Illustration by Joel Benjamin

When I arrived at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia last August from the UK, it felt like a paradise. I'd never visited the States, so it was strange to be greeted by Union Jacks and actors with questionable English accents in the colonial part of town, but they only added to its quaintness. I didn't know then, though, that behind Williamsburg's charm was a darker reality—that it houses a university with a crippling suicide problem.

William & Mary was recently described as a "top college" by Forbes and has a reputation for academic rigor and exceptionally high standards; two-thirds of all applicants get rejected. If colonial Williamsburg is the town's heart, the university is its brain. Weirdly, my first week at the college was characterized by compulsory child's games and scaremongering talks about the unimaginable dangers of drugs and alcohol. But despite this, the people there were hugely welcoming and friendly. I immediately felt part of a thriving community.

Within days, however, I noticed a sudden change in atmosphere—a student had taken his own life on campus, leaving the community muted and shaken. A memorial service was arranged and, slowly, the university drifted back to normality. As I knew very little about the place at the time, I considered this death a tragic anomaly; a singular black mark on this idyllic college community.

But I soon learned that this was by no means a lone case. Since my first week at the college, a total of four students have committed suicide, and in the past five years alone nine have taken their own lives. What makes these statistics even more shocking is the small size of the university—just over 8,000 students are currently enrolled. Tragedies such as these are now so frequent that Noa Nir, a 2013 graduate, recently told the Washington Post: "I still feel like I'm holding my breath every day, waiting for the next death."

The series of deaths at William & Mary is unusual; indeed, the university has tactlessly been labelled a "suicide school" by some. However, when they are examined in context, the tragedies at this small and close-knit school begin to fit into a wider narrative—one that shows that instances of student suicides are far from anomalies.

Read: The VICE Guide to Mental Health

In the past 50 years, suicide rates among young Americans have increased by 200 percent. But the issue isn't solely an American one; a similar trend can be observed across the UK. The number of students who took their own lives in England and Wales is still relatively low, but it rose by 50 percent between 2007 and 2011—from 75 to 112—despite the number of students as a whole rising by only 14 percent. Between 2008 and 2009, 13 student suicides were recorded at Warwick University alone.

Although we can't speculate or know for certain the reasons behind individual cases of suicide, it's worth noting that there has been an increased number of stressed students seeking help. In recent weeks it was reported that counseling services in the UK are facing an annual rise in demand of about 10 percent. Mental health problems on campus are also rising rapidly, from around 8,000 to 18,000 in the four years before 2012-13.

WATCH: 'Being Ida'—the story of a young women struggling with Borderline Personality Disorder

However, while we can measure the number of people using services, it's harder to know if this increase in numbers equates to an increase in mental health disorders, or whether it's simply easier for students to access the help they need.

"In recent years we have seen an increase each year in the number of students accessing counseling," says Robert Barnsley, who works for the counseling service at the University of Sheffield as a Mental Health Support Coordinator. "This could be as a result of an increase in prevalence, or it could be simply that students feel more open to accessing such services."

Rosanna Hardwick is a mental health campaigner and senior consultant at the charity Student Minds. She offers a variety of reasons why students are more likely to suffer from mental health problems. "Lack of sleep, poor diet, work pressures, lack of exercise, and alcohol consumption are all risk factors for developing mental health difficulties," she says. "In addition, the years spent at university coincide with the peak age of onset for a range of mental health difficulties, with 75 percent of all mental health difficulties developing by the mid-20s."

Indeed, Barnsley explains that "low mood and symptoms of depression, anxiety and difficulties in relationships" are the most common reasons people visit him.

Read on Broadly: Living with My Mother's Mental Illness

Student Minds believes that "peer intervention can change the state of student mental health," and thinks this is key in preventing mental health issues from reaching a crisis point. Hardwick cites their national "Look After Your Mate" campaign, which encourages informal peer support on university campuses. "Students are most likely to speak to friends when they are experiencing difficulties," she says, adding: "Good social networks and peer contacts have a protective influence against mental health difficulties. In a recent study, support from family and friends was the most often cited reason for why students decided to remain in higher education."

It is clear, then, that support from friends is crucial.

"The pressures that students face are as great now as they have ever been," says Barnsley. "Whether that's about the transition from family home to independent living, or family responsibilities for older students, or the difficulties faced by international students in either being so far from home and loved ones, or the very real concerns of those from countries where there's ongoing conflict."

These are, of course, all legitimate reasons for anxiety, and counselors are well-equipped to try to absolve them. But when thoughts of suicide enter the equation, is there still a place for counseling? Surprisingly, Barnsley thinks not.

"When people are feeling suicidal, starting counseling may not be the right thing for them," he says. "Counseling can leave people feeling worse in the short term. It can stir up more difficult emotions and can increase risk. Counseling that works on a model of weekly or fortnightly appointments isn't able to meet those urgent needs."

It seems, then, that university counseling isn't designed for those at rock-bottom and, in fact, can worsen the situation for those who are suffering with suicidal thoughts.

Jacob* is a student who suffers from depression, which resurged after he arrived at university. He experienced the aforementioned flaws in university counseling when he visited, citing suicidal thoughts. "I filled out an online form in advance and ticked a box to confirm I'd been having suicidal thoughts," he says, explaining that he then went to an appointment with a counselor and "had several unproductive sessions."

"Initially, I was prescribed a book on depression," he says. "When you have relapsed, the last thing you need is to be told what depression is, because, naturally, you know better than anyone They never even discussed my suicidal thoughts. The form was just a filtration system. Suicide is unspoken of in university counseling, as well as outside of it, because the moment you mention it they will ship you out."

Jacob's experience culminated with a session in which his counselor "told me to go to my doctor and ask to be prescribed Valium." When he told his doctor this, she responded furiously, saying, "That would leave you in rehab by the time you're 30." He sums up his counseling experience as "bureaucratic at best and, at worst, 'We don't know what to do with you at all.' I've never met anyone who has come away from that feeling like they've been offered any counsel."

It's a bleak picture indeed and, while on-campus counseling is important, it would seem it's not the answer to dealing with a student suicide problem.

So what are the solutions? Well, there are no easy answers, and finding them is not helped by the fact the subject is taboo both on campus and behind the closed doors of some counseling centers. At present, it seems like there is very little in place to help those at their lowest ebb, and that desperately needs to change.

* Names have been changed

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

'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' is the funniest show that nobody's watching. Photo courtesy of the CW

There are some spoilers for the first few episodes of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend below, but that shouldn't stop you from reading this then catching up on it.

The funniest new show on TV has the worst name and even worse ratings, and it's also a musical. It's called Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, its creator and star is basically unknown, it's on the CW, and at last count it's the least-watched of the 18 shows to debut on broadcast TV this season.

You'd be forgiven for not knowing exactly what Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is, or for being actively disinterested in its existence. Its main ad, which is probably the ad that you have seen on billboards or signs as you wait for the subway, features star Rachel Bloom slack-jawed, clutching a balloon the same shade of pink as her dress. She's standing against a white background, while the words "NEVER. LET. GO" leer ominously next to her. It's the sort of poster that both manages to communicate zero information to someone while simultaneously screaming, "DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, WATCH THIS SHOW." It's the sort of ad that inadvertently positions Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as the exact opposite of what it actually is and has probably caused countless people to dismiss it offhand.

And that's a shame, really, because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is wonderful. It combines the ribald humor and zero-fucks-given attitude of Broad City with Seinfeld's obsession with social minutiae, while jacking up the pacing to 30 Rock–levels of freneticism. That it accomplishes this while occasionally breaking out into song is a minor miracle.

The premise of the show is this: Rachel Bloom plays Rebecca Bunch, the sort of sleep-hating, high-functioning TV New Yorker whose stresses and miseries have compounded to the point that it's only a matter of time before she blows a gasket, or at least makes a monumental life decision without really thinking it through. That rash decision comes in the form of a chance meeting with Josh, a dude she dated at camp when she was 16, who offhandedly mentions he's moving to West Covina, California. At the end of her rope and looking for a change, Rebecca says "fuck it" and goes there too.

All of this stuff happens within the first few minutes of the pilot, and ultimately serves as setup to showcase Bloom's considerable talents as the sort of musical comedian you don't see too much of these days. Bloom was a staff writer on the generally funny, always incredibly bizarre Adult Swim show Robot Chicken, and has also garnered acclaim for making elaborate, extremely funny music videos with titles like "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury" (which is about wanting to fuck the famed science-fiction author Ray Bradbury) and "Pictures of Your Dick" (which is about getting revenge on an ex through posting pictures of his dick online). Her taste in collaborators is impeccable as well—Bloom penned the first two episodes with Aline Brosh McKenna, who wrote The Devil Wears Prada, and the show's songs are in part co-written by Bloom and Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne.

So clearly, the people behind Crazy Ex-Girlfriend know what they're doing. Tonally, the show can be looked at as a parody of Glee—often, the songs function to address the subtext of a scene, as characters hash out their underlying issues with the same full throats and unrelenting positivity that the plucky kids at William McKinley High might have covered "Don't Stop Believing."

Consider a scene in the second episode, in which Rebecca's out at a club with Josh, Josh's friend, and Josh's girlfriend Valencia. Still crushing on Josh, Rebecca has decided to befriend Valencia in the hopes of undermining her relationship, only she's in too deep and has turned her hatred into that terrible sort of frenemyship, where your hatred turns to an unhealthy obsession. If you've never experienced that specific emotion, well, the show lays it out in a number called "Feelin' Kinda Naughty," which features the lyric "I wanna kill you and wear your skin like a dress / But also have you see me in the dress and be like 'OMG, you look so cute in my skin!'," sung with the fervor of one of the numbers from Wicked. It's jarring, just like it's jarring when Crenshaw Crip Nipsey Hussle shows up to refer to curling irons and Spanx as "nasty-ass patriarchal bullshit" on "The Sexy Getting Ready Song" from the first episode.

On last night's episode, Rebecca decided to throw a party so that she could hang out with Josh, which led to the revelation that her dad left her mom while she was having a party, that her best friend/coworker Paula has a son who suffers from like seven different developmental disorders, and that, as a child, one of Rebecca's friends was simply known as "Girl with Mustache." All of this—the dark stuff and the overtly farcical—is treated with the same breeziness. This is a musical, so no one is trying to hold a mirror up to reality here—the show sublimates between whimsy and grimness in a way that isn't quite like anything else on TV.

Another, more nuanced bit of evidence that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a brilliant show comes in its treatment of West Covina, a city that despite being 19 miles east of my home in Los Angeles I didn't know existed until Crazy Ex-Girlfriend told me that it did. It is a city so unremarkable that its Wikipedia page—which one would presume was written, or at least minded, by someone who deeply cares about it and wants others to care deeply about it too—can only boast that it's a "center for malls, shops, movie theaters, restaurants, and diversity." Rebecca, who hails from a small town, serves to mock the sort of high achievers who view New York as the only city in the universe. She's intense, because New York and her Ivy League education have made her that way. It's a fish-out-of-water situation, if the fish got out of the water to evolve into a nuclear-powered shark, then jumped back in the water. The efficiency and speed that allowed Rebecca to barely survive in New York give her ample time to obsess over the smallest, most minuscule details of her life in California's 62nd most-populous city.

Problem is, the show's humor feels too specialized to survive in a network environment, and its marketing may have doomed what chance it had to catch on with the sort of pop-culture obsessed crowd who might have warmed to it. Let's hope that when its run is inevitably cut short, Netflix will pick it up.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

Trick 'r Treat's villain, Sam. Image via Legendary Pictures on YouTube

Halloween's as commercialized as any holiday that's widely celebrated in America, but it's unique among them in the fact that its core mythology hasn't been drastically rewritten by ad campaigns and sentimental TV movies. Its traditions and stories are still passed from kid to kid, a game of telephone played with a mishmash of millennia-old European superstitions and modern suburban myths.

The holiday's folklore and ancient spookiness provide the foundation for the 2007 movie Trick 'r Treat, a comedy-laced horror anthology film in the EC Comics-inspired tradition of Creepshow and Tales From the Darkside, that weaves together four storylines centered around the holiday's shadowy traditions, a small town in Ohio that celebrates them with a peculiar fervor, and the gruesome penalties for failing to follow them properly.

Trick 'r Treat was basically made for the type of horror fan that will happily sit through a straight 24 hours of movies. Like comics out of old Creepy and Eerie magazines, each of the film's interconnected plots starts out seeming pretty simple on the surface—a father teaches his young son about their family's peculiar holiday traditions; a dewy young virgin contemplates "doing it" for the first time—and each inevitably ends with a plot twist dramatic enough to make O. Henry and Edgar Allen Poe seem understated by comparison. The kills come at a steady pace throughout the movie, and a respectable amount of them happen onscreen. Blood flows by the gallon. A total of 27 people end up getting killed. Given Trick 'r Treat's 82 minute runtime, that's an average of one death every three minutes.

The film's emphasis on Halloween's rites comes from a fascination with its peculiar history and unflagging creepiness that goes back to writer-director Michael Dougherty's childhood. "My birthday's a few days before the holiday," he says, "so it's always a really magical time of year for me. I've been reading about it ever since I was a little kid, and had built up a pretty deep knowledge of the holiday and its traditions and its roots going back to Europe. I was always really fascinated with the notion that here was this holiday that's really centered around kids and candy but if you peel back the layers just a little bit you find out that it goes back to a very real, ancient pagan mystical holiday. We've turned it into this very commercial, kid-friendly thing where we dress our kids up like monsters and send them out into the night to collect candy from random strangers. As a kid that's the first rule that you're taught, don't talk to strangers and don't take candy from strangers. Oh, except for this night it's safe and you're going to go out in these crappy costumes. See you in a couple hours, kid."

The film's abundant gore is admirable, but its nasty sense of humor is what really put it over the top with horror fans. His gleefully psychopathic comedic sensibility is straight out of the most outrageous horror flicks of the VHS era like Evil Dead, Sleepaway Camp, and Night of the Demons, where deliriously grisly deaths also double as punchlines. To the type of person who will laugh out loud over an especially clever way of decapitating someone, Trick 'r Treat was a breath of fresh air in a genre that had become suffocatingly grim.

Dougherty says the film's irreverent appeal is embodied in Sam, the film's mascot (named after the ancient proto-Halloween festival Samhain), who was originally conceived for an animation project when Dougherty was in school. "My hope with creating Sam was that he'd appeal to that inner child that I think we all have. He's that perfect balance of cute and creepy and scary and funny. You look at him and you can't tell if you should be running away or hugging him."

Like misremembered school bus tragedies and rumors about candy tampering, Trick 'r Treat has managed to incorporate itself into Halloween observances through word of mouth, but its followed a rocky path to get to this point. Initially backed by special-effects-legend-turned-producer Stan Winston, then genre-film powerhouse Legendary Pictures, a deal with Warner Bros. got the movie made, but also doomed it to a straight-to-DVD fate. In a horror market crowded with torture porn and remakes of Japanese horror flicks, Trick 'r Treat seemed doomed to be a square peg trying to fit in a round hole.

Warner Bros. spent a year contemplating releasing the film in theaters, but in the end, Dougherty says. "I just don't think they got the combination of horror and comedy. I remember we did a test screening and there was a marketing exec from Warner Bros., and they said, 'Well, half your audience was laughing.' And I was like, 'Yeah, that's great! It's a horror movie!' I think they got a little cold feet and buyer's remorse for various reasons. The big one being the number of kids that we kill in the film."

Image via Legendary Pictures on YouTube

Dougherty quickly adapted to the film's more limited circumstances. Legendary ran off a couple prints and he was soon accompanying them to whatever niche film festivals around the country were willing to show it, starting with Ain't It Cool News founder Harry Knowles's annual Butt-Numb-A-Thon in Austin. Dougherty remembers that he could already see the roots of a Trick 'r Treat cult at that very first screening, at the very end of a nonstop 24 hour program. "They all woke up," he says, "and really embraced the movie. I'll never forget emerging from this dark theater that I've been sitting in for 24 hours into the bright morning sunlight and just all of the sudden being introduced to its first fans. From there things started to turn. All of a sudden there were Internet reviews popping up every day."

Dougherty has some practical, business-y reasons for preferring the kind of release that Trick 'r Treat eventually got ("There are a lot of films that come out and have huge theatrical releases but they're forgotten two weeks later," he points out), but talking to him, you get the feeling he actually enjoyed joining the ranks of cult filmmakers as much as working on the big-budget superhero movies (Superman Returns, the X-Men series) that he's worked on. "That's how the original Halloween found its success! Carpenter and his producer threw a print in the back of a car and were driving it around!"

On Motherboard: The Science of Being Scared to Death

"There's something fun about discovering a film, or a good friend of yours whose taste you trust saying, 'You really need to watch this,'" he says. "That's how I was introduced to a lot of my favorite films growing up. Some friend passing you a VHS tape. I think there's a charm to that, and an organic love that sprouts from that, and I don't think we would have had the same kind of following had we gone with a big theatrical release."

Perhaps because of this slow burn, Sam has become the movie's breakout star and the inspiration behind merchandise ranging from action figures to novelty sweaters, not to mention a bunch of tattoos. "I remember seeing a waitress at a restaurant who had a full sleeve of the movie," Dougherty says. "Her whole arm was Sam and other characters and scenery from the film. And she's not alone. I just can't think of a greater compliment than seeing somebody tattoo their body forever with your character. I'll take that over a gold statue any day." A long-rumored sequel is in the works, too, Dougherty recently confirmed—as soon as he's finished with the Christmas-horror film Krampus, starring Adam Scott. (Unlike Trick 'r Treat, Krampus will be getting a theatrical release.)

His biggest accomplishment with Sam, he says, is preparing a whole new generation for horror fandom. "I've seen videos of kids who are introduced to the character via an action figure or something," he says, "and there's sort of this very wary look on their face when they see him, and then something sparks and they instantly fall in love with him." He's also seen kids dressed up as his best-known character and says, "That makes me the happiest. I'm still waiting for the Halloween when some kid shows up at my door dressed as Sam."

Follow Miles on Twitter.

NYPD fencing in Occupy demonstrators in 2011. Photo via Flickr user Paul Stein

Watch: We Whipped Up Some Stuff from the 'Anarchist Cookbook'

A mysterious-sounding anarchist organization called the National Liberation Militia is allegedly planning a war on police this Halloween, at least according to an alert released by the FBI on Monday, CBS News reports.

The Bureau sent a bulletin to police departments around the country warning that this so-called "Halloween Revolt" may involve members of the anarchist group dressed up in masks and ambushing police with bottles and bricks and other Warriors-esque weaponry, according to the New York Post.

The NYPD is apparently "monitoring the situation," though the FBI did not hint at an attack targeting New York City, specifically.

It is not immediately clear what the National Liberation Militia is or if it has a website, but there is a stub of a Facebook page for an organization of that name, which three people have liked.

Less than a week after the Ontario government vowed to (kinda) end carding, a video has surfaced showing Toronto police officers intimidating a bystander who recorded what he believed was a racially-motivated street check.

Taken in a parking lot in northwest Toronto (near Jane Street and St. Lawrence Avenue West.), the video, which was published by the Toronto Star, shows Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) officers detaining two black youth. Another police cruiser then rolls up and two officers exit and approach the man behind the camera, Mike Miller.

"Is there a reason why you're videotaping," one of them asks, to which Miller responds, "'Cause I have the right to."

The officers, identified by the Star as constables Brian Smith and Shawn Gill, then crowd closer and closer to Miller, at times blocking his camera lens with their hands and faces, prompting Miller to ask: "Could you guys give me my personal space?"

"You're videotaping, so what, I can't engage in a conversation?" replies Gill.

When Miller attempts to explain why he started recording, Gill interrupts him and asks, "You seen them being investigated for smoking marijuana? Is that correct?...Don't assume to know if you don't know."

At one point, Smith asks if the video is going on "World Star."

Meaghan Gray, a spokeswoman for Toronto police, said the officers' superiors are aware of the incident, but that any disciplinary action taken would be a private, personnel matter.

The two men who were being investigated were charged with possession of marijuana. Gray said Smith and Gill were actually trying to protect their identities because they are minors, but that they went about it the wrong way. At no point in the video did the cops mention they were investigating youth.

"Their lack of communication to the man doing the filming and their approach in connecting with him was entirely inappropriate," Gray said, adding officers are aware they can be filmed in the line of duty. "Nobody believes the officers did the right thing in this regard."

According to the Toronto police website, "the success of TAVIS is not based on the number of arrests made but on the reduction in crime, enhancement of public trust and confidence, and the building of relationships within the communities most affected by violence."

Asked if that mandate is served by charging teenagers for smoking weed, something that might soon be legal, Gray said that officers use their discretion in those scenarios, looking at things like complaints from the public and the amount of weed present.

Community advocates who spoke to VICE about carding last week said without a caveat in place to punish cops who disregard the laws, nothing will change on the ground.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Nicholas Eckhart

Zachary Hammond's first date with Toni Morton involved weed, ice cream, and gunfire. On July 26, at around 8:20 PM, he pulled into a Hardee's parking lot in Seneca, South Carolina, where an undercover officer had allegedly arranged to buy ten grams of drugs from his companion. As an officer named Mark Tiller converged on the pair, Hammond hit the gas. The 19-year-old was was shot dead as his drug-dealing date snacked on a frozen treat.

Back in August, the New York Times reported that dash cam footage was forthcoming. That video was finally released Tuesday, around the same time Solicitor Chrissy Adams announced that Lieutenant Tiller won't be facing charges. It's the second disturbing recording of apparent police brutality to come out of the Palmetto State in as many days, and suggests that while police misconduct is a national phenomenon, some parts of America may still have it worse than others.

Details of the shooting were obviously disturbing when the news first broke, and not just because it was over a stupidly small amount of pot. Although police originally said Tiller shot Hammond because he was driving toward him, a second, private autopsy conducted by the family contradicts that claim, according to the Post and Courier, a local newspaper. That assessment found wounds in the teen's back and shoulder, which suggests he was actually driving away from the cop when he died. The just-released video seems to confirm the family's version of events.

At the time of Hammond's death, his story seemed like the latest to feature an unarmed teen, an officer with an itchy trigger-finger, and needless suffering. Criticism of police in South Carolina was still intense, as Walter Scott—an unarmed black man shot eight times in the back—had been killed just months earlier. But some began to opine online that, just as the conversation in America about police violence had reached a fever pitch, Hammond's name barely made headlines. As the Hammond family attorney, Eric Bland, told the Washington Post: "White-on-white crime does not get the same impact as white-on-black crime."

The Department of Justice is still investigating the circumstances surrounding Hammond's death, and federal charges could be forthcoming. A lawsuit filed by the deceased's family—which alleges that responding cops gave Hammond's dead body a high-five—is still pending in federal court.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Zach Hammond

Manhattan Criminal Court. Photo via Flickr user Gerard Flynn

This article was originally published by The Marshall Project.

My chest was thumping as I sat in Manhattan Criminal Court. A part of me was eager to serve on a grand jury, to see our criminal justice system up close. But another part of me wanted to just go to work and avoid what might become a two-week-long distraction. A clerk called our names, and we were supposed to say "serve" or "application." Serve sends your name into the bingo roller. Application means "application to defer."

Most of you are going to serve, now or two months from now, he told us. Yes, you will be here for a full two weeks. No, it doesn't matter if you are opposed to the criminal justice system. I said serve.

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Two hours later, our grand jury warden walked us to a room with 23 seats, a table, and a podium. I picked a random chair. "Fifteen, 16, 17, 18..." she counted rapidly around the room and then issued a series of rapid-fire instructions: Where we were sitting would always be our seats. We couldn't sit anywhere else. We couldn't use our phones, except during breaks. If she caught us with a phone, she would take it away. (She did.) We could take notes, but nothing could leave the room.

"Adults!" she cried whenever we screwed up.

The purpose of a grand jury is to formally charge people accused of felonies—essentially, the job is to determine whether there is enough evidence to justify a trial. In 23 states, including New York, the grand jury process is required. "It uses its power both as a sword and a shield," reads the handbook. "A sword to accuse or indict those whom there is reason to believe has committed crimes; a shield to protect the innocent against unfounded accusations."

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In New York County, 23 people are chosen at random to serve for at least ten days. As long as you're a citizen, have not committed any felonies, and live in Manhattan, it's basically no questions asked. Prosecutors come in one-by-one with their individual cases and lay out the evidence to the grand jury—usually in the form of witnesses, documents, and surveillance video—for anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours. We probably heard between five to seven prosecutors each day. Defendants have a right to testify, should they want to, but their lawyers can only advise them, not make arguments on their behalf.

Once the grand jury has heard all the evidence, a prosecutor reads the charges and their definitions out loud. A court reporter is tap-tap-tapping away. Then the grand jury is left alone to discuss the evidence and vote. If 12 of 23 people find that there is "legally sufficient evidence" and see "reasonable cause to believe" that a person did what they are accused of, the jury indicts. An indictment is not a judgment of guilt or innocence. But it clears the way for that question to be decided in a plea deal or trial.

I called my dad frazzled as I left that first day. You know there is a joke about grand juries, he told me. A grand jury will even indict a ham sandwich. When I came in the next day, several other jurors told me that someone had said the exact same thing to them. If grand juries have a reputation, this is it.

The reputation, to some extent, is justified: We indicted almost everyone. But it implies that a grand jury will believe anything a prosecutor tells them. That it will merely rubber stamp. And that, I found, was not right at all.

Prosecutors brought us a lot of evidence. We heard from police officers and victims, store managers and superintendents. Two people would often confirm the same series of events.

Maybe more importantly, we asked a lot of questions. Did the officer recover any other drugs from the defendant? Can the witness tell us why she waited to call the police? Are we allowed to consider the issue of entrapment?

We would spend ten, 20, even 30 minutes debating a case.

One woman doubted everything. I have no idea how his fingerprints got on the cash register!

Another man hardly doubted anything. It is so obvious this guy did it. Can we vote already?

People made sharp points. "Okay, so my understanding of the case is that there is enough evidence to indict on the first charge, but I'm less sure about the second, because..." our unofficial discussion leader would open every voting session, before he called on us one by one to speak. "Don't shush me," I snapped at him one time, as he tried to quiet me and my neighbors.

We talked about mental illness and drug addiction, unreliable cops and race. We spent a long time on issues that were important to us but probably didn't matter for the low standard of proof required for the indictment. I'm normally very stubborn. Here, I was routinely persuaded by my peers.

Still, I sometimes felt frustrated. "Why is this a felony?" I'd ask the other jurors. I knew what the consequences could potentially be of the indictment alone—Rikers, media attention, losing a job, a difficult plea bargain—and I sometimes didn't want to indict cases that seemed less serious, even if I had "reasonable cause to believe."

One time I cried. Another time I pleaded about our conflicting ethical obligations and the interests of justice. On our last day, I surprised myself when I yelled at a fellow juror who thought we should leave the question of mental illness for trial. The crime we were hearing about seemed to me unthinkable for a sane and rational person. "Who knows what kind of mental health treatment he'll get at Rikers," I barked. "Besides, you think there is going to be a trial?"

But asking my fellow jurors to consider the consequences was tough. Most of my peers saw themselves as fact-finders—interested in discussing the bigger questions and the mitigating circumstances, but only responsible for deciding if the evidence matched the crime. The consequences are a policy issue, some would tell me, not the issue we're supposed to decide.

And yet, more than anything else, I came away from my stint at the courthouse with a real appreciation for grand juries. Most of these cases will not go to trial, but I suspect that a grand jury's questioning and deliberations is an important check on the prosecution—making prosecutors more judicious in what they charge and more dedicated to uncovering evidence. The fact that we usually indicted, I realized, was not proof that we would have indicted anyone. Rather, it might have been evidence that one part of the system was working.

This article was originally published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Richard

Mahendra Sharma can tell you, fairly confidently, what the stock market will look like next week, or even next year. Back in 2012, after Facebook's IPO sharply fell, Sharma advised his clients not to buy stock just yet, because the price would dive another 50 percent more—and he was right. He knew this not because he is an investment adviser (though he does have a degree in finance), but because the moon was in the House of Scorpio, and it was all there on the astrology charts.

Since he launched his "financial astrology" business in 2001, Sharma has authored nine book-length editions of financial prophecies, including (correct) predictions like the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s and the spike in gold prices a few years later. Overall, he says he has a 90 percent accuracy rate.

Services like Sharma's aren't as uncommon as you might expect. There are numerous purveyors of the supernatural, offering investment advice with the flip of a Tarot card or using psychic energy to help a CEO make hiring decisions. As psychic services move from the Ouija board to the board room, companies are banking on the value of supernatural "insider information" while the psychics are making bank.

According to Lawrence R. Samuel, a cultural historian and author of Supernatural America: A Cultural History, corporate psychic services first emerged in the 1980s. Around the same time, psychics had gained a foothold with individuals as an alternative to therapists—a way for people to seize control of their lives by looking outward, instead of inward—a notion that carried over to the business world. What business owner doesn't want a crystal ball?

"Psychology and psychoanalysis and all that had been around for 75 years by the 80s, so folks were dropping their shrinks and going to psychics instead." Samuel's research makes note of businessmen like oil tycoon H. L. Hunt and auto mogul John DeLorean, who each consulted with psychics before making business decisions; designer Diane von Furstenberg and Sony co-founder Akio Morita both took business advice from the same fortune-teller.

Today, according to market research from IBIS World, the psychic services industry rakes in somewhere north of $2 billion each year, with an annual growth of 2.5 percent over the past five years.

Read: Learning to See the Future at Psychic School

Linda Lauren has been a professional psychic since the 70s and a corporate psychic since the 90s, listing clients as big as Pernod Ricard on her roster. She says she's a "color-energy expert," able to read energies through colored bubbles that appear to her. She's been asked to help companies make hiring choices, reorganize their work spaces, and smooth out managing decisions. She also has a few clients who work on Wall Street, who she's given insight about viable investments. Recently, she helped a company maximize its employees' potential by creating "sacred spaces" on their desks. "Each desk has a little mat with a salt lamp on it. They each have a piece of pyrite, which encourages money and calm, and they each have a little water bottle, which they fill every day and eventually negativity is contained within the bottle," Lauren told me.

About a quarter of her business is made up of corporate clients like this, all of whom she says believe deeply in her work. That very belief could explain some of her clients' success: A series of studies from the University of Cologne showed that people who believed in the supernatural also had better performance in various tasks, likely because of the confidence-boost from their own superstitious beliefs. Another study, from the University of Queensland, found that those who believed in psychics had greater feelings of control. It seems feeling confident and in-control of business decisions likely has as much of a positive effect on positive outcomes as actual psychic abilities.

"For psychics, the market is boring when it's good. But is the chance to really shine with psychic abilities." —Shawn Robbins

It follows that psychic services tend to thrive during periods of uncertainty. People don't dial 1-800-PSYCHICS when everything's dandy. With corporations, the same is true: Psychic and supernatural services are sought out more often during financial crashes and market slumps.

" definitely thrive in periods of uncertainty or turmoil," Samuel told me. "The 1930s were a Golden Age of the supernatural because of the Great Depression."

Between 2007 and 2012, the psychic industry grew at an annual rate of 2 percent according to IBIS World—the time period that straddled the financial meltdown of 2008. That report also cited a "financial psychic," Andrrea Hess, who claimed she grew her business from a $250,000 in 2011 to $750,000 in 2012, largely due to the financial turmoil of the time. As corporate psychic Shawn Robbins told the Associated Press in 1988, one year after stock markets around the world plummeted, "For psychics, the market is boring when it's good, but now is the chance to really shine with psychic abilities. This is a good time to go to a 'reputable psychic.'"

Watch: VICE hangs out with world-famous astrologer Susan Miller, who reads the company's chart.

Sharma said his clientele tends to stay fairly consistent—financial turmoil or not—but he does see a surge in interest after one of his predictions come true. Sharma offers a selection of these predictions in a weekly newsletter, which costs $550 per month or $5,790 for an annual subscription. Corporate clients can also come to him for one-on-one consultations, which cost $3,900 per session.

Apparently, companies see that as a fair price if the advice is good, even when there's a lot at stake. Seagate Technology, makers of equipment for Playstation and Xbox, formerly used the services of psychic Laura Day, who charged a fee of $10,000 per month. Day told Newsweek that she'd saved multimillion-dollar deals with her psychic prowess, like the time she accurately advised a Wall Street money manager client to pull out of an investment "just before the deal nose-dived."

"Day traders want to know, 'Is this little new company going to pan out in three years?' I can give them honest answers." —David Zarza

Barb Mather, a psychic-medium in Canada, says she tries not to think too much about what's at stake for her corporate clients. "The basis of the work is no different, in terms of how I connect and get the information—but it is a little different because we're not talking about small pennies."

Recently, Mather has been asked to consult on her business clients' hiring decisions. Companies send her résumés and photos of candidates and Mather sends them back a "psychic profile"—this one's a hard worker, this one is going to become very ill soon, this one has a poor work ethic. She says she acquires this information in a variety of ways, including reading the candidate's energy or connecting to a loved one who has passed on, who can attest to the person's character. As a hiring technique, it makes threats about what employers can find on the internet seem like a joke. "With a psychic, nobody can hide," says Mather.

Related: I Had My Tea Leaves Read by Kim Kardashian's Psychic

Like Mather, David Zarza, a Seattle-based psychic, says he gives companies psychic readings—delving into their past, present, and future—the same as he would with an individual. "For instance, I can say, 'It looks like this coming April, there's going to be an influx of cash flow. Or with day traders, they want to know, 'Is this little new company going to pan out in three years?' I can give them honest answers."

As Zarza sees it, part of running a corporation is trying to be one step ahead. Every business leader has an artillery of advisers to make this happen, from the person who interprets their financial data to the person who gives hiring advice to their legal counsel. A psychic adviser is just another soldier in the army.

Currently, Zarza has three corporations for which he serves as the "adviser on call," meaning they'll come to him with day-to-day decision-making questions and he'll weigh in. He's careful to note that he never tells clients what to do—instead, he lays out the information as he sees it and lets his clients make their own decisions. "I never say, 'Close this deal now,' or 'Fire this person.' I'll say, 'This is likely to occur.'"

It's not an uncommon consulting strategy; many business advisers present the data and their recommendations, then defer to the CEO for the decision-making. But as a psychic, it may be especially important in terms of protecting one's reputation. Psychics have long been held in dubious regard (which, as Sharma puts it frankly, is because "90 percent of them are fake") and when there's money on the line, it's important not to over-promise.

In 2010, Sean David Morton—who billed himself not only as a psychic, but as "America's prophet"—was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for coaxing clients to give him money to invest, which he actually funneled into his own business entities. The fraud earned him over $6 million in total. In their complaint, the SEC pointed out that, in addition to swindling his clients out of their money, Morton was also not a real psychic.

Zarza say he gets why corporate clients might be wary of hiring a psychic. "There's still a lot of shame around the idea of working with a psychic to make decisions, both among individuals and business leaders. I think that comes from there being a lot of shams and fake psychics that you really can't trust." Still, he has a handful of corporate clients who have been using his services for years. They keep coming back because they've seen positive results (though, he adds, some of his clients have dropped the term "psychic" and just call him an "adviser").

"Everybody can Bloomberg, but if you have a psychic coming in and telling you something different, that can be a potentially powerful weapon," says Samuel, before offering his own prediction: that corporate psychic services will continue to flourish.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Ben Carson. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

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

US News

It looks like the months-long dominance of Donald Trump may finally be over. The leader in the race for the Republican nomination is now, according to some polls, Dr. Ben Carson. In Iowa, Carson now leads by a significant margin, according to a new Monmouth poll that puts his support among Republican voters at 32 percent, compared to 18 percent for Trump. Nationally, a fresh New York Times/CBS News poll shows Carson leading Trump 26 percent to 22 percent. This is Carson's moment, and a great performance at Wednesday's GOP primary debate could push him higher, pulling support from voters who want an outsider candidate but have tired of the Trump Show.

But before we get too far on the Carson train, I have to step back and confess that the rise of the former pediatric neurosurgeon has me perplexed. Why is Carson resonating? What is it that people like about him? What exactly is his brand?

Much has been said about how Trump's pompous brashness flows from the id of very angry people on the right. So then what does it mean to have Carson supplant Trump? This is a massive cultural shift. If Trump were music he'd be some arrogant, abrasive, look-at-me, late-career Kanye; the soft-spoken Carson, would be some Kenny G-style, Muzakified smooth jazz. He talks like he's trying to lull you to sleep—although the content of what he says is so extreme, in a sense he's shouting just as loud as Trump.

Carson has a way with analogies. He likes to stretch them out to the nth degree, a habit that often destroys his point, inadvertently shifting the discussion toward him and his lack of judgment. Case in point: Carson's political star shot into the stratosphere when compared Obamacare to slavery. "Obamacare is really I think the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery," Carson told the Values Voter Summit in 2013. "And it is in a way, it is slavery in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government." It's a sentiment he's repeated many times since.

More from Toure: Talking to White People About Their White Privilege

And the slavery analogies aren't limited to Obamacare. In an appearance on Meet the Press Sunday, he compared women who get abortions to slave owners, saying that both believe they can "do whatever they want" to another person. In the past few weeks alone, he's said that the Jews might have prevented the Holocaust if they'd had guns, that Muslims should be disqualified from the presidency, and that Obama signed an executive order on immigration reform in order to create new Democratic voters. He also thought Congress should remove federal judges who ruled in favor marriage equality. I could go on, but you get the picture.

So Carson is, among other things, anti-abortion, anti-Obamacare, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, and LGBT-intolerant. Which means that for people on the right who long for a world without abortion, immigrants, Obamacare, and Obama, Carson is a dream. In that respect, his rise in popularity, like that of Trump, relates directly to Obama Derangement Syndrome: His attacks on the president— sometimes to his face—are highly seductive to that group of Americans who remain so angry about Obama's election that they oppose everything he stands for, and even oppose governing itself, cheering for shutdowns and endless obstruction and endless attacks on Obamacare and Benghazi! that put the country's ability to function in real danger.

Related: Ben Carson Reminds Us Why America Loves to Hate Muslims

Carson does have an inspiring personal story. He grew up poor in Detroit but made it to Yale University and eventually to the neurosurgery team at Johns Hopkins, where he made medical history. The "I-got-here-all-by-myself" narrative is appealing, particularly to a conservative electorate. His success seems to attack the notion that race holds people back, and appears to prove the right's tightly held argument that anyone can make it in the US, if only they try hard enough.

There is, of course, a deeper psychological aspect of this. While Obama Derangement Syndrome is not entirely fueled by racism, such vehement opposition to the president can lead to charges that one is a racist. Whether or not that's fair is a question for another essay. In the case of Carson, though, a black man's life story seems to repudiate liberal ideas about race in America— specifically that people of color struggle to succeed in this country and that policies should be formulated to help these communities. Thus supporting Carson may somehow seem to obliterate the sense that racism is an inherent part of hating Obama.

But while Carson's journey is definitely impressive, the insistence that he did it without help is farcical. He attended public schools, lived on food stamps, and even got free glasses from a government program. He's the product of a world with safety nets that helped him in significant ways throughout his early life.

Conservatives conveniently ignore that fact, preferring to see a man who came from nothing and made it to the top of an elite medical field—a glittering backstory filled with real tangible achievements that gives Carson an advantage over Jeb and Marco and other career politicians who've spent their adult lives in statehouses or on Capitol Hill. Carson's story separates him from almost all of the other Republican candidates, save Trump, whose backstory as a successful businessman in a party that reveres business success, similarly warms conservative hearts.

Related: Toure on Why Donald Trump Will Never Be President

We assume the brother is extraordinarily intelligent, because he's a pioneering surgeon, but when Carson speaks he says dumb—or, uh, unintelligent—things. But don't be fooled by the way Carson seems to be less quick-witted than the other candidates, or the way he seems to have less of a grasp of the nuances of policy or government. The truth is, Republicans like that: The party has a deep anti-intellectual streak and is quick to fall in love with strong people who project a disdain of intellectualism and studies and facts.

This is a party that has been in love with Trump since June, and whose past trysts include Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, and—let's just say it—Ronald Reagan. Carson's apparent slowness is something that separates him from the sharper political minds in the GOP presidential field, but don't be fooled: As with Trump, anti-intellectualism is part of Carson's appeal.

The thing that separates Carson from Trump, however, is his religion. Trump is lost on questions relating to faith, and his arrogance may be off-putting to many of the evangelical voters who make up a sizable chunk of the GOP's base. Carson, on the other hand, is deeply religious—he's a Seventh Day Adventist— and conducts himself in such a calm way, it seems like he just finished a nice, quiet church service. Or just finished a nice nap—but I digress. The NYT/CBS poll shows among evangelicals, Carson leads Trump by over 20 points, and other recent polls have shown a similar gap.

My friend, the political science professor Sam Popkin, author The Candidate: What It Takes to Win—and Hold—the White House, points out that this difference could be critical in a state like Iowa, where evangelicals make up a key voting bloc in the GOP. "Carson is more like Jimmy Carter than like Obama," said Popkin. "The polite, pure, dedicated outsider." Like Carter, Carson is a soft-spoken, calming, deeply religious man. Take that religious core and that nice guy mien and add in a deep hatred for Obama and you've got a dream candidate for a GOP who's pro-God and anti-Obama.

So ok, I understand that Carson's appeal flows from his ability to express Tea Party talking points in the calm voice of a political outsider. But I'm still not sure what Carson's brand slogan would be. At the last Republican debate, when it came time for candidates to give their closing statements, Carson spoke simply about being a surgeon. It seemed like he'd wandered in from a medical convention and decided to stay. But perhaps that's it. In this climate where being a political outsider is cherished, perhaps Carson's brand is "I was a surgeon." I'm not sure though. Because I've thought a lot about Ben and his appeal and I still don't entirely get it.

But maybe that's not my fault. If you can't clearly discern the central message of a campaign it usually means that campaign has done a bad job of explaining itself. So while Carson might be leading the GOP field for now, he's still got a lot of work to do to explain to America who he is.

Toure wants to know what you think about Ben Carson. Tell him on Twitter.

Brooke Purvis

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A lot of people need their student grant to get them through university. Without it, they wouldn't be able to pay for baked potatoes and Kraft singles, or mephedrone, or their rent. Whatever you spend it on, a maintenance loan is a vital part of the university experience—and one you'll be reminded of for years to come, as you watch SLC remove chunks of your pay packet every month.

Brooke Purvis, a mature student at London art school Central Saint Martins, wants us to take a step back and assess all this. To ask how important money really is.

To do this, he's going to burn the money from his student grant. All of it. His project, Everything Burns, seeks to ask questions about the nature of money and what we really gain from it. I chatted to him about the project, the concept of money, and whether he's really going to burn it all.

VICE: Hi Brooke. How did the concept for Everything Burns come about?
Brooke Purvis: Everything Burns has been an idea I've been toying with for the past few years. The idea that in today's society a person who wants to better themselves has to undertake a huge amount of debt seems unfathomable. And after researching more into the institutions of society, it finally became something I became less nervous of doing.

How does the burning of money illustrate that?
Let's firstly take a look at what money is. Money represents freedom and comfort to mostly everyone. It's the one thing that most aspire to obtain in life. You give up your very liberty and time in exchange for pieces of paper that actually have no financial worth. Money—in the UK, at least—holds absolutely no value whatsoever, other than that which you place upon it.

Now, when we look at a bank note in the UK, it suggests that you can exchange whatever the note's worth is for the sum of whatever that note is worth. It's an IOU. So we have a fiat currency not based on anything substantial, which means governments can easily manipulate it for their own means and that banks can create it out of nothing.

So, for me, when I realized that money is simply a fiction and a fixation of the mind and that people need a material object to understand something's existence, my own reality had been altered. Therefore, burning money would be a release from the bondages that society and our own minds have placed upon us all.

READ: I Lived in a London Hostel for a Week to See if It Could Be the Cure to My Rising Rent

But what will burning it really achieve? Couldn't you give that money to charity or do something positive with it?
I could give that money to charity, but charity is capitalism's solution to the problem it creates. But it's my money, remembering it's a fiction, and like anyone, I choose to do what I want with it. Also, I believe I am doing something positive with it. The work I'm creating highlights what I believe to be very important issues.

What will Everything Burns actually involve?
Well, the artwork is what can be seen as a conceptual piece. It's more to do with the semantic rather than the spectacle. Fundamentally, myself and another person, as witness, will take the time to destroy, by fire, my student loan. It will be documented by photography and film, the ashes collected for further documentation and possibly further display. It will not be a performance piece as such, in that there will be no live audience.

How much of your loan will be burnt?
The entirety of what is available to me.

Do you feel you're freeing yourself from your student loan by burning it?
On one hand, no. Tell me one person that would consider themselves logically free from the torments of money, debt, and pursuit of happiness. But on the other hand, you have to remember it's all a fiction, and it only becomes real if you choose to see it as real.

Related: 'Unicorns,' our film about the polyamorous London club kids who identify as the mythical creatures.

Are you comfortable financially?
I'm working practically full-time, alongside studying full-time, to cover the rent for the over-exaggerated rent prices of living in a mouse-infested house with 11 other people sharing the same bathroom on the outskirts of London. Just so I can then study at uni to effectively allow myself a better chance at getting a better job. I personally don't believe that I've ever experienced a comfortable life without fear of not making a rent payment or having enough for food or some maniacal person demanding something from me.

How are you going to survive without your student grant?
I can only imagine that it'll be extremely hard to survive without my student grant. Let's not forget a few factors, though. Firstly, it's all a state of mind. We discussed earlier how money is a fiction, and that this is also taking place around the same time that I finish at uni, meaning that if there's an emergency and I need to dip into my student loan, then I can, as anyone would be expected to.

What have been the reactions of the people around you to the project?
I haven't really discussed this with anyone as such. What I can imagine, though, is that they might think it's a juvenile stunt typical of a leftist view of the state. But compared to the stunts the right-wing fraternity are performing right now, this is nothing. And in this day and age, how do you get people interested in a subject that's important? There's so much background noise that the only way to make people look up and pay attention is to perform a shocking and outrageous stunt. That in itself is something I'm addressing: why is it that people are so bored in life that the only way to grab someone's attention is to do something like this? What are our modern day values? Shock value? Have these values really only been reduced to something as banal as this?

Follow Dan and Brooke Purvis on Twitter.

Photo by Bruno Bayley

This article originally appeared on VICE France

There are two questions I refuse to answer: 1.) How many driving lessons I've taken; and 2.) How many guys I've slept with. When it comes to driving, let's just say I was a slow learner. But if we're talking about fucking, I'd rather not do the math.

First, there's the fact that making a list just doesn't make any logical sense. How can I reduce a long-term boyfriend to just another name in line next to some lapse in judgement I barely remember? What about my first love, Alessandro—the older brother of my high school pen pal, who drove me on his scooter along the coast of Sicily when I was 15? He blew my pubescent mind and I'll never forget him, but we didn't sleep together. Does he not count?

But on the rare occasion I am forced to give someone a number, I typically round down. And according to studies, I'm not the only one. A survey by the French Institute of Public Opinion found that on average, people in France say they've had 9.9 sexual partners (13.1 for men, 6.9 for women). And while this figure varies depending on the social class and the age of people interrogated (young urban people, for example, are way above the national average), the results show one common theme—men always say they've had more sexual partners than women.

According to François Kraus of the French Institute of Public Opinion, this is nothing new: "Even if things are changing, today, in all social classes, the belief remains that a man who's had many sexual partners is more valuable than a woman who's had many sexual partners."

Read on Broadly: Why Over 40 Percent of People Refuse to Date Virgins

But do we really still live in a Don Juan versus Bell de Jour world? Yes. And it's even worse than that. If you're not fucking anybody, you're frigid; if you're only having sex with your partner, you're boring; and if you're sleeping around, you're still a whore.

Mina says she's "only slept with eight guys" but she's ashamed of it. "I want to have fun, to be liberated," she says, "but it's hard." Émilie—like me—prefers not to count. "You can write 20 if you want" she says, laughing. She says she's scared of her friends judging her but I can't help but think there's more to it. "If I count, seriously, it's too many," she insists. "It scares me. It might sound stupid, but I always imagined that after I'd finished studying I would spend the rest of my life with the same man. And in fact, telling myself I might have slept with 40 guys, even if in most of the cases I had a nice time... Well, it makes me sad."

What is sad is the fact that she has to judge herself like this—seeing every sexual encounter as another dent in her innocence, a further step away from the utopian prince charming fantasies she swallowed as a child.

Publicity shot for the TV show 'Threesome'

Louise, on the other hand, couldn't care less about telling me how many people she's slept with. "Around 20," she says casually. She's 27, recently broken up with a long-term partner, and is entering what we agree is her "YOLO phase." But she's found that not everyone is into her newfound sexual awakening: "I realized my friends can't bear hearing a woman talking about how happy she is, and how much fun she's having going out with loads of different guys. I used to tell my friends everything, now they're all like, 'And when do you plan on finding a boyfriend?' or, 'Shouldn't you be more careful with your reputation?'"

Is there anywhere women can talk about fucking without judgement? What about a gynecologist's office? I put the idea to Émilie. She laughed. "When I was 17, my gynecologist asked me how many partners I'd had. I said four. 'How do you think you will be respected if you don't even respect yourself?' she said."

My gynecologist is the opposite. She's named after a flower and has a kind, motherly face. I trust her. But I still lied about how many people I'd slept with when I first went to get the pill. "It's a pity," she said when I confessed. "People who start their sexual life early or have numerous partners have a better chance of getting HPV, and we could inform them if we knew that was the case," she explained sadly. "Our patients should be able to tell us everything without being scared we will judge them."

She almost made me feel sorry I'd lied to her. I told her it was complicated, that I felt torn between the desire to be free and maintaining a sense of propriety. "Well," she said. "I don't like to judge, but I've seen lots of young women like you. When they're 27 or 28, they want to party and be free, but then they come crying for an IVF treatment at 35 and ask themselves why they didn't wake up and try to get serious earlier. Life goes by fast." I took off my gown, got my insurance card back, and left straight away.

My boyfriend is certain that my pussy is damaged by the amount of guys I've had sex with.

Still this doesn't answer the basic question here: Why do we lie about the number of people we've slept with? I figured I'd ask some guys, too.

Antoine is 29 and works as a creative director. I met him at a party, drinking warm rosé in a plastic glass. When he heard I was writing this piece, he got in touch with me. "I will tell you what I think," he declared. He likes it when girls are not "easy at first. I like knowing the girl is giving me something special when she agrees to sleep with me—it gives me more value. If she's slept with the whole of Paris, I feel stupid. Sleeping with her doesn't make me feel good about myself if she opens her legs in front of anybody. I'm not proud of it but that's how it is."

Unfortunately, there are many Antoines. Valentine met one of them, too, via a friend of a friend. She was crushing on him but then one night, over drinks, she started talking about her sex life. He immediately lost interest in her, telling her friend he didn't know "if she's a serious girl or if she just wants to suck dicks at parties."

Of course, not all men are like this. And most of them have to deal with their own self-doubt and the social codes dictating their lives. Mathilda recently moved in with her boyfriend. They love each other, but the subject of how many people she's slept with always comes back. "Even guys who tell you they love liberated women at the beginning will end up reproaching you," she sighs.

She refuses to give her boyfriend a number. "He's certain that my pussy is damaged by the amount of guys I've had sex with. He has this stupid belief he can't let go, that the bigger the number of guys a woman sleeps with, the larger her pussy," she says. "My boyfriend isn't an asshole, he hates thinking like this, but it's somehow stronger than him."

For others, the fear is focused on being able to give a sexually experienced woman pleasure. Benoît, a bartender, admits he puts himself under a lot of pressure: "I'm always stressed the first time I sleep with a girl," he says. "'What if I can't get hard? What if I can't give her pleasure? What if I'm bad at sex?' are questions that always cross my mind. It's even worse if the girl seems really into sex. It's very exciting and very scary at the same time."

His solution? "I became an expert at going down on girls. Seriously, I am really conscientious," he says. "I stay there for as long as I am needed. I ask girls what they like, I insist, I want them to guide me. Once I feel sure they are enjoying themselves, the pressure is gone. Once she starts twisting and turning, grabbing the sheets, moaning; I don't care about the other men any more. She might have done it with Rocco the day before, but I feel like the king of the world."

There's a guy who gets it.

Follow Judith on Twitter.

*All the names have been changed.

All photos courtesy of Paul McGillion

A man with a loose Canadian accent is talking to me in a Hawaiian-themed bar in Prague. "These sci-fi conventions are like Woodstock," he's saying, over neat scotch. "They're full of quirky outfits and joyous fans looking to find someone to fuck." And then he tells me about the time Jack Bauer broke his neck, his adventures with Mulder and Scully, and the dedicated legion of fans who still love him for playing an intergalactic doctor on a cult TV show.

At this point, I'm feeling kind of confused and a little bit scared. Surely this is just Roy from Bognor Regis and he's having me on? A fantasist who's had one too many mixers and been split up from his grotesque stag-do friends. A man who might, possibly, strangle me to death and leave me in a Czech ditch. But the scotch keeps on flowing and the stories continue at breathtaking speed.

"So we just got back from this convention and this woman gave me a cross-stitched painting where I'm being hugged by a naked Joe Flanigan, the actor who played our fearless leader Colonel John Sheppard on the show," he reveals. "I was getting hugged erotically from behind and we're both topless with huge muscles, pecs and even bigger smiles. She just kept demanding, in a German accent, "'Do you like it? They are in space and love one another!'" There's a pause. "I didn't know what to say."

McGillion poses for a photo with fans.

I've just met Paul McGillion. A Canadian actor born in Scotland, he has spent the day entertaining die-hard fans at the local sci-fi convention, and he's now having a drink. So why all the furore? Well, once upon a time, McGillion played the lovable Scottish-accented Dr. Carson Beckett on Stargate Atlantis. But while fictional doctors come and go, Beckett—who unexpectedly exited the show in season three after a deep space tumor caused him to spontaneously combust (you really got to get those space tumors checked out, people)—has somehow endured. Translation: sci-fi nerds fucking love him.

Read on Motherboard: The Subversive Science Fiction of Hip-Hop

To make sense of my drunken encounter, I get in contact with Beckett devotee TJ Jeffrey. So incensed by the character's demise, she created a national protest movement along with a lady called Michelle, a NASA scientist who worked on the Orion Project. Together, in 2007, they led a march of fans wearing tartan underpants, who danced to a Scottish bagpipe band, as they protested outside the show's Vancouver studios. Long before the days of grown men and women weeping openly at the demise of Game of Thrones lothario Jon Snow, the "Save Carson Beckett" campaign generated global news coverage. The Today Show even sent a camera crew to Vancouver to film proceedings for a report, while the campaign won McGillion his place back on the show. Well, sort of: He later returned as a bizarre, short-circuiting clone.

"It felt like victory when they brought him back," Jeffrey, who now works as a broadcast journalist, tells me. "Some people were hugging and crying. We loved him, as Carson was just warm and this everyman badass." She adds, "The first convention I met Paul at, we met this girl called Vicky who brought her mum. Her mum got so drunk she got Paul to sign her arse. Me and Vicky ended up being housemates."

A beautifully constructed press shot for 'Stargate Atlantis'

As it turns out, this mythical, ass-signing space explorer is actually just some dude who wanted to be a teacher. A few weeks on from our visit in Prague, McGillion tells me over the phone: "When I finished studying to be a teacher, I just went to auditions with friends in Toronto for a laugh. My dad kept saying, 'You're a teacher, so bloody teach!' But when I got a part in The X Files and told him how much I got paid, he changed his tune."

These days, he's a long way from deep space. Our conversation is actually live from the set of Bravo's Girlfriend's Guide to Divorce, a sitcom as Sex and the City-lite as its name would suggest. Bread-and-butter romcom roles aside, though, you sense that spiritually the man still hasn't left his spaceship. In fact, he's spent the last decade touring the world during breaks from acting, because there is no escaping Dr. Carson Beckett fandom. Or, as TJ more accurately describes it, "He's like a Rolling Stone when he turns up at some of these sci-fi conventions. Dragon Con bloody loves him."

Read on Noisey: Y'all Ready for This?: Every 'Jock Jam,' Ranked

And much like during our rather odd first encounter in Eastern Europe, the stories of the more intense fans quickly resurface. "I've had my fair share of crazies," McGillion says. "I've met a few who think this is reality and that I'm a doctor; they come to me with the most intimate medical problems, expecting me to give them a diagnosis. And when we were in the Deep South, there was a particularly menacing Texan queuing in a trench coat. He asked me if I would sign something special, to which I said, 'Yeah, that's why I'm here.' The next day he returns in the same exact clothes, in need of a bath, and slaps his arm on the table, and he's wearing this giant glove."

The Stargate diehard was actually a man who unwinds by getting actors who play doctors to sign medical gloves.

"He then fills the gloves with cement and displays each of them on the wall in his mother's basement," McGillion explains. The convention equivalent of Buffalo Bill, then? "Robert Picardo, who played a doctor on Star Trek: Voyager, has had a few run-ins with him, too."

Thankfully, the doctorly advice can also result in less sinister situations. As I trawl through a hard drive full of convention photos, one in particular grabs my eye. McGillion, looking like the cat who got all the cream, is holding a blonde woman in a skimpy crop-top rather intimately. So do space doctors get groupies, too? "No, no, no," he quickly retorts. "That woman used to weigh over 400 pounds. I saw her when she was real heavy. She lost hundreds of pounds. I gave her words of encouragement, like, 'Dr. Beckett believes in you,' and a year and a half later she came up to me and showed me a picture of how she used to look. I picked her up and she was real happy, as no one could lift her before then. She is amazing."

The doctor will see you now

Oh, and there was that time McGillion got kidnapped by men in masks clutching machine guns. "It was in a convention center in England and they did this fancy dress competition, and these guys were all dressed up as the Wraith ," he says. "So I'm minding my own business and eight grown men grab me, put a handkerchief over my mouth, hog tie me to a chair and point machine guns at my head. I was terrified. I though this could be it. It turns out it was part of the skit from their act and they thought it would impress the judges."

There was also the enamored Polish girl who stalked McGillon passionately from a hotel room opposite the studios where he spent long days filming Stargate Atlantis. The love-struck lady had her mom stay with her for weeks on end as she tried everything to get Dr. Beckett's attention: "She pretended she was a messenger girl, tried to get through the gate on rollerblades." But what happened next couldn't have been easy to predict. "She sent me a DVD of every single episode I was ever in and she sang love songs over the top. The cover photo of the DVD was me in my space uniform holding her hand as we walked through the Stargate portal. At random points in the episode, both our heads would show up on the screen and she'd somehow aged us both. I turned bald and elderly to the music. It was so I knew what we'd look like if we grew old together."

Fans campaign to 'Save Carlson' outside the studio for 'Stargate Atlantic'

Oh, and the tattoos, obviously. "There was this one lady in Australia who had my smiling head right in the center of her back. She actually had the entire cast of Stargate SG1 and Atlantis tattooed onto her body," he reveals. "People used to get me to sign their neck braces and arms, too. A few would come back with my signature tattooed on their flesh, so I don't sign bodies any more."

However, the international convention circuit, which he currently tours four or five times a year, isn't all stalkers and kidnappings."I love it," he says. "I once ate lunch at the same table as David Prowse, the man who played Darth Vader, R2D2's Kenny Baker, Linda Blaire from the Exorcist, and The Incredible Hulk Lou Ferrigno. Where else can you eat a ham sandwich with that sort of company?

"When I tell people what I do, they are expecting to hear about deranged people, but 99 percent of the people you meet are sweethearts—a lot of them meet their wives and husbands at these conventions; it's a real brother and sisterhood. You never hear about a fight breaking out at Comic Con. There's a lot of babies out there now called Carson or Beckett, and in the future I hope I can meet some of them at a bar in Prague, too."

Follow Thomas Hobbs on Twitter.

Photos by Anica James

Crows have a badass reputation. They're the unofficial mascot of illustrious goths including Edgar Allen Poe, Brandon Lee, and Maleficent. They also have serious symbolic street cred as portents of prophecy and death.

That crows haven't caught on as pets might be precisely because of their freaky intelligence. They remember faces, and hold grudges against people who are mean to them. They mimic human voices and use tools. With avian speed and primate-like intelligence, they're basically the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. A bunch of crows is called a murder.

Their precociousness means they can get destructive and depressed when kept in captivity. Even their shit is scary: it contains freaky, antibiotic-resistant genes.

But in the gritty north end of Halifax, Nova Scotia, a couple of punks named Zack Trash and Cameron MacKay have started a micro-trend of fostering baby crows. Turns out, it's kind of an emotional rollercoaster—and definitely not for the squeamish.

Cameron MacKay with one of his crows.

Zack Trash, 27, formerly of the punk band Broken Ankles, has a flair for the dramatic.

He and his girlfriend, George Schneider, run Balloonicorns Entertainment, specializing in elaborate balloon animals and stilt-walking in crazy costumes. Their home is a menagerie: three cats, two dogs. One dog is trained to perform with them in a busking routine where he plays dead, then comes back as a zombie.

But crows weren't really on their radar until one afternoon in June of this year.

While picking up her kids, Schneider spotted some students gathered around hassling a nest of tiny, featherless crows. According to Trash, one of them hopped on to her arm. Even though they were currently embroiled a "nightmare housing situation" in an aging, dilapidated building, Schneider decided to bring home their new pet. The kids named him Jeffrey Winger.

"Now we had a crow in the house, and we didn't really know what to do," says Trash.

Enter Trash's buddy, Cameron MacKay, a microbrewer and folk noir singer-songwriter with a Dude-like aura of chill. In 2012, he took in two abandoned crows, George and Billy.

It had been ages since MacKay last met anyone with a pet corvid: keeping wild birds is technically illegal in Nova Scotia without a permit. Back when he was a kid, at the Amherst Mall, he saw a talking crow and "doped-up looking lynx" on display in a rinky-dink travelling animal show. MacKay found the spectacle depressing.

"I liked the idea of being able to speak their language, hang out, be cool, and see what they're saying," he says.

He has a huge tattoo on his forearm: a city skyline with crows perched, in Hitchcockian style, over telephone wires and radio antenna. It's a reminder of a dream he had, about a gigantic murder descending from the sky, blanketing his apartment with little black bodies.

MacKay gave Trash a crash course in keeping the babies alive—which turned out to be quite the undertaking. For about 2.5 months, baby crows need to be fed every ten to 20 minutes through the daylight hours.

Plus, "baby crows don't really eat like most pets," explains Trash. "You pinch the food between your thumb and forefinger and stuff it down their throat. They pretty much swallow your fingers for a second. It's weird, but they love it."

After a few weeks of cramming food down his little beak, Jeffrey started to look "less like a lump of raw hamburger with wings and more like a real bird."

To their surprise, another crow started visiting Jeffrey's perch on the deck. She even taught Jeffrey crow tricks like how to soften nuts and peck open seeds.

Trash showed MacKay a video of one of these visits. It turned out to be Mackay's own crow, Billy, who'd flown four blocks south from MacKay's house on Macara Street to Trash's house on May Street. It seemed incredible, but such meet-ups aren't that weird in the corvid world: unrelated crows occupying the same territory regularly team up to forage, sleep, and hang out.

Although the crows made friends, the vibes between the humans weren't so warm and fuzzy. Trash and Schneider's landlord issues continued to heat up and their apartment became untenable.

Jeffrey seemed good, though. He "would sing little crow songs to us, and we would have long conversations as he tried to mimic our vocal patterns," says Trash. "He even had this little dance he would do to get our attention, walking side-to-side and flapping his wings while doing a series of rhythmic chirps and purrs."

But his feathers were filling out. He was getting better at flying. it was clear he'd soon be ready to be released. "But we didn't really have a solid crow-related exit strategy."

Jeffrey, however had his own plans.

Two weeks before they had to leave, the landlord showed up and threatened to have Jeffrey removed. They had a loud dispute—then realized Jeffrey was missing. They searched the neighborhood with no luck.

Weeks passed without a trace. When it was finally time to move to their new apartment, they thought they'd seen the last of Jeffery.

One day, after they'd settled into their new place several kilometers away on Chebucto Road, Trash was out having a smoke on the deck. He was coughing—a hacking, distinctive cough he's had for years—when he noticed a figure perched on a nearby telephone wire.

The crow started doing a little dance, shuffling from side-to-side and making chirping noises. It was Jeffrey, who'd finally tracked him down.

Trash thinks his cough tipped Jeffrey off as to where they moved.

"He must think it's, like, my call," he explains.

He couldn't believe Jeffery found them. "It was easy to pick him out from a group—he has the loudest, most distinctive call in the neighbourhood," says Trash. At the last sighting, Jeffrey had joined a murder of six crows that also included Billy.

Jeffrey still shows up occasionally to say hi, "doing his little dance from the trees on the powerline outside our livingroom window."

In MacKay's art-strewn apartment in the North End, George is the only of the three crows still in captivity. A birth defect has made his feet useless, like clumps of wire, which means he'd never be able to make it in the wild. So he beats his fuzzy, moth-like wings as MacKay zooms him around the apartment in his hands.

"He can't fly, so this is the best we can do for him." It's kind of sweet, until George shits on the floor and MacKay's hyper mastiff puppy immediately dives to eat it.

George suits the mystical aesthetic at MacKay's place, decorated with a cow skulls, Alien sculptures, a Petunia poster, assorted plants, and tonnes of crow-related memorabilia. George's twisted feet and sparse feathers give him kind of a Nosferatu vibe. Most of the time, he chills in his perch by a window with a dish of blueberries and pate. Quartered paper towels keep the poop mess in check.

"When I wash him every week, he'll flap and make little grunty noises," says MacKay. "I keep him as healthy and happy as I can."

As MacKay's dog chases the cat down the hall in a barking, yowling blur, George seems relatively chill.

Over the years, George has learned to talk a bit. "He goes off on little crow tirades," says MacKay. "He has a sense of humour." He's also acquired a couple of human vocal mannerisms, including a demonic "HA. HA. HA. HAAA," a la Jabba the Hutt. MacKay talks back, but it's hard not to feel a little bad for George as he sits on his perch, little black eyes watching the sky.

Not that the wild crows have forgotten poor George. From time to time, Billy, Jeffrey, and the rest of their murder stop by for a visit.

"They'll come around to the front tree and hang out with George and chit-chat. As time goes by, they come here less and less, except in winter when they're looking for more food," says MacKay.

Despite the hard work and stress of raising Jeffrey, Trash says it made his world a little less cold and shitty. After sustaining serious injuries in a brutal assault while he was busking, he felt alienated and bitter—and his experience with the crow restored a bit of faith.

"Having Jeff made me a more patient and understanding person. I feel far, far removed from mainstream culture—but when people saw him, it opened up new doors. It was like, 'Wow, human interaction isn't dead. People still talk to one another.'"

MacKay sees corvids as a purer iteration of humanity's best qualities—deserving of serious respect. "Crows are serious animals," says MacKay.

"My philosophy is that crows and humans are basically the same—although humans are much more prone to being idiots than crows."

Follow Julia Wright on Twitter.

Image via Google

Welcome to Netiquette 101, in which we'll be using cyber-case studies to teach you basic but valuable cyber-lessons in how to be a better cyber-citizen. Today, we talk Halloween costumes, memes, and meme Halloween costumes.

These days, everyone is a real big fan of the world wide web. Wherever you are, you can find people "logging on" to the information superhighway by way of their desktops, laptops, tablets, or even their phones. These "netheads" love nothing more than to share internet-based humor with their Snapchat followers, reblog their favorite pieces of Sonic the Hedgehog fan art on Tumblr, or even nosedive into Social Justice Twitter to defend their use of the term "feMANist" rather than "male feminist." So it stands to reason that plenty of people source their Halloween costumes from the web. Heck, you might even call it "Hallowmeme," which, for better or worse, is a thing.

Different people celebrate Halloween differently, of course—some costumes are scary, some are pun-based, some are basically just excuses to get nearly naked in public. And some seem to say, "Hey, remember this thing that people were talking about a while back? Haha me too." In the viral churn of the internet, there's always a new cultural reference point to base jokes around: Benghazi, #DeflateGate, DJ Khaled mispronouncing the word "jewelry," Netflix and chill, Left Shark, Pizza Rat, and nearly everything that Drake does. And once these jokes get around enough, they lose their original context and just exist in relation to other memes.

If all memes exist on a continuum populated only by other memes, then how can we know which ones are actually worth remembering? Fortunately, the great cultural arbiters of our time—novelty Halloween costume manufacturers—have taken it upon themselves to let us know which memes were important and which memes were fucking bullshit by turning the best ones into costumes and letting the bad memes die. Unfortunately, all of these costumes are either offensive, surprisingly expensive, or just uncreative bludgeonings of one-note "jokes" that were pretty boring to begin with. Some are all three! Let's take a look at some of the costumes you can buy and wear if you are a shitty person:

Sexy Pizza Rat

Who sells this? This company Yandy, which is famous for taking time out of its busy schedule of manufacturing lingerie to make "sexy" Halloween costumes like this one.
Tell me about this meme! So, this one time a rat took a slice of pizza down a couple stairs of a New York subway station, and somebody filmed it and put it on the internet. It was sort of underwhelming to actually watch, but the phrase "Pizza Rat" is really evocative.
Why does this costume suck? You know how Magic Mike was a mumblecore movie that happened to be about a depressed male stripper, and then Magic Mike XXL was basically a Muppet musical about dudes who took their clothes off? Well, that's how I feel about Pizza Rat and its needlessly sexy sequel. Also, no one should wear clothing that features arrows pointing to their genitals.

On Motherboard: The Best Place on Earth to Die

Left Shark

Who sells this? Amazon, and probably lots of other people.
Tell me about this meme! Man, talk about a #TBT! The noble Left Shark first surfaced during Katy Perry's Super Bowl Halftime performance, when one of her backup dancers had no idea what was going on, man. Haha.
Why does this costume suck? This falls into the category of "worst type of Halloween Costume," which is any costume that makes your body way bigger than it actually is. Even if you're willing to get drunk enough to square the fact that dressed as a goddamn meme with your conscience, you have still significantly added to your body mass. Throughout the entire night you will get sweaty, keep bumping into people, and get frustrated while trying to pee, because these costumes never have zippers.

The Asshole Dentist Who Killed Cecil the Lion

Who sells this? There are a few variations of this idea—shouts to Yandy for just calling a regular lion costume a "Cecil the Lion" costume—but Costumeish's version, featuring a blood-splattered dentist's outfit and a severed lion head, takes the cake.
Tell me about this meme! This July, an American dentist named Walter Palmer killed a lion on a big game hunting trip to Zimbabwe. Everyone was very upset with him, and everyone pretended they cared about lions for a while. Though Palmer was never charged with a crime for his action, he was slapped with a rugged form of "internet street justice"—i.e., people trolled the shit out of his Yelp page.
Why does this costume suck? For one, this costume is $140, which is awfully expensive for what amounts to a quick, extremely evil joke. You might as well write "I'm an asshole" on a white T-shirt in Sharpie and then spend your $140 on drugs.

"The Dress"

Who sells this? Yet another Yandy Special.
Tell me about this meme! Memes have inherently short life cycles: They appear seemingly out of thin air, enjoy a meteoric rise to ubiquity, and then get overused until we all find a new one to run into the ground. The craziest thing about The Dress was it had a half-life of about ten minutes—compare interest in it over time on Google Trends to that of the consistently popular Grumpy Cat. Anyways, nobody could figure out if the dress was blue and black or white and gold, and it set the internet on FIRE for about 24 hours. Basically, any site that covered it at all broke traffic records; the BuzzFeed post that started it all had 16 million hits in six hours.
Why does this costume suck? OK, first off, I still think the dress was gold and white. Second, what kind of person is out here referencing a dead-ass meme like this? On the other hand, what kind of person is out here using their Halloween costume to reference any meme at all?

Watch: Inside London's Hedonistic, Polyamorous Unicorn Movement

Grumpy Cat

Who sells this? Amazon. You can find, like, anything on Amazon.
Tell me about this meme! Honestly, Grumpy Cat is one of those memes that seems like it's always been around. That's like asking me to tell you about the sky. Anyways, I just googled Grumpy Cat and it turns out she became a thing in 2012.
Why does this costume suck? Grumpy Cat is the least terrible costume on this list. If you insist on dressing as a meme this Halloween, buy this Grumpy Cat costume.

Deflategate

Who sells this? Costumeish.
Tell me about this meme! Deflategate is one of those thing I don't really understand because by the time I saw a post about it, everyone was making really elaborate inside jokes incorporating it or using it as a non sequitur. I think Tom Brady underinflated a football, or something.
Why does this costume suck? Come on, dude, this is just a giant football costume that they labeled "Deflategate."

Caitlyn Jenner

Who sells this? Surprise! No one.
Tell me about this meme! Caitlyn Jenner's Vanity Fair cover will probably go down as one of 2015's iconic images.
Why does this costume suck? Because humanity can be terrible sometimes, retailers started selling costumes spoofing the photo. But because humanity can also sometimes redeem itself, many, many people were like, "This is pretty much the definition of transphobia" and the offensive costumes have largely been removed from the internet. If you catch someone wearing this, it means they bought their Halloween costume very early, they went to one of the few retailers still selling the costumes, or they spent an ungodly amount of money buying one off eBay.

Sexy Donald Trump

Who sells this? Are you supposed to read "Yandy" in the same voice Austin Powers used to say the word "randy?" Or maybe are you supposed to read it in the voice Aziz Ansari used for his character "RAAAAAAAANDY?" Anyways, you can find this on Yandy.
Tell me about this meme! You know what Donald Trump's deal is.
Why does this costume suck? One time in college I was at a Halloween party and made out with a girl who was dressed as "Sexy Reagan." The next day, I found out she was a member of the College Republicans, and then spent the rest of my hangover hating myself. Anyways, I don't drink anymore, and Sexy Trump (technically "Donna T. Rumpshaker") is like Sexy Reagan, but worse.

A Hashtag

Photo via Facebook/Conservative Party of Canada

Stephen Harper's Conservative Party is dead. Long live Stephen harper's Conservative Party!

Now that we got that business out of the way, Canada's second-place party (first-place losers) have to go about the awful business of finding a new leader.

And from that smoking wreckage will emerge a white (also: caucasian) knight to lead the party back into the promised land.

We prepared for you this handy primer and even ranked candidates on the Harper-o-Meter — candidates are ranked, based on their chances of winning, from one to five Harper faces.

Interim Leadership Race

The party will be choosing its interim leader on November 5, and that person will be required to do the horrible, thankless work of rebuilding a party that nobody seems to like very much right now.

Diane Finley

Age: 58

Riding: Haldiman—Norfolk (Ontario)

Experience: Minister of Public Works and Government Services, and Human Resources and Skills Development

Chances:

Notable for: Breaking conflict of interest rules for hooking up a Conservative Party friend. Also: wearing sunglasses indoors that make her look badass. (She wears them because she has Graves' disease. Which is not funny. But she does legitimately look like a badass.)

Speak French?: Yes, all the time.

Campaign song:

Reason for running: She is the physical embodiment of the phrase: "I will fix this shit myself if I have to."

Erin O'Toole

Age: 42

Riding: Durham (Ontario)

Experience: Minister of Veterans Affairs, former Air Force Captain

Chances:

Notable for: Taking over Veterans Affairs and not totally fucking it up.

Speak French?: Somewhat.

Reasons for running: He's new to politics, he's absurdly likeable, and he managed to un-fuck-up the Veterans Affairs file.

Campaign song: O Canada.

Candice Bergen

Age: 51

Riding: Portage-Lisgar (Manitoba)

Experience: Minister of State for Social Development

Chances:

Notable for: Being the one responsible for killing the long-gun registry.

Speak French?: Not really.

Reason for running: She's a gun-loving, politically-savvy, social-housing-advocating prairie Conservative who shares her name (and hair) with the actress from Murphy Brown. What's not to love?

Campaign song: The other Candice Bergen singing "Better Than Ever."

Rob Nicholson

Age: 63

Riding: Niagara Falls (Ontario)

Experience: Government House leader, and Minister of Justice, Defence and Foreign Affairs.

Chances:

Notable for: Never really having a scandal/being a remarkably boring man.

Speak French?: He did once.

Reason for running: Rob Nicholson is the whole grain bread of the Conservative movement.

Campaign song:

Michelle Rempel

Age: 35

Riding: Calgary Nose Hill (Alberta)

Experience: Minister of State for Western Development

Chances:

Notable for: Subtweeting her way through the announcement that she was running, calling out unknown somebodies for saying she's too young, female, and brash to run.

Speak French?: Apparently?

Reasons for running: To smash the patriarchy, mostly. Also: to make financial responsibility and free-market enterprise cool again.

Campaign Song:

The Actual Leadership Race

The main event. Like rugby or dating your ex, nobody is quite sure of the rules yet, but rest assured that this race will be a mud-slinging good time.

Jason Kenney

Age: 47

Riding: Calgary Midnapore (Alberta)

Experience: Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Multiculturalism, Employment and Social Development, and Defence.

Chances:

Notable for: Doing every job ever in the Harper government, and doing it quite well.

Speak French?: As often as they'll let him.

Reasons for running: He's basically Harper 2.0—although he says he wants to make the party "sunnier"—and he's got serious cred when it comes to the military. He's also a goddamn celebrity at cultural events.

Campaign song:

Lisa Raitt

Age: 47

Riding: Halton (Ontario) / Cape Breton (her hometown)

Experience: Minister of Natural Resources, Labour, and Transportation

Chances:

Notable for: Once calling cancer isotopes "sexy" (then, later, beating actual cancer) and, more importantly, for being a wonderful person and politely dragging Elizabeth may off the stage as she made a fool of herself.

Speak French?: She's learning.

Reason for running: Because she's from that wing of the party that wants to sell the Conservatives as a likeable, electable, capable alternative to the other parties without turning the election into a goddang culture war. Old school.

Campaign song:

Maximum Bernier

Age: 52

Riding: Beauce (Quebec)

Experience: Minister of Industry, Foreign Affairs, and Small Business and Tourism (in that order.)

Chances:

Notable for: Leaving classified documents at the home of his Hells Angels-linked girlfriend.

Speak French?: French is not the language he has trouble with.

Reason for running: Probably because someone told him not to. He's the only Quebecer who appears set to join the race, so that's incentive right there. He's also a libertarian, which we all need a little more of.

Campaign song:

Nightime campaign song:

Doug Ford

Age: 50

Riding: A big black SUV

Experience: Toronto city councillor for Somewhere in Etobicoke

Chances:

Notable for: Everything.

Speak French?: Oh hell, I dunno. Probably.

Reason for running: Enablers.

Campaign song:

Rona Ambrose

Age: 46

Riding: Edmonton — Spruce Grove

Experience: Minister of the Environment, Intergovernmental Affairs, Status of Women, Labour, Western Development, Public Works, and Health.

Chances:

Notable for: Being a big Ayn Rand fan, and for voting on a bill that ostensibly could have reduced access to abortion while still being Minister for the Status of Women.

Speak French?: Yes, and apparently Spanish and Portuguese as well.

Reasons for running: To find out who John Galt is, I guess. Also because she's one of the most experienced candidates.

Campaign song: Atlas Shrugged e-book.

Kellie Leitch

Age: 45

Riding: Simcoe—Grey (Ontario)

Experience: Minister for Status of Women, and Labour

Chances:

Notable for: Having to convince people that we don't need an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women. Also: mentioning that she's a doctor every five minutes. (She's a doctor.)

Speak French?: She tries very hard and often succeeds.

Reasons for running: She is maybe one of the most ambitious people in Parliament. She became a minister two years after being elected for the first time. That's not half bad.

Campaign song:

Michael Chong

Age: 43

Riding: Wellington—Halton Hills (Ontario)

Experience: Well he's been an MP for more than a decade.

Chances:

Notable for: Introducing legislation that is supposed to empower individual MPs to stand up to their leader in a time when individual MPs never ever stood up to their leaders.

Speak French?: It doesn't matter, because he's not going to win.

Reasons for running: Chong is a classic issues candidate. He's going to run to stand on his "principles" and to advocate for a more "representative" "democracy". Total loser.

Campaign song:

Chris Alexander

Age: 47

Riding: The Open Road

Experience: Ambassador to Afghanistan, Minister of Immigration

Chances:

Notable for: Connecting the dots between women who wear the niqab and terrorists, introducing a bill to strip dual citizens of their citizenship if they've been convicted of a terrorism offence, having once been a star candidate for the Conservative Party, (sort-of) hanging up on Carol Off. There's a long list.

Speak French?: He has, on occasion, spoken French.

Reasons for running: To stop those hippy trippy Liberals from putting pot in every storefront window. Also: he's probably not running. We just wanted to put Carol Off's face on the Harper-o-Meter.

Campaign song:

Michelle Rempel again?

Age: Still 35

Riding: Still Calgary Nose Hill (Still Alberta)

Experience: She has gained experience from being on so many lists.

Chances:
One Trudeau strip tease video. Because if that guy can be prime minister, then Michelle Rempel should probably be President of Earth.

Notable for: Knowing wine really good. Also, being one of the fastest-rising politicians in a party that doesn't have a lot of upward mobility.

Speak French?: Apparently.

Reasons for running: Because she's just as capable as these other rubes.

Campaign song:

STEPHEN HARPER

Age: 56

Riding: Calgary Heritage

Experience: Prime Minister

Chances:

Notable for: Being Stephen Harper

Speak French?: So they tell me.

Reasons for running: Twist!

Campaign song: The soundtrack to my nightmares

Peter MacKay, John Baird and James Moore

Age: 135, combined

Riding: Joe Clark's Dreams

Experience: Doing roughly 50% of the work of the Harper Government.

Chances:

Notable for: Resigning at the exact right time.

Speak French?: At least 80% of it does.

Reasons for running: At the moment, none of the three seem terribly interested. MacKay and Moore got tired of commuting halfway across the country for a job where everyone hates you, and Baird decided to go into the private sector. Unless they pull a classic Parent Trap gag and try to rotate through the leadership, there's probably not much hope that either of the three will come back. But hey, wouldn't it be great to relive the Harper years just one more time?

Campaign Song:

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The Wallace sculpture at the author's beloved childhood amusement park features screaming eyes that suggest the wrong life more than the wrong pants. All photos by author

Growing up is horrible. They say all you want when you're young is to be older, and then, when you get to adulthood, you want to be a child again. I mean, that's not strictly true—for example, bars—but still: taxes, the job market, small-talk, the slow decay of your body, not being able to play football in the park without feeling weird, having to dance in public, everything. It sucks. It's horrible.

Childhood was good and I enjoyed it, and then I revisited it, and everything turned from beauty to turds. Example: my family used to drive around England for summer holidays, and we once stopped in Morecambe for the day. It was beautifully warm, with a beach that seemed to exist forever and an immense Polo mint tower you could get up and see the whole landscape from. For some reason, I remembered the smell of fried chicken and the chorus of "Born to Be Wild" playing on repeat from an arcade game. Anyway, we drove through it years later and the Polo tower was closed, a theme park had come and gone, and there was a man pissing in what seemed to be his own garden. Time isn't always a healer.

It was with trepidation, then, that I decided to revisit Storybook Glen—or, as it's now known, The Den and Glen—near Aberdeen. Once the staple of my childhood, The Den and Glen of my memory is a spacious, exciting place, where effigies of my idols and fairytale favorites stood, as tall as an adult, beckoning me motionlessly to play. The kind of play area you go to as a treat: expansive, well-maintained swings, fields beyond fields surrounding the border of a lush park, a sort of bar parking lot Disneyland, brilliant and never-ending, the kind of place you cry at when your mom says it's time to go home.

I recently went back, and this is what I found.

The Den and Glen's Lisa (or is it Bart?) has realized that not even music can stop the inevitable march to the grave, the pointless suffering of existence. Her crumpled face representing the collective years lost to learning saxophone pointlessly, for who can afford to be creative in 2015? Her closed eyes aren't those of passion; instead, they're rueful of memories of being used as a session musician for a Tropical House track that peaked at number 36.

I should probably mention here that I wasn't just hanging around a children's park taking photos of what appears to be a magical trampled eggplant by myself. Having decided that going solo would result in being questioned by police, I went with my friend Stephen and his two qualified, actual children, who have lives devoid of subtext. You don't have subtext when you're a child. I needed people there who could take The Glen at face value, not weary 20-somethings who'd stare into Cinderella's worn visage and think about monthly phone bills or dying.

Shrek here, with a mouth that says, "Come on, guys! Stay around! We can do a few more lines and wait for the bars to open!" But eyes that say: "Why can't I die?"

His Donkey friend seems to be struggling, too—note the water that's pooled within his suffering mouth, water that's impossibly collected in a space that seems impossible to reach. That's how long he has been screaming. So long the rain learned how to fall in him from the side.

Either there weren't live animals when I used to come here, or I'd forgotten them. Chickens seem to walk around now, among the not-yet-cynical kids and the parents who yearn for the serenity of the parking lot. There were lambs in shit-packed enclosures, a pony or two meandering melancholically in a pen, and this guy who exists as a metaphor for giving up:

"It's shit being Scottish."

TripAdvisor has some pretty brutal reviews for The Den and Glen. "Avoid this place," says one. "A place of nightmares and neglect," says another. Most beautifully, one "terrible" review is titled: "Highly recommended if your love disappointment, insults & want to hurt your kids!" Which I don't think is a real recommendation. While there are a substantial number of people on the website who seemed to have enjoyed their time, there are about as many decrying the decline of what was an Aberdeenshire institution.

Yet, my pal's daughters—two and four years old—were loving it. They were dead excited to see Cinderella and Snow White, wanted to play on every swing, roundabout, or anything with springs. The mock castles and three bears' house stood proud, striking conduits for imagination. Other groups of kids seemed to run around, ignoring the relentless misery of the statuettes, the color-drained monuments to childhood.

They don't see a little girl locked behind bars. There's nothing weird about this to them at all.

Maybe that's how we should be in adulthood. Maybe we should take absolutely everything at face value. "Lighten up," your friend says. "It'll be fun," they say, always the precursor to exclusively negative experiences. Maybe these worn figures of childhood innocence are hopelessly decayed because the place is just too busy with smiling kids almost every day of the year and there's no time to give them a fresh coat of paint, or whatever extensive work it would take to remove existential dread from Gromit's eyes.

Yet, as much as I wanted to be positive, it was almost impossible. Take a look at Postman Pat for fuck's sake.

Ignoring his deeply unsettling fingers and bizarre body proportions, Pat's a sign of the times. In the era of FedEx, Pat is a relic of the past. Pat's from a time when you knew your postman and you knew your neighbors. A bygone era where the doorbell ringing was something musical instead of a threatening siren, a time when you didn't have to pretend to the surprised Amazon delivery person that you were at home during the middle of the day because you're freelance, or you work nights or something. A throwback to a happier time. A purer time.

But then: Does anyone remember the episode of TMNT where Michelangelo was beheaded for forgetting the Dominos voucher code? Because I don't. But there it is, recaptured in resplendent glory.

What did I learn from The Glen and Den? First off, that it's very petty—easy, even—to make fun of, and that's because a lot of it looks irredeemably shitty. Yet, having my friend's daughters there reminded me that we inherently look for the bad in everything as we grow older. I came looking for meager-looking statuettes and I found them. But the kids found physical manifestations of the stories read to them before sleep, the reassuring characters that portray important lessons, e.g: don't sit on a wall and rely on the army to make futile attempts to fix you; don't enslave dwarfs for your benefit; it's inadvisable to raid the homes of bears.

I went to try to find some kind of nostalgic reassurance, but in that fruitless pursuit I found that it's meaningless to pass on that negative energy to kids and make fun of their park. They'll grow up and do it themselves. They'll find the place in their virtual reality headsets as they scour the radiated, post-President Trump nuclear wasteland for something to eat. But, for now, Shrek with too many teeth: a good thing.

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A bottle of Dokha and two pipes. All pictures by the author

Dokha, colloquially known as "Dook," is a traditional Middle Eastern tobacco, typically mixed with flowers, herbs, spices, or fruits. In Dubai, where it's more common than standard tobacco, it's usually smoked through a wooden pipe. Now, however, as more students from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) move to the UK, it's made its way to British universities and the kind of pipes traditionally used to smoke other stuff typically enjoyed by people who only have to concentrate for a one-hour seminar per day.

"We're now seeing a large rise in sales among British 20- to 40-year-olds, primarily male," says Alex from Enjoy Dokha, the company he started in 2011 to supply Dokha in the UK after spotting a gap in the market. Over the last few years, he's noticed more tobacconists in the UK starting to stock it on their own shelves, too. While it's only a refined form of tobacco—a stronger way of smoking a cigarette, essentially—the hit you get is far more intense. A bowl of dokha, depending on the intensity, contains as much nicotine as three to five cigarettes in one hit. It is, Alex says, like drinking an espresso instead of a cappuccino.

I'm quite a heavy cigarette smoker, but the first time I tried dokha at a friend's house I was coughing and spluttering all over the place, left confused by the whole experience.

Omar, 21, is a student at Birkbeck University. He reckons in Dubai, where he's from, around 70 percent of 15- to 18-year-olds smoke it. He tells me my experience is normal. "The first four or five times that you ever smoke will be filled with coughs. I've seen people who are drunk smoke it for the first time and throw up," he says. "Some people even pass out, which happens more frequently than you think."

Andrea smoking dokha in Camden, London

My friend Chad, who studies at UCL, has been smoking dokha since the age of 13. He smokes a bowl every day. "It becomes the way that you wake up in the morning. Your entire body just has this feeling of ultimate relaxation, your head just kind of goes back to sleep, but your eyes don't, and you're like, 'Woaah.' And then, 30 seconds later, you're fine and, if anything, a bit more awake."

Chad thinks that dokha might be such a "knock-out" because it feels like the oxygen is being cut off from the brain. This may explain why I thought it felt similar to laughing gas, which does exactly that. Both of them give a very quick, immediate rush and what Chad describes as an "ultra-light-headed feeling." In Arabic, dokha itself can be translated as "buzz," or is sometimes interpreted as meaning "dizzy." It's this very brief escapism that attracts him to dokha, Chad says: "When you're having a bowl, you're not thinking about anything else apart from maximizing and embracing the oncoming buzz with open arms."

Andrea Skye, an art student in London, tells me that if he's really drunk, dokha can enhance the feeling. "If I have a few Long Island Iced Teas and I have a bowl, it makes my receptors very sensitive to everything," he says. "I just become extremely sensitive and then I'm just fucked. I don't enjoy that because I can't communicate with people and I'm just like, 'I'm done.'"

It becomes the way that you wake up in the morning. Your entire body has this feeling of ultimate relaxation.

Dokha easily becomes addictive. Many students from the UAE can't quit when they move abroad, hence its growing prevalence in the UK. "After your first year, you don't get the same sort of buzzes any more, so people start smoking more intense stuff, and more regularly," Omar tells me.

There's a lack of research about the effects of dokha. Mike, 21, is a student at Oxford Brookes and says, "All the long-term effects or dangers I read about seem to either be unreliable, myths, legends or just assumptions," he says. Thing is, it's tobacco: it's definitely not going to be good for you—and experts suggest it may well be worse than cigarettes, despite the fact it's all-natural and doesn't contain any additives.

What Mike can guess from his own experience is that: "It has a large effect on appetite, on the health of the respiratory and cardiovascular systems, on energy, focus, and concentration." Both Mike and Omar seem to think that it's worse for you than smoking, based on the fact it contains so much nicotine and "also the fact that we don't really know what we are smoking," says Mike.

Dokha originated in Gilaki in northern Iran in the 1400s. According to Mike, "It was smoked by sailors originally because it was perfect for using out at sea. Over the next few hundred years it was widely smoked in the Ottoman Empire, where there were many attempts to ban and outlaw the smoking of all tobacco, which ironically ended up making the smoking of dokha more popular in the Middle East."

Reason being, it's harder to tell whether or not people have been smoking dokha. There's almost no second-hand smoke, so the smell doesn't stick to clothing or fingers in the same way as cigarettes.

Dokha and a more traditional wooden pipe

The ritual of smoking a pipe seems to be part of dokha's appeal. "People like their pipes—they like the process of filling it, of carrying it," says Omar. "In the UAE they really take pride in their pipes; there's a lot of personalisation in dokha and ways to express difference." At Enjoy Dokha they sell 30 different kinds of pipes, including a pipe made out of a rare deer horn for $105.

In Dubai, dokha works much like drinking does here—as a social lubricant. Omar describes it as "a base of conversation and a mutual understanding of what they like—it's a sense of community for them."

Alex from Enjoy Dokha reckons people in the UK like the convenience of it. "For people whose bosses didn't like their cigarette breaks, dokha is very quick," he says. "You smoke it for five seconds and you're done for the day." It's also cheap—about £20 pack of straights and it's not hard to see why people like it.

But could dokha really replace smoking for some Brits? "It depends on your smoking habits," says Omar. "My uncle actually quit smoking through dokha, because it's more intense than a cigarette."

My own experience of smoking dokha didn't make me want to take it up over cigarettes; I enjoy a cigarette's duration, even if it is only about three minutes. Chad agrees: "It couldn't replace smoking for me; I love cigarettes. If I didn't love cigarettes, I wouldn't smoke. I think it should be viewed as a different thing to tobacco, even though it's still nicotine."

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John McDonnell, Shadow Chancellor, speaks at the Momentum Jamboree. All photos author's own

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

On Saturday night the newest incarnation of the Labour left held its inaugural meeting. "Momentum" is a group tasked with turning the excitement that Jeremy Corbyn created in taking his leadership title into something more than a blip, as the parties' Blairite zombies plan to reclaim the party. In other words Momentum wants to keep up the—you guessed it—momentum of Corbyn's fast-rolling bandwagon.

While Corbyn-mania might have swept up hundreds of thousands, what happens next for the newly awakened socialist sleeper cells after his victory? According to Momentum's glitchy new website, the group will be "a network of people and organizations that will continue the energy and enthusiasm of Jeremy's campaign."

To work out what to make of it, I headed down to their launch event, a Saturday evening BYOB event bizarrely labeled a "jamboree."

As I headed into the hall in a rainy in East London, I had my hand stamped for possible re-entry. Middle-class lefty types pottered around drinking plastic cups of red wine. Activist groups such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Global Women's Strike, and Disabled People Against the Cuts stood by tables handing out badges, and there was a bloke trying to flog me a socialist newspaper that I still didn't want. The spot lighting and glitzy curtains behind the stage made it feel like some sort of awards ceremony for socialist of the year.

You can see why it's politically useful for the new leadership to garner grassroots support. Already we've seen Corbyn's "new politics" coming under attack from his own party, hardly a surprise given that the new leadership team sits firmly to the left of the Parliamentary Labour Party. However, Jeremy and John McDonnell, his shadow Chancellor, have long insisted that their views are well in tune with ordinary Labour Party members, as they made clear when we met before the General Election.

Related: Watch VICE's new documentary about a hedonistic cult of escapists: 'Unicorns'

If a Corbyn-endorsed Momentum group can attract supporters as fast as Jeremy did, it could become an influential mouthpiece to counter the loud carping from the party's right. The launch came almost in tandem with the onset of Labour Together—a new organization which seems to a right-wing attempt to challenge Corbyn's power. Labour Together says that "everyone in the party" can join it, but I can't help but think that an organization that everybody in the Labour Party can join is called the Labour Party, it's just that some people are unhappy that Corbyn is in charge of that.

'Guardian' columnist Owen Jones takes to the stage

Despite the extremely short notice, the heavy rain, and use of the word "jamboree," hundreds of people had turned up for the event, and I decided to pick some of their brains.

"My understanding, which is not very thorough, is that this is a group to follow on from Corbyn's campaign, to keep up the momentum, and to create results," 25-year-old Lesha Shine told me, who'd come along to this as political pre-drinks with a group of friends. She argued it needed to be about campaigning, not just politicians, bypassing the party's structures and fighting on issues, an organized voice of the left in the Labour "broad church."

As speeches got underway in the main hall, I headed back out into the corridors, to find out what volunteers, hopefully more in the know, thought Momentum would be getting up to soon.

Santigo and Jack

Santiago and Jack, both in their early 20s, were stood swigging cans of Stella as former London Mayor Ken Livingstone was projected on screens around the hall. I got chatting to them about this new movement, occasionally interrupted by lost looking attendees asking where they could sneak off for a smoke.

"Momentum needs to be outward looking," Santiago told me, "we hear all this stuff in the press about how insular it could be, looking to depose MPs an take over party structures. What we want is a grassroots movement up and down the UK."

"I don't think you should have to be a member of the Labour Party to be in Momentum," Jack continued, while Santiago showed Owen Jones where he could go for a slash. "People just need to share our left-wing values, and want to campaign on these issues at every level in the UK."

This might have been Jack's jamboree dream, but what Momentum will actually look like in the future remains unclear even a few days after launch.

Whether it'll be a membership-based organization, whether non-Labour members can join in with activities, and how much control the Labour bureaucracy will have over this new campaign group, remains the subject of an as yet undecided debate.

It's bound to be a lively and contentious one. What happens, for instance, if Momentum members want to campaign on an issue that parts of the Labour Party are culpable for? To take the example of the housing crisis: Labour controlled London boroughs, like Newham and Lambeth, have seen left-wing campaigners of the type who are likely to be attracted by Momentum up in arms. The Focus E15 mothers, who Jez and John speak so highly of, are fighting against Labour Party colleagues to fight evictions and social cleansing in the capital.

In the auditorium, I found John McDonnell, now Shadow Chancellor, who'd been billed as the headliner for this jamboree. I never knew jamborees had headliners. When he had given his speech I grabbed him for a chat.

"It needs to be a bridge between the Labour Party and civil society itself, and visa versa," McDonnell argued, when asked about the relationship between the party and this new group. But could non-members, or even opposing party members, get involved and campaign within Momentum too?

"In Momentum, you'll have large numbers of people attracted by Jeremy Corbyn's campaign, some of whom will join the Labour Party, and many of whom won't, but they'll share the core values," he continued, as adoring supporters kept popping over to say hi. "They may not become party members, but they'll be part of our campaigning on issues and talking about how we transform society."

So, it was a little unclear, but John did say that you can't stand for a different party and join Momentum.

Up on stage a woman was entertaining the crowd by taking swipes at Tony Blair – kind of like a band playing their only hit at a festival in Labour-left terms—before breaking out into some "Jeremy Corbyn inspired Harry Potter erotic fan fiction," so I made my way back into the corridor and out to the pub.

The question facing Momentum, and their founding supporters, is whether a pre-existing political party and a radical social movement can really co-exist. McDonnell was keen to tell me that this was how Labour existed at its birth; "We have to transform Labour into a social movement, as it was when it was founded," citing the success of squatters, occupiers, and widespread followers that led to the development of social housing in the UK.

In that sense, Momentum perhaps has more in common with the new European left than New Labour. Syriza in Greece, or Podemos in Spain, are grassroots movements that morphed into political parties and still have to marshal a relationship between their component parts.

As the Blairite vultures circle, Momentum has a serious challenge ahead of it if it's going to produce a left-wing boost to Corbyn's "new politics." My first piece of advice? Don't call it a "jamboree."

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