Malena Loonskin's family holds a picture of Malena.

Last month, I was crashing on a friend's couch while driving north through Ontario to research a story about a young mother who had been murdered more than a decade ago. The friend asked why I was passing through and I told him. I was working on the latest in an ongoing series about missing and murdered Indigenous women. He mentioned seeing an earlier story in the series, "She was 16 When She Went Missing, But the RCMP Didn't Tell Anyone for Three Years."

"Makes you wonder who's missing now that we don't know about," he said.

His words have stayed with me. As a journalist, I'm not bothered by the things people don't know; I'm galvanized by them. If there's something that people don't know, reporters can ask, and learn, and report. That's our job. What really confounds me are the things that people choose not to know.

How does a journalist make people choose to know? More than 1,200 Indigenous women have gone missing or been murdered in Canada in just three decades. How do you both attract and inform readers who believe that this statistic is a "native problem," when in fact it is a symptom of colonialismwhich has Canadians valuing Indigenous artifacts and sacred objects (think white kids wearing headdresses), but not Indigenous people or their way of life?

Searchers: Drag the Red

Back in January, when I began researching this series, my friend Adam Dietrich was reporting for a small weekly paper in northern Alberta. He began to flip me copies of RCMP press releases about missing Indigenous persons in the region. On average, he says he received one a week.

Adam had become frustrated by what he perceived to be racial bias in the media coverage of the region's missing. He felt certain that the disappearance of a white person would be front page news for the local weekly, while that of an Indigenous person would be relegated to the back pages, and might not even merit a photo.

His beliefs were not without evidence. The summer before, Adam had written a story about a 26-year-old Cree woman named Malena Loonskin who'd gone missing and then been found murdered. Malena's common-law husband was charged with the crime (the charges have since been stayed). Due to editorial constraints, his piece was essentially a rewrite of the RCMP's press release on the subject, and his primary source was the officer who wrote it. Adam told me it was the biggest news story that week, yet it ran on page 10. There was no photo of Malena.

More than a year later, Malena's murder still nags at Adam, and there's one aspect of the story that particularly nags at me. Malena's family says that 72 hours passed before police came to help them search for their loved one. Did that affect the quality of evidence gathered? Does that explain why the charges were stayed? Malena's family wonders, and so do I.

Chantelle Bushie, another missing woman. Photo courtesy Vivian Bushie

If there's a single thread that binds the stories in my series together, it's the attitude of the police and the judiciary toward Canada's Indigenous people. Occasionally, I'm able to report Indigenous amazement and gratitude for an investigation managed sensitively and competently, but usually, my stories report the pain and frustration caused by racist remarks, offensive assumptions, and legal standards that seem arbitrary at best, unjust at worst.

I've met people who say: Not all cops. Not all men. People who blame the Indigenous woman who was being beaten by her husband, because she went back to him before he ultimately killed her. People who, when confronted with the story of the RCMP officer who brought an Indigenous woman home from jail to "pursue a personal relationship," mention the video of the officer dancing at a powwow. People who say: They balance out somehow, right?

A few weeks ago, I visited with a mother whose daughter was murdered, whose case was botched repeatedly. She was furious, her eyes wet with tears, but she told me vehemently that before her daughter's case she believed in the police, she trusted them. Experience has destroyed that trust.

The rocking chair memorial Doris keeps for her niece Krystle. Photo by Adam Dietrich

When I think about the RCMP, inevitably I think about Krystle Knott, born 26 years ago.

If Krystle had enjoyed the opportunity to translate her childhood ambitions into adult passions, she might now be a veterinarian or a mechanic. She might still listen to Shania Twain. (She'd probably be as stubborn and willful as ever.) But her family will never know. Krystle was killed, together with 19-year-old Rene Gunning; the girls' remains were found in 2011. Who killed the two young women? That's just one more thing Krystle's family would like to know.

My first call to the police about Krystle was to an RCMP spokeswoman in Edmonton. I wanted to know why Krystle had been missing for three years before the RCMP said a single public word about her. I also wanted to explore the perception that her aunt, Doris Goulet, has of the case (which, to this day, remains unsolved): "It's like: they're found, they're buried, so it's done."

I asked the spokeswoman: Could you talk about that? Could you tell me about the procedures for staying in touch with families when cases drag on for years? Could you tell me how the RCMP tries to assure victims' families that it's still investigating?

For the second time in two months (the month before, I'd called about Malena's story), the spokeswoman was incredulous that it was a journalist calling, rather than the family itself. If the family has a problem with the investigation, she suggested, the family should call.

Doris Goulet holding a photo of herself, her husband Dave, and Krystle Knott that was taken at a family wedding the summer before Krystle disappeared. Photo credit to Adam Dietrich

Krystle's cousin, Wendy Goulet, knows why the family might not call.

If Wendy could rewind the clock, she would plaster Edmonton and northern Alberta with photos of her young, missing cousin, and she wouldn't wait to do it. She would go with her aunt Doris to the police station. Together, they would demand that Krystle's face be broadcast on the news, without delay.

If Wendy could rewind the clock, would it save Krystle and Rene? She doesn't know. She'll never know. What she does know is the feeling of three years of public silence in a missing-persons case. And she knows what it feels like to read a RCMP release that suggests a loved one's disappearance, while inexplicably failing to identify that person as anything more than "another female":

" You can't do anything about it."

At this point, you may object: Not all police or Well, that's just one person's story. If so, I urge you to read the detailed and horrific report by Human Rights Watch: "Canada: Abusive Policing, Neglect Along 'Highway of Tears.'"

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

On the phone with the RCMP spokeswoman, I forged ahead with my questions about Krystle. Most of them she couldn't, or wouldn't, answer.

"I wouldn't be able to speak to an ongoing investigation in specific details," she said at first.

Later she told me, "I don't have that information and we wouldn't be, I wouldn't be, providing that information."

It took a call to the Edmonton Police, another to the British Columbia RCMP, and another to the national RCMP before I got someone on the phone who would say more than Sorry, no. But even these answersfrom a different spokeswoman with the Alberta RCMP, one who had been directed to return my call by the force's national officerswere vague. My attempts to gain answers through the

Access to Information system have been shut down lest the public knowing why Krystle's disappearance wasn't publicized interfere with the hunt for her killer.

Sadly, the RCMP's insistence on secrecy is not limited to Krystle's case. I've spent much of the past nine months posing variations of these questions in respect of several different Indigenous women who disappeared or were murdered. These women died or disappeared in different ways, in different placesbut the police response is always fundamentally the same: the investigation is ongoing, and we need privacy in order to bring it to a successful resolution.

But only one case, that of Denise Bourdeau, abused and then killed by her common-law spouse, has been brought to a successful resolution. And having spent so much time in the homes of families desperate for any scrap of informationno matter how grimabout the fate of their loved ones, I have to believe that there must be a better way. The police must find a way to protect the integrity of its investigations, while at the same time ensuring that families awaiting news do not wind up feeling abandoned by the very system designed to protect and serve them.

Follow Jane Gerster on Twitter.

All photos courtesy of FX

Warning: Spoilers ahead for season one of 'Fargo' as well as the first episode of the second season.

I was, I admit, a Coen brothers skeptic. To me, their 1990small-town gangster film Miller's Crossing was the perfect crimemovie, so perfect that I assumed that no one could make a movie likethat twiceand I was right. Their next films, Barton Fink and HudsuckerProxy, did nothing for me, so even though I was living in Minneapoliswhen Fargo came out in 1996, I didn't go. It was ablisteringly cold winter, and I didn't need to trudge through the snow to see some Minnesota murder-mystery squander the legacy of Miller's Crossing.

These days, Fargo isone of my favorite films. In fact, I'm so protective of that film that whennews of FX's plan to produce an homage series broke, I went through the sameprocess of skepticism, reluctant viewing, and quick realization that somethingspecial was happening on the screen in front of me. Despite occasional missteps, the show locatedthe core of the Coens' dark, comedic, savage worldview in a new tale ofsmall-town murder and surprising heroism.

Season two premiered last night. As a skeptic,I doubted that FX could pull off the impossible a second time. I'm delighted tosay that, again, my fears were unfounded.

The show continues to capture the pace, feeling, and savagery of both the first season and its cinematic source material.

In the first scene of the new season, Rye Gerhardt (KieranCulkin), the youngest son of a small-time but savage North Dakota criminal mob,enters a Waffle Hut in Luverne, Minnesota, just across the border from SiouxFalls. It's an icy night in the winter of 1979. The ugly light of the dinerreflects off the snow and cheap plastic of the restaurant's tables as Rye sitsdown at the bar. But he's not there to order food. He plans to pressure a Fargojudge, sitting at nearby booth, into unfreezing the accounts of his businesspartner so the two of them can go into the IBM Selectric Typewriterbusiness.

By the end of the scene, Rye has shot three people and fled; soon his family, the cops, and members of a criminalsyndicate from Kansas City are looking for him. Unfortunately for everyone,he's already dead, his body disposed of in a scene reminiscent of the famous woodchipper from the Coens' film. Peggy and EdBlomquist (Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Daniels), a hair stylist and butcher, becomeinvolved, even as the KC syndicate and Gerhardt family go to war. It's goingto be a cold, bloody winter.

Fargo is the latest "anthology series" from FX. Anthologyseries tell independent stories connected by a theme, setting, or possibly acontinuing character or two. Seasons jump back and forth in time and space,drawing in viewers not by making us love (or hate) specific characters, or bytelling a story we want to see unfold over many years, but by hooking us on afeeling. It's an old genre, perhaps best characterized by shows like the Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits that began anew with each episode. A few yearsago, American Horror Story, also onFX, reinvigorated the form for the modern era, and has proved season afterseason that it can lure us back with another creepy context. Murder House, Asylum, Coven, and Freak Show all played with the horrorgenres in explicit and effective ways. Hotel,their latest, just came out last week.

The anthology series can fail, though. HBO's True Detective tried to do for crimedrama what AHS did for horror. Season one was great. Season two, on the other hand, was one of the biggest disappointments of the past year. Such are therisks of tearing up your setting and hoping consistent genre will get youthrough. On the bright side, a bad season of an anthology series doesn't meanthat the next year won't be wildly successful. While Kit Harrington has beenstuck with years of long hair in Game of Thrones, big stars can sign up for a single season of ananthology series as a finite commitment.

So what is Fargo's theme?It's not as cut and dry as "horror" or "crime" (or the forthcoming "family drama" from HBO), although the plotsare about crime, to be sure. It's American Gothic, but if the husband had stabbedsomeone with the pitchfork and the wife disposed of the body in heraward-winning meat pies she's taking down to the county fair. This is the Coen brothers' America, a land ofviolence, absurdity, small-time gangsters who think they're Al Capone,vengeance, and a nihilistic optimismor maybe an optimistic nihilism. A Coen brothers movie has a particular feel to it, a power to capture a mood or aplace, and I thought Fargo season onefelt just right. Season two, with its story of corporate America versus thefamily business (the family business being crime), does it even better.

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I wasn't alone in this assessment. The first season won a lot of awards, occupied the top slot on best-of lists, and was hailed asa terrific homage to the movie. Set in 2006, a bullied and henpecked insuranceagent, Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman), happens to meet a diabolical assassin,Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton). Nygaard murders his wife; Malvo murders thechief of police. The plot takes off from there. Freeman and Thornton were thebig names, each playing anti-heroes, but the show succeeded because of its trueheroes. Alison Tolman played detective Molly Solverson, the best heroine on TV in a long time. She's a small-town cop who is the only person to put all thepieces of the crime together, but has to deal with all kinds of good-old-boysexist bullshit that interfere with her pursuit of justice. The show pairs herwith Gus Grimley, a Duluth cop who is too afraid to act against Malvo inepisode one, and spends the rest of the season trying to redeem himself. Mollyfights patriarchy, Gus fights his cowardice, and eventually they fall in love.These things kept me happy with the show, despite its many missteps and weirdside plots.

The bad news: There is no Molly Solverson in season two. Infact, in the four episodes I've seen, the heroes are all just a little toostandard-issue "good cop" heroic, though that might change. The good news isthat there's also no Billy Bob Thornton to soak up the screen. I liked LorneMalvo, but he somehow distracted me from the world of northern Minnesota andNorth Dakota and its inhabitants. He was an outsider disrupting the order ofthings. In season two, the order of things is revealed as dysfunctional all byitself, no malevolent force needed.

The new season's 1979 setting is embodiedmost interestingly by the prevalence of post-Vietnam PTSD among themenfolk in their 30s. It turns out that here in the north, an environment asdifferent from Vietnam as is possible to conceive, the war has come home. Oneof these men is Lou Solverson, Molly's dad, here in the prime of his life. Hisdaughter is four. His wife is dying of cancer. It picks up a thread from seasonone, the "Sioux Falls incident" that turned Lou from a cop to a restaurantowner, and promises to reveal all the terrible details. Four episodes in, the crimewar is about to get serious, too many people are paying attention to the haplessBlomquists, and I can't quite tell how we, the viewers, are supposed to feelabout Peggy and Ed. That ambiguity feels right.

The show continues to capture the pace, feeling, and savageryof both the first season and its cinematic source material. It's a Coen brothers world: excessive, at times uneven, but never, ever boring.

Follow David on Twitter.

Fargo airs on Mondays at 10 PM on FX.

Going to use photos of animals looking like they're spooning in this because have you ever looked closely at a photo of two humans genuinely hugging? Honestly, it's disgusting, and I know a lot of you read these things on your lunch. Photo via Flickr user shellac

How romance has evolved. Your great-granddad wrote your gam-gam mud-flecked postcards from the Somme; your gran and granddad met in the lines for some rations; your parents slammed inexpertly behind the dustbins outside the Haciendasyrupy courtship working its way up to what, admittedly, was two people probably getting bin juice on their junk; but at least it was all very much substantial and sincere.

And now there's you: the sharp point of all those years of delicately negotiated romances, three episodes into Orange Is the New Black, hiding all visible signs of arousal underneath a blanket, and wondering when to make the move. This is Netflix and chillthe newest way young people have invented of fucking. The chill a lie, the Netflix a background noise, the humping calamitous.

The Netflix and chill meme has come so far in fact that, yesterday, someone started selling actual condoms branded with the phrase, and last month University of Pennsylvania staged a "Netflix and Chill Festival." Literally everyone knows about it now. They know about it and they are staging large events that require some level of extracurricular work because of it.

As we've reached this point, I thought it made sense to lay out some guidelines around the whole thing, because what is a fun casual sex meme without some extremely hard and fast rules about who, how, and where you can fuck someone while doing it?

Just assume the caption for all of these is "BUT YOU SAID NETFLIX AND CHILL!" Photo via Flickr user Dave Hogg

TRAIN YOUR BODY TO BE AROUSED BY ADAM SANDLER PUTTING BOTH OF HIS PALMS ON HIS FACE AND MAKING A FART SOUND WITH THEM

"Hey, I know what'd be fun: 90 minutes of Adam Sandler talking like a baby with a mouth full of coins while somehow conning an extremely attractive and mature woman into falling in love with him" nobody on Earth, ever.

This, right here, is why Netflix has paid for Sandler's next four films to be made exclusively for them. For sex. Because if you're going to be successful at Netflix and chill, you need to know the function of Adam Sandler moviesto be an inverted aphrodisiac, the exact polar opposite of a cheap thong and a plate of oysters; to be a film so bad that turning it off and having sex is the only viable option besides death.

Watching You Don't Mess With the Zohan is essentially an endurance event designed to test the very limits of your desire not to fuck. If you watch the Universal Pictures pre-roll and see Adam Sandler immediately make a fart joke ("Oh noooo, I did the poopy sound in the butt-pants area!"), then prepare your body for a sexual onslaught, because there's no way you're making your way through the next hour-and-a-half without at least doing some hand stuff.

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ACTUALLY GET NETFLIX SET UP ON A TV, DUDE

The main reason you need to get your Netflix set up on an actual TV while getting handsy, instead of squinting distantly at a precariously balanced laptop, is how easy it is: Every console made in the last ten years has a Netflix app. Failing that, an HDMI-to-HDMI cable or a Mini DisplayPort thing costs, like, $10 on Amazon. If you cannot spend $10 on Amazon and spend like three minutes and one Google search figuring out how to get the audio to run through the TV as well as the picture, then why should someone spend even a modicum of effort fucking you?

Second reason is there's a little switch that goes off when you flip from "trying to get into the first episode of Narcos" to "straight-up having sex with a person," and that switch completely nixes all feeling from your feet. You never know what you're doing with your feet when you're fucking. But they are there, always, on the end of your legs, waiting to absent-mindedly crush a laptop down to dust while you're trying to get purchase on the edge of a bed. Because you're all hands and hips and tongue action when you're fucking, is the thing, your feet flailing out distantly behind you, rarely if ever part of the action, each foot just one wrong move away from going absolutely through the screen and costing you a good hundred, hundred-and-fifty to replace, and all alonga condom bobbing off the end of your penis, shards of laptop screen in your foot, cab to the Apple Storeall along you're thinking, a $10 cable from Amazon and ten minutes of googling how to get the sound going could have saved me a lot of heartache, here.

"BUT YOU SAID NETFLIX AND CHILL!" &c. &c. Photo via Flickr user Tambako The Jaguar

BE CONSTANTLY AWARE OF THE INTIMATE SECRETS YOUR 'WATCHED BY X' BAR REVEALS TO OTHERS

If you're coming into Netflix and chill off the back of an extensive dry spell then your recommendations bar is an absolute shit-show: for dudes it is most likely "every single action film," and for girls it's probably just "all of Ru Paul, sorted ascending to descending in order of sassiness." Essentially, your recommendations bar is an air raid siren that, instead of warning you of the coming bombs, blares to the world just how many times you sat alone watching Netflix until the "Are you still watching, you fucking sad-act?" notification popped up.

Or maybe you're dabbling in a number of Netflix and chill-level relationships. There is no judgment here; we both know you won't be hot forever and you need to take advantage of it while you still can. But be aware that if your "Continue Watching" section is made up of two three-star horror movies, an Adam Sandler film abandoned after 15 minutes, and Clueless, that plainly tells whoever's next to you: You are not the only person ever invited over here for Netflix and chill. It says: You are but a sexy cog in this oiled and well-versed movie-streaming-n-casual-fucking machine. It essentially says: There are some stains lurking on this quilt that you do not want to know fully about.

Whether you're a Netflix and chill polygamist or some dusty-dicked adult virgin, the solution to both of these problems remains the same: set up a separate Netflix profile for each person you invite over to chill with. Or, more crudely: separate accounts for separate mounts.

DO NOT PROPOSE NETFLIX AND CHILL AS SOME SORT OF "PLAN A," AS THOUGH DRY-HUMPING ON A KNITTED BLANKET IN THE 45 MINUTES IT TAKES A DOMINO'S TO TURN UP IS AN ACCEPTABLE DATE

Thing is: Everybody likes chilling, everyone likes banging, everyone likes that little dipping sauce you get with Domino's, and everyone likes both the smooth and intuitive UI and the unparalleled choice of blockbuster movies and exclusive immersive TV that comes with Netflix. But you can't Netflix and chill on a first date; you've got to try a little harder than that.

Early dating is just two people tiptoeing around the fact they would both rather be in bed alternately relaxing and having sex instead of going out for dinner and doing interesting things together and pretending they don't shit. Early dating is a type of performance art where you pretend to be literally anything other than the person you are, until you fool someone into loving you.

Does Netflix and chill fit into that narrative? No, it does not.

"BUT YOU SAID NETFLIX AND CHILL!" It's actually a v funny caption, you see. Photo via Flickr user Carlos Pacheco

HAVE YOUR OWN NETFLIX ACCOUNT

Nothing kills a boner like having to text someone you shared a flat with three years ago to double-check the password (j03lissh1t) and log in with one of eight humorously named profiles (JOEL_IS_CUNT) before you can watch one single episode of Better Call Saul together. Netflix costs $7.99 a month, man. Come on. Come on.

"BUT YOU SAID" wait for it "NETFLIX AND CHILL!" Photo via Flickr user Andrea Schaffer

GETTING UR CHILL RIGHT

The "chill" in "Netflix and chill," as everybody on Earth knows, does not in fact mean "chill." It means: Lie down quietly for anywhere between 15 minutes to an hour and a half, fully aware of your breathing and your every motion, the blood pumping through your body so hard you can feel it, and thenslowly, halfway through that boring episode of House of Cards where Frank Underwood goes back to his old university and gets drunk and balefulwhile that's happening, slowly initiate anything from low-level hand stuff to full-on intercourse.

That is the unspoken secret, the words between the lines. Chill isn't chill. Chill is much more erection-y than that.

Does that mean your bedroom, the battlefield on which the sexual war will be wrought, needs to be a chill-free zone? Exactly the opposite. Your bedroom has to be the definition of chill. Two soft lamps. Cushion choices. A range of textures and weights to the blankets. Fresh sheets. A candle, maybe. Little snacks. A zen-like feeling of calm throughout the rest of the house. Soft entrance music. Luxurious carpets. A small warm animal to pet. Warm drinks. Lightly-scented incense. Airplane mode on your phone. Soft plump towels and robing. Your room has to be extremely chill in the brief moments you stay settled before breaking out the flavored lubricants and nipple equipment.

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DON'T WATCH AN OUT-OF-SEQUENCE EPISODE MIDWAY THROUGH A SERIES, YOU FUCKING IDIOT

What are you, an idiot? Are you a human idiot? How do you expect me to get fucky on a blanket when I'm still thinking about that episode of Orange Is the New Black? I do not understand why they just ran through a chain-link fence and into a lake. I do not understand why that was important. I was only six episodes into this series. Why is the annoying one friends with the crazy one now? Why is the silent one a shunned god? No, stostop rubbing that, I feel like I've missed a scene. Did I miss a scene? Why didn't they just escape? What does it mean? You know what, no, fuck it. I can't do this. I've got to go home now. I'm so confused.

"BUT YOU SAID NETFLIX AND CHILL!" Photo via Flickr user Aviva West

ACTUALLY HAVE SOME SEX, THOUGH

Netflix and chill has to end in sex otherwise it's "just Netflix," and "just Netflix" is what you do four years into a relationship when you already hate each other and you're just sitting there, two opposite ends of a sofa, grimly thanking the Netflix gods for that "Next Episode Will Play in 12 Seconds" auto-function so that neither one of you has to talk to the other about who is going to get up and click the "Play Next" button with their actual finger, breaking the silence only to say, "Can you pause it? I need a wee"; breaking the silence only to say, "It's your turn to make tea, I made the last teas." So, I mean, if you want that then just watch Netflix togetherone of you the cliff and one of you the sea, both of you slowly erodingthen by all means do so. But if you don't, then incorporate the chill component.

Much like the recommendations bar plots the exciting half-an-episode-of-It's-Always-Sunny-followed-by-anal opening sparks of a relationship, so the slow plod through every single Louis Theroux documentary in order, followed by a post-break-up argument over the Netflix password, follows the dying embers. Essentially, every relationship you have ever had can be accurately predicted by the Netflix algorithm. The intensity of your waning love can be foreseen by the "Related Movies" tab. Think about that next time you suggest one more episode of The West Wing before a full pajamas early night.

Anyway, remember to have fun!

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

All photos by Max Siedentopf

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands

Photographer MaxSiedentopf has no idea who the cars in his photos belong to. What hedid know the second he saw them, is that they were in dire need of an upgrade.

Armed with a fewpieces of cardboard and masking tape, he set out on the streets ofAmsterdam looking for the most average cars he could find. He often had to workquickly to stick on his custom-made fenders and wings before someone would spot himand ask what he was up to. After he customized all the Peugots, Lancias, andVolkswagens, he'd snap a picture and take off, leaving the pimped ride for the lucky ownersto find the next morning.

When we asked Max whyhe spent his nights pimping strangers' rides, he said: "Individuality, self-expression, and status aremore important than ever these days. But for some reason you see that things as ordinary as cars are getting personalized less and less, while it could be astrange but great form of self-expression. I thought I'd do people a favor bygiving them a custom-made supercar."

See more of Max's work here.

"Timeless" is among the dodgiest specimens of hyperbole ever to ooze from a critic's pen, but if any video game deserves the accolade, that game is Mojang AB's Minecraft. Its voxel-based visuals refuse to age, for all the efforts of middleware programmers and graphics card manufacturers to raise the barthey're as delightful filling out a Microsoft HoloLens demonstration today as they were in May 2009, when then-jAlbum coder Markus "Notch" Persson published an alpha version of Minecraft on TIGSource.com. More substantially, Minecraft has weathered time's ravages because it isn't just a game but a means of making games, a randomized terrain playset that is as much the artistic property of its enormous player community as of Mojang and, latterly, Microsoft.

Minecraft both inspires nostalgia and surpasses it, seducing at first with its resemblance to classic construction toys like LEGO, yet offering experiences such toys never couldthe chance to live (and die) in the landscapes you create, and share them online with thousands of like minds. Telltale's episodic narrative spin-off Minecraft: Story Mode, on the other hand, feels like a game with one foot in the grave. It too views the world through rose-tinted spectacles, turning in a plot that's effectively the tale of a chirpy greenhorn player getting to grips with Minecraft's props and tools, while harkening back to vintage Hollywood action-comedies like The Goonies and Ghostbusters. But where the original game's nostalgia is captivating, Telltale is held captive by it.

"Whenever we pick up a new license we don't say, 'Yeah we're just going to do whatever we did before,'" the developer's community manager Laura Perusco tells me after my episode one playthrough. "We look at it as a fresh thing, and try to figure out what's important about this license and how we can accommodate that." And yet, Telltale has chosen to tread water with Story Mode's first chapter, which relies on much the same devices as the developer's reputation-making The Walking Dead series, albeit softened a little for younger audiences.

In brief: You'll pick nice or nasty dialogue options within a time limit, scour small areas for highlighted objects, and hit buttons when prompted to avoid hazards such as arrows or fireballs (screw up, and you may simply be asked to repeat the scene). The "explore, hoard, construct" rhythms of Minecraft feature in a persistent but very superficial fashion: At intervals there are worktables where you have to craft an object to advance the plot, usually with ingredients you've literally just been handed by other characters. Elsewhere, "interactive" montage sequences in which you hammer a button to mine or assemble things are a pale shadow of the satisfaction that is raising a mighty edifice, block by block, over a verdant cuboid world.

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The easy objection to all this grumbling is that Telltale was never going to do more than scrape the surface of Minecraft. It and Mojang are polar opposites as creators, so marking one down for failing to entirely replicate the other's achievements is pretty harsh. Fair enough, but this could at least have been an opportunity for Telltale to evolve its methods. What we have here, instead, is a child-friendly dilution of them, with only one real puzzle to speak of and little tension when it comes to managing relationships with non-player characters. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting the Red Wedding. But something a little more grueling than deciding whether to share a cookie would have been pleasant.

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Story Mode's greatest strength is that it explores the culture of Minecraft, rather than just the technicalities. Much of the plot takes place in and around EnderCon, a tribute to the annual MineCon event. There are nods to cosplayers, a building competition, bustling stalls with trays of freebies, dudebro ushers, and stage cameos from Mojang AB employees. The script, meanwhile, finds time amid outbreaks of winsome goofball banter for the odd Minecraft in-joke that might rouse a chuckle from a seasoned player. But then Plot Shenanigans occur and you're plunged into one long, QTE-riddled escape sequence. Hopefully, later episodes will deliver their own little commentaries on other aspects of Minecraft societythe one that features "Magnus the Griefer" sounds like it could be especially entertaining.

Minecraft's lively creator community is worth shouting aboutit solidly debunks the lingering clich of the gamer as a destructive sociopath. Story Mode, however, is unlikely to convince anybody save those deeply in love with Telltale's school of interactive drama, of which there are admittedly a fair few. Perhaps episode two will pick up the slack, but right now this feels like a small step for Telltale, an even smaller one for Minecraft.

Episode one of Minecraft: Story Mode is out now. More information here.

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This. This is a mummer. Photo via Facebook

By now, you're probably sick to death of hearing people freak out about the niqab. I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that if Stephen Harper wins the election next Monday, it will be in large part because he tapped into a wide and ugly vein of Canadian bigotry. I know they're billing it as a stand for women's rights, but that would be more convincing if they weren't also selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, hadn't shuttered 75 percent of the country's Status of Women offices, and weren't shrugging off the more than 1,200 Indigenous women who have been missing or murdered in Canada since 1980.

But hey, what do I know?

Anyway, back in Newfoundland and Labradorwhere flipping off the federal Conservatives is basically a national pastimethere's a movement stirring to leverage one of the province's most "barbaric cultural practices" into a celebration of the democratic right to vote with a covered face.

Any Mummers 'Lowed to Vote? is encouraging Newfoundlander and Labradorians to doll up in their finest mummering gear, mosey on over to the polling booth, and slam dunk a ballot into the box. And, judging by some of the trip reports to the advance polls posted on YouTube, it seems to be working.

For the uninitiated (who have until this moment been wasting their lives), mummering is an old Christmas tradition from the outports. Topped with a mask (usually made of haggard old sheets), you and the b'ys get dressed up in gaudy, malfitting clothes and traipse from door to door for a scoff and a scuff, plying free booze from your hosts until they can guess who you are.

This extremely grainy video from 1987 is our greatest cultural treasure.

In other words, it's barbarism par excellence. God knows poor Jason Kenney would have a conniption if he were to hear the imperfectly accented Newfoundland English most mummers speak. All told, there's a good chance that mummer-vote organizer Jon Keefe can probably expect to get reported the minute the government's new tipline goes live.

A small business owner with a math degree and "not much trust for politicians," Keefe was struck one day by the mummer idea as a satirical response to the "shitty manufactured wedge issue" we all know and love as the ~niqab debate~.

"I realized there's no obligation to show your face in order to vote, thought it'd be a fun thing to do just to get a rise out of the bigots, then had a sort of lightbulb moment when I realized a mummer's costume would be the perfect fit," he told VICE.

But according to Keefe, the mummering schtick has a lot more going for it than simply a sublime way to troll racists. "I think it works on a few different levels, and that's why people seem to be responding to it so well. First, there's been a real resurgence of interest in mummering with young people in Newfoundland recently, and it's a fun way to make the election more of an event and hopefully draw more people out to vote.

"Beyond that, it hints at a few less-obvious points. There are lots of different cultures within Canada, each with their own values and traditions, but we've managed to coexist so far. You shouldn't have to show your face to a stranger in order to avail of your basic democratic right to vote it doesn't make sense. If even just a handful of people do it, other voters will see that it's allowed, totally permissible, and the election staff gets hands-on experience with processing covered-face voters. Everybody wins!"

"I'm sure other people have their own reasons as wella lot of people think it's a great way to make the point that Canadians don't care about manufactured wedge issues and would rather candidates concentrate on actual issues. The country is in flames and we're arguing about bullshit."

Of course, not everyone is thrilled with the idea. A few otherwise sympathetic people on Facebook (where the event was first organized) have highlighted that there may be problems with this idea. There's a legitimate concern that sauntering into a polling booth dressed like something out a low-budget nightmare might actually be trivializing or mocking the experience of those Canadian women who face regular harassment (or worse) as part of their religious devotionespecially now that the Conservative campaign is punting them around like a political football.

But Keefe is emphatic that he's not trying to make light of the niqab itself so much as the government's hamfisted handwringing. "There's no love lost between the federal Cons and people from this province, but running around having a few drinks and a lark around Christmas isn't even in the same realm of experience as regularly wearing a niqab. At all.

"It's easy to be misunderstood when talking about issues that are complex or that people are unfamiliar with, and I think a lot of serious discussion is avoided on many topics, for fear of being cast in a bad light because something you say was misunderstood. I'm sure there are people who've read every word I've written about mummer voting, and still think the point is to mock people who wear niqabs. Sucks, but I don't want to sterilize perfectly good satire just so people don't have to worry or think. I thought about updating the event description to spell everything out in big neon letters, but... read, think, figure it out for yourself, y'know?"

As far as Keefe is concerned, this is a way to showcase a beloved Newfoundland tradition while striking a blow for civil liberties in Canada. "At the end of the day, I want to normalize the idea that you do notand should nothave to expose your flesh to the government in order to avail of your basic democratic rights. That'd be barbaric."

Yes my son. I think we can all drink to that.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.

Misty Faith Potts is a 38-year-old Stoney woman who disappeared in March 2015. She has an MSc in Environmental Science and taught at Yellowhead College, but took a downward spiral into drugs after her brother died and her marriage unravelled. She was last seen at the store at Alexis Nakota Sioux First Nation an hour outside Edmonton and may have been on her way to the city.

VICE travels to Alberta to meet with Misty's family members, who have been combing through the worst drug corners in Edmonton and the fields and forests around Alexis and Paul first nations hoping to find clues leading to Misty's whereabouts. The family hasn't heard much from police and has taken the search for Misty into its own hands. Misty is one of the more than 1,200 missing or murdered Indigenous women across Canada.

Read more comics by Lauren Monger at her Tumblr and Twitter.

The sun sets on the mosque (a replica of the original) in center of town. Photos by the author.

No one admits it much, but Islam helped buildMarree. Locals say the town has never had a church, but it did once have twoactive mosques, with the first built as early as 1861 making it the firstmosque ever built in Australia.

Marree is an outback crossroads town about eight hours northof Adelaide connecting the Oodnadatta and Birdsville tracks. The men who built themosques came from places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. They come out to make moneyfrom their camels and whatever differences there were between then back home,they all became "Afghans." At one point there were so many of them gathered inMarree, the place was known as "Little Asia."

One of two roads into town

At that time, over a century ago, the town was segregatedalong racial lines, with the Afghans and the local Aboriginal people living in thenorth side of the town while the Europeans lived in the south. For theAboriginal people, the situation was a direct product of classic, old-worldracism. There was an element of this for the Afghans as well, but it was also born out of necessity, as theircamels were restricted to the outskirts of the settlement. This is how Marree developed two sides, each with very different cultures. Even the town cemetery is divided, with most Afghan graves marked only with a wooden pole.

Kuranda Seyit spent seven years researching a documentary on the Afghan cameleers and says that while there was racism, South Australia was "softer"than New South Wales and Western Australia. When racism did strike, it came fromoutside in the form of the White Australia Policy and fears among whiteEuropeans that brown-skinned cameleers were stealing white jobs.

Not that this stopped the Afghans from starting familieswith local European and Aboriginal women. The descendants of these unions arestill around today, having spread through the outback as far north as AliceSprings and as far south as Port Augusta, though there are no practicingMuslims among them.

Marree is flat and hot; a caricature of an outback town.

"When went away, they were away for six monthsand the kids were brought up by their mothers, some of whom were European andsome Indigenous," Seyit says. "Lots of the kids were brought up Christian and alot of the cameleers didn't mind their kids being Christian, because they'reall religions of the book. Jews, Christians, Muslims.

"Then in Marree, by 1930, segregation had ended. Theystarted going to school there. Once that boundary was broken the kidsassimilated very quickly."

Today the town feels almost empty with an old, unused railline dividing the town in half, a relic from the 60s and 70s when the place washome to 800 people. That was the golden age of Marree, when 50 trains wouldpass through in a week. Then one day in the 80s the lines closed and now only60 souls call Marree home, with another 600 scattered through the district.

Phil Walsh, owner of the Marree Hotel

As for the mosques, the first two have since been lost tothe desert, but a third stands today in the center of town, a replica of one ofthe originals. Not that the mosque has gone unused. According to Phil Walsh,owner of the local pub, about two years ago, two Muslim clerics rolled into totown and checked into his hotel.

"They were certainly out of place," Walsh says. "You couldspot them a mile off. Long robes and slippers, they just were not dressed forthe outback. And you could tell they'd never been out into the outback before.So that was a double whammy. They certainly had an impact on the residents ofMarree, just by their presence."

The men had come north to visit the site of Islam's entryinto Australia and for the first time in a generation, Islamic prayer could beheard in Marree.

The descendants of the cameleers have a complicatedrelationship with the faith of their grandfathers. I met a handful of these decedents,including 70-year-old Ken Dadleh, who had actually moved to Port Augusta to findwork when the railway closed but was back in town over the weekend.

"I've got no religion," explains Ken Dadleh, grandson of an Afghan pioneer.

Ken says cameleers like his grandfather, Nemit Remit Khan, "nevergot the recognition they deserved." He's quietly proud of his ancestry, butlike a lot of the locals is reluctant to delve into anything controversial. Or maybe like a lot of the guys in this town, he just doesn't say much. "I'vegot no religion," he explains. "I didn't get into that sort of thing, even if sometimesyou wonder if there is a God, you know?"

He doesn't say much else except that he's suspicious ofreligion in general and Islam in particular. It's a common feeling among someof the descendants. Even if their parents carried on some Muslim traditions,like abstaining from pork, most were never raised in the faith and many don'tcare for it. Islam is now as foreign to them now as the adhan.

The town's very old, very quiet cemetery

Even so, most still want to be buried alongside their Afghangrandfathers in their unmarked graves clustered at the back corner of thewindswept cemetery behind the town. Just last week an Afghan woman namedRosanne Cummings passed away and her body had been driven four hours up fromPort Augusta for the funeral on Saturday morning.

It was Marree's second funeral in four years and at leastthree generations of Afghans turned out for the wake under the palm trees inthe center of town where the beer flowed and the rock music lasted well intothe night.

"The Afghans here, I don't look at them as being Muslim," saysPhil Walsh, back at the pub. "In fact one of them looked at me and says we'renot Muslim when we come to the hotel. That's their humor, they've got a greatsense of humor."

Asked about his own attitudes to Islam, he says he doesn't pretend to be an expert and doesn't really care about who you are or where you come from. Still, the stuff he hears on the news at night about "fruitcakes" like ISIS or Al Qaeda frightens him. "They need to be terminated," he says.

"May you enjoy its peace and tranquility."

The next morning though, Walsh has had time to think on thesubject. The Friday before a young boy had shot police accountant Curtis Cheung outside a police station in and media coverage had beenongoing.

"I was watching the TV about that 15-year-old shooter, andyou know, you immediately think 'Muslim,'" he says. "But these guys are so farremoved from that. That's not who they are. And the Afghans, what they did wasjust incredible. No Australian would take a train of 70 camels into thedesert."

"This town is better off for having them here."

Follow Royce on Twitter.

Photo by Triska Hamid

Last week, a report revealed that if you're Muslim, you're half as likely to hold a managerial job than the average Brit, and far more likely to be unemployed. Papers scrambled to decipher why this was the case, offering up a range of reasons, but not too many solutions. Demos, the think-tank behind the report, had a simple one: Introduce legislation that makes it compulsory for large companies to assess anonymous CVs. That way, the thinking goes, employers can't discriminate against applicants with names that sound like they could belong to Muslims.

It's an interesting proposition, but it sidesteps the fact that the right-wing press's relentlessly negative portrayals of Britain's Muslims are perpetuating these prejudices in the first place. At their roots, these stories tend to be hung off the notion that the Muslim community at large has failed to integrate into British societya notion that simply isn't true.

Dr. Sadek Hamid, a Post-Doctoral Research fellow at Liverpool Hope University who has written widely on Britain's Muslim youth, spoke to me about this issue. "Muslims are fully integrated in this country and have been for decades," he said. "Yet, there's still an ongoing debate that Muslims aren't fully British. What more do they have to prove?"

Maariyah, 19, a student in London, says she noticed a difference two years ago after she started wearing a headscarf. "I was so new to it, and when people would be rude to me, I would break down. I'd get really upset because I couldn't understand why this was happening to me," she said. "I didn't know how to react. I would be like, 'I'm sorry.' I would apologize for doing nothing wrong, and I would start crying. When I'm out, it's always an issue. When ISIS was on the rise and I'd be on the train to university, people would move away from me. I've been walking down the road with my friends and people have stopped their cars to spit at us. It's really disgusting: We've been called terrorists and told to get out the country. We haven't done anything."

Understandably, most people I spoke to feel far removed from the right-wing media's portrayal of Islam. YouTuber Hussain Manawer, for instance, rarely feels that the Muslims in the media represent his views. "Never has one person said, 'Yo, I've got this crazy idea: let's blow up this building.' When I see those kinds of things on the news, I'm sort of confusedlike, where do they get these guys from?" he told me. "I'm faced with so many misconceptionsapparently don't wash their bums. I see a lot of issues raised in the name of Islam, but rarely is the voice of the 'moderate' Muslim ever really presented."

Related: Watch VICE's documentary, 'Mexican Muslims'

"Radicalization is an insignificant problem for Britain's Muslim youth," said a frustrated Dr. Hamid. "You know what's a bigger problem? Drugs. But communities are too embarrassed to talk about this."

This makes some sensewith Muslims feeling increasingly scrutinized for their actions, many feel the pressure to be "good Muslims" in the public eye. "Every little thing we do, we do as a Muslim," said student Maariyah. "Because of our headscarves, we are 100 percent Muslimthere's no doubt about it."

The pressure to be a "good Muslim" may also have something to do with parental pressures. "Our parents grew up in a world where Islam was normal," said Awab Elniel, the chair of Loughborough University's Islamic society. "They've seen the rise in Islamophobia and are more cautious of their children. They want us to 'blur' our religion, and often they can be incredibly protective."

By contrast, the current generation of young Muslims grew up in a community made to feel marginalized by the media. Because of this, many feel much more conscious of their faith and realize they have to be knowledgeable in order to defend it. "Islamophobia made me want to research my faith further," said Elniel. "And the more educated you are, the more confident you are in your beliefs."

Read on Noisey: Mainstream MinorityZayn Malik's Role as a Muslim Superstar Is Only Going to Grow

Interestingly, particularly in light of last week's Demos report, none of those I spoke to said their faith feels like a significant barrier to living their lives. Elniel thought it was fairly easy to live in Britain as a Muslim and never felt anything less than British. "It's the media who really think it's problematic," he told me.

"Being a Muslim sits alongside whatever I do," said 29-year-old Ahmed Hussain, a producer for BBC radio. "My religion fits into my day and my day fits into my religion. I don't kick up a fuss about it and I don't need to. Islam is about moderation, and if you want to practice it and make it part of your life, it will happen. I think that segregation exists if you make it exist. You can go and live wherever you want. You can be a Muslim or not. You can choose to believe that the reason why you won't live in a certain area is because of the people that already live there. But then it's only you and your mind-set to blame for saying that we are all segregated.

"If I have to go to a bar for a work event or birthdayyes, I'll be there, but I don't drink. But that doesn't mean that anyone else has to make an issue of it. I have chosen to be there and it won't make me more or less British if I go or not. Does being British mean you're welcoming of everyone, no matter what they believe or practice? Does it mean being nice to your neighbor? Because if it does, then I'm as British as Tom, Dick, or Harry."

An antique ball from an 1899 anatomy book

Every man with at least one functional ball has taken a hitto the junk, a jab to the jock, a plundering of the family jewels. Theuniversal pain and hilarity of the situation has kept America's Funniest Home Videos in business for over 25 years. Ballsare more durable than you might think, and most of the time a little sack tapresults in nothing more than a few moments of stomach-churning pain.

But sometimes, when the planets align and a nut is knocked hardenough or in just the right spot, it can rupture. What then? How do you put aball back together after it breaks and will it ever be the same? Who are thefaceless heroes who operate on man's most sensitive (and perhaps important)organ? Dr. Simon McRae, a genital urological and oncological surgeon at St.Vincent's Hospital in Western Massachusetts, is one of those heroes. With equalparts morbid curiosity and dedication to public service journalism we called Dr.McRae up to find out what happens when you pop a ball and how to fix it.

VICE: What is theworst ball injury you've ever seen?
Dr. Simon McRae: Ican remember one guy was playing hockey and got whacked with a puck in thatarea and it ruptured his testicle. We did the usual diagnostic evaluation andwe decided he needed surgery. That wasn't the worst, though, because he wasfine. You couldn't even tell a couple of weeks later that it had happened.

OK, so what was theworst?
There was a cop who had a gun in his pocket. He fired thegun and the rebound from the butt of the gun crushed his testicle between thegun and his pubic bone and it popped a bit. His situation was messier becauseit was a more complicated rupture than the guy with the hockey puck. Heprobably lost half the volume of his testicle, so that was disconcerting forhim because he was a macho guy.

Can you die from aruptured testicle?
They're not life threatening. The worst case is that youlose a testicle or both testicles. But I've never had a situation where a guyloses both.

But you've treatedpeople who lost one testicle?
There was a mountain biking accident, and that guy ended uplosing his testicle. It was completely annihilated. He came down with the fullforce of his considerable weight on the center bar of his mountain bike. Therewas no capsule left to stitch it back together to hold the innards in. We justremoved it and put in a prosthesis.

You're talking aboutcapsules and innards. What exactly is a ruptured testicle?The testicle has a parenchyma, which is the meat of thetesticle. It's a somewhat soft gelatinous rubbery consistency. Then it is boundby a thin capsule called a tunic. So you have a blunt force trauma, and it sortof ruptures the capsule that binds the innards. It looks like a cracked egg ora disrupted egg and the stuff is pushing out through the defect in the capsuleand you see this oozy material popping out. You have to remove the stuff thatis oozing out and then sew the capsule shut.

How do you diagnoseit?
There are people who show up with swollen nut bags all thetime that we don't do anything to. Differentiating those from people that needtreatment is the first thing. The diagnostic test is an ultrasound and thereare a few things you're looking for. You want to see good blood flow to thetesticle. If it's twisted you have to untwist it and if it's not you have toremove it. The other thing you need to see is that the capsule is intact in allareas and there is no evidence of the parenchyma oozing out. It can look awfulon the outside, all black and blue and swollen, but if the blood flow is goodand the capsule is intact, it can be the most awful thing in the world, but youdon't touch it.

Image via Flickr user Jake Guild

What can you do for abruised nut that doesn't require surgery?
A few weeks of good scrotal support as well asanti-inflammatory medicine and ice on and off for a few days. Then transitionto heat therapy, like sitting in a hot bath, for a week or so.

How long does it taketo recover from testicle surgery?
Usually a week. It is still going to be sore or swollen forfour to five weeks, but it won't be limiting for that amount of time. Theywon't want to do much and will be too sore to go to work for about a week.

How long before youcan have sex again?
Whenever they're ready. There is nothing about sex thatcould hurt them unless they're doing something crazy with a cock ring orsomething. Otherwise, I leave it up to them. No one is really in the mood to doit in the first week. They're too hesitant to do it.

Like balls? Read this article about our trip to the Montana Testicle Festival.

Are there anylong-term effects to rupturing a ball? Does it affect testosterone or fertilityat all?
None for hormones, even if they lose the wholetesticle.You have one on the other sideto compensate. There are plenty of guys with one who have plenty oftestosterone and plenty of kids. No one has any functional deficit fromtesticular repair or the loss of a testicle.

How many of thesehave you seen?
Not that many. Maybe only four or five in the ten years I'vebeen working as a doctor.

Is there any way toprevent a popped ball?
The way to avoid it is prevention or avoiding dangerousthings. Otherwise there is nothing else you can do.

So don't carry a gunin your pocket, even if you're a cop?
Exactly.

Follow Brian on Twitter.

Police during Toronto's 2010 G8/G20 meetings. Photo via Flickr user Jason Hargrove

The disproportionately high rate of visible minorities and poor people in Canada's prisons is rooted in the discriminatory decisions made by the politicians who run our cities, a recent study claims.

McGill professor Jason Carmichael analyzed the factors that determine the size of a city's police force and discovered it had little to do with crime rates. Rather, he found officials determined the number of officers on the ground based primarily on the size of the city's visible minority and lower-income populations, regardless of criminality.

VICE sat down with the sociologist to discuss his work, his hopes for the upcoming election, and his take that more police actually means more crime.

VICE: What is this study?
Jason Carmichael: What we were trying to accomplish was answer a fairly basic question. What spurred us on were recent media reports that were talking about a disconnect between the number of police we have on our streets in Canada and the crime ratesprincipally that crime rates are declining, but the number of police officers that we have in our cities is increasing. There was a lot of speculation in the media reports that I saw, and what I thought I would do is conduct a study whereby we could see what factors are, what structural conditions are actually driving this increase in the number of police we have in Canadian cities.

The first thing we did was try to asses the conventional understanding of this, which is to say people expect that population and crime rates would be the principal drivers. And so if I'm a city official and I'm trying to assess the need for more police, what I would do is evaluate the level of crime in a city. And if it was rising, I would hire more police officers.

What we find is that crime is actually not a predictor of how much police we have in our cities. It's actually many other factors.

The strongest predictor of variation in police force size across can cities is the number of visible minorities that are in a particular community. The second strongest predictor turned out to be the number of people below the poverty line, with crime not being significant.

Of course most people will argueand I want to make sure I'm clear about thisthey'll go OK, well the real reason you're seeing these kinds of effects is because these populations, visible minorities and poor people are the source of the crime problem. But I'll reiterate that we're actually accounting for the level of crime in cities in our models. So the effects of the size of the visible minority population and poor populations are actually independent of crime rates. They're actually the central players in what city officials are looking at when they're gauging their environment, their city, and wondering how they should respond in terms of police force size.

I think we want suspicion of our city officials marijuana, and I think this is likely a positive step in terms of de-emphasizing the role of the criminal justice system overall. It's less about whether marijuana should be decriminalized or not but more about just decreasing this overall criminalization in society. I do like what I hear there for sure but I would like more discussion there about the overall way we as a society manage the crime problem and how we're going to use the formal system to deal with the problem versus a more social system: trying to intervene in communities, trying to help communities build themselves up so people in those communities are less likely to engage in crime.

Follow Brigitte Nol on Twitter.

Forcillo holds his gun in the air, pointed at Yatim, who is on the streetcar alone. Screenshot via YouTube

Amidst a backdrop of growing public outrage against police brutality, Toronto cop James Forcillo entered court Tuesday to stand trial for unprecedented murder charges relating to the shooting death of teenager Sammy Yatim.

Forcillo, 32, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and attempted murder stemming from the death of Yatim. The 18-year-old was shot eight times and tasered while riding a Toronto streetcar on July 27, 2013. Yatim exposed himself to riders and was wielding a small knife at the time, but he was the only person on the streetcar when he was shot.

Murder charges for an officer who killed someone in the line of duty are extremely rare, and a conviction would be "unheard of" said University of Toronto criminologist Mariana Valverde.

"To prove murder you have to prove there was an intention to kill that particular person," she said, which is why a manslaughter charge would be more common in this scenario.

Warning: this video shows the shooting death of Sammy Yatim and may be too graphic for some readers

Valverde suspects the prosecution will argue against a self-defence defence by emphasizing that Forcillo fired multiple rounds and was the only one of the group of officers on scene to do so.

"That would be grounds for the prosecution to say it wasn't a reasonable response and it wasn't reasonable self-defence, because the other cops didn't respond in the same way."

It's possible the murder charge could be downgraded to manslaughter in the course of the trial, she explained, noting the attempted murder charge is "odd" because Yatim did not survive the shooting.

Yatim's death infuriated Torontonians, sparking protests in part because of a bystander video of the incident that was uploaded to YouTube. Security footage taken from inside the streetcar has yet to be seen. In the US, videos depicting police brutality, including the high profile deaths of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown, have ignited the Black Lives Matter movement. A local chapter is fighting racial injustice in Toronto, including the police practice of carding, which disproportionately affects visible minorities.

Street graffiti commemorating Yatim. Photo via Wikipedia

Valverde told VICE it's impossible to ignore the cultural context surrounding the Forcillo case.

"The prosecution of a police officer for a homicide committed in the line of duty is inescapably political," she said. "The Attorney General and the Crown office, the sort of managers who decide on these things... might decide they really don't want to look as if they're condoning police violence."

But she noted the Crown would not lay murder charges purely for "symbolic value."

"There must be a not insignificant chance of conviction."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Illustration by Sam Taylor

If the Republican debates have taught us anything, it's thata presidential primary doesn't really start until the candidates have a chanceto talk over each other for a few hours and be generally humiliated bybright-eyed cable news anchors on national television. Republicans have alreadydone this twice, in what amounted to episodes one and two of the White House season of Celebrity Apprentice; onTuesday night Democrats will get their chance at the party's first primary debate,hosted by CNN.

While it certainly won't be the goat rodeo we've come toexpect from their red-state counterparts, it will be one of the few times thatAmerica will get to meet the men challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democraticnomination in 2016.

Because it's been a long time since we saw a presidentialdebate without a reality star at the center of the proceedings, we've put together a user's manual to guide youthrough what to expect when Clinton and her crew get on stage tonight.

On VICE News: Bill Flores for Speaker of the House? Only if Paul Ryan Doesn't Want It

When and where is thedebate?
In what feels like an attempt to make up for the absence of Donald Trump, CNN is hosting Tuesday's debate at a Las Vegas casino, namely the WynnLas Vegas Resort. As many have pointed out, this is a bit of an odd choicegiven that the hotel's owner, Steve Wynn, though nominally a Democrat, hasgiven millions to Karl Rove's Super PAC.

The debate will last from 8:30 to 11 PM ESTanormal amount of time for these things that now seems merciful after thehellish ordeal CNN put us through with last month's Republican debate, which lasted approximately ten years. Moderator Anderson Cooper will be in charge of asking serious question about things likeincome inequality, guns, and where exactly government officials should bekeeping their emails. Cooper has said he won't force thecandidates to attack each other because he's "uncomfortable with that notion of settingpeople up in order to kind of promote some sort of a face-off"another change from the last GOP debate, where candidates were goaded into saying nasty things about each other like contestants on a reality show.

Who's debating?
Obviously the main attraction Tuesday is Hillary Clinton.The Democratic frontrunner has had a rough couple of weeks, plagued by sinkingpoll numbers and a weekly news trickle about that homebrew email server.

A CBS News poll released on Sunday found that while Clinton maintains a sizable leadover her Democratic rivals, her advantage has narrowed since this summer. Themore significant number, though, is Clinton's favorability rating, which has sunkto 33 percent, down from 41 percent in August. Even worse, 61 percent of votersthink Clinton isn't honest, putting her on par with Donald Trump when it comes to her perceived trustworthiness.

Tuesday is Clinton's chance to change that. Her campaign hasso far been tight-lipped about what their candidate has been doing to preparefor Tuesday's debate. But if the past is any indication, it's safe to assumeher staff has spent the last few weeks trying to make Clinton seem "real" and"relatable" to the average Americana ridiculous effort that usually results inClinton doing something weird, like driving around the country in a van named after a cartoon dog.

All of which is to say, the debate is Bernie Sanders's tolose. The Vermont Senator has been gaining on Clinton in important early votingstates like New Hampshire and Vermont, and his campaign announced this weekendthat it raised more than $25 million between July and September, bringing his total remarkably close to that of the Clinton campaign. He'll have the chance to introduce himself to anational audience on Tuesday, and convince Americans that a curmudgeonly Democraticsocialist who loves Sweden and talks exactly like Larry David is exactly theguy they want as leader of the free world.

But there will be three other candidates on stage, most notably MartinO'Malley, the former governor of Maryland who has been desperately trying toget people to pay attention to his campaign for months. So far, nothing hasworked: despite hitting all the Democratic high notes on issues like climatechange, income inequality, and gun controland being the only candidate to hitClinton while he does itO'Malley is still polling in the single digits.Tuesday night is his chance to change thatand clearly O'Malley knows it,although how he's gone about taking that chance might give you an idea of whyno one likes him in the first place.

The two guys other guys on stage will be former Virginia Senator Jim Webb and former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee.

Wait, who?
Good question. Both Webb and Chafee announced theircandidacies this past spring, but since then, no one has heard much from eitherabout why or how he is running for president.

Watch Our Documentary About Tokyo's Corrupt Diamond Industry:

As we pointed out back when he announced his campaign, Webbis theoretically an interestingand perhaps even viablechallenger to Clinton.A purple-state Democrat, he was calling for criminal justice reform at least adecade ago, when most of the other 2016 candidates were still deep into theirTough on Crime phases. Webb also has a nuanced view on foreign policy andveterans' affairs, informed by a long career in the military, and an illustrious run as a writer of sexy war novels.

Webb's stated reason for gettingin the 2016 race was to challenge Clinton on her foreign policy record asPresident Obama's Secretary of State. The problem is that sincethen, Webb hasn't said anything, at least not in any public forum. A recentMother Jones investigation into whether or not he is actually running wasinconclusive, and although an advisor named Dave "Mudcat" Saunders has beentelling reporters that Webb will be at the debate Tuesday, we probably won't knowfor sure until the lights actually go on at the Wynn.

Chafee is perhaps an even bigger mystery, although a lessinteresting one. A former Republican who's now running in the Democraticprimary, Chafee says he wants to challenge Clinton on her vote in favor of theIraq Warwhich, like Chafee, is old news.

What about Joe Biden?
He won't be there. Despite CNN's best efforts to get UncleJoe in on the action, the Vice President is still biding his time, delaying adecision on whether to make another presidential run until after his party'sfirst Democratic debate. This makes sense, given that Biden has a habit ofsaying things he shouldn'tso the more debates he misses, the fewer opportunities he has to fake an Indian accent on national television.

CNN has not given up hope though. The network changed itsrules to allow anyone polling over 1 percent to participate in the debate,provided they declare their candidacy by October 14the day after the debate.That means Biden could still make a game-time decisionand CNN is ready if hedoes.

Who else won't bethere?
Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig. A crusader forcampaign finance reform, Lessig announced he is running only recently, and ispolling below the 1 percent threshold required to get into the debate. (It's worth noting that Chafee has been right aroundand occasionally belowthat mark in the polls, a point that Lessig himself has made.)

On the spectator side of things, Bill Clinton has said hewon't attend the debatebut will be in Las Vegas on Tuesday anyway.

Will there be anydrama at all?
Probably not. Both Clinton and Sanders have indicated thatthey don't plan on making personal attacks, but will instead focus entirely onpolicy. And Cooper seems unwilling to try to inject drama into the proceedings. That leaves O'Malley as the only instigator on stage, but given hisinability to instigate anything this election cycle, I don't think we should beholding our breath.

In fact, the biggest controversy going into tonight's debatehasn't been about the candidates or their respective campaigns, but about thedebates themselvesspecifically how many of them are scheduled for thiselection cycle. The Democratic National Committee announced this summer thatthe party would only host six officially sanctioned debatesconsiderably fewerthan the number scheduled by the Republican Party.

Technically, it's the samenumber of debates that the Democrats put on in 2004 and 2008, but in the latteryear, candidates ended up meeting at least 26 times at other unofficial forumsand events. This year, however, the DNC has shown a surprisingly draconianstreak, and required the candidates to sign what amounts to a non-competeagreement that bars them from participating in any rogue debates.

The party swears it ran this past all of the campaigns,which is strange because most of the candidatesthat is, the ones not namedClintonwould like more debates, and have criticized the DNC for rigging theprocess in favor of their chosen candidate. Over the weekend, a vice chair ofthe committee said the DNC had asked her not to attend the Las Vegas event because she had voiced support for more debates. All of which is a particularly bad look for the party andits national chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, going into their big night.

On the plus side, Donald Trump will be livetweeting the debate, in case you miss him.

Follow VICE Politics on Twitter, and check out VICE.com later tonight for live coverage of the debate.

Illustrator Sam Taylor is also on Twitter, so follow him too.

Pablo Escobar was the mastermind of drug trafficking and narcoterrorism in Colombia during the 1980s. He transformed the city of Medelln into the cocaine capital of the world and pioneered a model that almost every major criminal organization would later adopt.

Countries around the globe are still grappling with the aftermath of Escobar's reign 20 years after his deathfrom the hired killers he trained as his army of underage hitmen to the remote cocaine labs and clandestine air strips in the jungles of Peru helping feed the world's hunger for coke.

In this excerpt from our recent documentary, we travel into the jungle with the Peruvian National Police in search of hidden cocaine labs scattered across the country.

The final part of our documentary, How Pablo Escobar's Legacy of Violence Drives Today's Cartel Wars, will be available on VICE.com today.

Photo via Flickr user Ben Churchill

"Once, I compared my feelings to a computer," said Bobby, a 56-year-old man who lives in Central Europe. "The systemmy mindcontains a piece of software, but the hardwaremy bodydoes not have the appropriate equipment. And the system keeps asking: 'Attach the device, please, and press any key.'"

Bobby is talking about glasses. Specifically, glasses strong enough to blur his vision; glasses that signal to the world that his eyes are imperfect. Bobby's eyesight is fine. He wishes it wasn't. Since childhood, Bobby has wanted to become visually impaired. This desire is so visceral that it's led him to adopt a lifestyle of blindsimming, or simulating blindness by obstructing his own vision.

"It is difficult to explain," he said of the urge. "I have always wanted to be visually impaired. Always." He says that his preferred method of blindsimmingwearing glasses over contacts to make his vision blurmakes him feel "cool, complete, and satisfied."

It wasn't until Bobby reached his 20s that he began experimenting with bindsimming. At first, he wore strong glasses that distorted his vision so much that he couldn't cross a street without watching the back of the person in front of him. Then, he started wearing an occluderan eyepatch made of plastic, often used to fix children's lazy eyesor wore glasses over contacts to simulate myopia. (Bobby is a partial blindsimmer: He wants to be extremely nearsighted, not fully blind.) At one point, he wore glasses over contacts every day for six years, but the blindsimming stopped when he moved in with his current partner, who he says doesn't understand his "strange desires."

Bobby's desire to be visually impaired, as a seeing person, is a manifestation of body integrity identity disorder (BIID), a condition so rare and controversial that it has yet to make it into the DSM. The most common cases of BIID are people who want to have a healthy limb amputated or paralyzed; while rarer, there are also cases of people who want to be blind, deaf, or castrated.

The earliest recorded instance is from the 18th century, when a man held up a surgeon at gunpoint and demanded the amputation of his perfectly healthy leg, but the term wasn't invented until 2004, when by Dr. Michael First, a Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University, wrote the seminal paper exploring the subject in the journal Psychological Medicine.

According to Dr. First's research, the "strange desires" of BIID usually start in childhood, and can be triggered or crystallized by the sight of someone who has that condition. Those who suffer from BIID report "a chronic, nagging sense that their body simply isn't right," as Dr. First explains it. One of the men he studied described feeling "over-complete" with his two healthy legs. He only wanted one.

"My sight was a prison. When I pretended to be blind, I felt free." Jewel Shuping

Recently, neurologists have joined in the research. They call the disorder "xenomelia," from the Greek "xeno" (foreign) and "melos" (limb). A research team in Zurich performed brain scans on a handful of men who wanted to be amputated, and found reduced cortical thickness in the subjects' superior parietal lobes, which is the part of the brain responsible for spatial awareness and "body ownership."

Still, this doesn't prove that the disorder is purely neurological. As the neurologists in question write, "It remains unclear whether the structural alterations are the cause or rather the consequence of the long-standing and pervasive mismatch between body and self." In other words, if someone constantly favors their right leg because they don't want their left one, it's possible that their brain would change to reflect that preference.

Watch: VICE meets a man with a fetish for balloons.

While the desire for paralysis or healthy limb amputation has been part of the collective consciousness for some time now (there are even several movies about it), the desire to be blind hasn't been as visible. Recently, though, a practicing blindsimmer named Jewel Shuping captured the public's attention when she claimed to have blinded herself with drain cleaner, eventually causing enough damage to one eye that it had to be removed. (Shuping claimed a "sympathetic psychologist" helped her with the procedure, though both Dr. First and Snopes find this hard to believe.)

"My sight was a prison," she told me. "When I pretended to be blind, I felt free." Like Bobby, she can hardly remember a time when she didn't feel like this. "My mother said she found me walking the halls in the dark when I was three. When I was six, I started staring at the sun." Today, Shuping seems happy with her new condition. Her Twitter bio reads, "Just your everyday blind woman, trying to deal with everyday life."

Most blindsimmers aren't so open about their lifestyle. While Dr. First has spoken to 150 people with BIID and estimates there may be "thousands" throughout the world, the disorder is shrouded in secrecy and shame. For years, Bobby kept his urges an "absolute secret," and even today, only a few people know about his desire to be partially blind. The fact that his partner does not accept his condition is devastating for him. "She will never ever understand," he said. "I do not speak about it with her."

"Nobody goes blindsimming because he or she thinks it is funny to pretend to be blind. They do it because they have to." Bobby

For a long time, he grappled with his desires in secret, and describes that period of his life as "lonely, fucking lonely, and strange." But then Bobby stumbled across a variety of online communitiesfirst a group of glasses fetishists, then a blind fetish community, and then finally a group of blindsimmers themselvesand he experienced an overwhelming sense of relief.

"Imagine yourself having blue hair or six fingers," he told me. "You believe you are the only person in the whole world who is like that. And then you find the same people: 'Wow! I am not alone! I am not a freak! There are more people like me!"

The online blindsimming communities became a space to swap tips, write fan fiction, and share Photoshopped photos of celebrities wearing thick glasses. The conversations can be amazingly technical: They help each other calculate "vertex distance" and "effective power on the cornea." They brainstorm ways to induce myopia. They perform complicated equations concerning prescription strengths. They talk, cautiously, about hospitals in Jalisco and Tijuana that are willing to remove their eyes' crystalline lensesthe transparent bit behind your iris that helps you focus on objects at different distances. They discuss the many tools of faux-blindness: walking canes, dark glasses, and the opaque contact lenses used by stage actors who play blind characters.

The blindsimmers also help each other invent excuses for the inevitable questioning, when a friend notices that your glasses are thicker than they used to be or that you're suddenly using a cane. In a discussion on Eyescene.net, an eyewear-interest site with a subsection of blindsimmers, one user suggested: "The trick for avoiding much comment is to retain the same frame style. Most people do not notice the lenses nearly as much as the frames... If there is a comment about the prescription, just say that law school is pretty hard on the eyes, without going into much detail."

Unlike other groups for common interests, the online blindsimming groupssome of which have 300 or 400 usersare underscored by a sense of deep pain and desperation. "Nobody goes blindsimming because he or she thinks it is funny to pretend to be blind," says Bobby. "None of them has ever said to themselves, 'Let us start doing this.' None of the real full or partial blindsimmers do it for fun. They do it because they have to."

Read: What It's Like to be Blind in the Age of the Internet

This urge, this itch, this lack of choiceit all begs a very difficult question. If someone has body identity integrity disorder, and if they are miserable because of it, is surgery ever an option? Is it ever OK to knowingly damage a healthy body?

"People say, 'How can you make me suffer with this?'" Dr. First explained. "It's difficult telling someone that surgery shouldn't be available to them, that they'll have to live with this for the rest of their life. There's no good answer; it's a very tough situation."

Dr. First is aware of 20 to 30 instances where people who longed for an amputation actually went through with medically-sanctioned surgeriesand are happier for it. With the limb gone from their body, they feel at peace, almost as if a ghost has stopped haunting them. Because of this, Dr. First doesn't explicitly oppose surgery, but he lays down three conditions that must be met for the surgery to be ethical. After all, once someone goes through with the surgery, they have to live in this new-ish body forever. "Everybody's worst nightmare is that someone gets this surgery and then regrets it," he says.

Here are the three conditions: "One, the person has to be competent to make the decision and must understand the risks and the benefits. Two, the surgery has to be framed as a treatment. We have to conceptualize it as doing this to treat a condition. Three, there should be some reason to believe that the treatment will be effective."

This third criterion can complicate the options for blindsimmers who want to be blind for real. Shuping provides some evidence that purposeful blinding was effective treatment, even though her "treatment" wasn't sanctioned by the medical establishment. (Dr. First finds it hard to believe that her "treatment" was sanctioned by a respectable medical professional, and he worries that her psychologist's actions were "completely irresponsible and unprofessional.") Shuping told me that she knew the psychologist for a year, and that they worked through many different forms of therapycognitive behavioral therapy, talk therapy, meditation, hypnosisbefore deciding to move ahead with the drain cleaner.

But there are still too many unknowns about her case for Dr. First to declare this an example of an ethical procedure, and so as things stand right now, he believes that any sort of eye surgery for blindsimmers would be "totally speculative." Shuping herself told me that she made her blindsimming friends swear that they wouldn't follow in her footsteps, since blinding by drain cleaning is highly dangerous. "It can be lethal. It can cause severe damage to the face. I told them that they had to promise me they wouldn't do it my way if I told them where I did it."

Without properly sanctioned treatments, those with BIID may go to terrible lengths in an effort to get their bodies aligned with their minds. Those who long for amputation have used dry ice to damage their legs so severely that hospitals are forced to amputate. They've built homemade guillotines and attempted to crush their limbs with cars. In 1998, a man died of gangrene after a black-market amputation in Mexico. Some doctors believe that it's better to offer safe, hygienic surgeries to people who might otherwise take matters into their own hands; others think that doctors should keep trying psychotherapy or medication tailored specifically to BIID.

The day after we first spoke, Bobby sent me a long Facebook message. He wanted to make sure I understand one nuance of his conditionthe inescapability of it.

"Something deep in our minds, souls, hearts urges us to pretend blindness," he wrote. "It is not our choice. We cannot just stop. We cannot fight it. If we fight it, after a time it bursts out itching, burning, and chasing us to put the glasses on and spend a day the way we need to. We are who we are, because we cannot help not being like that. Believe me, it is not an easy life."

The disorder he described has come to represent, to me, a more nuanced idea of sorrow. Usually, sorrow is spoken of in terms of absence, and it springs up this way in our idioms: "the missing piece," "a hole in my heart," "conspicuous by its absence," "empty nest," "empty-handed," "empty inside." But that's not the only way that sorrow can manifest itself. It can also be characterized by words we associate with joy: excess, abundance. A person with body identity integrity disorder feels perpetually "over-complete." While the rest of us tremble at the thought of loss, loss is what they crave. They have been given too much. They don't want it. They never asked for it.

Follow Tori Telfer on Twitter.

A trip to Kmart in 2015 is a trip to an American purgatory. If your town still has one, it probably seems cramped, ragged, poorly lit, and maybe a little bit dirty. Best case scenario, you're walking into what feels, more than anything else, like a counterfeit Walmart.

My town still has one somehow. Its Yelp reviews are sad like trying to stick up for an estranged alcoholic relative is sad. Even the lone positive review, penned by Rebecca T., goes out of its way to mention the place is "disorganized" and "a little dirty." The last time I went there, dream logic took over. I felt like I had fallen out of 2015 and into a place where 1995 never ended. Maybe if I rounded the wrong corner, I would walk into an entertainment section prominently advertising the Star Wars trilogy on VHS, or pass by the ghost of my grandmother buying Tupperware. Nineties nostalgia by way of Ambrose Bierce. It seemed like the lights might go off at any minute and a manager's voice would come over the PA to coldly say, "We regret to inform you that this store does not exist."

An abandoned Kmart storefront in Alabama. Photo via Flickr user Mike Kalasnik

The whole chain is fading to black now, its best days behind it even before the 13-year death march that began when they declared bankruptcy in 2002. Last year, Business Insider ran a piece called "21 Sad Photos of Dead and Dying Kmart Stores." There was no hyperbole in its headline.

K-Mart is a retailer of ruin. Abandonment is its present, demolition is its future. But now there is a soundtrack for its relatively prosperous past. This is thanks to Mark Davis, 42, who worked for Kmart in Naperville, Illinois. He has digitized his 56-cassette collection of the store's background music from 1989 to 1993.

By doing so, he has made public a collection of totally ephemeral muzak, designed by a corporation for Kmart specifically, that was created decades ago to keep shoppers from ever accidentally confronting silence. It is soullessness in bulk, created with machined efficiency, anonymous by design. One of the tapes is icily credited to a "MUSIC TECHNOLOGIES INTERNATIONAL," which sounds like a dystopian robotics firm that might have engineered Jandek, the Representative from Corwood Industries. Most of the material sounds like somebody said, "You know, 'To All the Girls I've Loved Before' is way too edgy for us."

Ripped from its proper time and place, consumed actively rather than absorbed passively, given a new narrative, the music becomes as haunting as an abandoned Kmart itself. Suddenly it's an artistically significant time capsule, a window into the past we weren't supposed to have. And at 2 A.M., it scares the hell out of me. So I emailed Mr. Davis to find out the story behind it.

"I was 16 years old and Kmart was my first job, which lasted for ten years," he writes. "When working in a retail store with a looping program, you hear the same songs over and over. And then you hear the same songs when you stop in to get your paycheck. And you hear them when you go to the store to visit friends when off the clock. Whether you initially like a song, artist, or genre or not, it really grows on you after hearing it over and over. That's what happened to me at the store, and I started liking the songs as they were predictable and helped the day along. . There's a wealth of other Kmart information outside of these tapes that is worth documenting and talking about. I worked for Kmart on their last days of a 'ma and pa' organization, then Walmart and the big retailers stepped in and the climate completely changed. Prior to 1992 employees were paid in cash, had time and a half pay on Sundays, the store closed on Sunday at 6 P.M. and we were not open on Thanksgiving or Easter. Then it all changed."

So in the wreckage of a corporation with numbered days, Mr. Davis has inadvertently created an extremely valuable time capsuleone that suggests a bygone culture's subconscious. Where most cultural time capsules focus on the highlight reel of an era, or the blooper reel, here lies something almost never documented: the unspeakably mundane.

These tapes are not the soundtrack of a Saturday night in Los Angeles or New York. They are not signifiers of the approaching internet revolution and they are not pictures from the Viper Room. They are the soundtrack of somebody's Wednesday afternoon in the Midwest. They are the soundtrack of people running errands. They allow us to viscerally imagine somebody's boring, forgotten day. And that opportunity doesn't come along often, because it's subjecting ourselves to a slice of period-specific mundanity that allows us to understand the rhythms of lives that would otherwise be forgotten.

Header image via Flickr user fanofretail.

Follow Kaleb on Twitter.

A Cree inmate looks out the window.

This article appears in the Canadian VICE Magazine's October Prison Issue

The third floor of the Northwest Territories' largest jail smelled delicious: Butter Lovers Act II microwave popcorn, to be specific. The scent was wafting up from the the inmates' living quarters, through the hallway vents.

The commissary officer told me the popcorn is popular because it's the cheapest food on offer, at 80 cents a bag, compared to a dollar fifty for chipsa significant savings when you're locked up.

With a capacity of roughly 150 inmates, the North Slave Correctional Centre in Yellowknife is the hub for offenders in Canada's arctic. It houses both the most violent criminals and minimum-security inmates. Many come from remote communities in the Northwest Territories, while others come from the neighbouring eastern territory, Nunavut, as part of an agreement to help deal with their high crime rates, poor prison conditions, and overburdened system.

The inmates appear to live relatively comfortable lives. It's no five-star hotel, but there are amenities and creative outlets for passing the time and staying fit. In many ways, Yellowknife's correctional centre is simply the safest place for offenders who will be released back to the community. In larger facilities in southern Canada, it's not uncommon for Northern inmates, especially Inuit, to be taunted or intimidated into concealing contraband or joining gangs. The Indigenous programs herewhich include a sweat lodge and smudging ceremonies developed by and for people from the communitiesdon't just help inmates pass the time, but also keep them connected to their culture.

Traditional healing aside, it's still a jail with concrete walls and windows that look out at barbed-wire fencing.

Inside Pod B, a group of about 30 inmates were playing cards, watching TV, or doing nothing at all. The pod is shaped like a half-circle and has a lower and upper level of cells. In one of them, inspirational quotes like, "Quit drinking. Hustle that cash. Flip every thing," are scratched into the walls like a pre-internet Tumblr page for prisoners.

While the inmates in Pod B were keeping busy, others were upstairs prepping potatoes and burgers for the night's dinner. In the arts and crafts room, an inmate showed me a tiny bouquet of colourfully beaded roses.

"I made these the other day. Took me a couple hours to do each one," he said as he looked out the window, the lake just barely visible past the rolling outcrops on the other side of the fence. "I really like flowers, but I don't know why."

Photo of James Mitchell via VICE News

In a federal suit filed on Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union, three plaintiffs argue that the CIA interrogation program designed by psychologists James Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jesse subjected them to torture. The 82-page complaint, written on behalf of two former prisoners and a family member of another who died in custody, is the first legal challenge to the architects of the brutal methods used by the government to extract information from suspected terrorists after 9/11.

According to a 2012 article in the Nation, after 9/11, a bounty system emerged in which African warlords would sell "terror suspects" to the CIA for cash. Suleiman Abdullah, a newlywed fisherman in Tanzania, was captured in March 2003, possibly by the help of one such warlord named "Mr. Tall." He was taken first to Kenya, and then shuffled around to various places in Afghanistan, like a prison called COBALTwhere, according to the ACLU, he was assaulted with music by the Irish boyband Westlife alternating with heavy metal and kept in a pitch-black cell that smelled like rotting seaweed. Eventually he was taken to another black site facility called the "Salt Pit" and, finally, an Air Force base. In total, he was held for more than five years without being charged, and was released when it was determined he " no threat to the United States Armed Forces or its interests in Afghanistan," according to the lawsuit.

Related on VICE News: Psychologist James Mitchell Admits He Waterboarded al Qaeda Suspects

Suleiman told the Nation that his interrogators would take a jug usually used by Muslims for cleansing rituals and stick the spout up his rectum. According to the ACLU, he was once known as "Travolta" because of his prowess on the dance floor, but he returned to Tanzibar a "shell of his former self."

Similarly, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud was captured in Pakistan, where he was living in April 2003 as an exile from the Gaddafi regime. He was released in August 2005 without ever being charged and was sent back to his native Libya, where he was then imprisoned until the Gaddafi regime was overthrown in 2011.

The third plaintiff, Gul Rahman, never made it home. He was captured in Pakistan and died in November 2002 of hypothermia while being held at Salt Pit. The lawsuit alleges that psychologist Jessen personally assisted in that interrogation.

Many of these allegations aren't new: Back in December, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its 525-page executive summary of the interrogation program that introduced the public to disturbing concepts like "rectal feeding." Soon after the bombshell report, psychologist Mitchell admitted to waterboarding 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed during an interview with VICE News.

In the Nation article about Suleiman, a legal scholar claimed his options for recourse were scant. But according to the complaint, the Alien Tort Statute, which was first adopted in 1789, allows non-US citizens to file suit here for violations of human rights. The plaintiffs allege torture, degrading treatment, and war crimes.

"Mitchell and Jessen conspired with the CIA to torture these three men and many others," Steven Watt, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program, said in a statement. "They claimed that their program was scientifically based, safe, and proven, when in fact it was none of those things. The program was unlawful and its methods barbaric. Psychology is a healing profession, but Mitchell and Jessen violated the ethical code of 'do no harm' in some of the most abhorrent ways imaginable."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

CIA Torture Complaint

Millennials born in the early 80s have the AIDS crisis mixed in with the rest of our childhood nostalgia. We get this weird crossed-wiring effect where flipped-up cycling caps and neon-colored T-shirts mingle with memories of TV news stories about young artists dying in the prime of their lives.

We're also a little bit of a nostalgia donut hole. We were kids with one foot squarely in the analog past, and one in the mysterious digital future. We piloted giant computers that blooped like R2D2 to the dangerous, frontier internet via some weird thing called Prodigy rather than AOL. Our cutting-edge video games included the ones rendered in that hideous blocky 3D, and jarring live-action cut scenes that no one wants to remember, and for good reason.

But we had flawless children's TV.

Nickelodeon had gone through some growing pains on its ascent to Kids TV supremacy in the late 80s and early 90s. In 1980, when a former teacher named Geraldine Laybourne began working at the network as a program manager, the programming and branding were off the mark, and probably relied too much on mimes. "My son hid his Nickelodeon hat and told people that I was a housewife it was so bad," Laybourne told me.

But when she took the helm as network president in 1984, she began to rapidly change things. The era overseen by Laybourne, sometimes called Nickelodeon's "Golden Age," is remembered for the Saturday night SNICK block of programming, the so called "Nicktoons" such as Doug and Rugrats, and the beautiful weirdness of Pete and Pete. But it was also a full-service information center for kids' lives. Laybourne and other executives created a TV ecosystem with it's own outlook on the world: mostly fun and messy, but also well-informed. "Our goal was to give useful stuff to kids," she said.

On Broadly: The Gay Men Who Have Sex With Women

Linda Ellerbee, who has hosted Nick News for decades since it debuted in 1991, put it more bluntly: "Don't lie to them," she said. Where other networks might try to keep things positive all the time, Nickelodeon would point its cameras into the darkness, and find a kid-centric take. "Wherever you find bad things happening in the world, you also find good people trying to make it better," Ellerbee explained.

Nickelodeon had a minor competitor in the Disney Channel, but those choosing the programming there at the time had a gentle approach that contrasted sharply with the attitude at Nick in both its rebelliousness and its guiding principle of civic responsibility.

So in the lead-up to an election, there would be serious policy discussions on Nickelodeon, dealing with issues like the environment, crime, and the war on drugs. During SNICK, the musical sketch comedy show Roundhouse devoted an entire episode to gang violence.

For me, the most vivid example of this ethos was an interstitial documentary on the painter Keith Haring, that came along in the early 90s, playing countless times during commercial breaks between programs. It gave glimpses of Haring's murals and sculptures from 1990 and later. It skipped things like Haring's 1989 gay sex mural, but it didn't obscure the facts of Haring's death, even if it did, as Ellerbee said, find a way to inject optimism into the truth.

It closed with the line "Keith Haring did affect the whole world, because before he died of AIDS in 1990, he showed the world that art isn't just for adults. It's for everybody, especially kids."

Screencap courtesy of Nickelodeon / Viacom

"People were getting born with AIDS and being isolated, and it was an increasingly important topic to know about," Laybourne said.

At the time, I didn't know or understand what my biases were about AIDS, but I had previously thought of AIDS as something that killed people who were somehow sinister. I didn't know the name Keith Haring before I saw that short, but I knew and loved his work, and when he spoke, he looked kind and earnest. So through the repetition of that Keith Haring segment, I learned that AIDS killed people not unlike myself.

Whether because of, or in spite of, that kind of frankness, Nickelodeon was peerless when it came to afternoon and evening programming for school-aged kids, until the Disney Channel and Cartoon Network clawed their way to a little bit of market share in the late 90s. During her time there however, Laybourne said the network's dominance was unchallenged, and that she "only watched what the competition was doing so we would do the opposite."

And it paid off. According to Laybourne, Nickelodeon was seeing annual growth of 20 to 30 percent a year, and had 56 percent of all kids TV viewership by the end of her tenure. It also had an incredible 40 percent profit margin, she told me, partly thanks to staggeringly profitable and cheap-to-produce game shows like Double Dare. "There was one phase where we started doing too many game shows," she admitted.

So was the occasional issues-focused bit of programming some kind of soul-saving gesture, aimed at offsetting the company's unapologetic capitalism? Laybourne balked at the suggestion "Everybody thought we just did that for political reasons, or to be a good guy? It got good ratings. It was good stories. Kids wanted to know what was happening in Northern Ireland."

"We were pretty good at figuring out our audience. What was Viacom going to complain about?" Laybourne asked. Seemingly with that in mind, they launched a potentially controversial project.

Earvin "Magic" Johnson shocked the countryparticularly Lakers fanswhen he announced his HIV diagnosis in 1991. At some point in 1992, according to Laybourne, he voiced his desire to educate kids about the virus. Ellerbee recalls Laybourne saying to her, "If he wants to educate kids, Nickelodeon is the place. Let's get him to come and sit down with a group of kids and talk about this. He will never find a better place to educate kids than our network."

Around that time, ABC News had aired a town hall-style AIDS special called "Growing Up In The Age Of AIDS," mostly about getting adults to talk to their high school-aged kids about condoms. Nickelodeon wanted something a little more intimate, focusing on everyday life with the disease.

But they were still a kids' network, so it did seem necessary to batten down the hatches and prepare for a shitstorm. "I had a consultant come in and train 100 Nickelodeon staffers to man the phones. They trained them in how to deal with angry people," Laybourne said.

Nick News booked Magic Johnson, and they also booked a bunch of kids, some of whom were HIV-positive. "We did not tell anybody on that set who was and who wasn't. Nobody but me knew, not even Magic," Ellerbee said. The plan was to stick them all in a small room together and get them talking. Ellerbee would host.

I watched it when it aired. The clothes were bright, and at first everyone was smiling, and they applauded when Magic came onto the set, but the subject of their conversation was a terminal illness. In 1992, powerful, life-extending antiretroviral meds didn't exist yet, and Johnson, along with anyone HIV-positive, was still staring death in the face.

Few people knew at the time, but Ellerbee was staring death in the face too. She'd recently been hospitalized with breast cancer, a fact she would later disclose when it wouldn't seem like hogging the spotlight.

"I asked everybody who was sitting on that set who was HIV-positive to raise their hands," Ellerbee said. "Astoundingly enough, the kids on that set who were HIV-positive raised their hands. Magic Johnson did not."

"I guess it's some kind of denial," Laybourne guessed.

In any case, the younger of the kids with HIV, Hydeia Broadbent, broke down crying. It was a display of raw emotion that could have derailed the whole show. For Laybourne, what happened next was just great TV. "He just rose to the occasion, with so much humanity. It was fantastic."

"He took her in his arms, and said 'You just want to have people sleep over at your house, right? You just want people to be your friends,'" Laybourne recalled.

"Aw, you don't have to cry," Johnson told Broadbent, "because we are normal people. OK? We are."

"That's when the show became something more than a television show," Ellerbee said. "That child erased the screen between her and the viewer." Indeed, TV reviewers at the time wanted to "reach out and hug her." (You might be relieved to know that Broadbent is still alive and working in AIDS advocacy.)

"And from that point on nobody could ever say again that they didn't know someone who was HIV-positive," Ellerbee said.

But the Nickelodeon special included some of the same medical information as the ABC special, which had been intended for an older crowd. In fact, it was even more detailed. "I remember sitting on that set and rolling a condom down two of my fingers and saying 'This is a condom; the man puts it over his penis before he puts his penis in the woman's vagina, and this is what constitutes safe sex,'" recalled Ellerbee, adding, "I can't believe we were allowed to do that. It's just that no one stopped us."

But was it really all that weird to tell kids how you can get HIV, and how you can't? Was it seen as offensive to acknowledge on a kids' TV network that Johnson contracted the virus during sex? Apparently not. Operators were standing by to deal with any complaints from America's pearl-clutchers. "We got, I think 99 calls that were positive, and one call from somebody who hadn't seen it but thought it was outrageous," Laybourne said.

After the special, called A Conversation with Magic aired, it circulated in clips and in its entirety on other TV shows. The executive producer of Nightline called Nickelodeon the day it premiered, and asked to just run it in place of that night's episode of Nightline. "Ted Koppel introduced it by saying, 'A remarkable piece of television happened today, and we've got permission to show it to you,'" Ellerbee recalled.

Still, the special didn't somehow make AIDS a popular topic for kids' TV. Why would it? "News that is news every day eventually stops being news and becomes fact," Ellerbee is fond of saying.

The issue itself didn't disappear, but the news topic largely did, and today people get wackier ideas than ever about how a person gets HIV, as we saw recently when people thought a story about Eazy E getting deliberately infected during an acupuncture session was somehow more of a plausible theory than his history of promiscuous sex in the late 80s and earl 90s.

For my part, my uncle's partner died of AIDS four years after the special aired. It's hard to say what role Nickelodeon played in my reaction to his declining health, but I know his diagnosis never alienated me from him, and I'm certain I was never afraid of him. When I try to recall where I learned to respond that way, the only place that comes to mind is Nickelodeon.

As for introducing other, newer serious topics to kids on networks like Nickelodeon, Laybourne sounded pessimistic. In her day, she said, "our goal was to raise better citizens, and to introduce kids to lots of different things, and we never got stuck repeating ourselves."

In other words, Laybourne seems to be suggesting that 90s Nickelodeon's juggernaut status cleared the way for risk-taking. From it's high point of 56 percent, Nickelodeon's market share is down, and expected to be around 37 percent by 2017.

"The problem with children's television today," she opined, "is that everybody's looking over their shoulder to see what the competition is doing."

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