Photo via Wikicommons

On Monday an Australian communications expert claimed his country's accent is the result of a "drunken slur" stemming from Australia's early settlers and their habit of being hammered all the time. This should surprise no one. It's a wonder this connection is only being made now, in 2015. For reference, here is a pitch-perfect impression of the Australian accent.

The expert, Dean Frenkel, is a lecturer in public speaking and communication at Victoria University (pronounced VIK-TOREE-UR UNI-VARSAH-TAYE). He made the claim in the Australian paper the Age. "The Australian alphabet cocktail was spiked by alcohol," he writes. "Our forefathers regularly got drunk together and through their frequent interactions unknowingly added an alcoholic slur to our national speech patterns. For the past two centuries, from generation to generation, drunken Aussie-speak continues to be taught by sober parents to their children."

Frenkel's piece isn't designed to insult so much as inform, and in it he calls on Australian schools to put more emphasis on linguistics. He also asks his fellow countrymen to stop it with the missing consonants and "lazily transform pronounce things as they're spelled. We add and abbreviate stuff."

Frenkel seems to agree, writing, "the communication skills of most average Americans would be just below that of Australia's best speakers."

But Frenkel believes there is hope for his country yet. "The holes in our education system reflect holes in our culture," he writes, calling for a fourth 'R'—rhetoric—to be added to the classroom culture alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic. Not doing so, he says, is costing the country not only some long overdue respect, but money. "Poor communication is evident among all sectors of Australian society and the annual cost to Australia may amount to billions of dollars," he writes, which is pretty impressive considering Australians already enjoy a low rate of unemployment, a steady economy, a robust education system, and a GDP growing at a faster rate than America's.

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Look at Anna Haifisch's art and comics at her website and Twitter.

Two white people don blackface to dress as Ray Rice and Janay Palmer. Photo via Facebook

Back in 2007, when I worked in a different industry, a former client invited me to a Halloween party. I wasn't able to make it, as I was down with the flu. When I was well enough to go back to work and declutter my email, I noticed he'd sent me a message with attachments. He said he hoped I was feeling better, and if not, maybe I'd get a laugh out of pictures from the party. I opened the attachment, grateful he'd thought of me. The first picture was him in an orange prison jumpsuit, with a long fake scar on his cheek. I chuckled; this was a guy who worked a security job and hoped to become a police officer one day.

The next picture hit me like a slap in the face. There was another white guy in the photo, in the most offensive blackface costume I'd seen up to that point. He'd painted his face black, folded tinfoil over his teeth to look like a grill, and put on a fake afro wig under a Raiders cap. He'd bent my client over a kitchen island to simulate prison rape, holding a fake gun to the back of his head. I never responded to that e-mail, and less than a month later, I changed jobs for unrelated reasons. I sometimes wonder (and worry) if my client ever did become a police officer.

A good tip in general is to not dress up as a murdered teenager (in this case Trayvon Martin), but especially don't do it if you're incorporating blackface! Photo via Twitter

Eight years later, as is usual for this time of year, white people find themselves confounded that dressing in blackface, redface, and other racially offensive Halloween costumes is a problem. So, like so many others before me, I began writing this piece with the intention to explain why it's not OK to appropriate people's skin colour and culture for laughs. Why it's inappropriate, for example, for a fifth grade teacher in the American south to paint his face and hands, put on a Kanye West costume, and act surprised when the internet reacts. I got two sentences in, before I realized something, and backspaced over everything I'd written. Writing that plea would be as fruitful as trying to shout back the tides, because it's not a plea to reasonable people. Halloween no longer belongs to reasonable people.

This is a really, really poorly done Nicki Minaj costume. Photo via Daily Mail/Twitter

So, fuck it: I'm giving up. If racists are this hell-bent on ruining Halloween, and racism-enablers are this hell-bent on excusing them, they can keep it.

We know the routine by heart. By the third week of October, some supposedly clueless chumps show up to frat parties, community events, and sometimes to public schools. Occasionally they win costume contests. The pictures inevitably migrate to Black Twitter, and those chumps become the epicentre of that year's shitstorm. After the outrage comes the standard non-apology apology. Take the words "not my intention to offend," "colour-blind," "some of my best friends," "harmless joke," throw them in a bag, add a few prepositions, shake them up, pour them out. After the anger burns itself out, everything begins to return to normal. We get a few thinkpieces and PSAs, and then we hunker down and wait to have this talk again next year.

Students at University of Toronto paying homage to Cool Runnings. Photo via Facebook

I recently spoke with an acquaintance, Rad Dockery, who was the first to tweet that infamous picture of former Mayfield vice principal Lionel Klotz. You might remember that school administrator whose livelihood was very much in question when his picture showed up in the Toronto Star. You may not know that Rad received the picture from another school board employee who was afraid to speak up, or that an online mob came to collect Rad's scalp.

At first, it was the deluge of threats and insults after his comments on City News. When that failed to shut him up, they decided to find out who cuts his cheques. It wasn't difficult, given his unique name, his open LinkedIn profile, and his employment in the public sector. Lionel Klotz is still employed as a vice-principal for the Peel District School Board, but Rad works for himself now.

Another friend of mine put it to me this way: "Remember that movie The Purge? Well consider Halloween The Purge for racists." And she's right. Every racist joke that went untold during the rest of the year, every argument that wasn't had over the shooting of Trayvon Martin, or Ray Rice knocking out his wife in an elevator, or the name of Washington's football team, all of that pent-up racial resentment is vomited into the public sphere when Halloween comes around. By now, we can safely say white people wearing racist costumes have passed the borders of "insensitive humour" and cruised right on through "attention-seeking racial aggrievement."

So screw it. I'm leaving the porch light off. I'm not taking invitations to Halloween parties unless I know and trust the hosts. If I had children, I sure as hell would not chance them knocking on the door of some jovial couple painted up for a good laugh. Take this one day of the year, wrap it up in the rebel flag, and put a nice little bow on it. Enjoy Halloween, racists. It's all yours.

Follow Andray Domise on Twitter.

All photos by the author

Historically, butter was a distinctly northern European phenomenon: Only in cooler temperatures could you keep butter for a number of days without it going rancid. But it's an especially big deal in Ireland, where butter is the country's most essential food export, and the Cork Butter Museum lends a certain cultural gravitas to everyone's favorite popcorn-topping.

The first thing you see when you walk into the Cork Butter Museum is the massive stack of aging butter logs. Past that, there are ancient butter skimmers, centuries-old firkins (a specialized butter container, which could be buried underground to help preserve the butter for longer) and butter churns that visitors can churn themselves. The two-story building is filled with artifacts of Cork's butter-making past and present. It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the world's only museum devoted solely to butter.

After visiting the museum myself, I sat down with its director, Peter Foynes, to chat about the importance of butter in Irish history and culture and the reasons for creating a butter museum in the first place.

VICE: What's the backstory of the museum?
Peter Foynes: The museum was opened in 1997 by a group of local businesspeople. In particular, to mark the old Butter Exchange in the city, that used to be the biggest butter market in the world. But also to commemorate Ireland's dairy history, which is really quite important. So that was the initial idea. The old Butter Exchange became vacant in 1996, so that was the ideal place for it.

Wait, what's a Butter Exchange?
In 1769, there was a group of people in the city called the Committee of Merchants that decided they wanted to take regulation into their own hands. There was butter trading in the city before that, but it was unsatisfactory. So the Merchants introduced a system of quality checking, basically grading the butter themselves. Over time, it also became a system for dealers to go through to get their butter because it would then have the mark of the Butter Exchange of Cork on it and that was a good thing to have.

Look at These Weird Pictures of Butter Sculptures

Why is Cork, in particular, so tied in with butter?
Historically it was because of the harbor and the trade routes across the Atlantic. As the British Empire expanded into the West Indies and North America, those trade routes became very important. Ireland itself is perfect grass-growing country and therefore a good place to raise animals, so Cork became the harbor where the dairy market met the Atlantic trade. The British Army that fought in the American War of Independence was significantly provisioned from Cork.

So Cork was providing supplies to the enemy?
It's a matter of geography, really. If you're going across the Atlantic from England, you have Cork on your way and that's about it. It's perfect cattle country, so you have beef, butter, and pork right there.

What made Irish butter so special?
Then and now, Irish butter is grass-fed. That's what makes a difference. Basically it's "garbage in, garbage out" with butter, so if cattle have bad feed, the butter quality is lower. Because we have a long growing season here—February to November or thereabouts—the cattle can be grass-fed for a very long time, which leads to a better quality of butter.

So butter is obviously an important part of Irish history. What kinds of things do you have in the museum?
Prior to the 1970s, there were many small, even minuscule, butter makers producing for the local parish or the local community and they all had their own parchment paper wrappers. We have at least 120 of those that we've collected. Those producers are all gone now, all consolidated into about half a dozen larger producers. They would have all completely disappeared from history if not for us.

the keg of bog butter that we have upstairs. There's a long tradition in Ireland of burying butter in bogs. The keg we have here is about a thousand years old. The oldest butter in the world is Irish and it's creation is dated to about three and a half thousand years ago.

On MUNCHIES: Butter Is Your Friend But Margarine Wants to Kill You

Why did ancient Irish people keep butter in the bog? That sounds kind of gross.
Exactly why people did this is not fully understood. It could have just been preservative, it could have been for ritual purposes. Butter was kind of a high-status object, and there was a tradition of burying high-value goods in the ground.

What's your personal favorite part of the museum?
It's not fair to pick out one, but I'm fairly pleased with the butter wrapper collection. That's the kind of stuff that will disappear very quickly. These were fairly commonplace forty years ago but will soon be gone unless someone makes an effort to find them and preserve them.

What do you see for the future of the Museum?
We're looking into further expansion into the old Butter Exchange building, but that's still a matter for discussion.

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Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox. All other photos courtesy of the author

Anne Simon grew up the daughter of Hollywood sci-fi writer Mayo Simon, who wrote classic cult films like Futureworld and the Saul Bass acid-tripfest Phase IV. He also got to interview Apollo astronauts and meet with some of the smartest scientists of his day. It's fitting, then, that the younger Simon ended up not only becoming one of the smartest scientists of her day, but also serving as a consultant on a little TV program called the X-Files, helping showrunner Chris Carter maintain an undercurrent of science over which the show's forays into the bizarre and unexplained could run. (Well, most of the time. The infamous black oil, Simon admits, was pretty much made up.)

Simon came to work on the show through a friendship with Carter, who was dating a friend of her mother's around the time of the show's first season, and needed help keeping the show based in some sort of reality. "His brother had a faculty position at MIT, so he had the physics covered," she said. "But not the biology. That's where I came in." Simon—who at the time worked as a biochemist at the University of Massachusetts—was a natural fit.

Simon's currently the head of the Virology graduate program at the University of Maryland, and has a story credit on the upcoming X-Files revival, a six-episode miniseries being aired in January by Fox. She's also heavily involved with the rabid X-Files fanbase on Twitter, and will sometimes livetweet episodes, inserting commentary and behind-the-scenes factoids. As the show ramps up for its return, VICE chatted with Anne about how X-Files changed the public perception of science, how she helps the science dictate the direction of the show's storylines, and the fans who are obsessed with Mulder and Scully fucking.

VICE: What drew you to X-Files?
Anne Simon: Scully was really the first time a scientist on TV was being portrayed in a positive light. She didn't just believe. She wanted facts. She wanted to test her hypotheses and do experiments and not just blurt out things. There's the Scully Effect—you have all these fans saying that they became scientists because of X-Files.

How would you contribute to a script or an episode?
knew where he wanted to go with something. So for example, he asked me on the last episode on the first season: "How would you study a microorganism? What would be the first thing that you would do?" So I told him, "Well, you'd grow more of it." He'd say "How would you do that?" "Well it would take ten years..." Well you know television, so you'd already have it growing. What would you do next? Well, you'd put it under a microscope, sequence some of its ribosomal DNA... You wouldn't figure something you were studying was just an alien—you'd relate it to something. Back then, there were specific genes everybody would sequence and compare. So he goes, "What could they find that would instantly scream that it was alien?" So I came up with—and this continued until the revival—"Well how about an extra pair of nucleotides?" From there he'd send me the scripts and I would correct them. And he would use all my corrections. I did this for about five years before I told anyone about it.

The Creator's Project discuss UFO sightings in Sabrina Ratté's video trilogy.

When you talk about ways to visualize science, do you think that's gotten better on TV and movies over time?
It's certainly improved in the movies. I haven't seen The Martian, but scientists are very happy about that. I think they take the time in the movies to get the science right. But on television it's very problematic. They don't have the time and they don't take the time. Chris takes the time. Which is why I always give my card to writers and tell them I'm available.

Can you think of an example where they didn't take your advice on something because they wanted a more powerful scene, or something like that?
The thing is it's all fantastical. I'm a fan of science fiction. This isn't supposed to be real. But we want what the scientists are doing to be real. The expression that I always use is that, "Aliens can do almost anything," So when you're trying to come up with something you just go, "Oh, the aliens are real smart, they can do this." There was an episode called "Redux," where Chris wanted Scully to figure out how she got infected by this alien virus. It was my idea to have a virus. So back then we had her do something state-of-the-art. Today it would be something else. It was called a "Southern blot." And I used to do lots of them... And he had her doing this on the show. Almost every single step. So he asked me, "How long would it take to do it?" And I said three days. And he said she has three hours... Well, let's say she needs a blazing hot probe, which is a radioactive piece of DNA. We didn't think we'd get that statement past the censors .

Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Read: Kevin McCarthy Just Announced He Won't Take Over As Speaker of the House

Representative Paul Ryan was elected the 54th Speaker of the House on Thursday, He took the reins from John Boehner, who resigned after years of conflict with the conservative wing of his Republican party, leading to him calling the position "the loneliest place in the world."

It speaks to the difficulties of being the Speaker that Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who was Mitt Romney's vice presidential candidate in 2012, initially didn't want to take it on. When asked if he'd be open to the job back in 2014, Ryan said he wasn't interested. According to the New York Times, it was only after a small group of conservatives blocked majority leader Kevin McCarthy's path to the speakership that the 45-year-old Wisconsin congressman had a change of heart.

Boehner, who has a weird habit of crying in Congressional chambers, delivered his farewell speech Thursday morning. "I leave with no regrets, no burdens," he said, clutching a box of Kleenex. "If anything, I leave the way I started: just a regular guy, humbled by the chance to do a big job."

Ryan said that, as speaker, he's hoping to bring the Republican Party together after years of disagreements over whether compromise is a valid tactic that have split the party.

"We're going to move forward," Ryan said Wednesday. "We're going to unify."

Before marijuana, and after. Illustrations by the author, taken from the original photographs.

Back in 1995, my D.A.R.E. instructor used a series of old photos in a lesson. The first was a normal spider web, then there were several webs in various states of shittiness. The explanation: the spider was on drugs when it made these webs! Surely the one high on marijuana (above) lost its train of thought partway through, and started staring at its own eight legs, I thought.

From time to time, these photos crop up again to illustrate something slightly different: since caffeine has arguably the most deleterious effect on web-building of all the drugs, the lesson of the spider webs has become less about the Horrors of Drugs has calmed down, and more about the surprisingly powerful psychoactive effects of caffeine.

A spider on caffeine.

"In addition to a general rule of thumb to avoid street drugs, it may also be wise to consider passing on that second cup of coffee this morning," a writer for Relevant Magazine concluded.

It may come as a surprise, then, that the original purpose behind giving spiders drugs wasn't to study the relative effects of drugs—or really to study anything. The person who did it wanted to get the spiders high for his own personal gain.

In 1948, the German zoologist Hans Peters wanted to make a documentary about spiders building webs, but couldn't because he didn't want to stay up past 2AM to watch it happen. Peters got his pharmacologist colleague Peter Witt to rig up a system for giving the spiders drugs in doses of sugar water, all in the hopes that their scrambled brains would lose track of the time, and make some webs during normal work hours.

Instead, Peters got the worst possible results: The high spiders annoyingly kept making their webs in the middle of the night, but they were also terrible at it. His photography project had to be scrapped.

But Witt was intrigued. The project became a lifelong passion for the pharmacologist, who over the decades teamed up with other likeminded scientists, including the Canadian chemist David Peakall, who took an interest in the effects the drugs were having on the business end of the spider, where the silk came out. Entomology seemingly always took a backseat.

"Chemistry wasn't nearly as advanced as it is now," said Linda Rayor, an entomologist at Cornell University who studies spider behavior. "Witt was into the idea that you could feed the blood of people on various drugs to spiders, and those spiders would build very drug-specific webs."

In addition to blood, Witt also gave spiders the urine of people with schizophrenia. There was a popular idea going around that schizophrenics had a hallucinogenic compound flowing through their veins. Some of Witt's contemporaries at a Swiss mental hospital performed a similar experiment, and found no connection between schizophrenia urine and crazy webs. Their only positive conclusion was that spiders hate the taste of schizophrenia urine. According to their report, after being dosed, the test subjects "left the web, rubbed any residual drops off on the wooden frame, only returned to the web after having given their pedipalps and mouthparts a thorough cleaning, and could scarcely be persuaded to take another drop of the stuff."

It appears Witt imagined a world where all police departments and hospitals have a sort of spider lab. When a patient or inmate behaved strangely, that person's blood would be fed to a spider, which would then be left overnight to build a web. In the morning, a careful look at the spider's handiwork would provide answers. "Aha! My webs indicate this inmate over here is a laudanum addict, and this poor patient is suffering from schizoaffective disorder," a chin-scratching lab technician might have said.

"It obviously didn't work that well," Rayor told me. "That wasn't necessarily the end-all-and-be-all in terms of analyzing what kinds of drugs people had taken." Eventually technologies like mass spectrometry made Witt's spidergraph (my word, not his) unnecessary.

But Witt's photos are still out there. Each one shows a crazy web next to the name of a drug, leaving the viewer to think that it must be a valuable lesson about the effects of drugs. But, Rayor added, "it's not particularly valuable information."

We can't really assume there's much of a connection between what a drug does to the web-building mechanisms deep in a spider's brain, and what they do to our own mammal brains. For instance, naturally occurring amounts of caffeine can kill animals that need a hormone called octopamine—a category that includes spiders, but not humans. That might help explain why caffeine devastates spider web production.

Benzedrine (amphetamine)

"When I'm teaching this," Raynor said, "I'm teaching about Peter Witt's experiments, which are only valuable in the context of their innate web-building behaviors." Although, she hastened to add, "biologists don't like the word 'innate.'"

But in this case, the word seems fitting. The behaviors involved in web-spinning aren't learned. Their mothers are typically dead by the time a spider is born, let alone by the time it starts building webs, meaning every young spider has to just figure it out. The spider doesn't need a Gladwellian 10,000-hour practice program either. "The first couple times, they're kind of not quite as complicated, and not quite perfect, but after the first couple times, they do a really good job," Rayor said.

So it's not so much what effect a bong hit will have on a spider web, but the fact that that bong hit will do just about the same thing to every web that's of interest to entomologists. "That the drugs modify their behavior in such a particular way is really interesting," Rayor explained. "This isn't a learned behavior."

The web of a spider who's been slipped a "Mickey," or more scientifically speaking, a spider that's been given chloral hydrate.

Scientists are only beginning to understand the ways this behavior manifests in webs. Crucially, Rayor said, if there's some kind of alteration to a spider's brain chemistry, it doesn't seem to effect the spider's sense of what a web should look like.

Perhaps in orb weavers, she said, "the third leg is holding onto the spider silk as the spider moves around in very characteristic ways, and the fourth pair of legs is moving in a very characteristic ways, to pull out the silk and lay it down." It's these specific movements that are altered by a change in the spider's brain chemistry.

We can see this in an example that has nothing to do with drugs. Ichneumonoid wasps plant their larvae on the backs of spiders. At first the spider with a wasp larva living on its back acts pretty normal, Rayor said, "but as the parasitoid gets close to pupating to maturity, it somehow causes changes in the spider's brain so that the webs are built in such a way that they become a retreat for the parasitoid." Essentially the "retreat," works as a rain shelter for the wasp, which the wasp can enjoy while it eats the spider who built it.

A wasp-addled orb weaver unwittingly creates a "retreat" for a wasp .Gif via the New York Times

So what horrifying mind control chemical is the wasp injecting into the spider? "I haven't seen any really good analysis," said Rayor. "This is relatively recent, that we're starting to notice this and recognize the amount that the behavior is modified." But as with the drug effects, it's likely just a few small changes in muscle movement that have a drastic change on the spider's web.

Further study into this might go a long way toward cracking one of the biggest spider-related mysteries—the one at the center of the classic children's book Charlotte's Web.

Every time the film adaptation is played on television, Rayor told me, people call entomologists at museums and universities to tell them that a spider in their garage is writing messages to them. After the entomologist has calmed the caller down, he or she explains that they're just witnessing a known spider behavior seen in diurnal orb-weavers called stabilimentum.

A spider sends a message to someone named "MAA." Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Anonymous author

Also known as "web ornamentation," stabilimentum is a spider's use of its thicker silk—the stuff they wrap around their prey—to spruce up its web in a couple spots. It may look like a bunch of capital "As," "Vs," "Ms," and "Ws," but it's not a message from Charlotte that Wilbur wants his MAMA to take him to the VMAs. It's just random zigzags.

But why does a spider put zigzags in its web? There are some ideas out there, like that the more visible stabilimentum—in contrast to the relatively invisible rest of the web—help the spider attract prey, or keep predators away and help humans avoid a nasty mouthful of web.

These are all just guesses, however. Rayor cautioned me from jumping to any conclusions about a grand scheme at work in any aspect of a spider's web. "By messing with their brains, they modify things in a particular way," she said, explaining that you don't even have to get into a spider's brain chemistry to "mess with its brain."

The LSD spider web pictured here is straighter and more intricate than a drug-free web.

Spiders will fix a web's radial lines (the straight ones resembling the spokes on a wheel) if you break them while the web is being built, Rayor told me. But hilariously, if you wait until they've moved on to the more intricate spiral lines, and mess up one of the radial lines, the spider will just make a weird, deformed web, rather than fix the radial lines. "They can't go back. They don't have that kind of flexibility," she said.

So it turns out, giving a spider drugs is just one possible interruption to a process within a brain that is, like all nonhuman brains, alien to us. We can't plausibly look at the handiwork of that arachnid and assume we know anything more about the drug that made it that way. Still, Rayor seemed thrilled to talk about the Witt photos, even though it sounded like she had used them as an example in a thousand lectures.

"It's a really cool example," she said.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

'Untitled' (from the series 'In the Vale of Cashmere'), 2010. All photographs by Thomas Roma.

Despite having had exhibitions at both the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography and being the founding Director of Columbia University's photography program, Thomas Roma has never had a solo exhibition in a gallery in New York. That will change tonight, with the opening of Steven Kasher Gallery's In the Vale of Cashmere, a show of black-and-white pictures taken in an area of Prospect Park called the Vale of Cashmere between 2008 and 2011. The area of the park is secluded, most easily accessible through a hole in a fence, and it's known in Brooklyn as a cruising ground for gay men.

Related: Thomas Roma: 'The Waters of Our Time'

Built as a playground for society children in the late 19th century, the Vale has been neglected, and is overgrown with foliage and the kind of giant, mutant weeds that can only grow from urban soil. Although a group is raising money to renovate the Vale, it has survived much of the constant cycle of renewal in New York unscathed, so much so that wandering into it might give anyone the cinematic feeling of stepping back in time. This naturally anachronistic quality, amplified by black-and-white photography and the dappled light that comes through the leaves just before the sun sets, play into the still, silent gravity of Roma's photographs.

"These pictures are about a sort of transience," Roma told me over hot tea that smelled like smoke at the house where he and his wife Anna raised their son Giancarlo, located in an area of Brooklyn between the park and Greenwood Cemetery. "We know that light. You know that directional light is going to be gone. You know it because you're alive, you've been in the world, not because you're a photographer."

With his family at the table, we talked about the light, we talked about photography, we talked about doing things that you're not good at in order to grow as an artist and as a human being. We talked about dutifully going into the park three to four days a week, making these pictures for over three years, about making yourself vulnerable to other people as an act of love. At one point, he recounted the most beautiful story of photographing a man in the Vale as night began to set in. ("I know a place where there's still a little light," the man told him. "Come with me.")

But we also talked about the highly political nature of the subject matter, and what it means for a seemingly heterosexual, white artist to make this kind of work in 2015. These are mostly the parts of the conversation I have included here, because I don't think anyone will deny that the Vale of Cashmere's portraits are gorgeous and its landscapes lyrical. I do think people might question Thomas Roma's motivations, though, or wonder if he should be the person to take these pictures. The key, in my estimation, is that his subjects look powerful.

He began by telling me about his process.

Thomas Roma: I thought it would take a few months maybe, but it was three and a half years. I maybe only photographed six or seven people in the first couple of months. I was mostly doing landscapes. It never got easier. I was there all the time, I was someone that was seen.

I'm trying to be part of a performance. I'm performing. I'm taking the picture. I'm not the only one in the performance. If there's a building, I most likely didn't build it. I didn't choose the wardrobe for the people in the picture, whether they're walking down the street or in the Vale of Cashmere. I want to be affected by all of it, as a photographer. Not as a citizen or a human being, not as a good person—I want to be a photographer, and I want to make decisions while I'm there as a photographer. The exposures for all the portraits are between one and six seconds in the Vale. It was only the second time I used a tripod in all the years, but I wanted the tripod because it was part of my costume. I wanted to be seen not as someone lurking who could turn quickly and take a picture, but someone who is standing behind a camera. I have a camera in front of me, I'd walk along, fold the legs, put it over my shoulder, walk along, open it up, take another picture of a tree, or a scene. Because mostly what I did was make landscapes. I'm not opposed to taking bad pictures, even if I know ahead of time it will be bad, just to hear the sound of the shutter. 'Cause it's maddening not to take a picture.

It does seem like a place where it would be hard to get people to agree to have their picture taken. It seems like seclusion would be a major reason for going there.
What you're saying is logical, and I'm not sure logic has anything to do with it. Let's put it this way—why are people going there? We could make a list. But let's start with number one on the list: People are going there because they want to meet someone. A boring way of saying it would be, they want to meet someone like-minded. But they're looking for affection, for affirmation. It's about a need in their life. That's the reason they go there. And to the extent that I have anything to do with that in my role as an old white photographer standing there with my camera on a tripod, if someone can see that I'm part of that number-one reason, there might be a possibility where it would make sense. They're not going there to be secluded, you could lock yourself up in a closet and be secluded. You could hide out in a crowd. People are not going there to hide, they're going there to meet. So, would you be surprised to go there and meet me? I'm sure surprise was part of the element. But many of the people that I ended up photographing saw me from far away, looped around, and finally decided it was OK to walk right by me, if I'm taking pictures of a tree or something. And I talk to people.

Why did you start going there with a camera in the first place? It was while your son Giancarlo was at baseball practice?
Well, the long history is, in 1974 I lived in a furnished room on Dean Street in Brooklyn. And the other men in this building that was cooperatively owned, rented out the furnished room to me. And the rest of the men in this building were gay men. And immediately I was immersed in that culture. They were all my friends, but one of them, he's the one who took me to Sicily in the first place, his name is Carl Spinella—Italian-American guy, a bit older—he and I were very very very close. He and I would go to this spot. He didn't have a car, so he would get me to drive him and drop him off near one of the holes in the fence on the Flatbush Avenue extension, and sometimes even pick him up. He would bring guys he met there home. So that's the story how I first knew about it, but from the outside.

And then later, during Giancarlo's practices in the park, this would be 1997–98, I would take walks, and I'd walk through the Vale with a camera on my shoulder, and in some point in the early 2000s I decided I should do something because I kept going back, even without a camera. I kept thinking of Carl, and the Carl in Giancarlo is because of Carl Spinella. The book is dedicated to him. .

A picture of Carl Spinella at the apartment on Dean Street in 1974 from Thomas Roma's book The Waters of Our Time.

Giancarlo, you went along sometimes?
Giancarlo Roma: Yeah, I mean, this was interesting to me. I went three times, and remember each one very vividly.

This is while you were an African-American Studies major at Columbia?
Yeah, and my concentration within the major was black masculinity. The idea of the down-low, male sexuality and representation were very central to all the courses. So it was, you know, very real to not just read about it but see it in action.

Thomas: Look, no one cares about intentions. Intentions are just bullshit. The thing you produce is the measure of what your intentions are, you're supposed to be looking at what you're doing. I want to be responsible. It goes hand in hand that if I want a response from the viewer, I could photograph lamp poles, or... there are things that have absolutely no controversy attached to them.

At this point in time, it would be hard to think of something more potentially controversial than this to make, right? I mean, issues of race, gender, and sexual identity, power dynamics... This is a very charged thing to have made.
I had to give myself permission. I had wanted to be pre-approved to be worthy of being loved. I think people are going there to find love, that's what I think. That's what it's about. I don't think people are pushed to a margin, I don't think this is a last resort, the people that are there. If I was there it's because I wanted to be there. Did everyone want me there? No, of course not. One time a guy yelled at me, Why would I want my picture taken? and blah blah blah. And clearly I'd triggered something. But it was impossible for me to be frightened of him, because I don't believe he wanted to hurt me, I think he just wanted me to move away from him, so I did.

Giancarlo: In my experience, the people who said yes were reacting from the same place, they just had a different reaction. They wanted to bare themselves. And in this place, and again this is my reading of it, they were really self-actualized, and they were a version of themselves that they couldn't be anywhere else or most other places. When they said no it was because they didn't want to share that with a person, and when they said yes they were so grateful that someone had maybe picked up about that fact about them and they got to bare it in their body language or something. But whatever their reaction was it came from the same place.

Thomas: I don't see the point to dwell on the obvious. No means no. But what you could dwell on is what we have in front of is, which is the yes. Because if no means no, yes means yes! And if you look at these pictures, you don't have to be a photographer to know that these people are aware they're being photographed. There's no flash, what you see pretty much translates into the collaboration that existed. So it's only charged externally to my effort. I don't feel I was doing anything controversial, because I was out and exposed, stating honestly to whoever would listen what I wanted. You should understand, as a photographer, some of the photographs are the result of talking for 45 minutes about Brooklyn, or family, jobs, everything else. At no point does anyone think I'm there for one day and not coming back. I told everyone I'd be there in the paths, if anyone ever had second thoughts, I'm there.

Did anyone ever come back and regret having posed for a portrait?
No no no.

How any pictures are in the book?
Anna knows this.

Anna Roma: Seventy-five portraits, 78 landscapes.

What was your experience going along to photograph, Anna?
I didn't go along. I realized that it didn't make sense for me to come.

Giancarlo: There's no women!

Anna: it was just the wrong energy. At this point in our relationship and our marriage, I had started to take it for granted that I was with him when he was photographing. So I kinda felt a little resentful at first, because he was there and I didn't get to see. When he'd come home I'd ask him for the full report. What did this guy look like, what was he wearing? Did it look like I was picturing it?

Giancarlo: Because even going is cinematic. That's why I remember it so vividly—each time going is like a story.

Thomas Roma: Sicily, 1986, from Sicilian Passage

Anna: You know what though? I just made a connection. A big part of our courtship was in Sicily, because he was still photographing in Sicily at that time. I remember you used to make me stay in the car when you were photographing the shepherds. You remember that? They were like these beautiful young men out in the landscape.

Thomas: Well that was for a different reason—those guys were paying way too much attention to you.

Anna: Yeah, but it was a similar kind of reason.

Giancarlo: It changes the energy, I can understand that.

Thomas: You get to be alone in nature with a man, talk talk talk. You don't see the talking in the pictures, but you see the effect of the talking. When people are talking about their lives, their body language changes. Photography, I aways say, the great medium of body language.

Look, you know, none of the reasons for anything we do, any piece of writing or any photo book, makes it better. The hope is it succeeds or fails to find an audience, based on what's in the book. I don't read a book constantly thinking about the author. Books I love I constantly relate to on my own. I think of myself, they're part of my life. Same thing when you look at a film—it becomes part of your cultural, psychological, political experience. You go out in the world after seeing a certain film, you see the world a little differently. Art is supposed to raise your consciousness, if only temporarily.

I'm trying to be invisible. You look at a photograph, you read a novel, you think about the author, until the author gives you permission to forget about them because they've written so well that the novelist disappears. I only want to disappear in those terms.

In the Vale of Cashmere will be on view at Steven Kasher Gallery in NYC through December 19. A book of the work is available for preorder from powerHouse Books.

Ron Mann. Photo via Flickr user Charlie Llewellin

Nobody sleeps well at film festivals. Some people don't sleep at all. The evening before this year's Toronto International Film Festival kicked off, Mike Boyuk, the Head of Distribution for Films We Like, lay awake for hours waiting for a file to upload. Hanging in the balance: the first TIFF press screening of a new film by a major Asian filmmaker. "I was on the bed with my phone beside me clicking on the refresh button all night," he says. "I made sure that I could hear the ding every time I got an email, but it was mostly just spam. It kept dinging."

The consequences of a film not being ready to screen for reviewers at TIFF are dire, especially for a distributor like Films We Like, which specializes in what might affectionately be called critic-bait. Between the likes of Apichatpong Weerasathul's cryptic and beautiful Cemetery of Splendor, Jia Zhangke's majestic Mountains May Depart, and Athina Rachel Tsangari's wryly funny Chevalier, the Films We Like slate is a veritable auteur smorgasbord. This year, the company's logo was on on nine titles, a huge amount for a company with less than a half-dozen employees operating out of a single-floor space on Mercer Street, a parking lot's width parallel to the Lightbox.

The Films We Like office is strewn with paraphernalia describing a decade spent distributing movies at the eccentric end of the spectrum: none of the posters or press books are emblazoned with what you'd call household names. Having made many visits there over the years, I can say that its employees have always ably and cheerfully shouldered the load that comes with operating near the low end of an economically stratified field. They are a dauntless group, and given the craziness of releasing films theatrically in 2015 AD—aka Year Zero VOD—they'd have to be. But that doesn't mean that they aren't tired. When I meet with co-founder Ron Mann, he also tells me that he hasn't been sleeping much, either—he looks a little more rumpled than usual, eyes weary underneath his bushy white hair. "I was up reading reviews from Venice and Telluride," he says. "I want to see what people are saying."

The films that Ron Mann buys tend to get good reviews. If they get bad ones, they're in big trouble. Long before he decided to start Films We Like, Mann was (and remains) a director of eclectic documentaries—most famously Comic-Book Confidential and Grass. Like his fellow Toronto New Wavers Atom Egoyan, Bruce McDonald, and Patricia Rozema, Mann's reputation in the early days was dependent on reviewers giving his work a thumbs up. This is still the case now that he's become a distributor. Without big stars or big budgets, the films that Mann acquires have to appeal to a more rarefied sensibility.

Case in point: this Friday, Films We Like will release Daniel Barber's The Keeping Room (starring Brit Marling) and Laurie Anderson's new documentary Heart of a Dog, the latter of which got raves at TIFF and the New York Film Festival. It's an intimate and impressionistic work centering on the director's late rat terrier Lolabelle, which is very interesting to those familiar with Anderson's career as a multimedia artist and probably a hard sell to anybody else. It's one thing for a filmmaker to preach to the converted, but a distributor's job is to get as many bystanders as possible into the tent—and to pay for the privilege of being there.

Mann has always been a resourceful showman. As a high school student in Toronto in the 1970s, he used to show 16 mm prints of big-ticket films like The Graduate and The French Connection in campus auditoriums or even his own basement, and he wasn't above squeezing his customers. "During the climax, we would turn off the lights and stop the projector and pass a hat around," he recalls. "We'd say that we needed a little more money to actually keep screening the movie."

By the beginning of the 1980s, Mann started making movies of his own, documenting Toronto's counterculture in the free-jazz film Imagine the Sound (1981) and an experimental dramatic feature, Listen to the City (1984), about a man who wakes up from a coma to discover an oddly haunted metropolis. Mann's desire to make movies featuring cultural marginalia—from Beat poets to indie bands—crested with Comic-Book Confidential (1988), a landmark survey of the medium featuring high-profile interviews (Frank Miller, Stan Lee) and a zippy visual style.

A box-office success, Comic-Book Confidential established Mann's as Canada's hippest documentary director—and there haven't been any heavyweight contenders for that title ever since. It also may have helped motivated him to eventually seek out and support films with a similarly maverick sensibility—and which needed the help. He co-founded Films We Like in 2003 with music promoter Gary Topp because the activist documentary The Weather Underground hadn't been picked up by any Canadian distributor.

"It made $17,000 in its first weekend," says Mann. "I thought it was just a one-off. After that, somebody brought me a movie called Rivers and Tides, which has done well in the US but had nobody representing it here. They said, 'We hear you're a distributor now.'"

Perceiving a niche between the Canadian distribution arms of American studios and the few other home-grown companies to gain any traction, Mann and Topp set about compiling a catalogue that reflected their idiosyncratic mandate. Poring over the list of films a decade later, it reflects either rigorously cinephilic taste or outright whimsy. Not to mention self-promotion: Films We Like has been putting out Mann's own movies for years, including his recent Altman (2014). "I got into this," he says, "because I really wanted to know where my royalties were going."

Mann says that the business has changed considerably since 2003, and that for all his purist fervor about watching movies in theatres, reality is moving in a different direction. "The audience for independent film is really specialized," he says. You can spend a lot of money promoting a film but in the end it's just a billboard for VOD. And DVD doesn't exist anymore. That's been a massive difference." At times, the best a company like Films We Like can do is roll with punches, but they've had moments of innovation as well; Mann's 2009 fungophile doc Know Your Mushrooms—featuring an appropriately psychedelic soundtrack by the Flaming Lips—had interesting post-theatrical packaging. "We were the first ever release on a USB," says Mann. "Selling 500 hand-made packages versus 2000 DVDs, we made just as much money—and we sold out."

Sometimes, instead of having to think up bright ideas, Films We Like hits paydirt. It was the Canadian distributor for Ida, an austere, black-and-white Polish drama that went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film. Other, bigger North American distributors salivate over the prospect of pushing Oscar contenders, and yet somehow Ida was available by the time Films We Like came calling after its Cannes premiere. How did a boutique company snap up one of the most popular foreign language releases of the last few years? "I have no idea," says Mann, who was also savvy enough to pick up the Palme D'or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), which became a word-of-mouth hit because of—not in spite of—its ecstatic strangeness.

The ragtag aspect of Films We Like is good branding: scrappy underdogs are always endearing. But it's also not solely a pose—it's a philosophy. Whether or not it's sustainable over the long haul is another case, although so far the evidence for the defense is more compelling. For his part, Mann has no illusions about his company's place in the overall pecking order, and for now (and probably for the foreseeable future) he isn't about to try to change it. "We can't compete with [the bigger distributors," he says. "To use a gambling analogy, we play at the $5 table. Mongrel is at the $50 table, and eOne is at the $100 table."

It's a gamble for any player to put their money where their mouth is, even—and sometimes especially—if they're playing for small stakes. It's a risk that Films We Like will continue to run. "I like being at the five-dollar table," says Mann. "It's my comfort zone."

Follow Adam Nayman on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Governor Tom Wolf

On Wednesday afternoon, Governor Tom Wolf announced that Pennsylvania is making naloxone, the drug that can reverse a heroin overdose, available to everyone in the state.

"We're here because we realize Pennsylvania has a problem, we have an epidemic here the likes of which we have not seen before," Wolf said before Physician General Dr. Rachel Levine signed a standing order, essentially a state-wide prescription. "Your next-door neighbors, people you know, members of your family, of all of our families— effect a lot of Pennsylvanians."

The move is interesting not only for its sweeping nature, but because the harm-reduction measure did not immediately trigger a deafening chorus of rage about coddling drug addicts. (In contrast, the needle exchange programs of the 1990s were roundly denounced by law-and-order types for allegedly fostering drug addiction.) That lack of opposition may indicate that heroin and other opiates are no longer seen as the purview of marginalized people of color in segregated neighborhoods.

The number of prescriptions to opioid painkillers began to spike in the late 1990s, and as of 2010, Americans consumed 99 percent of the hydrocodone on the planet. There was a quadrupling of overdose deaths from prescription painkillers between 1999 and 2013, and heroin overdose deaths in particular also nearly quadrupled between 2002 and 2013.

In other words, officials seem to be responding in part to the fact that too many white kids in suburbia are falling prey to these drugs.

"Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no drug warriors at a kid's funeral," says Keith Humphreys, section director for Mental Health Policy at Stanford University. "States that have been getting hit really hard are . And everyone is getting hit really hard. All legislators are hearing about it from families, whether Democrats or Republicans. Nobody wants to hear, 'We're not going to make it easier to save your kid because we need to send a tough message.'"

This standing order isn't the first action Pennsylvania has taken on naloxone, which is also known by its brand name Narcan. The previous governor, Republican Tom Corbett, signed a piece of legislation known as David's Law equipping first responders with the drug and granting immunity to prosecution to those who call in overdoses. The legislation was named after the deceased nephew of longtime Republican activist Lynne Massi. The ease with which she won attention and action to her cause speaks directly to the changing demographics of opioid use: Massi lives in wealthy Chester County, her husband is a police captain, and she had worked on the campaigns of State Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi.

Many of the state's top law enforcement officials have embraced the drug, in stark contrast to the hard line that their counterparts took in previous decades to most harm-reduction policies.

"I grew up in the 1970s, when it was a whole different type of image associated with heroin users," says Jack Whelan, the hard-charging Republican district attorney of Delaware County and a leading proponent of Narcan in the state. "A lot of good kids with strong family background and values are getting severely addicted and dying all of a sudden. Children of attorneys and doctors and senators—these are not the kids you see in the inner city. Now it's getting a lot of attention that it never did before."

Whelan and his predecessors have wholeheartedly embraced zero-tolerance drug war tactics like mandatory minimums and are known for a much tougher attitude towards plea-bargaining than their urban counterparts. But the prosecutor has taken full advantage of David's Law, and Delaware County has provided 42 of its police departments with the drug.

That's not to say there isn't still some lingering opposition to this new approach to heroin use. Whelan admits that it wasn't always easy to get his colleagues in law enforcement to embrace naloxone. "Some of the skepticism is, 'Well, they are addicts who have done this to themselves and some of them are criminals,'" he tells VICE. "When has that ever been a bar for us in law enforcement to try and save somebody?"

In Pennsylvania, Upper Darby Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood reports hearing similar attitudes from colleagues in the interior of the state. A former Philadelphia police officer, Chitwood is not necessarily the guy you would expect to be a big supporter of Narcan. (His biography, Tough Cop: Mike Chitwood Versus the 'ScumBags', sports an image of him holding an AK-47.) But he champions the drug and talks up its virtues to skeptical colleagues.

"To be quite frank, the officers think they are drug addicts and so what if they get sick or get hospitalized," Chitwood recalls a district attorney from a rural county telling him. "That's a 60s or 70s mentality. But suppose it's their child or their brother's child? It's a different world of addict today."

And prosecutors around America are charging heroin dealers with murder when their clients overdose, suggesting the war on drugs is not exactly in the rearview.

During Wednesday's press conference, the Wolf administration expressed hope that law enforcement officials and officers across the state were coming around. That may be, but the numbers aren't showing it yet. According to the governor's office, 322 lives have been saved with naoxone in Pennsylvania so far, but 135 of them have been under Whelan's zealous watch in Delaware County, which is home to only 5 percent of the state's population. Over a fourth of those (38) were performed by Chitwood's Upper Darby police force. An August survey of police departments by the Center for Rural Pennsylvania found that 82 percent of respondents had not yet decided to equip their officers with the drug. They cited costs and the idea that police aren't meant to provide emergency medical treatment—even though they are first on the scene 70 percent of the time for overdoses.

Now residents across the state should now be able to get it on their own. And in a state with 2,400 drug overdose deaths in 2013, more law enforcement agencies are likely to come around soon.

"Some people argued needle exchanges facilitated the use of opioids," James B. Martin, Republican district attorney for Lehigh County, says of the 1990s. "We've had an epidemic of overdose deaths attributed to opioids and I think that's probably accounted for why there is the buy-in to naloxone.

"Perhaps you wouldn't have expected that 20 years ago," the prosecutor said. "Now we are in the process of providing it to all the police departments in the county."

Follow Jake Blumgart on Twitter.

Shawn Gill, right, obstructs a cameraman's view of two young men being carded along with Brian Smith, left.

A Toronto busker says the same police officer who was seen on video earlier this week harassing a bystander "threatened and intimidated" him without cause last year.

Sebastian Brown, 23, contacted VICE after reading a story about two Toronto cops who tried to intimidate a man who was filming an arrest in a parking lot near Jane Street and Lawrence Avenue.

Soon after Brown started playing the video, he recognized one of the officers—Constable Shawn Gill.

"I was just shocked," he said of the video. "This is somebody who shouldn't be policing."

Brown said he was riding his bike in the east end of the city last year alongside a police cruiser; while he was crossing an intersection he said one of the officers in the car ordered him to pull over. He agreed, but said he continued crossing the intersection before stopping. The two cops then approached him.

Sebastian Brown. Photo courtesy Sebastian Brown

" stood right in front of me, he couldn't have been closer," said Brown, noting that Gill then accused him of trying to flee the scene, "which is absolutely not the case."

Brown, who told VICE he doesn't drink alcohol, said Gill then suggested he seemed intoxicated. After asking if he had any drugs or weapons on him—Brown said he didn't—the officers said they couldn't believe him without searching his backpack. They also patted him down.

"I didn't want him to search the bag and that irritated , so then he said 'we could do this the easy way or the hard way.'"

At the time, Brown said he felt "terrified."

"I thought he was threatening violence against me." So he agreed to let the cops look through his stuff. They found $600, for which he produced a bank receipt, and nothing else of consequence, according to Brown.

Meantime, he said, three additional cop cars rolled up to the scene. In total, eight officers were present.

"I'm one kid on my bike and eight police officers—it's just so excessive," he said. "It would be one thing if I had some huge car and they needed eight officers to take me down."

The exchange ended with Gill issuing Brown a warning for "fail to stop." VICE has viewed the incident report, which includes Gill's name and badge number.

" said 'You were this close to having something a lot worse happen to you'," Brown alleges.

Ultimately he decided against filing a complaint at the time because he wasn't fined or charged with anything. But after seeing Gill's behaviour in the video, he's having second thoughts about that decision. He said he hopes the fallout from the video will force Gill to re-evaluate his tactics.

"You're working in a community, you're supposed to on the people's side and you're pitting yourself against them. It damages public confidence and it damages people's trust."

Toronto police spokeswoman Meaghan Gray could not confirm the allegations.

She said Gill's superior is aware of the video incident but that any disciplinary action taken would remain a private personnel matter.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Giuan Bolisay

Twitter now has its very own Citizen Kane.

A woman identifying herself as Aziah "Zola" King posted a 148-tweet epic Tuesday night about a trip to Florida and the incredible chaos that ensued. If true, it's a detailed first-person account of crossing paths with a sex trafficker and murderer. If false, it punches most screenplay treatments in the teeth anyway.

Real or not, A Wild Weekend in Florida constitutes a leveling-up of social media's possibilities. Zola's story braided with a hungry news cycle and a horde of social media users eager to share their opinions: racist, doubtful, horrified, and gleeful. From a yarn of dubious veracity came something bigger, something indisputably real: This is how we feel about sex and race and money right now.

If you haven't already seen the story that set things off, here's the link—I recommend reading from start to finish, even though it takes a minute and your milage with emojis may vary. When paraphrased, it loses the language, the character development, and above all the pacing—which accelerates from a chance meeting at a Hooter's to a series of intense third-act scenes in motel rooms and condos around Tampa. We follow our narrator down a rabbit hole of id, archetypes, and violence. She wants to go to Florida, strip and make some cash, but soon is helping to pimp out a woman she scarcely knows and running for her life. There's a shooting, an abduction, and an unforgettable blowjob. There is graphic prostitution, which turns out to have been coercive, "hulking" black men who prey on white women and get their comeuppance, and a cuckolded white boyfriend whose attempted suicide is greeted with laughter.

If I didn't mention it, trigger warning from start to finish.

The story went viral almost immediately. Imaginary castings for the adapted movie became a meme. Authenticity was debated, crime reports from Florida and Las Vegas were produced as corroboration and then discounted. The woman central to the action was searched for, and possibly outed.

I am unqualified to comment in depth on intersectionality, but it is impossible to ignore it the coverage of this story. Race is central here and seen through a variety of idiomatic guises, most of them amused. Complex called the story "Wednesday ratchet entertainment" that would fill in for the lack of a new episode of Empire. Vulture inserted pop culture .GIFs and movie stills aplenty. Fader, VH1 and Buzzfeed kept it clean, sticking to praising the story and forming listicles out of response tweets.

Praising an ostensibly funny story about the ways the lives of marginalized women are marked by violence is a tricky line to walk. At Vulture, Ira Madison III published photos of Zola's "friend" Jess. Jezebel's Jia Tolentino posted the same photos and jokingly compared the story to the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God. "That part ... where Tea Cake gets rabies?... instead of a rabid dog it's a white girl named Jess who tricks for $100... and instead of Tea Cake it's a guy named Z." After being criticized for her flippant tone, Tolentino apologized for including Jess's Instagram handle and face in the post, but defended her language. (Whatever the writer's intent, comparing a woman who is coerced into prostituting herself to a dog is a hard simile to get behind.)

The laughing and meme-ifying response was galling, but it also indicates one of the reasons the story is so compelling: It's told from Zola's viewpoint, and she doesn't package herself as a victim we're used to. For most of the story, Jess doesn't either. This is not a Lifetime movie, or at least not one I've seen. The emotional responses in most depictions of Women in Sexual Peril range from plucky to destroyed. What fictional WSP says things like, "'he's not gna force you to trap' i said 'OH BITCH I KNOW HE NOT I KILL DEAD ASS KILL YALL' verbatim"?

The way Jess and Zola respond to their situation is complex, assertive, and doesn't fit into the innocence lost narrative of the trafficking specter. Two sugar daddies, a boyfriend, 20 dudes in a night, and enthusiasm for an upcoming trip to Florida—Jess isn't a traditional sponge for internet sympathy. Zola refuses to prostitute herself, but can't stand to see Jess work for less than fair market value, and profits off her. This falls more in line with my experience of what it's like in the sex work margins. Exploitation sucks, but it doesn't necessarily lead to empathy with other coerced women, it doesn't create financial indifference, and it doesn't mean you don't choose to have sex for money. There is frequently some agency—just not enough. Even being abducted and beaten doesn't turn Jess into the kind of woman who can expect our outrage; it turns her into a dog.

Another way to describe intersectionality is convenient partial blindness. Not understanding that privacy violations are a problem because you're engaged in praising a narrative with street cred is a partial blindness. If someone tells a joke about their rape, that doesn't make it OK for me to yuck it up about the event. It would be even more fucked if I read a primary source's dark humor about a violation and then wrote up Their Hilarious Rape Story.

What will be the repercussions for Zola? The story contains within it confessions of pandering—or facilitating prostitution—and being an accessory to a shooting, and those are just the crimes I'm knowledgeable enough to name. Will the story be used against Backpage.com as evidence against it? It's impossible to say.

The repercussions for Jess are a little easier to gauge: The story trended on Twitter and her Instagram photos of her kids turned into fair game. As a woman named Nichole tweeted, "i feel bad for Jess (of Zola, Jess, Z, and Jarrett fame) bc she's clearly tried to move on and now people are blowing her spot AGAIN."

Will Zola sell the screenplay, buddy up to Shonda Rhimes, and take over the world? We'll have to wait and see. One thing I do know: Easy reading is damned hard writing. If King writes something else, I will be swiping through it as fast as I can.

Follow April Adams on Twitter.

Last month I found myself sputtering around in the Utah desert, on my way to a place called Zaqistan. After countless hours of driving down a series of disintegrating roads, my friend Scott and I finally hiked two miles through tumbleweeds to make our way to a gate in front of a lonely immigration booth. We took a moment to let it all set in. Inside the booth was Zaq Landsberg, a Brooklyn artist and the 29-year-old founder of the Republic of Zaqistan. He didn't strike us as overly friendly, but that was less surprising than the fact that he was there at all, hours away from running water. He took our passports, scrutinized them, and stared at us suspiciously. After a moment of awkward silence, he apparently was satisfied with the authenticity of our documents, and with a thud, stamped our passports and opened the gate.

"Welcome to Zaqistan," he said approvingly, and lowered the gate behind us. Little did we know that, weeks later, the story of the New Yorker's self-declared sovereign nation inside of Utah would blow up, with stories in the New York Daily News, New York Times, People magazine, and a nod on Conan, along with international coverage in Turkey, Pakistan, China, Taiwan, Romania, Iran, Korea, and the United Arab Emirates.

I first met Zaq in 2013, when he and Clark Allen, my old roommate from New Orleans, crashed at my Salt Lake City apartment on a road trip. By many accounts, Zaq is a quiet, somewhat inscrutable person. As the founder of the Republic of Zaqistan, his muted demeanor seems at odds with the aesthetics of his country. The place looks and feels as if it had been created by a modern-day Don Quixote, but in reality it is the product of someone who would have made an adept administrator if he hadn't also been a talented artist. His previous work has consisted of all sorts of large political pieces, from plays on the NYPD's SkyWatch towers to an enormous cowering piñata, and the incredible precision he puts into his sculptures are indicative of the subversive yet playful way his mind works.

"Would you like to take a tour?" Zaq asked, leading us to a small bunker made out of sandbags. He pointed out a small tent city that had sprung up amongst the remains of a decrepit arch monument, explaining as we walked that the desert isn't kind to pretty much anything.

In the distance, the wooden bones of robots he'd constructed on previous expeditions rotted in the sun, and the Zaqistani flag waved in the breeze, a bright red banner emblazoned with a golden squid, symbolizing "the mystery and might" of the small country. We appreciated the slight bump, maybe five feet tall, that he called "Mount Insurmountable," but most of our attention was drawn towards the imposing, robot-adorned metalwork under construction in the middle of what he described as the city center, an area that consisted of sculpture and little else.

"This new piece is a play on a Soviet space monument," Zaq told us. "I'm trying to convey Zaqistan hurtling into the future, like the sun sets in the United States and rises in Zaqistan."

When Zaq originally won his two-acre Utah plot off eBay in 2005, he did so with the minimum bid of $610 dollars. Images of the property came with a bright red disclaimer that read, "This might not actually be your land."

'The Decennial Monument' in Zaqistan, erected in September 2015

When Zaq originally won his two-acre Utah plot off eBay in July 2005, he did so with the minimum bid of $610 dollars. Images of the property came with a bright red disclaimer that read, "This might not actually be your land," but the lack of any tangible differences from one parcel to the next made it purely incidental. The boundaries from one acre to the next were purely subjective, something that could be written on a map, but had no bearing in the real world.

"I wanted a piece of the American West before it's gone," Zaq related. But, upon his first trip to the property one month later, his goals became increasingly political.

"It was a dark time politically and for America," Zaq said. "Iraq was a mess; New Orleans was underwater. The government was not doing anything. Being the brash 20 year-old that I was, I figured I could run a country better than these clowns. Not only that I could, but that I should also do it. The kernel for Zaqistan was there in the Newspeak and doublespeak in the Bush administration. That whole 'enhanced interrogation' instead of torture, Bush saying Rumsfeld was the best defense secretary we've ever had... The administration deliberately manipulated the English language, and a lot of it went unquestioned. A lot of where Zaqistan started, and even today, the reality was obvious to everybody that it just wasn't true."

Landsberg atop the 'Victory Arch,' which is "a monument to an unspecified victory"

But Zaqistan isn't only a conceptual project—it's a physical place, and a forbidding one at that. As we made our way around the plot, Zaq explained that the majority of the surrounding ground is made up of cryptobiotic soil, a living crust that takes upwards of ten thousand years to develop but is capable of being completely destroyed by a single misplaced footstep. He advised us to try to stick to the beaten path, but in case we ventured off (there are no bathrooms in Zaqistan), to shuffle our feet wherever we walk. "Rattlesnakes," he explained.

When things go bad in Zaqistan, they have the potential to get worse in a hurry. The fact that the only things that can live there are soil and things that can kill you is nature's joke. Zaqistan is a remarkably remote location in an unforgiving environment, where survival depends upon a mix of luck, planning, and improvisation.

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Everything is amplified in this stretch of the desert. Jackson Chapman, a Salt Lake City resident and recent Zaqistani tourist, had told me before the trip, "Sometimes your ears can ring from the sound of nothing."

A place like Zaqistan could not exist without a healthy dose of insanity. Not only has Zaq dumped thousands of dollars into the whole thing—he estimates costs of five grand for this year's trip and monument, and somewhere between $15,000–20,000 in expenses for the ten years of Zaqistan's existence. But he's somehow managed to convince a handful of others, like me and Scott, to volunteer their labor. In fact, he considers their slightly psychotic mentalities to be the defining characteristic of Zaqistani citizens to begin with. "There definitely is a certain Zaqistani mindset," he solemnly remarked, "in the same sense that there is a Raider Nation."

Perhaps that's why Scott and I had started working on the project without Zaq ever asking. Ever since I first heard about Zaqistan, in 2013, I have identified with it. It's closer to my ideals than the United States is, and a look at my medical bills will confirm that. Zaqistan doesn't have a hospital, but if we did, it would be free. Education would be free, and refugees would be welcome. I'm Zaqistani—Zaqistan is the home I have always wanted, even though I had not been able to go there until now.

And so, despite having had orthopedic surgery less than two weeks before, there I was, slamming screws into steel with a low-powered drill, attaching panels to a metallic skeleton of what would be Zaqistan's newest monument, the Decennial Monument, which was being erected to mark ten years of independence. In addition to the drilling, we gathered rocks for a DIY recipe of what we supposed would create concrete. A local news crew from Salt Lake City was scheduled to check up on the monument's progress by morning—they'd been vaguely curious about Zaqistan after learning about its existence two years before—and we had no intention of giving them the wrong impression.

Zaqistan works best as a probing of what is real. I mean, is Iraq a real country? It is from maps and borders or whatever, but effectively it's way more complicated than that. What about Kurdistan? Is IS a real nation? If not, why not? –Zaq Landsberg

'Mount Insurmountable,' at roughly five feet tall, is the highest natural point in Zaqistan

Then again, what impression were we trying to make in the first place? What exactly was the point? Perhaps our capricious dedication summed it up—to us, Zaqistan was not a joke. Or rather, it was one highly serious joke, a place whose existence brought up a slew of line-blurring logical inconsistencies worth taking into consideration.

"Zaqistan works best as a probing of what is real," Zaq explained as he handed me another battery pack for the drill. "I mean, is Iraq a real country? It is from maps and borders or whatever, but effectively it's way more complicated than that. What about Kurdistan? Is IS a real nation? If not, why not?"

Like all conceptual notions, nation states exist as figments of our collective imagination. They are philosophical constructs with real-world implications—imaginary entities that are totally real in their ability to seriously impact your life.

Our discussion bounced between a variety of boundary-related topics, from Kashmir and the Falkland Islands to Juarez. Syrians were piling up on the borders of Europe, willing to risk death in order to find a better life, but a fictional line stood in their way. Greece was apparently owned by German banks, and you couldn't buy a bottle of wine in Utah on a Sunday. The BBC wanted to know who owns outer space.

"Shit's all fucked up and crazy," Scott yelled from the other side of the robot. "If it's all arbitrary in the first place, who's to say that this is any less real than anywhere else?"

"But that's the point!" Zaq said, driving the point home. "Zaqistan is real. These are real monuments, even if they're completely ridiculous. Zaqistani passports are real. They're not fake or counterfeit. They exist. They're simply not-quite-legitimate things existing in a legitimate space."

The passports I could vouch for. I'd had a Zaqistani passport since 2013, which Zaq given me for my enthusiasm in the project. Since then, no matter how many times I'd used the passport, to my surprise, not a single person had ever questioned its validity. The bodega, the bar, the airport—not once had anyone stopped me. If they had, it wouldn't matter, as it had all my legitimate information on it and wasn't fake, just like a student ID. I had my "real" ID on me in case it was needed, but what was real seemed to be based mostly on what people considered legitimate.

"Passports, merchandise, our Argentinian consulate—those are the currency of legitimacy," Zaq explained. "It's the perception of legitimacy that makes them legitimate, not the other way around."

It was around that point that Scott declared himself legitimately tired. Zaq agreed that the final touches could wait until morning, so we took a few minutes firing a flare gun at the moon before unrolling our sleeping bags next to the monolith we'd created and watched the flames from the fire reflect across the desert. Above us rose the blood moon, a lunar eclipse that once was thought to have divine meaning. "Welcome to Zaqistan," a sign read in the dark.

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The next morning, the local newscaster from Salt Lake arrived, genuinely thrilled to be there. He told us the report would be up sometime in the next few weeks. On the day the brief report went up, I held a screening at a local SLC bar. Everybody there laughed at how silly the whole thing seemed, but I was proud that we'd brought a little attention to our little nation in the desert.

One week later, Zaqistan went viral.

Articles from all over the world began to flood my Facebook page. Zaq was getting asked to do an interview with WGN, and I was apparently a star in Korea. The Zaqistani email account blew up with messages from people of all kinds, from passport applications (suggested donation $40) to inquiries about if he had jobs for them. Syrian refugees were asking for help. Conan O'Brien was joking about Zaqistan, and some of my mom's friends wanted to know if they could visit the place.

Many reporters who talked to Zaq were surprised to find out that he lived in Brooklyn, not in Zaqistan. Information about the country started to change as the story went further, with photos that weren't even of Zaqistan included in articles.

Before this, the only blip of media coverage since Zaqistan's inception had been for a three-week-long "embassy," in 2012, housed at a contemporary art museum in Buenos Aires. It was clear the local news spot had helped, but what explained the virality that happened next? Was there something larger about nations and their porous, shifting borders that made this a story people suddenly wanted to hear?

The official flag of Zaqistan. The squid represents "the mystery and the might of Zaqistan"

"If anyone asks me about it, I can explain it all," Zaq said. "Nobody is fooled when we talk about it. But when I'm not there, the facade has no explanation, and people start to believe the wildest shit. Many people get excited about Zaqistan and project their thoughts onto it. It exists as this hope space."

"I think this has only proved my point—as a society, we don't look at things too closely," Zaq said. "They misspelled it, used photographs from other places. How could they do that when they were just copy-and-pasting from an AP article? What they're doing is buttressing the facade and there's nothing I can do to explain the backend. The fact that people aren't questioning it kind of scares me even more."

Ana Fisyak, Zaq's girlfriend, who had visited Zaqistan from New York in mid-September, agreed with that sentiment. "People don't seem to be looking further than the veneer. They're not researching what the whole thing is really about, and they might not understand that there are thoughtful elements to it."

Still, we'd achieved part of what we set out to do, which was to turn Zaqistan into an actual place. By talking about Zaqistan, the internet legitimized it. And even if few seemed to understand what the hell was going on, our republic had achieved a form of international validation.

I asked Zaq what we should do next. "I guess we continue pursing international recognition, build up more infrastructure, and see if we can get funding," he said. "We'll probably need to put up a souvenir shop."

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Have you ever been playing a shooter and found yourself wondering, "Why can't I just shoot through the wall at my targets, seeing as wall is not stronger than bullet?" Well, you've been able to do that in some games for ages, but I'm going to ignore that in order to say: now you can. Step forward, Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Siege. (No, there's no colon.)

Siege is a Tom Clancy-prefixed multiplayer-only tactical team-based shooter coming in December, and I've now had a whole day with it, playing what I think are all the modes the game has to offer. And I think it has the potential to be great, so long as you're playing with like-minded folks and not imbeciles who go at the game like it's part of the Call of Duty series, hammer and tongs and bravado and bullets, without engaging their brains.

And unlike Call of Duty, there's no traditional single-player mode here. There's some training to go through, and you can take on Terrorist Hunt solo (more on that in a sec), but Siege hasn't been made to play on your lonesome. So get some friends involved if you do want to do it properly.

The main attraction here is joining a team of up to five players and either tackling a couple of dozen computer-controlled terrorists or up to five human-controlled opponents. A simple setup, sure, so let's get more complex.

First, you have to choose your mission Operator from a selection of around 20 (the final number's still up in the air, though a bunch of them are listed here), and each has a different ability that can be used to your advantage. For example, one character can kit the rest of the team out in extra armour, while another is able to use their drone (which everyone has for reconnaissance) to stun enemies. Simple.

Then you move in, either attacking or defending as the case may be, tasked with eliminating all the baddies, rescuing a hostage, disarming a bomb or the opposite of all those things if you're on the other side. Still pretty simple.

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Where things get really interesting is Siege's destruction mechanics. They actively change the way you play, at least after you're up to speed on the fact walls and doors and stuff can be utterly obliterated. Less simple.

See, normally, in other shooters, you're forced to approach a situation according to how a map is laid out. As such, a defending team would be able to survey the limited areas of engagement, create a bottleneck and shoot the shit out of you when you walked around the corner.

Instead, Siege lets you make your own door by blowing up a wall, or a floor, or a ceiling. Or maybe you've sent in your drone and have seen where the enemy is camped out, so you decide instead to just shoot them through the wall. Maybe you're defending and are worried about these tactics being used against you. In that case, create a broader line of sight for yourself and your team by tactically smashing holes in things.

It seems like so little, but it opens things up so well, once you're past the initial "who the fuck shot me how the fuck could they see me?" thing that everyone playing the game at the preview event went through.

The Terrorist Hunt part of Siege is more focused on co-operative than competitive play. While I believe you can play against other people (it may have been in the modes I mentioned above), what I experienced was focused on pulling together and operating as a team, five players versus a shitload of computer-controlled baddies.

This puts a different spin on things, as you can always game the AI. So the challenge is more about working well together and as a well-oiled machine than it is outwitting your opponent. The computer does set traps and is vulnerable to the gadgets you use, but they're never going to be as cunning as Real People. As such, Terrorist Hunt felt like a step down in quality: fun, but not a reason alone to buy Siege.

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This is still a first-person shooter, so there remain elements that will annoy those who avoid online games of the genre—camping, bunny hopping, ludicrously skilled bastards who make things the opposite of the fun you're supposed to be having. But generally speaking, Rainbow Six Siege feels to me like an interesting addition to the pantheon of multiplayer shooters, with enough originality to stand out from what can sometimes feel like a wholly homogeneous crowd.

It's not the super-tactical SWAT 4, nor is it the multiplayer legend that is Counter-Strike, but so long as everything achieves a level of balance that makes it, basically, "not a piece of shit," Rainbow Six Siege will be well placed to carve itself a niche in the online gaming world. I wasn't too fussed about the game until I played it, to be honest. But now, having felt it in the flesh, I'm actively looking forward to it.

Rainbow Six Siege is released on December 1st for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC. More information at the game's official website.

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Not only has the Greek economic crisis made life much more difficult in Greece, but it's also made dealing with the death of a loved one nearly impossible, causing an entirely separate burden from dealing with the initial loss.

With a limited amount of space in traditional burial grounds, an aversion to cremation due to the region's dominant Christian Orthodox faith, not to mention the exorbitantly high cemetery fees, families are forced to look for more economic alternatives to burial, like donating bodies to scientific institutions.

In this episode of VICE INTL, VICE Greece investigates the country's lucrative death business, noting the high cost of death and the different ways the industry is developing.

Edward Snowden speaking at the 2015 International Students for Liberty Conference (Photo by Gage Skidmore via)

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The Houses of Parliament. Photo via Flickr user Berit Watkin

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Degrees can be fun if you know how to do them right. At university, in a bid to rescue a failing politics course while also avoiding the study of Marxist theory at all costs, I miraculously blagged myself a parliamentary internship.

For three months, I worked for a respectable Liberal Democrat MP and spent my time mooching around the Houses of Parliament, pondering which parts of my experience would piss off the taxpayer most, and eating extremely well for under five quid a meal (I did some intern stuff, too, obvs).

Here's what I took away from my time there:

IT'S WEIRD BEING SURROUNDED BY 650 CELEBRITIES THAT A LOT OF PEOPLE DISLIKE

Entering Portcullis House (the glass building next to Parliament, which is essentially a sixth form common room for MPs) for the first time feels like walking into a political Panini sticker album, minus the stats, and with no way to tell who plays for which team. You quickly realize that not only do you not know as many MPs as you thought you did, but also that any one of the people surrounding you may well be hated by the general population.

Working in Parliament also guarantees at least one (admittedly quite minor) MP anecdote per day, ranging from being bumped into by human Weeble Ed Miliband, to standing next to the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the urinal. My personal best: watching Sadiq Khan trip up a step, and seeing Ken Clarke do a kind of weird hybrid burp-sneeze thing in a lift, and then standing there rigid for what felt like a millennium while everyone pretended absolutely nothing had happened.



MPS' Mailboxes ARE LIKE CHRISTMAS STOCKINGS OF CRISPS AND PORN

Some MPs publish records of every gift they're sent. Others don't. But all of them get sent sacks of random free shit every week with a pointless to useful ratio of about 9:1. I don't know what the ITV press team thinks members of Parliament are doing in their precious spare time, but I can guarantee you they're not watching any of the never-ending stream of post-watershed drama DVDs they're sent.

Alcohol, snacks, pens, umbrellas, and flowers are the usual goodies sent to your average constituency MP, but as you climb the greasy pole, the gifts become more interesting. Interns working for more senior MPs can look forward to surprises including: a bespoke wood-carved chest of drawers containing individually foil-wrapped dates; exotic-looking plants; and a box of 500 grouse and pheasant flavored crisps.

On the downside, they should also watch out for photos of mutilated badgers sent by people opposing the cull, and pictures of opposition MPs photo-shopped onto the bodies of porn stars.



Portcullis House in Westminster, a sixth form common room for MPs with great jerk chicken. Photo via flickr user Matt Brown


CONSTITUENTS HAVE LITERALLY NO IDEA HOW PARLIAMENT WORKS



You know those people who news anchors try to vox-pop outside the Wolverhampton Argos on budget day in an attempt to narrow down complicated domestic and international economics into the sort of "how many pints can I buy for a tenner" politics that gave rise to UKIP? Or those "ordinary" people they shove into the audience on Question Time to prove that people with bad cardigans and very bizarre opinions are part of the electorate, too?

These are the people who contact their local MPs, sometimes on a weekly basis, essentially asking them to move mountains (usually somewhere away from their back gardens). Most of them know nothing about how Parliament operates and how little power their elected representatives actually have. One of my intern friends spent a whole day answering emails from furious constituents who thought their MP had resigned, when she'd actually just quit a junior ministerial post as Parliamentary Private Secretary. Granted, titles and big words can be confusing, but also: the internet exists.

IN PARLIAMENT YOU CAN EAT HALF A CHICKEN FOR £3 lunch allowance, it was a lifesaver. Aside from the one canteen dedicated to serving daily Sunday roasts, the food there is pretty diverse for an archaic institution made up of mainly middle-aged white men. Seriously, the range of jerk curries in Portcullis House is exceptional.

Take your mates for a pint here. Photo via Flickr user Javi

ONCE YOU GET A PASS, YOU CAN GO PRETTY MUCH EVERYWHERE WITH UP TO SIX PEOPLE



Granted, getting security clearance takes fucking ages, especially if you've moved more than twice in your life, like a terrorist (and foreign interns and anyone with a more vibrant criminal record might not even get one at all). But once the lanyard is around your neck, that Grade I listed UNESCO World Heritage Site is all yours, seven days a week.

Not only can you explore the Houses of Parliament at leisure, but you can actually take people around with you. This usually means giving any constituents who show up a guided tour, fudging the historical significance of the Magna Carta to doe-eyed day trippers. But it also gives you a great place to take your friends for a beer. Highlights included the broken glass and cigarette butt-covered roof overlooking the terrace (until that guy caused the security to ramp up their attention-paying) and the "secret" chapel underneath Westminster Hall where the suffragette Emily Wilding Davison hid so she could state her residence as the House of Commons in the 1919 census (see, you do learn some actual stuff).

EVEN WESTMINSTER GETS AUTOMATED CALLS ABOUT WRONGLY SOLD PPI



Nobody is spared from the pause followed by an automated voice alerting you to the possibility you may have been sold that thing you know you haven't been sold, and also don't really know anything about. Not even Members of Parliament.

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THE PARLIAMENT YOU DON'T SEE ON TV IS EITHER FALLING APART OR RESEMBLES A TRAVELODGE

The Parliamentary Estate is a juxtaposition of grand and drab. The Great British Parliament you're used to seeing on TV is opulent and luxurious—an architectural bastion of the British elite. The rest of it, however, is a tatty labyrinth of corridors barely held up by crumbling walls, and windowless rooms that look like they were decorated by a pub landlord sometime in the late-70s.

For interns and staff based in the slightly newer adjacent 1 Parliament Square buildings, offices look almost identical to a Travelodge lobby, with the only real add-ons the MFI-framed portraits of people of supposed political relevance.

In my case, there were four staff (including the MP) crammed into a tiny attic office overlooking Big Ben on one side, with the daily chorus of protesters on the other. The one toilet on the floor was always rendered out of order by large middle-aged man shits, and there was a massive stain near the door where the office manager had tripped and flung his entire cup of coffee up the wall.

The posh bit of the House of Commons. The rest of it is shit. Photo via Flickr user Herry Lawford

A LOT OF THE STUFF YOU SEE WOULD PISS OFF THE TAXPAYER

There's plenty of excess that comes with parliamentary schmoozing that would get the average taxpayer highly fucked off. Most MPs probably are in politics to "help people" or "change things for the better," but it's hard to believe that when you notice that some of the safe-seat MPs don't even bother themselves with such mundane issues as actually showing up to work to debate and vote. But then why would they when there's more important stuff to be getting on with, like going on foreign trips or polishing off a second subsided plate of jerk chicken for lunch.

A LOT OF THE STUFF YOU SEE WOULD PROBABLY MAKE THE TAXPAYER LESS PISSED OFF



I'm not going to make any friends saying this, but after working in Parliament, I've developed much more sympathy for MPs than I had when I started. Not the turn-up-once-a-week-to-fund-the-second-home-in-Pimlico fuckwits, but those who battle 24/7 for their constituents in a grueling and archaic political system.

Honestly, most MPs are seriously busy—spending hours sitting in a parliamentary debate to get a minister's attention for 30 seconds; committee meetings; late night votes; going on local radio; opening the local train station, chip shop, school playground, or donkey sanctuary—not to mention the endless, interminable stream of letters and emails, alongside trying to be a mother or father, wife or husband, or simply a human being.

Obviously loads of us work hard, but there are plenty of people in the UK doing less work than your average MP for far more money, and they can probably expense the cab home. It was actually quite humbling to realize that, at some point, some of these people got into politics because they were as disillusioned with the system as the rest of us and wanted to do what they could to change it.

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You know who's got the best costumes this Halloween? Think it's the lady in your office going as Sexy Pizza Rat? Nope. It's the collection of reptilians and robots attempting to pass themselves off as human so we'll vote them into elected office next year. And unlike some sticky store-bought Pixar costume, these getups are almost believable.

The 2016 presidential debates, like the one that happened last night in Boulder, Colorado, have showcased these remarkable costume pieces, allowing these creatures' true forms to peek out momentarily from their fleshy exteriors.

For instance, it definitely looked like the wiring in Donald Trump's facial animatronics went haywire during the second Republican presidential debate. But because it's Trump we're talking about, there's always the possibility that his puppeteers were making that face on purpose.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Last night, for example, Carly Fiorina took a stab at the facial expression we humans use to communicate emotions like trust and warmth. But the imitation wasn't quite the same:

It was a little like when Jeb Bush read the words "turn down for what" off a cue card on the first episode of Late Night with Stephen Colbert. The moment failed to derail his campaign, but it likely won't be the last time the youngest Bush Cyborg reveals himself.

Not all nonhuman creatures are Republicans, of course. At the first Democratic presidential debate earlier this month, for instance, short-lived 2016 candidate Jim Webb cracked a very weird joke about a person who threw a grenade at him. He alluded to the fact that that person wasn't around anymore, because Webb had blown him up, along with several other people. But instead of saying it aloud, Webb just went like this:

...which makes it seem like Webb's human suit is draped over some kind of ghoul.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has famously struggled throughout her campaign to do anything that makes her relatable to her "fellow" humans, particularly human young. She's also having problems with FBI looking into her secret emails. So she recently tried to kill two birds with one stone, struggling through what seems to be some sort of attempt at a joke about Snapchat.

It's a really telling moment. "By the way," Clinton says, reeling a bit, "you may have seen that I recently launched a Snapchat account." The "S" in Snapchat is hissed, and Clinton seems uneasy about the word "account," as if she's waiting for someone to reassure her, like, "Yeah, they call them 'accounts.' Keep going. You're doing great!"

More than any other candidate, Clinton's grasp on human behavior is so tenuous, it seems like she could slip completely into her true form at any moment—something the reptilians only do once a year at Bohemian Grove. Clinton has practically lived in the Uncanny Valley ever since Bill Clinton became governor of Arkansas in 1979.

But while she may have never seemed fully human in those 36 years, she's also never seemed fully alien either. Which is more than can be said for most of this year's presidential candidates—and for politicians in general for that matter.

In fact, the most remarkable human suit malfunctions have happened outside the US. Like this one time, in 2011, when the thing that calls itself former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband went on TV to give an interview about a labor dispute. But Miliband apparently lost his data connection with the home planet, and had to just keep firing off different combinations of the same 30 or so words.

And earlier this year Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott had to be replaced with a newer model in his own party after his malfunctioning food receptor gave him the wrong instructions on what to do with an onion:

This was after Abbot had a meltdown similar to Milliband's, in response to an interview question in 2011. The entire Abbott Operating System took 21 seconds to reboot, at which point Abbott mistakenly claimed he had responded, apparently unaware that he had just stood there, silently convulsing.

Not all human suit malfunctions are necessarily bad, though. Take former US presidential candidate Herman Cain, for example: When filming an ad for his 2012 presidential campaign, the creature living inside Cain forgot to say "I'm Herman Cain, and I approved this message," and instead just stared into the camera, curling up the corners of his mouth in an imitation of a smile.

Around the same time the ad was released, Cain opened up a 20-point lead in GOP primary polls. Coincidence? You tell me.

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Illustrations by Craig Scott

Realistically, the scariest thing about Halloween is that as soon as it's over, we're all going to be bombarded with turkey bag commercials and endless 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' loops. It's not Christmas, mate. It's November.

The only people who should be feeling scared this weekend are those who risk getting STDs from strangers at Halloween parties, and children. Kids scare easy. In fact, by preying on that very weakness, parents the world over have long told their kids all sorts of ghoulish lies to make them stop acting like tiny pieces of shit.

We asked a few of our European editors to share the most terrifying story they were told by their parents as children. It turns out that, in Greece, if you catch your mother having an affair, she'll cook your liver and feed it to your dad.

DECAPITATED GOAT BABIES (ROMANIA)

The Goat and Her Three Kids teaches you that if you don't listen to your parents, you die. This goat has two naughty kids and one nice one. She goes out and tells them to keep the door closed until she returns and they hear her voice. A wolf passing by hears what she says, tries to copy her voice, but fails to convince the kids to let him in. Then he goes to the blacksmith, gets his tongue and teeth sharpened and tries again. The two naughty kids fall for it and open the door, but all three of them hide, just to be safe. The nice one, who was most wary of the wolf, hides in the best spot, so he survives. The other two get eaten by the wolf – except their heads, which he arranges at the window, not before modifying their facial expressions to make it look like they are smiling, for their mother to see and believe they are well and happy to see her. Then he smears the walls with blood and leaves.

The goat returns to hear the whole story from her last kid. The goat then calls the wolf to dinner to honour the passing of her children, pretending not to know that he was responsible for their death. She sits the wolf down on a wax chair, lights a fire under it and lets him die in the flames, while she and her remaining kid throw rocks at him. The end.

The story, written in 1875 by author Ion Creangă, is included in the Romanian educational curriculum from the first grade of kindergarten. That means the main recipients of the story are children between the ages of two and five. The story is supposed to teach children the consequences of disobeying their parents. It is also supposed to help them express their feelings better.

A FATHER IS FED HIS SON'S LIVER (GREECE)

The Murderer Mother is a classic folk story/song that Greek grandmothers sing to their granddaughters. The story goes that Constantine, the family's only son, comes home from school and finds his mother sleeping with another man. He threatens to tell his father about the affair and no matter how much his mother pleads, he refuses to back down. Constantine's mother sends him to his room, but soon after that follows him, slaughters him and cooks his liver.

The father arrives home wondering where his son's gone and the mother tells him that he is still at school. He goes to look for him at the school but the teachers tell him that he'd left earlier. When he gets home, his wife serves him Constantine's liver. At that point, the murdered kid's spirit appears and spills the beans on what's happened. Naturally the father is more than a little miffed about eating his own son's organs and decides to hack the mother's head off with a sword.

Many historians believe that the story was originally written in the 16th or 17th century. The tale pops up in different versions in a lot of local folk story books. It's said that the story was meant to warn young girls about misbehaving. Point taken.

THE LITTLE BOY WITH NO THUMBS (AUSTRIA)

One of the short stories most Austrian kids have had to endure is called The Thumbsucker. As you probably would have guessed, The Thumbsucker is about a boy called Konrad, who just won't stop sucking his thumbs. His mother keeps telling him to stop, but he just won't listen, so she warns Konrad that he might just get his fingers cut off by a crazy-ass tailor. Next thing you know, his mum leaves to run some errands, Konrad keeps sucking his thumb, so the tailor actually shows up, performing a smooth break-and-entry and starts chasing Konrad with his big-ass scissors. He eventually manages to cut the kid's thumbs off.

The Thumbsucker was written in the 19th century by a German doctor called Heinrich Hoffmann, who had more than fucked-up views on child education. This guy wrote a lot of really popular stories – including one about a little boy who drowns because he was daydreaming too much.

TROLLS LIVE IN YOUR MOUTH (DENMARK)

The tale of Karius and Baktus is supposed to teach you to brush your teeth and eat healthy food. Basically, if you don't, menacing tooth trolls will mine your teeth into little troll houses and set up shop in there.

The story goes: A young boy named Jens has shitty dental hygiene and a right, old sweet tooth. Because of this, black-haired tooth troll Karius and his red-haired brother Baktus hollow out Jens' teeth, fashion them into gaudy little troll houses, and start living prosperously in his mouth. These sadistic, pickaxe-wielding, little dickheads spend their days rhyming about their favourite sugary foods and maniacally la-la-la'ing as they hack, hammer and chisel away at Jens' teeth, while debating the oral real estate potential of Jens' incisor versus his molar. Their greatest fear is – you guessed it – the toothbrush, and as Karius gleefully comments on how Jens "hasn't brushed his teeth in weeks," Baktus shudders while reminiscing about that awful period, when the boy only ate carrots and rye bread. They blissfully rejoice whenever Jens ingests a Danish or other glucose-laden treats, singing about how they're growing "because of all the cake and caramel", and dreaming of a day when poor Jens' mouth will be filthy enough for all of their tooth troll brethren to come and join them. Ultimately, Jens pulls his shit together and goes to the dentist, who purges his mouth of the malevolent tooth trolls once and for all.

This wholesome tale was originally spun by Norwegian children's playwright, songwriter and illustrator Thorbjørn Egner in 1949. It was first published in Denmark in 1958, and quickly became an essential component of Danish bedtime-lore for generations of children to come.

THE OLD MAN RUBBING CHILDREN'S GUTS ON HIS CHEST (SPAIN)

In Spain we have a story called The Sack Man. It's not a complicated tale: it's about an old, ugly dude roaming the streets with an empty sack on his shoulders. He wanders about at night collecting lost children, children who've misbehaved during the day and children who don't want to go to bed at night. He puts them into his sack and from there nobody knows what the hell he does to them or where he takes them.

The most worrying part of this story is that the man really existed – kind of. It all begun in 1910, in Almeria in the south of Spain. Police documents of the time attest that a man called "el Moruno" paid a quack doctor a bunch of money, hoping he'd cure his TB. The "doctor" recommended drinking the blood of a child and massaging the kid's guts into his own chest. El Moruno obliged; the quack and two other men kidnaped a boy, kept him in a sack, cut his armpit in order to extract the blood, served the blood to El Moruno so he could drink it and then they crushed the kid's skull with a rock. Then came the slaughtering: They opened him up, extracted the fat and the guts and spread them on El Moruno's chest. The job was done but a money disagreement drove one of the men involved to the police station, where he told the whole story to the authorities. Everyone was sentenced to death.

Some people in Almeria still remember the old songs that people of the time sang about this horrific story. It was all so fucked up that we still frighten our kids threatening them with a visit by "the sack man".

A LITTLE GIRL GOES UP IN FLAMES (GERMANY)


Just like most terrible bedtime stories, The Dreadful Story of the Matches has one meaning: you'll die a terrible death if you don't listen to your parents. The protagonist of the story is a young girl named Paulinchen, who is left alone with her two cats. Her parents are out and she gets pretty bored. When she stumbles upon some matches, she decides that they make a fantastic toy and tries to light them. The family's two cats try to intervene and remind her that her father prohibited her from doing so, but she won't listen. She lights up a match and dances around with it, impressed by how beautiful the flames look when she moves. Naturally this doesn't end well. She manages to set her dress on fire, and only a few seconds later her whole body stands in flames. Her cats are crying desperately for help, but no one can hear the terrible screams of the child or the animals. Finally, Paulinchen dies, reduced to a pile of ashes. The only part of her that remains unharmed is her shoes. Her cats just sit there, crying, asking "Where are the poor parents? Where?" as if they were the real victims of this situation. The story ends with the author making some strange remark on how the cat's tears remind him of small creeks on a field.

'The Dreadful Story of the Matches' is part of Struwwelpeter – theSawof children's books. It was written in 1845 by psychologist Heinrich Hoffmann. His collection of short, scary stories make The Shining look like Minions and might be one of the reasons why Germans aren't known for their humour. Despite its gruesomeness, this story is told to children at an early age. Apparently you're never too young to learn that the most important thing in life is to listen to your parents.

SCARY, BLIND RUSSIAN LADIES (Poland)

Baba Yaga is an evil witch found in many Polish children stories. The most common premise is that if you quarrel with your parents and decide to leave home, you'll eventually end up lost in the woods – which is where the child-eating Baba Yaga dwells atop either a chicken's leg (pretty cool) or in a gingerbread house (pretty standard). She flies around in an iron "stupa" (a sort of urn or mortar), has a skeletal leg and is usually accompanied by her cat, crow, owl or snake. She's also blind (either completely or to some extent) but navigates unfailingly with her amazing sense of smell.

It's impossible to pinpoint the exact origin of the story, but researchers agree that Baba Yaga was an important deity in the Slavic mythology. The Baba Yaga is present in most Slavic cultures, but in Poland it always serves a malevolent character. Her role is a bit more ambivalent in Russia, where she often presents the protagonists with help and advice. But hey, here in Poland we somehow always assume that Baba Yaga is Russian (probably because of her "un-Polish" name) – there's never any love lost between the two countries. The sad truth might be that we're just scaring our children with a Russian old lady who owns a cat.

SANTA'S BEST FRIEND IS HALF GOAT, HALF DEMON (ITALY)

According to the stories Northern Italian grandparents tell their grandchildren, Saint Nicholas (i.e. Santa) has a devilish friend, called Krampus. Around Christmas, the wicked hairy devil – half goat, half demon – appears on the streets wielding a few chains and bells, a bundle of birch branches and carrying a wooden tub on his back.

Unlike Saint Nicholas, who rewards well-behaved children with gifts, Krampus takes the streets to beat misbehaving kids with sticks. Sometimes he'll come through the window at night and get his claws and fangs stuck into the skin of particularly naughty kids as a way to release the anger he's pent up after a year in isolation. Eventually, he will throw misbehaving children into his wooden tub and take them back to his lair to punish them — and encourage good behaviour in their friends.

Part of the German-speaking Alpine folklore, the origin of the Krampus remains unclear, although many agree on the story's links to pre-Christian traditions. In some Alpine areas, Krampus night takes place on December 5 and involves young, drunk men parading around town dressed as the demon.

Photo courtesy of Webster Hall

As the clock turns midnight on Halloween this Saturday, Webster Hall will once again sacrifice a virgin. Demons with flaming horns and ghouls with bleeding wounds will select a virgin from the crowd; she'll be stripped of her clothing, strapped upside-down to a massive pentagram suspended 40 feet in the air, then have her throat slashed, spurting her blood over the crowd.

It's a complicated, messy theatrical production to set up in the middle of a club, but it's also just one piece of a massive party that's a nightmare for staff and security at the Manhattan venue. Halloween emboldens costumed partiers to embrace false constructs for a night, discarding their identities as well as their inhibitions. They consume more and care less, making them extremely volatile headaches for employees at bars and nightclubs throwing Halloween parties.

"We're fucking drug dealers," manager Gerard McNamee says of how the environment of "Webster Hell," as the club is known on Halloween, encourages patrons to act out.

"There's this incredible permission slip, if you will," bartender John Mato says. "Completely let your freak flag fly."

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On a typical non-Halloween night, Webster Hall juggles as much or more as any nightclub in New York: Around 1,500 people fill 40,000 square feet spread out over the four floors and seven event rooms in the 129-year-old building on East 11th Street. But hosting the official after-party for the legendary Village Halloween Parade makes for added stress. The staff doubles to include 60 security guards, 30 bartenders, 15 door girls, 12 busboys, ten cashiers, and six barbacks. There are also the usual eight bathroom attendants who are mainly there to prevent public sex.

Webster Hall admits entrants as young as 19, but deciphering ages is harder given the holiday's attire and makeup. The event attracts intricate costumes, with a $5,000 prize awarded for the best one. Three years ago, a man won for his homemade costume of the yellow Bumblebee Autobot from Transformers. It was ten feet tall, weighed more than 100 pounds, and required multiple staffers' help to assemble. If you expected him to warn the staff in advance about the exoskeleton, that just shows you aren't used to working the Webster Hell door.

"The search on Halloween is fucking ridiculous," McNamee says of the thorough frisking at entrances. "People have shit they shouldn't have. We don't let in baseball bats if someone comes in as Derek Jeter. And then people have spiky things that we'd have to take, chokers and leather things. People have sabers and Darth Vader wands and swords. We have to decipher what's going to be able to hurt something if this person has a drunken or drug episode—or is pushed where they have to use their sword on someone."

Six guards will conduct the extensive door search, with female guards checking under the bras and padding down the skimpy outfits of women visitors.

"I had one female, I think she was trying to be a nurse," guard Marilyn Henry says. "But it wasn't a nurse costume. It was fishnet stockings with a thong. 'Miss, you can't come in like this.'"

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Security has seen everything when it comes to attempts to smuggle in contraband: heels that conceal hidden compartments, vials of alcohol stuffed in bras, canes that turn into swords, and hairbrushes that unscrew to reveal a six-inch metal barb.

"Recently, young girls—and we caught on real quick—were bringing tampons, but these tampons were so big that we started to question them," McNamee says. It turned out teens were sneaking booze in through the plastic tampon tubes. "Dude, it wasn't a very small vial. It was like a cigar holder. It had three or four ounces of alcohol in it, maybe four or five ounces. We'd never seen a tampon that big before."

Gerard McNamee. Photo courtesy of his website.

A staple at Webster Hall for 15 years and an East Village character known for his chic grunge-Francophile style shaped by St. Mark's Place thrift stores in the 1980s, McNamee is more of a guardian angel to debauchery than a guard. "I got good at monitoring the underbelly of New York City," he says.

Unlike the borough's glitzier, snobbier clubs like 1 Oak or Marquee, Webster Hall invites people of all kinds—"freaks," as McNamee puts it. The first event he worked was a 1993 drag-centric party called Queen. "I learned a lot," McNamee says. "The guys, I'd see them eventually duct-taping their dick into their ass so that their shit was hidden."

McNamee has kept a watchful eye over the fringe culture there ever since. Public urination around the club is a frequent hassle. "One of my lines are when people are pissing where they shouldn't be pissing: 'Are you going to take a shit too?'" he explains with a laugh.

McNamee says hundreds of neighbors have his cell phone number for when the party spills outside the boundaries of the club . Recently he was called to break up a couple allegedly having sex in a neighbor's flower garden. "They weren't fornicating when I got there. They were in a position where they could have been. They seemed clothed to me. The girl didn't have a skirt on or nothing, where they could've been, ya know..." he says, trailing off. "But, of course, they had fucked up the flowers."

Webster Hall pretty much lets anything go on inside short of noticeable sex, harassment, violence, and drug overdoses.

"If anyone's in the prone position, that's not good," McNamee tells his staff. "Their safety costs the company millions of dollars. The reason we're still open is because ownership gives management the resources to run a tight and secure business."

Despite all the hysteria of the gig, McNamee says, "I still love every minute of it. I throw parties for a living. I give people an escape from the brutal reality that is life these days. I provide them with entertainment that makes them smile and dance and gives them freedom from the rigors of life... I receive gratification and fulfillment from being able to produce such chaos within the world of drugs and alcohol. Everyone comes out of it safe and sound and wakes up and goes to work on Monday morning."

Hunter Atkins is a contributor to the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Forbes. Read more of his work at HunterAtkins.com and on Twitter.