This is the kind of simulated combat that campaigners say promotes domestic violence. All photos by Cory Lockwood

Australian women are being hit, thrown, and slammed through tables by men in a form of sports-entertainment, and it has some domestic violence campaigners outraged. Even though the fights are choreographed and the violence is staged, mixed-gender professional wrestling has come under fire for allegedly promoting the abuse of women.

According to domestic violence researcher Dr. Anastasia Powell, the glorification of violence against women has no place in a society that aims to eradicate gender-based violence. "How can we promote respectful gender equitable relationships in education with our young people, when men's violence against women is held up as entertainment?" she asked VICE over the phone. And it's a fair question.

To get at least one answer, I met with Melbourne pro-wrestler Kelly Salter. At just 22 years old, she's an eight-year veteran of the sport. We started the conversation by going through her extensive list of wrestling injuries.

Kelly Slater has been wrestling since she was 14 years old.

"My first injury was a fracture orbital bone that occurred mid-match in Adelaide when I was 16 years old," Kelly told me as if reeling off places she visited as a kid. "The next was a torn trapezius muscle. Then earlier this year I split my head open at training by trying out a high flying move—I looked like the elephant man after that," she said.

"I do have a few nagging injuries that will be with me forever like synaptic nerve problems, arthritis, and the constant sore neck, but that's the gig."

When I asked Kelly if mixed-gender wrestling was an appropriate thing to be doing given the extent of domestic violence in Australia, she said yes. "I love wrestling men as I believe it definitely empowers women," she said. "There is no sweeter satisfaction than winning your match against a male and a little girl coming up to you after it telling you you're their hero."

But for others, young fans are exactly the reason they want this form of entertainment banned.

Thirty-nine-year-old mother Diane Gould took her two children to a wrestling show. Diane was enjoying it until one of the female wrestlers was smashed through a wooden table by a male wrestler.

She says it was horrifying to see a woman sprawled on the ground in pain while the crowd rose from their seats and cheered.

Complaints have led to many companies halting mixed-gender events.

"Some of the kids see this stuff, and they don't realize it isn't real. They see these women get beaten, and they hear the crowd cheer, so they'll think its OK," she said.

According to her, education is a vital part of the approach to Australia's domestic violence issue, and this need for education is more important than competition. "The kids should think it's a foreign, abhorrent thing to do."

At 17, Tallara George is only just beginning her wrestling career. The one thing she can't wait to do is compete against a man. And like Kelly, it's about creating a level playing field.

"When the girls share the spotlight with the guys, it becomes an actual competition, rather than a feminizing display of two women ogled by the crowd," George said. "We're willing to endure a ton of pain to prove that women can be bad-asses too."

Related: Watch 'The British Wrestler'

And this is something that critics of mixed-gender wrestling often miss. While women have been part of wrestling for decades, they've traditionally served as sideshow events or worse: as window dressing. But be that as it may, the days of women squaring off against men may be numbered. Melbourne wrestling group Platinum Wrestling Enterprises (PWE) recently ceased their mixed-gender competitions following audience complaints.

"The goal was to treat everyone as equals knowing that the female wrestlers in this country are every bit as good as the boys, however it seems that some just aren't ready for it," a PWE spokesperson told VICE.

Salter argues that a woman fighting a man on equal terms is the complete opposite of man-on-woman abuse, and it challenges the "misogynist presumption" that women are weaker than men.

"The female stands toe to toe with a man, confident in her strength, skill, and courage. It's completely different. To forcibly segregate genders from competing for whatever reason is not only sexist, it's absurd," she said.

"Most the people who are offended by these matches don't understand the sport. By their logic horror movies should be banned," she added.

Follow Rowan on Twitter.

A brothel in the UK (not the "House of Cyn"). Photo by David Searcy

France's most notorious brothel was probably the sophisticated Le Chabanais near the Louvre in Paris, renowned for famous visitors like Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, and Mae West. In Germany it was the salubrious Salon Kitty, situated in Charlottenburg, a wealthy district of Berlin and remembered for being taken over by the SS to spy on German dignitaries in the 1930s. In America, men flocked to the Mahogany Hall bordello in New Orleans, where Jelly Roll Morton played piano for sex dances in the glittering mirrored parlor on Basin Street.

Britain's most infamous brothel, however, was situated in Streatham in an Edwardian house on Ambleside Avenue, a stone's throw from the Streatham High Road, once voted the worst street in the UK.

The south London "disorderly house" was run by Britain's most celebrated madam, Cynthia Payne, who became front-page news in 1978 when the Metropolitan Police raided her "respectable" net-curtained home and found a queue of men—including vicars, lawyers, and politicians—patiently waiting to see the 13 prostitutes on the premises. A sign in the kitchen read, "My house is clean enough to be healthy... and dirty enough to be happy."

Cynthia Payne in 1982. Screenshot via YouTube

The "House of Cyn," as it came to be known, was certainly not celebrated for its luxurious surroundings (the interior was very chintzy) or the beauty of its women. Its notoriety came from the method of payment used—the luncheon voucher.

In 1946, around the same time a teenage Cynthia was being expelled from her convent school for continually talking about sex and generally being a "bad influence," the British government started the luncheon voucher scheme. It introduced them as a tax concession, hoping that it would encourage its citizens to eat more healthily. In 1948 the tax relief was raised a few pence, to three shillings, but unfortunately for lunch-eating Britons that was where it stayed until 2013, when it was finally abolished due to it being almost worthless.

Men under 40 were banned from her brothel—"all Jack-the-lads boasting about their prowess."

Three shillings certainly wasn't worthless in 1949, when the average woman's weekly wage was just over three pounds (men earned almost twice the amount), and Cynthia was certainly earning far less than that when she started to work, age 17, at a bus garage in Bognor Regis. She began an affair with a married man (a period of her life that would feature in the 1987 movie Wish You Were Here, starring Emily Lloyd). The man followed Cynthia first to Brighton and then to London, where she got pregnant, eventually giving birth to her son Dominic, followed by another, who was put up for adoption.

The luncheon voucher scheme initially worked on an ad hoc basis, with each company printing their own vouchers and arranging for local cafés and restaurants to accept them. In 1954, the businessman John Hack realized that a standardized voucher acceptable all over the UK would be much more efficient for everyone concerned, so he started the Luncheon Voucher Company in 1955. Establishments that were part of the scheme started to feature a green "LV" logo in the window (as did Cynthia 20 years later). Until a couple of decades ago, these stickers were still ubiquitous all over the country. If you look closely in the cafe scenes you can see an example in the video for "Deep" by East 17.

By now Cynthia was based in Margate, where she was living with an Amusement Arcade operator, with whom she stayed for five years. After a third illegal abortion (he loathed contraception) she left him and started the career that would make her famous. She spent two years working as a prostitute, before realizing she would make more money by opening her own brothel. She saved enough to buy a small terraced house in Eden Court Road in Streatham (where, for a 16th birthday present, she allowed her son to be "deflowered"), and then a few years later, in 1974, bought the house in Ambleside Avenue called "Cranmore."

"We had a high-class clientele," Cynthia remembered years later. "No rowdy kids, no yobs, all well-dressed men in suits who knew how to respect a lady. It was like a vicar's tea party with sex thrown in—a lot of elderly, lonely people drinking sherry."

Although men under 40 were banned from her brothel ("all Jack-the-lads boasting about their prowess") she was proud that she provided for all sorts of men, and once said: "Everyone can get lonely... We even used to have some of them coming along in wheelchairs, although not too many because they tended to block up the corridors."

In 1980, two years after the police raid on Ambleside Avenue, the case went to court, with Payne eventually convicted for running "the biggest disorderly house" in history. Although sentenced to 18 months in prison, she was released from Holloway after four. Six years later, in 1987, Personal Services—the first film about her life—was released, starring Julie Walters and directed by former Python Terry Jones. After the filming was completed, Payne organized a celebration at Ambleside Avenue and once again the police raided the house. This time she was charged with nine counts of controlling prostitutes. There was much laughter during the subsequent 13-day trial, and the judge warned the jurors that the case was a criminal trial and not some kind of entertainment show. When, after five hours, the jury found her not guilty, the courtroom burst into spontaneous applause.

Payne left the court clutching a Laughing Policeman doll, which she had kept as a mascot throughout her trial. "This is a victory for common sense," she said. "But I have to admit all this has put me off having parties for a bit." Cynthia later sent Judge Brian Pryor QC a copy of her biography, An English Madam, with the inscription: "I hope this book will broaden your rather sheltered life."

The luncheon voucher became next to useless when the LV tax concession was abolished by the coalition government in 2013. Extraordinarily, they still exist, although no one knows who takes them.

Sadly, Cynthia Payne certainly doesn't. She died at age 82 on November 15, 2015 while still living at Ambleside Avenue. Britain's most notorious madam was always proud of how she treated her employees, and at the end of every afternoon shift she always provided something that the girls at Le Chabanais, Salon Kitty, and the Mahogany Hall would have been more than envious of: a poached egg on toast and a nice cup of tea.

Rob runs the blog Another Nickel in the Machine. His first book, Beautiful Idiots and Brilliant Lunatics, is out now.Follow him on Twitter.

Screenshot via candidate's video

It's getting to be that we can't get through one single election campaign in this country without getting pepper-sprayed with mesmerizingly bad election videos.

And, I guess, Newfoundland—our greatest province—wouldn't be any different.

Meet Beth Crosbie. She's the Progressive Conservative candidate in Virginia Waters-Pleasantville.

She's also the daughter of former cabinet minister and prominent Newfoundland-inhabitant John Crosbie, and sister of failed Conservative candidate Ches Crosbie, who got barred from running after he played MacHarper in a clunkily written Shakespeare parody.

This Crosbie is starring in her very own weird videos that put the "uuuuh" back in "uuuuhriginal."

The first video opens on a familiar Canadian election premise—Crosbie has been kidnapped by her election opponents and is being held, sealskin coat and all, in a dimly lit "ball pit." (There are no balls present.)

I am glad so many of you enjoyed my video. In case you missed it: https://t.co/IaSZauKB54 pic.twitter.com/el8qgTEySI
— Beth Crosbie (@bethcrosbie) November 17, 2015

Her nefarious opponents (Liberals!) have some vague and open-ended questions for her, like "Why are you running for Virginia Waters-Pleasantville?" "But why run NOW?!" and "So you're a fighter, eh? WHAT ARE YOU FIGHTING FOR?!"

These dastardly bastards they won't let her leave until she answers all those questions. (She then leaves of her own accord after about a minute.)

Thirty seconds into the video, Crosbie drops some goddamn knowledge.

"I'm a Crosbie, we don't pick pick easy battles—we pick the ones that need to be fought because it's in the best interests of Newfoundland and Labrador" which is pretty much the worst family motto of all time.

The VICE office is responsible for roughly half of the 176 views of this video.

After that audio-visual hallucinatory train wreck, Crosbie already cemented her standing in the most-WTF campaign ads hall-of-fame—alongside the BC dragon-slayer, Ron Planche, and our own fucked-up campaign ad remixes.

But wait, it doesn't stop there. Crosbie made another video.

Our new video - I hope that you enjoy it! #votebethcrosbie #nlvotes #nlpoli https://t.co/BlJc7Q5O2V pic.twitter.com/TH0Y4szzSA
— Beth Crosbie (@bethcrosbie) November 18, 2015

Walking into her office, where a tiny man appears to be playing the fiddle on her desk, Crosbie puts down her overly-large dictionary. She has work to do.

Crosbie opens to her favourite chapter of the dictionary: the Cs. She takes a picture of a word that she really likes: Committed. Then it's on to the ol' Rs. Responsible. Back to the As: Accessible. Es! Engaged. As again: Accountable.

Tiny violin man plays on. His name is Doug.

BETH CROSBIE: Responsive, Engaged, Accountable, Committed, Accessible. (REACA for short.)

Doug plays on, as the Microsoft Movie Maker 2004 graphics stay on the screen, reaching deep into your soul to say: "REACA! REACA!"

Crosbie is on track, like almost every other non-Liberal candidate in the province, to lose badly. Like, really badly.

But she's made a lasting mark.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

The miners' strike in 1984. Photo via Wikicommons

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Since Margaret Thatcher crushed the miners, the Tories' distaste for, and distrust of, trade unions hasn't exactly been a secret. And so (if you're not already aware), the fact that the Conservative government is currently trying to pass a new law intended to radically curtail the activities of trade unions probably won't come as a shock. If passed, the Trade Union Bill will ban trade unions from using online voting, allow agency workers to replace permanent staff during strikes, and will require unions to have at least 50 percent voter turnout in order to strike in "important public sector services." However, not all Tories are in support: Conservative MP David Davis described plans to make striking workers wear armbands as like something out of Franco's dictatorship in Spain. Former business secretary Vince Cable has also criticized the bill, calling it "vindictive, counterproductive, and ideologically driven."

For many young people still ticking the 16-24 box, unions will represent either: (a) the best excuse for "working from home" when the tube drivers are on strike, or (b) something that was around before they were born. But trade unions do actually still exist. And the reason they still exist is because—despite things changing a fair bit since they were founded at the dawn of the industrial revolution—we all still have to get up in morning and go to work. And work still sucks quite a lot of the time. In short, this is the historic mission of trade unions: to make work suck less.

So how have trade unions gone about doing this? The list is a long one. For starters, they gave us the weekend—if it had been left to employers, we might still be working on Saturdays. They also reduced the length of the working day to eight hours, putting the choice to work longer in the hands of employees rather than bosses. They have been at the forefront of the fight for equal pay between women and men and have "played a primary role in fighting against discrimination' at work, according to the European Commission. Apparently they're even good for the national economy, as explained to me by Alice Martin, researcher at the New Economics Foundation:

"Trade unions don't just protect employees, they also stimulate economic activity. Increasing the share of national income that goes to wages rather than profit—a key function of trade unions—boosts the economy because the average person has more money to spend."

Despite these achievements, many young people don't even know what trade unions are. And when they have heard of them, they're most likely to think of the 1980s, and "people who wear brown shirts and go on caravan holidays," according to focus group research conducted with groups of young people by the Trade Unions Congress (TUC) in 2011.

It will be of little surprise then, that the latest statistics show that 38 percent of trade union members are over the age of 50, and that the numbers of young people joining unions since has fallen sharply since 1995. If you're young, you may be thinking the Conservative attack on an aging trade union movement is not really your problem. But the lack of youthful enthusiasm for trade unions is perverse; and that's because it's young people who are getting a particularly crappy deal at work.

Take Gareth, a teenager who took a gap year in Daventry, Northamptonshire (a place he describes as "a bit like an industrial estate"). Gareth's first "real experience of work" was in a call center. Unfortunately for him, this experience was dominated by a sporadically enraged middle manager whose main pleasure in life was to patronize the youthful underlings unlucky enough to enter his personal fiefdom, and who could "do whatever he wanted," which included firing someone for wearing a bow tie.

Gareth was shocked at his manager's behavior. But speaking to his colleagues, he encountered a mixture of resignation and acquiescence—"people thought that was just the way things were." Many didn't know what a trade union was, a fact that is perhaps not surprising considering there was no union presence in the call center whatsoever.

Related: Watch our documentary, Cash Slaves

Stories of crazed managers taking it out on young people are abound. But beyond this, the statistics show that young people are getting completely done over in the UK labor market. 16-24 year olds are more likely to be unemployed, paid the minimum wage, and on a zero hours contract than the generation above them.

Combine this with the fact that young people are one of the groups hardest hit by the financial crisis and government austerity, and you might have expected them to have run headlong into the loving embrace of the trade union movement since 2010. But they haven't.

A significant reason there's a disconnect between under 24s and trade unions, is that many young people no longer identify with a "trade" the way they did for much of the twentieth century, when trade unions were at their height. The nature of work has changed—young people today are unlikely to have the same job from the age of 14 right up until retirement (which is something they may never reach considering the goalposts keep getting moved further and further into old age). They tend not to see themselves as the embodiment of "labor," locked into an eternal battle with capitalist bosses to ensure their survival and the historic betterment of their class.

The trouble is, even if this is often the underlying truth of being young in 21st century Britain, youngsters are more likely to identify with a Nike tick than a hammer and sickle. Take your average freelancing graduate bobbing along in the capital's creative industries. Point out that it is pretty shit to get treated like a personal serf by employers and to then pay half of a lousy wage on a damp shoebox of a bedroom in Zone 3, and they will simply tell you this is "the way things are."

According to focus groups conducted by trade unions, young people are most likely to seek advice on employment issues from their parents, friends and colleagues, line managers, and HR advisors. The young people in the focus group said they were more likely to "google it" if they had a problem than to ask a trade union.

The news gets even more depressing for trade unions when the young focus group participants were asked what would encourage them to join up: "You get a discount at Pizza Hut and Top Man. That's the only reason any of my friends have done it," said a student from Sheffield in a report by Unions 21.

So if young people do not identify themselves as "workers" locked into a class war, what can trade unions—or whatever campaigning vehicle—do to make work suck less?

For those young people who generally hate their job—and that includes many of the disproportionate numbers of young people stuck in low paid service sector jobs such as hospitality, catering, cleaning, and retail—the answer is not to call for "full employment" and "jobs for life," but rather to call for less work for the same pay. If unions want to appeal to young people and help them adapt work to an increasingly automated future, they need to start calling for "fully automated luxury communism." Or perhaps, if we are feeling a little less utopian, just a reduction in working hours.

For those young people who identify strongly with their jobs the issue is freedom and control at work. It is this professional frustration that unions have to take advantage of if they want to stay relevant amongst career driven graduates. They could start by taking a leaf out of AltGen's book, a group helping young people start their own workers' cooperatives as a way of empowering them to own and run their own working lives. People invested in their work want more than a pay rise—they want an empowering vision of their future working lives.

Third, unions could use that strange beast "the internet" in new ways to attract young people. Remember Gareth, the gap-yearing call center worker? Well, it turns out he left the call center and set up an app called FairOffice, designed to "enable workers to anonymously speak their mind so they can dialogue with their employers to make positive changes to the workplace." It's not a catch-all solution to young people's crappy working conditions, but it is something.

Finally, unions need to be open to changing the way they work and young people need to be less flippant in their attempts to transcend their dreary working lives. Unions are famously bureaucratic and they need help from youngsters if they are to revitalize themselves. And if young people want to improve their sorry lot, they will have to learn that changing things requires the kind of long, boring organizing that trade unions are all too familiar with.

Do young people need trade unions? Well, they certainly need something to improve their working lives. And right now, letting the Tories kill off the trade unions would be a catastrophic step in the wrong direction. So yes, young people need unions, and it is up to them to make unions look like they are on the side of the future.

Follow Gabriel onTwitter.

Merch for sale after the November 13 attacks on Paris

It wasn't long after the September 11 attacks that the vultures descended on our collective grief, exploiting tragedy to make a quick buck selling commemorative items like Bin Laden dartboards and Twin Towers rugs. Since 2001, thanks to the rise in internet shopping and on-demand printing, anyone with a computer and a couple hundred bucks can turn themselves into a grief entrepreneur.

In January 2015, following the attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine, Joachim Roncin's slogan "Je Suis Charlie" was reproduced on every item imaginable, including hoodies. Roncin said he was "horrified" at the attempts to commercialize his slogan. The French Institute of Industrial Property has since clarified that it has rejected all requests to trademark "Je Suis Charlie."

On the night of the November 13, French illustrator Jean Jullien posted a drawing he'd just made of the Eiffel Tower as part of the peace symbol. The design, as he explained to WIRED, was intended to convey a message of peace and solidarity—he was not looking to benefit from it in any way. However, this didn't stop several online retailers like Zazzle from printing his creation on iPhone cases, T-shirts, and badges. The same goes for sellers on Etsy, where you can order a matching set of pendant and earrings of the same design. While some websites claim that a part (or sometimes all) of the profit will be donated to victims' associations or organizations such as the Red Cross, it's hard to verify such promises.

Earlier this week, we contacted Zazzle to ask whether they would consider removing the items on sale so as not to take advantage of the attacks. "Many designers whose works Zazzle offers show support for the French during this difficult time. As the drawings follow our guidelines, Zazzle will continue to allow the sale of products on our websites," they responded.

CNN got a similar reply when they approached vendors of the "Je Suis Charlie" T-shirts in January, asking whether they thought what they were doing was a bit "insensitive." Most of the sellers, according to the report, said some equivalent of, "It's an important message that needs to get out. And if we don't sell it, someone else will."

And it's not just about the merchandise created specifically after the event. Even ads for Etsy items as innocuous as "Peace" bunting were cynically renamed "Pray for Paris Peace Bunting" with a callousness more typical of SEO optimizers than home crafters. There was even a special weekend promotion on a "All lives count. Except ISIS. Fuck them" T-shirt; it was 20 percent off if you used the discount code SOLIDARITY.

Props to the randomly named Pray For Paris clothes shop though, which opened in 2011. Owners decided to stop all sales on November 14 in the wake of the events and now 20 percent of its profits will be donated to the Red Cross.

In a press release issued on Monday, eBay announced its aim to donate "5 percent of the revenue made on its European marketplaces on November 14 and 15 to victims and their families." A cynic could argue that this might be an attempt for eBay to distance themselves from sellers profiteering from the tragedy. But a spokesman for the company said that measures had been taken to "ensure the absence of inappropriate or illegal ads seeking to glorify or to profit from this tragedy."

Amazon.fr told VICE France that since Saturday morning the site has aimed to "prevent exploitation of tragic events in Paris (caused) by selling derivative items on its Marketplace. If necessary, Amazon has removed all products from third-party merchants that have been identified as such." So far, no such sellers have been identified.

But there has been one positive piece of news: This morning, VICE France received an email from Zazzle. "Following negative comments we received on the products conceived by the Zazzle community, we decided to withdraw the products linked to the tragedy. This operation can take up to 48 hours." Public opinion, it seems, can have an impact—even on the grief capitalists.

Images courtesy of the author

According to science*, about 80 percent of millennials are on the toilet at this very moment, furiously swiping right towards a future orgasm.

This is news to exactly no one. A full 90 percent of the considerable number of people I've fucked "dated" in the past three years were mined from the internet, and I don't see how I would possibly have met them otherwise. Like, do people really still get gussied up and step out of doors hoping to rub uglies with an as-yet-undiscovered friend of a friend, or—horror of horrors—a stranger? Why would anyone ever do that when they could lure someone in from home whilst guzzling box wine in their crustiest pajamas?

I'm an expert in online dating. I've picked up a few idiot-proof tricks of the trade from my years of whoredom. I have used them to find not one but two long-term relationships. One is still a sometime-lover of mine and a dear friend. The other is a worthless fucknut, but we did almost get married, so that's something?

Anyway, let's be honest with ourselves. Electronic mating is just online shopping. You've got to know what you're looking for, and you've got to have a strategy. People, I'm here to tell you how to get exactly what you want out of online dating.

Here, I bestow you with the chops, the ropes, the ultimate 411 on a straight path to love, multiple orgasms, a surrogate daddy with a big dick. Or you know, what have you.

For a one-night stand

K, with this one, you gotta clinch a person real quick. Be raw, be sensual. Definitely pose with your arms folded next to a swanky vehicle of sorts if you can find one. Even if it's clear the vehicle isn't yours. Ambition is hot.

In a similar vein, if you can find a tiger who will consent to posing with you, grab a photo of that and use it as your main image. That will go a long way toward illustrating the raw power of your personal essence. If you're a man living in a rural area, you should take advantage of that by posing with a litany of recently slaughtered animals. Put a moose head in your truck. Smile next to it. Feed some Alpine to a dead fish. Everyone will see that you are both carnal and unafraid.

Then, once you've swiped right and matched with someone, you gotta ignore them. That's the way to appear most bangable.

Once you've used these tactics to coerce charm someone into giving you their number, you've really got to make use of that privilege. Make sure to text them and see what's up, and if they don't respond, know that it definitely has nothing to do with you. Keep chatting to them about your day, and if they don't reply you should FaceTime them, then call. If they don't pick up, leave a voicemail letting them know you'll accompany them to wherever they're going this Saturday night, because you have no plans. Then, text to alert them to the existence of the voicemail. Call again for good measure.

If you're looking for a fuck buddy

Alright, so you want to start out by making your main shot a photo of you with at least three of your closest friends. People want to see that you got a squad, that you're desired, that you have a crew to choose from should one of you propose a threesome. People really want to wonder which one you are—it's a fun guessing game.

Once you've got that down, the key is to just keep trying. If someone ignores your message, just keep texting "hey what's up" to them relentlessly. Ask how their day was, ask what's new, ask when they're done work or if they're home from vacation. People love being pursued, so show them you want it. Eventually, they will hit you back.

Also, if you're successful in the fuck buddy department, it could be hard to remember basic things like their name, or where they're from. Make a mnemonic device to keep them straight, it works every time usually.

If you're kinky

Let it be known. This should be reflected in your primary photo. Either a person in bondage, a woman's ass being spanked, or a shot of your nether regions encased in punishing leather garments. You don't want to lie by omission here, or bother to get to know someone before you share your innermost desires.

For a relationship

Start with something along the lines of "hey beautiful whats (sic) up." This a) lets the person know you find them bangable, and b) puts the onus on them to reciprocate the conversationality. Now, it's on them to amuse you, and you've started the whole thing off with the upper hand, which means you've set yourself up to be in the driver's seat for the entirety of the relationship.

Be sure to ask them a lot of questions about their work, what their average day looks like, and how they organize their fitness regimen before you ever meet. What people are really looking for on dating sites is to be seen. To be heard. To be understood. How can you be soulmates with someone if you don't even know what they tend to have for dinner, or if their job at the bank is rewarding?

When you meet up, be sure to bang on the first date. But just don't bang on the first date, because they might think you're just looking for a casual hookup and never text you again.

Also, if your match is a person of colour, be sure to ask them where they come from a lot. If they say somewhere in Canada, really, really press them on it. They want to talk about it, trust me. They want to get in touch with their roots. If you keep at it, eventually they're sure to just admit that, actually, they're FOB from another continent. Relationships are built around honesty, amirite? It should all be put out on the table.

If you're looking for love and marriage

If you want someone to commit to you by law, the first thing on your list is get an iPhone. Green text bubbles are not to be trusted. It either means you think this is 2005 and are one of the last seven people on the planet still using a Blackberry, or you're the kind of person who jerks it to their own commitment to Android. Both disgusting. Invest the $600 for that soothing blue bubble. It will buy you not only dick/pussy/both/other, but true everlasting love.

If you're looking to get married, you obviously need to attract someone is also voraciously looking to be wed. This person will be the basic of all basics. Here is how to snare yourself a husband: put on lots of glittery, shiny, wet pink lip gloss, purse your lips together, and thrust them out and as far away from your face as humanly possible. Really reach them out there! It reminds men of a vagina. If you're a man looking to get married, you need to include at least one shirtless mirror selfie taken at the gym. There is really no better display of virility. 95 percent of women want babies, and they have to know you have strong genes.

Further, if you are sexually active and living in a city, there is actually only one degree of separation between you and every other passably attractive person out there getting banged. If you're gonna keep up, you're gonna have to fuck like it's your job for a little bit. Plain old missionary sex is not going to cut it for anyone anymore. Your lovers should be able to tell you've been practicing.

And as for platforms: people on Tinder aren't looking to get married, you fucking tool. Tinder is for the first few categories. Try OKCupid or, if you're a freak of the largely undesirable sort, POF.

If you're looking to save yourself for a godly union or something, this entire site just isn't for you and I can't help you.

If you're looking for friends

GTFO online dating sites. You're annoying as fuck and no one likes you so fack off.

Conclusion

... And there you have it! Swipe right a lot, but never message your matches first. If they message you, make sure they can see you ignore them for a little while before responding. But make sure you don't ignore them, you want them to know you're real, and not afraid to get invested in something. Happy swiping!

*Not scientifically accurate.

You might not have noticed it, but the word ended yesterday. Language, the brief and probably doomed human experiment in communicating the immaterial by honking strange noises from our mouths or scratching loops and lines on pieces of paper, is over. You might try to talk to someone, and find yourself surprised by the vaguely simian hoots emerging from a wet and messy hole in the middle of your face that you no longer have any name for. You'll try to read a book, and find the pages covered in patterns as essentially meaningless as the scattered pebbles on a beach. Any semblance of society should have broken down entirely by Thursday. And all because Oxford Dictionaries named the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji as its Word of the Year 2015.

According to Oxford Dictionaries, the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji (also known as the "crying laughing emoji") was chosen as its Word of the Year "because it was the most used emoji globally in 2015," making up 20 percent of all British emoji use, and 17 percent in the United States. You've probably seen it, most likely accompanying a Vine and the words "LMAOOOO" or "I'M CRYING." It's not hard to see the relevance: We laugh, but we're weeping; the emoji represents a generation torn between socially mandated hedonism and epidemic melancholia, a world saturated with mass entertainment and lacerated by spectacularized bloodshed, a schizophrenic century. As statements of the age go, it's enviably succinct and rich in meaning. But for some people, it's heralding the end of days.

The Daily Telegraph led its coverage with the line "RIP language?" Thousands took to Twitter to impose their shock and outrage on nobody in particular. Oxford Dictionaries masochistically chose to allow comments on the official announcement; at the time of writing there are dozens of responses from the world's most boring people, keyboard Quixotes leaping to the defense of Western civilization by saying "today is a sad, sad day" and "why would you pander to this millennial token that drives us away from literature?" It was as if the Word of the Year weren't just a cute little marketing gimmick, but something that Oxford Dictionaries' squadron of armed goons was about to violently impose on the population at large, burning books in vast bonfires and draping landmarks in authoritarian red banners festooned with crying laughing emoji.

Related: Watch 'The Digital Love Industry'

Perhaps the most revealing expression of disgust came from @DepressedDarth, a Star Wars–themed parody Twitter account that inexplicably has over half a million followers. It wrote: "Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year is an emoji. RELATED: The Death Star finally has a good enough reason to destroy Earth." Apparently, whoever operates that account didn't see the minor hypocrisy in objecting to people communicating with little pictures of everyday objects while himself (let's be honest, it's a him) communicating exclusively through references to a schlocky 1970s science fiction film.

All this anger seems to stem from one blithely repeated but actually fairly contestable assertion: an emoji is not a word, and so the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji should not be allowed to be the Word of the Year 2015, and all this is very important. Except who's to say that an emoji isn't a word? Usually if you're having some kind of dispute over whether or not something is a word, you look in a dictionary—and Oxford Dictionaries has named the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji as a word. It's a discrete and combinable written element that conveys semantic (and, arguably, syntactical) meaning; the generally accepted linguistic definition is pretty much fulfilled.

True, it can't be pronounced, but it's not alone here. The Tetragrammaton, or the Hebrew name of God, יהוה, also lacks any determinate vocalization (in fact, it's expressly forbidden for anyone but a high priest to even attempt to speak it) but few people would insist that the name of God is a millennial token driving us away from literature. There's no necessary connection between writing and speech: emoji are a logogramic writing system, representing a concept rather than a sonic image, and therefore comprehensible across spoken languages—much like written Chinese, which is entirely legible to speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese, despite the fact that they would pronounce any given symbol in entirely different ways. Are Chinese words not words either?

There are, however, some slightly weightier objections. In the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern linguistics, a central component of language is its arbitrariness. There is nothing that inherently links a signifier (the spoken or written form of the word) to the signified (the mental image of its object). The word "red" has no intrinsic qualities that link it to the color; if the language had evolved differently, we might be using the word "blue." Instead, meaning emerges through a differential relationship between signifiers: a word doesn't refer directly to its object, but to the absence of all other words. But the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji doesn't negatively represent the totality of the signifying system; it represents a face with tears of joy. And while it's possible to conceive of a writing system in which the emoji actually represents something different—"fish," perhaps, or the concept of dignity—that's not how it's actually used.

But if the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji isn't technically a word, it might be something better. The philosopher Jacques Derrida expands on Saussure's theory in his efforts to build a literary approach that is not logocentric—that does not privilege speech over writing. In his book Writing and Difference, he alludes to the idea of a "lithography before words": writing whose fundamental unit is not the word but the mark. Unlike words, marks aren't confined to humans; a dog pissing against a tree to denote its territory is engaging in some form of writing. He didn't know it, but Derrida was describing the emoji. It's not the death of writing and literature and civilization in general; instead, at long last, these things have reached their purest, perfected form.

Follow Sam Kriss on Twitter.

Lomu teaching kids the haka. Image via Flickr

Arguably one of the greatest rugby union players of all time has died at the age of 40. All Blacks superstar Jonah Lomu died Wednesday morning at his home in Auckland, New Zealand. He'd been battling a rare disease known as nephroticsyndrome since he was 20.

Jonah Lomu's life played out like something written in Hollywood. He grew up in a poor part of Auckland called Mangere, but his rare combination of size and speed made him an artist. Still in high school he played with the national under-19s in 1993, before becoming the youngest-ever test player with the All Blacks at the Hong Kong National Sevens tournament in 1994. What came next has become rugby folklore.

In 1995, just one year after graduating from sevens, Lomu was selected to play at the World Cup in South Africa. He'd barely scraped in, having failed a fitness test at a training camp earlier that season. But then in his first match against Ireland he shocked the naysayers by scoring two tries in a 43–19 win. This performance was followed by another five tries over four subsequent games, culminating in his famed moment against England at the Cape Town semi-final.

Jonah Lomu consisted of around 120 kilograms of muscle stacked in a six-foot-five frame. He could run 100 meters in under 11 seconds, which made confronting him a bit like tackling a bus. This was made clear when he ran over England fullback Mike Catt.

Suddenly Lomu was rich and famous. He was asked for opinions and endorsements and met his future wife at a Johannesburg barbecue. To most observers it looked like just the beginning, but actually, and for many purists, he was half done. Lomu's health complaints were to compress his triumphs into two blindingly fast seasons—the 1995 and 1999 world cups.

In another world Lomu never got sick and continued to play at this level, but in this one he began to lose sensation in his legs. Towards the end of 1995, he visited a doctor who informed him that his symptoms—weight gain, dizziness, frothy urine—were the hallmarks of the illness that would eventually leave him paraplegic unless he had a kidney transplant. He was 21.

He married his girlfriend, Tanya Rutter, and attempted to curb his vast appetite for junk food. He focused on getting well but an injury pulled him from the game, and his absence continued through to 1997. The following two years were comparatively quiet for Lomu, who played poorly and featured only with the All Blacks off the bench in domestic games.

This changed at the 1999 World Cup in Wales. This was renaissance Lomu and he achieved eight tries from his six appearances and played with the sort of strength and finesse that attracted attention from the American NFL. Australia won the cup that year, but for a few weeks it looked like this Tongan kid from Mangere would move to the States. This didn't happen but Lomu finished the season having scored nearly a quarter of his total tries.

Looking back now it seems the best was over. Lomu's health deteriorated over the next years and in 2003 he dropped out of the Super 12 early. In an article published by Fox Sports he conceded that by this point he could barely walk.

"The darkest moment was when I fell over for the first time," he said. "I had no clue why it happened. By the time of the 2003 World Cup, I needed my wife to help me walk. I would take three steps and fall over, or I could walk for ten minutes and then just fall over out of the blue. It just gave out when it wanted. I was basically numb from the knees down."

In mid 2004 Lomu underwent a kidney transplant. This happened under some secrecy but it later emerged that New Zealand radio presenter Grant Kereama was the donor. Kereama admitted he was angry his identity had been leaked, telling Scoop that "I don't think it is for others to judge or comment on. I had two kidneys and I am in great health. Jonah was not well and was in need of one. It was very simple for me."

Lomu retired in 2007; having scored 37 tries for New Zealand and sharing a World Cup try-scoring record of 15. He was inducted in the World Rugby Hall of Fame in 2011.

Lomu's peak now seems tragically short, but it was also this brevity that made him a god. He came from nowhere and through a debilitating illness played some of the best rugby around, but it was also the way that he grew that made him so admirable. In 1995 he was barely out of adolescence and spoke in monosyllables that sometimes received subtitles. But by the end he was an ambassador for charities, a public speaker, and a mentor for kids who'd similarly come from nowhere. As Auckland Mayor Len Brown said on Tuesday, "Jonah was one of Auckland's greatest sons. He was an icon who New Zealanders from every walk of life respected. Our thoughts today are first and foremost with Jonah Lomu's family at their time of loss."

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Intrepid VICE editor Drew Millard steering his hoverboard through LA. Photo by Mike Pearl

Read: I Tested Out the 'Hoverboard' that Got Wiz Khalifa Handcuffed at the Airport

"Hoverboards" don't really hover, and they aren't really even boards. They're basically just RipStiks with motors, but no one seems to want to admit that. But whatever you call them, riding one in New York City can get you a ticket.

Gothamist reported that the NYPD made the status of swegways official earlier this week in the form of a since-deleted tweet, which read: "Be advised that the electric hoverboard is illegal as per NYC Admin. Code 19-176.2."

Apparently, if you're caught (not) hovering on your (not) board on the (not-so) mean streets of the Big Apple, you could be fined $500. Good thing that Missy Elliott video where guys did handstands on them already dropped.

The declaration that these boards are illegal stems from their classification as motorized vehicles that can't be registered by the DMV. "Even though they aren't in the DMV's list of expressly prohibited motor vehicles, they are considered motorized self-balancing devices, similar to Segways," wrote Gothamist.

Consider this one more reason to finally make that move to LA: Starting January 1, when new legislation takes effect, Californians will be able to "hoverboard" all they want.

The vigil for Paris in Trafalgar Square, London. Photo by Chris Bethell

More on the Paris attacks:

Will Anti-Refugee Sentiment Grow in the UK Following the Paris Attacks?

What Would It Take to Destroy the Islamic State?

Refugees in Greece React to the Paris Attacks

Yesterday afternoon, after arriving back from the G20 Summit in Turkey, David Cameron addressed the House of Commons in the aftermath of last Friday's attacks in Paris. With five days having passed since the attacks left 129 dead and 350 injured, the political response in the UK is now fully underway.

With Conservatives looking to pursue their own domestic agenda and the threat level currently set at "severe"—the security services claim to have foiled seven terror plots in the past year—the attacks in Paris could have far-reaching implications for life in the UK. To understand how the British state might respond in the weeks and months to come we took a look at three different areas of policy: counter-terrorism, the surveillance state, and the war in Syria.

COUNTER-EXTREMIST CRACK DOWN

The armed guards at Wembley last night were a visible sign of the effect the Paris attacks are already having in Britain. After chairing a Cobra meeting on Sunday night, Theresa May told the House of Commons on Monday afternoon that a number of steps had already been taken in the wake of the attacks. Over the weekend personnel from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment joined armed, undercover police officers on patrols across the West End. Security at airports and major events has been increased.

On top of that, extra funding for GHCQ, MI5, and MI6 to hire 1,900 new operatives is being planned in what the Telegraph called the "biggest expansion of the security services since the 7/7 terror attacks in London."

A review of exactly what happened in Paris on Friday is also set to take place—as it did after Charlie Hebdo and other major atrocities like 9/11 and 7/7—to see what lessons can be drawn. One possible outcome of this according to Arun Kundnani, an expert in counter-terrorism policy and the author of The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror , is increased militarization: "Whenever you get one of these events there is an attempt to mobilize a new level of aggression in counter-terrorism policy," he told me.

"This is not the first time we've been in this kind of situation. It happened with 9/11 and it happened with 7/7. One of the things you might see emerging is an attempt to say that what happened in Paris illustrates that we need to have a greater military presence within British cities. It's possible that the government will push for armed military personnel to be deployed on British streets were an event like Paris to unfold. There's some sort of logic as to why that might be necessary in certain circumstances but I think the danger of harm is greater than the advantages of it. We would be crossing a line of militarizing our civilian life in a whole new way."

The attacks might also influence the government's counter-radicalization program—which has already been criticized for criminalizing and pathologizing Muslims. "I think we'll also see a much greater climate of suspicion that will drive increasing numbers of people through this existing system," Kundnani said. "The number of people being referred through the 'Prevent' program is likely to continue increasing and the threshold someone needs to cross before they are considered a risk is always somewhat subjective and is going to shift now. All of this is going to increase the sense of alienation and drive people into a more polarized position in British society."

In October the government published yet another round of even more authoritarian counter-extremism proposals. Following the previous piece of legislation it seeks to create a number of new powers for those deemed extremists including a hunt for them in the public sector, an "extremist analysis unit" and "extremism banning orders." Before the Paris attacks we could have expected these new policies to be directed at Muslim communities more intensely than anywhere else. Today that feels even more certain.

THE SURVEILLANCE STATE

It was in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre earlier this year that David Cameron promised to reintroduce the "snooper's charter" and extend the government's surveillance powers should he win the forthcoming general election in May. It was hardly surprising then, that after Friday's attacks people's thoughts quickly turned to the Investigatory Powers Bill, a surveillance plan published earlier this month and anticipated to pass into law by the end of 2016.

Now however, senior conservative ministers are pushing for it to be passed through parliament much sooner. Speaking on Radio 4, David Cameron said the government "should look at the timetable" and in an article for the Mail on Sunday the former terrorism legislation reviewer Lord Carlile said the law should be "expedited."

Even without the possibility of it being fast-tracked the draft has caused a lot of controversy. Edward Snowden, the former intelligence analyst who blew the whistle on illegal government surveillance programs— described it as "the most intrusive and least accountable surveillance regime in the West." Among the measures it could introduce are laws forcing internet companies to store information about which websites their users have visited for a year and rules that force companies with encrypted messaging systems to disable them at the government's request. So what is the danger of it being fast-tracked and what are the risks?

Paul Bernal, a lecturer at the University of East Anglia's Law School specializing in internet privacy told me that both are significant: "It would mean the problems with the bill won't get proper scrutiny—both the civil liberties problems and also the technical, technological problems. It's really important in a bill like this to get those things right. If they don't go through the proper scrutiny the law will be vulnerable to being struck down."

Whether or not the bill is fast-tracked it's easy to see the Paris attacks being used as a major part of the government's justification as it seeks to pass the legislation through parliament.

"It's historical that whenever there is any act of terrorism we bring in more draconian laws," Bernal said. "Whether they have any effect is another matter. The US Patriot Act is probably the most dramatic example. It was passed incredibly fast and had huge implications that were not taken into account."

Related: Watch 'The Cost of Dying in Greece'

INTERVENTION IN SYRIA?

Since the attacks in Paris, the discussion over military intervention in Syria has returned once again. Speaking on Radio 4's Today program yesterday morning David Cameron said that so long as IS ignores the border between Iraq and Syria the UK should not restrict its aerial campaigns to Iraq.

This has been his view for some time. While the UK has been involved in a bombing campaign against IS in Iraq since September 2014, Cameron has wanted to join the coalition in Syria, too. The problem for him is a lack of appetite for war in a parliament scarred by past failures. In 2013 parliament rejected a vote to launch airstrikes against Assad and plans to seek approval to fight IS were shelved in early November with Cameron not wanting to face another humiliation.

Is this likely to change? At the G20 summit, Cameron admitted that he still doesn't have the backing of Parliament. But the pressure on the UK to maintain its international reputation by "doing something" is clearly growing and Cameron appears to think the case for military intervention has been considerably strengthened after Friday. "I've always said there's a strong case for us to do so, our allies are asking us to do this and the case for doing so has only grown stronger after the Paris attacks," he said in a statement to the Commons yesterday.

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Look at Stephen Maurice Graham's website, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram.

Alberta Education Minister David Eggen has ordered schools in the province to create LGBTQ-friendly policies. Photo via Flickr user Dave Cournoyer

Shortly after midnight on Aug. 14, a teenage boy in Southwest Calgary left a house party to walk a female friend home. On his way back, he was stopped by a group of fellow guests —between four to six males. They proceeded to beat him unconscious and leave him on the street; he was later hospitalized and released.

As part of an effort to find the assailants, Calgary police this week revealed the victim was attacked because he was gay. And yet just a day earlier, Alberta school board trustees voted against discussing policies that would specifically help protect LGBTQ students. This begs the question: what the fuck?

Alberta School Boards Association president Helen Clease was quick to say her members will work to meet the province's inclusivity guidelines, while Colleen Munro, chairwoman of Rocky View Schools claimed the no vote boiled down to agenda protocols not being followed.

"It has nothing to do with the essence of the motion, it's all about the procedure," she said.

Oh, OK then. LGBTQ kids are being bullied, beaten up and are contemplating suicide, but as long as we're adhering to the right meeting procedures.

Alberta has made progress in terms of LGBTQ rights in recent history, with the province legislating that schools are obliged to accommodate gay-straight-alliances should students request them. But, on the ground, there's a lot of work left to be done.

According to an investigation by Metro, 45 of the 61 school boards in the province don't have policies in place relating to gender identity discrimination, a gap that caught attention when the mother of a 7-year-old trans girl in Edmonton filed a human rights complaint because her daughter was singled out for wanting to use the girls' washroom. The little girl told her mom she was thinking of killing herself.

While debating the issue, Edmonton Catholic school trustees literally started screaming at each other, prompting a likely fed-up Education Minister David Eggen to tell them to "get their acts together." Eggen has since ordered all boards in the province to develop procedures targeted at LGBTQ youth by next March. And yet, at Monday's ASBA meeting, fewer than two-thirds of the boards agreed to even have a conversation on the topic.

"It's amazing to me they're not seeing what harm that in and itself does," Yiorgos Boudouris, founder of Acts of Greatness, a Calgary-based LGBTQ youth outreach organization told VICE.

"The refusal to even discuss this, what message is this sending to these LGBTQ youth who need this now?"

It's sending the message that authority figures don't care enough about an already marginalized group of kids to even talk about measures that could safeguard them. (For context, as Michael Janz, chairman of Edmonton Public Schools, pointed out: there are explicit school policies relating to oil wells and defibrillators.)

Some Alberta schools have claimed their "diversity" or "social justice" clubs are good enough, but we know that gay and trans kids have specific concerns and face specific challenges around safety and mental health.

"They know that in an LGBTQ GSA safe space they can talk about these issues," said Boudouris. "There's someone there to listen and to help."

Minister Eggen's deadline is months away, but the truth is, Alberta schools needed these policies in place yesterday. It's time for the people purporting to be in charge to get over their egos and do what's best for their students. Lives are depending on it.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Jose Ramirez, 13, who lives with his family in the Texas colonia of La Presa. All photos by the author

Sitting shirtless on the porch of his teal blue wooden shack, Victorio Ramirez, 75, squints half-blind eyes and listens to 15 grandchildren flutter around his South Texas land. A few young boys toss a ball and tease each other in Spanglish. A six-year-old girl rides her pink scooter through the mud. Barefoot babies flop on a giant bed with an aunt. Twenty-one relatives live on Ramirez's three-acre lot, crammed into four makeshift cottages, a trailer, and an outhouse.

Though he's now too frail to walk, Ramirez boasts of the homes, "I built them—who else?" The motley assortment of structures sits near Texas' southern border, just a few miles north of the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo. But despite the proximity, Ramirez hasn't returned to Mexico since he emigrated to the US in 1963, and his grandchildren have never visited his home country. But conditions in their American neighborhood mirror those that Ramirez would have left back in Mexico. The family has no access to running water, waste disposal, or drainage. The dirt road floods so heavily that the family sometimes can't leave the property when it rains.

The Ramirezes live in a colonia, one of more than a thousand US communities near the southern border that lack basic infrastructure. In Spanish the word "colonia" simply means neighborhood—but in the US, colonias describe the improvised subdivisions that crowd the southern border, where ranchers or developers has carved dozens of lots to sell on the cheap—without access to water, electricity, or sewage. Immigrants, mainly from Mexico, own the lots, and have added on new homes and shacks to accommodate the new generations. But while most residents are now US citizens, the colonias are still among the most impoverished, underserved communities in the country.

In colonias, life can be a constant series of struggles to meet fundamental needs. Simply getting water can take hours of work, since many communities have no pipes or wells. Over half the colonias in Texas' Webb County, where Ramirez lives, still lack potable water, according to a report on colonias published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas earlier this year.

The Ramirez family is lucky, in a sense, as their colonia is close to a dam (the town's name, La Presa, means "dam" in Spanish). Residents travel a few miles, making multiple stops to retrieve the water they need. Since Ramirez can now barely walk or see, his son-in-law, Lucio Ramos, drives to the city pump every few daysto fill a giant tank the family uses for bathing and cooking. The water isn't clean enough to drink, though, so Ramos also purchases hundreds of water bottles at convenience stores each week.

"If you don't have a car, you don't drink and you don't eat," Ramos tells me as he grabs a bucket to fill from a fresh tank at the front of the property.

But while thetrips are a hassle, Ramirez at least, seems resigned to the family's circumstances. "Of course I'd like running water but what can I do about it?" he says.

Agatha Martinez, Ramirez's neighbor and a member ofLa Presa's community board, told me the community has long been pushing for water services, but to no avail.

"We've been fighting for years and years for water, and we're tired of no one listening," she said. "It hasn't gotten better here."

The struggle to fulfill basic needs can be even worse in more rural colonias. Folks living in Santa Teresita, about 30 miles from Laredo, Texas, must venture all the way to the city to restock—about a 45-minute drive. As in La Presa, cars are essential—there's no public transportation from the colonia.

Catarina Casares

Catarina Casares, a 60-year-old widow who now lives alone in Santa Teresita, relies on her grown children to visit from Laredo with water shipments each week, since she has no vehicle.

"Yesterday they brought me two bottles of five gallons of water," she told me in Spanish while strolling past the chicken cages and goats outside her bungalow. She moved to the colonia two decades ago, after living in Laredo for 20 years ago. "I don't have a car, so I work here, taking care of the elderly," she said. "I'd love running water, but by now I'm used to this."

Many colonias also lack waste disposal systems, which means residents install their own septic tanks, potentially contaminating their land and that of their neighbors. The lack of potable water and waste disposal presents a serious public health concern, says Juan Manuel de la Rosa, a professor of pediatrics in El Paso who serves on the US-Mexico Border Health Initiative, a bilateral initiative between the two countries.

De la Rosa, who also serves as the vice president for health affairs at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, told me when he conducted research of colonias in the 1990s, he found high levels of hepatitis A due to residents placing latrines too close to their neighbors' yards—sometimes near wells used to store water. Other studies corroborate his findings: Back in 1998, researchers found that children in colonias had a 37 percent rate of hepatitis A, compared to their contemporaries in urban border areas. (According to de la Rosa, inadequate research has been conducted to track the communities' progress with hepatitis A in recent years.)

Colonias often lack paved roads. Residents in La Presa told me the school bus doesn't enter the community after hard rains—and when the roads are blocked, it's impossible to drive to a well to retrieve water.

"Every time I see a dark cloud I drive straight to get water, before we get stuck here," Martinez said. "It gets so bad you can't get down the street."

Electricity is yet another battle, according to some residents I spoke to. Erasmo Sanchez, who bought a lot and house in a colonia in January, said the city of Laredo told him he needed water in order to qualify for electricity.

Since no water runs to his community, Sanchez would need to install a well, which he said would cost more than he paid for the property. "I can't afford to do that," he explained. Instead, he's bought a generator for his seven-person family to use for power.

This lack of basic amenities, from water to power, totally contradicts American housing standards, de la Rosa pointed out. "It must be remembered these are American subdivisions," he said. "These are not people living in a third world country but third world country conditions exist."

Colonias first started in the 1950s, when developers divided up rural land near the border to sell to immigrants for dirt cheap prices. The terrain tended to be located in floodplains, or be otherwise unsuitable for agriculture, and lacked access to critical services like water.

But many new arrivals were eager to own a slice of American land, and colonias were the only option they could afford, de la Rosa told me. As housing prices in South Texas cities began to surge, even rentals became prohibitively expensive, leading to a proliferation of colonias communities by the late 1960s. "Since colonias fell outside city limits, developers only had to follow the housing code of counties, which was often nonexistent," de la Rosa explained.

To woo buyers, developers commonly promised residents that water and other city services were on the way, said Oscar Muñoz, director of the colonias program at Texas A&M University. "The fact is were sold the American Dream with the promise the city was eventually going to get to them with services," Muñoz told me. "It's a very lucrative business—it's not ethical, but it's easy for people to be taken advantage of."

For Ramirez, the colonia represented a rare opportunity to buy a a piece of property in the US. He first moved from Mexico to Dallas in 1963, working as a lawnmower, but by the late 1980s, he began to lose his eyesight and wanted a stable home for his family. So he bought three acres on a colonia for just $12,000 from a rancher, who had divided up his property.

"This land was cheap and we had nowhere else to go," Ramirez recalled. "Also, it was better here than the city. Here we don't have to deal with a bunch of noise, drunk people and loud music."

According to a factsheet from the Texas Secretary of State's office, émigrés who bought land in colonias often signed restrictive contracts for deed agreements, in which the buyer would for the property over time, often with high interest rates, and would not officially own the land until all of the payments had been made.

A contract for a deed requires no credit history so was a feasible way for low-income immigrants to purchase land. But the financial arrangement also left the buyers vulnerable to exploitation. The contracts weren't recorded with the county clerk, making it hard to enforce any commitments the developer made to provide infrastructure. And the developer could repossess the property if a buyer fell behind on payments for as little as 45 days.

In some cases, developers would allow delinquent buyers to continue living on the property, but would discredit all past payments so the resident would have to start paying again from scratch, said Jose Luis Guiterrez, the Laredo site director of the colonias program at Texas A&M. "There are people who've been paying for their property for decades, and they still don't own it," he said.

Related: Watch our documentary on prohibition in Northern Canada

By the late 1980s, the housing crisis at the border began to attract national attention. As the price to live in cities surged, more and more residents fled to colonias, and the communities' problems became increasingly apparent. The New York Times reported in 1988 that colonias residents faced constant health risks: the South Texas county of El Paso had more dysentery than 30 states, more hepatitis A than 29 states, and more hepatitis B than 20 states.

"What you hear today are the sights and sounds of human misery," Reverend Ed Roden of the South Texas town Socorro reportedly told a congressional committee in 1988. "The situation is so shockingly tragic and profound that most people would not expect it to exist in this country."

Federal and state governments eventually confronted the conditions, and have pumped an estimated $1.79 billion into the colonias in Texas since the 1980s, according to some reports. The Texas state legislature also passed a series of bills in the late 80s and early 90s to allocate funds for water, sewage, and other infrastructure in the communities. State lawmakers there also passed 1995 bill known as the Colonias Fair Land Sales Act Colonias Fair Land Sales Act, which required developers to register colonia land sales and to declare available services, like water and sewage.

A new report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas suggests that recent improvement efforts have significantly impacted the colonias. In 2006 the state of Texas started classifying colonias by their health risk and infrastructure, and at that time 442 colonias had no infrastructure, the report found. By 2014, the most recent year for which data is available), 337 had no infrastructure—a drop of about 25 percent. The report also found that in 2006, just 662 colonias had potable water, adequate drainage, paved roads and waste disposal; but by 2014, 922 colonias were fully equipped with such infrastructure.

While some colonias have indeed transformed through public aid, La Presa and hundreds of other communities remain virtually untouched. These colonias are classified as having a "high health risk," according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

The Texas Secretary of State recognized in a December 2014 report that significant roadblocks—including the remote locations of the communities and limited grant funding—continue to hinder progress for many of the subdivisions.

"Compared to where we were in the 1970s with colonias we've made great strides," de la Rosa said, "but it's not enough."

As the state struggles to better equip colonias, the population in the communities continues to multiply. Most of the growth now stems from burgeoning families—according to an ABC News report, one-fifth of the 500,000 colonia residents in Texas are children, the vast majority of which are US citizens.

The poverty cycle can trap new generations in the colonias—61 percent of residents fall below or near the poverty line, this Fed report found, and 55 percent of adults living in colonias have earned less than a high school diploma. About 45 percent lack English proficiency, compared to less than 10 percent of residents in the US overall.

Ramirez half-joked to me about his offspring living on his land, "They have to stay here—where else would they live? Anywhere else they'd have to pay."

Other residents, like Martinez, are determined for their children to leave, so they can pursue a better life. Martinez's kids live and work in downtown Laredo, after she urged them to abandon her home.

"I think people only stay here because they have to," Martinez told me.

As taxing as colonia life can be, some urban youth decide to return to the communities as a way to connect with their roots. Valeria Garcia, 21, who lived on a colonia until the third grade, when her family moved to Laredo, plans to reclaim her grandmother's forgotten plot once she has finished college.

"I miss it, it's peaceful," Garcia told me in Laredo's Motel Six lobby, where she works.

And to Ramirez's children and grandchildren, the calm, close-knit community tethers them to La Presa.

"Even if I had more money I'd stay here," his 27-year-old daughter Rosio Ramirez told me. "We got tired of the city life...here we get to live in the open air."

Ramirez's grandson Jose, a 13-year-old who lives with his mother in a Dallas apartment, has spent his last two months in La Presa and has begged for his mother's permission to stay. In Dallas, he has internet and all the typical modern amenities, but he said he likes the peace of La Presa.

"There are so many robberies in Dallas, but here you don't have to worry about crime," the teen told me, as his grandmother Guadalupe strolled onto the property after a day working at Laredo's Embassy Suites hotel. She agreed and told me the "tranquil" colonia life beats Dallas.

"I feel more at home here," Jose added, leaning on a wooden plank near his grandfather as we talked. "I'd rather be around my family."

Follow Meredith on Twitter.

Every day it seems like the housing situation in the Bay Area becomes more and more fucked. Approximately 100,000 people moved to the region between the summers of 2013 and 2014, according to data from the US Census Bureau. Meanwhile, San Francisco only has 55,000 units of new housing (i.e., apartments, condos, and single-family houses) in its construction pipeline, with many of the largest developments expected to take over a decade to complete.

As the tech boom lures tens of thousands to the region, workers are finding that the industry's notoriously lavish salaries aren't enough to make market rate housing affordable. Rents have gotten so high that local publications have openly wondered whether commuting by air from Las Vegas makes more economic sense than trying to rent in the Bay Area. In response to the housing crisis, a loud army of activists, journalists, community leaders, politicians, and trolls has emerged to accuse each other of spurring the outrageous upsurge in regional housing costs.

But not everyone is content to merely debate the issue. The San Francisco Bay Area Renters' Federation (SFBARF), a pro-development political action committee, is attempting a new strategy: Find a powerful progressive organization, pack its ranks with sympathizers—heavily recruited off Reddit—then use this new voting bloc to take that organization over, and leverage its platform and influence to convince voters to change the city's housing policy.

The organization is putting this strategy into action with the local Sierra Club chapter. Sonja Trauss, the founder of SFBARF, told VICE that her group has already recruited 210 supporters to join the venerable environmental advocacy group, whose executive committee elections begin today and run through December 18. The effort has received praise from local newspaper columnist Robyn Purchia and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman.

This is not the first time outsiders have tried to hijack the Sierra Club: in 2004, reports surfaced that anti-immigration activists had engaged in a decades-long attempt to stage a hostile takeover of the organization's national branch that would have allowed hate groups to advance their views without seeming racist. And even if SFBARF fails to take over the club, the campaign could serve as a blueprint for how real estate and other monied interests can seize control of influential liberal groups with open elections.

Over the course of reporting on SFBARF's efforts to take over the San Francisco city branch of the Sierra Club, VICE uncovered evidence that Donald Dewsnup, the SFBARF member spearheading the campaign, has a track record of using shady activism tactics in his attempts to make the San Francisco housing market more amenable to development, including providing multiple false addresses to the Department of Elections to gain access to a neighborhood organization he wished to influence. VICE also learned that Dewsnup has been banned from the neighborhood-oriented social network Nextdoor for making online threats so severe that they led users of the service to file a restraining order against him.

The Sierra Club Becomes a Target

Before we get into all that, though, it's important to understand why anyone would want to take over a local Sierra Club chapter at all. In recent years, the San Francisco city chapter of the Sierra Club has come to represent the interests of a variety of local progressive causes such as the solar energy initiative CleanPowerSF and the county's 2010 vehicle registration fee increase. Though protecting the environment is the national organization's chief concern, this often manifests itself locally in different public policy stances. This includes a commitment to supporting what a Bay Area Sierra Club spokesperson termed "transit-oriented housing," referring to housing built near public transportation with the intention of reducing the number of cars on the road.

In 2013, as part of a broad coalition of organizations, the San Francisco Sierra Club backed an effort to block a proposed 134-unit, 136-foot-tall condo project at 8 Washington, a parking lot steps away from the city's waterfront Ferry Building. The groups argued that the project, which would have sold bayside units for an estimated $5 million, would create a "wall on the waterfront," and kick off a wave of development that could transform the San Francisco shoreline into Miami Beach. Although the city's Board of Supervisors had previously approved the project, two separate initiatives made it on to the citywide ballot in 2013, allowing voters to determine the outcome of the project.

The campaign against the development was run by Jon Golinger, an environmental attorney and longtime activist living on nearby Telegraph Hill. When voters handily rejected the project, Golinger credited the Sierra Club (of which he's a longtime member) with helping sway voters against the project.

SFBARF has repeatedly used the Club's opposition to this project as evidence that the local chapter has gone rogue. That's not hyperbole: SFBARF founder Sonja Trauss literally referred to it as a "rogue chapter" when I spoke with her recently. She feels that anti-housing activists have taken over the Club's Executive Committee and have turned the Sierra Club into a NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) organization. "If nobody is paying attention," Trauss told me, "any old asshole can take over the board, and that's kinda what happened here."

The irony of her statement, of course, is that her organization is trying to do the same thing, but sway the Sierra Club in the opposite direction.

The Beginnings of SFBARF

For nearly two years, the San Francisco Bay Area Renters' Federation has had a singular message: build more housing, and build it now. It's a mantra that plays well with libertarian-minded Redditors (the San Francisco subreddit boasts over 48,000 subscribers) and with the scores of downtown strivers moving into the region, compelled by the booming tech industry.

Trauss, a former math teacher from Philadelphia who now lives in Oakland, started SFBARF in early 2014 as an email listserv she ran as a passion project. It has since grown into a burgeoning political operation, converting cash and outspoken support from the likes of Yelp's Stoppelman and Y Combinator partner Garry Tan into widespread credibility in the tech scene. The group has become a regular feature on the San Francisco subreddit, where users have praised Trauss and her "important activism." And Mike Schiraldi, a former Reddit employee and administrator, once referred to as "the face of our company" by a Reddit colleague, is an active member of SFBARF who promotes the club online and off.

In March of this year, Dewsnup joined the ranks of SFBARF, becoming what Trauss described in an email to VICE as "an enthusiastic and active member of our group." It was Dewsnup's idea, Trauss claimed, to infiltrate the Sierra Club. Though she admitted no one in the organization knows where Dewsnup actually lives, Trauss wrote it off, saying she "hadn't pried too much into Donald's private life." She characterized him as an "eccentric," but one who's "absolutely dedicated to the local causes he believes in."

Dewsnup's been a full-time housing activist ever since he joined SFBARF. He's been in the Bay Area since 2012, when he moved from Seattle in what he told VICE was an attempt to revive his ailing real estate career. He joined the San Francisco Association of Realtors, and became involved in the group's government affairs committee. Still, relocating did little to help his career. Speaking to me over the phone, he said he has failed to close a single real estate deal in his time as an agent in San Francisco.

VICE News: Airbnb Hates San Francisco's Rental Regulation Proposal—And Is Spending Millions to Kill It

In July of this year, Dewsnup, along with a few other SFBARF members including Schiraldi, attended the Sierra Club's San Francisco chapter Conservation Committee meeting after learning that the committee had previously adopted a resolution opposing height-limit increases on two projects that would have cast shadows on a public park.

In an email to VICE, Schiraldi claimed that though SFBARF members "had hoped to start a dialogue, the reaction of the existing members was distrusting and harsh."

"At one point, I got called an 'anti-environmentalist,' which I found really hurtful," he added.

In a September call-to-arms post on Reddit, Schiraldi wrote that Becky Evans, the chairwoman of the Sierra Club chapter's executive committee, had characterized SFBARF's members as "developers of high-rise condos for the rich." He continued, "I'm not trying to paint her as too much of a villain here, but if this is her view of anyone who supports more housing, it explains a lot."

But the primary goal of the post was recruitment, as evidenced in the title: "The SF chapter of the Sierra Club helps pass anti-housing laws that increase sprawl, carbon emissions, and the destruction of the wilderness. With the help of about *10* more redditors, we can fix this."

Schiraldi originally proposed packing the Sierra Club's conservation committee with pro-development Redditors. But SFBARF quickly realized that it would be easier to form a coalition of five real estate industry sympathizers (including Dewsnup) to run as a candidate slate in the club's executive committee election, which began November 18 and runs through December 18. Their expressed interest is in ousting the old guard and flipping the script on the Sierra Club's selective approach to construction. It only costs individuals $15 to join the Sierra Club and, according to the club's bylaws, any member can vote in chapter elections. Moreover, voting can be done online by new members who ultimately know very little about the candidates they are casting their ballot for.

"The Sierra Club has a homeowner's association feel to it with these elderly white folks," said Dewsnup, who is 48, when I asked about the contentious relationship between SFBARF and the Sierra Club.

SFBARF, utilizing Schiraldi's influence on Reddit, amassed a voting bloc of 210 pro-development activists to help Dewsnup's slate sweep the Sierra Club's chapter election. Those numbers pose a significant challenge to the club: In an October post on SFBARF's Google group, Trauss predicted that of the San Francisco city chapter's roughly 3,000 members, only 390 of them would end up voting in the election, meaning SFBARF would have a significant voting bloc come election time.

The Sierra Club's low bar for voting ultimately has provided SFBARF with their opportunity. Schiraldi and other members have heavily promoted the campaign on Reddit, with one such post classifying SFBARF's insurgent attack on the Sierra Club as "a civil war over whether housing people in cities is good or bad for the environment." It also allowed Dewsnup to amass significant support while receiving little scrutiny.

In an interview, Evans, the local Sierra Club chairwoman, repeatedly refused to discuss the new Sierra Club members or their motivations. Of Dewsnup, she only remarked that he has been "a quiet participant" in the meetings.

Dewsnup Skirts the Law

The Sierra Club isn't the first organization Dewsnup has attempted to infiltrate. And he has often resorted to unsavory tactics in his dogged activism on behalf of pro-development causes.

In late 2014, Dewsnup attempted to gain membership to the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, a 61-year-old neighborhood association, in what he told me was a ploy to get closer to Golinger, a prominent member. However, according to records filed with the San Francisco Department of Elections and the California Bureau of Real Estate, Dewsnup has registered paperwork at three different false addresses in the San Francisco neighborhood of Telegraph Hill in what Dewsnup told me was an attempt to establish a record of residency in the neighborhood.

Dewsnup's real estate license is listed at an address on Telegraph Hill's Filbert Street, which, according to the city assessor's property database, does not exist. He also registered to vote at a separate address down the street. Then, according to San Francisco's Department of Elections voter registration database, on October 9 of this year, Dewsnup re-registered to vote by mail at a third address on Filbert Street. Property owners at the two legitimate addresses on Filbert confirmed that Dewsnup has never lived at their properties.

After reviewing court documents, VICE discovered a fourth address for Dewsnup in the city's Castro neighborhood. Dewsnup later confirmed that is his true residence. When confronted with evidence that he provided false addresses, Dewsnup said it had been necessary to join the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, which he characterized as an obstructionist organization. "I had to give an address on the hill, and that is how I was able to join that group," he told VICE in a phone interview.

"I have not broken any laws," Dewsnup said. "I did give a false address, but I have not broken any laws—I made sure of that."

Watch: The Two Kids Who Remade 'Indiana Jones' Shot for Shot

A Fresno, California, comedy troupe called Dumb Drum just released a no-budget recreation of the full Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer, and it's surprisingly good. You'd be surprised at the kind of movie magic that can be whipped up with dental floss, cardboard, a few dozen army figurines, some imagination, and a seemingly endless supply of friends who apparently have nothing better to do.

The Star Wars 7 trailer remake has all the characters and Star Wars thingies you've come to love, only now they're made from cardboard. There's cardboard Chewbacca, and cardboard Stormtroopers, and cardboard TIE fighters, and a cardboard Millennium Falcon. There's even a cardboard desert, since Fresno doesn't really look much like the sandy planet of Jakku.

DIY recreations of famous movies isn't a new concept—it's called "sweding," and there are plenty of other Star Wars swedes out there already—but Dumb Drum's version of the trailer is spot-on.

Check out their low-rent video above and then watch it side-by-side with the original to see how well done the whole thing really is. May the cardboard force be with you.

Follow Brian on Twitter.

Times Square. Photo: Wikipedia

Everything you need to know in the world this morning, curated by VICE

US News

• IS Times Square Threat Not Credible
  New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has allayed fears over a new Islamic State video that suggested Times Square could be a potential target for attacks. The mayor said there is "nothing new" in the video's images of the city and "no credible and specific threat". —CBS News

• Virginia Mayor Suggests Internment Camps For Syrian Refugees
  The Democratic mayor of Roanoke explained his city's refusal of Syrian refugees by comparing the "threat" to the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Meanwhile, Jeb Bush said it's okay to let refugees in if they can prove they are Christian. —VICE News

• Chemical Spray Used in Minneapolis
  Both officers and protesters deployed a chemical irritant during clashes outside a north Minneapolis police HQ. Police also named the two officers—Mark Ringgenberg and Dustin Schwarze—who were involved in the death of Jamar Clark, an unarmed black man shot Sunday. —Minnesota Star Tribune

• NYC's $3 Billion Plan to End Homelessness
  New York City authorities plan to create 15,000 housing units for the homeless, all paired with social service support. About 58,000 people are in the city's shelter system, and concern remains about the rising number of people living on the streets. —The Wall Street Journal

International News

• France: Danger of Chemical Attack
  The French Prime Minister has warned that the country could face chemical or biological attacks, as he urged MPs to extend the state of emergency. Authorities are yet to confirm whether the suspected ringleader of the Paris terror attacks was killed in a police raid. —BBC News

• Canada Sticks to IS Jet Withdrawal
  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he will keep his pledge to pull fighter jets out of the US-led air campaign against the Islamic State. After meeting President Obama, Trudeau said his country would still be a strong member of the campaign against IS. —AP

• The Antibiotic Apocalypse
  The world is on the brink of a "post-antibiotic era", scientists have warned, as tests show bacteria are becoming resistant to drugs of last resort. The report in medical journal Lancet warns common infections could kill once again. —New Scientist
• Water Cannons Used on Protestors in Philippines
  Police have used water cannons on protesters on the streets of Manila, the Philippine capital where Asia-Pacific leaders have gathered for a trade summit. Students and labor groups say the trade bloc exploits poorer countries. —Reuters

A still from the video of Pussy Riot performing at Banksy's Dismaland

Done with reading today? That's alright—instead, watch our new film, 'Life Inside Japan's Ageing Biker Gangs'

(Illustration by Dan Evans)

Men often think of themselves as lone wolves. Lone wolf being ambitious in the office. Lone wolf on Tinder. Lone wolf playing Fallout 4 alone in a flat, eating lasagne out of the microwave carton. As we get older and life inevitably starts flinging shit at us, we might start to wonder whether there's a reason most wolves hunt in packs.

While we're typically sociable beasts during school and university, when the pressures of work start beating down, faces that were once familiar to us can start falling away, making us realise just how alone in the world we truly are.

This month, a YouGov poll carried out by The Movember Foundation found that 12 percent of men over the age of 18 don't have a close friend they would discuss a serious life problem with. That's two and a half million men across Britain. Over a quarter of men said they got in touch with their mates less than once a month, and 9 percent said they don't remember the last time they made contact with their friends.

This can develop into a serious problem in later life. Research by the World Health Organisation has shown that a lack of close friends has a significant impact on men's health in the long term, leaving us at risk of depression, anxiety and suicide.

Sarah Coghlan, head of Movember UK, tells me: "Many men we've spoken to don't actually realise how shallow their relationships have become until they face a significant challenge, such as bereavement, breakdown of a relationship, fatherhood or loss of employment – and yet that is of course when good friends are needed most."

So what happens to our friendships as we get older? Here, six men at different stages of their lives discuss their relationships with their friends.

Matt, 19
"I did the first year of sixth form, but I've had a rough year relationship-wise so didn't do well and left. I've been working seasonally since then. When that relationship stuff was going on I spoke about it to my friends who I went to secondary school with, rather than my new friends at college, just because I knew them better. I'm quite lucky that I'm in a social group that has about seven or eight people in – mostly other guys, but a couple of girls. We all went to secondary school together, but a few of them I've known since primary school. I'm pretty open with all of them, so would talk to them about anything. They've also come to me in the past about personal stuff. I'd rather talk to friends than family because they may be going through similar things at the time, so they can relate more. I have friends and acquaintances from work or sport, but my friends from school are tried and tested. We've been through a lot together."

Tom, 21
"I went straight into work after school. Maybe I would have made more friends if I'd gone to uni, but the student lifestyle is a lot about getting drunk and experimenting with drugs, which I do neither of. I would have been very much an outsider because those things have never appealed to me. I have around six or seven close friends, and I also live with a bunch of new friends, which is a laugh. I work four or five days a week, so on my days off I try to see mates if they're free. Ninety percent of my friends go to hardcore gigs, so I can always find them there in the moshpit. The past three years is when I've made most of my friends. When I was 16 I had no mates. The main reason it changed is because I have become far more confident about speaking to people. I couldn't communicate with people when I was in my teens; I was too scared. These days, I have two friends I feel like I can go to for everything. They let me live with them for a month while I was looking for a place and I told them some deep shit. They're more like my family than my own."

Most of the people I see are from work, which is a bit depressing.

Stefan, 24
"I graduated last June after staying on to do a Masters. To be honest, there were only really about two people that I felt like I actually got on with at uni. The others are part of a group that I see quite often to go drinking with, but they're not exactly people to discuss life decisions with. Since I've started working this year most of the people I see are from work, which is a bit depressing. They're good people, but the only thing we have in common is working at the same place. I have about three friends I see regularly, and a few others I talk to on WhatsApp but never see in person. As I've got older I think I've stopped trying to be nice and friendly to people I don't actually get on with. At school I used to try to be part of loads of different groups, but now I just hang out with those three guys I know from back home, or go to effectively mandatory work socials with people with kids. I think it's a good thing, though – I've found the few people that I'll probably get on with for a long time instead of trying to maintain relationships with people that I don't really like. If I had a serious problem, I'd talk to my girlfriend about it – unless it's about her. I've got one old friend I've known since I was three that I still see a few times a year whenever he's in London. He's the one friend I'd probably still go to with that stuff."

Ben, 26
"I've still got three or four friends from uni, but I was quite a different person then. I had more of a self-destruct button. The reason I'm not friends with more people from then is that I didn't make the sort of friends I'd want to have now. I wouldn't want to do the stupid shit we used to do. My mates from school are my closest mates, but I don't seem them as much – which is paradoxical, I guess. I see them about five weekends a year, usually at stag-dos or weddings. I know they've got my back. Some of them have been through some bad times, and after we've talked about those things I don't think there's anything we couldn't say to each other. It's hard to make time to see friends, though. I feel like weeks can be rinse-and-repeat. If your girlfriend gets one or two evenings a week, I try to do exercise two days a week, Friday is a bit of a lottery... when am I supposed to do anything else? There's no time. I had a conference call for work this evening, and that's not uncommon. So it's hard to have the time or energy to plan things with friends. It's sad. It's a bit depressing when I think about it."

My closest friend is probably the most emotionally stunted person I know.

Colin, 28
"I have a core group of friends from my first year of uni who I still keep in touch with, although some have moved abroad. My best mate from uni chased a girl to New Zealand, but I still manage to speak to him every day. The awkward thing about my group of friends is that one of them is my ex-girlfriend. If I try to introduce a new girl into that environment I'll pretend it's all fine until I get a barrage of shitty text messages. Other than that slight hiccup, I try to see them as much as possible. At uni, most of our downtime was as a result of horrendous hangovers caused by £2 treble deals. My first year or two after university was very much filled with withdrawal symptoms from not having these moments, but I'm OK with it now. If I have a serious problem, there are different people I'd talk to about different issues. One of my closest friends is probably the most emotionally stunted person I know, so I tend to keep away from discussing anything in depth with him. On the other hand, he's one of the funniest people I know, so I'll happily escape from my problems in his company."

Michael, 30
"I didn't go university, but I went straight into a working environment where I met a group of people of a similar age, and I'm still in touch with a few of them. In my mid-twenties I was always out with my mates on the weekend – we'd meet up all the time. At that point, it felt like the partying would just keep going. But towards the end of my twenties that started to change. People are living their lives more individually now and building towards their careers and their future. Nobody has as much time to spend having fun. I think it's just age that has initiated that change, and I understand that. I only still see a handful of my close friends, but if I want to speak about a serious problem or deeper issues I would usually only speak to my girlfriend. I'd really like to spend more time seeing my old friends again, but nowadays I tend to find that if I'm not the one who's busy, then they will be. It's difficult to find the time."

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This story appears in the November Issue of VICE.

On a drizzly Saturday this May, a small crowd of weekend shoppers gathered in the plaza outside Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church for the city's annual Peace Festival. With its incongruous crumbling spire jutting out over Berlin's lone stretch of luxury retail, the church is an abiding testament to the bombing campaigns that cratered the city during World War II. Around the church, the festival organizers had set up an arts and crafts tent, a "Falafel for Peace" food stand, and a modest stage on Breitscheidplatz. A lineup of amateur performers was playing to the half-empty picnic tables. At around 2 PM, after a woman in an obviously homemade butterfly costume sang a nature-themed cover of Pharrell's "Happy," Abdul Rahman Masri, better known as Murder Eyez, jogged onstage.

Masri is a rapper and native of Aleppo, the contested city that over the past four years of Syria's civil war has come to resemble the most devastating photographs of postwar Berlin. It looked as though he'd wandered in from some other festival entirely. Burly and bearded, he was wearing an old-school LA Raiders cap—a nod to the hip-hop group NWA—and a checkered kaffiyeh around his neck, signaling his allegiance to Palestine. Beneath a beaming purple photograph of Mahatma Gandhi, he decried all Arab leaders as "liars" and "bitches" and began the show with the classic Dr. Dre/Snoop beat from "The Next Episode" ("Hey, hey, hey, hey, / Smoke weed every day"). As he transitioned into his own tracks, the rain suddenly picked up, dappling the paper plates that were scattered across the picnic tables. Umbrellas ruffled open; the crowd began to disperse. Masri implored his audience to stand up, go crazy. He signaled the DJ to fast-forward to his next track. Then, just five minutes into his set, he thanked the audience, wished them peace (excepting, he said, any Arab leaders out there), and waved farewell.

Although few outside the region will recognize the name Murder Eyez, Masri is one of the most popular rappers in the history of Syria. He is also among the first, having recorded his debut single on cassette more than a decade ago, before most Syrians owned CD players, to say nothing of personal computers. During his rise to prominence, Murder Eyez performed weekly in posh Aleppo clubs, recorded tracks for Arabic hip-hop's leading impresario, Fredwreck, and rapped abroad for audiences in Dubai and Cairo—cities where it can be difficult for a Syrian to command cultural attention. In 2010, he was one of three finalists on a rap talent show called House of Hip-Hop, which was broadcast across the Middle East. In the months following the first anti-regime demonstrations in Deraa, in 2011, you could still find his music playing all over: on mobile phones, in taxicabs, and blasting from Aleppo's barbershops and cafés.

Back then he owned a recording studio, his own music label, Big Change Recordz, two clothing stores, and a graphic design business. Through a mixture of bluster, talent, and luck, he'd achieved a miniature version of the entrepreneurial hip-hop lifestyle he'd admired since childhood. He'd even become a kind of regional tastemaker: In the years leading up to the revolution, he'd used his studio to mentor scores of younger artists, who, on account of his large frame and status as the local capo dei capi, dubbed him "the Godfather."

Then the war came. He lost his studio, businesses, and family home. Since 2012, Masri's life has followed the familiar narrative of the refugee: a series of dangerous escapes punctuating long periods of agonizing idleness. He won asylum in Germany, where he is one of about 161,000 Syrians—a number expected to rise considerably over the next year. (From January through the end of July, 44,000 Syrians applied for German asylum.) But this figure accounts for only a miniscule fraction of the nearly 12 million Syrians—more than half the country's population—who have been forced from their homes since the war began. Seven and a half million are internally displaced; a little more than 4 million are registered abroad, the vast majority in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Though they command much of the media attention and invite the most political controversy, fewer than 4 percent of Syrian refugees reside in the European Union.

Now that he has settled in Rostock, a small city on the Baltic coast, Masri wants for work and friendship. His family is scattered across Syria, Egypt, and Dubai. To mark time, he fixes laptops for acquaintances and volunteers his computer expertise at a nearby Lebanese restaurant, all while keeping in touch with his legion of online fans: the Syrian youth diaspora, displaced but active as ever on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Every few days he uploads an intimidating selfportrait, a few words of wisdom, or excited plans for a new music video. But Masri's life in exile is often at odds with his pugnacious and upbeat public persona. "In Rostock I'm always alone," he said. "In my small apartment. Doing beats and things like this. My bad luck to be in a small town with a racist attitude so I don't have friends." He has health problems—he recently underwent surgery for a kidney stone—and he suffers from nightmares and feelings of alienation from German and even Arab neighbors. The thousands of likes and comments on his social media accounts have only clarified his solitude, not to mention his failure to find a receptive local audience. Even though it was summer-festival season, he couldn't get organizers in Germany to return his calls. The Peace Festival had been his first and only performance of the year.

"I have huge power," he told me, "but I can't turn it on."

Before the revolution, Aleppo was Syria's largest city and its economic hub. Its reputation as a resilient center of commerce predates the Hittites. Aleppines have prevailed over earthquakes, famine, plague, and an extensive history of imperial invasion from the Babylonians to the Ottomans and colonial French. The rise of the Baath Party in the 1960s brought stability to the region, but even peacetime in Aleppo could be turbulent. In March 1980, President Hafez al-Assad sent 12,000 troops to the city to quell protesters demanding democratic reforms, reportedly killing hundreds. Most recently, the city has seen some of the worst violence in its 7,000-year history: Aleppo has been balkanized by revolutionary armies, incessantly bombed by President Bashar al-Assad's soldiers, and abandoned by a majority of its citizens. Eighteen separate armed factions patrol the city in protean states of alignment. In many eastern neighborhoods, the destruction is absolute.

By contrast, the Aleppo of Masri's youth was a peaceful center of industry and culture. He was born in 1981, the eldest son of a government clerk and a schoolteacher. In high school he was a typical urban B-boy, breakdancing and lip-syncing over the imported hits of Ice Cube, Xzibit, and Dr. Dre. When he was 18, Masri gathered a group of like-minded amateurs ("Murder Eyez" originally referred to a trio) for his first live show—maybe the first hip-hop concert in all of Syria. He paid a local musician to record instrumental covers of his favorite songs and rapped over the tracks using his own carefully transcribed, if often imprecise, English lyrics. About 50 people came to see the weirdos who'd rented a restaurant for a rap show, but to him it felt "like five million."

"I was the first Syrian rapper. These guys rapping now—most of whom are aligned with Assad, or rebel groups like the Free Syrian Army or al-Nusra—grew up listening to me."—Abdul Rahman Masri

Masri studied information technology at the University of Aleppo, where his music remained a hobby. During his mandatory postgraduate stint in the army, he began recording lo-fi singles of his own and passing them out to friends and family. After military service he worked IT jobs to save money to start his own businesses, most of them hip-hop-related: fashion, graphic design, and production.

"I was the first Syrian rapper," he said. "These guys rapping now—most of whom are aligned with Assad, or rebel groups like the Free Syrian Army or al-Nusra—grew up listening to me." Yet from the start, Murder Eyez was working in a known tradition. Like other early Arabic rappers, notably the Palestinian group DAM, he began by trying on American hip-hop tropes. But soon he found himself focusing on the concerns of his country's youth: establishing the cultural identity of a small nation often overshadowed on the world stage by larger regional players, such as Egypt, Jordan, and Iran. At the time, the small hip-hop scene in Syria was dominated by the country's young bourgeoisie, according to Mohammad Abu Hajar, a Berlin-based, left-wing atheist rapper originally from Tartus. It was this group who knew English and had been exposed to Western media.

Today's Arabic hip-hop can be roughly divided into two categories: mainstream stories of love and loss, and political songs concerned with the realities of the Middle East—oppression, women's rights, Western imperialism, poverty, and revolution. Absent the commercializing forces that changed the American hip-hop landscape in the 1990s, this latter branch has remained true to the genre's South Bronx roots as a medium for political musing, manifesto, and screed. But whereas some early Syrian rappers' work was explicitly critical of the region's power structures (Abu Hajar has been criticizing the state with songs about honor killings, oil subsidies, and illegal detention since 2004), Murder Eyez's early oeuvre hewed closer to mainstream sentiment, only occasionally veering into political territory to assert the importance of Arab unity. (From "Wake Up": "You must stop appealing against each other with tongues like knives / Enough to fill your pockets and forget the millions of poor.") For the most part, the Western media has covered Arabic hip-hop only when a musician fits the narrow mold of the impassioned Arab Spring–style protester, and even then the coverage is limited to political content. Murder Eyez's music, with its throwback 90s-style beats and boastful, often joyfully apolitical lyrics, would seem to have had little appeal for Westerners searching for palatable freedom fighters. But in Syria he found a receptive audience.

After a brief stint working in Dubai, Masri returned to Syria in 2010 to open his recording studio and start Big Change Recordz. He called it "the first record label in Syria," but it more closely resembled a collective of like-minded friends, including Omar, a young rapper he was mentoring. Masri gave away most of his singles and made money with Omar by charging unknown but moneyed amateurs for studio time. Virtually all popular music in pre-war Syria was DIY. The government afforded few copyright protections to artists, and as a result, there was no real professional recording industry inside the country. Just to record a song legally, a musician first had to register with the state-run musicians' union, which did not recognize rap as a genre of expression. "I would have had to register as a pianist," Abu Hajar said. "The state didn't consider rap to be art, so all the recording studios were underground." According to Masri, the music press—doubly important in a landscape where bootlegs abounded and record sales were nearly nonexistent—was largely pay-to-play.

A working musician attracted followers by performing in restaurants, clubs, and rentable event spaces. Masri traveled to Homs, Damascus, and other cities, building a grassroots fan base to complement his inner circle of Aleppo mentees. At home, he recorded new songs every few weeks. His fame spread slowly, until his appearance on House of Hip-Hop. After the show aired in 2010, he was approached by Fredwreck to represent Syria in an ensemble song showcasing the varieties of Arabic hip-hop. It was called "The Revolution." That year, Murder Eyez released an album by the same name, his first proper LP.

"These were the happiest days," he told me. "We would stay out all night, driving around the city, and in the morning I would check on my stores and head into the studio to work. I never slept."

Masri's revolution was musical, not political. Decades of arbitrary state censorship had molded a generation of Syrian artists who knew to tread lightly over charged topics. "The government would never accept me if I got too deep in my music," he said. It was well known that musicians working in neighboring countries such as Jordan enjoyed greater freedoms. In 2007, shortly after releasing a song critical of Assad's oil policy, Abu Hajar was detained by state police and expelled from university. He moved to Jordan to finish school, and he was amazed by the mature state of the rap scene there. "People actually knew how to make beats," he said.

Two years later, near the height of his fame, Masri had his own brush with Syria's capricious censorship. He and Omar had traveled to Damascus for a show at a bar called Amigos. While taping up flyers, they were approached by one of Assad's intelligence officers and asked to come into the police station the next morning. When they showed up, the officer announced, "These are the Satanists." As evidence, he pointed to their hip-hop fashions and to the flyer, which featured Amigos' logo: the skull of a horned steer.

The men were arrested and taken to adjacent prison cells, which were filthy and dark save the slot of brightness in the door where food entered. They remained there for 20 days, after which Masri was brought to a courtroom. The charge was "spreading Satan's music." A sympathetic judge asked him to recite some verses of the Qur'an to prove his devoutness, and both men were released with a warning to avoid political subjects. After the arrest, Omar, the son of a wealthy industrialist, grew increasingly disenchanted with the government. When the protests started, he joined the ranks of young Syrians gathering at Friday-night mosque meetings.

But Masri didn't believe his arrest indicated widespread problems in the justice system, even given the regime's documented history of torture and unlawful imprisonment. "For me it was funny," he said. "I knew someone would catch the mistake. So long as you have connections, everything is fine."

Performing as Murder Eyez, Abdul Rahman Masri built a hip-hop empire in Syria. All photos courtesy of Masri

His attitude was typical. When protests spread from the country's southern regions in mid 2011, the cosmopolitan citizens of Aleppo were initially uninvolved. Masri's family moved in the city's elite circle of regime-friendly business owners, and Murder Eyez's most successful single, released that year, cautioned against divisive—that is, revolutionary—politics. Over a choppy and abrasive beat, he voiced the fear that youthful dissent might rend the country apart and pit brother against brother. Two days after the song's release, he told me, "It was in every taxicab in Syria, every mobile, every radio and TV station."

The surprise hit coincided with a pre-war surge in government support among a subset of affluent young Syrians. The single cemented Murder Eyez's status as the country's most recognizable rapper, while also occasioning anonymous threats against him and his family that hastened their eventual escape. He has since refused to align himself with either pro-Assad or rebel factions. To take sides now would be to incite further violence, he said. He is also worried about the safety of family members still in Aleppo: a sister, a brother-in- law, and several uncles and cousins, many of whom share his full name.

Assad's military responded to the early protests by arresting, beating, and shooting suspected participants. A few unwilling officers defected and founded the revolutionary Free Syrian Army. Armed skirmishes reached Aleppo in the first half of 2012, when security forces and state-armed shabiha fighters opened fire on peaceful demonstrators in the city. That year, on the third day of Ramadan, Masri was working in his recording studio when his mother called. "Don't come home," she said. "Your uncle's here, and we're moving everything." Behind her voice, he heard the rattle of gunfire. He thought of American war movies.

The family moved to a safer neighborhood, but violence followed as the city fractured into shifting zones of regime and rebel control. By August, opposition groups controlled eastern Aleppo. Meanwhile, Masri watched his diabetic mother's health decline. ("My father died before the war, thank God.") At the end of the year, shortly before the dramatic closure of Aleppo's airport, the family flew to Egypt, settling in Cairo for what they hoped would be a temporary stay. Masri was shaken by his sudden exile. He stopped recording music, put on weight, and watched his savings dwindle. Only after a year of silence did he write and record a new song, the mournful "Sigh of Aleppo." The video—in which he broods over scenes of the city's destruction—is his most viewed on YouTube.

After the military coup in Egypt, Syrian refugees there became frequent targets of abuse due to their perceived allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood. Masri found his family's future again uncertain, and he put his mother on a flight to Turkey. Thanks to a special visa exemption for elderly parents, she was able to go live with his younger brothers in Dubai, where they have worked for more than a decade. Masri had no chance of joining them—even now, the wealthy Gulf states have, with few exceptions, refused to accept Syrian refugees. But he knew of friends who had settled in Sweden, reportedly a haven for asylum seekers. Perhaps he could join them.

Masri decided to fly to Greece, where he paid the equivalent of $4,000 to get to Italy. He asked me not to publish the exact details of how he reached the shores of EU territory, but he showed me photographs taken on his cell phone that evinced a wearying and dangerous journey for him and his fellow passengers, one on which food and physical safety were at times uncertain.

Once the passengers reached Italy, authorities pressured them to claim asylum, as was required by the EU's Dublin Regulation. Masri says that the police beat detainees with nightsticks and that some people gave in and signed. Most new arrivals refused, however. Their eyes were on Germany and Scandinavian countries, where there is far more financial and structural support for incoming refugees. Those who refuse to claim asylum in poorer EU countries can be detained, but this is hardly a deterrent for desperate escapees. Many have heard tales of jobs and good welfare elsewhere. After three days in a repurposed gymnasium, Masri was released with the other holdouts, given food and a bath, and instructed to leave Italy within 24 hours. He then found transport into Germany, where he was arrested near the northern border with four other traveling companions. The cops were friendly and understanding, he said. The next day, he moved into a large refugee center near Rostock.

The ongoing conflict in Syria has created the largest wave of displacement since the Second World War, contributing to the record-setting 60 million people currently scattered by war around the world. About 800,000 people will enter Europe this year as refugees or migrants with virtually no way of doing so legally. Many cross the Mediterranean by boat, a dangerous passage that has killed more than 2,000 people this year. Few Syrians have the means to risk the journey into EU territory, and fewer still manage to reach the haven of Germany, where they find a supportive state apparatus and a high standard of living. In this sense, at least, having made it to the refugee center, Masri was among the luckiest of exiles.

In June—two months before the influx of refugees into the EU would capture worldwide attention—I visited Masri in Rostock, where he has lived since 2013. The German government had granted him asylum status, allowing him to receive welfare from a job center, rent an apartment on his own, and work if he could find employment. He met me at the train station at Lichtenhagen, a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. "This is it," he said, gesturing to the deserted street and towering residential dominoes. "There're no crowds here."

Rostock was once East Germany's largest port and one of the major trading hubs of the Eastern bloc. After the fall of the Wall, the shipping industry collapsed. Years of high unemployment and poverty followed. Since then, the name "Rostock" has entered the national consciousness exactly once. On the walk to Masri's building, we passed the occasion of the city's infamy: a large apartment complex known as the Sunflower House, decorated on one side with a floral mural. In August 1992, a mob of right-wing extremists attacked the building, which was being used as a reception center for mostly Vietnamese, Sinti, and Roma asylum seekers. The rioters shouted racist chants—"Germany for Germans!" "Foreigners out!"—and threw rocks and firebombs. Even as the housing complex went up in flames and residents scrambled to the roof, police and firefighters stood idly by alongside several thousand cheering onlookers. After the blaze was finally extinguished, justice moved slowly. Rostock's mayor was forced to resign, but only a handful of the 300 or so rioters were sentenced to time in prison. Across the country newspapers speculated on the meaning of this frightening return to 1930s-style unrest, and today mentions of Rostock can still conjure the specter of xenophobia. More than one German expressed surprise that I was visiting a Syrian refugee there.

He had a plan. He would become the rapper to speak for his own lost generation: young Syrian survivors who have had their homes destroyed and ambitions thwarted, if not by sniper fire and shrapnel then by displacement and uncertainty.

By chance, it was virtually in the shadow of the Sunflower House that Masri had found the one-room flat that held his twin bed, his couch, and the desk on which sat his large secondhand computer monitor. Above the bed hung a poster of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone.

"There are a few neighborhoods I was told to stay out of and not rent an apartment there," he said after making me a cup of Nescafé. "And two or three times a drunk guy has yelled something in German at me and a stranger has explained that it was against immigrants." Otherwise, Masri has been left undisturbed. He spends his days looking for work, writing songs, or else cycling to the small cobblestone plazas downtown. He avoids the company of others, even other Syrian exiles, although he had a hard time explaining why. Eventually, he found the words: "My uncle has been killed. Two cousins have been killed. A lot of places from my memory have been destroyed. There are too many things," he said. "Syrians in Germany have lost their emotional side."

Remembering Aleppo could occasion in Masri sudden feelings of helplessness, but more often he was jocular and exuberant. Decades of watching the world's biggest hip-hop stars had taught him the importance of self-aggrandizement, and he took pleasure in describing his rap and beat-making skills. For online fans he curates an unflappably tough persona: posting photo montages in which his eyes glower over the Aleppo skyline, and writing bombastic missives about current events and his own streetwise worldview. "Some ppl playin HardCore," he wrote on Facebook last year. "** I AM HARDCORE ** .. that's how I grew up n this is who I AM."

When we met he was wearing his standard hip-hop ensemble: a flat-brimmed baseball cap, sunglasses, and a shirt that read "Hustla King" amid an explosion of hundred-dollar bills. Hip-hop lifestyle was about appearances, he told me. As a practicing Muslim, he didn't drink or smoke. He also occasionally displayed the vestigial conservative values of his religious upbringing. When the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality this June, he posted a virulent message to Facebook that began, "Fuck the #LGBT Fuck the #Rainbow_ Flag." But when a gay man later confronted him about the post, he felt chastened. "He showed me I was selfish with my own opinion," he said. "It's against my society and my religion, but Europe is different, it's normal here." Above all, he hated violence, especially now that he knew what it was to be shot at. He said the name Murder Eyez was meant to imply a gaze filled with strength and resolve, and that he regretted the violent implications. (Before the revolution, he'd been invited to perform at the US embassy in Syria, where it was agreed he would rap under his birth name in order to avoid the potential scandal of a State Department performance that featured a devout Muslim rapper named "Murder Eyez.")

Of those rappers who stayed behind in Syria, some are now soldiers for either Assad or the Free Syrian Army. Even those who don't actively fight are often paid propagandists, Masri said, adding that he'd received offers from both groups but that he accepted none. Since the war displaced him, his music has avoided the sort of patriotic partisanship he'd embraced in what became his largest and most troublesome hit; instead, he has focused on the country's suffering and its future, on odes to friends and family, and on standard hip-hop braggadocio. His most recent single, "Arab Mud," excoriated Arab leaders for their indifference to Syria's suffering. He'd filmed the music video in his kitchen, against a blanket backdrop, a fact effectively masked by jittery post-production effects. "I did the music, the editing, the mixing, the video editing, and the graphics," he said. "I did everything myself here in the apartment."

This was another development that had slowed his work. In Aleppo, Masri worked with half a dozen regular collaborators. In Rostock, he was alone. The opportunities for a musician of any background were limited, and for a minority even more so. He longed to live in a larger, more youthful German city, such as Berlin or Cologne, where he might find more support for his music, including both fans and collaborators. "I need to move out of Rostock, to make my own recording studio again," he said. Moving wouldn't be easy, though. He would have to work his way through Germany's famous bureaucratic machinery and, if successful, forfeit his welfare checks.

By raw numbers, Germany accepts more refugees than any other country in Europe, although it trails several EU neighbors, notably Sweden, in refugees per capita. All of them lag far behind Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon, whose refugee camps are beyond overcrowded. (Syrian refugees make up more than a quarter of Lebanon's population.) In the first half of 2015, close to 180,000 people applied for asylum in Germany, about 34,000 of whom came from Syria. German chancellor Angela Merkel has invited all needful Syrians to apply for asylum in Germany, effectively suspending the EU's Dublin Regulation, which some pundits fear has created a new wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. While most Germans support their country's role as a haven for desperate asylum seekers, a steady reactionary impulse has taken hold in some regions. PEGIDA, the anti-Islam party whose name stands for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident, attracted thousands to its rallies last fall, and this summer, its candidate Tatjana Festerling won nearly 10 percent of the mayoral vote in its eastern stronghold of Dresden. In her campaign speeches, Festerling criticized asylum seekers who "left family and home because here there's somewhere nice to live and you get dough from the state."

Meanwhile, arsonists set fire to renovated shelters in Tröglitz and Vorra just weeks before migrants were to move in. Hate crimes have increased sharply over the past few years and intensified especially in recent months, even in liberal Berlin. Abu Hajar, the leftist rapper, described physical encounters with racists on public transit in the capital, where he has been threatened by locals with fierce-looking dogs and taunted with calls of "Moslem."

As the day waned, Masri and I took the train inland to eat at the Lebanese restaurant where he had offered his services as a graphic designer and IT consultant. Over the past few weeks, the restaurant had become a meeting place for the local Arab community. He introduced me to our waiter, an Iraqi barber who'd fled his country shortly after the US invasion and who quietly told me that things had been better under Saddam Hussein. An old man who'd lost his ring finger fighting for Yasser Arafat joined our table and asked me, in my opinion as an American journalist, whether it was true that the former PLO chairman had been poisoned. A group of Germans sat down and ordered a hookah. Arab families stopped in for tea, and Masri teased several of the children he knew.

"This generation is lucky," he said as he hoisted up a laughing girl by her overalls. "Because they escape from Arab rule and grow up in Europe. They will study in the best schools. They will get the habits of the European." The restaurant owner, a buff Lebanese-Palestinian man who'd lived in Rostock for 12 years (and who had married and fathered a child in the meantime), shook my hand and gushed in fluent German about the country's tremendous hospitality. In Masri's circle, pro-European sentiment was more or less universal, but other Syrians were willing to criticize EU policy and conservative German beliefs even as they praised the country's openness toward foreigners. Abu Hajar spoke of the condescension he'd witnessed in the "Refugees Welcome" movement, in which he said even well-meaning liberals often took their nationalism and ethnocentrism for granted.

The traumas of exile include both physical dangers and the alienation that attends language and cultural barriers in a foreign land. But there is a further trial, less often discussed: the exile's sudden abdication of power. Even the poorest citizen commands some influence in his homeland. On landing in Rostock, Masri found himself without a lifetime's worth of knowledge and cultural acumen. Upended in exile, he retreated inward. Knowledge of his sacrifice became an integral part of his self-image, even to the exclusion of other exiles, and he seemed determined to bend neither toward assimilation nor toward homesick resentment. "I don't have friends, especially Arab friends," he told me. "I'm trying hard to be away from the Arab mentality. I don't want to talk about the war anymore." I thought of a line of Edward Said's: "Clutching difference like a weapon to be used with stiffened will, the exile jealously insists on his or her right to refuse to belong."

A few days after I left Rostock, Masri emailed me to tell me he had concocted his most ambitious project since the war began. At the start of Ramadan, he assembled a group of seven Syrian rappers and producers, including both hard-line Assad supporters and revolutionaries, to film a music video promoting peace and unity for Syria. He spent the better part of a month editing the files sent to him by collaborators, and he released the song, "Upside Down," just in time for Eid. He had a plan. He would become the rapper to speak for his own lost generation: young Syrian survivors who have had their homes destroyed and ambitions thwarted, if not by sniper fire and shrapnel then by displacement and uncertainty.

He started a hashtag, #Syrian_Hip_Hop_Unity, which he began appending to his releases as well as those of other rappers. When we spoke again in October, he said that dozens of Syrian rappers had offered to support the hashtag, agreeing to set aside their sectarian differences in order to propagandize for a speedy peace.

"It's very hard to reunite people who used to hate and attack each other for 5 years hahaha but it seems it works," he wrote to me on Facebook. The small success had emboldened him, and he'd since swung back from misery toward his most natural state: busy optimism. He had about six other songs at various stages of the production process, most of them collaborations with Western rappers from the US, Germany, and France, and he was just finishing up a track called "Foreign," about being a stranger in another country. The best news of all, though, was that he was getting ready to leave Rostock. After months of searching for a job and an apartment in a more vibrant German city, he'd finally gotten lucky. "I met a German girl, amazing friend," he told me. "We started chatting online, and now she's helping me register at her apartment in Cologne." He would have to forfeit his payments from the job center, but he seemed pleased about this fact. "It's a big shame to be a young man and getting help from the government," he said.

Meanwhile, an anti-fascist group in Rostock had asked him to perform at a demonstration—his first concert since the Peace Festival—and other organizers were returning his emails about the 2016 festival season. He was back in business, making long-term plans and reviving a dream that could keep him in Germany indefinitely. He wanted to get an IT job in Cologne and save money in order to resurrect Big Change Recordz as soon as he could afford to open a studio. He'd already researched the whole process. "Before, we were an underground record label, but here I'll make it official, get the copyright, and make it legal."

In Rostock, when I had asked Masri when he thought he might go home again, he cut me off. "Of course I would love to go back today, but there's nothing there, no opportunities," he said. "Let's be real. Maybe my grandson will live in Syria."

This story appears in the November Issue of VICE.

On our drive across the barren, beautiful prairie of Semipalatinsk, a swath of land large enough to contain all of Kuwait, there was nothing to suggest secrecy or danger or the terrible, indelible extremes of human ingenuity. We parked, stepped outside, and the beeps of Yuriy Strilchuk's dosimeter, measuring the level of radiation, started coming faster.

With his wraparound shades, ponytail, and long goatee, Strilchuk looked like he could be leading a pack of soldiers into a post-apocalyptic battle. Instead, he was guiding a band of American journalists, equipped with shower caps on their shoes and heads, through a desolate stretch of land in northeastern Kazakhstan. We followed his orders not to breathe through our mouths without face masks or pick up any of the obsidian-looking rocks. But then, gloveless, he bent over and picked one up himself. "Melted earth," he said.

Beginning one morning in August 1949, Soviet scientists repeatedly made this very patch of steppe as hot as parts of the sun. Four years later, the nearby blast of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb—proof the world had entered the thermonuclear age—was 26 times larger than the bomb that had fallen on Hiroshima. After the United States test site in Nevada, this desolate place—dubbed the Polygon, the Russian word for "firing range"—would become the world's largest nuclear testing grounds. In all, 456 explosions were set off here, 340 of them underground after a ban on surface testing in 1963.

Strilchuk first came to work on testing at the Polygon in 1990, when this closedoff, 6,950-square-mile site was still in the outer reaches of the Soviet Union. By then, nuclear testing had waned: That year, the USSR, the US, the UK, France, and China conducted 18 nuclear tests, down from a Cold War height, in 1962, of 178. But testing remained part of a dangerous game of technological mastery, scientific understanding, and military one-upmanship.

The effects of previous blasts proved to be farther-reaching than military scientists had estimated: To this day, thousands of people living in the nearby city of Semey still struggle with staggering rates of mortality, cancer, and suicide. A 2002 study found that citizens who were exposed to high doses of radiation had an 80 percent higher rate of DNA mutation than control groups, and their children were twice as likely to have genetic aberrations.

The test Strilchuk was preparing for never happened. The Soviet Union dissolved, and on August 29, 1991, Kazakhstan's new president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, shut the Polygon down. Almost overnight, Semipalatinsk became a global symbol for nuclear disarmament and for the country's newfound independence from the Soviet Union.

But the decision also turned the Polygon into a no-man's-land, as Strilchuk and thousands of members of the military abandoned the site. Not long after they left, the scavengers arrived. They ripped out metal and other material from the old, mostly hidden nuclear infrastructure and, knowingly or not, exposed themselves to high levels of radiation. Local authorities were even issuing small mining permits to spur economic growth. (Mining has been a cornerstone of Kazakhstan's economy since Soviet times; today the country is the world's largest producer of uranium.)

Plutonium, the bomb fuel that's made from uranium, has a half-life of more than 24,000 years. In the early 1990s, fears that parts of the Soviet nuclear archipelago would fall into the wrong hands pushed Washington into action. One mission in 1994 covertly ferried more than half a ton of weapons-grade uranium out of a Kazakhstani metallurgical plant three hours east of the Polygon. (Recently, the same factory has been proposed as a global nuclear fuel bank for Iran.)

At the test site, analysts from the US Department of Defense were especially concerned about Degelen Mountain, home to the underground complex where the Soviets had conducted most of their nuclear tests. Officials later estimated that Degelen contained enough radioactive material embedded in metal and buried in tunnels for an aspiring nuclear power or a terrorist group to produce dozens of nuclear or radiological weapons. In 1996, the Department of Defense officially began a three-year project to "eliminate" the threat posed by the mountain, at a total cost of $6 million. That year, US and Kazakh officials celebrated the first set of tunnel sealings; no definitive accounting was made of what was left inside.

Strilchuk is now the head of training and information at the National Nuclear Center in the town of Kurchatov, a government research facility responsible for overseeing the site. I asked him if, back in 1991, he had imagined that leaving the Polygon might eventually raise the specter of nuclear terrorism. "This was a decision made by the president of Kazakhstan," he said. "What other choice did we have but to leave?"

Yuriy Strilchuk, right, director of training and information at Kazakhstan's National Nuclear Center, walks by blast observation towers at a test site. Many of these structures have been stripped by scavengers. Photo by the author

Siegfried S. Hecker was newly retired from his post as director of Los Alamos, the US nuclear lab where the bomb was born, when he received a troubling tip from a Kazakh acquaintance, a fellow nuclear scientist, in early 1998. Hecker had been on duty during the waning days of the Cold War and was well acquainted with the aftermath of nuclear testing. He traveled to the Polygon and was startled to see how bad the scavenging situation had become in and around Degelen: New machinery and torn-up earth indicated that it had reached an industrial scale.

A nuclear bomb might require about 17 pounds of plutonium, maybe less. Hecker estimated that the total plutonium in the area could be as much as 440 pounds. The material, he wrote in a report to officials in Washington, was "in reasonably concentrated form, easily picked up, completely open to wants to come." And it was hard to know how much, if any, was missing.

To convince dubious Russian officials the situation was dire, Hecker consulted the director of the Russian equivalent of Los Alamos and showed him photos of scavenging at the site. The next morning, physicists who were veterans of the Polygon joined Hecker and a team of Kazakh scientists to sketch out a cooperative effort to mitigate the dangers.

Everyone agreed to stay quiet. During negotiations, the Russians admitted that near Degelen there were more shallow shafts used for testing that were lined with plutonium. And in some instances, they said, not all of the devices in the tunnels had fully detonated, leaving behind pure plutonium or highly enriched uranium.

In 2000, the US paid for Kazakh engineers to begin sealing these sites, with their plutonium buried inside, using a mixture of concrete and steel, a technique that Soviet scientists had developed while attempting to contain the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, in Ukraine, in 1986. The sealing was intended to make the cost of extracting plutonium more expensive than making new plutonium.

But the effort was hobbled by legal impediments and delays in US funding. Soon, intruders were reopening some of the shafts and tunnels to get at scrap metal, in some cases brazenly using bulldozers, explosives, and other equipment that belonged to Degelen Mountain Enterprises, the mining company that had helped to seal them to begin with.

"Eventually everything gets out in the open." —Siegfried S. Hecker

September 11 and evidence that al Qaeda was on the hunt for nuclear material put American officials on alert. But the sealing at Semipalatinsk had stalled, and by the time the work began again in 2004, engineers found that 110 of the 181 sealed tunnels at Degelen Mountain had been reopened. The Russians made another startling admission: Buried inside Degelen were another 220 pounds of recoverable plutonium, along with highly sensitive components used for building nuclear weapons.

Department of Defense budget requests for the program spiked from around $5 million a year into the tens of millions. In 2009, according to a secret American embassy cable, a top-ranking US official visited Astana, Kazakhstan's capital, to communicate in person Washington's urgent push to "prevent nuclear-residue material from falling into terrorists' hands." The cable noted that "the risk of proliferation is high" and sealing the rest of the mountain would be "an up-hill battle."

A few weeks later, Vice President Joe Biden made a phone call to a high-ranking Kazakh official, imploring him to put an end to the scavenging. At last, a 37-mile area around the mountain was officially declared an "exclusion zone," with surveillance cameras and motion sensors. The US donated at least one small drone to help patrol the area and, all told, spent an estimated $100 million on security measures.

The following year, during a meeting at the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit, Presidents Barack Obama, Nazarbayev, and Dmitry Medvedev, of Russia, pledged to finish securing Degelen Mountain. In October 2012, a group of officials and scientists from the US, Kazakhstan, and Russia quietly celebrated the end of their efforts. After 16 years and more than $150 million in US assistance, the project was commemorated with a modest, three-sided monument near the mountain. In three languages, it said simply: 1996–2012. The world has become safer.

A model of ground zero at a museum in the formerly secret city of Kurchatov. Photo by Carl Robichaud

Notably absent from the ceremony was the world's central governing body for nuclear activity. Fearing that leaks and bureaucratic entanglements would slow down its work, the coalition had decided to conceal some of the plutonium contamination at the site from the record keepers of the International Atomic Energy Agency. During a 2010 visit by the IAEA, US officials managed to keep inspectors away from more sensitive locations. And recognizing the risks of reporting, IAEA officials appeared eager to play along.

"We thought about safeguards and asked ourselves, 'Is it worth the agency's efforts to allocate scarce safeguards resources for this material?'" an unnamed IAEA official told the authors of a 2013 report by Harvard's Belfer Center. "We decided it was not worth the cost involved of taking an inventory." As a result, international inspectors were never able to determine if sealing techniques at the Polygon met safety standards for long-term storage of nuclear waste. "Further assistance regarding Semipalatinsk is planned," an IAEA spokesman told me.

Nuclear secrets are justifiably guarded. In 2011, at the height of WikiLeaks, then secretary of state Hillary Clinton worried about an "internet age when dangerous information can be sent around the world with the click of a keystroke." She cited nuclear theft as a prime example. "By keeping the details confidential," she said, "we make it less likely that terrorists or criminals will find the nuclear material and steal it for their own purposes."

While Hecker defends the secrecy of the efforts to secure the Polygon, he underscores the importance of transparency around securing nuclear materials. "Eventually everything gets out in the open," he said. "In many areas, such as nuclear security, excessive secrecy backfires because the important information is kept away from workers or officials who have a real need to know."

The legacy of secrecy still reigns over the Polygon. While scavengers came within yards of unguarded plutonium, there is no evidence that they gathered any, officials said. But Sergey Lukashenko, director of the Institute of Radiation Safety and Ecology, said that worries remain about newly discovered "hot spots" around the test site where residues of plutonium or highly enriched uranium are present.

"We really don't know how much material we have," he said. It would be "nearly impossible," but with enough ingenuity and effort, a bad actor could today "in principle" extract enough material from the soil to devise a radiological weapon.

Last year, amid rising tensions over Ukraine, the Russian government informed US officials that it was exiting the nuclearthreat- reduction partnership; the US had already dedicated $100 million for the upcoming year to the program, which was set to last until 2018.

"The Russian government would like to extract itself from Semipalatinsk negotiations," Hecker said. Still, "cooperation between American and Kazakh scientists continues at Semi."

Today, there are some fences and barriers around the Polygon, and the most sensitive sites are guarded by surveillance equipment. But there is little to prevent herders and their animals from grazing on the rest of the landscape. Sanctioned mining operations are under way not far from Degelen Mountain, and the National Nuclear Center arranges public tours.

Lukashenko and his scientists are also trying to understand the lasting environmental damage at the Polygon, by growing beets and strawberries and chickens and looking for evidence of radiation. This kind of scientific effort—a kind of nuclear archaeology—will probably need to continue here, in some way, forever.

Still, he said, some parts of the Polygon were now relatively safe to visit and even to grow crops on. Someday, he hoped, more tourists would come (provided, of course, they didn't take any souvenirs).

Follow Alex on Twitter.

This story was reported with assistance from the International Reporting Project. Read more about nuclear topics on Motherboard.

"Nástio Mosquito: The Age I Don't Remember" at the ICA was commissioned by EDMASH

I meet Nastio Mosquito the afternoon of his latest performance. He's sitting on the marble back stairs of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, hunched over his laptop like a human prawn. This is not the elegant, tightly-wound, topless sweat machine I had expected after watching his 2013 performance piece "Demo Da Cracía." In that video, the 34-year-old artist dances, slowly undressing, in front of a large green screen while cascading a stream of consciousness to camera that includes tidbits like "I'm as Angolan as palm oil" and "Everyday the Cold War is available."

And yet here he is, soft-voiced, wearing small rounded glasses, sitting in the half-light of a stairwell just meters from Buckingham Palace, apologizing for running late. He's wearing a cardigan for chrissakes.

It hasn't exactly escaped my attention, either, that I'm meeting Mosquito during the 40th anniversary year of Angolan independence. But, it turns out, he isn't in much of a mood for looking backwards. "Separation is inevitable," he explains. "Separation from something that was, for something that is, with the enthusiasm for something that will be. If you're going to move then you have to leave something behind."

No wonder this latest piece, "The Age I Don't Remember," begins with the Bowie-like announcement that "Nastio Mosquito is dead." What's more, Mosquito is quick to point out the joke in the apparent nationalist fever in "Demo Da Cracía": "The irony of that statement is that palm oil isn't even originally Angolan," he explains, leaning back in his chair. "It's about the bullshit of identity. We use it for so many things—to connect or disconnect from people. It's ridiculous to be identity-driven."

Mosquito, who was born in Angola but spent 12 years working and living in Portugal, was recently nominated for Artes Mundi 2016 and received the Future Generation Art Prize for 2015. He's also performed at the 56th Venice Biennale: All The World's Futures (2015), held his first solo museum show at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, and, earlier this year, was named "the coolest guy in art" by journalist Grace Banks. So why, I wonder, is he so keen to kill himself off?

"The beginning of this performance is silent. It's about what has just been killed," says Mosquito, fixing me with a steady gaze. "For the night to be able to occur and for me to, for the first time, engage with my past and time, something has to be killed before. When you enter the room that something has just been killed . That's how we start."

Wearing all white, his shirt characteristically buttoned right to his throat, Mosquito's performance in "The Age I Don't Remember" is surrounded by screens, video, a live audience, and even a live band. "This dying to give birth to something new is a core element of our whole way of functioning. It can become religious, but if you want to be spiritual , or you can be pragmatic about it."

You mean we're all just feeding worms, who feed trees, who feed us, I venture? "Yes. It's a very real part of tangible life," Mosquito answers. "I need to kill my relationship with my ego, with what I've done, and engage with my sense of integrity of the now. What can I do now?"

Mosquito describes not just his work, but his entire life, as "building skyscrapers with my mind." It's not exactly a phrase I'd expect from a man killing off his ego, but, then again, who am I to judge? As if anticipating my antagonism towards such statements, Mosquito adds: "Most of the time I dream with my eyes open. I'm building skyscrapers every time I open my mouth. I have this recurring need to put myself in positions and I don't know why—it's to do with building something. I guess I want to have a positive impact on the people that cross my path. It might be a need to validate my existence."

How did he get that scar on his head, I ask, attempting to move the subject away from his cranial skyscrapers. "I fell on the floor," he says, touching his forehead. "I was too young to remember the pain. I fell in front of the house of an aunt of mine. She was a nurse but I was bleeding so much she had to do something there and then, which is why you can still see it."

I too have split my head open—resulting in a year-long loss of smell. Does he think an injury like that may have affected his approach to the world? "My concrete experience of life is vague, if that makes sense," says Mosquito, frowning. "I know I like rice a lot. I can say that with confidence. But there are very few things that I can do that about. I've always followed my need to materialize something; make it tangible. I don't make work based on my opinion, or because I need to say something. Of course, it's contaminated by my limited perception of things, but it's about giving light to possibilities. I thought there would be a stage in my life where I'd be able to say what was my favorite food, who was my best friend, my favorite movie, but I can't. People do this shit all the time and I admire that. I guess it's important for people to know what they like, but I just don't have a relationship with the world like that."

This somewhat transcendent experience of the world may be one of the reasons why Mosquito seems so utterly unconcerned by other people's opinions. "It's a huge privilege to have people not enjoy what I do," he says, going against the sentiments of pretty much every creative person I've ever met. "For them to not enjoy something, it has to be made first. It means that they saw it and there is something concrete about that dislike—it's tangible. Hopefully it made them realize something about themselves, too."

So he really doesn't mind if people walk out? Hate it? Take to the internet and run him through the mud? "It's not about me," he says calmly. "That's what's difficult to get a hold of. It's not about me; it's about doing shit. There's no way that can be negative. And to be positive doesn't mean people have to like it, either. Someone being offended or not liking it isn't bad—it can be a positive thing for them. For me, it's part of celebrating people's freedom to engage."

This attitude does, indeed, make Mosquito sound pretty cool. And yet, he assures me, he has certainly never thought of himself that way. "I used to go to parties with a notebook," he says, chuckling into the sleeve of his cardigan. "I liked to see people that way. I even went to discos with a notebook. Nobody thought that was cool, I assure you."

I'm not sure I quite believe that a handsome, internationally successful artist and musician—who's just recorded an album in a house in the north of Portugal, who speaks at least three languages fluently and is about to shout into the faces of a London contemporary art audience—really is, or ever was, painfully uncool.

But hey, perhaps that's the skyscrapers in my own mind.

Follow Nell on Twitter.