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Election Class of 2016: David Daleiden Is Revolutionizing Anti-Abortion Activism

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Who is he? David Daleiden, 26, anti-abortion activist, hidden-camera investigator, and founder of an organization called The Center for Medical Progress.

Do you know him? No. But if you've recently used either one of the hashtags #DefundPP or #StandWithPP then you're participating in the firestorm ignited by Daleiden's creation, "Human Capital." That was the name of the video he released back in July, which claimed to prove that Planned Parenthood was selling fetus body parts for profit.

Is he effective? Depends what you mean by "effective." In the immediate aftermath of the video's release, House Republicans launched an investigation into possible misdeeds committed by Planned Parenthood staff members. That investigation has involved congressional hearings, including one in which Planned Parenthood's president appeared in person to face down the politicians who most vehemently oppose everything she stands for.

But while the bill that stopped the government shutdown contains no funding for Planned Parenthood, technically speaking, that bill also won't defund Planned Parenthood either. Moreover, it looks increasingly like Planned Parenthood could bounce back from all this and emerge from the whole fetal tissue debacle with its funding intact.

Still, champions of the anti-abortion cause haven't been this energized in yearsand that's largely thanks to Daleiden's efforts. His videos have moved the abortion debate back to the top of the Republican Party's agenda, at a time when the GOP Establishment was trying to move away from the Culture Wars. Expect Republican candidates to whip themselves into a frenzy over this until the national conventions, to the gleeful delight of Democrats who know they can spend the rest of the election dining out on liberal outrage over the "War on Women."

Why does he matter? Before Daleiden came along, standard-issue anti-abortion activism had become maudlin and irritating at bestthink bumper stickers and picket signs with nauseating photos.

Not too long ago, such activism tended to give way to straight-up terrorism: the first murder of an abortion doctor in the US occurred in 1993, and sparked a series of successful and unsuccessful shooting incidents and clinic bombings throughout the 1990s; the most recent incident occurred in 2009, with the murder of Kansas City abortion doctor George Tiller. Since then, though, abortion activists have realized that the violence was creating martyrs, and the tactics have largely fallen out of favor.

By contrast, David Daleiden comes off as clear-eyed, smart, and relatively rational. He refers to himself as a "citizen journalist" in the press kit available on the Center for Medical Progress' website. The site itself is written in clear, unsentimental terms. "We are concerned about contemporary bioethical issues that impact human dignity, and we oppose any interventions, procedures, and experiments that exploit the unequal legal status of any class of human beings," his organization's About Us page says.

He's occasionally been in hot water for making himself a nuisance at Planned Parenthood clinics beginning in 2009, but has no apparent record of committing actual crimes, or of harming anyone. In fact, his personal and professional history are pretty boring, with his past teachers referring to him in terms like "bright and able," and calling one of his papers on abortion a "tour de force."

With Daleiden's help, conservatives have taken back some of the rhetorical authority they ceded to liberals long ago. Opposition to abortion was recently viewed purely as an emotional or religious objection, and part of that "War on Women." Now Republicans seeking the nomination are embracing the abortion issue with gusto, believing, perhaps for the first time, that they can put Democrats on defense.

Who likes him? While Daleiden may be Clark Kent-level squeaky clean, the same can hardly be said of some of his most ardent supporters. Troy Newman, one of the co-founders of The Center for Medical Progress was one of the activists who singled out George Tiller, and tracked his locations before he was murdered. Another of Daleiden's biggest fans is the doxxing-happy conservative blogger Chuck C. Johnson. "David's not just a friend; he's a great friend," Johnson wrote in a blog post about their college years. Apparently Daleiden is singlehandedly responsible for Johnson's conversion to Catholicism, and also for changing his mind about abortion.

More importantly, though, the Republicans running for president like him. No one has been more outspoken in her admiration for his project than surging 2016 hopeful Carly Fiorina, although she got some of the facts wrong when she referenced "a fully formed fetus on the table, with its heart beating, its legs kicking."

Nearly every Republican candidate weighed in on Daleiden's video shortly after it debuted, but none seems as changed by it as is New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Christie cut funding for women's health in 2010, but blamed the economic crisis, rather than any deep-seated beliefs. By September of 2015, though, Christie seemed more enthusiastically pro-life than the visiting pope, releasing an abortion-centric TV commercial in which he calls every life a "precious gift from God."

Who opposes him? As you might expect, the folks at Planned Parenthood don't care for him much. In a press statement released shortly after the "Human Capital" was released, the reproductive health nonprofit accurately referred to the Center for Medical Progress as "a well funded group established for the purpose of damaging Planned Parenthood's mission," and referred to Daleiden's work as "a heavily edited, secretly recorded videotape."

Editorial departments at seemingly every left-leaning newspaper have also denounced Daleiden and his video. The New York Times called "Human Capital" a "dishonest attempt to make legal, voluntary and potentially lifesaving tissue donations appear nefarious and illegal." The Los Angeles Times called their narrative a "total crock." The Washington Post said they were waging a "propaganda campaign."

What's his next move? In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Daleiden made it sound as though it's going to be a while before there's another big hidden camera investigation. After all, he spent 30 months in deep cover making "Human Capital." For the time being, it sounds like he's just waiting for the ensuing investigations to play outand perhaps make him a legend, should they go his way. But that might take a while. "Baby-parts trafficking is really complex and multi-layered," he told Bloomberg.

Still, Daleiden may well pop up again during the 2016 election as the personification of a new, more intellectual pro-life position. Much as Joe the Plumber added some much-needed color to the discussion of taxes during the 2008 presidential race, Daleiden could show up on the campaign trail and ambush Democrats. Liberal politicians and their supporters are used to falling back on feminism when cornered about the abortion issue, and their arguments can usually be boiled down to a "woman's right to choose." Now they'll have an opponent who can coldly recite some facts about fetal development, and if they're not ready for him, it might get them all befuddled in YouTube-friendly ways.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Illustration by Drew Lerman. Follow him on Twitter.


The New Kitty Genovese Documentary Is Like a Visualized 'Serial'

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All photos courtesy of Five More Minutes Productions

It was a case that transfixed New York, and the world. The sensational tale of urban apathy would later spawn 9-1-1 and countless sociology theses, psychology books, and conferences on thetopicit was even used as justification for the Iraq War.

Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was the beautiful young woman who was fatallystabbed in Kew Gardens, Queens, on her walk home from work late one night in1964, while 38 neighborsyes, 38watched or heard her blood-curdling cries forover a half hour. Some closed their windows; others went to bed. Butultimately, they all did one thing: nothing.

Or, at least, that's what we're led to believe.

James Solomon's new documentary The Witness follows BillGenovese, Kitty's younger brother. Early on, we see Bill lugging his wheelchair up the stairs, opening doors in the apartment building that overlooks the exact spot where Kittywas stabbed by Winston Moseley, a repeat rapist and murderer, some 50-odd yearsago. Bill stares out the window at a city vastly different than where it was in1964: richer, safer, and certainly more vigilant, the subway safety phrase "if yousee something, say something" now a part of its DNA.

Solomon has been working on this film, which premieres nextTuesday at the New York Film Festival, for nearly a decade. It's a story aboutBillwho was six at the time of his older sister's deathmore so than Kitty. Immediatelywe're introduced to this sibling who cannot stomach the fact that 38 people witnessed his sister, and close friend, get murdered in cold blood just belowtheir windows, leaving her to die alone.

Nearly 50 years after Kitty's murder, with Solomon in tow, Bill decides to trackdown those neighbors in question, to find out why they did, or said, nothing,to learn what went through their head when Kitty screamed for help.

For most of his career, Solomon has been a true-crimescreenwriter; in fact, The Witness is hisdirectorial debut. And you can tell where his roots lie. With its film-noirish feel and deeply personal angle, the film flows in a way that is reminiscent of Chinatown.The Witness is shotpractically in the first person, with Bill in almost every shot, and narratingalmost every scene, as if he's telling us the story, not Solomon. In one take,he's combing through NYPD evidence files. In another, we are shown a panorama of his office:whiteboards of names, timelines, webs; photos of his sister with friends, orwith him together when they were growing up, dotting the wall.

It's like a visualized, yet more deeply personal Serial. Bill has the obsessiveinvestigative drive of Sarah Koenig, but holds the emotions of being thevictim's brother and an otherwise ordinary guy who was dealt this inconceivablehorror in his life.

And, like the famous podcast, we see, and are only left with, mostly obscured glimpses of the truth.

Over time, Bill comes to meet a neighbor who says that hismother ran downstairs to be with Kitty in her final moments, as she wasbleeding to death in the vestibule after being stabbed by Moseley a second time(realizing nobody would do anything to save Genovese, the killer horrifyinglycame back to finish the job).

Another witness tells Bill that she did, in fact, call thepolice, but they said there were already aware of the stabbing. The NYPD's calllog shows no such call, casting uncertainty on both the Department and theneighbor's perhaps fictionalized, Brian Williams-like memory.

Regardless, the accounts, and the neighbor's sworn testimonysaying she ran downstairs to be with her close friend Kitty, directlycontradict the original New York Times front-pagestory that made the story famous, written by now-deceased reporter Martin Gansberg.In that account, Kitty died alone, with no one coming to help her. The headlineread: "37 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police."

We soon learn of the holes in that Times report; the first paragraph is shown being broken down byevidence that Bill has compiled. The infamous number 38, for the most part, could be wrong: It's unclear who saw and heard what, and there are recent reports that the number could have been 49 or even more. It's also unclear whatthe motives were of A. M. Rosenthal, the influential editor whodiscovered and assigned the story.

The New Yorkerwriter Nicholas Lemann wrote recently, "Rosenthal's convictions about thecrime were so powerful that he was impervious to the details of what actuallyhappened." In the documentary, he is portrayed as a man riddled with anxietyabout the direction society was changing; extremely concerned, in large part,with a Genovese-induced term, "Bad Samaritan." So maybe he stuck to this story,and its fame, that fostered his conviction, regardless of the facts.

When we see Bill sit down with Rosenthal, the retired newseditor refuses to refute the original reporting of 38 witnesses. Or that thereporter may have not told the whole story, or told it correctly, for that matter(something the Times later admitted to, over 30 years later). He does, however, compare thestory of Kitty Genovese to that of a jewel: We see a different light every timewe look at it. And, in many ways, the same thing can be said of Rosenthal andthe media that digested what he said whole.

But again, this is a film about Bill Genovese, and his struggleto come to grips with what whatever happened to his sister that brisk Marchnight. In one telling scene, we see him eating dinner with his two brothers,Frank and Vincent, and their wives. Bill is discussing new developments andleadshow he's trying to interview Moseley, who's on death row in upstate NewYorkwhen Frank interjects, "When will you be satisfied?" It is clear that thetwo older brothers have moved on, even if they didn't want to.

Bill, of course, hasn't: He tells his brother that one questionhas led to another, and another question has led to five. The short answer: "Idon't know." And the subtext: "Maybe never."

On VICE News: The Murdered Women in the State of Mexico:

Over time, we come to realize that Bill's entire life has beenhaunted by the murder of Kitty. He went to Vietnam because he didn't want to bean innocent bystander, like the neighbors who fell asleep to his sister'sscreams. The war that left him permanently handicappedsomething wehave to constantly see him deal with, over and over again.

When we are shown the endless archival tapes of Kitty'slifedancing in the park; smoking cigarettes with her friends; driving aroundin her red Fiatit's as if we're watching Bill watch them. When we are shown illustrations of Kitty's buildingthe angles, the apartment numbers, thedistanceit's as if we're in Bill's mind, recreating the crime scene tomake some sense of it. We even fill in the expressions that he cannot produceat one point: When I watched the film in the theater, the audience jeered at aneighbor who seemed clueless to find out that she was included in the 38 number, while Bill is stuck staring at her, silent but clearly not bemused.

In many ways, we're witnesses to him.

And that's the thing about TheWitness, its strength is in the lingeringquestions you're left with at the ending credits. You're left wondering whenthis man will achieve closure. You feel terrible that this young woman was rippedaway from her family and lovera secret girlfriend the family never knew, normet, until Bill doesfor no apparent reason. And, most importantly, you're lefthoping that the truth of Kitty Genovese's death is still out there somewhere.

Follow John on Twitter.

The Witness premieres Tuesday, October 6, at the New York Film Festival.

The Latest Mass Shooter Was Apparently an Anti-Religious Zealot Who Sought Companionship Online

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Photo via Flickr user Mika Jrvinen

On Thursday afternoon, a 26-year-old with a shaved head and blocky glasses packed six guns and plenty of ammunition and headed to Umpqua Community College in Oregon. From there, he walked into a humanities building, and then into a public speaking class, where he reportedly asked students to stand and state their religions.

"Good, because you're a Christian, you're going to see God in just about one second,'" he said, the father of a victim who survived told CNN.

Nine people were killed, and several more injured. The shooter, who was wearing body armor and is not being named in this story, later died in a confrontation with policeand fits the twisted profile of many recent mass shooters in America.

Read: Why the Media Shouldn't Name Mass Shooters Over and Over Again

Before he entered that classroom, the alleged killer didn't talk much. To his neighbors, he was just a quiet loner who wore the same military-style outfit every day and couldn't muster much more than an anxious "hi." In fact, the only person he was ever seen with was his protective mother, according to the New York Times.

If the man was looking for companionship, he did it online, specifically on a singles website for people who identify as "Not Religious, But Spiritual." The username of an connected to his email address on that site referenced Nazi Germany, and his profile alluded to a reverence to Satanism. The user also claimed that he enjoyed "killing zombies" and "didn't like organized religion."

On MySpace, the alleged shooter, who was reportedly born in England, expressed admiration for the Irish Republican Army and posed with a gun. Right now, there's speculation as to whether or not he warned about the attack on 4Chan. "Some of you guys are alright," a user posted on October 1. "Don't go to school tomorrow if you are in the Pacific Northwest."

And, according to the Times, the shooter apparently authored a blog containing a post that glorified the former TV anchor who shot an anchorwoman and a camera man on August 26. "On an interesting note, I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when the spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are," the killer allegedly wrote . "A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone."

Although the latest mass shooter's name is now making headlines across the country, local law enforcement in Oregon said in the immediate aftermath that they wanted to deny him infamy.

"I will not name the shooter," Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said in a press conference Thursday evening. "I will not give him the credit he probably sought prior to this horrific and cowardly act."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Actually, Charlotte Church Might Be Right About Syria and Climate Change

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BBC One "Question Time" screencap via The Telegraph

Charlotte Churchwho Americans might remember as that precocious singer with the "Voice of an Angel" from the late 90s and early aughtsgot a pretty cold reaction when she went on Friday's episode of the British panel show Question Time and blamed the current conflict in Syria on climate change.

During a conversation about the Islamic State, Syria's political situation, and the causes and possible solutions to the nearly five-year-long conflict there, Church took it upon herself to let out a big info dump about how climate change caused a catastrophic Syrian drought from 2006 through 2011 that affected the agriculture industry in the country. She followed that up with a pretty poorly constructed run-on sentence:

So there was a mass migration from rural areas in Syria, into the urban centers, which put more strain, and y'know there wasresources were scarce, et ceterawhich, apparently, did contribute to, um, to the conflict there today, and so, y'know, when we're looking aty'know no issue is an island, and we're trying to look at all the different factors in this, so I think that we also need to look at what we're doing to the planet and how that might actually cause more conflict in the world.

The crowd responded to her comment by doing an impression of a graveyard; and partway through her monologue, host David Dimbleby let out the sort of "alright," you might say to your grandmother when she's talking in a restaurant, and starting to get a teeny bit racist. Church apparently felt the burn later on, and started tweeting about it.

British publications like The Daily Mail, and The Telegraph excerpted the clip, and got plenty of mileage out of it, with commenters asking things like, "Did she read that in her colouring books?" and "What did you expect from this stupid little girl?" (Church is 29 years old).

Her timing and delivery were awkward without a doubt, but did she say anything inaccurate?

Colin Kelley, a climate scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara called Church's monologue "basically correct." Kelley co-wrote the recent paper "Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought," published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. He was quick to point out, though, that his paper never said climate change was the sole cause of Syria's recent horrors. "She didn't say that, and we didn't say that," Kelley said.

Watch VICE News' award-winning documentary on the Islamic State:

The chain of events that led up to all this war and strife occurred during and after a very real drought in Syria that lasted from 2007 to 2010. Long story short: farming as a way of feeding your family pretty much vanished in the country's northeastern "breadbasket" region, and millions of farmers and their families picked up their stuff, andalong with hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugeesmoved west to Syria's big cities. So when the Arab Spring came to Syria in 2011, cities were overcrowded, and resources including water were scarce, helping lead to the dissatisfaction and unrest that sparked the civil war that's still going on today.

But the standard "that's weather, not climate!" objection could apply here, raising the question of whether Syria's drought was really caused by climate change. That's the crux of Kelley's paper. He looked into the records, and mapped Syria's weather patterns onto the patterns predicted by climate change models, and found that "precipitation changes in Syria are linked to rising mean sea-level pressure in the Eastern Mediterranean, which also shows a long-term trend." In other words, Kelley told us, "there's a very strong reason to believe that climate change contributed to the severity of this drought."

Syria and the surrounding region experience wet years and dry years, and that's nothing new. But according to Kelley, three out of Syria's four worst droughts have occurred over the last 40 years. Along with increases in temperature and certain kinds of atmospheric pressure, Kelley says the pattern "lines up with the time evolution of increasing greenhouse gases."

Similar ridicule was heaped on former Maryland Governor and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley last month when he said that climate change was linked to the rise of the Islamic State. Afterward, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called O'Malley's comment "absurd," and said it proved that "no one in the Democratic Party has the foreign policy vision to keep America safe."

Politifact rated O'Malley's statement "mostly true," and so did Kelley. "We don't mention Islamic State in our paper, but it's a pretty fair characterization," he said.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Brooklyn Senior Idol Is Like 'American Idol' but More Glamorous

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What would American Idol look like without the money, the fame, the celebrity judges, the youth, the television coverage, and the legions of fans? It would probably resemble a bunch of senior citizens gathering in a high school auditorium in south Brooklyn to sing their hearts out in front of a crowd of not many.

That's what Brooklyn Senior Idol is. The contest, hosted by State Senator Marty Golden, is now in its ninth yearcontestants, who must be 50 or older, will compete for a prize of $500 on Saturday night armed with their covers of Elvis and Frank Sinatra tunes.

As adorable as that sounds, the show ran into a snag this summer when the company that owns the rights to AmericanIdol threatened to take legal action against the outer-borough competition for infringing on its copyright. But that dispute got sorted out and the name remains the same.

The finals are tonight at 7 PM, but photographer Amy Lombard was on the scene at the auditions Monday to document hopefuls belting out their favorite hits.

All photographs by Amy Lombard

Amy Lombard is a photographer living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Follow her on twitter.

Juliet Jacques Carves Out Her Own Space in 'Trans: A Memoir'

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Image via Verso Books

"If you articulate an outsider critique well enough, you stop being one," writes Juliet Jacques in her new book, Trans: A Memoir, which was released by Verso on September 22. The book documents Jacques's life, leading up to and after her gender reassignment surgery. The UK-based writer had already been writing on the subject for her popular Guardian column, Transgender Journey, where she detailed the process of transition as well as provided an appraisal of contemporary gender politics. Trans covers broader ground, delving into her own life and experiences to draw out a political and theoretical framework for understanding gender identities. Jacques, who studied film and history at school, uses film and literary references to frame an analysis of trans representations in pop culture and media. Short, essay-like interludes titled "A History of the Sex Change" and "Gender Outlaws: The Birth of Transgender Theory" help contextualize her deeply personal narrative within the larger history of trans lives.

Trans also paints a vivid picture of Jacques's time in the 90s punk music scenes in the UK and the state of British leftist politics. Jacques now lives in London, where she talked to VICE about her new book, the bureaucracy of gender reassignment surgery, and why she felt excluded from the feminist movement for a very long time.

VICE: Why did you decide to turn the Guardian series into a book?
Juliet Jacques: The Guardian column got commissioned in the summer of 2009. It went better than I was expecting. They let me do it for longer than I expected and people responded to it much better than I had hoped. After that, I repeatedly got asked about turning it into a book. I always said, "I actually don't really want to." I don't really see an existential need for it. I felt there was a need for a blog, because there wasn't an obvious starting place for a young trans person. It wasn't like how it was when I was 10, when we didn't have the internet and we lived in a small town and there was no info anywhere and there was a government law, Section 28, saying you couldn't talk about these things in schools. By 2009, there was the opposite problem. There was so much stuff online. It was so decentralized, and I thought, God, if I was young, I'd be baffled. I thought about what I would want if I was 16 or 18 now. In the book, there are lots of allusions to much more interesting and left-field writers than me. But it's accessible. My dad's read it.

If it were just my journey, it would be pointless. What makes the book worthwhile, I think, are all those theoretical questions. What a lot of trans memoirs don't really do, or historically haven't done, is explore that space in between or outside male or female, and cover pre-transitional material. I just found it much more interesting.

Did you realize that the book would coincide with this rise in visibility of trans people, like Janet Mock and Laverne Cox?
No. I started doing the proposal in September 2012three years ago now. It took ages to get commissioned. It got commissioned, I think, July 2013. By just some sort of weird fluke, it hit at the right time. In the five years since I started doing the Guardian series, things have changed so much. The book might just hit at the moment between there being an explosion of interest in trans and queer issues, and my perspective becoming irrelevant.

But, actually, a lot of outsiders aren't immersed in these issues. There hasn't been a really big transition narrative in the UK in a really long time. Janet Mock's book does the same thing that I'm trying to do, which is bring a lot of culture and theory and politics, and hook it onto a personal story. I thought was really great.

There wasn't anybody for me. So I had to just carve out my own space, and I did that through writing.

In Trans, your transition seemed like a very bureaucratic process at some points. You detailed the number of forms you had to fill out and the government literature you had to read, and the interviews you had to do. What was your reason for depicting that side of transitioning?
I was working for the National Health Service (NHS) for years, all throughout the period of the transition, I was very familiar with those structures. I was working for a commissioning body, so everyday I was surrounded by this healthcare commissioning culturetalk of budgets, meetings where you discuss who's eligible for what sort of treatments, how it will be funded, and how it will be trammeled. So I was very, very aware of that stuff.

I also grew up reading a lot of Kafka, and a lot of these dystopian novels where people are just trying to navigate incomprehensible, impenetrable bureaucracies. They were a big influence in how I think and how I write. But the bureaucratic process of the NHS for the gender reassignment program, it was just a load of hoops to jump through, really. I wanted to bring in a sense of the everyday surrealism of that process, because it was so slow. My main memory of the transition was just waiting to have that opportunity to say the things I needed to say to make the thing that needed to happen, happen. But I hope I was generous enough to the medics, because they get a really bad rapnot always unfairly, but for the most part, they were medical professionals working within a system that they hadn't designed.

You did say, in the book, that when being interviewed by these medical professionals you knew what to say in order to get what you wanted...
There was a certain narrative that I felt I had to give to them. It was a very strange process. Trans people tend to be expert patients. We find our communities and we talk to people who've been through the system already. So, to a larger extent, you do kind of know what you have to say. It's very odd.

The emotional exhaustion you felt by it came through in your writing, especially the constant fear you had just going outside to get your groceries.
For the first couple of years, but particularly in the summer, there would just be this expectation that someone would hurl abuse, or worse, at me. After the first couple of years, I got the hormones, and physically, things became a bit easier. I felt a bit more comfortable with myself, had worked out how to comport myself in public to minimize the likelihood of abuse. I moved to London because I'm more anonymous here as well. It doesn't really happen now. But there's psychological residue, and it's pretty intense. I have a fair amount of passing privilege compared to some other people who have it a lot harder than I do.

One of the toughest things psychologically is trying to work out when things are coming from a place of ignorance or when they were genuinely malicious, and how you respond in every situation is slightly different. Some situations are just malicious, but if you respond in-kind, you're going to get a kicking. There are plenty of times when three blokes came along and just hurled transphobic abuse and/or objects at me. I was like, I could answer back to this but I'm not going to win. Of course, that becomes psychologically draining, because it makes you angry. When the anger has nowhere to go, it becomes depression. That becomes incorporated into your body language, and then you look kind of vulnerable and like an easy target, and that makes it worse. It took me a year or two to get out of that.

Photo courtesy of Juliet Jacques

You were very intentional in your book about avoiding the "born in the wrong body" narrative. What do you think is the problem with that description?
It's not that I think that it's inaccurate, per se. There are plenty of people for whom it effectively conveys how they feel. My problem with it is that it's become a bit of a clich. The sensation of gender dysphoria is very difficult to convey in the same way that, like, physical pain is very difficult to convey. Physical pain is at least localized.

Also, I'm of a generation where by the early 90s coverage of trans stuff in the mainstream media was still very bad. I was aware from quite an early age that the possibility of modifying my body existed. At that point, I felt it was social things that were stopping me from changing my body. I felt maybe we should put the focus on a transphobic society, and what institutions and attitudes and prejudices are governing what people are or aren't allowed to do with their bodies, rather than blaming the body itself. There was some deep, visceral physical sense that the body wasn't as I wanted it. But it's the idea of entrapment that I had a problem with.

The kind of written and verbal language that we have around this stuff is completely inadequate. Hence, the very heated arguments you see online about what terminology to use around identities and variance. I'm sure the language I use in this book will be very out of date very soon. The language doesn't cooperate with people's lived experiences yet. That's why I'm so interested in film and I write about film a lot in the book, because, obviously, the camera circumvents the need for language and circumvents the need for people to define themselves in concrete. It allows a lot more fluidity.

You say that there's as much transphobia on the left wing as there is on the right. In what ways did you feel left out of leftist or feminist movements?
You had a brand of feminism that explicitly excluded and undermined and attacked trans people. That's changing in academic and activist and more left-field circles, but it was still very prevalent in liberal-left mainstream media. The discourse on trans people, in the Guardian in particular, was really dominated by that perspective still. Because that was my entry point, I didn't really look into other forms of feminism. I'd looked into trans and queer writing, but I hadn't really connected them to feminism. I saw them as antagonistic streams rather than things that were sort of crossing in and out of each other and interacting with each other. Within radical queer spaces, I never felt that welcome either, because as a kind of femme trans woman, I was never made to feel like them. There wasn't anybody for me. So I had to just carve out my own space, and I did that through writing.

You talk about the tokenizing impulse of editors who only want you to write about LGBTQ issues. Do you still have that problem as a writer?
Not so much anymore. You know, my background was in writing about film and literature, and then I fell into writing about trans stuff and then found that people wanted that from me because that was what I was asked to do. I would say yes, because I needed to build a profile and needed the money, but also it felt politically important. It felt irresponsible to say 'no' to these things. At the time, I thought, if I don't do it, who will? I don't feel like that anymore, because there are a lot more people.

Just after I started doing the Guardian series, I just did loads of sports blogging, and I wrote about film again. And I did all of that, more or less, for free, because I just wanted to build up a profile in those spaces. That was a difficult option. The easier option would have been to be like, 'Oh yeah, trans rights, I'm doing that.' At first, it felt irresponsible to not write about trans issues when I had the platform. But then I thought, no. I hope it's showing young trans people that you can be in culture or in media and you don't have to be trammeled into doing this one thing. Your identity is you, but it's not all that you are.

Follow Tasbeeh on Twitter.

'Romantic Story' Is an Art Book About the Horrors of Being in Love

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All illustrations courtesy of Heather Benjamin

Heather Benjamin's art is often both hopelessly romantic and overtly disgusting. The Providence-based illustrator (and frequent VICE contributor) regularly depicts women crying over broken hearts, couples looking into each other's eyes mawkishly, and other images reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein or 50s cartoonsbut the subjects are generally covered with insects and varicose veins or discharge is erupting from their various orifices.

Her intricate drawings, created the old-fashioned way with pencil and ink, reference the type of "over-the-top girly imagery and emotions" found in vintage media, but the way she embeds them with visceral, confrontational quirks reflects her own feelings about femininity and the human form. Benjamin's characters are beautiful and the scenes she creates can be sexy, but they're equally revolting and emotionally unstableas if she's balancing the erotic and the erratic. She's explored such ideas in two books (on top of countless self-published zines), Sad Sex and Exorcise Book, and is continuing her focus on the female experience in her third, Romantic Story, released in September at the New York Art Book Fair.

VICE caught up with one of our favorite illustrators to chat about the connections among identity, intimacy, and anxiety, as well as what genuine romance looks like to her.

VICE: Do the drawings in this book stand out from the rest of your work, or is this more of a continuation of your earlier stuff?
Heather Benjamin: Thematically,this body of work is pretty congruent with my work as a whole. I've alwaysfocused on the female experience, especially examining things like anxiety,sexuality, body image, and intimacy. What set this group of images apart frommy previous work was my interest in bringing an analysis of things likejealousy and nostalgia into the mix. I always felt like my work before was verymanic and in-the-moment; this body of work feels like a reminiscence to me.

Some of myprimary source material for Romantic Story was the classic romancecomics of the 1950s/60s, which are just brimming with over-the-top girlyimagery and emotionsall the classic kiss panels, girls throwing themselvesonto their beds to weep over their lost loves, etc. I was particularlyinterested in this classic composition that's seen on a lot of the covers ofthose comics where two figures in the background are embracing while a lonelygirl in the foreground looks wistfully at them, shedding a single tear. Istarted looking at these pieces and feeling like there was already a reallykindred spirit and similarity in my work, both literally in a visual sense, butalso in the feelings of feminine anguish and jealousy that I was trying toconvey. It made a lot of sense to me to start working directly from some ofthat imagery, and combining it with some of my previous visual ideas.

Watch: Talking to the Directors of the Austrian Horror Film 'Goodnight Mommy'

I'm curious about the title. Do you think of it as a "story," e.g. something with a narrative?
Actually, thetitle is taken directly from one of the romance comics I was influenced bywhile making the work for the book. Romantic Story was a serial comicpublication. I decided to co-opt the name for my book directly from that sinceI loved how simple it was, and found the re-contextualization of it sort ofnicely tongue-in-cheek. My book isn't about romance in a conventional,swoon-worthy way; it's about the anxieties and manic emotions that manifestthemselves in psychotic patterns over and over throughout the course of atumultuous intimate relationship. About obsession and complication andeverything getting totally twisted and painful. So I liked theoversimplification of Romantic Story as a title.

And yeah, Iliked it too because I do think of this book as a "story." In asimilar way to my previous work, I care about constructing a narrative, but notnecessarily an obvious or totally linear one. Through the way my single imagesare organized, I hope to convey a sort of progression of emotions that can beunderstood, but not necessarily an obvious storyline. I do feel that thisparticular book has a beginning/middle/end, but I'd say the beginning and endare single images and the rest of it constitutes the middle. I put a lot ofimportance on which images I used to start and end the book, since I think theyare really important in shaping the fuller narrative.

On Broadly: What Happens When a Turner PrizeNominated Artist Leads an Insanity Workout

One thing I love about your work is that it's veryintimate and often erotic, but also disgusting and foul. You visualize sexuality in such avisceral and even honest way. Can you tell me about your approach to illustrating the human form?
My process ofdrawing the human body is sort of a dichotomous thing. On the one hand, I lovethe human formI find it beautiful, and I enjoy the act of mark-making, soillustrating the body is an enjoyable and meditative action for me. But, muchmore than that, it's also cathartic. Although I find the body beautiful, I'mmore often repulsed or angered by it in one way or another, whether that's dueto things like body dysmorphia or just those really trippy and dark momentswhere you're too aware of your own flesh and meat.

Shame and anxiety are a bigpart of the experience of having a body for me, too, so I'm working with thoseideas as wellcomfort and acceptance in nudity versus feeling toouncomfortable in your own skin to even see your own body naked, let aloneothers. Specifically as a woman, I feel manicabout my physical form. I'm ecstatic at times to be female and to embodyeverything that goes along with that, and the next minute I feel explosive andswollen and leaky and out of control. I guess it is confrontational in thatI'm directly addressing and hashing out my complicated feelings about my ownbody as well as others' every time I draw a human form.

How do you create a work from start to finish?
I'm pretty old-fashioned as far as how I create my work, which is something I pride myself on. I mostly draw on Bristol board or other heavy papers. I use pencil to vaguely outline what I'm going to be making, then go back in with either super fine pens or brush and ink. I don't create any imagery on the computer, ever. The only times I use the computer for my work is when I'm preparing something for print and need to fine-tune the contrast because my scanner isn't so greator when I'm working on an illustration commission that's going to be displayed on the internet.

This is all partially due to the fact that I'm not super computer literate, so even if I wanted to make some multi-layered computer drawing with a tablet in Photoshop, I probably wouldn't really know where to start. That being said, I really have zero interest in doing that. I don't like the aesthetic of artwork created on the computer. I care way too much about line work, mark-making, and the physical presence of my pieces to ever be making things from scratch on the computer. I know this is a cranky old lady thing to say, but it feels like cheating to me, when people make their work from start to finish in Photoshop with a tablet or whatever. You're not going through all the suffering that's necessary if you aren't dealing with things like accidentally spilling ink all over your page or smearing a line every so often, in my opinion. I don't think you're growing as an artist if you always have the option to control-Z whatever you mess up.

"I'm psyched if even just a few people look at one of my drawings and are like, 'That's how it is!'"

Although you might not be thinking about the reader's perspective while making your work, what would be a fulfilling emotional or intellectual response someone might have while looking through Romantic Story?
It's truethat when I'm making my work, I'm not really considering the viewer at all. Mywork is created completely as fulfillment for myself, in order to sort ofrelease and articulate my emotions. That said, obviously I do care about whatpeople get from my work to an extent, otherwise I wouldn't bother making itpublic.

The best iswhen peopleusually it's women, but not alwayssay that my work reallyresonates with them for this or that reason, and we can get into a really greatconversation about being able to relate to each other's experiences. Like when it's hard to articulate a thought, and then somebodysays it in exactly the right way and you're like, "THAT'S what I meant!" I'm psyched if even just a few people look at one of my drawingsand are like, "That's how it is!"

Whatis the most memorable romantic gesture you've witnessed or experienced?
I've been with my partner for a pretty long timeand the thing that just always floors me and makes me swoon is the experienceof really growing together. Working on the things about yourself that you wantto improve upon, and being able to do that successfully with the help andsupport of another person, as well as being that person for them, is reallydifficult, but in the moments when it happens and is visible it's reallyincredible. I guess most of the time it's sort of behind the scenes, but thenwhen it manifests itself, that's the time when I think you can really feel likeyou're connected to another person in an otherworldly way. Witnessing anotherperson's growth alongside you as well as experiencing your own as a result ofthem being there for you is pretty romantic to me.

See more of Heather's work on her website, and order a copy of Romantic Story here.

Follow Zach on Twitter.

What It's Like to Be an Interior Designer for the One Percent

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Image via Flickr User Barney Bishop

A friend of mine works as an interior designer at the type of firm that builds those grandiose homes that flood Pinterest and hifalutin architecture magazines. On top of celebrities, his clients include people who don't think twice before dropping more money than the average American makes in a year on Herms wallpaper (which is apparently a thing).

The last time I spoke with him, he was telling me about a couple who asked if they could obtain a specialty bed frame that showed off their luxury brand mattress, which cost close to six figures. My friend (who asked to remain anonymous) was confounded by the request.Who would go into someone's bedroom and look under their covers to see the mattress?

Working as an interior designer, he explained, offered him a window into people's psyches, especially very, very wealthy people who's attitudes towards decorating their most personal spaces sometimes border on sociopathic and delusional. He said he's witnessed and benefited from the kind of conspicuous consumption that many might find detestable. I called him up to find out more about the lives of the extremely fortunate.

VICE: You're an interior designer, but what exactly do you do for your firm?
Anonymous: The firm I work at does both interior design and architecture, but I work on the design side. When a client comes to us, theyinitially express a certain end result they wish to achieve in regards tohow their home should look, or at least a direction. More often then not, thisdirection is communicated through reference imageswhat some may call a Pinterest nightmare. From there, we talk about existing furniturethey want to keep and put together a visual presentation that's outlinedroom by room. Each room includes inspiration images, specific furniture piecesthat we suggest, fabric choices, paint colors, etc. Then we figure out the budget and it goes on and on from there.

The ideal project is one that my firm starts from the ground up with a clean slate, and the client has no attachment to anything. Often for vacation homes we purchase everything from rugs, dining tables, and chandeliers to plungers, coffee mugs, doormats, and soap. My dream is a client that has no inhibitions and let's you run wild. The reality, however, is that we are always questioned and clients get nervous to try things they have never seen before or can't envision. After all, many people hire us precisely because they lack the vision themselves and need someone else to have it.

What types of clients do you work with?
We definitely work with a high-end clientele.Having an interior designer/architect is undeniable a luxury that only the verywealthy can afford. We rarely do work in apartments under $3 million, butgenerally they're worth much more than that. The most expensive I've worked onin New York cost around $15 million. We also do work in California and Europe, as well as a couple vacation destination spots.

That being said, as wealthy as everyonewe work for is, everyone wants an end product that requires morethan they are willing to spend. We have never had a client with an absolutelyunlimited budget, and everyone is shocked when we explain how much it will costto get the apartment or home they imagined in their heads.

Celebrities, in specific, arethe worst. Celebrities always want to trade publicity rightsmeaning we can use their name and photos of the job in a design magazine, or something similarin exchange for a reduced fee from our firm. Or, they want everything for free, which is not only obnoxious but frequently putsus in the awkward position of having to ask for favors on someone else'sbehalf.

Image via Flickr User Denise Carbonell

How did your firm gain its reputation?
People hire our firm because they are drawn not only to our final product, which they have either seen published or witnessed first hand, but also because they are attracted to who my bosses are as individuals and the lifestyle they lead. This is all cultured by social media and social circles, I think, which is a large reason why our business is so largely based off of referral. Having someone design your home is an extreme luxury and within that I think competition and status is deeply imbedded in the culture.

How does payment work with interior design?
We try not to do jobs with a furniture budgetless than $200,000 but sometimes it is hard to say no once you meet someone.Ideally, we would like budgets around $50,000 to $60,000 a room, and more is evenbetter. Billingvaries project to project.

For architecture, we charge a percentage overconstruction cost that's something between 20 percent and 30 percent. So if a project costs $1 million tobuild, we are paid $20,000 to $30,000. Design is similar. We also do mark-ups on furniture, but typically we either charge a flat designer fee or an hourly fee that can be close to $300 an hour. Wedecide upon the specifics of these conditions based on the clients overallbudget, but also how we perceive them to be as clients. If we know a client isgoing to be huge pain in the ass and take three weeks to pick a coffee table,then it is advantageous for us to charge hourly because we know they will takeup more of our time and usually they end up buying less.

Describe some of your clients to me. Are they quirkyor strange?
A lot of people hire a designer becausethey want someone to create a lifestyle or image for themselves that you maynot be otherwise be able to conceive otherwise. People never hire us justbecause they want new things. Rather, they have an idea in their mind ofwhat the ideal home or lifestyle is. It's interesting when people really specify how they want other people toperceive their home because it's often for superficial reasons.

For example, we designed this huge, specialty bookcasefor a client in the West Village. The person asked us to purchase books that would simply "look good" on the shelf. There's a site called Books by theFoot where you can buy books by color, size, topic, etc. Wepurchased books for this client based on size and color, but the books weretotally random, including romance novels that would embarrass most people if they were caught owning it. I left about 25 percent of the shelf empty so the client could fillit with her own books, but she said something like "It'd look better if youguys just filled it up yourself," implying she didn't own books or wasn'tplanning on reading them anyway. It'sodd getting asked to pick someone's personal collections like their books.

There are individual who wantgiant bookcases and are very specific about the kinds of books theywant. A bachelor may request 500 art books, but presently owns none. In hismind, he is the kind of guy who wants guests to think that art is aninterest of his when really it's not. It's a mask. Maybe he's maskingthat he really doesn't have any interests or taste of his own.

If you reside in a space that exudes a more 'successful' lifestyleboth materially and psychologicallythan in some way maybe that's a way to make that lifestyle a truer reality.

Here's another example: A singlebachelor wants to live under the guise that he is a family man whenhe isn't, or an even sadder version where he's so desperate to have afamily that he is willing to pay someone to physically build some component ofa family-friendly home in order to psychologically construct it for himself. We oncebuilt a home for a client where he wanted everything designed for twoa double vanity bathroom, double shower head, double closetsbut he had no wife, girlfriend, partner, or anything. We've had similar requests for kid's bedrooms when the client didn't have kids. A lot of friends in the industry have witnessed clients do similar things, too.

For more on the extremely wealthy, watch our doc 'Portrait of a Russian Oligarch':

Have you noticed any consistent personality trends in people who have a lot ofmoney and hire interior designers?
I think a lot of culture, especially right now, is focused onopulence and living outside of your means. Pretty much everyone comes to uswanting a look that they can't necessarily afford. Evenif a client is very wealthy, the home they want often exceeds that.

Does that make sense?
In a lot of ways, I can support that feeling. In my view, when aspace is more personal it has the possibility to influence the manner in whichyou live your life. If you reside in a space that exudes a more "successful"lifestyleboth materially any psychologicallythan in some way maybe that's away to make that lifestyle a truer reality? I like to think that spaces we helpour clients create are helping them achieve some sort of ideal regardless ofwhat that ideal might be.

I feel like maybe a lot of this comes off in a negative way, butpart of what makes my job so enjoyable is being able to create the ideal senseof what a certain individual or family thinks of as a "home," but can't otherwisecreate that idea for themselves.

Follow Zach on Twitter.


VICE Canada Reports: Canada's Waterless Communities: Neskantaga

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Canada has the world's second-largest supply of fresh water, but 169 First Nation communities have limited or no access to it. Nearly a quarter of the First Nations communities administered by Health Canada are currently without clean water. The alerts issued by the federal government range from "boil water advisories" going back more than 20 years to crippling "Do Not Consume" orders.

In part one, VICE went to Shoal Lake 40, a reserve only a few hours from Winnipeg that sits on a manmade island. The lake the reserve sits on supplies Winnipeg's drinking water, but Shoal Lake 40 has been under a boil water advisory for 17 years. In part two, we go to Neskantaga, a remote fly-in where the federal government opts to deliver rations of bottled water to rather than repair the treatment plant that would provide jobs and consistent water. VICE Canada meets with the chiefs, the political negotiators, and the young residents who have spent their whole lives without accessible, clean water.

Tattoo Artists Tell Us About the Weirdest and Worst Ink They've Ever Encountered

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Craig Jackman's tattoos. All images courtesy of the artists

Tattoos are fascinating objects, often so deeply personal in meaning that they can be nearly incomprehensible to an outsider. This usually is not an issue: who needs to understand what's been permanently implanted into the skin of your own body other than you?

The guy tattooing it on you, that's the fuck who.

At the risk of lapsing into tautology, it's literally a tattooer's job to tattoo stuff on people. They can tell the difference between a good tattoo idea and a bad one, and a great tattooer can work with a client to elevate what might have been a regrettable decision into a beautiful, high-quality piece of living art that its wearer will be proud to show off for the rest of his or her life.

But some ideas are beyond saving. If that's the case, maybe a tattooer will try to talk the client out of it, or they'll just say "ah, screw it" and give the poor sucker what they're asking for.

The point is, lots and lots of people have really bad tattoos. And because I am a loyal and forthright representative of VICE, I set out on a mission to get tattoo artists to tell me about those really bad tattoos. In my quest for knowledge, I found out that often, tattooers feel like the worst tattoos are just unoriginal, or ones that the recipient is eventually going to have to get covered up. There's really no such thing as an objectively shitty tattoo, just shitty people with dumb ideas.

Craig Jackman, AMERICAN ELECTRIC Tattoo Company - Los Angeles, CA

VICE: What do you think of the current state of tattooing?
Craig Jackman: Tattooing is safe nowgetting one is basically like getting a haircut. People come in every day and ask for the same thing. When I was first getting tattoos, I didn't want anything that anyone else had. There was an element of danger when you went into a tattoo shop. I remember going to a shop in Arizona that was doing branding and tattooing. There's nothing more disgusting than the smell of burning flesh.

The woman I just tattooed, she wanted some lettering, that's the big thing right now. I don't even know what it saidI don't actually read the words, I just trace them. At the moment the big thing is getting stuff on your ribs. It's always a quote from a poem or a line of just bollocks, always in script or typewriter font. At the shop, we keep all the lines and we stick 'em on the wall. We have a game where we try to write a song with the crap people get tattooed on them.

What's the most original request you've gotten?
I tattooed this guy who came in with a GI Joe doll. We tattooed the joints of the action figure on his arms and his hands, so it looked like he had doll arms. When we finished it, it looked fucking great. I really like the sense of humor in tattoos. It's great when you're doing a silly, clever thing. I like it when people put thought into their stupid ideas.

Ron Mor, The End Is Near - Brooklyn, NY

VICE: What do you consider a "strange" tattoo request?
Ron Mor: What we consider "strange" or "silly," we often find has to do with pop culture stuff. Recently, someone asked me to do a traditional portrait of a cat with the hair of Mary from There's Something about Mary.

Like, when Cameron Diaz has Ben Stiller's jizz in her hair?
Yeah. This tattoo was for an author, and in his book, the first thing that happens is a cat gets jizzed on. So it's to commemorate his own book; it was significant for him. Most of the time tattoos have a significance for the wearer, but sometimes even that wearer can agree that it's a silly idea.

Have you ever turned anyone down?
I've actually not had to get to that point. Everything is significant for someone for their own reasons, so we try to steer people in the right direction so that their idea is well-designed. As long as the tattoo is well-designed, we're happy to work on any idea.

What are some other great ones?
One tattoo was a traditional pinup girl, but the pinup girl was Darth Vader. It was a really sexy Darth Vader. Another was the musician Meatloaf riding a motorcycle, but his head was a slice of pizza. There was a banner that said, "I would do anything for a slice of pizza, but I won't do that."

Which tattoo are you most proud of having given?
I did a scar coverup on an amazing woman. She'd had a double mastectomy, and then got breast implants and wanted her entire torso covered. We gave her a corset with a shield in the middle. In the shield there was an owl. It helped her move on from a very difficult time in her life. That's what I'm most honored to have given someone.

LALO YUNDA - Brooklyn, NY

VICE: Do you have any odd stories from your early days of tattooing?
Lalo: When I first moved to New York, I didn't know anybody here. I had no connections, nothing. I did tattoos in a really shitty shop from six in the afternoon to four in the morning. You can only imagine all the people that would come and get tattooed. I remember a dude walking in. He was this tiny, chubby Russian. He was a little bit drunk, and he wanted a six-pack tattooed on him. And I was like, "WHAT?" I think he had like $150 or $200 on him. I was thinking, $200 is not enough money, because I'm going to have to do shading (to make it look realistic), like he's an extra in 300.

But this shop being the kind of shop it was, there was always a guy who was willing to do whatever. So this other guy says, "No problem!" He took a fucking ballpen, drew one line going down the middle, three lines going across, and two lines on the top, like a grid. Then he traced over it. It took like 20 minutes, and it was in red. I was like, "No fucking way! This guy's going to murder you." The guy got up, and he was a bouncy little fucker! He was so excited. He was looking at himself in the mirror like he was so happy.

Lalo then put me on the horn with his girlfriend, Melody, who also does tattoos.

Melody Mitchell - Brooklyn, NY

VICE: Have you ever given any tattoos that were weirdly awesome?
Melody Mitchell: My friend, she wanted a tattoo of a blowup doll riding a unicorn down a rainbow. And she wanted it on the front of her shin. So I was like, "I'll draw it just for fun," but I really wasn't serious. But she saw it and was like, "I want it! Let's do it!" So now she's got a blowup doll riding a unicorn down a rainbow. And that sounds ridiculous but it's totally fucking awesome.

I have some more stories, but they're terrible.

Like what?
The first shop I was in I was apprenticing so I didn't do the tattoo. I remember this girl walking in screaming, like, "Randy, I already know what you're going to say but you better give me this tattoo or I'll go somewhere else and get it!" He was like, "No, I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it." And I was like, "What are they talking about?" And she was like, "I want you to carve out this bitch's name and I want you to put my new girlfriend's name on me." And he was like, "No! I've already done this three fucking times. I'm not doing this to you again." They get in this whole argument. He finally covers up this girl's name, and it turns out it's the third name that he's covered up on her. And then, he's about to put the new girlfriend's name on her and she's like, "You want to give me a red, or pink, or something that's easy to cover up?" And he's like, "Why the fuck are you thinking about covering up this name already?"

Misha - Los Angeles, CA

VICE: What tattoos do you think are a bad idea?
Misha: I don't do names. I will do your child's name; I will do your mother's name. Anyone else, no. I specialize in cover-ups. A lot of the stories I hear have a lot more to do with what happened to get the client to me. People are always getting their partner's name, and then I'm always covering it up later on.

What have you had to cover up?
Property stuff"Property of Joe." Quite often, I'm covering up other coverups. The worst one I've had to cover was a girl who halfway through her tattoo looked down and realized the guy was doing something other than what they'd agreed on.

Oh my god.
It's horrible! She asked the guy what he was doing and he said, "Oh, well that thing we drew up is not going to work." She was like, "You couldn't have told me?"

Recommended: Tattoo Age - Tom deVita

***

At this point, I was feeling pretty good about my tattooer interview abilities. I had gotten some weird stories, some funny ones, some wisdom, and some heartfelt testimonials as to the healing powers of ink. Then I ended up emailing a tattooer in New Orleans who, after talking to me about tattoos for 15 minutes, told me he didn't want to be included in this piece. (I will, however, say that he once tattooed a sloth wearing a pope outfit on someone, simply because that information is too incredible not to disclose.)

So, one tattoo artist short of my self-imposed quota for tattoo artist interviews, I called up my friend Sasha. Sasha and I used to work together, and while she isn't a tattoo artist per se, she's a notorious giver of stick-and-poke tatsshe's stuck, and subsequently poked, members of White Lung, Joanna Gruesome, Chairlift, and "pretty much all of (New Jersey punk label) Partisan Records." She also tattooed Bill Murray's name on a member of the band Eagulls, who then met Bill Murray the next night. When Murray saw the tattoo, he wordlessly kissed it:

Anyways, I'm pretty sure that all this stuff makes Sasha the Kat Von D of DIY. Either way, she has lots of funny stories about inking people, and she is willing to be quoted in an article. And so, here are some of them:

Sasha, Non-Professional Tattooer - Bushwick

VICE: What was the first tattoo you ever gave?
Sasha Hecht: It was on my ex. It was our second date, we were both really drunk, so she had me tattoo "Born 2 Run" on her ass. Tattooing an ass is hard, because asses give a lot. The lines were a little deeper and darker than they should have been because I didn't know how hard to push down.

What's the strangest stick-and-poke story you've got?
The weirdest ones are ones done on myself. I remember at a festival two or three years ago, I asked some people for a ride and ended up riding in the trunk of their car. Unbeknownst to me, the people in the car were on mushrooms. We ended up getting lost on a road called "Motorkill Road," and then at a random motel. They all wanted tattoos, but we didn't have any supplies. Instead of a needle, we used the pin off the back of a button. You're supposed to use thread to hold the ink, but we didn't have any of that either. Instead, we used a piece of string from a dirty sock. When I went to sterilize everything with some alcohol, I realized the only thing we had was Four Loko. So there I was, on the floor of a motel room in the middle of fucking nowhere, jabbing an unsterile pin into my arm. It was supposed to be an "SOS," but it kind of looks like "505."

I feel like I've heard that you once tattooed a Social Security number on someone.
Yeah, I tattooed Terry Crews's Social Security number on a guy. I don't remember who it was actually on; I think it was a friend of a friend of a friend. I asked him how they knew his Social Security number, and he was like "Uh, it's complicated." That's probably the most confounding piece of information a person can have.

I'm just now remembering the best stick-and-poke I ever did. It was on you, you fucking idiot! Do you want me to tell that story?

...Fine.
It was at a party. I gave you the word "STARTED.," with a period, right next to your dick. You kept trying to put your pants back on, so we had to hide them. At some point you passed out, so I finished it while you were sleeping. I wrote a note saying, "By the way you asked for this, make sure you use lotion."

Thumbnail image via Flickr user Michael Faccio.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

Netiquette 101: How Much Internet Is Too Much Internet?

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I don't know this guy, but the look on his face (and his cat's face) definitely says "I spend too much time online." Photo via Flickr user Bill Olen

Welcome to Netiquette 101, in which we'll be using cyber-case studies to teach you basic but valuable cyber-lessons in being a better cyber-citizen. Today, we discuss how much internet is too much internet.

Case Study: "How do you come up with ideas for this column?" is something that no one ever asks me, but here's the answer anyway: Every week, I go to Google, type the word "internet" into the search bar, click the news tab, and see what appears. This week what popped up was a report from Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital that claimed teens who are "heavy internet users" are more likely to develop high blood pressure.

A "heavy internet user" is defined as someone who's online at least 14 hours per week, in case whether you were wondering whether this category includes you (it does). "The findings add to growing research that has shown an association between heavy internet use and other health risks like addiction, anxiety, depression, obesity, and social isolation," said a press release announcing the study. Are teensour most precious natural resourcein danger of dying out because of too much screen time?

What We Can Learn: First off, 14 hours of internet per week is nothing. Anyone with a conventional office job is basically on the internet eight hours a day, five days a week. When you factor in the amount of time that a person is fucking around on their phone and using the internet at home after work, we easily spend 50 or 60 hours per week online.

On Motherboard: Why We Would Should Worry About Hackable Hearts

Obviously, it's not as if the internet is infecting our kids with high blood pressure through Vines of raccoons being cute or Tumblr posts tagged #cisprivilegethe problem seems to be that when you're cruising the information superhighway, your IRL body is atrophying like Jello left out in the heat.

That's why Andrea Cassidy-Bushrow, the study's lead author, included some advice in the release: "It's important that young people take regular breaks from their computer or smartphone, and engage in some form of physical activity."

Everyone from Michelle Obama to your dad tells you to exercise, of course, but that doesn't make them wrong. If you have a teen in your life, make them to get off the internet and read a book. They'll get bored and go outside, guaranteed.

Recommended: Watch VICE visit a South Korean video game rehab facility

Case Study: "Internet addiction" sounds like a made-up affliction on par with "chocoholism." But it is, as they say, a Thing, as demonstrated by a 2009 story from Newsweek writer Winston Ross.

According to Ross, his brother's addiction to the internet had reduced him to living in a tent off a highway in Oregon, subsisting off food stamps, and bumming computer time at the Oregon State University computer lab. Ross writes of watching his brother, "eyes focused on a computer screen, pausing only to heat up that microwaved meal. He plays role-playing videogames such as World of Warcraft, but he's also got a page of RSS feeds that makes my head spin, filled with blogs he's interested in, news Web sites, and other tentacles into cyberspace." It's a grim story. "I know that homelessness... will kill my brother someday," Ross writes. "He's been consumed by computers for most of the past two decades. Maybe he's a lost cause."

What We Can Learn: There's definitely a line between "heavy use" and addiction when it comes to the internet, and it's pretty clear when someone crosses it.

Case Study: One thing Ross touched on in his Newsweek story is reSTART, an honest-to-gosh internet addiction rehab facility in the Seattle area. It offers an eight- to 12-week program in which participants surrender all their tech and stay in a beautiful woodland facility, participating in "wilderness adventures" such as backpacking, climbing, and water sports. It is to netheads to what those fancy-schmancy Malibu rehab facilities are to Scott Disick: less an actual place to confront your demons and change your life and more of an aggressively pleasant place to dry out (or unplug) for a while and reconnect with the rest of humanity, rather than the bottom of a Patron bottle or your smartphone. According to the Huffington Post, all this costs $25,000

What We Can Learn: The internet is a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but at bottom it's a machine that lets you tap into whatever stimuli your neurons are itching for. Worst-case scenario, you create your own little hermetically sealed world and drop into it. That might mean playing 18 hours of World of Warcraft per day, it might mean being a white dude who's really into arguing about rap music with other white dudes on Twitter. Either way, those little worlds are pretty deeply rewarding to the people in themthey're comfortable, and small enough that it's easy to gain a tiny bit of status. The problem is, that status can come at the expense of everything else, including your perspective, your health, and even your home. There are a lot of rabbit holes out there, and getting out of one can be a costly proces.

Thumbnail image via Flickr user Mike Licht.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

This Black Man Survived a Police Shooting and Became an Activist

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Photo courtesy Leon Ford, Jr.

On November 11, 2012, Leon Ford, Jr. waspulled over on a Pittsburgh street for what police described as a minor trafficviolation. There were no problems with his paperwork or warrants for hisarrest, but less than 20 minutes later, Ford found himself dazed in his wreckedsilver Infiniti while city police scrambled to handcuff him.

He didn't realize it at first, but hehad just been shot.

"I remember the officers screaming,yelling, 'Where's the guns, where's the drugs?'" Ford says. "They pulled me outand slammed me on the ground and handcuffed me face down. I thought they Tasedme until blood was coming out my mouth and from under me. I was like, Wow,they shot me... I thought I was going to die."

It's been nearly three years since theevening when Pittsburgh officer David Derbish shot then 19-year-old Ford four times, leaving him paralyzed. Before that night, Ford was a fairlytypical teenager: He enjoyed making music videos and boxing. He helped hisuncle out at the body shop and was getting ready to start taking classes at alocal community college. Now 22, Ford uses a wheelchair and has no sensationbelow his waist. He often wakes up with a tingling feeling in his hands and hastrouble writing without cramping up.

He certainly doesn't box anymore, but on arecent rainy Friday afternoon, as he wheels himself into a caf, Leon Ford is smiling.

That smile doesn't disappear, even whenhe talks about being shot or what he makes of the national conversation onpolicing issues and the Black Lives Matter movement. He's unrelentingly positiveand doesn't see why he should act otherwise. "You can either look ata situation as a curse or a blessing and I chose the blessing route," Ford says."It's just how I learned to deal with my problems."

But Ford also feels a sense ofresponsibility for speaking out on behalf of the many other unarmed black menwhose confrontations with police ended differently. It's what makes hisperspective on policing in America so unique.

"Unlike Tamir Rice, Oscar Grant, Ezell Ford, Mike Brown, andmany other victims of police misconduct, I survived to tell my story," Fordwrote in a September letter to Pittsburgh officials. "In many ways, I may also be telling theirstories as well."

Photo courtesy Leon Ford, Jr.

Just a few minutes after Ford was pulledover, he started to get the feeling there was something strange about that 2012 traffic stop. OfficersMichael Kosko and Andrew Miller later reported he was driving quickly and didn't stop completely at multiple stop signs. Ford had been arrested that September on DUI and underage drinking charges, but that didn't seem to be what the officers were concerned about. "They were barking at me, saying I was Lamont Ford," he recalls, referring to another man for whom police said they had an outstanding warrant. That's around the time officers called a third cop, DavidDerbish, to the scene to help identify him.

A video of the incident shows thetraffic stop dragged on until the officers started trying to get Ford out ofthe car. As the officers struggled, Derbish, who was standing at the passengerside, jumped into the car with Ford. Derbish said that he saw a bulge in Ford'spants that he thought was a gun and saw Ford reach for the gearshift,potentially endangering the other two officers. Seconds later, the car lurchedforward. Trapped inside, Derbish would testify thatFord hit him and tried to push him out of the car. Fearing for his life, and inan effort "to stop the threat," he drew his gun and pulled the trigger fivetimes.

Ford would prove to be unarmed, and evenpolice officials found the officers violated bureau policies. Theywere not wearing mandated audio recording equipment, for instance, and bureaupolicy forbids officers from reaching into a suspect's car while the engine is running.

The review board, comprised of toppolice officials, was also critical of the officers' conclusion that Ford wasarmed, and wrote that Derbish's decision to shoot him in a moving car was inconsistent with department policy. "We believe this situationcould have been avoided had the officers followed training and protocol and Mr.Leon Ford followed the lawful instructions of officers," the board wrote, and recommendedunspecified discipline for Derbish and remedial training for Kosko and Miller. Thoughthe district attorney did not charge any of the officers criminally, Derbish isreportedly under federal investigation.

Some outside experts have criticizedFord for appearing to resist the officers' commands, but many agree that if theofficers had behaved differently, the shooting could have been avoided. "Basicallyeverything was in order, everything checks out and yet they have some weirdsuspicion he's somebody else," says David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh lawprofessor who studies policing practices. "That's the inevitable path to theshooting. If the police had been simply focused on what they were doing,issuing a citation if necessary," it's likely the stop would have endedpeacefully, according to Harris.

For his part, Ford says he doesn'tremember the struggle, or why the car sped off. "It's pretty much like a blur,"he says. "It was very intense. I just remember being scared. I don't remember fun to me, it's healing," he says through a smile. "Every time I speak, I feel some ofmy pain go away."

Alex Zimmerman is a Brooklyn-based journalist covering everything from cops to trains. His work has appeared in the Village Voice, Pittsburgh City Paper, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Follow him on Twitter.

I Was Relentlessly Harassed by the Media After Cutting My Own Penis Off

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Andre Johnson, a.k.a. Christ Bearer

Last year, one of the biggest mental health-related stories to hit the mainstream was the case of Andre "Christ Bearer" Johnson, the Wu-Tang Clan-affiliated rapper who hacked off his own penis while high on angel dust and suffering from depression. The media frenzy surrounding his story was intense; he went from only being known among underground hip-hop fans to being plastered across the pages of nearly every newspaper and celebrity gossip magazine. It was bullying on a grand scale, with mainstream journalists mocking him for a potentially fatal act of self-harm. For World Mental Health Day (October 10), I decided to get in touch with him to see what impact the actions of the press had on his recovery. The following story is a narration of his thoughts on this matter.

2014 wasn't exactly my year. My life had descended into a fog of depression after being prevented from seeing my daughters by their mother, and I was feeling as if nothing was going right. Then, just as I thought my situation couldn't get any worse, it did in a dramatic way. I had been smoking weed and PCP one day, trying to blot out the misery of life with drugs, when I lost all contact with reality and took the somewhat insane step of cutting my own penis off and jumping from a balcony. Dark, destructive thoughts had been running through my head under the influence of the dust, and I just thought, "Fuck it. Maybe I'm better off without this thing so I can't have any more kids, seeing as things are going so badly with the ones that I've already brought into this world."

Luckily, I survived the incident. It was a horrific episode that would have destroyed a lesser man, but I'm a member of the Original Nation of Islam, and believe that the indomitable spirit of All Mighty God Allah that permeates throughout my entire being allowed me to overcome it. This horrific act of self-harm was only the beginning of my ordeal, though. Unfortunately, we live in an era where the media see the mentally ill as a circus act. Rather than wishing me a speedy recovery, they harassed me constantly and did their best to try and mentally break me.

The media shitstorm surrounding what happened was crazy. While I should have been focusing on getting better and still had two more surgeries to go, I was bombarded by reporters from almost every publication in existence, which forced the hospital to move me from room to room so that I could get some privacy. Clearly, the press were more concerned about making fun of a life-threatening episode than they were about the fact I could have died.

WATCH: 'Being Ida', our film about Ida Storm, a Norwegian woman who suffers from borderline personality disorder and filmed herself for years as a way to help process her thoughts.

After I'd been discharged from hospital, my depression was compounded by celebrities I had previously held in high regard making jokes at my expense in an attempt to profit from my misfortune. Some might argue that I brought my situation on myself by taking drugs, but when the story was first broken, the media didn't know that I was on dust at the time. They even reported that it was depression, not substance abuse, that had led to the incident. They weren't hounding me in a bid to highlight the dangers of drugs; they just wanted to sell copies of their publications by capitalizing upon my personal tragedy. Urban radio personality Charlamagne even went as far as to label me "Donkey of the Day", a spot usually reserved on his show for people who have said or done something stupid. That doesn't exactly send out a positive message about people who are struggling with mental health issues. I was also ridiculed by major newspapers with wide circulations, whose journalists really should have known better.

Read: The Night My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

According to Professor David Lester of Stockton University, who has studied suicide among famous people, treating celebrities like this puts their lives in danger. "It's similar to cyberbullying, which frequently results in suicide," he says. "The psychiatric disorder increases the risk of suicide further."

I'm only really known in hip-hop circles, so I can't imagine what people in the wider public eye go through when they suffer from mental illnesses. Professor Lester's sentiments have been echoed by Patrick Corrigan of the Illinois Institute of Technology, who was the editor of the book, The Stigma of Disease and Disability. "Making fun of a celebrity's mental illness not only worsens his or her challenges, but worsens the stigma of mental illness," he says. "Stigma can be as problematic for people as the symptoms of their mental illnesses."

READ: The VICE Guide to Mental Health

Luckily, I had my faith to help me overcome these trials and tribulations. Your values determine what you do in life, and belief in being your own personal Jesus is an integral part of the Original Nation of Islam. I am the god of my own world, so change had to come from within. I rose above all the criticism, made self-deprecating jokes about my accident to keep my spirits up and continued to make my music in the hope of empowering others.

The fact still remains that the media are complicit in contributing to the stigma that's placed on mental health issues. A radical change is needed, or we will remain in the dark ages, where people who suffer from psychological problems will continue to be ostracized and treated as figures of fun. The media defines societal opinions, but also reflects them, so just as I was ultimately responsible for my own recovery, we are all responsible for bringing about the change we want to see.

Hopefully it will come sooner rather than later, because it's desperately needed.

Visit Christ Bearer's website, or add him on Twitter.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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(Photo by Arms & Hearts via)

Here is everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

  • US Missiles Used in Syria
    American anti-tank missiles supplied to Syrian rebels are being used against Russian-made tanks there, dozens of YouTube videos have shown. Experts are calling it an accidental "proxy war". The Washington Post
  • Obama: Clinton Made Mistake
    President Obama called Hillary Clinton's private email use to conduct government business "a mistake", but one that did not endanger national security. In his interview with 60 Minutes, Obama also described Donald Trump as a "reality TV character". Chicago Tribune
  • Ohio Shooting 'Reasonable'
    An Ohio prosecutor handling the fatal shooting by police of a 12-year-old boy has been slammed for releasing reports calling the shooting "reasonable" before any grand jury decision. Tamir Rice was shot while carrying a replica toy gun. VICE News
  • Cocks Not Glocks
    Texan students are planning to wield "a proliferation of dildos" at colleges to protest a new state gun law allowing concealed weapons on university campuses. The Cocks Not Clocks group has already received death threats. The Daily Beast

International News

  • Turkey Blames Islamic State
    The Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has blamed Islamic State militants for Saturday's bomb attack in Ankara, which killed at least 97 peace protestors. The funerals of some victims take place today, as crowds continue to gather in the capital to mourn. BBC
  • Voting Begins in India
    More than 66 million voters are eligible to vote today in the northern state of Bihar. The state election is seen as a major test of the popularity of Indian PM Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist BJP party. The Times of India
  • Islamic State Leader Survives
    Eight senior figures from the Islamic State have been killed in an air strike while meeting in a town in western Iraq. Despite targeting his convoy, the group's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is not among the dead, according to US military sources. Reuters
  • El Nio Is Coming
    El Nio weather events expected over the next few months could leave four million people without enough food or clean water. Forecasters are predicting the rain, flooding and higher sea levels in Pacific countries near the equator will be the worst since 1998. The Guardian

(Photo by Fountain Posters via)

Everything Else

  • Kayne Wows the Democrats
    As well as catching some affectionate flak from Obama, Kanye West performed for almost an hour at a DNC fundraiser in San Francisco this weekend. Watch it all here. Noisey
  • Miranda July Builds Utopia
    The artist's interactive theatre show "New Society" invited audience members to compose anthems for a revolution. Oh, and she also asked couples to make out in front of everyone. The New York Times
  • New Star Wars Characters
    Characters from the forthcoming movie, previously thought to be minor alien extras, were revealed at the New York City Comic Con. They'll be fleshed out in novelization spin-offs. Vulture
  • The Dalai Lama Dated My Mom
    Tibet's top Buddhist was recently accused of casual misogyny. One woman tells her daughter how a London date with the Dalai Lama went down 40 years ago. Broadly

Done with reading for today? Watch the newest documentary from VICE Japan, Taking Down Tokyo's Corrupt Diamond Syndicate.


A Former Inmate at Rikers Island Becomes One of Its Overseers

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Portrait by Ryan Shorosky

This article appears in VICE Magazine's October Prison Issue

In February 1988, Stanley Richards was in the jail complex on Rikers Island in New York City, awaiting trial on robbery charges. Richards had been in the facility for nearly two years, and he had been in and out on lesser charges before. In that time, he had figured out how to maneuver through the system to soften the blow of being in jail. "I had always believed that my life would be about hustling on the streets, going to jail, getting out of jail, and repeating the cycle again," he said.

One Wednesday morning that winter, seven state inmates being temporarily held at the jail for parole violations interfered with a violent search, unused to the rough conditions at the facility. They soon precipitated an uprising in which more than 550 detainees used beds and lockers to barricade themselves in their cells, presenting a list of demands to the staff. Two hundred guards armed with clubs and tear gas stormed the jail in response. Richards was working in the kitchen when the alarms went off in the unit, and he witnessed the riot unfold. During the uprising, the fourth at Rikers in just three years, an inmate called United Press International to alert them to violent conditions at the jail. "People are fed up with the way police are beating inmates here," he said. "This is the only way to bring the problem to light."

Twenty-seven years later, conditions at Rikers are still in need of exposure and reform, and Richards has found himself in the facility to witness them again. But this time he comes not as an inmate but as a regulator. In May, he was appointed to the New York City Board of Correction, the civilian watchdog group that establishes the minimum standards at the city's jails. Richards has been dedicated to improving the lives of the incarcerated ever since he was released from prison in 1991. By the time he finished serving a four-and-a-half-year sentence on the robbery charges that landed him in Rikers at the time of the '88 riot, he had spent more than ten years in New York's prisons and jails. Inside he earned a GED and college degree (he was lucky to receive a Pell Grant before Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill eliminated them for prisoners), and he realized that he didn't have to be resigned to a life of constant incarceration. When he got out, he got a job at the Fortune Society, a nonprofit that provides reentry and job services to people coming home from prison and jail, beginning a 24-year career there devoted to helping reform the system that tried to keep him behind bars.

When Alexander Rovt, a billionaire real estate investor who had served on the Board of Correction since 2005, submitted his resignation earlier this year, advocates pressured City Council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito to appoint someone who had actually spent time in jail to replace him. For most of its 58-year existence, the board has made decisions about the conditions of confinement at the city's jails without a currently or formerly incarcerated person among its nine members. "In order for criminal justice policy to be effective, you want to always find a way to include the voices of people who are inherently affected by the same policy," said Johnny Perez, a member of the Jails Action Coalition who was detained on Rikers Island when he was 16 years old.

This spring, council member Daniel Dromm introduced Mark-Viverito to Richards, and she soon selected him to replace Rovt, citing his experience both inside and outside New York's jails. Richards is the first member appointed by the City Council to have once been incarcerated. "What I hope to bring to the board is a voice of reality," Richards told me. "I'm going to tell them what it's like to be on the island. I'm going to tell them what it's like when you impose additional restrictive behaviors. I'm going to tell them what it's like when you put somebody in punitive segregation, because I was in punitive segregation."

All photos from 'Behind These Prison Walls,' by Lorenzo Steele Jr., a former New York City correctional officer who served on Rikers Island from 1987 to 1999. Many of the images depict the harsh conditions that inmates face in solitary confinement.Criminal justice system, prison, prisoners, V22N10, VICEMagazine, October issue, prison issue,


The Board of Correction was created in 1957 to oversee the city's Department of Correction at a time when there was concern and speculation that overcrowding in the city's jails would result in riots. There had already been a number of smaller disturbances. The board's first nine civilian members, all nominated by then mayor Robert Wagner, held prominent positions in the city's philanthropic, political, and religious institutions.

The issues the group was considering at the time show how little has changed in New York City's justice system in the past 50 years. In its first report, published in 1958, the board recommended eliminating bail and only detaining people who were accused of committing a crime against another person. In 1960, the board called for a "renewed effort to bring all prisoners to trial at the earliest possible date." Today, about 45,000 people are remitted to Rikers each year only because they can't post bail at the time of arraignment, and 1,500 of the about 9,000 inmates currently at Rikers have been there for more than a year without a trial. Out of the five boroughs, the Bronx, where Richards was being prosecuted in the late 80s, has the worst delays in the city, with more than 70 percent of cases violating the state's speedy-trial guidelines.

Today, the board remains the chief overseer of Rikers and the city's other jails, but it also has increased powers thanks to the 1977 City Charter. The board sets minimum standards and regulations by which the DOC, which manages the facilities, must abide. Richards has joined the board at a time when the public scrutiny of Rikers is higher than it has been in at least a decade. Last year, the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York issued a report calling Rikers "a broken institution... where brute force is a first impulse rather than a last resort; where verbal insults are repaid with physical injuries; where beatings are routine while accountability is rare; and where a culture of violence endures even while a code of silence prevails." Four months later, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the city for the pervasive, "deep-seated culture of violence" at its jails.

This March, feeling the pressure to do something, Mayor Bill de Blasio and DOC commissioner Joseph Ponte introduced a package of 14 reforms intended to "promote a culture of safety" at Rikers. Among the proposed changes were restricting inmates' physical-contact visits and limiting their rights to receive packages, which they argued would reduce the number of weapons in the jail. Because the plan proposed to change the minimum standards regulating conditions at Rikers, it would require the board's approval.

On the morning of July 14, correctional officers, advocates, and lawyers filled an auditorium in lower Manhattan for Richards's second meeting as a member of the Board of Correction. The group was considering whether to open up the rulemaking period on the DOC's proposed changes to visits and packages at Rikers, and the board's chair, Stanley Brezenoff, invited the advocates in attendance to comment before the board decided whether they would even consider them. One by one, an attorney at Legal Aid Society, a City Council member, a social worker from Brooklyn Defenders Services, and others told the board they disagreed with the proposed change and urged them to vote against it.

When it came time for members of the board to express their opinions, Richards opposed the change. While some of the other members said they were voting yes out of a sense of trust in the commissioner's reputation as a reformer, Richards asserted that rulemaking was among the board's most special functions and that the DOC hadn't justified "infringing on the many, many visitors who come to see their loved ones in jail." What's more, analysis by the city's Department of Investigation has shown that the real problem at Rikers is weapons smuggled in by correctional officers, not visitors. Richards later told me that Ponte was "trying to implement a maximum-security-prison mentality into what is in effect a detention facility." Most of the people at Rikers have not been convicted of a crime and are being detained because they cannot post bail, he reminded me. They "should be afforded the notion of being innocent until proven guilty and should be afforded the rights and privileges of every other citizen," he said.


When Richards was incarcerated at Rikers, inmates were free to move from one place to another without being escorted. Now, they're dependent on guards to get around. Returning to Rikers as a member of the board after 30 years, Richards noticed how much policies like these have changed the atmosphere. "It's much darker in the sense of hope," he said. "There's less movement and focus on second chances, and much more on punishment. So when you walk into a facility, you see the inmates don't believe that life or anything is going to be different. They believe that their future is that cell, that incarceration."

In the end, only two other members joined Richards in opposing considering the changes. Despite outlining their concerns and worries with the DOC's proposals and rule violations, the board consistently votes in their favor. And while the board has the power to make minimum standards, little happens when the DOC is in violation of those same standards. "Our recourse for violating those standards is a conversation and only a conversation," Richards told me a few weeks after the July board meeting. "We make sure they are adhering to our standards, and when they're not, we call them on it." Sometimes the DOC apologizes and immediately stops violating the standards. Other times, the DOC apologizes and board members will see the same problem when they visit Rikers again weeks later. When I asked how that could change, Richards suggested giving the board the power to administer sanctions against the DOC when conditions at the jail don't meet its standards, but that idea has gained little traction.

Last December, the very first executive director of the Board of Correction, John Brickman, testified before the board at a public hearing on the creation of an Enhanced Supervision Unit at Rikers. Brickman, like many advocates, considered it a new solitary confinement unit and urged the board to oppose it. He also used his testimony as an opportunity to offer the group some advice. "You, as a board, are most effective and you have the best chance to bring about change when you maintain your distance from the Department of Correction. There needs to be a tension, a healthy tension," he told them. "The board's greatest impact has come when it has asserted its independence from the department and, indeed, from City Hall as well."

Despite Richards's frustrations with how the board operates, he disagrees with Brickman. In order to fix Rikers, he told me, he believes he'll need to work together with the commissioner and the mayor. Richards's experience at the jail hasn't made him into the "activist foil" that Brickman wants to see on the board. He's gone from inside the jail to inside the system, and it's from that position that he's banking on being able to change Rikers for the better.


Candid Photos of the Heroes, Villains, and Pikachus at New York Comic Con

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Ever year, the subways and streets of New York fill with Saiyans, Spider-Men, Sailor Soldiers, and dozens of other pop-cultural tribes as the city hosts Comic-Con, which this weekend came to the Javits Center in Manhattan.

Naturally, this cosplay-heavy occasion is also a bonanza for street photographers, who compete to take the best snaps of the most elaborate and outrageous costumes. VICE sent Michael Marcelle and Nathan Bajar to capture the intense outfits, but also the quiet moments of Pickachus eating pizza and men clinging proudly to their Dakimakuras. We weren't disappointed with the gloriously absurd results.

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Nathan Bajar is a photographer based in New York and New Jersey. Follow his work here.

Michael Marcelle is a photographer based in New York. Follow his work here.

VICE Vs Video Games: What the New Tony Hawk Game Gets Wrong About Nostalgia, ‘Transformers: Devastation’ Nails

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A screenshot from 'Transformers: Devastation'

Video gaming, just like the movie business, is frequently fond of looking to the past in order to progress, regularly producing new entertainment based on old franchisesrebooted or recycledand banking on nostalgia as the salient factor in selling freshly finished titles. This year, Sony's E3 presentation in June generated more press for the confirmations of The Last Guardian, the Final Fantasy VII remake, and Shenmue III than it did the reveal of unprecedented, baggage-free projects like Horizon: Zero Dawn and The Tomorrow Children; while Nintendo continues to dangle new Star Fox and Zelda titles in front of Wii U owners, at the same time as moving back release dates, in the hope that they'll hang in there and remain brand loyal.

The last couple of weeks have seen huge games publisher Activision put out two titles squarely aimed at players who've been around a while, each reliant more on affection for previous experiences, on misting-over memories of marathon sessions in front of the TV, than a desire to pop something completely original into their PlayStation (or Xbox, or PC). One of these has been made with a great deal of attention to its source material, positively bleeds fan respect, and uses gameplay that served prior releases by its studio incredibly well. The other appears to have been designed by a team that's never played a previous game in its parent series, features more bugs than mealtimes on I'm a Celebrity..., and controls as if the laws of physics are but speculative concepts as readily dashed by the everyman as the suggestion that the Earth's flat.

One of these games is Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5, developed by Chicago's Robomodo studiopast form: Tony Hawk: Ride, the worst Tony Hawk of all time, plus the disappointing HD version of the original Pro Skater. The other is Transformers: Devastation, made by Osaka-based PlatinumGames, responsible for the amazing Bayonetta, Vanquish, and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. And you already know which of the two descriptions above matches which release.

A screenshot from 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5'

Pro Skater 5 is dreadful. I've sat down with it several times since its release with the express intent of finding something positive within its litany of disappointments, and I have failed each time. Not one redeemable feature beyond the unintentional hilarity its glitches can provide: character models ragdolling like no human ever conceived, physically or digitally; crazy collision detection that turns ramps and walls into laughable illusions of solidity; and bizarre bails that have Tony or whoever (several other skaters are selectable) flying towards the skies. And it's so boring, just, so boring. Nary the slightest shred of a quiet triumph amid the terrific tumult of a decade and a half's accumulated reputation being wrecked in minutes. But it didn't have to be this way, at all.

Many reviews of Pro Skater 5 have highlighted that Activision's licensing agreement with Tony Hawk expires this year. That extension was signed just before the 2002 release of Pro Skater 4, which came out to some incredible reviews. Activision's subsequent shift to the Underground franchise didn't immediately lead to diminishing returns, but the company's return to the Pro Skater line says much about its desire to reconnect with fans of those earlier games. Unfortunately, the studio behind Pro Skaters one to four, Neversoft, last touched a skateboarding game with 2007's Tony Hawk's Proving Ground, and was absorbed by Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward in 2014. Which left Robomodo to carry the incredible weight of expectation that comes with any new Tony Hawk release, a burden tripled when it's a return to what made the series great back when consoles were still sold on their "bits."

This is the message that greets visitors to the Robomodo homepage. No, you really don't.

That weight has crushed them, but I can't help thinking that there was a different approach to take with Pro Skater 5. Robomodo's made a bunch of mobile games, one of which was Skateboard Slam for iOS, a not completely terrible side-scrolling affair that ultimately played easily and was bright and cheery enough to keep players coming back. Had they taken that base model and given it a thick layer of Tony Hawk lacquer, ditched the Pro Skater tag, and focused on a bona-fide fun game that could turnover substantial downloads at a moderate premium price on mobilelet's say 2.99 UK, $3.99 USwith versions for console webstores and Steam, we might have been looking at an OlliOlli rival.

Last month, Pumped BMX moved from mobile to consoles successfully, and snowboarding endless runner Alto's Adventure hit number one on App Store charts across the world at the start of 2015. Add in OlliOlli's BAFTA win in March and it's clear that there's a growing market for brilliantly intuitive, simply side-on, arcade-feel extreme sports games, and profits to be had. With these games the emphasis is only ever on tricks, on boosting your score, on staying on your board or bike. Pro Skater 5 chucks in mindless missionsknock balls out of an empty swimming pool, yay, or smash through so many drones in under this many seconds, whoopwhich require completion to unlock new levels, and an irritating camera to match, the Y axis of which cannot be inverted. Those italics are warranted. This is 2015, and not having that option is criminal.

Article continues after the video below

Watch part one of VICE's Epicly Later'd Episode on Geoff Rowley

What if Robomodo had said to Activision: "Sorry, moneybags, but we're just not cut out for making a 'proper' Pro Skater game. We figured that much was clear with the HD remake, and it's best that we're all honest with ourselves. So how about we deliver an awesome Tony Hawk-branded game, before you lose the license, that builds on the strengths we possess, that retains the spirit of the originals but presents it in an appealingly old-school aesthetic, running left to right, keeping the game quick and the stunts sick? Yeah? Cool, we'll do that, and you'll make a mint because the kids will love it."

Such a venture could not have yielded results any worse than the grim reality of Pro Skater 5, an ugly and ungainly waste of just about everybody's time, and a truly tragic end to a business relationship that had previously produced certifiable classics. Believe me, I've tried really hard to not arrive at this conclusion, not least of all because VICE UK is running a competition to win this very game (and some other awesome stuff). But, there you go: the truth hurts.

New on Motherboard: 96 Percent of Video Game Voice Actors Want the Power to Strike

'Transformers: Devastation', launch trailer

Transformers: Devastation on the other hand is both a satisfying yet simplified model of Platinum's celebrated melee combat mechanics as seen in Bayonetta and its sequel, right down to the "witch time" last-second dodging that opens your opponent up for slow-motion attacks, and a gleefully nudging and winking trip down Transformers memory lane. Its knowingly schlocky storyline is straight out of season one of the mid-1980s cartoon seriesthe Decepticon leader Megatron wants to "cyberform" Earth because the Transformers' home planet of Cybertron is properly fucked, but Optimus Prime and the heroic Autobots aren't about to stand for that nonsense, so set about kicking his metal ass, and those of his lackies, into deep spaceand there's a number of nods to both 1986's The Transformers: The Movie and standalone episodes. For example, the first level is named City of Steel, while one of the collectibles you'll find across the game's seven stages proper is a bouncing ball of crackling energy known as a Kremzeek. I smiled, and I'm sure thousands of others who grew up with these robots (and planes, and trucks, and cassette decks, and dinosaurs) will do the same.

Devastation's story is set before the movie's, so the five playable Autobots are entirely drawn from the Earth-stranded party that arrived from Cybertron four million years ago. There's Prime, of course, plus Wheeljack and his Dinobot creation Grimlock, supported by the warrior Sideswipe and scout Bumblebee. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses, with character stats and weapons upgradable as the game unfolds, albeit through some not entirely clear menus that do little to help you understand load-out options until you've actually done it a few times. The (unplayable) Decepticon forces feature famous facesMegatron's the final boss, obviously, and you'll smash fists and axes and teeth into Starscream, Soundwave, Devastator, Blitzwing and, my favorite (and one of the hardest fights, too), Shockwave. The whole thing looks like a cartoon come to life, the voices are by either the original actors or decent doubles, and the music is perfectly in tune with the movie's hyperactive guitar shredding. (Unfortunately, however, there is no Stan Bush.)

Another screenshot from 'Transformers: Devastation'

There's repetition in Devastation's gameplaygrunt-level Cons are restricted to just a few forms, and you fight them a lot, plus the environments aren't bursting with variety whether you're on Earth or Cybertronand the whole thing can be finished in under five hours, easily. But from the perspective of an out-and-proud fan of first-generation Transformers: what a five hours. Anyone who's loved Platinum's stylish brawlers of the past will get a kick out of Devastation too, because it really does play like a slightly dialled-down Bayonetta, its lessening of intensity made up for by sumptuous single-button transformations, pleasingly crunchy combos, and a good few instances of Megatron's maniacal cackling. It's fun, all the way through, and illustrates how nostalgia can comprise the core of a new game without compromising all other features. And be prepared for more, because the way it ends is pure sequel bait.

If Devastation had sucked, which it certainly doesn't, graying Transformers fans like me would have half-sighed at the predictability of it all and gotten back to bemoaning the meddling ways of Michael Bay. But then, it's a game that had little to prove, evidently a project of love, with only modest expectations to live up toexpectations that it's smashed. In contrast, Pro Skater 5 had to match the performance of games made by another company two console generations ago, and return today's gamers to their nascent PlayStation experiences. It had to be both a time capsule and a modern masterpiece, and there's simply no way that Robomodo was ever going to pull that off. Perhaps no studio could, not even Neversoft. Pro Skater 5, like Shenmue III and the FFVII remake might be too, was doomed as soon as its existence was confirmed. It won't be like it was; it can't be like it was; so whatever it is, it'll be shitty. And so it's sadly proved.

Transformers: Devastation and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 were tested on PlayStation 4.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

What Federal Drug Offenders Are Saying About Congress Reforming Mandatory Minimums

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FCI Terre Haute in Indiana. Photo via Bureau of Prisons official website

Some federal inmates hopingfor an early release from the bowels of the prison-industrial complex suffered a blow on Thursday when a sentencing reform bill introduced to the House of Representatives promised relatively little in the way of help for many non-violent federal drug offenders.

The Sentencing ReformAct largely mirrors a piece of legislation unveiled in the US Senate a week earlier. Among other things, it would retroactively reduce the mandatory-minimum sentence of life without parole for a third drug or violent offense to 25 years and the mandatory 20-yearsentence for a second drug or violent offense to 15 years. The bill narrowly defines whichprior drug offenses can trigger mandatory-minimum sentences, and would make retroactive the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, freeing an estimated 6,500 crackoffenders. It would also reduce the mandatory minimums for some gun offenses and allow several other categoriesof offenders to have a judge determine whether they should be free.

The bill enjoys strong bipartisan support, and with President Obama at the helm, the sense inside thefederal prison system is that something is a virtual lock to pass once the House and Senate bills are reconciled. But there's frustration at the scope of the proposed reforms, whichas you might expectmany inmates feel don't go nearly far enough.

"This is bullshit," 31-year-old inmate Joshua Yancy told VICE after reading key portions of the Sentencing Reform Act. "Theywant to help a few thousands lifers, a bunch of crack dealers, some guys with20 years and some gun offenders, but they don't want to do anything for anyoneelse?"

Serving ten years for aconspiracy involving OxyCodone, Yancy spoke to VICE on Thursday night insidethe Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Terre Haute, Indiana.

"What about guys like me?I was facing 63 to 78 months for the conspiracy charge that I was involved in,but because I had a prior conviction that was just a simple fistfight in thecounty jail, they turned me into some career offender and enhanced my sentenceto 122 months," he said. "It still blows my mind that they could do this to me. All I'masking for is to be able to earn a little extra good time. I mean, I work inUNICOR just gonna leave the guys with 30years doing more time than the guys who had life?

"This is shit is allfucked up, homie." he added.

With a handful of bills that would begin to correct Reagan-eramandatory-minimum sentencing laws percolating on Capitol Hill, it appears that reform is indeed on the way. And to be sure, more than a few prisoners in the federalsystem are overjoyed at lawmakers finally paying attention to their plight. But the glacial pace of action in Washingtoncoupled with fact that deserving inmates will almost certainly be left out of any sentencing overhaulmakes it hard for American prisoners to get too excited about changing the system.

Follow Robert Rosso on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Turns Out It Was Legal for that Dentist to Shoot Cecil the Lion

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This isn't Cecil, but it's a lion and lions generally look pretty much the same. Photo via Flickr user Tambako the Jaguar.

Read: We Talked to the Woman Who Says She's Spoken to Cecil the Lion from Beyond the Grave

Remember a few months back, when that Minnesota dentist went all Katniss Everdeen and shot Zimbabwe's beloved lion, Cecil, with a bow and arrow while on a big game hunt? Remember how he provoked the ire of the entire internet and wound up facing down protestors at his dental practice who thought he lured the lion off protected land to kill it?

Well, Zimbabwe officials said Monday that "all papers were in order" and therefore they will not charge him in the shooting of Cecil, according to Reuters. The officials have also dropped their extradition requests against him and said he's welcome to visit Zimbabwe as a tourist, so long as he doesn't murder any more of their majestic wildlife.

The dentist, Walter Palmer, paid roughly $50,000 to head out on the guided safari hunt and killed Cecil after the lion walked out of a national park and onto a farm where Palmer was allowed to hunt.

Both the guide and the farm's landowner face criminal charges in the alleged illegal hunt, but it looks like Palmer will avoid any punishment for this one. That doesn't really help his dental practice's dismal Yelp page, though.

An Outsourcing Company Director Wants the British Welfare State to Be More Like 'The Sims'

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The future of the welfare state. Photo via flickr user Eurritimia

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

As the debate over the extent and cost of the welfare state in the United Kingdom rumbles on, a particularly unhinged idea was aired in a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party conference last week, by a Vice President of Atosa controversial company that gets paid by the government to run welfare schemes.

Speaking on a Tory conference fringe panel with Minister Francis Maude MP, Philip Chalmers, Senior Vice President of Atos "Public Sector and Health," asked people to "imagine everyone is walking around like Sims or Second Life and you can see a little thing above their head that says, '25,000 million contract to run Work Capability Assessmentstesting the sick and disabled to see if they could be judged "fit for work" for the DWPafter public protests. Atos were accused of judging the manifestly unable to work as job-ready, leading to benefit cuts for the vulnerable. Horror stories of people dying of terminal diseases shortly after they were judged "fit to work" abounded.

Atos still have a contract to test disabled people for how much "Personal Independence Payments" they should receive. The government rewarded the contract with an intention of reducing the payments.

With their large government contracts, the French IT firm has a strong interest in keeping close to the government. Paying for the conference meeting, organized by Conservative-linked think tank Policy Exchange, is one way of keeping that relationship ticking over. Policy Exchange was founded by Nick Boles, currently a Local Government Minister and one of the modernizing "Cameroons." Atos Vice President Philip Chalmers was joined on the platform by Maude and by Mark Thompson, formerly George Osborne's Senior Adviser for IT.

VICE asked Atos if their Senior Vice President's scheme for exposing individual spending on the frail and sick was their official policy. Their spokesperson said, "This was a debate on the role digital advancements can play in government and how good use of data can provide better and more efficient services to the citizen. The particular future use of big data Philip was discussing was how it can allow community groups to link with social care and NHS services in order to provide the best care. A fictional example was used to illustrate this idea, it was not based on any policy we deliver and was in no way intended to cause offense and we apologize if it has."

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