Quantcast
Channel: VICE CA
Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live

The Most Surprising Moment from Wednesday's Republican Presidential Debate

0
0

Screencrap via CNN

Read VICE's in-depth coverage of the Republican debate:

Ben Carson Was V. Chill at Last Night's Debate

Who 'Won' Last Night's Republican Debate?

Donald Trump Is Still a Rambling Weirdo

Since the advent of the television modern American presidential debates have become steadily more theatrical, now focused mostly on political pageantry and whether candidates can pull off a selfie or a fist-bump without looking confused or senile. And Wednesday night's Republican presidential debate offered plenty of bizarre moments for the canon: Jeb Bush suggested that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill; Donald Trump claimed to have witnessed a baby get autism from a vaccine; Rand Paul said his Secret Service code name would be "Justice Never Sleeps."

But the biggest surprise of the night was when key Republican candidates were engaging in a vaguely sensible discussion of criminal justice policy. That's right: After decades of the War on Drugs and spiraling mass incarceration, somethingwhether it's the Black Lives Matter protest movement or cost-cutting impulses or pure political calculationhas mainstream conservatives expressing at least tepid support for medical marijuana and drug reform. And not just in front of swing voters in Ohio or Florida, but during the height of primary season.

"Forty years ago I smoked marijuana, and I admit it," Bush said at the debate. "I'm sure that other people might've done it and may not want to say it in front of 25 million people. My mom's not happy that I just did."

Supporting marijuana decriminalization, decrying racism in the justice system, and backing a re-think of the prison-industrial complex state aren't exactly novel stances for Paul. But Bush is a prototypical country-club Republican, just as comfortable hob-nodding with billionaires as with Florida soccer moms. That he speaks so openly about his pastlittle bro George W. ducked and weaved regarding his own drug use back in 1999reflects the rapidly-shifting national dialogue about drugs and the law.

"The exchange shows just how popular marijuana law reformparticularly medical cannabisis with Americans," said Tom Angell, chairman of the legalization advocacy group Marijuana Majority. "Even those candidates who personally oppose legalization are at least saying the federal government shouldn't arrest patients who are following state laws. And that means changing federal law. It's hard to imagine a discussion like this happening two or three election cycles ago."

Even New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor and staunch legalization opponent, insisted he was on board with medical pot in the Garden State and argued he's been a leader when it comes to keeping first-time drug users out of prison. Legalization advocates might take issue with that, but it's clear that the party traditionally associated with "more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors"as President George H.W. Bush said in a 1989 televised addressis changing its tune.

"You saw a tip of the iceberg moment tonight," said Rick Wilson, a veteran Florida-based Republican consultant. "Remember, a few years ago, this would have been, I would never smoke marijuana, it's a disgusting devil's weed. You would have had all the moral preening.

"I would guess the only guy on that stage who never smoked weed is Mike Huckabee," Wilson continued. "When you see people who are unarguable, rock-hard conservatives saying, 'I'm done with this fight,' that means we're really done with this fight. Now it's not a matter of if but when."

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.


Ben Carson Is V. Chill

0
0

Ben Carson, the anti-Donald Trump. Screencap via CNN

Read VICE's in-depth coverage of the Republican debate:

Who 'Won' the Republican Debate?

Donald Trump Is Still a Rambling Weirdo

The Most Surprising Moment from the CNN Republican Debate

Ben Carson didn't look much more awake Wednesday than he did the last time he showed up at a presidential debate. As he was then, the 63-year-old former pediatric neurosurgeon looked practically passed out when he took the podium at the CNN presidential debate, his somnolent, soft-spoken style a complete foil to Donald Trump's bombast.

But Carson's slow, spaciness belies his surprising successif anything, Carson should be excited about the momentum he's been building since the first presidential debate. A renowned Johns Hopkins physician and conservative folk hero, Carson has capitalized on his lack of political experience, riding a wave of voter discontent up the Republican 2016 polls. After nailing the last 10 minutes of the first debate with an anecdote about being the first person to separate conjoined twins, Carson jumped five points in the pollsan increase of about 70 percent.

He got another big jolt this week, on the eve of the second debate, with the release of a new New York Time/CBS poll that shows him pulling nearly even with Republican frontrunner Trump.

Part of that can be explained by the fact that Carson, like Trump, is an outsider. Faced with the idea of another Bush or a Clinton in the White House, many Republican voters seem to be opting to fuck with the system, picking candidates that have never been elected to public office.

"I don't really want to get into describing who's a politician and who's not a politician, but I think people have kind of made that decision for themselves and will continue to do so."

Carson's recent success in the polls could give Republican voters uncomfortable with the idea of President Trump an opportunity to rally behind a more low-key candidate. And as Carson demonstrated Wednesday, he is definitely the most chill Republican running for president in 2016.


But while the doctor may be a more personable choice than The Donald, Carson's political views tend to fall on the far right. For instance, he advocates for imposing a "tithe,"contribute 10 percent of his or her income in taxes, thinks homosexuality is an abomination, and feels that climate change is irrelevant.

During the debate, Carson didn't speak often, but he expanded upon his views on immigration and the minimum wage. For instance, he's chill with immigrants staying in the states illegally as long as they're willing to toil in fields. "I've talked to farmers and they've said they cannot hire Americans to do the kind of jobs I'm talking about," he reasoned.

What's more, he's chill with raising the minimum wage, as long as there's a second minimum wage for new workers, so that it's not "impractical" for employers to hire them.

Unfortunately, during a conversation about drug use, it was only Jeb(!) Bush who chimed in and admitted to smoking the stuffalbeit 40 years ago.

Ben Carson is chill, but he's not that chill.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Donald Trump Is Still a Rambling Weirdo

0
0

Image via CNN

Want more on the second Republican debate? Read these:

Who 'Won' Wednesday's Republican Debate

The Most Surprising Moment from Wednesday's Republican Debate
Ben Carson Is V. Chill

A lot has happened to Donald Trump since the first Republican debate in early August. He has dealt with the fallout of remarking on Carly Fiorina's face and, possibly, Megyn Kelly's menstruation cycle. He has moved further right on immigration, going so far as calling for the end of birthright citizenship. And he has sharpened his focus on rivals, including an ad that pointed out a sleepy Jeb Bush fan in the crowd.

But after observing him throughout the Trump mania that engulfed the summer news cycle, the field candidates have finally begun marking out their strategies on how to deal with, and finally combat, the billionaire businessman's electoral wrecking ball. As a result, the surprise frontrunner has seen his lead threatened, as contenders like Ben Carson and Fiorina seem to be finally making cracks in the Trump id.

So tonight, even with an (arguably) more structured approach to his campaign, Donald J. Trump entered the second debate with a stronger dose of reality. He was, without a doubt, the most targeted subject of the CNN moderator's questions. He was attacked on his most visible weaknessforeign policyand pressed to own up to basically everything he's said on the campaign trail since the first debate.

But, for three hours straight, Trump was Trump, and nothing changed about that.

The first words he uttereda pre-emptive attack against Rand Paul and his low ratings in the pollsset his tone for the night. He'd continue to release quick high-school jabs as other rivals assailed him. When Jeb Bush said Trump wanted to bring casino gambling to Florida, Trump said "wrong," and "More energy tonight, I like that." When Scott Walker was discussing his handling of Wisconsin, Trump said, "I can do so much better than that." Fiorina received constant eye-rolls as she went over her record as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard. He also told us a lot of vague things, most notably about our geopolitical status in the world"I'd get along with Putin," and "I'm very militaristic"and his campaign finance"I refused $5 million from somebody."

In true Trump fashion, he implied numerous times that he was the best, the richest, that everything he touches turns to gold, just like his hair. He casually brushed off (read: didn't really respond to) lingering questions about Syria, his one-time support of Hillary Clinton, his calls for higher taxes on capital gains, and his quixotic role as a billionaire who has donated billions, but hates those who take those billions. He even said some crazy shit about vaccines being linked to autism, and how he made his kids take doses over time.

All of this, as we know, was expected. Yet what were perhaps the most Trump-ish exchanges came, of course, on the topic of women.

Right before a commercial break, CNN moderator Jake Tapper snuck in a question about Trump's controversial comments in a recent Rolling Stone profile where he was quoted as saying "Look at that face!" as well as "Would anyone vote for that?" in reference to Carly Fiorina. The former CEO responded gracefully, saying, "I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Trump said." Judging by the audience's response, it was the most well-received remark of the entire debate.

Trump, on the other hand, quickly turned into that frat dude who has to recover from calling a girl a bitch, but saying he meant it as a compliment. "I think she's got a beautiful face, and is a beautiful woman," he said, to crickets in the crowd.

Then, soon after, Trump was asked by Jeb Bush to apologize to his wife, Columba, for saying Bush has a "soft spot" on immigration because, you know, the love of his life is from the country that Trump has basically derided as being full of rapists and murderers. In lieu of an apology, Trump said "I hear your wife is a lovely woman."

But strangely enough, the candidates who spent the past month going after Trump remained relatively quiet when the moderators lobbed easy knock-out questions about him. No one truly came out swinging when he said "Arab name, Arab name" as his reason for not knowing major players in Iraq, and Ben Carson even gave him a (albeit weak) high-five at one point.

Overall, the Reagan Library crowd didn't give Trump's controversial remarks nearly the same applause that the Quicken Loans Arena did. His 'Make America Great Again' plea at the end of the debate sounded recycled, and you could almost hear boos when he dissed Bush's wife and Fiorina's track record.

But, as we should've expected, he told CNN's Chris Cuomo in the post-debate glow that his message hasn't changed since the first debate. In other words, even if the dose of reality that Trump was served this debate was real, and palpable, the Trump mantra stands: he doesn't care much at all.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Why Don't We Teach Pleasure in Sex Ed?

0
0

Image via Flickr user Jay Williams

When I was in school, we were taught that sex led to pregnancies or chlamydia. If you got chlamydia, you'd die, and if you got pregnant, you'd want to.

There was no mention of the fact that most people have sex for positive reasons. No suggestion that people masturbate because it feels excellent or even improves self-esteem. We learned nothing about gender and sexual diversity, and only the basics of how to navigate consent. Past being proficient at putting a condom on a banana, I fumbled my way through adolescence feeling a deep sense of shame about my sexuality. Thank God I had Cosmopolitan magazine to tell me that all men really wanted was for women to eat donuts off their dicks.

Nearly two decades later, students are still squirming their way through awkward, uninformative sex education classes all around Australia. Several participants in the fifth National Survey of Secondary Students and Sexual Health complained that sex ed classes were all anatomy and abstinence, and no fun. "It was all about biology and contraception," noted one Australian student. "Nothing about sex for pleasure or LGBT+."

These criticisms were echoed by young female participants in a recent national survey conducted by the Equality Rights Alliance's Young Women's Advisory Group. Data from the survey, which captures the views of more than 1,000 Australian women on the sex education curriculum. the survey is still being collated, but preliminary findings reveal students are hungry for more information on pleasure and navigating intimate relationships.

One survey respondent said: "I found that sex education covered mainly periods and pregnancy and discussed very little about the actual act of sex and what consent is and the fact it should be pleasurable for girls as well. There was also no discussion about masturbation. I thought only boys could masturbate until about year eight." Another reported: "I would very much like it if there was a more open discussion surrounding the positives of sex and the emotions around it."

Author, speaker, and sex education advocate, Nina Funnell, who runs Great Sex workshops for university students that focuses on pleasure and consent, agrees. She feels high school sex education leaves young people ill-equipped to navigate intimate relationships and communicate with their partners about desire and pleasure.

It's highly heteronormativeit often doesn't acknowledge, let alone discuss, queer relationships and issues... Nina Funnell

"When we look at high school sex education there are a number of deficiencies and gaps that young people themselves identify as being deeply problematic," Funnell told VICE. "It's highly heteronormativeit often doesn't acknowledge, let alone discuss, queer relationships and issues. There's a lack of information about consent, a lack of information about young women's pleasure and pleasure in general.

" say is 'This is great, but I wish I'd had this information much earlier in my life,'" Funnell said. "This discussion needs to happen right through the education systemit needs to be mandated. We need to make sure every young person has access to appropriate sex education, but sadly, at the moment, that's just not happening."

Follow Hayley on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: ‘Kane & Lynch: Dead Men’ Handled Violence with a Nuance That's Rare in Video Games

0
0

Detail from 'Kane & Lynch: Dead Men' box art.

If you're interested in video game violence, its treatment, its origins, and the discussions that have arisen around it during the past few years, you should play 2007's Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, by IO Interactive. Similarly, if you find video games frustrating storytellersif you wish your behavior as a player was more often married to the personalities of your charactersthen you should play Kane & Lynch: Dead Men.

From an old hat, out-of-ten, boring video game review standpoint it comes up short, dragged down by bugs and dud sequences, especially towards the end. But when BioShock was wringing its hands about player versus developer, and Spec Ops was still just a squad-shooter for the PS1, Kane & Lynch connected the player to their character through a shared desire for violence.

"We did most of the writing by just taking those characters, putting them into a situation, and thinking about how they'd react," explains Jens Peter Kurup, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men's creative director. "So for the Tokyo level, they've been on a plane for hours, they're tired, they're in a queue outside this club being pushed around and Lynch gets into this mood, and then we built the level around that. My favorite moment in the whole game is turning the corner into that club and just knowing that Lynch is going to blow up."

Kane and Lynch in Tokyo

Kane, your main playable character, is a selfish crook who'll kill or abandon anyone if it means getting what he wants. When his escape van crashes after a botched bank robbery, Kane takes one look at the shattered vehicle and says, "Leave him." Though his daughter despises and wants nothing to do with him, Kane keeps going after herat the end of the game she either tells him she hates him one last time or ends up shot, seemingly dead.

Kane's motivation isn't grand or impressive. Unlike most video game protagonists, who are trying to save the world or stop the bomb, he's in this only for himself. Likewise, the player shoots people and shoots people and shoots people, commits all this violence so they can reach the game's end. Player motivationyour attitude towards killing people in the gameis as blunt as Kane's. Both you and he are, essentially, in it for yourself. But where Kane & Lynch stops short is moralizing. The game ends on an ambiguous down note, but it never devolves into directly addressing what Kane or the player does. Either overtly happy or overtly sad, there's no resolution.

Watch the short film 'Marc Jacobs', which has nothing to do with fashion

"We would have lost the characters if we gave them any resolution at the end," says Kurup. "And the older I get, the less violence interests me. I think a lot of games are being destroyed by it. It's beautified, it's dressed, it's justified with a purpose. Violence is always framed very well. But the violence in Kane & Lynch, I think, is naked violence. It's not pleasant. It's the symptom of a disease. In the first part of Kane & Lynch I think we served it up raw.

"I actually have a problem with the scene in the club when Lynch hits and knocks out that woman. It's because it's not something that's being played. It's a cutscene. It's just something that we presented, and dressed up with a fun bit of dialogue. We needed her unconscious from a gameplay perspectiveshe had to be carried over Lynch's shoulderbut that was out of tune."

New on VICE Sports: Sexism Still Rules in British Football

When the audience for shooting games has such specific, unmoving expectations, and mainstream video game design insists on fun, action, and consistent player feedback, it's difficult for games to be nuanced, or even varied, when it comes to violence. Even Kane & Lynch, which is one of the boldest shooting games of the past 15 years, struggles with consistency. It's never as aggressive or smart as you'd like, held down and sabotaged by video game industry realpolitik.

"When you do game design you're looking for your kicks," explains Kurup. "You need a kicka response from the gameat least twice a minute. People have to have something to do. I wish it wasn't like that. I don't like the sheer body count in Kane & Lynch. It gets comical. I become numb. I also personally hate the plot. We needed something to pull them around the world, but I don't get what they're doing in Cuba, or in the jungle. It loses its way after the first half.

"You have restrictions on any game but I feel annoyed that I didn't get my way with some things. We didn't get the right funding, we got moved around a lot, and we had a lot of concepts and mechanics that we just couldn't pin it down. It was an odd game. But I don't know if people were ready for it. I was perfectly fine with the bashing it got from a mechanical standpoint, but I was disappointed with the lack of interest people had in trying to get the characters. I thought they'd have been more interested, and if I had an art product, I would have been right. But I had a commercial product."

Since launching to derision in 2010, the original game's sequel Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days has picked up a worthy few admirers, including Max Chis and Steve Haske, who've written about it at length. It's a terrific game, and I'm glad it's slowly gaining some traction, albeit well after the fact (I only played it last year). The original however, thanks to a few problems and technical shortcomings, remains, if not unexpectedly, disappointingly maligned and disregarded by video game history.

Considering the debates about violence that calcified during the last console generation, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men's 2007 launch, right alongside the start of the PS3, now feels wonderfully propheticfor the questions that have been put to games during years between then and now, about ethics, characters, and the dissonance between player and developer. The game has some kind of answer, not always fully formed or digestible, but at least present. It's far from perfectKurup is totally right about its latter half falling apartbut at a time like this, when mainstream shooters couldn't be in a worse state, I encourage you to play the first Kane & Lynch. It's a crystalline example of why expectations, around video games generally, need to change.

Follow Ed on Twitter.

More from VICE Gaming:

At Its Sixth Attempt, Forza Has Finally Escaped the Shadow of Gran Turismo

Debating the Greatest Football Game of All Time

The Magical, Menacing Mobile Game 'Year Walk' Is Now a Nintendo Essential

What It’s Like to Buy Sperm from One of Canada’s 55(ish) Semen Donors

0
0

Just some sperm floatin' on a wall. Photo via Flickr user Grace Hebert

"Should we have sex now?" I wondered to myself. My wife was saving to PDF the PayPal receipt we're keeping as back-upproof, just in case someone in our IVF chain loses the paperwork or disputes the fact the we bought this exact semen on the internet.

"3246 is our guy. It says right here," I'll say if there's a problem.

I thought vaguely that we should do something like have sex because we'd just bought one genetic half of our hypothetical future baby, and I was looking for something to sanctify or somehow ennoble the moment.

Other than this, of course.

Jizzzz Receipt.JPG

Maybe I'll frame the receipt and put it above the crib.

It felt bizarre: that a total stranger's sexual climax in a Toronto-area office (possibly years ago) could be part of the happy, smiling kid we one day hope to raiseand that the act of procuring that life-giving stuff could be so astonishingly anti-climactic for me.

To be precise, this is what we bought: two vials of unwashed semen from ReproMed Donor 3246. (Unwashed effectively means raw ejaculate. The semen will be taken into a lab at our clinic, and stripped of all of its extra sex juice before they fertilize one of my wife's eggs with the important bit.)

If this very sterile scientific process is successful, Donor 3246 will at first give us half a zygote: chromosomes 1 through 22, plus an X or Y marker indicating sex (we don't know which and don't care). Hopefully, through the magic of mitosis, that zygote will become an embryo, and I will carry that embryo in my womb as a surrogate for my wife. And then someday, if we're lucky, we'll be raising a humanperhaps one who'll be grounded at some point for taking our car without asking.

Or maybe, our kid will be more like "Dad"who seems like a hell of a nice guy.

We picked the genetic father of our child out of a special online catalogue of Canadian donors. For about $75, clients of ReproMed, the country's only national sperm bank, get access to a breathtaking array of information about the 55 Canadian men currently listed as stud stock in this country.

(You read that correctly. There are currently only 55 Canadian semen donors listed as available in the ReproMed sperm bank for use coast-to-coastand two of them don't have any "vial availability" at the moment.)

It's really not hard to see why there are so few home-grown guys able and willing to make with the magic these days. Foremost, no matter what the movies tell you, it ain't a "one time, one cup" system: donating sperm in Canada is a far more complicated and even punitive process than you might think.

After an unfortunate chlamydia infection and a subsequent flurry of knee-jerk federal regulatory moves in about 2000, ReproMed became the only sperm bank doing this work in the country. That means now, because donors have to show up to their office, they more or less have to live in Toronto. The very scant few who do pass the rigorous medical and lifestyle vetting (still no gay men allowed, unbelievably) are required to give of themselves at near-weekly appointments for a year or more. Oh yeah: and since 2004, there's been no payment for sperm allowed, save a few bucks for parking or the cost of lost wages (up to a limit), so the system relies exclusively on altruism.

It hasn't been going well on the sperm collection side of things.

Now, most of the thousands of Canadians in need turn to paid foreign providers for hope.

But not us. A recent Toronto Star article made us think twice about cross-border baby daddy shopping. We figured even if the gene pool here is pretty shallow, at least we know ReproMed is doing some extensive vetting at the door. For that reason (and a perhaps a wee bit of weird, semi-competitive and certainly misplaced patriotism) we decided to dive in with a Canuck.

After the country-of-origin question was put to bed, the process of narrowing down the donors felt, as you might imagine, surrealwith just a smack of eugenics.

The surreal part: 55 perfect strangersmen and fellow Canadiansare offering to us, without the prospect of financial gain, the absolute, unfettered ability to bear and rear a descendant of their ancient family lineage. We, a same-sex couple in middle Canada, will cleave that lineage, and claim as our own someone to whom they are tethered by stardust, but will likely never meet.

The eugenics part: the way you pick feels kind of icky.

One night about three months ago, we opened up a bottle of wine, and printed off the ReproMed list.

Here's what you get to know before you even get to the individual donor profiles:

  • Race
  • Maternal/Paternal ancestry (i.e. Romanian, Korean, etc.)
  • Blood type
  • Hair type (colour, texture)
  • Eye colour
  • Skin tone
  • Height, weight, "bone size" (huh?)
  • Education and occupation
  • Interests (i.e. hobbies)

What you see.JPG

With slight, decisive slashes of a pen, would-be donors fell hard and fastand not necessarily for rational reasons.

For example, there's a very good chance that under more conventional circumstances, I would happily conceive and rear a child with someone who lists one of his hobbies as "playing guitar." For my wife, that tidbit was insurmountable.

"It reminds me of Jack Johnsonthe puka shell necklace guy who sings about pancakes," she said with another pen slash.

Perhaps slightly more troubling than my wife's contempt for the friendly, laid-back Hawaiian the rest of us seemed to love in the mid-2000s, is the idea that we would start the donor selection process with considerations of race and ancestry.

Again, under those more conventional circumstances, one of us might have met someone in a bar or at a party, and I can guarantee you that the eventual decision to procreate with that person would not have been informed by race or ancestry. Neither would someone have been disqualified from being a parenting partner for having a family history of heart disease or Cystic Fibrosis.

Hell, if that's how it typically worked, few of us would be heremy wife and I included.

But, in this strange place where you're paying to pick and choose the things you hope you'll get in your tiny human, donors are broken down into a list of features, traits and medical test results. And let me tell you: comparison shopping dads makes you feel like a real asshole.

Right out of the gate, you're talking about looks. You can't really help it. The way the registry is built you're asked to consider racial phenotypes instantly, and that's a glaringly uncomfortable way to start building a person.

After that, you're still dealing with looks. You get to see pictures of them, sort of. Donor's features are isolated into separate pictures to protect their identities. So when you look at a guy's profile, you can see pictures of his eyes, nose, mouth and ears, but you can't look at his complete face. All of that zooming in makes you fussy about things that might not matter at all in real life. (Who gives a shit about detached earlobes? Me, apparently.) Plus, fragmenting someone's features is a dehumanizing act, and semen shopping that way makes you feel like you're buying a show dog to put to stud.

You also realize instantly that you're absolutely trying to stack the genetic deck. ReproMed tests for a wide assortment of genetic diseases, but you get to know everything from whether he wears glasses to what killed his paternal grandparents. One particularly stellar donor made our short list, but we cut him in the end because of cancer in the family.

And then there's what I consider the donor window dressing: after you sort them out based on looks and health history, you get to go through the pedigree informationwhich is incredibly compelling, but mostly unreliable.

That's because things like education, aptitudes, temperament, interests and hobbies are pretty much completely self-reported. ReproMed says it calls to confirm where the guys work, but that's it.

Is he really a hilarious, gregarious humanitarian and MIT grad with a gift for languages and a love of travel? Does he actually run marathons, love to cook and aspire to change the world? Your guess is as good as mine.

There are no sperm bank P.I.s checking out and confirming that stuff. I repeat: no matter what you read, by and large, you can only go with what's on the page in front of you, and there is no logical reason to assume it's all true.

Just the same, it's all that unreliable soft stuff that really draws your heart inthose are exactly the things that would make you fall in love and have babies with someone.

We're having a baby with someone, in a way. And I guess in a way, we fell in love with our guy too.

After just a couple of hours, we decided to let Donor 3246 be one of the most important decisions we'll ever make. It really did come down to an overall feeling.

One of the tipping points with him was the "staff impressions" section in his profile. Those impressions are subjective, but they're the closest thing we have to a friend telling us this guy is okay.

"He is extremely outgoing," someone wrote in his assessment. "He has a humble demeanour and a very relaxed attitude. We are always very impressed with his systematic and organized approach to different endeavours."

A ringing endorsement!

The staff report also says this:

"He was encouraged by his family to participate as a semen donor."

You do wonder along the way: what kind of guy does this? Who goes to a clinic once a week for more than a year to donate semen for nothing except expenses?

Apparently, if you're 3246, you're doing it because you love your own wife and kids so much that you want other people to experience that joy, too.

" the best part of my life and my favourite thing in the world is the running hugs I get when I come home from work," he wrote in his essay.

Here's what else we think we know about our guy.

He's married (or was) and is raising two sons and a daughter. Thanks to his generous gift, there are also at least two other children in this country who won't call him dad but are certainly his children. There are likely many more.

He likes dogs, plays hockey and used to sing in a jazz band. He considers himself to be outgoing, creative and funny. He lists no serious hereditary diseases in his family. One of his life goals is "to be happy."

He also says he would meet our child, if they're ever interested.

We did get to see other pictures of himsome as a baby. He was beautiful. There is one blurry whole-body shot of him as an adult, clothed. He's standing up nice and straight with his shoulders back. Also, his nose looks like my wife's perfect little nose, his smile is kind and warm like hers, and like my own brothers, he has freckles on his arms.

We Asked Some Refugees for the Stories Behind Their Smartphone Backgrounds

0
0

All photos by Grey Hutton

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

A narrative seems to have emerged around smartphones in the ongoing refugee crisis. Many of those who oppose mass immigration and the opening of European borders to those in need have singled out this particular piece of technology and used it to essentially say: "Lookthese people have snazzy phones, therefore they must have loads of money, so why are they coming here?"

This opinion, objectively, is ludicrous. Firstly, you don't need to be loaded to own a phone. Secondly, and most importantly, the reason the majority of refugees currently traipsing through Europe has nothing to do with money; it has to do with the fact that their countries are ravaged by war and their homes have either been destroyed or are uninhabitable.

However, the phone thing is still managing to spread throughout social media in the form of ignorant status updates and hateful (and unfounded) memes.

We asked some refugees who'd recently arrived in Berlin to explain what their phones meant to them. For some, their worth lay in storing photographs of the homes they've lost and the loved ones they've let behind; others were simply using them for practical things like navigating rickety boats towards Europe. Each refugee seemed to connect differently with their phone, but one thing they all had in common was that they were terrified of losing theirs.

Check out more Grey Hutton's work here.

I Was a Teenage Fruit Fucker

0
0

Jesus Christ. Illustration by Alex Jenkins

Not that long ago, when I was a teenager, my trademark outfit was a fedora, track pants, and a sports jacket. I fervently browsed 4Chan on the daily. I had a 12-gigabyte folder of shitty memes. I was the epitome of that guy.

I also used to watch a lot of pornlike, a lot, even for a teenage boyand it got to the point where I was probably beating off five times a day in order to satisfy a never-ending need for stimulation. At a certain point in a man's life, however, the hand is simply not enough, and we all must make a choice.

Some of us, many of us, move onto real people; we form relationships, we have many awkward and/or awesome sexual encounters; and jerking off becomes less of a necessity and more of a failsafe for those dry spells. But all this came later in life for me. For the intervening years, I improvised physical intimacy with inanimate DIY objects. Trying everything from microwaved melons to surgical gloves wrapped in a towel, I chased the next best orgasm like a dope fiend.

Of course, improvising a fuck buddy is not a new thing, but there's almost no data whatsoever about just how popular DIY sex toys are.

In my case, Fleshlight-type objectsor "sleeves" as they're called in the communityare really all I was into, which seems pretty boring as far as the world of sex toys goes.

A lot of us, perhaps understandably, have some reservations walking into a shop and handing cash to a stranger for a mass-produced simulated-flesh wand to use on our genitalia, so we get creative. Sites like YouTube and Vimeo contain endless video guides and reviews about how to assemble and use a variety of McGyvered objects to get one off, making the online world of homemade pleasure devices deep and vibrant. In my case, after seeing ads about the Fleshlight back in 2010, I immediately wanted to up my masturbation game with the help of a mass-produced plastic vagina.

But there were a number of obstacles to my plan, the first of which was that, at the time, I had neither a credit card nor the money to order one. Even if I convinced my parents to let me use their Visa in exchange for some allowance money, I worried they'd get their monthly statement only to find "POCKET PUSSY 5000 - $69.99" next to their Grocery Gateway order.

Another problem was the actual arrival of the thing at my doorstep. I'd probably be at school and my mom would most likely be the first soul to lay eyes upon it. The idea of my mom unwrapping a package only to find a mechanical vagina that looks like it could suck the dimples off a golf ball seemed much worse than your usual, "My parents walked on me when" scenario.

So with my options limited to my imagination, I had to Frankenstein my own creations. The first video I found after YouTubing "Homemade pocket pussy" (which I am very happy to say is still online) described in just three short minutes how I could duct tape, heat up, and decore a banana into a tunnel of temporary love.

At 99 cents a pound, this was economically the best option. That's roughly 12 cents per fuck, and my parents would never second guess why there was a shortage of bananas in the house or why I happened to be on a sudden potassium kick. The downside to this was the mess: excess remaining banana goop and sugary starch would stick to my legs or drip onto the floor. Also, after you bust into a banana peel, that gut-churning feeling of shame that follows after beating off triples in size.

I dabbled in a dozen or so different DIY fuckables, and some are arguably better than others. A heated up watermelon, for example, totally sucks. While the concept of cutting a penis-sized hole in a big ball of microwaved fruit sounds like a potentially interesting sexual experience, the lack of pressure that can be applied due to the melon's hard shell leaves you with a loose, slobbery mess. You just don't get the grip or control you have with a banana. Also, it's pretty heavy to hold when you're a weak-ass teenager, so you'd need to use a table or another of your family's furniture for stability.

Then there's things like making your own cocksleeve via a complex molding process, like the one laid out in this video. This shit, in my opinion, is way over the top and is generally just done by wank enthusiasts. After all, if you have the skill, willpower, money and resources to do pull this off, you should probably just go out and buy a motorized Tenga.

The best thing I'd found (after the banana) was the use of a rubber surgical glove stuffed inside a tightly-wrapped towel. Popularised in prison and dubbed a "fifi," this little contraption is absolutely fantastic and way less shameful than wiping post-climax banana pulp and splooge from your thighs. It's legitimately the closest thing to an actual vagina (before there were actual vaginas in my life) that I have ever experienced. Squirt some of your favourite lotion in, strap it on and go to town. When you're done, just throw the glove away and voila! The only downside is trying to explain what you're doing humping that brand new towel your mom just bought at The Bay when she eventually walks in on you.

In my time spent browsing forums and watching uncensored how-tos on sites like Liveleak and Pornhub, I've heard of and seen just about all of it. Dudes fucking jello. Dudes fucking packaged meat. Dudes fucking anything and everything they can get their hands on. We got to the top of the food chain for a reason. I mean, why settle for a rough, callused hand when you could tape six Boston cream donuts together and plunge your dick into them like Jim the Pie Fucker.

In the end, what irked me the most about all of thiseven after I stopped trying to fuck pillows, mattresses with holes cut out of them, and various pieces of food after I finally lost my V-card in high schoolwas the defensiveness and embarrassment my guy friends had when we talked about the topic. Although they all later admitted that, at some point in their lives, they had tried to use something other than their hand or another person to get them off, I distinctly remember them laughing at me in disgust when I brought my fruit-fucking escapades to our lunchtime gatherings. That said, they were high school guys, so I don't know what I expected.

Now, whenever I can, I make an effort to bring up this story at parties, at dinner gatherings, while people are eating the very food I used to fuck. I do this to have a conversation, to riff on new ideas (recently I was suggested to try a rising loaf of bread, which sounds amazing, although I've yet to give it a go) and most importantly, to help people feel comfortable enough to talk about all the weird shit they do in private.

Also, believe it or not, it makes for some pretty good pillow talk. Followed by breakfast in bed.

View more of Alex Jenkins' illustrations on Instagram.


Everything We Know So Far About the Collapse of Northern Ireland's Government

0
0

Belfast's Stormont parliament building. Photo by Robert Paul Young via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Northern Ireland's administration is faltering, crippled by two vicious murders in Belfast that have ignited fears the paramilitary foot soldiers who brought bombs and bullets against British rule during The Troubles are still armed and in operation.

At the best of times, the power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland is delicate. The system is an alternative democratic model designed for societies emerging from conflict. In this system, both cultural and religious traditions are represented in government. Nationalists and unionists cannot dominate one another, but must make decisions together as both must make up the cabinet, the idea being that both sides in a post-conflict society will begin to work together and build trust.

Today, however, Belfast's house of cards is trembling. In a frenzy centered around the alleged continued existence of the IRA, parties on both sides of the political divide are being encouraged to take part in urgent talks. Relations in the assembly were already under serious straindeadlock, evenafter months of wrestling over welfare reform, but this current crisis looks to test the parties in ways not seen since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

The fallout can be traced back to early summer and the callous gunning down of ex-IRA commanding officer-turned-community worker Gerard "Jock" Davison.

Davison was walking home through the Markets area of Belfast on the morning of May 5 after purchasing his morning paper. A hooded gunman who had waited patiently in an alley made his move, shooting his victim in the back in broad daylight. After Davison had fallen to the ground, the hitman stood over him, shooting his victim a further four times before fleeing the scene.

What followed was fairly routine business. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) immediately appealed for witnesses and began their investigation. Over the course of the following weeks, the PSNI questioned a number of suspects and stated that they did not suspect republican or loyalist paramilitary involvement.

SEE: A Former Paratrooper's Photos from the Northern Irish Tour That Led Up to 1992's Coalisland Riots

On August 12, just over three months after Davison's murder, former Provisional IRA (PIRA) assassin Kevin McGuigan was gunned down at the door of his family home in Belfast's Short Strand area. Two masked gunmen, both armed with automatic weapons, ambushed and shot McGuigan at least six times in the head and neck at close range.

The link? Like many men and women who lived through the violent 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland, the two men met in the paramilitaries; McGuigan had worked closely with Davison as comrades in the Provisional IRA.

When the PIRA called its ceasefire in August of 1994, both men then became key assassins in a new PIRA unit active through the late 1990s and early 2000s, which called itself Direct Action Against Drugs (DAAD). The vigilante unit launched a murder campaign against known drug dealers who had been operating independently within Catholic neighborhoods across the province. Despite working together, it wasn't long before the two had fallen out of favor with one another, with McGuigan suffering a punishment shooting that he allegedly believed was ordered by Davison.

Kevin McGuigan with his grandson Ollie, who was in the hospital at the time, in 2011. Photo courtesy of the PSNI

Kevin McGuigan's name had surfaced in the weeks following the Davison murder, whispered by former comrades as a possible suspect in the killing, but through his solicitor he repeatedly denied any involvement. More telling was that the PSNI had warned McGuigan that his life was in imminent danger. Choosing to stay, he ended up dead.

Just over a week later, at a press conference the senior policeman affirmed that the PSNI assessment was that "current members of the PIRA" were involved in the murder. When asked to clarify, the officer said: "Quite clearly we are saying PIRA still exists, because current members of PIRA were involved."

The statement created more questions than it answered. This assessment was a tremor that caused outrage across the unionist parties within the Northern Ireland administration.

It was at this moment that two acts of street criminality came to threaten the democratic post-conflict assembly in Northern Ireland: the killings now had political consequence.

WATCH The Republic's Dissident Youth: Ireland's Young Warriors

The political difficulty of this is that the main republican party previously associated with the PIRA, Sinn Fein, had provided assurance for years that the IRA didn't exist any more and that their terror campaign was over. Officially, they're right. In July of 2005, the IRA proclaimed the end of their armed conflict in support of the peace process, vowing to pursue their objective of a united Ireland by democratic means and community activism.

In light of the police assessment on the IRA's involvement and existence, unionists were haunted by the often quoted quip of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams in 1995: "They haven't gone away, you know."

The delicate balance of trust that exists between Sinn Fein and their unionist partners in the administration, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), stood to be shattered. Unionist politicians wanted answers, trust was fraying. Despite the rising furor, senior Sinn Fein officials reiterated that the IRA were no more.

The official PSNI statement needed clarification, and there was no time to waste in giving it.

Just two days later, Chief Constable George Hamilton explained to a packed press conference that the PIRA organizational structure does exist in a reduced form. He made it absolutely clear that the organization "no longer engaged in terrorism" but clarified that remaining parts of it may engage in criminality or violence to satisfy "personal gain or personal agendas."

Dismissing the revenge murder as feuding, he went on, "...they are little more than an organized crime group in my view."


Photo by Brian Whelan

The Chief Constable's assertion is not a revelatory one. The Independent Monitoring Commission, set up to provide intelligence-based assessments on the continued activity of republican and loyalist paramilitary organizations post-conflict, published an extensive report in 2008 specifically dealing with the remaining leadership of the PIRA. It found that, "...the organization's former terrorist capability has been lost."

What fell on deaf unionist ears in Stormont, the seat of the Northern Ireland assembly, was the Chief Constable's insistence that his intelligence information allowed him to "accept the bona fides of the Sinn Fein leadership regarding their rejection of violence and pursuit of the peace process and accept their assurance that they want to support police in bringing those responsible to justice."

Either extraordinary opportunism or blind prematurity had set in. The gung-ho leader of the once main, now greatly diminished, Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) left the assembly with their single minister and announced the party would quit government. The UUP's rash move could not destabilize the administration significantly but would force the hand of the larger unionist party, the DUP.

The UUP leader Mike Nesbitt insists that the mere confirmation that the IRA still exists makes it impossible for his party to trust Sinn Fein.

The arrestand subsequent release without charge or conditionof Sinn Fein's northern chairman Bobby Storey last Wednesday tested the DUP's willingness to trust nationalist assurances that violence had been abandoned. They also began to drop out. Ultimately, it resulted in the resignation of the unionist First Minister Peter Robinson and most of his fellow DUP ministers, leaving only a small number of ministers in power.

READ ON VICE NEWS: 'Britain Taught the World How to Torture': Northern Ireland's Hooded Men Take New Evidence Back to Court

By leaving the administration limping, the unionist parties have stalled all business until this issue is dealt with in entirety. With a view on next May's elections, Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness described the whole ordeal as an "inter-unionist rivalry." Rather than allowing a full police investigation to run its course, in a stampede for the barricades, both unionist parties have attempted to outmaneuver one another in taking a hardline position on the idea of the existence of the IRA.

Regardless of the real reasons behind the unionist action, London and Dublin have both voiced commitment to the continuation of devolution. The long-term investment in the peace process by both the British and Irish governments makes it in their best interests for the Northern Irish assembly to continue to function.

At the moment there is only talk about talks. An agreed basis for conversation is being sought by the UK's Northern Ireland Secretary of State Theresa Villiers, who called the whole crisis "a sign of a complete breakdown in the working relationships within the executive."

What do both sides want? The UUP and DUP want agreed action that would lead to the dismantling of what remains of paramilitary and, in particular, IRA structures. Sinn Fein insist the IRA have left the stage. The outcome of talks, should they happen, looks likely to be the reinstatement of an independent paramilitary watchdog.

In another political stalemate fueled by the old suspicions, tribal mantras, and political maneuvering, the law-abiding electorate of Northern Ireland are without a functioning local assembly. Talks are necessary to the continuing of political progress and of a power sharing administration. More importantly, they provide an opportunity for a collective effort by all parties to deal with the aftermath of the 30-year-long conflict, as it exists in the form of criminal gangs within some neighborhoodsthe continuing legacy of a paramilitarized society.

But can the politicians of Northern Ireland work together to deliver this once and for all?

Follow David on Twitter.

Let the Wrong One In

0
0

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

I was hidingfrom my most recent birthday for a weekend in a hippie compound in TopangaCanyon, when I found some out-of-print, new age books from the 70s about sacredsexuality. The place was hippie compound 2.0less Manson family andwifeswapping, more AirBnB and everyone gets their own little cottage. The sexbooks, though, were relics from another time. Mostly I looked at the diagramsof dicks and labia. But one thing that stuck with me from the books was theidea of preserving one's lifeforce.

According to thebooks, your lifeforce can seep out in a variety of ways: through ejaculation,through anger, through drug use. What you don't want to do is lose all of yourlifeforce, because then you will be dead. The books talked about theimportance, for cis men, of sucking in one's ejaculate, instead of letting it out, so as topreserve one's lifeforce. The books also talked about the possibility, for ciswomen, of transforming one's anger into sexual energy. There were ten pages onthat, which I couldn't follow past the first step: trying to inhale energy downinto one's vagina. But I keep thinking about it.

Do I even wantto transform my anger into sexual energy? Do I even need any more sexualenergy? I feel like, already, I sexualize a lot of feelings that don't need tobe sexualized: sadness, fear, boredom, self-doubt. What I may need, however, ismore anger. I'm one of those people, whoas someone in a hippie compound mightsayis not particularly "in touch" with my anger. I am especially notin touch with my anger when it comes to any form of rejection, or perceivedrejection: particularly romantic. If I am angry, that means I care. If I care,I feel like a loser. But if I remain unaffected, then perhaps a rejection neverhappened at all.

With a fewrejections (or perceived rejections), I have gone so far as to make it seeminmy mindlike the rejector never even existed. I call the rejector a fantasy,imaginary, a ghost, an apparition. And, while it is true that I have an immenselyactive fantasy life and a penchant for taking one beautiful quality in a personand seeing them entirely through that lens, these people are still real. Theyhave bodies and voices. But I call them imaginary, because I am too sensitiveto (possibly perceived) rejections to even face them. To be rejected by afantasy is just me rejecting me. And I already know that I reject myself.

The problem,though, with blocking out people from one's past is that it makes it difficultto learn from one's mistakes. If you don't remember the pain of your mistakes,you'll probably make them again (I often make them again even when I doremember). But sometimes it is just too painful to sit with, as the hippiesmight say, "ultimate reality." Reality has never been my firstchoice.

For my birthday,my friend Susanna Briska sexual intuitivegave me a reading on a person who I haveturned into a ghost. In order to do this, all I had to do was send her a selfieof, shall we call him, "the dead boy."

Susanna saidthat this person has ancient sexual powers over women. She said that he is asoul player, but not running a full-on pussy con, because he doesn't evenreally understand his own power. She also said that this is his only power.Otherwise, he is not an intellect or an artist or deep.

"You definitelyhave a connection," she said. "You are of the same tribe. But just because youhad a past life thing doesn't mean it has to happen in this life. Think of himlike Oz, she said. Don't be one of the winged monkeys. Pay no attention to theman behind the curtain."

But she affirmedthat his romantic power was strong.

"A real pantydropper," she said. "In past lives, women have jumped off of bridges for him."

"I am one ofthose women who jumps off of bridges," I said.

"No, youaren't," she said.

OK, so perhaps Iam not a jumper. But I am a mourner. I've been lingering on the bridge foryears with his ghost. Maybe even lifetimes.

"I would putthat guy on a leash," she said. "Imagine you dominating him. That's the fantasyI would have about him and how I would let him go. I wouldn't say this for justanyone, but in your case, you should explore your anger more. Imagine he getsshit smeared on him and led in the town square on a leash and then beheaded."

"In a way Ialready killed him," I said. "I shut him out of my life."

"Yes, he isalready dead," she said.

But he isn'tdead. Not even to me, not fully. In my waking life I am doing well with keepinghim shut out, not going there too much in my mind. But he keeps showing up inmy dreams and I don't understand why. Like, I feel that the universe or god orthe flow or chi or qi or Buddha or my subconscious or even the voidwhatever isout theredoes not want me to contact him. Like, I feel that I am on the rightpath by having no contact. So if dreams contain spiritual messages, why wouldthe universe or god or the flow or chi or qi or Buddha or my subconscious or eventhe void prompt me to dream about him?

In these dreamswe are never together in a sexual way. Rather, there's a reconciliation offriendship or a mending of fences in terms of our humanity. Sometimes there ishugging and crying, but there is no longer kissing or sex. Still, no matter thecontent of the dreams, I wake up crestfallen. I am emotionally hungover,craving contact, all day.

The haze of romantic obsession casts a funhouse glow.


In a recentdream he gave me a bunch of gifts. In real life he never gave me any gifts. Butin the dream he gave me vegetables, a book, and a DVD of U2 performing inconcert. I think the DVD is symbolic of a change in the way I see him. Like, whenwe were together, I thought his taste in music was genius. It was almost likehe had invented genres or was playing the music himself. Now I see him as ahuman being like everyone else. Now I realize that his taste of music was in noway impeccable. In fact, there were some very embarrassing choices. I don'tthink he is a U2 fan, per se, but contemporary U2 would be indicative of thisfall from grace.

When we putpeople on pedestals, or see them only as we want to see them, everything iselevated. One time I saw a selfie of him sitting on the toilet, probably takinga shit, and I was like, "Wow that's so primal and real." My friends were like,"No, that's fucking gross." Or what I perceived as his deep, sullen quietudemay have just been moodiness. The haze of romantic obsession casts a funhouseglow.

In the dreamsthere is still some of the old pedestal-magic feeling. Susanna says that maybethese dreams are the universe's way of allowing me to be with him, withoutgetting in the mess again of actually being with him. Are dreams that smart andgiving?

In the dreams itis safe for us to be friends. There is a cathartic quality, in which I know itis right that we are making amends. Normally, I believe in honesty andforgiveness in waking life as well. But there are some people with whomfriendship is not possible, because it is not safe. It will always lead youback to the bridge. Perhaps what is left unresolved in this lifetime must beresolved in the next lifetime. But in this lifetime I need him to stay dead.

Follow So Sad Today on Twitter.

How You Can Build or Fix Your Terrible Credit

0
0

Illustration by Wren McDonald

I can't remember a time before I had a credit card, and I don't know how I got one. I assume my bank offered it to me at some point in my misty teenaged past and I accepted it without really understanding what I was getting into. That's how my problems began.

Since then, I've used my card to move across the country three times, buy a laptop I could otherwise never afford, and pay for nearly all my purchases during a month-long period after I had lost my debit card and was too lazy to order a new one. As a result, I've run up a debt of nearly $2,500, and have made monthly payments of about $100 ever since, even though it feels like my balance never gets any lower.

Previously: How to Invest Money When You Don't Have Any

A lot of my peers have avoided credit cards altogether, with a 2014 study suggesting that 63 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds don't have one. You can chalk that up to millennial distrust for financial institutions and debt in general after the economic collapse of the last decade, but those little pieces of plastic do have their uses, my cautionary tale aside. Chief among them is building credit, which tells potential borrowers and landlords that you're a reliable human adult.

"It's going to be so much easier to get an apartment , because you don't have to make as big of a downpayment," one finance expert told me. "Even setting up utilities. It gets you better insurance rates on health and car insurance, and when you get a house you'll get better mortgage rates. But you also don't pay interest rates, so your life really gets better.

"You can make money from your cards when you get into airline miles, too," the credit guru hinted. "I do; I travel for free quite often."

So it's at least possible to get the credit cardindustrial complex to work in your favorbut for young people who don't understand any of this stuff, making that happen seems like an impossible dream.

Be that as it may, I'm trying to learn how the financial system works on a personal and institutional level, so I decided to try to figure out how to go from having a tithe on my income to paying down the principal of my credit card debt to scoring free gifts from my new credit-card-company friends.

Related: What Would Happen if I Just Stopped Paying My Student Loans?

Building Credit

Some basics: Your credit score is made up of five components, with the length of your credit history accounting for 15 percent (your payment history and how much you owe are the biggest factors, making up a combined 65 percent). So time is on your side if you're young. The sooner you start building credit, the better your score will be in the long runbarring any catastrophic fuckups, of course. And unless you have a money-eating addiction or incredibly poor impulse control, there's really no reason not to get a credit card.

Still, young people are skittish about this stuff. "Millennials tend to use debit cards, which is great for money management, because you can only spend what you have in your account," explained Gerri Detweiler, the director of consumer affairs for Credit.com. "But that means they're not building credit."

One option for your first foray into credit is getting on your parents' card as an authorized userassuming they have not destroyed their own credit through compulsive gambling or lavish purchases. You can also get a secured credit card, which is basically like a pretend card that only allows you to spend whatever you've already put down on it as a deposit. If you want a real, honest-to-god credit card and have a credit score of zero, you'll pretty much have to take whatever card someone is willing to give youand that will probably have an interest rate of like 12 to 13 percent at least.

Higher interest rates mean that you pay more or the debt you accumulate by using a credit card. But if you clear the balance every month, you you can avoid paying interest at allin other words, ignore my parents' advice; you don't need to pay interest to build credit.

After having a card for about six months, you can get another, and then another, each potentially with a higher limit. As long as you don't miss payments on any of them, you'll be on the way to a good score. (Credit scores are out of 800, pretty much anything above is great.) Since I already had a card, had never missed a payment, and was paying gobs of interest to Wells Fargo every month, I figured companies would be dying to give me another one.

But every time you apply for a card and don't get it, it dings your credit score. This can be a nasty catch-22: You can't build credit without applying for a card, but if you don't have credit and apply for a card, it will be harder to get a card in the future.

So what was in my credit report? After years of accumulating debt through student loans and credit cards and dodging calls from collection agencies, I decided to take a deep breath and find out.

Watch: Meet Mr. Cherry, Japan's Leading World Record Holder

Getting and Reading Your Credit Report

If you google "free credit report," results will abound. But there's only one such site that is authorized by the federal government. On AnnualCreditReport.com, you can get free reports every 12 months from the three major reporting bureaus, or you can stagger them and check one every four months. (Other sites, like FreeCreditReport.com and CreditKarma.com, can provide summaries rather than complete reports.)

Surprisingly, my student loans seem to be in good shape. My minimum credit card payments are automatic, and when it comes to paying for my car, I'm always on time. But a credit card I forgot I ever signed up for seemed to be causing me trouble.

I didn't pay a Macy's bill for four months, so now I'm fucked until 2022.

About a year ago, I decided to buy a watch to celebrate my status as an adult, which I figured was cemented by my ability to buy a watch. I got it for almost half-price because I opened up a Macy's card in the process. What I didn't realize is that the purchase went on the new card and not my debit.

I could see on my credit report that the bill festered for four months, but I still have no idea how it was even paid, considering I didn't know it was charged. (I called my mom, who told me, in so many words, "The bill came to the house, and I just paid it, because I know you're stupid." I am struck by her generosity, and also by the fact that the thing I bought to make me feel "adult" is just an albatross of embarrassment that will forever serve to remind me that I am, in actuality, a child.)

Anyway, that blemish will stain my report for seven years. Had it been unpaid for longer, my credit score would have been further damaged. It's a reminder to pay your debts when they're duelenders hardly ever report anything until a payment is 30 days late, but you should avoid taking chances, and having unpaid bills can feel like a piano hanging over your head.

If you go for a long time without taking care of, say, your car or house payments, your possessions could get repo'd.If you don't pay your credit card debt, you won't face repossession -- unless you bought on something like rent-to-own furniture -- but you can eventually be taken to court.

Free Stuff

The true mark of adulthood is not a watch but a credit card that has frequent flyer mile rewards. Applying for a credit card and getting denied hurts your credit score, Detweiler explained, so I would need to know if I was in the "fair" credit score range of 650-699 before even bothering to fill out an application for one of these babies.

To that end, I went over to CreditKarma.com, which gave it to me two versions of my report for free. (If you want the actual score that lenders use, you have to fork over about $20 at myFICO.com.) Although the only negative on my report was the Macy's card thing, my overall credit health was... not good.


Unchill. :(((

How could this be? My only other credit card was always paid on time, because it was automatic, and I hadn't missed a payment in three years!

Apparently, there's something called a credit utilization ratio, and when your card is nearly maxed out it damages your score. Mine is currently 91 percent.

"Unfortunately, a lot of millennials are carrying a balance that's fairly high in comparison to the credit limitabout 46 percent," Detweiler said. "Consumers who have best credit scores tend to use about 10 percent of their available credit. It's important to be cognizant of your low limit starting out. Maybe fill up a tank of gas, go to the movies once, and that's it. Use the card very sparingly."

Too late. Way, way too late. It was time to call someone else to figure out how I could bail myself out of this mess.

Getting Out of Debt

Another thing I never realized is that if you make only the minimum payment on your credit card debt, it will take you more than 25 years to pay it off, because interest is a bitch. Your provider is required by law to explain on your statement how long it will take to pay off the debt while making the minimum payment, and also how much you have to pay each month in order to get rid of your debt in three years. You're not legally required to read this information, but it would probably be a good idea.

One way to get out of the habit of paying the minimum is to get a personal loan to pay off the debt. Going into debt to pay off debt may seem counterintuitive, but these loans count as "installment plans," and therefore don't affect your credit score. Meanwhile, the loan will come with a repayment plan that will give you a mandatory path to getting rid of the debt within three, four, or five years as opposed to 30.

If you have a good enough credit score, you can also apply for what's called a balance transfer card through your credit provider. Just call them up and ask if you qualify. If you do, you won't have to pay interest for a certain amount of time, like 12 or 21 months, on the new card. That sounds greatbut you need a really, really good credit score to get this, usually.

Yet another catch-22: If my credit score were good, I wouldn't be worrying about this shit, but I needed a good credit score to qualify for anything that might reduce my debt and improve my credit utilization ratio.

Beverly Harzog, author of the books The Debt Escape Plan and Confessions of a Credit Junkie, became a credit expert after finding herself more than $20,000 in debt, getting sick of eating PB&J sandwiches for dinner, and figuring out a way to take back her life.

Harzog told me that she both qualified for a balance transfer card and got a raise before being able to get her credit straight. That doesn't exactly help me in the here and now. But she did offer advice that extends to even the unluckiest among usthe most important thing is self-control.

"What I did was I went on a very strict budget," she says. "I used to go to a health club, and I canceled that and started going to a gym. There are certain things I believe you need to be happy or feel good about yourselfand for me that was exercisebut having a good credit score was going to help me in so many areas."

"Some people can handle credit cards and it's perfectly fine, but I will say there are people who probably should not get credit cards," Harzog told me. Probably not, indeed.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: Does ‘Destiny: The Taken King’ Live Up to Its Promise and Hype?

0
0

All screenshots from 'Destiny: The Taken King' courtesy of Activision

Destiny has rarely been out of the cultural conversation since its launch last year, from bitching about drop rates through sharing exploits to conflicted think pieces. It's a love/hate game for a player base that neither developers Bungie nor publishers Activision won't reveal the (presumably massive) scale of, and now The Taken King, which is technically not the third expansion but the kick-off to Year Two, is here to set hopefully everything bang (bang) to rights. Can Bungie nail its second launch? I had a chat with two of the game's senior designers, and then played The Taken King for nearly 12 hours straight to find out.

The most immediate change, long overdue but very welcome, is what Bungie calls "Questification," a silly word for fixing the esoteric, obtuse, and downright weird progression system and in-game economy. "We play the game incognito with fans all the time, for genuine feedback," Jacob Benton, open-world designer on the game, told me, and obviously the progression quirks comprised a common complaint. "We're always on Twitch, Reddit and Twitter. We're our own harshest critics and we hope something is fun, but until it's out there in the open..."

That's where community comes inboth the fans and creating a sense of being in one. And the dynamic will continue. "Just because we're launching now doesn't mean we're stopping what we've been doing with the fans," Benton says. "I want people to come away saying, 'Today I played with people I've never played with... I made new friends.'" The philosophy seems to have worked. The loot and quests themselves are now more varied, often borrowing popular mechanics from old exotic bounties or being tied to being in a fireteam to encourage buddying up, which addresses constant Year One complaints of poor matchmaking options and how bad the (PvP area) Crucible was if you didn't have a mate or two to coordinateor at least commiserate about Thorn and The Last Wordwith.

Aside from community, lore and improved narrative flow was the priority for story content designer Ryan Paradis, who describes his perfect Taken King player experience to me as: "Today, I learned so much about the Destiny universe... now, I understand so much more." He's largely vindicated, as the new "main" story missions and strikes centered around taking down the pissed-off Hive-Daddy of vanquished villain Crota very deliberately make up for complaints of a fragmented, schizophrenic story, cringe-worthy dialogue, and repetitiveness, and include plenty of surprisingly good self-deprecating in-jokes about it all.

Two remarkably influential series helped with the process. "Dark Souls has so many secrets," Paradis says, "and that's the kind of thing I enjoy, seeking out and solving those riddles, and one way or another I think that worked itself into The Taken King. And, of course, everything is an extension of The Legend of Zelda, when you had that feeling of getting on the bus and saying, 'Did you find that... does that exist?'" These moments are pure fan service, and to be more specific is to blaze a spoiler all over these words, but they're very welcome. "I've been playing a lot of EVE too, the community and their stories are everything to that game," Paradis adds, although sadly my hope for Guardian-run Ponzi schemes is apparently a misfire.

So far, so much improved. But like so much of Destiny, beyond the initial thrill, some things still feel under-baked in The Taken King. For example, a quick stealth segment changes up the pace and forces you to peer out from under your muzzle flash for once and really appreciate the enemy Hive up closebut it lasts for all of 45 seconds and you never get the opportunity to revisit the mechanic, much like that tiny, tantalizing turret section from previous expansion DLC House of Wolves.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film on competitive video gaming, eSports

The same thing occurs in an awesome segment in the excellent new "Fallen S.A.B.E.R." strike where one player-controlled Guardian must stumble around carrying an artifact through a narrow corridor full of electricity pulses while comrades defend him or her from exploding, while snipers take shots throughout. It feels like the kind of level design and proper co-op encouraging mechanic that should be in every strike in some form, and its effectiveness is harshly accentuated by the longing for more.

Still, combined with often genuinely funny dialogue (and the seductive drawls of voice actors Nathan Fillion and Nolan North), great boss encounters and hugely satisfying new sub-classes, the new mission and strike content is a critical hit.

Patrol, the more exploratory and traditionally grind-heavy hub mode, has also received a much-needed overhaul. "We know it could have used more variety, and we wish we had more time to fully flesh out that mode," Benton states. "Learning how best to utilize this new sandbox, making it feel more alive by having higher level enemies out in the world" were key for Paradis, and it showstooling around the Hive spaceship Dreadnaught now involves huge pitched fights between Cabal and Hive, quicker and more varied missions and secrets that trigger quests lying around. Benton adds "we wanted to have gigantic ultras walking around, smashing everyone, but giants walking around in space would have been a little crazy... a lot of stuff doesn't get cut forever." Paradis agrees: "There's something we cut from the original game that comes back for The Taken King, something no one seems to have discovered yet." Which makes me sad, because it's probably not sparrow racing.

New on Motherboard: The Long Shot

Unfortunately, the Taken King himself (pictured above) is not going to be stomping anyone. After so much hype and growly threats of not being worthy to face him, Oryx stands around spawning his weakest henchmen while you casually unload your portable munitions depot onto his face. And then, tantalizingly, he transports you to a foggy arena with the promise of his final formonly to laconically float by and swat ineffectually at you with his sword. It's a bafflingly weak encounter, especially after the strength of the run-up, and it makes you wonder, considering his son Crota could bring a giant, apocalyptic eye to his farewell party, if Oryx was forced out of retirement.

So what's in store for the coming months? "This is the first time I've seen a multiplayer FPS in the way that Bungie makes their games... We have an awesome sandbox and it's learning how to fully utilize that to craft wonderful experiences for the players," Paradis claims, somewhat elegantly avoiding the question. Still, Destiny Year Two, post its 2.0 patch, already feels like the game we deserved. And if you've never played, enjoying it all the first time with the new gubbins under the hood is going to feel like the game you never knew you needed.

Follow Danny Wadeson on Twitter.

White People Explain Why They Feel They Oppressed

0
0

Sometimes white people vex me. Maybe they confuse you, too. Maybe you're a white person who is sometimes confused by white people. A lot of white people have told me they're befuddled by the actions and perspectives of other white people. I hear you. What confuses me? I think it's the utter lack of awareness of how race in America truly functions. In the midst of a national policing crisis, the Black Lives Matter movement is trying to will into existence a sense of value for black bodies and some white people respond, "Why are they so anti-white?" That's dumbfounding to me. I wonder, how could they be so clueless? When white people question why blacks get to say certain words or make certain jokes that whites can't or when white people ask where is White History Month or when white people question why they have to pay for the racism of their ancestors, it's offensive and infuriating and it's also confounding.

In Ta-Nehisi Coates's astounding new book, Between the World and Me, he refers to white people as "dreamers" to evoke the sense of them being not fully awake, like sleepwalkers. I'm not sure if white people are like sleepwalkers, or more like ostriches, consciously burying their heads in the sand, hiding from reality. And that's exactly what vexes me the most about white people: their reluctance, or unwillingness, to recognize the vast impact their race has on their lives and on the lives of all those around them.

Modern white Americans are one of the most powerful groups of people to ever exist on this planet and yet those very peopleor, if you're white, you peoplestaunchly believe that the primary victims of modern racism are whites. We see this in poll after poll. A recent one by the Public Religion Research Institute found 52 percent of whites agreed, "Today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities." A 2011 study led by a Harvard Business School professor went deeper to find that "whites see race as a zero sum game they are losing." That was even the name of the study.It showed that over the last five decades both blacks and whites think racism against Blacks has been slowly declining, but white people think racism against whites is growing at a fast rate. White people are increasingly certain that they're being persecuted. The study also notes, "by any metricemployment, police treatment, loan rates, educationstats indicate drastically poorer outcomes for black than white Americans." White perception and the reality are completely at odds.

Why is it that some white people feel like they are the primary victims of racism? And why do they feel like giving any bit of liberty to black Americans means they are losing something? And why should I be an unpaid armchair psychiatrist interpreting the feelings of white people when I could just ask them? I mean, they're all over the place and available for study in their natural habitat. So I did my own unscientific poll, asking several white people to help me understand white people. Based off the responses, I found three primary explanations for why so many white folks feel like they are the true victims in America today.

Isn't Whiteness Less Valuable Now?

For some white people, whiteness seems less economically valuable than it was decades ago. It's as if white privilege doesn't take you as far these days in the same way that a dollar doesn't go as far as it did in your grandpa's time. Back in the Mad Men-era, if a white man showed up, he got a good job that let him take care of his family. No more, they say. But understanding the reasons behind that are hard. A woman who asked not to be named said, "Being a reasonably hard working white male no longer entitles you to respect or a middle class lifestyle. This has mostly to do with structural economic dynamics including increased competition globally and the decline of unions, but it's a lot simpler to blame it on the black person or Hispanic person who got the job that you think was supposed to be yours."

Jon Dariyanani, co-founder of a software start-up called Cognotion, echoed that sentiment. "It's much easier to believe that the reason the middle class life is slipping away from you is because some lazy group of people are soaking up resources and blocking the way, than to believe that it is caused by globalization and bad macroeconomic policy beyond any individual's control. 'Anti-white' racism relies on an economic anxiety that is almost entirely a fantasy."

It's definitely easier to blame a person of color than it is to try to understand how faceless global economic forces have screwed you over. You can't see global economic forces working, many people don't understand them, and who specifically are you supposed to blame? Besides, blaming black people is as American as Apple computers.

Is Whiteness Ending?

Throughout American history, white has been the dominant race. That is ending. Demographers say that by 2043 there will be fewer white people than people of color in America. We will become a minority-majority nation. Among children under six, it has already happenedthere are more kids of color than white kids. I imagine this impending end could seem frightening.

Tim Wise, anti-racist educator says, "When you've had the luxury of presuming yourself to be the norm, the prototype of an American, any change in the demographic and cultural realities in your society will strike you as outsized attacks on your status. You've been the king of the hill and never had to share shit with anyone, what is really just an adjustment to a more representative, pluralistic, shared society seems like discrimination. When you're used to 90 percent or more of the pie, having to settle for only 75 or 70 percent? Oh my God, it's like the end of the world." But as white people lose their dominant status, the meaning of whiteness in America will have to change significantly.

What Is Racism?

Some of the white people I talked with feel like many white people lack of a deep understanding of race and racism. Tim Wise said, "Whites are used to thinking of racism as an interpersonal thing, rather than institutional. So we can recall that time we got shitty customer service by a black person, or had some black person make fun of us for something, and we think, 'we're the victims of racism now,' paying no attention to the ongoing systemic imbalance in our favor." This is in part because the nature of privilege is that you don't have to think deeply about your privilege if you don't want to.

Erikka Knuti, a political strategist, said, "Part of white privilege has been the ability to not know that your privilege exists. If you benefit from racism, do you really want to know that?" I can see where it would be uncomfortable for people to admit that their lives are shaped by unearned advantages, especially in an environment where those advantages may be beginning to slip away, but the blindness itself is a part of the problem. White people have duties as part of the American community. They must be honest with themselves and their co-citizens and admit that white privilege shapes a lot of life in this country. They must understand that the truly pernicious, life-defining sort of racism is not interpersonal, it's institutional. The systems that shape who lives where, who gets educated, who gets jobs, who gets arrested, and so on, these things shape lives, and they are all heavily weighted in white people's favor. To ignore all of that is to misunderstand America. If white people admit those things, it will be plain that they are not, in any way, victims.

Calling yourself color-blind is not progressit's insulting.


I am not urging white people to feel guilty, I'm saying be more honest. As we move toward a nation where white people are less dominant, it will be critical that white people stop being racial ostriches, or sleepwalkers, and deal forthrightly with what it means to be white. Many white people say they have a strong desire to not discuss race because there's a chance they could make a mistake and end up somehow looking racist. But a lack of discussion about race leads to a lack of sophistication about race.

Sociologists speak of race-averse (homes where race is not discussed) and race-aware households (homes where race is openly discussed). Children who grow up in race-averse homes tend to have a more difficult time dealing with race when they get older because they have less experience wrestling with it in their youth. White people are, by and large, living in race-averse communities that support their desire to not discuss race and thus often ending up struggling with how to deal with this complex, nuanced, emotional subject. This is not progress. Calling yourself color-blind is not progressit's insulting. Engaging with race, making serious efforts to understand race, understanding how systems shape our world and how white people consistently benefit from those systems to the detriment of others, and rejecting the backwards notion of white victimhoodthat is the path to progress.

Follow Toure on Twitter.

The Absurdity of America Is Captured in Joy Williams’s Stories

0
0

Joy Williams. Photo by Anne Dalton. Courtesy of Knopf

Last month, atthe age of 35, I traveled for the first time to Europe. It was very nicebrightgreen parks, cobblestone streets, charming accents. Returning to JFK, I watched a man scream, "Fuck up Mario," into a bathroom mirror. Theman wore a name tag: "Mario." When I got off the train in my hometown of Albany,New York, I took my first picture since returning to America. It's of a garbage can stuffedwith Dunkin' Donuts cups and a pair of pants on top of the cups. After takingthe picture, a man thanked me, then grabbed the pants. After experiencing theseemingly relaxed and chill people of Scotland, I was home.

Reabsorbing intoAmerican culture has been weird and difficult. I have thought, multiple times, This place is fucked. There is, I believe, something intrinsically sad about living here. For me, the greatestcataloger of this particular sadness is Joy Williams. Being home has made methink, repeatedly, I'm in a Joy Williams story.

Toher devoted fans this isn't news. Williams has been highlighting our absurdconfidence in the face of cosmic obliteration since her collection Taking Care first appeared in 1982. But,it seems, she's never been more popular than she is now: a profile in the New York Times earlier this month,glowing reviews from the Washington Post and NPR, a current national book tour, a nearlysold-out forthcoming discussion with Don DeLillo, an interview in the Paris Review last summer, and a youngergeneration just discovering her work. I believe the reason for this is because we'vebecome as sad and ridiculous and detached from nature as her characters are. With The Visiting Privilege,a 500-page definitive omnibus of old and new work published last week byKnopf, she will be more read than any other point in her career. This is agreat thing, because looking around, we need Joy Williams now more than ever.

Photo by the author

Returning homewasn't the first time I've considered how accurate Joy Williams's portrayals ofAmerican culture and our people are. I have a note, two years old, that says,"Very Joy Williams," after an interaction with a coworker. I had been standing atthe end of the hall where my boss's office was and his two assistants sat. Makingsmall talk, I looked out the window and said, "It's a nice day out," and one ofthe assistants walked over, looked at the sky, and said, "It was a nice day on9/11, too."

This kind ofbrutally ridiculous speech bordering on non sequitur is everywhere in thestories of Joy Williams. Her characters say outlandish things, are mean to eachother, and are equally absurd and lonely. There's also something oddlybeautiful and funny going on here. They are people who want to live theirfuture by looking in the past, but they never connect. But what I realized, after my coworker said what she did, and even more recently after my trip, isthat this is how we talk and act, exclusively, as Americans. From the manscreaming in JFK to the pair of pants in the garbage can, it's all veryJoy Williams, and perhaps I should start leaving that note everywhere I havethis thought.

In the story "Hammer,"Angela has a daughter, Darleen, who hates her and one day surprises her with avisit. To Angela's surprise, Darleen brings along an older man named Deke whoinsults Angela for the duration of the story. Here's how Deke enters the room:

"This ain't much of an establishment if you pardon my saying so," he said to Angela. "No steaks in the freezer, no ice cream, sound system inadequate, music fit only to disinform the listener, no point in hearing it twice, towels thin, wash-clothes worn and most suspect, bed lumpy, poor recycling practices, few spare light bulbs on hand, fire extinguishers out of date, no playing cards, clocks not set properly"

"I like them a little fast," Angela conceded. It was all true. He was in no way exaggerating.

"Potted violets on windowsill in very poor condition, worst case of powdery mildew I ever saw. I could go on."

Deke, likemany people I've interacted with since having a break from America, is obliviousto his no-filter speech. Angela surprises herself halfway through the story bylaughing, which is all she can do, when Deke says, "Ever visit a prison giftshop?" I did the same when my coworker said "It was a nice day on 9/11, too." Deke is real.

In a fallseason with PR people and reviewers praising Jonathan Franzen's Purity, where you get to read about acharacter named "Pip" for nearly 600 pages, a slew of young female authorspromised as "the next big thing," more work from John Irving, MichaelCunningham, David Mitchell, and John Banville (all old white guys deserving shouldershrugs and a library loan), and a new Mary Gaitskill with the most depressingpublicity blurb I've ever read"The story of aDominican girl, the white woman who introduces her to riding, and the horse whochanges everything for her"TheVisiting Privilege is one of the most important and radical books publishedthis fall. And Joy Williams has been doing it for decades.

The newstories, for the most part, are in the same style as her previous, just morephilosophical and death-obsessed. Editor Gordon Lish (who published Williams atKnopf early in her career) and his message are very much present: first-person,minimal, intimate, compressed sentences, his idea of "torque," which he definesas a sense of mystery but not confusion, surprises at the sentence level. Her unmatchedjuxtaposing of words and ideas, her blend of humor and sadness, her penchantfor realism but talent for abstraction, is still clear and striking. But there'salso something more spiritual, more of a push for us to get back to dirt andacquiesce not with how to live with Dunkin Donuts, but animals and nature.

Williams hasbeen a strong advocate for nature and animals over the years. Part of herattack on American culture and our collective loneliness is an indictment onhow we've marginalized and subdued our natural surroundings. As she writes in her2001 essay collection Ill Nature: "Your eyes glaze as you travel life'shighway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups." What we're leftwith is a dark world full of consumption and loneliness.

This sentiment recommences in the new stories. There's astrong theme of nature and animals looking at us, wondering what exactly thefuck we're doing, as we ignore them, destroying our natural surroundings withnot only meanness, but indifference.

Watch VICE Meets Norwegian Literary Sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard:

In one of her shortest and most powerful stories, "Preparation for aCollie," published 35 years ago, a dysfunctional couple decides to get rid oftheir dog against the seemingly obvious fact that the dog is important to thewoman's son, and more importantly, to the well-being of the family as acomplete unit. But instead they treat the dog like utter shit. "What a sadstupid dog," says one of the characters. And another: "I'm going to kill thatdog, I'm sick of him."

Williams hasalways attempted to connect our human loneliness and American culture with ourdisconnect from animals and nature. It's just now, in an America where factoryfarming has been exposed as the nightmare it is, and animal-abuse stories aredaily (the other day I read a story about a man walking his dog by driving hiscar down a freeway), it feels much more real and like a necessary message.

If there's hopein the vision of Joy Williams, and there is, it predominately lies withinchildren, such as Jackson in "Preparation for a Collie" or the unnamed girlfrom "Shepherd." In her stories, children often serve as antidotes to adult absurdity and destruction. "Many thingsthat human words have harmed are restored again by the silence of animals," thelittle girl in "Shepherd" thinks. Children have yet to be fully poisoned byAmerican culture, adult action, and speech, and instead rely on their intimate connectionsto nature, and to animals as a source of love. In "Shepherd" the girl dreamsher dog has died only to wake up and realize that her dog has died in reality as well. She's stuck between the two worlds and the story ends in heartbreaking fashion:

"I did loveyou, didn't I?" the girl said. She saw herself forever leaping, forever fallingback. "And didn't you love me?"

I have a three-year-oldson, Julian, and when he's older I'll show him The Visiting Privilege. I'm not sure what my wife will think. These,after all, are dark stories. But it will be a kind of warning, and, an offering.Joy Williams's spiritual yearning for a world emotionally connected not todaily minutia and American culture, but to nature, silence, animals, is animportant one. Or I could simply take Julian for a nature hike in the Catskills,point to the blue sky and say it's like the blue sky on 9/11. I could point outhow damaged we are with no sense of humor or explanation whatsoever. As adults,the choice is ours.

Shane Jones is the author of several books including Light Boxes, Daniel Fights a Hurricane, and Crystal Eaters. Follow him on Twitter.

The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams available inbookstores and online from Knopf.

How Kygo's 'Instagram House' Became the Soundtrack to Millennial Daydreams

0
0

Screenshot via this Best of Kygo mix, but it could be from literally any one of those "tropical house" YouTube videos

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Ever found yourself stuck at home in a YouTube vortex, only to get distracted, go argue with a postman, and return 45 minutes into some weird "tropical house" mix featuring a stock photo of a palm tree at sunset?

I know I have. And unless, pre-distraction, I've been watching Russian street fight videos or a tutorial about unblocking sinks, the vortex usually takes me directly to a tune by Kygo, the Norwegian house producer. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that never in such a short amount of time has the canon of one single artist so invaded my life. Whether it's on YouTube, SoundCloud, those House of Fraser adverts, HSBC Radio, or distant barbecues full of healthy, happy people in denim shorts that I'll never be invited to, I just can't seem to escape the sound of Kygo, with all its woozy xylophones, plonking steel drums, and processed-to-within-an-inch-of-humanity vocals.

Wondering if I was the only person feeling the omnipresence of Kygo's workperhaps fearing it was some kind of delayed Ibiza flashback haunting me in my lowliest momentsI looked into the man's numbers, and they revealed that he's something of a quiet phenomenon.

So far, the artist known to his mother as Kyrre Grvell-Dahll has chalked up 92 million views on his track "Firestone," as well as tens and tens of millions more on all the others (which include a bizarre version of Blackstreet's "No Diggity"). He's done an official Coldplay remix, he's just released a proper single with unlikely X Factor success Ella Henderson, he replaced Avicii at this year's Tomorrowland festival, and god knows how much cash he's clearing through advertising syncs. The way his tracks autoplay on YouTube one after another suggests he knows where the bodies are buried in the Silicon Valley, and guarantees his world tour will sell out everywhere it goes. Granted, he's not quite on the world stage just yet, but he's quickly becoming massive.

When coming to understand the phenomenon behind Kygo, the "who" part of it doesn't matter too much. A scant bit of research will tell you that he recently turned 24; that he comes from Norway (the picturesque coastal city of Bergen, to be precise); and that he looks a bit like a mix between a slightly buffer Logan Sama and the guy who played the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network. Apparently he's an accomplished piano player, but packed that in when he discovered Logic Pro and Avicii, the man whose high-top patent leather Supras he would later fill, and who he cites as a major inspiration on his career, with his tongue absolutely nowhere near his cheek.

"Avicii's melodies were so simple and cool, and they were actually similar to the melodies I played on piano. I thought if I could teach myself how to produce and get those melodies out of my head and into the computer, maybe I could make some cool music, too," Kyrre told Billboard last year.

This has 93 and a half million views at time of writing

His enthusiasm about Avicii speaks to the kind of guy Kygo probably is: keen; polite; slightly nave, perhaps; not very cool. He wears scoop tees and always rocks his baseball cap backwards. He smiles in all his Instagram pictures, sometimes with dogs. He could be every nice European guy you've ever met; the backpacker who asks if you know where to find some cool music in King's Cross on a Wednesday night; the kid who cheerfully lets you into your hostel at 5AM, bandages your hand, and asks you how your night was. He's just a Scandinavian boy who loves to party but (probably) doesn't do drugs. He is the light to Martin Garrix's shade, and Martin Garrix isn't exactly shady.

The man himself might not be a fascinating figure, but his success reveals a wealth about not just the state of our culture, but the way we view our livesmuch more so than Rihanna or Guetta or Kanye or any of the other real big-hitters might.

Kygo is the leading light of a raft of "tropical house" producers that have positioned themselves as a slightly more tasteful, exotic alternative to all the fist-pumping, molly-popping and cake-throwing of EDM. Alongside the likes of Robin Schulz, Zwette, Thomas Jack, and Klingande (as well as a swarm of one-remix-wonders), Kygo is part of a scene that, at the moment, seems to exist in a mostly digital realm, slightly outside of the electronic music scene, utilizing functions like the related tracks on YouTube and SoundCloud to build a base, rather than the traditional routes of late-night radio plays and DJ sets.

Even compared to EDM, their music has little in common with traditional house and techno. The BPM count sits around the 100 mark, the sounds are so bait they're basically default, the artists they remix are unashamedly mainstream. There are no Red Bull Music Academy lectures here; no white labels; no rare edits; no collectors; no heads. There are barely even any club nights for it. The whole thing is so unchallenging it's almost challenging. It seems to be precision-engineered for global domination; euphoric but not overwhelming, anthemic but relaxing, nostalgic yet thoroughly modern, a little bit Ibiza but also a little bit Scandinavia, sort of like Duke Dumont on a couple of vallies. Jamie xx reimagined for the Hollister crowd. It's all things to all men, and despite my better instincts, I am probably one of those men. I sort of quite like it. It's quite hard not to like.

The formula is simple but devastatingly effective at almost every turn: pick a track by an artist who wouldn't usually have 4/4 drums or Balearic synth sounds (M83, Ed Sheeran, Passenger, Ellie Goulding, Marvin Gaye), take the vocal, put it underwater and then slowly bring it up for air as the track starts to build. Bring in your synthesized pan flutes and your Dario G melodies and your hard-drive load of effects, and voila: You've got a track that sounds like the last day of your holiday.

Have a look at Thump, our entire website dedicated to dance music.

You see, Kygo's success lies not in what his music sounds like, but in what it sounds like. He trades on nostalgia in the same way a San Miguel advert might. It isn't about the power of his productions, but the feelings they can evoke. His music might be fundamentally bland, somewhere between Gorgon City and something you might hear in a flotation tank, yet it's undeniably evocative, redolenttransformative, almost.

The combination of all these audio clichs, processed and slowed down to a pace that washes over your being like a neck-nibble from the sun, somehow manages to drop you into a kind of generation-wide collective memory: that first trip to Ibiza or Phuket or Zante; that first kiss under the stars with Becky or Josh or Andre or Isabella; that night where everyone got up onto Paolo's roof and watched the sun set over Barcelona or Lisbon or Brooklyn or Hackney Wick.

Whether you've ever actually done any of that or not is irrelevant; it's the feeling that counts. Kygo's music is the perfect soundtrack for a centre-left branch of youth culture whose main outlets exist not in nightclubs and shopping centers, but at beachside music festivals, full moon parties, and boat raves. This is the generation that's had the ability to travel and has become fully aware of its own globe-trotting narrative, determinedly catching every sunset, every kiss, every cocktail, every midnight skinny-dip and sharing it online with everyone they know.

WATCH: Big Night OutIbiza:

Calling Kygo's music tropical house is far too immediate, far too rooted in a reality that it has no basis in. What he's making is Instagram house, AirBNB house, YouTube slideshow house. His tunes don't exist in the moment; they exist in our heavily filtered daydreams. His music exists in places we've been before and places we've read about in a "Things to Do Before You're 30" book. The fact that every video of his comes with a shot of a desert island at dusk, or a tanned woman running her toes through white sand, or a rock pool under the twilight sky is no coincidence. The images are central to the appeal of the musicthey're the dream it's selling. The dream that so many people are buying. A Kygo video has replaced the postcard on the fridge, a reminder that a better time has come before and will come again.

Kygo's music looks and sounds like a screensaver that's been prescribed to somebody with post-traumatic stress disorder; it's barely even there. It has far more in common with New Age muzak like Kenny G or Enya or Play-era Moby than it does with house music. Problem is: I quite like Moby and Enya, and maybe I even quite like Kenny G. Though you can't help but wonder if Kygo's music was dreamt up by the Thai tourist board, he achieves what he's doing so proficiently that even as I'm typing this, listening to his remix of Henry Green's cover of MGMT's "Electric Feel" under the dishwater skies of an overcast Tuesday in North Hackney, I'm transported to another time and place.

But it's a time and place I'm pretty sure I was never even at. A time and place cobbled together from Qantas adverts, episodes of Made in Chelsea, Boden catalogues, TripAdvisor reviews, other people's gap year photos and my own regrets about having stayed in a city too long. Kygo's world might not actually exist, but it's not a bad place to be. It's little wonder so many people want to go there.

Follow Clive on Twitter.


BC’s Outdated Foster Care System Prompts a ‘New Wave’ of Homeless in Vancouver

0
0

Tent City is a homeless camp in Vancouver. Photo via Flickr user urbansnaps - kennymc

For youth in British Columbia's foster care system, turning 19 means getting a rather daunting letter from the province. That letter will officially indicate that support and care they previously provided will be terminated abruptly.

There are just over 7,000 youth in government care in BC, and every year 700 of them age out of the system.

It's no secret that setbacks in the foster care system are directly correlated with Vancouver's poverty and homelessness problems. The 2015 Vancouver homelessness report shows only a small dent was made to the number of sheltered and unsheltered homeless in the city, and Mayor Gregor Robertson's campaign promise seven years ago to end homelessness by 2015 has not been fulfilled.

Addiction, disability, mental health, and affordability are all still very real and serious causes, but the foster care systemwhich is in the responsibility of the provinceis a cause that too often goes unmentioned.

Vancouver Councillor Kerry Jang says that the city tried to build as many new housing units as homeless on the streets in 2014. But what the city saw in 2015 was a "new wave" of homeless consisting of people who reported being on the streets in the last year or sooner.

"Every time you build something, you know, the provincial social safety net pumps out more didn't even have full criminal record checks, other times they have been engaged in some behaviour with the young people that was inappropriate."

Since 2006, Turpel-Lafond said that she's seen nearly 50 group homes close down.

Group homes are contracted between agencies and the government of BC. Most recently, a residential child-care agency on the Lower Mainland called Community Vision was shut down following an investigation. Twenty-three homes were shut down, with 33 youth being forced to relocate. The agency, which was supposed to care for high-risk youth, is alleged to have falsified first-aid certificateswhich is a pretty big deal, considering the youth at hand depend on highly trained staff. Community Vision worked with the MCFD for 15 years, and collected $3-million each year from the contract. Details of the investigation cannot be obtained by law.

The province has not yet responded to Turpel-Lafond's recommendations of amendments, though said in an email they are willing to explore ideas to improve the system.

Follow Behdad Mahichi on Twitter.

Talking to the Journalist Who Literally Wrote the Book on Whitey Bulger

0
0

Johnny Depp as Bulger in the new film, Black Mass. Courtesy of Miramax

For nearly two decades, James "Whitey" Bulger ruled Boston's Irishmob, racking up bodies, controlling the flow of drugs throughout the city, andearning millions of dollars in dirty money along the way. By the time he fledBoston at the end of 1994hopping from state to state to escape charges of murder,extortion, and drug traffickingeven the FBI had blood from Bulger on their hands.

The nation's top law enforcement agency had secretlyprotected Bulger since the late 70s, tipping him off to investigations thatthreatened to put the mobster in jail. Each time someone came forward totestify against Bulger, the FBI let him know, and the informants disappeared. Theirbodies were found days, weeks, and sometimes months later.

In exchange for what amounted to total immunity, Bulger gavethe FBI dirt on other gangsters while he tightened his grip on Boston'scriminal underworld. When federal prosecutors finally got a chance to lockBulger up, the FBI dropped him one last tip: They're coming for you, Whitey.It's time to get out.

Bulger remained in hiding for 16 years, until he was finally arrested in 2011. He's now servingtime at a prison in Florida, whereat age 86he'll sit in a cell for the restof his life.

In 1988, a team of journalists at the Boston Globe revealed that Bulger was an informant for the FBI, andhad been one for years. The journalistsDick Lehr, Gerard O'Neill, ChristineChinlund, and Kevin Cullenknew they were breaking big news. But it wasn'tuntil the late 90s, when Bulger's closest associates in the mob and the FBItestified in open court, that they learned how dark Bulger's deal with theBureau really was.

After reporting on Bulger sporadically for about ten years,Lehr and O'Neill decided to put together a comprehensive look at his corruptties to the FBI. Their book, Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil's Deal, came out in 2000. Now, 15 yearslater, it's been adapted into a film starring Johnny Depp and BenedictCumberbatch, along with a few other big names in Hollywood.

Lehr wrote for the Globefor almost 20 years, where he worked on the paper's investigative teamand, ultimately, landed a spot as a Pulitzer Prize finalist. I sat down withhim in his office at Boston Universitywhere he's taught journalism classessince the mid-2000sto talk about what it was like to break open one of themost damaging scandals in FBI history, and how Black Mass wound up on the big screen.

WATCH: Legendary Filmmaker William Friedkin Talks 'Black Mass' with the Film's Director

VICE: You write in Black Mass that when you first startedreporting about Whitey Bugler with the Globe'sinvestigative team, you were "incredulous" about the idea that he could've beenan informant. What was it like to find out, for sure, that he was a rat?
Dick Lehr: Itjust blew our socks off. I remember going back and saying, "OK. We've confirmedit from within the FBI, two credible sources." Our jaws were dropping. We kindof wandered around in a fog, because it did go against everything that was thenunderstood about the persona and career of Whitey Bulger.

We got into the project not so much as hard-hitting,investigative reporterswe got into it to do an in-depth narrative about thetwo Bulger brothers, because it hadn't been done before. Which was sort ofsurprising, given that this was the late 80s, and Whitey was the major crimeboss, and meanwhile, his younger brother Bill was the most powerful politician took on a new life: polishing the script, getting adirector. First it was Jim Sheridan who might direct it, or Barry Levinson;Johnny Depp wanted to play Whiteyall this stuff started to happen. I thinkBrian Oliver deserves the most credit in terms of seeing it early, staying onit, determined to make it, and he did. He partnered up with Warner Brothers,and they made it a major-studio picture.

What role did youplay in the production of Black Mass?
Whether it was on-set or answering the phone, wheneveranyone had a question about the story, we consulted. We always made it clearthat we sure hoped they didn't turn Whitey into the myth of Whitey, try tosanitize him, and buff him up into somebody he's not. He's a horrible killer, amonster. That was our worry, and that's the one thing we ask, is to be true tothat, to the story, the black mass.

How closely does theon-screen adaptation resemble what actually went down in those 20 or so years?
I don't keep track of it. Because I understand that fordramatic, film purposes, you're going to rearrange the time a little bit,you're going to compress characters, things like that. They have to invent dialogue.There's no way we ever had access to Whitey talking about his son, for example.

This story spans at least 20 years. The movie's two hours.Things have to change for the movie. I get thatI can put my arms around itintellectually. But still, as a journalist, part of me wishes everything couldbe as accurate as we know the story to be.

I really think the standard to judge it is: Is it true tothe spirit of the story? And in that, I think Johnny Depp nails Whitey Bulger,really captures his character, and all that we know about him.

Bulger's more recent mugshot, from 2011

Did you ever interactwith Johnny Depp? What was that like?
That was interesting. There was a first meeting that justseemed like, "Whoa, this is strange." When he was on set, he was in somestrange place between himself and Whitey. But yeah, a whole bunch of times. Wehad story meetings, and we were talking about how to play this scene, me andthe director and all the producers and Johnny. It just became part of thecreative, consulting work, and that was kind of neat.

He never played the prima donna thing. I don't know howoften they do this, but I happened to be on set his last day, and when theywere done for the day, he ended up giving a speech to everybody, saying, "Thereare a few movies that you never want to stop making. This is one of them."Everyone gave this big applause, and all these hugs. It felt pretty special tohim, and that was interesting to observe.

I'm sure that somethings in the movie are exaggerated, but the tale itself, the truth, is prettydisturbing. And it seems to only get worse as the story goes on. I imagine asyou're learning more and more about this, the journalist in you isecstaticyou're getting all this great information, it's getting more complex,dirtierbut then the person in you, that just had to be pretty horrifying to belearning all that.
The dark truth about this is horrifying. You get reallyworked up realizing that this wasn't a single instance in time, a single casethat went sour in terms of investigation, but that this was a way of life thatwent on for several decades, this culture of corruption. And it caused harmthat could be calculated, that could be quantified. Murders. But there's alsoincalculable harm to the city, to justice, law enforcement, to the public, tothe FBI as an institution. It's just so big, because it went on for so long.That's pretty scary, and that's the thing that always has given me pause: Howdid something like this go on for so long, and bleed in so many directions?

What kind of effectdid that have on you during the reporting of it all?
Journalists are trained to be skeptical, but there's a levelof disbelief that an agency like the FBIwhich is supposed to be the nation's toplaw enforcement agencycould be so corrupt, institutionally, for so long. Thisis an informant scandal, but the FBI's had other scandals as well. I mean theBureau's done a lot of good things in terms of public safety, but it is kind ofscary that throughout its history, with disturbing regularity, there are thesemajor, major scandals.

How did reportingthis story and writing this book change your life? I imagine that at the veryleast, in terms of your career, it was a pretty big shift?
I don't know if I can assess it. All I can say is, this wasone of the biggest stories that I was in and out of my career, andone of the most important ones I've worked on. But there are others I feelalmost as strong about. It is in that category of, "OK, this is what journalismis all about. Making a difference." And I was part of a reporting team that, Ithink, has made a difference in terms of the public understanding, and theexposing of something that was really, deeply wrong. In that way, it's beenreally important.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

Black Mass opens Friday, September 18 in theaters nationwide.



Everything We Know About The Murders of Hailey Dunbar-Blanchette and Terry Blanchette

0
0

Terry Blanchette and Hailey Dunbar-Blanchette. Photo via Facebook

An Amber Alert that captured nation-wide attention ended in the worst possible result Tuesday night, when the remains of two-year-old Hailey Dunbar-Blanchette were discovered a day after her dad Terry Blanchette, 27, was found murdered in his Blairmore, Alta. home.

Local man Derek James Saretzky, 22, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder in their deaths Wednesday morning, as well as one count of committing an indignity to a bodyHailey's body.

"She was smart, beautiful, the greatest child ever," Hailey's mother, Cheyenne Dunbar, 20, told reporters. "I don't know why anybody would do that to her."

Dunbar and Blanchette were together when Hailey was born, on Dec. 31, 2012, but they broke up last year and Dunbar moved to Edmonton. Blanchette stayed in Blairmore, a Rocky Mountain community of about 2,000 located several hours south of Calgary. The pair split custody of their daughter, and, according to Dunbar, got along well.

"We talked about everything. He called me, he texted me, he sent pictures. I sent pictures. It was always back and forth between us," she said. "Terry was an awesome father. He did everything he could for that little girl."

In the very early hours of Monday morning, Blanchette's neighbours heard a noise coming from his property; those who looked outside saw a white van peeling away.

Around 11 AM, Crowsnest Pass RCMP received a report of a sudden death and found Terry Blanchette dead in his home. Three hours later they issued an Amber Alert for Haileya slight toddler with straight brown hair and brown eyescovering Western Canada and Montana.

Dunbar said she heard her daughter was missing on Facebook.

"I had no clue what was going on, I had no clue she was missing, I had no clue what happened to her father," she told the media.

RCMP apprehended a 22-year-old suspect Tuesday and were questioning him in relation to Blanchette's death and Hailey's disappearance.

The Amber Alert remained in effect Wednesday, but at around 9 PM, as community members gathered for a vigil in Hailey's honour, news broke that her remains had been found in a rural area, a few kilometres from Blairmore.

Saretzky was charged the next morning.

Hailey's mother, Dunbar said she had once been close friends with accused murderer Saretzky but "I haven't talked with him in three years."

Speaking to reporters, her father Kevin Dunbar dismissed any possibility of his daughter being linked to the crime.

"She was in Edmonton when all of this happened," he said.

RCMP said Saretzky and Blanchette knew each other but did not provide details on their relationship. Neighbours said they didn't get along.

Blanchette worked as a cook in town, and had a rap sheet that included convictions for minor theft and assault, but had been trying to turn his life around after his daughter was born.

According to reports, Saretzky worked at a dry cleaner in town. He has previously been charged with theft and breaking and entering.

Saretzky's next court date is scheduled for Sept. 23 in Lethbridge, Alberta.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: NHL Defenceman Clayton Stoner Charged in BC Grizzly Bear Slaying

0
0

We suspect Clayton Stoner regrets this photo.

A defenceman for the Anaheim Ducks is being charged with illegally killing a grizzly bear in British Columbia. A photo of Clayton Stoner, originally from Port McNeil, BC, surfaced in 2013 showing him proudly holding the scruff of a drooping, dead bear whilst staring up at the heavens.

After the photo was leaked to the media, Stoner, who has possibly the most BC-centric surname of all time, released the following statement: "I applied for and received a grizzly bear hunting while hunting with my father, uncle and a friend in May. I love to hunt and fish and will continue to do so with my family and friends in British Columbia."

Stoner shot the bear halfway between Bella Coola and Bella Bella, an area in the Kwatna River Estuary. This area is know to be off-limits due to a ban issued by First Nations on trophy hunting.

Police allege that Stoner lied about being a BC resident. He's set to appear in court on October 9 and is being charged with five offences related to the incident, including knowingly making a false statement to obtain a licence, hunting out of season, and hunting without a licence.

However contentious, it is legal in BC to hunt grizzly bears with the proper licensing in season, but Stoner was allegedly violating the province's regulations under the Wildlife Act.

With just five goals and 364 penalty minutes in his NHL career, Stoner is a quintessential plug, but last we checked, being a goon isn't a gateway to allegedly killing majestic grizzly bears out of season.

Stoner signed a four-year contract with the Ducks in 2014 worth $13-million. Bleacher Report says it is the worst contract on the team but hey, it should be enough for an OK lawyer.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.



VICE, QC: The Real Mohawk Girls

0
0

Mohawk Girls is a comedy-drama show on APTN following the lives of four women on a Mohawk reserve. We meet the women in Kahnawake, the Mohawk community where the show is shot, to talk about the series' themes (inter-cultural relationships, the reserve's controversial "marry out, move out" policy, the preservation of Aboriginal culture) but also to discuss the fact that this is one of the first times First Nations women are given a chance to shine in such edgy material.

Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images