Still courtesy TIFF

Brussels is often thought of as a quintessential capital city: organized, unassuming, stately, and sleepy as all hell. But that's not the Brussels of 27-year-old Belgian-based Moroccan filmmakers Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah's new movie Black, which is set in the inner city neighbourhoods and centres on gang violence and alienation among poor black and Moroccan communities. The film is essentially a Romeo and Juliet love story, but shot through with the streetwise and unflinching sensibilities of Larry Clark's Kids or Hector Babanco's Pixote, and uses blazing visuals to convey the seemingly limitless possibility of violence in the inner city.

As a second full-length feature for the directorial team (they debuted with 2014's Image), the film bears some of the cliches of young filmmakers grappling with big topics: the violence is occasionally over-stylized and parts of the plot feel a bit rushed, and while most of the characters on both side of the racial divide are complex and well drawn, the black gangsters are particularly vicious.

But their commitment to the authenticity of the neighbourhoods and the story set therein—the film is based on Dirk Bracke's youth-oriented novel of the same name, which is apparently a controversial favourite in Belgium—comes through in the characters and locations. (The entire film was cast off the streets, and shot in the city's marginalized neighbourhoods.) Indeed, even though Black begins with its focus on the petty, fairly unlikeable Moroccan gang and its proverbial Romeo, Marwan (Aboubakr Bensaihi), the real story becomes the tragic journey of Juliet stand-in Mavella's (Martha Canga Antonio) relationship with the terrifyingly powerful, and ultra-violent, Black Bronx gang—a crew with a penchant for gang rape and neighbourhood intimidation.

The all-around bleakness of the film aside, the filmmakers came across as a pair of enthusiastic and considerate dudes when VICE met up with them for their first ever North American interview.

VICE: How did you two get into filmmaking?
Bilall Fallah: On the first day of school, which was all only, like, artistic white people, he was the only Moroccan. So I asked him, "Are you Moroccan? And he said, "Yeah." So we formed a gang together, and made movies together. It came naturally: Every time I made a movie, he was on my set, and every time he made a movie, I was on set. It was like our minds were connected, sharing the same vision.

And these were student films?
Adil El Arbi: Yeah, in film school. We didn't even pass first year because everybody thought our films sucked.

Fallah: We both flunked. And they were fucking racist.

El Arbi: But the kind of movies we made were actually quite commercial. We were inspired by movies by [Martin] Scorsese and Spike Lee and whole bunch of directors. While the movies [the instructors] wanted to see were very artsy movies that you would see at festivals. It was a few years before they had some kind of respect for us.

It's kind of the opposite here where people who try to make art films are told they should be more commercial. So, you did one other full length, and anything else?
El Arbi: Every year in film school you have to make a short movie, and every short movie we made was in the same universe that we use in our long features. So the last short movie we made won some prizes, and one of those was a budget for a new short movie. But with that we said, "Fuck short movies; let's make a long feature." It was our first movie, Image, which was about a Moroccan gangster and a journalist in a neighbourhood in Brussels. And then the second movie is Black. And we hope we can make a shitload of other movies.

So obviously you guys are familiar with the scene you're portraying in the film. Can you give us a little background on that side of Brussels. I mean, I was there like 10 years ago, and saw a very different side of the city.
El Arbi: We read this book [Black] in school, as you read a lot of stuff that's aimed at teenagers. I wanted to read it because it was about black gangs in Brussels. There are about 35 gangs in the city that are active, more or less, and we know this kind of world, because we know lots of black people and Moroccan people in this immigrant community. It's our world. And we felt connected to the characters.

Fallah: There's also a universal thing about Romeo and Juliet, but we still wanted to keep it raw.

El Arbi: It was interesting when you read the book, you understand why the gangsters go into it, and get inside their heads.

There's the socio-economic aspect, and the racism between the two gangs in the film, but you don't really see the view outside of that in the movie. What's the immigrant experience like?
El Arbi: In Brussels, when you're Moroccan or you're black, you have a hard time finding a normal job. Even though Brussels is very rich, the population of Brussels is very poor. You have 1 million people coming in there to work every day, but the people who live there are very very poor. There's Moroccans, and blacks, and people from Eastern Europe, and for anyone with a foreign sounding name, they have a problem finding a job. So they don't belong to the society. And a lot of those young people, they see their big brothers or older friends who don't get a job, and so they are thinking, why should I try? So they get into some criminal activity, in a group where they feel like I am accepted and I have an identity—I am thought of as Black Bronx, that's who I am. And that's clear because I'm not part of society. A lot of those people just want to belong somewhere, and they feel like there's no real future for them. They feel always like an immigrant, even if they are born here or their parents are born here.

And in the film, there's even alienation within those groups. Once the main characters fall in love and they try to escape the violence, they're alienated from those groups that they belong to. Well, how did you choose to focus on this one specific story?
El Arbi: Most of the criminal activity that happened around 2008-2009, right when that book [Black] came out, was in the African community. It was the African gangs fighting for the same turf. But we wanted to explore some of the smaller gangs that act criminal or aren't as dangerous as the ones in the African neighbourhoods. They act really different. Sometimes you have wars between neighbourhoods—it's not always wars between African gangs and Moroccan gangs. It'll be two Moroccan gangs against each other, one from the north of Brussels against one from the south of Brussels. But we thought it would be interesting to show those two kinds of gangs, because the main characters are very similar [even though they're from different gangs]. And that's the beauty of the story.

By focusing on these two characters and their worlds, there's not a lot of the rest of Brussels. There are not a lot of white people in the film.
El Arbi: Just the cops. The racist cops.

What was the thinking behind setting it up that way?
El Arbi: What you see in the movie is the real neighbourhoods in Brussels, and the world that they live in. So you can see it's really difficult to have a good future in that kind of environment. So it happens in the underground in the metro subway station, and in their neighbourhoods.

Fallah: And there isn't a lot of contact with white Flemish people, it's really an entirely different world.

El Arbi: So for the movie, we had to stay there. And that's why the movie is much more about the relationship between Marwan and Mavella, and even more than about gangs—like, there are 35 different gangs, but you don't see all of them. It's just centred around those two characters,

And in so doing, I understand that the film is one of the first Flemish films to feature this racial makeup.
Fallah: All the Flemish films are full of white people. You never have Moroccans or black people.

El Arbi: If you come from another country and watch Flemish television, you think Belgium is all white. And all the famous people in Belgium are white. Even though Brussels and Antwerp and Ghent are multicultural. So that's one of the things that's going to be a shock and controversial in Flanders—it's something new. When you see a Moroccan person in a Flemish movie, they're usually a drug dealer or a terrorist. So we chose to make a movie full of blacks and Moroccans, and also show the good and bad side of both groups.

And is this how you ended up using non-professional actors?
Fallah: Since all the television shows are full of white actors, we weren't going to find them there. So we did street casting to find people who matched the characters. We had 400 auditions and saw them all, and did like four months to find those guys. We chose 16 of them, who we knew were talented, like diamonds. And then we like professionalized them by doing two months of rehearsing.

El Arbi: We worked with them to do a lot of improvisation. Obviously there's a screenplay, but we wanted to give them a lot of freedom because we wanted to capture that documentary style of acting. And we wanted to have that chemistry between the actors. They all knew a lot about gangs, even though they never said they were part of any gangs—they were always talking about, "Yeah, a friend of mine, he did this and this and this." And then one of the actors got arrested while we were shooting.

What's the story there?
El Arbi: We were just shooting, and then he got arrested, and then a few hours later he was free. And he never really told us what it was about. But he also talked about his father, who was known in the neighbourhood with the gangs, so we assumed it was something like that.

Fallah: But most of the actors really played a role. But they know the world and they know the language of the street. And that was really important to us, to be as authentic as possible and to have it almost as documentary acting. And I think we did that.

What was that like for them to have this opportunity to make a movie.
El Arbi: When we did the casting, most of them didn't believe we were really film directors. We had to show them our first movie to prove that we weren't bullshitters. Because we're on the street asking girls who are like 16-years-old: "Hey, do you want to play in a movie?" Ha ha.

Fallah: But after a while we had an office in downtown Brussels, and a lot of people walking by. And one guy who played the most important role of the gang leader, he was on his way to work and he passed by. We noticed he had a face like the character, so we asked him if he wanted to come in for casting.

El Arbi: He was the only one I was scared of, because everyone [auditioning for that role] was yelling, and he was really calm. Everybody thought maybe he'd killed somebody. But the two main characters, Marwan and Mavella—she'd read the book and was a fan of the book and found her own way to the casting. And as soon as she read [for the part] it was like a bomb of emotions and we knew it was going to be her.

What about the street lingo and the dialects—do you think any of that gets lost in the subtitles?
Fallah: We showed the movie through the French speaking channel and they didn't have any problem understanding it. Though, even for us there were little words and little jokes that we didn't understand.

El Arbi: We showed it to a famous Belgian artist, Stromae, and he was there with his black family and friends, and they were laughing their asses off. They understood all those sentences—so the actors were really thinking about their lines. But it's the images that really tell the story.

What was it like shooting the film?
Both: It was war.

El Arbi: We told the actors that if we want to make this movie it's like going into war. One-hundred percent, you have to give yourself, heart and mind. And in some of those neighbourhoods, there was some violence, like threatening to stab one of the white people on the crew.

Fallah: I got a bottle smashed on my head.

El Arbi: But we reached out to them. We went to the neighbourhoods months before we went to shoot, to get the trust of the people there. We wanted to be authentic in the actors and in the locations. We weren't going to shoot in the part of Brussels where nothing happens, and we wanted to be on the streets that are described in the book.

Fallah: We wouldn't tell people it was a film about gangsters, we'd tell them it was a love story.

One last question... how do you think this is going to be received in Belgium and in Europe?
El Arbi: Very interesting. The book was really hard.

The book already had a reputation?
El Arbi: Yeah, it was really popular. So when we shot the movie, we would shoot the hardest version possible and then tone it down a little. But the first version that we showed the producer and the distributors, they were like, keep it that way: keep it hard, keep it rough, you don't need to tone it down. So it's pretty much the version we have now. I think the good thing is that it will not go unnoticed. And that is a good thing for young directors.

Black plays at Toronto International Film Festival on Friday, Sept. 11, 9 PM; Sunday, Sept. 13, 10 PM; and Saturday, Sept. 19, 3 PM.

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Philip Boudreau. Photo via Facebook

Read: We Asked VICE's Global Offices to Talk About Canada's Politicians Based on Pictures

Lobster fishing is serious business in Nova Scotia. For many Maritimers, their entire livelihood is based on the industry, which can net nearly a billion dollars for the three have-not provinces in a good year. Atlantic lobster seasons are fairly short, heightening the stakes; in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the season is only about two months long. It shouldn't come as a complete surprise, then, that some are willing to kill over the delicious, profitable crustacean.

Today, following his crewmates being found guilty of manslaughter in the infamous "murder for lobster" case, Cape Breton fisherman Craig Landry pleaded guilty as an accessory in the death of a fellow fisherman who they suspected of fucking with their traps. Landry was sentenced to 28 days time served and two years of probation.

So, how and why exactly does a lobster killing go down? According to a statement read in court, a crew aboard a three-person boat named the Twin Maggies on June 1, 2013—halfway through the spring lobster season—spotted a man messing with traps in a harbour in Petit-de-Grat, Nova Scotia. The crew recognized him as Philip Boudreau, a man they had been feuding with for years and suspected of cutting their lobster traps.

Joseph James Landry, a relative of Craig, then shot a rifle four times (this is while he was on a boat, mind you) at 43-year-old Boudreau and hit him at least once in the leg. Following this, they rammed their boat into Boudreau's small speedboat several times until he went overboard. They then proceeded to drag him into the Atlantic on a big fish hook, then finally attached an anchor to him when he stopped struggling. His body has never been found.

Joseph Landry was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 14 years in prison. The boat's captain, Dwayne Matthew Samson, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in May. Samson's wife and Joseph's daughter, Carla, who owned the boat the men were onboard that day, was also facing charges as an accessory in the murder, but had these dropped in June.

Craig, a deckhand aboard the Twin Maggies that day, was initially facing a charge of second-degree murder. The charge was reduced after he helped police with a reenactment of the murder for lobster.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

This was how we last saw him. Photo by Helen Sloan. Courtesy of HBO

Warning: spoiler alert.

After Jon Snow died, Kit Harington and other people who work on the show went on a worldwide tour to assure us that he, in the words of the coroner from The Wizard of Oz, "is most sincerely dead." Even President Obama got involved. No one would admit anything. The official word—Jon Snow is staying dead.

No one believed him (including us). Speculation ran throughout the web as Game of Thrones fans, especially those enamored of Kit Harington's hair, discussed all the possible ways that he might have survived the treacherous attack. He could have "warged" out to Snow (put his consciousness inside his dire wolf's body), or get resurrected by the Fire Priestess. He could be Azor Ahai, or maybe just the most heroic zombie in Westeros. No one exactly knows, but we do believe that Jon Snow's fate is, and always has been, too intricately tied to the central plot of the books to let him stay dead.

There's good evidence for that belief. Jon Snow is not only the most heroic character in a show otherwise devoid of heroes, he's got a mysterious backstory that is perfectly set up to deliver a shocking revelation (think: "Luke, I am your father")—at least to everyone who doesn't know what R+L=J stands for. The show and the books have been teasing his secret origins since the very beginning as a secret that Ned Stark took to his grave. While George R. R. Martin and the show creators Weiss and Benioff are perfectly willing to kill off major characters, it just seems like a waste to blow five years of foreshadowing without giving us the revelation (and then killing him off, no doubt). Furthermore, Weiss and Benioff famously won the right to make the show by answering Martin's pop quiz, "Who is Jon Snow's mother?" Why would it matter if Snow stays dead?

A book could keep a secret, but since Kit Harington wasn't going to vanish off the face of the Earth for the ten months between TV seasons, paparazzi and reporters have been searching for clues. First, there's the hair. In a Rolling Stone interview interview about what would happen when the show was done, Harington said, "I told my agent, 'No more swords, no more horses. You [don't want to] get stuck in things. And maybe I can cut my fucking hair." But his hair stayed long, taunting us with its luscious curls (for my part—I want Jon Snow, and everyone living in the frozen North in the worst winter in living memory, to please just put on a hat. I'm cold just thinking about it).

Now—and here's the big spoiler of the day—Watchers on the Wall, a site dedicated to the show, has this news.

Kit Harington a.k.a. Jon Snow was also seen at the location, participating in shooting this week. Harington has been spotted in Belfast again recently, along with Iwan Rheon, so it's not too shocking Harington is filming Game of Thrones. Looks like Game of Thrones is planning another huge battle for the ever-important episode nine.

So we may officially be kept in doubt for a few episodes, but unless this is some kind of flashback scene, Snow's back. The big questions are how he returns, when he returns, and what are the consequences of his dance with death.

Or it could be that Harington's just messing with us. Maybe he called his friends on the show and asked if he could briefly crash some big battle scene in Northern Ireland, just to troll us, before he goes for a pint at the local pub. Now that would be a plot twist I didn't see coming.

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A short story and photo essay from photographer Sohrab Hura.

The sound of the cage crashing to the ground tore through the house. The crow had escaped. A light came on, and on the bed Madhu tottered from left to right trying to find her head. Her hands clasped at the smooth top of her torso, her fingers feeling for any trace of a stump of a head before falling still for a moment and then again repeating the motion, frantically. Even now she kept forgetting that she did not have a head. It had already been a year. An obsessive lover had stolen it while she had fallen asleep to the rumble of the waves outside. She should have seen it coming. The fortuneteller had warned her that it would happen, and there had been other signs too. Every time he made love to her he bit her really hard. It wasn't something unusual for a man to do, but with him it was different. He would try to tear the flesh off her breasts and when he didn't manage, he would smile and say, "I just wanted a piece of you so that I wouldn't miss you when I leave," and then he would slip the money down beside her.

It was a hot and sweaty night. The wind had strangely stopped blowing in the evening and with it the sea had died that. Madhu rubbed the sweat off her body. The day had been long and boring. An idiot of a photographer had come over from the nearby city of Chennai. He had heard about this woman who had lost her head and wanted to take photographs of her. He had said that he wanted to take photographs of all the wonder—awful and vicious things that happened along the Indian coastline and that he had started on his way through Tamil Nadu. "Why on Earth would anybody waste his time on something like that? Anyway he had a strange accent," she thought.

Madhu had started to feel her way to the living room. The tottering had now turned into a dance. "If only the asshole had let me at least keep my cerebellum, now I have to buy myself a whole new head." She had been saving money to buy the new head that the fortuneteller had promised her. But for now she had to make do with the ear that her sister had loaned to her, which she had attached to the front of her right shoulder, the more auspicious side. She missed the ordinary things: looking at herself in the mirror, wearing makeup, combing her hair, sticking her head out of the water when in the sea, you know... the usual.

She needed to hurry, the pill was starting to get slippery in her moist hands. A couple of months ago she had bought the bird cheaply because it had come with a terribly loud, and supposedly temporary, cough that had not yet been fixed. But she persisted. From the familiar edge at the end of the wall she realized that the she had forgotten to shut the window. She already knew that the cage had fallen. There was a string tied to it, its other end she tied around the big toe of her right foot every night while she slept. She picked up the cage and shook it hoping to feel a movement inside but only the open door rattled wildly against the frame. Loneliness put her arms around Madhu from behind as she stood with the empty cage. "Damn, I will have to buy another parrot from the fortuneteller tomorrow."

Dennis Cooper isn't a monster, but his books are. Ever since discovering the work of the Marquis de Sade at the tender age of 15, Cooper has spent his life devoted to writing merciless, gruesome fiction of the highest artistic caliber. His books are appalling, hypnotic, and exquisitely depraved, but if you can stomach your way through a whole novel, you might find yourself enlightened by its darkness.

Dennis always seems to be telling the same stories: all of his work dwells on adolescent horniness with reverence and tenderness. But while Cooper repeats the same narrative, he does so in endlessly various ways. While the consistently scandalous content of his books is what earned his notoriety, the structural virtuosity of his writing is what has garnered critical acclaim. He treats his prose, poetry, comic books, plays, and personal blog with the careful, precise touch of a surgeon who's elbows-deep in a patient's innards.

Finally, after years of anticipation, Cooper is poised to bring his vision to the movie screen with the premiere of his first original film. Like Cattle Towards Glow follows 13 young characters who find themselves in confusing and threatening situations by way of their sexual misadventures. In advance of the film's premiere in Paris this Friday, VICE spoke with Dennis about anarchism, the gay agenda, and giving his readers complicated erections.

VICE: I'm calling you from LA, which is the quintessential, wasteland-like Cooper setting—do you make it back to your hometown very often?
Dennis Cooper: I come back at least once a year because LA has the best Halloween. I'm obsessed with the haunted houses there—it's like the castles of Halloween, and there's hundreds of them.

Let's discuss your movie. Can you tell me what led you to working on a film? Readers of your blog know that this movie has been in the making for a really long time.
It kind of has a weird back-story because... About seven years ago I mentioned somewhere online, maybe on my blog, that I'd always wanted to make a porn movie. And this guy in the porn industry wrote to me, "I can get that made if you really want to do it, I have connections in the porn industry and I can get that made." I asked him "What are the guidelines? What sort of rules should I follow?" He told me to do anything I wanted, that there weren't any guidelines.

So, I wrote this script, and then when I gave it to him, it was just extremely impossible to make: It was too controversial, it was too arty. He tried to get it made and no one would touch it, so it died. But a few years later, a producer asked me for about the script again. My friend Zac [Farley] talked to me about it and said he wanted to direct it, so we rewrote it together. Zac directed the film, and Scott Michael Salerno did the cinematography, but everything else we did collaboratively—casting, everything.

Can you briefly explain Like Cattle Towards Glow?
It's in five parts—each part is a different story with different actors in it. It's a strange movie, it's very slow and deep in a way, but it's also very intense. Each of the scenes is about sex in some way, but in different ways—it's sort of about confusion about sex. It's not a porn movie anymore, but there is some explicit sex in it.

The first story is about this gothic guy who's a prostitute and sells himself as a dead body for people to have sex with. So in his story, this guy hires him and something goes wrong... Then there's one about this guy who's a spoken word artist who works with an electronic noise musician. They're doing a performance and the audience attacks the guy and rapes him on the floor while he's doing the performance. Then there's one about this girl and boy who live in the forest and dress up as monsters, and they kidnap a skateboarder and kill him. And there's another about this woman who's keeping elaborate surveillance on this young guy who lives in a bunker on the beach. I don't know... people should see [the movie] because it's actually really very cool.

I'm an anarchist, so I don't believe in collective identity. Even though I'm gay, I've never written about 'what gay guys do,' you know?

What is it that compels you write about pretty boys getting killed so much? Why is it such a recurring thing?
Well, of course the real answer is that I have no idea, because if I did, I wouldn't do it. I don't know where that comes from—I started using those motifs when I was a teenager, and obviously when I was thinking about it as a teenager, I was thinking about it being the young one. And now I'm much older and I'm still writing about it, and I'm not really the young one anymore. So... I don't really know. There's something about it that's very scary to me; I've always been fascinated by objectification. I really dislike it because when you objectify someone you're basically depersonalizing them and turning them into an example of a kind of beauty or attractiveness that you're into. And I think that when I was younger, especially, I was around people who were really, really taken advantage of for that—people who happened to be attractive, and so others would just do anything to get them, and then they would just drop them. So even though they said and sometimes even believed that they were actually interested in the person, it was all just this elaborate flirtation that was really about "conquering" the cute guy. I find that really disturbing, and I find it really fascinating that people do that to each other. I don't know why, but it's something that obviously interests me so much that I write about it a lot and I try to understand what's happening there.

When you write a story, whatever format it's in, how is it that you find a starting point to your creative process? Do you start working with thematic ideas, or specific details in the story?
It's not characters or stories or anything like that, because I don't care about those things. I use them as devices to get people to read, because people want those things, but they don't really interest me that much.

I tend to write about a similar thing all the time. I'm very confused about the stuff I write about, it's very compelling to me. The things that are confusing to me are the things that interest me. So, usually it comes from my need to represent something that's exciting me, confusing me, or scaring me. It's mostly emotional, really.

You said that your characters are devices to you—does that attitude extend to the way you use sex in your work?
It depends on what you mean because the sex in the book generally happens between the characters...

I mean, most writing about sex is incredibly banal. I'm not interested in giving people erections or anything—I'm interested in maybe giving them complicated erections—but the actual sex is not a device. But there are millions of devices that I use to try to get people to look at or read [my work], because I tend to write about things that are uncomfortable and disturbing. It's a matter of giving them some sort of eroticism and then undercutting it with something that's very disturbing or emotional and finding the right stew of stuff that will get it there.

There's been a lot of progress in the gay rights movement in my lifetime, and it's a much more visible movement than before. How does your work fit into that political movement, or how has it affected the way that you work?
First of all, I'm an anarchist, so I don't believe in collective identity. Even though I'm gay, I've never written about "what gay guys do," you know? I write about people who are off on their own and don't feel connected to anybody, regardless of what anyone else's sexual "thing" is. So it hasn't affected the way I think about things at all.

What really has happened is the more that "gay" got mainstreamed, the more stuff came out with gay themes in other mediums besides books. Because at first it was just books—when I was young, you just read books, because that's the only place you could find that stuff. Now there's movies and TV and everything, so gay guys don't read books anymore. So it's kind of interesting in that way—I think it actually fucked over a lot of gay writers who were writing for that audience because no one reads those books anymore. It didn't really affect me, though, because [my audience is different].

Actually, it's taken away a lot of the hostility towards what I do. When books were important to the gay movement there was a lot of hatred towards me because I wasn't sex-positive or whatever.

How is your work not sex-positive?
Because it doesn't present sex as a cathartic thing about love. It's not a celebration.

For your characters it is though...
Yeah, but there are those who want the portrayal of gays to be really positive and to speak to the world about how "normal" we are, and obviously the stuff I write about isn't like that.

It's so refreshing that you don't identify with the "gay" collective identity, or as a "gay artist." Most people these days seem to treat sexuality as a label and I think it limits what we can achieve.
The reason that the characters are gay in my books mostly is because it's just honest. That's who I am. It's not about identity.

Your work deals heavily with themes of alienation and isolation, to the point that sex becomes an act of depersonalized anatomical exploration, instead of a connection between people. I want to know whether love fits into this equation, and what connection you believe might exist between sex and romantic love.
Sometimes there's love, sometimes there isn't. I don't think the characters themselves would identify it as love—I think they'd see it as an artistic pursuit or the intake of information. I actually think that a significant part of the time [love] is what's actually going on, but they're afraid of that or not interested in the idea of love, so they don't actually talk about that at all.

People hardly ever talk about love in my work, although I think it might be going on. There's this total disconnect because the characters tend to be predators and victims. That's a really simplistic way to put it, but that's a dichotomy I work with a lot.

What is it that attracts you to that dynamic?
I'm very interested in power dynamics because of my interest in anarchism. There's a lot of intergenerational content in my work. Usually there's this older character that's going after the young one, and he might seem as if he's the power figure. Then the victim is usually passive and submissive and just wants to be wanted, and that would seem to be the weaker of the characters, but actually it's much more complex than that. I like contrast—it's easier to write about that stuff if you have contrasts. If you start to write about something like two guys in love, it ends up becoming kind of gooky because you have nothing to hang on—you just have two guys and they're both young, they're both attractive, one's a top and one's a bottom or something, and you end up writing this really boring stuff. But when you make characters really different from one another, [put them in opposition], and make them want different things instead of seeking to unite in blissful emotion, then it seems like sex is more interesting to write about or something.

What are your upcoming projects? Are you continuing making films or going back to your work as an author?
I put out this novel called Zac's Haunted House last year that's told entirely through animated .gifs. It's published by Kiddie Punk Press and is available to download or view online. I'm really excited about that [medium] and it's really fun to do, so I have a new one coming out called Zac's Control Panel that's going to be up on Kiddie Punk Press on September 10th.

Anyway, we're also doing another movie—we're looking for producers now. It's not a queer movie, it doesn't have sex in it, and it's about this guy who wants to explode. This young guy's goal is to explode, but he doesn't want to die, and he doesn't want anyone to think that he died when he exploded. He just wants people to think he exploded, and that the explosion is cool. So that's what it's about: a guy who's figuring out how to explode without dying.

Like Cattle Towards Glow debuts at L'Etrange Festival on Friday, September 11th in Paris, France.

Check out Dennis' website and blog.

Follow John on Twitter.

"Yeah science, bitch!" Photo via 'Breaking Bad' IMDB

Read: Myths About Science Education

Remember all those times you stared into space during science class and then copied the homework from the girl who sat next to you so that you didn't actually have to open your textbook? Well, it's starting to show. According to a new report from the Pew Research Center, Americans don't know very much about basic science.

The Pew survey asked over 3,000 American adults multiple-choice questions about geology, physics, astronomy, and other scientific fields. People generally answered correctly on "easy" questions, like "Which layer of the Earth is the hottest—the crust, the mantle, or the core?" The answer is the core, which 86 percent of people got right.

The didn't do so well on "hard" questions, like "Denver, Colorado, is at a higher altitude than Los Angeles, California. Does water boil at a higher temperature, a lower temperature, or the same temperature in Denver than in Los Angeles?" Water boils at a lower temperature in Denver. Who knew?

If that's not bad enough, 27 percent couldn't distinguish between astronomy (the study of stars, space, and the physical universe) and astrology (the source of the phrase "Mercury in retrograde").

All in all, only 6 percent of respondents got a perfect score on Pew's "science test." Now that we've spoiled a bunch of the answers for you, you can take the quiz for yourself here and feel like a genius.

My former roommates subdue my raccoon.

Right after college I lived in a house that my mother liked to call "the Locker Room." It was full of boys who liked to drink whiskey and smoke meat at 1 AM and smash Palmetto bugs with hammers. SportsCenter was always, always on, even when everyone in the house was asleep. My mom didn't visit very often.

I slept in a sort of cottage that was next to the Locker Room and shared the common areas and address with it—so I wasn't in the midst of the chaos, but it was usually happening in the nearby vicinity. As you might imagine, this was a fairly lonely time for me. Graduating college leaves a lot of people feeling aimless and anxious. And even though I lived with some of my best friends, I was often an outsider among them—at the risk of sounding like a buzzkill, sometimes I didn't feel like setting off fireworks inside the house; I certainly never shared their pervasive, all-encompassing passion for ESPN.

So I decided to get some pets.

Luckily—or so I thought at the time—I didn't have to look very far. I was drinking a PBR on my mini-porch one day when a baby raccoon timidly approached.

I understand that some people think of raccoons as vectors for rabies or garbage cats, others have borderline-obsessive affinities for these critters. For whatever reason, people across the South have a weird history of domesticating them, or making videos of them being adorable. Just watching this video of two raccoons playing in a pool makes my heart melt. The way I feel about these little guys is how I imagine women are supposed to feel about babies.

Naturally, upon seeing that raccoon baby, I went inside to spread the good word. Standing in front of the TV, I literally waved my arms in excitement and mentioned my new friend. Now I don't know if it was because I was interrupting SportsCenter or because my roommate had had a bad experience with raccoons in the past, but he immediately went and grabbed his gun.

For obvious reasons, my excitement turned to horror. I begged and pleaded as he ran to my porch and searched for the thing. Thankfully, the little guy was afraid enough of people that he had already run off.

Related: How to Make a Suit of Feral Raccoons

But I knew immediately that I could never tell my roommates about the raccoon again.

And for a long time, I didn't. The raccoon kept coming by, though, and every time he made contact, it was with a little less trepidation. Eventually, to my delight, he would come sit with me on the porch as I sipped a beer or read a book. Maybe one day, I thought, I could walk it down the street on a leash.

Raccoons are very smart. Not only do they have opposable thumbs that allow them to manipulate things, they have legitimate problem-solving skills. But eventually, my raccoon did something I didn't know had ever been recorded in such a creature—he got comfortable enough to play pranks.

I'll never forget the time I went into my cottage to use the bathroom and heard a ruckus on the porch. I looked up to see a tiny, furry face and a set of paws pressed against the window. When I went outside, the beer I had been drinking was nowhere to be found. It was only about a week later that I realized it had been dragged under the porch.

The raccoon had either developed a taste for cheap beer, or was fucking with me. Which was it? My skills as a raccoon whisperer only extended so far, so I had no way of asking him. But one two weeks after that, I looked up one day to the tree across from my porch to see five sets of glowing eyes looking back at me.

My raccoon, it seemed, was not quite a baby. And it had multiplied.

Soon it became apparent that the raccoons had founded a not-so-adorable colony under my cottage and were spreading garbage all over the Locker Room lawn and porches—all because I was stupid enough to give them a place to stay rather than shoot them dead.

Still, I was terrified to say something to my roommates. Even though I was by now afraid of the raccoons, I didn't really want them to get shot. Instead, I woke up early in the morning every single day to clean up their trash and conceal their presence.

Eventually, I moved away, which was the end of the story as far as I was concerned until today—when, in a fit of curiosity, I texted my former roommate to find out what happened. Apparently, after I left the raccoons started breaking into the Locker Room to eat food and cause general mayhem. "It left paw prints in the flour it spilled," he told me. "We heard the screen door opening and closing and went back there to find we had been invaded."

Little baby paw prints.

He sent me a photo of the mess, as well as the one at the top of this post, which appears to show what happened to my beloved raccoon. I was afraid to ask, but I did. The answer is still a little unclear. He probably knows I couldn't handle the truth.

"They became thoroughly scared of us to stop living above your room and leave our garbage alone," he wrote me, and left it at that.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

19th Century drawing by Jean Frédéric Maximilien de Waldeck via The British Museum

A historian in the UK just made an exciting discovery that's changing our understanding of the word "fuck."

Paul Booth, an honorary senior research fellow in history at Keele University, was recently digging around in the Chester county court plea rolls from December 8, 1310—and really, who hasn't dug around in there? That was when he came upon three write-ups from the court clerk, telling the sad story of a guy with the unenviable name of Roger Fuckebythenavele, or seemingly: "Roger the Navel-Fucker."

According to Themedievalists.org "fuck" popped up seemingly by accident in 1278 as part of a translation of the German word "fulcher," meaning soldier. That really wouldn't count. This, on the other hand, would be the first instance of the word being used the way we use it today, beating out recent discoveries like the one from around 1475, or one found last year from 1528.

Here is Roger the Navel-Fucker's story in its entirety, courtesy of the UK's National Archives.

1. County court of Chester, held on Tuesday after the feast of St Nicholas, 4 Edw. II, before Payn Tibotot, justiciar of Chester (8th December, 1310) A man called "Roger Fuckebythenavele" was exacted for the first time [the process preliminary to outlawry].

2. County court of Chester, held on Tuesday after the feast of the Ascension, 4 Edw. II, before Payn Tibotot, justiciar of Chester (25th May, 1311) Roger Fukkebythenavele, exacted.

3. County court of Chester, held on Tuesday the vigil of Michaelmas, 5 Edw. II, before Payn Tibotot, justiciar of Chester (28th September, 1311) Roger Fuckebythenavel', outlawed.

What just happened to poor Roger? Granted, being "outlawed," means banished, but why the horrible moniker? Was the court clerk just being a dick, or is that Roger's real last name? To find out, we got in touch with Paul Booth, the guy who made the discovery, to ask for his expert opinion on what all this means.

VICE: What's the significance of this discovery?
Paul Booth: The significance is the occurrence of (possibly) the earliest known use of the word "fuck" that clearly has a sexual connotation.

What were you doing when you found this?
Part of what I am doing in my retirement is to study the legal records of Cheshire for the turbulent reign of Edward II (1307-27), which are extremely rich. This name simply popped out of the parchment. Roger had failed to answer at the county court, is being solemnly summoned ('exacted') and finally outlawed.

Was the clerk cracking a joke, figuring that Roger would never know about it?
As the name is written three times—spelled slightly differently each time—it is unlikely to be the case of the clerk just inserting a joke name, I think. Even if it were, that does not take away the significance of the use of the word 'fuck' in a name.

So could it be his real name?
If it is a real name—a nickname, presumably—there seem to me to be two possible explanations for its application to Roger. First, that it applies to an actual event—a clumsy attempt at sexual intercourse by an 'Inexperienced Copulator' (my name for Roger), revealed to the world by a revengeful former girlfriend. Fourteenth-century revenge porn perhaps? Or it could be a rather elaborate way of describing someone regarded as a "halfwit"—i.e., that is the way that he would think of performing the sexual act.

Will this instance end up in the Oxford English Dictionary?
I have told the OED about it, and it's up to them what they will do. You might like to ask them, and let me know what they say.

Got any other great curse word stories from digging through these archives?
I haven't come across any other names of this type myself, but my pal at Keele, Dr. Philip Morgan, tells me of names such as Hunfridus de aureo testiculo—Humphrey of the golden testicle, and Rogerus deus salvat feminas—Roger God-save-women, as well as the Winchester tenant, Alwin Clawecunt—speaks for itself.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Kent Williams

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

On Friday, in an address to the Eagle Forum conference in Missouri, former Texas Governor Rick Perry pulled out of the Presidential race. His speech touched on many topics, but then he got to a part about the Lord working in mysterious ways, and said, "That's why today I am suspending my campaign for the presidency of the United States."

That makes Perry the first in the 17-Republican dogpile to officially pull out of the race.

Perry's campaign hadn't been going well. Polls indicated that he was down to 0.8 percent support, although he wasn't in last place. Bobby Jindal and Lindsey Graham are still bringing up the rear at 0.3 percent each.

His impassioned speech focused mainly on his vision for the Republican party, including a long section about states rights, in which he used Colorado as an example of a Goofus rather than a Gallant. "I support the states to be wrong, like Colorado," he said, adding "Legalizing pot is probably not gonna turn out that well for them."

Then he transitioned into subtly casting doubt on the qualifications of some unnamed Republican frontrunner. Riffing on Missouri's state nickname, he called for a "'show me' election," and urged Republicans not to choose someone who "speaks louder than his record." He also cautioned voters against "falling for the cult of personality."

"If a candidate can't take tough questions from a reporter, how in the world are they gonna deal with Russia, how are they gonna deal with China, or the fanatics in Iran?" he asked.

Nonetheless, he echoed Trump in calling for a policy of "securing the border with Mexico." He also sounded like he had internalized Trump's catchy slogan, "Make America great again," when he said "As Americans, we have the power to make the world new again," and later closed with a decidedly Rick Perry-ish hybrid of slogans: "Let's make America America again."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Canadian director Stephen Dunn's feature-length debut, the gay coming-of-age story Closet Monster, offers a light touch on decidedly heavy topics, including family violence, divorce, gay bashing, and coming out. It's a very Canadian film—with a dry sense of humor that crops up at unexpected moments, Closet Monster manages to be quiet without being somber, serious without ever crossing into melodrama.

The film opens with protagonist Oscar Madly (Falling Skies' Connor Jessup) witnessing a brutal gay bashing as a small child, right at the same time his parents get divorced. Fast forward about ten years, and Oscar is a sexually confused teen, living with his at-times violent father and his hamster Buffy (voiced by the incomparable Isabella Rossellini, who has the biggest laugh lines of the film). Closet Monster plays with familiar coming-out tropes, like the desire to run away to the big city and the sudden appearance of a sensual yet sexually ambiguous stranger. But it takes surprising turns, becoming more a story about reunification and claiming one's place than about either escape or romance.

Closet Monster had its world premiere earlier this week at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), where Dunn was previously awarded the Best Live Action Film in the student showcase (for Life Doesn't Frighten Me in 2012), and the RBC International Emerging Filmmaker award for his 2010 short, Swallowed. VICE caught up with Dunn to talk about the inspiration behind Closet Monster and what Dunn is cooking up with his new project, Pop-Up Porno.

VICE: The film feels very personal. Is it?
Stephen Dunn: It's inspired by my childhood growing up as a gay teenager in Newfoundland. When I was a kid there was a series of horrible gay hate crimes that happened in the city. The most violent one happened in the graveyard behind my school, where this kid was literally sodomized with a branch and then he killed himself two years later. It was really fucking powerful and disturbing and devastating for the islands, because Newfoundland is a really safe place. People were shocked.

That crime had a strong impact on me because I didn't know I was gay, I was too young to really know, but I knew I was different and I felt like I was in danger. I had an ulcer that poked its head up every morning when I was going to school in junior high. So the film is about my frustration with essentially being afraid of yourself. But it's very light, because Newfoundlanders, we deal with grief and pain and trauma through humor. That's the only way to get by.

I don't want to give too much away, but I think it's really interesting that the film isn't, in the end, about escape.
I'm by no means urging people to not move away, because travel is really important for self-growth. It's an easy solution, but for me it's too easy. I went back and forth for a while between Newfoundland and Toronto, and ultimately I did move. But as soon as I did, I realized how important Newfoundland is to me, and the distance only made me want to go back more. It's always going to be a huge part of me.

It's too simple a solution to just say, "Move away and all your problems will go away." Because that's not necessarily true. I wanted to switch the focus away from moving out of your small town, to getting your own independence. That doesn't necessarily mean having to leave your history behind. It's about creating your own world, no matter where that is. I have a lot of friends who haven't left Newfoundland, and I think it's judgmental of me to say you should leave. I don't think that's true. I think people should be staying.

Why is that?
Too many Newfoundlanders are leaving the island. My next film, What Waits for Them in Darkness, is essentially about that, the Newfoundland resettlement. It's this period that began in the 60s, after Newfoundland joined Canada. There were 50,000 people who lived on smaller islands around the coast. It was too expensive to get running water, electricity, education, and healthcare to them, so the government forced these people to move. But they didn't give them enough money to do it. So they were forced to drag their houses across the Atlantic Ocean and relocate on the mainland.

And it's continuing to happen. The younger people are moving to St. Johns, and the people in St. Johns are moving to Toronto or Vancouver, and everyone is slowly leaving. I feel like that is such a fucking shame. Because Newfoundland is so unique. It has a distinct cultural heritage that is unlike anything in North America.

If folks can't make it to TIFF to check out Closet Monster, is there something of yours they can watch online?
Pop-Up Porno! It's a series of shorts about online dating sexual experiences, told through these raunchy, playful pop-up books. I wanted to talk about people's experiences as a way of normalizing them. But it's not just a goofy funny series about online hookups. It is that, but it's also about real human experiences derived from these digital hookups. These experiences people are having can be really quite powerful.

There are three out now, but the series is interactive. Our content is going to be created by the viewers watching it. Each film ends with a link that brings people to popupporno.org, where they can either phone in and leave a voicemail, or send in an email with their story.

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.

Photo by Wikimedia user David Shankbone

This is the first installment in a series of pieces exploring the lyrics of Kanye West by legendary hip-hop writer Toure. Today, Toure analyzes West's verse on "Smuckers" from Tyler, the Creator's Cherry Bomb, line by line.

In Kanye West's lecture at Oxford University earlier this year he said, "That's one of my favorite ones: to be called crazy." Being crazy is liberating. I (and Kanye) mean that colloquial sense of the term, like the way some people say Kanye is crazy despite knowing full well there ain't nothing wrong with that man's mind. But once you've been deemed "crazy," you're expected to be unpredictable. We know we don't know what we're going to get from you and thus you're allowed to exist outside of societal norms. If you don't care about people calling you crazy, you can get away with whatever you want. And from that exchange comes a sort of liberation. You can live outside the lines, untethered from societal norms. It allows you to be whoever you really want to be.

Because Kanye is considered, by some, to be off his rocker, when he says he's running for President in 2020, people are on the proverbial edge of their seats. Is it that Kanye's so crazy that he just says whatever grandiose fly shit that comes to mind in the midst of a stream-of-consciousness quote-unquote "rant?" Or is it that Kanye's so crazy that he will mount some performance art project that centers around him running for President in his own way? I could believe either one. We have to stay tuned to find out and that's empowering to him as an artist. Having "crazy" as part of his brand means all eyes on Kanye.

All of that and more is why it's so powerful and so compelling when he says, "They say I'm crazy but that's the best thing going for me," on Tyler, the Creator's "Smuckers" (also featuring Lil Wayne.) It's exactly the sort of simply said yet sociopolitically explosive line that Kanye loves. And it made me want to deconstruct the rhymes surrounding it: West's verse is fascinating, and it brings up a lot of classically Kanye contradictions.

Kanye is not a really great rhyme-sayer—his voice is distinct but not buttery or smooth or bassy and he doesn't do the slick, technical elite MC flow and delivery sort of stuff that you expect from Nas, Jay, or Kendrick. But Kanye is an extraordinary writer who never utters a boring verse and sees every line as a chance for a big punchline or a bodacious statement. His verse on "Smuckers" is one of the more interesting of the year. Almost every line starts with the word "I" and/or is a statement about Kanye. It's like an ad for himself, announcing all that's great about him.

Why, why, why? / Why don't they like me?
I love how he begins by invoking the ghosts of disapproval and dislike as if he needs to remind us, "A lot of people don't like me." Being disliked and misunderstood is a central part of the Kanye West brand and it allows him to have an enemy to rage against.

Cause Nike gave lot of niggas checks / But I'm the only nigga ever to check Nike.

Photo via Flickr user Konstantinos Koukopoulos

In 2014, a British investigation discovered that more than 15,000 miscarried and aborted fetuses had been incinerated at UK hospitals over the previous two years. They had been mixed in with other medical waste, and in some cases their incineration helped heat and power the same hospitals at which those fetuses were miscarried. "Thousands of unborn foetuses incinerated to heat UK hospitals," was the headline splashed across the country's papers.

Suddenly, one of society's longest-standing taboos—miscarriage—had been suddenly pushed to the forefront of a nation's consciousness. That attention was long overdue: In the UK, as in the US, there was no national standard for handling miscarried fetuses.

As with all matters concerning pregnancy, there are a number of ways a woman may want to handle her miscarriage. Some women find comfort in burying or cremating the remains of the miscarried fetus; others don't consider their fetus something to be mourned, and prefer that it be handled alongside other medical waste. But the status quo in America often robs women of these choices altogether.

In the words of Erica and Joshua Raef, miscarriage "may be one of the least discussed, yet most common, sources of heartbreak." Like thousands of parents across America, they know that heartbreak all too well. Erica's pregnancy last year ended in a miscarriage.

In an interview with VICE, the Raefs described how, after seeing their baby's heartbeat weeks earlier, they were told at their next visit that it no longer had one. This was 13 weeks into Erica's pregnancy. As they sat down to work out how to manage the miscarriage, they were told that if they went into the hospital they would not be able to take the remains home for burial. This information, provided to the Raefs' doctor, later turned out to be incorrect, but it nevertheless led them to choose to wait out the miscarriage at home, in the hopes that they would be able to inter the remains of the fetus themselves.

It took ten days, but eventually Erica's body went into labor, and in her words, they "were able to see and hold [their] tiny and perfect little baby." Later that night, Erica began to bleed out and Joshua rushed her, unconscious, to the ER.

Some 18 months later, in April 2015, the Raefs stood up and testified about their experience in the Public Health Committee of the Texas House of Representatives in support of HB 635, a bill that came into effect at the beginning of this month and ensures that Texas parents will have the right to choose what happens to the remains of a pregnancy after a miscarriage. Already, Representative Four Price, the author of the bill, has seen the impact that this change in the law may have. Price told VICE, "After [HB 635] passed, many couples have called or sent letters saying how they had experienced similar circumstances and how thankful they were that this was now going to be the law."

A miscarriage is not, despite confusion in popular discourse, the same thing as a stillbirth. Every year in the United States there are more than 23,000 stillbirths—fetuses which die in utero after 20 weeks or longer of gestation. These babies are required by law to be either buried or cremated. In 34 states, parents may also receive a "Certificate of Birth Resulting in Stillbirth" or something similar alongside the obligatory death certificate. For a pregnancy loss prior to 20 weeks it is much more likely that the fetus, will be incinerated along with the rest of the day's medical waste or cremated and buried in an unmarked plot.

Yet the number of stillbirths in America is dwarfed by the number of miscarriages. Estimates vary due to lack of reporting, but the number may be close to 1 million a year; close to 30 percent of pregnancies end in a miscarriage.

As of 2014, in 27 states there was no explicit right for the mother (or her designee) to opt for a burial or cremation of a fetus which dies before the 20-week mark. In a further seven, one can opt for a burial or cremation but there is no duty to inform the mother of this power. This leaves grieving families in legal limbo and for many adds to their grief and suffering in the wake of a sudden loss. In the worst cases, it can lead to the dangerous situations like the Reafs'.

According to Tanya Marsh, a professor of law at Wake Forest University specializing in funeral and cemetery law, "the fundamental legal problem is that it never occurred to anybody until fairly recently, on the law-making side, that this is anything that they should care about." This is hardly surprising when one considers the lack of public understanding of miscarriage. In a recent paper in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, researchers found that more than half of respondents radically underestimated how often miscarriages occur. Representative Four Price said that even at the legislative level, a lot of education was needed. Price told VICE that while pushing their bill forward, legislators needed "to spend quite a bit of time educating members and staff members in the legislative offices in the House and the Senate as to why this was even necessary. Most individuals really had no personal experience or understanding of why this might be a good thing." Indeed, it was not an issue that Representative Price had considered himself until the Raefs visited with him. Price said, "That [visit] really was the catalyst for the bill."

It is hard to say when most miscarriages take place during a pregnancy, although the vast majority occur very early; in the first few weeks, many miscarriages may go unnoticed.

The 20-week mark distinguishing a miscarriage from a stillbirth is open to accusations of arbitrariness. According to Kristen Swanson, RN PhD, the reasoning behind that division doesn't make sense. In an interview with VICE, Swanson said, "The legal definition supposedly relies on the medical definition, which is, 'A stillbirth is the loss of a pregnancy past the point of expected fetal viability.' The legal breakoff tends to be 20 weeks. In most regards, we consider the medical breakoff to be 24 weeks. We use a legal definition of 20 weeks based on a medical definition that doesn't even apply."

It would be wrong to think that women who suffer miscarriages suffer less than women whose pregnancy loss is classified as a stillbirth. The area is little researched, but the experience of miscarriage has changed a lot since Irv Leon, a clinical psychologist and adjunct professor at University of Michigan, began working in the area of pregnancy loss in 1985.

"Then, miscarriage was not experience as loss of a baby, it was considered more as the loss of a pregnancy," he told VICE. According to Leon, the way in which women now experience an early-stage pregnancy as a baby is in part due to "the use of ultrasounds, especially early on, and the greater sharpness and clarity of the images."

"At around eight weeks, when one has the experience of the ultrasound where one sees the heartbeat, very often that is the beginning of the process of experiencing the pregnancy as a baby," said Leon. "Whereas before that, the pregnancy would usually be a quickening, when the mother experienced the baby 'move' in the second trimester." According to a June study in Obstetrics and Gynecology, 37 percent of women surveyed who had experienced a miscarriage conceived it as the loss of a child.

But the loss of a pregnancy can have different meanings to different people. As Joanne Cacciatore, PhD, an assistant professor at Arizona State University and founder of the MISS Foundation notes, "For a woman who has, perhaps, had trouble with infertility, and has been trying to get pregnant for five years, and finally gets pregnant, and she's so excited, and she's told everyone...and at 12 weeks she's miscarried—that's a devastating loss for her."

Martha Diamond, PhD, says that based on her research, "what effects the level of grief is the meaning of the loss to the individual or the couple. A very early loss can be absolutely devastating, or it can not [be]." For Cacciatore, and Diamond this means it is important to give parents control and choice over what happens after the loss of a pregnancy. This is, according to Leon, as much for psychological reasons as for moral ones. Providing choices in a situation of helplessness can psychologically assist parents by limiting and coping with what can be the overwhelming experience of pregnancy loss.

Like many parents across America, the Raefs were not given the chance to choose the method of final disposition for the remains of their pregnancy. This led them to extreme medical risk, but in the end it gave them what they wanted: the chance to bury their baby, which they had named Liam, following a small service on a family plot. This was something which gave them, in their own words, "a profound sense of closure." Cacciatore says that being allowed to mark the loss with a service and a burial—a ritual—is crucial to the grieving process.

"Ritual is very important for us to enact our emotions, for us to be able to socially connect to others around the loss," Cacciatore told VICE. "In some ways, parents use that ritual to be able to embody that love and connection that they so often hear doesn't matter, even if it is not explicit. Culturally, in an implicit way, we do hear it."

This ritualizing can be important even in the absence of a body, according to Kristen Swanson, Dean of the College of Nursing at Seattle University, who has done extensive research and clinical work with women who experienced a pregnancy loss. "People talk about 'making ceremony,' but I don't remember people talking too much about using the products of conception," Swanson told VICE. "It's more like they have a proper burial of the memory and have a proper ceremony surrounding that."

But Cacciatore emphasizes that however a family chooses to mark the loss of a pregnancy due to miscarriage—if they do so at all—is something which must remain an individual choice, and something that should not be forced on parents. "It is very important that ritual not be forced on people. Especially with very early losses, because for some women that may not be a child," she said.

Any legislation dealing with remains of a pregnancy has the potential to be incredibly fraught. While it is a separate issue, the closeness to the debate around abortion was very much in the mind of Representative Four Price when he and his staff were drafting the Texas legislation.

"We were very careful and deliberate with the language that we utilized, because any time you start to get into a debate or an area of law or proposed law where you are dealing with fetal remains, very quickly the assumption may be that you are entering into a pro-life/pro-choice issue, and that can immediately polarize folks," Price told VICE. "This bill had nothing to with that issue, what we were intent on doing was making sure that parents who had a miscarriage... had an absolute right to control the disposition of their child's remains."

"I don't remember people talking too much about the products of conception. It's more like they have a proper burial of the memory." —Kristen Swanson

In the UK, which has in general adopted a more liberal attitude to the myriad ethical issues surrounding embryos and fetuses, the Human Tissue Authority, a government agency, has issued revised guidance in the wake of the 2014 scandal. Now anyone disposing of pregnancy remains (pre-24th week) must provide the patient with clear verbal or written information about the disposal options available (which include cremation and burial), along with providing the option for a woman to opt out of receiving the information, thereby allowing the hospital to choose a method of disposal. It also explicitly bans mixing pregnancy remains with clinical waste for joint incineration. In the UK, this only occurred after a national outcry in the light of a scandal. Meanwhile, change in America is currently being driven by occasional legislative efforts—often encouraged by personal rather than national trauma.

Even once legislation is in place, the decision to dispose of fetal remains in one way or another may not, in fact, be a choice. Marsh told VICE, "If the hospital disposes of the remains, then the hospital pays for it. If parents have a choice, now the parents have to go find a funeral home and a funeral director [at their own expense]."

Nebraska residents Stephanie Hopp and her husband Andrew found themselves in a situation much like this. Last year, Hopp suffered a miscarriage at ten weeks. Hopp told VICE, "The day before surgery, when I called, I asked what happens to the remains after. [The hospital] told me that typically they take all of the fetal remains together and every so often they cremate them. They said that they would not be able to disclose where they would put [the cremated remains] after that." When Hopp pushed for her right to control the final disposition of her own pregnancy remains, she says she was told, "'You can set up your own funeral home costs and pay everything yourself, or you can do what the hospital is offering for free.'" When her husband called around local funeral homes, they found that a cremation was going to cost them around $1,000, a prohibitive sum for many families.

This was a concern that Price was well aware of when drafting the Texas legislation. While there is no standard procedure for either hospitals or funeral homes, he explained to VICE that "many funeral homes will handle such remains very inexpensively or sometimes for free. I am very hopeful that [this] will not result in a situation where only the more economically-advantaged can take advantage of the law. I think that hospitals and funeral homes will often accommodate parents."

Indeed, the hospital eventually accommodated Stephanie Hopp's request: "It wasn't until the day of surgery that I got a call and they said, 'You know what, we worked it out with the funeral home we contract with and we will pay for everything."

For many others in America, this kind of choice—and the resulting compassion—are not the case. In Connecticut, where there is no statutory provision for parents to choose, the charity Hope After Loss has been supporting individuals grieving a pregnancy loss for almost 20 years. Since 2010 the group, in collaboration with the Kelly Ryan Foundation, has been providing funding for disposal of remains according with the wishes of parents. So far, they have helped over 60 families across Connecticut. In their experience, the cost differs "depending on how much you want what it will cost, and that really does vary from funeral home to funeral home."

There is no rule book for how to handle a miscarriage, and the situation raises difficult decisions: not least, whether and how to mourn. The most important thing, in the words of Joshua and Erica Raef, is "giving parents the right to make that choice." In Texas and 16 other states this is now a reality—but across America much more needs to be done. But even when that right is secured, it can only be the first step; situations like the Hopps' will only become more common unless hospitals ensure, by policy or by law, that a woman's ability to bury or cremate what she understands to be her baby is not contingent upon her ability to pay up.

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Photo via Flickr user amiraelwakil

Every year in America, 40,000 people take their own lives; suicide remains the tenth leading cause of death in this country, and the third leading cause of death for young people aged 15-24. There is nothing glamorous about suicide, and no one knows that quite so well as those who survive an attempt. As National Suicide Prevention Week comes to a close, we decided to find out what life is like after getting a second chance.

VICE called up some young men and women who have survived suicide attempts. Melanie* is a 24-year-old Masters student originally from Buffalo, who went on to find herself in the polyamory community and through work with a suicide hotline. Shenika is a 26-year-old from Cleveland who finds joy through Weird Al Yankovic. I also spoke to Sam, a 27-year old from Virginia, who credits his dog with saving his life and hopes to open a rescue farm. There's Terry, a 20-year-old former foster child who hopes to one day foster children themselves, and Sara, a 20-year-old living in Monterey Bay who found a reason to live in dance.

* Some names have been changed at the request of the interviewees.

Melanie, 24

Photo courtesy of Melanie

VICE: Tell me about your history with depression.
Melanie: When I was as young as nine or ten, I remember feeling like I was in the wrong time period, the wrong place, in the wrong family, but didn't know how to get to what I wanted to be. I didn't think of suicide as an option until I was about 12 and my friend attempted. It was weirdly empowering as I realized I had the ability to take myself out. The big things that happened up until that point were I was dating a physically abusive guy at my high school, and I had completely uprooted my life. We switched schools, switched houses. I moved from an easy swim team to a really competitive one, it was just really overwhelming. That was when I was 15.

Tell me about the attempt.
It was a Sunday night and I wanted to get out of school. I talked to my mom and she was like, "No," so I was like, "Fine, fuck you." I went and got a bunch of pills from my Dad's medicine cabinet. I ended up taking 40 Tylenol and 20 muscle relaxers. And then I passed out an hour later. My parents came up and asked me if I wanted dinner, and I said, "No, I took a bunch of pills." If I hadn't said that, I don't think they would have known anything is wrong. I think I left a note buried on my computer. I really just wrote it because I thought that's what you do when you commit suicide, but I didn't have anything to say.

What happened after that?
I was hospitalized for about a week and half. I was unconscious for about three days. There was the psych eval and then you have to stay in the hospital for 72 hours after. Then about a week of therapy. I remember even though I didn't play the game anymore... of life, I also did not fit in with these kids that were in the psych ward with me. I remember thinking, "Whoa, I have my shit together way more than these people. I need to get out of here."

What was it like afterwards?
I think there was a lot of denial. That was until I was in college, where I would retreat back to depression and being a victim and use it as a crutch. Then I realized that I was using this as a way of getting out of a lot of adult experiences. It was keeping me from moving forward and getting the things that I really wanted. That's when I really made a conscious effort to become a complete person.

You seem to be in a really good place now. What's your favorite part about being alive?
Coming into [my poly identity] and working at Trevor both came from when I was in therapy and looking back at where I had gone astray. With the poly thing, it was like, Whoa, there's a word for all these things that I'm feeling? There are other people who want to do this too and are totally fine with it? I think that's probably been the most exciting thing. Working at Trevor, that kind of intimacy, talking to someone when they have their guard down, you can't really get that in a normal conversation. It's a kind of bond that I haven't really found anywhere else in this world.

And what are you studying?
I'm a Masters candidate studying epidemiology and biostatistics, to look at psychiatric epidemiology and how sexuality modifies that. [I'm studying] the distribution and determinants of psychiatric disorders in different sexual and gender identities.

Shenika, 26

Photo courtesy of Shenika

When did you first feel suicidal?
Shenika: My entire life has been kind of eventful, so I'm realizing that it was a build-up of things... 2013 was probably my worst year thus far. I had family troubles, I had lost friends, I had found out that my daughter may have needed a major surgery, and I was discovering that the career I had spent the better part of my life preparing for was not for me. But my breaking point was early last year during a change in my relationship. After about five or six months of being heartlessly broken up with, I was at my wit's end. I no longer wanted to live this life; anything seemed better than what I was going through.

Was there an attempt?
One day [my fiancé] dropped me off after picking up my car from out of the shop, and left to go be with the woman he had decided to leave me for. I got in my car with no clue what to do. I had been leaving my daughter at her grandparents' house since she went to school around the corner from them, and I was in terrible shape during those months and didn't want her to see me like that. I just drove. I remember thinking that if I just crashed, this would all be over. So on March 6th of 2014, I drove my car up to a speed of 85 MPH in a 30 MPH zone on a street riddled with potholes. By some miracle, I didn't crash.

How did you survive?
Once I had realized what I had done and what could have happened, I drove myself to the nearest emergency room and told the staff that I felt like I might harm to myself. After hours of being hysterical and having a psychiatrist come in and talk to me, I agreed to go into a voluntary mood disorder clinic for a minimum of five days. It was during that time that I learned about depression, and was diagnosed with manic depression.

What has been your favorite accomplishment since the attempt?
Leaving school and changing my course of action for my career. The accomplishment is not giving a damn. And finally doing something that is making me happy. The most gratifying thing about being at home and starting my own business is the fact that I can get in my truck, turn my music up loud with the windows down, and creep people out with my faces and horrible singing. It's total freedom that I enjoy the most. Driving to wherever I want when I want with my music. One particular time, I drove through the projects with Weird Al blasting, and gave the person in the car next to me direct eye contact while nodding my head. They sped off shaking their heads. It's incredible what something so seemingly stupid can do for your happiness.

Sam, 27

Sam's dog Harris. Photo courtesy of Sam

How long ago were you going through depression?
Sam: Oh, I still go through it. It's a daily struggle. Some days I wake up and the very first thought through my head is: "Put a bullet in your head." I'm as used to it as I'm going to get, if that makes sense. It's not about one thing. If you took everything that stresses me out: student loans, [unemployment], past heartbreak, all this stuff. It's been going on since middle school.

When did you attempt suicide?
It was in high school. Ninth or tenth [grade], I think. I tried to hang myself in my closet.

How'd you survive?
I used my belt and the belt broke. Before it broke, I remember, because I passed out. I was trying to get it loose, I was trying to undo it. And the belt broke.

So you decided you didn't want to go through with it?
It was more like a panic response. Nothing really consciously went through my head of, "Oh I don't want to do this anymore." It was more, "Oh fuck, I'm dying."

Now, over a decade later, you're here. What about life do you most enjoy?
Well, I'm a nerd. I love video games, I love movies. Those are my form of escapism. Before it was drugs, [but] now that part of my life is done. I play with my dog. My dog is my life. My dog Harris saves my life on a daily basis. Honestly, in the last four or five years since I had him, when I've had those [suicidal] thoughts, nothing compares to, "I couldn't do that to my dog."

What's your ultimate dream?
To own my own farm. I want to do a rescue farm for dogs.

Terry, 20

When did you first feel suicidal?
Terry: I first felt suicidal when I was 17 years old, I did attempt to commit suicide when I was 18 on October 15th 2013, I bought three packs of paracetamol from the shops and took them all at once. It happened while I was at work, I kept throwing up, so I was rushed to hospital. I was given tablets to make me sick, I was constantly throwing up what felt like my stomach lining. I had to stay in hospital overnight and throughout the night blood tests were being taken.

What makes you the happiest to be alive?
My friends that I have around, that I know I can go to when I'm feeling low, they are able to bring my mood back up. Also, recently getting into contact with my dad and my little brothers that I hadn't even met yet, [since] I was fostered. I hadn't seem them in over nine years. My dream is to become a foster carer and look after children that I was once in the same boat as, show them love and care, so that they don't go through life not knowing what it's like to be cared about. Unfortunately, we don't have many caring foster people; most usually do it for the money. My dream is also to just be happy, and have a family of my own that will unconditionally love me. My favorite memory is spending Christmas 2013 with my partner and his parents after the suicide attempt. I hadn't had a proper Christmas for as long as I can remember!

Sara, 20

Photo courtesy of Sara

Tell me about your history with suicide.
Sara: I was a freshman in high school when I attempted to take my life. My dad was an alcoholic, and a drug abuser, who was very abusive, physically, emotionally, mentally—very abusive. So I had to live with that until I was 12, when my mom divorced him, but the damage was already done. I also had an eating disorder. My freshman year I was like 85 pounds. I just felt like there was nothing left.

When was the attempt?
I would get these breakdowns to the point where I couldn't breathe. I remember writing in my diary, but I couldn't remember what I was writing, and then I decided that I couldn't do it anymore. My brother was home. I went into the bathroom and grabbed ibuprofen. I just started taking them. I think I took 60 and then I went and sat in my room and started getting sleepy, but I was thirsty, so I went into my kitchen to grab a glass of water and that's the last thing I remember. I woke up in the hospital and my brother was sitting next to me.

What eventually made life worth living for you?
I was a dancer before [the attempt and resulting hospitalization], but not a very serious dancer. Then I came back and I went into the dance studio, and my dance teacher sat me down and said, "I think you need to do more dance." So I just started dancing every single day. It saved my life. Because I wasn't good at expressing my feelings verbally, but I could express how I was feeling through dance. I just started dancing, and teaching. It was mostly contemporary, but I did everything.

Is dance still a part of your life now?
Yes, right now I am the captain of my university's dance team. I just finished a year teaching dance at this place called Dance Fusion, it's for kids who can't really afford dance [classes]. So we teach them dance for free or on really low rates.

If you are struggling with depression or suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

The author's idea of the modern spinster: Oprah Winfrey. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

To put my dating life in perspective: Charles Manson got engaged before I managed to find someone willing to semi-commit to me for longer than three months. My relationship status has become a Mad Lib of sorts. Every few months I find myself writing in a new series of verbs and nouns for the phrase, "We're [description of partnership]"—open relationship, casually dating, friends with benefits, not labeling things, just hanging out, good cop, bad cop, blah blah blah.

I've been single most of my adult life, and have not been afraid to air my frustrations about it. But I'm starting to realize that it's not actually being single that irritates me. In fact, I'd be perfectly content keeping my laptop as my sleeping partner for the rest of my life. Instead, it's this irrational fear of what would happen if I were single and alone forever—or, in other words, a spinster.

The term spinster refers to a woman who is past marriageable age. Contemporary culture often depicts these women as sad, eccentric aunts. You know the type: She owns a bunch of cats, smokes too many cigarettes, and collects porcelain figurines she calls her babies.

Unlike her male counterpart, the bachelor, the spinster is not to be envied. She is pathetic, undesirable, her life in shambles because she never married. She is a crazed shut-in like Miss Havisham, who just can't seem to get over that one time her fiancé left her at the altar. It's not that she chose this life. No one wanted her.

These are the things I hear from my mother, a Jewish immigrant raised on Old World values, who is perpetually embarrassed that I can't seem to get into a relationship, let alone stay in one. Every Friday she lights the Sabbath candles then calls to tell me that she prayed for me to marry soon (cue: Fiddler on the Roof music).

Except, that's all changing. In 2014, more than half the US population is single. We're seeing more examples in real life of women who are refusing to let the social pressure of marriage weigh them down, and have gone on to lead fulfilling lives. In fact, single women are even reclaiming the word spinster. Earlier this year, Kate Bolick published Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own, an homage to the single life; Rebecca Traister's forthcoming book, Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, plays to the same theme. One Urban Dictionary entry on spinster redefines the term as "a woman who can stand independently and doesn't need a man for her life." We are living in the age of the single woman.

"I don't see any biological reason why women should marry or have children. It's mostly a cultural construction," says Berit Brogaard, a philosopher, neuroscientist, and author of On Romantic Love: Simple Truths About a Complex Emotion. She is also a happily unwed mother of one. "Biologically, we probably weren't meant to be together for a long time. The reason romantic love often fades after a few years is probably that coupledom was only evolutionarily beneficial until children had been conceived and were old enough to survive without two parents living side by side."

Hence the many relationship iterations that are not long-term monogamy. In this brave new world, single women aren't sexless old maids—they're just not wifed-up either. "I think more and more people realize that a relationship isn't just something you have, it's something you do," said Broggard. "Relationships take work. Lots of work. If you want to focus on a career, it's a lot simpler to remain single."

That part is definitely true. According to a study from 2010, young single women earn up to 8 percent more than young single men—but that financial boost goes away if they get married or have kids.

Another reason to stay single: To avoid America's multibillion-dollar divorce industry.

As I get older, my heroes are changing. I now seek out women in popular culture who have chosen to be alone—and are even more badass because of it. Elaine Stritch did not remarry after John Bay, her first and only husband, died. She didn't want to. Author Vivian Gornick is a self-proclaimed "odd woman" who renounced marriage after experiencing two brief, failed ones. Gloria Steinem didn't marry until she was 66 years old. Oprah, who has never been married and probably never will, is the best example of all. Oprah is not a bitter, chain-smoking cat lady. She's a fucking billionaire.

These are now the women I find myself wanted to be, outspoken and unabashedly alone. My best friend and I frequently discuss the likelihood that we will live together in our later years as platonic life partners, a la The Golden Girls. Over the years, this plan of ours for the future feels less like a joke and more like an eventuality. One that I am becoming more and more OK with.

Young heterosexual women are also facing a time of sexual openness and liberation that makes traditional marriage even less necessary. We don't need him to put a ring on it in order to gratify us sexually (unless it's a cock ring). We're engaging more in casual sex as well as non-monogamous relationships, and because of this are also dealing with a vast number of heterosexual men who are less willing to commit than ever before. We'd rather stay single than settle for men who are perpetually unsure of their readiness to be in like, a relationship relationship.

I want to be a woman who knows her wants and her needs, and prioritizes them over what others dictate to her what her wants and needs are. There is a good chance that a man might never come my way who meets my expectations for long-lasting monogamous love. There is a good chance that my attitude and my outspoken nature makes me unloveable in the eyes of most heterosexual men. That's perfectly OK. I prefer this over being subdued.

Of course, I'm not trying to denounce marriage altogether—for myself or anyone else. But I'm tired of thinking about marriage as my singular goal. Being single all these years has given me so much valuable time to pursue my own projects, and overall just be my own person. I've used my alone time to figure out who I am, without worrying about outside validation from a romantic partner. I've met so many different kinds of men I wouldn't have met if I was coupled up. I've gone on dozens upon dozens of both disastrous and adventurous dates, and have a wide array of stories to entertain all the basic couples with at dinner parties because of it.

I've been moving my life forward—not putting it on hold—waiting for a man to come my way and validate my existence. In fact, I'm looking forward to staying single. You know, so I can finally get to chapter two of that next great American novel I've been sitting on for six years (or, more importantly, so I can keep staying awake until 5 AM watching Korean dramas, judgement free). What could be better than that?

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.