Kwok Cheung Chow, a.k.a. Raymond Chow, a.k.a Shrimp Boy, at the Ghee Kung Tong headquarters in San Francisco in 2007. Photo by Jen Siska

Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow was convicted by a San Francisco jury Friday on 162 separate charges. Prosecutors painted a picture of him as a dangerous thug who ran a well-oiled crime machine dealing in drugs, illegal booze, and cigarettes—a heartless operator willing to murder in cold blood when necessary. As a result, Chow is likely facing life in prison, though he plans to appeal.

The conviction brought to an end nearly two years of legal wrangling and drama that was extensively followed by the local media. At one point, Chow's lawyers made headlines by trumpeting court documents they said implicated local government officials in unethical behavior at best and criminal corruption at worst—though none have been formally charged.

Twenty-nine men and women, including Chow, were named in the initial charging documents—a lurid 137-page affidavit that included the now-convicted former State Senator Leland Yee's apparent aspirations as an international arms trafficker. The now-disgraced Yee pleaded guilty in 2015 to a single racketeering count centered around his alleged arms business and propensity for taking bribes from government agents. (He's awaiting sentencing.)

I was closer than most to the case, covering it for a local magazine, a blog, and a weekly newspaper. I first met Chow at the San Francisco county jail, a soul-sucking compound in the belly of the city's "tech district," South of Market. The metal stools, thick glass windows, and ongoing clang of gates smashing shut made for onerous circumstances, but Raymond and I continued a dialogue throughout his trial. I always found him irreverent and upbeat—Chow's longtime girlfriend told me after the verdict that he's "insanely strong" and "very Buddha-like." He was willing to candidly discuss the government's accusations, proclaiming his innocence and describing Ghee Kung Tong, the local organization the feds say was involved in all sorts of illegal activity, as a "private self-help group." (Tongs are fraternal organizations for Chinese-Americans and are sometimes accused of being fronts for crime.)

It's a weird way to get to know another human being, through glass and over a telephone, via conversations the government is likely recording and will almost certainly use against the prisoner if possible. "I don't want to make friends like this," Chow told me during one visit. He later offered to cook us dinner when he got out.

I have never shaken Shrimp Boy's hand, but know more about his life than many of the people I talk with regularly on my current business reporting beat. That might have something to do with the way Chow throws out details of his life in a manner that seems almost reckless: During the trial, he admitted to doing blow, "cut someone up" at the age of nine (he details the experience in an unpublished memoir he shared with me), buying sex after getting out of prison, and even taking money from undercover FBI agents—though he maintained that he wasn't taking the dough in return for overseeing criminal behavior of his alleged associates.

Chow has undeniable charisma. He's big-mouthed and big-hearted and always (if you believe him) looking out for the immigrant community he's a part of. According to those close to him, the man is broke enough that he had to live with relatives and his girlfriend upon getting out of prison in 2002, his most recent stretch in the federal pen. (Somehow, though, Chow always seemed to wear tailored, two-piece suits on the outside.) If he does have millions of dollars, even his lawyers have no idea where all the cash is—they took on this marquee client pro bono.

Chow is represented by the office of famous defense attorney J. Tony Serra, which is how I started covering him in March 2014. I was lucky: Curtis Briggs, an associate of Serra's I had previously worked with, was angling to bring Chow on as a client. The man trusted me, and invited me over to listen to the call as he pitched Chow from their offices in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood—a building that reeked of weed. ("We do things differently," one of Serra's staffers told me.)

Tony Serra, right, an attorney for Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow, pictured at left, listens to speakers at a news conference in San Francisco, Thursday, April 10, 2014. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

I watched and listened as Briggs, a tall, handsome ginger in a suit, reeled in Shrimp Boy. The lawyer worked with a frenetic intensity and passion, and as we waited for the call, Briggs and former-gangster-turned-community-leader Eli Crawford offered their take on the local character.

To hear Chow's defenders and friends tell it, he's a community worker of sorts—Crawford described how he and Chow had been giving talks to the city's troubled youth. In Chow's memoir, he writes about speaking to high schools, middle schools, and at-risk youth—all to stop kids from following in his footsteps. He also writes that he partnered with a local politician and organized a series of talks about Chinese culture and heritage, for which the city presented him with an award honoring his contribution.

Of course, Chow also has a history of criminal activities including armed robbery, arson, and assault. In his early days, he was a gang enforcer and describes in the book the surgical precision he deployed when hurting enemies. "Beating someone down for a living is a science, ain't nothing random about it," Chow writes. "You appraise the target for strengths and weaknesses.... Inflicting injury is a delicate balance, like a recipe you season to taste. You have to be able to evaluate the level of damage you're doing while you work, and you can get pretty damned good at figuring in the cost of an injury right there, heat of the moment. Most importantly though, you have to know when to stop."

Later, Chow claims in the unpublished book, he founded a band of home invaders that robbed people all over the Bay Area. He also claimed to have run a brothel and siphoned $250,000 in profits from that operation into a growing coke distribution business back in the 1980s.

But according to Chow and his supporters, that criminal life ended in the 1990s. Indicted on racketeering charges in 1992 and convicted in 1996, Chow was part of a massive case that sent an atomic shockwave through the West Coast crime world. The feds disrupted what might have eventually become the largest heroin trafficking ring in America: The crooks' plan was to unify disparate gangs and start shipping in smack from the Golden Triangle in huge quantities.

Chow was released from prison in 2003 after cutting a deal with the feds and testifying against his former boss and mentor Peter Chong. (Chow claims in the memoir he had no choice because Chong betrayed him by paying for Chow's lawyer to take a lavish trip to Macao, sending her off with $60,000 worth of designer handbags—and an agreement to drop Shrimp Boy as a client.)

At the time, Chow recalls in his memoir, the decision to testify against Chong challenged his view of the world. "Some 30 years before, as a child, I'd set out to become a gangster," he writes. "I sacrificed 20 of those years—the prime of my youth—locked up, a key player in a world that completely vanished beneath my feet. All the gang leaders, dope pushers, scandalous ex-cons and tough guys I'd known were long forgotten and out of the game. Everybody I'd come up with in Chinatown had flipped or cooperated somehow. Once upon a time, they all believed in our code and lived by it. Now every last one had shattered it."

Those claims may have contributed to Serra taking on Chow as a client, since the attorney doesn't usually represent people who might be called snitches. "I represent a beautiful man who 12 years ago transcended a lifestyle most people never have the courage to walk away from," the defense attorney told me when I was writing for San Francisco. "He experienced a true epiphany after prison and became a role model for many unfortunates. He has devoted his life since then to bona fide social causes."

As a free man, Chow rubbed shoulders with celebrities, talking loudly and publicly of making a film about his life story. In 2006, after a community leader named Allen Leung was gunned down, Chow took over his post as top boss, or Dragon Head, of the Ghee Kung Tong. (Chow was convicted for arranging Leung's murder on Friday.)

Federal prosecutors vigorously argued during the trial that Chow's work in his community was nothing more than a disguise, offering him cover to oversee a group of old-school Chinatown thugs and their illicit money-making schemes. The gang allegedly trafficked drugs and untaxed hooch and smokes, plotted murders, laundered money.

For their part, Chow and his lawyers maintain the case is bigger than the one-time crook—and insist the investigation shed light on how power in San Francisco really works. They say Judge Charles Breyer was prejudiced against the defense from the start, chopping down their witness list from 48 to less than ten and refusing to consider evidence that implicated city officials. Briggs called Breyer an "attack dog whose sole job was to guard the elite's secrets and to usher Chow as quickly as possible to life in prison."

"It took a lot of balls to do this with America watching, but that is an indication of just how comfortable the people he is protecting really are, and it illustrates their time tested trust in him," Briggs added.

Both Serra and Briggs have vowed to appeal, and Briggs argues they have a good shot, though Friday's verdict was obviously a resounding win for the prosecutors—a victory observers were pretty much anticipating. As Stanford Law Professor Robert Weisberg told the San Francisco Chronicle, "If you have tapes that are perfectly consistent with informant testimony, then juries convict a great deal of the time." He added that he expects the verdict to be upheld.

Whatever happens with the appeals, Chow is going to spend years behind bars, an environment he knows well by now. And the networks of local political power and crime he spent much of his life in will hum along without him. Shrimp Boy supposedly got his nickname from his grandmother in Hong Kong, who apparently believed that a pseudonym would protect the short kid from evil spirits.

Clearly, the moniker did not quite work as well as grandma hoped.

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Due to editorial considerations an image has been removed from this post.

Illustration by David McCaig

My feelings about David Bowie aren't unique. I've seen them echoed in every article eulogizing the late rock 'n' roll workhorse/genius. I was going to compare his career to Picasso's, but Nile Rodgers did that in the Fader yesterday.

David Bowie was like the queer Beatles. His appeal spanned music subcultures. If someone liked Bowie, you knew they were cool with queer culture, sex, stylishness. When my friend Thomas Morton was 13 he touched Bowie's hand after an early morning show in Georgia and then sold sniffs of his Bowie hand to the girls at his school. Who else could he have done this with? Maybe Morrissey, but it's a short list.

In high school, Bowie inspired me to really lean hard into my feminine glam style. Through Bowie, I discovered gender as a fluid concept. I would wander around my school, which I saw as brutal and jockish, with baby blue nail polish, chokers, lip gloss, and clothing items that girls had given me. I was never a macho guy, but Bowie's existence seemed to be an affirmation that there was no shame in exploring different aspects of yourself through changing your appearance.

To me, Bowie's music has always been good and often great, but it's dwarfed by the personality he presented and the invented personas he adopted for his concept records. He embraced rock 'n' roll as a form of theater more than anyone else. I never felt like I knew David Bowie, but I liked the things he made.

I draw and I know other people who draw so we've chosen to honor Bowie's passing in the way most natural to us. I've assembled a collection of 20 portraits of the Thin White Duke below.

Hannah Letourneau

Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, center left, at an emergency Arab League session in Cairo in January. (AP Photo Ahmed Omar)

The relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran has been fraught with tension for decades. In 1979, when the Shah was overthrown in Iran, that country shifted from being an ally of the US to an enemy, while the Saudis remained closely tied to the Americans. Since then, the two oil-producing regional Middle East powers have butted heads several times, notably in the aftermath of the 1987 incident in which hundreds of Iranian demonstrators in Mecca were killed by Saudi forces.

As 2015 rolled into 2016, things got worse: In September, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made threatening proclamations after a stampede in Mecca left more than 700 people dead, including many Iranians. Proxy wars between the two countries in Syria and Yemen have become increasingly bloody. Then came the Saudi execution of Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Al-Nimr on January 2, which fueled a protest in Tehran in which angry Iranians burned down the Saudi embassy.

Now the two countries have cut diplomatic ties, and Iran has banned its citizens from making pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia. Nerves between the rivals have frayed to the point where observers are talking about a cold war between the two countries. This is complicated by the recent Iranian nuclear deal, which has inched Iran closer to the West; in Europe, some sympathize more with Iran than Saudi Arabia due to the latter's record of mass executions and other human rights abuses.

To find out more about this simmering conflict and what it would mean for America and the West, VICE reached out to Michael Knights, a Lafer fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He has worked on the military balance between Iran and the Gulf States for over 20 years, and just recently wrote an article for Foreign Policy on what the future holds for the region.

VICE: Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran have been growing for decades, and the two are now locked into what amounts to a cold war. What happens if it turns into an actual war?
Michael Knights: Well, cold wars earn their name because they don't turn into sustained hot wars. And Saudi/GCC versus Iran falls into this category. Both states are actually remarkably vulnerable to attack by each other. This has created a fairly stable balance of terror in the past, with both sides using proxies to hurt each other, usually in third-party nations where the two sides both have interests like Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and Lebanon.

But all cold wars have the potential to suddenly turn hot, probably only for a moment before the leaderships "turn off" the war. This risk exists in the case of Saudi/GCC versus Iran. Until recently both sides were adopting the cold war idea of "sanctuary"—meaning they largely stayed out of each other's domestic security. But in the last year Iran has begun using its proxies to import advanced roadside bombs to Saudi Arabia's oil-rich Eastern Province, which has a majority Shia population who are very disgruntled with their second-class-citizen role in society. Iranian meddling in the Eastern Province is somewhat like the Soviets putting nukes in Cuba: You can't let it happen if you are the other side. This explains some of Saudi Arabia's tough stance on executing the Eastern Province Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Al-Nimr.

The US State Department cautioned that the execution of Sheikh Nimr Al-Nimr could worsen relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but the Obama administration has pointedly not criticized the move since it happened. What's the play for America here diplomatically?
There is a level of US discomfort over the case of Sheikh Nimr Al-Nimr and over the issue of Saudi Arabia's brutal air campaign in Yemen. Even under normal circumstances the United States would worry that Nimr's death might set off an Iranian retaliation and a slide to "hot war." Today, with the Obama administration desperate to sustain the Iran nuclear deal, the White House's fear is doubled. In Yemen the issue is more a humanitarian one: We know Saudi is fighting an unnecessarily dirty air war and we're implicated by association. We want that to stop.

Watch the VICE News documentary on the bombing of Yemen:

US State Department spokesman John Kirby has said, "We want to see tension reduced, we want to see dialogue restored and try to get a resolution to these things peacefully, diplomatically and without violence." How does the US go about helping achieve that?
The US is not a mediator between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Washington does not even have normal diplomatic relations with Tehran, the world's most prolific state sponsor of terrorism according to the very same State Department. So we're hardly the ideal interlocutor. But we can reduce the risk of violence in Eastern Province in two ways. First, signal to Iran that further evidence of the smuggling of arms to Eastern Province will result in U.S. abrogation of the nuclear deal and "snapback" of sanctions. And second, work with Saudi Arabia to build a comprehensive confidence and security-building initiative for Eastern Province Shia that is linked to ongoing US military aid in Yemen. But these are perfect-world options. In the real world the Obama team will not imperil the deal, no matter what the Iranian provocation, and the US will not risk its diplomatic and defense relations with Saudi Arabia under any circumstances.

And supposing America isn't able to find a peaceful resolution, does it back someone in the conflict?
We're somewhat tied to Saudi Arabia as a linchpin military and energy sector ally. We may not like what they are doing in Yemen and we wouldn't feel comfortable watching American-provided tanks used to roll over Shia husseiniyahs (prayer houses) in Eastern Province. All we can do is strongly signal that there must be limits to how we fight the wars that are here and those that are coming; international standards must be observed, both because military support will become more difficult, legally and politically, if gross violations are undertaken. But also because it is the least effective way to end a security threat and the best way to fan the flames of insurgency.

You've worked on the military balance between Iran and the Gulf states for over 20 years. Is this as bad as you've ever seen it?
The military tension is as bad as it has been at any point in my career. It was worse in the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War: Then there were Iranian missiles hitting ships in Kuwait harbors, Iranian saboteurs being landed on the Saudi coast, Iranian mines being laid in front of US warships, US forces sinking Iranian gunboats, and Iranian jets being shot down by the Saudis. Today both sides have a "push-button" capability to really hurt each other's coastal cities, key industries and foreign investment—and to do it in minutes. This makes the situation today pretty volatile, though we're not quite in the 1980s territory yet.

Where does this go from here?
The next steps in this proxy war will be an Iranian intensification in Eastern Province and Yemen, whilst the Saudis and Turks will ramp up the anti-Assad, anti-Iran forces in western Syria. The wild card is whether Saudi Arabia ever tries to mess inside Iran's home turf, backing Sunni militants in Sistan-Baluchistan (on Pakistan's border) or in Khuzestan (in the Arab parts of southern Iran). This would be the equivalent to Iranian meddling in Eastern Province.

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

People trying to avoid contracting cirrhosis by abstaining from drinking during January have become almost as ubiquitous as those getting trashed and fighty every night of December. Dry January, which began as something of a PR stunt by the charity Alcohol Concern back in 2013, has now become a British national bloodsport, forcing everyone to feel a bit shitty about themselves: either for not drinking, or for still drinking, or for trying to stop drinking and realizing they couldn't even last a week. Last year an estimated two million people gave up booze in the UK during January 2015, and with the drive now heavily funded by the government, that number is expected to be even higher this year.

At the same time, Public Health England (PHE) has just released a revised set of alcohol consumption guidelines that advise drinkers not to consume more than 14 units (a bottle and a half of wine) per week, as opposed to the old recommendation of 21 units per week for women, and 28 for men. "The vast majority of the population can reduce health risks further if they reduce drinking below the guideline levels, or do not drink at all," say the guidelines, in a sentence that'll strike fear into the hearts of anyone who routinely sinks five pints on a Monday evening just to make the train home a bit less bleak.

Obviously, nobody thinks binge-drinking is healthy, but festive over-indulgence is positively encouraged as supermarkets suggest we bulk-buy cava in December. We're given the trope to conform to, then admonished for it the following month. PHE claims that sales of alcohol in licensed public premises rose by 142% on the last Friday before Christmas in 2014—a day now dubbed Booze Black Friday. But if binge-drinking culture is a goldmine for the UK's tens of thousands of bars and pubs, what's Dry January?

"Frankly, it's a disaster," says Ben Walton, owner of "informal neighborhood hangout" Ben's Canteen, which has premises in Battersea and Earlsfield. "Spend per head is at least £10 less than it might be at another time of year. We sell so much tea and cola, and so little wine."

Ben's business isn't as vulnerable as others because it also serves food, but the change in atmosphere for him is palpable. "I feel that people not only restrict their indulgences but also their personalities," he says. "It feels a bit more austere."

That austerity is felt in a more literal sense for Walton's staff. "We have to cut back on hours and numbers, and nobody thinks of that when they boldly declare they're giving up the hard stuff for a month," he says.

A graph of how much you actually drink during 'dry January.' via Flickr

At more traditional pubs, where there are no food revenues to fall back on, things are tougher. Frank Murphy, of Glasgow watering hole The Pot Still, sees Dry January as the latest in an onslaught of campaigns to get people off booze. "It started with Macmillan and Go Sober for October, which stirred my ire. Then Cancer Research copied the idea with Dryathlon." It seems hard to begrudge charities an opportunity to raise money and inspire people to moderate their drinking, but in Murphy's eyes, Dry January and similar campaigns are less concerned with promoting a healthy lifestyle than they are with targeting a receptive demographic for easy fundraising. "It's a method of reducing alcohol consumption in the part of the population where drinking is not a problem," he says.

Public Health England, which funded Dry January's marketing and PR, does of course fund a range of anti-alcohol programs which target different kinds of drinkers, from serious alcoholics to children. But Dry January does appear to make a difference to people's drinking habits. A recent study by the University of Sussex and Alcohol Concern found participants' drinking habits became healthier in the long-term. That is still a worry to the traditional British pub, already closing at a rate of 29 per week in 2015. This year, the British Beer and Pub Association is even running a somewhat desperate #TryJanuary social media campaign to encourage people into pubs, suggesting pubs tell people that alcohol has a wide range of health benefits, including the prevention of heart disease, diabetes, and Parkinsons.

It all seems to be done with disregard for people trying to be healthier, but Murphy believes that is missing the point. "January in a rural pub is more likely to be hand-to-mouth than any other time of year. The longer these sobriety campaigns continue, the more rural pubs, inns, and hotels will close. When a village loses its last pub, it becomes somewhere you drive through, a dormitory rather than a community."

While independent pubs appear to suffer the worst, the great British institution that is JD Wetherspoon is a little more stoic about short-term abstinence. "Staff hours are not cut," their spokesperson Eddie Gershon assured me. "If some people wish to stop drinking or drink less in January, that's their decision. However, people enjoy going to pubs and that is not going to stop because of a campaign. For the last 15 years, all Wetherspoon pubs hold a January Sale, where a number of drinks—alcoholic, non-alcoholic, coffee, etc—are reduced in price. This is always very popular." Chris Hill, owner of Leeds wine shop Latitude Wines, says he also benefits from temporarily lowering prices, but admits he does notice a reduction in business.

"I find the whole Dry January thing a weird phenomenon," he says. "I've worked in licensed retail for almost three decades and January has always been a quiet month—but now, it has a new name. A few years ago I had too much stock coming out at Christmas and did our first January sale, mainly to free up enough cash to pay the VAT bill. Given that many people do cut down on booze in January, it proved surprisingly successful. Our regulars now expect a sale every year." Not everyone has the luxury of being able to put on a sale, though. Felix Cohen, a mixologist and the brains behind Manhattans Project, a pop-up cocktail bar in East London, says that "there just isn't the inventory to clear out," and echoes Walton's comments on bar staff being hit the hardest. "We staff less, which is one of the hardest things, because we want to make sure employees can still pay their rent," he says.

However you're experiencing your own particular brand of shame and failure this Dry January, it's undeniable that the pub and bar industry is one of the most important in the UK, with 1.3 million people currently employed in the "night trade." Britain's livers might be suffering, but so are people's livelihoods.

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Alan Rickman in a still from 'Dust'

Whether playing an internationally feared East German terrorist, a corrupt sheriff in Nottingham, or a sneaky Slytherin, Alan Rickman performed each of his roles with grace and panache. He passed away on Thursday at the age of 69, after a private battle with cancer.

Known for his smooth and distinctive voice, Rickman could also tell you profound things with only a look, or, more often, a glare. However, despite an acting career that lasted nearly 40 years and garnered him a Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Emmy, the much-loved British actor appeared in only a handful of short films. Most recently, he used his trademark creepiness and subtlety to play a stalker of sorts in Ben Ockrent and Jake Russell's 2013 drama Dust.

In the short film, which has almost no dialog, Rickman quietly pursues a young girl and her mother as they walk home from school. His character is a predatory one, and as the camera focuses heavily on his face and body movements, Rickman conveys a deep sense of need and longing to an incredibly unsettling effect. The film, like Rickman's best characters, has more to it beyond first glance.

He'll be missed.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the senior curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

Have you ever wondered about the connection between basketball and Duchamp? Or sex workers and classical paintings? Artist Awol Erizku has. These are some of the raw materials, inspirations, and issues at work in the 27-year-old's bold and fascinating work.

In his first solo show since moving to Los Angeles from New York, Erizku will present Bad II the Bone. The exhibition, which opens this Friday, marks the first show by the artist's conceptual gallery Duchamp Detox Clinic.

Awol Erizku. 'Jumpman, Jumpman, Jumpman, Them Boys Up to Something' (2015). Photo courtesy of the artist

"The idea behind the clinic is it's not fixed to one permanent location," said Erizku, who counts Marcel Duchamp, the gallery's namesake, as an influence. "I'm doing the first show to set the bar and let people know what to expect from the Clinic's programing." The gallery will feature artists who are not yet on the radar, and the physical location will change to better fit each artist's ideas.

It's been a busy time for the "Art World's New It Boy" (and occasional VICE contributor), who recently exhibited New Flower, a photography series of Ethiopian sex workers, at the Flag Arts Foundation and premiered his film Serendipity, an exploration of love, race, and Western ideas of beauty, at MoMA.

For the Clinic's first show, presented at the prominent Night Gallery, the Ethiopian-born, South Bronx-raised artist will break away from photography like he did for his 2014 solo show, The Only Way Is Up. Erizku will show new works of readymade road-sign sculptures, his infamous graffiti "gang paintings," and abstract basketball hoop backboard paintings. All the work is made from everyday things like house paint and plastic and objects such as rocks. The show will also display a collaboration with florist Sarah Lineberger called Ask the Dust. The large-scale sculptural work features an old, beat-up Porsche overgrown with indigenous California plants and silk flowers. Erizku sums up the show as his way of "taking the elements of the streets and brining them back into abstraction."

Follow Antwaun on Twitter.

Bad II the Bone opens Friday, January 16 through Friday, February 13 at Night Gallery in Los Angeles. Check out the website.

Photo of babies that (probably) weren't fathered by Simon Watson via Flickr user Dave Herholz

Read: Inside the Facebook for Sperm Donors

A 41-year-old UK man says he has been peddling his jizz to women looking to get pregnant for the past 16 years, and has fathered hundreds of kids "from Spain to Taiwan" by selling his "magic potion" for £50 ($72) a pop, according to the BBC.

The man, Simon Watson, claims to father an average of one child a week as an unlicensed sperm donor, and is trying to "get the world record make sure no-one's going to break it."

"I reckon I've got about 800 so far," Watson said, "so within four years I'd like to crack 1,000."

Because he's operating outside the jurisdiction of the UK's National Health Service (NHS) Watson told the BBC that he finds the majority of his clients through Facebook (his page had gone dark at time of publishing), and usually meets them in rest areas off of the M1 motorway connecting London to Leeds. He even gets STD tests every three months and posts photos of his most recent tests online.

Ruminating on why he enjoys giving his pole milk to strangers, Watson offered, "I didn't get my first girlfriend until I was 18. I thought, 'I'm never going to get married and have kids.' A psychologist would say that's where it stemmed from, but I don't know, I've never been to one."

BBC notes that standard artificial insemination at licensed UK clinics can cost hundreds, if not thousands, so meeting a 41-year-old dude on the side of the highway and buying a plastic jar of his spunk for under $100 is apparently an attractive low-cost alternative for a lot of people.

For more of Nina's work, visit her Tumblr.

Legend tells us that the world was once a place of peace. Birds sang, rivers ran, there were caverns measureless to man (because man did not exist). Then that man arrived and with him he did bring other men. The world changed. The winds blew. Huddled inside their nation states, humankind worried about what those other people huddled in their own nation states were planning to do to them.

Fear grew, at first because no one knew what was going on outside their village (Dragons?), and then because it was ramped up by media outlets/governments/your parents to the point where today, in 2016, the dark, semi-fathomable evils in this world come in so many different shapes, sizes, and hues that it's almost impossible to say which of them are fact and which of them are fiction.

With that in mind, here's our annual Global Fear League—a guide to which countries everyone should be afraid of this year.

Related: Watch VICE News' documentary 'Inside the Battle: Al Nusra-Al Qaeda in Syria'

SYRIA

The situation: Everyone from Putin to Obama to Hilary Benn wants a piece of the world's most pitiless war. The West scores cheap PR victories bombing easy targets whose significance it over-emphasizes. ISIS continues to plunder, collect tax, and terrorize.

Meanwhile, no one knows who the bad guy is. ISIS? Assad? Putin? Cameron? All of them? The Hollywood scriptwriters are shitting out their ten-dollar frappes in confusion. Is the Assad regime actually the John Wayne hero character because even though it kills innocent children (and everyone else), it's willing to help the West (which must be good?) fight ISIS?

Danger rating: With the 100-year anniversary of the Sykes-Picot agreement—the secret Anglo-French deal that divided the Ottoman lands into British and French spheres—coming up this May, the Middle East, and Syria in particular, is more troubled and torn apart than ever. Europe erects borders while victims of the Syrian war cross seas to find a place of greater safety. The world sends planes full of bombs. ISIS continues to produce relatable video #content.

Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Photo by via Flickr user Max Talbot-Minkin

IRAN AND SAUDI ARABIA

The situation: Since 1979, when the Iranian Shah was overthrown, the Shia state has been scheming against Saudi Arabia, the Sunni kingdom across the Gulf. Saudi Arabia has been returning the scheming favor. Recently, the scheming has got pretty serious.

In fact, a lot of actual things have happened: Saudi Arabia executed Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, led an intervention in Yemen to fight rebels backed by Iran, and withdrew their diplomats after their embassy in Tehran was attacked. The Saudis lobbied hard against the American-led nuclear deal with Iran and are now stamping their oil-filled feet and throwing their armaments out of the pram at the prospect of Russia and China selling all their crap to Iran as an arms embargo is lifted.

Meanwhile, in Tehran, bearded clerics continue their cold war with pro-Western Iranians, who want to watch The Big Bang Theory, wear Taylor Swift T-shirts, and listen to Bruce Springsteen while employing a straightforward Ronald Reagan–style interpretation of the Boss that ignores any criticism of America that may or may not be found in the lyrics.

Danger rating: Things can't be good if the government of Iraq is offering to mediate your titanic beef.

Photo via Twitter

UNITED KINGDOM

The situation: A super-wealthy, powerful elite rule over a downtrodden populace who are at the point of not being able to take it any more. Their only hope is an old, bearded man known as "Unelectable," whose mild proclamations of kindness are merely a front for his desire to replace "realism" with a Leninist dictatorship. Abroad, Britannia continues to try and prove that it rules something, anything—which is what makes it so dangerous.

Danger rating: With British planes in the air and half the country underwater, the nation's leader jets off to Saudi Arabia to accept the Order of King Abdulaziz "for meritous service to the kingdom." Britain is still the Waylon Smithers of the World.

An MQ-9 Reaper Drone. Photo via Wikimedia

UNITED STATES

The situation: Abroad, the Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace Project: Drone Edition, continues. At home, the president takes time out from doing podcasts and having coffee with Jerry Seinfeld to tearfully tell Congress that, if they would just stop cashing their gun lobby checks for half a second, they might realize that making it fractionally harder to murder school children is not the equivalent of pissing on George Washington's grave while burning the stars and stripes.

Danger rating: When you live in the home of the free and the land of the brave, the price is constant vigilance. Other people—particularly that socialist bastard Barack HUSSEIN Obama—are always trying to take your guns away from you. But it's OK because I've heard this guy Donald Trump is running for President and he's gonna sort everything out.

An Orthodox Jew waving a Palestinian flag in London. Photo by Henry Langston

ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

The situation: The Israel-Palestine conflict has been going on for so long that it's hard for those not directly affected by it day-to-day to remember that people are still suffering awfully. Nothing changes and people switch the channel. After all, there are newer sexier conflicts raging just next door to Israel. But now there is talk of a third intifada. Recent waves of violence have brought the deaths of 22 Israelis, 150 Palestinians, an American, and an Eritrean. These numbers will probably increase.

Danger rating: Very high. Always fear yesterday's man because it is once he is forgotten that he does most damage.

Teenage gun dealers Tripoli. Photo by Wil Crisp

LIBYA

The situation: Who would have thought that a military intervention backed by a David Cameron-led government and featuring no plan whatsoever for reconstruction would have resulted in a government-less state increasingly ruled by ISIS and a collection of warring groups?

Danger rating: Libya is ISIS's latest oilfield. ISIS + oil = HIGH DANGER.

Mahamadou Issoufou, President of Niger. Photo by Rama

NIGER

The situation: Previous editions of the Global Fear League have been the only half-satirical, half-serious beginning-of-year danger list to predict dramatic upswings in violence in Syria, Central African Republic, and Nigeria. This year, the outsider vote goes to Niger, officially the world's poorest country, and a nation where the potential for a major jihadist incursion has citizens and international partners deeply worried. The collapse of the government in Libya, the presence of Boko Haram in north-east Nigeria, and the unrest in eastern Mali are all threatening the borders of Niger.

Danger rating: Niger is a "key partner" in the West's fight against Islamic terrorism. That doesn't usually work out well for the partner.

Related: Watch 'The VICE Guide to North Korea'

NORTH KOREA

The situation: Something, something—impenetrable quasi-Soviet state—something, something—"I'm so Ronery."—something, something—Kim Jong-un—something, something—H BOMB H BOMB H BOMB H BOMB!

Danger rating: High—if you're a North Korean with an anti-authoritarian streak, or the idea of people living crushingly soulless lives makes you feel in danger. For the rest of the world—well, let's be honest, not that high. But it's fun to imagine they might Strangelove us all.

EVERYWHERE

The situation: Humans have ruined the planet and climate change is set to take revenge. No longer will we be able to look down on the animals and plants and triumphantly sing, "We are the Champions."

Danger rating: It's all over.

Follow Oscar Rickett on Twitter.

York University has taken yet another L. Photo via Flickr user The City of Toronto

York University likely crushed some dreams, or at least some Plan C backup dreams, this week when it informed 500 students that they'd mistakenly received acceptance letters.

Staff reportedly sent out two sets of emails Monday in response to applications received over the weekend; the first acknowledged receipt of the applications, while a follow-up indicated the student had been accepted to the school. The latter was sent in error.

Jock Phippen, director of student recruitment and admission told the Toronto Star the students, primarily in high school, and their families were notified as soon as the mistake came to light. Most, he said, have been fairly understanding.

"Truthfully it's probably something that's pretty disappointing for some of them as well."

The Toronto-based university is the third-largest in Canada, with more than 52,000 undergrad and grad students. It placed seventh in the "comprehensive" category of Maclean's 2016 university rankings.

York has a somewhat stigmatized reputation in this country due to the number of shootings and sexual assaults that have taken place on or around campus, though some feel unfair media coverage is partially to blame.

The school has received 26,000 applications for the fall semester.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Nicole Arbour. Photo via YouTube

Toronto cheerleader, YouTuber, and professional rage-baiter Nicole Arbour created a shitstorm a few months ago when she posted a rant online entitled "Dear Fat People!" where she claimed that "fat people smell like sausages" à la Andrew Dice Clay's routine circa 1982. She's very edgy, you guys. The fallout from such a nuanced and thoughtful video included her being dropped from an in-development film along with a very public chastising by the director. YouTube temporarily disabled her account after it was flagged as inappropriate by the community. Chrissy Teigen called her rants a form of bullying, and even the women of The View handed Arbour's ass to her on live international television. Since then, she has posted other such thigh-slapping classics as "Dear Black People!" and "Dear Refugees!" I'm sure there are more on her YouTube channel but I don't think my puny brain can handle all the funny.

Last week, her latest pièce de résistance was posted to the joy of 15-year-old angry white fapping dudebros everywhere entitled "Dear Feminists!" Prepare for a truth-storm, women who fight for equal rights around the world, you are about to get schooled by a white, blonde, thin, privileged Canadian cheerleader. Hope you brought some cushions for the butt-hurt.

In the delightfully seizure-inducing "Dear Feminists!" Arbour says that feminists are fat and their bodies smell.

Sick burn, bro.

She then suggests that instead of fighting against sexual harassment, especially street harassment and public objectification, women should instead give more blowjobs. She's right: standing up against objectification is a lot harder when you have a dick in your mouth.

In truth, I only got about two minutes into this video before I had to turn it off, realizing this wasn't comedy at all and she was just having a stroke.

Like the aftermath of Dear Fat People, Arbour has carefully prepared responses curated for any subsequent attacks. On The View, Arbour claimed all of her videos were "satire" and that she's just "being silly" and having fun.

Now, don't you feel stupid for taking her seriously? You're such an idiot! It doesn't matter what thoughtful critique you might have for her rants, because she knows ALL THE COMEDY and you're just frigid and fat, etc etc.

"This is offensive." No, you just don't have a sense of humour!

"You're fat-shaming." Yeah but fat people shame me for being skinny, won't someone think of the skinny people!

"You're being racist." Yeah but black people are my friends!

"You hate women." But other women call me a slut!

"This is bullying." No it's satiiiiire.

All these responses are crafted in such a way to silence her detractors and any flack she might receive. It reverses the blame, so that the onus isn't on her, it's now on the young impressionable kids who are affected by her widely publicized words. And I must give her kudos for this kind of brilliance. Her bullshit is so tightly compacted, she could bite off the end of a cigar with her asshole.

The choice of all comedians is to either entertain/educate, or entertain/manipulate. The problem a lot of comedians encounter is they feel they can't educate without coming across as preachy, which makes viewers feel uncomfortable. So they struggle too hard to stay relevant and edgy, to not fall off our radars and lose the significantly large audience they amass. So what's the easier choice? Manipulate.

And where there's manipulation, there's money. Because Arbour is a YouTube partner, she profits from banner and commercial advertisements placed on her content. Every hit she receives puts money in her account. So much so, that after Dear Fat People when viral around the world, Arbour posted a Snapchat of her counting her $50 bills. Stay classy, San Diego.

After her account was temporarily disabled, Arbour began marketing herself as anti-establishment—that she is the last bastion of free speech against the PC police. But really, she is the establishment. Her stance on women and fat people is so common, it's the reason Donald Trump is America's Yoda. What she says doesn't in any way make people think, make them question themselves, or even, at the very least, make them laugh—all three of which are the role of a comedian. Richard Pryor knew that. Amy Schumer knows that. Hell, even equally popular YouTubers like Jenna Marbles and Casey Neistat know that.

In fact, if you want satire, Marbles has garnered a following of millions (and presumably, a decent bank account) by posting satirical videos that lampoon dominant ideas of women, womanhood, and dating rituals. Marbles says in her "How to get ready for a date" video, which currently sits at over 19 million hits, "When the date's over, make sure you have sex with him because that's all you're good for. And when he doesn't call just assume it's because he's so busy at work." The utter ridiculousness of those two sentences is an obvious giveaway to anyone attuned to the art of satire that Marbles is actually scolding those dating practices. Compare and contrast that style with Arbour's flatlining statement "Women should give more blowjobs." Marbles comes across as Einstein whilst Arbour comes across as Cosmo Kramer shouting the N word in a comedy club.

Sasha Baron Cohen employed the same satirical style with his three most famous characters: Ali G, Borat, and Bruno. These characters said the most homophobic, misogynistic, racist and xenophobic things known to modern western civilization (at the time), but the nuance of Cohen's performance was in his ability to use these tactics to reveal the biases and prejudices of the people he's talking to, rather than himself. When Borat attends a rodeo and makes racist remarks regarding foreigners, we the audience know he's putting on an act. The people he's speaking to do not, so when they agree with him, it is a revelatory moment. We see how quickly one will admit to things no civilized person should. Bruno gets Paula Abdul to sit on the straining backs of Mexican migrant workers while talking about her charity work, and gets Ron Paul to flee at horrible possibility that a "queer" might want to have sex with him. It's outrageous whilst simultaneously enlightening.

Arbour, on the other hand, employs none of these tactics. Totally misunderstanding what constitutes satire, she uses its guise to post a misogynistic rant to YouTube in the hopes of rage-clicks, and then hides behind the banner of "it's just some jokes!"

Comedy is never "just" comedy. Comedy is extremely important commentary, vital to our lives, and paramount to all this, its practice is incredibly hard to master. It is one of the most difficult disciplines in the world, but when it's done right, it's ephemeral, moving, and most of all, it's fucking hilarious. Arbour's rage-ahol clickbait videos don't meet any of the criteria for comedy because they didn't require any discipline to produce. She just rants about black people, edits it with a million seizure-inducing jump cuts (see: derivative), slaps a funny face on the cover and calls it comedy. Arbour herself even tweeted recently that the things she says are "stupid." I definitely hear the word "stupid" when watching her videos but it's usually subtext.

Comedians usually stick together and have each other's backs. As do YouTubers. The YouTube community is very intricately woven and the top vloggers continually support each other. Neither comedians nor YouTubers have publicly vocalized their support for Arbour.

So she may be well off in YouTube money, but she doesn't seem that rich in character.

All this aside, it is easy to assume that Arbour doesn't care about you, her dear viewers. I mean, she does tweet a lot about some "positivity movement" called #GoTeam, and she has stated that she cares a lot about women's issues, childhood obesity, and bullying. But to what degree?

Whoopi Goldberg asked her on The View if she understands the controversy surrounding her videos, and if she understands the offence she has caused, especially on young impressionable kids. Arbour giggled and replied, "Frankly I'm most offended by my hair in that video."

And that's as concerned as she gets, folks.

Follow Christine Estima on Twitter.

All photos by Allison Elkin

In the future, when marijuana legalization is finally here, stoners who lived through prohibition will think back to a moment (or several) when we finally realized the end was in sight. A moment that made us reflect on how far we'd come from the days of crawling into the backseat of a Honda Civic in a Canadian Tire parking lot to purchase a dime bag of shake.

For me that moment came last Saturday, when I attended a cannabis-themed ball in downtown Toronto.

Marketed as "Canada's first vapour gala," the Go Greene Winter Gala was held at a "private upscale location" made known to ticketholders the day of. Go Greene is an advocacy group that promotes diversity within the cannabis community. It was founded former Alaska-based TV journalist Charlo Greene, who quit her job on air to become a full-time activist.

I arrived at the downtown address—a giant brick warehouse with peeling white paint—only to discover I'd been there before for another, less formal, weed-focused outing. The time previous, I'd greened out after doing my first dab, which might explain why I hadn't managed to take in the fascinating interior decor. Hallways featured eclectic wall "hangings" including a pitchfork from a child's halloween costume and a rubber chicken, as well as the occasional hole. While snapping shots of it, our photographer stumbled backward into a sheet of scrap metal and stacks of styrofoam. Needless to say, the organizers took liberties with the term "upscale location," but that was kind of a relief. I'm not quite ready for stoners to be hosting their parties at the same bottle service clubs Drake hangs out at/owns.

A table outside the door of the party room was stacked with goodies like THC-infused soda, cookies and candy. I passed, and by that I mean I stuffed them into my purse, because I knew I wouldn't be able to interview people baked. Once outfitted with green wristbands, we headed into what was akin to a massive hotbox. There was green lighting, gold balloons that spelled out "Go Greene," and a green carpet that was made of felt or something very similar to felt and was secured to the floor with visible packing tape.

The 80 or so guests were instructed to dress to impress, and many of them obliged, wearing gowns, tuxedos and random head gear. (I put on a grey dress that I wear to work all the time because I'm lazy.) They posed for photos in front of a backdrop branded with the names of different cannabis industry sponsors—the kind normally reserved for film festivals and obnoxious clubs.

"We got to dress up and we get to go dancing on Saturday night. It's really nice to see all these guys dressed for something besides court," said longtime patients' advocate Tracy Curley, known as Weed Woman Canada, who donned a flowy, bright green frock and matching spectacles that contrasted sharply with her red hair.

Despite most of her remarks being punctuated by giggles, Curley told me she's concerned about news that former Toronto police chief Bill Blair will be managing the Liberals' legalization scheme.

"I hear Bill Blair and I hear 'G20' but then I also , at least he went after Rob Ford," she said. "It's scary because he's consulting with the prohibitionist side of things but I'm really hoping Trudeau and the Liberals are paying attention to our side as well."

About halfway into the night, Greene gave a speech about all the work that still needs to be accomplished on the legalization front. Wearing a mint-green ballgown, her purple hair flowing, she didn't mince words when she told me prohibition is a form of slavery.

"Prohibition and mass incarceration go hand and when you have a dollar on every person that comes into a prison system... and you have police that have a vested interest in locking up these same people again and again and again... that's when we get into people being traded as commodities," she said.

Part of Go Greene's mission is to help people who've been saddled with criminal records due to the War on Drugs.

"When they leave jail with one of these cannabis crimes, it's not like everything is a clean slate. You don't get to go to school, you don't get to live in certain places. You are a second class citizen."

Despite the heaviness, though, the event itself, a hybrid concert/smoke session/networking opportunity, was mostly upbeat.

Caterers made their way around the room carrying trays of prosciutto-wrapped melon and black bean cakes, while hip-hop artists and DJs performed on a slightly elevated stage. The bar was manned by two dabtenders with blowtorches. (There was no booze on premise, which is probably for the best.)

Sarah Gilles, who works at promotions/events company The High Five, was serving up weed juice shots and giving away swag bags filled with her cannabis-infused beauty products like body butter and a scrub. She told me weed is responsible for her glowing "420 face" (think nice skin, not someone who is having an allergic reaction to a cat) and that people who suffer from skin conditions and pain should consider using it.

"For someone who's not a 420 smoker it's a nice gateway to learn about it and see the benefits without getting high."

Brian Kierans, 30, whose day job is in TV production and who recently launched Dovercourt Bakery, was pimping his cookies. He's always been a baker and is a longtime medical marijuana patient, so about a year ago he decided to merge the two passions. When asked about backlash facing edibles—Vancouver has banned them on the grounds that they're too appealing to kids—he said it's all about common sense.

"We have a chance in Ontario to show BC and the rest of Canada how to regulate edibles properly," he said. "Proper dosing, proper packaging... No one lets their children near medication."

I heard reports that members of the finance and real estate industries were floating around in the hopes of connecting with potential clients, though I never bumped into any myself.

Our photographer and I were separated briefly until I found her sitting alone on a bright red dentist's chair beside the bathroom, hair tousled and eyes glazed.

"I did dabs," she said, as if that explained everything. It did. "I seriously actually can't feel my face right now." Her words convinced me to do one, after which we posted on a couch in the loft discussing all the times we'd ghosted on events because we were too high. Then we did exactly that.

In hindsight, I realized the weed ball was novel for more than just its atmosphere; there seemed to be no fear of being busted by cops and, for the first time in my experience reporting on drugs, no one hesitated to give me their name.

But the party is only a small reflection of movements taking place across the country. Pot shops (including a recreational one with a dab bar), already well-established on the West Coast, are making their way east. Judges have been calling bullshit on possession-related cases due to the "ridiculous" laws they hinge on, and politicians are vocalizing their visions for having cannabis sold in liquor stores. Dealers are even hosting holiday sales.

So while pragmatists will tell you legalization is a long way from being reality, in some ways it seems it's already here.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Marissa Shephard, above, is wanted for first-degree murder. In the caption of this photo on Facebook, Shephard claims that this is a fake gun. Photo via Facebook

Marissa Shephard, a 20-year-old Moncton, New Brunswick woman being sought for first-degree murder since December, has gone off the radar. Her father suggests she may be dead, the RCMP says she "could be anywhere," and an expert says it's possible she has left the province entirely.

So far, the police have been tight-lipped about the exact details of the case, but what we know goes as follows: on December 17, Moncton police discovered the body of 18-year-old man inside the remains of a burned-out building. Shortly after, police arrested Devin Morningstar and charged him with first-degree murder and arson. Then, about 10 days later, the RCMP issued an arrest warrant for Shephard and Tyler Noel, also on charges of first-degree murder and arson. Noel was apprehended last weekend in Petitcodiac, New Brunswick, 30 minutes west of Moncton, but Shephard still remains at large.

The cause of death for the victim, Baylee Wylie, has not yet been released, but the RCMP previously described the murder as "extremely violent." While his relationship with Shephard and Noel is unclear, VICE's search through both of the suspects' Facebook pages found that both Shephard and Noel were friends with Wylie through the social network. Attempts to reach out to mutual friends went unreplied.

RCMP Constable Jullie Rogers-Marsh told VICE that the arrest warrant and all current information about Shephard has been relayed across the country, but that they've had no sign of her as of yet. The police force considers Shephard a danger to public safety and are asking for the public's help in locating her.

"At this point, we're relying a lot on the public's assistance," she said. "The reality is that we don't know where she is. We've received some tips and followed up on them with negative results, so she really could be anywhere."

In an interview with Global News yesterday, Shephard's father David Shephard said that he fears his daughter may be dead and that he has not seen her since December 12, adding it's behaviour he describes as "totally uncharacteristic."

The most recent follows on a Twitter account opened three years ago under the name "Marissa Shephard" include the New Brunswick and national RCMP accounts, among a very short list of celebrities and friends. It's unclear the exact date in which the accounts were followed.

According to Wade Knapp, associate professor at the University of Toronto and a now-retired 35-year veteran of the Toronto Police Service, similar cases to Shephard's disappearance are not entirely uncommon.

Knapp points to the 1983 murder of nine-year-old Sharin' Morningstar Keenan as a case that has gone unsolved to date. The main suspect, a Toronto man by the name of Dennis Melvyn Howe, has evaded authorities for over three decades and is speculated to have died at this point.

While Knapp says that it's plausible she could have crossed borders, either into another province or into the United States, he adds that it could just be that the police are withholding info in hopes of catching Shephard off guard.

"There's a potential for holdback information as well in regards to these types of things," he said. "It's a balance between the obtaining of assistance from the public through the media outlets and whatnot, and compromising the investigation or jeopardizing court proceedings down the road."

When asked whether Shephard could have crossed into the US before the arrest warrant was issued, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was not immediately available for comment.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

On Wednesday night, Donald Trump spoke to 10,000 supporters in Pensacola, Florida. He spent the whole time calling the Obama Administration "stupid," saying Bernie Sanders was "crazy," and asserting that America is now "a country that doesn't win," which is to say that the whole thing ended up being a pretty standard hour of Trump fun.

But before all that, while the Donald was talking the expected shit about Nikki Haley and Jeb Bush and Syrian refugees, something decidedly unexpected happened: a trio of young girls called the Freedom Kids broke into song and gave a rousing performance of a song titled "The Official Donald Trump Jam." The impromptu concert came complete with a synchronized dance routine and lyrics like "Enemies of freedom face the music / c'mon boys, take them down." It happened and it was glorious.

Fox 10 Phoenix, not one to let such an incredible display of patriotism go unnoticed, released the whole performance online and it is easily the greatest piece of Trump propaganda ever created. What could better win over a population of voters than a bunch of children in red, white, and blue outfits lip-syncing the word "Ameri-tude"?

If Trump has any modicum of smarts, he'll dump that limp campaign video and just start hemorrhaging money trying to get these girls onto every TV station in the country. Give the video a watch above and marvel at our modern world.

At the Republican primary debate in North Charleston, South Carolina, Thursday night, Fox Business moderator Neil Cavuto brought up the complicated constitutional question of whether US Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican presidential candidate born in Alberta, Canada, is technically allowed to be chief executive of the United States.

"I'm glad we are focusing on the important topics of the evening," Cruz told Cavuto. Criticizing the moderator is a tactic he's used before to great effect. He had obviously prepared for the subject of his birthplace to come up, and very quickly turned it around on his opponent, Donald Trump, who has been harping on the Cruz birther issue for the past few weeks.

"Since September, the constitution hasn't changed, but the poll numbers have," Cruz added, noting that until recently, none of his opponents have had an issue with his Canadian birthplace. "I recognize that Donald is dismayed that his poll numbers are falling in Iowa."

In aggregate polling in Iowa, Trump is neck-and-neck with Cruz, three weeks away from the state's first-in-the-nation caucus vote. And Trump is still doing incredibly well in national polls; an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday put the real estate mogul at 33 percent, up six points from the previous month—results Trump cited early and often during the debate. That same survey showed Cruz in second with 20 percent, down two points from the December numbers.

Trump, in his rebuttal, readily admitted that Cruz's momentum in the polls influenced his decision to go full birther once again. When the debate moderators asked why Trump was bringing up the birthplace issue now, the frontrunner answered, without hesitation, "I didn't care before. Now he's doing better—he's got probably a 4 or 5 percent chance."

But while Trump's handicapping is suspect, he may actually have a point on the birther issue. Most legal scholars admit that the question of whether a person who was born outside of the United States to an American citizen qualifies as a "natural-born citizen," as defined by the Constitution. Trump is probably right that should Cruz be elected as the Republican nominee—or as Trump's vice president, to quote the scenario cited by Trump himself Thursday—Democrats will likely mount a legal challenge to Cruz's candidacy.

"You have a big lawsuit over your head while you're running," Trump warned his opponent, while promising that he would not sue Cruz himself. He then suggested that Cruz would benefit from a legal ruling on the birthplace question before the general election campaign.

"You should go out and let the courts decide," Trump advised. "You have to have certainty. You can't have the question hanging over your head."

Cruz countered that Trump was simply invoking the recent punditry of Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor whose former students include Cruz and Barack Obama (to whom Tribe was a mentor). Tribe has seized on the birther issue this week, using it as a jumping off point to criticize Cruz's rigid, originalist interpretation of the Constitution.

"Ironically, the kind of justices he says he wants are the ones that say he's not eligible to run for president," Tribe argued in an interview with CNN on Monday. "This is important because the way this guy plays fast and loose with the Constitution, he's a fair weather originalist."

Tribe articulated similar arguments in an op-ed for the Boston Globe Tuesday, calling the Texas Senator a "fair-weather originalist."

"There are lots of reasons to be skeptical about the rigid approach to the Constitution espoused by Cruz and many of his fellow Republican candidates," Tribe wrote. "The rich irony — that it could hypothetically render him powerless to keep one of his most inhumane promises if applied consistently — is just the latest example of why constitutional interpretation matters. And why candidates should be careful what they wish for."

Trump, after mentioning a possible Trump/Cruz ticket. Via Fox Business Network

Trump, for his part, didn't entertain the idea Cruz would become the Republican nominee. But while he and Cruz may officially be enemies now, it seems the reality TV star still considers a Trump-Cruz ticket a possibility in 2016.

"I choose him as my VP, and the Democrats sue?" Trump suggested. "So I can't take him along for the ride? I don't like that."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2010. Right photo: Terry Richardson, 2005

Tyler Shields is a very successful man. Often referred to as "Hollywood's favorite photographer," a 2012 GQ profile of Shields claimed that "while big-shot Hollywood producers once demanded a trophy Banksy canvas to be hanging above their faux-Spanish fireplaces, now all they want is one of Shields' gloriously twisted photographs." According to a rep for Guy Hepner, a gallery that sells Shields's work, his photographs sell for between $5,000 and $15,000. Shields himself has claimed that his work sells for as much as $175,000. He's shot a host of celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, Aaron Paul, and Demi Lovato, and his work has been exhibited in galleries around the world.

This level of success is surprising, given that a glance at his portfolio by anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the history of photography would reveal that a high number of his images look an awful lot like those of other photographers. And not obscure photographers, either. Many of his shots bear striking resemblances to the work of some of the most famous photographers of all time. His portfolio is like Julie and Julia but with The Photography Book.

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2011. Right photo: Guy Bourdin, 1979

And it's not just individual images. Tyler's series of models falling from the sky came several years after Ryan McGinley made this one of his visual trademarks; his series of retro Americana shot against bright blue skies came at least five years after that became the signature style of Alex Prager; his photos of lips are incredibly similar to shots by Rankin and Marilyn Minter.

Sure, this could be passed off as "creative inspiration," a la Richard Prince or Quentin Tarantino, but, as far as I can tell, Shields has never acknowledged that his photography is influenced by the work of others. In fact, in an interview a few years back, when he was asked what inspires him, Shields replied: "I just love to show people the way I see the world. It's important for me to explore the things that I see and create inspiration from the world around me. I don't look to other artists, just the world." In a different interview, Shields was asked if Terry Richardson is an inspiration, and answered: "To be honest I don't look at other peoples work I only know who Terry is because people have asked me if I like his work."

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2015. Right photo, Henry Leutwyler 2012

Henry Leutwyler, who took the photo of a ballerina's feet shown above right, once publicly called out Shields on Instagram for copying his work. "I had seen his image before but really only took action when companies like Hasselblad and Nowness began to promote it," Leutwyler told me. "I felt that it was necessary to defend my work and I did." Shields did not respond to Leutwyler.

Leutwyler seemed especially irked that Shields posted a backstory along with his photo, in which Shields claimed to have gotten the idea years ago. On his Instagram page, Shields wrote:

"I first tried to do this photo in 2009 and was not happy with the results, so I shelved it then in 2011 I tried it again and again was un happy (sic) so I let the idea go for a while hoping that it would come back around again every time I would meet a ballerina I would ask to see her feet, in 2014 while shooting another ballet project, I finally met someone who I thought would be able to introduce me to the right person to execute it exactly how I wanted, One of the things I realized when I finally got it after 6 years of trying was shooting it on a Hasselblad took it to another level and waiting 6 years was worth it."

Leutwyler told me he felt this backstory was "false."

"He has mentioned that it has taken him years to create this image but an image like this is documentary, not staged, and should not be staged," Leutwyler said. "The picture I took actually happened while I was working backstage on a book for NYC Ballet. Those are real ballerina feet and that is what they looked like after a performance. It was a fairly spontaneous shot in the end."

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2014. Right photo: Sally Mann, 1989

As Picasso (possibly) once said, "Good artists copy; great artists steal." So is Tyler Shields a great artist? I put that question to Paddy Johnson, art critic and founder of Art F City, who also lectures about art at schools like Yale, Rutgers, and Parsons.

Johnson told me that, in her opinion, Shields's copying of other's work was not the biggest problem with his photographs. "The issue with the work of Tyler Shields isn't so much that he's copying so many artists' work—though his shouldn't be an artistic model to aspire to—but that his appropriations replace the unique vision of the original with the cheap ploys of shock or nostalgia," she said in an email.

"Take the Sally Mann rip-off : you never forget the original for the child's defiant gaze while holding a cigarette," Johnson wrote. "She's not an adult, but she's at the stage where you can begin to see who she will become emerge. And in that photo, it seems almost a little too early. With Shields', there's no authenticity to the photograph. It's staged from beginning to end, so what you get is a child striking a pose with two women in the background gazing sexily at the camera. Are they what she is to become or are they just ornaments for the photo? Either way, Shields takes what began as an incredibly haunting photograph and turns it into an art postcard."

"I can't think of a dumber, more offensive interpretation of the original piece," Johnson added.

To be clear, I don't have any direct proof that Shields is stealing his ideas from the work of others. But I've collected a bunch of examples below so you can decide for yourself. Maybe it's like that episode of 30 Rock when Liz thinks she's invented a fake person to act as a scapegoat for her department's problems, but it turns out to be the name of a real person she'd read early in the day without realizing. Maybe Shields will see this post and be like, "Oh. Fuck."

I reached out to Shields for comment, but he did not respond.

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2014. Right photo: Helmut Newton, 1982

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2014. Right photo: Diane Arbus, 1966

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2015. Right photo: Irving Penn, 1986

Left photos: Tyler Shields, 2009. Right screencaps: Stills from Moby's "We Are All Made of Stars" video, 2002.

Let photo: Tyler Shields, 2014. Right photo: Annie Liebovitz, 1984

Watch: Bruce Gilden critiques the work of up-and-coming photographers

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2015. Right photo: Helmut Newton, 1975

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2015. Right photo: Helmut Newton, 1967 (Newton's photo appears to have been inspired by Hitchcock's North by Northwest)

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2015. Right photo: Yeah Yeah Yeahs single cover, 2009

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2013. Right photo: Ryan McGinley, 2007

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2013. Right photo: Ryan McGinley, 2007

Left photo: Tyler Shields 2011. Right photo: Roberta Bayley, 1976

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2012. Right photo: Nick Veasey, 2008

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2012. Right photo: Nick Veasey, 2010.

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2015. Right photo: Larry Clark, 1968

Left photo: Tyler Shields, 2015. Right photo: Terry Richardson, 1998

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Cedrick Chatman. Photo via handout

With the city of Chicago still reeling from the grisly footage of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald's death at the hands of police, a video showing a Chicago cop fatally shooting another 17-year-old, Cedrick Chatman, has been released on a judge's order.

In recent months, with a Department of Justice investigation underway and the national media breathing down his neck, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired the city's police superintendent and created a police accountability task force, while the top official for the city's preexisting—and troubled—Independent Police Review Authority also resigned. But even as the mayor has acknowledged the need for sweeping change in how Chicago cops do their jobs, lawyers for the city have apparently been busy keeping video of Chatman's 2013 death hidden from the public.

"The city has been fighting us tooth and nail on getting the video out," said Mark Smolens, one of the lawyers for the Chatman family. "You have the incongruity of the city lawyers a few blocks away arguing against the release of the video, and the mayor saying this is a new era of transparency for police."

Unlike McDonald, Chatman was completely unarmed when police shot him four times in the middle of the day on January 7, 2013. The police narrative claims that the teen was carrying an unknown dark object that police interpreted as threatening, though the item was later revealed to be an iPhone 5 case, after it was recovered from Chatman's body. Footage from several separate surveillance cameras was released Thursday, offering imperfect views of the incident, including images of the officer firing off camera and Chatman collapsing to the ground.

Like McDonald, Chatman was moving away from the cop when he was shot down. According to police, Chatman ran after two officers, guns drawn, ordered him out of a Dodge Charger that had been reported stolen. Both cops—including the shooter, Officer Kevin Fry, who told the investigators that he shot the teenager out of fear for his own life and that of his partner—remain on the force and have not faced criminal charges.

The Independent Police Review Authority found the Chatman shooting to be justified, but only after former IPRA investigator Lorenzo Davis initially concluded otherwise, and recommended that Fry be fired. Instead, it was Davis who, unwilling to alter his report, was fired, he told the New York Times. (Davis has since filed a wrongful termination lawsuit.)

Like Jason Van Dyke, the officer who shot McDonald 16 times and has been indicted on first-degree murder charges, Fry has a troubling history of undisciplined misconduct complaints. His record cites 30 incidents in total, according to the Citizens Police Data Project, which was released in November by the Invisible Institute, where I work as a journalist. Fry's history includes multiple allegations of use of force, illegal search, and false arrest of citizens. Likewise, Van Dyke has 20 complaints in the same database, though the city has since provided reporters with additional records showing additional allegations against him.

On the eve of the judge's decision to release the Chatman video, the city's lawyers made an 11th-hour attempt to save face, filing a motion to withdraw their longstanding opposition from the protective order that guarded the video. "I went to a lot of trouble to decide this issue," Judge Robert W. Gettleman said in court Thursday, criticizing the city for wasting his time.

"They've had over two and a half years to be transparent with this case," Brian Coffman, a lawyer who also represents the Chatman family, told reporters outside of the hearing.

Lawyers for the city did not respond to multiple message requests for comment.

Release of the video evidence was initially held up by the criminal cases of two men who were allegedly with Chatman at the time of his death. The pair, Martel Odum and Akeem Clarke, faced murder charges, later dropped, for the teen's death. They pleaded guilty to robbery and unlawful vehicular invasion and were sentenced to ten years.

Chatman's mother does not wish to see the video, her lawyers say. But when Chicagoans discuss the events that led to her son's death, the video can now speak for itself.

"It makes you angry when are allowed to create this story about conduct by a young man who is literally running down a street," Smolens said. "Less than ten seconds from the time he got out and the time he is mortally wounded on a street in the City of Chicago."

Leaving a public event after the release of the video, Emanuel dodged questions from reporters who followed the mayor to an elevator.

"We're in the middle of transition to a different policy as it relates to transparency and letting that material out and the decision is exactly an example of that," Emanuel said, according to ABC News 7 Chicago.

Meanwhile, as activists plan protests in Chicago, Emanuel's own plans to host an annual Martin Luther King breakfast are being met with calls for African-American clergy members to boycott the event.

"Dr. King fought for civil rights, and I just feel that the mayor is not adequately leading the city in the African-American community in the right direction," said community activist William Calloway, who held a protest Monday at the intersection where Chatman was shot in the South Shore neighborhood. "Due to the current conditions in African-American community, under the current mayoral administration, I thought it would be disrespectful to the legacy of Dr. King."

Follow Alison Flowers on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user zemistor

It's been a bit of a scary week for those people who enjoy the comforts that a functioning economy affords such as knowing how much your money is worth from one day to the next and people not having their retirement fund wiped out in an instant. Financial analysts at some of the world's largest banks have been making cataclysmic predictions for world stock markets since the beginning of January, evoking images of city workers running around in panic shouting "SELL SELL SELL" into a cell phone, or sobbing into their ties.

Andrew Roberts at RBS advised investment banking customers to "sell (mostly) everything," while Society Generale's analyst Albert Edwards predicted a major crash in the US, which would devalue the stock market by 75 percent. Their reasons for these predictions: a slowing Chinese economy and weakening yuan, falling oil prices, and generally overvalued stocks. the money created from quantitative easing having been pumped into stock market speculation creating a bubble. British chancellor George Osborne described the situation as a "poisonous cocktail" of global risks.

If you've been following the business press for the last few days, it's hard not to believe these predictions are coming true. China's share prices have been tumbling throughout January, on Thursday, crude oil dropped below $30 a barrel, and financial indexes dropped throughout the week. Basically several important economic indicators are looking like the free-falling graph being pointed at by a forlorn city worker in a New Yorker cartoon.

I asked John Weeks, economist and professor emeritus at the University of London, whether markets around the world were indeed heading towards a massive precipice as the doomsayers predicted, and what a crash would mean for ordinary, non-Gordon Gekko types like you and I.

VICE: Hi John. There seem to be a lot of dire warnings out there. What do you make of them?
John Weeks: Yes, everybody seems to have jumped on this imminent disaster bandwagon. There are two different issues here: one is whether everybody is about to sell, causing a stock market crash, and the other is about a global financial collapse. Firstly, no one's ever believed RBS is particularly good on financial management and so, should we really take them seriously? If it were only RBS making these warnings we could probably ignore them but there seem to be a lot of analysts predicting this. I think therefore this is serious.

I think there'll be a shock—It could be a political one, or it could be something like a major company going bust—that's when you'll see the crisis. I would say yes, a global crash is coming, but not this week. I think things are going to be unstable for the coming year and it's difficult to predict when the crash will come.

What would cause a stock market crash now?
For one: fluctuations in commodity prices. In 2008 you had a lot of banks involved in sub-prime mortgages, it was a pyramid that couldn't support itself—the banks collapsed via a collapse in the value of these derivatives. Currently, a lot of banks are involved in speculation on commodities. The oil price, for example, is a permanent source of instability.

Stock markets are tremendously over inflated, also. There's considerable evidence to indicate that when the European Central Bank (ECB) and Bank of England initiated "quantitative easing," buying assets from financial institutions, giving the banks cash injections... that cash was used to speculate on the stock market. What quantitative easing was supposed to do was give money to banks, which they were supposed to loan out, injecting money into the wider economy, but they haven't done that. There's been very little investment of this kind and a lot of it has gone into speculating on the stock market, which is way overvalued.

Some have pointed to a slowdown in Chinese growth as a potential for a stock market crash. Is this correct?
A slowdown in the Chinese economy is a serious problem which will result in slower growth in imports from developed countries and slower demand on the world market for Chinese exports and that will lead fairly quickly to a global recession. Even the IMF, who are always optimistic, have downgraded growth rates for China and the world. I think it will lead fairly quickly to a general global recession; but I don't think it will lead to a dramatic, short-term, global financial crash. Germany, for example, now sends 50 percent of its exports to China. China is going to cease to be the country that absorbs the world's exports. Then we'll see the generalized global recession.

Talking short-term again, who will be affected if the global stock market does crash? Should any Gordon Gekkos reading this sell, sell, sell?
Should your readers bail out? Yes, certainly they should. But generally in terms of private individual investors, they're mostly people who are in the stock market because they can afford to lose all of their invested money. Here, I mean people who don't put in less than $75,000 a year or something like that. They're probably foolish to begin with.

Related: Watch 'Digging Into Surinam's Massive and Corrupt Gold Industry'

Also affected directly by stock market fluctuations are those with private pensions. I myself had a private pension from my teaching work in US universities made up of stocks and bonds. I switched completely to bonds in 2007 before the 2008 crash. If I hadn't of got out of stocks in 2007 I would have had a good bit of my pension wiped out. Friends of mine in similar positions lost about 40 percent of their pensions. I know people who planned to retire at 65 who are now still working into their 70s because they lost so much. A lot of pension funds are based on the assumption that stock prices will go up gradually forever—this may not be the case given all of the factors affecting the global economy and that puts a lot of peoples' pensions at risk.

So does the stock market volatility we see at the moment suggest a global crash is coming? Historically, stock markets have crashed without a general economic crisis ensuing, right?
If you look back at 2008 financial crisis, there was a lot of market turbulence up to when the real bottom fell out. There was a sub-prime crisis in 2008 and this time it could—and looks to be—a crisis of oil stocks and commodities. The stock market and wider economy are more clearly linked now than they were say 20 years ago. There are a lot of companies that hold their assets in stocks, so yes, it could be very damaging.

Are we looking at a general crisis of capitalism here with China slowing down? I think Marx said that capitalism always had to find new markets to exploit and China seems to have been the last major one left in the world.
Capitalists have a continuous problem of being able to sell everything they produce. With the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s all of a sudden there were these investment opportunities around the globe and this can be used to explain much of the growth in the 1990s and into this millennium and that's coming to an end. One interpretation of what's happening in China is that this was the last great opportunity to open up a new market, particularly financial markets, export markets, and it's becoming saturated. Without some rebalancing, we're looking at some very serious stagnation in the world. When it's going to converge and turn into a total collapse is anyone's guess. I think it's hard to predict a collapse on that scale.

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The weird thing about Charlie Kaufman's poignant, anxiety- and dread-driven fantasies is that they can usually be called comedies. In 1999, the screenwriter-turned-auteur probed identity, fame, gender, and a certain actor's noggin in Being John Malkovich. In 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , he showed that trying to erase our memories of love and loss is a delirious impossibility. His 2008 directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, spanned wildly imaginative decades in the twilight zone of a playwright who cannot separate his own life from art, suffering, and decay.

Kaufman's haunting and witty new feature, however, may be his masterpiece. Set largely in an upscale yet banal Cincinnati hotel, Anomalisa immerses us into an oddly comic dark night of the soul, as played by stop-motion animated puppets. Co-directed by Duke Johnson (an animation veteran whose credits include Adult Swim's Moral Orel), the film focuses on the isolation and depression of middle-aged Michael Stone, a customer-service guru on a lecture tour for his book How May I Help You Help Them? In this surreal every-world, Michael is voiced by David Thewlis, but almost every other character he interacts with—from a chatty cabbie to Michael's wife, to his spurned ex-girlfriend, even his son—sounds the same to him (voiced by the great Tom Noonan). Our narcissistic non-hero is in crisis, no doubt, but there's an odd flicker of hope after he meets a shy, sweetly naïve woman with a minor disfigurement who happens to be the only other person in Michael's universe with a unique voice (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Later in the evening, the two star in one of the most awkward, hilariously sad, unmistakably honest sex scenes in the history of cinema.

I recently spoke with Kaufman about my favorite film of the past year, along with the challenges and intricacies of telling an audacious, beautifully grown-up story one painstaking frame at a time.

VICE: I've read varying reports about how Anomalisa evolved from an audio-only stage experience to an animated film drama, and that you had reservations about the adaptation. Could you set the record straight?
Charlie Kaufman: It was designed as part of a series of staged radio plays, with three actors—actually, the same actors who are in the movie—Carter Burwell, who wrote the music and conducted it on stage, and a Foley artist [a person who creates or recreates sounds for movies]. It was written so that some of the information was ambiguous, so that the imagery would be created in the minds of the audience. In 2005, a friend of mine named Dino Stamatopolous was in the audience, and he's a writer whom I'd worked with on a TV show called The Dana Carvey Show in the 90s. He really liked this play, and over the years asked me for a copy of the script to read.

My reticence, if there was any, was of this thing being non-visualized, and, "What am I left with?" and, "Do I want to do that?" It wasn't much of an issue. I told them if they could raise money, we could go ahead and make it.

We didn't want this to look like a children's movie. We wanted the look of the characters to represent the feeling of the piece and the recordings.

You and Duke Johnson come from dissimilar artistic backgrounds. How did the collaboration work?
Going into it, we didn't know each other. I've been trying to direct since Synecdoche, so if someone is going to do my work, I want to be involved. I don't want to give up control. Fortunately, Duke and I have very similar sensibilities, and we had a harmonious relationship.

Animation is different than live action for a few reasons. It's extremely front-loaded in terms of conceptualization, figuring out what it is. In a low-budget animation like this, you don't have the option of multiple takes on the set, so you do something called an animatic. You record the actors' voices first and put them to a storyboard in real time. That's what the movie's going to look like, how it'll be timed out, what the shots are, in the form of drawings. Over the course of production, you have less and less drawings, and more and more actual animation.

It's not like you go into post-production with a whole lot of footage, figure out what to use, mix and match—you don't have that option. You have one take, perfectly timed out, and make some small adjustments, because of the limitations of the form. The stuff that wasn't in the sound play, like visual gags—that's what we figured out together.

What creative decisions went into the character designs, from their realistic human expressions to the odd seams across their faces that underscore their inhuman qualities?
We didn't want this to look like a children's movie. We wanted the look of the characters to represent the feeling of the piece and the recordings. People who have experience in this type of character design have built-in characteristics that they employ, and it was hard for people to move away from them. You know, they were slightly elfin-looking or had big eyes. It's simpler to animate large features, and they have those concerns because that's part of the process. But that wasn't working.

We started to look for real people that we could model these characters on. We were not really finding what we were looking for online. Duke happened to see a picture of his ex-brother-in-law on Facebook, he thought it was a good possibility for the character of Michael, and I agreed. Then the Lisa character was somebody that our producer, Rosa Tran, spotted at Little Dom's in Los Feliz. It turns out she's an actress, and agreed to be the model for Lisa. So, we photographed these people. Then we had a sculptor named Carol Koch come in and sculpt a representation out of clay, we settled on what these people would look like, and they were molded. The faces are 3-D printed.

I can't think of another film that looks quite like Anomalisa.
It's called "replacement animation." It's a fairly common stop-motion technique—you'll see it in a movie like Coraline. But what happens with this type of animation is, you've got a forehead piece, a lower face piece, and there are many versions of each. You replace them, in stop motion, to create the feeling of an emotional change in the character, to have the mouth move along with the dialogue.

The puppeteers are unseen but still sort of present, like observing angels.
We felt there was a kind of soulfulness and a brokenness that came with the decision to leave these seams in. We worked them into the story, so we were looking for puppets that were not cartoony. The Michael puppet is the biggest at 12 inches, so you can imagine how small his eyes are. We couldn't even find glass eyes for dolls that small. One of the side effects of choosing this detailed eye thing, and the very small hands, is that it's much harder to animate. That's complicated by the fact that this isn't a presentational stop-motion animation, where the characters move theatrically. We wanted the movements to be nuanced.

So it was difficult for the animators, and time-consuming. They were trying to do about two seconds a day, per animator. That goal was very rarely reached. In comparison to other stuff that Duke has worked on, like Moral Orel and Frankenhole, they would do about ten seconds a day. So it's a much slower, more exacting process. And all that was in service of creating this small, adult, hopefully emotionally authentic story.

VICE Talks Film with Gaspar Noé:

This reminds me of the sci-fi movie Westworld, about the malfunctioning robots that start killing the patrons of a theme park. Have you seen it ?
Not since I was a child, but yeah, I saw Westworld. Yul Brynner.

Exactly. There's a bit from Westworld, in which people can only tell the robot creations from the real humans because the inventors were unable to craft their hands accurately. In directing or observing the animators, what was most challenging to get right?
It's weird. Walking is hard, when you see the full body. That's very hard to do. Those puppets are screwed into the floor. You're doing tiny little increments, and they've gotta be stable while they're in a position where one leg is up. You've got two places on each foot where they can be screwed, so that the foot, as it moves, you can screw them into the heel, and then you can screw them into the ball of the foot. That's part of the walking process. You're drilling holes constantly in the set.

Then you're filling in the holes, as you move along. Very complicated stuff, and you're trying to make it look like people won't notice it. There are some modern tools to it now, but it's a very old process. It's almost as old as filmmaking, stop-motion, and few people use it anymore because it's cumbersome. And now there are computers, and those movies seem to be very appealing to people. So there's not a lot of point to doing stop-motion, except that it looks good, it's happening in real space, it's really lit, and they're real figures being moved by hand. The whole process is imperfect in a way that computer animation can only be by faking imperfection.

There's a quality of imperfection to it that we find heartbreaking, touching, and beautiful.

If walking is hard, I can't even imagine the ordeal of two puppets having sex.
The sex scene was enormously difficult to do for a myriad of reasons. You know, puppets' bodies do not want to interact that way. They had to be specially made with soft bellies, so that they could compress. Then you've got problems of—in addition to trying to get at the emotional resonance of the activity that they're engaged in—you also have the physics of trying to show how fabric moves, how someone takes off a shirt, how a bedspread is pushed back, and how shoes come off.

Those things look like they're just happening, and that's what you're hoping for, but there are rigs all over the place. When he's taking off his shirt, you've got wires on the back of the part that you're seeing because you can't double the fabric; it'll look too thick. It needs to look like a shirt. When he turns it around, you replace that shirt with a shirt that has wires on the other side. All of this without messing up the puppets. There's rigging within the bed, so that the bed compresses with body weight. All that has to be animated frame by frame by frame, and it's a very complicated scene.

As you said, the effort is worth it. Just as you can tell the difference between CGI-generated action and stunt work, or even film grain compared to digital photography, there's a texture and feeling that sets this film apart.
I think so, too, and that's what we love about it. You can literally see the residue of the animators' work constantly. They're miracle workers, but they're human, and there are limitations to the things you can do with these puppets. So there's a quality of imperfection to it that we find heartbreaking, touching, and beautiful.

It must be flattering to hear someone else's work described as "Kaufmanesque." Because self-reflexivity has been a frequent dynamic of your writing, I'm curious if outside reactions—positive or negative—have consciously influenced your creation process?
I try not to let it. That's number one on my list of job requirements. I can let it influence if I want to talk about it. I wrote a screenplay about internet anger and viciousness, which was a result of my experience of reading stuff online about myself and other people. That was a way to use it. But I wouldn't try to change what I do, how I do it, or the things I'm interested in to conform to somebody who doesn't like me—or even somebody who does like me—to what their expectations or disappointments are with my work. That's not my job.

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Anomalisa is now playing in New York and Los Angeles and opens nationwide this month.

In this video, writer John Doran meets the critically-acclaimed British director and hero of the kitchen-sink drama Mike Leigh to discuss his knack for capturing the socio-political zeitgeist of difficult times in British history, via the lived experiences of ordinary people.

Though perhaps his films of late have taken a different turn, with biopic Mr. Turner, the more gentile Another Year, and his upcoming picture based around the Peterloo Massacre, Leigh's vigor and undying interest in the often painful calamity of the human condition remains. In this edition of VICE Talks Film, he goes into how his early life in suburban Manchester, England, contributed heavily to his themes, and how the sense of impending doom related to the dawn of the millennium.

With Britain in a state of troubled economic and social flux, is the apocalyptic nature of Leigh's early works Bleak Moments, Meantime, and Naked more relevant today than ever?