Jimmy Savile. Screen shot via YouTube

"He said to me that he didn't have normal feelings, that he didn't have friends," says author and journalist Dan Davies. "He" is Jimmy Savile, and those words are a gross understatement. Knowing what we know now, any of us could have made that assumption of Savile. But Davies has the dubious privilege of having heard that admission from the man himself—as Savile's biographer, Davies spent a great deal of time with Savile interviewing him over six years. Of course, it was only after Savile's death, in 2011, that the truth of his life was revealed.

"He studied what his impact was on other people. He calculated how he could manipulate that and use that to his own end," continues Davies, whose biography of Savile, In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile, recently won the Gordon Burn Prize. "He used to boast to me about having this power to make people laugh. That you couldn't help but laugh. It gave him power over people."

I'm talking with Davies in a café in London's Soho, just around the corner from numerous venues Savile frequented during his life. We are four years removed from Savile's death, three away from the moment the allegations against his sexual offenses were taken seriously. I want to ask Davies about Savile, but also about his own journey—from "hating" Savile as a child to his adulthood obsession with a man who would posthumously become known as Britain's most public monster: the onetime Knight of the Realm, famous charity worker, and sexual offender of more than 450 people.

I recall seeing Savile in a 1999 episode of Have I Got News for You. A monstrous Teflon man with a shock of white hair and customary cigar, he sat there and casually made jokes about being "feared in every girl's school in the country." It was event television for the morbidly curious. Savile wasn't the only one to make jokes about himself, either. Over the years, people such as John Lydon, David Baddiel, Frank Skinner, and David Mitchell have publicly touched on Savile's depravity. It felt like a very public secret. "How he got away with it, God only knows," says Davies, "but it's a salutary lesson of how power, celebrity contacts, and public appearances can deviate truth."

Davies started interviewing Savile in 2004: "It started out as one man's quest to find the dark heart of Jimmy Savile," he says. "Originally the book was called Apocalypse Now, Then. He was Kurtz and I was Willard, traveling up the river into the center of his jungle. I was trying to get to the bottom of why I was fixated with him for so long. What was the mystery behind him? What secrets did he hold?"

Davies's interest in Savile started young. As a nine-year-old, he attended a recording of Jim'll Fix It with his mother. "I was really spooked out by ," he says. "I didn't know why—but that feeling stayed with me. Then I read a series of interviews with him in the Sun, which painted this totally alternative picture of him from what most people thought. He seemed dark, controlling—a violent character who had been spewed forth from the dancehall scene of Leeds."

They first met properly in 2004, when Davies worked for Jack magazine—and it swiftly became apparent who was in charge of these encounters. "I was thrust against the wall by two guys, one who was a police officer and both of whom were members of of his Friday morning club. And Savile told them to frisk me. It was meant to be a joke, but it established a power structure."

If—for example—Davies attempted to nail down Savile on the specifics of the rumors surrounding him, he would be rebuffed. On dates it was often, "How the fuck should I know? 1644?" And on questions he didn't want to touch upon: "'You ask the questions, I'll tell you the answers.' They were the rule of the engagements, here." A master of deflection and evasion, Savile was exceptionally skilled at "slipping out of" any awkward situation.

And yet Davies was intrigued by "Britain's favorite odd uncle," certain that despite a reputation as "a happy-go-lucky minstrel that danced across the British landscape sprinkling fun and laughter as he went," there was something off about Savile, that the nine-year-old Davies had been on to something.

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"Savile's life is the story of our society in the last fifty, sixty years," Davies says. "He went from Depression-era Leeds, through the War in the mines as a Bevin Boy, to the forefront of British pop music in the late 50s and early 60s, into institutions like the BBC, hospitals, royal families, prime ministers... And everywhere. You can tell all of these stories through this weird flickering beam of life light that was him," Davies says, slightly shaking his head. "The thing is, I didn't realize it would illuminate such fucking dark truths and hidden corners."

Savile would often wine and dine people from the highest echelons of society—those who, in retrospect, were tools of his deception. "Tony Calder, who worked with the Rolling Stones, said to me that he remembers that Savile used to wine and dine senior police officers," says Davies, "and they'd be telling him that he needs to 'cut it out.' But it wasn't explicit about what 'it' was." When people tried to go public with what they knew they were shut down. The BBC's Meirion Jones claims this was the case when his documentary about Savile was allegedly black-listed by the channel.

"He was one of the golden geese laying the eggs," explains Davies, "so had no reason to confront it. And he seemed to have the police in his pocket, as well. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he had something on people."

Back in the early 70s, Davies says, Radio 1 and 2 sent Savile's press office to lunch with all the major Fleet Street editors to find out if they had caught wind of the rumors about Savile. They all said yes. "And the next question was: 'Are you going to do anything about it?' And the answer was no... He's a popular guy. He's got an OBE, he does all this charity..."

"What I've subsequently found out is that hinting what he was up to was part of his defense mechanism," says Davies. "He got them into print or out as a joke—things that really happened—but in a way that sort of said, 'And I picked up this lovely lass, and one thing led to another, nudge-nudge-wink-wink. I'm a single guy, and I have these normal male urges.'"

Image via Wikicommons

Savile, of course, was not a normal man. He was a ferociously cruel monster—a molester of children, a violent manipulator, an egotistical knife to the back of every one he encountered. What is hard for people to balance is the idea of Savile as the ubiquitous entertainer and what he was in reality. Nicknamed Saint Jimmy, he reportedly raised an estimated £40 million for charity—funding hospitals, like Stoke Mandeville. He then abused the patients. He built up and destroyed lives.

"If someone wanted to take him down," says Davies, "Savile's response was: Do you want me to take all the money out of Stoke Mandeville? Do you want me to shut this down? Do you want to be the person responsible for doing that?"

Savile—"a very, very clever bloke" with an "almost animal cunning"—learned his tricks at a young age. "He called it the power of oddness," says Davies. "As a Bevin Boy, he worked the mines. Once, he claimed that he got to the mine late for his shift after a night out and didn't have time to change, so went down in the mine with his suit and a newspaper under his arm. When down there, he stripped off, worked all day, washed himself from his water can at the end of his shift, put his clothes back on, which he'd wrapped in his newspaper, and came out spotless. He had this power to keep people guessing, a power to manipulate and control his own image."

Power was central to Savile's life. From speaking to Davies, there's an implication that Savile derived little pleasure from anything other than power. It's a word Davies uses time and again to describe Savile's motives. "He talked about when he first played a record to make people dance, it wasn't the thrill of everybody losing themselves in the music," adds Davies, "it was the power that he had over those people to make them move to his tempo."

What about his offenses against children? Were they, I ask, motivated by sexual desire or a desire to exert power over people? "I think the testimonies of his victims suggest the events were very quick and emotionless, which suggests it was power rather than instant kicks," says Davies. "He groomed parents and he was capable of being charming in this overpowering way. The danger of discovery, maybe, made it more exciting for him."

I ask Davies if Savile ever showed any implications of guilt. Was he—for instance—a psychopath? What about his devout Catholicism and charitable work? Did they suggest that he was aware that he had committed awful crimes?

"He talked about his life being on a scale," says Davies. "On the one side there's all the bad stuff he's done, on the other hand is all the good stuff he's done. The fact that he looked at his life as a ledger between credit and debit suggests that he was conscious that there was stuff he had to balance out, but I don't think he sat up at night and worried about it."

Davies and I only had an hour together—but what is evident from our conversation is that this chance connection with one of Britain's most awful monsters has taken its toll. In Plain Sight is not just the story of Savile, but also one man's desire to find the real man behind the mask. It's never easy to peel back the curtain and stare into the eye of the wizard. Sometimes, the wizard stays with you.

"I'm hoping this is the end," says Davies. "Every time I was stood outside my back door having a cigarette I would say to myself: Don't think about it. Don't think about it. But I couldn't. Recently, I've boxed up all my research into nine massive containers, and I moved it out of the house. That was quite a cathartic moment."

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People in a Beijing nightclub on the day the end of the one-child policy was announced, not particularly thinking about the one child policy. All photos by author

As the doctor at the Central Opera House in the 1980s, Mrs. Lin was in charge of family planning for 400 people. "I wrote monthly reports for the unit leader. All men and women of childbearing age had to register and answer questions about their contraception methods," she says. "I would distribute contraceptives provided by the state. Couples had to apply to have a baby, their histories had to be checked.

"Our work unit was easy to manage because people were relatively cultured," she goes on. "The countryside was much more harsh. People weren't knowledgeable about contraception, so they were surgically sterilized. If you broke the rules they'd knock down your house, things like that."

I ask her what she personally thought of the one-child policy at the time.

"As a Chinese citizen you can't have your own opinion! It's a fundamental national policy, it's the law!" She kindly repeats herself for my benefit—I am a foreigner who doesn't quite grasp this simple and obvious fact. "There is no personal opinion, do you understand?"

On the day the end of the one-child policy is announced, 35 years after it began, I am loitering in the freezing smoking area outside Dada, a central Beijing music venue where American trap producer Lex Luger is playing. A group of young Chinese men in snapbacks and puffer jackets are standing in a circle beat-boxing, rapping in Mandarin, and bopping their heads. I loiter around before poking my head in the circle to enquire about their views on the Politburo Standing Committee's recent announcement. Earlier today—October 29—the Chinese heads of government said that all couples would be allowed to have a second child, in a move intended " to balance population development and address the challenge of an aging population."

MC Tiantian

Tiantian, a Buddhist who was born in the 80s and used to be in the army, tells his friend to find a backing track on his iPhone and responds with a freestyle rap about Chinese society: "China is a 5,000-year-old civilization going through high-speed development. It has a lot of problems, but we can resolve them all."

Tiantian welcomes the change. He thinks children born after 1980 have grown up selfish and uncaring. He's looking at the bigger picture. "This is what I think, but if you ask in different cities and different places you'll get different answers."

As I scroll through my friends' social media updates, amid the boasty holiday snaps, selfies, and food photos, there are signs of the loss and suffering that the one-child policy caused. One friend in her 20s living in Beijing posted, "Too late... Really want to have siblings :("

Another friend, who grew up in poverty in rural China posted a photo from 2005. It was of Wang Liping, an unmarried 23-year-old who was forced to abort her child when she was seven months pregnant. He wrote, "The unborn child struggled for two hours inside her stomach before dying. It didn't manage to catch a glimpse of this disordered Red nation." He told me, "This policy change won't really affect most young people. Anyway, it is good thing for those in the countryside who want a second child. Too many rural people have been bereaved by the government because of this policy."

Translation: "Give birth to a son soon." As part of a wedding tradition, seeds and nuts spell out a clear message on newlywed Michael's marital bed

I talk on the phone to Michael, who was born in the 1990s in rural Shanxi province. He had got married one day before the announcement, and was pleased with the news. "It will help people fulfill their responsibility to society and to their parents. My baby will be born next year, and I want to have a second." Experts predict that within a decade there will be 20 to 30 million men with no one to marry. Michael believes the new policy will help solve China's gender imbalance, which peaked at 1.22 to 1 in 2008 thanks to the abortion of unwanted girls—something that being allowed only one child in a patriarchal society clearly didn't help.

I phone Xiao Meili, a 25-year-old women's rights activist, to hear her take on it. "I don't think it will solve the gender imbalance. If people have one son, they'll want another son." Traditionally, a daughter will become part of her husband's family and so parents rely on a son to look after them in their old age and continue the family line.

Check out this trailer for Noisey's upcoming documentary with Stormzy: From South London to South Africa

Xiao Meili is worried about the implications for gender equality. "Me and many of my girl friends are only children. Our parents use all their resources to make their daughters successful. If there was no one-child policy, I'm sure my parents would have tried for a boy, and I would be treated differently."

For Xiao Meili, this is not a step forward for freedom. It's an attempt to replenish the cheap labor force that has fueled China's economic growth. "People on the Internet are celebrating, but I don't see it as progress. This is nothing to do with rights, it's about data, treating women like machines. Before it was enforced with no humanity, and now we need more people, instead of a one-child policy it's a two-child policy."

Back in Dada's smoking area, Eyu and Dacca, both born in the 1990s, are unsure why the policy change is big news in the West.

Eyu: "I think it will have no impact. Before today, rich people have been having two kids the whole time. In China, if you are rich, there is no law."

Dacca chimes in: "For us, no matter whether we're allowed to have one kid or five kids, we don't have the means to raise them. One is already enough."

"For us people who can see clearly, this news doesn't have any meaning. It's just some more bullshit... The more I hear the less I believe," adds Eyu. "But we're not your average people, we're skaters."

In 2013, the policy was partially relaxed, allowing couples where one was an only child to have two children. But so far only a small fraction of those who were eligible chose to have a second child. In an increasingly urbanized and competitive society the cost of raising a child is high. Healthcare is not free, and social services are minimal. In this communist nation where posters extolling the values of socialism are everywhere, people must rely on themselves.

Yiyu and her friend on the day of the announcement of the end of the one-child policy

Yiyu, a film student born in 1994, tells me, "In the beginning this policy was important, everyone wanted lots of kids to have a feeling of security. So it was implemented forcefully to help the government achieve its aims. But now things have changed, it's not the policy that controls you, it's financial pressure that means that you can only have one child."

She knows that her parents have worked hard in order to give her a good life, and their expectations are high. "My parents pay so much for me. Even though I think it's unnecessary to go to a fancy expensive kindergarten, if I had a child I'd be the same, I'd spend the money."

So Yiyu doesn't want to have children. She talks about her hopes of traveling, learning languages, and studying abroad. "I don't want children to affect my life."

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Amartya Sen, an Nobel-prize winning economist at Harvard University, attributes China's drop in birthrate to the empowerment of women, who have benefited from China's massive advances in education, healthcare, and employment opportunities. He writes that the fertility rate had been declining rapidly a decade before the one-child policy was introduced, and that the decline could be solely due to social influences.

The majority of people I spoke to felt that the policy change would have little impact on their lives. Demographers have commented that it is unlikely to lead to a sudden burst in birthrate, and will make little difference in the long term. Nations all over the world have seen their birthrate slump as they develop. While the reform could change some individual stories, it seems like the one-child policy is deemed largely redundant by many.

The author is writing under a pseudonym.

Photo via Steve Fareham

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The lighthouse that inspired Virginia Woolf's classic modernist novel To the Lighthouse may soon disappear from view, if developers have their way.

As a child, Woolf spent her summers looking out at Godevry lighthouse from her family vacation home in Talland House, St. Ives, Cambridgeshire, England, about 56 miles north of London. She used this experience to write her 1927 experimental masterpiece To the Lighthouse.

Until now, Woolf's legacy has been kept safe from gentrification, but this might soon be about to change. According to The Independent, the most famous literary lighthouse in history could be blocked from public view after the local council gave permission for developers to build a block of apartments in the bay.

The decision has been met with opposition from literary campaigners and members of Woolf's family. Speaking to The Independent, Maggie Humm, a professor of cultural studies at the University of East London, said, "This view from Talland House was the focus of Woolf's novel and visitors from around the world come to St. Ives specifically to view a key part of the town's history, heritage, and beauty."

A frequent commentator on social issues, Woolf's most famous essay, A Room of One's Own, talked about the importance of affordable social housing for women.

The Porthminster Beach View Ltd has been granted permission to build the block of apartments as long as they pay the council $206,000, in lieu of building affordable housing.

Robin Camp. Photo via Federal Court of Canada

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Alberta federal court judge Robin Camp rakes in more than $300,000 per year and has immense power within the Canadian legal system. That's what makes his comments about sexual assault during a trial when he was a provincial judge so appalling; he asked the alleged victim, a 19-year-old homeless woman, why she couldn't "keep that's not necessarily a bad thing."

Camp has now apologized for those comments, and for asking the woman why she hadn't moved her "bottom down into the basin so he couldn't penetrate " during the alleged assault. He will also undergo sensitivity training, at his own expense. On Monday, Camp was put under review by the Canadian Judicial Council.

While he is under review, Camp will avoid judgment of any cases involving sexual assault.

Former Justice Minister Peter Mackay appointed Camp in June. While it is exceedingly difficult to remove a sitting federal court judge (it requires an order of Parliament), CJC executive director Norman Sabourin said judges under review sometimes resign on their own, recognizing the seriousness of what they've done.

One of the three lawyers who lodged the complaint that led to Camp's review and apology is University of Calgary law professor Alice Wooley, who said that she has "never seen any conduct as bad as this in my time as a lawyer or as an academic. It creates a risk that people won't trust that they can go to court to solve their problem."

While that risk definitely already exists and can't be blamed entirely on Camp, the rhetoric he used in court adds to sexual assault survivors' skepticism of the justice system. His apology and willingness to enter sensitivity training may be a small step in the right direction, but they won't undo what he said.

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Baz Black. Photo by Arthur Carron

Baz Black is a body modification artist and model from Ireland. In a moment of naivety, he signed a waiver allowing a photographer to sell his image to a stock photography company, he says, without realizing what he was doing. Now his images are now used to plug everything from dating sites to the recent Mad Max movie, and there's nothing he can do about it.

Right now, his uniquely tattooed body could be being dismembered and sold—and he's not getting any money out of it. His tattoos have been altered to promote gang culture, his head's been digitally chopped off to advertise TV shows on giant billboards in Time Square, and he's been the unwitting subject of a poster for a Cardiff night club. He's pretty pissed off, but powerless to change the situation. What those using his image are doing is totally within copyright law.

When I asked for his take on the situation, Oktay Ortakcioglu, the photographer who took the photographs, told me: "I contacted him about doing a shoot and he came to the studio. I gave him the form, he read it, and signed it. He got professional photos to use for his personal interests. I have over 7,000 images on iStock. Sometimes some can be very successful, like Baz's, which sold loads. I think he didn't expect the images to go as far as they did, or to get that much interest."

I caught up with Baz to talk about what it's like to see your image circulated around the world without being able to stop it.

VICE: So Baz, I heard you've been dismembered via Photoshop and used to plug a comic con? That's a bit grim isn't it?
Baz Black: Yeah I have to admit it was a bit of a shock to see a stranger's head Photoshopped onto my body. It's part of a campaign to promote the new NBC show Blindspot. The first I heard about it was on makeup artist Nix Herreas Facebook page.

I suddenly saw his head on my body. Apparently there was a booth set up at Comic Con where anybody could go in and get their head photoshopped onto my body, so there is hundreds of random faces floating around the internet "wearing" my body!

Then they took it a step further and used four of the images for a huge billboard that was up in Times Square.

The Times Square billboard, with Baz's torso

How did you first find out images of your body were being used to advertise things around the world?
A customer from my shop told me I was the face of an online dating agency. It was a picture of me holding a scalpel and wearing a surgical mask. The caption read "MEET ALL KINDS OF PEOPLE." Initially I thought it was funny but it's probably not a good idea to have me looking like a serial killer as the promo for your site, guys.

And how exactly did you lose the copyright to... your own body?
So in 2011 I arranged a photo shoot with Oktay of Imaj Photography. The release I signed was actually a waiver for iStock and I ended up completely signing all my rights away without realizing it. He has now been selling these images for five years and has made thousands from it. I don't get any money or credit for these images that have been bought and used worldwide for TV shows, magazines, billboards, jewelry companies, shops, and dating sites. When I contacted the photographer two years ago to ask him why he was selling my images and not giving me any money or credit he said that it was his business and needed to make money. He also offered to give me a free photo shoot as compensation. Like he wanted to get more images to sell behind my back!

When I asked for the PDF files, on CD or email, so I could use them for my own promotion he told me I could go buy my own images on iStock if I wanted them. Cheeky bastard.

All he had to do was turn around and throw me a couple of hundred quid for doing the shoot and I wouldn't be so annoyed at his blatant attempt to make money off my image.

What kinds of things have you been used to plug and what countries are you selling in?
There have been over 50 that I am aware of. Customers have spotted me while away on holidays on a random array of products. Some countries included Romania, France, and Germany.

A Polish magazine with Baz on the front cover

H&M used my image for huge promotion campaign in all of their stores. My images have appeared on TV shows Doctor Who, Blue Bloods, Doctors, James Cordon's The Late Late Show in the USA, and Blindspot. The new Mad Max movie with Tom Hardy promotion, Cardiff Nightclub billboards, books such as Nico, Gang Life, H.I.Ts, and Expressing the Inner Wild. The Spotify music app. An app called Pheed. Bafta Movie Awards billboards. Also various magazines and online clothing brands.

What has been the worst thing about being sold and used as cannon fodder for advertisers?
In one image they changed the tattoos on my knuckles to say "GANG LIFE." I got a load of negative feedback from people who thought I was promoting gangs. It could actually limit my chances of traveling to America. I've been stopped before and had my tattoos examined to make sure there was no gang affiliation.

Baz being made to look like a gang member for a book cover

Other than not making money or getting credit, the loss of creative control is the worst feeling. Anybody can just buy my image and alter it and use for any purpose they want.

Do you think we need to change copyright laws to avoid this happening to younger people who might be more vulnerable to predatory snappers?Unfortunately the way the industry has gone a lot of photographers are taking advantage of susceptible young models. It was my own naivety signing that waiver without realizing the consequences, it was a lesson I learned the hard way.

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Any words of advice for anyone facing a similar situation?
First off be very wary signing any form of waiver, especially if it is an unpaid shoot to begin with. Now I am signed with agencies I only do paid shoots and waivers are checked by myself, my agency, and my solicitor.

In normal waivers there is a good case against anybody using your photographs for commercial gain without prior informing you of it. iStock waivers pretty much give up all of your rights, giving the photographer full control.

In case you were wondering, #pheed is a social networking app which can connect you with 00s reality TV starlets

Do you ever feel like you're in some weird alternate reality where there's an evil doppelganger going around pretending to be you, but it actually is you?
Yeah. That actually sums it up well. As I have no control I could pop up anywhere, commit evil doings, and have no knowledge of it.

Follow Norma on Twitter.

Verdun councillor Sterling Downey. Daily VICE screengrab

A Quebec mayor seemingly mad that a skateboard park project spearheaded by his political opponent was receiving good media play came up with an outlandish lie involving an injured teen to piss on everyone's parade.

Jean-François Parenteau, mayor of the Montreal borough Verdun, told members of his council that a teenage boy had suffered severe head trauma while using the soon-to-be-completed park over the weekend—a Rob Fordian lie.

Prior to the completely-made-up mishap, the park's biggest cheerleader, a bearded skateboarding councillor named Sterling Downey had been featured using the park in a Montreal Gazette video. He also posted to Facebook Saturday that he was "super excited to see over 90 skaters using the new ‪#‎Verdun‬ skatepark."

According to the Gazette, the mayor texted members of council the following evening, advising them that a 14-year-old was being treated in hospital following a serious incident at the park.

To Downey, he reportedly said, "'I hope you understand now—it's not going to be easy for you to respond to the media tomorrow'."

Downey expressed condolences on Facebook before rushing to the skatepark, where he was puzzled to find a bunch of people still hanging out. When he alerted his fellow councillors the mayor admitted his story had been complete bullshit.

"It was not my best idea ever, but my intention was to ensure the safety of our kids," Parenteau later told the Gazette.

He claimed the posts of Downey and others made it seem like the park was completely open for business, when in fact there are still bolts sticking out of the ground and some lighting issues. By promoting the park, Downey was putting young people at risk, he added.

"Everybody is happy and excited about the park but I don't want to start with an accident."

Downey seems to believe it's a matter of sour grapes.

"If somebody can lie about something like this—most probably because an article came out in the Gazette quoting me and they were jealous—what else can they lie about?" he asked.

The park has since ramped up its security, eliminating the chances of any more fake accidents going down.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter

The University of Missouri in Columbia. Photo via Flickr user Adam Procter

Read: University of Missouri President Timothy Wolfe Has Resigned Amid Student Protests

Around 2 AM on Wednesday, University of Missouri police arrested a teenager they say made threats against black students and staff on the social media app YikYak, which allows users to post and view discussions anonymously, the Associated Press reports. The suspect, who has been identified as 19-year-old Hunter Park, allegedly threatened to come to campus and "stand my ground ... and shoot every black person I see."

Another threat—possibly made by a third party—intoned, "Some of you are alright. Don't go to campus tomorrow."

Park was arrested in Rolla, Missouri, some two hours from the University's flagship campus in Columbia, on suspicion of making a terrorist threat. He is not a student at the University, and officials are suggesting there is currently no threat to the campus or its residents.

It's been an intense few weeks at the the school, often called Mizzou, with racial tension and protests bubbling over widespread concerns about on-campus discrimination. A threatened strike by the football team after an actual hunger strike by a student ultimately forced the resignation of the university system's President Tim Wolfe and the promised exit of Columbia campus Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin earlier this week. The news seemed like victory for activists, and resulted in a raucous celebration.

At least one Missouri resident was apparently less than pleased.

The Point Claire Holiday Inn just outside of Montreal played host to Quebec's largest annual reptile exposition on November 8th, 2015. In the hotel's "Champagne Room," the event blessed Quebec's reptile lovers with a large selection of all things reptilian. A range of snakes, geckos, skinks, and arachnids were available for purchase (along with top of the line supplies and custom terrariums) in all sizes and colours. The turnout of the community itself was quite diverse and it was surprising to learn that most reptiles are relatively chill and easy to take care of. Also, the vendors and fellow attendees were very friendly, down to earth people. One vendor mentioned that he feels reptiles are misunderstood by the general public, saying that each one of his animals has its own personality and is capable of showing affection to their humans.

These photos document animals, vendors, and displays at the Expo and highlight the sense of dedication and vitality observed from this small community.

-Danica Pinteric

For more of Garrett's work check out his website.

Photo by Clive Martin

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Coffee shops: the opium dens of New Britain, mini Chelsea Hotels where the silicon beatniks jam back and forth, "fleshing ideas out onto a one-pager" and "connecting with your urban tastemakers." Mostly frequented by men in red socks giddy off bottled ginger beer and staffed by overly-familiar Spanish baristas with barcode neck tattoos and a few garys left over from the last Villalobos night at Fabric tucked in their mocha-splattered aprons, they are the breeding ground for Boris's Beer Hall Putsch 2015. So much so that I've heard Foxtons actually use the presence of a trendy coffee shop as an indicator of areas of growth to target.

These are not just places to get coffee. If you want a coffee you can go to fucking Pret. If you want a lifestyle, you can go to a coffee shop, flick through the new NME, chill out to some Caribou, and stave off the crushing loneliness of the freelance world, one Americano at a time.

Photo by Joe Goodman

And in such an oversaturated market, coffee shops are constantly trying to stand out. Short of actually starting to murder each other like crack dealers would, they've resorted to an increasingly desperate attempts at viral publicity through the blackboard signs they leave outside, that sit in the middle of the street, begging you to come in with evermore shit slogans and jokes.

But where once they were usually cute little plays on existing gags and puns about coffee, famous quotes hilariously altered to be about coffee, flow charts about coffee and hangovers, or the occasional "Je Suis Charlie," they seem to have taken a turn into disturbing territory.

First came the imaginatively named "Brick Lane Coffee," which put up a sign saying "no poor people" after Fuck Parade's impromptu protest, in which a bunch of SOAS students in Uniqlo hoodies threw paint at a tourist attraction, while, as journalist Ben Machell put it, the north east of England lost almost the entire steel industry.

During the ensuing predictable Twitter outrage, it wasn't hard to feel for Brick Lane Coffee. Essentially, it was a bit of gallows humor that'd been taken out of context by a few righteous social media commentators, that might even be quite funny, had it not been just that little bit too close to the bone.

But all such feelings quickly dissipated this week, when they dropped their latest sign: "Sorry No Uggs (Slag Wellies)," making them sound like the commenters on some turn-of-the-noughties "chav-bashing" forum, and totally misunderstanding that nobody wears Uggs anymore anyway. Especially not on Brick Lane.

Promotional artwork for 'The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time'

Music means fantasy. From pop to hip-hop to opera, it drags us into fabricated landscapes or realities, or immerses us in scenes of love, joy, or death. Inspiration and evocation keep us listening to it, and its purely sonic nature makes it perhaps one of the most unadulterated supplements to fantasy out there. The great thing about combining music with video games is that the story and visual elements are interactive. Unlike film, we're not just viewing them, we're living them.

As a kid, I was never allowed a console, thanks to parents who were headstrong enough to think they could easily raise children without video games in an age when everybody else had access to them. This naturally meant that I spent all the free time I could with friends who, between them, had them all: Game Boys, PlayStations, SEGA Mega Drives, and (what was, for me) the hallowed Nintendo 64.

I discovered the Legend of Zelda series in 1998, at around seven years old. My N64-owning friend was one of five siblings, which may have contributed to why I wasn't allowed to have my own save on the cartridge. I was, however, allowed to watch him play, which I was more than happy to do—and for what could literally have been days on end, had I been allowed.

I didn't get the opportunity to embark on my own quest until around a decade later, when my parents had given up and N64s were cheap. I don't remember if my first console was a gift or something I decided to invest in myself, but the long and the short of it is that in 2009 I sat cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom before a tiny relic television borrowed from a friend, and flicked the power button on my own N64. Planted in its slot, like so many Master Swords in forest plinths across the world, was a copy of Ocarina of Time. As Koji Kondo's piano-led score atop the title screen unfolded to the silhouettes of horse and rider careening over a Hyrulian landscape, I was dragged by what felt like my navel back to being seven years old, sitting in the same cross-legged position beside my bastard N64-owning pal.

The author's Triforce tattoo, and some plasters. Photo by the author, all rights reserved

That music that was hitting me so hard was written by Kondo alongside his revered Super Mario Bros. soundtracks, which have been well analyzed over the years. According to Andrew Schartmann—an expert on musical theory, the history of music in gaming, and an author and teacher on the subject of both—Kondo's music for the two series was very much written to juxtapose one against the other.

"Whereas Mario is, in Shigeru Miyamoto's words, an 'athletic game,' Zelda is an action-adventure game—and much more puzzle oriented than Mario. In fact, when the original The Legend of Zelda came out, Miyamoto was worried that it would be too intellectual for the average gaming audience."

As Schartmann details in his book from the 33 ⅓ series, Koji Kondo's Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack (which VICE ran an excerpt from, here), the music of the Mario universe was written with action in mind. From Cheep-Cheeps flapping their fins in time to the music, to rhythms written with anticipation for how a player would sway to a given level, those themes were designed to incite, predict, and complement movement.

Zelda's soundtrack was a new kind of music, really—something that had never been heard before. —Andrew Schartmann

"Zelda is a completely different animal," Schartmann tells me. "Its music is atmospheric—it is designed to capture the vastness of Hyrule, and of Link's quest. Unlike the music to Mario, there is little that is flippant or comedic.

"In short, the Zelda music is epic. What makes it special, however, is how Kondo combines so many different genres into something entirely his own: Gregorian chant, Hollywood fantasy, rustic folk, 20th-century classical—the overworld theme was inspired by Bolero—and mediaeval troubadour all melded into one. It was a new kind of music, really—something that had never been heard before, especially when dressed up in synthesized sounds."

The Legend of Zelda illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham, commissioned for the VICE article, The Greatest Moments of The Legend of Zelda

In the early days of gaming, scores would be limited to the capabilities of the console they were playing through, which despite Kondo's desired scope, meant him cutting back on almost everything a full score would traditionally include. But this not only didn't prove an issue for him—it's where he shone as a seminal composer.

It may appear repetitive, understated, and entirely un-complex, but Kondo's music for Ocarina of Time—from the delicate twinkling and sprawling strings of the series-wide Great Fairy's Fountain theme to the jingling, wind-up waltz employed for that of the Windmill Hut—was expertly and, at the time, uniquely crafted to induce that almost nauseating hit of nostalgia I felt circa 2008. According to Schartmann, there's enormous compositional depth to all of Kondo's soundtracks, of which even fanatics of the series may not be aware.

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Related: Watch VICE's film, 'LARPing Saved My Life'

"Kondo's formal techniques were quite revolutionary during the NES and SNES eras," Schartmann tells me. "Amidst severe technological constraints—very limited memory, for one thing—he found ways to produce the illusion of variety. Not only did he repeat segments out of their original order to trump predictability, but he also varied the length of repeated phrases to avoid squareness, again making it more difficult for the gamer to predict when the theme as a whole would repeat. It's quite complex, actually, despite its simple surface.

"It's worth mentioning the je ne sais quoi that makes a theme memorable. Whatever it is, Kondo has it in spades. Some might argue that repetition explains his music's memorability—after all, gamers heard each theme dozens, if not hundreds, of times while playing. But all soundtracks were repetitive back then, and people remember only a select few—Zelda being one of them."

With the Zelda series, Kondo created perhaps the perfect music for sensory memory, paired not just pleasantly but meticulously with stories we didn't just watch but fully experienced.

Even now, as the series grows increasingly visually and conceptually brave, the Zelda soundtracks retain what Schartmann loves and respects about them. "I've always appreciated Kondo's bare-bones technique," he muses. "Despite having the option available to him, he doesn't use technological bells and whistles to prop up his music. He relies instead on a solid craft and basic musical features: rich harmonies, jostling rhythms, and, of course, tunes we just can't forget."

And boy, is that true. In fact, with the Zelda series, Kondo created perhaps the perfect music for sensory memory, paired not just pleasantly but meticulously with stories we didn't just watch but fully experienced. Hell, I found myself at 18 with a stick-and-poke Triforce tattoo on my ankle and still unable to rid my head of those themes, which led to my obsessing over the recording of an unfortunately guitar-heavy medley of the lot of them. This can still be heard below, under an equally embarrassing moniker—which is fine, because we were all awful teenagers at one point.

The author's own medley of Zelda tunes, recorded several years ago

Being, effectively, the game through which I discovered games, it was specifically the revolutionary 3D visuals and, at the time, unfathomably epic nature of Ocarina of Time that held and holds the most resonance for me, and many others. Based on Schartmann's comments on its astonishing soundtrack, this is fairly unsurprising.

"In Ocarina of Time, Kondo proved himself a master of reinvention. Not only did he re-orchestrate the music we all know and love (from previous, arguably less-ambitious Zelda titles), but he also created several new tunes to fit with the old ones. It's hard enough to reinvent the same themes over and over again, let alone supplement them with new ones—and all of that without sounding derivative.

"Ocarina was also the first game in which specific environments became firmly wedded to specific tunes. Yes, there was consistency between previous games, but Ocarina really set things in stone. With Ocarina, Kondo gave us the sound of Hyrule—something we could rely on from game to game for information about our surroundings. And that sonic consistency helped to position The Legend of Zelda as a mythology fit for the 21st century—a world around which we can roam freely, as its sounds wash over our ears."

Follow Merlin on Twitter.

Photo by the author

In Słubice, Poland, there's a monument to Wikipedia, the inscription on which reads: "Wikipedia the greatest project co-created by people regardless of political, religious, or cultural borders." A world before Wikipedia is difficult to imagine—a dark place in which Encyclopedia Brittanica held all the answers, a world in which the sum total of humanity's knowledge wasn't accessible to anyone with internet access, at any time, at any place. Some even consider Wikipedia one of humanity's greatest achievements.

Halfway across the world, on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, Wikipedia's co-founder Larry Sanger thinks otherwise. To him, the site is a disappointment, which became overrun with trolls and users whose "anti-elitism" ruined the credibility of the articles.

The story of Wikipedia starts with Nupedia, and the story of Nupedia starts with Bomis, a dot-com company founded by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis (the trio later became the Wikimedia Foundation's first Board of Trustees). Wales dreamed up Nupedia, a free, online encyclopedia, built not by ivory-tower elites but internet users from all over the world. To develop the project, he brought on Larry Sanger, a philosopher who had just received his PhD from Ohio State University, and who became Nupedia's first and only editor-in-chief. But by the end of its first year, Nupedia had only 21 articles approved under the aggressive vetting process; clearly, a better solution was needed.

It was Sanger, then, who synthesized emerging "wiki" technology with Nupedia's original vision. Sanger came up with the name "Wikipedia," wrote its founding documents, and spent the next 14 months as the site's sole paid editor and philosophical leader. But as word about the project spread throughout web, Wikipedia and Sanger were inundated with new users, some of them trolls, who plagued Sanger with "edit wars" and resisted input from experts. In 2002, Sanger left Wikipedia and became an outspoken critic of the site, criticizing its quality and the disregard many users displayed for experts.

When I met up with him near his home in Ohio, I found him to be patient and adamantly neutral. After each of my questions, he paused and gave a comprehensive, neutral answer. His opinions were partitioned by qualifiers: "sort of," "almost," "kind of," "maybe." It became clear how much Wikipedia was a child of his mind. Over coffee and a walk, we discussed Wikipedia's origin story, his critiques of the site, and his vision for the future.

Photo by the author

VICE: Your early work was influenced by your background in philosophy. How did you get interested in philosophy?
Larry Sanger: I decided I wanted to study philosophy and make it my life's work when I was about 16. I had a class, and although didn't have us read anything, he explained a bunch of different philosophical problems and had us discuss them.

I decided I ought to become a philosophy professor that summer because I thought it was very important not to make any deep mistakes in life. I saw that all of the misery and difficulties that were suffered by the people around me seemed to be due to false thoughts. For example, I knew people whose lives had been practically ruined by drugs, but I also knew that there's this false idea that if you take drugs, you get cooler, and then you achieve some sort of heightened sense of awareness. And it's all just false.

Was that influential toward your views on neutrality?
A philosopher isn't much of a philosopher if he isn't fair-minded. And that means, among other things, giving a fair shake to your opponents: answering their very best arguments, interpreting their arguments in a way that is very sympathetic.

I think it might have started when I was in debate in high school. I was exposed to different issues, and the fact that it is possible to construct interesting arguments on both sides of a debate. And so I'd look up articles about those things, and I was always furious when I came across an article that failed to present one side fairly or at all. The worst instances were when would just come out and say what their position is. It just struck me as being really unfair.

Read: Wikipedia Is Finally Encrypting the World's Knowledge

How did you meet Jimmy Wales?
Sometime between 1994 and 1994, I subscribed to Jimmy Wales' mailing list called MDOP: "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy." The philosophy for the reason that I don't take a position until I feel like I've gone through all of the best arguments on both sides. So there were all these people making these confident pronouncements about this and that, and to clarify for myself, I would try to poke holes in them. So people got kind of annoyed at me in those groups, including Jimmy Wales.

One time, Jimmy Wales called me up out of the blue, I think around 1995 or so, and he just wanted to talk about some of the things we had been debating. I think it was in the Ayn Rand group. Around that time, I started a discussion group called "The Association for Systematic Philosophy," and it was great. It was like a graduate seminar without professors, but there actually were some professors there, and we were all teaching each other. There were a good half a dozen people on that group who are now semi-famous.

Like who?
I think Jimmy Wales was on it. And then there was Mike Huemer and Luciano Floridi... The one thing that these people all mostly had in common is libertarianism. They either liked—or didn't hate—Ayn Rand.

An early Bomis photo. Jimmy Wales is third from the left; Larry Sanger is second from the bottom. Photo courtesy of Larry Sanger

How did you end up getting involved with Nupedia?
In January 2000, I circulated around to online friends an idea that I had for a website. It was a "cultural news blog"—not about the arts, but about different social and political issues. I'm sure it would have been big if I had run with it, but Jimmy Wales wrote back and said, "Instead of doing that, why don't you come and work on this idea that I've had?" Basically, he had registered a domain name, nupedia.com, and he had the vague idea that it would be a free encyclopedia built by the users. It would nevertheless be very rigorously vetted and academically respectable, and would be run according to open-source software principles.

I moved to San Diego, and was given the job of starting this project for Bomis . Jimmy didn't really talk about specific plans for the encyclopedia, but he gave me a few things to read. When it came to what the general outlines of the encyclopedia, how to organize it, and all the rest of that, I was pretty much on my own.

I went to work on Nupedia, but by the summer of 2000, it had become clear that the process we tested out was very slow. And the number of articles that had been finished were few.

On Motherboard: Why People Trust Wikipedia More Than the News

And that's how Wikipedia came about?
I made several different proposals to Jimmy about different ways we could supplement the Nupedia system. And everything required extra programming. By then, Jimmy Wales was worried about keeping costs low, the dot-com boom was turning to bust, and so whatever we did to solve the problem had to involve no more programming.

Then the infamous dinner conversation happened.
Then the famous, infamous, dinner conversation happened. On January 2, 2001, I had dinner with my friend Ben Kovitz, who I knew from those mailing lists, at a Mexican restaurant. I had enchiladas. Ben explained what he had been doing in his spare time, spending a lot of time on wikis . It all sounded very interesting, and at some point I said, "You know, I just wonder how this might solve the problem I've been having with Nupedia"—if articles could be started as wiki pages.

So I was quite excited after we talked about it for an hour or so. I was skeptical, obviously, because it doesn't sound plausible at first, but Ben was able to answer a lot of my objections. The best part of it was that the software was easy to install. So then Ben and I actually went back to my apartment so I could write an email to Jimmy Wales, and explain what the idea was, and ask him to install the software. He agreed, and within a day or two, had been installed.

Related: The Mission to Get Women Scientists on Wikipedia

What was the reaction from Nupedia?
Before it became Wikipedia, it was the Nupedia Wiki. After I had made the first introductory pages, home pages, and things like that—which took me maybe a week—I started inviting the first few people to go there and make their , they thought the idea was just absolutely ridiculous. They didn't want to have anything to do with anything called a "wiki."

Jimmy Wales sort of immediately started agreeing, virtually nodding his head in great concern to what these people were saying, and it became clear that we were going to have to put it on a different domain, with a different name. Because it was my little side project that I was working on, I remember sitting down at a word processing program on Word and just making a long list of names. I'm pretty sure one of the first ones that I came up with was Wikipedia. I think there were several other possibilities that were reasonable sounding but nothing nearly as likely as Wikipedia, even though it sounded pretty ugly.

Ugly?
Oh yeah. It sounded weird to almost everybody who heard of it, it's like "wiki, what?"

Names aside, did you have any doubts about the wiki technology?
My doubts were the doubts that anybody has about wikis when they first hear about them. How could this possibly work? What's going to stop vandals from changing everything? And the answer to that is very straightforward: Just change it back. But as far as the culture of wikis, I never really cared that much about that.

I always thought wiki was just a tool. One of the things that we did, that perhaps people don't give us much credit for, is that we changed the way that wikis are used. The old style of wiki didn't clearly distinguish between two different kind of pages: the kind which is like an article and the kind which is like a discussion. So that's why we started the convention of moving all of the discussion, always, to a talk sub-page, which much later became a tab, and so forth. Wikipedia was the first wiki to be run the way Wikipedia is run.

When Wikipedia started growing, there were some issues with trolls. How did you react?
It was kind of stressful. I think it stressed out my wife more than me. The idea that there were people who were abusing me online just bothered her greatly. Back then, I just wanted to sort of foster a collegial atmosphere that would be open and welcoming to a lot of different people so they could get to work on making a lot of encyclopedia articles. But these "characters" showed up and they focused a lot on the wiki itself, on getting quite personal, and causing a great deal of unnecessary controversy.

There was one guy called 24, but I suspect that he was literally insane. He wrote some really wacked-out stuff. And there's there another one called LIR. That person was... abrasive is not the right word, and was wide open, and anybody could participate, there were people who would spent a lot of their time wasting everyone else's time. I doubt that many of those people are just "bad," they might just be abrasive, confused... "mentally unhinged," in a few cases.

"People that I would say are trolls sort of took over. The inmates started running the asylum." — Larry Sanger

What do you think is Wikipedia's biggest problem today?
I think Wikipedia never solved the problem of how to organize itself in a way that didn't lead to mob rule. On the one hand, it isn't a mob at all. It's highly organized and structured and there's a lot of rules, so it seems like the very opposite of that, right? But on the other hand, the way that the community is organized isn't codified or decided upon in any type of constitutional way. So there might be some people who selectively apply rules according to positions that other people take on their pet issues. And that's inherently unfair, right?

And I think a small amount of that goes on. A lot of the behaviors that people associate with so-called social justice warriors today, I remember seeing back in 2001, 2002, with the new arrivals.

It's really hard to lay out what I think is the single biggest shortcoming of Wikipedia, especially if I want to do so in a way that is not going to make a lot of people pissed off at me. I don't want to be in the business of Wikipedia-bashing anymore. But I do think it has a root problem that's social. People that I would say are trolls sort of took over. The inmates started running the asylum.

If you could start over, what would you do differently with Wikipedia?
One thing that I would have done, could have done, and should have done right away would be to create a process whereby articles were approved by experts. Some sort of tagging system, something lightweight, something Web 2.0, that would enable experts to bless certain articles as credible. But by the time the new recruits arrived—the anarchist crowd, as I called it at the time—all that stuff became deeply unpopular.

Because there wasn't anyone who was really leading the project, including Jimmy Wales—he just sort of let the thing run itself after I left—there needed to be a way for new ideas to be proposed and voted on by the community. And right now, I think Wikipedia is sort of stuck, and has long been stuck. They're very slow to adapt, because they don't have any community-approved mechanism for proposing and approving new changes. So there needed to be a constitutional system for doing that. And I think it could have been added, but never was.

What are your thoughts on Wikipedia today? Do you feel proud of it?
I guess I'm moderately proud. I always sort of felt like we just got lucky with the right idea at the right time, and we had a reasonably successful implementation of the idea. I don't know how much the success of Wikipedia really reflects well on me.

Really? Why not?
Well, I don't know, but that's just the nature of certain kinds of discovery. I mean, just as anyone might say about any number of inventions, it's not clear to me how much Wikipedia was just dumb luck.

I will say that a lot of the success of Wikipedia was exactly what we hoped and dreamed. And some of the policy choices that we made were definitely the right ones. I think the neutrality policy is absolutely instrumental, for example. The changes that we made to the way that wikis work was instrumental. So we definitely did some right things that we can take credit for. But I don't know.

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Raymond gets ready before the memorial day parade in his hometown of Darien, Wisconsin. Photo by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos

These days I've relocated to a new city. There's a bar right around the corner that I sometimes go to, to pick up where I left off. Corner seat, by myself, beer and a whiskey, staring at the wall in front of me. Not too long ago, a couple patrons there approached me while I was doing my thing, and they asked if I was a veteran. I told them I was, deployed to Iraq from 2003 to 2004. They all shook their heads and told me they not only knew it, but that I totally reminded them of a friend of theirs who was also an Iraq war veteran, and was also a regular at the bar. They told me I not only acted like him at the bar, but I looked eerily like him as well. When I asked what happened to this guy and why he no longer comes to this bar, they told me he killed himself or something to that effect.

"Oh," I said.

"He was a good guy," they said, and then we went back to what we had been doing before, them with their drinks and conversations, and me with my thoughts.

The author (second from the left) with his platoon in Iraq in 2003. All photos courtesy of Colby Buzzell

When not at the bar or scrambling around town trying to land a job, I do the dad thing. My son's in kindergarten. He's six, and when I picked him up from school the other day, he appeared so excited. He told me all about how they not only didn't have to go to school the following day, thanks to it being Veterans Day, but also how they had an assembly where brought in two real-life veterans to speak with them.

"Really?" I asked, while wondering why in the hell didn't they invite me to speak? I'm a veteran, too, I thought.

"Yes," he said. "They were in the Army."

My son is well-aware I was in the Army, too. When I asked him what he thought a veteran was he told me, "It's someone who fights and kills people." I have no idea who the fuck told him that—I didn't.

"No, that's not true," I say. "Not all veterans are combat veterans. Some stay on base and don't do shit."

While walking home hand in hand, I asked my son what they taught him at school about Veterans Day. "What is Veterans Day?" I asked.

Besides being a day off from school he told me, "It's when you thank Army people for serving you dinner."

I nodded.

I was so sick and tired of PTSD, and everything about it. I was sick of hearing about it, sick of talking about it, sick of people asking me about it, and I'm sick of being viewed as someone with it. It's totally played."

At the gym prior to picking up my son from school, a person thanked me for my service. This took place while I was doing curls. I had my headphones on, primarily so that nobody will talk to me or ask me for a spot, and I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around. He asked if I had served. I think he did this primarily because I was wearing my old "Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America" T-shirt. I scored that IAVA T-shirt of mine back when I was attending City College thanks to my post 9/11 GI Bill. We had a room on campus devoted to student veterans to hang out in. One day they had a box of these shirts available for people to take, so I took one and ever since been using as a gym shirt.

I nodded to this guy and said, "Yeah, I served." He then put his hand out to shake, thanking me for my service. I shook his hand back and said thank you, and then this slightly awkward moment took place where we both just stood there in silence, neither of us knowing what more to say to one another other than what was just said. After that, he turned around and walked away, and I did, too.

Today is Veterans Day, and with people thanking me at the gym for my service and not knowing what more to say than that, and my son telling me all about how excited he is that he doesn't have school on Veterans Day, I was reminded of this time back in college when word spread around campus that I was an Iraq veteran, and I was invited by a professor to come and speak to her class about the Iraq war. I agreed to do this primarily as a way of creating "awareness" about the war and veterans' issues, and also helping bridge this so-called military-civilian divide I keep hearing about, as if though it's some new thing that never existed before.

On the day of my visit, the auditorium was packed. Nearly every seat was occupied, and a murmur of idle chatter filled the auditorium as I stood off to the side. The room went silent as the professor walked up behind the podium, set her notebooks down, and did her thing. After thanking everyone for showing up, she gave me a gracious introduction. She introduced me as not only an Iraq war veteran, but a fellow student as well. She thanked me for agreeing to come and speak with their class about my experiences in the war and welcomed me to the stage.

With her head cocked slightly to the side, she sweetly asked, 'How old are you?'

After some confusion by the audience on whether it would be appropriate to applaud, I got up from my seat and situated myself behind the podium. I took another deep breath and exhaled. Having recited it so many times before, I gave a little speech from memory about how and why I enlisted shortly after 9/11. I talked about how I was actually in New York City, blocks away from the towers falling, how it affected me, and the decisions I chose to make with my life afterwards. My time at Fort Benning, from there assigned to an Infantry unit at Fort Lewis and how we flew into Kuwait, from there driving up into Iraq in 2003 to 2004, where we conducted countless combat operations for nearly a year. As I was talking about the specific types of missions we conducted— raids, ambushes, counter mortar attacks, movement-to-contact patrols—a part of me felt as though I was on exhibit, like a zoo animal, especially with everyone just seated there staring at me blankly, but I brushed it off, telling myself it was just paranoia.

When I was done speaking, there was this silence. A silence that seemed to last forever until some modest clapping began. I looked over at the professor, who looked pleased. She went ahead and asked the class if they had any questions. Apparently no one did. After egging her class a bit, a student slouched down in his seat way off in the back corner shot his hand up. His question was for the professor.

"I was just wondering, how are you recording the extra credit? Is there going to be a sign-out sheet for that?"

The professor answered yes, that her teaching aides would have sign-out sheets at both exits for students to list their names once the session was over. The same student then asked a question about when the make-up exams will be, since he wasn't quite sure how that was going to work. Once that was resolved, the next question came from a young girl seated in the middle.

Watch Our HBO Report on PTSD Among American Veterans:

With her head cocked slightly to the side, she sweetly asked, "How old are you?"

I froze. While standing there in front of several hundred of my peers, I felt as if I had dumbly walked into an ambush. How old are you? This question that was aimed at me was totally unexpected and out of the blue, just like whenever one of our vehicles in Iraq got either RPG'ed or IED'ed.

I was at a loss for words, and the question replayed in my head over and over again. What did this have to do with my experience in Iraq? Now, filled with embarrassment and the feeling that I had made a huge mistake in agreeing to this, I wondered if these students didn't view me the way I did—as a veteran who'd served his country—but perhaps instead as that creepy old guy who sat in all their classes and wasted everyone's time by relentlessly asking the professor irrelevant questions that weren't appropriate for group settings, or going on and on about some story in which nobody gave a shit about, which annoyed the entire class. How old are you?

I repeated her question, this time out loud. "How old am I?"

"Yeah." She innocently wondered this, and I could tell by her seriousness that she was sincere, but very perplexed by me. "How old are you?" The looks on the young faces seated around her seemed to wonder the same.

My first inclination was to respond by saying something along the lines of that I was old enough to enlist in the military back when I was your age, sweetheart, but that seemed too confrontational. So instead I offered her a one-word answer: "Old."

Only a couple, maybe one or two students, chuckled at this answer of mine. The rest remained totally silent as if in total agreement with what I said.

Something that has always irked me is that these people want to hear war stories from you. It's porn to them. The more fucked up the war story is, the more of a hard-on they get.

Moving on, I looked around the room for another question, praying to God for it to be military- or war-related. While scanning the audience, I noticed a kid seated with his headphones still on bobbing his head. A question came from a student seated in the far back, and who I could tell by the tone of his voice loved weed. "Dude, what was like, the most messed-up stuff you guys did over there?"

"Excuse me?"

"You know, like, what's the most f'ed up thing you guys did to someone or saw while over there?"

"I'm sorry," I answered, knowing what he was getting at. Something that has always irked me is that these people want to hear war stories from you. It's porn to them. The more fucked up the war story is, the more of a hard-on they get. Then they nut and go about their everyday life while you carry the scars of what you saw and did. I don't give handjobs.

The author in Iraq in 2003

"I don't quite understand your question," I lied. Then I cut him off by quickly calling on a raised hand in one of the front rows. Nervous, this student began to physically struggle with his words. I couldn't for the life of me decipher the question.

Then the professor stepped in and apologized, mentioning that this particular student suffered from a form of dyslexia. Another student somewhere in the auditorium chimed in: "He wants to know if you have PTSD."

Again, I repeated the question out loud, "Do I have PTSD?"

"Yes!" the flustered student said.

I thought about this one as well, this time for a long second. Do I have PTSD?

I mentioned how yes, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs I did, but I didn't spend too much more time talking about it than that. I was so sick and tired of PTSD, and everything about it. I was sick of hearing about it, sick of talking about it, sick of people asking me about it, and I'm sick of being viewed as someone with it. It's totally played.

Resisting the urge not to laugh—or cry—I did my best to explain.

Focusing my attention back to the auditorium, I glanced the room as an awkward silence set in. They had become very obviously bored.

What in the hell was going on? Was this because I didn't have any cool war stories to share with them? Did they all just figure that I must not have seen any combat? Did they view me as some kind of POG? I hoped to God not. A POG is a term in military language that meant "Person Other than a Grunt," a highly derogatory term used by grunts to reference all those rear-echelon motherfuckers who worked non-infantry jobs.

I debated if perhaps they needed to hear a war story to wake up a bit, one with lots of blood and guts to see me as a soldier. I thought to myself how could tell them about that one time... or this one other time where... I took a deep breath, working out how to begin telling these stories. Biting my lower lip in pain, pausing on the thought of that, I finally said fuck it.

I didn't want to tell any war stories. I don't know why this is, but verbally I just can't. Especially to strangers. That said, get me with my other platoon mates and that's a whole other story. We could go on and on all night talking war stories to one another. These students, however, weren't my fellow platoon mates. I was not just like them, and they were not just like me. So instead I moved on to more questions. One student asked, "Is the government doing anything to help those with PTSD?"

Resisting the urge not to laugh—or cry—I did my best to explain.

"Well," I began, "the VA, or Department of Veterans Affairs helps them. Takes weeks, sometimes months to schedule an appointment... You fill out stacks and stacks of forms... You can get service-connected disability, or money from the government every month... How much depends on what percentage you're rated... I've heard it can take up to a year and a half, that is if you're lucky enough for the claim to go through... There's a VA customer service hotline you can call to check up on its status... There's also a 1-800 number you can call if you feel like committing suicide... You can get a prescription for free anti-depressants from the VA... They also offer free counseling... private and group sessions... There's an app now that you can download on your smartphone to help manage your PTSD... There's also a hashtag... There's PTSD Awareness Month... Yeah, there's help available."

Somehow, during all that, the kids began loosening up a bit, maybe I had struck a chord with the sorry state of affairs for veterans with PTSD, or maybe they could just tell that the class was almost over.

"Did you ever think you weren't going to make it?" one asked. "That you were going to get killed?"

"Yes. Every time I put on my kit and left the base to go out on a mission—which was several times a day—in the back of my mind, I wondered if this was the day, if this was going to be it..." I trailed off and went on to more questions.

From there, the questions all came and went in a blur: "What was it like?" "Why'd you do it?" "Was it worth it?" "Did you believe in what you guys were doing?" "Do you have any regrets?" "Do you know such and such, he's my cousin, he's been over there twice?" "Do you think we should have been there?" "What did your friends think of you joining the military?" "Did you miss home?" and again, from the exact same girl who asked it before, "You never told us how old you were!"

Emotionally drained, I thought about hitting a bar after class. The medevac finally arrived in the form of the professor getting up from her seat and announcing to the class that time was almost over, but one last question could be squeezed in. Nobody had any questions. A student, off to the side, raised his hand just before the teacher was about to announce class was dismissed. He was soft-spoken and he started off by explaining he had family who had served, a couple having rotated through Iraq and Afghanistan, one relative who was there right now. The student said that though I had probably heard this a lot since being back, for all that it's worth, he just wanted to tell me personally, "Thank you."

The professor thanked me as well for taking time out of my schedule to speak with her class, as I forced myself a smile.

With that said, applause lightly filled the auditorium as everyone routinely got up to leave, as I just stood there, invisible again, but proud to be who I was, a veteran.

Colby Buzzell is the author of My War: Killing Time In Iraq, Lost in America: A Dead End Journey, and Thank You for Being Expendable and Other Experiences. Follow him on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user wazimu0

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In 2006, Channel 4 newsreader Jon Snow first coined the term "poppy fascism," to describe the pressure he felt an increasingly large section of people in the public eye—newsreaders, politicians, athletes, even X Factor judges—were facing to wear the red flower of remembrance on their jackets.

Snow's defiance and the outrage that followed has become a familiar feature of the yearly news cycle. In 2013, ITV News presenter Charlene White was racially abused after deciding not to wear one on air. This year it was the British-American actress Sienna Miller who faced condemnation online after appearing poppy-less on The Graham Norton Show. Apparently it was tearing her dress.

Though most people aren't forced to explain themselves in front of an outraged nation, the pressure to wear a paper poppy faces everyone that leaves the house in early November. One of the Royal British Legion's recent billboard campaigns in London featured posters with cut-out poppies and a large tagline that said "Something Missing?". According to a YouGov poll from back in 2011, 82 percent of British people supported the prosecution of a man from the banned group Muslims Against Crusades who once burned a poppy on Remembrance Day.

Has it always been like this? If you're wondering if the poppy was a bit less obligatory and ubiquitous when you were younger, then it's probably not just your imagination.

To take the example of soccer, when England played Brazil on November 14, 2009, none of the players wore a poppy and nothing was made of it. Two years later, when FIFA refused to allow the English team to wear one in a friendly match against Spain on November 12, 2012 it sparked national outrage. Prince William demanded a U-turn, the Daily Mail started a campaign and two members of the English Defence League climbed onto the roof of FIFA's HQ in Zurich with a banner saying "how dare FIFA disrespect our war dead and wounded." After "working closely" with the Legion, the FA announced players would "wear training tops with embroidered poppies on match day," "poppy-embossed anthem jackets during the national anthems," and poppies would be placed "on the scoreboards and advertising boards."

But while the remembrance poppy may be triggering more hysteria than ever before, the symbol has always been divisive and hostility towards those that make a stand is not a recent phenomenon.

To understand why requires going back to the beginning, to the poem on which the symbol is based. Many of those that refuse to wear a poppy today like to claim the emblem has been "hijacked." Usually they blame a loose coalition of war-mongering politicians, right-wing newspapers, run-of-the-mill jingoists, and actual fascists. While this may be true to an extent, the assumption that the poppy was, at one stage, a purely neutral, apolitical symbol is not really true.

The first time the poppy was connected to World War I was in May 1915, when Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian doctor serving on the Western Front, became struck by the sight of red poppies growing over the battlefields and cemeteries of Flanders. The contrast he saw between the soldiers that had died and the flowers that were growing formed the basis of his famous poem: In Flanders Field, with the famous first stanza:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

But the poem wasn't limited to this observation, however moving. In the third stanza McCrae's message becomes clearer:

Take our quarrel with the foe
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

As the call to carry on the fight shows, the poem was never meant as a critique of war. Soon after it was published poppies began to be used on war bond posters and recruitment campaigns as a tool of propaganda. From the outset it was always going to be divisive.

Once the war was over and the poppy became an emblem of remembrance, the first dissenters emerged. The idea for an alternative poppy was raised as early as 1926 by the pacifist No More War Movement who wanted the words Haig Fund—a reference to Sir Douglas Haig, a commander during the Battle of the Somme—removed from the centre of the poppy and replaced with "No More War."

A few years later, in 1933, as another war loomed in Europe, the Women's Cooperative Guild created white poppies as a way of explicitly rejecting warfare and commemorating all of war's victims—not just the military as the red poppy did. They may not have been hounded for it on Twitter but many of the women involved lost their jobs and white poppy wreaths were often removed and trashed. And nor did the controversy go away. A few decades later in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher famously expressed her "deep distaste" for the white poppy during Prime Minister's Questions.

The most hostile reaction unsurprisingly took place in Ireland back in the 1920s and 30s. On Remembrance Day in Dublin poppies would often be snatched, depots attacked, flags burnt, and stink bombs let off during the two minute silence. Last year there was controversy as Wigan Athletic winger James Maclean refused to wear a poppy on his match shirt. Being from Derry, he explained, "it would be as much a gesture of disrespect for the innocent people who lost their lives in the Troubles—and Bloody Sunday especially—as I have in the past been accused of disrespecting the victims of WWI and WWII." Taking things a bit further, an Irish bar in Luton made the headlines this year after it refused to serve some people who were wearing poppies on remembrance Sunday. It's fair to say in Ireland the poppy remains a powerful, divisive symbol.

Throughout these controversies the Royal British Legion—the national custodian of remembrance—has been keen to present Remembrance Day and its Poppy Appeal as neutral. On a template for school assemblies the charity calls it "a day of reflection, allowing people to remember or think about all those people who are affected by wars, both in the past and now."

A Royal British Legion tweet from 2013

For the many people that wear a red poppy out of simple respect for the victims of war it clearly is. But many also feel like the event has become more militarized and politicized than ever before, less focused on mourning and more on celebrating war. In a letter to the Guardian published back in 2010 a group of British war veterans said, "A day that should be about peace and remembrance is turned into a month-long drum-roll of support for current wars." An image from 2013 of four young children holding cartoon-sized poppies and wearing t-shirts that say "future soldier" seemed like a confirmation the line between mourning past wars and celebrating future ones had become very blurred.

How this happened is up for debate. Some blame the state and its need to legitimize deeply unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others blame the Royal British Legion itself. In an article by Quaker Peace and Social Witness, part of the the national organization of British Quakers, the increased "involvement of the military in the Royal British Legion's campaign" is held responsible with troops and cadets now "selling poppies often with the cry of 'Support our troops!'"

Ties between the Royal British Legion and the arms industry have also raised difficult questions. Back in 2012 the charity's national president was forced to resign after the Sunday Times secretly filmed him offering to use his position to help lobby for arms companies. At one stage he described the group's annual Remembrance events as a "tremendous networking opportunity."

BAE systems, a British weapons company has sponsored national poppy appeals and donated huge amounts to the charity. And this year's "Poppy Rocks Ball"—a charity gala evening arranged on behalf of the Royal British Legion Young Professionals Branch—was sponsored by Lockheed Martin, the biggest arms dealer in the world.

Related: Watch 'Cadets,' a film about Britain's army ran youth club

On top of its links to the arms trade, the Royal British Legion has also been criticized for trivializing a historically somber event through tacky commercialism. The legion's poppy is a trademarked logo, the pop band The Saturdays have been used to help launch appeals, and on the group's website you can buy anything from poppy earrings and umbrellas to the controversial poppy hijab. Outside companies have been getting involved too. Last year Tesco started selling a poppy pizza, while Sainsbury offered canvas bags with the detachable symbol. You could see this as companies simply selling products that people want. But with the Legion's website promising corporate partners a host of benefits, remembrance is being used as a way to sell stuff and hype brands. "With 97 percent awareness of our poppy brand in the UK, we are uniquely placed to create a mutually beneficial partnership that meets your business needs," the Legion boasts.

Perhaps the anger of today's poppy-enforcers is a kind of a pushback against the growing number of people who—for some of the reasons detailed above—feel uneasy about how the dead are being remembered. And with milestones such as the death of people like Harry Patch—the last survivor of the trenches—this is happening while the need to preserve the ritual is felt more strongly than ever. Perhaps we're just becoming more jingoistic and intolerant as a nation. Whatever the reason, as Irish republicans, ex-veterans, and news anchors all show, commemorating the people that died in war has never been simple.

Follow Philip on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Alex Sosner

The title of Most Hated Person on the Internet is a rotating gig. Every few days someone digs up something new and upsetting for people on social media to decry en masse, then that something becomes a trending topic besieged by blog posts and hot takes, then we all move on to the next epic fail or baffling outrage. The web is a big place and sometimes it's upset at a lot of Worst People Ever—on Monday, though, the girls of The Bedford Stop were the undisputed champs.

What is The Bedford Stop? If you ask the Guardian, it's the thing that definitively "proves Williamsburg is over." It made a Jezebel writer "reconsider my own reality. Our reality." For the blog Free Williamsburg, it's the realization of "all your Williamsburg nightmares." On Gothamist, it was a "reality show despair vortex." It also prompted one YouTube user to comment, "Please make me not white."

More specifically, it is an amateurish reality show about a group of girls who go to brunch, talk about their dating lives, and just sort of generally occupy space. They are the kind of people who are conflicted about getting professional Tinder headshots but ultimately go through with it anyway. The pilot episode is called "Tinder Me Softly" and features lots of the kind of aimlessness and perpetual discussion of where to go for brunch/lunch/drinks that will be familiar to anyone who's ever sat in front of a TV. Episodes of it have been online for months, but they were only unearthed by Free Williamsburg this week, and the girls' mere existence made people very, very angry.

And on Tuesday I had dinner with them.

YouTube pulled the shows' videos down for alleged copyright violations related to the music, but they are still on Vimeo

I met them at Cafe Colette, which is the sort of Williamsburg-y place where a cheeseburger is $16 and chilled watermelon with whipped feta, olives, and mint is $13. It seemed like an appropriate place to meet the show's stars Alex Sosner and Olena Yatsyuk, and Mikey Ortiz, the 26-year-old auteur behind the camera.

On Broadly: Inside the Racism Shitstorm at Yale

Our waitress seated us with a knowing, mirthless stare, then winced when the girls ordered matching vodka-based drinks that included elderflower liqueur and prosecco but no food despite the fact that were taking up the biggest table in the place. For a second I thought I was imagining the attitude, but one of the show's stars picked up the vibe, too.

"She does not look happy with us," she said. "I'll tell you that right now."

"She probably saw the show," replied Ortiz.

Ortiz is from Pittsburgh, and has been filming unscripted shows since he was 12. He eventually landed at Full Sail, an unaccredited film school in Orlando, but dropped out after three years and started following bands as a videographer. Finally, he moved to Brooklyn where he met the girls who would become his collective muse.

Sosner, a self-described workaholic who is from South Florida, and Yatsyuk, a former MySpace scene queen who is from New Jersey by way of Ukraine, met in a Facebook group for incoming freshmen at FIT. They both lived in Manhattan, got sick of making weekend treks out to party in Williamsburg, and moved there several years ago.

"I love goats... I can't even."
—Olena Yatsyuk

Like everyone their age, all of them grew up in the era of reality shows centered around attractive people doing nothing in particular and then becoming famous for it. It was Ortiz's idea to start filming after he noticed a gap in the market.

"There hasn't been a show like The Hills in a while, and I feel like the brand of Brooklyn is hot with Girls and Broad City being on TV," he said. "No one's filling this void, so why not just do it?"

Well, everyone hates it is one reason why not. But when I asked them to reply to some of the criticism about the show—or not so much criticism as a lot of gagging noises—they brushed it off with the quickness of reality TV veterans.

"Our 16-minute clip—let's be real—does not show our full lives and what Brooklyn in general has to offer," insisted Sosner, who works as a marketing coordinator for Lord & Taylor. "Whether it's Williamsburg, Bushwick, Greenpoint, Fort Greene—for Halloween I think I was in all of them."

"We just went to the Queens Botanical Gardens because there was a pumpkin patch and a fall petting zoo," adds Ortiz, apparently attempting to illustrate that his group sometimes appears in other boroughs.

"There were goats," pointed out Sosner.

"I love goats," Yatsyuk said. "I can't even."

Both girls insisted that contrary to popular perception they are not bankrolled by trust funds and that they are fully employed in the fashion world. Sosner's lived in the same apartment ("not a condo") for the past four years, and said she gets quite a deal even though she won't reveal how much rent she pays. Yatsyuk, who has a cat named Pinot Grigio and Brand New lyrics tattooed on her ribcage, said her apartment has a mouse and no heat ("fuck my life").

I asked what their parents think of the show, and of Brooklyn in general.

"My parents frequent Brooklyn," said Sosner. "They think it's the best place in New York. They actually wanted to buy a place here. I have a younger sister, and if she moves here, they would probably move here. They love it."

As for the show, Yatsyuk's parents, who she described as "too off-the-boat to get it," think she swears too much. Sosner's love it.

Watch our interview with Gaspar Noe:

Then we get around, inevitably, to dating. Sosner has only been on one Tinder date, but it ended with the guy freaking out because she wouldn't have a second drink. Yatsyuk, who loves the app, offered a tale of organic romance gone awry. After dating a dude for a week, he apparently blurted out at dinner: "Why are you pretending?" after she laughed at one of his jokes. "He was scary," she said. "He was weird."

One fear is that these new Brooklynites will drive the authenticity right out of the borough. Another fear is that this has already happened.

Then we talked about why they love Williamsburg, and they describe a free show with complimentary tacos held inside an Urban Outfitters that they caught during CMJ. To Ortiz, it's the perfect example of what they want to showcase.

"I think are people who live here and don't want to admit that this is what it has become," said Yatsyuk. "If you don't like it, then move somewhere else."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Photo via Flickr user Diana Robinson

After taking a ton of flack from patients' advocates, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo reversed course on Wednesday and signed two bills to expedite the delivery of medical marijuana to people who desperately need it in the Empire State, as the New York Times reports.

Cuomo had previously approved the Compassionate Care Act, a 2014 bill that promises to establish 20 locations where a very small number of patients suffering from egregious diseases will get access to non-smokable pot. But that law is one of the most restrictive medical marijuana measures in the country, and doesn't take effect for two more months.

In a statement, the governor said he "deeply sympathized with New Yorkers suffering from serious illness, and I appreciate that medical marijuana may alleviate their chronic pain and debilitating symptoms."

Of course, according to the Associated Press, even the new emergency measure will only cover non-smokable pot—New York is a long way from Washington and other smoke-em-if-you-got-em states. Still, patients "whose serious condition is progressive and degenerative" are getting some love from state lawmakers, which is something.

Beginning this season, we at Epicly Later'd wanted to branch out internationally. Tired of filming pros next to their infinity pools in Los Angeles, we needed to branch out and get some skaters from other lands.

I wanted to not only find out out about the skaters themselves, but who some of the people that influenced them were and what the scene was like in their countries. So we hopped on a long flight to Sydney, Australia, and caught up with rising star Chima Ferguson. We spent a week with his brother and his mates, learning what we could.

—Patrick O'Dell

Dževrija, a sex worker and pajdo addict who lives in Little Leskovac. She has a tattoo of her ex-boyfriend's name from the period when she was clean. All photos by Aleksandrija Ajdukovic

Tarzan lives in a tin-roofed shack in a ghetto on the hilly outskirts of Serbia's capital, Belgrade. Locals call this place "Little Leskovac," after a notoriously run-down town in southern Serbia. It's one of around 100 informal settlements of Roma people dotted around the city. The settlement is strewn with stinking piles of garbage. Homes sit on either side of dirt tracks. On my June visit I saw a goat taking advantage of the shade provided by washing lines. Empty shacks are littered with syringes—detritus left behind by users of pajdo, the bargain-bucket drug of choice for many addicts in the community.

The local slang for "dope," pajdo is actually heroin, but not as it's commonly known. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) heroin in Serbia is incredibly tainted; in 2011 samples of the drug seized by authority had an average purity between 1 and 8 percent.

Even though pajdo is junk and gives users only a 15-minute high, it is prevalent among Serbia's Roma underclass by default—alcohol, cannabis, and cocaine are, in comparison, expensive luxuries that are hard to come by. And pajdo gives them more bang for their buck.

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"We all love pajdo here, it's easy to get, it's cheap. Even the little kids know about it," says resident Tarzan, pointing to a kid who is no older than six. "They go with their dads to buy."

Tarzan's name is tattooed on his back. He is in recovery after ten years of pajdo addiction.

At 40, Tarzan, a Romani Serb, has managed to survive a decade-long addiction to the drug. When I visited, Tarzan's younger brother had just been rushed to the hospital with an overdose. He survived, but three of Tarzan's brothers haven't been so lucky in their experiences with the drug.

According to Thomas Pietschmann, of the UNODC's research and trend analysis unit, pajdo is "very, very low purity and typical of the heroin in this region." It is a concoction cut to the bone with a mix of cheap agents such as paracetamol, caffeine, pudding dust (the powder containing corn starch used to make blancmange-type puddings), three-in-one coffee powder (sugar, powdered milk, and powdered coffee), and a host of other chemicals including benzamine, used to make herbicides.

In the 1980s, before the Bosnian War, heroin in Serbia was of good quality and generally used by the middle classes. Then, Serbia was a major transit country for heroin coming from Turkey to Europe. But since the 1990s the number of heroin seizures has tumbled as trafficking routes changed. Now Serbia's market gets the crumbs—often via Kosovo's leaky border—of heavily-cut heroin.

One of the only cars in the ghetto

Pajdo's impurity makes it less likely to lead to overdose, but it's a noxious mix that in long-term users can cause liver and kidney damage, stomach bleeding, and strokes. Because of its low quality, this poor man's heroin doesn't kick in when freebased. The only way users can eke out a high is through repeatedly injecting it.

As a result, despite it's low heroin content, pajdo causes severe physical damage. A habit among Roma users is to maintain bellybutton-sized open holes in their groins so they don't have to keep breaking new skin. Multiple injections and sharing needles in unclean slum-like conditions has led to between 60 and 90 percent of Roma drug users in these ghettos being infected with hepatitis C, which can cause fatal liver damage.

In Roma settlements, the notion of a "gateway drug" is nonexistent. "The Roma here don't use cannabis, it's not really around. They go straight to injecting pajdo," says Bojan Arsenijevic of ReGeneration, a Belgrade-based NGO promoting harm reduction in Serbia. "The Roma here are so socially excluded they are not even allowed to sell drugs. Although it's a shitty drug, it solves a problem for them, because they have tough lives. But for the Serbian government and people, it's easy to turn a blind eye."

In July, Veza (which means "link"), the last remaining drug service offering needle exchange and outreach services in Serbia, was shut when international funding dried up. When I spoke to an outreach worker at Veza named Lucky a few weeks before the group closed down, he told me the people using pajdo were more addicted to injecting itself rather than the actual high of the drug.

Veza's demise is being felt already. Drug users now have to rely on a handful of pharmacies willing to sell clean syringes to them, but this has resulted in more needle sharing. Veza was also the only service providing direct help for socially excluded drug users such as those living in Little Leskovic.

Nina, a sex worker, has been using pajdo since she was 13

Nina is one of these people. At 26, she lives in Little Leskovic with her partner and baby boy. She's been injecting pajdo for half her life, and has been a sex worker on the streets of Belgrade since she was 18. She's famous in the area for being part of a teenage girl gang with three of her sisters, who spent their days cleaning windscreens at traffic lights, stealing, getting arrested, and fighting with boys. One of her sisters died of a drug overdose and the rest, like Nina, are sex workers addicted to pajdo.

Nina says her baby is the best thing in her life, but pajdo makes her happy. Her sex work allows her to buy drugs and make sure her baby has a good life. "In the morning I wake up with withdrawal symptoms, try to get pajdo, get high, and play with my baby. Then I work from 8 PM to 11:30 PM," she told me. Nina buys two grams of pajdo a day and shares it with her boyfriend who she occasionally refers to as her pimp. "My work makes me feel sick. Emotionally I'm still not used to it after seven years. Sex work is business. I don't like my job, but nobody's forcing me."

Dr. Mira Kovacevic, director at Belgrade's Special Hospital for Addictive Disorders, sees many young Roma women with drug problems like Nina. "Most of the girls who come here are aged 14 to 17. They start injecting early," says Kovacevic. "Many are married at 12, have little education, and are the victims of domestic violence. Most of the Roma girls we see are sex workers."

Related: Watch our documentary 'Sisa: Cocaine of the Poor'

I asked her why are so many young Roma women use heroin. "Young Roma girls are easily manipulated by older family members or partners," she replied. "Often we hear they started using heroin after being initiated by family members. It's mind control. When we ask them what drugs they are taking, we know it's heroin, but they don't really know. They call it 'this brown stuff,' 'some yellow stuff,' or just 'pajdo.'"

According to Marijana Luković, status and socioeconomic rights program coordinator at Praxis, a human rights NGO, most Roma living in Belgrade's informal settlements are not registered citizens and cannot receive non-emergency medical help, such as drug treatment. They are locked out of the system.

The Roma here are seen as guilty for doing dirty jobs, being sick, addicted, poor, and uneducated. — Viktorija Cucić

To get social welfare, healthcare, jobs and adult education you need to have ID, which many Roma do not have this because their parents do not have it and they have no birth certificate. For example, earlier this year, a two-year-old Roma boy who had suffered severe burns on his arm was refused follow-up surgery because his mother did not have health insurance. Roma women have also been asked to pay to give birth in hospitals.

Belgrade, still in recovery from a decade of war in the 1990s, is littered with small abandoned buildings. But they are not unused. Most are refuges for pajdo addicts, places to go to hide and get high. The floor of one of these venues, a bomb-damaged brick building in the middle of town with "ALCATRAZ" written in graffiti on the outside wall, is littered with needles, blood spattered mattresses, piles of garbage, and human shit. Flies buzz everywhere and the smell is toxic.

The streets of Little Leskovac are bordered by huge piles of rubbish. Garbage trucks and other civic services do not come here.

Serbia does not have a great track record on treating its drug addicts, especially when the Orthodox Church is involved. In 2009 a video emerged of a drug user being hit with a shovel and punched in the face by way of 'treatment' at the Crna Reka rehab center connected to the Serbian Orthodox Church. Three years later priest Branislav Peranovic, who ran Crna Reka, beat a drug addict to death with a huge stick. He was later sentenced to 20 years for murder.

As with the widespread neglect of drug users in other parts of the Balkans, such as the Roma in Romania, this health emergency is largely left ignored by the Serbian authorities. The country plans to join the European Union in 2020, and the state of its Roma underclass has been a major point in talks with EU officials in Brussels; the EU has been providing funds to raise the living conditions of the Roma. But critics say that prejudice against the Roma runs deep.

"We are here to provide a nice smiling Serbia, the government is not interested in those who destroy this image," says Viktorija Cucić, a former professor of public health at Belgrade University. "It's not a problem about funding, it's a value problem. The Roma here are seen as guilty for doing dirty jobs, being sick, addicted, poor, and uneducated. The message is, 'Be happy you are still alive and sit in the corner and be quiet.'"

Cucic said that with the umbilical chord of international funding for drug users now cut, and a complete lack of interest on the part of the Serbian government to finance drug services, addiction and disease will only escalate.

Sofija's baby was born two months ago, but she was told he cannot be registered because she has no ID.

As I was leaving Little Leskovac, Tarzan took me to one of the shacks to see a two-month-old baby boy, Salmedi, being cradled by his mother, Sofija. Earlier that day Sofija had tried to get him a birth certificate but had been refused by the authorities. But he looked healthy. Roma babies are breastfed until they are four as it's the cheapest way of feeding.

On the table beside them was a meal of bread and water for the rest of the family—they can't afford anything better. Unless those in charge of such monumental inequality start to push for for change, that's the diet Salmedi will have to get used to once he's taken off his mother's milk.

The author would like to thank Jovana Arsenijevicand the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union for their assistance in writing this article. The HCLU has a new campaign to raise awareness of drug abuse in the Balkans; to learn more, go to their website, Room for Change.

Mulcair's pained laugh when he reads this article. Photo via Flickr user Joseph Morris

Thomas Mulcair really screwed up the last election.

I mean, he really fumbled that ball.

If Mulcair were the coach of the Montreal Canadiens, he would have been fired before the end of the second period. (Alternatively, if he were the coach of the Leafs, he would have been given a two-year contract extension.)

But somehow, Mulcair is still in the job, despite halving his caucus and losing more than a million votes over the NDP's breakthrough 2011 election, even though he started the election leading the polls.

His campaign was marred by a confounding lack of vision or substance, lacklustre performance debates, oddly out-of-character smiling, and general inability to understand or counter why people may have been flocking to Trudeau. Whatever reasons existed to support Mulcair appeared to evaporate by Labour Day.

I can't stress enough how bad that went for him.

Next year, he'll be facing a leadership review at his party's convention. We might like to think of the NDP as those happy-go-lucky granola socialists, but murmurs about the knives being unsheathed are already audible.

But the party faithful won't oust the bearded blunderer without an instigator at the helm of the mob.

So here's your primer on the Brutuses who are looking to end Mulcair's reign.

Peter Julian

Who?
The guy who pops up if you Google "white dude."

Why?
Because he's generally considered one of the more left-leaning politicians in the NDP caucus and he's generally pretty well liked.

Campaign slogan
"I am Peter Julian."

What will come of this mutiny?
NDP members will bore quickly of this insurrection.

Treachery score
One Peter Julian

Nathan Cullen

Who?
Nathan Cullen is to politics what They Might Be Giants are to music—weird, earnest, old-school, and painfully innocent. Cullen brings a barrel of do-gooderism to politics, mixes in a healthy dose of left-wing sanctimony, then wraps it in an unnerving veneer of non-partisanship.

Why?
Because last time, he ran on cooperating with the Liberals. So now that the Liberals are in power, he might take the position that the NDP needs to be a useful sidekick.

Likely campaign slogan
"Please! Thank you!"

What will come of this mutiny?
His happy-go-lucky kumbaya shit doesn't really go well with rebellion. And, besides, now that's Stephen Harper is gone, there's not a room for Cullen's plan to hold hands with the Liberals.

Treachery Score
Three Tinky Winkys

Ed Broadbent

Who?
The leader of the party from 1979 to 1985, Broadbent put the "curmudgeon" in "curmudgeonry old union dude who keeps yelling about NAFTA." He's the guy responsible for winning a bunch of seats for the NDP in 1988, which was the party's best result prior to 2011.

Why?
Because he's going to fix this shit himself, if he has to.

Campaign slogan
"I'm going to fix this shit myself, if I have to."

Treachery Score
Two union baseball bats, used to threaten scab workers

This wacky inflatable flailing-arm advertising man

Who?
This wacky inflatable flailing arm advertising man.

Why?
Because, unlike Mulcair, his painted-on smile seems genuine.

Campaign slogan
The soft whirr of a fan.

What will come of this mutiny?
Somebody trips over the cord that's plugging him in and he dies.

Treachery score
Zero. It is a wacky inflatable flailing arm tube man.

Niki Ashton

Who?
The 33-year-old Northern Manitoba political badger is one of the fiercest members of the NDP cabinet. She ran in the 2012 race with an endorsement from the party's socialist caucus, which is a collection of Trotskyite nutjobs and probably the only wing of the party that still has any sense of conviction or purpose. She's also the daughter of Steve Ashton, a Manitoba MLA who ran an unsuccessful mutiny against Premier Greg Selinger last year.

Why?
Because the NDP just ran itself into the ground by fielding a lacklustre, centrist, uninspiring, painfully crappy campaign that took a significant first-place and squandered it into a mediocre third. Also, she's the logical conclusion to the sentence: "Oh, you want an ideological, inexperienced, brash 30-something leader, do you? Well I got your scion right here..."

What will come of this mutiny?
She could probably become leader, if she wants it to. She's exactly what the NDP needs right now: someone who can take on Trudeau from the left, not from the undefined middle.

Campaign slogan
The entirety of Queen Latifah's All Hail the Queen.

Treachery Score
Three Marcus Brutusses and a Trotsky

An 1894 Edition of Das Kapital

Who?
This 800-odd-page opus from the syphilis-ridden father of modern communism has long been a staple of leftist thought, though it's fallen out of fashion in recent years thanks to a resurgence of neo-liberal hand-wringers.

Why?
Because the Marxist-Leninist and the Communist Parties have split the vote for too long and it's time to give them a proper home.

What will come of this mutiny?
Evidently there is some appetite in the NDP to tilt back leftward and follow the lead of leftist European movements like Greece's Syriza, France's Front de Gauche, or Spain's Podemos. Given that nobody in the NDP seems interested in recognizing that, the membership may as well elect a hundred year-old book.

Campaign slogan
"In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillation in the market price of labor power. Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer."

Treachery Score
Four hammer and sickles.

Alexandre Boulerice

Who?
The Palestinian-loving maybe-separatist who could change the NDP from the spineless party that nobody wants to vote for back into it's original form: the weirdly activist party that everyone is afraid to vote for.

Why?
Because we need more bae in politics.

What will come of this mutiny?
If Boulerice wanted to unseat Mulcair, he probably could. He's popular in the Quebec wing of the party, and he's a fiery public speaker. He would scare the shit out of every Albertan, though.

Campaign slogan
"Solidarity forever."

Treachery score
Three carrés rouges.

The Ghost of Tommy Douglas

Who?
The firebrand Baptist preacher who was elected premier of Saskatchewan, and the man who later helped set up the NDP. He's notable for bringing universal medicare to Canada, being the only leader to oppose the War Measures Act, and (less favourably) supporting eugenics, as was a la mode at the time.

Why?
He can't cross over until he address some unfinished business.

What will come of this mutiny?
The NDP faithful will finally see the error of their ways, coming to the realization that Canada does not need two neo-liberal self-styled progressive parties, and that there is ample room in the Canadian political sphere to have a left-wing, grassroots, populist party.

Campaign slogan
This. Keifer Sutherland and all.

Treachery score
Five ghosts

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Ted Cruz, holding his hands in the shape of the Constitution. Screen grab via Fox Business

Ted Cruz looks like a sad dog with wet eyes, but he's got one big, big advantage in the GOP debates: He's a great debater. He is literally enshrined in the Princeton Debate Panel's Hall of Fame for being both the "National Championship Top Speaker" and the "North Amer­i­can Debat­ing Cham­pi­onship Top Speaker" in 1992. According to a June 2014 New Yorker profile, Cruz specialized in parliamentary debate, in which debaters are given a topic and forced to generate their arguments on the spot. This requires being able to pull facts and figures seemingly out of your ass and being able to work the angles of any given position.

That might not seem like it would apply to presidential debates. After all, candidates pick the issues and the positions they want to argue (Mike Huckabee's is social security; Ben Carson's is the pyramids). But Cruz has a way of looking at arguments that seems uniquely tailored to the current political arena. He's not looking to score points, he wants to bend the entire discussion so that his position is self-evidently correct, no matter how odd it might be.

Related: What Would Actually Happen if Ted Cruz Abolished the IRS?

His secret, he told New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Toobin, is he believes the "essential battle is the meta-battle of framing the narrative." He started this practice as at Princeton—his college best friend David Panton recalled to the New York Times, "Ted was not about responding to anything. He would reframe the whole debate"—and by the time he was arguing cases in front of the Supreme Court as Texas's Solicitor General, he'd perfected it. He told Toobin that when arguing before the Justices, he concentrated on articulating "those two sentences that come out of the judge's mouth" when "the judge goes home and speaks to his or her grandchild, who's in kindergarten, and the child says, 'Paw-Paw, what did you do today?'"

Cruz's rhetorical acumen was on full display at last night's Republican debate, in which the 44-year-old Senator from Texas reiterated his desire to wipe out the IRS, let ailing banks die on the vine rather than bailing them out, and return to the gold standard. He used the term "philosopher-king" twice and referenced something called "The Dead Horse Act" once. Just because he seems like a candidate out of the 19th century doesn't mean he should be underestimated—the guy's got an uncanny ability to make insane stuff seem reasonable.

Take an exchange about illegal immigration. All of the Republican candidates are vehemently against migrants crossing the US border illegally, but Cruz, whose father is Cuban and who was born in Canada, stressed that it was "a very personal economic issue," one that elites would see very differently if their jobs were being taken by immigrants. He continued, "for those of us who believe people ought to come to this country legally, and we should enforce the law, we're tired of being told it's anti-immigrant. It's offensive." In a few quick words, he moved the debate away from whether increased immigration helps or hurts the economy—it's about the elites versus the regular folks whose jobs are threatened. To disagree with Cruz means denying the experiences and perspective of blue-collar Americans.

He employed this trick again when arguing with Ohio Governor John Kasich about the issue of bailing out large banks, positioning himself as a warrior for small business and Kasich as a steward of the rich. Cruz backed Kasich into a corner, asking, "Why would you then bail out rich Wall Street banks, but not Main Street, not mom and pop?" Who doesn't love Main Street? Who is hateful enough to hate mom and pop? By the end, the audience was actually booing Kasich.

In Cruz's hands seemingly contradictory policies such as shrinking the government and putting a fighter jet in every backyard seem like the most logical and reasonable positions in the world. "You think defending this nation is expensive, try not defending it," he said, before used car salesmannishly offering, "you can do that, and pay for it!" From there, he started talking about how sugar subsidies were bullshit. Every politician throws out facts and figures like they're tossing rice at a wedding, but only Cruz seems to be able make them sing on the way down.

As polished as he can sound, he still stumbles: He managed to commit one of the most flagrant gaffes of the evening, pledging to cut the Department of Commerce twice in one sentence when listing the five government agencies he'd eliminate. And when the Washington Post broke the numbers down, the paper found that Cruz's proposed cuts, in conjunction with his tax plan, would put the federal government $278 billion in debt. (Not that anyone who would vote for Cruz would ever read the Post.)

Whether it's threatening to shut the government down for the second time in three years or getting a guy who once made blood-splattered T-shirts that say "Mohammed is a homo" to design a portion of his campaign merch, Cruz is almost on the offensive. He stands up for his beliefs with the conviction of a man on a crusade. Those beliefs may make it hard for him to win a general election—if he doesn't waver in his positions from the primary, he'd be further to the right than any GOP nominee in recent memory—but if there's anyone who can win an argument with that kind of ammunition, it would be a champion debater.

Follow Drew Millard on Twitter.