Since the announcement of his presidential candidacy back in June, Donald Trump has made a habit of saying whatever comes his lunatic mind, whenever it happens to occur to him. His run for the highest office in the land has been as unhinged as it's been unscripted, which seems to be part of the appeal. It's also been consistently unapologetic—from the early days, when he couldn't utter a sentence without deeply offending Mexicans, to just a week ago, when he used a 95-minute rant at an Iowa community college to compare Dr. Ben Carson to a child molester.

In that regard, the things that come out of Trump's mouth shouldn't surprise us anymore. And yet somehow, he manages to find a way. In separate interviews with Sean Hannity of Fox News, on Morning Joe, and with Yahoo, Trump has been dropping his latest unshocking shockers, declaring that in the wake of last Friday's horrific attack on Paris, the war on terror may require even further surveillance of people in the US. Some people, anyway. Namely, Muslims.

Specifically, Trump wouldn't rule out closing some mosques, requiring Muslims to carry special ID inside the U.S. border, or creating a database to track members of the one billion member religion. Also on the table: warrantless searches. "We have no choice," he told Hannity.

He hammered similar themes in a chat with Yahoo Politics' Hunter Walker. "We're going to have to do things that we never did before," Trump said of his plan to deal with Muslims in the US, acknowledging "Some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule."

"Certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. We're going to have to do things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago," he added.

If some of this sounds familiar, that's because it is. In 2011, it was revealed that the New York Police Department's demographics unit was spying on Muslim neighborhoods in the city, tracking where they shopped, lived, and worked in a database with assistance from the CIA. Members of the unit went undercover to infiltrate Muslim student groups, and monitor sermons in mosques. After a torrent of lawsuits and community complaints, the program was shuttered in 2014, much to Trump's apparent chagrin.

The tough talk on the topic of Muslims is hardly limited to Trump. Since Friday's attacks, many, if not most, of the Republican presidential candidates have been thumping their chests in a pissing match that's turned the party's primary race into a game of Who's Toughest on Terror. Florida's absentee Senator Marco Rubio believes we're enmeshed in a "clash of civilizations" with radical Muslim terrorists who "hate us because of our values." Ohio Governor John Kasich wants to create a new government agency that promotes Judeo-Christian values. Mike Huckabee continues to be Mike Huckabee.

The rhetoric burning off the GOP's overheated engine mirrors a growing Islamophobia that has spread quickly across the country in the wake of the bloodshed in Paris. In Texas, vandals ripped up a copy of the Koran and flung poop at a mosque. At a movie theater in New York City, a medical student was shouted down for texting by a paranoid moviegoer who thought he was up to something more sinister. (The texter, it turns out, was a Texas-born Catholic who just happened to not be white.)

At last count 30 US governors wanted to ban the resettlement of Syrian refugees in their respective states, although it's not clear that's actually legal. Perhaps most notably, David Bowers, the Democratic mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, asked that the relocation of Syrian refugees to his city be suspended, citing internment camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II as a justification. A surprising number of Americans might actually agree: An NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll released this week found that 56 percent of US voters disapprove of the government's plans to accept more Syrian refugees; meanwhile, 81 percent support extensive surveillance aimed at preventing terrorist attacks.

With his latest fomenting, Trump may be just taking the pulse of the American people who, polls also show, are eager to hear him out. He is The Zelig of the American Id. Sometimes, in the face of terror, that even trumps American values.

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

Political candidates Darth Vader and Chewbacca, of the Internet Party, outside their van in Odessa. Photo by the author

Chewbacca's arrest in Odessa had more viral potential than any other story to surface from Ukraine's 2015 election season. Everyone from the Guardian to John Oliver to your freshman-year roommate noted the absurdity in the story, which saw the famous Star Wars character get arrested while trying to support his friend, Darth Vader, who was running for mayor of Odessa under the Internet Party. Such is the bizarre current state of politics in Ukraine.

Commentary on the Internet Party is scattered. Some see the party as a group of trolls trying to make an avant-garde message about the state of Ukrainian politics: "Ukraine's Internet Party has been adding a bit of levity and subtle satire to the country's tense politics for a few years now," reports tech website CNET. Others view it as symptomatic of Ukraine's hacker problem: "So deeply is this issue ingrained here that there's even a political party that champions hacker culture." The Washington Post dismisses both: "The real story is how the fake Vader represents the actual dark side of Ukrainian contemporary politics: election fraud and manipulation."

On VICE News: A Ukrainian Artist Decapitated a Statue of Lenin and Replaced It with Darth Vader

My sources in Ukraine agree with the latter notion. "The Internet Party was set up to discredit the electoral process," said political analyst Olexandr Paliy, adding that he believed the party—which, by his estimate, spent millions of dollars on advertising and Star Wars paraphernalia—was set up by oligarchs in an attempt to make the government look weak. "It's entirely too expensive to just be a joke," Paliey said.

Fedir Sydoruk, editor in chief of Slidstvo.info, a Ukrainian publication that monitors corruption, thinks that the party's intentions might be a bit more focused. "It's not a funny project—it's a political tool," Sydoruk told me. "Their job is to break up the opposition's electorate. Think about it: Who benefits the most from this?" In Odessa, that would be incumbent mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov. Trukhanov's primary opponent, Sasha Borovik (who finished in second place), blamed the Internet Party for fracturing the youth vote, one of his key demographics.

Looking for answers, I spoke to Darth Vader (who was accompanied by Chewbacca) in a posh Odessa cafe overlooking the Black Sea. The duo arrived in Darth Vader's matte black Mercedes van, took pictures with fans and spectators, debated with a man questioning the Internet Party's intentions, and spoke about Darth Vader's hope to see a Ukrainian parliament ran entirely by computers.

VICE: Thanks for talking to me today. It's an honor to talk to a Sith lord.
Darth Vader: Happy to be here.

So, exactly how old is Chewbacca?
[Darth Vader turns to Chewbacca.] How old are you? [Chewbacca motions with his hands.] Sorry, he doesn't want to say, doesn't want to talk to the press. Chewbacca's legal troubles left him in a bad mood. But we will find justice. Only then will Chewbacca be able to tell his story—and his age.

OK. How does the political scene on Earth compare to politics in a galaxy far, far away?
Compared to space politics, Ukrainian politicians are useless. They prove time and time again that they are unable to do their jobs well. That's why I propose that we computerize parliament. In Ukraine, it's common to see politicians go insane, take bribes, and beat each other up. But computers will do their jobs the way that they should.

Computers?
We have a problem. It's not a secret that in the most recent elections, politicians bought votes. Even me, by myself, I bought votes. I wanted to see what the result would be; it was an experiment. But I didn't have to buy the youth vote, they voted for me because they wanted to. They wanted change. They wanted Darth Vader. But this doesn't mean that, by tomorrow, all of Ukraine will be computerized. On elections, people should go with passports and get their own IDs, and tell the computers what to vote for. Again, I propose that we replace parliament members with computers. It would be like a giant server, connected to what the people want. No personal or political agenda would get in the way. Just computers. Right now, we have a system where we choose politicians, but after we elect them they forget about what the people want. They're so very corrupt. Again, the computers and servers will solve everything.

We had a list—when people voted for Darth Vader, they took a picture of the ballot with their phone, sent it our way, and we paid them.

So, you bought votes?
Yes. We had a strong response online. We promised money for votes, and people signed up. We had a list—when people voted for Darth Vader, they took a picture of the ballot with their phone, sent it our way, and we paid them. We bought about 18,000 votes in Odessa, but the final number of popular votes was around 7,000. We wanted to see if the election office would be honest, but they lied. We have 18,000 votes, confirmed. The government is to blame; the government doesn't allow us to get our earned votes. Because we proposed some unique reforms that will turn Ukraine into a stronger country that other countries want to associate with, they're afraid of us. The government doesn't want the status quo to change. They want the power.

We understand that retired people are ready to vote for buckwheat [a Ukrainian turn of phrase; essentially, old, poorer members of the community will exchange votes for food]. They usually sell their voices for food. The main aspect we understand about this election is that not all of our votes were counted. There were local elections in Kiev last year, and I was one of the candidates. I was 0.2 percent off from getting my party into the electoral committee. They clearly faked the results—the election committee understands that Darth Vader is too different to let in.

But why would the general public want to vote for Darth Vader over other candidates?
Look, I'm the only one in Ukraine who proposed a different conception of elections. I don't want people to vote for face, nor beauty, but for actions. You understand that I don't have any official position on anything, but I've stopped drug-dealing in Odessa. I'm the only one who fights against the drug mafia. I'm also fighting to save seaside property from greedy developers. It's important that we save this land for citizens to enjoy. This has been a problem for a while. We have to preserve this land.

[At this point in the interview, the restaurant's owner walked by and waved.]

That's my friend. He's a great guy—one of the most successful restaurateurs in Odessa. He has lovely restaurants, and he invests money and gives people job opportunities, and the city is better for it. That's what politicians should do: create jobs, expand the economy. But they don't seem capable here.

On VICE: The Warrior Women of the Ukraine:

How would you serve as mayor of a town like Odessa, with such a corrupt image?
Odessa doesn't have a corrupt image. Everyone wants to live in Odessa. It's a nest that develops spectacular relationships. We have a lot of nationalities, religions, ethnicities living together—it's a very diverse city. Everyone lives together in peace, because it's so comfortable. Even for , who is under investigation in Georgia. The thief.

But it's not perfect. I would like to add that the police's acts against Chewbacca were illegal. They used violence against Chewbacca, showing the world how low our armed forces can sink. They're all barbarians.

In the media, I've seen Darth Vader and the Internet Party get portrayed as antiheroes standing up against a corrupt electoral process, but I've also seen people call you a political tool used to take votes away from more traditional politicians. What's really going on here?
The truth is in my actions. I think that the next elections will be more productive. You should understand that I came into politics to change the game. Look at Borovik—he's new to Odessa, and he was Saakashvili's guy, but a governor should not openly endorse a mayoral candidate like that. Borovik started his campaign three weeks before elections, and at the end he won second place, just because of his affiliation.

People weren't voting for a candidate, they were voting for a brand, like adidas or Nike. Solidarity Party seems new, but it's really just full of old Ukrainian politicians. People think they're voting for a new brand, but they're getting the same old politicians. That's why these elections didn't change anything.

So you're more than a political tool?
I know what the people say. That I'm just a political tool, that I'm not a serious candidate. They're all just scared, afraid of my laws. I don't listen to them. I listen to the citizens. Their opinion is much more important to me.

How do you feel about Gennadiy Trukhanov ?
I mean, he's my son-in-law. What else can I say? There were obviously some differences in opinion, especially during the election, but we'll deal with that internally, as a family. It's a family thing.

Mayor Trukhanov is married to your daughter?
Yes.

Let's talk about money. A source estimated that your campaign expenses have surpassed $1 million. Where does the Internet Party get money?
Part of our money come from Mikhail Gorbachev. He gave us the money in 1992. But we wasted it all. Gorbachev found out, and never gave us anything more.

In all seriousness, we got money from Emperor Palpatine, who won a seat on Odessa's city council. We hope that, with his help, more and more will see things our way. Soon enough, the whole city council will join the dark side.

In the future, would you like to see Ukraine join the European Union?
It's not a question of joining anything. I think that our goal for Ukraine should be for complete independence, so that other countries come to us, asking to join in alliance. I promise to make things that way.

Got it. Let's switch gears: Who has the best lightsaber in the universe?
The best lightsaber in the universe is in my car. One time, a Jedi got in a fight with me, but I was too strong. The video is online. I had to use all of my dark power to win the fight, though.

How do you take your coffee?
Latté.

How do you physically drink coffee?
I use a straw.

Looking at the American political scene, what do you think of Donald Trump?
Well, as a man, he's very handsome, which has to work well for him. He definitely has a future in politics. There is a new tendency in the world: Beauty and eloquence control people.

Do you see him as a good presidential candidate?
Yoda would be better. He displays patience, courage, and responsibility, important virtues for a president.

What's your favorite type of ice cream?
Vanilla. Vanilla and pistachio.

What's your favorite movie?
Every episode of Star Wars. Those movies were sent to Earth to implement the ideas of the Internet Party. They're great for people of all ages, even though they're old, relatively speaking. Sure, they might be a bit dated, but they're timeless movies.

Is there something you'd like to tell America?
Yes, I would like to say hello to my grandma, who lives in New York City. If there's any way, I'd love it if you could deliver her some milk.

Follow Alex on Twitter.

The author and his baby, having fun with the alphabet.

People act hella foolish when they talk to babies. Your "zany voice" game springs into action. All of a sudden you're doing hella accents, talking hella high-pitched, being like "ruh-roh somebody could use a widdle nappy poo." That shit is wild annoying. I used to hate the weird affected way some people talk to babies. I still do, actually, but I have a way higher tolerance and understanding for it now.

I try to keep it with my baby and talk to her like I would any other grown person, but the conversation inevitably devolves down to her level. I ask her what she been up to and she's like, "Dada." I'm like, "Yeah, I'm Dada, but like how you been? What you been up to?" And she's like, "Dadadadada." And I'm like, "OK. I think you're not getting the proper context of 'dada.' You can't just use that word for everything, like aloha." Then she's like, "Oh ah." And I'm like, "Yeah, aloha." And she's like, "Oh. Ooh ooh." (But sort of in a dog voice, imitating a dog.) And I'm like, "Yeah, woof woof like a dog." And she's like, "Doh-doh." And I'm like, "Yeah, doh-doh." Then she's like, "Doh doh doh doh dadadadada." And I'm like, "No doubt, no doubt." So basically it's like any conversation with anybody else in my life.

She's still got a lot to learn. She's getting talked to in English, Spanish, Farsi, Arabic, Turkish, Italian, sometimes even French when we're feeling fancy. I know that all of this supposedly slows down the baby's language learning process a bit, but by the end of it their language and general cognitive skills will benefit so I think it's worth it. Even rudimentary knowledge of second, third, fourth, etc. languages improves knowledge of the primarily used language(s) and generally improves intelligence and critical thinking. You know that the word "idiot" originally meant a person who speaks only one language? No joke. I learned that lil gem en la universidad, mang. Like back in the day before conquest and whatnot, it was hella little languages. Fools had to learn some new language just to be able to kick it with the dudes over the next hill. That's hella real. Thinking of getting some Rosetta Stones, not just for the literal kid but the proverbial one too, feel me?

I want her to look at the skies and read the language of the clouds. I want her to see bulbous rain clouds and know how much rain the crops will get.

Anyway, the baby fucks with dogs heavy right now, and even speaks a little dog. When she sees a dog she says "doh doh" and then does a sort of barking thing and usually the dog barks back, so I guess she be on her Doc Doolittle in some respects. I want this baby to learn the language of the animals and plants as much as the languages of the human world. I want her to look at the skies and read the language of the clouds. I want her to see bulbous rain clouds and know how much rain the crops will get.

But I try not to overburden her with learning too much. I might read her some books or show her the alphabet or count to ten with her or whatever, but when she starts getting bored I don't force it. I let her roll around on the ground and rub stuff on her face and whatever too. I love MDMA as much as the next guy, I get it. I think it was Mr. Rogers who said that play is the work of children, or something like that. I always thought that was a tight line.

One thing you absolutely must do is teach the baby how to say "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain" in a flawless English accent. That way the baby will be able to land a decent middle wage desk job as a plan B to whatever creative pursuits it follows. Another thing you want your baby to know is all the words to "Lifestyle" by Young Thug. Once it learns that it can find a good lean plug, which will come in handy. Also teach the baby how to say "¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!" which is crucial for aligning its Latinidad to el swagitudo correcto, tú sabe? Teach the baby American Sign Language. It will actually learn that quicker than verbal speech because its motor skills develop quicker than its speech centers. The baby should know some Chinese and some Hindi too, because it's hella those dudes on Planet Earth.

Make sure you and the baby have an understanding between you that's extra-linguistic but still has some anchors in the linguistic world. If you don't know what I mean go ask ya mama. Teach the kid Pig Latin so it can listen in on police scanners. Also some real Latin so it can read the Harry Potter books with some authority. Teach the baby the Supreme Alphabet of the Nation of Islam, of course. Also Morse code, the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, some basic html, and Braille. Music helps kids learn language so play it some chunes. I know I've mentioned that more than once but it's an important thang in my book.

Speaking of books, it's never too early to read to the lil monky. It helps it with the rhythm of language and gets it generally familiar with the feeling of holding a book, which is key. Let the baby read to you. It will be a totally different story than what you were prepared for, real Tristan Tzara level stuff.

Freestyle with the baby. They bars is Don Dada, they hop in the cyph with the E-40 ad lib like "Oooogh." Babies' ad lib game is nasty. They got the Yeezy/Montana "Honh" down, they got the Jay-Z/Dipset "Gyea," they even do a decent Pusha T "Yech."

So yeah, in conclusion, like I said hellof times before, babies are hellof smart. You don't have to talk down to them, they'll run with whatever you're throwing at them. They literally have nothing else to do but learn so go in, turn up, etc.

Follow Kool A.D. on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Rochelle Hartman

Read: A Guide to Periods for Men

For as long as menstruation has existed—which is to say, forever—it has been used as evidence of female weakness. It's not just the bleeding, though that's gross enough (how could women function with that bloody, dripping mess between their legs?). Menstruation has also been a sign of instability: Women couldn't possibly be responsible for making important decisions with all those hormones swimming from their uteri up to their delicate little heads. Before the first American women were launched into space, for example, NASA had serious conversations about what could happen if a hormonal, moody, bleeding woman got behind an aerospace control board.

But while menstruation might be a "lady thing," men have hormonal cycles too. And according to a new survey, reported Thursday by the Telegraph, at least a quarter of men actually feel the same symptoms as women with PMS.

The poll asked 2,412 people in the UK—half men, half women—whether they periodically experienced symptoms like irritability, tiredness, and intense cravings. Twenty-six percent of men admitted to having one or more of these feelings. Some men even said they felt bloated during certain points in the month; others felt "easily upset" and "constantly hungry." As you may recall, these are the very symptoms that have led some people to believe a woman should never be president.

The condition is known as "Irritable Man Syndrome," a term coinedd by researcher Jed Diamond in the early 2000s. Diamond lists irritability, sadness, overeating, and acting "demanding" among the symptoms of IMS, which occur as men's hormones ebb and flow. (You can take a handy quiz on his website to determine if you, too, are a man suffering from IMS.)

Not everyone agrees with Diamond about whether or not IMS is a real thing, but other studies have found evidence that men's hormone levels rise and fall throughout the year, or possibly even throughout a 30-day cycle, like women.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Sharon, Bianca and Graham

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If you want to look at how London is changing, you need only look at Hackney. Of all the city's boroughs, gentrification is arguably most visible there; its community cafes now artisanal bakeries and bouji butchers, its housing situation now characterized more by $3 million two-bed flats than affordable accommodation for the families who've been living there for generations.

Ground zero is Dalston, with house prices in the area rising a massive 71 percent in the space of eight years, faster than anywhere else in East London. In the early days of all this—before Kingsland Road was known to most as an X Factor boyband and not the road that runs through Dalston—Hackney Council's Regeneration Committee decided to transform Gillett Street car park into Dalston's "town square."

The developer they brought in, Hawkins\Brown, described the space as "a disused car park surrounded by derelict buildings, inhabited by drinkers and drug dealers, and avoided by the local community." Fifteen years later, Gillett Square has certainly been regenerated, but it's still arguably just as popular with the groups the council were trying to oust as it ever was.

Photographer Roland Ramanan has spent the past three years documenting those who spend their days in the square, drinking and chatting and trying to avoid trouble from the police. Some are homeless, some suffer from mental health issues and most, he says, have alcohol or drug dependency problems. The series, however, isn't about pointing a finger at drug and alcohol abuse; instead, Roland hopes to tell the story of a group of vulnerable people left marginalized by the rapid social and economic change occurring around them.

I recently sat down for a chat with Roland about his Gillett Square project.

VICE: When did you decide that you wanted to document the people who spend their days hanging out in Gillett Square?
Roland Ramanan: I'd started street photography in around 2012, and I knew Gillett Square because as a musician sometimes I played at the Vortex Jazz Club there. Initially I sort of sat down next to and said, "Would you mind if I photographed you?" Some of them said, "Are you with the police?" I still get asked that now, even after three years of working there.

Most of the people there had been local to the area for a long time, right?
Many of the residents I spoke to, particularly from the Afro-Caribbean population, have roots going back to that spot for a very long time, so some of them had known each other for over 20 years, and they talked about the time before Gillett Square existed —before the cooperative body came together to create Gillett Square. They were there long before it was a car park, and they have fond memories of sitting there with their brazier in the winter to keep them warm, helping people with their shopping.

For them it's a kind of a one stop-shop, social community hub—a place where they can get support from each other, and it still has that role in a way. Gillett Square is quite a unique space in that sense. There aren't many spaces like that left that I know of, certainly in this area of London, as most are being gentrified.

So there's a real sense of community there?
Well, I mean, they are certainly not a homogenous group. There was a group that had roots in the Afro-Caribbean population and they had known each other for a very long time, so they helped each other out—sometimes in terms of accommodation; one person might be sleeping on another's floor for a while, and I think they helped each other out a lot in those terms.

Other groups came and went. There was a Turkish group for a while, an Eastern European group. So there were different groups that would come together and interact with each other in that sense.

There are altercations in a couple of the photos. How would you describe the relationship the group has with the police?
Sometimes there was a lot of friction. I think in the last year it's calmed down a lot. But sometimes there would be rivalries and fights would flare up, particularly at the end of the day—people had been drinking more. But they usually quickly died down again and there was always a code among people that you would repay your debts—that you would help the next person, you would try to keep the peace if you possibly could.

When I started they used to get a lot more hassle from the police because it was a zone that was an allocated no drinking spot. So, as a result, most days the police would swoop in and demand that people give up their cans of beer.

I saw one poor woman who decided no, I'm not gonna give up my can of beer. So she was chased around the square, wrestled to the ground and handcuffed. Her jeans had fallen down, a friend was trying to pull them up. She was kind of standing trousers fallen down in the middle of the street while waiting for the police van to pick her up—and this was someone who is very vulnerable. It was quite sad.

I think have eased off recently, and I think I'm right in thinking that there's no longer a "no drinking in public" sign. The community support officers have a good relationship with the people in the square—they kind of know who the characters are—and some of the police had a good relationship with the people in the square.

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There are ethics to be considered when photographing vulnerable people, and bearing in mind some of the group had issues around drug and alcohol abuse, and mental health in a few cases, how did that affect the way you worked?
I try to think what that person will think when they see the photograph, whether they'll think it's a truthful depiction, even though it may be very difficult to look at, or whether they feel I'm distorting things. I also have to be really clear with the people who are there. Why am I there? I'm there to take photographs of life as I see it, and it's a very fine balancing act. I think the way that I take pictures has changed over the course of the project. Some of my earlier pictures were more about me looking in from the outside and focusing on the drinking and the effect of that, , because I also think that's part of the story that people need to see.

Graham's funeral

What did you learn while shooting the project?
How hard some of the lives of these people are—many of them have died along the way, maybe not directly from alcohol, but probably a direct consequence of the life they were living. So maybe of a heart attack, or they had an accident because they may have been drinking, or an overdose.

I can think of six people who have died since I started the project. One them was a guy called Graham, who was a very eccentric character—a brilliant man. He was an artist and sculptor who would pass by the square sometimes. I interviewed him in his home and he was assessed as fit to work under the new welfare reforms. If you ever knew Graham, you would know that he was not fit for work—he had a lot of mental health issues and he was also facing with being evicted from where he lived because of the single bedroom rules—and he committed suicide. One of the things that happen with my photographs is that when someone dies, people will ask me for a photograph, or they'll use my photograph for a memorial service. It's a great sadness, but also a great honor.

Finally, what changes have you noticed in Hackney since you started the project?
One of the things I've noticed is the squeeze on welfare. have really felt they are fighting a battle in terms of their assessment for disability payments, and it seems as if the rules are applied in a very draconian way.

Also, since I started, because of the massive explosion in the nightlife in Dalston Junction and the gentrification that it's bringing—I think they're feeling more and more isolated. So they've definitely felt changes in the area and are kind of wondering what their place is within that.

Folllow Hani on Twitter.

The author (holding the dog) in Texas during his rowdy years, 2011

I should start by saying that I actively dislike people who write op-eds in Saturday broadsheets about their not-that-interesting-and-actually-quite-moderate life choices. It's the peak iteration of a load of terrible things: navel gazing, self-importance and spoilt dickheads with no real problems running the media.

Of course, the payoff to that paragraph is that I'm about to punch out a snappy 2,000 words on how I gave up drinking because it was starting to bum me out a bit. Sorry. If it helps, part of my intention is to tell a broader story about untangling the stupid ideas about life that you have in your youth so that you can work towards being properly happy.

I last had a drink at about 3AM on the 15th of June at a metal festival in the Midlands. I was there to write about it for work, but it was rainy and I had loads of coke and a Winnebago, so I sat in the Winnebago and did the coke and listened to a Chief Keef playlist on iPhone speakers with my friends all weekend. It was a lot of fun, absolutely no question. I'd known I wanted to take a little break from being a gross guy for a while, and I figured a disgusting four day cocaine/booze blowout – doing bumps while watching a paunchy Marilyn Manson play the hits – was as good a way as any to go out. I had a good time, but at the end of that weekend I was pretty sure I was done-zo.

I've seen a therapist a few times since I got sober, and he seems to think I had a bit of a problem – but I think he has to say that. I know lots of proper addicts – lots of people in AA and NA – and I've been to a few addiction-related funerals for people who really went for it (they're the reason why I feel like one of the shitty "minor personal issue" op-ed people). If I'm a drug-addicted alcoholic, then everyone I know in every major city and in what terrible people call "the creative industries" is a drug-addicted alcoholic. Of course I drank aggressively and shouted jokes at my friends three or four nights a week; of course I spent a crippling amount of money on coke every Friday, stayed up until 10AM Saturday and spent the rest of the weekend in the grips of paranoia and sadness; of course I let my job, health and relationships suffer, wither and fail because of it all. Doesn't everyone? That's part of the fun! And really, the nihilism is hilarious to talk about with your friends: "Last night I spent all my money on coke and got punched in the face!" is a great story.

The difference between me and the people who drink and take drugs the same amount as I did – but who still manage to remain happy and functional – is that my whole thing has always been nihilism. I'd been an angry teenager, really idealistic and passionate about a lot of things (punk and girls, mainly), but something happened when I hit my early twenties: I had a weird depressive episode and went to a psychiatric hospital for a while, and after that I stopped believing in anything at all – relationships, jobs, politics, the future. Nothing really felt like it was worth caring about. On an unconscious level I'm sure it must have been that I'm some kind of entitled brat and didn't see immediate payoffs for my ambitions in any of those areas, so started not caring as a defence tactic. But at the time, I felt like I'd really just developed a healthy scepticism about life. Of course, I was in my early twenties, so the whole thing drifted into unhealthy scepticism almost immediately.

To compound my bad vibes, I also found out that I was quite good at being unhealthily sceptical on paper. People seemed to like various mean record reviews (when record reviews were still a thing) and other cruel, funny stuff I wrote where I took bands, ideas and people apart and essentially said they were pointless, because at the core of it all, everything is completely pointless so everything's a stupid joke. People enjoying your writing and your opinions is a pretty validating experience, and so I figured I was right about nothing meaning anything and ran with it. That whole thing has been my whole thing since I was about 21, which was 11 years ago.

The author after a 2CB overdose

If nothing means anything to you and life's a joke, drink and drugs serve two purposes: they're a fun way to break up the vast expanse of grey that is life through a lens of not caring, and they're an easy way to be self-destructive in a measured and humorous way. Not like kill yourself self-destructive; like fuck your job up and be a shithead to people for fun self destructive – the kind of self-destructive it's funny to talk about the following morning.

If you drink and do drugs like that for a long time, nothing really bad ever happens – you don't die, you don't get really sick, you don't lose friends (a bit, but not really), you don't even get a worried phone call from your sister; you just keep going and stay the same. Your life doesn't change for better or for worse – you're in stasis: a murky, boozy, shitty-to-people, bad-at-your-job, lazy stasis.

It's that stasis that starts getting you down.

So, I got really down. I've always been a pretty depressed guy, but for about the last three years I've bounced on and off medication, in and out of periods of blackout drunkness, three day hangovers, anxiety attacks, coke-overs and paranoid episodes. There was no one moment when I knew I wanted to stop (breaking my ankle by jumping down some steps on MDMA and having a seven-hour operation at 31 years old should have set off an alarm bell, but I think I got a gram in the week afterwards). However, I think vanity had a reasonable amount to do with it in the end – I started looking old, sallow, chubby and sad in photos, and I wanted to not be those things.

"The worst I've ever been – ten days into all the drugs all the time, and after two punches to the face" Texas, 2011

Then I went to the metal festival and I stopped at the end of that. People I've met since I stopped have told me they might like to stop too, but they wouldn't know how. If you're a real addict, I couldn't tell you what to do – I'm not one: there was no chemical compulsion in me to drink and take drugs; to be really clear, I took them because I wanted to and because I found it fun – but if you recognise yourself in what I've said so far, I can tell you what I did, and maybe that will help you out.

I did this: I told myself – and, importantly, my friends – that I was taking a break, and I said it'd be three months. I told myself I was doing three months because then I didn't freak out about it possibly being forever, and every time I saw a beer advert or heard a funny drugs story I wouldn't get pangs of jealousy and I could just be like, "Oh, it's fine, I'll do it again in a few months," which kept me calm about it all. I told all my friends I was taking a break so that I'd be too ashamed to stop, because being a flake who never follows through on anything is a shitty way to live your life. Then I just didn't drink, I suppose. Three months came and went and I didn't want to go back.

I was surprised that after a couple of weeks of relative (crushing, debilitating, vomit-inducing) anxiety in social situations where I didn't know a lot of people, everything kind of levelled out, and it's been fine for a while now. I think the first few weeks are supposed to be the hardest, but for my first few weeks the alarmingly vicious comedown from the metal/cocaine festival was so fresh in my mind it made me pretty determined to stick with it. I was lucky in that respect. If I worry about stuff I get a lot of comfort from checking the Wikipedia list of teetotallers. That's a fun thing to look at and there are a load of great guys on there, but the main thing helping me not drink or do drugs has been the difference sobriety has made in my life.

When I stopped, part of me hoped that the change wouldn't be too dramatic. That way, the whole thing would have been a pointless exercise and it wouldn't really matter if I started doing coke on Wednesdays again. Irritatingly, the changes in my life have been so overwhelmingly vast and remarkably positive that I know for sure that throwing in the sobriety towel at this stage would be a really terrible call.

The author, over three months sober

My head took about a month to clear, but when it did I felt a huge, absolutely physical difference in my mental capacity, moods and mental state. I could think faster and with much more clarity. I immediately became better at my job, better in conversation and better at articulating my feelings. My mood lifted and I became less impulsive, less easily swayed and more confident in myself and my convictions. I started to have convictions, in fact – that's a big one. I started believing in things again – my friends, my own ideas, my work. I do decent things in the daytime on the weekends now. I developed my hobbies and now my photos get published and I do tattoos of the drawings I'd been doing. I remember to call my mother, I get my washing done, I got thinner and fitter, I've become better company. I stopped hating myself as much. I'm better than I was, ask any of my friends. I'm growing up. What has really happened is that I was able to rearrange a bunch of weird thoughts I'd had since I was much younger. I think I finally killed the nihilism – or at least I turned it into a joke and not a lifestyle. The drink and drugs and the nihilism were wrapped up together and now they're separate.

I reckon everyone's got a thing that they're sitting with that they maybe shouldn't sit with. It's worth figuring out what that thing is and checking it's not fucking everything up for you without you really noticing. I don't know if I'll drink or do drugs again. Maybe in a few years, maybe not, maybe that's it. I know for sure that stopping now has let me step out of a loop of misery that had been going on for over a decade.

WATCH ON NOISEY: 'Skepta – Top Boy, the Documentary'

The whole thing has been a giant leap forward in my quality of life, is what I'm trying to say. It's not perfect by a long shot – I've still got stuff to work out, but I wouldn't have ever noticed I had anything to sort out if I had carried on. I can't pretend I don't miss hiding in bathroom stalls with my friends, but my life is immeasurably better without drugs and alcohol, even though I didn't have a problem problem – and maybe I haven't hammered that point home hard enough. I don't think it mattered that I wasn't directly killing myself; I was still fucking miserable, and when I stopped I wasn't.

Unhappiness in and of itself feels like it was a good enough reason to stop, and maybe if you feel like drink and drugs are making you miserable you should try stopping for a minute to see if it makes a difference to your life too. I don't know; I've never written anything this earnest in my life before and I don't really know how to finish this without being sanctimonious or preachy. I'm just saying if you think you're sad, work out why you're sad, stop doing the thing that is making you sad and, hopefully, things will get better from there.

Follow Robert here and here.

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Video gaming has been looking to tennis for inspiration since day one. One of the very earliest arcade games, and certainly one of the most famous, Atari's Pong, presented gamers of 1972 with two on-screen paddles and a "ball," and asked them to have fun with it for the sum of a quarter per turn. You've probably never played Pong, given you're not ancient, but the years between then and now have seen a healthy clutch of racket sport adaptations earn critical and commercial acclaim.

I absolutely hammered Nintendo's Tennis in its Game Boy port—with just four difficulty levels, a single useable player avatar, and Mario as umpire, it was enough. I played Wimbledon, a 1992 release for SEGA's Master System, to death, creating my own tournaments for its array of not-quite-real-life professionals, drawing out competition brackets on sheets of A4 to track the winners and losers. Codemasters' Pete Sampras Tennis was one of the Mega Drive's best sports sims; Super Tennis for the SNES was a worthy alternative for gamers averse to SEGA systems; and the original Virtua Tennis, for the Dreamcast, is still held up as one of the greatest arcade sports games of all time.

Tennis games featuring playable Nintendo characters go back 20 years, beginning with 1995's Mario's Tennis for the Virtual Boy. Since 2000, the House of Mario has looked to Japanese company Camelot to produce its cartoon-styled tennis and golf titles, and it's that same studio behind Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash, a streamlined take on the multi-mode experiences that those familiar with this series have come to expect.

Ultra Smash immediately lays its limitations out for players to see: 12 selectable characters at the outset, expanded to 16 once you've unlocked everyone (some fast, some powerful, some tricky, you know how this works); just one arena to play in, albeit one that's home to a variety of surfaces, from grass and clay, to ice and sand; and no tournaments to compete in. There's a knockout mode, where you play tie-breaks against the AI, for as many matches as possible before you're beaten. Rally mode exists only to generate a paltry purse of coins—which you use to unlock new court types, characters, and difficulties (more on that in a second). There are two main ways to play one match at a time—classic tennis, which still allows for powered-up "chance" shots, and Mega Battle, where characters can pick up mushrooms tossed onto the court, making them massive (in standard Mario fashion) and improving their stats.

Related: Watch VICE's film on the world of eSports

I quickly gave up on Mega Battle—the cutaway transitions to your avatar becoming a giant break up the gameplay, and doubles matches where everyone's big become uncomfortably crowded. Classic is where I'm happiest, but with the chance shots left active. What this means is that striking a ball within a designated space, using the button indicated, produces a shot that might leave your opponent in a pickle. These can include fiery forehands, slice shots with incredible bend, and lobs that send the other player scrambling to the back of the court. If they only just manage a return, this can open an ultra smash window of opportunity—a spot on your side of the court will flash pink, and if you double-tap the Y button while standing on top of it, your character will produce a gravity defying leap and rocket the ball into next week. It's an almost-guaranteed point-winning shot on any of the game's initial three difficulty levels.

Ultra Smash, for some reason, locks its upper two difficulty levels—"pro" and "ace"—until you've either played enough matches or earned enough coins to activate them (most likely the latter—coins are accumulated quickly, so I just used those to unlock all characters, surfaces, and difficulties). Pro level is still easily beatable, although the AI is much quicker to punish any unforced errors on the player's side. Expect to lose some games, but never a match. It was only when I started to play on the ace difficulty that my dominance was shattered—I'm still to win a single game at that level, which indicates a sharper-than-expected challenge incline between pro and ace settings.

'Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash' trailer

Playing against the machine will only get you so far—to reiterate what I wrote above, there are no cups to play for, no offline rankings to rise up. The most fun you'll have with Ultra Smash is local co-op play, either in doubles against the AI or online, or against one another in couch competition. The game plays smoothly in the latter set-up, although the rear-court receiver is always at a slight disadvantage given the camera's perspective of being quite low down, almost on the server's shoulder. The camera immediately shifts upwards, though, allowing for fairer play, whatever side of the court you're on; and you can use the GamePad as a second screen, allowing one-on-one players to both work the foreground. Online play, in my experience, is patchy—I've had matches drop to an astonishingly poor frame rate, but that might be more down to my internet connection than anything else. It's early days for the game, but I've also had to wait for a fair few minutes before getting a match—which is fine when you get to play, but your opponent always has the option of dropping out of the pairing when they see who they're up against. (As do you—but why would you choose to cancel a match after waiting so long?)

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Ultra Smash isn't going to be a permanent fixture in anyone's Wii U, like Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon have proved to be when it comes to the just-one-more-game factor. Its shallow single-player options come as a surprise given Camelot's work on 2014's Mario Golf: World Tour for the 3DS, a game I still turn to when stuck on delayed commuter trains. That handheld sports sim featured a wealth of avatar customization, colorful tournaments to compete in, and special courses full of collectable coins and power-up blocks. Ultra Smash feels like a demo in comparison, with such a meager array of game modes and uninspired roster of playable characters. If this were a mid-price game, retailing somewhere south of premium cost, it'd be worthy of a recommendation for anyone who regularly has friends over for local co-op sessions, or simply loves tennis. But at the same RRP as the imminent mechs-and-aliens RPG of Xenoblade Chronicles X and endless creativity of Super Mario Maker, it's asking too much of consumers, for too little content.

The Wii U's suffered slightly in 2015 for not making good on previous promises to have new Star Fox and Zelda titles out, which leaves anything with the Mario name attached having to carry some significant expectations. In the run up to Christmas, this is the Wii U game with known-to-millions characters on its box art. This is the time of year where the Wii U really needed another system-seller, off the back of September's amazing Mario Maker. Ultra Smash is so far away from being that game—but it's still a fun one when the price is right, if you're OK with seeing everything it has to offer within the first few hours of play and can call on a pal or two to ensure that matches remain competitive in the long run.

(Apologies to amiibo fans, as I've not tested how that functionality works in Ultra Smash, on account of not having a stackload of said figurines on hand. But I'm sure you can find out for yourself using this internet thing.)

Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash is out now in the UK and US, exclusive to the Nintendo Wii U.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

A communist monument in Nanjie. All photos by Tim Fenby.

Why has the town held onto this model?
It's a complicated story. Around 1989, when Tiananmen Square happened, a lot of China was moving towards some form of capitalism and privatization. At the time Nanjie was fairly successful economically, and a lot of the Chinese old guard—politicians and some military generals who didn't like the changes saw Nanjie as an example of a functional commune.

The town was already fairly left-leaning and into Maoism, so a lot of politicians started throwing money at it. In response, Nanjie began to move even more to the left as the rest of China slowly became more Westernized.

So they kind of became a last stand for the fading communist dream?
Yeah, they also started getting all these government loans. A quick look into the Nanjie story and it looks like a really successful egalitarian town. But look even slightly closer and you'll notice the success they had was equal to how many loans they received.

A young Chinese tourist takes a picture of a monument to Stalin.

What did they do with the money flooding in?
The loans allowed them to build all these monuments. I read the other day that one of the town's leaders used millions of dollars from loans to try and build a perpetual motion machine.

That's amazing. Were those monuments key to Nanjie's transition into a tourist attraction?
Yeah, for outsiders like myself, it's a tourist attraction in the way I suppose Dubai will be in the future. All this money was present at one time, and it resulted in all these strange things. And those monuments are now starting to age, you can see in the photos, a lot of it looks really strange now.

But Chinese nationals go there to understand what communist life would have been like. Apparently, it does feel similar to how things used to be. People in China are seeking out this idealized concept of Maoist China, there's a lot of that in Nanjie. They have these communist theme songs playing over the loudspeakers throughout the day. It's actually kind of sweet. In a lot of ways, it's a pretty pleasant and charming town to be in.

More tourists

We've focused a lot on the tourists, but what is it like for the locals to live in this aging diorama?
Well, in many ways the town is a bit of a lie. Chinese academics call it egalitarian, but that's kind of ignoring the fact that the majority of the workforce are migrant workers. They have to follow the town's strict laws without any of the benefits. They don't have their house, education, and food provided for them like the locals do.

Getting back to the massive loans they received, how are they dealing with paying them back?
The loans were never expected to be paid back. That was how the town was able to exist. I think in 2000 they had 23 companies, mostly factories, and three of them were profitable.

Some of the city's many aging sculptures

All things considered, it sounds like a sad place to live.
It's hard to tell how people feel but it seems like people are keeping a brave face. One night I went by myself to the town restaurant next to the hotel. A middle-aged local guy came up and invited me to sit with his group in another room. There were 10 men sitting around smoking, having this big banquet. They got me to taste all the different foods; showing off this big meal of all these dishes, and telling me how good they are.

Then, when I left, they gave me this locally produced pack of cigarettes and a bottle of local rice wine. They seemed really keen to show the town was working and was successful, even though it kind of isn't.

Interview by Wendy Syfret. Follow her on Twitter.

All photos by Arvida Byström

This story appears in the November Issue of VICE.

My life coach's name is Hailey Jordan Yatros. She's 21. I'm 29. Yatros is a natural encourager; it's one of her gifts. I know this because she told me so the first time we talked. She's also a rule breaker at heart and a lover of crosswords. Her favorite movie is Patch Adams because it makes her feel unstoppable.

I hired Yatros because I wanted to know why so many people in their 20s are entering the multibillion-dollar, nebulously defined life-coaching industry.

"The face of the profession is becoming increasingly fresh," I'd read in the New York Times, "with some clients receiving motivational guidance from coaches young enough to be their children."

Three years ago, there were 47,500 practicing life coaches worldwide, and 9 percent were under 35. That's according to the International Coaching Federation, a professional organization for life coaches. In 2015, 14 percent of their new members were between 25 and 35 years old.

"They're getting younger and younger," said Johan Premfors, former CEO of the Coaches Training Institute, one of the oldest and largest coaching schools in the world. "We used to see a lot of people in their mid careers. Now we're seeing people in their twenties and lower twenties."

From what I could tell, life coaching was like therapy lite. I'd had a couple therapists over the years and found them helpful, if a little exhausting. They'd all been women around my mother's age. I'm sure there was some Freudian reason for that, but I was curious what someone like Yatros could teach me about myself.

Millennial life coaches will tell you their youth is an asset. "Women get to their forties, they have kids, and they realize they haven't lived their lives, and they don't necessarily want to learn from someone older," said Jessica Nazarali, a 27-year-old coach from Sydney, Australia. "Older women are less willing to take risks. Our generation is unapologetic about going after what we desire."

When I googled "millennial life coaches," Yatros came up on the first page. At 21, she was one of the youngest coaches I found, but she had a professional-looking website with positive endorsements, and she'd published a book. I was a writer, and nearly 30, and I didn't have those things. But what hooked me was her splash photo: a close-up of her youthful face with an expression of happiness so intense it bordered on insanity. I wanted that expression—and that shade of lipstick.

Also, I wanted advice. I'd recently moved back to New York after three years away. As a freelance writer, I was underemployed but overworked, with a relationship that needed nurturing and friends who seemed to exist only as green dots on my Gchat screen. Time management seemed like an equation I could never solve. I'd started feeling anxious no matter what I was doing, unless I was drinking or taking recreational drugs or having an orgasm (everything up to the orgasm was stressful). I'd lie awake at night unable to shake the feeling that I was doing everything wrong.

Online sessions are the norm for most life coaches, so it didn't matter that I lived in Brooklyn and Yatros lived in a suburb of Detroit. I hired her for a month at $75 a session (she has a sliding scale)—four sessions once a week via Google Hangouts, her preferred medium. Before our first session she asked me to fill out a questionnaire about my short-term and long-term goals, my general happiness and stress levels, and the important people in my life. These were questions I hadn't asked myself in a while; I felt like I was making progress already.

Google "how to cure anxiety" and you'll get 39 million results. There are 343,000 self-help books on Amazon.com. Barnes & Noble has a sizable section called "Living Your Best Life." It's enough to make a person panic at the thought of all the suboptimal living she's done.

A life coach is a shot of humanity in this crush of data. Hiring one isn't like calling an Uber or getting a TaskRabbit or listening to a self-help podcast. It's an old-school leap of faith that requires blocking out the din of the digital age and looking someone in the, uh, MacBook camera's eye.

That said, our first session got off to a bumpy start. I had a bad internet connection, so our voices were out of sync, and she looked more like a glitchy monster than a beaming, clear-eyed truth teller. "How's the weather over there?" she asked, genuinely excited to know. Neither of us had remembered it was the end of daylight savings, because our devices all reset themselves.

We spent maybe three minutes talking about my family. "I just like to get a little snippet," she said, a refreshing departure from every therapist I've ever had. I talked about being close to my mom and estranged from my dad, and she nodded enthusiastically. "Everything you just said I can completely, one-hundred percent understand, so I think that we might be able to help each other on that."

We got into my questionnaire. I told her about my tendency to jump into serious relationships quickly and then leave them because I feel trapped. She asked me how I was at self-care. I told her I either went to the gym or took walks before work in the mornings, but in general I had a hard time relaxing.

"Every freaking millennial feels this way," Yatros said. She told me the internet was to blame. "I love technology, but it's what's made us want things now. We want to be the CEO, but we don't know how to be the janitor first."

She suggested I try meditating as a way to practice "present moment living." She'd just finished Oprah and Deepak Chopra's 21-Day Meditation Experience, a downloadable audio program, and she said it changed her life. "I meditate every day on love and all things that are beautiful," she said.

Her career path seemed to contradict her wisdom about being the janitor before becoming the CEO, but maybe she was just climbing the ladder more quickly than most of us.

My homework was to try meditating for 20 minutes a day until our next session and set reminders on my phone to ask myself how I was feeling. "Your body will never steer you wrong," Yatros said. Using my iPhone to get in tune with my body didn't seem like present-moment living, though maybe all those Apple Watch and Fitbit wearers would disagree. She told me to complete an online test that would take $10 and half an hour to tell me five great things about myself, and she told me to read a book called Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, which I've successfully delayed doing to this day.

After the first session, I felt like I'd learned as much about Yatros as she'd learned about me. She lives in the town in Michigan where she grew up. Her pre-life- coaching résumé includes babysitting, food service, and fundraising for a nonprofit. She had a therapist when she was 15 who gave her books by gurus like Tony Robbins and Wayne Dyer, and she's devoured self-help books ever since.

She thought about becoming a therapist herself, but the path seemed long. So she took a course on communication and human relations through Dale Carnegie, a corporate-training company, and has been coaching ever since. Her career path seemed to contradict her wisdom about being the janitor before becoming the CEO, but maybe she was just climbing the ladder more quickly than most of us. "I wanted to be able to help people faster," she told me. "I wanted to start now."

I had some drinks before our second session, which made me feel less awkward and chattier. Yatros seemed more relaxed too. I'd taken the online test earlier in the week and sent her the results. I'd put an alert on my phone to remind me to ask myself how I was feeling. Usually I was feeling annoyed that my phone was going off.

I hadn't meditated once, though I'd thought about it every day. When I admitted as much to Yatros, she waved me away. "I celebrate everything! Even if you got on the call and said, 'I didn't do shit,' I'd be like, 'Wooo!'"

She told me I had a "perfect personality" based on my test results, which showed that I worked well alone but also with people, was good at collecting information but also taking action, and that I was a total teacher's pet. "I think they're amazing," said Yatros about these core strengths, as she called them. "I just love them. I get so excited because they're a perfect balance."

My problem, she said, was that I was stressing out about trying to use all my strengths at the same time. Guilt and shame were the anchors holding my bird down. The universe would open doors for me if I stayed true to who I was in each moment. I should do my very best and let go of the rest. In other words, if I wanted to be a reclusive workaholic I should just do it and trust that, sooner or later, I'd want to have sex with my boyfriend again. This thought actually did make me feel calm.

For the following week, she told me to make a list of everything that lit me up inside, that made me feel like I was fulfilling my purpose, in order to remind myself that I was a multi-passionate person.

"You and I are so much alike," she said. "Seriously, we have so much in common." She told me she loved me and to text her anytime.

Between our sessions, I'd get emails full of praise and encouragement.

"You have such a beautiful spirit."
"You've been on my mind, and I am excited to talk with you again."
"You are so lovely, my dear. I get such a high speaking with you."
"I'm getting so used to our sessions so much I don't want to stop them ever! LOL."
"Cheers to a great week!"
"With all my love..."
"Enthusiastically, Hailey."

Maybe I'm just another millennial wanting a trophy for being me, but it felt damn good to have a personal cheerleader on call. Her optimism never faltered; she had advice for every issue I raised. On dealing with difficult people: "Treat everybody like they have a broken heart." On worrying about being too old or too young: "Forget your age and live." On how coaching works: "There's nothing I can teach you that you don't already know." On patience: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." The clichés were relentless, but hearing them expressed so earnestly in Yatros's dulcet, regionally accented tone gave them a surprising resonance.

A few days before our third session, I had a fight with my boyfriend. He accused me of being unreliable when I broke plans because of work. I felt burdened by his expectations, though I also felt like he had a right to be mad. It wasn't the first time I'd flaked. But when I told Yatros about it, she told me I was right to push back.

"It's not you that has to change," she said. "It's the other person that needs to understand who you are."

If I'd had a therapist we'd probably talk about my adolescent eating disorders, my childhood OCD, my fears of intimacy caused by my parents' split. But with my life coach we didn't have to go there.

I struggled to process this theory that I should never have to settle, that "the right person will come along and fit you like a puzzle piece," as she put it. It seemed like a millennial fairy tale and a recipe for lifelong spinsterhood. "Relationships are about compromise," I insisted.

Yatros told me to read another book, The Four Agreements, which she said might change my mind. It's a self-help book by a self-described neo-shaman named Don Miguel Ruiz. It was a number-one New York Times best seller in the early 2000s and again in 2013, after Oprah had him on her show. I downloaded it for a flight to California and finished it before landing. Here's the book in a nutshell: When you are being true to yourself (agreement no. 1) people might think you're selfish, but don't take anything personally (agreement no. 2) and don't assume you know what other people are thinking (agreement no. 3). And also (agreement no. 4), do your best.

Ruiz can sound kind of like a yogi on his last day at Burning Man ("When you feel good, everything around you is good. When everything around you is great, everything makes you happy. You are loving everything that is around you, because you are loving yourself"). But sometimes he made sense. He made me think about how often I assumed other people were mad at me. Like my friends, who were just as busy as I was. And my boyfriend, who would probably forgive me for working late every night for a month if I told him that was how it was going to be. A lot of my day-to-day anxiety came from a compulsive need to jump through hoops of my own design. Flakiness isn't letting people down, Ruiz says; it's failing to understand and communicate your needs.

Self-help is a multibillion-dollar industry peddling promises of quick reinvention. No one gets rich on the idea that change is slow and hard-fought. More than once Yatros had told me that "transformation is just a shift in perception." The idea that my life could change because of some thoughts I'd had on a flight was certainly alluring. What if I could have transformative moments all the time?

Then I realized that this is just what life is like when you're young. When you haven't had a lot of experiences, every experience feels transformative. When I first heard John Mayer as a 15-year-old, I knew he was the best musician on Earth. For two months in my early 20s, I thought veganism was the way to lifelong happiness and toned abs.

I had my last session with Yatros in Healdsburg, California. My boyfriend and I were staying in a cabin overlooking a sauvignon blanc vineyard, visiting wineries, eating and drinking decadently. Everything was supremely romantic and wonderful, except for the persistent anxiety knotted in the bottom of my throat. Even in paradise, I was waking up at night convinced that something was deeply wrong.

I told Yatros about it as I sat in the drafty cabin, in an easy chair pulled up close to the gas fireplace, my laptop resting on my knees. We'd just come back from a full day of wine tasting. My boyfriend was out on the deck with the complimentary cheese plate, looking at dinner options on his phone.

"It's like anything I could possibly be worried about or upset about just flows in," I explained. "And everything is hopeless."

If I'd had a therapist we'd probably talk about my adolescent eating disorders, my childhood OCD, my fears of intimacy caused by my parents' split. But with Yatros we didn't have to go there.

"I absolutely have those times and those nights," she said cheerfully. "I usually turn on my TV and start watching a movie because then I get engrossed in somebody else's problems."

She recommended reading an article online or drinking a cup of tea. Or taking a shot of whiskey. Or had I given meditation another shot? I felt awash in a sadness I couldn't explain. I knew that any of those things might have done the trick, but I was looking for something more, or maybe less: some acknowledgement that my dips into existential panic were inevitable and not everything had a fix.

Unlike some life coaches I've spoken to, Yatros's desire to help people is 100 percent sincere. But the thing about empathy is the more you claim to understand someone, the less genuine it seems. Real empathy requires realizing that there are things about one another we'll never know.

And this might be the central irony of the millennial-life-coach phenomenon: The biggest selling point of these young sages is that they don't have "luggage," as Johan Premfors from the Coaches Training Institute said. But luggage isn't always a bad thing. Life experience is what teaches you that you don't know everything, that most of us know barely anything at all.

In the months since I finished my sessions with Yatros, I passed my one-year anniversary of being back in New York. My career has stabilized (by freelance standards), I'm finding time to see my friends, and my boyfriend and I are moving in together. I'm calmer and happier than I've been since I can remember. It's probably just that I'm getting older, finally seeing safe ground beyond the minefields of my 20s. But also, well, I'm meditating. I do it in the morning before getting out of bed. Not every day, never for more than ten minutes. Some days it's more like hitting snooze. But whatever. Those ten minutes are the opposite of the throat-clenching, paranoia-inducing anxiety I felt for so long, so I keep doing it.

Dj Mehdi and Kéry James, French suburban teenagers in the early 90s. Photo via the Facebook page of Mafia K'1 Fry

When he's not campaigning for the de-Christianization of French public holidays or lobbying against the Security Intelligence Act, political analyst Thomas Guénolé writes. In his 2015 book Les Jeunes de Banlieue Mangent-ils Les Enfants?—or Do Banlieue Youth Eat Children?—he tackles the prejudice faced by young people living in French suburban ghettos—also known as the banlieue.

Nowhere can this prejudice be summed up more succinctly than by French rap group La Rumeur's song "I Am An Ethnic Gang Myself Alone." "Hooligan, fundamentalist, barbarian, rioter, terrorist, bastard, savage," they spit, reeling off the labels thrown at them. And now, in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks, the subsequent raids in the Saint-Denis suburbs and the state of emergency declared by François Hollande, kids in Paris' banlieue will be even more under the spotlight.

It has been ten years since the notorious "banlieue riots" of 2005—three weeks of violent street protest in the suburbs, sparked by the deaths of two teenagers after a police chase. But according to Thomas Guénolé, "banlieue-phobic" attitudes are still entrenched in French culture—from newspaper editorials calling for a clampdown on security, to the dramatic scenes shown on TV news to cinema—where suburban Parisian kids are always, no matter how lovable their characters—connected in some way to crime and fundamentalism.

Back in 2005, there was a near-universal agreement that the root of the problems in the banlieue was poverty and discrimination. Now, it's Islam. But fears around radicalization are wrong, says Thomas. He thinks what is actually happening is a "de-Islamification" of the French suburbs. Only 15 percent of young Muslims wear the hijab and according to France's Intelligence Services themselves, radicalization concerns only 4 percent of the French mosques.

But poverty in these areas is still rife. Kids from the banlieue are two times more likely to have to repeat a year at school than the French average and half as likely to enter 1re S—the sought-after science stream of high school.

So what will happen to these kids in the wake of the September 13 attacks? I caught up with Thomas to find out.

Thomas Guénolé. Photo by Samuel Kirszenbaum for Libération, via Thomas Guénolé's Facebook

VICE: Hi Thomas. Your book aims to debunk French prejudices against young people from the banlieue—mainly Muslims and those from immigrant families. Do you think these prejudices will deepen after the November 13 attacks?
Thomas Guénolé: It is unfortunately likely. And it will be the same process of generalization: A portion of the young fundamentalist assassins come from the suburbs, so if you come from the suburbs, you are supposedly automatically predisposed to becoming a fundamentalist assassin.

That said, I am very surprised by the collective maturity of the French population compared to the days following the Charlie Hebdo attacks. After Charlie, the population split in two trying to answer the question, "Am I Charlie?" This time, the national unity and solidarity amongst the French population is very powerful. There's far less fearmongering. French people seem to have been able to see the difference between fundamentalists and Muslims.

Former Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said after the 2011 Utoya attacks: "We will answer to terror by more democracy, more open-mindedness, more tolerance." Do you agree with that?
Yes. I sincerely believe that our security strategy—more mass surveillance, fewer civil liberties—is a mistake. Not only do the results of the NSA and the Patriot Act show that in terms of efficiency, those methods don't work, but by following that path, France is moving further away from an open society and towards a police state.

It's a surrender of our fundamental values of freedom in the face of an enemy. It would be better to focus on dismantling the enemy's death machine by immediately setting up a coalition between the air force and ballistic capacities of NATO on one side, and the ground troops of the Arab League on the other side. That to me seems sensible and pragmatic.

If Islamic State are deliberately creating a hostile environment against Muslims to create martyrs, is it fair to say that Islamophobes and "banlieue-phobics" are not only idiots but useful to Islamist terrorism?
All those who make sweeping generalizations that fundamentalism is a problem amongst all French Muslims are faithful performers of Islamic State's strategy. They should be aware of that.

Have French policies towards the suburbs encouraged jihadism?
The condition of our suburbs is a problem in itself that needs a political answer. If the city centers have to fear jihadism in order to worry about the abject misery in which our suburban population has been sinking for decades—that is appalling. It says a great deal about the level of their empathy towards the poor populations in our country.

Your book on banlieue youth was published ten years after the 2005 riots. How did it come about?
The starting point for my book was the demonstrations against the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the summer of 2004, which gave rise to a flood of hate and fear speeches in the media against the "banlieue-youth" and the "banlieue-Islam".

Hearing so much hate rallied against these communities made me sick. So I wrote an opinion piece, published by left wing newspaper Libération, attacking this new rhetoric that the "jihadis from the banlieue" were our new enemy. A few months later, I published a second article, showing how racist and Islamophobic clichés had built this new enemy. A few days later, I got a book deal.

So are young Muslims now the enemy instead of the "suburban youths" of the 2000s?
I wouldn't say one has replaced the other, it's more about an accumulation. In addition to the hate and fear discourse about the "banlieue-youth," we now have an additional fear and hate discourse against Muslims.

Has religion been more prominent in the French banlieue since the September 11 attacks?
This focus on a radicalizing minority is disproportionate. The majority of young French Muslims are moving away from Islam. Compared with their parents' generation, religious practice is decreasing. Parallel to that however, we are witnessing a revival of religious fundamentalism within a minority of French Muslims.

The co-existence of both phenomena is not a coincidence. We saw the same thing happen in France in the latter part of the 20th Century: Small groups of Christian fundamentalists emerged, while the majority of French people were going through a de-Christianization process.

Although the media stigmatize the suburbs some well-known figures, like Omar Sy from The Untouchables and the rapper Joey Starr, are glorified. How do you explain this?
The problem with highlighting some isolated examples of great artistic or entrepreneurship success is that it reinforces the cliché. This notion that some of them are very nice is a complementary discourse to anti-banlieue-youth racism.

Instead of only showing drug dealers and dynamic entrepreneurs, maybe we could just show suburban youth as they are—roughly speaking, half of them in real pain, the other half living from small jobs at the bottom of the social ladder. Incidentally, half of the young people who live in the banlieue are actually girls. We never see them either.

The idea of systematic racism is hard to stomach for some Republican intellectuals.
One of the conclusions of my book is that there is an apartheid in France that is, in the strict sense, a coherent and structured system of economic, social, and cultural segregation. The apartheid is quite obvious, especially in the education system. And to say it more bluntly, every black person and every Arab person knows exactly what this is because they experience it everyday. The apartheid practiced in France might be sneaky and assumed, but it is still quite real.

The intellectuals who put blame for our social problems on migrant communities from Arabic or Sub-Saharan origins are actually aiming at the wrong target. Yes, there is a problem with separatism in France, but it's not young Muslims. It's the elderly middle-classes who make sure only them and their offspring have a chance to blossom in our society.

Follow Antoine on Twitter.

The southern Asian nation of Myanmar (or Burma) has a welcoming friendly nature contrasted by a dark, criminal underbelly. It's a regular destination for wealthy families on packaged bus tours and backpackers, and yet it's fighting numerous ethnic armies on multiple fronts; it's the third largest producer of opium in the world, and one of the most dangerous places on earth for ethnic and religious minorities outside of the territories held by the Islamic State.

I first visited Burma in 2010, when the country's beloved opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was being released after 15 sporadic years of house arrest. On my third day in Burma, I found myself staring at Aung San Suu Kyi as she addressed a crowd of no less than 10,000 die-hard supporters who were crying, screaming, and fainting. I saw genuine hope and happiness in the their eyes—it was a beautiful thing to witness and I wanted to tell this story of a democratic transition for this country. However things didn't go quite as planned.

Shan army soldiers

As I got further into the story, I realized that Burma's "transition" is a volume of smaller stories that must first be looked at and understood before one can actually comprehend modern Burma's state of affairs. This is why I named my book Little Pieces; this is only a small piece of the puzzle that is Burma.

I wanted to focus on Burma's ethnic civil war after hearing stories of attempted extermination at the hands of government forces and other atrocities from refugees along the country's eastern border. There are a total of 17 government recognized opposition armies active within Burma. This all stemmed from an agreement between the various ethnic groups and the government in 1947 called the Panglong Agreement that was never recognized by the military after Aung San (the author of the agreement and the President at the time) was assassinated. The agreement laid out a road to autonomy for the ethnic states once held together by the British Empire. Since 1947 over 30 different ethnic armies have fought the Burmese military for autonomy on some scale so I decided to focus on the three most active armies: the Kachin, Karen and the Shan.

The Kachin army

Since this conflict has been grinding along for six decades it is hard for it to get coverage in the mainstream media unless an untold tragedy happens. Each ethnic group has such a diverse and unique history I felt the story warranted a full book. Looking back at the shots I cut out, I could have made three volumes. These images try to tell the story of the struggle faced by ethnic minorities living within the Burmese apparatus of oppression.

Because Burma is still an obscure country for a North American audience, I decided to release my book at a point when people might be talking about Burma. On November 9, Burma held its first national democratic election in 25 years. With the country's main opposition party the National League for Democracy (NLD) winning a house majority, Burma looked distinctly like a newly blossomed democracy. However looks can be deceiving.

A soldier from the Karen army

There is one Achilles heel to Burmese democracy that the military has expertly put in place to consolidate their power over the populace: the 2008 constitution.

In 2003, in a bid to change the government's international reputation as an oppressive military dictatorship, state media announced the Seven Step roadmap to democracy. The steps included reassembling the National Convention and holding free and fair elections. However, the most significant step was to draft a new national constitution, and the government at the time knew precisely what it was doing. Changing one general for another went poorly in the past, so the government and military got smart and made a constitution that gave them ultimate control from behind the scenes.

In 2008 the new national constitution was drafted by the government, which set out clearly defined parameters for keeping the military in key power positions indefinitely. The 2008 constitution guarantees 25 percent of parliament's seats be designated to the military while any amendments to said constitution requires over 75 percent approval of parliament. Furthermore there is a committee called the National Defense and Security Council comprised of over 50 percent military personnel that have the ability to veto any decision and happen to wield more constitutional power than the elected government. To make matters worse for government opposition in the country, there is a special clause that many believe to be solely directed at keeping Aung San Suu Kyi from power, which states you are ineligible to run for the presidency if you have children who are foreign citizens. Since Aung San Suu Kyi has married Michael Aris, a British citizen, in 1972 and had two children with him who also subsequently hold British citizenship, she is barred from running for president.

Another Karen army soldier

On top of all of this, the military was granted unimaginable powers such as selecting the Defense Minister, the Border Affairs minister and the Home affairs minister while key departments such as the Judiciary and Police are beyond reach of the elected government's authority. The military even gets to set its own budget that the government has no say in, which gives the armed forces full independence from any elected government.

The first time I visited the country it was illegal to wear or advertise your support for the NLD, Aung San Suu Kyi or any other government opposition group and today it is hard to gaze anywhere in the cities of Burma and not see an NLD flag or portrait of its beloved leader.

But to say that Burma's national elections will change nothing is a false statement. However, the amount of change is up for debate.

You can find Little Pieces on Bryan's website.

A jug of used needles that will be exchanged for new ones in Camden, New Jersey. AP Photo/Mel Evans

For months, news outlets across America have been hyping the heroin "epidemic." It's now a white problem, the headlines scream, and consequently, the articles imply, we need a kinder, gentler approach.

If that sounds like a reductive (and maybe even racist) way to describe the situation, consider this passage from an October New York Times story:

When the nation's long-running war against drugs was defined by the crack epidemic and based in poor, predominantly black urban areas, the public response was defined by zero tolerance and stiff prison sentences. But today's heroin crisis is different. While heroin use has climbed among all demographic groups, it has skyrocketed among whites; nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white.

And the growing army of families of those lost to heroin—many of them in the suburbs and small towns—are now using their influence, anger and grief to cushion the country's approach to drugs, from altering the language around addiction to prodding government to treat it not as a crime, but as a disease.

It's not surprising that white families—who are generally more affluent and politically connected than minorities—would have a disproportionate impact on drug policies. But white families affected by drugs in the 70s and 80s were a major part of the conversation back then, too. The difference is, they were on the opposite side.

Read: Why Is it Still Illegal to Visit the US if You Admit to Using Drugs?

The earlier anti-drug " parents movement" began in 1976, in Atlanta, when a white mother, Marsha "Keith" Schuchard, caught her 13-year-old daughter smoking pot. She mobilized her neighbors and then the nation to crack down on a drug that she argued was damaging children's capacity to learn and acting as a "gateway" to "harder" substances.

This activism became part of a larger backlash against the permissiveness and counterculture of the 60s—one that would be embraced by conservatives and some liberals who thought the "let it all hang out" movement had gone too far. Tens of thousands of parents joined anti-drug groups, urged on by "Just Say No" first lady Nancy Reagan. Their sadness and rage were genuine, but they were also easy emotions for right-wing politicians to exploit.

Tough drug policies have long been tied to race: Drug warriors have used fears about Irish,Jewish, and German immigrants (Prohibition), Chinese railroad workers (opium), Mexicans (marijuana), or black people (cocaine, heroin, marijuana, you name it) to gain support for their prescribed crackdowns. By the time Schuchard began her work, drug scares had been elevated to an art by Republican operatives like Nixon aide John Ehrlichman. In 1992, Ehrlichman described these techniques to journalist Dan Baum:

By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

This tactic helped win elections for the GOP, and resulted in increasingly harsh drug laws. In the 1970s, ten states had decriminalized marijuana possession and President Jimmy Carter even told Congress in 1977 that he favored revising federal law in the same way. But thanks in part to the parents' movement, in the 1980s it became hard to turn on the TV or open a newspaper without hearing about the horrors of crack—and nearly every image used to illustrate the issue demonized black people.

The movement was more than a simple Republican front, however. Fear of drugs resonated across the political spectrum. The issue's effectiveness at getting votes prompted Democrats to equal and even at times exceed their opponents in drug incarceration mania. And among the parents who organized in favor of the most extreme punishments were many whose children were actually addicted.

Tens of thousands of families—the majority of them white—sent their children to programs like Straight Incorporated, which epitomized the idea that rehab itself should be as brutal as possible.

Phyllis and David York, for example, were white suburbanites whose daughter became addicted to cocaine. Their 1982 bestseller, Toughlove, advocated harsh treatment as the only way to help addicts— especially if they were your own kids. The approach was endorsed by leading advice columnist Ann Landers and gave rise to support groups with thousands of members. The movement advocated making drug laws more severe and refusing to bail out children in trouble. Helping was demonized as "codependence" and "enabling."

Toughlove parents lionized punitive treatment across the board. Tens of thousands of families—the majority of them white—sent their children to programs like Straight Incorporated, which epitomized the idea that rehab itself should be as brutal as possible. These organizations used torturous tactics like depriving patients of food and sleep, isolation, attack therapy, beatings, and punitive restraints (some of which went on for so long that teens soiled themselves) in a deliberate attempt to break down teens' personalities, which was supposed to end their addictions. In reality, it's more likely to cause PTSD, which worsens addiction.

But when the enemy was drugs, nothing—not kidnapping and imprisonment, not assault, not making girls wear clothes stained with feces and menstrual blood, not executing dealers or calling for casual users to be shot—was seen as taking it too far. And the parents' movement made every effort to keep white kids from being spared.In fact, since many of these teen programs were private, expensive, and not covered by insurance, the majority of children sent to them were actually white. (Today, at least 10,000 teenagers are held in such programs at any given time.)

We've spent over a trillion dollars; that's $1,000,000,000,000, a million million. Yet neither use rates or addiction rates have declined.

If white parents are advocating for gentler treatment of addicts as opposed to this sort of abuse, that's clearly significant progress. But why are they turning away from toughness now?

I can think of several reasons. For one, we've lived through at least three decades during which the only politically acceptable response to drug issues has been more of the same brutality. During this time, while various "epidemics" like crack and meth have risen and then fallen, no one has ever been able to honestly make the case that law enforcement–based approaches to fighting addiction have worked.

When the US first began measuring youth drug use in 1975, 55 percent of high school seniors reporting having tried an illegal drug (mainly weed), with a peak of 66 percent in 1981 and an all-time low of 41 percent in 1992. The latest figure is 49 percent. During that same period of time, spending on the drug war—which overwhelmingly focuses on law enforcement and incarceration—has risen exponentially. We've spent over a trillion dollars; that's $1,000,000,000,000, a million million. Yet neither use rates or addiction rates have declined; if anything, addiction has increased.

No one is more aware of this than the parents of people with addictions. Many if not most have tried tough love and harsh rehab and watched them fail, or even backfire—sometimes with fatal results. At the same time, data has been accumulating to show that the opposite approach, known as "harm reduction," can help.

Watch the VICE documentary on Japan's aging biker gangs:

Research now finds that a kind, gentle approach known as CRAFT Family Therapy doubles the success rate for loved ones trying to get addicted people into treatment, compared with the typical coercive TV-style intervention. Studies show that needle exchange and other harm reduction programs don't "enable" or extend problem drug use—in fact, Canada's safe injection rooms ultimately help 57 percent of their participants get treatment aimed at ending addiction.

But the harm-reduction program that I think has made the biggest difference is the growing use of, outside of medical treatment, of the opioid overdose antidote naloxone (a.k.a. Narcan). Since 1996, when Dan Bigg and the Chicago Recovery Alliance started providing naloxone to drug users and their loved ones, tens of thousands of people have been saved and many more have witnessed their Lazarus-like recoveries. The nontoxic and non-addictive drug, which does no harm if used in error, instantly revives people who have stopped breathing and taken on a deathly pallor.

Although Pulp Fiction notoriously misrepresented overdose reversal by suggesting that it required an adrenaline shot to the heart, Uma Thurman's sudden revival isn't far from the truth about how dramatically naloxone works when injected subcutaneously or applied as a nasal spray.

Hundreds of naloxone distribution programs now exist across the country; every day Google Alerts sends me dozens of items about how police departments, hospitals, drug treatment programs, and schools are using it to save lives. The federal government has made it a priority in efforts to stop overdose deaths.

Some reforms work slowly and invisibly, but naloxone saves lives in a visceral and immediately understandable way. When parents lose children who could have been saved if only they'd had it on hand, they get righteously furious. As several anguished mothers asked repeatedly at an FDA hearing on naloxone that I covered for TIME in 2012, "Why didn't I know about this when my child was still alive?"

No one in the world of crackdowns and tough talk has a good answer. Even those who worry that naloxone might encourage increased risk-taking admit that they would want it if their own loved ones were at risk.

Indeed, one of the main differences between today's parents' movement and that of the 80s is that many its leaders have already lost children. From Gary Mendell of Shatterproof to Denise Cullen of GRASP/Broken No More to Dianee Carden Glenn, Elaine Pawlowski, and some members of Families for Sensible Drug Policy and Moms United to End the War on Drugs, all have faced a child's overdose death.

"As a mother, it was intuitive: Our goal was never to punish or coerce, it was to help him get well."
—Denise Cullen

This perspective brings with it a very different attitude. Since naloxone programs grew out of the world of harm reduction, the new parent activists have been exposed to the research on gentler drug policies—and many have analyzed their children's stories in light of the harm done by arrests, incarceration, and tough love, not just drugs. As I reported in VICE this summer, for example, Denise Cullen's son, Jeff, died in 2008, less than two days after being released from jail—a time during which overdose death is exponentially higher than normal.

"All the law enforcement stuff did was punish my son, shame him," Cullen told me, describing why she supports harm reduction. "As a mother, it was intuitive: Our goal was never to punish or coerce, it was to help him get well."

Elaine Pawlowski's son died of an overdose in 2012. The 29-year-old grad student did not call 911 for help, she has written, because he feared consequences related to the drug court program he was being forced to attend. "Harm reduction gives you the respect you need to go forward," she says, contrasting it with the guilt and stigma of the criminal justice system.

And Mary Kay Villaverde's 24-year-old son, who died in 2001, had repeatedly tried abstinence-based programs without success. None of them informed him about other options that have been proven to reduce the risk of overdose death by over 70 percent. "From what I have learned, I believe medication-assisted treatment would've helped him, along with alternatives offered now, emphasizing harm reduction," she says.

Pieties like "think of the children" are clichés, but the notion that drug policies could save—or doom—kids is undeniably powerful. Arguments based on statistics are rarely as persuasive as an army of grieving mothers and fathers, no matter what their merits. But these new parent activists stand as living proof of the failure of the drug war to protect kids—and the harm that it has wrought on real families. And the data is on their side.

With any luck—and with solidarity for everyone harmed by the drug war—these could be the voices that politicians will finally heed to make effective change.

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

All photos by Jake Lewis

For most of those outside major cities, and quite a few inside them as well, learning to drive is a rite of passage. It's one of the few things in this world that seems impossible while you're learning it, until you remember the stupidest people in your life do it with no problem. Some will take to it later in life in a bid to assert their maturity, but most will be champing at the bit as soon as they turn 16. Panicking while a van driver pounds his horn behind you, nearly crashing into a hedge, stalling over and over again—yep, learning to drive is a real treat. And once you've managed to obtain your license from the fucking Gestapo headquarters that is the DMV, the world is your oyster, the 24-hour drive throughs your satellite kitchens.

That being said, aside from exploration and eating shitty food, the other thing young'uns like doing is taking drugs. Smoking weed, doing pills, snorting gear, chomping shrooms—getting wavy is the order of the day, but combined with driving it can prove fatal. Ford, the motor car company started by virulent anti-semite Henry Ford in 1902, wants the kids to know the dangers of drug driving, and have commissioned some German boffins from the Meyer-Hentschel Institute, the people behind something called an "age suit," to simulate the effects. The drug suit that they created impairs your physical movements and vision while driving, and will hopefully teach those whippersnappers a thing or two about driving safely.

I got a chance to test out the suit at the Ford Dunton Technical Centre in Laindon, Essex. It's a giant, town-like complex in which Ford tests all their new gadgets and cars and stuff in the UK. I was told a couple of thousand people work there. I was taken to a little circular test track at the bottom of a longer, more exciting test track that had a variety of surfaces, like cobbles and rumble strips and ramps. I wanted to drive on the exciting one, but it wasn't to be. I guess I'm just not important enough.

The suit was revealed to me, but it wasn't what I'd envisioned. In my head it was a hi-tech mecha-suit, turning me into a drunken, drugged-up Transformer. In reality it was a series of weights attached to my extremities, tightened to secure and reduce movement. There was also a vibrating glove that simulated a tremor in my hand, a neck brace, some headphones playing droning bleeps to distract me, and, the pièce de résistance, the crowning glory: the rave specs.

The rave specs were by far the most debilitating aspect of the whole ensemble. A pair of protective glasses you'd get in chemistry class in school, but modified with flashing lights and a grid of plastic that makes things seem far away and close at the same time. I tried a few times to catch some tennis balls and play keepy-up with middling success.

No matter, it was time for the real shit, the fun part: I was going to see how drugs would affect my driving skills. I don't actually have a license, but I can drive, so I have never actually combined the two. I have done drugs and I have driven as two separate activities, so I can imagine what the effects would be like. Unfortunately, however, I'm sad to report that the drug simulation suit does not effectively simulate drugs.

It seems the suit is aimed at people who have yet to ruin their lives with the pipe of nightmares, or the syringe of pain. To a non-user, the suit would make you think one hit on a blunt or one dab of MDMA would weigh you down like a pair of concrete galoshes, and turn your eyesight into a Kyuss show at the planetarium.

As most of us know, drugs won't do that. Not most drugs, at least. If you're eating shrooms or doing acid while driving you're asking for a disaster, so most people tend to avoid doing that. Driving while under the influence of more commonplace night out drugs, while something I, obviously, absolutely cannot condone, will not make you feel like you're in a 19th century diving suit, the helmet decorated by the HADOUKEN! street team.

After riding around a bit I decided to try and weave in and out of the cones that had been set up. I crushed and destroyed two of them, but after a bit of practice I could weave through them like a particularly sober judge.

Well, not really, but it didn't fuck me up as much as I'd thought. Part of the reason was the weights that were supposed to quell my movement didn't have much effect in the small space I was driving in. I imagined they were supposed to make changing gears and the like tiresome, but you can't really change gears while driving around in a little circle. It appears that the suit is trying to replicate the feelings of ecstasy, heroin, acid, coke, and weed all at once. But without actually being on those drugs, I'm just a drugless man wearing a lot of gym equipment.

Still, what Ford is doing, while perhaps not as effective as they'd hoped, is quite sweet. It's all a part of their little known Driving Skills For Life initiative, an over a decade-long program that provides safety tips to new drivers. Stats say that people driving after tooting rocks and greens are 30 times more likely to be involved in an accident, and if wearing weighted water wings and a rudimentary Oculus Rift simulating the experience of trying to find the toilet at Burning Man makes people think twice, then so be it.

Follow Joe and Jake on Twitter.

Kiribati's Millenial Atoll, also known as Caroline Island. Photo by Flickr user The TerraMar Project

Kiribati is one of the lowest carbon emitting countries in the world, but this Pacific Island nation is confronting some of the most disastrous effects of climate change. Made up of 33 low-lying coral atolls, Kiribati is shrinking as sea levels rise. Last year, the government went as far as buying a tract of land on a Fijian island in order to relocate some of its citizens.

In 30 years' time, it's been predicted the entire nation could be totally submerged, placing its population of 102,000 amongst the estimated 50 to 250 million people facing displacement due to the effects of climate change by the middle of the century.

And while the government of Kiribati has a relocation strategy, those forced to leave countries without one will face even greater barriers when resettling. The UN refugee convention defines a refugee as an individual unable to return to their country due to persecution, effectively excluding those fleeing the hazards of climate change.

Despite last week's terror attacks, the UN COP 21 climate change conference will commence in Paris on November 30. Yet they won't be discussing the movement of people displaced by climate change, as last month, a proposal to establish an international body to coordinate such movements was dropped from the draft agreement.

Butaritari, Kiribati. Photo by Flickr user KevGuy4101

And ahead of the COP 21, Kiribati president Anote Tong is currently in Australia calling for a global moratorium on new coal mines. This comes just after the Australian government has re-approved construction of the Carmichael mine in Queensland, set to be one of the world's largest coal mines.

VICE spoke to Fanny Thornton, assistant professor in law at the University of Canberra whose PhD focused on climate change-related displacement, to discuss what hope lies for those most direly affected.

VICE: What's happening to people from Pacific Island nations like Kiribati who are already being displaced by climate change?
Fanny Thornton: What we saw recently in New Zealand was an applicant from Kiribati who brought a claim to the NZ Immigration and Protection Tribunal, claiming he feared the impact of climate change in his home country and was applying on that basis for refugee status. The tribunal refused to recognize that he's capable of being a refugee, because the international legal framework of how you become a refugee is not really applicable to such people.

But an interesting aspect of that case is the tribunal did not preclude the possibility that there may become a time in the future when, based on human rights and humanitarian obligations, people may become eligible for protection. But that point has not currently been reached.

Last month, a proposal to establish an international body to coordinate the movement of people displaced by climate change was dropped from the COP 21 draft agreement. Why do you think that was? And why do you think the Australian government was one of the main opponents of the proposed body?
At the moment, there's no mention in the draft text whatsoever about any matter to do with human mobility in relation to climate change. In the past, the outcome text of some meetings have had some mention of migration displacement and relocation, but the language has always been very vague, noncommittal, very much against any possibility to start developing any kind of legal or institutional infrastructure.

I imagine that a powerful state like Australia would have opposed any such measure appearing in the draft and certainly in the final text. A lot of powerful states at this point do not really consider that the umbrella of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is necessarily appropriate for trying to resolve this issue of people displaced by climate change.

There's certainly lots of the more powerful states that are keen to not develop any kind of obligation in this area.

And why do you think this is?
We have a lot of states around the world, including Australia, who are taking a stand of wanting to limit migration of displaced people into their territory. There is this fear in the context of wanting to regulate and minimize such migration already. You don't really want to develop—in the international sphere—further commitments to people that may be displaced for example by environmental reasons.

To date have there been any other international programs set in place to help people displaced by climate change?
Yes. The most promising is called the Nansen Initiative. It's a state-led process to develop a protection agenda that relates to cross-border movements in relation to natural disasters and climate change. The two early adopters of this process were Switzerland and Norway, although Australia joined relatively early.

It has not developed a legal instrument, but just a few weeks ago, there was a meeting following its initial phase in Geneva and over 100 countries endorsed the protection agenda that was developed.

So I guess what we need to see now is how states such as Australia react to this initiative. And see how it is socialized and developed as at least a basic instrument, even as much as a binding one that is highly relevant in the context of people movement and climate change.

And if no changes take place at the international level, what's going to happen to these people?
Well people may end up moving internationally into situations that are quite precarious for them. Legally speaking they may end up in territories where they have very little legal status, which is not a good situation to be in.

You might see securitization in relation to this issue, with states that are fearing they may see an influx of people impacted by the effect of climate change further increasing border security, making it quite difficult for people to then in fact move.

And what isn't highlighted in this scenario is the possibility of trapped populations—populations that really need to move and should, but then become trapped because they really have nowhere to go.

What would you say to the leaders at the COP 21 about climate change-related displacement, if you had the chance?
Leaders should feel encouraged to further build consensus around the issue of migration, displacement, and relocation in the context of climate change. The COP has previously agreed on principles related to this, namely to cooperate and to coordinate under the umbrella of enhanced adaptation action. It is timely to now build on those commitments and to give them expanded content.

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On Friday, Todd Haynes's latest film—the period love story Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara—opens in theaters nationwide. Based on Patricia Highsmith's 1952 novel The Price of Salt, which she published under the name Claire Morgan because of its controversial lesbian content, Carol is the story of a yearning that does not even have a name to call itself.

Therese (played by a wide-eyed yet steely Mara) is a young photographer working as a holiday clerk in the doll department of a large New York City department store, where she meets the mysterious Carol (Blanchett, impressively capturing the weary glamour of the postwar period). Their connection is instantaneous but fraught. Carol, we quickly learn, is in the throws of a messy divorce, and although she's previously had a relationship with another woman, at the start of the film, neither she nor Therese seem to think themselves as queer. Discovering their love for one another, therefore, is also a process of discovering something vast about themselves—and the homophobic world they live in.

Visually, the film is stunning, with Haynes having drawn inspiration from street photographers like Vivian Maier and Saul Leiter. Like the character of Therese herself, the camera is always looking at Carol from a distance, framing her in beautiful moments.

Carol offers a curious bookend to Far from Heaven, Haynes's 2002 film about the wife of a closeted gay man. Both explore sexuality and desire in the 1950s, but Carol offers more hope—more possibility—for its characters than does Far from Heaven, an inversion of our standard thinking that progress is an inevitable line through history.

VICE sat down with Haynes in the swank lobby of New York City's Bowery Hotel to discuss Carol, his career, and what it even means to make queer indie films today.

VICE: Were you very familiar with The Price of Salt before making Carol?
Todd Haynes: I had read Patricia Highsmith, but I didn't know The Price of Salt when it came to me. But now I love that book. And the script was a beautiful adaptation of it, and for me it was a challenge too. It was all about the love story, something I felt I never really focused on in and of itself, as a traditional film.

The book is very closely told through Therese's point of view, but in Carol, we get much more of Carol. Why? And does that change the story?
I don't think there was any way to keep it completely locked inside Therese's point of view exclusively, but that's still where the camera is. Carol is really the impenetrable object of desire, the person who we don't really understand. Therese is the one looking, and Therese is the one assuming the lens, and holding it up and learning how to frame this person in her camera. When we enter Carol's life, it's because of the package Therese sends her, that's how we gain access. It's all because of Therese's agency in some way that we get into Carol's life.

"Really great love stories are blinded by subjective experience, and distorted by it, and by desire and yearning that doesn't get fulfilled."

But we see scenes with Carol and her husband, for instance, in a way we never do in the book.
I still think Carol remains at a distance, somebody who is hard to know and hard to understand. I think that's part of what excites Therese. It's a balance between the two. If we were too close to Carol, if she was too colloquial with the viewer, none of that sense of her being looked at, desired, or almost spied upon by Therese would have the same impact. Carol is not generating the story.

There are some obvious parallels between Carol and Far From Heaven. What attracts you to these kinds of stories?
What attracted me to Carol was how different it was from Far from Heaven, that even though both films take place in the 50s and have gay themes, they could be completely unique experiences. The 1950s were not just one thing by any stretch.

What differences do you see between the two?
Far from Heaven is a homage to the texts and subtexts of Sirkian melodrama at one of its apex moments in the history of movies. The melodrama is this sort of claustrophobic and powerfully artificial language that forces something authentic to happen in the viewer, almost because of how strenuous and expressionistic the artifice is. There's nothing natural about the way those movies look, the way they're written, the way the characters behave or speak. But that over-determination of style is contrasted by how simple the stories are, and how simple the people are, how unheroic they are, and how easily crushable they are by the forces of society and social mores.

The love story, to me, is a different beast because it is so much about point of view and subjectivity, and melodrama isn't. You're outside the melodramatic world looking in at all these forces crushing all these people. But really great love stories are blinded by subjective experience, and distorted by it, and by desire and yearning that doesn't get fulfilled. There's also a similar lack of fulfillment in melodrama, but this one gives the audience tremendous yearning for characters to come together. It uses point of view in ways the melodrama doesn't do.

And they're just really different ends of the 1950s. Far from Heaven is the full-on Eisenhower era, with its polished, enameled surfaces of that time, and this is this much murkier period: the end of the war years, more the postwar era before Eisenhower took office. With all the exposed needs that made people want a strong leader and a lot of answers addressed and solutions to problems posed.

"I'm interested in the condition of people who don't have as much direct access to power and agency as men usually have."

There seems to be slightly more hope for your characters' nontraditional love interests in Carol, surprisingly.
Yeah, and historically that's going backward—and that often happens. The war years opened up all these strange inversions where men were away and women were home, running the factories and munitions, and building weapons and airplanes and stuff. So there were homosocial realms that created all kinds of interesting and surprising results. Everything was upside-down, and then of course the 50s happen. Women get put in the home, men get put in the workplace, and everybody got put very rigidly back into their places. So some of that sense of possibility or uncertainty or improvisation or something went away for a while.

One of the things I've always loved about your work is your commitment to showing the emotional lives of women. So many gay male artists don't seem able (or perhaps interested) in doing so. Why are you?
I'm interested in the condition of people who don't have as much direct access to power and agency as men usually have. Even in Far from Heaven, we have some scenes where we see Frank, the husband, in the world, but they're very limited. Because that's where are all the action is, because he's a free agent and he can go out in the world. He works every day and comes home and we don't know what happens on the train or in the car, and so when and where we do see that has to be extremely curtailed and limited. Otherwise, the fact that all the big action and big stuff is happening in his world would completely tip the movie. Instead, the weight of concentration is on the wife, and she's the passive character. She's in the precarious position of having to maintain the family and the home, the things that keep her boxed up and cut off, while he in some ways enjoys way more freedoms than either she or the Dennis Haysbert character.

Similarly, Therese is the more passive character in Carol. It would be so easy to shift it all into Carol's domain, because all the big stuff is going on in Carol's life. But then every time you came to Therese's scenes you'd be like, "Who's this little squeaky mousy girl in the corner of the room waiting for Carol to walk up to her?" Where you are predominantly anchored has a big impact in tilting the shifts of power.

"There have been unbelievable legislative triumphs that are essential and correct and humane, but there's been all kinds of losses along the way. Really, I think what it's about is capitalism has won."

You've been making queer indie films for basically your whole career. How has the process and reception changed over time?
Every one is its own unique struggle. I always resist this notion of progressive momentum in terms of attitude or openness in society or interest in gay queer themes or whatever. Even though, clearly, acceptance of the AIDS epidemic has completely turned around, and gay marriage and rights and freedoms are acknowledged in a whole different way today than they were just ten years ago—almost to an unimaginable degree with a speed that's unique. But Velvet Goldmine was probably an easier film to put together than Carol. Carol took so long and it was this impenetrable script, bizarre, completely crazy script.

How so?
It's so layered and referential and camp in some ways. It doesn't really have a lot of precedence. You can't really say, "Oh, it's going to be just like that movie we've seen before, with a little bit of this thrown in." The way it was written was very ornate and impenetrable as well, same with I'm Not There. But I think because it had young pretty people in it and music, it was a little easier to finance Velvet Goldmine. Safe was a very difficult film to finance for all the obvious reasons.

Just the fact that Carol took this long to get off the ground, way before I came on board is remarkable to me. I don't think that it was just that it was about lesbians. I think the lesbian thing is something that distinguished it, made it unique, a selling point. Contradictorily, the fact that there are no big male leads in it put people off. So it's like, "How can we have a lesbian movie with male leads?"

On Broadly: The Last Lesbian Bars

You showed early work at venues like MIX, the queer experimental film festival. Is that still a viable path for young filmmakers?
Even the words experimental and queer—I don't even know what they mean to people right now, you know? Maybe I'm just a little out of it—I'm not as plugged into what's happening right now in terms of experimental work, and what kind of queer work is coming out that feels genuinely queer.

So much of the momentum has been going toward a kind of assimilation of all media and identity. There have been unbelievable legislative triumphs that are essential and correct and humane, but there's been all kinds of losses along the way. Really, I think what it's about is capitalism has won, and there's not even a language for standing outside the market and being critical of the market and seeing it as something one can stand outside of and speak coherently about from the margins.

Instead, our entire value system, our digital culture, our social media—all of it is one more cunning way that corporate culture wins out over all of us. Especially young people. They have a very hard time even knowing what those traditions of alternative thinking were, and why, where they came from, and what their political histories meant, and what their aesthetic histories reflect.

But there's always a pushback. I'm hoping right now we're still in this thrall over new technology and the pushback is coming. Kindle apparently is failing, and people want to read books in their hands. Bookstores are opening up, and that's so awesome. People are fetishizing vinyl—great! Fetishize vinyl. Have Rough Trade outlets all over with a hundred name-brand vinyl reissues, I don't care. Whatever. I think that's great. Have Tarantino make his movies on 70mm and have theaters show them on the screen. Any way to keep these languages that have real history and meaning alive.

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Carol opens today in theaters nationwide.

Look at Ines Estrada's work on her Instagram, Twitter, website, and online shop.

Jimmy McMillan, the founder of New York's Rent Is Too Damn High Party. Illustration by Wren McDonald

I live in Stuyvesant Town, an 8,757-unit behemoth in New York's East Village that's likely visible from space. It's a little like living in a mix between a college campus and a Florida suburb, which I like, plus it's seemingly one of the only affordable places to live in Manhattan. Well, "affordable" with a caveat: I pay less to live there than I would if I was anywhere in Brooklyn, but only because I split a two-bedroom with a couple.

When I lived in other large cities, I rented entire one-bedroom apartments for about half of what I pay for my current spot; when I lived in a small town, I had a big room in a huge house with a backyard for even less. New York has always been different, the place you make sacrifices to live inside, an archipelago teeming with so much culture that people will slave away at lousy jobs and sleep in closets just to be near all that light and sound.

But though the rent here has always been too damn high, it's getting worse: A growing number of New Yorkers are "rent-burdened," meaning 30 percent or more of their incomes go to rent and utilities. Around 21 percent of residents are "severely rent-burdened," meaning more than half their money goes to rent, according to a recent survey—and I'm one of them.

Previously: When Should You Start Thinking About Buying a House if You're Young and Broke?

On a basic level, I understand what everyone understands—there isn't enough housing in this city to keep up with demand; landlords will charge whatever the law allows—but the intricacies of the rental market make my head spin. (I'm still trying to figure out what it means that my complex was sold for $5.3 billion to a private equity firm and a Canadian real estate fund.)

To figure out why rent is so high, and what can be done about it, I reached out to experts who, unfortunately, said the first question was very simple and the second was very, very complicated.

The Problem

The way it's supposed to work is this: You graduate school, broke but starry-eyed and probably itching to get out of your square-shaped state to New York City or Portland or Austin or LA. You slog your way through an entry-level job, accumulate the trappings of an adult life, then settle down and buy property, after which you shoot out offspring and the cycle begins anew.

The housing bust disrupted this process. Foreclosures forced former owners back into the rental market, where they collided with recent college graduates who were also trying to find places to live while struggling to find work in a suddenly crappy economy.

"It's just part of the generational fabric," said Svenja Gudell, the chief economist for the real estate website Zillow. " getting married later in life, they're having kids later in life. All that means they're staying in the rental market for much longer than they used to, six or more years as opposed to two to three years. All of these people are demanding apartments."

Though millennials have been buying homes in increasing numbers, the market has remained tight, and in any case it's hard for many young people to save for a downpayment due to high rents, among other factors.

In New York and other cities, this increased demand for rental properties have led to formerly industrialized areas transformed into trendpiece-spawning hip neighborhoods. Markus Moos, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada, studies why city centers are getting younger. He calls this phenomenon "youthification." Basically, he's found that young people move where housing is cheap and abundant—often de-industrialized areas where former factory space, for instance, has become residential. The influx causes amenities and culture to pop up, which means more and more people then move there despite housing getting scarcer.

The Furman Center at New York University has studied rent trends in the 11 largest metropolitan areas by population between 2006 and 2013. A report that came out in May confirmed what should already be obvious to anyone who's looked for an apartment lately: The number of renters has gone up in all of them.

The report also found that when developers try to meet the demands of "youthification" or just an increase in the number of renters in general, they tend to build units that are largely unaffordable.

If you're in New York, think of the luxury high-rises that the girls on The Bedford Stop live in. If you're not, it still shouldn't be hard to think of an example of an apartment building with a name that sounds like a fancy cocktail and a gym in the basement. If you're the sort of young person who moved straight from college to one of the country's big, shiny cities, you probably can't afford to live in these places.

To make matters worse, wages have been flat for years; inflation-adjusted household income was lower in 2013 than it was in 1989. Combine that with rising rents and it's no surprise that so many Americans are spending more and more of their paychecks just to keep a roof over their heads.

"The majority of renters were rent burdened in most of the cities we studied, with the exception of Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, and Washington DC," Brian Karfunkel, one of the Furman report's authors told me. "But in all 11 cities, living with unaffordable rents is not an anomaly, and in many is even the norm."

Watch the VICE documentary on aging biker gangs:

The Solution

On the personal level, there aren't many options if you want to save money on rent. You could move in with roommates, but you probably already did that. If your city has some version of rent stabilization (rules that control how much landlords can raise rents when leases are up) you can try to find a stabilized apartment and hang onto it at all costs—but that's not much help if you don't already live in a stabilized apartment.

More drastically, you could move to a town where there isn't a severe shortage of rental units. If you go by the Furman report, if you want to do that and stay in a big city, your options are: Atlanta. Sorry everyone.

If you're not ready to make a big life change to reduce your rent burden, you better hope that the country's economists and politicians figure out how to fix America soon.

Among people who study this issue, there seems to be two camps. One group thinks the solution is for cities to offer more rent stabilization, which the other group thinks this is bad, because it just encourages developers to build condos to skirt the requirements.

Heated, complex fights over new construction are happening all over the country. In May, one politician in San Francisco proposed a moratorium on creating new market-rate units until a better plan could be drafted to combat full-stop development in the city's Mission District. When and if that plan comes into existence, it might look a little bit like the one New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio devised, which forces developers of large apartment buildings to set aside 30 percent of their units for affordable housing.

De Blasio's critics on the left say that this plan doesn't go far enough to combat poverty and gentrification. But there's only so much a single mayor can do. To make renting more affordable, you'd basically have to figure out how to solve the problem of income inequality and bring millions of Americans out of poverty. If you've got an idea of how to get the federal government to do that, please don't keep it to yourself.

"Income inequality is certainly something that's driving these things," says Gudell of Zillow. "Having wage growth be higher would be good, creating the correct type of jobs. We've been creating jobs, but a lot of those jobs aren't higher-paying jobs."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The University of Calgary's MacEwan Hall. Photo via Flickr user under_volcano

It maybe shouldn't come as much of a shocker that the university which exported former prime minister Stephen Harper is run by a pack of maniacal corporate shills who preach the importance of the "student experience" in one breath and proceed to zealously backstab the student body in another.

But, shit, here we are.

The University of Calgary (U of C) is currently being sued by the school's students' union (SU) because the administration wants to literally annex the property and revenues of MacEwan Hall, the massive students' hub that houses—just to name a few entities—a conference centre, two concert venues, a used bookstore, a LGBTQ centre and a food court with three fucking Tim Hortons.

All up, income from Mac Hall accounts for well over 80 percent of the SU's revenue. The mastication of Mac Hall would, in the words of SU president Levi Nilson, "essentially destroy the SU as it is right now." Mental health initiatives, health and dental plans, combatting against tuition hikes: all of those very good things are intimately tied to the power of the students' union and could be ostensibly jeopardized by a profit-oriented hostile takeover.

Ultimately, there appears to be no evidence the university has exclusive control over the building. It was specified in the initial agreement of 1969 that the SU received 55 percent of ownership since it paid for such an amount for the building via student levies and provincial loans (the latter of which was fully paid off in 1999). That was reiterated in three subsequent agreements through the '80s and '90s. Between 2010 and 2014, the SU spent an additional $13 million on Mac Hall, something administration dismissed as "certain monetary contributions" in a flaccid statement of defence. By the SU's calculations, the University of Calgary spent just over one-quarter of that sum within the same window. No matter how it's twisted, it seems indisputable the SU has paid for a great majority of what contributes to the vibrancy of Mac Hall.

A member of the University of Calgary's academic staff who requested anonymity told VICE: "If the university has documents saying they actually own the building and they should control its operation, then they should present that. But then they also have to justify why they've not actually been operating the building and have been abdicating it to another organization on campus for so long. We're not convinced."

Nilson adds: "We have not found any piece of paper, any statement, anything that we ever gave up, gifted or relinquished any type of ownership claim, ever."

This is an "interactive space" staircase at U of C. Photo via Flickr user jasonwoodhead23

The SU's president says the institution's board of governors—chaired by former Enbridge vice-president Bonnie DuPont—has consistently refused to meet with the SU about the issue. Phrases like "non-starter" have been frequently batted about by administration regarding the contention the SU owns over half the building's worth. At a painfully polite "town hall" hosted on Wednesday, university provost Dru Marshall stated: "We would much have preferred to solve things at the table." In contrast, Nilson—who was actually available for an interview, unlike the university's administration—says "they're still not even willing to talk to us about ownership."

On Tuesday, the SU filed an injunction against the University of Calgary to maintain the status-quo in regards to Mac Hall—that is, with the SU remaining as landlord—until the court case has been concluded. The most recent agreement, signed in 1999, expires on Dec. 9. If the injunction hadn't been filed, the university would have presumably attempted to claim full ownership of the building on that date.

The whole clusterfuck's compounded by the fact the university's administration is embroiled in allegations of corruption due to a corporate sponsorship deal with—surprise—Enbridge. CBC Calgary's Kyle Bakx recently uncovered details about a deal between the massive pipeline company and the post-secondary institution. In short, Enbridge pledged more than $2 million stretched over a decade to found the Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability, which included paying the salary of a faculty member and a handful of scholarships. As it turns out, the energy giant wanted much more from the deal, including "customized opportunities" between execs and researchers and for the university to collab with another institution in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where an Enbridge pipeline blew in 2010.

Shit got even more complicated when it was realized that Cannon, the president of the whole goddamn university, had been sitting on the board of Enbridge Income Fund Holdings since 2004. She made $130,500 per year in the role. She also sent an email in 2012 to the dean of the Haskayne School of Business—the department in which the Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability was housed—seemingly complaining on behalf of the company that was paying her the monetary equivalent of an Audi R8 per year that Enbridge was "not seeing your leadership on this file."

Cannon, who since stepped down from that board, has assured there was no conflict of interest. The university is now the subject of an independent review. The Canadian Association of University Teachers is also beginning an investigation. A student at the town hall requested Cannon resign as president due to the scandal, to which she replied "No" and "—from the faculty, to the students' union, to the rest of the province—that their management culture is deeply flawed." Shots fired.

But to Douglas Nesbitt, co-founder of labour news website RankAndFile.ca and Queen's University PhD candidate specializing in Canadian social movement history, this situation is nothing new. The last students' strike in English Canada that actually worked was in 1995, he says, when the Canadian Federation of Students organized tens of thousands of people to protest the hellishly controversial federal income contingent loan repayment scheme.

Real estate like Mac Hall gives the students' union uniquely significant leverage, Nesbitt says. But even though the board of governors is clearly "just fucking full of rubber-stamped corporate shitbags" and should serve as an easy target, Nesbitt notes it can prove difficult to coalesce students with busy schedules around an esoteric ownership dispute.

"If the students' unions have been resting on their laurels of pulling in all this money and they don't have a substantial enough base of students who give a shit, they're going to be steamrolled," he warns, noting it requires concerted advocacy campaigns to convince people to occupy offices or bring out thousands of students to a rally. "There might be activism. Something could go on at the U of C and I hope it does. But you're already behind the 8-ball in terms of reacting to the situation and now you're expected to try to build some sort of student campaign out of it that's going to succeed."

The Wildrose Party—Alberta's far-right Official Opposition which is very likely conning all of us—recently approved a policy idea that would make students' union membership optional. Keean Bexte, the Wildrose member and Ezra Levant protege who proposed the policy, recently lost a bid to become the SU's vice-president of operations and finance.

Bexte explicitly framed the policy proposal as a "human rights" issue. In an interview with CBC News, he suggested students have to "pay thousands of dollars throughout their degree" to the SU even though total membership only costs $55.50 per term, or $444 over the course of a degree, and would thus require over 16 years of post-secondary education to reach that lofty number. Fees for SU fees haven't been raised for 19 years, Nilson says, who also notes the university's SU would be in a uniquely strong position even if Bexte's proposal was implemented as law.

But that's assuming Mac Hall isn't annexed by administration.

The future's very uncertain on that front. Administration personnel at the town hall refused to delve into specifics due to the lawsuit. Marshall, the provost, said: "The plan is not to evict students from the building, as has been reported, but rather to follow the rules of the operating agreement." However, administration failed to address its recent contention the SU doesn't own Mac Hall because the U of C owns the land, something the aforementioned academic staff member calls a ridiculous argument: "Sorry, but anybody who knows anything about—I don't know—a national park or surface rights versus mineral rights would know that owning the building doesn't mean that you own the land."

And it's not as if the Mac Hall tug-of-war and Enbridge kerfuffle are the only things on the SU's plate: earlier this month, a hike in fees for students staying in residence—between 0.25 and 5.75 per cent depending on building—was proposed. The idea has yet to pass the board of governors. But Nilson says the SU still hasn't got a single answer has to why the rate would exceed inflation every year. Apparently, such radio silence has become quite the trend in administration-SU relations, whether it's regarding Mac Hall, or Enbridge, or fee hikes.

"It's one thing after another with the current administration," Nilson says. "It's getting a little much."

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Halfway through the first episode of The Man in the High Castle, Amazon's newest and best drama, Joe Blake blows a tire on his truck. He pulls over by a cornfield somewhere in 1960s middle America. A friendly local police officer, red SS armband the only splotch of color in the scene, pulls up to check things out. We expect violence. Joe shot a Nazi officer on his way out of New York and is ready to fight again, because he's a member of the Resistance, ferrying a secret package to Canon City, Colorado. But the cop is friendly; he offers the use of his toolkit and gives Joe an egg salad sandwich, since the officer's wife had packed him an extra one. Joe asks him about his old US Army tattoo. The cop describes it, but shrugs, "We lost the war. Can't even remember what we're fighting for."

Ash begins to fall around the pair. "What is that?" asks Joe. "Oh, that's the hospital," the officer replies as he fiddles with paperwork. "Tuesdays, they burn cripples, the terminally ill, drags on the state." He hands Joe his papers and says, "You have a safe trip, son."

The Man in the High Castle is Amazon.com's and executive producer Frank Spotnitz's (of X-Files fame) first foray into alternative history. Both the show and the famous Philip K. Dick novel of the same name take place in a world ruled by the Axis, the victors of World War II. The Nazis control North America from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rockies. The mountains form a neutral, if Nazi-dominated, buffer between the East and the Pacific States, which the Japanese control. Meanwhile, the resistance is circulating a strange movie called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (the name is a Biblical reference), which shows a world in which the fascists lost. Will it inspire revolution?

More things happen in nearly each episode of the new show than in the entire book, though that's not necessarily a criticism of either. While there is a plot to the book, the plot isn't the point. Dick wanted to play with notions of reality and authenticity. In his novel, the main characters obsess over a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is about a third alternate reality (not our world), something closer to a utopia. There's one gunfight and one throat gets cut, but the big reveal at the end of the book is that The Grasshopper was actually written by the I Ching, a Chinese oracular technique. What's real—our world, the Nazi one, or this third realm? We're not meant to know for sure.

For many lovers of science fiction, The Man in the High Castle is required reading. Gerry Canavan, a professor of contemporary American literature and popular culture at Marquette, told me, "It's probably the best known and best regarded work of Philip K. Dick, with the possible exception of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which is better known as the film . It's also, probably, the best alt history novel of all time."

Alt history is a popular literary genre, perhaps due to the way it allows authors to play with the familiar and the strange. Author Andrea Cremer, who has a PhD in history, recently wrote about her foray into alternate history, "The allure of what if lay in its ability to reveal the very heart of history itself—its ability to define national and cultural identities, instill concepts of tradition and heritage, foster loyalty, and nurture sentiment. Those traits of history pivot around iconic events and figures. Anchors that keep the present linked to the past." That's the lesson of the Joe's encounter with the avuncular Nazi cop. It feels like a scene we've seen a thousand times, but then the ash starts to fall.

Why have so few TV shows exploited the power of alternative history? We've really only seen the genre as components of shows premised around time travel or dimensional travel (or both). Doctor Who, Star Trek, Sliders, and older shows like Twilight Zone sometimes send their characters to alternate realities. J. J. Abrams's Fringe may be the best recent example. Its first season ended with the main character in the parallel universe, the camera slowly zooming out to show the Twin Towers, a stunning revelation at the time.

But getting all the details right is hard. In our interview, Spotnitz emphasized the challenges of fully realizing this strange new past, pondering both what would be lost, but also what might be gained. He wanted to understand, and portray, what makes fascism so seductive. For him, the show is about what makes each of us human and how we might "preserve our humanity in an inhuman world."

On VICE: Exploring the 'Nazi Village' of Jamel:

He's not been wholly successful. Agness Kaku, a video-game localizer based in Japan, has noted that the Japanese language and signs in the show are frequently nonsensical. Kaku told me, "I think a Pacific States of America that looks and sounds true to its fictional history would disturb the hell out of the audience. I think it would inspire the actors to go to deeper places. I think it would provoke questions that are never asked." I agree. The show is at its weakest when the villains turn cartoonish in their evil, such as when the Kempeitai (the Japanese secret police) beat and threaten the secret Jew, Frank Frink.

Fortunately, such missteps are rare. Spotnitz knows that the standard genre pieces—gunfights, car chases, bad guys in hats, and so on—have less impact than simply depicting his version of Philip K. Dick's dystopia. Polite Nazi cops discussing the systematic massacre of the disabled. Jewish children watching cartoons in a room that we know can be filled with lethal gas at any moment. Happy families strolling through the streets of New York, while the Nazi flag billows proudly in the breeze.

Good alternate history pushes us to ask the question: Could it happen here? The Man in the High Castle answers the question with a disturbing "yes." Sure, some people resist, but they fail, are more flawed than heroic, and they get other people hurt. Most Americans, though, simply adapt to the realities of the new regime, painting their biases on the targets of the Reich, content to see the extermination of the Jews and the rebirth of slavery in the South. As our own society wrestles with terror and fearmongering for political gain, it's not so hard to imagine.

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The entire first season of The Man In The High Castle is out today on Amazon Video.

At a certain point, clubbing becomes less a privilege and more of a chore, especially in Toronto, where you have to brave subzero temperatures in a skimpy outfit while being dicked around in a line run by a self-aggrandizing bouncer, all just to spend your rent money on a $15 cover charge and overpriced highballs.

So, it's a real double blow in Toronto if you are booted from that club, or worse, rejected before you can even get through the door. There's no shame that's quite as fun as club shame though, so we wanted to be there to capture all that rejection on camera. Enjoy.