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Spike Lee's ‘Chi-Raq’ Fails to Tell the Real Story Behind Chicago's Gun Violence

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All photos courtesy of Roadside Attractions/Amazon Studios

Early in Spike Lee's latest film, Chi-Raq, the virtuous Ms. Helen (Angela Bassett) reveals to sex-strike leader Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) that she lived in the Cabrini-Green housing projects before the city tore down the neighborhood and she moved to Englewood. Ms. Helen also tells Lysistrata she lost her ten-year-old daughter Pam to senseless gun violence. Growing up in those same housing projects in the 1980s and early 90s, I lost my childhood friend, Dantrell Davis, whom we called "Danny," in a similar way. When he was nine, a stray bullet caught Danny in the head as he held his mother's hand walking to school. The tragic event is one of my earliest memories from childhood.

Danny's death, and the other violence that marked my early childhood, produced in me a kind of survivor's guilt. I have often wondered how my family dealt with the everyday suffering inflicted on us by the police, city public housing policy, and gangs. Over the years people have asked me, "How did you make it out of the projects?" The answer is, I got lucky. Gun violence in Chicago has killed an entire generation of people I knew. This connection was largely why I wanted to see Chi-Raq. The story Spike Lee seeks to tell is one that's deeply personal to me.

Chi-Raq follows a sex strike started by Lysistrata, who faces off against her eponymously named boyfriend Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon) in an effort to curb the violence after Irene's (Jennifer Hudson) young child is killed by a stray bullet. The two-hour film rightly begins by framing the debate around the renaming of the South Side neighborhood of Englewood—and by proximity the entirety of Chicago. The renaming works to achieve a form of visibility for black suffering in the city, detailing the peculiarities of black Chicagoans' lived experience and memorializing the dead. For me, it's a personal link to the my friend Danny's death in 1992 to the killing of my mother's cousin Shawn Knowles in 1993 to the untimely death of Shawn's young brother Maurice Knowles in 2015. The name Chi-Raq represents a longer, more systemic heritage of violence in the city that has long watched black boys, men, and now women and girls killed in segregated black communities. The name Chi-raq is a reminder of that sad reality.

In the film's opening, the words "this is an emergency" flash across the screen in large, bold lettering, followed by statistics comparing the present-day total amount of American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan—6,773—with the 7,356 gun-related deaths that have occurred in Chicago during the same period. The numbers presented are a sobering reminder of the killing of nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee, who was murdered in Englewood last month in gang-related attack, and 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times by Chicago police, a case that is now being reviewed by the Justice Department.

The communal violence in the Windy City has been long described fallaciously as "black-on-black crime," and Lee seeks to connect the epidemic to the national level. At one point, the film's narrator Dolmedes (played gleefully by Samuel L. Jackson) describes Lysistrata by saying, "Baby so fine she made George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson want kiss her." The line is an example of the film's general theme of conflating communal violence in Chicago with police and general racially motivated brutality.

The film makes good use of the disturbing statistics; however, it leaves unexamined the ways that violence has altered the fundamental workings the city itself—how storefront windows have swapped out signs for "no smoking" with ones for "no guns" and how the city has been forced to set up "safe passage" routes so students can simply go to school alive. Instead of zeroing in on the reality of young people disproportionately affected by violence—44 percent of all homicide victims in the city are between the ages of 15 and 24, and over half of the offenders are of similar age—Lee focuses heavily on the adults.

At times the film recalls Lee's early comedic brilliance and ability to deconstruct complicated social issues with films like Do the Right Thing, and She's Gotta Have It. "No peace no pussy," the battle cry of Lysistrata's army of girlfriends, wives, sisters, and mothers, is a perfect example of the film's desire to use satire as a vehicle to explore the complexities of the decades-long communal violence. "Satire uses humor to elevate the issue you're describing," Lee told the Los Angles Times. But against the back drop of ongoing violence in Chicago, the exaggeration, humor, and irony deployed by Lee rings hollow. It doesn't signify a larger insight about violence in Chicago, and the movie ends neatly, peace achieved, in typical Hollywood fashion, as black Chicagoans' lives offscreen are engulfed in terror.

Lysistrata's sex strike also serves to highlight the city's institutional failures. One study found that in Chicago, only 6 percent of black male public school freshmen finish college; 92 percent of black male teens were unemployed in 2012. Without quality education and employment opportunities, it will be difficult to curb the violence. Activist groups like Black Lives Matter and Chicago's BYP100 have successfully campaigned to have Chicago police detective Dante Servin fired for his off-duty killing of 22-year-old Rekia Boyd, but they could do more to spotlight the issue of communal violence. Chi-Raq's use of a sex strike is timely in its play on current and historic black-led campaigns calling for realistic solutions.

The idea for the strike itself is drawn from Aristophanes's 411 BC Greek play Lysistrata, in which the title character convinces the women of Greece to withhold sex to force a negotiated peace to end the Peloponnesian War. In Chi-Raq, Lysistrata googles Nobel Price Prize winner and Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee, apparently drawing inspiration from Gbowee's Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace movement, which employed sex strikes to help end the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. However, as the writer Ta-neishi Coates recently pointed out in the Atlantic, Gbowee herself wrote that the sex strikes 'had little or no practical effect."

Gbowee does allow that the strikes were "extremely valuable in getting us media attention," a point that's certainly not lost on Lee. However, the director's heavy focus on them instead of her other tactics—such as prayer, sit-ins, and protests—distracts from the film's admirable effort to draw national attention to the structural inequalities that perpetuate violence in Chicago. In this way, the reductive use of the Greek comedy and Gbowee's activism in the film does not provide the historical heft that Lee was hoping to achieve. Instead, it plays down the comprehensive approach employed by Gbowee to quell the violence in her country against her gender. A better example in adapting a classic play to address contemporary issues would be Lynn Nottage's play Ruined, which masterfully pulls from Brecht's Mother Courage to locate specific violence against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In one scene, as the gangs and sex strikers stand symbolically, dressed in white and waiting to sign the "peace accord," I was reminded of the three-year long gang truce signed in Cabrini-Green after Danny was killed. For a time things were peaceful, but his mother was never the same. After Danny's death, local gang members wore baggy long white tee shirts, spray-painted with Danny face and name on them. It was a curious thing to see—they were honoring someone they had helped kill. I have long pondered how to memorialize Danny. But how do you honor a life that hardly got around to living?

At the film's conclusion, Ms. Helen holds a large black-and-white image of her slain daughter Pam in front of Chi-Raq that tells her daughter's story: "This is my Pam. She is ten years old, one summer day, back when we lived in the Cabrini-Green projects, Pam was outside, jumping double Dutch, when they started shooting. She was shot through her left eye, by a stray bullet. This was over 20 years ago, when children dying from stray bullets weren't a common occurrence."

In 1992, the year Danny was killed in Cabrini-Green, there were 61 murders of youth in Chicago. Today that number, as the film points out, hovers at 400 murders—more than one a day. I had hoped that Spike Lee's Chi-Raq would have told that story. The story of how Pam and Danny's story have sadly become a common occurrence in Chicago today. It will take more than a movie—it will take a movement—a movement to change it.

Follow Antwaun on Twitter.

Chi-Raq is streaming on Amazon Prime and showing in theaters nationwide.


Three Years After His Brush with Fame, the IKEA Monkey Is Doing Great

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The IKEA Monkey—who now goes by the name Darwin—living life to the full. Photo via Daina Liepa/Story Book Farm

It's been three whole years since a tiny monkey, resplendent in a shearling coat, was found wandering around an IKEA parking lot in Canada and changed the internet forever. On December 9, 2012, Darwin the macaque became an instant celebrity as the IKEA Monkey: a primate who launched a million memes and reminded us, however momentarily, what it is to feel joy in this otherwise miserable world.

Incredible as it was to see a minuscule monkey exploring a place usually reserved for legions of pissed-off humans in search of say, a nice fork or a reasonably-priced side table, everyone knew deep down a monkey wearing a jacket—a pretty nice jacket, as it would happen—just wasn't right.

Turns out, an agitated Darwin, who was only a few months old at the time, had escaped from his owner's car only to be found—and photographed—running amok on the Ontario branch of the store's parking lot. Yasmin Nadhuka, an exotic animal "enthusiast," had been rumbled, not only for dressing him up in a shearling coat AND a diaper, but for having an illegal exotic pet.

Nakhuda was fined $240 for keeping a prohibited animal, and Darwin was taken to the Story Book Farm Primate Sanctuary in Ontario, despite a lengthy court case which saw Nadhuka try to win him back (she failed, unsurprisingly). Darwin's getting another happy ending, as the sanctuary plans to introduce him to a new 'family' of two rescued macaques in January.

Despite financial difficulties at Story Book Farm earlier this year (which meant the facility's future was uncertain), thanks to the generosity of donors raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, the sanctuary has been able to remain open. Plans are afoot to build a series of new enclosures in 2016 for the 20 primates currently housed there through a series of fundraising events.


The picture we will never forget

Three years after the IKEA Monkey's dramatic entrance into the world by way of a damp car park, I spoke to volunteer and co-owner of the Story Book Farm sanctuary, Daina Liepa, about what Darwin's been up to since he hung up the shearling.

VICE: What was Darwin like when he first arrived?
Daina Liepa: He was actually quite quiet. We would take turns to look after him so that he wouldn't be too lonely. But now he's now an adolescent and he's actually become very shy. When people come to visit, everyone wants to see Darwin but he will hide and it takes a while for him to feel comfortable to come out. But when he's with us or when he's on his own, he's so rambunctious and jumping and swinging and just being a typical monkey.

How were the other monkeys towards him?
Some people think all the monkeys hang out together in a common area—that doesn't happen. I wish! He's next to a female baboon and next to her is a male baboon, and just across from him are two older rhesus macaques and, at this point, because he can be obnoxious and is being a typical adolescent, they'll start screaming at him to stop making so much noise because he'll throw things about.

Related: Watch 'An Inside Look at the Exotic Animal Trade'

Do you still not know where he came from?
We have absolutely no idea. The original owner never divulged that information and I don't even know if she knew. She bought him form an exotic pet trader and it's possible even he didn't know where he came from.

On your website, IKEA is listed as a donor to the sanctuary. How much did they actually donate?
They really haven't donated that much. I think they donated $10,000 and that was it. We have approached them since then and they have not entertained us. Everybody knows about Darwin the IKEA monkey so they're getting a lot of mentions!

What is Darwin's favorite toy?
He likes to throw things around—actually, his favorite toy at the moment is we tear up bits of sheeting and he'll put the sheet around his head and he literally looks as if he's flying like superman, jumping from one area to another. It's hilarious watching him.

"Monkeys shouldn't be wearing nappies, monkeys shouldn't be on a leash, and they shouldn't be wearing coats."

Does he have a favorite food?
all love peanut butter. If we have a plastic water bottle I'll put in grapes or peanuts which are both favorites, but then if you add peanut butter around the side then they lick it off or lick their fingers. And he loves peanut butter sandwiches.

Which word would best describe Darwin now?
Mischievous. When we clean his indoor enclosure we have to lock him out before anybody goes in but he doesn't like to be locked out, he likes to have free reign to go wherever he wants whenever he wants so he's always looking in the window to see what's happening and rattling the door to try and get in. He wants his own way. He's like a spoiled teenager.

Is it hard looking back at the pictures of Darwin at IKEA?
It is, because it just shows how ludicrous his life was as a baby monkey. Monkeys shouldn't be wearing nappies, monkeys shouldn't be on a leash, and they shouldn't be wearing coats. People ask us if we have the coat and I actually don't have a clue where it is.

That's probably a good thing.
It would probably make a good museum piece. When he came to us, he was eight inches tall when he was sitting down, now he's three to four times the size. The shearling coat would no way fit him now. It's sad. It reminds you of what happens with baby monkeys—they should be free to jump and run and cuddle with their mothers. But now he's definitely a monkey again.

What's the situation with Darwin's new "family"?
We're hoping that we can introduce him to two macaques, Cody and Puglsey, who are going to be coming to us in January and we're building a new enclosure for them. These are lab monkeys from a Canadian university, they've finished their research. So we're hoping we can introduce them to him and that they'll get on well, so their enclosures will be accessible to each other but then with the shift doors, we can separate them if necessary so I think that would be good for him.

Darwin has never looked better. Daina Liepa/Story Book Farm

Will they get along well?
We just have to see what happens. It would've been better to do that when he was younger. We actually had an opportunity to get two other macaques that were at a roadside zoo but Darwin's original owner bought them instead. So the family that we could've generated for Darwin, she actually bought them from under us.

Is it a strange situation, to take lab monkeys, when animal testing is not something you would ever endorse?
Yeah, we've had that conversation, because it's much easier and cheaper for the university to euthanize the monkey. For $50, they have the syringe and the medication and they don't have to think about the monkey any more, whereas if they care about the livelihood of the monkeys, they have to go out of their way to find who will take them, so we tend not to be judgmental. It's not pleasant, but as long as it's still legal for it to happen and there are monkeys in labs, then we'd rather help them.

Visit storybookmonkeys.org to learn more about Darwin and his primate pals or to make a donation to the sanctuary.

Ontario Has a Skyrocketing Opioid Overdose Problem, Hundreds Dead Just This Year

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There's been a nearly 500 percent increase in opioid overdose deaths in the last two decades in Ontario. The Canadian Press

A new statement from an Ontario nonprofit public health group is calling upon the government to take action in addressing the skyrocketing number of deaths from opioid-related overdoses in the province.

The Municipal Drug Strategy Coordinators Network of Ontario (MDSCNO) put out a press release today calling for the Ontario government to address the opioid crisis, effectively doubling down on the group's report back in June that found an opioid-related overdose death happens every 14 hours in Ontario.

The original report, called "Prescription for Life," cites the growing issue of addiction to opioid prescriptions and the deaths caused by them, noting that nearly 5,000 people died between 2000 and 2013 from an opioid-related overdose in Ontario. The new statement says that an estimated 328 Ontarians have died from opioid-related cause since the report was released just six months ago.

Michael Parkinson, a spokesperson for MSDCNO, told VICE that the lack of both a provincial and federal strategy on the opioid crisis is concerning and needs to be formulated quickly in order to curb the epidemic that has seen a 463 percent increase in deaths in the last 13 years.

"Policy change often starts at the ground level and not at the top, and it just hasn't hit anywhere near the top in Canada yet," he said.

"The key to resolving this crisis is a national strategy and provincial strategy, and we need to address this as a crisis, because that's exactly what it is."

Parkinson draws a comparison, one that's cited in the report, between how anaphylactic shock is treated compared to opioid overdose. Unlike EpiPens that have been long used to reverse anaphylaxis, naloxone—the opioid-antagonist drug that reverses opiate overdose—is not covered under government drug plans.

In Canada, the only way to access to naloxone is through emergency rooms when undergoing an overdose, needle exchange programs, and very select Hepatitis C programs. Take-home programs—like the one Toronto Public Health's "The Works" provides—are few and far between, and Parkinson says that it's the main stumbling block in curbing the current death rate.

The MSDCNO's report proposes a number of initiatives to increasing naloxone access, such as funding naloxone access under veteran drug plans and providing hospitals the ability to easily prescribe patients naloxone when necessary. The report also notes that current laws surrounding how overdose emergency calls are responded to should be converted to "Good Samaritan Laws," which allow both witnesses and survivors of an overdose to contact emergency services without fear of prosecution for administering or being in possession of illicit substances.

Parkinson said that there's "no good explanation" as to why more hasn't been done on the front of providing naloxone opioid user in Canada, making note how the drug is not only incredibly cheap—roughly $12 per non-subsidized prescription—but that there are already several US states that have naloxone programs set up, with departments like the Office of National Drug Control Policy actively taking action on establishing new naloxone programs across that country.

Both Parkinson and the report cite the increasing number of prescription sales in Canada as a cause for the increase in overdoses. Last year, there was nearly 22 million opioid prescriptions doled out in Canada—up from just 17 million in 2010—and US studies have shown a correlation between the number of opioid prescribed and overdoses.

The Minister of Health did not respond to VICE's request for comment.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Talking to a Man Who's Been in Love with His Sister for 20 Years

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Photo via Shutterstock

Read: Here Are All the People You'll Run Into at Your Office Holiday Party

I met Tom* through his psychotherapist, who is a friend of mine, but he didn't want to meet me in person. He was worried I would judge or insult him. That's how others have reacted when he's told them about his life. He does want to talk, though—he says he wants to get the truth off his chest. So we arrange a Skype interview. He turns up in dark sunglasses and a hat to protect his identity. He promises he'll tell me everything as long as I don't reveal his personal details. If I did, I would be putting his freedom at stake.

Tom's profile picture shows him and his girlfriend, Lena. She hugs him from behind, lovingly kissing him on the neck. He is smiling, twining his fingers in her long, brown hair. Strictly speaking, nothing is wrong with this photo. It shows two people who love each other—a relationship based on mutual attraction.

But Lena is Tom's sister, and for most people this changes everything; the photograph actually becomes criminal evidence. "I'm scared of people finding me disgusting," says Tom. He looks away from me and claws at his fingers. He's been in a committed relationship with his sister for 20 years, and the couple has a child together. "There's nothing that I haven't heard before. People have called me a desecrator, sister-fucker, or simply retarded. And all that's come out of the mouths of people who were at one time my friends. Even if society won't recognize us, we exist and there are more of us than you think."

Read: The Art of Gourmet Cooking in Prison

Rotraut Perner is a psychotherapist who has worked, among other things, on various incest cases since 1975. "In most cases, my patients were very shy toward strangers," he says. "They clearly exhibited social anxiety and tended to stay at home. This of course was often linked to their backstory: Most of them weren't allowed to meet up with other people as children because their parents were either very jealous or very stern—limiting their children's movements."

Tom and Lena grew up in a small Austrian village. They lived in a huge, white fairytale house with a dog on the front lawn. Their mother was a housewife and their father a civil servant. The kids were well-behaved, went to school, and did their best not to attract negative attention. In their family there were no quarrels, and smiles were obligatory. Otherwise, what would the neighbors think? At some point Tom realized that he wasn't perfect. Lena felt the same way. "I started getting real feelings for her when we both entered puberty," said Tom. "She was blossoming. Sometimes I would watch her getting dressed in her room and always felt ashamed of myself afterwards."

"I was relieved to find out she felt the same about me," said Tom. "We could be happy together. But of course that was a kind of utopia. In reality, our love was a curse—it still is."

Tom reassured himself that curiosity about the female body is normal. He wasn't attracted to his sister but to women in general. But his feelings kept growing stronger. Then, at 17, Lena got her first real boyfriend. "That was hell for me," Tom confesses. "I hated each one of her boyfriend's guts. Lena used to cry because I wouldn't get on with them. Today, I know that it was pure jealousy."

After a three-year relationship, Lena's boyfriend cheated on her. In the middle of the night she stumbled into Tom's bedroom. He was already asleep and was woken by her sobbing. To console her, he fetched some wine from the cellar. After the first glass, came the second, and then the third in quick succession. Intoxicated in the moment, Lena cuddled up to his shoulder.

In Rotraut Perner's view, this is not abnormal per se. "From my professional experience, it's not true that people don't find their siblings attractive," the psychotherapist says. "Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. More importantly, relationships between siblings are defined by envy, rivalry, and admiration, along with the need to cuddle or have secrets from the rest of the world. All those things are linked to certain fantasies—some of them induced by pop culture and the media, others by their upbringing and family situation. Whether or not you make those fantasies a reality, depends on how good you are at evaluating that reality. People in incestuous relationships often lack that skill."

Watch: The Real 'X-Files'?

In the case of Tom and Lena, their fantasy soon came to life: "I can still remember it like it happened yesterday," says Tom. "She looked up at me and asked why other men can't be more like me." That's when it happened; Tom felt sure that he and Lena were not just siblings. But before he could make a move, Lena leaned in and kissed him. Tom pushed his sister away. "What the hell are we doing?" he screamed. Lena started to cry.

The following days were torture for Tom. Of course they could have just blamed it on the alcohol, but was it really a one-off? His thoughts just wouldn't leave him alone. He begun to remember specific situations. "It became clear to me that Lena and I were always flirting," he said. "I always used to take it as a joke but it couldn't have been. All these strange situations suddenly became crystal clear."

He now knows that he used to watch Lena getting dressed because he was keen on her. He wasn't just aroused because she's a woman, but also because he had feelings for her. Lena and Tom have since spoken about that a lot. Lena's told Tom that she would leave her door open on purpose so that he could observe her. She was trying to seduce him—yet that only became clear to her after their kiss. "I was relieved to find out she felt the same about me," said Tom. "We could be happy together. But of course that was a kind of utopia. In reality, our love was a curse—it still is."

"It was then I realized that we're criminals."

The type of relationship that Tom and Lena have would be taboo in nearly every culture, and it's also illegal. In many countries around the world, including most of Europe, sexual relationships between close relatives are prohibited. In Austria, where Tom and I are from, incest between parents and children is punishable by up to a year in prison, and incest between siblings can result in six months behind bars.

When Tom slept with Lena for the first time, it wasn't just an act of love but also a criminal offense. "It was then I realized we're criminals. But Paragraph 211 punishes consenting adults for entering relationships with other adults. We're not forcing each other into anything."

For Tom, this paragraph is a huge, black cloud hovering above him. He can't understand why he should be sent to prison. "Since when is disgust a reason to imprison others?" he said. "Nobody would make someone serve time for having sex with a cake, just because someone else found it disgusting."

Of course, there's also a biological dimension to incest bans.

"Relatives share a common gene pool that becomes more and more similar the closer the blood relationship is," Franco Laccone, a doctor from the Institute of Medical Genetics at the Medical School of Vienna. "Of course, everybody carries what we call 'silent mutations,' which are completely harmless. The problems start only when you carry the same mutations, in the exact same genes. The risk for this increases significantly between relatives. If the parents are first cousins, the probability for recessive genetic defects increases to 6 percent, while healthy non-related parents have a risk of only 3 percent for handing down such defects."

For mothers, getting pregnant from incestuous intercourse is approximately as dangerous as getting pregnant as someone with trisomy, according to Laccone.

Not surprisingly, Tom has been preoccupied with the legal status of incest for years. When Patrick Stübing, who had four children with his sister, challenged Germany's incest laws in court a decade ago, in 2008, Tom rejoiced. He really believed that the law could be repealed. But the appeal was rejected in 2008 by judges who cited several reasons the law should stand, including:

  • Maintaining a diverse gene pool is in the best interest of public health
  • Laws against incest can protect vulnerable people from trauma that could arise even from consensual sexual acts.
  • Decriminalizing incest law could send the "wrong message" to the public

For Tom the third reason is based on arbitrary societal norms. And though his cause is a long way from the mainstream, he's not alone. Hans Jörg Albrecht, director of the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Germany, has tried to disprove the most common rumors surrounding incest in a lengthy analysis. Albrect's writings are Tom's Bible. "The majority of people think that Paragraph 211... serves children who are yet to be born," says Tom. "They are just so wrong. They assume that 100 percent of children who arise from incestuous relationships are handicapped."

"What kind of person is in love with his sister? It's unbelievable what a taboo can do to your feelings of self-worth."

In general, the children of related couples are more likely to have certain kinds of genetic conditions, but according to the Genetic Alliance, a UK-based group that works to improve the lives of people with genetic conditions, "most related couples have healthy children."

"I would understand it if you told me, 'You are going to prison because you are endangering your child,'" Tom said. "But my child is healthy and my wife and I love each other voluntarily. Therefore all good reasons for punishment do not apply."

Tom and Lena kept their relationship a secret for several years. "For a long time, we thought that we were sick. What kind of person is in love with his sister?" Tom said. "It's unbelievable what a taboo can do to your feelings of self-worth." Tom became depressed.

At one point, Tom became depressed, separating from Lena and trying to kill himself. Lena found him unconscious in the bath with sleeping tablets beside him. That was a moment of self-realization for him: "Something had to change. I felt like I lived in a bubble."

So, Lena and Tom decided to move out of their parents' home and far away from anyone who knew them. Today they share an apartment in Germany. Their new friends think they're married. When Lena gave birth to their daughter, Tom said, she declared the father to be unknown.

"We didn't want to risk anything. There's no way I'll let them put me in prison and take me away from my family."

*All names have been changed.

How to Live in Mansions Around the World Rent-Free

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You could live here for free! Photo by the author

Do you want to live in a castle? Like, an actual Norman castle in France, for free? Yes, of course you do, even if the castle is "small" and it comes with two dogs and three cats that you have to look after—those are tiny quibbles compared to the fact of living in your own fucking castle.

It sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but that sort of deal is relatively common on international housesitting websites, where strangers persuade other strangers to take care of their villas and their cats in exchange for staying there rent-free. The deal I just mentioned is a real one, currently offered on my favorite housesitting site, Mind My House. And if you buy a $20 subscription and create a convincing profile, you could be feeding a Labrador in an empty French castle in a couple of weeks.

I learned this a year ago while I was a student at the University of Chicago, which is a freezing, despair-filled wasteland. I'd taken time off to finish my thesis, so there was nothing tying me to Chicago except for my limited savings. Once I figured out I could take a flight to Europe for just $180 on Norwegian Air, spending time abroad became a matter of finding a place to crash.

So I delved into the travel-for-free internet, and $20 later, I found my answer. It was a map of the world covered with upside-down teardrops, each one an opportunity to live in an entirely new country rent-free.

Related: A Travel Hacker Explains How to Fly Around the World for Free

The site I chose was Mind My House, but it's not the only one. Nomador, Trusted Housesitters, and House Carers are better-known and specialize in housesitting gigs in the USA, Canada, Australia, and Europe.

The typical ad reads something like this: "Beautiful French Villa in the South of France: My husband and I will be traveling during the holidays and need a responsible person/couple to take care of our dog Snookypuss. He is a cuddly golden retriever who needs a lot of love." You send a message trying to persuade them you're the one for Snookypuss, and hope for the best.

Mind My House has the smallest selection of ads, but it's the most relaxed and the cheapest (subscriptions cost $20 a year, compared to $50 for House Carers, $89 for Nomador, and $100 for Trusted Housesitters). Unlike Nomador, a French-based site, it doesn't require proof of identity, "domicile," and bank details. There's also less competition than sites like Trusted Housesitter, where homeowners can get hundreds of answers to their listing in a matter of hours, and each sitter has ratings. With that kinds of selection, homeowners are likely to be more cautious, and seasoned housesitters have the advantage over young cheapskate travelers like myself. Mind My House feels more like Couchsurfing.com, with a smaller community built on traveler trust.

But the question remains: What kind of person lends their castle to a stranger?

"By the time they've arrived, I wouldn't call them strangers," said Paul Nash, a homeowner using Trusted Housesitters. "After the initial exchange of emails, we always Skype or FaceTime potential sitters before we make a decision on them. The concept of being able to go on holiday in the knowledge that, first and foremost, our pets are being cared for and don't have the trauma of being left alone or going to a cattery, which they would find extremely stressful, appealed greatly. It also gives you added security knowing the house is not left empty for weeks on end. And when you come home, the house is clean, the cats are happy and relaxed and often there's a meal waiting for us.

"The sitters also have references and police checks, if required," he added.

In other words, from the homeowner's perspective it's cheap, you're less likely to get burglarized, and your cat doesn't have to go to cat prison. And while there are paid housesitting services too, one of the great laws of economics applies here: Why pay for something when people will do it for free?

"Most, if not all, of the people we've housesat for are really travelers at heart," said Dalene Heck, an experienced housesitter. Last year she and her husband won the National Geographic "Traveler of the Year" award for their house-hopping lifestyle, and these days she gets most of her assignments by word-of-mouth. Her home base is with her family in Canada, but for the last six years she's been living from one assignment to the next, traveling the world and living.

"They understand the concept of a share economy really well and they understand the concept of trusting someone on the road, which I think that people that don't travel a lot have more reservations about," she told me.

According to Heck, many of the homeowners are middle-class expats looking to visit family on holidays. "A lot of are in the country, where you really don't want to leave your home for a long amount of time because there's not necessarily someone living right around it."

Heck says she keeps tabs on the housesitter community, sometimes through secret Facebook groups. When I asked her how old the average housesitter was in her experience, she estimated in the 50s. "I think it's attractive to retirees."

"Generally, it's most popular amongst boomer age group," echoed Andy Peck, the founder and CEO of Trusted Housesitters—although "some younger people house and pet sit too."

At 21, I was far younger than the average housesitter, and I knew I needed to build a competitive profile. I scoured the site for inspiration and described myself with words and phrases I'd found littered through ads ("self-reliant," "independent," "well-traveled," etc.) and wrote 17 individualized messages. I called the pets by name and offered to get references where needed. I didn't just apply to villas—I applied to anything that seemed like an adventure.

Simone Gribble, an Australian travel blogger, had advised me to "find the ones that aren't brilliant." By that, she means newbies should get started with housesitting gigs that aren't super lavish to build up credibility. It's a good strategy, especially since sites like Trusted Housesitters have a rating system. You're unlikely to get that Tuscan mansion first round, Gribble explained. The key is wading through those villas to find the real gems, like this:

"Royal Country Superhouse: Far from city enjoy green world with little Soviet village local life. Big house with two floors and many rooms. Toilet is outside in separate little house without water. Nobody speaks English and house is without bathroom. In winter house is cold and you need to heat ovens and dig in the snow."

It was the only listing in Latvia and I applied to it immediately. What better way to build up my housesitting reputation than there?

Out of 17 messages, I received four responses, an each had a catch: The one in Copenhagen was only available for only two weeks (too short a stay); the one in Tuscany wouldn't be uninhabited; and the one in Gibraltar looked difficult to reach.

But then of course, there was the Royal Country Superhouse: "Michaela, house is open for you. Just pay attention to my info about winter and house condition. Peace, Love & Happiness, Janis."

Two months later, I showed up near the village of Sidrabiņi, Latvia (population 115) with a friend and the instructions to look for "the man in the cookie monster sweater." Janis didn't ask for any information other than the dates of my arrival, and I didn't ask anything except how the hell to get there. After a brief stay with friends in England, I took a Ryanair flight to Riga and made my way to the bus station where I had to convince an incredulous ticket seller that yes, I really did want to go to Ergli.

Janis was a 27-year-old hipster architect, and the house turned out to be dust-filled former Soviet store. By "winter conditions," Janis had been referring to the lack of electrical heat. We had to use a wood stove to keep our room warmer than freezing, which meant hauling wood from the shed and feeding the fire every hour or so. It took a few days to figure out how to work; sometimes we'd fuck up and either be engulfed in smoke or wake up in below-freezing temperatures. There were strange blood-like stains on the couch, and when a friend came to visit, he was chased up a tree by wolves.

It was fucking fantastic. The house was brimming with books on art and architecture, and at night we'd blast music from the Soviet sound system as loud as we could. We spent New Years with Janis' family, drinking so much moonshine that Latvian started to sound like English. We had snowball fights in the perfect, powdery snow. The heart-shaped cutout in the outhouse provided an outlook of the glittering snow-covered forest, far more majestic than my usual view from the toilet. We nicknamed it "The Bone House" for its white color, and after three weeks we were sorry to leave.

The view from the outhouse. Photo by the author

We spent about $30 in the course of our three-week stay, which was spent on food from the town's only grocery store (the cashier actually used an abacus). Plane tickets included, it was still far less than I'd ever spent living in America, so I could only imagine how cheap it would be to live that way year-round.

"I know people who do it for $15K a year," said Heck. "That's Canadian dollars. So like, five American dollars."

Actually, that's $11,215.37. Little enough to qualify for food stamps—except, instead of living in government housing, you're taking care of a dog in a townhouse in Edinburgh belonging to Lady Plimpleshire (real story, fake name).

Heck and her husband generate money from their travel blog, and a housesitting e-book. "Freelance writing, freelance video—we do a lot of different things," she explained. "That's how digital nomads work. We all have multiple sources of income in order to keep it going."

Digital nomads are people who work off their laptop and travel the world full-time. Housesitting is a perfect tool for such a lifestyle, since housesits can last months or even years. And while housesitting sites have traditionally been geared toward vacations for retirees, they also promise a radical new lifestyle for millennials.

Of course, with great bargains come great responsibilities: Heck and her husband had to put a sick dog down during one housesitting stay (at a vet, not like in Old Yeller). Another time, she stayed in a tenth-century manor ("it was massive—it looked like a castle"), which she had to clean for two days to make habitable. Gribble told me a story about a time she stayed in a house with too many pets, and woke up one day to find that some of the animals had eaten some of the others. And obviously, housesitting in a place with pets means you can't travel around the country any time you want.

But the average time required is pretty low—Gribble estimates three to four hours a day for dogs and one to two hours for cats—which is still far less work than WWOOFing, and far more stable than couchsurfing, with (usually) way better digs.

Plus, you'll have plenty of stories to tell at parties about the times you lived like a king without spending a dime.

Follow Michaela Cross on Twitter.

Here Are All the People You’ll Run Into at Your Office Holiday Party

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Wow, they don't throw hootenannies like this anymore, do they? Photo via Flickr user Seattle Municipal Archives

The office holiday party is a confusing thing. On the one hand, it's going to be free food and booze (if it's not, we are so so sorry for you). On the other hand, it's likely full of awful people and extremely awkward situations, and overcompensating on alcohol could have an embarrassing, lasting effect on your life. After all, your colleagues aren't your family, they are people you have to see every day.

So peep the following scenarios ahead of time, lest they become the half-recollected memories of a 3 AM visit from the ghost of your future unemployed self.

A really drunk superior

Although they've never even met you in the several years you've worked at the company, is suddenly your best friend. Bizarrely, you get locked into a deep conversation about a mutual love of avant-garde jazz from the 1960s and agree to send each other some YouTube clips of John Coltrane live performances during your week off. Dude even throws a couple of your unnecessarily expensive cocktails on his personal tab and tells you a story about that time he shared a private box at a Knicks game with Louis CK but couldn't figure out who he was until halfway through the cab ride to the hotel. When you go back into work after the holidays pretty sure you're getting a raise from your new best friend, he won't even remember your name.

That person from an unknown department who you've had a crush on for like a year, but only see every three weeks or so while in line for coffee, where you can never muster more than a "hey" because there is actually no reason to talk to them about anything other than the fact that you feel like you've been accidentally creeping on them for months.

As it so happens, you run into them at the end of the night when you're half-cut and your contacts are blurry because you've been up for like 20 hours and you're pretty sure someone is waiting for you in a cab outside. But then you make eye contact, and time stops. And then you actually introduce yourself and get into enough of a conversation that you feel like you're getting comfortable—comfortable enough that they tell you they'll be bummed to not see you around anymore since they're taking a job at one of the company's satellite offices three time zones away.

The really hot and cool spouse of someone who is awful

What's this? A new face? A stranger! Someone you can potentially sleep with and never see again! At the office party! You slide in mid-group convo and are immediately taken with this person. Witty, a wonderful laugh, and owns the world's last interesting opinion on Drake. You end up alone with this person and after a solid five minutes of AAA-flirting you ask the obvious, if a bit late, question, "Why are you at this party?" The answer irrevocably changes your worldview permanently. "Oh, I'm dating/married to ." Really? This incredible person lets Alistair of Sales ("Wanna take a ride in my Tesla, bro?") put his (presumably) overly-cologned privates near hers? Does she not know about Alistair of Sales' Monday Morning Recap of His Entire Weekend That Everyone in the Office Hears Regardless of Whether or Not They Want to? His two-weeks-behind-the-meme emails? You feel nothing but pity for this lovely stranger you just met, and you want to hold them and tell them it will be alright. Then you do and Alistair of Sales reports you to HR.

Yeeeee-ikes. Photo via Flickr user HeatherLWilliams

Donna from HR

Oh god, oh god, she's walking toward me! Do not talk to anyone in HR if you want to have a job in the morning. Just don't.

The CEO who has the beer tickets

Before 9 PM: You're so friendly when you sidle up to her, mentioning a few of the "outstanding initiatives" the company has been involved with this year to show that you're a team player and well deserving of the perforated pieces of cardstock she's going to bestow upon you. Chances are she has no idea who you are, so you try not to overstay your welcome. You're in and out in like three minutes and now well on your way to beer town.

9 PM - Midnight: You've been eyeing the CEO for like 35 minutes, waiting until someone you know is chatting with her so you can use that as an excuse to get close. You laugh a little too hard at her lame jokes and have no idea what "great project" she's talking to your "friend" about, though you pretend to be super interested, until you space out for a second and all of a sudden you're standing alone with the CEO clutching your handful of beer tickets, mumbling something about needing to take a piss.

After midnight: You just stagger up to her and yell, "How 'bout some more of those fantastic beer tickets?!" which, weirdly, seems to impress her.

The significant other of the colleague you foolishly hooked up with

Maybe you had a drunken one-night stand with your hot-but-taken colleague after a team-building night, or perhaps it was a full-blown affair. Either way, they are still unavailable as fuck and now their significant other, a walking, talking embodiment of the poor decisions you've made, is in your face. Harness that guilt and shame into something useful by keeping it in your pants tonight. And forever.

The person you've worked with for years but have never spoken to

And now it's way too awkward to ask their name, but you ended up at the snack table at the same time and somehow they know your name (have you even spoken before???) and now you have to get through the next five minutes of small talk without making it obvious you don't know their name or anything about them.

You should have known something was up when he tried to lead a Lime-A-Rita chug-off at 9:30. The bar wasn't even serving them! Photo via Flickr user windowsau

The boss's 'partner' who actually turns out to be a one-night stand who won't leave

What an amazing holiday party this was! But wait, there's more. You've been invited to go back to your boss's place for an after-party that she says will include "Scotch that you can't afford." So you and a few colleagues go back to her condo (which isn't quite as nice as you thought it would be) and she tells you to grab beer from the kitchen. In the kitchen you find her husband and you tell him, "thanks for having us," and he kinda sways a little and says, "you have a really beautiful mouth." You are super creeped out and quickly grab a corporate beer from the fridge and get the fuck out of there. A few minutes later you get a frantic text of "help me get out of this conversation in the kitchen" from your work husband. You go to save him from your boss's husband, who, now that you notice it, looks like he's on some really serious painkillers. You make old-people convo and somehow there's a joke about The Beatles and then there's an incredibly racist joke about Yoko. Getting out of this conversation seems impossible and you ask a question (god, you are such an amateur, you think, just get out of there) about how long they've been married. "Oh," says the husband. "We actually just met last night at O'Reilly's pub."

Suddenly this person becomes the most interesting awful person you've ever met. Twenty minutes later he tries to kiss you and you realize your boss is the loneliest person in the world.

That dude you haven't talked to since you got wasted together at last year's holiday party

Oh shit. It's all coming back to you now. You'd only talked to him a few times in the office, but he seemed pretty chill and had managed to swipe a bottle of bourbon from the bar, so you spent the next three hours camped out in a stairwell trading shots, talking shit about all your co-workers, and complaining about the pointlessness of your respective university degrees. Now you feel guilty for never going to see his prog-metal band play, and you're pretty sure you never actually responded to his Facebook friend request. More importantly... how the hell was that a year ago? What have you even been doing with your life? You're pretty sure that just before you drained that bottle of bourbon and fired it down the stairwell last year, you made some big declaration about getting the fuck out of this place and moving to Berlin to finish a screenplay. And yet here you are, getting psyched up to do it all over again.

Who... are you. Photo via Flickr user HeatherLWilliams

The company lawyer

Sure, he might try to seem cool (read: rich), but you can't shake that feeling you're drinking with someone who is only, like, twice-removed from a cop. He'll probably talk about his kids' extracurricular activities and regale you with tales of living in a baller-ass mansion in the suburbs. Between the facts that he probably earns your entire salary in Q1 of the fiscal year and doesn't understand your Drake reference (come on, dude, who are you??), you're going to want to use the washroom escape method for this one.

The caterer

This person (either a comedian or an actor, depending on how attractive they are) is half-blazed and hates everyone in the room even more than you do. If you have a smoke with them by the back exit you are going to hear a hilarious takedown on all your co-workers and probably marry this person.

The intern

Almost always either painfully shy or overcompensating with entirely too much gregariousness, the intern is in a tough position at the holiday party (and, really, at all times; precarious labour is a bitch). Make them feel welcome if you're a good person, or, if you're like 90 percent of your coworkers, avoid them like the plague so you don't have to think about how much the place you work is paying them. Whatever you do: DON'T FUCK THE INTERN... unless you're another intern. (And if you're both consenting interns, make sure your parents know where you are spending the night so your direct supervisor doesn't get a call in the morning from some concerned father wondering why his daughter didn't come home from the staff party.)

The person from R&D who is always working on secret stuff and probably works way more hours than you and is a good example of what not to become. Ever.

This person will appear to be somewhat caught between handling their liquor and Australian-accent drunk, but is actually, in reality, extremely intoxicated and high off a number of different substances. This person is from another world—usually in their mid-30s, they'll probably end up giving you the best life advice you'll ever get at a party, but they also secretly realize events like this are a purgatory between a never-ending work week and chemically induced sleep. It's a break for them—if you want to even call it that. With all their infinite wisdom and wit, it may seem like you need them, but in reality, they really, really need you.

Her name is Janet and she's coming for you as soon as she downs both of these glasses of pinot. Photo via Flickr user Russell James Smith

The person from accounting who seems to know way too much about everyone's personal lives, even though you're pretty sure she's not actually friends with anyone in the office, which probably means she's been Facebook stalking everyone in preparation for this party.

How could she possibly know that Beach Slang (your new favourite band) covered "Bastards of Young?" (your favourite Replacements song) at that gig last month. There's just no way she was at that show. Does she have a Google alert set up for your tweets?

The person you want to hook up with that night but won't

Two beers in and you're probably thinking about the social economics of this one. They've had your eye all night (and probably week, or, honestly, month) and you can definitely strike up a conversation with them long enough to hold interest, but how are you going to pull this one off? These nights are long—there's plenty of drinking ahead. If you cloud your mind with how you're systemically going to make this work, you might not have any fun. Hell, you could put in hours of work and they might just ghost, only for you to learn about their disappearance when a coworker you only mildly like mentions that they took off a whole hour ago—with someone else from the party.

The person you hook up with that night

Disheartened by what happened above, you naturally gravitate back to the bar. That's when you notice that dude or woman you've done little more than nod at in the kitchen for an entire year. Except this time, their red-flannel-and-Chucks combination is looking fly as hell. How did you not realize sooner that they're a fucking dime? Probably because you're not regularly bombed off a million rum and eggnogs during the workweek. You proceed to talk shop, learning the ins and outs of their job (of which you will have zero recollection tomorrow). Eventually you suggest going for a cigarette, regardless of whether or not you smoke. Once outside, you drop the pretence and start making out in a dank stoop, unless you're a complete idiot and do it right out in the open where everyone can see (speaking from experience here). You ask the person where they live and irrespective of whether or not you're in the same vicinity, suggest sharing a ride. Sloppy sex with poor odds of finishing ensues. Unless it becomes a regular thing, you never speak again.

The person you'd been secretly dating for the past six months but broke up with two weeks ago

What you should do: be cordial when in close proximity but steer clear of each other for most of the night.

Far more likely scenarios:

1) You drunkenly corner them to analyze why things went south, but insist that you're TOTALLY FINE with it being over.

2) Passive-aggressively flirt with other colleagues in an attempt to make your ex jealous. No one else understands why you're acting this way, so you wind up making a lot of other party guests feel weird and uncomfortable, especially the people you're hitting on.

3) Sleep with your ex because they are still your only shot of getting laid. Regret it the next morning.

The person you assumed was straight edge until they offer you drugs

Well, that's a nice surprise.

Taxi Drivers Are Comparing Uber To ISIS And Hanging Onto Moving Vehicles In Protest

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The state of cabbie-Uber relations in Toronto. Screenshot via CBC.

Toronto taxi drivers completely lost their shit during a city-wide protest against Uber Wednesday, causing traffic jams and injuries, and even making comparisons to ISIS.

Tensions between local taxi operators and Uber have been mounting since the ride-sharing company set up shop in Toronto in August 2012. City council has been debating how to regulate Uber, but it seems taxi drivers have run out of patience—and common sense.

On Wednesday, thousands of them descended on the city's core in their cabs, blocking major traffic arteries and pissing commuters off by driving as slow as 5 km/h. As they neared City Hall, all hell broke loose.

Chanting "this is an UberX", one cabbie who identified himself to Global News as Suntharesan Kanagasabai started banging on the window of a white Honda and trying to open the driver's door. The alleged Uber driver then peeled off, but instead of letting go of the vehicle, Kanagasabai held onto the front and was essentially dragged mid-air through traffic.


CBC video

"We are trying to get a point across, that's what we're trying to do," he later breathlessly told reporters, noting that he has 22 years of driving experience. Well bro, if driving cabs doesn't end up working out, we're pretty sure you have a future in movie stunts.

Not done there, Kanagasabai then likened Uber to the most notorious terrorist organization on the planet.

"Uber is going to be like ISIS my friend, Uber is ISIS," he shouted. "Do you know what ISIS means?"

To his credit, reporter Mark McAllister told the disgruntled driver he was "going a little bit too far."

"You're claiming that Uber is bringing terrorism to Toronto?" he asked, to which Kanagasabai replied, "Yeah!" (Which begs the question, do you know what ISIS means, dude?)

Another cab driver ran down a cop on Yonge Street, causing minor injuries; according to police, one person was arrested and a bunch of tickets were handed out for slow driving.

All the drama prompted Toronto Mayor and Grandfather-in-chief John Tory to ask everyone to chill the fuck out.

"The point has been made ... we cannot allow our cities to have these dangerous activities to continue during rush hour," he said.

Meanwhile, some cab companies including Beck are distancing themselves from the methods being employed by protesting drivers. The Toronto Taxi Alliance said it doesn't support "any tactic which will disrupt traffic or transportation for Toronto drivers and residents."

Taxi drivers claim Uber isn't playing by the rules (because cabbies never do shitty things) and is causing them to lose business. But based on Wednesday's antics, they're doing a pretty good job of that on their own.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

So Sad Today: ​Extremely Conscious and Incredibly Scared of It

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Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

According to the DSM-V, my official diagnosis is panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and underlying depression. Yet sometimes I wonder if my conditions, which fluctuate on a continuum from the height of terror to a vague sense of unease, could instead be called seeing too much, feeling too much, or thinking too much.

I was always a hypersensitive, frightened child. Then, at later points in life—sometimes sober, and sometimes under the influence of psychedelics like psilocybin, peyote, or acid—I saw, felt, and thought things that were perhaps beyond the realm of what I could absorb that quickly. Like, I saw the world as a game or a play. I saw humans as players or actors, and the identities we'd constructed (and those that were constructed for us) as just a farce. Everyone was walking around in a body, engaged in the drama of the world, but no one seemed to be asking What is going on here? It felt painful that no one was asking. It also hurt, and made no sense, that people were cruel to one another based on those seemingly arbitrary layers of self. Once you see these things, it's hard to shut the door on that awareness. It's hard to just go on pretending it's normal that we exist.

In the seminal 1960s text The Psychedelic Experience: a Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, authors Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner define "games" as "behavioral sequences defined by roles, rules, rituals, goals, strategies, values, language, characteristic space−time locations and characteristic patterns of movement." They define heavy game players as "those who cling to their egos" and convey that it is the mind that renders the psychedelic experience, and all life experiences, as "heaven or hell."

I don't think my use of psychedelics was the cause, or primary catalyst, of my mental illness. I would not consider panic attacks an acid flashback, as I was having panic attacks prior to experimenting with drugs. But I do think that my psychedelic experiences called attention to the frightening dichotomy between the flimsy construction of self and a more fluid, unified consciousness. My experiences with psychedelics, as well as with mental illness, have presented similarities in the ways that they strip away various game identities. In that sense, the experience of depersonalization on psychedelic drugs is an apt metaphor for the feeling of decontextualization in the throws of a panic attack, and vice versa.

In fact, many of the physical symptoms of a panic attack mirror the ways in which Leary, Alpert, and Metzner describe the sensations of ego loss on psychedelics. In psychedelic ego loss there is "bodily pressure...body disintegrating or blown to atoms...sinking...pressure on head and ears...tingling in extremities...feelings of body flowing as if wax...nausea." Likewise, in the throws of a panic attack I feel suffocating sensations and a tightness in the chest, the experience that I am disintegrating, dissolving, or about to explode, and tingling in my hands and feet. During depressive episodes, often difficult to parse from periods of extreme anxiety (the sludge of mental illness, in my experience, doesn't lend itself easily to organization, clarity, or categorization), I feel caught in a sinking sensation as though all gravity resides in my chest.

As for the image of bodies made of wax, this is one of the scariest symptoms of panic attacks that I have experienced. In the throws of a panic attack, there is often a visceral shift in reality where the world suddenly looks like a movie: surreal or hyper-real. If I am with other people, they look plastic, melty, as though they are made of rubber or wearing masks. It's as though I am watching my self, the identity I have constructed, interact with other constructed identities. Not only is it scary—it's also very sad to feel like we are all wearing masks.

All of these similarities between an acute panic attack, or depressive episode, and the experience of psychedelic drugs make me wonder if mental illness is not, in some ways, a heightened state of consciousness, or intelligence. During these periods, I often find myself asking What am I really? and What's the point? While these aren't comforting questions, I wouldn't call them stupid questions. Rather, they are questions that point to an awareness that we make our own meaning, and that some of the activities, identity components, and life structures we utilize to provide this meaning, "role...status, sex...power, size, beauty," may not be particularly healthy, spiritual, or even real.

One might even see the questions of What am I? and What's the point? as beneficial questions, if we are willing to face the answers. Often the answers might necessitate a life overhaul—a restructuring of values to align with what we know deep down to be true—and this is terrifying. It can be a massive undertaking. When everyone is wearing masks, I don't know which is more uncomfortable: to wear a mask you know is false or to try and live in a more "naked" way among the masked.

As Leary, Alpert, and Metzner describe it, "Your ego, that one tiny remaining strand of self, screams STOP!. You wrench yourself out of the life-flow, drawn by your intense attachment to your old desires...if there is game distraction around you, you will find yourself dropping back."

It makes sense then that most people, if given the choice, would prefer not to access that questioning part of the brain. I know that in my deepest periods of mental "unwellness" I have felt like a curtain had been opened in my perception. All I wanted was for the curtain to be closed—to never see anything too clearly again. Similarly, in my psychedelic experiences I had many a trip wherein I felt that I had "gone out" too far and longed to return to a safer, more cloistered mind. Ego death is scary.

Having been clean and sober for many years, I haven't taken psychedelic drugs in a very long time. But even if I wasn't committed to sobriety, I don't think I would be able to handle tripping anymore. Perhaps that's because it was easier to live closer to the deeper "truth"—not so married to the external trappings of a false identity—when I was younger. It's not that I no longer see and feel the friction between a false identity and who I really am anymore. I feel it every time I have a panic attack. But just because you see and feel doesn't mean you change.

Leary, Alpert, and Metzner say, "Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream... physical reactions should be recognized as signs heralding transcendence. Avoid treating them as symptoms of illness, accept them, merge with them, enjoy them."

I have heard the exact same advice given for panic attacks: to ride the anxiety, float with it, bend as a blade of grass bends with the wind, experience it with gratitude as a sign that I am alive. But sometimes I don't want that much aliveness. Sometimes I feel so alive that it might just kill me.

If you are concerned about your mental health or that of someone you know, visit the Mental Health America website.

So Sad Today: Personal Essays will be released next March. Pre-order it here.

Follow So Sad Today on Twitter.


Talking Celebrities, Collaboration, and Chairs with Playwright and Artist Robert Wilson

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It is easy to get one's hopes up when speaking of Robert Wilson's potential collaborators. Since the composer Philip Glass lent his talents to the breakthrough 1976 play Einstein on the Beach, a sui generis, neo-surrealistic opera, it has become a right of passage among contemporary artists from all backgrounds to work with the 74-year-old playwright, among them David Byrne, Marina Abramović, and Lady Gaga. So I could feel my excitement bubble when I read, in a recent T magazine feature, a cryptic piece by the poet Anne Carson: "Notes for Meeting with the Actors the Day the Director Asked Me to Come to First Antigonick Read-Through." For what I assumed to be entries to an actual production of the lauded translation of Antigone, the poet jotted several mystifying phrases: "No punctuation much gives alacrity" and "Fun language meat language the shift." In response, Wilson sent a crushed and worn folded ruler. "I was taking a walk," he recently said to me over the phone, "and saw it in the middle of the street being run over by cars and trucks. I finally grabbed it and took it home and continued to contemplate it. I came to realize that it made me think of Anne's writing."

Collecting artifacts is habitual activity for the older, yet active playwright. His bedroom alone is reputed to contain over 700 found and made objects, ranging from a 2,000-year-old Eskimo sculpture, a Chinese neolithic pot, a photograph of Andre Breton and Gertrude Stein, and a chair that he's designed. A replication of his bedroom was part of his guest residency at the Louvre in 2013. Hardly any white of the wall space is left for what amounts to a miniature and intimate museum within a museum.

Like his fellow salvager (and possibly closest visionary) Pablo Picasso, relics have inspired a cosmology within Wilson's artistry. But whereas the Spanish painter famously picked through the contents of salvage yards, painting on various flotsam and jetsam, Wilson, a Texas native, acts as more of an aesthetic curator, filtering their influence into ideas for stage design, props, and costumes. Conversely, Wilson is auto-inspired: Much of his aesthetic pursuits come from his own hand. An artistic polymath, Wilson's brand of surrealism involves abstract furniture, periods of experimenting with specific colors (and their absence), and particular scenarios pulled from paintings and dreams.

Still from 'Winona Ryder' (2004) by Robert Wilson. Courtesy of the artist

Keeping Wilson's bedroom in mind, it was a dazzling perpendicularity to view the works at his recent show at the National Arts Club (who also awarded Wilson its esteemed Gold Medal). Rather than gathering acquired objects, Black and White surveyed Mr. Wilson's expansive monochromatic works. Featured in the show were dozens of charcoal drawn storyboard sketches from Einstein on the Beach , Wilson's most famous play that will celebrate its 40th anniversary next year. Also included were a garden of chairs from various productions, 118 human finger mold casts, and a video portrait of the opera singer Renée Fleming. The only noticeable absence from the exhibition was light—stage lighting is one of Wilson's signature touchstones.

"I definitely went through a black-and-white period," Wilson said. "I've done many black-and-white productions, particularly in the earlier part of my career." Wilson professed a fondness for black-and-white films. A particular favorite is Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad, which starred the French Lebanese actress Delphine Seyrig. "She was a great beauty," Wilson remarked. "And in the film, which is so heavily saturated black and white, you can't even see her shadow. It's just her."

Still from 'Renée Fleming' (2007) by Robert Wilson, music by Jules Massenet, arranged by David Gierten. Courtesy of the artist

The Renée Fleming portrait was a standout. Draped in a hijab and poised as if struck by a great emotional lift, the opera singer resembles a marble statue slowly coming to life. The camera soaks the screen in varying degrees of brightness, making both her face and the cloth disappear at varying intervals.

For his video-portraits series, Wilson places his subjects in surreal scenery, forbidding all but the simplest gestures. For Steve Buscemi's portrait, the actor, dressed in a white butcher's apron and black tie, stares intently at the camera. Behind him is an emerald green curtain. On a gurney in front of him lies a big slab of meat. The only movement is Buscemi's masticating jaw.

'Einstein on the Beach' by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass. Opéra Berlioz, Montpellier, France, 2012. Photo by Lucie Jansch/courtesy of Robert Wilson

"I see people in certain colors sometimes," Wilson said, "and others it's more of the concept that holds a color for me. It depends on the subject matter, or my mood, I guess." He recalls having met Marlene Dietrich early in his career , who told the rising dramatist to be mindful of his colors. "I asked her what colors were good for her," he said, "and she said 'black or white.' She was right, of course ."

Wilson is clearly mindful of his colors, pairing them to various subjects and friends: "Princess Caroline always looks stunning in black, she also looks good in red, as did Diana Vreeland. Alan Cumming I just can't see in black or white. Fuscia, or some variation of pink, would be the right color for him. Lady Gaga is more versatile. I did both in full color—in a portrait inspired by Ingres's Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière , and in a black-and-white portrait of her suspended upside down, tied up and nude. That's hanging in my bedroom."

Mikhail Baryshnikov in 'Letter to a Man' (2015). Photo by Lucie Jansch/courtesy of Robert Wilson

Adjacent to the Gaga portrait in Wilson's replicated bedroom is a small wooden chair. Oddly, none of its sinuous metal legs touch the ground, rather it is bolted to the wall, hovering a couple feet above the floor. Over his long career, Wilson has collected and designed scores of chairs, and more often than not, they are held more in sculptural credence than to perform the more functional role intended for the furniture piece. "Where I grew up, in this small suburban Texas town, furniture was always against the wall," Wilson explained. "That bothered me. I wanted to take the chairs and move them into the open space, where they could be viewed and appreciated for their form."

Chairs from his various productions are displayed at the National Arts Club, including the "Bessie Smith": a siamese chair—connected seat-to-seat but with opposing backs—from the production Cosmopolitan Greetings, described by Wilson as "a tête-à-tête that symbolizes the famous jazz-singer's marriage." Other chairs on display are a rather uncomfortable, stair-step-shaped seat, and the oblong, and stiff chair mysteriously named " Kafka II ."

Wilson traced his fascination back to a single chair. "When I was 12," he told me, "I went to visit my uncle who lived as a recluse in Alamogordo, New Mexico. He lived near the White Sands desert in this white adobe house he'd built. It was very minimal and spare: a mattress on the floor, a Navajo blanket, a few Native American pots. In one room there was only a chair. I was incredibly drawn to it. The chair had a tall, thin back, and it was made of wood. I said to my uncle, "This is a very beautiful chair!" Apparently he took note. "Christmas came around, and I'd been given some fairly typical gifts for a 12-year-old boy living in Texas: a shotgun, cowboy boots, a red flannel shirt. But then my uncle showed up and presented me the chair as a gift! I couldn't believe it."

'Bessie Smith' by Robert Wilson. Photo courtesy of the artist

Though it kicked off a passion for the furniture piece, Wilson was forced to part with the chairs after a cousin demanded its return. "'My father gave you this chair,'" he recalls the note saying, "'but it's mine, and I want it back.' So I sent it back, but by then I'd started collecting other chairs. That was the beginning." I don't know where that chair is now—my cousin died, and it disappeared."

Though there are no plans for a production of Antigonick (meaning no "Antigonick" chair). I expressed hope for the possibility, but also proffered a curio—in all of Wilson's video portraits, and despite his professed love for literature, none are of writers. "I do regret not shooting one of Susan Sontag while she was still alive." Wilson lamented. "She was a good friend." Why not Anne Carson, I suggested. "You know," he said after thinking for a moment, "that's not a bad idea."

Follow Michael on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Gun Rights Activists Are Planning a Fake Mass Shooting at the University of Texas

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Photo of the University of Texas by Brandon Watts / Creative Commons

A group of gun rights advocates, apparently concerned that the rhetoric around guns isn't heated enough, are planning to stage a mock mass shooting this weekend at the University of Texas. Complete with cardboard weapons, fake blood, and the sounds of gun shots blasted through a bullhorn, the Open Carry Walk and Crisis Performance Event will, its organizers believe,help illustrate that allowing people to carry concealed guns makes them safer.

"Criminals that want to do evil things and commit murder go places where people are not going to be able to stop them. When seconds count, the cops are minutes away," Matthew Short, a spokesman for the aggressively named Come and Take It Texas and DontComply.com, told theAustin-American Statesman, which first reported the group's plans Wednesday.

The stunt, which comes in the wake of several high-profile mass shootings, is centered around Texas' new campus carry law, which goes into effect in August. The measure will allow gun owners with a permit for concealed carry to be armed most everywhere on the state's college campuses, including dorms, classrooms, and public university buildings. But it also lets individual universities to make their own campus-specific rules based on "specific safety considerations and the uniqueness of the campus environment," opening the door for schools to create "gun-free zones." Now the idea of these gun-free zones has Short and others literally up in arms.

The activists behind the fake mass shooting reportedly aren't seeking permission from UT for their event, but the university told the Statesman that if they go through with the plan, the administration will consider it trespassing.

"The property or buildings owned or controlled by UT Austin are not... open to outside groups for assembly, speech, or other activities, including theatrical performances," a UT spokesman told the paper. "Only the university itself, faculty, staff and student groups may engage in such activities on campus."

VICE reached out to DontComply.com to see if the school's response might change the group's plans, and was told by co-founder Murdoch Pizgatti that the group's vice president would meet with UT's dean on Thursday. "If they don't allow it, we will be holding the event on university-adjacent land with UT as the backdrop," he added.

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: America's White Nationalist Party Is Crazy About Donald Trump

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Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons

Read: Why White Supremacists Love Donald Trump

Donald Trump may not be popular with Mexicans, Muslims, or the government of Scotland, but one group he can count on for support is the American Freedom Party—a political group devoted to white supremacy. In an interview with Venezuela's teleSUR this week, the party's chairman William Daniel Johnson called Donald Trump "the real deal," adding that his campaign is "a unique phenomenon in modern politics.

"It is a throwback to a previous era," Johnson told the Latin American news network. "Virtually all pro-white nationalists are at least somewhat supportive of Donald Trump and most are even enthusiastic."

Trump, for his part, doesn't identify white supremacist. But his political ideas align pretty neatly with the American Freedom Party's platform, which includes "defending our borders, preserving our language, and promoting our culture"—meaning the borders, language, and culture of white Americans.

Johnson said that he views Trump's ascent as a triumph for the American Freedom Party. Noting a "tremendous uptick in support" for his own party through The Donald's ongoing campaign, he vowed that AFP supporters would help Trump's campaign by "energiz the masses."

"It takes someone with the intestinal fortitude of Donald Trump to lead the way," Johnson said, adding ominously: "Look for white nationalism to gain widespread acceptance and even a degree of admiration in the coming decade."

Follow Michael Cuby on Twitter.

The Planned Parenthood Shooter Shouted That He's a 'Warrior for the Babies' in Court

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Robert Lewis Dear. Photo via El Paso County Sheriff's Office

Robert Lewis Dear, the man charged with murdering three people and wounding nine more at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado late last month, erupted several times during his first in-person court appearance Wednesday. The 57-year-old attempted to silence his public defender and expressed a desire to publicize not only his guilt but his anti-abortion views, which it is now quite clear were what motivated his mass shooting.

"I'm a warrior for the babies," Dear shouted during the court appearance, where he was being advised of the 179 charges he faces, including first-degree murder. "You'll never know what I saw in that clinic. Atrocities. The babies."

If there was any lingering doubt about Dear's reasons for going on a rampage that killed a police officer, an Army veteran, and a mother of two and wounded nine others, it was promptly extinguished Wednesday. Authorities had previously reported Dear muttered "no more baby parts" upon his arrest, and it later came out through one of his three ex-wives that he'd vandalized an abortion clinic decades ago. What's more, a law enforcement official told the Associated Press that Dear asked someone for directions to the Planned Parenthood location before he opened fire there.

During the hearing Wednesday, Dear also repeatedly attempted to silence Daniel King, the lawyer who defended James Holmes—the mass shooter who was sentenced to life in prison for his 2012 attack on a Colorado movie theater. "Do you know who this lawyer is?" Dear asked in court, according to the Associated Press. "He's the lawyer for the Batman shooter. Who drugged him all up. And he wants to do that to me."

Dear has not yet been asked to file a plea, although he did say in court that he would not be meeting with his lawyer again.

"I'm guilty," he said. "There's no trial."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: The New Season of 'Serial' Started This Morning

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Earlier this year, This American Life producer and Serial creator Sarah Koenig announced that the second season of her award-winning true crime podcast would probably drop in November. November came and went, and we were left without any of those blue iPhone app dots that signify a hot new podcast episode available.

That all changed on Thursday morning, when Koenig surprise released Serial's first new episode since 2014, called "DUSTWUN."

Unlike the first season of Serial, which focused on the largely underreported case of a Baltimore inmate named Adnan Syed serving time for the 1999 murder of his high school girlfriend, the second season examines a wholly different story, one that has already received worldwide coverage from nearly every major news outlet: The alleged desertion of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. After leaving his post in Afghanistan one night, Bergdahl was taken by the Taliban and held in captivity for five years. A widespread military manhunt to find him was launched, and he was finally freed during a controversial prisoner exchange last year.

Serial received permission to use interviews Bergdahl gave to the screenwriter Mark Boal, who is working on a film about Bergdahl's life, marking the first time the sergeant has publicly recounted his side of the story.

Listen to the "DUSTWUN" episode over at the Serial website right now. If the roll-out of this season is anything like the first, we should be waking up on Thursdays for the next ten to 12 weeks with a new piece of the Bergdahl story.

Talking to Convicted Felons About Gun Control and Mass Shootings

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After last week's horrific mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, that killed 14 and wounded 21, a familiar debate is playing out across America. On the left, Democratic lawmakers are calling for more gun control, theorizing that universal background checks, assault weapons bans, and aggressive enforcement against unlawful gun dealers is not only wise, but desperately needed. On the right, Republicans argue that such laws would infringe on constitutionally guaranteed rights, yet do nothing to stop these mass shootings. The solution, the NRA and other gun-rights advocates believe, is more guns—in schools, in movie theaters, in restaurants, in shopping malls, at sporting events, and anywhere people gather in public. A gun rights group even wants to perform a mock mass shooting at the University of Texas this weekend to show how "gun-free" zones are dangerous to the public.

For a fresh perspective on what often feels like a stale gun debate, VICE talked to inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana. These convicted felons have first-hand experience with guns—legal and otherwise—and, unsurprisingly given their life experiences, are mostly skeptical the government can or will do anything to halt in the proliferation of guns across America.

Frederick Stidham is habitual criminal currently serving 235 months for a gun charge. Specifically, he was caught with a stolen gun and charged as an "armed career criminal," and says that he has "pretty much been in jail all of life," thanks to convictions that predominately stem from burglaries.

"I was a scrapper," Stidham explains. "I mostly broke into old farmhouses and stole mostly metal and other stuff." Often, he admits, the "other stuff" included guns—"lots of guns."

"I've never bought a gun in my life," he continues. "So when I see people on TV saying stuff like they need to check peoples' backgrounds for mental health, it all seems like a big waste of time to me. I don't know any inmate in the Stages program that bought a gun legally, and there is a lot of gun offenders in that program."

The Stages program Stidham's referring to is for inmates like himself who suffer from mental illness. According to Stidham, he suffers from borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.

"But I ain't so crazy that I don't know that just about every farmhouse has a gun in it, and anywhere they have empty hunting cabins you can find guns and ammo," Stidham adds. "You have to be a real moron not to find a gun in America if you really want one."

"Junior," a 37-year old inmate from Michigan who made a living buying and selling guns, recalls traveling to gun shows around the country and purchasing thousands of dollars worth of guns. "Assault rifles, 9mm, 45s, bulletproof vests, you name it," he says. "And there was no background checks. As long as you had the money to throw down, you can buy whatever you want at a gun show if you know the right places to look."

An inmate in his 60s whom I'll call Mr. Williams thinks that if guns became less available on the legal market it would benefit guys like him. A career bank robber who went about his business old school—with a gun in his hand—and did discharge his firearm in more than one bank, Williams says, "I don't know any real criminal who wouldn't be extremely happy if Congress harsher gun laws, and I am someone who is been in prison most of my life."

To make his point, he reflects back to the 1990s, when the assault weapons ban went into effect (it was allowed to expire under President George W. Bush in 2004). "A lot of guys I know mad big money selling those guns," Williams says." I had a celly from California who made millions, and you can bet right now there are guys out there stocking up on assault riffles, just waiting to sell them on the black market. It'll be more lucrative than selling dope, and probably a lot safer."

As a final thought, he adds, "I think all of these people who go into crowded places and kill people are as sick in the head as those who think the world would be a safer place to live without guns in it. Neither live in reality."

Junior, who is serving 60 months for possession of a stolen gun, takes a different position.

"Guns have to go," he tells VICE. "I don't care about the Constitution or peoples' rights, too many people die each year from gun violence, and after speeding so much time in prison around guys who constantly talking about gang-banging and robbing and killing people—and laughing about it—it makes me sick to think that I used to be apart of this mess."

He believes that Obama should start by offering an Australia-style gun buy-back program. After that, he believes that law enforcement should go door-to-door and take peoples' guns.

"I think the problem is that urgent," he says. "And I don't want to hear about tradition and heritage. If you want to hunt, use a bow."

Follow Robert Rosso on Twitter.

Could an Online Petition Actually Get Donald Trump Banned from the UK?

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Photo by Gage Skidmore via

He went and did it. He went and said what everyone knew he probably would say at some point, but couldn't actually envision him saying because it just seems like—politically, morally, and personally—one of the worst possible decisions he could have ever made. But he did it: Donald Trump, following the tragic attacks in San Bernardino, said that all Muslims should be banned from entering the United States.

Sometimes right-wing populism goes too far, and there's probably no better example of that from the Republican presidential candidate race than this. Trump's remarks have done such a good job of pissing people off, in fact, that a Scottish university has revoked his honorary degree and an online petition launched to block him from entering the UK has already snowballed to nearly 400,000 signatures, meaning it must—by law—be considered for debate in Parliament.

The word considered is a big one there; plenty of petitions have reached 100,000 signatures—the number needed for politicians to consider debating a topic—but rarely do they actually make it to Parliament. So to better understand what kind of a chance the signatories have of achieving their goal, I spoke to immigration law expert Houman Mehr, from Westkin Associates.

VICE: So Parliament now might actually debate whether or not Trump should be banned from the UK. What are the chances, should they debate it, that he will be banned?
Houman Mehr: It's difficult to say, because the petition only grants the debate, it doesn't actually grant any insurance that it will happen. Now, when they debate it they will have to look at the feasibility of actually banning the potential future president of one of the biggest democracies outside the UK. But bearing in mind that what he has said is completely abhorrent in a democratic society, I would say that it is unlikely they would ban him unless he goes to more extreme measures. Teresa May has the power to ban him without him ever setting foot in the UK, but what I see happening is, in political terms, they will try and sweep it under the carpet, and if he ever does try to come to the UK they will look at it in more detail.

Now, there is a list of different reasons why they can ban him, and probably the most appropriate in his scenario comes under paragraph "320 (19)" of the immigration rules, and that's offenses being committed by someone else, which is essentially to say that if he were to come to the UK his extreme views would cause civil unrest. That's the one they usually use for hate preachers or people of that kind.

If someone who wasn't a multi-millionaire presidential candidate said: "No Muslims should be allowed to enter my country," would they be banned?
Well, if it was an average person, it probably wouldn't cause an issue at all, because if it was an average person the chance their speech would cause widespread civil unrest would be very slim. However, if that person was from a country that was less politically affiliated with the UK and maybe more hostile then it would be a lot easier to make that distinction. The closest example is actually Tyler, the Creator, who was banned in August for the same kind of reasons as people want to ban Donald Trump for.

What was the legal justification for that?
He was banned under the guise of not being conducive to the public good, under the assumption that his lyrics were obscene, which I think is a bit totalitarian. People like Chris Brown, Snoop Dogg, and Martha Stewart have been banned for criminal convictions, which is understandable, but the closest thing to this case in pop culture would be Tyler, the Creator.

Is there a precedent for this? Has anyone ever been banned from the UK for saying one sentence?
I don't think it has happened. But even with Trump it's not just this one sentence that has got everyone angry; it's everything he has said before. So when you present your evidence to the Home Office, it must be a really strong case to get someone banned, and needs to be based on reliable facts and not conjecture. Usually it's intelligence, provided by agencies like MI5, but it can also be open-sourced, so people on Facebook saying, "I'm going to start a riot" or "I will kill this person" can be used as evidence.

What constitutes hate speech when it comes to these kind of immigration issues?
It's relatively broad in this instance, based around what would be called a "protective characteristic." For example, if I say, "I hate everyone with brown hair," brown hair, in this instance, wouldn't be a protective characteristic. But obviously if you say: "I hate all Muslims," being Muslim is a protective characteristic. Now, what he has said, to me, is hate speech, but whether the Home Office would judge that to be hate speech is another matter, because he is not saying, "I want to kill all Muslims," he is just saying he will make it difficult for them to enter the country. So it's on the line, I'd say.

Related: Watch our documentary about gay conversion therapy

What's the lowest-scale thing you can do to be banned?
It's actually pretty broad, so anything from petty crime or even association with gangs or anyone with a bad character can get you banned. So even if you've been hanging out with people from a rough area, it can get you banned.

When was the last major change made to British immigration laws?
That was in 2005, when the Home Office included the "Unacceptable Behavior" clause, which meant anything could get you banned if it went against their definition of "British values," which could be anything from a perverse sexual fetish to being in a gang. So it's not the actual being in a gang that gets you banned, it's the crimes associated with being in a gang that get you banned. So even if you're not doing illegal activity you can still get banned.

What do you think about Donald Trump personally?
At first it was kind of funny because he was almost like a comic book character, but now it's getting kind of serious. But as a person, he is a horrendous man.

Follow Tom on Twitter.


How AOL Instant Messenger Shaped the Sexuality of a Generation

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Image via Flickr user Travis Wise

For those of us who came of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the internet was a wild and exciting world of rudimentary websites, slow-loading pornography, and the subversive thrill of spending three to five hours illegally downloading a CD you couldn't afford to buy at Tower Records.

Through it all, there was AOL Instant Messenger, an easy-to-use and highly customizable application that hid a wealth of features beneath its utilitarian facade. Before social media, before we started assuming that someone was monitoring our every online move, AIM was a place where so many of us expressed ourselves, made friends, and experienced our first sexual awakenings.

Mention the service to anyone who used it during their formative years and you'll get stories of away messages that were supposed to be clever, online boyfriends and girlfriends that ended up never existing—I dated a GAP model from Florida who claimed to be in all of the brand's commercials, too young to realize how astoundingly untrue this actually was—and nostalgia about the custom sounds you could create to let you know when specific members of your buddy list came online.

Released in 1997, the service was an instant hit. (AIM still exists today, although it hasn't been updated since 2012.) In the age before MySpace, before every teen in the world had a cell phone, there was no better way to make plans with your friends, arrange drug deals for after fifth period, and discover that while you probably weren't ready to have sex with another person, you could absolutely fake the sexual prowess of Wilt Chamberlain with some guy you met in a chatroom entitled M4OlderM.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, the word "cybersex" felt cool, maybe a little dangerous, and definitely futuristic, but all it really meant was pretending to bang strangers on the internet. Sometimes you'd write ::moan:: and sometimes you'd inform the person of exactly what you were doing to them ("I'm sucking on the tip of your penis," I once wrote, as a 14-year-old virgin), while presumably pleasuring yourself. Data about teens engaging in this behavior during these years is scarce, but conservative estimates suggested that 30 percent of internet-using adults engaged in cybersex.

Image via Flickr user Leonid Mamchenkov

"I had an internet sex addiction," Jennifer Martin joked to me. At 27, Martin's days of cybering with strangers are over, but she claims that as a young teen, she was scarily proficient in the art of making guys on the internet come with a few taps on the keyboard.

Growing up in a religious household where any talk of sex was verboten, Martin described herself as an awkward kid who moved around a lot and didn't have many friends outside the computer. "I played a lot of text-based role-playing games," she told me, explaining how she got involved with AIM. "Eventually, people said 'I want to talk to you outside the game.' I was this overweight, insecure girl, but behind the screen I could be whatever. It was sort of this weird place for me to come of sexual awakening."

And because Jesus doesn't watch your chat windows, Martin soon began experimenting with cybering, which, for her, was as much of a writing exercise as anything else. It wasn't the sexual release that drew Martin to cybering, but it was the attention and validation of the guys she cybered with, many of whom would come back for more. Some even asked for her phone number, something Martin's religious father wasn't too happy about. But she couldn't be stopped, she said: "If anyone would come and flirt with me online, it would invariably lead to cybersex."

Martin's activities weren't unusual. AIM allowed young people to be anyone they wanted, without requiring names, pictures, or identity verification that could be tracked back to real life. For many, cybersex offered the allure of a safe space in which one could experiment and express their innermost desires. In 2008, an article in The Village Voice detailed the many reasons why cybersex might be preferable to actual sex with another human, including convenience, safety, and the ability to try out new things one might not otherwise.

A man who asked to be identified only as his former AIM name, Unknown97478 (created to make him sound very mysterious) told me that cybersex was one of the few ways in which he could come to terms with his sexuality, allowing him to explore his sexual identities without letting anyone else know the kind of things he was into.

For some teens, online hookups were the only option they had for exploring their sexuality in an era when porn—or at least porn that wasn't heterosexual and vanilla—wasn't readily available. "It took me a long time to figure out that gay porn was a thing," Unknown97478 said. "I just didn't think that anyone would bother making porn that featured penises."

Two people using AIM but not having cybersex. Image via Flickr user Kate Moross

"In retrospect, talking with nerds about acts neither of us had performed and most of us only dimly understood at this point probably wasn't the healthiest introduction to sex," joked a former cybersexer I'll call D. "But hey, at least nobody got knocked up."

Another woman I spoke to admitted that she began meeting men in their 20s online when she was 17 years old. "It was totally legal because the age of consent is 16 in my state, but I'm fortunate I didn't get killed or anything."

She's not wrong. During AIM's heyday, there were countless cautionary tales of adults preying on children through the computer. The book Katie.com, for example, chronicled the story of a young woman seduced online by someone she thought was her age but who turned out to be a middle-aged sex offender.

She conceded that any of the guys she went out with from the internet could have been a serial killer.

Warnings like this were weren't as common for young gay men who were just trying to get a few dick pics from their older paramours. Unknown97478 recalled sending nude pictures to "this guy who lived in Australia, who was like 25-26 at the time, who was really nice. I seduced him, like full on. At first he was like, 'No, you're like 13 years old,' but I sent them anyway." He received nude pictures back. "I don't feel victimized," he insisted, but added that he has come to question, in retrospect, exactly who seduced whom.

The death of AIM came fairly gradually. With the advent of true social media networks—ones that allowed users to share everything about their lives with friends and friends of friends—the online social web became imbued with reality. One day, we were all skipping class to cyber with anonymous strangers, and by the next, everyone had moved on to MySpace, which involved pictures, and meant users had to at least go through the effort of prefabricating an internet identity, rather than just making one up on the spot. No longer could you seduce someone with only pink text on a black background, and the promise of a mind-blowing cybersexual experience.

By 2011, AIM's share of the chatting market had fallen to less than one percent. The app is still available today, but logging in won't give you the nostalgia you're looking for: Your buddy list will resemble a ghost town, a reminder of an era when people only had a couple hundred internet friends rather than the thousands they've now accumulated across an array of social media platforms.

Not many of us yearn for the days when most American families had just one computer, one phone line, and no high-speed internet. But there was a certain innocence to the era in which teens could be anything they wanted to be. And for that, AIM, we salute you.

Follow Mark on Twitter.

What It's Like to Live with Someone 65 Years Older Than You

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A lady who could be one of Iside's friends, but probably isn't. Photo by Andi Schmied from Tel Aviv Grannies Have All the Fun

Beethoven's Symphony No.4 can always be heard coming from the living room—that's Iside's favorite. It's been three months since I moved in with her. I have my own room and bathroom (although Iside likes to have a shower there sometimes), but we share the kitchen and a sincere fondness for salmon. "I'm going to a concert. Why don't you go out and get some fresh air?" she'll often ask me. I usually tell her I've got some work to do and wish her a good evening.

I'm 20 years old and I recently had to move to Milan for work. Like anyone else my age, I was in dire need of a cheap place to live. A regular at the hotel where I used to work was from Milan, so one night I asked him for advice. He told me he would ask around and let me know if he found anything that fit my budget. A few days later he came back saying he'd already set me up: "My friend's mother lives alone in a huge house in the city—you can stay at her place," he proclaimed. "The only thing is... the lady is 85," he added.

I still thought this was a great opportunity—particularly because I wouldn't have to pay any rent, but only do my landlady some minor favors. I thought it couldn't be worse than when I lived in London. I moved there as soon as I finished high school, looking for something new. But my flatmate was a drug dealer, so I spent most of my sleepless nights fighting back panic attacks by watching BBC documentaries on YouTube among rats and the smell of burnt foil.

Iside's house in Milan was built in the early 20th century and is located in a wealthy residential district. She used to work as a chief executive for a company and has been a widow for the past ten years.

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I can still recall the smell of orange, cinnamon, and honey permeating the apartment, when I first walked in and how afraid I was of sullying her beige carpet. Iside showed me my room, the bathroom, and the kitchen. She was acting really formal—almost like a real estate agent.

Everything was in disturbingly perfect order. Her pans were arranged by size, while silver cutlery, crystal glasses, paintings, and furniture whose value I am unable to recognize decorate the space. In the living room, I found a large sofa in front of the fireplace, a huge library stacked with old Einaudi sheet music, a crystal coffee table carrying bottles of whiskey, and a statue the size of me next to it. It was in front of this statue that I realized the coming months would be a trip into absurdity, class-envy, and misplaced nostalgia.

As time went by, Iside and I began to get more familiar. She started acting less formal and I slowly felt less shy. We started having dinner together, sitting at her long cherry-wood table—her crystal chandelier hanging above us. I sit at one end of the table, she sits at the opposite, and we talk about literature, philosophy, and travel. One day we even went out for lunch together and, between a sandwich and a glass of orange juice, she asked me if I wanted to write her biography. I mean, she isn't Baddie Winkle, but hanging out with Iside is still pretty thrilling.

Some moments aren't quite as pleasant: One time, I came home late from work and found Iside sitting at the table in front of a bowl of soup. It was raining and I was glad to have something that would warm me up. But just as she asked me if I was enjoying the soup, I realized something was tickling my palate. It was a hair. A white hair. I nonchalantly took it out of my mouth as if it was a piece of dental floss. "So good, thank you!" I replied.

There are also all those quirks you would expect from a person her age: issues with technology, for example, and irrational worries—like the fact that she always checks the best-before date on the milk carton, because she is convinced that "that lady at the store" has something against her. She is also constantly scandalized by the behavior of younger generations. Then again, what did I expect when I decided to move in with a 85-year-old woman?

I've never felt any particular affection for the elderly—but it might just be that I haven't really hung out with any before. My maternal grandmother died in a car accident when she was about my age and her husband has spent the last 20 years locked in a mental hospital. My other set of grandparents live abroad and I only see them once a year.

I'll never be a grandson to her, as she'll never be a grandmother to me, but her friendship has taught me to look at life from a different angle. I've also realized that I was biased when I first imagined living with a pensioner. I thought I would need to be a caregiver of sorts—having to escort her around town and run her errands, but that has not been the case.

Even today, when I talk about it with people my age, their reaction is always the same: "Why in the world would you do that?" they ask. They assume I'm a type of social worker, but I don't see it that way. My personal freedom has not been compromised one bit. I mostly see her in the evenings, I haven't had to carry any groceries and I've never found dentures on the bathroom shelf. On the weekends, she goes out more than I do. And, unlike some of my previous roommates, she doesn't steal my food or leave dirty socks around.

As for her, I think she sees me as a polite young man she is beginning to care about. She has five grandchildren, but she claims she's not a good grandmother. "I spent my whole life being a mother. I can't be bothered with acting like a grandmother," she once told me. "Obviously, I love my grandchildren and we hang out pretty often, but I am not the kind of granny who calls them all the time. I want to focus on myself now," she continued.

When we talk she doesn't try to teach me how to live—though after the hair episode, she did try to teach me how to make soup. She is OK with being old and rarely talks about her past. She says she prefers to focus on her future and the places she's yet to visit. And unlike me, she is not afraid to die. "What should I be afraid of? Life just happens and be sure that fear can't stop it," she often tells me. To hear that from a woman who turns the Wi-Fi off every other day because "the router is too hot, it could start a fire," that's quite something.

Drugs, Big Hair, and Communism: Belgrade Nightlife in the 80s

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Considering that just a decade later former Yugoslavia fell apart in a series of wars that killed hundreds of thousands and sent millions away from their homes, it's no wonder that in Serbia the 1980s are viewed through a rather nostalgic lens.

It was a time when Western influences—punk, new wave, big hair, and Rubik's cubes—were beginning to push back on our deep-seated communist principles. For a while, it felt that parties and gigs were taking place in every other corner of Belgrade. As Serbian photographer Miladin Jelicic "Jela" puts it, " The 1980s in Belgrade were not golden, they were silver."

I meet up with Jela and his wife, Nadja, at their home in Belgrade. They were both integral parts of the scene back then. Between 1982 and 1988, Jela would take his camera everywhere he went. The three of us go through his endless photo archive—there's images of people dancing, hugging, singing, posing sexily, or making silly faces. Many of them are now gone now—the majority fell victim to the largely unrestricted use of alcohol and drugs of the time.

I ask Jela if he thin›ks people used to be more beautiful when we were younger: "I thought people were beautiful then and they are also beautiful now," he replies. "Nothing is different now, except me—I'm older. We had a lot of fun then, but I'm also having a lot of fun today."

Scroll down for more pictures.

Stories of Women Finding Love (or a Reasonable Approximation of It) at the Office Holiday Party

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Illustration by Ella Strickland

Who's found love at their annual work Christmas party? And by love I mean, you know, a sloppy makeout or a bit of what you might be able to classify as sex. Just some human contact to make you feel less alone at the end of a cruel, tiring year. Come on, hands up. Because while on paper it might be one of the least sexy events of the whole year (cheap booze, awkward company, and regrettable conversation being the order of the evening), there's a fair few of us who have touched bits of our coworkers that we never thought—never hoped—we would.

But office parties aren't always about clumsy fumbles that will haunt you forever. According to one (completely reliable and absolutely scientific) survey that plopped into my inbox this week, one in seven women have entered into a long-term relationship with a colleague following a furry-tongued snog at the office party. And, apparently, the same number have "their eye" on someone they work with, hoping that things might take an intimate turn over a warm beer and a couple of handfuls of Chex mix.

In my experience, the only slightly "naughty" thing that's happened at a work Christmas outing was a female colleague flashed her bra. And I don't think it was even in my direction.

So can office parties really be the breeding ground for romance? We asked four female writers to share their experiences of The Office Christmas Party.

I MET MY GIRLFRIEND AND FELL IN LOVE

December 16, 2006. I was working as an usher at a West End theater and our Christmas party was being held after hours at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane.

I'm sat on the sweeping staircase of the theater, feeling pretty jazzed about the new Rip Curl hoodie I had on, with a plastic beaker of cava in my paw. A girl—let's call her Denise—meanders over and sits beside me. Denise is heart-skip beautiful, heterosexual, and had once gotten off with the boy from a peanut butter ad—so obviously I was out of my depth. I should also mention that I was wearing flared corduroy trousers and I hadn't figured out how to tint my blonde eyebrows yet, so I always looked like the shocked, wide-eyed, and open-mouth emoji.

Anyway. We chatted, we vibed, and then came the question that I now know to be A FLASHING RED WARNING SIGN. Denise says, "So, you're a lesbian? I just can't imagine, like, going down on a girl..."

Now that I've been out and lezzing around town for over a decade, I know that on the whole properly heterosexual girls don't ask this question. They don't spend much time thinking about performing oral sex on women because, I don't know, I guess they're just hungry for sausage. But the straight girls who are harboring a secret desire to have it off with another girl? They love getting drunk and cornering lesbians and asking them this question. Twenty-year-old me didn't know that yet though, so I just answered honestly, "I dunno. It's just normal. I like it."

A group of women, none of them the authors, enjoying a classic office Christmas party with some beer and a camo net. Image via Flickr

We stayed there on the stairs, talking, all night. In a matter of hours I went from not really knowing her name, to learning everything about her, to realizing that even if I could download her brain into my own, I could NEVER learn enough about her. And then she kissed me.

I fell in love with Denise like I've never loved anyone or thing before. She came out as gay. We made it official. We grew up together. We made each other better people. And then after five years together she proposed... Jokes. She cheated on me and tore my heart in to bloodied ribbons of flesh.

But shock twist: We worked through it and years later she's one of my dearest friends. Classic lez behavior.

And all that from a work Christmas party. —Kayleigh Llewellyn

OFFICE CHRISTMAS PARTIES ARE THE WORST

I've never in my life been able to imagine an atmosphere less conducive to fairytale romance than a work Christmas party. For some people, these things are laced with romantic possibility. I have clearly never worked in the same places as them. In my office, our Christmas celebrating will begin on the rough carpet tiles around our desks pincering a corrugated plastic cup of warm M&S cava, while making agonizing small talk with a woman from accounts you would really rather internally email.

If you work in the "creative industries" the party may take on more ambitious delusions of glamor. Things will inevitably relocate to a cheap-to-hire cocktail joint where you will be released like pack of sequinned greyhounds on the bar. Wherever your party's held, the only person you have ever fancied in the office will leave sensibly at about 11 PM muttering something about getting up for Winter Wonderland with his girlfriend—a woman who you have never met but deeply resent. After this time you'll be left to work the room, gently sabotaging your career in a way that will only become clear over the next year. Despite the fact that absolutely nobody is having what is popularly known as a "good time" the lure of the bar is certain to draw everyone back in like burnt moths slowly drowning in the wax of a church candle.

I think we all know how this ended. Image via Flickr

Outside the social smokers share rebellious menthols and swap titillating anecdotes you absolutely never wanted to hear. Your boss conducts her line management from the top of the a toilet cistern, a guy from accounts with Jagerbomb admits to you he's always hated his wife and you start doing weird flirting with the IT guy. This may or may not end in eggnog-fueled half-sex at his place. Through the window you may spot a man in his mid 40s in that palpable experimenting-with-hats phase of a midlife crisis who is attempting to impress the office manager by showing her he can still do the worm. This heartbreaking display marks the beginning of a countdown clock to the 2AM that will end with his vomiting into his corduroy trilby in the back of a cab.
—Lucy Hancock

I FELL IN LOVE WITH MY JOB

For me, romance has always been fairly low on the festive agenda—unless you count the time my old colleague and dear friend Ben pulled a single testicle out through his fly and tried to brush it against the back of my hand while Gok Wan played with his dog on the next table. But I did once fall in love at a Christmas party.

I was 25, had recently moved to London, and was living in a flat lightly coated with black mold, overlooking Lidl. I had not been happy, but thanks to a non-hormone coil and a change of job, I was starting to remember what happy felt like. The party was held at Shunt—the now-defunct club under a railway arch in London Bridge. I had been working at a charity for, at most, a month and took the precaution of eating no dinner and wearing shoes that didn't fit for our annual knees-up. As I walked in, I spotted an entire tray of fizzing wine and my wealthy philanthropist boss in a pair of ludicrously colorful trainers chatting animatedly to a waitress. We drank, I used a number of Christmas trees as ash trays, several slight men in waistcoats snogged up against the coats and I asked each of my colleagues in turn who they'd hollow out and use as a canoe in the case of an apocalypse.

Right then and there I fell in love. Not with a person, but with my job

For the first time in a long time, I was working with young people—people who made me laugh, who hated Christmas, who did the kind of dancing that can result in a neck brace, and who were happy to get off with each other pressed up against a rail of puffer jackets. I was being paid to write, I wasn't having to sell Ribena any more, and I could afford to get trains instead of the Megabus.

Right then and there I fell in love. Not with a person, but with my job. And it would be months, if not years, before I started having sex with any of them. —Nell Frizzell


PEOPLE ARE FILTHY AND IT'S GREAT

Maybe it's the fumes from 20 canisters of dry shampoo going full pelt inside the ladies' restroom. Maybe it's the fact that, you know, you hate your colleagues. Maybe it's the tinny Christmas music someone's been playing out of their PC since 9:50AM. But there's something about the office Christmas party that turns everyone into a raging hormonal maniac. Propelled by a free bar (until 9PM) and rage at your shitty Secret Santa present, your whole persona changes. Even if you've been in a long-term and loving relationship—like I have—the temperature changes and you start acting, frankly, like a slut.

Take one year that I was working at a newspaper. In a proper woman-from-the-Boots-ad bodycon dress, I decided to slut-drop on the dance floor to Rihanna's "Diamonds" in full knowledge that quite a senior editor was standing one foot behind me, watching with bemusement. At the time, I felt sexy. Empowered by my own womanliness. But that's what 12 glasses of cava will do for you.

That same night I got the most romantic proposition of all time from someone else: "I'll go outside and wait in a cab. Come and find me in ten minutes. Nobody ever needs to know."

"Oh, you." Image via Flickr user Andrea Allen

But it's just part of the ritual of humiliation that we act out every time. Any and all semi-attractive colleagues are slid up to, beers accepted, appalling flirting engaged in. It's mechanical, barely enjoyable, done mainly out of boredom, and always painful the next day in the office.

No wonder so many of us find love at Christmas parties—we let our guards down and act in a way that we would never normally dream of. Yes, there's the very high risk you'll come off deluded, or a creep, or a problematic drinker, but it's when we take the chance that things can actually happen. So, go for it—let your slut flag fly and see what happens. Just don't try the cab line, it's shit. —Helen Nianias

VICE Vs Video Games: ‘FAST Racing Neo’ Is a Great Game for Hardcore Racing Gamers

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FAST Racing Neo: correct, two words out of three, at least. German studio Shin'en Multimedia's Wii U exclusive is racing alright, featuring ten Wipeout-style floating craft rocketing around 16 different tracks, each visually unique and soundtracked by pulsating electro. And flipping heck, is it ever fast, Shin'en downplaying their game's breakneck speed with that title—and it just gets faster the better you get. But "neo," to me at least, means new—and that's something FAST Racing Neo never really feels.

Sure, it's brand new to the Nintendo eShop, but Neo is a throwback to console racers of generations past. It's most evocative of the GameCube's F-Zero GX, the so-far-final entry in Nintendo's futuristic racing series (and a game, get this, actually developed by a SEGA-owned studio, Amusement Vision), but there's also plenty of Wipeout parallels to draw, from the craft design and their made-up manufacturer names—where Psygnosis' original PlayStation classic had AG Systems and FEISAR, Neo has the likes of Fulcon Capital, Spaarc Unlimited, and (my favorite) Rochdale Trust—to the propulsive beats that thump away as you race. It's nowhere near as deep as GX was, with just a third of the simultaneous racers and no characters to become attached to. The game features four cups containing four circuits each, repeated across three difficulty/speed levels—only "novice" is unlocked to begin with, the Subsonic League, and you're going to need to work to get "advanced" (Supersonic) active. There is also a time trial option, and multiplayer modes for both online and split-screen competition.

But if all this sounds like the makings of a middling indie game that's only worth a try when it reaches the sales, I've inadvertently sold you wrong. F-Zero GX and the first Wipeout are racing genre classics, untouchable in many respects, though nostalgia can cloud the reality of replaying them today. FAST Racing Neo, actually the sequel to the 2011 WiiWare game FAST Racing League (explaining the "neo," maybe?), is a very good game of its kind, albeit one that can only come recommended with caveats that prevent it from quite being an essential on a system that's hardly burdened with A-grade third-party productions.

Firstly, it's hard. Seriously, hammer this game for an hour or so and you might unlock the middle difficulty level, if you get lucky. But you're never going to win a race, not even in the beginner-level Cobalt Cup, simply by hooning it around with your thumb never lifting from A for accelerate. Neo's tracks, even the comparatively simple ones, require quick reactions and a great degree of memorizing—the former because of the other drivers around you, who can send you into a spin if they get the chance, losing you time and (definitely) a few places; the latter because of the game's color-coded boost strips, which alternate between blue and orange and require you to shift your ship's "phase" to match (what color your back-end thrusters are, basically). Hit orange while you're blue, and your ship slows to a crawl. And every split-second lost in Neo can be as brutal as a place or three dropped. It's a little like the dual-polarity play of Treasure's 2001 shooter Ikaruga, only less bullet hell and more blistering speed.

Crashing, then, is a no-no—do so and you'll be replaced on the track, but with next to no chance of catching up to first, let alone scoring a top three finish, which is what you're aiming for to progress through this game's difficulties. The time trial mode comes in handy, then, for committing each course to the grey matter, getting friendly with every bend and turn, every leap and twist, and all the additional obstacles that clutter the tracks, surely incurring the wrath of any safety marshals.

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Related: Watch VICE's film about men going fast in cars, 'Boy Racer'

The Alpine Trust course has icicles that spear their way down from overhanging rocks to the ground below; they're breakable if you boost through them, but strike one at regular speed and it'll send your craft into a spin. So too will the boulders of Willard Mine, while crashing into a leg of the gigantic robot spider that crawls across Kamagori City's concrete overpasses will wipe you out completely. But while Neo's circuits are exacting, occasionally painfully (temper, temper), they're consistently beautiful. Shin'en has stripped back all other aspects of this game's presentation—menus are simple, trophies pointless, and vehicles can't be modified in any way—to focus on the most vibrant set of racetracks this side of Mario Kart 8.

And Neo impresses in this respect from the off. The first course, Scorpio Circuit, stars gargantuan sandworms that erupt from the landscape and arc over the racing line. The zero-G of the space-set Daitoshi Station sends your chosen vessel on a collision course with slow-moving asteroids, and while it's amongst the toughest tracks to score a top-three on, Sunahara Desert is a stunner in motion, colossal spacecraft hovering low overhead, the whole thing looking like it's set half a mile outside Mos Eisley. I also love the first track in the Titanium Cup, Storm Coast, which might well be set around a near-future Firth of Forth, endless rain pissing down from a blackened sky. Certain tracks offer different routes, splitting the pack down two paths, but there aren't really any short cuts (that I've noticed, anyway).

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While Neo's selectable craft aren't modifiable, each has its own values for weight, top speed, and acceleration, making some better for circuits with plenty of corners, and others for raw power down the straights. And it's important to pay attention to this, and find a ship that best suits your style of play. The Fulcon Capital vehicle is a beast when it comes to sheer speed, but weighs so much that the air brakes might as well be made of tissue paper. The Spaarc is slower by comparison but easier to handle, and its lighter weight means it's easier to correct any slightly mistimed bends without winding up a fireball. A final point on the game's handling isn't anything to do with the software whatsoever. I might have been imagining it, but I found playing with a Pro Controller a lot more responsive than with the GamePad (which only offers off-TV play). I certainly won more races. Maybe I was just getting better, though.

And you will get better. Well, you should, assuming you didn't smash your pad inside 20 minutes. That first hour will be frustrating, but the second one will probably see things going smoother. Come the third, you'll be winning the Cobalt Cup with a clean sweep of first-place finishes, silencing the cheesy announcer's jibes at your previous failures. Keep at it, and you can unlock Hero Mode, which reverses all track directions and shifts the gameplay so your boost meter also represents a shield, meaning that a single collision can be fatal. Game over. Wiped out. No pun intended.

There are things that'd make Neo a better experience—some way of knowing how close chasing rivals were would be nice, maybe even a mini, Daytona USA-style radar (I can't be sure, but it feels like there's some nasty rubberbanding at play). Being able to tune up each craft would be a sweet addition, too. But as it stands, as Shin'en has presented it to the world, FAST Racing Neo is a fine addition to the Wii U's small but worthy clutch of indie exclusives, deserving of a place beside Affordable Space Adventures and, um, Runbow? I said it was small.

FAST Racing Neo is out now, exclusive to the Wii U

Follow Mike on Twitter.

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