All illustrations by Michael Dockery

IKEA is where you graduate from street furniture into a more mature version of existence.It's that first non-student share house, or that first baby. It's that patch of life whereyou're full of zest and design opinions, but haven't necessarily consulted yourpartner on your vision. That's why IKEA is the place for gender stereotypes to erupt overcolor swatches and future plans, as petty squabbles are exacerbated by the stress of navigating a rat maze full of low-quality cheese. Thiscombination can bring out the worst in anyone.

For some reflections on watching people embark on a new, shared passage of life, we asked current and former employees of Australian IKEAs for stories. They had a few, as well as someinsights on what it's like to work at the world's largest furniture chain.

Alex, worked at a Melbourne store.

I worked in the warehouse out the back, with cardboard boxes and pallets of stuff. One thing when you work with a bunch of 21-year-old uni students is that half of the staff turn up pretty hungover on any given day. The mattresses were stored at the top of the warehouse in piles, so it was quite common to put your coworker on the forklift and drop them off for a nap, especially if it was quiet.

The main thing I learned at IKEA is that nesting was a bigger deal than I ever thought. I wasn't then, and I'm still not, an especially a nesty kind of person. I think people take great comfort and solace in nesting but I think it's a bit lazy. It feels like you are whiplashing at the end of the day in this little cocoon of pure happiness, where you don't let in ideas in that don't comply.

I would get confused as to how this urge made so many normal-ish looking people so vulnerable. I guess they had been walking around for hours. If tension builds for hours of course you're going to argue. The best piece of relationship advice I can give to people at IKEA is go in with a plan. Don't all of a sudden decide you want a cowhide rug. Because how will your vegetarian girlfriend feel about that?

IKEAwas a pressure cooker. It was like people supercharged their relationshipsbecause they went through all of society's expectations as they walked around. Theamount of arguments I saw was silly. And I couldn't believe how people completelyfucking separated themselves from the fact that they were in public. Like wecan tear each other to shreds at home, that's fine, but let's not get drawn into an argument when 70 people are walking past.

Bruce, works in a Sydney store.

People love their homes. Their homes are this sacred place where they escape and this attitude affects how they act in the store. I work checkouts and people are really reluctant to admit they're wrong. Like they'll have grabbed two boxes of something and one of the boxes is in a different color, so they'll get defensive about it. To me it seems like they're angry because it's for their hometheir worldand not your place to mess with.

The biggest fight I ever saw was right after I started. This couple came up to the registers and the guy was kind of smiling and I don't know what had happened, but I get the impression they weren't happy. As they were leaving I saw them yelling at each other. Then she ran back and yelled at me because she thought I'd left her card in the Eftpos terminal. But I hadn't, the transaction wouldn't have gone through if I left the card. I couldn't believe how loud she was and the guy just kept smiling. Then she stormed out and they left their stuff behind. It was full-on.

Generally the guys get angry because they can't assemble things. I had another guy come in once, when I was in customer service, and he had a trolley with thousands of dollars worth of kitchen stuff. He said we've got a huge problem. I didn't order a fucking blue kitchen. So then I realized all his stuff still had their blue protector plastic on them, so I lifted a corner to show him. He just looked at me and said, "I'm so sorry." I felt bad. He'd probably driven all that stuff from an hour away or wherever he lived.

Again, it's just people's homes. People take that stuff seriously, and they're trying to create homes at IKEA. That makes it such a volatile environment.

Steven, worked in a Melbourne store

I worked at IKEA in the early 2000s, at the turn of the century. The main thing I remember, and I don't want to sound like a misogynist, but normally men didn't want to be there. I remember once a guy put up an IKEA shelf and put his wife's wedding china on it. So of course it fell off and then he came back in with all the broken wedding china. He was furious. But he was an interesting mix of being angry with himself, angry with IKEA, and just scared of his wife.

I remember this other guy bringing in a mattress. There is a lifetime return on mattresses and this one had a broken spring so he brought it back covered in everything. No shame! I'm not talking about a little period stain or something like, okay things happen. No, this was full Jackson Polly. We gave the money back and put the mattress in the bin.

The more immature guys used to have fun with the radio intercom. So you would say like, Attention all areas, we have a one-three. And that meant there is a really hot chick in the bedding department and the staff would head that way. The first part of the number was the area, so one was bedding, two was kitchen, and so on. Then the second part of the number was the spectacle. One meant a customer to avoid, two meant a couple was fightingif anyone wanted to watchand three meant a cute girl. There was this hilarious guy from Latin America who was like the worst actor in the world. Imagine the Bumblebee Man on his day off kind of thing. He would go out to see the cute girls and pretend to tidy rugs and all this shit.

Peopleare cunts. That's the main thing I learned. People would just blow up over themost insignificant thing. They would come to the store; they had seen somethingin the catalogue and have their heart set on bookshelf number one, bookcasenumber two, and accessory number three. But if accessory number three weren't instock, it would ruin their entire day. It was this kind of petulant, fuckingass-holery. You sit down and you are like, Dude,you are not in the Congo, you have clean drinking water. What is wrong withyou?

Follow Julian on Twitter

(Photo by M Peake via)

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

US News

• Clinton: Sanders Weak on Guns
  Hillary Clinton accused Bernie Sanders of being "not at all" tough on gun control during last night's Democratic debate. There were heated clashes between the two frontrunners on Syria, the big banks and Danish-style socialism. The New York Times

• Social Media Is King in Congress
  Tweets and Facebook posts are the best way to influence congressional leaders in Washington, according to a report out today. More than a third of congressional aides say it takes less than 10 social media posts for their office to pay attention. USA Today

• Muslim Groups to Sue NYPD
  An appeals court has cleared Muslim groups to pursue a lawsuit accusing New York City police of secretly surveilling New Jersey Muslims after 9/11. New Jersey imams, business owners and students claim the surveillance was discriminatory. Politico

• Abortion Research Fees Dropped
  Planned Parenthood will no longer accept money to offset the costs of supplying post-abortion fetal tissue to researchers. The organization has denied making a profit, saying it had only charged fees of up to $100 to cover processing costs. BBC

International News

• Jerusalem Neighborhoods to Be Sealed Off
  Israel's security cabinet has authorized police to impose curfews and "seal off" Palestinian neighborhoods in a bid to halt violence. It follows attacks in Jerusalem in which three Israelis were killed, and another Palestinian death during clashes in the West Bank. Al Jazeera

• Coup Claim in Brazil
  President Dilma Rousseff has accused opponents of "deliberate coup-mongering" by trying to overthrow an elected government. Rousseff is facing impeachment calls after a federal court found her government manipulated accounts to disguise a deficit. Reuters

• One Percenters Just Got Richer
  A new report finds that just 1 percent of the world's population now owns half of the world's wealth. Global inequality has widened, according to Credit Suisse, with middle classes squeezed at the expense of the very rich. The Guardian

• Philippines Kidnapping Video Posted
  Muslim militants have released a video apparently showing that two Canadians, a Norwegian and a Filipino woman abducted from a Philippines resort are still alive. The kidnappers have demanded Philippine forces stop attacks in a Muslim province. AP

T.I. (Photo by Carla via)

Everything Else

• T.I. Admits Wrongness
  The rapper apologized for "insensitive" remarks about Hillary Clinton and womankind in general after saying he "can't vote for the leader of the free world to be a woman." Rolling Stone

• GM's Secret Self-Driving Car
  The self-driving revolution is here. General Motors' CEO has revealed the company has been secretly working on an autonomous electric car to push ahead of Silicon Valley competitors. Detroit Free Press

• Anti-Drone Weapon Arrives
  America has its first "drone defender" weapon. It knocks drones out of the sky without totally destroying them. Motherboard

• The Gay Men Who Have Sex with Women
  Self-identified gay men explain why they sleep with women, even though they much prefer the ass to the vagina. Broadly

Done with reading for this morning? Watch our new documentary, A Family's Desperate Search for a Missing Woman Police Can't Find.

Screenshot from the 'Why You Always Lying' music video via YouTube

Whether it's Hillary Clinton changing her story about her email use, the Pentagon changing its story about a recent bombing of a hospital in Afghanistan, or Volkswagen misrepresenting the amount of emissions produced by its vehicles, lies and dishonesty are everywhere. Corporations lie about their products; movie stars lie about their age; people lie about cheating on their spouses. Are we living in an age where lying has become more common, or does it just seem that way because technology has made it easier to get caught in a lie?

We posed the question to Dr. Matthew McGlone, a cognitive psychologist who literally teaches the course on "Lying and Deception" at the University of Texas in Austin. In his own research he studies psycholinguistics, or how people influence each other's behavior through verbal communication. He's co-written and edited two books on the subject of lying, and most recently, has been studying identity thieves and doctor shoppers looking for pills as modern forms of lying. He walked us through the history and development of lies, and explained why lying will always be a human tendency.

VICE: Is lying part of human nature? How early do humans begin to lie?
Dr. Matthew McGlone: The evidence seems to point to right around 19 months. . To my way of thinking, some of the most fascinating stuff going on in deception is in biology and medicine, looking at viruses and pathogens fool the body.

I have this woman who is a retired biologist-slash-botanist come to my class and talk about immunology, and also orchids. Many orchids reproduce by fooling male bees into thinking that they're female bees. The male bees are trying to get it on with the orchids, these sticky pollen sacs will get stuck to the male's back and then is carried to next orchid and that's how they cross-pollinate.

So you're basically saying that deception is an inherent part of biological evolution?
Honesty may be the best policy as we say in human affairs, but it sure isn't nature's policy.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Follow Bill Kilby on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user The All-Nite Images

Read: The Hidden-Camera Video That Pro-Lifers Claim Proves Planned Parenthood Is Selling Fetus Parts for Profit

On Tuesday, Planned Parenthood's president, Cecile Richards, delivered a letter to the National Institute of Health saying that the women's health organization would stop taking legal reimbursements for fetal tissue, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The move comes in the wake of heavily-doctored videos released last July by anti-abortion activists that appeared to show Planned Parenthood selling harvested human fetuses. The videos' subsequent controversy has incited a Republican-led campaign to federally defund the non-profit.

In reality, receiving reimbursement for the costs accrued during the process of donating fetal tissue for medical research is legal, but Planned Parenthood hopes the move will put the controversy to rest.

"Planned Parenthood's policies on fetal tissue donation already exceed the legal requirements," Richards said in her letter. "Now we're going even further in order to take away any basis for attacking Planned Parenthood to advance an anti-abortion political agenda."

The announcement has not placated the organization's opponents, however. A spokeswoman for anti-abortion group Students for Life of America said in a statement that even though "Planned Parenthood is supposedly stopping the exchange of money for the body parts of babies they abort," it still doesn't "lessen the criminal charges they are possibly facing."

On Tuesday night, CNN held the first Democratic presidential debate of the 2016 election, and VICE liveblogged it.

Highlights included the moment when Bernie Sanders told Hillary Clinton, "The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails"although it wasn't clear on Tuesday night whether the remark scored more political points for Clinton or Sandersalong with the delightful moment when Jim Webb, one of the more obscure democratic candidates, made a lasting impression when he recalled his own killing of a North Vietnamese soldier, and it gave him a case of the giggles.

If you didn't get to see the debate last night, catch up by starting from the bottom and reading the whole thing:

All stills from Yakuza Apocalypse courtesy TIFF

Fifteen years ago, Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike took a certain segment of the film world by storm with a string of shocking and/or irreverent films (Audition, Gozu, The Happiness of the Katakuris, Ichi the Killer, Visitor Q), which instantly established him as one of the world's leading cult auteurs. From 1999 to 2003, he directed anywhere from five to eight films per year, making him a constant presence on the festival circuit. Toward the end of this run, Japanese cinema found a more prominent place in the mainstream, thanks to Ringu/The Ring, Ju-on/The Grudge, and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill films. But for some, Miike remained the most vibrant and unpredictable voice in modern Japanese cinema.

Watch Takashi Miike on the October 14 episode of Daily VICE

Now 55, the director's productivity has been diminished somewhat by his own successas he explains below, bigger budgets are more time-consumingbut the eccentric impulses that built his reputation are alive and well. For evidence of this, look no further than Yakuza Apocalypse, the sprawling new yakuza vampire epic that screened at last month's Toronto International Film Festival and hit North American theatres and VOD last week. During TIFF, we sat down with the enigmatic director to discuss his unprecedented productivity, the challenges of going Hollywood, and his mother's unlikely experience with Ichi the Killer.

Interview with Takashi Miike courtesy Daily VICE

VICE: What's the process for making a film like Yakuza Apocalypse? How does the ball get rolling and how long does it take?
Takashi Miike: Among all the movies I've made, this is a very exceptional case. I was slated to make a movie in Hollywood, and it got cancelled at the last minute, so all of a sudden we found ourselves with a gap in our schedule. We got to drinkingthe producers and me and my staffand we talked about various things. "Okay, what can we do? What kind of movie would we like to make?" I thought it was just chatter over drinks, but then I noticed that the producer's eyes were very serious. I saw a little glimmer in his eye, and the next day we got the green light. The script still had to be written, but one month later, we were starting to shoot. You could almost say it was a movie made out of Hollywood because of how it came about.

What was the Hollywood film you were making?
That movie was The Outsider. It was supposed to star Tom Hardy, who had just finished shooting Mad Max. Production on that film was over, so we were expecting him to arrive. We still don't know the real reason he pulled out. We got one phone call from the lawyer. We were in Korea preparing to shoot and he told us, "Well, it's cancelled. You guys can go back to Japan." After that, it was all between the lawyers.

You've made many yakuza films. Is there a reason you keep returning to this subject?
Now that you mention it, it's true, I have made a lot of movies where there's a character who turns out to be a yakuza. It's not always that I intend to make a yakuza movie. It just turns out that the people out therethe sponsors, the producers, the audienceare looking for movies with yakuza in them. Personally, I like to make these movies because everything about them is about speed. The tempo of their lifestyle is about speed. They live by their instincts. They are allowed to be in fights. If you are making movies about politicians, it would take them five to ten years to get to that, but yakuza do it in one night. They're also regular people at their core.

The genres you work inhorror, action, science fiction, fantasyare often thought of as escapist or insubstantial. Is it important to you that you find ways to elevate these genres in some way?
I'm not really out there to convey a message or make a commentary on the state of society. I'm just trying to make movies simply about life. Naturally, when I'm doing that, horror, violence, and all those kinds of things get mixed in. All those things happen in reality.

What about the more surreal flourishes in your films? In Yakuza Apocalypse, there's a telekinetic martial arts expert in a frog-suit. What's the thinking behind that?
When I was a child, I would see this guy around me who was very popular with the girls, somebody who had trained in martial arts. Once he had to fight, and he was really strong. There are all kinds of things like that, things I wish I had. I was always full of complexes. Perhaps those kinds of characters in my movies are a product of my daydreaming and wishful thinking. That's how they are born. Once those characters appear in my movies, people who have the same complexes as me say, "Yeah, that's exactly what I would like to be." Some people who are already strong will say it's just a comedy, but it really all depends on who is watching the film. They have different sorts of meaning and resonance for different sorts of people.

Some of your most celebrated films are known for their more shocking moments. Do you get any resistance or backlash from friends and family about those films?
I have three kids. Now they're all grown up, but when they were little, every time I would start a new project, they would say, "So dad, are you making a movie we can watch or one we cannot watch?" That's the kind of stuff they would ask. People around mefamily and friendsusually know when to watch and when not to watch. My mom once brought a group of 30 of her friends to see one of my movies, saying, "This is a great movie. My son made it."

She had seen the one before, which was sort of a human drama with a moralistic quality, but the movie they saw was Ichi the Killer. Her friends were in an uproar and they said, "Why did you bring us to this movie? This is crazy. What is your son thinking?" Then I got a call from my mom, saying, "What are you thinking? What have you done?" It's my opinion that the audience has a choice to watch or not to watch. It's not really on me, but nowadays people around me can tell just by looking at my eyes.

Most cinephiles would agree that you're one of the world's most prolific filmmakers. For a while there, you were making six, seven, even eight films a year. Now you're down to about two. How do you account for that change?
During the years that I made a lot of movies, I had to work with very low budgets. We had two weeks to shoot the movie. Including the edit and everything, they would take around two months to make. That's all the time I could afford to spend on those movies. Nowadays, it takes me about two months to shoot a movie. With the CG technology and all that, it really takes much longer. That limits me to two movies per year, even if I use my time really efficiently. To be honest, I've never really thought about maintaining a certain pace or increasing my pace. I don't necessarily think it's good to make lots of movies. It's a very natural process that I ended up making only two films a year.

Do you feel equally connected to all these films or do some stay with you more than others?
It's equal. The title might be different, the characters might be different, the theme might be different, but it feels like I'm making one long movie continuously. Obviously it depends on how I am physically, my physical conditionsometimes I don't feel that great when I'm making a moviebut in terms of the attachment that I feel, it's always pretty much the same.

How do you fit into today's Japanese film industry? Are you widely celebrated or do you have more of a cult fanbase?
In the modern Japanese film industry, films that I would call soft entertainment are the norm. We tend to make films that everyone appreciates, everybody likes, everybody is comfortable watching. Once you're in the theatre, nothing really unexpected happens. You can go there with peace of mind that you'll enjoy the experience. I make those films too, but once in awhile, I make some really weird stuff like Yakuza Apocalypse. In general, I'm probably seen as an unusual director. There are some fans in Japan who enjoy my films as a cult following, but their level of cult-nessif you can call it thatis very diluted compared to what it is in North America.

Your Masters of Horror episode "Imprint" didn't get played on television in the United States because Showtime thought it was too extreme for American viewers, and you recently had this problem with the Tom Hardy movie. What do you think it is that's stopping you from fully crossing over into the American industry?
I've had a few offers to make films in the US, but it's a really difficult thing for me as a human being. I'm not talking necessarily about the creative process, I'm talking about being a director in the US It takes so much more energy. In terms of energy spent, making one movie in Hollywood is the equivalent of 10 or 20 movies in Japan. If I have to expend that much energy being a director in Hollywood, I'd rather stay in Japan. If I had been given the offer in my 20s or 30s, it might have been a different story.

How did it feel to see One Missed Call get remade by Hollywood?
When one of my movies gets remade in Hollywood, I think of it as being on a continuum with the audience's response. It was well received, so it gets remade. It's a great pleasure for me. It's an honour. It's flattering. But I haven't seen the remake of One Missed Call.

Now that you've made almost 100 films, is there anything you're still hungry to direct? Do you have an elusive dream project that you've been waiting years to get off the ground?
It's a very difficult question. To be totally honest, I don't think I do. For me, no matter what movie I make, no matter what the genre or the budget, they all have the same theme at their core: fear of death and happiness about living. So to answer your question, no, I don't really have a dream project.

Follow Jonathan Doyle on Twitter.

If you're trying to be the 2016 Democratic nominee for president, your position on the still-somewhat-mysterious Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal favored by President Obama, is under quite a bit of scrutiny right now. Going into Tuesday night's Democratic debate, the dealand the broader issues that it representshave become an unlikely flashpoint for the five candidates (yes, there are five). It's sure to make for some uncomfortable, on-the-fly opinion-parsing, and will likely put Hillary Clinton in the weird position of having her fellow candidates criticize her view, even when they agree with her.

See, Clinton used to support the deal, and was even tasked with selling it to the international community when she served as Obama's secretary of state. Since launching her current presidential campaign, though, she has repeatedly weaseled out of taking a clear stance on the deal, and as recently as last Tuesday, she was being singled out for her wishy-washiness. But now that the TPP is fully negotiated and ready for Congress to give the official thumbs-up or thumbs-down, she's suddenly decided she's against it.

Clinton announced this last week, although the exact words she used were a pretty timid denunciation, bordering on a non-answer: "As of today I am not in favor of what I have learned about it," she told PBS News Hour. Perhaps due to the mildness of these comments, her staff later deemed it necessary to issue a less ambiguous statement from the candidate, saying that the "bar was very high, and based on what I have seen, I don't believe this agreement has met it."

Her opposition places her on the same side as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a fierce TPP critic and Clinton's official rival for the Democratic nomination. After Clinton finally went on the record opposing the deal, Sanders issued a supportive statement, saying, "I hope that, with her help, with the efforts of virtually every union in the country and with the opposition of many environmental groups, we can defeat this agreement which was largely written by Wall Street and corporate America." He hedged this a little later though, telling reporters that "it would've been more helpful to have her on board a few months ago."

The sudden about-face has left people wondering just how genuine her new position really is, especially since, as Clinton pointed out herself, she has yet to read the deal. Critics like Ian Fletcher think the Democratic frontrunner changed her position on the TPP just because she noticed Sanders was taking away her far-leftist supporters. In contrast to Sanders, though, she's got some work to do in convincing Americans that she really wants to stop the TPP. If she's lying, that means she's going to need to lie harder; otherwise, she needs to turn on the pathos.

It doesn't help that Clinton's comments last week were accompanied by a lot of wonkish foreplay about her supposed "worries" regarding the deal. She explained on PBS that she was "worried about currency manipulation not being part of the agreement." She also said she was "worried that the pharmaceutical companies may have gotten more benefits, and consumers, fewer."

These reasons are a far cry from the populist denouncements espoused by Sanders and his supporters. Her pharmaceutical line is a little silly. As we've previously mentioned, the pharmaceutical provisions in the finalized TPP appear to be less friendly to the pharmaceutical industry than critics had initially feared. Demanding action on currency manipulation is a little farfetched as well since the leaked TPP documents never indicated the deal would include a section on currency manipulation.

Bernie vs. Hillary: A Guide to Tonight's Democratic Showdown

Paul Ryan, an outspoken right-wing Republican congressman and adamant non-candidate in any leadership race this year, was one of those who threw shade Hillary's way on the TPP issue. "I'm a little surprised that someone wouldsomeone who seeking the presidency wouldcavalierly dismiss a trade agreement that they haven't even had a chance to read it yet," he told MSNBC last week. For the record, this places Ryan on Team Obama, and Clinton in opposition to her former bossa great example of the strange bedfellows created by the deal sometimes known as "Obamatrade."

Since Hillary's statement, only one Democratic candidate, former Virginia Senator Jim Webb, seems to remain on the fence. In April, Webb decried the "fast track" bill that empowered Obama to negotiate the TPP more easily, prompting the amateur editors at Ballotpedia to lump him into the "against it" campbut the truth is, he hasn't clearly come out for or against the deal. And for what it's worth, Webb has a history of supporting trade agreements.

The only Democratic candidate who staunchly disagrees with Clinton's official position is a guy named Lincoln Chafee, a former governor and senator from Rhode Island. Chafee has voiced his support for the TPP, saying "I guess I'm the only Democratic candidate for president standing strong with President Obama on this issue." Then again, until eight years ago, Lincoln Chafee was a Republican.

Of course, there's also Vice President Joe Biden, who will not be on stage for the Democratic Debate in Las Vegas. If Biden does decide to run, he'll be among the party's 2016 frontrunners, and the only reasonably likely future president (apologies Mr. Chafee) still "standing strong" with the existing president. That position could hurt Joe, making him look overly enamored with the work done by the Obama administration, even when it hasn't satisfied the president's own party. Biden is a fierce supporter of labor unions, for instance, and unions hate the TPP, which could raise some challenges for the otherwise popular veep's hypothetical 2016 campaign.

But once upon a time, Clinton too spoke fondly of the deal. Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations as Secretary of State back in January of 2010, Clinton said that the US was "engaging in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations as a mechanism for improving linkages among many of the major Asia-Pacific economies." In 2012, she was even more effusive, calling it "the gold standard in trade agreements."

However implausible Clinton's reasons for flip-flopping may be, she has now made her decision. Assuming she knows better than to flip-flop-flipa move that tends to make politicians seem borderline unhingedshe's stuck with this decision for good. That's something White House Press Secretary Josh Ernest seemed to grokk when he said on Thursday that Obama "understands" the need to rebuke his trade deal, because "presidential politics are tough."

While the politics may be tough, major distinctions in policy are hard to come by in the lead-up to a debate. The Republican debates so far have tended to be mostly contests to see which candidate can get the most worked up over issues like abortion. But in the rare moments when GOP candidates parted ways, for instance when criminal justice reform came up, pulses quickened, and the staid proceedings suddenly turned into a vibrant conversation about solutions to real problems. The TPP may be similarly poised to provoke a substantive conversation in Vegas Tuesday night.

Clinton will be the literal centerpiece of the debate, and there in the middle of the stage, she'll be everyone's target when it comes time to answer questions about the TPP. With her agenda focused on fixing her "authenticity problem," she'll need the extra time in the spotlight to convince doubtful voters that she's, like, super not on board with this trade deal you guys. In the meantime, the odds of someone at the debate mentioning Clinton's "gold standard" remark are approximately 5 billion percent.

It's not abundantly clear how much voters care about this trade deal. According to a Gallup poll from back in May, the economy matters more than any other issue in the 2016 election, although "foreign affairs" ranks closer to the bottom of the list. But this partnership, which is ten years in the making, really has a chance of beating the odds and going into effect. And if it livens up an otherwise snoozy presidential debate, it could end up turning into an issue that Democratic voters actually give a shit about.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

As I got to the end of my time in prison, I had the chance to live out the final stretch in a "halfway house," or residential reentry facility, as many inmates do. Instead, I chose to stay in prison. That might surprise people who haven't had experience behind bars, but from what I'd heard, halfway houses can be dangerous places. Drugs circulate so freely that in 2009, 73 percent of those sampled in one New Jersey halfway house tested positive for them, according to a New York Times investigation, and a low-risk offender was apparently murdered in another halfway house in that state for the three dollars he had in his pocket.

I was thinking about my decision when it was announced earlier this month that the federal government will release 6,000 nonviolent drug offenders by November 2. About two-thirds of them are destined for halfway houses, and I can't help but wonder how many will have the resources they need to hack itand how many will be derailed before they even hit the street.

These facilities have been the targets of scathing investigations for years now. Escapes are commonjust last week, the Associated Press reported that 240 federal inmates have escaped en route to federal halfway houses since 2012 alone. According to the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation, in 2009, there was more gang activity in the state's halfway houses than in its prisons, and one study in Pennsylvania even found a higher recidivism rate for those released to halfway houses than for inmates launched directly into the street.

After all, a few high-profile mishaps have the potential to sour the public on reform. I saw this happen firsthand when I entered prison in December 2007; the murders of the Petit family in Cheshire, Connecticutcommitted by two ex-offenders who had apparently met in a Hartford halfway housewere only four months old at the time. Parole was soon banned for violent offenders across the state.

Watch the VICE HBO documentary on America's incarceration system, featuring President Barack Obama's first-ever visit to a federal prison:

Electronic monitoring has proven to be an effective alternative to halfway houses, with one Justice Department (DOJ) study finding it accounted for a 31 percent reduction in the failure on part of inmates to comply with terms of supervised release. (A 1993 study by a scholar affiliated with the Bureau of Prisons suggested the two systems are similarly effective, but conceded that "those offenders releasedvia electronic monitoring benefited more by maintaining continuous employment.") So why is it being used rather sparingly? According to the DOJ, when inmates pay the cost themselves, electronic monitoring runs $64 a month, which is nothing in comparison to the $73 a day the BOP says it costs to put inmates up at halfway houses.

A slow trickle out of prisons isn't enough to count as real reform, but a flood that produces a backlash isn't the answer, either. To change things for good, we need a damin the form of improved halfway houses or a safe alternative to themto prevent the prisoners going out from coming back in, and setting back the criminal justice reform project in the process.

Chandra Bozelko served more than six years in York Correctional Institution, a maximum security women's prison in Niantic, Connecticut. She is the author of Up the River: An Anthology (Bleakhouse, 2013) and blogs about her prison experiences at prison-diaries.com.

He's hip. He's cool. He's Tom Mulcair! Photo by Anthony Tuccitto

"Everyone has the freedom to choose, it's their prerogative, but I wouldn't vote like that," Yugeshwar Singh told me when I asked him how he felt about the idea of getting Stephen Harper out of office via a strategically placed vote for Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. "If kids are getting engaged in voting, I get it and that's great, but I think it's a bad way to voice your right to vote."

Singh, 26, a York University student, said that he came out to the VICE Meets Mulcair town hall event not to mince politics or support a particular party, but rather to know more about missing and murdered Indigenous women and how Thomas Mulcair's NDP was going to handle the crisis where at least 1,017 women have been murdered or gone missing since 1980.

Watch Tom Mulcair's town hall with VICE here.

"I share the same sentiments because it's a cause for concern," Singh's friend Vinay Ram added. "To be a part of a society that doesn't give recognition to the atrocities that have been committed and are being committed today on people that have been here for a very long time is shameful."

For Singh and Ram, the idea of voting for a party with opposing values based purely on polling dataespecially when there are outcomes to issues they feel passionately about hanging in the balanceis out of the question.

This was not the case for everybody in line to the event, however.

"I actually strategically voted and I feel sort of guilty about it," Kabir Bhatia, a Munk School student, told me while chuckling. Just moments earlier, he had explained to me how strongly he supported the NDP's positions on a variety of topics.

"When it comes to getting Harper out, anything's worth it."

Yugeshwar Singh and Vinay Ram. Photo by Jake Kivanc

Over the past few weeks, support for the federal NDP has declined sharply from the lead it had going into the campaign, with the latest Nanos polls putting the party at around 24 percent today. The Liberal Party, on the other hand, has surged ahead, polling at 35 percent, putting them neck and neck with the in-power Conservatives.

The phrase "anyone but Harper", which has become a common topic for Canadian progressives, has opened the door to the idea of strategically voting Harper out of office by tossing votes to the now-leading Liberal Party.

It's a concept Mulcair himself touched on during the opening moments of the event when asked about the idea of a coalition with the Liberalsa plan that Trudeau has shot down on multiple occasions.

"My priority is to get rid of Stephen Harper," Mulcair told the audience, noting that he has been and continues to be open to the idea of resigning his party to split a coalition government in order to defeat the Conservatives.

Mulcair, who answered questions on a variety of topics from audience members and VICE News reporters, held strong throughout the event and received applause for a number of his answers to issues involving the environment, clean water on reserves, and radicalization.

One of the questions, which seemed to reign in less applause for Mulcair than his previous answers, came from VICE News parliamentary correspondent Justin Ling, who pressed the NDP leader about whether he, as prime minister, would back out of the Canadian government's current $15-billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia due to the country's notorious human rights violations.

Mulcair, who initially described the deal as "abysmal," noted that he would not back out of the deal as a matter of business ethics. He added that he would ensure no future deals would happen with the country, however.

After the event, I caught up with Singh and Ram. I was curious what they thought of Mulcair's responses on Indigenous issues and foreign policythe two things they said they cared about the most.

"You know, I thought he was on point. It was an immediate approach," Ram told me about Mulcair's proposition to form a task force in order to tackle the issue of missing and murdered Aboriginal women. When it came to foreign policy, though, Singh highlighted what he thought has been a marker of the NDP's approach to sensitive issues for a while.

"I think the stance they have on Aboriginal is great, but as far as the Palestinian-Israeli deal goes, I think I'm still iffy about that," Singh told me, noting Mulcair's vague support of a peace deal between the two countries. "It seems like everybody tries to play both sideson this issue and othersand I think it's important to take a decisive stance on the issue. Something more practical should been said. I'm a little disappointed."

"And when I move my hands like this, it looks like I'm making a very serious point! That's really all you need to know to succeed in politics." Photo by Anthony Tuccitto

Out of the dozen people I spoke to at the event, only one of them said they weren't sure who they were voting for or who they supported. Almost everybody else, whether they had voted Liberal or the NDP, said they agreed with Mulcair's platform unequivocally.

It's telling then that, even in a room where Mulcair's policies received the same enthusiastic applause as a (pretty lame, IMO) beard joke, the majority of the people I talked to said strategic voting was ultimately more important than anything Mulcair had said or could have said to sway their vote. In a way, the NDP's single-minded approach to eliminating Harper at any cost may have very well been its death rattle this election.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Artwork by Nick Scott

I was 16 when I first experienced depersonalization disorder. Looking back, I feel like the onset was pretty much inevitable; my parents had separated a couple of years earlier, and I responded by developing an eating disorder and depression. Then my mom met my stepdad and we moved to be with himfirst to a tiny village in Yorkshire, and then to Texas. The first transition had felt like a stab in the gut, the second pushed me to breaking point.

It was my first day of high school in Houston when everything changed. Walking past the blue and orange walls of the seven-mile-long corridors, I felt a haze begin to spread in front of my eyes. People in my classes would enquire enthusiastically about my "British-ness," yet I couldn't relax in their company. I found myself acutely aware of everything around me. My senses were skewed; everything sounded miles away and my eyes hurt from the bright artificial lights. I felt disorientated and lost. I felt scared. What was happening to me? Why did everything look so strange? Why did I feel as if I was in a dream? I'd lost the plot, I reasoned. I was going fucking insane.

Depersonalization disorder, known as DPD, significantly affects up to 2 percent of the populationthat equates to 1.3 million people in the UK. One study suggests that up to 50 percent of adults in the US will experience a brief episode of depersonalization in their lifetimes. There is no definitive cause, although traumatic experiences, stress, and using hallucinogenic drugs are all thought to be triggers. There's also an undeniable correlation between the disorder and other anxiety-related conditionsI have always been an anxious person.

What is known about this under-recognized, misunderstood phenomenon is how it produces a robotic, emotionally numb, suffocating feeling in the sufferer. Some can't recognize their image in the mirror and suffer loss of sensation in parts of their body. For me, it was like my brain couldn't take any more and entered a state of detachmentmy mind attempting to buffer me from any more harm.

The only time I'd ever felt like this before was when I was 15 and I went with my friend to her older boyfriend's house. We smoked a lot of weed and I was given what I think now was probably ketamine. I didn't really know anyone there, and when things started getting weird there was nobody to reassure me. I sat on the side of the bathtub rocking back and forthI was convinced that the grime-covered walls around me were illusory.

By the morning, those feelings had passed. Surely this meant they would now pass again. I shook my head hoping the mist would clear. But it didn't. For some, the symptoms of depersonalization last just hours. But weeks later I still felt like I was watching the world from a seat set deep in the back of my skull, disconnected from myself, my family, even my own fingertips.

WATCH: Being Idathe story of a young Norwegian woman struggling with borderline personality disorder.

Each day I would wake up as if in a trance. I would put on a brave face and go to school, where I would be unable to concentrate on anything, owing to my constant fixation and rumination on everything I was seeing and thinking. Eventually I'd get myself so worked up that I'd have to bow out of class and seek solace in the nurse's room, where I would lie on a bed while the world closed in on me. How could I explain this to the new friends I had made? How would they understand, when I couldn't? I was convinced I'd "lost it," and I was ashamed.

I would come home on the yellow school bus, mentally annihilated, and spend my evenings self-diagnosing on Google. This led me down a hole of DPD forums that were full of bleak stories of years and years of misery. The terror this induced propelled me into panic attacks. I was never going to get better. Nothing was ever going to be the same. At the weekends I'd drink myself into oblivionbeing intoxicated masked my never-ending flurry of thoughts for a little while.

A commonality among depersonalization and derealization (an associated disorder that is categorized by seeing other people and the environment around you as dreamlike and unreal) sufferers is the ingrained fear of insanity. Unlike other dissociative disorders, though, people who experience DPD are still very much in touch with reality. You're implicitly aware that your perception of your body and the world are not in any way "normal." It's this awareness that makes it so bloody frightening.

Twenty-three-year-old Chloe* tells me that the first time she experienced depersonalization she was 19 and working in a bar kitchen. It came on seemingly out of the blue. "Suddenly it felt like nothing around me was real," she tells me. "I felt like I couldn't communicate with anyone, like I wasn't hearing them or I wasn't speaking. I was convinced I was saying my thoughts out loud."

She never went back to work after that, convinced she'd "gone mad." This fear caused her to become reclusive and keep everything to herself. After a few months of this she was put on medication to treat anxiety, which wasn't effective. "Cognitive behavioral therapy helped me a lot," she explains. "I had a really nice doctor who would set me totally ridiculous tasks to complete, like standing in a queue in Tesco's until you feel your anxiety has halved. The most helpful thing was being honest about it, though. Once I'd looked into it enough that I knew I hadn't just gone crazy, I could start trying to explain what was wrong with me to my parents and my friends, and look for help with coping with it."

Jessica*, a fine art graduate, has suffered with the disorder on and off ever since she was a child. Since the age of 18, though, she's found it increasingly debilitating.

"I find myself really longing to feel sad or angry, as these are such refreshing and healthy surges of energy as compared to the emotional wasteland that is depersonalization," she tells me. "I have often struggled to create work because I have felt too numb and consequently have had no urge to create anything. This has been a huge source of frustration to me."

Her methods of coping include maintaining a healthy lifestyle and finding release in early morning runs, swimming, cooking, and listening to music with heavy bass, which she can feel. These, she says, anchor her in reality and help her overcome the visceral sense that everything is "made of cardboard."

Seven years later, I still live with DPD. I've never been able to shake it completely. Yet, over the years it has eased; I find myself most at peace when I'm outside, particularly in the countryside. The symptoms only become really uncomfortable when I'm tired or hungover. But I can't help but feel that my recovery was hindered a lot by the "experts" I initially saw in Texas. They took sips from Coca Cola cans and nodded approvingly while I sat on the sofa quietly being swallowed.

Herein lies the issue with the disorder: People just don't know what it is. This lack of awareness, even among mental health professionals, leads those living with it to feel isolated, fearful and convinced that things will never get better.

The Depersonalization Research Unit at Maudsley Hospital in South London opened in 1998. It's the only department of its kind in the UK, and it is spearheaded by the amazing Dr. Elaine Hunter. "I think potentially everyone can experience this," she explains about the symptoms of DPD. "It's something that's a bit innate in all of us. We all have a sort of trip-switch within, but with some of us it's a lot more sensitive than others."

The clinic has provided hundreds of people with a place to speak about their experiences and receive treatment through a specialized version of CBT that helps to pinpoint predisposing and precipitating psychological factors that may have triggered that so-called trip-switch. "A lot of the time," Hunter says, "patients will sit down and just burst into tears out of happiness that they're finally understood."

I'm told about a particular patient of Hunter's who, through therapy, has trained himself to understand his depersonalization as just "a bit of a headache." "Probably tomorrow, or in a day or two's time, it will be better," he reasons. Probably, it will.

*Names have been changed.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Photo: the Kremlin via Wikipedia

This article originally appeared on VICE Spain.

The global financial crisis and a healthy black market have turned Venezuela into an economic mindfuck. According to the government, one euro is worth 8.3 bolvares (BsF). If you were to sell that same euro on the black market, however, it would net you 812 BsF.

This is because of the government's complicated and convoluted exchange rate controls, which I won't explain here, because a) I don't really understand them myself, and b) there are plenty of articles elsewhere written by people who actually know what they're talking about.

What I do want to do here, however, is help my country's tourism industry by demonstrating that you can live like a king for an entire month in Venezuela with just one 100 bank note (about $115) thanks to these strange and confusing economic controls. If you're a local earning local money, life is toughvery basic supplies like toilet paper are in extraordinarily short supply and you'll have to wait in line for hours just to get your hands on them. If you're a tourist bringing over foreign currency, on the other hand, the country is your oyster.

Before embarking on my luxury adventure, I made a list of all the things I planned to do, on top of living my normal life in Venezuela. Here is that list:

• Rent a room in an expensive central area in Maracaibo (where I live) for a month
• Spend one night in a five-star hotel room
• Buy a return plane ticket to Caracas, Venezuela's capital
• Lease a convertible and drive around for a day
• Buy lots of beer
• Buy lots of drugs
• Have dinner in five of the best restaurants in Maracaibo
• Get massages andacupuncture at the most luxurious massage parlor I could find
• Give everyone in my building enough money for a full tank of gas

Once I was done writing my list, I sold my 100 on the "black market." I know you're probably picturing some dodgy guy with a shitty mustache and a grubby tracksuit ushering me into a lock-up full of counterfeit Givenchy handbags and "massage oils" made out of oil from a fryer, but in Venezuela selling currency is as simple as posting a message on your Facebook page saying: "I am selling 100."

All you do next is wait. Eventually someone will comment, and then that person will buy your money.

Thing is, you receive so many Venezuelan bank notes for your 100 that it's actually quite unsafe to make the exchange with real cash, so almost everyone prefers a bank transfer. I transferred 100 to my buyer's account and then went to the bank to pick up my money's worth.

The above is what 100 looks like in bolivares.

My first move was renting myself the sweet room above for a cool 9,600 BsF a month. The guy who leased me the room was obviously a charitable soul, because renting an apartment in Venezuela these days is an almost impossible task. Over the past couple of decades, policies such as rent freezes and expropriation orderswhere the government takes privately-owned property and uses it for the benefit of the publichave led to landlords preferring to keep an apartment empty rather than risking losing control of it. I already have an apartment in Maracaibo so I didn't really spend much time in that room, but it was great to feel that I could if I wanted.

The next splurge had to be a bit more exciting than paying (admittedly very cheap) rent for a month, so I decided to go for my five-star hotel experience. I picked one of the most luxurious hotels in Maracaibowhich, by the way, is subsidized by the government of Venezuelaand booked myself a room, with breakfast and round the clock access to a swimming pool.

This cost me 7,000 BsF (8.70, or $9.93) for a night. I went to bed feeling like I had committed a serious fraud. But I hadn't; I was just living that Birdman life on that Slim Jesus dime.

My plane ticket

A few days later, I bought myself a plane ticket toCaracas, the capital of the country and, until recently, the murder capital of the world. The flight took 50 minutes and cost me about 8 ($9). I realized I'd blown about a third of my budget and still had plenty left to do.

Like realizing my lifelong dream of driving a convertiblea red '59 Cadillac, to be exact. Leasing the car for 12 hours put me another $3.40 (3) out of pocket, but it was worth it. Driving this beauty around town made me feel like a king.

More than 30 people asked to have their picture taken with me throughout the day. If, like me, you measure success by how many strangers demand a photo with you and your $3.40 rental car, I think you'll agree: I was doing more than all right.

Fuel is a hot button issue in Venezuela at the moment. One liter of 95 octane gas costs 0.097 bolvares, while dieselthe most used fuel for public transportis 0.048 bolvares per liter. Whatever you're filling up, you're not going to pay more than 20p (around $0.30). However, at the border with Colombia the price per liter of fuelrises to 83 BsF. That's because the border is home to flourishing smuggling businessesbutthat's a completely different issue that I'm not going to go into.

Three bolvares was enough to fill the Cadillac tank. That's about 46 to fill up an entire tank of a car made almost 60 years ago.

To celebrate this bargain, I walked to a nearby liquor store to buy seven 34-beer crates one for each day of a wildly inebriated week, if you will. Each crate cost just 10 BsF, so about $1.70, meaning I spent a total of $12.34 on 238 beers. How are those craft beer bars in New York and London working out for you?

Want to feel even shittier about living in a first world country? In Venezuela, you can buy three grams of good quality cocaine for about 5 ($5.72) and 20 gramsof weed for 7 ($8).

All that weed got my appetite going, so as soon as I got back to Maracaibo I moved on to my next favorite pastime: eating. I picked five of my favorite restaurants and, in the space of five days, had dinners that included pasta, a Caesar salad, pizza, fish, burgers, and risottos.

The mean price of each meal, including the drink, was 1.80 ($2.06). All five dinners combined cost me the extortionate sum of 9 ($10.29).

I'd spent most of my money and was starting to feel a bit sad about having to return to the reality of living in Venezuela on a local wage, so I decided to combat my foul mood with some acupuncture. I called a friend of mine who works at a massage parlor and, within a few hours, I was lying on my stomach, being rubbed by a practitioner who'd just washed their hands with weed crystals to "purify and enhance the experience."

Theprice for this acupuncture-massage combo was 2.5 ($2.86). Taking inventory, I noticed I still had some money left over, so I went to thesame parlor for two more days in a row.

After all this self-indulgence I felt like giving something back. The building I normally live in (not my luxurious prime location room) is home to 45 more people who I barely interact with. I wanted to make amends. I got in touch with the chairman of the building and asked him whether he'd mind if I filled the fuel tanks of all the neighbors' cars. He agreed, obviously, because not doing so would have been a huge dick move. The total cost of buying fuel for 32 cars was 120 BsF, which is less than $3.

That was about it; I had run out of funds. Living in Venezuela might suck for me on my local wage, but it doesn't have to for everyone. To you, Venezuela could be a dream vacation destination.

Finally, since I just spent 1,400 words trying to show you what you can do in Venezuela with a 100 note, let me show you what you can buy with a 100 BsF billthe largest bank note my country publishes.

THIS:

For those of you who aren't familiar with that orange tube, it's the Venezuelan equivalent of Nutella.

See you here on your next vacation!

Rebecka Josephson as Stella in 'My Skinny Sister'

My Skinny Sister, the debut feature by Swedish filmmaker Sanna Lenken, won the Audience Award when it premiered at the Gothenburg Film Festival in January. Soon after, it had picked up a much-coveted Crystal Bear, the Berlinale's prize dedicated to films for younger audiences.

Starring newcomer Rebecka Josephsongranddaughter of the late Ingmar Bergman muse Erland JosephsonLenken's film is a coming-of-age-tale and offers a fine depiction of sisterhood between 12-year-old Stella (Josephson) and her teenage sibling Katja (Amy Deasismont). Stella idolizes Katja so much that she's willing to keep the latter's eating disorder a secret from their parents. But when the effects of the disease worsen, the younger child finds her sisterly loyalties torn apart.

Earlier this year, we spoke with Lenken at a European Film Festival in Lecce, southern Italy, where her film was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize by a jury of international critics. Here, she talks about some of the autobiographical and practical contexts behind the film, and how the research she carried out for itas well as her own pregnancyled to the production of another, shorter work on similar themes.

VICE: What made you center so much of the story around an eating disorder?
Sanna Lenken: The story was there kind of naturally. I had anorexia myself in my teenage years. I thought it wasn't a story that had been told much through fiction, but it's very similar to other diseases like alcoholism or drugs addictionit's not only affecting the sick person. It affects a whole family. I also think it has a lot to do with becoming a woman. The ideal picture of a woman is very limited, in the way we are supposed to both look and act. A lot of girls don't feel happy with themselves. They feel angst, and to control their food is one way to control their angst. I really wish girls had more freedom to be and look like whoever they want to be.

How much research, and what kinds of research, did you carry out?
I did a lot of research. I met with families and with girls who had been sick. They really helped me with the script, which is a mixture between my own experiences and my researchand a bit of fantasy, too. I also went to eating disorder clinics to talk to therapists and doctors.

Do you think these issues are addressed adequately in Sweden? What kinds of support systems are in place?
I read a big article about how more people are getting sick and how they don't get help in time. They don't have enough space in clinics, which means that parents have to be nurses. I think the discussion about how to help is important, but it also misses a bigger discussion, about why so many girlsstill mostly girlsget sick in the first place, and how hard it can be when you grow up. What kind of ideal are we aiming for, and if this ideal actually makes people seriously sick, what can we do to change it?

Three years ago, you made a short film about eating disorders called Eating Lunch. How do you get from that film to My Skinny Sister?
I got pregnant in 2012 and I thought "Okay, I'm pregnant, I won't be able to make the feature now." I said to Annika ?" Because most parents are like, "Oh, my daughter's going to be in a film, it's cool, amazing." But when a person says maybe or doesn't get excited? I just had this feeling that it might be the granddaughter, because the name is not so common with this spelling.

Then we googled the father and realized he was the son of Erland Josephson. It could have been coolnow I think it's cool, it's a nice thing, it's something to saybut back then I didn't like it. I thought, "They know how it is to film, and they know what it is to be in a film." The mother was like, "I'm not sure. This is not like a Pippi Longstocking film. It's not a cheerful story. It's more like a depressing story. It's so dark for her." I didn't want to persuade her or call her or anything. I didn't feel like I could do that. I just had to keep on waiting. And one month and two weeks before the shooting they said yes.

My Skinny Sister is showing as part of the BFI London Film Festival tonight at Vue Cinema Islington, and October 17 at Picturehouse Central.

Follow Michael Pattison on Twitter.

Photo by Megan Brown

Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff's fourth book, is a novel about what it means to be lucky. It's an appropriate subject for anauthor who has been publishing excellent work since 2008 but is only nowreceiving the level of recognition she deserves. Debuting at number seven on the New York Times Bestseller list, Fates and Furies has garnered a host of adoring reviews and on Wednesday was named a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Her talent hasnever been in question. This time she's also caught the right breaks.

The focusof Fates and Furies is a marriage between a seeminglyindestructible couple named Lotto and Mathilde. Groff slowly reveals layers of secrecy andserendipity in the relationship. Drama is added by the simple structuraldecision to break the book into two halves. First comes the husband's story,then that of his wife. There is no alternation between perspectives, nointertwinement of accounts, just this single divorce of voices. The breakageallows established facts to be undermined. It's how Groff allows the light to get in. On thesentence level, this technique is mirrored in a series of smaller fissures: apassage of beautiful, looping description often breaks on an unexpected fullstop.

When I satdown with Groff in a bar in Brooklyn there was awarmth and vibrancy to her. A modesty, too. She's fiercely effusive about otherauthors' work but humble about her own. When she gets angry she does so with aflash of amusement in her eyes that makes you suspect she knows something youdon't. We talked about her rejection of "purity" in storytelling, her book asan exploration of American privilege, and why sometimes the most subversivething you can do in a novel is suggest that married couples have sex.

VICE: Was this book a reaction against the waymarriages are often written about in American literary fictionfrom a singleperspective, which is so often the male perspective?
Lauren Groff: I haven't really said this to anyonebefore, but yes, I really resist the way marriage has been written about insome of the big American novels of the last few years. I think that marriage isoften formed into a very flat, one-sided story in contemporary Americanfiction, and that often the female side of the relationship is not explored atall, or not in any convincing way. I don't know why, but I have a lot of impatiencethese days with what I call cause-and-effect realism in writing. Somethinghappens here, which occasions this, which occasions that. I don't think that'swhat life is like. Life, relationships, marriagesthese are containers for amillion things that are arranged in a nebulous shape. Life isn't lived frombeginning to end in any linear way, a rope full of convenient knots. There aremoments that seem to go on forever, and then there are years you can summarizein just one line.

Sometimes Ithink subversive books are best when they don't announce themselves as subversive.I don't think it's until the second half of this novel that you understandyou're reading a feminist book, and a book about privilege, and luck.

"Itinfuriates me that motherhood in America is supposed to be a form of martyrdom."

All your novels seem to find room to explore theidea of ownership of storiesthe question of who gets to hold the microphone.
I have no faithin who gets to own or tell a given story. That instability is built into myprocess too. I write out all my drafts longhand. I read through the draft andthen I put it to one side and don't look at it as I write another. It's a wayof retaining a sense of playon a computer screen, it would look too much likea finished novel. All this happens because I want to strip the idea ofperfection away, and I believe in the physicality of writing. Anything thatmakes it fun. Stopping to do a seven-minute workout. Writing a particular scenestanding up instead of sitting down. I had all these pieces of butcher paper upon my walls during the writing of Fates andFuries, with drawings of the Greenwich Village apartment my characters livein, and all these diagrams full of arrows linking messy ideas. I'm always in astate of opposition to whatever solid-seeming version of events people presentto me.

You go about life assuming that everyone islying to you.
No! It's not like that. I'm sogullible! My problem is that I resist purityand I don't mean that in theFranzen sense. Nothing seems simple to me now. As I've been moving through my 30s,so many things have been added into my life, yet nothing has been taken out.

What kinds of things have been added?
Well, children.That's one thing. My children are amazing, but you don't become another personwhen you have children. You just become a person who has to do more. Itinfuriates me that motherhood in America is supposed to be a form of martyrdom.My husband is the primary parent. I don't see my kids in the morning beforethey go to schoolI'm in my room, working. This is how we agreed it would bebefore we had kids.

And the truthis, when it comes my turn to bathe and feed my children, I know I often slipinto autopilot. I'm thinking of the book I'm working on, my imagined life,which is often more vivid to me than real life at home is. I am not thesuper-sappy version of motherhood that America seems to want me to be. I'm notgoing to spend all night making a costume for my kids to take to school thenext day. My kids can play for four hours while I read. I'm a loving presencein their lives, but it is not a bad thing that they know that their motherworks, and that her work is extremely important to her. This is appalling tomany women, I know that. I've said this at readings and women have walked out.

"TheAmerican Dream is predicated on ignoring the influence of ingrained privilege."

You say that this is a book about privilege. Lottois an interesting character in that context. He thinks all his good luck hassomehow been earned by him. Was that notion of earned luckat the center of theso-called American Dream, I guesssomething you wanted to explore?
So many peoplein America today, in this political climate, believe they have what they havebecause they are inherently good people, that it's due to hard work. There is acomplete lack of understanding about how much luck goes into the comfortablelives so many of us in America lead. I live in Florida, where I'm surrounded bypeople who believe they've earned their luck. It drives me fucking batshit. Youcan't do anything but remind some of them that, by a stroke of sheer goodfortune, they were born into middle-class families in America, a country wherewe generally ship our wars out, where there's generally free high schooleducation for everybody. To deny that is crazy, yet people deny it all thetime.

You and I areboth creative people. We write for a living. It's incredibly lucky, and theluck goes all the way back to the fact that our ancestors managed to reproduceand create us, and the mere fact that we have the education and freedom tospend our days writing seems a stroke of shocking luck. Every time I hearsomeone complaining about their life as a writer, and being ungrateful for allthe invisible strings that have been pulled in our favor, it makes me want toscream. Lotto is... well, ungrateful. If he reflects on his own luck, he'dnever stop saying thank you. Few of us do. The American Dream is predicated onignoring the influence of ingrained privilege. That's incredibly offensive tome.

I heard that you originally planned the twohalves of Fates and FuriesLotto'sstory and Mathilde'sto be published as separate novellas. Is that right? Youwanted to physically break up cause and effect?
Yes. I wantedthem to be published as two paperback originals and I wanted them to bereleased six months apart from each other.

Presumably your agent let out a large sigh.
I think what heactually did was say, "Are you crazy?" And I was! You could never readMathilde's part and then separately read Lotto's. It wouldn't make any sense. Ittook me a while to see that even though Lotto and Mathilde have radicallydifferent stories to tell, they are both telling their story from within amarriage, which is a unit, a community, just as a book is. It's as Frank LloydWright saysI hope I get this right"Form and function should be one, joined ina spiritual union." Once I realized the stories belonged in the same bookmyfriend Laura van den Berg helped me realize thatit allowed mode and the matterto be married.

Watch: VICE Meets Norwegian Literary Sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard:

Lotto has thisnotion in the book that women are physical creators and men are intellectualcreators.
An artist I hada drink with once said that to me. That's where that line came from. I didn'trebut it at the time, or rebutted it only very weakly, because I was socompletely appalled by what he'd said. He thought there was a biologicalimperative that led men to put their aggressive energy into creating greatgenius works of art, whereas women are built for creating children. And thisguy, he really would consider himself a feminist. He'd say, "I love women, Ilove how gentle they are." That was his version of feminism.

"I love womenthey have sex with me!"
Exactly!

Related: Ta-Nehisi Coates's 'Between the World and Me' Is as Important and Necessary as Everyone Says It Is

Speaking of sexyou write it so well. And I lovethat, as opposed to a novel like Freedom,where the only halfway decent sex is extramarital, you explore eroticism withina marriage, between two people who know each other so well and are thereforebound up in this long pattern of power shifts and psychological slants.
I just hatecontemporary sex scenes that are all bumbly and cute and where everything goeswrong. I mean, that maybe happens in real life, 10 percent of the time, but infiction it happens almost all of the time, right? It's a process of panderingto the readera sympathy move by the writer, whoever he or she is. So manywriters are afraid of writing a serious, complex sex scene. Personally, I'drather write sincerely about sex and risk the Bad Sex Award thanwrite one of those pandering, comical grotesqueries of sex placed there so thereader will like the character and the writer. Alsopeople who are married dostill have sex! With each other! Fiction writers, take note.

Some criticsseem to have failed to relate to Lotto or Mathilde or both. Does that botheryou? Do you buy into the old idea that likability or relatability has any roleat all in fiction?
I don't expectpeople to love Lotto. I kind of wanted him to be this golden character likeBill Clinton who walks into a room and gives off these sparks of light andeveryone just bows to him. And I wanted him to be Floridian, too, and soflawed. He feels like Florida to me. He's sunny and warm but he has this darkheart, he's superficial, and he has no idea how lucky he is.

But MathildeIlove her. She's incredibly autonomous and self-directed. She might not be nice,but who cares? The function of fiction is to show you people who are not likeyou. Likability is bullshit. To be honest, I find the whole idea ofrelatability insulting too. You want to make your character "relatable"? Towho, exactly? It isn't the job of a writer to try and find a consensus amongreaders. Every reader, every character, is different. There's never one storyto be told.

Jonathan Lee's new novel, High Dive, willbe released by Knopf in March 2016. Follow him on Twitter.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff is now out from RiverheadBooks.

Check out more from Julian Glander at his Twitter, Instagram, and blog.

A Calgary cyclist sports a niqab. Photo via Tumblr

While it's pretty clear that Harper created the niqab "debate" to distract voters from more pressing issues in this election, it hasn't stopped pretty much every person you know from announcing via social media their rationale for supporting either side, occasionally with accompanying casual racism.

Niqabs of/du Canada has become a twisted solace for some in these dark times, a Tumblr stream of photos showing Canadians concealing their faces in a niqab-like fashion during everyday activities: a plastic mask worn by a hockey goalie, the scarf and hat necessary for tromping through a proper blizzard, the thin fabric covering surgeons wear. VICE found the person behind the page, Vivek Krishnamurthy, and talked to him over the phone from Massachusetts, where he lives and works as a cyberlaw instructor at Harvard University, to find out what he thinks about the niqab debate and Canadian politics.

VICE: What inspired you to start the Niqabs of/du Canada Tumblr in the first place?
Vivek Krishnamurthy: I had been rather dismayed by the entire debate about the niqab issue, which I think is a non-issue for several reasons we can talk about. But it just struck me as I was looking at the photos that the comparison between the niqab and the way that Canadians often dress during the cold seem to be obvious. I was just surprised that no one had raised that fact. I thought that it was a wonderful way of demonstrating that in our public sphere in Canada, just because of the exigency of weather, we end up covering ourselves a lot, and this is completely non-controversial. So if for six months of the year people have to cover themselves for utilitarian reasons, what's the big deal about some other people choosing to do so 12 months of the year when they walk down the street? Why is this such a major political issue? It just seems so ripe for satire, which is why I decided to start the Tumblr.

Even though you live in the US right now, you're Canadian, correct? Where in Canada are you from?
Yes, I've sort of lived all over Canada. I was born in Calgary, grew up in Montreal and Ottawa, and then Toronto most recently is home. I was actually up there for the long weekend for Canadian Thanksgiving. My parents live in Toronto. So I have very strong ties to Canada even though I happen to live and work in the United States. I've been in the US for about five years.

What do you think about the niqab being made into an election issue in Canada?
I find it really ironic for a few reasons. It's really a debate about this one woman, Zunera Ishaq. The entire thing, as I understand it, was really about her wanting to wear a niqab while taking the oath of citizenship. One of the things that really resonated for me was that in the midst of an election campaign, we're having a debate about one woman's apparel choices precisely when she chose to become a citizen of Canadashe had qualified for it completely with all the requirements. This is about taking the oath in a niqab or not, and the effect of the government's decision was to disenfranchise her by going through the courts and trying to claim that she should not be allowed to wear a niqab while taking the oath of citizenship. She couldn't vote; she was denied the right to participate in the very election in which it became an issue.

It wasn't until this weekend, as I understand it, that a private ceremony was held for her that she was able to take the vow of citizenship and can now register and vote. But she was denied the right to take the oath of citizenship in the way that every other naturalized Canadian has, which is in a public ceremony where people affirm their loyalty, patriotism, and love of the country. And that is something that resonated for me in particular because I've also been disenfranchised by this government. I'm a Canadian who's lived outside of Canada for five years, and under the Orwellian-named Fair Elections Act, for the first time in my life, I have been deprived the right to vote. So this really struck a chord with me, the fact that this individual's right to vote was being deprived at the 11th hour by a government that was changing the rules was something that I felt required a strong statement.

I'm very heartened to see that it looks like the issue has kind of fizzled out almost everywhere except Quebec because I think Canadians are basically a tolerant people who don't just passively put up with difference, but, you know, celebrate that. That's part of what makes Canada, in my view, the greatest country in the world: that we really embrace people of different backgrounds and traditions and allow them to have the fullest commitment of prolific expression of their culture in our country. That's why we do not have the same kinds of problems that people have in Europe or, frankly, here in the United States, with integrating immigrant communities.

Even medical professionals have started covering their faces. Wow. Incredible. Photo via Tumblr

I'm curious what you think are the differences in how racism is presented in Canadian versus American society since you've lived in both.
Let's face it: both countries have deeply troubled histories, and histories where, in Canada, one group of people, and in the United States, two groups of people, have learned the brunt of racial oppression. In Canada, it's our Aboriginal people; in the United States, Native Americans and African-Americans have suffered tremendous systemic disadvantages for years. What I think is different in Canada is that there's much more of a willingness to acknowledge the wrong of the past and to have a public conversation about that. We see that with regard to Aboriginal people, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal people, the Royal Commission on residential schoolspublic apology for what has happened to Aboriginal peoples, which we've never seen in the United States. No one has engaged in similar soul-searching with the effects of the ways Native American people have been treated.

What do you think about the fact that Harper has chosen to have such a strong stance on the niqab, which is something that affects Canadian women, but not to be concerned with the issue of missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada?
Well that does speak to the hypocrisy and the sort of fragrant dog-whistle politics that he's engaging in. What could be a more barbaric cultural practice than all of Canadian society not giving enough about all these missing Aboriginal women? There's nothing more barbaric in my books than women from a disadvantaged minority disappearing, probably being killed, and also society doing nothing. Why has the prime minister decided to make such an issue about women's form of dress, which is her free choice? Perhaps there is a rationale for our public authorities to get involved if someone is being forced by their family to dress in a way that they don't want to. But if you're prioritizing what scarce government resources, and this is a government that claims to be a careful steward of the public purse, why is the government spending millions in legal fees to challenge this one woman's decision to wear a niqab to three levels of courts? Couldn't that money be better spent on investigating what's happened to missing Aboriginal women?

Niqabs everywhere! Photo via Tumblr

What do you think of National Post columnist Barbara Kay's recent statement in an article in which she compared the wearing a niqab in public as being as "indecent" as being naked in public?
What's interesting about her statement is that if nudity is her standard of indecency, that's something that we in Canada accept. In the early 90s, there was a campaign by a number of women who wanted to appear topless in public to get public obscenity laws overturned, and they basically went topless all over the place at Parliament Hill, Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, etc., and they were all charged by police and taken away. Charter challenges were brought to the indecency laws, and the indecency laws were struck down. So if she thinks that's obscene, then that's her view, and she's certainly entitled to it, but the law is the law, and the law is clear that people have choices. We can't simply legislate the values of the majority in a multicultural society that's ruled by law. We have objective standards by which the government can act when there's a real harm to society. One columnist's opinion about what's obscene or one politician's opinion should not be controlling.

What has the response been to Niqabs of/du Canada?
It's certainly shone a light on the issue, and I hope it's made light that this is really unimportant. This issue does not deserve the kind of attention and debate that it has in the election campaign when there are many, many bigger issues that are important to all Canadians like the ones we've discussed.

What's next for your Tumblr?
I think at this point I've made the point. If I get any more particularly amusing photos, I might put them up, but I think it's had its 15 minutes of social media fame, and I'm always looking for opportunities to put up another Tumblr about something else that deserves a satirical poke in the eye.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

Screen grab via Google

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia

The following account of the sexually charged, but still somehow deeply boring, world of a reality TV producer was provided to VICE by someone who has worked in the industry for several years. In the interest of their job, and to ensure they could divulge the good stuff, they've asked to remain anonymous. While they don't name the shows they worked on, it's safe to say if you clicked on a story about reality TV, you'll probably be able to figure it out.

There are two types of people in the world: those who would do reality TV, and those who wouldn't. Those who would see it as a legitimate career option. They know they could end up writing books, making albums, working in TV, designing cookware, and hosting late night game shows. They apply because humans love shortcuts. Reality TV looks like a warp zone to your dreams, bypassing boring shit like a four year apprenticeship peeling garlic.

Plus, there's the makeover factor. Don't underestimate the appeal that holds. No matter what happens on the show, at the very least we'll turn you into a solid 8.5. People will do pretty much anything for the spotlight once they've had foundation applied with an airbrush gun.

But despite all the meltdowns, I actually feel pretty good about reality TV. It's cool to see regular people work their guts out and surprise themselves. The high moments on set send a wave of adrenalin through the entire crew, and you can physically feel it when you've made a moment of really mesmerizing TV. That's what we live for, that's why we pick up fungal cream for strangers.

Image by Doug Rickard and T. A.

Last week, some news appeared onmy Twitter feed that would have been shocking were it not so predictable. The Los AngelesTimes reported that a group of students at UCLA wore blackface and baggyclothes at a "Kanye Western" party oncampus. Predictably, the incident did not go over well. The Times reported that hundreds ofoutraged students mobilized into action, protesting with signs bearing thepithy, powerful statement: "Our Culture Is Not a Costume."

The UCLA affair is only the latestin a string of similar recent incidents. Black and brownface parties have reportedly been thrown by fraternities and sororities in Arizona, California, Florida and South Carolina. Such events even inspired the plot of Justin Simien's Dear WhitePeople (2013), a satirical film centered around identity politics at aracially-divided liberal arts college. Had dancer Julianne Hough seen Dear WhitePeople in time, she might have reconsidered her decision to attend a Halloween party in blackface as Orange Is theNew Black's Crazy Eyes. (Hough soon issued an apology.)

Once the floodgates had opened for me, it became distressingly clear that this practice was in fact alive and well on a global scale.

The peculiarly insistent "neo-blackface"phenomenon has been on my mind since I started writing and researching myforthcoming book on Spike Lee's film Bamboozled, whichcelebrates the 15th anniversary of its US release this month. It is a brutal satireabout a frustrated black TV executive, Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), whocreates a contemporary version of a minstrel show in order to deliberately gethimself fired and expose the commissioning network as a racist, backwardoutfit ("The networks don't want black people on television unless they arebuffoons!" he complains). However the outrageous showwhich features its blackstars channeling the ghosts of history by performing in burnt-cork blackfacebecomesa smash hit with audiences of all races, prompting Delacroix's mental collapse,and an explosion of violence.

I knew the process of working onthe book was not going to be easy on the spirit. To dive into the grotesquehistorical misrepresentation of black people in American entertainment is tounderstand how negative stereotypes are forged and subsequently broadcast to devastatingeffect.

It is, for example, noexaggeration to draw a direct link from the black "savages" (white actors inblackface) marauding through the landscape of D. W. Griffith's shockinglyracist, pro-Confederacy epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) tothe account provided by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson of his fatefulaltercation with the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. "It was like ademon," Wilson said of Brown. "It."

Bamboozled isnot an easy film to pin down. Its satire targets everyone from mediacorporations and wigga executives to self-hating black creativesand even the black performers willing to sell themselves out for a quick buck.However, its most powerful moment arrives in its closing sequence: a grueling, three-minutemontage comprising genuine footage of American entertainment's most offensivehistorical images. This includes blacked-up Hollywood stars like Judy Garlandand Mickey Rooney; black stars in demeaning "coon" and "mammy" roles; racistcartoons; and disturbing scenes from films like The Birth of a Nation andGone with the Wind (1939).

I can confirm that this tumblingindex of degradation and dehumanization, cloaked in the guise of harmless funfor all the family, gets no easier to stomach on the 10th, 15th, or 20thviewing. Its power is only intensified in today's climate, where white Americahas to be reminded daily that black humanity is a thing that matters, and thenames of people like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, JohnCrawford, Eric Harris, Samuel DuBose, the Charleston nine, Kalief Browder, andTamir Rice are routinely compressed into macabre, symbolic hashtags. A climatein which the idea of a blackface fundraising performance for theBaltimore cops charged in the April 2015 slaying of unarmed black man FreddieGray can be seriously considered. (The performance was, mercifully, cancelled.)

When Bamboozled wasreleased, some critics, like Anthony Lane of the NewYorker, argued that Lee was needlessly raking up old graves"enoughhas changed for audiences to know that blackface is ugly and unfunny," he sniffed. It is true that the blackface traditionwidely recognized, yet rarelycelebrated, as the nation's inaugural indigenous theatrical art formwaslargely eliminated from American film comedy after the end of the 1930s, whenit became harder to defend as innocuous. And I suspect that critics like Lanemay have had their perspectives emboldened by the widely negative reactionsafforded to films like Soul Man (1986), adeeply unfunny comedy about a white preppy who blacks up to "earn" a place atHarvard, and public fiascos like Ted Danson's thoroughly ill-advised 1993 appearance in blackface make-up at a New York Friars Clubroast of his then-partner Whoopi Goldberg.

However, timeand plain factshaveconspired to prove this dismissive view wrong: Blackface persists. One of thegreatest difficulties I faced in writing the book was keeping pace with thesheer onslaught of relevant contemporary stories. The college and Halloweenparties are at once the most obvious, irritating, and exhausting examples, butwhat of the more complex cases, the ones less easily attributable to thestupidity of youth?

Take the curious tale of RachelDolezal, the NAACP official in Spokane, Washington, who claimed to beAfrican-American, but was outed by her parents in June 2015 as a white woman whoallegedly darkened her skin. Her glistening faux-fro trembled as she attemptedto reassure TV presenter Matt Lauer. "This is not some freak, Birth of aNation, mockery blackface performance,"she said. Dolezal's actions attracted plenty of scorn, but I have some sympathywith her, and I think The New Yorker's Jelani Cobb summed it up bestwhen he wrote that she "has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictivegarb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. Thisdoesn't mean that Dolezal wasn't lying about who she is. It means that she waslying about a lie."

Conceptual pranksters like Vanessa Place, Joe Scanlan, and Kenneth Goldsmithall white artistshave faced sharp criticism for trafficking in politically loaded, purportedly cutting-edge blackface imagery in their work.

In Dolezal's case, therace-bending connoted a twisted form of respect. And perhaps the blacked-upKanyes at UCLA simply love his music and want to emulate him? Should we raise atoast to those assholes? I'm inclined to say no, but there are history books thatdelve into issues surrounding the origins of blackface performance. Eric Lott'sfascinating Love & Theft contendsthat the form, rather than blossoming from hatred, reflected a whiteworking-class attempt at fostering a transracial union through ironic miming,even if this desire rarely, if ever, transcended the realm of "theft," A.K.A.the white appropriation of black expressive forms. On that note, somehistorians have suggested that performing in blackface was a way for whiteperformers to express the emotional side of themselves that the prevailing Protestantculture of the time repressed. This sentiment was further developed by NormanMailer in his essay "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster," in which "blackness" isexplicitly equated with "coolness," and thus positioned as something toemulate. (Paging Iggy Azalea, Miley Cyrus, and Tom Hanks's N-wordspouting white rapper son, Chet Haze.)

I thought that the Dolezal casewas weird until I found out about the actions of Vijay Chokalingam, the brotherof comedian Mindy Kaling. He revealed in April 2015 that, as an undergraduateat the University of Chicago, he applied to medical school claiming to be African-American,believing for some reason that it would "dramatically enhance" his chances ofsuccess. Alas, he had mediocre grades and only received one offer, even whileposing as black. This was a real-life remake of Soul Man thatsomehow managed to suck more than the film itself.

Meanwhile, instances of blackfacein Hollywood ranged from the grimly predictable (Ridley Scott darkening theskin of his white principal cast for Exodus:Gods and Kings), to the inadvisable (Zoe Saldana apparently slapping on facepaint to playNina Simone), and the "are you serious?" (the practice of blacking up stunt-people and body doubles in Hollywood).

Watch: The Struggles of One Black Trans Man:

Variations of blackface alsopermeate the contemporary art world. Conceptual pranksters like Vanessa Place, JoeScanlan, and Kenneth Goldsmithall white artistshave faced sharp criticism fortrafficking in politically loaded, purportedly cutting-edge blackface imageryin their work. Goldsmith went as far as to re-appropriate the autopsy ofMichael Brown for a public poetry performance that ended with his remarking onBrown's genitals as "unremarkable." He later asked Brown University, where hehad been invited to speak, to suppress the video recording of his performance.

It's worth noting at this pointthat blackface is part of a wider phenomenon. For just one broader example,consider the recent case of Michael Derrick Hudson, a white poet who adoptedthe use of the Chinese pen name Yi-Fen Choua meretricious act described bywriter Jenny Zhang as an act of yellowface that's part of a long tradition ofwhite voices drowning out those of color in the literary world. Another exampleis the redface dressing-up as Native Americans that willinevitably be happening again this Halloween.

Once the floodgates had opened forme, it became distressingly clear that this practice was in fact alive and wellon a global scale. I read about the Black Pete (or ZwartePiet) holiday tradition in Holland, in which Sinterklaas (Santa Claus) isaccompanied by the dark-skinned figure of Black Pete, often played by whites inblackface who wear curly afro-style wigs and bright red lip coloring. Despite loudprotests, the ceremony continues today. Peru boasts the grotesque and popularTV character Negro Mama; while in Japan there are pop acts like Momoiro Clover Z. In Australia there is a blackfaced Jackson Five-parody band called the Jackson Jive.

On i-D: The Art of the Black Lives Matter Movement

Looking back to my home country ofEngland, I tumbled down the YouTube rabbit hole to cringe at famed comedianswho indulged in blackface imagery. Harry Enfield was criticized for painting his face to appear as Harry Belafonte in a 2014 BBC special, while in 2010, on BBC comedy Come Fly With Me, MattLucas saw fit to appear in blackface, as a lazy, fat, West Indianlady called Precious Little.

In the most purely horrifyinginstance I came across, impressionist Rory Bremner performedon his sketch show as a shuckin' and jivin' version of black celebrity chef Ainsley Harriott. It's not hyperbole to say it's one of the most disturbing andhateful sketches I've ever seen, and yet only 15 viewers saw fit to complainabout the sketch (more specifically, only two on the grounds of racism). PerhapsI shouldn't have been quite so surprised: The BBC's Black and White MinstrelShow existed until 1978.

All of this begs the question: Whydoes this kind of thing keep happening? One obvious, disturbing answer is thatit simply reflects the virulent anti-blackness that courses through globalveins. At its core is a deep-set, thorough disrespect for black life and anirresistible compulsion to mock. Another reading is that, in American instancesat least, such aggravated tomfoolery reflects an optimistic belief among theperpetrators that, in the age of Obamaa time of risky, race-bending satire aspurveyed most recently and successfully by the likes of Key and Peelea so-calledpost-racial America has genuinely taken hold, and we should just all justchill out about such things. Such a view, however, is dismally ignorant to thecontext of real life for black people in America.

It's hard to come up with concreteanswers for such knotty questions, but there are few better places to start thediscussion than by watching and absorbing Bamboozled. The filmflopped when it was released, I suspect in large part because of its insistenceat looking so unsparingly at the continuum between America's racist past andpresent. To progress beyond the bleak world of neo-blackface, however, the film'slessons need to be looked at long and hard. It may be 15 years old, but itstime is now.

Ashley Clark is the author of Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee's Bamboozled, publishedby the Critical Press. Follow him on Twitter.

Bamboozled screensat BAMcinmatek in Brooklyn on Wednesday, October 28, as part of Behind the Mask: Bamboozled in Focus, a film series curated by Clark.

Photos by Holly Rae Jones styled by Malak El Sawi

Launched last week in an underground urinal in Kennington, London, Creamer magazine takes the meaning of toilet humor to a whole other level. With a "Girls on the Toilet" photoshoot and an article titled "The Devil's Lettuce Turned Me into a Shit-Slinger" you could be mistaken for thinking this a scatological fetish magazine.

In reality Creamer is a self-styled trashy mag started by seven girls tired of art-school pretentiousness. Combining a DIY aesthetic with a puerile sense of humor, they're foregoing the endless demand for justification and focusing on just having fun.

That's not to say they're unambitious. After the success of the first issue, the girls now have their sights set higherTV, radio, and a punk band named Pussy Palace all get a mention when I ask. On the one hand it's the art-school dream we've seen shattered before, but on the other these are a genuinely talented bunch who might just have enough creativity and ambition to pull it off.

I caught up with the seven-part power-house to find out what makes them tick.

VICE: Looking at Creamer and meeting you guys in person, I'm really tempted to describe this as a feminist zine, is that cool or am I bowing to clich?
Creamer: The way we see ourselves, feminism is actually quite tangential to what we're doing. Naturally, we're all feminists, but I don't think calling yourself a feminist zine is actually saying anything very interesting anymore. There's a certain level of clickbait associated with the word feminism and we don't want to be associated with that. It's cool that people can interpret it in that way but we don't think having fun and making art always has to be a statementand that's all we're doing.

But at the same time some of the stuff you do is quite subversive. There's a lot of toilet humor and sex jokes that could be interpreted as challenging conventions about femininity and how women are expected to behave.
Yeah but it's not like we ever sat down and thought about it. I think we all are quite disgusting naturally and we forget that people aren't cool with that. The toilet-theme to this issue came about quite unintentionally and then we just ran with it until we decided to rent out an underground urinal for our launch night. We like to think of ourselves as a trashy toilet mag, something to read while you're doing a dump, so it's quite fitting really.

So how do you describe the style of the zine, is it something you can pin down?
We coined this term crispy to describe all those really sleek zines you see at art school. We are like the opposite of that. We're not a photocopy zine or a crispy magazine, we're a trashy mag.

The group dynamic is really important to the aesthetic of the magazine. Everyone's opinion really matters and that's what makes it creamyfor example if it was just like Malak and Hannah's magazine it would probably be pink and fluffy with like fur on the outside but because it's all of ours it makes it this really unique thing. In terms of style, we like to think it teeters on the border of looking great or really shit.

Is it anything to do with rebelling against art school?
Maybe a bit. At art school everything's super formal and academic. You get used to getting shot down if you can't justify your work. With a fine art degree especially, aesthetics isn't considered a very noble pursuit in itself. It's really liberating to do art on our own terms, for fun and because we love itnot to prove something to someone.

Also just being in London it can be really easy to become individualistic and it gets kind of nasty sometimes. There are places you go on like a night out and people aren't there to have fun and it can make you feel quite isolated. Last year we were all just a bit fed up, Malak actually wanted to leave London, and doing Creamer gave us like a new lease on life. It's so nice to do something collaborative and creative and fun just because.

Comic by Corey McCallen

So that's how the magazine started?
Yeah. We all lived together last year in the Pussy Palace and it was such a great house. Malak didn't know us all that well and I think she was a bit scared at first. She freaked out because she burst in on us all naked jumping on the bed and thought we were psychos. That's pretty much how the stage was set.

Then two of us made a zine at Uni called Shart (a mixture of shit and art) and that's where girls on the toilet came from. After that we were like let's make something for proper so then we started talking about Creamer. At first it was going to be called Moist but a band had already taken the name so we changed it to Creamer and made a Facebook page.

Where did you take it from there?
There were a few things going on in and around London that inspired us. Brainchild and DIG and Steez were all things that just completely altered our perspectives. You go to these nights or festivals or whatever and you just meet so many cool people and leave feeling so good about yourself. That's the energy we really wanted to put across in the magazine.

If you think of zines like ten or 20 years ago though they were stereotypically associated with a movement, whether that be fashion/music/politicsis that something we've lost?
I reckon it's hard to see it in the moment though. The thing is there might not be any apparent defining features, but there is an energy connecting a lot of young creative people in London, especially South London where we live. In the Pussy Palace we used to sit in our window and chat to people in the streetwe called it networking. We spent a whole night getting wine-drunk on our doorstep with a woman we met that way.

The nine-to-five world is pretty shit but if you smile at people they'll smile back. There's a lot of love and independent thinking going on in London you just need to know where to look. Punk wasn't about a set garb or music anyway, it was a state of mindI think Creamer's quite punk in a way, "Nu-Punk."

What's next?
What isn't! We want to branch out into as many things as possible. There's totally a band on the cards, we love the DIY punk thing of groups like Half Japanese, Riot Grrrl, and even the Shags. We were going to write a play, and radio would be cool. Our dream is to do an episode of Bargain Hunt with David Dickinson. We've got a weird thing for him.

In terms of our next issue, you'll just have to wait, but there'll be new things and old things and a launch event in January. Keep your eyes creamed.

The first issue of Creamer is SOLD OUT but you can follow them on Facebook for updates on issue 2.

Photo via Flickr user Thomas Le Ngo

Watch: Kings of Cannabis

The state of Oregon legalized marijuana last July, and the sale of recreational weed in medical dispensaries has been allowed since October 1, but the state won't begin allowing Willy Wonka-esque pot retail stores until the second half of 2016.

In preparation for that, Portland City Councilors are voting Wednesday on zoning changes that could turn sections of the city's downtown into a "green light district," KATU reported Wednesday.

The changes would allow weed retail shops to open next door to each other, hopefully filling empty spaces in downtown areas like the Lloyd District and the South Waterfront and welcoming new tourism, Councilman Dan Saltzman told KATU.

"Marijuana retailers want to be downtown because they know it's high density, lot of volume of people, tourists," he said. "We shouldn't force them to be only 1,000 feet apart from each other."

The City Council will be voting on the changes during their regular Wednesday meeting, so we'll know soon enough if Portland's downtown will soon erupt into a cornucopia of pot-related boutiques.

Kazuma Kiryu, putting the boot in... boot, snakeskin shoe, whatever.

Let us tell you about a first-time drinking experience in Kamurocho, Tokyo. It started normally enough with a bit of light shopping, followed by a small lunch. Later came a ten-man brawl; some steady boozing in a hostess bar; and finally an energy drink-fueled, shirtless battle to the death on top of a skyscraper.

This is just a regular day in the life of Kazuma Kiryu, the player-controlled star of SEGA's Yakuza franchise. While it's not as well known in the West, the Yakuza games are big business for their makers in Japan, with six games in the main series, five spin-offs, a TV show, and a movie from Takashi Miike, legendary director of Audition and other cult classics. The games are full of high melodrama, ultra-violence, and slapstick comedy, and they're the closest you'll get to walking the streets of Tokyo without getting on a plane.

The big man himself, Uncle Kaz

You're probably wondering why we're talking about Yakuza now, when the last game released in the West, zombie spin-off Yakuza: Dead Souls, came out over three years ago. Well, it's because the 2012-released Yakuza 5 is finally making its way to Europe and the States, coming out for the PlayStation 3, through PSN, sometime in the next few weeks. (At least, that's the latest.) As the founding members of the UK Yakuza Fan Club we, the Bit Socket boys, reckon we're the right people to get you up to date and ready to get fired into Yakuza 5. Which you should do, because these games are great.

First up, let's have a look at the story so far, while trying to avoid any major spoilers. Take notes though, there's a test at the end.

Read on MUNCHIES: Two Insane Fruit Robots Are Going to Duke It Out at the Tokyo Marathon

In the original Yakuza, Kazuma Kiryu is released from prison after serving ten years for a murder that his best friend Nishiki had committed while defending Yumi, his fianc. Getting back into the world, he's no longer the Dragon of the Dojima Family, but a man approaching middle age, with few allies and a faded reputation. Over the course of the game, the streets of Kamurocho are once again littered with bodies, broken bikes, and revenge.

But Kazuma isn't all about his fists. He's a man seeking an escape from his past and redemption. He becomes a surrogate father to Haruka, a young girl who may hold the key to finding the Tojo Clan's ten billion stolen yen. Haruka's father is a corrupt politician who wants to wield his influence over the yakuza and politics in Tokyo to gain more power. He'll stop at nothing to gain it, even attempting to kill his own daughter if it leads him to his goal.

Kazuma and Haruka

One year later, in the sequel, Kazuma is drafted in by the Tojo Clan, his old crime family, to stop an upcoming war with the Omi Alliance from Kansai. The Tojo Clan was left in tatters after the events of the year before, so Kazuma enlists series favorite Mad-Dog Majima and Daigo Dojima to pull the Clan together.

Yakuza 3 finds Kazuma living peacefully in Okinawa, running an orphanage with the help of Haruka. A dispute over the land his orphanage sits on escalates, incorporating rival yakuza and political opponents. Kazuma is dragged back to Tokyo when an attempt is made to assassinate Daigo, and the existence of a clandestine US black-ops group led by Kazuma's adopted father comes to light.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film on the sacred art of Japanese tattoos

The final core game released in the West so far, Yakuza 4, takes place in 2010 and is the first game to feature multiple playable characters. The Tojo Clan slowly rebuilds itself, and Kamurocho seems to enjoy a long period of peace and normality. We follow the lives of Akiyama, a money lender; Saejima, an escaped death row convict; and Tanimura, a police officer. A dispute between smaller families of local yakuza and the presence of a mysterious girl out for revenge start to expose a conspiracy that links the yakuza and the Tokyo establishment, and only the legendary Kazuma Kiryu can fix the situation in his inimitable style. Which usually involves breaking some jaws.

And that brings us up to Yakuza 5, which again delves into the workings of the yakuza and brings us back into a world that has grown and developed as the series and technology has progressed. Every main entry takes place in Kamurocho, with other cities featuring from time to time. Returning to the same place and seeing how it has changed, and how the characters have grown, is part of the appeal. The Yakuza games are like a long-running melodramatic TV series, with characters you can't wait to see again with each new entry.

Speaking of characters, while Yakuza 5 introduces a few new faces to the series, there's a few returning sorts who have featured before.

Akiyama, in the (virtual) flesh

Shun Akiyama, introduced in Yakuza 4, is a fan favorite. A moneylender whose easy smile hides his world-weary brow, he likes to have a bit of fun around town and his fighting style is full of acrobatic kicks and flips. He acted as the first new playable character in the series in Yakuza 4, showing the new depth that SEGA could bring to the games' combat.

Up next is a real beast of a man, Taiga Saejima, framed for the murder of 18 members of a rival gang (he shot them, but with rubber bullets... it's a long story) and a jail escapee at the start of Yakuza 4. As you'd expect from a larger character, his moves aren't as quick as those of Kazuma or Akiyama, but he makes up for it in brute strength and gorgeous long hair.

Yakuza 5 marks the first time that Haruka, the girl Kazuma has sworn to protect, is available as a playable character. Moved away from the orphanage in Okinawa, she's now pursuing her own ambition of becoming an idol, but it looks like there might be shady goings on behind the scenes of her management. Fun fact: Haruka doesn't engage in fights, but she will be able to participate in dance battles.

"Mad Dog" Majima is pretty much the greatest video game character ever

Finally, we come to Goro Majima, the Mad Dog of the Shimano Family, and the single best video game character ever. He's a mad, one-eyed sadist who steals every scene he's in, and is probably the only reason you should play Yakuza: Dead Souls. He's constantly challenging Kazuma to a fight, but he's loyal and always respects those who don't hold back. Sadly he didn't become a playable character in the main series until Yakuza 0, released in 2015 in Japan but sadly unlikely to appear in the West anytime soon.

Read on Noisey: Meet the Japanese MCs Who Do Insane Covers of UK Grime

The Yakuza series has had a hard time making an impact in the West, which is why half the games have never made it here. Yakuza 5's imminent release in English-language regions is a miracle given how little known the games are beyond their homeland. It's a real shame, because the combination of free-roaming gameplay, hilariously violent combat and brilliantly written characters really deserves a bigger following. But together, we can fix that.

If our synopsis has piqued your interest in the series, then now's the perfect time to jump on board with it. The episodic-style plot and growing universe over the games' chronology makes playing from the first Yakuza onwards a great prospect for those with enough time and curiosity, but Yakuza 3 or 4 are both perfect starting points if you don't want to fully commit yourself. Both benefit from smoother combat and hundreds more moves that the upgrade from PlayStation 2 to PS3 brought to the series, as well as a fully 3D camera to view the incredibly detailed locations.

Of all the Yakuza series' mini-games, karaoke is the favorite

Or you could just start with Yakuza 5 when it comes out. It's been available for three years in Japan and is considered the best game in the series. It's easy to see why, with five cities to explore, five playable characters, a revamped fighting system and brand new mini-games, including brilliant taxi races on the Japanese highways and an excursion to the snowy north to hunt bears. It's also the antithesis of the Ubisoft-style template for open worlds that has become so stale nowadays, with each location small enough to not be overwhelming and yet still full to the gills with stuff to do, instead of being expansive but containing trinket-like tokens and collectibles to mop up for no real reason.

As for the future of the series, it's hard to tell what that'll be in the West. If Yakuza 5 sells well there's hope that we'll continue to see the series released here, but we have a lot of catching up to do. Yakuza 0 has been out in Japan for almost a year, and 2016 brings both a full-on remake of the first chapter and a sixth game starring none other than Takeshi Kitano. We might never see those games here, but at least we've got five incredible ones to enjoy, five chapters in the surreal life of the hardest bastard in all of Japan.

Seriously, you need to see this man in all his glory.

Yakuza 5 is released for PlayStation 3 in "quarter four" of 2015, which we'll take to mean in a few weeks, please SEGA.

Follow Bit Socket on Twitter.