black Card is the coalescence of noughties values: it's bottle service and Juicy Couture sweatsuits and hair extensions and gradated Tom Ford sunglasses in currency form.

My favorite customers were the foreign plutocrats, all with the same floppy haircuts and Polo shirts with that giant horse, who were usually friendly and surprised when you could identify where they were from. More than anything, they had a sense of shame that was truly endearing. Aware, unlike their American counterparts, that this whole charade was pretty ridiculous. Maybe they didn't know about the impending global economic collapse (they probably did), but the sense lingered around them that this frenzy of consumption was a tenuous trend.

After the store manager finally quit, a new manager, Robbie, was poached from the Ted Baker shop across the street. Robbie was big on ethnic profiling: If you were young and African American, he would hover around you like a helicopter over Baldwin Hills; if a woman in a silk headscarf and sunglasses walked in, he would makes us foist the most expensive product onto her. He obsessively tracked foot traffic throughout the day, and if someone came in to return something, we had to make up for it in double the value in sales. Robbie did his best to destroy any notion I had that commerce could be an interpersonal exchange of ideas, an expression of individuality; everyone was a chip in the system, expected to perform their task.

Not long after that, I quit too. In the summer of 2008, I got accepted to a masters program in Classical Acting and moved to London for a year. I proudly embarked on that experience with no expectations: I'd never been to London, never lived outside the US, I knew little of class systems or the significance of regional accents. In fact, I was so untroubled by what the future might hold that upon my arrival to the UK, I briefly moved in with a woman whom I'd met while working at True Religion. She was a semi-regular customer who lived with her three adult children in a stunning flat in Kensington. I may have Googled her before I left, but I also may have not; I honestly can't recall. I definitely did not know what or where Kensington was. Nonetheless, that fall I took a plane, then a taxi to the address she wrote down on a piece of receipt paper, and started a new chapter of my life.

Drama school changed everything for me. I learned how to do a passable RP accent, how to breathe in a Shakespearean soliloquy, how to stage fight with a rapier and dagger. I learned how to cry on cue. I studied John Ford and Cecily Berry and Yat Malmgren. I learned, in a fundamental way, that every person perceives the world differently—that no one, not a sibling or soulmate or parent will see the world exactly as you do. Making those ephemeral moments of connection and flow all the more meaningful. And I learned that it didn't matter what success I had in ten months; the goal was ten years. Rejection is a fact of life, but if you have conviction in your art, your story, your view, you'll find a way to tell it.

And in a way, I see threads of those lessons from my time at True Religion Brand Jeans. I recently learned via Instagram that my ex-boyfriend/assistant manager is engaged. Summer and her husband divorced after she learned that a friend of his with "connections" at the NSA hacked into her phone, read all her messages, and deleted contacts of whom her husband didn't approve.

A lot has changed since 2007. Selfie sticks are now a thing, as are hashtags and the Kardashians. The Hummers and Bentleys that once clogged West side traffic have all been replaced by Teslas. Twitter fights and ayahuasca ceremonies have overtaken crotch shots and prawn diets as the preferred celebrity fads. True Religion Brand Jeans has become embroiled in multiple lawsuits.

Too many artistic geniuses have met an untimely demise, and everyone left seems to think they're Basquiat. Fashion has adopted something called "athleisure," which, if you ask me, is an improvement. I'm back in Los Angeles, trying to assemble a career of which I can be proud. It's the small things, the marginal wins, that move us forward. And I am grateful that we're no longer expected to wear uncomfortable, unaffordable jeans while we do it.

Follow Sandha Khin on Twitter.

September's Best and Worst Albums

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This article appears in the September Issue of VICE

BEST ALBUM OF THE MONTH


DESTRUCTION UNIT
Negative Feedback Resistor
Sacred Bones

Some bands were born in the wrong era. It could have been Gary Wilson instead of Ariel Pink or Blu instead of Common. If Destruction Unit formed between the years of 1977 and 1982, they would be the biggest psych or punk band ever to leave a trail of sonic sludge across this godforsaken planet. I swear, brother, if Father Time messed with history, the freaks in high school would be subbing in Deep Trip shirts for Misfits garb. Not to slight Glenn Danzig and company, but seeing D-Unit live is a mind-bendingly holy experience—at least if viewed from within a space-time vacuum. It's not that they aren't original today, but let's be real: if you think a bunch of dudes from an Arizona art collective who eat shrooms and make head-y guitar music in 2015 are ever gonna make it into the rock canon, you might as well start jerking it to VHS tapes and cancel your Brazzers subscription.
~ BUD LUDDITE

WORST ALBUM OF THE MONTH


BRING ME THE HORIZON
That's the Spirit
Columbia

Allow me to, um, allow the press release for this pile-of-garbage-worthy-only-of-being-torched-and-having-a-backflip-done-over-it-with-a-dirtbike speak for itself: "British metalcore [sic] act [sic] Bring Me the Horizon will release its fifth album [sic], That's the Spirit, on September 11 via Columbia Records [sic]. Eleven tracks were laid down [sic] for the CD [sic], which was produced [sic] by Bring Me the Horizon keyboardist [sic] /vocalist [sic] Jordan Fish."
~ EWOK TO REMEMBER

BEST COVER OF THE MONTH


SILICON
Personal Compute
Weird World
This whiskey dick right here's a jazz-fusion spin on "girlfriend jams," a special genre name I reserve for extra-soft synthpop: mostly weepy (with a beat you can shuffle side to side to, so as not to stare at other girls) and sung by somebody who's been in a relationship so long that even his singing voice is "just a suggestion"—you also know all the synths must be analog because why would they have stopped leaving their apartments? I don't currently know anyone who would be a fan of this, but I do know catching up would be a drag, Duncan. Let it die.
~ LUKE BADONTOUCH

WORST COVER OF THE MONTH


BEACH HOUSE
Depression Cherry
Sub Pop
My friend said he doesn't like Beach House because they're like a bed with too many throw pillows: You're just piled on with more layers and layers of sound until you're hot, sweaty, and begin to realize you're suffocating. Pretty spot-on, but I think it's more like getting a handjob in that overindulgent bed: A tug can be methodical, consistent, maybe even thoughtfully textured. It's fine, I guess—you're getting the old baboon greased, after all! But the climax is ultimately a weak puff of smoke, followed by a gnarly Dutch oven that does the real suffocating.
~ #ARIPARTY


METHOD MAN
The Meth Lab
Hanz On/Tommy Boy

It's that time of year again—you're all getting ready to hang up your thong sandals and light one last bonfire. But before you make the beach smell like the undercarriage of a horse and drink the rest of your sister's Coors Light, you'd better make sure Siri's got The Meth Lab queued up on your fucking iPhone because you, Murphy, Powers, O'Reilly, and Sinclair, are gonna need it to pre-game to. If you guys are lucky, Powers will cry actual tears, forever tarnishing your memories of driving home drunk from the golf course, feeling a connection with Method Man.
~ OLDMAN GRUMPY


2 CHAINZ
Trapavelli Tre Mixtape
Self-Released

Is 2 Chainz out of his goddamn mind? He's got the Dream, Wiz Khalifa, and Kevin Gates on his new mixtape and production by Zaytoven all over the place! Straight off the bat, let's get it straight: Wiz Khalifa is crack to millennials; unless they're actually smoking crack for some reason—probably ironically. The first track to drop, "Watch Out," is classic 2 Chainz: It has the simple keyboard jingle, clap sounds, and bass drops. It's nothing compared with his past tracks, though, and to pick that track to introduce the tape might have been a bad choice, to be honest. Here's why this mixtape is lit: He loves to rhyme things that don't technically rhyme by changing the pronunciation of the word, he unabashedly talks about smacking dat ass and jack hammering "thots," and he cleverly describes a jet-setting, blunt smoking life we'd all love to have, all while avoiding wack controversies and politics. If you're looking for a mixtape to pump for the end of the summer, this is worth the space in your Dropbox or downloading to the HD, especially because it's $FREE.99. Put this record on while you roast a Dutch and/or get your wiener slobbed on, or just listen to it on your headphones on the subway quietly—it's perfect for any occasion.
~ BROWN BEAR


SILENTÓ
Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)
Capitol

My teenage nephew tells me that he's into hip-hop, so I play him ODB, and the kid just yawns at me. It seriously breaks my fragile heart. These days, you can just make up a dance and you're now the greatest thing since Fred Astaire made 'em laugh. Originality is dead. Long live Nae Nae.
~ UNCLE JON


YOUNG THUG
Hy!£UN35
300 Entertainment

I read somewhere that it is "close to impossible to read Young Thug's mind," which is crazy, because if people can possibly read Young Thug's mind, that means that there is almost certainly someone who can definitely read my mind. If you're out there, what am I thinking about right now? You got it, I was thinking about how funny it was when the iPad came out; remember how the menstrual-blood-fearing techno-Illuminati made this magical device into a second grader's reaction to foie gras? "Ew, what a fucking disgusting name for the machine of our wildest dreams!" they would blog, which caused a disruptive chain reaction of social media word hurl. If Ford—wait, no—if Honda unveiled a flying car tomorrow called the 2015 Honda Condom, would that bother you? Do condoms fucking bother you, man? Pig. It's really funny, though, because now no one has iPods, and when people say "iPad" it sounds like they're saying "iPod," but like a crotchety, old son of a bitch from the Hamptons.
~ JIMMY CALIGULA BREATH


DAM-FUNK
Invite the Light
Stones Throw

Come here, Jimmy. Come sit on Pop Pop's lap. I'm getting very old, and before I vanish off the face of this here planet, I want to tell you a secret I've never told anyone. Can you keep a secret? Back in the day, your Pop Pop lived a very different life. Before I started reading mystery novels, before I started watching re-runs of JAG, I used to be a musician by the name of Dam-Funk. Things were off the motherfucking chain, Jimbo. I had some money; I was making tunes for a living and puffing from an endless supply of the Devil's herb. I had a white Impala that would make hoochies wetter than the Amazon! Fuck! It was the life. But then, one day me and one of the girls went for a cruise in the whip. Jim, always make sure you understand how hydraulics work before you drop ten grand installing them in your car. This bird in the passenger seat started nibbling on Pop Pop's pecker, and it got real hot, lemme tell you. Before you know it—BAM! I accidentally hit a switch and the suspensions went off, jabbing my ole one-eyed snake right into her left cornea. She became the real one-eyed something, rather. I panicked and tossed her out of the car, leading to her untimely death. Your Pop Pop had to split town and drop the whole music thing to avoid the fuzz. Went deep undercover and started anew—new name, new haircut, new ethnicity, you name it. I met Grandma working on a farm on the other side of the country. It's been damn near 60 years since that fateful ride! Boy, do I miss that car. Anyway, it's time for your bubble bath, champ. Your Pop Pop loves you.
~ POP POP


IDJUT BOYS
Versions
Smalltown Supersound

This is what I'm talking about, man. Leg-shattering disco-dub bangers from a couple of legends that get about as pretentious as a dish-detergent company flaunting their product's capacity to clean an oil-soaked duckling. Music that can save the world and music that can make our own meaningless existence less difficult to trudge through can be the same music, and here it mothersucking is.
~ NEFIR T'BRIDE


AFX
Orphaned Deejay Selek (2006–2008)
Warp

It's comforting to know not only that insane geniuses are alive, well, and active, but that people actually respect and love them. It's like a Natural Born Killers kind of thing. It's so true, too—we love insane people. In fact, even the phrase insane people could be taken to mean awesome people in the parlance of our times. Crazy, insane, ridiculous are all words to describe irrational behavior until they became words to describe awesomeness. How fucking stupid is that? Even stupid can mean very sometimes, in which case, my previous sentence makes absolutely no sense, especially because fucking was used to mean very. Fucking has always meant the same thing, or at least Game of Thrones would have you believe so. People love to argue about the historical accuracy of that show, and I'm like, OK, can we just enjoy learning about where we all came from and not bicker over the details? Geez.
~ T. KID


MUELLER-ROEDELIUS
Imagori
Grönland

I once told a lie—just one lie ever in my life—that I did not bury a set of stolen Sonic the Hedgehog temporary tattoos in my backyard. Actually, the lie was that I didn't steal them. I did bury them. To this day, their function as a royal-blue, supersonic tell-tale heart in my life has caused me unending distress. It actually feels good to get the lie off my chest to you now, dear reader. It reminds me of one other lie—only one other lie, ever in my life—that I have told, that this kind of music is for people who try too hard to hide their inferior intellect by drawing elaborate, impossible comparisons between Tarkovsky movies and a dream they had once but say is recurring. I actually don't believe what I've said to be true, this lie; in truth, I think I'm one of these people because I went to a Montessori school.
~ RAPHAEL FELLATIO


DJ RICHARD
Grind
DIAL

When I was in high school, I developed some big-boy feelings for this indie chick who lived a couple towns over. She dated this really hot dude in a pretty good band, hipped me to Arthur Russell, and sported the type of knockers that were impossible to look at without immediately going to the nearest bathroom to furiously jerk one out. While I friend-zoned myself in high school, I grew some pubes in college, and we started fooling around once a year during holiday break. My friends called her "the Perennial" because of the season-specific routine. It was the thing I looked forward to the most every year. Eventually, she moved to my neighborhood in New York, and I guess my weird-looking penis and doughy ass were no longer so charming when she had to deal with them on the reg. Now she's into fringe electronic music and dates a hot DJ. Hanukkah isn't very fun anymore.
~ DJ DICK


MY DISCO
Severe
Temporary Residence Ltd.

I recently downloaded the Taco Bell app on my phone, which is fucked because I was just giving them a hard time on Twitter, saying it was a clever way for a suicide help line to disguise an app of its own. I still think that's a brilliant cross-promotional platform for these two massive corporations—each more massive in its own corporate right—to circle back on by EOD.
~ DR. DEW


HEAVEN'S GATE
Woman at Night
Dull Tools

The new brigade is stronger, faster, cooler, and more willing to smoke DMT every single day without batting an eyelash at the cost of therapy. Let's face it, young people will find everything they need for free online. It's good that the fine freaks of Heaven's Gate are willing to give those of you with some semblance of mental stability a run for your Bitcoin. I hope someone accidentally plays this instead of Health at whatever ayahuasca ceremony you didn't invite me to so that I don't have to be only person in my therapist's waiting room playing Candy Crush anymore.
~ NUTE FROGHAIR


GHOST B.C.
Meliora
Spinefarm/Loma Vista

I had a lot of hope for this group. When they first hit the scene, they delivered everything you wanted from a band with the intellect of a third grader the day before Halloween. I figured they'd have called it quits long before being bullied into a half-assed compromise of a name change, which made anyone who came to their defense immediately think of that band HIM. For fuck's sake, HIM? I don't want to think about HIM! I'm not trying to watch CKY2K and be a virgin again. HIM? Jesus.
~ ROMAN NIGHTCUBE


LACED
Laced
Bayonet

There was this weird Married... with Children spinoff called Top of the Heap in the early 90s, starring Joey from Friends and the real-life husband of the woman who played Eva Braun in The Producers. You'd think that with such an all-star cast, the show would still be on today, but it lasted just seven episodes. At any rate, it's about how Joey and Hitler go around asking people how they're doin' (sic) over and over again until they're finally rich and rule the world. Everyone agrees that Fox took some huge risks back in the day and whatever paranoid conservatism they seem to flaunt now kinda fucked up their money-burning, coked-up legacy, which stinks. Why can't things just be the way I remember them? Like exactly as I accurately remember them—back when shit was so much fucking fun?
~ EDO ROCKY


SALAD BOYS
Metalmania
Trouble in Mind

Methamphetamine isn't even illegal in New Zealand, and they have zero security at the airports there. In fact, you could fucking show up to the airport in New Zealand with another person's ticket—like if you found it on the ground or something—and just get on whatever plane the rightful owner of the ticket was meant to be on. I think this is a domestic-only sort of thing, but still! With all that said, forget about the Dunedin Sound, forget about the Clean—it's 2015, and New Zealand's thing now is legal meth, no-hassle air travel, and Salad Boys!
~ TREVOR BETREV


KURT VILE
B'lieve I'm Goin Down...
Matador

Kurt's records are so consistently outstanding that I wish I could read whatever Faustian contract he drafted up for the Devil to produce such candidly robust hits over and over again. His trick is in how he pioneers pockets of familiar territory and stakes his individual claim on them, like when I built that sweet fort in my neighbors' backyard in elementary school but it pissed the neighbors off, so they came over and reprimanded my parents—all "Your kid better get rid of that jerk booth he built on our property"—but my parents didn't even know I had been building the thing, so my mom and dad got divorced or something. Whatever the case and whatever we're talking about, I didn't bring the porn into the fort. I think it was a homeless guy who was released on uncertain terms from the mental hospital that movie Session 9 was shot in. Anyway, you know what I'm talking about.
~ OOLONG GOODBYE


KING STORK
Year Of The Bud
Self Released

People are always asking me what the state of ska music is today, and I really don't know. Here's the thing—the third wave is in a kind of receding, pre-tsunami phase because the motherfuckers tying to break new ground in the ska circuit are members of what is called the "Boomlet Generation," i.e., high school. High schools are a fertile, two-tone Garden of Eden for ska kids, because if you walk into homeroom on the first day of ninth grade with a Spamalot T-shirt on, they just hand you a fucking trombone. There's virtually no other way to get a trombone, honestly; they fall into three pricing categories: free, a million dollars, or willed by the deceased grandparent who took you to Spamalot the summer before ninth grade. As a result, third-wave ska is—and forever shall remain—in a kind of fugue state characterized by its worthlessness. The old saying goes, "Every time a ska band's horn section gets early admission to college, a bass player grows an ego," but sometimes the horns keep blowing after senior year. Sometimes they wind up in an indie band.
~ FAT BOOMLET


SEAN NICHOLAS SAVAGE
Other Death
Arbutus

If John Waters ever had a kid, the type who took full advantage of a trust fund but still wore ratty clothes and lived in a squat, it would be this sleazy bastard. I have the rule never to date musicians (or equestrians, now that we're on the topic) because of fronting motherfuckers like SNS. You know those kids who snorted heroin once during sophomore year of art school and still talk about it a decade later? Shaking. My. Goddamn. Head. I'm sure Other Death is fine, but writing this passive-aggressive rant is already giving this loser more attention than he deserves. I'm gonna go watch Cry-Baby and think about how sweet it would be to have a trust fund. Living in this squat is getting old, and I would kill to move to Bushwick proper.
CATERPILLAR MUSTACHE MAN


YO LA TENGO
Stuff Like That There
Matador

If Matador were the Titanic, Yo La Tengo would be the band playing while Gerard Cosloy used a copy of the Earles & Jensen prank-call record as a life raft. Guitar Wolf would be trying to collect every jettisoned leather jacket, and Spiral Stairs and Stephen Malkmus would manage to build a revolutionary rowboat out of a milk crate full of wet magazines and refuse to just admit that they couldn't have done it without each other. Meanwhile, Mark E. Smith would be doing the last of his dry cocaine—also in a boat he made—bitching about how he built his boat first, and Kim Gordon would scold him, shouting, "People have been making boats forever!"
~ THIRSTIN 4 MOORE


FUTURE PUNX
This Is Post-Wave
Dull Tools

You know how, when we're introduced to Arnie in Terminator, he's stark-naked, born from a motherfucking lightning bolt in a shit-burger section of LA near the biker bar? "Gimme your clothes," or whatever he says? Imagine if the scene unfolded exactly the same way but Arnie was born from lightning on the frog hair of a country club, and instead of getting decked out in sweet biker gear he looked like some blue-blooded fuckstick? That would be ripe! This sounds like being born in tight shape from a bolt of lightning, though; that's the connection.
~ KOLD KOFFEE


MICACHU AND THE SHAPES
Good Sad Happy Bad
Rough Trade

I remember when A$AP Rocky first exploded into the mainstream and backpack-rap types were losing their marbles thinking that it was like an Aesop Rock–produced rap thing. It's like how this band made me think of Pokémon, obviously. Did you know that as of right now there are 718 Pokémon in the National Pokédex, not including variant forms? How the fuck am I supposed to catch all that shit? What the fuck sort of game is Pokémon, even? Why would you catch a pet and then make it fight other peoples' pets, which they caught for the same reason? What sort of fucked-up La Jolla noir is the Pokéverse becoming?
~ IGGLYBUFF U. UP


THE LENTILS
Brattleboro Is Flooding
BUFU/Feeding Tube

It's so sad—this band just tries to make happy pop songs, but they always just ending up recording downers. You know what's also sad? When you love someone, and you love your group of friends, and you love the city that you live in, but then you break up with your loved one, and half of you friends disappear, and now the place that you live is poisonous, and everything in your life just goes to shit... Yeah... that's what this album is about.
~ GINGER SADDLINGSBY


LIONLIMB
Turnstile
Bayonet

When I was in high school I somehow got into AP Spanish, and we had to watch this show called Destinos, wherein, if memory serves me, a señorita named Raquel Rodríguez attempts to solve a mystery about her dead dad when she's not caught up in illicit flings with a cortège of nefarious señores—all of this so that I could learn Spanish at an advanced level. Her journey also involves buckets of sangria and delectable local fare. It was produced in the 90s, and even though I like to think that decade is on the wane with regard to current cultural relevance, Turnstile is definitely the sort of six-minute-long pair of songs I wish I could fuck Annie Lennox to.
~ YUNG CROSSFIT

Infographic: Fewer Americans Are Seeing the Benefits of Higher Education

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This article appears in the September Issue of VICE

Click to enlarge

Even a Low-Tech Bookbinder on the Lower East Side Can't Escape the Internet

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Even a Low-Tech Bookbinder on the Lower East Side Can't Escape the Internet

Leaving My Friend Rasool Behind and Why He Must Be Freed from Turkish Prison

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Leaving My Friend Rasool Behind and Why He Must Be Freed from Turkish Prison

Photos of Navajo People Who Have Refused to Leave Their Land

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Big Mountain is a time-soaked corner of the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona, a high-desert plateau where the Hopi and Navajo tribes have lived for centuries—but the natives are being forced out by the US government in an eviction process which began 50 years ago and continues to this day. Also called Black Mesa, the plateau follows the outline of a prehistoric lake, and over the long millennia the life supported by the water decayed to form the largest coal deposit in the US.

The extraction of this coal began in the late 1960s after extensive legal wrangling by utilities such as Peabody Coal and WEST (Western Energy Supply and Transmission) to bypass the resistance of the Navajo and Hopi indigenous peoples, a process brilliantly detailed by writer Judith Nies in 2000. A key figure in negotiations was lawyer John Boyden, who organized a Hopi tribal council that then hired him—he went on to simultaneously work as counsel for the Hopi and Peabody Coal. The councils of the two tribes—which did not necessary represent the majority of the natives—signed the first strip-mining leases in 1966, agreeing to royalties of 30 cents per ton of coal, a grotesquely substandard rate. Soon, a coal slurry pipeline and two generating stations were built by Bechtel, the engineering giant famous for projects such as the Hoover Dam.

On VICE News: Leaving My Friend Rasool Behind and Why He Must Be Freed from Turkish Prison

Before large-scale mining could begin though, vast areas of designated reservation land—shared between the Navajo and Hopi—had to be cleared. Boyden achieved this by claiming loudly in the press that the tribes were engaged in a war over grazing rights, leading eventually to the partition of the shared land in the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act of 1974. The result of this bill was the state-enforced eviction of thousands of indigenous people from the area, mostly Navajo caught on the wrong side of the new division.

Today only a small group of mostly older Navajo continue to live permanently or semipermanently on Big Mountain, herding sheep and maintaining what elements they can of their traditional existence. Despite small victories, such as a 1996 federal court ruling against Peabody for violating the tribe's human and environmental rights, the Navajo have been forced to spend the last four decades living as resistors against regular eviction attempts. This year has seen another escalation in livestock impoundments and confiscations, a tactic employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Hopi authorities to enforce the eviction order by making life unsustainable for the Navajo.


Watch: Is This Art Photography Any Good?


The mining activity has done serious damage to the Navajo and their culture, from the poisoning of the tribe's groundwater to the bulldozing of its ancient burial grounds. Peabody Energy, now the world's biggest private-sector coal company, continues to extract resources from the Big Mountain area. Water is pumped by Big Mountain coal via the Navajo Generating Station in Page, Arizona, into cities, orchards, and cotton fields across the Southwest. The ground, a life force at the center of the Navajo spiritual universe, is now the energy source for the desert oases of Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles.

Last September, the Obama administration agreed to a $554 million settlement with the Navajo to end a lawsuit alleging that the federal government mismanaged the tribe's resources, but the people of Big Mountain are still going through hard times. In the last year, four of the remaining elders have died.

And yet, in her photographs from Big Mountain, Camille Summers-Valli captures something affirming, something enduring and vital, that still exists in this community. She documents the younger generations who were born in or relocated to the sprawling settlements of Navajo Nation—such as New Lands in eastern-central Arizona—as they return to Big Mountain to reconnect with their spiritual inheritance. They go, whenever they have the time and the means, to ride horses, help their grandparents raise livestock, and participate in the daily ceremonies and prayers that tie the culture to the land.

Wessie du Toit

All photographs by Camille Summers-Valli, scroll down for more.



Why David Cameron's Pledge to Take 20,000 Syrian Refugees Isn't Enough

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Screen grab via the BBC

More on the refugee crisis from VICE:

We Asked an Expert How to Solve the Calais Migrant Crisis

A Myth-Busting Guide to Migration to the UK

This Is What it's Really Like to Be a Refugee in Britain Today

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Witnessing images of children's bloated corpses washing up on beaches has made a lot of people desperate to do something to help with the refugee crisis. For instance, by donating supplies to be taken to those languishing in Calais, or opening their homes to otherwise stranded asylum seekers.

It's a shame—but an understandable shame—that it took those pictures to rouse the conscience of the great British public. You might have hoped, though, that the government has been basing its approach toward asylum seekers on some serious intel, and that their policy of not letting very many into the country was based on sound logic—not the kind of thing that could be shifted almost overnight by a particularly tear-jerking photo.

However, it seems it was that very photograph that's made David Cameron feel a pang of urgency too, because yesterday he told the House of Commons that it's finally time for Britain to step up to the plate. Since 2011, the Syrian Civil War has displaced half of the country's population and caused over 4 million people to become refugees. David Cameron got back from his summer holidays to tell Parliament that the UK will take 20,000 of them. By 2020.

To be fair, that is a lot more that the 216 who had been allowed into the UK up to this point via the Vulnerable Persons Relocation Regime. It's also a lot more than the number Cameron would prefer we talk about—the 5,000 Syrians who have been granted asylum in the UK since 2011, separate to that scheme.

However, after you stop holding that number up to Britain's crappy effort so far, the favorable comparisons run out.

As the Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman put it, Cameron's plan to take 20,000 over five years is pretty poor when "the Germans took in 10,000 on one day." Caroline Lucas, Brighton's Green MP, pointed out that 20,000 over five years is the equivalent of 12 refugees per day; Germany expects 800,000 asylum seekers this year alone.

The figure also doesn't look great when you compare it to previous refugee crises. Britain, for example, took over 75,000 refugees each year for three years from the break up of Yugoslavia.

And a last bit of number crunching: it falls short of the government's official formula for how to distribute refugees throughout the country, which is one refugee per 200 residents of a town. If you use that as a benchmark, the UK could accept 320,000 refugees.

Read on Motherboard: Hell On High Seas

David Cameron gave his A-grade humanitarian spiel yesterday, with the word "swarms" appearing nowhere near the speech. "The whole country has been deeply moved by the heart-breaking images we have seen over the past few days," he said. "And it is absolutely right that Britain should fulfill its moral responsibility to help those refugees just as we have done so proudly throughout our history."

"We will ensure that vulnerable children, including orphans, will be a priority," he said, failing to mention that vulnerable children and orphans who are taken in could be deported when they hit 18 years of age.

Nevertheless, taking anybody at all is a bit of a U-turn since just last week, when the Prime Minister said Britain still shouldn't take any more refugees, despite the distressing pictures of a drowned Syrian child, Alan Krudi, going viral. "I don't think there is an answer that can be achieved simply by taking more and more refugees," he said. But with the scale of the human tragedy becoming unavoidable, Cameron was starting to look a bit callous. I guess a tough stance doesn't hold up so well when the scary enemy are leagues of drowned refugees, those who have tried and failed to make it by boat to Western Europe.


WATCH: Simon Ostrovsky discuss the Migrant Offshore Aid Station, a civilian organization founded to assist migrants who find themselves in danger crossing the Mediterranean Sea:


Not that yesterday's announcement will help those people directly. Instead, Britain will take refugees who are currently in camps in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon; the idea is that we don't want to encourage people from taking these dangerous journeys in the first place. Experts say that this "pull factor"—the UK opening their borders being an invitation for refugees to travel across Europe—isn't a thing, but that doesn't stop people from banging on about it. It was presumably for this reason that Cameron was keen to hype the £1 billion [$1.54 billion] Britain has given to the Syrian conflict in aid money. "No other European country has come close to this level of support," he said.

MPs repeatedly asked Cameron how many people we are going to take right now, since the crisis is pretty urgent. He wouldn't be pinned down. "It depends," he said, on the UNHCR's ability to process refugees, and local councils' willingness to take them. Caroline Lucas asked if the government would guarantee funding for local councils to welcome refugees for more than one year. He sort of skirted around the question.

While taking 20,000 is better than nothing, there are hundreds of thousands Britain could feasibly be helping—but we're not. And for those refugees who don't form part of that figure, the reality is still bleak; being forcibly denied access to safety in Britain and potentially being locked up indefinitely in a detention center, only to be deported back to the country you were fleeing. At least for once, opinion has shamed politics into helping refugees out, instead of making a sadistic show of being violently uncaring.

Follow Simon on Twitter.

Queen of the Hill: A Day Out with the World's Top Hillary Clinton Look-alike

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Queen of the Hill: A Day Out with the World's Top Hillary Clinton Look-alike

Ten Years Later, 'Lords of Dogtown' Remains a Monument to Teen Boy Bravado

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Ten Years Later, 'Lords of Dogtown' Remains a Monument to Teen Boy Bravado

Author Patrick DeWitt on Booze, Expectations, and Fairy Tales

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Patrick deWitt. Handout photo.

As a former Hollywood bartender, acclaimed novelist Patrick deWitt would likely have few qualms with calling his own remarkable success story a bit of a cliche. His debut novel about a whiskey- and pill-abusing Hollywood bartender (Ablutions) was helped along after he plied a customer (High Fidelity screenwriter D.V. DeVincentis) with booze so he would read it. That bleakly funny book, obviously based a bit on his own experiences, initially sold like ass but put him on the map as a writer to watch. It brought him just enough success to get him out from behind the bar and let him work on his second book, the confusingly named The Sisters Brothers. That book, a black comedy Western with modern sensibilities, contended for pretty much every book award worth mentioning, winning the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Stephen Leacock Medal, and being shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller and Man Booker.

Although deWitt currently lives in Portland, Oregon and spent most of his life in the US, he was born in Canada, and this country loves to jump on a bandwagon (we hear you, new Blue Jays fans). VICE sat down with the author at House of Anasi's downtown Toronto office to discuss his new novel, Undermajordomo Minor—best described as a mashup of Wes Anderson and Grimm's Fairy Tales—and to basically ask for some advice on how to get your shit together.

VICE: For this book, what was it like writing for an audience, knowing you have that readership after the success of The Sisters Brothers?
Patrick deWitt: It was different, in the beginning it didn't feel different, it felt the same as it always had, but then at a certain point, coinciding with me struggling with this book, I began to worry. I just become aware of that audience in a way I hadn't before. It was off-putting. It was not a good feeling necessarily, because I was struggling. Once the book corrected itself, I began to think of the audience in a different way, or not really at all. It took me some time to recalibrate after Sisters Brothers and all the travel I did with it and all the press. I felt distracted for a period of time. It was a process to get back to the original state that you need to be in to work properly. I'm grateful the readership is there but when they are there in the room with you, it can be distracting or frightening.

So, this wasn't the novel that you intended to write after 2011's Sisters Brothers.
I was on another book for about a year about a corrupt investment advisor, a Bernie Madoff type. I'd done research trips to New York City and I was doing a residency in Paris as research because the character in the book flees to Paris to avoid prison. Two months or so in my residency, I ditched that book because it wasn't working. The subject matter wasn't interesting enough, I just don't care that much about bankers and the accumulation of money. It was a bit boring.

But around the time I began reading fables, fairy tales, first to my son and then on my own. I was easing my way into this other world. It seemed like a nice Plan B.

What appealed to you about the fairy tale world?
If you read Jewish fables, central and eastern European fables, the sheer quality of the storytelling is very high. They do so much in the space of a few pages. They are often strange, bleak, bizarre and twisted. They are very funny. It's just really rich material.

It just seemed approachable to me in a way and a nice antidote to this banker book. To go from someone obsessed with numbers to something so much freer and so much more strange and magical. I was so relieved to leave the world of high finance.

You discussed this overtly in your last novel, this idea of a "likeable character" and Lucy (the protagonist of Undermajordomo Minor) initially doesn't inspire much at the start of this one. Is there something that interests you in particular about these neurotic, weaker-willed-type characters?
It must. I think you are speaking about the obvious. The opposite type of character, the investment banker or whatever, there are just no surprises with an alpha male. If someone can't be proven wrong then what mystery is there for them for you?

I've been wondering how I can mix things up a bit, because I do have this tendency to create these hapless, compromised individuals. I don't want to necessarily stop doing that but I don't want to repeat myself either.


Your novels are quite cinematic. There's set pieces, especially in this one. You've lived in Los Angeles, you've written a screenplay (Terri), so how much has the world of film played into your novel writing?
I listed a cinematic reference of Werner Herzog on the acknowledgment page (for this book). I've immersed myself in film since a young age. I think it is an influence but it's a secondary influence to the literary. I'm not one to worry about why I do things. If something feels correct, it feels correct. If it feels good and I think it serves the greater good of the book, I go with it.

I've been criticized sometimes for writing this way, but it's not a criticism I take seriously. These three books are the ones I wanted to write. If I meet a reader who tells me my work is too cinematic, then we are just not a good match. And that's OK.

Switching gears a bit, you have a pretty interesting origin story. You were in LA, bartending, got someone (screenwriter D.V. DeVincentis) to read your draft which became a well-received but little-read novel, but a few years later you are a best-selling author who has won a number of major awards. Looking back at that period (pre-success) to where you are now, do you think much about that? It's probably pretty inspiring for those who also dropped out of high school, didn't go the MFA route...
It doesn't really add up that I've done as well as I had. I would not recommend my path to anyone, because I felt like I wasted a lot of time. That's not to say I'd recommend an MFA. It's a strange story but no stranger than any other part of my life or anyone's life.

What I wanted was to write books and ideally, I wanted that to be my sole focus. Typically when I obsessively want something for a long period of time, I feel there's a letdown there. That's the human condition. I don't even resent that happening anymore.

In terms of the trajectory of my career... luck plays such a large role in it and you can't really applaud yourself for something where luck plays such a prominent role. I've been given a gift and I don't want to fuck it up.

I have to ask, what's your relationship with booze and writing now?
I'm really a bit of a teetotaler these days, to tell you the truth. I've always loved to drink and, at times, it has been to the detriment of my health and relationships, but I'm mellowing. A lot of that has to do with fatherhood and just not wanting to be that person anymore.

I don't think I've ever written a single good line when I was drinking, when I was drunk, I should say. At the age of 40, I've learned the difference between having a drink or two and drinking. That's advice I wish someone would have told me earlier, because I lost a lot of time to drinking. I think of drinking and drugs, if it's done in excess to the point you are degrading yourself, it basically represents a complete stasis. You stop evolving the moment you begin to do anything habitually.

Addictive behaviour doesn't lead to much, although you get some stories out of it. That's something. I don't mean to belittle that. A lot of these experiences I had through drinking and drugs were colourful, if not positive. But in relationship to writing, I don't see there being a real connection there.

I was a year late on the deadline for this book, and the deadline was really bearing down on me and it was a close call, so I stopped drinking completely for the last two months. I came out of that realizing I hadn't been drunk in however many weeks and I just found I didn't have any overwhelming desire to go back.

I'm not saying I'm never going to get drunk again, I'm just at a point now where I really don't want to get wasted. That self-destructive impulse is just not [in me] anymore. Maybe it will come back, but I hope it doesn't because I am a lot happier without it.

What's your relationship like with Canada as someone who has spent most of their adult life in the US?
Since I started publishing here it's much deeper and richer. I haven't lived in Canada since I was 20. My relationship in those years [my 20s] was pretty slight. Nowadays, I feel a relationship to my publishers here, writers, my readers here. It's an abstract friendship with your readers but it feels really real when I am here.

Having reasons to come here, showing my [ten-year-old] son Nova Scotia or Toronto, where he's never been, those are important things to me.

I'm not in the States because it's preferable to me, it's just that life happens. I had a child, and he was born in the States. You just wind up where you wind up. But I'm happy where I am these days.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Follow Josh Visser on Twitter.

Denise Bourdeau Kept Returning to Her Abusive Partner. One Day, He Killed Her

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A photo of Denise taken in the early 1980s. Photo provided by Amy Miller

The last time she was seen alive—New Year's Eve, 2006—Denise Bourdeau was wearing a baseball cap over her brown curls. She'd borrowed it from her friend David Heath, in whose apartment she'd taken refuge two days earlier. In her haste, Denise had forgotten to bring the hair dryer she used to tame her hair, so the cap would have to serve instead. She and Heath were heading out to ring in 2007 at a bar in a plaza in Waterloo, Ontario.

When Denise, 39, had shown up at Heath's apartment, a fresh bruise marred her face. It was the second time in less than a week that she'd come to him looking like this and in need of a place to stay. But this time she'd brought a duffel bag with clothes and ID, as if she planned to stay awhile.

They got to the bar just after 9 PM. Soon after, Denise's common-law spouse David Thomas, then 44, arrived. At first, some said he seemed upset—one reveler said that David yelled something about Denise being his wife, and about how she should be at home; another saw him grab her by the arm—but that he appeared to cool off. Later, the pair drank, and talked, and danced.

Sometime after midnight, they were seen leaving the bar together, Denise still wearing Heath's cap.

A bit before 2 AM, Heath left the bar. On the sidewalk outside, he found the cap he'd loaned Denise.

Amy at home in Kitchener with a portrait of Denise that was used for the Sisters in Spirit gathering in Ottawa. Photo by the author

Denise and David met two years earlier, in late December 2004. She was working a series of temp jobs and he was a plumber. By January 2005 they were dating. Soon after, Denise moved into his apartment.

Nine months later, over the course of several days in September, David beat Denise repeatedly. She had a broken nose and marks on her neck. But it wasn't until five days later, when a neighbor spotted her on the street with blood on her face, that Denise was taken to the hospital and David was charged with assault causing bodily harm.

In November 2005, David pled guilty. He was sentenced to time served and two years probation. He was released, roughly two months after he'd been arrested for—and this is according to the agreed statement of facts—beating Denise while telling her, over and over, "I want you dead."

They continued their relationship.

Denise with her parents at her wedding. Photo provided by Amy Miller

In the mind of Amy Miller, Denise's mother, there was no doubt from the moment Denise went missing: David Thomas was the guilty party. Amy had circumstantial evidence that her eldest daughter's common-law spouse was to blame for her disappearance.

Amy and her husband Glen Miller had heard from the police many times over the course of Denise and David's relationship. The cops would report that they'd had to intervene at the couple's home and they wanted to drop Denise off with her parents.

Denise stayed with Amy and Glen for most of the summer of 2006. But then she went back to David. And soon the police called again: there'd been an incident at Denise and David's place, and could they bring Denise by?

Amy was incensed that it was always Denise who was being removed. She'd be removed, she'd go back; she'd be removed, she'd go back. Amy wondered: Why didn't the police remove Dave?

By the fall of 2006, when the police asked if they could drop Denise off, Amy began to say "no." She didn't know how to stop her daughter from going through the same harrowing experience that she herself had suffered. "I went through it; my ex-husband did that to me," she says. She only knew that there was a cycle she had to break. Still, saying no "was extremely hard."

That November, while Amy was cleaning out a purse that she'd loaned to Denise that summer, she found a letter written by her daughter.

"Dear Dave," it began. It was dated July 18, 2006. It was five pages long.

"I know you never did read it but the book you brought home from your anger management (on the end table) stated that physical, mental and emotional abuse usually does not end until one or the other partner moves out. Dave, you must know that this is what I had to do. The physical was intensifying and the mental [...] was out of control...

"I am not blaming all our problems on you. I am fully aware of what I was guilty of as we both know you felt the need to remind me on a daily basis. The thing was I stopped but you were so hung up on the past, you couldn't or can't let it go. I don't understand how you can justify the continual hitting, throat grabbing, name calling and recently locking me in for, as you stated yourself, just to torment me. Why?"

The letter went on to describe how David changed when he drank, how the quantity of his death threats was increasing, but how he still had many qualities that she loved.

Amy gave the letter to the police in January, shortly after Denise went missing and right around what would have been her 40th birthday.

On April 17, 2007, a man walking his dog found Denise's naked, badly decomposed remains on the floodplain of the Grand River. With that discovery, a missing person case officially became a suspected homicide.

Undated photo of Denise at Christmas. Photo by the author

Denise Katherine Bourdeau was the oldest of three sisters. Denise was Amy's "centennial baby," born January 17, 1967 in Kitchener, where she spent most of her life. She was a busy toddler, always running from one place to the next. Amy would blink and Denise would be gone.

Often, when Denise was three years old, a police officer would bring her home in the back of a squad car, alongside the family's puppy. She would take advantage of a moment of maternal distraction and walk the dog down their quiet, suburban street to the corner store. Her adventures were cut short by the same kindly police officer.

Denise may have found amusement in those police rides down the block. Even as a toddler—with close-cropped hair, chubby cheeks, and a little round belly—she found humour in everything, and laughed frequently.

"Right from the belly," Amy says of her daughter's mirth.

When Denise was three, Amy left Denise's father because he was abusive and alcoholic. When Denise was seven, Amy met and fell in love with Glen.

Nobody drank growing up in that home, Amy later testified. Denise, for her part, never forgot a Father's Day, a Mother's Day, or a birthday.

Denise finished Grade 11 with plans to be a lab technician. Then she moved in with a boy. She went on to have two serious relationships before Dave, including one marriage, and she had three children.

To support her family, she worked for temp agencies: a toy factory, a poultry factory, a wood factory. But she also started to drink, and she kept drinking.

Canadian society is not adept at having conversations about excessive drinking or about how to curb excessive drinking. A review released in early March of 2015 by the Canadian Medical Association Journal estimated that between 15 and 20 percent of Canadians overdrink, and that action is needed "to help curb the growing abuse of alcohol."

The review highlights the lack of education on addiction in medical schools, the poor screening at hospitals and clinics for addiction and misuse, as well as the low prescription rates for medication that could help.

Alcoholism, "it runs in our family," Amy says.

Glen was not a drinker, but Denise's biological father was an alcoholic, as were Amy's parents.

"I look at it as a disease," she says, "same as you've got thyroid problems, you've got heart problems, you've got mental health issues, you have alcoholic problems."

Amy notes that her own father got his 25-year sobriety pin before his death. He gave her a book reviewing the literature on alcoholism, and the 12-step recovery programs.

Amy gave it to Denise, but she can't remember when. She hasn't seen it since.

A photo of Denise when she was in grade eight. Photo provided by Amy Miller

Zach Larocque is Denise's nephew. The last time he saw his aunt was during the summer before she disappeared, at the annual luau hosted by Amy and Glen, his grandparents. The couple loved Hawaii—they'd reaffirmed their wedding vows there, and visited the islands nearly a dozen times after that—but they hadn't been back since 1995. Since then, they haven't been able to afford the trip.

Zach knew at the time that Denise was in an abusive relationship. He knew that she wanted out. He remembers thinking that Denise's predicament was similar to what his own mother, Denise's sister, had endured with a "controlling, manipulative" partner.

Even so, he remembers Denise's laughter that night. At one moment, Denise sat with a cigarette in hand; her head tilted back, her hair loose, her eyes bright and her smile wide.

"Everybody always talks about her laugh," Zach says. "They all remember how she liked to have fun. But you can't really ignore the fact that she was a really damaged girl... there was a lot of self-confidence issues, a lot of self-esteem issues."

He pauses. "It's not like she's the only woman who's ever been in that position."

A photo Amy keeps of Denise from she was just a toddler. Photo by the author

Early in January 2007, shortly after Denise disappeared, David spoke with one of her sisters. On January 15, her sister reported her missing to Waterloo Regional Police. For two days, the police tried—unsuccessfully—to speak with David. One constable, Jeff Sauve, knocked on the door of his house, where David could be heard talking on the phone with the television on. After Constable Sauve announced himself as a police officer, both the television and David went silent, but David never came to the door. Constable Sauve remained at the door, knocking, for 20 minutes, without answer.

On January 17, David called Constable Sauve. He said that he was worried about Denise, about where she was. He told Constable Sauve about the New Year's Eve they'd shared at the bar.

Both Amy and Denise's sister would later report that David called them that same day, to rebuke them for involving the police.

A week later, armed with a search warrant, police combed through David's apartment. Among other things, they were looking for blood and Denise's diary.

A police surveillance team saw David drive up to his building while the police were there. Noting the cruisers, he parked in the parking lot of a nearby school instead of his own space. Leaving his car, David took a "circuitous route" toward his house, according to court documents. He "was observed taking a circuitous route and at one point was seen crouching behind vehicles in the apartment parking lot so he could watch the police without being seen." Then he left for a local plaza.

A week later, police obtained a separate warrant to search David's car. There, they found Denise's blood. In a two-and-a-half week period in late January and early February, David was formally interviewed twice and communicated with a detective more than a dozen times.

It would be two and a half months before Denise's remains—by then, too decomposed to determine a cause of death—would be found.

It would be another four years—July 2011—before David would be arrested for her murder.

An undated photo of Amy taken where Denise's body was found, at the memorial she created and continues to tend for her daughter

In the intervening years, it was Amy who pushed for an arrest, who harangued police over their seeming inaction, and who ultimately filed complaints against the Waterloo Regional Police because of her frustration with the first three years of their investigation into Denise's death.

Amy's first formal complaint, dated April 25, 2010, was to the Ontario Civilian Police Commission. She told the OCPC about her struggle to get officers to answer her questions, to meet with her regularly. She wrote about an allegedly belligerent officer who tried to bring Denise to her home in 2006 after removing her from David's apartment. She wrote about a detective on the case who, in April 2009, admitted to her that he hadn't read Denise's file. A spokesman with the Waterloo Regional Police Service declined to comment for this story.

As the years passed, the case too seemed to pass—haphazardly or without proper communication—from one set of detectives to another. Amy expressed her frustration with this, too. Finally she asked: Why was it Denise who was always removed from the home, never David? Why was his probation never revoked?

In her letter, Amy wrote: "I honestly believe, if we were [...] NOT Native, the situation would have been treated FAR more differently!" Like her daughters, she is of Mohawk ancestry, from Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation.

On May 3, 2010, the OCPC responded: "Your complaint has been forwarded to the Waterloo Regional Police [...]"

Fifteen days later, a letter dated from the Waterloo Regional Police informed her: "At this time there will be no further investigation by this Police Service of your complaint."

The force's reasoning was sound, but felt callous. Amy's complaints were about alleged events—the belligerent officer in 2006, the ignorant detective of 2009—that had happened more than six months before the date on which Amy filed her complaint. In such cases, according to section 60(2) of the Police Services Act, a Chief of Police may choose not to investigate.

Amy requested the OCPC review the police's decision. Her request included a one-and-a-half page typed explanation and several pages of photos "to put a FACE to 'a' FILE number." In that, Amy wrote that it was only through the inquiries of a local reporter that she'd learned the detective who had not been answering her phone calls was no longer on the case, replaced by another without notice to the family. "Investigators may change on any and all investigations due to various circumstances," a spokesman for the Waterloo Regional Police Service said via email.

The response to Amy's request for review arrived, dated February 14, 2011. The OCPC supported the decision of the Waterloo Regional Police. Still, the letter said, "the Commission was not unsympathetic to your concerns and as such we are recommending the Waterloo Regional Police arrange for a senior officer to meet with you and to provide with you periodic updates on the progress of the investigation into your daughter's death."

But it was local media that seemed, at least to Amy, to advance the case. On July 12, 2011, The Waterloo Region Record ran the front-page story: "Waiting for Justice." In that story, Amy was quoted as saying: "We know nothing more than what we knew when we were told it was her."

She'd spoken to the paper previously, on the first anniversary of Denise's disappearance, about how she suspected she knew the identity of her daughter's killer—but even in that 2011 story, police would only say they had one "person of interest." "There's a reluctance by some people to come forward with information," Chris Downey, a Staff Sgt. who has since retired, says in the Record's story.

The day after the story ran, David was arrested.

Zach got the news while downing a quick meal with friends at a restaurant. He'd spent the earlier part of the evening in the place where Denise's body was found: a tree-lined area off the Grand River that Amy decorated annually with a picture of Denise. Other decorations included a "letter from heaven" telling her family not to worry, flowers, and a bow.

It was summer and the air was dense with mosquitoes. Zach had felt furious after reading "Waiting for Justice," but when he went to the site of Denise's discovery, "everything just kind of relaxed."

Zach's mom called while he sat at the restaurant. "They arrested Dave today," she told him.

"I'd had a shit day at work," Zach says now. "I found out about the article, I'd had that huge rage fit, gone all the way down there and everything just got so calm, so relaxed, I feel the most peaceful at that site ever, and then I find out he was arrested."

Amy holds the two angels that she keeps close—the purple one by her bed, the other clutched in her hand while she sleeps. Photo by the author

Since Denise's murder, Amy has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. She sleeps with her fingers wrapped tightly around an amber angel encased in a clear acrylic oval. She keeps another angel—a more delicate amethyst angel—nearby, though she doesn't sleep with that one, for fear it might break.

The angels are a part of Amy's connection to Denise, whose ashes are in a corner of her apartment given over to her family. There, three glamour shots of her daughters hang, one after another. Leaning against the wall below is Denise's poster from the 2012 Families of Sisters in Spirit National Vigil on Parliament Hill. She looks radiant, but the caption tells another story: "Denise Bourdeau found murdered 2007."

In 2013, Amy travelled to Ottawa to speak before the federal government's special committee on violence against indigenous women.

She told them about the abuse, about David locking Denise in, about how hard it was to tell the police they couldn't bring Denise to her because she'd just go back—it was a "Band-Aid" solution at best—about how long she felt it took for the police to do their job.

"I was raised to believe that the police force was there to help, serve, and protect," Amy told the special committee. "Did they protect my daughter? After two years of abuse, did they protect my daughter? She was a wrongful death."

David's trial finally began in January 2015, almost four years after his arrest and eight years after Denise's murder. It lasted nine weeks.

Denise's family filled the court's benches whenever they could. "I felt like there needed to be some kind of family support there at all times," Zach said.

In the trial's early days, the court heard testimony from David's probation officer, Mary Gifkins.

Mary met David in November 2005, she said, shortly after he pled guilty to assaulting Denise. In early December, she testified, he told her that he was single, and that Denise was his ex. Why did you do it? she asked him during that meeting.

His answer is found in Mary's notes: "Client got STD. Heard phone message for Denise. Grabbed by throat. Mistrust, arguments, swearing and yelling. Open hand hit. Felt betrayed and used. Lost control of behaviour."

David and Mary spoke again about Denise during an April 2006 meeting. At that time, he was finishing the Partner Assault Response Program. "He told me that the program was helpful and that he'd learned a lot of skills that he believes would be helpful to him in future relationships," Mary testified.

But also this, from her notes: "I noted that client continues to blame victim for causing the situation in which client assaulted her. He speaks of her infidelity, betrayals and lying as causal factors."

David and Mary spoke again that June.

"He attributes the violence to his choice of partner rather than to his choice of behaviour," she testified.

Amy believes that the police, by removing Denise rather than David when the couple's interactions turned violent, reinforced that narrative.

"Police come in, they take the woman out, then the woman goes back... he says, 'See, I'm not doing anything wrong. The cops took you out, they didn't take me out,'" she says.

"The system is backwards," says Mary Zilney, chief executive officer for Women's Crisis Services of Waterloo Region. "It's completely frustrating."

Through the news, she followed the search for Denise, the hunt for her killer, and finally David's trial. It was tragic, she says, but not a surprise.

It's hard, Zilney says, for many people to understand why a woman like Denise—consistently abused, as she was, unfaithful and berated physically and emotionally for it, as she was—didn't leave.

"It's a huge barrier that we've not yet been able to surpass," Zilney says.

There was one day in May 2006, when Denise showed up on a former coworker's doorstep, "crying, bleeding, shaking."

Nancy Cossaboom had worked with Denise at a chicken manufacturing company for a few weeks that year. It was Nancy who testified about that one day.

Denise was bleeding from her nose and her lip. Her hands were covered in blood as if she'd wiped her face, and her shirt was bloodied around the collar. She was "shaking, crying, uncontrollable crying," Nancy testified.

She said that when she reached for the phone to call the police, Denise "grabbed [her] hands" and told her, "No, please, don't."

According to Nancy, Denise said: "I don't want him to go back there again."

She explained further: "[he's] been in jail before for hitting me."

The Crown prosecutor asked Nancy how she responded at the time.

"I didn't—I couldn't say anything. I didn't know what to say."

"Did you call the police at that time?"

"No."

A photo of Denise taken in 1993. Photo provided by Amy Miller

On March 13, 2015, after two days of deliberations, jurors found David Thomas guilty of second-degree murder, even though prosecutors could never prove exactly how he killed Denise. He is appealing the conviction.

On July 15, Justice D.A. Broad sentenced David Thomas to life in prison. He will not be eligible for parole for 16 years, though the four years he's already served will count against that number.

The defence argued that David Thomas' eligibility for parole should arrive sooner, but Justice Broad would have none of it.

"What can be safely surmised is that at the time of her death Ms. Bourdeau was utterly isolated and alone with no one to protect her from Mr. Thomas' violence," he wrote in his decision. "It came through clearly in her writings that what Ms. Bourdeau was looking for in her relationship with David Thomas was love, acceptance and security. What she got was physical violence, emotional abuse and ultimately death at his hands."

Amy has a warning for anyone who comes to her now, wanting to talk justice.

"They're gonna get punched in the face," she says. "Because there is no justice. No justice will bring Denise back. And there's no closure; Denise will never smile again."

Follow Jane Gerster on Twitter.

We Asked an Expert Whether Britain’s Secret Drone Strike in Syria Was Legal

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A reaper drone

Yesterday UK Prime Minister David Cameron confirmed that the RAF had engaged in previously unannounced drone strikes in Syria, killing two British men believed to be fighting with the Islamic State, as well as another Islamic State "associate."

The PM told Parliament that the strikes were justified on the grounds that Reyaad Khan, a 21-year-old from Cardiff, was a "clear and present danger" to Britain. Khan was featured in an Islamic State recruiting video last year, and is said to have been planning on attacking a "major event" on UK territory. Cameron said nobody killed was a civilian.

It's throwing up some complicated legal and moral questions. Can you just bomb another country's territory without telling anyone, because you think it's a good idea? Didn't Parliament vote against bombing Syria a while ago? Was the strike technically an act of war?

Dr. Michael Kearney is an expert in International law based at the University of Sussex, with a particular focus on the laws of war and state jurisdiction. This morning, VICE caught up with him to find out what this all means for the UK government and international law.

VICE: Is this a first for the British government?
Dr. Michael Kearney: Yes, this is the first time that they've declared they've used drones in attacking a target in a country which they're not at war with.

So we're not officially at war then?
It's difficult to know; this is where international law gets complicated. [Defence Secretary] Michael Fallon was on the radio saying "we undertook this strike on the target in Syria as an act of self-defense," that they were preventing an armed attack that was planned against the UK. The Syrian government didn't do anything to address the threat, so they say it was necessary.

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon. Photo via Policy Exchange

Fallon used the notion of self-defense in the same way that British police can use force to protect people or respond to a threat. The problem here is that we're talking in Syria, which is a sovereign state, so no other state has authority to use force there without the Syrian Government's permission.

But we've been targeting Iraq for a long time in the same way?
Yeah, The UK is certainly engaged in similar strikes in Iraq against ISIS, but the UK government was requested to do this by the Iraqi government.

So, are we at war? Well, look at the war on terror, look at the mesh of policing and military, and the way the distinction between war and peace has disappeared. We're in a military-policing permanent state of conflict, it's the position the US has been pushing the whole time.

Since the resignation of [former PM Tony] Blair, the UK government has publicly avoided endorsing this approach. But as an international lawyer, it doesn't look like we're at war with Syria.

The US and Jordan, some Gulf states, and Israel have all been sporadically bombing targets in Syria in recent years. Now the UK is as well, so it's not a novel event, rather a new player.

Cameron has said that UK forces "would repeat Syria drone strike." What do you make of that?
What's significant is the indication for the future, it suggests a shift towards the US doctrine of a seemingly permanent war on terror which selectively disregards state sovereignty.

We know British troops have been flying US planes in Syria, and that British intelligence agencies have supported various rebel groups in Syria through training and logistics for the last few years. So rather than being a novel military intervention in Syria, this seems more a stepping up of scale and visibility.

Would it have been different if those killed hadn't been British citizens?
The nationality of the subjects of an attack, from an international law perspective, isn't significant in the first instance. What is important is the breach of Syrian sovereignty.

We need to understand the rights and responsibilities of a state when it's acting outside its jurisdiction; does it have the right to act in Syria? The answer—excepting that you can justify it on the basis of self-defense—is no. Think about it: the UK can't send police to Holland to arrest British people smoking weed in a coffee shop, they can't go without permission.

Do the British laws of self-defense apply abroad then?
You can use self-defense if necessary to respond to an imminent armed attack. How large scale? Can said attack emanate from a terrorist or does it have to come from a state? These questions are unresolved.

When it comes to the war on terror, starting with Afghanistan, were we fighting the state? The Taliban? Al Qaeda? It was al Qaeda who attacked the US on 9/11, it's unclear whether international law gives them the capacity to carry out an armed attack as if acting as a state.

We resolved it by saying the Afghan government failed to deal with it, they consented to al Qaeda presence, so that's our justification—they take responsibility.

But there is an increasing fragmentation of the political system, where states and non-state actors exist among each other. If we say ISIS is capable of launching armed attacks, we begin to recognize them as having the characteristics of a state.

We end up implying that Isis are so significant, through the seizure of territory to the exclusion of the formal government, and through their capacity to engage in warfare and terrorism, that we are in practice treating them like a state.


Related: Watch 'Gone: The Story of Paul Alexander'


What's the legal process that allowed these strikes?
Under the UN charter, if you need to take urgent action in self-defense in response to an imminent threat, which is the UK position here, and you don't have time to go to the UN Security Council to get authorization, then you go ahead anyway but immediately report to the UN Secretary General to explain what you did and why.

Under British law, however, the practice now—which is a policy rather than a binding constitutional arrangement—would see the decision taken in Parliament. Cameron says, understandably, that this would have jeopardized their plans.

Cameron says it was a "perfectly legal act of self-defense." Can this ever really be tested?
Not really, no. As with the invasion of Iraq, we have the [long delayed] Chilcot Enquiry, and there's very little you can do. For the most part the response will be political and diplomatic, though revolving around legal arguments and principles.

However, because two of the subjects of the attack are British citizens, their families will have jurisdiction to challenge their deaths before British courts, it's a right to life case. This happened with the "shoot to kill" policy in Northern Ireland—families could challenge police actions on the basis of whether force was lawful in the circumstances.

Syria, as the nation state, would also have standing to complain to the UN or International Court of Justice; it seems pretty unlikely given the circumstances.

Why did this happen? Is it a surprise?
It would be useful if the UK government were to provide the legal advice they received as to this incident, since as things stand, the explanation seems to be based on "common sense" principles, i.e. that we needed to act in self-defense, so we did. That might be entirely appropriate in this instance, but what we've seen time and again as the nature of the war on terror continues to mutate, is that political notions of necessity and defense are advanced to the exclusion of legal oversight and regulation.

Follow Michael Segalov on Twitter.


The VICE Guide to Right Now: Donald Trump Gives Tom Brady Motivational Speeches, Promotional Hats

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Image via Flickr user Keith Allison

Read: What Would Happen if Donald Trump Actually Became President

Tom Brady is known for a lot of things. He's the Patriots' star quarterback, he's Gisele's hot husband, and he's the guy from that Deflategate meme. He's also apparently a Donald Trump fan, and keeps an official "Make America Great Again" hat front and center in his Patriots locker.

A photo of Brady's locker was posted to Twitter this weekend, and the world collectively lost their shit when they spotted the Trump hat tucked in amid Brady's football pads and Old Spice deodorant and almost-empty bottles of mouthwash. The hat even had its own special, hat-sized cubbyhole.

On Tuesday morning, Brady went on Boston's sport radio station WEEI to address the hat and his relationship with Donald Trump, which apparently involves Tony Robbins-esque speeches and rounds of golf together.

"[Trump] sent [the hat] to me via R.K.K.," Brady told the hosts of WEEI's Dennis and Calahan Show, referring to Robert Kraft, the Patriots' owner.

Apparently, Brady and the Donald have been friends since 2002, and Trump likes to hit up Brady on the phone in his spare time. Or, as Brady puts it, "He always gives me a call and different types of motivational speeches at different times. So now that he's running for president, he sent me a hat ... It found its way to my locker."

Although he didn't confirm whether he'd actually vote for him, Brady called the success of Trump's campaign "pretty amazing."

In War-Torn Ukraine, Intolerance and Violence Against LGBTQ Community Grows

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Photos by Jane Lytvynenko

When I asked how to find Kiev's only queer community centre, a man, while blowing cigarette smoke, nodded, grimaced, and pointed at the unmarked entrance without a word. The only hint for potential visitors is a printed sign saying "queer home" taped to the inside of a window. The entrance is a heavy metal door and the stone steps leading into the basement space are worn down and uneven. This is what serves as the capital's only permanent gathering place for the LGBTQ community, discreetly hidden away for safety.

In Ukraine, activists and allies have been steadily increasing their efforts for LGBTQ acceptance. But as visibility grows, so does intolerance and violence. Activists try not to let the threat of getting beaten up or killed get in the way, but the government and police are overwhelmingly indifferent to LGBTQ issues, unwilling to help.

Ksysha, while sitting on the steps of the centre waiting for it to open, said she moved to Kiev from Crimea, right after the 2014 referendum. For her, Kiev is "the same thing but bigger." In Crimea, like in Ukraine's capital, they had gatherings and dances but for her there is more to do here. The community centre has events almost every night and there are more people to talk to.

Queer home

"I don't know if there's more negativity here, I ignore them, I don't give a shit," she says. "There are no huge problems for me—boys have bigger issues.

"I can walk down the street with my girlfriend and sometimes I'll get yells and profanities but it's not a constant problem. But if boys do the same they could get beaten up or worse. In terms of public displays of affection, it's more difficult for them. I don't think people give much thought about what boys do in private, I think they just like yelling the word 'pidoras.' I think they just want to hurt someone's feelings."

That word, pidoras, is hard to translate. It's a gay slur used to wound both LGBTQ people and any heterosexuals who deviate from the norm in the way they speak or dress. Pidoras is the go-to homophobic insult that has become a part of life for the community, just like death threats.

Vladimir Naumenko, manager of regional growth of the Ukraine Gay Alliance, says they're thinking about hiring a private security firm as violence against the LGBTQ community rises with its visibility. Last month, a Ukrainian parliamentary committee on constitutional reform, under pressure from Ukrainian churches, declined to study the possibility of qualifying violence and discrimination against LGBTQ people as a criminal offence. Gay marriage and civil union are out of the question in Ukraine, and the situation is getting worse.

Alexander Zinchenkov

Alexander Zinchenkov has been working for Our World LGBTQ Centre since 1997. He and his partner used to live in Luhansk, a territory now under Russian occupation. He has lived in Kiev for 12 years but has never seen violence against LGBTQ people so bad. He says, "Those who visually stand out almost always risk aggression."

It's obvious he's being a bit reserved. A recently released video of a gay couple in downtown Kiev getting assaulted in broad daylight proves his point. So does an alleged brutal beating of two young men by former parliamentary candidate Oleg Kytserib.

Kytserib wrote a Facebook update (since deleted) about beating up a gay couple sitting in front of his home at night. According to the post, he told them, "Have you gone crazy, pidoras, bitches, being cute here? There's a war going on, and you're here relaxing? This is not Gay-rope, especially beside my home."

Screenshot of Kysterib's now-deleted Facebook post

When, according to the post, they replied, "Are you jealous that we love each other?" he went home, woke up his almost 18-year-old boxer son, took a wooden stick left over from the days of Maidan, and together they beat up the two men. "Two pidoras and the two sympathizers [sitting beside them] will be in the hospital for two weeks." He wrote that the only damage he suffered was a torn jacket and a hand hurt where it "hit pidoras' teeth."

Alexander said he has been trying to find the victims by calling hospitals, but they haven't turned up. In the last six months to a year, he has seen a huge increase in violent cases reported to his organization. Part of the problem is Ukraine's police, who are often unwilling to do anything about the assaults—at most, charging perpetrators with disturbing the peace. Still, he wants to tell authorities about those potentially beaten by Kytserib.

"I'm going to write a police report, but I'm not sure whether the police will be careful with information about where I live," said Alexander. "I don't know that these right-wing activists won't show up at my door. I will write the report, but I still feel in danger."

According to both Alexander and Vladimir, the conservative and violent right-wing movement sprung from the revolution. Ukrainians have a complicated relationships with those groups. On one hand, they are active in conflict zones and served as security during Maidan. At the same time, they are not accountable to anyone.

Those who attacked the Kiev March for Equality in June associated with the movement but received little, if any, punishment. Right-wing activists also burned down a historic movie theatre in Kiev that played a gay film. They were only charged with disturbing the peace.

While violence against individuals has grown, some politicians began showing support for Ukraine's queer community for the first time. Two politicians marched with the activists during a pride parade in June and president Petro Poroshenko voiced his support. But Vladimir says he might just be playing politics as no concrete changes are made.

The necessarily nondescript entry to queer home

"The government doesn't see this as a priority right now, which is dangerous," he says, referring to the war in the country.

Aleksander also points to the war as the reason for increasing violence.

"Homophobia in society is a reflection of the larger feeling in Ukraine," he says. "There's a lot of unrest and negative attitudes.

"About 10 years ago, LGBT people were not noticeable both in the newspapers and in the streets. But now LGBT activists are more vocal and the issues are more visible. An anti-LGBT movement has formed and it's fairly influential. Many Ukrainian politicians and churches are homophobic and have a big influence on society."

For Vladimir and Gay Alliance Ukraine, death threats have become a part of routine procedure. When they had a help line, funded by the Canadian Embassy, brutal threats of violence were just a part of the job. They have tried reporting them but nothing comes of it. Police say they can't do anything until physical harm takes place. "By then it might be too late," says Vladimir.

He has faced those threats and uses them to fuel his work. Gay Alliance Ukraine has opened community centres across the country, organized activities for queers, and sends volunteers on skills exchanges to other countries. He hopes, one day, for acceptance in the country.

"As an individual, I would want change the entire infrastructure," he said. "I would burn it down and build a new one. As an activist, I just want our government to notice what democracy is and that every person is important. That society is made up of minorities."

I asked him how he brings himself to keep going in this climate. After a minute of silence, he says, "I don't know." After another minute he adds, "If we don't keep going, nothing will change."

Follow Jane on Twitter.

A Former Inmate Talks About How Prisons Manufacture Criminals

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Right now, there are over 2.2 million Americans in prison. We imprison a larger portion of our population than any other nation. Most of those inmates were convicted for nonviolent offenses, and most inmates will eventually get out. It's easy to say, "Hey they committed a crime, be as harsh as you can so they learn a lesson and we can send a message." But if we treat inmates poorly—by allowing them to be raped and beaten and told they are subhuman while being cut off from their families—and then we return those inmates to society, what, then, will happen to us?

If we care about ourselves, then we must care about what happens in prison. It may feel like it's far from society, but it's really not, and the things that happen in prison will eventually impact all of us. That violence, that pain, that deprivation, will seep out and hurt us. If we truly are a nation that believes in second acts and in the possibility of changing your life, then why don't we extend that beyond the world of religion and self-help and weight loss and let it also be part of how we think about our prisoners?

The overwhelming majority of inmates end up going back to prison—because of crimes committed against the rest of us. Last year, Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 67.8 percent of state prisoners released in 2005 were re-arrested within three years. A large reason why so many inmates who get out end up going back is prison itself. The place is supposedly constructed to keep people from ever wanting to go there, and you would think that a trip to prison would be a huge motivator to keep from ever going back. But prison is criminogenic—prison helps cause crime. Prison builds better criminals, it cuts people off from law-abiding society, and it narrows people's chances to ever make it in the legitimate economy. Prison is supposed to help curb crime—they are called "correctional facilities," after all—but instead, prison is feeding our crime problem.

On VICE News: Leaving My Friend Rasool Behind and Why He Must Be Freed from Turkish Prison

Jeff Smith is a professor in urban policy at the New School's Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy in New York, and not someone you would ever guess had spent time inside. He's short and bookish and preppy and brilliant and has the gentlemanly manners we expect of Midwesterners, along with a politician's way of putting people at ease. He was a Missouri state senator from 2007 to 2009, representing the fourth district, which includes part of St. Louis. But in August 2009, he pled guilty to obstruction of justice stemming from federal election law violations committed during a failed 2004 campaign for Congress. He spent nine months incarcerated in federal prison, and his excellent memoir of his time away, Mr. Smith Goes to Prison: What My Year Behind Bars Taught Me About America's Prison Crisis, is out now. (Full disclosure: I blurbed the book because I loved it and because Jeff is a friend ,but I'm interviewing him now at no benefit to myself.)

There are few people who can speak more intelligently about prison from an academic and a lived perspective, so I called Jeff to talk about his time there. He is, somewhat surprisingly, extremely passionate about the subject, especially on the impact of prison rape.

VICE: Is prison criminogenic?
Jeff Smith: Yes. For a number of reasons. Some reasons are specific to what happens inside prison and other reasons are more about the kinds of things that happen after prison. For one, the fact of having been in prison makes it harder to find housing, because four out of five landlords see if you have a criminal background. Nine out of ten employers see if you have a criminal background. The majority of employers surveyed will not hire you if you have a criminal background. So there's all these kinds of things that make it harder to get back on your feet, and if you don't have money to meet your basic needs that makes you more likely to recidivate.

There's also all the things that happen inside prison that are criminogenic. One of them is that it's dehumanizing. When people are making it clear to you in every way that you're shit, then you're not going to be feeling very good about yourself. So there's a psychological dehumanization. There's also a total lack of opportunity in prison to rehabilitate. In fact, at my facility, when you left prison there was one CO [correctional officer] who said to everybody leaving, "You'll be back, shitbird." They seemed to take a perverse pleasure in not rehabilitating you. That's on top of a total lack of vocational training or an opportunity to develop skills that will help you succeed on the outside.


Watch: Inside Norway's Prisons


Then there's rape, which is a sad but omnipresent feature of prison life. There's a tolerance of rape in many prisons—even though we've passed federal legislation, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, a lot of states don't even keep track of how many rapes are reported in their prisons, they're just ignoring the legislation. So there's that whole aspect which makes people much more likely to rape when they get out, because when you feel as if your manhood has been stripped away, a lot of people attempt to reclaim their manhood in a violent fashion when they get out.

And in prison, you learn how to deceive all the time. In order to eat in prison, in order to have basic hygiene, in order to have a bar of soap or toothpaste, you've got to have money. And most people don't have money, so they're hustling and that means they're figuring out ways to get drugs and sell them or pornography and sell it or whatever type of contraband there is or sometimes how to provide some service. So they're operating in an underground economy that in some ways encourages entrepreneurial ingenuity, but also reinforces this notion that you always have to get around the system and not do things in a lawful way.

There's also the way that in prison your bonds with law-abiding society are being broken down and your bond with other criminals is being strengthened.
Absolutely. And they make it extremely difficult for you to stay in touch with other people because it's so expensive. In prison, normal phone calls can be from $1 to $3 a minute. We know two things reduce recidivism: one, staying in touch with people, with law-abiding loved ones, and having a support network; and two, advancing educationally. And yet we make it harder to stay in touch with people by making it hugely expensive, by locating prisons far from where criminals live, by doing things like video visits which are prohibitively expensive for many families, instead of allowing actual visits, by making it so that you can only visit in very limited times. I'm not saying it should be a country club, but if people want to come see you, they should be able to come see you. Often times, Theresa, who's now my wife, would drive eight hours and then they would make her wait for two hours so she would only be able to see me for like an hour and then have to drive eight hours back. Having good positive interactions with people on the outside makes you less likely to recidivate, but they try to make that difficult. They once told Theresa to leave because she was wearing khaki, so she had to go shopping for new clothes and by the time she got back, she had driven eight hours to see me for 20 minutes.

"If you look at nations that have far lower recidivism rates, you'll see they do actual vocational training in prison."

Because she was wearing khaki?
In the fine print of some regulations, they said you can't do that.

Because the prisoners wore khaki?
No! Khaki was not our color! We wore dark greens! That was just a rule! Then we know the other thing that makes you less likely to recidivate is to advance educationally, yet the whole year I was in prison they offered one GED course and one hydroponics course for two weeks where they taught you how to grow tomatoes in water. If you look at nations that have far lower recidivism rates, you'll see they do actual vocational training in prison. When you come in they figure out what skills you have or can acquire and then they train you to be a plumber or how to do HVAC, how to do jobs that there's a need for. If we were smart and we actually cared as a country about the people who get locked up, then we would do that.

But we make it pretty clear that we don't care very much and one place we see that is in our tolerance of rape. There's tens of thousands of rapes in prisons every year [one group called Stop Prison Rape says more than 200,000 men are raped in prison each year] and it's essentially tolerated because that's the deterrent. If I asked 100 dudes on the street what do you fear most in the world, I bet 90 would say going to prison and getting raped. And society views it as an acceptable cost in order to deter people. And that's pretty messed up.

Part of the problem seems to be that we don't care about what happens to criminals and we don't see the behavior that's visited on them as having a chance of rebounding onto us.
The mentality is very slowly changing in this society, but for decades at the highest levels of policymaking you couldn't be too tough on criminals. You saw governors getting elected by advocating chain gangs. Before [Former Florida Governor] Charlie Crist was a Democrat, he cut his political teeth by running for attorney general as "Chain Gang Charlie." I think that from the highest levels of policymaking, it was impossible to be too tough on criminals. And that caused us to increase our prison population fivefold from 1985 to now. And we didn't really make society safer.

I mean, when you come out of prison, you may still owe court costs from before you went in, and you have to pay to live in your halfway house and you have to pay for your drug testing and you have to pay for clothes for job interviews and you're trying to get back on your feet and there's all these obstacles in your way! I had a fucking PhD, I had 300 letters to the judge from prominent people including the attorney general, the lieutenant governor, the mayor of St. Louis, the senate majority leader, and I had a hard time getting a job when I came out. Think of how hard it is for someone with no savings, no community support, no PhD, no college degree, nothing but a GED earned in prison, no savings to fall back on, no transportation, no place to live. It makes you wonder not why the recidivism rate is 66 percent but why is it only that low.

Did you see people who were not violent criminals morphing into violent criminals?
I saw myself doing criminal things in prison. I'm stealing at the warehouse. I'm getting in fights. I'm acting in ways that I didn't act on the street, and I was not even there a year. Imagine getting a long sentence and you have to learn to adjust to that environment, a world where you can't show any emotion, you can't show any vulnerability, and you gotta be tough and hard at all times. You think that's not gonna have an effect on somebody? I watched it have an effect on me in ten months. So yeah, I watched guys who seemed to be mild-mannered come in and get baited, get antagonized, get in fights. There's an element in there that that's what they do. They prey on people who seem to be weak. That's why you can't show any weakness. Even though there's tremendous entrepreneurial ingenuity, even though there was tremendous desire among people who wanted to fly straight and learn a trade, there's also people who are so beaten down that they're going to cause a problem for others, and there's criminogenic effects there as well.

How do we make prison less criminogenic?
First we adopt some Western European models of prison where prison is seen more like putting your kid on a break to think about what they did, but not to dehumanize your child by beating them or exposing them to violence or psychological torture like solitary confinement—which is a key tactic that prisons use to control people and to discipline them for small infractions, even though solitary confinement is a huge driver of PTSD. But it's a routine method used in prisons all around the country, and that's a real problem. We should treat prisons much more like Western Europe does which is like, "OK, why did you get here? What were your problems on the outside? And what can we do to address them from a therapeutic perspective, from a vocational training perspective, from an holistic human perspective to say how can we make sure you don't come back?" That's what the mentality is as opposed to, "You're here to be punished," which is the American prison mentality.

When we think of prison as a business, does it make sense for prison to be criminogenic? Shouldn't a business try to bring its customers back?
Politically it works out very nicely that a huge sector of people who would probably be progressive voters are incarcerated. Economically it works out to take a lot of people who would drive down wages out of the labor market. It works out from a lot of different perspectives to have a huge prison population. But would America tolerate it, would any business tolerate it, if 66 percent of their products failed? But 66 percent of prisoners are essentially failures by coming back and recidivating. And it's no accident. And we shouldn't tolerate it.

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Here's What It Feels Like to Smuggle 700 Grams of Cocaine in Your Stomach

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This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands

A few years ago, one of my cousins spent some time working as a drug mule. She's flown from Curacao to Europe with her stomach packed full of plastic-wrapped cocaine, transported briefcases full of drugs from Jamaica, and only really stopped because she got caught doing it. I wanted to know more about her history of illegal drug trafficking, so I went to her house for a chat.

After letting me in, Sharon* sat down on her black leather couch and told me she couldn't understand why I was so interested in her story. "I don't get what's so special about swallowing balloons filled with coke," she said. Sharon, who is half-Dutch and half-Surinamese, grew up in a very small town, but started hanging out on the streets of Amsterdam when she was 13 years old. "There were only Dutch people where I was living. I hated it. I wanted to hang out with people who looked like me."

She found some friends in the suburbs of the capital, who introduced her to pastimes like crack cocaine, and taught her how to rob people. Her worried mother desperately tried to coax her out of crime, but without much success. "She gave me a choice: either I move back to Suriname or go to a very strict boarding school. I chose the boarding school, because I knew I was in for a right kicking in Suriname," she said.

Eventually she got expelled, spent some time in juvenile detention and, finally, ended up in adult prison "for robberies and stuff like that." In 2001, after being released, Sharon traveled to the small Caribbean island of Curacao because she'd heard that smuggling cocaine through there was easy. The plan was for her to pick up a suitcase filled with coke just past customs, and then turn around and immediately fly back to the Netherlands with it.

"The people I was supposed to meet didn't have their shit together, so I decided not to do it and just stay there for a while instead," she told me. In Curacao, she says, people would constantly ask her if she wanted to smuggle coke for them. Obviously, Sharon was an easy target: she wasn't from Curacao and had no family there. "A lot of people would ask you to smuggle for them if they knew you were Dutch. But I always told them that I wouldn't. Well, until I ran into a friend I knew from back home," Sharon shrugged. "She asked me if I would smuggle some stuff for her and I decided to do it. Everybody did it back then. Every flight would have at least ten or 20 people with drugs on it. Even little old grandmas were selling drugs in Curacao."

To test things out, Sharon swallowed a single cocaine-filled balloon. It went down without a problem, so she ingested another 70 or so. Each balloon contained ten grams of coke, and she was being paid 1,000 guilders (about $550) per hundred grams. The cocaine was packed in plastic, then wrapped in a layer of latex (from a glove), taped shut with a special kind of packaging tape, and then wrapped in an additional layer of plastic and latex. "It was really well packaged. Some people had a hard time getting it down, though. They'd practice with a piece of carrot or something like that," she laughed.

Unfortunately, coke balloons weren't always that well packaged. A friend of Sharon's died at the age of 19 when a balloon burst in her stomach. "That was pure coke, though. I only swallowed boiled coke, which won't kill you. Or, at least, that's what they told me," she said. "I've seen a lot of drug mules get dropped off at A&E [the emergency room], actually."

Before swallowing, Sharon would check each and every balloon by dropping it in a bucket of water. If it sank to the bottom, it needed to be repackaged. "It's not that complicated," she assured me. Smuggling drugs seemed like a good option for Sharon—she wanted to go back to Holland, and this seemed like an easy way to get a free plane ticket.

Sharon wasn't even nervous the first time she did it, she told me. She just stood patiently in line at the airport with those she knew had their stomachs full, and then breezed through customs. "They pay a lot of attention to people that don't eat. I guess it's because they think you can't eat if you have loads of cocaine in your stomach. But I just ate like I always do," she told me. "It's also important that you don't look scared or act like you're nervous. They asked a bunch of questions, but I just answered like I normally would. I even asked them if they wanted me to get undressed or perform any additional checks or whatever."


Watch our documentary about synthetic cannabis addiction, 'Spice Boys':


Unlike others in her situation, Sharon never had to pass the balloons mid-flight. When that happens, the mules have to wash and swallow them again. "It gives you pretty bad breath," she told me.

After she landed, Sharon would expel the cocaine balloons with the help of a special laxative chocolate. Once out, you'd have to hand them off to the dealers right away. "If you didn't, you'd be in big trouble"—not that Sharon had ever experienced any trouble with the higher-ups herself. The closest she got to disaster was hearing about an 18-year-old guy who got the balloons stuck in his intestinal tract. His stomach had to be cut open by a surgeon, who later delivered the stash—but not the kid—to the police. Even in those situations, doctors have to uphold the hippocratic oath.

She recalled another time when she had to smuggle a suitcase full of drugs from Jamaica. "It was pretty easy," she said. "They had bribed the people at customs. In Holland, another courier took my suitcase and we walked past customs together. I didn't really have to do anything." Because Jamaica isn't considered to be a "high risk country," fewer flights are checked. The trip landed her £2,700 [$4,100].

Today, Sharon is on welfare, which is a far cry from the money she used to be earning. Every time a smuggle was successful, she'd reward herself with clothing.

Of course, perhaps unexpectedly, there was eventually a fuck-up, and Sharon got caught in 2007. That time, instead of swallowing the drugs, she had put them in a hollow dildo and inserted it into her vagina. "I thought they were only going to X-ray my stomach, but they also took pictures down there," she said, pointing to her crotch. "They don't take you to jail if you're carrying less than three kilos, though. All you have to do is talk to the cops and then you can leave. I never even saw the inside of a police station."

Sharon was allowed to go back to the Netherlands right away. "I felt sorry for my mother, because she had to buy the plane ticket," she told me. As a punishment, the authorities cut her passport in half, and she was banned from flying for a year. Her mother saw an opportunity to change Sharon's ways and brought her back home.

Sharon misses the old days, but definitely not the smuggling. She'd heard that it was getting far more difficult. "Flights from Colombia and Curacao are being checked more thoroughly now," she said. "I don't know too much about the latest methods. I certainly won't be doing it again." You could tell she was being sincere.

"What else do you want to know? I told you it's not that interesting," she yawned as we ended our conversation.

*Name has been changed to protect anonymity.


Canadian Political Parties Really Suck at Vetting Their Candidates

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Canadian Political Parties Really Suck at Vetting Their Candidates
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