Molly Crabapple is an artist, writer, and activist born and based in New York. She is a contributing editor here at VICE, and has been hailed as "equal parts Hieronymus Bosch, William S. Burroughs, and Cirque du Soleil," by the Guardian.

Her upcoming illustrated memoir, Drawing Blood, details Crabapple's life and the development of her craft and career since she began drawing at age four. Alongside the story of her coming of age as an artist, the book simultaneously charts the changing face of New York City and the political upheaval that the world has seen in that time. From 9/11 to the financial crisis of 2008 to Occupy Wall Street, Crabapple captures it all with an artist's eye for detail.

VICE is proud to present this standalone excerpt from the upcoming book, out December 1 from HarperCollins.

—Dory Carr-Harris

The Box

I spent more and more nights at the Box. Outside the club, I fell into New York's frenzy. I was photographed for magazines, staring into the camera's insect eye as I once had as a model. But I was no longer girl flesh—I was me. The morning news did stories on Dr. Sketchy's. A T-shirt company gave me my own line and flew me out to Hollywood to launch it. At the party, the publicist guided the starlet Bai Ling and the boy-starlet Boo Boo Stewart over. We embraced, letting go just after the cameras stopped. But Buck Angel showed up and hugged me for real.

Together, my friend Gala and I went to a party for Louis Vuitton. I prepared with great care: sequined dress, Louboutins. Gala showed up on the corner of Houston in a cerulean tutu. We had a tense moment at the door. Would the girl see our names on the list? Some New Yorkers were legendary door crashers: They viewed lying past guest lists as a test of fortitude. I was not one of them. When I wasn't on the list, all I wanted was to apologize to the door girl and slink away. But miracle! Our names were found! Gala and I strode into the room. Like all fashion parties, the Louis Vuitton party was a sort of video game. We had three goals: Gulp as much champagne as possible. Get a swag bag. Pose for photos.

I stood around, trying to look haughty, too scared to talk to anyone. I willed the photographer to turn his flash in our direction. Why even come if he wouldn't record our presence? Eventually, he noticed us. Hands on hips, Gala and I snapped into our glamorous molds. He took two photos and turned away.

After thirty minutes we left, toting champagne headaches and swag bags full of gummy bears and conditioner packets. I dumped them into the trash.

Later, Gala wrote up the party on her blog. On the Internet, we were chosen, enviable, fabulous. She sold back the myth of our enjoyment, sandwiched in between ads.

In New York, before the crash, this was all there was.

The media had become stupid with money. Web 2.0 brought with it the intoxicating delusion that we could all be wealthy microcelebrities. Thoughtful work was for idiots. There were gilded prizes to be seized.

Gawker turned a bland dating columnist into the era's Becky Sharp, making her famous by eviscerating her online for her naked ploys for attention, then scooping up all the clicks for themselves. Video editors donned white suits and were flown to Vegas on private jets, working-class craftsmen transformed into brands, traveling to a branded city on a branded plane. One friend made a Tumblr of crowdsourced photos of bacon. He got a book deal for a hundred thousand dollars. Facebook took over the New Museum and gave five thousand people panama hats and tiny apple pies. Where did the money come from? Who cares? I thought, stuffing a minipie into my face.

Outside New York, books like Rich Dad Poor Dad spread the lie that, for the middle classes, money could come from nowhere. They didn't reveal that this trick only works for the rich. Buy a house on credit, flip it, buy another—so the pundits counseled. Don't think. Don't wait. Everyone was getting rich. You'd be an idiot to hesitate. Don't miss out. In New York, we were the credit we would draw against. We were no longer writers or artists. We were start-ups. Branding may have been for cattle, but we were all brands. We would get book deals movie deals angel funds venture capital cash cash cash and never think that someday we'd have to earn it back.

One night Richard ordered me to duplicate Raven O's tattoos on the bodies of the waitstaff. Raven's torso was a muscled wonder, emphasized by stars and tiger stripes, and the words American Boy stretched across his improbable abdomen. Each waiter would take off his shirt and stand, bored, while I daubed paint over his perfect back. The job took me eight hours.

I stuck around for the show. A guest came up to me. "I can get you into the VIP section," he bragged. He was rotund, with a bowl cut and a suit.

"I work here," I answered.

"Doing what?"

I gestured to a waitress painted with my handiwork.

He chortled to his friends. "Can you body-paint me?"

"Sure. If you give me a hundred dollars." I made myself sound bored. You always get more money if you sound bored.

He led me to a private box filled with his friends. I unbuttoned his shirt. His belly was a furry dome. His chest rose with anticipation.

I took out a Sharpie and drew a smiley face on his stomach.

Smiling, I shoved out my hand.

He dropped a hundred into my palm, too embarrassed to protest.

Rose Wood was dressed as a caricature of a sex worker: lime-green tube dress, clear platforms, pounds of fake hair. She'd just gotten her tits done, and the bags sat proud atop her well-developed pectorals. Beneath her glitter-caked eyelids, Rose had a handsome, stoic face. Her jaw was square, and you could see the tension of someone who had fought hard but wasn't going to show it.

During another act, Rose had walked the floor, opening audience members' beer bottles with her asshole. While she did it, she wore the same cold dignity on her face.

For this act, Rose led an actor onstage. In his banker's suit, he looked identical to any man in the audience.

From the wings, Raven whispered the banker's thoughts.

She's so beautiful, the banker said to himself. No one at the office would think I was wild enough to get a prostitute. But I am.

Rose started to undress the banker. She unbuttoned his shirt with the movements of a lover, not a worker, with poetry and pain. As she removed each gray piece of his suit, she hung it up on a coatrack.

She's so neat. Not like my bitch of a wife, the banker thought.

Rose led him to the bed. She cuffed his hands to the bed frame, with his head pointed toward the audience.

"Naughty! Kinky!" the banker purred.

She straddled him. She pulled her dress up, over her breasts.

Oh. She has a dick, the banker thought. But she's hot. I don't care.

They mimed sex. The banker screamed in pleasure. The bed jumped.

Afterward, the banker lay back, stupid in his satiation. Rose pulled off her wig. She was bald underneath. Her gestures were graceful, slow, as if the blue stage lights were water. Her shoulders slumped with exhaustion. She lit a cigarette.

Raven began to sing.

"This is not a love song."

From behind the coatrack, Rose pulled out a knife.

"I'm going over to the other side. I'm happy to have lots to hide ..."

Rose walked back to the bed. We couldn't see the banker's face, but we could feel him there, grinning with satisfaction. He was brave. He was a rebel. He had just been fucked liquid. He was a man. Rose straddled him, hiding the knife behind her back.

Then she raised the knife. The banker's head jerked with surprise.

Didn't they have a nice time? Didn't he pay her? Weren't they friends?

Then Rose brought down the knife.

The lights went to strobe.

In that confusion of smoke and flash, Rose stabbed the banker over and over. Blood flew. Rose rode the banker as she killed him. Her face shone orgasmic. She bit her lips with joy.

Finally, the banker's body lay flaccid.

Rose cut off his head.

The lights went back to blue. Spent, Rose rose from the bloody bed. She pulled off the tube dress to the rhythm of Raven's song. Then she stood naked in the middle of the stage and stared hard out at the crowd. She showed her breasts, her penis, the cold dignity on her face. She stared at every motherfucker in the audience as if she had tied him to that bed and stabbed him too, and she wanted to let him know he deserved it.

Slowly, Rose put on the banker's suit. In class drag, she walked off the stage.

As she left, she tossed her cigarette onto the bed. It went up in flames, banker and all.

Then, in 2008, the stock market crashed. When it did, Simon Hammerstein was one of three people who rang the opening bell.

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer in New York. She is a contributing editor for Vice, and has written for publications including the New York Times, The Paris Review, and the Guardian. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Conor McGregor. Photo by Andrius Petrucenia via Wikimedia Commons

"Irishness" has different meanings—not just abroad, but here in Ireland. Abroad, the clichés are unavoidable—maybe Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge character summed it up best with "leprechauns, shamrocks, Guinness, horses running through council estates, toothless simpletons."

For an older lot reared during simpler times, that isn't a million miles away. Indeed, their Ireland is one of traditional music, pints of stout, and romanticizing the IRA. For the upper classes, however, it's more a vision, one built around blonde hair dye and new cars, sugary coffees in posh hotels and fake-smile Christmases with annual visits to church.

But for the rest of us—mostly working class—our Irishness comes mainly from the pub, memories of old football matches and wink-and-nod embraces of St. Patrick's Day. It comes, most vividly, from feeling underrepresented.

Here in Ireland, our cultural sphere consists mainly of disconnected arseholes. Our political sphere, the same. If someone gets elected who represents the working class, they're immediately made to look like crackpots, like Luke "Ming" Flanagan—nicknamed by the media because his beard looks like that of Ming the Merciless—who stands for such wacky things as opposing austerity and legalizing marijuana. And if someone working class is allowed to exist culturally, they immediately become cult heroes, like football analyst Eamon Dunphy. Such is our clamor for realness.

Internationally, it's similar. Though seemingly very nice men, I wonder if Graham Norton or Chris O'Dowd would be so successful if they didn't vamp up their begob-and-begorrah Irishness to the level foreigners expect.

In Conor McGregor, however, and the resurgent Colin Farrell—most recently in True Detective season two and The Lobster—there are finally people on the international stage who, to the Irish working class, represent the Ireland we live in.

Firstly, their reputations as tasteless speak to something in our character. Having endured enough unemployment to essentially not give a shit, we as a people have trouble taking things too seriously, so when McGregor wears one of his chimney-sweep suits, or when he called everyone out at the UFC Go Big press conference before Glasgow-kissing Jose Aldo, what Irishman can say that he—or a large portion of his mates—hasn't done the same stuff? We've been squaring up outside nightclubs for years; we've been turning up to communions, confirmations, and weddings in ridiculous outfits since we were born.

And when Farrell states, "Holy fuck, man. Breakfast, lunch, and fuckin' dinner right here, and I'm not even fuckin' jokin'," during his sex tape while giving oral sex, what Irishman can say that he hasn't expressed similar poetry at such moments? We're brought up to essentially fear sex, so actually having it can be joyous—indeed, like three meals at once.

Colin Farrell. Screen grab via Youtube

But past their rough exteriors, their insides are also recognizably Irish, full of the old-school values so popular here. Watch Farrell as he discusses the sex tape with the mortification of a boy just caught wanking. Truly, it's both sides of the Irish male Catholic spectrum; and for a man famed for his womanizing, as well as being an actor paid to look cool, it's quite sweet how he melts under the spotlight of his past indiscretions.

Reared in Castleknock, a semi-decent suburb of Dublin, he can't quite claim the same working-man credentials as McGregor—who grew up in Crumlin and then Lucan, both a fair bit rougher—but having come of age when class lines weren't so starkly drawn, he has all the manner of your mate who sits in a camping chair at Electric Picnic with a slab of Budweiser, hassling passersby for weed.

Now sober, his obsessions are yoga, juicing, and his kids. He speaks of his sons in almost every interview and seems like a great dad. It's this love of family that he shares with McGregor.


Having been with his girlfriend Dee for eight years—since he was 19—McGregor's also spoken about clearing off all his family's debts and how securing their future is his primary motivation for fighting. Once a plumber's mate—"making the tea," as he describes it—this comes from the not un-Irish experience of having very little. He's also at pains to credit his coach, John Kavanagh, for all his success. So though the perception is he'll criticize anyone, it's just not true—he's fiercely loyal to those who he feels have helped him.

McGregor's free of body and speech. Listen to him speak—I mean, really listen—and beneath the shit talk you'll understand he's about dreaming big and working hard to achieve it. He's also about not shortchanging that dream, or himself, by not continuing to push. He had no right to achieve what he has, but he has and he knows it.

Read on VICE News: Women Tweet About Their Periods to the Irish Prime Minister in Protest of Abortion Law

My relationship with Ireland is strained. Feelings of resentment stem from having grown up in the same environment McGregor did and not thinking I could be anything other than my dad, who worked his whole life painting houses for almost nothing.


We go to school here and are taught to say prayers we don't believe in, along with a language we never speak, and if we don't buy into that, wanting more than society has carved for us, we're told "No" by our parents and teachers. Then, if we do break out, elevating ourselves in class if only intermittently, we feel obliged to hide part of ourselves.

For years I've had the piss taken out of me because of my accent and where I'm from, and have consequently tried to hide it. Am I proud? No. But you still wouldn't hear me speak as I should unless I'm pissed.

This inferiority complex is a huge problem in the Irish working class. If we do become successful, we're taught that it's in spite of who we are, not because of it. We've developed Stockholm Syndrome, having convinced ourselves that the restrictions placed on us by the upper classes are, in fact, necessary.

But things are changing. Go to any martial arts gym in the country, or Dublin's 3Arena, where UFC Fight Night 76 took place last month, and experience young people more involved than in any movement—cultural, political, or sporting—I can name. These young men and women are the same ones who were thrown on the recessionary scrapheap; who, despite the government's claims of economic growth, still live with unemployment and a probable need to emigrate. With the children of the upper classes already on their fourth startup, us working class have turned out exactly like our fathers, kicking and screaming for every bit of income like it's the 1980s all over again, the promises of the Celtic Tiger now mounted and stuffed on an anonymous banker's wall.

But in McGregor and Farrell we now have heroes who've not only overcome the obstacles we face—who naturally inspire us—but who've actually become successful not in spite of who they are, but, in large part, because of it; because in their relatively uniform worlds, UFC and Hollywood, they appear unique.

They appear unique because of their Irishness, and by being so brazen they're teaching us not to be so cowed. They're teaching me that, rather than hide from who I am, I should embrace it.

Related: 'Mobile Love Industries,' our documentary about how phone apps have changed sex and love.

There's resistance here, of course. Both McGregor and Farrell are looked down on by the upper classes because of those rough exteriors, and though there isn't a country where the phrase "human cockfighting" hasn't been uttered in relation to MMA, here in Ireland it feels particularly venomous. Obviously, these people have little understanding of what MMA is, only that its representative, McGregor, doesn't look or sound like them; only that those who filled the 3Arena two weeks ago aren't in the mould of their sons or daughters, or their privately-schooled Rugby World Cup heroes.

Believing that anything that serves a positive role in the community—which gives many hope at a time when little else does—is distasteful, is indicative of an elitist society, one where the upper classes don't believe the youth of Crumlin and Lucan deserve their own heroes, where we should be grateful for what we're given and shut up.

But the age of shutting up is over, and because of heroes like McGregor and Farrell, we're hopefully being dragged towards a country where success won't be so strictly determined by class, but rather by the qualities we've always had, but which largely go unnoticed: hard work and talent.

Follow James Nolan on Twitter.

Check out more from Julian Glander at his Twitter, Instagram, and blog.

A screenshot from 'The Beginner's Guide'

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

I'm writing this at the end of October (magazine deadlines, you see), which means a few things. One, I haven't been kept awake all fucking night by pricks with fireworks just yet, but I know those bastards are coming, popping off rockets mere days from now, practically right outside my window, the gigantic twats. Two, my kids still think they're getting everything they've asked for this Christmas, as reality hasn't quite kicked down the doors of their fantasy existence with a fresh cable bill and final demand for the latest missed payment to keep us in hot water. And three, it's too flipping soon to really know what the very best games of 2015 have been.

I mean, I know a few. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has been amazing, made better, as unlikely as that would seem given the main game's entire-weeks-swallowing immersive qualities, with its recent Hearts of Stone expansion, which flits from wedding revelry to vault robbery without breaking a narrative step. FromSoftware's gothic masterpiece Bloodborne killed me and killed me, but I loved every deathblow. Super Mario Maker and LEGO Dimensions have been outstanding in the category marked family friendly (as in: I've been playing them after the kids are snoozing); the comeback of Guitar Hero Live was better than all expectations; Splatoon made multiplayer shooters palatable for those averse to sharing game time with trash-talking dickheads; and there's a stack of titles from major publishers that I've only scraped the surfaces of. A handful of hours in the company of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain isn't a tenth of what it's going to take to make the most of director Hideo Kojima's Konami swan song (and do read our "final word" on said game, please), while Halo 5: Guardians hasn't even finished downloading yet.

A screenshot from 'Ori and the Blind Forest'

There's a substantial clutch of commercial heavyweights yet to make their moves: Fallout 4, Star Wars: Battlefront, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, and Rise of the Tomb Raider remain in the future of right here, right now (click each title for the corresponding review). But games from the independent sector, games made outside of the machine-like production line of the biggest publishers, the teams with hundreds of people all working on a single release, have as good as wrapped for the year. It's not that there aren't any more indie games out between now and your eighth helping of dried-to-tasteless-perfection Christmas turkey; more that I know that the best in show have already emerged, bloomed, and been celebrated as special titles existing on the periphery of so much homogenous testosterone-spilling action-adventure mulch that goes on in the mainstream.

So let's look at some of them.

The Beginner's Guide is Californian developer Davey Wreden's follow-up to his somewhat autobiographical debut-cum-breakthrough, The Stanley Parable, which addressed issues of free will with some wickedly sharp snark. This game is also connected to its creator, with Wreden himself providing the voice over as the player navigates a series of game worlds within the cluttered catalogue of a character called Coda, a host of half-finished projects that mesh together into a digital portrait of a person we only learn about through their games. And it turns out that person is damaged, disillusioned, perhaps even dangerous to themselves. Powerful stuff, but not big on gameplay, which is a criticism that can also be leveled (if we must) at Everybody's Gone to the Rapture by Brighton-based studio The Chinese Room. This gorgeous-looking, sumptuously soundtracked walk 'em up was too ponderous for some critics, but I loved its slow, methodical pace and open-world design, allowing you to freely explore an English village after its inhabitants have mysteriously disappeared. To where, only its endgame can reveal.

Related: Watch VICE's documentary oneSports

Rapture sold well enough on its August release to place as that week's top-selling game across all formats—impressive given it's a digital-only PlayStation 4 exclusive. Another high-enough-profile indie release of the summer was the Metal Gear Solid-inspired Volume, a stealth puzzler with a Robin Hood-borrowed backstory from Mike Bithell, a British designer whose first solo game Thomas Was Alone won a BAFTA in 2013. It lacks the idiosyncratic invention of its predecessor, but Volume is one of a few indie productions in 2015 that play and look as good as something you'd expect to find on a bigger developer's books. Another is Ori and the Blind Forest, made for Microsoft by a multinational team at Moon Studios. A mouth-wateringly beautiful platformer that mixes fantastical magic with Metroidvania exploration, it's a surprisingly moving affair that has the player guiding a cute furry creature around darkness-ravaged environments full of deadly surprises.

Rather more bloody of mind, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number saw Swedish developers Dennaton repeat the pixel-art hyper-violence of their acclaimed first game in great style, even if the sequel's maps weren't so compellingly exacting—frustration can set in if you let it. The same can be said of Titan Souls, from Manchester's Acid Nerve, a boss-battles-only top-down adventure of retro visuals and obvious Zelda inspiration. With its single-hit deaths, it's entirely possible to lose several hours attempting to defeat just one colossal enemy. Yet both games are worth your time, providing you're able to calm temper flare ups by switching to something more meditative.

A screenshot from 'Titan Souls'

Something like Toby Fox's Undertale, perhaps, a game looking like a Japanese role-player from the 1980s but charged with narrative innovation unlike any preceding release. Your diminutive hero will encounter all manner of monsters on their quest to defeat the king of said beasts, but battles need not be decided by sword swings and blunt blows—you are able to talk your opponents around, to work out their grievances, and ultimately spare them. Then again, there's always the option of murdering everyone, but don't come crying to me when you get the "bad" ending.

There have been so many more unique indie experiences in 2015: Sam Barlow's murder mystery Her Story, Failbetter's steampunk-ish Sunless Sea, and how can anyone not become addicted to the phenomenal Rocket League from American studio Psyonix? But I'm out of words, and Halo 5's ready now (it took nine hours), so, if you don't mind.

VICE Gaming's ultimate run down of the best games of 2015, based on contributor votes, will run at the start of December.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Tariq Ramadan. Image courtesy VICE du Jour

When Tariq Ramadan speaks, the French establishment disagrees. Although he's been invited to hundreds of French debate shows, his most notable appearance was probably a 2003 debate with ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, in which the Muslim scholar (grand-son of the Muslim Brotherhood founder in Egypt) suggested a moratorium on stoning unfaithful wives in the Middle East (warning: the English subtitles are wonky). His argument was that imposed sanctions would be unwelcome in the Islamic world, and only internal debate could lead to real progress.

This year, he's at it again. He's publicly said that French President François Hollande is the new George W. Bush, and while he condemned the Charlie Hebdo massacre earlier in January, he also condemned the Charlie Hebdo illustrators, and refused to stand by them as everyone in the world was expressing their solidarity with #JeSuisCharlie.

It really didn't help when he wrote a letter on the Oumma website that the newspaper Le Monde refused to publish, in which he accuses most French intellectuals of being too docile in response to Israeli and Zionist politics.

It would be easy to dismiss Ramadan as a pure provocative agent. He was fired from Erasmus University in Rotterdam in 2009 for contributing to an Iranian state-owned television show, accused of supporting the regime and making homophobic and misogynistic remarks on his show "Islam and Life."

In 2004 he was denied entry into the United States for a series of conferences and speeches that he was supposed to give. The Patriot Act argument was that the money he gave to Palestinian charitable organizations helped fund the Hamas. Years later, a Hilary Clinton-signed document led to complete absolution from these past accusations.

On top of that, the prolific author has been featured as one of the most influential thinkers in Time and Foreign Policy. He's a professor of Islamic studies at Oxford, is the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics' director in Qatar, and gives interviews in French, English, and Arabic whenever he's not posting homemade online videos commenting on the general status of Western-Islamic relations. I caught up with him before a Montréal conference, just days after the Paris attack.

VICE du Jour, November 24

Read: Here Are the Reasons Why Justin Trudeau Is Right to End the ISIS Bombing Mission

VICE: You've compared François Hollande to George W. Bush. Can you explain why you made the comparison?
Ramadan: What I meant was that Hollande's speeches right after the attacks had the exact same tone as Bush's after September 11th. And the tone is set with three ideas: First, these people don't share our values, they don't like democracy. Secondly, they want to scare us, we'll show them that we're not scared. We will hit them and we will do it with more strength. Here we announce the strengthening of our Syria strikes. So, in the end, we are these people's victims. And this will justify internal policy. This answers to attack by a war surplus. And we also imply that you are either with us or against us, without necessarily explaining what that means, in terms of concrete actions in our foreign policy. Like, how will you bomb Syria? Why? In that sense it's the exact same thing, this notion of revenge behind national unity. It's very emotional. And it's troubling, if we consider that Bush's answer in 2001 wasn't really appropriate.

What can the West do about terrorism in Syria?
We have to be clear when we condemn ideology, objectives and means. We have to be clear, not just as Westerners, but as Muslims in Muslim societies, that the Paris attacks need to be condemned. But we're also talking politics. And politics develop over time, and there are reasons for certain behaviours. We have to ask ourselves questions about the West's responsibility in the Middle-East powder-keg. We have to consider Afghanistan, our heritage with the Taliban, with our alliance to Bin Laden before he became public enemy number one, our strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia, all these are objective reasons that lead some to radicalization. The Iraqi model of complete instability, the division of the country, all the while protecting its mines and oil fields, it developed a surplus of violent extremism and terrorism. When they asked me to be on Tony Blair's task force in Great Britain, I told them, I agreed that in no way you can justify the killings of innocents in London with England's foreign policy, I understand that you have to condemn it, but there is a link between your foreign policy, following Bush on his war-saddles, and then having people say, hey, you're killing us over here, we're going to kill you over there. You have to understand what you're doing there, what your project is, what your policies are in the Middle East.

There are things we need to talk that we don't talk about, like the instability created in the Middle East, the objective alliances that lead to support for Israel and non-recognition of rights for Palestinians, all this is part of the general solution. But we'll also have to think about concrete politics: Iran has joined the regional coalition to fight Daesh, but we're working with Saudi Arabia at the same times, and these two countries are enemies.

How is Islamophobia evolving in France?
Islamophobia is definitely settling in. I said it fifteen years ago: the problem is not the potential victory of the Front National (a far-right political party gaining more and more speed in France).The problem is the normalization of its ideas. With the Republicans as much as with the Socialists. When we hear Prime Minister Valls on the left, or ex-president Sarkozy on the right, we can wonder where the difference lies. The Front National is gaining territory with this. The objective is fear. And there's a new informal concept right now, which is this notion of the alien citizen. He's a citizen, but he's a little bit of a stranger, because he's way too Muslim to be a complete French citizen. The Front National want to revoke the French nationality for anyone suspected of having problematic thoughts linked to their adherence to Islam. These are institutionalized measures of structured racism, and there needs to be a united front of men and women, not only Muslims, who answer to that. This isn't only limited to the French, as we saw with Harper in the recent election who wanted to crystallize national identity with the Niqab debate. This is the age of the emotional political discourse, not of ideologies debating with other, but of emotions confronting one another. This is breeding ground for Islamophobia, it's a breeding ground for anti-Semitism, and it's breeding ground for racism in general.

Follow Joseph Elfassi on Twitter.

Between the Paris terror attacks and Donald Trump's demanding surveillance over Muslims in America, anti-immigrant fears have continued to dominate the global conversation amid the ongoing refugee crisis. The timing couldn't be more unsettling, even profound, for writer-director Jonas Carpignano's vivid and vital humanist drama Mediterranea, which opened in theaters over the weekend.

Expanded from Carpignano's acclaimed 2012 short A Chjàna, Mediterranea intimately observes the perilous journey of iron-willed West African migrants Ayiva (Koudous Seihon, in a scene-stealing debut) and Abas (Alassane Sy) from their home in Burkina Faso to Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and ultimately Italy. Surviving hostile environments, bandits, and worse, the two friends settle in a shantytown on the fringe of Calabria, where they face further persecution from exploitative bosses and xenophobic locals. There are moments of levity depicted in their day-to-day life, but have these men, like many, ultimately swapped one marginalized life for another?

Back in May, during the film's Cannes premiere in the Critics' Week section (the same month hundreds of African migrants were shipwrecked and killed in the waters between Libya and Italy), I sat down with Carpignano. We discussed the film's blend of fiction and nonfiction, how technology like Facebook plays into immigrant stories, and how a pint-size hooligan became one of this year's most memorable supporting characters in cinema.

VICE: The European refugee crisis escalated dramatically this year. Obviously, movies aren't made overnight, but what was the initial spark for the story?
Jonas Carpignano: I'd always wanted to make a film about race in Italy, especially in the South. It's something I'd never seen before, and I feel like Italian cinema is moving toward—especially when we decided to make the film five years ago—this very commercial, factory-like, industrial system. It's improved a lot. There are many more interesting films, but I really wanted to make something that was neo-realist, essentially.

My mother is African-American, my father's Italian, and it's something that I felt very sensitive to. I thought maybe I could bring some personal experience to it, and show the story from another side. But when I got down there, I met the lead actor, Koudous Seihon. I immediately knew that I wanted to make a movie about him, about his experience in particular. I never wanted to make something overly didactic. I wanted to put a face to it, and have this character-driven story set within this larger framework and context. The idea was to have people attach to one person, and hopefully think about everything they're reading in the news in a different way.

How did the story evolve from what you learned about Kouduos's experience?
It all changed. The first time I went down there, I had an agenda, like I'm gonna expose things that are happening. When I spoke to him, I got to know the place. It didn't feel right to me to go down there with a foreigner's perspective and idea. Coming from Rome, from New York, to tell a story through that lens felt wrong. I changed my approach: "Let's make it about this incredibly charismatic character."

In the end, it's all things that have happened to him, combined with stories that I've collected while doing research. I was in Africa for a long period of time, during a large part of that voyage. Some of the stories I had heard, I added to his experience. So, the boat situation's very true to his experience. The robbery is something I'd heard about from other people I met in Algeria, who had just been through something like that.

What I'm seeing in Calabria now are people who are ingraining themselves in the community. That's changing the social fabric of Italy.

There are many different migrant experiences. What was your collaboration like with Koudous, in terms of creative choices?
The first choice was to make the film with him. He's from Burkina , and those are the countries he went through to get there. I had to make it as true to his experience as possible, but I will say that the idea was never to choose someone leaving a war-torn country. We wanted to explore the pull as much as the push. When you're leaving a war-torn country, it's obvious why you're going to leave. Your life is in danger. There's an imminent stress, so you and your family leave. That seems like a natural thing to understand.

More relevant for exploring the creation of this African population in Italy, to me, is the pull. What draws them there, and what makes them plant their roots. If it's just about the adversity, you move to the next place. Whereas what I'm seeing in Calabria now are people who are ingraining themselves in the community. That's changing the social fabric of Italy.

Overall, these characters seem to have a blindly optimistic view of what Europe has to offer them. In some ways, it's a lateral move from where they came from. What do you think leads them to believe this path will be better?
That's something I think about all the time, something that's always been true to the immigrant experience. The same thing happened in Italy, when people were coming from Calabria to New York at the turn of the century. Someone must've said, "Hey, we're living in a tenement building with 15 people. I don't know if that boat ride, where you might get the plague, is worth it." People do it anyway, and fundamentally, I've come to think it's for various reasons.

Some say it's going to be difficult, but people love to project the image of success, wherever they are. That's what Facebook is, right? We all create ourselves, and put it out there. It's an ad for ourselves. You see that a lot in Calabria. Like, guys posing on cars that aren't theirs. Guys taking pictures with large groups at a party, trying to make themselves appear successful to the people back home. Just a little bit of that is enough to make people say, "All right. If they can do it, we can too." Koudous, for example, refuses to believe at any moment that things could be better where he was than in where he could go. All those dangers seem like calculated risks to him.

I hope that more people will concentrate, or change the conversation from, 'What are we gonna do about all these people coming?' to, 'What do we do now that they're here?'

The film has the immediacy of an activist documentary, but it's ultimately a fictionalized story. What do you hope audiences are going to take away it?
I hope there's recognition of the fact that this is not a fleeting thing. I hope that, especially the section in Italy, succeeds in showing that a real community and culture is forming. I hope that more people will concentrate, or change the conversation from, "What are we gonna do about all these people coming?" to, "What do we do now that they're here?"

Late in the film, there's an excitingly staged sequence involving a large-scale riot, inspired by the 2010 riots in Rosarno. Could you talk about some of the thrills, mistakes, and otherwise when filming scenes of that magnitude?
That's sort of our naïveté coming out in its strongest. We've been making short films for a long time down there, and we're of the impression that if we try real hard, it's going to work. We give ourselves one take to do things like that. We set it up, put the cars there, choreograph it for a full day, and then just roll the dice.

How did it go down in that single take?
The general filmmaking idea was to set up an event that has its narrative purpose, and then let it evolve. Let it become its own living thing. It happens with the smallest dialogue scene; it happens with the riot. We staged, more or less, where the people should be. We had to time the explosions, and people can only be so close. So you rehearse it, rehearse it, rehearse it, and the explosions aren't happening. Then when you actually do it, the explosions happen right in people's faces.

It creates an entirely different energy. When you see that guy run off and smash the pipe on the ground, or go crazy on that wall... that guy was actually fired up because he'd thrown this Molotov and it had just blown up right next to him. We stick to the choreography, but luckily, we're always looking for and ready to pick out that moment that's going to take it to another level—an unexpected blessing, as opposed to, "Damn, it didn't go right."

I like how you incorporate technology into the film, from hand-me-downs to hustling over MP3 players. When did that come into the story?
Very early. There was always this idea to emphasize the global culture. We're all slowly speaking the same language. That's where the pop music comes in. You take someone from a remote village in Africa, a little girl from Calabria, a film crew that comes half from New York and half from Rome, and everyone knows the words to the same song. It's the same thing with technology. We all know what Facebook is. So those were always part of the tale.

The part about the underground economy is the thing that struck me while living there. That's something that emerges with low wages and the black market, almost back to a bartering system. Like, that Moroccan stand in that place actually existed. I remember walking in there, and I was like, "All right. Here's the electronics store, there's the supermarket..." Everyone had their own space in this underground economy. That's one of those rich flavors that needed to be in the film, to capture that experience. I couldn't have him walk into a Walmart, or an Auchan that we have there [in Italy].

I have to single out one of your performers, because young Pio Amato plays the smoothest operator I've seen onscreen this year. He's a preteen gangster with the hottest stolen goods.
There was always a role for that person in the earliest drafts of the script, and it used to be this older Gypsy guy I knew who lives in the town. But the film kept evolving. At some point during the shooting of the short, one of our cars had been stolen, so we went to get it back. Essentially what they do down there, in that Romani community, is they steal your car and then rent it back to you. It's not a real theft. It's more like a kidnapping. We went down there to get the car back. I'd seen this world, and I was like, "OK. This place is unbelievable, I need to see if I can get in here." I spent a lot of time with the kids playing soccer, getting in that community, and that's where I met Pio. It turned out that his brothers had been the ones who'd stolen our car.

It was like I had this shadow. I'd be walking around, this kid with a leather jacket and a cigarette constantly following me. One day—I'll confess, over a cigarette and a beer—we started talking, and he was like, "So, what's the deal with this movie thing, what's going on?" And I was like, "Why don't we make a movie together and see if you like this whole thing."

He hustled his way into a role, didn't he?
He hustled his way into becoming my friend. Four hours with that kid on-set, and he's done. He's like, "OK, I'm out of here," and he just walked away... So we made a short film, and had such a great time working together, I tailored the role in the feature script and added two more scenes because I liked him so much.

Do you want to continue telling stories in a similar cinematic vein, naturalistic and even neo-realist?
Absolutely. Right now I'm writing a feature script for that boy. It's about him, and about trying to make a couple more films in that universe. A lot of the characters we see in Mediterranea will also come back in this story of the boy. Eventually, there are three things I want to explore down there. It was the immigrant community, now it's the Romani community, and then the Mafia is very present down there. That will find its way into the second film, and hopefully become a third film.

Follow Aaron on Twitter.

Mediterranea is now playing at the IFC Center in New York and Sundance Sunset Cinemas in Los Angeles, as well as on VOD.

Photo via Kijiji

A "scandalous" nude painting of former Canadian leader Stephen Harper has resurfaced after a former civil servant listed the item for sale on Kijiji this month.

The painting shows the former leader of the Conservatives casually laying nude on a sofa and surrounded by a crowd of bureaucrats—one of which is offering him what looks like a Tim Hortons beverage. The painting was purchased back in 2012 for $5,000 by Danielle Potvin, a resident of Gatineau, Quebec.

The painting made headlines in 2012, when news of its creation spread like wildfire across the internet, although no one was aware of its whereabouts after its purchase.

Potvin, who has now listed the painting for $8,800 on Kijiji, told the Edmonton Journal that she was worried about repercussions of telling people she owned it while Harper was still prime minister, as she was working in the government at the time.

Although the painting drew some controversy when it was first unveiled, even conjuring up a human rights complaint that was shot down by a judge later that year, Potvin thought the painting was "brilliant."

"I thought, 'My God, this is unbelievable,'" she said. "I thought that the artist was going to be sued by the government or by the prime minister. Then I started reading about it, and it was quite interesting. Not because it's just nude, but there's a story behind it."

The creator of the painting, Margaret Sutherland—who went by the name Emperor Haute Couture when the piece first cropped up online—says that she created the painting as a way to vent about how dissatisfied she was with the Harper government.

"It was a sort of a culmination of some general frustrations of the federal government's policies and what they were telling us," she told the Globe and Mail in 2012.

"Satire is a great way to make valid social comment and have some fun at the same time."

It is unclear if Harper will come out of retirement to comment on the painting.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

I helped conduct the poll that UK tabloid paper The Sun splashed all over its front page on Monday under the inflammatory headline '1 in 5 Brit Muslims' sympathy for jihadis.' I have done work for the market research agency behind the survey, Survation, on and off since March, and when I showed up to the office last week I was presented with a poll that seemed quite different from the usual. On our screen, it was called the 'Muslim Poll.' At first, I thought it looked interesting. After about 20 minutes, I began to feel strange about it.

All of us who worked as Survation's callers on the project were suspicious of the script, and the way the questions were framed, but we had no idea who the client was, or how the information would be used.

The script was reductive and often patronizing. One question asked whether the interviewee thought that: a) British Muslims are not doing enough to integrate into British society, b) British Muslims are doing enough to integrate into British society, or c) it is not important whether British Muslims integrate into British society. A man I spoke to responded to this question with irritation and confusion: "What do you mean? What about when non-Muslims in Britain are hostile toward us? Is there a question about that?"

I became more and more embarrassed about asking these questions. Many people we called refused to take part. But those who did agree to the survey were often very talkative. The poll itself only took a couple of minutes, but more often than not I was on the phone for ten minutes or more. One man kept me on the phone just short of half an hour. For any other poll, we are told to keep the phone calls as short as possible; for this particular poll, we were briefed and told to let the interviewee talk as much as they wanted to—due to it being a sensitive subject. Every single person I spoke to for more than five minutes condemned the terrorist attacks carried out in the name of Islam. Some wanted to do the survey primarily in order to show that—as a Muslim—they were disgusted and appalled by what had happened in Paris. These thoughts and feelings were lost in a small set of multiple-choice questions. The idea that one, badly worded poll can speak for complex and emotional topics such as identity and religion would be funny if it weren't so damaging.

Then there was the specific question about sympathy for fighters in Syria. (Note: there was no mention of the word 'jihadi' in the script at any point.) One question asked which of the statements the interviewee most agreed with: a) I have a lot of sympathy for young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria, b) I have some sympathy for young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria, or c) I have no sympathy for young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria.

The overwhelming majority of those polled responded to this question with answer c), but some did say they had some sympathy (no one I spoke to said that they had a lot of sympathy). The problem with this question is the word 'sympathy.' What does 'sympathy' mean? Does sympathy mean pity? Or does sympathy mean empathy?

In response to growing criticism over their methodology, Survation released a statement on Tuesday explaining that they chose the wording of the survey, not The Sun, but distanced themselves from The Sun's interpretation of the results.

"The wording of the question on "sympathy with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria" was not chosen by The Sun newspaper but was chosen by Survation in order to be completely comparable with previous work we have done, both among Muslims and non-Muslims and therefore enable meaningful and proper comparisons to be drawn.

"However, there is a distinction between the work we do and how clients chose to present this work. Survation do not support or endorse the way in which this poll's findings have been interpreted. Neither the headline nor the body text of articles published were discussed with or approved by Survation prior to publication. For reference, our own coverage and analysis can be found here:

"Furthermore, Survation categorically objects to the use of any of our findings by any group, as has happened elsewhere on social networks, to incite racial or religious tensions."

None of the people I polled who responded to the question with the 'some sympathy' answer supported jihadis. One woman gave me thoughtful, considered answers to every question. She thought that David Cameron would probably be right to bomb Syria, and that Muslims did have a responsibility to condemn terrorist attacks carried out in the name of Islam. But she also had some sympathy with young British Muslims who joined fighters in Syria. "They're brainwashed, I feel sorry for them," she said. And so I ticked the box, "I have some sympathy for young British Muslims who go to join fighters in Syria."

The front page of the Sun yesterday came as a nasty shock to me. Based on their statement, it may well have come as a shock to Survation, too.

Okay, sure, the gamesmanship inside Parliament is awful and cynical. But it's so beautiful! Photo via Flickr user tsaiproject

I'm going to explain to you how the Trudeau government, despite all of its rosy, journalist-loving rhetoric, just repeated the first thing that the Harper government did upon taking power.

So rewind to 2006. the Conservatives were just elected, and the country is simultaneously excited to be rid of the pocket-lining ol' boys club of the Chretien/Martin years, while simultaneously nervous of the new Stephen "Secret Agenda" Harper administration.

Almost immediately, Harper's government bans access to the third-floor hallway outside of the cabinet room.

Your reaction to reading that sentence was likely similar to the reaction of your 2006 self: so what?

The third-floor mezzanine overlooks the foyer, just outside the House of Commons. Generations of Canadian political reporters could expect that every single minister, following their weekly cabinet meeting, would walk out of the cabinet room and into the throng of reporters assembled on the third floor.

Journalists could expect that, because there was no other escape. Unless you rappelled down from the windows like the Pink Panther, you would have to walk through the journopuddle.

Harper put the kibosh on that. He forbid journalists from ascending the marble stairs up to the third floor.

At the time, conservatives told the media: stop whining.

You're not allowed on the third floor, the new Prime Minister's Office told media, but we'll do availabilities in the foyer.

"As long as Canadians can hear from their government, it shouldn't matter what floor they hear it from," Harper's communications director, Sandra Buckler, told media.

But quickly, those availabilities in the foyer dried up. Then ministers became scarcer and scarcer. Suddenly, interviews with the prime minister stopped. Press conferences became rare. MPs and officials were suddenly unavailable an awful lot.

Ten years on, the Harper communications shop was run like a two-bit student union with a power-mad public relations undergrad at the helm.

Jump back to reality: Trudeau's government is pulling the same shtick.

At first, they wholesale replicated Harper's policy: no reporters on the third floor. Then, after a number of us complained to the powers that be, they relaxed: reporters would be notified in advance of cabinet meetings, and they would be allowed onto the third floor to scrum ministers. Some, however, would descend to the foyer and speak to reporters there, instead.

Everybody was happy!

But last week, the PMO tried to push us down to the foyer. All of our ministers will come talk to you! They told us. We love the media! They told us.

'Twas not to be. Fully a third of the cabinet were no-shows. That includes Bill Morneau, the finance minister, who ducked reporters the week it was revealed that the government would be running a much bigger deficit than expected.

Back to the old ways.

This week, the entire Press Gallery mounted the steps and set up a microphone on the third floor. We cordoned-off a little area for the minister to speak. It was to be as civilized an affair as politics ever gets in Ottawa.

But minister after minister, the new breed of politicians who are supposedly charged with carrying the flag of this decentralized and media-friendly government, told us: "I'll take questions downstairs!"

Many of us pointed out that there were no reporters downstairs and that they wouldn't be able to answer any questions. But they kept walking.

And so, a standoff began.

The Liberals have pulled out a handful of excuses, saying it's a logistical thing. Or a safety thing. Obviously, the Trudeau government has treated the media better than the dying days of the last regime. That doesn't mean we should roll over and thank them every time screw us over.

But ultimately, it's a control thing. The Liberals, just like the Conservatives, want to control who speaks to the media, when, and where.

One Trudeau communications staffer said simply: "No scrums on the third floor."

Kory Teneycke, your ghost lives on.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Michael Nadli was convicted of spousal abuse, served just eight days of his 45-day sentence, and was re-elected in the Northwest Territories' recent election. Photo via Facebook/Michael Nadli

It was a night of upheaval in Canada's great white north as voters across the Northwest Territories rejected the status quo by turfing an unprecedented number of incumbents in the 2015 territorial election.

Pundits who were betting heavily on the reelection of members who had served up to five terms were shocked after the final polls revealed that just seven out of a possible 19 MLAs will be returning to Yellowknife's legislative assembly.

At a time when the territory's economy is struggling and the prohibitively high cost of living is driving residents to move south, the list of casualties included the territory's finance minister, Michael Miltenberger, who had served five consecutive terms as an MLA, as well as its Industry, Tourism, and Investment Minister David Ramsay, who also served as justice minister.

Voters also chose not to reelect the speaker of the house, who was recently outed by a local media outlet for having his government credit card revoked after he racked up thousands of dollars' worth of unauthorized personal expenses.

Also booted out were two Yellowknife MLAs who pushed the boundaries of the Elections Act in an attempt to secure reelection.

But in an election which seemed to ride the crest of Justin Trudeau's wave of change at the federal level, the territory's smallest riding ended up maintaining the status quo by turning a blind eye to the glaring problem of domestic violence in Canada's north. The Deh Cho, a region with a population of about 1,300 people in the southwest of the territory, voted for an incumbent that was in jail for assaulting his wife less than a month before polls opened.

"That's the one that's pissing everyone off," Nancy MacNeil, co-founder and project coordinator of the Northern arts-based sexual health and leadership program FOXY, told VICE. "I wish I was shocked but I think that's very representative of the attitude that the Northwest Territories has towards domestic violence and inter-partner violence."

Read more: Inside Canada's Arctic Prison

Michael Nadli was re-elected to his Deh Cho riding after pleading guilty to breaking his wife's arm during a dispute in his hometown of Fort Providence last April. Nadli ended up being sentenced to 45 days on October 15 and was subsequently suspended from the legislative assembly. He should have been ineligible to run in the election, but he only ended up serving eight days of his sentence after he requested an early release.

"For corrections to let him go like that, that's just wrong," Alisa Praamsma, executive director of the Native Women's Association of the NWT, said. She pointed out that the NWT currently has rates of domestic violence in that are nine times higher than the rest of Canada.

"How on earth with that kind of charge can somebody run? What message does that send to victims of violence?"

Nadli did not respond to requests for comment.

When asked why Nadli was released early, Sue Glowach, senior communications advisor for the department of justice, said she was prohibited from speaking to specific cases for individuals.

However, she explained that under the NWT's corrections service regulations a person is eligible for a temporary absence/early release program after serving 1/6 of their sentence.

"Through the program the sentence doesn't end. Instead it is served in the community instead of a facility," she wrote in an email to VICE, adding that there are always conditions attached to early releases.

This was the second time Nadli was convicted of domestic abuse having been sentenced to six months probation for assaulting his wife in 2004, seven years before he first took office. While Deh Cho's 60 percent turnout was higher than the 44 percent average for the territory, and the race was tight—Nadli won by just 18 votes in a field of four candidates—MacNeil still said the fact he won sends a disparaging message to the territory.

"There's a hell of a lot talk about how we need to support victims of violence or people who are in violent relationships and want to change but when it comes right down to it, we don't seem to be willing to do anything to actually enforce that change," she told VICE.

"It's embarrassing but it's not only embarrassing, it's reinforcing."

An ice highway in NWT. Photo via Flickr user Ian Mackenzie

The fact that Nadli was re-elected points not just to the territory's complacency toward domestic violence, but also to the strange ways in which consensus government works, especially in a territory that only has a population of just over 40,000 people.

Unlike elected members of Canada's ten provincial governments and the Yukon, MLAs in the NWT and Nunavut and are voted in as independent candidates with no affiliation to a political party. As the federal election showed, parties were dropping candidates for anything from making prank calls to peeing in a cup.

If he had to plead his case with party apparatchiks, Nadli would have almost certainly been given his marching orders before he was able to submit his papers. Without that filter and with ridings having as few as 777 registered voters and no more than 2,492, candidates are often voted in on the basis of name recognition and family ties as much as their platforms.

"A lot of it has to do with families and traditional historical supporters," explained former premier Joe Handley during a CBC panel. "In Fort Providence a lot of people know Michael Nadli and they say let's give him another chance."

Trying to decipher the new government's stance on family violence could take a while. One of the more bizarre features of consensus government in the NWT is the fact that even though the last ballot has been counted, it will still be a few more weeks until a premier is chosen. That is because instead of being elected by the people, the premier is chosen in a unique process in which MLAs who are interested in the job put their name forward. Members then discuss the merits of each candidate before agreeing on a premier, who then chooses a cabinet of six ministers.

A waterfall near Fort Simpson, NWT. Photo via Flickr user Fort Simpson Chamber of Commerce

Dismay over the fact that the public has no say in who gets to be premier generated a lot of discussion in the lead up to the election with some people floating the idea that the position should be voted on independently by the public. While he admits the system isn't perfect, Handley said the government should focus on cost of living and the lagging economy.

"Really what we're doing is talking about moving deck chairs around while the ship is sinking," said Handley.

With so many fresh faces in the assembly and lots of experience out the door it will be curious to see who will take the lead in tackling the government's struggling economy. Even more intriguing will be who gets appointed to be the Status of Women Minister.

The last legislative assembly didn't have a single female member of cabinet, despite two female MLAs being elected. This time around there are two new women in office – Julie Green, who is a prominent LGBTQ activist and Caroline Cochrane-Johnson, who formerly served as the chief executive for the Centre for Northern Families. Without a premier having been selected, either Green or Cochrane-Johnson could send a message to the old boy's club by putting their names forward to run the government. Barring that, Praamsma suggested the next premier would be wise to choose either candidate as the Status of Women Minister.

"That would be a very good thing for women, victims of crime and native women in particular," said Praamsma.

Meanwhile, all eyes will be on Nadli, waiting to see if he tries to sweep his past under the rug or uses it to being a much needed process of healing for himself and the territory.

"People clearly believe him and we have to trust that there is a reason for that," MacNeil said. "He has a huge opportunity to become a leader and to become a role model and if he chooses to do so it will be a really impressive statement on a political level, on a personal level, and a human level."

Follow Cody Punter on Twitter.

For anyone who knows conflict photographer André Liohn, he's among the first people that comes to mind when asked the question, "Who would you want on your side in a bar fight?" Liohn is not tall, but it's clear upon meeting him that he possesses a strength, physically and otherwise, that only comes with living through true hardship. He also exclusively wears black, rides a Harley, and has a tattoo on his right forearm that reads "REFUGEE" in block letters.

Liohn, 41, has spent the majority of the last decade photographing in war zones in Somalia, Syria, and Libya, where his coverage of the Libyan Civil War earned him the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 2011. But his new exhibition, Revogo at Caixa Cultural in São Paulo marks a pivotal point in his career. Last year, Liohn returned home and decided to turn the camera on his native Brazil for the first time in his career, haunted by the similarities his homeland bore to the war zones from which he'd come. Revogo is his first solo exhibition, and also his first show of non-conflict photography. But if you didn't know any better, looking at the photographs you'd think Brazil was on the brink of an uprising. Each photograph is loaded with the kind of tension that puts you on high alert—sparks fly from the barrel of a handgun in the hands of a young boy, police lurk ominously outside a bombed-out bus, a woman begins to remove her jeans on an empty street, a motorcycle helmet lies empty in the street next to a pool of blood. Most pictures have a reddish hue to them, as if lit by a stoplight.

Last month, I spent a week with Liohn in Brazil and I was struck by his intensity and his sensitivity. During the workshop he taught the week following his opening, he kicked a man out of the class for photographing two people having sex, yelling at him until he was out the door. But if you watched Liohn closely in social settings, you would often find him writing notes in a small black notebook with the penmanship of a calligrapher. He was also, for the entirety of my time with him, deeply distraught over his recently dissolved relationship.

Sometimes, Liohn just seemed mythological. One day, while chatting at a friend's apartment, I asked him about a military helmet he'd suddenly taken out of his bag. At first, he said he'd forgotten where he'd gotten it. But after I pressed him, genuinely curious, he remembered: "Oh, this was Gaddafi's," he explained dispassionately. "I was the first journalist in his house and it was just sitting on a table. So I took it." He now uses it whenever he's in a war zone.

VICE: Why did you start photographing?
André Liohn :When I was six years old, my parents were getting married at the church. I remember that I wanted to go around the church but no one would allow me, so they gave me a small camera and they said, "OK cool, stay quiet," but then with the camera I understood I could go anywhere in the church and people would accept me. Without the camera, they wouldn't accept me running around. But with the camera I could. But from that day, until I was 31, I never touched a camera again, basically. But the idea of photography was always in my mind from that day—this idea that I could photograph.

How did you come to leave Brazil?
I left Brazil when I was 19 to work in Norway. I was on drugs, doing a lot of shit in Brazil, and everything that I tried to do went wrong. Nothing of what I tried to do actually went well, because of my economic conditions, my intellectual conditions, my emotional conditions, the society, everything around me. Nothing was made to help me get out of the troubles I was in. Nothing.

So you felt like you needed to leave the country in order to do that?
First I left my city where I come from for São Paolo. In the beginning I was living with friends, and then I was living in the square here, Plaça de República, for a little bit.

Like outside?
Yeah. I was sleeping outside for a few months. And I said, "I have to do something." So I met this Swiss guy and we became friends and started exchanging emails. I told him if I stayed in Brazil everything was going to go wrong for me. So he said, "OK, come to Switzerland and stay with me." So I went, and through one of his friends, I got a job working illegally as a lumberjack, cutting timber.

So how did you come to pick up a camera again?
I was walking by a shop and I thought, I want to buy this camera, because I was traveling a lot and I didn't have pictures of the places I was traveling to. I thought I could at least photograph while I was traveling. But then the idea of using drugs stayed in my mind, preventing me. I got very depressed, left my work, and went to a place where I could buy heroin. After debating whether I actually should, I finally decided against it. I remember I kept going back there, and one day I had the camera with me, so I started photographing. Eventually, I had a lot of pictures. The health workers who take care of these people asked me what I was doing and I said, "Photographing," and they said, "Photographing for what?"

And why were you taking pictures of them?
For myself. I told them, "I'm here with them, I'm friends with them." And they asked if they could see the pictures. I said no, because at the time I wasn't thinking of becoming a photographer. I was just trying to be with them. I didn't think that I was making "photography." But then the guys who used drugs said to show them the pictures because they need to know how they actually live. So I showed them the pictures and they loved them and they said we've never seen something like that before here in Norway.

And you had no training at all?
No, no.

So how did you go from that to war photography?
I had a friend in Norway who was from Somalia and we met when I arrived in Trondheim. He was a refugee from Somalia, my age. The experience that he had as a child was very similar to my experience as a child in Brazil—the violence. He didn't have the drug part, but came from a very damaging society. So I started asking myself, why is he a refugee and I am a migrant? What is the difference between him being a refugee and me being a migrant if we have basically the same background? In 2006, he said, "I'm going back to Somalia," because he was invited to become the director of a radio program. He had studied journalism in Norway and I said, "Wow, fuck, I'm coming with you." He told me it wasn't going to happen because Somalia is incredibly dangerous but I told him I could handle it being from Brazil. I was pretty ignorant.

Was it worse?
It was far worse. When we arrived in Mogadishu, I was very, very, very scared. I wasn't prepared for that, because it was war. Proper war, you know? I was basically one of the first white people that came to Mogadishu since 1995. And it was amazing, man. So I stayed only a few days, as it started getting really dangerous with kidnappings starting to happen. There was a Swedish cameraman that had been shot in the neck. It was a civil war. Do you know Black Hawk Down? That happened in Mogadishu. I told myself I had to leave, so I left. My friend, his name is Abdi, was Abdi. He stayed there and a few years later he was shot down and killed.

Why was he killed?
Because he was a journalist working for the radio and they were killing every journalist. I mean, all of the people, basically, that I met at the time at this radio, they are dead today. All of them.

I think most people would think you were crazy for going into these war zones. You understand why people fight civil wars, they are being oppressed; you understand why a refugee flees a country—but you have no stake in the conflict, you're not from there. Why do you do it?
In the beginning it was my own troubles from childhood. I wanted to know why Abdi was a refugee and I was a migrant if we had the same background. That was the curiosity that that motivated me wanting to go and see Somalia.

So you new show, you titled it Revogo. What does that mean?
It means "revoke." I wanted to revoke the certainty that we have in ourselves and the only certainty that I had in myself, that I revoked, was my own. I came out completely unsure about everything.

In the photographs, there are kids with guns, bodies being loaded into a truck, and prostitutes. What's the commonality in the photographs, besides them being in Brazil?
That's the feeling we have in Brazil, of chronic delinquency. And chronic delinquency and war have a few similarities. The most important similarity is that you have the possibility to die at any moment, anywhere, in a violent, vulgar way. Wars are like that, and Brazil is like that. The possibility you have of dying makes you adapt, it creates a behavior that will ensure that if someone here has to die because of violence, it won't be me, it will be you, because I don't know you. War as it was before was saying, "I would die for that." But now it's, "I would kill for that." So people start looking for things that they can kill for, and not die for anything. And then at some point they'll find it, and they'll start killing. One thing people are sick of in Brazil is how excluded they are from the system, and then today, they can kill to get included in the system.

Why did you come back to Brazil in the first place?
In January 2014, I came to Brazil thinking I was going to do something about the local violence. My idea was to use the method of war photography on the atrocities here. There was a hidden war going on that I wanted to unveil.

When you say "method of war photography," what do you mean by that?
From my perspective, the method of war photography is physical, emotional, and political proximity. It's when you have a very close physical proximity, a high emotional proximity, and a political opinion about that. So this is what I call war photography. I thought even after coming back after 20 years from living abroad it would be easy for me to communicate with people because it's my home country. I thought I would work for one or two years as I had done in Somalia or Libya and then be finished. I was completely wrong man, completely wrong.

And why was that?
I started feeling very different. I felt, Wow, I found my place. Because now I'm doing the work I can really jump into. And I dropped all my defense mechanisms here in Brazil. Because when you go to Somalia, it is easy for you to build a defensive shell around you. Once I got home, I was able to at least try to become André again. I never fell in love so much with a person as I fell in love here in Brazil.

So where do you go from here?
Man, I have no idea what to do. I've showed enough violence. I need new kinds of human challenges. I don't know what that challenge is,but I need to meet a new kind of challenge in humanity that is meaningful to me. That we can overcome violence is a very important challenge of all of humanity, but I have done my share of that work. I have absolutely no more energy to see violence, to deal with violence. I just have to learn how to trust people in a new way.

Revogo will be on display till December 6 at Caixa Cultural Sao Paulo. See more images from the show below:

Sheldon Silver (right) in 2011. Photo via Flickr user Zack Seward

If you live in New York right now, you have a dubious honor citizens of no other state can share: You can sit in on corruption trials of the top two men in the legislature.

Earlier this year, two of Albany's biggest players—Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (a Democrat), and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (a Republican)—were booked on federal charges of abusing their power, a sad situation that might lead one to conclude that New York is the most corrupt state in the nation. For the last few weeks, the state capital's dirty laundry has been airing out in the Southern District federal court in Downtown Manhattan, a rare political moment that you kind of have to see to truly believe.

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On Monday, I went to the courthouse to catch the prosecution's closing statement against Silver. The longtime Assembly Speaker from Manhattan's Lower East Side had been the first target of US Attorney Preet Bharara's double-edged sting, and so he started his trial earlier than Skelos, in October. Today would be a sort of primer on everything that had come before, and given the complexity of the charges, there's a lot of shit to sift through. So some context is needed:

A few years ago, Governor Andrew Cuomo swore to clean up a state legislature that had become synonymous with kickbacks and established the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption in 2013. With subpoena power in hand, the team of prosecutors sought to put a magnifying glass on outside income of legislators and the "quid pro quo" culture of politicians trading money for favors that persists in Albany.

As has been reported, the Commission began to hone in on what Bharara has derided as "the three men in the room" nature of state government, in which Cuomo, Silver, and Skelos would hammer out back-room deals in an effort to pass budgets on time. Before long, this resulted in a conflict: The governor's office, the New York Times would later write, "deeply compromised the panel's work, objecting whenever the commission focused on groups with ties to Mr. Cuomo or on issues that might reflect poorly on him." In March, the governor shut down the investigation he himself had launched, and that was the end of that. Until the US Attorney's Office stepped in.

Bharara picked up where Moreland left off, and ended up with the indictments of Silver and Skelos in the months after. "Stay tuned," he famously said after announcing Silver's charges, as if forewarning New Yorkers that their elected leaders were no longer immune to prosecution.

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Silver's case is primarily focused on referral fees Silver received as a private lawyer from clients who were directly connected to his legislative business. These clients include a Columbia University doctor named Robert Taub, and a huge Manhattan real estate developer called Glenwood Management. Silver is now on trial for seven charges ranging from extortion to dishonesty, all of which were excruciatingly explained for three hours straight in a packed courtroom on Monday morning.

The prosecution is basically arguing that Silver received millions in exchange for legislative goodies. In Taub's case, the doctor allegedly referred medical malpractice clients to Silver's firm, Weitz & Luxenberg, then received Silver-directed state grants for the doctor's mesothelioma research. For Glenwood, that meant a retainer Silver allegedly secretly held in exchange for his help in securing huge tax breaks and ensuring that developer-friendly policies would continue in Albany.

According to federal prosecutor Andrew Goldstein, the Speaker did it all through straight-up fabrication. "He lied repeatedly, and he lied to everyone," Goldstein said sternly to the jury, showing off an interview in which Silver tells a reporter that his outside income came from helping out the common man with injury lawsuits. "And why do people lie? Because usually, they have something to hide."

The prosecution threw up an onslaught of listicles to get its point across, with some as surreally named as "Nine Reasons Why You Know Silver is Guilty of the Asbestos Scheme" (one of the reasons: "common sense"). One chart even clearly listed "The Quid" and "The Quo," for the more Latin-weary jurors. Mixing BuzzFeed-speak with articles, testimony transcripts, and emails—one of which showed Taub writing " is the most powerful man in New York State"—the lawyer did an great job of breaking down the charges against Silver to jurors who may have had trouble following the complicated case.

As Silver sat stoically throughout, staring at Goldstein while he delivered his remarks, the prosecutor ended his speech by shooting for simplicity. "This, ladies and gentlemen, is bribery. This was extortion," he said. "This was corruption, the real deal. Do not let it stand." One jury nodded her head as if in agreement.

(Later, just a couple hours into deliberation, one juror would ask to be excused because she was "stressed out." The judge refused that request.)

While the court broke for lunch, I walked around the corner to the federal courthouse at 500 Pearl Street, where the second Albany trial was taking place. On the 18th floor, in a much smaller and less crowded courtroom, the participants and observers sat down for the afternoon processions in Dean Skelos's trial.

The court had just resumed Rent Stabilization Association President Joe Strasburg's testimony when I got there. The prosecutors asked Strasburg to detail the budget proceedings, where legislators wheel, deal, and threaten their way to an agreement that no one is happy with.

(At one point, in what was perhaps the most New York thing to ever happen, Strasburg explained what it was like working with Governor Cuomo. "I've worked for a Sicilian, and I know they're fine... until they get threatened," he told the court, to laughs.)

While Silver was barraged with charges related to his legal work, the (former) Senate Majority Leader is dealing with the fallout from his alleged nepotistic treatment of his son, Adam Skelos. The duo, who were both seated in between lawyers on Monday, had both been arrested on conspiracy, bribery, and extortion charges stemming from alleged deals made by Papa Skelos to get his son high-positioned jobs in firms that could benefit from some government intervention.

One of those jobs included a consulting position at an environmental company called AbTech Industries; on Monday, its CEO, Glenn Rink, took the stand. Rink's company is known for its Smart Sponge technology, which essentially absorbs oil out of water. This meant that of course Rink had to demonstrate the method with a sponge, a vial of motor oil, and some tap water.

Once the demonstration ended, Rink went on to explain how one of the top dogs at Glenwood Management (remember them?) contacted him about hiring someone they thought would be perfect for the consulting job: Adam Skelos. In an email to Rink, the developer bigwig literally wrote, "There is great potential for him to exploit his father's contacts statewide." In the hopes of securing a lucrative contract in Nassau County, where the Skelos family is from, Adam was hired soon after.

In between testimonies, the prosecution played cellphone audio of a call made between Skelos and one of his customers, a Greek guy named Dmitri. We're given little context, but it's safe to say the two had some history. Almost immediately, Skelos begins gloating about the "fucking reach and business opportunity" he has as the then-Senate Majority Leader's son. He continuously berates the guy for not seeming to care as much as he does. "Who gives a shit about this?" he asks himself, before ending the call.

In the press, Skelos the Younger is often characterized as the rich politician's son, a ne'er-do-well whose father gave him leg up after leg up. Evidence like that phone call does him no favors.

Being inside courtrooms of high-profile cases like these is strange. There's a sense that news happens inside these spaces, an almost ritualized unfolding of events and disclosing of information: arrest, indictment, press conference, trial, conviction (or not). Outside the court, the politicians return to being flesh-and-blood humans—Silver held the door for me as we left the court; later, I stood at the urinal with Skelos.

Eventually, this sense of unreality will collapse—the jury is deliberating Silver's fate now, and Skelos's trial should be over by Christmas. When everything settles, both those men's lives could be very different, and Bharara could wind up nailing a couple of prize political skins on his trophy wall. After that? As Bharara said, "Stay tuned."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Maison Sere (top) celebrating his win at the Mr. Ugly competition. Photo via AP

Last Friday, 200 spectators gathered in Harare, Zimbabwe to crown the winner of the nation's fourth annual-ish Mr. Ugly pageant. The victor, Maison Sere, an unemployed 42-year-old sporting a handful of crooked teeth and torn overalls, beat out 36 competitors over two rounds of competition, walking away from the nightclub where the finals were held with a $500 cash prize. But unlike in previous years where everyone had fun, the media scratched its head over potential exploitation issues, and then everyone went on their merry ways, when Sere was crowned this year the audience erupted into shoving and heckling. The rabble-rousers were supporters of the pageant's runner-up, vegetable porter William Masvinu, who claimed that Sere was too handsome for the title. By the start of this week, Masvinu, who has won the competition twice before, had publicly demanded a do-over, claiming that Sere's ugliness was due to his teeth and the grotesque faces he pulled—not true, inherent repugnance.

Zimbabwe's Mr. Ugly competition began in 2011 as a pet project of David "Apama" Machowa, a local comedic dancer and entrepreneur. At first the contest only attracted a handful of entrants, and could only give out a first prize of $50—that year to one Brian Mateyazondo. But within a year, the competition had grown large enough, with official sanction from the government and the support of local bars and entertainers, that the prize money doubled—Masvinu walked away with $100 and a hotel voucher in his first win. The competition lapsed in 2014, but its absence inspired a resurgence of support that made the 2015 pageant the largest and best funded yet.

The pageant's popularity may seem offensive at first blush, given how blatantly it seems to use the physical difference of a few for the amusement of the many. But according to Apama, the pageant was created not to mock, but to celebrate perceived ugliness, giving people typically rejected in society a venue to be appreciated and cheered for who they are for a night instead.

"Looks are God given," the AP recently quoted Apama as saying. "We should all be proud of who we are."

According to Tamsen de Beer, a South African writer who penned the book on regional pageants in 2009 ( Miss Beautiful: South Africa in Pageants), this kind of issue-based or theoretically personally-empowering contest is fairly common in (at least) southern Africa. She mentions a competition called Mr. Dare, in which a local community elevated the social status of anyone willing to do something outrageous onstage—and wound up lionizing a very ugly man who'd usually be low in the social pecking order because he was willing to streak while making weird faces. Then there's Miss Gay South Africa International, which de Beer sees as an avenue for a group facing rampant discrimination to be appreciated for who they are and get a rare public platform to promote issues unique to their lives. And that's only the tip of the iceberg—the region has pageants for everything from Miss Gay Disco Queen to Little Miss Squatter Camp.

"In Angola, there was even a Miss Landmine," says de Beer. "Something that could be otherwise perceived as grotesque, the content of looking at that is around the benefit of the issue that's raised. That's a compelling reason for pageants to gain any kind of local traction."

De Beer likens this particular pageant to Victorian-era freak shows and would probably agree with the theory argued by Robert Bogdan in his book Freak Show, that while someone was definitely making money off of the differences of people with radically unique bodies in these venues, they actually seem to be places where more often than not "freaks" were able to reclaim their dignity and elevate themselves higher than they could offstage.

"Look at how happy they look," says de Beer. "There's no shame. It's more about: Look at me, my confidence. I'm fantastic. I can go anywhere ... There's something about inverting a norm that makes this kind of thing compelling for participants as well as for audience members."

Related: Watch VICE's film about 'The Miss Africa Greece Beauty Pageant'

But according to Masvinu, this embrace of "ugliness" ought to (and was intended to) address core looks. Sere competed against him in 2013 and came in fourth, he argues. So if the competition is really about inherent, inborn ugliness there's no way that Sere should have won this year. Masvinu is especially offended that the judges said that Sere's teeth and faces were a key factor in their decision, as he does not consider this true ugliness—just a performance.

"I am naturally ugly," the AP quoted Masvinu as saying. "He is not. He is ugly only when he opens his mouth."

On the surface, Masvinu seems to have a point. De Beer admits that many pageants she's observed usually do have some shady machinations going on, in which judgments are more about local social concerns and popularity than the actual criteria of the event. (And in Masvinu's case, Apama and company could be tired of Masvinu's public whining about how his titles have failed to deliver him the sort of fame and fortune he'd assumed they'd bring.)

But if you poke his argument with a stick, it doesn't hold up. For one thing, Masvinu is arguably not that ugly himself. For another, he knew that aside from physical modeling, the event would feature a question and answer segment, meaning that persona and performance play a role. And in the past Masvinu (who works with a manager) has admitted to trying to find the right clothes and develop the right modeling choreography to maximize his own ugliness.

It makes sense that the competition would be as much about personality and performance as raw physical ugliness, according to de Beer, because that's how all competitions do it. In part that's because beauty and ugliness are subjective—it's hard to definitively score based on them alone. In part it also probably reflects a reticence to let Masvinu monopolize the title and the prize money to keep the competition interesting and give others a chance to rise to prominence. But mostly it's because pageants are really attempts to find a spokesperson for a cause, idea, or concept, rather than just meat markets selecting a prime cut (or here the foulest offal). There's an assumption, de Beer argues, that everyone who enters the pageant is probably ugly. (And there's an acknowledgement that the true ugliest people are probably too marginalized and scared to take part in a competition like this.) So the real purpose of Mr. Ugly isn't to find the sickest mug around. It's to find someone ugly yet charismatic who people can rally behind and who can go on to advance the stated goal of challenging perceptions of beauty while elevating himself via a platform his personality and persona deserve but to which he never had access.

By that logic, if Masvinu has a two-year monopoly and the judges thought he was coasting on his laurels, then the charismatic Sere deserved his win. He may not be objectively the ugliest man around, but it's really impossible to judge that definitively. Instead, he's a seemingly charming ugly man who might be able to turn a few heads (in a good way) and grow the popularity of the event. His selection makes it more likely that the next contest, to be hosted in Zimbabwe in 2017, will be an interesting, well-attended, and productive pageant. So in this bizarre, ugly squabble, this reporter backs Sere as the ugliest man in Zimbabwe and hopes that his tenure of spokesman of the aesthetically challenged in the nation is fruitful.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Still via "Inside the Hungry World of Feeder Fetishes" on MUNCHIES

When I met Steve (not his real name, for reasons that will become obvious), I thought he was cute. He also looked kind of like a guy I had a crush on at the time, but who wasn't interested in me. Unlike that guy, though, Steve was interested, and we started hooking up because my mother taught me to always accept free things.

The first few times Steve and I got together, the sex was pretty vanilla: a tickle here, some fingers there, an unfortunate case of "what's that smell?" It wasn't bad, exactly, but it veered toward boring. Then one day, Steve told me he had a "kink."

"It's more of a fetish," he said, before covering his face with his hands. "I'm so embarrassed."

"It's OK, you can tell me," I told him. I really hoped it wasn't whips and chains, as I was broke and wasn't sure I could afford leather.

"I like food," he said. "Like, in bed. I like feeding someone while they're fucking me."

I wasn't exactly relieved, but in a way I could relate, because I used to be fat. I don't mean that in the way people say, "Oh, I used to be fat" and then show you a couple of pre-puberty chubby kid photos. That's not being fat; that's having a plump adolescence. I'm talking about being fat and staying fat: I was born at ten pounds, weighed 230 pounds at age 14, and then peaked at 275 pounds at 24.

I lost 100 pounds in my mid-20s and I've kept it off, more or less, since then. But as anyone who grew up fat can tell you, once a fatty, always a fatty. The fat may come and go, but it always stays with you in your mind. I don't obsess over my weight as much as I used to—I'll eat a goddamn cupcake these days—but the PTSD from being bullied as a 200-plus-pound kid still lingers.

I wondered if using food during sex would bring out my weight-shame, or if I had found my soulmate—someone who could pacify my anxieties about gaining weight. I asked Steve what kinds of foods he liked in bed.

"Donut holes, cakes, cold cuts," he listed. As a vegetarian, I could see that this was not going well.

Still, I'll try anything once—so I leaned in and said yes.

Did you know that Munchies has an entire series devoted to Sex + Food?

The first food we brought into bed was a sheet cake, a grocery-store birthday cake with piped icing so sweet I could feel it rotting my teeth. The sex started normally enough: We made out and enjoyed some foreplay, while the cake waited on the nightstand, as if silently asking us, Are you ready for me yet? Is it my turn?

Then Steve took the cake and placed it on my bare chest. As he centered it, he began to get into his groove, grinding on me as he fed me handfuls of the cake, until I came.

Afterward, I had a headache from the sugar rush, but also more energy for more sex.

Watch: Inside the Hungry World of Feeder Fetishes

Over the course of a few weeks we incorporated all kinds of different foods into sex. One time he ate a sandwich while I fucked him. Another time, he fed me Dunkin Donuts Munchkins, which left a powdery residue on the sheets.

By then, I noticed a pattern forming: There were crumbs all over the bed, and Steve insisted on crumbly food, like cake and donut holes, that left a huge mess behind. I was enjoying being fed, but I like being clean, and rolling around in crumbs was not my idea of a good time. But relationships are about compromises, and I've done worse for a good lay, so I carried on.

Read: The Women Who Get Off by Watching Men Gain Weight

On our last night together, Steve suggested he drip honey over my body. The very thought made me uncomfortable—honey is sticky—but I reminded myself of the principle of compromise and agreed.

"This is going to be hot," he said, as the honey oozed over my body. Steve began licking the sticky trail on my body. Then he lifted my legs into the air and poured honey directly into my asshole.

The next morning, while Steve was still asleep in my bed, I tried to clean up the mess, looking around for rogue drops of honey that may have pooled on my hardwood floors. It looked like the coast was clear—until I saw an ant crawling on my foot.

I leaned over and cautiously examined the insect. Then I moved closer to my side of the bed, where I'd plugged in my phone. As I picked it up, I saw hundreds of ants crawling up my bed, over my phone, and covering parts of my nightstand, including my copy of Suze Orman's Young, Fabulous, & Broke, which was now spotted in moving black dots. Panicking, I woke Steve up.

"Aaaaants!" I yelled, as he jumped up.

"What? Where? Oh, that's nothing," Steve said, dismissing the obvious trail of ants overtaking my bedroom. "Ants won't harm you."

"They're here because of the honey, you idiot," I yelled. "They're everywhere! We were sleeping, and they were crawling over everything next to us."

Then a thought hit me and I froze. My asshole. He'd put honey in my asshole. What if a colony of ants was taking up residence in my asshole?

I ran to the bathroom and tried to inspect it. It didn't look like there were any ants, but ants are small and can get into tiny places. What if my anal cavity was covered with ants? Do you go to the emergency room with this kind of problem? Excuse me, my boyfriend put honey in my asshole, and now I'm afraid ants are eating me from the inside out, can you help? Also what's the co-pay for that sort of thing?

Read on Munchies: I Accidentally Fell Into the Feeder Fetish Community

After that, I knew I had to end things.

"Listen, you're a great guy, but I don't think this is for me," I told Steve.

"It's not for everyone," he said.

At the time I accepted this, because I wanted Steve out of my apartment so that I could begin furiously cleaning my apartment. But by the time I'd exterminated the ant colony, I realized it wasn't the food fetish that turned me off—it was the mess. I like things clean, and upon further research, it's clear that other people with a food fetish feel the same way.

Sure, I gained some weight during our relationship, but I was surprisingly OK with that. In fact, the best thing to come from all this—despite the personal anguish and paranoia that came with the messiness—was realizing, maybe for the first time, that I like my body. It's pretty fucking great, curves and all. I just don't need a cake on my chest or honey in my asshole to prove it.

Follow H. Alan Scott on Twitter.

Watch: The Islamic State

Everybody is talking about how Giovanni Gambino—son of noted mobster Francesco Gambino—declared that the Sicilian mafia is ready to go to war with the Islamic State.

"Mafia heir warns ISIS to stay away from New York—but slams 'Hollywood gangsters' De Niro and Pacino for failing to 'stand up' to the terrorists" is how the ever-subtle Daily Mail put it. The Russian government–funded outlet RT, in an early version of the story that got more than 56,000 Facebook likes, quoted Gambino at length: "The world is dangerous today, but people living in New York neighborhoods with Sicilian connections should feel safe," he said. "We make sure our friends and families are protected from extremists and terrorists, especially the brutal, psychopathic organization that calls itself the Islamic State."

Strong words. Viral words, even. But where'd they come from? RT cites (but doesn't link to) a Reuters piece that supposedly in turn quotes an NBC News interview. But that Reuters article is actually just a November 19 press release, and the video embedded in it is a 2012 interview Gambino did to promote his book Prince of Omerta. To make matters more muddled, he was actually speaking to the hosts of Good Company, a local Cleveland talk show, and the conversation in the YouTube clip never touches on the Islamic State. (The YouTube clip is apparently mislabeled.) If Gambino appeared on NBC News recently, we couldn't find that video.

So where did those quotes in the press release that spread far and wide come from? To clear things up, VICE called Joseph Savoy, a friend of Gambino's who was listed as the contact on the press release. He wasn't sure how that old 2012 video clip got involved, but confirmed that the quotes "came from Giovanni directly" and "that's how he feels."

Attribution issues aside, Gambino seems to be enjoying the attention. Even if that NBC News interview referenced in the first line of the press release never happened, his quotes were picked up by media outlets all over the world, to the point where he's now being invited to expound upon his views. On Monday, Gambino was a guest on Michael Savage's right-wing radio show, Savage Nation, where he said, "We have to stand up together to fight this monster ," and claimed the Islamic State is scared to take action in the US because "the Sicilians would take action right away."

Gambino also spread a version of the story—suddenly popular again in Republican circles—that American Muslims cheered after 9/11.

"When the Twin Towers went down you had everybody from Bay Ridge in Brooklyn celebrating in the streets," Gambino told Savage. "I live in Bay Ridge, I saw it with my own eyes. The cops were protecting them."

The press release says that Gambino "has fostered relationships with major movie producers, and he is on his way to building a highly respected career in Hollywood."

Screencap via Fox Entertainment

Not long ago, while I was at home alone eating some raw vegetables, I tried to swallow too much broccoli and it got lodged in my throat. I gagged and sputtered for a few minutes, and every time I tried to swallow water, I just sprayed it all over my kitchen. Eventually, I called 9-1-1. A fire truck showed up just in time to find me standing in front of my apartment, leaning on a trash can, and very successfully puking a big green wad into the gutter. After the crew saw me breathing, they immediately left, politely waiting until they got out of earshot before calling me an idiot. Soon after, I decided to get a roommate.

Technically, the flow of air to my lungs wasn't fully blocked, so I probably wasn't choking to begin with. But if that broccoli had gone down my windpipe, instead of just clogging up my esophagus, then I would have had a real crisis on my hands.

It would be easy to be glib and say "just chew your food better you idiot," but choking has toppled down some of the world's mightiest intellects. Christy Brown, the Irish poet immortalized in the filmMy Left Foot, choked to death during dinner; one of the greatest chess masters of all time, Alexander Alekhine, choked to death on some meat while playing chess solo; the great American playwright Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle top.

And according to Jonathan Epstein, a paramedic and senior director of science and content development at the American Red Cross, the menace of choking is something to keep in mind around Thanksgiving. "Anytime there's a lot of food, and a lot of alcohol involved, we see an increase in choking," he told me. "Around holiday dinners, there seems to be an uptick."

In Epstein's experience, the biggest culprit is "solid pieces of meat over anything else." That doesn't necessarily mean vegetarians are safe, though. There's nothing magical about Tofurkey that makes it impossible to choke on—and nothing would delight vegan-hating carnivores more than a vegetarian like me choking on fake turkey during Thanksgiving dinner.

Apart from the meat problem, and the slightly more puzzling choking hazards posed by peanut butter, tip sheets about foods that cause choking contain few surprises. Most of what's on a standard Thanksgiving table is on the list, including vegetables and soft baked goods. But I'm not 90, so I'm not about to puree my dinner or fill up on mashed potatoes.

Did you come here because you're into choking? Our documentary Love Is Pain sounds like it's for you:

Choking kills roughly 2,500 Americans per year. It's number four on the National Safety Council's list of causes for "unintentional injury death." Choking fatalities are rare enough that incidents don't appear to be broken down by demographics, but according to one Australian study, despite frequent, horrible news stories about children choking to death, people aged 55-74 are at the highest risk.

Epstein suggested the trouble for this demographic may not be age or physical weakness, but too much dignity. The scariest category of victim, he said, is "the adult who gets up from the Thanksgiving table, choking"—that is, adults who fear the embarrassment that comes from choking in front of their friends and family, pretend they're just freshening up, and stupidly lock themselves in the bathroom. According to Epstein, this is pretty common.

"In my experience as a paramedic, those are the patients who we actually have to perform CPR on, and often don't survive because they were unresponsive for 10-15 minutes," he told me.

Fortunately, embarrassment isn't one of my many fears. As for someone else who darts away from the table, Epstein advised asking them if they're OK, and wait for a verbal response—not just a head nod. "If they don't answer you, or they grab at their throat, follow them. Investigate," he said. Don't let them politely and quietly die in that locked bathroom.

"Emergency medical services will take anywhere from 5-8 minutes to arrive, depending on where you live," Epstein said. "Brain cells begin to die at 4-6 minutes, and permanent damage sets in at 8-10 minutes. You do the math."

So what should you do when someone starts gagging on their cooked bird this week?

You might think the first course of action should be to grab the choker around the middle, and lift him or her up in the air a la Pierce Brosnan in Mrs. Doubtfire, all the while, hoping to see a piece of food flying through the air. In all likelihood, though, there won't be a satisfying champagne cork effect, and Epstein recommends starting by "delivering five back blows." Per his instructions, I asked a coworker to thump me on the back from 6-10 inches away. It takes a surprisingly hard hit to make someone feel pain in that location, so thump away.

If the thumping doesn't work, that's when things start to get scary. Going through the familiar first aid steps for choking victims seems routine at first, but it quickly devolves into desperation and improvisation as the time runs out.

The next step, Epstein said, is to deliver "upward thrusts into the abdomen five times." He's referring, of course, to "The Procedure Formerly Known as the Heimlich Maneuver," which the Red Cross now refers to as "abdominal thrusts."

Apparently, the Heimlich, once thought to be a revolution in first aid for choking victims, has lost some of its luster in recent years. Heimlich himself—who is still alive—disputes the name change and the new reliance on thumping people in the back, perhaps fearing that it will tarnish his legacy. (It's also worth noting that he invented his maneuver back in 1974 specifically because a few light pats on the back weren't doing the trick.) But the Red Cross stands by their decision, explaining that back blows work not instead of, but in combination with thrusts. Where the name is concerned, Epstein argued that specifying the maneuver as "abdominal thrusts" could help bypass moments of potentially-lethal confusion.

If the thrusts and blows aren't working, and the victim becomes unresponsive, that's when it starts to look less like choking and more like dying. It's time for CPR-style chest compressions—provided you know how to do them without crushing the person's ribcage. A person's windpipe seems to relax slightly after they lose consciousness, giving the obstruction one more chance to pop out. If that still doesn't work, the clock is ticking, and the victim's brain might be starting to die, so this is the point when you can pry open his or her mouth and see if you can find the offending piece of Tofurkey.

From time to time, a quick-thinking good Samaritan trying to get a few minutes on TV news stabs a choking victim in the throat, and inserts a straw or ball-point pen tube. But according to Epstein, "it's something that a paramedic often will never do in their careers," and normal people shouldn't actually try it. "If you don't do it correctly you get blood in the airway, and it causes you more problems," he said.

In short, as unreliable as other humans can often be, they make choking much less scary. But for good measure, I asked Epstein how scared I should be of the choking first aid itself. "The risks are not life threatening, but they can cause bleeding, fractures, or other potential complications," he said. "You're really looking at risk versus benefit."

Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of Choking?

3/5: Sweating it

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

A still from a Chicago police video showing an officer shoot teenager Laquan McDonald 16 times

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

US News

• Chicago Police Release Video of Laquan McDonald Shooting
  Protesters clashed with police on the streets of Chicago after the release of a shocking video showing an officer shooting 16 rounds into teenager Laquan McDonald. Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Jason Van Dyke, charged with first-degree murder, had "violated basic moral standards". —The Washington Post

• Kentucky Restores Felon Voting Rights
  The governor of Kentucky has issued an executive order granting the right to vote to about 140,000 nonviolent felons who have completed their sentences. Civil rights campaigners welcomed the move, which brings Kentucky policy in line with other states. —The New York Times

• Clinton Pledges Not to Say 'Illegal Immigrants'
  The Democratic frontrunner apologized for using the term in the past, saying it was "a poor choice of words". In a Facebook question and answer session, Clinton also condemned the "loose and inflammatory talk" other politicians were using about refugees. —The Guardian

• Three Arrested for Sit-in Shooting
  Minneapolis police have arrested three white males in connection to the shooting at a Black Lives Matter sit-in protest over the death of Jamar Clark. Clark's brother has called for an end to the vigil outside the police precinct over safety concerns. —Minneapolis Star Tribune

International NEWS

• Russian Rescue Marine Killed
  Russia says one pilot was killed and another is missing after their jet was shot down by Turkey. A Russian marine attempting their rescue has also been killed. As Russia suspends military cooperation with Turkey, Putin has described the jet downing as a "stab in the back". —BBC News

• Bus Bombed in Tunis
  The Tunisian capital is under curfew after an explosion hit a bus carrying presidential guards, killing at least 12 people. No group has yet claimed responsibility, but Tunisia has been targeted by the Islamic State before. —Al Jazeera

• Pope Arrives in Africa
  Pope Francis begins his African tour in Kenya today, followed by stops in Uganda and the Central African Republic. His visit marks the Catholic Church's expansion in Africa: the number of people practicing the faith has grown 238 percent since 1980. —CNN

• UN: Japan Should Take More Refugees
  Japan should be doing more to help ease the global refugee crisis, said UN High Commissioner Antonio Guterres, who urged the country to accept Syrians. Japan is a major donor of humanitarian aid but accepts very few refugees each year. —AP
  

Steven Spielberg (Photo via Flickr)

Everything Else

• Obama's Medal List Most Diverse
  Steven Spielberg was among 17 Americans awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Obama. A comparison study shows Obama has recognized many more women and five times as many activists as President George W. Bush. —The Washington Post

• Troll Phucs With the World's Press
  An Australian man made headlines around the world by claiming Facebook demanded he remove his real name, Phuc Dat Bich. Then he admitted it was all a hoax – his real name is Joe Kerr. —The Sydney Morning Herald

• Facebook Discovers State Department Hack
  Iranian hackers allegedly broke into the social media accounts of State Department staffers last month. But neither the victims or the US government knew until they got a Facebook alert. —Motherboard
• Mafia Son Declares War on ISIS
  Giovanni Gambino - son of noted gangster Francesco Gambino - has issued a press release indicating the mob was ready to fight the Islamic State. —VICE

Done with reading today? That's alright—instead, watch our new film, 'The Cost of Dying in Greece'

Screencap vice NBC Chicago

A police officer in Chicago is facing first-degree murder charges in the shooting death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.

A video of the October 20, 2014, confrontation released today shows McDonald being shot 16 times by Officer Jason Van Dyke. Prosecutors said the cop even begun to reload after "clouds of debris" had been blown off of the deceased's body.

McDonald punctured a car's tires with a knife while high on PCP, police said, and the officer claimed he acted out of fear for his life.

Originally, that footage was to be disseminated after the settlement of a $5 million lawsuit brought on by McDonald's family. Then a judge ruled that a shortened version of the video must be released by Wednesday. That video was leaked just before a Tuesday evening press conference.

The autopsy lists gunshot wounds to McDonald's left scalp, neck, left and right chests, left elbow, right upper arm, left forearm, right upper leg, left upper back, left elbow, right upper arm, right arm, right forearm, right hand, right lower back, and right upper leg—basically everywhere.

Although the shooting was particularly brutal, the fact that charges were filed is remarkable—a database made public earlier this month revealed that Windy City cops are rarely held accountable. Between 2001 and 2015, black Chicago residents made 60 percent of complaints against officers and only 3 percent resulted in any sort of disciplinary action.

During the press conference, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said that he knew people would be upset upon viewing the video and would want to protest.

"At the end of the day," he told reporters, "we knew this day was coming."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Artwork from 'Katamari Damacy'

I read the news today and, oh boy, it's pretty bleak out, isn't it? Not that this is especially uncommon, as bad news always travels faster than words on wonderful happenings—but as 2015 comes to a close there's the definite impression that the globe's fizzing on a short fuse. I don't need to go into specifics, as you've all seen the headlines. But sometimes I wonder if it's better to simply look the other way, not watch the TV summaries or read the live feeds on the BBC and Guardian homepages.

That's nonsense, of course—we need to know what is happening around us. All of this matters when you're a citizen of this modern world, enjoying unprecedented connectivity and communication with complete strangers in foreign lands. Ignorance isn't bliss—it's naivety. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't also allow yourself to escape reality for a few hours per week, exploring fantasy dimensions representing safe spaces for role-play, reflection, and, just sometimes, as it turns out, visceral bouts of hyper-violence.

'Rocket League'

See, while video gaming is a maturing medium, today open to tackling themes like terminal illness, depression, suicide, and gender dysphoria, it's also where the participant (that's you) can have a whole ton of fun for just a while, temporarily shutting out any and all chaos consuming the news media. There really is a video game for everyone—anyone claiming that they "don't like video games" simply hasn't been looking—and everyone should have an interactive happy place to call their own, assuming they've access to the essential hardware in the first place. Most people do: that smartphone in your pocket, it's one of the best gaming devices ever created.

I've been thinking about my own video gaming happy places over the past 48 hours or so, the titles I turn to when I just want an hour to myself, to sit and smile at a screen and not worry about the weighty things. I've my share—just regular stuff, pressures and responsibilities that any of us can have, nothing special; but they're there, every single day. And every day I think about disappearing from it all, for a heartbeat in time. Occasionally, I do.

Right now, that usually means Rocket League. It's an online multiplayer arcade sports game where you play soccer-like, most-goals-wins matches inside an enclosed arena, in which the ball is massive and every player is a jet-powered car or truck. I wrote about it at some length in July 2015, but really, that's all you need to know in order to realize it's amazing: rocket cars and (roughly) soccer rules. Matches last five minutes, unless the scores are tied, in which case golden-goal extra time is played. It's fast, completely hilarious and incredibly competitive, and my retinas remain absolutely fixed on the action. I worry a house fire wouldn't snap my attention from the screen. It's one of my very favorite games of 2015, and not because it offers anything radical. It's simply somewhere that, for 20 minutes at a time (unless the one-more-match bug really bites), I can just forget about everything else.

Watch VICE's new film, Life Inside Japan's Aging Biker Gangs

Another 2015 game, Guitar Hero Live, is an effective portal to glee for me, so excellently engineered to engender good times that even numbers by Evanescence and Calvin Harris feel like the most inspirational songs to have flowed through my veins since that all-smiles-everywhere circle pit at The Movielife in 2002. Other shows have happened since, but you get my point: GHL manages to make the ordinary, and even the turgid, into moments. And in doing so categorically shuts away the outside world, constantly streaming new songs to strum along to via its TV service, an endless, all-you-can-eat buffet of escapism. Is there a better feeling than full combo-ing Wolf Alice's "Moaning Lisa Smile"? Obviously. But not at the very second that notification pops up on your screen, there's not.

I've had these happy places ever since I began playing games. I'm sure you have, too. An early one for me was The Secret of Monkey Island, something that I can play today (it's great on iOS, if that version is still available, and we published a love letter to the game, here) and feel that same delight I did when I wasn't yet a teenager. It's perfect, supremely silly, yet taxing enough (not that I don't know all the puzzles inside out) that the player's brain doesn't turn to mulch. Nintendo's Super Mario series—inspired of level design, bold of palette, boisterous of sound, and immediate of control—is a favorite of many, based on the responses I get when asking for other people's go-to games when they need a pick-me-up after a right shitter of a day, or just to slip away from very real horrors for a half-hour. I count Mario Kart 8 as amongst the best remedies for a downer: three laps of Dolphin Shoals and I am brimming with positive vibes, stirred into a hypnotizing swirl by that circuit's phenomenal music.

'Super Mario Galaxy 2' is just one of the most gloriously fun video games you'll ever play

Something that did surprise me, looking at those replies on Twitter and Facebook, was the number of violent games used as a fun-time-forget-about-everything-else comfort blanket slash good-times-rolling step-pepper. One fellow cited Dark Souls, a game so overwhelmingly intimidating that just looking at the box in my cupboard of games (that I'll never finish) makes me nervous. Half-Life 2 doesn't strike me as a happy game, either, but its position as someone's cheery standby makes me realize something that might seem obvious to many, but hasn't been so black and white to me, until now: our video gaming happy places are almost always wrapped in a thick layer of nostalgia. Streets of Rage 2 and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night were wheeled out as responses, both echoes from a gaming era alien to today's CoD T-shirt-wearing teens raised on a steady diet of identikit shooters. It's worth noting that both have excellent modern ports: Streets of Rage 2 on the 3DS is the definitive version IMHO, and Symphony of the Night is up there on PSN for less than a tenner (so get on that).

Beside shout outs for Mario, Zelda games and Keita Takahashi's deliriously singular roll 'em up Katamari series—that's one of my favorite frown-upside-down affairs, too; We Love Katamari will always be stored in the house proper, amongst just a select few PS2 games to have so far avoided the loft—the shootybangs and punchathons felt incongruous, initially. But then it clicked in my head that the last few times I'd fired up the gratuitously violent Grand Theft Auto V on the PS4—not the online game you understand, because balls to that noise—it was to cruise the game's take on LA and the surrounding area, beneath a beautiful California sunset, while listening to "With Every Heartbeat." Hammering north on the highway to Paleto Bay, Robyn on the stereo, and taillights showing the way, no mission in mind: a guaranteed high, however low the previous few hours have left me feeling.

'Hohokum'

The first game that had popped into my head when considering my gaming happy places of right now was Hohokum, perhaps not even a "game" at all by certain standards. You zoom a weird snake thing around a bizarre landscape, interacting with inhabitants and unlocking new passages to environments just as weird as what preceded them. It's half interactive art exhibition, half surreal meditation on gaming's fascination with demanding completion of trivial quests to facilitate progression. It's so far away from something like Dark Souls that an outsider looking into gaming for the first time in 20 years wouldn't think they're bound by a medium, although you might call them comparably obtuse of direction. Anyway, I see now that these happy places exist less on the screen and more in the players themselves, often but not always supported by memories of gaming before adulthood and responsibility, when time was available to properly luxuriate in a new adventure and creep into its every corner.

Streets of Rage 2 is a very violent game, with iron bars routinely smacked into skulls and enemies forever wanting to slice strips of the selected protagonist's lovely face. But it's innocent with its menace; crisp of pixels and uncommonly innovative of music, soaked in that near-neon SEGA brightness that the Mega Drive conveyed so well during the battle for 16bit supremacy. Playing it now makes me happy, just as it ever did. Maybe you get the same feeling from Candy Crush or Command & Conquer or Crash Bandicoot or Clash of Clans, makes no difference: you've got your happy place, and that really is an essential, I think, in order to best balance the stresses of our new everyday against a little light.

If you want to share your own Monkey Islands with us, please do—VICE Gaming is on Twitter, or you can comment below.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Greece

On Saturday, about 1,300 refugees gathered in the town of Idomeni—which lies on the Greek side of the border between Greece and Macedonia—to protest against the decision by Macedonian authorities to turn away those who do not come from war zones such as Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

The protest held strong throughout the weekend and on Monday at least ten Iranian demonstrators called a hunger strike, sewed their lips shut, and sat down in front of lines of Macedonian riot police. At the time of writing, the protest is gaining momentum resulting in a backlog of people stuck at the border.

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