Puppies poke their heads through the patio fence before being taken by the Canine Action Project. Photos by Khang Nguyen

On Remembrance Day, the man in charge of animal control for Sturgeon Lake First Nation stopped at a house known to be crowded with dogs and was greeted outside by an eager but ragged-looking dog named Fluffy. While Jeff McLeod kneeled down and petted Fluffy, half a dozen puppies quietly whined from the house's deck.

McLeod had been driving me around the Saskatchewan reserve for a few hours. Sturgeon Lake is about 50 kilometres northwest of Prince Albert, Sask., and consists of two main villages with a lot of houses spread out on the reserve. McLeod's truck was at the head of one of two small convoys driving door to door on the vast reserve to rescue any strays or pets that families can't afford to care for. The drivers of each vehicle are volunteers who had already saved 163 of Sturgeon Lake's dogs and cats before returning to the area so that the Canine Action Project (CAP) could wrap up its rescue efforts with this final sweep.

Jacy Gratias (left) helps Jeff McLeod rescue a stray dog from Sturgeon Lake First Nation on Wednesday, Nov. 11.

By the time McLeod's convoy made its way to Fluffy's home, we already had one cat and two dogs in kennels, for which the owners signed a consent forms agreeing to surrender their pets (CAP the takes the pets to an animal rescue and be adopted into a new home). One of the dogs was a skinny male stray with a missing tail. A rural homeowner had been feeding the pup moose meat, so the dog kept returning.

If CAP wasn't here, that dog would likely have been shot to death in the near future—during what is called a cull. Dog overpopulation is a major issue on Canada's reserves because the dogs get aggressive when they pack up. Mauling deaths are a real fear. In 2010, a boy on Canoe Lake First Nation in northern Saskatchewan was killed by a wild dog. Within the past few years, CAP has offered a humane way to help communities manage their animals. This November visit to Sturgeon Lake marks the conclusion of its biggest undertaking yet.

One of the hundred or so strays that roam around Sturgeon Lake knocked up Fluffy, according to her owner, Gary Turner.

Children of Sturgeon Lake First Nation looking on as two dogs get their photos taken.

"There's so many stray dogs in the reserve here and kids are getting bit, and especially in the village. Kids are getting bit and dogs are getting run over here and there and they're not really looking after their dogs either," he told VICE.

When McLeod asked if Turner had any dogs he wanted to surrender, Turner was immediately willing to part ways with Fluffy, saying he has too many dogs.

"There's no place I can really put her either, I don't want to put her down," Turner explained.

Erin Janzen plays with a stray dog as another watches from afar.

While he spoke, the CAP crew—all women—grabbed a bag of dog food to leave behind and placed Fluffy into a crate. At first, Turner told CAP volunteer Cori Dillman he wouldn't surrender the dogs, saying most of the puppies were already spoken for. I stood back during this conversation because CAP's founders, Kelly Phipps and Monique Schultz, had previously warned me that only certain people do the talking when CAP goes onto reserves.

On this day, Cori Dillman was the voice of CAP, informing Turner of the safe homes the puppies would be going to. Turner's edges softened and eventually he agreed to surrender all but two of the puppies. Volunteer Wendy Fyrk explained to me, in whispers, that the dogs had signs of mange and lice. It was a chilly day, so Fyrk and Dillman tucked the puppies into their jackets. Fyrk pointed out the rattling in their lungs—yet another sign of the poor shape the pups were in.

Jeff McLeod pets a dog as the owner watches from the door of his home.

Phipps and Schultz both have deep fears of people misinterpreting what they do. In fact, the night before I joined the Sturgeon Lake crew, Schultz rescinded the invitation. It took a half hour of last-minute convincing to make sure I was welcome. If you wonder why, check out the comment sections from any media coverage about on-reserve dog culls. Shit's ugly.

When those stories come out almost every year, the often-racist responses perpetuate the centuries-old rift between non-Aboriginal people and Canada's First Nations.

Wendy Fyrk closes the gate on a captured stray dog from Sturgeon Lake First Nation on Wednesday, Nov. 11.

It's a cycle: a story comes out about how stray reserve dogs will be shot to deal with overpopulation; that story sparks outrage with animal rights activists and the general non-reserve living population; people start petitions calling for an end to dog culls; and those from the outside looking in cast shame on those who allow it.

And sometimes that call is answered, as was the case in 2013 in Deschambault Lake when a cull was temporarily held off.

The underlying assumption of many naysayers is that people on reserves don't care about their pets. But the perception is "absolutely not true," Phipps told VICE. For about three and a half years, her volunteer-run non-profit has been committed to helping First Nations and remote communities in Saskatchewan find lasting solutions to dog overpopulation.

Jacy Gratias (far right) and Wendy Fyrk (beside) after receiving three puppies from a family in Sturgeon Lake First Nation.

She says CAP does not judge those who host culls. When it comes to protecting residents from packs of stray dogs, Phipps argues that communities do the best with the resources they have. In the case of Sturgeon Lake, you need to consider that McLeod is not only in charge of animal control, he's also a water quality monitor, emergency planning coordinator, and first responder. He simply doesn't have the means to manage the hundreds of dogs. So, for the past few years, Sturgeon Lake residents got out their shotguns and dealt with their fear for the safety of their families and kids the only way they knew how. Up until this year, he had no idea that CAP existed.

The reality is, culls haven't sat well with many of Sturgeon Lake's residents, including Turner.

"I didn't really like that, because dog is a man's best friend and you want to keep it that way," he said.

Jacy Gratias (far right) and Wendy Fyrk (beside) after receiving three puppies from a family in Sturgeon Lake First Nation.

Jonas Frenchman is in the same boat, saying, "I didn't like that at all, not one bit." He feels a deep kinship with dogs: "I love them and whatnot, and they take care of the house and they sense people and how they feel." Frenchman even explained how a dog once saved his life.

According to Frenchman, years ago, he was attacked by a disgruntled partygoer at his aunt's place who was moaning, "where's my wine?" A white German shepherd had followed Frenchman on his trek to his aunt's and had been staying outside until he sensed Frenchman's distress.

The drunk man "grabbed me by the throat and he was choking me. He was choking me, and he lifted me right off my legs," Frenchman recalled, saying that the dog dug into that man's ankle, allowing him the chance to get away.

"I always think about that, like, if it wasn't for him I would have been six deep or whatever."

Jonas Frenchman and his dog Brutus

The last time CAP visited Sturgeon Lake, Frenchman's wife surrendered their dog Nicky.

They still have another dog, named Brutus, whose ribs show through his fur—but he's gained weight since Nicky's been gone.

"Sometimes I'll either get fish or something, or wild meat and whatnot, and I'll just look around for it," Frenchman said. "If I have dog food, it'd be good but it's not all the time we an afford dog food but whenever we can we'll do it."

He's had to explain to his son what a dog cull is, "Well, they had to kill them because they can't afford to keep them," Frenchman said, speculating "Yeah, it probably does bug 'em. It probably affects them in a way where like, they don't care about it, you know, what they see mom and dad doing, or uncle, or whatever, shooting dogs. They probably think it's OK."

Phipps told VICE the mental health of a community suffers from culls, especially for those tasked with destroying the dogs as they often experience emotional and mental distress.

Bailey Nikolaisen is a University of Saskatchewan community nursing student who lives in Prince Albert, and is taking her placement at Sturgeon Lake.

Nikolaisen's first trip to the reserve was like nothing she'd ever seen. As a self-professed dog lover, Nikolaisen immediately noticed the packs of strays roaming around and following kids on their way to school. It didn't take long before she saw there's not just a safety issue, but a health issue.

"Within the first few weeks that I was out here, we got called out to a house here in the community where the kids had worms. And it was likely a contraction from their dog that was suspected of having worms," Nikolaisen said. "It's believed that the kids in the household got the worms from possibly playing in the dirt that dogs had had bowel movements in, or just anything could have happened, just not washing their hands and going to eat something."

She uncovered some absolutely shocking local statistics. Over the past two years, at least 15 people have been bitten by dogs on Sturgeon Lake. Ten of those bites—from rabid dogs that could carry rabies—were to the face or neck, and seven of the victims were children.

Nikolaisen was the one to get the ball rolling, and introduced Sturgeon Lake's band to CAP.

Now that he's aware of CAP's services, McLeod plans to form a long-term relationship between the band and CAP. This could include mobile pet clinics where veterinarians spay, neuter, treat, vaccinate and microchip pets.

It might seem like a big undertaking, but for a group like CAP it's nothing new. CAP's already partnered with five First Nations that used to host culls and will keep on working together to deal with the root issues of animal overpopulation.

In only a month's time, there's been a drastic change. McLeod tells VICE how Halloween this year compared to the past.

"Halloween, it just went awesome, like the kids weren't afraid to go from house to house, they weren't afraid of being chased by dogs, they weren't afraid of being bitten by dogs and they weren't afraid of their candies being stolen by dogs," he said.

Photo via Top Shelf Extracts.

Vancouver police had to do some embarrassing backpedalling Monday, following a social media freak out over the supposedly deadly dangers of shatter.

Perhaps not realizing shatter (aka wax or dabs), is just a concentrated form of weed, the cops sent out a bunch of tweets over the weekend warning people about the drug.

"Parents!!!! Please educate your children on the dangers of 'Shatter'. We cannot lose any more young people to senseless overdoses" read a tweet from the force's gang unit referring to an absolutely bogus scenario that has never happened. Another tweet containing a photo of shatter claimed the drug "can cause temporary psychosis. Looks like toffee. This was seized in a traffic stop tonight. BEWARE."

(Anyone else think it's weird that cops are using ALL CAPS and several exclamation points to get their message across?)

Aside from the toffee comparison, there's no truth to any of these claims, which the police themselves admitted on Twitter Monday.

"While well-intentioned, our tweets about #Shatter weren't accurate & have been deleted. Our apologies. We will do better in future."

Perry Kendall, a BC health officer told Global News that shatter "could make you very stoned" and but hasn't been linked to a fatal overdose. Which makes sense, considering that no one has ever died from smoking too much weed.

Vancouver's finest aren't alone in their ignorance. Illinois police also recently cautioned the public about "hallucinations and other types of psychosis" linked to shatter use.

But weed advocates say the only real danger associated with shatter comes from production—explosions have taken place at home labs.

"If you do it in industrial setting, you can do it perfectly safely. It's about moving it from the black market to the regulated white market to do it," Colorado dispensary owner Kevin Fisher told VICE News.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

This would look messed-up to a British person, but it is normal and good to Americans. Photo via Flickr user martha_chapa95

Some aspects of culture cross the ocean between the US and the UK with ease—Islamophobia, for instance. But there's plenty that gets lost in translation on its way across the Atlantic. I'm never going to really, truly understand Guy Fawkes Day, cheeky Nando's, or Dapper Laughs; and my colleagues over at VICE UK will probably never understand American football, Thanksgiving, or why so many people own guns here.

Most Brits don't much care about handegg and are horrified by our lax firearm laws, but I realized recently I had no idea what they thought of turkey day. So I called up VICE UK staff writer Joel Golby, a man so British he once wrote a five-year retrospective of that "Being a Dickhead's Cool" song. Here's what he thought of Thanksgiving:

VICE: Have you ever experienced American Thanksgiving?

1. I once watched the Thanksgiving episode of popular friendship-based TV show Friends.
2. An American lady brought pumpkin pie in to the office once and it was the most delicious thing I ever ate.
3. I once went to a flatshare and ate something that was like mashed sweet potato with marshmallows and Jack Daniels out of the fridge? What the fuck was that garbage?

What do I think of the actual day? It's a big meal that your family travels across the country to bicker over, and it is mainly turkey and sweet potato mash and vegetables, and so I mean basically is it really that different from Christmas? I don't get it. You have a roast with your family and then go aggressively shopping the next day. How is that different from Christmas?

Read: We Asked the European VICE Offices What Refugees Should Expect in Their Countries

Would you like to celebrate an American Thanksgiving? What would the ideal scenario be like?
Yes, I would. It would go like this: A friend invites me to their house and cooks for me while I drink an American beer. The beer is cold and tall. A Bud Light, probably. I crack the beer and watch sports. I am given delicious food. Nobody is allowed to invite their family because family always ends in arguments. Nobody is allowed to audibly mention God. I am allowed to snooze on the sofa for the subsequent eight to ten days. I am given an entire pumpkin pie to take home with me.

"I can't believe you actually say what you are thankful for. That's the most saccharine American shit I've ever heard in my life."

How do you think reality would compare to this fantasy?
I mean this is the thing, right, because my best Christmases were always ruined by other people, and I figure this is the same with Thanksgiving. Like your mum has invited you around for Thanksgiving, but also like 20 other people. Racist cousins. Loud drunk uncles. That weird silent girlfriend of your weird younger brother. And that never works over a table heaving with food and where alcohol is served. Nervous smalltalk always gives way to racist ranting—always. Or someone's grandma is there and she has somehow lived for 80 years without hearing a swear. You say "fuck" and she is like, "Oh my goodness" and literally dies. Also, the bit with the actual giving of thanks: Do you do that? You go around the table and do that? Surely the food gets cold? Nah. Fuck that. Fuck Thanksgiving.

Bonfire Night is a very cozy holiday. Basically kids go and put their winter coats on and wear mittens and play with sparklers in the garden, then go to a municipal park and watch some fireworks go off and look at a bonfire, and then go home. There are other things they can do—traditionally, kids made a straw Guy and would lug it door-to-door asking their neighbors for money for the Guy before burning it on a fire, and—holy shit I've only just realized how weird that is while typing it out. That is fucking weird. Nobody does that anymore.

In more old-school towns—the best one is Lewes—people go fucking crazy for Bonfire Night, dressing up and burning stuff down and firing fireworks at each other and guzzling baked nuts. But most people just stand in drizzle and watch fireworks and go home.

Anyway, it all happens in the evening so it's not worth a day off. It's not a real holiday at all. Just a thing we do.

If the British were to celebrate Thanksgiving, what would that look like?
The only things British people like to eat are roast dinners (roast meat, gravy, cabbage, roast potatoes, roast vegetables, mash, gravy, Yorkshire puddings, gravy, gravy, mash) and full English breakfast (beans, sausages, egg, bacon, maybe chips, fried bread, black pudding, fried mushrooms, grilled tomato). So, logically, if we had Thanksgiving we would have a mash-up of the two. Like a beef joint wrapped around some sausages and baked. Beans in gravy. Potatoes on toast. Mad shit like that. For pudding: a single Penguin biscuit.

Photo via Flickr user Jamelle Bouie

Sickened by GOP presidential hopefuls' anti-immigrant rhetoric and hawkish immigration promises, Latino conservatives have a warning for their party's presidential contenders: Chill out, or lose our vote.

The Republican field seems to cook up new ways to target migrants each week. Donald Trump clearly leads the pack: he's vowed to make Mexico pay for a giant wall on the whole border, to stop US-born babies of undocumented parents from being citizens, and to round up all 11 illegal immigrants for a mass deportation. Lately Ted Cruz has been similarly flexing his muscles, pledging to stop more migrants from entering the US, even legally (a particular irony since his dad is a Cuban-born refugee). And now, the aspiring GOP leaders have called on President Obama to halt his plans to accept additional Syrian refugees, claiming that doing so would be akin to inviting ISIS into the homeland.

Latino Republicans are understandably fed up. A group of the nation's top Hispanic conservative organizations have mobilized to voice their demands, and organized a press conference before the last GOP primary debate in Boulder, Colorado, to pressure candidates to avoid espousing extreme positions on immigration reform. Trump's incendiary anti-Latino rhetoric sparked the protest, but the activists warned the rest of the field that they'd be watching each candidate closely.

"We're angry at the tone some candidates are using to talk about Latinos and immigrants. We're also concerned about the proposals some candidates are advancing," Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, told reporters at the press conference. "To these candidates, we issue a warning to say don't embrace these policies if you want to be successful in the general election."

Read VICE's Myth-Busting Guide to the Shit Republicans Say About Immigration

The group has vowed to boycott Trump, and will hold another rally before December's GOP debate in Las Vegas, in which they'll address other candidates' approaches.

"We Hispanic Republicans are not going to turn our backs on our own fellow citizens, documented or undocumented. The issue of immigration is an issue of inclusion and respect," Gonzalo Ferrer, chairman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, told me. "We're all immigrants to this country, documented or undocumented, and the people who need to survive and work and who love America who want to be American citizens—we're talking about very good people here."

Ferrer and other conservative Latinos point out, correctly, that the GOP's anti-immigrant rhetoric could hurt the party on Election Day, and perhaps even cost it the White House in 2016. According to a recent NBC News poll, just 6 percent of Latino voters view the Republican Party "very positively," and just 18 percent view the party as "somewhat positive"; meanwhile, a full 43 percent said they viewed the party in a negative light.

"Instead of recognizing that a realistic and humane solution for the undocumented population is in the best interest for the nation—as well as the best interest of the GOP future—Republicans are mounting a relentless fight against sensible immigration policies," Frank Sharry, executive director of the immigration reform advocacy group America's Voice, said in a press statement last month. "Barring an unforeseen change of heart in immigration, the Republicans will head to a 2016 general election season with a Latino problem that will make their past electoral problems seem quaint."

But while Hispanic conservatives are predictably frustrated by the Republican Party's demented descent into xenophobic paranoia and straight-up racism, their position is starting to feel like an oxymoron. In the GOP's alternate universe of mass deportations and anchor babies and IRS agents patrolling the border, what does it mean to be a conservative who supports immigration reform? I talked with some leading Republican Latino activists to find out what a reasonable Republican immigration policy might look like in 2016.

The Border
Latino conservatives I spoke to agree with GOP candidates that the US needs to do more to secure its southern border—but not with a giant wall, and not as a condition to other reforms. "We absolutely oppose a wall but we're all for border security and increasing resources on the border," said Daniel Garza, executive director of the Libre Initiative, a Koch-funded political that aims to draw Latino voters to the GOP.

"Everyone knows we have a porous border and that's not a good thing for our country. Latinos recognize that," Garza added. "But if you only address border security, that's a problem. Border security should not hold up other reforms and we shouldn't wait for some magical interception rate at the border to trigger other pieces ."

Other conservative activists I spoke to weren't opposed to the idea of some sort of erecting additional barriers between the US and Mexico. Aguilar said that fencing is needed along some parts of the border, but that it's unreasonable for anyone to expect the US could stop illegal crossings entirely.

"I believe in strategic fencing where a lot of immigrants are trying to cross illegally, like the El Paso sector in Texas," he explained. "There are parts of the border that are totally porous."

Ferrer meanwhile claimed candidates' obsession with sealing the border from dangerous migrants conveyed a ludicrous, racist fear of Latinos. "When we're only talking about the border with south it's really racist. We have problems with the northern border too," he said. "What candidates are afraid of is the rapidly changing faces of America."

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Those 11 Million Undocumented Immigrants
When it comes to the estimated 11 million undocumented workers living in the US—you know, the ones Trump wants to round up and send to Mexico—Latino conservatives, like their liberal counterparts, tend to support giving these individuals a pathway to citizenship. In fact, the vast majority of Latinos in the US—77 percent, according to a recent Gallup poll—support a pathway to citizenship; about half of Republican voters also support this type of reform.

"Here, like Nazi Germany, mothers go to sleep every night thinking their families are going to be deported," Ferrer said. "We cannot have people living in fear thinking they can be deported any time so our first priority should be that."

GOP candidates have resisted a path to citizenship, claiming this would be an unfair reward for undocumented individuals. Garza acknowledged that convincing Republicans—or a Republican president—to support a pathway to citizenship would be politically difficult, if not impossible, and said he and other Latino conservatives are open to finding a compromise.

"Ideally what we'd like to see is a path to citizenship. The 11 million has to become assimilated and contributing immediately to our economy and society, the way poor immigrants have in the past," Garza said. "What is politically viable is a whole different ballgame. If we cannot get an ideal path to citizenship, we'd find acceptable a work visa program for folks already here."

Watch Immigrant America: VICE News' investigation into the labor market for illegal immigrants in the US

New Work Visas
The conservative Latino activists I spoke with argued that the government should expand its work visa program, by issuing more visas for both skilled and unskilled laborers—a position that was once accepted by many in the GOP, but is increasingly rejected by the party's presidential candidates.

"It's extremely hard to immigrate to the US, as evidenced by the backlog of applications, and that's evidence of what we as conservatives talk about—that government is inefficient and counterproductive," said Mario Lopez, president of the Hispanic Leadership Fund. Lopez suggested that the government should increase visa quotas for both skilled and unskilled workers.

"I'd like to see the number of visas match up with the number of jobs available," he told me. "There's no question we also need more skilled worker visas," he added, but "we need a recognition that the number of lower skilled worker visas is inadequate."

Most Republican candidates previously agreed with at least part of Lopez's suggestion, supporting the growth of skilled worker visas. But as the primary has taken a turn toward nativism, nearly all have undergone a stark policy reversal to tow a harder immigration line. Ted Cruz, for instance has done a total 180 on the issue of skilled worker visas; as recently as 2013, the Texas Senator supported an increase of H1-B highly skilled work visas from 65,000 to 325,000, but just this month Cruz pledged to suspend any such visas, claiming the move would protect American workers.

Obama's Executive Order on Immigration
While many Latino Republicans may implicitly agree with President Obama on the issue of deportation relief, they, like the rest of their party, were outraged by the president's executive order to extend that protection to as many as 4.7 million undocumented immigrants. Every activist I spoke to cheered the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision to strike down the executive action, accusing the president of attempting a power grab that left millions of lives in limbo.

Read on VICE News: President Obama Wants to Take His Deportation Relief Fight to the Supreme Court

"Whatever he can do by executive order you have to assume can be rescinded by executive order," Lopez said. "So if a different president says this isn't legitimate and rescinds it that leaves those people in limbo as well. The legislative branch has legitimate power to write laws, not the executive branch."

"The issue is Obama is using these poor folks as pawns," he added. "He's playing political games with people's lives."

Aguilar argued that the only permanent reform would have to come through Congress.

"When you're doing something big like this you have to achieve bipartisan consensus," he said.

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

Photo viaWikimedia Commons

In November 1963, two days before his blood and brains were splattered across its thick tweed, John F. Kennedy hand-selected the rose-pink Chanel suit he wanted his wife Jacqueline to wear for a luncheon they would attend together in Dallas, Texas—a state he needed to win if he wanted to be reelected the following year.

"Be simple—show these Texans what good taste really is," he instructed his wife, according to William Manchester's 2013 book on the JFK assassination, The Death of a President: November 20—November 25, 1963.

His insistence on the knee-length suit and matching jacket—reportedly his favorite ensemble, and one that she wore often despite owning an enormous wardrobe—might explain why Jackie Kennedy refused to take it off long after it became stained with the gruesome evidence of her husband's public assassination during their convertible ride through Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. She was still wearing the blood-stained suit when JFK's vice president Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as president aboard Air Force One.

"It's a very powerful thing that she was doing, wearing the psychological insides of the slain charismatic leader on her suit until the suit became part of his body, and it was like she was wearing his insides," said Rhonda Garelick, author of Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History.

Now, 52 years later, the rose-colored suit remains hidden away in a custom-made, humidity-controlled box at the National Archives in Maryland, where it's taken on an almost mythic quality. It won't be made viewable to the public for nearly a century to come, as mandated in a 2003 deed signed by Caroline Kennedy, JFK's only surviving heir, —which means that as America's most famous political couple fades into history, the suit will live on perfectly preserved. And like most aspects of the Kennedy assassination, the suit has become ripe for conspiracy theories, including questions about the missing pill box hat and the suit's authenticity as real Chanel.

"Like a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying in the back seat." — Lady Bird Johnson

The suit itself—double-breasted, with three gold buttons and navy trim, and a matching pillbox hat—fit Jackie Kennedy's trademark style. It was simple, yet elegant; structured, yet feminine. The fact that it was Chanel only added to its glamour. In the years since the assassination, though, there's been considerable interest in—and contention about—whether or not the suit was a knockoff.

In her 2011 book Chanel, Her Life, Justine Picardie describes the suit as an "authorized Chanel copy." The materials came from Coco Chanel in Paris, Picardie wrote, but the suit was assembled and tailored to Jackie Kennedy's frame by a team of high-end tailors in a New York fashion house called Chez Ninon.

Graham Wetzbarger, a Chanel authenticator who studies every detail of every stitch on items that pass through the online luxury consignment shop The Real Real, also believes that the suit was a "line by line" copy of Chanel, made with licensed materials.

"It was known that Jackie Kennedy had an account with Chez Ninon for a couple of years before the inauguration," said Wetzbarger, describing the suit as a design from Chanel's 1961 fall/winter collection. "These imitation or licensed pieces are so immaculately well made," he said, adding that the suit likely cost around $800 at the time—"by no means cheap."

In 2012, Chanel's head designer Karl Lagerfeld caused an uproar when he suggested to Vogue that Kennedy's famous suit and jacket were instead made by Oleg Cassini, her official wardrobe designer, who had created the wool coat and matching pillbox hat she wore to Kennedy's inauguration. "It was a fake, a line-by-line copy by Cassini," Lagerfeld said of the pink suit.

Related: Do You Need a Signature Look to Make It In Fashion?

Nicole Mary Kelby, an author and historian, said there's "plenty of paper trail" to suggest that the suit was a knockoff. As part of the research for The Pink Suit, a work of historical fiction based on the iconic outfit, Kelby interviewed some of the tailors and seamstresses who claim to have made Kennedy's now-iconic suit and jacket at a tailor shop in New York. The team included Jankiel Horowicz, a former tailor for the Polish army who survived a concentration camp, immigrated to New York, and joined the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union in the early 1950s, according to his son Michael's account in The Daily Beast in 2013.

"Can you imagine the pain of that? All the hard work and pride that went into making something of such outrageous beauty, only to have it forever linked with a national tragedy?" Kelby wrote in an email. Kelby believes that Kennedy's opting for the American-made Chanel copy was her own savvy attempt to repair she and her husband's political image. She'd cut back on her spending and made a concerted effort to support American designers like Cassini after Women's Wear Daily accused her of spending $30,000 on a shopping spree in Paris during the 1960 presidential campaign.

"Everyone thought I was a snob from Newport, who had bouffant hair and had French clothes and hated politics," Jackie Kennedy told historian Arthur Schlesinger in taped interviews that were sealed until 2011. But Cassini reversed that stuffy perception, Kelby said, dressing the First Lady in comfortable-yet-chic clothing that catapulted her into a fashion icon American women wanted to emulate, rather than sneer at. The cylindrical Halston-designed pill box hat that Kennedy frequently pinned to the back of her short brown bob, for example, quickly became a fashion staple for many American women who sought to imitate her effortless glamour.

Watch: VICE does New York Fashion Week.

The pink pill box hat Kennedy wore on November 22, 1963 went missing in the frenzy of the assassination. It was last seen with Mary Gallagher, her personal secretary, who allegedly refuses to discuss its whereabouts. The white gloves she was wearing that day are missing as well.

In The Death of a President, Manchester writes that the hat may have made its way back to DC in a paper sack, where a White House policeman gave it to secret service agent Robert Foster, who reportedly took the bag to the Map Room and opened it. Whether he gave it to Caroline or John F. Kennedy, Jr. remains unknown.

"There are pictures of her going into Parkland Hospital with it on, and then when she leaves, it's gone," said Wetzbarger. "It might never turn up. Maybe it's in somebody's dress-up box from the 1970s and got destroyed, but who knows? It's one of those things, it's going to be lost to the annals of time." (The hat has never been found.)

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The last time Jackie Kennedy wore the pink suit, it had been deliberately chosen in an attempt to save President Kennedy's political career. "Jackie's pink suit was his secret weapon," said Kelby. "When she passed by in that open car, those who lined the streets saw her as one of their own. She became the woman who played golf in the foursome just ahead of them on the greens, the mother who held her children close."

And then, in a matter of seconds, bullets punctured that illusion. Her attempts to endear herself to the American public made her grief all the more resonant. She was no longer the snob from Newport— she was the traumatized American woman who watched her husband's brains spill into her lap.

In her diary, Lady Bird Johnson, who had been trailing the Kennedy's limousine along with her husband, then vice president Johnson, described the First Lady draped over her husband "like a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying in the back seat."

When Caroline Kennedy donated her mother's jacket, skirt, stockings, and matching blue blouse, shoes, and Chanel purse to the National Archives in 2003, she specified that the items not be displayed until 2103, even to researchers or historians, or shown in any other way that would "dishonor the memory of Mrs. Kennedy or President Kennedy, or cause any grief or suffering to members of their family." When the deed expires, the institution's archivist will decide how to handle the materials in a way that best honors the family's wishes.

National Archives spokesperson Miriam Kleiman confirmed that the institution received the materials more than 40 years ago, but the exact date of delivery is unknown, as are the whereabouts of Kennedy's matching pink pill box hat. Because the items were delivered in a package with a one-digit zip code, Kleiman believes they arrived at the National Archives prior to July 1964, when the post office switched to a multi-digit system.

If and when the garments do become available for display, Wetzbarger believes they could cause mass hysteria, even decades after the woman who wore them passed away herself. But for others, the suit's concealment only contributes to its sense of mystery, furthering public fascination with the former First Lady. Because we can't touch it or even get close to it, the suit "grabs an even more talismanic significance like a precious relic in a cathedral," Garelick said. "It has a ghostly power now."

Follow Jennifer Swann on Twitter.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

You're 18 years old and you've just begun the monotonous cycle of college life: eating like shit, spending your parents' money on your new, ethnically ambiguous friend's Adderall, and working on your politically-slanted street art. Your significant other, the one you fell for in high school during the mandatory sensitivity workshop you attended after someone scratched a backwards swastika onto the agnostic principal's Prius, is now living hundreds of miles away in a dorm just like yours. You've told each other that you want to "make it work" and that nothing, nothing, can come between you and your young love.

But something has been nagging at you since you've moved out of your family's beige home, the one with the TV in the bathroom and the couch that you humped when you first figured out how your junk worked. You've met so many new and interesting people (Zoey, the bisexual chess champion; Trevin, the white guy with bangs), have had so many new experiences (putting ice in a bong), and you've realized that you're no longer the person you were in high school. Things have changed. You've changed. Everything is different, and now you're starting to question whether that person on the other side of the country, "the one," is still for you.

Sure, they were the first person to finger you in public, and sure, they were there for you when your parents got divorced because dad lost all his money betting on Draft Kings. But now... Now you're finding yourself, figuring out what you really want, and a boyfriend or girlfriend who quotes Modern Family to you every night on the phone before you fall asleep while your dorm mate posts offensive comments on Sizzler's Facebook page just isn't that appealing anymore. Oh shit, you realize, this might be over. And, unfortunately for you, it's Thanksgiving break, and now you have to face your significant other for the first time in months And you know what that means. It's the perfect time to break up, baby!

They say that "breakin' up is hard to do," but I say that in these modern times breaking up has never been easier, especially during Thanksgiving break, when morale is already at an all-time low due to forced interactions with your defective family and justifiable overeating. Here's an easy, infallible guide to breaking up.

The Wish Bone Technique

My favorite part of Thanksgiving is when you rip the bones from the crispy flesh of an overrated bird. Invite your partner over for the ceremonial breaking of the wishbone. They'll already know something's up because that's just a weird thing to do. But don't acknowledge that! Take that bone and for God's sake, make a fucking wish. Wish that this breakup goes well, that no one's feelings are hurt, and that you'll still be able to have sex with this person at least twice a year without it being weird.

If you break the bone and get the larger half, obviously your wish will come true, so feel free to break the bad news at will. If your soon-to-be ex gets the bigger half, start whining that you never get the bigger half and it's so not fair and hopefully they'll be annoyed enough to see that "you've changed" and they'll do the breaking up for you. Easy as pie! Pumpkin pie, that is! Hahaha (help me)!

Read: The MUNCHIES Guide to Thanksgiving

Family Bonding

Chances are your family does not like the person you are dating, because, well, that's just how it goes. It's always, "they're too quiet" this or "their father killed my dog" that. Hanging out with family totally sucks, so why not spice things up a little this holiday season and let them join in on the fun of inevitable heartbreak?

Invite your partner to a post-Thanksgiving dinner hang out at your place like everything is cool. Before they come over, present your break up plans to your family over Thanksgiving dinner and assign them roles in your break-up performance. Instruct your nosy aunt to ask things like, "So when are you two lovebirds getting married?" and "Y'all fuckin' or what?" Tell your overprotective father to say something like, "If you ever hurt my child, I swear to God..." and then trail off ominously. Grandpa can cough on your significant other's mashed potatoes. You can even stage a stunt where your grandma gets hit in the head with a selfie stick and blames your insignificant other.

Once everything's in place, there is no way your future ex will stick around. Unless, of course, they like, really like you. If this is the case, it means you are left with only one option...

Read: I Paid This Company $30 to Break Up with My Girlfriend

Be Honest

Just like the Pilgrims were honest with the Native Americans when they promised to live in peace with them and share the fruits of their labor, you should be honest with your future ex. "Honesty," in these scenarios, actually means "a huge lie that is presented as a sincere gesture of friendship." It doesn't have to be true, but as long as you seem like you're coming from a good place, chances are your future ex will understand. Tell them the truth—that you realized a relationship was something you didn't want at this crucial time in your life, just like you'll realize, two years into college, that you actually don't want to be a civil rights lawyer and that the only way you can really change the world is to perform long form improv and retweet articles about manspreading.

Feel free to leave out the fact that you might have accidentally, kind of, maybe made out with a person wearing Dia de Los Muertos sugar skull face paint on Halloween; an "interesting" person who's not afraid to wear hats and talk about race in a chill, uninformed way. They just so happen to suit your new and definitely unimproved taste.

At this point, your future ex will have become your current ex, as they too will have come to the realization that all good things must come to an end. And as you hand over a Ziploc bag full of leftovers your mom insisted you give them as a parting gift, just remember this: You are young! Tight bods will come and go, and there's no telling when—or even if—you'll meet the love of your life. But you're free now. Swipe right into the future, my child. It is just as dark as the past, so you might as well have fun and get some ass (and find love, or whatever) while you can. And don't forget to save the turkey bones for a nice broth.

Follow Clare O'Kane on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user shay sowden

Every year at Thanksgiving, Americans gather with their families, say prayers of gratitude, and fill their face holes with homemade, carb-rich comfort. Mashed potatoes, mac 'n cheese, yams: That's all pretty good stuff, right there. Then there's the turkey, which is both the centerpiece of the table and almost unquestionably the worst thing on it. Each year we seem to arm ourselves with a sort of collective willful amnesia and forget a basic culinary truth: Turkey, at Thanksgiving or any other time, is the absolute fucking worst.

Deep down, we know this, but bury it beneath happy memories of Thanksgivings past. It is, almost without fail, a dried-out, depressing hunk of sun-baked papier-mâché—a jaw-tiringly chewy, unsatisfying, and depressingly bland workout. It can be made palatable through cranberries or gravy or other condiments, but any meat that requires that much assistance is a piss-poor entree option.

But why is turkey normally so bad? And what can be done to make sure that your turkey isn't as bad this year as it was the years before?

The truth is, not much. If you're reading this and don't have your turkey already soaking in some type of brine (more on that in a bit), you've most likely lost the battle of the bird this year anyway. This isn't because you're not a fabulous cook. You very well may be. It's because it's almost impossible to roast a whole turkey (or 20-pound-plus anything) without overcooking it to the point of its being inedible. They're just too damn big. And as a big-ass whole turkey cooks, the moisture inside it escapes. Since you have no choice but to cook it through, everything that helps make the turkey consumable disappears like so many promises the white man made the Native Americans, and what you're left with is a pile of protein-packed cardboard.

"You can't just cook a turkey casually. It's so much work, not the type of thing you can throw in the oven and then go suck down a beer in front of the football game and forget about."
—Chef Jason Kerr

Don't take my word for it—ask Joe Mac Regenstein, a professor in the Department of Food Science at Cornell University and the only person I've ever talked to who has a master's in dairy chemistry. (He also holds a PhD in biophysics, but who doesn't?)

"The issue is lack of uniform heating across something as big as a turkey," says Regenstien. "The heat comes in from the surface—so the closer to the surface the more 'total heat' the product will receive. We see that clearly on large beef roasts—but the difference is that the different cooking amounts in beef are all acceptable eating. With turkey, relatively low in fat, we lose more moisture and succulence so it dries out, but unless the 'center' is cooked, we can't eat it, because less-cooked poultry is not acceptable. So there is the problem."

That problem is why some companies will inject their turkeys with phosphates and other water- and fat-retention compounds, so that the "overcooked" parts are more juicy, Regenstein says. But even the miracles of modern science can't help when a turkey is blasted with heat for hours on end and roasted to near-coal.

Watch on MUNCHIES: How to Make a Thanksgiving Feast

"A Thanksgiving turkey sets you up to fail," says Jason Kerr, a one-time chef at several Houston hot spots who now works for a specialty food distributor that supplies most of that city's top-shelf restaurants with seafood and produce. "They're so labor-intensive. You can't just cook a turkey casually. It's so much work, not the type of thing you can throw in the oven and then go suck down a beer in front of the football game and forget about."

Most amateur home cooks are content to follow the directions on the Butterball wrapper, which will tell them to cook the turkey at 350 degrees for roughly 20 to 30 minutes per pound (pretty wide discrepancy, that). They'll throw it in the oven first thing in the morning, baste it a couple times over the course of the day, and just lay around Americanishly until the completely useless built-in thermometer most commercial turkeys have in them pops up, indicating that the center is up to the temp it needs to be.

Undercooked poultry is, to Regenstein's point, "not acceptable" for reasons that are obvious to anyone unlucky enough to have ever bitten into a undercooked bird. For one, it's gross. Not only that, it carries a much higher "microbial load" than other dead animals, as Dr. Chad Carr, a meat extension specialist and associate professor at the University of Florida's Department of Animal Sciences, tells me. That load is made up of bacteria, most typically salmonella, and is the reason your turkey must be cooked well-done, to an internal temp of at least 165-degrees to be precise. Otherwise you'll likely get sick. As a result, "it's inevitable that portions of that carcass are going to be cook past ideal," Carr says.

In order to prevent this, Kerr advises, you must (sorry about this quote) "bukkake the turkey all day with butter and stock." Since the heat of the oven is actively pulling moisture out of the bird all days, you must be ever vigilant about putting the moisture back in, dousing it "a few times every hour" according to Kerr. It's great to mix butter in with the stock and the natural juices leaking into your roasting pan and baste the turkey with that, in addition to the room-temperature butter you've already rubbed under and on top of the pre-roasted turkey skin, which also helps in retaining moisture by creating a crust.

Stuffing is also important. If you stuff a turkey with traditional bread-based stuffing, it helps catch and reabsorb some of the water lost in the cooking process. It's important, though, to stuff loosely, thus allowing it to expand. A better idea still may be to stuff the turkey with water-rich vegetables like onions and carrots. Maybe even some wet fruit, like lemons. That way all the moisture they contain is released back into the turkey.

That above advice is something every chef will tell you, and increasingly tips like these are becoming common knowledge. As usual, the internet is working to disseminate wisdom far and wide. With food sites like VICE's own Munchies teaching home cooks basic techniques, amateurs are armed with more information than ever. These people are willing to put in time to roast a turkey well because hey, who doesn't want to show up their entire families with culinary knowhow?

One popular option is to skip the over altogether and deep-fry a whole turkey. The frying, of course, makes for more uniform cooking. It's also a wet heat, which helps trap some of the moisture in. But if you're cooking a Thanksgiving turkey this way 1) You're cheating (anything fried is good, where's the challenge?) and 2) You're risking your life because deep-frying a whole turkey is incredibly dangerous. There are countless YouTube fried turkey fail compilations that prove this—check it out if you want to see dads dropping meaty birds into friers only to run away a second later as the whole operation becomes a deck-consuming fireball. You don't need to risk your life (or at least a call to the fire department) to make turkey taste good.

"Of course it's possible to make a phenomenal Thanksgiving turkey," chef Scott Schroeder tells me. "It's just incredibly difficult and most people don't know how." Schroeder is the executive chef of two renowned Philly restaurants, South Philadelphia Tap Room and American Sardine Bar, which was just named the best bar in the city by Philadelphia Magazine. Soon he'll open up a restaurant of his own, the much anticipated Hungry Pigeon.

"Use a fucking brine and people are going to think you're a genius. It's so easy, but no one thinks of it."
—Chef Scott Schroeder

Schroeder, like other chefs worth their salt (ha), will tell you that a brine is key if you're going to make a run at anything resembling a delicious whole roasted turkey. Submerge the turkey in a salt water and sugar solution. Keep that in your fridge for at least three days, he says. Over those 72 hours, the turkey is taking on that water, and the likelihood that it'll lose it all over the course of its being cooked is reduced. "In general, the best trick a home cook can use to impress those he's cooking for," Schroeder says. "Use a fucking brine and people are going to think you're a genius. It's so easy, but no one thinks of it."

Another thing you can do in order to increase the odds your turkey won't be a complete disaster is shirk tradition and debone the bird, says Carr, the meat specialist. Once that's done you can roast the breasts in a pan, and braise the legs and the rest in a pot. "Of course, that changes the presentation we've come to expect on Thanksgiving, but it makes for much better-tasting turkey," he says. "You may have to trade one for the other."

When I mention that presentation may be more important than taste on Thanksgiving, and that the holiday is perhaps nothing without its symbolism, Carr says, "Well, you've certainly got a point there."

So chances are more likely you'll stick with what you've done before: Roast the whole bird to hell and fake a smile at your drunk uncle after he says he agrees with Mike Huckabee about something. Your turkey will suck, but that's not the point anyway. It's mostly about spending time with family and wondering how the hell you ever got out alive.

"That's why we all drink so much on Thanksgiving," Kerr says. "To help us forget how miserable the fucking turkey is and to tolerate family."

Best of luck. And pass the gravy.

Follow Brian on Twitter.

'Justice For Jamar' protestors in Minnesota. Photo via Flickr user Fibonacci Blue

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

US News

• Shooting at Minneapolis Protest
  At least five people have been shot near the north Minneapolis police precinct, the site of protests over the fatal shooting of Jamar Clark. Police said five people are being treated for non-life threatening injuries, but there are no details on a suspect or suspects. —NBC News

• Ben Carson Apologies
  The GOP presidential candidate apologized for "mistaken references", after claiming to have seen footage of New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9/11. Donald Trump stands by his claims he watched "Arab populations" in New Jersey cheer as the twin towers came down. —The Washington Post

• Planned Parenthood Sues Texas
  Planned Parenthood has filed a lawsuit against Texas in federal court in a bid to stop the state from cutting off its Medicaid funding. It contends the Republican-led state's decision was politically motivated because of the organization's work on abortion. —The New York Times

• State Department Issues Travel Alert
  The US State Department has issued a rare worldwide travel alert, warning travelers of the risk of potential terrorist attacks. The alert states that "ISIL (aka Da'esh), al-Qa'ida, Boko Haram, and other terrorist groups continue to plan terrorist attacks in multiple regions". —USA Today

International NEWS

• Suicide Belt Dumped
  French police are examining a suspected suicide belt, found in a Paris dustbin by street cleaners. Police are linking the discarded device to Salah Abdeslam, one of the main suspects in the terror attacks, who remains at large. —BBC News

• Canada To Take 25,000 Refugees
  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will today outline his plan to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees. Although all 10 of Canada's provincial leaders support the aim, security screening criteria could make it difficult to meet the target by the end of the year. —Ottowa Citizen

• Vatican Five Stand Trial
  Five people are set to go on trial in the Vatican over the leaking of secret documents revealing mismanagement. Two journalists who used the leaked documents face the tribunal today, and could be jailed for up to eight years if convicted. —AP
• Bomb Attack in Greece
  A bomb exploded outside the Athens office of a Greek business federation, smashing windows but causing no injuries. It is the first attack since leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras came to power in January. —Reuters

Killer Mike, big fan of Bernie Sanders. (Photo via Flickr user swimfinfan)

Everything Else

• Killer Mike Loves Bernie
  Atlanta rapper Killer Mike delivered a heartfelt endorsement of Bernie Sanders after taking the politician to soul food restaurant Busy Bee. "Stay confronting bullshit wherever you turn," said the hip-shop star. —Pitchfork

• Clock Teenager Wants $15 Million in Damages
  Ahmed Mohamed - the Muslim-American teenager arrested after bringing a homemade clock to school - is demanding $15 million in damages from the city and school district. He also wants an apology. —CNN

• Hacker Outed as FBI Snitch
  A notorious hacker and anti-Anonymous troll has admitted to being an FBI informant. "What the fuck have I done", tweeted 5hm00p in a series of anguished confessions. —Motherboard

• Canadian Police Apologize for Freaking Out
  Vancouver police made hysterical warnings about the "senseless overdoses" caused by shatter, a concentrated form of weed. Then they conceded their tweets about overdoses "weren't accurate". —VICE
  

Done with reading today? That's alright—instead, watch our new film, 'The Cleveland Strangler': The Story of a Brutal Serial Killer and His Forgotten Victims

Private investigator Jack Roberts

In The End of the Affair, Graham Greene describes adultery as "part of modern life." He wrote those words almost 65 years ago, but they're still just as true today. TV shows like The Affair and Doctor Foster nod to our obsession with what goes on behind closed hotel doors, while, last summer, adultery site Ashley Madison hit headlines across the world after hackers revealed the details of millions who'd signed up in the hope of starting an affair.

Jack Roberts, a private investigator at Global Investigations, is tasked with exposing affairs. His work has taken him across the world, jumping on planes, following cars and lurking in shady hotels to uncover the sometimes-ugly truth about his clients' relationships. Charging £225 ($340) for five hours of surveillance, Jack has over two decades of experience in tracking down and exposing cheating partners. This is what he told me about his job.

VICE: Hi Jack. What made you decide to be a private investigator?
Jack Roberts: James Bond. My father took me to see The Spy Who Loved Me when I was 11 and it inspired me. So, 23 years ago, I started off tracing people for debts. Then, in 1994, I began dealing with matrimonial cases.

What happens first when someone comes to you and says, "I think my spouse is having an affair"?
First, I check for warning signs. I ask for the backstory. For instance, I'll ask how much time they are spending outside of the house. Some people say their partner goes to work every day but the mileage on their car tells a different story. Or they've stopped having intimate relations, or the partner might take their phone into the bathroom with them.

Are people generally right if they think their partner is cheating?
If you can smell a rat, normally there's something that we need to look further on. A lot of the time, women are right. They sense things better than men do. A lot of men are just paranoid. Women tend to come to us as a last resort, whereas men come when there's something slightly not right. However, we keep an open mind and don't make assumptions too early. Sometimes it turns out the subject is suffering from a drugs or gambling addiction, rather than having an affair.

So what counts as proof of infidelity?
I can't speak for the client. Sometimes we just need to prove intimacy with another person: holding hands, kissing. But some partners go as far as leading double lives. We had one client who lived with his wife from Monday to Friday, but on the weekends he wouldn't come to the house. It wasn't until he died that the client found out he had been having an affair; after the funeral, she saw a wreath left on the grave which was "from Jane* and family", which read: "My love for you will go on and on." The client approached us and said: "What the hell is this?" We did background checks on the guy, looked at where his vehicle had been spotted and spoke to some of his old friends, trying to squeeze information here and there. It took us a month, but we discovered that, from the Friday evening to the Monday morning, he had been living at another lady's address. They had a child together and everything. This had gone on for 16 years.

Wow. So I'm sure you end up breaking a lot of bad news.
Yeah. I've got used to behaving like a counsellor and releasing information in the best way I can. But, in the same manner, we don't paint pictures here—we tell them what they need to hear. Generally they've come to us with the feeling that it's hit rock bottom, and they want intelligence.

WATCH: The Real 'True Detective'?

How far would you go to follow someone?
I'm never sure where I will end up. Sometimes I'll go out at 8AM and then I won't come home that night. You have to be prepared for all eventualities, because cheating partners often take up the old adage "out of sight, out of mind". Most of the time I carry a passport, I'll carry loose change and I'll carry a Travelcard when I'm not even using travel. A few weeks ago, my colleague and I had a case where the client was travelling to the States and asked us to keep an eye on their husband back in London. The husband travelled from Hampshire to St Pancras and got on the Eurostar... We ended up following him to Paris. He checked into a hotel and met with a lady there. So we checked in too and filmed him. We had to stay overnight, but we got what we wanted.

Has anyone ever been impossible to trace?
Sometimes it takes time. But slowly, slowly, catchy monkey. In one case, my client's 84-year-old husband had told her he was popping out for a loaf of bread and then completely disappeared. His clothes had gone, too. We couldn't find him for two months. He was a clever guy, ex-Army, and he had covered every single aspect of his life—all his post had been forwarded to a C/O address. He never told anyone where he was going. Eventually, we tracked him down at an Army reunion dinner in Southampton. We followed him all the way home to an address ten miles away from his former home, where he was living with a new woman who, like my client, was in her 70s. He had been married to my client for 28 years, but one day he just picked up and left.

Do you only work with married couples?
Not always. A lot of men, particularly American or Russian businessmen, like to have escorts as kept women here in London, and then want to check up on them when they're not with them. We had one American client who had more money than sense—he showered young girls with gifts. He was in his early 40s and started dating an escort in her early 20s. He'd persuaded her to give up her job and promised to pay her rent. Meanwhile, he wanted us to check out her online escort profile and see if she was still working... So my colleague posed as a client.

TRENDING ON MOTHERBOARD: Watch Scientists Unroll a Tumour Like a Roll of Toilet Paper

And did your client's girlfriend turn up?
The woman who arrived turned out to be a different escort. But then we found out the woman we were looking for was spending three nights a week at a brothel in Paddington. So that was proof.

Extramarital affairs are a hot topic for TV shows at the moment. Over the past 20 years, have you had an increase in matrimonial investigation cases?
It's actually the same as ever. Matrimonial cases are always going to happen because people are always going to cheat and lie. As a professional investigator, I help my clients to see behind those lies so that they can have peace of mind and move forward.

Follow Francesca on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Mark Turner

Read: Undergrads Today Are the Worst: A TA's Confession

It's now legal for female burlesque performers to expose their breasts at shows, according to a new ruling from the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission (AGLC) on Monday.

After a six year challenge from performers in the province, the AGLC changed their stance surrounding the exposure of female breasts after a decision redefining "nude entertainment" that came down from the regulator yesterday.

"It has been brought to AGLC's attention by members of the burlesque community that the nude entertainment policy, as it stood before, may not be aligned with the Canadian Human Rights Act," said spokesperson AGLC Tatjana Laskovic, according to CBC News. "The AGLC has looked into this, and the result is the policy that applies equally to males and females.

Before this ruling, performers who showed even a side boob weren't allowed to be part of regular performances, as they be considered nude entertainment. By revealing one's breasts prior to the ruling, a burlesque performer would effectively be lumped into the same category as strippers and could not interact with customers or staff at the establishment.

According to one of burlesque performers, the previous ban on boobs during shows actually drew the cops out on a number of occasions.

"It sparked some media attention, which subsequently led to some aggression on both sides—us fighting the definition and the AGLC responding by visiting venues, by making themselves known, by telling us they did not want to change the policy, that the policy was essentially iron-clad—which frightened us a little bit," Arielle Rombough, an Alberta burlesque performer, told CBC.

"There were visits that involved police officers and AGLC representatives and fire marshals, and that got us all a little edgy."

New regulations now define nude entertainment as any performance where a performer's genitals are exposed.

According to the AGLC, regulations are effective immediately. Enjoy, Albertans.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Victor Biro. Photos by Jake Kivanc

Heavy rainfall spatters down on the windshield of Victor Biro's mid-2000s minivan as we sit in a parking lot near Toronto's Yonge-Dundas Square. The LED billboards flashing in the distance paint the water running down his windshield different colours as his EMS and fire radio scanner poke holes in our conversation.

"Arrived at the scene and there's one female," a paramedic blurts over the radio. "She's VSA."

"VSA means 'Vital Signs Absent,'" Biro says after strapping himself in and flipping the ignition on. "Could be something, could be nothing. You never know."

Biro is what many people call a "nightcrawler"—a photojournalist who cruises the city after dark while listening to the radio chatter of first responders, all in effort to get to the scene of crime and accidents as fast as possible and snap a picture that he can sell to a news outlet. He has told me the nickname, which was popularized by the Jake Gyllenhaal film of the same title, doesn't represent what he does at all.

"I'm not a sociopath. It's not about some sense of vanity or sensationalism," he tells me, tossing a cigarette out the window. "These are issues that affect social policy and public perception. There are guys that do this just for the rush, but there are a lot of people that don't."

Daily VICE, November 21

From the Toronto Star to Metro, National Post to the Sun, Biro's shots of car accidents, crime scenes and nighttime disturbances have been plastered on the front pages of Toronto's newspapers and media websites for over five years. Some of his shots feature the mangled remains of vehicles after fatal accidents, others just show caution tape illuminated by the red and blue glow of police cars at the scene of a shooting.

Up until 2008, Biro was working in the telecom industry. Despite having a love for cameras ever since he was a kid, Biro put his passion for photography on the back burner after he got into the lucrative world of telecom sales. At his peak in the telecom industry, Biro made good money—upwards of six figures, he tells me—but the job just wasn't doing it for him.

"It was not what I wanted to do," he said. "I wasn't contributing anything I felt was meaningful to society and I wasn't enjoying what I was doing. Of course the money was good, but I wasn't being true to myself."

For years, Biro had dabbled in the use of radio scanners as part of his work in the telecommunications sector. When he heard about photojournalists trying to keep up with first responders at night by using the very tools he was so familiar with, he said that he felt compelled to give it a try. After a few months of showing up to random scenes with his camera—which he found listed on a bulletin board at his office—he began to connect with journalists on the ground level and learn the ropes of chasing spot news. Things like knowing how to judge the severity of a call based on the sound of urgency in an operator's voice, or not staying at dead-end scenes for too long to avoid spinning one's wheels, are just a few of the things he picked up from working around the pros. In 2010, he decided it was time to go full-on.

Now 50, Biro fully acknowledges and accepts trading his high-paying white collar job for the brutal art of freelancing as a nighttime photojournalist, sacrificing the life of a big house and a fancy car for long hours and little money. On average, Biro makes about $50-$200 a photo, depending on what publication purchases it, how many publications purchase it, and if it makes it to print or stays online. However, there are some nights—many nights—where nothing happens and no photos are purchased.

"With the gas, all the time spent and the money it costs for the gear, you basically break even every night unless you pull in something really big," he said. "But nobody gets in this for the money. You'd have to be stupid to."

Biro picked me up around 10 PM, he usually doesn't end his night until around 3 or 4 AM, depending on how busy the scanners are. His job sees him sitting in zones of the city he describes as high-access—places that are either close to where action tends to happen or are near urban arteries such as highways and service roads—while waiting for his scanner to flare up with something that piques his interest.

Sometimes, it's a habit that can see him sitting for hours with nothing to do but sip on coffee, smoke cigarettes, and watch his phone for Toronto police tweets. Other times, it can see him responding to two, three, even four calls in a single night, racing from one scene to the next with around a half-dozen competing journalists and camera crews.

By the time we're a quarter way to the VSA incident, Biro tells me we're dropping the call. He says that, due to lack of chatter or further details given about the call, it was most likely nothing more than a back injury or heart attack. With a quick shoulder check and crank of the wheel, Biro's Ford whips into a U-turn as we head back towards the downtown core.

This has happened before and it will happen again: false alarms, non-fatal accidents, and anything that won't make the news is a pointless pursuit to Biro. As much as he'd like to photograph everything, he notes that there's a story to tell at the end of the day.

"You have to think about the larger picture, about the narrative you're trying to tell. I may not be writing the story, but these pictures need to accompany something, and if there's nothing to go along with it, won't buy it."

One of the main challenges for Biro over the last year has been the silencing of police scanners. Since 2014, Toronto Police and its surrounding municipal partners have been switching their radio-based frequencies for encrypted, digital communications. The police's reason for going digital is two-part. One, they don't want criminals listening in on their communications and anticipating their moves, and two, they don't think journalists have a right to know as much as the cops do. This is according to Mark Pugash, director of communications for the Toronto Police Service, with whom I spoke earlier this year for a Canadaland story.

"There is information about arrests, there is information on warrants that are going to be executed, there is personal information on there, and we think it's important that information remains confidential," he said to me during a phone interview. "Our major concern is safety of information. We've seen situations where media arrive to scene ahead of police and that interferes with officer safety, as well as the safety of a variety of people."

When I first rode with Biro back in July of this year, he relied entirely on fire and EMS radio chatter to aide him hunting the news. The mechanism that was supposed to bridge the gap between police and journalists—a Twitter account for Toronto Police Service's Operations (TPSO)—was infrequently used and often failed to provide updates to police operations in a timely manner.

In the five months since then, things have changed significantly. Now, the TPSO tweets more regularly—a large improvement from their old habits which would sometimes leave journalists in the dark for six to seven hours at a time—but other impediments have risen up in its place. One example is how fire is now less active on the radio than it was before due to the implementation of mobile data terminals, which allow fire services to communicate specific details over a proprietary system, only using the radio when they need to contact EMS. This has made the job even more difficult for Biro.

Without having reliable contacts in emergency services—most of whom stay tight-lipped in order to keep their jobs—Biro has to string together information from vague Toronto Police tweets that often give major intersections rather than exact addresses, broken radio chatter from the remaining fire and EMS communications, and what he hears from other reporters on the night grind. All in all, Biro ends up getting to less scenes and getting to them a lot slower than he used to.

When Biro does end up gathering enough information to narrow down a location and get to the scene, there's no guarantee it's going to be hot enough of a take for a publication to pick up. In the case of shootings involving the police—such as that of Andrew Loku earlier this year—the Special Investigative Unit (SIU) has the prerogative to invoke a mandate that prevents the police from giving details about a crime. This not only stops tweets about incidents from going out until it's far too late, but it also prevents Biro from getting worthwhile photos for publications. Ultimately, Biro tells me it's a gruelling practice that takes a lot of patience, time, and, most importantly, luck.

There was a time this summer when Biro and I arrived at a small collision in Etobicoke. A cameraman for a national TV channel, who Biro had spoken with earlier to coordinate where exactly the accident was, had beat us to the scene and was already filming. With a bulky camera in hand and a second DSLR dangling off his shoulder, Biro circled the scene and took photos with precision. A picture of the police, of the firetruck and the car, another one to capture the whole scene.

When we got back to the car, he imported the photos onto his laptop and opened them with editing software. He tweaked the lighting to make things a little more visible, but didn't touch much more than that. Then, he threw it all in the trash. When I asked him why, he told me that this wasn't going to make print, but that he was optimistic we'd hear something else.

Sometimes, that optimism pays off. When Biro heard calls coming in on the radio about a driver headed the wrong way on Highway 427 back in August, he had reservations about whether it was actually a serious incident or not, noting that it's pretty common for people to pull onto the wrong ramp at night, only to realize they're going the wrong direction and reverse their decision. This time was different, however. The calls didn't stop.

"In this case, there was multiple callers, and they were all at different intersections," Biro told me. "That's when we knew it was a real guy and this was really happening."

The driver ended up hitting a vehicle head-on that was merging onto the Hwy 427 from the QEW, totalling a van that was carrying a mother and father, as well as their 16-year-old daughter. While the mother and driver of the oncoming car suffered severe injuries and were rushed to a local hospital, the father and daughter died from the impact.

Biro and a few other journalists showed up to the scene while the father and daughter were being pulled from the crumpled remains of the car by emergency personnel. He snapped photos of their bodies being excavated, of the area around the impact, of the reconstructionists arriving on scene. It's an experience that he says he's had quite often, but not one that he ever gets used to.

"I was really, really sad," he said. "You knew this was not going to turn out well, just because the damage was so severe. It was really ugly... I have cried doing this job."

Biro also tells me there's many times he's missed the mark. Just a day prior to the head-on accident, the infamous shooting at Toronto's Muzik nightclub happened. Biro, after picking up nothing on the scanners for hours, had just called it a night. He was far away from the scene when it happened, and it ate at him for days afterward.

When asked if he is going to keep doing this—with all the irregular sleep, poor pay, and gruesome accidents—Biro tells me that as much as he would love to, it's become a hard idea to justify.

"I don't think it's going to be a thing much longer, for anybody, not just me. There's too much restriction, too little information, too little of a market for what's being done. It's important work and I wish it didn't have to be this way."

"As long as the calls are coming in, I'll be there as much as I can. How much longer that will last, I'm not quite sure."

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Last week, I took to Kickstarter to stage an undeniably petty act of protest. I asked for financial backing to send my new film Paint Drying—a single, unbroken shot of white paint drying on a brick wall—to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), the UK's film censorship board. BBFC viewings are charged on a per-minute basis, so the final length of Paint Drying will be determined by how much money is raised by the time the campaign ends on December 16. At the time of writing, the film is set to run a little over ten hours.

This project is the culmination of a decade spent aimlessly railing against the BBFC—a decade that began when I was 13 years old and, like every other 13-year-old I knew, was convinced that the movie Fight Club represented the pinnacle of western cultural achievement. One day, while poring through the trivia section on the film's IMDb page (did you know that cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth's sister appears in the film as an airline check-in attendant?) I noticed another tab labeled 'alternate versions.' There, I discovered that the cut of the film I knew so well was in fact censored, with around six seconds removed by the BBFC to "reduce the sense of sadistic pleasure in inflicting violence."

My mind was blown. I was well aware of the BBFC's color-coded age rating system, which had been seared into my mind by a series of stern, early-90s advisory ads, but it had never occurred to me that the board might be able to restrict movies altogether. After all, censorship was something I learned about in history lessons: a relic from the past, the preserve of dictators and despots. In a society that balked at the very suggestion of censoring literature, music, visual art, or theater, why were movies fair game?

The answer is: They weren't always. When film first came to the UK at the end of the 19th century, it was largely unrestricted, but as it evolved from sideshow gimmick to legitimate art form, it came under increasing scrutiny. The Cinematograph Act 1909 required cinemas—for the first time—to secure licenses from local councils. Initially, this was an attempt to curb the growing number of nitrate fires in Britain's movie theaters by ensuring safety standards, but the following year, a court ruled that councils could also take the content of films into account when issuing licenses. Shortly afterwards, the British Board of Film Censors was born, and its authority over UK film culture has remained in place ever since, even if it did rebrand as the British Board of Film Classification in 1985.

Despite the name change, the board continues to ban—or, to use its euphemism, reject—films on a regular basis. Earlier this year, the home invasion thriller Hate Crime was banned for scenes in which a middle-class Jewish family is tormented by a gang of neo-Nazis. Director James Bressack, himself Jewish, claimed that he made the film in order to explore his most deep-seated fears. Nonetheless, the BBFC decided that "the unremitting manner in which Hate Crime focuses on physical and sexual abuse" was unacceptable. That film's UK release was ultimately scrapped, though most distributors prefer to re-edit offending films in order to appease the BBFC. In 2010, the remake of I Spit on Your Grave was released with 43 seconds missing from its runtime. In 2011, The Human Centipede 2 lost almost three minutes.

The BBFC justifies its censorship activities on the grounds that some films pose a "risk of harm" to the public, with "harm" defined broadly enough to encompass such wooly concepts as "encouraging anti-social attitudes" and "distorting a viewer's sense of right or wrong." But if we censor art on the basis that someone somewhere might be hurt by it, we'll be left with no art at all. Should The White Album be banned because Charlie Manson used Helter Skelter to justify murder? What about Catcher in the Rye, which has at least three high-profile shootings to its name? More recently, the killer of Welsh five-year-old April Jones was found to have psyched himself up for the murder by obsessively re-watching a rape scene from The Last House on the Left—a film passed uncut by the BBFC in 2009. Did the board fail to spot a "risk of harm" in that instance, or is it simply impossible to predict the way art will be used and misused?

The BBFC's own guidelines admit that "expert opinion on issues of suitability and harm can be inconclusive or contradictory." Unfortunately, to the BBFC it therefore follows that examiners should use their "experience and expertise to make a judgement" on whether or not a film should be censored. Well, how's this for experience: BBFC employees have been viewing uncensored versions of supposedly harmful films for more than a century and as far as I'm aware, none have gone on killing sprees or started masturbating with sandpaper. What makes them impervious to this moral decay that threatens the rest of us?

Of course, the BBFC's censorship is easily circumvented. In the 1980s, the board's prohibition of various so-called "video nasties" led to a roaring under-the-counter trade in video stores across Britain. Today, markedly less effort is required to watch a forbidden title. Of the rejected works mentioned above, The Human Centipede 2 can be watched on US Netflix with the installation of a browser plug-in, while I Spit on Your Grave and Hate Crime can be illegally downloaded in a matter of minutes. Piracy robs filmmakers of the chance to earn a living from their work, so it's only them that lose out when the BBFC ensures UK audiences have no legal way to access films. Bear that in mind the next time some smug anti-piracy ad urges you to consider of the effects of illegal downloading on the British film industry.

All of this isn't to say that the BBFC doesn't perform a worthwhile function. Its ratings, and the content reports available on its website, are a valuable resource for parents keen to moderate their children's viewing habits. The board could continue to fulfil its role as an advisory service without also acting as a censor, if only its services weren't government mandated. That way, films that the board refused to classify could simply be released "unrated," as they are in the United States, rather than being consigned to the Pirate Bay.

Currently, it's effectively illegal to distribute a film in the UK without a BBFC certificate, and the cost of getting one disproportionately impacts independent filmmakers looking to self-release their films. The BBFC charges £7.09 per minute to classify a theatrical release. If you want to put the same film out on DVD, it has to be rated again, because the BBFC says its "ratings are issued according to their intended use at the point of submission" and may therefore change when films leave the cinema and arrive in the nation's homes. (The last time this happened was in 2007, when 30 Days of Night was reclassified from a 15 in cinemas to an 18 on DVD.) The combined cost of these certificates can run into the thousands of pounds.

Since I announced my plan to submit Paint Drying for classification, a number of people have pointed out that my complaint should really be with the various pieces of UK legislature that empower the BBFC, rather than the organization itself. That's largely true, and rest assured I have nothing but antipathy for the likes of the Video Recordings Act 2010 and the Obscene Publications Act 1964, among other bits of obscenely antiquated text. But I also think there's a value in attacking the public face of censorship, if only to show that—a hundred years in—we haven't totally numbed to the absurdity of its existence.

And besides, the BBFC doesn't perform its role as censor with an air of stoic duty, but with barely contained zeal. When it rejected Hate Crime, it didn't express somber disappointment that it had been forced to limit speech in order to protect the public from harm. Instead, it mocked the film's attempts to comment on anti-Semitism, calling them "unconvincing." The BBFC assured me that it doesn't take artistic merit into consideration when classifying films, but qualitative judgements like the one handed to Hate Crime betray the subjectivity at the heart of the process. Are these people classifiers, censors, or critics?

One thing's for sure: They're cocky, and I suspect that's because tradition is on their side. The BBFC has been censoring films for so long that nobody can remember a time when they weren't, whereas any new organization that sought to limit access to an art form—say literature, or music—would likely be met with outrage. (For what it's worth, I asked the BBFC if it would consider classifying these media in the future, and it said it was "open to helping classification of other media in addition to film and video in order to protect children and empower consumers as long as we have the expertise to do so.")

On a recent edition of the BBFC podcast, former examiner James Blatch posited the notion that "this generation are far more comfortable with classification than my generation were. I think we were a little bit more questioning about the need for censorship... whereas this generation see it as part of the landscape." He seemed to see this as a positive development. It sounds to me like a challenge.

Follow Charlie Lyne on Twitter.

Find the Kickstarter here.

As the daughter of a Lebanese mother, I was raised with a longing for the lost glory of the Middle East. Black-and-white Egyptian movies flickered in the background of my childhood. The women in my family would sometimes weep to the songs of Oum Khaltoum and Fairuz—classic singers from bygone decades—while they cooked and cleaned. "Ya haram," they'd sigh as I listened uncomprehendingly to the rise and fall of the music, wishing they would put on the Spice Girls. "What a pity."

As the daughter of a victim of terrorism, I was also raised with a personal understanding of how dangerous the Middle East has become. In March 1985, during the Lebanese civil war, my father, the journalist Terry Anderson, was kidnapped in Beirut by a radical Shia militia known as the Islamic Jihad. He was taken three months before I was born and held for almost seven years, after which I met him for the first time. His captivity almost destroyed my family, my childhood, and much of my adulthood; his trauma engendered my own. The resulting fallout until only recently completely engulfed my life. I've spent a good portion of my youth trying to repair the damage that the men who kidnapped him inflicted on my family, and have largely succeeded.

I'm now a journalist partly based in Beirut, just as my father was. My reasons for choosing this career are psychologically complicated, to say the least, but they include a desire to tell people about the part of the world that has shaped my life, for better or worse. I want to follow the thread of terrorism's evil to its genesis, so I spend much time studying the region's history, trying to find a way to comprehend what happened to my family as well as the pain and horror I see today—such as this month's terror attacks in Beirut and Paris.

Today it's difficult to imagine a hopeful Middle East. Too many angry men have committed acts of terrorism that resulted in reprisals and denunciations from the West. Too many conflicts have turned cities into war zones. Most Arabs I meet now have quietly resigned themselves to the destruction of their homelands—and being vilified for the acts of a vicious minority—with a befuddled sadness that's difficult for outsiders to understand.

On VICE News: French Jets Bomb Raqqa as US Blasts 283 Islamic State Oil Trucks

One way to try to understand, however, is to look back at what came before. Not to cast blame for the present woes—an exercise I find largely pointless—but to see how the actions of West and local actors shaped the region in unexpected ways. There are lessons to be learned from events as recent as 60 years ago, when the mid-century "Golden Age" of the Middle East that my mother taught me to cherish was in full flower. The era was an illusion, in many ways, since the stability she remembers with such fondness was never organic—it was the product of authoritarian rule, which the West had a role in creating. Still, compared to what's happening now, it's understandable that people of her generation would look back on that time with longing.

Growing up partly in Lebanon, it was clear to me that nostalgia is in many ways a defining feature of Arab culture—and for good reason. In 1950, Oum Khaltoum, the immortal diva of Egyptian music, sang these lyrics, written by the great medieval Persian poet Omar Khayyam: "Tomorrow is unknown and today is mine." And so it seemed at the time. Following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, Arab states had struggled to find their identity as Britain and France divided the spoils of the former kingdom, not least the booming oil trade. The two world powers manipulated leaders seen as corrupt colonialist puppets, including Egypt's King Farouk. But a number of Arab intellectuals began writing about nationalist ideals and sentiments, spreading a sense of pride in their identities. The phenomenon known as Pan-Arabism was beginning to take shape.

The establishment of Israel, a Western-sponsored nation, and the displacement of the Palestinians led to war and an quick defeat of the united Arab nations. Thoroughly disgusted with their rulers, who were seen as incompetent sycophants, talk of revolution began to spread. On July 23, 1952, a group of Egyptian military officers led by the charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser staged a coup against King Farouk's government. One by one, other Arab states followed suit, mounting revolutions and coups against their parliamentary monarchies and ruling elites: Iraq (1958), North Yemen (1962), Syria (1963), Algeria (1965), and South Yemen and Libya (1969).

After Nasser and other such nationalistic leaders in the Middle East and North Africa seized control of their governments, for a short while, certain states in the region became relatively stable. Under the umbrella of the new regimes, their populations—at least the wealthy and middle classes—were free to enjoy the lingering legacy of Western innovations as they savored the pride of their national identities. For a brief moment, some Arabs hoped they might return to the time hundreds of years ago, when Islamic nations were at the peak of civilization and learning. And they dreamed in style, albeit style borrowed from their former oppressors. The most obvious example of lasting colonialist influence on a Middle Eastern society is that of Lebanon, where the French had set about creating a little Arab replica of their own country.

While the city's reputation for hedonism has lasted, Beirut's nightlife now seems strained and desperately escapist.

Every once in a while, I'll sit for hours online, looking at pictures of Beirut in the 1950s and 60s. I reproduce those images as often as possible—on my business cards, on social media. I feel the need to remind others, and myself, what Lebanon used to be. Growing up, my mother used to show me photos of herself as a young bohemian with glossy black hair down to her waist, wearing tight bellbottom jeans and tottering on enormous platform shoes. She wasn't unique in her sophistication either. Sleek jetsetters sipping cocktails in hotel lobbies, beautiful women in bikinis giggling together on sandy beaches, trains that ran efficiently and on time—the Lebanon of that era bears little resemblance to the gradually disintegrating state that exists today. While the city's reputation for hedonism has lasted, Beirut's nightlife now seems strained and desperately escapist, given its placement against the country's bleak political backdrop.

Colonialism may have brought cosmopolitan culture, but it also widened sectarian and socioeconomic gaps in Middle Eastern countries. In addition to spurring the rise of nationalist regimes in Egypt, Iraq, and Libya—all of which would become as authoritarian and corrupt as the monarchies they had overthrown—the West exacerbated conflicts in Lebanon by sponsoring its various warring sects and external actors. In 1975, the country exploded into a 15-year civil war. It wasn't long before each sect was up to its elbows in blood and wanton violence became a way of life for the Lebanese. The chaos of Lebanon's civil war chained my father to the ground for seven years while I floated away like a little balloon. It robbed me of a healthy relationship with him—and with myself—for well over a decade.

The history of the wider region isn't any more uplifting. Bitter sectarianism, egomaniacal hubris on the part of leaders such as Nasser and Saddam Hussein, and continued Western meddling in the region's affairs fed upon each other. While colonialism started the fire, it must be said that Arab factionalism doused it with gasoline. Exhausted and broken, the region is now eating itself alive.

As a reporter working in the Middle East, I've witnessed some of this with my own eyes. I was in Cairo during the spring of 2013, after the ill-fated revolution against authoritarian Egyptian president Mubarak—who was seen as a Western-sponsored leader—ignited chaos and anarchy in Egypt. The pandemonium that ensued prompted the Egyptian people to support a semi-radical Islamic group, the Muslim Brotherhood. Then another, just as brutal, military ruler seized power: the current president of Egypt, Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi. While I was working there, I was told that walking down the street by myself in broad daylight could be seen as an invitation for rape. Sexual violence plagues Egypt now—a far cry from the days when women traveled the country in relative safety.

Iran is another nightmarish example of unintended consequences. In the early 50s, Mohammed Mossadegh, the country's democratically elected prime minister, began making efforts to nationalize the country's oil industry, which had been largely controlled by the British and French—until the CIA and MI6 instigated a coup against him in 1953. The resulting conflict returned Iran to the authoritarian yet Westernized rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. This move would have dire consequences in 1979, when radical Islamists hijacked popular outrage at the Shah's foreign-sponsored dictatorship and channelled it into the Islamic Revolution, which led to the oppressive government of religious clerics we know today. A faction of that government funded and sponsored the Islamic Jihad, the group that took my father.

Watch: The Cost of Dying in Greece

A former high-ranking CIA agent who was stationed in the Middle East recently made the argument to me that the US has supported certain authoritarian Middle Eastern leaders in order to maintain peace in the region. "We don't run around trying to set up dictatorships," he said. "We're trying to create stability and the grounds for democracy." And it's true that authoritarian military rule tends to have one major advantage—a state's iron-fisted control often provides the illusion of peace and prosperity, as dissidents and criminals cower and plot quietly in the shadows.

But even from a crude realpolitik perspective, I'd argue that this formula may have served American interests in the short-term, but its long-term sustainability is fragile at best. Remarkably, when extremists turn against us, as the Taliban did in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein did in Iraq, the US seems to be quite blown away by the result, regardless of how much historical precedent accumulates. Today, the American alliance with Saudi Arabia, which bears at least some responsibility for the rise of the Islamic State, seems to fit this pattern. As in the case of the rulers who created the mirage of a Golden Age after overthrowing the Western-sponsored monarchies that preceded them, I don't believe the foundation for democracy can ever be built upon tyranny.

Democracy is a creation of the people, but here's the rub: When the people rule, they tend to dislike putting the interests of more powerful countries before their own. Rulers such as the al Sauds have no problem considering the interests of other nations before those of their own people. What they have an aversion to is placing the West's interests before their own desires—be they religious, financial, or political.

And even when authoritarian leaders remain loyal, steadfastly serving Western demands over those of their own citizens, uprisings such as the Arab Spring and Iran's Islamic Revolution demonstrate that people will usually take issue with being oppressed and eventually cease to tolerate it. Post-revolution power vacuums invite anarchy; a retained sense of outrage at the West helps create an environment in which anti-Western Islamic extremism can flourish. This pattern has played out across the region time and time again. Its threads are obvious to the eye when looked at in the right light.

As a friend put it recently, Lebanon now has the dubious honor of being the world's most successful failed state.

But most heartbreaking of all, at least for me, has been watching Lebanon slowly decay, gradually becoming as decrepit and crumbling as the ancient Roman ruins that dot the country. Today, the little war-weary nation has been without a president for a year and a half because the sectarian government can't get it together for long enough to reach a consensus and elect a leader. They can't even cooperate on finding a company to dispose of Beirut's trash—as the Mediterranean winter wraps its damp tendrils around the city, revolting mounds of wet garbage flood the streets. The Islamic State presses close in the north while mounting violent terror strikes against the Lebanese people, such as the bombings in Beirut, which were largely ignored in the frenzy following the Paris attacks. Israel is preparing for an almost inevitable confrontation with the Iranian-funded militia Hezbollah—considered by most to be a latter-day incarnation of the Islamic Jihad—along the southern border. By some miracle, my mother's homeland continues to sputter along, but it's painfully obvious that the situation is unsustainable. As a friend put it recently, Lebanon now has the dubious honor of being the world's most successful failed state.

The once-cosmopolitan city of Damascus is now ravaged by war. Cairo is revolution-weary and racked with political tension. Any dreams of a thriving future for this part of the world have been largely extinguished. Even though the Golden Age is nice to think about, it must be said that nostalgia is often kinder than reality—it was but the illusion of a moment's hope a long time ago. True stability would have been impossible under dictators like Nasser, Hussein, or the Shah, all three in many ways products of neocolonialism. History is offering a clarification: Any chance the Middle East has for a better future seems to hang on the hope that the West will change the way it interacts with the region.

I hope we will someday learn from history's mistakes and support the people of the Middle East rather than the men who exploit them. Missed opportunities to do so, including Western inaction when Syrians began an initially peaceful revolution against their ruthless ruler Bashar al-Assad—because an intervention didn't appear to serve short-term American interests—also seem to have less than ideal outcomes. In many ways, it can be argued that our failure to support the Syrian people left a chaotic vacuum from which the Islamic State sprung. I also believe that had we built a relationship with the people suffering from Lebanon's civil war instead of certain actors participating in the conflict, perhaps I would not have grown up without a father. Had our leaders lived up to the values they give lip service to and fostered democracy—real democracy, with the long-term plan of creating stability and goodwill in a tumultuous region, I think the Middle East would look quite different now.

These days, the Arab Golden Age is nothing more than an ephemeral dream. But the wistful memory of well-dressed women strolling the boardwalk by the Mediterranean Sea, of exquisite restaurants and tourists pouring in from all over the world—most Arabs carry that with them. You can still hear it in their voices sometimes, at least the older ones; that overwhelming sense of something beautiful lost.

Sulome Anderson is a journalist and author based between Beirut and New York City. Her book The Hostage's Daughter is scheduled for publication with HarperCollins in fall 2016.

An agar plate with bacteria spread over the surface. The little discs contain antibiotics (like ceftazidime 'CAZ' and cefoxitin 'FOX'). This shows how the bacteria grows straight over the top. The number refers to the concentration of antibiotic in the disc. Photo by Dr. Patrick Harris

Last week researchers announced that they'd found strains of bacteria that are resistant to the planet's most potent antibiotic, colistin. Not only that, but the gene for this resistance is easily shared between different strains. So it's really just a matter of time before this resistance goes global.

The road to this discovery started in 2011. The Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology funded a group of researchers to test meat samples around the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Much of the country's meat is produced here in high-intensity factory farms, where farmers stave off infection by feeding the animals human-grade antibiotics. This might insure investments for farmers, but it also encourages bacteria to develop ways of coping with our best antibiotics. It's perhaps therefore no coincidence that SARS first appeared in Guangzhou in 2002.

But that's not to say China is to blame. Antibiotics have been used in animal agriculture everywhere for a long time and especially in the US. It's just that we're now paying for it.

To unpack this complex issue we spoke to Dr. Patrick Harris. He's an infectious disease physician and microbiologist with the University of Queensland, and he co-wrote a paper on what it means to have our last antibiotic curtailed—both now, and very soon.

VICE: Hi Patrick, are we doomed?
Dr. Patrick Harris: Well I think this is a bit like climate change. We're not there yet, but we will be. See we've always had a few things in the cupboard that we can turn to when needed. These are known as carbapenems—which are a branch of broad-spectrum penicillin drugs for our sickest patients—but since the early 2000s we've seen more and more resistance to these drugs.

And that was when we traditionally used colistin?
That's right. In those circumstances, when nothing else works, we've got colistin. It's a really old, crappy antibiotic in many ways because it's so toxic. It was developed in the 1950s and abandoned because it was too toxic, but it's still around and we can get it when we need it. Colistin usually wipes out most gram-negative infections, but what's new is this gene that makes bacteria resistant to it, called MCR-1.

Now, I understand this resistance is transmissible between bacteria. How does that work?
It works because the MCR-1 gene has latched itself onto a plasmid. A plasmid is mobile packet of DNA. It's like a little tool kit that can carry all kind of resistance genes. Bugs are very clever. They can have a very primitive type of sex and share these genes via plasmids. So if you have drug resistant E. coli sitting in your gut with one of these plasmids, they can pass the plasmid on to all the other different strains of bacteria in your gut. And that's how this resistance spreads very, very quickly.

Let's say that resistance to colistin goes global. What does that future look like?
Well keep in mind that people won't transmit these bugs by shaking hands. The worry is that it'll just take medicine back in time. Before penicillin, if you got a blood infection you had an 80 percent chance of dying. After penicillin, that dropped to 10 percent. Now, at the moment when patients get infected with these bugs, they've got a 50/50 chance of dying, and that's with colistin available. So if you take colistin out of the equation, then we'll go back to pre-penicillin figures of 80 percent mortality. That would mean you could forget about all sorts of modern surgery. We couldn't do transplants or orthopedic surgery or all sorts of things we take for granted. We'd suddenly have very limited options.

It's completely indefensible to be feeding food animals antibiotics for humans.

I'm finding this very depressing.
I don't think it's the end of the world just yet. Instead I'm saying that it's completely indefensible to be feeding food animals antibiotics for humans.

Yes, let's talk about how we got to this point.
Well, it was known even in the 1950s that if you feed animals antibiotics they grow faster. No one really knows why this is. The other thing is that in intensive factory farming animals are much more susceptible to infection so antibiotics are used in the feed as a kind of prophylactic measure. The thinking is that we should just give animals the most powerful antibiotics we've got all the time. That's logical if you're growing chickens, but no one's been thinking about the downstream effects.

Are we still feeding colistin to food animals, even now?
Absolutely. In the US it's something like 60 to 70 percent of all antibiotics are used in agriculture. And of course the agricultural lobby is very powerful. The Iowa pig industry produces billions of bacon rashes every year. If you ask them to stop using antibiotics, they're very reluctant. You might be asking to change how we practice industrial farming.

So why aren't we lobbying against this in the same way we're tackling climate change?
I'll be honest. As an infectious diseases doctor, we've been banging on about this for 20 years. It's just been very difficult to capture the public's imagination.

Are you pissed off about that?
It's not that people don't listen. I just think a lot of people don't understand. It's very technical and a lot of people don't even know the difference between bacteria, a virus, or a parasite. It's hard to capture imaginations when people don't understand the problem.

So is there a moral to the story?
This a wake-up call. It's not the apocalypse, but it is indefensible to be using critical antibiotics as growth promotion in animals. That's just not a logical or ethical thing to do.

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Image via the Boston Public Library on Flickr

Now's the time of year when we hear a lot about the Pilgrims, those buckle-hat-wearing (not really) motherfuckers who crossed the Atlantic to colonize Plymouth, wound up making friends with the Native Americans, and blah blah blah that is why we have Thanksgiving.

You've probably already heard about how there were no turkeys at that first Thanksgiving in 1621. But you likely don't know about an especially grim episode that occurred 21 years later, in the midst of a colony-wide sin outbreak, when a man named Thomas Granger was executed for having sex with a number of animals, including the bird that would become the Thanksgiving mascot.

The story comes from Of Plymouth Plantation, a diary by Governor William Bradford that is the most complete and authoritative primary source from that period. Here's what Bradford wrote of Granger:

"He was this year detected of buggery, and indicted for the same, with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey. Horrible it is to mention, but the truth of the history requires it."

Basically, someone walked in on Granger, a teenage servant, while he was engaged in "lewd practice towards the mare," and the young man eventually confessed to having sex with the horse regularly, along with several other farm animals.

Then, as now, bestiality was a serious crime. But back in 1642, the punishment was strange by modern standards: The authorities worked to determine which animals Granger had had sex with, then killed them in front of him before executing Granger himself. They then buried the animals, as opposed to eating them, because their bodies had been defiled. (This procedure was based off of the Bible passage Leviticus 20:15.)

"Just before this event, we have an account of two people accused of rape, but they were whipped rather than executed," said Peter Drummey, a historian who serves as the Stephen T. Riley Librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society. "There certainly seems to be a disdain for executions," he added, which points to how extreme Granger's transgressions were considered to be.

Drummey added that the killing and burying of the animals would have been a hardship for the colonists and was therefore another indicator of how seriously this crime was viewed: "You're talking about an agricultural society. This slaughter of all the farm animals, that's a substantial economic sacrifice."

Life in the early American colonies was brutal and people died, like, all the time, over seemingly minor afflictions. In 1621, Bradford recorded, Plymouth's governor, John Carver, "came out of the field very sick, it being a hot day; he complained greatly of his head, and lay down, and within a few hours his senses failed, so as he never spake more till he died, which was within a few days after." That was how Bradford took over as governor.

The colony grew under Bradford, but by the time of Granger's sordid misdeeds, there was a sense that people were sliding into sin—even though breaking sexual taboos resulted in harsh punishments, people kept on breaking them. Bradford took this so seriously he even consulted with a trio of ministers to determine which sodomy crimes were worthy of the death penalty, how far an interrogator should go while attempting to extract a confession, and whether there are crimes where a single witness and a confession were sufficient rather than the then-traditional standard of two witnesses.

"Bradford lists it as why he sees as a decline of Plymouth Plantation," said Drummey. "Granger learned this from some other people who learned it in England. So here they are being tainted by the old world. There's a paradox. They're surviving and growing. They're successful but maybe not in the way they intended to be."

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By worldly standards, the Plymouth Colony was doing great in 1642. Nearly half of the Pilgrims who set out from England had died by the time of the first Thanksgiving in 1621, and of the 53 survivors, only four were adult women. But by 1641, the population of Plymouth had shot up to about 2,000 according to Plymouth Colony, Its History and People. Life in Plymouth had finally stabilized.

"And yet all this could not suppress breaking out of sundry notorious sins, (as this year, besides other, gives us too many sad precedents and instances) especially drunkenness and uncleanliness; not only intercourse between persons unmarried, for which many both men and women have been punished sharply enough, but some married persons also," Bradford wrote at the beginning of the 1642 section of his book. "But that which is worse, even sodomy and buggery, (things fearful to name) have broke forth in this land, oftener then once."

Granger's acts were extreme, but there are other examples from that period of the Pilgrims stuffing more than just turkeys. Plymouth court records from 1642 tell the story of Edward Michell, who was accused of "lewd and sodomitical practices tending to sodomy with Edward Preston, and other lewd carriages with Lydia Hatch," who was also punished for sharing a bed with her brother. All this came to light because Preston apparently propositioned a man named John Keene, who turned him down and told the authorities. Keene was then ordered to watch while the two Edwards were whipped. Another, tamer, example of sexual wrongdoing was the case of John Casley and his fiancee, Alis, who were discovered to have had sex before their marriage; John was whipped while Alis was forced to look on from the stocks.

All this led Bradford to wonder if perhaps the Devil had more power in the New World than in European "Christian nations." He even considered that the Pilgrims' strict moral codes might be to blame for all the unlawful fornicating: "It may be in this case as it is with waters when their streams are stopped or dam̅ed up, when they get passage they flow with more violence, and make more noise and disturbance, then when they are suffered to run quietly in their own channels. So wickedness being here more stopped by strict laws, and the same more nearly looked unto, so as it cannot rune in a common road of liberty as it would, and is inclined, it searches everywhere, and at last breaks out where it gets vent."

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All over the Alberta, young men will sit anxiously in front of a strip club stage with change stacked in front of them. They wait patiently, eagerly anticipating their turn to throw their money at a stripper's crotch for the chance to win some shitty prize, usually a poster or a magnet.

Around these parts it's known as the loonie game, named after Canada's dollar coin. The game commences shortly after a dancer has finished her initial dance on stage. At this point she'll typically sit down on a towel or blanket (so she's not seated directly on the stage) and start to make her way around the riser, stopping in front of every member of perv row—the area where eager dudes occupying the row of seats directly in front of the stage. Once she's positioned in front of said audience member, she will most likely, shall we say, present herself by lying on her back and spreading her legs or turning around and arching her back on all fours.

The patron then takes their money and lobs it in the general direction of the stripper's genitals. Sometimes, she will hold a rolled up poster of herself, positioned like a funnel leading down towards her crotch, into which the contestant will toss his coins. But, like a carny, the dancer will typically move it slightly to let you win or lose depending on the amount you've spent so far. Another popular variation of the contest is when a stripper will get on all fours and stick a loonie on her posterior, which patrons will then try to knock off with their coins. The loonie game can take many forms but there is one constant rule—it will all end with change being chucked towards a stripper's crotch. (That's typically followed by the stripper making a sad stroll around the stage afterwards while swinging a magnet on a string to collect the change.)

The game raises many questions, the main one being, how in god's name did we get to the point where this gross spectacle is normal behaviour in Alberta strip clubs?

As with a great many shitty things in our society like prohibition and the war on drugs, it arose from good old fashioned puritanism. In the late 80s and early 90s, an extreme anti-exotic dancing group named the "Citizens for Decency" emerged in Alberta. It was spearheaded by Audrey Jensen, a woman who, all things considered, seemed dead set on being the biggest buzzkill on the planet. Believing that "the lust" caused by exotic dancing created many of the great evils in society Jensen set out to ban stripping in Alberta. She was an effective advocate, showing up in front of strip clubs with signs and organizing letter writing campaigns. Over time she earned the ear of many politicians in the right wing government.

Jensen's crusade has had lasting effects on the province, the most profound being her impact on the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission, which was founded in 1996, and its precursor, the Alberta Liquor Control Board. The AGLChas some of the strictest rules in the country regarding nude entertainment in licensed venues—and this is where you can find the catalyst that created the loonie game.

"The loonie toss stems from having a liquor license a three-foot barrier in your liquor service area between the customers and the dancers," Jesse Cochard of Chez Pierre, the only club without the loonie game in Edmonton, told VICE." Historically, that is where the loonie toss comes from."

The particular rule that has inspired thousands of coins to take flight is 5.11.6-A. The almost two decade old rule deems that any licensed venue that offers nude entertainment must provide "a stage or enclosed dance floor, separated from the patron seating area by at least one (1) metre." The enforcement of this rule essentially outlawed close-up tipping in any licensed venue that held nude entertainment. Touching is banned, so you can't hand the dancer money directly and, because neither customer nor dancer can enter that three foot area, you can't leave the money on the stage. As a response, the loonie game was invented to circumvent the rules and allow patrons to tip the dancers.

So it would seem that Audrey Jensen, one of the most ardent defenders of "decency" in western Canada, is at least partly responsible for one of the most repugnant traditions in that part of the country. If the act wasn't so dehumanizing, the whole situation would be hilarious.

"It's gross. Beyond just being gross, it's weird," said Sylvia Linings, an exotic dancer who grew up in Alberta. "It's a weird reaction to 'Hey we can't do the titty tipping anymore, we're Canadian so let's flick coins at people's pussies.' It's a weird, weird thing."

As degrading as it seems, it's still become such an entrenched part of the culture that strippers tend to acquire a set of skills unique to this particular aspect of their occupation.

"The funny thing about being a stripper in Alberta is that when a coin hits your body you can tell, oh, that's a quarter," Arabella Allure, an Australian stripper now working in Canada, told VICE. "Once you've had several thousand dollars of change thrown at you, believe me, when a coin hits you that isn't the right weight, you fuckin' know about it."

But the loonie game is not only gross, it's also dangerous. The coins can easily cause a dancer sporting heels to take a nasty fall if a customer gets a little worked up and blows his loonie wad all over the stage before the strippers initial dance ends. Moreover, some people use the game to intentionally hurt strippers.

Read more: Edmonton's Most Notorious Strip Club Is a Family Affair

Some strippers sport little indents from patrons winging coins at their genitals while others sport permanent half circle burns on their bodies from when men use their lighter to heat up a coin before throwing it.

"You'll get guys who think it's super funny to hit you on the nipple, your asshole or clit," Allure told me. "I've had friends whose skin has been broken because they had a piercing on their hood or whatever and the coin impacts hard enough that it has broken the skin. Which then it's like a health issue because money is filthy."

When she first came to Edmonton to dance, no one told Allure about the game—she saw one of her dancers getting change thrown at her vagina, and tried to grab security to beat the shit out of the man doing the deed.

"Where the fuck is security? I thought. What the fuck is this? When she got off stage, I started apologizing to the girl that I couldn't find security because that guy was chucking coins at her. And she was like, 'No, honey it's just the loonie game.'"

"I've been all over the world, and Alberta is the only place they throw coins at you."

Now, even if the rules change—which is a possibility—the activity of chucking hunks of metal at a stripper is likely to stick around because it's ingrained into the culture of Albertan strip clubs. Some clubs have change dispensers, and others have girls walking around with a tray filled with rolls of loonies to sell to the participants just like they were tequila shots. It's just the way things are in this region of Canada now—a part of the experience.

"It's weird, I grew up with it in Alberta, learning about it as soon as I learned about strip clubs," Linings told me. "It's the world's weirdest carnival game. Like here's your big stuffy bear for throwing loonies at my crotch for a while. It's disgusting."

"It's the most fucked up, inhumane thing I have ever come across."

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Photos by Daniel Castro Garcia

This article appears in the November issue of the UK edition of VICE magazine.

When the distinguished theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli was a student, he didn't spend much time studying: he was too busy trying to overthrow the government. Bologna in 1977—and Italy throughout the decade—was a stage for intense political struggle, and the leading players were the extra-parliamentary groups of the New Left. With the Italian Communist Party in terminal decline, the New Leftists in Bologna occupied universities, fought fascists in the street, and established autonomist communities. They were all, in their own way, oriented towards revolution. "It was very fragmented," says Rovelli, "some of us were Marxist-Leninist or Trotskyist; some were hippies into sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll; and some were just into the mystical Far East."

Although Rovelli was involved with Metropolitani Indiani, a group of hippies who dressed like Native Americans and were "a lot more show than substance," his radicalism also found meaningful expression. He worked at Radio Alice, a subversive radio station that provided information for protesters, sparking riots when it announced the death of a student shot in the back by police. He also co-wrote a book about the so-called "Movement of 1977" called Fatti Nostri, made up of radio transcripts, political documents, and zealous essays. The police tried to ban its publication and, after it was secretly printed, searched his parents' house and launched an investigation into the editors, which was eventually thrown out by a judge.

Ultimately the Movement of 1977 was a "totally failed revolution." Too many of its participants were the children of the bourgeoisie and had a "suspicion of any attempt to impose structure" on their action: its ephemerality was built-in. So, Rovelli left the barricades and began working out how to avoid spending the rest of his life in an office job. "It's funny," he adds, "now the problem for young people is to find a job. In my generation the problem was how to not find a job." It was at this juncture that he "fell in love with science," seeing it as an ideological terrain "where revolutions actually succeed, revolutions in thinking."

But revolutions in theoretical physics are quieter than those in politics: once completed, public life carries on undisturbed. It took a century for the Copernican Revolution to leave the province of academia and become common knowledge. Likewise, the two physical revolutions of the last century that invalidated Newton's ruling ideas—Einstein's general relativity and Bohr's quantum mechanics—appear arcane to a contemporary audience. "If you go into any high school and ask students about space and time, you get an answer which is basically Newtonian," Rovelli explains. Our intuitions dictate that space is completely empty, time flows in a straight line, and gravity operates like a metaphysical force of attraction, but this hasn't reflected scientific understandings of the universe since Einstein, and it explains why Rovelli wrote Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. If Fatti Nostri was propaganda for a revolution manqué, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is propaganda for the two revolutions, general relativity, and quantum mechanics, that have passed us by.

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It's his first book for a popular audience and has been a tremendous success in Italy: Sette Brevi Lezioni di Fisica sold 140,000 copies in six months, outselling Fifty Shades of Grey for two months and surpassing the publisher's expectations. It has been translated into 24 languages and the English version, published by Allen Lane (Penguin) was released this October. When I meet Rovelli at Penguin's offices, he is friendly and inquisitive, asking straight away about the etymology of the word "Strand," the central London road running outside. (I didn't have an answer, but it turns out to be derived from an Old English word for a beach or shore, tied to the road's position parallel to the Thames.) He is short, carries a backpack, and has black-and-gray curly hair that he fiddles with when in thought. Like the scientists he writes about in his book, he is decisively equivocal—alloying confidence with doubt, qualifying assertions about the universe with "at least it seems to me..." Despite his success, it becomes clear he eschews the arrogance of those other public spokespeople for science—figures like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox—that the English-speaking world is obsessed with, which is a relief.

I jog his memory of the "failed revolution" of 1977 by presenting a pamphlet, titled "Memories of a Metropolitan Indian," written by a participant—he peers at it before exclaiming, "Oh! My youth!" He reminisces fondly about his revolutionary days, so I ask whether he keeps in touch with his comrades. "Yes, I do. A surprising number of them live in the memory of it, which I think is totally stupid," he says. "The idea was we would change everything: get rid of family, cops, and money... But you have to basically take the world as it is, changing it here and there." He might no longer be committed to a widescale political transformation of society, but traces of the student that was are visible in the book: the clearest sign of a radical mind in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics appears when Rovelli defines his research into the fringes of theoretical physics. "In the vanguard," he writes, "science becomes incandescent in the effort to imagine what has not yet been imagined." This reads less like science, I suggest, and more like the definition of utopian political thought. Rovelli is bemused but agrees. "It's funny you ask this because I don't usually talk about it. It's always in the background. There's an aspect of rebellion in my work that is definitely rooted in that ideology."

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics begins with the theory of general relativity. Einstein's revision of Newton's model of empty space and gravitational force is, Rovelli writes, "breathtakingly simple": the gravitational field is not a magical force within space but is space itself. This picture is complicated by quantum theory, which holds that "electrons do not always exist" but only do so when they interact with something else. After lessons on the shape of the universe, the particles that compose it and the illusory nature of time, we learn about Rovelli's contribution to the field: an attempt to resolve the contradictions between general relativity and quantum theory called "loop quantum gravity." This is where his work becomes animated by the utopian. As director of the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseille, he has pioneered a theory that claims space is made up of minute "grains of space," interwoven like chainmail. When describing these grains of space with mathematical equations, the constant time—which is usually present in these calculations—is omitted: Rovelli's universe is literally timeless. "It is a huge conceptual leap," he says, one that he and colleagues reached "by avoiding the tendency in theoretical physics to follow the crowd."

The subject matter is complex but rendered in simple prose. The chapters are short, the book a mere 80 pages, and Rovelli says most of his time writing was spent editing: the content of a theory is reduced to its simplest proposition and the implications of its conclusion are given an elegant, philosophical gleam. But there are omissions and the reader is left wanting, such as on the emergence of the book's central characters. Although the book describes a time-less and space-less universe that transcends individuality, there are great individuals who populate it: the geniuses. It's a term Rovelli uses a lot, applying it to Einstein, Bohr, Maxwell, and Heisenberg. The geniuses burn bright with hubris and doubt, increasing scientific knowledge in real terms but forever dissatisfied. Rovelli attempts, in line with that ideology of youthful rebellion, to explain where geniuses come from—"Einstein attended occasional lectures as a student for pleasure, without being registered or having to think about exams. It is thus that serious scientists are made"—but they remain mysterious creatures, so I ask how geniuses are made. Shouldn't a history of science look at the historical conditions of an era and how they contribute towards the emergence of breakthroughs rather than focusing on a few great men? Doesn't scientific knowledge have a sociohistorical character, operating within society like the rest of us?

He pauses for some time. He replies that it might be the case that there are certain ideas that "happen to coalesce" around certain individuals, but then hesitates: "But if that were true, how was it possible that Einstein did so many things? He didn't do one great thing, he did six or seven. So obviously he had the right tools." He's worried that emphasizing the historical truth of a claim to knowledge leads to relativism, according to which one can't say what is objectively true. It's the first unsatisfying response that he's given in our time together, and he senses it. "Look," he adds, "Einstein developed special relativity, which is all about simultaneity, while working in a patent office on projects for French, German, and Swiss trains that had the problem of synchronizing their clocks between stations. So the technological problems of his time impacted his theory. Likewise, thermodynamics came out when people in England started making steam machines and were able to see heat in action. More than that, the entire ideology in your head affects the way you think about the world. But, with all this, you understand what heat is—and it remains true! You understand the earth is a sphere and it's not a sphere because feudalism went down, it's a sphere, period! Maybe it's true we understood it once we freed our minds from feudalism, but it remains a fact that it's a sphere, and it's going to be a sphere forever!"

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Having made a world-renowned theoretical physicist explain to me that the Earth isn't flat, I look down at my notes. There's one more topic scribbled and it's likely to cause as much discomfort: God. "In Italy," he says, "the Catholic religion is so dominant that I think people appreciate, in my book, a simple story, and a plain way of understanding humanity without nonsense." But despite being a "rationalist atheist," Rovelli is sympathetic towards the divine: in the book he refers to space as "the heavens" ("An accurate translation" from the Italian edition, he assures me); and often presents cosmic concepts from a messianic perspective—sometimes denoted as "God," sometimes as a "hypothetical supersensible being"—to help the reader understand them. He resists my suggestion that his work leaves conceptual space for God ("No, no, it's just a way of explaining things!") but is not blind to the anti-intellectualism of contemporary atheism, telling me that he's "against the agenda of people like Richard Dawkins" who go around saying that everyone who believes in God is stupid. "Religiosity is part of who we are and there's nothing wrong with that." But when I ask, a few days later via email, what he really thinks of the New Atheist trend, he is diplomatic to the point of parody: "I think it is good that ideas, good and bad, are made visible. Then people can listen, think, choose, develop..." The decorum, however, is understandable when I discover that he's sharing a stage with Dawkins at a public talk a few weeks later.

Hippie, revolutionary, theoretical physicist... I end by asking what he makes of his fourth career: public intellectual. Now that he tours the world delivering TED Talks, writes columns for Sunday newspapers and gives interviews to global punk conglomerates, has his vocation changed? Healthily, he is unimpressed by the prospect. "Writing books is not my job. What I really like and love in life is when I shut the door, turn off the internet and do my little calculations. That's when I'm happy," he replies. "Recently I've been doing too many..." he doesn't finish the sentence and smiles, possibly not wanting to offend the representative from Penguin who's just entered the room.

We finish the interview and try to leave Penguin's labyrinthine offices, getting lost more than once on our way out. I'm still thinking about the politics of his youth, as is he. He starts talking about Herbert Marcuse and the philosophers of the New Left he used to read. Marcuse taught him, he tells me, how people in the West were less free than those in the Soviet Union precisely because of the individual liberties they were indulged, blinding them to the social tyranny of the free market.

We part ways and I dodge tourists on the busy Strand—which, weeks before, had been busy in a different way, blocked by thousands marching towards parliament—thinking about how political convictions can change over a lifetime. I think of the disappointed radicals of Rovelli's generation who either live in nostalgia for an impossible revolution or have repurposed their ideas to become pragmatic reformists. I think of the theoretical physicists applying principles of utopia to their work, not to imagine or create better worlds, but to more accurately describe the one we live in. It's a fascinating profession but I can't help feel it begs a political question, the kind Rovelli abandoned considering years ago: what's the point of describing the atomic structure of a world as squalid and senseless as ours?

Still from the FX series "Fargo"

Read: The Messed-Up Story Behind Alberta's Sad Tradition of Throwing Loonies at Strippers

In the same week that the four-year Charbonneau Commission released its extensive report on corruption in Quebec, a Montreal inspector general report has found that the city has a powerful cartel controlling... the removal of snow from roads.

Allegations in the report include certain contractors dominating specific areas of the city through both collusion with other contractors and threatening competitors. The inspector general spoke to about 100 people, 60 of them being snow-removal contractors.

Many contractors denied that anything shady was underway, but according to the CBC's report, even those contractors who claimed everything was on the up-and-up hinted tellingly at collusion. Some of them are quoted (anonymously, of course) as saying things like "everyone decides to stay in his own territory" and telling would-be competitors, "You stay in your turf and I'll stay in mine."

That's in addition to the threats of physical violence some contractors received. The report's three examples were of contractors being warned they'd have their legs broken for bidding on a specific contract, be hit with a hammer for refusing to buy out a bankrupt company's contracts, and one person being told he'd "have the shit beat out of him" if he didn't buy a contract from another person.

Around 3,000 contractors are involved each year in carting 300,000 truckloads of snow off Montreal streets, at a cost to the city of $155 million. The inspector general office was created in 2013 by Montreal mayor Denis Coderre, shortly after he took office.

The aforementioned Charbonneau Commission report, released this week, is nearly 1,800 pages long and contains 60 recommendations for the province of Quebec to cut down on corruption. With this new revelation, Quebec's already tarnished reputation is taking yet another hit.

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Protesters in Minneapolis on November 19. Photo via Flickr user Fibonacci Blue

On Monday night at around 10:40 PM, shots rang out at a Black Lives Matter rally in Minneapolis. Five protesters were shot and three were rushed to North Memorial Medical Center and Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC), according to deputy police chief Medaria Arradondo, where they were treated for non life-threatening injuries. The suspected shooters are white supremacists who arrived at the protest with the express intent to disrupt it, according to eyewitness accounts in the Star Tribune and Minneapolis City Pages. No suspects have yet been arrested.

Black Lives Matter spokesperson Miski Noor told the Star Tribune that white supremacist counter-protesters have been a permanent fixture of the BLM protest outside Minneapolis's Police Department's Fourth Precinct that began last week in response to the shooting death of Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old unarmed black man who was killed by police eight days ago by a shot to the head.

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According to a video of alleged witnesses uploaded to YouTube by a white supremacist blog, on Monday BLM protesters noticed a few suspicious white men videotaping them. They approached and asked the men to remove their masks and identify themselves, a request met by a "fuck no!" A BLM protester then punched one of the white men in the face, and a chase began, according to the men in the video. When it ended on the corner of the 1400 block of Morgan Avenue North, the three unidentified white men pulled a gun and opened fire into the crowd.

Protester Jie Wronski-Riley was on the scene, and witnessed two people close to him get shot, he told the Star Tribune. At first, he thought the gunshots were firecrackers, unable to believe it could be gunfire. "Surely they're not shooting human beings," he thought, according to the paper.

Officers reported a seeing Silver Chevy Trailblazer or Chevy Envoy leave the scene in a hurry, according to police scanner audio. A statement from the Minneapolis Police Department says officers responded "almost immediately" after the call of shots fired came in around 10:40 PM Monday. (Commenters on the BLM Facebook page claim it took police as long as ten minutes to respond.)

In response to last night's shooting, Jamar Clark's brother Eddie Sutton released a statement asking that protesters end their occupation outside the Fourth District police station: "We appreciate Black Lives Matter for holding it down and keeping the protests peaceful. But in light of tonight's shootings, the family feels out of imminent concern for the safety of the occupiers, we must get the occupation of the 4th precinct ended and onto the next step."

Jamar Clark's funeral is scheduled for Wednesday.